Andy Runton

Steve Thomas: Andy, thank you for coming on the podcast.

Andy Runton: Oh, it’s my pleasure, Steve.

Steve Thomas: So we’ve known each other for a long time, and we’ve lived in the same area. We just met in person for the first time, even though we both live in the Metro Atlanta area.

Andy Runton: I always see you at conventions.

Steve Thomas: Yes, and I think librarians and libraries have been pretty strong supporters of Owly. How have libraries impacted your work and what’s your relationship with them?

Andy Runton: Well, it’s funny. It’s something I never really realized how big of a part just libraries in general are to me. A lot of that comes down to when I was little, my mom went back to school and it was a different time. This was like, 70s, 80s, and she would go to the library downtown, this is in Jacksonville, Florida, and she basically just dropped me off in the children’s section, and then go do her research in card catalogs and that huge, fast expanses, stacks of books with vacuum tubes transporting everything. It was really cool.

I would just get lost on those shelves of books. It was so cool. I would just be there, and it would usually be during the day and so I’d be alone. I’d see a librarian and every now and then, but it was just the access to the library and just access to all of these books. And I kinda got hooked on it that way. And I would just voraciously consume picture books. And I didn’t really realize at the time that’s what I was doing, was basically just reading picture books, nonstop, just visual after visual after visual. I never could get enough picture books or anything like that.

And so, as I got older, the libraries were still a huge part of my life in doing research on all kinds of projects. I loved encyclopedias. We had an encyclopedia set at home, which a lot of kids did at the time, but it was a Funk & Wagnalls, which is black and white with hardly any photos in it, and I loved photos, you know? And so we’d go to the library and just check out all these different books, whether it was about space or aquariums or whatever.

It was just, always had access to all that stuff, and I never really realized how big a part of my life it was until I had a librarian come up to me at a convention and told me how much they loved Owly. And they said, “Well, one of the biggest things was that Owly does research.” And I never even thought about the fact that if Owly doesn’t know something, he looks it up in a book, or he finds somebody that knows about it. And it’s just part of, that’s just what I do. It was so big a part of my life that I just, of course, Owly’s going to look it up. If he doesn’t know something, he’s going to find a book. And I never realized how special that was, but she really opened my eyes to that, and ever since then, I’ve really reflected on it. It’s a huge deal to me to this day, just having access to information. It’s so important. So important.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, Owly doesn’t just come up with alternative facts.

Andy Runton: No, no. And it’s interesting because I recently have gotten more, I’ve always loved aquariums and everything like that and had fish, but I recently have had to get into it more and it’s so weird because when you have pets, a lot of it is just about how much you love them, but it’s funny. I have a little crayfish that I’m taking care of and I was listening to this guy and he was talking about, with fish, you have to show them that you love them by researching the crap out of what they need and being able to get them what they need because they can’t talk to you. You have to read it. A lot of it is science and math and all of this stuff, that doesn’t sound that exciting, but wrap it up into something else. And it’s like, there it is, and that knowledge exists, but it exists in a book. A lot of the times and that’s what’s so great about it.

Steve Thomas: Can you tell listeners a little bit about how you came up with Owly in the first place and what the concept of Owly is, for those who have not seen it?

Andy Runton: Yeah, sure. So I used to be a graphic designer, and I got really disillusioned with my job. I always loved drawing my whole life, but I never felt like I could really do comics because I really, like I grew up in the eighties and Marvel was huge, X-Men and everything. And I couldn’t draw people that well, I never could. I loved drawing animals. That was my thing. I loved the zoo and, and I could draw animals nonstop, but people just bored me, honestly. It was so strange. So I kind of put comics out of my mind.

I came across some independent comics that were, instead of people, they were drawn as animals, and I was like, “Oh, well, this is kind of cool.” And the thing about independent comics and autobiographical comics was that a lot of the stories were just everyday life of what happened to people. And I kind of did that, but with animals. Owly was, like, my autobiographical comic, but I was Owly.

Owly came from the fact that I used to stay up super late at night and my mom called me a little night owl, and so I drew this little owl for a long time. And when I sat down and was like, I really want to try to draw a comic, I just drew one with that little owl I’d been drawing. It was really short and to the point, but I loved it. I loved but also was suddenly hit with the realization that I’m going to be doing storytelling, and I don’t know much about that and maybe I should try to learn more about that and learning about comics. And it’s just been something I’ve done by myself along the way. At that point, I already had a master’s degree in design and I was like, “I don’t really want to go back to school for this and maybe I can try to figure it out on my own.”

So I have been stumbling through it, but it’s been fun. It’s like all these stories that I’ve wanted to tell or things that have happened to me but re-imagined through the eyes of a little animal universe and wrapping up all the things I used to love as a kid and putting them into the stories. It’s been really fun.

But it’s always stories about a little owl and his best friends especially one of them is Wormy, that’s his little best friend. So Owly’s a vegetarian, and he’s a pacifist. He doesn’t want to hurt anybody. And Wormy is his best friend, and they’re roommates, and they experience the world together. Most of the stories are about friendship and misunderstandings and exploring the natural world and going on adventures and yeah, that’s what the stories are about.

Steve Thomas: Has the natural world been always something that’s been of interest to you as well, that this is combining those two things of art and that?

