Category: Interviews

Smash Pages Q&A: Gabrielle Lyon on ‘No Small Plans’

The Vice President of Education and Experiences at the Chicago Architecture Foundation discusses her organization’s mission and why they chose to create a graphic novel to help celebrate its 50th anniversary.

One of the most striking and interesting graphic novels of 2017 was No Small Plans, and the book came from an unexpected source – The Chicago Architecture Foundation. In three stories set in three different periods of time, teenagers explore the city of Chicago, confront segregation, development and reconsider not just they think about their city – but how. The story of cities and how they are built and function is very much the story of how we relate to one another, both as individual human beings and through institutions. No Small Plans is a call for teenagers to engage with the city and with government. More than just a call to engagement and action, the book wants people to ask questions, and understand the history of these issues.

Gabrielle Lyon is the Vice President of Education and Experiences at the Chicago Architecture Foundation and the writer and editor of No Small Plans, which she made with Devin Mawdsley, Kayce Bayer, Chris Lin and Deon Reed, members of the Eyes of the Cat Illustration Studio. Lyon is an activist, a comics fan, and she talked about the unlikely origins of the book and their ambitions for it.

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Smash Pages Q&A: Tatiana Gill

The creator of ‘Blackoutings: How I Quit Drinking’ discusses her early influences, her anthology work, teaching comics, drawing body-positive women and more.

Tatiana Gill is a cartoonist and illustrator. She’s the author of the graphic memoir Blackoutings: How I Quit Drinking. Her comics have been collected in books like Wombgenda, Living in the Now and Omnibusted. She’s also the person behind the adult coloring book Down to Clown.

Gill works as a teacher and illustrator in Seattle. In the past few years she’s had comics in a number of anthologies like Comics for Choice, she was in Resist!, and has contributed comics articles and book reviews to The Stranger and The Seattle Review of Books. After seeing her comics and illustrations keep coming up in my social media feeds and in different publications, I reached out to Gill to talk about her work.

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Smash Pages Q&A: Van Jensen + Amber Bellerjeau on ‘Walk Together’

Jensen and Bellerjeau discuss making a comic book about Stacey Abrams, who is running for governor of Georgia.

Stacey Abrams is running for governor of Georgia in November. Abrams’ campaign is historic and notable for many reasons, but her campaign did something really dynamic and interesting – they made a comic book. It’s not the first time someone has used comics for a campaign or for educational purposes, but Walk Together was a striking project and I reached out to writer Van Jensen and artist Amber Bellerjeau to talk a little about the project.

Van Jensen is perhaps best known to comics readers as the writer of Flash, Pinocchio, Vampire Slayer, and the new publisher of the website ArtsATL. Bellerjeau is an artist and illustrator. Both are Georgia residents and were kind enough to answer a few questions about the project.

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Smash Pages Q&A: Beth Evans on “I Really Didn’t Think This Through”

The webcomics creator discusses the release of her first book, her influences and process, Eurovision and more.

Beth Evans has been posting comics online for a few years now. In the comics, which range in length, she uses a fairly simple style to tackle anxiety and depression in ways that range from the strange to the funny to the disturbingly true.

Evans’ first book, I Really Didn’t Think This Through: Tales From My So-Called Adult Life came out this month. The book is part memoir and part self help guide, part comics and part prose, Evans talks in depth about her own life and details her struggles with mental illness and ways to cope and find stability.

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Smash Pages Q&A: Ben Truman on ‘Scout: Marauder’

Truman discusses working with his father on the next chapter of ‘Scout,’ which you can help bring to life on Kickstarter.

Ben Truman is a writer and game designer, but comics fans might know him best for co-writing A Man Named Hawken with his father, the great Timothy Truman. He’s written or co-written other comics over the years for Creepy, Conan, FUBAR and elsewhere, but he and his father have just launched a Kickstarter for their biggest project to date, Scout: Marauder.

For people who don’t know, Scout and its sequel Scout: War Shaman were two books written and drawn by Tim Truman in the 1980s and early 90s about Emmanuel Santana, an Apache ex-Army Ranger in a collapsed United States in the distant future of 1999. At the end of the series, Scout was killed leaving his two sons behind. The new book opens years later, the two boys having been separated since. At a time when the idea of an environmentally ravaged United States that collapsed due to infighting no longer seems insane or absurd, it is perhaps a good time for Scout to return.

The Kickstarter recently launched and Ben Truman answered a few questions about the book and working with his father on it.

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Smash Pages Q&A: Audrey Mok on ‘Archie’ and more

The ‘Heroine Chic’ artist discusses her work on ‘Josie and the Pussycats,’ the latest issue of ‘Archie,’ how she works and more.

Audrey Mok made a big impression when Josie and the Pussycats #1 came out in late 2016. Some of us knew her for her work on the comic Heroine Chic, but her work on Josie managed to straddle the original work of Dan DeCarlo and put her own spin on the characters and their designs. She found a way to visually balance the madcap humor with honest emotion, and find interesting ways to draw both battle scenes and concert scenes with equal ease.

Since Josie wrapped, Mok has been drawing Archie beginning with issue #23. Issue #31 of the series is out this week, and I asked Mok a few questions about her career and how she works.

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Smash Pages Q&A: Maximilian Uriarte on ‘Terminal Lance’

The cartoonist and Marine discusses his ongoing strip about the military and its recent collection.

