Episode 038 - Graphic Novels with Joshua Howell
August 4, 2020
Science fiction author Joshua Howell discusses the graphic novel he created based on the first novel in his Fierce Saga, The Fierce are Fading, including his collaboration with illustrator Ilaria Apostoli, the technical challenges that graphic novels pose, and how preparing his story for this visual medium gave him the inspiration he needed to complete the prose version.
Joshua Howell is an Air Force Veteran who wrote his first novel in high school and had it published while serving overseas. Since returning to civilian life, he has received awards for his poetry and short stories.
Joshua Howell is an Air Force Veteran who wrote his first novel in high school and had it published while serving overseas. Since returning to civilian life, he has received awards for his poetry and short stories.
He also writes science fiction and co-hosts a weekly podcast, Nerfherders Assemble, where he chats about all things related to the movie, TV, and comic book industries.
Normally Joshua connects with readers and fans at book shows and comic conventions, and spends his weekdays working for an Equine-Assisted Therapy nonprofit organization in Gretna, Nebraska.
Recently, Joshua completed his science fiction trilogy, The Fierce Saga, which is printed under the Fierce Literature imprint, and has also completed a graphic novel adaption of the first book, The Fierce Are Fading.
Normally Joshua connects with readers and fans at book shows and comic conventions, and spends his weekdays working for an Equine-Assisted Therapy nonprofit organization in Gretna, Nebraska.
Recently, Joshua completed his science fiction trilogy, The Fierce Saga, which is printed under the Fierce Literature imprint, and has also completed a graphic novel adaption of the first book, The Fierce Are Fading.
"It wasn't easier to write less. It was a lot harder to put the same things on the page but write less." --Joshua Howell
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Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast today. My guest is Joshua Howell. Hey Joshua, how are you doing?
[00:00:07] Joshua: I'm doing great, Matty. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:09] Matty: My pleasure. So to give our listeners a little bit of background on you.
Joshua Howell is an Air Force Veteran who wrote his first novel in high school and had it published while serving overseas. Since returning to civilian life, he has received awards for his poetry and short stories. He also writes science fiction, and we’ll be talking about that shortly.
When Joshua isn't writing, he co-hosts a weekly podcast, Nerfherders Assemble, where he chats about all things related to the movie, TV, and comic book industries.
Normally Joshua connects with readers and fans at book shows and comic conventions, and spends his weekdays working for an Equine-Assisted Therapy nonprofit organization in Gretna, Nebraska.
Recently, Joshua completed his science fiction trilogy, The Fierce Saga, which is printed under the Fierce Literature imprint, and has also completed a graphic novel adaption of the first book, The Fierce Are Fading.
And that's what we're going to be talking about today: graphic novels.
[00:01:08] So Joshua, before we dive into the details of the graphic novel of The Fierce are Fading. talk a little bit about your background as a reader of graphic novels.
[00:01:18] Joshua: I'm quite the fan of comics and graphic novels. I grew up going to the record store with my dad on Saturday mornings and they had a little alcove in that building that just had long boxes of comics. And they weren't in any type of order, but they were a quarter a piece and I would spend hours in there trying to find issue two, three, and four, an order of something. So I read comics a lot as a kid. My grandpa always tried to get me to read, higher levels then than what I was doing, and so he would get me graphic novels, whether they were based on books-- one of his favorites was the Screwtape Letters, or In His Steps, great classic books--and he would find graphic novel versions of that and get me to read those. And then, if I wanted to keep the graphic novel, I would then have to read the book itself. So that was his incentive to get me to read more. So graphic novels have always been a part of my life and I still collect them to this day.
[00:02:21] Matty: Are comic books, a subset of graphic novels, or how do those two terms relate to each other?
[00:00:07] Joshua: I'm doing great, Matty. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:09] Matty: My pleasure. So to give our listeners a little bit of background on you.
Joshua Howell is an Air Force Veteran who wrote his first novel in high school and had it published while serving overseas. Since returning to civilian life, he has received awards for his poetry and short stories. He also writes science fiction, and we’ll be talking about that shortly.
When Joshua isn't writing, he co-hosts a weekly podcast, Nerfherders Assemble, where he chats about all things related to the movie, TV, and comic book industries.
Normally Joshua connects with readers and fans at book shows and comic conventions, and spends his weekdays working for an Equine-Assisted Therapy nonprofit organization in Gretna, Nebraska.
Recently, Joshua completed his science fiction trilogy, The Fierce Saga, which is printed under the Fierce Literature imprint, and has also completed a graphic novel adaption of the first book, The Fierce Are Fading.
And that's what we're going to be talking about today: graphic novels.
[00:01:08] So Joshua, before we dive into the details of the graphic novel of The Fierce are Fading. talk a little bit about your background as a reader of graphic novels.
[00:01:18] Joshua: I'm quite the fan of comics and graphic novels. I grew up going to the record store with my dad on Saturday mornings and they had a little alcove in that building that just had long boxes of comics. And they weren't in any type of order, but they were a quarter a piece and I would spend hours in there trying to find issue two, three, and four, an order of something. So I read comics a lot as a kid. My grandpa always tried to get me to read, higher levels then than what I was doing, and so he would get me graphic novels, whether they were based on books-- one of his favorites was the Screwtape Letters, or In His Steps, great classic books--and he would find graphic novel versions of that and get me to read those. And then, if I wanted to keep the graphic novel, I would then have to read the book itself. So that was his incentive to get me to read more. So graphic novels have always been a part of my life and I still collect them to this day.
[00:02:21] Matty: Are comic books, a subset of graphic novels, or how do those two terms relate to each other?
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[00:02:26] Joshua: When you go to a comic store or a bookstore, graphic novels could be one of two things. Either they're a collection of individual comics. If a story arc is told over 10 issues that were sold individually, then there could be a collected, hard cover of that book or soft cover of those all in one, or it could just be a story that was originally only intended to be a graphic novel. So it's either a collection of individual issues or that's the way it was meant to originally be presented, just all in one.
[00:02:59] Matty: Talk a little bit first about The Fierce Saga, the original, as I understand it, textual book, novel presentation.
[00:03:08] Joshua: It was a story that was in my head for a long time, especially while I was in the military. I'm a huge procrastinator at heart. So I had the story in my head for years before I finally broke down and started typing it up. And I was writing the first book, The Fierce are Fading. It's a science fiction story about agent Riley Harper. Her partner goes missing and the more she looks for him, the more craziness happens around her. There's a secret society with monsters and teleportation and assassins and all crazy stuff.
