Final Major Project - Pitch - Ideas and Research

For my final major project, I will produce a graphic novel aimed at a young-adult audience. While there are many young-adult graphic novels, I feel that in comparison to regular books (where young-adult is one of the largest and most successful genres), there is still plenty of room in the marketplace for more.

My graphic novel will be about time travel, with a big focus on humour. The humour will mainly come from subverting the reader’s expectations about time travel stories. For example: In the opening chapter the hero has to go back in time and save Hitler from being assassinated by another time-traveller (travelling back in time to kill Hitler being a common time-travel trope).

The story will mainly consist of the villain travelling through time and collecting various other villains to help him in his evil scheme, with the heroine travelling to those same time periods to collect heroes to fight those villains, with a slight focus on Victorian London as that is where both the hero and villain are from.

My book will consist of around five or six chapters, all of which will be 22 pages in length, so around 110/132 pages.

Before I began any major work, I looked at other illustrators who's work I wanted to emulate on some level in my book, the first being Jess Fink, author of We Can Fix It: A Time Travel Memoir, a humorous book about a time traveller going back in time to fix all of her past mistakes:

Compared to Fink’s other, more risqué work (Such as Chester 5000, a webcomic about a Victorian sex-robot), We Can Fix It seems relatively tame, with no nudity and only some minor sexual jokes.

While her style is a big inspiration, what I’m most interested in is the format of the pages, which mostly consists of small square panels, making it reminiscent of a collection of newspaper comics, which I think work very well with the small page size of the book. Her style also really works with the humorous content of the book, which I think would work really well with a young adult audience.

Another illustrator I looked at was Hergé (also known as Georges Prosper Remi), the creator of Tintin.

What I’m mostly trying to emulate is that although Tintin is quite simply drawn, there is still a huge sense of adventure in it all. I want my work to be funny, but at the same time to still be adventurous.

One thing I don’t want to emulate is the page layout. It seems very typical and somewhat old fashioned, which I think would turn off my intended audience. I want something with a bit more of a punch to it.