"I can't stand comics."

Of course with every supporter, you get one of these. Not only did she loath Good As Lily, but I ruined all of comics for her. Man, I really wish GAL wasn't the first "graphic novel" she read. I'm more saddened by the fact that she won't be trying any more comics because of GAL than her just hating the book.Oh well, you can't win 'em all.On a side note, it's also the most entertaining review I've ever gotten. I love this:"I should probably point out that the format was similar to a comic strip or even comic books. I can’t stand comics."Can we get rid of the term, "graphic novel" already and just tell people it's just a goddamn comic book with quotes from The New York Times on the back?Lastly, sometimes I get asked if I have any words for aspiring cartoonists. One major thing I would say is to have a thick skin. If you crumple under every negative review, you won't make it very far. You just have to be comfortable with the fact that no matter how much hard work and soul you put into something, there's always going to be someone who hates it. And sometimes, hate you, the person, for no apparent reason.

Thumbnail

Originally, I was thinking of laying out "Good As Lily" as well, but Jesse wanted to do that himself. I did scribble out the thumbnail for the first page though which you can see above. I thought it'd be fun to compare how Jesse and I layout a scene. If you look at my thumbnail and Jesse's finished art on the first page of "Good As Lily," you'll see that we have very different approaches to storytelling.Also, you'll notice there's a little picture of Grace as well as some other data like "user" and "date" above the narration in my thumbnail. That's because originally I was going to have her narration bits be her LiveJournal posts complete with accompanying avatars. I abandoned that idea early on though.Welp, this wraps up the behind the scenes look at "Good As Lily." I hope you enjoyed it. (And I hope you'll consider picking up the book! ;)My thanks to everyone that picked up the book and gave such nice feedback and reviews! I really appreciate the support!

Clothes Part 2

"Good As Lily" Misprint

Hey all, there's a major misprint in some copies of "Good As Lily." In these jacked-up copies, pages 97-128 are missing, replaced with pages 65-96. (So pages 65-96 are printed twice with pages 97-128 -- a substantial chunk -- not even in the book.) So if you're in the store about to buy a copy you might want to make sure page 96 continues onto 97 and onward. If you've already purchased one of these deformed copies please exchange it for a good copy from the store you bought it from. If they won't or can't replace it, contact DC Comics and complain.I have no idea how many of these messed-up copies are floating around, but needless to say, it really sucks. Sigh...

Clothes Part 1

I wanted the important characters in "Good As Lily" to change their clothes with every scene to make them seem more realistic. I dictated all these "costume changes" as well, as you can see from the sketch above. I didn't bother with the minor characters though; because they didn't have much "screen time", I thought it might be confusing if I changed their clothes around. For the sake of clarity, I kept the clothes the same for the alternate Graces throughout too. Even though I wasn't drawing this particular project, I couldn't let go of the one part of the comics creating process that's genuinely enjoyable. It's fun playing paper dolls with characters. It's fun and challenging trying to stay consistent to a particular person's fashion sense since everyone's is different. I'm such a girl...

Stephanie and Mom

I actually perused a few online stores for women's clothing to put together their outfits. I'm so glad I live alone. But hey, I didn't want them to be out of fashion knowing that was a big part of their character.Oh, and I should mention that Stephanie's two pals in her posse were a couple of the very few speaking characters that I let go of my control-freakness and let Jesse design himself.

Pinata Lady

Here's the old lady that sells the pinata to Grace. I have some things I want to say about her, but.... I don't have the energy today. Back to work with me.

Mr. and Mrs. Kwon

Here are Grace's parents. My Korean birth father died when I was little and I have no memories of him. So I'm just projecting when it comes to Korean dads. Luckily I have no less than 5 Korean uncles to draw from. Mr. Kwon's "Balls!" line is probably one of my favorites from the book.Mrs. Kwon's penchant for feeding all of Grace's friends is, of course, lifted straight from my wonderful Mom. There was a review of "Good As Lily" that criticized that scene as stereotyping Korean moms. I'm not sure what the reviewer wants from me. NOT to write from experience? Also, I doubt that particular habit is limited just to my mom, or just to Korean moms for that matter.I wish I had had the room to unfold the scene where Grace asks her parents about Lily more slowly. I think it could've been much more powerful and subtle if I had more pages. With all the plot elements I had to get in inside the 144 page limit, I really had to pack each scene as tightly as I could. It's nobody's fault but my own though. I knew the book had to be 144 pages going in. The story just ended up having way more plot points and characters to cover than I had originally thought. When a story is just some mercurial blob in your mind, it's really hard to predict exactly what shape it will take once you put it down on paper. There were even scenes I wanted to get into the story that I had to excise all together. I think the book could've easily been 200 pages or so if I had had the freedom to tell the story in as many pages as the story naturally dictated. But I don't have regrets about having to do that though. It was a good exercise. There are lots of instances when there are limits like that. A regular comic book issue has to fit into 22 pages. Every episode of every TV show has to fit into an exact minute. Movies have time limits of course, lots of instances dictated by studio heads who have no direct involvement with the story. I have a new-found respect for these writers now. I have no idea how they put up with these restrictions day in and day out.

