AICN COMICS: Q&@ is our new semi-weekly interview column where some of your favorite @$$Holes interview comic bookdom’s biggest, brightest, newest, and oldest stars. Enjoy this latest in-depth interview filled with @$$y goodness and be sure to join the rest of your favorite @$$Holes for their opinions on the weekly pull every Wednesday with AICN COMICS REVIEWS!
@’s by Andrew Rostan
Writer of AN ELEGY FOR AMELIA JOHNSON !
Hey folks, Ambush Bug here with another interview I did at this year’s Chicago Comic & Entertainment Expo (C2E2). This time around I interviewed an extremely interesting fellow named Andrew Rostan, who has an awful lot going for him. First off he won a boatload of cash on JEOPARDY and played in the Tournament of Champions; then he took his winnings and put together his own comic called AN ELEGY FOR AMELIA JOHNSON, a new hardcover graphic novel from Archaia which follows a pair of friends as they grant the final wish of their friend who is dying of cancer. It’s a touching and memorable graphic novel that I reviewed here a while back and one I would recommend to anyone looking for an example of how borderless the field of comics can be. I had a chance to talk with Mr. Rostan at C2E2 and found him to be a soft-spoken and charming guy. Here’s what he had to say…AMBUSH BUG (BUG): What can you say about your book?
ANDREW ROSTAN (AR): In general if I had to sum up the book in one sentence, it’s about a woman dying of cancer and her two best friends. Now she asks the friends to go across the country and take her final messages to people she cares about the most with the covert aim of showing them how they are really meant for each other, but thematically… this project is very special to me, because it’s really about my way of expressing what I think it means to be human and I think it’s something really important for the world these days. I look at America and the entire state of the planet. People are splintering all over with different sizes, faiths, different ideologies, political parties…they don’t agree and I wanted to write a story about why we care about each other, why we are connected to each other, and what it means to really be a person in a world full of other people. We very well have to appreciate who we are and to do what we can for our fellow man.
BUG: It is a great story and it involves some pretty serious issues there. Does this have a personal significance to you with the person passing away or cancer? Have you had that happened to you in your real life?AR: That’s the million-dollar question. A lot of people…people are always asking “is AMELIA autobiographical?” Well, all of the ideas about what it means to live and to love other people, the ideas are all mine. They come from a decade of thinking about it. My mother had a very small cancer and she’s been cancer free ever since they found out. Her older sister was not so lucky. She died of cancer seven years before I was born, but other than that nothing in the book is purely autobiographical. I’ve never known anything like to happen to anybody I know. I’ve never taken cross-country journeys for this purpose. The characters are all complete inventions except Henry, Jillian, and Amelia, like Amelia and her two friends. They were based on real people. I used a real couple I know as the germ for Henry and Jillian and Amelia is a combination of really remarkable women I’ve known throughout my life. But once I started writing, they just took on real lives of their own from that starting point. It’s funny, because if I had met my girlfriend while I was writing this…we didn’t meet up until after it was pretty much done Amelia would have been based purely on her and I tell her “Amelia would have been so perfect that nobody would have believed she could have existed.”
BUG: I think you always write better when you are single and alone, because it’s like that starving artist sort of mentality, it seems.AR: There’s something to that. I actually rewrote 70% of the book in one giant weeklong flash hunched over my friend Mike Pintar’s iMac in the upstairs room of a house we shared in LA, because mine had just crashed, it was February, I was getting rejected from all of these grad schools, working a good but low paying job, I had nothing else to do and I just sunk my heart and soul into this.
BUG: That’s when all of the good stuff comes out.
AR: Both of my artists, Dave who was still fully on the book at the time and Steven Christy our editor, they got back to me after reading that new page, this whole giant rewrite and said, separately, it made them cry, so yeah there’s something to that.
BUG: So let’s talk about the artists there. It is kind of cartoony, but it’s got a real slice of life kind of flavor to it. How did you meet the artist and how did that all come about.
