An Elegy for Amelia Johnson, the first graphic novel by Andrew Rostan, offers a meditation on death, love, and the connection between them. Archaia Press, which will release the 128-page volume in March, sees it as a tent pole of their list for the next few seasons and hopes it will help draw new readers to their press and graphic novels in general.
Stephen Christy, the book’s editor, attended Emerson College with Rostan and encouraged him to try his hand at graphic novels. In an interview with PW Comics Week, Rostan explains he had a few false starts; the work only came together after Christy suggested he put aside his ideas about a work of fantasy or science fiction and focus on a story about “love and time.”
Christy’s prompt eventually led to a story about three young artists: Amelia, a poet dying of cancer, and her two oldest friends, the filmmaker Henry and writer Jillian. Amelia sends Henry and Jillian across the country to deliver messages to people whohave shaped her life, with Henry filming the trip. Revelations, and tears, ensue.
“What really attracted me to this is that it is a story for young people about coming to terms with the death of a young one,” Christy explains. He and Rostan believe the subject matter, and the spare black and white artwork, will attract a wide range of readers, including teenagers, twenty-somethings, and women. Christy stresses that it is “an accessible book at an accessible price point” ($14.95).
Rostan has nothing but praise for the illustrators, Dave Valeza and Kate Kasenow. Valeza joined the project first. “I would get his artwork in e-mails. And every time I opened one I almost had a heart attack—he got everything in my mind,” Rostan explains. Rostan decided to undertake extensive plot revisions after Valeza shared a draft with his workshop at the Savannah Art and Design College. Kasenow joined the project near its final stages. “Dave and Kate are so well matched that is hard to tell who drew what.”
An Elegy is a very different book than Archaia’s biggest sellers up until now, which have been science fiction and fantasy works such as Return of the Dapper Men and the Mouse Guard series. “We don’t want to be limited to certain genres or demographics,” Christy notes, adding he hopes to do more slice-of-life works to continue to bring in new readers to Archaia.
Elegy will have a “very healthy” initial print run. The book will also be made available in electronic formats for iPads and Kindle. The marketing campaign will target mainstream publications, as well as schools and libraries, and Rostan will appear at Comic-Con and is also reaching out to independent bookstores.
On the horizon for Archaia is A Tale of Sand, based on a never-produced screenplay found in the Jim Henson Company vaults. Rostan is working on a novel and a graphic novel. The author was able to support his work on An Elegy through his winnings from the game show Jeopardy. “It let me do what I have done in the last 5 years,” he explains. “Now I can start giving back to the world and it feels fabulous.”
