I’ve been an admirer of Matt Kindt’s comics work ever since I read the 2001 graphic novel Pistolwhip, his collaboration with Jason Hall. Since then, his career has seen him take on a host of genres, including working with some other high-profile collaborators. (Notably, Keanu Reeves on BRZRKR.) Kindt’s latest collaboration finds him working in the mystery genre, collaborating with his mother Margie Kraft Kindt on the series Gilt Frame. The first issue is due out this Wednesday, and I spoke with the two collaborators on the making of their new series.
There’s a long lineage of fictional detectives looking to solve mysteries in comics and prose alike. Where do you see Sam and Merry — and Gilt Frame — fitting into the genre?
Matt Kindt: I’m curious what my mom will say on this one. We didn’t talk too much about outside influences while working on it.
I would say a mix of Jessica Fletcher from Murder She Wrote and Hardcastle and McCormick — classic 80s television. I don’t think we were thinking about either one of those things when we started writing this. Maybe throw in a dash of Only Murders in the Building. I think Murder, She Wrote because Sam and Merry aren’t really looking for murder. They kind of stumble into it. And Hardcastle and McCormick because of the age gap between the protagonists. But the more I think about it — I think if you mixed Murder, She Wrote with The Talented Mr. Ripley — that would be the closest comparison.
Margie Kraft Kindt: If you are familiar with the Little Lulu comic books of the 1940s-50s, Merry is Lulu as a grown-up globetrotter in a far broader, more dangerous world.
An unconventional septuagenarian, Great-Aunt Merry and her equally quirky great-nephew, Sam, close the generation gap because she wanted a child and trusted confidante while he needed a mother and good buddy. The two eccentrics are not designed to string together one monotonous day after another–if Merry wins a pair of antique French chairs at auction, she is off to Paris to trace their history. Where she goes, Sam goes, and in a flash a journey can turn into an escapade . . . anything can happen . . . and does.
Matt, has collaborating with your mother been similar to some of your other collaborations, or did you have to work out a different method for this project?
Matt Kindt: Every project has a different process to it — regardless of collaborator. Even when I’m just on my own — I’m trying something different or approaching it in a different way to keep myself from getting into a rut or getting bored. Adding a collaborator just makes the entire thing different without having to try as hard. You’r bouncing off of another person. I think my collaboration with Keanu Reeves on BRZRKR was really just great training for a collaboration with my mom. There’s a perceived power dynamic imbalance with both of these collabs — and I think Keanu was a great model on how to approach that perceived imbalance and just wiping it away. Just becoming two people in a room trying to come up with the best ideas. So if anything, I copied the process that Keanu and I used. We just talk about story first. Plot. Characters. Then sort of act it out. And I type it down as we go. Life and the creative process are kind of funny – you’re flowing down a river to a degree. You can steer left or right a bit – but one things flows into the next in a way that just always seems to make sense. Every book I’ve worked on – they’re all connected in some way.
Margie, what first interested you in comics as a storytelling medium? Any favorite books or creators?
Margie Kraft Kindt: Growing up in the 1940s-50s, isolated on a dairy farm in southern Illinois, the monthly treks to town were highlighted by a stop at J.J. Newberry 5 & 10 with a sprawling wall of colorful, come-hither comic books. My grandmother allowed me only one dime and it was no contest, Little Lulu every time. When I could finagle an extra dime, I looked for a Scrooge McDuck comic that featured the Beagle boys – it is important to keep your eye on the bad guys.
Since my generation did not grow up with graphic novels, they first caught my attention when Matthew, as a youngster, wanted to go to comic book conventions. The nearest one was held annually on Mother’s Day – a great way to celebrate the occasion every year because the moms were handed a carnation at the door, there were vintage Little Lulu comics to replace those that did not survive my childhood, and it was an opportunity to walk around with Matt and see what caught his eye, to learn about what interested him, and to watch him interact with the artists who were there–as a tween he was already curious about why a cartoonist used blue for shadows on a character’s face.
This Mother’s Day, Matt gifted me a page of original art from our Gilt Frame collaboration–who could have predicted?
What prompted the three issue structure for this? Would you say that Gilt Frame follows something of a three-act structure?
