Category: Graphic Novel

The Making of ZOONI TALES

10/24/2023

ZOONI TALES is a graphic-novel-in-rhyme for Ages 5-9 featuring the adventures of "a plucky pup with perseverance and pals".

This book is loosely inspired by our Covid puppy, Zooni, who arrived in our lives in April of 2020, at 8 weeks old, adopted from a family who was giving her up. In the Kashmiri language of India, the word for moon is ZOON, and ZOONI is a cute pet name given to girl children. We named the pup ZOONI given how cute she was, and quickly discovered that not only was she quote, but she had the sweetest, friendliest, personality. I would often call the pup ZOONI MOONI, and one day I thought to myself, ZOONI AND MOONI sounds like the title of a book. Perhaps it could be a book about a dog and another character, maybe a cat?

Once the idea was seeded in my mind, I tried to imagine who these characters would be. ZOONI was easy, since I could base the character on my pup's personality (friendly, kind, empathetic, helpful..), and the secondary character would develop based on playing off the character of ZOONI.

To develop a book idea, I need two things: a character and a story. First I tried to see if I could come up with a cute looking character. Here are early sketches, trying to come up with a character who resembles Zooni:

Once I had a character, I had to decide what kind of book this was going to be. Picture Book? Early Reader (like Bobo & Pup-Pup)? Graphic Novel (like Owl & Penguin)? Or something else?

I decided to try a graphic novel early reader format, but, since I love poetry, maybe this one could be in rhyme (like a Dr. Seuss book).

At this point in time, Zooni the pup was in her chewing phase - chewing everything including shoes. Shoe is an easy word to rhyme, so I thought of, maybe a story about a missing shoe? Maybe a shoe... lost at a zoo? Stolen by a kangaroo? Or a shrew? There seemed to be many rhyming possibilities here!

Having written three poetry collections to date, I thought writing a story in rhyme would be easy. Boy was I wrong! Writing a story in conversational dialogue proved to be particularly challenging. A story needs to have an arc and progress logically. And the dialogue has to sound natural and conversational. Doing all that in rhyme turned out not to be easy at all. I was planning a 72 page book, but halfway through it I got stuck. I simply could not find the words to proceed. For about six months the story went absolutely nowhere. Finally I shared it with my critique group (you know who you are), and their excitement about the story compelled me to sit down and try to finish it. And one afternoon, in a flash of brilliance, I found myself writing the entire 36 pages I needed. This was followed by creating sketches for the story along with a few pages of finished art, which looked like this:

Finally, when I had my 72 pages of sketches, and a few pages of 'finished art', I sent the manuscript to my agent, thinking this idea was good to go 'on submission'. But the first thing my agent asked was, did I have more stories with these characters? Because often editors want to know if the submission is an individual one-off book, or a potential series of books.

Well obviously I did not have any more stories. So I brainstormed with myself and came up with this:

My entire synopsis of this 'second story' was: "Zooni and Mooni are lost at sea and have to find their way back." I had no idea what was going to happen in this story, except vaguely imagine that sea creatures could help them on their quest.

Luckily my agent liked the first story enough to send the proposal forward to my editor at Holiday House. The editor instantly loved the idea of doing a graphic novel in rhyme, because apparently teachers and librarians are constantly looking for alternatives to Dr. Seuss, and there just aren't that many of them out there.

However my editor had a couple of requests. Would I consider removing the Mooni character and just having a single protagonist? Uhm, ok, i thought, I'm willing to try that and see what happens.

That actually turned out to be a good call. When I rewrote Mooni the Cat out of the story, my Zooni character became stronger because they inherited all the good qualities of both characters. It also made the character more in charge of their own destiny.

The next thing the editor asked for was to redesign the Zooni character and make them more adorable. My original design was intentionally simplified to save myself from the hard labor of drawing a complex character over and over again - the way Mickey Mouse's ears are always 2 circles flat on, which was a device Walt Disney reduce his drawing effort. I redesigned the character:

Again, good call. I originally had the character in all-American overalls, but my daughter insisted the character should wear a 'Kurta' and also be browner, which seemed like good ideas to me, so I evolved the look further.

