How I Made My Debut Graphic Novel: Interview with Stan Yan

Stan Yan is a first generation American-born Chinese writer, illustrator, caricature artist, and instructor from Denver, Colorado, who has been drawing comics before he realized it. He helped cofound the Squid Works comic creator cooperative, was a board member of the Colorado Alliance of Illustrators, and is currently the co-regional advisor for the Rocky Mountain Chapter of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators. The Many Misfortunes of Eugenia Wang is his debut graphic novel.

In this interview, I met with Stan to learn more about how his debut graphic novel came to life! From self publishing, to comic shows, to school visits, to a book deal, Stan takes us through his journey with comics!

Huge thanks to Bailey Culver for editing the interview transcript!

JANNA: Why don’t you start by telling me what the book is about?

STAN: Well, I don’t even know where to start with that because I should have this memorized right now. But the marketing department has come out with so many great little things for promotion. So recently, they came out with this bookmark for ALA that says:

“Most birthdays bring cake. Eugenia Wang’s brings disasters.”

Oh, I love that!

On the back of it said:

“In this heartfelt graphic novel, a girl born on a day considered unlucky starts to wonder if she’s really cursed when she’s troubled by visions of doom.”

Then on the back of the paperback, it says:

“Eugenia Wang never gets to do anything fun. She’s never celebrated her birthday on her actual birthday, April 4th, because of her mom’s belief in the Chinese superstition that four is an unlucky number. Her mom won’t even let her go to a comic art summer camp because she thinks the art is a waste of time. 

This year though, Eugenia is determined to defy her mom, and that means applying for camp, partying on her actual birthday, and maybe inviting her super cute crush Enrique to her party, too. But then, Eugenia gets hit in the head with a sneaker during PE and starts getting weird, unnerving visions of impending doom about her upcoming birthday. It might be the after effect of a head injury, or maybe she’s just anxious about turning 13. 

As the visions get worse, Eugenia suspects an unseen force may be sending her messages through her artwork. If she’s haunted after all, Eugenia will have to figure out why before it’s too late. Even more horrifying, she might have to do the unthinkable. Admit her mom was right.”

Did you write that copy or did the editor write that copy? 

That was a collaboration between all of us. The bookmark was all them.

So, how much is the final story similar to what you originally had in mind?

The only thing that’s the same is having visions of dying on the 13th birthday.

In fact, the original version of the story was called Olefactory Memory. Eugenia was Morty Chen, not Eugenia Wang and it was set in 1981. It was about this kid who’s got a really sensitive sense of smell. One day he gets conked on the head by softball and starts having these weird visions that were connected every time he had smelled certain things.

He realizes the visions were of previous lives on the day that he died, which was always on a 13th birthday.

Wow. Yeah, so it was different. So, is that the story that you pitched that helped you get an agent? Or is it a story that you actually got a book deal for and then it completely transformed?

Actually, neither.

So, I do this weekly web comic called Peter Cadaver. That was what I was originally pitching.

But along the way, I wanted to challenge myself to write and illustrate a comic that actually scared me. I felt like in spite of the rich history of horror comics, I’ve never read one that really did it for me the way that a scary movie or a scary novel did. There was too little sensory stimulation. 

A movie has the audio and the editor forces you to watch it at a certain pace so that the scares work. With a novel, it’s just my highly visual imagination that takes over, so that’s why it gets scary. 

An artist drawing the monster in the comic actually makes it less scary to me. I’m always like, “I would have imagined it way scarier than that.”

But how do you make that happy medium? I did realize along the way that it’s subjective. So what scares me doesn’t scare other people or vice versa, you know?

I tried to think of the commonalities of the horror entertainment that scared me. More times than not, the memorable scenes always involved a child. I was like, “Oh, well, let’s go ahead and make my protagonist a child.”

So it accidentally became a children’s book. But as I was writing it, I was like, “Yeah, it doesn’t scare me, but I like the story!” So I continued and finished it. 

