The Pitch or Why We Fell in Love with Mountain

When we first received the pitch for Mountain, we were impressed. The Elevator Pitch hooked us right away!

“When someone you love dies, you must climb to Mountain’s summit to spread their ashes, or their spirit will forever be trapped in the material plane. Nobody understands this better than the unnamed traveler, but the chatty mouse-girl is an inexperienced climber, and Mountain is full of perils and pitfalls. When she meets the cool and confident (and, similarly, unnamed) Climber, she convinces them to help her reach the summit. But Climber has their own reasons to scale Mountain, and their strength alone won’t get the two of them to the top.”

Sheika: Reading through Mountain the first time, this is the line that really resonated with me.

“Mountain is perfect for readers who enjoy colorful, allegorical comics with simple stories and rich artwork...”

My first thought was - that’s me! I love those kinds of stories! It’s important to me that I connect with a story and creative team. I do my best work when I truly believe in the project. This also shows me that the creative team is able to view their work objectively and think about how it is similar and different from other works on the market. Easier said than done! I’m the kind of publisher that likes to have a working editorial relationship with the creative team - so I look for signs that the team is able to approach their work with a critical eye.

The cover image was really important as well. For a story centered around climbing a mountain, it was important that I could see the artist’s ability to execute their plan. The characters are dynamic and it’s obvious that Bitmap knew (or had researched) climbing techniques, hiking packs etc.

Jenna: What really struck me when looking at Mountain’s pitch was that I had a sense of the world right off the bat.

I basically looked at the pitch backwards, jumping straight down to the sample pages to see if I could get a sense of the story without context. Then I went back up to the concept art to see what were the themes the creative team was focused on and applying and then the synopsis.

The pages made a great impression on me; everything from the contemplative colors and the unapologetic non-human characters to the glimpses of this detailed, gorgeous world in the backgrounds. The atmosphere hit me immediately. That demonstrated that there was a lot of thought put into not just the story, but also the world in which the story took place.

Sheika: Yeah, the sample pages were so cool! Bitmap calls herself a “CMYK Matriarch” and she definitely deserves that title! The colors were vibrant yet still encapsulated the slow moodiness of the story. The Moebius-esque color palette really appealed to me and later became a source of inspiration for panelling as well.

This page also answered a question in the back of my mind - would the artist be able to pull off drawing both the zoomed out environments and the minute character moments that were central to the success of the story.

So what do we look for in a pitch?

Every publisher is different! Depending on the season, the books in their catalog, the projects coming down the pipeline, each person’s individual taste and interests . . . there’s no one perfect pitch. At the end of the day, a publisher is trying to figure out if your project is the right fit for them at this time, and if they are the right fit for YOU!

In our next post, we’ll talk more about what should go in a pitch packet!

Interview with Emily Riesbeck on Mountain

J: Emily, thank you so much for joining me in this interview!

Emily: No, thank you! My favorite topic in the world is me!

J: (Oh my god, I need your confidence in my life. Give that to me.)

J: Let’s start off with a basic question. Where did the inspiration for Mountain come from?

Cover of “It’s Your Funeral!” written by Emily Riesbeck

Emily: Inspirations for my stories come from all over. It usually begins when I get stuck on one little detail. Sometimes it’ll be a title, sometimes just a concept or a thought that I obsess over until I realize that I need to make a whole story exploring it.

As for the specific idea to do Mountain, the start of it was me wanting to write about something simple. I had just finished writing a few books that had complex, character-driven plots and when I was approaching this project, I thought to myself that it would be interesting to tell a story that was, comparatively speaking, really simple or easy to understand. I thought, well, “what’s a challenging and intimate activity that would be exciting to read about?” and the idea of climbing a mountain came to me. But I still wanted to challenge myself a bit, which is where the idea of “what if only one character ever spoke?” came from. Everything else was me and Bitmap spinning off each other until we got to where we wanted to be.

At all points of writing, I wanted to keep the story very simple. Neither character is named: in the script, they’re called PILGRIM and CLIMBER. They give a few place names, but they’re vague descriptions. I really wanted the whole book to feel immersive: you’re transported into their world and you will live by their rules during your time there. With any luck, I’ve succeeded!

J: Speaking of Bitmap, how did you two come to work together?

Emily: Bitmap and I had been friends for a few years; we came to know each other through our webcomics and on Twitter before we were able to meet in real life because we both were going to the same cons (unsurprising, considering we both lived in Chicago). I’ve really admired Bitmap’s work from afar for a long time, but I was pretty shy about approaching her - just because I worried she would say no. But one time we were both tabling at CAKE and I just said “let's do a comic together” and, to my surprise, Bitmap responded enthusiastically.

