EMERALD CITY COMIC CON IS UPON US! And the good news is that you don’t have to be there in person to take part in what we have planned! We’re teaming up with Emerald City Comic Con this year to make sure you have access to all of our upcoming releases and spotlighted giveaways. Keep scrolling to see what books you can snag exclusive free copies of ? From a new Miyazaki to riveting biographies, we’re giving away a stack of three adult graphic novels that you don’t want to miss! Enter here.   Get lost in SIX highly-anticipated YA novels from Fierce Reads! Enter for a chance to win here ..read more

Raise your hand if you’re ready for the Fall 2022 cover round-up! That’s right, we’re sharing the covers for all the graphic novels we’ll be publishing from September until December. There are so many amazing new books coming out and we can’t wait until each and every one of them goes on sale so you can add them to your TBR stack. So, what are you waiting for? Keep reading to see them all. Improve: How I Discovered Improv and Conquered Social Anxiety by Alex Graudins On Sale: September 6, 2022 Cover design: Molly Johanson A graphic memoir for teens about the author’s efforts to overcom ..read more

What initially drew you to comics? I was a huge fantasy & sci-fi fan growing up in the 70s. Star Trek, Batman, Superman, The Hulk, Wonder Woman, Lost In Space, Star Wars, and the animated Lord of the Rings were all on TV or in the theaters. We had all those great Ray Harryhausen films like Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans, and Japanese monster movies like Godzilla and Gamera. I read all the Conan books, Tarzan books, Elric, John Carter, Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, etc, etc. I loved all that stuff. The problem was, I tore through it and started to run out. That’s when I learned tha ..read more

What initially drew you to comics?Jeannette: I find comics to be a relatively more accessible way for creators online to share their stories. We just happened to be extremely lucky to get Blackwater published as a graphic novel. I love the level of control you have when making comics as well. Ren: I was pretty equally drawn to both art and writing while growing up, so it seemed natural to combine these two interests to tell a story in a graphic novel format. I love that graphic novels let you visualize your story for an audience in such an intuitive way that you control the focal images, the ..read more

What initially drew you to comics? I didn’t read a lot of comic books as a kid, but I loved the daily comic strips in the paper. I was also a huge fan of heavily illustrated epistolary journal or letter-style books, like the Amelia’s Notebook series or Kate Klise’s Regarding the Fountain—I loved poring over all the small details and was obsessed with the way they felt like they were really made by kids. But I really came to this genre through working as a cover designer for children’s and YA books. I studied art in college and even though I loved books, I always thought of myself as more of a ..read more

What initially drew you to comics? I’ve always been interested in comics since I was a little kid. I read a lot of newspaper comics like Calvin and Hobbes, Garfield, Farside, and Foxtrot. In fact, my first comic at age 6, I think was a thinly-veiled rip-off of Garfield called “Grfeld.” I read and made comics through middle school and high school, but it wasn’t until college that my life-long love of books and telling stories with pictures was cemented. I was visiting my hometown of Essex Junction, VT during a break from college and ended up running into my high school art school teacher. I t ..read more

When I was asked to put together a playlist for All My Friends I had to sit with the idea for a bit. It’s tricky putting music to a comic because what if a reader “hears” it differently than the tracklist you’re presenting and thinks, “Um, I hate this?” So I chose to assemble a bunch of songs that have, for the most part, a lo-fi, DIY, pages-ripped-from-a-teenaged-girl’s-diary vibe to them. The playlist kicks off with the Marine Girls, a group of teenage girls from the early 1980s. It features a track from The Go-Go’s, who were discussed in All Together Now, and a track from P.S. Eliot, a band ..read more

Meet Hope Larson, creator of All My Friends! What initially drew you to comics? As a kid, I was big on reading and making up stories, but I loved drawing, too. Over the years I went back and forth between seeing myself as a writer and as an artist, and eventually, I managed to combine those two interests into comics–but that didn’t happen until my 20s. I did read lots of comics from an early age, however! This was a time when there were tons of wonderful comics in the newspaper–Calvin and Hobbes, The Far Side–and I read them every day as a kid. Then, when my family moved to France for a ..read more

Meet Alina Chau, creator of Marshmallow & Jordan! What initially drew you to comics? Growing up, I loved reading comics. I am from Hong Kong, so we had Japanese manga, European comics, and popular American comics. I always looked forward to Sunday newspaper comic strips, like Calvin and Hobbes and Peanuts. At the end of the school year, my friends and I would rush to the cinema to catch the latest Hayao Miyazaki movies and then go to the manga stores to look for the newest summer manga series. Non-fiction manga was also a gateway for me to learn about subject matters, especially history—l ..read more

Meet Misako Rocks!, creator of Bounce Back! What initially drew you to comics? While I was working at a Children Museum in Wisconsin, I met a boy who showed me Dragon Ball Z, which was translated in English. He told me how popular manga had become. To be honest, I was trying to become a puppeteer at that time. But thanks to that important conversation with him, I changed my mind. I decided to become a Japanese manga artist in the U.S.! What was the inspiration behind Bounce Back? My manga students! I’ve been teaching manga in person and virtually via my online school Learn Manga with Misako ..read more