Andy Runton: Exactly. So like, I basically have always loved nature and being outside and little wild animals and everything like that. That was the other thing growing up as a kid, we didn’t travel a lot or anything like that so my backyard became like my playground. And when you’re in one place for a long time, you suddenly start to realize there’s a lot going on in this place that you may just dismiss really quickly, if you slow down and you look and you observe the animals and the insects and everything. And that’s something I’ve always loved to do, so I was able to basically take parts of my life, that natural world, learning about things because you know, you see a new insect or a new animal, and you want to learn about it and finding books about it, and then wrapping all of that up into a story. And then add to that, the emotional aspects of my personality, where I’m just very kindhearted and always worried about all the other animals. And so it all wraps up into Owly!

Steve Thomas: Yeah, I was going to mention that all the stories are very heartwarming and kind. Are those the kinds of themes you’re hoping readers get out of the stories?

Andy Runton: Yeah. One of the things very early on, I decided that I wanted all the stories to have happy endings because that’s something that doesn’t happen in real life, but when you’re making a story, you are in complete control, you know? And so all the kind of stories I loved as a kid, Dumbo, Pete’s Dragon, all the old Disney movies. I love the animation of course, but I love any kind of thing with animals in it or anything like that. But I always wanted it to end happily as a kid, just to let you know that everything was going to be okay. It’s going to be a struggle. The story is going to always have its ups and downs, and it’s gonna be difficult, but I usually find a way to figure out things and make sure that everybody in the end is happy. And that’s something I wanted to do. I never wanted to have a story that ended like a movie where it just has a horrible ending, which is fine for some people, but as a kid, they would destroy me, and even as an adult, they destroy me.

That’s the kind of stuff I wanted to create, and I also wanted to create stories that I could show anybody, whether it was at the time when I was creating them, like my mom and all my friends and their kids and everything, it was just the kind of stories that I felt comfortable with. They’re emotionally complicated because there’s a lot going on there, but the stories themselves are relatively simple conceptually, not too complicated, not huge mysteries and stuff like that, but yeah, getting that mix is part of the fun. Making comics, it’s like a big puzzle. You’re trying to put all these things together and somehow make it work and get people excited to keep turning the page. I’m always learning through the process of creating and I think that’s what makes it so engaging.

Steve Thomas: And I think they’re generally marketed to the kids’ market, but I mean, they’re really all ages. It’s accessible to kids and so that makes people think it’s for kids.

Andy Runton: It’s funny. The book market is incredibly specific on its segments. It’s like, is it a 2-3, 3-5, 5-7…? When I’m creating it, I’m not thinking about that. It’s funny because when I look at books that I loved as a kid, I can still read them today, and if it’s too simplistic, and you realize, “oh, this isn’t good,” and I don’t want to read those. So I want the books to be timeless.

One of the other things that’s interesting, in the fact that it does appeal to a lot of different age ranges is that’s the kind of stuff that I always loved as a kid, you know, the Muppets, and it’s all working at a whole bunch of different levels. Something that I never really realized when I was making it was that even though I’m making these for kids and people that are young at heart, little kids aren’t in charge of what they buy. It’s up to the parents, and the parents have to be able to read it and just understand what’s going on and value it so that they want to buy it for their kids. It all kind of works together. Well, there’s no huge plan, unfortunately about it. It’s just one of those, “well, I’d like to read it and I’d like to read it to somebody else.”

And I think that’s the other thing is that when I’m creating my stories, I kind of talk them out almost like they’re spoken stories, like sitting around a campfire. If it starts getting so complicated that I can tell you’re losing people. You ever had those stories where like you’re telling the story, and suddenly you can tell somebody tunes out. That’s not fun. I always want people to be engaged with the story and not lose focus and that probably works because I am easily distracted with things, but yeah, I mean, all of that plays into how I create my stories and the way I tell them.

Steve Thomas: And is that just talking it through with yourself or do you talk it through with other people when you’re saying it out loud?

Andy Runton: It’s funny, I actually will talk it through myself and I’ll write it down, sometimes, not all the time. It’s funny, as a cartoonist, and the fact that I love to draw, I don’t write a full script. I usually write it out like an outline. Because when I try to write it out in text, I get bored. Because I’m like this would be so much easier for me to draw than to say, “We open up on the exterior shot of Owly outside of his house.” Yeah, I just draw it. I’ll just draw it. Some people love to write it out and that’s fine, but that’s not the way I work.

So I’ll do kind of like a bullet point list. Then I’ll actually talk it through with my mom sometimes, and she’s been amazing. I think that’s the thing about sharing so many influences and she is a huge influence on who Owly is. It’s basically like who I want to be: kind, never quick to anger or anything and always loves the outdoors, always kind to animals. She’s always been my guidance with that and being able to tell the story to her is really cool because I can say like, “What do you think about that?” And she’ll ask me questions. Like, ” What happened? Wouldn’t Owly be upset?” I’m like, “Yeah, he would be upset there.”

So it’s interesting, but when you’re talking the story through from a storytelling perspective, it just makes it easier because, I don’t know. It’s almost like trying to present something and as soon as you present it, you’re like, “Oh wow, this isn’t holding together. This seemed so good on paper, but now I’m trying to tell it and it’s terrible.” So yeah, it all goes through that process. It’s fascinating to see it work and then you refine it as it goes, but that early on, it’s fun to kind of have it kind of loose. You know, so it’s cool.

