How I Made My Debut Graphic Novel: Interview with Angela Hsieh

Angela Hsieh is a Taiwanese American illustrator and author whose life choices can mostly be explained by her love of goofy animals. She is the writer and illustrator of the graphic novel, Lu and Ren’s Guide to Geozoology, as well as the illustrator of the critically acclaimed nonfiction STEM book, Antarctica: The Melting Continent.

In this interview, I met with Angela to learn more about how her debut graphic novel came to life! We discuss the entirety of her graphic novel journey and the lessons she’s learned along the way. (Who would have thought a line-less illustration style would be so complicated!)

Huge thanks to Bailey Culver for editing the interview transcript!

Janna: So, Angela, could you introduce yourself?

Angela: Hello, I’m Angela Hsieh! I am the author and illustrator of Lu and Ren’s Guide to Geozology.

Lu and Ren’s Guide to Geozoolology is about a girl, Lu, who is setting off on an adventure across a land full of giant animals like mountainous guinea pigs and colossal axolotls. And she’s doing this in search of her missing grandmother. She and her friend Ren team up to follow her lost grandmother’s journal to try and find out where she’s disappeared to. 

Awesome! So, I wondered if there were elements of your own story, like your personal background, that are woven into the story at all? Can you tell me about where the idea for the book came from?

So, the answer to your question is yes. The idea came from a lot of different places. So,  one of the first places where it came from is about, oh gosh, it was probably eight years ago at this point. I drew a birthday illustration for a friend. She really likes guinea pigs. So, I drew her a guinea pig, but really big. So, I drew this giant, mountainous guinea pig that had a little figure climbing up its back. And that little figure was “Proto-Lu” essentially, but at that point, she didn’t have a name. And so that was one part of the inspiration.

At the same time, my family was going through some of my maternal grandfather’s journals and old things because he had passed away a couple of years before that and they were talking about how he was writing this or that in his journal about [me] or about his own life and there was just a point where I realized, wow… I can’t read any of this. 

I have like a first-grader understanding of written Chinese. I can speak it all right. I just felt really sad that I would not be able to go through these things myself and it would always be filtered through a family member. Which is fine and it works, but I just felt disconnected. Especially now that he’s no longer around, I wouldn’t be able to talk to him directly. This would kind of be the only way to hear his thoughts again. 

And so those two things happened at more or less the same time. Generally, the way my ideas come about is that I just let them sit back for years and sometimes they come together, like the giant guinea pig. There’s also a love of travel and nature that’s been in my life the whole time. And it melded together because I realized that using physical distance as a metaphor for emotional and cultural distance is something that could be very powerful. 

So it took a while, but eventually these things sort of connected in my head and I’m like, “Oh, I could make this all work together!” I could put my thoughts and feelings together along with my passions and turn it into a cohesive whole. 

So tell me in a little more detail how that process happened. Were you working on other projects at the same time and this was just one of many stories? Or was this one that you really knew you wanted to create?

I can’t really pinpoint an exact moment where I decided that this would happen. It’s kind of like “shower thoughts,” right? You aren’t really expecting it and then one day you’re like, “Whoa, that would be cool if I did that.”

When I graduated from art school, I thought I would be an editorial illustrator. So I was doing that. I had a gig at NPR, an internship that turned into a contract position as an illustrator, and that was great. It was exercising a different part of my brain. A lot of short turnarounds, a lot of nonfiction, and of course, a lot more news. 

Maybe it was just a case of my brain trying to find something else to do that was not the thing I was doing every single day. So I wish I could tell you how exactly this came about, because maybe then I could make it happen again on command.

I want to really hone in on this “idea generation to book pitch process.” So, you don’t remember exactly how the ideas came together, but they did start coalescing. And was your first step like, “okay, now I have this story in my head and I want to put together a book proposal and then find an agent,” or did you make a zine with the story? What was the thing that you started working on?

The thing that I actually started working on, after that initial giant mountain guinea pig illustration, was a series of illustrations of other giant animals. My initial thought was to make it a calendar: every month you have another giant animal. (And honestly, I still want to do that. I just got a little derailed. Not in a bad way.)

At the same time, I met a fellow NPR [art] intern, Deb Lee, and we obviously started talking illustration. They very kindly introduced me to their agent and when that happened, I was like, “Oh, I should write something. I should actually make this a story!”  

That was when I started considering making it a book. Some of the initial ideas were more of a picture book. But then I realized I just had so much to say and it would not fit. That then turned into a graphic novel pitch. So it took some time. This was quite a long process at the beginning…Oh, also in the middle…and the end. It’s a graphic novel. 

