Hi all, check out the cover to my upcoming graphic novel romance, Hockey Girl Loves Drama Boy! It will be out in October from First Second Books, and is available for pre-order now!
Design by Kirk Benshoff! I’m really thrilled with it. It’s my first time doing a comic book romance.
Otherwise, I’m continuing to sell original The Last of Us: American Dreams pages through Cadence Comic Art, so please keep an eye on their website if you are interested in buying those.
Hi all. Exciting news! Nearly a decade ago (whew) I drew and co-wrote the 4 issue comic book prequel to the Playstation video game The Last of Us, in collaboration with the game’s writer/creator, Neil Druckmann. The comic was published by Dark Horse Comics, and you can buy the collected edition wherever books are sold. I’ve hung on to most of the original artwork for those comics, and now I’m selling those pages in collaboration with Cadence Comic Art. The pages from issue 1 will be going up for sale on the Cadence website TODAY at 11AM PST/2PM EST. The Last of Us has become an incredible franchise, and now there’s a very well reviewed HBO show based on the game (watch it on Crave TV for us Canadians). It’s super exciting to see the TLOU characters come to life in a different medium, and I can’t wait to see Riley, the character I co-created in the comic, in an upcoming episode!
(A little peek at the pages I’ll be selling.)
Keep an eye on Cadence‘s website for upcoming news about future Last of Us art drops, beyond the one they’re putting up today.
The year isn’t quite over yet, but I’ve got some time now, so thought I’d write a ‘what I did in 2022’ post. Since Twitter seems to be on the verge of collapse and/or becoming sentient, I feel I need to find other places to update readers on what’s up with yours truly. So thus, a rare blog post! 😉
So, 2022. A much better year than 2021, but still one with a lot of challenges. We’re still in the midst of an ongoing pandemic (sigh) which continues to make travel, book promotion and Author Life more challenging. I got my vaccine boosters twice this year and still haven’t caught Covid, so I’m doing okay for the most part, but the last few years have been taking their toll. I’m not particularly hopeful that things will be drastically different in 2023, so I’ll just keep getting boosted and wearing a mask until … well, who knows at this point. But please, get vaccinated, get boosted, wear a mask, etc please please please. It’s our only way back to some semblance of normal.
Ride On, my graphic novel inspired by my childhood as a horse crazy girl, was published in August. I was so excited for this book to come out, and the response to it was lovely. So many nice comments! It even got on the Indie Bestseller List for a while, which was super cool. My first time on that list!
Unfortunately, due to my discomfort with the state of the pandemic (and especially international travel), I decided to cancel my in person events for Ride On’s publication. Trying to be safe, all that etc, but wow, I was super disappointed. My hope is that I’ll finally be comfortable with travelling internationally in 2023, but we’ll see. I’m definitely planning to do what Canadian comic conventions I can, so I’ll see readers there. I went to VanCAF (the Vancouver Comic Arts Festival) in May, my first comic convention since The Before Times, and had a great time! Attendees were really excited to buy my books and talk about comics, which was wonderful. I’ve missed comic conventions a lot over the past few years. I’ve applied to attend VanCAF in 2023, so hopefully I’ll be there.
In terms of comic work, I was both super busy and then actually not busy (like, at all) for a couple months. A weird year, work wise! For the first half of 2022 I was frantically drawing away on my next graphic novel, Hockey Girl loves Drama Boy, a young adult romance that will be out from First Second Books sometime in 2023. I threw pretty much all my frustrations over the progress (or lack thereof) of the pandemic into finishing that book, and ended up drawing nearly 300 pages in about a year. Wild!
I also wrote an Avatar: The Last Airbender script, a 72-page stand alone graphic novel focusing on Azula called Azula in the Spirit Temple, that will be out from Dark Horse Comics sometime in 2023. It’s drawn by my usual Avatar collaborator, Peter Wartman, and it’s basically my fever dream Azula story. Here’s the cover:
So good, right??? SO GOOD!!!!
Anyway, I very much did NOT pace myself, and finishing Hockey Girl (and the Azula script) early-ish in the year meant I spent the summer somewhat flailing around, not sure what my next project would be. I did eventually figure it out and am now working on something new, but it was a strange, empty summer where I played a lot of video games and then felt mildly guilty about it.
Getting obsessed with the Dragon Age game series was my big “thing I enjoyed” in 2022. I played through Dragon Age Inquisition (the third game in the series) a second time, fell in love with Sera and just had a ridiculously wonderful time, so much so that I literally felt depressed for a week after finishing the game. I’d mostly stopped playing games for the past decade due to the hours my comics career demanded, and getting back into gaming over the past two years has been very rewarding. Due to those 10 years of all work/no fun, I missed playing the first two Dragon Age games. So, I went back and played Dragon Age Origins, and am now in the midst of playing Dragon Age 2. The ancient combat system and graphics made Origins kind of a slog, but it was worth it for the lore. Anyway, if you see me in real life, let’s talk about Dragon Age!
Otherwise, I read a ton of books, over 40 (a lot for me)! My faves were as follows:
Tehanu by Ursula K Le Guin
Nettle and Bone by T Kingfisher
Spear by Nicola Griffith
A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers
The Last Graduate by Naomi Novik
And I also re-read All Systems Red, the first Murderbot novella, for the millionth time. Also re-read Network Effect, the Murderbot novel. And Fugitive Telemetry, the 6th novella. XD
Anyway, I love Murderbot. My favourite series of the last decade or so.
