#AND i need to thank you for inspiring me to do longer-form narrative comics

[aliensfuckmeup]

winks cutely

DROPS THIS ON THE TABLE AND COLLAPSES DEAD ON THE GROUND.

Illustration for chapter 10 of In Blood And Stars by @actingwithportals.

[rem289]

Q: Why are you writing this post?

A: Because during the Christmas holidays I started to receive attention from the Zootopia fandom which led me to re-discover some concepts that I thought I had made clear, and since this didn’t turn out to be true, I am forced to reiterate them.

Q: What happened?

A: I discovered that someone had reposted, obviously without my consent, an old comic of Aoimotion and mine on reddit, a site I don't like and on which I had already said not to publish my actually and old contents. This repost "reminded" this fandom of my existence, and after this event some people came to ask us questions such as "when Nick and Judy would reappear in our work?" and the like.

You can imagine how much it bothered me, so I went to reddit and wrote to immediately delete the content. Unfortunately, doing this I couldn’t help but notice how the post had become a place to waste insinuations and insults aimed at me and Aoimotion. In particular, the comments of three users stood out: @ggctuk , @owningsuperset7​ and @hammytotherescue

Q: Why did these users get your attention?

A: ggctuk, which I have no idea who they are, have proclaimed themselves as the narrative voice of the events that have taken place between us and the fandom, providing a lot of incomplete and, in the worst case, completely wrong information, about why we left the fandom and about the alleged "abusive behaviors" we had against translators.

Owningsuperset7 spoke about us (like he does every time the occasion presents itself to him), defining us ungrateful towards the fandom "that had fed us". But "fed" in what sense? It seems to me that we have been those who have definitely "eaten" very little… or likes can be monetized, just like the views on youtube, and I didn't know it? Did they break the keyboard in order to put those likes on our works? If it’s so, I'm sorry, but I certainly wasn't the one who pointed the gun at their head to follow my work. Always remember that paying attention to a work is always and only a reader’s choice. No creator has power over these phenomena, we just create and publish, the rest is always an unknown factor. So expressing yourself as a seduced and abandoned lover on an old and free work doesn’t make you a victim, it only makes you ridiculous. Anyway, I know the subject, who had already decided in the past to talk on DeviantArt before I blocked him, and I decided not to tell him anything in that moment, also because, what can you say to a person who clearly has problems that go beyond fandom? Sometimes ignoring is the kindest choice you can make.

Hammytotherescue instead claimed that he and I were friends in the past, before the duo formed by me and aoimotion became toxic. Since I had no memory of this person and I hate when someone alludes to relationships with me that don't exist, I wrote to him privately on Tumblr asking him if he could kindly refresh my memory about this "friendship" he was bragging about.

Q: How did it end?

A: The conversation, which I report below because I, unlike him, have nothing to be ashamed of, is as follows:

As you can see, Hammy never replied to my last message . But in reality the story was not over. A few days ago, in fact, I discover that the user in question "vented" in the post of reddit, not under my comment (so that I received notification of his reply) but in response to another comment that had been left to me. Showing, as always, the incredible maturity of these people.

After reading this comment, I decided to act by reporting the user on reddit, but the answer I received can be summarized as: "since you are a content creator, you deserve insults regardless." In short, a response as useful and smart as the people who gave it to me. So don’t worry Hammy, you won't be banned from reddit because the only braincell shared by you users agrees that defining a toxic and manipulative person is, to quote one of the wise moderators I talked to, "a fairly typical level of criticism". All is well that ends well.

Q: You mentioned "concepts to reiterate". What would they be?

A: Let's start by denying what ggctuk wrote in that reddit's post, given how much popularity his comments have gained.

My split from this fandom started because I simply lost interest in Nick and Judy and preferred to do something else, something of my own. Black Jack gave us the opportunity to invent many original characters and they was those I wanted to work on. We have never worked for ulterior motives other than having fun together. When we recognized that we no longer have anything to give to this universe, we declared it openly and closed this chapter of our "artistic life". This split could take place in a peaceful and calm way, I would have taken my own path and you yours, since it was obvious, since BJ times, that you had very little interest in our original contents. You also reiterated this between the lines of these last comments, so really, I make a terrible effort to understand your logic of contents belonging to your fandom. It's not your fault, don't worry. You have been spoiled by this entrenched habit of creating any anthropomorphic animal and attributing it to your precious and super-nutritive fandom. Once you labeled this attitude at heresy, now everything is fine as long as it helps you keeping this universe going, honestly, I just pity you. However it seems that your obsession with me prevents you from accepting the fact that my life would have continued even without this fandom and that I would have lived very well even without the amount of likes that fanarts could give me. Indeed my life would be even more beautiful if I didn't have to waste time like I am doing now.

Both me and aoimotion together gave you a lot, and in the end we simply got it back. Jack is a prime example: yes, he is a character born from the scratches of Zootopia's artwork, but thanks to our work he has evolved to the point of becoming a completely original character. This fandom has not been able to accept it and until the end has tried to claim him as its own, and even now it can’t accept that we have instead taken him back, and even less can you bear that we are successfully using him in our original works, which is why you insist so much on his "Disney" origin, as if this defines his identity, and for months you have made fun of us saying that we were claiming something that belongs to Disney as our own. Unfortunately, beyond a doodle and a hint of a hypothetical background, Disney has absolutely nothing. Whatever weight you have attributed to "Jack Savage" is only thanks to our work, Disney has nothing to do with your mania and it has nothing to do with everything we've built up over the years. Still, you took our job and stuck it over the "Disney" label, and that was even when Black Jack was long gone, so don’t use that excuse anymore. You even tried to attribute Cynthia to the Disney universe by calling her "Skye", since you are so desperate to keep your fantasies going, and when you had nothing more to say, you said that my art style was "clearly inspired by Disney". Did you think I could condone such an attitude? I suppose these statements derive above all from the certainly very poor culture that you have of the world outside the fandom (or fandoms), however there are artists who WORKED for Disney, who TEACHED drawing techniques at the Disney Academy and who work at own productions with that style, without anyone attributing anything to the major. If you don't believe me, try using the web for something constructive, like doing some in-depth research on the subject.

As for the matter of our alleged abuses on translators, I will only say two things: the translations started because of my naivety, and we prohibited them because the translators abused their role and went out of control, acting as if the comics belonged to them and / or as if there was a special relationship of complicity between me and them. I'm sorry I gave false hopes to these people, unfortunately I didn't have time to realize the misunderstandings that were being created and how our work was being used. There is a clear difference between the fan content and the original content, so now more than even, less our work passes into the hands of others, the better it is for us.

Now let’s analyzing the brilliant messages of Hammy, both on Tumblr and on reddit:

In both cases, what I see is a desperate need to cling to Rem's "pretty" facade while simultaneously demolishing the person behind Aoimotion. These insinuations suggest that the only possible Rem to conceive for your narrow minds is the kind and lovely one, and everything I say and do that does not fall within this definition is the work of aoimotion.

I will never go into detail about the dynamics between me and her, because frankly it’s not your business and I don’t want to give you further ground to cultivate your absurd speculations and your degenerated ideas. If you have decided to treat us as two two-dimensional characters of some fourth category fan fiction born from your fragile minds and then feel disappointed or offended by my attitude or a severe response I can give you, you cannot help but blame yourself and not who is my friend .

But you have to get it into your heads that when you talk about us in a personal way, you refer only on the basis of two web profiles. You don't know us personally and above all you don't know me. Being an extremely reserved person, I always decided to use social networks to share my artistic side or my interests related to entertainment, nothing more, nothing less. "Rem289" has always been only a blog, a showcase on the web, I’ve never attributed a real emotional and above all personal value to it, even before Zootopia. For the rest I prefer to live my personal life off the web. Unfortunately, you have been so careless as to decide to hit my personal sphere, my friendships and my affections. So no, Aoi didn’t take over between you and me, but the person behind Rem289 took over and you paid the consequences.

Still on the subject of aoimotion, it seems that the moment this comment was written on DA has remained particularly impressed: https://www.deviantart.com/comments/1/765376682/4647911119

This great insult, which among other things is attributed to her as if I didn’t think the same (if not worse) about you, has become the new reason why aoimotion is ugly and bad and is the reason why she deserves to be insulted and disparaged at the slightest opportunity, even during a conversation with me in which she’s not involved in any way.

Now, since this term seems to me rather dated to be used as a matter of indignation during your debates, and since I still find it rather ”soft” to use to outline my intolerance towards you, in order to give you another thing to think over, I will give you an attribute which seems more correct to me: you are sick. Confronting you is like talking to someone who has been brainwashed. You are a broken record that always says the same things over and over again. I can't even feel sorry for you, what I feel is just a great sense of unease. (Of course there are people that still participate in this fandom and are perfectly normal, but those are exceptions and they already know we think good of them.)

And it’s precisely your illness that prompted me to dissociate myself so violently from the fandom. Not aoimotion, as you have been saying for months between an insult and another that you address to her because perhaps you are too afraid of me to address them directly to me, which is rather contradictory since I should be the sweet and pretty one of the duo. After all, it's better to treat me like a poor brainless fool who lets herself be manipulated rather than admit that I also have my own ideas and that, you don’t say, you don't like them.

Q: In any case, you have no right to deprive your fans of old content they love so much, you just want to be spiteful! Why did all your old WildeHopps comics disappear from the web?

A: The decision to delete the contents created by me relating to the fandom from my web platforms or those shared with my partner was not born in the least out of spite or "punishment" towards the members of the fandom. It was a decision made to dissociate my name and my current work from fandom, because unfortunately it created difficulties for my image and real difficulties for readers to understand (you can go on and say that if people think your work is still Zootopia-related is not a big deal, but I assure you it is). All that came after, are only and exclusively speculations built on purpose to find the most sinister reasons of why it happened. Publishing content is only an accessory part of the job itself, a percentage of the process. Deciding to publish, not publish or cancel a publication is at the pure expense of the author, and no consumer has the right to impose his will on the creator. I understand that they are perhaps too complex concepts for you, since it’s clear that you are used to measuring the value of things based on the likes they receive, but this current of thought also exists and I hope it will be useful to you someday, in the remote possibility that decide to take moments of deep reflection (which would be more and more useful than tapping your fingers on the keyboard).

(Little curiosity: in the last few weeks we have forwarded about twenty reports to various sites to remove our old contents posted there without our permission. Not only all twenty reports have been accepted, but the contents have all been removed in less than 12 hours from the date of reporting. This is to remind you that if we don’t want our content on the web, we have them removed and it’s the reposters who pay for it, not us.)

Q: Well, however you can't force us not to talk badly about you or aoimotion, in fact, you can't stop us from believing that she's been manipulating you for years. Almost certainly it’s she who is writing this post without your knowledge, isn't it?

A: The people of the web are notoriously lazy and are therefore often uninformed and constipated in developing their own concepts. They spit sentences without even knowing what they’re talking about, they choose "comfortable" truths, such as the fact of attributing to aoimotion every not nice word that comes from me, and when this phenomenon is reflected on real persons, unfortunately it’s quite difficult to manage.

We are attributed with labels, words, concepts, faults, relationships that don’t belong to us and that are difficult to get away from. A simple comment or a wrong statement towards a person can spread like wildfire and end up marking them for life. Needless to say, these conditions often prevent these same people from continuing with their activities, which instead are healthy, in a serene and peaceful way. Even now, instead of drawing, I’m writing this latest post to defend me and my partner from your sick slanders. Those who allow themselves the luxury of damaging the "active personalities" of the web are people who fully enjoy anonymity behind a screen, and often people who have the matter of regulating them (like the reddits moderators, who are a joke at best) limit themselves to considering certain behaviors "ordinary” in the creator / consumer relationship. The mere fact of normalizing certain behaviors doesn’t smooth out the rules of civilized life, makes these "authorities" complicit and therefore only adds a problem. It’s more than evident that some people are not yet able to distinguish the boundary that exists between objective opinion and direct and personal insult, but from people who lose sleep at night because they have been defined as “lunatic” I don’t expect anything less. Who knows what you will do now that I have called you sick.

I conclude with a message to the interested party:

@hammytotherescue​: I don't know how old you are, however, judging by what you write and how you write it and how you act, I deduce that you should not be more than 14-15 years old. Unfortunately I regret to tell you that the fact you are a minor doesn’t mean that you don’t have to take responsibility for your actions, and if you still have doubts about understanding where you have gone wrong I advise you to ask your parents for advice. I gave you the opportunity to confront me but you ran away to cry on a public platform. Hasn't anyone taught you that real life doesn't work like that? If, on the other hand, you are an adult, I sincerely feel sorry for you, I say this from the bottom of my heart.

I know how comfortable it is to hide behind a group or in this case a fandom to vent one's dislikes towards the individual. This time you and your friends have received the same treatment, you have not caught generic appellations addressed to the fandom but I decided to speak to you personally. My only advice is to use this experience to learn how it behaves on the web, and when you have learned it, you could teach it to all your friends, perhaps starting with @owningsuperset7​.

