Few artists have as much range as cartoonist Ann Xu, whose line and color work adapts to her subjects to create an incredibly diverse body of work. Here, Xu discusses “Grave Cleaning,” a comic about coming home.
—Kristen Radtke
THE BELIEVER: How did this comic start?
ANN XU: The last time I visited China with my family, some images just stuck in my mind, particularly from going to the cemetery where my paternal grandfather is memorialized. The sensations of that memory are still quite distinct to me, and being around my relatives always dredges up old feelings. I believe in writing and drawing from personal experience when you can, so this one was no different.
BLVR: What’s your process like?
AX: I like to start with just writing and notes; if there’s a persistent visual image in my head of a scene, I will draw that first as part of my notes. Similarly, if there’s an impactful line of dialogue or action I’m thinking of, I will also note that. From there, I’ll divide the loose script into pages/panels based on the beats of the story. Then I do thumbnails and pencils. Sometimes I separate the two, but other times it ends up in a state that’s in between thumbs and pencils, so I just end up counting that as the pencil stage. After scanning those, I print them out at the size I’m inking, and then I use a lightbox to ink on the final paper. I usually have a few mistakes to correct digitally, so if it’s something that needs me to manually correct it with more drawing, I’ll do those bits on another piece of paper to edit in later, as well as any hand-lettering work. Coloring is something I almost always do digitally.
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