Style and Snot: Bryan Lee O’Malley and Leslie Hung Talk Snotgirl

Lottie Person is a fashion blogger striving to maintain an impeccable online and public persona while suffering from otherwise debilitating allergies. She’s got perfect hair, the best clothes, and a snarky presence that belies the fact that she’s, in many ways, a complete mess, her constantly runny nose being just the prime outward manifestation. And isn’t that all of us?
Even without the best hair and clothes, we’re all caught between an almost entirely fictional outward representation our ourselves, and a behind-the-scenes life that’s somewhat less perfect—now more than ever, with social media handing us all the tools to craft a perfect version of ourselves. Though Snotgirl is interested in fashion, a book about Lottie the fashion blogger wouldn’t be particularly interesting. Lottie the fashion blogger who’s desperate to hide the fact that she’s 100 percent human? Perfect, and perfectly timely. Fans of O’Malley’s earlier work will recognize his distinctive blend of pop culture, funny stuff, snark, and humanity.
This is O’Malley’s first major work for which he hasn’t done his own drawing, as well as his first ongoing series. Leslie Hung’s art has a strong manga influence that’s well-suited to O’Malley’s writing (part of the appeal of his own pencil work on earlier books is his North American take on Japanese comic art), but she approaches the story with a softer, more painterly style. The palette of pastel colors from Mickey Quinn is equal parts cute and sickly, which doesn’t sound like much of a compliment until you look again at the title. There’s even neat stuff with the lettering from Maré Odomo, capturing the transition from speech to thought to online stuff. It is a melding of styles from artists working terrifically in tandem.
Shortly before the release of the series’ first trade paperback, collaborators O’Malley and Hung were nice enough to chat with us about allergies. And also Snotgirl.
There’s a lot in Snotgirl about social media and the ways in which we all seem to have dual identities now. What’s the origin of the story?
Leslie: Fashion blogging and blogging in general has always been a point of interest for me.  Blogging and using the internet to strengthen your personal brand wasn’t really something people could do as a viable source of income five years ago.  We wanted to explore a character whose life is examined but misunderstood by her friends and her followers because it’s filtered through a phone screen.
Bryan: I wanted Leslie to make more comics, so we started talking about a collaboration. One of her ideas was a fashion blogger heroine.

When I was doing Scott Pilgrim, a decade ago, I was always searching for fashion reference, so I had a peripheral awareness of the fashion blogging world. It felt like a good focal point for a story about this moment in time! Social media duality is something we found ourselves talking about a lot — the idea of someone’s life being a performance. So we came up with a bunch of characters through whom we can explore the subject. Who’s faking it, who’s real, who’s being duped?
It seems obvious to a sniffy Claritin-popper like myself, but what inspired the focus on…snot? It’s a unique trait to give a protagonist.
Bryan: Allergies are a huge part of my life, especially since moving to Southern California, where the pollen season never ends,  [it]just rotates. Allergies are also one of the things in the Venn diagram where my and Leslie’s experiences overlap. We both love fashion, we were both fascinated by fashion bloggers, and we both have allergies. The ideas just logically followed one another from there.
What inspired the book’s focus on style?
Bryan: The only reason this book exists is because I’ve loved Leslie’s art for years! It’s always so stylish and romantic, with an undercurrent of sadness. If she’s drawing the book, of course it’s got to be about pretty people and clothes. All the style of this book is entirely her department. I don’t provide any fashion cues in the scripts, unless there’s some specific plot requirement.
Leslie: Even if we weren’t making a comic about bloggers, the book would probably be focused on style.  But because we are, it’s in the forefront!

For Bryan, in particular: can you talk about the shift into monthly comics from a more graphic-novel approach in stuff like Seconds? Has there been a big shift in your process?
Bryan: As far as doing a monthly serial, it’s more work than I imagined! It’s a full-time job. It’s a collaboration, so I’m not writing for me, I’m writing for Leslie—she’s my target audience. I can’t just write whatever stupid ideas come to mind and assume she’s on board. I have to keep her engaged with every plot twist. That to me is the unique challenge of writing scripts for someone else to draw.
More generally: what’s it like working together? I’m always curious about the process behind collaborations like this, particularly when there are two artists involved.
Bryan: We have a lot of back-and-forth about the story and the character motivations. I try to smush our raw ideas into the form of a script, and once we’re happy with it, Leslie goes away and draws it. I generally give her a round of notes on her roughs, for flow and clarity, just because I have more experience with comic pages, but otherwise I’m pretty hands-off with the art. I’m very hands-on with the lettering, though, because I think of it as an extension of the rewriting process. I do a lot of last-minute dialogue tweaks.
Leslie: Yeah, Bryan helps me figure things out when I have clarity or other types of issues in my pages, and I have the advice he’s given me in the past on my mind when I’m drawing and laying things out.  We tend to volley the script around a few times to figure out the major plot points and what we want to focus on.
What’s next for Snotgirl? Is there a long-form story planned, or are you taking a chapter-by-chapter approach?
Bryan: Hopefully a mix of both! I’ve never serialized a story in chapters before, so there’s a lot for me to discover every month. Overall, I just hope it holds together and that people enjoy reading it.
Snotgirl is available on February 28 in an exclusive Barnes & Noble edition, featuring exclusive cover and poster art.