January 2026: Book announcement!
A book announcement and other news.
Big news! Big news!!
The word has gone out. The seal is off. I am finally allowed to tell you what I was working on last year… with K Czap, Raina Telgemeier, and Ray Baehr.
We have adapted Ann M. Martin’s The Baby-Sitters Club Super Special #1: Baby-Sitters On Board!1 into a graphic novel, and it will be landing on bookshelves this September.
The BSC Super Specials are standalone adventures that take the kids out of their usual lives. (If you watched the Netflix series and enjoyed the camp episodes, those were based off of the second Super Special book!) And, while the main stories mostly follow one central character per book, the Super Specials feature multiple points of view - in this case, almost the entire club2 as they go on a cruise trip to a theme park. Whew!
Now, you might be wondering what part I played in the making of this book. A comics collab usually involves dividing up tasks like writing, coloring, and drawing3, right?
But if you have a set of characters telling interwoven stories, well, doesn’t that sound like the perfect tag-team opportunity?
For this book, Raina and I split up the cast so that we could each adapt our characters’ chapters, with Raina’s pages inked by genius Ray Baehr4, and the entire book colored by the luminary K Czap5. And it was so much fun! We brainstormed a whole imaginary theme park, worked on location designs together, and passed character outfits back and forth to keep everything consistent from chapter to chapter.6
Speaking of fun outfits…
Did I call dibs on Claudia? Yes. Yes, absolutely. My one small sadness at the end of my time on the BSC was that I hadn’t had a chance to adapt for Claudia7, so this really is a “button up the story arc, we’re done” moment for me. Closure!
Here are some special facts:
The book is coming out just in time for the BSC’s 40th anniversary.
It’s also coming out just in time for the first graphic novel adaptation’s 20th anniversary.
Aaaand it’s almost my own ten-year anniversary with the BSC.8 Not quite, but close enough that I think it’s neat.
This really is a full-circle moment for me in many ways. I met Raina when I was fresh out of college, trying to figure out what I could do with my life; she was one of the people who helped me realize that the answer was comics. I fell in love with The Baby-Sitters Club when I was young, and it became the doorway to my career.
Returning to these characters feels like home. Working together with dear friends, celebrating a story that has connected generations of readers – what an incredible gift.
I can’t wait for you to read it.
In other news…
Fresh Start is officially one year old, and it’s a SCBWI Golden Kite Award finalist! It means a lot to have this book recognized. :’)
Most of my public events will be later in the year (stay tuned), but I will be at the Silver Unicorn Kids Graphic Novel Festival in May! If you’re in or around Acton, MA, please come by — it is the best time.
I’ve been hard at work on my next book! It’s a solo middle grade graphic novel, and I’ll look forward to telling you more about that soon. We have to save some news for future newsletters, right?
Maia Kobabe and Lucky Srikumar’s middle grade graphic novel, Opting Out, is available for preorder! I read the ARC and wished I could send it back in time to Tween Gale, so I’ll do the next best thing and ask you to share it with a young person when it comes out.
Cartoonists have been sharing stories about ICE in their cities under #iceoutcomics. They’re well worth the read, as is this Wired piece.
I’m also grateful for 404 Media’s independent tech reporting around ICE, surveillance, and AI, as well as their more lighthearted “oh shit spiders can do what?” weekend science roundups.
In closing…
I told my child a bedtime story about a kid with eraser shoes who erased everything he walked over, causing chaos and distress, before realizing the problem and swapping his erasers out for pencils. It felt right at the time, but wouldn’t that also be an issue? If you’re wearing magic shoes, whether they’re erasers or pencils, please step carefully.
Yours in comics,
Gale
I know that the title is a mouthful. I have privately been referring to it as The Cruise Ship Book, and I give you permission to do so as well. ↩
Sorry, Logan. ↩
And it doesn’t stop there! You can subdivide even further: penciling, inking, layouts, “I’ll draw the characters and you draw the backgrounds,” “can you please draw the cars for me,” “I need a special horse artist,” etc. Comics are magic. ↩
As seen in The Cartoonists Club! ↩
The inimitable colorist of my own Freestyle and Fresh Start, as well as The Breakaways, Speechless, and Bunt!. If you are a grownup, you need to go read Karen’s solo comics right now. ↩
“Hey, that’s a lot of stuff to keep track of!” YES. This endeavor would not have been possible without our proofreading team, art department, and beloved editor, Cassandra, as well as probably a dozen other people behind the scenes. I cannot stress enough how much of a team effort this was. ↩
If you would like to hear about my Claudia Feelings, The Claudia Kishi Club will give you that and more. ↩
My first book was Dawn and the Impossible Three (2017). I was working on it in 2016, that has to count for something! ↩