[00:03:41] But I was having a hard time finishing the book. I had all these ideas and all these plans, but I just couldn't wrap it up. I went to a lot of comic conventions and I read a lot of comics and a couple people just said, hey, why don't you try to turn it into a graphic novel? Put it out in script format instead of prose and see if writing it in the different format shakes your brain loose a bit and wraps it up that way. And it did. I focused all of my efforts for a few months on putting it in script form and creating the graphic novel adaption of the first book. And yeah, it worked. I was able to go back and finish the novel and then write the sequels.
[00:04:21] Matty: Did you do the same approach for the sequels of doing the graphic novel adaptation ahead of doing the text novel?
[00:04:29] Joshua: No, actually we only did one graphic novel. It was a year process to do the graphic novel with auditioning people and then finding the artist and then finding the money to pay for the artist, because artists costs money, and then promoting that and everything. I was lucky enough to find the artist that I did and be able to find a way to afford her wonderful art. But I didn't know that I'd be able to do that again, so I wrote the end of the graphic novel to be slightly different, wrap it up a little bit better, so if we never had another comic, that would be fine. And then treated the book and the sequels like the extended director's cut. So if you wanted more, you would read the prose novel and then the books would continue.
[00:05:12] Matty: And you completed the book after the graphic novel, correct?
[00:05:17] Joshua: Correct. Yup.
[00:05:18] Matty: Do you think that you could have gotten that same benefit of getting the jumpstart to complete the novel if you had done a version of the graphic novel that you never intended to publish? So without professional illustration, but writing it out the way I imagine you would have to?
[00:05:35] Joshua: Yeah, sure. That would be a good technique to do it. Definitely made my brain work in a different way. Prose, you can write and write and write and be specific and long form as possible. And then of course, go back later and edit it. With a comic, you only have so much space on that page and that page can't all be words, it's got to mostly be visuals and you don't want to blow it up with text boxes or dialogue.
[00:06:00] Each one of those pages had the number of panels, the size of the panels, what you wanted in the panel. And I had to be as specific as possible to pass that along to the artist, but then make sure that everything on that page was telling the story that I wanted to tell without putting a lot of text on that page.
[00:06:20] So, yeah, it was a great writing challenge for me. But then, yeah, working through every scene through a different lens and making it that way. Then when I returned to the prose book, I felt liberated and I could suddenly write as long as I wanted again, and make it as detailed as I wanted, and was able to finish the things that I couldn't wrap up before.
[00:06:44] Matty: Talk a little bit about the step by step process of you doing the part you had to do, and then your illustrator, and say what her name is.
[00:06:54] Joshua: Ilaria Apostoli.
[00:06:55] Matty: And then what she did and how the two of you worked together.
[00:06:59] Joshua: Sure. Well, first of all, I had to find her. I get a lot of, auditions.
[00:07:04] I started locally. I'm from Nebraska, so there's a lot of artists around here, or at least I've run into a lot of artists and other writers at conventions or meetups and whatnot. I did a lot of auditioning locally first. I basically wrote the first 10 pages in script form and then sent it out.
[00:07:24] And I had just a hard time connecting with anybody that got back to me. I am not an artist. I really wish that I was. I'm very jealous of all artists out there. I can't draw to save my life. I was open minded in terms of style, but I was looking for certain things. If I wrote a panel that said, girl tied up to a chair and a basement, I didn't necessarily write girl with certain types of figure aspects and in skimpy lingerie and stuff like that. When I would get those images back, I just knew that wasn't really the vibe I was looking for.
[00:07:59] But Facebook has a lot of author / artist meetup pages. You still have to do some work. There's a lot of people out there that have crazy expectations, people that have never been published before, but they want to make the money that the top artists in the industry do, and there's a lot of skill level in there too. But I found Ilaria on there and I really liked her artwork.
[00:08:21] I told her about the story. She loved that it was a strong female character and she liked the concept and the story I was telling. And so I did the same thing with her -- sent her a few pages, asked her to pick something out, and she just blew me away, both with her style and her determination and her commitment and her love for this story and some of the things that she brought back to me as far as suggestions, cause she is the artist, not me. I didn't want to just tell her what to do. I wanted her to put some of her own flair to it.
[00:08:51] So the first maybe 10, 20 pages or so, it was very much I sent her the whole script, she would send me back to sketches and then the next stage and the next stage, and I would approve it. And then after a while, I was just like, I love your work, Ilaria, you're doing fantastic. If you want to just send me updates in a couple of weeks, a month, then do that, and if I have any glaring issues, I'll let you know. But otherwise we vibed really well together. And, we only spoke through Facebook. She lives in Italy. I've never met her in my life. It was crazy to work with somebody on the other side of the planet, but we just were in the right mindset and it worked out.
[00:09:30] Matty: The pictures are really gorgeously rendered.
[00:09:32] Joshua: Yeah. I agree.
[00:09:33] Matty: And I'm wondering how different the look was from what you had in mind?
[00:09:41] Joshua: Again, I was very open to styles. I knew that everybody has their own different style. We raised money on Kickstarter to pay her, and we raised $6,000 for 200 pages. And that sounds like a lot money, but it's really not considering that she did everything on the page, except for the speech bubbles. I did the speech bubbles. But in most of the professional comic industry, you have one person doing the pencils and one person doing the shading and one person doing the coloring. It's a whole crew that goes into every page and, tens of thousands of dollars going into comics. So as long as I could find somebody that I could work with and that I could raise the money that they were expecting, I was very open to the style.
[00:10:24] But she had a style in her commission work and that's what I fell in love with initially, and then just her applying that to the characters I had in mind. I would send her headshots of somebody that I thought in my mind looked like the character I was writing. And then she would do her take on that.
[00:10:40] And then also, if you look at some of the artwork, she does a sketchy look, like you can see a lot of the lines, they're not just one perfect line around the characters. She can do more fine line art, but when she was showing me that artwork, I just thought it matched the tone of the story, which is kind of like a noir thriller.
[00:11:03] I really liked her sketchy look to it and I was just like, keep that and go with it. And that's usually one of the first things that people mention to me at comic cons when they finger through it, how they love that style and they don't see that style very often. So, yeah, I never had an issue with her art ability. It always just blew me out of the water.
