Multiversity Comics Presents: Colleen Coover

Photo from Bully Comics via Periscope Studios

This week we’ve offered you a couple of great interviews already (see: Natalie Nourigat, Emi Lenox), and today we continue our interview series with a sit down with Colleen Coover, writer and artist extraordinaire responsible for books like Gingerbread Girl, Small Favors and entries in books like Jim Henson’s Storyteller.

Click behind the cut as we discuss Portland, superheroes and heroines, Gingerbread Girl, digital comics and more!

Spot illustration from Periscope Studios

You’re a member of the rather prolific Periscope Studios in Portland. For you as a member, what do you find appealing about working in a studio surrounded by other creators?

The best thing about it, other than fulfilling the basic human need to be around other people occasionally so you don’t go mad, is the cross-pollination that occurs. I can learn new things about drawing by asking Steve Lieber or Ron Randall or Jeff Parker to show me stuff, or I can learn stuff about storytelling by critiquing our interns, or I can learn technical tricks with Photoshop, or how to negotiate a Work For Hire contract, or a million other things. It’s like being in grad school for comics.

Even outside of Periscope, Portland is filled to the brim with writers, artists, publishers and any number of other comic related talents. Obviously Gingerbread Girl took place in Portland, but do you draw inspiration for your work from the city you live in and its inhabitants?

Yeah, it’s a pretty great town for being a creative person. It just makes me happy to live here. It’s very liberating to be able to tell your dentist or your banker that you make your living as a freelance illustrator and not have them look at you like you’re a freak. It means I have a lot more energy to spend on my creative work.

Art collective blogs have become all of the rage lately, and you’ve recently joined The Sindiecate. For you as an artist, what is it about this experience that is so rewarding? How’d you join up with that very talented group?

Very short answer to how I joined is: Mike Choi had to take a break, and David Lafuente wrote me and asked me to join. I was deeply honored. It’s a perfect set-up in that it has me sketching characters that it might not otherwise occur to me to do, and I can experiment with styles if I want. And it’s helped me remember to post more regularly on my own blog, too. I tend to forget to do that when I get busy or distracted.

I’ve noticed on your Tumblr page that you work pretty heavily with digital on sketches. With the advancement of digital art technologies, do you find yourself working more and more with digital, or is it a blend between that and pen and paper? What advantages do you feel digital provides you as an artist?

I do work digitally more and more. I’ve always had trouble maintaining a physical sketchbook, but something about being able to edit a digital sketch frees me up. Even in my professional work, much of the work is done digitally– in the layout stage especially. It lets me redesign panels without having to do a lot of erasing or tracing over stuff on a lightboard. Recently, I’ve been doing such tight layouts in Manga Studio, I don’t even do physical pencils anymore. I just print out the layout on art paper in blue lines and ink right on that. I expect it won’t be long before I produce comics that are entirely digital.

Page from Girl Comics

You’ve done a wide spectrum of work now, from Marvel and their superheroes to the world of creator-owned books. As a visual storyteller, what’s your preference as far as what you work on? How do the two experiences differ for you?

I honestly like them both. I like the absolute freedom of indie work, where I can do whatever I want and no one’s gonna have anything to say about it. I like working within the restriction of working with a company’s property, figuring out the way I want to tell my story within the editorial boundaries.

Gingerbread Girl was a very well received effort last year from you and your husband Paul Tobin. How did that project come together? Looking back on it now, how well do you feel the two of you accomplished what you set out to do?

It al started when Paul read a book about neuroscience that introduced him to the rather wacky (real) concept of the Penfield Homunculus, which is like a map of the bits of your brain that correspond to the sensory perception of different parts of your body. It’s a very fanciful image that stuck in Paul’s head, and he spun it out into this weird story about the mystery of identity.

Taking one step forward and two steps back, Gingerbread Girl is entirely set in Portland. Recently, Portland has been a hotspot for the setting for popular fiction, both in comics and in things like…well, Portlandia. From a storytelling perspective, what is it about Portland that you feel sings some sort of siren song to writers and artists? Is it simply that so many are based there?

I think in our case, it was partly due to the fact that we had just moved here, so we were still just enamored of the whole town. But also it’s a good place for an odd character like Annah to live: she’s young, creative, bisexual, capricious, and a little bit crazy. Portland also seems to be a hot spot for hipster chic, which is how you get people making parodies like Portlandia and Jeff Parker & Erika Moen’s web comic Bucko. But as much as people make fun of it, it’s one of the reasons they like to be here. I know it is for me. I mean, I wear glasses with black frames, and I do like a nice mustache.

Pages from Gingerbread Girl

One of the things that we found most interesting about Gingerbread Girl was that it was serialized online first — and, to my understanding, that wasn’t the original intent, but rather a “happy accident” of sorts. How did the decision come about to place it online before print? Do you feel that helped with sales at all?

I think it did help. It was suggested as a marketing strategy by Top Shelf, and while we were initially hesitant, it didn’t take us long to realize that it would be a lot easier to market this way. I mean, it’s not a book where you can explain it easily as “it’s like Ghost World” or “it’s like Persepolis”, because it’s not like anything. The closest thing I’ve seen in terms of theme to Gingerbread Girl is the Coen brothers’ movie A Serious Man, which is also an exploration of the big mysteries in life.

Sometime this year will see the release of Small Favors from you and Paul again, once more from Top Shelf, which is a pub that has roots in Portland as well. What is it about working with Top Shelf that makes you want to keep coming back working with them?

