Colin Blanchette | June 30, 2025
Jon Allen’s comics are pleasing to look at, easy to read, and are accessible to even the most comics-illiterate of readers. As a result, due to the sort of inverted logic that the comics world specializes in, he hasn’t found a readership or success commensurate with the level of his talent. As Allen observes in the following interview, his work presents as something it’s not. He meant that his work looks kid-friendly while dealing with sex, drugs, and ennui. But it also can present as simplistic and shallow to the eyes of a jaded reader, belying the enormous amount of skill and labor that goes into making his comics so easy, and pleasing, to read.
Allen’s latest effort is The Well, a 700+ page doorstop of a book, published by Top Shelf in an affordable softcover. It's the latest in a series of books set in his Ohio Is For Sale universe, where the characters that populate his books overlap with each other, though each of his books can be read independently (that dirty word, “accessible,” comes to mind). It’s a breezy read throughout. Someone once observed that it was harder to not read Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy than it was to read it, and I believe this principle applies to Allen’s work as well. For someone making, in his words, “very standard suburban-losers-on-the-couch kind of comics” Allen puts as much effort into pacing and storytelling as any contemporary cartoonist I can think of.
The Well is Allen’s fifth Ohio Is For Sale book, and by far the longest. He tries out some new things in this book, which we discuss, while still inhabiting and expanding a world that he has mined to great effect over the last twelve years. His anthropomorphic characters and stripped down art style are at odds with what tastemakers expect from serious comics nowadays, but I think time will be kind to Allen’s comics. They just need to get in front of readers’ eyes, at which point his seamless storytelling and top notch cartooning will do the rest.
I talked to Allen over a video call about his new book, his process, and his future. This interview was edited for length and clarity.
-Colin Blanchette
COLIN BLANCHETTE: How did you get together with Top Shelf?
JON ALLEN: I did a couple of books with Iron Circus. I did The Lonesome Era with them, and I just kind of pitched to them cold. When I was in the middle of working on Julian in Purgatory, I just emailed them, and I was like, “Hey, I have another book.” I sent them what I had, and they sent me a contract. It was very easy. When I sent them an email about this new book, they said, “We're open to it, but your first two books haven't earned out yet, so we can't take on another project with you until those get in the black,” or whatever they say. Which is completely understandable. But I was thinking, “I don't know that these will ever earn out. How long am I going to be waiting?” I didn't really know what to do with this project. It was a very improvisational endeavor, more so even than some of the past ones.
Anyway, I was halfway through it and I did not have a guarantee that I would get a contract from Iron Circus. I got this email from Chris Staros, and it said “I help graphic novelists approach publishers with their project.” On Chris Staros’ mailing list, a couple of times a year he’s been offering his services to look at people's graphic novel projects and read them and critique them. It's not cheap. I thought, “Yes, this is what I need.” I signed up for it and sent him the book, which at the time was, I think, probably about halfway done. Around 350 pages, maybe. He read it, set up an appointment, and during the critique, he said, “This is great. I'll send you a contract right now.” I don't know if this is a secret, but I think this is something that he does. It's a good pipeline for him to get new talent without having to go out and hunt for it.
That makes a lot of sense. Did he offer any critique of the work?
I would have to go back in my notes and look… It was nothing major. I don't remember, honestly. I don't know if you were keeping up with the story on Instagram, but there's a scene where Persephone finds a dead body in a trash bag in the online version. He said, “That's too much. Your story doesn't really support that.” So, in the published version it's a bag of people's stuff, which softened it and kept it a little bit more in the realm of possibility. That's the one note that I remember him making.
You mentioned your improvisational style. Is that actually how you work? You really just kind of go along, or do you have an outline or a script that you work off of?
