Graphic Novel

Coiled is the story of Joshua, a boy who is searching for his mother who has mysteriously gone missing. When he finds an envelope with her handwriting on it, he traces her first to an East African neighborhood of Seattle, and then into a virtual world that he previously thought existed only in her imagination.

Coiled was written by Peter Gruenbaum and illustrated by Amanda Kingsley.

Read Coiled from the beginning.

What’s happening with Coiled?

If you’ve read Coiled, you’ve seen what extraordinary artwork Amanda created for it. Well, it turns out that that kind of artistry takes time. Amanda was spending huge amount of time on it each week, and we were still far from getting enough pages to create a book which we could sell. In the end, she couldn’t keep going.

So we tried a different route, which was to see if we could find a traditional publisher that could give us an advance. We actually came kind of close. The first step was to find an agent. First thing I did was to contact one of the biggest agents in the industry. To my amazement, she expressed interest, but wanted to see a finished script. I took a few months and finished it, but by the time it was ready, she no longer had time to take it on. A few months later, we had a contract with a well-known agent who wanted to use Coiled to break into the graphic novel world. She was waiting for the right time to get it to publishers, and just before she was going to send it out, she decided to quit being an agent. Amanda had one more idea for us, and she wrote to the head of First Second, her favorite publisher. I didn’t expect anything, but in fact, he wrote back a long letter, and gave us praise and also some criticism, and explained how we weren’t quite at the level that he would need from us. After being let down twice by agents, something about that letter from him restored my faith in humanity.

I’m still interesting in the webcomic + self-publishing idea. Amanda would rather find a traditional publisher. I am open to that, but not willing to spend more time on finding someone. But I am also open to starting over with another artist who is willing to do what it takes to get the webcomic model working. The script is sitting there, waiting…