If you haven’t visited the website Trip City, a mixture of reportage, essays, prose fiction, commix, films and much more besides, then you’re missing out:

Stilts: Why does Trip City exist? If it didn’t, would it have to be invented?

Dean Haspiel: TRIP CITY is a multimedia evolution of what me and my peers learned doing print anthologies and webcomix collectives and is a personal venue to do more than just comix. TRIP CITY exists simply because we decided it would.

Kevin Colden: The prophet Muhammed or someone who looked just like him appeared to Dean Haspiel late one night and told him to gather together the finest people on Earth and create something that would instantly inspire world peace. Trip City is the result of that effort and it radiates with the glorious light of a thousand suns.

Nick Abadzis: Trip City is Dean [Haspiel's], Seth [Kushner's] and Chris [Miskiewicz's] brainchild. It’s a way of looking at the local area and the world in general through a glass darkly, so to speak. It was born through Dean’s energy and determination, Seth’s vision and Chris’ humour.  The rest of us all contribute ideas, but they’re the ‘brains trust’. Now it’s here, I don’t think it couldn’t not exist. If you know Dean, you know that he’s always conjuring great things out of nothing. He’s a true creative, always putting things into the world. Trip City’s sort of a wormhole into another one, which I think will be very entertaining.

Jennifer Hayden: In the past when there were art movements or literary movements, people got excited and started a magazine.  Now they start websites.  Trip City could only have been invented by Dean and Chris and Seth.  It’s a website and a magazine and a movement.

Joe Infurnari: I think Trip City exists because a lot of us are looking for new ways to get our work out there. Speaking for myself, I feel that the landscape for artists is changing very quickly in terms of how they get their work out into the world. I’m not sure that the web comics model is for everyone so Trip City represents a different approach. Trip City is a cultural collective instead of just a comics collective. I think that’s the real difference. What I offer on Trip City are basically web comics but the difference is that I’m putting them on a site that draws its audience from a wide array of disciplines.

Comics seem to have a tough time building new readers and few people who don’t read comics are ever really exposed to them. Trip City is our attempt to bring comics into the fold with the other media of literature, poetry, photography, art, music and theatre. It’s our way of staking our claim that comics are just as valid as all other media of expression. For many of us, that’s something we not only preach; it’s what we practise. Seth Kushner, Dean Haspiel, Chris Miskiewicz, Nick Abadzis, Amy Finkel, Kevin Colden, Jeff UK and Ron Scalzo are all multidisciplinary artists. For folks with varied talents, Trip City is an opportunity to show a sampling of all their output in one place, too.

(Loony Sharpie Doodles by and (c) Joe Infurnari)

Stilts: Please tell me how you came to be involved in Trip City?

Joe Infurnari: I had become good friends with Dean at his old studio, Deep 6. When he moved to Hang Dai studios, I would make a point of visiting it from time to time. It seemed like I would end up there on evenings when Dean, Seth, Chris, Nick and Tim would be discussing an upcoming secret project (the as yet unnamed Trip City). Not being one known for keeping my mouth shut, I would end up offering up ideas and I guess I was enough of a squeaky wheel that they offered me to join up.

Kevin Colden: I was at breakfast one morning with Seth Kushner and my infant son Charlie – because that’s when those of us who have acquired children have meetings – and we were discussing the possibility of jointly purchasing some nuclear arms from the Canadian government. Naturally, the conversation turned from there to comics and he mentioned that he was starting a new website with some likeminded fellows and could I possibly be bothered to grace the collective with my presence. After chuckling softly and farting loudly I reached in my back pocket and pulled out the crumpled first pages of Baby With a Mohawk, threw them in his face and ran away, leaving him to pay the check and drop my son off at home. I haven’t spoken to him since.

(perplexing problems for the Baby With a Mohawk by and (c) Kevin Colden)

Nick Abadzis: They asked me and I am honoured to join them. They make me laugh a lot and they always provoke interesting ideas.

Dean Haspiel: TRIP CITY is staffed with interesting and interested, like-minded creators who proactively hawk their wares and understand that the art of making something and making it available is only half of the battle. To contribute to TRIP CITY means you are challenged as a publisher and a publicist, too. With that criteria, TRIP CITY was strategically curated to mutually benefit the content and creators involved.

Jennifer Hayden: S’Crapbook was a webstrip I had recently started posting on www.onlytheblogknowsbrooklyn.com, but the blog went on hiatus, leaving my strip homeless.  Dean told me Trip City was in the works and asked if I’d like to post S’Crapbook there.  I love the idea of a multi-media website, and when I saw who else was involved and what they were contributing, I jumped right in.

(panels from Jennifer Hayden’s S’Crapbook)

Stilts: What can people expect to find when they visit Trip City?

Joe Infurnari: That’s a tough question because there’s such a wonderful variety of things to be had at Trip City. Fans of music can take in a podcast with interviews such as Moby and Henry Rollins as well as check out a live recording or the latest single from Jeff’s Americans UK. Literary types can read essays and poetry by Sandra Beasley, Jonathan Vankin, Dean Haspiel and Chris Miskiewicz to name a few.

Our most recent podcast has an interview with Johathan Lethem! Fans of the visual arts can appreciate the work of Seth Kushner, Jen Ferguson and Krista Dragomer while comics buffs can check out new work and process pieces by Nick Abadzis, Jennifer Hayden, Dean Haspiel, Kevin Colden and myself among others. Most importantly if someone visits the site and discovers something else they enjoyed, then we’ve succeeded.

Kevin Colden: What can one expect when gazing upon the lost city of gold? Or the Holy Grail? Or the face of God? I would expect wonders beyond imagination, that’s what.

Nick Abadzis: It’s essentially a magazine format, a compendium of features and viewpoints but with a revolving bunch of curators and contributors. For me personally, it’s a place to put a lot of my non-comics ideas. Or comics-related ideas that don’t quite fit in more traditional arenas, or which aren’t SF-related like my essays at Tor.com. I like to write features and reviews, I like to observe culture in general – in one sense, my comics work is a relatively small part of my life and the things that get sieved through my perceptual filters. I have a mountain of ideas that often lie dormant in my sketchbooks and notebooks. Now I have a place to put some of that stuff.

Dean Haspiel: TRIP CITY is only a month old as I type this and what you can expect to see and read and enjoy, for free, are highly independent yet universally appealing comix, prose, humor, real life stories, erotica, doodles, sketches, interviews, profiles, music, spoken word, pop culture, personal essays, and whatever we deem worthy of our time and yours. Soon, we will also have short movies and television. TRIP CITY is the only place I will publish process pieces and “unexpurgated Dean Haspiel.” Come Dec. 6th, TRIP CITY will furnish my new, 22-page BILLY DOGMA comic, “The Last Romantic Antihero.” (Please note this round-table conversation was started with multiple folks some weeks back right on the hells of the first part)

Jannifer Hayden: I am still surprised by the offerings on Trip City — from comix to standalone art to music to stories to all sorts of loose editorials.  Every time I stop in, I unwrap a new idea.

Stilts: Where are your hopes for the site? Where would like it to be in one, five, ten years time?

Jennifer Hayden: I expect Trip City to keep intensifying and expanding, taking on more multi-media experiments.  And I think a performance aspect would be fun.

Kevin Colden: I would hope that within five years, Trip City will be the primary form of currency for the United States and Europe, making all paper money obsolete and securing intellectual property as the most valuable extant monetary unit. There are other “intellectuals” that we will need to club* to death first, but I think with persistence we can achieve this goal and more.

(*by club I mean dance club. Dave Eggers and Jonathan Franzen in an Ecstasy-fueled breakdance face-off to the death.)

Joe Infurnari: I have a couple of models for what I’d like to see. One would be a large enough following for the site that would allow us to hold live performances that take the online experience into a new direction. We would reinterpret our works for the stage and combine our various strengths in writing, music and art to create an interesting real life experience. The other model may not be mutually exclusive but involves having a core unit of individuals so that we could agent our works to publishers, negotiate contracts, market and promote our output all from within the Trip City brain trust. If it does well enough, we may not even need third party publishers but could do all of it in house with our own graphic design and book packaging affiliations. If we could find all the things we need as professional artists etc within our own group, I think we could really be onto something.

Dean Haspiel: I have no plans for the future of TRIP CITY except to live in the moment. TRIP CITY is organic and I learn about it everyday and, if it becomes popular and the masses demand an App or a digital download or a sexy, expensive print edition, we will consider those options. Meanwhile, comments and communication; spreading the good word of TRIP CITY via social networking, is our current currency. If you like what you see and read at TRIP CITY, please share it.

Stilts:Is Trip City about a ‘strength in numbers’ approach to publicising your art?

Kevin Colden: Trip City is about spreading the love across all media. I like to spread my love across many media, sometimes more than one at a time, if you know what I mean (wink, wink). Would you like to join me?

Nick Abadzis: I’ll admit, that’s a draw for me (no pun intended). I’m habitually something of a loner, which is partially just due to the way I work, alone in my own space, my own head. Publicity therefore tends to be a singular pursuit too, so it feels great to also be covered by an umbrella organisation and sit alongside people I like and respect and whose work I enjoy. I think we all like the feedback and exchange of ideas.

Jennifer Hayden: I think of Trip City less as a place to publicize than as a place to grow as an artist.  My projects are self-generated and I’m not part of a studio.  So it’s great for me to have cohorts, and a regular deadline, and comments. I also am really digging the creative challenge of a 4-panel strip.

Joe Infurnari: I think this is where I was going with my last answer. It would be ideal if we could keep our members employed on various projects with each helping everyone else get their work out there. For now however, I think it works to have each of us bring our audiences to Trip City and introduce them to as much of the other great stuff going on there as possible.

Stilts: Are you hoping to bring the medium of comics to a wider audience via the site? What particular challenges do cartoonists face at the moment in America (and, indeed, internationally)?

Kevin Colden: People love free comics, right? Right. That’s the answer to both questions.

Dean Haspiel: Comix is just one component of TRIP CITY. And, if someone came to read artist/writer Jenn Shannon’s personal report on Richard Serra’s “Junction/Cycle,” or a profile from Seth Kushner’s Culture POP series, or Jen Ferguson’s heart-charming “Metrollpolis,” or a short zombie story by Jef UK, or an upcoming, erotically-charged holiday ditty by award-winning poet/author, Sandra Beasley, and stumbled upon our comix, too, then they’re taking full advantage of the expansive TRIP CITY experience. Why limit our works to one kind of fan-base? Otherwise, no. There is no mission statement, as far as I’m concerned, to teach people the power of comix. That’s like trying to convince people that air and water is cool. Comix, like life, is essential. And franchise comic book publishers shouldn’t be shy to contact us to help make their comic books better. ‘Nuff said.

(a page from Metrollpolis by and (c) Jen Ferguson)

Jennifer Hayden: I think more people interested in other media will read the comix here, and that’s fantastic.  I also wonder if there will be more mixing of comics with other media as a result of artists working together on the site. I believe comix are coming of age in the U.S.–growing up into a serious literary art form, and so they should be appearing side-by-side with music, video, literature, more traditional media.  Trip City is a place where they can do that.

Joe Infurnari: Trip City puts comics on a level playing field with all the other stuff going on at the site. Comics as a medium has been marginalized and misunderstood in North America. For many, comics are considered juvenile junk simply because they are comics. There has been a lot of progress made on this front in recent years but there’s still a long way to go. Visitors to Trip City are going to see comics of all stripes and colors. Chris Miskiewicz and Kate McElroy have a great personal comic on the site called Adrift which is very different from Kevin Colden’s Baby with a Mohawk which is also different from any of Dean’s Billy Dogma strips. Comics are a medium like novels, films etc and the kinds of stories one can tell within that medium is limitless.

Stilts: And finally, what question haven’t I asked about the site that I should have?

Kevin Colden: You should have asked about Trip City: The Musical. It has no music, isn’t on stage, and looks exactly like the website. In fact, it IS the website:www.welcometotripcity.com

Joe Infurnari: Q: What’s the thing to come out of Trip City that will be the single greatest cultural event of the millennium? A: Joe Infurnari’s Time Fucker coming soon to Trip City. ;)

About this roundtable’s participants:

Emmy award winning artist, Dean Haspiel, created the Eisner Award-nominated BILLY DOGMA, the semi-autobiographical digital comic, STREET CODE, helped pioneer personal webcomics with the invention of ACT-I-VATE, and co-created/co-curates TRIP CITY.net, a Brooklyn-filtered, multimedia salon.

Dean has drawn many great superhero and semi-autobiographical comic books published by Marvel, DC/Vertigo, Dark Horse, IDW, Image, Scholastic Graphix, Toon Books, Top Shelf, Playboy, The New York Times, and Tor.com, including critically acclaimed collaborations with Harvey Pekar (American Splendor, The Quitter), Jonathan Ames (The Alcoholic), Jonathan Lethem (Cousin Corinne’s REMINDER), Tim Hall (The Last Mortician), and with Inverna Lockpez on the Harvey Award winning, CUBA: My Revolution. Dean illustrated the Super Ray comics art for HBO’s “Bored To Death,” for which he won an Emmy award for his work on the opening title sequence.