For @ggctuk: I hope you will appreciate my effort in writing this long post, as so the next time you talk about us again, you can use it as a reference to explain how things went 🤗

[skruttet]

I flicked through the Tuula Karjalainen book and read bits and pieces of it already and there’s this one section about homosexuality in it that I found really interesting so I thought I’d post it here, even though it’s a bit long oops, in case any of y’all were interested in reading it! Like, I never knew Tove had a gay cousin whom Tove was supportive of in terms of her lesbian identity and whose partner wrote a dissertation on Tove’s books?? So fascinating! Also was not expecting the sentence “The Hattifatteners resemble a wandering flock of penises or condoms”; usually they’re referred to more subtly with words like ‘phallic’ but not here xD

OPEN AND CLOSED

Many researchers have looked for references to homosexuality in Tove’s writings. Although she did not talk about it in public, she made no attempt to conceal it either, and her relationship with Tuulikki Pietilä was known to everyone. The two women took part in official state events such as the President’s Independence Day ball, where they were clearly the first to attend the event officially as a lesbian couple. Their relationship was so open and obvious it was that it was not newsworthy. It was hard to build a scandal on something that everyone knew - even the press, which liked to chase stories of that kind.

Psychological explanations of various kinds often have a chapter of their own in the analyses of Tove’s books, and sometimes unusual views have been expressed. The Swedish scholar Barbro K. Gustafsson earned her doctorate in 1992 from Uppsala University’s Theological Faculty with a dissertation on Tove’s books for adults. She made a special study of The Doll’s House, Sun City, ‘The Great Journey’ and Fair Play, and although her thesis also covered the Moomin stories, they were dealt with more briefly.

Perhaps surprisingly, Tove agreed to be interviewed by Gustafsson during her research work, and even participated in it actively by attending Gustafsson’s dissertation defence. The fact that Tove was prepared to do this may partly be explained by a family connection: Gustafsson was the partner of Tove’s beloved cousin Kerstin. When Kerstin, from a religious family, had realised that she was lesbian, Tove had been extremely supportive. Tove and her friends also helped Kerstin with many issues related to her lesbian identity.

Tove refused to give any public interviews about the dissertation defence, and did not want to talk about her private life or relationships. She returned to Finland as soon as the defence and the celebrations for Gustafsson’s Ph.D. were over, though she did issue a press release. In it she followed convention, thanking Gustafsson for the clarity of her book and her extensive knowledge of the subject - she had, Tove thought, succeeded in uncovering a rarely explored area of the unconscious. She also said that though much was written about authors, it was perhaps best done after their death, if at all. As if to soften the blow, she stressed the degree of trust between herself and Gustafsson. She said that following the progress of the research had been like an adventure, and that it had almost allowed her to see herself as a pioneer.

In her study, Gustafsson focuses on a dream that Tove had in the 1930s and found strangely threatening. In it she had seen large, black, wolf-like dogs on a seashore at sunset. A psychologist had explained to her that the dream was about repressed drives and forbidden sensuality.

In her thesis, Gustafsson is perhaps prone to detect elements of homosexuality too easily in very ordinary matters connected with the sea and archipelago life. She also discussed the wild animals that Tove often returned to both in the Moomin books and in her works for adults. In Moominland Midwinter the dog Sorry-oo wants to join the wolves and learn to howl like them. The story concerns the desire to leave the species into which one has been born, something that proves impossible. In The True Deceiver, the wolfhound plays a central role in the power relationship between the two women. Numerous readers have seen allusions to homosexuality in the comic strip about a little dog that falls in love with a cat. It realises that the love is wrong and becomes depressed. In the end the cat turns out to be a dog in disguise. This time the problem has a simple solution.

In Tove’s books there are repeated descriptions of people or Moominvalley creatures becoming ‘electric’, and this is clearly an important theme in her writing. The Hattifatteners resemble a wandering flock of penises or condoms - in thunderstorms they become electric, and then burn anyone who gets close to them. It is very easy to imagine that the electrification is an allegory for oestrus. The Mymble is also able to become electric - with her countless children she is the most sensual character in Moominvalley. The Whomper Toft in Moominvalley in November is the master of thunder and lightning. He lets the Creature out of a locked cupboard, and all that remains is a smell of electricity. The Creature runs away and grows even larger during thunderstorms, when lightning fills the sky, but is too big, angry and bewildered to be so big and angry. In ‘The Doll’s House’, electrification brings about a drama of jealousy between three men that leads to violence. There is a similar outcome in ‘The Great Journey’, where the mother feels the electrifying presence of her daughter’s female friend, whereupon the daughter becomes jealous.

Fair Play is a book about the relationship between two women in their seventies who are set in their ways, and their daily life together. Gustafsson uses the narrative to examine their mutual roles in the light of the old custom of categorising lesbians either as ‘femmes’ or ‘butches’, the latter having more masculine traits - a way of seeing a relationship between two women as a copy of a heterosexual one. Jonna and her prototype Tuulikki correspond to the ‘butch’ profile. Tove also portrayed Tuulikki as Moominvalley’s Too-ticky, a rather burly, masculine figure who keeps a knife in her belt.

Quoting Lord Alfred Douglas and the line of verse that was mentioned at the indecency trial of Oscar Wilde, Gustafsson writes that homosexual love is the love that does not dare speak its name. Although the time in which Tove lived was quite different from Wilde’s, there were similar prejudices and tensions in society - and, of course, they influenced her writing. Over the centuries women were not expected to write blatant erotic descriptions, but had instead to express themselves in allegorical terms. It was supposed that they did experience such feelings - and even more so when they were the result of unlawful love.

Tove’s books contain no openly erotic episodes or writing of a sexual nature and in this her writing is typical of women’s literature of her time. Sometimes it feels as though the characters in her books have to some extent been freed from sexuality. Their relationships are based more on understanding and friendship than on ardent passion, though their jealousy can sometimes take violent forms. Many things are veiled in highly metaphorical language. In the books that Tove wrote for adults, male and female couples are portrayed interchangeably without particular emphasis. In many of her books, as in her life, homosexuality was so natural that there was no need to make a fuss about it. While it was not to be denied, it was not to be given a high profile either. It was almost as though she backed out of dealing with her sexuality too openly, and in fact she forbade her biographer to write about her love affairs. Since the biography was written for children, this kind of advance censorship was possible.

In the story ‘The Great Journey’ (’Den stora resan’), two women in their seventies, Rosa and Elena, together with Rosa’s mother, live a life of humdrum joys and sorrows and work on their creative tasks. Among all three, physical love is a taboo subject. Elena asks Rosa: ‘What does she know, in any case? Nothing. She doesn’t know anything about such matters.’ The two women are unable to show their feelings for each other if Rosa’s mother is present. They plan a holiday together, but Rosa changes her mind and goes away with her mother instead. She remembers the promise she made in the nursery: ‘I’ll take you with me, I’ll steal you from Papa, we’ll go to a jungle or sail out on the Mediterranean... I’ll build you a castle where you shall be queen.’

Organisations that promoted sexual equality in Finland and the Nordic countries gave Tove awards for her pioneering work on behalf of sexual minorities, and she has certainly been an extremely important role model and author in the gay community. She had the ability to be completely open, yet at the same time quite private - as in the case of the dissertation, when she gave Gustafsson interviews and took part in the defence, but would not agree to answer questions from journalists who were interested in her private life. In relation to her lesbian identity, as shown by this very situation, she sometimes came out of the closet, and at other times she concealed the truth.

Tove’s homosexuality inspired a great many researchers and readers to look for the most varied interpretations. Perhaps her slightly sardonic attitude to this excessive interest can be seen in her song ‘Psychomania’ (’Psykofnattvisan’), written in 1963 for the revue Krasch and set to music by Erna Tauro. The song is like an obscure parody, in which psychoanalytic terms form a wild, cacophonous reality all of their own. It is as though she is drifting among people who are intently looking for something and who begin to see the signs of it everywhere. In fact, they can no longer see anything else because their heads are filled with ‘psychomania’. The song is a lengthy one, and operates on many levels. It also demonstrates that its author was familiar with the psychological terminology of the day - Tove had always been fascinated by interpretations of the human mind and she knew the terminology back to front, so well in fact that she could play with it:

I pore and pore and where I pore the symbols gather more and more I sink right through the floor into depression and tendentious apperception...

-Tove Jansson: Work and Love by Tuula Karjalainen

[narwhallove]

Behind the Curtain: Interview with Romy Writer Ludi-Ling

House of Cards actually started out as a random smut scene that burgeoned into something far, far more.

@ludi-ling goes meta in our final interview about her writing process; how the Romy fandom’s changed over the years; alternate universes (AU); and the role of smut for Romy fans. (Spoiler alert, our heroes are hot.)

No surprise that it’s a pleasure interviewing Ludi. I kept sending her more questions (25 total!) because her responses fascinated me and inspired me to ask more. It’s a rare person who writes visceral, startling prose and can also talk about her work with clarity, intelligence, and an affection for her characters that doesn’t occlude good writerly judgment.

The superlatives don’t end there. Anyone who knows the community knows that Ludi is a friend to her readers and to her fellow writers. As we all enter a heady 2019, reading Mr. and Mrs. X together, Ludi is someone to cherish.

If you haven’t read our other interviews, please check out: Part 1 of interviews: X-men Origins Part 2 of interviews: Going Dark

As a scholar of fan studies, do you believe Romy fanfiction fulfills needs that Marvel never can? What needs might those be, for Romy fans?

Certainly I think that fanfic is built on the premise of filling in the gaps, scribbling in the margins (to quote the seminal fan studies scholar, Henry Jenkins!) and fixing perceived wrongs. Comics are unique in that regard because the characters and stories within them continue for years and even decades. Comics continuities are convoluted and complicated, and there is a constant churn of writers working on them. Many fans have followed characters for far longer than the writers, and may know the characters more intimately than the professionals. Comics are full of retcons and contradictory takes on the characters. And I think fanfic is an important medium for allowing fans to “fix” that, to negotiate it. Because of the ongoing nature of comics, and because the futures of the characters are always going to be nebulous and subject to the whims of Marvel and the writers indefinitely, I think it’s going to continue to be important. Romy may be married in the comics, but there will still be plenty to write about—kids, divorce, a reconciliation . . . who knows? ;) 

What do you think Romy readers seek out when they read fanfiction? If it’s wish fulfillment, what kinds of wishes are being fulfilled? If it’s looking for “gaps” that the comics skip over, what have you found to be the most common sorts of gaps?

I think Romy is a very interesting example of the “wish fulfillment” function of fanfiction. Because part of the mystique of that ship (no pun intended) is that they can’t touch, they can’t consummate their relationship . . . And fanfic is a way that fans can get them to touch, to work out that angst. I think that one of the staples of Romy fic is the sexual tension between the two, and how they resolve that; the push and pull between them. Sometimes these take place in epic, superheroic backdrops, sometimes in AUs, where they have no mutant powers and where the tension between them is born from other factors (such as already having significant others, or being enemies, or in illicit lines of work).

What draws you to AUs? Your stories aren’t a case of fanfiction filling what’s “between panels”; you tend to shift characters and relationships to entirely different settings, whether it’s a Strange Days–like world or another genre, like a Southern gothic procedural. Can you talk about AUs and how they play out in your imagination?

What I’ve always liked is world-building. One of my first large-scale writing projects was a fantasy trilogy called The Legend of Elu. Most of the fun I got from that was actually building the world, the kingdoms, the mythology, the theology, the languages, the history of that story. That definitely bled into my fanfic.

Now I tend to write canon stuff as one-shots, and novel-length stuff as AUs, because they give me more space to play with world-building. That was something I realised I enjoyed more when I wrote Threads. Writing all those little worlds in a series of one-shots felt too “small.” HoC was originally an expansion of the Threads tale Touch and Go, but it grew into something else, and since then, I’ve preferred to go the AU route for the longer-form stories. :)

We’re living in peak Romy times—I think we’re still reeling from the wedding! Let’s say you had the power to go back in time and drop a pin into an earlier moment in the Romy timeline that you felt truly represents what Romy means to you (which isn’t the same as when they’re happiest!). When and in what universe? Why this choice?

There are so many iconic moments from Romy’s past, but, for me personally, I always go back to their time in Valle Soleada (in X-Treme X-Men). That’s not because they’re happy per se, but because I think that that period was the perfect example of how great they worked together on every level, and was proof positive that they were a good match. I often say it, but I will say it again here, because it’s the truth, and y’all can fight me to the death over it—if there was a time they would’ve got married and I would’ve bought it 100%, it would’ve been in Valle Soleada.

On Tumblr, it seems a large contingent of Romy fans are women in their 30s who discovered Romy at a tender age, thanks to the animated series. This includes you and me! There are exceptions, of course. What’s it like for you to have been in the fandom from the early aughts? What changes in the fandom have you noticed between 2003 and 2018?

I really joined the fandom at an exciting time for Romy—they’d just got back together properly after all the turmoil of the Trial of Gambit. X-Treme X-Men was a treat for Romy fans, and Claremont wrote such a great dynamic between them. As fans we were all excited and happy and well-fed on all that Romy goodness.

