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From shodō to writing children stories - Jon J Muth Comicon Napoli Interview
We caught up with the multi-faceted writer and illustrator in Naples to learn more about his intriguing background and education, his technique, and the key to capturing children's imagination.
Audio transcription
"Hi Gamereactor friends, I'm at the 25th Comicon, it's loud, it's crowded and it's very lively and it's very nice to be joined by Jon, thank you so much for joining us.
Thank you."
"We only have a brief moment because you're of course busy with your art and with fans.
I wanted to ask you first and foremost about your education and how it shaped you as an artist because it's a pretty peculiar way you learned about art and then you ended up doing what you do.
I suppose it's unique, yeah, we have a short amount of time so I can't get too far into it but my mother was an art teacher so she took me to museums almost every weekend and through that I grew to really love, really love art and I'd go and see these paintings in the museum and if I didn't know what the story was I would make it up in my head."
"So you'd see these paintings by Caravaggio or Rembrandt or something like that and it would trigger these amazing dramas for me and so I've always liked words and pictures together and I was educated, you know, a little bit of university and then I studied in Japan, I studied shodo, chanoyu, just working with a brush and also tea ceremony and I studied drawing in Austria actually and sort of had a very eclectic kind of education but I'm kind of an older guy so at the time it seemed like just the thing to do."
"Did sculpture permeate your technique somehow?
Well, being in Japan, I spent time in Japan and worked with, I studied sculpture on the island of Mure which is where Isamu Noguchi, the American-Japanese artist, had his studio.
I didn't meet him but his assistant, Masatoshi Izumi, [and it] was one of the places that I was visiting and able to study and just the Japanese aesthetic was very important to me."
"See, one of the things I found in the museums when my mother was taking me was there were these pieces by Caravaggio and I'm saying that I think there was a drawing but I loved it so much but the actual thing that blew my mind was that there was all the Western art and that was very powerful to me but then I found that there was work by Asian artists, Chinese brush strokes and when you saw, I don't know why it was, but when I saw the way the brush made marks something seemed so right to me, seemed so perfectly right that I needed to know more about the people who made this kind of work and I needed to know about what made that mark look like that as opposed to what I saw when I looked at Courbet or Monet or somebody else from Europe."
"Why was this so different but seemed so natural?
So that was what kind of pushed me to want to discover more.
This led me to working in Japan and it all kind of came together that way.
Fantastic. Let me ask you about Stillwater."
"If I'm correct, there is an adaptation on Apple TV.
Right.
And I've heard several stories about adaptations both coming from still image to animation and the other way around here at Comicon."
"So what can you tell me in your personal experience has been this adaptation and how you feel about how it ended up?
Right. Well, Stillwater grew out of my taking trips to visit with children.
When I was beginning to do work in children's books, I would take tours and I was touring with a book I'd done called Stone Soup where I'd taken the story of Stone Soup and set it in China."
"And while I was there, like if I'm in a library with children, I would read or I'd tell them stories while I was drawing.
And I'd draw with this huge Japanese brush and that always seemed to get them excited.
And I would start telling them stories, and I realized the stories I was telling were oftentimes from Zen."
"They're Eastern stories, you know, from China or from Japan, stories from Buddhism.
And they had never heard these stories, so I wanted to find a way to convey more of those to them.
That's what led to making Stillwater.
Anyway, long story short, cut forward to after the books are out, I was approached by Apple Television saying that they would like to do an adaptation through my publisher, Scholastic, and they did."
"They did animate it. We went back and forth about how to do it.
I originally saw it as kind of a Miyazaki approach to drawing it, very hand-drawing.
They wanted to do it more computer.
At first I was like, eh."
"But they convinced me, and I think the people who worked on the show did a beautiful job of bringing this character to a different kind of audience.
They took him in a nice direction. Maybe not my direction exactly, but I was there at every step and I was able to do drawings to help them figure out how to do things."
"So I was pretty hands-on about it, and that was nice.
Final one. You've worked with many styles.
You've worked with Marvel, you've worked with comic in many different genres and formats, and now you do children's books."
"What did you bring from your previous experience to this one, and how do you approach children's drawings to capture their imagination?
I know being a dad is one of the things, or being with kids, that makes you get them right, but I think it's really tricky."
"It is. You're right.
I think sometimes people who move into children's books don't realize how much providential wisdom children already innately have.
So I wanted to tap into that."
"That was my experience, both as a father and as a person who spent time around kids, writing for kids.
As to how everything fits together, all of these different parts, the Japanese brushwork, the studies of Zen and the arts in Japan, and my love of drawing and storytelling, everything kind of fit together to make what I brought to children's books, which, I guess, at the time it was 20 years ago, was pretty unusual."
"I didn't think of it as unusual, it's just the stories I would tell.
So I don't know that I have a conscious understanding of why or how I got to that point, but that's just where I am.
Naturally, right?
Yeah."
"Latest work that we can check out?
Stillwater and Koo Save the World.
All right, let's check it out.
Thank you so much for your time, Jon."
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