A modern day Little Orphan Annie with a touch of Tim Burton, Ted Naifeh's Courtney Crumrin series has produced five graphic novels with a sixth on the way. Titied Courtney Crumrin & The Prince of Nowhere,
this one-shot follows Courtney and Uncle Aloysius on their European
vacation as they journey into the homeland of their family name as they
discover old truths and new wrinkles in Courtney's relationship with
her Uncle.
Debuting back in 2002, Courtney Crumrin propelled Ted Naifeh's comic career to new heights after coming onto the seen with Gloomcookie.
She's a young girl, outcast to both her schoolmates and her
absent(-minded) parents. When this aloof family moves in with their
mysterious Uncle Aloysius, Courtney begins to understand her magical
heritage and a beginning of a exciting new chapter of her life.
With this new book scheduled for release this December, we talked with Naifeh for more.
Newsarama: Thanks for talking to us, Ted. What can you tell us about Courtney Crumrin & The Prince of Nowhere?
Ted Naifeh: First things first. It’s coming out in December. The
book is done, but Oni had to fit it into their schedule as best they
could, since it was so late.
The Prince of Nowhere is the second half of Courtney’s European
travel saga. In the first part, Courtney meets werewolves in Romania.
In this one, she meets vampires in Germany. I love gothic monsters, but
I like to root them more firmly in the traditional folklore from which
they sprang. Or at least, I like to evoke the feeling of those folk
stories. Putting Courtney in places where you can almost believe this
stuff took place is a good start. I think one of the reasons Stephen
King’s stories work so well is that he places his stories in spooky old
New England, where a lot of American folk legends came from. In Prince Of Nowhere,
Courtney travels to a small town called Krumrhein, which has been
largely overlooked by the twentieth century. There, she discovers some
history of the Crumrin family name, and her relationship with her Uncle
Aloysius is stretched to the breaking point.
NRAMA: That history is tied to a legendary woman named Lady
Isolde. Tell us more about Lady Isolde and how she's connected with
Courtney.
TN: Lady Isolde von Krumrhein was the duchess of the town in the
16th century. She’s still hanging around the castle, toying with
alchemy and black magic, which she has used to prolong her life, or at
least, create a semblance of everlasting life. She is an ancestor of
the Crumrin family, and keeps in touch with her magical descendants. Of
course, there are only two magical descendants left: Aloysius, and
Courtney. And Aloysius wouldn’t let Courtney anywhere near a creature
like Lady Isolde.
Basically, she’s my attempt to insert the Elizabeth Bathory story into
the Courtney world. To be frank, I don’t think I really believe the
Bathory story, which sounds like medieval a smear campaign against a
powerful female in a male-dominated world. But it’s a compelling
picture of pride and vanity gone mad. I wanted to use that image to
depict how magical power can take away one’s soul.
NRAMA: While in town, Courtney meets a amiable young man named
Wolfgang who's more than he seems. Despite what his name implies he's
no werewolf (that's in the last book), but he is more than what he
seems. Tell us about him?
TN: Wolfgang is the story’s Dracula, a tween version of the
classic vampire lover. But because he’s essentially an immortal
14-year-old, he’s not so much a seducer as a rebellious teenager of the
sort that is magnetic to other lonely kids, and always looking for an
emotional connection he doesn’t have with his own family. His Lady
Isolde’s son, and how can a vampire family be anything but
dysfunctional?
NRAMA: Courtney's constant through all the books has been her
uncle Aloysius. From first meeting in book one, they're now traveling
together across Europe. How would you describe their relationship with
one another?
TN: Currently, their relationship is in deep trouble. Basically,
Aloysius is a grown-up version of Courtney, set in his ways, and really
bad at connecting with others. As with most relationships, their
similarities draw them to each other, but cause just as many problems.
Courtney has far more in common with Aloysius than she does with her
own parents, and Aloysius relates to her as outsiders tend to relate to
one another. But what keeps throwing Aloysius off is Courtney’s need
for him to act as a parental figure, and his complete ignorance of what
that role involves. It doesn’t help that Courtney is also a rebellious
kid who recoils from parental figures, sending Aloysius mixed signals.
The previous book ended with them pretty much alienated. Then in this
book, Courtney meets a boy vampire who’s offering everlasting love and
companionship. From where she sits, it doesn’t sound too bad.
NRAMA: How would you describe Courtney's magic skills right now?
TN: She’s pretty capable, at least as far as magic goes.
Courtney’s been able to deal with ordinary people from the end of the
first chapter of the first volume. By the end of the second volume,
she’s learned to tap her emotions and use them to fuel some extremely
powerful mojo. I have yet to go into the details of her powers, but I
intend to in upcoming books.
But the stories thus far imply that she can hold her own in a magical
fight. But fights aren’t what Courtney’s tales are about. In the first
series, she goes from being essentially helpless in the face of
antagonism to being pretty self-sufficient, all in the first chapter.
The rest of the chapters show her discovering a need for something more
than power; her emotional journey from isolation to connection. And of
course, that journey is still in progress.
NRAMA: Wth the recent one shot The Fire Thief's Tale,
you've really pulled Courtney out of her element and into some more
harrowing situations than before. What was the impetus for you with
these one-shots and taking Courtney traveling through Europe with
Aloysius?
TN: For one thing, I wanted to explore Courtney’s relationship
with Aloysius, reveal more about him, and let that relationship evolve.
But I also wanted to explore the vampire and werewolf legends. In
eastern European folklore, where these legends originated, the vampire
and the werewolf are basically the same thing, subdividing into
different varieties of infectious evil only in the last century and a
half as they were discovered by western Europe. After all, if a vampire
can become a wolf, and goes around biting people, infecting and
transforming them, what, at the end of the day, is the difference? From
the original point of view, the animal, the sexual, the diseased, and
the undead were all one thing.