Grace's Friends

Grace's friends were really fun to come up with and I'm sad that I didn't have the space in the book to showcase them more. (All Minx books have a strict 144 page count the story has to conform to.) I spent a lot of time developing them and it seems like a waste to never see them again. Ah well...At first I had trouble making them distinctive and real as possible with the little glimpses you get of them. Plus the fact that I'd been out of high school for over a decade when I wrote this made me self-conscious. I was afraid I'd come off like an old guy totally out of touch with today's youth trying to be "hip." You know those writers. There's nothing worse.Luckily, I was teaching at the Academy of Art's summer program for high school students at the time. Being able to draw upon them really helped me. There's all kinds of people and observations mixed into these characters. Bits and pieces of my students, cousins, and memories from my own high school years. It really does bum me out that I won't be using these characters again.

Jeremy and Mr. Levon

Jeremy was based primarily on my younger brother, Brent, in high-school. Except not as funny. If you read Brent's brilliant, hilarious comics about his experience in Drama and the romantic woes mined there, you'll see the parallels. I asked Jesse to keep Brent in mind when drawing Jeremy.Mr. Ahpo was the name our Drama teacher in my high school -- the same one in Brent's comics -- and he was always like a friend to us as much as a teacher. I tried to incorporate that into Mr. Levon. Physically, I was going for a sort of dirty-blonde version of Paul Pope. I remember a lot of female comic readers having a crush on him, so I thought he'd make a good starting point. Jesse totally ran with the idea in the actual book. Also, when I was in high school we had a really young female teacher who was just starting out that all the boys (and probably some of the girls, too) had crushes on. The boys would flirt with her shameless so I drew on those experie-- er, I mean, observations too. Also in my high school, we had a pretty young French teacher that a lot of the girls had cooed over so I put some of him into Mr. Levon as well. He's a good guy, Mr. Levon. I like him a lot.Much like Brent, I was pretty active in Drama back in high school which is why there's such a focus on it in "Good As Lily." I can honestly say those were some of the best times I had in high school. Heck, some of the best times of my entire life. It's really exciting and invigorating to be part of a group artistic project like that. There's something indescribably life-affirming about it. Everyone pulling together to create something bigger than each individual. Especially in high-school when it's as pure as it can be. When an art is not your "job," or a "stepping stone" to one, it's free of a lot of the petty politics and bullshit.And unlike other such endeavors like animation where everyone is given their little parts and then are shuffled off to their individual corner to carve their cog for the giant machine, Drama is much more communal and interactive. It's more like you yourself are a cog and you constantly have to push and pull on each other to see how you function best together. (Ew, that's a gross analogy.) And just on a little personal note, I did have a crush on a long-time friend back in my own high-school Drama experience. (Heh, but then who didn't, right?) Ah, high school.... It seems like a life-time ago now.But writing those Drama scenes brought all those memories flooding back and it was great to relive them. The fights, the crying, the endless rehearsals, the performances, the accidents, the crushes, the breathing as quiet as you can behind the set, the trying not to breath at all as you play a dead body, the hugging and calming down your friends as they freak out backstage, the "afterglow" that is the after party. I hope I captured some of that feeling in "Good As Lily."It's probably why I get such a fond feeling whenever I think about "Good As Lily." What started as a commercial job ended up becoming really personal to me. Despite the lackluster response and mixed reviews, it's really darling to me and I'm proud of it. It's great how things like that work out sometimes.

