Firebug: Image Comics Graphic Novel Conjures Beautiful Magic

Firebug is about myths, magic, family, doubt -- it’s, well, about a lot of things. It’s about a group of idealists, devotees of the Goddess of the Fiery Mountain, trying to change the world for the better and discovering that making history is messy. It’s about balancing love, ego, ambition, kindness and necessity. And it’s about creating a unique, recent-history fantasy world that centers blackness, one built on elements of writer and penciller Johnnie Christmas' years of mulling over creation and destruction myths from all over the world.

This beautiful new Image Comics graphic novel from Christmas and Tamra Bonvillain, with letters by Ariana Maher, is hard to boil down into a tidy handful of themes. In speaking to Christmas and Bonvillain, they had just as much trouble fitting the comic for an elevator pitch that both summed it up and advertised its most interesting qualities. That’s because Firebug is expansive. At 120-odd pages it’s not a tome and the narrative itself is fairly tight, but the comic feels rich with mythology, history and ideas.

Christmas describes the kernel of Firebug to be the fickleness of life, how “it’s like living at the foot of a volcano. And what if that volcano had agency? What if it didn’t like you? What if there’s something you could do to find favor in the eyes of this volcano? Those are the themes that lead to what is now Firebug.” It takes place in a world where the supernatural is real, and nature goddesses have a direct hand in our lives. The Goddess of the Fiery Mountain, who creates and destroys land, even as she creates and destroys herself, has been worshipped since the start of recorded history.

But over time, people got tired of her changeable ways, and moved away from her mountain home. Far away they founded their new capital and a new Cult of the Goddess, in which a high priestess would speak for her. In the years since, the mountain, and the Goddess, have gone quiet. Young rebels, Keegan, Griffon, and Adria set out the fight the Cult, and free the living Goddess who they’ve imprisoned -- even while they work out their new and bitter love triangle.

Firebug asks readers to contend with questions of identity and heritage, safety and justice, without sacrificing its fast-moving adventure plot. It’s not a coming-of-age story, though Keegan, who has a destiny, and Adria, who stumbles into one, both spend a lot of time in Firebug learning to understand themselves and their place in the world. Instead, it hints at something more mythic or epic, with characters undergoing personal journeys metonymic to the great social and godly forces arrayed against each other. Keegan and Adria are in conflict from their first meeting, and I don’t think it’s spoiling anything to tell you that division continues, and that it feeds into and reflects an even greater conflict within the world of Firebug. Because of this double focus on character and plot, and because of Christmas and Bonvillain’s light-handed approach to the material, Firebug is a comic that could appeal to young and adult readers alike.

When I asked Christmas who he anticipated would read the book, he told me that he didn’t know -- but he hoped, everyone.

“I’m very curious to see who is the audience for Firebug. Who am I gonna run into? On every project I’m always surprised by who approaches [me about it], which is wonderful.”

If I tell you that Firebug is almost 10 years in the making, you’ll get the wrong idea -- it’s been almost 10 years of the idea working itself in notes, outlines, and sometimes in the back of Christmas’ head, but only a couple of years of scripting, pencilling, and coloring.

“The first notes I found for it were from 2011,” Christmas told me. (“WOW,” was naturally my response.) “It would emerge as one thing and I then I would forget about it for months. When it popped back up again it would be something slightly different in each incarnation. It’s been with me for a while.”

Firebug made its debut in the now-defunct Image Comics anthology, Island, in May 2016. Christmas and Bonvillain had intended to serialize it, but the magazine was cancelled before a second chapter could be published. After taking some time to rethink what Firebug needed to be, and how it needed to change for the graphic novel format, Christmas and Bonvillain resumed work on the project. “There was a whole lot of Firebug that had to be chopped; rewritten and redrawn. Which I think ultimately made it a better story.”

The thrust of Firebug is significantly but not essentially changed from what we were first saw in Island. Christmas said that subplots were changed or eliminated, and new characters and themes insisted on their inclusion. The difference between Island’s Firebug and its final version is marked -- it moves faster, feels more accessible, and leaves less unsaid. That’s not a result of Christmas having had more time to work on it: the graphic novel isn’t the perfected form of the idea, it’s a different take on it.

The Firebug of Island is what he meant it to be and the Firebug that stands on its own is what he meant it to be, too. The difference is the format and the company. Island provided Christmas with an opportunity to finally bring Firebug to life, and to work alongside other comics creators he admires, anticipating and responding to their work. “Originally it was a bit more experimental; more like a poem. The story was going to be like three episodes that [functioned as] windows into the life of this character.”

Turning Firebug into a graphic novel, with a more linear narrative, required a slightly different set of skills and a different approach to the material. It required thinking about a very different potential audience. Cutting, for example, any profanity or violence he didn’t think the story required. “If it didn’t need it, why keep it?” The intent wasn’t to target younger readers specifically, but to ensure that he didn’t alienate them, or anyone else, unnecessarily. “Whoever shows up to the party, I’m glad they’re there and I hope they’re having a good time.” The result is a fully fleshed out new world that only Christmas could have built, and only Bonvillain could have decorated.

"At first the writing was a bit more... loose, but as I got further along I started writing scripts for myself as though I was writing for someone else," Christmas said. "I would leave some areas open to go more Marvel Method, for lack of a better term. So it was like heavy structure in some parts and then it would open up when scenes were a bit more emotional, or free flowing, just so I wouldn’t get in my own way, art-wise.”