[00:11:22] Matty: Yeah, it does portray a nice action sense to it and also sort of a frenetic, jarring kind of effect to have that very sketchy drawing.
[00:11:32] When you market The Fierce are Fading, and now you have both the graphic novel and the traditional novel to offer, how do you coordinate marketing between those two editions?
[00:11:46] Joshua: Well, the graphic novel certainly gets me into different places, like comic cons are most of the shows I go to now, whether they're small ones here in Nebraska and around the Midwest, or they're big ones like New York Comic Con, where you have 110,000 people walking around a building for four days. So it definitely gets me into places that I wouldn't necessarily be able to get into with just a book. But there's still a large group of people that don't read comics. And I know several decades ago, comics used to be like, Oh, don't read those, that's bad for your brain, or you must not be very intelligent if you're reading a comic or whatnot.
[00:12:24] But they're making a comeback. You've got the whole superhero genre of movies now, but a lot of movies that aren't just superhero films are based off comics now. Chris Hemsworth just came out with a movie on Netflix called Extraction, and that was a big action film based on a graphic novel. Basically, a graphic novel gives you the ability to have a visual to your story without doing a film, but depending on your artist, it can be just as immersive as a film or a TV series. And a lot of current studios are going after the graphic novel market, because not only can they read the story, but they can see the story. And it's almost like storyboarding a movie without actually storyboarding it. You're just putting it out as a comic. People are becoming more and more receptive to the graphic novel, but there's still a lot of people that just, they would just rather read the book.
[00:13:18] I actually re-released the first copy of the book The Fierce Are Fading with the first 20 pages of the graphic novel in the back so that the reader could see the difference between what they read on the page to what they would see in the comics. I just marketed it as, the graphic novel is a 210-page short form version. The prose novel is like the director's cut. You got more scenes. You get a little more depth to the scenes. And then there is an alternate ending that gave room for sequels.
[00:13:50] Matty: I had never read a graphic novel, and when I learned about you and we were going to have you on the podcast, I thought I should really read one. I watched the gorgeous trailer for your book, and I thought that's a little too gruesome for me. So I thought I'm going to try at least some other graphic novel. So I got Snow, Glass, Apples by Neil Gaiman and Colleen Doran. Have you ever read that?
[00:14:14] Joshua: Yeah. Neil Gaiman puts out some great work, so for sure.
[00:14:17] Matty: Yeah. I always say one of my favorite books of all time it Neverwhere. And I thought, Oh look, Neil Gaiman. And it's a retelling of the Snow White story, and it was very gruesome. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. This was told from the stepmother's point of view, and anything that's tied into a fairy tale, fairytales in general are quite gruesome and also quite sexually explicit, this book. I thought, Oh look, a retelling of the Snow White story. But there really isn't anything in the description that would indicate to you that really, really bad things are going to happen, except for the fact that the stepmother is holding a bleeding heart in her hand. But if you don't look carefully, you really don't notice that it's a bleeding heart.
[00:15:02] And I thought there's some poor kid whose mom or dad saw, Oh, look, it's a retelling of the Snow White story. Let's get that for Junior. And Junior's is never going to be the same.
[00:15:15] Joshua: Usually those books have a parental warning or a mature material.
[00:15:19] Matty: There's nothing like that. That's what I was going to ask, because I think that for people who are reading textual novels, you get used to the conventions that indicates that, Oh, this is probably going to be pretty violent. Or this is probably going to have a lot of sexual content in it. But is there a similar set of conventions that clue people in when they're looking around for the graphic novel that they want to read?
[00:15:42] Joshua: Yeah. At least in the comics conventions that I go to, my booth is always located in the small press section. So that means that there will be prose books as well as graphic novels. I can't do art, but I designed my own covers, and usually that's the thing that draws somebody over to the booth. And every once in a while, a kid will come over and I'm just very upfront with the parents. I tell them what's in there. The trailer was a little shock and awe, that showed the more horrific parts of the book, but it's certainly not 210 pages of that.
[00:16:12] Matty: That's good to know.
[00:16:13] Joshua: Yeah, at least the comic doesn't have any super R rated language or sex scenes or anything. It just has some monsters and an action scene here and there. I do tell the parents that it's not written for teenagers, but it's certainly probably a teenager in that book. And sometimes the parents are like, well, my 12-year-old reads higher and reads more adult books than most. And I'm like, that's your prerogative. But I usually try to be honest with them upfront. Just like in the comic industry, there are family friendly comics and then there's more comics geared towards adults. I think as long as you're honest with people, most people, don't look at it and say, Oh, that's too much. In fact, my book's probably more tame than most of the things that they come across in the small press section. I feel like just as long as you open a dialogue and kind of give them a heads up, most people are open to still continuing and trying out the book.
[00:17:05] Matty: It would be interesting to see what people's reaction would be if you only had a few pages that were particularly gruesome. And you can say, "Just flip over two pages."
[00:17:15] Joshua: That's what happens. Sometimes they finger through and then they flip to that one page. That's a great page, but it's not 200 pages of that.
[00:17:24] Matty: I may take the dive then into your book because it did look great. The beginning of the trailer really hooked me. I'm glad that at least I had the opportunity to read a graphic novel before we talked, because it really is a very immersive experience, in some ways, much more immersive than watching a movie, because I think that with a movie, you're an observer. But with this, I felt it combined the best parts of excellent writing with the grabbing quality of great illustration. And it was one of those things that I have not gotten recently with a book where a bomb could have gone off around me and I wouldn't have noticed because I was so deep into the story.
[00:18:01] It sounds like you're bringing a little bit different perspective to it though. That it's just a different experience in that the book can provide more detail, but you're getting obviously more visual with the graphic novel.
[00:18:12] Joshua: Yeah, I think the graphic novel, it was an experience that worked out beautifully. It's something that I'd like to do again, but as a writer, it's so much easier for me just to write a book. I write it, I send it off to somebody to edit, that's really the only cost I'm putting into it. Whereas as creating a comic, I had to find the artist. And then if I wrote the book or if I wrote the comic, then I have to wait a year or even longer for them to finish the artwork. Ilaria worked on this comic for nine months, she churned out 210 pages in nine months. And to some people that would seem like a long time. To most artists that would seem like an incredibly short time to churn out that many pages.
[00:18:52] I was very lucky. She was very dedicated. She was in a spot in her life where she could just focus on this. That trailer was actually built just on 10 pages worth of drawings that she did.
