Next month, Top Shelf Productions will release Glork Patrol Takes a Bath!, the second book in the young readers graphic novel series from acclaimed cartoonist James Kochalka. Today The Beat is pleased to present an exclusive first look at the upcoming graphic novel, as well as behind-the-scenes process artwork from Kochalka.
Here’s how Top Shelf describes Glork Patrol Takes a Bath!:
What a mess! It all started when Glorkian SuperGrandma told the Glork Patrol they could eat candy for breakfast… now their “Dada,” the Glorkian Warrior, has a lot of cleaning up to do. Super Backpack gets a robot super-suit made of candy wrappers and takes Baby Gonk on the adventure of a lifetime, while Glorkian Warrior stays behind and tries to help the uncontrollable Baby Quackaboodle take a bath.
Families come in all kinds… even in outer space. This kooky, colorful adventure will feel hilariously relatable and have kids giggling through story time and bath time alike!
Glork Patrol Takes a Bath! is the latest James Kochalka release from IDW’s Top Shelf Productions. Kochalka’s previous books with Top Shelf include the American Elf, Johnny Boo, and Dragon Puncher series, among others.
In speaking with The Beat about his process for a book like Glork Patrol, Kochalka described how the pages evolve from pencils to finished product:
“When I write a new graphic novel, I don’t type a script. I just go straight to drawing in pencil, very rough and quickly, to get the story down visually as fast as possible. You can see many erasures on these pages… where I moved a character, or turned two panels into one, or tweaked dialog. Occasionally I have to make a change so big that it’s easier to start over. For those you’ll see where I drew new panels on a separate piece of paper and then glued them over the page.
The initially quick gestural drawing of my rough draft is very important to the emotion and action of the story, so I try very hard to make my final inks match the rough draft as closely as possible. Maybe a little more polished, but I try to keep the immediacy and freshness of the original gesture intact.”
The six-page excerpt from the new book is presented below in both its original pencils and in its finished version, and you can see what Kochalka is talking about there – how the artwork is tightened up from pencils to final line art, and how the dialogue evolves from rough to finished drafts.
Check out the excerpt, from pencils to final, for Glork Patrol Takes a Bath! below. The second book in the graphic novel series arrives in bookstores on Tuesday, March 8th, and in comic shops on Wednesday, March 9th.
