By the time Mark Siegel and Siena Cherson met as undergraduates at Brown University, they both knew something about what it is like to chase a big dream. Mark arrived at Brown raring to perfect the skills he had been developing from childhood as an artist and writer — the career he always envisioned for himself. Siena had trained from age six to be a ballerina and had been edging ever closer to that near-impossible goal when at eighteen she suffered an ankle injury that abruptly ended her chances. College for her was about reimagining her life minus the dream that had meant so much to her for as long as she could remember. She met Mark while having a go at acting, in a play written and directed by him.

Although Mark was able to keep to his original plan, it was not smooth sailing for him for a time. About ten years passed after Mark graduated from college before anyone wanted to publish him. (It was not long after that, however, that he also became a publisher, founding First Second Books — one of the first imprints to specialize in graphic novels.) In time, Siena decided that teaching young people to dance might be a very good use of her talent. To Dance grew out of that same realization. I spoke with Mark and Siena Siegel by phone for this interview on February 16, 2014.

Leonard S. Marcus: What were you like as children?

Mark Siegel: I was a little bit absent, a daydreamer, spending half my life in other worlds.

Siena Cherson Siegel: I was very active and I would say a little bit on the serious side. In terms of dance, I was driven and disciplined. Dance was such a love of mine, though, that much of the time I didn’t notice how hard I was working.

Q: Mark, how did you find your way into the world of comics?

M: I was in it as far back as I can remember. I grew up in France and so was exposed first to the European tradition, rather than to American superhero comics or Japanese manga. We were living just outside Paris, and I would read anything and everything I could get my hands on.

At that time there were French magazines for kids that serialized the great French comics artists from the sixties, seventies, and eighties. One magazine, called Pilote, was edited by René Goscinny, who also co-created and wrote Astérix for the magazine. In all, he produced dozens of series, having been inspired, during a visit to New York, by the gang who launched Mad. Astérix got started in the most unlikely way. With just one day left before the first issue of Pilote was due to go to the printer, Goscinny realized he had five more pages to fill. So he found an artist who was free named Albert Uderzo and told him they were going to do a comic about a little Gaul warrior. That was the birth of Astérix, one of the all-time best-selling comics. Goscinny became a huge role model for me.

Comics were something I always returned to. When I was in third or fourth grade in France, I was already photocopying and selling my comics at school. The first one was about a swarm of mosquitoes. Another was about an invisible man. When I was about nine, I was apprenticed to a painter who had done comics during World War I and worked with Salvador Dalí. [He was] an amazing guy who was in his late eighties when I met him, I think, through a friend of my mother. He took a liking to me. I would draw comics and paint in his studio.

Q: Siena, you were equally passionate about ballet.

S: Yes, and when I realized I wasn’t going to be a ballet dancer, I didn’t have a backup plan. I did a lot of theater at Brown — which is where Mark and I met — but found I didn’t enjoy it. It took several years before I found my work on the education side of dance and thought to write about my own experience.

Q: Mark, when did you start publishing your work?

M: When I came to the States, it was for college. At Brown I studied fine arts and creative writing. After college I had various jobs as a designer while working on my own book and comics projects. I would send them out to publishers and have them rejected — on both sides of the Atlantic! That went on for about ten years. But I was dogged! In 2000 we moved to New York from Boston, and suddenly doors opened for both of us. I illustrated my first picture book, Seadogs, in a European comics style, and it got a lot of attention just as publishers were recognizing the exploding popularity in the U.S. of Japanese manga. Publishers at this time were looking for a way to become involved with comics. That in turn led to my starting First Second Books, the comics imprint I continue to edit today at Macmillan.

Q: To Dance came out in the same year that First Second Books published its first books.

M: Yes, and our first child was born that year too.

Q: How did you go about creating that book?

S: We always thought it would be a graphic memoir.

M: It started with a brief conversation during which we just toyed with the idea and joked about it. One day I mentioned our idea for a “ballet comic” to my editor, a book that would chronicle ten years of Siena’s life and be the only ballet book in existence with a football scene, because Siena likes football. Six months later I was talking with my editor again when he said out of the blue, “You know that dance book with Siena? Let’s sign it up.” He didn’t want to see an outline or anything. It was as simple as that.

Q: What did you do first?

M: We had to learn each other’s language. I was not especially drawn to ballet. Funnily enough, Siena is like that about comics. Siena had to train me to read a ballet, to teach me the vocabulary of ballet and what to watch for. We saw many performances together — both live and on tape — before finally there was a moment in a grainy old black-and-white video we were viewing that absolutely electrified me. Suddenly I got it! In a similar way, Siena ventured into the world of comics with me.

Siena and I would go for long walks together with a tape recorder running. Eventually, we recorded about a hundred hours of conversations about the story. We wanted a much longer book, but it wasn’t a practical option. We kept reworking and reworking the text right up until the end.

S: I don’t know how many drafts there were that had to be cut and cut. A graphic memoir I read at the time, and which I would say was a real inspiration for me, was Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.

