There’s nothing like working with a true legend. And when you’re reinterpreting that legend’s work into a new medium…well, you’d better do it right.

That’s just what writer Joshua Dysart did with Greendale, his graphic-novel take on Neil Young’s album of the same name, which has also been reimagined as a movie and a book. So Dysart is certainly in good company. But his graphic novel, with artist Cliff Chiang, extraordinarily brings to life this magical story about good vs. evil and the quest of a young woman to understand both her own nature and the nature of the world around her.
 
We talked to Dysart about the creation of the book and how it all came together.
 

 
 
When did you first hear the album Greendale?
 
When it first came out. I’m a pretty big music fan and I investigate as much new music as I can. Of course, when Neil Young puts out an album, I always know about it. Admittedly, I didn’t actually buy the album until 2006, though.
 
 
How did you use both the album and the film versions of Greendale as a basis when you were working on the graphic-novel version?
 
The album had a large impact on our graphic novel, obviously, but the film not so much. Actually, it’s the Greendale art book where I found a lot of the narrative points, such as the supernatural relationship between the Green Women and nature. That’s all in there.
 
What was Neil Young’s involvement in the project?
 
He green-lit my take on it and then, throughout the writing and art process, at various stages, he gave notes and okayed our direction and execution. I spoke with him several times in person just to get a feel for what he wanted and to see which of my ideas most excited him. You could call him the creative director of the piece.
 
The story takes place in 2003—which seems worlds away socially and politically from where we are now as a country. How did you get back into the mindset of that time period and the political fracturing that was going on as a result of the beginning of the Iraq war?
 
I was heavily involved in the political opposition to the Iraq war. I helped organize protests, was struck violently by LAPD mounted on horses during a peaceful occupation of Western Ave. and Hollywood Blvd., and even wrote a document in conjunction with the Lawyer’s Guild of America on how to be arrested for Civil Disobedience at political rallies with as few legal ramifications as possible. So it wasn’t hard for me to project back to all of that. At the same time, I didn’t want to create a politically shrill piece. So it helped that I had a little distance on it all. I was also concerned about the relevance of the work. So I tried to keep the language more poetic and less specific, in the hope that it would speak to the greater arc of human politics and not just to the period in which the book takes place.
 
 
How did you and Cliff Chiang meet and begin working together?
 
Through Karen Berger, the editor on the book. Cliff was an early choice for both Karen and I when we started casting about for an artist. Unfortunately, he turned us down at first (for very pragmatic reasons). It wasn’t until Neil himself started courting Cliff that we got him. He’s amazing, isn’t he?
 
 
He definitely is. What is the message of Greendale, first as an album and now as a story?
 
I’m not here to speak about Neil’s album. That work belongs solely to him and Crazy Horse. But the book is about a lot of things. Family, small town America, the female as the center for communal healing and emotional strength. But most of all, it’s an allegorical fable about our integration with nature. It wants to break the idea that we are somehow separate aspects of this planet, because what we do to it, we do to ourselves.
 
 
The stranger who appears midway through the story and causes so much trouble for Sun—whose idea was it to make him appear like Neil Young?
 
That was mine. I don’t have a great reason for it. It just seemed to ring with a subtle irony that made me happy.
 
 
The politics of Greendale are entirely current and topical, even though it’s set in 2003. Does that speak to how little we’ve come even after seven years of being at war?
 
Well, as I said, we did work hard to keep the book relevant and I do think that our relationship with Gulf War II and Afghanistan is different than it was seven years ago, but still, we are hopelessly addicted to oil. That hasn’t changed. And we’re now experiencing a full-fledged eco-disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, yet there is still no epic do-or-die response in this country toward alternative energy tech research. No “we will go to the moon!” speech from Obama. Afghanistan is turning ugly. We continue to pour more and more money into a war machine that is ill equipped to overcome the new, nonlocalized, scoot and shoot enemy America and the world face, yet we slash education and profoundly undermine our future as a nation. We continue to undercut the communal need in favor of individual greed despite a massive economic collapse built, in part, on the hubris and slight of hand of a few unregulated institutions. All and all, despite some subtle shifts, we continue our divergent gallop from the critical path.
 
One topic raised quite often throughout the book is the question of drilling for oil in Alaska, a hot button that got even more controversial during the 2008 election and even more so now in light of the Gulf oil spill. What made it one of the biggest issues addressed in Greendale?
 
Well, that’s a question for Neil, as it’s a major part of the Greendale album. As you said, it was a huge part of the political landscape in 2003.
 
What are you working on next?
 
I’m finishing up my run Unknown Soldier, which is my four-graphic-novel series about East African politics and the child soldiers behind the Lord’s Resistance Army. And then we’ll see. I’ve got lots of prospects, but nothing I can mention just yet. I’m very seriously thinking about dedicating the next few years of my creative life to science fiction. I like the idea of that and I’ve been a fan of it for a long time. But, you know, I’m obviously mostly engaged with the world we occupy right here and now as well as the people in it, so don’t expect my sci-fi to be escapism.