Interview With Bob Clark

The following is an interview with Bob Clark, author and illustrator of Misty Morte: Afterlife Attorney.

1. For anyone who doesn’t know who you are, could you tell us a little bit about yourself?
My name is Bob Clark. I’m a writer and animator from New York. I’m on the Autism spectrum, and have an independent animated film inspired by that that’s running the festival circuit right now called “Autistic Mode.” It’s an animated anthology film made by myself, as well as fellow Autistic animators Charles Moss, Nix Busby, Malcolm Thomas, and Gabrielle Teaford, each of us using animatics to tell short and long stories in a wide variety of genres, including JRPG-inspired action-adventure, musical comedy, music video, and cyberpunk noir. It’s already played at the Boomtown Film & Music Festival in Beaumont, Texas. It’s playing in Austin, and will soon be in the Nyack International Film Festival. If it hits a festival near you, and you’re into more edgy adult-style 80s and 90s anime, check it out!

2. What initially got you into writing in general?
I more or less got into writing as a way to help my mom on her own local productions in her after-school and library program, Theatre in a Trunk over the years, starting as a kid and continuing while I was in college and beyond. Oftentimes it was a way to relax and let off steam from more pressing school assignments, but as time went on it became something I tried to take more seriously as a way to put some real artistic and political statements into material being offered for young audiences. I can remember being terribly bored and alienated in a lot of classes and wanting to see something that was more entertaining and gutsy. Whenever I’ve written scripts for middle school programs, I’ve always tried to make sure that it was material that we were getting away with.

3. What inspired you to write Mitsy Morte: Afterlife Attorney?
In a word– Trump. In two words– legal dramas. I found myself binging a lot of shows like “The Good Wife” and “Law and Order” as a coping mechanism in the first Trump administration, and as time went on I thought this would make good material for a play in the Theatre in a Trunk program. It was taking a bit of a risk, since another script of mine that tried to tackle police corruption through the lens of classic movie monsters (with the monsters as the good guys, of course) had already been rejected by the school for being too critical of cops. However, by pushing the monster and supernatural comedy angle, with a lot of inspiration from C.S. Lewis’ satirical “Screwtape Letters,” I was able to come up with a story revolving around the election of an egotistical grim reaper running for President. Most importantly; however, I took a favorite character from the rejected script, the devilish hotshot lawyer Mitsy Morte, and made her the star of the show. It made for a combination that was too fun to be rejected, no matter the politics.

4. Can you tell us about your writing process? What is the most difficult part of writing a book?
In the case of “Mitsy Morte,” each scene was written more or less piecemeal on its own, often around the demands of how many kids were joining the cast of the show. If we had more girls than boys join, I had to write more girl parts, and give everybody something to do that was vital for the story. That led to it being a very big ensemble cast where there’s lots of different players, different agencies and rivals gunning for power, which is perfect for a supernaturally themed satire of American politics. Then, sometimes you get an opportunity in casting that’s just too weird and singular not to take advantage of– the fact that one of our main cast members had an identical twin brother who wanted to be involved gave me the idea to introduce a “Twin Peaks” inspired doppelganger into the story, adding an absurdist twist to the story that was as weird as it was funny. Sometimes scripts are written by intuition.

5. What advice would you give to an aspiring author?
First of all, write for yourself. Follow your own interests, passions, obsessions. They’re the things you know the most about, the stuff you’re most sincere about. You have to be your own most important audience member, and tell the stories you most want to see in the world. Second, whenever possible, write the stuff that only you can write. It can be fun to dabble in other creators’ worlds and characters, and sometimes it’s just plain easier when it comes to reaching a wider audience if they’re dealing with known entities (a lot of the stuff I wrote for Theatre in a Trunk used public domain stuff like fairy tales or very obvious genre homages). But you have to really try and make them your own, and create something that nobody else has written before. If nothing else, it’ll be a lot easier legally. Trust Mitsy Morte on this– copyright law in the afterlife is an absolute NIGHTMARE.