In Nothing Special, Callie has been surrounded by magical artifacts and creatures her entire life, but there's nothing special about that. She knows she's not human—after all, she can see and commune with the spirits of vegetables—but beyond being part daemon on her dad's side, she hasn't a clue what else might be in her lineage. That begins to change when Callie and her boyfriend Declan embark upon a rescue mission past the town gate she had been forbidden to cross, joined by enigmatic companions including the demon prince Lasser and a dead radish named Radish.

Created by Ann Arbor artist Katie Cook and originally serialized online on the Webtoon platform, the third volume of Nothing Special is now available in a chonky print graphic novel. Cook's artwork is fresh and bright, complementing her surprising, laugh-out-loud humor. Yet some of the conflicts these characters encounter speak to heavier, darker themes. 

I spoke with Cook about Nothing Special, its inspirations, and how it compares to her work on Star Wars and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.

Q: How would you describe Nothing Special?
A: You know, it's YA in category only because I have readers that are younger than that and then readers that are adults, so I tried to make it all ages in that anybody can read and appreciate it in different ways. It's a magical adventure about a girl named Callie who comes into her own as she starts growing up. And this group of people around her from her boyfriend, who's a fairy—his story arc is like the "second season" as Webtoon calls it, but it's the first bigger arc because book one collected is just season one, something like 27 weeks of the webcomic. And then books two and three are one whole story arc combined. Because you cannot put out an 800-page graphic novel and say, "Here's the complete arc." There's only so many people out there that will buy the brick that is the Bone [single volume edition]. In hardcover. And have two copies of it.

Q: You have to have a black and white complete Bone and the color one.
A:  Yeah. And the black and white paperback one that's all beat to hell because I've looked at it five million tim,es or I've thrown it at a kid that lives in this neighborhood and be like, "Bring it back when you're done. We'll talk about it."

Q: So I'd say, you've got this book that is for everyone. And there's a lot going on. It's fun and it's funny, and it's got a very cute style, but there are also some pretty dark things going on. How do you feel that the two aspects work together?
A: I am a big lover of Jim Henson. Jim Henson appealed to every age, just like I want to. That's the goal. And when you're making something that is a puppet, it is fun automatically. And then you take Dark Crystal, which is a very serious --  It's this horrifying storyline with puppets. And that's that line that I try to wiggle on the whole time. ... [N]ow everything is The Crow and everyone gets really goth? I don't want to do that. We have enough people out there making their comics about Everything Being Terrible, and I'm not going to be one of them.

Q: No, that's legitimate.
A: I tell everybody that, "Oh, the horrors of the world persist, yet I remain silly."

Q: I'm really enjoying all the background gags in these books. I'd be curious, do you feel like you have a favorite thing that you've thrown in, whether that's volume three or one of the earlier ones, that you're either really proud of or that still makes you laugh?
A: There's one thing that I just have a box in the background at some point, and there's a little tiny label on it that says Chekov's Gun. And then in the final chapter, you see it again in the background. And it's just a prop in the background. And it's just a dumb nod to everything that's been before. If there was a throwaway joke that I did five years ago, and I have one chance to tie it back in, I'm going to take it. I think it's in the second book, the first part of the story arc, Lasser mentions that he had a femur [bone] named Teddy when he was a kid, and that was his teddy bear. That's what was allowed for this demon house. I just did a chapter where it's like a demon holiday special, and I have Baby Lasser carrying Teddy around. And I was like, Well, I'm just going to put that back in. That's the lore now.

Q: Love a good callback. We've talked a bit about how these Nothing Special graphic novels are collecting stories that were originally published online. I know that Webtoon is also a vertical scroll. I'm wondering about some of the challenges of adapting Webtoon into print books.
A: I call that Nate's problem, not my problem. My friend Nate [Pride], who is another Michigan guy who letters the comic, he also re-lettered and reformatted all of it for print. And I would go in with new art touches or patches. In a few cases, I just redrew the whole thing or just added to it to make sure that the reprint of the book was not just all this white space, and it didn't look like you copy and paste it in. Just the most basic PowerPoint-esque layout that your parents can accomplish without you telling them how to use PowerPoint. Because I have seen [other webcomics] go to print like that. So we really tried to make it like it was originally intended to be a book thing. We pulled art. There's art that I did that I spent hours on that aren't in the books because they were transitional things or they really ruined the flow of it in book form. But it would bring tension when you're scrolling down, when you're looking at the web format. It was a kill-your-darlings moment of like, "Oh, no one is going to see all of this work that I put into this."

Nate and my editor, Vedika Khanna, would put it in front of me and go, "How's this look?" I got input that way, and then the stuff to redraw and how much effort I wanted to put in. Every single time, I chose way more effort than I needed to, to make sure that it was a different reading experience.

Q: On the other side of that, what would you say you enjoy about serializing on the web?
A: The thing that I wanted to do when I was a kid was, I wanted to be a newspaper cartoonist. I wanted to put out a daily four-panel and then a big Sunday page. That was my dream goal. I wanted to be Bill Watterson. And then I went to college—I have a degree in illustration. I have a BFA from the College for Creative Studies. And by the time I was in college, newspapers started declining, and comics pages were being cut everywhere. Things were moving a little bit online for some of them, but it was like, "Oh, man, what am I going to do?" So I started a webcomic back then. I had Gronk, which I did collect into a few small books. That actually led to me getting a lot of licensed work in comics. And then I just returned back to making something for myself after that. I'm lucky enough that I was handed some money and said, "Go figure out what you want to make."

That's where Nothing Special comes from. It's my baby. I have two actual babies. But yeah, this comic is ... I pour a lot of myself into it, especially with the new stuff, when I was seven months in a wheelchair and I didn't have anything to do. So in between PT sessions, I just started drawing more, and I didn't do so much of the "let's just get it done. I'm on a really tight schedule." For some reason, and I think it's because I've been around [Mouse Guard creator] David Petersen and Jeremy Bastian [Cursed Pirate Girl] a lot, I've just started adding more shit to everything. Oh, my God. But I love it. It's the most me that I've seen in my artwork in a long time.

Q: You mentioned licensed work. Outside of this weird little universe you've created in Nothing Special, you've worked on some other things people might be familiar with. I'd be curious, what would you say is similar or different about working on Nothing Special as opposed to things like My Little Pony and Star Wars?
A: I love working on a license, especially when I'm already attached to it. Working on Star Wars for as long as I have is amazing. I get a lot of leeway as far as how I get to draw things. But with a licensed product, that's not your sandbox. You are visiting a friend's house, and that is their sandbox full of their toys and their games that they already have established that can be played with in the sandbox. And I'm very good at sticking to the rules of that game to make the guy that owns that sandbox happy and not step out of line. Whereas in Nothing Special, I get to go to my sandbox and those are my toys, and I get to play however I want. So, yeah, that's the difference. I enjoy a traverse over to other sandboxes, but I like having the warm, snuggly place that is my sandbox.

Shaun Manning is a founder and former co-owner of Booksweet. He is also a writer of various things, mostly comics.