Those are still things that I can find influences of in my work … and I guess I’d have to say, especially if we’re going back to early influences? The Little Mermaid. And I also really liked Revolutionary Girl Utena.

I haven’t read manga in a really long time, but I’d say that the first book I read in high school was Rurouni Kenshin. I started drawing comics in high school, and at the time I was reading a lot of manga and I grew up watching cartoons, obviously – so those are the two big influencers of my drawing style. Do you think that’s a fair assessment, and anyway what are your major artistic influences? And I knew that he’d written some Young Adult novels, but – I actually heard an interview with him, about his novel Little Brother, but I’d never read any of his fiction until “Anda’s Game.”ĪC: The Lambiek site mentions that your style is a cross between manga and Disney animation. JW: No, I was familiar with him as a blogger with Boing Boing, of course, and of his role as an activist. I’d write a draft and send it to Cory, and he’d give notes and suggestions … and so it changed to update the story, but also to make it fit the medium of comics, to make it a little more active.ĪC: Had you read other works by Cory before you started this project? But things needed to be updated, because Cory’d written it in maybe 1999 or 2000? And a lot of things had changed in video games and gold farming, so we just kept pushing it. So we went through a couple different drafts, and the first draft was very similar to the original story. And Cory was also a live author, so he was somebody that I would be able to ask questions of and bounce ideas off of. JW: This was my first time adapting somebody else’s writing – and that’s another reason I wanted to do it, because it’d be a new experience. And I read it, and I was like, “Oh yeah, I’ll totally do this book.”ĪC: How did you figure out how to break it down, to adapt it ~ because there’s quite a few differences between “Anda’s Game” and In Real Life, right? And they sent my Cory’s short story “Anda’s Game,” which is what In Real Life is based on. And I’d just finished a book and was kind of in between projects, so they asked if I’d be interested. Jen Wang: My publishers First Second approached me, because they were working with Cory and they were looking for an artist.

But there was no way we weren’t going to grab a brief interview with his collaborator on the project, too, a few minutes with the acclaimed artist of Koko Be Good and other books, Jen Wang:Īustin Chronicle: Jen, how’d you get involved in this project? Because the author Cory Doctorow is going to be in Austin for the Texas Teen Book Festival this Saturday, so of course we spoke with him about this new book In Real Life that was recently released from First Second Books.

In real life by jen wang