When Hope Larson was a girl, superhero comics were everywhere, and most were clearly aimed at boy readers. Not surprisingly, she looked elsewhere for the stories she craved: to classic fantasy fiction like C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, and to the stories she herself was always writing. The world of comics first caught her eye during a year her family spent in France, where she fell in love with the illustrated adventures of Tintin and Astérix, and with other comics that were unlike any she had seen back home. As she came of age artistically, she turned to the comics format for her own stories as well and found it was equally well suited for tales based on history (a favorite subject of hers) and the everyday lives of girls like the one she had been.

Larson’s creative life came full circle when a publisher e-mailed her out of the blue with an invitation to create a graphic novel based on A Wrinkle in Time. Meg Murry — the story’s gawky, misunderstood, courageous young heroine — had always been such a favorite character of hers that Larson had reread L’Engle’s book often as a teenager. She knew that adapting Wrinkle would be an epic undertaking, not least because the original novel was itself quite long. (Larson would later recall that it had taken her a month just to draw all the speech balloons.) Of even greater concern was the fear that it might be impossible to satisfy L’Engle’s legions of die-hard fans. Her worries proved unwarranted; A Wrinkle in Time: The Graphic Novel became a bestseller and won Larson her second Will Eisner Award. Then it was time for a break. “I went to ice cream school,” she told a reporter, “which is actually quite science-heavy; Dr. Kate Murry would approve.”

Larson was at home in Los Angeles when we recorded this conversation by phone on November 15, 2013.

Leonard S. Marcus: What were you like as a child?

Hope Larson: I was always drawing. Writing too. One of my earlier memories is of dictating a story to my dad and him typing it up. Then I drew illustrations on the pages when he was done. Even in second grade, I would do illustrated books that were stapled together. A lot of them were about unicorns! Typical little-girl stuff. I was always working with illustrated stories.

We were living in Asheville, North Carolina, which is not a big city, and our house had a big backyard with a creek in it and lots of trees and a stand of bamboo. I would spend all of my time out there. My parents also owned a chunk of land in the nearby countryside. We would go out there on a regular basis and hike in the woods.

Q: What were you reading then?

A: A lot of fantasy. The first books I remember reading are C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, which my parents introduced me to, and Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain. From there I got into Tolkien.

Q: Were your parents involved in the arts?

A: No. My mom’s a nurse, and my dad is an economics professor. My brother grew up to become a computer programmer. So as an artist and writer, I’m the odd one out in my immediate family. But my maternal grandfather was an artist and a sign painter and printmaker. He was an artist jack-of-all-trades. He died before I was born, but I feel that everything I have artistically has come from him.

Q: You seem to like drawing trees.

A: I do. It’s hard to mess them up, and you don’t have to break out a ruler. Straight lines are such a pain! I find it relaxing to draw trees. If I’m drawing a forest scene, I start with just one tree and build around it. I start with an orderly image and go from there.

Q: You spent a year of your childhood in France.

A: I was seven going on eight and didn’t know any French when I got there. My dad was on sabbatical and was translating a book from French to English. I think he used that project as an excuse for us to live in France for a year. It was an amazing experience. They put my brother and me in the village school with all the French kids, and we learned by total immersion. That is where I read my first comics: Tintin, Astérix, and My Little Pony comics, which came out once a week, and Scrooge McDuck, which was huge in France.

When I came back to the United States, it was hard to find that kind of thing. There were just a lot of superhero comics. I wasn’t into them, and I could tell my mom didn’t especially approve of them. So from about age eight or nine through high school, I didn’t read any comics. Then I got into manga and from there into indie comics.

Q: Did you get interested in superhero comics later on?

A: No, and I am still not into them. I don’t like the way most of them look stylistically. Because I didn’t grow up with the rhythm of serialized storytelling, it’s hard for me to get into it now. In the few superhero comics I’ve read, it seems that a lot of time has been devoted to catching people up to what has already happened in the story. There’s just not much there that appeals to me.

Q: What was the appeal of manga to you?

A: The first thing that got my attention was the art. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. The first one I read was Ranma ½, by Rumiko Takahashi, who I think is one of the richest women in Japan! She is an extremely successful, extremely talented manga artist. A lot of what she does is for boys, but they’re really lighthearted and fun and slapsticky and action packed. I was so into all that.