TRIP CITY is the current vista where Dean Haspiel’s cosmic bruiser, Billy Dogma, excavates unexpurgated romance and adventure with his knock ‘em dead dame, Jane Legit, while flexing two-fisted aggro-moxie and purple staccato for the 21st Century. Please click here to see what Dean’s been up to at TRIP CITY.

For more Dino Info and News, check out his MAN-SIZE blog. Dean also answers to the name Dino, not because of his similarity to the Rat Pack member but because of his remarkable impersonation of Fred Flintstone’s pet dinosaur.

Jennifer Hayden’s first book, UNDERWIRE, was published October 2011 by Top Shelf. Jennifer came to comics from fiction-writing and children’s book illustration. She is a member of ACT-I-VATE, the premier webcomics collective, and her comics have appeared in two anthologies: The ACT-I-VATE Primer, and Cousin Corinne’s Reminder. She is currently working on a graphic novel about her life and her experience with breast cancer, The Story of My Tits, forthcoming from Top Shelf. She lives in a barn in New Jersey with her husband, two kids, three cats, and the dog.

Jennifer’s blog, Jennifer’s website and Jennifer’s book UNDERWIRE, published by Top Shelf

Nick Abadzis was born in Sweden to Greek and British parents. He is a cartoonist, writer, graphic novelist and editor of international renown who has been honoured with various awards including the prestigious Eisner in 2008 for his graphic novel Laika. Laika also won best script at Le Borget Book Festival in France and a Micheluzzi for best foreign graphic novel at the 2009 Napoli Comicon Awards in Italy. It was selected by YALSA  as one of its top ten graphic novels for 2007 and it was both a Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus Review Best Book of the Year. To date, there have been ten foreign editions.

Nick Abadzis has been published in the USA by Condé Nast Digital, Macmillan, Marvel Comics, DC/Vertigo Comics and Tor.com, in Japan by Kodansha and Korea by Marubol Publications. His comics have appeared in various national UK newspapers including The Times, The Guardian and The Independent on Sunday and he has been published in Europe by BBC Worldwide, Dargaud, Glenat, Magic Press, 2000AD, Doctor Who Magazine, Punch and Atrium Verlag, among others. He also works as an editorial consultant and has helped create lasting equity and sales for the numerous magazines, websites and publishing entities that he has been involved with. He recently relocated from London in the UK to New York City where he continues to work both as a storyteller and editorial consultant. His next major project is a revamped and digitally-restored collection of his first ever strip Hugo Tate, originally published in legendary UK music and comics magazine Deadline. This will be published by Blank Slate Books in spring 2012, and other graphic novels are in the works.

Joe ‘The Towering’ Infurnari is a Brooklyn based Canadian cartoonist. His web comics have been nominated for two Eisners and his print illustrations have appeared in the pages of Marvel, Image Comics, Three Rivers Press, and more. He has two graphic novels coming from First Second. MUSH! Sled Dogs with Issues! is out now and MARATHON is out in Spring 2012.

Kevin Colden is the author of the Eisner Award-nominated, Xeric award-winning graphic novel Fishtown and the digital comic series I Rule the Night. He drew the comics adaptation of Robert Bloch’s Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper, has illustrated an edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, contributed to Vertigo’s Strange Tales, and appears in various other projects from DC Comics and IDW Publishing. He is a veteran of the ACT-I-VATE and Chemstry Set webcomics collectives as well as Zuda Comics.

Bat: Gareth, who are you and why would what you’re doing be of interest to readers of the FPI blog?

Gareth: Well, over on Twitter I describe myself as “award-winning Northern hospitality operator, management consulting guru, publisher of Vworp Vworp and gentleman of the road…”. In essence, I own and operate the Lass O’Gowrie, a very nice little pub down the side of the old BBC [in Manchester] and publish a very nice fanzine and (with luck) comics if we can get the rights to the odd interesting property. I suppose it’s of interest because I use the Lass as a platform for all the things I love, so it’s festooned with original comic art, old collectables and vintage arcade machines. We also programme plenty of genre shows, including, come January, Russell T Davies’ Midnight and a brand new adaptation of Halo Jones.

B: Please tell us about this new production of Halo Jones? It’s not just a re-staging of the eighties stage play is it? Who’s involved and what’s your role?

G: No, it’s a fresh adaptation of Books One and Two, going back to the source material. The odd thing we’ll be looking at [changing] and there are a lot of healthy debates going on in the team as to location, characters and design. There are some practical things to get over too, so Toby is now a humanoid dog character to get him off all fours, but it works – trust me! I’m involved this time round as Producer, so I’m overseeing it, chipping in where I see fit and making useful suggestions. The chaps have termed me Joel Silver, which I’m taking in the spirit it was intended (honest; you’re fired, chaps!). Alongside me is Ross Kelly, who has been scripting, Daniel Thackery who is directing and a top-secret script editor who has asked not to be revealed, but has been brilliant to work with. And, as of today, we’ve cast all but one of the roles and it’s the best cast I’ve ever worked with. We’ve settled on Louise Hamer as Halo and she’s perfect. See Casting Call Pro if you don’t believe me. In fact, if you don’t fall in love with Halo all over again after this then frankly, you’re dead inside…

B: Halo Jones is part of the Mid-Winter Lassfest. What else have you got on that may be of interest to the blog’s readers?

G: A whole heap of goodies. An event with genre publisher Hirst Books. They will be bringing along a host of his writers for a day on Saturday, 7th January. Three episodes of Coronation Street from 1968 penned by the legendary Jack Rosenthal and performed on the ground floor of the pub, cast by the great June West of the Road to Coronation Street fame. A revival of Jack’s Play for Today from 1974 ‘Hot Fat’, never since repeated and the tapes have been LONG wiped by the BBC. Oh… and an adaptation of Russell T. Davies’ Midnight, originally from the 2008 run of Doctor Who in our claustrophobic Salmon Room upstairs.

B: How did you get permission to put on a performance of Halo Jones and also Russell T Davies’ Midnight?

G: Well, we asked Rebellion [publishers of 2000 AD] very nicely and they very kindly allowed us to perform Halo. Similarly with Russell, who is a fan of [Gareth's rightly celebrated Doctor Who fanzine] Vworp Vworp and knows the Lass from his BBC Manchester days (apparently he lost his watch there in the nineties. We’ve still not found it!), although what we’re adapting is the script and characters created by Russell. Nowhere are the Doctor or Donna to be seen, but a brand new mysterious stranger known only as John Smith. You may recognise him….

B: Word is that you had to chat to Tharg himself, the mighty Mr. Moore and that you’ve been seen in the company of television giant, Russell T Davies. It must be a big thrill to be rubbing shoulders with (or making phone calls to) these guys. Are you in geek heaven?

G: Oh absolutely. In fact, it’s like being controller of your own TV channel! Alan has been very kind to us with Vworp Vworp and he’s such a pleasure to work with. I was adamant we wouldn’t do Halo unless Alan was cool with it, even though it’s not his IP, it’s important to let people know what you’re about and what we’re here for. Ditto with Russell who we’ve got to know again through Vworp Vworp, so we want it to be right. The Lass doesn’t profit by a penny from Halo or Midnight. We do it, because we want to and we love the material. And it’s often completely forgotten, but these guys are fans of things too. We’re all fans.

B: Please tell us about the theatre space you’ve got at the Lass.

G: Well, we have a wee space above the pub called the Salmon Room (named after our good pal, the artist Adrian Salmon) which we’ve developed as we’ve gone along into a great studio space that seats around 35 people. Our budget is non-existent, but we work our capital hard and with support from sponsors, we do manage miracles. Of course, a first for us this January is to use the ground floor of the pub to stage things, so Halo and Corrie will be down there and that will be amazing.

B: Tell us about the mighty publishing adventure that has been Vworp Vworp. It’s a fanzine that, I think, is fair to say, has exceeded expectations?

G: Again, we’ve been blown away by the supper for our little fanzine, but the love and nostalgia seems to have been there, which is lovely. I mean, what could be better than publishing a lost Abslom Daak tale from Steve Moore? And working with people whose work I so admire like Steve Dillon, Steve Moore, Dez Skinn, Mick McMahon, Alan McKenzie, Ade Salmon and Martin Geraghty is so not work. It’s an honour.

B: What’s the word on Vworp Vworp 3? What’s in it and when’s it out?

G: Well we’re beavering away — myself and co-editor Colin Brockhurst — and we’re aiming for Summer 2012. And you can look forward to a frankly amazing chat with Alan Moore talking about his early Doctor Who and Empire Strikes Back strips, his thoughts on contemporary Doctor Who and something so top secret, you’ll weep when you read it. Elsewhere, we’ve more Abslom Daak as well as a sequel to the seminal Iron Legion strip penned by Lance Parkin with pencils and inks by Dan McDaid and colours by Charlie Kirchoff. And, of course, another wizard free gift that will top issue #1′s transfers and #2′s Weetabix cards.

B: What’s next for you, the Lass and for your adventures in pub theatre?

G: Well, we’ve ambitions for a much bigger space up there to make the Lass a proper, London-style theatrepub. We’ll see…

B: Finally, there’s quite a lot going on year round at the Lass. What regular events might the blog’s readers want to pop along to?

G: We open our doors to Doctor Who fans on the last Saturday of every month in the Snug for drinks and the occasional screenings. We also hold retro gaming nights on the second Friday and last Tuesday of the month, as well as open mics, book clubs, karaoke, meat-free Mondays and the like. Come see us on Facebook, or bob over to www.thelass.co.uk!

Thanks to Gareth and Bat for taking the time to conduct this interview. Bat, a short, balding man with (according to his dad) ‘shifty eyes’ was last seen at Manchester Piccadilly Station clutching a stained copy of Fantastic Four #6. If anyone has any information about his whereabouts, please contact us here at the blog. His mum is very worried about him. (To be honest, we’re not that bothered, we know he’ll come home when he gets hungry enough.)The Halo Jones stage production runs from the 2nd to 7th January, a fine way to start the New Year – if you’re in town please do go along and give them some support.

Matt: What is Trip City? And why is it needed (if, indeed, it is)?

Jen Ferguson: It’s a thoughtful, beautifully designed outlet for creative people who care deeply about art and the imaginative life. It serves to enhance our inner lives. It’s inventors, the members of Hang Dai Studio and principally Dean Haspiel, Seth Kushner, Chris Miskiewicz and Jeffrey Burandt are highly respected and accomplished artists who constantly seek to create opportunities for themselves and others to express and share their talents.

Seth Kushner: Trip City exists and was initially invented to give a few of us like-minded artistic content-makers a venue. Personally, I’d been posting my content in various places. On GRAPHIC NYC I was posting my photographic portraits of comics creators, along with Chris Irving’s interview-based essays, as a means of compiling for a book (which will finally be released in march as Leaping Tall Buildings: The Origins of American Comics).

I also wrote personal and pop-culture essays there. I was posting my photos and behind-the-scenes material from my shoots on my personal blog. And, my series, CulturePOP Photocomix was appearing on ACTIVATEcomix.com. I wondered if I was spreading myself too thin over too many venues. Frustrated, I spoke with Dean Haspiel and he let me know of his notion to create a new “thing.” Then, like in Ocean’s 11, we went about recruiting crew of “specialists,” who would contribute to the site.

Trip City was born out of the need to have ONE place to post our unique content and sell our wares.

(Patrick Stewart and My Father by and (c) Seth Kushner, a deeply moving, personal piece on shared son-dad time and the heroic in the everyday)

Chris Miskiewicz: I feel like Trip City is a natural response to the changes in publishing that have happened over the last few years for creators. The internet is still the Wild West. We currently own a really great saloon inside of it.

Amy Finkel: Trip City is certainly a necessary platform for its contributors. Hopefully, that translates into it being a creative necessity for its readers. I think a lot of creative artists get pigeonholed; their audience expects them to do one thing and only that one thing. The wonderful thing about Dean, Seth, Chris and the other artists who are involved with Trip City is that they’re all working on a host of creative endeavours. Their output is impressive and exciting and without Trip City, some of their work may not otherwise be seen/heard/explored by an audience.

What’s more thrilling that being exposed to a number of forms of creative production (side projects and other expressive undertakings) from artists whose primary work you respect and admire? And with the blog and written process arm of Trip City, it’s especially nice to be able to experience what drives said artists creatively and pushes them to produce so prolifically. I think that’s the one thing that all of the Trip City contributors have in common; their need to be expressive in a number of different forms. Thanks to interactive media these days, all of these art forms, whether analogue or digital, visual or aural, etc, can be displayed in a really lovely manner online at the Trip City site.

Jef UK: I think Trip City is an evolution of formats and processes that each of us individually or in smaller groups were already participating. Every one of us involved has a motor to make things (whether we’ve been hired to do so or not) and so it gives us an outlet for projects outside of freelance work. It allows us to show off our other skills– the comix artist as podcast host, say, or the rock n’ roll frontman as prose stylist.

