Ryan North might be best known for the weekly comic "Dinosaur Comics." North also wrote the “Adventure Time” comic book series for years, “The Midas Flesh” miniseries and wrote the novel “To Be Or Not To Be.” This fall he takes over writing “Jughead” at Archie Comics.
This month two books he wrote come out. One is his new novel,"Romeo and/or Juliet," which is just what it sounds. North crammed as much Shakespeare as he could into a book designed as a game. North is also writing “The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl” monthly from Marvel Comics, which is possibly the funniest comic being made right now. The titular hero can take anyone–she’s “unbeatable” and never lost a fight–but she tries to find a way to solve people’s problems without violence. In this, she’s assisted by various heroes (Chipmunk Hunk, Koi Boi), her college roommate Nancy, and her squirrel sidekick Tippy-Toe. In the very first issue, she writes her own theme song (to the tune of “Spider-man”) which she sings while beating up muggers. The new collection of the book titled “Squirrel Girl: Squirrel, You Really Got Me Now” is just out.
ALEX DUEBEN: I spent a couple hours flipping through Romeo and/or Juliet to see what you were trying to do
RYAN NORTH: What is he trying to do with this? [laughs]
AD: And I have no idea, but it was a lot of fun.
RN: [laughs] That’s what I’m shooting for.
AD: I wanted to talk because I so rarely read anything unless it’s for work but I read the first two Squirrel Girl trades recently and they were hysterical.
RN: That’s very easy to hear. I love hearing people like the books. It’s much better than I got Squirrel Girl and what were you doing?
AD: People probably know you for Dinosaur Comics, you wrote the Adventure Time comic book years, and other projects, but how did you end up writing Squirrel Girl?
RN: You can trace that all the way back to Dinosaur Comics, actually. I’ve been doing Dinosaur Comics for the past 13 years and what I found out a couple years ago was it turns out on top of comics I was also making this hopefully entertaining longform resume. I’ve been doing Dinosaur Comics long enough that some of the readers have gotten jobs and are out there in the world. I got that job writing Adventure Time because the editor Shannon Watters was a fan of Dinosaur Comics and when it came time to find a writer for the book she thought of me and dropped me an email. Which is a boring story because it’s, I got an email asking if I wanted to write this and I said I would. But the fact that she already knew the kind of humor I had, she knew that I could meet a deadline, she knew that I had a similar sensibility to the show–all that came from the comic.
For Squirrel Girl, editor Will Moss found me through Adventure Time. The comic increased my profile and so he thought I would be a good fit for Squirrel Girl. The way Marvel works or at least Will works, is he collects his team. He thought, I bet Ryan North and Erica Henderson could do a good Squirrel Girl comic. I didn’t know Erica before at all and now we’re really good pals. There’s a line though all of that leading back to me in 2003 putting up this talking dinosaur comic where the pictures don’t change on a webserver. I think it’s cool that you can trace that journey.
AD: When he came to you, what was that first conversation like?
RN: He said, give me your pitch on what your Squirrel Girl comic would look like.
AD: Was your first response, who the heck is Squirrel Girl?
RN: [laughs] My first response was, Squirrel Girl? Do I know who that is? I looked her up and she was who I thought. I took the weekend, which is what I tend to do every time I do a pitch. I take a couple days, think about the character, research all I can, and try to see if there’s something there that catches my interest. Sometimes it doesn’t. I’ve gone back to people and said, I don’t have any ideas, I’m sorry. With Squirrel Girl I took the weekend and at the end of that weekend, I knew that I really wanted there to be a Squirrel Girl comic and I knew that I really wanted to be the person who was writing it. I was totally sucked in.