And then, during the pandemic, I got a manuscript request at SCBWI’s summer conference. The editor was Melissa Manlove, who at that time was with Chronicle Books. 

She said, “I really love it, but I think there’s too many things going on. I think you need to make it contemporary and take out the extra superpower.” (Cuz she thought the smell thing was a superpower.) 

I was like, “All right, do you want me to revise and resubmit if I redo this?” 

And she’s like, “Yeah.” 

So I was like, “Okay.” 

So, I rewrote it. In the process, I had also been doing a bunch of school visits for my zombie bedtime story book. When I told librarians I was working on a spooky graphic novel, they always got excited. But the one thing that I kept hearing over and over is, “I wish there were more scary graphic novels for girls.”

And I’m like, “I wonder if I make my protagonist a girl, whether that would fit what they’re asking for?” That’s how Morty became Eugenia and how Keith became Kesha. 

But then I was like, “well, there’s still got to be a way for her to get these visions and how do I want to do that? Well, maybe I’ll make her a comic artist.”

And so, she has this weird first vision and decides she wants to draw a comic about it to document it before she forgot. Along the way, as she continues to work on the comic, things start happening to the comic beyond her control.

As I was writing this, I was like, “Okay, this scares me again.” A lot of the movies that I’ve watched with automatic drawings and channeling a spirit or whatever always spooked me. So, it became my scary story again. 

Wow!  So was Eugenia Wang the project that you ended up working on first with your agent? 

Yeah, although she didn’t sign me because of it. She actually signed me because of the one that I got the two book deal for. I got to interview with three different agents, and she immediately hopped right into constructive feedback on this project. I later found out a pet peeve of hers is that she really hates stories that begin with a character waking up. And that’s exactly what I had in my story! 

I’m like, “And you still wanted me?! Oh, wow! Everything else must have been really that much better because I queried you with your pet peeve.” 

Haha!  Well, that just goes to show you that agents try to say what they like and what they don’t like. But I think it happens all the time that you’re like, “Well, this is the exact thing I said I didn’t want and yet I really want it!”

Well, my story doesn’t start that way anymore!  Haha! 

That is fascinating. All right. So, basically you had developed the Eugenia Wang story?

At that time I was actually pitching both stories during PitMad and that’s how she found out about me and I found out about her. I had been taking Eugenia Wang to conferences to get manuscript critiques. So I had Melissa Manlove and an editor at Scholastic, but she wouldn’t look at it unless I had an agent. She actually ended up sending me a bunch of agent referrals to aid my querying process, which was really nice. So I knew she was serious about it. 

Then during PitMad, another editor “hearted” my pitch, so I knew I needed to prioritize this story because I have no nibbles on the other one. But, I had three editors that are already interested in this. 

That’s always a sign.

After I signed with Ann, I was like, “Okay, I know that you signed me for this, but we need to prioritize this because we’ve got these three editors that want to see it.”

So she started reviewing, I took another couple of months to revise the story, and we went out on submission at the beginning of 2022.

How long did the whole process take of finding a publisher and finalizing a deal? 

It was fairly quick because my agent went out on sub with seven editors. Kristie Choi, who’s my editor at Atheneum, liked it right away and gave us a RNR [revise-and-resubmit] on the story synopsis. So I worked on that and she gave us another RNR on it.

And then she was supposed to take it to acquisitions before that conference (that you were at as well). I was looking forward to being at the conference and celebrating with her, but she had to postpone.  But eventually it happened!

Yeah. Okay. That’s awesome. You’re both in Colorado, right? 

Yeah! Every time we have any sort of milestone event, we normally get together to go out to get boba tea or dim sum to celebrate. It’s awfully nice and makes the rest of my critique group really jealous because they can’t do that with their editors. 

Oh, no. It’s rare. I think that’s super cool! And isn’t it funny that I feel like I’ve known about this book for so long and it hasn’t even come out yet. It takes so long!

I think I queried you with it!

Yeah, I remember, haha! And I think I told you I don’t like scary stuff.

