Katriona Chapman on Emotional Temperature, Digital Tools, and Growing as a Writer

Transmission 325: Interview with Katriona Chapman

Katriona Chapman is an award-winning graphic novelist and illustrator, renowned for her meditative style and the distinct “hand-crafted” feel of her work. A singular figure in the indie comics scene, she has built a singular position in the graphic novel world. From the humid jungles of Mexico in Follow Me In to the salt-strewn cinematic nostalgia of Breakwater, her stories are as much about the landscapes we inhabit as the internal lives we lead. She isn’t just a cartoonist; she’s an atmospheric world-builder who uses color to create some of the most sophisticated and peerless graphic novels in the UK.

Her books are tactile experiences, celebrated for their meditative pacing. Her writing is known for its restraint, emotional precision, and attention to the spaces between action and meaning. Her latest release, The Pass, published by Fantagraphics, marks a compelling shift into psychological tension and the complexities of lifelong friendships. While it retains her signature atmospheric style, the book is a fascinating evolution that dives deeper into the psychological weight of environments and human dynamics. The story is a compelling look at the heart of shared trauma.

Balancing her creative career with a deep background in publishing—including a long tenure as Head of Marketing for Avery Hill—Chapman possesses a “pro” edge in book design. Few understand the DNA of a great book better than she does. As her work transitions from memoir toward psychological fiction, it continues to garner critical acclaim: in 2018, Follow Me In won ‘Best Graphic Non-Fiction’ at the Broken Frontier Awards, and in 2020, Breakwater was named one of the New York Times best graphic novels of the year.

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You’re well-known for your masterful use of colored pencils, a medium that is notoriously time-consuming and physically demanding. How does the slow pace of the medium influence the way you create your stories?

 Well, I don’t actually use colored pencils anymore. I use all digital artwork for my books. When I started out as an illustrator, I used colored pencil and watercolor. But as you say, it’s very slow. I was able to make some short children’s books with that medium, but not a long graphic novel. So I’ve switched to digital, but I could still use tools within the program that I use that look like traditional media.

In a world moving fast toward digital, you say that it takes a lot of physical energy to stay committed to paper and pencil. Do you feel there is something missing in the digital brush that made you feel more comfortable with paper and pencil?

There’s obviously a very nice physical aspect to working on paper. I’ve just found that for practical reasons, it doesn’t work for me anymore with the way I work. I’m quite often travelling, and If I work on an iPad, I can just take that very easily with me and do my work wherever I am. Whereas if I was having to travel with large pieces of watercolor paper and paintbrushes and pencils and all those things, it would be very difficult. So although there are some very nice things about having work on paper, it just doesn’t work with the way that I produce graphic novels, which is very intensive. I need to sit down for many hours at a time. I just find that working on an iPad is kind of easy and comfortable. Digital allows you to make changes as well that are harder to do if you’ve done your artwork on paper.

Katriona Chapman’s work feels like a necessary deep breath that oxygenates the brain and invites deeper reflection.

You have a gift for silent panels. What is a specific emotion or realization you’ve found is better communicated through a facial expression or a landscape than through a speech or a writing?

That’s a good question. I really like drawing facial expressions and body language to try and show the reader what is happening with the character internally. You know what they’re thinking and feeling. So, definitely, there’s a lot of panels where I would rather try and convey what the character’s thinking without saying it in words. I think of it like acting, almost like watching a performance in that I try and imagine, to think if this was a performance and there was an actor doing this, how would they convey what’s important in this moment? There’s lots of ways you can do it in comics—speech bubbles, narration, and things. But it’s just become my style to have minimal words. There’s quite a lot of talking in my book already, so I feel like it would be a lot if we could see all the characters’ thoughts as well.

Much of your artwork captures a specific feeling of being “alone but not lonely.” How do you use light and shadow to portrait that deep interiority?

That’s really interesting as well. A lot of my characters are quite solitary people in this book. There is a range, because Lisa is the only married with a child and has more of a busy family life. But a lot of my characters are often alone. Probably especially a character like Claudia, they get a lot out of their creative work and that’s what’s important to them. So I guess they’re not lonely in that sense, in that they’re very occupied with this side of themselves that is productive and creative and working very hard. In terms of light and shadow, I love to draw light and shadow and I think it creates a nice atmosphere. You can use it to convey, along with color, you can use it to convey  the emotions of the scene or things like the time of day, or whether it’s a particularly serious moment or not. I think I use light and shade like that to try and suggest the emotional temperature of the scene, whether everybody is happy or whether they’re worried or what’s going on with the characters.

