Over the past few weeks I’ve been reworking the art for SOME DID REST, the graphic novel proposal that resulted in my being awarded a 2011 Creative Workforce Fellowship. In mid-May I’ll be heading to China to spend a few weeks visiting the site of the 2008 Sichuan earthquakes, which was the original inspiration for the story. Over the few years that I’ve been developing this book, my line work has tightened, and I realized that the proposal art I drew last year no longer reflects how the final book would be drawn. So I’ve been reinking and reworking the opening scenes pages, a sample of which you can see on the right.

In January, my hometown newspaper, the Lawrence Journal World, ran a story about SOME DID REST’s inspirations and the steps leading up to the fellowship from the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture here in Cleveland.

Storm Stories: LHS Grad Making Name for Work in Graphic Novels
“There’s something about disasters,” she says, struggling to explain her interest in them. “Everyone loses control.
“Maybe you can blame it on the tornado that hit my house and neighborhood in Lawrence.”

Another paper, Cleveland’s weekly magazine, Scene, also recently ran an article focusing on those awarded fellowships from the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture here in Cleveland, and I was one of the artists highlighted. The grants are funded with a tax on cigarettes in the county, hence the article’s title.

What Your Butts Buy: How we spend one of the nation’s biggest pots of public arts money
Fellowship judges were impressed by Smith’s initial drawings for Some Did Rest, her forthcoming graphic novel inspired by the 2008 earthquakes in Sichuan, China. While reading about the disaster, Smith was struck by reports of thousands of students dying in shoddily constructed school buildings.

Both articles talk about the origins of the story behind SOME DID REST, and why it is I’ll be making a trip next week to Sichuan, China.

In other small, flattering honors, a cover I designed last year for independent publisher Lethe Press was on Lambda Literary’s 2010 in Review: Best Book Covers in very good company. The book is DIANA COMET AND OTHER IMPROBABLE STORIES by Sandra McDonald, and it was a pleasure to work on.

I also was a part of FULL SERVICE, a show that ran last week at the Cleveland Institute of Art’s Visual Arts + Technologies Coventry Center as part of the campus-wide spring show. Full Service included work by myself and some of my fellow technical assistants here at CIA, and my piece was a print of the original first chapter of SOME DID REST. I hope some of you stopped by to see it!

Always keeping busy.

March already?

Still no sequential art I can show, but I’ve been doing a few covers for small presses as freelance.

I’m deep into the first bit of SOME DID REST at the moment, inking the second half of the chapter and prepping files. It seems like script revisions never end, and I’m just lucky that the ones I’m thinking about right now won’t result in what I’ve drawn so far going into the trash. My days are spent hunched over my lightbox, drawing rubble…

Things are coming together for IN MAPS & LEGENDS, though I still don’t have anything I’m allowed to share. Soon, though! I’ve even tricked collaborator Mike Jasper into doing a few pages of thumbnails. Poor guy doesn’t realize he’s been swindled into doing the least enjoyable part of comics for me~ ;) We’re both eager to move forward with the story.

Fellow Cleveland Institute of Art grad and comics guy Kevin Czapiewski is teaching a continuing education class called The Art of Comics right now at CIA, and he recently asked me if I was interested in stopping by and getting involved. He’s got a great curriculum planned, and those who sign up go through the process of building a comic from a script and series of thumbnails all the way to a finished story.

I’m hoping to help out with next week’s session, where Kevin’s talking about how time can be portrayed in sequential art. He plans on teaching the class again during the summer, so I’ll be sure to post more info when I have it so anyone local can take a look. Who says Cleveland doesn’t have a comics scene?

And while you’re at it, take a look at Kevin’s long-scrolling webcomic, SPOILERS! We’re both what you get when you combine fine arts majors with a love of comics.

I also recently did an extensive update to the list of literary agents who represent graphic novels, going through it to fix links and remove names of those who are no longer in the business– as well as adding a few agents. So take a look if you’ve got a graphic novel ready to query. (But please– I’m not an agent! Queries that come to me don’t get you anywhere!)

A few quick updates! I recently offered to design mock-up book cover designs for people interested on my Twitter account, and a few people took me up on it. I’ve added the results of the design exercise to the gallery section. All of the covers were put together pretty quickly as an exercise as I work on other projects, with no more than an afternoon or two working on and off on each. The cover for seen here took the longest, but after a few false starts it’s the one I’m happiest with! The Grey Knight is a dark fantasy novel by one of my fellow FinePrint clients (yay!), Chris Finch, and has a bunch of really appealing visuals… ultimately I went with the city of Highbranch, since I had read about it on his site a month or two ago, and had been drawn to it even then. The cover for Hanging by a Thread came from a concept belonging to C. L. Steele (“a graphic novel about coming out as a lesbian after marriage”) while Jupiter’s Goat was pretty much just a phrase I liked. ;) I have a few more ideas in mind, so I may update again with those soon.

Also, the list of literary agents who represent graphic novels has been updated! Brenda Bowen has joined Sanford J. Greenburger Associates, and you can read an article about what she’s interested in at Publishers Weekly. Take a look if you’re a graphic novel artist/writer interested in finding an agent.

“Bowen will represent authors and illustrators of children’s books for all ages (preschool to teen) as well as, in her words, “graphic novelists, animators and maybe a surprise element or two.”