When thinking of a story for this graphic novella, I knew that I would need inspiration. In some ways, creating a shorter graphic novella is more difficult than creating one that has an indefinite length. With a story with indefinite length, you can keep adding and adding information. This helps for plot points that weren’t explained or unclear. On the other hand, a story that has a set amount of pages has to have a concrete story in a particular amount of space. When looking for an idea for a story, I turned to one of my favorite story tellers, Casey Crescenzo, who writes stories in the form of songs. The one song that Casey wrote that mainly inspired my graphic novella is called “The Inquiry of Ms. Terri”(1) in the song, a woman feels guilty for lying to her son about being a prostitute in order to support the both of them since her husband left her. The lyrics of the song read, “We dance around the truth, my dear I lie for you, and when I lie down, I’m simply lying to them too.” This concept behind the song really inspired me to make a story with two different sides. My graphic novella tells the story of a boy on one side, who thinks his mother dislikes him because she turns down the drawings that he makes of his father. While the other side tells the story of the mistaken mother, who does this because she can’t stand to look at her husband because she despises him. In terms of technical craft, I was inspired by the art of Bryan Lee O’Malley, who wrote and illustrated the graphic novel “Seconds”(2). O’Malley uses a very strict color palette when coloring his illustrations and I was very inspired to do this as well. I knew since the structure of the book was in an accordion the whole book would have to be cohesive. So I decided to stick to a cohesive color palette throughout my book.
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(1) The Dear Hunter. Act I: The Lake South, the River North. Triple Crown Records, 2006, digital.
(2) O’Malley, Bryan Lee., Jason Fischer, Dustin Harbin, and Nathan Fairbairn. Seconds. New York: Ballantine Books, 2014.