[00:19:03] We had to create a trailer for the Kickstarter, so she just did those images, we built the trailer around it, and then we raised the money before she even started the comics. At that time, the comic didn't exist. It was, if we raised the amount we're trying to raise, in nine months we'll put out the book. And so that's the schedule we kept.
[00:19:22] But I viewed them as a joined experience because, depending on the imagination you have, when you read a book, you could visualize a certain thing and then you can look over at the comic and see what I visualized in my head. And sometimes those things might clash or sometimes they might just brighten up what you had in your head when you were reading the story. The artwork definitely helps set the tone of the story a little bit more and it gives you things that you might not always see when you're reading, when you're reading a character doing something, but you can't see the expression on their face, unless I'm putting a lot of detail into that paragraph. And just to be able to then go over to the comic and watch that scene on the comic page. I think it just adds to the experience. Definitely I would always suggest if you liked one, read the other and it just helps you enjoy it that much more.
[00:20:11] Matty: Do you have a separate marketing effort that's focused just on the people who are reading the trilogy that is different than the approach you take to try to entice people to read the graphic novel?
[00:20:22] Joshua: No, not really. I feel like most people that read sci-fi nowadays, or that read horror or fantasy, I just feel like that divide isn't as wide as use to be. People that want to be immersed in a story with monsters and action and fantasy or sci-fi, they'll usually take it in whatever form they can get.
[00:20:43] So sometimes somebody will come across my book and not know that there is a comic adaption. And then when they find out they're just that much more intrigued. And that's why I added it to the end of the first book. The first book is the shortest of the trilogy. I was like, what can I do to thicken this book up a little bit, and so I threw in 20 pages of the comic. And usually people get to that and they're like, Oh my goodness, there's a visual form of this. Let's do it.
[00:21:08] Maybe at one time I might've thought that I needed to market them differently, but I think most people that are attracted to that type of story anyway would be attracted to it in many forms. I just say, hey, there's more to take in.
[00:21:21] Matty: Are your textual books available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, all the normal online platforms?
[00:21:29] Joshua: Yeah. They're on Amazon and they're through my website, so they're easily out there. This isn't a full-time gig for me. Like I said, I work at a nonprofit nine to five on the weekdays, so I sell most of my books in person. I really like going to as many book sales and conventions and book fairs as I can, because I'm a people person. I like meeting people. I like telling them about my book, I like shaking their hand. I like learning what they like and seeing if I have something that'll fit their tastes. My other book is a fantasy book. If you're not into sci-fi, I've got fantasy as well. And unfortunately, I haven't been able to do that at all this year. All of my shows have been canceled. It's been depressing for me because I really like meeting new people and then going to that same show a year later and maybe they come back and get the next book.
[00:22:19] So it's a very people person thing for me, but with being indoors and being in quarantine and everything for basically the past half of this year, I've tried to put more work into making sure they're available on my website and selling them digitally if I can and just getting it in people's hands however I can do that.
[00:22:39] Matty: Did you encounter any challenges with getting a book onto KDP that had graphics in it as well as the text?
[00:22:48] Joshua: Oh, yes. KDP, there's a lot of templates out there that you could do for text that will auto format and make sure the margins are great and everything. It is a lot different with visuals, with the graphic novel. First of all, especially if you're going through KDP, if your comic has color interiors, it's going to be extremely expensive. A black and white text book costs not a lot to make. If you have one page on the inside with color, then all pages are considered color. So it's very expensive to do that. So basically, we released a black and white version that you could order through Amazon, that KDP prints.
[00:23:29] There is actually a group of niche comic readers that like their comics in black and white. Some comics don't even ever put out color version of their story, like The Walking Dead TV show is based on a very popular comic called The Walking Dead, and it was always only released in black and white. So we released a black and white version of the comic, we call it the Noir Edition, and put that through. KDP. We were able to make it a little bit bigger because KDP's printing costs are pretty darn affordable, and then I go through a private printer for the color versions of the comic.
[00:24:03] But yeah, it was touch and go for learning how to get around the margin issues and making sure it printed correctly and everything. But once you got a hang of it, it wasn't an issue after that.
[00:24:14] Matty: I wanted to jump back to another question about working with your illustrator in terms of the actual layout on the page of the material. Is that something that you determined, that she determined, that you determined in conjunction?
[00:24:29] Joshua: Sure. When I was doing the script, I wanted each page to be as detailed on my side as possible so that she wasn't ever needing more information from me, but then she could take it and run with it. Each page of the script, on the top of the page, it said how many panels there were, and panels are the little boxes with graphic in it. And if you look at any comic page, every page is not the same. Some page could have three panels, some page could be one picture, some of them could have 16 panels that are all just different sizes. So I on my end would sketch it out and imagine how I would see it and how it would flow.
[00:25:07] And then on the script, I would say this page is going to have five panels. Panel one is either a full page or a third of the page, or I would give the size of the panel and I would do that for every single panel, what I would want in that panel, what's in the dialogue, and just be as detailed as possible.
[00:25:24] And then she would get it, and if she had questions, she would roll it back to me, but otherwise, that flowed pretty well, just as long as I tried to give her as much detail upfront as possible.
[00:25:35] Matty: It would be interesting from format to format because some graphic novels I imagine are sort of geographically laid out panels. And then I noticed in Snow, Glass, Apples that there would be circumstances where there might be a picture in the upper left, and then there would be something like a person's body through the middle, on a diagonal, and then there would be another scene going on in the lower right, so that they weren't panels the way I would think of from comic book reading, but it was a page that was somehow molding that all together. Did you encounter that when you were putting together yours?
[00:26:10] Joshua: Yeah, she did that a lot. She liked to bring the more immersive elements to the page as possible. And I would be totally open to her doing that every time she did it. I tried to give her the bare minimum that I needed on that page from a story standpoint. But then once her and I started vibing together, once we got through those first couple pages and I knew that I could trust her, and I certainly didn't want to be someone that was virtually standing over her shoulder and making sure that each thing was perfect, once I knew that I could trust her, I just let it roll.
[00:26:43] Not every page has those things that kind of break the form of the panel or come out or change the layout of the page. But when she did, it was an absolute surprise and it was very well welcomed. Sometimes those things, especially with the formatting of the page, got a little difficult from a printing side. If it went too far outside of the panel brackets, we had to figure out a way to get that without cutting off the artwork. But most of the time it was well welcomed and just made for better visual experience.
