Note from Janna: I’m excited to share my interview with Mike Dawson, the award-winning creator behind the middle grade graphic novel The Fifth Quarter and, most recently, The Hidden Dominion of Geordie James (Union Square Kids).
We spent the first half of our talk on the new book, discussing how Mike developed the story and built its lush, watercolor art. In the second half, we got into something you find particularly useful: how Mike has turned school and library visits into a significant income stream.
Click below to view our full conversation on YouTube, or read the (edited) transcript below.
JANNA: The very first thing I want to talk about is your newest book, The Hidden Dominion of Geordie James. Tell me about the story — what is it about?
MIKE: On the first page of the book I actually have my character tell you how to pronounce Geordie, because I realized kids might have a question about that.
It got three starred reviews, which I was very excited about. When I go to schools I’ve started describing it as “Charlotte’s Web meets the Minecraft movie” — kids perk up when they hear Minecraft, and they all know Charlotte’s Web, and it sort of sums up the tone. It doesn’t have much to do with the actual plot, but it gets their attention.
Here’s what it’s really about. It’s about an anxious sixth grader named Geordie James. He’s struggling — at school, and a lot socially. He’s having trouble making friends. And because he and four other kids are all failing their science class, they get put together on a group project, and you can see on their faces exactly how thrilled they are about that.
The teacher tells them they’re going to create a display for a science fair answering the question, “What is our place in this world?” Geordie could not care less. He doesn’t want to be bothered with any of it. He just wants to do the one thing he loves, which is play Dominion — the best game ever made. It’s a video game he plays on his tablet, very similar to Minecraft or Roblox in how it works. In terms of how it looks, I had to make different decisions based on my own abilities.
Kids all play online together — it’s an open-world situation. You can have battles, battle royales, and there’s a lot of building, like Minecraft, where you can construct whatever you have the resources for. Building is what Geordie loves. He likes playing alone, building this intricate amusement park in his own little nook of Dominion.
His father gets frustrated with how things are going — the grades, the social stuff — and feels Geordie is spending too much time on the device, so he tells him to go spend some time outside. Geordie doesn’t feel great about that either. But while they’re out in the woods, his dog Cracker Jack breaks off her leash and discovers this weird mountain of Christmas trees — it’s what the town does with discarded Christmas trees before they’re mulched. Geordie thinks of it as a Christmas tree graveyard, and underneath it he finds a fort that some teenagers must have built.
When he’s in there, he notices that not only can he still play his tablet game out in the woods — it works better. Things are happening in the game that don’t normally happen. He’s more powerful, he has more abilities, and the game is doing unexpected things.
And there are pigs throughout the story. There’s a pig Geordie sees on the news — a story about a pig that escaped from a nearby factory-farm slaughterhouse and is rumored to have gotten into the woods somewhere nearby, and Geordie can’t stop worrying about the fate of this animal. There’s a pig that appears inside Dominion when he plays out in the woods, maybe connected to what’s happening to him. And there’s a long-forgotten memory of a pig Geordie met when he was small — and that memory may be the key to a lot of what’s going on.
It’s a complicated story, so that’s my best way of summarizing it. Some of my other books are much easier to sum up in a few sentences; this one was more of a challenge.
It is a very layered story. So I’m going to ask you what’s probably one of the most conventional, generic questions you could possibly get: where did the idea come from?
I was thinking about this recently, because the book’s been out about two weeks and I’m very much in the mode of trying to raise awareness and get the word out.
A few things fed into it. During those first months of COVID I was out walking my dogs in a little natural area in my town, on one of those gray, foggy days, and I came across a mountain of discarded Christmas trees. It felt ethereal and mysterious — this weird little place people didn’t realize was there. That image just stuck in my head.
