Back in February I made a trip to Seattle to meet with Kevin, Grace and our publisher to start the assembly of book 2. We got a lot done over the weekend, firstly settling on the final version of the cover, soon to grace the novel as it hits stores this May!
So we all sat down after one of Grace’s amazing dinners, poured out generous glasses of wine and spread out copies of the pages with the innocent intent of ordering them into a smooth-flowing, cohesive graphic novel. We attempted the impossible by trying to break the stories down into categories so that we could spread out story “types” equally throughout the book:
Were the characters boy/girl? How do you define that in cases of trans sexuality and gender confusion?
Gay/straight? By whose definition? Not all “loss-of-virginity-acts” align with the person’s sexual orientation.
Were the stories Funny/happy/sad/tragic? Some hit several emotions at once.
Book layout is something I am new at, and Grace and Kevin did this very well on their own with the publication of volume 1 back in 2008. I had no idea how complicated this process was, and Grace’s journalism and paper layout experience were invaluable. After some general ground-rules, it mostly came down to “artistic-gut-feelings” and after a couple of hours we’d assembled a good, solid collection of stories that we’re extremely proud of. Here are a couple of things we noticed along the way:
This volume is comprised of 138 pages of comics, slightly more than Volume 1, which has 131.
We’re showing slightly more nudity (this is a book about sex, after all).
A majority of stories coming from women (guys? Come on, we know you’re doing it).
Ideally, this table would have been about 20 feet longer…
We demonstrate our jedi-reflexes.
We take this very, very seriously.
It was an exciting evening and very satisfying to see all our hard work finally gel just a little bit. In just about a month and a half it should all be bound, beautiful and available!!