Whew, this is getting long! What else did I like? I enjoyed the Rings of Power tv show. I watched a lot of Rupaul’s Drag Race. Turning Red was a very good movie that I hope means more modern, human focused animated movies from Pixar and Disney in the future. Season 3 of Star Trek: Lower Decks was good, although I wish the seasons were longer (10 episodes is short!). What We Do In the Shadows was AMAZING!! Pretty much my favourite TV shows this year. Really enjoyed The Outer Worlds, the rare non-Dragon Age game I played this year, haha.
And I think that’s it! Thanks to everyone who sent a nice note this way, or bought my books or supported my books in other ways. I really love making comics and I couldn’t do it without you! Social media-wise, the only place I post regularly is Instagram, so follow me there if you like comics and cat pictures. Hope to see you all in 2023!
-Faith Erin Hicks, 2022
Hi all, my next graphic novel, Ride On, is out NEXT WEEK!!! To celebrate I’ll be having a couple of virtual events; both are free but require registration.
1) August 16 at 9pm PST/6pm PST, hosted by Linden Tree.
2) August 17th at 7pm EST/4pm PST with fellow cartoonists Gene Yang and Kristin Varner, hosted by An Unlikely Story.
The registration link for both events is here, hope to see you there!
Hi all. Ride On, my next original graphic novel, will be published on August 16, 2022. Hopefully I’ll be able to do events and signings to promote it, but at this point, who knows? Just gonna take things one day at a time. Anyway, the cover for Ride On has been revealed, here it is:
Looks good, yeah? I’m really proud of it!
Please pre-order Ride On at your local bookstore, comic store, or wherever you get your books. Helpful links below:
Indiebound // Comic Shop Locator // Indigo // Barnes & Noble // Powells // Amazon (US) // Amazon (CAN) //
Hello all! A few years ago I adapted and drew a sweet, funny young adult novel by Prudence Shen into the graphic novel Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong, which was published by First Second Books in 2013. Now that comic, originally published in black and white, has a brand new edition in full colour by Alison Acton! Take a look at the pictures below for a comparison:
So exciting! If you haven’t heard of it before, NCPGW is a funny, drama-filled story of two guys, Nate & Charlie. Nate is a geek, Charlie is a jock, but they’ve been friends since childhood. Then they end up pitted against each other in a high school election, and things go HORRIBLY WRONG from there. I’m so thrilled that First Second is giving this awesome book a second chance to find its readers, especially in a young adult comic market that’s much stronger than it was when NCPGW was first published.
If you’d like to check out Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong, please follow this link for handy purchasing info.
Ride On is about young riders and horses and also Star Trek. So, I was a horse crazy girl in my younger years. I loved horses. I rode constantly. I would go and hang out at the barn with other young women who rode, and one boy, there was one boy who rode at the stables that I rode at when I was a young teen.”
“And Ride On, it’s not a memoir. There is nothing in this book that is completely true to events that happened to me, but I would consider it emotionally true. So, it is based on, a little bit based on my experiences being this young, horse crazy girl, and also based on my experience of having this one thing in my life that I loved.”
Last fall, I talked to comicbook.com about my forthcoming graphic novel Ride On. Read the complete interview here. Ride On is coming in Winter 2022 – can’t wait for you to see it!
Hi all, I’ve had a couple of books come out, so wanted to make a post to update everyone.
First off, One Year at Ellsmere, the new and improved version of an older graphic novel that was published years ago under the title The War at Ellsmere, is out now from First Second Books! One Year at Ellsmere has updated artwork (I re-inked the entire book) and is now in colour, thanks to the work of amazing colourist Shelli Paroline! I’m thrilled with how the new edition looks, please check it out here.
Second, Imbalance, the Avatar: The Last Airbender trilogy written by me with art by Peter Wartman (colour by Adele Matera) is out in a collected edition. All three parts of the trilogy as well as notes from Peter and me are contained in this lovely (and huge!) library edition. Go here for more info.
In further Avatar news, there will be a brand new stand-alone graphic novel about Katara published in October. It’s called Katara and the Pirate’s Silver, and I’m once again working with Peter and Adele. Please check that out here.
And in February of 2021 there will be a second stand-alone Avatar graphic novel, this one focused on Toph (who is kind of my favourite!). That one is called Toph Beifong’s Metalbending Academy. Go here for more info. As always, pre-orders for these books are important, so if you’re able to do that, please do!
That’s a lot! And there’s more to come. 😉 I’m also in the midst of writing and drawing a brand new original graphic novel which has not yet been announced, but I occasionally post artwork from it on my twitter or Instagram. Hopefully that book will be announced fairly soon and then I can be more open about it. It’s a graphic novel I’ve been dying to work on for years, and I’m so happy it’s finally happening.
The completely updated, re-inked, full in colour (and somewhat re-written) One Year at Ellsmere (previously published in 2008 as The War at Ellsmere) is available for pre-order! It’ll be published in both paperback and hardback by First Second Books in July 2020. I’m so excited for this older book to find new readers, and I’m very happy with this new edition, which looks so good, thanks to updated art and gorgeous colour by Shelli Paroline. Please check it out and pre-order if possible! Go here for more info about the book, as well as a short preview. 
Hi guys, I’ll be tabling at Fan Expo Vancouver on February 15th-17th. I’m a comic creator guest, so I’ll be in that part of the exhibit hall, at table P17. I’ll have copies of my books for sale, as well as original artwork, and I’m on a Kids & Comics panel on Monday afternoon. Go here for more info. Hope to see people there!
Also, the paperback edition of my young adult romance novel (that is all about comics) Comics Will Break Your Heart is out now! You can buy it from your local bookstore or Amazon for the low price of $10! So cheap!