Then there was a book I read back in 2006, The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan — one of those popular pop-science nonfiction hardcovers, the NPR book of the moment. I honestly only read about half of one chapter, but he talked about this idea that we can accept certain things about how our food is produced — but if any of us found out about a pig that had escaped from that kind of situation, we’d all root for that pig. Nobody would say, “Let’s get it back to the farm.” We’d want the little guy to win. That’s human nature. Part of what the story is getting at is that we tell ourselves stories about how the world works so we can live in it.
The other piece came from a diary comic I made in 2015 about a day at the beach. We lived near the shore in New Jersey, and my daughter was really into Minecraft at the time. On the beach, people had done all this construction to stop the waves from eroding the nice stuff at the beach clubs — trying to control something natural that we don’t really have much control over. I kept connecting that to the building and controlling that my kids were doing on their tablets in Minecraft.
So those were the early nuggets. I was about to say they “festered” in my brain — marinated is a better word. Then I had to think about it as a book for kids, because some of those ideas don’t obviously sound like a kids’ book. I hope it speaks to anxiety in kids, which is so common now and probably connected to devices. But I also didn’t want to write an anti-screen-time book. Teachers and parents might like that, but it’s not what I wanted. I wanted to meet my character where he is, and to look at gaming and devices the way my readership does — as an important, real place where they live and operate. That’s certainly what I’ve seen in my own household.
So how did those sparks become something you could pitch to a publisher? At what point did you start formulating it into a story, and how long did that take?
It took a long while, and it’s something I’ve thought about in terms of the creative process.
My previous series, The Fifth Quarter, is a very straightforward story — the main character loves playing basketball and isn’t that good, and it’s about her determination to improve so she can get into the real game instead of being relegated to the “fifth quarter,” the extra period for the not-so-good kids. That was a perfectly good, entertaining middle grade story.
But The Hidden Dominion — which was originally called George’s Dominion — started out much smaller and more straightforward. My earliest pitches didn’t have a lot of what ended up in the book, like the science fair. It was basically just going to be about his dog getting lost in the woods and him worrying about, and figuring out what happened to, the pig.
The book took a long time, though. Publishing moves at a glacial pace, in case you haven’t noticed. I got some significant early interest that didn’t pan out, and I had to rethink and rewrite the pitch quite a few times before I finalized the publisher. I’m actually grateful for that now — I wasn’t at the time, because it was painfully slow and I just wanted a book to be working on. But that time helped me put layers into the story and add a lot of things I’m really glad are there. I don’t miss those nights in 2022 and 2023, lying awake wondering if I could do this anymore. But early feedback that wasn’t entirely positive — that suggested the book needed more — ended up helping me develop it.
You got the book deal and started the fun part — producing the book. And as I said before we started recording, I’m so impressed by the art. It’s just so lush — that’s the word I keep using. Incredibly detailed, and I love the coloring style. Tell me about the artwork. How did you develop the style for it?
Creatively, I really wanted to spend a lot of time rendering the environments, because there are two places: the real world, which I wanted to feel very real and inhabited, and the world of Dominion, which equally needed to feel big and real, like an actual place. So I spent a lot more time on the visuals than I have on other projects.
Usually when I think about cartooning, I think about how you can go minimal. Cartooning is an efficient way to tell stories — you often don’t need backgrounds, because as long as the reader understands where they are, you don’t have to show everything. That’s the mentality I carry with me; in the little diary cartoons I post on Instagram or in essays, I rarely get intricate with the backgrounds. But for this story I felt it was necessary to make the world feel rich and inhabited.
So I made two decisions, and I actually drew on two different devices. I have a large Wacom Cintiq — a big glass tablet I draw directly into Photoshop with, using a brush called Full Bleed, and that’s what I used to ink all the real-world stuff. Then I’d take those pages and send them to my iPad Pro, where I’d do the watercoloring in Procreate using a different set of brushes that created that watercolor feel.
