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Graphic Novel Editor

The creators of Accused, a true crime podcast by the Cincinnati Enquirer, wanted to do something different for their third season: a graphic novel. I threw together a few test pages using illustrator Clay Sisk’s illustrations to see if we could position images with real text, not drawn text, to produce a graphic novel like experience. We could, but it was going to mean a lot of manual labor inputting X and Y coordinates for images and text boxes in desktop and mobile layouts. I thought it would be quicker if I could throw together a simple layout editor to drag the pieces into place on the page, then click a “publish” button. The result was this, which we all agreed turned out pretty well.

A short time later, we were approached to do a graphic novel treatment to accompany usatoday.com’s coverage of the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. I churned out three more graphic novels using the same tool I’d developed for Accused.

• • Mary Church Terrell
• • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
• • Carrie Chapman Catt

It worked fine, but the tool had to be run locally, not over a network, so I was the only one producing the novels. When it looked like there would be a desire for more, I went to work on version 2 of the editor.

The app is a Svelte frontend hitting an Express server hosted on Google Firebase and saving data files and media assets to Firestore and Cloud Storage respectively. I basically copied a bunch of functionality from Illustrator: drag and drop, resize-and-rotate handles, buttons to change stacking order and align objects, option-drag to copy, multiple undo and redo, just to name a few features.

Here are some of the graphic novels produced with the new editor:

• • Illustrated look at 5 new dinosaur discoveries
• • The Other Side of the RV Boom
• • How to game the numbers for Title IX
• • Berry Tramel’s look at the top 5 Oklahoma Nebraska football games.