Downlands, the newest book from author and artist Norm Konyu, is a decade-spanning ghost story that is just as heartfelt as it is chilling. This new release, courtesy of Titan Comics, is Norm’s most ambitious project to date, and we were given the opportunity to talk to him about his approach to writing/drawing and the ideas that inspired the sprawling story of his new comic book.
Read Aaron’s rave review of Downlands here.
You can watch the interview, in full, in the player below or read on for a transcript. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
GYCO: How does it feel to have Downlands out in the world?
Norm Konyu: This has been a long process. I mean, just making it alone. I’m not quite sure how many years it took me to get through it, but we had it. It was supposed to be out last year for Halloween, but there were some infrastructure and transport issues, and that didn’t make it into the country. It’s been a long route. It’s been such a long route that the French edition came out last week, beating the English edition.
Would you say the creative process of your books has evolved with each project? Or has there been a structure that’s stayed in place?
This was my third book. I’m starting to lose the order of them all. I think I’ve done six books altogether.
My first book, The Junction, was a huge learning curve. I learned what not to do in the process, but it also depends on the book. I mean, a big old hunk of paper, like Downlands, is a completely different approach to that than, say, some of my slimmer volumes like A Call to Cthulhu or something, where I can think, it’s not going to take me that long. So I don’t have to have such a plan going into it.
With Downlands, there is a real plan to doing it, and because it was such a big project, I actually worked on other books in the middle of it, because it just got to the point where I couldn’t see the end of the project so I’d hop on to something else for a while. I wanted to do a story where there are lots of threads, and hopefully they’ll at the end, tie together and you can see the relationship to each other. This one, I wrote the main linear timeline that runs through the whole book, James’ story, and then I had these other little stories in my head that I knew weren’t enough for a book, so I tried to tie those into his story. So they’re little junctions to his main timeline.
Because you write and illustrate your books, what comes first? Is it the ideas or the illustrations, or is it the story with the artwork coming naturally off the back of that?
Oh, that’s a good one.
I think there’s a combination of things. I mean, it’s visual things that kind of trigger me in the first place. I’ll have some images, kind of stuffed up here in the ‘grey matter’ and then the writing. But because I’m, as you say, the writer and the artist, I have a bit of leeway where I don’t have to have the strictest script in place when going into the art.
If I were to write it like I do for myself and give it to someone, they probably would have convulsions and drop dead because it’s just not structured enough. Once I’ve got the story in place, then I play with it visually, with how I’m going to tell the story without all those instructions of how many panels on a page, what that page is saying.
I suppose with your angle, with comic books, there is that freedom. You can try whatever you want, and then if something doesn’t work, you don’t have to start from scratch. You can just keep evolving ideas until you get something that starts to form a whole. Is that about right?
That’s true. Because I initially crowdfund these, I don’t have to answer to an editor or anything during the process. So I have complete control, which, you know, isn’t common in most commercial lines of comic books, where you’ll constantly have someone you’re having to run stuff through. So I have that freedom as well.
I hate to say it about animation, which is my day job, but it has all these difficult processes along the way, and it’s necessary, absolutely necessary. But that’s one of the reasons I started doing comics was to do something outside of that strict regime.
I was wondering if there were any elements of working in animation throughout your career that’s carried over into the books that you’ve written?
Well, I don’t take it directly from the animation, but I think the way I approach telling a story visually is basically just a glorified storyboard. I’m thinking of it in terms of how it would work as a film in my head, because that’s my background. I approach it like a storyboard other than I’m not hemmed in by the fact that everything has to be a 16:9 ratio. I can tell the story with whatever ratio I want, which is a nice feeling.
The location of the book fascinated me as I was reading it, I live in East Sussex and noticed the book is set there as well. So it was really interesting to see it translated in the book, and have it almost feel like a character in itself. What was it about this area in particular that made you go, I need to tell this story here?
I haven’t taken anywhere specifically, I’ve taken Sussex architecture and tiled houses and all those sorts of things and popped them in there. It’s familiarity. I could probably tell a story about stone circles better from Wiltshire or somewhere. But it’s just that I know this area, and as an artist, like I said, it’s visual things that trigger me. Like if I go hiking on the South Downs, I’ll see something and I’ll drag that in.
It’s also personal experience. I transplanted a few things from outside the county into the story. But it’s just a familiar thing. My first book was based on the town where I grew up with and went to school in Canada. Writers write what they know.
