Rich Barrett is a graphic designer and lifelong comic enthusiast who is working on his first graphic novel—Nathan Sorry. Rich studied illustration at Syracuse University and worked in advertising and web design in New York City for 10 years before moving down to Charlotte, NC where he now lives with his wife, two daughters, and two dogs. Nathan Sorry is free to the public. Just go to NathanSorry.com and read the graphic novel to date. Rich is adding a new page each week. What an ingenious way to keep you in suspense. The use of 9/11 as a life-changing event is something I think our readers will find intriguing. In this, part 1 of a two-part interview, Rich discusses bringing Nathan Sorry to fruition.

The Interview Part 1

Chuck: I think the comic book world is a world unto itself. With that in mind I would like to ask you some questions that define who you are and what you do for the benefit of our readers who are not familiar with this world.

Rich: Okay.

Chuck: Are you a graphic artist who’s writing a graphic novel on the side, or are you just working a job and writing a graphic novel on the side until the world recognizes your genius and you can do it full time?

Rich: Wow. That’s the first question? It’s just something I always wanted to do. I’ve never decided that I want to make a career out of it. I make a good living out of being a graphic designer, and I enjoy that. I’ve always wanted to tell a story. I’ve been itching to tell a story. I’ve always wanted to draw a story. I always wanted to be an illustrator back in the day. So after years of thinking about it, I decided to tell a story that was working its way through my mind—even if I only told it on the side. So for a while I began working on Nathan Sorry without anyone knowing about it. It’s only in the past year that I’ve been showing it. Since I’ve gotten some really good feedback, I’ve decided to promote it with the idea of eventually publishing it one way or the other—either publishing it myself or being lucky enough to find someone who wants to publish it for me. So the end result is to have published a book. From there…well, I wouldn’t look beyond that. I do have thoughts for another story, but I guess in my mind I don’t really expect it to take over my other career.

Chuck: Okay. How long does your love of the comic book go back? What was it that drew you to it and kept you there?

Rich: Yeah. I won’t say I learned how to read via comics, but I’ve been reading comics from that far back. I’ve always been interested in them, I guess, because comics can be seen as a marriage between writing and art. Those two things have always interested me. Also, I think that a lot of people that are into comics have that itch to do it themselves. I don’t know what it is about comics. They sort of have that do-it-yourself kind of sensibility to them. Although comics may have a small fan base, a big percentage of that base wants to get into it themselves. All the years I’ve been reading comics I’ve always wanted to take a stab at it. It wasn’t until I found the right storyline that I got off my butt and started doing it.

Chuck: What is the difference between a comic and a graphic novel?

Rich: It’s mostly semantic. I guess it’s how you really look at it. In a general sense, a graphic novel is longer than a comic book. Comic books you think of as 20 page pamphlets that you used to buy at news stands and now you buy at comic book stores. Graphic novels started to come about in the ’80s, and they were of longer but varying lengths—usually around 100 pages or so. Since they had novel-type length, someone started calling them graphic novels. The way the comic industry works now they first publish comic books and then package them together to publish hard and soft bound books. They call those graphic novels as well. The term graphic novel has attained a little more credibility or prestige over the comic book. People kind of think of comic books as stuff that’s for kids whereas graphic novels are a little more sophisticated. They’re a little more geared towards adults. But at their heart they’re really the same thing.

Chuck: Is a graphic novel ever drawn in color?

Rich: Oh yeah. Definitely. There’s color and there are also black and white ones. Generally black and white is cheaper to print. A lot of small or independent publishers will work on black and white books. It’s easier to get it out there. Myself, I lie somewhere in between that, actually. I’m publishing initially on the web, and I’ve been using a kind of one-color tone, but I also recently printed a sort of first-issue or first part of this story—the first 20 pages or so. I printed that in black and white because it was a lot cheaper to do than printing it in even that one-color that I’m using.

Chuck: When I was reading Nathan Sorry I was wondering if the choice of the color tone had something to do with the mood you were trying to create for the story? It’s kind of, well—it may be a thriller. I’m not sure what’s going to happen next. Certainly dark. So did that go into your decision or was it just basically economics?

