He Did It All for the Nyuki – Part 2

KO: How old is your son?

JH: My son is two right now. But I wrote Clan Apis when I was just married and planning to have kids, so I guess I always thought in those terms. I guess — this is going to sound screwy — but as far as things like that are concerned, I’ve had my son in mind, and I’ve had my mother in mind. My mother and my father. I want to write stories that they can read.

KO: What kind of readers are your mother and father?

JH: Well, I guess it’s not in terms of necessarily the content. But I come from northern Indiana, a small midwestern town, but a lot of cursing, and sexual situations, and a lot of gratuitous, drippy, bloody violence — not that that’s my voice anyway — that’s not something I’m gonna hand to my mother, or that I want my son to read. And I can’t say for certain whether or not that’s the voice inherent in me, or whether it’s a voice that’s a reaction to a dearth of that type of material. In any event, that’s just the way I write. Because a Warner Brothers cartoon was the same way. As nasty as it got was Bugs Bunny wearing a bra.

KO: And I can enjoy them just as much now as I did when I was six.

JH: And that’s, to me, the key. It’s writing a story that I can enjoy and be proud of now, and in twenty years. That can sit on a library shelf and not be dated. The word my wife constantly accuses me of using is “classic.” There’s something that isn’t rooted in a particular time, and is accessible to anybody who wants to read it at any time. Because the minute you start doing those other things, I think you start cutting yourself off from people. It’s my desire not to cut people out. And the reason that’s important is that it comes from a second perspective from which I write, and that is as an educator. I want to teach people something. So much of the stuff that I pick up — and this is true of comics, it’s true of books, it’s true of magazines — I find myself growing very frustrated, because I read these things, and I don’t walk away with anything. My life hasn’t been enriched in any way. Now that’s not true of everything, but I think a lot of stuff out there just sort of, you know, exists, kind of goes through the motions of telling a story. It doesn’t really do anything to improve me. You know? I don’t want to cut myself off from an audience. The minute you do that, the minute you turn off potential students is the minute you fail to educate somebody, and that’s no good.

KO: You mentioned gratuitous blood and gore — do you think there’s an excess of that in comics specifically? It sounds like maybe you do.

JH: Well, to say there’s an excess is to suggest that I’ve studied the situation, and I have not. So all I can go on is anecdotal stuff. Comics are like movies, so it’s not as if it’s something that’s unique to comics. Comics are like movies — you see more now, there’s a lot less left to your imagination. And growing up, I was never a kid who liked gory movies. I liked scary movies. To this day, I still enjoy watching The Creature from the Black Lagoon, those classic Universal monster pictures. They still scare me a little bit. But I never enjoyed the Halloween, the Friday the 13ths, the hacking and chopping, that just wasn’t my style. So when I see it creeping in, and you can see people holding decapitated heads dripping on the covers of comic books. And it’s not that I think, “oh my goodness, we should censor that,” And I can’t even say that it shouldn’t be done, but invariably it’s going to affect public opinion. And people can make the argument that movies are the same way, people don’t castigate movies because of violence, but the bottom line is, movies are doing fine. There’s no fear that the movie industry is going to collapse. And so that may be true, and people are free to make whatever comics they want, because as long as there’s a market for them — and that’s the other thing. They’ll only be produced if there are people buying them. And you don’t publish books like that at a loss. And so there’s clearly a market for them, so I’m not making any sort of judgment call on them, but it would be nice to see, and I think there are — okay, so now I’ve just sort of spiraled right into mishmash, but — my gut is, when I look at the stands, that it’s a more violent place than it used to be. It’s a less noble place than it used to be, in all genres. I prefer to contribute to something that attempts to be much less violent and more hopeful.

KO: And Clan Apis is nothing if not hopeful.

JH: I hope so.

KO: Staying on that track, you’re very frank about death in Clan Apis, and its place in the cycle of life and in the universe as a whole. When you were thinking that you were going to be writing for all ages, was there ever a contrast as far as writing something for all ages yet not pulling any punches?

JH: It kind of goes back to kids being smart, and kids being able to handle things. My dad, when he was growing up, he was orphaned when he was very young. And it’s a corny story told by my father who grew up in the 40s, but he went to see “Bambi” with his aunt, within the year. And he still talks about how Bambit’s dad says, “You gotta go on. You’ve got to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and that’s just the way it is.” And now people criticize that because, you know, we can’t show kids death, and blah blah blah, and it’s a violent image, but the bottom line is that kids have to potentially deal with death in some respect all through their life. I think they’re capable of dealing with a lot more than we give them credit for. We’re not talking about the death of their aunt or uncle here, or a relative. We’re talking about the death of an animal. And I think the understanding that that’s an element of an animal’s life is an important thing for them not to ignore. Because you can Disneyfy nature too much, you can make it a little too warm, a little too cuddly, and that goes back to the dangerous spiral of anthropomorphizing. These bees are my characters. These bees are my heroes. The queen I liked, Queen Hatchi. But you find out she had to kill the previous queen, and so these elements are not things — as long as you don’t have eviscerated bees lying around and stuff, then these are things that kids can deal with. The real motivation for dealing with that properly on a more important level was my own — if this came through as a fundamental part of the story, it’s because I’ve always dealt with an awful fear of death. And so Nyuki was my surrogate for a lot of things in the story. Like my fear of change, and fear of death as the biggest change there is. And this was sort of my way of dealing with that issue, and in some respects I view that as one of the more grown-up elements, and one of the things that a kid will probably just gloss over. I’m not sure I dealt with the metaphysics of that very well.