Interview by Fer García
Tim Disney's The A.R.C. begins with an unsettling premise: a pandemic in which lying itself becomes contagious. The resulting graphic novel combines political satire, speculative fiction, social commentary, and an extensive supplementary "compendium" that expands the book's concerns into questions of history, race, labor, climate change, power, and public discourse.
For Disney, however, the most interesting question may be the medium itself. Although he initially approached The A.R.C. through his experience in film and screenwriting, the process eventually forced him to rethink how a story is constructed for comics. In our conversation, he reflects on the differences between film and sequential art, the role of abstraction, the reader's participation in constructing meaning, and why comics may offer a particularly effective way of confronting difficult ideas.
You initially conceived The A.R.C. as a movie. Why choose comics for this message?
The project actually began as a movie. I wrote it during the pandemic, and I had a producer who was interested in making it. He introduced me to someone who had worked extensively in graphic novels, and the suggestion was made to turn it into one.
I thought, "Oh, that will be fun," and then discovered that it was neither fast nor easy. I teamed up with my co-writer, J.C. Lys, who essentially became the producer and creative director, and he brought in the artist Vincent Dubour.
Because of my experience writing screenplays, I initially approached the book in screenplay format. Looking back, I wouldn't do it that way again. If I make another graphic novel, I would try to compose it directly in comic form—to think about the panels and the story natively in that format.
I tended to overwrite. There were too many words. Eventually I realized that I had to think differently. Comics are about economizing wherever you can, and once I understood that, we became much more efficient.
What can comics do particularly well when dealing with subjects such as misinformation and social criticism?
I'll be curious to hear what you think because you're much more of a student of this than I am.
There is something about graphic treatment that gets filtered through the human subconscious. There's a difference between an illustration and a photograph. Something happens as the image passes through us. The artist has an intention, but what comes out isn't entirely that intention. Something else happens too. It becomes humanized, in spite of ourselves.
Then there is the panel-to-panel experience and the way our eyes move over a page. It's different from reading a book. To me, it suggests something about the episodic way memory works and the way our brains organize information.
We see an image, or a series of images, or an action—a jump between one moment and the next—and we fill in everything else. There's a lot of background processing in our brains that fills in information. That's how I think memory works, and there's something powerful about that. Maybe that's part of why comics are such a successful format for memoirs.
You are describing something more than simply a visual version of a written story. Are you suggesting that the gaps between panels actually become part of the storytelling?
Yes. I think the way the reader fills in those gaps is important. Our brains are constantly economizing on energy. We don't process everything around us equally; we make assumptions about what is happening outside the center of our attention.
Comics seem to engage with that process. You give the reader certain pieces of information and the reader constructs what happens between them.
You have also worked in film, technology, business, and nonprofit leadership. What made comics the right tool at this particular moment in your career?
There wasn't really one particular reason. I have this tendency not to fully understand how difficult something is going to be before I start it. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't do many of these things.
I thought, "Oh, this will be fun," and then you get into it and think, "Oh my God, this is so hard. It takes so long. It's much more complicated than I thought."
But that's also how good things happen. You meet new people, you work with teams, and it becomes a great experience. If I had fully understood how involved it was going to be, I'm not sure I would have done it. But I'm very glad that I did.
At one point, the project changed significantly when you decided to include the compendium. What happened?
The compendium was where the project took a different turn.
For a while, we were focused primarily on the illustrated story pages. Then we realized that we had an opportunity to create something denser and different. That made me more comfortable being earnest and talking about things like climate change, labor relations, history, and race.
Those were subjects I wanted the book to address but didn't know how to incorporate into the story pages in a way that was palatable and didn't become too pedantic.
The compendium gave us a place to do that.
That raises an interesting question about the relationship between the narrative and the material surrounding it. Do you see the compendium as commentary on the story, or as part of the storytelling itself?
I think it became part of the world we were building.
There are layers and layers of assumptions in the world we live in, and the extensive footnotes and connections gave us a way to suggest how dense that world is—how much we assume, and how much we should question the things we think we know.
It allowed us to create connections between all these different subjects rather than simply presenting them as isolated arguments.
The book is deliberately satirical, but you decided to make a number of real public figures recognizable. Was that a difficult decision?