Steve Thomas: So when Owly first were out, they’re black and white, and now they’re being reissued in color, and I want to talk about that in a little bit, but Owly himself doesn’t ever speak words and I’ve read somewhere that you’ve said that that helps connect with the deaf community quite a bit. Can you talk about what kind of feedback you’ve gotten from the deaf and hard of hearing community about that?

Andy Runton: Yeah. So the funny thing is, is that the reason that Owly is actually wordless, the original black and white Owlys are wordless, completely wordless, like just a few words. The only place that words show up is in signs and books because books are super important to Owly, as we talked about. But the funny thing was is that when I first wrote the Owly stories, I was focusing on the visual storytelling, and I had no understanding of the way comics worked at the time, and I thought, “Oh, well, somebody can come in and add words if they need it.” I didn’t even think that was my job. I was so naive. I knew so little. “Naive” isn’t the right word. I was a sweet summer child. That’s the best way to say. I just had no real understanding of the fact that basically it was up to me what was gonna happen, but because I was worried about writing.

And the reason I was worried about writing. Once I had tried to write some dialogue, and it came out terribly. It was all recycled, it was almost as if a little 14 year old wrote something where it was jokes that they heard, at the time it’s like SNL, you know, like, “oh, that had to hurt!” And you know, all those, all those typical things…

Steve Thomas: That’s really good, Owly… NOT!

Andy Runton: Right. Wormysayswhat? Right. Exactly. That’s exactly the kind of thing. And I just said, you know what, I’m just going to leave them off. I won’t worry about it. So if you can imagine they were in Photoshop, I just shut the layer off. No bubbles. And it worked! Because I had spent so much time on the art. And then it got to the point where Owly needed to communicate some things. And so what Owly did is he used little icons and that was actually my previous life was, I was an icon designer, interface designer. And I was like, instead of saying Owly wanted to go home, he could point and like use the little house as his, ” Oh, I’m going to go home!” Okay good. And I loved it. I love being able to write like that because it also helps with the storytelling because the story’s really gotta be nailed down because there’s no soliloquies to explain what’s happening and it’s gotta be super clear, so I think it really helped my storytelling a lot.

But one thing I never really thought about was that parents had a hard time reading the stories to their kids if they weren’t familiar with comics already, like the parents, and if they were kind of rushed. Because a lot of parents just can’t slow down to read stuff, so they would look at the book and they would actually say, “Oh, so you make up the story?” It’s like, no, you don’t make up the story. You just explain what’s happening as it goes through. It’s just as if you are watching a silent film or something. It’s almost quicker than reading and I thought it was great.

It became a real barrier to kids getting the books because the parents didn’t think they were worth as much because they didn’t have any words, which is so strange to me, loving picture books, but that’s the problem with comics in general, is that the comic art form is not valued as much as the written art form because words equal value somehow. It’s very strange, but it’s still something we fight. So Owly had to fight it even harder. Because there were no words, and I even had a much older school librarian come up to me at a convention in Florida. She picked up the book. And I was like, “Oh, these are really great for kids.” And she looked at it and she said, “Ah, no words!” and closed it and put it down and walked away. And it was heartbreaking to me. But I mean, it really opened my eyes to the fight that Owly had to go through.

What happened was I left my publisher, and I wanted to try to do more Owly and try to get Owly into a bigger audience, and I approached the people I knew at Scholastic that I had known for years because they were big fans of the Owly black and white books. We were even going to do a joint publication, in 2007 with Scholastic. But if you can imagine this, I would’ve lost money on the deal because the amount of the printing cost and how many they wanted and how much they could buy them for anyways, it would end up costing us. So we didn’t do that deal.

But then when I left Top Shelf, which was my old publisher, I approached Scholastic and they said they really wanted to do something, but they wanted to try something different, maybe an educational thing with Owly. So I pitched them an idea of the first graphic novel was going to be about Owly talking about the weather and explaining the weather to the other forest animals. But when it came and they were like, “You need to use some words.” And when it came to writing dialogue for Owly, I just couldn’t do it. I said, “I can’t ever make Owly speak. He just, he can’t. It’s too much of his personality.” So what I came up with was, and this was during that process of trying to come up with some educational book, was that if I thought about the little language as being like Owly’s own special language, or maybe the language of the animals, and then treating it almost like a second language, then the other animals could speak in Owly’s language and words. So they basically got close captioning, or whatever for their bubbles. And it actually worked out okay. And I liked it.

So I came up with that way of doing it, and they were happy with it. They still wanted Owly to talk, but I was adamant that Owly was not going to talk and I’m really glad I stayed with that and then they came back to me, Scholastic was like, “Well, we like the idea, but nobody really knows who Owly is. So why don’t we just release all the early books this way first and we’ll see what happens?” And I was like, “Oh, okay.” But suddenly I had to go through and edit all of the books and color them as well and that’s all me. You really realize, it’s like under harsh lighting, you suddenly realize all the shortcuts I took with my drawing and everything. It’s been a very long process and fixing a lot of mistakes I could fix.

Steve Thomas: It’s a couple of decades. I think you’ve just grown as an artist too. You’re just more skilled now, too.

Andy Runton: Absolutely. I mean, the first book was drawn in 2003. So like I was making the new version in 2019 and was like, “Oh, this is so hard!” but the earlier books, they let me do what I needed to do and fix what I needed to do. It just took a lot longer than I expected. But I’m happy with the way it turned out.

