Kickstarting Comics: ‘The Great Hare After’ — Liam Sharp And Matylda McCormack-Sharp’s Children’s Book
by Richard Bruton
Another Kickstarter campaign to really get behind now – a family affair with comic artist Liam Sharp and his daughter Matylda McCormack-Sharp bringing you a lovely tale of the generations – The Great Hare After…
This one’s a lovely-looking kids book from a familiar name, with a very sweet story behind it – The Great Hare After.
It’s all about a young rabbit worried about her poor sick grandfather. It’s written by comic artist and writer Liam Sharp with hand-painted watercolour art by his daughter, herself a fine artist in her own right – Matylda McCormack-Sharp.
The book will be a traditional 28 pages in square format soft-back, 8.3″ x 8.3″ on high quality art stock paper, with card stock cover.
As you can see from the art on this page, it’s a lovely little book…
And here’s Liam Sharp with the lovely tale behind its creation, all going back some 26 years…
“Some 26 years ago I wrote a story for my very young daughter, Matylda. My grandfather had succumbed to cancer when the great hereafter beckoned, shortly before we had had her, leading me to conceive of the idea of a grandchild writing a letter to try and stave off the inevitable. It was a bitter-sweet concept further rounded out by my hitting upon the notion that the child mis-heard ‘hereafter’, and thus ‘The Great Hare’ came into being.
Back then I had dreams of illustrating the story myself, and maybe even seeing it in print. But time and work requirements have a habit of relentlessly shifting the ground beneath us, and with the passing years it eventually became an unrealized dream.
Skip forward a couple of decades and I find my now adult daughter is a fine, sensitive and charming artist in her own right, and it dawns on us that such an intergenerational story would be the perfect vehicle for a father/daughter collaboration, as she too has felt the pangs of losing a beloved grandfather. And indeed, from this father’s proud perspective, I believe the passage of time has in fact been kind, and that the story is far better now than it ever would have been had it been produced by myself alone.
In Matylda’s hands the grandchild became a young female rabbit, not the little boy I had originally imagined, and so the Great Hare himself became much grander. Without wishing to spoil it, the somewhat painful – though relatable – stakes suggested by the story concept became at once more poignant, and also much more palatable. You fall in love with her little rabbit family.”
As you’d expect, plenty of options with this one, but of course the main thing here is the book itself, available in digital and print. You’ve also got bookplate, signed and remarqued editions, horror cover variant by Liam Sharp, and original Liam Sharp art. And there’s going to be a fair number of stretch goals as well.
Matylda McCormack-Sharp is a UK based artist whose work includes illustrations for “What’s Happening to Me Now?”, an illustrated book about peri-menopause written by Heather Wright, “Yawa the Adventurer”, a mid-grade comic series written by Bernard Mensah, and “A Garden of Flowers”, a children’s book written by Michael Rosenblum.
Liam Sharp is an award-winning Anglo-American writer and artist – we imagine you know a lot of his work already – Wonder Woman: Rebirth, The Brave and The Bold, Green Lantern. More recently we’ve all been rather loving his work on his creator-owned series at Image Comics – Starhenge, an epic sci-fantasy saga based on the legend of King Arthur.
This is their first book together and it really does look adorable!
