Photo: supplied
Paekakariki-based award-winning animator, illustrator and graphic artist Ned Wenlock's first graphic novel Tsunami is a cautionary tale about Peter, a self-righteous 12-year-old boy, and his fraught last six weeks at primary school.
It's a coming-of-age story, and an examination of teenage alienation and the unpredictable consequences of our actions.
Everything feels overwhelming to Peter - like a tsunami is coming - and he isn't sure he can stop it.
"It's quite a dark book," Wenlock tells Saturday Morning's Kim Hill about Tsunami, but it's also got its lighter side.
"Going through the book there's a big sense of humour around things.
"The main character being so righteous, making lots of wrong decisions as he goes along, I just find there's a lot of humour in there, a lot of play."
Wenlock came from a highly successful animation career. His short film Spring Jam won the 2016 New Zealand International Film Festival, Show Me Shorts Best Film Award & DEGNZ Best Director Award.
Ned Wenlock Photo: Mark Coote
He spent years making music videos for bands like MGMT and Danger Beach.
"That was my film school basically, was that I would approach bands and say, hey would you like a music video, for free? My idea was that if you take money out of the equation then you have a lot of control over what you do.
"Over 10 years I did that approaching different bands, one a year."
When Spring Jam won many awards it also served as a 'full stop' in his career to that point, which is when Wenlock ended up doing a graphic novel.
"The reason I did this graphic novel is that I was struggling to go from making these musical short videos to go to something longer with drama involved.
"One of my struggles is that I find it very difficult to write scripts. I have to see things visually in order to tell a story and it develops through the pictures and the words."
He looked at projects with the New Zealand Film Commission, but had problems visualising them.
"The idea for this graphic novel came from that, was that I could do this graphic novel in pictures, develop a longer story, work out how this thing worked and then possibly go back to making features or something like this."
Excerpt from Ned Wenlock's graphic novel 'Tsunami.' Photo: Supplied
The character of Peter is very much spun out of Wenlock's own youth, he says.
"When I came up with the idea the character came from me.
"I was thinking about myself at the age of 12 and how I was a little bit of a righteous person and I found that kind of humorous.
"As I started drawing the story he turned into his own character. He's not me now, but that's where it came from."
Tsunami ends on an intentionally ambiguous note, he says.
"I think ambiguity, it's important for the writer to know specifically what they're doing but to leave that space open for the reader to interpret."
What's next for Wenlock? He's not entirely sure whether it will be more film work or another graphic novel.
"It is hard to spend time on something like this graphic novel, (with) such a small audience here in New Zealand, you can't really get that back in terms of monetary."
Tsunami is now available through Earth's End Publishing.
