Feature

Everybody Knows You're Not from Here

1 Hiram Lucke

I had the pleasure of meeting Sara Ryan and Steve Lieber awhile back through a mutual friend who lives on the other coast. They’re warm and wonderfully talented people that I like to hang out with. Sara (http://sararyan.com) won her second Oregon Book Award for her novel The Rules of Hearts last year. Steve is a founder of Periscope Studios (http://periscopestudio.com/) in Portland and draws all kinds of comics, including the Whiteout series. We talked about what they do and why Portland for about an hour and a half, after they made me a great tofu scramble, delicious potatoes and bread, and mimosas on January 9, 2009. What follows are the highlights, minus some of my “That’s cool”s and “Oh, yeah”s. Steve was finishing dishes when Sara and I started talking (well, when I hit record). Don’t miss the bonus tidbit at the end.

HL = me, Sara = Sara Ryan, Steve = Steve Lieber.

HL: What do you do?

Sara: I work as the teen services specialist for Multnomah County Library. So that means I have something to do with all the work the library does with teens--we have a bunch of teen councils, a lot of teen programming, tons of teens who volunteer for individual programs or just throughout the year--and I work on our teen web pages, I train staff to work effectively with teens, I look for grants to fund special programs, etc. Sometimes I sum it up as: "My job is to make people be nicer to teenagers." And then I have another life as a writer of novels and comics. Some of the comics are self-published in the great Portland DIY, zinester kind of tradition and some of them I’ve done for anthologies or magazines. The two novels are also for teens so I sort of have great attention to teenagers as part of my life. The first one is Empress of the World and the second one is The Rules for Hearts, and that one just came out in paperback.

HL: This may be a dumb question, but why teens?

Sara: For a lot of reasons. I think a lot of people who work for teens and write for teens basically haven’t forgotten. Haven’t forgotten what it was like to be a teen and still understand that teens are a group that do not get a lot of respect or opportunities as a whole in this culture so being able to create opportunities in the library world and in narratives and in the world of writing that teens will actually respond to and be into, I think it’s really important and also awesome. It’s the time when you’re sort of figuring everything out, becoming an adult, having first love, conflict with parents and authority, establishing independence, all of these things are happening for the first time and they’re so intense. So being able to help support that process and again to make stories that resonate, I... it’s really a big deal for me.

HL: Were you big into comics as a teenager?

Sara: Um.

HL: It’s kind of a leading question...

Sara: I was big into a few comics. This is where I whip out my massive nerd cred. I was hugely into Elf Quest by Wendy and Richard Pini and I was one of those girls who discovered Sandman and that was kind of my entrée into graphic novels and longer comic story lines. I wasn’t actually ever a big fan of the mainstream superhero comics, but fantasy stuff and... I had my big comics education at the beginning of grad school and I got Love and Rockets, Cerebus, and Bone, just a whole bunch of stuff thrown at me.

HL: I was just kind of wondering because at least for writers and especially comic book artists/writers, comic books seemed to have some sort of relevance in their formative years.

Sara: Very much so, but also there’s the fact that I started hanging out with Steve, and that was very influential...

HL: Well, there’s that, too.

Sara: Well, you know, in part because I just encountered a lot more comics and I think that, you know, when you are around lots more comics and around lots of comics people, you start thinking about the form in a different way. And it was also... writing comics became a way to think about narrative in a different way than writing prose, and that’s a huge reason of why I am still really excited about writing comics. I’ve said this in other contexts, but because I can’t draw, any comics I do are necessarily a collaboration, and I love collaborating. I think it’s really exciting to see what an artist will do and see how the pictures that I had in my head translate to the images on the page that the artist creates.

HL: Right. It definitely seems that writing novels and prose is a pretty solitary act.

Sara: Yeah.

HL: There is collaboration, but it seems to be in your own head.

Sara: Well, and eventually the editor...

HL: Editing and stuff, yeah. Definitely seems like comics are more collaborative though. When you write for comics, do you write out a script of some sort? Is it like a movie script?

