Panel One 2018: Look Straight Ahead with Elaine M. Will
Elaine M. Will at the 2018 Panel One Comic Creator Festival (Photo credit: Chris Doucher/GeekNerdNet)
The following interview was recorded, and written by Chris Doucher, Managing Editor for GeekNerdNet. (GeekNerdNet.com is the Official Media Sponsor of the 2018 Panel One Comic Creator Festival)
The books Look Straight Ahead and Dust-Ship Glory are written and illustrated by Elaine M. Will, who I spoke with at the 2018 Panel One Comic Creator Festival. Elaine opens up about the coming of age story Look Straight Ahead, about a teenage boy who has a mental breakdown in his last year of high school. It’s about blurring the lines between fantasy and reality. We talk about the topic of mental health and how she portrayed one aspect of it in her story. After reading Look Straight Ahead, one reader told Elaine: “Thank you for explaining what I never could.”
To hear more on this, hit play on the Soundcloud link below. (*If you have any issue playing the audio, please reload the page and select/tap/click where it says “Listen in browser.”) And, if you get a chance to meet Elaine at a show, go and talk to her and check out her work. Her other book, Dust-Ship Glory, is adapted from a novel by Andreas Schroeder, telling the true story of a Finnish immigrant farmer - Tom Sukanen - who lived in Saskatchewan, Canada in the 1930’s, and built a steamship in the middle of the Prairies.
