Meet Marvelous Marcus, the most marvelous child you will ever know. Marcus’s imagination is like no other and it is out of this world. He will take you from watching TV in the living room to sailing the high seas as a fierce pirate, but there is only one problem with Marcus’s wild imagination! As marvelous as Marcus is, sometimes he is unaware of how his imagination can affect others around him. Throughout his marvelous adventures, he learns some good values and life lessons that build his character along the way. The Adventures of Marvelous Marcus by Stephen Lewis ’20 was independently published (ISBN-13: 979-8654493309) in July 2020 and is available at Amazon.com. Read on for Lewis’s story in his own words and a video interview with the author.
The development of The Adventures of Marvelous Marcus began as a small, little one-month project that took off for the best. I came up with the idea of creating a children’s picture book during intersession in January. The challenge I had for myself was to see if I could create a children’s book within a span of one month, but plans changed the more I got into it. The story all began with a simple Idea, which was a child with an overactive imagination learning how his actions affect others. Once I had the idea down, I began to storyboard how the story would play out. The storyboarding process consists of me sketching how each page is going to look, and how the events in the book smoothly comes together. The storyboarding process took me about a month or two to complete, but once that was done the next step was to illustrate everything. The style of art used to illustrate this book is called ‘Stoodlez’, which is my authentic style of drawing for all the characters and objects. The illustration process took me about another two to three months to finalize, and that is with consistent weekly illustrations. Once the illustrations were done, the last step was to add the words, and the story is basically complete from that point on.
Stephen Lewis ’20
