a cool 90 minutes
November 15, 2024
Please Be My Star is out in the world now! Yay! It’s so funny, I’ve been making comics for over 10 years, but this is my “debut” in fiction. In a lot of ways, though, I appreciate it taking this long. I feel a lot more confident in the kinds of stories I want to tell and how I want to tell them. It feels satisfying to have it all crystallized in Please Be My Star.
The biggest adjustment after writing a long-form webcomic for years and then non-fiction comics after that was how to tell a story in roughly 200 pages. It doesn’t help that a lot of my inspirations are from episodic storytelling like webtoons, monthly manga, and dramas. I was kinda like “what the hell?! how do I do this???”
But, let’s be honest, since my adolescence, one of my biggest storytelling inspos has always been movies. I even went to film school (kinda??) because of it! I’m a huge fan of directors like Baz Luhrmann, Wes Anderson, and Tim Burton, and when I thought of them and the way they tell stories – it clicked. And I mean, can’t you see it? Their work is so over-the-top and punchy it translates well to a comic sensibility.
For Please Be My Star, my biggest touchstones were definitely Wes Anderson’s Rushmore and John Hughes’s Pretty In Pink – 93 and 97 minutes, respectively. They tell complete stories with decently-sized quirky casts, and they’re just two of my favorite movies of all time.
So, going into writing and planning scenes, that’s how I thought of the pacing – a cool 90 minute runtime. Even some anime OVA episodes clock in around 30-40 minutes and tell memorable, beautiful short stories. And I’m a fast reader. For me a single manga volume or graphic novel takes less than an hour of my time, so I’m under no illusion Please Be My Star will be different for other readers, too.
That in mind, I did my best to keep the story flow how I like (a little fast, a little slow – I love manga decompression, after all), the characters punchy with a hint at deeper backstories, and focus mostly on Erika & Christian’s subtle “Will They, Won’t They?” dance.
In movies, you don’t get much backstory or lore drops, but hints at histories or sudden reveals. It’s all contained within a pretty tight proscenium. Coming from longer fiction, I used to feel like this was a drawback, but by the time I went into making Please Be My Star, it felt like a fun challenge, and, frankly, a relief LOL. Being able to strategically reveal things how and when I wanted, to keep the edges of the story vague, to leave the characters at the end, and to give it all to you not over the course of years but as one complete story – it was so refreshing!
Having now made Please Be My Star, I feel al lot more confident in stretching the bounds of this movie-inspired romance writing for comics. I’m so, so excited working on my next project, and I’m looking forward to adding to my little pantheon of offbeat romances! But that’s all I’ll say for now, heheh 
By the way, if you’d like to read more of my thoughts on teen movies, I did a writeup for The Nerd Daily on my favorite teen movie fashions. I got so crazy writing this I almost made collages for each of the looks I discuss, but I had to stop myself. I was like “no…that’s too much work. Focus on your job,” LOL. Anyway, I’d love for you to check it out! I had a lot of fun writing it, and you can see more of my movie inspos for these kinds of stories.