Calista Brill ’02 Is Crazy for Comics

If you’re the parent of an elementary or middle schooler, you’re likely dialed into a literary phenomenon the rest of the adult world doesn’t realize is happening: Graphic novels for kids are blowing up. They command sizable real estate in bookstores and inspire devotion that brings teens and tweens to author events in droves. Consider a 2023 survey by School Library Journal: 51 percent of public libraries and 61 percent of school libraries reported that young people’s interest in graphic novels had significantly increased within the past few years.

Editor Calista Brill ’02 has had a front-row seat for much of that growth. Though a longtime fan of the form, she says these books were once such a rarity in children’s publishing that dedicating a career to them hadn’t seemed possible when she went into the industry. How rare? Brill describes a bookshelf that she kept at her earliest editing job: “It had maybe 15 volumes,” she says. “It was my precious little collection — the sum total of graphic novels that had been created for children.”

Then came the fantasy epic comic series Bone, originally self-published by Jeff Smith and reissued by Scholastic in 2005. “It was an instant hit,” Brill says. “The children of America, it turns out, were willing to read graphic novels. Suddenly it looked like long-form comic storytelling was a viable format for children, and there was a rush to start publishing more of it.”

Brill was thrilled to make a leap. In 2008 she joined First Second Books, then a fledgling graphic novel publisher, and today is its editorial director. Brill also recently debuted her own graphic novel, Creaky Acres, with illustrator Nilah Magruder. The story follows a Black middle schooler, Nora, as she faces the challenges and changes that come with moving: new school, new friends — plus a new barn where she practices her beloved horseback riding.

Brill grew up in Detroit in a family that prized literature, thanks to her English professor father. She chose the College partly for New York City — as a “voracious extrovert” she loved the energy — and partly for the Core Curriculum. “The Core ended up being the thing that I loved the best about Columbia,” Brill says. “It’s served me tremendously well as a writer and editor, and it also gave me a richer and more nuanced outlook on humanity.”

Yet even as she came of age surrounded by stacks of classic lit, Brill found her way to visual storytelling. In a June interview from her New England home, she spoke about discovering her passion for comics, how they differ from conventional narratives and why graphic novels spark kids’ appetite for reading.

First off, can you tell me the difference between comics, comic books and graphic novels? Are they interchangeable?

[Laughs] Right, let’s take a moment to define our terms. Most people who work in the industry, when they say “comics,” they mean a series of images that tell a story in sequence. But nobody likes saying “sequential art” because it’s a mouthful. It makes you sound pretentious. So we say comics.

A comic book is like Spider-Man; it comes out every month, it’s a little stapled thing, floppy — sort of semi-disposable, right? Then a graphic novel is a comic book that is fat enough to have a spine. But when I say “comics” as a genre, I’m talking about stuff that’s told in panels.

So how did you get into comics?

I had the great fortune of having a much older big brother. He is a much hipper person than I could ever hope to be, and he was into these really extraordinary indie comics in the ’80s; he was bringing those books home and leaving them around. So I was reading Love and Rockets and Wonder Wart-Hog and Flaming Carrot. Reid Fleming, World’s Toughest Milkman. These are not books for children — they represent some of the weirdest creative impulses of that time. But they made a strong impression on me.

The book that ultimately showed me the extraordinary heights that comic storytelling can take you to is this indie comic that’s still running today — Frank, by Jim Woodring. These comics are silent; they have no text. They take place in a landscape that is not where we are; the stories mainly focus on the protagonist encountering things and being acted on by his environment. They’re visually extraordinary. They’re sort of deeply hallucinogenic.

Frank was a gateway into comics that really push boundaries, that have something new to say and also say things that you could never say in prose — that are finding ways of telling stories that you can really only tell in comics.

Can you say more about that? How does the storytelling differ?

In certain ways, a cartoonist has a lot more control over the reader’s experience than a novelist does. One of the wonderful things about reading prose is so much of the work is happening in your mind. You are contributing so much as a reader when all you have on the page is words.

But one of the fascinating things about reading comics is how much more input you’re getting. You get a complete vision, kind of like with a movie. And while a filmmaker can control the passage of time, good comics writers and artists also have tricks that subconsciously control how fast or slow you’re taking in a page. Things that have to do with the density of information, or the structure of a layout, or how much text there is on a given page.

I’m going to get really nerdy on you now. Cartoonist Scott McCloud is a great theorist of sequential art, and one of the things that he talks about a lot is that in well-constructed comics, there is a constant give and take between what the text is telling you and what the art is telling you. Sometimes they’re complementary, sometimes they’re contradictory, but they’re very rarely the same thing. Because if they were, what’s the point? If somebody says, “I’m sad” and then they’re making a sad face, now you’ve learned the same information twice. That’s boring. So a comic has baked into it this marvelous opportunity for messiness and contradiction that I really dig.

You’ve been an editor at First Second since 2008, almost since it was founded, as well as during this seminal growth period for kids’ graphic novels. What was that like?

The market was growing rapidly, but nobody knew what anybody wanted or how to get it to them. And so the first 5 or 10 years at First Second were really just a joyful, exploratory stage where we were throwing stuff at the wall to see what stuck. It was a wonderful way to gain an education, both in publishing and as a graphic novel editor, because I got to work on a tremendous variety of books. Books for very different readers, books with very different approaches, some of them quite experimental, some of them very commercial, and everything in between.

