Emma Ríos is well-known for her stellar artwork on books ranging from Marvel’s Amazing Spider-Man to the Eisner-Award-winning Pretty Deadly, with Kelly Sue DeConnick. But for the new Image Comics graphic novel Anzuelo, she’s striking out on her own as both writer and artist.
“Images are a fundamental way of writing to me,” Ríos told Comic Book Club over email. “I try to offer the most information I can through them, whether it is the atmosphere or the character’s inner feelings. They are also my primary tool to control and manipulate the pacing. Sometimes, the sound and the visuals play the same melody, others they focus on bringing separate messages. It’s a fun wide range for me, that I think works diegetically by offering different sources of information to put together.”
The book itself is haunting and beautiful, a metaphysical tale of three kids lost in the sea which transforms and molds them over time. It’s a fantasy coming-of-age story told through jaw-dropping art that breaks and changes the very format of a comic book itself.
To find out more about how Ríos put Anzuelo together, read on.
Comic Book Club: I’m curious about your process here since the words are so sparse on the page… Did you write the script first? Layouts, then words? How did you approach this?
Emma Ríos: Working alone differs from collaborating in a sense that I focus more carefully on developing a detailed outline with layouts and dialogues simultaneously, instead of writing a full script.
It’s comfortable for me to work, but a mess to show others. I asked my friend David Brothers to be my editor for the book, and I would send him unreadable compositions of the crazy micro drafted layouts with notes everywhere. I never go with final art until pencils and dialogues work for me. This is also difficult to do when you collaborate, because part of the work is coordinating with everybody’s time.
Images are a fundamental way of writing to me. I try to offer the most information I can through them, whether it is the atmosphere or the character’s inner feelings. They are also my primary tool to control and manipulate the pacing. Sometimes, the sound and the visuals play the same melody, others they focus on bringing separate messages. It’s a fun wide range for me, that I think works diegetically by offering different sources of information to put together.
The hardest part is striking a balance in which cutting the flow of reading the text does not urge a desire to pass the page.
Similarly, what’s your take on the interplay of dialogue/narration on the page and the art itself? Is it just another part of the art? Or a separate element?
I think it’s vital to avoid redundancy so I work hard on blending both the sound and the image organically. I trust the readers’ interest in getting involved in the story when they connect with it, and I try to trust my skill, or more likely, my capacity to refine the ability to split the information so that a scene can grow without losing its ghosts, and keep some mystery inside and outside the characters.
I also wanted the lettering to connect with the thin lines in the artwork, and for that I opted for my own handwriting. As I continuously rewrite everything I asked designer and indie cartoonist Dan Berry to help me turn it into a font. I used the font and wrote/drew the sound fx myself too, so yeah, I might have been a little obsessed with making everything part of the whole aesthetics.
Another process question, but I was fascinated by your page structure, with the watercolors lightly bleeding into the white grid between panels. How did you approach this?
The design decisions in Anzuelo are, somehow, an inverse approach to “confusion” from what I do in other books like Pretty Deadly, where I disintegrate the grid to infuse the composition with weirdness.
I felt Anzuelo needed some restraint in that level to emphasize the others, because the art style and the concepts I was playing with were already bleeding in every direction. Cleaning the gutters in white brought some tranquility and at the same time emphasized the idea of the frailty and the wetness spreading from the story core. This was a ridiculous amount of work as it was necessary to work slowly with the brush in Photoshop respecting the watercolor’s natural stains, and I ended up asking my friend, also amazing cartoonist, Luis Yang to assist me with that stuff. Luis is also the animator of the Anzuelo trailer we did.
There’s a lot of beautiful color-work in here, but the reds stand in stark contrast throughout. They’re more solid, and pop more. What was the goal with this color? Or what does it mean to you?
Watercolor excels at being loose and ephemeral, it felt perfect to highlight the concept of horror and kindness working simultaneously, from which the book was born. The red is a vibrant color that dialogues with stress, violence, flesh and blood. It made sense to use it to give more impact and viscerality in some scenes.
Still, it’s embarrassing to admit that I can’t plan the coloring in advance, which sets me apart from professional watercolorists. I’m attracted to watercolor by the sense of immediate, unfinished art, forcing me to draw less to express more. So I tried to work as if I were sketching, very loose, looking for a refinement in my artstyle and a more oneiric feeling for the book.
The technique is very difficult to control, and even after 304 pages plus covers I feel I’ve not nearly scratched the surface.
I wanted to be more forgiving with myself assuming that mistakes were going to be impossible to correct and part of the technique. But I still ended up repeating way too many pages and traumatizing myself while dealing with the difference in style from the beginning to the end.
Two of the big themes I pulled out of this book are transformation, and discovery – through the lens of growing up. Is that what you were going for? Either way, I’d love to hear you talk about your overall theme.
Hmm… If I’m honest about this, I chose these two ranges of aging because I’m not that interested in writing the middle. I find the vulnerability of childhood and the idea of giving up on important things in late middle age, that feels somehow imposed by society and even by our bodies starting to falter, more interesting overall. And I tried to make the characters rather unchanged, as childish hopeful adults, running away or pushing themselves to the limit to go for, paraphrasing a little, a better way to live.
In Anzuelo I wanted to reflect on how to confront violence and fear without losing kindness and respect for other living beings and for yourself. An intended abstraction to look for a more candid way of thinking that personally helps me remember how the dreadful things we see in our everyday lives shouldn’t be taken for granted.
Similarly, you mention that this book transformed you in the process. How has this changed you?
Anzuelo had been in my head for quite a while but I focused on it when I finished Pretty Deadly: The Rat in 2020. It was going to be a more traditional cosmic horror approach, with a boat and a small crew as the core of the story. I wanted to have fun writing something pretty dark, and doing a horror book. But flirting with beloved pessimistic reads to improve the story I ended up turning 180 degrees and writing from a more humanist and melancholic perspective.
I wasn’t very conscious but for me it was pretty intense, a moment of reflection with the whole world in hiatus. Unconsciously, I was looking for some respite, for the characters and also myself, and becoming more and more self-absorbed. Seeing traces of light in insignificant things, as a mechanism to analyze why we are here without falling apart, I think helped the book and my own ideas acquire depth overall.
Anzuelo hits stores on November 6, 2024 from Image Comics.
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