[00:27:14] Matty: And do you have plans in your future for another graphic novel?
[00:27:19] Joshua: I would hope so. I'd love to do it. I've definitely done projects with Ilaria since. When I released the 15th anniversary of my fantasy book, I rewrote the whole thing and she did some key artwork for some of the major scenes and we put that artwork in a gallery format in the back of the book, so that was really neat. And I do have a storyline that I'm working on that would look really great in black and white. And Ilaria has been doing well and I'm not ashamed to say that I can't afford her now, but a black and white comic would cost less and also take less of her time, so we're considering doing that. But I'm always open to do it. Like I said, it takes a lot more work to do that than a story, so it's just finding a way to make it work, but I love going to comic conventions and I love meeting those people. So if I can have another book that keeps my foot in the door there, then absolutely. I'd love to do it again.
[00:28:10] Matty: Well, I loved having the opportunity to discover graphic novels and I'll put a recommendation out to anyone who's listening to this that if you haven't read a story in pictures since you are a child, now's the time to give it another try. And I also really liked the idea, I think that even people who have no plan of publishing a graphic novel themselves could really benefit from your experience that when you started approaching that way, it got you over a hump, and I can imagine people just sitting down with Post-it Notes and just sketching out stick figures with speech bubbles, and that might be something that they may never show those Post-it Notes to anyone else, but that could be a nice way to get past the rough spot in a novel that they're working on.
[00:28:56] Joshua: Oh, definitely. Sometimes you're writing a scene and you just can't visualize how it would work or you just can't put it on paper, yeah, sometimes just drawing it out, envisioning what it would look like on a TV screen, in a film scene, and drawing those visuals will help you understand the scene better and write it easier.
[00:29:15] Taking a story from paragraph form to little, couple word or a couple sentences on a page panels, was definitely a format that I was not used to and it really did challenge me. It wasn't easier to write less. It was a lot harder to put the same things on the page but write less. And by the time I got back to the book, it was a welcome format and it made the story easier to write. So I definitely recommend it as a technique.
[00:29:41] Matty: That's great. Well, Joshua, thank you so much, this has been so interesting. Please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and your books online.
[00:29:51] Joshua: My website is fierceliterature.com. While I'm not going at conventions, I'm mostly on there. I'm also on Instagram #fierceliterature and I think I have a couple other social accounts that are connected to that website. But I'm trying to work on some projects while I'm locked away at the house and get some things done so that when I am going back into shows and meeting people across the country, I can bring more things to them. But yeah, you can follow me on Instagram for now and keep up with what I'm doing.
[00:30:22] Matty: Sounds good. And hopefully soon people will be able to catch up with you at the conventions as well.
[00:30:27] Joshua: Absolutely safely, but absolutely.
[00:30:29] Matty: Yeah. Thank you very much, this has been great.
[00:30:32] Joshua: Yeah. Thanks, Matty. Take care.
[00:02:59] Matty: Talk a little bit first about The Fierce Saga, the original, as I understand it, textual book, novel presentation.
[00:03:08] Joshua: It was a story that was in my head for a long time, especially while I was in the military. I'm a huge procrastinator at heart. So I had the story in my head for years before I finally broke down and started typing it up. And I was writing the first book, The Fierce are Fading. It's a science fiction story about agent Riley Harper. Her partner goes missing and the more she looks for him, the more craziness happens around her. There's a secret society with monsters and teleportation and assassins and all crazy stuff.
[00:03:41] But I was having a hard time finishing the book. I had all these ideas and all these plans, but I just couldn't wrap it up. I went to a lot of comic conventions and I read a lot of comics and a couple people just said, hey, why don't you try to turn it into a graphic novel? Put it out in script format instead of prose and see if writing it in the different format shakes your brain loose a bit and wraps it up that way. And it did. I focused all of my efforts for a few months on putting it in script form and creating the graphic novel adaption of the first book. And yeah, it worked. I was able to go back and finish the novel and then write the sequels.
[00:04:21] Matty: Did you do the same approach for the sequels of doing the graphic novel adaptation ahead of doing the text novel?
[00:04:29] Joshua: No, actually we only did one graphic novel. It was a year process to do the graphic novel with auditioning people and then finding the artist and then finding the money to pay for the artist, because artists costs money, and then promoting that and everything. I was lucky enough to find the artist that I did and be able to find a way to afford her wonderful art. But I didn't know that I'd be able to do that again, so I wrote the end of the graphic novel to be slightly different, wrap it up a little bit better, so if we never had another comic, that would be fine. And then treated the book and the sequels like the extended director's cut. So if you wanted more, you would read the prose novel and then the books would continue.
[00:05:12] Matty: And you completed the book after the graphic novel, correct?
[00:05:17] Joshua: Correct. Yup.
[00:05:18] Matty: Do you think that you could have gotten that same benefit of getting the jumpstart to complete the novel if you had done a version of the graphic novel that you never intended to publish? So without professional illustration, but writing it out the way I imagine you would have to?
[00:05:35] Joshua: Yeah, sure. That would be a good technique to do it. Definitely made my brain work in a different way. Prose, you can write and write and write and be specific and long form as possible. And then of course, go back later and edit it. With a comic, you only have so much space on that page and that page can't all be words, it's got to mostly be visuals and you don't want to blow it up with text boxes or dialogue.
[00:06:00] Each one of those pages had the number of panels, the size of the panels, what you wanted in the panel. And I had to be as specific as possible to pass that along to the artist, but then make sure that everything on that page was telling the story that I wanted to tell without putting a lot of text on that page.
[00:06:20] So, yeah, it was a great writing challenge for me. But then, yeah, working through every scene through a different lens and making it that way. Then when I returned to the prose book, I felt liberated and I could suddenly write as long as I wanted again, and make it as detailed as I wanted, and was able to finish the things that I couldn't wrap up before.
[00:06:44] Matty: Talk a little bit about the step by step process of you doing the part you had to do, and then your illustrator, and say what her name is.
[00:06:54] Joshua: Ilaria Apostoli.
[00:06:55] Matty: And then what she did and how the two of you worked together.
[00:06:59] Joshua: Sure. Well, first of all, I had to find her. I get a lot of, auditions.
[00:07:04] I started locally. I'm from Nebraska, so there's a lot of artists around here, or at least I've run into a lot of artists and other writers at conventions or meetups and whatnot. I did a lot of auditioning locally first. I basically wrote the first 10 pages in script form and then sent it out.
