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Lifelike
Lifelike is a diverse collection of slice-of-life stories... and beyond. Each vignette, illustrated by a different artist, presents a glimpse into a different corner of the world outside our window. From the sentimental to the shocking, the familiar to the unknown, it's all here.
Lifelike’s stories are not limited to the clichéd autobiographic tales so often associated with the genre. Instead, the stories range in content from noir crime to love stories to war memoirs to humorous conversation pieces. A multicultural, multiethnic cast of characters infuses the book with a realism often missing from today’s comics.
All the stories are written by Dara Naraghi (Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now) with the art provided by a variety of award-winning artists, including Marvin Mann, 2006 Day Prize winner, 3-time Harvey Award nominee, Forward Magazine Honorary Mention, Glyph Award nominee, and YALSA nominee; Tom Williams, 2002 Day Prize winner; Adrian Barbu, 2003 L. Ron Hubbard “Illustrators of the Future” Achievement Award winner.
"There are so many different visual styles here, and Naraghi is such a versatile storyteller, that they barely seem to be part of the same series, but there's something that links them together, a great storyteller's sensibility. From hard-boiled noir crime to war memoirs to sweet, sentimental stories, Lifelike has the feel of a great comics anthology, like Drawn and Quarterly or World War III." —Cory Doctorow, Nebula and Locus award winning novelist
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Interview with Lifelike creator Dara Naraghi
At a time when the slabbing craze created an industry of comics that can be collected but not read, a parallel revolution spread across the Internet: comics that can be read, but not collected, existing only on servers, screens and hard drives. One of the most creatively successful efforts to exploit the new medium now makes the jump from webcomic to the ultimate format in printed comics: IDW’s deluxe, hardcover edition of Dara Naraghi’s Lifelike.
Told in vignettes of unrelated snapshots of ordinary life, the series – using an amazingly wide array of artists and art styles – becomes a collected work much more than the sum of its parts: an author’s true narrative vision.
But for all its intellectual and critical praise, the man behind Lifelike retains a decidedly indie sensibility. Dara talked with IDW about his work on Lifelike, a few of his other projects, and his often uniquely guerilla approach to comics storytelling.
IDW: Wow – a webcomic that makes the transition directly to a hardcover graphic novel. That's gotta feel pretty damn good.
Yeah, needless to say I'm pretty excited. I started the Lifelike webcomic with the intent of one day seeing it in print, but I suppose in the back of my mind I thought I'd end up self-publishing it. To have it come out as a deluxe, full-color hardcover from IDW, with distribution to bookstores and libraries, is a fantastic feeling.
IDW: Give our readers some background on how Lifelike came about.
I'd been doing small-press comics for about three years before starting Lifelike, both through my self-publishing venture Ferret Press and by contributing short stories to other indie publishers. I love holding a comic book in my hands, it's a very real manifestation of the hard work that goes into it by everyone involved; but at the same time, it's a bit disheartening to realize that only a few hundred to at most a thousand or so people are ever going to see your work. So I slowly became interested in the opportunities presented by webcomics: wider distribution with an international audience, very little cost, a near-indefinite shelf life, and so on. In terms of subject matter, I've always enjoyed writing slice-of-life stories, and given the dearth of gag-a-day and foul-mouthed-video-gamer webcomics out there, I figured it was a good niche.
IDW: How did it come to IDW?
Through the perfect convergence of luck, networking and timing! When I started Lifelike the webcomic, I wanted it on a site with other webcomics rather than go it alone. It debuted on Kevin Smith's now-defunct pop culture site MoviePoopShoot.com. The editor and showrunner for the site, who approved Lifelike at the time: Chris Ryall, now publisher and editor-in-chief at IDW. But I ended up moving the strip to Komikwerks.com a while later (quite amicably and with no hurt feelings), because I wanted a more comic-centric host. Well, fast-forward about two years after the strip debuted, to the point where I had enough stories to shop it around to publishers for a graphic novel treatment. I mailed a submission packet to Image, Dark Horse, and (file under "it doesn't hurt to ask") – IDW. By this time, Chris had joined IDW, which I figured would at least mean someone would hopefully look over my submission. But I honestly didn't think they'd publish it, because it wasn't the type of material they were known for. Well, in what was probably the fastest approval process ever – I mailed the packet on a Tuesday, and Chris called me on Friday – IDW picked up my book. Chris told me my timing was impeccable, because had it come a month earlier, they would have passed on it due to the genre. But he and Ted Adams (IDW co-founder and president) were in the midst of starting a new line of more indie/alternative graphic novels, and they enjoyed my work enough to want to publish it. Sometimes, everything just clicks into place perfectly!
