Hi, Sophia. Welcome to What Your Next podcast.

Hi, Laura. Thank you so much for having me.

So happy to have you here. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Well my name is Sophia Glock. I am a cartoonist. I write and draw long form graphic novels and shorter ones too. But I like making books. I like making. Long self-contained stories and I tell them in comics.

Yeah. As I was telling you, you were the very first graphic novelist or comic cartoonist as a author who I've been interview, and I've done 900 of these at this point, I'm like. So surprised and I'm like, holy crap, why have I missed? Because I read your book. It was actually like a good break in between finishing off work and coming here and it was like this place I was like, I'm missing a whole world of of books that I can actually consume. That can be a good escape and that can deal with difficult situations, but in a way that feels like. Feeding the inner child, fitting that child who's like watching picture books. And I was like, there's something to be said about that, that it's coming to mind,

absolutely. One, I'm very honored to be the first graphic novelist on your amazing podcast. I hope I am not the last

No you're not.

because it really is, it is such a varied and exciting and still developing medium for kids lit and well, adult lit and all lit. But you're right, it's very digestible. My books are. Meant to be read in like a couple of sittings. I mean, you can take as long as you like with them and they are re readable, which is also nice, but it's not as big of a commitment. It does readability is very, it important to me. It's one of my main concerns when writing, I don't. Want it to be a sort of a challenge to enter, I sort of want you to enter into it and like kind of let it wash over you. Yeah. And it is a way to talk about, there are some like big themes you can tackle in, like I said the digestible format.

Yeah, like your book before we Wake is about grief. It's a paranormal left triangle. Ish. But at the core of the essence is grief. It's an emotion that's heavy that doesn't go linear, doesn't happen at once. And it's not everyone experiences the same. And I think you provide a window that feels digestible, not just for adults, but also for young adults or even tweens, to experience it and see see themselves your experience matter. And I think that's a really cool, neat way too. Talk like a difficult to topic within a way that feels like it's a Georgian horse, essentially.

Yes, thank you. Yeah, it's a little bit sneaky because it is, there's a romance in this book, but that is a little bit, not to spoil too much. The romance for me is beside the point. At the end, the romance rather, it's not beside the point. The romance is central,

Yeah.

but it's not the ultimate point, if that makes sense.

Which makes sense for the age group because we don't want them to have a forever

not

it's not, that's not the point. This is not a forever.

That always makes me so nervous in adolescence. Like when we talk about like forever, because I'm like wait. We're talking about teenagers here.

yeah.

there's. Time, there's a lot of time to meet a lot of people. So yeah, like ultimately, like whether or not they end up together is speculative and happens sort of like off stage. Because really my main concern was Alicia.

Yeah. All right, so let's talk about the writing and the design and the story. How do you put together, does the story come first? Does the drawing come first? Does the actual like. The dialogue? Is it a piece of dialogue that comes in or an image and you're like, okay, we gotta take this. It's essentially, the question is like plotter planter, as I was talking to an author, like a fiction author are you a plotter or planter? What comes first for you?

So because so much of my thinking happens while I draw I go back and forth. So I had a feeling about this book and I began to draw around that feeling and the images that came up, that's what I was chasing. And there comes a point where I'm like, okay. Once I begin to get a feel for it, I will just write, but it's not very organized. There's a lot of word dumping and you never see any of it. Because once I feel like I kind of have the cohesive story, that's when I start doing like rough drawings, like rough thumbnails. So I'm making my pages as I go and that's where the real writing for me happens, and that's where the dialogue comes in. And I'm genuinely letting them talk for themselves at that point. Like I'm trying to like, almost like tune into the radio,

Yeah.

Like the frequency. I'm like, where is it? It's right there. And I don't, for the dialogue, I'm like letting them talk. But the writing, writing for me happens when I'm drawing.