J: It sounds like you were hoping to collaborate with Bitmap for quite some time.

Emily: A bit, which is funny because I didn’t have a clear idea what to do with her. Normally, when I approach artists for collaborations, I have a specific story in mind I can pitch. But with Bitmap, we didn’t have anything other than a vague idea that we wanted to work on SOMETHING together. So I asked Bitmap what kinds of things she likes to draw? Once I got my answer, we started brainstorming from there.

Once I had an initial sketch of what the plot would be and a general idea for the worldbuilding, I came back to Bitmap with it and asked for her input.

J: Aha, there’s the back-and-forth.

Emily: Yup! I generally have a standing rule to any artist I work with that if they have an idea for something they want to draw or some way they want the world to work, they should pitch it. Artists have a visual acuity in a way that I, as a writer, just don’t. I trust the artists I collaborate with to be able to bring their own unique voice to the visual design and layout of the world. This combined with the fact that Mountain was a project that we set out to do because we were excited to work together, we adopted a sort of “everything and the kitchen sink” approach to worldbuilding. If something seemed exciting or interesting, we put it in!

Cover of “Last Gasp” written by Emily Riesbeck

J: Oh man, the worldbuilding! That’s the first thing that struck me when I saw the pitch for Mountain. The setting and the character designs are so intriguing. Which leads me to ask: For worldbuilding, did you do any research for it? If so, how much do you do?

Emily: I do, but how much depends on the story! I am not the best researcher, so typically when I set out to research before writing a story, I focus on what’s absolutely necessary. Mountain, being a pretty short and largely fantastical story, didn’t require as much research. I would occasionally look up a bit on mountain climbing techniques and tools to get inspiration for what the characters might use. But Mountain being not quite a “mountain” complicates that a bit. When writing historical fiction, I research a lot but I’ll admit that I’m impatient about it. I want to get to the fun parts of the world and character building and scripting! So I could definitely afford to learn how to be a more diligent researcher!

J: You do have a point. There’s not much of a need for research if the world the story takes place in is far removed from ours.

Emily: Exactly. In fact, I think doing so little research for Mountain might have helped it a bit. My favorite thing about the story of Mountain is precisely that it takes place in a world that isn’t ours, although some of their rituals and customs look very similar. So it was fun and freeing to try and think beyond the ordinary when it came to answering some of the questions that came to me while we were trying to develop the world.

J: Questions…?

Emily: Yeah, like how do you show a civilization that’s ancient enough to be foreign, but familiar enough that the readers would recognize the spaces they operate? That way it further connects them to this civilization and further drives in the theme of the story.

J: So what were the reasons for making the characters and the world they navigate like this?

Emily: I can’t take too much credit for it. All the wonderful designs of the characters and Mountain itself -- that’s all Bitmap’s brain. I had a little input here and there such as, “what if Mountain was actually a skyscraper?” and “Maybe Pilgrim should be a rodent or bunny.”

...Actually, I’ll stop myself there and admit that I asked for Pilgrim to be a bunny at first. I played a bunny inventor in a tabletop RPG once and I’m still stuck on that character. It was Bitmap’s idea for Pilgrim to be a mouse instead.

But as for the setting, plot, the sorts of things I had control over - I think we both were really excited by the idea of a “post-post-apocalypse.” The idea that life goes on even after the world ends. So Pilgrim and Climber live among the ruins of a world that came before them, barely aware of what that world was like. And that might seem sad at first, the idea that eventually, everything we do will be lost to time. But I actually find it a bit comforting. Pilgrim and Climber struggle, of course, but otherwise they live their own lives, with their own goals and dreams and customs. To me, the idea that life can keep carrying on, and maybe even carry on in a way that doesn’t replicate the mistakes of the past, is a comfort all its own.

See more of Emily’s work at EmilyRiesbeck.com
Read The Blue Valkyrie webcomic
Twitter  @emilyriesbeck

Interview with Bitmap: How does she draw?

J: You have been in the comics game for a very long time. How did you come to make comics?

Bitmap: Well, when I was very small, maybe like seven years old, I started reading Calvin and Hobbes, and immediately I thought ,”I want to do that forever.” I went so far to get books on how to publish books - which prompted my parents to say, ”Are you serious about this? This is a bad career.”

. . . I was ten.

J: Wow.

Bitmap: And because I was ten, I went, “It’s okay, fifty people in the world probably do this, and I’ll be one of them. I could definitely do it, no problem.”

Bitmap’s Avatar Drawing

J: Did you know what kind of comics you wanted to write?

