Four St. Timothy’s School students were awarded the Young Alberta Book Society’s Martyn Godfrey Young Writers Award.
Veronika Vrablik, Grace Kloster, Delaney Wiebe, and Kennedy Michalski, all Grade 9 students, were rcognized for a comic book they made as part of a school project the previous year. Susanne Olsen, their teacher, is to thank for the push the girls needed to enter the contest.
“It started out as just a normal school project that we were being marked on after going through our whole graphic novel unit. Then Ms. Olsen discovered this contest and thought it would be a good idea to enter all of our comic books,” Vrablik said.
As partners on the group project, each girl had a role in creating the comic. Vrablik was in charge of character illustrations, Wiebe looked after formatting the comic and providing the writing, and Kloster and Michalski looked after colouring, helping with the writing, and attention to detail.
After working for nearly four months, the girls had their finished product – Spice Spies.
“If you’ve ever watched the TV show Totally Spies that’s what it’s kind of based off of. They are four teenage girls who are spies and get called for a mission to defeat the evil villain and her death ray,” said Wiebe .
For character development, the girls drew inspiration from their friendship.
“We based our characters on each of our personalities,” Kloster explained.
The girls were all very surprised and honoured to receive the award and it has inspired them to consider writing a sequel to their hit comic.
“We have been getting a lot of questions about us continuing so we have thought about doing a sequel,” Michalski explained.
As they are only in junior high school, the girls have plenty of time to discuss whether they will turn their work into a series.
Despite their success, the girls weren’t always on the same page when it came to designing the comic.
“It took a lot of time and fighting and tears,” Wiebe said with a laugh.
“Since I was in charge of drawing the characters, you see cleavage a lot on characters – it’s just a normal thing. So I thought I would add it into the comic book,” Vrablik said.
The girls argued over that specific character design for roughly two weeks. Ms. Olsen ruled that it was OK in the end. The group paid close attention to detail to ensure the comic turned out as they imagined.
“We tried to make the characters kind of like Disney princesses, very aesthetically pleasing to the eye,” Michalski said.
Overall, the girls appreciate the recognition from the award and plan on having copies of the comic available at the school library.
“We were really surprised and really honoured to win the grand prize for our comic,” Vrablik said.
To read Spice Spies, a PDF version of the comic is available online at yabs.ab.ca.
