Graphic novelist's latest book tackles the cruelty of youth
Graphic novelist David Small draws comics for grown-ups about the tough task of being a kid. For his latest book, "Home After Dark," Small drew upon his own experiences in order to explore the horrors of bullying.
Small is perhaps best known for his memoir "Stitches," about how he grew up in a dysfunctional family in 1950s Detroit in what he calls a Soviet regime of a household.
How he came to write "Home After Dark" starts with someone else.
"It began actually with some stories that a friend of mine told me," he said.
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Small's friend grew up in northern California, hanging with friends, building treehouses and trying to look cool at the local soda fountain. To Small, it sounded idyllic.
"But my ears really perked up when a little psychopath entered the story," he recalled.
His friend and his buddies came across another kid who was known to torture animals. One day, they beat him up. Small says that was kind of the end of the story, "except for the fact that having been raised a good Catholic he had a deep sense of right and wrong, and he wondered for the rest of his life if what they had done was the right thing."
Small thought this could make a great graphic novel. With his friend's OK he took notes and went back to his studio to draw.
"And everything went very well for about three months," he said, "until I realized something was wrong with what I was doing. And I couldn't put my finger on it."
Then a writer friend told him the best books have some of the author in them.
"And if you are going to go that route then you are probably going to have to explore your own adolescence at 13 and you are probably going to have to deal with the thing that scared you the most at that time," Small said
So Small dug deep and he reshaped the story.
"Having been bullied in school was part of it," he said.
It became a story of Russell, a teenager in Ohio whose mother takes off with his father's best friend. His dad then decides to move to California. There, Russell finds himself isolated and increasingly desperate. Again this is based on Small's own experience.
"When I found a group of my peers, I would have done anything, anything, betrayed anyone to be part of that group, to be looked up to," he said.
Although, he didn't do anything quite as bad as happens in the book, he says.
Small drew and redrew the novel 12 times as he refined the story.
"The last revision had to do with cutting out three major characters, several major incidents, and also the little psychopath because he was beginning to take over my story," he said.
It wasn't easy. Small describes revising a graphic novel in terms of falling dominoes. A change in one panel can mean changes in dozens that follow it. And Small holds himself to a very high standard.
He finally finished the book. It was 400 pages. He sat down and read it one more time.
"And I said, I can do better than this."
So he took himself off to Mexico for three months.
"And I redrew the entire book on a piece of good Italian rag watercolor paper," he said. "Doing that made my washes look like silk, and my lines have a wonderful quality. And then I was happy and I turned it in."
Small will read from "Home After Dark" at 7 p.m. Friday at Moon Palace Books in Minneapolis.
It's a dark story of the cruelty of youth, and the carelessness of adults. It is however quite beautiful, and Small says it's possibly the best thing he's ever done.