Kalaʻi Miller: R. Kikuo Johnson was born and raised on the island of Maui and fell
in love with comics at a young age.
That love never left and today he is an award-winning graphic novelist and illustrator.
Recently, he received a Whiting award as one of the ten most promising emerging writers
in the country.
Kikuo Johnson: I'm Kikuo Johnson.
I'm an illustrator and comic book artist.
I was born on Maui, and I, we grew up in Makawao while and you know, it rains a lot up there.
So I spent a lot of times inside.
My dad had lots of paper, was drawing all the time, and never stopped.
When I was about eight, I think I found comic books.
And I was hooked.
My brother had this one comic.
It was like a GI Joe comic, I think.
And it had an advertisement for another comic.
And it was about this big.
And it was a drawing of Wolverine.
But when they photographed it, they they kind of made all the color go to black and white.
So it's super edgy and dramatic.
And it's the cover of Wolverine number one by Frank Miller where he's like this.
And it looks scary.
It looked intimidating.
But also I was so drawn to it as a little kid because there's nothing like that like
in the cartoons I’d seen on TV.
So I begged my dad to take me to the comic book store.
And that was that.
Right after I got my first comic it was about in third grade.
And I started drawing my own comics almost immediately.
I think like, one of the things that's super appealing about comics is that it's just paper
and, and staples, really.
And if you have a pencil, then you can make your own comic.
I kept all these old comics that I was making when I was a little kid.
Wind Man versus Dark Destructor—definitely needed a copy-editor for these ones.
When I was kid, I was super attracted to the superhero stories.
When you're a kid, you have power fantasies, and that's a way to kind of, an outlet for
that.
But pretty soon, I was still buying comics.
And I just actually didn't care that much about the stories.
They weren't, the superhero genre just wasn't that interesting to me.
And as I became a teenager, I found other kind of independent comics and, and other
stories and just got attracted to like, regular novels.
The stories that always appealed to me typically are just family relationships, like the, like
how people that love each other are interacting.
And those are the stories I'm drawn to.
Those are just the stories I want to read, and those are the stories I wanted to make.
So, I was always drawing, but it never occurred to me that it was a job like you could actually
make a living this way.
My parents saw me just drawing all the time in my spare time.
And I was actually shocked that my parents, by the time I was a senior was like, have
you thought about art school?
I was, I couldn't believe that they would like, go it like pushing that kind of like
less stable direction.
And I'm just super grateful that I have supportive parents.
And it made sense.
It's all I ever wanted to do, I would just be doing it anyway.
I went to went to the Rhode Island School of Design.
It’s super far, but I wanted an adventure.
While I was in school, I did a comic called Night Fisher.
I started it my junior year.
I worked on it for another three years.
So when I was working on Night Fisher, and I was living in New York at that point with
some of my classmates that I graduated with.
And I was waiting tables, and I was sharing an apartment with three other guys, and I
was broke.
The thing that kept me going, that kept me like, you know, this is worth it.
This is a story that's worthwhile, was I really wanted to show the Hawaiʻi that I knew, because
in any of the media, I saw I didn't recognize the Hawaiʻi that was presented at all, and
especially not the Maui that I knew.
So I tried to write a book that really presented a version of Maui that I really, really recognized.
And that really kept me going and I believe that it was something that needed to be put
out, I convinced myself that it was worth struggling for.
Looking back at it, I'm 40 years old now I wrote it when I was 21.
Now looking back, I do see that I was working out a lot of the kind of events of my high
school years and some of it is autobiographical, a lot of it is fiction, it's kind of a mix
of both.
To be honest, I was never sure how I was going to totally make it all work.
I just knew that I really wanted to draw comics and I thought, if I made something that got
out there, and people saw it, I hoped that it might lead to other opportunities.
I was like, I'll make this comic and this will be my debut, and people hopefully will
see it.
And it actually worked.
Amazingly, it came out people saw it and people started hiring me to do drawings for their
magazines.
It takes about a year for like a book to go from it being announced, and then finally
being published.
And during that year, I was trying to publish comic strips in magazines.
So I would just like make up emails, I'd look at the art director, and it'd be like John
Smith.
So I'd be like John underscore Smith, at outdoor magazine.com.
And I, and I would email John Smith and be like, hey, publish this comic strip, please.
And, of course, everybody either just didn't answer or rejected me.
And eventually, I started submitting stuff to the New Yorker.
And amazingly, I got an email back from the New Yorker.
And they said, we don't know what you want us to do with this comic strip.
Like, that's not how it works.
But we do have an article that we'd like you to illustrate.
Because I have your book on my desk.
They sent it to us as a review, copy.
I love it.
Do you want to do this illustration for us?