AR: That’s a great story. I just want to say how much I love the art for AMELIA. Of all of the privileges in creating this book, getting to work with Dave Valeza and Kate Kasenow was probably the best and what I love about the art is that it’s realistic, but stylized realistic. There’s this extra jolt to all of the realities of it. I met Dave back in November of 2007 when AMELIA was still in outline format and we had dinner with Steven. Steven and I found his work in a Savannah College of Art and Design sampler and we just really hit it off and I gave him like one or two sentence descriptions of the characters and he came back with these sketches of them, which were exactly the way I saw them in my head. I was like “I can not believe somebody is drawing things to go with my words like this.” I would get a heart attack every time he turned in new pages and in fact that rewrite of 70% of the book, which was initiated by Dave, we were almost done and he took my script in to a workshop at Savannah and people loved it, but they had a lot of ideas. He shared them with me and Steve and we decided “let’s rewrite the book.” The book came out better than ever. Now unfortunately after all of this time had gone by and we had finally gotten the script perfect, Dave had some things come up in his life where he could no longer fully commit to AMELIA and Kate, who…I found out this later, was in the workshop where we rewrote the book. Kate stepped in and she pulled off one of the most superhuman feats of artistry I have ever seen. She drew a huge percentage of this book in world record time and it was absolutely beautiful. It was the same thing with Dave, more heart attacks everyday as I’m looking at this work and thinking “How did I get so lucky?” I am Dave and Kate’s biggest fan, both of them, and I would love to work with both of them in the future on projects.
BUG: So your story of just being able to put this thing together is pretty amazing. You are a JEOPARDY champion?AR: That is true.
BUG: How did that all come about? What was it like just winning JEOPARDY?
AR: I grew up sitting on my grandfather’s lap in preschool watching JEOPARDY. It was my dream for years to be on a game show, JEOPARDY most of all, and when the opportunity finally came, I just wanted to win once and when I did I was like “that’s it! I can go now, I’m happy,” but I kept winning and it was bizarre like I almost couldn’t stop and a lot of people here I’m sure have not been on JEOPARDY or thought about it, it is so astonishing up there in the booth on the screen where you have so much adrenaline pulsing through that sometimes you can’t even move your thumb to hit the buzzer. It was an amazing experience. People who work with and compete on JEOPARDY are some of the most remarkable people you ever meet. I have just been blessed with so much in my life, JEOPARDY, AMELIA, a wonderful family, a wonderful girlfriend…AMELIA is the start of me trying to give something back.
BUG: That sounds fantastic. So what’s next for you? You could have taken your winnings and done anything, a big blockbuster novel or a sci-fi epic or something like that. Are you interested in that type of stuff or is it more the intimate relationship novels?
AR: That’s a great question. I actually was trained as a screenwriter in college and the thing that marked my work then is that there was nothing that marked my work. I love genre hopping. My unproduced scripts were like a Hitchcockian thriller, a really horribly over the top action film inspired by Sergio Leone, a very intimate character drama, and I want to keep trying to produce. I’d love to write a really action packed title for Archaia, but I’m working on a few biographical and then more purely autobiographical projects. Steven and I are putting those together, but also I’m working on my first prose novel. I really do mean my second, because my first novel was really bad and I kind of threw that away and I don’t want…but this one is going to be even more an expression of my ideas and a story that’s going to involve a lot of human drama and a lot of sex just so you know.
BUG: Nothing wrong with that--sounds great. So is AN ELEGY FOR AMELIA JOHNSON available now?AR: AMELIA is available through any bookstore in the country where it’s being sold on BarnesAndNoble.Com right now. It’s been on preorder for Amazon and it’s going to be finally shipping at the end of the month, in fact it might be shipping right now. All of my relatives preordered and they keep saying they are getting there at different times, so we will see, but right now I’m in Chicago, I just got my badge approved for San Diego in July, so I will be out there for the big Comic Con which is amazing.
BUG: I’ll be there, too. Have you ever been there before?
AR: I never have. I lived in LA for two and a half years and I never went, but now it’s just great to be able to go as a creator and getting to meet other creators. I don’t know what it’s going to lead to, but…
BUG: It’s a madhouse out there, but it’s a lot of fun. It’s a blur. It’s all a blur.
AR: I love collaborating with people, so if San Diego leads to another book, that will be phenomenal, because I know AMELIA…I’m so proud of this book and I know I can write even better ones in the future.
BUG: Well it is a great book and I can’t wait to see the next one. Thanks a lot for sitting with me and talking with me today.BUG: Thanks a lot. It was great to meet you.
AR: It’s great to meet you.
BUG: AN ELEGY FOR AMELIA JOHNSON is available now from Archaia. Do yourself a favor and check it out. It’s an outstanding piece of fiction.
Ambush Bug is Mark L. Miller, original @$$Hole/wordslinger/reviewer/co-editor of AICN Comics for over nine years. Support a Bug by checking out his comics (click on the covers to purchase)!
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Special thanks to Muldoon for transcription.
Proofs, co-edits & common sense provided by Sleazy G
