Artist Reilly Brown has worked with some of the greatest creators in the comic book industry. But now, for Thunder Guardian, he’s facing his toughest collaborator yet: his third-grade son, Will.
“It was just so fun to see the ideas that would come out of a little kid like that,” Brown told Comic Book Club over email. “Totally crazy, fun ideas! Stuff that adults would never think about, because adults make their ideas fit with basic ways that the world and things like physics and logic actually work. He doesn’t know anything about any of that yet, so he doesn’t let it hold him back and just gets right to the good stuff!”
The project collecting Thunder Guardian strips is on Zoop now — and fully funded. To find out more about working with his son, if he’s worried his ideas will become more normal as he grows older, and more… Read on!
Comic Book Club: Let’s start with the basics… Where did this idea come from? Did your son approach you? Or did you approach him? Or were you, I don’t know, talking to your son, a normal thing that people do, versus having some sort of business meeting?
Reilly Brown: My son, Will, is a huge fan of super heroes, Star Wars, comics, action figures and all that, and has a really vivid imagination. He’d come home from first grade with these drawings of characters, monsters and all that, and I’d ask him about them. I’d just say “who’s this guy?” and then he’d go off on this whole crazy story about who these characters were, and what they were doing and what their powers were. It was just so fun to see the ideas that would come out of a little kid like that. Totally crazy, fun ideas! Stuff that adults would never think about, because adults make their ideas fit with basic ways that the world and things like physics and logic actually work. He doesn’t know anything about any of that yet, so he doesn’t let it hold him back and just gets right to the good stuff!
I’d say “Man, these stories are better than anything I’m getting from Marvel or DC, I want to draw THIS!”
For a while I’d just draw the characters with him if we were hanging out drawing, but eventually I met the guys who make A Kid and A Comic, which is a newspaper that’s all comics pages. They invited me to pitch, and I just thought it would be a great opportunity to actually do a Thunder Guardian comic. Luckily they didn’t mind having me team up with a writer who didn’t have any published credits yet lol.
You’ve been doing this for a while… How much is pure, unfiltered 1st to 3rd grader magic, versus you giving little tips here and there?
It’s a balancing act. I’m always considering how unfiltered to make it. On the one hand, he has no sense of story structure or anything, which is part of the fun, because it makes the things that happen in the story really unexpected. But on the other hand, he’s a kid, and it can be hard to get him to focus, and he’ll tell multiple versions of the same story that don’t match up in any way that I could draw on the same page, you know? So I’ll try to take the best bits from the different versions, and mix them together into something that has some kind of continuity to it.
Was there anything you outright vetoed?
Nothing too major. There were a few times where I had to steer him away from potty humor, and a couple of times where I thought a gag was too similar to one that we already did, but generally he gives me enough material that I have a lot to choose from.
The biggest argument we had was over the name of a character that he’d named Vynactyl, which was a ninja with vine powers. I thought that was just an awesome name. But when I was working on the strip that introduced him, he mixed him up with some other characters named “Boxorp” and “Tynorp,” and he insisted that the character’s name was “Vynorp.” Still a cool name, but not quite the same level of awesomeness.
And of course, when the strip was actually he said “I thought his name was Vynactyl?” Facepalm.
How much back and forth was there on the designs? You seem to have, shall we say, adapted liberally.
Ha hah, well, he’ll do his versions of the drawings, but also tell me specific details that I might not pick up on. For instance, He’d tell me that Thunder Guardian had a suit of robotic armor like Iron Man, and wings like an eagle. He might not know how to draw those things, so he’ll just tell me about them.
Also, he doesn’t always draw characters the same way twice, so I sometimes have options.
But I really like to look at how he uses color, and I’ll incorporate that into the structure of the characters costumes, and if he has and specific details that I find interesting, I’ll try to turn them into something in the design.
For instance, the first bunch of times he drew Thunder Guardian, he would use a different color for the outline of his face than he would use to color it. I thought that was kind of interesting, so I wanted to use that somehow. I ended up making Thunder Guardian’s head orange, and gave him a blue mask, so my drawings of him can achieve the same effect.
Are you worried that as he gets older, his ideas are going to get more reasonable?
Ha ha, all the time! I figure the concept has an eventual expiration date. Eventually it either won’t have that some youthful magic, or he’ll just lose interest in the character he drew when he was six. Although I think it might be funny if he sticks with it, and the story grows up with him. I kind of want to see Thunder Guardian’s broody badass phase!
This has been printed in your local newspaper – what has the response been like?
It’s printed in A Kid and A Comic– it’s not a local newspaper, it’s a paper that’s all comic strips. You can subscribe anywhere and they’ll deliver it right to your house, wherever you live!
Now that it’s on Zoop — and fully funded — what can folks expect from the book?
The book will be 30-40 pages, and include most of the previously published comic strips, as well as some new material, and also some process stuff, since the process is such an important part of the concept.
There are also a bunch of reward tiers where people can get things like stickers, or even original sketches from me and from Will. Those will be fun.
The story features a lot of superheroes, space pirates, monsters, boogers, and all that stuff that grade school boys think is cool. It’s a fun exploration of childhood imagination, and I think it’ll be great for other parents to share with their kids, or just for adults to read to take themselves back to how their own brains worked when they were kids.
In any case, I hope you all have as much fun reading it as we have making it!
Thunder Guardian is now live on Zoop.
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