The neat thing about it is that, and this comes back to the deaf thing and all that stuff was that Owly, because he didn’t speak in words, attracted the early books and now the new books too, attracted a lot of kids who saw themselves in Owly. Owly communicates differently. And whether they’re autistic or deaf or don’t speak English as a first language, they identify with Owly in a way that’s been really eye-opening to me. It’s been amazing that they see themselves in Owly. One of the best experiences I had with that is I did a little presentation for the Atlanta School of the Deaf, and the librarian there, they wanted to make a promo video for the kids that that were deaf of one of the Owly picture books, which is also silent, no words, and what she did was she got her son to basically narrate it, and he was, like six at the time. So he’s just explaining what’s happening, which was amazing to me. And that was the other aspect of Owly not using a lot of words was that younger kids who didn’t have a huge grasp of reading could also approach it, which was great for me because I always struggled as a reader and if you have it read huge blocks of texts, I was out.

Anyways, then they took that narration that the librarian’s son had done, and then they signed it to the kids while they were reading the books. So it was like a video with ASL, somebody performing over it. Oh my gosh. It was incredible cause there’s no audio, it’s just silent and it was, oh, it was so exciting to see that. That’s what I’m talking about. That is exactly right. It’s that lowering the barrier for entry to these things that in a way that we didn’t even realize we were keeping people out. I think we don’t, as with so many things, you don’t really realize how much a different ability can keep you away from something that is meant for everybody to enjoy. That inclusivity, I love it.

Steve Thomas: And that accessibility and inclusivity, it’s opening it up to more people. It’s not like, “Let’s make a special version for these people.” It’s like, no, we’re just opening it up. And it is including these other people who couldn’t be before, but it’s not closed to you now. It’s just more people can enjoy this.

Andy Runton: It’s funny because you think about the things in your life that you think is a waste of time and then it ends up helping you. So if you can imagine this, I went to Georgia Tech as a designer, and I co-opped at RYOBI power tools, which is well-known now, but in the nineties, nobody really knew about them. It was a very niche Japanese company, and they were getting ready to relaunch all their products in America, and I had the very lowly design job of doing the labels that go on the power tools. So, not the power tools, the labels that go on the power tool, but the funniest thing was is that they had a big push for, it had to be three languages, so it had to be English. Spanish and French. So it could be all of North America, right? Cause you got Canada, and then also South America and us. And all the symbols that we had to put on there had to be multilingual in a way that you couldn’t just say that this button means stop, and you couldn’t even use the stop sign because not everybody knows that. And it was like I had to understand that and what works in multiple languages and like, that ended up influencing me in a weird way that I never thought would. 30 years later, it still impacts me because I think about it from a different perspective of like, “Oh, somebody reading this that can’t read, and they need to know how to turn this thing on and turn it off and adjust this, like, oh, well, to make it faster, you use a rabbit, and to make it slow you have a little turtle and it’s like, all those little things come into play and it’s fun for me to look at a lot of that accessible stuff is coming into design more and more because the market’s more global, but when you pick up old power tools, they’re only in English.

Steve Thomas: Hey, no. Yeah, but it helps you now, because when you’re thinking about Owly, he’s saying, “Let’s go down to the river.” You have to think of what is the symbol or maybe two symbols together that’s going to say, “Let’s go down to the river.”

Andy Runton: Exactly, and not only that, like, let’s make sure this can’t be misinterpreted. You know what I mean? It only means this. It can’t mean anything else. It’s gotta be clear. It’s incredible to think about all those things, but like all that stuff goes into my mind when I’m trying to create this, and sometimes it works perfectly and sometimes it doesn’t quite work perfectly and you run out of time and you have to just go with your best thing and you do your best.

Steve Thomas: When you were putting together these new versions, colored and with text, what was some of the big challenges you faced with that? Like, did you have the original pencils and stuff that you can go back to you and start with?

Andy Runton: Thankfully, working with everything being done with a small publisher before, Top Shelf, I never sent things away to anybody to do. I had to do it all myself. That was a learning process in its own right, learning how to scan stuff and get it all cleaned up. And you can imagine this, I would send my files, I would burn a CD and then later a DVD and FedEx it to Canada to be printed. So like, I was the last one to see the files, and it was, oh, it was so nerve wracking because you’re like, saving out the final version and you’re sending it by FedEx, which is $150 at the time, to Canada, and you’re like, oh boy. This is so upsetting to think about, but this is the way it worked was that you might get a PDF. PDFs were still really weird. They would be low resolution so you couldn’t really tell what was happening, and you wouldn’t really know if you made a mistake until you got a box of books, which would just be one of the many boxes of the probably 5,000 that they printed, so talk about attention to detail. It was crazy.

But anyways, I saved everything and I backed it up, so I had DVDs cause we’re talking about, wow, so this would be 2000. So I’m on like a PowerPC Mac, and I had Zip disks, and luckily, I saved some of that stuff and I had all the originals. There is a sequence in the first Owly book where Owly’s walking through the rain, and I had a version with no rain that I did a long time ago, so like 2002, and I was luckily able to find it because otherwise I would’ve had to redraw a lot of that stuff, and a lot of it could have been redrawn. That’s what people do; they just start over. I just didn’t want to do that. A lot of the times when, this is something I’ve always done with my art is that if you have to refine something too much, you lose the, I don’t know, the gesture of it, the emotion of it, so I think there’s something valuable in having the original.