I had this idea in the back of my head from when I was very little that I would do a book one day, but I didn’t know if I was ready yet at that point. But then someone came along and gave me a boot in the butt and I was like, “All right, sure. Let’s do it.”

Yay for boots in the butt!  And now are you still doing editorial illustration?

Yeah, I still take on the odd job. I’ve had to turn a lot down to finish my book, but I still like to do it because short turnarounds are nice. You feel accomplished without having to wait three years.

Oh my gosh. Yeah.  Well, speaking of three years, let’s get into the nitty-gritty about how you produced your graphic novel because your artwork is really interesting. I have seen other comics artists who follow the kind of style where there isn’t any inking, but it’s still not common. How did you develop the story and art from start to finish?

I think that goes back to what I was saying about how it started off as a series of illustrations, then turned into a picture book, and then turned into a graphic novel pitch. But as you know, and as I’m sure most kidlit and comics creators know, you don’t have to have a finished script before you go on submission to editors and agents. I had a synopsis that I had written for the pitch that was very, very different from what ended up on the page.

During the querying process, I got a few rejections and a lot of them had the same feedback: “It’s too quiet.”

It was more of a meditation on nature is how I would describe it when it was at that stage, where there were very few words. It was mostly about a very small person in a big expansive landscape. There was that element of not being able to understand the written language of your grandparents, but it was definitely a lot more vague. You go out into nature, you’re not really looking for an answer, but then you come across it. It was a lot artsier, let’s say. That was the initial synopsis.

I was introduced to an agent through my friend. But I ended up finding a different agent and it was simply a style fit. I needed someone who was “meaner.” I need someone to tell me that I need to get things done and not be too nice about it because otherwise I won’t get the thing done. Not to say that my current agent is “mean”, she just is on my case a little more… a lot more. So, I went through the query process with this new synopsis and my current agent, Jen, acquired it based on that synopsis, but had a lot of feedback to make it more exciting and more of an adventure story. 

I wrote a new synopsis that had a little more plot and we went on submission with that. And then we got even more feedback about how it needed even more plot.

Once my editor Karen acquired it, she was like, “so maybe we need a little more human interaction in this.” One of the big changes was that Ren became a much bigger part of the story. That was one of those choices that I think made the story a lot stronger because you could see her as a foil to Lu and her story. It’s hard to think about this story without her at this point, but that’s how it started. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me until later with some nudges. 

Is there any element of your personal life, or say your family background, that is more like Lu or more like Ren or a mixture between them?

Oh, it’s more like Lu’s for sure. My parents are honestly remarkably chill. They are very supportive of my interests and my passions. When I initially went to school as a biology major, I was in pre-med. I wanted to be either a doctor or a veterinarian. At some point, I was just like, “No, I don’t want to do this anymore.” And they were very, very supportive of it. 

There’s a scene where Lu is leaving on an adventure and she’s really nervous about telling her parents. Her mom just kind of thinks about it and goes, “All right, be safe.” And I just thought that was just a fun way to poke fun at that one trope of the parents being like, “No, you’re not allowed to do anything.”

Lu was very shocked that her mom’s just like, “Yeah, all right. Just don’t get in trouble.”

Did you ever have any friends growing up like Ren who had parents who were really hard on them?

Yeah. So, that was based on quite a few people that I knew. Maybe not in such obvious ways. I only had so much space in the book. Some of the pieces of Ren’s backstory are a little more on the nose. I do think some people experience things like that in real life. But yeah, there were a lot of my friends who experienced a lot of pressure from their parents, and it felt unfair.

You handled it beautifully. You said you went through several rounds to develop your synopsis. Did you go straight to the script or or was there any thumbnailing involved?

I am one of those people who has to get the script down first. I know there are people who can go straight to thumbnails or they do both at the same time. I’m not one of those people. I draw too slowly to not be sure. I am very keen on wanting the storybeats to be all in the right place.

Things get moved around, of course. But still I had it all written and sent off to edit before I even started thinking about thumbnails. If something really stood out to me, I would probably do a little doodle on the side, but the majority was written first before it turned into thumbnails. 

I can’t really see myself working another way at this point in time, but there were a couple of disadvantages to doing it that way because of the page limit. I had 256 pages total. So that ended up being about 240 pages of story and then there was the front and back matter.

But because I wrote the script first, I way overshot that limit in that first round of thumbnails. I think I went to about 320 and then there was some back and forth with my editor. I was asking, “can I have more pages?” And she just went, “no, we just got to get this down.”

