Q&A With Author Jeremy Banx on His Latest Comedy Horror Family Book 'Frankenthing'

Jeremy Banx is an award winning cartoonist. He has contributed to many magazines and newspapers, including the Private Eye, Punch, She, The Week, New Statesman, London Evening Standard and The Mail on Sunday. His strips have appeared in comics such as Oink! and Toxic!

Since 1989 he has been the pocket cartoonist for the Financial Times. In 2008 and 2011, he was voted Pocket Cartoonist of the Year by the Cartoon Art Trust. He has published books, designed floats for the carnival in Nice and made 156 short animated films based on his book ‘The Many Deaths of Norma Spittal’. The Derby winning thoroughbred racehorse Dr. Devious was named after one of his characters. He lives and works in Greenwich, London with his wife Elaine and has four children.

Jeremy recently released his first illustrated e-book entitled ‘Frankenthing’ a funny horror story for adults and children. The plot revolves around ‘Frankenthing’, a creature of mysterious origins that Dr. Frankenstein brings back to life to serve as a companion for his other creation; mumbling, cat-allergic, Monster. The cast would not be complete without Igor, the castle cat, who has a score to settle with ‘Frankenthing’ and wreaks havoc in his attempts to re-kill him that soon puts the inhabitants of the castle in grave danger.

The book is not only humorous but witty and lighthearted as well, in spite of its abounding scenes of gore, snot and flying body parts. I loved it (For a full review see HERE).

Jeremy took the time out of his very busy schedule to answer a few questions BookFabulous emailed to him regarding his book and writing. Below is the full interview.

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• How did the idea to write ‘Frankenthing’ come about?

It was very piecemeal. There was no one single moment when the idea came to me.  The look of the character came first. Sometimes I find it useful to draw ideas rather than write them - especially at the beginning. I thought he looked like a ‘Frankenthing’. The name sort of stuck with me. Then I had to work out what that meant and how he had come into existence.
The turning point came when I got the idea of Igor dragging him in from the garden and Dr. Frankenstein making him into a friend for the Monster.  That made it fun for me and it sort of took off from there.
And silly ideas cropped up like making the Monster allergic to cats, which became really useful later on in the story. But there was no one ‘Eureka’ moment. It came in little bits, layer by layer, quite organically, till it started to become a world in which all sorts of ludicrous things could happen.

• It’s got a great cover and the illustrations inside are quite intricate, did you do all that yourself? 
  

I did all the drawings myself. But I had help designing the cover from a very good designer called Graham Moulding who happens to be the boyfriend of one of my daughters.

• There were a lot of similes in the book, some quite ingenious, where on earth did you manage to get inspiration to think of them all?

I approached the similes very much like I approach getting ideas for my cartoons. They’re all very visual. I’d scribble long lists of things that might provide useful imagery and just think, think, think.  I could get quite obsessive about it. I always have my notebook on me so I was always writing ideas down.  It could sometimes take days to ‘build’ a simile.
A good example of a complex one would be the scene were Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory is shaking like ‘…a wheelbarrow full of jellyfish rolling down a cobbled path’. Each element does something to crank up the visual story of just how wobbly the laboratory is. But sometimes I wanted them to be very simple and to the point. Such as when ‘Frankenthing was as scared as a vampire’s lunch.’

• The book is very funny but there are quite a few scary bits as well as a few scenes where eyes pop out, brain splatters and limbs fall off. There is also the idea that when someone dies, they can be brought back to life in a lab. How do you see all this reference to death (and some might say mild violence) impacting on the children who will read your book? Do you see it as a way to encourage the talk about death, even to mock it, especially these days in nanny states where we have become experts at cottoning our children against nearly everything?

I try not to write any differently for children than I do for adults. Children don’t perhaps have the ‘sophistication’ that adults have but they’re not stupid and they’ll put up with far less rubbish than adults do. In many ways I ‘write up’ for children.
They’re naturally interested in death and body parts and guts and other gory stuff. Why wouldn’t they be? It’s their bodies and their deaths after all. The main thing that differentiates humans from other animals is the awareness of our own deaths. So children have to be aware of this and be curious about it or they wouldn’t be human.
But children do need a framework of support.  And you have to give them a happy ending, no matter how many dark places you have to go to to get there. Which isn’t to say that everything should go back to how it was at the beginning of the story. I don’t like the status quo to be preserved. I like my characters to be altered by their experiences.