IDW: The stories you're telling – they’re just about ordinary life, but with extraordinary insight. How do you decide what you're going to write about? Are these snapshots of your own life? Other people's lives? Or does the theme come to you first, and then you look for a story context?
All of the above. One of my goals with Lifelike was to change perceptions of the slice-of-life genre. I wanted to avoid the clichés and preconceptions associated with stories about "ordinary life." No self-indulgent autobiographic tales, no "whiny artists suffering for their craft" stories, none of any of that. But, having said that, I didn't limit myself either. A couple of the stories, such as "The Long Journey," about the Iran/Iraq war, are inspired by real events in my life, as well as those of my friends and relatives, though obviously highly fictionalized. Other ones, like "Remembrance," were pure flights of fancy. Sometimes I have a theme in mind, such as "love," and the story develops out of my desire to approach the theme slightly differently than what would be expected, as in the story "Crush." Other times, I started out wanting to write a crime story just because it seemed like it would be fun. The only constant was wanting the overall work to be diverse, with a multi-ethnic cast of characters across the different stories.
IDW: There's an amazing range of art and artists for this book. How do you go about getting them all, and how close do you collaborate with them? Do you tailor the story to the art style, or wait till you find one that suits the story?
Again, I had the freedom to do all of the above. Several of the artists are friends I've known for years and live right here in Columbus, Ohio. Guys like Tom Williams, Andy Bennett, and Tim McClurg. So we collaborated very closely, just because we could sit down together and go over character designs, breakdowns, pencils, and so on. Others I found over the Internet – from posts on comics forums or through browsing their sites – and our collaboration was limited to e-mails and phone calls. The fantastic part, though, was being able to craft a story with artists living as far away as Brazil (Irapuan Luiz) and Romania (Adrian Barbu). That's the power of the web right there, which if you think about it in the context of a webcomic, is even more appropriate. As for styles, again, there were times I tailored the story to the artist's interests and style, such as "Intermission" with Andy Bennett, where he draws some of his favorite things: Goth girls, musicians, and bar scenes. Other times, I wrote the story first, then looked for just the right artist for it, as was the case with "Remembrance" and "Crush." I wanted a painted, dreamlike approach for both, and Jerry Lange fit the bill perfectly. And then there’s someone like mpMann, who is so versatile he can draw a noir crime story as well as a quiet "talking heads" tale, and kick ass on both.
IDW: What's next from you? Anything cool coming up?
I've got a few projects on opposite ends of the comics spectrum. My IDW synchronicity continues to pay off, as a while ago Lifelike was reviewed quite positively on the popular boingboing.net blog by award-winning writer Cory Doctorow. It so happens that IDW is publishing six of his short science fiction tales in comic book form, and I ended up writing three of those adaptations. (The first one, adapting "Anda's Game," appears in October’s Cory Doctorow's Tales of the Future Here and Now #1.) On a much smaller scale, I've got a short story in the latest volume of the Panel anthology that I co-edit and self-publish through Ferret Press. A quick bit of background: I'm a founding member of a Columbus-based writer/artist collective known as Panel. We put out themed, small-press anthologies twice a year, and come November we publish the 10th volume. This one will be called Panel: X, which aside from the numeric meaning, is also a reference to the… uh, adult theme of this particular issue. We've always had fun with the packaging of our books to reflect the theme—a passport-sized comic for the travel issue, a square one in a record sleeve for the music issue, and so on. Let's just say the big 10th anniversary will be magazine sized, with a glossy cover.
IDW: I guess we’ll have to check it out to see who’s in the centerfold.
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