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 story about a young goblin witch trying to rescue her best friend, a ghost who is being forced to haunt the mall. To do this, Beetle has to enlist the help of Kat, her previous best friend who moved away to attend a prestigious and expensive school of magic. I really recommend reading that book first!

Beetle and the Chimera Carnival is the second book. It follows all three characters again after they discover a dragon, injured and close to death, on the vacant lot where the mall once stood. How did this happen? Why are all the dragons disappearing? Beetle wants to get to the bottom of it, but her latent magic is going haywire. She’s turning into a monster. Those two things couldn’t possibly 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 bit about the blob ghost whose undead heart was a penny in a mall fountain had me laughing right on page 1. Humor can be really hard, though. How do you tap into that humor? Or is it part of your natural voice?

The joke you’ve just described has been a central part of the plot of this 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 of people around me who enjoy doing that, being funny together with each other as our audience. Writing a story is also a game of communication, so I’m thinking about what the kids reading will find funny or emotional or cool. Even though making a book is rather one-sided, I can’t talk back or clarify what I’m saying to the reader either if they’re confused, so I have to be careful. And I do like it when I get to have a real conversation because of the book at author events. I’ve met some really wonderful people that way!

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

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

And here’s the strangest part—a few years after I left and the first Beetle book was published, the bookstore I’d worked at was bought out. And the person who bought it opened a haunted house. A year-round haunted house in the mall! I’ve never been inside because it’s always closed. I don’t know why that happened! 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 or down 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 just making comics, so I’m really doing it intuitively at this point. Luckily, the only thing preventing me from getting the shots I want to get is my own drawing ability. When I look down on rooms like that, I often use a 3d program to compose references for the shot before I draw it. That way I can plan the space so that it works perfectly for what I need, but I also have the freedom to put a camera there as if it were real and find new shots.

Action is difficult to compose, but the primary thing is being able to understand what’s happening, so I try to write and draw with clarity in my mind first. 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 telling the backstory for new readers and not giving too much for readers familiar with the characters? 

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

This story weaves together necromancy, dragons, and many magical elements. How did you approach balancing these different supernatural aspects 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 Halloween fantasy series. Halloween is a holiday that has never lost its magic for me and I think it’s because everyone is encouraged to play, even adults. So I wanted my ideas for how magic would work to come from that feeling of playing. But more than anything, the lore is built for a purpose: to tell the story I’m interested in telling. The story always comes first.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The coming out party at the end features some of the most colorful and vibrant panels in the entire book. Could you talk about how you approached this scene of self-acceptance and its importance to the overall story?

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

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

I hope that because of this book, at least one kid who comes out to their 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 hardest stage 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 is turned into puppets, a Prince is haunted, a giant corpse is reanimated, and an egg hatches. The culprit is right in front of you, but cannot be seen in a mirror.

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.com and you can find all socials there as well. Thanks for the talk!

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