Interviews 

Interview with a Webcomic: Coni Yovaniniz & Rodrigo Vargas on Cons, Travel, and The Autobio Line

By | February 4th, 2020
Posted in Interviews | % Comments

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.

This month, after taking a break for the holiday & new year months, and settling into our new bi-monthly schedule, I sat down and had a chat with Coni Yovaniniz and Rodrigo Vargas, creators of “Walking to Do,” which we highlighted in The Webcomics Weekly about a year ago. Read that and then come on back because we have some interviewing to do. . .this is why I’m not a comedian.

[Editor’s Note: As of 3/23/2020, the version of “Walking to Do” discussed here, the travel journal, has been taken down. But it will return in another form! You can read more about it here. Until then, enjoy the talk we had!]

What was your prior experience with webcomics before starting “Walking to Do?”

Rodrigo Vargas: I don’t really have that much experience prior. I did a webcomic back in 2008 and then I dropped it forever, haha. But Coni can tell us more.

Coni Yovaniniz: I’ve pretty much got introduced to comics via webcomics, so it’s what I’ve been doing for quite a while. But actually doing a webcomic — starting and finishing it — I’ve done two previous ones: one in did in college in 2012-ish, which was a short thing where I wanted to learn how to make a longform comic and whatnot, and then there was “Postcards in Braille,” which was the big thing I did before, which is a webcomic that took me about 4 years: 2014 to about 2017, if I’m not mistaken.

That’s how I got to know most people I know now, so that’s a cool thing. And now we’re doing this!

So you met people through the creation of the comic or was it through interacting with fans?

CY: When I was doing “Postcards,” I met a lot of people who were also doing their own webcomics. LIke, a lot of us were just getting started and were like, “Oh, I like you comic!” “Oh I like your comic too!” And that’s how you make friends on the internet basically. I got to meet a lot of people and they’ve been growing a lot lately. Some of them are making actual books now, some are working for animation; it’s like this group I got to grow up with in a way.

How did you and Rodrigo meet?

RV: Ummm. . .

CY: Comics. [Laughs]

RV: [Laughs] Yeah. Well, here in Chile I used to work for this thing called MapacheStudios, it was a team of just two people, one of them was just me, and we used to give these micro grants to comic creators. Twice a year, we gave around two hundred dollars, sometimes three hundred later. We had open submissions and Coni got in touch and we liked her comic. She was the best one in the lot and we became friends after that. She started, like, joining us whenever we gave away the prize; she joins the team as a jury for the other comics and we’ll discuss and we’ll meet. . .what, two, three times a year?

CY: Yeah, something like that.

RV: Then we started working together when Mapachestudios was about to release a book. We asked her to make some stuff and she did a really good job. Then we were like, “Why doesn’t she join the team, like, for real?”

CY: Finally.

RV: Haha, finally. So, that’s how we met, because of her comic “Postcards in Braille.”

CY: That’s the comic that gets me friends. Everywhere.

It was a fairly long lasting comic. Did you expect it to run for four years?

CY: I absolutely didn’t. It just started as this fun thing I did with a friend. I was visiting her and we did this joke, Dog and Fries, and whatever, and I was like, “Eh, I’ll do a couple pages, you know, just for fun.” Since I was in college at the time, it was this little thingy to distract myself and suddenly I was doing consistent updates every week for four years, I dunno how that happened.

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You kinda fell into it?

CY: Yeah, I kinda fell into it and it got pretty big. Then I reached a point where I said, “You know what? That’s enough” and I started closing things. I think it had a good run; I wouldn’t have extended it more.

Do you feel that a good ending is better than something lasting a long time?

CY: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, some things last for a long time and they’re good but I’ve always had this big respect for people who are like, “You know what? This is fine.” You feel like you’ve already told everything you wanted to and you’re not just going to continue. For “Postcards,” I had a lot of people who were like, “It’s so fun. I don’t want it to end.” And yeah, it’s fun but what am I gonna do about it?

It’s like Gravity Falls. It wouldn’t have been so good if it had gone on for longer. I really respect that.

This is very, though it did take a year between seasons.

CY: Oh, I watched it later, I didn’t notice.

RV: She usually just waits until it’s over and then watches the entire thing.

You have made the correct choice.

CY: Well The Good Place is doing that now with the ending. I’m ready.

RV: Oh, last night was a really good episode, so I was checking out Twitter at night and I started seeing some gifs and I was like NO.

CY: Nooo.

RV: Not gonna happen.

