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Breena Bard Sells Graphic Novel, Wildfire, to Little Brown

Published Fri, 25 Dec 2020 11:00:09 -0600

Last updated Sat, 30 Jan 2021 17:29:20 -0600

Breena Bard has sold her middle-grade graphic novel Wildfire to Andrea Colvin at Little, Brown. Publisher's Weekly reports that Wildfire tells the following tale. "After a wildfire destroys her family's home, 13-year-old Julianna is engulfed in anger toward Carson, the boy who accidentally started it. But once she joins her new school's conservation club and learns more about climate change and its underlying causes, she finds a way to channel her frustration into action, and even to forgive Carson."

Breena Bard Sells Graphic Novel, Wildfire, to Little Brown — Wildfire by Breena Bard, art not final.

Born and raised in Wisconsin, Breena Bard moved to Portland, Oregon in the late 'aughts to chase her dream of writing and illustrating graphic novels. Her first self-published book Picket Line was funded by a Xeric Grant in 2011. In 2016 she self-published a collection of memoir comics called Hey Baby, which is the story of her pregnancy and birth of her first child. In 2017 she won the "Get Published by Graphix" contest, and her debut middle grade graphic novel Trespassers was released on May 5, 2020 on Scholastic/Graphix.

Wildfire will be published by Little, Brown in 2023 and Breena's agent Alex Slater at Trident Media Group negotiated the deal for world rights.

Last year, Little, Brown had a directive to expand their graphic novel list for years going ahead and appointed Andrea Colvin, formerly of Lion Forge as editorial director, Graphic Publishing to do just that. Publishing new fiction and nonfiction graphic novels for a range of ages, from early readers to young adults. Little, Brown has been doubling-to-tripling their comic book publishing line each scheduled year since then, with Suggs one of a number of beneficiaries of this publishing plan. It's another sign of major growth in the graphic novel market in bookstores, libraries and book fairs, as well as the greater range in content and comic book styles being published. It's a long way until the USA gets to the kind of breadth and depth enjoyed by Japan, Korea or France but it is one of a number of major moves in that direction.

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