So the plan was to pick up a copy of Shing Yin Khor’s The American Dream? A Journey On Route 66 Discovering Dinosaur Statues, Muffler Men, And The Perfect Breakfast Burrito and read it. Khor’s work, as has been discussed on this page, is powerfully personal; their watercolors are capable of the most delicate filigree and the angriest rage, often simultaneously, and perfectly suit their stories. Plus, this one has at least four of their obsessions in it — dinosaur statues, muffler men, road trips, and a small adventure dog named Bug; it’s been my most-anticipated book of summer.

But it wasn’t in stock at the local bookstore. It wasn’t in stock at any store I could find in the state of New Jersey via Indiebound¹, not in stock at Powell’s, or The Strand, or even Barnes & Noble. At the time I checked, Amazon (who I will not buy anything from as long as an alternative exists) had eleven copies in stock. Eleven. As in, ten plus one, nationwide, on day of release. And none of those we-don’t-have-it-in-stock places would take an order because they couldn’t tell when the backorders would fill.

I mean, I suppose I could have gotten a copy of the e-book, but I believe I’ve made my feelings known on licensed media.

Somewhere between the publisher (Lerner) and the distributor (there’s basically one left, Ingram²), there’s just no copies that have made it to the retail end point — and based on a conversation I had with the publisher’s sales division, it’s probably the distribution end that is slow this time. See, I placed an order with Lerner’s online store (which is really skewed towards schools and libraries from the look of it³) and then called to find out what the ship time would be (answer: probably about ten days, arrgh) and the very pleasant gentleman I spoke to told me we’ve got about 4000 copies in the warehouse, and it’s not like they held onto every copy for themselves.

So as of this writing, if you want to get a copy of TAD?AJOR66DDSMMATPBB, your choice for copies-on-hand are Lerner, maybe Target (if you’re interested in the library binding), or people on Ebay and Amazon’s Marketplace that claim to have single copies (possibly advance review copies) at inflated prices. Oh, and if you’re not opposed to Amazon? Too late. In the time since I started typing, they’re down to nine (9) copies in stock, and by the time you read this they’ll be out. Okay, okay, they’ve probably got the library binding edition. It’s still Amazon.

On the one hand, this is great — people want to read Khor’s work, and when the backlog in the pipeline finally eases, that demand will hopefully be promptly met. On the other hand, my bookselling experience (high school, plus summer breaks through college and grad school) tells me that when a book isn’t available when people want it — and these days, especially for online order — they tend to forget about it. With any luck, readers who are just now learning about Khor’s work will have the patience to make it through this rather distressing hiccup and be amply rewarded when the book comes out.

In the meantime, here’s a couple of teaser pages, and here’s an interview with Khor at The Beat, and you can buy a bunch of Khor’s minicomics here. With any luck, when their next graphic novel releases next year (date TBD), it’ll fare better on the logistics end.

PS: Five copies at Amazon, which is now listing it as #1 New Release in Teen & Young Adult Cultural Heritage Biographies.

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¹ Except — maybe — a Hudson’s newsstand in Newark International Airport, terminal C.

² The comic shop industry could probably have warned the book publishing industry about what having only one distributor means.

³ And which required I open an account to make a purchase which I hate, but not as much as I hate buying from Amazon.

[Editor’s note: Disclaimer time again. The purpose of these recaps is to get at the gist of what was being said and by whom; to the extent that direct quotes occur, they will be italicized. And just because you don’t see somebody’s name doesn’t mean they weren’t in the middle of the conversation; it just means that I need to learn shorthand, or go back to typing these things.]

So you want to get comics into the classroom (which was a recurring theme of the sessions being held at the San Diego Public Library, which is a magnificent facility bee-tee-dubs), so what better way than to be able to have a nearly entirely question-driven session with creators (Jimmy Gownley and James Parks, with Ben Costa in the audience because the table was full), academics (Talia Hurwich and Meryl Jaffe, authors of Worth A Thousand Words), teachers (Derek Heid and Tracy Edmunds), and publishers (Mark Siegel and Gina Gagliano, who was honored by Publishers Weekly today)?

It was rhetorical, but the answer is There is no better way.

The questions from the audience ranged from the purely physical (How do you keep graphic novels from getting shredded in circulation?, a librarian wanted to know) to the application of theory (Teachers wanted to discuss leveling, the process of determining reading level for materials, and why graphic novels are consistently rated too low), with the ever-popular How do you get buy-in from parents/colleagues/administrators? along the way. Let’s take that last one first.

Jaffe admitted that she used to be one of those parents/teachers who thought that graphic novels weren’t useful in the classroom; she credited the kids in her class who did an intervention with me. She noted that because there is so little text on a page, the vocabulary tends to be advanced, with an extremely high incidence of metaphor. Gownley supported this point, noting that the most garbage Marvel superhero comics are written to the same level as the New York Times. Parks added that comics stretch the reading skills further, in that they — uniquely — allow readers to interpret what happens on a page more broadly than other forms of reading.

We noted a couple recaps back that the Common Core standards require students to examine a work classic literature in at least two different media; Heid stressed that to read text only is not teaching to standard, and Edmunds pointed out that graphic novels are specifically listed in those standards as a media type to be used in¹ fifth grade.

Siegel was happy to note that parents are the last pockets of resistance, when they think that their kids are getting short-changed or being given half measures. Librarians (and this is a recurring theme with Siegel over the years) have been ahead of the curve, obtaining and pushing graphic novels².

When there is still resistance in the community, he recommends putting up a display of books with all the shiny awards stickers on the front — the National Book Awards don’t have a category for graphic literature, after all. But, he allowed, it gets a little tiring to keep having the same conversation about format. Gownley had the ultimate solution: These people will get old and die someday.

Heid remarked that teachers are pretty much onboard, since they saw how large the medium (not genre!) is, but is ticked that at education conferences, there’s no panel on Novels In The Classroom. Nobody even thinks to question their inclusion, but somehow the absolute equivalecy of novel:=literature persists to the detriment of other media.

