Art and storytelling have always been central in Geoffrey Hayes’s life. As a grade-schooler and later as a teen, he and his younger brother, Rory, loved many of the same toys, books, movies, and comics. Together they formed a two-boy fantasy factory, filling their free time at home with projects that included picture stories, puppet shows, posters, and plays. When they were not collaborating, they took turns being each other’s number-one fan.

The restless Hayes family called San Francisco home, but never remained at any one address for very long. They changed neighborhoods with such dizzying regularity that the brothers found it impossible to make friends. This brought the two of them even closer together. So did the onset of puberty, which Hayes recalls as an earthshaking and intensely creative time: Banding together, the brothers “fortif[ied]” their “inner world,” inventing distinct personalities for each of the stuffed animal toys they had first played with a few years earlier, developing the toys into a cast of characters for the stories and plays they wrote as a team. “We [weren’t] the first siblings to share an imaginary universe,” Hayes observes, although at the time everything they made and did together felt uniquely their own. “Our world,” he says, felt “private and sacred.” It was all good training for the brothers, who both went on to have notable art careers, although Rory’s was cut short by lifelong emotional difficulties that eventually spiraled out of control and ended in a drug overdose.

Hayes’s illustrated stories about wee, wide-eyed furry creatures are often described — and have sometimes been dismissed — as “cute.” Hayes has a thoughtful response to this suggestion: “I still believe,” he says, that “we can never have too much sweetness in the world, and am pleased to contribute what I can.” The books, he notes, are not only cute. The drawings are as much about drawing — the challenge of seeing how much action and feeling can be packed into a few spare lines and daubs of color — as they are about toy bears and mice. Ultimately, readers care about Hayes’s characters not because they are adorable but because they are small, doughty adventurers making their way in a big and scary world. In future books, Hayes suspects, he may take a different direction. “I’m finding increased inspiration in bucking trends and pushing the envelope. I feel I’ve done more than my share of ‘nice.’”

Hayes had just moved to North Carolina from his longtime home in New York City when we spoke by telephone on November 4, 2013.

Leonard S. Marcus: Did you enjoy growing up in San Francisco?

Geoffrey Hayes: As a kid in the 1950s, San Francisco was a great place to be. The downtown seemed exciting. The liquor stores sold comic books! That is where my brother, Rory, who was just eighteen months younger than me, and I bought most of our comics.

Q: Did you have favorites?

A: I liked funny animal comics like Donald Duck, Mighty Mouse, and Felix the Cat and funny stories about kids like Little Lulu and Sugar and Spike. Rory and I weren’t big on superheroes such as Superman and Hawkman, although we read them, too, just because we liked comics so much. We especially liked anything that was a little odd or off-kilter. If one of the Disney artists drew Donald Duck with an exaggeratedly big round head, we noticed and liked it.

Q: Did you talk about comics with your school friends too?

A: No, this was all between my brother and me. My brother and I drew for each other. We drew before we could write. We did two wordless books together when we were very young. One was about a devil who came out of the sewers through a manhole to terrorize people. That’s all I remember about that one! The second book was about a character called Little Miss Lady who was constantly being chased by someone or falling off a cliff. Later we did stories for each other. We had a teddy bear who became our main character. He is the early incarnation of Patrick and was even named Patrick after our own Patrick Henry School. As kids you don’t go too far afield! But we made an entire universe populated with stuffed animals.

Q: How about your parents? How did they feel about comics?

A: They felt that as long as we were reading, comics were fine. They were more concerned that we not see certain movies, like Psycho. Of course, we went and saw it anyway! Both my parents were amateur artists, and while neither of them encouraged us to become professional artists, they didn’t discourage us either. They supported whatever we wanted to do.

As a matter of fact, when I was very young, I thought I wanted to be an actor. Then at about age twelve everything changed, and I realized that comics were my first love. Something about the format fascinated me. I’ve always loved sequential storytelling. A comic is almost like a movie, and as the artist you are the actor and the director and the designer. You get to create an entire universe all by yourself.

Q: Were you the class artist?

A: I was hardly a child prodigy, but, yes, the other kids were aware of my talent. I just loved to draw, and as I kept drawing, I got better over time.

Q: You said once that a flashlight was your favorite childhood toy.

A: It was one of them. Rory and I had a big flashlight with different colored filters. It was all very theatrical. We’d project images on the wall and create haunted houses in a room using the flashlight for special effects. We got a lot of mileage out of that flashlight.

Q: Did you and your brother remain close?

A: We did. As Rory got older, I was in New York and he was in California, so we didn’t speak as much. Unfortunately, he got into drugs at that time in his life, and he finally OD’d when he was in his early thirties. By then he had become well known in the underground comix movement. His stuff was very dark — so dark that it even surprised me. But Rory was not a particularly dark person to be around, though he was certainly a troubled person. He was one of those kids who came into life with the short end of the stick. He was very emotional, and he had to wear glasses from the time he was a toddler because one of his eyes was crossed, which is very difficult for a young kid. He had a lot of strikes against him. The darkness in his comics was a creative way for him to release his demons, to get out the anger that he felt.

