Raina Telgemeier and Scott McCloud are very different cartoonists. Telgemeier is the creator of a string of bestselling middle-grade graphic novels including Smile, Drama, and Guts, while McCloud is known for his pioneering analyses of the medium, Understanding Comics and Making Comics. But the two have been friends for decades, and when Telgemeier’s young readers demanded a guide to creating their own comics, she turned to McCloud.

Their collaboration, The Cartoonists Club, was published by Graphix/Scholastic in April. Formally, it’s in the mode of Telgemeier’s other books: a story about four kids, Makayla, Art, Lynda, and Howard, who figure out together how they can turn blank pages into comics. What they discover, though, is very much derived from McCloud’s work. He and Telgemeier wrote the book together; she drew its characters, and he drew those characters’ creations.

McCloud and Telgemeier talked to Kirkus about The Cartoonists Club over Zoom from their homes in Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco, respectively. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve just finished the first leg of the tour for The Cartoonists Club. How has it been received?

SCOTT McCLOUD: We’ve had big crowds, very warm and very excitable. When we ask for participation, their hands are bopping in the air. The sense of kinship that I saw in the eyes of parents and kids was really something. And we’re also beginning to see kids give us art—actually hand things to us that they’ve made—and that’s tremendously exciting.

RAINA TELGEMEIER: Being able to recognize that kinship as a two-way gaze is very rewarding. It’s a full-circle experience.

McCLOUD: There’s that key moment in our presentation when Raina shows a piece of art that she did herself, when she drew the Baby-Sitters Club cast.

TELGEMEIER: As an 11-year-old!

McCLOUD: That completes the circuit beautifully, because the kids are seeing that this adult was that kid noodling out this rough draft for how the universe could be, and now that universe is real. When we’re giving voice to the creative aspirations of kids, it’s not as if we just handed this to them out of thin air. It was already there. We just handed them the key to unlock it.

TELGEMEIER: We just received some comics, a couple of days ago, from a very young creator whose parents were also very excited that she was creating. She handed us her work, and Scott and I both looked at it and went, Oh, this is good. Like, this is really good. You’ve got it.

McCLOUD: We never say that in so many words, of course.

TELGEMEIER: Right.

McCLOUD: We see it in each other’s eyes. We catch the parents’ eyes, and then we say things like, “Keep going” [laughter].

You’ve talked about Raina’s similarities to Lynda and Scott’s similarities to Art, but how did Makayla and Howard develop?

TELGEMEIER: I’ve kept meeting the same [types of] kids over and over again in my workshops, signings, presentations, school visits—there’s the one who has the big, big, big ideas but doesn’t have the focus or the tools to really sit down and start. And there’s the kid who likes to draw funny pictures but doesn’t know how to take those funny ideas and turn them into a story. I mean, I’m a memoir cartoonist. I journal, I keep notes, I draw kids when I see them in my sketchbook. These kids have existed for a long time.

McCLOUD: I have my pet theory that there are four passions or campfires that people return to: knowledge and learning and experimentation; or story and imagination; or iconoclastic rule-breaking and skewering power; or pursuing craft. So as soon as I had four characters, I thought, I know what boxes I’m going to put them in. But one of the wonderful things that happened is that when Raina had the insight, about halfway through, of having Lynda find her story, it kind of broke my rules, and I knew I had to let that take its course.

TELGEMEIER: For each character, the kid is half of the character, and what they create is the other half. I feel like I knew who Makayla was, but I didn’t know what she was writing and drawing. And I leaned on Scott for that, because I don’t have that kind of imagination. I don’t have a big fantastical writerly brain.

McCLOUD: I might politely disagree—I think you have a tremendous imagination, but I do know what you’re describing. I had to imagine the artistic persona of each kid and impersonate them on paper. Lynda was the hardest of all, because Lynda is a young artist without a lot of experience but with a lot of natural talent. And I’m an old artist with tons of experience but very limited natural talent. So that was a very, very hard thing for me to put onto paper.

Over the course of the story’s multiple drafts, what other surprising things came out of your collaboration?

TELGEMEIER: There’s a really big one: Our story originally had Raina and Scott in it. We were main characters, teaching a class, and explaining everything. And the feedback we got from the editorial team was, “It doesn’t quite feel like a Raina book, and it needs to feel more like a Raina book.” At the time, that felt like non-advice: I don’t know how to be more me! But I had a heavier hand in the second draft, and it was only 30 pages into rewriting it that I realized Raina and Scott probably shouldn’t be in this at all. That felt like a tiny dagger to the heart, but it made sense to everybody.

McCLOUD: I think your insight and bravery—and my natural irascible rebelliousness—led us to isolate the problem: that the book felt a little didactic and wasn’t kid-centered enough. Which did, in the end, make it feel more like a Raina book, but also more like the book that was struggling to get out, which is a story that originated from the kids rather than a case of adults handing down the wisdom.

Both of you have always had an eye for what’s on its way in comics. What are you seeing from the kids who’ve been coming to your readings all these years?

TELGEMEIER: A lot of them are working on WEBTOON, and a lot of them are self-publishing. I’ve had a lot of young School of Visual Arts grads who’ve followed in my wake, and I always feel a special kinship with them.

McCLOUD: The generation that began with reading Raina’s work is really coming of age now. I find it hard to believe that their work will not be quite socially and politically intense. I think that their storytelling chops are probably going to be tremendous. I think we’re seeing the victory of the kind of pacing that Raina has been doing that very few people did before her, the idea of emotion as action. One of the things that scares me is that the diversity of output that we’ve seen to this point may go in retrograde because of a political environment that discourages diversity. But it’s going to be an exciting time. It just may be a little more fraught than we would have liked.

Douglas Wolk is the author of All of the Marvels: A Journey to the Ends of the Biggest Story Ever Told.