Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1276583
Zach Smith loves fast food. So much so that he notes it on his website: "When I'm not drawing things for money, my pastimes include but are not limited to: eating fast food alone in my car." Smith confesses that he probably eats way too much of it, but he also loves '90s fast food mascots and '70s McDonaldland collectibles. So it's not surprising that the lead character in his new graphic novel, Dolphin Girl 1: Trouble in Pizza Paradise, works with her father in a fast food restaurant that is modeled on a Chuck E Cheese. "I ate F R A M E X F R A M E STORYBOARD ARTIST ZACH SMITH'S FIRST GRAPHIC NOVEL WAS FINISHED DURING QUARANTINE WITH THE HELP OF LOTS OF COFFEE. FAST FOOD INSPIRATION 10 KEYFRAME a lot of fast food growing up and it definitely inspired this book," he adds with a laugh. Smith's first foray into animation began in middle school, creating stop motion videos with his parents' video camera. This youthful hobby led him to the College for Creative Studies in Detroit where he pursued animation. Later, Smith moved to Los Angeles where he worked on the Mad Magazine show, creating shorts. More recently, he worked as a storyboard artist on the Netflix series We lost Our Human and has started storyboarding on Nick Jr's Baby Shark. Between work and family life, how did he find time to squeeze in a graphic novel? He finished the book during quarantine, so with he and his wife both working, and two small kids, "there was a lot of staying up late and drinking coffee—cranking everything up after hours, basically." The idea for the Dolphin Girl graphic novel began when he heard about the formation of a new publishing company, Pixel + Ink, that was taking pitches from people in the animation industry with the hope of developing graphic novels. "It's something I had always thought about doing… but I didn't really know how to get into it." He pitched five or six ideas, some of which were old TV show pitches that had been sitting around, and had been rejected by other networks. One of those was Dolphin Girl, an idea he'd been sitting on for almost 10 years. Smith retooled it to be more kid-oriented and focused on the relationship between a daughter and her not-so-perfect dad. "They really liked it and decided to let me go for it," he says. Inspiration for the graphic novel also came from '90s cartoons—highlighting banal suburbia and finding humor in the really mundane. "It's a superhero book, but there's not a lot of action," he explains. Dolphin Girl emerged as a character who was really smart, perhaps smarter than her own dad, who's stuck taking care of her dad and helping to run their fast food restaurant, where they're not only the mascots of the restaurant— hence their costumes—but are also actual superheroes who fight crime. Smith says wryly that the dad is based on people in his own life—including exaggerated aspects of himself. While the dad is goofy and loveable, he's not very aware of what's going on in Dolphin Girl's life, and this dynamic between the two characters provides Smith with plenty of story ideas. "When I write comedy, I usually just try to make myself laugh, or make my wife or my friends laugh," he says. "I don't really sit down and say: what would a kid like? I think about what would I have