Holy hell, what John did with this. Script sample: Here our trip into Seuss-style art begins. Regarding “Seuss-style:” I’d suggest going to the original book’s illustrations for inspiration on this one, including its simple two-color palette (it’s black and white and red all over… nobody knew the Grinch was green until it was adapted for TV. The whites of the Grinch’s eyes were sometimes shown as red, though, which might be a good trick to emulate when we come to our story’s villain). Here, Spanner himself is wearing red, and some of the tools and parts in his wagon are various shades to direct focus to them and help distinguish them from one another.

There should also be some white left underneath the illustration for the Seuss-style captions, which should look more like storybook text than traditional comic-book narration.

So it wasn’t until draft 3 that we settled on making most of this a Seuss pastiche. It was Phil’s suggestion, but I latched right onto it. Not only were verse and pastiche two of my specialties, but I was reading The Grinch Who Stole Christmas as a bedtime story to my goddaughter at that point, so it was very much in my head.

Rachel’s gift for Byron would actually see some use!