Two Scoops of Banana Sunday
This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on March. 28, 2006 Sign up now!
by Douglas Wolk -- Publishers Weekly, 3/28/2006
Colleen Coover's first two major comics projects are about as different as can be. Following her cult-favorite X-rated romance comic Small Favors, she turned her attention to the all-ages whimsy of Banana Sunday. The slyly goofy story of three magical monkeys and the two teenage girls who befriend them, Banana Sunday was written by Coover's partner Paul Tobin (under the name "Root Nibot"), and originally serialized as a four-issue miniseries; it's now been collected as a graphic novel from Oni Press. As the Portland, Ore.-based team reveals here, though, the comics version of Banana Sunday is only the beginning of Tobin's plans for those characters—and they've got another graphic-novel collaboration in the works.
PW Comics Week: Where did Banana Sunday come from?
Paul Tobin: Just pure love of monkeys. Monkeys and apes. And one of our primary goals was to make it an all-ages book.
Colleen Coover: And fun.
PT: By all-ages, we really meant all ages—not just that it could be picked up by a six-year-old or an eight-year-old, but that it could be picked up by a six-year-old or a 28-year-old, and no matter what age you are, you would get some enjoyment out of it. "All-ages" has a tendency to mean just "good for younger readers," and we wanted to make something that was good for any reader.
PWCW: It developed over a few years, though, didn't it?
PT: The earliest Banana Sunday stuff, no one will ever, ever see. It's really manga-style—Colleen's and my version of Ranma 1/2. But the story grew over time, so the version of the comic that was eventually published was done concurrently with the Banana Sunday novels that I'm working on.
CC: But the novels are nothing like the comics.
PT: It's a much more complex story, and it gets darker at times.
CC: Banana Sunday never stopped being a comics project—it's just that I went off and did Small Favors for a while, establishing myself as an artist. I was contracted with Eros to do four issues of Small Favors, and then another four issues, and we decided that after the eighth issue came out, we were going to tackle Banana Sunday again.
PWCW: How did you develop the look of the Banana Sunday comics?
CC: I wanted them to be fun and cute. I get very involved with characters, and I identify with them very closely when I'm drawing them. It's really kind of similar in my head to acting—when I draw something sad happening to somebody, I get really sad. It's a very personal thing.
PWCW: When did you decide to set it in Portland?
CC: Did we?
PT: It's not really set in Portland, per se, but there are some Portland landmarks in it.
CC: That's just because we moved here, and everything was so new and cool.
PT: A lot of the pages in the first couple of issues were actually drawn in Iowa, before we'd even planned on moving. Although the graphic novel I'm writing for Colleen right now [Freckled Face, Bony Knees] is actually set in Portland.
CC: Is it really?
PT: I don't like to discuss scripts before they're done.
PWCW: Are there plans for more Banana Sunday stories?
PT: Most of my plans are with the novels now—the characters as they are in the novels have always been a little bit more the real characters for me. Except that with the novels I don't get to see Colleen's artwork, which is always a joy. Just her drawing of Go-Go can make me laugh.
CC: Maybe we'll do a Go-Go adventure as a minicomic.
PT: Go-Go's the most popular.
CC: By far the most popular.
PWCW: Did you ever suspect otherwise?
PT: Not really. Because he's my favorite, too.
CC: Yeah, he's mine as well. There's a lot of both of us in Go-Go.
PT: I actually have mental charts in my head when I'm writing the novels: "okay, there's three primates here, and Go-Go's got 60 percent of the stage time... there's supposed to be three characters!"