What’s been a project that was especially meaningful to you?

I love all of my babies equally, obviously, but I will tell you about one that was particularly gratifying — Ash’s Cabin, by Jen Wang. It was such a difficult and intense and ultimately satisfying journey for me and the author. It’s about a kid who is profoundly alienated, and who decides to run away and live in the wilderness. So the book functions in certain respects as a crash course on what it takes to live alone in the wild, and it does not sugarcoat how difficult that is.

One of the things that this character discovers is that we live in society for a reason. We need each other. And so this is where the editorial journey comes in. The author and I worked very hard for a long time on the ending. With a book like this, the character’s trajectory is toward reintegration with the human race. But Ash’s determination to exit society is so intense, that having an easy ending, where they come back and everything’s OK, felt like a betrayal of that.

I really like where this ending landed; it’s tremendously hopeful and tremendously moving, but it’s also extremely complicated. It’s an ending that honors the difficulty of the story. That was something that Jen and I worked together on for several rounds, and I was happy to feel as though I was actually being useful, which is not always the case.

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Let’s talk about Creaky Acres. What has it been like to be on the other side of a graphic novel?

Well, I love writing. And yet one of the things that was so embarrassing about writing Creaky Acres is that I am literally a graphic novel editor by trade, and I made every mistake as a writer that I as an editor tell my authors not to make [laughs].

Can you give an example?

A thing that’s easy for writers of comics to do is to overpack a page with too much text. You have one tool — words — and so you want to use them for everything. It can be extremely difficult to take the leap of faith required to use the minimum amount of text and just trust that the artist you’re working with is going to do their part. So you have to find ways to be a good collaborator, to use the format the way the format wants to be used, and not the way that you the writer wants it to work. It was a humbling experience in that regard.

But I also think there are many ways in which I was able to let my experience as an editor guide me well. One of them is that, I think I have — finally, after decades — figured out the intersection in the Venn diagram between stuff that I find delightful, and stuff that anyone else might find delightful. That’s a huge part of what editors do: look for the places where someone’s native enthusiasms are going to translate to a broader audience. And so I feel as though I was able to do that on my own behalf. As it turns out, telling a kind of incredibly emotional, heartfelt story about horses and friendship is a thing that I really wanted to do, and I was pretty confident that the rest of the world would be receptive to it.

How did you come to the idea?

I grew up as just an unbelievable horse girl. I rode horses, I read all the horse books, I had all those Breyer figurines. And it seemed crazy to me that there weren’t any graphic novels about horseback riding for middle-grade readers, because it seemed like such an obvious fit. For a while I was knocking it around, trying to figure out if there was something I wanted to get going at First Second. Then the more I thought about it, the more I realized, this is a story I really want to tell. So, I begged Nilah to throw in with me, and she very kindly said yes. We put together the pitch with our agents, and with her art and my text, we sold the book.

I’d love to come back to kids’ appetite for graphic novels. I have a daughter who’s almost 9, and it’s almost all she wants to read. I’m curious about what makes it so satisfying and resonant for kids.

It’s funny ... I used to resent when people cited graphic novels as perfect for reluctant readers, because it implies that they’re only good as a stepping stone on the way to “real reading.” But I feel very differently about it now. I’ve been doing this long enough and I’ve talked to enough educators and parents, and also, I have kids; I see what these books can do to light that fire within them.

So, I think the reluctant reader thing is real. Graphic novels tend to have much more easily digestible chunks of text than equivalent prose books for that age. For dyslexic readers, certainly they’re great; but they’re also great for readers who don’t yet have the attention span or the stamina for long, unbroken chunks of text.

In addition, I think there are certain kinds of stories that are really well told in this format. They can be deeply emotional and deeply relatable for kids when presented this way. There’s also a sub-genre of book, like Creaky Acres, where you’re getting insight into a subculture or a sport or a hobby that you might not necessarily have had any prior interest in. Some good examples are Swim Team by Johnnie Christmas and Duel by Jessixa and Aaron Bagley, about fencing. That’s a really cool thing that a graphic novel can do — it can introduce you to a topic or an activity or a world that you didn’t know existed and thus didn’t care about, and you come out feeling as though you’ve really learned something. It’s an invitation into something. And that’s fun, like you become an insider.

I could see that. It’s helpful to have some of this articulated; as a parent, it can be hard to engage with a format that didn’t exist when I was a kid!

Absolutely. And I’ll say another thing having to do with the facility of the graphic novel from a parent’s perspective: When given the choice between literally anything on a screen and a book, my kids will always choose the screen — except when the book is a comic. Then they will choose the comic about half the time. I think most parents are kind of desperate for alternatives to screens for their kids, and I think it’s pretty powerful that comics are consistently another thing that most kids will reach for.

Yes, reading comics is qualitatively, extremely different than reading unillustrated prose. But it’s still reading. You’re still building your muscles as a reader. You’re engaging with a book and you’re loving it. You are going to the library. You’re thinking about authors. You’re thinking about stories. You’re likely reaching for the next one. It creates a habit of reading that I think is key, and that is harder and harder to inculcate, particularly for kids who, for whatever reason, have a lot of access to screens. And I think that’s most kids at this point, because, you know, it’s 2025. So I find myself grateful to comics for a reason that I never thought I would be, which is it gets my kids off the iPad.