A Literary Hawaiian Punch

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on Nov. 1, 2005 Sign up now!

By Douglas Wolk -- Publishers Weekly, 11/1/2005

R. Kikuo Johnson is the art-comics rookie of the year. His debut graphic novel, Night Fisher, (Fantagraphics) is a semiautobiographical coming-of-age story about a teenage boy in Maui falling in with small-time crooks and trying to figure out his future. Johnson, who is trained as a landscape painter, worked on the novel for years, and he's already trying to grow beyond its style.

PW Comics Week: What is the history of Night Fisher—how did it come about?

R. Kikuo Johnson: I started it my junior year of college, when I was living in Rome, Italy. I guess being in a foreign country is one of the best places to write a memoir, or pseudo-memoir. I really started thinking about Hawaii, and where I was from—I'd never felt so Hawaiian. Over the next three years, I kept drawing, and by the end I'd redrawn everything I'd done in Rome. In 2002, I actually had a copy of the first 50 pages, and I brought it to SPX, showed it to [Fantagraphics'] Kim Thompson, and he kind of grimaced, and that was it—I never heard from him again. At the end of last year, I'd finished it, and I sent it in cold. I only sent it to Fantagraphics—I wanted them to publish it—and a week later they called me up with a publishing schedule. And I was like, "Hey, I actually gave this to Kim two years ago!"

How did it change when you revised it?

When I first started, it was a little more of a reaction against superhero comics and action and adventure. As I graduated from college, my taste definitely changed. I wrote out the ending, which was this big action finale, and wrote in something a lot more quiet and reflective. Then I had to go back and change the beginning to set up the new ending.

What have you been working on since you finished Night Fisher?

I was drawing in that one style for three years—I think it was a really cinematic approach to storytelling, based on mainstream and superhero comics. Now that it's finally done, I've been working on short strips, trying to draw in as many different styles as I can—four-panel gag strips, that kind of stuff. Everything I've done since Night Fisher is very un-cinematic; I'm really trying to do pure comics. I've done two strips slated for the MOME anthology, and I did a two-page strip about John James Audubon, who's a hero of mine—I'm going to try to get it into a birding magazine.

Why Audubon?

I think, besides being part of the cliche of liking old-timey drawing from that era like every other cartoonist, I'm just really enamored of his life. I love the idea of this guy in the old frontier going out and being a pioneer and drawing. And I think his work is very related to comics: he's not drawing a lifelike image of a bird as much as drawing a symbol of the bird's form. He picks the most descriptive angle from which to draw the bird while simultaneously telling a narrative with the bird, and making a beautifully designed object. That's definitely something that cartoonists think about.

The landscapes in Night Fisher are really evocative of Maui—they capture the look of the place with a few bold strokes. How did you approach drawing them?

I spent entire days walking through space in my mind, like a director would do, plotting things out in space. But there was a long period in college when I abandoned comics—I was a landscape painter for a little over a year. I had stuff in galleries, and I thought that was my career until I came to my senses and realized that what I thought was "real art" was pretty fake, and that comics were about as real as it gets.

What brought you back to comics?

Making about 30 or 40 canvases that didn't have any narrative. They felt like studies, and I never felt completed as a creative person. I started drawing because I wanted to use my imagination, and they just weren't fulfilling. I realized that what I was missing was narrative, and comics definitely have that. To say the least.