Hey guys, I’m doing a bunch of events with other amazing authors to promote the publication of The Stone Heart (The Nameless City book 2), which is out NEXT WEEK AAAAH! Hope to see some of you out on the road! I’ll post further details for the events under a cut below the image. I’ll also be at two comic festivals (TCAFandVanCAF) and the LA Times Festival of Books.
Woohoo! The cover for the new Avatar comic series I’ve been writing, drawn by Peter Wartman! :D
So excited for this series! ⚡️⚡️ In addition to Faith writing and Peter drawing, the great Ryan Hill is doing colors on the interiors and covers — like this pretty one above!
It’s the cover for the third Nameless City book, The Divided Earth! Out in September 2018, it will conclude the Nameless City trilogy. Also here are some process thumbnails from designing the cover, which was coloured by Shelli Paroline & Braden Lamb.
More digital comic practice. This one went a lot smoother than the last one.
Anyway, I like Marrow, even though she’s been ill-served by some writers at Marvel. I like making up stories about her when she was a kid and lived in the sewers with the Morlocks, because why not.
Short version: Maggie makes the difficult transition from home school to public high school, made more difficult by the fact that up until that point her friends had only been her three brothers. At school she discovers that her brothers have history she knew nothing about. All the while she is haunted by a silent ghost from the town’s maritime urban legend.
What I thought: There’s a lot going on in Maggie’s story, everything from a recent divorce to a sort-of new crush to new friends to local history. It feels like it could make for a more interesting text novel than a graphic one. I liked that Maggie herself does grow up a little over the course of the story, but not in any profound way like the old genre of buildingsroman usually does. Yes she does eventually make a stand and take responsibility for certain things in her life, but it’s done very easily and she doesn’t learn a thing about consequences. I guess what bugged me is that it has such a great setup, and such cute art (the same lady who brought us Adventures of Superhero Girl), but after more than half the volume, the plot hasn’t really taken off, and once it does, it falls back again fairly quickly and benignly. They spend a lot of time puzzling on what’s the Big Secret that made her oldest brother and new crush such hostile enemies, and the reason for it ends up being so boring I read that part over to make certain I hadn’t missed some subtext, but nope, just garden-variety conflict. I thought it would be something actually worth their reactions and glares, maybe something humiliating or the crush mistreated someone in a truly unforgivable fashion, but turns out he was just kind of rude a couple times. The ghost. Why was there a ghost at all? They never find out what the ghost wanted, and she mostly served to represent Maggie’s absent mother, without being actually connected to her. Maggie does try to help the ghost find peace, but the only thing she could think of didn’t work, and the ghost never says anything or offers closure. Frustrating for everyone. Also frustrating was the fact that Maggie blames herself for her parents’ divorce, and the only people who know that she does either don’t care about the pain that misconception causes her, or actually agree with her. That’s never touched on either, and we’re left with no more closure than with the ghost. Overall it was okay, I like Hicks as an artist and I like her understanding of the everyday struggle, but this one felt like it needed to be either longer or a different medium.
Read it if you liked: Mercuryby Hope Larson, Adventures of Superhero Girl, also by Faith Erin Hicks, Scott Pilgrim vs the World by Brian Lee O’Malley, anything by John Green.
Short version: Compilation of online comic by the same name (read it here!) starring Superhero Girl, local hero for a small Canadian town. SHG faces entirely too much adversity for one person to handle, ranging from criticism of bystanders to having her job interviews hijacked by ninjas. Throughout it all, she maintains her positive attitude and sense of justice, even if it means working without thanks, recognition, or ability to pay rent.
What I thought: I really didn’t know where this was going at first. I Thought it was just a cute slice-of-life perspective on the superhero genre, and while it is that, it’s not exclusively mundane activity. Sure it’s hilarious to see our heroine upset that her cape shrank in the wash or that she now had a hard-to-explain suntan where he mask covers her face, but there’s also a lot of very real and relatable trouble she carries with her. Mostly this comes in the form of her brother Kevin, who is also a superhero (similar to Superman) but according to everyone, including their mother, “he’s better at it.” In some ways that’s true, he does have a broader range of powers and also the charisma to win the hearts of the people, but in no way does that make him a better person. Whenever SHG tries to point this out, her opinion gets slapped down and diminished on the basis that she must be jealous. She’s endlessly compared to him, always with the phrase “why can’t you be more like him?” thrown in her face, totally discounting all the work that she has done to get so far. You really do begin to feel her rage after a few strips, the unfairness of it boiling steadily throughout the whole volume. Even without her brother in the picture, she’s expelled from university because of the liability she represents (”Our insurance just doesn’t cover ninja attacks”). Once, while she’s fighting a city-destroying alien, she’s stopped by a random skeptic who refuses to acknowledge her as a superhero because, and I’m quoting here, “You just don’t look like one.” She was literally throwing a giant monster into orbit as he spoke. He waited for her to get back to street level so he could tell this to her face. When it was revealed that she was a hero purely out of a sense of justice and not because of some tragic backstory that made her swear revenge against evil, he walks away entirely because she “broke the rules.” Never mind that the city was saved. Or that this was the third time this month she saved it. Skeptical Guy (as she called him) is just as bad as those asshats who accuse women of being “fake geek girls” because they don’t know Mark Hamill’s birthday by heart, or any other stupid and arbitrary standard. Yet her attitude stays strong. At one point she meets her future self, is horrified to discover that the wear on her ego eventually drives her into becoming a villain, and hardens her resolve even further. I’d call this an incredible Girl Power book, suitable for all ages and enjoyable for everyone who has ever been told that their best isn’t good enough.
Read it if you liked: Lumberjanesby Noelle Stevenson, Astro City by Kurt Busiek, Nimonaalso by Noelle Stevenson, IRL (In Real Life) by Cory Doctrow
