Comics Bulletin logo
Search
  • Columns
    Random
    • Livin' and Drinkin' In San Diego

      Keith Silva
      August 2, 2004
      Busted Knuckles
    Recent
    • Revisiting the Witchblade/Fathom/Tomb Raider Crossover

      Daniel Gehen
      February 8, 2021
    • The Full Run: Usagi Yojimbo – The Wanderer’s Road Part 2

      Daniel Gehen
      December 4, 2020
    • The Full Run: Usagi Yojimbo – The Wanderer’s Road Part 1

      Daniel Gehen
      October 30, 2020
    • What Looks Good
    • Comics Bulletin Soapbox
    • The Full Run
    • Leading Question
    • Top 10
    • The Long-Form
    • Jumping On
    • Comics in Color
    • Slouches Towards Comics
  • Big Two
    Random
    • The Full Run: Hickman's 'New Avengers' #13 and 14

      Keith Silva
      November 2, 2015
      Columns, Marvel Comics, The Full Run
    Recent
    • 3.0

      Review: X-MEN LEGENDS #1 Delivers A Dose of Nostalgia

      Daniel Gehen
      February 22, 2021
    • 4.5

      DCeased: Dead Planet #7 Presents a Hopeful Future (Review)

      Daniel Gehen
      January 22, 2021
    • Retro Review: Detective Comics #826 Remains a Holiday Classic

      Daniel Gehen
      December 3, 2020
    • DC Comics
    • Big Two Reviews
    • Marvel Comics
  • Indie
    Random
    • Interview: Ibrahim Moustafa Delivers Jaeger the Nazi Hunter for Stela

      Keith Silva
      May 3, 2016
      Indie, Interviews
    Recent
    • 4.5

      Review: THE LAST RONIN #2 Hurts So Good

      Daniel Gehen
      February 19, 2021
    • TIME BEFORE TIME—A HIGH STAKES TIME TRAVEL SCIENCE FICTION SERIES SET TO LAUNCH THIS MAY

      Daniel Gehen
      February 19, 2021
    • Image Comics and TMP Announces SPAWN’S UNIVERSE

      Daniel Gehen
      February 18, 2021
    • Reviews
    • Archie Comics
    • Boom! Studios
    • Dark Horse
    • IDW
    • Image
    • Oni Press
    • Valiant
  • Reviews
    Random
    • 3.5

      Review: Economix: How Our Economy Works (and Doesn't Work)

      Keith Silva
      August 21, 2012
      Reviews
    Recent
    • 3.0

      Review: X-MEN LEGENDS #1 Delivers A Dose of Nostalgia

      Daniel Gehen
      February 22, 2021
    • 4.5

      Review: THE LAST RONIN #2 Hurts So Good

      Daniel Gehen
      February 19, 2021
    • 2.3

      Review: SAVAGE #1 Needs Taming

      Daniel Gehen
      February 16, 2021
    • Singles Going Steady
    • Slugfest
    • Manga
      • Reviews
    • Small Press
      • Reviews
      • ICYMI
      • Tiny Pages Made of Ashes
  • Interviews
    Random
    • You Walk Into a Comic Store—Welcome to Legends Comics & Coffee

      Keith Silva
      July 12, 2016
      Interviews
    Recent
    • Interview: Jon Davis-Hunt Talks SHADOWMAN

      Daniel Gehen
      June 8, 2020
    • Interview: Becky Cloonan talks DARK AGNES and Her Personal Influences

      Mike Nickells
      March 4, 2020
    • Simon Roy

      Interview: Simon Roy on His Inspirations and Collaborations on PROTECTOR

      Mike Nickells
      January 29, 2020
    • Audio Interview
    • Video Interview
  • Classic Comics
    Random
    • 4.0

      Nexus Omnibus 4: Nexus is something of a singular achievement

      Keith Silva
      March 19, 2014
      Classic Comics Cavalcade, Columns
    Recent
    • Countdown to the King: Marvel’s Godzilla

      Daniel Gehen
      May 29, 2019
    • Honoring A Legend: Fantagraphics To Resurrect Tomi Ungerer Classics

      Daniel Gehen
      February 15, 2019
    • Reliving the Craziest Decade in Comics History: An interview with Jason Sacks

      Mark Stack
      January 2, 2019
    • Classic Comics Cavalcade
    • Classic Interviews
  • News
    Random
    • THE WALKING DEAD Deluxe Offers A Full Color Comeback!