But yeah, that was part of the process. Just getting it there and luckily, I scanned everything at a high enough resolution at the time it took so much space. Now it all fits on a thumb drive but at the time, a two gigabyte hard drive was so noisy, it was impossible to deal with. Now, that’s nothing, and it’s crazy to think about.

So that was part of the process, but the biggest issue was that I had a vision in my mind of what I wanted it to be and then trying to get it to that place, and then trying to get it there on a deadline when I wasn’t really sure how long it was going to take, cause I’d never done it before. I mean, I had colored stuff in the past, but never to this extent. Everybody said I should hire somebody and everything like that. But I knew how much time was involved and if you want to talk about people that aren’t paid well, you know, there’s teachers, of course librarians, cartoonists, but people that do support work for books are like the lowest paid, and a lot of times they’ll even get people overseas and shady stuff, and even comics to this day does that they pay people literally like $20 a page. And I know that page took 16 hours. And I just couldn’t like…. morally, I felt wrong doing that to anybody but myself. So I took the hit and just spent so much time doing these things and I actually, I was running so late, I had to get somebody to help me who was a professional on just like 10 pages and I still think about those pages. They did an amazing job, but I didn’t do them. You know, I did most of it, but like, the part that was taking me so long, he came in and like, had it done in just a few days.

I could do that now, but at the time…. but yeah. So I use Photoshop, which is problematic, but the main issue is layers, and how many layers I actually use. I got addicted to that as a designer, because anything was always open to be changed at the last minute by somebody else, and so either you had to redo it or you could just turn on and off layers, so like, I got addicted to layers and this guy was just doing everything on one layer and it was so much faster for him. I still use tons of layers, but it’s just the process of doing it. I mean, but the one thing I can say is if you ever want to get good at something, do it a lot. Now I’ve done five books, roughly about 150 pages each. I’ve gotten a lot better at it. It’s still incredibly time consuming, but at least I understand what I’m doing.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, but you did touch up the art quite a bit too. I was going back and forth with my black and white copy and the color, I was like, “Oh, those lines are different, bringing out emotion in a face a little bit better than maybe you could, when you were 15 years younger.”

Andy Runton: Yeah. I mean, and a lot of that actually was even the way I used to draw Owly. I used to draw him with much bigger feet, like huge sometimes. There was things that I realized I would struggle with, that I had to fix, like, you can imagine this it’s something I still struggle with. But Owly will get too big or too small, and I have to make sure that all the scales are relative. Because he’s still a little owl, and sometimes he’d get person size. It’s almost like some crazy Sesame Street, but I could see it, like all of a sudden, you know, that’s not Kermit, that’s a person dressed up as Kermit, you know what I mean? And suddenly at the time when I drew it, I couldn’t see it, but now I’m like, oh, it was glaringly obvious that I didn’t do this right, so I wanted to fix it.

Owly’s eyes, I was really just shooting for consistency, because as much as I love the fact that when you look at older, this is very true with even newspaper comics, you look at the way they used to draw somebody over the years. They’ve modified it. It wasn’t as bad as the latest book I did was the book five was the Tiny Tales, and it collects a whole bunch of stories I did over the course of the whole 20 years of Owly and oh my gosh, what a difference over that course and trying to make them all look the same as opposed to trying to explain to a kid, ” Hey, well, Andy was in a different place back then, and he drew Owly differently, and he realized that he was cuter when he had a smaller beak. So he drew him this way.” Yeah. So I tried to make them all consistent. Yeah. Yeah. But that’s the kind of thing that, I describe it kind of like when you have to get new tires for your car or something like that, where you’re like, I just spent a lot of money, and the car looks exactly the same. Yeah. Like, you know that it’s better, but like, that was a lot of money, and so it’s the same thing with Owly. Like I think a lot of this stuff I notice, but I don’t know that everybody would notice. I appreciate it that you notice, but that not everybody would.

Steve Thomas: And I don’t know that I would notice if I wasn’t putting them side by side and looking back and forth.

Andy Runton: And the whole point, honestly, is that I didn’t want you to know. You know what I mean? Again, just like the car, like you don’t want to come home with red tires.

Steve Thomas: I was looking for the changes.

Andy Runton: Exactly, and the whole point is to make it feel natural, but it’s so funny because it actually takes a lot of work to make something look effortless. And that is something that’s really hard to explain to people, so it’s like if you’re reading something and you’re like, “Oh wow, it flowed. Oh, that’s incredible!” But you don’t notice it as much as, “Oh my God. This book had so many typos.”

Steve Thomas: There’s some flow issues. I think that, only the first story did I go back and forth between the two, so you may have done it later too, but there’s one point where you even flipped two panels of when Wormy comes home, like you see it from one angle and the other angle, but then the newer version, you flipped it where you see when he’s opening the door, it’s like, you see him at the door, but you see the parents first, but then you flip it where you see the parents and then him. It flowed better that way now.

