Contemporary Authors

• The End of Summer Avery Hill Publishing (London, England), 2015
• I Love This Part Avery Hill Publishing (London, England), 2015
• Spinning ( young adult autobiography) First Second (New York, NY), 2017
• On a Sunbeam ( based on her Web comic of the same title) First Second (New York, NY), 2018

1. On a sunbeam LCCN 2017957414 Type of material Book Personal name Walden, Tillie. Main title On a sunbeam / Tillie Walden (author and illus). Published/Produced New York, NY : First Second, 2018. Projected pub date 1810 Description pages cm ISBN 9781250178145 (hardcover) 9781250178138 (pbk.) Item not available at the Library. Why not? 2. Spinning LCCN 2016961586 Type of material Book Personal name Walden, Tillie, 1996- author, artist. Main title Spinning / Tillie Walden. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : First Second, 2017 ©2017 Description 395 pages : chiefly illustrations (some color) ; 23 cm ISBN 9781626729407 (paperback) 1626729409 (paperback) 9781626727724 (hardcover) 1626727724 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER GV850.W35 A3 2017 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 3. I love this part LCCN 2017218534 Type of material Book Personal name Walden, Tillie, author, artist. Main title I love this part / Tillie Walden. Published/Produced [London] : Avery Hill Publishing, 2015. Description 1 volume (unpaged) : color illustrations ; 21 cm ISBN 9781910395172 191039517X CALL NUMBER Foreign Comic Book 00065 Vault Set 1 Small Press Expo Collection. Prior special permission required to access this collection. Request by Comic Book number and date. Request in Newspaper & Current Periodical Reading Room (Madison LM133) Older receipts 2015 2015 4. The end of summer LCCN 2017218533 Type of material Book Personal name Walden, Tillie, author, artist. Main title The end of summer / Tillie Walden. Published/Produced [London] : Avery Hill Publishing, 2015. Description 1 volume (unpaged) : color illustrations ; 24 cm ISBN 9781910395134 1910395137 CALL NUMBER Foreign Comic Book 00064 Vault Set 1 Small Press Expo Collection. Prior special permission required to access this collection. Request by Comic Book number and date. Request in Newspaper & Current Periodical Reading Room (Madison LM133) Older receipts 2015 2015

• Amazon -

  Tillie Walden is a cartoonist and illustrator from Austin, Texas. Born in 1996, she is a recent graduate from the Center for Cartoon Studies, a comics school in Vermont. Over the course of her time at CCS she published three books with the London based Avery Hill Publishing. She has already received an Eisner Award nomination and two Ignatz Awards for her early works. When she is not drawing comics, Tillie can be found walking and listening to audiobooks or asleep with a cat. She also enjoys studying architecture and tries to incorporate that passion into her comics. Spinning is her first long form autobiographical work.

• Wikipedia -

  Tillie Walden
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Tillie Walden
  Born 1996 (age 21–22)
  Occupation Cartoonist, author
  Residence Austin, Texas
  Nationality American
  Education Center for Cartoon Studies
  Genre Graphic novel
  Notable works Spinning
  Notable awards
  Ignatz Award
  2016 Outstanding artist – The End of Summer
  Ignatz Award
  2016 Promising new talent – I Love This Part
  Website
  tilliewalden.com
  Tillie Walden (born 1996)[1] is an American cartoonist who has published four graphic novels and a webcomic.[2]

  Contents
  1 Early life
  2 Career
  3 Personal life
  4 References
  5 External links
  Early life
  Tillie Walden grew up in New Jersey and Austin, Texas. She was a competitive ice skater.[3] Walden is named after her paternal grandmother, an artist who died before Walden was born. Walden's first comic was a black-and-white comic "about never knowing her [grandmother] but following in her footsteps." Walden began putting her comics and drawings on her website, and was discovered while still in high school by British publisher Avery Hill Publishing, who worked with Walden to publish her first graphic novel, The End of Summer.[4]

  Career
  Walden's debut graphic novel, The End of Summer, was published by Avery Hill Publishing in June 2015. It is told from the viewpoint of Lars, a sickly boy who lives in a fantastical palace and has a giant cat named Nemo.[4] Walden won the 2016 Ignatz Award for outstanding artist for The End of Summer.[5]

  Her second graphic novel, I Love This Part, was published by Avery Hill Publishing in November 2015 and tells the story of two teenage girls who fall in love.[4] Walden won the 2016 Ignatz Award for promising new talent for I Love This Part.[5] The novel was nominated for the 2016 Eisner Award for Best Single Issue/One-Shot.[6]

  Her third graphic novel, A City Inside, was published by Avery Hill Publishing in 2016.[7] It won the 2016 Broken Frontier Award for Best One-Shot.[8]

  Spinning, her first graphic novel memoir about her years coming-of-age as a competitive ice skater, was published in September 2017.[9]

  Waldin has published a webcomic, On a Sunbeam, which is being adapted into a graphic novel.[1] On a Sunbeam was nominated for the 2017 Eisner Award for Best Digital Comic.[10]

  Personal life
  Walden knew she was a lesbian since she was 5.[9][11] Before she came out, Walden avoided including queer characters in her stories, feeling that she "couldn't draw openly gay characters if [she] was still scared to be openly gay".[4]

  Walden is a graduate of the Center for Cartoon Studies.[1]

• The Comics Journal - http://www.tcj.com/everything-i-had-to-say-about-my-life-is-in-that-book-an-interview-with-tillie-walden/

  “Everything I Had to Say about My Life Is in That Book”: An Interview with Tillie Walden
  BY ALEX WONG OCT 4, 2017
  Tillie Walden’s Spinning is a first-person memoir that focuses on the author’s years-long relationship with competitive figure skating growing up, first in New Jersey and then in Austin, Texas. But figure skating is just a backdrop.

  Spinning explores Walden’s memories growing up, and how she deals with being gay, coming out to the people close to her, her first love, and learning to grow up and leave things behind. It is a powerful memoir in which Walden is unafraid to explore the most painful moments of adolescence with a maturity that is striking and admirable for her age (Walden just turned 21 earlier this year).

  Below Walden talks about putting together a memoir, her relationship with figure skating, the importance of representation in the comics industry, her affinity for Studio Ghibli movies, and more.

  You’ve mentioned that when you create fiction, you don’t take a lot of advice from other people during the creative process, but that it was different for Spinning.

  When I do fiction, I have a lot of confidence. But when I was working on this memoir, I was very lacking in confidence, mostly just because it was a type of storytelling I had never done before. It’s quite an undertaking to try and turn your own life into a cohesive narrative, because life rarely plays out exactly as it should for a book. So the process was long and drawn out, with a lot of fiddling along the way. The book changed a lot between when I first drew it to the final form.

  The first time I drew Spinning, it was an 100-page story in black and white. That was the skeleton version of the book that you’re reading now. My editor at First Second held my hand as I explored all of these memories, and helped me turn it into a book. I was extremely impatient with the entire process. I really just wanted the book to be done, and had to force myself to take my time. I knew this was a story that required some thought, and I just needed time.

  What was some of the feedback you were getting from your editor?

  She was pushing me to go further down, to go deeper into these moments that I had opened up. I would write a scene, and she would read it and say, “This is the start of something.” She would tell me I was touching on something that was leading to something more, and pushed me to dive deeper into my story, to seek out connections between things. In the beginning of the process, I looked at my story as individual events and not anything that was connected, but she helped push me to draw lines between things, and build something that was more cohesive.

  How did you manage to overcome the impatience that you were talking about? Was it a process for you to really understand and accept that tapping into personal memories was going to be a longer undertaking than you thought?

  It was. I really had to do that during the writing process. By the time we knew everything I needed to do and it got to the illustration process, I got to flex my muscles. I had a conversation with the folks at First Second about how much time I would have to do it. Basically, if I wanted the book to be complete, it would have to be done very quickly. They weren’t pushing me to do that, but I told them: “Wait, guys, I’m so bored of going slow, let me draw this book quickly.” So in like three months, I drew all the pages that you’re reading now. It was a lot of fun, and it made me feel more like myself.

  I read in another interview that this book made you more nervous than your other works because you’re not just selling a comic, you’re selling your own story. Do you feel more nervous now that you’re finished, or were you more nervous during the process of putting the memoir together?

  I feel like I was more nervous during the process. I’m now at a point where I finished the book over a year ago, and it very much feels like the distant past to me even though it’s just coming out now. My nerves have relaxed. I can look at it as a really personal part of myself and simply as a product and a part of my career, and now my job is to sell the book and get it out there.

  Maybe I’m compartmentalizing, but I am less nervous now. Underneath it all, there’s an aspect of vulnerability to everything I do. Everyone I do an interview or talk about it at a bookstore, there’s always this vulnerability because the character I’m talking about is myself. I don’t know if that’ll ever go away. Maybe that’s one of the reasons it’s so powerful — because there’s vulnerability there and people read that and recognize it and connect with that.

  On the other hand, you’ve also said that this is the most rewarding work you’ve done.

  All the comics I’ve made before this and all the comics I’ve made after, all the fiction I’ve done, has been really fun and engaging. But when I finish it, I would very much feel done with it and I have no need to go back to think about it or hold on to it. With Spinning, when I finished it, I felt so accomplished. I didn’t want to fully let go of it. I think Spinning stays with me no matter what I do. It’s so hard to describe. It’s such a different experience. It’s so cathartic and bizarre to have made a memoir like this, and at my age especially, because this isn’t exactly the age when most people make memoirs. It’s rewarding. It’s sort of life changing to have done this book, and to feel like I’ve processed and dealt with a lot of my past. After finishing Spinning, I felt like a real adult for the first time. I know everyone starts to feel like an adult at different points in time, like when they get their driver’s license or when they’re 30 and they own a house. For me, I felt like an adult when I finished this book.

  I was a figure skater for a few years growing up and definitely related to the competitive aspect of figure skating that you illustrate in Spinning.

  I’ve heard from a lot of people who do ballet and gymnastics and they said it really resonates with them too, so there’s definitely some universal sports stuff going on in the book.

  How would you describe your relationship with figure skating growing up?

  Amazingly enough I’ve never been asked that in an interview. I would say complicated. I really enjoyed the feeling of skating fast and just the feeling and motion of ice skating, but I kind of really didn’t like every other part of it. My biggest issue with skating growing up was <>, especially as a female figure skater. It’s a weird relationship. I jumped back on the ice a week ago to take some promotional pictures for Spinning, and I was like, oh my god, I get why I did this now for 12 years, and also, I was like, oh my god, why did I do this for 12 years. I still haven’t figured out my entire relationship with ice skating. It’s so tied into ice skating as a lifestyle and not just a sport. It was a complex relationship with a mostly negative edge. I’ll leave that as my answer.

  At the end of the book, you mentioned that Spinning was originally going to provide more of an inside look at the world of competitive figure skating. What were the things you wanted to highlight?

  I wanted to highlight <> that they hold young girls to that I think are completely ridiculous and unnecessary. <> we wear, it’s so ridiculous and stupid. Ice skating is a winter sport, and we dress like it’s tennis. I really don’t get it. There’s no other winter sport where they dress like this. I wanted to talk about that. I wanted to talk about the way <> acted. The way competition can drive everyone a little crazy.

  I just feel like so many people see ice skating as America’s sweetheart sport, and there’s so few ice skating stories that are realistic. Every movie I can think of, like Blades of Glory and Ice Princess, are such bullshit because they have nothing to do with the actual sport. I find it so shocking because there are so many skaters out there with so many interesting experiences. I wanted to talk about an authentic ice skating experience because there’s a lot of bullshit in this sport and industry. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that people higher up in figure skating really like figure skating’s image as a pretty sport, and I don’t think that’s completely accurate. I’m not a figure skater anymore and I don’t care about protecting figure skating and I think a lot of people in the sport do, and I don’t have to worry about that.

  You start each chapter of the book describing a figure skating move.

  The moves describe the different feelings and they get more complex as the book goes on. I had originally been writing larger numbers on the chapter pages to divide the book. My editor nudged me and said, “I want you to think about doing something with the chapter pages. Every page in your book is an opportunity to contribute to the narrative.” I was like, oh, I guess you’re right. I started by just having it to be ice skating moves, and then I realize that each move you do on the ice has a very distinct feeling, and I have my own relationship to all these different moves. That’s when I realized I could connect to the different parts of my story. People ask me about it a lot, so I think it strikes a chord with a lot of people.

  There’s a specific scene in the book where you’re outside of your friend’s house, waiting for your mom to pick you up, and you are nearly part of a car accident that really shakes you up.

  It was very scary, but it was worth it because by putting those scenes on paper I was really able to heal from them, which always sounds cheesey when I saw it but it’s true. As far as the near car accident, I think in childhood, it is very easy to be disconnected from reality, from your reality, from your parent’s reality, from just reality in general. An incident like that which I think plenty of kids have experienced really brings you back to Earth, and really forces you to be aware of your surroundings, to just be aware of your morality. It just really kind of shook me and brought me back down in an unfortunate way, because I think childhood should be disconnected from reality and that’s part of the joy of it, that you’re not forced to live completely in this world, and that really took me away from that sort of innocence of childhood as did a lot of events of this book. That’s the nature of most coming of age stories, it’s about the reality coming to you.

  You detail a lot of your relationship with Rae. How difficult was it for you at that age to sort through your sexuality, and deal with a relationship starting and ending?

  It’s a burden that most queer kids face in one way or another. I think a lot of queer kids are forced to grow up faster than others. I certainly was, and it was completely overwhelming. The idea of a crush or someone you like should be nothing but a joyous experience for a teenager, but because I was gay, and Rae was gay, it didn’t work out like that. It was a huge burden and really difficult. At the same time, while kids can’t deal with a lot of things, they are also adaptable and resourceful. I think a had a lot of that in me and was ultimately able to get through it and be an adult and look back and reflect on that experience.

  Did you want this book to, in a way, inspire people or let people know you as a relatable figure?

  Absolutely. The book is 14+ and I plan to make the most of that and get it in the hands of every 14-year-old and older that I can. I think there’s a lot of talk in the comic industry, and every industry, about representation. I want queer kids to read this story even if this story won’t necessarily relate to every queer experience. Just the fact there’s other people like them walking this Earth and telling this story, I think that’s hugely significant.

  I love the various scenes when you decide to come out to your mom, dad, and brother. Was there one conversation that was most difficult?

  Honestly, they were all pretty equal. Despite whatever anyone’s reaction was when I came out, just the fact you’re saying you’re gay out loud ... in the first year, it never got easier for me. I never felt easier. Every time I had to admit to people who I was, it felt kind of miserable. That was the hardest, and it felt kind of slimy. I think coming out is so silly because I don’t think a kid should have to admit to people who they are. They should just be who they are and it’s fine. By coming out I felt like I was admitting this flaw about myself that I was gay and that we had to deal with it. They were all hard. No particular conversation strikes me as more difficult than others because it’s all just really, really difficult.

  At the end of the book, you said Spinning was not about sharing memories, but about sharing a feeling. Do you feel like you accomplished that?

  I do. I know people approach memoirs in lots of different ways. A lot of people look back at photos and journals and try to connect the dots. I’m pretty aware that memory is flawed and that everyone has their own idea of what the truth is. I didn’t want to set out to make a book to tell exactly what happened in my life as accurately as possible. I didn’t know if I could do that. What I felt like I could do was tell a story accurately of how I felt, and I do feel like I accomplished that. I don’t know if I’d be talking about this book if I didn’t feel like I had done that.