So we had to cut some things. A lot of it was just shifting panels around to be more efficient. I think a lot of people run into this issue where you draw a scene moment by moment when it really doesn’t need to be drawn that way; where it’s just like you get everybody’s reactions or you have someone picking up something and you draw like two panels of them picking the thing up when it would just be fine to draw one. Getting rid of some of those, it all eventually ended up in 240 pages without feeling too crowded.

How long did it take you to get from 320 pages of thumbs down to 256? Was it like a month of work or several months of work? 

It was less than a month. So I really buckled down with thumbnails. When I got the go, I was just like, “Yeah, let’s do this!” The thumbnails took about a month. And I think there were just a few edits afterwards, but we got that part done fast. The other parts were very slow. I actually have my thumbnails here with me because I love looking at them like this. It looks like I work so hard. Which I did.

I like getting away from a screen as much as possible, which is not very easy. So, this is kind of the only stage where I can do that in my process.

Oh, yeah. It’s really fun when they’re all laid out! So, do you want to show how you turned those thumbnails into pencils and then into final art?

Yes, I’ll do that! So, like I mentioned, I start with a script and I don’t think there’s much I have to say about this particular page. It’s pretty straightforward. 

So you get from the script to the final page. How does that happen?

Yeah. So after the synopsis, I used the “save the cat method,” which I have thoughts about, but it’s a very useful starting point. For those who aren’t aware, Save the Cat is a screenwriting method and it’s very prescriptive. Every single scene something must happen, and the acts are divided in a very clear way. It’s very helpful if you don’t know where to start, but I think the book itself can be too specific. However, if you’re stuck, get that book out.

And so this is the page I’m going to be focusing on. And as you can see, it used to be one and a half pages and then we had to mash it into one page. You can see my sticky notes all over everything and how the page number kept shifting around. But with these thumbnails, you can tell that everybody’s just a stick figure. And the way that I differentiated between the Lu and Ren stick figures was that Ren has a little triangle. That’s her ponytail.

With pencils, I use a program called Comic Draw. I believe Victoria Ying has done a couple of videos about Comic Draw, and she does a great job of explaining its features.

It’s iPad only. It’s a little buggy, but the thing that I love about it is that you can put your script in the program and it will autogenerate speech bubbles for you! It’s a little finicky, but to me it’s absolutely worth it. I don’t think I found another program that does that specifically. I don’t use these speech bubbles as the final. They’re mostly for placement because once you export the page, the text is no longer live. It’s just an image. So you can’t really can’t really work with that.

However, like I said, as a layout tool it’s amazing.   As you can tell, [in my pencils] everyone’s really scribbly because I don’t do lines. So, I skip the inking stage and I start blocking in colors.

The first thing I always do is put in the panels and then I redraw the speech bubbles because my speech bubbles also don’t have lines. I’m going to find a better way to do this. I don’t recommend this. Do as I say, not as I do. 

The color palette is already laid out. I made a character lineup to figure out everyone’s palettes and relative heights. (What I also should have done is a turnaround for my two main characters, but I didn’t do that. So, I could have made life easier, but I didn’t.)

So, I start off by blocking off the silhouettes of my characters and main objects in the scene. It’s pretty straightforward. I just use black so I don’t have to worry about the details. And I keep them all on a separate layer.

And then I block in the colors. I have a general idea of the colors for the scene. This is a dusk scene. But as far as the colors on the characters themselves, I just use the colors that I developed in the palette and the lineup. And I worry about the way the colors interact with the environment later. Right now, it’s just getting all the colors down. I do put some of the background colors in, but we’re just trying to get them to look like Lu and Ren right now.

And this is just adding more detail to the environments. At some point you can tell that I had moved the speech bubbles in that last panel. It was not quite working with the flow. So, I just changed it to be more readable and added more stuff to the background. Adding more detail, really getting the time of day down here. You can also see that I am adding some of the lighting effects from the campfire with the light on Lu and Ren’s sleeves as they’re drinking the soup. This is where I start having the characters fit in with the environment more. 

I am a big fan of layer modes. They are so helpful. That means that I can save a lot of time just by putting layer modes over things instead of trying to figure out how someone looks and what color someone would be in each particular scene.

So in this case as you can see that I have used multiple layer modes because glowing things are a pain to do unless you have modes. Frankly it is a lot of playing around and figuring things out. You know generally the fire is warm, the environment is cool and you go from there. You push the sliders around until it works. But once you find what works, make sure you have a palette for that scene.

