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Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Children’s Crusade
Rich Watson talks to Jimmy Gownley about addressing the Iraq war in Amelia Rules
 By Rich Watson
In Jimmy Gownley’s children’s comic Amelia Rules, while the emphasis is always on the wonder and excitement of being a kid, it has often times been mixed with a dash of more grown-up elements. For example, Amelia’s parents are divorced, and Gownley has dealt with the realities of such a situation through Amelia’s eyes. In Amelia Rules #18 (due out this summer), the primary theme is a larger one. Amelia’s friend Joan is the daughter of a U.S. soldier, and when he gets called to fight in the Iraq war, Joan must face the possibility of never seeing him again. For Gownley, this tale represented a prime opportunity to provide a venue for a little-heard side of the conflict.
“I didn’t see a whole lot [in the media] about the kids,” says Gownley. “You hear a lot about the spouses, deservedly so, of course, and obviously you hear a lot about the soldiers themselves (even then, not enough, quite frankly). You hear more about American Idol than we actually hear about these people that are going through this, essentially, for our country. I didn’t hear a lot about the kids – and way back since the September 11 attacks, I wanted to start to do something that was more relevant. [Amelia is] not just kids growing up at any time, it really is kids growing up today. When you read Peanuts, you sort of get the feeling that this is the Cold War era, especially the early strips, with the kind of ex-GI, little tract houses and that very suburban feel that there’s a sort of new, ongoing paranoia. And I wanted to do something for the early 21st century, a version of that. But by the time we got to the Iraq war, it just seemed like a huge topic, and it could lend itself very easily to just a rant, a huge diatribe, which is also not what I wanted to do. But I really wanted to address this somehow, and it was nagging at me that there didn’t seem to be a lot of fiction that talked about kids that were going through this kind of thing.”
Direction came once he was able to pinpoint the heart of the matter. “I was on a flight to Seattle and I thought, well, what am I trying to say? And I thought, well, what I’m trying to say is [that] these kids, who have parents who get sent off to war, are making a sacrifice. Some of them sacrifice their parents for a year, some for two years, and some for ever, and that sacrifice deserves to be honored. And those kids deserve a voice. And I don’t see it out there. And then I thought, well, I can do one of two things: I can wait for someone else to do it, in which case I’ll probably be waiting the rest of my life, or I can do it myself. And at that point I thought, well, I’m just gonna do it myself. And on the flight I pulled out my notebook and roughed in an outline of what I wanted to have happen. And then I realized this isn’t the kind of thing I can just wing. This outline is great and I think it’s a powerful story, but I need to really know what I’m talking about. So that’s why I decided to work with Steve and his family.”
Major Steve Murphy is an old college friend of Gownley’s who was in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps when they met in the early ‘90s. Murphy and Gownley, along with their respective wives Mary and Karen, have been close for years, all throughout Steve’s tenure with the military, which constantly took him from one part of the country to another. When Steve got the call to report to Texas for what would eventually mean a deployment to Iraq, Mary and their kids were somewhat blasé about it at first, according to Gownley. “It didn’t sort of register with anybody, including Mary, because he said that six months before he was going. So that sort of gave him a long time to think, ‘Oh, it’ll never get here, or something will change,’ because so many times in a military career, things happen – like he thought he was going to Colorado and ended up going to Texas. So at first it was kinda like, ‘Oh yeah, sure.’ And then it wasn’t until, like, the very very end that they really got hit hard and sort of broke down; essentially the day of [departure].”
How the Murphys handled the situation provided the inspiration for Gownley’s story, “The Things I Cannot Change,” especially ten-year-old Taegen. “Taegen is very smart. I would say he’s a little on the quiet side, but he’s very active. He takes tae kwon do. He’s a huge reader; he loves the Harry Potter books and any kind of science fiction. Big Star Wars fan. He’s just a really nice, warm, well-behaved kid… I thought to do it with Taegen because he was the oldest and I thought he would be able to articulate exactly kind of what happened… but also, he’s the exact age of the Amelia character [Joan], so I thought well, if I’m gonna be talking about what it’s like for a ten-year-old to go through with this, I should talk to a ten-year-old!”
