07: Announcing RIVALS

Cam and Amanda are back, this time with 100% more soccer.

After years of work behind the scenes, the news is out: my Mapmakers collaborator Amanda Castillo and I are teaming up again for a new middle grade graphic novel called Rivals. The book follows Anthony and Miles, two soccer-obsessed best friends. When Miles’s family moves one town over, the boys end up at competing schools and their friendship warps into a rivalry.

It took years to get to this point and it’ll take a few more for the book to actually arrive (summer 2027 will be here before we know it, right??) but Amanda and I could not be more excited about the project.

See below for the formal announcement and some awesome art Amanda put together to celebrate the occasion.

After writing nearly 700 pages of a fantasy trilogy with Mapmakers, it felt like a good time to switch gears and tap into my love of sports. To my pleasant surprise (and relief), Amanda felt the same way.

While it doesn’t feature a single talking animal (regretfully), Rivals is in some ways a continuation of many of the themes we explored in Mapmakers. We’ll come at them from new angles and with the goal of reaching different destinations, but both stories revolve around friends learning how to understand and support one another during times of change. Miles and Anthony have their work cut out for them and I can’t wait for people to get to know these competitive, goofy, and (hopefully) endearing kids.

Rivals is also about sports (obviously). As someone who spent much of his childhood in a gym, on a field, or just pretending to be good at baseball in his backyard, sports was a huge component of my identity, routines, and friendships. While nothing in Rivals is an exact one-to-one with my own life, that experience certainly inspired the story in a myriad of ways.

We’ll be sharing more about the book as we get closer to its release, but with the script locked last month, I now get to sit back and experience the absolute best part of writing comics: seeing the art come in.

What Happens Between Now and 2027?

Who knows! But I do know that this weekend I will be joining Amanda at the comic expo CAMP up in Portland, ME as a booth helper. I’ll mainly be working the register, fetching coffees, and manning the table when Amanda goes off to panels, but that’s the absolute bare minimum I can do to make up for some of the more ridiculous page layouts waiting for Amanda in the Rivals script. It’s the first year of what looks to be an awesome event and anyone in the area should come by and say hi. (Plus, there’s just never a bad reason to go to Maine.)

Thanks for reading,

Cam
4.3.2025