The Princess Who Saved Herself is “Straight-Up Heroic” An Interview With Greg Pak And Jonathan Coulton

The Princess Who Saved Herself is “Straight-Up Heroic” An Interview With Greg Pak And Jonathan Coulton

March 23, 2015 0 By Emilia Cowan

Princesses and heroes are kind of a big deal and The Princess Who Saved Herself (PWSH for short) aims to reinvent the princess hero genre with rock n’ roll, a farting bee, and a kickass princess. PWSH is already a lesson in Kickstarter success with only a few days left before the project ends, I was able to ask Greg Pak and Jonathan Coulton a few questions about their widely successful endeavours into the world of crowdfunding. By the way, you better support this project before the end date because it’s straight-up awesome!

Are you surprised at the response to the Kickstarter having amassed four times your goal?

Greg: Yes! The morning we launched, we actually had a last minute discussion about whether we should lower our goal, just in case, but our backers are amazing and we’re now close to six times our original goal. That’s allowed us to add a digital Princess Who Saved Herself Activity Book for kids and a digital Princess Who Saved Herself Script Book with the original manuscript and “Making Of” color commentary about how we made the book. And last night, we hit our third stretch goal, which will let us make a digital Spanish language edition of the book.

Our final stretch goal is to super-size the stickers we’re sending every backer who picks a physical reward. Feel free to come on board and push us over the edge.

Previous Code Monkey Save World backers already have the Princess Who Save Herself, what made you decide to return to Kickstarter and make the comic available to an entirely new audience?

Greg: The PWSH exists because CMSW backers hit a stretch goal that let us make a digital version of the princess book, which we’ve delivered to our wonderful CMSW backers. But of course with a children’s book, we all really want physical copies, right? So we launched the PWSH Kickstarter to make those physical books.

PWSH has raised a lot of money, which you’ve used to expand the Kickstarter. How do you manage to keep up with it all and decide the next step in expanding the project?

Greg: Great question. Jonathan and I have talked at least once or twice a day to plan the next steps as the campaigns progressed. We made a big list of possible stretch goals, but we tried to keep in mind that we had already made the book — we just needed to print it. So we didn’t want to add any stretch goals that would delay the printing and shipping of the actual books. One of the glories of this particular campaign is that if we do it right, we should be able to deliver the books very quickly, and we want to stick to that. We’ve tried to pick stretch goals that don’t require the production of physical objects, but that still add a lot of value and fun to the whole package. These supplemental digital books made a lot of sense for us, and folks seem to be responding.

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The activity book was a fantastic idea, by the way! Who came up with that?

Greg: That was me! It just occurred to me that we have all of this gorgeous line art from the book, and that those could make for great coloring book pages. And then it occurred to me that we could add to that with mazes and word searches and storytelling and drawing projects. A kids activity book fits the ethos of our heroine, I think. Glad you like the idea!

Greg, you’ve been working with Jonathan Coulton for a few years now; what’s it like working with him?

Greg: It’s pretty dang awesome. We’re friends from waaaay back, so I think we’ve got a lot of shared perspectives and experiences that make hanging out really fun. We’ve come up separately working in very different fields but kind of doing very similar things, wallowing in goofy genre fun while striving to tell emotionally honest stories. It’s very easy and inspiring to work with Jonathan. I also laugh like a hyena whenever we get together, and that’s a great thing.

Jonathan, what’s it like to work with Greg?

Jonathan: The worst. Just kidding. Greg is spookily good at telling stories – obviously that’s his job, so it’s what you’d expect I guess. But I’m always impressed at how quickly and deftly he can take a small idea like the content of a song and spin it out into this larger, more complicated thing that beat by beat makes sense, and stays true to the original. I always feel like my characters are in good hands.

Are there any advantages to working with Kickstarter versus working with a big publisher, like DC or Marvel?

Greg: I love working for DC and Marvel, and I hope to continue doing so for a long time. But different projects belong in different places, and both Code Monkey Save Worl and the Princess Who Saved Herself both made total sense as independent projects. Jonathan and I both immediately mind-melded when we started talking about these stories — we just saw them in the same way and knew they would work. With crowdfunding, we were pretty sure we could find the support to just get it done. Trying to explain these projects to a traditional children’s book publisher and work through the contracts might have taken a couple of years; Kickstarter let us get started in a couple of months.

How different was it working on a children’s book rather than a comic?

Greg: At a certain point I sat down and realized I’d written the thing as a comic book with just fewer panels per page and I realized it really needed to be simpler. I cut out half of the images, which let our brilliant artist, Takeshi Miyazawa, cut loose in just the right way. It was freeing for me as a writer, too. With a children’s picture book, you don’t have to necessarily show every step in an action the way you might want to in a traditional comic book. You can go for big, iconic images that get to the core of the moment at hand. It’s been a blast. This is also a great time to sing the praises of our colorist Jessica Kholinne and our letterer Simon Bowland, who made the whole thing come to life with just the right touch and tone.

Jonathan, you said you wrote this song for your daughter, has she gotten to see and/or listen to PWSH?

Jonathan: Yes! She’s a bit older than the target audience by now, but she likes the song and thinks the book is pretty cool. Though quite honestly, Dad’s entertainment content is a lot less interesting to both my kids than the rest of the stuff in the world. They get enough of Dad in their daily lives, I can imagine that consuming Dad’s media is a little too much at times.

Greg, aside from the song, where there any other inspirations for PWSH? What message are you (and Jonathan) hoping young readers and even adults get from this book?

Greg: I just hope any kid who reads the book gets the affirmation that it’s cool to be awesome and it’s cool to be kind. Our heroine’s always ready to stand up for herself — and will kick a dragon in the butt if she has to. But at the same time, she’s always ready to extend a hand, to solve problems through compassion. That’s straight-up heroic. I want to be like her when I grow up.

Code Monkey Save World was your first book with Jonathan, how different is PWSH? Did you approach writing PWSH in a different way than with Code Monkey? What mindset did you have during the writing process?

Greg: CMSW was in some ways an exercise in glorious excess. We embraced a big, loopy plot based on eight or nine songs with a huge cast of beautiful weirdos and just went for it. I love it for that. But the PWSH is a children’s book based on a single song and I wanted to hone it down to its essentials and do something very simple but evocative.

Jonathan, were there any messages you wanted to make sure Greg incorporated into his writing? How much collaboration occurs(ed) between you, Greg, Takeshi Miyazawa, Jessica Kholinne, and Simon Bowland?

Jonathan: I stay out of the conversations Greg has with the rest of the folks, only because I don’t really feel qualified to comment on that stuff. I have absolutely zero visual creative bones. I can barely draw a square, so seeing the stuff that Tak and Jessica and Simon do is like watching a magic trick. But Greg and I talk a lot about the general plan up front, and I contributed a couple of ideas along the way (the farting bee was my idea – you’re welcome everybody). That said, I think we both felt like the messages were in there from the start, this idea of a princess character who was totally self-actualized and self-reliant, and moreover, solved problems through compassion and positivity.

Interior art from The Princess Who Saved Herself by Takeshi Miyazawa, colored by Jessica Kholinne.

Interior art from The Princess Who Saved Herself by Takeshi Miyazawa, colored by Jessica Kholinne.

INTERVIEW CONTINUES HERE!

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