A Book of Perfect Ideas
How I got to making West Hollywood Monster Squad a perfect graphic novel
Last week, as a little Pride treat, Abrams books told me and illustrator Bradley Clayton that we could announce our graphic novel for their Surely imprint, West Hollywood Monster Squad. I’ve never had a project take so long to bake, and I’ve never been happier with the final results.
The book has a somewhat simple plot: a group of queer kids out in weho for a drag show end up in the fight of their lives as the city becomes overtaken by giant magenta monsters. You’d think I just had that one in my pocket, easy peasy, right? Very wrong.
As I get older, I’ve become more and more trusting of my instincts and listening to the material telling me when something is working/ not working. West Hollywood Monster Squad feels *perfect* to me. I love the cast, the story is both fun and surprising, the humor is lit, and the art is flawless (all credit due to Bradley Clayton, they slayed on every page). “Perfect” doesn’t mean “smooth,” and I had to trust and follow my instincts every step of the way.
For starters, the threat in the book was originally aliens. In the idea’s first year or two of life, I was sending that pitch around and no one was biting. I shelved the idea because it even felt clear to me that something wasn’t working… I was just hoping I’d get a publisher interested and I could figure out how to fix what wasn’t down the road. While that book (I believe called Alien Lanes) was gathering dust on google drive, I had a different idea to do a story about a fictional me fighting across town with a boyfriend and an ex, where we’re dealing with our interpersonal drama as magenta monsters attack. It was clear that idea was just me working out some love life stuff and not an actual book. Finally (in the shower, where most good thinking happens), I took the spirit of the first idea, and the plot mechanics of the second idea to form WeHoMoS (yes, our acronym is WEHOMOS!!!).
The idea finally made sense! A group of friends who are kind of being monsters to each other have to fight literal monsters! And they all look so iconic! It’s the gay action-horror book I always dreamt of reading but never had growing up! “Everything’s solved and the book will write itself,” I thought as I signed a contract with Abrams. Hah!
Without getting into too many details, ‘cuz we have a nice long rollout ahead of us, the main issue I ran into making this project the most perfect greatest version of itself was keeping the FUN going throughout. I’ll get into how necessary it was to work with Mariko Tamaki & everyone at Surely in a later post, but for the sake of this specific post and talking about listening to your storytelling guts, I’ll share one anecdote.
Somewhere after the second draft, Mariko called me. She told me I had to re-write the second half of the book. “What you wrote is good. We could publish it. It would be fine,” she said (I’m paraphrasing). “But your first 80 pages are SO great, and I think you can match the energy of that in the second half of the book.” She pinpointed the exact moment where the story stopped firing on all cylinders, when the book stopped being fun, and just became a sort of means to an end. Mariko was so incredibly right, and I had to stare at the book and go “how do I fix this?”
I walked myself to my favorite gay spot in LA, Akbar, ordered a cosmo, pulled out a sketchbook, and tried to figure out the plot of the new ending. Instead of writing down some “point a to point b” outline, a funny thing happened. Olivia Newton-John’s “Magic” started playing on the jukebox. My heart warmed looking around. It was an off-night, so there was just a sprinkling of folks hanging around. David Bowie’s “Starman” played next. I stared at the doorman reading a sci-fi paperback while right next to him, a trio of young gays laughed at something on a phone. With the spirit of queer joy around me, I just started sketching images that didn’t have a context, but looked LEGENDARY. It wasn’t clear in that moment why the characters were doing the things they were doing in those images, but I knew I had to get them there.
When you have your themes nailed down, your characters perfectly understood, it’s okay to let those be the anchors of your story. In that moment, I said “take a backseat plot, what are the VIBES of the ending???” Where I ended up taking the book from that night’s sketch session delivered a way more exciting ending, and actually put me in a place where the book was really saying something about our community and its strengths/ challenges.
West Hollywood Monster Squad comes out January 2025, and you should start pre-ordering it today to ensure you’re an OG reader.
Inspired!
Yo, very excited for this! #whms