Ping Pong Match | Part 2

‘Ping Pong Match’ is a series that brings together Executive Director Raul Roman and Graphic Storytelling Director Eric Andriantsialonina to engage in a spirited back-and-forth about the collaborative process of creating DAWNING’s graphic novels. Here, they discuss their work on a graphic novel for the ongoing research project “Many Lives of War,” a study of the long and twisty road to reconciliation after the Sri Lankan civil war.

Eric Andriantsialonina says that working on graphic novels with Raul Roman is like a ping pong match. They have a lot of fun discussing possibilities face to face during fieldwork. But the real ping pong match starts once they get back home.

At home -Eric in Madagascar, and Raul in Washington, DC- they connect online to discuss which ideas will translate into actual graphic novels: entire visual narratives populated with people, places, and scenes drawn from dozens of interview transcripts and thousands of photographs.

EA: I remember very well the moment I first heard the story that became the basis for this graphic novel. Rafe Andrews, our Lead Creative Producer, came to me while we were in Sri Lanka and said, “We have a story for you!” As he was relaying the story, images came to my head of the scenes Rafe was describing: the main character in a prison cell, holding a knife to her own throat, her mother’s bloodied hand.

RR: I remember conducting the interview. While she was telling her story, I suddenly had the idea that this could be a graphic novel so I stopped her mid-sentence and said, “How would you feel if your story became a graphic novel?” She said she would welcome that and became very excited for her story to be out there in the world that way.

From there, the nature of the interview changed. When you’re collaborating with the protagonist of the story in the creation of a graphic novel script, which is what we do at DAWNING, the interview becomes deeper, more rigorous and meticulous. You’re probing constantly.

I started asking many granular questions about small details in the scenes she was describing. For example, if she was talking about being on the bus to a memorial, we had to know the distance she traveled, the time of day, how many other passengers were there, what were they wearing… Was it quiet or were passengers talking to each other? The interview lasted close to three hours.

EA: All of those details were invaluable for me as I drew up the storyboard. Still, it was challenging because I hadn’t witnessed the events myself and didn’t always have photographs to work from.

For example, when I was drawing the scene of the main character with the knife to her throat, I asked my son to take a picture of me holding a pen at my neck, so that I could see how a human hand looks in that position and get the angles right. In other cases, I used images that I found online for inspiration. I hope it worked.

“If this was going to work, it had to look and feel authentic to Sri Lankans”

RR: For Sri Lankans who’ve seen the final product, it worked. They were very moved by it. And that’s a product of your attention to detail, Eric, as well as the time we spent obsessing over things like the colors of the textiles, the quality of light, and the background settings. That was a priority for us: If this was going to work, it had to look and feel authentic to Sri Lankans.

EA: We did also have a lot of our own photography for many of the scenes. That helped a lot.

RR: That’s true. Our team was at the Mullivaikal ceremony of 2024 to photograph it. And even for the scenes in the courtroom, Eric, you found photos of the facility online. So, aside from the main character’s home and the inside of the prison, we had everything documented visually.

EA: For her home, I was able to use photos of a different house that I spent time in during a separate interview in Sri Lanka. I had taken some bad pictures of the interior with my smartphone, as I often do. At the time I didn’t know if they would be useful, but they turned out to be a good basis for the scenes inside the main character’s house.

RR: All of those details were important for another reason: For this novel, we felt it was crucial to slow down the pace of storytelling so as to immerse the reader in the ceremonies and rituals that surround memory and mourning in Tamil communities. For our previous graphic novels, the pacing was much faster.

“It’s the first time that we dove into a single character’s life story with this much depth.”

EA: Yes, this graphic novel was also the first one where we took the time to do it the way we thought it should be done. We didn’t impose any constraints or limits, unlike our previous efforts, which were much shorter.

We added a lot of details to make the story breathe. It’s the first time that we dove into a single character’s life story with this much depth. For me, it’s the best story we’ve produced so far.

RR: I agree. One thing we wanted to do with this story was to allow the reader to stop and see –to fully appreciate the dignity of this woman and what she’s fighting against. There’s a lot of love in all of these details, including the careful rendering of all the ceremonies.

EA: It took me a whole day just to make the drawing of the temple! That’s compared to an average of two days to draw one page.

“It took a lot of work and a lot of courage, because we changed the way we do graphic novels.”

RR: For our earlier graphic novels, everything was done on watercolor and paper. In this case, it was ink on paper but the final colors were added digitally. So that allowed us to have a discussion about it and we went back and forth several times about how to adjust the colors.

It took a lot of work and a lot of courage, because we changed the way we do graphic novels. It’s the first time that one of our graphic novels has been narrated entirely in the first person. And it’s the first time we’ve really put the images front and center. It felt like another step in DAWNING’s process of creation and evolution.

We studied her transcript, then Eric created the first storyboard with text, and from there we focused solely on the visual side and the tempo of the story, without words.

Eric, what other panels of the novel were particularly memorable for you?

EA: There’s a section of the story where the main character is watching TV at her aunt and uncle’s house, before the police visit her home. She’s watching a Tamil movie, enjoying the time with her family. It was fun for me to draw this one, especially because much of the rest of the story takes place in jails and courthouses and is about interactions with law enforcement.

RR: Yes! It’s the first time we’ve tried something like that, with the inlaid circle showing the scene from the movie. The contrast of that happy family scene to the confrontation with police shows how quickly life can turn from idyll to horror.

Another first for us was on the second page, something we’ve never done stylistically, which is to create two frames in one, showing photos of the main character with her mom and her aunt, then focusing on how her mom is holding her hand. That was also to portray the dignified life of a happy family –they’re not just victims or survivors, they’re real people like you and me.

EA: I also like the final panel, showing the main character swimming in the ocean. Initially on my storyboard, I had drawn her walking through the market. And then we discussed it, and you came up with the idea of ending it with her in the ocean.

RR: Yes, it seemed right to have for her to be in a place where she could be completely free and open. These kinds of visuals allowed for a balance after her having been in prison the entire time.

EA: There’s a lot of trauma in this story, and that can be a difficult thing to portray with sensitivity. For me, the fact that I never met the main character of the story helped me to have some distance from her and her story. Also, since she requested anonymity, I had no idea about her face or her name.

RR: But everything she said, her words, and her scenes are all real – they’re all coming from her testimony. We worked for three months to create 20 pages of graphic novel that are meticulously dictated by the facts –facts that are recreated with imagination and empathy.

EA: We can’t wait to show it to her in our upcoming trip to Sri Lanka.