Every family tree has a bit of history – you can help it. Whether big
or small, each of our lineages trace their way in and out of important
historical events. The lives your forefathers (and foremothers) led
were just as interesting as yours – maybe more. In the Crogan family,
adventure is in their blood. Crogan's Vengeance is the first in
an ongoing series of adventure graphic novels that profile the Crogan
family tree. This volume documents "Catfoot" Crogan, an honest sailor
who ends up in the pirate's life abard the ship of the most dangerous
buccaneer on the Spanish Main.
According to Oni Editor-In-Chief James Lucas Jones, Schweizer's
original pitch included a poster-size copy of the Crogan Family Tree.
That set the tone for the publisher and for the readers, with future
adventures promising private eyes, gunfighters, legionnaires, flying
aces and even a lion tamer. Schweizer admits that this series is
inspired by "great adventure stories" such as Treasure Island and the Three Musketeers,
while being a good old fashioned comic book at heart. This 192-page
hardcover is published by Oni Press and is Schweizer's first standalone
work in comics. Crogan's Vengeance debuted at
Small Press Expo on October 4th.
Newsarama: It's good to talk to you, Chris. So what's Crogan's Vengeance about?
Chris Schweizer: While the story is a high adventure tale
centering around a young sailor, nicknamed “Catfoot” Crogan, the book
is really about piracy. There are two different schools of thought
among pirate historians: that pirates were either the swashbucklers of
popular fiction whose society was one of the first examples of pure
equality and personal freedom, or that they were horrible, murderous
brutes who used fear and aggression to nearly collapse the trade and
economy of the New World. Both, I think, are true, and I wanted to use
this book to show how that’s possible.
NRAMA: Tell us more about Catfoot Crogan and how he ends up a pirate.
CS: Though the book doesn’t dwell much on his backstory, Catfoot
comes from what used to be an extremely well-to-do line, but his family
was stripped of their wealth and position when they took the royalist
side during the English civil war. He’s seen firsthand the consequences
of making waves, and so he really just wants to go through life without
finding himself in the middle of a conflict.
Like a lot of pirates, Catfoot “goes on the account” not so much
because of a love of plunder as to free himself of the unfairness of
nautical life in the eighteenth century. Even aboard private merchant
vessels, crews were subject entirely to the will of the ship’s master,
and were often poorly paid, poorly fed, and harshly punished for every
infraction, real or imagined. Piracy offered freedom in a time when the
social order was extremely hierarchical and it was almost impossible
for anyone to not be under the thumb of someone else.
The problem that
Catfoot faces is reconciling this need for freedom and personal liberty
with the reality of pirate life; namely, having to steal and kill in
order to survive.
NRAMA: The title of the book mentions 'vengeance' – so what is Catfoot seeking vengeance for?
CS: Though he's surrounded by cutthroats, one stands out above
all the others as a real villain. This character is out to get Catfoot,
and though the latter would prefer to avoid confrontation, the villain
consistently forces him to make a hard choice; either stand idly by
while cruel and barbarous exploits are undertaken, or intervene at the
cost of his own safety and position. The final choice that Crogan has
to make is if, once no longer in the proximity of this character, he
should still seek him out in order to put an end to such misdeeds. The
"vengeance" in question is the potential outcome of such a choice.
NRAMA: This is an entire series of graphic novels – quite
ambitious. Did it come to you as a big series, or just grow out of the
first book
CS: I had the series idea before I ever thought of specific
story details. I had a job where there was plenty of
sit-at-a-desk-and-draw time, and I found myself drawing this WWI flying
ace a lot. One day I drew another character – probably the pirate, I’m
not positive – and realized that they looked like they could be
related. That gave me the idea to try and draw all of the other
relatives in this lineage, so with the help of a calculator I figured
out what years each generation would fall into, and tailored the
“professions” to fit the time periods allotted. I think I drew out the
whole family tree in one day, and I named most of the characters after
my Dad’s brothers.
Like a lot of creations, its birth feels like pure chance – I happened
to be thinking about the right thing at the right time, and it fell
into place. I feel so lucky to have come up with it, because it allows
me to stay within the framework of an established series while still
getting to try a different genre with each successive volume – a
swashbuckler, a western, a noir detective story – it’s a project that
I’m unlikely to ever tire of.
To tell the truth, I had no idea at all what it’d be for – this was
before I decided that I was going to be a cartoonist – I just knew that
it was a series that I’d probably enjoy reading or watching. I’d become
disheartened by the lack of gender-specific children’s literature out
there, and I knew that I wanted to create an old-style Boy’s Adventure
series. While I think it’s wonderful that there are so many books that
are aimed at both girls and boys, like Bone and Harry Potter and The Secret Science Alliance – I think that books aimed at one or the other can be really fulfilling as well. I loved Howard Pyle books as a kid, and the Hardy Boys, and Tom Swift; my wife, like so many other girls, loved the L.M. Montgomery books, and Nancy Drew, and the Babysitters’ Club
series. While I certainly hope there will be a crossover in terms of
readership, I think it’s good for kids of both genders to have work
specifically aimed at them.
