What started as a hastily scrawled notebook of ideas on Katie Cook’s way back from a Chicago comics convention has turned into a popular webtoon with almost 30 million views and 3.1 million likes. Cook’s popular webtoon, Nothing Special, is getting the graphic novel treatment over at Ten Speed Graphic—it's the first original graphic novel of Cook’s, and the first of four books in the Nothing Special series. Readers can expect the graphic novel to publish next March, with the first volume covering the first season of the webtoon and featuring never-before-seen material from Cook.
Nothing Special: Volume One follows the life of teenager Callie, whose dad collects magical items and owns a magical antique shop. Callie has long considered herself “nothing special,” having lived in the human world her whole life—that is, until her seventeenth birthday, when she finds her home broken into, her dad missing, and a blood trail leading into the magical realm. With her friend Declan and a friendly ghost radish spirit, Callie sets off to find her dad and discover the secrets the magical realm holds.
When the premise of the story first came to Cook’s mind, while she and her friend Isabel were driving together back from Chicago, “we dug out a notebook and I started talking like a lunatic,” Cook said. “Isabel wrote it all down in bumpy, frantic cursive. I still have the notebook.” Later, “my agent, Seth Fishman, took a PDF I made about selling the web comic as a book, literally called ‘Please Make My Thing Your Thing’,” Cook recalled. “[It] had been sitting around for a while, and [he] sent it to publishers.”
Ten Speed Graphic agreed to publish the book amid a boom time for webcomics, but still, when Cook received the news, she stared at her wall in shock before telling her husband, her parents, and, of course, her beloved cat. “We had no idea how many pages the books were going to be, because things were not in a page layout format, and some of those panels I drew are 60 inches tall in their digital files. But Ten Speed Graphic was up for the challenge,” said Cook. “And that’s not even half of what I’ve been cooking in my kitchen for the past several years.”
Along with the original webcomic in print form, the graphic novel will contain bonus content from Cook’s series, including concept art, tons of fun jokes, and character profiles. “People always ask where Radish, my guardian vegetable, comes from,” Cook said. “I wanted to poke at the fact that if the main hero is a girlm there’s a cute animal sidekick. My hero got a talking radish because I love the old show Fraggle Rock [TV show].”
Cook pulls inspiration from everything around her. “I try to take in a little bit of everything that I watch, read, etc., to use in my own work. The way I draw pupils? Pretty sure I grabbed that from Dr. Seuss. Hands? Those four fingers are from the Looney Tunes, thank you very much. How I plot out a story? Why not take some inspiration from Bilbo’s journey [in The Hobbit]?”
The finished product is something Cook is very proud of: “It’s so well done and I’m so proud of how well my letterer/designer Nate Pride and my editor Vedika Khanna worked on the layout. I think anyone who has a scrolling comic can look at what Ten Speed Graphic has done here to learn how to format your work into a printed page without losing the fun, whimsy, and weirdness.”
Cook said she has always wanted to create the kind of story she wished she had read as a kid. “YA adventure comics were not the norm ‘back in my day,’” she said. “And I love fantasy… adventure…humor…vegetables. It’s funny, after Webtoon approached me to create ‘anything I wanted,’ it was a little creative explosion in my head.”
Seeing how fans have connected to her original work has filled Cook, who has long produced licensed work, with immense gratitude. “I wrote the My Little Pony comics for so long they made me a pony on the show,” she said. “I have gotten away with more in Marvel scripts than I ever thought possible—but Nothing Special is mine. It isn’t someone else’s sandbox that I just get permission to play in. It’s my sandbox. And seeing people who have connected to that…my sandbox? I have a fanart wall in my office that makes me cry. The biggest compliment I get is someone just liking the world that I made.”
While Cook is gearing up for the release of her graphic novel series, she wants to encourage readers to gear up as well—for big, honking volumes. “They are thick,” Cook warned her prospective readers. “We are talking ‘I like big books and I cannot lie’ territory. Tell your bookshelves to gird their loins.”
This article has been updated for clarity.
