PAUL GRAVETT: Silence is something that comics can capture beautifully and specifically, in a way that perhaps no other medium can. What appeals to you about using silence in your comics?

ANDI WATSON: Silence is one weapon in your comic-book armory that you can deploy. My aim with it is to capture a moment and keep it there, because it's in front of your face. A movie is temporal and constantly moving, whereas with a comic you also have more control and can get the feeling in your head you want to convey and hopefully put it down on paper. It's the same with expressions on characters' faces. And then you can make a point by making a panel bigger or by showing the same scene with minor changes over several panels. One of the bands I like is Low -- they're very slow and they use minimal instrumentation and notes. Their moments of silence are as important as their moments of music. There are so many ways a story plays out in comics, not only in choosing a moment to have stillness to highlight an emotion or a moment, but also the gaps between the panels, where you try to suggest things in between.

GRAVETT: Do you see the page as the unit of the comic, to end a scene or make a reader pause, if only to turn the page over?

WATSON: Exactly, like a full stop, the page and double spread, those are the units that go back to thumbnailing. Though I've had to change that slightly with Slow News Day because of space constraints.

GRAVETT: Here in Breakfast After Noon, you have a silent transition, a passage of time.

WATSON: Without saying "The next day" in a caption.

GRAVETT: So you never use location or time captions?

WATSON: No, saying "Meanwhile back at the factory" invades your suspension of disbelief. It's like you're breaking the moment. There's no division between writing and drawing when I'm thumbnailing. When I start, they're usually more detailed, but at a certain point they're like chicken scratchings! First, when I've refined it down to a story and its scenes, I work out my order of scenes, each on a different piece of paper, and then I write out each scene in longhand. And then I'll go back and work out the thumbnails and page divisions. Then I break it down per page and do thumbnails. And often that's when I find out I don't have enough pages to fit in all the story. So I go back and start editing again. For Dumped, I had to go through three times. That's the hardest part. All longhand, not on computer, since I'm not a very good typist. I'm sat here in my chair and can plan on the paper as directly as possible and scribble notes, erase, add, correct, do changes as I go along. Then when I'm thumbnailing, I may lose bits, it keeps it organic. So I've got some room to expand or contract scenes, or I might edit some out or contract two pages into one. And I leave some pages or panels blank for "passage of time" sections. So it's not all predetermined. I got Dumped finished to this stage at the end of January and I'm going to be drawing this sucker 'til mid-March. I don't want everything decided ahead of time, there's got to be room for some flexibility.

GRAVETT: One of the challenges in comics can be to make longer dialogue passages interesting visually, panel to panel.

WATSON: With Slow News Day I used lots of moment-to-moment and reaction shots. I still don't feel I've got a grip on how detailed a conversation can be, because there's a million things going on, eye contact, expressions, people weighing up what the person's said. I get annoyed when people say "Oh, nothing happens in your books." Lots of things happen. One of my favorite authors is Henry James, where everything is suggested, nothing is overt or explicit, it's all under the surface. You have to be willing to invest yourself in reading and examining it. This is why comics are so good, they can communicate the intangible. You know a character wants to express something but they don't and then you think about why they don't.

GRAVETT: Why have you avoided thought balloons?

WATSON: Thought balloons are intrusive into the suspension of disbelief, again. They explicitly spell out to the reader what the character is feeling, whereas I think readers should be able to interpret that from their own personal experience and from being totally involved in the moment, in the reading. If someone's prescriptively describing what's going, I think it pops the bubble. Monsieur Jean by Dupuy & Berberian is always going off on daydreams and imagining himself, so showing his thoughts visually is more effective than thought balloons. As I go on, I find there's never enough space, you're constantly trying to get more meaning into each panel, or a series, leading up to a meaningful moment. So Slow News Day took me three drafts to nail that pacing down and I still felt it was a bit tight at points. I switched to four tiers per page because it's only 24 not 32 pages. My highpoints are generally dramatic moments in conversations between characters, emotional scenes, where the panels become denser. Slow News Day also refers back to a lot of '30s screwball-comedy movies like His Girl Friday, the back and forth is superquick, a lot of cross-talking on top of each other. Another reference is Eric Rohmer's films, which are nearly all dialogue based, not traditional three-act structure, with more of a gentler, interpersonal relations; the characters are gradually revealed and then you have dramatic moments, to expose what the characters are really like.

