About Fenix Starlight

From a young age, I have always loved comics. I never wanted to draw “one final picture”, instead preferring to draw doodles of a narrative in my head, drawing scene after scene on a single piece of paper, until it became a mass of scribbles. After some redirecetion from my parents, I started to draw each scene on a separate sheet, stapling them to become a “mini book”. As I grew older, these “stapled books” became more detailed, with panels and text, eventually turning into mini comic books!

In primary school, the teacher would always ask us what we wanted to be when we grew up. I loved writing stories and drawing, and struggles to pick one. It was only when my parents told me, “well why not comics? You can do both!”, that so many new possibilities opened up, and I finally knew what I wanted to be when I grew up… a comic artist.

I grew up reading memori graphic novels such as “sisters” and “El defo”, when there was a recent bloom in the industry to create comics for a younger audience. I was particularly drawn to the fantasy genre, I loved the idea of magical relms hidden in the every day world, but didn’t see many graphic novels like that growing up.

By the time I was 10 years old, I had collected almost all of the graphic novels aimed at my age group, and found myself yearning for more. This was before a ton of middle-grade titles came out during the pandemic- such as “Lightfall”, “The Squad” and “Speechless”.

But before this, there weren’t many middle-grade graphic novels that were appropriate for 10-year-olds, either the story was too complicated, or had topics that a 10-year-old shouldn’t be reading about. 

It was only till one evening after searching with no luck to find a graphic novel for chinese new yea, I thought to myself… “Why don’t I try making one?” I’ll make the graphic novel I want to read! Although I loved fantasy, the comics I grew up with were all memoirs, so I seatreched around my table, and pucked up a Rubiks cube I had recently solved for the first time (which I was very proud of at that time, being only 10), and decided to make a graphic novel about that!

And so SpeedCubers was born. 

Obvliosuly, creating a graphic novel wasnt as simple as just that. Although I made comics when I was younger, I usually drew them page by page, didn’t plan out te story or panels, with the text barley fitting in, and just “flowing” with the story. If I wanted to make a “proper” graphic novel, I would have to do it probably, I thought!

So over the next few weeks, I did a deep dive looking at what the process was for making a graphic nobel. In particular, I found Raina Telemigers website Goraina.com extremely helpful. In the blogs section, she talks a lot about her materials and process, from creating the idea to formatting the page for colouring. 

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For SpeedCubers, I mainly followed her process step for step, from sketching in blue pencil, to inking using Indian Ink. However, so things you can only learn through doing, for example the first time I drew out all the Speedcubers pages, I can calculated the panels wrong, and not measured them, so had to start over, to get the best resolution and formatting correct.

At this point, it was lockdown, and I worked on speedcubers for a few hours each day when home learning had finished. Over the next nine months, I worked tirelessly on thumbnailing, sketching, inking and colouring the pages. As my parents were graphic designers, my dad helped me a lot with the formatting of the pages in adobe for the lettering, and for using photoshop to colour the pages. Without them, I don’t think I would have been able to finish Speedcubers. You can see the full timeline of the creation of Speedcubers on the bottom of [this] page.

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After almost a whole year, I had finally finished my first graphic novel!! I was over the moon, having learnt valuable skills about the comic makling process, and just extremely happy that I had created something I always dreamed of, and could publish it! After some research, we had planned to self- publish SpeedCubers on Amazon. However, I wanted to check with the creators of Rubik’s cubes, Mattel, so see if they would allow me to publish this book.

And so my dad contacted Spin Masters legal team about what had happened, and at first, all seemed to be going well. They seemed happy to let me go ahead to self publish, and were going to get a document for us to sign to use their ip. However, the changed their mind, and the legal team said I couldn’t publish it.

At the time, I was devastated. All of the work and effort I had poured into this project would never be seen, and it felt like my dreams as a comic artist were crushed. It took me a while to get over that, leading to a pause in drawing comics or characters for a few months. However, now that I look back, I am really glad that this happened. Copyright is an important thing in creating work, as I am glad that I learnt this lesson earlier on, than later in life. Instead, this drove me to create my own ip, to make a graphic novel that had no existing products or take inspiration from media, I wanted the characters and world to be my own ideas. After a couple of alternative graphic novel ideas, I settled on the story of a girl who was bitten by a wolf… WolfBound.

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Now, I was 12, and had learnt the process of creating a graphic novel from start to finish (except for the publication part), I wanted WolfBound to be a full length graphic novel. WolfBound is 250+ pages long, so every step of the way took longer. I learnt from creating SpeedCubers, and changed my process to fit my needs, this time using Procreate instead of Photoshop. As I was getting older, school work also increased, as I took my GCSEs and overall stress went up, progress when down. But I always tried to make time to work on WolfBound, waking up earlier at 5am to get two hours of work in before school started, or starting homework during school break and lunch to get a few more minutes of work at home. Overall, WolfBound took 5 years to compleat, from 2021 to 2025. You can see the full timeline of the creation of WolfBound on the bottom of [this] page.

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Now, I’m 17 years old, and WolfBound is complete. In the early months of this year I finished formatting and adding the text to Wolfbound, the book is now comple and ready to go. For the last year and a half, progress had slowed considerably as I started looking into how to publish it, reading blogs of people who have been there adn doen it, reading book about graphic novel publishing, and joining several communities for first time authors. It is my mission for Wolfbound to be published down the traditional rount, and it would be my dream for it to be published by graphix or harper ally.

Over tha past year, I have been more active on social media, trying to gain a readership of people interested in WolfBound. To mu surprise, a [short] documenting my journey went viral, aging over 1M views. It makes me so happy to see people interested in my storiues, and I would love for Wolfbound to be shared with the world, for my 12 year old self to have their dreams come true

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I am currently looking for a literacy agent to represent me, and help get Wolfbound published! It is my dream for it to be published by graphix or harpers ally.

If you are a literacy agent or publisher, and would liek to knwo more about WOlfbound, please contact me on this [page], as I have the Wolfbound pitch and sample pages ready! I know this is a bit of an odd order, as I have created the graphic novel first, however, I have created a pitch with the specifications, and would be happy to send it to you!

If you are a reader, or someone interested in reading Wolfboudn when it comes out, please consider signing up to my mailing list below, so I can send you an email to give you more updates and when it might come out!