I do, occasionally, get criticism for the way I draw female superheroes, but I think the criticism comes from people who don’t read superhero comics. They see little snippets, individual images, and assume that the women are nothing but T&A. And then they criticize me for just drawing T&A, and I’m like, no, you have to read it to understand.
Power Girl is a great example of this. People assume she’s just a T&A character. One of the things Jimmy [Palmiotti], Justin [Gray] and I wanted to do in Power Girl was to make her a strong, lovable person you could know. She could be one of your buddies. I still had people asking me, “Why didn’t you shrink [Power Girl’s] boobs?”, and I said, “Because then it would become an issue.” We already know that Power Girl has big boobs, everybody knows it. If I shrank them, it would be pointed out a lot. We wanted to acknowledge that she has big boobs, show her with big boobs, and then move on to the story. I think it worked, for the most part.
Q. Do you ever have difficulty reconciling the need to show T&A for marketing purposes and actual storytelling?
A. You know, I don’t think I’ve ever had someone say to me, “Make this bigger for marketing purposes.” Every female superhero character is different, so I try to visualize them that way. Power Girl is around a DDD, while I make Supergirl a very small B-cup. In my head, Supergirl is still a teenager. But I also try to give the male superheroes a lot of different body types. Spider-Man is skinny and can jump and climb walls, but Superman and Batman are really bulky.
Q. How do you decide on the clothes the women you draw are wearing? Power Girl, for instance, always looks sharply dressed in your comics...
A. I kept Power Girl’s costume because she’s had it for years, and it’s become iconic and recognizable. But I added seams to it – personally, I think seams are sexy. The boots that I gave her are actually a pair of boots Jimmy gave me for Christmas. My boots are olive, but I gave Power Girl those in blue. For her street clothes, I tried to think of what I would want to wear. Also, because Power Girl, Karen, is a New York girl now, I would look at what the girls were wearing as I was running around New York. I really do enjoy accessorizing in my art – in real life, I get up, roll out of bed, get a cup of coffee and start working. I never get to dress up for work, so I fantasize about doing it.
As far as superhero clothing for women in general goes, I don’t mind sexy stuff. I kind of like sexy stuff, I think it’s fun, and I think women like to dress sexy every once in a while. The problem is that sometimes you can just tell – I don’t know how you can tell, but you can – that the women are made to dress sexy only for the jerk-off factor. But then there’s times when the art is drawn really well, and it’s still sexy, but it transcends the jerk-off factor.
I have to admit that when I was drawing a few issues of Birds of Prey, I put Black Canary back into fishnets because I just love fishnets! Now, fishnets, if you’re going to fight crime, are really stupid. But visually in a comic, they are cool looking. I didn’t want to give her the strapless leotard, though, I wanted to give her a leather look. I’m dating myself here, but I was thinking of the Fly Girl outfits from the television show In Living Color. I was going for those really cute outfits that they used to wear.
The nice thing about that storyarc, which was written by Terry Moore, was that I got to have Black Canary get really pissed about the fishnets, because they are not industrial strength, you know? They tend to get holes in them, quickly. If you were a superhero in fishnets, you would get really aggravated. You’d have to go to Macy’s and buy them in bulk.
Q. Tell us about Painkiller Jane, another character you’re associated with. You worked on her origin story (Painkiller Jane #0). Are you happy with how she’s been handled in subsequent series?
A. Sometimes I like the way she’s been handled, sometimes I’m more ehh. She’s been written by several people. I think that the person who handles her the best is Jimmy, and I’m not just saying that because he’s my husband. I think that Jane is actually what Jimmy thinks of himself if he were a woman. If Jimmy were a girl, he’d be Jane. So I love it when he writes Jane, and he’s supposed to be writing a new Jane script for me! There’s this story he’s been talking about for eight or ten years, and I love it so much, I told him that if he does it with another artist, I’ll... I don’t know... smother him in his sleep. He’s going to write it up for me in a few months, and I can’t wait.
