Our story is an interesting one! We met over fifteen years ago through email and began writing to one another about our research, comparing and contrasting our findings on surrogacy in the US and in Israel. We would comment on one another's writing, encourage one another and give each other critiques and comparative comments on drafts. We became good friends without ever meeting, and even began to write co-authored articles comparing our findings, before we finally met up for the first time at a conference on reproduction at Cambridge University in 2017. We arrived a few days before the conference began, and walked around the town together, and it was like we knew each other always!
During the pandemic, we felt inspired to do something more creative than the usual academic writing, and both of us wanted to make our writing more accessible to a cross-over audience that could include people entering the world of surrogacy or caregivers working with people in the process. We also both noticed that our students were of a new generation that engaged with visual texts more freely than with classic academic writing. So we decided to try this, not knowing that it would take us over three years to complete and not really knowing how complex it is to write a graphic novel about ethnographic research?