Numlock Sunday: Keezy Young talks Hello, Sunshine
By Walt Hickey
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week, I spoke to Keezy Young, the author of the 2025 graphic novel Hello, Sunshine and the new comic It’s Bitter, Baby, and it’s Very Sweet.
Hello, Sunshine was one of my favorite books of last year, Young’s got a phenomenal artistic style and the graphic novel was a clever and immersive mystery that I’ve still been thinking about months later. With the release of their horror one-shot It’s Bitter, Baby, and it’s Very Sweet, I wanted to have Keezy on to talk about the books.
Hello, Sunshine can be found wherever books are sold, It’s Bitter, Baby, and it’s Very Sweet is available for purchase and download at Itch.io, and Keezy Young can be found on BlueSky.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Keezy, thank you so much for coming on.
Thanks for having me.
I absolutely loved Hello Sunshine when it came out last year. You are out with a brand new comic that is available on your Itch.io called It’s Bitter Baby, and it’s Very Sweet. I wanted to have you on because I think that you have a really striking style. I love your storytelling. You’re at this really interesting intersection of mystery and horror; what would you say draws you towards that subgenre?
I’ve always been drawn toward it ever since I was a little kid. I was sneaking downstairs to watch X-Files through the slats on my stairs after I was supposed to be in bed. And X-Files is like the perfect mix between horror and mystery, I think. I loved all of the old 1950s giant monster movies. I loved all of the ’80s wet puppet movies, all that stuff. Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. This has always been in my blood, I guess you could say.
When I started making comics about it, it was just a natural place to go — to write about my favorite thing, the thing that compels me the most and hooks me the most. I find it very exhilarating to be able to do that for other people, too.
You mentioned the X-Files, one thing I’ve enjoyed a lot about your work is that there are supernatural elements in it, but it is also grounded in people’s psychological states. It’s a really interesting midpoint between that very, very realistic region of terror and that very, very supernatural phenomenon of interesting mystery.
I was actually just having a conversation with a friend about an essay by Ursula K. Le Guin, where she says (and I’m paraphrasing here, because I didn’t actually read the essay) something like, “You’re using supernatural elements to tell the truth.” I think that really resonated with me, because I always want to be telling some truth and I want to be saying something meaningful.
I’m using supernatural elements or magic or whatever it is to get those ideas across in a new and interesting way, find a back alley avenue to get readers there, and get them thinking. But the core of it has to be something that is real. So, for Hello Sunshine, for example, the core is mental illness. There’s supernatural elements, there are ghosts and that stuff, but it is really more of a story about mental illness, not necessarily a story about ghosts.
I think a lot of supernatural stuff also lends itself to that really well, because it’s all coming from our psyches. What are ghosts? They represent a lot of things. They represent grief for lost loved ones. They represent fear of the unknown, what’s going to happen to us after we die. All of these things go into it naturally. In some ways, it’s easier for me to write about real things with supernatural elements than it is to just write about real things.
You use point-of-view in this very, very fascinating way. “Unreliable narrator” is one way to phrase it. I read It’s Bitter Baby, and it’s Very Sweet like three times because I had to go through each time to see exactly what was really grounded and what had these more supernatural elements.
I think that psychosis, for example, is the mental illness specifically that Hello Sunshine is about, and one that I’ve written about before, because I have bipolar disorder with psychosis. By definition, you’re experiencing something that isn’t real, but it feels completely real to you in the moment. I definitely put some of that into my work.
I think every character is experiencing their own reality, regardless of whether they’re unwell or not. And it’s really important for me to honor that and respect it. Even if I’m suggesting that this isn’t really happening, it is really happening for that character. Their feelings are real, and their fears are real and all that stuff.
It’s a fun storytelling tool to be able to switch POV and have it be different from different people’s points of view. It’s like a clever storytelling tool. You don’t have to say it directly, necessarily. You get to leave it up to readers to figure out for themselves what exactly they think is really going on and whether that is even a meaningful question to ask. I think what is really going on in real life or whatever isn’t necessarily the most interesting thing going on. And you can get a lot out of something that’s going on in somebody’s head.
I would love to talk a little bit about your process. I think the art is particularly gorgeous. I love your backgrounds. How did you settle into the style?
I actually went through a lot of style problems for a while there. When I was in my 20s and whatnot, I was trying different things. I was trying to figure out what my niche was. I finally landed on style being not what you’re best at drawing, but what you have most fun drawing. I realized things, like I don’t really like shading. I like just using flats for the most part, so I’m just gonna not shade. And I think it looks fine. It looks great. If anybody out there is struggling with their style in any creative field, I would definitely lean toward figuring out what you have the most fun doing — what you really enjoy doing, and just lean into that. That’s what your style is. It doesn’t matter how good you are at it or how good you are at something else that you don’t like doing. If you don’t like doing it, then what’s the point?
Yeah, it’s also just so rich. The colors are so really lovely. You’re making me go back to reading a fourth time now, checking out the shading.