I sent a pitch which was probably a two page document with, this is the type of story I want to tell. I remember saying I wanted it to be accessible and all ages because they recently rebooted it–we had two #1’s in the same year–but at that point they had 60 years of continuity and that’s a hard thing to get into. Also I don’t know 60 years of Marvel continuity. My pitch was let’s make it accessible. I referenced the Lego Marvel games which use all these characters in a way that tell you who they are, give you the basics, and you can hit the ground running. You don’t have to know all of Galactus’ history, you have to know he’s a big guy and he eats planets. That was my pitch and a week later Will said, it’s a great pitch, we’re really excited, here’s Erica’s art, what do you think? She had done these sketches of Squirrel Girl and the sketches were so good and we were on the same page with the character. Having seen nothing of what I wrote, the sketches were exactly what I was thinking of. And so when I was writing the first issue I had her sketches up on one monitor and my writing up on the other monitor so I could keep the image of the character in my head. It was a real collaborative experience which worked out really well as comics is a collaborative medium and at its best you’re putting out a book that’s better than you could do on your own. More than the sum of its parts is the cliche I’m reaching for there.
AD: You’re dealing with a shared universe, when the company decides to relaunch the book with a new #1. Does all that throw you off or do you try not think about that?
RN: This sounds like an evasive answer, but it’s a fun challenge. You’re working in a shared universe. For example in the first issue–the first first issue–I wanted to put Kraven in it. Will said, let me check with the Spider-man office. You’ve got to imagine that's an office with Spider-man sitting at a desk. The Spider office came back and said, you can use Kraven but just so you know, he’s immortal right now and can only be killed by Spider-man. I thought, okay, I can work with that. Later on I wanted to use Captain America and have her beat up The Avengers. Will checked with the Captain America office, which I assume has the shield on the door. They said sure but just so you know he’s got the super soldier serum sucked out of his right now and he’s an old man with no powers. I thought, well, Squirrel Girl beating up Captain America is fun but beating up an old man without powers feels mean. I said, okay, let’s not do that. Then my editor’s editor piped in on the email chain and said, he’s still really powerful, he’s been trained by the military, and I’m like, okay, she’ll beat him up. When you’re working in a shared universe you have access to all these toys and other characters but they also have their own stories going on and you don’t want to step on their toes. It’s a challenge but also you can use it as a way to unlock storytelling possibilities you wouldn’t have thought of in the first place. The issue is all about Squirrel Girl finding a new way for Kraven to live given this restriction he operates under. That came out of them saying, he’s immortal and can only be killed by Spider-man. It’s unlike any other sort of writing I’ve done.
AD: You also have fun in one issue where people trapped in the Statue of Liberty during a fight all tell their Squirrel Girl stories, each in a different tone and art style.
RN: That was fun. I pitched that as let’s have a breather issue where we do something different and let’s let Erica show off her chops by having her change her drawing style. She does a perfect dead on pastiche of Silver Age comics. I was inspired by that because in issue two or three we had a flashback to Galactus coming to Earth and it was done in the sixties super dramatic style and so I saw Erica could do that and I wanted to write something to show that off.
AD: The issue also has one of the best descriptions of a superhero’s powers: she punches people until they stop committing crimes.
RN: It’s fun to write a superhero vigilante comic, but given the larger context there are some problems associated with going out and beating up people. [laughs] That’s why we invented the police. What I like about Squirrel Girl as a character is she doesn’t punch first, she tries to find compromise first. That was something that my editor gave me. It was like reading the answer sheet in a teachers manual. In the first draft I had her beating up Kraven and he was like, I saw her as someone who helps people solve their problems and I was like oh my god, yes, that’s who she is. That’s been the defining aspect of the character. She’s not instantly ready to fight everyone all the time, which for a regular human I would hope is routine, but in a superhero context it’s a bit more revolutionary. [laughs]
AD: You also have great supporting characters like Koi Boi.
RN: Koi Boi. Chipmunk Hunk. Nancy Whitehead.
AD: The book comes out monthly, the third collection is out this month, and then you have a graphic novel coming out in the fall.