Sara: It’s a sort of similar format to a screenplay. There’s actually a couple of books that Steve and I are in. There’s Panel One and Panel Two and they’re just collections of comic scripts so you can see the range of ways that people approach doing comic scripts. There was a style that was prevalent at Marvel for awhile, so it was called “Marvel style,” where it’s very loosely outlined in terms of what happens page by page and the artist makes all the choices about the layout of the page and how the panels are going to go and then the writer comes back and adds dialogue. I have never done a script in that form. All of the ones I’ve done have been described panel by panel with the dialogue included, but I’ve also... all the comics I’ve done at this point, I’ve known the artist. I’ve worked with a bunch of different artists, but I’ve been fortunate enough to always work with people I know, whose work I know, so I can take their skills into consideration and what their strengths are when I’m actually writing, and that definitely influences the story.

HL: That’s pretty cool. Yeah, that seems like it would help a lot.

Sara: Yeah. Actually, I was just talking about this. I can’t quite imagine working with an artist that I don’t know. I mean, people do it all the time and it comes out great, but it would be a huge adjustment to write a script blind without knowing the kind of artist who was going to draw it.

HL: Yeah, definitely. So, we talked about fantasy literature--and I’ll actually bring Steve into this so that he doesn’t have to clean the kitchen the whole time--but you had mentioned the fantasy sort of stuff, so on the novel side of things... does that play into it? What were your influences as far as novel writing, because...

Sara: I have so many.

HL: it doesn’t seem like you’re a huge fantasy writer when it comes to prose.

Sara: Well, I’m not now.

HL: OK.

Sara: Probably the most influential thing I did in terms of developing as a writer was going to the Clarion workshop, which is designed for writers of science fiction and fantasy. I did that when I was 19. So that was just dramatically influential--six weeks, very intense. Let’s see: Tim Powers, Ellen Kushner, Karen Joy Fowler, John Kessel, Damon Knight, and Kate Wilhelm. Total powerhouse set of instructors. And I feel like it took me about ten years to internalize the lessons of the workshop. But that was the workshop that really showed me how to be a professional in terms of writing, as opposed to, you know, I had had some college writing classes that were... they felt like they were about expressing yourself in some amorphous way without really any attention to what markets were, what you should be thinking about if you really wanted to establish yourself in a professional way. That’s not quite an answer to the question you were asking about influences. I hesitate to answer it because I’m afraid of who I might leave out...

HL: Right.

Sara: ... but the one fantasy author who was very influential to the point... we didn’t have the term fan fiction, but I totally wrote Susan Cooper fan fiction. I was very influenced by her Dark is Rising sequence and I did read it quite often. Ursula LeGuin, of course. Not all of my reading was highbrow, award winning stuff. I read a lot of Heinlein. I read a lot of Stephen R. Donaldson, Piers Anthony. A lot of the heavyweights of mainstream fantasy in the 80s.

HL: That leads me to another question that Steve can jump in on, since, Steve, I know you run an office that a bunch of artists basically work at... So, you were talking about the sort of workshop crap that you write in college and a workshop in which they try to gear you to be more professional, is there ever a huge gap between those two ideas for you guys. Do you ever still write things that you feel are close to your heart Đthat you feel express yourself or do you draw things that you feel kind of express yourself or is it different. Do you ever start drawing or writing and feel, “I’m not in this at all, but somebody wants this.” Is that ever a problem?

Steve: It’s not a problem for me, because a lot of what I do, whether it’s personal work or just commercial work, is problem solving. They all require a similar exercise of just figuring out how to answer the set of requirements of what a particular job has. Sometimes that job is what’s in my head, what am I feeling here? Sometimes that job is how do I get my client’s message across. Either way, I’ve got a goal and I just marshal the skills I have toward achieving that goal in the time I’ve got to work. There is some stuff that’s absolutely not personal. I’d say about half my income these days is, maybe more, is from storyboards and commercial art where a client calls you at noon and we’ve got a meeting at 4:30 and we need five pictures of coal miners in different situations can you draw that for us. And I’m not a person with a lot of feelings about coal miners either way, you know. God bless Ôem, thanks for the coal guys. In a case like that you just try to get across what the client is looking to get across. You’re still bringing all of your chops to bear on it. You’re trying to make a nice balance of black, white, and gray in the picture, an interesting range of types of pictures so that the client doesn’t feel that they’re looking at the same five pictures, but it’s not my feelings they’re looking for, it’s just my skills. It’s my chops. If I’m telling a story that I’m deeply and personally involved in, the client I’m trying to please is myself...