We’re also a group of people who show up at parties, gallery openings, and comix or literary events, or drop in at each other’s studios, so there’s a real social element to Trip City that probably demanded its emergence into the world, yes. Further, from the comix and music side of things, those are both (often) collaborative processes, so this format is an extension of a way of working that most of us are already familiar: work hard, listen to each other, play nice, but make sure shit is good.

Ron Scalzo: To me, Trip City is a virtual community, an extension of what is created at the place that Dean, Seth, Chris, and some other bohemians I haven’t met yet hang out and work at, or as they affectionately call it, “Hang Dai.” That name always makes me crave Vietnamese food, but I digress. There used to be a time where hanging out and exchanging creative ideas in person was the norm, but now it’s all on the web, so I guess we have technology to blame for Trip City’s invention as much as anything else. Damn you, technology!

Matt: Please tell me how you all came to be involved in Trip City?

Jen Ferguson: I was asked by Dean Haspiel to contribute and I had just started to create Metrollpolis, so it was a perfect project to share.

Amy Finkel: I used to work down the hall from Dean’s Deep 6 studio in Gowanus. Dean and I developed a close friendship and discussed doing creative projects together (I’m not a comic book artist but rather a filmmaker, teacher and web designer/developer). When he moved to his new studio, Hang Dai, he asked if I’d like to come too.

It’s really great to be able to check in with him regularly, and with our Hang Dai studio mates, because everyone is always working on something super creative and it inspires me to do the same. It’s tough to be lazy and unmotivated when you’re in a room full of people who are constantly outputting such incredible work. So once we were in a studio together (along with Seth and Chris, Trip City’s Co-Founders), I was asked to be part of Trip City. It’s really nice to have a place to put all of my non-client/teaching work. And it motivates me to create more, now that I have that platform.

Chris Miskiewicz: Dean was leaving Deep 6 and starting a new studio. Seth Kushner and I were the first people he asked along. I make my living as an actor/writer, so my film schedule is always in flux and I wasn’t sure how often I’d actually get to be there, but the idea of being around other creative people appealed to me. We formed Hang Dai Studio’s. And what we learned was that if you put three creative people in a room together, stuff happens. What happened was Trip City, a place where we could put our ideas into play.

Dean, Seth and I spoke about the concept for about five months. Who would be a part of it, what we’d do, how we’d do it. We wanted comics, along with prose, fiction, a web-series, and a podcast. What we ended up creating was a multi-media site that catered to each of our individual interests and hopefully blended them together into a stronger whole. After that we started asking people in our immediate community who we liked and respected to be a part of it. Jef UK and Nick Abadzis were two of the first to come on and things quickly began to grow from there.

(the Everywhere series on the excellent webcomic collective Act-I-vate, by and (c) Chris Miskiewicz)

Ron Scalzo: Seth Kushner is a close friend of mine, I’ve always been a fan of his photography and his creative spirit, and we have lots of similar interests, specifically films. Seth has taken photos for my long-running electronic rock project, Q*Ball, and even designed a lot of the album artwork with me. I had never met Dean Haspiel, just heard a lot of good things about him from Seth and admired his beard from afar. I’m a fan of [HBO TV show] “Bored To Death” and knew he was involved. When Seth approached me about contributing to Trip City, a creative collective he was starting with Dean, I was all in.

Seth and I met up with Dean, Chris Miskiewicz and Jef UK at Hang Dai one night, and we set things in motion. I told them I’d like to contribute just as long as I didn’t have to be in charge. I find that being in charge can be stifling to the creative process and I just wanted to focus on the latter for the purposes of exploring new terrain for me, which is essay writing and video production.

Jef UK: I had been buddying up with Dean Haspiel the last couple of years, and in the process I think we became fans of each other. He was into my band Americans UK, and he really liked my non-fiction work in magazines, and, of course, I love his comix work. He’s also just fun to be around — a real charmer. Anyway, he approached me last winter about some secret project with which he hoped AM/UK and I could be involved, and then at one of the MoCCA parties this past Spring, Seth Kushner came up to me and told me the general goal of what would become Trip City–to embrace nu media and get more eyes on our work as individuals, by making and promoting our work as a group. They saw me as someone who was constantly making stuff and putting it out there, and they needed peeps like me to provide content for what is a pretty huge endeavour: new material every week — now, every day! Soon I was involved in meetings at Hang Dai Studios to figure out exactly what this project was going to be.

Matt: What can people expect to find when they visit Trip City?

Amy Finkel: Creativity, imagination, irreverence, subversion, perversion, proliferation, quality. All the stuff that inspires us when we’re kids.

Jen Ferguson: There are a lot of independent projects by published working artists that you wouldn’t see anywhere else. Things that are under the radar but extremely interesting and worthwhile.

Seth Kushner: Trip City was designed from the get-go to be a multi-media hub. A bunch of us came from the ACT-I-VATE webcomix collective and we were determined to take a “not-just-comix” approach to Trip City so we could potentially reach a larger audience. We do have comix, but accessible ones, which could be read and appreciated by anyone who might stumble upon the site. Folks will also find essays, often written from a personal perspective, and a bi-weekly podcast featuring name guests like Michael Moore, Henry Rollins and Miranda July. But that’s just a sampling. I think we offer items of interests for any fans of art, literature, film, music, etc.

Jef UK: Quality art in every medium and every genre. Experimentation, prose fiction, comix, music, visual arts, photography, essays, interviews, podcasts, criticism and theory, process blogs, and any combination you can imagine thereof. Oh, and we’re making a web TV channel too.

Chris Miskiewicz: A wide range of good content that we, the contributors, want to see/read/hear ourselves. Beyond comix, visual arts, profiles, prose pieces, and an ongoing podcast series, we’re doing several short stories with an audio-recording to accompany the piece. Listen or read, they’re both there. Next year we’ll be testing serialized novels published as weekly chapters, as well as launching our own web-series station, Trip City Television, which is my baby on the site. TC-TV will be the home of several original web-series and short films bringing us into that market as well and capping our multi-media angle.

Ron Scalzo: When we launched, my answer would have been, “I’m not sure” – I think a big maxim these guys stuck by was ‘Let’s get it up and then we’ll find our way,’ and just a couple of months in, I think the journey has begun. It starts with a lot of cool comics, nostalgia writing, nerd humour, and some pretty sweet visual pieces. It’s a potpourri of things right now with an urban feel. Diversity isn’t such a bad thing nowadays — consider that our first two podcasts have featured Michael Moore and Henry Rollins. If you’re expecting Lady Gaga or the broad from Modern Family, look elsewhere.

Matt: Where are your hopes for the site? Where would you like it to be in one, five, ten years time?

Seth Kushner: I’m really trying to focus on today and continue to figure ways to reach a wider audience. Ideally, the site will grow and become a place viewers will go for quality original material.

We’re a free site, so it’s a labour of love for everyone involved and we’re all busting our asses during the hours we’re not doing paid work, to provide our strongest signature material. I’d like for this to pay off somehow, either by the repackaging of material into a form we charge for, or book deals, or offers of work based upon the work we’re showing, or perhaps we’ll be able to sell ad space on the site at some point.

(the Brooklyn Phallacy by and (c) Seth Kushner)

Jen Ferguson: I hope it continues for as long as it’s viable.

Amy Finkel: I hope the audience grows and grows and that everyone involved remains inspired and excited and productive! And that we continue to make one another, and our viewers, laugh. For me that’s always the end goal. Trip City is a really entertaining and mischievous community.

Chris Miskiewicz: I’d like for it to become a destination point in the same way people go to other news/entertainment/media sites for content. We’re building it, and it’s a good plan with some great people contributing. I’d love to hear someone ask “Did you see that webseries on Trip City?” go find it, and then find our site and just be blown away by the content coming from individuals who are pro’s in their respected fields. We’ve got something for everyone brewing here.

Ron Scalzo: I hope it maintains a loyal fan base, that’s all these little web collectives can aspire to nowadays, to become the next AV Club or The Onion — it’s so hard to monetise what we do as artists in the Internet age, and time is money. It’s all about numbers now — we’ve become digital numbers. How many Facebook fans do you have, how many hits did your article get, how many Twitter followers? How many people are actually paying attention to this when they can be attending to 8 million other things both on and offline?

As a result, sites like Trip City have a pretty short shelf life, so for me there are no expectations. Que sera sera. I’d like to think that a small group of knuckleheads will remain loyal and spread the gospel to their knucklehead friends. My bigger hope is to find cool ways to collaborate with other folks who contribute to the site — I’m already a fan of Seth & Dean’s, and I’m becoming a fan of a lot of the folks on the site like Jef UK. I live in Staten Island, so it’s hard to find like-minded individuals to make music and mojo with. We can make a pizza out here, maybe, but that’s pretty much it. Really, I’m just hoping my Mom reads my stuff.

Jef UK: I just want people to come read, watch, listen and interact with what we’re making — everybody and everyday.

In one year I would like to have the kinks ironed out, and know that people across the world are tuning in every day to see what’s new up at Trip City. In five years time, I hope we’ve sold the site to GoogleAppleBrosDisney Inc. for a buttload of cash. In ten years time, I hope we’re wailing about how we never should have sold the site to GoogleAppleBrosDisney Inc.

Matt: Is Trip City about a ‘strength in numbers’ approach to publicising your art?

Jen Ferguson: I don’t think about it that way, personally. I’d be happy if people were interesting in reading Metrollpolis, and I’m honoured to have my work in the company of other good inventive artists.

The site is beautifully designed and it’s easy to see and access the works presented there, which should help people to not only follow their favourite artist’s work but also perhaps discover new favourites.

Amy Finkel: It certainly helps. But mostly I think that the Trip City founders happen to know a myriad of highly creative artists in a relatively small community in Brooklyn, and they want to champion one another’s work. We all do. It’s a very supportive community of people that actually make things happen. The strength in those numbers, then, becomes inspiration. And positive reinforcement among your peers.

Seth Kushner: There’s strong social media aspect to Trip City. We’re using Facebook and Twitter to promote all new material and we all “share” and retweet each other, so theoretically this allows us each to reach a different audience than we would on our own.

Chris Miskiewicz: To some degree, yes. But more than that, we happen to be fans and friends of each other’s work. Several of us are constantly speaking about what we’re writing/drawing/making and emailing each other for review. This community is becoming an interesting collective voice. We all make stuff, and this is our spot to freely show/voice that stuff without the constant search and struggle of pitching to publishers. We have a free hand here, and we’re using it.

Jef UK: Absolutely. We’re trying to embrace social media, such that if there are 5-10 of us talking about one another’s new feature or blog post, then that conversation will grow exponentially between all of our contacts and followers. Similarly, we all have different contacts in the press and fan sites and the like, so we hope and know that if one of us can get some exposure on a particular website, another can get some exposure on a particular podcast, etc.

Ron Scalzo: It’s a noble thought, and in the Internet age, it’s become Marketing 101. I don’t really buy into it, tho — I mean, I conform to it but only as a necessary evil. I know how to promote myself, I’ve been running my own record label for five years and I’m associated with some pretty big acts, guys who play in Guns N Roses and Coheed + Cambria. To “latch on” to the epic numbers of followers those bands possess seems huge on paper, but it’s like ‘How many fans of “Welcome To The Jungle” are gonna be into a Q*Ball song based on the ’80s movie “Three O’Clock High”‘? It doesn’t really translate — it’s one thing to let people know you exist, it’s another thing to get them to care that you exist. It’s kinda like trying to get the attention of a girl you like.

I’m always happy to plug anything I’m a fan of, both on and offline, whether I’m involved in it or not. I’m not a comic artist or a cartoonist, so I’m really a bit of an outsider here, writing about my affection for horror movies and waxing nostalgic about my childhood and shitty romantic life. Rick Parker is contributing illustrations to my monthly horror movie piece, and so yeah, his fans are reading my essays and my fans are checking out his artwork. Even if a dozen people on each side cross over, it’s a win-win. But I’m not doing this for anything more than to flex my creative muscles. I’m not in charge, remember? :)

Matt: And finally, what question haven’t I asked about the site that I should have?

Ron Scalzo: You forgot to ask what the property taxes were in Trip City. The answer is cheap. Real cheap.

Seth Kushner: There’s a lot brewing at Trip City. I’ve been continuing my series CulturePOP Photocomix on Trip City. Author and creator of HBO’s Bored To Death Jonathan Ames was the first one, followed by comedian and WTF podcaster Marc Maron. Upcoming I have Moby and James Haspiel, Dean’s dad and friend and biographer of Marilyn Monroe.

I will also be writing my own semi-autobio comix series called, SCHMUCK. The first chapter, illustrated by Kevin Colden, appeared on ActivateComix.com two years ago. Moving forward, I’ll have different artists illustrating 8-10 page chapters. I plan to launch it in February and then post monthly.

The big thing coming on the site proper is Dean’s new Billy Dogma story, “The Last Romantic Antihero.” I’ve seen it and it’s a doozey and it will appear only on Trip City.

Jef UK: “How did you get so many talented people involved that are also so good looking?”