[00:07:24] And I had just a hard time connecting with anybody that got back to me. I am not an artist. I really wish that I was. I'm very jealous of all artists out there. I can't draw to save my life. I was open minded in terms of style, but I was looking for certain things. If I wrote a panel that said, girl tied up to a chair and a basement, I didn't necessarily write girl with certain types of figure aspects and in skimpy lingerie and stuff like that. When I would get those images back, I just knew that wasn't really the vibe I was looking for.
[00:07:59] But Facebook has a lot of author / artist meetup pages. You still have to do some work. There's a lot of people out there that have crazy expectations, people that have never been published before, but they want to make the money that the top artists in the industry do, and there's a lot of skill level in there too. But I found Ilaria on there and I really liked her artwork.
[00:08:21] I told her about the story. She loved that it was a strong female character and she liked the concept and the story I was telling. And so I did the same thing with her -- sent her a few pages, asked her to pick something out, and she just blew me away, both with her style and her determination and her commitment and her love for this story and some of the things that she brought back to me as far as suggestions, cause she is the artist, not me. I didn't want to just tell her what to do. I wanted her to put some of her own flair to it.
[00:08:51] So the first maybe 10, 20 pages or so, it was very much I sent her the whole script, she would send me back to sketches and then the next stage and the next stage, and I would approve it. And then after a while, I was just like, I love your work, Ilaria, you're doing fantastic. If you want to just send me updates in a couple of weeks, a month, then do that, and if I have any glaring issues, I'll let you know. But otherwise we vibed really well together. And, we only spoke through Facebook. She lives in Italy. I've never met her in my life. It was crazy to work with somebody on the other side of the planet, but we just were in the right mindset and it worked out.
[00:09:30] Matty: The pictures are really gorgeously rendered.
[00:09:32] Joshua: Yeah. I agree.
[00:09:33] Matty: And I'm wondering how different the look was from what you had in mind?
[00:09:41] Joshua: Again, I was very open to styles. I knew that everybody has their own different style. We raised money on Kickstarter to pay her, and we raised $6,000 for 200 pages. And that sounds like a lot money, but it's really not considering that she did everything on the page, except for the speech bubbles. I did the speech bubbles. But in most of the professional comic industry, you have one person doing the pencils and one person doing the shading and one person doing the coloring. It's a whole crew that goes into every page and, tens of thousands of dollars going into comics. So as long as I could find somebody that I could work with and that I could raise the money that they were expecting, I was very open to the style.
[00:10:24] But she had a style in her commission work and that's what I fell in love with initially, and then just her applying that to the characters I had in mind. I would send her headshots of somebody that I thought in my mind looked like the character I was writing. And then she would do her take on that.
[00:10:40] And then also, if you look at some of the artwork, she does a sketchy look, like you can see a lot of the lines, they're not just one perfect line around the characters. She can do more fine line art, but when she was showing me that artwork, I just thought it matched the tone of the story, which is kind of like a noir thriller.
[00:11:03] I really liked her sketchy look to it and I was just like, keep that and go with it. And that's usually one of the first things that people mention to me at comic cons when they finger through it, how they love that style and they don't see that style very often. So, yeah, I never had an issue with her art ability. It always just blew me out of the water.
[00:11:22] Matty: Yeah, it does portray a nice action sense to it and also sort of a frenetic, jarring kind of effect to have that very sketchy drawing.
[00:11:32] When you market The Fierce are Fading, and now you have both the graphic novel and the traditional novel to offer, how do you coordinate marketing between those two editions?
[00:11:46] Joshua: Well, the graphic novel certainly gets me into different places, like comic cons are most of the shows I go to now, whether they're small ones here in Nebraska and around the Midwest, or they're big ones like New York Comic Con, where you have 110,000 people walking around a building for four days. So it definitely gets me into places that I wouldn't necessarily be able to get into with just a book. But there's still a large group of people that don't read comics. And I know several decades ago, comics used to be like, Oh, don't read those, that's bad for your brain, or you must not be very intelligent if you're reading a comic or whatnot.
[00:12:24] But they're making a comeback. You've got the whole superhero genre of movies now, but a lot of movies that aren't just superhero films are based off comics now. Chris Hemsworth just came out with a movie on Netflix called Extraction, and that was a big action film based on a graphic novel. Basically, a graphic novel gives you the ability to have a visual to your story without doing a film, but depending on your artist, it can be just as immersive as a film or a TV series. And a lot of current studios are going after the graphic novel market, because not only can they read the story, but they can see the story. And it's almost like storyboarding a movie without actually storyboarding it. You're just putting it out as a comic. People are becoming more and more receptive to the graphic novel, but there's still a lot of people that just, they would just rather read the book.
[00:13:18] I actually re-released the first copy of the book The Fierce Are Fading with the first 20 pages of the graphic novel in the back so that the reader could see the difference between what they read on the page to what they would see in the comics. I just marketed it as, the graphic novel is a 210-page short form version. The prose novel is like the director's cut. You got more scenes. You get a little more depth to the scenes. And then there is an alternate ending that gave room for sequels.
[00:13:50] Matty: I had never read a graphic novel, and when I learned about you and we were going to have you on the podcast, I thought I should really read one. I watched the gorgeous trailer for your book, and I thought that's a little too gruesome for me. So I thought I'm going to try at least some other graphic novel. So I got Snow, Glass, Apples by Neil Gaiman and Colleen Doran. Have you ever read that?
[00:14:14] Joshua: Yeah. Neil Gaiman puts out some great work, so for sure.
[00:14:17] Matty: Yeah. I always say one of my favorite books of all time it Neverwhere. And I thought, Oh look, Neil Gaiman. And it's a retelling of the Snow White story, and it was very gruesome. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. This was told from the stepmother's point of view, and anything that's tied into a fairy tale, fairytales in general are quite gruesome and also quite sexually explicit, this book. I thought, Oh look, a retelling of the Snow White story. But there really isn't anything in the description that would indicate to you that really, really bad things are going to happen, except for the fact that the stepmother is holding a bleeding heart in her hand. But if you don't look carefully, you really don't notice that it's a bleeding heart.
[00:15:02] And I thought there's some poor kid whose mom or dad saw, Oh, look, it's a retelling of the Snow White story. Let's get that for Junior. And Junior's is never going to be the same.
[00:15:15] Joshua: Usually those books have a parental warning or a mature material.