I don't have a script. The Lonesome Era was a special case because at the time I was self-publishing little issues of Ohio Is For Sale, and I started with this character and did a couple of issues and realized that I wasn't writing discrete stories. I was building a longer narrative without meaning to, and once I realized that I had to go back and then build it out as a story. But yeah, there’s no planning involved, really. I just draw stuff. I write as I’m drawing. That book was a total mess, I just kind of backed into writing a story and had to pull it together later.
I don't really do thumbnailing or anything. I don't do scripts. I use those black 8 ½ x 11, hard-bound sketchbooks that you can get in any art supply store. I draw the square and then sketch on the page, and I'll sketch a scene at a time. It'll be seven pages or ten pages, usually no more than ten pages. I'll keep it as a sketch for a while, really loose, just general character positions, panel breakdowns, and the dialogue. The first pass is never correct. Once I get to the end of the scene, I know what it needs to do. I read through it a few times and sit with it for a day or two. I'll see that I need to compress this, or stretch this, or land somewhere else. It goes through a lot of changes while it's a sketch. It's kind of like thumbnailing, but I'm thumbnailing very small pieces at a time. I'll rough it out, and then I'll pencil it, then ink it, then scan it. There is something different... I don't do editing, really, in the pencil stage or the ink stage. Generally, once I've gotten to pencils and inks, it's stable. Once it's inked and scanned, and I see it finished, and especially once I sit with it for a while in the context of the rest of the story, I'll start to notice things. Or, I'll have a new idea. I do a lot of editing in the sketching stage and I do a lot of editing on the finished product.
The Lonesome Era was such a cut-and-paste job, with tons of editing and reshaping that I had to do. But I learned a lot in that process. I serialized Twelve Miles From Akron on Instagram, and that one was completely improvisational. I didn't even have an outline for that, I just worked week to week, drawing six or seven pages and having no idea what the next week was going to be. I feel really good about that book. I'm happy with how it came out.
With Julian in Purgatory, I wrote an outline of all of the story beats, and that one actually went really smoothly, way more than I expected. I did very little editing once it was done. I thought I had figured out how to tell a long story, and I had a good sense of that character and the characters in that book, because they had been in a lot of my other stories. I spent a year working on the story, just writing outlines and pieces of dialogue, and then I drew it and it was done. It was kind of breezy, and I think I felt overconfident in my ability to tell a long story at that point. I wanted to do something more complicated and more ambitious. And after Julian in Purgatory, I believed that I understood how stories work, and I believed that I had all of the tools in my tool kit to build a story.
Between two books, I was like, “Okay, I think I can do this for a longer, sustained thing. I spent about a year working with The Well as an outline. It changed so much in the course of working on it from the initial images that I had in my mind for it. A lot of it didn't make it into the book. As I worked on it, it took me a long time to figure out what the story was. There was an outline, and I always had a sense of the overall arc of it. But there were a lot of key points that I wasn't able to make a decision on until I was there in the story, writing it.
You know, I think part of it was working on Instagram. When I started posting on Instagram, I had a reserve of about 40 pages, around two months of work, before I started posting it. Then I just had to keep ahead of it. I did manage to work up a surplus. I think I was 80 pages ahead in my output, but it was still pretty tight. As I was developing the characters and the story, I was really engaged with the comments that people were leaving on Instagram. It was really, really exciting to see people engaging with the characters and guessing about their motivations or where they were going to go. “Is this person a jerk? Are they cool?” It was real-time feedback for me that kind of helped, not intentionally, but it made its way, I think, into the story.
A lot of really key points in the story were not clear to me until 500 pages in or after it was done. When I finished it, I sent it to some people to get their feedback. I read it and took my own notes. There was a lot of stuff that I rethought in a pretty fundamental way. So, it wasn’t improvisation in the sense of improvising a piano piece or something. It's not quite like that. It's not like I play these notes and then I play these notes, and I make it up as I go along. I'm responding to things that are happening around me. It was just this continuous churn of shaping. I had a plan, but I didn't feel strongly about it. I felt like if I thought of something I liked better, I would just go in that direction, and I didn't hold myself to the plan. For better or worse, I think it still feels a bit like a patchwork to me. But I think that overall, that approach kept me kind of loose and kept me excited and engaged with it over a long period of time. It led me to a lot of genuine surprises.