So it was weird (not to mention disappointing) when the 2004 reboot happened, and Marvel did everything they could to tank Romy. Which is one thing, and I can stomach it if [it were] logically and well written, but it was just so terribly done that I think many of us just tapped out of the fandom completely. I’d say 2005–2018 were fallow years for the Romy fandom. Most (if not all) of the fan friends I made at that time completely left the fandom. For myself, as someone who enjoys writing AUs, it was the perfect time to branch out from writing in canon and fitting Romy into my own world.

Who are your influences? What writers do you feel a particular affinity for? Are there writers whom we might be surprised to discover informed your work, but you feel have, despite appearances?

I was heavily influenced by the dark, modern fairytales of Angela Carter about the time that I was writing Queen of Diamonds and Threads. She had a really magical way with words—her prose was lyrical, sensual, and unbelievably rich. She was a huge inspiration, but later I moved away from her tone, firstly because I felt I was doing a poor imitation of her, secondly because it wasn’t really appropriate for the direction I wanted to move my fics in, and lastly because I was becoming self-conscious of my insane verbosity and wanted to pare down my prose. That’s something I’m still working on!

At some point during the writing of House of Cards, I finally got round to reading Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and I think it was Douglas Adams who convinced me to move away from Carter’s beautiful but too-flowery prose. I loved the way his narrative just sizzled. I’m bad at capturing that energy—but I do think that from HoC onwards, I’ve tried to learn to be more economical with my words—which is hard for a florid soul like mine. 

Threads—structurally at least—was influenced by Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller, and later, by David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. 

Let’s say you can pair your fiction with other works of art—of all forms, films, paintings, music, etc.—as if you were pairing wines to foods. What other pieces of art might you say go along with yours?

Wow! OK—that’s hard. Threads I’d probably pair with Cloud Atlas (the book, not the film, which I haven’t yet watched). HoC—I don’t know that there’s any one thing I would pair it with, but you can bet a load of post-apocalyptic stuff was thrown into that stew, along with a bit of The Matrix and probably some Inception.

52 Pickup was influenced a lot by Asmus’s Gambit run, cos I really wanted to write a heist fic with Remy and Rogue rather than Remy and Joelle (who I freely admit kicked ass). But if I had to pair it with a piece of media, it’d be with the video game Remember Me, which dealt a lot with themes of how memories inform our identities, and the ethical concerns of having memories essentially become “documents” that are uploaded and shared digitally through the cloud.

This is a good segue to talk about high-low culture. We may not want to believe in a hierarchy of culture, but we can certainly talk about the differences between fanfiction and “regular fiction.” When you read fanfiction, do you approach it differently than you would regular fiction? Are your expectations for form, reading pleasure, or anything else different? If so, how so?

Interesting question! I don’t know whether I approach it differently per se, but I think that readers have different expectations of fanfic. Hopefully we all read “regular fiction” for the same reason we read fanfic—for pleasure. But I don’t think there’s really a binary between regular and fanfiction. I think both exist on a continuum. There is a lot of “regular fiction” (I prefer to call it “profic” or “professional fiction,” because I think that’s where the binary between the two exists) that is actually very close to fanfic, and vice versa. By that I mean that there is plenty of fanfic that is epic in scope, deals with serious themes, and might be considered “classics” if they weren’t fanfiction.

And there is also profic, like romance, that is more similar to fanfic in terms of the kind of functions that it serves. There is an illicit pleasure to reading romance—for example, it’s not the kind of thing you’d openly read in public! There’s a similarity between that and fanfic, and I think, as readers of fanfic, we anticipate some level of illicitness when we approach it—even if the illicitness is only in the format (i.e., it’s fanfiction!), not in the content.

Fun question: What role do you think explicit smut functions in a fic? How do you deal with smut in your work? There’s an interesting moment that’s not in HoC, in which you write about Gambit and Rogue’s first time having sex in his point of view. It’s a separate chapter that exists as its own entity on your fanfiction.net page. Notably, it is much more explicit than the scene in Rogue’s perspective. Can you talk a little bit about this decision?

Well, I do think that fanfic is a safe space for writers to explore their sexuality (and I think that’s a huge part of the reason why fic is looked down upon), and smut plays a significant role in that. And smut certainly plays a part in my own fics. HoC actually started out as a random smut scene that burgeoned into something far, far more. Generally, I do try to make the sex scenes have a purpose in the plot (’cos I’m kind of anal about plot structure!), but in the particular case of Slow Burn and the other HoC vignettes, those are more self-contained one-shots where I could explore things that I couldn’t explore in the main story. So I could indulge in the smut a bit more! And let’s be honest—Gambit’s dark sexuality makes it thrilling to write smut from his perspective—of course his “thoughts” are going to be more explicit! ;)

But I also think that it’s interesting to write their individual perspectives on their sexual encounters, because of that tension between their characters. Rogue is the quintessential virginal Southern Baptist gal who’s inexperienced; whereas Gambit is the sexually aggressive alpha male who’s probably never had a woman turn him down in his life. That makes for a very combustive love affair between the two, and makes it fun to write that love affair (and all the smut in-between) from both their points of view.

[daresplaining]

Daredevil Countdown: 3 Days

D.A. Foggy Nelson

    As depressing as Matt and Foggy’s break-up was in Season 2, it has set up some really neat stories for Foggy. In the comics, as in the MCU, it is important for him to step out of Matt’s shadow, because this allows him the freedom to build his career and self-confidence. One plot point I’ve been dying for since last season-- which, it seems, is actually happening-- is Foggy running for District Attorney! This is a really interesting plotline as far as Foggy’s character arc is concerned, and as a bonus, it’s a reference to a period of Daredevil comics that doesn’t generally get much attention. 

    Matt and Foggy have been friends for a long time, and as with most long-term relationships, their dynamic has evolved over the years. When discussing their law partnership, 616 Foggy once referred to Matt as the inspiration and himself as the perspiration. And this seems like a pretty accurate assessment. While Matt is a naturally brilliant lawyer, a charismatic speaker, and is also neglectful of his day job thanks to his superheroing, Foggy works hard to build up his reputation. He’s not a great public speaker. He lacks Matt’s flair. But he is devoted to his career and is, in a quieter way, a brilliant lawyer in his own right. 

    But when he is first introduced in the comics, he exists very much in Matt’s shadow. When discussing the newly-formed Nelson & Murdock in the very first issue, he attributes the firm’s future success to Matt brains and his (Foggy’s) father’s money. And in the early issues, this fits with his narrative role. He is there to hold down the fort, to run the firm and be the boring, less talented partner against whom Matt’s awesomeness can be compared. The possibility of his becoming the D.A. is teased very early-on, in issue #10-11... but it turns out to be a supervillain’s ruse and nothing more. 

Foggy: “Well, that makes me the prize chump of the year! He sure had me fooled!”

Matt: “Chump nothing! You were the first to suspect that the picture of the Organizer on TV was a phony... taken in advance to throw suspicion on Monroe! You’ve proven you do have what it takes to make a fighting D.A., mister!”    

Daredevil vol. 1 #11 by Stan Lee, Bobby Powell, Wally Wood, and Sam Rosen

    As gullible as this makes Foggy look, it introduces an important character element for him at this early point: his aspirations. Poor Foggy may be treated as a loser by the narrative, he may not have Matt’s talents and main character advantages, but he still has big dreams. It’s thus satisfying that forty issues later, he runs again for real... and wins!

Foggy: “Me and Daniel Webster! --What a laugh! It’s Matt who should have this job-- not me! He was the real brains of ‘Nelson and Murdock’! I was just-- the work horse! But, they say a man can sometimes grow into a job-- maybe this will be my chance to prove myself! My chance to finally get out-- from under the shadow of Matt Murdock!”

Daredevil vol. 1 #50 by Stan Lee, Gene Colan, and George Klein

    At this point he is conflicted-- both excited by this boost to his career and nervous about stepping out of his comfort zone. He and Matt had a huge fight during the campaign and so they are no longer speaking at this point... but they get over it, and Foggy decides to fix his nerves by bringing Matt on board has his special assistant. 

Reporter: “Howzabout a shot of you two together, Mr. Nelson? It’ll go great with our story of your declared war on Crime-Wave!”

Foggy: “Even better than you think, friend! ‘Cause I’ve got a surprise announcement to make...! Namely, I’ve just invited Matthew Murdock to become my special assistant... for the duration of the current investigation!”

Matt: “It’s true all right, newshound! I’ve joined the team!”

Daredevil vol. 1 #58 by Roy Thomas and Gene Colan

    (How great is this page? Love that Gene Colan art.)

    But even this, with Matt working as Foggy’s subordinate rather than partner, is a huge shift in the balance of their dynamic. For once, Foggy gets to take the lead, with Matt dropping by the office when he has time to consult on cases. As District Attorney, Foggy is directly interacting with politicians and the press, and he is the first person people come to for help. And then Matt runs off to San Francisco with Natasha Romanov and leaves Foggy all on his own. 

    Since this is Matt’s comic, this separation means that we don’t see much of Foggy during this period. But when he does appear, he is notably changed. He is extra serious, extra busy. His wardrobe gets snazzier. 

Daredevil vol. 1 #114 by Steve Gerber, Bob Brown, and Stan Goldberg

    And he becomes more deeply embedded in The Establishment. He is forced to handle tough ethics cases: corruption, student protests, and the ever-present NYC topic of superheroes, about whom he has always had mixed feelings. (This is 200+ issues before he finds out about his best friend’s double life.)

Matt: “Great! Competence lives in Fun City! Sorry about the mess, friend, but I’m sure our crackerjack sanitation department can make it all tidy again-- or at least as tidy as the rest of New York. Which isn’t saying much.”

Foggy: “Not so quick with the flippancy, Hornhead. I think it’s time the police questioned you about a few matters. I’m getting a bit sick and tired of you long underwear types swinging up and down Fifth Avenue like you owned it.”

Matt: “I never thought I’d say this, ‘Mr.’ Nelson, but methinks you’re more interested in your re-election than you are in justice. But I think it’s a little bit too late to begin a crusading D.A. image now.”

Daredevil vol. 1 #127 by Marv Wolfman, Bob Brown, and Petra Goldberg

    And Foggy matures, becoming a more jaded and world-weary version of himself. After getting shot while on the job, he starts rethinking his career. This is a neat mental shift when placed next to Matt’s own superhero philosophy. Foggy has now had a taste of doing what Matt does as Daredevil-- protecting the city-- and it is wearing him down. If only he and Matt could actually speak candidly about this shared experience...

Matt: “You sound a little bitter, Foggy. Are you still upset about the shooting?”

Foggy: “Frankly, Matt... I am. You spend a chunk of your life trying to help this city-- trying to make it safer, a decent place for people to live-- you put up with the crackpots, the bad cops, the crooks-- and then WHAM you get the city’s thanks-- a crummy bullet from a third-hand Saturday Night Special. So sure-- I’m bitter, Matt, this has been building up in me since it happened. I’m bitter as hell.”

Matt: “You’re forgetting good things, Foggy, the good cops... the good people... Don’t do yourself and them an injustice. Have a little faith.”

Daredevil vol. 1 #118 by Gerry Conway, Don Heck, and Petra Goldberg

    When his re-election campaign rolls around, Foggy fights hard. His opponent is the charming, charismatic Blake Tower, who Foggy ends up liking and respecting in spite of himself. In the end, and thanks to some supervillain intervention by expert media manipulator the Jester...

TV Foggy: “Fellow citizens, as much as this pains me to say, I am forced to admit that I consider myself unworthy of being re-elected. Please bear with me as I give my explanations.”

Foggy: “What? It’s a lie! I never said that!”

Daredevil vol. 1 #130 by Marv Wolfman, Bob Brown, and Michele Wolfman

    ...Foggy loses. Tower, a genuinely good guy and superhero supporter, goes on to have a long and successful career as the new D.A. And Foggy, as hard as he fought for re-election, discovers that he is glad to have escaped from such a stressful job. Matt invites him to join his new private practice, and he gratefully accepts. 

Foggy: Once the vote became apparent, I just couldn’t stick around any longer. I had to get away--to be by myself to think. But I’ve come to some conclusions, Matt. The first is that I’m happy I lost, and the second-- Matt, I’ve never begged before, but Matt-- I need a job now... do you need a rather tubby loser hanging around here?”

Matt: “Do you still have that business card I gave you, Foggy?”

Foggy: “Sure, I was too busy to look at it. Why?”

Matt: Just read it. Whether you won the election or not, Foggy, you always were, and you’ll always be-- my partner. Welcome back, buddy. It’s been awhile.”

Daredevil vol. 1 #130 by Marv Wolfman, Bob Brown, and Michele Wolfman

    Many writers since have written Foggy back into Matt’s shadow-- and that’s tough to avoid, since Matt is the main character. But this story arc first introduced the idea of Foggy as a force in his own right, someone who can succeed without Matt around, which is an attitude that has largely stuck around to this day. It presented a welcome and permanent shift in the way writers, and thus Daredevil readers, viewed his character and role in the comic. 