She is one of the industry’s most vital voices, best known for her masterful use of colored pencils and a keen eye for the quiet intersections of nature and human emotion.

How much of your artwork and stories  blend travelogue and memoir? When you are creating, how do you decide which moments are “too private” for the page, and which are essential for the reader to understand  the point of view of the story?

That’s always a big thing with autobiographical work. My first book was autobiographical and quite personal and then my second two have been fictional. So I haven’t really had to think too much about that. But I’ve self-published some zines that are all quite personal as well. It is something you have to ask yourself: how much you want to share. I think it’s important if you want the reader to understand what’s going on that you need to be quite open. That involves sharing things that might be a little uncomfortable. It just depends on what you’re trying to communicate. But there are times where you’re not really sure. There’s certainly things that I would struggle to depict in an autobiographical book. In my book, Follow Me In, there was a lot of personal stuff about my partner’s problems with alcohol and the feelings that I had traveling with someone who had this problem. I didn’t find it too hard to draw; I was just interested in conveying that experience, and maybe it helped that it was quite a long time in the past. It didn’t feel too new or too raw.

In an era where many  follow trending topics at the risk of their own uniqueness, which part of your creative process do you protect the most from outside influence, and why?

Gosh, that’s a really interesting question. I hear a lot of my peers talk about how they like to read a lot of comics and then they sometimes feel themselves getting overwhelmed and thinking “I’m not as good as this other person”. I try to avoid that just because I think everyone has their own strengths and you can’t compare yourself to other creators. You can’t try and do what other people are doing because it might just not be right for you. So as much as I read things sometimes and think, “Wow, that person’s doing something that I had never thought of,” I just try and not worry about that and just say, “Yeah, but I’m doing the thing that I thought of”. That’s okay. It’s really tricky in this age where everyone’s on social media and everyone compares their work to other people’s work. It’s difficult not to do that, but I just try to focus on making my work and not really worrying too much about what other people are doing.

Katriona Chapman brings a rare, 360-degree perspective to her craft, exploring travel, solitude, transition, uncertainty, and the moments that shape who we become.

How did the physical or emotional setting of The Pass shape the pacing of the story? 

When I write comics, I try to write very economically in the sense that I don’t want lots of unnecessary stuff in the story, because the more I’ve written into it, the more I’m going to have to draw. It’s just going to take a long time. So I try and tell the story in as few moments and pages as I can, whilst also having enough detail. I don’t want it to feel rushed. So I think the pacing is really important. Regarding the setting of the restaurant, they’re very fast-paced work environments. And that was what I wanted to show: people who are very ambitious and career-focused tend to have this fast-paced life where they’re busy all the time. As much as it can be very rewarding to have all these achievements in your career, it can also be difficult for your health and your mental health, that is what I wanted to show. I think anyone in that kind of work, there’s probably a time limit to how long they can do that before they reconsider how crazy their life is. That was kind of the main idea I was looking at with this book: what fast-paced life is like for someone trying to get through it.

The Pass explores how a single shared experience can anchor people together or push them apart over decades. When writing, did you view The Pass more as a physical location or a metaphor for a fence these characters never truly cleared?

I’m very interested in the workplace as a setting for my stories, because my second book Breakwater was also in a very specific workplace. I think that the building and the space that the characters are in is quite important. I did think of it very much like that. Just the thing of people working very closely together. Like you say, they bond because they’re working so closely together in this small space. But that can bring its tensions as well.

In 2022, she was a judge in the Alternative Publishing category of the AOI’s World Illustration Awards.

What question does The Pass ask that you didn’t consciously set out to explore at the beginning of the development of the story?

I’m really interested in this question because I feel like there’s quite a lot in my work sometimes that I don’t intend, which I think for every creator, there’s probably a mix of stuff that they intend and stuff that is almost instinctual or subconscious that goes into your stories. I definitely find that sometimes when I read reviews of my books or I do interviews afterwards, people mention things and I think actually you’ve described that better than I did, even if I made the whole book because I’m very close to it and I’m very focused on all the details, all the drawing things. Sometimes I don’t think you’re consciously aware of everything. So, yeah, I had this idea of a really ambitious person, but I hadn’t really thought about the question of success and the pitfalls of success. I knew I wanted these people to be kind of exhausted and stressed and to kind of show the conflict between the fact that they get so much out of this work, but it also takes a toll on them. I think it says a lot about our society’s emphasis on achievements and that type of career life, which I hadn’t necessarily thought about until after the book was finished.

