A single lamp lights the at-home studio of Connor McCann ’14. It’s curved towards his slanted desk, casting shadows behind the opened bottles of ink and stray graphite tips that have fallen off of broken pencils.
Posters blanket the wall from floor to ceiling—Friday the 13th, Dexter, some Batman. All the classics of the horror and comic book worlds line up to coat the walls of a 15-year-old student who may have just created the next Marvel great.
Earlier this month, McCann published his first graphic novel titled Bitter Liquid. This 119-page, “pop-culture infused mystery adventure,” as McCann proclaims, has taken more than nine months to produce and, according to McCann, roughly 650 hours of work.
“I went through a three or four month art slump before I started on the book,” McCann said. “But then I thought to myself, if I didn’t put the work in now I would just be another awful teenage artist. I really strove for professionalism.”
In trying to reach that professional level, McCann created a Tumblr where throughout the process of the book he posted progress updates and scanned a number of different illustrations—from a new page he had inked, to warm-up sketches.
“Once you get past the super emotional teenagers on Tumblr, it is a great way to network,” McCann said. “I’ve even gotten some positive feedback from actual industry professionals on there.”
Although Bitter Liquid is his first published work, comics to McCann are nothing new. He recalls drawing his first comic, “Spidey and Connor,” when he was just seven-years-old and since then he hasn’t lost any steam. Between creating thousands of original sketches and compiling an archive of graphic novels by the hundreds, McCann seems to have only strengthened his passion.
“I got into it because my sister planned on making comics and abandoned it. I guess I wanted to be involved with something she did,” McCann said. “Now I’d call it a full blown obsession.”
By the end of high school, McCann plans to publish a series of five or six books—Bitter Liquid is just the first. But for now he will turn off the desk lamp after each long night of work and crawl under his Spiderman sheets, watching as the posters on his wall become too dark to see.
Bitter Liquid is on sale now for $12.00 at www.deliciousbrains.bigcartel.com, and McCann’s Tumblr can be found at www.deliciousbrains.tumblr.com.
