The webcomic creator is never far from their audience. Be it through social media, public email addresses, Discord servers, or simply the comments section beneath a page, there is a rapport and a conversation that is developed that is unique to the medium. We’re continuing those conversations here, albeit a little more formally, by interviewing webcomics creators to pick their brains about craft, storytelling, and their personal experiences with the medium.
In this second interview, we got talking to Danielle Corsetto, creator of the webcomics “Girls with Slingshots” and “Stuck at 32” as well as the author of three Adventure Time OGNs. Her current project, “Boo! It’s Sex,” is in conjunction with Monica Gallagher (“Assassin Roommate,” “Bonnie N. Collide”)
To start us off, tell us about your experiences with webcomics prior to starting “Girls With Slingshots.”
Danielle Corsetto: I had a little bit of experience with creating webcomics on a schedule (a pretty loose one as I recall – maybe once a week) the year before I started “GWS;” two comic news websites ran my strips “Ramblers” and “Hazelnuts” (an accidental prequel to “GWS”) in the early aughts. I was reading comics like “PVP” and “Something Positive” around that time, and was inspired to start my own strip after graduating from college in 2004.
You’ve been creating webcomics for close to fourteen years and a lot has changed with the internet and the webcomics community. How do you feel this has impacted the ways in which you construct and disseminate your strips? How have your interactions with your audience changed over the years?
DC: At this point I feel like kind of a grandpa when it comes to webcomics. Mobile content consumption has really shifted the way we read. . .well, everything. I swore I would never want to read webcomics on a phone, but I wound up downloading the Weboon app last year, and it has definitely challenged (um, obliterated) my former stance. I found myself enjoying the flexibility and creative possibilities available in vertical storytelling – the pacing is so different, you can easily float word balloons in between panels rather than trying to fit them inside panels and around artwork, and it feels natural to just run your finger along your screen to continue reading.
I started creating new autobio comics (casually called “Stuck at 32,”) and decided without hesitation to make it a vertical scrolling comic that would be mobile-friendly, in part because I didn’t want to create the comic with an end goal of putting it into a book; I chose to make this a personal project instead.
As for communicating with readers, I’m at a bit of a loss there. Twitter is a fire pit that nobody wants to roast marshmallows around anymore, and I’m flummoxed by the comment section on Webtoon – I’ve never felt so old in my life than I do reading those (hundreds of!!) comments. So I rely on Patreon to catch up with the readers who support me, the comment section below my GWS reruns for my old-school readers who have stuck around, and a (fortunately, rather large) email list that I try to limit myself to contacting once a month.
Do you work digitally, physically or a combination of both? What about your preferred format do you find works best for you?
DC: I try to do as little digital art as I possibly can, mainly because I don’t like spending so much time behind a screen; I associate screen time with work time, and I don’t want drawing to feel like work. I love scritching a pen along paper, changing my tools by putting one down and picking another one up, even fucking up and resorting to white-out (or, resorting to just accepting that my work won’t be perfect). Stuck at 32 is entirely traditional, although I tend to increase the space between panels digitally. I’m working on a new book that I’m determined to do as traditionally as I can, but I know that my grasp of color is a little underdeveloped, and coloring digitally will most likely produce the best work in the end.
So at bare minimum, I’ll be inking and lettering everything traditionally. There’s always a part of me that wants to color every page using gouache and watercolor, but I’d like to get this book done in under a decade.
Continued belowWhat have you found to be the most challenging part of the creation process? Is it the idea generation, the scripting or is it a function of the art, the lettering or the coloring?
DC: The writing is always the hardest, because the flow of ideas is unpredictable and you can’t really force it to happen. Sometimes I write a strip in twenty minutes, sometimes it takes two days. I pour a lot of time into researching things I don’t know.
The drawing of a strip, on the other hand, always stuck to a pretty routine schedule: an hour and a half to pencil and ink and letter, a few minutes to scan and prepare in Photoshop, and between an hour and two hours to color, depending on the complexity. Of course, I’ve mostly just worked in comic strip format, which is, y’know, talking heads, or the top half of a body floating in a copy-paste background. So it could be a completely different game when I start drawing full pages with characters whose bodies have to jive with their settings.
Your first webcomic, “Girls with Slingshots,” is modeled in form after newspaper strips. What about that format grabbed you and in what ways did it influence the way you told the story and crafted the humor?