Was there a lot of stuff left on the cutting room floor? You said you were going in different directions. Would you follow avenues and then back up?
Or, yeah, about 100 pages went in the trash. I have kind of a simple style; it's not super detailed, it's not super-rendered. And part of the reason that I've been doing that is because I throw so much stuff out. I change so much in the process. It's important for me to feel the freedom to throw anything away if I'm not happy with it or if I think of something better. I don't want to get attached to a drawing in that way. There were definitely drawings I made where I was like, “I love this,” and then they just go in the trash, but it's just part of the process for me.
I saw a post you had on Instagram near the end of 2023. It was captioned “Scenes from around the office” and it showed a bunch of pages pinned to the wall, and then you had another slide that was little scraps of paper that had writing. I couldn't make them out. Were those notes for the book, or are those something else?
I had scenes on slips of paper, and I stuck them to my door, and I would post photos of this as I was going, on Instagram. The slips of paper were the story beats, organized by different sections, and they continued to change significantly as the story went on. In the middle there's an ordered cluster of rows. Those are the stories. Everything around that is stuff that I pulled out, ideas that I had and pulled out. So, you can see there's a lot of stuff that got caught. They say stuff like, “Veronika, Dave and Persephone go to Crispy’s,” or “Veronika starts her new job,” or “Dave in the office.” They're just the broad beats. I studied painting in grad school, and it was always central to me to be able to put stuff up on the wall in my studio and just live with it for a long time. To hang out with it, and see it, and pace around. It's a way for me to do that where it's up on the wall, it's always there, and I can spend time with it in a way where I feel like I'm looking at the whole book in its totality. I can see how act two feels in proportion to act three or act one. I can say, “Okay, this actually needs to be split into three chunks, and the beats land here, here and here.” I had it up on my wall, and I would spend a lot of evenings just standing in front of it or pacing around with a beer and music on, just… Contemplating it, I suppose. But yeah, that was really the only outline that I was working with, those little slips of paper on my door.
When you hung the art up on your wall, did you do that in sections? Because this thing's over 700 pages…
Oh, yeah. In the picture that I shared, the top row is the sequence where they've just left Crispy’s, and Veronika goes up to Persephone’s apartment. If you look closely at it you can see I haven't even finished those pages yet. I had inked them and scanned them and then printed them out and taped them to the wall. There's a ton of notes on there, and it's a lot of notes about the acting, the body language, the motivation. It's not necessarily dialogue or anything, but it's like directing, almost. The lower section is the scene where she meets the weird undersea monster-thing. When I said I threw out 100 pages of material, probably at least 50 of it was from that scene. I thought that I knew what was going into it, and I tried a lot of different things before I felt like I had gotten it sort of making sense. Towards the end of the process, I printed out all of the pages and then sliced them in half so that I could move them around. And I had other strips of paper, and I would write out the beats that I needed to patch in. I tried a lot of things with that scene before I was happy with it.
When I talked to you last time, you said “When I edit, I rarely remove things, I mostly just add things. I'll read through something and find that it feels a little hurried to me. A lot of times I'll add pages, or I'll split a page in half and then add stuff between that and then fuse it back together, you know? I'm usually just kind of stretching the time.” It sounds like you were doing the same thing, but this time you weren't just adding.
I definitely still do that, the stretching. I'll write the scene and draw it and it'll land where I want it to land, but it'll feel a little too rushed, and I'll want to pace it out a little more. I've never thrown away as much material as I did this time. I think at the time what I said was true, but that's no longer true.
I felt like this book really breathed. The pacing was deliberate, nothing was rushed. Even in the introduction sequence, you really linger on these quiet, wordless pages before you get into Veronika’s voiceover. The Lonesome Era was over 400 pages, and this book is over 700. Did you know that you wanted this book to be this big when you started out, or did it just grow on you?