    While MCU Matt doubled down on his DD activities in Season 2, prioritizing that side of his life over his legal work, Foggy plunged headfirst into his career-- mostly because he had no other choice. With Matt neglecting the firm, Foggy picked up the slack. He spent the entirely of Season 1 putting himself down, emphasizing Matt’s skills over his own, and showing an intense lack of self-confidence regarding his abilities as a lawyer. But Season 2 showed him, in ways that he could not ignore, that he was actually damn good at him job. He realized that he could still achieve his law school (or possibly undergrad...) dream of having a high-powered legal career... even without Matt by his side. And so when the chance to make that dream happen was presented, he leapt at it. 

    It has been an absolute treat to see Foggy hop around to the other shows, further developing his career, getting used to hanging out with superheroes, and generally demonstrating a level of confidence in himself that is new and wonderful. His life isn’t perfect-- there’s no question that he would rather be doing this with Matt-- but it’s still a big deal for his character development. From here, there are several ways his D.A. aspirations could go. It could be a great thing-- further boosting his career, giving him a new set of challenges, and showing us a side of Foggy we’ve never seen before: a Foggy in a position of power, trying to cope. Or it could end terribly. He could lose. He could win, but end up butting heads with Wilson Fisk. Since Fisk named Foggy in Season 2 as someone he was aiming to take down, that confrontation is going to happen no matter what-- but if Foggy were the D.A., this takedown might involve bribery and blackmail as part of Fisk’s bid for power. I’m really excited to see how this plotline is handled, and feel confident that-- just like in the comics-- this separation will be a good thing for him, and will end with the recreation of a new, better, stronger Nelson and Murdock. 

[comicsbeat]

And so we wrap up this edition of our yearly wide-ranging survey of creators from every end of the business on what happened and what’s coming. It’s been a fascinating journey through the thoughts of the comics industry on all levels. Once again, huge thanks to everyone who took time out of their busy schedules to respond and comment. We wind things up with a lot more previews including a new book from Emma Rios and a peek at the Birdcage Bottom Books lineup for the year- and lots in-between. You can check out the other parts of the survey here.

Emma Ríos,  Cartoonist

2019 Projects: I’m very glad to say that Hwei and I finally finished Mirror. It was quite a tough year for us and I’m extremely proud of how we managed to come over all that and of how we drove this little big story to its well deserved ending. Issue 10 will appear in the solicitations next month and the book will reach stores in April. For all of you who kept waiting to read the conclusion, thank you, really. I can tell you we gave everything we had and we really hope you like it. (Some preview pages below)

On the other hand, Kelly Sue and I have been working on the third arc of Pretty Deadly. It’s set in Early Hollywood and we are bringing some noir and horror to our pages this time. We are also using shadow puppetry as a narrative element which is very interesting and crazy fun for me. The arc is half done and we will bombard you with lots of updates soon.

And now, my secret. If everything goes as planned I’ll spend most of this year working on a new project called Anzuelo, meaning ‘hook’ or ‘lure’. A book about death and preservation, and more than anything about the sea. I’ve been keeping this story in the back of my head for a couple of years already, waiting for a chance to finally focus on it alone. I’m writing and drawing again for this, but unlike I.D., this time it will be all in watercolors and wayyy longer. The whole project is pretty ambitious and, ahem, rather pretentious. I’m scared but also very excited about it.

Fortunately, the mighty David Brothers, whose thinking and writing I truly adore, will help me as editor/therapist and will bear with me through all of this terrifying journey.

What was the biggest story in comics in 2018? I’m going to say the recent English subscription to Shonen Jump. I believe it’s a pretty generous and smart move, and to me it feels like the biggest change in comics since we started preordering.

What will be the biggest story in comics in 2019? Emily Carroll’s new book, When I Arrived at the Castle. The book is published by Koyama Press and will debut at TCAF. Emily is one of my favorite creators, obviously. Her work has been inspiring and frightening me for years. She always takes storytelling to a whole new crazy level almost effortlessly. I’m so jealous!

Also! The latest work by my friend Borja González is going to be released in English this year. The title may change but in Spanish (Reservoir Books) and French (Dargaud) its called The Black Holes and it is a truly fascinating story that I hope to see in every BEST OF THE YEAR list. You’re going to be mindblown.

What guilty pleasure (of any kind) are you looking forward to in 2019? Maybe reading all Naruto, I guess? Bleach? Having a rather easy access to all those crazy popular and crazy long series from the last decades now drives me crazy. But, to be honest, it doesn’t feel guilty at all.

Who inspired you in 2018? I’ve been very inspired by rewatching Yoshiyuki Tomino’s dystopian anime of the 80s and 90s, recently. Specially anti-war stuff like Gundam, Fang of the Sun Dougram, and so on…

Steve Foxe, Writer & Paste Magazine Editor

2019 Projects: In addition to plenty of Paste goodness, I’ve got two OGNs I can’t talk about just yet, several promising pitches in the works, and my short in BOOM!’s Steven Universe: Fusion Frenzy one- shot will be out in March!

What was the biggest story in comics in 2018? Honestly? 2018 didn’t feel like it had a defining comic story. Maybe I’d just give the nod to DC announcing umpteen new imprints targeting different markets. We won’t actually see how Zoom, Ink, Black Label, and Wonder Comics work out for a bit, but I applaud the publisher trying to meet readers in different niches. And while it’s not a POSITIVE story, the swift response to Eric Esquivel accusations gave me hope that we are getting better, as an industry, at responding to these sorts of issues.

What will be the biggest story in comics in 2019? Similarly, I think the response to Zoom and Ink will be a huge story in 2019–either because it works as well as I hope/suspect it might, or because it does so-so and DC gets cold feet right away. I also expect some BIG BIG things for Marvel’s Merry Mutants, but I’ve already said too much… And while I’m not a movie guy, seeing how Captain Marvel lands and how the MCU pivots out of Endgame will mean a lot for the MCU’s continued success, especially with GotG3 in such a precarious position.

What guilty pleasure (of any kind) are you looking forward to in 2019? Reading more old comics! It can feel like a never-ending marathon keeping up with weekly releases, but in 2019, I plan to carve out more time to read (and re-read) older books. I did that a bit this year with some old Vertigo runs and loved it, and I plan to do it again next year, as well as start a FULL re-read of Uncanny X-Men and New Mutants, starting with Giant-Size X-Men and going through to the Morrison era.

Who inspired you in 2018? Tini Howard has been a close friend since 2014, and seeing her amazing successes this year (and knowing about some of the ones coming up in 2019!) has definitely inspired me to kick my own butt harder.

Tom Kaczynski, Cartoonist/Uncivilized Books Publisher

2019 Projects: Ginseng Roots by Craig Thompson; Now, for the first time in his career, Thompson is working in serial form, in a bimonthly comic book series. Part memoir, part travelogue, part essay—all comic book—Ginseng Roots explores class divide, agriculture, holistic healing, the 300 year long trade relationship between China and North America, childhood labor, and the bond between two brothers.

Cannonball by Kelsey Wroten; Follow the messy life of Caroline Bertram: aspiring writer, queer, art school graduate, near alcoholic, and self proclaimed tortured genius. Wrotens’s debut graphic novel will turn many heads!

Stonebreaker by Peter Wartman; The sequel to Over The Wall by the artist of Avatar the Last Airbender: Imbalance; Four years after saving her brother, Anya continues to explore the endless, twisting streets of the mystical city, Noridun.

What was the biggest story in comics in 2018? The biggest story is the ongoing seismic shift in the comics industry. The slow but sure transition from periodical business to graphic novel business. Comics retailers complain about the continued slides periodical sales from Marvel & DC, but don’t really do the homework on graphic novels, or alternatives that could bring in new audiences. This job is being done admirably by indie book stores and online retailers who are not afraid to experiment and try out new titles.

What will be the biggest story in comics in 2019? The biggest story of 2019 will still be the biggest story of 2018 with the added caveat that we will start seeing more diverse and interesting periodical titles that will move into the space that will be opened up by the continued slide of Marvel & DC.

What guilty pleasure (of any kind) are you looking forward to in 2019? The new Criminal series by Brubaker & Phillips, but I don’t feel guilty about it.

Who inspired you in 2018? I’m continually inspired by every independent cartoonist out there who manages to keep creating new and interesting work, year after year. The seas are rough out there, and seeing new and amazing work continue to emerge, is flabbergasting and humbling.

  Joan Hilty, Editorial directo

2019 Projects: Showtime at the Apollo (Abrams, Jan), Good Talk (One World, Mar). Pageturner’s thrilled to have helped bring these to life.

What was the biggest story in comics in 2018? The passing of Stan Lee. However one feels about his life and legacy, it’s a milestone for both the past and future of comics.

What will be the biggest story in comics in 2019? For me it’s which companies survive, and thrive in, the remarkable ongoing staffing and distribution shakeups across our whole landscape — and how that affects workplace equality. We’re living in transformational times.

Ayo, cartoonist

2019 Projects: I’m working on more and more Little Garden comics and associated projects. Chiefly, the continuation of my four-panel, one-page strips.

What was the biggest story in comics in 2018? The dissolution of Tumblr for a great many users is undoubtedly the most significant and impactful comics story of 2018. Tumblr performed a crucial function in the visual arts industries, particularly in the comics industries. It was a way for work to spread around as casually and easily as radio works for music. A lot of important careers began in the trenches of tumblr blogs and reblogs. The scaling back of the platform will do considerable damage to industries rooted in visual culture.

What will be the biggest story in comics in 2019? I’d like the biggest comics story in 2019 to be an increased interest in short works; strips, short stories and graphic essays. Long form comics are wonderful but we need to give more space for a multitude of ways to approach sequential art.

What guilty pleasure (of any kind) are you looking forward to in 2019? I’ve finally gotten to be old enough that I laugh out loud at the cartoons in The New Yorker. And I accidentally subscribed to the magazine, so bring ’em on!

Who inspired you in 2018? I’ve recently begun reconnecting with the work of Aubrey Beardsley when I was experiencing a bit of an overload of inspirations. Being able to zero in on his illustrations has helped me to focus my ambitions and cut out a lot of the noise in my head.

Josh Bayer, cartoonist

2019 Projects: Working on something called Unfinished (seriously, thats the title.) Heres an advance page

And on seasons 2 and 3 of AllTimeComics with Josh Simmons, Trevor Van Eeden, with guest chapters by Gabrielle Bell, Julia Gfrorer and inks by Simmons, Me and Josh Simmons, Tom Toye, Ben Marra Ken Landgraf and others. I also have a new book due in April from Tinto Press, theres some images here:

What was the biggest story in comics in 2018? I really don’t know, theres a lot of destruction everywhere on every level of Society and also a lot of community building in our own little microcosm. I am just trying to stay lost in a haze of work and art and teaching. Sorry, thats not much of an answer.

What will be the biggest story in comics in 2019? Someone going down in the worst flameout of Indie Comics history and someone else rising to the highest peaks of industry adulation. While I have been known to see the future through mystic means, I can’t be more specific than that Ive already said too much.

What guilty pleasure (of any kind) are you looking forward to in 2019? Two way tie: Silently judging people for their desperate need for approval and vocally judging peopler their desperate need for approval.

Who inspired you in 2018? I tend to work in 20 year blocks of inspiration, not yearly. Janelle Hessig and Bobby Madness and Elizabeth Bethea all inspired me to engage with comics hard at the start of the millenium when I discovered them. They are true DIY, as are many other punk publishers and artists; but their work crossed my path at a crucial point that gave me a strong push towards what I wanted to do. And I am still going with them as key influences.

Alex Lu, Managing/New Media Editor of The Beat

2019 Projects: On the journalism side of things, I’m launching some exciting new media ventures for The Beat. And on the comics side of things, I have credits on INFINITE DARK, several upcoming First Second books, and a whole bunch of ~secret projects~ you’ll see on the shelves next year.

What was the biggest story in comics in 2018? Can I cheat and say there’s a three way tie? The death of Stan Lee, clearly, but also the fascinating narrative surrounding Olivia Jaimes’ run of NANCY and the continuing (and currently more rapid) investment of Hollywood money into new comics ventures.

What will be the biggest story in comics in 2019? If there’s a recession, that will likely become the central narrative for anything that happens in comics in 2019. Even if there isn’t, however, I’d still be interested to see what the flow of outside money into comics looks like by the end of the year.

What guilty pleasure (of any kind) are you looking forward to in 2019? TEEN ROMANCE COMICS (I FEEL NO GUILT)

Who inspired you in 2018? This is a total cop out, but this year has been crazy for me and I owe a great deal to an enormous network of friends, colleagues, and mentors who have both supported me and given me opportunities that have made 2018 the best year of my professional life. From my Editor-in- Chief Heidi MacDonald to everyone at First Second to my lunch pal/business adviser Brandon Montclare to my frequent creative collaborator and awesome pal Ryan Cady– I owe all of you (and many more whom I didn’t name here) a great deal.

MariNaomi, cartoonist, database administrator

2019 Projects: In addition to maintaining the Cartoonists of Color and Queer Cartoonists databases, I’m gearing up to get the Disabled Cartoonists (TK) database up and running.

On the creative front, I’m coming out with Book Two of my Life on Earth young adult graphic novel trilogy, and finishing up Book Three (for release in 2020).

What was the biggest story in comics in 2018? Cody Pickrodt suing Whit Taylor and her supporters.

What will be the biggest story in comics in 2019? Cody losing his suit, I can only hope.

