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Interviews with multimedia comics creators—how Hannah Berry, Lance Dann and Tom McNally use audio drama to move their work into new areas of storytelling

Alex Fitch

Résumés

Cette contribution comprend deux entretiens enregistrés avec des professionnels qui travaillent dans le domaine de la bande dessinée et de la réalisation de fictions sonores. Ces praticiens sont passés de la création de bandes dessinées à la production audio ou ont mis leur expérience de la création de bandes dessinées au service de la réalisation de fictions en podcasts.
Dans le premier entretien, Tom McNally, ancien scénariste de bandes dessinées, rédacteur et éditeur de l’anthologie de bandes dessinées sud-africaines Semiotic Cohesion (2006-2008), parle de son feuilleton audio fantastique et humoristique Saga of the European King. Dans cet entretien, il explique comment il a affiné sa pratique de la narration grâce à la bande dessinée, et quels changements il a dû opérer pour passer à la narration audio. L’anthologie de bandes dessinées de McNally était déjà accompagnée de chansons, disponibles en téléchargement sur un site web, comprenant une première version de sa fiction sonore. Cet entretien a eu lieu le 30 octobre 2017, au Cartoon County, un groupe de discussion mensuel où un créateur de bande dessinée parle de son travail devant un public de pairs, à Brighton et Hove, dans le Sussex.
Dans la deuxième interview, Hannah Berry, auteure de bande dessinée primée, et Lance Dann, producteur audio, évoquent leur travail commun sur The Rez, un projet de narration multimédia qui existe sous la forme d’un podcast, d’une application, d’un site web et d’une bande dessinée. Chacun de ses aspects est conçu pour se compléter afin de raconter une histoire plus vaste dans un monde de science-fiction, visant à promouvoir auprès des enfants les valeurs de gentillesse et de résilience. La création de The Rez a commencé pendant les confinements sanitaires du Covid. Cet entretien a été enregistré pendant le colloque Graphic Brighton, à l’Université de Brighton, le 27 mai 2022.
Chacune de ces séances de questions-réponses a été présidée par Alex Fitch et enregistrée devant un public, puis diffusée sur Resonance 104.4 FM (Londres).
Les transcriptions de ces entretiens mettent en évidence les liens entre les médias comparés, les différentes approches adoptées par chacun des professionnels pour la création de fictions audio et de bandes dessinées, la manière dont ces créateurs se sont impliqués dans chaque projet discuté, ainsi que les différences et les similitudes qu’ils ont rencontrées dans les différents médias.

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Notes de la rédaction

These interviews are part of the documentary section of Comicalités’ “Comics Aloud” dossier, and as such have not been peer-reviewed. They have been read/edited and approved by the editorial board.

Ces interviews s’inscrivent dans la partie documentaire du dossier thématique « La bande dessinée à voix haute » de la revue Comicalités et, à ce titre, elles n’ont pas fait l’objet d’une relecture par les pairs. Elles ont été relues et approuvées par le comité de rédaction.

Texte intégral

The Saga of the European King

1A conversation recorded in 2017, at a meeting of Cartoon County, a monthly get-together where a comics creator talks about their work to an audience mainly consisting of fellow cartoonists. I host these interviews to provide a forum where creators and share info about their latest work, and get feedback on work in progress. As a broadcast journalist, with a monthly radio programme, Cartoon County is a valuable resource to find content for my show. I am also personally a fan of Science-Fiction audio drams, and so was intrigued to learn more from a writer of this medium.

  • 1 Podcasts of the 35 chapters/episodes of The Saga of the European King, and additional recordings, s (...)

2With each of these aspects in mind, I interviewed Tom McNally about his audio drama The Saga of the European King, a comedy/fantasy which ran for 35 episodes between 2012 and 2021.1 McNally had previously been a comic book writer and editor of the self-published anthology Semiotic Cohesion, which featured both his work and that of creators hailing from South Africa, and saw five issues released between 2006 and 2009.

3McNally’s audio drama is a continuation of stories he made as a cartoonist—as will be discussed below—and so this interview will be of interest to researchers and comic creators who might like to learn about how a comic book writer has adapted his writing method when moving from comics into a different storytelling medium. The plot of The Saga of the European King is a parody of fantasy sagas, and of the apocryphal story of King Canute trying to command the waves to obey his wishes. In McNally’s story, a fictional King gathers fellow adventures to go on a quest to defeat the season of winter, as if this was a person or force that could be defeated in battle.

4A recording of this interview was broadcast on Resonance FM [London] on 17th January 2018, and podcast on 19th March 2018.2

Tom McNally: I learned that it’s very, very difficult to make comics at the same time as studying, maybe because it just takes so long to make a page. It takes so long, especially as I don’t have the best workflow. It takes me forever to do anything. And I then started to think about audio drama, because you can just say it! You can just speak and that’s content, now.

It doesn’t have to be good. It just has to occupy time. [laughs]

I thought this was a great wheeze, and I was at Sussex and it’s what brought me to Brighton.

  • 3 Artist of V for Vendetta, and Brighton resident.

I remember years back, around 2002, David [Lloyd] told me that Brighton was a great place to be, because you didn’t have to drive anywhere.3 And that stuck in my mind. So, when it came to choosing a university - University of Sussex - you don’t have to drive. So, I did it.

They have a very good, well-spoken of, drama department there. So, it was it seemed like a good idea to me to go to the drama department, go to a rehearsal of something they were making and recruit some people and make an audio play, like I used to when I was a kid.

I took an idea I was going to turn into a comic called The Saga of the European King, which is spun out of a long, complicated series of other comics, and I adapted that to just go for an audio drama, and just kind of hit the ground running.

We made our first season in a couple of weeks, and then the whole production got mired down and after a few years I was able to bring it back, and now we’ve been releasing it every month, have gained that momentum back again - that most precious of all substances, the momentum…

  • 4 This took place on October 6 2017. More info about the event can be found on Onca’s website: https: (...)
  • 5 McNally is referring to himself and his team of actors.

At the beginning of the month, we had a live show at Onka Gallery down on the bottom of Trafalgar Street.4 The Arts Council funded it, and it was part of Brighton Digital Festival, and now we have momentum. Now we’re running forward. It’s going to be more of that. We’re about to start the third season and that is The Saga of the European King.5

We’re up on SoundCloud. We’re up on iTunes, the most important thing in the world, to be up on, if you have anything that is audio that that plays in real time, you have to be on iTunes!

The two actors are a couple; I go to their house and we stand in this doorway, which has the best acoustics in the house. And we go through the scripts, and we record it. I edit it together, and we put it up online. People can come and download it, and they do. They do!

But it’s not comics. And it’s not comics in three important ways that I’m going to talk about today, Alex.

It’s not comics. In fact, the obvious thing of the medium. It’s not comics in the physical act of making it, and the scene is very different. So, let’s talk about that.

Alex Fitch: Okay. Well, and clearly it’s not comics because there aren’t any pictures…

TM: The most obvious thing, right away!

AF: So, you said that you were doing audio plays as a kid. Where did that interest come from? Was it listening to Dick Barton and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy on the radio?

TM: I’ve heard The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy! The main appeal to it, is that it’s something that you can do as a kid with a tape recorder that you don’t really need anything else for, and all this mad imagination you have as a kid, can just be put front and centre, very easily. And that is still a great appeal to audio drama.

You know, compared to: if I can imagine something, I can then draw it, but then that would take ages. But I can have people describe that and then let the listener do the work, which is an incredible switcheroo, to be able to pull!

AF: Were you doing all the voices yourself back then?

TM: Yeah, then it was myself and my neighbour. A young Greek man, called Mano who lived next door to me in Cape Town, who now does music for Saga of the European King. Yeah, we just had a tape recorder. I don’t think we even kept the tapes. When we got to the end of one, we’d just record over.

AF: See, if you’d kept them and distributed them at conventions, you could be doing the voice of the Daleks on TV, right now!

  • 6 Nicholas Briggs has been the voice of the Daleks and other aliens in Doctor Who on television since (...)

TM: Really? Is that what [Nicholas Briggs] was doing? Yeah, but he was doing Dalek voices?6

AF: He was playing the Doctor in homemade cassettes of Doctor Who that were given out at Doctor Who conventions.

TM: That’s huge! We were just being cruel to our classmates and teachers and things. But maybe they would buy them? Maybe they’d like to hear themselves as a child, and understood them, in the year 1996?

AF: So, you did drama at Sussex?

TM: No, I didn’t.

AF: Oh, you did science…

TM: I did Biology.

AF: …but hung out with the drama department?

TM: Yeah. You get to the thing which society values the most, and then you just leech off of the talent of others!

AF: [laughs] So, you approached them, and they were up for doing it with a complete stranger. Or did you show them some comics first to get them interested?

TM: I think I kept the comics under my belt. I don’t know why…

AF: There’s nothing embarrassing about comics.

TM: No, no, no. I just thought they wouldn’t understand: “Why are you doing comics?”… Well, that’s in my own mind, that’s something I’ll tell a roomful of people in 2017!

No, I think I presented myself as a playwright, which is something I think I guess I am by default, but I still think of myself as a cartoonist. But now one who uses a bit of audio.

AF: I listened to “Book One” of Saga of the European King, which has ten chapters, and they’re all about 15 minutes each. Presumably it’s a similar format for Book Two?