And so that was kind of my break, where I finally started kind of pivoting to paid magazine
work.
And that became my bread and butter and how I kept the lights on in New York for a while.
I had already worked for The New Yorker for years at this point doing interior illustrations,
which were really fun to do, but like kind of the Holy Grail as a professional illustrator
is to try to get a cover.
One reason for that is that it's a really rare illustration gig where the illustrator
comes up with a concept.
Most of my job is illustrating someone else's idea.
But for the New Yorker, it's all about coming up with your own idea telling your own story.
So after years of submitting ideas something finally clicked and I got my first cover in
the New Yorker.
I got a call and Francois was like, we need a cover.
It's the music issue.
We want it to take place in Brooklyn.
So we want someone that lives in Brooklyn, and we want someone young, we want someone
new and that's you.
So we're gonna give you a try.
So I kind of had like this set up audition.
It was cool, because I did a bunch of different sketches.
I actually went out to a club that was close to my house at the time in Brooklyn, with
a music writer, which was a fun night, and came up with his image.
And you can see that it's like the perspective like you're standing on a stage.
And I don't know if this is a real story, but it sounded like maybe it got accepted
because the editor of the New Yorker plays guitar and could imagine himself on the onstage
playing his guitar.
That was one of the rare moments in the career where you know, you pop a bottle of champagne.
For my second book after Night Fisher, I did a book called The Shark King and the art editor.
And an editor for that series is a woman named Francois Mouly, who also happens to be the
art director for the New Yorker.
The concept for the line is that comics are a really great way to learn to read, because
it's like pictures and words, instead of books that parents are, parents are reading to kids,
it's books that kids can read to themselves.
And I got a call from the editor.
And she was like, Have you ever thought about doing a kid's comic?
We're doing some like mythological stories.
And immediately, I thought of the Nanaue story, which is a story I grew up with.
Of this, you know, demigod, Nanaue, half shark, half man.
And it's a pretty scary story if you know the story.
But it's also a story of a character with a foot in two worlds.
And that really appealed to me.
And I tried to honor that story as best as I could, while making it not quite so violent
for kids.
But I went to Waipio Valley and really tried to dig into what that story meant.
It was it was such a treat, just to research and really kind of dig into that mythology,
they’re such incredible stories.
I feel like there's a lot of insight in those stories.
And they survive for a reason, right?
They're, they're hundreds of years old, and they survive for a reason.
I've lived in Brooklyn now for, for years.
And it's still, I still just feel like a visitor there.
I don't know if that'll ever go away.
I always think of Maui as home.
I come home and spend about a month here every year, and it's still just feels like home.
I come home every winter, and spend time with my family, and like when I think about family
time, it's all in Hawaiʻi, and it's the people I know, it's the people I love.
And so there are stories that I've set elsewhere, that don't really make sense to me until I
if I reset them in Hawaiʻi suddenly like it all becomes real and it becomes familiar.
When I was first started writing No One Else, I actually had set it in Massachusetts, where
I was like, briefly living, and uh spending a summer.
And I wrote this script and it kind of didn't make sense to me or like, not that, it didn't
quite feel real, wasn't working.
And then I came home one winter, and this would have been 2015.
And I was sitting up on up on up in Wailuku and looking out at a cane fire.
And it just occurred to me what if I set it right here?
And what if like, the cane fires were the backdrop for the island?
And what if the characters were local people, and suddenly, it all seemed super real, it
all seemed familiar to me, it seemed natural.
And, and then I was like, I have to have to write this.
I started writing the book, started working on the book.
And then the next year, the mill closed.
So it was kind of, the story almost became like a story of mourning, as this kind of
era was ending.
And think there’s like a magic, just as a reader, when I'm reading a story about a
world that I'm not familiar with, would be a culture I'm not familiar with.
I just noticed that those kinds of really specific ticks have a place or have a culture
or have a language, make it feel so much more real.
I think there's a paradox, where almost the more specific, you can make it a story to
your own experience, the more universal it is somehow.
And so if you're wanting to tell your story, I think if you can be as specific to it as
possible.
I think that's only a strength.
So when I was a kid I got hooked on comics.
And it just never went away.
I just always loved them.
And I think the magic of it is, like reading pictures, like in a movie, the images don't
stay on the screen long enough to really kind of really study and kind of figure out what
the story is from the image if you have a more complex story.
One cartoonists that I really love, his name is Chester Brown.
And he always says that what he loves about comics is the silence and the stillness.
And I couldn't agree more.
It's looking at a still image, and kind of deciphering all its nuance spending, taking
your own time on it.
And then going to the next image and seeing how those two images connect.
It's just a magic reading experience for me that I love.
And I just, I love a new great comic.
I crave that I just, it's my favorite way to my favorite form of entertainment.