You might want to look at illustrator Shawn Harris’ upcoming performance and book signing of his graphic novel “The First Cat in Space Ate Pizza” from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. at the Sedona Public Library on Saturday, July 8, as an event for youth and by youth.

“Accompanied by the imperious Moon Queen and LOZ 4000, a toenail-clipping robot, the First Cat in Space journeys across a fantastic lunar landscape in a quest to save the world. Will these unlikely heroes save the moon in time? Can a toenail-clipping robot find its purpose in the vast universe? And will the First Cat in Space ever eat some pizza?” the book’s Amazon blurb inquires.

Harris will be doing a live reading combining all of the character voices with a professional musical score for the book, which he produced in collaboration with a childhood friend, author Mac Barnett. A workshop about how to make a comic book will follow the performance.

“I’ll be doing a live version of these readings, and also doing a comics workshop after the reading,” Harris said, adding that his goal is to make his fantastical version of the moon that the First Cat explores as immersive as possible. “We’ve always made things together [since] when we were younger,” Harris added, explaining how the duo will still play video games together to take a break from the creative process. “I tried to get Mac to play in a band with me for years. But he’d never committed to learning an instrument, but I finally roped him into singing some songs. Storytelling is baked into our relationship. It’s fun. Our relationship is not and has never been very practical, or based entirely in reality; it’s only fitting we get to tell stories together.”

Harris has been an illustrator for nearly a decade after getting his start in the arts as a touring musician in his youth. He said that he has always been entertaining kids, whether with music, pictures or stories.

The first book of the duo’s planned trilogy, “The First Cat in Space Ate Pizza,” is out now, with its sequel “The First Cat in Space and the Soup of Doom” set to be released on Tuesday, October 3. A yet-to-be-titled third book is also in the works.

Dialogue between the duo is at the core of their creative process.

Barnett will send Harris a manuscript of a given chapter focused primarily on dialogue, and Harris will fill in location information with his illustrations and round out the characters before sending the manuscript back to Barnett to begin work on the next chapter. Harris compared their working process to improvisation in comedy.

“Comics are uniquely suited for creating [comedic] timing,” Harris said. “The size of a panel, and whether or not you put dialogue in a panel … There is a beat and a rhythm that you can establish with your reader so that their way of directing it in their head might resemble more like what we’re envisioning. There’s a really fun pace in collaboration with the reader when you’re making comics.”

Part of the joy of these live programs for Harris has been seeing the differences between how he envisions his characters and their delivery compared to what the members of his audiences have created in their own minds based on his work.

“Everybody’s going to have different deliveries,” Harris said. “When you’re reading a book, you’re the actor and director and that’s all happening in your head. Part of the power of picking up a book is that you have so much control over what happens with the directing. The more imagination you as a reader have, the better the movie that’s going to play in [your] head. But part of our [live] reading is that we get to control that narrative more.”

Bridging the distance between reader and creator is also of interest to Harris, because technology can sometimes make people forget that there are creative minds behind the entertainment they consume.

“Reading and writing [are] soimportant,” Harris said. “There are many mediums of storytelling, and especially in an age wherestorytelling is oftentimes cloaked in entertainment on screen. It’s important to tell this generation that there are writers behind all of these stories they’re seeing on the screen.”

“The Soup of Doom” will continue the adventures of the First Cat in Space on the moon. Harris said they have only scraped the lunar surface of localities so far.