This interview was conducted over email by Fantagraphics' Eric Buckler. Thanks to Eric and Joe!
Cartoonist Joe Daly grew up in apartheid South Africa. His perspective on storytelling and illustration have a deeply infused characterization and a mythical slapstick. The comics reflect a bizarre and amazing facet of imagination that is at once familiar as it is far flung and not of this planet. His characters in Dungeon Quest are on a mission to find the Atlantean Resonator Guitar, and will go through everything from beating the shit out of some homophobic goons to returning a magic penis sheath to a large breasted demigod. The crew will be suited up with new armor, weapons, and will have loads of new mind altering opportunities in the all new Dungeon Quest Book 2. Daly is the creator of Scrublands and The Red Monkey Double Happiness Book.
ERIC BUCKLER: Would you talk about how you pace your storytelling?
JOE DALY: Comics can be a very efficient form for story telling, so it's very easy and natural for a comic narrative to progress very quickly. I think a cartoonist is usually trying to counteract that natural tendency by trying to slow things down. You're always moving away from the last plot point and towards the next one, and so I try to be aware of what's needed in order to heighten the moment of arriving at that plot point. It often requires adding more panels, slowing down the action, and letting the dialogue ramble to build tension as one is moving into "the big moment." Very seldom do I encounter a situation where I find I need to eliminate panels. That said, it becomes a fine line between building tension and padding, so the idea is to let the plot point dictate how much tension is required to precede it, and then add no more or no less panels than is required. As a reader you have to arrive at a plot point organically, in a way that you're a little unaware that you've even hit a plot point. I know as a reader I don't like to feel rushed or shunted along from plot point to plot point, as if one were on a conveyor belt. One of my main criticisms of my Red Monkey stories, is that they tend to be plot dominant, and the reader is moved from point to point too quickly. A story shouldn't be all about plot, the reader needs breathing space, unfocused space, where they can engage in the story in a non-rational kind of way. Of course, some readers favor structure and plot heavy stories, and some don't: they'll prefer the rambling, looser approach. I think each story should inform the pace that's required to tell the story, and since I've found myself doing these strange action adventure stories (with quite a lot of dialogue) I've found it's natural to keep "medium pace," somewhere between Chris Ware's work (extreme patience) and an in your face superhero action comics (extreme immediacy).
BUCKLER: Why black and white? Did you consider using color on this comic?
DALY: My first two books were already in color, and I wanted to try something different. I'd discovered while working on the Red Monkey stories, which were in color, that coloring the work took me almost as much time as writing and drawing the work, and so given that I'm currently unable to employ a colorist on my books I decided to eliminate this time consuming process altogether. I was also interested in shifting from a clear line art style to a high contrast black and white art style, simply to broaden my abilities as a drawer and inker, and that's the process I'm engaged in at the moment. I think black and white, whether it's in photography, or in film, or in comics can be very elegant and complete. When "completeness" can be achieved in black and white, it's all the more impressive and satisfying to me, because of the purity and simplicity of black and white. I think perhaps black and white also engages the reader's own imagination more than color, in that they are filling in the white spaces with their own projected colors. When one leaves things out, one creates suggestions. Also, working in black and white helps to keep the cost of the book down.
BUCKLER: Can you talk about lexicons you draw when creating dialogue in Dungeon Quest?
DALY: For Dungeon Quest I was trying to evoke the kind of language that me and my video gaming friends would use when playing video games when we were 10-14 year olds. It as a strange mixture of general profanity, South African school-boy slang, American slang we'd learned from TV and movies, technical jargon and the pseudo-poetic language of high fantasy/adventure which would be used in the actual game. Saved games could be titled things like "got to get splendid key from orange dude," "kief!," "totally fucked," "dawn light factory skyline," "given frayed rope to little whore," "in lonely place," "got to open fucking bay doors," stuff like that. It became a kind of esoteric lexicon. I don't apply this lexicon directly to the writing in Dungeon Quest. I'm drawing from it, allowing it to inform my dialogue. It's a flavor.