Matt: Thanks to Jen, Amy, Seth, Chris, Jef and Ron for taking time out of their busy schedules to participate in this roundtable. As you can see it’s a pretty intoxicating combination of various artistic mediums and works coming from the sparks generated by putting some excellent creative people into a room and telling them Dean will buy them all donuts, and it should be in your bookmarks now (and you should be re-tweeting and posting about it; you can also follow the latest on the site via their Twitter). Look out for another Trip City chat coming (relatively) soon.

About this roundtable’s participants:

Chris Miskiewicz is a native Brooklynite who works in film, music, comics and prose.

Chris is a member of the webcomics collective ACT-I-VATE where he writes the monthly anthology series EVERYWHERE. His writing has appeared in Underflow & Jerry Magazines. He also makes music in Swinger Eight and is the producer of the Trip City Podcast series. You can also follow Chris on Twitter here.

Seth Kushner’s photography has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Time, Newsweek, L’Uomo Vogue, The New Yorker and others. He was chosen by Photo District News magazine as one of their 30 under 30 in 1999 and is a two-time winner of their Photo Annual Competition.

Seth’s first book, The Brooklynites, (with Anthony LaSala) was published by powerHouse Books in 2007. His next book, Leaping Tall Buildings: The Origins of American Comics (with Chris Irving) will be released in March 2012.

TRIP CITY is the current home of Seth’s profile series CulturePOP Photocomix, which began life on ACT-I-VATE.com.

Seth resides in his hometown of Brooklyn, NY with his wife, son and way too many cameras and comics.

Jef UK is a writer and rockstar from Texas, living in Brooklyn, NY. Frontman for the now decade-old, sci-fi post-punk band,AMERICANS UK, he writes all the time, he rocks all the time. Sometimes he gets published. His first graphic novel, Odd Schnozz and the Odd Squad, is scheduled for release in 2012 from Oni Press. The follow-up album to 2009′s Rocktronic by AMERICANS UK is also on the horizon, titled Where Giants Walk. You can also find Jef online on his Tumblr, the Americans UK Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter.

(the Better Head from Trip City by and (c) Jeff UK, art by Tony Fleecs)

Amy Finkel is a designer, photographer, documentary filmmaker, and writer. She is the founder and creative director of Sailor Beware, LLC, an agency that specializes in web design and video work. Her video work has appeared on HBO, MTV, Comedy Central, The History Channel and PBS. She is an instructor at both NYU and Parsons School of Design, where she teaches classes in web design, documentary film making, and new media. Amy served as a judge for the feature-length documentary division for IDA’s 2009 Documentary Achievement Awards. She has also been a judge for New York Festivals, in their TV documentary division.

Amy’s website can be found here and this recent article in the NYT’s City Rooms blog gives a good insight into her work.

Ron Scalzo is a supreme music and movie nerd who dabbles in writing, puppetry, list making, and film scoring. His creative resume includes fronting longtime electronic rock act Q*Ball, progressive metal band Return To Earth (Metal Blade Records), and experimental electro project Hooper. Ron is the owner of NY based independent record label Bald Freak Music and has signed NJ pirate metal band Swashbuckle (now on Nuclear Blast) and NYC modern rock act The Head Set in addition to promoting and distributing music from his own musical projects since 2005.

Ron is also a producer for the syndicated Elvis Duran & the Morning Show. Ron has perfect grammar and terrible timing; you can also follow him via Twitter.

Jen Ferguson lives and works as a full time artist in Brooklyn, NY, where she paints and creates strange worlds through which to filter a life of quixotic artistic endeavors.

Jen’s art is featured in the Blue Ribbon Restaurants where she created the menu art and décor since its inception, and was published in “Art of the Brooklyn Bridge: A Visual History” [Richard Haw, Routledge 2008]. Jen has created wine label art for Brooklyn Oenology, and “Railbirds,” an ongoing drawing project inspired by the Aqueduct Racetrack. She most recently collaborated with composer and artist JG Thirlwell on “DUMBO: A Pagan Walks Among Us,” a comic published in BookCourt’s Cousin Corrine’s Reminder, and her paintings are featured in HBO’S Bored to Death. Jen’s work may be viewed at www.artinchaos.com and via her blog; her prints are available at to purchase via her Etsy store.

Low Life: The Deal in 2000 AD (by Rob Williams and D’Israeli from Rebellion) – Dirty Frank, an undercover judge from Mega-City One, heads to Hondo-Cit (the ‘Dreddverse Japan’).  There, he’s forced to consider his place in the universe as both a Judge and a human being. Action-packed, thrill-tastic, emotional and really quite deep, this is an absolute classic. Possibly the best strip in 2000 AD this year (but… you know… Zombo.)

(some stunning Hondo City art from Low Life: the Deal by Rob Williams and D’Israeli, borrowed shamelesly from D’Israeli’s blog)

The Doctor Who comics exhibition at the Cartoon Museum in London (by various) – Two national treasures collided. The result was mind-blowing.

(The Usual Suspects Revisited by and (c) Lee Sullivan, Doctor Who (c) BBC)

Blood Blokes (By Adam Cadwell) – Vampiric goings-on against the backdrop of Manchester. Cool art. Good writing. In short, dead fab. (Do you see what I did there?)

(a scene from Blood Blokes by and (c) Adam Cadwell)

Sandcastle (by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters from SelfMadeHero) – The best graphic novel of 2011 from one of the best publishing houses. A group of people find themselves trapped on a beach where… well, to say more would spoil things. Chilling stuff that makes you think. It’s like an ‘art-house’ take on an episode of the Twilight Zone.

(a scene from the disturbing & intriguing Sandcastle by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederick Peeters, published SelfMadeHero)

SVK (by Warren Ellis and D’Israeli from BERG) – Thomas Woodwind is tasked with finding the titular SVK (special viewing kit) in this smart thriller. The SVK lets people see the thoughts of others. ‘Invisible’ thought balloons printed in ultra-violet ink mean that the reader can too (via an ultra-violet torch that comes with this comic and when shined on its pages reveals the balloons). Warren Ellis reminds us that he’s a talented bugger and no mistake. D’Israeli knocks it out of the park (as usual). Fantastic storytelling and art meet formal play.

(Warren Ellis and D’Israeli’s unusual SVK – as seen bythe human eye (above) and with the aid of ultraviolet ‘black’ light torch (below))

West: Stray Bullets (by Andrew Cheverton, Tim Keable, Warwick Johnson Cadwell, Jenika Ioffreda, Emma Price and Paul Rainey from Angry Candy) – Six tales of Andrew Cheverton and Tim Keable’s Jerusalem West, with contributions from a number of other top artists. The resultant anthology — that occasionally mixes supernatural and fantastic themes into its Wild West setting — is well worth picking up.

(cover to Angry Candy’s West: Stray Bullets collection – the series is  firm favourite around these here parts, let no low-down varmint say otherwise or we’ll send him to Boot Hill)

The Thought Bubble comic con (held in Leeds on an annual basis) – I came, I saw, I danced to A-Ha. And picked up lots of great small press comics. Best. Con. Ever. (Probably.)

(Woodrow Phoenix with the Nelson anthology at Thought Bubble this year, pic by Richard and Molly Bruton, from the FPI Flickr; sadly not pictured – Matt’s 80s revival dancing, alas…)

MB: How did you come up with the idea for The Thrill Electric?

Leah: It was actually one of those mythic “sit bolt upright in bed and have to write it all down” moments, which, to be honest, I’ve never had before and didn’t really believe in either. I’d been looking at an amazing website about the telegraph and must have read almost all of it in one day. I found it fascinating that way back in the 1800s people had a form of instant messaging. That small fact kind of changed the whole way I’d thought about the whole of the Nineteenth Century! I’d previously thought of them all as very ponderous old men, sitting in their gloomy studies growing huge sideburns and being philanthropic.

If you introduce what was effectively a Victorian Internet into that idea then they become much more recognisably modern, feeling people. The other thing that really struck me was the fact that it was a really big breakthrough industry for women getting into the workplace. It was a clean respectable, white-collar job that young girls and women could get into and rise through the ranks of. I couldn’t stop thinking about this really modern story, of a girl starting her new job at the telegraph office. It just seemed so cool to me.

MB: How did it come to be placed with Channel 4?

John: We got an email out of the blue from Andrew Mettam at Hat Trick Productions saying he liked our work and that he’d like to meet up and discuss the possibility of us working with them on something to pitch to Channel 4 Education. We knocked a few rough ideas together to show him the kind of thing we thought would be interesting and educational for 14 to 19 year-olds, and The Thrill Electric was one of them. Andrew really liked what we’d come up with and was keen for us to push things forward. Within weeks we were down in London meeting with Hat Trick and pitching our ideas with them to Channel 4. The Thrill Electric was the one that everyone seemed to really love. Within a couple of months of Andrew contacting us we had an agent and had signed the contract to write the series. It’s all very exciting.

MB: I’ve been describing The Thrill Electric to myself as a ‘motion comic’, but it’s not is it? It’s an enhanced digital comic. But what’s the difference?

John: Up to this point in time, motion comics have largely been stories that have already been printed in the normal format and then later been digitised and enhanced to add something a bit extra. This has resulted in some of them basically turning into sub-par animations, complete with dodgy voice acting.

Because we’ve written The Thrill Electric specifically as an enhanced digital comic, we’ve been able to stick to what we see as the fundamentals of comic-book storytelling – pages, panels, word balloons, captions – and add extra layers.  So, we have things like sound-loops for each panel that set the scene and provide a bit of ambience; we have panels stacking up one in front of another to form corridors, or becoming the walls of a 3D space; we have clickable icons serving the same function as old-fashioned thought balloons, allowing you to see what a character is thinking.

We’re not trying to hide the fact that it’s a comic by adding a load of bells and whistles. We’re trying to make it everything a print comic is and more. Even though the reader for The Thrill Electric was purpose-built for the project by LittleLoud, we’ve ended up pushing it to the limits of what it’s capable of, which can only be a good thing.

MB: Why did you go for that approach, rather than a ‘straight’ comic or animation?

Leah: I think it’s appropriate for Thrill to be like that, because, like the protagonist, it’s embracing the surge in technology. We wanted Thrill to be available to its audience in an accessible form, so they can read it on their phones, their tablet PCs or Ipads. You often get existing comics sold as digital copies, or motion comics where they have been adapted into semi-animated comics with a voiceover. Obviously that has a place in the industry but we didn’t want to do that.

The Thrill Electric is essentially a 150-page graphic novel written specifically for the digital online format, which I’m not sure anyone else has done before. We wanted to do all the things you definitely can’t do in print, but that you see all the time in online content, soundtracks, music, movement etc. It has been a challenge to make all of that work and make it fit with the story, but I am really pleased with the result. I think it’s a really fun story and hopefully the format will be something new for people. A new way to enjoy comics.

MB: What is Emma Vieceli’s role in The Thrill Electric and how did she come on board?

Leah: We’ve known Emma for ages and loved her work, so when we were asked who we might like to draw The Thrill Electric, she was one of our very first suggestions. Unluckily for us, she was much too busy to draw and colour 150 pages of comic all of a sudden. Luckily for comic fans, this was because she was already drawing the Vampire Academy graphic novel adaptations, which, I believe, recently made the New York Times best-sellers list! Despite being so incredibly busy, Emma kindly offered to design the characters and the whole feel of the story, and then put us in touch with Windflower Studio who would go on to draw the comic in Emma’s beautiful style. The whole thing couldn’t have worked better really. Our only worry is that Emma will be in such demand now we’ll not get a look in! We’ll have to snag her on something else soon!

MB: Please tell us about Windflower Studio and their involvement.

John: All-female UK-based comic book collective, Windflower Studio has turned out to be a perfect fit for the project. They’re all incredibly talented and have properly slogged their guts out on the series. To get The Thrill Electric ‘look’, the foreground, midground and background of each panel had to be drawn separately, so you can imagine how much work went into every single page. I just hope we haven’t put them off doing more comics work, not least because I’d love to see more from them in the future.

MB: Even though it’s set in the Victorian era, the Thrill Electric is actually quite contemporaneous in terms of its subject and themes. Would you agree with that statement and to what extent, and in what way? (Cor, that one’s a bit like an essay question. Soz.)

Leah: Whoo. Okay. Loving your use of the word contemporaneous by the way! Yes, it’s dealing with young people going into the workplace for the first time and how daunting that can be. It’s about what an online network like the Internet, or the Telegraph actually means for people in their everyday lives. Gossip spreading faster than people could imagine, online bullying, sexting, spam and scam artists, online gaming and Skype-type intercontinental communications.

It’s about being in a world where you can hear the voices of so many other people and more importantly, they can all hear you too. It’s about a group of young people suddenly finding themselves at the very cutting edge of technology, and almost becoming a species of their own, with their own language, their own slang, their online buddies, their Siemens telegraph key. I’d say in a way it’s one of the most modern things we’ve ever written, even though it’s set in the 1870’s.

MB: Finally, what haven’t I asked about the Thrill Electric (or the creators involved) that I should have?

