My four favorite parts of Faith Erin Hicks' new Inbetweens

Faith Erin Hicks' latest graphic novel Inbetweens stars twin sisters Ash and Sloane, both of whom are gifted young artists who have shared the dream of working in animation since they were little girls. As the book opens, they are about to attend a summer-long animation program for high school students at the prestigious Ormidale College, and, better yet, one of their heroes will actually be one of their instructors!

They make new friends, like Cameron, a boy who excels at drawing backgrounds and animals but is quickly bored by drawing the same things over and over, and Nisha, perhaps the most naturally talented person at camp, although at least one of her instructors is quite dismissive of her (Whether this is because she is one of the few young women in the program, or because of her darker skin, Hicks never makes it explicit).

The twins also meet a variety of mentors, one quite good and one quite bad, they are exposed to new kinds of animation beyond the Disney and Disney-like feature films they know inside and out (particular anime, and particular Studio Ghibli anime) and they discover different ways of learning and thinking about art.

They also, for the very first time, find reason to question their dream, as they learn exactly how difficult the work (and the people) can be, and both of them start to wonder if animation is really for them or not, although for very different reasons.

Hicks sets the book in the summer of 1999 (according to a calendar we see in the girls' bedroom), which I imagine is because she herself is, as her bio on the back cover says, a "former animation industry professional", and is basing the graphic novel at least in part on her own experiences. That's natural, of course, and I have to imagine that the field of, say, the 2020s is quite different than that of the late '90s, as the increasingly popular use of computers has so completely changed the way so much animation looks these days and, I assume, how it is made (I can't say for certain, but computers must make things like drawing the "inbetweens" far, far easier, right...?). 

While it does feel weird to think of a graphic novel set during my young adulthood as a "period piece", I was rather glad of it, as it meant I got all the references! (Well, being an American, I wasn't familiar with The Sweater, a 1980 National Film Board of Canada short that is one of the five films Hicks recommends at the end of the book, but I recognized all the others.). 

Plenty of real films are discussed or play a part in the story, including Disney's The Great Mouse Detective and One Hundred and One Dalmatians and Hayao Miyazaki's Castle in the Sky and Kiki's Delivery Service (Both of which would later become, retroactively, Disney movies, I guess). 

Additionally, the backgrounds are full of posters for recognizable movies, many with slightly off titles. For example, there's a poster in the halls at Orindale for a movie called All Good Boys, the sketchy image of which is colored in a way to suggest All Dogs Go to Heaven.

One fictional movie plays a pretty big part in the book, and that's a film directed by Ash's animation hero Douglas Frye entitled Monstrous, which looks and sounds a bit like The Iron Giant (Confession: I've never actually watched The Iron Giant).  As to why Hicks needed to make up a movie to attribute to Frye, well, a) he's fictional and b) he turns out to maybe not be the best of mentors and he is gradually painted in a rather poor light.

I picked the book up both because I am a longtime fan of Hicks' work and because I was planning on reviewing it for Good Comics for Kids, but a colleague of mine beat me to it. So instead of writing a formal review for it, I wanted to call attention to some of what I think were the most fun and interesting elements of the book here. 

1.) It's fun to see Hicks' version of various anime characters. Early in the story, we sit in on the program's film class, taught by Lisa Sato, the only female instructor there (I'm not sure how the animation industry looks today, but Hicks' book certainly seems to suggest that it was quite male dominated in the '90s). Her job is to expose the kids to animation made outside of America, and this of course leads to anime...and thus seeing Hick's drawings of famous characters you probably know from animation.

In this panel, for example, we see Hicks' "covers" of Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy, Nadia from Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water and Rei Ayanami and the Evangelion Unit 01 from Neon Genesis Evangelion. Nadia is an interesting choice, I thought, because I assumed it wasn't a terribly well-known anime (I had only watched it in the early '00s after I learned that it was created by Hideaki Anno and Gainax, the creators of Evangelion), but then, it's quite illustrative of the teacher's point, that two anime shows from the same folks could be so different. 

In the very next panel, the teacher slides a VHS tape labeled "Laputa" into the VCR to show the kids Castle in the Sky (Laputa is the name of the castle and is sometimes part of the title of the film). Later, Nisha shares Kiki's Delivery Service with Sloane and Cameron (in addition to inspiring them, its plot rather directly informs the way the kids see their own conflicts). At another point, Nisha mentions Princess Mononoke. In each case, Hicks draws characters and scenes from those films into the action of her story, as the kids enter into the worlds of the films. In the case of Princess Mononoke, it's just a panel, but the sequences are a bit bigger and longer for the other two films. 

