Welcome to another installment of Indie Books! This week we have Eliza Frye. She contacted me about her new indie comic book that is premiering at San Diego Comic-Con this week and I really fell in love with the look and feel of the whole thing.
I know we usually stick to prose in this column, but I felt this project was too special to pass up.
So, without further ado, here’s Eliza:
Oh, hello! My name is Eliza Frye and I make comics, graphic novels, sequential arts, and visual narratives, occasionally even all at the same time. I started this practice four years ago with a short webcomic called “The Lady’s Murder.” At the time I was studying animation and decided to use a comic as way to visually develop my second-year film; but before the end of the first semester I fell crazy in love with comics and ditched animation by the side of the road. My webcomic got nominated for an Eisner Award the following year, and I knew I’d finally found my medium.
“The Lady’s Murder” became the opening story of my first book, Regalia, a collection of short stories about love, murder, fathers, daughters, and tigers. My comics tend to be described with words like visceral, graphic, and spooky, but I like to think of them as love letters. From “The Lady’s Murder,” a mystery told only by the men closest to the victim, to “I Can See Your Underpants,” a musing on peaches and the history of ladies’ undergarments, each story in Regalia spills some sort of messy secret. (Just not out loud.)
I produced Regalia through a Kickstarter campaign that quite simply took my breath away. The project got over-funded by 230%, allowing me to upgrade from paperback to hardcover and work exclusively with domestic printers. I’m truly thrilled with the finished book, and feel that my friend Chris Northrop summed it up best the first time he picked up a copy and immediately said, “this book smells like quality.”
More about Regalia at San Diego Comic-Con: http://elizafrye.com/regalia-
More of my work: http://elizafrye.com/
My current webcomic: http://deathcomic.com/