Gotta avoid Twitter from now on. To move back to Walking to Do, because it’s a collaborative work, how did you decide to do it that way, so that there’s one person drawing and the two of you writing, and then how did you figure out the rhythm you wanted?

RV: It started when I started making these really tiny comics in my planner, like the one with the bagel.

CY: [Laughs] That’s the classic one.

RV: It was such a weird experience. I mean, we do have bagels here but it’s not really common.

CY: Yeah, they’re rare.

RV: They’re pretty rare. So, when we found those, we were like “Oh let’s get the bagels. And then it happened, and I was actually eating half of a bagel with the strawberry cream cheese on top. It was an everything bagel, which we didn’t know meant onion and garlic, and then it sucks because the next day, we were having breakfast and then Coni did the same thing!

CY: I should have known better, I was there the first time.

RV: We didn’t notice any of that when it happened, then we kept on having these little adventures and when we got back home, we were like “OK, that was fun.” We didn’t think about making a comic book. But then, I thought it [the bagel story] was really funny so I started drawing the same comic of us, the same comic both times but we just switched the characters and then Coni said, “We can do some stuff with this, like the stuff you had on your Patreon.”

CY: Like the little journal comic kind of thing?

RV: Yeah, like the journal comics and the ones that I wrote. Then we got super interested, like we had an actual story to tell with this. That’s kind of a big deal for me because, I dunno, life as a cartoonist isn’t that exciting. You can sit and draw and draw and draw and nothing else will happen. Once we figured out, oh, we have a story to tell with this, that we have a point to make, we figured, let’s just do it. You take one and I take the other one and we kept switching.

Our main goal was to have it feel like a conversation.

CY: It’s kind of what we’re doing in the intro to the comic. We go out for tea and donuts, hot chocolate and donuts, and we’re like, “We went on this trip and this happened and then that happened,” so it kind of goes like that.

RV: It’s just us telling people what we did with the trip. We just take turns. Coni has a better grasp on a lot of stuff. Her facial expressions, and the more emotional moments are most of her work, and I just do the food ones, which is the stuff I enjoy drawing. We started switching that way and taking notes. We have this huge pile with most of everything that happened on the trip.

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CY: We have a big Trello board because this was going to be a lot smaller in the beginning.

RV: No, yeah, we should be over now.

CY: We were like, “It’s not gonna take more than a year,” and here we are. But we were like, “Yeah, let’s remember everything we can. All the little moments and the adventures and everything.” We started writing little cards on the Trello board and it got completely out of control. So we work mostly with that and we got, “OK, you do this one. I do this one.” I think the bagel ones are the first one we decided. Rodrigo is making everything bagel. . .themed!

RV: And there’s more to come.

More bagel adventures?

CY: Yeah, they’re not over yet.

Do you think these bagel adventures will be one of the thru-lines of the series? The emotional moments?

RV: I mean, we didn’t have that many bagels but the ones we did have, half of them were really bad and the other half were really good.

Did you have any in New York? That’s the important question

RV: Yeah, yes. That’s the closing one.

CY: Uh, spoiler alert.

RV: It should be coming soon-ish. [Editor’s note: It has since come out.]

CY: It’s cool because posting the comic is how we figure out that people have really strong opinions about bagels, especially in New York. We didn’t know that.

RV: We went to a New York deli with some friends and they had this really cool bagel that had egg but not as a filling.

CY: Yeah, like the bagel was kinda orangey.

RV: And shiny! And crunchy, it was so good.

CY: I took a picture of it, just so I can look at it more.

RV: We should put it on the site. That’s one of the ones that’s going to close it because then we got to Ohio and we didn’t have any bagels there. I mean, probably, people in New York are going to be, “It’s a good thing you didn’t have any bagels in Ohio.”

CY: You finished on a high note.

RV: We like them but, we don’t recognize which ones are which ones. We just bought store bought ones and they were good enough, I guess.

CY: Yeah, they were good.

It’s food.

RV: We’re going to have better bagels again in the future.

CY: Oh for sure. We’ll take recommendations or something. . .I completely lost track of what we were talking about. Oh! Collaborating. I think one of the fun things we’ve done is that for most of the comic we take turns, but we’ve also done pages where we draw on the same page.

Could you give me an example of one of those pages?

RV: The whole chapter with the SPX Prom. We tried to do a longer narrative with it, instead of one gag per page. We actually drew ourselves in the same pages and, if you wonder, we shared most of the work. Like the one in the movies, we just talked about it. “Oh, yeah. Remember that movie?” “Yeah, it was so good but also so so so soooooo hard on us.” “Do you want to do the comic?” “Yeah, I wanna do the comic.” “OK.”