Yeah! Which is funny because my agent is the same way. She doesn’t like scary. I mean, she does a lot of Halloween type stuff and just slightly spooky stuff, but I’m kind of like an anomaly. I was the first illustrator she signed and the first graphic novelist she signed. 

Oh, wow!

But after interviewing everyone, it became clear that I still needed to go with her. She checked off every other box on my list and we just had great chemistry. 

That’s what’s really important.

We definitely had a shared vision of not only the story, but my career. And she had the most actionable feedback right out of the gate on anything, which I needed because my previous agent was completely non-editorial and we weren’t getting any movement on any of anything. 

I always love hearing details about where a project started and how it evolved over time. Like starting with Olfactory Memory. to where it is now. That’s amazing. So once you got the book deal with Atheneum and with Kristie, how did her input affect the ultimate shape? 

It was invaluable, she’s a magician. On top of that, obviously she’s got a better idea of what’s age-appropriate based on what they want within their imprint. So, we did have a few back and forth discussions about certain words that could be interpreted as considered ableist.

But in the end, I relented. You pick your battles, you know?

Yeah, for sure. So, to what extent is Eugenia’s relationship with her mother drawing from your own personal story?

It’s actually more based on my sister’s relationship with my mom because they had a very contentious relationship when she was a teen. My sister was trying to get her freedom and wanted to do all these things that our mom didn’t want her to do with friends that she didn’t approve of.

That sounds pretty familiar if you’ve read the book. The cartooning part of it is me though. So Eugenia is definitely an amalgamation of my sister and me. But William is definitely much more me.

What about the little brother and the mom character? Is the mom character a lot like your actual mom or not? 

She was stubborn about her positions, but as far as not supporting art, she wasn’t ever like that. But, I also felt growing up that I had to be practical with my educational decisions. I never did consider going to art school. In fact, I didn’t explore it because I didn’t know there was such a thing.

I actually studied accounting in school. If you check out my old report cards in college, you will realize that was the worst part of my GPA. How did I get suckered into studying this? Haha. 

But overall, I think it ended up being a really good thing because it filled in gaps in my business sense. When you’re doing what I’m doing, you really are an entrepreneur. It’s really helpful when you’re trying to launch your career to not have to spend a bunch of money hiring other professionals to help you out with things like your taxes.

I was a stockbroker for 13 years, so I had to read a lot of contracts because it’s a highly litigious industry. When I got to creating my own artist contracts based off of templates from artist contract books, it made me more confident that I could understand what each section meant. I could also modify things the way I needed to for freelance jobs that maybe didn’t pay a whole lot or weren’t worth hiring a lawyer over.

I do feel like that has paid off because I’m like one of the rare artists that hasn’t gotten screwed over in a job. I’ve never talked to another artist like that. I’m the only one.

Knock on wood. I don’t want to get screwed over! Haha!

I kind of really want to dive into that with you because I get so excited about the entrepreneurial stuff. We’ll circle back to it because I want to stick with the story a little bit. One thing that I thought was really interesting when I read the book is that you dedicated the book to your mother. Yet, the mother character in the book, to me, came across as maybe the least likable.  That was super interesting and I wanted to hear more. 

I was just being honest to how we perceived her growing up. I think a lot of times, once you become an adult and you look back on what your parents were actually doing, you have a different perspective. Once you become a parent you start to really appreciate it a whole lot more, you know?

I know that a lot of tweens and teenagers feel stifled by their parents, so hopefully that aspect of it they can relate to. But yeah, I dedicated it to her, of course. I wouldn’t have dedicated to anyone else. 

I love that! Okay, let’s talk a little bit about the art process. You said the one the book that you’re working on now, the deadline’s not until 2030! So, it’s a very, very long process. But I’m trying to do math in my head here. Your book got signed in 2022, right?

Eugenia did and it’s coming out in 2025.

Did you turn in the artwork in like the fall of 2024?  

