Ink & Paint After Hours
A Graphic Novel

About this book:

In the sweltering Ink & Paint Annex of 1940s Apex Animation Studios, Clara Brooks spends her days tracing Barnaby Bear's slapstick misadventures with surgical precision—ninety cents an hour to perfect the "boys'" messy genius. By night, she steals into the locked department with a stolen peg bar, contraband acetate, and a vision no studio executive would ever approve: a woman walking rain-slick streets in shades of slate and shadow, animated with the weight and gravity the cartoons never allow.

*Ink & Paint After Hours* is a gorgeously rendered graphic novel about the invisible artists who built animation's golden age frame by frame—and the dangerous, exhilarating act of drawing outside the lines. As production quotas tighten and a cynical lead animator closes in on their secret, Clara, quick-witted Dot, and veteran painter Peggy orchestrate a quiet mutiny in cellulose and gouache, proving that the most subversive special effect is a woman claiming her own keyframes.

Equal parts workplace noir, feminist heist, and love letter to a vanished craft, this is *Hidden Figures* meets *The Animator's Survival Kit*—a story where every smuggled cel is a declaration of independence, and the real rebellion happens between the frames.