If you read the June issue of Condé Nast Traveler, you no doubt came across the story, “The Case of the Missing Angulas: A Barcelona Mystery.” It was unusual for two reasons: Not only was it illustrated like a graphic novel, but it was detective fiction. An editors’ note announced, “The conceit is concocted—but all the tantalizing details are real.” In the story, our bespectacled hero, Tom, explores Barcelona, from La Boqueria food market to La Rambla to Parc Guell. There, we get dialogue like this: “See, Tom—You Americans come here expecting to dine in the middle of the night, but that’s Madrid. Here in Catalonia, we eat at 10. Catalans are actually great conformists. Even our best-known creative radical, Gaudí, the architect of this park, went to the same mass every day.” I was delighted to come across the story. Tom Downey, who contributed Sleepless in Rangoon to World Hum, wrote the piece for the magazine. (It isn’t up on the magazine’s site, but you can see it on his site.) I e-mailed him to learn a little more about it.

World Hum: I don’t even know what to call the form of the piece. What do you call it?

Tom Downey: My editor suggested “graphic novella” and I kind of like that. But it’s a bit short for a novella; graphic travel story works.

How did the idea come about?

In the past few years I’ve started to read a lot of detective fiction. I find that detective novels serve as great guides to the hidden life of a city. The next time you travel, plunge into the dark alleyways of an unknown metropolis with only a great, local detective novel in hand, and see where it leads you. Fictional detectives have a lot in common with travelers. Both troll the streets, observing the telling gestures of the people passing by, the dance of the crowd, and the spirit of the street corner. These novels interpret the atmosphere of a city in a way no guidebook ever will, and unlock the secret resonances of a place: those details you know about your home, but rarely learn about the cities you visit.

Since I had found detective stories so interesting as guides to foreign cities, I wanted to write a travel story that used the detective form to take readers to real places and to capture local atmosphere and insight. My editor at Condé Nast Traveler suggested that we use an artist, rather than a photographer, to illustrate the piece. At first we imagined he would simply illustrate my story. But I’m an avid fan of graphic novels. So Neil Gower, the artist, and I decided that we would try to make the story entirely graphic, with no separate text outside the comic’s frames. Our editors at Traveler were daring enough to let us try. 

How did you put the story together? Did you pay a visit to Barcelona to research it, as you would a conventional travel story?

I knew Barcelona well—one of my good friends is a Spaniard who lives in the heart of El Raval and I visit him frequently. For this assignment I traveled again to Barcelona and used my local contacts to find especially interesting neighborhoods, restaurants, bars and attractions. After I spent some time scouting the story, characters, and locales, the artist, Neil, came over from the UK to join me. I took him to the locations I had chosen so that he had both a visual record in the form of a sketch or a photo, and also a feeling for these places. After that I wrote a script, like a movie script, that detailed the action, dialogue, narrative, for each page and frame. Then Neil came back with rough thumbnail sketches, almost a storyboard, and we worked with our editors to agree on the final content. After that Neil drew the piece in black and white, then painted the final product in color.

After finishing the Barcelona piece we had a much better idea of how to do this the next time. Right now we’re abroad together working on the second installment in the series.

Then I’ll look forward to the next one. Thanks, Tom.

Related on World Hum:
* Welcome to Bizarroland, a review of the graphic novel/travelogue, “Pyongyang”