Interviews Editor, Andrew Irvin, sits down with Josh O'Neill, the Publisher and Editor of Mike Mignola and Lemony Snicket's latest rendition of the classic Carlo Collodi fairy tale, Pinocchio, available through O'Neill's Beehive Books.
COMIC BOOK YETI: Josh, it’s a pleasure to have you by the Yeti Cave to discuss this gorgeous new graphic novel, The Adventures of Pinocchio. How’s everything going in Philly as we head into fall?
JOSH O’NEILL: Thank you for having me! It’s always a pleasure to spend time with the Yetis.
CBY: We certainly try to keep things engaging over here! I'm grateful for an opportunity to chat with you regarding this new edition of the classic Carlo Collodi fairy tale, which represents the collaborative efforts of two titans of comic books and children’s literature, respectively; Mike Mignola and Lemony Snicket. I saw a first look in Variety published a year and a half ago, so it’s clearly been in the works for a while. Mignola has expressed his longstanding appreciation for The Adventures of Pinocchio - an interest going back almost a decade in your dialogue with him - and a wariness about creating a sufficiently novel rendition of the story. What goes into convincing a creator with so distinct a style (and so packed a schedule) as Mignola’s to lend his time and effort to a story he’s already acknowledged has been well-rendered in previously published illustrated editions?
JO: It wasn’t so much about persuasion as keeping a door open until he was ready. We had always fantasized about doing something with Mike, and had reached out to him in the early days of our press. When we asked him about doing an Illuminated Edition for us, back in 2017 or so, he immediately mentioned that he’d long thought about illustrating a version of Pinocchio. But Mike is, as you say, incredibly busy with all sorts of wonderful things… and yes, I think a little intimidated by taking on text that was so important to him, and has been illustrated so many times. So it sort of hung there for a few years as a possible dream project, for both us maybe also for him.
Then COVID hit, and so much of the world suddenly shut down, and for a little while Mike had a lot of unexpected time on his hands. That’s when this whole journey really got underway. We got an email from Mike basically saying, "let’s go."
CBY: COVID had a way of freeing up time and possibility for a whole range of creative endeavors, and this has proven worth the wait. I know David Handler/Lemony Snicket has had a hand in Rick, the 2003 film adaptation of the opera, Rigoletto, by Collodi’s fellow countryman and contemporary, Giuseppe Verdi. Given Snicket's 19th century gothic Victorian influences across A Series of Unfortunate Events - referencing Baudelaire and pull from later figures like Edward Gorey and Roald Dahl in their meshing of both children as subjects and a throughline of morbidity - when he claims in the foreword not to have read The Adventures of Pinocchio prior to writing this adaptation, without a deep previous dedication to the work, what did the process of enlisting him to the project entail, and when was his unique and entertaining annotated contribution style decided upon for the final version? Was this a conversation that happened following the attachment of Mignola, or were these invitations to contribute handled in parallel?
JO: We first got in touch with Snicket long after Mike was already on board. We usually invite a prominent author to contribute an essay or introduction to our Illuminated Editions. We’ve been lucky enough to get a lot of amazing people to contribute writing to this series – Michael Cunningham, Guillermo Del Toro, Brooke Bolander, Darren Aronofsky, Alan Moore. It occurred to us that Lemony Snicket would be the perfect writer to comment on this book, which is itself a series of very unfortunate events. (Without saying too much, I believe Pinocchio may in fact be deeper in the Unfortunate Events DNA than the annotations might let on…)
So, we asked him for an introduction – and he promptly said, "no, I’m not interested in writing an introduction." Instead he offered us something so much more fascinating and compelling: a collection of annotations of the text in which he, Snicket, encounters Pinocchio for the first time, and is slowly driven mad by it.
Our biggest contribution at Beehive was the idea to present these not as traditional footnotes, but as hand-typed slipped-in typesheets, covered with coffee stains and revisions and tell-tale signals of incipient authorial madness. Our creative director, Maëlle Doliveux, typed these herself on a travel typewriter during a cross-country road trip. It was sort of a series of sparks that turned into a glorious, towering bonfire, threatening to consume all we hold dear.
CBY: You've certainly ended up with something striking to behold in this edition, and the presentation of the additional content shows the effort that went into the process. Beyond your creative leads, (which include Dave Stewart as colorist and design from the aforementioned Maëlle Doliveux) the translation was undertaken by Carol Della Chiesa, with your editing contributions. How did you pull in Dave, Maëlle, and Carol, and what went into finding an aesthetic tone with The Adventures of Pinocchio that would allow it to stand alongside the rest of the Illuminated Edition releases? What various considerations focused on the material of the individual book, and what did you build into this publication that you learned from previous Illuminated Edition titles?