TM: We bloat out a little bit and kind of it’s more 18 to 20 minutes.

  • 7 Foley is the term for pre-recorded sound effects, both real—e.g. the recording of bird song in the (...)

AF: The sound effects and the sound mixing have gotten better, not that it wasn’t good in Book One, but presumably you were learning the technology and how to do improved foley, and sound mixing, and special effects as you were going along.7

TM: Yeah, yeah. I was learning very much on my feet and Book Two we did twice because of the cast mix up and things. So, I had a practice run at it, and I was able to do YouTube tutorials for everything. I’ve got to say […] it’s so much easier than drawing, in a way that I find kind of obscene! If you listen to the most listened to audio dramas […] they’re good at the highest professional level, […] there’s not as much work in there as what you’d find in a mediocre comic, just in terms of hours, and in terms of production.

But there’s a lot more money which is involved in getting that [audio] production done well. I mean, we’re fortunate these days in that foley banks and there are online communities of sound effects, and it’s easy to get hold of open-source software, that can do a lot of the work for you.

  • 8 Berry is one of the interviewees of the second interview in this chapter, a graphic novelist who is (...)

AF: But going back to your point about making money, Hannah Berry said a few months ago that she’s giving up for the foreseeable future writing and drawing graphic novels just because in order for her to render it in a way that she’s happy with on the page, she can’t produce pages at a rate for it to be economically sustainable to live on.8 So, I think she’s going to continue just writing comics, but not drawing them as well. But presumably it’s like what you were saying: even a second-rate comic takes much longer to make in terms of just drawing the thing, as opposed to mixing an audio, going to a person’s bedroom and getting people to do funny voices inside the doorway.

  • 9 McNally seems to be suggesting there wasn’t much ‘rich’ or non-American audio drama available at th (...)

TM: Yeah, I mean, I don’t want to give a false impression of the riches of audio drama there is.9 There is much… The main problem with the whole medium is that there’s nothing to show. Somebody needs to make the decision to sit down, to listen to it, and then stick with it enough for the story to make sense and to kind of start engaging with the characters. And the only way to really make money in this medium is by appealing to a higher power, and right now, in the landscape of audio drama, there’s not many of those, certainly not in the UK, In the US, there’s like the big podcasting companies, there’s things like networks which have channels. There’s Radiotopia and Gimlet, but none of them are really doing audio drama. It is a medium for enthusiasts at the moment.

AF: I suppose we are getting there, because over the past year, serialised documentary dramas like Serial and S-town have sort of emerged into the public consciousness. So, maybe entirely written ones will be the next thing.

TM: Yeah, I certainly hope so. So, Audible are kind of the big players and they are producing a lot of original content, but right now, it’s mostly licensed things. They have one or two sitcoms, but they’re having trouble generating anything which isn’t American really, which is one of the big limitations of the medium. You can hire an actor who can do accents. But anybody who actually belongs to that accent immediately knows that they’re imitating it. So, the more […] diverse your character set […] and the more groups you have [represented in the story], you are excluding [them by not casting them authentically], because you are copying them, you know? Like, the human brain is very, very good at picking up on imitators in terms of voice. Character design in general is actually very, very difficult in audio drama, because you are now dealing in a level of communication that people, whether they know it or not, are automatically try to pick out liars.

AF: So, you’ve done two volumes, now. The second volume you are selling on Bandcamp, in the sense that it’s pay what you want. Are you happy to say what the average amount is, that people are donating?

TM: I think the average amount is £5. A volume is about 3 hours of content, and it represents probably a year of work. So, the business model in audio drama is not selling the thing. Selling the albums. In fact, if you do that, if you put things behind a paywall, where it’s not selling pay what you want, you’re kind of a jerk. The model is selling advertising and using it as a way to court a larger body [of income].

AF: Okay. Have you tried to sell advertising space to fancy bookshops?

  • 10 This links to my mention of Hannah Berry’s similar problem at the time of recording, that working i (...)
  • 11 After this interview took place, companies that make audio dramas and a small number of comics, suc (...)

TM: No. I am running Saga of the European King pretty much entirely as an enthusiast’s thing right now. I’m fortunate to have a job at the moment where I’m able to devote a lot of time to it.10 But […] even on the small price level, where you have a product that you can then take to conventions, and you can book a table and maybe make a profit on that, that doesn’t really exist in audio drama in any kind of form.11

AF: But I saw you somewhere recently where you were still selling comics, or am I imagining that?

  • 12 Presumably Brighton Film and Comic Con 2016.

TM: I sold some comics in Brighton. Shane Chebsey’s show.12

AF: So, conceivably, if you were to continue selling comics, you could burn CDs of Saga, you could do some nice packaging.

TM: I have some good cover art for these things, […] I’ve been keeping my hand in on that. And part of the live show we did, we did […] an exhibition, had all the cover art up on the walls, while we were doing the show live. And that […] was a great success, and seems to be very encouraging, because we got Arts Council Funding for it. Which is something I never really thought of getting for comics. Of course, people do, but when you have […] multiple people involved and when you can teach workshops to kids, and have a […] sense of community theatre [...] The [Arts Council] seem to understand that better than comics.

AF: It’s nice that you’re keeping an element of illustration to it. So, when you download each chapter and listen to it on, say, an iPhone, then you’ll get an image filling the size of the iPhone screen, so that while you’re listening to it, there is at least some illustration going on.

TM: Yes, that is our unique selling point. No other audio drama does that! [laughs] So, I feel that I have carried over the skills, from years of making comics.

  • 13 Jackanory was a British television show broadcast between 1965 and 1996, where a presenter—often an (...)

AF: Would you be tempted to go full Jackanory and do YouTube videos with a new illustration, say, every 30 seconds or every 10 seconds?13

TM: I’d have to really change my illustration style for that [… which] would take forever to do. But yeah, it’s something that gets suggested to me a lot. I would need to [...] take on an animation skill set for that […] There are [video] games do that quite well. You have […] a limited palette where […] a character will pop up, but they’re […] a still image and they don’t move the mouth. The lips don’t move as such. Cause that’s way too much man hours to do. But then for key emotions they change, so it’s more a puppet show. That would certainly be an evolution to do that. I’d feel […] the story would have to cater around it.

I’ve written these, and made these, to be audio only. If I go down that route, yeah, things would have to be written for that.

AF: The first book was advertised as being a sort of a satirical take on popular culture at the time. Listening to Book One, there seem to be elements of Game of Thrones in there, elements of Adventure Time. Were there particular kinds of pop culture references that you felt weren’t hitting the mark that you wanted to satirise?

TM: I made a colossal effort not to watch Game of Thrones, because […] with the plot of Saga being: it’s the King of Europe, of a medieval Europe and he wants to go out and kill winter because it’s very difficult to get your clothes dry in the winter and everybody’s […] miserable and sad.

  • 14 In 2009, Fitch interviewed McNally when he was selling his comics on a cold day, from a stall in Ca (...)

AF: Did that come from those days in Camden Lock, when the wind was whistling through?14 “Finally, I can get my revenge!”

TM: It was all in the DNA there! Sure. So, when Game of Thrones came round, with the very effective tagline of: “The winter is coming”, people instantly made the connection. So, quite spitefully, I decided to not participate. I try and set my sights much lower in references and culture I want to assimilate. We were talking just now about Tom Scioli, and I took a lot of inspiration from him. I spoke to him in Angoulême a few years back, and quite off the cuff. He’s a Canadian comics artist. He does amazing work. He started off in webcomics. He did Satan’s Soldier, Godland, and American Barbarian. They’re […] assimilations of 80s junk culture, the kind of stuff made to sell toys to children. And he has […] unpicked the […] high culture influences in there. So, he’s taken something like: He-Man… you don’t have to go very from He-Man to find Jack Kirby, you don’t have to go very far to find Moebius. You don’t have to go very far to find Conan, obviously. And then all those have influences on them.

  • 15 M.A.S.K. was an American cartoon series which mixed elements of Science-Fiction and the Western and (...)

So, if you […] trace that line of influence back to its source, you quickly find something […] worth talking about. So it’s easy to do a kind of Robot Chicken and just say: “Okay, do you remember He-Man? Do you remember Thundercats?” But, that’s kind of worthless, because Thundercats and He-Man aren’t good things. We shouldn’t be proud of those, but they are […] something some poor, tired freelancer came up with on a weekend, because they had subsisted on a diet of good things. And if you try to find that, and then marry it back to this quite junky capitalist advert that it became, something quite magical happens. So, I have taken a leaf out of Tom Scioli’s work and tried to find things like M.A.S.K. and BraveStarr and just… I mean, I tried to […] research and […] watch them, but they’re just unwatchable.15 They’re just such a dirge. But you try to find, like one specific element, and then you spend the night trying to find out what they were thinking, what they were trying, what they were trying to channel, to come up with that. Then you go on sort of a psychogeography tour around the world on any particular thing, and then you try to find […] the oddest or the oldest point of reference and you tie in something like that.

It comes back to Semiotic Cohesion, right? And it comes back to you find yourself doing an episode which is […] a BraveStarr pastiche, but I’ll throw in these very old obscure bits, to try and build it up again. To try and square that circle. Which is mostly satisfying to me and hopefully it makes something that is not just a pastiche, it’s something that tries to re-inject some kind of life into a culture that […] went wrong a long time ago.

