Ask the Author: Doogie Horner
Answered Questions (1)
Doogie Horner
The answer is kind of weird. My son, who was five years old at the time, used to have an imaginary friend called "Shadow Kirby," who I pretended to be. My son and I played make-believe together A LOT, and during those years when he was 3-6 years old, I spent about 75% of my waking life pretending to be Shadow Kirby. It was a strange and exhausting experience spending that much time pretending to be someone else.
Shadow Kirby always did everything wrong. He was a real nut. One day my son and Shadow Kirby were discussing what would make a good comic book character. Since Shadow Kirby only ever had bad ideas, he suggested a comic where the main character was invisible, where you literally couldn't see them at all. My son thought that was funny.
But then later, I started wondering if you really could draw a comic book like that. Usually in comics when a character is invisible, you can still kind of see them. The artist draws them as a ghostly outline or a dotted line, like the Invisible Woman in the Fantastic Four. But could you draw a comic where the main character was actually totally invisible to the reader? I thought it sounded like a fun challenge, so that's why I started drawing Invisible Boy.
I finished a whole version of Invisible Boy where all you could see were his speech bubbles (you can that version on my website if you're interested) but ultimately discovered that it was, indeed, a bad idea. The biggest problem was that you couldn't read Invisible Boy's expressions, which took away a huge aspect of the storytelling.
So when I rewrote/redrew Invisible Boy for the graphic novel, I changed him to a ghostly outline.
So actually I didn't come up with the idea for Invisible Boy, Shadow Kirby did.
Shadow Kirby always did everything wrong. He was a real nut. One day my son and Shadow Kirby were discussing what would make a good comic book character. Since Shadow Kirby only ever had bad ideas, he suggested a comic where the main character was invisible, where you literally couldn't see them at all. My son thought that was funny.
But then later, I started wondering if you really could draw a comic book like that. Usually in comics when a character is invisible, you can still kind of see them. The artist draws them as a ghostly outline or a dotted line, like the Invisible Woman in the Fantastic Four. But could you draw a comic where the main character was actually totally invisible to the reader? I thought it sounded like a fun challenge, so that's why I started drawing Invisible Boy.
I finished a whole version of Invisible Boy where all you could see were his speech bubbles (you can that version on my website if you're interested) but ultimately discovered that it was, indeed, a bad idea. The biggest problem was that you couldn't read Invisible Boy's expressions, which took away a huge aspect of the storytelling.
So when I rewrote/redrew Invisible Boy for the graphic novel, I changed him to a ghostly outline.
So actually I didn't come up with the idea for Invisible Boy, Shadow Kirby did.
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