The all-ages BOOM! Studios series Lumberjanes, the highest-profile hit in its BOOM! Box line, has made the leap from comics to prose with the first of the Lumberjanes chapter books, Lumberjanes: Unicorn Power!, now on sale from Amulet Books, an imprint of Abrams.

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Writer Mariko Tamaki (Hulk, This One Summer) and artist Brooklyn Allen (one of the original Lumberjanes creators) are already working on the next two volumes, and we caught up with them last month at New York Comic Con to talk about the joys and challenges of moving Jo, April, Molly, Mal and Ripley from comics to prose.

CBR: Mariko, what was your first exposure to Lumberjanes?

Mariko Tamaki: I saw it when it first came out. I think it’s one of those lesbian word-of-mouth things, because it’s such a unique thing, and it’s one of those things that all of us were getting other people to read. I loved it immediately. I was waiting for something like this to exist, and I was so thrilled that it was awesome. It wasn’t just that you were like “Oh, it’s lesbians, and it’s kind of OK," it was like, "Oh, this is great!”

Brooklyn, you were part of the original creative team on Lumberjanes. How did that happen?

Brooklyn Allen: I had done a little bit of work for BOOM! Studios already, a couple of covers, so I had been in contact with Whitney Leopard, who was an editor there. Shannon [Watters] and Grace [Ellis] were putting together the pitch, and they just had text and no imagery for the pitch, and they were like, “We need something fast. I guess we’ll contact Brooklyn!” and they were like, “Hey, can you do this by tomorrow?”

Thankfully I was unemployed and living at home and super-sad, so I was like “I can do this! I’ve got all night!” So I did. And the rest is history.

That sounds like something out of a movie.

Allen: Yeah, it’s wild to think about it now. At the time it didn’t feel very special, but when I got Grace’s character descriptions and just describing the world, it seemed really awesome. Something about it, I was like, "Oh my god, this is so good." If I’m not part of making it, it doesn’t matter. It’s just good that it exists. I was already a fan of it in that moment. Happy to be along for the ride.

You were the artist for the series for a time.

Allen: Yes. I did the original character designs and they handed it off to Noelle [Stevenson] to redesign them. She did an amazing job. I can’t even imagine if that hadn’t happened. Then she came on as a writer and did all the A covers, and I did the interior artwork.

How long did you stay with that?

Allen: It must have been two or three years. I was working at a Trader Joe’s at the time, so it was really brutal. Eight issues in, it kind of wore me down, and I got to the point where I was sick all the time. I was gaining momentum, but until I had a big financial break, I wasn’t going to be able to quit Trader Joe’s and devote my full time to Lumberjanes, like I wanted to. So they brought in Carolyn [Nowak]. I came back for the next arc.

Mariko, how did you get involved with this project?

Tamaki: I got an email from my agent, and she was like, “Do you know the Lumberjanes?” And I e-mailed her back “Yes I do. I’m not leaving my hotel room until you call me. Call me now. I want to find out what this is!”

How did you approach turning a comic into a text-based story?

Tamaki: I really wanted to give all five characters a presence. I’m a really big Douglas Adams fan, so I thought if I give it this third person voice that’s knowledgeable and knows all the history so they don’t always have to say stuff -- you have a voice that can give background -- I thought that would work, and it was actually really fun to write. It was very easy to write, which was kind of a blessing, because I didn’t have much time.

We decided to make each book focus on one character more than the others, a little bit. The first one is about April, which seemed kind of a natural thing to do. Then it just happened! I was such a fan of the books, I was so familiar with them, that it was actually really easy to just write into that world.

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These are all original stories?

Tamaki: Yes.

Brooklyn, how did you approach illustrating it?

Allen: It was really weird, because there was so much I wanted to illustrate. I sat down and approached it almost like comic book scripts, I started thumbnailing and unconsciously thinking about it, and I was like aw, I can’t, that’s not a good illustration, the next page is a better one. And I kept doing that for a while and it got really tiring so I had to compromise with myself: All right, I’m going to read each chapter and then I’m going to draw a little thumbnail for the chapter heading so I’ll know that’s what it summarizes, and I’ll pull certain things out of that chapter that I think would be really cool to illustrate and just narrow it down from there.

I wanted to go crazy. I wanted to do a little animation like the Animorphs had, on the side, I wanted to do something ridiculous like that, but I ran out of time.

Did doing it in black and white make it faster, or was it harder?

Allen: The chapter headings are easy because it’s more simplistic and it’s just one block of color, whereas I was trying to figure out how to do grayscale and I was trying to figure out the style for the actual illustrations and those are a little harder. It’s still coloring, you’re just coloring with grays.

Did you do your own toning?

Allen: I did.

Have you done toning before?

Allen: Not professionally. [Laughs]

How many of these are you doing?

Tamaki: Four. I got the copyedits for [volume] 2, and now I’m working on 3.

And Brooklyn, are you drawing it?

Allen: [Laughs] I’ve started drawing, but I have a ways to go on 2.

How is it different working with a book publisher as opposed to a comics publisher?

Tamaki: More time!

Allen: More time! [To Mariko:] Which is saying something, because you wrote that in like a month or something, which is crazy.

Tamaki: I think it’s one of those things where if everything is set up, then it all works. There’s no gray area. You know who everybody is. There’s nothing to really figure out. You just have to execute it, let it play out the way it should. As soon as the first week went by, and the first couple of chapters, I was like, I think this is going no problem -- knock on wood. I think.

Have you changed anything from the comic, or is it exactly the same? Will the obsessive fans notice differences?

Tamaki: I think that the obsessive fans will know that I am an obsessive fan. There are some new characters, because obviously, we get to play with a couple of things. There’s a couple of characters that are new, but not too many, because there are a lot of people already in the comic.

There were reveals at a couple of different times in the series, so at what point are you entering the storyline?

Tamaki: Obviously, time is a complicated thing in the Lumberjanes universe, since it’s one summer that we’re really talking about, so I think readers will see that there are a couple of characters that lead you to think it’s happening in one time but it could really fit in anywhere. It could fit in between any of the adventures in the existing comics.

So these are not replacing the comics.

Tamaki: No. If you love the Lumberjanes, there’s more to love.

Allen: It’s expanding the universe.

Is there anything you didn’t get to do in this book that you are hoping to work into future volumes?

Tamaki: We actually had a really great dinner the other night and we came up with our wish list of things we want to do, which I’m not going to spoil because I really want to go through the whole list. It’s our favorite adventure stories, our favorite TV shows, just taking all those things and putting them in these books.

Lumberjanes: Unicorn Power! is available now.