here’s a bunch of Island Book
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BIG NEW THING
Two sequels to Island Book are in production with First Second Books. These sequels build a cohesive trilogy out of Island Book, and expand the fable storytelling of the first book into an enormous, harrowing adventure story with a focus on authoritarianism, looming apocalypse, and queer identity.
Island Book 2 comes out in 2021, and 3 in 2022. As with everything I work on, you can follow along with some of the process on my twitter, instagram, patreon…
I was recently interviewed in The Comics Journal about this and other upcoming projects!
Island Book Epilogue Triptych.
Three images that take place between the events of Island Book and Island Book 2, on the home islands of the series’ three focal characters.
I’ll be at SPX this weekend, at table H14 with practically every book I’ve ever made, and some prints of this triptych. Please come by if you’re in the DC area!
The Island Book Art Books are now for sale!
They come in a set: Making Island Book is 40 pages long and densely-packed with development art and commentary. Vessels is 20 pages long and is a quiet series of still lifes from the comic. Both of these are carefully made to loosely introduce the atmosphere and look of Island Book, without giving away really any narrative details at all.
I’ll have these at SPX in a few weeks in DC. And Island Book itself, a 280-page fantasy-adventure graphic novel, will be available in Spring 2019.
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Sola, Hunder, and Wick
The soundtrack to my graphic novel Island Book is now available for download. My brother Lewis made this album of 14 different atmospheric tracks that relate to the story and world of Island Book; I’m really happy with how it’s turned out as its own thing and as a support to the book.
A limited cassette edition will be available with the book’s debut this weekend at TCAF in Toronto.
Drawing Island Book 2!!! Excited about these sequels.
The Matriarch.
Six weeks until Island Book!
I have been thinking a lot about the disorienting science fiction novel Roadside Picnic by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, and Tarkovsky’s weirdly poetic film adaptation Stalker– I read and watched these during the process of working on Island Book, and I think they helped sort of crystallize some things in ways I don’t want to get too specific about! I am obsessed with fiction about struggling to know the unknowable (Solaris is a novel that works through parallel ideas that I really love, and that was also adapted into a film by Tarkovsky), and I’m interested in how that aspect of Island Book, and a lot of the narrative work I’ve made & will make, will look!
The Watcher.
8 weeks!! I had an advance copy of Island Book at Emerald City Comic Con last weekend, exciting for people to finally be able to see it. It is available for preorder now…..
While I’m putting up weekly countdown images, maybe I will talk a little about inspiration and starting points for this project! I can probably come up with something to say every week but we will see.
Island Book is tied in my head to a few specific books, and in particular it charts a kind of course through my reading of Moby-Dick, a weird encyclopedic book I have spent a lot of time with. If you read Moby-Dick I would suggest keeping an eye out for its attitude towards mystery: parodic attempts at cataloging, violent consequences for overconfidence, and elemental forms that are fundamentally outside of our understanding.
The Wake and the Ghost! Finished inks, not yet cleaned up or colored.
These are the two ships that are a big part of Island Book 2, which I’m working on very intensely lately, and which will be out in early 2021. Very happy with this book so far, I think it’s intense and I think it behaves kind of unexpectedly as a sequel. I’m excited to be able to build this whole trilogy!!!!
The first Island Book is available online and at bookstores.
Here’s a series of development drawings for a character in Island Book!
The first illustration is a sort of first-presentable-pass on the character. From there, I did a lot of drawing to develop his look and the look of the setting to which he pertains, focused particularly on simple shapes and clear repeating motifs– I’ve tried to keep a lot of the design work in Island Book simple and ‘crystallized’ in this way, and it builds an overall visual texture that I like. The last drawing is what he looks like to me ideally, before I go into drawing him in the comic itself– But inevitably the process of applying this design to the narrative itself (having it act and occupy space with the other characters, etc) will apply further pressures to it and change it a little more. So I generally go back and do some reworking for consistency before I ink a sequence of the book.
maybe that is interesting!! this project is making me look at my process in different ways.