What guilty pleasure (of any kind) are you looking forward to in 2019? Finishing up my trilogy and finally getting time off to read some freaking books!

Who inspired you in 2018? Whit Taylor and her supporters. They’re going through a lot right now, stuff that nobody should have to go through, and keeping strong, fighting back. That’s really inspiring to me.

Hibbs, l., with Breanna Thumler

Brian Hibbs, Retailer

2019 Projects: We love and joy these days is hosting the Graphic Novel Clubs  — I adore talking to smart and talented folks about exciting new work and the nuts and bolts of craft!

What was the biggest story in comics in 2018? The increasing weariness (and wariness) that the average Direct Market retailer is feeling about the market leaders: Marvel, DC, and Image. We’re ending 2018 with the lowest confidence in the future of comics that I can ever remember among my peers. And I lived through two crashes! The odd thing is that the numbers aren’t really that bad — but we’re being asked to work harder and harder (and more speculatively) for the same reward. Virtually every comic published now has 2+ covers, and the worst publishers out there are offering five or more for most every title they publish. The system is getting too stressed, sucking almost all of the “joy” out of running a store.

What will be the biggest story in comics in 2019? I keep expecting Barnes & Noble to collapse at any moment. I also expect an increasing number of “I’ve had enough of the industry nonsense” closures in the DM. At what point do these changes coupled with the utter lack of faith most retailers (in both markets) have in the most of the product make it so that AT&T and Disney decide it isn’t worth still publishing the comics? Everyone “in” comics can be working at 150%, and we’re now at the whims of souless multi-national corporations to keep the engines humming.

What guilty pleasure (of any kind) are you looking forward to in 2019? Despite me putting “breaking news” first in the survey, I actually look forward to Heidi rants a whole lot….. man I miss that period when you, Spurgeon and Dirk Deppey all had daily rants….

Who inspired you in 2018? Honestly, just talking to creators about craft keeps me going: we’re well past a hundred hours of interviews now. Go dig through the video archives at https://www.comixexperience.com/archives

Henry Barajas, Writer, Director of Ops at Top Cow Productions

2019 projects: I’m working on La Voz De M.A.Y.O. and La Loca: Via Con Diablo! Brush up on your spanish, gringos!

What was the biggest story in comics in 2018? Batman Damned #1 no doubt. It swept every news outlet. Every comic book shop whether they liked it or not, had to talk about the pink, fleshy elephant in the room.

What will be the biggest story in comics in 2019? Someone has to create an app that will make ordering comics from your local comic shop easier. It’s the year of Bladerunner for crying out loud!

What guilty pleasure (of any kind) are you looking forward to in 2019? Burnouts by Culver, Geoffo, and Dwonch. Stoners killing aliens. It’s mindless fun.

Who inspired you in 2018? Joe Illidge. Joe stuck to his guns, helped make some amazing comics, and raised profiles for some marginalized voices. I don’t know anyone that can lose two editorial gigs in one year, brush his shoulders off, and say “I can’t wait for you to see what’s next.”

Randy Reynaldo, Cartoonist

2019 Project: Rob Hanes Adventures #20 — I’ll be at the 2019 San Diego Comic-Con for my 21st appearance, following my receiving the Inkpot Award at the 2018 show!

What was the biggest story in comics in 2018? Passing of Stan Lee

What guilty pleasure (of any kind) are you looking forward to in 2019? Avengers: Endgame — gotta see how it concludes!

Kat Kan, Librarian/Comics Reviewer

2019 Projects: I write the Graphically Speaking column for Voice of Youth Advocates, and the February 2019 issue will mark my 25th anniversary of writing about comics for the library world.

What was the biggest story in comics in 2018? For libraries: the new Excellence in Graphic Literature Awards created by the Pop Culture Classroom. And the creation of the Graphic Novels & Comics in Libraries Round Table as an official part of the American Library Association.

What will be the biggest story in comics in 2019? Continuing growth in the use of comics in schools and academia.

Bonus questions:

What guilty pleasure (of any kind) are you looking forward to in 2019? Getting back to “normal” after Hurricane Michael devastated most of my city (Panama City, FL) in October.

Who inspired you in 2018? I admire my friends and colleagues in libraries and schools who have worked so hard to gain recognition of comics as a valid form of literature for study and research. I’ve pushed so hard for this since 1983, when I first started working in libraries, and I love seeing so many more people take up the banner over the past several decades.

J.T. Yost, cartoonist/publisher, Birdcage Bottom Books

2019 Projects: We’ll be publishing two new books and at least one minicomic this year. “Blood & Drugs” – a story of fall & redemption by Lance Ward, “Rooftop Stew” collecting lots of uncollected autobiographical and fictional weirdness by Max Clotfelter, and “Future Corpse”, a collection of new short work by Eva Müller (we published her death obsessed “In The Future, We Are Dead” last year). See previews below.

What was the biggest story in comics in 2018? Annie Koyama moving away from comics publishing.

What will be the biggest story in comics in 2019? President Trump implementing a new Comics Code Authority that only censors work critical of the president and his administration.

What guilty pleasure (of any kind) are you looking forward to in 2019? Probably some dumb tv show or something

Who inspired you in 2018? Avi of Silver Sprocket

  The Beat's Annual Creator Survey Part 5: From Emma Rios' new book to "Blood & Drugs" - and an update on Mirror And so we wrap up this edition of our yearly wide-ranging survey of creators from every end of the business on what happened and what's coming.

[aion-rsa]

Riverdale Season 5 Episode 8 Review – Chapter 84: Lock and Key

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This Riverdale review contains spoilers.

Riverdale Season 5 Episode 8

“Am I crazy or have you been feeling the same way too?”

Since Jughead’s narration opens most episodes with the most obvious observations possible, I’m going to return the favor by stating the following: Riverdale is not a series known for its profundity.

Over its five seasons to date it has proven to be a dumb show that is more often or not done smartly. Or maybe its ability to constantly induce narrative whiplash has be semi-concussed and believing that the program is way better than it has any right to be.

Which is where the above quote comes in.

With this season’s time jump and the characters dealing with actual real-life problems like post-collegiate ennui and the long farewell of long-held dreams (alongside of the usual nonsense that is the program’s calling card), Riverdale is the best it has ever been of late. And I’d never thought I’d write such words, but the most shocking thing about this episode was not Jughead’s alien tormentor or the Reggie and Fangs kiss but the way all of the trauma endured by these characters was brought to the surface tonight. Handled with grace no less.

That this minor miracle was set in motion thanks to a Key Party thrown by Cheryl in a creepy effort to break up Fangs and Kevin and live some sort of demented domestic bliss with Toni in her Gothic prison is kind of besides the point. The sheer volume of storylines happening in each Riverdale are so often disjointed that it feels like several shows are happening at once. Again, this is part of the appeal of watching this hottest of messes. So it’s a bit of a wallop across the head then when you have these characters having relatable moments, letting their guards down and getting to the heart of what haunts them.

Throughout this episode we see these characters shedding pretense and recognizing what drives them, be it fear, lust or anxiety. Kevin implodes his and Fangs’ relationship because the former has no idea what he wants out of life, but is certain it isn’t the small town drama teacher existence he currently has. Jughead is quite literally haunted by visions of an otherworldly creature who is either a literal alien or a manifestation of being twentysomething and rudderless, a literary one-hit wonder. Betty is still having nightmares about the Trash Bag Killer, suspecting that he may be responsible for Polly’s disappearance and worried her failure to bring him to justice will result in personal tragedy.

“What’s coming next with my mom and Polly is the darkest thing I’ve ever faced,” Betty states to Archie in the episode’s most powerful scene. The pair then acknowledge their true feelings, that they will be better off as friends. Veronica’s latest fight with Chad makes her acknowledge that whatever bonded them together is no longer there. It is Archie she truly loves, and vice versa. Cheryl bares her twisted soul to Toni, who is in return horrified by her actions and tells her as much. Yet Cheryl quickly finds a form of redemption in the embrace of the mysterious Minerva Marble (Adeline Rudolph, late of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina).

Yes, it is a contrivance that all of these huge epiphanies happen more or less at the same time. I’ll forgive this sin however since Riverdale so often has its character development move at a glacial pace. Perhaps when Veronica states that “the past is in the past” the show’s writers are telling us to forget what we know about how stories will unfold from here on out. Certainly, the post-time jump episodes have proven this. Maybe we really are in a brave new world for the series? Stranger things have happened before, especially on Riverdale.

Riverdale Rundown

• Jughead Jones has become unstuck in time! What do we make of Jughead teaching Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s Slaughterhouse Five to his students? More importantly, is Riverdale going to do a Jughead’s Time Police-inspired storyline?

• This stuff with Jughead and the alien is the absolute best. Please please please let the E.T. be real.

• In what must be a Riverdale first, Archie is shirtless within the first 30 seconds of this episode. As a sexy fireman no less.

• Art dealer Minerva is almost certainly not what she appears to be. So what is she really playing at? Are her feelings for Cheryl legitimate? Or is she playing some sort of long game?

• Speaking of Cheryl, I feel the writers need to really figure out how to handle this character’s mental illness as the argument can (and probably should) be made that they have entered exploitation territory.

• I was getting huge Psycho Goreman vibes off of the alien stalking Jughead.

• We see Jughead making like his comic counterpart and snacking on Lay’s chips in this episode.

• Varchie shippers, are you happy with the Veronica/Archie reconciliation?

• Drew Ray Tanner shined as Fangs here, delivering a heartbreaking performance as Kevin throws away their future together.

• Betty again illustrates how awful of an FBI agent she is by allowing her mom to keep a key to her home in a garden gnome while living in a dangerous city that has multiple serial killers on the loose.

• I desperately want to hear about Jughead’s Jingle Jangle-fueled New York City exploits. This is what happens when you read too much Bret Easton Ellis, folks.

• Lucy Hale makes an audio cameo as Katy Keene in this episode, simultaneously making me wonder why the CW cancelled her show in the first place and laughing at how the Riverdale producers keep thumbing their noses at the network by constantly referencing the doomed spinoff.

• Dr. Whitley’s name is an obvious homage to UFO novelist/experiencer Whitley Strieber (whose most famous work was Fire in the Sky, which just so happened to be the name of last week’s episode).

• Jackson incredulously remarking on Archie as player by saying “Sarge juggling two ladies?” indicates that he doesn’t know him at all.

• Casey Cott gets the episode’s funniest moment as he reacts to Reggie and Fangs’ kiss with impressed shock.

• Despite how this episode ended, I still think that Alice’s remark about how it sounded like Polly was calling from a spaceship is not a red herring. Look, there better be a full blown alien invasion by the time of the midseason finale, okay? I ask for so little.

• “I’m not bringing my baby into this house of horrors” might be the most sensible sentence ever uttered in the Blossom household.

• Betty refers to Cheryl’s Spin the Bottle party (when Archie spends Seven Minutes in Heaven with Veronica) from the series’ pilot.

• Next week, Betty goes in to the heart of darkness.

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[violetsystems]

#personal

It’s been a pretty busy couple of weeks in terms of work.  It is a little surreal to identify as working for yourself.  I ran into one of the people who hangs out on this block.  I’ve known them for years in passing.  There’s a gang of people who hang out in the alley underneath the subway tracks.  They asked what I had been doing.  I replied I work for myself now.  My office is officially my kitchen.  It look out at those very tracks. They film Chicago Fire and PD on my block often.  I don’t watch either of those shows but it can have a Hollywood backlot kind of feel.  Most of the street level communication I have resembles grittier parts of New York.  There’s no one dominant kind of person on the block.  People tend to keep to themselves but know vaguely what the other’s deal is.  There’s a sort of hidden network of communication maybe.  A block culture.  That can get a little hard to read the further you get away from your safe zone.  I’ve travelled all over the world at this point by myself.  I started travelling to Asia back in 2011 with the intention of networking.  Later in 2014, I revisited making music particularly with a Chicago form of street dance called footwork.  Footwork at the time was on the tip of everyone’s tongue.  But the root of it was buried under layers of white dominated dance music.  In 2015, I decided to say fuck it and try to organize a music tour for myself.  I tried with people in my own city but their personal agendas always eclipsed my basic plans.  There was a bass driven night in Chicago at the time called Coldtech.  It had a sister night in Melbourne.  I tried to organize a tour that passed through on my way from New Zealand.  I went to New Zealand to visit a friend.  I ended up going out on a few dates then ghosted the final night.  Somewhere in there I got detained in customs and accused of being a gang member.  I eventually ended up in Japan where I met Jake Innes.  Jake was an anime nerd and video game freak.  He knew the Coldtech people but was more like me.   Out on his own trying to use his passion to promote something he loved.  Culture.  Just like punk back in the day, you could count on that culture in a pinch to survive.  We travelled all over Japan for a few days.  Jake was my translator.  I was guided to amazing food.  Amazing spots to shop.  We talked about what moved us.  I had come up with this dumb ass phrase at the time.  Yolonet.  A sort of blockchain word of mouth.  Jake had a lot of trust with people.  He was friends with Lil B after all.  It didn’t really matter who he was friends with to me.  I am a very genuine and transparent person.  You have to be when you’ve wasted so much time on liabilities.  You never expect those to turn out to be past friends.  After reading all this depressing news about the entropy in the job search, I felt down.  You don’t expect your professional contacts to just disappear without a trace.  I barely have the connections on professional social networking to prove it.  Those people never reach out.  Never ask how my employment is going.  Don’t even realize I work for myself.  And yet the block knows.  Jake knows too.  In fact, the last two releases I put out just for fun were purchased by him.  The only way I am connecting to people I can depend on is through culture.  Something I can trust beyond politics, sooth saying, and employment fraud.  