So she lets me do the comic and I’ll show her some sketches maybe. Not that often though.

CY: You’re more likely to show me the finished page. I send you my thumbnails.

RV: Yeah, Coni sends me her thumbnails and is like, “Oh, maybe we can do this or that?” We know what we want to say with each page, so we trust ourselves to go, “Oh, you’re gonna try to make a joke around that point.”

CY: And we talk about connecting some pages. Like, this page finished before we get on the train and this page is after we’re already on the train.

RV: Or, like, it was raining before, so you should put some rain drops on this one. But on the SPX Prom, we sat down and did the layouts together and we drew ourselves together and I did half of the graytones and Coni did the other half, so it was mostly split.

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That was probably a lot of fun.

CY: Yeah! It was a lot of fun. It was weird at first since we draw, at least at the beginning, pretty differently.

RV: We had to match styles.

CY: My proportions were way different and felt off sometimes. Also, since we were working on the same page, and we work on paper, we’d have to physically exchange pages. I was like, “Oh, I have it but I gotta go to your house and take it and scan it and ugh.” It was messy but it worked out.

This whole comic is this great balance between comedy and travelogue. A lot of travel narratives are a lot of internal reflection, instead of what you have, which is a lot of comedy, a lot of conversations. It feels like being there with the two of you instead of a narrative about going.

CY: Yeah, it’s been interesting to find a good tone for it and so far I’m pretty happy with how it is. But we didn’t want to do a travelogue that was just, “We went here and then we went there and then we went here. Here’s a building we saw.” Actually focusing on the moments and the jokes. . .based around that in a way is what we wanted.

Do you think a lot of the reasons why the comic skews more towards comedy and conversation rather than introspection about the places and the people is because it is two of you collaborating? Like, if you had gone on this just on your own, had the project still happened, it’d have turned out differently?

CY: If it wasn’t the two of us doing this thing, the comic probably wouldn’t be a thing to begin with but yeah, earlier last year I tried doing a travelogue kind of thing when I was traveling on my own and I only did it at the very beginning of the trip. When you’re on your own, you don’t have the conversations we had on the trip. I tried to draw some comics like, “I’m at the airport and I saw this and that” because I was on my own and bored but by the time the airplane landed, I was too tired to do it. Then I visited a friend and got distracted and never did any more of those comics.

So I guess it is different. It’s more of an experience than traveling per se. I’m not sure.

RV: That’s actually one of the things we tried to achieve with this. It goes hand in hand with the part about making the comic feel like we’re telling a story as if we were all together in a reunion with more people. Like, “We went to the states. Oh, and we had a problem at the airport.” “I remember that guy.” “Oh yeah! Remember the–” and building the story like that. But yeah, a bunch of Travel logs get introspective but we’re not really that introspective.

CY: Yeah, like we’re not making it up. If we go and just do silly things and talk for hours, it’s absolutely real.

RV: That’s what we do every time we hang out. There were a bunch of talks about comics, then there was some talk about food, then more comics.

CY: We also went to two comic conventions. I guess we didn’t show it that much in the comic but there was a lot around SPX and then CXC *deep gasp* Did you see this comic? And did you see that comic and that one?

And we went super crazy over how much we loved reading comics.

RV: There was an executive decision because we didn’t want to name drop a bunch of people. Like, “Oh, we got to meet Kevin Czap.” We do mention them by name because they’re our friend but we don’t want to go and say, look at our friends, we have such cool friends.

CY: ~Look at all the cool people we know.~

RV: It [this comic page] was mostly about me being a super fanboy of Liz Suburbia’s comic and then later, us being super excited about sharing candy with the ones we like or getting super excited because we find this artist or these pins. Because. . .the other way, where we say, “Ohh, we met, um, I dunno. Jim Rugg” and then name dropping him feels kinda dirty and kinda cheap.

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CY: You’re not telling much. It’s the same as saying, we went to a touristy part of New York City. We didn’t actually do any touristy parts, we’ve both been there before. We went to Joe’s Pizza.

RV: And we went to CBGB.

Was it good pizza?

RV: Oh yeah.

CY: It’s all we think about. I miss New York City.

