3 Questions With… Ryan Andrews
I don’t know a whole lot about Ryan. Just what he has on his website. He lives in Japan and works in animation doing backgrounds for Disney. What I do know is that when his graphic novel, This Was Our Pact came out in 2019, it blew me away.
The art was beautiful and the story captivating. It’s about a group of kids who live in a town that has an annual festival where they float lanterns down a river. This year, the boys make a pact to follow the lanterns to see where they go. One by one the boys turn back until there are just two. The two that decide to continue find themselves on a surreal adventure that is like something out of a Studio Ghibli movie or Time Bandits.
I tend to reach out to artists with books that are just coming out. But last year, Ryan put some pages from This Was Our Pact up for sale and I bought one. It sits on the book shelf above my desk. So I think about his work and wonder what he’s up to a fair amount. I finally decided to reach out to get a bit of insight into his approach to comics. Enjoy!
What is something you do now that you wish you had either figured out or implemented sooner in your career?
I always struggled with page layout (still do from time to time!), so at one point I tried drawing my panels more like a storyboard, and it turned out to be a fantastic trick to overcoming that fear of a blank page! I draw a single thumbnail of a panel on the left side of the paper – off to the right I write the dialogue/narration and any notes to help with clarity in case I can’t make sense of my sketch later. Then I just keep doing that for all the panels of a scene until I’m done. This makes editing much easier because I can very simply cross out a panel without ruining the flow of the page layout. At this stage I don’t concern myself with page numbers either, so panels can be moved around easily. Once I feel like I have this down, I can save an image of each panel, and then just flip through them one by one to see if the flow of a scene feels right. This frees me up to just move forward without having to consider page turns and panel layout. Come to think of it, there’s probably some storyboarding software I could use to streamline the process – I should look into that!
What is your favorite part/step of the process?
Without a doubt, it’s that moment when you come up with an idea that’s so exciting and new, and it propels you into a story that is destined to be the greatest thing you’ve ever written. It consumes your every thought and you feel like a genius for a few days. It’s such a wonderful feeling. Then a day or two later you hit a wall and realize that it was a terrible idea and will never work. Then you feel awful for a bit…until you find that next idea and suddenly you’re a genius again. Eventually one of those ideas sticks and you manage to work all the way through a story without giving up. There are many wonderful moments along the way of course, but that initial burst is just the best.
If you had a genie to promote your work in any way, what would that look like?
Have the students at Gobelins animation school in Paris create incredible animated trailers for me, please! I don’t know how well those work to sell books, but it doesn’t matter! I just REALLY want to see what they would make.
You can find Ryan online at:
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