[00:15:19] Matty: There's nothing like that. That's what I was going to ask, because I think that for people who are reading textual novels, you get used to the conventions that indicates that, Oh, this is probably going to be pretty violent. Or this is probably going to have a lot of sexual content in it. But is there a similar set of conventions that clue people in when they're looking around for the graphic novel that they want to read?
[00:15:42] Joshua: Yeah. At least in the comics conventions that I go to, my booth is always located in the small press section. So that means that there will be prose books as well as graphic novels. I can't do art, but I designed my own covers, and usually that's the thing that draws somebody over to the booth. And every once in a while, a kid will come over and I'm just very upfront with the parents. I tell them what's in there. The trailer was a little shock and awe, that showed the more horrific parts of the book, but it's certainly not 210 pages of that.
[00:16:12] Matty: That's good to know.
[00:16:13] Joshua: Yeah, at least the comic doesn't have any super R rated language or sex scenes or anything. It just has some monsters and an action scene here and there. I do tell the parents that it's not written for teenagers, but it's certainly probably a teenager in that book. And sometimes the parents are like, well, my 12-year-old reads higher and reads more adult books than most. And I'm like, that's your prerogative. But I usually try to be honest with them upfront. Just like in the comic industry, there are family friendly comics and then there's more comics geared towards adults. I think as long as you're honest with people, most people, don't look at it and say, Oh, that's too much. In fact, my book's probably more tame than most of the things that they come across in the small press section. I feel like just as long as you open a dialogue and kind of give them a heads up, most people are open to still continuing and trying out the book.
[00:17:05] Matty: It would be interesting to see what people's reaction would be if you only had a few pages that were particularly gruesome. And you can say, "Just flip over two pages."
[00:17:15] Joshua: That's what happens. Sometimes they finger through and then they flip to that one page. That's a great page, but it's not 200 pages of that.
[00:17:24] Matty: I may take the dive then into your book because it did look great. The beginning of the trailer really hooked me. I'm glad that at least I had the opportunity to read a graphic novel before we talked, because it really is a very immersive experience, in some ways, much more immersive than watching a movie, because I think that with a movie, you're an observer. But with this, I felt it combined the best parts of excellent writing with the grabbing quality of great illustration. And it was one of those things that I have not gotten recently with a book where a bomb could have gone off around me and I wouldn't have noticed because I was so deep into the story.
[00:18:01] It sounds like you're bringing a little bit different perspective to it though. That it's just a different experience in that the book can provide more detail, but you're getting obviously more visual with the graphic novel.
[00:18:12] Joshua: Yeah, I think the graphic novel, it was an experience that worked out beautifully. It's something that I'd like to do again, but as a writer, it's so much easier for me just to write a book. I write it, I send it off to somebody to edit, that's really the only cost I'm putting into it. Whereas as creating a comic, I had to find the artist. And then if I wrote the book or if I wrote the comic, then I have to wait a year or even longer for them to finish the artwork. Ilaria worked on this comic for nine months, she churned out 210 pages in nine months. And to some people that would seem like a long time. To most artists that would seem like an incredibly short time to churn out that many pages.
[00:18:52] I was very lucky. She was very dedicated. She was in a spot in her life where she could just focus on this. That trailer was actually built just on 10 pages worth of drawings that she did.
[00:19:03] We had to create a trailer for the Kickstarter, so she just did those images, we built the trailer around it, and then we raised the money before she even started the comics. At that time, the comic didn't exist. It was, if we raised the amount we're trying to raise, in nine months we'll put out the book. And so that's the schedule we kept.
[00:19:22] But I viewed them as a joined experience because, depending on the imagination you have, when you read a book, you could visualize a certain thing and then you can look over at the comic and see what I visualized in my head. And sometimes those things might clash or sometimes they might just brighten up what you had in your head when you were reading the story. The artwork definitely helps set the tone of the story a little bit more and it gives you things that you might not always see when you're reading, when you're reading a character doing something, but you can't see the expression on their face, unless I'm putting a lot of detail into that paragraph. And just to be able to then go over to the comic and watch that scene on the comic page. I think it just adds to the experience. Definitely I would always suggest if you liked one, read the other and it just helps you enjoy it that much more.
[00:20:11] Matty: Do you have a separate marketing effort that's focused just on the people who are reading the trilogy that is different than the approach you take to try to entice people to read the graphic novel?
[00:20:22] Joshua: No, not really. I feel like most people that read sci-fi nowadays, or that read horror or fantasy, I just feel like that divide isn't as wide as use to be. People that want to be immersed in a story with monsters and action and fantasy or sci-fi, they'll usually take it in whatever form they can get.
[00:20:43] So sometimes somebody will come across my book and not know that there is a comic adaption. And then when they find out they're just that much more intrigued. And that's why I added it to the end of the first book. The first book is the shortest of the trilogy. I was like, what can I do to thicken this book up a little bit, and so I threw in 20 pages of the comic. And usually people get to that and they're like, Oh my goodness, there's a visual form of this. Let's do it.
[00:21:08] Maybe at one time I might've thought that I needed to market them differently, but I think most people that are attracted to that type of story anyway would be attracted to it in many forms. I just say, hey, there's more to take in.
[00:21:21] Matty: Are your textual books available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, all the normal online platforms?
[00:21:29] Joshua: Yeah. They're on Amazon and they're through my website, so they're easily out there. This isn't a full-time gig for me. Like I said, I work at a nonprofit nine to five on the weekdays, so I sell most of my books in person. I really like going to as many book sales and conventions and book fairs as I can, because I'm a people person. I like meeting people. I like telling them about my book, I like shaking their hand. I like learning what they like and seeing if I have something that'll fit their tastes. My other book is a fantasy book. If you're not into sci-fi, I've got fantasy as well. And unfortunately, I haven't been able to do that at all this year. All of my shows have been canceled. It's been depressing for me because I really like meeting new people and then going to that same show a year later and maybe they come back and get the next book.
[00:22:19] So it's a very people person thing for me, but with being indoors and being in quarantine and everything for basically the past half of this year, I've tried to put more work into making sure they're available on my website and selling them digitally if I can and just getting it in people's hands however I can do that.
[00:22:39] Matty: Did you encounter any challenges with getting a book onto KDP that had graphics in it as well as the text?
