You can visit Miriam at her tumblr, Unicorn Brigade, or at her portfolio.

Otherwise! There is some stuff coming up for local people! If you are in the Halifax area, there are two events you might possibly want to attend. One is Ladies’ Night at local comic store Strange Adventures on February 29th, 7-9pm. If you are a lady, please join the rest of us ladies and celebrate comics! I will be there and there might be Friends With Boys copies for purchase, and I will be happy to sign them as well as any other comics of mine you might have. :) If you are not a lady, there will be a signing at Strange Adventures for Friends With Boys on March 3rd (Saturday), from 2-4pm. I hope to see you all there!

Also, I did a review of Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder: Voice graphic novel over at Unshelved, if you’d like to read it.

So, dear readers, were you satisfied with the ending to Friends With Boys? What’s that? You weren’t? Well, good news everyone! Because it’s not over. My good friend Miriam Gibson, creator of hilarious comics, has written THE COMPLETELY UNAUTHORIZED (okay, authorized. I begged her to) Friends With Boys proper ending. Another comic under the cut!

What’s that, you say? You’re not satisfied that every plot twist has been tied up? Well, have EVEN MORE ENDINGS courtesy of Miriam!

THUS EVERYTHING IS SOLVED THE END!!!! No, wait, even more endings are coming! That’s right, the super duper final ultimate ending is happening tomorrow, so check back to see it! Oh man I can’t wait.

PS. These comics had to go up a little smaller than I would’ve liked, so here are larger versions where you can bask in Miriam’s awesomeness: Ending #1 and Ending #2.

Miriam Gibson is an awesome person and you all need to visit her various webspots and enjoy her wonderful work. Here is her Tumblr, Unicorn Brigade and her portfolio site.  She is a drawer of excellent catbeards.

THE END!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yes, final page. As a few people have noticed, the webcomic is slightly shorter than the print comic, which uses two pages for the double page spreads, as opposed to the one page of the webcomic. So the print version is slightly longer for better value. :)

Here we are at the end, my friends. Thank you so much for being a part of this. (Haha, I almost wrote “thank you so much for being a part of the Friends With Boys Webcomic Experience. How cheesy!) I have really enjoyed sharing this comic (and my thoughts on making comics and comics I love and just comics!!!!) with you. I hope you’ve enjoyed it too … if the response I’ve gotten from the online community (so many comments! so many pageviews) is any indication, I think you have.

First off, website news: The full version of Friends With Boys (the webcomic) will remain up for about another week and a half. Then the image files (except for the first 16 pages which will remain up as a preview for interested readers) will be removed from the website. The blog posts will all remain up for the foreseeable future (I hope to archive them a little better down the line), so you can come back and read them anytime.

And now, I have a small favour to ask: if you can, please buy the book. You certainly do not owe me anything. I have worked hard on this comic over the last seven months, and I feel I have been rewarded by your attention and your involvement in it. But if you are someone who has very much enjoyed this comic and want to give back to me, you can do so buy purchasing the comic. A few kind souls have asked what is the best way for them to buy the comic (local comic store, bookshop, ordering online) and I don’t think it matters in terms of my royalties (I will eventually be paid royalties if my advance for FWB earns out), but I always encourage people to try and support local. So that is my suggestion. If you do not have a local comic or bookstore you enjoy (and I do not begrudge those of you wishing to avoid the dank pamphlet filled hellhole that is a crappy local comic store), by all means, order from your preferred online retailer. If you cannot afford the book, but would still like to support me, you can ask your local library to buy it. I LOVE libraries, and I think they are incredibly important in the front line of reaching new comic book readers, so that is also a big help.  You could lead someone brand new into reading comics!

So that is my request. If you can, support me, and buy the print version of Friends With Boys, so I can continue my fruitful relationship with First Second, and they can continue to publish my books.

And now … one of the things that is so different about the webcomic experience, as opposed to having a book published and then sending it out into the world, is that I suddenly find myself in a situation where I can explain myself. Friends With Boys has an open ending. It was a deliberate artististic choice to end it so, and while some might have (completely valid) issues with the ending, I am content with it.

