What was the first part of the story that appeared in your head? We caught up with her to talk about why YA is booming, incorporating criticisms of the first volume in the series, and how being Canadian helps her produce good work. The story is compelling enough to garner an animated-series adaptation, slated for 2018, meaning Hicks’s tale will soon be spreading far beyond the book market. Their friendship is heartfelt but threatened by their differences of race and class, and they stumble upon plots to destroy the détente that people from each of their groups have died for in the past. Those conquerors were of a different ethnicity than the majority of the people they ruled, and The Nameless City plays with the notion of multiethnic coexistence and tension by establishing a fantastical burg without a name where a tense peace could unravel at any moment.Īgainst that backdrop, we meet Rat and Kaidu, a poor child and the child of the ruling elite, respectively. It follows a handful of young people in a world built on a base of ideas and imagery from China during the first half of the last millennium, specifically during the Yuan Dynasty, a period when the Mongols held the Imperial throne. Its second installment, The Stone Heart, will be released in the first week of April, and it’s even better than the first. Hicks has mapped out a three-part YA novel series, colored by Jordie Bellaire, titled The Nameless City. She’s been cranking out ace work both in webcomics and the printed page since the turn of the millennium, and her greatest work yet is currently underway. The past few years have seen sensational releases from youth-oriented creators like Raina Telgemeier ( Ghosts), Hope Larson ( Compass South), and Hicks, a Vancouver-based writer-artist with an animation background and a crackerjack eye for action and emotion. Superhero fiction has long been the dominant mode for sequential art, but in recent years, female-led literature targeted at younger readers has been experiencing a spectacular rise in both visibility and sales. The comics medium has been undergoing a revolution in the past decade, and Faith Erin Hicks is in the vanguard.

Nameless comic