Comics entertain, they can also educate, but can they heal? Can they be used in a therapeutic fashion? To help young readers process big emotions and experiences?
The team at Fanbase Press are convinced of it, and that’s why they’ve released the middle-grade comic series Shrub.
Writer/creator Shane Portman and Editor-in-Chief Barbra Dillon joined me (Patrick Lugo) for a conversation about the collected edition of their series, its origins and high concept, how it was received in libraries and what exactly is Graphic Medicine.
You can watch the conversation on YouTube, or read the edited transcript below.
What is Fanbase Press
Barbra Dillon: For those unfamiliar with Fanbase Press, we are a GLAAD Award-winning and Art Eisner and Harvey Awards-nominated publisher and media outlet. We have been in operation for 16 years now. And what we love to do is to celebrate fandoms and create new ones.
We love highlighting stories of all mediums, especially those around marginalized voices and stories. And we love lifting up those stories and helping them to reach as many readers as possible. And one of those stories is Shrub.
Patrick Lugo: Before we go really deep into Shrub, I wanted to cover a little bit more about Fanbase Press as a publishing entity.
BD: Fanbase Press, we are a boutique publishing company. So we only really tackle and develop one project at a time. All of our projects remain creator-owned. It’s very important to us, especially in this challenging artistic landscape, that creators maintain 100% of the rights to their work.
And so with regard to our submission process, everything, every story that we’ve published has come to us through submission or through a referral. And so in that, we really do our due diligence to ensure that it is a complementary story to our existing catalog. We want our existing readers to have some sort of connection or through line to all of the books that we read.
And we do try to offer something for everybody. And that means all different age demographics, all different genres. We really, truly do try to have something for everyone.
But more than just something for everyone, we try to have that uniting through line, which is that it’s not just the resonating characters and storylines. It’s that we want to leave readers asking questions. So we want to engage people in dialogue about the themes within each of our stories, and most importantly, to engage with each other.
And we want to engage that empathy as well, whether it’s a story that talks about a lived experience that you might be familiar with or a lived experience completely outside of your own. If we can engage you in dialogue with other people and especially engage your empathy muscles, then that’s exactly what we want to be doing.
Who is Shane Portman
Shane Portman: I’m a writer, creator.
Primarily, I’ve worked in animation. So I was the head of development for BixPix Entertainment, which is a stop-motion animation studio that created shows like Tumbleleaf and Shape Island. And Shrub is my first foray into the comics world, which I’m very excited about.
What is Shrub?
SP: It’s about a lonely shrub who winds up befriending these two grieving siblings, and they head off on this road trip adventure to find the shrub’s last known relative, who apparently is a background actor in Hollywood. So they’re heading off on this road trip to Hollywood.
And in the process, they go through a journey where they are reconnecting with each other and learning to let their grief take root, which is something they hadn’t done. So the series, the theme of the series is this idea of letting your grief take root and, you know, reconnecting and finding connections.
PL: This is a story whose roots tap into a profound personal experience for you. I was wondering if you could explain how it was that you ended up collaborating with Barbara on this project. What were its initial seeds?
SP: Initially, I just had an idea for a shrub character and that sat in my brain for a while. I didn’t really know what to do with it.
I just thought that was kind of cool and interesting and cute. So I just put it in the back of the brain, to see what happens. After letting it marinate back there for a bit, this idea started coming to my mind as a story kind of started rolling out.
It became a way for me to address a lot of stuff that had happened to me as a kid. I dealt with loss as a child. When I was almost 10 years old, my dad had a traumatic heart attack and he was in a coma for a few weeks. They were able to bring him out of it and he was brought back to life. But when he came out of that coma, he had brain damage, he was a completely different person for the majority of my life.
He passed away in 2006, and when he passed away, I had all of these feelings. I didn’t know all these unaddressed things which I didn’t have time or the understanding, when I was a kid, to address. There was all this stuff, this grief that I had from the dad that I lost at 10 who was never the same again.
So Shrub is a story about addressing grief and being OK with the complications in it. And part of what I really wanted to talk about is that I’m one of four kids. I really wanted it to be a story that addresses how grief affects a family and particularly siblings differently, depending on how old you are, when something happens, when trauma happens to your family, what position you are in that, you know, that ranking of your family, eldest, middle, youngest. That was interesting to me because of what happened to my family and my siblings. So I really wanted to explore that.
