The Secret Origin of JUDD WINICK

Judd Winick is well-known to comic book fans for writing superhero stories, but the creator has found a new audience through his all-ages graphic novel series HILO, which he both writes and draws.

Winick’s latest release, HILO Book 6: All the Pieces Fit, finished the original story arc the author launched with his first HILO book. But the story ended with several new mysteries that Winick will tackle in future books.

All-ages graphic novels is still a relatively new adventure for Winick, whose career has included everything from reality TV (on MTV’s The Real World) to animation (as creator of Cartoon Network’s The Life and Times of Juniper Lee). But it’s one that has been successful enough for HILO’s publisher, Random House, to give Winick the ability to continue releasing books for the foreseeable future.

HILO tells the story of an alien boy named Hilo (pronounced “high-low”) who crashed to Earth and made two new human friends, D.J. and Gina. Over the course of the first six books, Winick took the characters on a variety of adventures and confrontations with Hilo’s pursuer, the villainous Razorwark.

In the latest of our “Year One”-style interviews, The Secret Origin Of…, Newsarama turns our attention to Judd Winick’s varied history and what brought him to writing and drawing HILO.

Newsarama: Judd, before we dive into your “secret origin,” what’s your status now with the COVID-19 situation? Last time we talked, you were supposed to be doing a book tour to schools. Was that impacted?

Judd Winick: Book tour-wise, I was OK. My tour started on February 4, when my book came out, and I was on the road for about five weeks. The outbreak began, literally, while I was on the road. And although behavior changed while I was out there – as in I had to stop shaking hands, letting kids down by letting them know they can no longer fist bump or high-five towards the end there – I got through all of my travel.

I had about three more weeks of local visits in the bay area where I would be visiting schools and bookstores. And I was lucky enough to get through about half that before everything shut down.

In the two days before all of the schools closed in the Bay Area, I visited several bookstores that had pre-orders and signed something in the neighborhood of 400-500 books which went out to the kids just before they went home for the homeschooling experience. So, they got their HILO books just before everybody checked out.

Nrama: So you back at writing? Or drawing? One of our first questions we always ask for the “Secret Origin” stories is, “What’s on your drawing board right now?”

Winick: Proverbial drawing board? I just finished the seventh HILO book. And it’s now being colored. Maarta Laiho is my colorist and she’s amazing.

With that, I’ve stepped away from the drawing board, literally, and I have begun writing the next book.

I’m entering what is usually my most difficult phase of my next book, which is the hard-core writing of it. This, of course, is proving to be a little bit challenging because I have a home studio. And my home currently has my two children in it who are being homeschooled, and my wife always sets up a makeshift office to see patients via ZOOM and Skype and continue her research. Pam, to remind everyone, is a physician.

But I consider myself one of the lucky ones. My next book, as in HILO Book 7, was completed before I began my book tour. So a little bit of pressure is off there. Again I’m the lucky one. And I’m happy that my work is providing a little bit of escape and fun for the young readers of HILO.

Nrama: When you draw the HILO books, can you describe the medium you use?

Winick: I used to draw on board with pencil and ink and letter on computer. But in the last couple years, I’ve gone fully digital. I do it all on my iPad Pro — mostly in this app called Comicdraw, and I finish off the ink in Procreate. I won’t lie, it saves me lots of time, but I do miss paper a lot.

Nrama: Doing the drawing and writing of HILO, it feels like you’ve returned to your first love. You were originally a comic strip person, right?

Winick: For me, it all started with comic strips. That’s what I wanted to do. Every book tour, I give a new talk – I sit down for a few days or weeks and come up with an entirely new lecture – or a talk – with about 120 little drawings to go along with it. I do this little Power Point presentation.

This one delves suddenly into the fact that I didn’t think I would be doing exactly this. I always wanted to be a cartoonist, and I am a cartoonist, but it was going to be comic strips. That’s what I love.

When I was eight years old, I fell in love with Garfield. And when I was 13, I fell in love with Bloom County. And that’s what I wanted to do with my life. That was the plan.

And then for awhile, I was doing a comic strip: Frumpy the Clown. And somewhere along the line, I got syndicated with Frumpy the Clown through Creators Syndicate. And I couldn’t be happier, because it was all I ever wanted to do. That was the end-all, be-all goal.

But I think it was only when I doubled up on my workload and decided to do a graphic novel about Pedro Zamora that things changed.

