Dark Horse’s ‘Soupy Leaves Home’ Abandons The Romantic Hobo View

Jason Borelli writes from his time at New York Comic Con for Bleeding Cool,

During the Great Depression, many destitute souls became hobos. They rode the rails, scrounged for food, and lived day-to-day. While the hobo life was bleak, it has been romanticized for decades.

Soupy Leaves Home follows Pearl, a runaway who cuts her hair, poses as a boy, and falls under the wing of Ramshackle, a wise hobo. Created by Cecil Castellucci and Jose Pimienta, Soupy Leaves Home was released by Dark Horse in April., This is Castellucci’s third full graphic novel, following “The P.L.A.I.N. Janes” books for DC Comics’ defunct Minx imprint. She recently attended New York Comic Con to promote the book.

“I try to listen to the way a story wants to be told,” she said. “My natural way to tell stories is novel-length. Soupy really wanted to be a graphic novel. It didn’t want to be a prose novel. It really didn’t feel like something that should be serialized. It really felt like, as a whole, a graphic novel.”

Castellucci has worked to keep the book as authentic as possible, putting in the signs that hobos would draw to alert their kind, as well as doing research on the culture, with references at the end of the book. It took her eight years to complete it, including a stint writing in a cabin under an art residency. During that time, Castellucci was going through a rough patch in her life, which she worked through as she wrote the book.

“It felt really romantic to me,” she noted, “this idea of hopping trains and leaving my situation. It was a way of writing myself forward out of the darkness.

Soupy Leaves Home is the first collaboration between Castellucci and Jose Pimienta paired together by Dark Horse. Pimienta had done the art for another Depression-era graphic novel – The Leg – with Van Jensen for Top Shelf, which suited Castellucci’s story

“With Jose, I did open script,” she remembered. “I would put in action dialogue, and I would let Jose come up with panel breakdowns. I think that gave Jose a chance to illustrate the fantastical that Ramshackle was seeing in the world. [It was] such a great collaboration between me and him because he was able toplay off my words. Once he did his magic with realism, I was able to eliminate as many of my words so we could have that great silence.”

What does she want people to take away from Soupy Leaves Home? “[That] you can go home, and you can go home on your own terms, and you can be who you want to be in the world.There is a tribe for you. There is a group for you. There are people who will understand and see you for who you are.”

Castellucci remains the writer of Shade the Changing Girl for DC Comics’ Young Animal imprint, and she will be writing a special with Shade and Wonder Woman. Recently, Castellucci and Jim Rugg reacquired the rights to “The P.L.A.I.N. Janes” books. Plans have been made by publisher Little, Brown and Company to reprint the Minx books, as well as a new story, in one volume. The target date for that  book is 2019.