RN: In October we have a separate standalone story coming out. That’s a brand new Squirrel Girl adventure. The reason we did that is because in this monthly shared storytelling, you have to clean up after yourself. If I have a cliffhanger that ends with say the Earth gets blown up and then the issue ends, everyone reading comics during that month until the next issue comes out will be like, the Earth was destroyed in Squirrel Girl, how is everyone else still here? This makes no sense. If you can put that story out all at once where you blow up the earth and replace the earth at some point within that one book, you can still tell a story within that shared universe and not have it break everything else. So let’s just tell a larger story than what we could otherwise do. Which is good because it’s called Squirrel Girl Beats Up the Marvel Universe. It’s about her beating up the Marvel Universe–for a good reason. I don’t want to spoil it, but they had it coming. [laughs]
AD: Now before this series I knew two things about Squirrel Girl. One, that she was co-created by Steve Ditko.
RN: Who co-created Spider-Man.
AD: And two, that she’s famous for beating up every person she faces.
RN: Yeah. The way that came across was she shows up in the early nineties and she beats up Doctor Doom when she meets Iron Man. At the time Doctor Doom was getting beat up by everyone, so it was no great shakes. In the decade after that in which she did not appear, Marvel started repositioning Doctor Doom as this big undefeatable bad guy and retroconned all of his previous losses as being doombots, robotic duplicates, clones, stuff like that. They did it on a one by one basis and this story with Squirrel Girl was so obscure it was overlooked. Ten years later someone noticed that this was one of the only times that Doctor Doom has lost–and it was to a woman with squirrel powers. Dan Slott put her in Great Lakes Avengers and the joke was that off panel she would beat people way out of her power league. “That’s it for Thanos, took care of it.” Our book is called “The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl.” She’s really good at what she does. She’s supremely competent but I can’t use that gag of off panel beatups too often because it becomes a cheat. The fun of writing it is figuring out all these different ways that a woman with squirrel powers could stop Galactus or do all this other stuff. It’s a very fun, creative challenge writing Squirrel Girl, for sure.
AD: And as you say, it’s about her finding a way to solve people’s problems and not beat them up
RN: I feel like in the comic as in real life–this is a truth that I’ve found–you can’t solve all your problems by beating someone up. [laughs]
AD: One of my favorite moments in the comic is when she writes her own theme song.
RN: That was in the pitch! I was turning over her name in my head, Squirrel Girl squirrel girl squirrel girl. It fits the cadence of the Spider-man theme song and so I just started writing lyrics and every draft of the first issue, the lyrics got more and more refined. The fun of it is that, as you know, comics is a silent medium and it’s very hard to put music in. The advantage of working for Marvel and them having Spider-man is that everybody knows the Spider-man theme song. On top of that its cadence is very clear when it’s written down because it’s such a punchy one-two-three one-two-three one-two-three-four-five one-two-three and once you hit that with your syllables, people hear it in their head right away. You get to have people sing along to the song even though it’s a silent medium, which is a lot of fun. I love seeing people’s videos of them singing the Squirrel Girl theme song–which Spider-man retroactively stole. [laughs]
AD: You can use the constant revision in comics to your advantage.
RN: Exactly. The fun thing is that in Spider-man’s continuity, he doesn’t know that song. Peter Parker doesn’t go around singing that song, which means that in the Marvel Universe, it can totally be Squirrel Girl’s. No one else has claimed it.
AD: Were the footnotes there from the beginning?
RN: They were. They have their lineage in the alt text Dinosaur Comics where you hover your mouse over the comic and get a secondary punchline. When I started writing Adventure Time, I wanted to put the footnotes in. The punchline there was that my editor was all for them and her editor was all against them and so as a compromise they put the footnotes on every second page of that first issue of Adventure Time to see how people reacted. People loved them so then I got all the footnotes that I wanted. In Squirrel Girl I continued that. I put them on basically every page as a way to do more jokes or to comment on what’s happening. I’ll sometimes leave them out if it ruins the beat of the comic itself. I never want to interfere with the reading experience. What I like about it is that comics is not a cheap hobby. It’s not an inexpensive way to spend your time. I love the idea that we’re literally stuffing jokes in the margins. We’re trying to get you as much comic entertainment as we can.
