Image Comics' upcoming series Getting It Together is a 'slice of life' dramedy, and as it turns out the path towards it coming to be is also a bit of a story as well.
Co-writer Omar Spahi has shared an essay recounting how he and co-writer Sina Grace went to the same high school together but didn't actually 'meet' until Grace started working at Spahi's local comic shop. And then on from that, the path from there to Getting It Together #1's debut on October 7.
Read the essay below, printed with permission from Spahi.
How Getting It Together From Image Comics Got It Together
(Image credit: Jenny D. Fine (Image Comics))
Working with Sina feels like fate. Sina and I went to the same high school but we'd never actually spoken a word to each other while there. Then, by chance, he started working at my favorite comic shop, Hi De Ho Comics.
Being a comic book fan as a high school kid can be a lonely place. So as you can imagine, I was super excited to find another middle eastern person my age who devoured comics just as I did.
One day I gathered my courage, walked up to the counter, and I shot my shot. I asked if we went to school together, to which he casually replied, "Yeah, I see you around."
At the time my world revolved around the DC series, The Flash. He was my hero and I fairly exclusively read comics involving him. I asked if he read The Flash and he proceeded to list several Marvel and Image comics he was reading, but sadly none of them were The Flash or other DC superheroes. So we talked a little but ultimately parted ways at that.
To help paint the picture, Sina was a lot more 'woke' than I was, even when we were younger. He was already reading the newest Image titles and always dressed like he was a hip Vietnam war vet yet somehow made it fashionable. He organized peer mediation groups and with the anti-defamation league in high school and also interned at Top Cow Productions.
Sina and I may come from the same area, but we're more like opposites than anything. I was a cisgender straight male raised by a single father, and Sina was a gay guy raised by a single mother (why didn't we do a Parent Trap?). Sina was into fashion and art, and I was into videogames and superheroes. I would go right and he would go left, at least that's what it felt like.
It seemed our chance to be fast friends was over. The one book I read, he didn't read. I was on my own lonely isolation island again as the only person I knew who read superhero comics.
Fast forward a few years, and I was at Phoenix Comic Con and a mutual friend told me about this great comic book, Li'l Depressed Boy. So I went over to Sina's booth to check it out.
As soon as I read it, I knew the story was about me, it even felt like my face was on LDB's body. To be honest, It wasn't actually about me, but I connected with it on such a level where I really felt like it was.
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