Patrick Rills believes the moment you fall in love, it hits you out of nowhere – just like that. It is from this belief that Rills came up with the idea for his recently published graphic novel titled, “Like That.” Rills said a graphic novel is not like a comic book that has a new issue published each month, but rather it is one self-contained novel. Rills said he has been making his own comics since high school and really got serious about it after he graduated from LSU in 2002. “When you do comic books, you get into things like monsters, demons and aliens,” he said. “And sometimes you have to prove to yourself that you can write something different. A different genre.” “Like That” is Rills’ attempt at a different genre. He said the novel is a complicated, modern love story involving two main characters, Melanie and Reed, that takes place on the LSU campus. Rills said the graphic novel is the first publication from the Baton Rouge, Louisiana-based art house, ICON Studios. Rills, along with friends Heath Tullier and Sean Jandle, founded ICON Studios in 1996. The setting of the graphic novel features various places all over the LSU campus. Rills said he had to go through the University licensing department in order to use the LSU campus as his setting. “I needed a University for the story,” Rills said. “I love LSU and it has a beautiful campus, so I thought why not?” Rills said he did the majority of the work – producing, writing the story line, creating a Web site and taking the pictures – for the novel. He said he took actual photographs of each scene, put them on the pages in the order he wanted them, then sent them to an artist who put ink on top of the images to create the final pictures. “That is why the images are so realistic looking,” he said. “You can tell it’s the LSU campus.” Although the setting of the novel is real, Rills said the characters are not based on any specific real life people. He said one of the main points of the novel is that he was trying to capture the essence of real life people, places and emotions so readers could relate to the story. “I wanted people to get the full experience of what it’s like to be on campus,” he said. “I wanted something recognizable.” In the graphic novel, Reed Hapwood is a fickle, eccentric college student who unexpectedly falls in love with his girlfriend Melanie. Rills said Reed is scared of commitment and feels he does not have time, nor is he mature enough, for a relationship in college. The story begins with Reed explaining to his friends that he and Melanie just had a fight. Then, the story uses flashbacks to describe what caused their fight. Rills said Reed had intended on breaking up with Melanie, but before he had the chance to do so, Melanie suddenly said those three little words – “I love you.” Rills said Melanie scares Reed by saying this and it is not until the next morning after he wakes up that Reed realizes he loves her too. “It’s about the day you fall in love,” Rills said. “Reed wakes up and everything he encounters reminds him of her. He can’t stop thinking about Melanie.” The novel has what Rills said is an open-ending. Reed realizes on his way to class that he loves Melanie, so he runs across campus to her dorm in Evangeline to tell her, yet the reader never finds out what he tells her. Rills wrote the plot of the story last year and said he has made several revisions. He said he finalized the story as a screenplay for a short film he wrote, but then converted it into a graphic novel. “It’s just a story I had to tell,” he said.
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