The comic — page one of thirty-one

The first finished page · the rest is being drawn

There are two versions of this story. The one you can read today is the prose: three chapters, about forty minutes. The other is a comic book, and this is its first finished page — art and lettering both.

Four panels: a boy on a too-big bicycle under rain trees in the 1980s; the same road today, six lanes and glass towers with a yellow school bus; the narrator seen from behind-right looking through the bus's left window at parallel traffic; a red-tiled bungalow being demolished into red dust

Why a comic at all

The comic isn't a souvenir of the novel. It's the low-friction cut: the same nineteen beats and the same science, redistributed so that art carries the scenery and dialogue carries the rest. The prose version keeps the novel register — it is the one an adult enjoys reading aloud. This is the one a ten-year-old finishes alone.

Thirty-one pages, marked into the same three chapters as the prose: pages 1–12, 13–23, 24–31. Nothing is cut. What changes is who does the describing.

What page one settles

A first page is expensive because every later page inherits it. This one fixes the things that were still arguable:

The drawing language. Pastel ink and watercolor on warm ivory paper — washed colour held by charcoal contours, with firmer edges and stronger value separation than the watercolour plates in the prose chapters, so faces, vehicles and architecture still read at print size.
The lettering. Warm-ivory caption boxes, charcoal lettering, and a caption parked in the panel's quietest corner — never crowding a face.
Caption discipline. No caption runs over twenty words, no page carries more than two, and eleven of the thirty-one pages carry none at all. Anything a caption wants to explain, a kid says instead. Page one spends its whole allowance, and then the book gets quieter.
Nobody is a villain. Four grown-ups are wrong in the first chapter and not one of them is foolish, lazy, or lying. That has to be visible in how they're drawn, which is a decision you can only really test on a drawn page.

What happens next

The core cast has reference sheets; the art language is locked; page one is approved. The rest of chapter one gets drawn against it, page by page.

There's no release date, and inventing one would be the least honest thing on this site. When there are more pages, they'll appear here.

In the meantime the whole story is finished in prose, and it starts on the same road as the page above: Chapter 1 — The Rainbow on the Wrong Wall.