Hear what they had to say, then let us know your thoughts in the comments. IGN Comic: To start us off, could you guys give me a quick pitch of what the comic is about?
Michael Stock: The book starts the day before Christmas, and a little girl finds a mysterious box on her front step. It turns out that the box grants wishes.
Sina Grace: Yeah, the quick elevator pitch is basically a young girl in a fictional Orange County town gets what is essentially Pandora's Box. It's a story that explores "Be careful what you wish for" in a fun, lighthearted, totally intense way.
IGN: How did you two come to be on this book together?
Grace: I met Michael through Tomm Coker. Michael has been entering comic books, and we met purely on a social basis, but through our conversations and checking out his Part Time Punks series we built a friendship. When he floated the idea of me illustrating Penny Dora for him, I was super down. [Laughs] So that was the beginning of it.
IGN: Most comics these days are made for boys, but you have one all about a young girl and her mother -- and her cat. What made you want to do an all-female comic?
Stock: Well, I'll tell you -- it stems from my daughter, who is now 13. Her name's Nico, and she has been going to the comic store with me literally every Wednesday, on new comic day, since she was three or four. So this has been a shared thing between her and I, buying comics. She likes Archie and Little Lulu comics from the '50s and all the Silver Age Supergirl and Lois Lane stuff from the '60s. As she's gotten older, her taste has skewed more and more towards girl-centric titles -- so, like, Coraline and Courtney Crumrin are some of her favorites -- and she's always giving me her books.
When Nico was eight, for her school paper, she was asked to write a story, so she wrote the story that our comic is based on. She wrote a story about an eight-year-old little girl who finds this box that grants wishes. It was just like a half-page long; it squeezed into a column in the paper. It was a story that she read on my radio show, and I got all these calls about it. Every once in awhile I still get calls about it from various listeners, because it certainly had that Twilight Zone ending, even though at age eight she'd never seen The Twilight Zone. It's sort of a [Gasps!] cliffhanger ending. Somehow, I think it was a listener had called in and asked, "Hey, whatever happened to that story?" It was, like, years and years later. Then I was thinking, "Oh, this would be great for a comic," especially when I'm constantly reading books with my daughter and she's like, "Papa, why are there not more books for girls?" So we're doing our bit to solve that problem.
IGN: And are you marketing this comic specifically towards women?
Stock: I don't think we are, no. It's definitely story first, and any implications that come from it being about a group of empowered women making high-risk choices and dealing with consequences and the power that comes with that, you know, the story comes first and it's being marketed as such. I think the implications are there, but that's not actively on our agenda.
IGN: The comic has a very storybook quality to it, especially with the narration. What made you decide to go that route?
Stock: You know, I'm writing the book now, and it's based on a story that my daughter had written when she was eight. I guess I'm trying to tap into some of those stories that she likes. I remember we spent a year and a half reading Little Nemo Goes to Slumberland, like the original Winsor McCay book. Night after night, we would read five to 12 to 16 of these strips. And there is an homage in issue #3 or #4 to Winsor McCay. I guess between that and also Coraline, which is a really big influence. It taught me as a writer. I just felt like that that's kind of the framework that would be right to tell this story.
So there definitely is a whimsical nature to the story, which is a box that can grant wishes. But there is also a darker side of it that will come out as the series goes along, because obviously there's going to be a catch. If you can have anything that you wish for, this is the cautionary part of the tale.
IGN: Sina, this is very different from your other work. What was it like drawing this story?
Grace: I'd done a kids' book a couple years ago, an illustrated children's novel. I had a blast with it. So it's always been in my blood to do something like this, especially because growing up my favorite stories were The Wizard of Oz, The Little Prince and all of the Dr. Seuss books and all of Roald Dahl. So I definitely love these types of stories.
Back to Michael floating the idea by me, his scripts were so delightful and had such a sense of fun. Again, even though we're going to be dealing with heavier themes, at the end of the day, it's just chock-full of fun. I think Michael has a lot of fun creating it with Nico, and I have a blast breathing visual life into their story. That was what attracted me to it. This is just a lot of really exciting, dynamic, fun-for-all-ages, adventure stuff that I grew up reading, so it's been in my blood since.
Stock: Yeah, and I also want to point out that it was when I was reading the very first issue of Burn the Orphanage, some of the whimsical, silly -- the action stuff fused with the silly stuff was when I thought, "Oh, wow, this would actually be a great fit with the story."
IGN: Really? Someone getting their head uppercutted off their body?
Stock: [Laughs] No, not that sequence... And I didn't know when I went to Sina that he had done the book with Amber before. So I was like, "I know this sounds kind of crazy, but would you be into doing an all-ages book?"
IGN: Which one of you has the cat? Because that cat is the cutest thing I've ever seen.
Stock: [Laughs] That cat is based on our cat -- like verbatim our cat. It's the same name. Also Iggy, also a giant, black-and-white, 17-pounds-of-fluff cat, who loves ham. So very similar.
IGN: Oh yeah, I was going to ask about the ham thing, because I don't know if you've seen this Miyazaki film called Ponyo, but the tiny little fish character Ponyo loves ham, and she screams, "Haaam!" just like in your comic.
Stock: Yeah, actually, my girlfriend showed it to me just a couple weeks ago, and she hadn't told me. She just went, "I think you're really going to like this film." So when we started watching it, I just totally started laughing. But yeah, our cat is obsessed with ham. Like, he knows the word. We have to spell the word around him, otherwise he starts meowing like a madman and turning around in circles.
IGN: Because this is a story about a wishing box, I have to ask both of you, if you had a wishing box, what would you wish for?
Stock: [Laughs] Man, I should have anticipated that question.
Grace: I've actually thought about this -- not in regards to Penny Dora but just for some reason in my head I do wonder about fantastic things like that. If I had one wish, I would wish for the world to be the absolute best it could be.
IGN: This isn't the Miss America Pageant. [Laughs] Michael?
Stock: See, this is the question we should have asked Nico actually. You know what? I'm going to ask her after school what she would wish for so you can throw it in there, because I'm curious as to what my 13-year-old daughter would wish for. But I'm guessing it would probably also be along these lines of the complete elimination of all firearms in the universe.
IGN: That's good. I mean, I feel bad for wanting an Iron Man armor suit now, but I suppose that's fine. Last question, I'm just going to throw it to you guys. What would you say to readers to get them excited for Penny Dora and the Wishing Box?
Grace: Whatever your favorite parts of your childhood were, you will get that in Penny Dora in spades, in a wonderful, modern package.
Stock: I would say for reader to expect unpredictability. The magic of the book and setup is literally there are no limits. The limits of the wishing box's powers are the limits of the imagination, of two 10-year-old girls. So the story, by issue #3, is going to change radically as the box gets passed from Penny Dora to her friend Elizabeth.
Elizabeth has a completely -- she would answer all of these questions very differently. If you were to ask her what she would want, she would want princess castles and fire-breathing dragons and a circus of bears. So as the box slips from one set of hands to another, the wishes are just going to go crazy. That's going to kind of be the arc of the book, as we track Penny's journey with the box and how things are going to change. But also, in the second arc, going back and telling the origin story of the box, and a lot of crazy, dark stuff that happens to the box before it was entrusted to Penny.
That and fans of Assassin's Creed will love this book.
IGN: Come again?
Stock: Just trying to keep this IGN-themed. [Laughs]
IGN: Oh, nice! [Laughs]
Joshua is IGN’s Comics Editor. If Game of Thrones, Spider-Man, or Super Smash Bros. are frequently used words in your vocabulary, you’ll want to follow him on Twitter and IGN.