Jane is one of my favorite characters to draw because she’s such a bad-ass, and because I can draw all of the emotion on her face – it’s all showing. Everything is painful and a pain in the ass to her, so I can do some great facial expressions with Jane.
Q. Can you tell us a bit about The Pro?
A. That’s my other baby. I love that book so much. Every time I see Garth [Ennis], I try to chisel away at him a little more, try to get him to write more Pro. Understandably, he says we’ve told her story already, but I could tell stories like that forever. I really had such fun drawing the Pro herself. She was so disgusted with life – I hate to say it, but the more disgusted a character is with life, the more fun they are to draw.
Q. The story of how that title came about is funny, right?
A. Oh, yeah! I don’t remember the year, but Jimmy, Garth, [Hitman artist] John McCrea and I got invited to a big convention. It was a gaming, book and comic convention in Essen, Germany. We kept looking for places to eat – it was really hard for poor Johnny McCrea, because he’s a vegetarian and Germany is such a meaty place – but at the end of every night we would go to this bar. Of course, the two Irish guys found the only Irish bar in Essen, Germany.
I was sick as a dog, with this awful head-chest-throat cold. So of course, the two Irish guys tell me the remedy for that is a hot port or hot toddy. So I would go and have a hot port and drink myself into a stupor. We’re sitting around this big table, and I’m sick and drunk, and we started talking about how funny it would be to have a superhero prostitute. After a minute, we look around and realized, y’know, we make comics. We could do this.
Q. So it came from a drunken in-joke?
A. Yeah, that’s it. I think we were doing foul things with some melted candle wax on the table, that might have had something to do with it. We have pictures of that. Maybe someday, we’ll put it in a book if the guys let me. I still love The Pro to this day.
Q. And it sold and got nominated for an Eisner...
A. It did! We lost to Mike Mignola for Amazing Screw-On Head. I still think of that as my Eisner! But we couldn’t have lost to a nicer guy. Actually, I lost it to Mike and his daughter, who is awesome. They won it together. But it was really nice to be nominated for a prostitute book. Who knew that could happen?
Q. What are you working on now?
A. I’m working on that DC project they won’t let me talk about yet! It might actually be two DC projects. After that, Jimmy and I and Frank Tieri are doing a creator-owned project called Captain Brooklyn. It’s about a garbage collector in Brooklyn who gains superpowers, though not in the same way the Pro does. After that, if I’m not working on a second DC story, I’ll go straight to the Painkiller Jane project.
Q. Is this through your group film/production studio, too?
A. Paper Films! Yes. It’s actually through Paper Films and Image. Image is putting out the Captain Brooklyn comic. I’m really looking forward to that. I was trying to figure out my approach for it, and I was going back and forth and looking around for inspiration, when Jimmy called me in to see something on the TV. It was a [famed Looney Tunes animator] Chuck Jones marathon, and Chuck Jones is one of my gods. I sat there for however many hours the marathon was going on and I realized, that’s it. That’s how I want Captain Brooklyn to look. I want to unleash my inner Chuck Jones.
Q. Anything else you want to tell us that we didn’t think to ask?
A. Probably, but I can’t think of it now! If I think of anything I can text it to you, because I’m mentally a 13 year old.
Q. Last question: What would you like to see in
the future for women and comics?
A. Here’s what I am seeing. When I first started going to conventions, I saw mostly guys. I saw 5 to 10% girls, and most of those women were mothers or sisters or girlfriends dragged along as burros to carry all of the comics to be signed. They were there reluctantly, but they were showing love for their man who was into comics. Throughout the years, I kept seeing more and more women, though. Three years ago – I think it was three years because I was working on Power Girl – I was at DragonCon and I couldn’t believe it. Around 50% of my line was women and girls with stuff for me to sign. It was great!
I used to think that the reason women weren’t in comics is that they knew you could make ten times as much money in commercial illustration, and they were simply all smarter than guys. But I think it’s gotten to the point where they love comics so much, they don’t care. The girls, they’ve discovered the comics and it turns out, they love comics.