Audience[“Tim”]: So, is it […] Beowulf via Mattel?

TM: That’s a great way of putting it. Oh my God, you’ve summarised… I’m going to use that line forever. Thank you.

AF: Actually, I was going to say, you have to balance the comedy and the drama in it, so while individual chapters may be like the characters fighting giant birds or being trapped in the realm of the dead, there are still loads of jokes in there and it’s very funny at times. It made me think of… I heard Terry Gilliam talk once about when he was co-directing one of the Python films with Terry Jones, that Gilliam wanted to put more blood and sword fights in it and Jones wanted to make more jokes. So, do you find yourself with the right brain, left brain in […] agreement or argument: trying to put more jokes in one episode, or more death by swords?

TM: Yes. Well, you know, as a learning process of figuring out the medium, you learn quite quickly that your instincts as a storyteller have been calibrated quite wrongly by comics for audio drama. For comics, you […] need this feed of interesting imagery. Whereas imagery in audio drama is quite difficult to conjure. So, you need the character. I mean the original draft of Saga of the European King, I was doing as a comic; it had almost no dialogue.

It was just kind of about tone and it was about absurd images strung together, which you could do in a comic. In a comic you can be completely obtuse and still […] have a good comic; it will be an obtuse comic, but […] I feel that someone like Daniel Clowes can make a character be completely unrelatable but still make an amazing story out of that. But, you can’t have an unrelatable character speak to you for a great length of time, and still make something worth listening to.

So absolutely, yeah, [in audio] you need to drop in those jokes […] you need to harness that rhythm. This character needs to say something. It needs to reveal something about the world, but that’s kind of boring. So, they need to say their joke now because the audience has got bored listening to this bit. We need to make them realise that they haven’t absorbed that information, because absorbing big chunks of information is hard to do in in audio drama. You can’t do a big splash page that has […] textual elements that [reveal] a bit about the geography of the world, a bit about the history of the world, a bit about where these, how these… just the scale of the character within that world.

  • 16 ‘Mystery box’ is a form of storytelling in episodic television, popularised by writer/director J.J. (...)

You have to have characters say all that, which is boring. So yeah, you have to come back to the jokes, you have to come back to the character beats and even just… you have to have other characters speak for the audience in interrupting characters, just […] to say the thing which you as a storyteller want them to really say. Which is good, because you mystery box it. You string out those mysteries. You can make mundane stuff […] be a myth arc.16

AF: I really enjoy the characters, but actually one of my favourite aspects of it, is the voice of the narrator, and particularly, I was listening to a chapter earlier where you kind of break character and say: “I’m sorry, I’ve got to stop and have some soup”, which is a really nice way of both drawing the reader in, but also pointing out […] that this is […] a production actually made in your kitchen.

TM: That moment was absolutely Cinéma vérité; I really did have some soup! I was trying to think of a way to end that scene. I thought, “I can just be honest. [...] I could stop pretending I am narrating this grand fictional history”. The main problem facing audio drama as a whole medium is that you don’t really have that many different formats. […] You can’t do a whole issue made of double page spreads. You can’t do one which is a square format, one which is large scale. You only really have […]: “narrator” or “no narrator”, or “entirely stage play”. Found footage is very popular right now, taken from […] horror cinema. […] I figured it would be pretty much intolerable to not have a narrator because I want to get those ‘images’ in and I want to be able to skip over things which would be easy to do in comics, which are hard to do in audio drama: like fight scenes, chase scenes. It’s much easier just to have a narrator say that something happened. But then you need to address the artifice, […] the listener instantly knows that it’s just someone telling you that something happens. So, you need to acknowledge that.

AF: Well, I can’t think of a specific example, but your style of narration reminded me of a line from one of the iterations of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where Douglas Adams says something like “the Vogon ships hung in the sky almost entirely unlike bricks”. And it’s those kinds of gentle, surrealistic contrasts that I think you do very well.

  • 17 Dirk Maggs, who worked on radio adaptions of Douglas Adams’ work is discussed elsewhere in this Com (...)

TM: Thank you very much. I’m a big fan of Douglas Adams, I read them when I was very small, and then sort of rediscovered the radio series, which […] I feel is better than it was [in other media] … it was written that way originally.17 […] That’s the that’s the real strength of the medium. That’s the thing that I really love about it, is it’s all that you get, all the strength of prose. But then when you want to use prose in comics, you now are taking up image space and […] that’s […] less than ideal. You want the images to speak for themselves and you want to be able to use that other language. So, if you’re able to seduce the listener to the point where they can, they feel like they want to listen to your voice, then you can start bringing in these prose elements and start to say impossible things in a way that couldn’t possibly be drawn.

AF: Is it entirely scripted from start to finish or is some of it improvised?

TM: I would like to be of a temperament that I tolerated more improvisation. The actors, Josh and Amy are incredibly talented. They are working actors and improvisation is a huge part of their job. But I […] cut out a lot of what they improvise… I need to loosen up.

I’m starting to write more parts where lines get improvised. For the moment, I trust them to certainly sell a line in intonation and non-vocal performance, but yes, I need to rely on them, on them as part of the medium itself.

AF: With a small cast, with considerably more characters than there are actors in the room, obviously they have to double and triple up. So, as you’ve gone along, have you written types of characters based on the sort of voices you’d like to hear them do? Or, have they come to you and said, I’d love to play a talking tree or […] a demon cat or something?

TM: Yeah, it goes both ways […] They say […] I’ve been doing this voice and I need a character for it and that’s a challenge. And then […] I’ll write a character around it. There’s a couple of characters in book three that are built around voices, and […] these guys, they talk in voices all the time. They talk in voices to [their] cats!

But then the other thing is […]: when I have this […] idea for a character who’s going to have this kind of quality to them. And when you sit down writing about it, I’m kind of, you know, mumbling to myself in the voice, but a lot of it comes in dialect rather than what the voice sounds like. So, I know that this character wants to […] I just have a notion that this character should use all the words that Snoop Dogg uses in his lyrics and so […] that’s something you can spend a night researching and building up a sort of a “slang bank”. Then it becomes sort of a puzzle: how can this character express this sort of sentiment using only words that have been included in a Snoop Dogg song?

  • 18 British actor who has appeared in television shows such as Toast of London and What we do in the Sh (...)
  • 19 “Pilot” being the term used for the first episode of a TV series, but also “Backdoor Pilots” are la (...)

You have that kind of layer of it, and then taking it to Josh, who then does that character, renders the character in a sort of dissonant Matt Berry tone.18 And then instantly certain words become funnier than others, ’cause it’s dissonant. Now, making it and writing it in verse now becomes very funny because that just sounds very strange. I’m like: “Okay, this character is actually very strange”, and now you’re trying to push it to become stranger and stranger. […] In television, […] characters “find their voice”, and [that happens] literally in this case. You have the pilot effect for every new character that’s introduced, they’re […] quite broad, and then they find what works between writing and performance.19

AF: So, you’re writing in advance of each episode rather than writing 20 and then giving it to the actors?

TM: Oh, yeah. I have story ideas that go far into the future. But yeah, the scripts themselves are written pretty […] close to recording.

Audience [“Jo”]: You talked a bit about the time that it takes to draw a comic and it being much quicker making audio plays, but what is it about the process of drawing that you miss, if anything?

TM: So, the thing I always found difficult about drawing is the isolation of it, and the wonderful thing about audio drama is that you bring—especially for me—you bring your friends in, and you get to hang out with them. And it’s like a play date! At the end of the play date, you have this hour of material you’ll condense down to 10 minutes. That is a huge strength for me. But what I really miss about drawing is, especially the way I draw, it’s: you’re in control of every line, pixel on the page and you are just the God of this universe.

And everything you say goes, you might not do that...

Audience: …assuming that the drawing comes out the way you want it…

TM: Yeah and then even if it doesn’t, and assuming your drawing’s good enough for you to make that boast as well, which is depending on how you feel that day, […] how much practice you’ve had. And there’s also […] the fact that […] you have access to so many tools when you have something visual and […] if you… it’s quite a globe-trotting story and I’m very conscious of creating something that’s quite offensive, if I have of our three actors, you know, having one that might do an accent or do a voice.

We have a Mexican character, and I made a decision quite early on […] I didn’t tell the actors they were from Mexico, so they’ve done that […] broad American accent and it’s fine. The fact that she is Mexican […] it’s not part of her [audio] character, and I didn’t want them to do a […] comedy Mexican accent. But of course, that’s a colouring issue, when you’re drawing [comics].

You don’t have a silhouette [in audio]. You can’t have a character that’s silent at all. It’s like, he doesn’t exist. You can’t have a character looming in the background. If you have a character loom, they have to […] come in, and say something unnecessary. And I miss that…

Audience: …the unspoken.

TM: Yes.

Summary

5In the interview, Tom McNally started out by saying he was going to discuss how audio dramas were “not comics in three important ways”.

6He noted how it’s a different medium, how the making of audio drama is physically different to making comics, and how the “scene” around audio drama is different. Longer explorations of these ideas emerged during our conversation.

7Firstly, in terms of being a different medium, McNally explained how the needs of audio drama and comics are sometimes quite different. If he had continued Saga of the European King “as a comic; it had almost like no dialogue”, while on audio much narration and dialogue is needed to serve the same role as art that would tell elements of the story by itself. However, “absorbing big chunks of information is hard to do in in audio drama”, so information has to be seeded into the spoken words without being “boring”.