      Keith Silva
      July 19, 2020
      News, Press Release
    Recent
    • TIME BEFORE TIME—A HIGH STAKES TIME TRAVEL SCIENCE FICTION SERIES SET TO LAUNCH THIS MAY

      Daniel Gehen
      February 19, 2021
    • Image Comics and TMP Announces SPAWN’S UNIVERSE

      Daniel Gehen
      February 18, 2021
    • SAVAGE DRAGON IS A FORCE TO BE RECKONED WITH THIS MAY

      Daniel Gehen
      February 17, 2021
    • Press Release
    • Kickstarter Spotlight
  • Books
    Random
    • 'The Smell of Starving Boys' is a Brilliant, Haunting Western

      Keith Silva
      November 29, 2017
      Books
    Recent
    • Collecting Profile: Disney Frozen

      CB Staff
      November 22, 2019
    • Collecting Profile: NFL Superpro

      CB Staff
      August 31, 2019
    • “THE BEST OF WITZEND” is a Wonderful Celebration of Artistic Freedom

      Daniel Gehen
      September 15, 2018
    • Review: ‘Machete Squad’ is a Disappointing Afghan Memoir

      Jason Sacks
      July 31, 2018
    • Review: ‘Out of Nothing’ is the Antidote to Our Sick Times

      Jason Sacks
      July 23, 2018
    • Review: ‘Bizarre Romance’ Shows Rough Edges in the Early Days of a New Marriage

      Jason Sacks
      July 10, 2018
What's New
  • Review: X-MEN LEGENDS #1 Delivers A Dose of Nostalgia
  • Collecting Profile: Kraven the Hunter
  • Review: THE LAST RONIN #2 Hurts So Good
  • TIME BEFORE TIME—A HIGH STAKES TIME TRAVEL SCIENCE FICTION SERIES SET TO LAUNCH THIS MAY
  • Image Comics and TMP Announces SPAWN'S UNIVERSE
  • SAVAGE DRAGON IS A FORCE TO BE RECKONED WITH THIS MAY
  • RSS Feed
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Google+
  • Contact Us
  • Write for us!
  • Visit Video Game Break!
Home
Interviews

Peter Wartman: Going Over the Wall

Keith Silva
September 16, 2013
Interviews

When I finished Over The Wall I was overcome with the need to write about it (which I did) and to also call every teacher I know to say: you need to order this book for your classroom, now (!). Sometimes the journey from mild-mannered critic to evangelist is a short distance.

Over The Wall needs to be read by children and adults alike for this simple reason: it’s unsettling. Unsettling in the same way the story about an unsuspecting woman who gets tricked by an evil Queen to bite into a ‘magic wishing apple’ is unsettling; ditto the one about the bookish young girl who agrees to live with a literal beast in exchange for her father’s life. The same stuff kids want their parents to watch or read to them before bed, the classics. Over The Wall is like that too.  

What creator Peter Wartman has over those princess-types comes from pluck and originality. Wartman uses familiarity to anchor his story, but where he takes this tale of a young girl on a mission to save her brothers contains … levels, some are blind alleys, some are secret passages and others open on vistas of imagination and all are places and ideas that appeal to any age.


Keith Silva for Comics Bulletin: In my review of Over The Wall I write: ‘where has this guy been hiding? — Minnesota, apparently.’ Your author bio says you’ve been ”drawing since you could hold a pencil.” When did drawing become cartooning and a talent become a career?

Peter Wartman: So “drawing since I could hold a pencil” is a bit of an exaggeration, but I really can’t remember a time when I wasn’t constantly doodling something. The Minnesota bit is relevant here—I know it’s a stereotype, but, yeah. The weather. You grow up In Duluth (in the north of the state) and for over half the year your options are pretty limited, so I basically spent my time drawing things. Not comics though. I wasn’t too into comics for a long time, which seems weird to me now, but I wasn’t reading the right things. It took going to art school (MCAD(http://mcad.edu/)) before I was exposed to artists like Moebius (http://www.moebius.fr/) and Katsuhiro Otomo (http://www.akira2019.com/katsuhiro-otomo.htm ) and Jeff Smith (http://www.boneville.com/ ) and realized that, wow, there’s a lot you can do with this medium.

CB: How did the story of Over The Wall develop and what was your creative process?

PW: I’d been playing around with the idea of a huge, abandoned city for a while before I started working on Over the Wall, although none of those ideas worked out. Over the Wall really started with an image of a girl standing on top of a wall—with, of course, a big desolate city in the background—that popped into my head one day. I started asking questions about the scene, like why was she on the wall? What was she looking for? What was going on in the city? Things just evolved from there.

Over the Wall

CB: Over The Wall began as a webcomic on your site, Shipwreck Planet. Why did you choose the digital route for distribution?