The Many Graces

These were pretty much the first sketches I did of all the different Graces and I just stuck with them. She was already pretty much formed in my head when I went to the drawing board so it wasn't that much of a challenge giving her visual life. What was challenging was making each of them distinctive yet have them look like the same person. With the 70-year old Grace, I pretty much just threw that out the window in lieu of goofy caricature. She did change quite a bit from conception to the cover though.The 70-year old Grace was particularly fun to come up with as I drew on my own halmoni (Korean for "grandma") for a lot of her characteristics. My halmoni has been smoking since she was 14. No joke. And that jacket she wears in the comic was lifted right off of my halmoni's back. One of my cousins spotted it right away. My halmoni is one of my favorite people. She's carefree, no nonsense, a voracious eater, and just generally seems to enjoy life. I hope to be like her when I'm her age.She always cracks me up too. Every time I see her, without fail, she'll nag me about getting married. In the grand Korean tradition. Just to get out of the conversation, once I told her jokingly that I couldn't because I just had too many girls to choose from. Without a pause, she shot back in Korean, "Bring them over to me and I'll pick one out for you!" Another time, I asked her what she would think if I married a Japanese woman just to see what she'd say. (In case you didn't know, Koreans of her generation are extremely prejudiced toward the Japanese having been occupied by them during the first half of this century. Hell, who can blame them after having lived through that?) She replied, "A Japanese woman is fine. They know how to treat a man right!" Err.... Speaking of the 70-year old Grace, one thing that I wonder about is how I'll percieve the book when I'm 70 myself. Unlike the other Graces, I haven't lived through her age period, so I was projecting more with that character than any other in "Good As Lily." Or in any of my stories for that matter. I wonder if I'll just think it was silly and presumptuous of me to think I'd ever know what it's like to be a senior citizen. I'm looking forward to finding out! Granted I live that long, of course.One last behind-the-scenes tidbit: The nicknames 18-year old Grace gives to the other three Graces -- Katie, Shana, and Jessica -- are the names of one of my uncle's three daughters, Katie being the youngest and Jessica being the oldest just like the Graces. I think one of the funnest parts of writing stories is breathing in bits of your real life into them.

I love these people

Besides writing "Good As Lily," I also did all the character designs. All this week I'll be featuring my design sketches and notes, and there's plenty more to come. So for those of you who were wondering what the book would have looked like had I drawn it, now you'll know!The above composite drawing was done to show Jesse how tall I wanted each character.You know, going through all these sketches made me realize how fond I am of these characters. They feel like friends to me. Or maybe friends I never had and wish I did. At the Emerald City Comicon, someone told me that she bawled at the end of the book. (Actually her boyfriend volunteered the information to her slight embarrassment.) I never thought it would make me so happy to make a woman cry. Seriously though, I can't think of a better compliment for a writer. Not making a reader cry specifically of course, but to have someone react to your fictional creations in any real way. I remember reading books like "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" and having the same sort of reactions and how powerful that was. How Betty Smith made me feel as if the people on the page were real and I was living with them. To know that you are carrying on that wonderful and amazing tradition even if it's just to a few people is such a joy for a writer. At least to this writer. So to that lovely couple in Seattle, thanks for making my trip up there totally worth it!

Good As Lily preview!

There's a 10-page preview of "Good As Lily" up at the New York Magazine website here. Click to read!

Good As Lily

My next book, Good As Lily will be released on August 15th! Written by me and illustrated by Jesse Hamm. (Check out this story by Jesse to see a sample of his wonderful work) The cover is by me.So what's the book about? Here's the official blurb:What if your biggest competition was…yourself? Following a strange mishap on her 18th birthday, Grace Kwon is confronted with herself at three different periods in her life. The timing couldn't be worse as Grace and her friends desperately try to save a crumbling school play. Will her other selves wreak havoc on her present life or illuminate her uncertain future?Basically, "Good As Lily", is my 80's teen movie. I loved those films growing up (not to mention "Clueless" from the 90's) and I always wanted to try writing something in that vein. As you can probably tell by now, this book is pretty different from the kind of stories you've seen from me thus far. If you're anticipating something like, say, "The 10 Commandments of Simon", well, this book's probably not for you. But if you're into stuff like "Better Off Dead", "Sixteen Candles" (minus Long Duck Dong, of course), and "Breakfast Club", with some "Weird Science" thrown in, I think you'll have a good time. It's got all the classic staples of that genre, like a romantic triangle, nerds, the school play, the hot teacher, but all filtered through my own writing style (whatever that is). I hope for it to be familiar yet new. But most of all, fun. I'm eagerly awaiting its release.Now for a little feature on how the cover came into being:(I should note that the design of the cover was by someone else, I was just told what to draw so they could plug it in.)(Click the images for larger verisons.)First it was drawn in pencil of course:Then inked:Then scanned in and colored in Photoshop:And finally the characters were grouped together and a pink hue was put over three of them, to set them apart from the main character. (The pink hue was the idea of Shelly Bond, my editor) Actually, all four of them are the "main character" as they are the same person, just at different ages.Finally this was then placed into the cover design which you can see at the top of this post.I wish old Grace on the right hadn't been pushed off the cover so much, but these things aren't up to me.