Your purchase helps support NPR programming. The first installment of the Check, Please! graphic novel, which chronicles Bittle’s freshman and sophomore years, was published in September.Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Check, Please! Author Ngozi Ukazu

“When you put something online and you see that immediate response it makes it feel as though what you’re doing really matters, and it gives you confidence - even though I’m still scared with every comic that I post,” she said. But Ukazu finds this new means of finding an audience extremely validating. In the past, authors and artists would try to find success in print first. “I had no life for two years - I still don’t have a life - but it was a very different way of not having a life when I was tweeting as this 19-year-old boy on a fictional college campus.” she said.

I’m so proud of my teammates and can’t wait to celebrate their accomplishments this weekend. “I’m telling a happy LGBTQ love story, which audiences never get that - it’s just doom and gloom or a sad story.”Īudiences connected so much that Kickstarter campaigns have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the print publication of installments of Check, Please! Between the online updates to the web comic, Ukazu built her following by actively maintaining Twitter accounts for some of the characters. “There are so many ways that I could just drag people into the story,” she said. “What if there was a kid from the South - a place I’m so familiar with - what if he went into this totally foreign environment and we got to see what would happen if there was a gay kid on the hockey team?”īetween the hockey story line, Bittle’s love of baking, and the LGBTQ elements, there’s plenty of things for an audience to connect with - including a love story as he gets involved with a fellow player. “Check, Please! is all about kind of answering that question, ‘What if?'” she said. So, she took that as a challenge and made her main character gay. She knew a Yale hockey player who remarked that none of the players on the hockey team were gay. But she also worked in a few elements of Bittle’s character in response to an experience she had in school. Ukazu incorporates elements she found in that deep hole into her story - such as slang players use and the practice of giving teammates nicknames. Artist Ngozi Ukazu is the creator of the popular web comic Check Please, about a gay college hockey player who loves to bake.

Check please comic book