Q: After art school, you worked for a time in an architect’s office. What did you do there?

A: I had studied mechanical drawing in school and was a good draftsman. Among other things, I drew floor plans. The precision that goes into that kind of drawing has always fascinated me.

Q: The spreads in your books are so beautifully structured. Is your skill at that somehow related to the kind of drawing you were doing in that office?

A: Oh, yes. My favorite part about doing the comics is creating the page layouts, planning the movement of the characters throughout the page, keeping everything clear and readable while also being as inventive as possible.

Q: Did you always want to make funny comics rather than, say, scary ones?

A: I’ve always considered myself a humor writer. Humor comes easily to me, and it’s what interests me. By the time I was ready to start a career, Marvel superhero comics were very big, and the funny animal comics I had grown up with were fading away. So I turned to making picture books and beginning readers, both genres in which it was all right to be funny. But I have always embraced my shadow side, too. During the same period I was formulating my first stories for children, I was swooning over Bernie Wrightson’s horror comics and wishing I could draw well enough to emulate them.

Rory and I would love anything that was odd or quirky about a character. When we were young men and both living in New York, for instance, we would see street vendors selling these weird balloons with feet and a face. The character was called Swissy Mouse. We would just stand there and watch the balloons bob up and down. That’s the kind of thing I like!

I try to give my characters some of that same quirkiness. One of the best compliments I ever received was from someone who said that my books were “never satisfied with being merely cute.”

Q: Before TOON Books came along, had you already turned back to making comics?

A: Yes. Seven or eight years ago, I got to the point where I was fed up with my picture book career. So I stopped cold and I said to myself, “I am just going to draw and write whatever I like, without any thought of publication.” I wrote several stories that I had wanted to write for some time. At least half of these were comics stories, so I was moving in that direction. Then one day I was talking to my agent and said, “Well, maybe I’ll do comics for beginning readers. It has never been done before, and somebody’s got to do it!” I thought maybe I was the right person for the job.

A few months later, I got a call from Françoise Mouly, who was just starting TOON Books. It was great to realize we were both thinking along the same lines. She and her husband, Art Spiegelman, had read some of the little Patrick books, which I had done as picture books in the 1980s, to their own children. They weren’t comics, but they had word balloons and Art had remembered them. Françoise probably found me on Google.

Q: Had the publication of Art Spiegelman’s Maus been a big event for you?

A: Not particularly, because by then I had drifted away from comics. I saw it and admired it — at a time when there were so few comics. Certainly, I was very aware of it and intrigued by what Art had done.

Q: Why has there been such an explosion of creativity in the graphic novel realm?

A: It has to do with the visual age in which we’re living. With computers everywhere, ours is becoming a more and more visual age. So I don’t think it’s a fad and [feel] that comics will be around for quite a while.

Q: Why are comics a good format for beginning readers?

A: I find that comics are easy to reread. I tend to reread the comics I love more than I would reread a novel. There is something about the format that makes you want to go back and follow it again and again through the pictures.

Q: Is it the thought that you might have missed something the first time?

A: Sometimes it’s that. Just recently all the Donald Duck books by Carl Barks have been reprinted and I have been rereading them. The thing I find amazing about them is that it’s almost impossible to just look at the art. I’ve tried and you just can’t do it. You have to read the text. It’s so beautifully synchronized. It’s a mystery to me how he did that. Of all the comics I know, his are the most readable; there is such a total integration of the pictures and text.

Also, there are all sorts of fun things you can do educationally in comics. If there is an unusual word that I want to keep in the text, I’ll find a way to do a little picture or icon and put it in a thought bubble. I did that in The Toy Breaker where Penny is talking about treasure, and I added an icon in a thought bubble of a treasure chest. That’s something you cannot do in any other genre.

Q: Tell me more about how comics “work.”

A: Well, there is the pacing — the way the panels are divided. In Benny and Penny in Just Pretend, in the part where they fall down the hill, the panels are all skewed and going at crazy angles. Or if I’m drawing a claustrophobic scene, the panels may suddenly narrow or be smaller than usual to emphasize that feeling.

Q: Sometimes you’ll have a picture in a frame, and the image next to it might not be in a frame. Why is that?

A: Sometimes it is just to add variety. Most of those choices are intuitive. I’ll look at a picture, and I’ll see it without a border or with one. Sometimes I’ll do a panel that has a very thick border or a double border. It just feels right. When I first got into children’s books, I spent hours and hours obsessing about composition. Now it has become second nature.

Q: You mentioned wanting to be an actor when you were very young. Your characters look like they’re acting on the page. Do you think of them that way?

