We’re a month away from the release of my “debut graphic memoir” Murder Book!
It’s fun to say “debut” and “memoir” because we all know I am so self absorbed and will be writing literally so many memoirs.
I wanted to share with you this week an excerpt of Murder Book, some of the process that went into it, and my schedule at New York Comic Con this weekend if you want to come by and get an early copy of the book (plus stickers)!!
First of all, if you haven’t checked out www.hilarysmurderbook.com please do it NOW! My friend Mark Vigeant (you can hire him too!) designed this wonderful website, perfectly to my 1992 vision. Make sure to click around to all of the different pages and don’t forget to call the True Crime Hotline! I love to receive voicemails :)
Murder Book began as a process a few years ago, in the Spring of 2019 when I pitched a few ideas for a book to my agent and she was like “you absolutely need to follow this one and see where it leads you.” This one meaning, the “I love murder maybe I could draw about that??” one. And she was right! Once I started drawing I couldn’t stop. I had a million things I wanted to cram into the book. After drawing 70 pages of it with an additional proposal — and somehow getting part of that into The New York Times Sunday Book Review…
…we sold the book to Andrews McMeel around Christmas that year!!! Obviously, it was a dream come true. Soon after, I met my new lovely editor Allison Adler (we actually had lunch like a week before the world shut down, but that’s another story!) and I began to work on the book full time.
I went through a lot of the classic “I can’t do this” feelings, followed by “I can do this but just not… right… now” procrastinations before I was really able to begin on the book ( and the pandemic terror didn’t help at all). I had never written or drawn anything like this before. I’d spent several years drawing gags for The New Yorker and had began to draw longer stories for other publications on Medium (RIP Spiralbound), but was mostly putting diary comics up on Patreon because I got obsessed with the idea that I should never ever forget anything funny or weird that happened, therefore I must draw it all!!! (This is very exhausting and not super wise btw). My style that emerged in my diary comics is what led to the drawings you’ll see in Murder Book. They’re like structured chaos. There’s a story to follow, but there’s also so many tangents I go off on. It’s not unlike how I am in real life!
While I was mapping out Murder Book—which honestly, I’m not great at, I can sketch like 10 pages ahead at a time, but I’m not a person who will do a whole first draft and then go back and edit and THEN ink…that requires way more patience than I have—I wanted to read as many graphic memoirs as I could, to get a sense of what was out there, and what I’d been missing out on. I’d picked up a few books along the years but I had never really truly delved into the world of graphic memoirs (which I’m embarrassed to say) since I was always reading… you guessed it, true crime! But as I was collecting ideas for Murder Book, I read a lot of Julia Wertz, Liana Finck, Gabrielle Belle, Roz Chast (duh), Marisa Acocella, Vanessa Davis, Ruby Eliot, Ellen Forney and my dear friend Amy Kurzweil’s book The Flying Couch. I must say, women dominate this genre. I hate to gender things like this but I really do feel like we’re better at writing personal narratives. Suck it boys! Reading all of these women’s work was incredibly helpful in putting together my own story—and I highly recommend you reading their books as well!!
PROCESS
Not to say this is how everyone should do it, but this was my general approach to writing a book.
I found a big wooden box that I liked and named it the Murder Box. I began to fill it with scraps of paper. Any relevant ideas, thoughts, sketches, memories I had went in. I scoured through all my past sketchbooks and found any pages where I had drawn anything remotely related to the concept of true crime, murder stories, jokes my mother made about Dateline, and made photo copies of these so I would remember to include them into the book in some form.
Since this book was to be the story of me becoming a true crime junkie, I created several large maps that pin pointed moments in my life as they corresponded with prominent murder cases in the media. For awhile I felt like if I used really large paper I could let my ideas run wild more. Was this true? Who knows. The timeline I created on these pads helped to put together the chapter breakdown of the book.
Because I often have a hard time outlining and ideating at home, I bought some classic college ruled paper notebooks and would find different cafes to sit in to sketch out specific stories for the book while getting cracked out on coffee. My sketch outlines are truly horrific. They’re mostly stick people with really vague expressions and scribbled handwriting. When my editor asked if she could see the outlines before I would actually draw them I was like… lol no, I don’t think you’ll understand them.
Eventually those sketches became inks and those inks got scanned…
Finally, I would clean up stray marks in Procreate and add grey tones! For me, working on Procreate (or any digital platform) is the truly miserable point of the process. Though it’s nice to have mindless work because you can watch a million movies through it, I just hate staring at a screen.
I’m forgetting to mention the obvious process of “notes from editor” which would come in rounds every couple of months as I would deliver chapters. We would move pages around together, see what works, what doesn’t, what’s repetitive, what could be cut, what absolutely has to stay… And after your editor combs through and you think you’re really done, a copy editor will come in and remind you how horrible you are at punctuation. Before you know it, the book is due and you’re having a meltdown trying to finish all these new pages and your desk looks like this:
When you’re really done and you’ve dotted every I and added all the missing periods throughout your 320 page book, you hand the book in, and then completely panic because you don’t know what to do with yourself anymore!!!
SNEAK PEEK BABY!
Drum roll please!! Here is.. one of my favorite pages from Murder Book :)
A large focus of Murder Book is how true crime obsessions are not only largely female… they also seem to be inherited! Or at least it’s true for my family. It’s like a lineage of morbid curiosity. And also yes, my great grandmother was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s little sister. Unfortunately, she was very Catholic and didn’t approve of F. Scott and Zelda’s wild lifestyle, so she burned all his letters. Can you IMAGINE?! Anyway… I had fun drawing the different rooms of the matriarchs of my mother’s family. For my mother and my grandmother I knew exactly what to draw, but for Annabel I was truly guessing! Made an assumption that she was a simple, minimalist woman with one pair of shoes…realizing now I should’ve given her a rosary. *sigh*
I truly cannot believe that after all these years, Murder Book is going to be out in the public. I’m excited but also terrified everyone will think I’m… a bad person!? I have a dark sense of humor, ok!!! Please don’t hate me for it <3
NEW YORK COMIC CON BEGINS TONIGHT
I have a very limited number of early copies of Murder Book that I’ll be giving away for free at Booth #2928 if you say the magic word… JERRY ORBACH!
Thursday 4 - 7 PM
Friday 4 - 7 PM
Saturday 10 - 1 PM
Sunday 10 - 1:30 PM