RV: So, it was mostly about that kind of stuff, about the fun stuff you get to do when you’re on a trip. Half of the fun of the trip is that we got to stay at someone else’s house or we’re going to stay at an AirBnB and they’re going to have weird stuff in their refrigerators and I wonder how the bathroom looks and–

CY: We’re gonna see what kind of stuff they have at the grocery store.

RV: Right! We can go get the candies. That kind of stuff that we don’t get to do here because it’s not that exciting to get the stuff you get everyday.

It’s kinda like seeing what’s mundane elsewhere and that’s suddenly exciting.

CY: Yeah! I don’t know how it is for people in the States but for us. . .eventually, we get a little more used to it but the first couple times I went to the States at least, it’s so weird because everything’s like in the movies, like the school buses. I guess it’s normal for people but for us it’s “Ooh, everything’s different. There are no sidewalks in places.” Like, what the hell?!

I was going to ask what differences, but that’s a great example.

RV: Yeah, we’ve got sidewalks everywhere here.

We do not.

CY: Yeah but we also live in a city. We walk a lot.

Backtracking a little, and this is for both of you, because you talked about having to bring over pages, does that mean that both of you work physically with ink and pens and brushes or are you working digitally or are you working both ways? What do you find about those formats work best for you?

RV: Coni is more used to doing stuff digitally but I’m pretty sure we’re both super into working with brushes and ink and paper so the whole comic is being done in paper. Coni actually has a bunch of folders with every comic page she has ever done.

CY: Pretty much.

RV: She’s the kind of person that stores them forever.

CY: There in those little transparent sleeves in a big book.

RV: So, yeah, we’re doing it with traditional art. The only thing we’ve done digitally are the greytones and the headers for the websites.

CY: The fun thing is that, for this, we do it 90% with brush and ink. I haven’t used an actual brush before for my comic. I used to use a brush pen for “Postcards,” which is not exactly the same as using the actual, actual ink and controlling how much you use. I had never used a brush before because I was too lazy to clean things. With a brush pen, you cap it and whatever, it’s done.

But we started talking about brush inking, I think before starting this but not too before.

RV: We kind of agreed to doing everything traditionally so it was Coni using this to practice a lot more using the brush. On my side, it was practicing doing hand lettering because my writing is a mess. That’s probably one of the parts that shows how not ready I was for the comic at the beginning. It was terrible, and it’s gotten better, but it’s not where it should be.

Do you both letter directly onto the page or do you place it afterwords?

CY: Oh, we do it on the page.

RV: We have to make a couple corrections sometimes so we do it on another piece of paper and paste it on, just to have the complete set since it’s not really needed. We want to have these folders at the end so we can read it as a book in the original pages. We’d like to have all the pages, on the page, and as close to the finished result as we can.

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Do you plan on releasing this as a whole book once it’s finished?

RV: There’s a chance. It doesn’t hurt to have another book under your arm but we’re not doing this to print it. At some point, I did start paying attention to where in the book each page would be located.

CY: Like on the left side or right?

RV: Yeah, because, especially on the SPX Prom, if you’re gonna have a cliffhanger, you want it on the right side of the book, so it’s more exciting when you turn the page. We started trying to keep that going on so that on the next pages that are two-page long or stuff like that, we can keep them on the same spread, so they can be read as a whole thing. That started kind of recently.

CY: It started from SPX Prom and onwards.

RV: When we got to SPX Prom, we started adding more pages just to fill it up. But when we did the Trello board, with the little note cards, we had way more moments. We at some point decided to shorten things up otherwise we’d end up telling this story in three years instead of one like we were hoping to. So, once we started chopping stuff out, we realized we may need to bring some stuff back just to make the pages fit for the book. . .If there’s the book.

CY: I think we should print it. It’s not like we’re actively doing stuff to get it printed but it’s print ready. We have the hi-rez files and everything.

RV: And we already did the booklet.

CY: Oh yeah. We did a little booklet for TCAF this year, which was a little selection from the beginning of the comic. We’ll see where we go when the comic is over.

RV: We’re really hoping to be done by this time next year. We want to go to SPX again and so, we’d want to have the whole book done for next year, for SPX. I mean, we were expecting it to be done with this–

CY: For this year.

RV: For this year and it didn’t happen, so we may not be ready then; we just don’t want to take that much more time with it.

CY: I think we’re doing well. We’re past halfway already.

RV: Right now, we’re trying to start updating three times a week.

CY: We’re just like, “we wanna go fast.”

What’s that schedule like? Do you think it’s too fast?

