“I created Saturday because I wanted to make a book that would make both the ten year-old me and the 40 year-old me explode with delight. I wanted to make a book you could get lost in. I wanted to make the thing that I wanted to see out in the world.
NOAH KROESE TALKS ABOUT HIS GRAPHIC NOVEL, SATURDAY
oah Kroese is an illustrious illustrator, cartoonist, and master storyteller from northern Idaho whose imagination knows no bounds. Is he BOOM’s father? In this POPcast, we’ll find out together what role Noah plays in making BOOM so darn cute.
If you’re into lavishly illustrated, king-sized novels that embark into adventures in wonderful and unexpected places. You are going to love Noah’s evolution of sketches that tickle the imagination. We’ll even peek into the thoughts swirling within Noah’s creative mind.
Let’s uncover the stories behind the art of a multifaceted Creative!
Noah Kroese: Thank you so much for having me, BOOM. It’s such a pleasure to be on the POPcast.
Noah Kroese: Your father? It’s starting to feel like I’m on Maury Povich. So, I think maybe it’s more accurate to say I helped design you. But it wasn’t just me. There were two other people.
Noah Kroese: Yeah, I think we’re all pretty lucky not to remember our conception. It makes Thanksgiving less awkward. So here’s how it happened. A few years back, a pair of very cool wandering raconteurs reached out to me and asked if I wanted to help develop an idea they had. That idea was you. And together, the three of us brainstormed, and sketched, and worked, and turned the idea of you into something real. It was super cool to be a part of.
Noah Kroese: Well, that one’s easy. The coolest thing about being one of your creators is seeing all the things you’ve gotten up to since we set you loose.
Noah Kroese: Technically, I’m an adult, but for the most part, it feels like I’m two kids in a trench coat pretending to be an adult. I’m still obsessed with monsters and science fiction. I’m delighted by art and by the people who make it. I don’t have much free time these days, but when I have the chance, I love to be outdoors, hiking, and biking, and fishing.
Noah Kroese: So Saturday is about an imaginative little girl named India McGreevy, her parents, Fred and Elizabeth, an awful swamp of a week, and the wild ride back to almost normal. It has everything you could want in a book, assuming what you want is a lot of crazy drawings, a traveling circus, a mechanic with a prosthetic leg, and the world’s largest crocodile. I created Saturday because I wanted to make a book that would make both the ten year-old me and the 40 year-old me explode with delight. I wanted to make a book you could get lost in. I wanted to make the thing that I wanted to see out in the world.
Noah Kroese: The Adventurer is about a curious and fearless inventor, an explorer named Chuck, her dumpy, sullen teenage brother, Lug, a doomed Victorian expedition, and search for a treasure with a curse so dark, it stains history. It’s gonna be epic. I’m crazy, crazy excited about this new book. It has long forgotten treasure, a dark curse, exotic locations, terrifying monsters, ancient machines, abandoned cities, and a lot of dumb jokes. It’s coming along nicely, but also slowly. There’s no real eta.
Noah Kroese: Picking my favorite robot would be like picking my favorite child. So, yes, you’re absolutely my favorite.
Noah Kroese: Usually I’ll create a pretty rough outline of the story before I start drawing. Then I’ll do some character design sketches and maybe a few thumbnails. But a lot of the detail is written as I go, and that makes the process even more fun. Every panel is a little visual puzzle. It’s an awesome challenge.
Noah Kroese: My influences are pretty diverse: Frank Frazetta, Rien Poortvliet, Holling Clancy Holling, Hergé (the guy who wrote “Tintin”). There really are too many to name.
Noah Kroese: Oh, man, I love drawing so many things that it would probably be easier to tell you what I don’t like to draw, but here goes. Detail is probably my favorite thing to draw. Textures, rivets, rust, that kind of thing. I also love drawing cartoony facial expressions, creatures of various kinds, and, you know, robots, of course. For the record, the things I don’t love to draw, cars and babies.
Noah Kroese: If I could introduce people to one artist they might not know. It might be Holling Clancy Holling, who wrote a book called “The Tree and The Trail”, and also one called “Paddle to the Sea”. Either that or a guy named Kadir Nelson.
Noah Kroese: My favorite song right now is probably “I Don’t Want to be Funny Anymore” by Lucy Dacus or a song called “South Town Girls” by The Hold Steady. Book-wise, right now I’m reading a book called Number Go Up by Zeke Faux. But my favorite book is probably Neuromancer by William Gibson or Going Postal by Terry Pratchett.
Noah Kroese: I think the best advice I could offer someone who wants to write an illustrated graphic novel is don’t wait. Don’t wait until you have free time. Free time is like Godot or your side of ranch at a busy restaurant. It’s just not coming. Don’t wait until you feel ready. You know when I feel ready? When I’ve just finished the thing I never felt ready for. And maybe most importantly, don’t avoid making your thing because you think making cool stuff is something other people do. That it’s the domain of other people who have access to knowledge and talent and abilities that you don’t. The people who made the stuff that you love were pretty much all normal folks. They worried about whether or not they could do it, and then they did it anyway. Trust me, making your thing doesn’t have to take a wealth of knowledge or competence. Just get started. Learn how to do it while you do it. I promise it’ll be hard. I also promise it’ll be fun. What’s the worst that could happen?
Noah Kroese: Oh yeah, I love comic conventions. My favorite thing about them is the people. It’s all people who are excited about art. Nothing’s more fun than that.
Noah Kroese: My imagination is like a combination between Geppetto’s workshop and the Tyrell Corporation. There’s always half finished things hanging around. Some of them are beautiful, and some of them are nightmarish and upsetting. But lately I’ve been toying with the idea of making a comic strip or maybe a manga. I think that would be really cool.
Noah Kroese: I am definitely Luke, but not Jedi Master Luke. Goofy Luke, bumming around Tatooine, and picking out power converters at Tosche Station, and shooting Womp Rats. Idaho is a lot like Tatooine, really. Same pastimes.
Noah Kroese: So you can find me on my website, noahkroese.com spelled n-o-a-h-k-r-o-e-s-e.com and at patreon.com/noahkroese spelled the same way. You can find me on Instagram and as of today, you can also find me on Cara.
Noah Kroese: I think I’ll steal my answer from Bill S. Preston, Esquire and Ted “Theodore” Logan. You can make the world a better place by being excellent to each other.
Noah Kroese: Thank you so much for the great questions. It was a real pleasure to be on the show.
Discover Noah at https://noahkroese.com or find him on:
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