Yes, at the very beginning of December. When I look back at it, once we had all of the scripts approved, I did the art in two years. In those two years, I figured out the time that I was waiting for editorial notes was one year. So, I actually did all 264 pages, the covers, lettering, colors, pencils, inks, everything in one calendar year, which is the fastest I’ve ever worked before.

Wow.  What’s your creative routine like? Are there certain days, certain times that you are in the studio working? 

I do my best to balance my personal life. I don’t have a basic schedule other than that I know I have a deadline. But the one thing that I did figure out that I needed to do was self-care. 

When I was first inking the comic, I could reach my deadlines if I did two pages a day. But I was like, “Oh, I’m going to get way ahead!” So, for the first two days, I did four pages a day.

But then, I couldn’t do anything else that day because it took me 12 hours to do that and my hands started hurting.

I’m like, “Okay, so maybe I need to scale back and only do the two pages that I’d planned.” Even if I blast through them, that’s it. Then I can go for a run or do some yoga or do other things in my life.

That was really important for me and I think important for the longevity of my career.

I didn’t have that luxury when I got to colors. When I did the inks, they also had me do eight pages of sample colors for test print.

Everything that happens in my story is in full color except for in the visions and night scenes.  So in the visions, it’s monochromatic red. In the nighttime scenes, it’s monochromatic blue. I blasted through those but because it’s really fast to do the monochromatic pages.

So I was like, “oh I can easily do four pages.” They were asking me if I’d be able to finish this at the beginning of or the middle of October. I was like, “I think I can finish this by the end of November if I do four pages a day.”

That was brutal. Not all the pages were created equal. So yeah, that was taking time out of my personal life. My hand was hurting and boy, I needed some therapy in December for sure when I was finally done. 

These were the scripted pages that I did on Scrivener. 

This is what my dummy pages look like.

Oh, your thumbnails are pretty tight. 

Yeah, some of these are tighter than others. I think at this point I’m still trying to figure out how I want to do the thumbnails. 

Then when I went to inks.

Did you not have an interim pencil stage? 

No, I went straight to inks because we had already passed the pencil stage. I had already figured out that based on my process, it was a little redundant anyway. So she let me go straight to inks. 

Oh, interesting. 

During the inks, I also included where I was going to add shadows or some sort of value just to see whether the panels stood out from one another.

And then of course in full color it looks like this. 

And you did everything?

Yeah. I was a control freak on this project. 

Do you think that you’ll always be a control freak in that respect? Or would you ever consider working with someone?

Yes but also no. 

I used to go to comic book conventions where I did zombie caricatures of people. I always had way more than I could handle. I would go home and I’d have weeks of mail-outs. It was physically taxing on me to be drawing like eight plus hours a day non-stop with only breaks to go to the bathroom or reach under my seat for trail mix and water.

But that was what made financial sense for me at the time. 

Then I was like, “You know what? Once I’m done drawing these zombie caricatures or My Little Pony characters or whatever they ask for; that’s it, end of the line. That’s all the money I’m going to make from it. I need something that I’ve got some ownership of that has at least a chance to provide me with a passive income into the future.”

But I felt like I needed to have my writing out there so that, if I was physically unable to draw my stories anymore at some point, I could pass the drawing off to someone else.

But, on the flip side, I will not draw a graphic novel for anyone else right now because it’s just too time consuming. I will consider doing smaller jobs because I’ve got four months normally when I’m waiting for editorial notes. So, I’m trying to build up my book cover portfolio and picture books as well. 

Although I found that I’m still having a hard time writing picture books that are age appropriate. So, I still got to work on that.

I’ve got a couple of people within my agency as well as in my critique group that I’ve collaborated with. They wrote something that I illustrated and we’ve gone out on sub with those things. So we’ll see!

But then on the flip side, those four months could be also used for promotion. Even though this is traditionally published, it seems like we still have to do a lot of our own promotion. 

Oh, yes. Haha, definitely! 

But, I think all the decades of self-publishing has helped me immensely with not being bashful about promoting myself. The thing that I hear the most from people is that they feel weird promoting themselves. I have no qualms about that.

