Outside the Box

Pete Stathis sets the tone for our latest Book Quarterly.

by Carolyn Huckabay

Give a boy a comic book and he'll read it for a day. But what happens if you teach him how to make one? If he's lucky — and mighty talented — he'll grow up to be like Pete Stathis, our Book Quarterly cover illustrator and well-known Philly graphic novelist.

We approached Stathis, whose Evenfall series has just become a Webcomic (check evenfallcomic.com every Monday, Wednesday and Friday for updates), with just one request: Make up a story. Our parameters were simple — it has to be set in Philly, and it should relate, somehow, to reading.

The rest was up to Stathis, who, it turns out, is a freaking mastermind; within a week he showed up at my office bearing three sketched-out pitches (because, as he rightly points out, "Comics can't really be described adequately with words alone; they're a unique language with their own alphabet"). The concept we chose is the loosest interpretation of our must-be-about-reading rule, but we dug it because it tells a story, and lets you, dear readers, make the connection. (Plus, it's totally meta and reminds us of A-ha's "Take on Me" video.)

We're honored to display Stathis' work in our honor boxes, well, because it looks pretty sweet. But also because graphic novels don't always get their due in the lit world. That's why, along with the usual slew of fiction and nonfiction reviews in these pages, we've included a roundup of recently released graphic novels.

It's also why our BQ feature this time around focuses on Jane Golden, Sherman Fleming and the Mural Arts Program's latest endeavor: collaborating with youth on a mural and a comic book, conceived and created by kids who've got something to say. These kids are not all that different from Stathis, who started drawing at a very young age. "I still have a comic I did when I was 6," he says. "It's a couple of pages of the Super Friends rescuing a train from a tornado. I always liked to make believe with my drawings."

If you teach a kid how to create something unique, who knows what'll come of it?