• What part of the book did you enjoy writing? And do you have a favourite character? Why?

I like working on plot. Trying to work out what kind of story it’s going to be and how the characters are all going to fit into it and how they’ll move the story along.  It’s great when the characters start writing themselves. If I got stuck, my solution would be to stop being clever, get out of the way and just ask myself exactly what the characters would really do -or really say. And it was always a lot more interesting and funnier than anything I would have thought up. Like when Frankenthing works out the best way of hiding from Igor. It was Frankenthing who came up with the idea of climbing on to the machines, not me.
I suppose my favourite character would have to be Frankenthing himself. For some reason I identify with him the most.  I worry about his wellbeing. Getting him in and out of predicaments was always great fun. But I like Igor too, even though he is Frankenthing’s predicament for most of the story. He’s horrible but he’s highly motivated. There’s always something funny about characters who obsess. 
The Monster is just a great lummox. I enjoyed playing around with his back story, to show there had been a lot more to him, especially as a significant part of it took place in the grave and at the undertakers.
Dr. Frankenstein is probably the character I have the least sympathy for. He’s selfish, thoughtless, egotistical, vain and smug.  And he doesn’t have to do all the crazy things he does. He does them because he is fundamentally irresponsible and thinks only of himself and what interests him. He jokes with life. I really enjoyed revealing more and more of that aspect of him as the story progressed because at the beginning he seems quite nice.

• The book is self-published, any tips for authors who are thinking of going this route? If any, did you have any reservations/fears going this route yourself? And have you got any thoughts to whether self-publishing may/may not be the more likely (sought after) destination for authors to present their work?

Initially I was highly resistant to the idea of self-publishing an e-book. It seemed like an insurmountable task and I wasn’t especially happy with the thought of all the technology involved. But once I looked into it and found out a bit more about how an e-book works, I began to realize it was something I could actually manage. The hardest part is deciding whether to do it or not.
My advice to anyone interested in self-publishing is just to do it. There’s plenty of advice on the web and free software. Forums are very useful. It’s nowhere near as hard as it may seem at first. I think publishing is going towards e-publishing. There can’t be any doubt about it. I don’t think it will do away with traditional books. I think there’s room for both. And it’s ideal for self-publishing.

• What was the hardest thing you faced writing Frankenthing?

At one point I realized that a lot of my plot, which I had spent ages lovingly crafting, just didn’t work. It was too busy, there were too many characters, too many locations; the whole thing was too involved and complicated. I had to dump a lot of writing and a lot of characters. There was a whole lot of stuff that took place in Countess Dracula’s castle and there were vampire bats and werewolves as well! Cutting it was quite traumatic. But it was also exciting and strangely enjoyable.
It was perhaps the most stimulating time I had working on the book. Because once I’d got over that hurdle and pared everything down to the bone and thought up some new ideas, I felt I had a plot that really worked.
And I’ve kept a lot of the stuff I discarded for future Frankenthing stories.  That’s why there are references to Dracula’s castle and icons for werewolves in the map in the appendices at the back of the book.

• What are you working on now?

Just at the moment I’m doing a lot of cartoons for a new e-mag called ‘The Reaper’. It’s all about death –not that I’m morbidly obsessed or anything. Ultimately they’ll all go into one big cartoon book. It’ll be a giant book with literally hundreds of cartoons in it  -all without captions. And I want them all to be good.
But my next e-book will probably be a collection of stories based loosely (very loosely) on my parenting of my girls. Then there’s a sci-fi book, and then another Frankenthing. Perhaps not in that order.

• Tell us something about yourself that not many people know about you?

I’m qualified to be a French postal clerk. 

• What book are you reading now? 

I’ve got a few books on the go. I’ve just finished reading Daniel Defoe’s ‘Moll Flanders’, which I loved. I’m currently reading Rex Warner’s ‘The Aerodrome’; an odd book about a fascistic air force that takes over a typical English village. It was written in 1941 and it’s subtitled ‘a love story’. I’m also reading a book of Richard Feynman’s lectures on particle physics called ‘Six Easy Pieces’.

To contact Jeremy: twitter -(@banxcartoons) / www.banxcartoons.co.uk / banxcartoons@gmail.com