Q: What about indie comics? What did you see in them?

A: They were a little edgier. As I was moving into college, I was looking for cooler, edgier things. Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World was a hugely important book for me and still is.

Q: In college you studied animation.

A: I studied film for a year and had a little bit of training both in live-action moviemaking and animation. I did life drawing on the side because I thought I might go into animation. But I ended up not clicking with film and decided to concentrate instead on illustration, printmaking, and painting.

Q: How would you compare the graphic novel with film as art forms?

A: I would say that the big similarity is in the editing. In a comic you are telling a story by putting different images together to create a sequence. Editing a film is essentially the same process. You have all this footage and you think, “OK, this moment and this image are going to work well next to that moment and that image.” It’s all about transitions. That is the one big similarity. When I started making comics after having had some experience editing films, I immediately thought, “I know how to do this.” But the differences between comics and film are huge. Making comics is a very solitary art form whereas filmmaking is a very social art form.

Q: Your book Mercury is in part a story about gold miners in 1800s Canada. Have you always been interested in history? In doing historical research?

A: Growing up, I liked to read about the American Revolution, and, yes, I love research. It’s easier for me to make up a story by starting with something real that I can build on, rather than building up fantasy from nothing.

Q: How did you research Mercury?

A: The story is set in Nova Scotia, where I was living at the time. I had access to the archives in Halifax, and I found a book of local myths from which I pulled various details. I went through genealogy books in which I would sometimes find interesting brief biographies of individuals from which I took other details.

Q: Why are there so many good Canadian graphic novelists, including your former husband, Bryan Lee O’Malley, and Seth?

A: I think it’s partly because Canada has some really good comics shops that nurture young talent. If you have access to a wide range of art to inspire you, and you have people who are going to be excited to sell your first zine or mini-comic, then you’re more likely to stick with it and get serious about it. Toronto and Montreal, especially, have a ton of cartoonists living there.

Q: Comics artists seem to enjoy being part of a community.

A: Totally. We’re spread out across the United States and the world, and are all working at the same solitary pursuit, so we have found that it is good to reach out for support to other people who are doing the same thing. We’re all on Twitter all day long! You do some drawing, and then you check in with all of your friends who are also working on comics and talking about comics and art and writing. I think it helps us all to keep from going crazy! The other big topic is always tendonitis and exercises for your hand or wrist.

Q: How did all this start?

A: Web comics were out there, and most of us came out of that. Lots of manga were being translated from Japanese into English and flooding the market. Barnes & Noble had a huge manga section, and you’d go in there and see kids sitting all over the floor, reading those books. Manga series run to ten, twenty, even thirty volumes long. It must have interested publishers to see kids buying so many of those books.

Then in 2005 book publishers started expressing interest in graphic novels. Suddenly, publishers were snapping people up right and left, and it seemed that everybody had a book deal — and were finally getting paid enough money to just sit down and focus and do a book and get it done and get it out. Then in 2008, when the economy went kaput, things got difficult for a few years. But now we’re starting to hit our stride. A lot of great books that have been in the works for years are coming out, and publishers are starting to figure out how to sell the books and get them to their audience. I think that my peers and I, who were starting out around 2005, are now coming into our own as artists. I’ve done a lot of books at this point, but I still feel that I am kind of just starting out and putting all the pieces together. It’s a daunting thing to do a graphic novel. You have to be able to draw it and write it. It takes a while to get up to speed. I think that that is what is happening now and that we are all finding our own voices.

Q: Did you think about who your audience was?

A: At first I didn’t think I was writing for anyone in particular. I thought, “These are the stories I feel like writing.” Then when I sold Chiggers, it dawned on me that I was basically going to be a young adult cartoonist because that is what they were selling me as. So I had to make a conscious decision to tell those kinds of stories in the future. That’s what they wanted from me, and that is what I felt was most natural anyway.

Q: Do you see yourself in any of your stories?

A: Chiggers is probably the closest to being an autobiographical story, but even that one isn’t very autobiographical. One reason I turned to writing historical fiction, in fact, was to make it clear that the stories are not just about me.