JO: Well, to give a straight answer which may deflate a thoughtful question, we didn’t exactly pull in any of those people!
Maëlle is a co-founder of Beehive, and designer of the entire Illuminated Editions series up to this point. (Though our forthcoming INFERNO and CARMILLA do have new designers.) So there was never really any idea to have another designer besides Maëlle for this.
Dave Stewart, who is one of the absolute best colorists ever to work in comics, is Mike’s long time collaborator on Hellboy and many other things. I’m not sure I’ve seen Mike colored by anyone else in decades – I doubt he has been since early in his career. So there was never really any chance we would have a colorist other than Dave.
Carol Della Chiesa translated Pinocchio back in 1926. There are too many English translations of Pinocchio to count, many of them excellent, and I read a lot of various ones in preparation for this project. I also talked to some folks who had read it in its original Italian, which I don’t speak, to try to get a sense of which English translations best capture its flavor. I love the Della Chiesa translation, and so did our other collaborators.
CBY: It's useful to know how everyone factored into the final publication, and how they were all involved from the inception of the project in their own ways. This graphic novel includes four pages of acknowledgements, and a team of editorial and publishing credits including over thirty names, which were offered as some non-trivial rewards in various Kickstarter backer packages. In addition to your Editor-in-Chief role at Beehive, you’re also the publisher, having picked up Harvey and Eisner awards for your work across the comics industry. Can you share with our audience a bit about how you developed this model for approaching publications and how Kickstarter (and crowdfunding more generally) supplement and change the process of building interest, support, and funding for titles compared to other publishing approaches?
JO: Our whole company is based on the crowdfunding model – it’s the only way we’re able to afford the level of craft and high-end production to which we are… well, addicted. We’re an entirely independent press with no outside funding coming from anywhere except our readers, which gives us an unusual level of freedom to develop our own way of doing things.
I think the combination of our crowdfunded business model and a generally collectivist publishing ethos might make us a bit more community-minded than most publishers. That’s why we go by Beehive – because like our apian friends, we can’t do it alone. We look at our books as the work of many hands, including not just authors and artists but printers, designers, editors, and vitally, readers. Our audience is quite literally co-creating these projects with us, in the sense that their support – their willingness to put their faith and their funds behind things that don’t exist yet – is maybe the most indispensable element. Without them, we can’t publish. So we’re proud to run the names of these folks in print. We’ve never needed four pages before, though!
CBY: The ethos behind Beehive as a publisher makes all the more sense now. With other phenomenal titles in the Illuminated Edition collection (like Kwaidan, illustrated by Kent Williams, or The Island of Doctor Moreau, illustrated by Bill Sienkiewicz - which have both received inimitable film adaptations), what do you see in-store for future releases? Can you share anything forthcoming from your publication slate, and are there any original works from Beehive that don’t draw upon well-known public domain titles that you’d like to turn the spotlight upon for our audience to discover?
JO: Our next two titles are THE INFERNO, which comes out in stores in just a few months, and CARMILLA, which should be up on Kickstarter before the end of the year. They’re illustrated respectively by the British linocut artist, Sophy Hollington, and the graphic novelist and illustrator, Rosemary Valero O’Connell, both of whom we’re so honored to work with. We have a ton of great titles cooking which have not been officially announced yet, but some of our very favorite artists on Earth are hard at work on illustration portfolios for this series, including Das Pastoras, Julie Doucet, Lorenzo Mattotti and more.
We also took a different approach to a public domain text with our years-delayed but soon-to-be-finished project DRACULA: The Evidence, which presents the original text of Bram Stoker’s novel as a suitcase full of primary source documents – letters, newspaper clippings, diaries, telegrams, ship’s logs, a playable photograph record. It’s a special project for us, which was supposed to come out a long time ago. Our readers have been very patient as we’ve tormented ourselves getting it done the way we’ve envisioned it.
We have a hell of a lot of fun with these books. Working with such astounding artists on fascinating, culturally definitive texts is a genuine joy.
CBY: It's inspiring to see the added value Beehive brings to these titles. I know there’s been a consolidation of the mainstream literary publishing industry over recent decades, and you’ve taken a different approach towards the market, with gorgeous high-end titles that stand out from both the literary market and the comic book industry in a variety of respects. Can you retrace your path towards founding Beehive (and Locust Moon) and what other experiences in, and beyond, the publishing industry that led you to your current business practices? What feeds into your do-it-yourself ethos, and are there other publishers or editors whose work you particularly admire?
