The Colors of the Mountain: Jose Pimienta on Their New Graphic Novel "Halfway to Somewhere"
I had the opportunity a couple months back to talk with Jose Pimienta about their new graphic novel, "Halfway to Somewhere." Reading it in preparation, I found myself transfixed by the environments and the sense of place, or misplacement, Jose creates throughout the book. I didn't ask as much about that as I'd have liked, but we did talk about their approach to coloring, the book's conversations about gender identity and sibling relationships, the power of language, and the minutia of printing!
I hope I'm not the only one jazzed about that last one.
For the unfamiliar, Jose Pimienta created the graphic novels "Suncatcher" and "Twin Cities" as well as being the illustrator on a number of other projects, including "Soupy Leaves Home," where I first encountered their work.
Thanks to Random House Graphic for arranging this interview and to Jose for chatting with me!
When did you start working on “Halfway to Somewhere?”
Jose Pimienta: Oh gosh. Jumping right into it. Let me dig back a little bit back into my memories.
The idea for “Halfway to Somewhere” had to have happened sometime in 2022, maybe 2021 is when I started kicking it around? Yes! The variety of concepts for “Halfway to Somewhere” were definitely sometime in 2020 but some time in 2021, when I officially finished “Twin Cities” and I handed it in, long after we started having conversations about what to work on next, somewhere around there is when I started putting together the building blocks for “Halfway to Somewhere.”
When I started writing and drawing it? It must’ve been somewhere in mid-2021 and 2022. This is a bit of a tangent but I just got a new computer. In my previous computer, I had a calendar with all my dates in it: when I started penciling, when I started coloring, all that. When I got this new computer, the only thing that did not occur to me to transfer would be my calendars, which was fine until a question like this came up [laughs.]
Like, I could have given you an exact date.
It’s funny because I also just replaced my computer.
JP: These things. They just don’t live the way they used to.
How do you usually send over all the stuff to your editors? No more physically carrying over pages or, like, a flash drive?
JP: Oh yeah. I’m so glad we don’t have to do that anymore, especially with how my working methods have shifted. The way that I usually work with an editor is I draw everything on paper and then I scan it. Then, either a) they give me a link to a Dropbox of sorts – and for my own mental health and safety I have a google drive that I can drop everything into – or b) I send my editors a link to those folders. That way it’s easier in case of any quick notes.
How has your process changed over the years?
JP: Quite a lot. In the artsy-farsty way of speaking, my process of making comics used to be more traditional. I would draw on really big Bristol pages. I used to pencil with actual graphite or with blue pencil and I used to ink with nibs and brush. There was a while when I was trying water-coloring.
Over the years I’ve been on a personal journey to try and minimize my personal toolbox as much as possible. Nowadays I think that I’m about as minimal as I can make it. I still draw on Bristol paper – this is after thumbnailing, which has remained the same – but I don’t draw with blue pencils anymore; I draw with straight graphite. I draw on a comfortable size that is easier to scan on an 8 1/2x11” scanner, so all of my original pages are like, 7 1/2x10” or in that range.
My inking tools have gone from nibs and brushes to micron pens. It’s a very limited amount of micron pens. If I have to black something out, I may use brush pens but for the most part, I’m just experimenting with leaving some areas open and just doing it digitally to save ink and save time.
Oh, I also used to draw all my panel borders with rulers, because that’s how you would do it, but I started getting quite a few comments from designers that my lines weren’t always straight, even when I tried to correct them, they wouldn’t line up. I started finding that I wasn’t drawing squares correctly so I just decided to stop trying and do them digitally, which is a lot faster and a lot easier.
Even though I still draw traditionally, the incoming of digital touch-ups and digital additions has become almost 50/50 and all my coloring and lettering is digital. That’s definitely not where I was 15 years ago. It’s been quite a change.
How much of it changed between Twin Cities and now?
JP: The only really really big changes in “Halfway to Somewhere” is when I stopped drawing panel borders. I would have to revisit some “Twin Cities” pages to check. The process of drawing stayed relatively similar. The coloring did change a little bit. Not in a technical way but in my approach to coloring. I don’t know how nerdy you want me to get with it.