8He noted having more control of the comics he made - as an artist being the creator of every drawn line - while as an audio director, has to rely on his cast and lean into the nature of their performances, ignoring the temptation to ask them to play characters in styles that might be too much like imitation of other cultures. He found drawing comics isolating, and enjoys the collaborative process of making audio drama.

9Secondly, regarding the making of audio drama—dependant on the level of finesse intended—it can be as simple as sharing a tape recorder with a friend. With a larger number of characters, it requires collaboration with a cast of actors, and McNally is cautious about casting people to do ‘funny’ accents, when he would be happier to draw someone of a different ethnicity on the comic page. However, the availability of open-source software and being able to access sound effects online makes post-production relatively easy.

10Thirdly, in terms of the scene, he noted that the small-press aspect of comic book conventions—where small publishers can rent a table for a weekend and sell their wares—does not have a similar equivalent in audio drama. Instead, audio drama relies on certain channels such as Audible and podcast networks to find an audience. For him, audio drama is potentially less profitable than making comics. Having distributed episodes of Saga of the European King based on a “pay what you want” model, he is earning £5 each time someone downloads a season of episodes, but is looking towards advertising as a way of improving this.

11While he is no longer making comics, beyond spot illustrations to accompany the podcast, he is still inspired by comics. An example of this is how the work of Tom Scioli influenced his similar approach to looking at pop culture and seeing if elements can be drawn out from 1980s American animation, which have value to a modern storyteller.

The Rez

12The Rez is a Sci-Fi multimedia project produced by Lance Dann, which exists as an app for mobile platforms, a website, an audio drama and a comic. The plot of the drama is a satire on capitalism and social media, in which two recurring characters learn that kindness and friendship are better for your mental health than retail therapy, in the midst of fighting an A.I. that controls the futuristic world they live in. Issues of the comic released so far have been written by former Comics Laureate / graphic novelist Hannah Berry, with art by Rachel Smith, and Berry is also a co-writer of the audio drama. The project website went live on September 23 2020, and since then two issues of the comic, and as of October 2024, 31 episodes of the audio drama have been released, across three seasons. According to project consultant Prof. Robin Banarjee, the multimedia experience is intended to: “communicate the value of kindness for building resilience in young people” [Banarjee, “The Importance of Kindness”].

13The Q&A with Lance Dann and Hannah Berry was recorded on 27th May 2022 at Graphic Brighton, an annual conference curated by Alex Fitch and Barbara Chamberlin which mixes a conference for academics with a symposium for comic book creators to discuss their work.20 A recording of this interview was broadcast on Resonance FM [London] on 1st June 2022, and podcast on 8th June 2022.21

Alex Fitch: How did the project come about?

  • 22 The Welcome to Night Vale website describes this audio drama as: “a twice-monthly podcast in the st (...)
  • 23 The Rez website went live on Sep 23 2020, so presumably Dann started work on the project in the lat (...)

Lance Dann: I’ve been working in audio drama for a long time and podcasting, and with people using podcasting to improve their mental health. Young people are talking about that. If you know Welcome to Night Vale, […] people are listening to that to help them with depression and things.22 And at the time [I began the project], kids podcasting was very nascent and there’s hardly anything there.23 I kind of began to glue together the idea of, like, creating kids podcasts that would address these issues, and then how to address those issues. And then alongside that, I think there’s a kind of an awareness that if kids are not used to this action of listening […] this is where the idea of working with comics came in, it’s […] giving them […] a visual guide, almost to help the message, to give them ideas of the characters, put the images in their heads, because otherwise they would be very lost.

And this is kind of what was happening, particularly in America, when podcasting, audio fiction podcasting, was booming and people weren’t quite sure how to listen. So, that […] was the nascent form of it. We worked with Robin Banerjee and Mark Wright. Robin Banerjee, the Professor of Kindness at Sussex University, who rather regrettably is a really kind man, I wanted him to be grumpy and cross when I met him! But he’s lovely and we got various forms of Arts Council backing and funding to […] grow this […] project, and that’s when through Tim Pilcher—who’s one of our team—we brought Hannah on board. Do you want to say anything?

Hannah Berry: I came in quite late in the whole proceeding, there is a huge amount of work that went into all of the planning, and the gathering of money and funding. […] I wasn’t the first one brought in, was I?

  • 24 The first international incidents of COVID 19 infection are recorded as happening in December 2019, (...)

LD: You were in the first creative meetings. We’re talking about December 2019, when nothing was about to go wrong!24

HB: Yeah. Plain sailing as far as the eye could see! And in the very beginning […] there was just this idea that it was going to be a podcast for children, which had to… there was going be an interactive element to it. That was something that was always going to be in it.

LD: And the comic book was always in it. There was going to be the comic book, as this way of supporting kids […] because in the UK there’s not a culture of kids listening to things. We thought the comic book would be a good way of introducing them to the whole project.

HB: Initially, we had this idea… it was all about the idea of connection and how in the future […] it was kind of a utopian future, but dystopia at the same time, because people have become disconnected from each other and it’s very focused on commercialism, and on consumerism […]: there was no real focus on human connection, on the positive, on the need for it, basically.

So, we started at the very beginning, to […] suggest that children should rely on connections in real life and not via technology. And then suddenly, that was the only way they could actually connect with people [due to COVID lockdowns]. So, we had to have some hasty rewrites!

  • 25 This took place on March 25 2020, as reported in the Derbyshire Telegraph: https://www.derbytelegra (...)
  • 26 Dann and Berry seem to be implying they wrote a similar scenario before it happened in real life—as (...)

LD: And there were episodes about: what would you do if school went away? What was the point of school? And also there was… I don’t know if everyone remembers the incident where I think the Derbyshire police were following people around the moors with drones, pointed them out.25 And we have episodes where people go out to the wilds and then followed by drones […] are shouting at them: “Go back to the city, it’s dirty and not safe!”, and again, you know, it was kind of like all those beats were coming true throughout that whole kind of strange period.26

HB: Derbyshire Police are big fans, big fans!

LD: All their inspiration from us. [laughs]

AF: I mean, it’s interesting though, because science fiction is always kind of about the present. It’s always […] extrapolating what’s going on. So, by accident and design, you guys were really responding to the moment. I mean, incredible serendipity. […] Was the feedback that you were getting back […] positive because of that, that actually you were addressing concerns that were really happening at the moment? And that it was being shared with people?

LD: If you’re talking about feedback from the grown-ups.

AF: Grown-ups and kids.

LD: Yeah, we’ve had feedback from grown-ups. We’re in our second season now, and we got signed to one of the biggest podcast networks in the world. And it went very big in America, that’s the other thing. Kids… and this has rather slightly wrong-footed us on a number of things, because we’re big, big in America and get tens and tens of thousands of listeners and we’re not getting a lot of traction in the UK. I could go on about that for a bit, and I kind of know why, but it’s interesting […] that the messages that have resonated across the series and kids have really picked up on it, but also they’ve been younger than we thought. That was another lesson. And this is […] the thing about writing for children.

We began aiming at 10 to 12, didn’t we? In the early meetings, of 10 to 12. 12-year-olds are quite cool and savvy aren’t they? And we’re more naughty [than 12-year-olds]: fart jokes skew a little bit younger.

HB: Our own mental level was younger than 12, so we’ve brought it all down! [laughs]

LD: But then we resonated with [the younger end of] that group. So, we’ve actually readjusted the whole project to be for age 10, and it makes me really admire people who set out to hit that kids demographic, and land it. I mean that is, you know, serious alchemy, to be able to talk to those children […] One thing that we’ve been really careful to do in the entire project is never to be preachy, and never to be… it’s got all these messages in it, but they’re quite embedded in the story, and in the jokes, and in the excitement, and I’ve just been really careful about that.

HB: …to keep it kind of light touch, and amusing as well. I think a message lands a lot easier, if it’s funny, at the same time. If you can get across a nice message about the way to treat other people and land it with a fart joke, that’s the ultimate goal.

LD: And I think the other thing with a series that runs is, that once you get the audience onside, and especially when they’re kids and they start following it, and become involved with characters, then you can land those messages more explicitly. And I think by the time… I mean, we’re talking a lot about the audio, across the arc of that, but in the comic book, by the time you get to chapters 9 to 10, which is Hannah’s one on loneliness, the messages were quite explicit there.

HB: Yeah.

LD: You were hitting those beats really quite clearly, but the [listeners] were on our side, by that time.

HB: Yeah.

LD: So, the characters could talk about what to do if you’re feeling lonely more directly than in the first one where it appears to be about “Omni Burgers” and funny hairstyles.

HB: Well, there’s a lot of world-building to do. This is the thing, it’s a huge world, and there’s a lot of world-building to do, and lots of explanation of how things work. So I think in the earlier episodes we’re […] explaining who the characters were to the listeners, and [defining] how the world works.

I think getting across this idea that there was a problem, the world was quite tough at the very start, because on paper it looks very nice: you can have anything you want, you can have it immediately. And there’s not much want in this world. It’s very… everything is kind of provided for, but it’s the fact that everything is provided for without any... not struggle, that’s not the right word, but there’s no there’s no real work to attain knowledge, or there’s no real work to […] create something.

There’s a couple of episodes about being creative and…

LD: …failure…

HB: Yeah, about failure, experiencing failure as well.

