Summeryear Graphic Novel
December 15th, 2009
I’m young. I’m still learning about myself and my creative impulses. So, I’m going to try something.
I’ve always loved the idea of comics and graphic novels, although I never read any at all until recently. It’s a brilliant mesh between written storytelling and visual art. I want to be a writer and I want to be an artist. I figure I’ll try doing both at once and see how it goes.
I expect this to be an enormous project — much bigger than the novel, maybe. But hell, I can’t learn without trying, so here goes. First order of business is writing out the script. I’ll update again once I’ve finished that.
The plan is doing the whole graphic novel in my own digital painted style. Nothing cartoony if I can help it. A daunting project, but if I can pull it off I might find a life calling.
Cheers. (EDIT: Doing this with a new story called Pastel Sun instead)
Summeryear is a story that came to me in one ecstatic moment some time around the beginning of February 2009. My then-boyfriend was describing a worldwide, year-long, see-everything-”real”, hostels-only trip he was considering. The phrase that came to me then was ‘Summeryear – chase the season’ and my characters sprung out fully-formed, albeit a little shallow at the time. I imagined teenagers who resolved to travel across the globe after high school, following the summer season throughout their destinations. Before they graduated, however, they would instead push themselves into a world of anarchy by their own impatience to leave and their loathing for the lack of culture they found in North America.