Let’s get nerdy!
JP: So the way that I did coloring before. It was just flat coloring, with simple colors and some minor lighting here and there. I was trying to be as efficient as possible. The thing with “Halfway to Somewhere,” a big theme of the book is finding the beauty in your surroundings and the two major settings are Lawrence, Kansas, where there’s a lot of limestone design and classic university architecture, and the other big set piece is La Rumorosa, which is this mountain range right outside of Mexicali. If you want to make it simple, I could have just made the stones one color and the mountains one color but that doesn’t really translate to the aesthetic of these locations.
Because I’m not a good painter, and I’m not really good at rendering, I had to figure out what’s a good coloring style, or what’s a coloring approach I can take where I’m still putting emphasis on how beautiful these places are while still being as time efficient as possible. So I took color more into consideration. I did more coloring matching with bright vs muted colors which was a challenge for sure.
I think it pays off, especially in the opening few pages. You really get a sense of the environment and it’s got that depth to it. Did you get any push-back from your editors for opening with this silent sequence?
JP: No, I did not. I was a little surprised and I’m very flattered when I didn’t. Huge kudos to Whitney for, before I start writing anything, Whitney Leopard (my editor) and I get very much on the same page of what the theme and the trail of the story is going to be, so we have a very good idea of what direction we’re going in.
Even from the script, I’d started putting descriptions of what the surroundings were going to be and I think, god bless her, she understood what I was going for; she understood the approach of the story; she understood that this about a kid who, the place where they come from is very important, and we need to have that amount of time just looking at the environment, taking it in, in order to relate to this main character’s perspective.
So, no I didn’t get any push-back at all. In fact, I think it was myself who kind of took a bit farther. From the very beginning, like the first drafts, even by the time that I started drawing actually, that entire first scene where the family is hiking and they get to this site and walking around, all that was going to be silent. But the more I thought about it, the more I went “you know? If nobody knows about this site, it’s going to be a little distracting. It’s going to make the reader ask the wrong questions like: where are there? What is this? Why is there a house there? Now they’re in a donut shop? Now they’re in a restaurant? What’s going on?” I felt there needed to be some indicators of at least some casual conversation.
I can never praise Whitney enough for how much she’s willing to have conversations with me about making sure I’m on the right track for making the best story possible. That she trusts that the story required that level of immersion, if you will.
Moving from coloring onto lettering, I’m always curious how artists letter when they letter themselves. Are you hand-digital lettering or is it a font?
JP: Lettering is definitely my weakest skill. It’s something I’m still learning. Back when I worked on “Soupy Leaves Home” with Cecil Castellucci, we had a letterer named Nate Piekos who runs a website called BPhotoshopbot – and Nate is also a cartoonist – but he’s predominantly a letter. He does amazing things.
I liked what he did so much with “Soupy Leave Home,” at some point I was looking around his website and found this one font that I liked so I downloaded it and I’ve been using it ever since, although now I’m in a situation where, as we were talking about earlier, my computer died, that font is gone and at the moment of this interview, I do not have photoshop on my computer. My lettering is about to make a very big change on whatever I’m working on next and I have no idea what I’m going to do.
For all of “Suncatcher,” “Twin Cities,” and “Halfway to Somewhere,” the lettering was done with this font called “Chewed Pen” by Nate Piekos’ BLAMbot. It was a great font. In a way, it’s a little poetic that I won’t be able to use that font anymore because those three books are my Mexicali trilogy so it’s just a really good signal from the universe that I have to figure out another way to letter. I’m open to ideas, either try to make a font out of my own lettering or look for another font or hire a letterer. I’m not sure.
Call up Nate.
JP: [Laughs] That’s one of the cool things about Nate. On his website, he does have a really wide variety of fonts. That might be my next step.
When you were choosing to render both Spanish and English in different colors, did you consider doing the more “traditional,” here’s one language, here’s another, brackets approach? What drew you to using colors and then not indicating, though a caption box at the beginning, which language was which?
JP: It was a pretty organic way of landing where we did and eventually it was a very technical decision. This also goes into when I first started conceptualizing “Halfway to Somewhere.” I was deep diving into code-switching and language and all these topics that I think are very important. But for the story itself…I think I’ve talked about this before.