PW: There are a lot of really great stories online now, things like Gunnerkrigg Court (a pretty great one, especially if you’re into the all-ages thing) or Rice Boy (a fun collection of weird fantasy stories), that are doing long form stories with skill and care. The web feels like a legitimate place to publish yourself now, although I think it has a ways to go before it becomes the final destination for comics. I think everyone who posts stuff online is planning on getting it into print at some point, but it’s a good way to start building an audience (plus having to upload a page every week is a great way to stay on task).

CB: How did Over The Wall arrive at Uncivilized Books?

PW: No one wants to have their work stuck online forever. Things just read better on paper, you know? Books are a great technology.

I knew I wanted Over The Wall to be printed once I was done with the story, but that wasn’t something I had much experience with. I’m not sure what I would have done on my own. It probably would have involved a lot of laser printers and staplers. Luckily Tom Kaczynski – one of my teachers from MCAD and the man behind Uncivilized Books – approached me about publishing the comic. Obviously, I immediately said ”yes,” and here we are.

Over the Wall

CB: Did you feel a temptation to redraw or retell a particular sequence and were there changes Tom suggested as Over The Wall made its journey from pixels to print?

PW: Yeah, there was a lot of work between getting the online comic done and getting it into print.  I think the changes are more along the lines of ”the first half of the comic” then ”a particular sequence.” Tom was as much my editor as my publisher, and we went over pages and pages with a red pen to make things smoother. He also suggested adding some things—there is, for example, a whole sequence with a skeleton that doesn’t show up in the online comic which I now see as a pretty crucial part of the story.

Over the Wall

There is a danger in going back and reworking old pages ad nauseam, but Over The Wall is short enough that I could indulge in changing things. I learned a lot over the course of drawing the comic, and it was a lot of fun to go back and apply my new knowledge to old problems.

CB: There’s a great fusion of cultures in the look of Over The Wall. How did this aspect of the story develop and how does it inform the narrative?

PW: I started off developing the look of the city by thinking about the role it would play in the story, which meant lots of twisty streets and archways everywhere. I wanted to give a very labyrinth-like feel to the world and make it a place you could get lost in, swallowed up and forgotten, although the city itself hopefully feels like has a lot of history (if a confused and chaotic one).

I did look at a lot of reference, at least at first, but as I drew the comic I eventually developed a language for the buildings, motifs that I could reuse and keep things consistent.Over the Wall

CB: As a ca
rtoonist, how do you approach storytelling and how does it affect narration and dialogue?

I start out all my stories with a script. I used to write things out panel by panel, but that just got tedious and killed the process. My scripts now look a lot like screenplays. I don’t get too detailed with anything beyond the dialogue — mostly I’m just writing notes to myself about how things look.

I don’t really feel like I’ve started writing the comic until I get to the thumbnail stage (and I do mean writing: thumbnails never feel like they belong to the illustration part of the process). That’s really the point where things start to take shape and I start to get a feel of how everything is flowing. A lot of the time what I’ve written doesn’t work visually, or I stumble across something while I’m sketching and everything goes off in a completely new direction. I have a tendency to overdo the dialog in my scripts—now is when I realize that I can cut a lot of what my characters are saying and just show them doing things.

The rest is just persistence.

Over the Wall

CB: This comic has a unique color palette. Why did you decide to add a shade of light purple (lavender?) to what is essentially a black & white comic?

Let’s just say that being unable to see much red (or green, for that matter) lets you make unconventional color choices. I’m just glad that, whatever I did, people have been liking it!

CB: Colorblind, seriously! C’mon Wartman, there’s more there there, don’t rob me of riches!

PW: My plan was to make the comic blue. I thought it would be a good color, something that would give the city a cold feel and help with the nighttime setting. If you’ve read the online comic you’ve probably noticed that the comic was originally done in grey tones, but Tom made the smart suggestion to add a bit of color for the print run. We used the cover (which I was working on at that time) as a test bed, so I found a nice shade of (what I thought was) blue and sent the file off to Tom. A little latter I got an email back which led to a conversation that was something like:

Tom K: “This purple color is pretty great.”

Peter W: “The what color?”

TK: “The purple. I like it a lot. Let’s go with it.”

So there you have it. I guess this is an instance of my colorblindness working in my favor.

(The comic still looks blue to me.)

Over the Wall

CB: The payoffs in Over The Wall are too wonderful to spoil, but I’ve got to ask you what’s your fascination with names and the power of names and naming?

PW: To name something is to make it knowable, and thereby to gain some level of control over it. It’s the way we make the world feel comprehensible, whether or not we actually comprehend it.  I think all the characters in Over the Wall are concerned with creating an identity for themselves, or are struggling against the one they have been given. That’s very much a coming of age thing, learning both to forge your own identity and to accept that the rest of the world is beyond your control.