I see so many girls and women at comic conventions now. Not only are they getting books signed for themselves, a lot of them come to me with portfolios! And some of the portfolios are fantastic. I think it’s inevitable that we’ll see more women drawing comics in the next ten years – it’s just going to happen. Not because anybody’s screaming about it or railing about it, but just because girls love comics. They love comics, they want to get into comics, they don’t care that they won’t make as much money as if they went into advertising, and they can draw really well.
It’s inevitable.
A Matter of When
Carla Speed McNeil is author, artist, and head goat-roper of Lightspeed Press. She is a winner of multiple Ignatz and Lulu awards, and won the 2009 Eisner for Best Digital Comic for Finder. She is a technophobe in a house that contains seven-plus computers. She’s continually amazed at how many stories she gets out of this contrast, and at the fact that her phobia remains firmly in place. She lives with her husband Mike, far too many monitors, not enough movies, some very sharp kitchen knives, and a fish-eagle which insists on stunning itself against the back windows from time to time. She was once compared favorably to Oppenheimer.
Here’s what I tell people: When I was eight or nine, I stole a comic book from a cousin (bad girl!). It was “Days of Future Past”, the Uncanny X-Men time-travel story with the now-iconic “everybody’s dead” cover by John Byrne, featuring a grizzled-up Wolverine and Kitty Pryde. There was no comic shop in my town, so I read whatever I could get off the rack at the 7-11 or through mail-order – horror comics, mostly.
I was getting to the point of boredom with Uncanny X-Men (Paul Smith had just done his last issue) when I found Cerebus #52 and ElfQuest #13 in the same waterlogged box at a flea market. The stallholder was closing up for good that afternoon, and he gave me copy of Pacific Comics’s catalogue. I mail-ordered myself half to death with that thing! There weren’t very many indies back then, and I think I ordered them all. Cerebus, Journey, Neil the Horse, and Normalman were a revelation. Although differences in style existed in the superhero comics, they had nothing like the range and freedom found in the black and white books.
The colorless format also made the art seem more possible. The color process of the regular books (in this I include the horrors) put the art at, I felt, a greater remove. When I looked at the crosshatching in Cerebus, I could see how it might be done. Later, I started finding original artwork for sale at conventions. That original art really made it clear that the work was done by actual humans, with pencils and pens and brushes. At that point, it seemed clear that making comics was a matter of “when” for me, not “if.”
Why? Simple. I wanted to write and I wanted to draw. I dearly loved animation, but the eighties were a different landscape for animators compared to what they are now – nearly a different planet. I knew that producing an animated film was slow and expensive, and that almost never did one person’s pet project get made. Many other wonderful things might come out of the cumbersome process of making a film, but look at this – with a ream of paper and a copy machine, you can make a story right now!
Ah. But comics are not art. Or, at least, not good art. Or, at least, not good enough for anyone to pay you to do them. An art teacher in college told me that figure study was irrelevant to modern art. Another told me that learning perspective drawing was for commercial artists only. There was no illustration major at my college then, and only two watercolor classes – those were taught by the Dean.
I did learn plenty of useful things in college. My professors let me turn in a lot of stuff that wasn’t, strictly speaking, what they’d assigned. They did let me graduate. And, along the way, I met a junior professor with a new gallery show. His focus was on “narrative art.”
Sounds like the Art World had found a focus I could get into! Unfortunately, what the show turned out to be was a series of large, mud-colored canvases depicting vaguely human shapes. They had titles – Story of Lilith and so on. I didn’t know the story of Lilith at the time, so I listened to my professor tell it. I concluded that I would never in a million years have figured it out from that immense muddy garage-door-sized rectangle of canvas.
This showed me the limits of telling a story in a single, wordless image. This is not to say that a single image cannot convey a great deal, or that leaving the elements of an image to inspire the viewer to imagine a story can’t evoke a profound response. Or, that a great cartoonist can’t say everything he or she wants to say with a single image. It just wasn’t what I wanted to do. So I didn’t stay, free hors d’oeuvres or no.