John: The fact that it’s set in Manchester is a pretty big deal and quite important. When we were still at the pitching stage we were thinking of setting it in London, which would have made things very different. Manchester was the first truly industrialised city on the planet and was viewed by the rest of the world as a kind of metropolis of the future. The cotton industry was incredibly important, of course, but there was just so much industry – so many inventions and innovations that were changing the world all coming out of this place that had been little more than a small market town mere decades before. Victorian Manchester is about as steampunk as it gets.

MB: Leah and John, thanks for your time.

Leah Moore and John Reppion are the critically acclaimed writing team behind such works as The Trial of Sherlock Holmes, Albion, Raise the Dead and Wild Girl. Their website can be found here, while the Thrill Electric is online here.

Windflower Studio is a UK-based, all-female comic book studio. For more on Windflower Studio, check their website.

Emma Vieceli is the acclaimed writer/artist behind many works including Marvel Girl Comics and Dragon Heir: Reborn. For details of Vieceli and her work, have a look at Em’s site.

Matt Badham has written articles for the Big Issue in the North, Comic Heroes and the Judge Dredd Megazine. He’s also had three of his comic scripts realised, in 2000 AD, Commando Picture Library and Zarjaz. He can be contacted via mattbadham (at) hotmail (dot) com. He doesn’t have a blog or website because… well, he’s doesn’t do enough interesting stuff to justify having a blog or website. (Last night he painted the bathroom door. Tonight he’s going to give it another coat… or two.)

But why do I want to write a column? And what will I be writing about?

I don’t really like keeping a blog. I’ve tried over the last few years (mainly because I felt, as a freelance writer, that I should have somewhere to showcase myself). However, my latest effort has just gone ‘boom’ due to inattention because…

Time for a digression.

A few years ago I was at a comics convention talking to Colin Mathieson of Accent UK and he identified me as “The man who keeps starting and then deleting blogs.” (that’s not entirely accurate – you’re also the man who starts and deletes Twitter accounts too! – Joe)

I can commit to certain things in life: I can commit to my friends, my family and to the Doctor (until recently at least: ‘appointment drama’, who needs it?) But I can never seem to commit to blogs. They’re just too f**king needy. Rapacious little content eaters that… well, they’re not for me.

An occasional column at the FPI blog gives me the best of all worlds. I’ve got a place to put writing that I’m not being paid for, but I’m not solely responsible for all the content here and if I fall off the radar, well… it was nice while it lasted.

That’s the why. Now what about the what…

I’ll be writing mostly about comics (no surprise there) but I hope to filter the medium through the wider lens of society. In fact, what I imagine I’ll write about a lot is hacking.

A pause. Another digression and another explanation:

A few weeks ago (or a month, maybe more), there was an interesting article in the Guardian about hacking. (I can’t find it online but if anyone can and they want to send it to me, I’d be most grateful.) The piece discussed the fact that (and I’m working from memory here) the classic stereotypical image of a hacker is almost wholly negative. That what springs to mind when someone uses the term ‘hacker’ is a programmer who uses their expertise and knowledge to disrupt computer systems. To steal money perhaps…

But not all hacking is negative. After all, a hacker can go into a system and try to improve it. The article further posited hacking as a metaphor for any intervention we make in life and that idea really caught my imagination. I’m a member of a local gardening group — co-project-managing a community allotment scheme — and now every time I sit down to devote time to my work with the group, I think of it as a hack. We’re hacking society. We’re hacking the land.

(cover art to Commando Book #4385, Deserter, written by Matthew Badham, art by Macabich, published and (c)  DC Thomson)

But what has that got to do with comics?

Well, comics is full of hackers…

From creator to fan.

Writers and artists create content that reflects their world-view and then filters down to fans (although they don’t always accept it unquestioningly, of course, as many creators can testify to). Fans use their wallets to decide which titles live or die. Retailers betray bias in their shelf-space arrangement, even if unconsciously. Con-organisers make the spaces in which feuds happen and friendships are formed. Bloggers throw words and images into the idea-scape, which spark, rebound and reverberate.

And they all shape comics. Put their values somewhere on the agenda. For good or ill.

And that’s what I want to write about.

So, yeah, what do I hope this column will be about? Comics — from fan to creator — and hacking… and, if all goes a plan, a bit more besides.

Matt Badham has written articles for the Big Issue in the North, Comic Heroes and the Judge Dredd Megazine. He’s also had three of his comic scripts realised, in 2000 AD, Commando Picture Library and Zarjaz. He can be contacted via mattbadham (at) hotmail (dot) com.

If you’d like Matt to mention your stuff (comics, books, cakes, board games, card games, beer or whatever), then feel free to drop him a line and send him a sample. If he likes your product and the ethic behind it, he’ll try to give you a plug. If he doesn’t, then he won’t. (Also, if you’re an individual or small company then he’s more likely to give you a plug. If you’re a mega-corp, you might just be wasting your time sending anything.)

This time round, Matt would like to direct your attention to the fantastic Thrillpowered Thursday blog, which as the name infers, covers the great institution, 2000 AD. (Yes, he’d like to plug blogs and websites too that catch his eye.)

(some gorgeous promotional art for John’s Mercy Heights in 2000 AD, art by the excellent Kev Walker)

Matt: How did you first get into the comics biz?

John: I was a graphic design student, and in the second year of my B.A. course at Leicester Poly. I wrote to IPC, DC Thomson and Marvel asking for work experience. Marvel was first to respond, although I expect to hear from IPC and DC Thompson any day now. I’d always wanted to draw comics; writing never occurred to me as an option. All my illustration work was done with a pointy little Rotring pen and I used to think I was pretty good – but the first actual page of professional comic art I saw was a revelation. For one thing it was huge – twice the size it appeared in print, and rendered in beautiful brushwork. The first pages I saw were from Steve Dillon’s Abslom Daak (the famous ‘Dalek Killer’ – Joe) strip for Doctor Who Magazine and, though he was maybe 17 years old at the time, he was already drawing like a seasoned pro. I couldn’t believe how good it was.

Matt: How much pressure came with editing an iconic comic like 2000 AD?

John: The main source of stress on a 32-page, full colour, fully-originated weekly comic is deadlines. I was incredibly lucky when I edited 2000 AD in that the freelancers tended to turn things in on time; writers and artists are free-spirited, sometimes flaky creatures and to corral them into the rigid confines of a weekly schedule can be akin to herding cats. Very rarely someone (more often an artist than a writer, though there’s no hard and fast rule) would go AWOL, but there was invariably another available to fill in and we never went late on sale. Now and then we’d have to break a series and drop in a Future Shock to allow the artist time to catch up, but the readers rarely complained.

(cover art for 2000 AD Prog 1133, with  Tor Cyan by Greg Staples, introducing part 1 of  John Tomlinson’s Mercy Heights)

Matt: What makes a quintessential 2000 AD strip (if indeed there is such a thing)?

John: The mere fact that I’ve been asked this question, let alone attempted to answer it, might suggest that I regard myself as some kind of authority on the subject. I don’t – and I’d be suspicious of anyone who claimed to be. Despite having written a bunch of strips for 2000 AD over the years and edited a lot more in my time as Tharg, I’m still just guessing around. Maybe it’s because the audience has seen it all before. Or maybe there IS no quintessential 2000 AD strip – after all, if a writer or editor ever discovered the formula and tried to impose it on the writers every strip would be the same, and that wouldn’t work.

Obviously it helps if it’s set in the future, though that’s not compulsory. Ostensibly a science fiction mag, 2000 AD has always been a pretty broad church, incorporating fantasy, horror and (in my case, anyway) kitchen sink drama. Albeit the kind of sink that has sentient, inimical growths lurking in it. One strip I wrote was directly inspired by the seething Petri dish of Dickensian squalor that I remember only too well from my first shared flat. The sundered MFI kitchen units, the drunken 3AM grill fires and the slugs. Oh god, the slugs. Memories are made of this, and of substances still a mystery to forensic science. There were four of us in there, and we very soon began to disavow responsibility for the washing up. Towering mesas of it piled up and up, and started to smell. We would carry it to the end of the garden to alleviate the stench rather than actually clean the bloody stuff. And from that came a story about a stack of possessed washing up that needed exorcism.

Perhaps it’s just me, but I’ve always thought that the most effective 2000 AD strips are those that leave the reader feeling afraid, appalled and slightly ill. It’s a tricky formula to pull off, but when it works it’s instantly identifiable. It was there in the early series of Flesh, in John Smith’s work, in the best Dredd stories and it’s there in abundance in Al Ewing and Henry Flint’s Zombo. There may not be an archetypal 2000 AD strip, but Zombo comes pretty close in my opinion. And if there’s a quintessential 2000 AD writer/artist team, those two are it.

Matt: Why are Al Ewing and Henry Flint the ‘quintessential 2000 AD team’?

John: It just seems to me that their work typifies all that’s baddest and best about 2000 AD. I’ve never met Al Ewing, but I’d be willing to bet he grew up reading it, and his writing, particularly Zombo, captures its pitch black essence just right. Same goes for Henry Flint, who I brought to Richard Burton and Alan McKenzie’s attention after he drew a couple of my strips (Of Ill Omen and Kicking The Monolithic Habit) for Monster Massacre, published by the gone but not forgotten Tundra. They fell upon him like hunger-maddened lampreys, nabbing him to draw Rogue Trooper, and he’s rarely been out of 2000 AD since. His work is often, and justly, compared to Mike McMahon and Cam Kennedy, two of the very best artists in 2000 AD history. When he draws Dredd there are elements of Ezquerra too, but his style has its own unique identity, particularly in strips like Zombo and Shakara, and it’s all 2000 AD.

(above and below, some wonderful Rogue Trooper pages from John’s script, illustrated by the great Dave Gibbons, (c) Rebellion)

Matt: How did you ‘learn’ to write comics? By reading comics, by just sitting down and getting on with it? By editing them? All three?

John: By reading them, for sure. But like milk that takes the flavour of whatever it’s next to in the fridge, there were plenty of other influences.

The biggest influence in terms of comics storytelling was undoubtedly David Lloyd, who I was lucky enough to interview for my college thesis. V For Vendetta was running in Warrior at the time and, though it seems incredible to me now, I’d never really considered the importance of storytelling in comics until that strip. The best comics, and Vendetta is pretty much a paradigm in that respect, are those in which it’s possible to follow the story without the benefit of captions or dialogue, like a movie storyboard. I remember him saying ‘forget Dallas and Dynasty – watch Citizen Kane!’ I never saw any scripts and therefore couldn’t say how much influence Alan Moore had on the storytelling aspect, but David Lloyd also said that V was a total collaboration and I have no reason to doubt him.

Again though, all the above rather gives the impression that I regard myself as some kind of bleedin’ expert. The inescapable fact is that I’m still learning how to write comics, and I’m not even halfway there yet. A few years ago the Danish artist Peter Snejbjerg, with whom I’d worked on a horror series (The Lords of Misrule, co-written with Dan Abnett and Steve White.), asked me to dialogue a graphic novel he’d written and drawn (Marlene), about a shape-shifting succubus. His approach to the visual storytelling was so original, so fluid, so utterly different from The Lords of Misrule that I suddenly realised I didn’t know a damn thing. I was inspired rather than depressed by this realisation however.

(cover to Marlene by and (c) Peter Snejbjerg)

Matt: What was that approach?

John: To me it’s like the difference between a three chord pop song and a symphony orchestra. One thing that impressed me was the way he uses the panel count of a page to vary the pace of the story. In writing a six-page 2000 AD strip I stick to a pretty rigid template; between five and six panels a page, with an occasional three or four-panel page for the intro, or if there are any shocking or spectacular scenes I need to spring on the reader. It varies, but not by much.

In Marlene, by cutting between progressively smaller, tighter panels Peter creates the impression of increasing speed and mounting tension, a technique I’d never seen before. The way he uses body language to establish a character is also innovative, and perhaps more likely to occur to an artist than a writer. The hero of Marlene is a cop, Michael Joergensen. As the story opens he’s a somewhat stiff, repressed figure. Peter conveys this in a fight scene in which he barely moves; ducking slightly or stepping aside, his upright pose and expression barely changing as three desperate hoods effectively beat themselves up in their clumsy attempts to lay a finger (or shovel) on him. From that scene also comes a particular favourite sound effect, which I’ve pinched and used elsewhere since, as someone is clobbered with the aforementioned shovel: BLONG! Love it.

Incidentally, the first two pages of Marlene, introducing three key characters and ending in a gruesome murder, are played out entirely in tightly paced images and sound effects and are all the more effective for it.

(above and bellow, scenes from Marlene by and (c) Peter Snejbjerg)

The story is set in two main locations. The city scenes are dark and cramped, huddled in shadow. When the narrative moves to the country the panels become larger, more open, with less use of blacks, creating the impression of wide open spaces and bright sunlight. Subtle techniques, but highly effective. For my money Peter is also the equal of David Lloyd in his ability to tell a story without captions or dialogue. Editors (and I’ve been guilty of this myself) are infamously wanton vandals when it comes to ‘empty’ pages. If a page of strip has no captions or dialogue they really can’t bear it, and start whacking them in willy-nilly.

