Raya Golden and George R.R. Martin on the origin and future of their Voyaging graphic novels (Exclusive)

Editor's note: this article contains mild spoilers for the graphic novel Voyaging, Volume One: The Plague Star.

Last month, the 82nd annual World Science Fiction Convention — Worldcon — took place in Glasgow, Scotland. In addition to hosting the Hugo Awards every year, Worldcon serves as an important meeting place for fantasy and sci-fi creatives and fans, somewhere they can come together to honor the stories they love. I was at this year's Worldcon and had the great fortune of getting to interview George R.R. Martin about his long writing career and history with fandom.

I also had the opportunity to speak with Martin's longtime collaborator and minion, artist Raya Golden. Golden has worked with Martin for years, both as the art director of his Fevre River Packet Company as well as on several graphic novel adaptations of his works. The latest collaboration between Golden and Martin is Voyaging, the first volume of which adapts his 1986 novella The Plague Star. This story serves as the introduction to the androgynous space captain Haviland Tuf, explaining how he came to pilot a powerful ship populated by a bunch of cats. During the 1970s and '80s, Martin wrote a number of shorter works about Tuf's adventures, which were later collected into the fix-up novel Tuf Voyaging.

Since I enjoyed the first volume of Voyaging, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to speak with Golden and Martin about how this adaption came about...and their hopes for its future.

The road from Meathouse Man to Voyaging

Voyaging isn't the first graphic novel Martin and Golden have done together. Unlike many of the other graphic novels which have cropped up based on the author's works, Golden's projects tend to focus on lesser known or previously unreleased material. Their first collaboration was Meathouse Man, based on a short story Martin wrote in 1976. After that, Golden tackled Starport, based on a television pilot Martin penned for Fox back when he was working in TV which the network ultimately decided not to pursue.

However, Tuf Voyaging was the George R.R. Martin work that Golden had her eye on adapting right from the start. "I read Tuf and was like, 'That's the one I wanna do,'" Golden recalls. Haviland Tuf was a popular character of Martin's in the early days of his career, but at this point he's been far overshadowed by the denizens of Westeros. But Tuf still has his fans, and Golden is staunchly among them. "It's the quality of the character, not necessarily what's most popular," she says.

Unfortunately, when she first set her heart on adapting Tuf Voyaging, Martin no longer held the graphic novel adaptation rights. Instead, he suggested Golden adapt another story: Meathouse Man. "He was like, 'You can't [do Tuf]...but you like zombies, why don't you do Meathouse Man?''" Golden gives me a long stare. "Have you read Meathouse Man?"

Yes, I have read it, and I understand the look. It is one of Martin's darkest, bleakest, most infamously messed up stories, about a corpse-handler searching for love and meaning on a grim collection of worlds where re-animated human corpses are used for everything from manual labor in horrible conditions to corpse brothels — the titular "meathouses."

"Yeah, corpse-fucking and everything...like, that was my first comic book," Golden says. "But it was actually a blessing. After doing it all myself, the inking, the penciling the text layout and adaptation, I was completely exhausted. It took me a year to do 36 pages, and as a traditional illustrator I got a little too in depth in the panels, which can ultimately be a little distracting, right? Because a good comic should have its detailed splashes, but you can’t get stuck up on any one panel or you’ll ruin the flow of the sequential art.”

Meathouse Man was well-received, earning Golden and Martin a nomination for the Hugo Award in 2014 for Best Graphic Story. It was also an immense learning experience, and affected the way Golden worked on future books — namely, that she didn't go it completely alone so that the workload was more manageable.

"Now, after Starport, I always work with a colorist," she explains. "And if I can move forward [with Voyaging] my ultimate goal is to not only write new stories but work in tandem with other artists, so every time we see Tuf in a new world it’s like we see him through a whole new perspective. The one thing that will stay the same is the ship, Tuf, and his cats, but every other aspect will be wildly different, a whole rich new world with its own sense of expression and human culture.”

