Excerpt from The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I hear her let out a shaky breath. She's nervous. I reach out and make her take my hand. One of the board members is speaking on-stage.

"Their first full-length feature, Nashville Combat, is a true tour de force: equal parts angry and tender, funny and sorrowful, demonstrative of a thoughtful, skilled craftwork. Like its creators, the work seems older than its years. Vaught and Kisses have made known their allegiance to the ink-and-color tactics prized by classic animators, and the content of Nashville Combat is as compelling as its look— a story of modern womanhood, gay identity, family, criminality, and the travails of a late twentieth-century childhood. The vessel for these issues is co-creator Mel Vaught, who transcends autobiography to make something entirely new with her story of growing up poor in the Central Florida swamps with a delinquent mother who is incarcerated when Vaught is thirteen years old. It is dark, yet bril-liantly funny, well crafted enough to let the light shine through the cracks."

The lights dim. A screen behind the podium flickers.

To us, the opening credits of Nashville Combat are like the voice of a friend. We know it immediately. We worried over the first two minutes for months, trying at least twenty different approaches be-fore settling on the final cut. "What's the best way," Mel kept saying, "to get someone's heart rate up? Make them feel like someone's hovering just over their shoulder? That's what we need." We used distortion to fuzz the initial frames, making it look like a bad conversion from analog, like the old stuff we love, something best seen in a piss-drenched movie theater forty years ago, seats knifed to bits, carpet stained, a man with no face in a trench coat two rows behind you. The landscape is all smeared pastels, ink blobs—a dirty bizarro world, part Ren & Stimpy, part Clutch Cargo, part seventies German cartoon porno.

I can feel every year that has passed since we met in the first thirty seconds of the movie. All those nights in college we spent sketching, talking Tex Avery and the old school, dissecting everything from The Simpsons to Krazy Kat, tracking down lovely old Nickelodeon bumpers and watching them over and over, taking notes, finding out about production companies, learning how to track other artists, their techniques, their tics. We pored over all the gritty American International stuff, all the Fritz the Cat and Heavy Traffic we could handle. The grainy, ripped-off VHS and Betamax tapes I picked up on trips to Manhattan from hole-in- the-wall comic book shops and porn retailers back when a good chunk of the Village was still dangerous. The beginning of our work life together, the 2001-to-2002 school year, tinged with rising terror levels and TVs blaring, a raw feeling around the edges of everything. The first night we met. I look down at my arm. The hairs are standing up.

Onscreen, a skinny kid with a yellow bowl cut walks through a gas station. My mom went to prison when I was thirteen years old, the voiceover says—the voice being Mel's, of course; no one else could replicate that rippling, broken-glass sound. I was probably lucky I didn't go with her.

The kid's hand grasps a pack of Skittles and slips the candy into her pocket. Cut to an old guy at the counter, coffee- ground stubble on his cheeks, scratching at his newspaper with a pencil.

Cut to a shadowy form in a trucker hat meandering in the next aisle. A swath of light comes down just far enough so you can see his eyes, wily and blue, glint knowingly. Meet Red Line Dickie, the voice continues. As far as Mom's boyfriends went, he was actually okay. He tolerated me, because he found me useful.

The kid walks the next aisle, pockets a battery. Red Line does a little nod. They do a separate stroll for the door. Then, off- frame, the unmistakable click of a shotgun's safety being switched. The rumble: "Tell your brat to empty his pockets."

Excerpted from The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker. Copyright © 2017 by Kayla Rae Whitaker. Excerpted by permission of Random House. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.