Andy Runton: Little things like that, yeah, like flowing and some of that first story there, it was like, at the time that story was 36 pages long. That was the longest thing I’d ever written, so like trying to get it done and I remember drawing that and literally that night going to Kinko’s and photocopying it to make little mini comics out of it, which is unheard of that I would do something like that today, but like staying up for two days straight finishing it. And it’s like, you look at it through fresh eyes and you see it slightly differently. It’s been so long since I really looked at it and gone, “Oh yeah. Why did I do that? I don’t know. I’m going to change it!” and forgiving myself for it and saying, “Okay, Let’s fix it. That’s okay.” I don’t want to “George Lucas it”, for lack of a better word, so I’m not trying to do that. I’m not trying to add like tons of stuff. I’m just trying to make it clearer.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, now when Owly gets up, he goes, “NOOOOOOOO!!” And there’s a few more like stormtroopers in the background now.

Andy Runton: And there’s a whole thing at the end. It’s poetry.

Steve Thomas: Do you have any advice for librarians and educators who want to use Owly in their classrooms or in their libraries?

Andy Runton: Yeah, I think the thing is, is it’s funny because I recently got an email from a teacher and I ended up sending a little letter to the boy cause there was one kid in the class who was really having trouble reading. And he just felt really out of the loop, you know. It’s something I can remember as a kid, and I think that everybody does, I think, especially librarians, remember feeling like they weren’t the same as everybody else. I think that’s who Owly is for.

It was so great because this teacher had a kid that wasn’t reading as well, but she knew that Owly existed and like, in a way, it’s his gateway drug into reading, in an amazing way, because it’s like, that feeling of accomplishment you get when you’ve read a book, and we’ve done it so many times, we forget. But that’s that feeling of being alone and like everybody around you is doing something, because, like, I had friends when I was a kid reading Lord of the Rings, and like, I couldn’t even get through the Hobbit. My mind was just all over the place. I mean, I had ADHD undiagnosed my whole entire life, but I didn’t know what was wrong, so trying to figure out what somebody, and this is the thing that librarians do and teachers do is, zeroing in on what makes this kid excited and giving them that and not worrying about the test result or whatever it’s because so much of what we’re learning is a lifetime pursuit.

Everything that I love is because I was excited about it. And I’m like, “Oh, I want to find out more about that animal” or I want to find them out that tree, or I see this blossom and I want to like, “What tree is that? Oh, it’s native to Georgia!” It’s like, for us, it’s like a little chain, you can see it, and it’s weird, but I think that we actually have to be taught that in a strange way. It’s almost like comics, like I’ve read comics my entire life, and I still encounter people who don’t know how to read comics. It’s a language of understanding pictures and taking the time to read it. That’s weird to think about, but just like reading, it’s its own thing, and I think that trying to put all those pieces together, we forget how hard it is at the beginning.

So I think Owly’s about not being worried that you’re different. It’s slowing down, looking at this and being able to enjoy it because it’s a story and understanding that books hold amazing information and how fun they can be. They’re not meant to be intimidating. They’re meant to be exciting. And that’s why, I know you’ve probably experienced this where a parent won’t want a kid to get a certain book or whatever. It’s like, just let them get whatever they want. It’s all important. It’s all important. And I think that’s the great thing about it. I know that’s a very rambling answer, but I tried to sum it all up.

Steve Thomas: That’s good. So you have Tiny Tails is the newest one that’s come out, and you also have A Fishy Situation coming out soon. which is the first new, completely new Owly for a long, long time. These have been these Special Editions.

Andy Runton: Yeah, the Special Editions, that’s exactly right.

But like, yeah, I actually started writing A Fishy Situation a long time ago, probably like 2011, I had the idea for it. I started writing it and ended up leaving my publisher, and so I didn’t work on it for a while and I wanted to do that. That was going to be before Scholastic, I wanted to do that. I was going to crowdfund it and do all these things and luckily ended up finding a way to get the other books back in print, and now I’m finally able to work on Fishy.

It’s been really fun because it’s brand new, but also, it’s different because I’m approaching it as a much more mature writer, like, I know too much now. I know what goes into drawing it and all that stuff, and I have to kind of not think about it, not think about how I chose all of this water that I have to draw. And all of these things, like all the reflections and oh, water in a forest, okay, and wanting to make it look real and the splashing, but I’m also very aware of a lot of the good things about the storytelling and stuff.

So it’s exciting. It’s almost a different process, writing now versus writing when I didn’t know as much, it’s interesting. It’s interesting because you can draw differently, but when you’re actually sitting down and writing it and trying to get it all planned out and everything, it takes a certain amount of focus.

Oh, that’s the other thing is that this is the first one I’ve really written in an era where smartphones and social media exists, and the others already existed and the foundations were laid and now this one is like, okay, how much do I share about it? Should I share anything about? It’s just, it changes things, and it’s also the first one that I’m actually writing with an editor. It’s a difficult process. I mean, I think anybody will tell you that when you first have an idea for something, it’s really delicate, and you’re not ready to defend it quite yet, and you’ve got to work with it a little bit, and you believe in it, but somebody else may not and trying to convince them to do it, it’s been the learning process for sure, but we’re getting there. I’ve just about got the story all locked in and I’m going to start inking soon. So that’s good. It’s exciting, then I know the color is coming.

Steve Thomas: Is there an approximate date on the calendar for it?