There’s people outside of that Yolonet who have gone dark.  Entire segments of ex-friends who memorialize people who have long died while pretending I just vanished from the face of the earth.  It’s been surreal to watch.  Much more disorienting to live.  And yet, I am still here and surviving.  The people in my dash are much realer and emotionally satisfying to me than the people who forgot about me.  And the mystery of why is a little harder to detangle.  I was reading a book about Chinese director Jia Zhangke.  He was talking about how as a kid the only way to escape the place you grew up was to join the army or go overseas to school.  It’s the same if not worse here.  America talks a great game about freedom but it’s at the expense of the coffers of the military industrial complex of world war two.  Thank the baby boomers for that.  It benefits mostly the rich and generationally wealthy first.  Wealth connects and is rewarded by those connections in America with more wealth.  People who have Military family ties seem to always fall victim to the state’s own hidden expectations of connection, opportunity and ability.  Hunted by recruiters since there’s little actual income to go around.  The rich are hording it without paying taxes.  So the military often bullies people into the reserves when there’s no valid occupational work or space on corporate payrolls.  Fight their wars as a gateway into a career in cybersecurity I’m already overqualified for. My current state of wealth is due to a benefit known as a pension.  This is to say I actually worked for it.  And this is also to say I’m not exactly retired by choice.  But I worked with a lot of people I knew for over twenty years.  I literally got people jobs at that place.  My ex girlfriend for one.  That ended horribly.  The other people I helped out to try to connect ghosted me out of guilt presumably.  And so the only people I seem to be able to rely on are in the culture I have built or connected to myself.  This blog has been one of those lifelines in ways I am not at liberty to divulge at times.  There’s people I have better friendships through a click of a button than I’ve had ever in my life.  I used to try to explain these things to people.  And generally my exile from anyone in real life giving a fuck is a harsh lesson in the reality.  People don’t actually listen.  They don’t actually communicate in anything other than comparison and contrast and monetary valuation.  I was reading how a person just literally asked to buy the rights to one of Elon Musk’s tweets for 7777$.  How a sentence from a billionaire is worth more than my pain in this entire process or the lives of the worker’s in his factories even.  We just got six hundred dollars.  That should be enough for us.  But I wasn’t valuable enough to insure past October even though I was paying the premiums.  It would seem the real world’s network isn’t very reliable or at least focused on something so out of sync it seems comically evil.  What can I rely on?  It seems a lot.  I never have felt alone in the last year or so.  Ever since Valentine’s day really.  Sometimes you can show you care by not even saying a word.  Words are worthless when you can buy them for seven grand I guess.  It’s the action of caring and attention that counts.  If you built a foundation on people who didn’t care, your path ahead will be volatile at best.  If you limit someone based on your fear of them outshining you, the results will be constantly mediocre.  And many times, later in life you find you’ve outgrown these limitations people envision you in.  And through that worthless feeling you seek out something true.  You take the once in a lifetime risk to set up your own network.  To leave the baggage and the past behind and see it for what it really is.  Your self worth is no longer shackled by people’s envy, jealousy and active sabotage.  You are a defective crash test dummy that served it’s purpose for capitalism.  Or you can leave the car wreck behind and opt out of the American social experiment entirely.  It’s a free country after all.

The baby boomers did have an answer to all of this.  Shut up and take their money because they know what’s best.  My dad would always say later on in life I’d understand Republicans.  Maybe I’d even want to become one.  Like many Republicans from the suburbs, he’d never be caught dead in the rougher areas of the city much less outside of the country.  I’ve never seen any politicians talking to people on the streets in passing.  I’ve never seen anyone answering, speaking for, or actively working on this privilege that acts like a monkey on my back.  I’m an only child.  When my parents die, my bloodline is some bullshit.  I’ll most certainly have to deal with some estate affairs on either side.  But when I die, who knows where my legacy will go.  Will I get married?  Will I have children?  Will I be able to fulfill my role in the helping America achieve it’s desired GDP?  I can’t even count on my government during a Pandemic let alone to hold people accountable for crimes.  Will I die alone, invisible, broke but talked about on the Internet.  Will people watch my life until the very end to see the tragedy unmatched to their own?  Are people just drunk on making me some sort of talking point?  The gossip will never end.  The sad truth of the last five to ten years for me is simple.  There is an opposite to block chain.  A network of people who only cover for themselves and their lies.  The great lie as they spoke of in Germany did something horribly foul.  A lie when it gets out of control.  A lie when it eclipses the truth.  When every word out of your mouth is gaslighted to protect an entire ecosystem that feeds itself and protects the criminal.  When your very presence needs to be edited and erased to continue the engine running.  A great lie can tear a hole in the very fabric of reality and the truth of a narrative.  And it can suck somebody so far out into space that they have to terraform a whole new network of support.  These days the writing is on the wall.  We trust everything and doubt further.  I have only had the luxury of looking to myself for answers.  I have other inspiration.  The best inspiration if you ask me.  But I keep that to myself for fear of breaches in trust.  But it’s no lie what I believe in.  A freedom that allows love to bloom.  A freedom that values people for what they do in deeds not speculation.  A freedom that is accountable in broad daylight and answers for what it represents.  Opportunities that exist outside of war economies and mark to market accounting.  Making art that connects people without controlling the dialog.  Being part of a culture and democratically so without disrespecting the read receipts.  I’ve been real for longer than most people have been breathing.  Not long enough to claw my way out of the designs these dinosaurs outspend me on.  But the one thing I know going forward is that you cannot get anymore hardcore of a foundation other than being true to yourself.  And I’m proud to surround myself with people who are true to me.  Wherever the fuck you may be.  You all live deeply inside my heart.  And that’s something there’s no price on to betray.  So let’s stop speculating and let’s live in the moment.  I built this Yolonet for us.  And instead of hello world.  Let the first words be simple.  I love you.  World peace forever.  Drink some water.  It’s your human right.  <3 Tim

[iesorno]

Anxious Comics – issue 3 page 4

I first saw Daniel Bristow-Bailey’s work when he offered up free copies of his prose zine Dog. I ordered it on the strength of the cover, Dog handwritten above a very detailed drawing of a frog. It made me laugh, there was something oddly significant in that juxtaposition, couldn’t tell you why, but there was. Shortly after that he started his Anxious Comics series, which is a fast paced, underground influenced mash series that has a lot of nonsense and yet some very powerful moments. It’s daft, but also on point and so, exactly what I enjoy.

He’s an eclectic creator and has a set of skills that make his work pop.

  You can find him here

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Use the discount code ZINELOVE10 for a 10% discount on anything you buy. Valid until the end of 2020.

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  Screaming page 2

Can you tell us a bit about the first creator whose work you recognised?

It would have been someone from 2000AD. I remember being very excited by Kevin O’Neill’s run on Nemesis and Simon Bisley’s painted artwork for Sláine. If I look at Bisley’s stuff now I find it hard to get past the grotesque anatomy, but as with people like Todd MacFarlane in the US he pushed past his technical limitations with a raw energy that appealed to adolescent boys. I don’t mean that as snootily as it sounds! Adolescent boys can be fierce critics.

Kev O’Neill – Nemesis the Warlock

Simon Bisley – Slaine

  Which creators do you remember first copying?

My mum, who should get most of the credit for teaching me to draw, always strongly discouraged me from copying directly, but I came pretty close to it with Moebius! He always makes it look so (deceptively) easy that it’s hard not to have a go oneself.

Moebius – Edena

Who was the creator that you first thought ‘I’m going to be as good as you!’?

That’s an interesting question. Probably Gilbert Shelton. I started reading the Freak Brothers when I was far too young (got to thank my mum again for that) and that “underground” style with lots of fine linework and cross-hatching seemed to be achievable with the materials I had at home. I think the Shelton influence still shows in my black-and-white stuff.

Gilbert Shelton – Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers

Which creator or creators do you currently find most inspiring?

In terms of comics, I’ve recently discovered Al Columbia. I can’t remember the last time I found an artist who really disturbed me like his stuff does. Even the more restrained stuff has an evil, haunted quality. The book I’ve got (Pim and Francie, Fantagraphics, 2009) feels like a cursed object, like the Necronomicon in Lovecraft’s stories, or the video cassette in the Ring. It’s a great example of text, illustration and book design all working together.

Al Columbia – Pim and Francie

Nabokov – Pale fire – Gingko Press edition

I’ve been reading a lot of Nabokov. He’s one of those writers I keep coming back to. Sometimes I like to think about how you could do a graphic novel of “Pale Fire”. The first half of the book is a very long poem, written by one fictitious character, and the second half is a collection of footnotes to the poem, written by a second fictitious character, who has stolen the manuscript and is preparing an unauthorised edition of the poem. As the notes digress further and further from the text of the poem, another narrative emerges, that may or may not be “true”, so it would probably be impossible to do a graphic novel adaptation, but thinking about how one might do impossible things is often creatively rewarding.

  Which creators do you most often think about?

David Lynch – Twin Peaks

Aside from the people I’ve mentioned already, I think a lot about David Lynch. I’ve always liked his stuff but Twin Peaks: The Return (2017) absolutely blew me away. There were points I was watching that when I thought “I didn’t know you could do that with television”. I think whenever a work expands your ideas about what’s possible within a particular medium you know you’re in the presence of real Art with a capital A. I love the sense of mystery in Lynch’s stuff, which I think comes from his letting the subconscious take the lead in the creative process – he talks a lot about using ideas or imagery from dreams, or meditation. It’s a process I’ve consciously been emulating with “Anxious Comics”.

Anxious Comics – issue 3 page 4

Can you name the first three creative peers that come into your head and tell a little bit about why?

      Gareth Hopkins, because I’ve just finished doing a page for his “no new ideas” project. It was great fun getting to paint over a copy of one of his pages. Gareth posts a lot of his process online and I’ve found it inspiring how he reworks and recycles stuff. His work has definitely encouraged me to veer more towards abstraction, and not to be afraid, in comics, of decoupling the text from the image – I think he was a big influence on my one-shot “the Screaming”.

Gareth Brookes. I’ve not talked to Gareth much about process but he seems drawn to ridiculously labour-intensive media, like embroidery or linocuts. As if making comics wasn’t hard enough already! But as I said before, there’s nothing like setting yourself an impossible challenge to get the creative juices flowing. Also, when I look at the spread of stuff he’s got for sale at conventions – a mix of self-published zines and two or three big hardback books published more traditionally, I think it’s where I’d like to be myself in a few years’ time, so I guess he’s kind of a role model for me right now.

  Hannah Lee Miller

Hannah Lee Miller is producing some lovely stuff. I picked up a copy of her zine about condiments at Catford Zine Fair and it’s one of those things that initially seems rather slight and inconsequential but is actually really, really good, it just doesn’t shout about it. Also, Hannah is, in my limited experience, infallibly enthusiastic about other comic / zine people and always ready to help out or lend support where it’s needed. An asset to the scene.

  Finally, can you tell us a bit about your recent work and yourself?

For a long time I tried to be self-disciplined and only work on one thing at once, but recently I’ve come to accept that I’m happier when I have several projects, preferably in different media, on the go at once.

The last thing I self-published was “The Screaming”, an experimental one-shot comic about dreams and mental health. I wrote about it in some detail for Broken Frontier.

Screaming page 8

I’ve got five pages in the upcoming anthology by Obsolete Comics. I’m really excited about this one as it looks like it’s going to be great, and hopefully represents the start of another small comics press. We can never have enough small comics presses.

I’ve also got Anxious Comics, my ongoing series – four issues out to date and the fifth long overdue! My long-term plan with that, if you can call it that, is to keep it going between other projects for as long as it needs to, or until I get bored. At some point it would be nice to do a collected edition.

I’m currently drawing a comic written by Steve Thompson, which he’ll be pitching to publishers soon I think. I like drawing other people’s scripts because it forces me to draw stuff I otherwise wouldn’t think of.

Looking to the longer term, I’m working on a script for a longer-form comic. It’s kind of a superhero thing. But not quite. I’ve got this character who’s kind of my own take on the super-violent costumed vigilantes like the Punisher and Deadpool that were popular when I was a kid, but transplanted to the “real world” of early-noughties London.  It’s pretty bleak. I think it’s funny myself but as with some other stuff I’ve self-published in the past it will probably cause people to express concern for my mental health.

