Author Spotlight: Fernanda Frick H., author/illustrator of the graphic novel Raise the Bar

©Carolina Burgos

We’re excited to have author/illustrator Fernanda Frick H. from Santiago, Chile, on here today to talk about her debut graphic novel, Raise the Bar. In their starred review, Publisher’s Weekly praised the emotion, humor, and action, calling it “an exceptional debut” & “a gold-medal performance.” A very fitting description for a story about a young girl striving to win a debut gold medal in weightlifting.

Hi, Fernanda, thank you so much for joining us here today. We’d like to learn more about you, and then we’ll talk about your graphic novel.

Can you tell us a little about your life growing up in Santiago, Chile?

I’ve lived in Santiago my whole life. It’s the capital city of Chile, so it’s a pretty big city. I grew up being the youngest in my family — my sisters were nine and ten years older than me, so I grew up between adults. I really didn’t like sports, I didn’t like playing outside. I spent a lot of my childhood watching cartoons and playing video games, and reading comic books and novels. That really set the stage for my career in animation and comics.

Your character Sam has a hobby that her friends and family don’t understand or support. Did you ever feel like Sam – that nobody understood you or your interest?

Of course. I felt really misunderstood growing up because, as I said, I grew up between adults. I loved Pokémon when it first came out, but most of my siblings and cousins were much older, so they didn’t really understand the cartoons I liked.

But also, I started animating when I was thirteen, and I became pretty obsessed with that. For me, animation was what for Sam is weightlifting. It really worried my parents that I was so obsessed with becoming an animator when I had trouble fitting in at school with kids my age. It was a tough couple of years, but I guess it ended up well, because I ended up being an animation director and author.

Weightlifting is not only Sam’s hobby, but her dream. A dream that seems too big to come true. Have you ever had a goal that feels as big as that? If so, how did you move toward it?

Yeah! I started animating when I was thirteen. From that moment, I would watch short films online made by animation schools in the US and France — CalArts and Gobelins, the best animation schools in the world — and I would dream of studying there. But they were super expensive, and my parents would never have let me go when I turned eighteen. So it did feel huge. That’s what gave me the drive to start very early.

I started learning animation with tutorials. I would stay up late making my own short animations. And I really got a sense that my dream was achievable when I was fourteen and I got a freelance job: an American music producer hired me to make an animated video clip. He didn’t know I was a fourteen-year-old girl from Chile. He said, okay, I’m going to pay you a hundred dollars, and if it does well, I’m going to pay you another five hundred. For me, that was like being a millionaire. And it worked out — they really paid me, and with that I bought a newer computer. That really gave me confidence that it was possible.

Did you love to read as a child? If so, can you tell us some favorite books?

I really loved to read. I had trouble falling asleep when I was a kid, so for a while I needed to read a lot to fall asleep. I read all of The Chronicles of Narnia. I really loved Roald Dahl’s books—The BFG, The Witches — I thought they were hilarious. And also Chilean comics, like Condorito, and Argentinian comics like Mafalda.

When did you first become interested in art?

I really don’t remember a time when I wasn’t drawing. But the moment I realized this was something people actually do was when I would watch those old Disney making-ofs that came on VHS — yes, I’m old. You would see the animators working on the films, and I was like, oh my god, people do that. Maybe I could do that.

What was your biggest fear when you were young? Did you get over it?

One of my biggest fears was spiders, and I haven’t really gotten over that one. Another was that I was really, really scared of the witch in Disney’s Snow White. I don’t know what it was, but it scared me for a lot of my childhood. And one day I had a dream where I hugged her — I hugged the witch in the dream — and when I woke up, I wasn’t afraid of her anymore.

What advice would you give to your younger self?

To enjoy what she enjoys. Not to be ashamed of your interests and the cartoons you like. I used to be really embarrassed to watch Pokémon and Digimon, because I felt like both my sisters would make fun of me a little. And as I got a little older, my classmates stopped watching cartoons. Also, back then Pokémon and Digimon were “boys’ cartoons,” so it was weird to be a girl who liked them. So my advice would be: just enjoy, without shame, the things that you enjoy.