They put out quality books, both in terms of content and production. They have a catalog that covers everything from all-ages to adults-only, and Top Shelf co-owner Brett Warnock lives about seven blocks from us and mixes a mean margarita.

Page from Small Favors

On that same note, Small Favors is a rather grand departure from other works of yours, given that it isn’t exactly an all-ages comic even slightly. With its more erotic fanfare, what is it about adult-oriented comics that you find appealing in comparison with all-ages?

I’m an adult, you know? I like adult content when I’m in the mood for it. I read steamy romance novels. As far as the creative process is concerned, making comics for adults and making comics for all-ages (and I do mean all-ages, not “kids’ comics”) is exactly the same. It’s all about the restrictions you put on yourself. For an all-ages book, you can tell any story you want, but use the restriction of limiting against adult language, nudity, and violence. I used similar restrictions in my erotic comics: everybody has fun, nobody gets hurt, and everyone gets off. It’s the same thing; only the angle of approach is different.

Back in June of last year, I remember reporting on a sketch you had made of a character labeled “the Sister” for a project you were working on once again with Paul. Has that project moved forward at all, to the point that you can share something with our readers and us?

That was for a project called Imbecile that we were working up, but it’s on temporary hiatus while we work together on anther thing, which I can’t talk about yet. This is the problem with having too many different creative irons in the fire. Sometimes one has to be set to one side for a while.

Back to the realm of digital comics, you have a short story entitled Rose’s Heart coming out in March in a comic serialized in an iPad app, which really takes the reading experience to another level of user interaction. Given the evolving presentation of comics, how do you feel digital options like this weigh over print comics, which can certainly be annotated but not displayed in such an interactive way?

That interaction is the main reason I was attracted to the Double Feature app. Corinna Bechko showed me her and Gabriel Hardman’s story The Liar on her iPad, with the ability to strip off the letters, and colors, and get a peek at the pencils, and I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. Then she showed me how each page has text annotations, and I just about flipped. The nice thing about these kind of extras for creators is; we already have all this stuff, so it’s not like showing off the pencils of a page is gonna make us do a lot of extra work, and it gives the readers a nifty look behind the curtain. For my text annotations in Rose’s Heart, which is a gothic horror story in the style of the horror comics of the 1970s, I wrote some annotative notes, but I also included the original script, so readers could see how much I deviated from the text. It’s all very, very cool. In an app like Double Feature, the creator can share his content with its process; in physical print, he is presenting it as a product.

On that similar note, we live in a world abuzz with comics debuting on the web either as free comics or in apps as opposed to print, usually in order to find a larger audience. Of course, this tends to cause a bit of a schism at times, especially with retailers. As a creator, where do you stand in the endless battle between print and digital?

Well, it doesn’t take a crystal ball to know that the reality of publishing is changing. Digital is attractive, especially to indie creators, because you can get worldwide distribution for free. It’s attractive to readers because it’s portable and doesn’t take up any physical space in your house. I’m afraid that means that retailers are going to need to adjust, and comic shops will go back playing the role of specialty shops, much the way they did before the Direct Market became a thing.

You recently contributed to a wonderful collection of Henson-based stories for an Archaia anthology. Given his prolific career and monumental stature in the land of creativity, how did it feel to be working in the same world as Henson? Are you a big fan of his work?

I know how to read in large part because I know that C is for Cookie, you know? The Muppets are a huge influence on my work and my life. It was a very exciting project to work on, an I was very pleased when editor Nate Cosby asked me to be a part of it.

In more of a closing note, I remember reading recently in an interview that you mentioned, when discussing female costume design, that if Jack Kirby wouldn’t draw it, you stay away from it as well. Given the rather popular but somewhat dicey subject of women in comics both in terms of character and professionally, how do you feel about the role of popular female characters in comics today? What do you feel the Big Two are doing right or wrong?

I think I was mostly referring to the fact that I don’t like “French cut” bikinis or thongs. I can’t imagine Kirby drawing a woman with her butt hanging out of her pants, can you? I think his Hela or Big Barda are much sexier designs, all wrapped up in bands of awesome metal armor, than a character whose clothes need glue to stay in place. But that’s just my personal aesthetic. That’s what this all comes down to, at least in terms of how women are represented visually in superhero comics: aesthetics. Personally, I think you want to see better representation of women characters in superhero comics, no matter what they look like, you’re gonna have to think about expanding the genre to include more varied sub-genres. Superhero horror, superhero romance, superhero mystery. It’s hard to do that when all your titles are intertwined and interdependent.

In terms of moving forward, what do you feel needs to be done from both a creative and a fan aspect when it comes to female representation in comics?

Females are represented just fine in comics, as long as you remember that superhero comics are not the only ones out there. I think the idea that the Big Two are the pinnacle of all things comics is what gives the false impression that comics are a man’s world, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.

What does 2012 hold for Colleen Coover?

Creepy preview art

In terms of comics, we’ve already talked about the Small Favors re-release, and the Rose’s Heart story in the Double Feature Horror issue in March. I just finished working on a story with Jeff Parker for Creepy Quarterly #8 from Dark Horse, and then I’m working on a thing with Nate Cosby that I’m not sure I can talk about yet, and that other thing I mentioned with Paul that I know I can’t talk about yet. In addition to comics, I’m dipping my toes into creative writing. (Like, fiction writing, prose, no pictures!) I plan to self-publish my first short story as an ebook in February– it’s called Home Port; it’s a gay romance!