I did. I used to self-publish individual issues of Ohio Is For Sale, and the first five of those issues got collected into the book published by Alternative Comics. That was really just me reliving my early 20s, me and my goofy friends in the suburbs. It's the very standard suburban-losers-on-the-couch kind of comics, right? In issue five, the gang has a big party. I had drawn Veronika as a background character, and she has a couple of lines. I liked the design of the character, and she seemed interesting. So, in issue six, I wanted to draw an office. I'm a big David Foster Wallace guy. I don't know if The Pale King was out yet, but all of that boring institutional stuff, I really like. I wanted to do a comic about an office, and so I did this 50 page comic, and I put Veronica in it, in an office. And Dave is there and Jim is there, these proto-versions of themselves. And, yeah, I really liked that.
Veronika is in an office, and she keeps falling asleep at her desk and having this dream of wandering through this labyrinth. The labyrinth is filling up with this black water. I had the cubicles in the labyrinth in these overhead shots. But I don't know… I really liked it. And then in issue seven, there was a subplot where this character is going into the basement of the VFW, and he goes into this weird little office, and there's this guy behind the office who gives him this drug and he trips out. The guy behind the office is Jake, the guy with the goggles in The Well. I printed a few copies of those and never reprinted them, but I really liked both of those stories, because it felt like I was really expanding the universe. I wanted to go back into those stories and unpack them. “Okay, I have Veronika in an office, and I have like this guy with the goggles selling drugs or whatever, and what happens if I just smash them together? What can I do with that?” I was really excited about the possibilities of that.
By that point, I had read The Pale King a couple of times, and Infinite Jest. I love the feeling of being inside of a story for a long time where you're not really trying to get anywhere, you're just kind of in it. There's something about The Pale King where he can write about something crushingly boring, but it sparkles with this aliveness. I wanted to do something like that. I wanted it to be very slow and very open and meandering. I kind of wanted… I don't know, my mind is going in a couple different directions. I really like institutions, the feeling of being inside a place, a structured, ordered place, and exploring within that. I loved the idea of putting this character in this big, sort of mysterious institutional space, and weaving through it and opening doors, and just discovering secrets. I felt like personally, I wanted to stay there for a long time. I just wanted to stay inside of this book for a long time. I also wanted to make it entertaining enough that somebody else would hopefully want to stay there for a while, too. I forget what the question was.
Me, too. We were talking about it being such a big book.
Oh, yeah, that's why: I didn't want to leave it. Even from the outset, I wanted to be in this book for a while.
Yeah, it's very ambitious. Each of your books have a different protagonist. You have a cast of characters in the universe and they overlap or they'll be in the background of each other’s stories. You said that you had these two characters that you wanted to smash them together and see what happened. This was clearly the “Veronika” book. Has that been the same process with the other books, where you think,“Oh, I want to follow this guy around for a little bit?”
Not exactly. With The Well, I really started from a character and an environment and a feeling, and I had to build the story around that, which I know they say is not what you're supposed to do. I think part of the reason why I had so much trouble with it is I was doing things in the wrong order. But I tried to land the plane as best I could. Usually, I'll start with a scene or a feeling. There's always one little thing that I want to build a book around.
This book starts off with the same vibe as your other books, but it ends up being a lot different from the rest of your work. I don't want to have any spoilers here, but you went in kind of a fantastical direction. Was that something you found your way to, or is this something you always wanted to work towards?
