This boggles my mind: SMILE just hit the two-year mark on the New York Times Graphic Books Bestseller list. Two years!!! Without a movie tie-in, without being part of a series, and while competing with books like Batman and The Walking Dead. This would not have happened without the support and enthusiasm of booksellers, librarians, teachers, bloggers, and most of all, readers. So thank you, readers! You've made my day/week/month/year! *****

I had a nice time at Book Expo America and Book Con this past week and weekend. It's exciting to see so much support for Sisters, before it's even published. Here are a couple of photos:

The enormous, lit-up Sisters banner at the Scholastic booth!

Signing books before my Book Con panel.

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So a couple of weeks ago, I got a neat surprise: Mark Tatulli, who is best known as the creator of the syndicated comic strips Lio and Heart of the City, decided to write a week's worth of HotC basically celebrating Smile and the awesomeness of graphic novels in general. Here are the strips:

To say I was flattered was a huge understatement!!

I got a chance to meet Mark at Book Expo, and he is just as nice as can be. Thanks again to Mark for this incredible shout-out! I hope some of my readers will check out his comics in return.

To celebrate the release of SMILE, I drew an exclusive comic strip for Scholastic's Ink Splot Blog, about novocaine! Click here to read. Novocaine is something almost everyone is familiar with, but for some reason, I never drew a page of the actual book talking about how weird it feels.

Another fun thing I did this week was participating in my very first Hourly Comic Day, where you draw a short comic for every hour of the day you're awake. It was a challenge! HCD fell on the day right before SMILE's release, so I was excited and busy and nervous about it. Enjoy.