2013 Harvey Award nomination for Best Original Graphic Novel!

We just learned that our book is nominated in the Best Graphic Album Original category for the 2013 Harvey Awards. These awards are creator-chosen, so this is a heart-warming nod from our fellow comics-makers... thanks to everyone who cast their vote for our book!

Don't Forget This Song Receives Two Eisner Award Nominations! Yahoo!

This just announced: our Carter Family graphic novel is nominated for two 2013 Eisner Awards, according to Comic Book Resources' website (click on the link to see their article.)

The book is nominated for Best Reality-Based Work (and is up against stiff competition from Ellen Forney and Carol Tyler) and for Best Writer (Frank M. Young, who shares this nomination 50/50 with co-creator David Lasky). Again, we're up against a big name--Ed Brubaker--but we're the only non-mainstream figure in that category, so who knows what'll happen?

Receiving these nominations is an enormous honor, and gives us a strong sense of "thumbs up" from our contemporaries in the comics world. Whether we win or not, this is a big deal to us--thank you so much to everyone who voted for us!

(And, since this post bumped David's recent announcement--if you are in the SF area and would like to meet David and get your book signed, please read the posting immediately below. David will be in SF on Thursday, along with legendary underground cartoonist/musician Robert Armstrong. Show your love for David, San Francisco!)

Beginning today: "The Storms Are on the Ocean" a full chapter online

Starting today, Frank and I will be posting one page a day from the longest chapter in the book, "The Storms Are on the Ocean," in which the Carter Family travels to Bristol (on the VA/TN border) to record their music for the first time. This is our way of counting down to early October and the release of the book. 

This chapter is dedicated to Dylan Williams, who died one year ago. I began drawing the chapter the day after returning from his funeral. My main thought was: 'Dylan would want me to keep on drawing.'

In this opening page, we see (my drawing of) the actual newspaper ad that was used to alert musicians in the Bristol area of the recording sessions that were being done by Victor.  These sessions would later be called "The Big Bang of Country Music." Click here for a much larger version of the page.

The Evolution of a "Carter Family: Don't Forget This Song" Page

Frank and I wanted to show you what went into creating an average page of our Carter Family graphic novel. I chose the page in which their producer and manager, Ralph Peer, along with his wife Anita, arrives on a visit to the Carters in Maces Spring, VA. 
The text here, is by Frank, unless I pipe in (with blue type)...
-David

The process of creating comics is highly subjective. Some artists just put pen or pencil to paper and move forward, without a clear idea where they're going. Others out-do Alfred Hitchcock in the pre-planning stages, and create multiple images of each panel before they commit the final image to paper.

Add a writer to the mix, and their style of input also affects the creative outcome.

Every cartoonist or creative team has their own method. And a method of some kind is a must--especially when creating a long-form work. Our agent, Bob Mecoy, has called our graphic novel a "movie on paper," and some of the methodology of film-making did influence our approach.

Here is the origin of one page from our book, from rough script to thumbnails to pencil and ink to publication.

The script, at this point, is more of a guidepost of the marks we want to hit in each panel. There's no for-real dialogue--just detailed descriptions of each panel's event, mood and what each character is doing or feeling. Nothing is cast in stone here. In this case, the finished page is pretty close to the descriptions in the script.

The only piece of dialogue that stayed to the end is A.P.'s blessing for the meal, in the last panel of the page. That was a documented piece of real-life speech.

Next is the first rough thumbnail. This is a vital stage. Will the sequence work in comics form? Does the panel-to-panel flow make sense, and support the events and the characters? Frank did this first thumbnail. It won't win an art contest; it's only meant to serve the material.
(Note: The 'thumbnail' images are only about 3 inches tall. Just enough to get a sense of what will fit on the page, without getting bogged down in details.)

Next, David took this first rough thumbnail and revised it. Notice that he cuts out a panel and adds another. This was a good decision. His sketches are tighter than the first thumbnail, but still more suggestive than definitive.

(We wanted to highlight the fact that the Ralph Peer's Cadillac is large -- too large for the garage A.P. has built in anticipation of the visit. We've also added a panel to the presentation of the Orthophonic Credenza, an important gift from Peer to the Carters.)

In the next iteration, (a pencil rough drawn at print size) David tightens up the staging of the panels, the body language of each character, and gives a strong sense of the settings. Frank then enters the first draft of the dialogue.

Then, it's decided that a long-shot could be made more effective as a medium shot (in panel 5). At this point, the page is ready to commit to ink on paper.

(We showed the rough draft of our book to an artist who is very experienced with this kind of material, and he advised me to draw Ralph Peer's Cadillac Limo much larger. On this page I digitally enlarged the Cadillac in every panel, and made Peer higher in the driver's seat, in panel 3. We also decided to add more family members to the table in the last panel.)

As David inks the final version, he tightens up the compositions and figures. This piece of the story really and truly comes to life.

(I should note that we had to find reference photos for the Cadillac Limo and the Orthophonic Credenza. Extra time, but worth it for historical accuracy.)



Now it's ready for Frank to color. After that, the final dialogue is written. There are some small changes from the first draft of the dialogue and narration--mostly in reducing the amount of text.

As said, this page did not undergo a major change from start to finish--just a refinement of the narrative event that its eight panels capture.

