It's April Already, How Did This Happen
Hello everyone!
Once again, it has been a hot minute. I’m so sorry. It turns out, Emerald City kicked my butt in mostly extremely good ways but also in one odd and annoying way—I developed an isolated dry cough that lasted a month. Mostly I just couldn’t sing to myself in my office for the first few weeks, but I otherwise felt pretty normal.
I’m currently keeping my nose to the grindstone churning out pages of Fairy Hunter, my book with Laurel Snyder. I’ll post some of the inks and eventually the coloring process here. I’m finally comfortable with the inks. The big challenge of this book is that Laurel is a very experience prose writer of children’s books, but she’s still very new at comic scripts. Our beloved editor, Melissa, unfortunately left the project right at the tail end of the writing phase, so our new editor, Emily, inherited the project. Emily rules, by the way.
Anyway, one of the challenges of working with someone newer to writing comics is that much of the script needs continual adaptation. Sometimes the pages work better when they look like an illustrated book page, while others feel more at home looking like a comic. This book has a healthy dose of both, which can be jarring for me, someone who is more accustomed to the trappings of a comic book than an illustrated prose book. Marrying the two in one book will be my big project as the pages come together.
I’m still developing the considerations for the color process. I really want to implement this watercolor style here, in this Vampirella piece I did for fun. Someday, I want to be bolder in using brushes that look like pencils for the line art. I tend to use the more solid, blocky ink lines because so much of the comic book coloring process relies on those hard lines to ease the process of flatting. With lines and textures that feel more naturalistic and do not reliably close their loops around their shapes, I have to take a more painterly approach. I think it’ll take slightly longer, but I like the look of it and want to expand on it.
In other news, I recently got some more information on my book tour this coming fall and winter for Angelica and the Bear Prince. I have not yet seen the fully laid out pages or the cover, but I’m extremely excited about it, and I’ll start yelling about preorders as soon as that happens. I’ll be attending ALA in Pennsylvania, I have a school stop in Illinois, and I’ll be a guest at SLICE in Saint Louis later this year. I’m still very nervous about travel considering All of the Things Happening Right Now, but I’m sure everyone I’m working with will do their best to keep me feeling safe and settled.
The audiobook for The Magic Fish was also released very recently, at the top of the month. You can request it from your local library or get it in your preferred audiobook format. It’s a full-cast production, and I recommend listening to it while flipping along in my copy of the book. They did a brilliant job.
I also popped in on a podcast episode with horror writer Sara Century for her podcast Best Issue Ever, which has been such a balm these past few weeks. The conceit of the podcast is that Sara and guest will pick an issue of any comic that is special to the guest and they gush about the comic and meander on about art and life besides. It was a blast to be on it, and I hope I can do it again in the future. I guess we’re entering an era where I’m also in your earbuds? Exciting! Sara and I talked about this chapter of Oh My Goddess together. I'll drop a link as soon as the episode is posted in a couple weeks.
I was hoping to do an ECCC haul post to show off my other favorite artists, but a lot of my stuff is still in Seattle. They’ll get here eventually!
I also just had a lovely chat with my agent about pitching new projects to Whitney, my editor at Random House Graphic, and I threw like six ideas at her that I want to develop. More on those soon!
My copy of Mike Mignola's book Bowling with Corpses just arrived the other day, and I'm thrilled to dig into the physical version of the book. I think Diamond's recent issues have gummed up the comics distribution pipeline, and nobody's been able to get ahold of this physical books for weeks after its release in January. I've read through the digital copy more times now than I can count. It's a treasure, and I'm so excited to see where it goes.
I also remain very busy (maybe a little too busy, tbh), but I’m finding some time to relax. If anybody’s playing Monster Hunter Wilds, I’d be delighted to pop in and help you flay a giant salmon monster to make a cute top and maybe some shoes.
My little hunter, Vesper, is currently dressed like surly angel, shooting monsters with her bow and chugging healing potions on behalf of her team. I'll keep you alive!
And in some news at home, we got more babies!
Meet the Wilhelminas—Wilma, Billie, and Mina. They're much smaller than our usual chicks since they're bantams, so they will also grow up to be tiny little cartoonishly adorable chickens that move around like muppets.
