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.
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.
The turn came on an exercise bike in his basement, listening to Giuseppe Castellano’s podcast episode with myself and Adam Ming, where Adam Ming said to stop treating Substack as the road to being published and start treating it as being published. “It just was one of those ding moments,” Brian said. He got off the bike and got to work.
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?”
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.”
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.”
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.