That became a technical problem, because I was drawing the inks at 1200 dpi to get the look I wanted, but I couldn’t color at that level — the files would just crash. So I had to shrink the pages down and color at 300. What I did throughout was build the book in InDesign from the very beginning: a layer with the large high-res inks, the low-res color underneath, and I lettered straight into InDesign too. The Dominion pages I did entirely on the Cintiq into Photoshop, colored with a brighter, bolder brush.
InDesign was something I learned on the Fifth Quarter books, and I got used to building the pages as I went, letting the InDesign document be the dummy — it only exists virtually. Later on, if you look at the cover, which is very intricate with lots of layers, I basically built that in InDesign too. I created graphics — bushes, trees, branches — and layered them. That cover image doesn’t actually exist anywhere as a single image; it’s just pieces I’ve layered together.
I made this very layered InDesign file because I thought a lot about my own limitations as an artist. I wouldn’t be very good at drawing a forest like that straight up, in one go. But layering it helped me do what nature does — slapping stuff on top of each other, giving the feel of a messy, real place. I couldn’t have done this book without basically building it in InDesign. Some of it kind of had to happen a little by accident.
It’s really fascinating. Do you know Gareth Hinds at all?
I do know that name.
He does a lot of adaptations of classic literature — Greek mythology and so on — as graphic novels, and he’s been doing it for a very long time. He does something similar to you with InDesign. He did a workshop for Kids Comics Unite a number of years ago, and he puts everything together in InDesign too.
It’s interesting how you can do it with the different resolutions like that. You can set things so it wouldn’t come together at all if you weren’t using the program. I love it.
I really love the coloring style in this book. Is that something you experimented with to arrive at what you liked, or was it just your natural style from the beginning?
The watercolors are basically my style. I found these brushes on my iPad Pro in Procreate, and from making comics for years, that’s a lot of my natural style.
The Dominion pages are a bolder color, which is also somewhat my style. In the beginning I was trying to get something that looked more graphically like Roblox or Fortnite — shinier, blockier, more pixel-based. I really tried that for a bit, but I felt like I wasn’t hitting it, and it was just going to end up looking bad. It wasn’t going to look like an actual Roblox game. So I decided my world of Dominion doesn’t have to look exactly like a video game. I did my best to capture a little bit of a Fortnite feel, but then let the rest go.
I also cut things like the words you usually see floating everywhere in video games, because I felt that’s information the reader takes in, and if it’s not important it just busies up and muddies the whole look. So I had to push myself past what I normally do, while still keeping it within my own skill level.
So how many pages is the book?
It’s quite long — it kept growing. The story is about 236 pages, and then there’s a bunch of back matter too. That was the other thing: for so many pages, and out of a frank desire to one day not be working on the book, I had to find the right place in between.
How long did it take you, start to finish?
A good solid three years total. The first nine months or so were very focused on the writing.
That’s what my thumbnails look like in the writing phase. I do it as comics immediately; I’m writing and drawing simultaneously.
But the writing continued even once I moved into the final art, because I was struggling with certain aspects of the story. I did more of getting other people to read the book and give me feedback than I’ve ever done before. I was trying to hit on things that are harder to put into a story for kids — animal welfare, anxiety about the environment. I actually paid people. I hired sensitivity readers because there are characters of color in the book and I wanted to make sure I was presenting them the right way, and I also paid for general feedback. So it was a long, rolling process where I was making changes continually even once I was into the drawing.
And then the drawing itself took a while, because some of those pages — like a double-page spread of the Christmas trees — took a long time. I’ve always thought that in cartooning, those big moments can carry a story, and it’s worth putting in the time for that kind of big shot. I used to say you could go pages without much background and then occasionally just remind the reader you know how to draw — “see what I can do?” But with this one I was trying to maintain a steady, high bar on the illustrations throughout.
I’m wondering if I should switch over to talking about how you’re getting the word out about this. Is there anything else you want to say about the creative part?
The only thing I’ll add is that I’ve written for grown-up readers and now a couple of books for younger readers, and I think this book actually works for both. It’s written for middle grade — that’s who it’s targeted at — but I feel as confident in it as an adult book. I think adults will get just as much out of it.