LD: Just literally before coming here I was writing an advert for the series about a new “Glamazon” delivery service that delivers products to you before you know that you want them by reading your circumstances and your algorithms, and I was trying to get some gags out around that […].

It’s like a post scarcity scenario […] Actually one of the problems, and we’re talking to the kids afterwards, on some levels, in the second season, we’ve had to hit the anti-commercialism messages a lot harder. Because we thought that they’d see that having an Omni Burger machine, and be able to eat 40 burgers a day, and having that in your bedroom would be a bad thing. And the feedback from the kids actually said: “This is brilliant! You can eat all the burgers you want!”

  • 27 London based cartoonist, first published by Soaring Penguin Press in their Breakthrough Initiative: (...)

So, Abbigayle Bircham and I have written an episode about “Bleep Friday”, which is our version of Black Friday, which is going to be…27 It’s actually quite dark, and all the adults are going to be battling over products, literally.

AF: But it’s nice, I mean, as creators, when you’re doing an ongoing show and comic, to […] respond live to feedback. First of all, realising you need to skew it slightly younger, which must change the writing as you go along, then reacting to what’s going on in the pandemic, and then reacting to messages that kids have left. So, it must be both kind of terrifying, but also really exciting to […] react to those things live as they’re going on.

HB. And, actually it’s quite useful as a writer to have restrictions. I think the more guidelines you have, the way you need to hit certain beats in certain ways, the ways you need to get a message across… I find that really useful. It seems counterproductive, it seems counterintuitive, but it’s very handy to have… as we’re working on something, to have a message that: this is quite an important topic for these kids. Can we work around this a bit more.

I’ll be honest, it was quite frustrating in series one when we had to rewrite because we had to find a way of having the two main characters separated from each other, and so one is in a cave for most of series one: “the plot cave”!

There were lots of… I’m not going to say “gimmicks” because they weren’t sort of thrown in, they’re sort of useful devices, which we had to sort of incorporate in order to get across… In order to make situations work, in a way that works within that world—that futuristic world—and resonated with kids now, who are obviously in a very different situation.

LD: And, working with the scripts from the comic writers… you guys just can think of having living, moving buildings and write that down, and then you just draw a picture of a building that’s alive.

HB: Yeah.

LD: As has happened this week in our discussions…

HB: This is a very sore point!

  • 28 Karl Queensborough who plays Preen in The Rez, has been in the UK production of Hamilton.

LD: …and that’s going to be so hard to sound design! And the other thing is […] logistics […] because we did have quite a good cast and they were all stuck at home. So, they weren’t appearing in Hamilton, or going off to shoot films.28

So, we could use them all during the lockdown. And now in this new series, they’ve been very difficult to pin down, due to their success. So, the logistics around casting… I know, in comics, that if you want to have a room full of characters…

HB: You just throw them in there!

LD: …you just throw them in there, don’t you?

HB: That was a really tough thing for the last episode of the second series, because there were so many constraints around who was going to be available when, and who could be available for certain scenes, and who shouldn’t be available for certain scenes… Who needs to be recorded alone, or who needs to be recorded with whom…

LD: And who’s got a matinee the next day? And then you’re like: “Okay, this scene can have these people, and those scenes can have those people”.

HB: Comics is so easy!

LD: This is feedback from the kids. This is what you get from eight to ten-year-olds on this.

This is from Amazon, which is mostly eight-year-olds: “So good, I pooped!”, and this is kind of quite sweet, because […] eight to nine-year-olds […] don’t have access to social media in the same way, and actually use these reviews as a little feedback thing, and almost to talk to you. So, I guess they’re trying to get us to respond and you’re relying on this, mostly gibberish feedback from the audience, and are slightly terrified of it, and they’ll say things like: “One stars out of five. I love it, but I haven’t heard it”!

I mean, like, how do I work with this feedback?

AF: That’s quite an average Amazon review, though.

LD: Exactly!

  • 29 For example: the Wookie ‘Krrsantan’ first appeared in Star Wars: Darth Vader #1 [Kieron Gillen and (...)

AF: This kind of multimedia storytelling where part of the story is a podcast, another part of the story is in a comic. This seems to be something that’s getting more and more traction in the West. I think it’s been quite common in Japan for years, but now over here, something like Star Wars where a story might have characters introduced in the comic they might appear in the animated series, and then they appear in the live action series.29 It seems to be something we’re now kind of getting used to. With the two of you doing a comic and a podcast that kind of run side by side, how [do] the logistics of that work? Do you think: “Okay, well, chapters one to three will be a podcast, chapter four will be a comic, chapter five and six will be a podcast”, and we need to write both in such a way that we don’t have to rely on everyone experiencing both aspects…

HB: Fortunately, not! So, in season one, the comic was supposed to be sort of a little insight into the story itself. It was given out free to schools, to give to the kids, and they were basically the first two episodes of the first series. We did this first…

LD: …and then we adapted the first two episodes from it, because we couldn’t assume that everyone listening to the podcast would have the comic, and that was right because tens of thousands of American kids could only get the comic online. Whereas, the second comic is more little stories, snap shots, and a flavour of the world with the characters. And then the second season is a continuation of the first one. So, that second comic can be read in isolation, can’t it? Without having a clue what’s going on.

HB: World building fun, silly fart jokes... No, there’s no fart jokes.

  • 30 Rinse in this context meaning to visit and absorb every part of the website.

LD: Yeah, it’s not some big integrated transmedia empire. I think that because there’s just pockets of your audience, that will not have access to everything. Actually, with kids you do have an audience willing to trawl the website, and there’s a lot on the website, there’s games… but if you look at the audience data, there’s a very high percentage that just go to the website and they just rinse it, and they’ve obviously got time on their hands.30

[…] One of our psychologists, put what I thought was quite a boring survey about kindness, and what they’d learned from it; it involved ranking feelings [from] 1 to 5. And I remember saying: “No kid is going to do this. This is boring”.

We made it […] look nice and then we put it live, and I’m proven wrong: they just all flooded to it, and again I think they want their opinions be heard, and it’s a thing to do, and it’s fun, and they get to think.

  • 31 Trickle in this context meaning to arrive gradually, in small numbers.

I haven’t looked for a while, but we got over a thousand responses in a couple months and I’m like: “Okay. That’s, you know, that’s a lot of trickles for kids being willing to do this”.31

AF: Hannah, thinking of this fitting into your career as a comic creator, your first three graphic novels were very much aimed at an adult audience. Your comic strip for New Statesman, is kind of aimed at adults. But then during lockdown, you’ve worked on The Rez, you also worked on Planet Divoc-91, an online comic you contributed to, both of which are aimed at younger audiences. How have you found that experience, writing for that age group?

HB: I’ve really enjoyed it. I don’t know if this is the right way to go about it. I probably should ask other people who work exclusively for kids, but I’ve approached it in the same way I would approach any other story. I don’t necessarily… I put in more fart jokes for sure…

AF: Adults love them too!

HB: Yeah, of course! But, the content is… it’s not really dumbed down, I don’t try to sort of simplify the ideas; the way that I explain the concepts obviously has to be geared towards the audience, but the actual concepts that are being discussed, all the relationships that are being discussed, all the situations that are being discussed… I don’t really believe in dumbing those things down. Kids are…. I feel that they’re very, very intelligent. If you can frame something the right way, they can handle some incredible concepts.

I was explaining jury service to my daughter the other day; she’s four. She doesn’t want to do jury service, so she’s said! But I mean, if you can explain something the right way, there’s no reason that you have to dumb down what is basically very common experiences to most age groups.

AF: I noticed that you had Patrice Aggs in the writer’s room, who has worked [as an illustrator] on The Phoenix comic. Did she give any advice that you hadn’t come across before, in terms of writing for a young audience?

HB: It’s hard to say now, because that was the writers’ room right back at the beginning…

LD: That was before the pandemic. She went on to… she had work to do on something else, I think. I mean, in general, because of the pandemic we had to change the writers’ team. So, there were no children’s writing specialists on the team, which might explain why we ended up hitting a younger audience which weren’t quite so specifically targeted.

What the refreshing thing is, is quite how [intensely and seriously] everyone involved takes it […] it’s all worked up quite intensely.

I don’t think I see a difference between, you know, other projects that I work on producing for Audible or something like that. It feels the same, and I think that’s kind of noteworthy.

AF: You said that when you started, there didn’t seem to be many podcasts for kids at all. Does it feel that now there is a growing scene, and you guys have kind of helped bolster that in a way?

LD: In America there is. Not in England. In America, what happens, and I think it’s probably true of most children’s media, is that kids… and if you read these reviews these kids are talking about… we’re on a network called Gen-Z Media, which got sold to Media One Group… Basically, we are trustworthy inside that walled environment, that network, and the kids have a loyalty to that network, they love it.

  • 32 There have been concerns in recent years that online media aimed at young audiences, such as on You (...)

And then, if you become part of that family, of family listening, you become trusted. I think that’s the thing with children’s media, is that […] you need to be seen as trusted for parents who leave their kids with headphones on, not knowing what they’re hearing and know that there’s not going to be anything unsuitable. There’ll be no dodgy adverts, and there needs to be that trust.32 In England, in the UK, that culture hasn’t developed. Don’t ask me why.

