by Caitlín R. Kiernan

Re-creating Dancy Flammarion for a graphic novel has been a very interesting and, at times, very challenging undertaking. It’s actually felt like a sort of translation. In the prose work, beginning with her first appearance in my second novel, Threshold (1998), then in the short stories collected in Alabaster (2006), I’ve always had the luxury of using however many words I needed to tell the story. But in the comic, I’ve had to learn to trust Steve Lieber and Rachelle Rosenberg to tell a huge part of the story for me, to convey everything from mood to description to a character’s emotional state. Show it, don’t tell it—which is indispensible advice for any author—is doubly true here. The prose stories were me flying solo. It’s been hard to get used to being part of this wonderful team. Hard, but rewarding.

There are days when I get finished pages, and they blow me away. Those days leave me feeling more like Steve and Rachelle—and our cover artist, Greg Ruth—have crawled inside my head and plugged directly into my thoughts. I think, there’s no way my scripts were that good at communicating what I saw in my head. Those are astounding days and nights.

Whenever I complete a project—­whether it’s a novel, a short story, whatever—when I let go and send it out into the Scary Big Wide World, I can only hope that people will grasp what I’ve tried to communicate, and that it will somehow speak to them. And, in part, I could say that I want to leave them wanting more. That’s especially true here. There are many Dancy Flammarion stories remaining that I want to tell, and one of my fondest hopes for Alabaster: Wolves is that it’s the beginning of a long and marvelous relationship with Dark Horse, a new life for Dancy, and a continuing collaboration with Steve, Rachelle, and Greg. I hope readers love what they see here.