If a page is particularly wordy they get a glassy stare and the hacking and slashing begins. Perhaps because Peter was his own editor on Marlene there’s none of this; silent pages remain silent, wordy pages are allowed to stand, and the story as a whole is richer for it. Although I dialogued Marlene based on Peter’s translation, I could see how well this approach worked and was happy to leave it alone.

I hesitate to say this, because it wrests a lot of control from the writer – writers are notorious control freaks and I’m no exception – but I’ve come to believe that the best method for writers and artists to collaborate is ‘Marvel style’ (pioneered in the 60s by Stan Lee, who was presumably too busy to write full scripts). In essence, the writer supplies a detailed synopsis of the story, containing all essential plot points and relevant details. This goes to the artist, who breaks it down into visual storytelling; pages of comic art. The strip is then returned to the writer who adds captions, dialogue and sound effects. The inescapable fact (though by no means a rule of thumb) is that the average comics artist knows a lot more about how to tell a story in pictures than the average comics writer.

I worked this way recently on a script written for Marvel veteran Herb Trimpe, an artist famed for his cinematic storytelling, who coincidentally drew the first Marvel comic I ever read (Incredible Hulk issue #117). It was great fun and turned out well, though he did say that my plot was way too detailed: ‘Usually we only got a few lines!’ As Stan might say, they fight Doc Doom this month.

(a page from Mercy Heights series 2 in 2000AD by John Tomlinson, art by  Trevor Hairsine, colouring by Chris Blythe)

Matt: You’ve (fairly) recently returned to writing Dredd for 2000 AD after a break of some years. How do you write a Dredd? Both how do you and how does one write a Dredd?

John: Another thing I’m still trying to figure out. Judge Dredd has changed and evolved quite a bit in its long history, the jokier, action-based strips giving way to more layered, political stories. This has much to do with the evolution of John Wagner’s writing, since he’s still the main Dredd writer and therefore sets the tone. He certainly didn’t need any guidance from me when I edited 2000 AD. As a strip Judge Dredd appears to have grown up – however, though I love the current approach I still kind of miss the old school stories. So I tried to hark back to them in the few I’ve written recently.

Like most good SF, Judge Dredd isn’t really about the future. It’s a grim satire about today, current social, political and scientific trends extrapolated to terrible extremes. And it’s not easy to do – particularly as the present day becomes increasingly difficult to satirise, and London in particular seems more like the Big Meg with every passing year.

Matt: Why is Stan Lee one of your heroes?

John: Where do you start? Just check out every other movie blockbuster of the past decade. But long before any of those movies there was Stan the Man, Jack ‘King’ Kirby and the Mighty Marvel Bullpen. Pushing 90, he’s still a tireless showman and huckster for comics, fizzing with energy and enthusiasm. He’s taken a kicking over the years for supposedly grabbing glory due to Kirby and Ditko, but for anyone who’s read the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Thor et al, Stan’s writing style is instantly identifiable, clear and distinctive as a watermark. He may indeed have called Jack once a month to say ‘they fight Doc Doom this issue’ rather than write full scripts, but it was the synthesis of their talents that made the FF great. Jack created a galaxy of characters, but Stan made you care about them and laugh at their jokes.

A total eccentric too… All that cod-Shakespearian, quasi-biblical, Omar Khayam stuff: ‘Verily true believer, tamam shud!’ and so on. My favourite Marvel cover line of all time has to be ‘WHAT PROFITETH IT A MAN TO FLEE HIS FATE? FOR HE SHALL SURELY FIND… WORLDS WITHIN WORLDS!’ I’ve no idea if Stan actually wrote that, but it certainly wouldn’t have happened without him. You couldn’t get away with any of that nonsense at Marvel now, and more’s the pity. I hope he lives forever. The only tragedy is that Jack didn’t live to enjoy the spoils too.

FPI would like to thank John and Matt for taking the time to share their thoughts with us.

In this round table, conducted for the Forbidden Planet International blog and Down the Tubes by Matt Badham, Matt Smith (editor of 2000 AD), Gerry Finley-Day, Staz Johnson (the artist on this new strip) and Pat Mills (veteran comics writer and friend of Finley-Day) all talk about the genesis of the new story, entitled Dead Ringer…

(NB: Matt Badham originally conducted these interviews by email. They were then edited together to make a ’round table discussion’.)

(cover art to 2000 AD Prog 2011, which features the return of Rogue Trooper under the guiding hand of Gerry Finley-Day)

Matt Badham: Gerry, what have you been up to writing-wise since you stopped working for 2000 AD?

Gerry Finley-Day: Once a writer, always a writer… I have written novels and some screen plays.

Matt Badham: And what brought you back to 2000 AD and to Rogue?

Gerry Finley-Day: When my friend Pat Mills returned from a comics convention in the States he told me that many people were asking about me. He seemed to think there was a demand for some fresh material from me and I thought, why not?

Matt Smith: Pat got in touch and said that he’d like to work (in an editorial capacity) with Gerry on a Rogue story. I think he felt that Gerry got unfairly sidelined out of 2000 AD, and wanted to help him try to write something for the comic today. The plan was to work on a standalone Rogue story, something that could slot quite easily into the comic.

Pat Mills: Gerry was the creator of Tammy, from which Battle, Action and 2000 AD are descended, so he is the founder of modern British comics. This has been pretty much ignored by comic historians and Gerry also had some insider-encouraged negative press on the web in years gone by, which made me seethe with anger with its inaccuracy and self-serving motivation. The reality is fans loved his work, but it didn’t find favour with 2000 AD editorial at one stage.

Having been Gerry’s editor, I know the relatively small problems they faced (pacing and some story logic issues) but it was my view that it was worth dealing with them ‘in house’ because his stories were so popular. We all of us have our scripting faults and eccentricities and it’s just something I felt we had to accept. Editorial didn’t agree and I can completely understand why. But fans didn’t agree with them either and kept asking for Gerry back, so I recently seized the chance and facilitated it.

(the return of Rogue Trooper, art by Staz Johnson, (c) Rebellion)

Matt Badham: Matt, where in Rogue continuity is the story set?

Matt Smith: During the original run. It starts with the commemoration of the fifth anniversary of the Quartz Zone Massacre.

Matt Badham: How did you go about finding an appropriate artist for this new episode and why did you choose Staz Johnson?

Matt Smith: It was always the intention to run it in black and white, so I was after a good b/w artist. Staz has experience drawing Rogue and was champing at the bit to do it.

Matt Badham: How excited were you to welcome Rogue and his creator back? Were you a fan of the strip way back in the day…?

Matt Smith: It’s good to see the original Rogue back in the prog for a simple, action-packed story. I was a fan of the original run, but he’s a character who’s been diminished, unfortunately, by too many ‘re-imaginings’ and new directions. Just seeing Rogue back on Nu Earth fighting Norts is quite reassuring.

Matt Badham: Staz, are you also a fan of Rogue from way back?

Staz Johnson: Absolutely I am. I was at the key 2000 AD readership age (17) when Rogue debuted in 2000 AD and it didn’t take long before he had usurped Dredd as my favourite character. Anyone who has followed my blog will have seen this post where I posted some of my attempts at Rogue from long before I became a professional cartoonist, and just drew him for the sheer love of the character.

(Rogue takes on the Norts, art by Staz Johnson, (c) Rebellion)

Matt Badham: So, how did you actually get involved with the new strip?

Staz Johnson: There was no alchemy to it, as it was simply the case that I had spoken to Tharg saying I was available. (I assume) when the script came in a few days later, he in his mighty wisdom figured I’d be a good fit, so he called me up.

Matt Badham: Pat, what was the exact nature of your ‘editorial’ involvement with the new strip?

Pat Mills: I made a few minor changes to Gerry’s new Rogue story strip, but frankly it was just like I remembered his scripts. Not a big deal to make a few alterations. He has a feeling for some stories – notably war – which the readers intuitively respond to because of his own military background in the TA.

Matt Badham: Matt, are we going to see more Rogue from Gerry?

Matt Smith: I think Gerry would be keen to write more, providing it goes down well. It would have to be an occasional thing, a retro blast now and then, as I feel, as a series, the story’s been played out.

Matt Badham: Gerry, do you think you’ll return to Rogue again after this outing or maybe even pen further instalments of some of your other strips, such as The V.C.s or Fiends on the Eastern Front?

Gerry Finley-Day:  I hope so, [but] that will be up to Matt [Smith].

Matt Badham: How easy was it to slip back into writing for the character and his world?

Gerry Finley-Day: As I said, I haven’t stopped writing and Rogue is a good character.

Matt Badham: Did you enjoy the experience?

Gerry Finley-Day: Yes, very much so.

Matt Badham: Why do you think that Rogue has remained a fan favourite among 2000 AD readers? What is the character’s core appeal?

Gerry Finley-Day: I suppose because war – like it or not – is the ultimate adventure and Rogue is still the recognisable soldier no matter how far into the future.

Matt Badham: Pat, you facilitated Gerry’s return so presumably you want to see him write more for 2000 AD?

Pat Mills: Reader reaction to Gerry’s impending return has been extremely enthusiastic and I’m hoping I can persuade him to write more.  We really don’t want anyone else writing Fiends, V.C.s or Rogue, any more than fans would appreciate anyone other than Alan Moore writing D.R. and Quinch or Halo Jones.  Gerry is entitled to the same respect.

Matt Badham: Staz, Would you like to do more Rogue?

Staz Johnson: I’d love to. I’d certainly hope that should Tharg choose to run more Nu Earth stories, I’d then be given the opportunity to draw at least some of them. I suppose the question is whether there is a thirst among the current 2000 AD readership for a strip that is essentially ‘retro’. There’s no point making strips just because the creators think it’s fun to work on them. I think there’s still a way to make war stories relevant to a modern, more sophisticated audience, without having to resort to gimmicks or by making a war story that isn’t really about war. Take a look at Saving Private Ryan and Band Of Brothers. A Rogue with that level of visceral realism, gravity and pathos would be fantastic I think.

(more Rogue in action, art by Staz Johnson, (c) Rebellion)

Matt Badham: What was it like working on a ‘classic’ strip with a ‘classic’ creator?

Staz Johnson: Well, that was the thing. As a fan of those original Nu Earth stories, it was a real thrill. Clearly, as the original writer, you can take as gospel that this IS Rogue… not just another writer’s ‘version’ of the character.

Matt Badham: What approach have you taken to the visuals for this new episode of Rogue?

Staz Johnson: Well, one of the things that pulled me into Rogue way back in ’81 was Dave Gibbons’ artwork. I had my old Titan Books reprint of the Gibbons strips on my desk the whole time I was working on the pages, so I took a lot of my design cues from him: things like the Southerner military police and the genetic camels, stammels. However, in addition to that, I looked at a lot of other old school 2000 AD artwork because I definitely wanted it to have that ‘feel’. In the end I think it wound up being close to someone like (Mean Arena artist) Mike White’s work, with bits of Jesus Redondo thrown in. Hopefully with a healthy dose of Staz Johnson too, obviously.

Matt Badham: Who is your favourite Rogue Trooper artist?

Staz Johnson: Dave Gibbons, all the way. That’s not to denigrate those who followed him, especially Cam Kennedy, but for me Dave is #1.

Matt Badham: Matt, Gerry isn’t the only creator to have made his way back to 2000 AD. You’ve also had Brendan McCarthy back in the mix. Why do you think these ‘classic’ creators are being tempted back to 2000 AD?

Matt Smith: Partly because it’s always there. If you’ve got a gap in your schedule, it’s worth tapping up 2000 AD for a short Dredd story or whatever. Also, because it’s fun – no hoops to jump through, no marketing men to approve every process, just get back to having fun with comics. And 2000 AD characters hold a special place in a lot of creators’ hearts – they’ve been with them for the past three decades.

Matt Badham: Are there any other ex-2000 AD creators you’re particularly keen to welcome back into the fold?

Matt Smith: Plenty. Steve Dillon, Kevin O’Neill, Garth Ennis, Pete Milligan, Trevor Hairsine, Duncan Fegredo…

Matt Badham: What else is in Prog 2011 and why is it a good jumping on point for new readers?

Matt Smith: We’ve got a twelve-page complete Dredd story by Al Ewing and Paul Marshall, called ‘The Chief Judge’s Speech’; the ten-page opening episodes of the post-apocalyptic Kingdom: ‘His Master’s Voice’ by Dan Abnett and Richard Elson, pan-galactic weirdfest Shakara: ‘Avenger’ by Robbie Morrison and Henry Flint, supernatural thriller Ampney Crucis Investigates: ‘The List of Ten’ by Ian Edginton and Simon Davis, and Hell-set Necrophim: ‘Civil Warlord’ by Tony Lee and Lee Carter; twelve pages of Celtic barbarity in Slaine by Pat Mills and Clint Langley; and a one-off Psi-Judge Anderson story showing her as a cadet, by Alan Grant and Patrick Goddard. If a new reader picks that little lot up, you’ll get a good idea of what 2000 AD is about – action, SF, horror, oddball characters and wild ideas, brilliantly written and wonderfully drawn. If you want a comic like nothing else out there, get into 2000 AD!