Bitmap: I knew I wanted to write deep lore things. Funny enough, at first I was going to make video games but then I realized all of my novellas would not turn into video games very well. Turns out it’s hard to be a one-person game-making machine. For example, I developed this big deep, OC lore, which I later rethought. I told myself, “If I did 3 pages every other week, I would finish my magnum opus when i’m 80 yrs old, which is a bad idea.”

So at 24, I revamped my story probably because I started transitioning and that may have influenced me. “This was bad,” I thought. “This story is about a bunch of depressed people who are destroying the world. I need to modify it.”

J: So when you were little, you wanted to make comics. Then at one point you were thinking of making video games - and then you went back to comics?

Bitmap: I was into painting too.

J: Painting?

Bitmap: Yeah, my background as an artist is a little messy. My father deeply disapproved of me doing art to the point that I went to a liberal arts college instead of going to an art school like RISD (since I was from Boston), because I was banned from that.

So then I entered the art department and took all the classes including painting. I had to take an independent study to make a comic. It was a bit of a reroute, but when I started drawing digitally, I was immediately able to take everything I learned from painting and applied it to my tablet. 

J: In a way, it worked out!

Sketch of the Mountain Sculpture

Bitmap: It did! It’s funny, the stuff I did in my non-comics related class sorta came full circle. When Emily asked me what I wanted to draw, I told them “I want to draw something quiet and contemplative” and they introduced the mountain aspect. Then I asked if the mountain could be this sculpture I made in college, which was this weird pyramid skyscraper made out of glued-together styrofoam so it had all these curves.

We all have our motifs that we put in over and over again and especially since I haven’t been able to use the mountain idea, I’m like ‘I need to bring this back somehow.”

J: Were there any other motifs that you brought back into this project besides the Mountain?

Bitmap: I’ve always had a thing for ‘bigness’ and ‘smallness’ and I did bring that into this. I think it may be some psychological thing because I feel like most of my ideas stem from my Jewish identity. I think about how little I was able to relate to very common cultural structures around me in the sense of “what is considered a good thing to do or bad thing to do? Is selfishness good or bad?” Very basic things that fundamentally disagreed with the culture I was from. Even from a young age, it stemmed from that - big vast things you can’t easily connect to, small intimate things you can, and not doing well with the middle. 

So ‘bigness’ and ‘smallness’ comes into all of my comics, not just in Mountain. It’s in my style. I like making these large sprawling, detailed backgrounds - seeing this world, this shape of something that’s overwhelming in its density, and it can be tragic or lethargic. Then I like to zoom into it almost like you’re dissecting it through a microscope and then you get up-close to this super hyperactive scene. This is how I built everything essentially. You make something emotionally intense and then you zoom in and override it. I keep coming back to it and try to not get stuck into it because then I make stuff like…this.

A Page from Ashen Princess

J: Whoa, that is intense. 

Bitmap: Yeah for me, it’s always like..I think about the vastness of everything around us and the feeling you get when you go hiking or go to the ocean, exploring a city alone, being distanced and getting a broad picture - then the actual closeness and intimacy of what you’re doing with your normal life that’s fun and exciting. Sadness and joy. Sadness are big panels that look really pretty and awestruck and then the joy are all the smaller moments so they become smaller panels.

J: That’s really interesting - the way you lay out your panels is pretty conceptual. What made you say yes to collaborating with Emily on this project?

Bitmap: Before Emily wanted to do a comic with me, I was in such an intense burnout phase and I wanted someone else to take the lead. Also, I met Emily in person a bunch of times and that helped. They’ve read all of my stuff, they’re open and flexible, and I was like “well I’m not sure I want to make any of the stuff I’ve been wanting to make right now, maybe I need something different.” 

Turns out Emily was very good at making things I do want to draw and it was impressive. It’s very rare, I tend to be boxed into drawing things I don’t want to draw, which has happened in the past. I’ve been incredibly pleased - this has been a great project to work on, I’ve been able to open up and explore ideas without falling off or without getting too absorbed and getting bogged down in detail. 

J: So what DO you like to draw?

Bitmap: Hmm. Well, things I enjoy drawing involve opportunities to draw flowing linework. And I'm always interested in contained fantastical adventures like landing on an alien planet, exploring an island or city, et cetera, or just exploring a character’s inner life during an unusual situation. As long as there is some form of visual spectacle I suppose. I struggle with work that’s mostly talking heads since I end up over-focusing on the environment and body language. So if it was a conversion piece, it would need to be set to the backdrop of a dramatic environment, the way Calvin and Hobbes does for its Sunday strips. Also, doing the environments first help me set the palette for the rest of the scenes.