Q: In Chiggers you give instructions for making a friendship bracelet. Do you think of making your books in a similar way, as a kind of handicraft for your readers to try one day?

A: Probably. I haven’t thought about that. In my new book Who Is AC? the main character makes little chapbook zines. That is definitely a nod to the time when I was just starting out — a time I look back on very fondly, when I could draw a comic, bring it to the copy shop, and give out copies to friends, sometimes all in the same day.

Q: Had you known A Wrinkle in Time as a child?

A: Yes. It was another of those important books for me growing up. I read it and the rest of the Time Quintet, and I remember that the bookstore I went to as a kid had an entire shelf devoted to Madeleine L’Engle, and I knew that if I went to the store and got something from that shelf, it was going to be really good. Over the years I have reread the Time Quintet books many times.

When I received an e-mail asking if I would want to do a graphic novel version of A Wrinkle in Time, I couldn’t believe my luck. I thought at first that it must be a mistake or somebody’s idea of a joke.

Q: Given its power as a story and its special value for so many readers, how did you go about imagining and planning your own version of A Wrinkle in Time? What did you do first?

A: I sat down with the book, which I hadn’t reread for a couple of years, and I wrote the script as I was rereading it. One reason that I thought A Wrinkle in Time was a good candidate for being made into a graphic novel was that there is not all that much description in it. That meant that I had many opportunities to play visually and fill in the blanks. Madeleine L’Engle’s text is almost all dialogue, and nearly all of the original dialogue is in the graphic novel too.

It went through remarkably few stages and revisions. I couldn’t figure out a way to cut the story, and I didn’t want to anyway. Very little changed from my sketches to the finished art. I used blue as an extra color because it felt right and because much of the story takes place at night or in dark places, so it seemed a good choice. Also, blue tends to recede in space, rather than pop out at you. Red is a very aggressive color, so I did not want red, and my editor was very adamant that I not use purple. I don’t know why!

I had to think carefully about how to draw Meg because my visual image of her was very different from the way she is actually described in the book. She goes through the story with a black eye, for instance, and I had forgotten all about that. For clothes and hairstyles and other details of that kind, I used a 1962 Sears and Roebuck catalog that I found on eBay.

Q: How do you think of the graphic novel version of a book, especially of a classic like A Wrinkle in Time, in relation to the original?

A: I see it as being supplementary and as an homage. It’s certainly not in any sense a replacement for the original. My hope is always that kids who read the graphic novel first will go on to read the novel.

Q: What inspired you to create “Starland”?

A: This comic is about my love of Los Angeles. It’s a big city, but it’s not a city in the way that New York or Chicago or Toronto is a city. It’s spread out, and it’s full of unexpected pockets of wilderness. There’s Griffith Park, where this story takes place, a 4,000-acre park full of hiking trails and wildlife like coyotes and cougars. There are also a number of smaller but still sizable parks, including Elysian Park (600 acres) and Debs Park (282 acres). In spite of the cars and the smog, nature is a big part of life in Los Angeles. The other aspect of LA that I wanted to touch on is the fact that many people here lead hidden lives. Everyone’s either trying to blend in and go incognito, or they’re fronting like they’re somebody important when they don’t even know where next month’s rent is coming from. So, it was fun to write a story about this character in Griffith Park who couldn’t possibly be what he appears to be, but is.

Q: Do you have a daily work routine?

A: I do. When I’m writing, I get up at seven every day, and I write from eight or nine in the morning until noon. Then I take a break and maybe go for a run. Around two, I go out to a coffee shop and work there for two or three more hours. Then I’m done for the day. When I’m drawing, my schedule is similar except that I will have a page count that I need to hit, whereas for writing it is much harder to set a specific goal. By the time I start drawing, the script is already in place, and I know that I just have to sit down and draw. If I’m drawing “pencils,” I will want to have finished four by the end of the day; if I’m doing “inks,” I will do two per day. Inking is a purely mechanical process. I listen to a lot of audiobooks at that stage!

Q: What are some of the things you like best about making comics?

A: I like telling stories that have the feel of a novel: stories that are big and all of a piece. And I feel like there should be more stories out there for girls, and I try to tell them.