JO: I love books, and the people who make them. For years I dabbled all over publishing trying to figure out a career… I’ve worked as a retailer, an author, a critic, a festival organizer, an editor, a marketer, a publisher. And over time I came to feel that so many of our existing systems are broken, or extractive, or usually both, that we have to invent new models and build them ourselves if we’re to have any hope of building something sustainable and rewarding for all the people involved. We do things differently because the normal ways of doing things don’t work anymore – not for authors, or artists, or publishers, or publishing workers, or anyone.
I used to co-own a small book store in Philadelphia called Locust Moon, and we used to publish books through our store. We put together a Winsor McCay tribute anthology called LITTLE NEMO: Dream Another Dream, in which a hundred-some illustrators and cartoonists created tributes to Little Nemo in Slumberland. We published them at the full size of the original Little Nemo newspaper strips, 16” x 21”, the size of a small surfboard. It was this crazy labor of love we worked on for years, and it kind of took off – raised a lot of funds on Kickstarter, won Eisner and Harvey awards, was one of NPR’s best books of the year – and that project turned my head around a little bit about what was possible. We had done it totally outside the system, we had worked with these fantastic artists, we were able to pay a good wage for their contributions, the book was profitable and celebrated… the whole thing felt kind of utopian. So Beehive was an attempt to build on that model – crowdfunded, independent, reader-supported projects that are really unusual, singular, and don’t fit easily into the distribution channels we already have. We look at publishing as an exercise in the possible. Where can we open doors and windows that are currently closed? What are some things we hope to bring into the world that are unlike the things that already exist?
There are so many publishers I admire… Denis Kitchen of Kitchen Sink Press has been a dear friend and mentor to me since the beginning of my career, and the fiercely independent and innovative ethos of their work for decades is a good model for anyone hoping to carve out their own space in comics or publishing. Silver Sprocket is doing excellent work, and bringing so many new authors into the spotlight. Our friends at newer small presses like Bulghilan, Fieldmouse, Go Press Girl, Paradise Systems. Outstanding archival work from Sunday Press and New York Review of Comics. Big fish in the small comics pond like Fanta and D&Q continue to make great work after all these years. So many great small publishers making vital work these days, and figuring it out.
CBY: While I know you’ve got a whole catalogue of Beehive publications to promote beyond The Adventures of Pinocchio, can you share with our readers a bit about the creative work inspiring you beyond anything you’re directly involved in? What other comics, or film, music, literature, etc. has caught your attention lately?
JO: The upcoming book I’m most excited for is Ben Passmore’s BLACK ARMS TO HOLD YOU UP, a graphic history of black militant uprisings in the US. I read one of Ben’s WIP drafts of the book, and it’s a really astonishing piece of work. I recently read a fantastic comic called MISTER LIGHTBULB by a Polish artist named Wojtek Wawszczyk. It’s this 600+ page tome that chronicles the horrors that visit a Polish working class family with this bizarre surrealist dark humor, and I’ve never really read anything like it before. I loved the recent reprint of the erotic pop comic IRIS from Thé Tjong-Khing, an artist I wasn’t familiar with before the reprint. Music? I’ve been listening to the last Fiona Apple album FETCH THE BOLT CUTTERS a lot… Films, I’ve been working my way through the Robert Altman catalogue, which turns out to be an act of self-care that I recommend to everyone. There are too many great things to read, to see, to hear…
CBY: I'm a big Altman fan, so I concur there, and I appreciate the additional material you've mentioned which I haven't checked out yet (readers take note!) Josh, it has been an honor to have you share some of your insight and experience with us today. Beyond the Beehive Books link to Pinocchio, what other portfolio, publication, and social media links would you like our audience to give a look?
JO: We have a live Kickstarter for LAAB Magazine, our annual radical art magazine, which is struggling to get to its funding goal. It’s an oversized newsprint assemblage of comics, interviews, essays, illustration and more, masterminded by the great author and cartoonist Ronald Wimberly. We never sell as many copies of it as I’d like to, but it may be my personal favorite thing that we do at Beehive! Also check out our new edition of THE INFERNO, and the forthcoming CARMILLA (Kickstarter launching soon), which I’m incredibly excited about, and our beautiful new piece of graphic art history, MYTHS OF MAKING, which can all be found at beehivebooks.com. We also have an expanded edition of our tarot deck BOTANICA by Kevin Jay Stanton coming out early next year, which I’m very excited about. You can sign up for our Kickstarter launch here. But the best place to stay apprised of what’s buzzing in the Hive is by signing up for our newsletter, which is both delicious and nutritionally dense.