Finally the editor asked if I would change the 72-page book to a 96-page book, and BTW, can you shrink this 72-page story to 30-pages, add 2 more full stories, and a couple of interspersed mini-comics. And create 2 books like this?

Wait, what? It was hard enough putting that one 72-page story together in rhyme, and now I needed to write 5 more full stories, in rhyme, and add 4 short mini-comics? That seemed like quite a challenge, but I'm not one to back down from a challenge. With a fair bit of struggle, I managed to flesh out the 'Lost at Sea' story, and add a third story about a 'Cave Rescue'. This process took a long time as I would often get stuck trying to find the right words for the next thing the characters needed to say to move the story forward. Sometimes it would take days or weeks for me to write 2 lines of rhyme. Finally, once I had 96 pages of rhyming content for the first book, we inked a deal for two books, and talk about a leap of faith, the second book was entirely unconceived in any detail at that point of time.

Next it was time to develop the finished art. In my previous OWL & PENGUIN books, I had strived for a very warm, soft, and organic look that would feel welcoming to a 3-year old reader, and put more focus on the art since there are very few words in those books. For ZOONI TALES, I decided to create a completely different look, maybe one closer to the comics that a slightly older reader might encounter, and one where the emphasis could remain on the rhyme. Here are 2 pages side-by-side so you can see the difference for yourself.

While planning the book, I experimented with hundreds of commercially available fonts, trying to find one that felt just right for the book, but failed to find one that felt satisfactory. Finally, out of frustration, I decided to create a font from my own handwriting, using an online tool called Calligraphr. This took a fair bit of experimentation:

But I am happy with how the font turned out, even though it is not perfect. It makes the book feel all the more personal to me.

Similarly, not being able to find an ideal font for the title, I decided to create a Title font too. I ended up creating five different variations, and, with input from my editor, finally arrived at a font that is furry, has wagging tails, curly glyphs, and little pawprints. This is the font we used for the final book title:

In parallel with working on the art for Book 1, I also needed to develop cover designs. Covers need to be finalized well before the book so that they can be plugged into the sales and marketing pipeline months ahead of the actual release. Here some of the cover ideas that did not make the cut:

Drawing a graphic novel is an enormous amount of work. Every panel on every page has tons of painstaking, hand-drawn detail that most readers will never notice, but just can't be skimped over. Characters have to look consistent in every appearance, context has to be correct, you can't just leave things half-drawn. Environments have to look appropriate. There is always a phase in drawing graphic novels where you wonder why you signed up for this in the first place, and a phase where your body physically hurts from the repetitive process of continuous drawing. At one point I counted I had drawn 768 individual characters in this book, each one having to look correct and consistent!

Anyway, after a marathon of effort the art was turned in. But then I was asked if I could create a cover for Book #2, so the publisher could print it on the back of Book #1. At this point Book #2 is not even written yet, let alone drawn, so I had to scramble to finish a story for Book #2, draw the internal art for it, and then base the cover off the internal art, another speed-marathon in itself. Here are the covers for Book #1 and Book #2, side by side:

Yes, ZOONI goes to space! One of my favorite comics growing up was TINTIN: EXPLORERS ON THE MOON. I simply could not pass up an opportunity to do a moon story! :)

ZOONI TALES #1 released October 2023. ZOONI TALES #2 releases June 2024. Look for both books everywhere books are sold.

Here is a quick flip-through ZOONI #1 to give you an idea of the book.

And if you're not convinced this is a fun book for kids, watch this review from a 5-year old who gives ZOONI #1 a "ONE HUNDRED THUMBS UPS!"

And finally, here are a few photos of Zooni the pup, from the time when I first conceived the book, to the time the book finally came out, three years later: