From left: Calista Brill and Nilah Magruder Nilah Magruder photo by Michelle Kinne

Calista Brill and Nilah Magruder’s Creaky Acres (Kokila, May 6) is a story about a girl, a horse, and a whole new way of life.

When Nora and her family move to a new town for her mother’s job, everything changes. She’s now the only Black girl in school in a town more rural and less affluent than the suburb she left behind. And her sole refuge—riding and caring for her horse Hay Fever—is different, too.

Going from her very structured stable to a tumbledown farm with a ragtag crew of riders and a distinctly casual attitude is the hardest adjustment of all. Nora loves riding and caring for her horse, but now she is doing it at Creaky Acres, where goats and possums roam freely and one of the “horses” is actually a mule.

“Nora is this real by-the-book, process-oriented kid who is forced to unwind a little bit and learn how to deal with this environment that's extremely different from the barn that we see her riding in at the beginning of the book,” says Brill, an editor at First Second Books and a self-confessed “insufferable horse girl.”

“I was a very untalented rider,” she says, “but I was also very passionate about it, so I kept at it. And I was that kind of kid who draws horses on everything and only reads horse books and only watches horse movies.”

The seed that became Creaky Acres was sown over a decade ago, during a conversation with her First Second colleagues about the lack of middle grade graphic novels about horses. “The more I thought about it, the more I thought, ‘I really want to tell a horse story myself,’” says Brill.

It was about more than just the horses, though.

“I started thinking about how when you are a certain age and you get really passionately invested in a particular activity, the rules and norms of the place where you do that thing feel very universal,” she says. “And then you go somewhere else and you're so shocked.”

Brill’s own experience was exactly the opposite of Nora’s. “The barn that I rode in was extremely loosey goosey and ramshackle,” she says. “And then I went to another barn, and it was fancy and so buttoned up, and everybody was so clean, that I felt extremely alarmed and confused by this situation.”

So she came up with a story that reversed her own: “What if a fancy horse girl from a fancy barn had to contend with a barn that was anarchic and community-minded, but also not fancy or by the book?”

Creating Nora

Brill was also intrigued by issues of class and race. “Nora is not only the only Black kid in her school and at this barn, she’s also the wealthiest kid in town, and that puts her in a strange position in terms of class dynamics,” Brill says. “I wanted to noodle around with all of this.”

Early on, she joined forces with Magruder. Brill was a fan of Magruder’s webcomic M.F.K., which won the Dwayne McDuffie Award for Diversity in Comics in 2015 and was published in print by Insight Comics in 2017. The two worked together on Creaky Acres for years. Magruder is both the artist and a co-writer.

“We had some tough conversations about how to communicate Nora's story in an authentic way,” says Magruder. “I had to sit down and think, 'What do I want out of this book? How would I write these characters?' So it was a really collaborative effort.”

“Nilah gave me so much perspective into Nora and what her internal experience would be,” Brill says. “The collaboration is really what got us there and made Nora the character that she is, and I think made her as authentic as she is on the page.”

Magruder’s experience in the predominantly white world of riding was very different from Brill’s. She was about seven when she took a summer riding class.

“I was the only Black kid,” she says. “My mother was not happy with how the instructor interacted with me. It was really clear she didn't like me. I finished the class, but my mom didn't bring up continuing, and I didn't bring up continuing, so that was it.”

Nonetheless, she loves to draw animals. “There aren’t a lot of comic illustrators that are going to willingly draw horses for 200 pages,” Magruder says. “Graphic novels are hard, so my rule is I will take it if I can’t stand the idea of anyone else working on it.”

A ragtag crew of equestrians

Brill and Magruder came up with a delightfully weird farm where, in addition to the mule, one of the riders occasionally saddles up a cow. Following the rules takes a back seat to supporting others, including Laura, a nerdy girl who loves Dungeons & Dragons-type games; Dizzy, an energetic and skilled rider; and Wilson, whose signature move is getting thrown off the horse. The owner, Susan, affects a cranky attitude but cares deeply about the riders, and her son Hank, who loves to tinker, keeps the farm going with duct tape and his own inventions, including a remote-control toy fire engine that the kids use to open and close the corral gate. While it all seems goofy, Brill and Magruder put a lot of effort into getting the technical aspects right, from the animal anatomy to the horsemanship.

Although she has written picture books, Creaky Acres is Brill’s first graphic novel, and she admits she made a lot of the same mistakes that, as an editor, she warned her writers about.

“If I had been my own editor, I would have told me not to try to fit as much into this book as we did. There's a lot of story here; a lot of themes,” she says.

“It became a visual challenge,” Magruder says. “Hank has devised all these contraptions, and there was not a lot of room to fit it all in. With every medium you've got your challenge. With animation, it’s time. With a comic, it’s space. We really had to figure out what’s important in every page and every panel and prioritize that.”

Obviously, Creaky Acres is much more than a horse book, and Brill and Magruder agree that its appeal should go far beyond the insufferable horse girls.

“It's a sports book,” Magruder says. “My favorite anime is Haikyu!!, which is about volleyball. I don't play volleyball, but I like feeling that competitiveness. This book is kind of a Horseback Riding 101 tutorial, so it's a great entry point for kids who have never ridden or have never ridden competitively.”

Brill agrees. “One of the things that's really cool about how kids interact with graphic novels is there seems to be this real appetite in that readership for graphic novels that are about experiences or hobbies or sports that are kind of weird and obscure. Roller Girl did really well, and it's about roller derby. There's something so fun about the graphic novel as a way to experience this thing that never even occurred to you to wonder about. So hopefully, this will be that, but for horses. Fingers crossed.”