Gareth – Hunt Begins – work in progess

Bio: Daniel Bristow-Bailey was born in London in 1978. Growing up during the “dark age” of mainstream comics, he quickly became attracted to the alternative / indie scene and, encouraged by his mum and the bloke in the local comic shop, started drawing his own from an early age. Like many others, he drifted away from comics in his late teens, put off by their uncool image and lack of seriousness compared to grown-up art and literature, but came back to them in recent years as he realised that no-one was going to think he was cool or take him seriously anyway. As well as making his own comics, he draws other people’s scripts and sometimes writes prose fiction. He has a day job working as a mental health person in schools. He lives in Richmond with his wife and two children.

Thank you very much for taking the time to fill this out and let us into your mind.

Gerald – work in progress

all art copyright and trademark it’s respective owners.

content copyright iestyn pettigrew 2020

    Small (press) oaks – Daniel Bristow-Bailey @bristowbailey details who influenced him (tl:dr mostly his mum!) in our latest look creator's influences #smalloaks #comics #zines #inetrviews #zinelove I first saw Daniel Bristow-Bailey's work when he offered up free copies of his prose zine Dog.

[theseadagiodays]

April 6, 2020

Travel at home

I have always been a passionate traveler, with an insatiable curiosity for new experiences, cultures and sensations.  But what also comes with all the titillation is a fair dose of unfamiliar, unsettling, and often challenging new circumstances every traveler must agily welcome if they are to thrive.  When you are served dinner with no cutlery in Kalkata, scooping sloppy curry with your hands has to do.  When you’re penniless and lose your companion, hours from home in Bangkok’s busy streets, you must ingratitate yourself to the kindness of strangers for bus fare to your hotel.  It strikes me that this same flexibility can serve us well as we navigate the unchartered territories of this new nation we all inhabit, called COVID.

But what moves me most as I wander the world is the way in which constant new sensory input elevates my present-minded attention so intensely.  My ears delight in a particularly evocative call to prayer in Morocco.  My mouth savors the sour sweetness of a Colombian maracuya (passionfruit).  And my nose even appreciates the cow dung furnaces on the side of the road in India. It is like meditation in motion.  After each journey, when I return home, I set the earnest intention to sustain such sensory focus at home.  But as the days pass, this consistently becomes increasingly difficult.  However now, with little opportunity to venture much more than metres from our door, we need new strategies to remain sane and stimulated.  So, I think we can all benefit from living like tourists at home. I believe there is a science to this. I’ve even coined a term for it. It came from a time when I heard education expert Ken Robinson define the word aesthetics.  Associated with beauty, most think of the definition as subjective.  But he simplified this by pointing out that the opposite of aesthetics is anaesthetics (that which numbs our senses).  So, aesthetics are those things which make us feel.  Since this revelation, I have come to call myself an aesthesiologist because I believe that all artists are in the business of making people feel.  And this is why I feel that sharing artistic resources on this blog is the best medicine I can offer as we all ride out this crisis together.

So, maybe today you can consiciously pay attention to some subtle new observation each of your senses notice in your environment.  The way the light hits your tea kettle at dawn.  The call of a returning bird at spring time.  The crunch of the potato chips that you’re binging on right now.  Lately, I’ve certainly learned to feel extra fortunate that I can taste or smell at all, because my husband completely lost his sense of smell 3 weeks ago.  Most have probably heard that this is an alarming and bizarre potential sign of COVID, particularly in people with no other symptoms.  So, having come thru full incubation period, we’re at least past the scare that it could have become worse or that he might have infected myself or others with whom he’d had contact prior to quarantine.  But he never thought he’d look so forward to the day he could smell my farts again.  (Meanwhile, I’m indulging in all the beans and garlic I want)

At any rate, if home sensations don’t tickle you enough, there is always virtual travel.  And while that certainly risks inspiring a vicarious longing that may not serve you, for others, it can elicit some of the same wonders as adventures themselves.  So, if you’re craving sensory immersion into other worlds, New York Times can help you do this with their 13 recommended travel podcasts.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/09/travel/travel-podcasts.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage&contentCollection=AtHome

I know I have certainly spent many days in quarantine wallowing over my screensaver trip photos, longing for a time when I could journey further afield once more.  But I have also been swept away by the photographic brilliance of some of the work that the New York Times is featuring weekly, in their World Through a Lens column.  Marcus Westerberg’s shots of Zambian wildlife (https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/31/travel/zambia-safari.html) were particularly emotional for me, having just had one of the most meaningful travel experiences of my life there, last year, when I served as resident visiting artist at a music school in Lusaka.  In fact, I arrived exactly one year ago, today, and can’t wait to return to those magical people.  A girl has to dream, after all...

April 7, 2020

Creativity at Home

If any of you are variety-mongers like me, seeing only the same person or people, day in and day out, can have you dressing up your spouse in wigs or Hawaian skirts or bear costumes just to mix things up a bit.    But largely, I’ve been hearing that many parents and siblings are embracing ways to capitalize on their excessive togetherness. I think it’s why the show Survivor has been so successful all these years. Forced into small spaces and “tribes”, we tend to do whatever it takes to get along with our fellow captives.  Cooped up together for days on end, there is no limit to the clever activities some families have created to keep themselves occupied.  

This crew took a simple tube and board of wood to create some exercise apparatus that has kept them busy for hours:  https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.5518064

Others are taking vicarious travel to the next level with some Photoshop fun - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/travel/coronavirus-fake-travel.html

And the most impressive might be this 5-person brood, each with operatic quality voices, who belt out their rendition of One More Day, from Les Miserable.

https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-52106893/coronavirus-family-goes-viral-with-lockdown-les-mis-song-adaptation

But, if you happen to be stumped for ideas yourselves, here are a few ways you can kickstart your family’s creativity.  A bunch of resourceful theatre company’s have been commissioning playwrights to create short Plays at Home, designed for actors and amateurs alike to perform in their own living rooms.  Most are staged for 1-7 humans, with joyful themes, and participants are welcome to share video recordings of their readings.

https://www.playathome.org/?fbclid=IwAR3_Uib1GQV5134ZbF7IEI5F5lpt0HQdxYkd1HtiNeUFws1UKCvVV4_2KEQ

And right here in Vancouver, my friend Vanessa Richards is finding thoughtful ways to engage community in collaborative singing, by sustaining her weekly free choir sessions, now in Livestream, every Wednesday, from 6-7:30.  You can check out Van Van Song Society here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/togethersinging/

April 8, 2020

Quarantine Living - Al Yankovic style Some of you may be too young to recognize this reference to our favorite weasly moustached 80’s bard, who humorously bastardized everything from Queen’s Another One Rides the Bus to Michael Jakcson’s Eat It, with his own comic lyrics.  But lately, like our Les Miserable family, Weird Al Yancovic’s “wordsquatting” trend is spreading more virally than corona.

This original take on the Beatles, I gotta wash my hands is a classic.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OxOJ7hh3H-I

For more potty humor, I adore this Philipino artists’ no-toilet paper campaign, I love tabo- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vzb98tQp53I

And certainly, the most high tech example has come from Vancouver’s own Phoenix Chamber Choir, in their rendition of the hugely popular Queen song, Coronavirus Rhapsody- https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1720158275935?fbclid=IwAR3gEdqv95oX4KT_W4F4_naJyASRhUaGpr-T56Aux9k4tCStGvow9xgHIQw

April 9, 2020

Reading Respite Endless screentime has probably left many of us fatigued and squinting, with a need for stronger reading glass prescriptions that we can’t fill, because all the optometry shops have shut down.  So, these next suggestions are offered with that caveat. However, for me, the tactile experience of a book in my hand can still be a nourishing antidote to digital overload. Often just a page is capable of transporting my body, mind and soul away from news feeds, virus counts, and press conferences.  

Never a fan of e-readers, I have always passionately supported my local bookshops.  And thankfully, there is a current intiative intended to do the same, at a time when the threat of a certain Capital A behometh taking over global commerce is greater than ever.  So, you can actually feed your spirit and your neighborhood bookseller by purchasing any literary craving here. Thanks to the new site, bookshop.org, you can order what you’d like from the local bookstore of your choice, while this company acts as liason.  And the fair split allows your local vendor to keep 30% of total profit, when direct sales that are no longer possible for them may have only been slightly more (40-45%).  

As far as what to stories to consume at a time like this, it has amazed me how much films like Contagion and Outbreak have had huge resurgences. This tells me that relevance and resonance are key factors in people’s entertainment choices.  However, if you’re looking for something that relates to your current circumstances, but leaves you not with more fear, but with actual hope, inspiration, or tools for survival, here are a few better options:

Emily St. Mandel’s Station Eleven is, in fact, a post-apocalyptic tale.  But her narrative’s most clever survivors form a travelling Shakespeare troupe, demonstrating the power of art to heal in dire times.  

For some existential musing reaped in self-isolation, Thoreau’s Life in the Woods always still provides.

And if the new stressors arising from this crisis find you busier than ever, but you long to slow down, travel journalist, Pico Iyer, in his prophetic 2014 book, The Art of Stillness, makes a strong case for the fact that “in our madly accelerating world, our lives are crowded, chaotic and noisy. So, there’s never been a greater need to slow down, tune out and give ourselves permission to be still.”

April 10, 2020

How Might We Fill This Space?

Never before have Memes, Tik tok or Cat Videos provided such many needed lifelines for people all over the world.  But the video that most stirred me to action was this stunning dance collaboration that popped up in my Facebook feed, during the early days of self-isolation, before my first Zoom conference, before I’d seen my first collaborative musical Quarantine Song spoof. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3pFxsYPLgU

This global initiative to weave together dance gestures, while performers were entirely physically separate, seeded the idea for a community art and writing project that I have recently started with a few friends.

In an effort to connect artists during this physically distant time, we have launched Spool of Thought.  And all artistic contributions are welcome to the thread.  

https://www.instagram.com/spoolofthought2020/

On this page, we invite people to respond to the question, “How might we fill this space?”as we adjust to different rhythms of being. The idea is to weave together our thoughts, through the fluid form of cursive writing, in a non-linear narrative documenting this unique time on our planet.

The full instructions are below, for those interested and eager to participate:

1.Using Notes (iPhone) or Evernote (Android) and the digital pen, draw a continuous cursive line from the left to right side of the note (arranged horizontally) and write a word, phrase or sentence that responds to the prompt: How Might We Fill This Space?

2. Save it to your photos.

3. Then,send it by email to: spoolofthought2020@gmail.com, and we will add your text to the Spool of Thought Instagram page.

4. Please include your name, your location, your occupation, and your Instagram@ for the caption of your photo.

5. And feel free to share this invite with your community, along with these instructions.

6. Finally, enjoy watching the spool unravel on @spoolofthought2020, as the thread grows, and tag us wherever you choose to share: #spoolofthought2020.

[richincolor]

An Interview with Abdi Nazemian

Today we welcome Abdi Nazemian to the blog. We're excited to learn more about his new novel The Authentics, which was released earlier this month.

Summary: The Authentics is a fresh, funny, and insightful novel about culture, love, and family—the kind we are born into and the ones we create.

Daria Esfandyar is Iranian-American and proud of her heritage, unlike some of the “Nose Jobs” in the clique led by her former best friend, Heidi Javadi. Daria and her friends call themselves the Authentics, because they pride themselves on always keeping it real.

But in the course of researching a school project, Daria learns something shocking about her past, which launches her on a journey of self-discovery. It seems everyone is keeping secrets. And it’s getting harder to know who she even is any longer.

With infighting among the Authentics, her mother planning an over-the-top sweet sixteen party, and a romance that should be totally off limits, Daria doesn’t have time for this identity crisis. As everything in her life is spinning out of control—can she figure out how to stay true to herself?

How did you find your way to this story of family and identity?

I started my career as a screenwriter, and I still work in film and television. I love that medium, but one of the unfortunate realities of the business is that getting movies about Iranian characters made is extremely difficult. I’ve tried many times to write stories that explore my culture for the screen, and inevitably the conversation turns to the lack of bankable stars that could be cast in the roles. Take a look at some of the highest-profile movies about Iranians that Hollywood has made for a peek into this problem. Gael Garcia Bernal and Alfred Molina are Hollywood’s version of Iranians. Jake Gyllenhaal is their Prince of Persia. The argument for these decisions is that there are no Iranian stars, but how can there be if no one gives Iranian actors a chance? I’ve always loved books, and at some point in my screenwriting career, I had this epiphany that in the literary world, no one could tell me they needed a celebrity to publish my book. Then I discovered that writing novels was also a far more personal journey than screenwriting, and that liberated me to write stories that explored issues of family and identity that were (and still are) closest to me. For this particular story, it’s hard to pinpoint one thing that helped me find my way, but I think the biggest inspiration was my own children, who were born with the help of an incredible surrogate, and who are being raised in a very modern, very multicultural family. They were babies when this book began to take shape, but I projected forward to the kinds of questions they might have, and I began to write a fictional story inspired by those questions. And then, luckily, Daria took on a life of her own. She had a lot to say. And for the record, I have no secrets from my own children.

What did you like most about Daria?

I love so much about Daria, but perhaps what I love most is her passion. That passion is partly inspired by myself as an older teen (I was very outspoken about my views on right and wrong), but mostly inspired by many young people I know who are devoted to speaking out for what they believe in. Daria’s pride in her culture, her commitment to her friends, her patience and empathy for her family, are all offshoots of that passion. She is a deeply moral person, and wants to live a life of truth. Sometimes circumstances make that difficult, and that’s what the book explores, but Daria never strays far from her core desire to be honest and make moral decisions. I love that about her. Also, I love her capacity for forgiveness.