The title suggests both movement and limitation. When did The Pass become more than a place for you?

I think when I had the idea that the main character was going to leave at the end, and I realized that was a really nice sort of tie in with the word of The Pass as well, because she almost passes the whole project on to her best friend and wants her to have a chance to do this. Maybe then when I had that kind of thought that  I really liked the idea of double meaning. I mean, I think you can interpret what she does at the end in a lot of ways and she probably doesn’t handle it very well. But I think in some ways she’s trying to do a nice thing. She’s trying to let her friend have a chance at being the star because she’s been dominating the whole project for so long.

What was technically the hardest chapter to write and why wasn’t the one that you expected that hard?

Well, the scene that I really enjoyed writing that I didn’t plan until later on was when Lisa later confronts her brother Jack in a pub about what he did. It’s only maybe three pages long, but I really enjoyed it. I thought that it would be difficult to write because I thought God knows what they would say to each other. But actually that came out really easily when I just kind of tried to imagine what his motivations might have been for what he did and how she would ask him about it. So that was a surprising scene. But for one that was difficult, for me  it’s harder to write characters that are more different from yourself. I don’t have children and I’ve never written a character that’s a mother before. So I think I found it difficult to write Lisa’s family scenes. That’s just something you have to do as you grow as a writer is to try and get better at tackling characters that aren’t just you in different ways.

With three protagonists, there is a constant shift in perspective. How did you balance the “truth” of the story when each character’s memory is colored by their own nostalgia?  What was your biggest challenge in trying to convey how the “weight” of the world shifts as your characters gain more life experience?

I did want the focus of the book to be these three main characters and we see a little bit of their background and where they’ve come from with their own families. We also see what their hopes are and their interests at the moment. And I just wanted that to be the main focus, I think, rather than specifically what… A few people have commented on things like that I don’t really show much of the food that they’re making in the restaurant and things, but to me that was less interesting than what was going on with these characters’ lives. How each of them and how this scene and life experience and all these things. At the beginning where each of them goes home for Christmas and you get a little glimpse into their family life, their parents and things. I think that’s quite illuminating with each character to show you a little bit about what their main struggles are in life.

In your previous artworks, silence often feels peaceful. In The Pass, silence frequently feels heavy. How did you shift your artistic approach to make a quiet panel feel “tense” rather than “calm”?

 I think there’s a lot you can do with color and lighting, like we said before, but also the composition of a page can suggest tension and then also the characters’ body language and facial expression. One page that springs to mind is the one where the three main characters are just sitting together silently in the restaurant around a table once they’ve discovered the problem that the brother has been stealing from the business. It’s just the three of them sitting, not knowing what to say. I definitely wanted the atmosphere there to be heavy. So I guess I use the color and just the expressions on their faces to suggest that.

What did writing The Pass teach you that you will carry into your next project?

I think with each book, I’ve got a little bit more confident, because my first book being an autobiography was the easiest type of writing because you have a starting point and you know what the story is, you have just to decide how to depict it. Then with Breakwater, I did a lot more fiction work, but it was set in a place that I used to work myself and it was a job I used to do, so there was a lot of my own experience in it still. It was also a very small scope, whereas there’s few characters. There were more characters in this one and more locations and I think it just broadened out a little bit. I think I got more confident. I got less feedback with this book from editors; before I had people really helping me to figure out the structure of the story and thing, but with this one I took a few really useful points from my editor, but other than that I kind of did everything myself which felt very surprising. I was never very confident at the writing side of comics, I was always more confident to draw. So hopefully that just means that if I do another book, I feel like my skill has built a little bit each time. This is very useful.

Photos and illustrations courtesy of Katriona Chapman

Dominique Musorrafiti

Ciao! My name is Dominique. I’m Italian and I’m proud to be a mix. My father was an Italian chemical engineer and high school teacher, with Greek and Polish heritage. My mother is Haitian, she was high school language teacher, with Dominican, Spanish, French, Portuguese, African and Native American heritage. Being a mix makes me appreciate to want to understand different cultures and lifestyles. I grew up in Italy, lived few years in Haiti, travel around main European capitals, lived many years in China, in Spain and UK. Traveling makes me feel that we can learn something from every situation in every part of the world.