writer: Sam Costello
artist: Savannah Horrocks
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Stories are stories, right? The medium doesn’t matter when you begin with the idea. It’s the characters and their relationships, the plot and its twists that matter.
That’s true with Doll’s House, at least. Doll’s House, you see, started its life, years ago, as a shortish prose story called The Little House. I worked the story over many times over the course of a couple of years, let it sit for many years after that, and then returned to it a couple of years ago with the intention of wrapping up the story in prose and getting it published.
I made notes, changed characters, tweaked motivations. I worked at it, but it still wasn’t quite coming together. But then I thought: comics. Taking the basic ideas and effects of the story and translating them to comics seemed like a way to break the logjam of the prose.
It worked: Instead of the years spent on the short story, the comic Doll’s House took three drafts over less than two months to complete.
In many ways, it’s still the same story. In other ways, it’s profoundly changed. Either way, this is the story it’s become. I hope you like it.