Writer and artist Molly Knox Ostertag announced yesterday that her new graphic novel “Darkest Night” is being serialized on her Substack, In the Telling. Via Polygon, the dark YA story is releasing its first segment today, with additional short segments to be released each Friday.
The story follows Mags, a teenager whose family guards a dark secret deep in their basement, as she reunites with Nessa, a trans girl and Mags’s childhood friend, who returns to town and meets Mags for the first time post-transition.
Though she kept the plot details obscure, Ostertag told Polygon that the secret in the basement is something that deeply affects Mags’s life. “And when her oldest friend comes back into town,” Ostertag said, “she shines a light into Mags’ life and forces her to confront things she hasn’t confronted before.”
With “Darkest Night” marking her fifth solo book, Ostertag noted that her return to digital comics is “really going back to [her] roots,” referring to the philosophical superhero webcomic “Strong Female Protagonist” she created a decade ago with writer, comedian, and Dimension 20 Dungeon Master Brennan Lee Mulligan. “That was my first entry into the world of comics, and it really opened so many doors for me,” she said. “So webcomics always have this very special place in my heart.”
Although Ostertag eventually plans to collect to story physically, the comic will initially be formatted as a vertical scroll rather than a series of pages. “Making a story fit into pages is always really hard for me,” she said. “I get into the rhythm of it, but the act of the page-turn, the fact of it being a book, it’s sometimes so limiting. So getting to publish something online, I’m drawing it all as this long scroll, a format I really enjoy, and that feels very natural to me.”
Ostertag will release the weekly updates to paid subscribers first. Those weekly updates will add up to chapters, and the collected chapters will be eventually made available to general subscribers. Per her Substack, Ostertag matches and donates all money made from her paid subscriptions to trans charities.
