Firefly Nights: Leland Myrick's Missouri Boy

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on August 15, 2006 Sign up now!

by Chris Barsanti, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 8/15/2006

In the increasingly crowded and self-referential world of comics, it's nice to have the enigmatic, richly colored, elliptical works of Leland Myrick. His five-issue series Sweet (Adept Books, 2000) looked at love in five different ways, while 2004's Bright Elegy (Adept) was a mystery about a man's troubled past. In September First Second is publishing his autobiographical work Missouri Boy, which tells his life story growing up and living in Missouri before he lit out for California. It's a loosely episodic tale of firecrackers and friendship, lit with a nostalgia that is ultimately overshadowed by a palpable sense of personal darkness. PWCW spoke with Myrick about publishing his life story.

PWCW: Where in Missouri did your family live? How would you describe the region?

Leland Myrick: It was in St. Charles County, not too far from St. Louis. It was an interesting area to grow up in, an ever-changing place that was very different when I left than what it was when I entered it. We moved into the house I was raised in when I was four, about 1965 or so. And at that time you had to travel a couple of miles to reach a paved road--it was all gravel roads around us--very rural, with several family farms in the area and all the houses sitting on three or four acres. I remember we used to get all of our eggs from an old farmer's widow down the road. There was a field of a few dozen acres right next to our house, completely undeveloped and unused, except for hunters and the occasional blackberry picker. The chapter "Underwear Pond" takes place in that field. By the 1970s, however, tract home developments began popping up everywhere, consuming the farmland and the open fields, everything, though very slowly. There are no farms there now at all. I'm not saying it's a bad place now--it's just not the place where I grew up anymore. In a very real way it just doesn't exist.

PWCW: What made you become an artist? The book doesn't even mention that your character draws or writes.

LM: I like telling stories. I think what I have in common with many artists and writers is that I tend toward the introspective, looking inward much more than I look out. I started as a writer, actually with newspapers, though I quickly gave it up. I've enjoyed the graphic storytelling medium of comics since I was a child, so it felt quite natural to tell my stories using the comics/graphic novel format. I'm pretty much self-taught as an artist, with no formal art training. I began drawing by copying artists that I liked, and over the years all those influences melded into a style of my own.

PWCW: Who influenced you?

LM: I was never a very good copyist, so some might not find much resemblance in my early work to the artists that influenced me. First, there are a couple of European [comics] artists, Jacques Tardi and Hugo Pratt. All my early work was in black and white, and Tardi and Pratt are the two finest artists at working in black and white. In America, there's Milt Caniff, and from Japan Keiko Nishi and Taiyo Matsumoto. As I said, I doubt that any of them would be flattered by the comparison, and while I absorbed certain aspects of each, I think I bring to it my own way of looking at the world and representing what I see.

PWCW: Did growing up in the 1960s and 1970s in a small Missouri town affect your art? Does that account somewhat for the book's non-ironic point of view?

LM: Probably so. I'm not always dead serious, but when I write, I'm usually writing about something that has made enough of an impression on me for me to record it, something that has touched me. I do use irony, just carefully.

PWCW: You're a poet as well as an artist. Given the episodic and gracefully cryptic nature of much of Missouri Boy, do you think that your writing has influenced the way you draw?

LM: Yes. All of the stories in Missouri Boy began life as poems. In making the book, I had to go through the process of translating poetry into graphic novel form, which turned out to be very interesting--sometimes nearly the entire poem survived intact in the comics story, though more often many of the words just fell away and became drawings. And that was difficult sometimes, letting go of the words. I was describing the process to a friend of mine once, and she said, "Oh, don't let them go! Give them to me." I thought that was sweet. But I believe it's a better book for it. In general I think poetry and graphic novels can have a lot in common.

PWCW: Was there anything in particular that made you sit down and write this book? Had it been gestating for awhile?

LM: It was my wife's idea really. One of the chapters in the book "Paper Airplanes", had earlier been published in an anthology by Dark Horse Comics [Happy Endings, 2002]. My wife kept coming back to that story and telling me that it was the best thing I'd done, and that I should turn all of my poems into comics. And while they didn't all make the transition, I did take the ones that conveyed a consistent (sort of) narrative and included those in Missouri Boy. I certainly didn't sit down one day and say, "Hey, I should write a memoir." It was the farthest thing from my mind, as I'd never done anything autobiographical in comic form before "Paper Airplanes". I'd written many personal poems, and read them to friends and at poetry gatherings at my house, but not comics. I'm really a very private person, and I still sometimes have a hard time believing that I'm going to lay these very personal pieces out there for everyone to read.

PWCW: How did First Second get involved with this project?

LM: Mark Siegel, my editor, had seen some of my work, and my previous graphic novel Bright Elegy was getting some attention at the time because I'd been awarded a Xeric Grant [an independent publishing award] for it. Mark contacted me and told me he and [First Second publisher] Simon Boughton were putting together a new imprint. I thought it was very ambitious and exciting, and when I had enough of the book together to present to Mark, I jumped at the chance to be a part of it. The whole idea of bringing together creators from all over the world, like Joann Sfar, with creators from America under one umbrella imprint is, I think, unique.

PWCW: Given the recent increase in attention paid to graphic novels and growing numbers of interested publishers, do you think that has made it easier for books of a more personal nature to get published?

LM: Certainly. Missouri Boy is proof of it. Quirky, episodic and, as you said, cryptic. In a market where only the same-old-thing was getting published, I don't know that anyone would have taken the chance on Missouri Boy that Mark and Simon did.

PWCW: Although there's a generous amount of darkness in the story here--your hospital job, your older brother going to jail--this seems to be the chronicle of what was, for the most part, a happy childhood. Would you agree?

LM: I think it was a fairly normal childhood, with the good and bad that come with growing up, no matter where it is. Nothing absolutely horrid happened to me. My wife says that I'm a basically unhappy and unsatisfied person that can find the dark and melancholy side of any situation. Maybe that's true, too.