Sheila the Zombie Cheerleader

* Sheila is currently in the middle grade novel I'm writing. Description: Zombies love football. Sheila loves football. She loves football so much that she wants to play, which causes a few problems.

Before that, Sheila was in a zombie romance novel that I wrote in a mediabistro YA writing class (taught by editor and writer Claudia Gabel). Despite threats to eat my brains, she was not the main character. Unfortunately, that didn't allow her to be her usual uber zombie self, so I'm rewriting the novel with a new plot and Sheila as the main character.

You're probably wondering how this whole zombie cheerleader thing began ...

Sheila came to life when I painted a horrible picture of a zombie that readers of my old blog really liked, which might have had something to do with her personality (a little sarcastic, with many threats to eat people's brains). I got lots of encouragement from my wonderful online friends, so I kept working with Sheila. I was having a ton of fun, plus, her personality and attitude came to me fully formed. Later I realized that this was because Sheila is the older, zombie version of Kitty, my favorite stuffed animal when I was little. There are differences between Sheila and Kitty. For instance, Sheila is afraid of chickens, Kitty is not.

Then I took a mediabistro comic scripting class from David Seidman, because I wanted to try creating comics. I followed that up by creating a mini comic in a two week intensive comics class at SVA (School of Visual Arts) with Matt Madden and Jessica Abel. My mini comic, starring Sheila the Zombie Cheerleader, debuted at the 2009 MoCCA comics festival! (I sold a few and traded a few and had a blast.) Here's the cover:

Here are three images from the mini comic (99% of which was inked on a lightbox in one day because that's all the time I had before MoCCA and the end of the class).

I'm always thinking up new ideas for Sheila. She might be in a mini comic or web comic, or even have an advice column some day (although I'm not sure how helpful her advice will be). For now though, she's in a middle grade novel and artwork for The Sketchbook Project.