Once upon a time I was a student at the Savannah College of Art and Design, majoring in Sequential Art (aka COMIC BOOKS hurr :B ). I was just a student, there to learn, I had no idea what would be coming my way very quickly.

Some friends of mine had just started a club, called Shoujo Phonebook. The purpose of the club was to self-publish an actual manga anthology, filled with work by the student club members, and paid for by money the club raised. It was a very ambitious club, and very well run, because it succeeded at publishing that book within its first year.

I was a club member, and my 19 page original story "Utopia Device" was published in that first Shoujo Phonebook volume. (I only had time to finish the inks, so in that copy it has no tones.) Now, I did this because I thought it was fun, and that was it. Or so I thought.

The Sequential Art department at SCAD is awesome because they are always bringing in editors from top comic book publishers to talk to the students. That year was the first year Tokyopop sent out an editor to talk to students and do portfolio reviews. I of course signed up right away, eager to hear what the great big company of Tokyopop had to say about my art, and to learn how I could improve. I was a second-year student.

I had my review, got some pointers, and also asked if I could send the editor a short story pitch. You see, in one of my classes, Scriptwriting for Comics, the final was to send a real story pitch to a real comic publishing company. The editor gave me his work address. I got an A on the final.

Now, I thought that was the end of it. I was, after all, only a sophomore, with two and a half full years of college still ahead of me. It turns out that the editor took a copy of Shoujo Phonebook back to the offices with him. So one day, a couple of months later completely out of the blue, I get this email in my inbox with the subject line "I'm a TOKYOPOP editor"

... I must have screamed for thirty minutes after I read that email.

It said that they really liked mine and another student's work (friend of mine Lianne Cruz) and they wanted me to pitch a book! Like... right away. O_O While I was still in school.

They talked to my teachers, I talked to my teachers, we weighed all the pros and cons.... and decided that I'd be stupid to pass this chance up. I was already majoring in sequential art, and there had been other students before who had done sequential work while taking classes. (They were always for single issues though...) So we decided that yeah, I could do this.

That summer I flew back to Texas and worked on story submissions. I landed the Sea Princess Azuri pitch before fall classes started.



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