Over the Wall

There is also something I found delightfully creepy about a world where you can simply fade from everyone’s memories.  It’s so much worse than just dying (and this is an all-ages book, right), and brings up a lot of questions about what makes us who we are (is anyone who the main character thinks they are? Does it matter?). Stuff I definitely want to explore more.

CB: What are the challenges of telling an ‘all ages’ story?

PW: I just tried to write something I’d like to read, really. I can think of a few points where I had to step back a moment and think about how appropriate a scene was, or where I worried I was going a little too far, but for the most part I just tried to keep the story engaging for myself and hope that others would enjoy it as well.

This is a bit of a tangent, but something I like about the best kid’s books is when there is something unsettling in them (I’ve always found Where the Wild Things Are to be pretty bleak, for example). The world is big and mysterious, especially when you’re a kid, and I think the best stories are the ones that embrace that.

Over the Wall

CB: At present, mainstream and even independent comics publishers don’t seem to have a lot of interest in cultivating new readers with ‘all ages‘ titles outside of licensed properties. Where do you think Over The Wall fits and is this gap in the marketplace frustrating to you as a creator of original all-ages content?

PW: It seems like a lot of creative industries are feeling this crunch. Why take risks when endless repetition makes money? I mean, nothing that hasn’t been said a million times before. I still have hope that the internet is our way out of the creative gulags, maybe through something like Kickstarter (in the short term) or something we haven’t even thought of yet. I’ve seen a lot of online comics have success with Kickstarter, so hopefully that will become a Thing and hopefully we’ll see more all ages stuff there.

Honestly, Uncivilized Books picked me up before I had much of a chance to feel too frustrated, so I’m thankful for that.

CB: Over The Wall is a complete stand-alone story; however, you’ve built such a deep and fascinating world full of possibilities, I wonder if your future plans include more about pink demons, plucky protagonists, and worlds with three moons?

Yes. There are plans.


Over The Wall is available through Uncivilized Books or check with your local retailer and tell ’em to order six!

For all things Peter Wartman visit Shipwreck Planet.


No one has ever mistaken Keith Silva for a plucky female protagonist; however, he has copped to being a pink demon. Follow @keithpmsilva and there is Interested in Sophisticated Fun for the more adventurous soul.

 

Keith SilvaPeter Wartman

Share On:
Tweet
Real Talk: ”From Here… Adventure’s Unleashed”: Paul Pope’s Battling Boy
Tiny Pages Made of Ashes 9/16/2013: Autobiography and Elves (but not autobiographical elves)

About The Author

<a href="http://comicsbulletin.com/byline/keith-silva/" rel="tag">Keith Silva</a>
Keith Silva

Keith Silva writes for Comics Bulletin and Twitter: @keithpmsilva

Related Posts

  • Risk and the Terrible Abyss: David Hine and Alberto Ponticelli discuss Second Sight

    Keith Silva
    January 20, 2016
  • Vanesa Del Rey & the Power of Thinness: Hit: Pen & Ink #2

    Keith Silva
    October 1, 2015

Latest Interviews

  • Interview: Jon Davis-Hunt Talks SHADOWMAN

    Daniel Gehen
    June 8, 2020
  • Interview: Becky Cloonan talks DARK AGNES and Her Personal Influences

    Mike Nickells
    March 4, 2020
  • Simon Roy

    Interview: Simon Roy on His Inspirations and Collaborations on PROTECTOR

    Mike Nickells
    January 29, 2020
  • Interview: V.E. Schwab on revisiting Red London in The Steel Prince

    Stephen Cook
    March 13, 2019
  • Interview: David Foster Wallace and Hellblazer, words on Wyrd with writer Curt Pires

    Stephen Cook
    February 27, 2019
  • “The Night Has Teeth” An Interview with Sarah deLaine, Artist of Image Comics’ “Little Girls”

    Jason Sacks
    February 26, 2019
  • Interview: Caitlin Kittredge talks the future of Witchblade

    Daniel Gehen
    February 12, 2019
  • Interview: Andy Nakatani and the Future of Weekly Shonen Jump

    Daniel Gehen
    December 19, 2018
  • INTERVIEW: Todd Matthy talks robots, princesses, and bridging the divide with storytelling

    Stephen Cook
    September 13, 2018
  • INTERVIEW: Gallaher & Ellis discuss THE ONLY LIVING GIRL

    Daniel Gehen, Thea Srinivasan
    September 7, 2018
RSSTwitterFacebookgoogleplusinstagramtumblr

Comics Bulletin is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for website owners to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com, audible.com, and any other website that may be affiliated with Amazon Service LLC Associates Program. As an Amazon Associate, Comics Bulletin earns from qualifying purchases.

All content on this site (c) 2018 The Respective Copyright Holders