MK Reed and Jonathan Hill are no strangers to collaboration. Having previously joined forces on graphic novels like Americus and Science Comics: Wild Weather, they’ve established themselves as a formidable creative duo. Now, they’re venturing into new territory with their latest digital comic series, Budding Crisis, for Comixology Originals.
This fantasy epic plunges readers into a world where the Onamanthe plant—whose seeds possess the extraordinary power to grant wishes—has become extinct. When the remaining seeds aboard a ship called The Eclipse are stolen in the Bay of Cygnus, the Dureni people must race against time to recover this irreplaceable treasure. As they hunt for both the magical seeds and the thieves who took them, they stumble upon a conspiracy far greater than they could have imagined.
I spoke with Reed and Hill about the origins of this new series, their creative process and the unique challenges of crafting a fantasy world where the most precious resource is rapidly disappearing. The second issue arrived on Amazon today.
Let’s start with your secret origins — when did you first discover comics, and when did you decide you wanted to make them?
Jonathan: I loved reading comic strips in the newspaper as a kid. Like most kids my age, I was obsessed with Calvin & Hobbes and the Far Side. That was also a time when you could pick up comics at the grocery store, so I would also get to pick up an issue of Spider-man or X-men when we were shopping as a treat. So I was into them, and I have always loved to draw, but it never occurred to me that it was something I could do. When it came time for me to go to college, I went to art school but didn’t really have an idea of how to turn my love of drawing into what a career would be. I majored in illustration and after two years in that program, I grew to hate it and the focus on editorial illustration. My brain thinks in terms of narrative and stories. This was at the Savannah College of Art & Design, and at the time it was one of the few places that actually had a comics major. I had a friend who I was close to who was in that program that encouraged me to give taking a comics class a try. I was weary, but immediately fell in love. I haven’t looked back since.
MK: Echoing Jonathan on newspaper comics, and also newsstands. Except for me, it was Archie. By high school I had stopped reading them but was drawing them for friends in class. I picked my college, Syracuse, because they had daily strips in the student paper, The Daily Orange. I went for literary theory but kept up art side projects.
The idea of “three wishes” is a common theme in many stories. What inspired the concept of the Onamanthe plant and the limited nature of these seeds?
MK: Oh, I think it was just wanting to put a stop on power creep? Because if you can magically fix everything, or anyone can do whatever they want all the time, you have a story that’s been done a million times. There’s also been a million monkey’s paw takes, and I just didn’t want to go the most obvious routes. I’m interested in the things people would do to make the world better.
What narrative and visual challenges were most exciting for you when designing the world of “Budding Crisis”?
MK: Narratively, I think just having the choice to change it up a lot from a standard issue to-issue book has made me think a lot more about the world and what’s in it. If I were building a serial story, then it’d be a little more about the characters and their growth throughout the story. But as an anthology of shorts, I can play around more with what’s different that I want to show off. I don’t have to fit a story to the character. It does make starting each issue much harder, because it’s not “The Gang Goes To (fill in the blank)” each issue, which is easy when you’ve had characters you’ve been writing a while.
Jonathan: For me it was the world-building as well as the visual style. It’s fantasy, but we wanted to steer it away from what MK calls ‘Ren-faire Fantasy’. MK has a short visuals brief, but I love that we’ve worked together long enough that they know I’ll use that as a starting point and then riff off that and build on it. I’m really, really happy with the world that we’ve built. It really has been a collaboration between MK, myself, and our colorist, Allie Drake.
As far as the visual style, since I primarily make books for youth audiences, I wanted something that stood apart from that. I wanted to use this project as an opportunity to experiment and play with my drawing in a way I don’t really get to in my usual work. I wanted it to be looser and more organic to try to mimic the process I draw with in my sketchbook. BUT… when you’ve done something for so long, it’s hard to retrain that muscle memory, so the final product is sort of a middle ground between my experimental ambition and the way I’ve drawn for 20 years. People often talk about style being something purely visual, but I think something that I didn’t need to change is the storytelling. Whether it’s a fantasy story like Budding Crisis geared towards older readers or one of my middle grade comics, the way I tell stories stays the same.
Can you share a bit about your collaborative process, and bringing this story from initial concept to the final comic?
Jonathan: Without going into every step of the process – sometimes people are into that, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll say that it’s very, very collaborative between everyone on the team, MK, myself, and Allie Drake, our colorist. Every step of the way we’re sharing with each other and we’ll all chime in and build off what was laid down.
So for instance, when we start a new issue MK will send us a script to read through. Since this is an anthology story that jumps around a bit between characters and locations, I’ll start out doing some visual development. Usually some sketches with the new characters to get a sense of them and maybe some of the new locations. I’ll share this with MK and Allie and we’ll bounce ideas around – is this what MK envisioned? Maybe not, but maybe it goes in a direction we all like. But maybe it needs to be changed because the story calls for X or Y. Allie might also chime in and do a color test to see how her work can continue to tell the story that way.
That’s pretty much the process through the whole thing. We’re all doing our jobs, but we’re all sharing and thinking about what works, what doesn’t and how it can really bring the project to life in the best way possible. This is such solitary work, and to have that collaboration, even if we’re all working on our own in our own studios, has really been one of the joys of this project.
MK: Yeah, I will add it involves a shocking amount of reaction emojis and support gifs. Not that we don’t give each other actual feedback, but when someone brings you fire every day, there’s one appropriate response.
How has working on Budding Crisis been different for the two of you, compared to your other projects together?
MK: There’s like… an undercurrent of the adults being busy elsewhere and us trying to have fun without them noticing? On Americus our editor was super involved, and while it’s the same editor looking over the scripts, Jonathan really is in full control of what goes on the page.
Jonathan: We’ve worked on so many things together. This is our third book together, we’ve made lots of other collaborative small projects together, and when MK lived in Portland, we were in a tabletop roleplaying group where everyone in the group would trade off running a one-shot for the group. There’s a lot of trust and collaboration involved in that sort of thing.
So I think maybe how it’s different is that we’re really good at doing this – both collaborating and making comics. We’re at the top of our game. We really know how each other works, how each other thinks, and we’re able to really lean into those things. But it also makes the process pretty smooth, which as you get older, you really, really appreciate.
What else are the two of you working on, or have coming out soon?
MK: I’m working on a history comic about the National Women’s Party, and trying to figure out a thesis at the moment.
Jonathan: It’s a busy year for me! Besides Budding Crisis I have an upcoming middle reader graphic novel coming out on April 8 – Lizard Boy 2: The Most Perfect Summer Ever, which is a sequel to my last book Tales of a Seventh-Grade Lizard Boy (Candlewick/Walker Books US). The first book was my weirdest book, but also my most personal, and I’m excited to expand on that world and those themes in the sequel.