  Were you inspired by any other memoirs?

  I read memoirs as a kid, but for this book specifically, no. I didn’t want to be influenced by the way anyone else approached memoirs. I wanted it to be distinctly my own. I made a point to not take in a lot of influences while I was working on this book because I wanted it to be its own creature.

  I’ve read that Studio Ghibli is a huge influence on your work.

  Studio Ghibli has completely shaped my visual vocabulary and how I think about stories. I’ve thought about it a lot, and how the influences of those movies have seeped into my own work. What I see now is I think the best part of the Studio Ghibli movies is how the animation, for example, the way they animate tears, it’s not how tears are, but how they feel. They feel big and overwhelming. The way their hair moves, the way their clothes move, it’s now how it is in real life, but it’s how it feels. I see that so completely in my own work. I care a lot more about the feelings over the reality of the situation, and I appreciate that in all the Studio Ghibli movies, there’s never a layer of justification. No one is like, wait, hold on, can people fly in this world? Or what is a Totoro ecologically? No one ever asks those questions. They just present the world and basically asks you to accept it as truth. I just love that. I think it’s so powerful to just present your own story and your own narrative as a reality, and I do that in my faction and I see it in Spinning too.

  I’ve also read that your dad encouraged you to get into comics.

  My dad has been the behind-the-scenes guy for my entire comics career. I realized that when I start looking, he’s been everywhere. He was the one who bought me manga as a kid, and he just sort of gently left books around and encouraged me to read. He was never like, “you need to do this, this is your career,” all he did was present me with material that I could learn from and enjoy. When I got older, he signed me up for a workshop with Scott McCloud and that was a turning point for me. After that, I started making comics. It was just one of those amazing moments, where I wonder if he saw the potential in this career, or did he just do it because he thought I’d enjoy it. Who knows. Still, to this day, he’s supportive of everything that I do as is my mom. It’s amazing. I didn’t realize how significant it was that he was getting me these books and signing me up for these things at the time, and now I realize how important it was.

  Have your parents read Spinning and what’s been the feedback and conversations you’ve had?

  I get that question a lot. I get a lot of questions about how people in my world have reacted to the book, and I always have the same answer, which is, that is between me and the people in my life. As a memoirist, people are very eager to hear more about my story. There’s a lot of my story that I’m willing to talk about, but I have to draw clear lines to keep some of my life to myself, because so many people think that just because you’re a memoirist, you’re a very public person. In reality, I think I’m a pretty private person, and I control what I let out about myself, and in this book, I obviously let out a lot.

  There is often this expectation from people that when you do something personal, they just expect you to be an open book.

  I find that a lot of people expect it to be a continuing conversation, and in my mind, it’s like, no, everything I had to say about my life and my story is in that book. Outside of that, sure, there’s tidbits I’d be happy to talk about, but no, it’s not a continuing conversation. That book is it. That’s what I’m putting out, the rest of my life is for me and my loved ones.

  I always use Instagram as an example. People can share personal things on there, but they’re not there to have a conversation about those moments.

  It’s so easy to get overwhelmed by like-sharing, especially with social media. You really have to control your own flow of information.

  Is that part difficult for you?

  It’s pretty easy. I think I’ve in recent years gotten pretty good with that. Also there’s a slight joy in telling people I’m not going to answer that question.

  I’ve heard you mention having artist’s block before. What’s your approach when that happens?

  I find the best cure for any kind of creative block is to draw a really bad comic. It works every time, without fail. That’s what you’re afraid of when you have a creative block, that you can’t making something good, or what you’re going to make isn’t going to be worthy, or you have no good ideas. If I sit down and slam down a page, and it’s god awful, now I’m going to make one that’s better. It works every time. It’s like letting it out of your system. Somehow you just work through it. I find sitting around waiting for a creative block to go away doesn’t work for me. I would just keep waiting. I prefer to be proactive about it.

  Do you think Spinning will be your most personal work, or do you think you’ll do something more personal in your career?

  That’s a good question. I don’t think it will be my most personal work. I expect there will be fiction that I do in the future that will be deeply personal to me in a different sort of way, and I imagine everything that I do has some of me in it. I don’t expect Spinning to be the creme de la creme or the most personal thing that I’ve ever done. I think Spinning will always be distinct among of body of work, but I think there’s a lot of myself to give in stories, just in different ways.

  Tillie Walden
  BY ANNIE MOK SEP 8, 2016
  ACIfrontcover
  Tillie Walden is a young Texas-based cartoonist who has three graphic novellas from UK’s Avery Hill Publishing to her name (The End of Summer in 2015 and I Love This Part and A City Inside in 2016), as well as her upcoming graphic memoir about synchronized skating for First Second, Spinning (fall 2017). Tillie wields a high degree of technical polish with her clean inks and dreamy watercolor tones, always in service of challenging emotional storytelling, often centering around teenage queer relationships. I spoke to Tillie by Skype from her apartment in Austin.

  Interview transcribed and edited by AM.

  ANNIE MOK: So The End of Summer is getting re-released?

  TILLIE WALDEN: It went out of print and it’s getting a bigger edition.

  MOK: With extra material?

  WALDEN: There’s gonna be a little prequel strip. We’re gonna redo the design of the book, redo the covers. I can see the prequel strip on my desk right there.

  MOK: What’s it like to revisit this story, which is this fairy tale, Little Nemo-esque story—there’s a big cat in it named “Nemo.” What’s it like to come back to this world?

  WALDEN: It’s surprisingly enjoyable! I was a little worried that I wouldn’t be able to re-engage with the story because once you finish something, you tend to put it away and lock it up. I thought that it would be gone from me. But sitting down and re-drawing the backgrounds and the characters, I was like, “Oh yeah, that’s why I did this book, it’s really fun!” It makes me want to draw old characters and look back at other things. I can only do it to a certain extent. I can do this short prequel strip, but I don’t have a sequel in me.

  MOK: I always wonder about that stuff, I’ve never done that, except for my memoir comics which are sequel-y. Thinking of stuff like Hellboy and Peanuts, I wonder about a connection to characters over a long period of time.

  WALDEN: I always wonder about people who work on something for like, ten years. I haven’t even done comics long enough for that to be a thing for me yet. It seems like a crazy ride.

  MOK: How long have you been making comics?

  WALDEN: I’ve been making comics for three, four years. Three years seriously, there was an extra year for my senior year of high school where I was just kind of learning.

  MOK: But you transitioned from fine art?

  WALDEN: I did. And it was a very extreme cut-off for me. It was like, one day I was painting, and the next day, “I will never pick up a paintbrush again! I will only draw comics!”

  MOK: I feel like that’s one of the quintessential teen feelings or experiences.

  WALDEN: You have to go full-force into it. I told my art teachers, I know you’re gonna give me assignments, “Make a linoleum print.” And I was like, “I’ll make a linoleum print, of a comic. But I won’t do not-comics. And my teachers were cool with it ‘cause it was my last year of high school, so they were kind of, “Okay, whatever. Do whatever you want.” I’m glad I did fine art ‘cause it taught me a lot, but it’s not something I’d wanna do ever again.

  MOK: Coming back to The End of Summer, in which fine art influences are very apparent, one of the main things that strikes me about that book is the architecture of the book. And by that I mean the literal architecture in the book [Tillie laughs]. There are high ceilings of the kind you’d see in Little Nemo, and I think of fairy tales and Hans Christian Andersen seeing this stuff. Do you have any connection to fairy tales?

  WALDEN: I don’t think I have a very solid connection, but a lot of media I liked as a kid were magical or sort of tales. I liked all the stuff from Studio Ghibli. I got attached to that style of storytelling, which is why that comes out in The End of Summer. I like not being in the real world [laughs] most of the time, and the architecture was my way to create that. I knew when I was drawing it that with every panel I would make the place a little bit bigger and I would make the people a little bit smaller and it would make it more dizzying.

  MOK: Have you seen Citizen Kane?

  WALDEN: Yes!

  MOK: That makes me think of the shot where he’s lost everything and he walks back to the window and he seems tiny and he seems giant all of a sudden… What was your favorite Ghibli film?

  WALDEN: I’m always embarrassed to tell people, but my favorite is Whisper of the Heart.

  MOK: Why would you be embarrassed about that? That movie is amazing.

  WALDEN: When I was younger, I loved the ones like Howl’s Moving Castle, Castle in the Sky, Spirited Away, that are super magical. And they still have a place in my heart. But I ended up as I got older really attaching to Whisper of the Heart in part because of how they portray the main character and her struggle of finding what she wants to do. That connected with me so deeply. She finds a story to tell, and she starts working on it! I can watch that movie over and over because that’s a narrative I will always relate to.

  MOK: So speaking of the journey of making a book, looking back on any of the projects that you would want to talk about in more detail, I’m curious about your process. Especially now that you’ve done three books, the process of planning a book, and planning pages, and editing. How does the process start for you? How does the idea germinate?

  WALDEN: Usually it starts with images. I come up with one scene in a story, and I have that scene in my mind, and it starts to build. If we’re talking about my first three little books, each time the process has become more loose. For End of Summer, I did a lot of planning, and at the end there was a lot of editing. For all my books, me and my editor at Avery Hill, we always look at it harshly and try to find everything we can to fix. With A City Inside I stopped thumbnailing because I realized that’s a part of the process I don’t really need, but I was doing it before because I thought, “That’s how cartoonists do it!” I write down in a notebook—when I’m planning a story, I can’t type for some reason, I wish I could because it would save my hand, but I can’t. So I get a notebook and I just put down plot points. From there I just go for it. For I Love This Part, I wrote down a couple plot points, then I sat down with a marker and a stack of paper and loosely drew the entire book, and I sent that to my editor. And I said, how does this look, can we do this as a book? And he was like, it’s great! Draw it! And I have all those pages still, so it’s funny to compare the marker drawings to the final pages, some are very similar.

  marker_01

  MOK: How did that spontaneity change the storytelling?

  WALDEN: I think it let the flow work a lot better. Drawing it all in one go let me… It let the tempo of my drawing decide the tempo of my book. As my drawing got faster, the tempo of the story and the images… I also think when I started I Love This Part, I decided I’m only gonna do a single image on every page, that’s a format that I won’t break. So I have to find a way to build a tempo with just one drawing on every page. Having both a limitation and freedom is a really great way to work.

  MOK: Were these marker drawings drawn at size [of the final printing]?

  WALDEN: Yes! I think 8 ½ x 11” pages. A Tombow marker or something.

  MOK: What kind of paper?

  WALDEN: It was paper I had never used before—I got it from JetPens, that manga paper? It worked well for this because it’s smooth and the pages are light so I could sort of [makes fast paper flipping motion]... ‘Cause Bristol board’s very thick, so when I’m holding it and I’m drawing on it, it feels like a THING that I have to really focus on. But using the lighter paper, I could just draw quickly.

  MOK: What about the finals? What did you draw those on?

  WALDEN: I had to use a thicker paper because I do watercolors directly on my inks. I used a recycled Bristol from [Canson], 9x12”. I drew it with the Faber-Castell pens. I have a weird thing where I have to use a different paper with every project, so the paper lives forever with that project [laughs]! I think it’s because I associate the cover color of the paper with the project. So I Love This Part will always be dark green to me. And The End of Summer will always be brown. My skating book will always be light green.

  MOK: You’re gonna run out of papers mid-career.

  WALDEN: I know [laughs]! I’m gonna have to figure something out, it’s a very weird quirk.

  webbionewMOK: In 20 years, you’re gonna be in trouble… I’m impressed, it seems like these [books] came out in a short time [within two years]. [The ice skating graphic memoir] Spinning with First Second is coming out when?

  WALDEN: Next fall, but it is already done, because it has to be done… That’s how the big publishers work!

  MOK: What did you learn with each project, and in-between projects?

  WALDEN: I’m gonna go down the list. Doing End of Summer taught me that I can do things. When I started it, I didn’t know if I could really draw. I knew I could hold a pen, but I didn’t know if I could translate what was in my mind to paper, and that book proved to me that I could. I Love This Part was my first book with gay characters. I’ve been out for a long time, but I was hesitant to draw gay characters, ‘cause I was like, “It’s gonna make me a gay artist, I don’t want to be that!” But that book taught me that I do want to draw gay characters. That kind of narrative is really important to me, and I realize that as the book made the rounds on Tumblr, and I get so many sweet letters from sweet teens… I do events at LGBT youth places with the book, that book just sort of opened up that whole world for me. And A City Inside, showed me that I can do projects for fun, or serve a purpose for me and they don’t have to be big and important. ‘Cause my First Second book, I felt like I have to make this my memoir, it has to be good, solid, important. A City Inside, I was like, I want to do this poetic little thing, I don’t really know what it is, but y’know […] I think Spinning is gonna be a very accessible book, because it’s YA and I want younger people to read it.

  MOK: Can you tell me about the monologue format [in A City Inside]?

  WALDEN: That’s sort of how the story came to me, as I was talking to myself in that voice. Telling myself a story. I liked how that sounded. Something in it sounded different from how I’d done stories in the past. Or different from how I’d done narration. That’s where the images, story, and style followed along.

  MOK: Who is that narrator?

  WALDEN: I don’t know, I don’t feel like it’s me, but I felt the whole time like someone was sitting next to me telling me that story. And obviously whoever’s sitting next to me is me really, because it’s all coming from me, but it felt like I was sharing the space. In a lot of other stories, it feels like it’s me projecting onto the page. This felt like I was strangely collaborative with all my ideas and my internal voice.

  ACI_sample

  MOK: You were talking a bit about getting letters for teens. I write for teens also, for Rookie.

  WALDEN: Yeah!

  MOK: I’m wondering what your relationship with your readers or fans is like.

  WALDEN: It’s really lovely. I feel like I spend an excessive amount of time responding to a lot of these kids who reach out to me. I’m really touched because it’s hard to reach out to people who you like, or whose work you like. It’s something I was scared to do as a kid. These are teens who don’t get a lot of representation, who don’t get a lot of stories about themselves, and a lot of them say that. It feels like this great connection! I’m amazed how many have found me.

  MOK: What have visits to LGBTQ youth spots have been like for you?

  WALDEN: They’re wonderful. There’s actually one in Austin that I was scared to go to when I was [laughs] an LGBT youth in Austin! A teacher was telling me to go there, and I was like, “I just can’t!” To be able to be with them when they read the comics and see their reactions, it’s so wonderful. I don’t know if you’ve seen the the comic I did about Steven Universe? I read that one to teens and we get to share this moment where we’re relating to, y’know, being in love and you can’t tell anyone about it, and also being fangirls together! They’re cute [laughs].

  MOK: [...] What artists who are making work currently are you over the moon about?

  WALDEN: I am really in love with Jillian Tamaki, not a surprise. Especially the stuff she writes and draws herself. I adore her writing and her art, and when they’re merged together it’s just, it’s beautiful. I love her stuff. I love Eleanor Davis. She was in Austin recently and I really wanted to like, search the city for her [laughs]! I love her style, the openness of her art, it’s something I would love to experiment with in my own work. Everything she does. I also really like Emily Carroll. All three of these people are very different, but they’re very present creators right now, and I also love about all three of them, like Jillian Tamaki and Eleanor Davis, they share a lot about themselves, in both their work and their presence online, and I like that, because I feel like I can read their work, kind of get to know them, interact with them if I want to.

  MOK: Yeah, they’re all top #1 twitter-ers.

  WALDEN: Totally [laughs]!

