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Author and Ukiah native Jesse Holden and his artistic partner Matthew Bogart will be in Ukiah at the Mendocino Book Company and in Lakeport in September for a book signing and reading from their second novel, “Incredible Doom.”
The novel is being published by Harper Collins as a “HarperAlley” Young Adult graphic novel. “Volume One came out in 2021 and is doing great, and Volume Two’s street date is September 5th, a few days before our arrival in Ukiah,” notes Holden.
Bogart and Holden began working on the series in 2016.
“The series draws heavily on our respective experiences as teenagers in the 1990s. For me, that included growing up on Standley Street where I was born and later on Orr Springs Road, just past the Greenfield Ranch Gate. I spent the summer of 1995 in Fort Bragg with a girl who I met on the Redwood Free-Net – a dial-up bulletin board hosted at the Ukiah branch library, which reshaped my entire life, along with getting into and out of scrapes around town as a bit of a troublemaker,” smiles Holden. The son of Cheri and J. Holden, both Jesse and Matt were users of early internet technology, heavily featured in both novels.
“My first introduction to computers was in the early-to-mid ‘90s with the library’s Bulletin Board Service, or BBS. You’d dial in to the library, connect with other county library branches, see each other’s posts, share photos and chat with people online. The BBS was not wired into a grand, global internet. It took a deliberate act to dial in and get online for one hour per day. More then, it was more common to own a library card than a computer, so people sat at the library’s computers behind the card catalog and get online in person.”
The BBS was a digital gathering place for local teens, long before Facebook and MySpace.
“The kids who were really keen on this stayed up until midnight because you got your next daily hour allocated at 12:01 a.m. I connected via modem on my Apple Performa – the era when you’d hear that screaming connecting noise, or you’d dial up, not realizing someone’s on the phone. It’s almost surreal to talk about from today’s vantage point,” Holden muses.
“BBS’s were a text-based, geographically, hyper-specific thing. You were literally making local phone calls. It wasn’t one great big internet. It was a collective island. Over time, everyone was in one giant digital mosh pit, but that early period was very exciting.”
The duo met through employment at an Apple reseller in Portland. Holden was a big fan of Bogart’s work, which he purchased on Kickstarter and distributed to his friends.
“I was looking for a creative opportunity with Matt. We seemed simpatico and were both interested in collaborating.”
“I’d been doing comics my whole life,” says Bogart. “I’d built my identity around them, seriously as a serious professional for six years. I’d always enjoyed comics and movies that featured teenagers who met on the internet, fell in love and ran away. Jesse asked me what I was working on next. It turned out Jesse’s real-life tale was very close to the next story I’d been envisioning.”
“I told Matt, ‘I ran away with a girl that I met on the early internet.’ Matt said, ‘Can I ask you a few thousand questions?’ We got burgers and talked for hours about my life in Ukiah, and that’s how we started,” says Holden.
“Jesse taught me about the project,” Bogart continues. “I was desperately seeking early internet experiences that were different from nerdy, middle-class white boys playing video games. Jesse’s stories were about misfits, outcasts, social economics, race, sexuality – people who met each other online and were safer there than their real-life homes.”
The novels track four primary characters who meet online and whose lives intersect in “real life.” The books are recommended for Young Adult readers, and Book One has been lauded by the New York Times, Buzzfeed, Kirkus Reviews, Publisher’s Weekly and Booklist, to name a few.
For those who lived during the ‘90s, the novels exude authenticity. The characters share many traits of all teenagers – simultaneously naïve and smart-ass, innocent and damaged, brilliant yet unable to make simple, clear choices. One of the characters was built from an actual experience of Holden’s.
“I was dialing into Redwood Freenet having a midnight chat with a girl in Fort Bragg. As our hour came to an end, she said, ‘You’d better hang up your modem because I’m going to call you.’ I was terrified. My dad was upstairs, so I grabbed the phone and talked to her. She ended up coming to my house and we spent a few weeks hanging out together.”
“The early internet was an exciting, bizarre, secret club that teens knew about and adults didn’t. It was wild, adventurous and weirdly dangerous. The novels play right into that. I grilled Jesse for years worked some of his stories into the book,” says Bogart. His illustrations are effectively simple, captivating and offer time and space for readers to develop their own conclusions about the character’s motivations. They are, much like the time period, fraught with a kind of innocence that you know is probably not going to last.
“The BBS world could be a romantic, unchaperoned, safe, less judgmental new space in which to exist. No one knew how old you were, what you looked like, what your family life was like, how much money you had. How you presented yourself in writing was who you were, and during that really difficult adolescent period, being unsaddled with social albatrosses was a good thing,” Holden continues.
