H&H

I think its time I talk a little bit about this one.

WARNING — Before we get too far into this. I will warn you that this story does deal with suicide as one of its main character developments. The theme is really close to me as someone who struggled with ideation in my early years (16-25) this story (and a few others in my repertoire like it) were a bit of a catharsis for me. You’ve been warned. If that sort of thing bugs you, you can dip now, no hard feelings, I know this is a very sensitive subject <3

That being said… I don’t know how structured this post is going to be, maybe mostly a ramble. I have a lot of thoughts and feelings. And I’m angry still about what happened to this book…. but I am also quite glad with the fact that this isn’t my debut graphic novel. I’ll chit chat about that a bit later.

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H&H was supposed to be a graphic novel about two characters in a sapphic relationship both of whom struggle with different flavours of mental illness, (one with severe depression, one with severe anxiety) and how, unchecked, these illnesses can have severe effects on one another. It’s about how, even with our own demons, we can be in positions to help build each other up even when we get knocked down. It was poised to be hopeful even while dealing with heavy subject matter, of course using fantasy elements to really play up the imagery.

Here’s what some of my final pages looked like:

Um…. I’m still proud of these. I feel like my art & sensibilities could definitely handle them better nowadays. I think these pages were made with my first crack at procreate back in 2018. Little did I know that would become my main squeeze. I was such a traditional-art nerd back then. I even have the next chunk of pages from this GN in traditional pencils:

(These are…………. a bit rougher than I remember but goes to show how forgiving a digital medium can be and how much more comfortable I’ve become with comics nowadays). This pencilled batch of pages were done before the procreate pages. I was hoping I could work through the sketches on the graphic novel and veer back around to that more difficult/sensitive part of the story later when my skills had improved from drawing nearly 250 pages.

Turns out I wouldn’t even get there… but before we get into THAT…

Here’s the thumbnails for pretty much the entire thing. Have fun~ Most of my thumbnails (especially back then) were page layouts until I started working with a partner and felt bad leaving everything up to the pencils. In hindsight I’m really proud of my growth as an artist, I can still feel a lot of the uncertainty I struggled with through these pages.

I haven’t looked at the script in a while. I know just before I stopped working on this project I’d chopped it down from like 223 pages to 175 because the scope of the project was starting to scare me a little and I wasn’t sure if I could mentally pull myself through to the end.

A final little gallery for the very little visual development I did for it. There isn’t much here which is a bit of a personal mistake on my part. I was never much of a practical (setting things to paper) person so much as I can sit and work a lot of things out Mentally with stories. That… works a lot with prose but… the confidence in creating comics comes from a LOT of drawing practice. Essentially the more you draw the main characters of your story the easier it becomes when you have to actually put this thing to paper. It’s something even now at 32 I struggle a lot in Making Time to do this sort of thing. Slowing down and working through ideas is always a bit of a tough point for me. I’m working on a new Graphic Novel pitch right now and I’m making a promise HERE that I will spend some time developing the visuals for the story as I build the script/plot/character dynamics.

H & H is a bit weird. I’ve had these characters since 2011 so its very likely this was a bad idea to roll into proper publishing with from the get go. Too much personal stake in the game. The original story these two were a part of is NOT what I pitched to the publisher. I just recycled the characters and some of their concepts because I was curious if I could take these two from some Tim Burton-esque 2010s Halloween camp to a story with a bit more heart. Lets see if I can dig up the old 32-page comic I did in 20…15?? for a graphic novel drawing class… (turns out I CAN and here it is):

Now thIS–this you’re NOT allowed to laugh at me for. LOL. If cringe is dead you’ll let everything about this iteration of the story slide. A lot of the text can be excused for the fact that I’m a writer at heart (and also I just REALLY wanted to have fun with text-art in comics);;; I have to say, that a lot of the edge aside here, some of this panelling….. some of this style is still extremely fun. Idk. You can feel that I really just was on my shit here and that I was just having fun with the medium.

This isn’t even going back to its roots, not entirely. I know a few of you reading this must know about NaNoWriMo– well–I don’t know if you know back when ScriptFrenzy existed (god I miss her, bring her back plss). But Little Mad Hattie was the original working title for these two and featured a 50s housewife-witch (Hattie) with her undead husband she trapped in his own damned (literally) body (Hawley) after he tried to kill himself to get away from her.

Hello yes call the edge-police. The script was a wild ride complete with the above insane asylum written way back in 2011. I don’t even know if I have that version of the story lurking around in my drives anymore. Its essence was pretty much boiled down to that above comic (though the attempts at a rhythmic rhyming text…. are new to the comic itself). And you can see a lot of the influence bleed into the comic I did wind up pitching to publishing.

A part of me doesn’t entirely hate the original premise I think the original versions (both script and comic) were a way for me to cope with my own current mental struggles by pushing them to outrageous lengths. Vers, the pitch I wound up offering to publishers which was trying to be more… honest about my struggles and maybe try to patchwork a solution into them.