(I hope what comes across is that a great amount of care went into making every page of this book. Frank and I gave this our all.)

If anyone would like to see larger versions of the images above, they are all available on flickr.com: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dlasky/tags/dftspageevolution/

Diamonds in the Rough: Sara and A.P. audition for Brunswick Records

Before the Carter Family had their breakthrough moment at the Bristol Sessions, they (or at least, Sara and A.P.) auditioned for another record label: Brunswick Records. Frank and I are excited to present a full chapter from our graphic novel which tells the story of this earlier and less successful attempt to become recording artists.

Because there is little to no documentation of the event (no one can even seem to agree what city it was in), this is our vision of what may have happened at the Brunswick Session.  All we really know is that A.P. was asked to play the fiddle on record and he refused.

The year is 1925, the place is Poor Valley, Virginia, on the modest farm of Alvin Pleasant and Sara Carter...

We hope you enjoyed this chapter. Learn what happens next in the graphic novel Carter Family: Don't Forget This Song, from Abrams Comicarts this fall...

Creeping Into Reality... the book bobs up on the pop-culture radar...

Humble soul that I am, I seldom think to Google my own projects and see how they're doing out in the world. A friend of my collaborator David Lasky mentioned he'd seen a write-up of Don't Forget This Song in the Previews catalog (for non comix-nuts, this is the Sears Roebuck catalog of upcoming comics, graphic novels and assorted doo-dads).

This piqued my curiosity, and here are some results of my Googly search.

1. A flattering preview/recommendation from The Library Journal:

2. Abrams Comic Art's page for the book, including this lovely comment by Art Spiegelman...

"What a fine marriage of form and content! Humble and moving—straightforward with occasional breathtaking bravura passages—this book echoes the Carter Family's rough-hewn sounds. It tells of the lives, sorrows, and values of a lost America in short episodes like a giant stack of old 78s. Using the vocabulary of comic strips like Little Orphan Annie and Gasoline Alley, it's as obsessive in its dedication to vernacular craft and hard work as A.P. Carter himself. Frank Young and David Lasky have spun a work of visual music that will replay in your head and heart well after you've finished reading it."

see the page HERE.

3. numerous pre-order sites for the book (including Diamond Previews, the aforementioned mega-catalog)... all these listings basically use the boilerplate promotional description supplied by Abrams. It's a good description, but you'll see it all over the place over the next few months.

Indeed, the book is getting closer to release. We're supposed to get our mitts on an advance copy pretty soon. Abrams' booth at the San Diego Comic Con will have copies of the book for sale (IF the book gets back from the printers by then--a big if at this point!)

If you've seen any random web mentions of our book, please let us know! In the meantime, it's neat to see the book coming up on the horizon of the publishing/reading world...

We will showcase some sequences from the book here very soon. In the meantime, we're excited to share this news with you!
.

Don't Forget This Song is on pre-order status at Amazon!

Our book was once listed on amazon.com, but due to the various hurdles David and I had to jump to get this baby done, that listing was soon a pipe-dream.

This time it's for real!


Click HERE to see the real thing!

As David said, "This is yet another marker for me that the book is a REAL thing, and will really be in print soon..." I second that emotion! 


If the book isn't physically being printed, as I write this, it's either on the printer's queue (or, perhaps, already run off) in China. The street date is October 1st, but copies may surface before then, depending on when the book is printed and how long it takes copies to arrive, via the proverbial slow boat from China, to our consumer shores.


It's exciting news for us, and we're glad to share it here with you!

The Sampler Booklet is Out...

David and I each got a bundle of 68-page, full color sampler editions of CARTER FAMILY COMICS: DON'T FORGET THIS SONG from our publisher, Abrams Comicarts this week.

If you're at a comics convention this spring or summer, or if you attend any events at The Museum of Cartoon Art in New York, you'll be able to lay hands on a complementary copy of this uncorrected proof edition!

This book presents the first third of the graphic novel in full color, including an introduction I wrote, our bibliography and thank-you acknowledgments from David and myself to all the wonderful people who have cheered us on during the sometimes-rocky road of this book's creation!

The preview is printed on newsprint, and the effect is different than that of the final hardcover book. It's a blast to see these pages printed on comic-book paper, nonetheless.

Trainspotters will want to hang onto this preview edition--it has little bits of art and dialogue you won't see in the final hardcover version. This is mostly due to some information we got, late in the game, mostly pertaining to recording technology of the late 1920s.

David has made several small but important changes to the artwork since this preview went to press. I've also fine tuned some of the dialogue and color. So this booklet may be a future collector's item!

Here's a quick scan of a page from the sampler:

This page, from Chapter 10 of the book, stands alone. It shows the moment when the idea of recording truly gets into A.P. Carter's head. He also meets a future ally, record retailer Cecil McLister. The top panel is one of the many labor-of-love moments throughout the book. It took David considerable time to render all those distinct figures in the panel--on top of the many other elements therein. Ditto, it was time-consuming (but fun) for me to color them, the buildings, A.P.'s horse cart, etc.

Kim Deitch kindly offered a rave reaction to our book, when it was still in the production stage. Abrams excerpted his enthusiastic words on the back cover of the sampler:

This sampler brings us--and the book--one significant step closer to publication! As said, keep your eyes out for this free proof. We'll keep you updated on the book's progress, as the street date of October, 2012 approaches...