It is very tempting for me to sit here and blog my thoughts about the ending and the book as a whole. This is what the Ghost means to me! This is what this symbolizes! And this, and this! Etc. I have decided I will not do that, because I think endings are best when they are left a little up to the imagination of the readers. I have a future in mind for Maggie, that involves her Mom and her family and maybe the Ghost. But you might have a different future for her. And since there is no sequel planned for Friends With Boys (ever! Unless the book sells 20 million copies and Ryan Gosling himself begs me for it), that future remains open, and I think that is pretty great. I love the idea of the readers of this book making up different futures for all these characters.

I will say this though: this is not a story about a Ghost. It is a story about a girl learning that there are things she cannot fix, but maybe that will be okay. Even when it’s not.

That is the story I wanted to tell.

Thank you for reading.

PS. Come back tomorrow, for I have some hilarious guest comics by a good friend to show you! You will laugh your socks off, guaranteed.

(Thanks page: Thank you so much to First Second for allowing me to serialize Friends With Boys online. I know I have reached more readers than I ever thought possible this way. Thank to to my agent, Bernadette, for suggesting we do this. Thank you to my boyfriend Tim for supporting me through this busy, stressful time. Thank you to my wonderful webmaster Lissa, and all the hours she put into maintaining this website. Couldn’t have done it without you, Lissa! I owe you many drawings. And again, thank you readers. You have made this something special.)

[Oh man, second to last page!!!!!11 Anyway, a couple of things. One, I did a (hopefully amusing) post on being a Homeschooled Feral Child for the Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog. I am proud to be published on a blog for something my parents have actually heard of! Two, I did a rather in-depth interview with Wired's Geek Dad blog, and specifically went into my reasoning for why some of the Friends With Boys plotlines aren't tied up in a neat little bow.  If that's something you're interested in find out more about, read away!

And onward! Today we have a wonderful guest blog post by super-librarian Robin Brenner. Robin is the founder of No Flying, No Tights, a graphic novel review site that also seeks to educate non-comic readers about the art form.  When I was first starting out reading comics and looking for recommendations, No Flying No Tights was one of the helpful sites that pointed me towards my kind of comics. I'm really thrilled to have Robin contributing to the blog, and I loved what she had to say about kids and comics, girls and comics, and the future of comics, which I agree is bright indeed. So please Read More to find out what Robin has to say! /Faith out.]

In the comics world, especially of late, there have been a lot of conversations (and arguments, and unfortunately vicious commenting) concerning female readers of comics, female characters in comics, and female creators. From using humor to critique the ridiculousness of the only roles women seem to fill in media (thanks to Kate Beaton and her webcomics cohorts) to questioning the lack of female characters, let alone protagonists, in animated films (thanks to novelist & comics author Shannon Hale, who has made highlighting this gap a mission of sorts), there’s a lot to get you down about girls connections to and exclusions from the world of comics, cartoons, and animation. These conversations are necessary and important, but I decided with this guest post to look at the things that will give hope rather than frustrate.

When you live in a world of blog posts, twitter discussions, and pop culture critique like I do (as a professional teen and comics librarian, it’s definitely part of my job), it’s easy to get mired in all of the down sides. You develop tunnel vision, seeing only the walls and glass ceilings and bouncing off the more irritating boundaries. This is especially true when positive steps seem to be able to be counted on one hand. Comics can be diverse and vibrant and inspiring, but they also get hemmed in by lingering prejudices, conscious and unconscious biases, and hurtful heckling by a few rotten apples.

Thus, I wanted to focus on the items that brighten my day-to-day comics life and remind me why girls and women are as important to the evolution of comics as any other group. I want to look at why our young readers can give us hope that change is coming, however slowly.

If you consider the general flow of comics discussion, the majority of those tweeting, blogging, and commentating on comics have been adults who have been fans for at least a decade. It helps to remember that while fans come from all age ranges, the young fans are the ones who are going to change what comics we read, how comics are created, and expand our definitions of what comics are.