I don’t know. This story has had me stuck in a bit of a pickle here. There are parts of both iterations that really grip me and that I like a lot so as I’m picking away at it I’m really struggling to nail down what it is I want from it. A new outline/rework of this project I was fiddling with…had the story beginning at opposite ends of the book and ending in the middle. I’m a bit of a nutjob… I wanna make my selfpub stuff so much fucking weirder…. I think this direction is… better. Chipping away at my indecisiveness will eventually give way to decisiveness, right?

But hey this is just one of the reasons I haven’t gone back to it fully… Aside from my general indecisiveness… comics are HARD. Solo comics are even HARDER. People have such a test of STRENGTH doing these things alone. Pushing through hundreds of pages in, what, six months? Yikes! I get really caught up in my own head at every single stage, its a wonder I get anything done….

Haha…. that leads me to the final reason I haven’t gone back to it. It sure was unceremoniously dropped from my publisher’s lineup after a merger…. in a series of unfortunate post-pandemic events that really just ough. They boil my blood to no end even now, looking back on it. Unfortunately I can’t say shit because I signed a mutual ‘don’t say shit about me’ waiver with the publisher but IYKYK~

Essentially the story was picked up after a couple tweets were exchanged between me and the main publisher. I got shafted onto an editor (who in hindsight probably had enough on their plate to deal with & didn’t really want my story though I really do appreciate what feedback they did offer me then). But Then they left and I was caught in editor limbo while the big merger happened, watching layoffs on editors left and right, watching my friends get dropped unceremoniously from book deals. I was hm. I was definitely feeling the heat here. I kept reaching out for feedback from the editor in chief at the time and figuring things were pretty quiet due to the pandemic. I kept working on the story the best I could in the interim… only to get the editor in chief’s request at a video call about the project. I think a part of me knew then there was a problem though I tried to keep things positive, its not uncommon for editors to want to video/voice call just to talk about edits and whatnot.

Uhm…. probably wound up being the worst video call of my life lmao. I opened up the call to not only the editor in chief (who was my acting editor at the time) but also the ceo/publisher at the time, sitting there silently as the editor in chief pretty much delivered my nightmare scenario.

“People might misconstrue the story”
“This might not be the best debut comic, we’re looking out for your best interests”
“Even our sensitivity readers agreed it was maybe Too Much.”

They’d basically tossed my manuscript around their editing dept without telling me and everyone agreed without talking to me that the story was Too Much…. I still feel so violated about it tbh. If they had at least asked me about if first/emailed me about their concerns one on one we could have discussed it and maybe things could have been done to the script before I’d started on pages. I’m definitely not against my stuff being sensitivity read, but it felt like my own personal experience with the subject was being sidelined entirely. They also kept assuming this book was intended for kids/teens even though that was entirely news to me. I was writing for an adult audience in my own brain, nobody on staff at all had discussed age-range or audience otherwise.

Anyway. After all of that absolute fucking nonsense, the editor in chief pretty much gave me an ultimatum (told through fake crocodile tears) that I needed to either overhaul the story OR pitch a new one.

Rattled… I just agreed to pitch them something new. And since my old GN got clipped in the system, I was asked to straight up re-pitch with no guarantee they were going to keep me around. I was stuck in limbo again…. and then this editor in chief quit, right after this making this whole fucking thing absolutely null and void. I was stuck now, with half my advance paid and no work to show for it, panicking because my partner and I weren’t exactly rolling in cash at the time and this was nearly two years of wasted time and work. I was lucky enough my partner’s agent was kind enough to help get me out relatively unscathed at this point. I hope the two fools from the call aren’t in publishing anymore. They really made a fucking insensitive mess out of something that really wasn’t a big fucking deal. If folks have ever worked with me, you’d know I’m generally pretty easygoing and lenient. If there were problems with a script that had before been accepted and was no longer acceptable it was definitely something I would have been open to working out. Ugh. I’m still mad. I’m still upset. Whatever.

The way this all came about was awful, an absolute destruction of my trust. It’s been 3 years and I still struggle to even consider pitching work to publishers currently. I’ll sit down to that blank page with cold sweats before I tap out and just work on a self-published story I’m having fun already picking away at.

The silver lining is that in writing this now… I AM picking at a pitch for publishing. I’m working at my own pace. Its properly angled for Adult audiences (and we’re gonna make that extra fucking clear from the get go). It’ll also limit the scope at which I’m even feasibly capable of pitching at. Wish me luck LOL.

Ultimately… Am I upset this graphic novel never came to fruition…? Mmm not entirely. I think at 25 I still had a lot to learn about myself as a person and the stories I wanted to write. I think I had a lot of self-esteem building to do. I needed to learn to really stand up for myself. I’m happy to say that now most folks would find themselves hard pressed to try that shit on me again.

And hell if anything goes south, I’ve always got self-pub.