Kat Leyh: Hello, my name is Kat Leyh and I wrote the graphic novel Snapdragon. And I also drew it. I did all the lettering and the colors and everything for it. It was originally going to be called Roadkill Witch; that was my working title for it while I was working on it. I came up with the idea for one of the main characters, Jacks, the witch. I was going home to visit my family in the country. I live in the city now, but I grew up in the country and so then sometimes going back to the country, you'll kind of be shocked and reminded of all the roadkill on the side of the interstate or along the country roads, and I thought up a character who would just go along these roads and collect these animals and take them somewhere so that they can decompose safely so that the scavenger animals don't also fall prey to some semi-truck on the side of the road. It was just this daydream that I was having in the car while I was bored.

I thought up this character and I thought it would be a cool short comic that I could just do a little story about whoever this character is, this woman who collects roadkill, and I came up with the character of Snap as someone who is also interested in dead animals in a scientific sort of the way, the way that a lot of little kids like to find jawbones and little bones in the woods and things like that. And then from there, I ended up creating the rest of the story. I wanted there to be some queer elements to it because that's important to me to include in all of my stories but especially stories for a younger audience. I like to have queer characters in there.

So the story kind of just happened while I was figuring out who these characters were, what their lives were like. That was my process for figuring out a lot of the plot of the book. Once I had a general idea of what my ending was going to be, I already knew what my beginning was going to be, and figuring out the middle. It kind of happened like puzzle pieces falling into place.

I want Jacks to look kind of like a classic, old, creepy character, so I wanted her to be tall and spindly. I wanted her to be dressed in the long black outfit and a creepy hat that we see her in at the start. And then I wanted her to just have zero fashion sense as kind of a joke. She just wears whatever she manages to find at the Goodwill. She doesn't care about what she wears. When I was coming up with the character for Snap, I wanted her to be a girl of color. So many magical adventure stories have white people as the main characters. I grew up reading about a lot of white protagonists. I wanted her to look a little different than the characters that we're used to seeing because I wanted it to be a more modern, inclusive look at what a witch can be.