For me, if there was going to be a difference between werewolves and
vampires, it should be a fundamental one. In the Courtney world, a
werewolf is a magical beast that can look human if it wants, and its
bite can turn a man wild and bestial. But they’re not evil, any more
than humans are evil. They’re not good either, any more than humans are
good. The point of them is that they’re living creatures, and
sympathetic for that reason, if no other.
The world’s vampires, on the other hand, are Undead with a capital U.
There lies the difference. The living werewolves have genuine needs and
desires, which, though they may oppose ours, are valid. Even if they
want to eat humans, you can’t really call them evil, anymore than mice
can call cats evil, or chickens can call humans evil. It’s all just a
matter of where you’re standing. But the vampire has no life to
nourish. It feeds emptiness, and only the emptiness grows.
That’s a metaphor for something, but I can’t really think of what right now.
NRAMA: You're the writer – we'll give you time.
One thing I've always marveled about your work is the character
designs. This book is no different, with several amazing designs
especially Lady Isolde. What are you thinking when you're crafting
these characters?
TN: With Lady Isolde, I think I took a major risk, crafting a
vampire queen character that isn’t sexy, but austere and forbidding, as
a five hundred year old aristocrat must be. I wanted someone who looked
like they walked out of a 16th century portrait, all Habsburgian and
homely, regal and melancholy.
I think character design is a fundamental element of storytelling. I’ve
read dozens of comics with goth girl protagonists, and with most, you
can almost read the description in the writer’s script. “Isabel is a
sort of goth chick with black hair and black clothes, but sweet and
feisty and has her unique style.” The artist, utterly uninspired, must
do his or her best to indicate gothiness with a few well-used
signifiers. A skull here, a face piercing there, and voila, instant
goth, and as bland as cereal with water instead of milk. There’s
nothing to hook the reader. Character design, like story design,
requires a hook to grab the reader’s attention. For Courtney, the lack
of nose might be a little too noticeable, but without it, the only
thing left is the bat barrette and the black eyes against the blond
hair. It could work, but the nose is the real grabber.
NRAMA: And how'd you come up with the idea to draw Courtney without a nose?
TN: It was the first thing I thought of for her, a face that was
just really black eyes, a raised eyebrow and a bat barrette. Hair,
nose, everything else is washed out.
Remember, she’s the first character I sketched. Out of context, her not
having a nose was no more weird than Hello Kitty not having a mouth.
Then, when I started formulating the world around her, the characters
became more and more realistic. I wanted her to be the only one without
a nose, thus separating her from the other characters, to make her more
the center of the story in the same way that Cerebus, being the only
character with zip-o-tone, stood out and stayed the center of good no
matter how abominable his behavior was. But as Courtney’s world took
shape, it became harder and harder to keep it cartoony. There are still
a few things that hold it in cartoon space. The pointy bushes, the
pointy four-fingered hands, the occasional Orphan Annie circles for
eyes (thanks to the brilliant Craig Russell for that charming piece of
stylization) and the crooked buildings all create an atmosphere of
cartooniness that keeps the bleaker, sadder parts of the story from
becoming too melodramatic. But the nose-less cartoon girl in a
realistic world allows the reader to identify with her as a stand-in
for themselves. I could write a book on how that process works, but
Scott McCloud already has.
NRAMA: This is the third one shot under the Courtney Crumrin banner – what's next for the young girl?
TN: I have two more volumes planned for Courtney, which is to
say four more prestige format books like that last one shot. The two
European travel books will be bound into a single small volume called Courtney Crumrin’s Monstrous Holiday. I reasoned that most of my readers preferred graphic novels to single issue comics, so instead of releasing Monstrous Holiday
as four 32 page floppies, I did it as two 64 page OGNs. That way, the
regular floppy collectors are happy as well. I’m pretty happy with the
way it’s come out, so I think I’ll continue to do one 64 page prestige
format book per year till I’m done.
I’m not 100 percent sure what the next story will be, but I have some
ideas. I want to start tying together the various plot threads I’ve
left dangling. Her recklessness has left a path of destruction and
messed up lives, and I want some of that to come back and haunt her.
NRAMA: When I've interviewed you in the past, you've mentioned
that Hollywood has been interested in Courtney Crumrin. Has there been
any movement on that front?
TN: No, I’m still waiting to hear if there’s anything new. I
think that there’s been enough completely failed spooky kids movies
that producers are reluctant to just crank out another one, which is
all to the good. If they do make Courtney into a movie, I don’t want a
slapdash job like what happened with “The Dark Is Rising.” I want
people to make the thing work.
NRAMA: If Hollywood did go ahead with a Courtney Crumrin feature, how would you like to see it done?
TN: I like the idea of doing it live action rather than
animated. I think this would allow people to think of it as its own
thing rather than a recreation of the book. Movies aren’t comics, and
have their own rules. Adaptations can’t all be Sin City style
reproductions. That being said, I think it would be fun to give it a
Henry Selick-like treatment, but with live action actors against a
whimsically stylized environment. I’d like to see a very restrained
color palette with lots of blues, grays and purples.
But really, it doesn’t matter to me how they make the thing look so
much as how it’s written. Obviously, you can’t break the movie into
four episodes like the first book. Well, you could, but they probably
won’t. But the important thing is the emotional story. Courtney must be
both snarky and lonely. If she’s just snarky, she won’t be all that
sympathetic. The story is really about these two lonely people,
Courtney and her uncle, finding each other, and learning to overcome
their distrust of emotional vulnerability and love one another. If that
dynamic is captured in the screenplay, the movie will probably work. If
it’s not, the movie is doomed.
