by Benjamin Ong Pang Kean

Alex de Campi was smokin’ hot when her and Igor Kordey’s violent, blackly comic thriller, Smoke, debuted from IDW Publishing in May. Billed as “one of the most innovative and inventive new age writers that you’ve never heard of,” de Campi’s next project is a “CSI for tweens” titled Kat & Mouse, debuting in May 2006 from TOKYOPOP.

“Kat & Mouse is a turbocharged, modern Nancy Drew-meets-Revenge of the Nerds; a CSI for tweens,” de Campi told Newsarama. “Seventh-grader Kat Brown is a star student, captain of the junior high women’s soccer team, and science teacher’s daughter in Spencer, Iowa. One week into the new school year, her dad gets a new job at the elite private school Dover Academy in New Hampshire. Kat’s mom is thrilled to move back to New England, but Kat finds the new school an absolute misery. Because she’s the teacher’s kid there on scholarship, Kat gets lumped in with the nerds.

”Kat is really a fish out of water in New Hampshire. This whole New England old-money thing, and the preppy thing, and the private school thing – all completely alien to her. She comes in with a fair amount of confidence, but by the end of the first week she’s completely destroyed by the ruling clique in the class, Chloe and her Chloettes.”

So, if Kat is, well, Kat, then who is Mouse? Instead of a cartoon character named Minnie, Mouse is the nickname for Mee-seen Huang, the only person who’s nice to Kat. “Mouse is more resigned to her fate. She totally embraces her Inner Nerd. She’s that girl in the school with the funny haircut and the odd clothes who isn’t in your face, but she couldn’t really give a toss what you think. She might be lonely as hell, but she’s not going to give you the pleasure of knowing that.

“She is a girl who is actually excited about math tests. And the sports… to a girl from Iowa, this whole field hockey thing comes as a bit of a surprise. A painful surprise. Even worse, there’s a reason the old science teacher quit one week into term. And unless Kat & Mouse figure out the mystery of who’s behind the threats to her family, Kat’s father is going to be fired in disgrace.”

A new Kat on the block with Mouse as her new best friend would be just the perfect story for a kid these days, right? Wrong. While there’re also “hot guys, a European princess (who we’ll meet in later volumes), and a mysterious school thief - not to mention some serious bitchiness - this book is just as violent as something like Smoke, only without the guns and the punching. 7th grade is a pretty mean time for kids,” de Campi said.

“Kat really has a hard time adjusting to the fact she’s gone from top of the heap to being a social pariah. She’s not very nice to Mouse at first, because Mouse isn’t the sort of girl she’s usually friends with. But Kat finally realizes the only thing that’s going to save her and her family is embracing her nerd-fu.”

And don’t forget the bad girls in the form of the Chloettes. “They have very distinct, well-rounded personalities. Ruth is the number three, not quite as pretty as the rest, and she’s desperate to stay in the group so sometimes this makes her extra-mean. Mimi is just small and evil, and Chloe herself is not so much mean but doesn’t want to lose face in front of Mimi or Ruth. Chloe’s one of those girls that if you got her on her own, she’d be really nice, and then you see her rolling with her crew and she totally cuts you dead.”

Not all is doom and gloom with the premise, though. Well, sorta. Kinda. “Kat’s parents are pretty fun, too,” de Campi said. “Kat’s mom has a really hard time talking to Kat – she has a gift for saying something she thinks is helpful and supportive, but it so isn’t, and she can’t figure out what she’s doing wrong. Kat’s dad is very committed to teaching, and very moral – and his very moral intractability gets him into a huge amount of trouble in the book, where he could take an easy [way] out if he wanted to.”

Think of Kat & Mouse as de Campi’s reflection on how kids live today. “There are sections based on video game logic, on IM conversations and on mobile text conversations,” she added.

The artist attached to Kat & Mouse is Federica (Amazing Fantasy) Manfredi. She had initially contacted Manfredi through superstar artist Jim Lee to work on a French book that she was doing. “I fell in love with Federica’s style from the start,” she admitted. “She’s monstrously talented, and also an incredibly nice person to work with. Irony of ironies, I also suggested her to Marvel when I was embroiled in that whole Amazing Fantasy artist fiasco. They said no, but then ended up using her for the back-up story in that very arc after they re-evaluated their artist choices somewhat.

“One of the many great things about Federica’s art is that her teens are adorable, and actually look, move and dress like real 12-year-olds. This is so important for a book that is being marketed to girls. If the girls in the book don’t look cool and fashionable, forget it. You’ve lost your audience. And Federica’s characters just have this wonderful energy and personality to them… She’s also really meticulous and skilful at drawing backgrounds, which is key for creating a sense of atmosphere and environment.”

