The Official Adventures in Odyssey Podcast

Bob: Hello Odyssey fans, I'm Bob.

Jesse: And I'm Jesse. Welcome to the official Adventures in Odyssey podcast.

Bob: Coming up on the podcast, we'll be hearing from the man behind the Adventures in Odyssey comics, social media, and art direction.

Jesse: Sounds like he wears as many hats as he does first names.

Bob: We're talking about Evan Scott David, better known to comic readers as Evan David.

Jesse: But before we get to Evan, here's the latest news.

Bob: We have an exciting announcement for people who love to read and for people who don't love to read.

Jesse: This sounds interesting.

Bob: And it looks interesting too, Jess. The second Elsewhere in Odyssey graphic novel is now available for pre-order. If you like reading, there are plenty of classic Odyssey stories here to experience. If you don't love reading, there are lots of pictures to enjoy with just a little reading to go along with them.

These comics include stories like "Connie, You Shrunk Your Friends", "Prom Perfect", and "A Day in the Life: The Movie". All of them are beautifully illustrated by our comic artist and written by our Odyssey team.

Jesse: You can find these comics in the read section of the club right now or you can pick up the graphic novel on the Focus on the Family e-store. Now let's turn to the man at the intersection of these comics, social media, and design, brand art director, Evan David.

Bob: Evan David, welcome back to the podcast. Thanks for making that long journey downstairs.

Evan David: It was arduous, but thank you for having me back.

Bob: First, let's rewind. For listeners who have never heard you on earlier podcasts and may not have even read the Elsewhere in Odyssey comics, what are they and how do they fit into the larger world of Adventures in Odyssey?

Evan David: The Elsewhere in Odyssey comics are, of course, comics about Adventures in Odyssey, but they are elsewhere in the town. A lot of the time we talk about what happened to that character or this character and we always say the camera is just pointing somewhere else. Until now, we've not been able to find out what's happening off the scenes of the audio show. That's the purpose of Elsewhere in Odyssey. It's to get a second camera and go see what the other characters are doing that we don't hear on the audio show anymore.

Jesse: How do you decide on the storylines and which characters or corners of Odyssey deserve their own comic and their own camera view?

Evan David: In the beginning, when we first started, it was more just what do I, as a giant Odyssey fan, really want to see? Those are the things I was pitching, like wanting to go see this character or that character. Since then, we've expanded the writers for the comics to some of the audio show writers as well and we have a comic summit every year where we talk about story ideas that we want to do.

Now it's really just a matter of what character do we want to spend time with and then taking it from there. What stories are there left to tell with that character or what themes could this character hit? It's a character-first approach, at least with the germ of the idea.

Bob: As both the creator of the series and the art director for the brand of Adventures in Odyssey, what are your various jobs for each comic?

Evan David: I oversee the writing and the story production along with Marshall Younger, who's making sure everything lines up exactly how it should with the audio drama. I'm making sure it works well for the comic book medium. I write stories for it as well, but then I'm also helping the artists make sure they are in line with what our characters look like and what the town feels like, art directing them as they go and overseeing the letters, which is a whole other pass over the comic art.

Bob: I know we don't use the term comic strip so much, but at the same time we don't want to give the impression that these are all comic books. They've been developed in a form where they could be released as books, but as they're released on a weekly basis in the club, they really run like comic strips that are serial.

Evan David: I don't know if we call them comic strips publicly, but that's what I call them internally. They are a serialized comic strip. Each story arc is 12 strips and if you combine those 12 strips together, that makes it the length of one standard audio episode if you're reading through.

Jesse: What's been the biggest challenge for you translating these characters from audio, theatre of the mind, and you're doing a visual medium? Kind of like the Adventures in Odyssey movie coming out, you've been doing that for a little bit longer now, turning it into a visual form of entertainment.

Evan David: The first thing we want to do is look at all the audio scripts and make sure that we hit any notes that have already been stated. For instance, like Kelly Washington, it's stated she has black hair so we don't want to give her blonde hair. We make sure all that's right. Then we'll listen to what the character sounds like and consider what their voice informs about their appearance.

