Graphic novelist Kane Lynch publishes Reel Life, a tween book about divorce

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Sixth grader Galen Murphy’s life is about to get upended. One of his friends, Kyle, has suddenly turned mean, and worse still, his parents announce they’re separating. Galen and his other friend, Luna, decide to make a documentary film about his parents’ divorce. Will Galen’s “reel” life help him process his “real” life? So goes the premise of Kane Lynch’s debut Scholastic publication, Reel Life, coming out on May 20.

Lynch grew up in San Luis Obispo and experienced his own parents’ divorce, and his semi-autobiographical book explores the myriad emotions and complications divorced families go through.

Galen’s dad, Paul, has an affair and strikes up a relationship with the much younger Jasmine. Galen’s mom, Roberta, is devastated, but she eventually finds a new relationship with Mike, whose daughter Autumn brings new difficulties into Galen’s family dynamics. 

“The ‘family’ story is more autobiographical than the ‘kid’ story,” Lynch explained. “I wanted to capture my family’s specific quirky dynamic, how my experience wasn’t really like any divorce story I’d seen in movies or TV. The storyline with the kids is more of a classic ‘composite characters’ situation. Me and my friends were always doing creative projects together, and our personal drama often dovetailed with our artistic output. 

“But there’s no one real ‘Kyle’ or ‘Luna,’ even if every one of my childhood friends will probably think one or the other is based on them. In both cases, I felt like a fictional framework was the best way to reflect the authentic emotional experience of what really happened—I wanted to make my characters talk to each other, and to do that, I had to have license to imagine scenes and conversations.”

Lynch’s book promises to help young readers experiencing their parents’ divorce understand that they’re not alone and maybe help them process their feelings.

Lynch, 38, has had a lifelong love affair with comics and cartooning, beginning in the fourth grade. He created comics for the SLO High School newspaper, graduated in 2004, then attended UC Santa Cruz, where his interests “vacillated between comics and film.” He took a job as a video editor in the Bay Area, but comics were always his passion.

When he got laid off, he decided to go all-in on his dream, moving to a “2,000-person town in Vermont” to earn his Master of Fine Arts from The Center for Cartoon Studies in 2016. He eventually found his way back to SLO in 2023. Along the way, he became a professional cartoonist and educator whose nonfiction comics and illustrations have appeared on The Nib, Slate, and Psychology Today, and in the graphic novel Guantanamo Voices (Abrams Books, 2020). Reel Life is his first graphic novel designed for kids.

In the book, Galen’s dad, a yoga instructor, meets Jasmine at a yoga retreat. Lynch describes Galen’s dad as a “positive person who wants everyone to have a good time and is sort of unaware of the repercussions of his actions. He’s a little bit of a jock, but a hippie jock.”

Lynch felt it was important to explore the topic of divorce from a kid’s perspective and explore a kid’s emotional response and ways of processing their situation.

“I wanted to do some version of this for years, and I didn’t originally think of it as a book for kids,” he explained. “Most of my other professional work so far has not been for kids. But this story, it’s something that happened to me when I was a kid, and for whatever reason, my memories of that time are very vivid. I felt I could tap into that.”

Scholastic is gearing the book for 8- to 12-year-olds, which Lynch calls “a huge age for graphic novels.”

“The majority of graphic novels sold are for kids that age, and Scholastic is the biggest publisher,” he said. “Someone asked me, ‘Would you kill to work for DC or Marvel?’ I would be happy to, sure, but Scholastic is as big as those guys. It’s just a different demographic.”

Lynch’s novel does a spectacular job at character development—of both kids and adults—who act and feel like real people. Galen’s friend Kyle is angry his parents are divorcing, and he handles it much differently than Galen. Luna’s parents would never divorce, but that doesn’t stop them from fighting, which pains her. Slightly older Autumn, the daughter of Galen’s mom’s new boyfriend, has her own divorce-related issues to deal with and lashes out in a hurtful way.

“When you’re a kid and your parents are fighting, you don’t process it like an adult, ‘Well, mom had some good points but also dad had some good points.’ No, you just think, ‘Oh God, they’re yelling,’” Lynch said. “As a kid is navigating this, I wanted there to be some inner kid conflict too. Fundamentally the way humans treat each other and build relationships and have problems with those relationships—that’s something that can happen when you’re 11 or when you’re 45.

“There are some things that are funny about how kids deal with things, including not being aware that the family issues are why they’re acting the way they are, which is especially true with Autumn and Kyle but probably true of all of these. They don’t have the tools to resolve their conflicts.

“The adult characters are all versions of me to some degree now that I’ve been these ages,” Lynch continued. “Hey, what’s it like to be 26 and move to a new place? What’s it like to be in your late 30s and question your life choices? I feel connected to all of them, and I feel like the adult characters are as big a part of it as the kid characters. I hope that people of all ages will read it.”

Contact New Times Arts Editor Glen Starkey at gstarkey@newtimesslo.com.

This article appears in May 15-25, 2025.