Jess Ruliffson on Starting With One Thing and Ending Up With Another
This is from our star teacher, Jess Ruliffson: Website | Patreon.
Recently a student shared their experience putting a graphic novel pitch together and it made me reflect on the pitch I made for the book manuscript I just turned in. I dug up my old pitch from 2016--quite a few years ago now. At the time, I carefully polished and refined it--and looking at it now it actually changed quite a bit. Also, I interviewed veterans that fought in Afghanistan and wonder what their words read like on the day Kabul falls to Taliban forces. Even if you get everything in place, the world continues and changes shape. Hopefully you're making the sort of work that's timeless and honest and sits on the waves of the shifting currents. At the very least, it's some type of historical record, maybe.
I don't have a way of sharing the final book right now, but I started with a pitch that emphasized my own life/memoir (I ditched this idea pretty early on after we got a publisher, it was fine). Two of these vets didn't want to be included, so they were dropped, and I added two other/different veterans. The art changed a lot, etc. etc.
All of this to say, is that your work will and should evolve a little, and no publisher or audience will begrudge you for growing as you go. It's part of the whole deal, I think.
I'm not sure if this is useful, it was just a comment on Dante's work and I thought I'd make a post in case others have thought about this stuff or were wondering about it.
I got edits on the manuscript back from the publisher today! And it will probably be at least one year if not two until the manuscript becomes a published book. It's a process. Or as a friend once told me, with his head thrown back in exasperation, EVERYTHING TAKES FOREVER!
Left: comic page first published in a magazine, Right: same story/similar part of that story in the final comic book/graphic novel
Update: This post was written in 2022, and since then Invisible Wounds came out and was nominated for an Eisner Award!
Jess Ruliffson is an award-winning cartoonist. Her debut graphic novel, Invisible Wounds, was nominated for an Eisner award, is out now from Fantagraphics. In 2017, her comic I Trained to Fight The Enemy was shortlisted for Slate's Cartoonist Studio Prize. Her comics have appeared in a variety of places including Virginia Quarterly Review, The Gainesville Sun, BuzzFeed, The Nib, The Boston Globe, Pantheon Books, and more.
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