Office Hours! What's your dream IP project?

Welcome to this new, hopefully regular way for me to attempt to organize all the questions folks might ask about me or my work. I'll do my best to answer them, and I have a healthy backlog of these to get through!

Onto our first question.

No holds barred, no IP or people off-limit: You can do a graphic novel adaptation of anything (or anyone's life story). What (or who) are you choosing?

Ooh! I love this question. Thank you so much for asking it. I think, in terms of someone’s life story, I’d love to do a period piece about Anita Loos, the screenwriter and novelist who wrote Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and its follow-up But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes.

In the middle of the 20th century, in a press interview presumably for the publicity cycle of her book’s movie musical adaptation starring Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe, Loos joked that she would follow up But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes with “Gentlemen Prefer Gentlemen,” at which point the host abruptly ended the interview. She seems rad. I’m starting to read her autobiography now, A Girl Like I. 

The original Gentlemen Prefer Blondes novel, first published in 1925, is illustrated by Ralph Barton, a fantastic Jazz Age illustrator who died far too young. His illustrations look almost totally contemporary—cartoonish, elegant, design-forward, and expressive. I love looking at these pictures. 

As far as IP goes, I’m also not totally sure if I’m supposed to say, but I was approached by an editor to gauge my interest in doing a Scarlet Witch middle grade graphic novel (I did not have to sign an NDA, so I'm sure it's fine). I have a lot of opinions about Wanda, and she’s one of my absolute favorite characters. I also find that I dislike most of the comic stories she’s been in, and my take on it is that Wanda Maximoff (1964), like Jean Grey (1963), was invented at a time when American popular culture started to interpret the goings-on within the sciences interested in the study of the mind. Hot off the heels of the cognitive revolution, the ascendency of second-wave feminism, and a lot of pretty contentious changes in the fields concerning mental health and illness (the APA still considered gayness to be a mental disorder, and activists were challenging this more openly at the time), I consider Wanda and Jean to be of apiece with this whole burgeoning pop cultural interest in psychedelia as filtered through science fiction.

With that in mind, I wanted to write and draw a book about an alternate universe Wanda in middle school having to navigate the quagmire of pediatric mental health services through the American public school system on top of figuring out her reality-warping powers. Like, what would the challenge of developing the tools for self-affirmation look like for a middle school girl who can change reality at will or by accident? How can she figure out and center what’s real or not if reality itself is literally malleable around her? How would she confront the emotional and physical gauntlet of being a tween when a mental health spiral could upend the fabric of the universe? That sort of thing. The whole arc of it was inspired by seeing how difficult it was for my little niece, who has similar brain issues to me, and her mother try to get adequate mental health support services for her in school, even with an IEP. It's a doozy of a process!

Anyway, the timing just didn’t work out. I’m just too tied up in projects I’m excited about at the moment, which is such a nice problem to have, honestly! 

Thanks so much for your question!

If you have any Office Hours questions for me, feel free to drop them here anonymously or through my website contact form.