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This is where members of the BeanCan Book Club get a full month’s worth of commentary before the rest of the internet! If you want even more video time-lapse commentary you can get that for as little as a dollar per month at Patreon.com/Freemoney If you want to read a comic about my comics journey Failing (to Quit) is available for free on most digital comics platforms and for sale in print at my store.

T9 Commentary:

The handwritten sheet within this image is one of the first pages I wrote in the story of Cloud Town during the only artist residency I've participated in as an artist (I’ve provided rough-and-tumble lodging to artists-in-residence many times but that’s another story). The sheet depicted is an essay Pen wrote about the history of the skateboard, one of the few popular "toys" invented by children. Supposedly the first skateboards were made by kids in France who were picking through rubble in the aftermath of a bombing during WWII. They affixed wheels from a broken roller skate to a plank of wood, and there you have it! The original Cloud Town pitch had a lot of pages of text here and there. I wanted to continue with the work I had been doing on my first hybrid novel A Film About Billy combining comics with prose. And my publisher seemed to be excited about it due to their success with Diary of A Wimpy Kid but later asked me to remove the text portions. This was a struggle because one page of prose is equivalent to 3-5 pages of comic storytelling so this was akin to a severe reduction in page count. This required me to rework the plot a great deal after the story had already been reduced to less than a third of its original size (I had pitched a trilogy). This is the only place that I was able to recycle one of those original written pages to at least add some ambiance, though I've found some readers are frustrated that they are unable to read the full essay! I have it somewhere... perhaps I'll dig it up one day. The idea to have Pen's dad work as a phone and tablet repairer was inspired by my life at the time. I had a bizarre accident where a strap on my backpack broke while I was biking home from teaching at the Young Writers' Institute, which caused a chain reaction that broke the front wheel of my bike, the screen of my laptop, and the screen of my phone all at the same time. Since I didn't have a lot of money I ordered the parts and taught myself to replace the screens myself. The front wheel, unfortunately, had to be replaced entirely.😅

I've always enjoyed the look of weekly labeled pill containers and thought they would be useful for organizing the little bits and bobs required for these kinds of repair jobs. I was also toying with the idea of marketing googly-eyed chrystals as a kind of new-age evolution of the pet rock. I still think that if I wanted to be a rich person that's the project I'd be working on now. 😁

T10 Commentary:

This page is one of the few that ended up staying pretty close to the way it was in my original pitch! Here they are side by side!

T11 Commentary:

Finally, we've hit some paneled story pages! Here’s another comparison between my final art and my pitch packet art!

This sequence follows my pitch closely, but as you can see the style is cleaner, which was something I needed to prove myself capable of before Abrams was willing to make an offer on the book, and you can also see I changed the pacing. This book became dense (as I've mentioned before) as the page limit shrank and my flexibility in using prose was reduced. All of these requests for edits were both challenging and exciting because, well, challenges are exciting!

At any rate, this little silly exchange is one I like quite a bit so I'm glad It made it into the book. It's unusual to have a book open without the main characters in sight, but I'm proud of how this page sets up the world in a way I never saw in a Kaiju story before. It takes its inspiration from real-life indignation some collectors of dinosaur scale models have at hearing their prized possessions called "toys" 😅

T12 Commentary:

Another final art page replaceing a double page spread from the pitch…

Here's another little example of re-compressed storytelling compared to my pitch. I took what was a double-page spread and shrunk it down to a third of a page. In the pitch, I used this time to place the world as slightly futuristic with a gag about a hacked "Mrs. Lunch" machine. You can see the art is cleaner in the finished version and I took this time to introduce Olive, our main character, and add a little foreshadowing. "The Coolest Kid in School" was originally a throw-away character I doodled to fill out the lunch line. I just wrote "the coolest kid in school" above him because it seemed funny. But I decided quickly that this kind of metal-Napoleon-Dynamite-looking guy I drew really would be the coolest kid in school, and tried to think of the different ways kids became popular in my school. One way that isn't in a lot of fiction (because it's not inherently dramatic) is by being confident and mature for their age. I decided those would be his likable qualities. It was my editor that really wanted to see Olive and TCKIS go on a date, but I guess we are getting ahead of ourselves. Just know that when I drew this page I had no idea how important this guy would become!

T13 Commentary:

Olive crushing ants was an element I added late in the game because I felt it helped readers understand what was going on much later in the book (if you’ve read it you know what I’m talking about), but that little shove in the background came straight out of the pitch. I don't know what it is about it, but I love that shove!

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading!

-Daniel McCloskey

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