Page 2: [valnet-url-page page=2 paginated=0 text='The long-running collaboration between Christmas and Bonvillain, changing up processes for Firebug']

The other difference in Christmas’ approach was that he “wrote on the page.” That is, without a writer or line artist collaborator he was free to go straight to thumbnailing or pencilling scenes, realizing scenes immediately in visuals without having to describe them, and to write dialogue as he pencilled without second guessing himself. Changing gears from the heavily collaborative comics model of Marvel, DC Comics, and many mid to small-size publishers, to doing the writing and linework himself was definitely a change -- but one that seems to have pushed Christmas to try new things. “As I’m going, I know what the character needs to say or emote and it just goes right down [on the page] right then. It was freeing.”

This method was driven by Christmas’ desire to have a character-driven story that also had a tight plot. He would sketch out the structure and key events of the plot, but leave some of the details of scenes and dialogue to be worked out when he sat down to do pencils.

“Depending on what the characters were doing, that might shift the plot," he said. "Not overall, you know, in the grand scheme, but in subtle ways,” and especially within scenes. Some of these changes surprised him, but as he learned about his characters, he let them guide his hand. “I would thumbnail on the day [I sat down to do pencils] and on the page, as opposed to doing a universal thumbnail, and just draw on top of it. Since I knew where [the story] was going, I knew what the highlights were and what I wanted to emphasize. Then I would ink it. (Most of the time I would forget to scan the pencils, which a few of my art friends would yell at me for.) So it was kind of, all happening as it was happening.”

Christmas and Bonvillain have worked together for years, first collaborating on a cover for Enormous, then right after, the science fiction comic Pisces. They most recently worked together on Margaret Atwood’s quirky environmental pulp comic at Dark Horse Comics, Angel Catbird. They’ve been working together so long that Bonvillain was at the top of Christmas’ list for the project -- the obvious choice -- and their collaborative process has become easy, almost instinctive.

“I couldn’t tell you exactly when I first started thinking about Firebug,” Christmas told me, “But I think I was thinking about it even then, when I first approached Tamra about Pisces. I just loved her colors.” (Her name was the only one on his list for potential collaborators for that Enormous cover, too.)

Firebug isn’t quite like Christmas’ past work. Pisces and Angel Catbird are very different beasts. It’s fluid and bright in a way that few of his and Bonvillain’s past collaborations have been in the past. That’s because both Christmas and Bonvillain saw Firebug as an opportunity to experiment and to stretch themselves.

Asked if previous projects had informed what Firebug became, Christmas said it was a holistic influence, and nothing direct in terms of theme. Or in other words, his career wasn’t building towards Firebug specifically, but every project he’s worked on made it easier for him to finally make Firebug a reality.

“It helps with shorthand," he said. "Every project you work on helps you get to the solution you want much more elegantly. I think Tamra would agree that everything you do, you’re trying to get to the core of what you want without all the extra around it. Every job helps you streamline the next one, so you’re getting there faster.”

When I told him that, in terms of linework, I thought Firebug was a bit of a departure for him, he said that he tried to approach the story with a lighter hand, describing his pencils as “looser” than is typical. That’s an apt description. If you’re most familiar with Christmas from Angel Catbird, Firebug will seem a riot of curls and wild lines. Bonvillain responded to this by trying something new herself: watercolours.

“There’s certain artists, as a colorist, that I feel you really click with and Johnnie’s definitely one of those," Bonvillain said. "I’ve always loved working with him. On [Firebug] we tried something different. He gave me the name of a watercolor artist [as a reference]. And I thought, you know what, we’ll try this.”

Bonvillain found a good digital watercolor brush and started playing around, doing tests, quickly finding herself far from that original reference point. “I approached the work with the same sensibilities,” she told me, but this time incorporating new techniques into “my own thing,” expanding what that could be.

"I have a very specific method of coloring, and this was completely different from how I would normally do it," she explained. "Normally you do a thing called flats for a comic. It’s just what it sounds like, flat color, with no light or shadow. Then I’ll have layers of stuff on top of that to fill out the rendering. So I’ll have a layer for shadows [and another] for mood lighting. All built on top of those flats. But with this, watercolor, you can’t do that. With watercolor you start from a white page and you build up the color from there, and you can’t build it on top of flats because with watercolor you don’t fill everything in with solid [blocks of] color. And especially with the way Johnnie draws, there’s lots of open areas that don’t have neat delineations, where something ends and begins.”

Firebug, Bonvillain related, pushed to approach coloring differently. Watercolour, she said, is just “more organic.”

Christmas similarly described his process as “organic,” and it struck me as I talked to them about how the book came together, how in tune they are with each other and how much they trusted the other’s work. They didn’t have lengthy discussions of how to approach things, instead, like old friends, just riffing on each other’s skills and trusting each other to hold up their end.

“When we did the first [comic],” Bonvillain said, “I sent him a lot of color studies that I did ahead of time. But once we got a rhythm [and worked out the details], I just kind of went. We have a good relationship where he trusts me and we’re usually on the same page.” These days, Christmas and Bonvillain work smoothly and easily, knowing they’ll make each other’s work better.

Firebug is available now from Image Comics.