Q&A: Mercy Thompson's Comics Support Group

LJ Talks to Comickers David Lawrence, Francis Tsai & Amelia Woo

By Martha Cornog, Philadelphia -- Library Journal, 12/03/2009

The four-volume “Mercy Thompson” series has been described as a “top-notch paranormal mystery” by Publishers Weekly and “engaging” by LJ. Mercy does have singular talents—she can fix your Volkswagen and then turn into a coyote and probably outrun the car! Del Rey recently issued a graphic novel prequel, Mercy Thompson: Homecoming, supplying Mercy’s origin story and how she met her mentor, Zee. (For a review, see the Graphic Novels column in the January 2010 issue.)

An interview with best-selling author Patricia Briggs is included in the prequel, so now we introduce the rest of the core creative team: editor and cowriter David Lawrence (DL) and artists Francis Tsai (FT) and Amelia Woo (AW).

Mercy’s shape-shifting adventures with her werewolf and vampire frenemies certainly adapt very well to comics, especially with the compelling art you’ve all provided. How have Mercy’s fans reacted to the graphic format?

AW: I think they’ve been very receptive—the book made the New York Times Graphic Books best sellers list. David commented that most of our readers were female (thank you so much, girls!).

FT: As far as I can tell, for the most part, fans of the Mercy Thompson books have been positive about the graphic novel version. Inevitably, you’ll have some people who say the depiction of the characters is different from how they imagined the characters looking, which is completely understandable.

David, how did you and Patricia Briggs divide up the work of creating the script? Did Briggs do a first pass and then you worked with that? Did she write a long synopsis or a prose version that you then translated into panels and pages?

DL: Keep in mind that the story itself is Patty’s; my role was in figuring out the best way to tell it with pictures. The first issue was a slog. I came on board late, after Patty had begun working with another editor. I was handed a script and told that it needed a rewrite but that Patty was short on time, since she was also finishing up a Mercy novel. So I did a rewrite and sent it on to Patty only to discover she had also been rewriting the script. I ended up taking the best of the two versions and merging them together.

After that first issue, Patty actually wrote scenes, sort of rough drafts of short stories or chapters, which I would translate into a script. Some scenes I would expand on, others shorten or delete, maybe change the order of the scenes or come up with a little something new. As she got comfortable with me, she kind of loosened up the reins a bit and trusted me, a tough thing for writers to do since we are all control freaks and our characters our children.

With two writers and two artists sharing the same volume, there could be problems of vision. How did you all get on the same page about what the characters and settings looked like?

DL: First, an awful lot of the credit here goes to Francis. I’d worked with a couple of other artists who tried very hard but just couldn’t quite get it in terms of the character designs. Then when we found Francis, he just nailed it. Patty described his character designs as exactly what she pictured—only better.

Losing Francis halfway through was difficult and could have been devastating, if not for Amelia. She’s a wonderful artist and worked hard to achieve consistency. The switch is still a little disconcerting but not nearly as jarring as it could have been. I consider myself lucky to have worked with both of them.

FT: I can speak only for myself, but I relied on David and Patricia to provide feedback and to make sure things stayed consistent visually with the world of Mercy Thompson. Art-wise, the situation was more of a handoff from me to Amelia, and from what I saw Amelia did a great job of maintaining the visual look and feel of the characters while also bringing her own artistic sensibilities to the book.

AW: I didn’t have any problems because David is a very good editor, and he guided me on the art direction. For me, it was simple—I just had to follow Francis’s studies. The reference points for locations like Tri-Cities and Mercy’s trailer were supplied by David and Patty.

Francis and Amelia, your wolves are wonderful! Scary, majestic, wolfish, and otherworldly altogether. Did you study up by watching wolves in zoos? 

FT: A bit of that and also a lot of Google image searches. The wolves are a huge part of the story, and drawing them was a very new experience for me. It was fun to try to add that extra hint of supernatural otherworldliness to them without altering the familiar wolf silhouette too much.

AW: There are no wolves in the zoos in Brazil where I live. But I took classes in college on human and animal anatomy, so it was easy enough to get back in the groove. When I began the project, I also bought two books about dog and wolf anatomy to help me brush up.

DL: It’s funny, but Amelia really had very little idea what wolves looked like. I put together a big folder of wolf pictures for her to get started. Plus, Patty’s wolves are not entirely natural but sort of wolves on steroids. Amelia worked very hard to get them right.

In Briggs’s stories, Mercy goes naked when she transforms, as do the werewolves. You’ve managed to keep the nakedness without letting it seem sexual. How did you manage that?