We'll also look at historical art from the '80s where we see what we have already established that Kurt Stevens looks like and decide if we can pay homage to that or if it would be good to change it. Then if we don't have anything there, we'll look at the personality, hobbies, and the actions of the character.

Bob: You work with a number of different cartoonists or comic artists. For years and years Gary Locke has been our go-to guy for the bigger brand illustrations, but one of the things I've always loved about Elsewhere in Odyssey is how on any given arc you might be working with somebody with a slightly different style.

Evan David: Some of that is out of necessity to stay on schedule because we want this to be a weekly comic strip and one artist is a lot of work. Unless we had them working five years ahead, we're going to need multiple artists. We try to keep it relatively within the same style, but each artist brings their own special something to it.

We're actually trying to have a more uniform style now, but each artist's own sensibilities bleed through anyway. We work with a very talented group of artists who have just been great. They've been translating our beloved characters and our beloved town into the visual medium for a few years now.

Jesse: Since we last talked, many new comic stories have come out and we'll have links in the show notes, but let's dig into a few of them. First up is "The Washingtons Go to Washington". I have to ask, which came first, the story or the title?

Evan David: Totally the title. The title came first. We thought that was a great one and we would figure out something to go with it. And we did.

Bob: Tell us about Kelly Washington. Her last scene on the audio dramas was all the way back in "The Imagination Station Revisited", but she's in a very different place in this story. Why was this comic moment the right one to start with Kelly?

Evan David: It was the right one to start with Kelly because the audio drama didn't want to put her back in the audio drama after I had petitioned. I got permission to put her in the comics because I love Kelly. I love stories about adopted people and found families and things like that. Adoption obviously is a great picture of what Christ does for us.

I just really love the character. Looking at the title, "The Washingtons Go to Washington", we had to figure out why they are in Washington. We decided to have Kelly because she seemed to be, if not a full prodigy, bordering on the level of a prodigy because she was self-taught on all of her keyboard and piano stuff in the audio show. It seemed like we should take that and run with it. Maybe she's become even more talented as time has gone on and now she's gotten this chance to play at the Kennedy Center. She's entered into a certain program and that's why they're there in town. From there, shenanigans ensue.

Jesse: Next up, "The First Great Adventure of the Summer". This one features Robin, Lucy, Donna, and Lawrence, who are familiar characters from many years ago, but they're returning as adults. How did you fill in the gaps since these characters left the audio show?

Evan David: It surprisingly wasn't too hard. There's been some information leaked about these characters in the audio episodes. A mention here, a mention there, gives us a hint of what they had been doing. We just took that and expanded upon it.

Dale Jacobs at one point, I think in the episode "The Labyrinth", says that his daughter was in the Peace Corps. That informs what we did with Robin. Some of you eagle-eared listeners will remember a deleted scene of Robin saying that she was in law school, but that was a deleted scene and therefore not canon. We're going with the canon comment that she was in the Peace Corps. Obviously, we wanted to make Lucy a news reporter, which totally made sense.

Then there's Lawrence, who, if you remember in the episode "The Triangle Web", was revealed to have joined NASA but been kicked out because he crashed the simulator. That tells us where he is. Then Donna, of course, we have established in a previous Elsewhere in Odyssey story where we've seen her in her grown-up life when she got married. We carried on from there.

Bob: Moving on to "Football Madness", which assembles an emergency football team from familiar Odyssey students who are not athletes. I got a kick out of that one. The pun was intended, but I did enjoy that one very much. What was the inspiration behind this story and the characters you chose to put in it?

Evan David: This story was the idea of Marshall Younger because I am not a sports person and I wouldn't know how to write a football story if I tried. He did a great job. I can't remember if he had come up with the characters who are in it or if we all just collaborated on that. We ended up going with Trent and Jay and Alex Jefferson. It's also fun to mix the characters from older episodes with the characters from the newer episodes. Bob, your character appears in this comic story.