HL: right, right

Steve: ... and I’m a much bigger pain in the ass than anyone who hires me.

HL: Well, I think I asked because I know I have friends who are writers who you can kinda tell a difference between when they’re trying to get a story published in a certain place and they’re just writing something. I don’t know if it’s a problem, but you can tell.

Sara: I was going to say that I may not have expressed myself very well about the influence in Clarion. I think that because I have a day job, I actually am far less... I mean I’m totally not dependent on writing for an income.

HL: Right.

Sara: And I think because of that, I have a lot more freedom to be very deliberate about what I write and what I publish. You know, stories about teenage lesbians are not a massively commercial enterprise, shockingly.

HL: Yeah, and in my asking you that question, I didn’t mean to say that either one of you are going over to hackdom or anything like that.

Sara: Oh, no no no no. I think it’s a really good question. I think from my perspective I’ve tried.... most of the stuff that I do as a writer is entirely my own vision of what I want to do, but some of the anthologies that I’ve done for comics, like when I wrote a Hellboy story, I had never read Hellboy.

HL: Nice.

Sara: So I had to learn what was going on in that world. And that’s a good example of something where, you know, it wasn’t like self expression.

HL: Did you bring a theme that is close to your heart within the story, or was it more just like, “OK, I’m going to just make him do this.”

Sara: Well, I suppose...

HL: Would it have been something that you wrote about anyway?

Sara: If one of my themes is overly-intellectual couples fighting, then I did bring something close to my heart.

HL: So, Hellboy didn’t meet any teenage lesbians?

Sara: He didn’t meet any teenage lesbians. But, actually, the fun thing about that was taking my own sensibility and applying it to a character that someone else created and trying to make sure that Hellboy still acts like Hellboy, but with the sort of Ryan/Lieber twist.

HL: OK, I think I’ve asked you this before, but on the art side of things whenever you’re doing a comic that’s existed for awhile, how do you do that? Do they have certain forms that you, uh...

Steve: They ought to have model sheets, but they don’t.

HL: Oh.

Steve: It’s kind of disappointing. If I’m doing a character that somebody else created, I’d be happiest if they provided me with a platonic ideal of what this character should look like and I could fit that model and just apply my skills and try to tell a story that clearly belongs to that character’s world and draw the character the way they want. In fact, it’s nothing like that. For reasons that I couldn’t even diagnose, they’ve kind of lost the idea of a house style or a central model for characters and instead have embraced this idea of treating characters almost like the MTV logo where everybody working on them brings in their own spin and as a result the character kind of turns into a scattered set of traits rather than a unified thing. I’ve done my best when I’ve been able to just seize upon one vision of the character that makes the most sense to me and run with that. Ideally, it would eventually become my own vision if I stayed with the character long enough, but the way the industry is structured right now, that’s very unlikely to happen.

HL: Do you think that’s a part of the sort of 80s rewriting of Batman sort of idea at play?

Steve: I think so.

HL: Or do you think that it’s more of the zeitgeist?

Steve: I think the various versions of characters that have had the strongest impact have been really personal visions and usually these things appear in special projects that are away from the characters central branch; their ongoing title. And everybody wants to be the guy who does his own special thing with it and the result of the that is that the center cannot hold. I think where they’re eventually going to wind up is there’s so many dramatic, well-crafted, personal visions of these characters that there’s no real agreement on what they’re all interpreting.

HL: So it would be like the DC Universe comics, except it would all be just the Batman universe, basically. You could put together just these huge anthologies of Batman. Or something.

