This month, more than two decades after first conceiving the graphic novel series “Amulet,” Kazu Kibuishi published the ninth and final installment, “Waverider.”
For readers, the conclusion of the fantasy and science-fiction saga – which involves the adventures of two young siblings, Emily and Navin, as they search for their kidnapped mother across a range of incredible places – was a long time coming from the Southern California native, who was born in Japan but grew up “an Orange County kid” in Irvine and crafted the early books in the series while living in Alhambra before moving to Seattle and then San Antonio, Texas, where he and his family now reside.
While any number of setbacks could have delayed the completion of a sprawling multi-part series written and drawn by one person, there was one compelling reason the “Amulet” books took as long as they did.
Kibuishi nearly died midway through making the series.
‘Like a crater in my memory’
While he was still living in Alhambra, Kibuishi contracted bacterial meningitis, which he believes was caused by a dose of steroids he received while being treated for a broken hand.
“I’ll never be able to say for 100 percent sure,” says Kibuishi, who believes the dose may have been part of a 2012 outbreak of fungal infections tied to a batch of tainted medicine. “After that, life was a blur; all sorts of stuff happened.”
After being told at one emergency room that he had an ear infection and should go home and sleep, he recalls later the same evening paramedics rushing him to San Gabriel Valley Medical Center, which had recently encountered another patient who’d contracted meningitis.
“They knew what they were looking at with me because they had already watched one patient … with the same thing,” he says. “The San Gabriel Valley hospital did an amazing job and really saved my life. If we didn’t go to that particular hospital, I would have died.”
Even so, his survival hadn’t been guaranteed.
“What they ended up having to do is give me a spinal tap, put me in a coma and just pump me full of antibiotics and hope for the best,” he says. “And it worked. So I was in a medically induced coma for something like a week.
“I felt like I died,” says Kibuishi. “I was really lucky that certain things happened a certain way. It was just not my time to go. That’s what it felt like, that I was basically told to come back because I had work to do.
“I hadn’t met my daughter yet, so that was a big motivator to heal and get back because my wife was eight months pregnant at the time of the incident,” says Kibuishi, who repeatedly praises the toughness, dedication and support of his wife, Amy Kim Kibuishi, author of the fantasy graphic novel series “The Rema Chronicles.” The couple now have two kids, one of whom is already showing promise as a cartoonist.
But in the decade since his recovery, Kibuishi says he still feels the effects.
“It changed my life, for sure. That’s part of the reason why I can’t write as fast as I used to. I can definitely draw just as quickly; that’s just motor skill. But writing is really what takes the most time,” he says, adding his memory has been affected – sometimes he’d finish a page only to realize he’d already drawn it before. “There are certain obstacles and hurdles I have to get over. I don’t want to use it as an excuse but … I have set a standard with my former self that is very hard for this brain to match.”
Kibuishi’s memory came up when I mention an earlier meeting we’d had. Years ago, not long after he’d recovered, I’d reached out to tell him how much my family enjoyed his books and Kibuishi had invited us to visit his Bolt City Productions studio in Alhambra. While a memorable event for us, Kibuishi says he can’t remember much from that period.
“That time in my life, I just have to accept that I was a bit of an amnesiac. There’s like a crater in my memory,” he says. “I don’t know if I’ll ever fully recover from it, but I manage well, I think, despite all of that.”
The difficult choices
Since the 2008 launch, the “Amulet” books have sold 7 million copies and have been translated into 21 languages. What began as the story of a grieving family who move into the strange home of a mysterious and eccentric relative, the story grew to encompass a large cast of characters featuring robots, elves, warriors, magical creatures, spaceships, enchanted stones and more.
The success of the series offered Kibuishi the opportunity to do things like illustrate a new line of covers for the 15th anniversary of the Harry Potter books.
Creating work for children hadn’t necessarily been what Kibuishi, who studied film at UC Santa Barbara and who cites filmmakers such as t he Coen Brothers, John Carpenter and Francis Ford Coppola’s “Captain EO” Disneyland film as inspirations, had necessarily planned to do.
He recalls taking a film class from Carpenter – who he calls “a genius” – and being shocked that the director of iconic films such as “Halloween,” “The Thing,” “Escape From New York” and “They Live” could be dismissive of his own work, which Kibuishi and so many others loved.
“It’s for us to determine what real art is – the audience,” Kibuishi says he told the director. “The kids know what real art is because they’re going to tout it as the years go on; those will be the things we remember. The ones heralded by the adults are often forgotten because there’s nobody there to herald them later. So when I did ‘Amulet,’ I felt that that’s where I was going.”
Still, deciding to do “Amulet” wasn’t a sure thing. He’d published a well-regarded YA comic, “Daisy Kutter: The Last Train,” and the much-praised “Explorer” and “Flight” comic anthologies, and he wasn’t sure that writing for younger children was the move he wanted to make.
“When it came time to do kids’ comics, it was kind of a difficult decision to make because it wasn’t naturally what I was geared to do or wanted to do. I felt that it was something that I should do, because there weren’t many people doing self-reflective, thoughtful, engaging, introspective dramas and comedies for kids. And I thought that was a real shame,” he says, citing Jeff Smith’s “Bone” series as a stellar example of an all-ages comic.
As he was still finding his way into the project, he says he encountered issues making the story work.
“I lost my footing actually with ‘Amulet 1’ and it took me a long time to get it back. It was actually Jeff Smith who helped me quite a bit when he looked at the stuff and gave me a confidence boost,” says Kibuishi. “He saw parts in it that were good; he did admit that it was not good as a whole. [laughs] So I took that to heart and I just broke it apart … and took away the parts that didn’t work and kept the parts that did.
Rather than focusing on the events in the story, he began to focus on the characters’ choices. “I decided choices were the most important thing to happen in a story like this,” he says. “So give the kids difficult and important choices to make … and now we have ‘Amulet.’”
Upon its publication, some early reviews weren’t always kind – one simply began, “Meh,” he says – but he stuck to his vision, thinking about the movies he loved, many of which had been critical failures upon release only to find an audience later.
“I thought this is one of those things that critics would probably lambaste, but the audience that would find it in the bargain bin somewhere are going to attach themselves to in the ways we did as kids watching ‘The NeverEnding Story’ or ‘The Last Starfighter’ or ‘Big Trouble in Little China,’ all three of those movies were box office bombs and critical failures,” he says, citing the influence of those films on current shows like “Stranger Things.” “Here we are basically celebrating all that work now.”
In any case, Kibuishi knew who he was trying to reach.
“I didn’t make it for critics,” he says. “I made it for the readers.”
The next adventure
So considering all those years and all that effort, does he really feel ready to let go of the story?
“It’s taken 16 years for publication,” says the 45-year-old artist. “Since the moment I signed the contract, it’s been 19 years. And since I started working on the project, I think it’s probably something like … 27 years ago.”
“It’s the final book in the ‘Amulet’ series, as it is. There’s not going to be an ‘Amulet 10,’ per se. But I won’t rule out another series of ‘Amulet’ books with a different generation of characters. I’ve already thought about it. It’s been percolating, but there are other projects to do,” he says.
When asked if he’s got something planned for the screen, he smiles but doesn’t give much away. “There’s a lot in the works, I’ll just say, that people will be excited about,” he says. “Yeah, there is one that is screen-related.”
And there is the now-complete series of “Amulet” books, which Kibuishi sees as something readers and fans know they can always return to.
“That’s what I’m hoping for, that people revisit the books like they’re like a theme park. Each one of the books is like a ride,” he says. “They’ve got to have fun and ride through this thing, and then they’ll be back.”