What forms of media were you most interested in when you were a teen? What kinds of stories got your attention?

Before my teen years, I was a huge reader (a lot of Ramona books, endless readings of Charlotte’s Web and an insatiable obsession with Archie Comics).  By the time I became a teenager, I developed a fascination with Old Hollywood. I watched old movies voraciously, everything from film noir to musicals to silent film. Those films transported me to a fantasy version of the world, which was very appealing to me as a kid who usually wanted to crawl out of his dark, gay skin. I read a lot back then, though YA wasn’t the thriving world it is now, and there were few diverse reads to be found. My favorite book as a teen was Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. I worshipped it. And in my later teen years, I discovered James Baldwin, who remains my favorite author. His writing is ridiculously good, and perhaps sadly, more relevant than ever. If we all read his words and studied them, we’d probably live in a much more beautiful world.

Though this is your debut YA novel, you're not new to writing. Did writing The Authentics have any unique challenges?

It absolutely did. First and foremost, this was my first young adult novel, and I love YA, so I wanted to enter this world with a story that would have an impact and feel honest. Also, this is a far more personal piece of writing than most of my screenwriting work. This is a chance for me to represent the people I love most: Iranian-American characters, LGBTQ people of color, young people questioning their identity, and struggling with how to define themselves in a world obsessed with labels. I am painfully aware of how rare depictions of minorities are in our stories, and so I felt an added responsibility here to get it right, and to make sure that all my love for these characters came through loud and clear.

Being authentic is obviously a focus in this story. What does it mean to you to be authentic? How does that look in everyday life?

The word “authentic” is thrown around so often these days that it starts to lose any real meaning. Sometimes it’s a badge of honor (that’s how Daria and her friends use it), and sometimes it is hurled as an accusation toward anyone or anything we think is false. I wanted to explore this subject matter because I feel passionately that there is more than one way to be authentic. To me, being authentic only means being true to oneself, and that looks different for every human being. That might be why the relationship between Daria and her ex-best-friend Heidi (who Daria calls a “Nose Job”) is one of my favorites in the book. Daria considers Heidi inauthentic for focusing so much on her appearance, while Heidi feels that she is authentic because she is projecting the person she wants to be. To me, both characters are authentic in their own way, and their journey is to see authenticity in someone who is different from them. I recently read this quote from one of my favorite singers, Lana Del Rey, who is constantly accused of being inauthentic, and she said a lot of smart things on the subject: “Of course. I’m always being myself. They don’t know what authentic is. If you think of all the music that came out until 2013, it was super straight and shiny. If that’s authentic to you, this is going to look like the opposite. I think that shit is stylized. Just because I do my hair big does not mean I’m a product. If anything, I’m doing my own hair.”

I just found and read Madonna's picture book The Adventures of Abdi at my local library. Are you certain there's no connection to you?

There are few things I want more in the world than to be connected to Madonna. I fell in love with her when her very first video was released, and made my parents take me to The Virgin Tour despite being way too young for it. Not long after that, I converted a room in our home into “The Madonna Room” (no, this is not a joke). You can imagine my extreme excitement when I saw that Madonna had released a book about the adventures of a boy named Abdi, who does look a little like me. Sadly, I have no proof that the character is connected to me, though I can confirm I knew some people who worked with Madonna at the time, and that she signed an autograph to me well before the book was released, so perhaps my name seeped into her subconscious somehow. A boy can hope.

What's up next for you in writing? Are we likely to see more YA books from you?

I write both screenplays and novels. In my screenwriting life, I am currently adapting a phenomenal documentary called “Out of Iraq” into a narrative feature. It’s the story of two Iraqi men who fall in love against the backdrop of the Iraq War, and their struggle to be reunited when one moves to the United States and the other gets stuck in the bureaucracy of the immigration system. It’s an honor to adapt it. In my life as an author, I am committed to continuing to write young adult fiction. Writing “The Authentics” was so gratifying, and I have more stories to tell in this space. I’m about halfway done with my next book, so I shouldn’t say too much about it, but I can say that it is probably the most personal writing I’ve ever done, and that it tells the story of a love triangle between three teens who get caught up in the world of AIDS activism in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Is there anything you would like to tell our readers that I didn't ask?

I’d like to say thank you to the young adult reading community for demanding diverse reads from publishers. Reading young adult fiction gives me so much hope for our future. I believe storytelling is our greatest tool for creating empathy, and seeing the way young people are demanding and consuming literature about characters who don’t look or think like them is so exciting to me. It’s easy to be pessimistic about the world, and seeing a book like The Hate U Give on the bestseller list makes me optimistic. Discovering there is a whole community of Iranian YA authors makes me optimistic. Reading YA books about cultures and experiences that were foreign to me gives me hope. And that’s all the result of readers creating demand for these stories. So, I’d like to just say thanks, and keep seeking out stories you may not think are for you.

Abdi Nazemian spent his childhood in a series of glamorous locations (Tehran, Paris, Toronto, New York), but could usually be found in his bedroom watching old movies and reading. He currently resides in Los Angeles with his two children and his fiancé.

Abdi has written four produced films: MENENDEZ: BLOOD BROTHERS (Lifetime, 2017), THE QUIET (Sony Pictures Classics, 2006), CELESTE IN THE CITY (ABC Family, 2004), and BEAUTIFUL GIRL (ABC FAMILY, 2003). He also wrote, directed and produced the short film REVOLUTION (2012). He is proud to say his words have been spoken by the likes of Carmela Soprano, The Nanny, and The Girl With The Most Cake.

Abdi’s first novel, THE WALK-IN CLOSET, was released in 2015 by Curtis Brown Unlimited, and was awarded Best Debut at the Lambda Literary Awards. His debut young adult novel, THE AUTHENTICS, was released on August 8, 2017 by Balzer + Bray / HarperCollins.

[superfan99records]

Super Fan Illustrator Focus #2

I first met Nicholas Stevenson almost ten years ago when we shared a manager for our respective musical projects. His artwork and music were very intwined, his sleeves always struck me as being an extension of himself and his songs. One played equal part in supporting the other. I'd describe his style as being extremely playful, colourful, fanciful, distorted, magical and most of all joyful. I loved his art and have had him in mind for so many projects since. The first time we worked together he illustrated my band aboard a ship for a limited screen print single, unusually it was printed on black card making a night sky backdrop. Years later when I started Super Fan and needed a logo he was the first person I thought to ask. The brief was simply "Do something with Ice hockey sticks and maybe a shield?" He came back to me pretty quick with a whole range of variants, I picked one and this was to be the labels logo for releases 1 through to 50. He then did sleeves for both our live to tape night 'Reelin' releases and Matt McKees album too (with photos by Naomi Goggin) 

As well as picking up various awards and being exhibited, he's done work for The New York Times, Blue Note Records, The Scouts Association, Urban Outfitters, Warner/Chappell Music, Anorak Magazine and countless bands along the way. He is currently a teacher on the BA Illustration course at Hereford College of Arts, plays in the band Lucky Shivers AND is one half of the excellent Oro Swimming Hour. In short, he's a busy guy with a very colourful mind.

What did you like drawing as kid? Were there particular characters or subjects that you'd always come back to?

Thanks for the kind words Luke! I had several phases, and I was quite obsessive. Tractors, then fish, then dinosaurs, ninja turtles, power rangers, star wars... I'd draw when I watched TV and had battles with my friends trying to draw bigger scarier space ships. I found and scanned a box of drawings from the fish/dinosaur era, here my parents collaborated with me a fair bit, so I can't take total credit for them. 

Your work sometimes reminds me of Eric Carle in it's texture and colour. What are some of your favourite illustrated kids books?

Yes I love Eric Carle's work and I do quite a similar process, cutting and rearranging paintings and found textures, albeit with some help from the computer. I've always loved the book 'Goodnight Moon', it's so eerie and strange. Just a rabbit wishing all the weird, kitsch and creepy objects in its room goodnight. The colour palette is very influential. I also just discovered a Japanese book called 'The Night Train' by Shigeo Nishimura, which is hard to find in the uk, but worth tracking down. It's all pictures and no words, showing a beautifully observed journey on a night train, it's very calming and magical.

Tell us about the Bill Murray colouring book project and how that came about? It seemed to blow up online and the cover featured an illustration of Bill by Nic in his unmistakeable style. You can find them everywhere, I even spotted one in a store on a recent trip to LA. 

Mike from Belly Kids (the publisher) got in touch out of the blue asking me to contribute to a colouring book idea he had. I was a little unsure how I'd make my painting work for a colouring book and I nearly did a line drawing instead. Luckily Mike liked the painted image so much that he put it on the cover. I obviously thought the book was a great idea, but I had no idea that people would go as crazy for it as they did. I found the original painting the other day, and I'd accidentally been mixing colours on the back...

Let's talk about record sleeves. Are there any that stick out in your mind from browsing stores when you were a kid and which sleeve do you wish you designed yourself?

Record stores were like galleries to me, I often bought albums just because the record sleeve did something interesting for me and I discovered some great stuff that way (Seekonk Pinkwood comes to mind). Anything painted, drawn, unpolished and visceral usually grabbed my attention. Bob Dylan's painting on the cover of 'Music from Big Pink', Robert Pollard's collages for Guided by Voices, Pavement's 'Brighten the Corners', Frank Zappa sleeves, Iron and Wine 'The Shepherds Dog', Beck 'The Information'... When I was an illustration student my final project was a deluxe repackaging of Elliott Smith's 'Roman Candle'. I actually love the photograph on the cover of that record, but I wanted to see what would happen if it was illustrated instead. I'd like to do the same for Midlake's 'Bamnan and Slivercork'. That album is so lyrically visual, there's a clear narrative I'm just aching to draw. One handed machinists, a balloon maker, junglers, monocle-men...

For your musical projects you always contribute the art whether it be gig posters, zines or sleeve designs, would you ever trust this job with another artist or do you feel it is too intertwined with the songs themselves?

Sometimes I'd love to hand it over and see what someone else would do with it. There's so many people I admire and would trust to do a great job... But I always feel like it needs to be me, and like you say there's a shared ethos with the drawing and recording, it seems to work. That's not to say it's easy though, my own record sleeves are the things I do and redo over and over, I'm never satisfied, my own worst client! It's harder to have a pure reaction to your own music, you're too close to the struggle of it and the circumstances of its creation sometimes.

I can often imagine many of your characters coming to life in animated form, is this something you'd like to explore in the future? 

Yes, I love to animate, and have collaborated with some wonderful animators, but often on project slightly sideways of my own interests. I'm working on my own story telling and longer forms of narrative so we'll see if that doesn't lead to some more animation in the future. 

Are there any geographical places that inspire your art or ideas?

My mother is American, and I hop back over there when I can. Portland Maine, New Hampshire, Boston are places I discovered a lot of the records I love (thanks Bull Moose Records & Newbury Comics), and that landscape, endless woods, flakey wooden town houses, fireflies... I lived in the Seychelles for a few years as a child too, tropical plants at night, ghost stories, and hidden pirate treasures are things I take from there. I'm currently renting a medieval house, I love timber frames and puffy sleeves too. I used to not be very interested in the English landscape, but I think it's going to be more important going forward.

What's been your favourite project to work on and is there a particular project out there you'd love to have a go at?

I got to produce some animated GIFs for Save the Children recently, which was a really challenging project to do, telling the story of an internally displaced refugee in Afghanistan. I was really surprised that I got to do something like that, and that I was able to translate my visuals in to something serious and purposeful in a different way. I've always said I'd love to do the seat patterns for TFL? How about they let me redo the Northern Line?

My Dad paints watercolours and often gets fixated on a certain artist or record for a long time while working. Do you have any go to artists you like to listen to while you work?

In the idea generating stage I can't have anything on anymore, I'm too easily distracted! But once the idea is crystallised and I'm just producing work I really like anything by Grouper, Ali Farka, Tinariwen, Deru, A Hawk and a Hacksaw... instrumental mostly. You've got to keep that language part of your brain shut off!

I can't imagine the answer for this being a no but are you a collector of anything? Haha, yes. For one reason or another I have: Postcards of Volcanic Eruptions, matchbox labels, plastic animals, toy trees, zines, riso prints, composition notebooks.

And finally, what's the latest with your musical projects? I hear there is a new Oro Swimming Hour record in the pipeline?

Yes! The new record is finished, there's a slightly broader sound palette this time and even more tracks, even eerier. Process wise it's still very spur-of-the-moment, songs recorded as they're being written, intensely collaborative and open. It's nice because I'm still surprised when I listen back, did we do that? I don't remember, it all happened so fast. I will most definitely be appearing sometime in 2019.I suspect you'll be hearing more from Lucky Shivers this year too, we're much more methodical and careful over those songs, but there's a record slowly being chipped away at!

You can find more of Nic’s work by visiting the link below to his homepage or following him on Instagram. Look out for further posts in this series as I talk to the other artists who have helped shape Super Fans visual identity.

www.nicholasstevenson.com @nicholasillustration