GRAVETT: It's a tricky balancing act, because you want the reader to make that leap across the gutter into the next panel, but not to leap too soon, too quickly, to pause and take each panel in.

WATSON: This is why comics is not the mass medium it used to be. It requires collaboration, effort, and people are getting lazy. It's probably why movies are the most popular medium, you just sit back in a trance-like state, if the director and everyone have done their job right, and you don't have to work at it. The best movies are the ones you give yourself to, and that's what I try to do in the comics, the more the readers put in, the more they get out.

I got comments about the first Slow News Day that it was over too quick and some reviewers said it's not very dense, it's a very quick read. I think it's the densest thing I've done. Just because it hasn't got gray tones over it to fill up the white space makes it look breezier than it is. I definitely have concentrated on the moments more than ever. When I read a comic, I linger over the panels and try and get as much meaning out of the panels before I move on. You also immerse yourself in the moments on a page, like in Seth's work. You get the feeling some people just want to pick up a comic, read it in five minutes and put it on a pile.

GRAVETT: I think if you read mainly the texts in a comic and only glimpse at the pictures, you haven't taken the time to let the whole comic come alive.

WATSON: Exactly, you've got to let it stew in your brain for a bit. Slow News Day should be the about the slowest thing I've done, because a lot of the dialogue carries more meaning.

GRAVETT: I thought the book's TV-sitcom subplot must tie in to some of your experiences trying to get Skeleton Key made into a TV cartoon - the whole negotiation and compromise of working with the media.

WATSON: One of the themes in Slow News Day is the big audience and the small audience and that definitely reflects my feelings about comic books. It may not reach a whole lot of people, but it's one of the purest art forms out there, in that you have control over what you're doing, you're pulling all the strings. Just because a lot of people have access to popular TV shows, doesn't mean they're any good, that's pretty obvious! In Slow News Day, just because they're working on a small local newspaper doesn't mean they're immune from all the commercial pressures. It's a comment on commerce vs. art.

GRAVETT: You also touched on English attitudes toward Americans. However much they may think we love them, we don't necessarily, and there are tensions trying to fit into English society.

WATSON: Absolutely, and I tried to dramatize that without slapping people over the head. Americans and English people have very different priorities, the forces in the American character that shaped their country are very different to the ones we have here.

GRAVETT: Have you turned your back on manga?

WATSON: No, what still interests me is the pacing, the timing, the setting of a scene, the willingness to try and convey an atmosphere rather than action. What's under the surface look of manga are the most important lessons from manga, especially as it's generally a longer form. [Pulls out a paperback of the baseball manga H2 by Mitsuru Adachi.] In this, he takes 200 pages just for the first part of a baseball game, and there are 24 volumes of this! I haven't pushed anywhere near how broken-down comics can be, how you can pace a moment and put it under the spotlight like manga does. I love Taniguchi's The Man Who Walks, there's very little dialogue, it's just putting quiet moments under a microscope. It works, it's amazing. You couldn't do that in any other medium. If it was novel, then there would be an internal dialogue as he was walking. I think that book gets close to communicating a moment or an experience which isn't tangible, and that is what art should do. This is what's so special about comics; they're alchemical. Hoo! Gets you all excited, the words and the pictures and how different balances together can get different reactions! It's like a great big scientific experiment. Chris Ware is going off exploding the form but that's just one direction of exploration. That's why comics are so great, that there's so much wide open space -- it's like the Great West waiting to be colonized.

[To read the rest of this interview, please see The Comics Journal #248.]

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