Questions by Rafer Roberts
You've worked on both solo projects and on collaborations. What is your approach working in either method, and do you prefer one over the other?
My preference is to work solo. It's very satisfying to move an idea from its initial inkling to a full blooded comic page (although, the failure to do so is particularly frustrating). I also think, in the end, that it's the solo projects that really test a cartoonist's mettle.
Collaborating can be a refreshing change, though, because of the way it divvies up the creative and technical labor. It's also fun because you don't really know what the final product will look like, so there's some healthy anticipation to see the subsequent stages, too.
That said, I do think that the ideal is the one person - one comic model, and I think collaborations require that at least one of the people be able to do a whole comic on their own. Otherwise, the division of talent and labor can be too rigidly separate, and that disjuncture affects both the fun of the process and the quality of the product.
A lot of your work could be described as happy or welcoming or friendly. I can only assume that your work is such due to you having a terrifying dark side. What lives inside your soul?
I think juxtaposition is a very interesting and rich vein to mine with comics. Visual style is one source of that contraposition, using it as a kind of foil or cutting agent against other aspects of content or writing. I've lately been trying to use style as a kind of disarming aspect for content. It had occurred to me at some point that a more overtly cartoon style would yield certain dividends, like a potentially broader range of tone as between the writing and drawing. That way, I could plausibly zigzag between extremes and keep things from ever really settling too much for the reader. By consciously playing the writing against the style, and vice versa, I get an extra layer of storytelling to play with.
What is your dream project and why haven't you worked on it yet?
Somehow disposing of the commercial notions of "graphic novels" and "original art" would be something of a dream, I guess, but in the meanwhile I'm still waiting for things to bubble up out of the brain.