That character Jake, the guy with the goggles, he's kind of been around in the universe for a while. I've actually written him into every story and I end up taking him out. I don't know, sci-fi isn't quite the right word. Magical Realism sounds like such a precious phrase to me. It doesn't describe what I had in my mind. A lot of weird, fantastical shit went into The Lonesome Era in drafts, where I thought I might go with it as a way to structure the story. The same with Julian in Purgatory, there's an episode where one of the characters dies and goes to hell and there's this Devil character. And I really liked the Devil character. There was a whole aspect of that book where the devil came back, and it really got kind of out there. There was a lot of mystical stuff, and I cut it all. It was a useful framework for me to shape the story and build a foundation for it. But once I had that, I pulled all of the fantastical stuff out. Basically, he comes in at the end for a little bit.
I read a lot of sci-fi. I really love science fiction. There's a lot of weird stuff and surreal stuff in my books, but I kept finding myself putting in these more fantastical, sci-fi things, and always pulling them out. Every time I did that, I knew it was the right decision. The books were stronger for having cut that stuff, but with The Well, I really just wanted to force myself to stick with it. “I'm going to make this work. I'm gonna keep it in there, and I'm not gonna cut it, and I'll build a story around it.” Without it, it would have been a story about people and feelings and the movement of relationships. And it could have been a better book… I don't know. But I was more interested in making something messy and chaotic and trying to hold it all together than I was in making something clean. I wanted it to be a mess, I was gonna try my best to hold it all together, but if it fell apart, that was fine, too.
You have this shared universe without a “main character.” Do you think that not having a main character has hurt you with readers, or do you not give a shit?
I don't. Yeah, I don't, if that's my problem. I don't care. If anything hurts me, I think it's that my books present as being for a younger audience than they actually are. Again, there are certain conditions that I need to set up for myself in order to feel free as a writer. I need to feel like I can throw anything away and not worry about it, and I also need the characters to feel right to me. I've been drawing some of these characters since I was in high school. It's just naturally what comes out of my brain and my hand when I draw characters. How it reads to another person, I don't know. I can't control that. So, yeah, I think that they present as being for a younger audience than I'm intending, but at the same time, I'm not really intending them for any particular audience.
Another condition of freedom that I set for myself is… You know, people will write a pitch for a book and try to sell it. And if they sell it, they'll make the book; and if they don't sell it, they won't make the book. They'll write a new pitch and try to sell something else. I don't think about it like that. I have to start every project with a full and honest acceptance that it will go nowhere. It will go unpublished, unread, and wind up in a box under my bed. If I can't accept that as a likely scenario, as a foundational condition of the work, I can't be free in the work. When I was starting Veronika (The Well), I had put a year into writing it, and the response on Instagram was really encouraging. Pretty quickly, people seem to grab onto it. I realized, “Okay, this isn't just gonna go away, somebody is gonna end up reading this at some point.” But I really needed to let it be whatever it wanted to be, and not impose a lot of conditions.
I think that the way that I draw maybe doesn't perfectly align with the material, or maybe you expect something different than what you get. Somebody who might like the story might see the art and say, “Oh, this isn't my kind of book,” or whatever. I mean, that's all fine. People will either read it or not; the part of it that I care about is sitting at my desk and doing the work. Anything that happens on top of that is a bonus, I suppose. That being said, I do like the thing that you can do in comics, where it can present as one thing but then when you engage with it, it reveals itself to be something else. I feel like you can control that in interesting ways. This isn’t a comic book, but the emblematic cultural object that does that for me is the first Talking Heads record, where it presents these very buoyant, bubbly pop songs, and the lyrics themselves are even very upbeat. But the more time you spend with it, there's this undercurrent of real tension and paranoia and darkness that comes up through the surface. And I really like that.
Do you have a master plan for these characters or this world? Do you think about the future of the world you’ve created?
I do. I'm working on a new book now. I've been writing for a while and I keep thinking that I have it, and then it falls apart on me. So, I haven't really started drawing it yet, but it will not be set in this universe. It'll be completely different characters. I think I'm looking to take a break from Ohio Is For Sale for a bit, but I do think I want to do at least one more book. I want to do something big and just pull everyone together. In my mind, the main character is Patrick, from Twelve Miles From Akron. He hasn't really had an appearance in a while. The core of it, in my mind, is Patrick because he's the closest to an avatar for me in the universe. He's a writer. He's miserable. I want to do another long story with him, if not as the focal point, at least as the perspective character.
