BUT WAIT, HOW DO YOU MAKe A GRAPHIC NOVEL?

Before we could get it into the hands of those that needed it most, there was a year and a half of hard work. We could never possibly summarize every single long night or bottle up all the passion behind this project, but here’s a glimpse into the process.

Backed by Research

We held focus groups with 11-13 year olds to peek inside their minds and understand their likes, dislikes, hobbies, lingo. We also partnered with grief professionals to ensure the story was rooted in clinically backed research.

Each character in the story experiences a different degree of loss — from Cam who just moved to town and is missing his old life, to Alex who recently lost her older brother.

Character Development

Then, we developed the cast of main and supporting characters. This included everything from their names and ethnicities, to storylines, personalities and TOV.

Manuscript

I wrote the entire manuscript which became the bible for the project.

The final version was 54 pages of narration text, character dialogue, text messages, dream sequences, flashbacks, social media posts, and of course, visual descriptions for every single scene. This all translated into our final 200-page graphic novel.

Illustration Process

We turned the manuscript over to Barcelona-based Genie Espinosa and her team for the illustration phase. This was a fluid and collaborative process with rounds of sketches, line drawings, and then eventually, pages in full color.

Printing

The book is available to download for free, in both English and Spanish, but we also printed 1,000+ copies for schools and relevant events.

Animated videos

The QR codes throughout the book lead to videos of the different characters talking directly to the reader. Each video ends with a “prompt” for the reader to engage with.

We cast actual middle schoolers to VO the characters, wrote the scripts and oversaw the post-production process.