[Shannon, by the way, is currently on tour on the west coast -- she's doing a book launch at Lucky's on Aug. 24th in case you live in Vancouver!]

So here’s a breakdown of how much time we each spent working on the book.

Jim’s hours: 283.8 (writing: 23%, revisions and editing: 16%, publicity: 20%, publishing business: 38%)

Shannon’s hours:  1000+ (drawing)

So basically, Shannon put in 80% of the time even considering I took on publicity and publishing roles. (If I was just doing the writing, it would have been closer to a 90/10% split.)

We’re dividing the money we make 80/20%, but it still feels weird. I mean, I knew it took a long time to draw, but it really takes a long time to draw. This wonky division of labour is something to keep in mind when if you’re ever approaching someone to draw a comic. Even if you’re a slow writer and they’re a fast drawer, you’re still asking them to spend much more time realizing something than you spent creating it. What are you bringing to the project beyond amazing ideas and sparkling prose?

We got a bit of coverage at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival — the guys from Vepo Studios interviewed me for their great piece on self-publishing comics and I rambled on with the guys with RGB Filter as well. (Sadly, Shannon hates being videotaped.)

More recently we drove to Detroit and did a launch at Leopold’s Books, a fantastic new bookstore with an emphasis on comic/zine/visual culture. Greg, the owner, interviewed us on stage. Probably the nicest thing was hearing that he was worried the comic was going to be another exploitive take on Detroit in the “ruin porn” genre but was pleasantly surprised to see it was not.

UPDATE: Quill & Quire gave it a starred review: “Munroe has created another stunning, thought-provoking work that will linger in the reader’s mind.” The Indypendent has an interesting contrasting review of three Detroit books, including ours. Also, Shannon’s touring the west coast in August! Drop her a line if you want her to come to your town.

Secondly — what with the urban farming theme and spring being here and all, we figured it’d be fun to make seed packets marketed for the post-Rapture world — ones that don’t need the light of God to grow. (The first twenty people to buy a copy of Sword of My Mouth at the Toronto launch get one.) So Scott made a nice design and Shannon went to take some pictures “in context” as it were at a garden centre. The photo and the altercation that followed with the manager follows below.

Manager: Do you have permission to take these?
Shannon: I sure do!
Manager: I don’t understand. Do you have permission to take these photos?
Shannon: Yes, I do.
Manager: From who?
Shannon: That guy who is in charge of everything. What’s his name again?
Manager: Can you please stop?
Shannon: Peter. That’s his name. Peter gave me permission.
Manager: If you don’t stop taking pictures, I will have to confiscate your camera.
Shannon: (laughing my head off) No, you will not.
Manager: Hmm, well…you have to stop. Please.
Shannon: Hang on, I need one more with the macro setting…

And the guerrilla photography is only this week’s promotional gambit — last week Shannon spent a ton of time redrawing people’s faces for their Facebook profiles in her signature style, in exchange for them linking to the launch or the book.

Over a hundred people have had their Faces Gerardified.

UPDATE: Check out this neat interview with Shannon at Annalemma.

It was a push to get the book ready in time, and tricky to manage as it’s a IDW / NMK single edition co-publishing dealy, but Shannon still took the time to do these hilariously amazing bio illustrations of the two of us, check ‘em out after the jump!


I’d given Shannon a bunch of photos of me on a trip for a possible bio pic illustration, and the one she chose was of me facing off the digital zombies in some airport arcade. I went along with it even though I was a bit concerned it would make me look like an asshole if she drew herself quietly crocheting or something. Happily she drew herself as villainous as me. As usual with Shannon, things turned out awesome! Back to back, awaiting the critical onslaught…

One of the things we did differently with this book was research, and so I’ll take this opportunity to write a bit about that.

I’m a big believer in the notion that just living a varied life is a valid kind of research, and most of my creative work has pretty clearly drawn from my life in one way or another. (I have to rely on my recent history because, frankly, I have a pretty shitty memory — I’m envious of writers who can dip back into their childhood with ease.)