AD: Your other big book this month is Romeo and/or Juliet. A few years ago you wrote To Be or Not To Be. Where did the idea of taking a Shakespeare play and turning it into a choose your own adventure story come from?
RN: This story makes me sound a lot more classy than I actually am. I was driving home and the radio was talking about how people don’t have any poetry memorized these days. I was thinking, what poetry do I have memorized, and I was turning over Hamlet’s To Be or Not To Be speech. I realized that structure has a choice. To Be or Not To Be. It’s structured like a choice in those old choose your own adventure books I used to read when I was a kid. My next thought was, I have to write this. Also I have to call it something other than “choose your own adventure” because that is a trademarked phrase, so I call it as “chooseable path adventure”.
I said I would write a sequel and that’s where Romeo and/or Juliet comes from. I was going to do Macbeth at first but if you look at Hamlet’s storyline from a game perspective: Hamlet gets a mission to kill the final boss, he takes his time and then kills the final boss and then story’s over. Also, he’s dead. If you look at Macbeth, Macbeth decides he’s going to kill the king, kills the king pretty quickly and spends the rest of the play feeling guilty about it. From a a play perspective, that’s high drama. From a game perspective, turn to page 17 to feel guilty isn’t really a compelling story. [laughs] I was thinking about Romeo and Juliet for a long time and I realized that I didn’t like the ending. I found the ending really frustrating. It took me a surprisingly long time to realize I could have multiple endings–over 100 endings. You can get that happy ending. Then I wrote Macbeth in as a book within the book. I tried to cram in all the Shakespeare I could into this book.
AD: I hadn’t thought of it that way but Macbeth and King Lear and a lot of the other plays are about the consequences of what people do early on.
RN: It’s good for writing a play, but if you’re playing it, you want events happening all the time. Romeo and Juliet as characters make some spectacularly bad decisions, but that also causes a lot of things to happen all the time.
AD: They’re also surrounded by lots of interesting characters.
RN: And they themselves are interesting too. It took me a while to figure out who Juliet is. In my book I realized what makes Juliet work is if she is this shut in who has her life controlled by her parents. Then this thing with Romeo is not oh I met a cool guy at a party it’s more like oh my god I met my first guy at a party. I remember my first crush. I thought, this person is perfect and this person is definitely my soulmate and what an incredible coincidence that I met the love of my life here in grade 9 and they live in the same town. It feels like that height of world ending emotion and you don’t know these feelings you’re feeling for the first time. That made me understand, this is who Juliet is. She’s not dealing with a crush but a first crush and she’s unequipped for it and she just throws herself into it. And I gave her lots of muscles because I’ve never seen a muscly Juliet. I thought if you were a shut in, you’d lift weights, so she gets ripped. [laughs]
AD: You had a lot of fun turning the play into a game.
RN: The conceit of the book is that Romeo and/or Juliet came first and Shakespeare did one read through the book and plagiarizes it for his play. Which I love because it’s the most egotistical conceit in the world. [laughs] I’m not an egotistical guy but I love saying, that guy Shakespeare plagiarized me.
I think the fun of doing something like this is that Shakespeare is so canonized as this amazingly great writer and everyone knows who these characters are. There’s a sense of fun and anarchy and breaking the rules that comes with this canonized text when you have fun with it and play with it. I was worried some Shakespeare scholar, some old guy in a stuffy room would say, you’re desecrating the bard, but everyone I spoke to was really enthusiastic. It might be because these plays were written as entertainment. Now we study them in school–turning them literally into homework, and when something is homework it’s less fun. I think that’s fair. A book like this recaptures this sense of entertainment–and you’re not going to have to write an essay about it! You have the option of following Shakespeare’s path through my book and recovering the original play, but I would not recommend writing an essay based on that experience because you’re probably going to get some details wrong. I can’t guarantee you an A+.
AD: When thinking about doing another play after Hamlet were you thinking well I have to do a tragedy, I can’t do a comedy or a fun play?
