1. Please tell us about Just Roll With It (and any upcoming projects you'd like to share about).
Just Roll With It is a story about Maggie, who’s entering her first year of middle school. She’s dealing with anxiety about her new school, and it only gets worse when she’s confronted with picking a school club to join, making friends, and the monster that people keep seeing around that’s rumored to eat middle schoolers.
Throughout the story, Maggie comes to learn and come to terms with the fact that she has OCD, and some of the habits she has are actually compulsions related to the disorder.
Just Roll With It is a story meant to normalize mental illness, and to make it easier to face our fears head-on.
Right now, Lee and I are working on the second in the JRWI series, as well as a few other pitches for books we’d like to publish!
2. What drew you both to comics?
Veronica: I’ve always loved art, ever since I could hold a crayon. I’ve also always loved books, and comics are the perfect marriage between art and words. There are also so many things you can only do with comics, they are sort of prose, sort of movie, but also entirely their own.
Lee: I knew I wanted to be an author since first grade, and fell in love with comics specifically during middle school. I think it was specifically manga adaptations of Shakespeare because I was a huge nerd as a kid. Comics are such a particularly brilliant and special medium, and so unique in their own way, that you can’t help but love them.
3. Please tell us about your authorly/artistic collaboration, including any details of the process you'd like to share.
Veronica: Lee and I work great together. We always joke that the other person has the harder job. I find writing and research very daunting, but he's able to tackle those things with no fear whatsoever. We’re also perfect for each other because he makes sure I don’t get stuck in my own head. I always say the way we work together is like building a body, he builds the skeleton and adds the muscles, I add the skin and hair and clothes, and we both put the soul into it together.
Lee: Veronica definitely has the harder job and manages to break a few lines into gorgeous and emotional art. The first book was written almost entirely on my phone and, afterward, Veronica was kind enough to give me an old laptop that I’ve been using since. We usually end up working, literally, side-by-side and so our communication is back and forth.
4. What is your message for young comics creators?
Veronica: Keep making stuff! And don’t stress about what’s been done before or what hasn’t- you have something to offer the world that no one else can. You view the world in your own unique way, and only you can make the story you’re going to make. Even if someone’s art or writing is better, they won’t make *your* story, and that’s important.
Also, work smarter not harder! It’s ok to use the tools and technology available to you to make your job easier!!!
Lee: Read, and watch, everything. Movies, manga, plays, ballets, prose novels, poetry, etc. Immerse yourself in the beauty of the world around you and allow yourself to make stuff you think is beautiful- or gross or scary or romantic or exciting! As long as it makes your heart sing, and as long as it’s you you’re going to be set. You live a singularly unique and magical life, and can therefore tell a story that literally nobody else can tell.
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