Bob: I remember seeing that for the first time when it showed up. I thought, wow, I had no idea I looked like that.

Evan David: He doesn't have a name. I think we need to have the fans come up with a name for the booth announcer, the PA guy for the Odyssey Owls.

Bob: Send in your letters.

Jesse: This next one is a lot of fun because it's titled "Band of Brothers and Sisters" and it introduces an entirely new Odyssey family, the Ahns.

Bob: First of all, I think we have to spell that for people, A-H-N-S, the Ahns. Are we going to see more of these guys?

Evan David: We will see more of these. These were created by Abigail Geiger and they are a large homeschool family. Their last name is spelled and sounds the way it does because they are of Korean descent. The husband is actually Korean and his wife is not. They're a mixed family, they're a large family, and they're a homeschool family. This was something that Abby came into with some experience being also from a large homeschool family.

We also often get letters or comments asking where a homeschool family like this is that we can hear about in the Odyssey universe. We wanted to create a new, different kind of family that we just haven't seen a lot of in the show.

Bob: It's fun. This story shifts between the woods around Trickle Lake and the fantasy worlds imagined by the Ahn siblings and Buddy. What's different about developing imaginative scenes for comics as opposed to audio drama?

Evan David: I have never developed an imaginary scene for the audio drama. I've written one with Buddy as a secret service agent, but I haven't sound designed it obviously and that's a different animal. I have art directed plenty of imaginary scenes in comic books and so it was fun. You can take different kinds of creative liberties in the visual format that you couldn't do in the audio and vice versa.

Just getting to show this alien world that Buddy is imagining, what does it actually look like? What kind of visual fun stuff could we do there? Same thing when the Ahns envision their Lewis and Clark style explorers, what does that look like? It's also fun anytime we can depict characters in different period costumes. It's fun to see Whit as Ben Franklin or Buddy as a space adventurer.

Bob: I remember when Gary had to create the world of Whitonia for us and that was a little outside the box too. It's always a lot of fun to go there.

Jesse: This next one is one of my favorites because I love the character of Matthew. It's called "Matthew Rewired" and it has Matthew, Tori, and Kelly. Why put these three characters together in the same story?

Evan David: I had written an episode called "The School of Hard Knocks" which reintroduces Tori to the audio audience. She's at this new prep school, Mapleton Prep. In that episode you may recall at the very end she alludes to Olivia that she's got another friend at school that was out of town and that she wanted to introduce her to. The other friend was Kelly Washington and she was out of town in Washington in the comics.

I don't know if we'll ever get a chance to follow up on that in the audio show, but we do get a chance to follow up on it here in the comics. Tori and Kelly are friends. Kelly won a scholarship, the same way she got into the Kennedy Center. She won a scholarship to this Mapleton Prep school. Then I'm also a giant fan of Matthew and I know that a lot of other Odyssey fans are fans of him as well. We wanted to catch up with him and I thought wouldn't it be neat if he also, because he's very bright and works with all sorts of electronics and things, got a scholarship to this school?

Now we have this new trio of friends who aren't in the audio drama, but now you can spend time with them and catch up with them. We can go off and have adventures in Mapleton with these characters in the comics. That was a cool way to do that, to bring these three characters from three different eras really and three different mediums sometimes and bring them all together.

Bob: When you read a comic, lots of times you'll have the voice of the character. You're reading the balloons but you're hearing that voice. The question now is, which Matthew voice are you going to be hearing when you read through the comic strip?

Evan David: Honestly, and this is probably not something I should admit on the podcast, I could never tell the difference between them.

Bob: They were awfully close. We had great casting on those kids. They were great.

Finally, we are in the midst of one called "All's Fair in Love". It's a comic sequel. I remember long ago, it seemed like, you did the story with Edwin Blackgaard and Zelda. Remind us a little bit more about that first story and then why you decided to take a step and bring them back.

