Mel Gillman’s The Goblin Throne begins with a broken promise and the consequences that follow when you think you can outrun it.
The graphic novel, the latest from the creator of As the Crow Flies and Stage Dreams, follows a young woman who makes a pact with the Goblin Queen for peace and safety, then flees when confronted with the true cost. What she doesn’t realize is that all roads lead back to the Goblin Kingdom.
The Kickstarter campaign from Iron Circus Comics has already blown past its funding goal, with more than $20,000 raised as I type this. I spoke with Gillman about sapphic fairy tales, colored pencil illustration and more.
We’re a few days into the campaign, which hit its goal very quickly on the first day (congrats, by the way!). Were you anticipating that sort of reaction to the project, and does it take any pressure off, knowing you’ve been fully funded?
I actually went into this Kickstarter with pretty modest funding expectations, so I’ve been pleasantly surprised by people’s enthusiasm for the book! Grimy, tragic, bloody lesbian folk-horror-romance definitely isn’t gonna be everyone’s cup of tea, so I knew we’d be trying to reach a niche audience. I’m just happy my fellow freaks are finding the Kickstarter, and seem interested in this weird little book!
The press release describes this as filling a gap in “sapphic” fairy tales. Do you think of The Goblin Throne as operating in conversation with that tradition, or more as something apart from it?
This is definitely a queer story by design, on multiple levels. In the most obvious, blatant sense, it’s a complicated decade-long love story between two women. But underneath that, it’s also a fairy-tale-style allegorical take on some unique flavors of middle-aged lesbian yearning, examined in a very un-sugar-coated way – the deep loneliness of longing for a spouse as an older person stuck in a very narrow dating pool; the awkwardness of having to navigate some “first-relationship” problems at a much older age than most cishet people do; and the unearned overconfidence of telling yourself, “I’ve matured and sorted all my shit out, and I’m totally ready to be a great partner for somebody, anybody,” despite all evidence to the contrary.
Musical theater nerds, it will not surprise you to hear I listened to a whole lot of Company soundtracks in the background while dreaming up this book.
You’re working in colored pencil, which from what I’ve seen seems to be your preferred drawing tool. What does that medium give you that ink or digital work wouldn’t?
Colored pencil is a glacially slow medium to draw comics in, especially compared to ink or digital art. What you give up in speed and efficiency, though, I think you make up for in handmade beauty. There’s a gentle, layered, organic softness to colored pencil that I adore. And the coloring process itself is such a treat – it feels very meditative once you get into the groove. Colored pencil is also a great medium for precision in visual art – when you’re filling up entire pages with nothing but your itty bitty pencil tip, you have a lot of control over small details, textures, and colors. That weird combination of “control freak + very slow and deliberate” is a pretty good descriptor for how my brain works too, as a storyteller. Colored pencil is the drawing medium that best fits my personality, in a strange way!
You worked with Iron Circus before on As the Crow Flies. What does that relationship give you creatively?
There’s a lot I like about working with Iron Circus. As a publisher, they’ve never shied away from weird, freaky adult comics – despite the fact that we’re living in a time when a lot of medium-to-large-size graphic novel publishers are pretty risk-averse when it comes to those sorts of books. Iron Circus is also a publisher that’s always been very pro-webcomics, which I really appreciate. For both As the Crow Flies and The Goblin Throne, they were very supportive of me continuing to post the whole book for free online, which was important to me.
You’ve been posting the story as a webcomic. I was curious, how much story do you feel you have left? And are there other areas of the Goblin Queen’s world you’d like to explore?
All told, this comic will end up about 140 pages long – I guess you could call that either a long graphic novella or a short graphic novel, haha. This is going to be a pretty self-contained, standalone story! I don’t have additional stories set in this universe or utilizing these characters I plan on telling after this – I think the reader will understand why by the end of the book. But I do love drawing these fairy-tale-style comics, so this probably isn’t the last time I’ll be telling stories set in this sort of quasi-magical medieval-pastoral setting!
Beyond Goblin Throne, you’ve been very prolific with zines and 24 hour comics over the last couple years (I follow you on Tumblr, where your comics always draw large crowds!). Are you still able to work on those smaller projects, or does focusing on Goblin Throne tend to take up all your time?
Right now, The Goblin Throne is my main comics project. But that actually has more to do with my dayjob! On top of making comics, I’m also a college department chair, running two different comics programs. That is a rewarding job in a lot of ways, but it has been keeping me EXTREMELY busy the past couple years. Once my chairship ends, I’m looking forward to hopefully having a little more time to make more comics with. I love creating lots of little comics and zines for the sake of play and experimentation – I believe that’s a really important part of how you keep on growing as an artist over the course of your career, by always trying something new.
