Travelling the world in freezing cold weather in an uncovered sleigh, squeezing down filthy chimneys on your own on Christmas Eve while everyone else is slumbering under their duvets.” Briggs found the graphic novel format allowed him the opportunity to draw on strong memories from his own childhood. “His house was based on my mum and dad’s home. These ties to my early life were big inspirations in my work.” Although Briggs won many awards during his career, he felt a special pride for his Kate Greenaway medals – which he kept safe at home in his work room. “The Kate Greenaway Medal is the only one I have had twice.”
With such a long gap between Father Christmas winning the Kate Greenaway medal and Long Way Down does Danica feel graphic novels receive enough attention?
“Every year graphic novels get more and more attention. I’ve been working with graphic novels for somewhere between fifteen and twenty years now. In that time, they have really become more visible and have been getting a lot of respect across different genres. There’s a lot of amazing non-fiction and memoirs which are put on the shelf alongside prose and a lot of great fiction and fantasy, especially for children.”
Danica feels that graphic narratives can offer a route into reading, adding: “if it inspires children to read and encourages them to engage it creates pathways to reading. Graphic novels are really engaging for a lot of children. Teachers and librarians are really starting to recognise that a lot.”
Discussing what makes a strong graphic novel, Danica talks about those which combine text and images in imaginative ways, and that challenge readers to read two media types simultaneously. She says: “They make your mind work in a different way than other types of literature of visual media. There are so many different possibilities, it could be quite linear, or it could completely deconstruct the space on the page and use different types of interesting formats, there are so many aspects to what you can do with it, it makes it really exciting and interesting.” Danica enjoyed collaborating with Jason Reynolds and having someone else’s story to illustrate, revealing: “Working with Jason, who is one of the most incredible writers of YA fiction that there is, made the process really enjoyable. I didn’t have to have all those deep doubts and fears about my own writing. I knew it was a good story so I could feel free to try to make the artwork live up to that. “It was a challenge and a little bit nerve-wracking, but at least I didn’t have to question the flow of the story and the
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Danica Novgorodoff. Photo © Tanja Geis
words on the page because I knew they were perfect.”
The process is different when working individually, according to Danica who says: “When I’m working on my own stories it’s twice the agony – is this any good, is this going to work – and it takes twice the amount of time because the writing takes a long time before you can even get to the stage of starting to draw. It’s nice to work with someone who you
really respect and whose writing you already love.”
Long Way Down explores some complex and emotionally sophisticated ideas around gun violence, gang culture and inequalities. A key aspect for Danica when communicating this visually is the emotional impact. “When you’re looking at images, you’re hearing a story in a different language to straight text, so it can have a different emotional impact. For this book the emotional impact of gun violence was really what I wanted to convey, showing how the main character was deeply affected emotionally.”
One of the challenges Danica felt was in finding how to show grief visually. “It’s something that you can’t necessarily show in words,” she says. “It’s a very visceral interior state of being. There are times that seeing images can convey that in a very powerful way. I definitely wanted to show as little of the actual gory violence as possible because it is such a personal heart-breaking story, so I don’t think it needs that. For me the scenes that are most impactful are the panels where his brother is being zipped into a body bag. It made me cry when I was looking at it. You don’t need to show all of that
Autumn-Winter 2022
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