This is not the final. This is just where I am right now because after this, we had to proof. So, I had to finish most of the colors before we got to proofing. But I’m very, very glad for this stage because I’m not super used to working in print. This was a big learning experience. I made everything too dark. So, as you can see in this set of proofs, this is a different scene, but every nighttime scene I did had the same problem, which is that it looked great on the screen and just completely unreadable on the page. So what I had to do was ask my designer to basically do a global levels change.

Wow, that’s fascinating. I don’t think I’ve heard of somebody who does things exactly like you do.

Oh gosh, there’s a reason why people don’t do this. And I learned. But before we get to that, this is the final page.

I had mentioned earlier that for the text, my designer ran out the text in InDesign once I was giving her the finalized pages. I say “finalized,” but you know I mean multiple adjustments afterwards. 

So, as far as this style goes, it’s really hard to work in this style. It took a very, very long time and I’m trying to figure out whether or not I’m going to stay with this in my future books because I love the way it looks. I do not love how long it took and how basically impossible it was to make any sort of pipeline. If I needed assistance for anything, I couldn’t really figure out how to ask people to help with coloring and so on and so forth. The only thing that I could ask people to help me with was speech bubbles, like filling in the speech bubbles. So I don’t really have the answer to that. I just think that it is an extremely time-intensive process that was very difficult to outsource.

So, of all the stages, the coloring took me the longest. Yeah… that took me 15 months. 

15 months?!

Yeah. Because I don’t have an ink stage and it just was subsumed. So, from pencils to colors, yeah, it was 15 months. And I’m like, “that’s not sustainable.”

I got much faster by the end, but I think there is a solution that I haven’t found yet. In terms of making my life easier.

Wow. So, I have two questions. So, number one, what was it that made you pick that style in the first place? And then secondly, can you go into a little more detail on why the style you used specifically is more time-intensive than a more typical comics style? 

So, I sort of work in this style to begin with. If you look at my editorial illustration, this isn’t too far a step away from that. It’s just that when you have to do multiple panels and multiple pages, that time really adds up. And I like it because I have some aversion to line. I don’t know why.

I did a lot of line when I was first starting out in general. I really love very delicate line work and I always wanted to do that. But I was taking classes at MICA when I was trying to avoid doing my biology classes and the teacher there made us do an assignment where we had to do a portrait of a celebrity in three different styles. One was a line style, one was a painted style, and one was in color blocks. And something about that particular assignment and the way that I could just push the forms around without having to redraw a line just worked for me. From then on, I kept doing it and I ended up here.

As far as how different it would be from a more, is “traditional” the right word? Let’s just say a “line style.” I guess I couldn’t really say, because I haven’t done a long-form project in a line style, but I think the ability to outsource flatting and coloring is something that I was really envious of. It definitely would have shortened the timeline because when you’re done with the lines, you can just start handing off whatever you’re done with to your flatter or your colorist.

But again, I don’t really have much experience in that because I haven’t tried it yet.

Yeah. Now I’m so curious how you’re going to figure this out with your next project.

Yeah. I don’t know. I do remember having a moment of being like, “Oh, my style isn’t suited for comics” and then picking up Katie O’Neill’s Tea Dragon books and being like, “Wait, it is! Oh, yeah. I can do this. Yeah, totally.”

But then you might have noticed that K O’Neill has stepped away from that style. I think I could guess why.

So, one of my questions for you was what part of this process was the most challenging? Would you say coloring in general or something else?

I think just getting it done. Sitting there looking at the 240 pages that I penciled, going, now I have to make these look good.

But right now, I’m currently in the midst of marketing. Which one’s harder? I’m not sure.

What are you doing for marketing right now?

So, I reached out to a lot of bookstores, a lot of groups that I’m in like reaching out to you and KCU. And I am putting off reaching out to my friends who aren’t in the arts. I know I should do it. I’m just putting it off right now because frankly, it’s really, really exhausting.

I think a lot of comic artists and authors can say that they did not go into this because they love marketing. In fact, maybe marketing is the antithesis of who they are, like me. So, uh, it’s tough.

I’m also posting on social media, but that, how do I say, doesn’t feel very helpful. But it also sort of feels like I have to — I suppose we must examine that as an industry. Everyone feels obligated to, but I’m not sure it’s really doing anything. 

When you say reaching out to bookstores and groups, are you reaching out just to say, “Hey, I’m an author, here’s my book, and I could do a reading?” What specifically are you doing with outreach to bookstores?

So, a bit of that. I contacted a few about events and signings and I contacted a few others about simply, “Hey, I’m an author, my book’s coming out, would you consider having it on your shelves and if I happen to be in the area, would you like me to come in and sign whatever copies you have?”