  MOK: [...] I’m curious about how you process relationships and breakups in your work [Tillie laughs]. That’s something I’m very interested in, I Love This Part being both a “love song” and a “breakup song” at the same time. A City Inside being kind of a love song as well. I write a lot of love songs and draw a lot of love comics [laughs] or romance comics, a lot of which are memoir-based. Can I ask you about that?

  WALDEN: Yeah! Recently I interacted with the girl who I Love This Part is based off of, and it was bizarre and lovely. I hadn’t seen her in a long time. But I feel a little guilty when I do romances, because what I’m putting on the page is very much my own dream/memory of how it went. It all feels very much my side, from myself. That always feels a bit dishonest, because a relationship is between two people, but at the same time I can’t really stop myself. When I made I Love This Part, I felt like when I was doing the breakup, it has to look to like this. It felt like this, I have to draw it like this. And then I think, “Well, it was kind of like that! But in real life, there was other stuff.” It feels complicated to me to depict relationships. I also worry about the other person seeing it or experiencing it, because it feels so heavy in my perspective. It feels very biased. But at the same time, because I’m depicting these relationships and breakups heavily from one side, I think it becomes intimate. The reader can get down and deep in it. I also don’t know [laughs] if I had enough relationships in my life to accurately portray a relationship between two people! Because I haven’t had many long-term relationships, and the few I’ve had have now been immortalized in comics.

  MOK: It seems evidence shows that you only need to have a relationship to write about a relationship! And you’ve written several, so you’re succeeding in that goal.

  WALDEN: Thank you.

  MOK: I once hooked up with someone, and the next morning I ran into someone I hadn’t met, but who—this is confusing, maybe, without saying any names [Tillie laughs]—but who was the ex of someone I was friends with who had written a story [based on their relationship and breakup]. I was like, “Yeah, I read that story,” and she was like, “Yeah, I read it and I was like, it’s such a bummer! She sees everything so melancholy!”

  WALDEN: [Laughs] That’s so funny.

  MOK: Yeah, and it’s a sad story. I certainly understand where she’s coming from. Proof that one person’s perspective is never both people’s perspectives.

  WALDEN: Yeah. And it’s funny how in my life, there are certain relationships I’m totally okay drawing on, and taking aspects of and turning it into a narrative. But there are a couple where I’m like, I will never touch that with comics. Some relationships, maybe it’s like, it’s too much, or it meant too much or hurt too much. Some things, I have a very clear line. “That girl? Nope, never gonna be in a comic!”

  MOK: I wonder if that will change over time.

  WALDEN: I was thinking about it. It could be that over time, that line breaks down. I don’t know.

  MOK: Do you know about Dickens with David Copperfield?

  WALDEN: No!

  MOK: He had a traumatic incident in his childhood where his family went into debt [...] and he was put to work in a shoe blacking factory for a couple months. And he never wrote about it until David Copperfield, and he’d never told anyone about it really, never told his family [...] Then him sharing that ended up being this giant thing that helped change history, because [the book] helped change child labor laws.

  WALDEN: Wow [laughs] maybe I’ll change laws!

  MOK: I hope so!

• London Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/sep/19/tillie-walden-art-of-skating-spinning-comics

  Interview
  Tillie Walden: young graphic novelist breaks the ice with memoir Spinning
  By JA Micheline
  The 21-year-old cartoonist on life as a competitive, teen ice skater, her work rituals and how her emotions affect her art

  Tue 19 Sep 2017 16.42 BST Last modified on Fri 22 Sep 2017 09.43 BST
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  Spinning cover by Tillie Walden
  It figures … Walden (centre) as depicted in Spinning.
  American cartoonist Tillie Walden has been a quiet yet confident force to be reckoned with from the moment she published her debut graphic novel, The End of Summer, in 2015. Since then, Walden has been a veritable machine: just as one piece wraps up, we hear she’s working on something new. In just two years, the 21-year-old has published four books and a webcomic (On a Sunbeam, a 20-chapter webcomic that she updated with 30 fresh pages a week).

  Get ready, here I come: 20 talents set to take 2017 by storm
  Read more
  Her latest work is something new again: Spinning, a gargantuan memoir in which Walden revisits her adolescence through the lens of competitive figure skating. For the artist, the rink was a source of anxiety and social turmoil, but also peace, and as she began dealing with complicated teenage feelings – isolation, first love, a growing need for control – skating became more and more difficult. Spinning is her first departure from fiction, and her first book aimed at young adults.

  When starting a project, Walden explains, she carefully selects her paper to match the mood. Spinning was a dark-pad project. “I get kind of obsessed about what the colour of the pad of paper itself is, at the top,” she says. “With Spinning, I knew I needed a darker-coloured something, so I used a 400 series Bristol – smooth surface, 15 sheets. And I always use [the pad] with the kid on it. I was hellbent on only using Bristol pads that had that illustration.”

  Spinning was drawn smaller than before. Walden describes this as strategic; the material loomed so large in her mind that the only way to control it was to keep her work physically small. This, in turn, allowed her to move more freely. “And now I don’t really use this Bristol for anything else,” she says, wistfully. “I have this pad of new paper just sitting here that I probably won’t use, which is a terrible waste.”

  Still, she laughs: “Why am I like this?”

  Spinning by Tillie Walden
  Facebook Twitter Pinterest Illustrations from Spinning by Tillie Walden.
  It is interesting to connect her work rituals with her interest in structure. Emphasis upon physical spaces and their inventive uses is a commonly noted feature of Walden’s work, and seems to show itself off the page as much as on it. Her 2016 book, A City Inside imagines particular emotions as crumbling buildings, towering skyscrapers, or close, warm rooms – a motif that can be seen almost everywhere in her books.

  Alongside her fastidious paper selection is her selection process for pens: she labels the ones she will use for each project with coloured tape and sticks to her choices rigorously. “I think for Spinning, I used orange tape. I was really obsessed with the colour orange for that book. The book isn’t orange; I just associate orange with it.”

  Spinning does have brief bursts of orange, bright pops of colour that counter the book’s heavy blues. It is remarkable to think how that colour journeyed from the paper, to the pens, and finally into the finished work – where, according to the artist, it stays: “I like my projects to feel distinct from one another. I think it helps me wrap my head around them and stay focused on them. And then it also helps me to put them to rest when they’re done. I’m like, ‘OK, I’m putting this paper away and these pens away and now I’m going to start fresh again.’”

  Spinning is certainly a fresh start. Though she is known for her free use of space, with illustrations bleeding out of panels, Spinning is more classically laid out; gridded and more linear. This, she says, was there to protect her.

  Tillie Walden’s self-drawn author portrait.
  A self-drawn portrait. Photograph: Tillie Walden
  “I’ll use The End of Summer as a comparison: I was really able to fall into [that] story and let the story really affect the layout in a kind of crazy, surreal way. I felt like if I gave myself permission in Spinning to really feel that free, then I would lose track of all the narrative threads. There was so much more to carry in this book and I felt like using a grid, using these smaller pages, and keeping it within this realm really helped me manage everything.”

  Skating, as understood through Spinning, is likewise about tight, precise use of the body. . It’s a good way to frame Walden’s control of space in her work – A City Inside’s literalised emotional architecture; the marked “bigness” of The End of Summer’s huge winter palace and its dinosaur-sized cat; the extreme closeness and confinement of characters in On a Sunbeam contrasted with the vastness of outer space. It also seems to reveal something about the author, because the memoir is very much about the attempts of her young adult self to exert control over her life, the brittleness that results when precision is pursued for its own sake.

  “I thought about my own memories,” Walden says, “not necessarily in terms of content but in terms of the space. Where I was when something happened and how did my emotions affect how I remember that space? In certain instances in the book, I would realise: ‘OK, during this competition, I was feeling horrifically restricted and sad and that emotion was growing inside me.’ So I would have this space that would suddenly grow bigger and become more cavernous.”

  She nods slowly but assuredly as she speaks. “I thought that there was a level of emotional honesty there that I hope the reader finds.”

  • Spinning is published by SelfMadeHero at £14.99 and is available from the Guardian Bookshop at £12.74.

• Paste - https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/09/spinnings-tillie-walden-on-the-power-of-pursuing-a.html

  Spinning’s Tillie Walden on the Power of Pursuing and Ending Childhood Dreams
  By Hillary Brown | September 26, 2017 | 1:40pm
  Main Art by Tillie Walden
  COMICS FEATURES TILLIE WALDEN
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  Spinning’s Tillie Walden on the Power of Pursuing and Ending Childhood Dreams
  In the few years she’s been active, cartoonist Tillie Walden has published three books, been nominated for an Eisner and won two Ignatz awards. Not bad for anyone, let alone a young artist born in the mid-90s. Her work ethic and ambition are evident through previous projects I Love This Part, The End of Summer and A City Inside , and now First Second has released her biggest project yet, Spinning, a 400-page memoir that uses her years as a competitive figure skater to tell a story about learning to follow your own path. Walden answered Paste’s questions over email, including how she manages to wake up at 4 a.m. to work.

  Spinning_Cov.jpg

  1linebreakdiamond.png
  Paste: Spinning is your thesis work for the Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS), right? Can you talk a little bit about how it evolved during the long process of creating it?
  Tillie Walden: Wow, it’s so funny to remember that. It feels like centuries ago that this book was just my thesis. Yes, it was the project I worked on and graduated with in my second year at CCS. It really just slowly grew throughout the year. The scope of the project kept getting wider. It started out as just a collection of small black-and-white scenes of me on the ice and looking a little grumpy. And with the help of James Sturm (my thesis advisor and friend) I turned those scenes into a skeleton of a narrative with a beginning, middle and end. After I graduated from school and made a deal with First Second Books, my editor Connie Hsu helped me turn the skeleton into the 400-page graphic novel that you can read now.

  Paste: How much changed between your submitting it to CCS and publishing it through First Second?
  Walden: Ah, I guess I sort of got into that in the last question. It really just got fattened up. Nothing major changed, and it was the original version that everyone at First Second fell in love with in the first place so no one was interested in a total revamp. My editor at FS really just helped me add transitions and depth and the finishing touches. She held my hand through it all, thank god! I needed it.

  SPINNING-2P-Int-43.jpg
  Spinning Interior Art by Tillie Walden

  Paste: Your work is pretty focused on line (more than on shape or color). Has it always been that way?
  Walden: Yes, I think that’s something I learned from manga. I read a lot of manga as a kid, and for those who don’t, the majority of it is black and white. So I spent a lot of younger years focusing on line and realizing the power in it. I think that really influenced how I think about my own art and how I approach visualizing the world.

  Paste: What’s your set-up for drawing? Are you particular about materials (i.e., specific pens or pencils)?
  Walden: I have a little desk from IKEA that I’ve been drawing all my comics on since the dawn of time (or at least it feels that way.) And as far as materials go, I tend to switch around a lot. I have an alarming number of pens and pencils, a lot that are the same brands, but in different colors. Bear with me. Some days I feel a powerful need to draw with a pink pencil; the next day, I need a white pencil. It’s the same with pens. I really just pick what I use that day based on my mood. It’s the same with my paper. I use different paper with every project I do in order to have a paper that I can deeply associate with a specific comic. Someday I’m going to run out of options though.

  Paste: How much time do you spend procrastinating?
  Walden: Very little. I tend to procrastinate after a project is through. Once a project is done, and I need to think of a new idea, that’s the time when I roll around and think and sketch and watch endless movies to get inspired. But when I’m in the middle of drawing a comic, I rarely get off course. Maybe for 10 minutes I’ll stare into space. But that’s about as far as I go. I do all my thinking and wandering in myself while I draw. It’s easy for me to get work done and also disconnect my mind. So procrastination just doesn’t seem all that necessary.

  SPINNING-2P-Int-44.jpg
  Spinning Interior Art by Tillie Walden

  Paste: Do you see parallels between the way you approach drawing/making comics and the things figure skating prizes?
  Walden: Ohhh hmm, that’s a good question. In a very basic sense, I see a parallel in the simple fact that comics and ice skating both take a lot of hard work, and a lot of commitment. Instead of waking up at 4 A.M. for a skating lesson, now I wake up at 4 a.m. and draw. But I think after that the similarities disappear. Figure skating prizes performance. It’s a sport that smiles upon you when you excel in its image, in its expectations. But making comics isn’t about performing, and it doesn’t have a rule book. Making comics, for me, is about expressing yourself. And in a perfect world, yeah, skating should be about expressing yourself too. But 10 years in the ice-skating world proved to me that that is not actually the case.

  Paste: That’s a good point about the discipline both comics and figure skating require. I was also thinking about the importance of line to both, which is something you bring out in the book—the fact that performing a maneuver in skating is basically drawing a particular kind of line, just with your feet and your body instead of your hands.
  Walden: That’s a very interesting point! There’s some of this in the book, but skaters often memorize routines or moves based on the line-drawn version of what their blade would be mapping on the ice. In fact, after I would do certain jumps or spins, my coaches would have me go back and look at the lines I made on the ice to see if I had done it correctly. This is a great parallel. I gotta remember this one.

  Paste: You seem like you don’t really mind getting up at 4 a.m. all that much. Or at least you’re committed to doing it. Do you think it’s just your in-born work ethic?
  Walden: Honestly, I think skating sort of broke me a little bit in terms of mornings. I don’t think I am naturally a morning person, but I was sort of forced to become one. And now I have this bizarre stamina in me to just rise at 4 and start working. I mean, sure, some of it definitely comes from the fact that I’m really committed to what I do, and I don’t mind the slog or the long days. Plus, watching the sun rise while I draw is one of my greatest pleasures in life.

  SPINNING-2P-Int-45.jpg
  Spinning Interior Art by Tillie Walden

  Paste: It seems like a major theme of this book has to do with learning how to lose control (maybe that’s not the right way to phrase it: give up control? not obsess about control?). Do you think that’s true?
  Walden: I think that’s true. It’s difficult for me to see themes in this book—it’s just too close to me. So I’m always fascinated when others tell me the threads they find. And what you say makes a lot of sense. I think my path in ice skating, and in my life, dealt a lot with aspects of control and power.

  Paste: Is learning how to quit as important a skill as learning how to persevere?
  Walden: Absolutely. And in a way it depends a lot on the person and what their instincts are. My instinct is always to follow through, to never give up. So learning to quit was hugely important for me. I think a lot of kids in competitive sports could stand to learn that skill. And honestly I hate the word “quit.” It has such a negative connotation, and it implies that you’re losing something, somehow. I would much rather think of it as being finished, being done. There’s so much power in being self-aware, in knowing when to say when.

  Paste: I see a lot of similarities between Spinning and Nicole Georges’ new book, Fetch. (For example: the way both of you title your chapters after a concept that has to do with dog training or figure skating, but then expand out that concept metaphorically). Did you work with her at all at CCS?
  Walden: Huh, I haven’t read Fetch, and this is the first I’m hearing about the chapter titles. That’s cool! No, I never worked with her, and she was at CCS at a different time from me, so we never actually crossed paths. That’s interesting, though.

  Paste: Did you deliberately approach Spinning as a YA comic? Or do you think that most books that focus on a teenage protagonist tend to be categorized as YA?
  Walden: It wasn’t deliberate. I think you’re right in that a lot of books with teenage protagonists tend to be categorized as YA, which makes sense to me. The book naturally fit into the YA category just because of its content and the ages of the characters. And I’m really glad, because I think the YA genre is a great place to be.