I mean, the other thing that’s difficult is all the rejection that you face in this industry. That was something that my previous career really prepared me for. I used to cold call people all day long for like three years of my career. So, I had a lot of rejection.

So, when I get a rejection right now, I’m very pragmatic about it, you know? I understand why it happened and why it’s not a bad thing. 

Yeah, that’s great. 

I also feel like it gets me one step closer to who I’m supposed to be with. 

That’s a great way of looking at it.

Which really was what happened with my agent search, for sure. And I do feel like Atheneum is really dedicated to my career, not just not this book.

But they have definitely shown me the love with this book for sure! They took me out to ALA and made me one of six authors at the Night of Novels. I was on their fall preview video with a half a dozen other authors as well.

Pretty elite company for a debut. I got to present back-to-back with Peter Brown. 

Oh, wow! That’s exciting! 

And then at the Night of Novels, I was presenting alongside Neil Schusterman, so that was exciting. 

Wow, that’s super cool! So, which part of the drawing process is your favorite? 

I think the parts of the process that involve me not being able to listen to audio books are the most demanding, but they’re also the most fun. That includes: page panel layouts, panel compositions, basically organizing everything so I can decide on the page turns and how the eye flow is.

I mean, I love seeing the finished product, but coloring is probably my least favorite. It’s kind of mind-numbing and normally I can work for maybe about an hour. Then I get tired and have to have a nap before I can resume.  I think part of that is because I don’t feel like I’m really good at color theory. So I do what any good artist does — I swipe palettes from other people’s books and things that I see out there online. That’s how I ended up settling the fairly limited palette for Eugenia Wang. 

But I feel like most of my favorite books have a more limited palette than what I even used. I’m trying to push myself as far towards a limited palette as I can before it’s just gray tones with a spot color.

I don’t know. Then I’ll probably have to start doing YA because I know that that’s not normally the thing for middle grade.

Although, I will say, I have wondered if — because of a contracting economy and all the headwinds that the publishing industry is facing — I have wondered if they will start experimenting more with black and white or limited color for kids as well. I don’t know. 

Maybe! 

Well, speaking of color, one thing that really impresses me about the book is the cover. It’s such a strong cover. Was that cover something that just came together really fast? Like you had the vision for it or was there a lot of iteration? 

Really, no. They told me to give them like six different options. This was the first one I drew up. That was the one they liked the best. So we went with that, haha!

Yeah, even from just reading the book it really stuck out at me like, “wow this is such a great moment.”

Even in all my pitch materials, Eugenia on the rope was always the image that was on the cover of my pitch packet. It’s about her conquering all sorts of things. One of those things is her fear of heights which runs parallel with a lot of the different things going on in the storyline. 

Oh my gosh, that’s fantastic. All right. Well, now I want to circle back to what I told you I was so excited to talk to you about: your entrepreneurialism! You had a self-publishing career before you started working with traditional publishers. I feel like I do see that sometimes, but to be honest, I wish I saw it more often! I wish more people in the Kidlit world would go off and do self-published stuff as they’re working towards traditional publishing. Back when you did start self-publishing, were you thinking of it that way? How did that end up happening? 

Well, when I originally started self-publishing, I was actually making books for my friends. My first self-published comic book was characters that were based on my friends and their families. I just wanted to create something that made them laugh, you know?

But then I started to take this book to these comic cons. They were really like swap meets, mostly guys with their long boxes on folding tables at a comic book shop or whatever. But they did have a few creators like myself.

I had this Xerox-copied, black and white, saddle-stitched book, so I thought I’d give it a shot. I made this book — might as well see if people will pay $2 for it.  And people did!

Total strangers were coming back to me and telling me how much they liked it. And I was like, “Wow, that’s kind of cool! They don’t have any relational obligation to tell me they liked my book!” 

That was a little bit addictive. 

If I’m to be honest with you, that’s why I’m still doing what I’m doing, because that’s what I’m passionate about: telling stories to strangers and affecting them in some way, shape, or form. Enough that they want to come back and tell me about it, you know?