Let’s jump back to the circulation question; the answer was at least partly to adjust expectations. Gagliano pointed out that the typical graphic novel binding will hold up to about 60 circulations, which is as good or better than prose. The librarian admitted that they’re seeing about 75 circulations, so there you go.

Gagliano also mentioned specialty bindings for libraries from outfits like Perma-Bound and Bound To Stay Bound to increase durability (Gownley chimed in that they aren’t as pleasing to read, but they hold up). Siegel noted there’s an increasing number of simultaneous releases of hardcover and softcover, specifically with libraries in mind.

The discussion around leveling fascinated me, because it was clearly of great interest to nearly everybody in the room, but also completely new to me. The discussion began when a teacher said she had no problems with her elementary principal, librarians, fellow teachers, or parents. Her issue was that the district wants comprehension tests after every book, and she needs both documentation that kids aren’t reading below grade level and a mechanism to evaluate how well the students are reading (NB: The teachers and teacher-adjacent in the room would refer to what I saw as two things almost interchangeably).

Edmunds jumped on the leveling issue: the grade level assigned by the most common leveling rules/services does not accurately reflect the complexity of the reading. The levels, and most tests available to teachers, are algorithmically generated and only take into account the text. Gagliano mentioned that publishers are constantly in communication with the test-generation folks to more accurately reflect the material and the leveling.

Gownley almost hopes that a solution isn’t found — when the books are outside the official curriculum, there’s no test, no proofs of proficiency, a slight hint of being forbidden, then reading becomes more fun.

But returning to why there isn’t a leveling tool that incorporates words+pictures, Edmunds explained that it’s difficult to to. Leveling is the province of computers, not humans; Jaffe added that it’s done by people who aren’t in classrooms. Siegel expressed some sympathy for the lack of accurate leveling, in that the entire idea of visual literacy is hazy right now. As noted a few days ago, we’re all just waiting for McCloud to give us the vocabulary to have the conversation that we need to have in order to come to a consensus on this complex and constantly changing landscape.

The last question of the session³ was about how to incorporate graphic novels along with nongraphic novels, rather than instead of. Heid jumped in to say it depends on what you’re teaching, but using both allows all kinds of discussion. For example, To Kill A Mockingbird presents the climactic verdict scene with a focus on Jem, but the graphic novel adaptation shifts it to Tom Robinson, with each Guilty shifting his expression from shock, to horror, to the sure knowledge it was always going to be this way. After your kids have read both, ask them, Why did Harper Lee focus on Jem and the graphic novel focus on Tom?

Jaffe says the contrast between text-only and graphic novels allows you to explore questions with students that you couldn’t otherwise. Contrasting the different formats allows investigation into concepts like How do you communicate? Gagliano focused on the fact that a lot of literature teachers may not have a background/training in art, but they can learn with their students; you can think about why a page was designed the way it way, why the choice was made to use color or B&W, what job each panel has to do. Asking the questions and seeing what answers they come up with will spur a teacher’s own education.

And that education continues: Hurwich is working on her PhD (graphic novels and other media in the classroom and their effect on student literacy) and Heid his Masters (on education standards and how graphic novels fit); Gagliano and Siegel keep seeking out the best books they can, and Parks and Costa keep figuring out how to make their series more entertaining and relevant for kids. None of them will ever stop trying to do more for their students or their readers.

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¹ Or possibly starting in fifth grade, rather than solely fifth grade. My notes got a little rushed, and any teachers familiar with the Common Core are welcome to clarify for us.

² Asked in a follow-up when the librarians started pushing graphic novels, Gownley perkily answered Thursday! to general laughter. Gagliano remarked that the annual YALSA Great Graphic Novels For Teens list started in 2005, which she described as the tipping point. American Born Chinese would be nominated for the National Book Award the next year, and once SMILE took the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award for nonfiction, the momentum was pretty much irreversible. Edmunds half-lamented that it’s almost not possible to keep up with all the good graphic novels being published today.

³ Well, second to last; the last was Where will we see you after this session?, which prompted the best response from Gownley: The Crowne Plaza sushi bar.

Sometimes, panels don’t lend themselves to traditional write-ups (or, at least not write-ups as I do them; everybody’s got their own style, after all), and the preview of all-ages comics from Scholastic/Graphix is a prime example. It wasn’t so much a discussion as an opportunity to talk about what Graphix has coming up in the near future, with creators talking about their current/forthcoming projects. Thus, the disclaimer I normally start with on these panel recaps is missing, since there’s not so much the opportunity to confuse quotes with paraphrases. Okay, there’s one quote coming up, you’ll know it when you see it.

Instead, I’m going to talk about some of the work that was previewed, with little things that caught my eye. For example, Jim Benton is half graphic novelist, half IP licensing machine, and Catwad straddles that line. Benton actually first came up with Catwad years ago, but similarities to a slightly more recent cat with grumpy tendencies¹.

Tui Sutherland talked about the process of adapting her book series, Wings Of Fire (thirteen books and counting!) to graphic novels (third one coming soon). Particularly, she’d like to note that while it’s all very easy to describe an arena full of dragon-type beings as far as the eye can see, it’s quite another to expect Mike Holmes to draw that over and over (Sutherland: Sorry, Mike!). And since I don’t see her credited on the series page (or even on the covers, for goodness sake), I’ll note that the colorist is Maarta Laiho, who has her own challenges — rainforests, chameleonic dragons who change color, leading to completely different colors from panel to panel — and deserves a bit of recognition here.

Jon J Muth’s adaptation of The Seventh Voyage by Stanislaw Lem was included in the giveaway bag at the Scholastic party on Thursday night, so I can tell you that it’s smart, charming, funny, and very, very different from any other graphic novel you’ve read or are going to read this year. Lem’s ability to lambaste Poland’s political institutions and society without running afoul of governmental authorities is legendary, and you’ll see a prime example of his skill as Ijon Tichy struggles to resolve a life-or-death situation despite the interference of a bureaucracy of himself² doing its damndest to prevent anything from actually happening. And the space suit³ is hilarious.