Is your past woven into the story? If so, how?

Yes, a lot of me is in Sam. For me it wasn’t weightlifting, it was animation — but that drive, that stubbornness, that single-mindedness Sam has of being interested in only one thing for the great majority of the book, that was definitely me. I didn’t really care about making friends. Though I did make friends afterwards, thanks to animation — people at school started thinking it was cool that I made animations.

It was also a constant battle with my parents, because my first couple of animations were very scary for them. I was a really depressed kid, and my first animations were like a Tim Burton–style character who takes a knife and pulls his heart out and then eats it, with metal music in the background. Of course they freaked out, and they sent me to a psychiatrist. And of course I was fine — but now I understand how worried they were.

Around that time, because of one of these more gory animations I made, my family told me that some members of my family had been persecuted during the Chilean dictatorship. I was around Sam’s age in the book. Of course, they didn’t explain how that connected to them being scared of me not having friends and being obsessed with this weird hobby. But now I’ve made the connection, and it makes sense. A lot of Chilean people are still afraid of seeming different, because the scars of the dictatorship are still there.

So a lot of those family dinner table conversations in the book are how it actually felt to be that age — being in conflict with my parents about what I wanted to do with my life.

Would you be willing to share an embarrassing grade school moment?

I wasn’t athletic until high school — I’ve never really been athletic, but I started exercising in high school. Before that, I was a real couch potato, and I was kind of known for it. My favorite cartoon when I was young was Garfield, so my gym teacher would sometimes narrate as if I were Garfield. If we were playing volleyball, every time I had the ball it was, “Garfield gets the ball, Garfield throws the ball.” That was embarrassing. But I loved Garfield. I still do.

It’s interesting that you didn’t really enjoy sports, but you ended up writing about a weightlifter. How did you get interested in weightlifting? Did you ever try it later on in life?

At first I started doing CrossFit. For some reason, I really like intense sports, even if I’m really bad at them — I’m not in great shape, I never have been. But back in 2016 or 2017, I started doing CrossFit, and CrossFit includes the Olympic weightlifting movements, the snatch and the clean and jerk. At that gym, there were also weightlifting classes aside from the CrossFit ones.

I really loved how weightlifting made me feel. It made me feel strong. And I thought it was a really bizarre idea to make a story about weightlifting, because it’s a weird sport and it would be such a big challenge to make it interesting for people. For some reason, I wanted to take that challenge. And I think I kind of succeeded — I think Raise the Bar gets pretty fun even if you don’t know anything about weightlifting. Even if you don’t follow exactly what’s happening, the emotions of the competitions are there, and anyone can understand them.

What gave you the idea for this story?

In 2016 I was watching the Rio Olympics, and I thought: why has no one made a sports anime about the Olympics? Sports anime are usually about one sport — swimmers, or volleyball, or football, or judo. And I thought it would be really cool if there was one character from each sport, and they all went to a high-performance center together. That’s where it started.

Are the characters in the story based on anyone you know?

Not exactly, but there’s a bit of the people in my life — or people who were in my life — in each one of the characters. Some of them come from elsewhere: Eva dos Santos is based a little more on another anime character, All Might from My Hero Academia. That mentor who comes in and promises he’ll help you. She was kind of a fantasy of the kind of mentor I wanted to have.

And Chichi is kind of based on one of my cats, who passed away a couple of years ago.

And of course Sam’s family is very similar to my family in some ways — though I don’t have a brother, I just have two sisters.

Does Sam resemble you in any way?

In a lot of ways, starting with the fact that I think we’re physically similar. Young Sam has exactly the hair I had at that age — and even now, I think we have the same haircut. It wasn’t like that when I started writing and designing the story; I had a short pixie cut then. But now that I’ve grown my hair out again, we’re really similar.

But also, I’m autistic and have ADHD, and I got diagnosed at thirty — so I had already created the character of Sam. Since she was like me, and I have always been autistic, she’s pretty autistic too. After the diagnosis I really tried to dial that up, even if it’s never mentioned in the story. She has a lot of autistic traits: having trouble socializing, and having really, really strong special interests.