Yeah, that’s amazing. And then you said that you self-published a children’s book and then you were doing school visits.

It was my first picture book. It was a book inspired by my three-year-old son’s fear of my zombie caricature artwork. One day he wouldn’t come down to my basement studio for some reason.

And when his mom asked him why, he’s like, “I’m scared.”

She’s like, “What are you scared of?”

And he started pointing at all the zombie artwork hanging from my walls that I had drawn.  So that inspired me to write There’s a Zombie in the Basement. I didn’t console him or anything like that, but he gets credit for changing the whole trajectory of my career!

 And after that happened, I got involved with SCBWI and learned a whole lot more about the industry. 

I love the fact that you were doing school visits with that book. I suspect there are author illustrators out there who think, “I could never do school visits unless I was traditionally published. They’re not going to want me.”

Yeah, that’s totally untrue! A lot of the people that I’ve run into that are children’s book authors that do school visits are self-published.

Now the trick is how to do the pre-orders because it’s a lot of work if you’re doing it yourself. So, a lot of the authors will just bring their own stock and they have their own inventory or whatever.

But I always found the thing that helped me the most was collaborating with a local bookstore.  The hybrid publisher that I worked with actually would get your book into Ingram. That allowed bookstores to buy my books, which was a real game-changer.

I did have some comic books distributed through Baker and Taylor — very unsuccessfully — for a very short period of time. Diamond didn’t necessarily hit the same retailers at that time. Schools didn’t typically work with the comic book stores, they worked with the bookstores.

So I started working with a bookstore that were helping with pre-orders, and that helped me quite a bit. 

I think over the last nine years that I’ve been taking that book to school visits, I’ve visited probably more than 150 schools. 

Oh wow!

Yeah. It’s been a lot. Not as many over the last couple years because I’ve been too busy working on this book!

Are you willing to share the range of what you get paid to do school visits?

Yeah. So, it used to be a lot less, but now I’ve got a booking agent and she’s like, “No, you got to raise your prices.”

So now, I think for in-person visits, the bare minimum for me to be there for an hour is about $500. But of course, the longer they have me there, they get more of a quantity discount.

Ideally for me, I want to be at a school all day long, like a K-8 school all day long, and do my Zombie in the Basement presentation for the K through second or third grade. Then do The Many Misfortunes of Eugenia Wang for the rest of the kids.

I can tell the fourth graders, “Remember when I came and visited you with There’s a Zombie in the Basement last year and told you that there’s nothing to be scared of? I lied!”

Oh, that’s fantastic. So, I was so excited to talk to you about  “Team Misfortune.” I was so into it. So explain what it is and then tell me like where you got the idea for it and then how you tweaked it for yourself. 

Yeah! So basically, Team Misfortune is like a “street team.” I saw other authors recruiting street teams and some of them were using a thing called Rafflecopter.

I did a little bit of digging and I was like, “Oh, that’s kind of expensive. If by the end of this I’ve only got like 10 people on my street team and I spent $20 a month, that doesn’t seem to be a very good investment.” So I decided to do it through a Google form.

Almost everyone can join my street team if you’ve supported me in any way, shape or form or even are just on my newsletter list. You can review my book on Idlewise or NetGalley if you’ve pre-ordered my book and get to join. 

This opens things up to book sellers and librarians, which I really want to be a big part of my street team. 

So, I know that there’s a ton of people that have pre-ordered my book that are definitely not on my street team. Get on my street team, people!

If you requested my book from your library, take a screenshot of that and send it to me because you get points. The people that join my street team, they all get sent my outtakes. You get to see the pages from Olfactory Memory and the process about how everything came to be.

I’ll send you a signed book plate, some bookmarks, and then we’ve got prizes: t-shirts, mugs, things. Each month, I draw a name at random, but it’s based on the points that you’ve accumulated. I see how many points everyone has, see what they all tally up to, and then I use a random number generator to pick the winner.