Raina Telgemeier let her audience know that Guts is different than her previous work (her exact words were Wake up, ’cause we’re going to talk about anxiety!), but in a way that let them know that’s okay. That she had a hard time dealing with the stressors in her life at their age, and sometimes still has those feelings, but she got help. And if they feel overwhelmed and anxious, they can get help, too. She’s really our best ambassador to the middle grades, the one that remembers what that time was like and can converse with those who live their in terms of their own experiences. As I told her when I got to read an advance copy back in April, I wanted very much to travel back in time and hug Young Raina and tell her it would be okay.

The only question I noted was when a girl, about ten years old, came to the mic to ask Miss Raina, what happened to Amara’s snake? Readers of Sisters may recall that Raina’s younger sister had a snake who got loose and lost, only to be found six months later under the seats in the minivan (or at least, a snake similar enough to the one that was lost as to make no difference). In the meantime, their mom had gotten Amara another snake and when that one got loose, Raina said I left the house. It was time for college, but the snake was definitely part of the decision. Like I said, she know how to speak Middle Grader.

Release dates:

• Glitch by Sarah Graley is available now
• Guts by Raina Telgemeier releases 17 September
• Sunny Rolls The Dice by Jennifer Holm (words) and Matthew Holm (art) releases 1 October
• The Seventh Voyage by Jon J Muth and Stanislaw Lem (translation by Michael Kandel) releases 1 October
• Wings Of Fire: The Hidden Kingdom by Tui Sutherland, Mike Holmes, and Maarta Laiho releases 15 October

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¹ Who, it could be argued, primarily went viral because of a mash-up with a Kate Beaton punchline. Speaking of Beaton, she’s got a new diary comic up, featuring doggo Agnes with a supporting appearance by daughter Mary Lou. It’s a treat.

² Or, more precisely, himselves, as they are all time-displaced instances of Ijon Tichy thrown together and forced to try and cooperate.

³ Baggy, shapeless, five sizes too large at the very least, stubby-legged, and featuring an umbilical attached in the middle of a buttoned-up buttflap.

[Editor’s note: Once again, there are relatively few direct quotes in these recaps, and those that exist are italicized. As a caveat to the reminder, the latter portion of this post comes from a conversation with Jim Ottaviani, but the paraphrase/quote rule remains in effect.]

That title up there makes me think about Frank Zappa’s Project/Object concept¹, which isn’t really tied into the work being discussed at the moment, but what else are you going to call a panel on making comics with factual bases about actual things? And a fine discussion it was, with Chula Vista librarian Judy Prince-Neeb wrangling Randall Munroe, Don Brown, Rachel Ignotofsky, Jim Ottaviani, and Dylan Meconis holding forth on how they get to the real.

But Gary, I hear you cry, Dylan Meconis works in fiction! True, Grasshopper, she does. But anybody that’s spent any time with her knows that she sweats the details to get a sense of place with the greatest verisimilitude known to humanity. She may have mucked up history into a Mirror Universe version of itself in Queen Of The Sea, but by God she got the goats right! We’ll come back to the goats in a minute.

The idea that factual doesn’t have to equal the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth down to fourteen decimal places was a recurring theme. When asked by Prince-Neeb why they get excited by their work, Brown talked about the thrill of talking about Big Ideas and Moments (say, walking on the gosh-darned moon for the first time) and digging not into the BIaM itself, but the hundreds of thousands of much smaller bits and bobs that built up to it.

What Armstrong did in the roughly half-hour from start of the first lunar EVA until that one small step is exhaustively catalogued; what decisions were made between a design engineer and a lingerie seamstress to figure out how to make Armstrong’s suit? There’s room for interpretation there, a bit of impressionism that make the real moreseo².

For Ignotofsky, reality comes from the places where the hard data fears to tread. She’ll dig through a Census for fun, but when there’s little information committed to the historical record about the accomplishments of women, the indigenous, people of color, the LGTBQ+ community, focusing on those subjects for the benefit of kids means that future generations won’t have to rely as much on anecdotes when looking for people like them. The opportunity to see yourself as part of the world is what excites Ottaviani, that and the realization at a tender age that books are things that are made by people leading to the thought I could — should — make a book.

We’re living in History now is how Meconis puts it (you could hear the capital-H in her voice); the minutiae of our daily lives is future history and significant. How we lived our lives then shaped history. That minutiae lends a sense of reality to even the most fantastical world, making it all the more fascinating to the reader.

Munroe was, as may not surprise you, an outlier: I don’t know why I’m interested in anything, he said. Something catches his fancy, he works back to the science, engineering, and math, takes things to the logical extreme (he often ends up at some variation of Of course, now we’re at about 30% of the speed of light and have killed everybody on the East Coast), with the hope that it may accidentally cause a reader to learn something. Or, as Meconis put it, We’re big on tricking people!

So they all have some reason to share their work, but why pictures? Munroe’s decision is based on efficiency: you can see a big block of text and decide not to read it, but a picture on the page? You’ve already seen it; at least some part of it seeps through³. Ottaviani added that it’s pretty much impossible to stop reading in the middle of a comics page like you can in the middle of a paragraph; additionally, half of Science works from pictures already.

Sometimes, the motivation is elsewhere. Meconis notes that Writing + Drawing is like Juggling + Chainsaws; you can get attention if you’re good at either, but if you combine them, it’s a great way to get attention on the internet as a teenager! [Editor’s note: yikes.]

The bulk of the discussion was on research techniques. Munroe is relentless, digging down into the details of various commissions and committees that exist in the world, because that’s where the weird stuff (like how much water is legally required to pass over Niagara Falls, and how much of an act of war it is to alter it) lives. Ignotofsky haunts libraries and looks for the odd grace notes (like the famed painter in the early 1800s Paris how lived as an out lesbian, and was made to pay for a license to wear trousers; Munroe perked up and desperately wants to know if the office that issued that license issued others).

