Microplastics Are Your Friends! Storyboards & DVD Commentary

Take a special look at what I sent the dude who illustrated my book.

My (super messed-up) children’s book Microplastics Are Your Friends! is now available for purchase on Amazon.

(You can also read it for much cheaper as a paid subscriber to this blog.)

In honor of this momentous occasion, allow me to share with you the storyboards I drew and sent to the poor dude on Fiverr who drew my book.

(Sidebar, if you need a children’s book illustrated, I highly recommend Lucas D! He was fantastic to work with!)

This is what this dude had to go by to create my masterpiece. Along the way I’ll be providing some DVD commentary on the creative process.

(If you haven’t read the book yet, it’s a very quick read and you’ll want to do that before seeing this behind-the-scenes look at it. It’s free on Kindle Unlimited!)

As you can see, I cannot fucking draw for shit. Everything in red is instructions I gave him. Also didn’t realize how close the professor and kid would look to Rick & Morty until I got the final version back. Oops.

(Also if you like Lucas D’s final version of the cover, you can get it on a t-shirt right here!)

There’s no specific reason for why I named him McTegan, the character being Irish doesn’t really factor into anything. I like some Tegan & Sara songs and “McTegan” rolls off the tongue nicely.

One thing I definitely learned during this process is “factor the words into the image when storyboarding.” I told the guy not to add any of the words in as I am very picky with fonts and prefer to do that myself and a few of these pages proved very tough with the final images that were given to me.

I did some legitimate research on microplastics when planning out this book. (Five minutes of Googling and skimming scientific articles for factoids to use.)

As you can see, he did add the hat and whistle:

Sadly there was no Earth in the background so he did not receive bonus points.

I loved his version of this image so much that I open the book with it and even put it on a shirt you can buy. This little guy is kinda the mascot of the book for me.

I think it’s a combination of the blue skin color with the white little tears and the fact Lucas took my suggestion and did the sign with the sad face. One of the pages he absolutely demolished.

I don’t think the “more and more disheveled” thing really ended up translating but it’s fine.

The final version of the Shalhoub was very close to what I drew:

Gonna be honest, I doubt this monster design scares him.

This is my single favorite page of my storyboards. I think it’s funny that I just copied and pasted Tony’s face, I think my instruction is funny, honestly I just wholeheartedly believe that this is a prime example of how hilarious I am and this whole post is an excuse to show you this page. Very proud of it. I also think Lucas crushed the final Tony Shalhoub design:

This image ended up being perfect for the back cover, I didn’t include Tony Shalhoub in my design for the cover because I wanted that entire subplot to be a huge surprise for the reader but I did include this image as the back cover as a sort of foreshadowing.

Oh how I’d love to be a fly on the wall for the moment a parent who bought this book for their kid realizes the giant mistake they made as they read it to them. My ultimate dream is this book catching on and an entire generation of kids grow up believing in The Shalhoub.

Cannot believe I was able to upload this as a kids book.

Like what. the. fuck.

The Tony Shalhoub stalking twist was baked into the premise when I thought of the idea. The idea came to me like this: “What if the Trump Administration was trying to sell microplastics as a positive to kids? And they said they were good because they stave off an evil demon? And we call the demon The Shalhoub? And the guy narrating the book is using that as an excuse to stalk the real-life Tony Shalhoub?” All these thoughts happened within a twenty second period. I am a comedic genius.

Fun fact: originally Lucas gave this back to me as a bunch of cavemen running after the monster:

I explained to him that I needed those people to look more modern and he sent it back to me with the same cavemen character models just reskinned to be wearing modern clothes:

And I chuckled at the fact the monster was now being chased by the Geico cavemen so I was like “Fuck it, this is the final version.” How neat is that?

When I was putting this book together on Amazon KDP, I did the print version first and got halfway through the Kindle e-book version before I realized I had forgotten this page. I noted that the book does work without it but the “action figure’s worth of microplastics” joke makes me giggle too hard so I had to wait the full 72 hours for the book to be approved and then updated the manuscript accordingly. Also I don’t know why I chose “Pipetown, USA” other than it sounds funny.

I am going to burn in hell when I die.

This is my single favorite image from the entire book, Lucas absolutely slam-dunked it and once again, I cannot believe that this is a visual that exists inside of a children’s book on Amazon:

Someone really should have stepped in and prevented this. Society truly is failing our youth.

So there you go! Please buy the book and leave a review. Preferably I’d like five stars but if your review is funny enough I’ll accept a lower score.