CY: It depends on what else we’re doing at the moment. Previously this year, we were doing other things, like for example, I did a comic for “Team Avatar Tales” for Dark Horse. That came out in October. We were working on that in April, May-ish.

On top of that, it was hard to keep up with “Walking to Do” updates and we’d be doing other projects as well and there was the whole trip to TCAF, so when we’re doing other stuff, it’s kind of hard to stay consistent with the updates. Now that we have a little more time, we’re trying to get this moving faster, build more of a buffer.

RV: At some point, we had a really big buffer, like that month and a half.

CY: And then we depleted it completely.

RV: When we were closing on the date for the “Avatar” comic, it just went away. Now we’re struggling to get a bigger buffer but we also have stuff to do for next year. We’re trying to catch up as much as we can now, so we can free ourselves earlier and have some extra time next year to work on other stuff.

CY: Yeah, that’s the webcomic life, trying to keep up and we all dream of having a buffer but we never do.

RV: And it may be kind of different from other webcomics because this is not something that we can go on hiatus for. That would be really hard because we’ll be done really soon and there’s a whole story and we don’t want to leave people hanging.

CY: It gets momentum.

RV: Like, when “Postcards” was on hold because of your Thesis work, you put a hold to
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it, since there was no storyline that was impending.

CY: Yeah. Like, all the pages would stand on their own.

RV: But with the pages that are starting to come out now in “Walking To Do,” there’s a narrative that’s there and waiting and there’s a need to complete and I’m really anxious about not completing that stuff. I’m a musician and when you have a chord that needs to resolve on another chord, and it doesn’t resolve, it fucks me up.

CY: [Laughs] I have no idea what that is but OK.

RV: It’s like that song. The classic song.

CY: You know, the song.

RV: It’s kinda like that. We can’t just leave it hanging for too long because there’s stuff that needs to close, to resolve. It’s like cancelling a movie in the middle of it. You’re like, “Oh shit, what’s gonna happen now?” You leave people waiting and that’s not fair for the 20 people who really wanted to read it.

CY: It gets enough of a following. I mean, “Harry Potter” could get away with it in the last two movies, so they could leave it on a huge cliffhanger and we all had to wait a year. People were gonna watch it anyways. Not everyone has that privilege.

RV: We’re not Game of Thrones.

CY: Who is Game of Thrones?

Not Game of Thrones, not anymore.

CY: Did you watch Game of Thrones?

No, I read the books, which is it’s own. . .

RV: You’re still waiting.

Yeah. Still waiting.

CY: It’ll probably be a better ending than the TV show.

RV: Oh yeah. This year, we went to the States just as Game of Thrones was ending, and we hadn’t seen any episodes ever or read any books or read any comics. We just know that people were really into it and we got to watch the final episode as it aired.

You’ve just watched the final episode?

RV: Yeah, that’s the only things that we know about Game of Thrones.

That’s like me and LOST actually. It’s the only episode I saw.

CY: It was an experience for sure.

RV: There was a dragon. And there was a meeting.

CY: And a throne.

RV: Yeah, there was one throne but then they invented democracy.

CY: Oh yeah, that happened.

RV: Remember when they invented democracy? That was something. I don’t know if there’s more democracy in the books. They’re gonna vote now.

CY: There’s a master of coin.

RV: Oh yeah, there was a master of coin. Every since that episode, Coni has been hoarding every coin possible so she became master of coin.

CY: I got coin.

RV: Because we can’t take the coin home, she’s in charge of the coin now.

You’ve talked in the beginning, Coni, about how “Postcards in Braille” was where you found a lot of your friends. How did the event of going to SPX and taking these trips, do you feel that it made the comics world feel a little bit smaller and nicer? Or was it more of a star struck tour?

RV: The comic world is super nice. Before we went on this trip, Coni had been at TCAF before.

CY: Not tabling, just visiting.

RV: She met a bunch of people there and this year we went to TCAF again because they remember Coni from the last time she was there. A guy actually brought us some bread.

Regular bread?

CY: He worked at a bakery and brought us some croissants. They were really good. They knew our deal.

RV: We had to start hiding because you can’t eat on the second floor.

CY: You had been to CXC before.

RV: Yeah, I had been to CXC. That’s the next step on “Walking To Do.” SPX was our first one. But there’s a bunch of people and characters that repeat in our lives, I guess. We’re really big fans of “Johnny Wander” and “Octopus Pie,” so when we had the chance to meet them and talk to them, it was really nice. I dunno. They remembered Coni, they remembered the candy.

CY: We made an impression with that.