AF: I was just about to! I mean, podcasts are massive with adults in the UK, and you think they’d be saying—that if they found that there were kids’ podcasts—they’d be saying to their kids: “You know, we’re enjoying this, maybe you can too, and we don’t have to watch you on your Switch all the time, at the dinner table?”

LD: Yeah, it’s interesting because kids are doing the listening as the secondary activity a lot. They’ll play a video game, while listening to something else. So, that’s in there. But I don’t know whether adults know that there are these spaces that are trustworthy, they can leave the kids with it. It’s a lot to be with young kids, to worry about what they’re consuming—video streams and things—it’s an unregulated space.

HB: I honestly had no idea there were kids podcasts, before I was working on one. I don’t want to say that I doubted you, but when you asked if I wanted to do this. “At this stage, sure, I’ll do this weird thing that definitely exists!”

LD: There’s a seed of it in the UK, and we’re hopefully part of that. But you know, it’s very difficult to get that traction, which is where the comic book helps. We’ve been taking it into schools, with the kids in schools, and sending out thousands of them. It’s quite hard sending a comic book out to schools during a pandemic, that didn’t work very well, as there were no schools to send them to. The BBC have recently done a big Doctor Who podcast to see, would it take something like that to break through for them, for people to pick up? I mean the Doctor Who podcast the BBC have just done is not really aimed at kids, so it might take something to spur it on and just to recognise… honestly, I don’t have the answer to that, you know?33 And it’s not something I’m bemoaning, because we got some action up in America, and pick up in Canada. And I just think there are networks of parents who say: “Yeah, it’s good, let’s let children listen to these things, engage with these things”, and it just becomes something that […] kids and their parents do […] over smart speakers. About 15% is on smart speakers. So, that’s the other thing, making something that parents can put up with being in the room with as well, not making it painful and annoying, having a few secret jokes for the parents… We don’t do too many of those, do we?

HB: No… there are a few nods to things that probably only grown-ups really get, like we’ve got a riff on Facebook. “Gabface”, it’s called.

LD: …little kind of moments, we don’t fillip too much with that, but also I think sonically, not making it irritating so that you can kind of be in the room, and it feels nice, and it’s not something you wouldn’t want to listen to.

HB: I think they might be into English accents as well, I remember reading something about that.

LD: Really?

HB: Yeah, I think I read in the reviews […] which is nice. Nice to have a nice accent, I guess? So, the characters in the comic, they were really drawn from the workshops that were run with the kids. We asked the kids to sort of describe who they would like to see as a character, who they’d want to follow. They were sort of describing different attributes, and they were drawing different people.

Some of those bits were sort of… they were kind of amalgamated into these two characters.

They’re called Sav and Preen. Preen is the one with big pink hair, sort of an influencer type, somebody who’s very aware of himself and his sort of appeal to people, but not very aware of himself, his interpersonal relationships. Sav is the other character who is more… She’s not exactly shy, she’s kind of a grumpy character.

I kind of like that! She’s maybe more restrained, and doesn’t really buy into this whole sort of ethos of… there’s a whole system in there as well of ’chieves, achievements. You might recognise if you have any kind of gaming systems where you can get achievements. But [in our story] in real life, if you surprise a dog, you get an achievement, that kind of thing! And you get these sort of points in real life, which is absolutely pointless.

LD: But you can level-up in life!

HB: Exactly. And you get more and more prestige amongst your peers. We had the basis that the kids had come up with, these different ideas. And then we developed the basics of the world, how this world would work, and then we tried to create the characters that would fit into that, in the best possible way that would show sort of either side of this scenario where you have this ‘chieve system, this popularity system, where everything is a kind of a popularity contest.

You know, there’s lots of restrictions if you’re not popular. Like at one point, I think it’s in the comic as well, you can’t go into the wilds unless you are popular enough for someone to care and come find you, if you get lost out there. So, that was the genesis of these characters. And […] they riff off each other quite nicely as well, I think. It’s quite fun to write.

LD: There’s a lot of, you know, we could satirise technology and I know one of the pitches I use is: “it’s like a kid’s version of Black Mirror”, but we’re very careful not to denigrate technology, ‘cause kids of this age live with technology. And if we go to them: “Why don’t you put your screens down and go out and play in the grass?”, they’ll go “Piss off!”

  • 34 The idea of “knitting yogurt” apparently comes from a joke about green activism in the 1970s, as no (...)

Whereas if we make funny jokes about spending too long on screens and your legs withering, and maybe go out to the plastic grass outside… whatever we’re up to with those gags, […] we’re playing along with them. We’re […] talking to them about their world, and the way they live. I think in the writers’ team, there’s enough people who know gaming tropes that were able to use those gags from that kind of culture too, without denigrating it. We do have one in the new series where everyone’s encouraged to go off and knit yogurt and do basket weaving, but within minutes we’re taking the mickey out of that whole situation, and it goes a bit too far and things like that.34 So, we […] never quite land that…

HB: Everything in moderation! That’s the moral of the story.

LD: Just don’t tell them the culture that they live in, that they grow up in, is wrong. We can’t, because they’re going to be there, and they’re not going to change. They’ve got enough people telling them that that culture is wrong, as opposed to saying: “Yes, moderate it”, and different ways of doing it, all the different little contexts we have.

HB: Yeah. There’s the episodes in series two, where they come across a settlement outside of the town, of people who are entirely technology free. They live without any form of technology. And the episode is: one of the main characters trying to tell them that technology can be useful, it can be very helpful and can help you connect to other people. Which is quite a nice spin. I don’t think you really get that ever in anything that’s aimed for kids.

I’ve been watching a lot... I’ve got a four-year old, I watch a lot of kids TV and a lot of it feels like it is coming from like that kind of, very didactic, you know: “Thou shalt not technology approach towards screens, and trying to get kids off it. And there’s not enough about, you know, these can be… these can be good things, these can be useful tools. It’s just an integral part of their world.

LD: Coming to the space, and the culture that they’re in. I’m trying to talk to them there, rather than dragging them, kicking and screaming, out and forcing them to the sunlight. I have to do that with my kids!

Audience: What was the inspiration behind the comic?

HB: Well, basically with the first comic it was to set up the world. That was the inspiration. It was a lot of heavy lifting to be able to explain to the kids how this world works, the problems of the world, the perils of it. […] We had a writers room meeting beforehand, and we were working out how things could be perfect, but not quite perfect. The way everything sort of interacts with each other and the issues arising. And then the comic wasn’t… I mean, it was restrictive in a fun way. It was a really fun project to write. But […] there was a lot of work to be done in explaining how their world works, effectively.

LD: Sometimes I wonder… I’ve been looking at manga recently, and with this in mind, I’m just noticing how little effort they put into explaining worldbuilding.

I just started reading the beginning of Fullmetal Alchemist, through my son’s shelf. And instantly there’s this big metal character. There’s no explanation. It’s like: “Bang!”, these ideas are just thrown in. And I’m like: “Hang on, well, then we don’t have to explain anything. We can just have all this stuff! And that’s just the way it is”.

And do I wonder whether I, you know, is it a bit old-fashioned of us to try to…

HB: It’s very Western, I guess?

LD: …to try to contextualise and explain, introduce the concepts and then kind of have an unpacking of that concept. A little scenario that helps you make it clear. Here you go: “Everyone’s got this likes system called ’chieves”…

HB: Especially with kids, because manga is booming right now. I read something in The Bookseller on about how the sales of manga just shot through the roof, and it’s mostly kids and so they’re sort of ingesting stories that don’t need that explanation of…

LD: Do you think that’s because in the written or in the graphic form, there’s more time to digest as opposed to a linear audio thing that’s just flying past you, and you can get lost?

There’s time to be slower over images?

HB: Maybe. Perhaps part of it is being encouraged by grown-ups as well, because everyone loves a reading kid, don’t they?

LD: But I think, dropping ideas, if you’re listening to something and you’re getting these ideas hitting you: “Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang!” like that and if they’re listening through, then they could lose their way. Within a comic, you can go back over, or figure it out over time.

HB: I’m quite guilty of making comics a little complicated, I would say. And I do that because you can go back. And I trust the readers to go back and say: “Oh, this is connected to this… Did I see this before? Yes, I did. Here it is…” if a reader is confused. Yeah, you don’t have that with…

LD: Well, you can rewind a podcast, but…

HB: …if you’ve missed the last 10 seconds or so, you can catch it. But, you don’t really go back to the beginning.

LD: I find, when I’m listening, if I get ideas in front of me, I’ll switch off, which you don’t tend to do when you’re reading. I mean, that’s the thing about how much you unpack for children, how much you explain. I find that, we’re doing it in the audio, and maybe in comics you don’t. Maybe we ought to be more like manga, and braver. Just throw the ideas at them: “There you go, walking talking plants! Moving buildings for no apparent reason!”

HB: It’s a very important plot device! A very bitter subject! [laughs]

Audience: I’m still a little unclear on the connection between the web comic and the podcast. Was the written comic just to launch the whole thing? Are there more being printed, and if there’s a webcomic, how do you view it on the website in conjunction with the podcast? You did mention that there was some overlap of stories, but how does that actually work in terms of what you would know from one, but hasn’t happened in the other or… it’s just such a whole new concept.

