In 2005, I finally got my first manuscript sold, and it was for a picture book, about a little red devil, it was called The Devil You Know published at Walker Books, cute little mischievous devil causing trouble for a family. I thought it was a lot of fun, and funny and goofy, not a hugely popular book, but it looked sort of like a graphic novel.
Now, I wasn’t thinking of comics or graphic novels, but when I broke the book into little sections, it did kind of break into panels. And in my same state is an author with my same last name, Shannon Hale, who I’d never met before, we’re not related. But she was a big deal, her first book had just come out which was The Goose Girl from Bloomsbury. And I met her at one of these writing conferences, when my first book had come out, and I felt like I was hot stuff, and she was collecting books for donations, for charity, she said, “Hey, all local authors, can you give me a bunch of books? We’re going to donate them.” So I gave her one of my books about this little red devil, it wasn’t doing very well.
So I had lots to giveaway. And she looked at it and she said, “This looks like a graphic novel.” And I was like, “Oh, okay.” And she said, “Would you like to do a graphic novel?” And I said, “You know, I like picture books. I like paintings, so, no.” And she said, “That’s too bad because my husband and I have written a graphic novel and we want to find an illustrator for it. It’s about Rapunzel.” And I was still like, “Eh, I’m not that interested.”
And then said it’s about “Rapunzel in the old west.” And I thought, “Wait, really? That sounds kind of cool.” Let’s talk more about this, because she was very popular with that first book, I wanted to follow her lead and be popular, too, so we just jumped-in. Her publisher Bloomsbury had never published a graphic novel. She and her co-author, her husband Dean Hale had never written a graphic novel. I had never illustrated a graphic novel, and the editor had never read a graphic novel.
We jumped in and just did it. It ended up being one of the hardest years of my life. I was stunned at how much work it was. I thought this was something I would do in a couple of months, and I spent a year trying that book, and by the time it came out it was more popular than anything I’d ever worked on. At that point I think I’d had two books published, and my third was coming out, and none of those picture books did well.
But the graphic novel was exciting. It was picked up by the “Today Show” as the book of the month. It popped up on a bunch of state reading lists. It was a Texas Maverick’s book, and people were going crazy for it.
We immediately did a sequel, and on the sequel I was a little faster, it was a little less hard, and from there I just thought, you know what? I loved drawing these fantasy characters in the old west, but what was really fascinating to me was the old west, itself, the hats, the boots, the guns.