Owl House’s Molly Knox Ostertag is publishing a new graphic novel on Substack

Molly Knox Ostertag (writer and artist) is enjoying an interesting year. Disney has cancelled their animated series Owl HouseFans are trying to prolong the series beyond its planned end date. Netflix announced plans for an animated musical feature adaptation of Ostertag’s first graphic novel, 2017’s series-launching fantasy The Witch Boy. The graphic novel is her latest, a coming-of age gay love story. The Girl From the SeaIn June, a book called ‘The Lie of the Heart’ was published. And on Oct. 28, Ostertag announced that she’s kicking off a new graphic novel, The Darkest NightThis will be serialized by her Substack in the Telling.

The Darkest Night After the three Witch Boy books, this will be her fifth book solo. The Girl From the SeaThis is. But it won’t be her first foray into serialized storytelling that starts life online. This is the passionate and philosophical webcomic about a superhero. Female Strong Protagonist — illustrated by Ostertag, written by CollegeHumor writer-performer and Dimension 20 DM Brennan Lee Mulligan, and eventually collected as two chunky graphic novels — gave Ostertag her start in comics, and that series is one of the things she has in mind as she heads back into the webcomic trenches.

“It’s really going back to my roots,” Ostertag tells Polygon. “I started with A strong female protagonistIt was 10 years ago. This was my first introduction to comics and opened up so many new doors. My heart holds webcomics very dear. With this graphic novel, I’ve had the idea for a while, but I wasn’t quite sure where I would do it. It felt maybe a little old [audience-wise] compared to some of the other work I’ve done, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to change it for a publisher. So it’s been fun to write exactly what I want.”

Molly Knox Ostertag

Ostertag stated that she will release the story weekly in short scenes, each arriving Fridays. Each set of scenes would eventually add up to one chapter. Ostertag plans to first make scenes available for paid subscribers. Then, general subscribers will eventually get the complete chapters.

The story will be formatted with web scrolling in mind — each scene is a vertical scroll rather than a series of pages. “Making a story fit into pages is always really hard for me,” she says. “I get into the rhythm of it, but the act of the page-turn, the fact of it being a book, it’s sometimes so limiting. So getting to publish something online, I’m drawing it all as this long scroll, a format I really enjoy, and that feels very natural to me.”

Ostertag says she’s writing and drawing The Darkest NightWith the hope that the book will eventually become a printed book, she is currently focusing her attention on the potential of online media. “I’m interested in exploring stuff you can only do online,” she says. “There are a lot of songs that inspired parts of the story, so I’m excited to post the songs when we come to those scenes. I think there are fun things around reader interaction that I’m going to try to do while it’s in this format.”

This story is about a reunion of two childhood best friends. Mags Herrara, who is a short, chunky teenager, cares for her elderly abuela at their home. Nessa, who was trans, returns to the town where she meets Mags post-transition. Ostertag calls it a dark, YA story that has a touch of magic realism. But the first chapter Polygon provided to Polygon feels almost like a horror tale.

Describing more of the plot, Ostertag carefully circles around the story’s big reveals. Mags and her family have a secret that’s only hinted at in unsettling ways in the first chapter. “It’s something that deeply affects her life,” Ostertag says. “And when her oldest friend comes back into town, she shines a light into Mags’ life and forces her to confront things she hasn’t confronted before. This sounds rather vague. In this case, the magical elements are a little more metaphorical than in my previous work.”

She describes The Darkest Night as a story about “the burdens people carry, and the things that separate us from other people. It’s really close to my heart, something I wrote from a very emotional place. That’s the heart of it — a story about about depression, and about staying in the darkness. It’s a lot of conversations between these two teenage girls hanging out in Joshua Tree, as the mystery of what’s going on with Mags is slowly unfolding. At the same time, there are these bright, luminous memories of their childhood, as they remember their time together before everything went wrong.”

Sadly, it doesn’t seem like returning to webcomics will include returning to A strong female protagonistThe book, which was on hiatus from 2018 and left its last chapter incomplete, is now available. “Brennan’s gotten very busy, and I’ve gotten very busy,” Ostertag says. “We’ve both been wanting to return to it, but I don’t know if I would have the time. So we’ve discussed ways to finish the story, but it was Brennan’s project. As the writer, it was very much his story, so he’s a better person to ask whether things will continue.”

It seems at the moment it is The Darkest Night will take a year or more to roll out — Ostertag is still working on it, but she believes it’ll be a story on the scope of The Girl from the SeaIt has 256 pages. Ostertag will release the first pages on October 29.

Molly Knox Ostertag

Molly Knox Ostertag

The Witch Boy

Price at publishing time.

Netflix has an animated musical movie in development. In thirteen-year-old Aster’s family, all the girls are raised to be witches, while boys grow up to be shapeshifters. All who cross these lines are exiled. Unfortunately for Aster, he still hasn’t shifted… and he’s still fascinated by witchery, no matter how forbidden it might be.