  Paste: Do you think skating is a Trojan horse for what this book is really about? Does it enable the book to reach a larger audience, potentially, than if it were marketed as a coming-out story?
  Walden: I’ve never thought of it like that. I think the ice-skating theme has a lot of potential. You would be amazed how many times people have told me about their own dreams to be a figure skater when I would mention that I used to skate. It’s a sport that a lot of people are interested in. I guess I can hope, right? I would love for the ice-skating aspect to help propel the book to further spaces. But honestly this is not my wheelhouse; marketing is a little baffling to me.

  SPINNING-2P-Int-46.jpg
  Spinning Interior Art by Tillie Walden

  Paste: What’s harder: memoir or fiction?
  Walden: There’s no comparison in my mind. Memoir is 10,000,000,000 times harder than fiction. Easily.

  Paste: You don’t talk much in the book about reading, but were you reading comics while you were pursuing figure skating? Which ones? Did your friends read them too? (Are you just so young that reading comics is a totally normal thing to do and not one that’s segregated from reading books that just have words?)
  Walden: Haha, I’m not that young. I didn’t have friends who were into comics, which is one of the reasons it didn’t figure into the book much. I read comics very casually, and sort of on and off throughout my life. I wouldn’t categorize myself as any sort of hardcore fan. I enjoyed reading manga the most as a kid, specifically books by Osamu Tezuka, Yoshihiro Togashi and Rumiko Takahashi. And then in my teen years I started picking up more graphic memoirs (and how they influenced me is probably pretty obvious) like Fun Home by Alison Bechdel, Blankets by Craig Thompson and Stitches by David Small.

  Paste: One of my favorite things about this book is the way you manage to capture the feel of different spaces through small details, like the flecks on the walls of your Austin rink. How do you approach that task without having to draw every detail?
  Walden: Comics are all about choices. The choice to include a wall fleck, or the decision to not draw a building because it seems too annoying to deal with. I find that I just go with my instinct. I’ve drawn hundreds upon hundreds of pages of comics in my three or so years in this industry. And all that drawing gave me quite a set of skills in being able to make decisions about what to put on the page. Those wall flecks mattered to me. I spent so much time staring at the tile floors and the grimy walls around the ice rink, because it was all I could stand to look at. And if a detail matters to me, then I put it in.

• Tillie Walden Website - http://tilliewalden.com/

  Hey all, my name is Tillie. I'm a cartoonist and illustrator from Austin, TX. I'm also a graduate of the Center for Cartoon Studies.

  I've been making comics seriously since high school. In the past few years I've published some books and I'm currently working on more. I do sell my original art, so if you're ever interested, shoot me an email. Follow me on social media for news about appearances and events.

  I made a webcomic called On a Sunbeam. Read it all at onasunbeam.com

• Comics Alliance - http://comicsalliance.com/tillie-walden-on-a-sunbeam-interview/

  WHY TILLIE WALDEN’S ‘ON A SUNBEAM’ MAKES OUTER SPACE A WARM PLACE [WEBCOMIC Q&A]
  JON ERIK CHRISTIANSONMarch 27, 2017
  Tillie Walden
  SHARE ON TWITTER
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  When many people see outer space, they envision something cold, apathetic, maybe sterile or unforgiving. If there's civilization out there, it definitely looks like the Apple Store, or the interior of a tin can. When Tillie Walden sees space, she envisions something warm, inviting, and definitely dotted with trees.
  ComicsAlliance spoke with Walden about her webcomic On a Sunbeam; why she embraces space, but feels at odds with conventional science-fiction; and the use of fish as space travel.
  ComicsAlliance: What was the genesis for On a Sunbeam? And what genres and inspirations does it build from?

  Tillie Walden: Well I think the genesis came from the fact that I was interested in doing a comic set in space. But despite that, I wasn’t particularly inspired by the sci-fi genre; in fact I avoided it all together because I didn’t want to make a space comic that felt like one that had already been done before. The initial idea came from the interest in space, my love of architecture, my interest in young gay relationships, and a desire to do some fun world building.
  Outside of that the comic was definitely inspired by every Ghibli movie ever. There aren’t any cartoonists or comics that inspired this story specifically. I’ve been much more engaged with prose over comics, and I definitely see aspects of The Secret Place by Tana French in this story, as well as a lot of the surrealism from the Murakami books I like.
  CA: What’s it about?

  TW: I’m terrible at this question, but let’s see if I can come up with a coherent answer. On its surface, On A Sunbeam is about a girl named Mia and two different times in her life --- one in her younger years as she embarks on a relationship with a mysterious girl at her boarding school (which is in space), the other following her when she’s older and working with a crew that flies around space and restores old buildings.

  Tillie Walden

  But really it’s a story about Mia’s own journey --- who she becomes, who she meets along the way, who she loses, and who she can try and find again.

  CA: Who is the intended audience, and do you suggest any age restrictions or content warnings?

  TW: I suppose the intended audience is teens, but that being said I don’t like to limit it or really label it as a "teen" comic. I’d love for anyone to read it.
  As far as content warnings, there is some strong language and some mild violence, so it’s not all-ages. But as far as what age a kid would have to be to be able to read it is entirely up to their parents.

  CA: Your comment about wanting to set a comic in space without it necessarily being inspired by the science-fiction genre is a fascinating one, because I think some folks automatically assume the space part guarantees the genre part. Could you elaborate more on why you distance the two? Does it come from not wanting to bog down the story in jargon and expected genre trappings? Because On a Sunbeam very much utilizes space without making it "about space," so to speak.

  TW: Yeah it is interesting --- when I mention my comic is in space, I think people assumes that means there won’t be any trees. This comic is full of space, and it’s also full of nature. I don’t know why, but that’s always what I think of first.
  But to answer your question: the sci-fi stuff I had seen before I made OAS always really repulsed me. Outer space always seemed like such an inviting, fascinating idea, yet everyone always paired space with this sterile, bright white light futuristic dead architecture. It was all so cold! And to me, space seemed like it had the potential to be so warm. So I really wanted to push back against that.
  I didn’t want to feel any limitations from the genre of sci-fi, and I really wanted to explore the potential of the warmth of space. Of the homey-ness, if that makes sense. I think that people assume that because space is so vast that makes it impersonal, somehow. But that’s never been how my mind works. The bigger something is, to me, the more close I can feel to it. So I wanted to make a comic that made space into a visual home, and one that also had plenty of trees. But, all the while, making the comic not about space at all. It’s a funny mix, because I’ve thought a lot about space in this comic yet it isn’t even remotely about space.

  CA: That desire to break the sterile status quo is definitely evident in On a Sunbeam, even beyond the trees! The classic Apple Store lacquer isn't present in OAS, even where it could be. Mia and her team preserve old buildings, in a way celebrating the rough edges, the history. And then there are the betta fish-shaped ships which are showy and eye-catching, not minimalist.

  Could you talk about why you included those elements (the building restoration, the fish ships) in the story, and was that part of it?

  TW: Apple Store lacquer, what a great way to describe it, hah! So with the building restoration I had a very sort of specific intention. On the surface it was a good excuse to draw some interesting architecture set against the backdrop of space, but it was really more about this basic idea of fixing something. The crew works on these buildings full of history and charm and restores them to something more solid while also preserving their history. And I think that’s very much what Mia’s story is, at it’s core.
  She’s a person with a rich and interesting history but she isn’t really whole yet. None of the members of the crew really are. And I wanted to include the building restoration because it seemed like it really represented this core emotion in the story --- this idea that these are people who are working on themselves, working on who they are with each other and who they are in the context of their world. And they’re all striving to become solid and new again but without losing the parts of their past that helped shape them.

  Tillie Walden

  As far as the fish ships go, that was a much less formed idea haha. In my last book, A City Inside, I drew some flying fish and that sort of got me interested in this idea of flying machines that were based on living creatures. I always think about how I talk to my car like it’s a living creature when it is actually just a sad hunk of metal. So it seemed interesting to be able to give this world machinery that actually felt/looked alive.
  Also, just in a practical sense, I had no clue how to go about designing space ships when I started this comic. But I can draw fish, so it seemed like a much better path to just run with the fish instead of attempting to design some hardcore looking space machine. Also something I realized recently while drawing --- I like that the fish ships imply that space has a texture somewhat like water. I often draw light that spills and moves around like water, and the fish seem to echo that. I think it adds a lot to the atmosphere of the story.

  CA: How has both your creative approach and the webcomic itself changed since inception?

  TW: I don’t think my creative approach has really changed much as I’ve made the comic. I approach each chapter in pretty much the same way every time. I ask myself what I need to accomplish in this section, and think about how I can best do that. The webcomic itself has changed some along the way, which is pretty much the natural way things go when you stick around with the same world and characters for a while.
  Everything has gotten more solid, and I’ve been learning more and more about color as the project has gone on. This is the first project I’ve ever done full digital color on so that’s definitely been a learning experience.

  Tillie Walden

  CA: What drew you to webcomics and the platform you currently use?

  TW: I had a pretty simple desire --- to reach people. Webcomics are free. Anyone with an internet connection and a device can read it. That was it, that was why I wanted it to be a webcomic. So people could find it. When designing the site with my Dad (he’s a programmer) I tried to make it in the simplest way possible. I didn’t want it to feel like you’re on some website and there’s all this stuff to do. I wanted to just make a site that simply had a comic on it, and it being on the web wasn’t really a part of the story but instead was simply a method for you to find it.
  CA: What’s your process like?

  TW: My process sometimes feels like running down a hill. Like your legs are moving as fast as they can, but you know you could be going faster, and everything is just a blur around you. Basically, with each chapter I know what needs to happen, so it usually starts with me making a few incoherent thumbnails of the first few pages of the chapter. Once I’ve planned the first few pages, I’ll stop thumbnailing and just go straight to the art.
  I find that I don’t really need thumbnails of the whole thing anymore, because it’s much easier for me to write the dialogue and nail out the story as I’m drawing the final art. I don’t really pencil, so I usually just grab a pen and jump in. Then I’ll resurface after a dizzying few days. It usually takes two or three days to draw the art for a 30-50 page chapter. Then I come up for air and scan and color and the world comes back into focus.

  After I’m done I send the chapter to Ricky, my editor and On A Sunbeam bestie, who will shoot back spelling errors, any pacing fixes, and sometimes Ricky will have ideas for new pages that could help the chapter, so I’ll sometimes draw a couple more pages after I’ve finished and pop those in. Then when it’s all done I send the pages to my Dad, who uploads them to our little handmade site. Then I start the next chapter!
  CA: Your color palettes are way potent in their emotional effectiveness. What's your approach when it comes to tackling an individual page, chapter, or story when it comes to color?

  TW: That’s lovely to hear, I find color to be so baffling, generally. Well to me, every chapter has a core color. Usually my core colors are blue, orange, or pink. And then, as I color each scene, I pick some highlight colors for the scene. So, say, a three page spread where the core color is blue and the highlights are yellow, orange, and pink. But it can get a lot more complicated then that in certain scenes.
  When the emotion is high, or there’s a really significant moment, I tend to agonize over what colors to pick and where to apply them. But the colors I agonize over aren’t the base colors, it’s usually the one top color that just skims across the scene, like a thin light. And that color to me is so important, because it just gives it all a certain flavor. But I trust myself, and usually once I pick the colors for a scene and look at them laid out I feel good and stick with it. I have no interest in recoloring.
  CA: Do you think self-publishing this story granted you freedom that you might not have had elsewhere?

  TW: Of course! It’s all mine, I can do anything. It’s very freeing. I can use any images in promotion which is one of my favorite parts of self publishing. When you go through a publisher, big or small, there are limitations on what you can show your audience from the book itself. But with OAS I can just post all my favorite pages from the comic on Tumblr and it’s no big deal.
  Also it’s very satisfying to be able to show people the site and say, "hey, it’s all here for free, go ahead and read anytime." When you make graphic novels there’s a lot of push and pull --- it’s more like, hey I made this nice thing, but it costs money and you probably have to order it but you should get it blah blah etc. But with a webcomic it’s so simple --- hey dude click this link and enjoy.

  Tillie Walden

  CA: How have you approached On a Sunbeam differently than your other works?

  TW: Well, OAS is the only serialized work I’ve ever done, so it’s definitely been different. My other works feel like these neat little packages, and OAS feels like a road where I still can’t see the end. It’s often very exciting, because it feels like this project has had limitless potential. But it’s exhausting. The weekly deadlines are tough as hell.
  But I feel like my approach to OAS has been very raw, and that’s been very interesting. I feel the story more vividly than I’ve felt any of my other work. I really react to the pages in a way I never have before, and I think that helps me mold the story. Though to be fair it’s all been written out to the end so the only molding I really get to do at the moment is visual, not plot molding.
  CA: Which other webcomics would you recommend to readers who like yours?

  TW: I would recommend Mildred Louis’ Agents of the Realm, which is a college/magical girl/fantasy comic that will satisfy any reader. I would also recommend Sledgehammer by Sam Alden, which just started --- it seems to be a family drama, but it’s still in its early days, so now is a good chance to jump in.
  And I would just like to generally recommend two resources --- the LGBT webcomics Tumblr and the LGBTQ creators database run by Marinaomi. If you’re looking for webcomics made by queer creators then those are fantastic places to discover some gems.

  You can follow On a Sunbeam on its website and support its author on Patreon. Find more from Tillie Walden at her website, Instagram, Twitter, and Tumblr.

  If you have a webcomic you’d like to suggest for an upcoming Webcomic Q&A, send a tip to jonerikchristianson[at]gmail[dot]com with the subject line “Webcomic Q&A.”

• Vulture - http://www.vulture.com/2015/11/comics-phenom-tillie-walden-on-i-love-this-part.html

  Tillie Walden on the Queer Characters and Emotional Turmoil of Her New Comic, I Love This Part
  By Claire Landsbaum
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  A self-portrait by the artist Photo: Tillie Walden
  Tillie Walden’s first comic was about her paternal grandmother, who died before Walden was born, and who is her namesake. The late Tillie was an artist, too, and her paintings hang in Walden’s childhood home. “I made a simple black-and-white comic about never knowing her but following in her footsteps, and when I showed it to my dad, he cried,” she said. That was when she realized she could make people feel something with her art.

  It was her dad who talked her into putting comics and drawings on her website, which is how Avery Hill Publishing discovered her work. The British publisher emailed her while she was still in high school asking if she’d like to work with them. She panicked (“I thought it was a scam”), told them she had too much to do senior year, and to get back to her after she’d graduated. To her amazement, they did, and her first graphic novel, The End of Summer, was the result.

  That book is told from the perspective of Lars, a sickly boy who rides around on a giant cat named Nemo. He and his family live in a fantastical palace that’s about to shut its doors for a three-year winter. As the icy season progresses, tensions in the family rise and story lines become increasingly twisted — Lars has to deal with Maja, his headstrong twin sister who’s beginning to rebel against family norms; their older brother’s manic tendencies escalate; there’s at least one scandalous romance; and their mother tries to hold everything together. Tragedy and discomfort permeate The End of Summer, but it’s a beautifully told story nonetheless.

  Almost immediately after The End of Summer was released in June, Walden started work on her second book, I Love This Part, which was released by Avery Hill on November 14. It’s another gut-wrenching story — this time about two teenage girls who bond over movies, music, and the internet, and in the process innocently fall in love. We caught up with Walden to talk about her creative process and the real-life events that inspired I Love This Part.