Hicks mostly has the Miyazaki characters looking away from the readers, though, so while readers will clearly recognize Kiki during passages of the book, they won't really see Hicks' version of her as clearly as they saw Hicks' Astro Boy, Nadia and Rei.

2.) Hicks does a great job of illustrating the act of animation in the medium of comics. Animation usually means doing a lot of drawing and drawing the same things over and over. So how does a cartoonist manage to dramatize the action of a character sitting at a table and drawing, say, a ball, over and over and over again? And how do they do it in a way that is compelling to read?

I liked Hicks' solution to the problem of "drawing about drawing" quite a bit. In fact, I think this is the most interesting aspect of the book, from a storytelling perspective, and I'm only addressing it second as I was writing about the parts that struck me in the order in which they appear in the comic.

Now, in the very first scene of the book, Hicks draws Ash drawing, a two-and-a-half page sequence that starts with a splash of her hands, one of which holds a pencil, over a notebook; the image is overlapped on the splash by a similar image, in which the sketch of a tree has now appeared. One inset panel shows a close-up of Ash's eyes and another of her tongue sticking out.

On the next page and a half, we see multiple images of her hands and the pencil as she's obviously moving them around quickly, and hand-drawn sound effects like "SHF" and "SKRATCH" appear around her.

So that's Hicks drawing drawing. But drawing animation? 

Well, on this two-page splash above we see Ash and Sloane literally drawing in the foreground, while, in the background, Hicks adopts a more symbolic approach, showing us what they are drawing, while multiple images of of the girls hover around the action they are drawing. 

What they are working on here is their first animation assignment, the bouncing ball. They have been tasked with drawing a bouncing ball, which necessitates drawing that ball over and over again on different sheets of paper, the ball seemingly moving a little on each page, so that, when the pages are flipped, the ball appears to move on its own. (On the end pages at the beginning of the book, Hicks draws another version of Ash and Sloane standing next to sketches of bouncing balls, too).

On the next pages, we see Cameron and Nisha similarly animating their bouncing balls, their full-color figures standing alongside the full-size sketches of the balls with their pencils pointed at them (Interestingly, Cameron gets bored, and, after a deep sigh, he ends up giving the balls faces and accessories and draws a background for the "characters".)

Later still, the kids all get the more advanced task of animating a flour sack as if it is alive, and Hicks uses this same technique to show the characters in the act of animation. Ash's bag seems to move clumsily in one panel, and then she sits down next to it to talk to it. Meanwhile, we see Nisha dancing alongside her flour sack, using her pencil a little like a conductor uses a baton to move it along. And, again, Cameron is bored; in the few panels featuring him during this sequence, we see a barely sketched flour sack laying on its side, while he's busy drawing an extremely detailed house and trees in the background.

3.) I just thought this was funny. At one point, the kids take a field trip to an agricultural fair, where they are to do life drawing of real animals (I can't remember which making-of-documentary I saw this on, probably one for the Lion King or Jungle Book or something with wild animals, but I remember seeing a scene in which Disney animators are shown sitting around with sketchbooks at the zoo to study how the animals look and move in real life). 

First, I just love Sloane's response to Ash, "We both know horses are impossible to draw." Not just hard or difficult—impossible! This is, of course, all the funnier because they are characters in a drawn comic book, and they are standing right there next to a horse, a horse that Hicks has obviously drawn, and thus they can't be all that impossible to draw (It's a good horse, too! Although, I guess Hicks got lots of practice while working on 2022's Ride On).

(Speaking of drawing horses, when I was still in grade-school, I used to borrow those how-to-draw books from the library, those guides that broke drawing whatever subject was into a few simple shapes to build upon, and the one I remember the best was the one on horses, and how you would start with two big circles and later connect them, forming the horses' body. I remember quite clearly showing my work to my grandfather who was visiting us that evening, and him saying, "Hey Mugget," his name for my grandmother Margaret, "Look at this horse! It's a little husky, isn't it?" I'm not sure if I remember that because he was making fun of my art, or because it was the first time I heard the word "husky", but it embedded itself in my memory. I think the last such book I ever read was one I had bought from Books Galore in Erie, Pennsylvania, a big, 1998 paperback entitled How To Draw DC Comics Super Heroes illustrated by John Delaney and Ron Boyd that I purchased because I wanted to be able to draw in that Bruce Timm-inspired animated style of the time. It did not, in fact, teach me to draw like Bruce Timm...or John Delaney...or Ron Boyd, but it's fun to look at some deeper-cut DC heroes drawn in that style, as this was well before the Justice League cartoon. I tried to post a thread of images from it on Bluesky the other day, but I don't think they threaded quite right.). 

