A Q&A with Rob Valois, editor of Villains: A Pop-up Storybook
What is your favorite part of working on Star Wars: The Clone Wars books?
My favorite part is that I get to work on The Clone Wars books. Every day for the past two and a half years I've been lucky enough to work on these books. I get to spend hours debating the continuity of our original novels. I get to make picture books, storybooks, novels, activity books, and pop-up books around these stories and characters. I get to go to conventions and talk to the kids who read these books and find out what they like (and occasionally don't like).
This is the second pop-up storybook from Grosset & Dunlap. How did working on Villains compare to working on Heroes?
With the first book, we really had to build it from the ground up—both creatively and technically. There was a lot of time spent on things like trim size and paper stock as well as determining what was actually going to be on each page. We spent weeks discussing things like: How many pops did we want per page? Did we want smaller side pops? What kinds of stories did we want to tell? Should we use a comic book–style layout or traditional text boxes? How many characters per spread? We went through several versions of what each spread could look like before agreeing on what actually made it into the book. For Villains we had the luxury of there already being a template in place. And because of that, the designers and I could focus more on creating a book that, we hope, is visually superior to the previous one.
How did you do the research for this book?
We knew that we were going to do a follow-up to Heroes long before Season 2 of the show started. Pop-up books can take a long time to make. At the time, we knew all of the Season 1 villains, but didn't want to limit the book to just those guys. I e-mailed our editor at Lucasfilm, Frank Parisi, and asked him for some suggestions from the upcoming second season. This was a huge help, except that at the time there were no images available for these new villains. So, for a large portion of the development of this book there were huge placeholders where images and pops should be. Eventually, we received scripts, which were a help to me in writing the book—but useless to our designers who needed to start building pops and laying out pages.
What is the most difficult part of making a pop-up book?
For me, it's not all that much different from a regular book. I just write up a text document and a list of images for each character and scene. The really difficult work is done by our paper engineer, Michael Caputo. He's the one that actually has to design and build these elaborate pops. I can't even begin to describe what he does. All I can say is that it's pretty amazing.
Which villains will readers encounter in the new Clone Wars pop-up book?
Obviously there are the big villains: Count Dooku, Ventress, and Grievous. We've also included some of the newer guys like Pre Vizsla, some of the bounty hunters (who are arguably not villains), and an amazing spread of monsters. I'm not going to list them all; you'll have to buy the book to find out.
Who is your favorite villain and why?
I'm going to go with Grievous. He's such a wonderful bad guy, the other villains don't even like him. I'd like to think that if I were a Clone Wars villain I'd be Grievous, but realistically, I'd probably be more like Lok Durd.
Can you share some of your favorite interactions with Star Wars fans at conventions like Comic-Con or through fan mail you've received?
We get a lot of letters from kids telling us how much they love The Clone Wars and enjoy reading the books. For me, what's really exciting is that for many kids these are among the first books they've ever read. As a children's book publisher, it is important for us to make Clone Wars books that are as exciting and enjoyable as the television show, while also engaging and challenging for these young readers.
Fan conventions are overwhelming for adults; for kids they're total sensory overload. Kids usually stop by our booth after they've seen all the toys, games, electronics, and anything with blinking lights. As much as we'd like to think otherwise, books are not their number one destination spot at these shows. However, we do get a lot of kids who have read all the books and enjoy stopping by to ask questions or talk about their favorite stories or characters. I really enjoy the kids who know more about The Clone Wars than I do. They can list every character, planet, ship, whatever. It's amazing. These kids are also good at pointing out factual or continuity errors in our books—and quite often the ones I've written. Hopefully someday these kids can find a job as cool as mine.