  You’re about to graduate from the Center for Cartoon Studies; you’re working on your thesis, which is a graphic novel; you already published one book while in school, and now there's I Love This Part. How do you get so much done?
  I have to get ten hours of sleep every night — I refuse to ever let comics interrupt my sleep. I go to bed at 8 p.m. every night like an old lady. But I’m also at the point where I don’t struggle with drawing at all, so as long as ideas are flowing and I’m working on something interesting, I can draw anything. I’m also not afraid to make pages and get rid of them. When I was younger, I thought the pages I made had to be the perfect reflection of my vision, but now I know things don’t work like that. I just made 50 pages of my thesis, and I’ll use maybe 30, but making 20 bad pages is still good because I’m still being productive.

  So you’re not exactly a night owl?
  No. I do my best work early in the morning. I like to wake up and just go straight from being asleep to sitting at my desk. I like that my work has this sort of sleepy, dreamy quality to it, and I think a lot of that is because I’m actually sleepy and dreamy as I’m making it.

  Maja snuggles up in a window seat in The End of Summer.
  Are there any artists whose work particularly inspired you?
  Sam Alden is an indie cartoonist, and I read his comics online. He makes really dreamy, cool stories. My style is very similar to his because I started trying to draw like him.

  You have some incredible settings in your comics: outer space, miniature cities, mazelike palaces, and jungles, to name a few. What inspires that?
  I like backgrounds because I like making stories where it feels like you have to go somewhere, and backgrounds are usually the way to do that. In big spaces, or in spaces where you can see partially down a hallway or slightly around a tree, there’s always potential for something to come around it or for a story to happen.

  The palace’s elaborate interior leads to a sleeping Lars in The End of Summer.
  How did you come up with the idea for The End of Summer?
  It was winter break, I was home in Texas, and I’d been talking to the team at Avery Hill. I told them I had an idea for a book and they were like, ‘Cool, send it to us!’ And I was like, Wait, I don’t actually have an idea for a book. I lied! When I write and draw, I have to be covered in blankets and pillows, so I immersed myself in bed just like Lars. I ended up writing and drawing Lars and Maja and the cat over and over and over again, so I thought, okay, they’re in this huge place. If I were in this place, what would I do? Then I hopped out of bed, jumped in the bath, closed my eyes, and thought, what can go wrong? I jumped out of the bath and wrote it all down, and it still made no sense, so I got back in the bath and got back out and kept doing that until I had a story with edges to it. Once I get myself going, I can’t stop until I’ve figured everything out.

  That’s one way to do it.
  I don’t spend a long time thinking about doing it differently. I’m really about going with your gut feeling.

  A huge part of the book is autobiographical, right?
  Right. My strongest stories come when I put part of myself and my experience in them. For instance, I was always really sick as a kid, and in 11th grade I started having heart issues and breathing issues and was in and out of hospital for a little while. It was one of the lowest points of my life — I couldn’t bear to think about all the school I was missing, and I couldn’t bear to think about what was going on with my body, so I just lay there and dreamily thought of stories and places and tried to take myself anywhere but the hospital. So Lars’s issues in The End of Summer came from a very emotionally and physically real place, and doing that book actually helped me close off that part of my life. When I draw a character going through something that I went through, it makes me feel weirdly less alone, and it helps me make it a lighter subject — it becomes less of an experience that I had and more of a magical thing.

  Lars’ health issues foreshadow The End of Summer’s conclusion.
  Is I Love This Part autobiographical to the extent that The End of Summer is?
  Yes. When I came up with the idea for the book, I was getting very nostalgic for a relationship I had with a girl in middle school, and remembering the dumb things we said to each other. I’m not in touch with that girl anymore because it ended badly — her mother found out and didn’t want a gay daughter. We were both closeted at the time, so it was all very secretive.

  What was it like to draw queer characters now that you’re out of the closet?
  I don’t think I could’ve drawn a graphic novel about two young lesbians if I wasn’t out right now. I always avoided the whole queer thing in stories because I felt like I couldn’t draw openly gay characters if I was still scared to be openly gay — in The End of Summer there’s a gay character, but it’s very quiet and hidden and shadowy. Now a huge part of my voice is the fact that I’m gay and I like writing gay characters. It was so nice to draw girls kissing!

  Two teenage girls eventually fall for each other in I Love This Part.
  A lot of your comics are mean to inspire an emotional response. When you’re working, how can you tell if you’re getting that right?
  The stories that naturally come into my head are pretty emotionally big, but the moments I choose to show in a comic and the way I make it is intended to evoke a response. The way I gauge if I’m doing it right is: I sit, close my eyes, grab my stomach, and imagine the whole story in my head. If I have a reaction in my gut, if I feel something, then that’s it. There’s something cool about being able to put pictures in boxes and make someone feel something.

• Broken Frontier - http://www.brokenfrontier.com/small-press-spotlight-tillie-walden-on-a-sunbeam-avery-hill-publishing-first-second/

  Small Press Spotlight on… Tillie Walden and ‘On a Sunbeam’
  by Andy Oliver September 26, 2016
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  With Eisner nominations, Ignatz wins and, of course, that Broken Frontier Awards triumph in the our Breakout Talent category, it can hardly be said that Tillie Walden’s comics output has gone unnoticed over the last year or so. <> but Walden’s maturity as both a comics storyteller and a practitioner of the form is astonishingly accomplished for someone of just twenty years of age.

  Her three books from Avery Hill Publishing – The End of Summer, I Love this Part and A City Inside – have all gone on to notable critical acclaim and she has a major autobiographical work, Spinning, coming from First Second next year. With her new self-published project – the webcomic On a Sunbeam – debuting online this week on September 28th it seemed a perfect opportunity to catch up with Tillie. Join us as we chat about *that* remarkable debut year in comics, what readers can expect from her new foray into science fiction, and the particular vulnerabilities of autobio work…

  eos_0916ANDY OLIVER: When last we spoke here at Broken Frontier your debut graphic novel The End of Summer had yet to be released. Since then you’ve had a number of projects published and multiple awards recognition. Looking back over the last memorable year what have been the particular highlights for you?

  TILLIE WALDEN: Oh god, picking highlights seems almost impossible, it’s been one of the craziest times of my life. But, ok, I’ll try. Graduating from CCS (Center for Cartoon Studies) was a huge one. The awards were really nice but a little overwhelming. I mean, honestly, the real highlight for this year for me personally has just been being able to make so many different kinds of comics and watching myself grow and change. Sometimes I literally can’t believe the amount of work I’ve done in just this year, and it’s amazing that all this is even possible.

  On the subject of The End of Summer, the new expanded version debuts at the Lakes International Comic Art Festival this year. What can readers expect to see in terms of extra material in the book?

  Well the new edition has a prequel strip (below) that tells the story of how Lars met/got to know his very large cat Nemo. There’s also some extra bits at the end about how I met the guys at Avery Hill Publishing and how this crazy book managed to get published. I do think though that the best part of the new edition is that it’s much larger. Readers will be able to catch a lot more detail in this edition.

  eosbanner_0916small

  You’re about to venture into the webcomic world with On a Sunbeam (see a preview here at BF), debuting this month. How would you describe its premise and cast of characters?

  Ah god I hate descriptions. I normally make Ricky [Miller – Avery Hill co-publisher] write them for me. But ok here we go. On a Sunbeam is a webcomic that follows two stories at different times in a girl named Mia’s life. The first story follows Mia as she travels around space with a crew that restores forgotten buildings. The crew is a rowdy, interseting bunch, and I won’t go into too much detail cause I’ll never shut up.

  The second story follows Mia in her younger years while she attends a boarding school. The second story revolves around a single relationship, whereas the first story examines a group dynamic. But both stories, ultimately, are about Mia figuring out who she is and what the hell she wants to do with herself.

  oas-banner1_0916small

  We’ve seen you tackle a broad storytelling base either in print or online but science fiction is something of a diversion for you. Without giving anything away there’s some truly captivating sci-fi imagery and inventiveness in your approach to the genre in the preview I’ve been lucky enough to read. How long has On a Sunbeam been gestating in your ever fertile imagination?

  Most of the work I do, I come up with the idea right before I draw it. What’s interesting about OAS is I’ve really been thinking on it for almost a year before I started it. So I’ve had a lot of time to really let the environment and characters grow inside me. Also, yeah, sci-fi is way not my usual thing. But look, honestly I just wanted to draw lots of stars. Space is a great excuse to draw stars. And I feel like sci-fi gives me an excellent excuse to do whatever I want to when it comes to setting and logic.

  oasbanner2_0916small

  I’m not a huge sci-fi fan so I really don’t know much about the genre and I’ve found that because of that all my ideas feel very fresh and bizarre. I purposely tried to design the world in a way that wasn’t typical. I saw Star Wars for the first time about a year ago and thought it was really boring. And it seemed like such a waste to take a space setting and make it be full of dull machinery and dust. Also silly clothes. Oh god I’m gonna make people angry. But the point is, is that to me space is limitless. And it seems like the perfect place to fill with everything my imagination can come up with. I don’t care that trees can’t exist in space; my space world has tons of them. Also fish ships. That’s a whole thing.

  There are echoes of The End of Summer in On a Sunbeam in the sense of location being almost a character in itself. There’s a fusion of the organic, the baroque and the clinical to the look of the strip’s world that is refreshingly distinctive in sci-fi terms. Can you give us some insights into the design choices behind the environment the characters interact with?

  I think in OAS, more then in TEOS, I am much more interested in the organic. I’ve slowly been leaving my phase of hard angles and become a lot more interested in the way things move naturally. But I also still love drawing extreme architecture, so those two ideas have sort of merged together to form On a Sunbeam.

  oas-banner3_0916small

  I really wanted the environment to reflect Mia. She’s the most important person in this narrative so I wanted to shape the world around where she was at. And in the first chapter, for example, it feels like for Mia everything is moving and changing and growing. And so I tried to draw backgrounds and shapes that pulled at edges, that made her world move. In future chapters the setting will change somewhat, because, well, Mia will change.

  Why did you choose to release On a Sunbeam as a webcomic? What was it about the project that especially lent itself to that form of delivery?

  The first reason was <>. Anyone with internet and some sort of a device can read the comic. My Dad (who designed the site for me) and I made a point to make sure the site is readable <>, especially mobile. But I have wondered about why I chose OAS specifically for this, because I could’ve done a different story as a webcomic. And I honestly don’t know the answer. Something about this comic just seemed to fit for this format, and it seemed to fit for serialization (and not all my stuff fits for that.) I just had a gut feeling that that’s where this comic needed to be, and I always follow my gut.

  oascover_0916small

  In terms of pacing and structuring a story what challenges have you encountered in writing for webcomic serialisation so far? How has it differed to your approach to writing for a standalone graphic novel?

  Man, writing for a webcomic is HARD. Much harder, at least for me, than a standalone graphic novel. The biggest challenge for me is finding a way to make each chunk interesting. I know how everything connects and works in the long run, but the reader doesn’t! So I’ve had to find a way to make each chapter in itself its own small story with a beginning, middle and end, because I want the reader to be satisfied and curious with every chapter. But this is a new challenge for me, so I’m definitely working hard to make this thing work.

  aosint1aosint2

  One of the aspects of your comics that particularly appeals to me is that you’re unafraid to make your readers work – to infer meaning for themselves, for example, from delicately crafted visual metaphor in I Love this Part and A City Inside, or to tie together strands of narrative into a whole in The End of Summer. In On a Sunbeam you’re also playing with two linked storytelling segments. Are you consciously looking to foster a more direct connection between the reader and the page by inviting them to become a part of the interpretive process?

  Definitely. There’s a lot of little hints I’m leaving around for the readers to find if they want to search. I would love for readers to really engage with this story and to wonder about where it will lead, and to wonder about how the stories work together. Readers often tell me their interpretations of my work and I find most of the time they understand it better than I do. And I have a feeling that will be the case with this comic too. I know how the stories come together (I won’t say though) but I’m sure the readers will find connections that I would’ve never seen.

  spinning1_0916small spinning2_0916small

  We have an upcoming longer-form offering from you via First Second next year. Tell us about Spinning (above and below) and its subject matter…

  Ahhh yes. That book. That very long, long book. Spinning is a graphic memoir recounting my time as a competitive figure and synchronized skater. It’s my first long form, truly autobiographical work. Now this is a very hard book for me to describe. And it was a hard book to make. I think all I can really say right now is that it’s very different from all the other work I’ve done, and it’s probably the most emotionally charged work I’ve done. It follows me through a very difficult time in my life. But I think there will be a lot of interesting parts to it for non-ice skaters. In a way it’s also sort of a tell-all about the ridiculous behind the scenes world of figure skating.

  spinning3_0916small

  Autobiographical themes have been an intrinsic part of your work to date – whether obliquely in The End of Summer or more overtly in I Love this Part. How greater a sense of vulnerability is there about directly portraying yourself on the page in Spinning rather than using characters as avatars for aspects of your life?

  The difference is huge. Using parts of myself in fictional work is child’s play compared to the chaos of making truly autobiographical work. Spinning was so difficult to make that I can’t see myself doing any more straight-up memoir for many years. I mean Spinning makes me nervous in a way unlike any of my other work. Because it’s not just about selling a comic, that book is my story. It’s really my life in there, and that makes me feel hugely vulnerable. But the upside is that Spinning has been by far the most rewarding comic I’ve ever made. Nothing has ever changed me like making that book did. It’s an experience I’m proud to have had.

  TillieHCD5small

  Earlier this year you were kind enough to allow us to run your Hourly Comic Day strips here at BF (samples above and below). Diary comics are the focus of your Patreon account. What kind of material can readers who become your patrons look forward to seeing there?

  My dear Patrons. You know when I started my Patreon I was like “I’ll just draw a page a day and that’s that.” And my god, was I wrong. I work my ass off for my Patrons. The material covers a hugely wide range, and the comics are usually at least 3 pages long each day. The content is sometimes about just the struggle of being a cartoonist, there are often dream comics, sometimes they’re simply comics with me rambling about ideas.

  Recently my Patreon has been doing a mini-serialized story, and every day I tell another little part of a story of a girl from my past. That’s all I’ll say. Want to find out more? Only $3 a month to get a sickeningly substantial comic from me EVERY DAY. I haven’t missed a single day so far.

  TillieHCD8small

  You’ll be over for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival in October. Where can attendees see you there? What events will you be a part of?

  The Lakes! Yes. I will be hanging out at the Avery Hill table most of the time, but I’ll also be on a Women in Comics panel, and a spotlight sort of thing with Warren Bernard interviewing/talking to me. As far as exact times I have no clue, but I bet the Lakes website has all that info. Also it’s in a super tiny town, I’ll be there, you can find me!

  And, finally, are there any other projects we haven’t covered as yet that you’re working on or have planned that you can talk to us about? What else does 2017 have in store for the prolific Tillie Walden?

  Good lord I hope there aren’t any other projects, I’m tired. Nah I’m just kidding, I have a few other quiet things going on but nothing I can talk about yet. For now, my readers have On a Sunbeam to enjoy, and next year Spinning will appear on October 3. Yes, that is the OFFICIAL publication date. But I will also say that starting from around December till July of next year I’m going to be doing some traveling. And I’ll be logging my journeys and adventures in my Patreon. Yes, here I go with more promotion. So Patreon is the place to be if you want to see what I’m up to EVERY DAY.

  To find out more about Tillie Walden’s work visit her website here. You can also follow her on Twitter here. Buy her books from the Avery Hill Publishing online store here. On a Sunbeam debuts on September 28th here.