Combining forces with other artists would have a strong impact not only on the storytelling, but the manufacturing of the books as well. Golden notes that this method would allow her to "get them out faster, and get more stories into it."

Why Voyaging was renamed from the original book, Tuf Voyaging

One thing you may have noticed about this graphic novel is a slight change in the title: Martin's original fix-up book was called Tuf Voyaging, but the graphic novel leaves off Tuf's name. That might seem like a relatively minor change on the surface, but it wasn't one that Golden or publisher Ten Speed Graphic came to lightly. The Plague Star is essentially a survival story on an abandoned ship where a ragtag crew of mercenaries are slowly picked off one by one. Golden felt strongly that it was important to not telegraph Tuf's name up front, because it would make it far too obvious for new readers that he would survive to the end.

Instead, the first volume of Voyaging ends with the line: "the forever voyaging Haviland Tuf," which didn't appear in the original novella, as a way to set up the broader story of Tuf's adventures with his ship full of cats. Golden says she "added that in specifically because I had to fight to take Tuf's name off of the initial thing."

"The first story [George R.R. Martin] wrote was A Beast for Norn, that's set in the middle of everything," she continues. "And then he wrote all these other stories on either side of it, so it ends up being very episodic without ever really knowing where Tuf is going to show up in his own timeline. He then wrote The Plague Star as a way to tie all the stories together and give Tuf an origin story. So he wrote it specially for the Tuf compendium novel of all his disparate short stories, titled Tuf Voyaging. And I fought hard to keep Tuf's name off of the title because I wanted people to be surprised when being introduced to Voyaging that Tuf is the hero in the end. And for those of us who are already fans, I felt it could be a sort of 'Red Wedding' moment when introducing him and Voyaging to new readers unfamiliar with Tuf, who won’t know with this first story that he will end up being our Indiana Jones in the end.”

Will there be more volumes of Voyaging?

If you're like me and you enjoyed the first volume of Voyaging, then it begets an obvious question: will there be more? Golden has a clear vision for what she'd like to do with further graphic novel adventures for Haviland Tuf. But as of this writing, it's still not certain whether we'll get to see the rest of Tuf Voyaging adapted into comics.

"Like anything, it all depends on the publishers, and you know, how well did the first one sell? And will their bean counters count the right number of beans and say, 'yes, we want to do another one,'" Martin explains. "I would love to see more of it, I mean I thought the first one turned out great. I always liked Tuf. Mind you, I meant to write more Tuf stories, but somehow I haven't gotten around to it in my copious spare time. But I have like, [more ideas] for Tuf stories written...Tuf Voyaging is a collection of like eight stories that I wrote for Tuf over the years, including Plague Star, [which] is the origin story and the longest development. It's only one of them."

"The stories that I have in mind for writing are based upon your notes and stuff, they're not out of the thin air," Golden adds. "Every other volume would actually feature two stories. So because The Plague Star was so long, every other volume would be either one of the published stories and a new story, or the other like long-standing story, which is Manna From Heaven with the S'uthlamese. Which I probably would do still broken up...because it gives time between [the other stories]."

With more Tuf adventures yet to be adapted, including some based on notes Martin has for unreleased stories, the future for Haviland Tuf seems bright. We'll still be waiting some time until we know for certain whether sequels will happen, but after hearing more about what Golden has in mind for them, I know I want to read them. Hopefully those beans are counted to just the right amount, and Tuf and his ship full of cats soar onto shelves again in the near future.

In the meantime, Voyaging, Volume One: The Plague Star is available now — you can even get signed copies of it, as well as Meathouse Man, from Martin's Santa Fe-based indie bookstore, Beastly Books. And if you're curious about where it all started, you can always check out Martin's book Tuf Voyaging as well.

Our full interview with George R.R. Martin and Raya Golden from Glasgow Worldcon is now live! Read it here:

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