I’ve never liked research because it felt like homework. Obligatory. But I definitely needed to do it for Sword — I’d only visited Detroit once very briefly and I didn’t want to fuck up my characterization of that troubled and unique city. And it really helped — not only did it make me feel less fraudulent, but it gave the book a thematic core and direction I wouldn’t have hit upon myself.

Here’s five approaches to research that worked for me.

1. Choose a research subject that you’re fascinated in — not just something you think would make a good story subject. I’ve been interested in Detroit ever since a brief visit in ’94, but despite it only being 4 hours away I’d never visited again. Writing a book set there was a great way to spend some focused time learning about the place. Even if I decided not to write the book it would have been time well spent.

2. Talk to people. Let everyone know what you’re researching. Talk to experts & enthusiasts alike. On the phone or in person — email interviews are just work for people. Be social, have some fun, meet some characters and see how far a conversation with a stranger can go.

3. Go places. There’s a million details that even a gorgeous photo won’t expose you to. Get a list of places of interest you’d like to visit and maybe go with one of the strangers from #2. Research as adventure! Shannon and I went to Detroit twice for a few days — she got tons of photo refs, and I got lots of story and character ideas.

4. Niche websites and blogs are good starting places. Especially when they can connect you with people and new places to go. For me it was a good starting point for cultural touchstones like scrappers, 8 Mile, political corruption.

5. Read some books in a style you enjoy. Long form non-fiction generally makes me glaze over (which allows me to daydream about the subject at hand, so admittedly still useful) so I went with some more entertainingly written books. While a bit sensational, Devil’s Night: And Other True Tales of Detroit by Zev Chafets was a compelling read and gave me some ideas about the racial dynamics that are still relevant today, 20 years after it was written.

Final thoughts: in excess, research can be a procrastination method with diminishing returns. But for someone like me, who is more on the make-it-up-as-you-go school, it’s helped bring a richness in ideas and specificity in detail to my recent work — and has been enjoyable to boot.

Sword of My Mouth #1, the first part of the follow-up to my post-Rapture graphic novel Therefore Repent!, is now in stores and this weekend at TCAF. #1 will be the only print edtion — issues #2-6 will be digital only, after which the complete story will be collected together and published as a printed graphic novel. So if you’d like to get them as they’re released bi-monthly through this year, you have two options — you can subscribe to the complete series in a digital format for $6 or pre-order the printed graphic novel for $12 and get a free subscription to the digital issues as well as some other goodies.

In a time when the economy and other forces are making the print pamphlet model unsustainable for many indies, we’re excited to see how this will work. The digital format isn’t going to replace the print book, but it’s an interesting format that allows for cheaper prices and more direct interaction between creators and readers — one we hope to foster by adding commentary.

UPDATE: Pre-orders no longer available, but you can order it here.

The first 22 pages of the next post-Rapture story after Therefore Repent! will be appearing in comic stores in May, to be eventually collected into a graphic novel called Sword of My Mouth in 2010. Check out Shannon Gerard’s fantastic cover art and the description after the jump, and if it looks good you can preorder at your local comic store — it’s in this month’s Previews (MAR09 4308, pg. 266). Update: I just saw it’s a Staff Pick at Previews!

(What’s that, you say? You’re behind and haven’t read the critically acclaimed Therefore Repent! yet? Well, lucky thing I’m releasing the full graphic novel as a free download today, isn’t it?)

Sword of My Mouth #1
Jim Munroe (w) • Shannon Gerard (a)

If Ella didn’t have her baby, she’d go crazy from the loneliness. But she might still go crazy from the guilt, because the baby isn’t quite right. The world was simpler before the righteous floated away into the sky, and magic started working.

A stand-alone six-issue story continuing on from acclaimed graphic novel Therefore Repent! (“It’s completely nuts… It’s a book about what if the Rapture actually happened, and that’s all I’m gonna tell you.” —Junot Díaz, 2008 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Fiction), Sword of My Mouth moves the focus from Chicago, under siege by angels with machine guns, to the urban prairie of Detroit, where a different kind of struggle is faced. Folks in the D have banded together to turn land with burned out crackhouses into farming tracts, and seem to be on a road to self-sufficiency… until Famine rides into town. This six-issue story arc will be written by creator Jim Munroe (“a pop culture provocateur” — Austin Chronicle) and drawn by Shannon Gerard.