RV: I mean, when you take a candy to the face, you don’t forget that. On the other side, we have people like Kat Fajardo and Breena Nuñez, I knew from before at Sol-Con and it was really awesome finding them again at SPX. We became better friends and we spoke more. They were super supportive and they shared a bunch of stuff; same with the people in Toronto.

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CY: It’s really nice to meet comics people in person. It’s probably this way for everyone, but especially for us, who are pretty far away most of the time and you see these people on the internet and they’re talking about the things they do or it’s more work focused and you don’t get a chance to talk to people as in hanging out.

Going to these things, it can be as simple as “Hey, how’s the show going?” Everyone has been really friendly to us. When I got to meet all these people Rodrigo knew from before at CXC, I was meeting them for the first time and they were really nice to me the entire time. I dunno, it’s been a lot of fun. We miss our people.

RV: That also doesn’t negate the star-struck.

CY: It’s a mix of both.

RV: My first CXC I met Evan Dorkin for the first time and I’d been a huge fan of him for a while, and I was like, “Oh shit, I met Evan Dorkin and we said stuff.” Or meeting Nate Powell at CXC the year before the one we’re showing in “Walking to Do,” and him seeing us at the table and walking by the table just to say hello because he remembered us and we got to say, “Oh shit. That guy remembered us.”

I’m a fan and living in Chile, our relationship with most of the comics people is by reading their books and falling in love with the stuff they do. So, it’s a mixture of both.

CY: It’s still a shock like, ooh, we’re here and people remember us, but it’s also cool to actually be there. Everything feels more real then, like these are real people.

When you’re with others?

RV: Yeah, when you see them, and you’re building a personality out of what they’re just talking about online and what they’re writing is.

You have, kind of an image in your head of what you think they’re going to be like based on all the social media interactions and it doesn’t always match up to who they are in person?

RV: The real world yes but when we went to SPX, everyone was just as nice and kind as we imagined it.

That’s good!

RV: So, everybody that makes a cameo, it’s basically because we were as fascinated by that person in person as we were when reading their books or, like, tweets.

CY: We’re like, “Oh these people are so cool.” And then you meet them, and they’re cool, for real.

RV: They helped us out and gave us tips. That was the most amazing part.

CY: Everyone’s looking forward to share with other people and meet new people and have a good time. It’s really fun.

I wanna pull something from the middle of that. Do you find that comics like “Johnny Wander” and “Octopus Pie” influenced the way you’re telling “Walking To Do?”

CY: Yeah.

RV: Yeah.

CY: For sure.

RV: They influenced a lot of stuff. You can find the connections between “Octopus Pie” and “Postcards in Braille” even if it’s not intentional. Or the connections between “Johnny Wander” and “Walking to Do” because they’re basically both autobio comics that are one joke at a time, and chill.

CY: They have this lighthearted mood that we both really enjoy.

RV: We have a really big cast of people going around. Originally, it was going to be closer to “Johnny Wander” because I was just finishing the omnibus. But they’re different in a way that’s more condensed.

CY: They can tell a story in a few panels.

RV: Like, they have pages with two panels or three and it has a nice mood and joke. . .and we have like seven panels per page.

CY: You have more panels than I do.

RV: Yeah, I do a lot of panels and a lot of dialog. Those are some of the goals in what we do but there are others like, what’s the one you’re reading?

CY: Oh, “American Elf.”

RV: Stuff like “American Elf.” Trying to build a little more distance between other stuff, like Lucy Knisley’s books.

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CY: Those are more introspective.

RV: Yeah, those are way more introspective and as we said before, we’re not really that introspective. Everytime we’re spacing out, it’s because we’re actually spacing out and not thinking. Lucy makes really cool comics and tells us a lot about herself and her adventures in the world but she also tells us about her private life. And we find that there’s a barrier we’re not willing to cross.

CY: There’s a weird line there. When you do an autobio, you have to draw a line for how much personal is too personal.

We see a little bit of that on page 52, when you’re leaving Midtown comics and there’s the implication that something has happened and then you get the invitation from Feña but we don’t know what it was, just that there was something.

CY: That’s the thing. We want to tell the story and there was a mood there. At the beginning, I don’t think we were going to mention this. This has nothing to do with anything; I was having some problems. I didn’t want to go into specifics because I don’t want to roast people or anything, but then we realized it was needed to tell the story the way we wanted to. I was like, OK, let’s do it but in a way that’s not too much.

RV: We don’t want to call too much attention to the problems.

