Faith Erin Hicks used photos of her hometown, Halifax, to create settings for her graphic novel Friends With Boys, and she puts up a few side-by-side comparisons of photos and drawings in her LJ. It's interesting to see how she transforms them—the finished drawings are not only livelier than the photos, they are quite different in composition and details. Compare that to the obviously photo-referenced panels that Frank Santoro was complaining about the other day—it's a whole different world.