I talk to teenagers every day in my library. Here, I’m happy to report, we have a relatively giant comics section tailored for their needs. These teens have not been raised with superhero comics. These are kids who started with Calvin and Hobbes and the Bone series and moved on to a steady diet of Japanese manga and stand-alone titles. Many have encountered superheroes, but through television and films. It was only later that they realized there were ongoing comics series to explore. (For example, I just had one eighth grader tell me he snapped up our battered old collection of Static Shock because he’d loved the TV show.) Most of these teens don’t find their comics in comics stores, but on bookstore and library shelves. They read them for hours, ensconced in comfy chairs. Their favorites are book-books, not 32-page comic books, and many are published by book publishers like First Second (who is releasing Friends with Boys on February 28th). This has led to a major shift toward even more book publishers getting into the medium. To teens, comics have always arrived as hardcovers and paperbacks. Even more of them follow webcomics online; newspaper funnies barely register. Their touchstones for animation are not Disney, but Hayao Miyazaki’s steady stream of animated adventures (notable as well for featuring far more girl protagonists than US animation companies) and the constantly referenced and beloved Nickelodeon series Avatar: The Last Airbender.

To these readers, comics are not a niche medium, or a juvenile indulgence to be outgrown. This is the generation that has honed its visual literacy with comics, video games, television, films, and the internet, and the way they read is vastly different than previous generations that limited reading that “counted” to prose. To today’s teens, comics are just another way to get stories and they are not going to give up the medium as they grow up. Their tastes may change, and they may go through phases of interest, but their love of the format isn’t waning.

These girls and guys also don’t put books down because the a lead character isn’t a mirror. These are the teens of both genders that devoured The Hunger Games without caring one whit that the lead character is a girl or that there’s a romantic triangle in the mix. What they care about is an engaging story, and the stereotype that girls will read about both guys and girls while guys will only read about guys just isn’t true (if it ever was.)

The argument that comics are a man’s medium and that’s it’s okay for the medium to stay that way just doesn’t compute — since when have comics only been for guys? Both guys and girls camp out in the graphic novel section and read. They count women in their list of favorite creators including Raina Telgemeier (Smile), Shannon Hale (Rapunzel’s Revenge), Svetlana Chmakova (Nightschool), Hiromu Arakawa (Fullmetal Alchemist), Bisco Hatori (Ouran High School Host Club), and Yana Toboso (Black Butler). They do, however, want more books like the ones they enjoy and that’s when they feel stumped by what’s available — for them it’s not a truth inherent to the industry that women aren’t as visible as either characters or creators, but a challenge they want to take on.

Just wait until these teens start taking up the creative reins themselves. So many of them are becoming creators. With the rise of social art sites like deviantart and tumblr alongside the visibility and accessibility of professional comics creators, more and more young fans are putting pen to paper. The distance between being a reader and a creator is dwindling fast. Guides like Adventures in Cartooning and Drawing Words and Writing Pictures show young readers the nuts and bolts of comics creation, and off they go. What they create has been influenced by everything they’ve read, and I cannot wait to see the professional work I know they will someday launch.

So, while those of us can feel bitter and defensive about the state of comics by and for women and girls, the good news is that change will come, and these teens are raring to go.

[Robin Brenner is a Reference/Teen Librarian at the Brookline (MA) Public Library. She was the Chair of the ALA/YALSA Great Graphic Novels for Teens Selection List Committee in 2008, was a judge for the 2007 Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, and has covered graphic novels, manga and anime for Library Journal, School Library Journal, VOYA, and GraphicNovelReporter.com. Robin gives lectures and workshops on graphic novels, manga, and anime all across the country. Her guide Understanding Manga and Anime was nominated for a 2008 Eisner Award. She is the editor-in-chief of No Flying No Tights, a graphic novel review site.  Brenner is a contributor to EarlyWord.com and for the group blog Good Comics for Kids hosted at School Library Journal.]

Oh dang you guys, the comic wraps up this week! THIS WEEK! I will probably do some blogging afterwards, and I’m hoping to maybe do a giveaway contest for a hardcopy of Friends With Boys (and maybe an original drawing), but I’m not sure yet what I want the contest to be. I want to make you guys work for your prizes! ;)

Anyway, this will probably be one of the last process blogs I’ll do. I’ve really appreciated the tremendous response I’ve gotten to talking about My Life as A Cartoonist, and writing down my work methods (and other thoughts on comics) have in many ways helped me clarify why I work that way. It’s weird, I feel so much more professional! Like my opinions are valid because I wrote them down. Weird, huh? Thank you so much for being a part of that.

