Check out our guest blog from Jack Noel about Dadbot, his new graphic novel!
I love comics! I loved comics when I was a beautiful little boy and I love comics now I am a grisly old dad.
I like comics because, well … see how boring these words are?
I grew up in the 1990s. I don’t know if it was a good time for comics because I was a kid and I didn’t read the Bookseller. It seemed good to me because I had a subscription to the Beano and the library was packed with Tintin and Asterix and stuff. I think I would have loved comics whatever age I was in.
We are now in a new Golden Age of comics. I love reading books like Dog Man and Looshkin and Barry Loser and Pablo & Splash and Sister Clawdetta: Murder at the Monastery with my daughter. They inspired me to make my own comic book.
(By the way, some people are happy about kids reading more comics because comics are a gateway to proper reading. That doesn’t make sense to me though. They’re not a “gateway” to reading, they are reading! Reading is reading is reading. It’s like saying chewing and swallowing is a gateway to eating. A “gateway to reading” only makes sense if you are talking about the M4.)
I can’t remember exactly when I came upon the idea for Dadbot. It might have been when I caught sight of myself in the full length-mirror.
DADBOT. Those six little letters were the seed of a character, a family and a story. I planted it in the soil of my mind and pretty soon it took root. Before too long, the sapling of a story emerged.
This will be a laugh, I thought. A classic fish-out-of-water romp with a sprinkling of sci-fi silliness. A naive metal man, two wise-cracking kids and a few bum jokes. And then … profit! Meanwhile, under the surface, the roots were growing deeper. I ended up writing a meditation on technology, community and what it means to be human. But, you know … with bum jokes and stuff.
The whole thing took ages. It was quite ironic because the book is about being wary of technology and staying present with your loved ones and to make it I had to lock myself in a room with an iPad and ignore my own kids.