You wanted to acknowledge it without not necessarily sharing the details.pp

RV: Yeah because when you start to get into it, people are gonna try to find out who we’re talking about.

CY: Yeah, spill the tea man.

RV: But we don’t really want people wanting to find out. That would be nasty.

CY: It’s been an experience. We have to be conscious of where we draw that line the entire time. I think we’re doing a good job of it for what we want to do.

RV: We want to welcome you into our trip but we don’t want to welcome you that much. OK, you can come, we can tell you our story.

CY: You can stay here but at arms reach.

You gotta go home at eleven.

CY: That’s exactly it. You can stay over for dinner but then you gotta go home.

I have a couple more questions. The first is, what made you two decide to put transcripts at the bottom? What prompted that because I think it’s a good approach to making comics accessible.

CY: I started doing transcripts with “Postcards in Braille” because the main character in “Postcards” is blind, it only seemed reasonable for there to be transcripts for it. I didn’t know it was a thing but I was learning about captions in pictures and image descriptions, which are a little more common now, but I had never seen it done for comics.

After looking it up, I found a couple more but it’s still super rare. For “Postcards,” I decided to do a full transcript of the thing and for “Walking to Do,” it just kinda came from that previous experience. I’d really like to normalize it.

RV: It’s a really big shame since we’re just this close to being done with the decade and there’s no more transcripts in comics. I mean, why would you not want people to read them? There’s also an extra challenge because there’s a difference in how to write the joke.

CY: You have to get the mood of it.

RV: Yeah, you have to find the mood, you have to see what you’re gonna pay attention to, you have to do a bunch of other work. A lot of work goes into a transcript. But it’s good work and it helps you a lot to learn how to write.

CY: I get why people wouldn’t want to do it because it does take time but it gets better, it becomes more of a habit. It kinda becomes second nature. At least, the same for people who should be doing subtitles for videos, especially YouTube. We all know the automatic captions suck so why don’t they do captions. People should do that more.

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For subtitles, it’s getting better and it’d be nice for transcripts and image descriptions.

RV: You want to get the most amount of readers to your work so why are you actively leaving people out?

OK, my last question. Why are three webcomics you’d recommend for fans of “Walking to Do?”

RV: Oh, that’s easy. “Octopus Pie.”

CY: “Johnny Wander.” “American Elf” isn’t online anymore. What other webcomics am I reading that are similar?

RV: Do you remember the ones Emi Lenox used to do? I don’t think she’s making those anymore.

CY: Those are from a while ago and the ones I’m reading have nothing to do with what we’re doing. I mean, Lucy Knisley has some comics now about her daily life. Those are nice.

RV: I’m trying to look at my library to find a webcomic.

CY: You’re not going to find it looking at books.

RV: But everybody prints stuff.

Unless you back their kickstarter.

CY: Yeah, that’s true.

RV: There’s probably more webcomics we can talk about that aren’t like slice-of-life, travelogues. It’s always fun to check out stuff like what Breena Nuñez posts online, or Kat Fajardo.

CY: She’s releasing a book in 2020, I think.

RV: Maybe. But that’s just some good comics you can read that are autobio and slice of life.

CY: Read comics. Also, if you can get your hands on the entire “American Elf,” it’s worth it. I read, like, 12 years? This year, I got all of it digital and read the entire thing in one go. It was really fun.

RV: If you read in digital, it’s kinda like reading a webcomic.

CY: It was a webcomic, then it got printed, now it’s not online anymore. There’s a bundle where you can get the whole thing.

CY: Yeah, that’s true.

RV: We’ve been reading regular books and print comics because we’re starting for future jobs.

CY: We’re kinda getting into new and different stuff.

RV: We’re getting ready to do another comic book right now, so I’ve been reading a lot of “Spider-Man” right now.

CY: Not that it’s a bad thing.

RV: No, I enjoy it but we’ve been branching out to read other things than what we usually read, so that’s probably why stuff doesn’t come out super easily.

You’ve been reading widely instead of narrowly.

CY: Yeah!

RV: Every year, I try to finish “Octopus Pie.” I haven’t finished it so at the beginning of the year, I set a goal to read “Octopus Pie” from beginning to end during the course of one year. I’ve never been able to finish it and every year, I start from the first page. It’s really hard so that’s the last webcomic I’ve been reading.

So, what are the types of things you’ve been reading lately? You said Spider-Man and…

RV: Yeah, we’ve been reading Kayla Miller’s book, “Click” and “Camp.” Oh! We’ve been reading the Raina books.