FT: The clothing aspect is one of the things that makes the shape-shifting feel a bit more realistic, or at least addresses some real-world issues that would happen if one were able to transform from a human being into a much smaller animal. I tried to make the nudity more a functional thing than a sexual one, mainly through the poses. The pose of a character, even if she is clothed, has a huge effect on whether she is perceived in a sexual manner. Life-drawing models are almost always nude, but in that instance the nudity is not about sexuality either. In the end, it’s a subjective judgment. My intent was to avoid overt sexuality, but there were still people who interpreted it that way.

AW: As an artist who studied drawing with naked models and corpses, I don’t have any problem with nudity. But I knew some people would see a naked human body and protest. I tried to avoid sexual connotations by hiding Mercy’s genitals and breasts with a simple scene composition; using the perspective in my favor. That’s it.

DL: There was actually less controversy about that than I expected. I kind of imagined the five pages of naked Mercy fighting werewolves in the first story might stir up some trouble. Personally, I didn’t think it was sexual at all; the nudity really emphasized her vulnerability. Though I suppose if someone’s personal kink was watching a large carnivore devour a naked woman it could have turned them on.

And I think after that we all sort of collectively decided that though we would show a certain amount of discretion, we weren’t going to jump through all sorts of obvious hoops to avoid it. That sort of thing was pretty effectively lampooned at the beginning of the second Austin Powers movie, anyway.

I found it quite effective the way you’ve shown shape-shifting and movement together by drawing a character several times successively within the same panel. But that’s not done very frequently in American comics. Was it a collective decision?

DL: It was something I came up with for the big opening sequence in the first chapter, where Mercy is fleeing the werewolves and shifting simultaneously. I thought that breaking the transformation into multiple panels would slow the scene down and take away from the urgency of the situation.

But it’s one thing to have an idea and another to execute it. Francis did it so well that it became a repeated motif for shifting in the series, and Amelia executed it nicely as well. And, of course, even the idea isn’t original with me. I first remember the multiple figure technique in Silver Age Flash stories by Carmine Infantino, though that was only to show movement. And I’m quite certain if I went looking I could find older examples as well.

FT: It’s a device I’ve seen a few times in some American comics. Because comics uses still images to convey movement and action, artists have to rely on other means to communicate motion. Speed lines are a very typical visual cue to indicate motion, but since the action here often involves the physical transformation of a character, indicating the various steps of the transformation seemed like a more effective way to show that.

AW: The multiple-action animation panel was required by David. I didn’t think it was strange because this technique is utilized in manga; it was the style I started with, so I’m a bit more familiar with it.

Could you share a bit about your art technique? Did you paint all the panels by hand on paper, or did you do some of the work via computer? Did you use watercolor? Acrylic? Markers?

FT: The pages I worked on were done mostly in Photoshop. There were some pages that I laid out on paper first, and then scanned and painted digitally, but most of them were created entirely within Photoshop.

AW: I’m a digital artist, and I did everything by computer with my tablet (Wacom Intuos3). I use programs like Photoshop CS2, Painter (very good for textures), and MangaStudio for effects. For me, drawing by computer is just drawing with an electronic pen. During my training, my favorite materials were acrylic and watercolor. Nowadays, I apply the same technique the digital way. As Michelangelo said, you draw with your eyes, not with your hands.

How long does art like this take per page or panel, not including the research and the character designs? That is to say, sketches, inking, and painting altogether?

FT: For me, the average seemed to be about two to three days per page, depending on the complexity of the visuals, number of panels, number of characters, etc.

AW: Usually, a page takes me eight to nine hours from pencil to colors, but because the deadline for issue four was so crazy, I did it in six days. Each page took me about four hours to do.

I’m guessing that the “Mercy Thompson” series has way more female fans than do many of the comics series that the three of you have worked on previously. Was there any discussion about catering to women readers in the adaptation and art?

DL: My very first published series was the original Ex-Mutants with Ron Lim in the middle 1980s; we seemed to have a lot of female fans on that. Certainly with Mercy, the majority of the fan mail came from women. I think that was because it featured strong, independent female characters who weren’t waiting around to get rescued. But I’ve never deliberately tailored my approach or storytelling to a particular demographic. The needs of the story and the characters dictate that, or you are simply pandering. I don’t like to insult or underestimate my audience.

FT: I think for any entertainment property there is going to be a core group of fans who like to see it treated a certain way. My feeling is that with comics, the main goal should be to communicate the story and characters in a way that’s as true as possible to the intent of the writer. There wasn’t a big discussion ahead of time about catering the artwork specifically to a female audience (at least that I know of). My feeling is that doing that can be sort of condescending. I think that just creating a work that is honest and true to the source material, without gratuitous catering to either a male or female audience, will have the broadest appeal and best chance of success.

AW: My first gig was at Yaoi Press, so Mercy Thompson wasn’t my first title with a lot of female fans. When I read the Mercy Thompson books, I feel comfortable with the story, elements, and characters. I think the art can get better and better without altering the essence.