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I’m going to Japan! I’ll be travelling as part of the TCAF group of artists, and taking part in a number of events in Tokyo from Nov. 14th to the 22nd. I AM VERY EXCITED ABOUT THIS.

The Art of TCAF @ Gallery Hakusen  Saturday Nov. 14, 2015

I’ll be part of the “The Art of TCAF” gallery show at Gallery Hakusen in Asagaya, with the originals at the top of this post on display! The show runs for a week, until the 21st, but I’ll be there on the 14th for the opening! Time Out Tokyo also has more info about the show.

Kaigai Manga Festa  Sunday Nov. 15, 2015

Come find us at the Tokyo International Comic Festival at the Tokyo Big Sight convention centre on Odaiba! I’ll be at the TCAF booth with a limited assortment of March Grand Prix and Jellaby books, so come by and find us early!

Design Festa Saturday Nov. 21 - Sunday Nov. 22, 2015

Some drawings that were up at the Alaska Robotics Gallery last month in Juneau, Alaska (sorry, I am awful at keeping this Tumblr up to date)! 

We had such a great time out there, everyone was so great, and the kids we ran workshops with were super creative! 

Tomorrow is the book launch for March Grand Prix! We’ll have papercrafts of March and Lyca’s cars for you! Or better yet, design your own!

Come on down to Little Island Comics tomorrow (742 Bathurst St., Toronto), Saturday August 15, from 1-3 PM, get a copy of the new book and celebrate with us! You can also meet a REAL LIFE character from the books, Sir Reginald Barkley, who will be there in person as well!

MARCH GRAND PRIX: The Baker's Run

This one came together from all over the place. The Baker's Run actually started life as a Jellaby short story years and years ago (wherein Jason and Jellaby were to deliver a wagon full of Chinese pastries to his grandmother; hijinks ensue).

A few years later, I had put together a pitch for a sci-fi / time travel graphic novel that never quite caught on. However, working on that graphic novel produced several important elements that ended up in March Grand Prix -- the character of Tuttle the Turtle, cross-sectional diagrams being integrated into the story itself (the diagram below is from my abandoned time travel story pitch), and specific to this story, a car chase through an open air market.

When I knew March Grand Prix was going to be a series of 48-page stories, I immediately thought a story about a pastry delivery would be a perfect fit in March's world. It was also an opportunity to get away from a pure racing story, which the other two stories clearly would be.

The Baker's Run also had an interesting writing process -- as I was wrapping up production on the first three March Grand Prix stories, I was brought in by the Toronto District School Board to be part of their Writers-in-Residence program for the school year, and I was able to take this story with me to the various schools I was visiting and talking at. Reading portions of this story to kids, I was able to get immediate feedback from them -- if a joke didn't land particularly well, or if their attention wandered in a scene, I was able to go in afterwards and tweak some of the dialogue or pacing. Being able to road test the material, like a band playing new songs on tour, was invaluable, and it's something I'd love to be able to continue to do when making things for younger readers.

Next up: The Grand Desert Rally!

MARCH GRAND PRIX: The Race at Harewood

The core story of The Race at Harewood never changed all that much from start to finish: this was always going to be an introduction into March and his world, a story about March and Hammond entering in their very first professional race.

I began working on writing out a detailed story outline, and at the same time, drew up some early concept designs of the characters and their cars:

Some interesting things to note from these early designs: March's primary antagonist in the series was originally going to be a cat, and she would eventually become Lyca the Fox (which made much more sense, with foxes being predators of rabbits), and the pack of dog racers ended up getting absorbed into becoming Lyca's team of mechanics.

March was also going to have a teammate early on in the series, a bear by the name of Bearington, or Beringer (his name was constantly shifting in early drafts; I never could quite settle on a name for him). He kind of went away in later story drafts, elements of his character being broken up and incorporated into other characters, primarily in Hammond and Lyca. Bearington/Beringer Bear actually made it quite far into the early story drafts, including this revised drawing of the cast, at which point Lyca the Fox appears as the antagonist:

By this point, I had also produced six pages of completed artwork to be used as part of my pitch for publishers, which you can see here:

Designing this story with young readers in mind, I was very conscious of making some of the emotions a lot bigger and more exaggerated than my previous work, which I wanted to show with Hammond's little freak out. In the final version of the story, this scene still exists, and is pushed even further, ending with a waterfall of tears (as you can see below). Another notable change in the later iterations of MARCH GRAND PRIX was giving the characters bigger, more expressive eyes, which I think are a huge improvement over the small ‘dot’ eyes.