Matt Kindt: I’ve been experimenting with format the last couple years with my Flux House imprint. I’m kind of bridling against this sort of lazy 22 page monthly comic format – that usually runs 4 or 6 issues and gets collected into a trade. It’s a boring way to make comics. 22 pages isn’t enough for a chapter. Or for the five bucks you’re going to spend on it. I want these issues to feel special. To be fat…thick with content. So every month when you read an issue it’s putting a little dent into your psyche. Sticking with you long enough to get to the next issue. They’re big issues. As I was finishing up painting the first one — I was wondering why it was taking so long. I felt slow…like I was slacking — and then realized that no — I’m painting the equivalent of 3 normal comic book issues in a month. I don’t really think in three act structure. I think that’s kind of damaging to the creative process. It makes it more of a science and less of an art. So I don’t like talking in those terms. What we did was write the entire story. Then broke it down into pages. Then I just started drawing it. There are chapter breaks here and there – but it’s where the story needed them. Where it made sense. Only at the end was I worried about how we would publish it. Would it be 6 issues — 30 pages each? That seemed too fractured — too long for a whodunnit. We don’t want you forgetting what happened in issue 1 by the time you get to the end. So we condensed it for this one. It took a little designing out-of-the-box to get the story to fit in 60 page chunks since we hadn’t written in that way. But it’s like sculpting. You take some off here – add a hunk there. Build it up into its final form. We had a few extra pages here and there for the 60 page format so that just gave us an opportunity to add some extra journal pages – story stuff – that my mom is designing – literally building a journal that I’m taking photos of for some of the back matter. It’s not throw-away filler though. We’ve made it integral to the story. I’m not a fan of ads in comics or in process pages to show how it’s done – I think all of that just pulls you out of the story. I want these issues to be immersive – like an artifact you’ve found. Every inch of the comic is part of the story.
Margie Kraft Kindt: Gilt Frame fits the model of a three-act play – in part one, all hell breaks loose and the unthinkable happens . . . in part two everyone is set on either confuscating or cracking a grisly crime . . . by the end of part three, everyone knows where to point the finger . . . perhaps.
If the announcement of Gilt Frame is any indication, these characters have a long shared history prior to the events of this volume. What was the process like as far as coming up with their backstory?
Matt Kindt; It was easy for me. I’ll let mom talk about that a bit — we sourced some of her previously written mysteries for her character — and sort of grafted “my” character — Sam into them. They’re very much analogs of me and my mom — but a kind of heightened and warped version of ourselves. It was important that we both have a “main character” that we would each control. Again — something I learned by doing with BRZRKR. I was operating the Diana and Caldwell characters to a degree and Keanu was running B — and the same here — we were really just playing a role-playing game…”becoming” our characters to a degree more than they are just us, fictionalized.
The backstory of the characters is really critical to the book. I think the main “mystery” that’s solved (or not) in the comic is one thing — but the real fun, the real reason you’d want to come back and read this again…and read another one — is Sam and Merry. They are the real mystery of this series.
Margie Kraft Kindt: About twenty-five years ago, I wanted a break from writing nonfiction and ended up with three novella-length mysteries featuring and developing the same characters –written just for fun, my own amusement.
During our family dinners, we typically talk about the latest true crime, gasp over a dramatic court scene when the defendant took the stand, or predict the resolution of an on-going television serial. When I wrongly predicted the ending of one of our favorite tv mysteries, Matt liked my solution better than how the program actually unfolded and suggested, “Mom, we ought to write a mystery together.”
When I pulled the mysteries from the shelf and brushed away the dust, one of them contained the seed for Gilt Frame, though a much different story as we changed the setting from a rural village to St. Louis and then Paris, as more dynamic and exotic characters were written into the plot, and as twists and back story were added that led to a more complicated investigation and a different, unforeseen resolution–unanticipated even by us, as our characters led the way.
Matt gave Sam his back story, while creating a past for Merry meant taking a good look at the psychology of her character and then imagining what life experiences shaped her present personality, outlook, worldview, and philosophy. That she is easily bored and far from mainstream in the way she puts together a life, she blames on her gene pool . . . that she is tenacious and Stoic, she attributes to a long history of goal setting, challenges, and adversity.
Read on for a preview of the first issue of Gilt Frame….
Follow Vol. 1 Brooklyn on Twitter, Facebook, and sign up for our mailing list.