"Moonfly" and The Kids Comics Studio Anthology

“Moon Fly” is one of three comics I submitted for the upcoming Kids Comics Studio anthology.

What’s Kids Comics Studio? It’s a wing of Kids Comics Unite, an awesome online community that supports artists who are working on graphic novels for kids.

I’ve been a member for several years and was stoked when the opportunity to participate in an anthology arose.

Anthology cover art by Eli Estrella Pérez

Kickstarter

“Let’s Go!” is being crowdfunded and will feature 28 comics by 31 artists from around the world. A labor of love, everyone in the anthology has been involved in the production of it, in various roles. I’m a member of the Publishing Committee and also the leader of the Editorial team, and I’ve learned a ton by working on the book for the past year.

Our Kickstarter campaign launches on April 22^nd, and if you’d like to support it (would love that!) you can sign up here to be notified when it goes live:

"Let's Go" Kickstarter Pre-Launch Page

The Genesis of “Moon Fly”

Anyhow, sales pitch over, where’d the idea for “Moon Fly” come from? It sprung from the theme we created for the anthology: a kid-friendly protagonist goes on a journey and meets some kind of creature along the way.

To brainstorm, I made lists of locations, modes of transportation, and creatures. I was looking for something maybe a little unusual and silly, and as I considered genres, Sci-Fi led me to the realm of the Extra-terrestial, with a first stop at the moon. It was pretty simple after that… location: moon, protagonist: astronaut, mode of transportation: lunar rover, antagonist: bug on the windshield (or in the case of a rover, visor). And the punchline was just a semi-logical extrapolation away.

Writing Short

One challenge was to keep the comic short. I’d already written an eight pager and a two pager, and was looking to make a one pager, should the anthology need something even shorter.

Writing short can be challenging after working on a 200 page graphic novel. But it can also be fun and freeing! If you’d like to learn more about how I approached it, you can check out this article I wrote for the Kids Comics Unite blog.

Link to "Writing Short" article on Kids Comics Unite Blog

So that’s it for this comic. I look forward to sharing more soon, including the other two I did for the anthology!

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