SDCC 2013: Steve T. Seagle And Teddy Kristiansen Announce New Book

Upping their game from collaborations such as It’s a Bird and the The Red Diary the team of Steve T. Seagle and Teddy Kristiansen announced their new book tentatively called Mercury at their spotlight panel Thursday afternoon. The duo also just released their latest graphic novel, Genius published by First Second, which Seagle described as a semi-autobiographical spiritual successor to It’s a Bird.

The format of this new project will be two panels per page, which Seagle claims he knows nothing about. This may sound strange, but the team has attempted something like this before when Seagle “translated” Kristiansen’s Danish-language book The Red Diary from just the context of the art. He then sent his interpretation of the book to Kristiansen, who told him he got it all wrong. They ended up publishing both versions in a single volume, which I haven’t read but sounds very cool.

According to Seagle’s explanation during the panel, the idea for Mercury is that Kristiansen just draws panels based on riffs and motifs and whatever really comes into to his head, and will present these pages to Seagle as he goes. When the book is finished being drawn, Seagle reserves the right to reorder pages and panels to tell his story, and at that point he will write a script. Only at the end of this process will either creator actually know the story that they were telling all along. It’s a fascinating riff on the collaborative process, and I can’t wait to see how the result turns out.

We often talk about writer/artist duos that seem to work together with a special sort of magic. I think these two deserve a spot on that list and am glad to see that they’re refusing to rest on their laurels and keep pushing the medium to it’s limits.