6 Books with Ale Presser and K.B. Spangler

There are two of us for this Six Books Interview!

Artist and co-creator Ale Presser is a very tired Brazilian mom who lives in Portugal with her husband and son. She lives and breathes comics. According to K.B., she’s a border collie who has to be working on comics every hour of the day or she’ll start to eat the couch.

Author and co-creator K.B. Spangler lives in North Carolina with her husband and two completely awful dogs. She never stops writing novels, comics, and short stories. To hear Ale tell it, if left unattended, she’ll wander off and start another major writing project.

1. What book are you currently reading?

To Ride a Rising Storm by Moniquill Blackgoose, sequel to To Shape a Dragon’s Breath. I’m about a hundred pages in, and it’s got the same tone and pacing as the first book, so I’m really enjoying it. It’s one of those stories that operates on multiple levels, which I adore: the first level are the obvious challenges of the indigenous main character who is forced to operate in a white-dominated society; the second level are all of these baby living fusion engines just running around being adorable, with all the subtle implications of what it might mean that dragons can change physical matter at the elemental level; the third level is the folklore surrounding dragons and how each extremely different society claims they were saved from catastrophic climate crisis through forging bonds with these creatures. Blackgoose is building to something and I’m eager to learn how these themes are resolved.

2. What upcoming book are you really excited about?

This Machine Kills Billionaires by T.R. Napper. It’s a cyberpunk short story collection and Napper writes dark and hard, so basically it’ll be like consuming a little slice of fury whenever I’m in the mood for delicious hate cake.

3. Is there a book you’re currently itching to re-read?

I really love rereading The Scholomance Trilogy by Naomi Novik. It’s another one of those multiple-level stories where I find something new each time I read it. There are the monsters and the capitalism metaphor, of course, but on my last reread I realized that the man character mentions many times that the monsters will go after non-magical humans once they’ve eaten all of the tasty magic-enriched stuff. So if you extend the metaphor a little, nobody is safe from the harms caused by capitalism even if they can’t participate in it themselves. Plus you get phrases like “all the sense of an unvarnished deck chair” and, I mean, never. Not on my best day.

4. Is there a book that you love and wish that you yourself had written?

Watership Down, obvs.

5. What’s one book, which you read as a child or a young adult, that holds a special place in your heart?

Same answer. Those bunnies, man. How do you do that with bunnies? Fiver is constantly shivering in my head somewhere…you know, I should probably reread that book, too.

6. And speaking of that, what’s your latest book, and why is it awesome?

Well! That would be SideQuested, the first collected graphic novel of our webcomic of the same name. Here’s the cover copy:

Magic makes the world go round, but no one in Charlie Goldskin’s world knows precisely where magic comes from. This isn’t Charlie’s problem. She’s the adopted daughter of a woodcarver and is training to be a librarian. It’ll be a quiet life, but that’s fine with Charlie, as magic is summoned through conflict and she would like to avoid that, thank you very much!

Then her birth father shows up to take her from her village and bring her to the king’s court.

Prince Leopold is gifted in the noble arts of diplomacy and combat, but he’s never met anyone like Charlie. Falling in love with her wouldn’t be an issue, except he’s already engaged, and his fiancée is the daughter of a very powerful evil witch. Charlie, panicking, decides to break the news to Princess Robin...but then she finds love at first sight, too. To resolve this love triangle, the teens are sent on a quest to discover the source of magic! So much for Charlie’s plans for a quiet life...

I’m the author, and Ale Presser is the artist. Actually she’s the primary creator: she tells me what she wants to see in the story, and I slam words and plots into place, and then she illustrates my scripts. Ale is very firm about what I can and cannot do—she won’t let me kill off anyone!—and we’re both heavily influenced by Ranma ½ and other slapstick anime romcoms, so the story is constantly full steam ahead and beware of random giant mallets. Also, magical cults seeking to steal your life’s essence for their own nefarious purposes.

But the real joy is in the characters and how they interact. For example, Princess Robin and her mother, the all-powerful witch-queen Boopsie, know each other so well that it’s a joy to write their interactions. And they’re both very clever people so they’re constantly pushing each other’s buttons. Stack these characters with Ale’s amazing and expressive art, and it’s a wildly fun ride!

Thank you! 

POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.