July 27th, 2023
The best (online) conversation I ever had about my graphic novel The Weirdos was with a fellow dad who let his 13-year-old read it. (The dad and his kid shall remain nameless out of respect for our private conversation, but they are two of the coolest cats I know.)
My immediate reaction to hearing this was: oh no. I had been very adamant to people that The Weirdos is for adults; there’s no gore or nudity or anything, but it deals with adult issues and has adult language. The first line of dialogue is the f-word, and I don’t mean “fun.”
To my relief and relative bewilderment, she liked it; they elaborated and then it was clear why, and it reminded me that we don’t get to decide who our art connects with or how.
It also reaffirmed what I knew when I was young, and what I know about young people now: nobody likes being talked down to.
And I took that lesson into Brushfire.
I wanted to talk about things you don’t always find in an all-ages talking animal story. I knew I had to distill some of the ideas, but I also knew that I had to be really real about them.
I treated the wildlife like they were adults, with complex thoughts and emotions and whole lives to live; the young gravitate to that because they have these, too.
I was wrong to make a decision about who my work was for.
For some reason, getting older can make us forget that we’ve always dealt with these same feelings inside us, except they were even bigger then, because they were even more impossible to deal with.
I want someone to read Brushfire — to read anything I’ve written — and feel like the impossible things in their life are possible.
No matter what their age happens to be.
[ 📸 by Cori Miller ]
The Den 