Today I want to talk about adapting prose into comics, because that’s something I’m doing now, and something that seems to be … I dunno, popular in certain sections of the comic publishing world. I cannot say that I’ve read many prose-to-comics adaptations that are good (off the top of my head I can’t think of a single one I’d recommend). But I think adapting a novel to comics can be very rewarding, and also work very well, if it is done correctly.

First let me talk a bit about how I percieve a comic adaptation of a prose novel should go, using my old Hunger Games comic. Back in 2010 sometime I adapted the first couple pages of the first Hunger Games novel to comics, just for funsies. I was bored and unemployed, so I draw random comics. Here is the entire comic, 5 pages long, and it covers the first 4 pages of the book.

It seems like a stupid thing to say, but comics are a visual medium. They tell the story through pictures as much as they do words. Often when I pick up a comic adaptation of a prose novel, I am confronted by a huge wall of text, plastered all over the pages of the comic. The text is usually lifted straight from the prose novel. It seems that’s what people think a comic of a prose novel should be: an illustration with text slapped all over it.

I think it’s awful. I hate adaptations like that. Comics are visual. If you are a cartoonist translating a novel to comics, it is your job to take the words the author has written, and draw them. It is your challenge to make those drawings as evocative and moving as the prose.

In the Hunger Games novel, in the 4 pages I adapted, there is a section where Katniss talks about her relationship with her sister’s cantankerous cat, Buttercup. Katniss talks about how she tried to drown Buttercup when the cat was a kitten, and their relationship has never been good. But now, they are at least at peace, because Katniss’s sister loves Buttercup. I chose to illustrate those words on page 3, panels 5-7. We don’t know Katniss tried to drown Buttercup, or that her sister interceeded on Buttercup’s behalf, but we know Katniss and the cat have a bad relationship. I have drawn it there, in the way Katniss looks at Buttercup, in the way the cat flattens her ears at the girl. I could have had a big stupid wall of text in there, lifted directly from the book, but why? When you watch a movie adaptation of a book, does the director stick text from the novel right on to the screen? No, because movies are a visual medium. So are comics. You must convey the emotion, the setting, the relationships of the prose novel through your drawings.

I actually had a couple people email me after I did this little Hunger Games adaptation, asking me to “finish” the comic. They thought it was unfinished because there wasn’t text from the novel all over the comic.

Let me qualify this ramble against text-heavy comics by saying that there are times when a comic works brilliantly when it has a lot of text. I’m thinking specifically of books like Fun Home or Skim, which use a rich inner voice to paint very intimate character portraits. Seriously, those comics are so good. But they’re also very special, very personal stories told from a single character’s point of view. If you have a comic with multiple viewpoints and multiple plotlines that you’re all following, having a lot of inner character narration and walls of text is very tricky.

Anyway, I’m digressing. Point is, lots of text in comics: sometimes it works. But copying and pasting from novels on to a drawing and pretending that’s a legitimate comic makes me want to gnaw my arms off. BTW, feel free to recommend any prose to comic adaptations you think are good. I swear I cannot think of a single one … D:

And now … a peek into my current graphic novel with First Second, the follow up to Friends With Boys! Yay! And guess what? It’s an adaptation of a prose novel to comic form! Hurrah! Let’s put this behind a cut, because it’s getting long.

The graphic novel I’m currently drawing for First Second is called Voted Most Likely (I am about 70% sure that title will change), and is an adaptation of an unpublished Young Adult novel by a writer, Pru Shen. It’s about two guys in high school, one is a popular basketball player (who’s also depressed and struggling with his parents’ divorce) and the other is a robot-building nerd (who is aggressive and goes out and gets what he wants), and their weird, combative friendship. The story plays a bit with the Jocks/Nerd stereotypes, which I personally really appreciate, and really lets me stretch my comedy chops. It’s a funny, over the top story, and I’m having a lot of fun drawing it.

I had free reign to adapt the story as I saw fit. I was handed a 200+ page manuscript and told to go wild. I had my opinions on adapting a prose story, and told my editor up front that I didn’t plan to take a large amount of text from the story and paste it onto images; I wanted to adapt the story visually. My editor was all for it, and I think the book is going to be a lot of fun. I must admit, I really enjoy drawing all the boys! It’s been a while since I worked on a story that was boy-centric, and a great challange. I’m definitely going to come out the other side a much better artist and author.