Did you have to fight for anything the way Sam did?

I would say up until this point I’ve always felt like I had a chip on my shoulder about having to fight for my career and my passions, as an artist from Latin America.

At the time I started writing Raise the Bar I was really frustrated, because I had just finished my first animated short film and I was experiencing firsthand how difficult it is to get noticed by the rest of the world when you’re from Latin America. This was pre-pandemic — I think it’s a little easier now, people are more used to working with people all over the world and online. But back then I really had to fight for my short film to get noticed. I would travel to festivals financed by the Chilean government; I had to apply for grants because it was so expensive to go anywhere there were animation markets and festivals. I sent so many emails, to so many specialized websites, trying to get my work noticed. And for a while it really seemed like no one cared.

But in the end it kind of did work — Raise the Bar was picked up by an American streamer to become an animated series, even if it didn’t work out in the end.

So Sam’s story started out as a movie idea, but ended up as a graphic novel. Please tell us about creating the book version.

It started as an animated series idea. In the beginning, it was going to be twelve episodes, going from Sam training alone in Santiago without any support all the way to the Olympics — the actual Tokyo Olympics. This was a long time before those Olympics. The midpoint of the series was going to be them going to the Pan American Games.

Since the book was much shorter, at first I thought maybe I’d do three books. But my agent said no, no, no — let’s sell one first, finish one first, and then if you want you can maybe do more. And I thought, I don’t think I’m going to do more if I don’t sell it as a series, so I’m just going to tell this story in one book. So I had to shorten Sam’s journey to end at the Pan Americans and not the actual Olympics.

At first there was a little bit of grief, because I really wanted to see Sam get to the Olympics. But in the end it was for the better, because the message of the book is about the journey, not the destination. The way it ends now is perfect for what I wanted to convey.

A lot of other things changed too. In animation it had to be aged down a little — the notes I would get, they didn’t want much emotional depth. Books allow a lot of emotional depth. And I had so much more time to write it. I rewrote everything; there’s very little in the book that was in the animated series. The story that ended up in the book is the story I really wanted to tell.

Can you explain the different processes involved in creating the art for a graphic novel and tell us who did which part?

The stages are thumbnails, sketch, inks, and then color.

I start with the script, so I write everything out. Then I thumbnails, which I did on paper in little sketchbooks. My thumbnails can’t be read by anyone except me — they’re for me to figure out how to break the dialogue and the action into panels. Then I draw the sketches for the whole book digitally.

Usually I do everything myself, but this was so much work that I hired support from my friends. I inked chapters one, two and five, and my friend Ale Carrasco inked chapters three and four. My friend Kat drew almost all the backgrounds in the book. My friend Gaby did more than half of the lettering — she decided where to put the word balloons, which was a really difficult task because there wasn’t much space. She did a great job. And coloring was a double effort between Perry Wheeler and me. This is my first book in color, and it was such a big task.

What is your favorite or most challenging part of being a writer and illustrator?

I think it’s the same thing: being able to tell stories. Getting things out of my head where I can be in control of both the storytelling and how it’s visually depicted. I’ve usually worked as an illustrator, illustrating other people’s stories, but I don’t think I would ever write other people’s stories, because I do it to communicate personal stuff, stories inside me. So I really love being able to tell stories.

Have you had any careers besides writing and illustrating?

Only recently — because, as I said, I started really young. My first freelance job as an animator was at fourteen, so it’s been a lifetime of working as an illustrator, animator and director.

But two years ago, I became really interested in psychology. I started working on myself, on this self-development journey, and that made me want to help other people directly. So I applied for a job to become a mental health coach, and I got certified with the Healthy Gamer Institute. For the past two years I’ve been working part-time, a couple of hours a week, with clients all over the world, helping them accomplish their goals. It’s been very, very fulfilling.

Do you have any tips for children who want to create graphic novels?

