This week, Lerner Publishing Group’s Graphic Universe imprint is about to launch Night and Dana, a brand new middle-grade graphic novel from cartoonist Anya Davidson. The coming-of-age story follows a pair of excessive school-aged filmmakers engaged on a local weather change-inspired horror film. Today The Beat is happy to current an unique excerpt of the graphic novel.
Here’s how Graphic Universe describes Night and Dana:
Dana Drucker fights boredom in her Florida seashore city by crafting special-effects make-up—the extra grotesque, the higher. But when a messy prank with Dana’s finest pal Lily will get the flawed sort of consideration, the women have two decisions: discover a new inventive outlet or go away highschool with out graduating.
To save their shot at diplomas, Dana and Lily be part of a neighborhood faculty movie class. It offers Dana an opportunity to maintain practising her monster make-up, as she and Lily begin work on a horror film impressed by native ocean warming. And a seek for filming areas places Dana within the path of Daphne Ocean, an activist and self-proclaimed water witch—the proper sort of inspiring outsider. But when filming begins, Dana finds herself rising aside from Lily, who doesn’t appear to wish her closest pal a lot anymore.
Soon, tempers are flaring, and Dana’s pushing away outdated buddies and her new mentor. But as every thing begins going up in flames, Dana additionally begins to forge her voice. Night and Dana is a inventive coming-of-age story for the climate-change period, a graphic novel about making artwork and rising up when it feels just like the world is on hearth.
“I started the story as a way to process my own rage and grief surrounding the climate crisis,” cartoonist Anya Davidson informed The Beat, “but also to celebrate the subversive power of art. It made sense to set the story in a coastal region, as they are currently among the worst affected. I was born in Sarasota, Florida and spent the first few years of my life on Boca Grande, which has been developed as a resort community, and now that whole region has been severely affected by the red tide, so much so that many of my family friends have been forced out.”
As for grounding the bigger story within the characters, Davidson mentioned the characters themselves made that simpler for them than anticipated. “Once I started scripting, the characters took on lives of their own,” they mentioned. “Their personal squabbles, dreams and traumas became just as important as the overarching storyline, and their goals started to diverge. I stopped worrying about whether the story was too “preachy” and loved letting it shock me.”
Check out the unique preview of Night and Dana beneath. The graphic novel, out there in hardcover, softcover, and eBook editions, is due out in bookstores tomorrow, September twelfth.
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