The other thing is, I was trying to figure out how many books I’ve written — some are short story collections, so I don’t know if they count — but I’ll say I’ve written about six or seven books. And that’s a good thing to say at a school visit, because then all the kids go, “Six, seven!”
Perfect segue — “six seven” and schools. Before we started recording, I told you how much I admire what you do with school visits. I’ve seen you give workshops at libraries and schools, and you’re so good at it. You explain your work really well, and you also explain how storytelling works in comics, and you bring this super cool workbook. Do you still bring this exact workbook?
It’s probably been updated a tiny bit. It’s a twelve-page pamphlet, essentially.
This came out of the fact that I make zines. I’ve been making zines since the ’90s and still do. I have a little zine club through my Patreon. So I was able to create this workbook to bring into schools, with activities and exercises I can walk kids through. That’s basically given me two things I can offer a school or library: an assembly presentation — all the kids in a gym or auditorium, with a big slideshow — and a workshop.
What I try to do in both is connect it to my work but focus a lot on how cartooning works, the language of making comics, to encourage kids to make their own stuff. Because, frankly, they love that. Kids love making and writing, and making them feel like they could make their own comics is something they enjoy. I’ve benefited from not making my presentations just about my books.
I learned that early on. When The Fifth Quarter first came out, I’d go to schools and do a 30-minute presentation about the book and then take questions, and that was fine. But it was when I started getting asked to go to libraries that I realized I needed to put more into it. I went to a library in Allentown, New Jersey — a very small but lovely town in Monmouth County — and two kids showed up. Two kids.
One was five and the other was his eight-year-old older brother. I did my whole presentation, asked if they had any questions, they said no, and I said, “Do you want to buy a book?” That’s when I thought, I should probably make this more interactive.
So I started with photocopies, and then, because of my zine background, I built this whole workbook. When I held it up it probably doesn’t look that impressive — there’s nothing really on the cover, because the idea is that it gets filled in by the person working on it. And a lot of what’s printed in it is in blue ink, a little nod to the non-reproducible blue-line pencil cartoonists use. So it doesn’t look amazing when you hold it up, but it’s full of interesting things.
It is truly full of interesting things. The way you explain all the most important conventions of comic storytelling in this short zine workbook is astounding to me. How long did it take you to plan it?
The Fifth Quarter books came out at an unfortunate time: COVID time. The first was May of 2020 and the second was May of 2021, when there still wasn’t a lot happening in the traditional ways of doing a book release, like a bookstore party or panels. So the avenue I started pushing hard into was libraries, because those were starting to have things happen again. And a lot of it was trial and error, learning by doing.
I feel fortunate to live in New Jersey, because it’s very densely populated but not a giant geographical area, so there are a million libraries and schools I can get to, generally without driving more than an hour and a half. I’ve covered a lot of the state at this point.
The workbook itself evolved. I originally made little stapled packets, then switched to the workbook, and I’ve kept changing it — taking things out. The original one had “draw a picture of my character from The Fifth Quarter,” and I took that out because it turns out kids are much more excited not to have to draw my character. Now we have an activity that’s usually drawing a cartoon character they’ll recognize — often SpongeBob — in some kind of situation, trying to express a lot through the drawing. Then we take random words we’ve generated elsewhere and put them on the picture.
That particular activity I got from a Lynda Barry book, which is wonderful. I can’t express enough gratitude for the existence of those Lynda Barry books. And Ivan Brunetti has some great ones too. There are some wonderful books out there with good ideas for cartooning activities. So now we draw these famous characters, put our own words on them, and see how putting words into a drawing changes the meaning — it creates scenarios and backstory. It’s the part where we focus on the role of words in comics. In some of my earlier workshops I focused a lot on how you don’t use words in comics — you do the storytelling in the drawing — but that’s not entirely true. Words operate in a different way: they’re not describing the action, they’re giving you information about the characters and the story. It’s continually evolving.
So how many copies of your workbook would you estimate you’ve given out to kids at this point?
Definitely in the low thousands. I know that because I order them through a website called Mixam, which is a really great way to self-publish little zines, and I’ve had to order boxes of a thousand at a time. Sometimes I go to a school and do the workshop even for large groups, so that’s a lot of workbooks. But it’s great, because it’s got my name on every one.
Do you happen to know the unit cost for each workbook?
If I order in bulk, it can be as low as thirty to fifty cents a copy. It’s not nothing, but ordering in larger amounts brings the per-unit cost down.
One of the more unfortunate learning experiences I had was when I ordered at least a few hundred of these and hadn’t checked the setting for matte paper, so they all showed up glossy — that magazine kind of feel, hard to draw on. I’ve taken those to events where I’m doing stuff for free: “Here you go, kids, here are the ones that are a real pain to draw on, I’ve got to get rid of these.” I figured it out, but pencils on matte are the nice, easy thing. It’s easy to just bring a box full of pencils, a pencil sharpener, and scrap paper. Aside from producing the booklets, it’s not a massive overhead.
I want to get into the nitty-gritty of the school-visit business, because I do think it’s tough to make a living as a cartoonist, and one of the ways you can make money is being paid to visit schools and libraries. So how has your business evolved? Is it slow, steady growth each year — tell me whatever you’re comfortable sharing.
The very first one I did was at my kids’ school. I actually lived right across the street from it. They invited me in, masks on, full COVID-era stuff, and they offered me an honorarium. I had no idea you could get an honorarium for this. It turns out it’s quite normal. Schools generally don’t have budgets for it, but PTAs often do. That came about just because I was a local author who’d been written about in our little town magazine. And it was one of those rare, wonderful visits where the PTA also buys a copy of the book for the students.
So I thought, if my kids’ school does this, surely other schools do. And they absolutely do!
But a lot of it requires self-starting and a DIY attitude, because so much of what I’ve had to do is cold emails: going on the web, looking up PTAs, trying to find addresses and make contact. The PTA is the best one to reach, but the school librarian is good too because they advocate for you, and the principal can help. The tough part is that PTAs change every year — it’s all parent volunteers — so you might have a great visit and a great connection, and two years later those people don’t have kids at that school anymore.
So I’ve tried other ways beyond emailing. New Jersey has a convention for school librarians, held in Atlantic City, where you can get a vendor table and show your books and your school-visit information. I did that for the first time a couple of years ago and made connections with school librarians that have been extremely fruitful. There’s also a small crowd of like-minded New Jersey children’s book illustrators and cartoonists who show up to these things.
New Jersey also has arts organizations that get some state funding and focus on bringing arts into schools. One of them up north helped me a lot. I got in contact, shared some of what I’d done, and they put on a showcase where people with offerings for schools each made a fifteen-minute demo of their presentation for librarians from schools all over the state. It was a little stressful condensing my hour-long presentation into fifteen minutes, because I didn’t want to kill any of my darlings, so I just did it micro-machine style, super fast.
Another thing I love now, which I only recently started, is having kids draw even in the assemblies. They show up with paper and pencils and lean on the floor to draw, and it’s been almost a game changer. As an author of middle grade books, my real target audience is upper elementary into middle school, but a lot of schools want you to present to the entire student body. So creating a program suitable for kindergartners and first and second graders — engaging, not just them sitting there — was a challenge, and having more interactivity has been really wonderful for that.
Is the revenue you get from school and library visits significant? Do you feel it’s an important stream for you now?
Yes, it’s very important to my income. The thing I’m feeling right now — we’re talking in June, and this will probably be viewed over the summer — is that summer is a real low point, because there are no school visits. My wife keeps telling me I should teach a summer camp, and she’s right. Library events I can do, but those have smaller budgets.
I make most of my money during the school year, and really the spring — around Read Across America — is the busy season for authors, because that’s when a lot of schools and PTAs think about bringing people in. September through December I rarely have much going on, because everyone’s coming back to school, and it’s the same as the rest of the publishing industry — editors can’t read pitches during back-to-school, and then it’s the holidays. By January, it’s like, okay, now we’re really at school, let’s see what we’ve got to do. So spring is the best time for booking visits. And nicely, I now get a lot more inquiries around that time, often from PTA people who didn’t realize they needed to bring in an author.
I think there’s enough word of mouth happening now. Librarians share a lot of information with one another — more people are reaching out to me.
How far in advance are visits typically scheduled? A couple of months?
Usually a couple of months, though a month is pretty normal, and I’ve had last-minute ones, like, “Can you come in a couple of weeks?” I don’t really have a contract. I create an invoice that details what I’m going to do, the date, and the rate, and I send that over, but I don’t necessarily have a formal contract with the schools.
Do you have a PDF or something you ask the school to share with parents, so they know who you are and what your books are?
Yes, especially if I’m trying to help the school sell copies. Book selling happens in a number of ways. Sometimes — not often — the PTA just buys copies, which is wonderful. Sometimes they work with a local bookstore and do it all through the store with a flyer. But probably most often, the school knows I’m coming, I create a flyer with information about me and the books, the librarian distributes it, and families pay me directly through something like Venmo or PayPal. That’s pretty easy for parents. Orders come through my Venmo, and I show up with boxes of books that are already pre-signed and hand them out.
And then all the kids whose parents didn’t order a book are like, “Hey!” — and, well, maybe your parents should read the flyers. Which, honestly — I’m a parent myself, and I’m the one who doesn’t read the flyers and doesn’t order anything. I’m pretty sure I forgot to order my son a yearbook this year, and he’s about to find that out in about a week.
We need to have empathy for parents overall. Well, I think I covered everything I wanted to talk about, but I definitely want you to tell everybody how they can connect with you.
A couple of ways. I have a website, mikedawsoncomics.com, which is on my list of things I really need to improve — there’s not a lot going on there.
I have a separate, more robust website for my school visits, cartooninglessonswithmikedawson.com, focused on visits and workshops.
And I have a newsletter through Substack that I send out about once a month, usually with a little comic plus information on visits and workshops I’ve done. And I’m extremely active on Instagram, which is a good way to follow me day to day, because I post a lot of small diary cartoons there.
And you also have your Patreon zine club, right?
This is what I mean about needing a website that brings everything into one place, so it’s not all separate. But yes — Patreon, Mike Dawson. At this point it’s a bi-monthly zine club: you pay a flat fee, and I mail you a brand-new, signed zine that shows up at your house. It used to be monthly; now it’s every other month, and I made the price a little lower. The new one I’m working on is a bunch of diary comics about songs — a mixtape zine, little short cartoons about songs. So actually, everyone, don’t go to my newsletter — subscribe to my Patreon. That’s the better one.
Do that, everybody. Well, this has been so awesome, Mike. Thank you so much.
Thank you very much. Thanks for having me — it’s great to talk to you again.
Connect with Mike Dawson
- Follow Mike’s work: mikedawsoncomics.com
- School visits & workshops: cartooninglessonswithmikedawson.com
- Newsletter: mikedawson.substack.com
- Social: Instagram @mikedawwwson
- Zine club: Patreon @mikedawwwson
- Buy The Hidden Dominion of Geordie James: Bookshop.org
Resources Mentioned
- The Hidden Dominion of Geordie James by Mike Dawson (Union Square Kids)
- The Fifth Quarter by Mike Dawson (First Second)
- The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan
- Making Comics by Lynda Barry
- Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice by Ivan Brunetti
- Gareth Hinds — graphic-novel adaptations of classic literature and mythology
- Mixam — zine and booklet printing
- Tools Mike uses: Wacom Cintiq, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, and Procreate on the iPad Pro
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