  For regular updates on all things small press follow Andy Oliver on Twitter here.

  Tillie Walden is a guest at this year’s Lakes International Comic Art Festival. More details about the festival here.

Spinning

Shoshana Flax

The Horn Book Magazine. 93.6 (November-December 2017): p127+.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Horn Book, Inc.. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Sources, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.hbook.com/magazine/default.asp

Full Text:

Spinning

by Tillie Walden; illus. by the author

High School First Second/Roaring Brook 396 pp.

9/17 978-1-62672-772-4 $22.99

Paper ed. 978-1-62672-940-7 $17.99

In a graphic memoir, former competitive figure skater and synchronized skater Walden looks back at her twelve years growing up in the world of competitive sports. The shadowy, cool bluish-purples of most of the pencil drawings reflect young Tillie's mood for much of the narrative: although she's committed to her skating, it rarely brings her joy. Meanwhile, she's being bullied; her family relationships are strained; she feels the need to hide her homosexuality; she struggles academically; and she is sexually assaulted by her SAT tutor. The skating world serves mainly as a well-realized backdrop for<< a story about holding secrets in and going against expectations>>. Walden, whose growing interest in art is a recurring theme throughout her memoir, knows when to let this book's art or text be spare and when to interrupt the purple sleepiness with a pop of golden yellow; the occasional incompletely drawn figures are clearly deliberate, whether to protect her own memory or someone else's anonymity. She sometimes only hints at her motivations, giving the impression that, like many adolescents, she's not fully sure what they are. The result is much more layered than the "tell-all about the seedy world of glittering young ice skaters" that, according to the author's note, Walden (now only a few years removed from the events) originally intended to create.

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)

Flax, Shoshana. "Spinning." The Horn Book Magazine, Nov.-Dec. 2017, p. 127+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A515012672/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5b42745e. Accessed 13 Apr. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A515012672

Walden, Tillie: SPINNING

Kirkus Reviews. (Aug. 1, 2017):

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/

Full Text:

Walden, Tillie SPINNING First Second (Children's Informational) $17.99 9, 12 ISBN: 978-1-62672-940-7

Graphic novelist Walden recounts her years coming-of-age as a competitive ice skater.Tillie Walden knew she was gay since she was 5, which was also when she began ice skating. This memoir recounts the years from when she's 11 to when she reaches her late teens, as her life marches on through fledgling romances, moving halfway across the country, bullying, and various traumas with skating as her only constant. Her story is largely insular, with her family only visible in the periphery, even with regard to her skating. Walden's recollections tend to meander at times, with an almost stream-of-consciousness feel about them; her taciturn introspection mixed with adolescent ennui creates a subdued, yet graceful tone. For a young author (Walden is in her early 20s), <> and evincing their impacts on her trajectory. Her two-toned art is lovely and spare, utilizing the occasional splash of an accenting color to heighten visual interest. She draws herself as a blonde, bespectacled, white girl, a depiction that brings Harriet Welsch to mind. Walden deems herself "a creator who is happy making a book without all the answers," and while she may not solve any of life's great conundrums, her offering is intimate and compelling. A quiet powerhouse of a memoir. (Graphic memoir. 13-adult)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)

"Walden, Tillie: SPINNING." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499572657/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8101d8f5. Accessed 13 Apr. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A499572657

Walden, Tillie. Spinning

Meghann Meeusen

Voice of Youth Advocates. 40.3 (Aug. 2017): p81.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 E L Kurdyla Publishing LLC
http://www.voya.com

Full Text:

4Q * 3P * M * J * S * (G)

Walden, Tillie. Spinning. First Second/ Macmillian, 2017. 400p. $17.99. 978-162672-940-7.

Figure skating has always been a huge part of Tillies life, from private coaching in the early morning hours to practice for the synchronized skating team after school. Yet she has also always had a complicated relationship with this competitive and restrictive sport, feelings that are intensified when her family moves from New Jersey to Texas. In Austin, Tillie must build a new life, but faces even greater difficulties, including relentless bullying and an attempted sexual assault, as well the tremendous challenge of making friends and coming out, having known she was gay since she was very young. Tillie wades through complex emotions, at turns determined or depressed, hopeful or heartbroken, but she also <> and the strength to realize that, perhaps, figure skating need not be her whole life forever.

A remarkable graphic memoir, Spinning explores the authors teenage years as she struggles to come to terms with how she fits in the world around her. What sets this text apart is the way<< expressive, artistic renderings and sophisticated comics choices enrich the depth of emotion>> portrayed in the story. Even seemingly simple visual details contribute substantially to the written portions, combining distinctive art with reflective narration and sparse dialogue to create not only a rounded and dynamic character, but also insights into the experiences of competitive figure skating, coming out, and being a teenager when nothing seems to be the right fit. For readers who enjoy the graphic memoir genre, this story will be an exceptional treat.--Meghann Meeusen.

(a) Highlighted Reviews Graphic Novel Format

(G) Graphic Novel Format

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)

Meeusen, Meghann. "Walden, Tillie. Spinning." Voice of Youth Advocates, Aug. 2017, p. 81. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502000893/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=01e8b516. Accessed 13 Apr. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A502000893

Spinning

Publishers Weekly. 264.29 (July 17, 2017): p223.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/

Full Text:

* Spinning

Tillie Walden. First Second, $17.99 (400p)

ISBN 978-1-62672-940-7

In an elegant, contemplative, and somber graphic memoir, Walden (The End of Summer) immerses readers in an adolescence dominated by competitive figure skating. The story stretches over several years, during which time Walden vacillates between embracing the routine of early morning practices and the rush of competition, and a near-constant feeling of otherness, due in large part to her attraction to girls, which she hides from her family and peers. "It wasn't the thrill or freedom I felt that I remember," she notes after making a romantic connection with a friend. "It was the fear." Chapters open with illustrations of spins and jumps, the movements delicately mapped, paired with commentary that, at times, gives insight into Walden's personal life; of the frustrating axel, she writes, "As I would turn to go into it I would wish and hope with everything I had that this time it would work." A palette of deep purple, splashed with yellow, underscores the loneliness that permeates Walden's story, and her careful attention to facial expressions and body language makes readers intimately aware of what she is feeling. A haunting and resonant coming-of-age story. Ages 14-up. Agent: Seth Fishman, Gernert Company. (Sept.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)

"Spinning." Publishers Weekly, 17 July 2017, p. 223. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498997025/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ea1598aa. Accessed 13 Apr. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A498997025

Spinning

Sarah Hunter

Booklist. 113.21 (July 1, 2017): p46.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/

Full Text:

* Spinning.

By Tillie Walden. Illus. by the author.

Sept. 2017.400p. First Second, paper, $17.99 (9781626729407). 741.5. Gr. 8-11.

Award-winning Walden's first book-length work traces her childhood spent in the competitive figure-skating world, and although most of her memoir happens in skating rinks or at competitions, that element ultimately becomes the backdrop for a deeper story about her coming out and coming-of-age. In delicate, evocative artwork, rendered exclusively in purple with yellow highlights, Walden relates the struggles of moving to a new city in middle school, dealing with a particularly cruel bully, feeling scared to be open about her homosexuality, and so on, all while gradually becoming disillusioned with skating. She uses negative space to great effect, elegantly depicting her loneliness and isolation while simultaneously emphasizing how deeply she feels unable to speak up for herself. Subtle hints of her burgeoning interest in art, depicted in small, fine-lined doodles encroaching on the edges of panels and pages, are a tantalizing glimpse into what readers know she'll become. All these feelings play out compellingly on the ice, and chapter-heading descriptions of skating moves seem to hint at Walden's larger emotional development. The overall effect is quiet and lyrical--there aren't many huge epiphanies, and conflicts disappear rather quickly--but Walden's cumulative growth and courage to speak up for what she actually wants are unmistakable and deeply satisfying. A stirring, gorgeously illustrated story of finding the strength to follow one's own path.--Sarah Hunter

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)

Hunter, Sarah. "Spinning." Booklist, 1 July 2017, p. 46. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499862800/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9dbf2b90. Accessed 13 Apr. 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A499862800

Flax, Shoshana. "Spinning." The Horn Book Magazine, Nov.-Dec. 2017, p. 127+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A515012672/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=5b42745e. Accessed 13 Apr. 2018. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Walden, Tillie: SPINNING." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Aug. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499572657/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8101d8f5. Accessed 13 Apr. 2018. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Meeusen, Meghann. "Walden, Tillie. Spinning." Voice of Youth Advocates, Aug. 2017, p. 81. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502000893/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=01e8b516. Accessed 13 Apr. 2018. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Spinning." Publishers Weekly, 17 July 2017, p. 223. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A498997025/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ea1598aa. Accessed 13 Apr. 2018. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hunter, Sarah. "Spinning." Booklist, 1 July 2017, p. 46. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A499862800/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=9dbf2b90. Accessed 13 Apr. 2018.

• Comicsverse
  https://comicsverse.com/beauty-tillie-waldens-on-a-sunbeam/
  Word count: 1600

  The Heartbreaking Beauty of Tillie Walden’s ON A SUNBEAM
  By Molly Barnewitz Posted: 4 weeks ago
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  Maybe it’s the sunset colors. Maybe it’s the Ghibli-esque artwork. Or maybe it’s the enduring story of young love. Whatever it is, ON A SUNBEAM is the most devastatingly beautiful comic I have ever read. The protective instinct in me wants to say, read this over the course of a week or two.

  Don’t bite off more than you can chew. But that’s not possible. Like the first time I read ON A SUNBEAM, my reread of the comic was straight through. I sat and stared at the luscious colors on my computer, the beautiful characters, and their universe filling my heart to burst. It is no overstatement to say Tillie Walden’s 20 chapter masterpiece is nothing short of sublime.

  Walden, whose graphic memoir SPINNING debuted in September of 2017, is an exceptionally talented artist whose work is similar to artists like Jillian Tamaki. Recently, Walden’s short comic MINUTES featured on the International Women’s Day Google Doodle. Like Walden’s other works, ON A SUNBEAM combines Walden’s poetic writing with dream-like artwork.

  A Breathtaking Story
  The narrative structure winds thoughtfully like a mobius strip. ON A SUNBEAM starts with Mia’s introduction to the fish-shaped spaceship, the Aktis. Her job, and that of the crew, is to stabilize old buildings on long-abandoned planets. In Walden’s universe, there are no men, only women, and nonbinary people. The queer element emphasizes a refreshingly non-heteropatriarchal dynamic.

  On board the Atkis, Mia meets Char, Char’s partner Alma, Alma’s rambunctious niece Jules, and their mysterious friend Elliot. As the comic progresses, Mia’s background story emerges. At her boarding school, Mia fell in love with Grace. The comic articulates the joy of young love and the gut-wrenching history of their separation. The two storylines quietly progress until eventually meeting again, when Mia joins the Aktis, and when the crew helps her reconnect with Grace.

  ON A SUNBEAM
  Image courtesy of Tillie Walden.
  Why have I become so emotional over such a relatively happy story of young love and space adventure? While on the surface, the comic is happy, the quality of the narrative, the artwork, and the bittersweet moments between lovers old and young, is overwhelmingly lovely. Walden’s work reminds readers that comics — elusive as the medium may be — is a striking art form that can capture the depth and power of human emotion. Additionally, Walden’s dedication to telling stories about young queer people should not be undervalued.

  Journey Into the Sublime
  As a term of art, the Sublime is a slippery name for something that inspires awe to a point of terror mixed with profound pleasure. In literary fields, Longinus usually gets the credit for early definitions. However, later works by Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, also creatives during the romantic period modified the aesthetic mood’s definition. For the sake of generalization, the Sublime attempts to describe an aesthetic, moral, or metaphysical experience that goes beyond description. It is immeasurable, and the drastic incalculability of the experience is what produces the awe and fear.

  ON A SUNBEAM
  Image courtesy of Tillie Walden.
  But, skeptics will ask, how can a comic be Sublime? Walden’s webcomic can be read within the Sublime mood as a result of both the artwork and writing. However, the best example of the Sublime at work is in Walden’s land- and skyscapes. For instance, in the gymnasium, Mia plays a space-age Quidditch-like game. The small fish-shaped ships chase “planets” — small specs of stardust — around the huge rooms. These bright sunset-shaded specs fill the void of black like the night sky. This motif is often reflected in backdrops to Mia’s scenes with Grace as well as her friends on the Aktis.

  Other landscapes are the buildings the Aktis crew restores, as well as the striking mountain landscape of Grace’s home planet, The Staircase. The Staircase in particular defies description. The planet’s terrain contains towering red rock pillars and unique magical creatures. Although it is beautiful, it is also dangerous and somewhat desolate. The magical animals are both beautiful and very threatening. Due to human interference, the colonizers of the planet isolated themselves from all outside contact for generations. As a result, the people there are both rugged and mysterious. Taken together, The Staircase embodies the Sublime.

  ON A SUNBEAM
  Image courtesy of Tillie Walden.
  The Colors of Emotions
  In each landscape, there is a sense of endlessness, as well as a mild threat of the unknown. However, the reassuring sunset colors make the spaces almost comforting. The time spent on the ship is laced with purples and yellows that transition into the blue of Mia’s teenage years.

  Walden’s artwork uses a lot of negative space to convey meaning. The figures appear to rise out of the darkness in fiery colors fitting the mood of the characters and the moment. While Mia and Grace are together, the blues and yellows suspend them in the feeling of timelessness. As Mia grows up, the bright sunshine yellow is there to draw her back into the present. Orange is a powerful color on The Staircase, both as part of the natural landscape and the subtle warning of possible danger.

  Walden’s talent for color and movement puts the poetry of her narrative into graceful form. As the comic moves forward, readers can almost feel the wind on the crew’s faces as they journey on the Staircase. At other times, the warm sunlight gives readers a chance to bask in the comic alongside the characters. The artwork invites the readers to have a physical relationship with the comic, making the emotions feel all the more powerful.

  ON A SUNBEAM
  Image courtesy of Tillie Walden.
  ON A SUNBEAM: The Universes of Love and Loss
  The vast spaces through which Mia travels alongside her ragtag crew of friends mirror the emotional spaces with which Walden grapples in ON A SUNBEAM. With stunning attention, Walden captures what it feels like to look at another person and see a whole universe of possibilities.

  Moreover, she shows how painful it is when opportunities are lost. That is what ON A SUNBEAM does exceptionally well: the comic masterfully depicts that feeling of loving someone so much it hurts. It’s not just between Mia and Grace, whose young love is sweet, naive, and very nearly lost. It is also the romantic love between Alma and Char, as well as the filial affection between Alma and Jules. Finally, Walden emphasizes the love between friends.

  I promise it’s not as trite as it sounds. In fact, Walden’s writing is sincere, but not without humor and joy. While most of the characters are soft-spoken, Jules speaks with a contemporary vernacular, somewhat breaking the spell of Walden’s scenes and providing much-needed breaks from the enchantment. However, Walden carefully acknowledges the importance of characters like Jules, pointing out her internal strength and endurance on several occasions.

  Much of Walden’s work is reminiscent of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince. Like the French children’s book, figures alone on floating islands called “planets” fill the pages of ON A SUNBEAM. The little prince also left his planet to explore the world and experience love and loss. A bittersweet story of friendship and love is at the heart of both works.