Nrama: That graphic novel was career-changing for you, I assume, but it was the result of something that was even more life-changing. Can you explain who Pedro Zamora is?

Winick: In 1994, I was on the third season of MTV’s The Real World, here in San Francisco. And Pedro Zamora was a 22-year-old AIDS educator and activist – a Cuban immigrant who grew up in Miami.

And to tell it simply but honestly, in a lot of ways, he changed the world. It was the first time most people had ever actually seen someone who was living with AIDS, in a real way, in an honest way. It wasn’t a news report where we were watching someone who was sick or dying. It was just Pedro.

He was soap-opera handsome, kind, and he was living his life. He had friends. He had a job. He had a boyfriend. And people saw that for the very first time. And it changed the way most people viewed people who were living with AIDS.

Unfortunately, we finished filming the show in June of 1994 and Pedro got sick that August. And he passed away in November. So it was very fast.

One of my very good friends at the time, Pam, who was also on the show – her name’s Pam Ling – she and I actually went around the country for a few years and spoke about Pedro. We lectured and gave talks at high schools and colleges and middle schools and talked about Pedro. We jus didn’t want people to forget him. We felt it was important for his story to go on. It was the only thing we thought to do.

And then after a couple years, we stopped because it had gotten too taxing. And Pam went back to medical school.

And I went back to cartooning full-time.

But it got into my head, as I was doing Frumpy the Clown, that I didn’t want to stop telling Pedro’s story. I thought we should keep it out there in some way. So I got it into my head to maybe introduce a character into the comic strip who was a lot like Pedro – like Uncle Peter or somebody. But as I started working on it, it didn’t quite feel right.

And that’s when I started toying with doing it as a graphic novel. Two-and-a-half years later, I had a first draft.

I had never done something like that. I had done comic strips, and cartoons, and spot illustrations – all manner of things. But I had never done sequential art. I never did it before. The first time I did it was doing this book about Pedro. And after that, something clicked.

Nrama: So Pedro changed your life again, with your work on Pedro and Me.

Winick: Yeah, something clicked in a way that hadn’t before. I really decided that, I think I want to tell stories this way. And that was all because of Pedro. It all started with him. It all started with this story that I wanted to tell about him.

It wasn’t long after I finished the book that I decided to hang up the comic strip. I had done it for three years.

Right after that, the first thing I did was Barry Ween. I went and did the silliest, most profane thing I could think of. [Laughs]

After the emotion and stress of doing a memoir about Pedro and myself and Pam and all that, I just wanted to do something kind of dumb and full of foul language.

Nrama: The Adventures of Barry Ween, Boy Genius — it’s become a cult classic. It’s how I first discovered your work.

Winick: Yeah, but you know, what’s funny about that is, as I did it, that wound up being kind of emotional too. It was just supposed to be dumb. And it kind of got real for me.

In that, it proved to me, OK, this is how I want to tell stories.

Nrama: Next came superhero comic books, for which most Newsarama readers probably remember you most. Was that just the next natural step in sequential storytelling for you?

Winick: I can’t take the credit for it. The idea was put into my head by Bob Schreck. I met Bob at the San Diego Comic Con in, I don’t know, 1995? ’96? So a gajillion years ago. He recognized me from the show, and I knew who he was. I was like, “You’re Bob Schreck! You’re Frank Miller’s editor!” And he liked Frumpy the Clown.

And so, around the time they were launching Oni Press, he wondered if I wanted to do something for Oni Double Feature, but I told him I was busy finishing up a graphic novel. And I asked him to read it, and he did. He read Pedro and Me before it went out to publishers. And he told me it should have a mainstream publisher. He said that if everybody said no, then Oni Press would publish it. But he thought I should go to mainstream publishers first, which was great advice.

Sometime about two years into Oni, he then got a job at DC Comics. And when Ron Marz was going to leave Green Lantern, he gave me a call. Like, “Do you like superhero comics?” “Yeah! I love superhero comics!” “You ever thought about writing them?” “Bob, I don’t know.” “No, you could totally do it. I’m going to send you some scripts. I want you to read them. And call me back in a week or two and tell me if you think you can do this.”

Nrama: And you were a huge fan of superhero comic books – I remember us talking about it.