NRAMA: One thing I noticed on the family tree artwork is that they are all men – will there be any story of the Crogan women?
CS: There will definitely be prominent female characters, but the protagonist of each of the main Crogan
books is going to be a guy – at least that’s my plan as of now. Mostly
this is because the series is, as I mentioned, targeted primarily at
boys. The reason that none of the mothers are on the family tree is
that seeing who the mother is would give away some key story elements
that I want to keep secret. If the reader knows that two characters
have a child, then the suspense built in a romantic subplot as to
whether or not they end up together would be negated.
But historically, there are a lot of periods in which women played a
big role on the adventure side of things, especially in the early part
of the twentieth century, so don’t expect many of the protagonists to
go it alone.
NRAMA: How far are you along in doing the first book, Crogan's Vengeance?
CS: The first book is actually completely finished, and is being
shipped over from the printers as we speak – it’s debuting at the Small
Press Expo on October 4th. I’m working on the plot of the second book,
Crogan’s March, which I hope to have finished and on shelves in the
later part of ’09.
NRAMA: This series is about the adventures of the Crogan family throughout history. Is your family tree this adventurous?
CS: Actually, yes. As a kid, I loved hearing stories about my family tree. There are a lot, but a few spring readily to mind.
My great-grandfather, an engineer and Germanic Literature professor,
found himself in America because he was enslaved on a Cuban sugar
plantation with a friend (long story), and escaped through the jungle,
building a raft and making his way to the Florida coast (both men
contracted Malaria, and his friend didn’t survive the escape; my
great-grandfather almost didn’t). Then there was the Revolutionary War
colonel on my Grandmother’s side who escaped from a swarm of hostile
Native Americans by diving his horse off the side of a giant cliff
(there’s a national monument there now, called “McCullough’s Leap”),
and was subsequently able to bring relief to a besieged fort. I had a
great-great-grandmother who ran a bootlegging operation, another
great-grandfather who was the founder of America’s Vocational Placement
for the Blind program, and an ancestor who was skinned alive by the
British during the war of 1812. My grandfather designed Epcot’s Mexican
Pavilion, and my great-grandmother’s sister, science fiction novelist
Andre Norton, wrote her first published novel at age 16 during school
(the tradition of working on stories while we’re supposed to be paying
attention in class is an old family tradition, apparently). There’s
also a surprising amount of alligator-related incidents on my dad’s
side, plus some shadier characters who are probably be best left
unmentioned, though everybody in the family is pretty open about the
immorality of some of our forebears. It’s pretty likely that I’ll
borrow from my ancestors’ experiences for the Crogan books sometime down the road.
NRAMA: This is your first major comics work, but can you tell us about your art career leading up to this?
CS: There’s not a whole lot, actually… though I’ve drawn all my
life, most of what I’ve done to this point can be seen as preparatory,
trying different storytelling mediums (film, prose writing, a college
newspaper strip, illustration, theater, etc) that now inform my comics
work. I had never really considered cartooning as a career possibility
until my dad suggested it a couple of years ago. My dad, while very
encouraging, is also very pragmatic, and kind of an quality snob, so
his suggestion carried a lot of weight for me – if he didn’t think I
could do it, he wouldn’t have said it. I thought “you know what? I
would LOVE to make comics for a living!” and went about trying to find
out how to do so. I made my first short story – the Goodbye Beard,
which can be read on my website – at the beginning of ’06, and took a
job as a sixth grade history teacher while I prepared for grad school,
making more comics so that I’d have a portfolio with which to trick
them into accepting me into the program; I was so nervous about getting
in.
NRAMA: You graduated from the Savannah College of Art &
Design with an MFA in Sequential Art. How do you think that college
training helped you get to where you are today?
CS: Absolutely. Firstly, it increased the quality of my work
tenfold. My drawing got better, my process sped up as I learned quicker
ways to do things that heretofore had taken me hours, and I was exposed
to a lot of artists whose work I had never seen. The faculty at
SCAD-Atlanta also bend over backwards to make sure that we get all the
opportunities possible for us; Our grad program was small, but all of
us came out working (Hunter Clark is drawing The Return of King Doug,
which was recently optioned by Ben Stiller, Douglas Dabbs just did the
art for the Resurrection Annual, and Justin Wagner is doing the art for
Greg Thompson’s Lonesome Town, and I was finished with Vengeance by the
time I had my last class) thanks in no small part to the tireless
efforts of Shawn Crystal, who takes time away from his own busy
freelancing schedule to really help the career paths of his students.
There are also lots of visiting artist and editor workshops and panels
that allow the students face time with everybody from James Jean to Art
Spiegelman, and that’s invaluable. The contacts I made through
SCAD-Atlanta were, I think, just as valuable career-wise as the actual
education, and that’s saying a lot.