It was interesting seeing how you had taken bits of folklore from around all of East Sussex and made them work for the sake of the story. How did you decide what elements of that folklore to tweak for the sake of the story or keep? Because Sussex has tons to choose from.
Yeah. The whole of the UK has. That’s why I’m fascinated with it. We don’t have this kind of depth of history and folklore in Canada, where I grew up, so coming here, you kind of pull this stuff in as a sponge and then something comes up. There’s no specific phantom hitchhiker for East Sussex, but it’s such a common story across all of Britain, and even the States and Canada have stories about phantom hitchhikers, so it works well in the story. I think I had a couple of other ideas, but they didn’t make the book. They didn’t fit in the puzzle.
Were there inspirations for Downlands outside of the location that influenced certain aspects, whether it be characters, story, ideas, designs etc?
The only one I can think of was that when I was a kid collecting comics, I collected Conan. I had several issues of the original Barry Windsor-Smith run, the early, early stuff. There was one comic, and it was my favourite. It’s about the only Conan I still have, I sold all of my collection other than a couple of pieces. It’s one I still have, and it’s just in shreds because, as a kid, I read it over and over again, and it was The Black Hound of Vengeance, done in his own inimitable style.
That kind of stayed with me, and I’d heard the Black Shuck stories, and then the Dark Hound, you know, Hound of the Baskervilles. It’s quite a common story, but that image from the Barry Windsor comic has always stayed with me. So I think that played a part. I think we also equate, especially hounds, with being hunted. I think there’s an element of that in our consciousness, that’s what I was trying for.
Where did that initial idea come from? The story of James’s journey with his sister.
Well, ironically, maybe not ironically. I don’t want to use ironic badly like Alanis Morissette.
Years ago, I tried my hand at writing a novel, and my prose just wasn’t up to it. But this is where the bones of the story started. It was about someone who had lost someone. In that case, it was husband and wife, she’d seen the black dog, and then that just sat on the shelf for ages. Then, after doing The Junction, I thought maybe I should return to that story, but use a kid because I think kids are much more effective as characters in ghost stories, because of the whole innocence thing.
I changed it around, polished it up, and expanded on the original story. It’s quite an old idea, probably 20 years old or something, the actual bare bones of it. I went much deeper into the folklore thing than the original story.
Knowing the local area and its history. Are any of the characters in Downlands based on actual people in and around the area, or were they just ideas of people that came to you while writing the book?
No, they weren’t based on anyone specific. I think in a way, they’re stereotypes. There’s the Edwardian farmer stereotype and the old woman next door stereotype, characters that, as you see them, you kind of know where you are with them. I don’t think they’re based on anyone historically or that I know personally.
There’s a lot of shifting storylines, tones and time periods in the book. You visually showed those shifts in tone and time through the use of colours. Could you explain a little bit about that creative decision?
I generally work in chapters or chunks of the story, I tend to choose a colour palette anyway, to separate it from another and, of course, this is the first one I’ve told with huge changes in time. It only seemed natural to me, so I changed my palette. When I go to the 70s, I’ll have a 70s palette, and then when I do Edwardian, I’ll do it in sepia. So I think it’s just an extension of the way I work, choosing colour palettes. My first book didn’t have those swings in time, but the chapters would have their own colour code.
You have a very specific way of drawing characters. I know a lot of the heavy lifting, emotionally, can come from the facial expressions, even though a lot of the time it is very simplified here. How did you develop that style, because it’s something that’s carried over throughout all of your books?
I think that really comes out of the animation background. You try to keep the lines down to a minimum because you’ve got to draw hundreds of bloody things to do a few seconds. Keep it as simple as you can to tell the story. The first one I did, The Junction, is about a younger child, so the style in that is even simpler. This one it’s a little bit more mature, but still simplified. I’m working on one now where the main characters are adults instead of kids. I’m hoping for that to be slightly more mature again, but still within that style frame.
What is next in the pipeline?
I always have something in the pipeline until I burn out, I guess. I’ve just finished a Kickstarter about Edgar Allan Poe, which is very similar to the Cthulhu one. Then I’ve got another long project cooking, but how long that will take is anybody’s guess, and it picks up on some of the ideas in Downlands as well.
It kind of goes with a similar background. I have this strange love of Neolithic stuff. So the next one will be set in Wiltshire. Right now, I’ve got another book coming out with Titan later in the year, and then we’ve got some French editions coming out of things as well.
Downlands is available in stores and on digital platforms from today. You can also listen to our full interview with Norm on all major podcast platforms, including Spotify and Apple.