Here is a section of the novel, followed by my adapted comic pages, so you can see what I chose to keep, and what to remove. Unfortunately the pages aren’t lettered, but you should be able to get the gist of the story.

Charlie looked apoplectic, on the verge of throwing an honest to God tantrum, a mangled HARDING FOR STUDENT BODY PRESIDENT flier still clutched in his left hand with the right fisting the collar of Nate’s shirt.  

“What the hell is this?” Charlie asked, voice rising with every successive word.

“I’ve always had political aspirations,” Nate stalled.

He tried to ignore the rapt audience of the rest of their AP U.S. History class, half of whom were crammed into the doorway of their classroom and watching in undisguised glee, enjoying the theater and waiting for Mr. Tisdale to make an appearance. Joanna–that traitor–hadn’t even tried to stop Charlie when he’d stormed into the room, grabbed Nate by the arm, and dragged him out. “And you’ve already got all those duties as captain of the basketball team,” Nate said, smiling brightly.

Charlie shoved Nate further into the wall, but before Nate could say, “Okay, ow! You realize I have a spine in there, right?” Charlie was in his face, furious as he shouted:

“I knew something was up yesterday! I should have seen it coming! Did you not learn anything from my 16^th birthday incident?”

“I only rented that pony to make you happy,” Nate said feelingly.

Charlie let go of Nate to tear at his own hair. “I cannot believe you!”

Nate pushed him away, tugging at his shirt, trying to smooth out his ruffled dignity–which was hard to do when your entire fifth period class was watching in prurient interest.

“Before you go any more wronged princess on me here,” Nate warned, “let’s stop pretending that you care about me running for class president or lying to you–in fact, let’s stop pretending you care about the cheerleaders getting their uniforms.”

Charlie made a frantic shushing noise and looked around, pale.

“You are such a wuss,” Nate said, revolted. “They’re cheerleaders, not the KGB, and you told me that Holly’s spent the last eight months pretending she doesn’t even know you’re alive–God only knows why you’re so scared of her.”

Nate had spent a small fortune and more than a year of his life putting together The Beast, gotten burned and cut and accidentally glued things to himself and then burned and cut some more attempting to unglue things from himself. He and the rest of his team had literally shed tears and blood over their creation. Weighed against all the hours lost to the dank and mildewed corners of his basement putting The Beast together–Nate couldn’t give two shakes about screwing over the pom-pom brigade, if that’s what it took to get to the contest.

They spent the next forty minutes failing one of Mr. Tisdale’s legendary tests–a one hundred question fill-in-the-blank final average killer–and despite himself, Nate caught Charlie’s eye halfway through the period so they could share a moment of solidarity. Five minutes after the lunch bell and just after Tisdale had pried the last test paper from the last frantically scribbling student, Joanna fell into step next to Nate, radiating curiosity.

“Is Charlie Nolan seriously afraid of the cheerleaders?” she asked, eyes tracking Charlie as he was corralled by his teammates further down the hall–laughing and passing the basketball one to another, talking about their upcoming game against some other basketball team Nate knew nothing about.

And now my pages!

Page 1 / Page 2 / Page 3 / Page 4 / Page 5 /

The scene concludes with Joanna (curly haired girl) saying “Is Charlie Nolan seriously afraid of the Cheerleaders?”

Anyway, I hope you can see the choices I made to make the scene work, and work in a way that is not dragged out. I mean, it was a 200 page manuscript and ended up being a nearly 300 page comic. If I’d tried to pack in every single thing from this scene, it would have been a 1000 page comic. And there is no way I’d be able to make a living. I have to say, I’ve never felt so much like a director as I do when working on this comic. I’m literally taking someone else’s story and adapting it with my visuals … it’s pretty cool!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this sneak peak at Voted Most Likely, and that you’ll keep an eye out for it. It’s slotted to come out mid-2013, and right now I’m in the drive of my life to get it done. I think it’s going to be a comic that all of you can really enjoy … and just like Friends With Boys it has 1) underage drinking, 2) facepunching (the one part of the story I added! hahah!) and 3) people having meaningful conversations under a bed. Sadly, there are no ghosts or zombies, though. It’s actually the very first comic I’ve ever made without a supernatural/genre twist! I’m becoming a grown up comic book artist, I am.

Lucy is very concerned about things that are important to her!