FPI would like to thank to Matt Badham for organising this round table. And of course thanksgo  to Matt Smith, Gerry, Pat and Staz for taking the time to participate (and extra thanks to Staz and Matt for supplying the artwork). Prog 2011 of 2000 AD will be available to buy in shops, including branches of Forbidden Planet International, from 15th December.

(Sarah with the Vern and Lettuce collection at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, pic from Joe’s Flickr)

Cartoonist and illustrator Sarah McIntyre first came to my attention via her Vern and Lettuce strips in The DFC. Since then, I’ve been following her work both online and in print. She’s a fantastic artist whose mini-comics never fail to make me smile. In this interview (cross posted with Down The Tubes), Sarah talks about her art education, the links between comics and picture books, and why she sees a healthy future for the British comics scene.

MB: Are you a formally trained or self-taught artist?

SMc: A bit of both, really. A very kind art teacher give me after-school oil painting classes, starting when I was five. I spent the next six years mostly painting kittens, puppies and rather tedious landscapes, but it made me love mucking in with paint. My high school art teacher was also great in that she didn’t make me follow the class assignments, just let me set my own projects and get on with them, even if I had to stay through lunch break or after school. I took a few oil painting classes from a wonderful and slightly dotty Hungarian woman who collected filing cabinets full of dead crows that had been run over on the road in front of her shop, so we could draw them.

(‘Dear Diary’ mini comic showing a teenage Sarah with her dotty Hungarian art teacher, by and (c) Sarah McIntyre)

I didn’t think I could earn any money doing fine art, so I studied Russian at university. But in the States, we have this great option of completing a ‘minor degree’, which is half a regular degree, so I did my minor in History of Art. And the professors there let me fudge the requirements a bit so a lot of that time was spent drawing life models in the art studio instead of memorising slides. Before my last year of university, I spent two years in Moscow, running around its galleries and museums, teaching myself a lot about Russian painting and its arts and crafts movement at the end of the 18th, beginning of the 19th century. Until I realised I couldn’t live on the pay of three dollars an hour, I worked in the Moscow branch of Shakespeare & Co bookshop, and we hosted these marvellous arts evenings where I got to meet loads of fascinating painters, sculptors, writers and poets, and occasionally I’d get to see their studios.

I spent several years working as an illustrator, just taking a few evening classes here and there. My favourite short course leader was Elizabeth Harbour, who set loads of brilliant little book projects, similar to the kinds of things you see at small press fairs now. She’s the one who got me set on the path to making full books, not just drawings. About five years after moving to London, I enrolled at Camberwell College of the Arts to do my Master’s degree. I was lucky, it was the first year Janet Woolley began leading the course, and it was still small, only 14 students. (I think it’s over 50 now) Jan combined being a total powerhouse with being quite mumsy; she really cared about the people on her course and looked after us at the same time as pushing us hard and being utterly frank with us. What I didn’t learn on that course, I was able to pick up from the Association of Illustrator’s Business Start-up classes and seminars led by the Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators. And Ellen Lindner on my course started me off learning about comics, pointing me to the kind of comics I actually liked, not the kind I’d seen when I walked into mainstream comic book shops.

(early comic made in art college, in response to reading ‘On Sight and Insight’ by John Hull, by and (c) Sarah McIntyre)

I think it wouldn’t have been too difficult to slide through the course without doing much; I tried to come up with at least one piece of artwork every day and I think that decision made all the difference. I only felt I’d made my first real breakthrough about a week before the final show. Jan and the Graphic Design leader actually let me set up a second, separate show in the hallway because my work had changed so dramatically between the stuff I’d carefully printed up for the exhibition and the artwork and comics I’d been doing in the meantime.

MB: So when did you actually start making comics?

SMc: When I was about eight years old, I used to make a magazine called ‘Family Favorite’ and leave it on my neighbours’ doorstep, ring the bell and run away. I think the first comics I ever made were for that magazine, and they were copied, possibly even traced, from Archie comics. But all the comics I ever read in the Seattle Times or Archie seemed to have funny punch lines, and I didn’t think I would ever be able to do that. And I read a few of my mother’s stashed-away story comics (Jack London’s ‘White Fang’, a couple fairy tales) but they were so old and brittle that I didn’t think people still made them. I didn’t even connect them as a storytelling medium with the funnies in the newspaper. In fact, the linework and colours looked so polished to me that I never even thought about real, live people making them at all. Maybe I thought they grew on trees or something.

I think my first comic was a little book I made for my dad for his birthday, telling his life story from my point of view. It was more of an illustrated book that a comic, but if would have fit in with minis you see at small press fairs. My first comic I made at art college was a double-page spread about some yobs throwing a beer can into the Thames and then the river bursting its banks to take revenge on everyone. Ellen gave me some good tips on it and it made me start thinking more seriously about making comics. I read a book called ‘On Sight and Insight’ by John Hull about the experience of blindness and thought I’d write a graphic novel with a character in a soundscape environment, simulating blindness, but in a visual way, using typographical artwork. That subject was WAY too big for me at the time and I had to shelve it. I made a couple travel minis and took part in an online comics jam with some people on LiveJournal. Then the opportunity came up and I cheekily promised David Fickling I could do a page a week of comics for the DFC. I practically had my fingers crossed behind my back when he asked me if I could do it; I had absolutely no idea if I could, and I sweated bullets. But I approached Vern and Lettuce like a children’s book, just drawn within panels instead of pages, and the editor didn’t ask me to stop, so I figured it must be okay. I was overwhelmed when people started telling me they liked it.

MB: What did producing Vern and Lettuce, a weekly comic, teach you in terms of making comics and also the business, deadline, discipline side of being a comic artist?

SMc: I was already used to deadlines and discipline from making picture books, although I still had a lot to learn about the business side of things. When I started with David Fickling, I was approached by one of the best agents in the business and she’s made my work phenomenally less stressful.

In terms of making comics, I’d never submitted more than a few single illustrations in digital form, and I still had a lot to learn about Photoshop. I still only really know what I need to know, but I try to keep things simple by sticking as closely as possible to the methods of traditional printmaking. For Vern and Lettuce, I tried to think of the layers in Photoshop as the layers in a screen print, one layer per colour. I hate the overly slick, airbrushed effects and gradients so many people rely on in Photoshop; it often it makes beautiful linework look like cheap pizza flyers, or makes everything look muddy. But I love the imperfect, slightly textured look of hand painted signs, and I saw some gorgeous revolutionary posters in Moscow in places like the Mayakovsky Museum. They owe a lot of their visual power to the fact that the painters didn’t have many colours of paint, they just made do with two or three tins. With Photoshop, I can access millions of colours, but if I just stick to a few, my work looks so much better. There’s a lot of experimentation in Vern and Lettuce with this; I was very strict with myself in the first few pages, then I started to introduce more and more colours until about episode twelve, when I got frustrated and reined in my colour palette again.

Writing was also difficult, the relentless pace of the weekly deadline. In the beginning I had a few weeks to play with, but then I took a holiday and after that, I was finishing bang on the day the strip was due for print. There’s this tricky thing, just like in picture books, where there’s supposed to be a sort of ‘flip’ at the end of the story. It can be a joke, but it doesn’t even have to be funny, just something to give the strip closure and make the reader look at things a bit differently. A lot of the other DFC people I talked to started their stories with this end point in mind, but I never did. My way of working was just to put Vern and Lettuce into a situation and see where they went. They’re so real to me that I can hear exactly what they’d say to each other. And sometimes they defied tight little endings, they still weren’t very domesticated animals. A few times they got me into a real panic and I’d ring up my DFC colleague Woodrow Phoenix, who lives nearby. He would patiently look at where my strip had gone and then walk me through to the end of it. It’s been the same working in a studio with Gary Northfield; it’s shown me that endings aren’t magic, that much of the job just requires focusing and taking things to their logical conclusion, and then one step beyond. I think it’s the ‘one step beyond’ that looks like magic to the rest of us. (I think DFC artists James Turner and Jamie Smart live in the land of one step beyond.)

(Airship, a comics jam with David O’Connell)

Doing comics jams with David O’Connell also helped me get my writing out of terrible ruts. In a comics jam, I can’t get pig headed about where a strip is going; when I hand the next page over to Dave, he always takes it in a direction I would never have dreamed up. When I get his page and start on the next one, it’s almost like a completely fresh story. That really helped show me that there’s never one solution to telling a tale, the permutations are infinite, and when I’m stuck, instead of blundering on with something dull, I can step back and send the story flying in a completely different direction. And writing with friends makes things more fun. Vern and Lettuce were great to me that way, in introducing me to so many amazing comics friends who know how to combine hard work with being a bit silly.

MB: Can you give me a couple of examples of ‘flips’ from your own work?

SMc: Well, things such as the raisins in Vern’s cake ingredients, which turn out to be something much less palatable (see below). Or the little stowaway moles that parade out of the airship, just as Vern thinks he’s going to get some peace in his park keeper job.

MB: You make comics and picture books. What’s the difference between the two? Is there a difference? Is any distinction arbitrary, they are, after all, both collisions of text and art? What do picture books do well that comics don’t and vice versa?

SMc: This is a huge subject, I can do long workshops on the answer to this, and it needs me to show lots of visual examples. But I was amazed with The DFC, at how smoothly I could transition from picture books to comics. In the old days, a lot of picture books had very simple formats: a picture, possibly in a box, with text underneath. But there’s more of a move to vary formats in picture books now, and make the text intertwine and work with the pictures. I’ve always liked doing this, and never wanted to leave it solely to the book’s designer. Often in picture books, you’ll see several small images on a page, which picture book editors would call ‘vignettes’, and comics people would call ‘panels’. Many picture book people (Russell Ayto, Mo Willems, Posy Simmonds, Raymond Briggs, Satoshi Kitamura, loads of others) have been using comics formats for years, even if they wouldn’t have called it that, or wanted you to call it that. I remember the surprise of learning that Maurice Sendak’s 1970 book, In the Night Kitchen, was a direct tribute to Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland. I always knew it as a picture book, but of course, it’s a comic, too, and a love letter to comics.

I don’t think there has to be any boundaries between picture books and comics. I think they can flow into each other entirely seamlessly, and keep people developing their visual literacy well after they’ve moved on from reading only children’s books. And it lends added sophistication to children’s books, when kids can read a book that’s slightly above their level without it being a huge break from picture books to text-only novels. I think this merging needs two things to happen: Editors need to overcome their prejudices against books looking too much like comics, or ‘cartoony’ (a damning adjective in an editor’s office). And I think this is happening, as they realise there’s a market, and librarians go nuts trying to get their hands on these books that ‘reluctant readers’ will pick up. (You can see this happening with picture book publishers such as David Fickling with his DFC Library, Walker Books, a bit with Templar; and even more so in the USA with Toon Books, Scholastic Inc and others.) Some editors are starting to warm up to speech bubbles, as a clear and vibrant way of showing who’s talking on a page. Children’s magazines such as Okido and Anorak are just getting on with it and making lovely non-traditional, kid-friendly comics. And some publishers are tentatively starting to experiment with publishing adult picture books, such as those by Audrey Niffenegger (although she had to prove herself first with a text-only novel).

It’s essential that comic fans do their best to let people know about the new books they love, so we’ll get a chance to see more of them. Write reviews, blog about them, make as much noise as you can.

(Vern and Lettuce, from pencils – above – to inks – below – and then the final coloured page – lower image, all by and (c) Sarah McIntyre)

The second thing is that comic creators need to go visit the children’s book sections in shops, see what’s happening right now in publishing, and accept that some stories can be told without having to rely on sexual clichés, excessive violence or bad language, and that it doesn’t make them a wimp for writing these kinds of stories. (I keep hearing comics people saying ‘I’ve got this amazing character, who fights THIS character, it’ll be awesome!’ And that’s their whole story.) I think sometimes people switch into a different mode when they’re writing for children, they get very patronising, clichéd, or even boring (because their adult comics rely on sex or cheap shock tactics and they suddenly can’t use them). Or they over-egg the pages with so many high-impact graphics that there’s no resting time for the eyes and it’s hard to read. There’s nothing wrong with a comic that has a single panel on a page. I think simpler formats with less panels may be a way forward for making comics for children. Reflections of a Solitary Hamster does this well: sometimes a single panel, sometimes two, three or four panels, but the large pages have plenty of breathing space.

Kids like clear stories with solid plot lines and well-developed characters they can relate to. I believe, if you can write an excellent story for children, adults will like it just as much as the children. I think it was Philip Pullman who said something about the difference between kids books and adult books: that adults remember what it was like to be kids and can relate to the experience, but kids have no idea what it’s like to be adult yet, even though they wish they could. So you need to keep that in mind if you’re writing about adult characters or including adult conversations in a children’s book, don’t talk over their heads. You can have more than one story going on a page at the same time, but the simplest story always needs to be the best one, don’t neglect it for subtext.