The talk of the difficulty of drawing horses also reminded me of Kelley Jones' various scary horses, seen in his 2000 Vertigo adaptation of Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow and the 2001-2002 series The Crusades with Steven T. Seagle (I wonder, was that series a pitch for a dark, gritty Vertigo take on The Shining Knight, or am I just making that up?). When I had to draw scary horses for one of my own terrible minicomics, I looked to Jones' horses for inspiration, rather than real horses. 

Finally, the exchange also reminded me of one of the funnier bits of Brian Michael Bendis' memoir Fortune & Glory: The Musical, in which Bendis shares an anecdote regarding the legendary Gil Kane's reaction to Frank Miller's then hot comic Ronin (Spoiler: It involves the drawing of horses).

The scene continues, though, as we learn Cameron also likes drawing cars. I can't even remember the last time I attempted to draw a car for any reason...

4.) Guess the anime. When Nisha wants to share her favorite movie with her new friends, she takes them to a video store to show them the "Japanese Animation" section, where she will select Kiki's Delivery Service (Poor kids today, never knowing the pleasure of renting a movie from a video store...)

I always enjoy seeing fake movies in comic (the posters on the outside windows of the store are for Monster, Kiss Me Stupid, Alien Hunter and the apparently Child's Play-esque Killer Doll 5). This bottom panel shows us the covers of a bunch of anime, little rectangles upon which Hicks has room for a tiny picture, a splash of color and a word or two or three worth of title.

Still, that's enough that you can recognize Neon Genesis Evangelion ("Neon Angel"), Hamtaro ("I Am Hammy"), Trigun ("Twogun"), Sailor Moon ("Moon"), Cowboy Bebop ("Cowboy Jazz") and Dragon Ball Z ("Z"). 

The rest, I'm not sure about, but I enjoyed puzzling over them as I went back to linger on this panel. I think "Doll" may be referring to Chobits, but that's just a guess. Similarly, "War of the Elves" on the bottom shelf may be Record of Lodoss War...? Or maybe Those That Hunt Elves...? I'm just guessing; I've never seen the former and saw only a few episodes of the latter.

Similarly, I got nothing "Road Rage", "Knight" or "Sweet", but I would be curious to hear your guesses (Given the red hair on the cover of "Knight", I wonder, could it be Magic Knight Rayearth...?)  

And in the lower righthand corner, the image on that one DVD suggests Akira, but I'll be damned if I can read that little red writing over black with my now old man eyes...

Meanwhile...

Today at Robot 6 I have a review of Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong, a YA original graphic novel by newcomer Prudence Shen and already-here-er Faith Erin Hicks. It's really good.

The above page is probably my favorite of the book, in which head cheerleader Holly's hatred for Nate is so powerful that he can feel it emanating out of her head and reaching over and touching him. I'm fairly certain the project began its life as a prose novel, and its scenes like the one above that make me curious about how exactly they would have been written, given how well they work in the purely visual narrative structure that comics allow.

This is maybe my second favorite page, featuring Charlie and Nate:

In other Caleb-writing-about-comics links, this week at Good Comics For Kids I reviewed the latest of Papercutz' Smurfs reprints, The Smurflings, and their first volume of a new series reprinting another of Peyo's comics, Benny Breakiron: The Red Taxis. They're both good; the latter a bit more interesting just because it's Peyo doing non-Smurf work, and it's fun to see his style applied to human and automobiles and modern buildings and so on.

Meanwhile...

Hello, and welcome to This Week In Caleb In Writing About Comics On The Internet That Aren't EDILW!

First up, I reviewed Philippe Coudray's Benjamin Bear in Bright Ideas on Good Comics For Kids (There's a badly-scanned images of one of my, like, ten favorite strips in the book at the top of this post).

Also at GC4K this week, I participated in the roundtable discussion of Faith Erin Hicks' Friends With Boys.

Those are two really great comic books. I'd recommend Benjamin Bear (both this volume and the previous one), to anyone on the planet, whether they can read words yet or not. I'd recommend Friends With Boys to just about anyone—it's a really winning coming-of-age story about a girl with some big problems, featuring some really great art from a really great (and getting greater!) comics artist.

Finally, I wrote a bit about Saga #12, a comic you might have already read something about this week, at Robot 6 today.