M: There were certain feelings we were going for. We ended up organizing the story around four key moments. There was the moment when Siena first saw one of the great Russian ballerinas dance and realized how powerful and beautiful dance could be. There was the scene we included from the romantic French ballet Giselle. And there was the moment when the great choreographer George Balanchine died, and the moving performance that was given in his memory. Finally, there was the moment when Siena realized she wasn’t going to be a dancer.

Q: Mark, how did you settle on the look of the drawings?

M: It was hard. I knew the book needed to have a “feminine” look. I also knew that it’s usually pretty painful to look at ballet in the static form of drawings or photographs. I had to find a way to make the drawings fluid. Siena corrected the details: where the elbows and ankles would be, for example. I went for a handcrafted, slightly messy look in the drawings. I wanted them to feel “young” and a little bit light. Throughout the book I drew ribbons like the ones used to tie toe shoes as both a decorative device and a connecting device between sections. I think the ribbons somehow hint at the mystery of dance, which is something that Siena talked a lot about in our taped conversations — the mystery of the connections that dance makes for us that lie beyond words.

Q: Mark, were you involved in web comics?

M: Not until I did Sailor Twain. The web comics world is huge, with millions of readers who don’t necessarily also buy books, in part because web comics are so easily forwarded and shared. Some web comics artists would rather raise money on Kickstarter or by selling T-shirts and other merchandise than by having a publishing deal. But not always.

Q: Sailor Twain is such a sprawling, big, ambitious book.

M: It took nine years from the time I sketched the first doodles on the commuter train I take to work in the morning! Among the goals I had for myself at the beginning was the idea that I wanted to tell a story from an adult perspective, and that I wanted to make the story layered enough that readers would want to go back to it again and again.

Q: What feeling were you going for in your drawings of the characters? Why, for instance, does Captain Twain have such big cartoony eyes?

M: The story made me do it! Each character is drawn in a different style that reveals something basic about that character’s moral view of the world and about his or her inner nature. I drew the captain all in black-and-white and gave him a slightly rigid, geometric look, whereas the more ambiguous Lafayette is more fluid and organic-looking and is drawn in shades of gray. The mermaid, although a fantastic creature, actually looks more naturalistic — more real — than either of the men.

I tried doing the illustrations before choosing to draw them in charcoal, which is very messy and hard to control. But charcoal has such atmosphere. Three strokes and I would have a steamboat appearing out of the mist.

Q: Your drawings remind me of old sepia photographs.

M: I looked at a lot of those old pictures at museums and libraries as I was doing my research, as well as at nineteenth-century maps. I read the diaries of some of the many captains who sailed the Hudson during that period.

Q: What other kinds of research did you do?

M: I set up a Sailor Twain website, where I posted one finished page from the book every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday over a period of two years. Eventually, I had posted all of it. As readers discovered the site, it became a shared experience, with a dialogue that grew and deepened.

Every so often there would be somebody who was a total steamboat geek, who knew that the width of the planks in the floor of the captain’s room was a bit off and would write to say that the planks would have to be teak or cypress wood, because both are easily replaced in case of water damage. Then they would say, “What were you thinking?!” There was another guy who knew all about engine rooms, who would write comments like “Those pistons are for shallow-water Mississippi steamboats. You’ve got it all wrong!” It was great to hear from these people.

Q: What did you learn from your experience on the Web?

M: That there’s a place now for an author who is an interactive presence and not just a hermit in a cave who tosses out a masterpiece every few years. It’s not a hard-and-fast rule, but it has something to do with our time being the age of the Internet.

Early on when the audience was starting to build and I was learning that I needed to respond to what they were saying, I happened to be drawing a crowd scene on board the boat, and so I posted a message that said “Send me a photo and I’ll draw you into the scene in 1880s fashion.” I thought a few people would do so, but I immediately got seventy-five photos, and they kept coming and coming. By the time I finished the book, I had incorporated cameo portraits of about a hundred readers, or “Twainers,” as they started to call themselves, in the illustrations.

Q: Tell me about the comic you created for this book, “City Entity.”

S: A city is a mysterious creature. It’s a collection of individual homes and people, but it’s also an entity. And art is like that too, sometimes individual, sometimes collective. We were especially interested in the idea that any art form — be it in paint, in book form, in film, or in this case in dance — can allow us to become the voice, the instrument, the pen, sometimes without our even being aware of it. So this idea came to us in a conversation: what would it be like if unbeknownst to one another, all the dancers in the city were dancing the same movement at once? What might that release or cause or feel like? Dance, like drawing, can be wordless and open to every individual’s own understanding. The feeling of awe and mystery appealed to us and resulted in this strange little comic!

Q: What do you both find particularly satisfying about comics as an art form?

S: Looking back at To Dance, I see that Mark was able to capture through his drawings many of the feelings I have about dance that I could not have put into words.

M: I think that, like dance, the best comics touch us on a level that is somehow even more basic than words.