When comics creator Johnnie Christmas released his first book for young readers, Swim Team (HarperAlley, 2022), he went beyond a simple sports story to explore Black America’s fraught history with swimming. In Gamerville (HarperAlley, July 16), his second middle-grade graphic novel, he flexes those same muscles to deliver a multilayered narrative that’s really several stories at once.

Max’s favorite place is Calamity Bay, the world in his favorite video game. He’s just qualified for the semifinals of the Gamerville tournament when he gets the worst news ever: His parents have signed him up for a technology-free summer at Camp Reset. There’s no getting out of it, but as Max’s story intersects with that of other Camp Reset members, he uses the skills he has—and some new ones he’s picked up—to do the thing he feels born to do.

For Christmas, this isn’t a story that debates the merits of video games versus the outdoors; instead, he’s interested in the ways people connect to each other, and how their environment affects these connections. He spoke with Kirkus via Zoom from Miami Beach, where he was in residence at the Betsy Writer’s Room in late May. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

First things first: Were you a camp kid or a video game kid?

I was a video game kid. I played a lot of the Zelda games, Mario games. I loved expansive adventure-action games. Sometimes the shooter games or Grand Theft Auto, games where there’s a nice story arc with action and adventure. Now I’m playing mostly word games, like Wordle and Connections.

You essentially had to create two games for Gamerville. You made the world of Max’s favorite game, Lone Wolf of Calamity Bay, but Camp Reset is also laid out like a video game. Can you talk about designing these two different landscapes and how they influenced each other?

It’s actually four different interconnected worlds. There’s Max’s normal life and his hopes and aspirations, the world of the video game (Lone Wolf of Calamity Bay), and the world of Camp Reset—and there’s also the world of the tournament and its heightened reality. They all had to respond to the others in some kind of way. It was a fun, creative challenge.

Calamity Bay is a completely technological unreality, but Camp Reset is another kind of unreality—of a past world completely outside of technology. I love playing with the juxtaposition between those two, and with the ways the denizens of each are completely committed to their particular worlds. And of course, Max is trying to figure out his place in both.

Video games can be very polarizing for adults. I loved seeing Max’s mom worry about the impact on Max’s attention span, social life, and health, but not realizing how her worries could have the same effect. Tell us about walking that line.

I didn’t want a book that denigrated video games, because they’re fun and they’re enjoyable. You can learn a lot of lessons from them, and they have great narrative value.

I wanted to say that [the most important thing is] the relationships we have, even in the video game world: between the characters, between Max and his screen, and [between Max and] his would-be coaches. We’re all looking for something. I wanted the video game world, as well as the camp world, as well as the school world and the family-life world, to be metaphors for what we’re all looking for—which is ultimately connection. And that’s what the book is about: digital connection. Connecting to the game, but also connecting to each other.

Something that really interests me is the way you handle the nature of bullying. With the character of Dylan, a reformed bully trying to make amends, you show how bullies often make more bullies, and you’ve also created empathetic characters on all sides.

When you put on a mask, you take on a persona. It’s a very powerful thing. Our online world is this relatively new culture that we’re all forming in real time, and within this new culture, we’re trying to figure out what we are.

In the book, Dylan puts on this mask and realizes that he’s actually starting to become this thing. What do you do with that person when you encounter them? You have to reconcile what we do with these people. And I don’t have any answers. I wanted to have the characters figure it out. The readers of Gamerville and all our young people are the folks who will be making these decisions for us. They’re the people who are forming this culture; they’re native to it.

Gamerville isn’t about systemic racism in the same way that Swim Team was, but there are so few books about children of color, especially Black kids, in the natural world. In that way, this is kind of groundbreaking.

Stories with Black kids often use words like asphalt and concrete and urban—unnatural, man-made elements, and racism is an unnatural, man-made structure. It really bothers me, and I try to think about how we can separate our inherent humanity from these structures.

There are islands off the coast of Vancouver, where I live, called the Gulf Islands. I spent most of my childhood growing up in cities, so the first winter I was there, I started realizing that my relationship to the natural world was mine. A lot of the time, stories about Black children are about them being removed into the natural world, plugged into this artificial system. [Those experiences] helped my thoughts on Gamerville quite a bit: Max’s relationship to the natural world is something that’s his. He has guides and these wonderful friends he makes along the way, but he’s going to be developing [that relationship for] himself for his entire life.

It was very important to me that the camp be Black-owned for generations; these kids weren’t being plugged into another system, another middleman. I wanted it to be a Black military officer who’d found the natural world on his own and created it for all these campers.

Max avoids the entire underground level in Calamity Bay. When he reaches Camp Reset, he’s frightened by the cave system near the camp. Tell us more about illustrating this fear.

I was thinking about how to visually show isolation, and how lost one can be in isolation. Caves are dark, cavernous. You could be lost down there forever if you’re not able to find your way back. The beauty of graphic novels is that we can visually display things. You can just show something, and people can feel it in their own way. People create their own language inside. So the cave was a very important part of my showing Max’s journey from darkness, loneliness, and isolation to connectivity and light.

What was your favorite part about creating this book?

The worldbuilding was almost like designing a video game, but for a graphic novel. The hard work, the discipline, came in simplifying it. The inception part is always the most fun, because you’re just dealing with what ifs. And then the hard part is making everything link together.

In this completely digital video game world, echoes of environmental messages from our actual physical world are baked into this digital, artificial game. If you’re playing along, you can see what’s happening. This artificial world echoes our concerns in the actual world, because if you lose this one, you lose that one, too.

Maggie Reagan is a children’s book editor and reviewer in Chicago.