Kat Leyh on Snapdragon
The TeachingBooks Virtual Book Tour is your opportunity to learn from and build personal connections with extraordinary book creators and their brand-new titles. In this post, Kat Leyh speaks about her graphic novel Snapdragon.



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Drawing a graphic novel is a bit like making a film—on your own. The artist becomes the writer, director, production crew, costume designer, art director, location scout, cinematographer, the special effects team, the actors, and the editor. Unlike film, however, the images are static and time, motion, and sound must be implied through picture sequences, or by descriptive text, such as “We waited for hours,” or “WHAM!”

When I was in the fifth grade, I convinced my mother to take me to our local comics shop. While I browsed the shelves, she stood by the door with her arms crossed, silently judging an entire industry. I went home with Secret Wars #4, the latest issue of Marvel’s cosmic, no-holds-barred superhero slugfest. It’s like Homer’s Iliad, only in outer space and without all the boring pathos. It was everything my 10-year-old heart desired. That evening, I made the mistake of letting my mom flip through it.
The whole thing started in 2008, when I was working as Congressman John Lewis’s press secretary during his primary campaign.