B&W · 32 pages · $3.99
Diamond Previews code: MAR09 4308

Therefore Repent!

What if the religious right… are actually right?

Without warning, multitudes of Christians float bodily up into the sky.

For the immoral majority, life goes on pretty much as usual.

Except that after the Rapture, magic works — for those willing to risk demonic mutations.

And an angelic army appears to have been deployed to mop up the sinners.

But through it all, outsiders Raven and Mummy face the possibility of a bigger problem than the end of the world: the end of their relationship.

Praise for Therefore Repent!

“Therefore Repent! is great. Loved the conflict between the old and new religions, plus it’s got Jesus and mutants.” — Joe Meno, author of Hairstyles of the Damned

“Therefore Repent! is impressive, layered, and in places surprisingly funny. I didn’t think it would be my sort of thing, but I enjoyed it.” —Jim Ottaviani, author of FALLOUT: J. Robert Oppenheimer, Leo Szilard, and the Political Science of the Atomic Bomb

“Now, just dealing with the Rapture might be enough of a hook, but Jim and Salgood do a great job of characterization from the very beginning. The two protagonists are so interesting that I had to keep turning page after page to see what and who they were. And yes, Salgood can draw like nobody’s business… I give this book two thumbs up.” —Chris Pitzer, AdHouse Books

“The tale’s offbeat anarchy and peculiar, parodic charms will win you over. It’s like one of those church pamphlets about salvation gone terribly, terribly wrong.” —John Burns, The Georgia Straight

“Therefore Repent! is an absolutely boundless piece of fantasy that he wisely grounds in very human relationships… to say it’s an imaginative work would be an understatement: ‘unhinged’ is probably more accurate. I can’t wait for more.”— Robert J. Wierseman, Quill & Quire

“The art is extraordinarily fluid and the storyline ingenious and sharply intelligent.” —Jeff VanderMeer, Realms of Fantasy

“It’s completely nuts… It’s a book about what if the Rapture actually happened, and that’s all I’m gonna tell you.” —Junot Díaz, 2008 Pulitzer Prize Winner for Fiction

Joe Shuster Award Nominee for Outstanding Canadian Comic Book Writer 2008

I don’t want to give away too many details, but it’s set in Detroit, involves one of the Four Horsemen, and the first 22 pages should be debuting at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival in May 2009.

That video (part of my Pleasure Circuit Overload series of vids about videogames) has gotten a ridonkulous amount of attention for what it is and it seems to keeps bumbling into places it doesn’t belong. (CTheory? The New York Times? Whaa…?)

But just so my head doesn’t inflate too much — I didn’t win the Shuster award for best comics writing I was nominated for last week. My new pal Cecil Castellucci won it for her excellent P.L.A.I.N. Janes graphic novel about a clique of nerdy girls transforming their town with art-terrorism.

Undeterred, I’m diving into researching and writing a new comics project, Time Management for Anarchists: The Comic. Which is gonna be drawn by Marc Ngui, the genius behind the My Trip avatar skins (pictured below).

It seems random, but everything in my life connects if you have enough time and graph paper to map it out.

Top: Canadian Tourist skin. Middle: Attack Mime skin. Bottom: Street Priest skin. Created by Marc Ngui for My Trip to Liberty City.

2008′s Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, Junot Díaz, was asked what he was reading for pleasure and he named my and Salgood’s graphic novel Therefore Repent! “It’s completely nuts,” he said, which is pretty close to what the Quill and Quire guy said (“unhinged”). Seems there’s a literary consensus on that. When my reader poll came out in favour of Lilith being actually daemonic and not just crazy, I committed to doing something over-the-top fantastical in contrast to my more muted stuff — nice to hear it’s working for people. Junot sounds like my kinda booknerd!

In other flattering news, I’ve been nominated for the Joe Shuster Outstanding Canadian Comic Book Writer award. Unlike some of the other talent there with a dozen or so comics to their name, I have only TR! and one other strip that appeared in the Beguiling-produced Comic Festival. You can read it on Salgood’s site.

Also: Chicago launch of Therefore Repent! next month!