Inspiration and Imagination: An Interview with Jonny Jimison
- Stephen Hesselman
- 6 hours ago
- 9 min read
by Stephen Hesselman
Note: The latest volume in The Dragon Lord Saga, “Dragons and Desperados,” is now available. You can order your copy today from Rabbit Room Press.
Jonny Jimison has been crafting an epic graphic novel adventure series for over 10 years now. The Dragon Lord Saga has a wide array of characters, locales, and plot twists, and no shortage of humor and brilliant artwork with vivid colors. Illustrated in the vein of the very best Sunday comic strips of years gone by (think of creators like Bill Waterson, Charles Schultz, and Walt Kelly), he explores themes of family, friendship, self-doubt, disappointment, loss, fear, love, being stuck as a horse (#relatable), and even how to fight off pesky dragons.
Dragons and Desperados is book three in this five book series and is the largest volume yet. Fans have been eagerly awaiting this release for years, and it is well worth the wait. The book is chock-full of everything we love about the series (and more), and in its pages we find surprises like adventures on the Western frontier (a feast for the eyes and imagination) and even musical numbers. I had the pleasure of meeting with Jonny to talk about his creative journey through the volumes of The Dragon Lord Saga and especially Dragons and Desperados. So without further ado, let's catch up with Jonny, Martin, Marco, and all the rest.
Stephen Hesselman: Jonny, a lot of us are so excited that your new graphic novel is almost here, especially longtime fans such as myself who’ve been on board since the first edition of Martin and Marco. Tell us a little about the latest chapter in The Dragon Lord Saga?
Jonny Jimison: In the first volume, we got to meet the characters. And in the second volume, I developed the characters and the situations further. And now, in the third volume, I’ve got a lot of backstory, which turned out to be the most fun I've had with the whole series so far.
It weirdly turned into a classic Western story. And I don't know how it became a musical, but musical numbers kept popping up. It's kind of a grab bag of everything, but it feels like everything clicked in a way that I'm really satisfied with. All of the threads that were running through the first two books have come together in a really fun way in the third book, and all the things I wanted to set up for books four and five, to finish up the story, I was able to insert into volume three and still keep the tone fun, adventurous, and kind of crazy.
SH: Crafting a multi-volume epic like The Dragon Lord Saga looks like it would be pretty complicated. There are so many characters, environments, and subplots to balance, all while keeping the whole thing on the rails as a cohesive story. Can you tell us a little about your writing process? How do you keep it all straight?
JJ: It only stays straight because I spend so much time in that world in my head. I've spent so many years processing this story, in part because it takes so long to draw the comics. So, getting a single volume out takes a year and a half at the very least. Scripting and rescripting one volume gives me new ideas for the future volumes, and as I get to know the characters more, they start to suggest things that I never thought of. So the further we get into the series, the more time I've had to prepare. As I head into working on book four, I've had over a decade of time to prepare for it. Because as I lay the groundwork for volume four, I'm figuring out what the story is and who the characters are.
SH: Regarding the characters and story suggesting things and taking unexpected turns, is there anything that’s surprised you in this latest volume?
JJ: Oh, yeah. I mentioned this earlier, but this is a volume with a lot of backstory. I tried in the first two volumes to insert little clues about the world and the story. And I knew at some point I was going to have to fully answer all the questions that I had raised about what is the satchel, who is the Dragon Lord, what is the Dragon Stone, what was the Dragon Crusade? Lots of mysteries. And I didn't want to do a giant lore dump at the start of book one, so I've just been introducing those as part of the world.
So, I knew volume three was going to be the longest book and the most difficult to write, because there were a lot of questions I needed to answer and a lot of things I needed to set up. But it kind of surprised me how much that exposition gave me opportunities to do really fun things with the story. For example, I didn't want to do just a giant 25-page scene where I explained every detail of the world; I wanted to pepper in the backstory and the answers little by little.
One of the ways I do that is to have various characters relate their version of what the story was. So I had some unreliable narrators giving something that was kind of true, but also their subjective perspective. That was a way to explore while also saying something about the characters. It’s given an opportunity for a lot of interesting character moments and also really crazy comedy moments.
So yeah, I was expecting the character exposition to be an uphill climb, but it turned out to be a great entry point for all the storytelling that needed to happen.
SH: I love the array of characters in your books. Any new introductions to keep an eye out for? And will we get a glimpse of the dreaded Dragon Lord?
JJ: There are. I think the stage is now set with volume three. I don't think there will be any major character introductions in the last two books; I think we've met pretty much everyone. And in volume three, we finally see the Dragon Lord, and we meet some other characters that we've only been hearing about for the first couple of books.