Rich: Yeah, it’s definitely the right color choice to achieve the mood I’m going for. I’m trying to do a story that somewhat has the trappings of a noirish thriller. But it’s also the kind of thing where I am trying to achieve that somber, moody and paranoid feeling. So the kind of blueish-green color I use is perfect for that. Actually, initially I was using a second color. My story has a lot of flashbacks in it so I was originally using another color as a device to indicate that you were in a flashback. I think the first flashback I really did was a kind of one-panel shot, maybe on page 3 or something where he can flashback to the night before where he passed out in his hotel room. I used a kind of yellowish-gold color to indicate that it was a flashback. As I kind of went along, I decided that I was going to have a lot of flashbacks that would be a lot longer than one panel and that gold color just didn’t feel right to me. So I went back and changed it even though it was already up on line. Now it’s all one color.

Chuck: Before I ask you any more questions, it would probably be easier on my readers if I let you give a short synopsis of the 38 pages you already have up on-line. How would you describe your story?

Rich: Okay. So it’s a graphic novel that I’m publishing on line one page at a time. It comes out roughly once a week— a new page per week. It’s about a guy named Nathan Sorry who was an investment analyst who was supposed to have been in the World Trade Center on 9/11. He was away on a business trip and missed his flight back. So everybody that knows him thinks he was in the World Trade Center that morning. But he was actually in Phoenix, Arizona. So he kind of takes this opportunity from a certain sequence of events that leads to him having mistakenly picked up a laptop bag that leads to giving him a new identity and about 20 million dollars. So he goes on the run and disappears. The story picks up a couple of months later in a small town in North Carolina. He’s looking to make his big escape and try to leave the country. He sort of doesn’t know what he’s doing and he’s kind of spinning his wheels a little bit.

The more he spins his wheels (indecision) the more he kind of gets stuck where he is. He gets wrapped up in the lives of a couple of local residents. So it’s a bit of a thriller and it’s a bit of a story about people who try to escape things. Life and how they don’t always know what they’re escaping from or to.

Chuck: It has a kind of noir feel from the 40′s, like the old detective noir stories.

Rich: Yeah. I love crime stories. I wanted to do that type of story and keep it as suspenseful as possible. I want to do some kind of story that is kind of grounded in the feeling that you get from both noir and paranoid films. I want to play in that area.

Chuck: One of the things I always wonder about writers, so I guess I wonder about it with comic book writers as well, is this: Do you have your story in your mind complete from beginning to end when you start, or is it something that is evolving as you go?

Rich: This is the first thing I’ve ever written. Or I should say the first real thing I’ve ever written. When I started I was taking great pains to kind of write the whole story out, outline it, and get the plot written down on paper. I wanted to work out as many details as I could. I was doing that for a long time before I ever actually started drawing the first page. The short answer is that I know the entire story although there are certain details later on that I’m unsure about. But I found I was taking too long to really get into it. You know, you can probably do too much planning in the beginning. It began to slow down my enthusiasm for the whole thing. So once I started actually getting to it and drawing each page, I found that just naturally things were kind of changing as I went along anyway. Although I do have the book plotted and I know just about every significant detail, I only write a few pages ahead of what I’m doing now. It kind of keeps it a little more interesting for me. I’ve found that if I write too far ahead, as I’m going along I wind up kind of rewriting the dialog quite a bit as I go. It sort of streamlines it a bit for me.

Chuck: Are the pictures, or the drawings I should say, driving the story or is the story dictating what is drawn?

Rich: Hmmm…It should be an equal marriage. And whether I’m successful at that or not, I’m not sure. I think I’m getting better at this as I go along. I will say that I need to go back and redraw the first 15 pages or so. In the beginning I was still learning how to tell a story like this. I think in some cases I made choices that were not great. There are certain drawing mistakes that I made. The story telling, that is the marriage of the pictures and words, were not as good as they could be initially. It’s something that I’ve learned is a real challenge. It’s a lot about pacing and guiding the reader along. The words and the pictures have to do that together. It’s tricky kind of thinking of both things at once.

Chuck: Do you ever get a vision of something you’d really like to draw and take a detour with your plot to get to it?