A: Animators have sometimes described themselves as actors with a pencil. That’s probably true. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve gotten better at expressions and body language. I spend a lot of time drawing the characters to get their expressions right. Benny and Penny are pretty simple, and so there is a tendency to put them in similar poses again and again. So I’m always trying to find a new pose that is less common and more expressive and truer to their characters. I just did a drawing of Benny running in which his right arm is pushed forward in the way that athletes do. It adds some variety to the illustrations. Animators talk about a character being “off-model,” which means that the character does not look exactly like he should. Sometimes I’ll see that I’ve done that with Benny and Penny. But even we human beings don’t always look the same in every picture that’s taken of us. I have one drawing of Benny in which his expression reminds me of the actor David Duchovny. I don’t know why! That’s just something I see. Probably no one else will notice it. I don’t see myself, particularly, in my illustrations, though other people may see me in my characters — maybe in my character Patrick most of all.

Q: Do you think — and see — like an artist all the time?

A: When I open a book by another artist, I’ll sometimes sense that the layout is chaotic or doesn’t make sense. If I’m watching a movie, I may be impressed by a certain shot that stands out as unusual. I’ll take a walk and look at the trees, and sometimes I will see something that I think I can incorporate into one of my drawings. But I don’t walk around with a sketchbook, and I do very little research. I remember what I see. What fascinates me about drawing is seeing what comes out of my unconscious. Google Images has been a great help for when I have had to draw a particular kind of bird. But when I look at a tree, I realize there’s no way I could ever duplicate nature, which is so beautiful and perfect, so I don’t even try. Instead, I sit down and get started, and whatever comes out is the way I draw the tree.

Q: Tell me about “Mister Bear Makes His Move.” Why did you want to tell that story?

A: When I saw that the topic you chose for each artist was “the city,” I laughed because I’d been trying to leave the big city for years — first San Francisco, then New York. While I still love big cities, I no longer care to live in them. I’d been seeking a small city and felt I’d found the perfect one in Asheville, North Carolina. However, when I moved, I spent the first several weeks not in Asheville itself but at my friends’ retreat center in Black Mountain, forty-five minutes away by car — 150 acres and not a Starbucks in sight! Just trees, bugs, a noisy creek, and cold, lots of cold! It didn’t help that I took a nasty spill down some wet wooden steps shortly after arriving!

I found myself considering if there was still a possibility that I could change my plans and hightail it back to NYC. (There wasn’t.) I wrote this little two-pager in a small office off the barn in about twenty minutes.

But most children’s stories have happy endings. Once I left the mountain and became a resident of the city of Asheville, my misgivings vanished. I can’t imagine living anywhere else. All those big-city travails are but a memory.

Q: Do you have a work routine?

A: In the past, when I was writing more, I would start out by writing gobbledygook — sheer nonsense. I found that very quickly it would evolve into regular writing. But I don’t do that anymore.

I find that the different phases of making a book each have their own climate. When I am just coming up with an idea for a book, it’s a chaotic time, with a lot of nervous tension, and I’m not able to work long hours. I have to put the ideas down, then leave them alone, maybe go for a walk or go to the grocery store, and let things gestate. By the time I am ready to do the dummy or layout for the book, things are a little different, not so tense. The real crunch comes when I do the final art. That’s when I will work ten or twelve hours a day to get the book done. But not at the beginning!

Q: Do you revise your work?

A: Constantly! Especially the art. I just changed the order of panels in the book I’m working on now and the order of the text. I haven’t told my editor yet! It’s all for the sake of clarity. I change things right up until the end.

Q: Do you hear from readers about your books?

A: I was at one school in Illinois where the kids wanted me to draw Benny and Penny’s mother. As I drew her, I would ask for help with questions like “What kind of dress should she have?” They kept piling on the makeup and the clothes, and by the time I was done, [Benny and] Penny’s mother looked like a whore! I love the spontaneity of kids. One little boy, a kindergartner or maybe even a preschooler, asked, “How do you do the cover?” I replied, rather earnestly, “Well, first you do a layout, and then you worry about the type . . .” I was going on and on until he interrupted me and said, “No. How do you make the cover so stiff?” He thought I actually made the covers myself, one by one, from scratch.

Q: You seem to enjoy making books for readers like him.

A: It’s odd. I don’t know why this is, but I somehow have the ability to capture the lingo of preschoolers. I don’t remember much about my toddler and preschool years. My own earliest memories go back to when I was seven or eight. But I have a facility for nailing the way young kids speak.

Q: How has your art changed over the years?

A: The world of children’s literature has changed. When I began my career, it simply wasn’t possible to include dark stuff in my books. But I can now. The graphic novel I’ve been working on for years — and which is finally coming to fruition — has a lot of dark elements. And it’s telling that my favorite living graphic artist is Mike Mignola. (I love the bimonthly comic Mouse Guard too, so I haven’t totally gone over to the dark side!)

Q: What do you like best about making books?

A: When I’m writing my books, my thought is always about clarity: on finding the most direct way of saying something. Everything in my books — the placement, the characters, the expressions on the characters’ faces, the way the panels are composed — is there to further the communication. For me, art is all about communication. If anything, I would like to think that I’m a good communicator.