Andy Runton: Well, the thing was, is that a lot of it got delayed with COVID and a few other things like that. Right now I’m hoping it’ll be done by next year. So yeah, but a lot of it is just the process of figuring it out. And it’s one thing to say to somebody, ” Look, I know how long this is going to take me to, like for instance, like you’re going to cook something like, I know how long it’s going to take me to cook.” all right. Now, throw in five other people that you got to work with, and the rest of your life is going on. Now tell me how long it’s going to take you to cook it. And you’re like, “Oh, hmm. I don’t know.” And the biggest problem is I don’t want to over promise and under deliver, but unfortunately, publishing works on schedules, just like everything else. So I’m trying to get it done this year, and a lot of it is just focus.

Steve Thomas: But the new one will be in the format of the first five?

Andy Runton: It will look exactly the same. It’s like 120 pages. No. I’m sorry, it’s 144 pages. That was the other thing is trying to figure out how to get it all wrapped up, and it’s the first one I actually had a couple of extra pages at the end, so I added some little backstory to where the inspiration for the Fishy story came from, so that’s fun. Yeah. It’s got some really neat stuff in it. I’m excited about it, but yeah, it’s going to look exactly the same. The thing is, is that I’m working from scratch as opposed to massaging stuff that already existed. And there’s a lot of uncertainty in that. It’s almost like when you’ve got a story that’s pretty close in the final draft, you’re just doing the last minute. This is different. This is like, I could theoretically change anything at any point. And I don’t like that.

Steve Thomas: Well, we talked before we ever recorded that my daughter will just come over and finish it for you if you want.

Andy Runton: Yeah, that would be great! Yeah. She can come over, one night. Yep.

Steve Thomas: Wrap it up.

Andy Runton: Get some pizza, right? Yeah, it takes a long time, but hopefully everything will work out good. It’ll be done in about a year.

Steve Thomas: That’s great, then hopefully more Owly after that!

Andy Runton: I’m hoping. I want to do more Owly. The biggest issue is again, the market and like how long series sell and, oh my gosh. I think that is the other upsetting thing is if you’ve ever been to the ALA or anything like that. And you just look at how many books are released in one year. And you know this, you’re surrounded by them. There’s so many books.

Steve Thomas: I can’t read all of my favorite books because too many books sound good. Like, I can’t even read all the ones that sound good to me.

Andy Runton: We didn’t have that many options when we were growing up, and so a lot of it is like it’s good, and it’s also incredibly intimidating. I think the one thing that is difficult to remember is that it takes so long that a lot of people kind of peter out. So you have to think of it like a marathon, and like, I’m going to do this. It’s going to happen. I’m not a startup that’s going to promise all these things. I’ve got to actually get it done in order to get paid. So, hopefully it will work out good.

Steve Thomas: All right. Well, everybody on the summer reading series is getting asked two questions. So I’m going to ask you the two questions to wrap things up.

Andy Runton: Yes, sir.

Steve Thomas: The first one is what was your first favorite book, the first book that you remember as being a favorite or one of the first, if you can’t remember the exact first.

Andy Runton: I remember this little book, I need to double check the name of it, but it’s like Spider’s Halloween or something like that [How Spider Saved Halloween – Steve]. It’s this little tiny, doesn’t even have a spine. It’s a little picture book about this little spider that gets dressed up and goes out for trick or treating, and it’s so funny cause he dresses up as a jack-o-lantern, and he paints this little face on himself and everything. It’s so beautifully and simply drawn, almost looks like it’s drawn with like colored pencils at the time.

So definitely it’s a ’70s book. But that was, I carried that book everywhere. I found the copy recently. It’s all torn up, but I think it’s called Spider’s Halloween, and it’s such a small little book. It’s not some major name that everybody knows, but that was my book, and I think that’s what’s inspired me to remember that. You can be anybody’s favorite book.

Steve Thomas: And then we’re building a summer reading list, so what is a book that you would want to add to a summer reading list, a book you want to recommend to people? It can be a comic; it can be a novel….

Andy Runton: Oh, my gosh. Give me a second here. Okay. I’ve got one. This is a science fiction, alternate history book. This isn’t a graphic novel, but it could be an amazing graphic novel. I forget the name of the author [Ian Tregillis – Steve]. It’s called Bitter Seeds, and it is about, it’s an alternate history. So like I’m a big fan of Hellboy, which is basically the Nazis did experiments and summon the devil, pre-World War II. So this book though is about the Nazis doing experiments on people and basically creating mutants almost, but the twist is that the Allies have to find a way to counter it, and the way they counter it is English wizards, which turned out to be real, like Merlin and things like that. So they draw from this wizard, but there’s a price to be paid for their magic, and it’s amazing. So like, our world turns out the way it is, but you find out all this stuff that happened in the background, and it was just one of those things where it’s just like, I could not put that book down because it was so conspiratorial, you know, it’s like, all this stuff that happened behind the scenes back in an age when, like, we didn’t really know all this stuff that was going on behind the scenes. It was just really fun, but it’s actually a trilogy, and it ends really well, but Bitter Seeds, the first book, I highly recommended. Highly recommended. Very enjoyable.

Steve Thomas: Cool. We’ll add that to the list. Well, Andy, thank you so much for talking to me for the podcast.

Andy Runton: You’re welcome, Steve. Thank you so much for your support. Over the years, it has meant the world to me and having a friend in the library, it’s been great!

Steve Thomas: Thanks.

Andy Runton: Thanks.

***

Rebecca Vnuk: Welcome to The Circ Desk. I’m Rebecca Vnuk from Library Reads.