DC: I’ve always enjoyed creating art within constraints, and comic strips are like the haiku of the visual storytelling world. I spent so much of my childhood reading newspaper comic strips, it just became my language. This might have less to do with me and more to do with the age I was when I started making my own comic strips, though; when I lead comic strip workshops for kids and tweens, even if they didn’t grow up reading comic strips, they seem to take to the format like it’s the most natural way in the world to tell a story or a joke. They know exactly how to set up a joke and end with the punchline, without my even telling them how to do it.
“Girls with Slingshots” ran for 11 years and as with any long running project, it can be hard to keep up momentum. Was there ever a time that you found yourself burning out or finding the work less satisfying? If it happened, what did you do to remedy that?
DC: Definitely, but it had more to do with where I was mentally at the time than tiring of the story. If I felt like the story was becoming a drag, I’d just remind myself that I could write whatever I damn pleased, and that usually got me back on track. I would give myself the sort of ultimatum a parent gives to a kid: you can find a way to enjoy this, or we can go home. When the options are “do it” or “stop doing it entirely,” it becomes a lot easier to find a way to make “doing it” not only tolerable, but enjoyable.
Your most recent project, “Boo! It’s Sex,” is being drawn, not by you, but instead by Monica Gallagher. Has it been strange to write for another artist? How different is the writing process for “Boo! It’s Sex” compared to “Girls with Slingshots” or “Stuck at 32” because of this?
DC: I’ve had a little experience writing for another artist in the past – I wrote three “Adventure Time” graphic novels – but I wasn’t in communication with the artists for those. I didn’t even know WHO the artist would be, in fact!
Working on “BOO!” is a special experience, because Monica and I have been both writing and drawing our own comics forever, and we’ve been friends for a long time to boot. Knowing your collaborator well is mad helpful, because you can craft your work according to what’s going to be the most helpful and/or freeing for them. When I write, I’m more likely to draw facial expressions, panel compositions, and body language than I am to write it out, and thumbnailing takes less time to communicate an idea than writing it out does. So I draw out a lot of the panels for her with the stipulation that she draw it the way SHE thinks is best – I don’t wanna force her to lay out panels like me, I just want to give her ideas in case they work well for her (or inspire something different that suits her better).
Continued belowI also recognize that she’s boss at coming up with hilarious dumb names for things as secondary background jokes, so I leave those details – made-up brand names, bus marquees, etc. – to her. Acknowledging your collaborator’s strengths and giving them control over those aspects is key!
“Boo! It’s Sex” also straddles the line between education and humor within the frame of the story. Is one of these aspects more intrinsic to what you’re trying to achieve?
DC: “Straddles,” nice one. I really don’t know how to write anything without some element of humor, and I think the awkwardness of talking about sex (especially for Webtoon readers, because most of them are so young) is a lot more palatable when you present it in comic strip format padded with plenty of jokes. The education process, for the record, is the only thing that makes writing this strip so difficult; the language we use for sex and the slow-moving data (sex research is super underfunded) is still wobbly and hard to find, and sometimes even contradictory. And all those medical terms are a lot easier to swallow with someone as bubbly and positive as Tara (the ghost character) to translate it all.
Some of this stuff you can’t write about WITHOUT making it a joke. For Christ’s sake, we still call penis-in-vagina sex “penis-in-vagina sex.” I’m not even kidding. Professional sexologists say “PIV sex.” And people still recoil at anatomy terms like “vagina.” So Tara just runs with it and uses absurd terms like “meat muffin” and “little kumquat.”
To close us out, what are three webcomics you would recommend for fans of your works or, if you feel “Girls with Slingshots,” “Stuck at 32,” and “Boo! It’s Sex” have fundamentally different audiences, give a couple recs for each.
DC: To be honest, I don’t read very many webcomics anymore! I feel a little guilty about it, but just like with drawing, I associate the screen with work, so I’ve shifted to reading paper books when I want to enjoy a story. But I do follow a few Webtoon comics, some on Instagram, and a few on Patreon. Here are a few recent favorites:
“My Giant Nerd Boyfriend”
“Boumeries”
“Up and Out”
“Alison and her Rock Awesome Robot”
Kevin Budnik’s autobio comics
“Lunarbaboon”