Meconis is fond of finding the one person that cares about a narrow subject more than anybody else, which is why she spent time on a Geocities site about heritage goat breeds maintained by dissident goat-breeders in remote Scotland. They have opinions on that newcomer Nubian goat, and arguments to back up those opinions. It might not make it to the Annals of the Royal Society, but it’s no less accurate. Plus, fiction! You can pick and choose where you want to be accurate.

Ottaviani is big on the personal interview, but has the advantage of mostly writing about people who are (or were recently) alive, and have/had friends/acquaintances who still are. He particularly noted that you can get a super accurate feel for a person without ever talking to them directly, citing the classic work of New Journalism by Gay Talese, Frank Sinatra Has A Cold (bonus: a pre-famous Harlan Ellison appears and almost gets his ass kicked). Add in a little visual reference (Ignotofsky: Get the photos! Get the clothing right! If you’re going to draw the dog, make you it’s the correct breed!) and you’re golden.

After the panel, I was lucky enough to sit down with Jim Ottaviani for a one-on-one discussion about his work, his artistic partnerships, and what’s next. His latest science bio, Hawking (art by the inimitable Leland Myrick, who also drew Feynman) released about two weeks before SDCC, and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The first point of discussion was about the depiction of Jane, Hawking’s longtime wife, academic partner (when you can’t tie your own shoes, you certainly aren’t typing your own manuscripts), and primary caregiver. They divorced after Hawking became HAWKING, but remained on what I’d call unusually good terms for exes. Throughout the book, Jane is subtly, but progressively, depicted as … frustrated? annoyed? it’s tough to give a single word to the emotional heft in Myrick’s illustrations.

I read it as one part We’ve been married for more than two decades, why can’t you manage this one simple courtesy that’s annoyed me since before we were married and I’ve told you about it forever and MY GOD I hate you sometimes (everybody married more than a week has seen that look on their spouse’s face), one part You’re getting a bit full of yourself, Dr Hawking, and a few dozen parts absolute weariness at being a 24/7 caregiver, requiring ever-more challenging efforts, without so much as an afternoon off in who knows how long.

I think it’s an intimately truthful detail, to allow the great man to not be perfect, and ultimately sympathetic towards Jane, recognizing the tremendous sacrifices she made over decades. Ottaviani said the purpose was to show all of those emotional elements, with an addition of a growing distance between the couple — they had fundamentally incompatible belief systems⁴, exacerbated by his growing fame.

I read the entire later relationship between them as a classic case of being able to love somebody without liking them very much. He allowed that some of the friends of Jane Hawking were concerned about how she would be portrayed — it would be easy to cast her as a villain, abandoning her husband who is bravely clinging to life (not true, and Ottaviani and Myrick aren’t that lazy) — and concluded that he hoped his own friends would be as protective.

Ottaviani’s subjects, as our conversation hit on several times, could be complicated people. Richard Feynman is in a bit of a reappraisal, with people looking past the genius (especially for teaching) and seeing some really retrograde treatment of women for a big chunk of his life. He was also, to put it mildly, his own biggest cheerleader. His stories always make him look good, or smart, or funny, or popular, the center of attention. Hawking, by contrast, never tried to stick out (and I think even less so the more his ALS progressed), but found himself famous. Balancing that reticence with the obvious glee he exhibited while guesting on Star Trek or The Simpsons must have required a considerable effort (not to mention the fact that anybody with a measure of fame will attract cranks⁵).

My most burning question was who Ottaviani wants to cover next. He’s already hit the big name scientists and engineers that people might actually recognize (in addition to Feynman and Hawking, he’s covered Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruteé Galdikas, Turing, Bohr, Oppenheimer and Szilard, and goodly bits of Einstein all throughout), so who next? I made a pitch for Claude Shannon⁶ (because you can never have enough Shannon), and he’s got some potential candidates in mind; it’s more than deciding that a scientist or engineer needs the Ottaviani treatment, it’s finding work that lends itself to visual representation and finding the right artist for the project.

In the meantime, he’s doing a series of two-pagers for the Royal Society Of Chemistry celebrating the Year Of The Periodic Table. Myrick’s got his own projects coming up, so it would be a while before they got to work again. I remarked how Myrick’s style provided a natural transition from depicting people to depicting scientific concepts and diagrams, and that led to a side discussion of art styles ranging from Mike Mignola to the Franco-Belgian ligne claire school. He’s not just writing for comics, he has a deep and abiding love of the form and the artists who make them. Asked who he’d like to work with, he replied Everybody I’ve already worked with, which is a pretty extensive list.

We finished out by making each other extremely envious of the other’s original comic art collection. Ottaviani has several Richard Thompson originals, including one of God bouncing dice off Einstein’s head. I have several Larry Gonick original pages featuring Shannon. In the end, it was a really pleasant conversation between a couple of engineers, talkin’ about comics and fountain pens, the sort that leaves you wrapped up until you have to walk briskly to your next appointment. If you ever have the chance to do the same, I recommend it.

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¹ Key takeaway, and I quote:

In the case of the Project/Object, you may find a little poodle over here, a little blow job over there, etc., etc. I am not obsessed by poodles or blow jobs, however; these words (and others of equal insignificance), along with pictorial images and melodic themes, recur throughout the albums, interviews, films, videos (and this book) for no other reason than to unify the ‘collection.’

² Cf: Kazu Kibuishi’s abstract landscapes, which look more real to us the less detail he adds.

³ Meconis noted the downside: parents can more easily find something to be offended by in a picture than by reading things line by line. This point would be echoed in a couple of the teacher/librarian panels over the course of the Con.

⁴ Jane being rather more a Christian than Stephen, and he being frankly rude as shit in his dismissal of her beliefs.

⁵ I’ve actually met one of Hawking’s cranks and the dude struck me as somebody I should slowly back away from, making no sudden moves. I can’t imagine what dealing with him must be like in a severely limited body.

⁶ Let the record show that he recognized Figure 1 on the cover of my notebook.

