1. What drew you to comics?
As a kid, I was more inclined to tell you I loved cartoons a la Pokemon and the Powerpuff Girls than comics, despite the fact I grew up reading a lot of manga in the early 2000s. Back then, I didn’t consider them “comics” because the west was so ingrained with issuing that title to superhero stories and Sunday funnies. For the longest time, I was set on being an animator or storyboard artist because I was really into Meet the Robinsons in middle school and learned about the feature animation industry from its art book. When I started frequenting my local library more often in high school, I found graphic novels like Brain Camp by Laurence Klavan, Susan Kim, and Faith Erin Hicks and Anya's Ghost by Vera Brosgol, which opened my eyes to the variety of stories that the comics medium could serve. It felt like a compromise between animation and prose, mediums that felt very one or the other when it came to drawing and writing. I needed both to get my ideas across. Truly I was doomed the moment my grandparents bought me Making Comics by Scott McCloud when I was fifteen—I devoured it in one sitting! The more I learned about comics, the more I fell in love with the art form.
2. Please tell us about Improve (I've had a chance to read an early copy and loved it).
Aw, thank you! Improve is a graphic memoir recounting my first few years of taking improv classes as someone who’s lived her whole life with anxiety. It focuses on my personal experience, but I also did my best to lay out each exercise and terminology in case any readers wanted to try it out themselves.
I’ve been drawing autobio comics for about ten years now, mostly for fun, but also because it’s a way to untangle my racing thoughts into something cohesive. At times they serve more as personal essays, like the ones I drew for The Nib, and I hoped to write something in that vein regarding improv, so I took a lot of notes in class. I was just really interested in the social philosophies I took away from it—a funny development when you remember it’s just a bunch of adults playing pretend together—and really wanted to tell everyone! Of course, when I started writing it down, I realized I had to explain a lot of my own history with social anxiety for reference, from childhood through college, and by then I’d already taken two years’ worth of improv classes, so the longer it became, the more I started to think, “Oh…this is a book now, isn’t it?”
Basically, Improve doubles as a manual about me specifically—something I can hand to someone and say, “Hi, this is what you need to know when interacting with me”—as well as my attempt to use my story to encourage other folks on their own personal journeys, or at least give them food for thought.
3. Please tell us about your creative process.
Oof, man, I think my creative process can best be described as scribbling and staring off into space, haha. Comics are very much a “chicken or the egg” situation for me: sometimes the drawing ideas come before the text, and other times it’s vice versa, I think it depends on the subject. Improve was more the latter in this case since everything was based in reality and already had an existing timeline of events. But even then, when writing it down, it mostly starts out as stream-of-consciousness word vomit, a messy outline that just needs to be reshaped like clay. Concept art is like that, too, where I’ll just spit out a bunch of super rough options of an idea and eventually combine all the parts I like from each in a neater rendition. When I collaborated with writers, I’d often print out their script and doodle ideas as I read through. I think that’s just the effect of my anxiety-riddled mind; I get trapped in my own head trying to latch onto one thought and mold it into something understandable, when really I just need to spit it out and clean up the mess from there. (Ah, yet another improv-relevant lesson!) And in times when I have no thoughts at all? I kick back and throw on music or TV or a YouTube video essay. It’s easy to forget that resting and daydreaming are part of the process, too.
4. What words of advice do you have for young creators?
I could ramble for hours about advice, but I’ll narrow it down to two, one that was passed on to me and one that I learned the hard way.
The first piece of advice, which I learned from a Q&A session between cartoonists at a book launch back in college, is: Start small. Trying to draw the big epic you’ve been planning in your head for ages can be daunting, especially when you have a brain like mine. Instead, start out with a short story, maybe 2-5 pages, featuring that world or those characters. It doesn’t have to be a snippet from the larger idea—even just portraying a mundane event is good practice. It’s why I like diary comics, just taking moments from your own life and figuring out how you’d depict them as a super short story.
The one I’m still learning is: Remember why you enjoy creating. When I started pursuing comics as a career, I fell into the traps of comparing myself to others and worrying about follower counts or whether I was “good enough,” when really I started all this because I just loved drawing. I forgot to rest and set aside time for personal projects and suffered crazy burnout as a result. The best comics I’ve made have been silly one-offs featuring inside jokes with friends, or shorts made as an excuse to draw specific characters. I didn't make them because I wanted to attract a specific crowd or get publishers to notice me—I drew them because I wanted to, and putting them out there still led people to me. When you’re passionate about what you’re doing, it shows through your work. Be self-indulgent, even if some people think it’s cringe. Embrace that cringe! If you are your only target audience, so be it—at least you're happy.
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