So, one of the things that Simon and Schuster has been doing for me is they made these sticker sheets. My last Team Misfortune winner got five sheets of those sent to her that she can distribute amongst her students.

And then the one thing that I’m going to add for pub date, I’m going to give away a free 1-hour school visit as well. 

Wow, that is so cool. So, how would you say the response has been so far?

 Ah, a little lukewarm, so I’m definitely glad that I didn’t do the Rafflecopter. I probably have like a dozen and a half people in Team Misfortune right now. So, it’s very, very easy to win the monthly prize, okay? I can’t emphasize that enough.

And all you got to do is go to my web page: eugeniawangcomic.com and scroll down to the Team Misfortune. There’s a bunch of fun things on my page.

I just found out that Simon and Schuster made a book trailer for me where they did real animation on my characters, which is so cool. Hopefully that will be making the rounds at some point close to my pub date late September.

There’s links to educator resources that I’ve created that you can download for free. So, you can get my book but don’t have to have me do a school visit and have all these different things that you can do with your students. 

Or if you don’t want to worry about the street team raffle, you can just get your Eugenia Wang merch here at eugeniawangcomic.com. 

So what are you using for the merch? 

It’s Teepublic. I used to have a Redbubble account, but I was just seeing too many of my friends get their stuff stolen off of there. Even though they had a lot of cool things, I just didn’t want to see stuff that wasn’t even published yet get swiped from me.

This has been great.  How should people connect with you?

I would definitely say the the biggest way that you could support me is to go to eugeniawangcomic.com  and sign up to be a part of Team Misfortune. Definitely sign up to be on my free newsletter as well!

My newsletter is a little sprawling at this point, but there’s a lot of good stuff. Every month I try to put in free comic strips, I’m doing like three updating regular comic strips right now. You also get to know little things about my journey and hear about things that we didn’t talk about in this interview. As I experience new things, I try to be as transparent as possible about it. 

I always try to put some fun videos in there as well like reveal videos of caricatures or things from school visits. On the last page of There’s a Zombie in the Basement there’s a page that says, “What are you scared of? Draw a picture of it here.”

I figured maybe if kids draw what they’re scared of, that removes a layer of the mystery and makes it just that much less scary. I normally try to take one of these kids drawings and draw it in my own style. All you need to do is send me your kid’s drawings and you’re entered immediately for a chance to do that. 

I also try to talk about things that are craft related whether I’m telling you a little bit about the insights of what I’m doing to create a book or about revisions. Revisions have been a big bugaboo for me, haha. 

I think another thing that you should mention is your Cuddlefish Academy, right? 

Oh, Cuddlefish Academy! Yes! So, the majority of the professors in the Cuddlefish Academy are critique group partners of ours. Even if they aren’t, they’re all Rocky Mountain chapter members (and I’m probably the least accomplished of any of them, haha).

Since a lot of us taught higher education at art schools, we were seeing the tuition just go up dramatically. Yet most of us were adjunct faculty, and our pay hadn’t changed in like a decade and a half. We’re like, “well, it’s not fair to us.”

And then on top of that, most students are still clueless as to how to get into the children’s book industry. That was something that we felt was really lacking in a lot of the art school. So, we’re like, “you know what we need to do? Let’s open our own online school.”

We wanted to create classes for that and also offer coaching. For as little as $25, people can actually bring their unique issue and get our professional opinions on things. I feel like my classes are a little bit of an anomaly because I feel like a lot of what I do is a little bit more foundational in nature.

So I have the graphic novel boot camp, which is really for accomplished illustrators that are asking, “do I want to do graphic novels or not? I never thought about it. I don’t even know where to start.”

My class helps them figure out what their own process is and what makes sense for them. I also offer graphic novel reviews. If you’ve already got a graphic novel dummy in process or something that you’re working on and just need some professional eyes on top of it, that might be a great way of doing that as well. Or you can bundle all of these things together. 

That is awesome. 

So, that’s cuddlefishacademy.com.

Thank you for chatting with me today Stan!

Oh, you’re very welcome. Thank you!

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