It was a scary decision.
We had originally gone most of the way through the project using analogues for real people. Near the end, we asked ourselves why we were doing that. So we went back and put the real people in.
Those people don't necessarily like being made fun of, and they have a lot of money. So yes, it's scary.
But we have strong free-speech protections in this country, at least theoretically, and there's a great tradition of making fun of public figures. I think that's an important corrective.
Mark Twain and H. L. Mencken are part of that tradition, and today many of the people willing to say uncomfortable things publicly are comedians—people like Stephen Colbert and John Oliver. People who have money at stake tend to keep their mouths shut.
One of the book's central concerns is the collapse of trust. What interests you about trust as a social force?
Some basic level of trust is required for anything to happen.
We made a real effort to be fair and even-handed in the satire. We tried to point out hypocrisies on the left, the right, and everywhere in between, because there's plenty to go around.
The idea isn't simply to tell people which side is right. It's to look at the ways in which we have become accustomed to accepting things that perhaps deserve more scrutiny.
Comics have often been dismissed as entertainment, yet they can address subjects that other forms struggle to approach. Why do you think comics are particularly powerful for difficult conversations?
I think it has something to do with abstraction from real life.
Even in a movie, if you're using actors and talking about deep subjects, it can become uncomfortable because you're looking at an actual person. If you create a layer of abstraction—talking animals, superheroes, or whatever metaphor you're using—I think it suppresses the fear response in us.
It allows us to take on ideas without immediately freaking out.
The reader has less resistance because it's "just a comic book." It's not a documentary. It's not a movie. It's not a conventional book.
You spent several years working in Disney's animation department. What did that experience teach you about storytelling?
What I experienced there was a culture of quality—the idea that you should make something as good as it can possibly be.
You can have a good idea and smart people and get something to 85 or 90 percent fairly quickly. Getting that final five or ten percent requires a great deal of additional time and energy. Disney had a culture built around making that effort.
It was also a very collaborative environment. I was in the story department. We worked with storyboards; I would write dialogue, artists would create panels, and we would present sequences to everybody. Everyone contributed ideas.
It was the opposite of the auteur idea that there is one genius who has all the ideas. Ultimately someone has to make decisions, but the best idea could come from anybody. That was a great experience.
You have spent significant parts of your life in artistic and entrepreneurial environments. Many people see those worlds as opposites. Why do you think that divide exists?
There's something strange about the way culture works. What we might call "high culture" is largely funded by philanthropic money. Museums and similar institutions are funded by wealthy people.
And where do those people get their money?
They get it from the corporate world.
These things are intertwined inextricably, but we create this false separation between them.
If an independent comics creator told you, "I want to make meaningful work without sacrificing sustainability," what would you tell them?
I suppose I'd say don't print paper copies.
But one of the beautiful things about this world is the physical book. When the first box of galleys arrived, there was something deeply satisfying about taking the book out and realizing: "Look, we made something. It's a thing. It's an actual thing."
I love that about graphic novels. Readers are very devoted to the physical books.
But obviously, physical production has consequences. Our book was printed in Malaysia and then has to be shipped around the world. Once you start pulling on that thread, it's difficult to know how to make value judgments about what resources are worth expending.
Looking back across film, technology, philanthropy, and now comics, what thread connects all those pursuits?
I'm not sure there is one.
I like trying new things. I like new challenges, complicated problems, and working with teams. That's what attracted me to this project.
And ultimately, I like the idea of trying to put something good into the world and hoping that it has some value that I can't necessarily articulate in advance.
The book is aggressively satirical and sometimes quite dark. What do you hope readers discover beneath that surface?
I think there is a real, earnest strain of hope and optimism in the book.
I hope people see that.
And I particularly encourage readers to go all the way through the supplementary material, because there are connections between all the different things in there. That's my favorite part.
Tim Disney is a filmmaker, entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist. He has worked in film and animation, including a period in Disney's animation department, and has been involved in technology and media ventures. The A.R.C. is his first graphic novel.
Fernando García Cruz is a comics scholar, educator, and entrepreneur whose work focuses on comics, creative entrepreneurship, transmedia storytelling, and the relationship between comics and the creative economy.
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