[Editor’s note: We begin here our annual recap of various panels at SDCC. I will not be attempting to describe the conversation as it happened, or at least attempting less than in previous years. Rather than typing rapidly on a laptop and trying to capture as close a paraphrase as possible, my work process this year relied on paper note-taking (not to mention a JetPens-fueled fountain pen habit) and so there are relatively few complete quotes in my notes. Where they appear in the text, they will be in italics.]

We are half a year out from Random House Graphic releasing their first books, and the buzz is only growing. Although Gina Gagliano was unable to attend what was essentially her spotlight panel, her senior editor, Whitney Leopard (late of BOOM!) did an admirable job talking to NPR’s Petra Mayer (who also brought us that Dylan Meconis interview on Weekend Edition Sunday) about what RHG wants to accomplish and how they’re going to get there.

Which made this conversation different from any other with a publisher I can recall; RHG is building something from the ground up, and thanks to the tremendous success of imprints like Scholastic Graphix and :01 Books, there’s a bit of established ground that the money folks upstairs can see, a bit of trust earned in the market segment that leads to some room to make decisions. Random House was apparently just looking for the right person to trust, as Leopard recounts it — Gagliano was asked If you could start your own imprint, what would it look like? and had an answer, followed by a job.

But even when you have that trust — and Leopard firmly believes that they do — and have the resources to make the thing you’ve wanted to make — again, Random House is huge, RHG is only four people¹, but they don’t feel they’re lost in the shuffle — there’s still a zillion details you didn’t know you’d need to chime in on. Leopard described coming from a purely editorial role and wondering why she was being asked for input on things like the logo, but ultimately came to the conclusion that it was good to be involved. If you want to make sure that the imprint is going to reflect your vision and values, even the smallest details become crucial.

Which maybe will be reflected, more than anything, in the tagline. RHG will cover every genre², and they need something pithy that will reflect that breadth without being something they’ll be stuck with forever if it turns out bad. And since that vision is to collaborate with creators, to help each one make the best, the most them book that can be, I’m not sure they could have done better than what they chose:

A graphic novel on every bookshelf.

It doesn’t matter where that bookshelf is, or who it belongs to. They will produce something (most likely numerous somethings) that will fit right in there. What Leopard wants, more than anything else, is for somebody to think This is the book I was waiting for.

The waiting won’t be much longer; the first four books already existed (two self-published, two are English presentations of French material) and so could be turned around for release in the January-April 2020 timeframe. Lucy Knisley’s Stepping Stones drops in May, and then it’s a full slate for each season.

For those of you that think you might want to work with RHG, their website is live and they are accepting open submissions … but Leopard warns they’re getting more than 50 a month, so maybe don’t expect the Standard Rich And Famous Contract by the end of the week. Also keep in mind that for now, Young Adult is the highest age bracket that they’re going to be working in. Maybe 19 or 20, but not going to New Adult, as Leopard put it.

A lot of publishers are equating graphic novel with Middle Grade, but kids don’t stay Middle Grade forever; they get older every year. Leopard’s looking for the older version of Dogman, noting YA doesn’t all have to doom and gloom, and then they all died. There’s a desperate need in YA graphic novels — and prose! — for a broader range. She and Gagliano have a vision for the best, broadest range of graphic novels possible. In six months, we get to read them.

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¹ For the moment, at least. They are Gagliano, Leopard, a designer, and their marketing person is wrapping up at DC and starting next month. I am reminded of how much ground :01 broke with four people (Mark Siegel, Callista Brill, Gagliano, and Colleen AF Venable) and how much they accomplished before staffing up. The right four people can move the world.

² Including some nonfiction that sounds unique and fascinating. Leopard mentioned a history of dessert, and a book on modern infrastructure — from the design of cities to the design of the internet — that I really want to get my hands on. The trick in nonfiction graphic novels is finding a way to make them more than just an illustrated textbook.

I almost had a nit to pick with Queen Of The Sea Dylan Meconis’s gorgeous, immersive, engaging, and absorbing alternate history of the disputed succession of the British crown. It’s not the history we know, it’s a different history with the lands of Albion, Gallia, and Ecossia standing in for England, France, and Scotland. King Edmund reigns in Albion rather than Fat Henry; his daughters from various wives include Catherine and the fire-haired Eleanor (taking the place of Mary and Elizabeth), and the order of nuns¹ that make a large portion of the cast all worship the Mournful Mother and the Sorrowful Son.

Everything is just a little bit off, but so little that if you came to the book not knowing much about the tail end of the Wars of the Roses, and figured that for some reason some Latinish names were used for countries, you might not realize it’s a different history at all. The economics of an isolated abbey on an infrequently-visited island, the politics of serving and betraying noble families, the mechanisms of exile, the remnants of pagan culture to be discovered, the modes of dress, they all read mostly familiar and just a little different. It’s our history, plus or minus a few key differences at a few branches of history’s tree.

A metaphor may help you place the degree of familiarity and oddness that we’re talking about, one that I think Meconis would appreciate — this is the 16th Century by way of a Trekian Mirror Universe². Not the one that we keep seeing in the various iterations of Star Trek where good is evil and everybody has the same name with a reversed personality; it’s more of an angled mirror, one that’s a random 17.6° off from our reality instead of 180.

And that is why I decided that I don’t have a nit to pick over the first few pages of the book, where we see a put-upon and about to be captured Queen Eleanor, flanked by a pair of rather majestic greyhounds.

You see, they’re actually grey, uniformly grey, from tip to tail, and in our reality greyhounds very rarely come in that color³, and those few that do are nearly always sporting a tuxedo pattern of white on their chests. But in that world that’s 17.6° off from ours, let us allow that the grey in greyhound actually refers to the color, rather than having an unknown origin as it does here.

I mention it because it was literally the only thing in the book that I didn’t absolutely love with all my heart from the very beginning.

Young Margaret, our POV character, takes us through her life on an isolated island and the ten other people that live there, the socio-political state of her world, the foundation of the dominant religion, and the rhythms of her life in a natural, conversational tone over two dozen pages. The plot kicks in when two more come to the island to stay, and she discovers that the simple truths we absorb in childhood have layers of hidden truth behind them. As she grows (and grows more inquisitive), she finds that answers to earlier questions and personal biographies change, the world becomes more complex, and that the heroes and villains she’s heard about are both more nuanced — and closer — than she’d dreamed.