HB: So, the webcomic is, it’s not like a long running webcomic in the background. It’s just this [gestures to a print copy of The Rez comic] that is available to read online. Just this one and they’re free. So, if everybody wants one, they can have a look and a read. They were […] developed at the same time, the podcast and this comic, because one was supposed to […] help launch and back up the other, so that they do work independently of each other. You can also take them together. The second comic is worldbuilding stuff, it’s not integral to the plot.

There’s nothing in there that is integral to the plot. It’s just some fun riffing, basically, and will that be online as well?

LD: It will be online and be physical as well. And yeah, because both… I mean the second comic, with the short stories is more like a kid could pick up and just be quite interested, but know nothing. [Issue one] is more of an introduction. This is like your episode one, your pilot, with the final beats of the story being: the adventure’s about to begin.

It’s quite close, it’s 90% of the first two episodes. We have a few differences across them in terms of writing and adapting that into audio. But, yeah, they’re really close to each other and we realise that when we put out another comic, it couldn’t be just episodes 3 and 4, so we kind of looked more around at other characters and tertiary stories and things like that, as a kind of introduction to provide more flavour for the world.

HB: I can’t rely on people being able to read the second comic or the first comic either. So, we didn’t want to have anything which… there are a few sort of crossover bits, where if you’ve seen, if you read the, the comic, you’ll get some little bits and some insights into the podcast.

  • 35 This comment seems an exaggeration on Dann’s part, suggesting that not only Americans no longer lis (...)
  • 36 This is also the conceit of the BBC Doctor Who podcast drama mentioned earlier in the Q&A.

LD: And also I think, to go back to what I said earlier, it helps. Because when American… we’re not talking about kids podcasts, but when American audio fiction before that, started breaking very big, they get huge audiences in America now. The very first, which were about 2014, when the first show is coming out, they didn’t have a tradition of radio drama, so we didn’t know really how to listen.35 So, everything had to be: someone was making a podcast, it was like a fake podcast.36 It was sort of this sort of dire: “I’m a reporter and now I’ve discovered these ghosts”, or something like that, and everything would sound like that, because they couldn’t imagine why, the audience couldn’t imagine: “Why is this not film?” Well, there has to be someone with a microphone, and within that it provides you with lots of crutches to listen, and do this new experience.

And now they’ve begun to move on to having things more like we’d recognise. If you listen to Radio Four or something like that, you know how great audio drama is, or how audio drama works. With children if they’re not used to listening... I was kind of conscious of the fact that there is quite a lot of heavy weight dialogue, if you hear two people talking [you wonder]: “What do they look like? What do they sound like? Where are they? Oh, there’s a fight going on! What do I picture here?”

So […] part of the thing about the comic is it might help just [to] give them a little bit of scaffolding, to build the mental images as they now know what Preen and Sav look like, now they know what the world looks like. It gives them that little kind of scaffolding to build the images as they listen, and hopefully the transition to this new way of experiencing media.

And now later on, we can do great things, you can do that kind of radio drama… because Preen always has changing and ridiculous hair. So, in a later one, some says: “Is his hair always like that? Yes, it is, but it’s not normally on fire!”, and we bring on crackling sounds. You don’t need to say anything more, the kid listeners now realise: “Oh Preen’s hair, it’s got a hairstyle that’s permanently burning”, and they can put that [mental] image in. But you get there, through the little gentle introductions by giving them these images. I think particularly in the UK that’s useful. Apparently in America, the kids are used to doing this, a bit more… and leaving us weird reviews!

Summary

14The conversation between myself, Lance Dann and Hannah Berry explores the creation and continuation of the podcast and comic The Rez. The project came about due to a desire by Dann to make a podcast for a younger audience, and then the themes of the story—about young people dealing with technology and kindness—became increasingly prescient as the early episodes were created and released during the first year of the COVID outbreak.

15Dann notes the comic was intended as a way of introducing younger audiences to the podcast, as it is not a medium they become familiar with until they are older. Neither Dann nor Berry had previous experience of creating content for young audiences, and finding their listeners were younger than intended—10 rather 12—skewed the writing younger as they progressed. They then discovered from listener feedback that even younger audiences—8- to 9-year-olds—were also listening.

16As they couldn’t ensure everyone who listened to the podcast had also read the comic, the first two episodes of the podcast reiterate the plot of the comic book version. In comparison, the second issue of the comic adds additional “world building” with gives a “flavour of the world” the narrative is set in, without being a part of the ongoing story.

17Dann also sees the comic as a useful visual guide to listeners of the podcast (with imagery from the comic on The Rez website also), so that listeners can then visualise the characters while listening.

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Bibliographie

Robin Banarjee, “The Importance of Kindness”, The Rez, accessed Jan 13, 2024, https://jointherez.com/crumblies/#kindness

BBC, “Doctor Who Redacted”, BBC Sounds, accessed Feb 09, 2024, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/p0c0krqf

Nick Earls, “Platform Games” in Publishing and Culture, ed. Dallas John Baker, Donna Lee Brien and Jen Webb (Cambridge:‎ Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019), 220-239

Alex Fitch, “Audio Dramatics: Comic and Fantasy Sounds”, Panel Borders, accessed Feb 09, 2024, https://panelborders.wordpress.com/2018/03/19/audio-dramatics-comic-and-fantasy-sounds

Alex Fitch, “Graphic Brighton 2022”, Graphic Brighton, accessed Feb 09, 2024, https://graphicbrighton.wordpress.com/2022/01/13/comic-making-workshops-for-teens

Alex Fitch, “Panel Borders: London / Quebec / Cape Town”, Panel Borders, accessed Feb 09, 2024, https://panelborders.wordpress.com/2009/10/08/panel-borders-london-quebec-cape-town

Alex Fitch, “Panel Borders: Multimedia Comics”, Panel Borders, accessed Feb 09, 2024, https://panelborders.wordpress.com/2022/06/08/panel-borders-multimedia-comics

Jack French and David S. Siegel. Radio Rides the Range: A Reference Guide to Western Drama on the Air, 1929-1967 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company), 5-6

David Hendy, “The Strange Survival of Radio Drama”, BBC, accessed Feb 09, 2024), https://www.bbc.com/historyofthebbc/100-voices/radio-reinvented/the-strange-survival-of-radio-drama

Knit your own yogurt, “Knit your own yogurt?”, Knit your own yogurt: Decomplicated living, accessed Feb 09, 2024, https://tsdg.typepad.com/kyoy/2007/11/knit-your-own-y.html

Heidi McDonald, “Graphic novelist quits making graphic novels after trying to live on $10k/year for three years”, Comics Beat, accessed Feb 09, 2024, https://www.comicsbeat.com/graphic-novelist-quits-making-graphic-novels-after-trying-to-live-on-10kyear-for-three-years

Tom McNally, “The Saga of the European King”, The Saga of the European King, accessed Feb 09, 2024, https://thesagaoftheeuropeanking.libsyn.com

Onca, “Saga of the European King”, Onca, accessed Feb 09, 2024, https://onca.org.uk/event/saga-of-the-european-king

Julius Purcell, “The resurgence of audio drama”, Financial Times, accessed Feb 09, 2024, https://www.ft.com/content/dd2521a6-d178-11e4-86c8-00144feab7de

Emma Roth, “Senators want YouTube investigated over showing targeted ads to kids, again”, The Verge, accessed Feb 09, 2024, https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/18/23837530/youtube-ads-child-safety-tracking-coppa-senator-investigation

Nigel Slater, “Police criticised for filming Peak District walkers breaking lockdown rules”, Derbyshire Live, accessed Feb 09, 2024, https://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/news/local-news/police-criticised-filming-peak-district-3992542

Soaring Penguin Press, “Abbigayle Bircham”, Soaring Penguin Press, accessed Feb 09, 2024, https://www.soaringpenguinpress.com/creator/abbigayle-bircham

UK Government, “Independent report: COVID-19 and Occupational Impacts”, UK Government, accessed Feb 09, 024, https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-and-occupational-impacts/covid-19-and-occupational-impacts

Welcome to Night Vale. “Welcome to Night Vale”, Welcome to Night Vale, accessed Feb 09, 2024, https://www.welcometonightvale.com

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Notes

1 Podcasts of the 35 chapters/episodes of The Saga of the European King, and additional recordings, such as the live performance at ONCA Gallery, can be downloaded on the podcast’s website—https://thesagaoftheeuropeanking.libsyn.com [McNally, “The Saga of the European King”].

2 The podcast of Alex Fitch’s interview with Tom McNally can be downloaded via https://panelborders.wordpress.com/2018/03/19 [Fitch, “Audio Dramatics: Comic and Fantasy Sounds”].

3 Artist of V for Vendetta, and Brighton resident.

4 This took place on October 6 2017. More info about the event can be found on Onca’s website: https://onca.org.uk/event/saga-of-the-european-king [Onca, “Saga of the European King”].

5 McNally is referring to himself and his team of actors.

6 Nicholas Briggs has been the voice of the Daleks and other aliens in Doctor Who on television since 2005, but started his association with the program by making amateur Doctor Who productions on audio cassettes called ‘Audio Visuals’ between 1984 and 1991. Subsequently, he and other members of the same production team have made licenced Doctor Who audio plays authorised by the BBC, through the company Big Finish, since 1999.

7 Foley is the term for pre-recorded sound effects, both real—e.g. the recording of bird song in the landscape—and artificial, such as recording the sound of stabbing a watermelon to simulate an attack on a human being.