Yeah, I am. One of the things I noticed was that I like doing backgrounds, actually, but I don’t like doing really super detailed stuff. I use the same size brush. I do everything digitally, which means you can change the size of brushes as many times as you want. You can make it giant. You can make it small. You can make it incrementally different. But I use just one size, maybe two sizes — for outlines and then for everything else. And sticking with that one size was very freeing in some ways, because it let me focus on what was actually important in the art in a more profound way than trying to get every single detail that exists. When you’re focusing on something that’s very distant from the reader, something far in the background, you can say, “What actually is important to depict there?”
I think that backgrounds can be really revealing. You can show all kinds of interesting things about what’s in a character’s bedroom, for example. Little, little tiny details: what posters they have on their wall, how messy it is and that sort of thing. And using certain tools, like the same size of brush all the time, means that I’m really only focused on that. I’m not focused on trying to add every single detail. I’m not focused on how good it looks necessarily. It’s more about the content of it. It’s about communicating something.
I do want to call out your colors, too, which I really enjoy, particularly in your graphic novel work. You can actually see the temperature of the book change as you proceed deeper into it. It’s just a really cool effect.
Thank you. Colors are probably my favorite part overall. I know a lot of people don’t really like doing them, but I really think that it can add so much nuance and storytelling detail.
Early on, these kids, their best friend is missing, and they’re trying to find him. But at this point, it’s still very Scooby-Doo-like: they’re making jokes, they’re having fun a little bit, trying to solve this mystery, despite their grief at having lost this guy. And at that point, it’s very bright. It’s very sunny. It’s a lot of bold colors, like blues and reds and yellows and that sort of thing. As we get further into the story and things take a turn for the darker, I wanted to have it literally take a turn for the darker and start using some unsettling color schemes, too. It’s not just that it’s dark. It’s also that skin tones are a little bit off, a little bit too green, maybe. There’s an element of uneasiness throughout the entire thing.
You can also bring back those bold, bright, warm colors in interesting ways, then, because it’s such a contrast. You suddenly remember, “Oh, I am living in this uneasy, disconcerting, dark world right now. I had almost forgotten what this brighter world can look like.” And that is what Mental illness feels like sometimes. So yeah, that was very intentional.
Yeah, it’s a really superb effect. And it’s an atmospheric thing that comics as a medium are particularly well-suited for compared to other mediums. I do want to talk a little bit about your most recent work. It’s Bitter Baby, and it’s Very Sweet. This was just delightful. It was such a quick, fun, really cool thing. How did this come together? Hello Sunshine was a work with a publisher, but this is just you doing a cool solo story.
I’ll be honest, I was bored. I am waiting to be able to pitch my next graphic novel project. It’s a lot of publishing nonsense going on: rehiring editors and waiting for sales data and all that sort of stuff. So I’m on hold at the moment.
I’ve just been twiddling my thumbs a little bit, doing side projects and that sort of thing while I wait. But I really missed doing comics. Comics are my favorite thing to do. It had been like months and months since I’d actually drawn a comic page. So last August or, something that, I started the story. I was just like, “Okay, I can’t stand this anymore. I need to draw something.” I whipped it up in a couple of days and scripted it in another week and then started drawing.
It came together really quickly — maybe even too quickly for the amount of time that I actually ended up working on the art because it is 34 pages long, which is quite long for a short comic. I probably could have stood to spend a little bit more time thinking through the script, but I think it turned out well. So I’m glad to hear that people are enjoying it. I’m really glad to hear that you liked it.
It is a story about three kids. It’s two kids and then one of their bullies who are all teenagers who go into a basement on Halloween in 1994 and find something uncomfortable about one of their classmates. It’s about nostalgia and a lot of people in my generation are very nostalgic for our young childhoods. I was a little kid in 1994, and especially around Halloween, that’s one of the most fun things that we could do. I wanted to poke holes in that a little tiny bit. So that’s the premise of that story.
You’ve been so generous with your time. Where can folks find you and where can they find these books?
Hello Sunshine is available pretty much anywhere books are sold. It is from Little Brown. You can do ebook, there’s a hard cover and a soft cover. You can find it at Barnes & Noble or whatnot or order it from your local indie, which is my favorite thing to suggest.
It’s Bitter, Baby, and it’s Very Sweet is only available digitally at the moment from Itch.io. I will be printing copies of it to bring to comic conventions, so if you happen to be at Emerald City Comic Con in March next month, I will have it there. But I have no plans to do a wide release at this point. So you might have to be okay with just a PDF.
As far as where you can find me, I’m very active on BlueSky. Actually, it is probably the place that I’m at most. I’m just @KeezyYoung on there. I’m Keezy Young pretty much everywhere. I’m on Instagram, Tumblr, Itch.io. I also have a Patreon newsletter; you can pay what you want, or you can follow me for free. You get all the same content that everybody else does. I’ll announce my events and I post all my new art there and that sort of thing. And that’s, as well, just Keezy Young.
Edited by Crystal Wang
If you have anything you’d like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.
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Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news.