And so her story goes, learning to navigate the priorities and plottings and conspirations of people who range from utterly dismissive of her existence to desperately willing to exploit her. Her personal experience is no different from any other pre-teen girl, one that’s still got a sense of adventure and inquisitiveness, that hasn’t yet been pulled fully into the allowed gender roles of her time. She’s naive — or maybe merely uninformed, not having grown up among intrigues — but not stupid. She knows when things appear right and when they appear wrong, and she feels the sting of injustice as keenly as any child whose temper flares in a That’s not fair! reaction. She may not appreciate the weighty nature of all that’s landed on her little home island, but she’s willing to kick back at the cruel and manipulative to the best of her ability.

The lack of chapter breaks in Queen Of The Sea may have been for practical reasons (the book is exactly 400 pages long, plus endpapers), but it makes the experience of reading reflect Margaret’s perception of time. A child of just about ten years, she lives life in a continual flow, one thing leading to another, aware of the larger passing of days, but not really saying and then this ended and having it be a true break before the next thing begins. It also makes it almost imperative to read the book in one sitting.

Be sure to set aside enough time for that sitting, though — the art throughout is gorgeous, subtle, each page a watercolor (some decorated by embroidery), done in a color palette inspired by the cloudy skies and choppy seas around a little spit of an island housing a rather subdued order of nuns. Each face is lovingly lived-in, each life revealed by posture and expression as much as word and deed. Every drape and fold of clothing reveals the effects of both gravity and a cycle of wear and repair. Eyes and brows speak volumes, and the noses….

Ah, the noses. Who pays attention to noses when they design comics characters? Meconis does, each one different and full of character. In a medium where too many careers are built on sameface and samebody and clothing that may as well be spray-painted onto naked (exaggerated, idealized, ridiculous) bodies, Meconis does her characters the respect of making them stoop here, sag there, to exist as gloriously varied and imperfect people.

Queen Of The Sea is, by turns, contemplative, pulse-pounding, educational, silly, philosophical, and overall a perfect distillation of what it’s like to be a child learning your way in the world rather too quickly for comfort. It’s a perfect read for anybody of, let’s say 8 or 9 years and up. Producing it was a labor of years — I was privileged to watch several of the pages be painted last year, in the rush towards deadline — and I wouldn’t wish that burden on anyone, but if Meconis should feel the need to tell us what came next in the dynastic struggles of that world that is 17.6° off from ours, she’ll find a crowd of readers eager to join Margaret, Eleanor, and the rest in the next phase of their lives.

Queen Of The Sea by Dylan Meconis is published by Candlewick Press. It’s available wherever books are sold.

Spam of the day:

Revolutionary Bluetooth-Powered Smart Wallet is Driving Pick-Pockets Crazy

Oh yes, because having a shit-security bluetooth connection in your wallet won’t make it vulnerable in all kinds of interesting new ways. Just keep your damn wallet in your front pocket. Problem solved.

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¹ Of which we are introduced to four: the Clarites, the Wandering Sisters, the Lamentines, and the Elysians.

² Meconis, one may recall, is a Trekkie from birth, and one of the few people I would trust with an actually operational phaser.

³ Which greyhound people refer to as blue. And plausibly-colored or not, these greyhounds are marvelously rendered, each pose and proportion perfectly rendered. It’s almost like she had a live model to draw inspiration from.

A bunch of forthcoming stuff has been announced, which I thought we ought to be familiar with. Let’s dig in, shall we?

• Lucy Knisley does memoir like nobody else. I mean, her ability to capture the mood and tenor of a situation in her completely authentic voice is like an inward-focused Studs Terkel. We’ve seen her travel the world, eat, marry, and have a child, now we’re going to see what motherhood is like:
  

  Cover reveal! Check out the cover for my book, “Go To Sleep (I Miss You)”, which collects my sketches and comics from my days (and nights) of early parenthood. Out February! https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250211491 …
  #babies #newborns #breastfeeding #birth #comics #thelongestshortesttime

  Did I mention that she’s a comicking machine? It will be only one year since Kid Gloves released that we get Go To Sleep (I Miss You).

• Last July, the world learned not only that there would be an original Steven Universe movie, but also that Becky Dreistadt would be the lead character designer. At the time she couldn’t say that the story took place after a time skip, but the poster reveal shows a clearly older, taller Steven¹ as well as a new villain. Entertainment Weekly has the first look.

  I’d ask Dreistadt about it next week in San Diego, but I know she’s gonna be under killer NDAs, so let’s just consider — this is a movie that’s already announced Patti Lupone (as Yellow Diamond) in the cast, so at least one Diamond is still on Earth and this new baddie has to be a credible threat to the team that took down the Diamond Authority. Citizens are urged to remain calm until the air date.

• You know what we haven’t had in waaay too long? A collection of Scott C’s Great Showdowns. So you know what Scott C just teased over on The Gram? News of a new collection of Great Showdowns. Teased is the right term, too, since all we have is a title (Legend Of The Great Showdowns) and a super-vague release date (2020). You know what? I’ll take it.
• In terms of scientific journals, you don’t get much more prestigious than Cell. It’s pretty much up there with Nature and Science, and within the family of Cell journals there is a new one, Matter, which is devoted to Materials Science². Volume 1, issue 1 has just released, and there appears to be a section for discussion of issues that are less hard-science-and-numbers in nature, things that scientists should keep in mind as they are Doing Science, but also dealing with people who are Not Scientists. This section is called Matter Of Opinion and the inaugural iteration is titled On The Sensory Analysis Of Matter And Materials.

