It’s loosely based on an anecdote my dad told me a long time ago that I thought about and spun around. Well, that is a story I have had in my head for probably a decade, so I don’t know about that. How has making Ducks impacted what you’re doing moving forward? I feel like If I Cannot Have My Own on your Patreon demonstrates a similar tone, as well as a similar sense of pacing, for example. So in that sense, a gradual education works out by design and naturally, as it did for me. Luckily for those readers, I didn’t know much about it myself when I landed there, and everything in the book is from my point of view, and the reader is dropped in those shoes to learn as I learn what they are looking at.

If you don’t have a connection to it, you might only have a sense of it being a place that is, you know, big and ponderous and full of dump trucks and environmental issues and money. I know a lot of readers won’t know much about the oil sands. The book feels very educational in that respect. Perhaps I’m betraying my own shortsightedness, but I had no idea of what the oil sands were, or what working there was like.

But, you care about the people you are surrounded by, don’t you? Of course, I have had many years to think about it, too, and to get older myself, and I am sure that has made a difference at a gradient-hopefully the slow onset of wisdom. And even when things are grim, I can see what I’m looking at. I lived with these people, they were my friends, my coworkers, my neighbors. I didn’t come back to reflect only to find that everyone was human after all, haha. I mean-I started the book in 2016, not that long afterward, so it’s not really a question of 2014 versus 2022, it’s just that it took this long to make the book. I had a picture book I was working on I couldn’t fathom leaving Hark a Vagrant right away. I guess I always thought this was a book I’d make, but that really made it clear that I could.īut I couldn’t do it right then. I later called them a “test,” but at the time it was just something I was driven to do for their own sake, and as I was doing it, you could see the bigger picture emerging of what it could be. In 2014, I was just in my studio and I was compelled one day to start drawing out those comics. I’m sure it was helpful, but also it’s just the way it was.ĭoes now feel like the right time to tell this story, compared with 2014? Or, perhaps, is it a case of you being better equipped to handle it now? There were long periods then when I wasn’t working on it but it was always on my mind. I had two children, and I lost my sister Becky to cancer. In between, there were a few stops and starts. The book was in the works since 2016, I pitched it to Drawn and Quarterly in the summer of 2016.

Graphic novel ducks