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Out October 13th
DMA #57: The Calligrapher and the PrincessBrian Biggs on Draw Me Anything: Geeking out about paper, a sawn-in-half pencil, and a graphic novel being built in public!
Wednesday, midday… Brian Biggs is alone in his Philadelphia studio, an old garage he describes as a hermit cave, holding his phone in one hand and a pen in the other. I’m at my drawing board doing the same. For the next hour, 90 people watched 2 grown men show each other their doodles. If you missed it live, the replay is above. What follows is what you missed, with links to everything we held up to the camera. Brian has made more than 80 books. The Everything Goes series, Tinyville Town, the New York Times-bestselling Frank Einstein books with Jon Scieszka. So naturally, when he started his Substack, the imposter syndrome turned up anyway. “I had to give myself a break,” he said, “and get past my oh-no ego and just let it happen.” “All I want to do, man, is just draw.
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The work is The Walk, and the story behind it is every author’s recurring nightmare. In 2019, Brian published a picture book with Penguin called The Space Walk: an astronaut, alone in space, who just wants to go outside. It came out, in his words, “to the great yawn of indifference of children’s publishing”, and was out of print within a couple of years.
But out of print means the rights come home. So Brian is now turning that orphaned story into a full graphic novel, and serialising every step of it on his Substack: thumbnails, wrong turns, existential wobbles, all of it. “Every stupid thought I’m having about this is going onto my Substack,” he said. The story is already mutinying. “The story has decided it wants to be something bigger than I think I want it to be,” he told me, having informed his wife that morning it might be three 200-page volumes. “I’m 58 years old, man. Do I have a 600-page graphic novel in front of me?”
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The logic, though, is sound: last time, the book arrived to silence. This time, “at least it’s going to be a thing that there’s an audience built in already following it. And they care about it.” Every page will be hand-lettered, incidentally, because Brian letters the way you’d read it aloud, and he’d rather do that than make a font. He’s seen his hand-lettering redrawn by translators into Hebrew and Chinese, stroke by stroke. “I would love to meet those people one day,” he said, “but I’m afraid they would punch me in the face.”
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Somewhere in the middle of all this I made him explain the line in his bio about being calligrapher to a princess, and I’m pleased to report it’s all true.
Junior year at Parsons, 1988, studying in Paris, he answered a job-board ad to address envelopes for a man in a cravat who threw parties for people like the Rothschilds. Which is how a kid from Texas, whose calligraphy career began with a drugstore Speedball set and the Renaissance Fairs of early-80s Houston, ended up hand-lettering the guest book for Princess Ghislaine de Polignac, whose family had been friends with Marie Antoinette, and who hosted Ronald and Nancy Reagan a few weeks later. Brian was escorted out as the Reagans arrived. He did the work at his apartment drawing table, Enya on the stereo (not sure which album…), his roommate’s Akira comics all over the futon.
A year or 2 later, he was waiting tables at a Bennigan’s, telling anyone who’d listen: “I was a calligrapher for a princess for a month.”
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Shit Brushes and Other Filing Systems
Then I flipped the camera, and we got into the pens, as is my tradition. Highlights of the show-and-tell: his Kuretake brush pens, my Hunt 101, the ink bottle I suction-cup to train tables, and his filing system of labelled coffee cans reading “new brushes”, “good brushes” and (after asking the stream’s permission to swear) “shit brushes”. He keeps a box labelled “used but might be useful on a rainy day”. He made it in 1994. It’s bloody full.
Related Reading:
In Praise of the Humble Pencil |
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Drawing is Thinking... |
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This is also the man whose YouTube channel features a cheap pencil challenge (three pencils found on the street, one illustration) and who once sawed a Blackwing in half to fit his pencil case (who among us?), to the horror of his commenters. His position: “Just make the damn illustration.” We’re both Blackwing ambassadors. Neither of us wore the merch. We apologise to our sponsor-adjacent overlords.
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Sitting Around Talking About Art Supplies
Brian’s YouTube channel, home of the cheap pencil challenge
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On the Road Again… |
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What's in my Road Kit? |
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One sermon we both delivered, and mean: before you buy pens on Amazon, try JetPens or Goulet Pens. They stock what artists actually use, and they’re the closest thing to a local art store most of us have left.
Fine, It Was Doodling
Earlier in the week, I told you not to call it Doodling. Brian would like to complicate that. The hands essay started because he was, in his own cheerful admission, doodling: drawing hands like stone monuments in a field after rereading The Lord of the Rings. (”What if Frodo had come across a giant hand?”) Then he misdrew one. Five fingers and a thumb. He went for a walk in the park, came back, and realised the mistake was a plot device: it’s science fiction, after all, and now there are six-fingered gloves in the book, and a reason for them. “The doodling became a door opener,” he said. The ideas never arrive at the desk. They arrive on the bus, in the queue at the bagel shop, on a run in the woods.
Which led us both onto the soapbox: “I’m not your mom,” Brian said, “…but put your freaking phones down and turn off notifications!” Long-time readers know I’ve been yelling this at clouds for years…
Bathe yourself in boredom... |
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I was standing in my kitchen the other morning, waiting for the coffee to revive my aching corpse, and I caught myself reaching for my phone. |
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And then, quietly, the bit I keep thinking about. In the summer of 2022, for the first time in his career, Brian had no contract in front of him. He went to Iceland, raced bicycles, caught COVID, came home and, in his words, “curled up in the fetal position for about a month.” (again- who among us?)
What came out of it wasn’t a new hustle. It was a recalibration.
“All I want to do, man, is just draw. I just want to draw. When I was a kid, I got in trouble for drawing and telling stories. And I have to remember that I’m 58 and that’s what I do every day now.”
That’s the whole show, really. That’s all of us.
Watch the full replay above, then go follow the book being built at Random Orbit. Brian says if you have questions about any of it, his messages are open. He has a deadline. Ask anyway.
‘til next time!
Your pal,
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PS. Look, if this actually did something for your brain (or at least distracted you from the creeping dread of your own inbox for six minutes), please consider restacking this and sharing it with your people. It’s the only way the word spreads.
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It’s not “Doodling”, the essay
The Space Walk, the original 2019 picture book; Brian has about 40 copies for sale
The Illustration Department Podcast, episode 318, the one Brian heard on the exercise bike
JetPens and Goulet Pens, buy your pens like a person
My rant about letting your brain just “be” in the world:
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