That’s generally been pretty successful. 

Oh, that’s great!

Yeah. I got ghosted quite a lot, but I’m used to that. You can’t really expect everyone to respond, right?

But yeah, I’ve done that and I also have done the thing that I know some people don’t recommend, which is Googling myself and my book. And one of the things that I thought would be kind of fun, and it hasn’t happened yet, but I did notice there was at least one bookstore that chose my book among others to be part of a graphic novel book club and I was going to reach out to them and ask them, “hey, would you like an author visit during your book club?”

So things like that. I have an opportunity, I just give someone a nudge and it feels weird, but I try to do it. 

It is hard work. I know. But kudos to you for doing it. 

Thank you. I also did want to mention I have some very, very wonderful friends who are doing a book trailer for me.

Oh, exciting!

Angela: Yeah, it’s going to be animated!

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A post shared by Angela Hsieh (@hisiheyah)

My roommate Mithra Krishnan is a very talented motion designer and she’s worked on some amazing things. I had a friend who storyboarded this as well, MJ Esquivel, you should hire her if you need a storyboarder. They both came together and did this for me and I’m like, “Oh my god, I think I owe you my first born.” 

That is adorable. Look at that nose twitch!

I know! So, they’re going to stitch it together and I think it’ll be 30 seconds. I’m doing the backgrounds. (It is my book after all.)

So, yeah, we have a shot list and a shot tracker. We’re trying to find a sound designer. It’s a production! And I have some very amazing friends. 

So, what are you planning for your launch party?

I teamed up with a local comic shop, Fantom Comics. You should shop there if you’re in the area, also if you’re not in the area, because they ship! 

Oh, okay. Tell people what is the area?

Oh, right haha! I’m in Washington DC.

I’ve heard all about Fantom Comics and I’ve never been there. I really need to go. 

They’re amazing! They’re just so friendly and they’re always doing community events. They do Mario Kart night, they do fundraisers, they do book clubs and readings and launches. So, yeah, I’m very excited.

Editors note: Angela had her launch party on July 13th! Here’s a photo!

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A post shared by Angela Hsieh (@hisiheyah)

All right, so let’s see, what did we not talk about yet? Oh, actually, this is kind of going to be going backwards a little bit, but we talked about how you got your agent, and about how you worked with your editor at Harper Collins to develop the story. But once you had your agent and you had the final book proposal and you went out on submission, how long was that process? 

It was fast. Oh, it was fast. So, from the day we went on submission to the unofficial acquisition was about three months. 

Oh, that is really fast.

Yeah. It’s not very typical. And my agent set up an auction.

When we had interest from one editor, she went around to all of the other people she had submitted to and asked if they were interested and the book went through two rounds of an auction. Yeah. I think it was between four or five houses. It was pretty exciting. It made me feel like the special girl at prom. Everyone wants me to go to prom with them.

Oh my gosh, that is exciting. Congratulations on that! That definitely doesn’t happen all the time. So, that’s awesome!

Yeah. And it’s actually a two book deal, so I still got to work on that next one.

Ah, okay. So, that sort of brings us back full circle to where we started when you and I were chatting in the very beginning. So, is your next project completely wide open still or do you know what it’s going to be about? 

I think I know, but like I had mentioned, I’m so busy trying to get the word out about Geozoology that I’m really frustrated that I don’t get to work on it. So, I don’t have anything concrete to tell anybody. It’s in the works, though!

It’s not going to be a sequel because I do think I need a break from this world. As much as I love it, it’s already a miracle that I stuck with this thing for four or five years. I really like short-term projects. So, again, miracle that this ever got done, but it will still be fantasy and it will still be middle grade and it will be in color. 

Well, that’s actually great. That gives me a good sense of what your target is.

Yeah. Well, we’ll see. I really want to get going on this. 

Well, we can wrap it up now. So, can you tell me how you want people to connect with you if they want to follow you, buy your book, or support you? 

You can find me always at my website, which is angelahh.com. I have a newsletter on Substack. It is angelahsieh.substack.com. I am on social media everywhere, and my handle is spelled @hisiheyah. It’s hard to spell, but I’m very fond of it because it is essentially a messed up version of my last name that I thought was so hilarious.

My brother, when he was on a volleyball team in high school, everybody just called him that and I’m like, “I’m stealing that.” So, that’s where you can find me. 

And my book Lu and Ren’s Guide to Geozoology is available wherever you buy your books.

Well, thanks for joining me, Angela! I can’t wait for the book to come out and all good things.

Thank you so much for having me. This was a lot of fun!

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