In Real Life: Cory Doctorow

Award-winning author, cyber-activist, and Boing Boing co-editor Cory Doctorow is coming to the Texas Teen Book Festival at St. Edward’s University this Saturday.

Of course he is, because the TTBF knows what’s up, and when you’ve written such compelling works as Little Brother and Homeland and others, the TTBF is going to make sure your congenial and charmingly tech-savvy self is going to be there.

We spoke with Doctorow recently, about his newest book – the graphic novel In Real Life, co-created with artist Jen Wang, just out from First Second Books – and this is some of what was said:

Austin Chronicle: Cory, your short story “Anda’s Game” that In Real Life is based on, it’s been around for a while, and it’s been shared widely across the Internet and in print collections. How did it become this graphic novel?

Cory Doctorow: Well, First Second is a company I’ve admired for a long time, and they’re part of MacMillan Publishing, so their offices are just downstairs from Tor’s – my novel publishers. And I’m a big fan of graphic novels, so I’d often head down there after I dropped in on my publisher, to see what they’re up to, get a stack of comics – to review them, usually – and I really admire the stuff they’re doing. And every now and again, they’d say, “Well, when are you gonna write us something?” And I’d actually not done much comics work, but I was intrigued by the idea.

AC: Were you into comics as a kid?

CD: I came to comics late in life. In Toronto, where I grew up, there was a dying comics store called The Silver Snail, and across the street from it was a giant science-fiction bookstore called Bakka. And when my friends and Iwould go down to that neighborhood, I’d go into the bookstore and they’d go to the comics store. And so, as a kind of late convert, I found myself in a delightful place of being able to find unlimited piles of amazing stuff that I hadn’t already read. Which was wonderful – and First Second was part of that awakening for me. So, when they talked about my writing something, it excited me. So I wrote a treatment based on my story “Anda’s Game,” and it was an episodic comic inspired somewhat by the structure of Warren Ellis’s Transmetropolitan, a series of three-book arcs that told a giant story that all fit together, and I thought I could do this with the ideas from “Anda’s Game.” The ideas of gold farmers and trade-union organizers and Pinkertons all fighting down in virtual worlds – because there’s lots of places in the world where people are exploited for their labor, and there’s also lots of variety in virtual game worlds. And I thought, if I did a different one every time – a different game world and a different country – the combinations are kind of endless. And so you could tell all these stories so it builds a crescendo about the overall mission of the trade-union – the Webblies, as I call them, the Industrial Workers of the World Wide Web – and they could go off and have these adventures.

AC: Sounds like a big project.

CD: It was! And I took that to First Second, and they said, “Well, that’s very ambitious, but it’s not really what we had in mind. However, we read the short story that you said all of this is based on, and that’s really cool, so what about doing that instead?” So I ended up writing a prose novel based on my big treatment – it’s called For The Win – and we went to work on doing a graphic novel based directly on “Anda’s Game.”

AC: And what was it like working with Jen Wang on the book?

CD: It was really wonderful. I’ve done a little bit of adaptation work before, and the cool thing about adaptation is that, if you’re working with someone who’s really good, you’re being paid just about the biggest compliment there is. Someone’s sitting down and using their own prodigious talents and imagination, finding things latent in your own work – that you didn’t even know were there – and creating the kind of curious situation in which you can be deeply impressed and, ah, appreciative of something that has your name on it without being at all egotistical. I can sit there and look at what Jen did – because she did all the heavy lifting in the adaptation – and I can look at that and say, “Oh my goodness, that is just brilliant!” Without thinking I have no business talking about how brilliant something that has my name on it is. Because, in this case, I know I didn’t make it – it’s all Jen’s doing.

AC: Man, that sounds like some preacher saying “It weren’t me, I give all my thanks to Gawwwd.”

CD: [laughs] Yeah, except that I’m pretty certain that Jen exists.

AC: [laughs] Were you familiar with her work before you started working on In Real Life?

CD: I’d actually read her debut graphic novel, Koko Be Good. But when we started working on the “Anda’s Game” adaptation, I didn’t realize that it was her. What happened was, First Second sent me sketches and roughs from a whole bunch of different people who they’d worked with before. And I really liked Jen’s – they stood out head and shoulders above the rest. And her name rang a bell, but it didn’t occur to me at the time. It was really late in the process, when we got to galleys, and I looked at her capsule bio on the back, and I realized that she’d written this amazing graphic novel, Koko Be Good, that I’d absolutely loved.

AC: Oh yeah, Koko Be Good is one hell of a fine thing.

CD: Koko Be Good is the best rebuttal – to that whole manic pixie dream girl thing – that you’re ever likely to read. It’s a really great story about what it means to have meaning in your life, just a terrific book that manages to be sprightly and have a light touch while telling a story that’s moving and deep. I can’t say enough good things about it.

AC: There’ve been other sequential-art adaptations of your short stories, too, right?

CD: Yes – including a previous version of “Anda’s Game,” in fact. IDW took six of my short stories and published them as six singles called Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now and collected them into a single bound volume – and it’s quite good. Especially, I wrote a novella called “After the Siege,” which is based on my grandmother’s memoir of being a child soldier during the Siege of Leningrad – it’s a story that means an awful lot to me – and IDW did a terrific job of adapting it to comics. They also did a great job with “Anda’s Game,” but it was a much more straight-ahead adaptation. It didn’t do what Jen did, which was to find a more modern, and U.S.-based set of circumstances to tell the story in, and to transpose the gold farmers from from Mexico to China.

AC: And of course the art itself – I mean, wow, the woman can draw! But, okay, say if you could have any other short story of yours adapted by another artist – any comics artist working today, which story would it be? And who would you choose?

CD: I guess, you know, the stories that are on my mind are the ones that I’ve recently finished. I’ve got two new novellas this season: One, in the Heiroglyph anthology that Neal Stephenson kicked off; and the other in Bruce Sterling’s issue of the MIT Tech Review’s annual science-fiction collection. And either of those – “Petard” or “The Man Who Sold the Moon” – I’d be delighted to see them adapted for comics. And Dave McKean did the cover for my novel Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town a few years ago, and no one has ever done a visual treatment of my work that was as impressive as what he did. So I’d certainly never turn up my nose a a Dave McKean adaptation. But I’m more interested in who would write it, because not only would I want it adapted by a great artist, I’d want it to be adapted by a great comics writer – someone who knows an awful lot about writing comics, knows much more than I do. I could see, for example, Molly Crabapple and Warren Ellis teaming up to do either one of those stories. I’d love to have both of them involved in my work, y’know, and they’d do an amazing job. I’m seriously jealous that John Scalzi just got a limited edition of his new novel with a Molly Crabapple cover.