And when I brought it to Barbara and Brian at Fanbase Press, they told me about this idea of graphic medicine. So we came up with this concept to bring in. Each issue features an essay about grief that either comes from a specialist who has personally dealt with grief or one of my siblings and my mom. We all address what happened to us throughout this process. So it’s deeply connected to me and my family.
What is Graphic Medicine?
BD: Very simply, graphic medicine is a field of comics [about] the entire field of medicine. So it can be anything, your physical body, mental health, all well-being and the sequential art medium.
So if you combine these two fields, you get graphic medicine. The term was coined by Dr. Ian Williams, I believe, back in 2006. He was very impacted by Brian Fee’s Mom’s Cancer, if anyone has read that graphic novel.
So he came up with this term to describe this burgeoning field of combining comics and medicine. And then I believe it was in 2018, Dr. Williams and other founding members created the Graphic Medicine International Collective, which is an international organization by which they highlight, support and facilitate just the idea and the creation of graphic medicine. And I was very fortunate to become a board member of the Graphic Medicine International Collective back in 2024, I believe, and have just been amazed at the global community that brings graphic medicine to life, that supports it.
It’s everybody. It’s not just comics creators, but medical professionals. It’s patient advocates. It’s such a broad swath of people, and it’s amazing to see what’s created.
Graphic medicine can take so many different forms.It can be didactic. It can be something that folks use, maybe medical professionals to teach about. Or it can be more personal, like a graphic memoir where someone’s telling their own lived experience.
And then in terms of stories like Shrub, it can be fictional and yet still impactful, helping to educate people and make people aware of different lived experiences about a specific medical subject.
PL: And so might we grandfather in something like Harvey Pekar’s, I think it was called, My Year with Cancer from American Splendor from the 70s?
BD: Absolutely. I think that’s the amazing thing is that graphic medicine is such a wide umbrella term. And a lot of folks didn’t have a phrase for it until the early 2000s. It has been going on for decades. I mean, as long as comics have been around, graphic medicine has existed anytime that you’re tackling a subject within the medical field.
Working with Libraries
PL: The series was released into libraries and on Hoopla. Were parts of the comic freely available before the whole project was completed?
BD: That is accurate. We started in June of this year. We released issue one via Hoopla and Comics Plus, if you have a library card at your local library, you likely have access to Hoopla. And you can actually get all of Fanbase Press’s entire catalog available through Hoopla as well.
But we started to release each individual issue digitally first. So you can now get issues one through three on Hoopla and Comics Plus, and then we will continue releasing through January each issue of the series. But readers will only be able to get the collected edition in print through the Kickstarter campaign. The Kickstarter is to fund the collected edition of the series. So this will be all 8 issues in print.
Plus the collected edition is going to have a lot of bonus features that are only going to be available in this collected print edition. Now, in advance of that, as you mentioned, though, for us, we love libraries. We love the work that librarians do and likewise that schools and educators do. So we wanted to give an early sneak peek to readers through libraries and schools. So we released our series digitally, month to month, each issue.
PL: Your credits include a library consultant. I was wondering if you could explain why that choice.
BD: So Moni Barrette is a comics librarian. She was also a past president of the American Library Association’s Graphic Novel and Comics Roundtable.
It’s a very long acronym. GNCRT. But she has done amazing work with an organization called Creators Assemble, which is a literacy advocacy group, and they create study guides geared towards specific age demographics for comics and graphic novels. They’ve worked with Skybound, they’ve worked with Dark Horse, IDW, all of the big publishers, and they also created one for us for our prior series, Ripple Effects.
So in addition to doing a study guide for the collected edition of Shrub, I reached out to Moni because I wanted to ensure that we were crafting the story and being mindful of the age demographic and being mindful of schools and libraries that this would be an appropriate resource for them as a series and applicable in course curriculum and even more.
I know Shane, has had a lot of experience in the past, on the animation side of things of working with similar consultants to ensure that the content being delivered to audiences is appropriate.
Shane, I’ll defer to you on that.