Will you draw in your usual style for your next book? Are you looking to do something different, visually?
I want to do color. I was talking to one of the guys from Top Shelf at MoCCA about color comics. We were talking about how color is a real generational thing. The cartoonists that I grew up looking at, they all printed in black and white, because it was too expensive to print your own stuff in color. So, I came up working in black and white, because the idea of self-publishing a full book in color seemed impossible to me. But now that so much stuff is online, you don't need to worry about printing costs anymore. Or if you do, as I understand it, it's a lot cheaper to print in color than it used to be, it's a lot more attainable.
I feel like I'm behind the times on this, but I really like working in color. Like I said, I used to paint, and my paintings had a lot of big, bold color shapes in them. So, I want to do it in color. Also, this is boring, but the brush that I've been drawing with for 20 years was a Loew Cornell brush and they don't make them anymore. Loew Cornell was acquired by a company called KingArt. If you go to their website, they say they're still making the Loew Cornell brushes. “It's the same brush. It's just a different name on it.” But they're clearly not the same brush. It does not behave in the way that the old one used to. I think I bought every remaining copy of this brush on Earth. I bought some from a store in Australia, and ran them into the ground while finishing the book, so I don't have any of these brushes anymore. I've tried a bunch of other brushes and I have not found anything that I like. I really like fat-tipped Micron pens and Staedtler pens. That's usually what I use to draw in my sketchbook. But drawing a long book using those, I know that I would be generating a huge amount of plastic trash, which makes me very unhappy. I bought a bunch of old rapidographs, and I've been working with those and getting used to drawing with them.
So yeah, basically the same style of characters, the same basic approach to blocking and line work and all that. I want to work in color, and it'll be like a different kind of line. Nobody will care except me. But these are the things that keep you up at night.
Will you have anthropomorphic characters?
Yeah, yeah. It'll be more sci-fi, though, a full sci-fi thing.
Well, what are your hopes for this new book? Or is that something that you think about?
When you asked that, my mind went to “one-hand clapping.” No, no hopes. I'm very happy that it's done and I have it to hold and flip through. Just having the object is, was, the goal. Everything that happens after that, I don't know.
Has Top Shelf communicated any expectations to you?
I'm going to TCAF with them. I'll be doing a bunch of shows this year, so there will be events. They made a little animated trailer for The Well, which was extremely exciting for me. We're doing a book release party soon in Brooklyn. I mean, long term, it's a book. People put it on their shelf and they read it, or they don't.
Did you have any involvement with that animated trailer?
No, it was a total surprise. They posted a short version of it on Instagram a day or two ago, but there's a full minute-long version that I think they're gonna post closer to the release date. I was so happy to see that. One thing about the way that I draw is that I do kind of imagine it as a little cartoon show. A lot of the influence on how I draw and how I think about a page is from Rocko's Modern Life and stuff like that. It's always been a dream to see it animated. So, yeah, I was very tickled by that.
Have you ever had any interest from anyone wanting to option your work?
I had one awkward meeting with a studio where there was a total misalignment of expectations.
I guess I'll end with this. You've been working with these characters, in this world, for about 12 years. Five books, plus a few random issues that haven't been collected. A lot of pages. I didn't do the math, but it’s probably well over 1,500 pages. Have you thought at all about your accomplishment? Or do you even think about this stuff in that way?
I mean, I think about work all the time... I don't know, it doesn't feel like an accomplishment to me. It feels like a weird thing that I feel compelled to do, that I'm mildly embarrassed about.
Well, I hope that's a healthy way to look at it.
It’s not. (Laughter)
I'm very curious to see what you do next. Whatever it is, I'm very interested.
Yeah, me too. Me too.
English (US) · 