Teenreads.com Blog

Today, we're joined by Stephen Emond, creator of the comics Emo Boy and Steverino. Below, he reflects on the practice of keeping a journal --- online or otherwise --- and discusses how it inspired his debut novel for young adults, HAPPYFACE.


I’ve always been interested in the idea of self-expression. I’m rather shy by nature and never was one to speak out or draw attention to myself, so I think my piles of art and writing are my way of communicating with the world. In my debut YA novel HAPPYFACE, the main character similarly writes and draws in his own journal, expressing all the things he hides in person. The dichotomy of Happyface as he is with his friends, how he comes off in his emails and online conversations, and how he is in his own journal was really interesting to me.

Back in 2004 --- well before the days of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and sliced bread --- I had just signed up for my very own LiveJournal account. Complete strangers were becoming my LiveJournal friends. A lot of them were teenagers who picked up a copy of my comic book Emo Boy and added me to see what I had to say. Likewise, it was interesting for me to see what they had to say. You see, before the facebooks and the twitters, people would write these long rambling diatribes on LiveJournal; what they did, what they’re doing, what they plan to do, how they feel about it. Some of them were intensely personal and I felt a little guilty reading them. But this was their self-expression; it was the same thing I did with all my projects, just a little more direct. I always wondered if any of them had writing aspirations, if they save these ideas, or if it’s just an outlet and that’s that. And are they that open in their offline lives?

My LiveJournal never got very personal. I keep sketchbooks, which is about as close to a diary as I’ve ever come. I have boxes full of my old sketchbooks, which contain superhero drawings, pencil renderings, drawings of girls, and autobiographical comics. Some drawings were silly; some were mimicking my cartooning idols. A lot of them weren’t very good. As the years moved on my sketchbooks were filling more and more with my writing; there were ideas for stories, character names, town names, bits of dialogue, jokes. My current sketchbooks are nearly full of writing (though I still prefer to use unlined paper). I have pages set aside for movie ideas, book ideas, comic books, stand up routines, sketch comedy stuff. Memories. I try to just store it all up --- if I think it, it’s worth writing down. I guess the idea is that it’s all potentially usable, somewhere, sometime.

I used a lot of my jokes and gags working on a newspaper comic strip that never took off. My comic strip “STEVERINO” was me pouring my lonely heart out, a sad comic about a naïve lovelorn boy. I barely hid myself in the work; it was my way of saying all the things I was too shy to say aloud. I used a lot of life experience and how I felt as a teen in writing Emo Boy. But here I obscured myself a bit more, concentrating more on outlandish concepts and story arcs.

I thought about the LiveJournalists while writing HAPPYFACE and tried to fuse that honesty and emotion, that rawness, with what I’d always known, my sketchbooks. So Happyface’s journal is a diary, but it’s also where he draws and expresses all of his ideas. He talks about his experiences and feelings but he also draws what he can’t talk about. He jots down little throwaway gags in the margins. He adapts his experiences into short story ideas. I even pulled in the social media idea a bit and have him using email and instant message conversations as part of his own self-expression.
It’s something that would be kind of cool to catch on, I think --- just a puddle of self-expression in its purest forms. I could see a “SketchJournal” site, maybe, where a creative community would write and draw, sing and dance, post music and videos and share all their thoughts and feelings with whoever is willing to watch, read and listen. Just credit me if you build it.

-- Stephen Emond

Labels: Happyface, Steve Emond