Just start. Create what’s interesting to you — what you find funny, or fun to draw. If there’s a story you want to tell, something you want to express, or characters you want to exist, just do it. It’s very fulfilling, and it’s something anyone can do, in the sense that you don’t need expensive software or tools. You can start making comics with a pen and paper.

Do you have any message or advice for the teachers and parents who will be sharing your book with their students and families?

I would love for this book to be read by adults and kids together. Even if most of the story is Sam’s and happens with the other teenagers, there are also adults — there’s her relationship with Eva, her mentor and teacher, and her relationship with her family. In the end there’s a lot in there about the bridge between kids and their parents. There’s a lot of understanding to be made on both sides.

I think this story really gives space for adults and kids to understand each other. Sam gets to understand what made Eva who she is. Eva learns how to support Sam in the best way. Sam gets to understand why her parents were so opposed to her doing weightlifting, and her parents get the chance to understand why it was so important for her.

A lot of special things can happen when we try to hear each other. And I know it’s difficult — it took me a long time to put myself in my parents’ shoes and understand why they were so scared for me when I was a teen and started animating.

What do you hope readers will take away from your book?

I hope they get a feeling of hope. That there’s hope to do what you want to do, hope to find your place in the world and to find people like you, and to take steps toward your dream even if you don’t end up where you hoped. There’s real joy and fulfillment in just striving to be really great at something you love.

Can you tell us about some of your other books?

I’ve published two other books in Chile. They’re available digitally in English from my shop.

One is Trazos — Brushstrokes — about an artist who suffers a really big failure, decides to never create again, and goes to work at a bar. It’s the story of how she regains her passion to create again. And everyone in it is a cat.

The other is Here’s the Plan, a picture book adaptation of my animated short film of the same name, which can be watched on YouTube. It’s about a married baker couple, a cat and a dog, who make cupcakes. Their oven explodes and they have to take normal jobs, and that starts to drift them away from their dream and from themselves.

So it seems there’s a common theme of ambition and dreams in all of my work so far.

What are you working on now?

I want to write more books. I’ve started writing another picture book, and I want to write another middle grade story after that — I don’t know yet if it will be an actual novel or a graphic novel, but I really want to do it. I’m also working on the development of a new animated series project. It’s not my idea, it’s an adaptation, and I don’t know if it will work out or not. But for now it feels great to go back to animation.

Thank you so much for taking the time to do this interview. Good luck with your career.

ABOUT RAISE THE BAR

A debut graphic novel about one girl’s weightlifting dreams and how far she’ll go for them, from a popular Chilean animator.

Sam Sanchez might not have a coach or proper equipment, but she’s going to become Chile’s first weightlifting gold medalist. She just knows it.

When there’s an opportunity to train at the high-performance center with her weightlifting hero and Olympic gold medalist Eva Dos Santos . . . well, Sam can’t let that opportunity pass. Even if it means going behind her parents’ back.

As she makes friends (and a rival) during training and tries to qualify for the Pan American Games, she’ll find out how far hard work and perseverance can take her and just how much weight she’s able to hold.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Fernanda Frick H. is an animation director, storyboarder, illustrator and comic artist. “Here’s the Plan”, her 4th short-film, was selected in various festivals around the world including Nashville International Film Festival, SANFIC, Chilemonos, Anima Mundi, CICFF and the Premios Quirino. It won the Jury Prize at SIGGRAPH ASIA. It was also long-listed for the 2017 Academy Awards. In 2019, she published “Trazos”, her first graphic novel with Editorial Planeta and had a series project in development with Netflix. Currently, she manages her independent animation studio FFrick Studio.

Laurie J. Edwards

Laurie J. Edwards planned to run away when she was nine. She didn’t get far before she realized she’d miss her pet parakeet, so she slept on the back patio. That started her on a life of travel that has led to many interesting adventures, including stepping on a lizard in Africa, climbing a Korean mountain in flip-flops, strolling the streets of Venice in a cat costume, and eating deep-fried water beetles (yum!) in China. You can find out more about her and her books at her website.