Maggie Shang

Interview on Author Illustrator Collaborations + Limited-Time Submission Opportunities

A girl with a red umbrella walks toward a train station with a sign that reads: Welcome to Train Station/OBX. Next Train 3 min. The station is foggy and a ticket booth is barely visible in the haze. The atmosphere is spooky and mysterious.
~ Johnell DeWitt ~ Leave a comment

A big thank you to Daphne Higbee for interviewing Maggie Shang and I about our collaboration on “Runaway Train,” the 8-page comic we did for the Let’s Go!: A Kids Comics Studio Anthology.

Daphne also included other great links in the article about collaborations. You can read it here:

Exploring the Graphic Novel Collaboration Process: A Q&A with Johnell DeWitt and Maggie Shang

As an author-only, I’m keeping my sites on finding a collaborator for some graphic novel scripts I’ve been working on, so I would love to hear any further tips in the comments on how you’ve created a successful collaboration.

And in other graphic novel news, KidLitGN just announced changes to their upcoming pitch event along with this informative article by agent Andrea Colvin:

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Behind the Scenes of “Runaway Train”

~ Johnell DeWitt ~ 3 Comments

Tech and time weren’t my friends this week, but I did manage to mostly edit a video that I’m excited to share because it shows the evolution process of the script for “Runaway Train,” my and Maggie Shang‘s collaboration for the Let’s Go!: A Kids Comics Anthology. But instead of having all the cool captions and corresponding pictures added to the video, I ran into tech issues that I couldn’t solve in time to tag team with Maggie’s post about her process.

So here’s the video with loads of info about how we started our collaboration, how the scripts changed over time, Maggie’s artistic decisions plus really valuable insights she learned along the way, my scripting decisions, and what I learned from the comic’s scripting process for this anthology project. For the time-limited among us, I’ve included time codes and supplementary graphics and info below. I hope you have as much fun watching this video as Maggie and I did making it.

Time Codes:

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