Posted in: Comics, Current News | Tagged: Agent, graphic novel, holiday house, Nicole K. Georges
The Ballad of X-Ray and Koko is the middle-grade graphic novel debut from cartoonist Nicole J. Georges of Calling Dr. Laura, and Fetch.
Article Summary
- Nicole J. Georges debuts a graphic novel for middle-grade readers in 2026.
- The Ballad of X-Ray and Koko explores queer friendship and belonging.
- Georges’ Lambda Award-winning work includes Calling Dr. Laura.
- Holiday House, a leader in children’s books, to publish the graphic novel.
The Ballad of X-Ray and Koko is the middle-grade graphic novel debut from cartoonist Nicole J. Georges of Calling Dr. Laura, and Fetch: How a Bad Dog Brought Me Home, the story of a girl named X-Ray, her pet chicken, a life-changing queer friendship, and her journey to finding the place she belongs.
Della Farrell at Holiday House has acquired world rights for The Ballad of X-Ray and Koko, and publication is scheduled for the autumn of 2026. Nicole J. Georges’s agent, Anjali Singh, at Ayesha Pande Literary, negotiated the deal.
Nicole J. Georges is a writer, illustrator, podcaster & professor from Portland who teaches at California College for the Art’s MFA in Comics Program. She has been “publishing autobiographical comics about her queer vegan life for the past 25 years, evolving from teen zinester to graphic novelist.” Her Lambda Award-winning graphic memoir, Calling Dr. Laura, was called “engrossing, lovable, smart and ultimately poignant” by Rachel Maddow, and “disarming and haunting, hip and sweet, all at once” by Alison Bechdel, and the French translation, Allô, dr Laura? was an Official Selection at the Angoulême International Comics Festival. It was also adapted into an Edward R. Murrow-award-winning podcast series called Relative Fiction with Oregon Public Broadcasting. Fetch: How a Bad Dog Brought Me Home, recipient of 2 Oregon Book Awards, was voted a 2018 “Great Graphic Novel for Teens” by The American Library Association. It is currently in development for television with Sid Gentle Productions.
Holiday House was the first American publishing house founded with the purpose of publishing only children’s books in 1935. Holiday House launched its first eponymous imprints, Margaret Ferguson Books and Neal Porter Books, in 2018. The iconic logo of the Holiday House “little boy” is by Ernest H. Shepard, the illustrator of The Wind in the Willows and the Winnie the Pooh books, from their original edition of The Reluctant Dragon by Kenneth Grahame.
The expansion of children’s graphic novels is fuelling all manner of publishers extending into the comics medium. Right now, it seems like an infinite market that is being tapped into, and creating longstanding comic book readers for decades to come. It is not for nothing that kids’ graphic novels in bookstores are being referred to as the newsstand of the twenty-first century.
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