Interview: Ganzeer on The Solar Grid

Mark Allen chats to Ganzeer about The Solar Grid…

Writer/artist Ganzeer’s first full-length comics project is certainly an ambitious one. His nine-part series The Solar Grid is a sprawling socio-political science fiction story that spans centuries of future history and interplanetary distances, featuring a diverse array of characters each struggling with the state of the world in which they live.

Its themes of surveillance, environmental catastrophe, dystopia and political ambiguity are all reflections of the real world, though Ganzeer’s detailed monochrome art and retro-futurist designs describe a civilisation sprung from both science fiction lore and keen observation of how our own flawed one already functions. It’s an intoxicating, ambitious read, and each installment brings new angles and exciting concepts to the story.

With two distinct chapters already out and a third on the way, we took some time to chat to Ganzeer about his process, the themes of the series and whether his dystopian disaster narrative is an optimistic or pessimistic one:

MA: THE SOLAR GRID is a sprawling narrative told through many different characters over distant time periods. Was that always your intention, or did the story initially have a narrower focus?

G: Oh, the story definitely started with a narrower focus. It really started as a tight 4-issue high concept piece, with the entirety of the story taking place in 949 AF (After the Flood). The core story really takes place with a handful of characters between Earth, Mars, and the moon. It became very clear, though, looking at that first outline that I had a very mechanical, plot-based action/adventure piece of sci-fi on my hands, completely void of the interesting complexities behind the thoughts surrounding the creation of the story. So I allowed myself to explore the backstory of the world of The Solar Grid and jot it down as it came to me. I threw away the very structured, mechanical outline I’d initially come up with, and instead outlined the whole thing in a Jack Kerouac, stream-of-consciousness sort of way.

The result was massive and quite insane. But from there I was able to chop at the thing until I had something containable in 9 chapters, with the backstory of how things came to be the way the were actually explored through narratives in the distant past involving completely different characters.Which is actually very akin to our own reality. It’s difficult to tell the story of say, a Lakota kid growing up on the Pine Ridge rez, without at least a nod to Christopher Columbus’s first sighting of the Bahamas.

A part of me wishes I’d stuck to tighter 4-chapter version though. I’d be close to finished by now. But chances are I wouldn’t have been entirely satisfied with the thing.

And if you’d decided to go the traditional publishing route you might have faced editorial restrictions on changing the structure. Is that a key factor in choosing to self-publish? What have been the challenges in creating, publishing and promoting THE SOLAR GRID completely solo?

To a certain degree, it is a key factor. I got frustrated with putting so much energy into trying to distill the entirety of the story into a one page pitch, which is what most publishers/editors ask for. Once I did it (several versions of it actually), what I had on my hands was a very dry plot-based outline completely void of what I thought made the story great. It’s unfortunate that most people in Hollywood or Comics will tell you that’s what you need to do to make sure you’ve got a good story on your hands. But that is the lie of the entertainment industry, which in my view has only served to reduce the art of storytelling to pointless laughs, thrills, or tears, with no other purpose to back it up other than sales.

The authors of actual stories, however, authors of books and novels, will tell you that the only way to figure out a story, is go through the experience of telling the story. And all my favorite authors agree that story and plot are two different things. And that a great plot does not make a great story. Plot, in fact, comes secondary to actual story, and I find that my favorite stories tend to be rather plotless. Plot-dependent stories, on the other hand, give me a very short-term sensation, but lack the power to fascinate me for years on end. So no wonder we feel that the majority of movies and comic books today are utter crap. It has to do with producers’ and editors’ over-fixation with plot, and their insistence that writers ought to share that exact same fixation.

Creating, publishing, and promoting the work is definitely harder than I thought. Luckily though, with digital publishing, the publishing aspect of it doesn’t require too much out of me. A few years ago I put out a zine, and the energy one has to put into printing, stapling, and distributing the physical things can be incredibly draining. So with digital publishing, I don’t have to deal with any of that, which leaves me more time and energy to focus on the actual content of the book.

Still have to put in the work to promote though, which I would rather not have to do, just so I can focus entirely on the actual book. But promotion is a necessary evil. I don’t want to feel like I’m cramming something down anybody’s throat, but at the same time, I’d just like to let people know that this thing exists. And that requires so much work on my part because of the sheer amount of noise out there, especially by the big established companies.

THE SOLAR GRID is in the tradition of complex, multi-stranded sci-fi with a global focus. It’s reminiscent of comics like Transmetropolitan, and novelists like Phillip K. Dick. How much of the project is extrapolating real-world concerns versus riffing on the themes of classic sci-fi?

I think there’s equal parts of both. The story is predominantly concerned with reflecting on real world events, while also acting as a love letter to the genre of science fiction, so you’ll find an endless number of references to other works. But the latter comes secondary to the former. If one was to take all the references out and throw them away, the story would still essentially be the same. So quite different from, say, a Stranger Things approach, where the references very much inform the story. With The Solar Grid, the references are little more than a nod. The similarities to PKD predominantly lie in allowing personal events to influence the story. But that doesn’t make The Solar Grid any more autobiographical than A Scanner Darkly was to Dick.Rather than think of The Solar Grid as any kind of actual mirror, be it for the world, myself, or the genre of Sci-fi, best to consider it the reflective chrome surface of the hull of a spaceship. One that is completely imagined.

The STRANGER THINGS comparison feels particularly relevant – personally, there seems to be much more substance to THE SOLAR GRID because you’re not borrowing wholesale from other sources or relying on a nostalgic boost from an audience more interested in looking back than forwards.