I wanted to write and I wanted to draw. I didn’t know what and I didn’t know how. Several years later, I finally threw up my hands and said fuck it! I started writing down everything that popped into my head, and drawing everything else. I had a mulch pile in my mind that dated back to early childhood that needed turning. I had reasonable confidence that whatever problems the art might present me, those would work themselves out as I went. I was far less confident about the writing.
Somewhere around 1996, I looked at the two-foot-high stack of notes and drawings and sketchbooks I had amassed, though, and said fuck it! again. Nobody wants to read a stack of exhaustive notes, I said, not by itself. There has to be a story. I dug out all the characters who were at the same place at the same time, and only one character connected them, so I started with him. I sat down and drew my first issue of Finder, so ignorant of basic pen and ink techniques that I didn’t even think to use a straightedge to made the panel borders look nice. Walt Kelly may have freehanded all of his panel borders, but I’m noooo Walt Kelly.
For a long time, I did my book as a minicomic. I didn’t even know that minis are supposed to be small. Like, an 8.5” x 11” sheet of paper folded in half, that size was and is common. Note to hopefuls: Minis are supposed to be small. Photocopiers don’t like making double-sided copies on big paper. Noooo, they don’t. But I went to San Diego Comic-Con with a sackful of minis over my shoulder like a newsboy, stood in that incredibly long line, got a cataclysmic sunburn, and handed out minis to every pro I could find whose work I loved.
Of a couple hundred handed out, I got seven of the best letters ever.
Professional comics creators actually bothered to write to me. Not even 5% of those who got my minis, but so what? Those that did were amazing. Some gave me a thumbs up, some offered useful critique. All of them were okay with my quoting them when I approached a distribution company to go on to the next level, and their names did help me get a foot in the door.
I came from a small business background, so the idea of self-publishing didn’t seem odd to me. Get to know a few suppliers, build a relationship with a few distributors, make the rounds with the shops and the trade shows, and you’re off. It wasn’t easy money. The black-and-white bubble had burst, the distribution implosion had sunk nearly all ships – I was sitting in the lobby of Diamond Comics Distribution the morning that their last viable rival gave up the ghost. I could hear what would be called a Lively Discussion about it in a nea
rby boardroom.
For 12 years, I self-published under my own imprint, Lightspeed Press. The Internet happened, and I went webcomic. The animation boom gathered strength, and with it a massive turnabout in pop culture. Comics, movies, TV, and gaming are elephantine compared to what they were in my youth. I knew it was coming when I was up early on a Sunday, gagging on paint thinner trying to get my own pointless and forgettable muddy canvas ready for Monday’s class critique, when the most bizarre thing I’d ever seen caught my attention from the TV. I called up all my grumpy, hungover friends and made them turn on the TV to watch Ren and Stimpy sing the Log Song. Probably the first and last time I was the first to know about something hip.
It’s been cool to see it all flower. Not just flower, but grow into a vast and tangled jungle, full of life. Yes, things are changing, things will change. Digital formats are coming, and who knows what else. Some things we love won’t survive. But comics are so different than they were when I got into it. Change has been happening all along, and the field is so much more wide open than it was, so many more people making them. As long as we still have a copy machine and somebody to pedal the bamboo bicycle to power it, we’ll have comics. And more and more people to make them.
Anyhow, that’s me. I write and draw a comic called Finder, now published by Dark Horse, who are proving to be a very good partner. I’m working on a pile of other things, and I hope all of you are as well.
The Other Side of the Desk
Rachel Edidin is currently an editor at Dark Horse Comics. She is also (in no particular order) a semi-professional freelance writer, a lousy but enthusiastic cellist, an amateur wireworker (making things out of it, not walking on it), and a voracious reader. She enjoys good comics, George Orwell’s nonfiction, the word “linger,” and ugly baby animals.
Chicks Dig Comics: A Celebration of Comic Books by the Women Who Love Them Page 5
