Lee Lai

Thank you.

My tools are pencil and kneadable erasers and Bristol board.

I work on 9x12, which I'm very ashamed to say 9x12 because that means inches.

And it's a hint that I live in North America now with the horrible imperial system.

And I use brush and ink.

So I use just like a sable hair paintbrush to do all of my lines with.

And I've used those tools for about 10 years because I'm a creature of habit.

It's definitely both.

I do script quite rigorously beforehand because the unfortunate truth of comics is they're hard to edit.

And so the more editing that can be done just with the text, the better, because then at least you don't have to redraw quite as much when you are going over the book afterwards and figuring out what to change.

But I try and leave a kind of window of spontaneity for myself.

A lot of cartoonists tend to thumbnail, which means just like little tiny rough drawings of what you want the final page to look like.

And I try and not do that.

So I will write out all the dialogue first and then I will draw straight onto the page, hoping to surprise myself with the kind of quote unquote writing process that happens when you just

deciding about the emotionality of a character's facial expression or the implications of their body language or the ways in which the panels across two pages, a page spread, interact with one another.

Those kinds of decision-making processes I like to kind of make up on the fly as I'm working from the script and transposing that onto the final page.

And I find that process so fun.

Underground media, whether that be radio, podcasts, alternative film, graphic novels have existed mostly within a niche subculture for a long time.

And because of that, they are just exquisitely strange most of the time.

They do things that I think a lot of mainstream fiction prose just doesn't do.