Let's talk about the, before we wake, what is the elevator pitch? We talk a little bit briefly about what the trodden horse is, but there's actually a story that we actually have experienced between Marissa and Alicia and. Dreams and it's a little bit, it's like you get immersed in the story from the beginning. You see two friends starting out and having conversation of trading homework, and then you're like, what this is all about,

yeah. So our protagonist rather, is Alicia, and she is very attached to her best friend Marissa. And Marissa's that friend whose house you're always at, right? Who's like mother is your second mom. And Alicia's having this reoccurring dream that's bothering her. It's like really bothering her every night she has the same dream and she wakes up dissatisfied and kind of. Bothered by it. And so she goes to her best friend's mom, who's a psychologist, and she borrows a book about dreaming. And she decides to solve her problem by teaching herself how to lucid dream, except that she finds that she's a little too successful at Lucid Dreaming. And it begins to affect her waking light, including her relationship with Marissa, and more specifically her relationship with Marissa's. Boyfriend Quentin, who up until this summer, she hasn't really liked.

Yeah.

And then

And then more to come, things happen. And this one is it set in the nineties or like late nineties? Because we get,

is set very specifically in 2003.

oh my gosh,

Yeah.

I,

and literally the movies on the shelf

Yeah,

movie store.

where I realized I was like, it's either it's a weird, I think I co I see the nineties, I graduated high school in 1999 and I graduated college in thousand three. That those formative four years were kind of like in this weird space of college. So I felt Buffy there's Blockbuster, which we had,

yeah.

In the

Exactly. This was kind of the last. Hurrah before, literally everyone has a phone.

And social media. There's no social media. There's notes like

We're,

to each other.

yeah. Friendster might exist, but like these kids wouldn't have been on it necessarily. Right. Friendster. So yeah, so once I kind of realized it was in 2003, a lot of things came together. I realized that was the final. Season of Buffy aired in 2003. All these little things like it just sort of sorted it nicely for me. It, the book is a bit of a nostalgia bomb. There's a lot of nineties in it, but yes, it, I, once I sort of realized what summer this happened in, it was very fun to organize the culture around them and not include anything that they would not yet be exposed to.

Yeah. So how was the process of realizing what was not available at that time?

And that was annoying actually, because I'd be like, oh, this song would be perfect for, this should be on her wall. Nah. You know what I mean? That kind of

Historical accuracy, like maybe three kids to say won't, wouldn't even bother. I have a sibling who's like half my age. She was born in 2003, so she did not experience nine 11 or Y 2K. So I asked her like 20 years later, I was like, oh, so do you know what Y 2K was? And she was like, oh, it's like a beauty thing.

It is a beauty thing.

I was like, yeah, it end of the, as we know.

My mom wouldn't let me go out for years that year 'cause she was like, well, what if the world ends? I'm

the world is gonna

we'll be together.

it's like Taylor forever. So yeah, like it's a weird, I think it's it's interesting to educate the youth, like they, 'cause they need to be educated on informed pop culture moments and we're experiencing this as we sharing at the beginning, we're experiencing this nostalgia of going back to the nineties or going back to the aughts, like going back to that era of like where life was simpler and yet it wasn't the same. It was still. We're still fighting more. We're still doing a lot of stuff. It's just that we have nostalgia of life before phones, life before our social media or being an algorithm. Like it's just like we had nostalgia from the 2016, like it started with that. We were like, 2016, what do you used to be like? And I was like, really?

What do you mean? Yeah it's just very powerful. It's very powerful. We have this bias where we kind of. Reorganize things in our minds. But if you think hard, like there was such a moral panic in the nineties about what children were going through and like what teenagers were like now and

yes.

and that it must have been better in the seventies.

The fifties, the sixties, or

I remember the fifties and the sixties were like a very big deal in the nineties.

Yeah. Like they were so worried about drugs. Like the drugs were like, the crack is whack. All those different things. And it's yeah, we came with terrible. Food mindset, terrible body image issues,

it's like same as it ever was,

Yeah. Like it is just there, so, but yes. Oh, now that I know it's an era, now I'm like, oh, that's when I graduated college. So I can actually like jump into even

we're like the same year too. I am. I was I graduated high school in 2000, so my senior's t-shirt said Y 2K. Ready.

yes.

I'm not even kidding.

Yeah, I was partying 19, like in 1999.

Oh, right, right. That's

partying like it's 1999, we're in the last class from the millennium. Like that was the era.

was your badge of honor.