CY: We’ve been reading a lot of middle grade graphic novels.

RV: Yeah, we’ve “Smile” and “Sisters.”

CY: “Ghosts.”

RV: Yeah!

CY: “Ghosts” is really good.

RV: I was super ready to be offended by it because I’m Latino and she’s super white but I fell in love with the book. It’s super respectful and kind. I actually loved it a lot.

CY: It is really nice.

RV: I’m also reading the one about Andy Kaufmann by Box Brown. We’ve also been reading “Bakuman.”

CY: Oh yeah!

RV: We’re in kind of a race because Coni is one book ahead of me.

CY: I read it a while ago, now I’m re-reading it and Rodrigo’s also reading it. He’s kind of catching up to me and we can comment on all the stuff that happens. It’s been really interesting for sure.

RV: It puts a lot of stuff in perspective, like about the guy who makes 80 pages in three days. It’s bananas.

CY: And how they keep going with series, just making stuff up as they go as the series gets longer and longer. It’s really different from what we’re doing with this comic, even if it’s a webcomic and it gets longer, we know it’s gonna start here and it’s gonna end here. But here, it can go on forever. New bad guys show up and…

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RV: At one point, they want to stop with one and the editor is like, no you have to keep doing it. That idea broke my head. Why can’t they finish their comic if they don’t wanna keep making it? No, no, you have to because that’s how you do.

CY: It’s a whole different world.

RV: What if we find a real ending for the book? Doesn’t matter, you have to keep doing it. That kind of stuff is kind of scary. I also noticed that they’re using the page size we use for “Walking to Do.”

CY: Really?

RV: Yeah, they’re working on the small page. So every time you see them, you can try to find the balance. We’re using the same paper and we take twice or three times as long as them to make.

CY: And we make simpler drawings.

RV: We’re 90 pages in the comic and these kids have 50 chapters in one year?

CY: But we also have day jobs and they have assistants.

And you two probably have better health.

CY: Yeah, we sleep, we go to sleep early and all that.

I actually had a question, now that you mention it, about day jobs. Comics making isn’t your primary career.

RV: I guess that would be a way to put it. I would say comics making is our main job. . .except we don’t make enough money with it.

CY: It’s not what pays the bill right now.

Let me rephrase then. Would you hope it would be your main job or do you like it being secondary? Coni, you recently earned your PhD, correct?

RV:

CY: No, Masters. MSc. I was going to go for my PhD until I decided I was done with academia. . .forever.

Bad break or just too much? Was it because of something in academia or were you like: “I’m done. I’m done. I’m. Done?”

RV: That’s exactly it.

CY: I got into academia because I wanted to do research but it turns out that research is very–

RV: *whispers* Boring.

CY: It can be fun! But it’s very intense. It’s getting a little better in places but people are like, “You gotta be 110% dedicated to your research.” When I got into grad school, I was already making “Postcards” so I was the person who “not taking things seriously enough” because I was doing other things. Even if they don’t tell it to your face, well, they do tell it to your face, but they think you’re not committed enough.

Because I was working on my comic, I was like, I can do both but they don’t like you doing both and I was like, “I’ve had enough of this.” I do outreach now, which is fun. So I can put my degree to use.

RV: So, I would say comics are our main job, like the most important part of the day because that’s what we want to do for life. At least for right now. But it doesn’t pay the bills or make the most amount of money but it’s enough.

CY: It’s enough and we make it work. At least in my case, I’m glad I have the job I have right now because it doesn’t take too much of my day. I can make comics without the stress of not making money off of it right away. Kind of a balance for sure. My job in science is paying for my insurance, so that’s one less thing to stress about. We might look to make more comics in the future, and we want to make more in the future, but for now it’s a situation we make work.

RV: At least until we get another opportunity to get stuff for a good amount of money and a good amount of time. Because that’s kind of the problem of freelancing.

CY: You don’t have consistency of payment.

RV: And we really like consistency in our lives.

CY: That’s why I think it works for now but it’s better than jumping into nothing.


//TAGS | Webcomics

Elias Rosner

Elias is a lover of stories who, when he isn't writing reviews for Mulitversity, is hiding in the stacks of his library. Co-host of Make Mine Multiversity, a Marvel podcast, after winning the no-prize from the former hosts, co-editor of The Webcomics Weekly, and writer of the Worthy column, he can be found on Twitter (for mostly comics stuff) here and has finally updated his profile photo again.

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