Ten years after the first volume of Amulet came out, Kazu Kibuishi is heading into the final stretch of the middle-grade fantasy series. Volume 8, subtitled Supernova, arrives in stores on September 25, with Kibuishi already working on the ninth and final volume, which he promises will send the characters off to ride bicycles on a distant planet.
In addition to sharing the exclusive debut of the trailer for Supernova, Kibuishi spoke with CBR about what he's thinking about as he winds up the plot threads and gets ready to bring his saga to an end.
CBR: Supernova is the eighth volume, and then you have just one to go. Are you still working on that one or is it finished?
Kazu Kibuishi: I have a contract for another book with Scholastic, but right now I’m just focused on doing research for volume 9 right. I’ve been doing field research. In Amulet 8, I went out and studied a lot of mountain bikes, and that actually played heavily into that book, and in the next book, because the characters are essentially left on a giant ambulance, I am studying what medics do.
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You have described this book as “a trilogy of trilogies.” Is there a single backbone that you have used to construct the whole story?
Yes, in that where we are going to end up in the story is generally what I had planned from the beginning, but as I continued through the story, the arcs got more complicated and a lot bigger. I see it as a circle, like an elastic band that has expanded to encompass a lot more than I anticipated
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So you didn’t originally plan for it to be nine volumes long?
No, I had no idea how long it would be, and I didn’t know that Amulet would be my big project. I thought of it as a warmup to other projects.
How hard is it to tell a story over a series of volumes like this—and how hard is it to keep your audience engaged?
There are new things that go into each book that really are reflective of what I’m thinking of while I’m writing that particular book. There is an arc, but most of the ideas in each book are reflective of my current life. So it is fresh. If I’m going on the journey with the characters, the characters have to go on this journey with me as well. So I found middle ground between what I planned to do and what I currently would want to do. Like the bicycles in volume 8—I had no idea I would be drawing characters riding bikes on another planet. That came as a surprise, but it made sense in the moment. I ride all the time, every week. I researched mountain bike suspension design and I incorporated that into the design of the bikes in the book.
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What were your influences? Were you thinking about any particular kind of comic or TV show?
When I started I was mostly influenced by the movies I grew up in the 80s: Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, George Lucas, John Carpenter, movies you would see on TV all the time like Big Trouble in Little China and The Last Star Fighter. And I fused it with my love of Miyazaki movies, especially Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. I discovered his work late, when I was in college. I basically just fused those plus Akira Kurasawa movies. I love Kurasawa; he’s my favorite filmmaker. And Krzysztof Kieslowski; the opening scene of Amulet was very much influenced by the opening scene of Blue from the Three Colors trilogy.
Did you plan for Amulet to be nine volumes long?
Going into the first book, I really thought it was going to be a short story—I thought it would be a 300-page book. Scholastic asked me to turn it into two volumes. I just figured I would do this two-book story and then do the next thing. Then they asked if I would extend the series, and I am glad they asked me to do that. They asked for three more books after the first two, so we were up to five, and by the time I was on the fifth book, it was clear I wouldn’t be able to complete the story in the fifth book, so I asked for a contract for seven, and then it was clear I couldn’t finish there, so I asked for two more books. It’s one of the reasons why this latest book has taken so long. I’m trying not to open any new threads. I do open new threads in this book, but they are designed to end at the end of this series. They are not a completely new major-character storyline that is going to last for multiple books. I had to journey to the end of the story, figure out what that was, then walk it back and make the eighth book.
Does that mean making the ninth book will be easier?
I hope so. I don’t expect any book to be easy. Each book is harder than the next, but going into it I set it up so there are only two storylines running in this particular book, so I could focus a little bit more on fewer characters, or at least fewer places. I’ve been running three threads on each book, and it has limited the amount of time I could spend on each place. I would like the reader to be able to spend a little bit more time with the main two characters, Emily and Navin.
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Amulet has some dark aspects as well as lots of fun, Saturday-morning-cartoon-style action. How do you balance these aspects, especially when writing for children?
I think it’s good to have a mix of the two. I don’t really do it in a calculated manner. I just go where the scene takes me. Sometimes it’s a funny scene and I go with that. Sometimes it’s more serious than I anticipated, and that’s fine too. It’s my job to be surprised by it so the readers will be surprised too. I feel like I’m following [the characters] with a camera or with a journal and documenting it and hoping something interesting happens along the way. That’s why I do so many drafts, maybe 20 drafts of the sequences, to try different things. I’ll sketch out a 20-page sequence one night, then I’ll sleep on it, get up, and do it again and do it again. Sometimes I’ll put it away for a month or two and come back to it, and eventually I’ll have all these different drafts, and really interesting things will have happened by accident. One day I’ll say “This is the day I’ll do this scene. I’ll pencil it today.” I think of all the ones I have, take the best parts, and combine all those parts with improvisation, and that is the final draft.
I basically formed my process around the writing process. I feel the best writers are the rewriters who do it over and over again. I simplified my style and made the characters easy to draw over and over again. Drawing Amulet doesn’t hurt. Copper hurts too much—it’s all circles, and it causes tension in my hand and wrist to try to draw perfect circles. So I design my characters to be more elliptical and triangular and rectangular shapes that don’t require so much precision. I am good at understanding where I fail, and I’m good at working around it. I enjoy process, thinking about it, what’s not right about it and what can I do better. And that’s what gets me excited about the work.
How did you create the world of these books? Do you draw maps or make models to help you as you go?
I don’t produce much reference. I try to design as much as I can within the book, so I know what I need for that object or person or environment and what I need those things to do. I often change the design of a character or object or landscape while I’m drawing that scene, and I’ll have to go back and redraw all of it to fit what I have in the end. I do five or six sketches, that will take me 15-20 minutes, and I will say “That looks good enough” and start drawing and writing scenes knowing that I will throw away the first, second, third, fourth drafts anyway, so I might as well see how they look. I go back and do it again, do it again, and by the time I am done with the scene I have become an expert at that scene.
I feel only a little bit nervous when the book is coming out, but I know for myself when it’s good and when it’s not, because I have done all the bad versions. It gives me a sense of calm when it moves out of there after going through that kind of process.
In the end, what is your favorite part of the series?
Being done with it! Being done with each book and going on the road to talk to the readers. That’s my favorite part. I’m not the kind of person who likes to sit in a room and draw. In fact, that’s why I tried to quit drawing comics for a career—I wanted to get out and about—but I realized I can still do that, I just have to get away from the desk once in a while or go somewhere else to draw.