The Making of a Comics Memoir

“Over thirty years of friendship amounts to quite a few stories. I whittled away at them to form the story I wanted to tell.”

When Retrofit Comics approached me to do a book for them, they gave me complete freedom to do as I wanted—the ultimate author’s wet dream. So I gave it long thought: What kind of books do I not see enough of? What kind of story do I feel is missing from the American cultural milieu?

The answer came to me: We need more realistic, nuanced stories about female friendship. In popular media, friendships between women always seem to include some ugly shit, from fighting over men to acrimonious competition. These things are so common onscreen, yet I’ve never personally experienced them. I wanted to write a different kind of book about female friendship.

I’ve had a number of book-worthy friendships over the years, but the one with “Mirabai Jones” stood out because of how much it has changed over time. Mirabai and I have known each other for over thirty years, which means we’ve had lots of time to process our ups and downs. She used to be my bully; then she became my friend; then we were very close and she was my muse; then we lost touch (but she never stopped being an influence); and then, finally, we became close again. Ours seemed like the ideal complicated relationship to put into book form—a friend-romance that has taken all sorts of beatings and come out stronger in the end.

First, I asked Mirabai’s permission. She knew I wasn’t going to write a book that was just about how great she is. I try to see and consider all sides when I tell a story, though ultimately I am telling my own side of things. Of course, my request made her a bit nervous (was I going to expose all her secrets? Make her out to be a terrible person?), but I tried to calm her fears by showing her the comics as I made them. It was the first time I had done such a thing, and it was stressful for me, but it also ensured I didn’t accidentally overstep any unspoken boundaries. To Mirabai’s credit, although she noted that not all the events in my book played out as she remembered, she didn’t insist I change anything. (I’m hoping I can someday convince her to tell her side of the story.)

I wrote down as many book-worthy memories as I could think of. Over thirty years of friendship amounts to quite a few stories! I whittled away at them to form the story I wanted to tell about us, trying to keep it to just one or two stories for each year that we were in touch.

At the same time, I was looking for some visual inspiration. Normally, when I’m making comics, I do my best to push boundaries; it’s fairly easy to break new ground in such a vast, unexplored medium. But this time I decided to try something new, and borrow from something old. I wanted to pay homage to an old great as well as give myself some boundaries for a change, and my obvious choice was Charles Schulz’s Peanuts strips.

I decided to tell each of our stories in strip-form. This was challenging in some ways, but made other things easier. I didn’t need to worry about breaking new ground in the medium. Instead, I was just going to tell our story in a form that already felt familiar.

Next I had to get the visuals down. I knew I’d be emulating Schulz (in my own style), but I needed more information. What sort of clothing did we wear in third grade? Fourth grade? Later? I don’t trust my memory for this sort of thing (for a memoirist, I’ve got a really shitty memory!), so I consulted yearbooks, photo albums, Facebook pages. I sketched little portraits of all our outfits over the years, and made sure to draw from these when redesigning outfits for each comic.

The next thing I did was sketch out the stories. Here’s an early version of a scene that appears in the book:

You can see I sketched out a few versions of our faces in the margins, trying to figure out how I wanted to draw us. That one on the middle-left is very Schulz-y! I liked it, but I didn’t use it because I didn’t want to directly rip him off.

(Drawing in someone else’s style feels strange to me. It’s like trying on someone else’s underwear . . . without their consent.)

Then I dove into creating the actual pages. I like to draw my pencils on graph paper, as that makes certain things easier (such as lettering). The pencils, erasers, and extendable ruler you see here are what I used to pencil this book. The blue pencil is .05 and has a break-proof tip; the orange is a dainty .02 and its tip breaks constantly, but it’s worth the amount of detail I can get out of it.

After I finished the pencil stage, I found a handful of beta readers by putting a call out on social media: Anyone have an extra hour or two to spare and want to see an advanced preview of my book? I got about a dozen responses, sent them the work, then read each response carefully.

My rules for getting and using feedback:

1) Don’t send anything out until it is absolutely done. That means fully proofread, every little detail pored over again and again.

2) When the readers respond, look for commonalities. One person might have a problem with page 5, panel 2, but if they’re the only person who mentions it out of a dozen readers, I can assume it’s just their own bias, not something that all the reviewers will be tearing apart when the book comes out.

3) If there are commonalities, that means those are the trouble spots that need looking at. Sometimes it just takes a word or two to clarify a panel, sometimes the whole page needs to be redone. It depends! (Note: a wise writer once said that you should listen to your readers to figure out where you’re going wrong, but you should never listen to their advice on how to fix it.)

4) Always thank your beta readers! I gave mine a special section in the Acknowledgments.

After I made some tweaks based on the feedback I got, I sent a PDF of the pencils to my publisher. They had a couple of suggestions to make it tighter. I made those changes, then got to inking.

Once I finish penciling a page, I scan it, enlarge it, print out the larger version, then ink it with a lightbox onto bleed-proof paper. As you can see, the inked version is a bit bigger than the pencil version. When it goes to print, it gets shrunk again, which makes the details smoother.

Here it is, in final book form! Isn’t it pretty?

I didn’t design the cover; I’m terrible at graphic design. Luckily, I’ve had great luck with publishers and have benefited from their graphic design acumen. Box Brown created this cover, with a little feedback from me. The first time I saw it on the computer screen, my heart skipped a beat. (It’s how I imagine a soon-to-be parent feels when she first sees an ultrasound, but without the terror of being split open at the seams.)

And look! Purple ink! This was my suggestion, and I was thrilled when they went for it.

Throughout the book, I gave each person a different font when they were talking, to make it easy for the reader to distinguish between them. Mine is sans serif, as I’ve always felt like a plain nobody. Harmony got cursive, because she was smart and fancy in my young eyes. Mirabai got italics, because while she was less femme than Harmony, she was also much smarter and cooler than I ever was.

Here’s the final product of that sketch I showed you earlier:

And here’s a follow-up to that story that takes place many years later. Yeah, she was a stinker.

Visit RetroFit Comics to purchase or learn more about I Thought YOU Hated ME, a new comics memoir by MariNaomi.