Interview with Aliza Layne, Author and Illustrator of Beetle and the Chimera Carnival

Please tell us about Beetle & the Chimera Carnival.

This book is the second in a trilogy that starts with Beetle and the Hollowbones, a storyabout a young goblin witch trying to rescue her best friend, a ghost who isbeing forced to haunt the mall. To do this, Beetle has to enlist the help ofKat, her previous best friend who moved away to attend a prestigious andexpensive school of magic. I really recommend reading that book first!

Beetle and the ChimeraCarnival is the second book. It follows all threecharacters again after they discover a dragon, injured and close to death, onthe vacant lot where the mall once stood. How did this happen? Why are all thedragons disappearing? Beetle wants to get to the bottom of it, but her latentmagic is going haywire. She’s turning into a monster. Those two things couldn’tpossibly be connected… could they?

This is the book where I will teach you how skeletons get born.

Nothing draws me into a book faster than humor. The bitabout the blob ghost whose undead heart was a penny in a mall fountain had melaughing right on page 1. Humor can be really hard, though. How do you tap intothat humor? Or is it part of your natural voice?

The joke you’ve just described has been a central part of the plot ofthis series for so long that I actually completely forgot it was funny at all!

Humor evolves naturally when you’re talking. I’m lucky to have a lot ofpeople around me who enjoy doing that, being funny together with each other asour audience. Writing a story is also a game of communication, so I’m thinkingabout what the kids reading will find funny or emotional or cool. Even thoughmaking a book is rather one-sided, I can’t talk back or clarify what I’m sayingto the reader either if they’re confused, so I have to be careful. And I dolike it when I get to have a real conversation because of the book at authorevents. I’ve met some really wonderful people that way!

As a child of the ‘80s, I loved the fact that this tookplace at the site of an old abandoned mall. How’d you come to choose it as thesetting?

I was a mall employee at a bookstore from 2014 to about 2018, and somenights I used to leave after the mall was closed and all the lights were off. Iwould walk out of the weird little labyrinth of the mall alone but I wasn’t theonly thing making noise. In the distance, down the corridors, I could hear thearcade games and claw machines calling out in their recorded voices, likelittle ghosts.

And here’s the strangest part—a few years after I left and the firstBeetle book was published, the bookstore I’d worked at was bought out. And theperson who bought it opened a haunted house. A year-round haunted house in themall! I’ve never been inside because it’s always closed. I don’t know why thathappened! Why did that happen?!

I was struck by how much movement is in the panels–flying,falling, even the POV shifts where we’re looking up at buildings from below ordown at rooms from the ceiling. How did you plan out the action?

I’ve spent a lot of time studying comics and films as well as justmaking comics, so I’m really doing it intuitively at this point. Luckily, theonly thing preventing me from getting the shots I want to get is my own drawingability. When I look down on rooms like that, I often use a 3d program tocompose references for the shot before I draw it. That way I can plan the spaceso that it works perfectly for what I need, but I also have the freedom to puta camera there as if it were real and find new shots.

Action is difficult to compose, but the primary thing is being able tounderstand what’s happening, so I try to write and draw with clarity in my mindfirst. I think there’s still lots of ground for me to gain there!

I know this is a sequel. How hard was it to balance tellingthe backstory for new readers and not giving too much for readers familiar withthe characters? 

I wrote out all the most successful sequels I’d seen done and actuallyhad pretty much all the same criteria in my mind as in this question, and thesequel that stood out to me was Shrek 2. I figured it did a huge amount of thethings I needed to do, so I studied its structure and tried to understand whyit worked. This method comes at a high recommendation from me! I think itworked!

This story weaves together necromancy, dragons, and manymagical elements. How did you approach balancing these different supernaturalaspects while keeping the story cohesive?

Halloween-themed anime and manga like Sugar Sugar Rune, Soul Eater, and Little Witch Academia certainly influenced my idea for a Halloweenfantasy series. Halloween is a holiday that has never lost its magic for me andI think it’s because everyone is encouraged to play, even adults. So I wantedmy ideas for how magic would work to come from that feeling of playing. Butmore than anything, the lore is built for a purpose: to tell the story I’minterested in telling. The story always comes first.

As a writer who recently got back into art myself, I'mcurious about your character design process. How do you develop the visualelements of your characters, especially considering how clothing seems to playsuch an important role in their identities?

That’s exciting! I really wish you the best with drawing, I personallylove it a lot and am self taught.

What I think about most when I’m designing characters is whether they’regoing to be able to do what they need to do, like whether they can give abelievable acting performance. That’s why Kat looks less like a skeleton thanall the other skeleton characters, because her model needs to be able toperform tons of different kinds of acting. Unfortunately, everyone tells methat Kat is very hard to draw, and I agree. I often don’t get her right andhave to try again. Making her that way was goofy of me but I like how uniqueshe looks.

I decided early on to make sure the characters wore different outfitsbecause of how much I enjoyed it in SailorMoon. It allows you to show so much about who the characters are!

I was struck by how the story emphasizes that witchcraftisn't about innate talent but work and practice. Was challenging the concept ofnatural talent an intentional theme from the start? What other ideas do youhope readers take away from the book?

Witchcraft is separated from the other talents to make the readerinitially question its legitimacy, which they’re invited to do along withBeetle in book one. We also establish that sorcery has gained dominance withinculture as the kind of “real” magic academics use. In book two I contrast thisagainst the other two types of magic in the setting, necromancy andtransformation, and talk about what complicates them, especially becausetransformation magic is innate andnecromancy calls into question the concept of “natural vs unnatural” creatures.In book three, you will find that this exploration is building to a thesis, sothat’s all I’ll say about that for now.

The coming out party at the end features some of the mostcolorful and vibrant panels in the entire book. Could you talk about how youapproached this scene of self-acceptance and its importance to the overallstory?

Thank you! In both this scene and the scene from book one, we’re back atGoblinhouse, which I wanted to be very homey and safe-feeling. It feels alittle obvious to say, but I was certainly influenced by hobbiton and bag-endin Jackson’s adaptation of Fellowship ofthe Ring, which came out when I was a kid.

Since book one, Beetle’s comfort with her Grandmother has been a foil toKat’s authoritarian family situation. Beetle and her Gran aren’t immune tomisunderstanding one another and Beetle doesn’t always know how to share thingswith her Gran before she understands them herself, but the two of them think oftheir little family as a team, as cooperative and communicative. In this booktoo, I didn’t want to deny bad things kids really go through, but I also wantto present a blueprint for something better.

I hope that because of this book, at least one kid who comes out totheir family gets a garden party and a cake with real icing roses.

What’s next?

Book three. I’m currently thumbnailing it, which is probably the hardeststage because it’s when I compose every shot, similar to storyboarding a movie.

In book three, a school for magic is abducted, a wizard council isturned into puppets, a Prince is haunted, a giant corpse is reanimated, and anegg hatches. The culprit is right in front of you, but cannot be seen in amirror.

After that, maybe I will have something new to tell everybody about.

Where can we find you?

I have an author and art portfolio website at alizalayne.comand you can find all socials there as well. Thanks for the talk!

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