Guest post written by authors Richard Fairgray and Lucy Campagnolo
In Cardboardia 1: The Other Side of the Box, a group of friends must use their ingenuity to save a parallel world that can only be accessed through cardboard boxes in this series starter from Black Sand Beach author Richard Fairgray and Lucy Campagnolo. Perfect for readers ready to step up from Jelly.
The papier mache volcano, it’s the simplest experiment. You pour vinegar on to baking soda and you get a volcanic eruption. If only writing a book was that easy. From the jump we knew our goal with Cardboardia was to drag high fantasy into a low budget world, because nothing felt more low budget than an empty cardboard box. It took us close to 7 years to create this series and a lot of good stuff has been discarded along the way, but the one that hurt the most is the Volcano Club.
Four kids get magic tokens in their cereal that allow them to travel through empty boxes to a world made entirely of a strange organic cardboard, filled with cardboard people and box trees and a promise of adventure, but what made the story matter to us wasn’t all the imaginary stuff that could happen on the other side (that’s fun, but not what made us care), it was the real lives of Mac, Maisie, Pokey and Bird. We’ve read so many stories about kids going off on a quest to a magical place, we wanted to know what it would look like if the adventures were really tethered to their home and reality. After all, they can go through the cardboard boxes both ways, to the Cardboard and back to Earth.
This meant we couldn’t just phone in the real world, we had to flesh it out in full, to the same intensity as any mysterious high fantasy plain. We had to figure out the rules, the geography and how the magic works when they are in their houses, on the train, in the classroom, and (most importantly) what they did in their spare time.
So, we created the Volcano Club.
Fine, maybe we’re big nerds, maybe we both just harbor some deep desire to build model volcanoes like the ones we’ve seen on tv, maybe we want to pretend we’re giants. Maybe it’s a mix of all three, but why be a comic writer if you can’t use the pages to live out your own low budget fantasy without having to get glue all over your hands?
The idea fit perfectly, the kids would be in a club that met every lunchtime to make papier mache volcanoes. They’d get together after school to research volcanoes of different types. There was built-in conflict if one of them didn’t turn up or if someone left their volcano at home. In the caffeine-fuelled weekend that we first broke the story this all seemed like a rich vein of literary gold. Then things changed.
What had started as a television script became a novel. Suddenly the visual gags were falling flat. The Rugrats style misleads of eruptive close ups had to be stripped away, the great poster ideas with volcano puns became like broken pencils (pointless) and the imagined soundscapes of fizzing and bubbling began to fade.
But the novel became a comic book and Volcano club lived again. Sure, there was no animation to support the bursting and popping or gluing and sticking, but the posters, the puns, the excitement of sitting in a room and slowly and meticulously building a model volcano were . . . still a terrible idea.
Cardboardia, now in its final form (actually the third version of the comic, but that’s a more complicated journey) is the story of four kids who can travel between our world and a world made of strange organic cardboard. It’s low budget high fantasy with evil armies and magical powers and family dramas and adults who are way too into board games, and none of the main characters are in a volcano club. The posters made it in, occasionally, advertising the club that readers will never get to see, but that’s it and that’s probably all it needs to be.
Imagine though, if it had worked out. Imagine if it hadn’t been so obviously confusing to have a club which heavily relied on our characters destroying the very boxes they needed for travel in order to lay a base for a miniature Vesuvius? In this day and age you have to think about multi media tie ins, theme park rides and merch, so what could that have looked like?
Book one comes with a free box of baking soda?
Book two has a ziploc bag of vinegar glued to the inside back cover?
Books three and four up the challenge level by just giving you a tree and a horse and phone numbers for some factories so you can figure it out on your own?
In the end, we answered the question on the second funniest poster we thought of, we were not a VolcaYES, we were in fact a VolcaNO.