Winick: Yeah! I was always a huge comic book fan as a kid. I loved them. That’s how I learned how to draw. That’s how I learned anything about story was – I mean, I mostly read comics as a kid. I don’t think I read a prose book for pleasure until I was 13. It was all comics.

Nrama: Was that the first time you’d done scripts, and not drawing it yourself?

Winick: Yep, yep. It was all because of Bob. Everybody needs a mentor. Everybody needs a rabbi. Everybody needs someone who can tell you, no, you’ll be fine. Go ahead and do it.

And I did the first few scripts and DC liked them. And they liked more. And at some point I said, so, am I the regular writer now? And they said, “Oh! Yeah!”

So I owe it to Bob, and I owe it to Mike Carlin, who took a chance on me. But again, it actually comes back to …. I owe it to Pedro.

If I hadn’t had this experience, if I hadn’t met him, if I hadn’t just wanted to tell this story about this experience that me and Pam had knowing him… I don’t know where I would be. It led to everything. It led to everything I’m doing today.

Nrama: Including the “Pam” you keep talking about – the one you met on The Real World and did those lectures with. Just to make it clear to everyone, that’s the same “Pam” you mentioned earlier – your wife, right?

Winick: Yes. For clarity, Pam Ling, who was my housemate on The Real World – we started dating just a couple of months after the show stopped filming. And we have been together for 26 years. We got married in 2001. We’ve got two children. So yeah, I’m really, really glad I did that stupid television show! It turned out to be not a stupid television show.

Nrama: OK, and not to skip a whole decade-plus of your life spent doing superhero comics – I mean, I would love to delve into some of my favorites you’ve done, especially Justice Leafgue: Generation Lost.

Winick: Thank you!

Nrama: It would be nice to have you writing those characters right now, because they’re not really around much anymore.

Winick: No, they’re not.

Nrama: But just to skip ahead, can you briefly talk about the next step? How did superhero comics turn into your success on HILO?

Winick: We are the sum total of our parts. I wouldn’t be doing HILO if I hadn’t spent over a decade writing superhero comics, making action-adventure just second nature.

When you do superhero comics that long – it’s something Ed Brubaker and I talked about, that you develop these muscles when it comes to plot and storytelling, and it’s simply because of the way superhero comics are designed publishing-wise. A lot of times, you’re told, “yeah, you can’t do that story — you’ve got to change it up.” So you can’t use those characters, so you’ve got to figure out another way to do it. So you’re like, OK, what if this character does that instead, and then that character does that, and we do this, and we do that …

Ed and I joked about, it’s like Joe Pantoliano talking about how he sees the Matrix in The Matrix – he can just see how it all fits together. When you do superhero comics long enough, figuring out plots and the machinations of adventure storytelling becomes a little second-nature.

And that made it easier to make this leap to do HILO.

It was about everything coming together. I did superhero comics for over a decade. I wasn’t burnt out, by any stretch of the imagination, but I wanted to start drawing again. I realized I was becoming deeply unhappy, because it occurred to me that I’m a cartoonist, and I had gotten away from it in a big way. I hadn’t drawn anything in years.

And that met up with my son, who was seven years old, and he wanted to read Dad’s superhero comics. “Dad, can I read your run on Batman?” And I had to tell him, “no.” ‘Cause he was seven! It was just too intense for him.

I’ve told you this story before, I think, but I gave him Bone. He lost his mind and just loved it. And I joke that I got jealous but … it’s the truth. I did get jealous about how much he loved it.

It lit a fire under me that, I can do this. I really can do this.

And with that, it really was kind of a return to where I’d started. As a medium, comic strips are for everybody. You know, cradle to grave – it’s for kids right up to the elderly. It’s a thing that’s supposed to be designed for everybody to read.

And the art is supposed to be accessible in that way too.

So HILO is actually a combination of – you know, it looks like a comic strip; it’s loaded with jokes like a family comic strip; but it’s a straight-up action-adventure story like a superhero comic.

It is everything I ever did, just basically in one ongoing serialized story. It’s funny that it took me so long to figure out exactly where I wanted to be and how I want to tell stories, but that was it.

Now, it seems obvious. Now it seems like a straight line. But it didn’t happen that way. It took awhile to find where I wanted to be.

Nrama: And this is where you want to be.

Winick: Yeah, where I want to be is writing and drawing these all-ages action-adventure stories. That’s my little niche. That’s my piece of real estate that I love.