My Agent is Circulating My Graphic Novel. I Think It's Great!

I mean, of course I do. But how she and I got here is a pretty interesting window into my creative process in 2025.

A few years back, I had what I thought was a great idea for a series of “middle grade” novels — in America, that’s a book for kids 8-12+.

Here’s the series overview:

In The Ferryman series, twelve-year-old “control freak” Ellie mistakenly climbs aboard the boat of a mysterious cloaked man, the Ferryman. The Ferryman paddles Ellie onto the Great Flow, a mystical waterway that connects all living things throughout the universe, guiding her into a series of dark adventures in strange but fascinating locations, including a journey to the center of the universe itself. Each book in The Ferryman series involves a stand-alone mystery, as Ellie also tries to unravel the true agenda of the Ferryman, and piece together the point of all the adventures.

I liked the mix of fantasy and mystery, and that the project was darker than most kids’ books. I also liked that the main character was neurodivergent-ish, but that this was not at all the point of the book.

I wrote the first book in the series, The Ferryman: City of Gold, and outlined the next two books, and I loved it more than anything I’d ever written.

I sent it to my agent, Amy Brewer, at the Metamorphosis Agency.

She loved it too, even as she also offered me her usual long list of brutal yet brilliant editorial notes for improvement.

But she also said, sadly, “Middle grade is a really hard sell right now. And fantasy might be even worse.”

I made her suggested revisions, but being my usual foolishly optimistic self, I ignored her words of caution about the marketplace.

Even so, she agreed to send it out to editors.

Or, rather, she tried to send it out. For the first time in her career, my agent could get hardly any editors even to read the damn thing. She’s generally as brutally honest about the market as she is about my books, but even she was surprised by how bleak things had become.

(This experience was part of the reason why I wrote this depressing article back in 2023.)

I was pretty demoralized. But I said before that I am foolishly optimistic, and I recalled my agent mentioning something in a Zoom chat a few weeks before: that graphic novels were selling, even in middle grade.

I said to her: “What if I rewrote this story as a series of graphic novels?”

“That would be great,” she said. “But do you know anything about graphic novels?”

“Absolutely!” I said, lying through my teeth.

The truth is, I read graphic novels, but I didn’t know how to write or illustrate them.

Which wasn’t to say I couldn’t learn.

And I did learn, doing a deep dive into the mechanics of genre. It helped a lot that I’m an experienced screenwriter, trained to think visually, and I’ve also done some storyboarding.

Then I rewrote my own story as a graphic novel “script.”

However, I doubted that editors would be any more interested in a graphic novel script than they had been in the novel itself; I at least needed some sample pages.

I approached some established illustrators, but their quotes were far higher than expected: hundreds of dollars per page. I couldn’t afford to spend thousands of dollars on a spec project — I’m foolishly optimistic, but not that foolishly optimistic.

Photo by Alexander Mils on Unsplash

At this point, I confess I explored the possibility of AI-generated art. But two things put me off.

First, at that point, the technology simply wasn’t there yet, not for a continuous story.

Second, my friends in the graphic novel publishing community also told me privately that there was currently a huge backlash against anything AI-related and that editors would very negatively judge a project that used it, even for placeholder-art.

(Even a year later, I suspect this is much less true, at least deep within the bowels of the industry. With the industry in such dire straits — and with public attitudes on AI shifting so rapidly — I suspect editors are now actively exploring all options that will save them money.)

Anyway, next I started interviewing aspiring illustrators — at Upwork. I was still paying them, but these were rates I could afford — the agreement being that if the project sold to a publisher, and the editor liked their work, there might be a bigger, better-paying job later on.

The finished artwork turned out far better than I expected.

And now here we are, my agent and I, ready to submit the project and its sample pages to editors.

What’s the point of my sharing all this? Well, it’s partly to share the artwork, below, which I really do think is sensational. And to brag about learning a new skill set, which I’m very proud to have done.

But this whole story is also a pretty good illustration of what I wrote last month: that if you want to make it in a creative field in 2025, you can’t just play by the old rules. You have to take risks and think outside the box — while also keeping your ear to the ground and doggedly pursuing any realistic possibility that comes your way.

And I’ve also written how important it is to share your story online and on social media — to tell the story behind your stories — helping to drum up interest and support.

So here we are!

What do I think the chances are that this project will ever get picked up and see the light of day?

Well, I still think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever written. And I am still foolishly optimistic in general.

But it’s a ridiculously crazy time in the industry right now, so I guess we’ll just have to cross our fingers and hope.

I do have some exciting news about a different book that will be published later this year, but that will have to wait a few weeks.

In the meantime, as promised, here is some of the art from my would-be graphic novel.

First, the first two pages:

Now we skip ahead a bit, to three pages at the end of the third chapter:

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Brent Hartinger is a screenwriter and author. Check out his other newsletter about his travels at BrentAndMichaelAreGoingPlaces.com.