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Matt Phelan on The Storm in the Barn CREDIT: |
MP: I suppose that when an industry picks up and vanishes from your town leaving you with no work or prospects, you may feel the same sense of powerlessness as these farmers did.
NRAMA: What appeals to you about illustrating rural stories like this and Lucky? MP: I think a rural setting can get rid of a lot of clutter, even in a modern story. I don’t have much interest in drawing a character Tweet. NRAMA: What's interesting about the supernatural element in the story is that you create this personification of the situation people faced at that time. It reminded me of Neil Gaiman's American Gods in that respect. Do you feel we're now at a point where the history of the United States has sort of given rise to its own unique series of myths and legends? That is, that events such as the Dust Bowl can now be viewed in this almost mythological context, similar to how the histories of many older countries have their own gods and monsters? This seems like something you’re touching upon through the references to the Oz books and the traditional "Jack" tales. MP: The idea of an American mythology was definitely something I wanted to explore. The Jack Tales were a very popular oral tradition that directly mirrored the fairy tales of Europe. By the time this story takes place (1937) the Oz books had been captivating readers for more than thirty years, and I bet they had an even stronger resonance with kids in the Kansas of the Dust Bowl. The idea of a tornado taking you to another world doesn’t seem so farfetched when a one-hundred-foot wall of black dust could suddenly make your town vanish in minutes. To kids in the Dust Bowl, who knew fairy tales and the Oz stories but maybe not the science of erosion, what would their world look like? If there was such a thing as a cursed land, then surely this was it. I wanted to use the Dust Bowl as the setting for a fairy tale instead of taking it and writing a straight-up historical novel. That seemed like fair game at this point in our history. NRAMA: Tying the Oz books into the Kansas situation makes sense, but I'd like to know more about how they influenced you as a writer. MP: Well, I didn’t actually read the first Oz book until I took a college class on children’s literature. I was surprised about how truly weird it is (not that the movie version hadn’t always creeped me out). I thought it would be good to have Jack’s sister Dorothy read one of the Oz books, so I checked the synopses for the books and discovered that Ozma of Oz had references to the Deadly Desert of Oz and featured a Gnome King which tied in nicely. So I read it, and really enjoyed it. Ozma has some of Baum’s more disturbing creations like the Wheelers (the great movie Return to Oz used a lot of material from this book).NRAMA: With Jack and his father, you also touch on some deep themes about what it meant to be a man in those times, and living up to a sense of expectation when you have no idea what it is you're supposed to do. How did you develop those characters and themes?
MP: The father is a good man who is slowly giving up and losing his identity. He has trouble seeing past that, and seeing that Jack is not just another now useless part of his wasteland of a farm. Jack is desperate not only to be seen as having value, but for his pa to simply notice his existence. NRAMA: Do you see yourself doing more graphic novels in the future? MP: Absolutely. Even though the words “labor intensive” do not even begin to describe the process, I fell in love with what you can do with this unique medium. I’m anxious to experiment more. I’d like to do some more short stories. I contributed a short comic to an upcoming anthology called Sideshow which I’m really excited about because it’s the first time an anthology in this series included comics. Danica Novgorodoff and Shawn Cheng also contributed stories. NRAMA: What else are you working on? MP: I’m writing another graphic novel for Candlewick Press that’s based on three true solo journeys around the world that took place at the end of the nineteenth century. I’ll begin drawing it early next year, with the aim of it being published in 2011. For more of Phelan’s work, check out his website at www.mattphelan.com or his blog at http://planetham.blogspot.com/. The Storm in the Barn blows into stores this August.THE STORM IN THE BARN. Copyright © 2009 by Matt Phelan. Reproduced by permission of the publisher, Candlewick Press, Somerville, MA.