“It gave people leeway to try on versions of yourself. That’s a lot of soil to grow in,” says Bogart.
People often ask what the books are about.
“It’s set in a time when computers were in their adolescence, as one generation experienced a ‘before and after the internet’ moment, having their social growing pains at the same time the internet was growing,” says Holden. This rarified moment happened only once in history, and the novel is both a mirror and paean to a very fleeting time.
“There was a generation where most of life was pre-internet. Now, no generations will ever know life without connectivity. Only one, single generation had no one before them to tell them how to be online. Teens and young adults were the point of the spear in online communities, and learned by experimentation within their own lives,” Bogart continues.
Bogart has a superb eye, and his accessibly drawn characters, attention to detail and adherence to a blue/black/grey colorscape invites the reader into each frame. The sharing of music was a big part of the early BBS scene. “In Chapter One, Matt recreated a system called Pine on the character’s computer screen. I used Pine back when I worked at the Call Center at Real Goods. The second time I used Pine, I called Winston Smith,” Holden laughs. Smith, who lives in Mendocino County, is the well-known montage artist made famous for his album covers for the legendary punk rock band Dead Kennedys, who are referenced several times in the novels.
Many other parts of Holden’s life bleed through the novels. A graduate of Ukiah Class of ‘99, Holden preferred to spend lunch in the arts room. “I socialized with my art teacher, JoAnn Skywalker. My first UDJ story was, ‘UHS senior thrives in art class.’”
The novels appeal to young and older readers.
“Young adults like that the story is about young adults. Problems that seem small to adults are huge to young people – career, love, future – all dangling by a thread, teetering toward disaster. These stories are a good opportunity for drama,” says Holden. “I felt the responsibility for the story to be as rough and tumble as it was, but also treating it honestly and treating readers as mature people.”
“What appeals to later generations is the attention to detail. People who lived through similar experiences get really excited because they viscerally know this story,” says Bogart.
“I think kids find their oases. Mine were Brahma Bull Music, Greg’s Comic Book Store, Pokémon, the Green Mac. I grew up with Laurel Near’s kids. These all shaped who I became,” Holden continues.
“Regarding the ‘lack of things for young people to do’ concept – I like the Jurassic Park approach: ‘Life finds a way,’” notes Bogart, who grew up in Mansfield, Ohio. “On one hand, it’s crucially important to gather, socialize and have things to do – but when denied those things, you draw comics on notebook paper, or form garage bands.”
Holden and Bogart did not use the novels to foreshadow the internet’s future. “At that time, kids were hijacking business machines – a tool of the corporate world – to create semi-underground networks. That was so punk rock,” says Holden. And within the Mega/Maga/Meta world that defines today’s internet, some users are rediscovering that smaller is beautiful.
“There’s an advent of small, curated moderated communities, text messaging groups and private discords. I feel like there’s less interest in one canonical presence and more in curating private groups – returning to what was great about being a little more siloed,” says Holden.
The pair has offered several renditions of their novels.
“I’m a huge fan of ubiquity,” says Bogart. “In the beginning, we physically mailed books to subscribers. We created bespoke mini-comics inserted on the back page with handcrafted slipcases, but we also had the option for anyone to read the story for free online. For Volume Two we made a floppy disc with a bunch of files the characters have read to each other. Only a few people will have those, but we love to ride that line. The e-book is available internationally, and the mini-books please other readers who enjoy rare experiences.”
The pair had to adjust to working with a major publisher.
“Graphic novels take years to write and draw,” says Bogart. “The project had built-in logistic constraints. How would it make enough money to support itself? If it couldn’t, I’d have to allocate comics to a hobby. We spent a year arranging the launch and certainly had moneymaking in mind, but never thought we’d land a book deal with one of the biggest publishers in the world. We hoped to make enough money to allow me to leave my job, and this project did that.”
Bogart and Holden are excited to be on a book tour.
“We didn’t promote the first book because of lockdown, so we’re really excited to build our own road trip and visit Ukiah,” says Holden.
When people ask the pair how the novel came into being, Bogart responds, “I was in charge of the drawing and Jesse was in charge of the life mistakes,” he smiles.
“We’ve enjoyed looking back and capturing those experiences of the early internet – this bizarre secret club that was about to envelop the whole world,” Holden concludes.
Holden and Bogart will be at the Mendocino Book Company on Sept. 16 at 6 p.m. and Watershed Books in Lakeport on Sept. 15 at 3:30 p.m. For more information, visit https://www.matthewbogart.net/events/ or http://jesseholden.com
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