Maximilian Uriarte began making the comic strip Terminal Lance when he was still an active duty Marine. He continued making the strip while in art school and since. The strip has become a phenomenon, but Uriarte gained a larger audience with the publication of his 2016 graphic novel The White Donkey.

Little Brown has just released Terminal Lance: Ultimate Omnibus, which collects much of Uriarte’s strip along with notes and commentary. The strip skirts the brutal realism of The White Donkey and is instead strange and surreal, funny and weird. It’s easy to see why the strip became so popular. So often marines are portrayed in very one-dimensional ways, but what runs through all of Uriarte’s work is the desire to show them as human. This is not propaganda, this is not a recruitment tool; rather, in both the comic strip and the graphic novel, Uriarte seeks to be honest above all. Sometimes it’s funny or absurd, sometimes disturbing, sometimes brutal. I spoke with Uriarte about the strip and the collection.

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Smash Pages Q&A: Megan Rose Gedris on ‘Spectacle’

The longtime webcomics creator discusses her latest collaboration with Oni Press.

Megan Rose Gedris has been making comics for years. From Yu+Me to I Was Kidnapped by Lesbian Pirates from Outer Space to The Lady Eudora Henley and Darlin’ It’s Betta Down Where It’s Wetta, Gedris has been producing thousands of comics pages nonstop and more than a dozen series online and in print in many genres.

Her current project is Spectacle, an ongoing series published by Oni Press about Anna, a fortune teller and an engineer working at a traveling circus. In the first issue her twin sister Kat is murdered, though she lingers as a ghost, which comes as a shock to the scientifically minded Anna. The series is about finding Kat’s murderer, but it’s also about exploring the people who made up the circus and examining their lives. It is not just a beautifully drawn book, but a strikingly insightful look at a community of outsiders and performers.

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Smash Pages Q&A: Jason McNamara on ‘Sucker’

McNamara discusses his latest collaboration with artist Tony Talbert, an original graphic novel about vampires, the pharmaceutical industry and immortality.

A vampire stockbroker from the 1980s reemerges in the present day to find that a pharmaceutical industry wants to sink their teeth into him — and steal his immortality. Writer Jason McNamara (The Rattler) teams with longtime collaborator Tony Talbert (Continuity, First Moon, Less Than Hero) to bring this “mature readers” adventure to life. They’re joined by inker John Heebink and colorist Paul Little.

Using Kickstarter, the team hopes you’ll help them see their vision become a reality. We ran a preview of the new book last week, and I caught up with Jason to learn more about the new book, Kickstarter and more.

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Smash Pages Q&A: Ellen Forney on ‘Rock Steady’

The creator of ‘Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me’ discusses her latest project, which is out now from Fantagraphics.

Ellen Forney has made many comics over the years that were collected in the books I Love Led Zeppelin and I Was 7 in ’75. She collaborated on the National Book Award winning novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Forney curated the traveling exhibition Graphic Medicine: Ill-Conceived & Well-Drawn. Most readers though know her for her book Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me.

Marbles was a stunning book. Both a personal story of her bipolar diagnosis, Forney also investigated the many myths around art and artists and how she has considered and lived with them in her own life. Her new book Rock Steady: Brilliant Advice From My Bipolar Life, which has just been published by Fantagraphics, is a self help guide designed to help people dealing with anxiety, depression and other disorders. It is beautifully drawn, thoughtfully written, and provides a great deal of insight into these issues. She also created a helpful and hilarious mascot to help readers, Smedmerts!

Forney is on book tour right now. She’ll be at Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena with Maria Bamford on Friday night before going to the East coast next week. I spoke with her at home before she left about the book and her work.

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Smash Pages Q&A: A. David Lewis on ‘Kismet, Man of Fate’

The writer and comics scholar shares more about his webcomic collaboration with Noel Tuazon that brings a 1940s character into the present.

A. David Lewis is a comics scholar who’s written books like American Comics, Literary Theory and Religion: The Superhero Afterlife and co-edited many books including Muslim Superheroes: Comics, Islam and Representation, and Graven Images: Religion in Comic Books and Graphic Novels. Lewis is also the founder of CYRIC, Comics for Youth Refugees Incorporated Collective, which makes and distributes comics for children.

Lewis has written comics, but it wasn’t until recently that he wrote a superhero. Kismet, Man of Fate was a character originally created in 1944 as part of the wartime comic boom. An Algerian operative fighting the Nazi occupation in the original stories, Lewis along with artist Noel Tuazon (Elk’s Run, Tumor) has brought the character into the present in a series of new stories. After making some standalone short comics, the two have been serializing a new longer story. Kismet wraps up today and will be collected later this summer. I reached out to Lewis to talk about his many comics and comics-related projects.

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Smash Pages Q&A: Pan S. on ‘Loving Iran, Loving Me’

The comics creator discusses her contribution to ‘Habibi,’ an anthology featuring Muslim women telling stories about love.

Habibi is a new anthology of comics and prose from Bedside Press. Edited by Hadeel al-Massari and Nyala Ali, the book collects the work of Muslim women telling stories about love.

One of those creators is Sugarpun, or Pan, as she goes by. Her contribution to the anthology “Loving Iran, Loving Me,” a beautifully drawn and beautifully designed comic. She admitted that comics are something she’s only gotten back into doing recently. Primarily an illustrator, she answered a few questions about the anthology and her own work.

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