Yaika Sabat: And I’m Yaika Sabat from NoveList.

Rebecca Vnuk: And today we are going to chat a little bit about graphic novels.

So Steve was just talking to Andy Runton, with Owly: Tiny Tales. And I have to say, so Library Reads, we are going to bow out a little bit on this one, because I think we had two or three out of the 10 years, we’ve had two or three graphic novels hit the list, but I actually am going to use this to spread the word that Library Reads is an adult title list, and maybe I can nudge some people into not voting for children’s and YA titles, because we do get votes for those every month, but we can’t use them. So, unfortunately, we do not do children’s or youth books on Library Reads. We’ve talked about it when the group was first founded, they decided part of the impetus to start Library Reads was because there seemed to be so many children’s lists, and it feels a little easier to find book recommendations for kids of all different ages, all different reading levels, and the same list didn’t exist for adults. So we sort of wanted to keep that close to the vest, making it just adults. So I do get asked on a regular basis, whether or not we’re going to do a children’s list. Don’t know what the future holds, but right now it is just adult books. So please remember to vote only for adult books. And with that, I’m just going to toss this right over to Yaika. We can chat a little bit about graphic novels and reading and all that kind of stuff. So take it away, Yaika.

Yaika Sabat: Well, I was really excited about this one because graphic novels were probably like some of the earliest things I read and I’ve been reading them my whole life. If you’re not familiar with Owly as a series, Owly: Tiny Tales is the fifth book in the series, and they are silent graphic novels, so without words, and they follow the adventures of Owly, who is a very cute, round owl, he’s so adorable, who very much wants to be friends with other animals in the forest. You’re sort of following his adventures to make friends with other animals in the forest where he lives. And so it is sort of stories without words. They are not fast-paced, action-packed. They’re sort of leisurely-paced. They’re very feel good. They’re very sweet. These are gonna leave you feeling happy when you finish them.

And as far as the illustration, which I think is really important part of graphic novels that sometimes people forget, it’s cartoony in style. It’s black and white, and I will point out having illustration appeals in NoveList is very helpful to me because as someone who reads comics and graphic novels, I can tell you that the art can be make or break. So there might be some people who would love a cartoony book. There might be someone who loves lush, like really lavish illustrations, or they might want something more minimal, more spare. So when you’re talking to someone about comics and graphic novels, even the kids, kids have their preferences, you know, they are fully formed people, make sure to talk about the drawings and try and capture that if you can, because it will make a big difference for the reader you’re helping.

I did take a look as far as some read-alikes, and the first one that sprung to mind without me even searching is the Korgi series by Christian Slade. It is another graphic novel series for middle grade, you know, 9 to 12 ages. This one follows Ivy and her corgi, just like the adorable dog whose name’s Sprout, as they discover things about themselves as they adventure through Korgi Hollow, which is a kingdom in the woods. And it is just as cute as you would imagine. This one is more fantasy so that’s a little bit different, and it is a little bit faster paced. But I will say it’s also stories without words, so you have that same silent reading experience, and it also has black and white illustrations. It’s just very cute and I highly recommend it if you aren’t already recommending it to middle graders.

Then another one that sprung to mind is Bug Boys by Laura Knetzger, if I mispronounced that name, I deeply apologize. But this follows two bug friends who are Stag-B and Rhino-B as they sort of explore their world and share adventures. Friendship is another big theme in this one and it is feel-good, it is upbeat, it’s another happy reading experience. And the illustrations in this are cartoony, just like Owly. So, I think that could be another fun match, a little bit different animals that readers would enjoy.

The last read-alike that I have is Haru by Joe Latham. This follows a little bird named Haru who dreams of flying and whose best friend is a boar who used to sort of live life in the shadows, and they end up sort of on an epic journey to destroy an artifact and save the world, so it has anthropomorphic characters, but this one’s going to have words. It’s going to be more action-packed. It’s going to be more intricately plotted. So if you want something maybe a little more advanced or potentially more engaging for different types of readers, Haru might be a good option.

Rebecca Vnuk: Sounds good. I will say, and I’m fairly certain that Yaika will chime in and back me up on this, if you’re looking for actual library people to tell you, yes, graphic novels are reading. I don’t think anybody really needs us to tell them that but I think some people kind of still don’t think so. My two sons have been huge readers from the beginning, and I was always happy to fill their bookshelves with as many graphic novels as they wanted, and it has paid off because now they’re in high school and are still reading, and they still like graphic novels, and they moved a little bit into anime, and they’ve moved into regular big old full-on adult novels, chapter books, etc. So to me, I definitely would argue with anyone who would try and say that a graphic novel is not really reading.

Yaika Sabat: When I hear that, it’s like, just let me just pull up my soapbox. Me, my brother, and my sister, we all read comics growing up. X-Men, you know, whatever we could get our hands on, and we’re all readers. And if you look at the research, look at the studies. It does improve reading. It also teaches you certain skills in visual literacy and in following action from panel to panel. And more important that, it’s fun and it gets people excited about picking up a book. And I think more than any other research, that’s the most important thing. If you get people excited about picking up books, they’re going to keep doing it. So yeah, I could go on for a while about that comics and graphic novels.

Rebecca Vnuk: You could do, like, a full podcast episode on that, so let’s not!

That’s The Circ Desk for this episode. We will check you out next time.