About the Episodes

A smart mouthed kid provokes the wrong flatmate, a misguided teen gets schooled by her crush and a former child star struggles to escape his past.
Seductive advertising fantasies collide headfirst with everyday life in this delicately interwoven tale of identity, desire and coming of age – even in adulthood. A thrillingly observed critique of our media-based society.
Episodes traverses the rocky landscape of on and offline social interactions, advertising and media in a way that is both darkly humorous and emotionally engaging. Set in a metropolitan city, spanning the mid-90s to early 2020, Episodes follows a diverse group of characters as they struggle to reconcile their messy day-to-day reality with the aspirational fiction of their ever-present screens.
“This is an epic tale told on a personal level,” says writer and artist Alex Scott. “Episodes is for an audience who grew up on a diet of scheduled TV programming and now feeds off a 24-hour cycle of social-media updates and sponsored content.”
A multidisciplinary artist from Auckland, Alex describes her first graphic novel as the culmination of a childhood spent in thrall of the TV, a degree in scriptwriting, 15 years as a sub-editor, an illustration and painting practice, and nine years as a cartoonist for the New Zealand Listener. “My trajectory hasn’t felt entirely logical, but it’s all fed into the making of Episodes,” she says. “This is an incredibly personal book to me because all the stories developed out of experiences or feelings I’ve had and finally felt ready to share.”