Ursula Murray Husted | books | cv | about | blog | contact
Making Rain (2004)
A graphic novella about a girl who has lost her grandmother.

"Making Rain uses a two-color printing process (blue and brown) and it's beautiful. Husted seems to draw her characters almost as outlines, using just dashes and strokes of brown to carve them into being."- Greg McElhatton, Read About Comics
"Emotion, real emotion, comes forth from the pages, and it's very easy to be swept up into one's own memories of similar experiences. Death--real, human death--is a topic that is seldom dealt with in comics. Oh sure, we're constantly bombarded with the "In This Issue: A Character Dies!" type of death, but that's exploitive and sensational, and completely divorced from the real experience. Husted is to be commended for presenting a story with genuine humanity." - Dave Carter
"A wonderful meditation on loss as a young girl copes with her grandmother's passing. She attends the funeral, family members visit, and then she has to return to school.
The thick brush-looking linework makes the figures rough-edged, as though their raw emotions are visible. The blue tones and brown ink on cream paper are an unusual but very effective choice.
Husted does a beautiful job of capturing how a child sees the world. The adult reader will recognize the impact of what young Rosie hears while Rosie herself doesn't. Husted trusts the reader to fill in necessary gaps, as when the teacher reads the note from her mother; we don't see it, but we know exactly what it says." -Joanna Draper Carlson, Comics Worth Reading