Texas native Ngozi Ukazu, author of the YA Check, Please!: #Hockey (First Second, Sept.), first wrote about hockey in a screenplay-writing seminar during her senior year at Yale. Later she used her research on the sport for a webcomic project at the Savannah College of Art and Design. Her online graphic novel about hockey, Check, Please!, went on to become the most funded webcomics Kickstarter ever, when fans urged her to publish in print.
What drew Ukazu to hockey in the first place? She explains, “Being a black woman from the South, seeing this really Canadian northern sport with all of its idiosyncrasies and traditions seemed exotic to me. And I was really interested in writing a story that subverted white male frat culture. Yale even won the NCAA hockey championship my senior year, so it was meant to be.”
The webcomic features former figure skater Eric Bittle, who likes to bake and who joins a college hockey team. Because he’s small, Eric is afraid of getting “checked” during the game. The story also has a romantic element; Eric has a crush on the captain of the hockey team. “I wanted to show how Eric navigates the world of college men’s ice hockey and finds love at the same time,” says Ukazu.
She initially turned to Kickstarter because fans of the webcomic kept asking her when it would be published. She hoped to raise $15,000 to print the first volume, but ended up raising nearly five times that, or $74,000. For the second volume, Ukazu raised a whopping $398,000.
This fall, First Second is reformatting the first two volumes into one publication. The self-published versions of the book continue to be available online and at conventions. Ukazu says, “It was an honor to have people reach out and say, ‘We want to print your book.’ Just three or four years ago, this was just something I was drawing at my coffee table at home.
“The reason Check, Please! is so big,” she continues, “is because the fans are really enthusiastic. People become ambassadors for the comic and won’t stop talking about it. The other thing that’s crazy is that the comic is free to read online in its entirety, yet people want to buy the book. It’s awesome to see the impact that this story has had and how people respond to it.”