Interestingly, I ended up re-using some of the art from those early sample pages, although most of it was chopped up and re-edited to fit in with the new story.

However, once I had finished these sample pages and had a chance to re-read my outline again, I wasn't at all happy with how the story was shaping up, so I rewrote the story to give March's family a much larger role in the story (before, I only had Hammond and Tuttle as March's pit crew). I produced all-new sample pages from this new outline, and these were the pages that were used to pitch the series to publishers (and also appears in the final version of The Race at Harewood):

And there you have it. From that point on, with the character designs and story finally in place, it was a fairly straight line to get to the finished product. Next up: a look at the making of the second story, The Baker’s Run!

Hey you guys!

My new book, MARCH GRAND PRIX, is officially available in bookstores RIGHT NOW!

The quick elevator pitch of this new series: it’s Hello Kitty meets The Fast and the Furious. Cute anthropomorphic animals racing cars. March the Hare tries to become the greatest racing driver in the world, but quickly learns that he can't do it on his own without the help of his friends and family (pretty much a metaphor for creating any graphic novel, but I digress).

It's based on a story I had written years before my first book, Jellaby, that didn't really find any traction until I rewrote it as a story for kids. The original story was a confluence of a couple of things -- my interest in Hong Kong street racing via a documentary that was in production at the time (which was ultimately never completed, as far as I can tell), and the release of the first Fast and the Furious movie, way back in 2001. I saw that movie, and immediately thought, "Hey, I can do better than that."

The script I turned out was gritty and angsty (MUCH GRIT SO ANGST), had maybe one or two good ideas in it, but in the end, it just wasn't very good. It was written at a point where I had only just started writing and drawing my own comics, so it got put on the back burner for the better part of a decade while I went on to work on better things like FLIGHT and Jellaby.

It wasn't until 2012, while I had been struggling to come up with a new project for several years, that a trip to visit friends in Los Angeles was what MARCH really needed to come together. Standing in the Sanrio store in Little Tokyo while a friend's son ran through the store, clutching a toy car in one hand and a stuffed penguin in the other, everything tumbled into place: what if I took this story and turned it from an angsty Young Adult thing into something for kids?

So. MARCH GRAND PRIX. It's a thing I'm really proud of, a distillation of my love for all things car-related, from early picture books like Richard Scarry's Cars and Trucks and Things That Go, to manga series like Initial D, to the endless hours I spent playing games like Car Wars and Interstate '76, to hugely influential movies like The Road Warrior, and more recently, the incredible Senna documentary.

ANYWAY: The stories are fun, and a fast read. Good for kids and adults, I packed in as much action, adventure, heart, and stupid jokes as I could fit into each story. And beyond just a story about racing cars, under that hood lies the true beating heart of MARCH GRAND PRIX: Family. Friendship. Hopefully, it's earnest in all the ways I probably am not in person.

If you have any kids in your life, maybe your own, or maybe even a friend's kid, I'd love it if you picked up a copy for them. Sales are important to a book's launch, they let the publisher know there's a demand for these kinds of stories, and let me tell you, I've got way more stories to tell in the world of MARCH GRAND PRIX, and I would love to do more.  

August 1st also happens to mark 5 years with my lady (who I married almost a whole year ago), and 2 years with this jerk of a dog (who also happens to have a cameo in the book). So yeah, there are some reasons to celebrate. Best way to celebrate with me? Help me make more MARCH GRAND PRIX. Buy my book. :)

Amazon | Indigo | Little Island Comics

People have been saying some really nice things in advance of the March Grand Prix: The Fast and the Furriest collected edition!

Kirkus Reviews calls it: "An unfalteringly sunny, action-driven collection.”

And a Starred Review (!) from Publishers Weekly: “In what reads like a love letter to racing comics like Speed Racer, Soo (Jellaby) presents a highly entertaining trio of stories about March Hare, a talented racer who's a good sport, too.”