Ligon + Knezovich collaboration no.2/

I'm about to embark on a year-long editorial illustration project with the always awesome fiction writer Samuel Ligon.

As a reminder, Sam and I collaborated a few years ago on a collection of 13 short stories entitled Wonderland (pictured above).

Wonderland was billed as:

"... a picture book for adults featuring tales as dark and absurd as they are poignant, playful, and true. ... containing thirteen subversive short stories full of love and ugliness, loss and beauty, donkeys and goats, baked goods and booze, country starlets and bearded ladies, domestic battles and corporate passions, sex and violence and sweet songs of sadness and heartache." 

I could not be more proud to have been a part of the project—the stories are funny and totally fucked up—and I'm excited to be working with Sam again. This time around, we will be tackling a much more ambitious collaborative project: a serialized novel!

The novel will be published in 50+ weekly installments in print edition of The Inlander, as well as on it's own website. Plus, Sam will be reading each installment on the radio, which will be turned into a downloadable podcast (I believe). I love the idea of combining an antiquated approach to publishing and storytelling (a la serialization and radio play) with the modern, digital elements of a website and podcast. 

The novel is not yet written (only the first few chapters are complete), so part of the challenge will be staying on track and keeping up with the publishing schedule without allowing the quality of the writing (or art) to suffer. 

I don't want to divulge too much about the book, but it's about American history and the American West, violence and travel, family and love and life and death and everything in between.

I'm still working out my approach to the illustrations, but I think I'm going to experiment with some different processes and forms. And I, too, may combine analog with digital. We'll see. 

Without question, though, I'll share more as the project evolves. For now, here are all 13 of the collages created for Wonderland.