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I’ve been aware of this graphic novel for the last few months, and picked up a copy recently. Not having gotten a lot of graphic novels lately, it is still surprising to see good color printing, and good white paper as a matter of course, and of course a Scholastic logo.

The opening of the book is familiar. Makayla is a deeply creative person, with stories and ideas floating through her head all the time. What she doesn’t have is a good way to start expressing all this. This wasn’t me, but I certainly knew people like this.

She has another creative friend, more involved in drawing, but with trouble finding anything beyond single, spur-of-the-moment, illustrations to do.

So, they team up, start a school club, attract a few more creative types, and start learning how to make comics under the light tutelage of a friendly library media specialist (good school!).

The focus of the book changes as it goes. We start out with a character focus, where we get to know the characters, and deal with various struggles on both an artistic front and on a personal front. As we go, this largely drops by the wayside, and we get more involved in how comics work, and how to effectively communicate through them, to the point of the last sections being fourth-wall breaking to show off some of the hidden assumptions of the medium. This latter thread is present all the way from the beginning, as the characters try to wrestle with just what they’re doing, and how you’re “supposed” to do it.

In all, this book is not merely a collaboration of Raina Telgemeier and Scott McCloud, it is a collaboration of their own stories.

If you want more stories of the struggles of middle-school kids in graphic novel form, there’s plenty to choose from, including Telgemeier’s own books. If you want a discussion of how comics work as a medium, the atmosphere is much more rarefied, but the outstanding work is McCloud’s Understanding Comics, which is a book that will really make you think.

It is also the pair of them explicitly handing advice on to the next (and future) generation. You want to do art, make comics? Start a club, gather other people together and start pooling your individual talents! There’s a nice section on expressing emotion and body language which is more involved than Understanding Comics. And there’s very practical advice on how to put together mini-comics and start getting out there on an extremely local level. In other words the book is about how to get your enthusiasm up, start creating, and take your first steps into getting your ideas out there.