By KIARA LETCHER
J Alumni News staff
Van Jensen
In Van Jensen’s world, puppets slay vampires — at least, that’s what happens in Jensen’s new graphic novel, “Pinocchio, Vampire Slayer.”
But this 2004 J school graduate also enjoys telling stories about real people’s lives. His work involves balancing two passions: the fantasy of graphic novels and the objectivity of journalism.
“Journalism keeps people honest; it’s a great historical record,” Jensen said in a phone interview. He said the J school helped him emerge as a writer. Charlyne Berens, interim dean of CoJMC, remembers Jensen as a creative writer.
“I remember that his honors thesis was about his hometown of Lewellen, a very small place in western Nebraska, and some of the characters who lived there. So I knew then that he had a strong streak of creativity,” Berens said.
College also sparked his interest in his other passion: graphic novels. Students who worked at the Daily Nebraskan got him into reading books like “Watchmen,” “Maus” and “Dark Knight,” which swept him away.
He had wondered whether to study art or journalism in college.
“It was just a matter of those two things coming together,” Jensen said. He was always drawing, but studying journalism seemed as if it would take him further.
Jensen, who worked as a crime reporter at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette after graduation, and a colleague, Dusty Higgins, an artist, came up with the idea for “Pinocchio, Vampire Slayer.”
One day in a meeting, Higgins slipped Jensen a sketch of Pinocchio stabbing a vampire. They laughed and thought nothing more of it for a while.
“It was a very slow process, and I’m not really sure when exactly it clicked over from just being an idea that I couldn’t get out of my head to an idea that I thought had the potential to be a full-fledged story,” Higgins said in an e-mail. Later he called Jensen and turned the idea into a book.
Together, Jensen and Higgins hashed out the plot: After Pinocchio witnesses his father’s death by a gang of vampires, he goes out to seek revenge.
Meanwhile, the vampires plot the enslavement of mankind. However, Pinocchio has a weapon: his lies. Every time he lies, his nose grows longer; he then breaks off his nose and stabs bloodsuckers in the heart with it.
Jensen and Higgins are working on a sequel.
“We’ve been really cool about being open to each other’s ideas,” Higgins said. “And I know by bouncing ideas off each other we’ve managed to craft a much larger, more in-depth story that I ever imagined.”
As a storyteller, Jensen said he tries to find new approaches and tries to write very character-driven stories — an approach that works both in journalism and graphic novels.
“Pinocchio, Vampire Slayer” was published in October. It’s available in stores and through amazon.com. By combining the two worlds of journalism and comics, Jensen said he has found his niche.
“The key is to be well read, well informed and curious in general,” Jensen said.
In an e-mail, Jensen said, he doesn’t consider himself out of journalism. He is the editor of the Georgia Tech Alumni Magazine. And he still writes about the graphic novel industry and occasionally writes for magazines.
loading...