  Very interesting, Gary, but what are you talking about this? What’s it got to do with webcomics? Excellent questions, Sparky. Because this first Matter Of Opinion features an illustration by Lucas Landherr and Monica Keszler, names that should be familiar if you recall Landherr’s contributions to STEM education via comics, Science The World. Landherr, one should recall, is one of the most highly regarded STEM educators in the US university system³, as well as the proprietor of Surviving The World, and Keszler formerly one of his Chemical Engineering students and also an animator. It hasn’t been said that Landherr and/or Keszler will continue to provide comics to the journal, but it hasn’t been said that they won’t, either.

• And in the ultimate in first looks: HarperCollins announced today the formation of a new graphic novel imprint, HarperAlley, under the editorial directorship of Andrew Arnold (formerly an art director and acquisitions editor at :01 Books). The HarperCollins backlist (which includes Scott McCloud’s Comics trilogy and Noelle Stevenson’s Nimona) will be joined by about 30 books a year, starting Fall of 2020.

  That is an insanely close time. To release books in the Fall of next year, they need to already be pretty much done with the editorial process and well into the production cycle. Recall that when Gina Gagliano got headhunted by Random House in May of last year, the first books were set for 2020. Arnold is trying to do what Gagliano is doing in half the time. And the thing of it? With what he learned at :01, he’ll very likely succeed. :01 Books is looking as much an incubator of the next generation(s) of publishing leaders as it is an imprint.

Spam of the day:

Action requested: Regarding your subscription …

This claims to come from Sears. The only communication I want from Sears is a notification when Brandon Bird decides to do something Sears-related.

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¹ And hey, we saw Stevonnie shaving last season, so a puberty-affected Steven so it’s rational to expect some rapid changes from Steven.

² I prefer to read a second meaning into the title — these are things that matter.

³ Relevant part of his CV: American Institute Of Chemical Engineers 35 Under 35 Award, 2017; AIChE Award For Innovation in Chemical Engineering Education, 2018; American Society Of Engineering Education Northeast Section Outstanding Teacher Award, 2016; ASEE Chemical Engineering Division Ray W Fahien Award, 2019, Fostering Engineering Innovation In Education Award, 2017; Dr RH Sioui Award for Excellence in Teaching, 2015; Omega Chi Epsilon Faculty Member Of The Year Award, 2015, 2016, and 2018.

Hey there. Let’s catch up with some stuff over at the Kickstarter, yes?

• Rippin’ up the charts, the latest game from the folks over at Cyanide & Happiness is notable for a few reasons:
  1. It gamifies the traditional philosophical connundrum known as the Trolley Problem for laugh-chuckles.
  2. They asked for a funding goal of US$69,420, an amount known as one sexweed.
  3. They cleared goal in 44 minutes.
  4. They have further gamified stretch goals by putting in now-familiar social media promotional activities, but also by essentially playing a mass game of Trial By Trolley. The outcome for the first vote hasn’t wrapped up yet, but presumably the stretch goals will be revealed based on which path the murdery (but quaint) mass transit vehicle takes.
• Jon Rosenberg¹ is Kickstarting the third Scenes From A Multiverse collection, in part to get the revenue to reprint out of print Goats collections to fulfill a previous Kickstarter². Normally, an uncompleted fulfillment would be a red flag, but since Jon’s gone from trying to run this himself to engaging the professional stuff-handlers at Make That Thing, I’d say that supporting this one is safe, and will do a solid to folks waiting for the earlier one to finish.
• From Matt Inman and the Throw Throw Burrito team, news that shipping on product which was due to begin in September has been rescheduled to approximately now. I am not convinced that somebody on Team Kittens hasn’t internalized the lessons of one Commander Montgomery Scott, who notes that you always inflate your delivery promises so as to come in earlier than you said you would. If half of adulthood is showing up, the other half is managing expectations.
• Anthology 1: A new themed anthology that will raise funds to support the Coalition To End Gun Violence and the Community Justice Reform Coalition has been announced. Shots Fired finishes its 28 day campaign in a week, and features a (pardon the expression) murderer’s row of creative talent, including Tom Beland, Alex de Campi, Colleen Coover, Roger Langridge, Carla Speed McNeil, Trina Robbins, Marguerite Sauvage, Scott Snyder, Paul Tobin, Fred Van Lente, Shannon Wheeler, and about four dozen others. US$25 for the paperback, US$35 for the Kickstarter-exclusive hardcover.
• Anthology 2: There’s lots of harbingers of the End Times out there, friendos, but maybe none so disturbing as the fact that a Kel McDonald Kickstart is in danger of not funding. The anthology Can I Pet Your Werewolf was Kickstarted back in 2017, and it’s out of print. The reprint campaign is three days from wrapping and (as of this writing) a bit more than US$3000 from goal.

  That’s a lot better than it was two days ago when it was under US$10K (and boy howdy, that’s a weird funding curve), but still possibly it will fall short of the mark. McDonald and co-editor Molly Muldoon have a lot of great folks on the book³ which again — just needs a reprint. It’s done, it’s all laid out, it’s a proven seller. It just (as Thrór told Thráin⁴) needs gold to breed gold.

Spam of the day:

The guy lost 84 lbs

Wait, which guy? Stinko Man? Because everybody says he’s the guy, and I wanna be the guy, too!

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¹ Disclaimer: he hosts this page, was the one that prompted me to start it in the first place, and owns my soul.

² And let’s acknowledge that was approximately the time that Jon and his wife had a high-risk pregnancy with two very small twin sons, one of whom has spent a significant chunk of his life getting past the medical side-effects of being born. Dude’s had some shit on his plate is what I’m saying.

³ Aud Koch! Seanan McGuire! Monica Gallagher! Sophie Goldstein! Cat Farris! Kendra Wells! Plus at least one dude because there are men that make comics, too.

⁴ Nerrrrrrrrrrrd.

But a week in which The Nib finds its existence is in upheaval-slash-transition is anything but rational. That being said, better late than never with the news: Gene Yang’s next book has a release date. We’ve known about the title (Dragon Hoops) and the elevator pitch (the story of the basketball team from the high school where Yang used to teach in Oakland) for years — he shared them when we spoke back in Aught-Sixteen.