Evan David: In the first story, Edwin is smitten by the waitress at Hal's Diner, Zelda, who is an actual character in the audio show. She's appeared in a few episodes, especially if you go listen to "The Ties That Bind" and "Taking the Plunge". But she's kind of like this down-to-earth small-town waitress and Edwin, of course, is larger than life and considers himself a brilliant Shakespearean actor.

He kind of finds himself in an existential crisis. He's like, how can I, the great Edwin Blackgaard, be smitten with this lady? He eventually has to work up the courage and get over himself and his prejudices to see if there's something there with this lady.

Jesse: What's happening in this new storyline?

Evan David: In the new one, Edwin is a little bit in his head about his new relationship with Zelda and he's kind of reeling from a previous trauma that he experienced in a previous romantic relationship with his first girlfriend. We're going to take a very long flashback. It's going to basically be the entire story where we get to go back and find out more about Edwin's origins and what happened with this lady and even how he met Shakespeare, his faithful sidekick.

Bob: All right, as we're getting ready to land, we've got a couple more questions left, Evan, but one of them has to be totally random. It's time for our TRQ. This totally random question comes from Joe890011. What is your favorite type of cheese?

Evan David: Oh my goodness, I am a notoriously bland eater. I am not adventurous in my palette at all and so it would be Kraft Singles, Bob. Just the most processed little square of cheese that we put on our cheeseburger, that would be the one.

Jesse: Peel and stick. Perfect. Evan, if you could travel back in time and talk to yourself four years ago when you started this project, what would you tell yourself?

Evan David: I would get myself super hyped because I would go in like you're not going to believe what they're going to let you do. I'm a huge Odyssey fan and being able to write for any of these characters has been a huge fun dream come true.

The second thing I would say is do not start releasing right away. Build up a back catalog so that way you don't have all these tight deadlines like we have had and continue to have. But it's fun. It's a rollercoaster, it's an adventure.

Bob: What's the most important lesson or theme that has come out of these comics in your opinion? You've hit a number of them.

Evan David: That's tough. I had to pull up the comics on the club just to see how many we've done and there's been some great messages in here. Predictably, a lot of them are lessons that I learned growing up and felt were valuable to share with the audience.

One of them is in "Prom Perfect" where Trent is having a hard time because the beautiful night he envisioned with his girlfriend Mandy is not going the way he always envisioned it. Mandy has to kind of be like, we are not perfect people, life is not a perfect fairy tale. We just have to roll with the punches and trust that God has got it. That's a great one.

Then there's "The First Great Adventure of the Summer" which we already talked about. That's about how your Instagram life is not your life, where all the girls are pretending that their lives are going great and what you see on their social media is what they've got going on, but then at the end they come clean. Donna's one is pretty funny where she says that her last person at the law firm paid her in chicken eggs because she's just out in the sticks.

We have a lot of stories about friendship as well and being a true friend and what's really important. There are a lot of life lessons that I've learned that God has taught me and I'm sure the same thing is true for all our other writers for the series like Abby and Marshall and Nathan who contribute. Then there's a great story about always checking who's in the Imagination Station before you turn it on. That's a lesson for all of us for all time. And what happens, how do you survive if you get shrunk down? You're stuck in there and you gotta get out.

Jesse: Evan, thank you. And just like Dave Arnold has said so many times, what makes Odyssey work is the story and the life lessons and things and that does come across very clearly in Elsewhere in Odyssey, which is again, just a blast to read and to see these characters and what they look like and what they're going through and how they've grown sometimes is just a lot of fun. Thanks for joining us today.

Evan David: Thanks for having me, guys.

Jesse: You can read a new comic every week in the club.

Bob: You can also pick up a whole bunch of comics in the new graphic novel Elsewhere in Odyssey Volume 2. It's available for pre-order in our e-store.

Jesse: That's all for this edition of the official Adventures in Odyssey podcast, a presentation of Focus on the Family.

Bob: Visit us online at adventuresinodyssey.com or call us at 1-800-A-FAMILY. I'm Bob.

Jesse: And I'm Jesse, reminding you that with God in your life, every day's an adventure.