J: I’ve definitely noticed. Your environments are amazing. There’s so much detail and it’s clear that there IS a story in these environments. You just don’t know what the story is.

Bitmap: Yeah, I like implying that something has happened but not telling you all about it. Something I think a lot about is death and societies, and moving on. You don’t need to know what happened, just that it did.

See more of Bitmap’s work at BMPrager.com
☆ Twitter @BMPrager
☆ Store http://bmprager.itch.io
☆ Gay Space Future Comic http://ASHENPRINCESS.COM
☆ Patreon http://patreon.com/bmprager

A Page from “We’re Still Here” Anthology

The Cow House Editorial Process !

Editorial Meetings are a very VERY serious business. Most of the time. 

Or maybe just some of the time. 

Changes as simple as sound effects can be something to discuss on whether or not it fits for the page! It’s where we all get together and combine our brain power to make sure the artist’s work is the best it can be!

We offer feedback, checking that everything will be clear to the reader. Some things we may talk about are layout, lettering and making sure the pages are ready for printing.

We do this through a process called redlining! This is really the meat and potatoes of the process. We make the edits and the artist goes back in and makes the changes they choose (Because after all, it’s still the artist’s book and we are just helpful editors!). We mark up the pages and add comments around things that need work, and things that are perfect!

It's also important for the author and artist to have the floor to discuss back and forth what should be changed or what works well! Sometimes ideas can change from the original vision, and it's important to encourage this and aid in an overall better project! Even small adjustments are important in making a great book. It’s the small details that takes an okay project to an amazing one, and the best part about working on something collaboratively is watching it evolve over time as new ideas and changes are added.

We also spend a lot of time talking about what we love about the work! It’s important to think about what is exciting and amazing about the book, and give the author and/or artist encouragement on what they did well in addition to what needs work.

It’s a back and forth process, which means that pages can get reviewed over and over until it satisfies both the author, editor, and potential reader! It's very important to go through pages many times so that the comic and story can be the best it can be!

Today’s post brought to you by interns Finn (text) and Sym (some text + art)!

Bitmap Prager and Emily Riesbeck - Who are they?

We’re glad you asked! Our newest project, Mountain, is going to be a gorgeous, full colored comic, all about friendship. Artist Bitmap Prager and writer Emily Riesbeck are a powerhouse creative team and we’re so excited to work with them.

Bitmap is the creator of “The Ashen Princess,” “Ash Skies” and “To Catch A Dream-Eater”. Her work has been featured in anthologies including “The Other Side” and the Ignatz-winning “We’re Still Here.”

Bitmap Prager is a self-professed “CMYK matriarch!” Her wild color palettes aren’t just pretty, they’re assertive and impossible to ignore.

“My work is about creating safe queer spaces in art, without denying the danger of the world or suggesting pacifism in the face of inequality. My work is about different bodies being able to occupy lived in spaces, with their own history and cultures, while making it clear you should be able to look and see yourself within those.

My work is also about punching nazis. It is visually loud, and in all places denying of supremacy or assimilation. While I may hate being put on targeting lists by white supremacists targeting Jews or trans people, I can say I'm endlessly pleased that they hate my art.”

And Emily?

Emily is a machine.

They’re a writing veteran, working on multiple projects at the same time, and churning out 10,000 words a week. They’re super detailed, their world-building is top-notch, and incredibly quotable. Some of our favorites so far are:

“My favorite topic in the world is me.”

“I hate weight-lifting, but I like having weight-lifted.”

“Bitmap, if that’s your bliss, go for it.”

Emily Riesbeck started writing comics at the ripe old age of ten, when they created their first original character, the superhero Aqua Guy. Since then, they’ve been self-publishing their superhero webcomic, The Blue Valkyrie, and their debut graphic novel, It’s Your Funeral, is being published by Iron Circus Comics. Their short comics have been featured in anthologies like Chubby and Local Haunts.

Mountain is currently a work-in-progress. Pre-orders will be available in October 2020 and due to ship in December 2020. We’ll be talking about every step of the journey, from pitch to finished book! For immediate updates, follow us on twitter and instagram.

Drumroll please! Announcing: Mountain

Wheee, we’re so excited to publicly announce to the world that we’re starting on this new, awesome sci-fi fantasy project with the wonderful Bitmap Prager and Emily Reisbeck!

What you see here is not the cover, but a gorgeously illustrated and colored panel from the comic. Crazy, right? It’s just one panel! Bitmap is truly the CMYK royalty and Emily is a world-building, super detailed wordsmith; we’re stoked to work with such two awesome people on this!