Review Fix chats with Richard Fairgray, who talks about his Black Sand Beach series and what makes them special.
About Black Sand Beach #1: Are You Afraid of the Light? and Black Sand Beach #2: Do You Remember the Summer Before?:
Black Sand Beach is the can’t-put-down middle-grade graphic-novel series about a haunted summer vacation. In Are You Afraid of the Light?, 12-year-old Dash and his best friend Lily are spending the summer at Back Sand Beach, where Dash’s family has a house. But nothing is as it seems from the beginning. In Do You Remember the Summer Before?, a revelation about how Dash may or may not have spent the summer before raises the stakes even higher. Eerie and enthralling, this series is sure to be a hit with audiences of any age.
Review Fix: How did you know a career in comics/graphic novels was for you?
Richard Fairgray: A lot of factors all kind of just came together. I’m blind in my left eye and my right eye only sees about 3% of what a normal eye should, so processing things in 3 dimensions has always been tough for me. i do a lot of math in my head when I’m walking to know how many steps to take before I bump into something. I started drawing when I was really young and it just sort of clicked that this was a way of making the world make sense. I could literally take the things I saw and make them flat. I’ve always loved reading and writing stories, so I quickly started putting that together and by the time I was 7 I was writing and publishing my first comic. Then I just never stopped. Now, with Black Sand Beach 2: Do You Remember the Summer Before?, I have 236 books in the world with my name on them.
Review Fix: Who inspires you creatively?
Fairgray: There are so many great writers out there, but mostly it’s my friends and the way they think about the problems of the world. So many of my stories are extrapolated from tiny concepts that a few of us have stayed up all night talking about. They’re never story ideas, more like responses to real life. A lot of the horror in Black Sand Beach is an allegory for trauma (repressed memory, loss of self) filtered through this story engine of a beach on the edge of our understandable reality.
Review Fix: How are your comics/graphic novels different or special?
Fairgray: I have so many ideas, too many to draw, too many to write down. Some are good, some are marketable, but I always have a sense of whether a story is specifically something, or something that I would make differently from anybody else. Those are the books I get obsessed with, the ones I can really live inside for months at a time while I draw.
Review Fix: Who do you think will dig it the most?
Fairgray: I hope everyone can find something in Black Sand Beach. I made it for the weird, horror loving kid that I was, but I think we all grow up feeling like we’re the strangest kid in class.
Review Fix: How do you want your books to be remembered?
Fairgray: Alphabetically.
Review Fix: Anything else you’d like to add?
Fairgray: I want to be honest, I am still laughing at how funny my last answer was. But seriously, I hope my books are special to at least one person. I want to know that someone like me in the world read something I wrote and thought ‘yeah, this person gets me.’
Review Fix: What’s next?
Fairgray: Well, Cardboardia 1: The Other Side of the Box comes out in September, I’m drawing Black Sand Beach 4 right now (Black Sand Beach 3: Have You Seen the Darkness? is out next Summer and is very much finished and scarier than the first 2), I have a book called Shed coming sometime in 2022, a YA comic about gay teens and a shared love of superhero stories, I’m working on a memoir and I’m working on something that I’m really excited about that I really can’t talk about yet, but it involves impossible places and a talking stegosaurus.
Review Fix: Where can people find out more?
Fairgray: richardfairgray.com, or on Instagram (where I am most active) @richardfairgrayauthor
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