Author Chat with Neil Kleid

In this episode of Lit Happens with Cyd, I would like to welcome an award-winning illustrator, comic guy, Neal Clyde. Neal, how are you? Good, how are you, Cindy? Thanks for having me. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on and chit-chat with us. So before we kind of take a look at one of your latest creations, tell us a little bit about who you are, where you're from, and what really made you kind of want to get into comics. uh sure yeah so i mean um uh i've been a writer for quite a while now but i'm originally i'm currently living in New Jersey but i was raised in Detroit i grew up in Detroit um i basically started buying all my comics in Detroit my dad used to shop at Little Professor's Bookstore uh on Nine Mile and i think Coolidge used to come home every day with a bag every weekend with a bag of comics and give it to my brother and i and that really got me interested in comic books and then I actually started as a as an artist I wanted to draw comics so I used to trace comics and draw them and when I moved to the New York New Jersey area I actually had a chance to go into DC Comics and show my work to some editors and their response was needs work um but they said my writing was really great the pacing the storytelling so they said well you know you have a long way to come as an artist you might want to lean into writing and so I started to really investigate what that meant to be a writer how to write comics how to write um for prose and so my first comics were published uh right uh read 2000 2001 right before 9-11 i've been doing it for over 20 years now and now i've kind of done a hybrid work where i'm doing comics and prose together and so my latest book is a prose book yeah i love that you're from Detroit because i'm very familiar with Nine Mile and Coolidge I grew up on Ridgedale like literally smack dab right there by the Lighthouse Liquor Store like that whole little area you know my mom went to Oak Park High School so Oak Park has a very special place you know in in my heart now when it comes to your comics and illustrations how long is the process when it comes to you know creating the story and then kind of drawing it out right so i don't really draw so much i'm a writer primarily I work with a lot of co-authors who are sort of like my artistic partners the way it tends to work is I'll come up with an idea a springboard kind of a concept I'll turn it into an outline or a pitch and I'll send it off to a publisher and basically say like look this is the idea here's some samples right of what the art could look like and invariably they'll either you know move it forward or go back and we'll make some changes I think that process usually takes like you know a month or two and then once the project is green lit and I'm actually going like comics are a lot like movies right we're making we're creating like like not screenplays but like the concept of panels versus frames is kind of the same so you're creating a script versus like a traditional manuscript like when you read a book and so depending on how long the comic is or how long the book is traditional kind of like like when you think of a comic book which we'll call like a pan like a floppy which is like stapled right like from Marvel to DC they're about 20 to 22 pages each versus like a graphic novel which could be 128 pages to 200 and some odd pages so depending on the length that'll really inform how long it'll take me to write it i can pump out like a 22 page issue in less than a month but a graphic novel could take me three to four months my first book Brownsville which was about the uh about Jewish gangsters in New York it's like a non-fiction book that took me about a year to write because of all the research i had to do and all the investigation and my co-author Jake Allen who was the artist on the book he and i did a lot of photo reference so it really kind of depends on the length of the book and then uh you know there's time to you know do the art which could take again from a 22 page issue could take a lot quicker than a 200 page graphic novel so you're really looking at a graphic novel maybe it's like a year or two or more sometimes three years to get a book out for a traditional like single issue comic it could take you know under a year six months you know if you work quick you know with the art maybe like four to six months and so you have a new um one out it actually came out earlier this month and it's called Return to the Mother Freaking Fun Factory so tell viewers a little bit about what's involved in this storyline right so this is not a comic book this is a traditional horror novel um this was a concept that i actually came up with seven years ago my family were big Willy Wonka fans and so we've seen the movies the three movies right the Gene Wilder original the Johnny Depp version and then now the prequel so many times and my kids watch it over and over and i sort of realized along the way like Willy Wonka is kind of a monster right like the the character and and the position that he puts the kids in it's kind of a great breeding ground for a horror story and all i kept thinking about for you know for the first two that we watched were what happened to the kids who lost and left right what happened to the losers and so on social media one day I kind of posted like great idea for a story the four kids come back for revenge to get revenge on Willy Wonka and friends of mine who are writers in the industry reached out and said like that's a great idea if you don't do it I will and I sort of like thought about it and I toyed with it as a comic and I turned it over for a couple years and finally wrote like an outline and I have a friend uh an editor who I've worked with in the past on some books and I sent it his way I was like is this anything what do you think about this as an idea he's like that's a great story really kind of develop it as a horror story and so what we did was it's kind of a little bit of a mashup of Willy Wonka and Stephen King's It it's about the four kids who you know there's five kids who go to a toy factory they win a contest five go in four come out and one stays behind and is never seen again and the story is about set 10 years later where the four losers kind of come back to get revenge on the toy maker that they won the contest but also to save the guy who got left behind so it's like a little bit of a heist a little bit of a revenge story um it's a very much a haunted house tale um it's my first real true like horror story a lot of the work that i do is either like family drama or crime or you know i've worked a lot with like superheroes in the past but this is like my opportunity to get in and write like a real horror story and so it's been a lot of fun now what would you say has been the best part about creating this story um so i love the act of writing in general coming you know coming up with the plot lines the dialogue i love writing good dialogue thinking about the characters and who each of them are um but i'll tell you sort of the thing that most authors will tell you the book just came out and we debuted it recently at the New York Comic Con here in New York City. And I got to talk to people about it and tell them about it. And I know some of them have read it already, and we get comments about how much they're enjoying it. And so, you know, the act of writing is a pretty solitary task. You sit in a room and you think about ideas, you work with editors and people to kind of get the book together and into shape. And I have a fantastic editor who really helped me with that. But you never know how it's going to emotionally resonate with a reader and so when you start to get that feedback um my daughter loves to read and is now like really basically she tells me anytime she gets money she says do you mind if i spend money on books like please spend money on books and so i gave her the book she's you know she's a teenager and she read two or three chapters and i was like how would you think she goes like i couldn't finish it it's too scary and so that's that's good and bad like you want to finish it but you're also like yo it's job well done but i do have other people who are not my family who have read it who have enjoyed it fans and readers people who have been reading my work for years and the feedback is really great because you want to whether it's a good response or bad response you want to instill some sort of emotion in your reader and i think this book is is doing that in spades yeah i love telling people like even if they say they don't hate it because you know like i'll look at the reviews you know before i read a book to kind of get a feel for it and you have a you know it's kind of sometimes it's mixed reviews but i'm like even if you don't like it like that author still evoked that type of emotion out of you so i still consider it a job well done you know on their end because they got something out of you on it and so no before i let you go is there anything else that you would like to say to fellow book lovers out there um so if you love the book tell people about it right you know you read something you really enjoyed it go online social media your favorite bookseller write a review tell tell folks we live and breathe on word of mouth right you know right now publishing there's a lot of books out there whether it's in books or comics um the way we get to expand who we tell stories to and how many stories we get to tell is because of you if you really love someone tell somebody about it Right. There's there's no better time in your life to connect to people through social media, TikTok, Instagram, just generally, if you have a website, if you have a newsletter, if you love somebody, love something, pay it forward, tell someone because somebody else might enjoy it and then they can tell somebody. And that's how really, you know, books do well and you want more books out there. and this is kind of the way to get it done. Well, Neil, thank you so much for what you're doing and contributing to the literary world. And thank you for taking the time to come and chat with me and fellow book lovers out there. We greatly appreciate it. I appreciate the time. Thanks so much.