Meanwhile, at Robot 6...

Today at Robot 6 I have a piece on two different "kids" graphic novels that are well worth your time, David Nytra's incredibly drawn The Secret of the Stone Frog and J. Torres and Faith Erin Hicks' Bigfoot Boy, from which the above panel was taken.

Review: Zombies Calling

I was a little uncomfortable while reading Faith Erin Hicks' Zombies Calling, and was made so by an argument going on in my skull. I was of two minds about it; one of those minds was really into it, and one of those minds was pretty cynical about it.

(The cynical mind, I should probably note, had nothing to do with the subject matter; it’s hardly the fault of the 2007 book or its talented creator, who began working on it at least as far back as 2004, that I didn’t read it until 2012, and thus have experienced a dozen or two more zombie narratives than I would have if I read it upon its original release).

It’s the story of a trio of Canadian college students, each with a somewhat pretentious and unlikely-sounding name (to my cynical mind, anyway). There’s the heroine Joss (short for Jocelyn), who is obsessed with Britain and zombie movies; there’s Robyn, a fairly stock slacker dude; and then there’s Sonnet, who is naturally into poetry.

One day, zombies attack their school, and only Joss and Robyn’s intricate and extensive knowledge of zombie movies, including the oft-referenced “rules” of the genre, can get them out of this mess alive.

And that’s where I started feeling a bit uncomfortable, even more so than the self-consciously cool aspects of the characters made me. The graphic novel is a sort of meta-narrative, but it’s a meta-narrative specifically dealing with the conventions of film, not comics, and the results are therefore somewhat muddled, even confusing.

If a character in a zombie movie suddenly realizes “Oh holy cow, I am in a zombie movie!”, then I suppose that would be pretty “meta,” and a clever way to play with the typical zombie movie conventions (if the Scream movies got there a decade or so previous), but when a character in a comic book declares that she’s in a zombie movie…? Well, that just seems wrong: No, you’re not in a zombie movie. You’re in a zombie comic. I know because I am reading you in it as you speak.

It’s entirely possible this bothered me more than it would you, but the comic is so conscious of the conventions it’s riffing on, and it references them so often, that it seems to be the organizing principle, and the fact that it’s about an entirely different media doesn’t quite work…at the very least, it doesn’t work quite as well as it would if Zombies Calling was a film that Faith Erin Hicks wrote and directed, rather than an original graphic novel she wrote and drew.

(That said, however, it’s not quite structured like a film and, were what’s in these panels and pages put on a screen unchanged, it would be a very, very short film…like, 75 minutes long).

Beyond that somewhat fundamental difficulty, however, it’s actually a pretty fun comic.

(Above: So I guess you can have fast zombies, or you can have slow zombies, but you can't have fast and slow zombies. Not without traffic issues, anyway)

Hicks’ zombies are of the Return of The Living Dead variety, capable of saying “Braaains!”, although they’re maybe even a bit smarter that that movie's zombies, as they are also able to communicate with one another and follow the directions of their master, who is the only other character introduced before the zombies attack, so it’s not exactly a big surprise when he reveals his hand in their creation and his grand plan:

Universities are overrun by zombies, taught by zombies, financed by zombies. And if that is figuratively what they are, then that is literally what they shall become…pretty ingenious way to make a point, eh children?

That’s not the only zombies-as-flexible-horror-metaphor instance in Hicks’ story, though; Joss is terrified by her student loans, and, in fact, she’s so scared that she suspects her fear of that is what helps her overcome her fear of actual zombies—compared to a lifetime of crippling debt, what’s so scary about a horde of rotting cannibals trying to eat you alive, you know?

It was a kick seeing Hicks’ art from this period in her career. I like it quite a bit, as it was then and as it is now, although it’s a noticeably less refined and more fussy here than it has since become (There’s a making of section of the book showing earlier sketches of various characters, demonstrating how much Hicks art had changed before she even drew the first panel of Zombies Calling)

(Above: From the sketchbook section at the back. Hicks' art style has changed a lot, as you can see from the above examples and several others included)

If you're unfamiliar with her work for some reason (you should rectify that), her characters have big heads and big eyes, and, design-wise, look like a compromise between manga and turn-of-the-millennium Cartoon Network original series characters. The black and white artwork and the tankōbon-esque digest SLG published the book in probably further suggests manga, but it’s a format that perfectly suits Hicks’ designs and staging. The book is packed to the point of hyper-compression with action.

I’m of two minds about the book, but they both kind of liked it. One mind a lot more than the other mind, though.