One of the things that gives me a huge sense of being self-conscious and insecure and even personal frustration is that I’m very interested in writing stories about latinx people, Mexican specifically, and stories that take place in Mexico but because I’m writing comics currently in the U.S., they have to be in English. And there’s no way around it; comics don’t have subtitles. That’s not really how you do you. It’s either all in Spanish or maybe you have caption boxes but that just eats more space.
By looking at a bunch of different influences and looking how a lot of other people had done it before, both in prose and in comics, I had to make a choice how to go about this. One of the easiest ways is to throw in some Spanish in there where the meaning of the dialog is implied – words work very well for that. What happens in part of the story is there’s this kid from Mexicali who does not speak very fluent English at the moment so when they’re at home they’re speaking Spanish but in the world they’re in, everyone else is speaking a different language.
The reason I didn’t want to go with brackets or icons is that would mean more space in the bubbles. I didn’t want to go that route so the next obvious step for me was: “Well, why don’t you just give each language its own color?” That worked until, I can’t remember if it was Whitney or the designer, Michelle Cunningham, but they gave me the note that for printing, if you use multiple colors it’s more likely for there to be offset. So having multiple colors for each font might not be as proactive or indicative as I thought.
Instead, they suggested one language in full black and the other in a full, 100% different color like cyan or yellow or magenta. I tried that but it wasn’t quite matching so the next step was, instead of using 100% cyan, let’s try to find a color that just uses two instead of all four. Maybe that would help.
So that’s how that shook out. I tried a purple color and I also took into consideration that when Random House Graphic does printed ARCs [ed: Advanced Reader’s Copies,] they do them in greyscale. I kept wondering, if I pick a color that looks very good in color but in grey is going to be very light, that’s going to be very difficult for those who get their hands on the ARC so I need to pick a color that’s distinctive enough from black but can still read very clear in grey.
That’s how I ended up with the blue. Not to mention it goes with another color theme of the book: blue is specifically how I indicate the color of the United States and of English. So we were like, alright, let’s use black for Spanish and this readable blue for English and that will end well. I think it worked out! I’m happy with the results.
I didn’t get to see the greyscale ARC but I have gotten some of them before and...yeah.
JP: I hope it doesn’t come across as dismissive or anything. It’s very understandable. They’re ARCs. They’re supposed to be-
They need to be cheap.
JP: Exactly. It makes total sense. It just wasn’t something I’d taken into total consideration before. It was a cool new thing!
Do you have any siblings?
JP: I do. That was one of the most autobiographical things about the book; I am a middle sibling. I don’t know if it reads but unlike in the book, I have an older brother and a younger sister. I have a pretty good relationship with both.
Was it always good?
JP: No. Definitely not. I think I’ve always had a stronger relationship with my sister just because we were closer for a number of reasons. With my brother, we definitely went through some ups and downs. We’re good now and in each others lives in a positive way but no, there were time periods where it was oof. This is a very turbulent situation.
Should I assume you mined a lot of that for the relationship between Ave and their brother? Or was it more the vibes?
JP: The thing about “Halfway to Somewhere” is that not explicitly – well, in some passages it is pretty explicit – there are some conversations about the concept of gender rolls and Ave being non-binary, same as yours truly. With my brother, he’s a little more conservative in that sense, a little more tied to specific gender rolls and gender norms altogether so we clashed about that for a long time, which eventually led to different conversations.
I don’t think any of that made it into the book but it did work as a base for disconnects you can have with siblings. A lot of the relationships between Ave and their siblings is not exactly autobiographical to my relationship with my siblings but there’s definitely building blocks in there. Like I said, in the book, it’s Ave’s older sister whereas my sister is younger so we have a different dynamic there.
This is the second book where siblinghood really kicks in and I have a lot of opinions.
Do you think that’s something you’ll continue to mine going forward or now that the Mexicali Trilogy is closed, you’ll turn your attention to other familial relationships?