RN: I feel like Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet are the fun ones. [laughs] But they are! In the book within a book when Juliet gets knocked out she can have a dream which is a Midsummer Night’s Dream which becomes Midsummer Night’s Choice. The thing with the comedies is that very rarely do people die. When you’re playing as a game I feel like having the option of making the characters die raises the stakes in a way that a romp through fairy land with love potions doesn’t quite feel like you’re doing anything essential in the same way. Sorry, Puck!
AD: As someone who studied this in school, do you understand Romeo and Juliet now in a way you never did before?
RN: Oh yeah. The danger is you start feeling like you understand Shakespeare as a person. It’s so tempting. You see all these people writing books about Shakespeare and a lot of them are filling in the blanks in ways that are unique to them. We don’t know who this guy was. He died 400 years ago. We have very few records. You can never understand Shakespeare the person, but I feel a lot more confident talking about the play Romeo and Juliet now than I did three years ago when I started working on this book. I also feel a lot more confident talking about squirrels, now, too. I know a lot about squirrels. [laughs]
AD: I loved in the first issue of Squirrel Girl when Tippy-toe, the main squirrel sidekick, is complaining that she’s going to college and won’t be studying squirrels. She says, I know everything about squirrels, but I don’t know everything about distributed computing.
RN: I think it’s fun to have a character who is a computer science student and have that impact her life because it’s something she’s studying and she’s good at it. I like that there’s someone who’s a superhero and is like, I’ve got the punching and kicking and fighting down, but I don’t know about maintaining consistency across distributed databases. That might help me someday so I should learn that too.
AD: You do a great job of balancing those wilder, more absurd aspects and more mundane ones, like discussions of computing.
RN: Thank you. The same thing with Romeo and/or Juliet is that the play can be static. Everyone knows what that play is and the format of a choose your own path book is kind of absurd. It seems like books weren’t designed to do this and we’re hacking it, turning a book into a game. That’s what interest me. Exploring the medium.
AD: We should probably mention that there are a lot of great artists who have contributed to Romeo and/or Juliet.
RN: When I read the chose your adventure books as a kid when I got to an ending I always felt stupid. Like, I lost at a book and died. I thought that by putting a picture in it makes it an achievement you’ve unlocked. The other bonus is that as you’re flipping through the book you can see these pictures. Maybe you see Romeo with a T-Rex and you go, how can I get to that ending? The book teases you with surprises which i really enjoy.
AD: So right now you’re writing The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl and what else are you working on?
RN: That’s coming out monthly. We also have an OGN coming out in October. I’m writing Jughead for Archie. They’re not out yet but I’m writing those. That’s also monthly. That’s the big stuff.
AD: Do you want to talk about Jughead because this is a new series started after Archie relaunched last year?
RN: My buddy Chip Zdarsky was writing it and he was leaving book he asked, do you have any ideas? He did such a good job on it. I didn’t want to undo anything he had done and so I basically continue everything but in a slightly different style because we’re different writers. The fun with Jughead is that he is a guy who likes to eat a lot and doesn’t like to date women. I was a guy in middle school and high school who ate an awful lot and was terrified of talking to women because what if they didn’t like me. So it’s not hard to get into Jughead’s space. [laughs] Don’t care about women, want a hamburger, that’s very relatable. He’s fun to write and the Archie universe is one that even more than the Marvel universe a lot of us are already familiar with. You just have to say the Archie-Betty-Veronica relationship and you know everything that’s going on there. Jughead always seemed above it all. He also seemed, to me at least, to be the smartest one. Dilton obviously is next level smart, but Jughead has book and street smarts. He’s the whole package. Dilton’s just got book smarts.
AD: Have you given any thought to making another chooseable path adventure book?
RN: I haven’t. I tried to put all the Shakespeare I could into this one and make it the best possible book. I’d never written a sequel before so I sat down and said, what is a sequel, what are good sequels? So I watched Back to the Future II, which is the best sequel because it literally revisits the first film. I decided that the best sequels do what the first one did but bigger and better. Which is very easy to say. [laughs]