But now we get the full launch announcement, in Entertainment Weekly¹ no less, with quotes from Yang and a set of preview pages. Yang’s art has lost no steps in the years that he’s let others do the drawing (Sonny Liew on The Shadow Hero, Mike Holmes on the Secret Coders series, Gurihiru on the Avatar: The Last Airbender series, various artists on Superman and New Super-Man), and the story …

The story’s different. It’s not just the story of the basketball team at the Oakland high school where he used to teach, their history, and their run for a state championship. It’s a story about his relationship to comics and creativity, to teaching, and to sports. It’s treading into Raina Telgemeier territory and that is terrific news. Yang put a lot of himself into the stories in American Born Chinese but this time he’s literally on the page, captions talking to the reader about what’s going through his mind as he acts out his life on the page.

It’s particularly an interesting tack to take, making Dragon Hoops not just about the team, but also his struggles to find a story — then finding a story just across campus in the gym — while simultaneously admitting that he’s never been a sports guy and actively shies away from the culture of captial-S Sports. I think it’s not coincidence that Yang breaking out of his comfort zone would have coincided with his term as the fifth National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, where his efforts were summarized in his Reading Without Walls Challenge:

• Read a book about a character who doesn’t look or live like you.
• Read a book in a format you don’t typically read — graphic novels, poetry, audiobooks, plays.
• Read a book about a new subject you don’t know much about.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see this theme in Dragon Hoops; we’ll all find out together on 17 March 2020, when 448 pages (!) of comics wisdom drops from :01 Books.

Spam of the day:

Thank you for registering at Hotel Tino – Ohrid

Blah, blah, click the link, set up your account, blah. Ordinarily, I’d chalk this up to a clumsy attempt to get me to go to a virus-ridden hellsite, but it appears to be a legit business. Looks like one of the other Garies Tyrrell has forgotten again that my email is not their email. Hope they get their reservation honored.

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¹ Remember when a new graphic novel announcement would trickle out with maybe a small mention in Publishers Weekly or at The Beat? Now it’s the Los Angeles Review Of Books, or EW, or Premiere, or some other mainstream culture publication, if it’s not Washington Post or New York Times. Don’t ever tel me that comics as a medium is dying.

This review is late; I’ve been delayed in a getting a copy of Island Book by Evan Dahm, but now that I’ve got it and read it, my mind is full of ideas. This review is also early; I really should give this another week or so and let all those ideas coalesce into something more definite, but I don’t want to wait. I want to tell you about this remarkable story and why you should want to read it. And, appropriate for a book that takes place largely on and adjacent to the ocean, Mild spoilers ahoy.

Island Book draws from all of Dahm’s previous work. Although it’s not a story of his Overside setting, it could be part of Overside — the characters are not human, they feature fully-realized cultures with distinct hallmarks, and the eyes express intentions in a clear way. Everything has a backstory, which is largely unrevealed.

We know only as much of the history of Tarrus or the War-Men as the characters in-story see fit to remark upon; what they would take as ordinary and everyday (say, the significance of a mantle the main character wears, then discards as she embarks on adventure) isn’t explained any more than you or I would start the morning with a declaration of And now I will commute to my job in my automobile, which is powered by an internal-combustion engine and around the operation of which some of the most powerful trade forces in the world have organized themselves, as we all know!

And though parts of Island Book go back half a decade or so, I’m not sure he could have completed it until after his edition of Moby-Dick. The boats and winds and the nature of being on the ocean aren’t the sharply-defined realism of Melville’s novel, but they are a simplification of them, a cartoony version that draws the same essential truth in broad strokes. It’s just as a caricature artist must have a formal grounding in anatomy and the rules of realistic representation to know where and when to ignore those rules and keep things simple, but plausible.

But the clearest relation to Dahm’s earlier work would be his edition of The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz. Sola, our POV character, is swept away to color-coded lands of distinct people, who are mostly aware of each other but don’t really interact. She eventually returns to an Uncle figure (her parents, like Dorothy’s are dead) having learned some about the world and found an appreciation of home. The travels from place to place, where something happens, then something happens, then something happens, sometimes at a fast pace and sometimes slow, but always pushing the story to the next beat with a clear focus on what the story needs.

Like the first Oz book, this first Island Book volume (if the 1 on the spine means anything) serves to introduce us to the world of oceans and the Monster that all seem to know and seek out for different reasons — to conquer, to find inspiration, for pure knowledge — and then place the players back in their starting locales until it’s time for the next adventure. In case you never read the dozen-and-a-half books that L Frank Baum wrote set in Oz, they all start with Dorothy getting swept back into the Fairy Lands from Kansas¹ and getting a subset of the band back together again, until whatever new challenge presenting itself was overcome.

And like the Oz books, there’s a fabulous foundation in this first book, for as many journeys as Sola chooses to make, with whichever friends (some she hasn’t made yet) suit a given story. The Monster may have its secrets revealed or not. New islands may be discovered, or not. Sola’s people may decide she’s no longer cursed and evil² or not. I suspect the future adventures will be more about journey than destination, and that they’ll be just as charming as this first one. I’m looking forward to watching Sola grow into the woman that she’ll be, and the mark that she’ll leave on this world of ever-shifting waves.

Island Book, by Evan Dahm, is published by :01 Books and available wherever books are sold. 288 pages, full color, ages 8 and up. Fleen thanks Dahm for sharing those first two dozen pages all those years ago, and for delivering on their promise in a big way.

Spam of the day:

iBlocker: the digital solution to any security problem. The padlock with a fingerprint.

Wait, isn’t this that padlock that had screws on the outside of the casing that let you disassemble the lock in about twelve seconds, making it the perfect tangible representation of security theater? Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, no.

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¹ Or wherever; in one, she was on an ocean voyage with Uncle Henry to Australia when swept overboard. Eventually, she just moved with Uncle Henry, and Aunt Em, and Toto, and a Kansas friend or two to the Emerald City to save Baum the trouble of dreaming up another variation on Chapter One to get her back to Oz.

² Did I mention that? They’re totally jerks to a preteen-equivalent girl for something she had no control over.