Navigating your teenage years is never easy, but two things are bound to help with the journey: a best friend and a passion for something outside of the everyday.
For most of us, that passion can be distilled as some type of fandom, and if you can share that love with a friend, you and your friendship is bound to become stronger because of it.
Writer Jeremy Whitley’s latest graphic novel from Madcave’s YA imprint Maverick, Navigating With You, is sure to strike a cord with young adults and those who remember those awkward, trying years.
We spoke to Whitley about the origins of his passion project and how fandom can enrich everyone’s lives in this exclusive interview.
Where did the idea for Navigating with You originate?
It’s ultimately a story about finding your people thanks to fandom. I started out with the basic concept of two fish out of water bonding over their shared love of a manga they had both gotten into as kids. I wanted to make it true to what I had experienced working in comics and the people who had come to my table, so it seemed obvious to me that they should both be girls. Queer women have made up a large chunk of my audience since very early in my career and I wanted to tell a story that was true to the amazing people I’ve gotten to know both online and at cons who loved and were inspired by stories I’ve worked on.
You have said that “…our loves- both romantic and fandom – help us find ourselves and work through trauma.” How did you use this as a guiding storytelling principle for the graphic novel?
Everyone who’s had a relationship that has broken down, even if the end was amicable, has baggage they bring with them. And you often don’t understand what that baggage even is until you experience a relationship that’s caring and supportive. Sometimes you don’t really recognize it until you see it reflected back on you in storytelling. Both of these can be incredibly important and helpful. The manga is the engine that gets them working together, but the care that they have for each other (and the story in the manga) help them both see their way forward. Like the other character, our audience starts off not knowing much about our girls, but as their relationship deepens, they start to feel comfortable being vulnerable with each other and as a result both they and we learn more about each other. Then we start tackling the big issues.
What does artist Cassio Ribeiro bring to the story as a visual artist?
Cassio’s work is incredible. When my editor and I saw his work, we knew it would be perfect for the story we wanted to tell with Neesha and Gabby. His colors are so brilliant and his settings feel so lived in. It was important to me that these spaces – set in the same town I live in – felt lived in and authentic. Cassio’s work does that so well.
What we didn’t know we could expect and that Cassio blew us away with are the manga pages included in the book. We included interludes from the story that Gabby and Neesha are reading and I knew those had to have a very different look and feel and that it needed to be the feeling of an obscure manga from the 90’s. We thought we might need a second artist to handle these pages, but Cassio absolutely knocked it out of the park. If you didn’t know, I don’t know if you’d even think it was the same artist. The man is insanely talented.
Manga is such a cultural force and touchstone for many young people. In terms of the girls in Navigating, how important was it for you to portray this type of fandom in a realistic light”?
It’s true! One of the things we really wanted to play with is how much some manga is still so hard to collect in the US. In a time when we feel like you can order anything through Amazon, there are tons of anime series with print runs that were all out of balance, where the first volume was everywhere and by the time they got to volume five or ten, you just can’t find them stateside. Sometimes they just stop translating them if the numbers don’t support it. That means things become impossible to find – either out of print or only translated through some guy online who kinda knows Japanese, but whose translations are completely wild. That added a fun sort of scavenger hunt element to the story, where it was no longer just “let’s read this together” but “let’s go on an adventure”.
We also wanted the manga itself to feel like the sort of book you might have run into as a kid. There are elements that are never explained, they’re just part of the world and you go with it. Why do their starships look like steam trains? That’s just how it is. Why does the navigator not really seem to do much navigating, but is more like an engineer? Well, it’s a translation thing. What are you gonna do?
The story is written with a younger teen audience in mind. Going back to your own fandom, what helped you cope with the intricacies of being a young adult?
Oh, my fandoms are all over the place, but as a young adult I loved X-Men, Buffy, and The Lord of the Rings. In a pre-Peter Jackson films world, being an LOTR kid had very much the same feeling that being a manga kid does today. There were the three main books that you took very seriously, then then goofy prequel which you kinda had to pretend not to like as a serious teen, then all these books and books of lore that were strange and unfinished and difficult to read. You wanted to get more of the story, but the deeper in you got the less coherent it got. I was never a big fan fiction writer, but if I had been, it would have been about Lord of the Rings. The thing that was really inspirational with LOTR was this feeling that everyone has a role to play in defeating the darkness. The weakest and smallest characters are the ones who carry the most and grow the most. Also, I was obsessed with Eowyn, which I feel like shows in my own work.
I think X-Men, especially the 80’s X-Men, is a huge source of inspiration for a lot of the creators working in manga and anime now. They still hold tight to the weirdness and the romance influences that made X-Men the giant soap opera that it became.
And Buffy, well, that show is very close to being an anime all on its own – up to and including have a creator that became problematic after it was over and having such an unmanageably large cast that it had to become two shows.
Do you have any memories you can share of working on the Unstoppable Wasp?
Unstoppable Wasp was a huge book for me for multiple reasons. Obviously it was my first ongoing story for Marvel, so had by far the largest profile of anything I’d worked on, but beyond that, my editor let me get really deep and personal with that book. Even though ultimately the book only had two short runs, it has so much heart in it. We went to such great lengths to get details correct and to create a meaningful representation of a good and smart and enthusiastic character dealing with mental illness. There were a lot of points where Marvel could have doubled back or chickened out on telling that story and I appreciate that they didn’t.
It’s interesting that you ask, because Unstoppable Wasp actually had a lot of direct influence on this project. There’s the obvious mental health connections, but the character from that run that is tied most closely to Navigating with You is Taina Miranda. When I created a character to be part of Nadia’s team who was an engineer with cerebral palsy, I barely knew anything about CP. But thankfully the book had a fan named Quade Reed who had CP himself and volunteered to be an authenticity reader for Taina. I think it ended up making that character so much better. Taina became one of my favorite characters and I really wanted to do more stories with her. In fact, I had wanted to do a little flirty story with her and Robbie Reyes – one brilliant mechanic to another – but the book never made it that long and Marvel didn’t have any interest in following that character on her own.
So when I got the chance to tell a romance story, I wanted to tell a story that centered a character with a physical disability. I wanted to highlight the challenges that comes with some of the everyday parts of having a relationship for a person with a disability. So when I created Neesha Sparks for Navigating with You, I knew I wanted her to have CP and to highlight that. It’s never a question of whether Neesha deserves to be loved. Personally, I can’t help it. She’s kind of a magnetic character. I brought Quade and others in to help me with some of the details there. I’m so happy with how all of that turned out and hopefully so are the readers.
Any details you might be able to offer on upcoming projects?
Ooh, well, I have a lot of stuff on the horizon! For fans of my book with Bre Indigo “The Dog Knight” about a non-binary middle schooler who gets recruited by magical dogs to save the world, the second volume of that is almost through pencils and will hopefully be out next year.
The third book of School for Extraterrestrial Girls from Papercutz is underway and Jamie Noguchi is doing his best work yet on that book.
I think the only other project that’s officially announced is The Dashing School for Wayward Princes, which I cowrote with my friend and podcast cohost Ben Kahn and is being drawn by Melissa Capriglione. It’s about a school for princes who don’t fit the mold where they are taught the finer points of toxic masculinity!
Navigating With You is currently available at finer comic book shops and bookstores everywhere.
