Jessica Abel at the U-Dub Bookstore

On Friday, Seattle's University Bookstore hosted a meet-the-author event with Jessica Abel, ont he occasion of the release of the collected edition of La Perdida, a book about a young woman's turbulent stay in Mexico. We managed to show up late to the event, but caught the last 15 or 20 minutes of her Q and A session. She went into her writing process, where she starts with a dialogue-only script and then proceeds to break that down into pages and panels before doing any sort of thmubnail process, and her artistic influences for the book most notably Paul Pope, and his loose, brushy style. Like Pope, she work mainly in the inking stage, using pencils to rough in figures and guides before doing the heavy lifting with a brush. She also spoke about her upcoming projects, a textbook on comics co-written with her husband, Matt Madden; and a graphic novel about "vampires in love" titled Life Sucks.

It was a small but appreciative audience (except perhaps for the man up front who kept insisting, without provocation, "no habla espanol"...which was odd, considering the entire presentation was in english). Also in attendance was Seattle local Jason Lutes, of Berlin and Jar of Fools fame. So of course, I had to have a brief fanboy moment with him on the way out...

Picked up a copy of the gorgeous La Perdida hardcover while I was there, which is now signed and skethced in. I haven't had the chance to read it yet (and probably won't for a little while, having recently read the individual issues released by Fantagraphics). I do hear that there have been some changes from the original version, so it'll be interesting to compare against Serene's copies.

Anyways...looks like it's worth paying attention to the U. Bookstore's schedule of apeparances, as we've already missed Seth there, a couple of months ago. Seems like they have decent comics related events on a somewhat regular basis.