  No Man’s Land: Queering Space
  Outside of the aesthetic mood, ON A SUNBEAM is a fascinating science-fiction piece. Walden’s exclusion of men in the plot allows her to focus on homosocial bonds between women. However, Walden is very protective of queer identities in general. Elliot, the only nonbinary character, uses they/them pronouns. In a very heartwarming scene, Jules comes to Elliot’s defense by correcting their temporary boss who refuses to acknowledge Elliot’s identity. Other than this scene, the comic understates gender identity and homosexuality.

  For queer readers, ON A SUNBEAM creates a space that prioritizes respect for queer identities. Moreover, Walden’s universe erases socially-assigned gender roles. For example, Alma is both engineer, pirate, and mother figure. Mia is an imperfect student who loves sports and caring for her friends. ON A SUNBEAM is refreshingly post-gender in many ways, yet nevertheless refuses to essentialize identity or dismiss diversity.

  ON A SUNBEAM
  Image courtesy of Tillie Walden.
  Feeling Catharsis
  <>. Towards the end of the comic, readers, like me, may feel bereft that the story ends. However, the comic stays with you once it’s over. And it is not for lack of catharsis. Indeed, Walden’s comic follows the arc of Mia’s character as she explores love and loss, providing enchanting universes of adventure and mystery. Readers will be swept along with the crew of the Atkis as they sail through space.

  ON A SUNBEAM will be available in book form from First Second Books October 2, 2018.

• The Verge
  https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/21/13299966/tille-walden-on-a-sunbeam-webcomic
  Word count: 570

  On a Sunbeam is a must-read comic about boarding schools in space
  1
  By Andrew Liptak@AndrewLiptak Oct 21, 2016, 10:00am EDT
  SHARE

  Tillie Walden
  Every now and again, there’s a comic that will stop you dead in your tracks and consume your time until you take in every last page and dialogue bubble. That’s the case with Tillie Walden’s fantastic, ongoing webcomic, On A Sunbeam.

  Hailing from Texas, Walden recently graduated from the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont, and just began publishing a new webcomic, On a Sunbeam. Four installments in, and it’s clear that this is a beautiful comic that has a ton of potential. The story follows a girl named Mia after she’s assigned to a spaceship and tasked with rebuilding old structures, while the story flashes back to her past.

  Tillie Walden
  "Sam Alden is a big inspiration," Walden told The Verge in an email. "I find his work very atmospheric and that definitely played a part in On A Sunbeam." Alden is best known for It Never Happened Again, Wicked Chicken Queen, and Lydian, and also for his work on Cartoon Network's Adventure Time. She recounted other influences, such as Canadian artist Jillian Tamaki and Irish novelist Tana French. "[French] is a crime writer and there isn’t actually any crime in the comic, but the way [she] writes girls and their relationships with schools and vocations was a huge influence."

  Walden noted that she first inks the comic by hand with a fountain pen straight onto bristol board before scanning the page onto her computer, where she uses photoshop to add in the colors. "I normally work in batches — so I’ll ink a bunch of pages at once then color a bunch later."

  Tillie Walden
  Walden noted that the comic came about from two sources. The first was due to her experiences at a "boarding school for summer camp when I was a teenager," a place she likened to an island on its own in the world. The second was her fascination with old buildings and architecture. "So both of those ideas kind of melded together for me to make this story."

  Each installment of On A Sunbeam uses an interesting framing angle: one part is set in the present, while the second is set in the past, exploring Mia’s days at a space-based boarding school. "I don’t think I wanted Mia to be an obvious character," Walden explained. "I didn’t want her roots and her growth to be apparent right off the bat. And I do have big plans in future chapters for how these two stories connect, because they do have a direct connection (which will be discovered later on.)"

  Tillie Walden
  As to what that future entails, Walden isn’t saying, but she noted that her initial plot has since changed quite a bit. "Basically, I know the ending. I know exactly what the end is going to look like, I even know the last words of the story." What is for certain however, is that things will get bigger. "I’ve introduced the world that Mia is in currently and things are going to shake up and expand. The road ahead is not a comfortable, simple one."

• Yes Homo
  http://yeshomo.net/on-a-sunbeam/
  Word count: 965

  On A Sunbeam
  A comic by Tillie Walden
  By Wisp. From January 21, 2017. 7 Comments
  A+
  The Verdict
  <>. I can't recommend it highly enough.
  There are interesting layers of meaning to the word “soft”. In one sense, it can mean comfortable, inviting, pleasant to touch. In another, it conveys instead looseness, a lack of structure, or a yielding quality. These connotations have an unspoken gendered quality to them – “soft” is code, in so many ways, for “feminine”, and whether something being soft is a good or bad thing betrays much about the speaker’s attitude towards femininity. As a case in point, whenever a dude dismisses something as “soft scifi”, I get the sense that he prefers scifi that follows strict rules, that doesn’t deviate from real-world scientific theories, that dispenses with ooey-gooey trivialities like “romance” and “feelings”, and that he would call these things “hard scifi”.

  This seems normal.
  Tillie Walden’s On A Sunbeam is not for that guy. This is a comic that is proud of its softness, and with good reason. A story of young love, boarding school, construction work, and leaving the small town you grew up in, Sunbeam feels in many ways like something familiar. But<>, familiar elements take on strange and wondrous new life.

  Ell’s cute.
  Mia is fresh out of high school when she gets a job doing deep-space building restoration, joining a crew consisting of curt foreman Alma, shy captain Char, silent technician Elliot, and ebullient iconoclast Jules, travelling in a koi-shaped starship to fix up old buildings free-floating out in the abyss. It’s a lush and dreamlike setting peppered with beautiful and inexplicable background elements and following a set of rules that only Walden knows. Windows open harmlessly to space, train tracks stretch between planets, gigantic cats play and hunt among the stars, and gravity doesn’t exist except when it does. It’s delicious and odd and I’ve never seen its like.

  Walden’s hand-lettering is so tiny and impeccable!
  But as bizarre as the imagery might be to a reader, for Mia fixing up the abandoned temple of a forgotten space religion is just a regular blue-collar job, and we get the sense that she found herself here because it was her only option – though exactly what bridges she burned to end up here are left mysterious. Whatever her mistakes, the bond she forms with her new teammates allows her to forget them… for a time.

  This pacing!!
  And here the narrative splits, flashing back to Mia’s freshman year at Cleary’s School for Girls, a facsimile of a prototypical earthbound boarding school but transposed to the vastness of space. Here we begin to see how Mia might’ve fucked things for herself: she’s a whip-tongued rulebreaker, an abrasive peer, and a mediocre student. She’s also fierce, stubborn, loyal and driven—but not always in constructive ways. When she meets the quiet, studious Grace in detention, the two girls begin to form a stuttering friendship that’s as familiar as your own awkward memories of middle school. Mia sees in Grace a kindred spirit—a fellow delinquent—but Grace’s rebellion is still, purposeful, and hidden under her serious mien, so she scorns Mia’s attention. At first.

  I’m still not sure if it’s actually magic or not.
  The dynamic between the two girls and their slowly blossoming love is at once joyous and painful to watch, because it’s interrupted by regular flash-forwards to Mia’s present, a time when Grace is nowhere to be seen. What happened? How fresh is that heartbreak? And was the breakup due to mundane incompatibility, or were they crossed by the stars?

  (I’ll give you a hint: this comic has a LOT of stars.)

  SO PRETTY i mean oh no i hope Mia’s okay.
  Sunbeam‘s quiet tone makes its scenes of action all the more immediate and urgent. We see Alma and Char in their old job—smuggling people out of an isolated, xenophobic pseudoplanet called The Staircase, their ship pursued by horseback vigilantes. We see Cleary’s big sport, flux—a scifi calvinball played with bumper-car-sized spaceships—and we see Mia and Grace sneak into the flux stadium for an ill-fated joyride. We see Mia nearly fall to her death when she stumbles into an off-limits wing of the building they’re repairing. The way Walden renders each of these moments is so understated that they feel like slow motion, each second suspended by piano-wire tension, yet at the same time they feel sleepy, even distant, as if only a dream from which Mia is about to wake.

  It’s also a quitting-your-job power fantasy.
  That, I think, is the reason On A Sunbeam speaks to me so deeply. We’ve all fucked up so bad at some point that we felt like we were stuck in a nightmare. Sunbeam is an escapist fantasy for that feeling, where our fuckups are just dreams. And maybe we can’t wake up from them, but in the end they’re not so bad. Even at our lowest point, there are people—friends, strangers, found family—who still value us, still love us, and still want to help. And even tragedies and mistakes can lead to incredible adventures.

  Final Verdict: A staggering work that is at once high-minded poetry and delightful, satisfying pulp. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

• Maia A Little More
  http://maiaandalittlemoore.com/index.php/2016/12/04/book-review-i-love-this-part-tillie-walden/
  Word count: 326

  DECEMBER 4, 2016 BY MAIA MOORE
  Book Review: i love this part (Tillie Walden)
  Publisher: Avery Hill Publishing

  Pages: 68

  Release Date: November 13th 2015

  Summary (from Goodreads):

  Two girls in a small town in the USA kill time together as they try to get through their days at school.

  They watch videos, share earbuds as they play each other songs and exchange their stories. In the process they form a deep connection and an unexpected relationship begins to develop.

  Review:

  This is my first review in a long time. With NaNoWriMo last month and going back to work, I’ve not had much time for reading or blogging. But I did find a few minutes to sit and read this little gem, which Nathan picked up for me at Thought Bubble this year.

  I was a little worried about writing this review, as this is one of those books where I feel there’s probably so much more to it that I haven’t got, and I’ll just sound stupid when I review it. But oh well, I’m doing it anyway!

  This is a short coming of age love story between two girls in a small USA town. The sparse dialogue tells the story succinctly and also makes it kind of haunting. The art is simple and stunning and stays with you when you’ve finished reading. The two girls appear as giants at first, towering over buildings and mountains as they are consumed by their developing feelings for each other. As their relationship gets more complicated, the world shrinks around them.

  This was a really quick read, but one I can see myself returning to lots.<> and sentences. I look forward to reading more of Walden’s work.

• School Library Journal
  http://www.teenlibrariantoolbox.com/2018/01/book-review-i-love-this-part-by-tillie-walden/
  Word count: 329

  Book Review: I Love This Part by Tillie Walden
  JANUARY 30, 2018 BY AMANDA MACGREGOR LEAVE A COMMENT
  Publisher’s description
  Two girls in a small town in the USA kill time together as they try to get through their days at school.

  They watch videos, share earbuds as they play each other songs and exchange their stories. In the process they form a deep connection and an unexpected relationship begins to develop.

  In her follow up to the critically acclaimed The End of Summer, Tillie Walden tells the story of a small love that can make you feel like the biggest thing around, and how it’s possible to find another person who understands you when you thought no one could.

  Amanda’s thoughts
  love this partI was sent this by Avery Hill Publishing, in the UK. This is a hardcover rerelease of Walden’s 2015 book. It’s still available in the US in paperback and comes out in March in hardcover.

  This book will take you all of five minutes to read, but the art is lovely and the brief story is heartbreaking. The little summary up there tells you all there is to know about the sparse story. While the narrative is spare, the expansive art, full of cities and outdoor landscapes and open spaces, contributes so much to the tone and feel of this short look at love and heartbreak. This is the kind of book that, for older readers, will make you think of breathtaking and devastating first love—how it encompassed everything, how every connection felt so significant, and how it could hurt like nothing you could imagine.<< Younger readers experiencing their first crush or heartbreak will see themselves reflected>> in this brief, beautiful look at love. Emotionally resonant despite its brevity.

  Review copy courtesy of the publisher

  ISBN-13: 9781910395325
  Publisher: Avery Hill Publishing
  Publication date: 03/01/2018

• Lesbary
  http://lesbrary.com/2016/09/14/susan-reviews-i-love-this-part-by-tillie-walden/
  Word count: 1216

  Susan reviews "i love this part" by Tillie Walden
  Posted on September 14, 2016 by danikaellis — 1 Comment ↓
  iltp1_0915

  i love this part is a graphic novel by Tillie Walden, which effectively serves as snapshots of the romance and relationship between two American schoolgirls. It was described to me as a sweet queer romance… Which is half right.

  For the most part, it’s simple and straightforward. The two girls are in love, and spend their days doing homework together or listening to music and playing on their computers and talking about their families and hopes for the future! There are some really interesting style choices here though. For example, the girls aren’t actually named for most of the book; I’ve been calling them Elizabeth and Rae based off a panel showing Elizabeth’s email inbox towards the end, but that might not actually be right. The spelling and capitalisation sometimes becomes text-speak during dialogue in a way that I think is deliberate but can’t be sure of. But the format of the story is what’s really novel; it’s not structured as a traditional comic! It’s a collection of one-page illustrations that tell a story individually and sequentially, and by necessity it’s done slowly and in pieces.

  On the topic of the art; it’s pretty good! It’s predominantly monochromatic, with purple or grey washes for colour. The application of colour feels thematic to me — the flashbacks to how Elizabeth and Rae met and grew close are in grey, with more purple creeping in the closer they get to each other. The backgrounds are really well done; whether it’s nature or buildings, the backgrounds are really detailed and well put together. The art does some really cool things with scale as well — when Elizabeth and Rae are happy and together, they’re drawn like giants, doing their homework against the rooftops of buildings and leaning against mountains to listen to music. It read to me as a good visual way of representing how much bigger their emotions make them feel, or possibly how everything that isn’t them seem smaller and less important. (I have to admit, I really enjoy how, despite there being no other people visible when the girls are together — there are people before they get together, but after that they’re a world of two — the art still makes them feel like they’re part of the world; this change of scale and positioning contributes to that.) The way that both girls seem to shrink or the world gets bigger as the story goes on is such a good continuation of this theme. And the use of empty or silent panels (landscapes with no people, or panels of the girls not talking) works well to show time passing and contrast the spaces Elizabeth and Rae filled with each other.

  Where the Much of the characterisation is handled in the same way — we learn that Elizabeth is Jewish, for example, and Rae has a stepmother she doesn’t get on with, that both of the girls play music and love instruments — but that information is parcelled out in dribs and drabs. They’re both believable teenage girls! And their love for music is really clear, even though we’re not told what music they listen to; it’s not like The Less Than Epic Adventures of TJ and Amal where the songs they’re listening to are as important as what’s going on in the page, but music is part of how Elizabeth and Rae bond and relate to each other and show their feelings, and it’s really cute.

  But I need to explain that “half right”, don’t I. There will be spoilers from here-on out, I’m afraid, so for anyone who wants to go into the book mostly unspoiled: I have some mixed feelings about this book, based on the second half of it, but everyone lives. Most of it is the very sweet, peaceful story with a cute romance that I was promised! I just don’t think that the last third of it lives up to that.

  See, about a third of the way through, cracks start showing in Elizabeth and Rae’s relationship. There are panels where neither of them appear (the time passing that I mentioned earlier), or where they fight about boundaries. There’s a panel where they ask each other “Do you think we’ll ever be able to tell anyone?” and conclude “Probably not,” There are panels of Elizabeth waiting for Rae, asking if she’ll be there soon — and Rae never replying. All of which culminates in Rae breaking up with Elizabeth.