Rich: No. I do know that there are a lot of comic book artists that do that. More so, the kind of comic book artists that are working for the big companies. Working as a writer writing a script for a 22 page comic and they have a certain amount of time to turn that around. So they’ll kind of maybe redo the script to get to certain pages they want to draw. So the way I’m publishing things for Nathan Sorry, I do things in a certain order and stick to it one page at a time.

Chuck: I’ve read through the 38 pages twice now. I find it to be an incredibly good read and a story that keeps your attention. It leaves the reader eager to know what comes next. I did have a few things that I was wondering about. Certain characters or situations appear, and I wonder if they’re going to be explained. I’ll give you an example: Nathan has all the money and he’s got the laptop, and he’s thinking about getting out of the country. Then he goes and rents a house and says ‘well, I’ll get out of the country in two weeks.’ I’m wondering if him going and renting that house and meeting the girl he met down there, is part of a plot that’s going to come back later. Because I don’t understand what’s going to be different in two weeks for Nathan. After 911, how’s it going to be safer two weeks from now? Also, another one I found interesting, is the one you just drew. The girl held him at the bar because he was interested in the girl and the FBI agent arrives. I’m wondering: Is that something that’s going to go on or is the girl just a ploy to keep him in the bar until the FBI agent got there?

Rich:Yeah, you know it’s interesting, I think, for a reader to read a story this way. A lot of times when you pick up a book or movie, you’ve probably read a synopsis or seen a movie trailer so that you kind of have a pretty good idea of how the story is going to work out. But with a story that’s unveiled one page a week, it doesn’t let the reader know where it’s going. I will say that the waitress is a major character in the story, as is the couple he rents the house from.

Chuck: Okay!

Rich: Yeah, yeah. They are, and the wife especially is going to be big. Brenda and the waitress, Casey, are pivotal to the story. The scene that’s taking place right now is where he has met his waitress. The waitress in the bar is important, but basically this is her scene.

Chuck: I guess this might be a question that you don’t want to answer. So don’t if you don’t. Is Nathan Sorry the beginning of a series of graphic novels?

Rich: It isn’t. No. It is one story. One thing I’m not sure about is how long it’s going to end up being. Somewhere in the 200-250 page range.

Chuck: Wow!

Rich: We still have a long ways to go. We’re still kind of like in the first act of the story. It will be one story and that will be it. It won’t be continued from there.

Chuck: How common in the world of on-line publishing is it for someone to do it the way you’re doing it? You know, coming out with a page every week or ten days. If you’re a day or two late do you start hearing from people?

Rich: There are a lot of web comic creators out there—people that do kind of gag strips, you know, like newspaper strips. A lot of them actually do it every day. Some, a couple of times a week. For those guys deadlines are very important. Especially if they’re doing it every day. People are going to the site every day for a laugh. For me, I would love to guarantee that I could get a page out every week and have it there on a particular day. It certainly wouldn’t hurt our readership doing that. It’s just not always possible for me. It’s built on a platform that’s basically a blog. So I can get comments on any page. I often get comments from people who write, “Hurry up and get the next page out.” I like to try, whenever possible, to leave a page on a cliffhanger. It does drive some people crazy when I’m late.

Chuck: Speaking from just a drawing standpoint, when you look back at the 38 pages that you’ve done so far, what pages are you the most proud of? And also, what are you least satisfied with?

Rich: Well, I get better as I go along. I’m always happier with the most recent page that I’ve done. And I hate the first 10 or

Chuck: (Laughing)

Rich: …15 pages I’ve done. Take the first eight pages. I mean, I drew those a few years ago actually (laughs). I was initially working on it very slowly. I’ve learned a lot since then. I really think I’ve improved quite a bit, at least from a technical standpoint. So, definitely the later pages are better. That’s why I’ve set the web site up the way I have. When you go to NathanSorry.com it doesn’t take you to the first page automatically. You’ve got the option to go to the first page but it can also take you to the last page. So the reader can see what’s going on at the most recent page and go back if he wants to. This way the new reader will see better pages and this will maybe make it more enticing.

End of Part 1

In the April CS2 Rich will discuss the graphic artists he most admires and tell us why. He’ll also tell us about the techniques he employs to make Nathan Sorry drawings. You need to go to NathanSorry.com and catch up on the story. Once hooked, I’m sure you’ll be back for the second part of the Rich Barrett interview in the April CS2.