Carly Usdin Books In Order

Publication Order of Heavy Vinyl Books

Publication Order of The Avant-Guards Books

Carly Usdin is a renowned American writer of young adult, LGBT, sequential arts, comic books, and graphic novels; and an award-winning filmmaker and producer. She hails from Los Angeles and is particularly famous for her first feature called Suicide Kale. It is the winner of the 2016 Audience Award at Outfest in the category of the Best First Feature. This film has played in more than 30 film festivals all over the world and is now available on Amazon Prime and iTunes. Usdin served as a director and showrunner for a scripted series called Threads. It was produced for the g090 platform of Verizon by New Form. In this anthology series, author Usdin has depicted 20 episodes filled with comedy and horror and has brought to life several outrageous stories available on internet forums such as Reddit. Author Usdin is best known for her 2 comic book series written for Boom! Studies, The Avant Guards and Heavy Vinyl.

The latter was nominated for a Prism award in 2018. Usdin has spent several years developing branded content and short-form narrative for big clients like CollegeHumor, World of Wonder, Funny or Die, Astronauts Wanted, CBS, Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls, Portal A, Fullscreen, YouTube, TruTV, and Viacom. Her most notable work is directing the 3rd season of Tawk, a digital series produced by Awkwafina. Additionally, Usdin has penned promo campaigns for the Drag Race of RuPaul that has won Promax BDA Awards and One Show Awards. Recently, Usdin completed the post-production work of her new short film called Misdirection. It has been officially selected to be played at the Bentonville Film Festival. She created it as a part of the Directing Workshop for Women conducted by the American Film Institute’s 2019 class.

As of now, Usdin is busy in the development of a few projects under the banner of her production house called Scheme Machine Studios. She owns this company in partnership with her wife, producer and photographer Robin Roemer. Author Usdin was born in 1982 in Florida and was brought up in Monmouth County, New Jersey. She is Jewish by religion and has a younger sister. It was the age of 16 that Usdin began to realize that she was a lesbian. She completed her graduation from Central Florida University and obtained a degree in filmmaking. To write her debut comic book series, Heavy Vinyl, Usdin collaborated with illustrator Nina Vakueva. Following the grand success of this series, Usdin shifted her focus towards making feature films. She started by adapting her own books into films.

In her debut series, Usdin has described the story of a queer teenager, who begins a new job at a record store and discovers that the other employees belong to an all-female, clandestine vigilante fight club. It was initially named Hi-Fi Fight Club, but was changed to Heavy Vinyl in November 2017. In January 2019, Usdin started her second series of comic books, The Avant Guards. It is said to consist of a total of twelve issues with one issue released every month. The illustrations in this second series have been done by Noah Hayes. In the books of this series, Usdin has narrated a transfer student’s story who joins an all-girls arts college and gets selected in the fledgling basketball team. In 2012, Usdin married her lesbian partner Robin Roemer, who is a photographer & producer by profession. She claims to belong to the non-binary spectrum of transgender identity.

The successful debut series written by author Carly Usdin is known as the Heavy Vinyl series. It is comprised of 4 books, all of which were released in 2017. The books of this series are set in the late 20th century in New Jersey. Usdin has mentioned the lead characters in the roles of Chris, Rory Glory, Maggie, Rosie Riot, and a few others. The debut book of this comic series is entitled ‘Heavy Vinyl #1’. It was published by the Boom! Box publication in August 2017. Initially, Chris is introduced as a queer teenage girl living in New Jersey in 1998. She joins work at a local record store called Vinyl Mayhem to earn some extra money. Chris seems to be prepared to face anything that comes her way, including misogynistic metalheads and grunge wannabes. She even manages to deal with her crush on a wicked but cute co-worker named Maggie.

Later, the story takes a shocking turn when the favorite singer among the store’s staff, Rory Glory, goes missing mysteriously. She was supposed to perform at a show with her band in town, but vanished without a trace the night before the scheduled performance. While still trying to come to terms with the shocking news of Rory Glory’s disappearance, Chris discovers that her co-workers are involved in doing something else in addition to sorting vinyl. And soon after, she is also included in the vigilante fight club of teen girls organized and run in the same store by her co-workers.

The second mind-blowing installment of the series is called ‘Heavy Vinyl #2’. It was also published in September 2017 by Boom! Box. This book opens by showing that Chris has become an integral part of the secret band of girls who pose as vigilantes. Just like the other ladies working in the Vinyl Mayhem record store, she also starts fighting against all those men who show disrespect towards others. But, the current problem that the vigilante group has at hand is to find out what happened to their favorite singer and co-worker Rory Glory. They wonder if she is in some kind of trouble and needs that help to come out of it.

Each member of the group comes up with her own plan to move ahead with the task of searching Rory Glory. And as each one of them stresses on following their own plan, it leads to a conflict between them. Later, the story moves further with some heartwarming scenes and a few character developments. In the end, the mystery is unraveled in a cliff-hanger climax sequence. Many readers found the story of this book to be quite simple and adorable. They feel it has its fair share of complexities, but that does not stop it from being labeled as a mass entertainer. After the worldwide success this volume, author Usdin developed and published two more volumes that also became immensely popular, enabling the series to become successful as a whole.