JP: I don’t have anything on the horizon that has a strong emphasis on sibling-hood. I think at the moment I’ve said enough. [Laughs.] Who knows? We keep changing as people so maybe in the future I’ll write something else on sibling-hood. Never say never.
Maybe your subconscious will bubble it back up.
JP: Yeah. I try to stay receptive because you never know where ideas will come from.
When you were working on the plot for this, what were some of the themes you wanted to explore in addition to moving, being in a new place, the drama for kids and teens?
JP: Language was a big one. The idea of language and code-switching and language discrimination was a big theme and being bilingual. Those were important elements. There was always the idea of a journey or a walk but I didn’t know how to approach it and also I wanted to be very careful how I approach something like that because going on family journeys, especially in the desert, it’s also the subject of many other types of conversations that I do not have the experience to talk about.
One of the big ideas where “Halfway to Somewhere” came from was, one, my literary agent, Elizabeth Bennet. When I first met with her in person, we met up in her hometown of Boston and she was, as she tells me, fascinated that my way of vacationing was walking around as much as possible. She pitched me the idea of “well, why don’t you have a kid who’s really interested in walking and that eventually leads into their participation in cross-country.” I was like, that could be something. Now I don’t have that much experience with cross-country but I do have experience with running track, competing and also being on a track team.
The other big building block was several years ago, my brother, my dad, and I went on this pilgrimage and for my dad, I think he came from the approach that it was very important for him and his two boys to go on this trip. Little did he know. Whoops. [Laughs.] But I kind of had this weird feeling inside me, like, why aren’t you inviting my sister? She also likes these adventures. She loves going on excursions. She loves hiking. Why is she not invited?
Not to put him on blast or anything, I hope I can only show respect for my dad, but his response was, well, because she’s a girl and this is supposed to be: We’re walking into the wilderness and walking in these things and girls don’t like that.
I thought 1) I just think you’re very wrong about women period but 2) I think that you’re very wrong about your own daughter. Cowardlessly, I don’t think I every mentioned anything. I think I just went with it and though, well this is weird. Eventually I had a conversation with my sister about it and she was like, “yeah, that sucked! That did not feel good. I didn’t like that I wasn’t invited.” That stayed with me.
I used that for a scene, where it’s supposed to be a father/son walk and going back to gender rolls, it’s the son who is not interested in walking but it’s this unofficial family tradition that only means something to the people that do it. That was another building block that I didn’t quite know how to turn into a full story.
The other was this topic that is common in the latinx or the Latin American community, and I’m sure it’s common among other demographics, going into the weeds of who’s more X than the other: a No True Scotsman fallacy. Like, are Mexican-Americans as Mexican as people who are born and raised in Mexico? Even if they speak Spanish but they live here in the U.S.? These conversations can get complex and contentious-
Thorny questions of identity?
JP: Yeah. Yeah. Because of my own self and what I’ve been going through, questioning myself and the conversations I’ve been having with friends. You know, I had a really big existential swerve about myself when I realized that, and I almost timed it to the date of when I had lived a day longer in the U.S. than I had been living in Mexico. That was a really big point for me.
Am I still Mexican? Well, legally, I’ve always been American but like a lot of things in the book, I feel like I’m losing language because I don’t practice it as often. Talking with Mexican-Americans who do speak Spanish or don’t speak Spanish or speak a little Spanish, I find that we have a bunch of other concerns here or there.
All those topics are really important to me and I wanted to figure out how to put it into a story. Throwing that to Whitney and going, “I want to make a story with this!” Well. OK. Write it.
What would I do without her, or Elizabeth for that matter? She was very supportive of the whole thing.
Final question: What is the favorite meal you put in here? I saved the hardest one for last.
JP: Yeah, you saved the hardest one for last for sure. I’m glad that I got away with drawing Galletas María, Maria Cookies, in there. I wasn’t sure if I was going to get those right. Everything else, I’ve tried before. Actually, they’re not called Marías in the book, they’re called Maggies or Magdas. They’re in an orange tube that Ave eats when they first talk to Cruz via the tablet.
"Halfway to Somewhere" is out 2/18/2025 from wherever you get books or comics as well as your local library.
Jose Pimienta
More reading, if you'd like:
Elias Rosner
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