45 Days Of CCS, #17: Pat Leonhard

I've been watching Pat Leonhard develop his graphic novel Margo since sitting next to him during a class at CCS when I visited for Industry Day in 2018. Margo is a horror-comedy-fantasy novel that is a cross between "The Monkey's Paw," Shawn Of The Dead, aliens, monsters, ancient civilizations, and much more. Part 1 is the first 70 or so pages of a story that's over 200 pages. Despite the fact that the book turns out to be an epic, at its heart it's the story of the friendship between Margo (a reanimated zombie girl) and Fran (the weird museum-obsessed kid who comes up with a lot of great plans. 

Leonhard loves to create double-takes for readers. The first comes when we meet Margo, and the reader realizes that she's a zombie or ghoul, with part of her face eaten away. She is also a perfectly typical girl. The second comes after she bites her half-sister Becky, and the reader realizes that Margo has accidentally turned her into a flesh-craving zombie. Leonhard unspools the plot slowly so as to focus on mean girl dynamics and to introduce Margo's cruelly buffoonish father Mortimer. It is revealed that Margo's mother is an archeologist who discovered a real-life monkey's paw amid an ancient civilization. Mortimer stupidly uses the paw to make a wish, but the wishes are cursed--Margo dies as a result. He reluctantly brings her back from the dead, but she comes back as the undead, which leads to her mother being able to speak only in an ancient language, which lands her in a mental hospital. 

Leonhard has gone through a lot of permutations in order to make two key segments of the book not only readable, but wildly entertaining. Part of this is his clever use of color. For the segment that reveals the key scenes in the story "The Monkey's Paw," Leonhard uses a sepia tone designed to make the pages look like an old horror comic (except for one page, where he forgets to do this). For the scene where we learn why and how Margo's mother wound up in her situation, Leonhard uses a purple wash in an action-packed segment. Giving the reader a lot of narrative pipe while finding ways to keep it entertaining prevents the story from bogging down until it really blasts off halfway through. There are so many delightful little jokes, easter eggs, and other visual details that enhance what Leonhard is doing. The final version will be an absurd, action-oriented YA fantasy on the level of Mathew New's excellent Billy Johnson book.