The 9-Lives

Some of you may recall me mentioning that I had been hired by Tokyopop to collaborate with Bayou, an Indonesian artist-creator, for a manga about catboys. It's now out: The 9-Lives, volume 1. In a time when alien cat-people with nine lives are made into "pets" (slaves) on Earth, a rebellious 9-Life named Conri gets emotionally entangled with a human named Adrian. (The name is a total coincidence. I had not yet met my boyfriend Adrian when I completed this project, and anyway Bayou created and named all the characters.)

I know some of you are interested in the ins and outs of manga creation, so here's the story of how a certain type of project-- a work-for-hire commission in which one person is given an existing story and characters, and then works off of that-- can work.

Bayou, the artist, submitted her art and a story synopsis. Tokyopop loved her art and story, but thought that she needed a collaborator for the script. Bayou speaks excellent English, but is not a native speaker or writer of it. They decided to hire a writer to turn her characters and story into a manga script written in fluent, idiomatic English.

I was given Bayou's characters and story synopsis. The first thing I did was take her very complex synopsis, which contained at least three volumes worth of story and backstory, and pull one volume worth of story from that. After some discussion with Bayou and the editor, Alexis Kirsch, I produced a synopsis for the first volume, and then wrote that into a script. Cue more discussion! (If I recall correctly, I was most interested in the possibility of the enslaved 9-Lives rebelling against their human overlords, Bayou was most interested in Conri's personal journey and changing understanding of humans, and Alexis was most interested in the relationship between Conri and Adrian.) And then we repeated the write-discuss-rewrite process.

When Bayou drew the art based on the script I gave her, she also rewrote the story and dialogue. One consequence of this was that what we originally had as the last chapter, in which Conri meets some 9-Life rebels and becomes a bad-ass martial artist, couldn't fit in this volume and became the first chapter of volume 2. But due to the general shake-ups at Tokyopop, the fate of volume 2 is now in question. Perhaps it will be published if volume 1 does well.

I think this was my first international collaboration. If you want to get the inside scoop on what that was like, Bayou has some hilarious omake on our creative process (and the ease of making excuses when your editor is on another continent) in the back of the book.

The 9-Lives

Some of you may recall me mentioning that I had been hired by Tokyopop to collaborate with Bayou, an Indonesian artist-creator, for a manga about catboys. It's now out: The 9-Lives, volume 1. In a time when alien cat-people with nine lives are made into "pets" (slaves) on Earth, a rebellious 9-Life named Conri gets emotionally entangled with a human named Adrian. (The name is a total coincidence. I had not yet met my boyfriend Adrian when I completed this project, and anyway Bayou created and named all the characters.)

I know some of you are interested in the ins and outs of manga creation, so here's the story of how a certain type of project-- a work-for-hire commission in which one person is given an existing story and characters, and then works off of that-- can work.

Bayou, the artist, submitted her art and a story synopsis. Tokyopop loved her art and story, but thought that she needed a collaborator for the script. Bayou speaks excellent English, but is not a native speaker or writer of it. They decided to hire a writer to turn her characters and story into a manga script written in fluent, idiomatic English.

I was given Bayou's characters and story synopsis. The first thing I did was take her very complex synopsis, which contained at least three volumes worth of story and backstory, and pull one volume worth of story from that. After some discussion with Bayou and the editor, Alexis Kirsch, I produced a synopsis for the first volume, and then wrote that into a script. Cue more discussion! (If I recall correctly, I was most interested in the possibility of the enslaved 9-Lives rebelling against their human overlords, Bayou was most interested in Conri's personal journey and changing understanding of humans, and Alexis was most interested in the relationship between Conri and Adrian.) And then we repeated the write-discuss-rewrite process.

When Bayou drew the art based on the script I gave her, she also rewrote the story and dialogue. One consequence of this was that what we originally had as the last chapter, in which Conri meets some 9-Life rebels and becomes a bad-ass martial artist, couldn't fit in this volume and became the first chapter of volume 2. But due to the general shake-ups at Tokyopop, the fate of volume 2 is now in question. Perhaps it will be published if volume 1 does well.

I think this was my first international collaboration. If you want to get the inside scoop on what that was like, Bayou has some hilarious omake on our creative process (and the ease of making excuses when your editor is on another continent) in the back of the book.