Yeah. But you know what? The S really started in 1998. Like it really didn't like that. That was like in 97, 98. That's when the s like, we got the appointments, we got the music. We got a lot of like early internet 'cause boom already has happened. So

aesthetic shift. I would agree. The aesthetic shift happened in the late nineties, not. On the.in 2000, it was, we were anticipating the millennium and that informed the way we, the, it informed everything. It informed our body wash, it informed the packaging on our makeup, it informed our fashion. It was all very new millennium was the focus. I totally agree with you.

Yeah, like it's just this weird it's a weird conjunction. Like I think we have this and I, not for music, it's a really weird place. 'cause the caught up for music was 2012 for lots. It was like a really interesting, but even this decade, like the 2020, like it really started in 2016. So like even the era, like it's started, like there's certain points, like it doesn't happen linear, like 10 years and that's it. No.

Yeah. And you don't know when it is until it's over. Like you can't see it until it happens,

I have an idea when this one is over, but we're hoping

Okay. Write it down now.

Yeah, when it happens, that's when it's over,

yeah. Right. And then you'll have to wait another 20 years

I know there're 20 years for another, another thing, but you know, it is the stuff. So let's talk about, so from your perspective, work can be good entry points for people who are new to comics, graphic novels as an adult or even kid lit. But let's talk about adults. 'cause I think that's our era,

I met somebody the other day at a party who said that they just read their very first graphic novel and that it changed their lives. And I was like, I have to know what it was. And she said it was Mouse which is a very famous, graphic novel from the nineties about the Holocaust, and it's assigned very often in high schools now. I think it's pretty common, but it made me so happy because it's on my short list of what I tell adults to read when they really have never read a graphic novel before, but they're interested and they're open-minded. The next two would be Perlis which is. A memoir and everybody should read it. It's so beautiful. Again, very like. The artwork is disarmingly simple, but the story is so complex and it's about the history of Iran, and it's written by Margie Tropi. I think it should be required reading for the human race. Another wonderful graphic novel for people who are especially, you're like more literary and feeling a little bit snobby about graphic novels. I highly recommend Fun Home. It's another memoir.

I.

There you go. It's so good. It's so good though. And if you're a reader, it's a reader's book, if that makes sense. Right? And I will do a soft pitch for ya lit too, because something that I've understood, I was not a ya person until I started writing ya. And I had to give myself a crash course in what is ya? Why am I writing ya? And how does it work? Because it's a totally different, it's not, it's more than a genre. It's a tone. So that's like my party line is that ya is not an age group. It's a tone. And if you are any of these. Something that actually I think straddles the line between YA and Adult is a graphic novel called This One Summer. It's another highly recommended comic book. And another one I might recommend is everybody who is interested in comics as literature should be reading. I'm not gonna, there, I could list different titles, but the artist Tilly Walden is a genius and has absolutely sort of, along with the Tamaki Cousins Act, I believe, has set the tone for modern comic storytelling. And she wrote a book called Spinning and several others. Amazing.

Oh my gosh, this is a great starter list for people like me who's now I'm like, oh, I need to just go dive into it. So, tell us. We can find you online.

Oh I am. Sophia draws daily on Instagram. I also have a Substack. I actually encourage everybody to sign up there. I'm not a frequent poster. I'm not annoying at all. I'm trying to be deeply intentional, but I think it's gonna be a really good place to share comics because a lot of the places where people have been sharing their comics recently in the past, like 10 years has in the past few years just really degraded in terms of like good places to show static art.

Yeah.

if that makes sense.

Yes, it does.

and you can also find me, I have a website, sophia draws.com and yeah, I'm out there and trying to post my comics as I draw them and trying to do it in ways that feel good, I guess. Yeah.

I love this. I am signing up for your substack, so thank you

you.

much.

Thank you so much for having me. This conversation was delightful and nostalgic and and I'm deeply honored that I'm your first graphic novel.

I am so excited. This was like great start. So I am now excited to discover this genre and just dive deep and like hyper fixation as a good millennial

Yes.

awesome.

Awesome, Laura.

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