SH: We’ve talked before about how challenging it was getting volume two across the finish line. What would you say is the biggest takeaway that you’ve learned from your work on this volume?
JJ: The biggest challenge was keeping the story coming page by page. Before I start working on a book, I always create a basic story outline, and then I take that outline and thumbnail it so that I have each page blocked out with the panels that I need and the basic information that's happening on the page.
When it came time to work on volume three, I discovered there were a lot of things in one part of the story that weren't working. In the series, the two main characters, Marco and Martin, are on parallel journeys. And Marco's journey was front and center in volume two. And in volume three, I knew exactly what Martin's journey needed to be. But Marco’s story wasn't working quite right early on. So I had to stop work on all of Martin's story while I tried to fix Marco's. That presented some setbacks.
The thing I discovered was that I was getting way too involved in Marco’s story. This is the one book in the series that takes on the format of a Western—we have a Western town and the desperados, and I had so many story ideas that as far as I'm concerned are still canon and they still happened. But in this particular book, I needed to strip everything away and make that story just about Marco and his friends and their interactions with the desperados.
So I had to take the time to restructure that part of the story. In the end, I think it works really well now. I found ways to get to the heart of Marco's story and parrot what was going on in Martin's side of the story, but that was a challenge.
SH: It feels like there is a lot of room to play in the world you’ve created in this saga. And speaking of that, I loved the Tales from the Dragon Lord Saga interlude a while back. Do you have more plans to branch off from the main story in the future?
JJ: I have so many plans for stories that go beyond The Dragon Lord Saga, and I actually found out while working on this book that I know what happens to Martin and Marco after The Dragon Lord Saga. But whether I'm able to create that as a story unto itself remains to be seen. I'm just trying to make it through this five volume series first.
SH: One epic is an awful lot.
JJ: It is. And so is one book.
SH: I’ve seen such growth in your storytelling and art skills over the years with each successive project. Having seen previews of Dragons and Desperados along the way, I believe this is your best yet (and that’s saying something). Can you tell us about your biggest inspirations and influences this round?
JJ: When I started work on these color versions of The Dragon Lord Saga, it was the first time I'd worked extensively in color. There's been a journey of figuring out how to use color effectively through the first two volumes, and in this volume, I think you see a major improvement in the way the color looks on the page.
I've been pulling colors from the comics that I've been using for inspiration. So, for this book, I was pulling from a lot of European comics; there are a lot of French, Dutch, and Italian comics that explore adventure stories, with some really beautiful art. And I was enjoying going through those, especially as some of them explore wild frontiers and Western settings, and using them for inspiration for the art. But they also gave me color palettes to work from.
SH: Any recommendations for those of us not very familiar with European comics?
JJ: It's a tricky thing because it's unpredictable which of those comics are available in America. Tin Tin and Asterix have been influences on The Dragon Lord Saga from the beginning. For this project, I discovered a Western comic called Lucky Luke. With that one, you need to be careful about which volumes you read, because not all of it is super culturally sensitive. But it gave me a huge palette to work from both with the use of color and the Western settings.
SH: I know these things take an incredible amount of time, dedication, belief, and energy to produce. What motivates you to invest so much of yourself to put these stories out into the world? What keeps you going day after day?
JJ: [Pauses] Yeah, there’s nothing practical about spending a year and half to make a book that takes twenty minutes to read. Art is hard, and it really caught me off guard when you first asked the question. Why DO I do this? But the more I think about it, the more answers I come up with. Turns out there are a lot of things that keep me going.
For one thing, making art is cool. Where there was nothing on the page, there is now a story. That will never stop delighting me.
For another thing, when I was a kid, books were my greatest treasure. Nothing else filled me with excitement like a new story clutched in my hands, and I can’t think of anything better than providing that for another kid—maybe even my own.
But the biggest thing that keeps me going is that I process the world through stories. I needed adventure stories so much that I created my own, and shaping The Dragon Lord Saga has been shaping me as I process truth and life and grief and all kinds of things through my characters. I hope it provides that for my readers as well.
Stephen Hesselman is a Nashville-area illustrator, recording artist, and technical writer with three children whom he adores. He is currently hard at work on a new graphic novel aimed at publication for next year and also has plans to release at least one full-length album later this year. He has adapted George MacDonald’s classic fairy tale, “The Golden Key,” into a graphic novel, self-published an all-ages coloring book, Serial Adventures and Daydreams, and provided illustrations for several other books. You can find most of his published works in the Rabbit Room Store, follow along (at the free membership level) on his new graphic novel at Patreon, and listen to his EP, Isn't She Pretty?, streaming on Spotify.
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