What led to the creation of Kat & Mouse? “It’s the president of Harvard’s fault, you know, saying that us ickie girls’ pretty heads weren’t suited to science or math,” de Campi exclaimed. “So I thought, up yours, academic dude who probably hasn’t gotten laid since Carter was president, I’m going to write a book that gives girls a science hero. Kat solves mysteries using science, and Mouse chips in on the programming/maths side. But the science stuff isn’t done in a preachy way – it’s more like, KA-BAM! Cool stuff! Okay, on with our story.

According to de Campi, each volume of Kat & Mouse will also pay tributes to real-life women of sciences. “In each volume, at the end, we do a little experiment that kids can do at home (the book is all-ages, so really aimed at 8-10 year olds), and do little bios of Kat & Mouse’s heroes: women who have made important contributions to the sciences. In Book 1, we talk about movie star Hedy Lamarr, who helped invent Spread Spectrum, a basic principle of modern wireless communications, and Eileen Collins, Air Force test pilot and NASA space shuttle captain. Next up will be Jocelyn Bell Burnell, and of course Amelia Earhardt. You just can’t believe how amazing some of these women’s lives are.”

de Campi added that Kat & Mouse landed at TOKYOPOP because she wanted to do manga. “I wanted to write for girls! Girls who buy books in bookstores! I blind-submitted it to TOKYOPOP in early 2004, when nobody knew me from a bar of soap. It’s funny, although Smoke has opened a huge amount of doors for me, all my 2006 work is with publishers who signed me before Smoke came out: TOKYOPOP and Humanoids. I have two series coming out with Humanoids next year, a sci-noir epic (nine volumes, plus 3-volume prequel if sales permit) and a kids’ fantasy-adventure series (3 volumes). I love writing manga, and I love writing European-format – they’re so supportive of creator-owned endeavours.

“Back to Kat & Mouse... The book took a long time to get off the ground because at the time, TOKYOPOP was focused on more edgy, fantastic stuff for its OEL books. I just wanted to do classic shoujo love/school drama/mystery, like Mars or Kare Kano or Marmalade Boy. My editor at the time, Mark Paniccia, was like, “oh, just put a talking cat or a vampire in it, and then it’ll be easier for us to get approved.” But I stood my ground, and thanks to a huge amount of effort from Tim Beedle, Carol Fox and Mike Kiley, all of whom really went above and beyond the call of duty, we finally got the book greenlit without talking cats or anything.”

The writer added that she’s been sparking off Brendan McCarthy’s Swimini Purpose, Naoki Urasawa’s Monster and Kaneko Atsushi’s Bambi And Her Pink Gun. “Other recent favorites include Doll, Planetes, Mezzo & Pirius’ Roi Des Mouches, Bolland’s Bolland Strips! and I finally finished Fuyumi Soryo’s classic Mars. I loved Sharknife; I quite liked Scott Pilgrim but I think it’s something I’ll get bored of really quickly. I’m the consumer from hell: it takes a lot for me to read/watch something beyond the first couple episodes. Normally I’m like, OK, I got your schtick, here are your interesting tricks, I’ve learned them, I’m gone.

“I’m not anti-superhero or anti-US comics, there’s just not a lot out there that appeals to me right now,” she continued. “This big crossover year just lost me as a consumer. I know I’m in the minority in that, but – to show my age and quote the Smiths, these comics “say nothing to me about my life…” They’re not even proper big kablooey escapism, because they’re not accessible to readers who don’t have quite a detailed working knowledge of these universes. Also, I like a longer read. To be honest, I can’t be bothered to go out and spend $3 on something that’s 22 pages long and takes me two nanoseconds to read. Manga, graphic novels and BD give me more story for my money.

“I also draw a lot of inspiration from film. I pay a huge amount of attention to cinematography, and think about how I can use those techniques in a 2D, sequential environment. That’s why I’m such a slut for directors like Melville, or the design element of a lot of modern Japanese films. I can’t wait for Thomas Vincent’s next film. Je Suis Un Assassin was such a technical achievement, in the way he used the camera to create a network of symbols and refer back to other scenes in the film.”

Kat & Mouse is not the only project that she’s doing for the largest English-language publisher of manga in the world that’s been hailed as a leading youth-oriented entertainment brand. “Since then, I’ve done a book with a talking cat. No, really. I have. It’s been greenlit by TOKYOPOP as a Chapter Book (kids’ illustrated prose novel), which is awesome because it means I get a toehold in the kids’ fiction section as well as the graphic novel section. It’s called Agent Boo, which in itself is an in-joke from a comment I once made to Brian Scot Johnson of Khepri. Think Spy Kids meets Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.”

Elsewhere, other than the Humanoids projects, she also has an Escapist story in development with Dark Horse. “There’ll be more Smoke, eventually, and maybe a 4-issue US creator-owned mini next year,” she concluded.