Teen Lit, Juvenile Lit, Junior Lit, Geek Lit, call it whatever you want, but Barry's Lyga's "The Astonishing Adventures of Fan Boy & Goth Girl" breaks through easy categorization on the strength of well drawn characters and the all too familiar ninth-cirlce-of-hell, high school setting.

Lyga's debut novel is virtually a love letter and suicide note to comic books and comic book culture, but to fans of story, it serves as another excellent tale in the tradition of some of literature's great teenage tales. This is Huck Finn with a sharpie and bristol board, navigating the mind numbing halls of South Brook high and the desperate and sweaty convention isles instead of the treacherous and debauched banks of the Mississippi. Lyga's superb story fits comfortably on the shelf between C.D. Payne's "Youth In Revolt" and Jonathan Lethem's "Fortress Of Solitude."

Barry agreed to talk with Hidden Robot about comics, Bendis!, "Fanboy & Gothgirl", his writing and that third thing...

Q: You've expressed in other interviews a "love-hate" relationship with comics. Elaborate on both sides of that for moment? Well, I love comics. I mean, I can't deny that. I learned how to read thanks to comics. I've read them my whole life. I credit them with teaching me how to write, how to pace, how to structure a narrative. I got into Yale thanks to comic books. And obviously, I have a writing career thanks to my love of comics. The hate part is a little tougher to describe. I'm a fan, OK? So I'm not immune to the million petty annoyances we all live with as comic book fans. I mean, I can get cranky about continuity reboots and stuff like that. Or stories that are told for shock value and nothing else. There's a part of me that throws down a comic and screams, "Just tell a good story, damn it!" I worked at Diamond for ten years, so I got to see a lot of inside stuff, and I became annoyed by that, too. Not necessarily stuff at Diamond - I'm talking across the board, throughout the industry. You can get fed up with the business end of things and that can bleed into your love of the medium. Now that I'm out of the industry, I make a concerted effort to remain ignorant of the behind-the-scenes stuff. I try to just read the comics and take them or leave them based on quality, not the internal politics and this guy is a jerk and that sort of thing.

Q: Have you had any invitations to return to comics as a writer since publication of the book? It's kinda funny because when I worked in comics, everyone knew that I wanted to write comics. Then I left the industry and got this book published and the joke around the comic book store became "Hey, so now you'll get to write Legion of Super-Heroes!" just because so many new comic book writers are coming from other fields. I'm pretty busy with the novels right now, but if someone were to approach me about writing a comic, I would find it tough to turn it down out of hand. I mean, comics are practically encoded in my DNA at this point. I would have to take it very seriously.

Q: Why Bendis and why POWERS as being the creator and title so central to Fanboy's fictional life? It's funny how important Bendis became. Originally, I just decided that Fanboy would be working on a graphic novel and I thought it would be cool for him to be obsessed with a creator. When I was Fanboy's age, I was obsessed with Paul Levitz's Legion of Super-Heroes. I mean, I was a complete and utter geekzilla for that book. I had a notebook filled with character information and stats and stuff, and I would memorize it all, and OK, I'm gonna stop talking about that now before I really go nuts. Anyway, I realized that I couldn't have Fanboy be obsessed with Paul because Paul's not writing these days. So I sat there and I thought, "OK, Fanboy is based on me. If I were a really smart kid today, who would I be obsessed with?" And I swear to God, I didn't even think about it for five seconds - I just thought, "Bendis." Everything else took off from there. It worked out perfectly because Bendis's rise from the indies to Marvel is something that Fanboy would obviously respect and want to emulate to a degree. Bendis's openness and availability online and in print, his versatility, his work as a writer, an artist, and as a writer/artist - all of this would be enormously attractive to a kid like Fanboy. So it just came together beautifully - he just fit in perfectly.

Q: Fanboy has obviously visited Jinxworld, do you visit the board? I visited a lot early on when I was working on the book, trying to get a feel for what Fanboy would experience. But around the time I finished the last draft of the book, I was leaving Diamond and I was dangerously close to burn-out, so I really cut back on my forum-visiting across the board (no pun intended).

Q: The American Dream used to be an education, an excellent paying profession, a wife (or husband), 2 kids, 2 cars and dog (cat). Do you think that the Dream might now read, create a graphic novel, get it optioned into a film and, and then the wife/husband, kids, animals etc? That might be! Either that or "develop a killer web application, sell it to Google for a billion dollars, retire to Cabo."

Q: You've talked about attempting to attract male readers in an effort to combat the notion that young males don't read as much as their female counter-parts, but what made you decide to attempt to give voice to this specific period of one's youth? It just seemed like such a horrible time of life! I mean, when you're fifteen, you've got so many options and opportunities ahead of you, but you're just incapable of seeing them. It's part of being a teenager - you don't have the context to understand that there's time for all the things you want to do, that the world coddles you and spits on you in equal measure, and that people have their own agendas and lives and don't just exist to annoy you. You're forming your own identity, figuring out who and what you want to be, making lots of mistakes, and also trying not to look like a complete idiot at the same time. It's a tough time, but it's also a great time because you have the ability to completely devote yourself to your obsessions and you'll never have that level of freedom again.

Q: Comics are the basis for the world highest grossing motion pictures, attract ridiculously talented writers and artists to the medium, provide ridiculously talented writers and artist to other mediums, help sell everything from video games to underwear, so please explain why they still suffer from the geek stigma? Man, I wish I knew. But I'll say this, and I'm ready to be pilloried for it - I'm not sure it's such a terrible thing. Comics have a hell of a lot more respect now than they did when I was Fanboy's age. It's a whole different world. If you gave them much more respect, they'd become bland and corporatized. Well, OK - more bland and corporatized. There's something to be said for being on the outskirts, for being a trash medium. I think the challenge for comics is maintain some of the old outlaw status while still appealing to a broad enough audience to maintain the industry and the artform.

For Part 2 of the Interview, click here.

  

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