Interview: Danica Novgorodoff (+Traduction)

Welcome on Between Dreams and Reality, can you present yourself in a few words ?

I call myself a graphic novelist, but I create all kinds of work that combines text and images: comics, murals, children’s books, theatre and music posters, logos, paintings, and other more experimental, less classifiable art. I live in New York, but I try to travel as often as possible to places where I can climb mountains and ride horses.

Is it difficult to manage illustrations and story at the same time ? How is your process ?

Writing without illustrations or drawing without narrative feels to me like trying to play soccer with only one foot.

I tend to come up with the story first, and create the images afterwards. The story is like the skeleton and the images are like the muscles and skin of a creature, of a graphic novel. I need to know what the structure is before I add weight and aesthetics to it. Of course eventually it all gets intermingled, and often after creating images I have to go back and change the text if it’s not fitting together right.

You didn’t write a lot of dialogues, but your story doesn’t need them, the illustrations are perfect for that. Is it what you’re trying to share too ? That we don’t have to have words to understand everything ?

I try to tell as much of the story as possible visually, and to refrain from redundant text. Each element—the text and the images—tells a different aspect of the story. If you can tell that a character is sad in the image, she doesn’t need to explain that through dialogue. I hope to show rather than tell.

How long did it take to realize the whole book ?

It took me about five years to create The Undertaking of Lily Chen. The story went through about 15 revisions before I started drawing, and then at my most productive, I was only able to complete about a page of drawings per day.

How did you manage to find such a topic for The Undertaking of Lily Chen ? It was so interesting. Does it happen in real life too?

I read about the tradition of ghost marriages in an article in the Economist magazine. In it, a man named Song was described as having been arrested for grave robbing when police found his cell phone dropped in a plundered grave. That gave me the idea for a premise to the story, as well as for a grave-robbing villain. Ghost marriages—when two deceased people are married by their families and buried together—are still practiced in some parts of China currently. The Economist article explained that a black market for female corpses had sprung up as a result of the tradition. I found that startling and fascinating.

Are you influenced a lot by the asian culture ?

My grandmother was Chinese and my father was born in Shanghai, but until working on this book I would say I was not heavily influenced by Asian culture. It was after my first trip to China in 2007, when I went to visit a friend there (and climb some mountains!) that I began writing this book. I have always been interested in traditional Chinese art, especially landscape brush paintings, ink on rice paper. I wanted to create a comic in which the setting referenced that type of painting. I also really love ancient Chinese figure paintings and horse art. The horses always have a very distinctive style that I referenced in Mr. Song’s horse.

Do you have any future projects ?

I’m currently working on several projects—a collection of graphic essays about the environment and climate change; two picture books for children; a novel (with images) for kids; and a book of memoir/nonfiction/paintings/poetry about volcanoes. Hopefully I will have something finished before another five years elapses!

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