Covering Kiki
Homesick in Italy
I'd like to tell you a bit about my comic Casa Kiki, which I write and draw for girls magazine Tina - about a girl who moves to Italy with her family to start a hotel:
In The Netherlands there are several TV-shows around the theme of emigrants following their dream of starting a new life in a foreign country. It's great entertainment to see how people fare and what problems they run into, so my assignment was to make a comic with the same premise.
Kiki, her little brother Milo and their parents arrive at Casa Ciccioli (quickly renamed to Casa Kiki), a beautiful but rundown house on a lake somewhere in the North of Italy…
Kiki soon adapts, but has to deal with learning a new language and missing her friend Nora at home…
But eventually she makes new friends…
And of course, the house provides plenty of adventure:
In order to make the house believable, my husband Yiri (who does the coloring, lettering and provides various backgrounds) and I drew up elaborate design sheets and floor plans:
Yiri even made a scale model!
As you can see, making Kiki proved to be quite an undertaking! After about a year, ten pages a month proved just too much of a strain. Fortunately the editors of Tina were very sympathetic, and now we're doing "only" one 5-page story a month.
The upside of such a pace is that in no time, we had enough pages for the first album, which appeared in September 2022, at the annual Tina Festival:
There will be another Tina Festival in just two months, and I'm already very much looking forward to it! We're now working on getting the second album ready for print, and just finished the cover:
There's no english publication of Kiki planned yet, but there is a translation of the first three stories. If you're interested, email me and I'll send you the preview for free!
You can follow Kiki on Instagram! :D