8 Berry is one of the interviewees of the second interview in this chapter, a graphic novelist who is now also working in audio drama. I mentioned her here due to an interview she had given earlier in the year about the economics of making comics. More info can be found about this on the Comics Beat website: https://www.comicsbeat.com/graphic-novelist-quits-making-graphic-novels-after-trying-to-live-on-10kyear-for-three-years [MacDonald, “Graphic novelist quits making graphic novels after trying to live on $10k/year for three years”]

9 McNally seems to be suggesting there wasn’t much ‘rich’ or non-American audio drama available at the time, which isn’t entirely true. An article published in the Financial Times two years before this interview was recorded notes “The resurgence of audio drama”—https://www.ft.com/content/dd2521a6-d178-11e4-86c8-00144feab7de [Purcell, “The resurgence of audio drama”] - in the mid-2010s, and this is without mentioning the large amount of drama broadcast on BBC Radio in the UK, on such channels as Radio 4 and Radio 4 Extra, as well as via their online iPlayer platform.

10 This links to my mention of Hannah Berry’s similar problem at the time of recording, that working in comics was not financially viable for her. As an audio producer, McNally had to have a separate job to earn a living, with audio writing and production more of a hobby, which only generated a small profit. Ironically, as will be seen below, Berry’s move from comics into podcasts seems to have been more profitable for her.

11 After this interview took place, companies that make audio dramas and a small number of comics, such as B7 Media, started to have tables at such events as The Lakes International Comic Art Festival, and London Film and Comic Con. Companies that make audio dramas based on particular franchises have previously sold their spin-off media at conventions linked to their product, for example Big Finish Productions selling their Doctor Who audio plays at Doctor Who conventions.

12 Presumably Brighton Film and Comic Con 2016.

13 Jackanory was a British television show broadcast between 1965 and 1996, where a presenter—often an actor or comedian—would read out a children’s story with illustrations shown on screen.

14 In 2009, Fitch interviewed McNally when he was selling his comics on a cold day, from a stall in Camden Lock market: https://panelborders.wordpress.com/2009/10/08/panel-borders-london-quebec-cape-town [Fitch, “Panel Borders: London/Quebec/Cape Town”].

15 M.A.S.K. was an American cartoon series which mixed elements of Science-Fiction and the Western and ran between 1987 and 1988, also intended to sell a connected toy range.

BraveStarr was an American cartoon series that ran between 1985 and 1986 with similarities to Transformers, and was also designed to sell toys that the characters in the show were based on.

16 ‘Mystery box’ is a form of storytelling in episodic television, popularised by writer/director J.J. Abrams, where clues and mysterious events seeded through episodes pay off in later seasons of the drama.

17 Dirk Maggs, who worked on radio adaptions of Douglas Adams’ work is discussed elsewhere in this Comics Aloud issue. Adams rewrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for various media: originally a radio series in 1978, as a novel in 1979, as a TV series in 1981, as a text-based computer game in 1984, and he was working on the cinema adaptation at the time of his death in 2001. Each version includes material from previous versions, adding new scenes and jokes, but also removes other elements—for example, most of episodes 10-12 of the radio series broadcast in 1980 were not reused in any subsequent medium.

18 British actor who has appeared in television shows such as Toast of London and What we do in the Shadows.

19 “Pilot” being the term used for the first episode of a TV series, but also “Backdoor Pilots” are later episodes of a series which new characters are first introduced in, which then may be given their own show subsequently. For example: the character of Mork appearing in Happy Days in February 1978, before appearing in his own show Mork and Mindy seven months later.

20 More info about Graphic Brighton 2022 can be found at: https://graphicbrighton.wordpress.com/2022/01/13/comic-making-workshops-for-teens [Fitch, “Graphic Brighton 2022”].

21 The podcast of this interview can be found at: https://panelborders.wordpress.com/2022/06/08 [Fitch, “Multimedia Comics”].

22 The Welcome to Night Vale website describes this audio drama as: “a twice-monthly podcast in the style of community updates for the small desert town of Night Vale, featuring local weather, news, announcements from the Sheriff’s Secret Police, mysterious lights in the night sky, dark hooded figures with unknowable powers, and cultural events.” [“Welcome to Night Vale”].

23 The Rez website went live on Sep 23 2020, so presumably Dann started work on the project in the late 2010s—he later notes early creative meetings taking place in 2019.

24 The first international incidents of COVID 19 infection are recorded as happening in December 2019, with the first UK infections being reported in January 2020. National lockdowns took place in the UK between March 2020 and June 2020, and between January 2021 and July 2021; further lockdowns in particular geographical areas also took place between September and November 2020. More information can be found on the UK Government website: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-and-occupational-impacts/covid-19-and-occupational-impacts [“Independent report: COVID-19 and Occupational Impacts”].

25 This took place on March 25 2020, as reported in the Derbyshire Telegraph: https://www.derbytelegraph.co.uk/news/local-news/police-criticised-filming-peak-district-3992542 [Slater, “Police criticised for filming Peak District walkers breaking lockdown rules”].

26 Dann and Berry seem to be implying they wrote a similar scenario before it happened in real life—as The Rez wasn’t released until Autumn 2020, one assumes the scenario they came up with was in one of their meetings to discuss the plot of the comic and podcast. These meetings started in December 2019, and as the lockdowns began in Spring 2020, this idea might have been discussed by the creators in early 2020 based on their observance of British life at the time.

27 London based cartoonist, first published by Soaring Penguin Press in their Breakthrough Initiative: Our Time anthology in 2021: https://www.soaringpenguinpress.com/creator/abbigayle-bircham [Soaring Penguin Press, “Abbigayle Bircham”].

28 Karl Queensborough who plays Preen in The Rez, has been in the UK production of Hamilton.

29 For example: the Wookie ‘Krrsantan’ first appeared in Star Wars: Darth Vader #1 [Kieron Gillen and Salvador Larroca, Marvel Comics, February 2015], and then on screen in Star Wars: The Book of Boba Fett episode 2 [dir: Steph Green, January 2022]. The character Ahsoka Kano first appeared in the animated film Star Wars: The Clone Wars [dir.: Dave Filoni, August 2008] and numerous subsequent cartoons, and then in the live action Star Wars: The Mandalorian, season 2, episode 5 [dir.: Dave Filoni, November 2020].

30 Rinse in this context meaning to visit and absorb every part of the website.

31 Trickle in this context meaning to arrive gradually, in small numbers.

32 There have been concerns in recent years that online media aimed at young audiences, such as on YouTube, can contain adverts for adult products, or a cartoon aimed at children will be followed by one aimed at adults. So, if they are left alone with the website they may experience ‘inappropriate’ content. Noted, for example, in this article: https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/18/23837530/youtube-ads-child-safety-tracking-coppa-senator-investigation [Roth, “Senators want YouTube investigated over showing targeted ads to kids, again”].

33 This is Doctor Who: Redacted - https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/p0c0krqf [“Doctor Who Redacted”]—a consideration of who the audience might be depends on one’s definition of “kids”, it seems to certainly be aimed at teenagers. A conceit of the podcast is that it is a drama about characters making a non-fiction podcast, suggesting it is aimed at listeners who understand the structure of non-fiction podcasts, and uses this to introduce them to how audio drama works.

34 The idea of “knitting yogurt” apparently comes from a joke about green activism in the 1970s, as noted at: https://tsdg.typepad.com/kyoy/2007/11/knit-your-own-y.html [“Knit your own yogurt?”]; a commentator on this website speculates the joke was originated by a British comedian such as “Alexei Sayle, or possibly Chris Langham”.

35 This comment seems an exaggeration on Dann’s part, suggesting that not only Americans no longer listen to radio drama at all, they had forgotten that radio drama existed. Certainly, American listenership to radio drama dwindled as Television became the home entertainment medium of choice by the late 1950s, as noted by French and Siegel (Radio Rides the Range, 5-6). However, drama podcasts have been increasing in popularity throughout the 2010s, with launch of networks such as Radiotopia in 2014, and Audible augmenting their catalogue of talking books with short form entertainment in 2016 (Platform Games, 231), so the practice of listening to audio drama—albeit via the internet rather than American radio - had started to become popular again in America by the time The Rez was being conceived. In Britain, due to content broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and other channels, this practice continued through the 20th Century and into the 21st, as noted by the broadcaster themselves: https://www.bbc.com/historyofthebbc/100-voices/radio-reinvented/the-strange-survival-of-radio-drama [Hendy, “The Strange Survival of Radio Drama”].

36 This is also the conceit of the BBC Doctor Who podcast drama mentioned earlier in the Q&A.

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Référence électronique

Alex Fitch, « Interviews with multimedia comics creators—how Hannah Berry, Lance Dann and Tom McNally use audio drama to move their work into new areas of storytelling »Comicalités [En ligne], La bande dessinée à voix haute, mis en ligne le 01 novembre 2024, consulté le 15 décembre 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/comicalites/9553 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12w6y

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Auteur

Alex Fitch

Alex Fitch presents the UK’s only month broadcast radio show on comics—Panel Borders—on Resonance FM, the Arts Council radio station in London. He lectures in the Schools of Media and Architecture at the University of Brighton where he is also pursuing a PhD investigating The Depiction of Architecture in Comics. He has been widely published on the topics of comics and film, with inclusion in journals and anthologies published by Cambridge Scholars, Intellect, McFarland, Strange Attractor, University Press of Mississippi, and others.

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