In terms of format, picture books tend to be shorter, full-colour, and better paid for the amount of work put into them. You might earn as much for a 32-page picture book as a 200-page graphic novel. Which means the picture book editors will scrutinise each page in much more depth. As comics get more popular (and I don’t doubt that they will), hopefully publishers will raise their payments for comics, but it may take the best comic creators getting good agents, or really learning hard negotiation tactics before this happens.

MB: What next for Sarah McIntyre?

SMc: A week after Vern and Lettuce comes out, I’m launching another picture book with the writer Anne Cottringer, called When Titus Took the Train. (You might recognise one of Anne’s other books, Eliot Jones, Midnight Superhero.) The editor and designer said they really wanted me to illustrate it because of my ‘comic sensibilities’. I originally thought they wanted it in comics format, but it’s more of a straightforward picture book. But there are bits of comics creeping in from all sides. Woodrow lent me some of his Western comics, such as Bat Lash, Buffalo Bill and Johnny Thunder so I could get into the wild frontier swing of things. The story’s about a kid named Titus who goes by himself on a big train journey, which gets more and more fantastical, so it’s not entirely clear what’s really happening and what he’s imagining. Bandits, white water canoeing, a T-Rex… actually, Gary helped me with the dinosaur because mine wasn’t looking nuts enough. I thrust a post-it note across the studio at him and begged, ‘Gary, please please will you draw me a T-Rex?’ He scribbled something in two seconds that was just PERFECT. So you might notice that my dinosaur looks an awful lot like Gary’s Derek the Sheep. (I call him Derek the Dinosaur. It’s one of my favourite spreads.)

(Gary Northfield lends a hand with some dino-design! This is the sort of thing that happens at the Fleece Station and, below, a spread from Titus Takes the Train which borrowed from it)

MB: Who would you like to big up, comics-wise, on both the small press and the pro’ scene?

SMc: I’m constantly amazed by the pictures Warwick Johnson Cadwell keeps making. Such amazing line work and colouring, and he looks every part the boat captain that he is. (I’m a bit smitten with him, can’t you tell?) He contributed to the first Birdsong anthology, and I’m also keenly watching the work of another contributor (and one of its editors), Will Kirkby. He also has gorgeous line work, and I’m hoping he takes his more epic, Japanese influenced tales and turns them back to his hometown in Sheffield to tell more personal stories. (But that’s just me, we’ll have to see where he goes.) Darryl Cunningham is on a roll after launching his hard-hitting novel Psychiatric Tales. Viviane Schwarz is working on a marvellous sheep comic with Walker Books and she’s posting its progress on her blog. My three studio mates at the Fleece Station, Gary Northfield, Ellen Lindner and Lauren O’Farrell all have amazing projects up their sleeves at the moment and we all joined together because we get so excited about each other’s stuff. We all work in slightly different areas, and I think some great thing are going to happen in the places where our creations cross over. And the DFC Library crew are making magic, I’m so excited by the books they’re putting out.

I think Nikki Gamble, who heads the Write Away website and huge picture book review database, is very hot on comics for children and teenagers, and sharing them across the country with teachers and librarians. So I’m hoping we’ll get a lot more comics in front of kids with the help of people like her, Paul Gravett and others, and the industry in Britain will make even more business sense to publishers and booksellers and really take flight.

(Sarah sketching in and signing one of her books at the recent Edinburgh Book Festival, pic from Joe’s Flickr)

Sarah’s Vern and Lettuce is published next week by David Fickling and you can follow her Live Journal for regular updates on her work, events and  plenty of lovely sketches; Sarah will be at the Wigtown Book Festival on Saturday 25th at 10am and on the same day there is one of her Morris the Mankiest Monster original pieces being auctioned for the very good cause of the Facing Africa charity, you can bid in person or online here. Matthew posts thoughts on his Citizen Badham blog and the brand new issue of Comic Book Heroes (from the SFX stable) has a special feature on the British small press comics scene by Matt.

(Art School Scum, one of the first of Tom’s works I became aware of and if you haven’t read it, it’s available to download from his site; art by and (c) Tom Humberstone)

MB: How did you get involved in the small press/self-publishing?

TH: I started making comics in my second year of art college when I became disillusioned with some of my peers and frustrated with the few seconds of animation I was producing each week despite extremely long hours in the studio. To me, making a comic was a wonderful exercise in instant gratification. Which, as time has gone by and I attempt more ambitious work, seems laughably naive in retrospect.

Regardless, I started photocopying these vicious little character assassinations called Art School Scum on the way into college and plastered them throughout the halls. I loved having complete control of the content from start to finish and not having to compromise at any stage due to finances or time constraints. It felt quite punk. Needing only a pen, some paper, and about 20p for the photocopier.

Every fortnight I’d cover the college walls with a new edition, targeting a different art school archetype under the alias of Ventedspleen. It was only much later – sometime late in my third year – that I even considered collecting them in a book. It was later still – maybe even a year after graduating – that a friend managed to convince me to take my comics to a comic show and attempt to sell them.

My relationship with comics and the small press continued to be an on/off hobby for a few years until about two years ago when I started to really commit to publishing regular comics and attending more shows.

MB: How do you make your living, from your art or in other ways?

TH: While I don’t tend to lose money on my comics – in fact, more often than not, I make a tiny profit – I can’t rely entirely on them to pay rent, bills and all the other necessary monthly expenses. I have a full-time graphic design job and supplement that with storyboard and illustration commissions, which often pay for print-runs and allow me to invest spare cash into my comics in a variety of ways. Currently, everything I manage to save goes into publishing Solipsistic Pop and organising related exhibitions and events.

MB: What’s the best/worst thing about the small press?

TH: I’d say the best thing about it is the very liberating aspect of complete artistic control. I can publish what I like. Be it my own work or the work of other artists I adore in Solipsistic Pop. There’s no sales team to convince, no editor, no marketing department in need of an angle or snappy soundbite. Total creative freedom.

There are so many exciting new business models opening up for small publishers too, so it’s becoming an increasingly interesting field to be working in right now. Currently, a lot of the publishing industry is up in the air and no one can be totally sure how it will all land so there’s a lot of scope to create new paradigms.

On a related note – the gestation period for a lot of books can take an extremely long time, whereas in the small press scene artists can conceive, implement and publish an idea within weeks. For example, Dan Hancox and I managed to publish the very first book about the 2008 American Presidential election (My Fellow Americans) in May 2008 – before Obama had even secured the Democratic nomination. That’s a very addictive advantage of the small press and one that will always keep me coming back.

(fear and loathing – and comics – on the campaign trail: My Fellow Americans by Dan Hancox and Tom Humberstone)

As far as the worst thing: I suppose it’s attempting to do it all. As much as I absolutely adore wearing so many hats (editor, artist, designer, art director, publisher, press officer, distributor, events co-ordinator… etc.), I think it stands to reason that there are some things I’m better at than others. Attempting to do all of this on your own can mean doing a couple of extremely important aspects of the job poorly. But I can’t afford to hire additional help. This is the one thing that could really benefit from being involved with a larger publishing house.

MB: Please tell me a little about Solipsistic Pop and what you’re trying to achieve with the anthology?

TH: Solipsistic Pop is a biannual anthology of alternative comic artists based in the UK. It was created with the intention of providing a high quality platform for those artists when, currently, there isn’t a huge infrastructure in place that supports that sort of work. While North America has Drawn & Quarterly, Fantagraphics, Top Shelf and various other great publishers – we don’t really have anything here that’s similar. Things are changing of course. There’s Blank Slate and No Brow Press. But I really wanted Solipsistic Pop to exist as a kind of aperture for people to discover brilliant UK talent in a beautiful, boutique publication that wouldn’t look amiss next to Mome, RAW or McSweeney’s on a bookshelf.

Solipsistic Pop is very much about taking the wonderful things people are doing in the small press here and then publishing it using the best possible printing methods available. Conducting experiments with inks, paper stock and pull-outs. Making the product a gorgeous, tactile artefact that shows the work in the best possible light and demands the attention of everyone with a passing interest in comic art. Doing something that makes the rest of the world sit up and take notice of the brilliant artists we have working in comics in the UK at the moment. And encouraging those artists to produce the best work they are capable of.

(cover art for Solipsistic Pop 2 by Luke Pearson)

MB: How’s successful has it been so far? Where next for Solipsistic Pop?

TH: The response to the first two volumes of Solipsistic Pop has been wonderful. We’ve been getting some great reviews and the related exhibitions and events have had enormously successful turnouts. Momentum is definitely building and I’m just about managing to break even on the whole thing. It’s a lot of hard work and a big drain on my time and finances but it’s worth it. I’m extremely proud of Solipsistic Pop and continue to be surprised at what it’s achieved already.

A third volume is due in November and I’ll also be announcing some events around that time. It’s possible Solipsistic Pop will go on hiatus after that while I take stock of what has been a success and where it’s possible to improve. The main things I really need to start considering are whether I can publish more than 500 copies of each volume and how I can solve the problem of distribution. But it’s early days and I’m very much learning as I go.

MB: You do the ‘auto-bio’ thing, amongst other things. Do you ever worry about revealing too much about yourself (or even other people)?

TH: I actually decided to take a break from auto-bio comics after completing How To Date A Girl In 10 Days, only recently returning to it when I undertook the challenge to make a comic a day for 100 days. I simply couldn’t see any other way of producing content on a daily basis without going for the illustrated journal approach. With the 100 Days comics I’ve been very careful to only put other people in there when it is light-hearted and jovial – trying my best not to put words in people’s mouths and to make it clear to friends that I’m doing it. Everyone has been completely fine with it and often enjoy making occasional cameos now and again. But that has a lot to do with making sure I’m documenting things that they’re comfortable with. If there’s ever a moment of introspection or darkness, you’ll most likely find the comic features me and me alone.

(a page from How To Date a Girl in 10 Days by and (c) Tom Humberstone)

The only time this hasn’t been the case was with How To Date A Girl In 10 Days, which was about a relationship that didn’t last more than a fortnight. We didn’t stay friends and when I decided to make a comic about it (which was much less about the relationship itself and much more about being a directionless twenty-something and learning to get beyond my inability to date), I was careful to change names and hide identities. I didn’t have permission to make that comic and so was very careful to make sure that I remained the butt of any jokes. The comic actually gives you little about the relationship or the girl in question. If I was vague at points – to ensure I didn’t share something that the other person wouldn’t want shared – I made sure there was a point I was attempting to communicate. Looking back on it now I think I was generally successful, but I probably wouldn’t attempt that comic now. I think it’s an incredibly delicate line. And too easy to cross.

In terms of sharing too much of myself – that’s not something I worry about at all. I’m happy to do that. Writing Everything You Never Wanted To Know About Crohns Disease was a real eye-opener and let me exorcise a lot of demons about having Crohns. Somehow, writing and drawing about embarrassing moments is quite cathartic and allows me to own them. Additionally, for every personal moment I choose to share with my readers, there are another twenty that I’ve chosen not to. So I never worry about giving too much away.

(a page from Tom’s very honest, touching and sometimes darkly funny 24 hour comic about living with an illness: Everything You Never Wanted to Know About Crohns Disease, by and (c) Tom Humbsertone)

MB: Is the small press a stepping stone for you to get pro’ work or an end in itself?

TH: I’m not entirely sure my work would lend itself well to ‘pro’ work. But it’s not something I’d dismiss – being paid to draw comics is obviously something of a dream. It would have to be the right project though and it certainly hasn’t been the plan behind getting involved in the small press. If anything, it would be nice to get to a point where a slightly larger company helped out with Solipsistic Pop and took care of some of the distribution and marketing side of things but that’s certainly something I couldn’t envisage happening for some time – and wouldn’t want to – I think I enjoy being the over-zealous one-man-band too much.

It would be fantastic if I could make my living out of comics, as it would obviously allow me the time to draw more of them. But similarly, if I never make any money from comics, I’ll continue to draw them.

MB: What’s your involvement in cs?

TH: We Are Words + Pictures is a collective of talented artists and writers who are all, in some way or another, involved in comics. Matthew Sheret and Julia Scheele created it and it predominantly focuses on organising comic-related events, taking comics to comedy nights where there is potential crossover appeal or to music festivals like Latitude. The idea being that by taking comics outside of the conventions and traditional places you might find them, you can increase interest in the medium and the small press scene.

(the We Are Words + Pictures mob go off to the Latitude Festival, art by and (c) Tom Humbsertone)

I’ve been helping out with We Are Words + Pictures as much as I can – designing flyers and brochures and helping to run Drop In + Draw workshops. It’s a fantastic collective doing exciting things and wonderfully ties in with a lot of what Solipsistic Pop is trying to achieve too. It’s no coincidence that Matthew and I co-wrote the comic manifesto that opens Solipsistic Pop 1. We have a lot of similar feelings about the UK comics scene and I look forward to helping out with We Are Words + Pictures whenever I can.

FPI would like to thank Tom and Matt for their time and thoughts; you can follow Tom via his site here and Matthew’s blog is here. Richard reviewed the first two volumes of Solipsistic Pop here on the blog; you can read Richard’s reviews of  volume one here and volume two here. Solipsistic Pop Volume 3 should be launched this November and of course we’ll bring you more on that nearer the time.