[00:22:48] Joshua: Oh, yes. KDP, there's a lot of templates out there that you could do for text that will auto format and make sure the margins are great and everything. It is a lot different with visuals, with the graphic novel. First of all, especially if you're going through KDP, if your comic has color interiors, it's going to be extremely expensive. A black and white text book costs not a lot to make. If you have one page on the inside with color, then all pages are considered color. So it's very expensive to do that. So basically, we released a black and white version that you could order through Amazon, that KDP prints.
[00:23:29] There is actually a group of niche comic readers that like their comics in black and white. Some comics don't even ever put out color version of their story, like The Walking Dead TV show is based on a very popular comic called The Walking Dead, and it was always only released in black and white. So we released a black and white version of the comic, we call it the Noir Edition, and put that through. KDP. We were able to make it a little bit bigger because KDP's printing costs are pretty darn affordable, and then I go through a private printer for the color versions of the comic.
[00:24:03] But yeah, it was touch and go for learning how to get around the margin issues and making sure it printed correctly and everything. But once you got a hang of it, it wasn't an issue after that.
[00:24:14] Matty: I wanted to jump back to another question about working with your illustrator in terms of the actual layout on the page of the material. Is that something that you determined, that she determined, that you determined in conjunction?
[00:24:29] Joshua: Sure. When I was doing the script, I wanted each page to be as detailed on my side as possible so that she wasn't ever needing more information from me, but then she could take it and run with it. Each page of the script, on the top of the page, it said how many panels there were, and panels are the little boxes with graphic in it. And if you look at any comic page, every page is not the same. Some page could have three panels, some page could be one picture, some of them could have 16 panels that are all just different sizes. So I on my end would sketch it out and imagine how I would see it and how it would flow.
[00:25:07] And then on the script, I would say this page is going to have five panels. Panel one is either a full page or a third of the page, or I would give the size of the panel and I would do that for every single panel, what I would want in that panel, what's in the dialogue, and just be as detailed as possible.
[00:25:24] And then she would get it, and if she had questions, she would roll it back to me, but otherwise, that flowed pretty well, just as long as I tried to give her as much detail upfront as possible.
[00:25:35] Matty: It would be interesting from format to format because some graphic novels I imagine are sort of geographically laid out panels. And then I noticed in Snow, Glass, Apples that there would be circumstances where there might be a picture in the upper left, and then there would be something like a person's body through the middle, on a diagonal, and then there would be another scene going on in the lower right, so that they weren't panels the way I would think of from comic book reading, but it was a page that was somehow molding that all together. Did you encounter that when you were putting together yours?
[00:26:10] Joshua: Yeah, she did that a lot. She liked to bring the more immersive elements to the page as possible. And I would be totally open to her doing that every time she did it. I tried to give her the bare minimum that I needed on that page from a story standpoint. But then once her and I started vibing together, once we got through those first couple pages and I knew that I could trust her, and I certainly didn't want to be someone that was virtually standing over her shoulder and making sure that each thing was perfect, once I knew that I could trust her, I just let it roll.
[00:26:43] Not every page has those things that kind of break the form of the panel or come out or change the layout of the page. But when she did, it was an absolute surprise and it was very well welcomed. Sometimes those things, especially with the formatting of the page, got a little difficult from a printing side. If it went too far outside of the panel brackets, we had to figure out a way to get that without cutting off the artwork. But most of the time it was well welcomed and just made for better visual experience.
[00:27:14] Matty: And do you have plans in your future for another graphic novel?
[00:27:19] Joshua: I would hope so. I'd love to do it. I've definitely done projects with Ilaria since. When I released the 15th anniversary of my fantasy book, I rewrote the whole thing and she did some key artwork for some of the major scenes and we put that artwork in a gallery format in the back of the book, so that was really neat. And I do have a storyline that I'm working on that would look really great in black and white. And Ilaria has been doing well and I'm not ashamed to say that I can't afford her now, but a black and white comic would cost less and also take less of her time, so we're considering doing that. But I'm always open to do it. Like I said, it takes a lot more work to do that than a story, so it's just finding a way to make it work, but I love going to comic conventions and I love meeting those people. So if I can have another book that keeps my foot in the door there, then absolutely. I'd love to do it again.
[00:28:10] Matty: Well, I loved having the opportunity to discover graphic novels and I'll put a recommendation out to anyone who's listening to this that if you haven't read a story in pictures since you are a child, now's the time to give it another try. And I also really liked the idea, I think that even people who have no plan of publishing a graphic novel themselves could really benefit from your experience that when you started approaching that way, it got you over a hump, and I can imagine people just sitting down with Post-it Notes and just sketching out stick figures with speech bubbles, and that might be something that they may never show those Post-it Notes to anyone else, but that could be a nice way to get past the rough spot in a novel that they're working on.
[00:28:56] Joshua: Oh, definitely. Sometimes you're writing a scene and you just can't visualize how it would work or you just can't put it on paper, yeah, sometimes just drawing it out, envisioning what it would look like on a TV screen, in a film scene, and drawing those visuals will help you understand the scene better and write it easier.
[00:29:15] Taking a story from paragraph form to little, couple word or a couple sentences on a page panels, was definitely a format that I was not used to and it really did challenge me. It wasn't easier to write less. It was a lot harder to put the same things on the page but write less. And by the time I got back to the book, it was a welcome format and it made the story easier to write. So I definitely recommend it as a technique.
[00:29:41] Matty: That's great. Well, Joshua, thank you so much, this has been so interesting. Please let the listeners know where they can go to find out more about you and your books online.
[00:29:51] Joshua: My website is fierceliterature.com. While I'm not going at conventions, I'm mostly on there. I'm also on Instagram #fierceliterature and I think I have a couple other social accounts that are connected to that website. But I'm trying to work on some projects while I'm locked away at the house and get some things done so that when I am going back into shows and meeting people across the country, I can bring more things to them. But yeah, you can follow me on Instagram for now and keep up with what I'm doing.
[00:30:22] Matty: Sounds good. And hopefully soon people will be able to catch up with you at the conventions as well.
[00:30:27] Joshua: Absolutely safely, but absolutely.
[00:30:29] Matty: Yeah. Thank you very much, this has been great.
[00:30:32] Joshua: Yeah. Thanks, Matty. Take care.
I'd love to know if you are a graphic novel reader, or plan to become one based on what you heard in my conversation with Joshua. I’d also love to know how you might use a visual representation of your story—even if that’s just stick figures and Post-It Notes—to get you over a challenge you’re facing in your own work. Please leave your comments below!
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