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When I was growing up, my sister and I would put on tights, a pillowcase cape, and a plastic mask to play Batman and Robin. She’s about 4 years older than me so I always had to be the trusty sidekick. The fact that we were pretending to be men never even entered into our minds. We were just superheroes: guys in capes with crime-fighting superpowers.

So it’s interesting to me that, when Leah and I first started working on Couri Vine, we started with a male protagonist. I mean, we just made our hero a guy without really questioning it. It seemed natural; I’d been watching and reading stories that star MEN for most of my life. Only after we started working on Couri did we have a realization, “Why have we been imagining a male protagonist? Let’s write about a girl!”

So Couri, who was initially a supporting character, became our hero. And I took a good look at our supporting characters and made sure that there are numerous interesting, complicated, and fierce female characters.

Moon Leader Todal is our “Bad Guy”, but he has a female counterpart, Anaxia, who is actually a little meaner than the Moon Leader.

And there’s Doo Dad, the “Good Guy” in Book 1. In subsequent books, Thyme, a grandmotherly genius, comes into prominence as Couri’s mentor and ally. Thyme is only mentioned briefly in Book 1, but I promise you that by the end of Book 4 her awesomeness will be revealed.

I believe it’s vitally important for young girls to see strong women and girls in comic books. Yet, as we were getting started, I fell into the same trap that I hope young girls WON’T fall into: I assumed the best person for the job was a boy.

So Couri is a girl – a real girl. She’s eleven years old with strengths and weaknesses, and a hugely obvious, frustrating disability. Her feelings are complicated, but she has a purpose in life that’s greater than just getting some boy to notice her. She has to learn to embrace who she is, and when she does, she’ll find her superpowers.

With immense respect for comic book artists, it’s fair to say I was a little intimidated by the thought of making my own comic book. It’s a huge undertaking! The process of making a comic book is like putting together a giant puzzle, one which stretches your creative muscles in limitless ways. So when Vanessa and I decided to make COURI VINE as a comic book I knew it was not something to attempt lightly. For popular comic books, it might take five artists to complete one book. This includes a concept artist, penciller, inker, colorist, and letterer. Here, I was about to attempt all of these roles. But I listen to my mother’s words of wisdom, “take one thing at a time,” grabbed my sketchbook, and started chipping away.

Vanessa and I started with the idea of a girl with an unbeknownst superpower who lives in Moon City with her senile grandfather, an old scientist who was displaced from Earth years ago. From there I set out to determine what this world looks like. At this point in the process, my role as artist was to develop concept art for the characters, determine the setting, architectural designs, spaceship and robot designs, and develop a map of the city.

Life drawing had been something I practiced on a fairly regular bases. But drawing a model who is posing for you and doing portraits is much different than drawing for comics. In my research, I picked up Tom Bancroft’s book “Characters Mentor,” and also “How To Draw The Marvel Way” by Stan Lee and have referred to these books often. With comics, characters emote with their entire bodies. Expression is found not only in the face but also in the pose of a character. Even the perspective of the composition can bring a character to life. I continue to learn and practice this as I illustrate these characters in each panel.

Then there’s the setting for the characters. When it comes to designing a futuristic, sustainable world, I’m intrigued by Janine Benyus’ concept of biomimicry and her book called “Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature.” According to Wikipedia, biomimicry is the imitation of the models, systems, and elements of nature for the purpose of solving complex human problems. How cool is that!? I wanted my designs to reflect this idea.

Other inspiration was found at an instillation by Architects of Art called the “Luminarium Pentalum.” These giant inflated structures linked domes to a maze of tunnels and allowed sunshine to stream in through colorful vinyl panels creating brilliant arrays of light. Inflated structures on the moon connecting existing lava tunnels, it made sense!

Vanessa and I also had questions like: What kind of games do people play in Moon City? How would people get around? Where would they live? What were the dilemmas and advantages of having a lower gravitational pull? How many hours are in a day in Moon City? All of these questions, and more, needed to be considered when approaching the design.

Helicopter Cycles were a must! Take an old-timey, penny-farthing bike crossed with a helicopter, add a lower gravitational pull, and there you have it, a fun and potentially life threatening, pedal-driven, aeronautic machine specially designed for lunar extreme sports!

Book 1 of COURI VINE scratches the surface of the possibilities in Moon City, exploring ideas of sustainable living in a man-made province, concepts that will continue to unfold in the upcoming books. Included here are some of the pre-visuals developed for the first book.

Like Couri, I am discovering what the universe has to offer, and what I have to offer in return. Thanks for reading.

So, Leah and I decided to write a comic book! Wow! GREAT!! Wait a minute. That means…I actually have to write a comic book?! I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to pull this off, so I decided I better school myself in comic book writing. Lucky for me, homework included trips to MidTown Comics, tickets to NY Comic Con, and loads and loads of comic book reading. I also picked up some books on the subject, including Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics” and Dennis O’Neill’s “The DC Comics Guide to Writing Comics.”

All the while, story ideas for Couri Vine were brewing. I still didn’t quite know where to start, so I set out to create a Story Bible, an only-for-our-eyes description of the world of Couri Vine. Through that process I found the one question with the potential to define every aspect of this story: How on Earth did they end up on the moon?

The answer to that question is contained in a long history of the future: devastation of the planet, a war on Earth, foul play in the universe, and eventually an Air Plague (with a mysterious cause) that forces the inhabitants of Earth to migrate to the Moon.

The rewrites…oh, the rewrites…

Our Story Bible is sitting in the Dropbox folder that Leah and I share. What’s exciting to me is that this first story arc (the first four books) is just scratching the surface. Couri won’t even discover her powers until the final pages of the last book. Then, all kinds of new trouble is waiting for her. (insert sinister laugh here)

When it came time to write the script for Book One, I wish I could say that the story just poured out of me. But that’s not the way it happened. I made a lot of mistakes and had to reimagine the story once I actually started typing words. This is the guts of what I learned: writing a comic book is hard. It’s like a puzzle – you think you have this great story that practically tells itself, but then you find yourself counting the number of panels per page and trying to fit in the conflict before the page turns.

Then there are the speech balloons. I had way too many words in my early drafts so I spent a lot of time cutting dialogue and simplifying the story. As I’m writing books 2, 3 and 4, I’m getting better about this. But no regrets – the process has been awesome and I’m loving every minute of it. I guess the best way to write a comic book is just to write a comic book. And then rewrite it. And rewrite it again. And again. And again. And…you get the idea.