  Points to Tillie Walden; <> she<< handled the relationship and its ending is wrenching>>. The panels of them arguing, and the panels of them after the break-up are genuinely affecting and thoughtful. Tillie Walden makes good choices with how she handles it; both girls are clearly broken-hearted, even Rae, and the choice she made to have the pages of them at their happiest while they were together facing the panels where they’re sobbing after they’re broken up is really effective. (Yes, guess where the titlular panel falls.) Plus, everything about it — including Rae sending a mixtape! — rings as plausible to me. But for however well it’s handled, I have two major problems with this. The first is that I am really ready for people to stop trying to sell me on queer romances where the main couple don’t make it to the end for whatever reason. We did our time on that trope, I am ready for it to be laid to rest! The second is why they break up.

  See, Rae instigates the break-up because “I’m not… Like you. This — this is wrong.” And even if it’s later clarified a little more (I’m sorry. I didn’t want to hurt you. but im just not ready for this rn” [sic]. And for some reason — perhaps the space of format of the book was a limit — that’s just… Left there. There’s no rebuttal, there’s no exploration, there is just a teenage girl whose <> is cutting her heart to ribbons, and the story leaves her there. No matter how well i love this part handles everything else, that is disappointing.

  I honestly have difficulty summing up how I feel about this one. On a technical and emotional level, I can’t fault it. The art and the way it handles its characters emotions are pretty good, and I really enjoyed the way it presented the story it was telling! However, the story that it was telling was one that is really familiar to me in its beats and structure, and no matter how well done it is, I’m not sure I need that story again.

  Susan is a library assistant who uses her insider access to keep her shelves and to-read list permanently overflowing. She can usually be found writing for Hugo-nominated media blog Lady Business or bringing the tweets and shouting on twitter.

• Broken Frontier
  http://www.brokenfrontier.com/the-end-of-summer-tillie-walden-avery-hill-publishing/
  Word count: 1169

  The End of Summer – An Astonishingly Confident Debut Graphic Novel from Remarkable New Talent Tillie Walden
  by Andy Oliver September 9, 2015
  28
  0

  EndofSummerbannersmall_0915I have been particularly fortunate in the years that I have been writing ‘Small Pressganged’ here at Broken Frontier to be able to not just cover a number of astonishing new talents but also follow their creative development as their styles evolve and they become more confident in their storytelling craft. Seldom, though, have I encountered an artist whose debut print work is so assured in composition, and so mature in realisation, as Tillie Walden’s is in the pages of her first full-length graphic novel The End of Summer. The book is brought to us – you will be unsurprised to hear from that build-up – by that always impressive micropublishing force Avery Hill Publishing.

  endofsummercoversmall_0215While The End of Summer is ostensibly a dark fantasy tale, its dramatic roots lie in very recognisable themes of familial conflict and identifiable fears. Set within the walls of a sprawling castle that is almost a world unto itself, it follows the degenerating relationships between a well-to-do family. It’s told largely from the perspective of one of the youngest children, the ailing Lars, whose sickly condition means he relies on riding his giant cat Nemo as a mode of transport.

  When we join this cast of characters they are preparing to close themselves away from the three-year winter that is enveloping the castle’s outside boundaries in its freezing grip. Lars, tended by his faithful servant Hector, is convinced he will not live long enough to see this bitter season’s end. A large proportion of the narrative is focused on his attempts to deal with the tedium of the clan’s confinement, his failing health and his close but troubled bond with his insubordinate and wilful twin sister Maja who is determinedly rebelling against the strange conventions of the household.

  As the months progress the extreme personalities and fractured interrelationships of this strained family unit and their own ways of dealing with their enforced exile within the castle’s walls come to the fore. These include a disturbed and obsessive brother whose mania will lead him down a very twisted path, a mother who must battle to hold their lives together, and an older brother and heir finding love for the first time. As tensions grow and revelations build up, events proceed to their <>…

  Eosp1_0915 Eosp2_0915 Eosp3_0915

  The End of Summer is by no means a straightforward reading experience. Walden has no reservations about making her audience work a little harder to understand every layered nuance, to comprehend the full implications of each situation, and to discern the motivations behind all the characters’ actions in their broadest sense. In this regard this is a graphic novel that doesn’t simply reward re-reading… it positively demands it. Intriguingly, though, rather than detracting from the experience this obscurely constructed storytelling style is actually a thematic boon mirroring, as it does, the complexities of the cast’s personalities and the child’s eye view of many of the events depicted.

  The taut atmosphere and that air of tragic predestination that permeates the pages of The End of Summer is one of the book’s greatest dramatic triumphs and that’s in no small part due to the story’s setting. Walden’s elaborately designed castle interiors have a haunting quality that is fascinatingly contradictory in the response it elicits from the reader; both echoing and cathedral-like in their expansive environs and yet claustrophobic and imposing at the same time. Allied with her careful attention to the overlapping sub-plots of the individual family members, as they escalate towards their inescapable conclusions, it lends a sense of inexorable doom to the proceedings.

  EOStimesmall_0915When I interviewed Walden earlier this year at Broken Frontier here she spoke candidly about the autobiographical side to the story, the way that Lars and Maja’s connection was drawn from her relationship with her own twin brother, and how her past health issues had fed into her depiction of Lars’ convalescence. She concluded by saying “It’s funny for me to think of the book as fantasy, because even though it takes place in an otherworldly place and it doesn’t resemble modern life, it’s ultimately a very personal story for me.” Any reader with even a passing familiarity with her comics will be aware of how that propensity for imbuing her work with direct autobio elements has lent such a raw honesty and empathetic authenticity to her back catalogue to date.

  Walden’s debut full-length work speaks so articulately to the reader not just because it’s a delicate character study, or through its grimly fantastical fantasy realm, but simply because there’s so much going on here that is instantly relatable, despite being dressed in the trappings of the bizarre and the extravagantly grotesque. It’s a comic that will take you back to childhood fears – <> – and immerse you once more in those feelings of helplessness and powerlessness that characterise our younger days.

  For many who have discovered Tillie Walden from the growing press profile she’s had this year, though, it will be her stunningly crafted visuals full of intricate detail and beautiful pacing that will have been the immediate draw to her work, and The End of Summer will not disappoint on that score. But beyond that gorgeous and ornately realised style there’s the most innate understanding of the form on show here in terms of narrative transitions and page layouts. Just look at the example above right of her depiction of the passage of time that turns an abstract concept into almost a brooding character in its own right, or her panel design in the scenes of Lars at death’s door early in the story (below), or any number of juxtapositions of recurring motifs throughout with the events they pertain to.

  EOSbanner3small_0915

  This book is a major coup for Avery Hill Publishing who will, no doubt, be able to say in years to come that they launched the career of one of the medium’s future foremost practitioners. You’re unlikely to read anything else this year that so fully manipulates the pure mechanics of the comics form to the degree that The End of Summer does. It really is that remarkable a piece of work and Tillie Walden really is that remarkable a prospect.

  For more on the work of Tillie Walden visit her website here and follow her on Twitter here. You can buy The End of Summer from Avery Hill’s online store here.

  For regular updates on all things small press follow Andy Oliver on Twitter here.

• Forbidden Planet
  http://forbiddenplanet.blog/2015/review-the-end-of-summer/
  Word count: 996

  REVIEW: THE END OF SUMMER
  Published On November 5, 2015 | By Richard Bruton | Comics, Reviews
  The End Of Summer

  By

  Avery Hill

  the-end-of-summer-cover

  The End Of Summer is the debut graphic novel by Tillie Walden, a young artist currently studying at the Centre for Cartoon Studies in Vermont. She’s not been drawing for very long, but there’s no way you could tell that, as her talent is simply extraordinary, and her début is pretty much the best thing I’ve read all year.

  There’s a fabulous story on the press release of Avery Hill first contacting her in 2014 to do something with them and her very sweetly, very sensibly, declining their offer to finish High School. Yes. She’s that young. Having said that, in the intervening year and a bit, I’ve no doubt she’s made incredible leaps in her work.

  So, a debut graphic novel, the longest thing the artist’s done to date. Inside she tells a tale of twins, Lars and his sister Maja, it’s a beautiful and poignant tale. A massive fantasy, but in the closeness of the twins there’s a lot of autobiographical elements from Walden and her own twin brother. Best of the year? Well I reckon it will make the list.

  It opens on a secluded castle, uncertain time, but we’re drawn to thinking of the past, with the beautiful, ornate buildings and the period dress. A young boy, obviously ill, the doctor’s ministrations something he’s more than used to.

  “I’m going to die before the winter ends.
  It’s my heart.”

  Those are the opening lines. It should give you some idea of the mood of The End Of Summer, that sense of a young life cut short, of lost potential.

  And then this..

  end-of-summer-tillie-walden02

  Now. I have to admit, when I first read this, my eye was so taken with the ornate surroundings, the high ceilings, the spectacular glass walls, the luxurious four-poster bed… that I actually missed, for just a few moments, the massive cat curled up in the corner.

  Yes, that’s Nemo. The cat. Although the name, the beautiful vaulted ceilings, the four poster bed, the sheer openess of the rooms certainly has something of the spirit of Winsor McCay about it. And there’s a Game Of Thrones epic sense to it as well, even though it all takes place within the confines of the giant home. All takes place in a secluded castle, ahead of a winter meant to stretch out for three years, the idea of being on the cusp of something terrible all through the book. It comes out with Lars, the terribly ill child, bored and trapped inside, it comes out with the family, the confinement bringing out all the simmering bitterness so common in families. A confinement that will see things change, as adults grow older, tensions simmer, children grow to adulthood, all the problems of adolescence magnified by confinement.

  Page after page we see the mood shift, we see a drifting ennui take hold, then tensions build, the year passes and things come to a shocking head, all goes wrong, as you always felt it would.

  end-of-summer-tillie-walden09

  Walden’s storytelling is superb all through, her control, panel to panel, beat to beat, page to page is quite breathtaking. A set of pages early on set the tone, with Lars narrating a choice series of moments, the art picking up on them and expanding them. It’s quite beautiful You want a comparison that came to me immediately, the same sense of control over time across unfolding panels? I’d say Bryan Talbot in Luther Arkwright. Completely different in tone, in content, but the skill, the breathtaking skill is the same. The compression in panel to panel transitions is excellent, perfectly establishing the timescale, the end of summer that takes so long, a long, long three years confined.

  Within a mere sixteen pages, the entire tone and mood of The End Of Summer has been set in stone, all the ennui coming through, that sense that three years of this, day after day, nothing more to do than explore these rooms, no matter how huge they’ll run out of mystery long before the end of winter, the fleeting joy of play will be long gone, the niceties of family wont last. The end of summer leading to something life-changing, terrible, heart-breaking.

  There’s a tightening in your stomach from that point on, a sense of impending calamity, something that you can feel, palpable, driven, and it’s all down to Walden’s incredible control of things.

  end-of-summer-tillie-walden06

  end-of-summer-tillie-walden07

  What makes it so incredible is the speed in which she’s put it together, something you can see on the page. She works fast, in pen direct to the page, her line dominated by the flowing penmanship.

  According to the Avery Hill PR that came with the book Walden’s idea from the book came from her “obsessive need for detail and my twin brother. We’re extremely close, and our relationship is where my main characters came from. And I wanted to make a place that was everything I wanted. Huge rooms, oversized cats, indoor pools and playgrounds, and intricate patterns over everything. Basically, my ideal home.”

  The End Of Summer really is<< that rarest of things, a debut that springs fully formed and>> as<< near to a perfect read >>as makes no odds. An epic tale of sorrow and loss, of growing up, of human nature. It’s a book that not only rewards repeated reads but pretty much demands it. Excellent and highly recommended.

• Publishers Weekly
  https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-910395-26-4
  Word count: 200

  The End of Summer
  Tillie Walden. Avery Hill , $18 trade paper (108p) ISBN 978-1-910395-26-4

  MORE BY AND ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
  It’s hard to discuss this graphic novel without bringing up the youth of its creator, who was only 19 when she drew it as a side project during her schooling at the Center for Cartoon Studies, but this dreamy, luminous fantasy would be impressive coming from an artist of any age. In a world where winter lasts for three years, a royal family holes up in its impossibly vast snowbound palace for the duration, trying and failing to stave off cabin fever. The youngest son, sickly Lars, falls back on the support of his giant cat, Nemo, as his twin sister rebels against their hemmed-in life. <>, her delicately drawn characters dwarfed by cathedral-sized rooms of tapestries, sculptures, huge baths, and piles of eiderdown quilts. Her art suggests great past artists of dreams, such as Winsor McCay and Moto Hagio, but is fully her own. Understated and achingly beautiful, this book sticks in the mind and heart. (Nov.)
  DETAILS
  Reviewed on: 12/05/2016
  Release date: 10/15/2016

• Newsarama
  https://www.newsarama.com/31503-best-shots-review-the-end-of-summer.html
  Word count: 694

  Best Shots Review: THE END OF SUMMER 'A Beautiful Moment That Breaks Our Heart'
  By Scott Cederlund, Best Shots Reviewer
  October 11, 2016 12:30pm ET
  "The End of Summer" cover
  Credit: Tillie Walden

  Credit: Tillie Walden
  The End of Summer
  Written and Illustrated by Tillie Walden
  Published by Avery Hill Publishing
  Review by Scott Cederlund
  ‘Rama Rating: 9 out of 10

  In describing the process of creating The End of Summer, Tillie Walden writes in the afterword, “So I started with three things: Twins. Cats. Architecture. And with those three words I built the story.” Her book tells the story of a sick boy, Lars, who lives in a really quite wonderful and mysterious house with his twin sister and their family. And to call their home a “house” is really underselling what it is. It’s more like a castle or even a mesmerizing fortress that protects the family from the three-year winter that is advancing on them. <>s with the cruelty of family.

  The End of Summer is part fantasy and part family drama. And both parts buttress each other as the fantasy that she creates develops the aristocracy of the family drama which gives the fantasy weight and meaning. Their home, a giant mansion with all of these wonderful little nooks and crannies, becomes another character in the book, another member of the family. The architecture is both a comforter and a threat to the Lars, his giant cat Nemo, and his twin sister Maja. It’s full of all of these wonders and things that would thrill any kid, almost like it’s a giant, indoor, Victorian amusement park. Lars rides around inside his home on Nemo. But the house is also a prison, as his family prepares to spend three years in it, protected from the winter.

  Within the many walls of this labyrinthine house, Walden sets up these complex and damaging family relationships. The sickly Lars is essentially trapped in this house with his family as they all begin to fall into a bit of madness. They are all essentially looking at a three-year imprisonment from the winter. Maja rebels against her parents; their brother Percy starts to become overly possessive of little figurines; their parents begin to chafe at their roles and moral responsibilities. Winter may be coming in this book but the madness is already here. Walden carefully paces out the many sins of the family, leading up to the sad breakup of everything Lars’ family was trying to protect.

  Visually, the family is quite literally fading from view throughout the book while the architecture gets more solid and permanent. Walden draws as much as she needs to in every panel and on each page to tell her story so sometimes her characters are well defined and sometimes they’re just a few marks, more than enough to suggest the mood or tone of the moment. As the book develops, she gets more confident in her drawing and storytelling, until her art is quite minimalistic towards the climax of the story. It’s as if the people are fading from this place and this time while the house, a monument to their existence, will long outlast them.

  In The End of Summer, it’s as if the house both protects the family while it picks away at them. As a reader, it looks like this great and magical place that would just be a fantastic place to live in but you can quickly see how the madness sets in. Tillie Walden creates this space that should be safe but the pressures it and the coming winter press on Lars and his family forces this maddening change in the family. “Twins. Cats. Architecture.” Walden’s story takes this fragile, unhealthy family and places them in a fortress, protecting them from the winter but traps them with the rest of their family.