1) Tell us a little bit about yourself. How did you get into writing?

Hi, my name’s Adam Wilson and I’m a comic writer as well as the co-publisher and Director of Production for Read Furiously – a press my partner S. Atzeni and I have been running for almost ten years now. 

Initially though, I got into writing at a very young age. I was always making up stories in one way or another. In fact, I remember I made my first movie when I was about seven or eight years old. I spent most of the summer working on it with my friends and family. As I grew up I experimented with different types of writing, from plays to song-writing, short stories. It wasn’t till I was almost out of college that I ended up trying to write comics. I was having one of those “We’re gonna graduate soon, what are we going to do with our lives” conversations with a friend. He was an art major, I was a burnt out pre-law major. We came up with the idea to do something together – I’d write it, he’d draw it – and before long we were printing out mini-comics in the college’s computer lab, stapling them together on our dorm room floor. It was something I really enjoyed, and even though nothing ever really came of that project, I kept going with it, getting short stories published in different anthologies, building up larger and larger projects over time till eventually I had my first graphic novel published.

2) What inspired you to write your book?

The inspiration for Last of the Pops actually came from the title itself. It’s a play on the British music program Top of the Pops. And when it popped into my head one day I just really liked the sound of it. Top of the Pops was a show all about celebrating the most popular music of the week. Last of the Pops kind of has this feel of the end of pop music. That seemed like a fun idea to play with, even though I had no idea what I was going to do with it. But I created a blank word document on my computer and just labeled it “Last of the Pops.” 

For a while it was just this place where I’d jot down ideas, phrases I really liked, concepts I thought would be cool to explore. They all revolved around music in some way, and I just threw everything on there. Eventually amidst all the spattering of ideas characters started to take shape from all of the bits and pieces I had. All the different areas of inspiration started to develop into a story and over about five years I was able to craft it all into a narrative.

3) What theme or message do you hope readers will take away from your book?

When I first started writing Last of the Pops my intention was really to look at people’s relationship to music, but as I dove deeper into writing the book it ended up evolving a lot and really became a book about loneliness. Particularly the loneliness that comes from change and growth and how people come to terms with it. 

The book is still very music centric, the entire plot revolves around the final radio broadcast and a musician who vanished before getting to record his first album. But in writing it I realized there are a lot of parallels between music and loneliness that I really wanted to explore. 

Music is very much something that brings us together. Musicians form bands to play, people bond over their favorite songs. Music connects us. But the way we consume music over the past few decades has changed so much. I’m a millennial, so I’ve lived through the tail end of vinyl, eight tracks, the entire lifespan of cassettes and CDs. I was starting college right when peer to peer music sharing became a thing, and as I’m writing this I’m streaming a playlist on Spotify. 

That’s a lot of change in a very short time. And as a result our relationship to music has changed as a result of that. It’s changed how we consume it, how we connect with it, and how it connects us to each other. In some ways it’s left us disconnected from each other, but in others it’s actually connected us more. So really music kinda became the perfect lens from which to explore this kind of loneliness.

4) What drew you into this particular genre?

I think one of the things I love about comics and graphic novels is the play between the narrative storytelling and the visual storytelling. You’re almost telling two different stories at a time, and how you structure the two relative to each other can create some really amazing moments. Getting to go back and forth between harmony and dissonance of what are you choosing to tell the reader vs what are you letting them see. These are all extra layers that you don’t really get in a lot of other mediums.

I’ve also found, and maybe this is just me, but sequential storytelling can actually give you the truest vision of the story you want to tell. In prose you’re limited in your ability to connect to the imagination of your reader, how thoroughly you can paint a mental image for them. With a medium like film, you get the visual and the narrative storytelling, but you’re limited with things like budget, locations, what computer or editing effects can accomplish, you sometimes have to make compromises to bring something to life. 

But with sequential storytelling, if you’re willing to put in the work, the artwork can be an exact representation of what you envision. Characters can look exactly as you picture them in your head. The emotional beats can play out at the exact pacing you feel them rising and falling. And the fantastical elements can be as fantastical as you’d ever hope them to be, there are really no restrictions. It’s the only medium I’ve ever experienced where that’s possible.

5) If you could sit down with any character in your book, what would you ask them and why?

In an alternate dimension somewhere, I never switched majors after my freshman year in college, and I ended up pursuing a career in radio like the 18 year old version of myself wanted to. In a way, the character of Caroline from Last of the Pops is how I saw that story eventually playing out. So as I was writing her arc I pulled a lot from my own personal experience for her character, memories from my childhood and teen years even. So I think it would be nice to talk with her. Reminisce a bit about the life that could have been.

6) What social media site has been the most helpful in developing your readership?

This is a tough one, because I’m awful at most social media. But I think the one that I’ve at least been able to keep up with the longest is probably Instagram. I think particularly for someone working in comics, it’s a great tool because it’s got such a visual focus. 

7) What advice would you give to aspiring or just starting authors out there?

So having worked on both sides of the industry at this point, both as an author and as a publisher, I think the best advice I can give is that you really have to care about the stories you are telling. There are so many avenues out there available for folks to get their work in front of readers, but your audience will always connect the most with the stories you’re passionate about. That’s why it’s so important that you have to be writing the things that really mean something to you. Cause when it’s an important story, you’ll go to any extreme to make sure it’s the best possible version of itself. And sometimes that even means being willing to tear it all apart and start anew if it means making your work better. But that kind of commitment and effort shows in the final product, and the readers you want to appreciate your book will see that.

8) What does the future hold in store for you? Any new books/projects on the horizon?

Well, Last of the Pops is going to be hitting shelves in October, so I’m gearing up for the release of that. In the meantime though, my co-publisher at Read Furiously, S. Atzeni, and I have also just started work on the third volume of the award winning anthology series Life in the Garden State – which is all about exploring the sides of New Jersey that often get overlooked. It’s our chance to show how amazing a place it is. So we’re both really excited to get going on that.

About the Author

A former comic editor, Adam Wilson is one of the co-publishers of Read Furiously and an award winning comic writer, His works includes Brian & Bobbi, In the Fallout, Helium, and the upcoming graphic novel Last of the Pops. He co-writes the graphic novel series The MOTHER Principle and edits the anthology series Life in the Garden State with his partner S. Atzeni. Together they live in West Trenton with their son and cat.

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