SP: Yeah, I mean, a lot of my experience in animation was working on preschool shows. And those, they usually attach an educational advisor of some kind to it. So you’re constantly kind of bouncing ideas off in it. It’s actually very helpful, especially in the preschool world, but I think it’s probably even beyond.
A lot of times, we as adults, have a tendency to underestimate kids. People would pitch out ideas thinking that, and the educational advisor would let us know that the kids understand. If you weren’t seeing it from that kid’s perspective they’d help you get your idea there. So it’s helpful to have an educational advisor.
Publishing & Crowdfunding
PL: You mentioned Kickstarter, I’ve seen instances of colleagues who had not been able to get their book traditionally published and decided to crowdfund it instead. Then a year or so later, they find a publisher, maybe because they’ve got the physical thing. So I was wondering if we could talk a little bit about that phenomenon in the context of current publishing.
BD: Absolutely. First I empathize. It is a very challenging time in all avenues of creativity right now. I think that especially in comics publishing, it is very challenging. Comics publishing, we often liken it to theater, it’s something you really have to love to do because there’s not a lot of money in comics.
So hopefully this is a medium that you really love. But yes, it is really challenging, unless you’re someone with a name like Raina Telgemeier, you know, a really well-known comics creator. Interestingly, crowdfunding, which has been around for probably the better part of 15 years, has become an amazing opportunity with which creators can bring their work to life.
I think what’s been interesting for us at Fanbase Press, we resisted crowdfunding for quite a long time because I think there was a stigma attached to it. We, as a publisher, thought “we’re a publisher, we don’t want to have a negative stigma or connotation for crowdfunding,” but some of the biggest publishers in the industry have moved to that publishing model.
It is a way to bypass direct markets and go directly to the consumer and to provide them with what it is that they really want. I think that there is a sense of ownership that you as a consumer get being able to own something. In this time of digital media where you buy something, but you don’t really own it because you can’t have it physically, what an amazing gift to be able to go directly to the creators or directly to the creative team and buy something from them and be able to receive it in return.
So with crowdfunding, you do often see creators who might strike out on their own and bring something to life in physical form through crowdfunding.Then, as you noted Patrick, a year later, because they have put in the work and time to bring something to life, it’s like a proof of concept. Other publishers can see you’ve got a fan base and may help you bring it to an even larger audience.
SHRUB on Kickstarter
PL: I think this might be the chance to explain some of the rewards which people might want to check out.
BD: So on our Kickstarter, we try to have a wide swath of different opportunities at different financial levels because we want to be mindful that, of course, we are in a challenging economic time as well. So we start with a digital copy of Shrub, the collected edition. You can enjoy it yourself at home if you’re a digital reader.
We have other opportunities, of course, like the trade, the collected edition itself. We have signed copies by writer Shane and artist Andy. We also have an opportunity for Andy to do a remarked edition if you’d like. But we have some really fun opportunities as well. Going back to the idea of our love and admiration for educators and for librarians, we have a “donate a copy” tier as well as a “buy a copy, donate a copy” tier. With that, you can donate a copy to the library or school of your choice.
We are also offering a plantable postcard, which features art by Andy Owls. You can actually plant the postcard. It has Non-GMO wild flowers embedded within it, so you can plant it and build your own garden at home if you’d like. And then we have other opportunities as well.
We also have on the Fanbase Press site of things, a sponsorship. You get a free month sponsorship, both with our podcast and our newsletter. So if you’re a creator looking to promote a specific project, you can get free promotion for the course of a month. We’ve got lots of amazing opportunities available. Something for everybody, depending on what you’d like to take away in addition to the book itself.
The Kickstarter campaign for Shrub launched on September 15th 2026 and ends on Thursday, October 8th. You can show your support at this link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/fanbasepress/shrub-the-collected-edition?ref=aw5vwq
Connect with Patrick and Fanbase Press
Thank you to Patrick, Barbra, and Shane for this illuminating conversation! Connect with them below:
Patrick Lugo
YouTube: https://youtube.com/@plugoarts
Website: https://patricklugo.com/
Fanbase Press
YouTube: https://youtube.com/@fanbasepress9348
Website: https://fanbasepress.com/