With the Murphys’ permission, Gownley e-mailed questions – not only about military-related details, but about what the family felt and experienced. Taegen’s answers about how he coped with the news were especially illuminating to Gownley. “When we asked him who was the number one person that helped him get through this, he said his mom. He said his mom told him everything’s gonna be okay and she’s usually right about everything! Which his mom laughed at when she heard that, because she said she’s gonna hold that over his head for the next few years! They’re a really close family (he has brothers as well), and I think that was what got him through it. What was interesting from Mary’s point of view was seeing the difference in how each of them reacted. Dougan, who’s Taegen’s younger brother but the second oldest – he had to deal with it by essentially blocking it out entirely, and apparently that’s not uncommon among kids, to just have as little reaction as possible. But obviously, by the time Steve came back, he was really ready to see his dad again. It was pretty much a rough ordeal for all of them.”
Gownley says that Taegen had mixed emotions. “[He said] that ‘I felt really sad, because I was gonna miss my dad, and I felt sort of mad,’ but he didn’t really have anyone to be mad at. He wasn’t mad at his parents, and he doesn’t understand foreign policy enough to be mad at a government. The other thing he felt was pride, because he said, ‘My dad was gonna do something to help our country.’ And that comes from being in that military family. He understands that what his dad’s doing is important. It’s not like being a cartoonist [laughs], or being a TV repairman or whatever. And he didn’t want to take away from that, so he was proud. But that makes a really complex mixture, psychologically, for a little kid to deal with. And it’s tough to put that into the mouths of my characters. And that’s the other trick – it can’t just be Taegen’s story entirely, just transposed onto a comic book page. It has to fit into the Amelia world; it has to be in those characters’ voices. So that was a real challenge as well.”
Mary’s contribution was no less substantial. “I got access to Mary’s journal entry for the last day, the day he shipped out. And it is utterly amazing. It really is the type of thing that should be preserved because it’s a historical document. It’s what really happens to a wife of a soldier in the middle of this conflict. It was so great – all I had to do was, I looked at it and highlighted certain paragraphs and certain things I wanted and said, this is panel one, this is panel two, panel three. And the book ends with a four-page sequence that’s primarily silent. There’s a few words at the end, but it’s mostly silent, and that comes entirely from Mary’s journal.”
Avoiding political dogma was crucial in order to keep the story’s focus on Joan and her situation, says Gownley. “I got into a huge argument with someone not too long ago where they said it’s important to honor the soldiers and all that, but keep in mind it’s a voluntary army. They decided to join the army, so it’s their job to go. And that’s true as far as it goes. But it’s also true that it’s a contract, and we the people are on the other side of it. And we should then honor that, and say, well, if you’re willing to go wherever we the people send you, then we should pay really close attention to where we send you, and why, and we shouldn’t take for granted what you’re willing to doing for us. And we should be vigilant and pay attention. And I don’t see that being the case…
“Obviously, as an adult in America, if you don’t have an opinion about this war, one way or the other, you’re really not paying good attention! But as an artist, that’s not what I wanted the story to be about. So I started thinking, this isn’t really about Iraq. This is about the same thing that has happened in World War 2, in Korea, in Vietnam, in the Revolutionary War. And at that point, on that narrative level, it doesn’t make a difference what you think of the war – the kid is going through the same thing. And Amelia is always written from the kid’s point of view. So that was actually huge for me, because it freed me from a lot of worrying about politics and being concerned about that sort of thing, and it ended up being purely about what this kid is going through.”
In addition to the story, Gownley has included as part of the comic an instructional manual for teachers and other educators so that they can discuss the lessons in this story with children, put together with the help of a few teachers and a child psychologist. Also, as part of a big media push, Gownley has talked to Diamond about getting Amelia Rules #18 into Post Exchange shops on military bases, and he has posted the entire issue for free on his website.
Ultimately, Gownley believes telling this kind of story in this manner will prove therapeutic for the sons and daughters of American soldiers. “I think doing it as a comic book, just as a fictional story, what it does is it makes it abstract, so you can talk about the story and get at what the real kid is actually feeling or going through, and the kid will be able to talk about that and not feel like they’re revealing everything about themselves. It gives it this kind of surrogate… It’s trying to give a voice to the kids in those families and then sort of letting the story be what it is and let people discuss it and work it into their own lives, or reject it if that’s what they think they need to do, on those merits, rather than me putting something in on top of it. This is done with such a light touch, and it’s not political. It’s just about this kid.”
Rich Watson is a former CWN columnist who has been writing about the industry since 2000. He is currently editor of the black comics magazine UVC: The Urban Voice in Comics. E-mail questions and comments to cptsisko318@aol.com.
Amelia Rules #18 is available through Renaissance Press or for free online at www.ameliarules.com.
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