Steve: They totally could. It could turn into a strange game of telephone.

Sara: Right.

HL: Oh, right, yeah. That makes sense.

Steve: And if the audience is comfortable with that, then develop it that way and let a thousand flowers bloom.

Sara: But usually they don’t want even a dozen flowers to bloom.

Steve: No.

Sara: At least some elements of the audience would like the same flower to bloom that has been the same flower since they were ten.

Steve: Yeah, the market shifted really, really strikingly from a children’s market, or a tween market that turns over every five or six years with always a new group of eight- or ten-year-olds coming in and reading the stuff to adults that have been reading the stuff for twenty or thirty years. And that’s a market that’s going to demand constantly shifting viewpoints and different approaches because they’ve already seen the previous approach. When you’ve got a new group of eight-year-olds coming in, you don’t have to reinvent Bugs Bunny for them...

HL: Right, it’s Bugs Bunny.

Steve: It’s Bugs Bunny, they’re excited to see it.

Sara: But I think that that exists simultaneously with the sense for who these characters are that if you violate the audiences’ sense of who these characters are, great outrage ensues.

Steve: Oh yeah, that’s true.

Sara: So it’s a weird juxtaposition. Do this differently, except the same.

Steve: Yeah. Well, right now Batman, they just did a movie that I would never take a 10-year-old to see that movie. That movie is too scary, it’s too violent, it’s too intense, but it’s also a character that’s on lunch boxes and underwear. And that’s a strange thing. Here we almost start to get into a who owns culture sort of argument because you could have a thousand variations on Robin Hood...

HL: Right.

Steve: ... but Batman is all owned by the stockholders of Warner Brothers and so it’s a strange thing.

HL: I never did see the Dark Knight movie.

Sara: I never did either.

HL: I probably won’t just because I’m a little Batmanned out.

Steve: They don’t need your money.

HL: Yeah, exactly. And they don’t give a shit, either. But, the Dark Knight thing seems strange because that came out in the 80s and it’s just now a movie. Although I guess what’s his face, uh, Tim Burton, kind of went for that feel, I guess.

Steve: Yeah.

HL: He tried, but it just wasn’t as scary-violent as Frank Miller or something.

Steve: It’s hard to remember; it was pretty darn violent for it’s time. Weren’t there people being thrown off of roofs and stuff?

HL: Yeah, it was kind of violent, but it wasn’t your typical Batman.

Steve: No, it wasn’t like a Mel Gibson thriller...

HL: Yeah, exactly. But it still was kind of tame, I would say. Crap, I had a question, but I can’t remember what it was. OK, since you’re both here...

Sara: Transition!

HL: I know you guys work together occasionally, and I’m not going to ask how does that work or how does that feel, but uh....

Steve: Well, you collaborate with your wife...

HL: Yeah, so I know and people are always asking me and I’m like, “You’re going to have to ask the people who sit around us while we argue for 30 minutes over something small.” So I can understand that.

Steve: Well, you know, it’s a lively blend of passive and active aggression.

HL: It is interesting. But basically I was kind of wondering when you guys met, did you start off doing stuff or has it taken awhile for it start?

Steve: No.

Sara: It took awhile. I remember a specific conversation where we decided that we wanted to try and work on something together. And we were actually thinking that it was going to be for kids, so we were going to be like Milne and Shepard.

HL: That would have been pretty nice.

Sara: Well, it still might happen.

Steve: I’d have to get good.

Sara: But, it was... I don’t know, maybe a couple of years in when we started thinking that we could work together. The first thing that we thought we would try to do was an actual illustrated novel of the type that we read growing up.

HL: Oh yeah.

Sara: Chapter Books.

HL: Yeah. I think that’s how I first read Huck Finn when I was in third grade or something.

Sara: Yeah. We sort of experimented with that, but the first project that we actually worked together on that we published was the “Me and Edith Head” short story, which was in Cicada magazine, which is like the teen version of Cricket, which I grew up reading.

HL: Uh huh. It was always in the doctor’s office.

Sara: Yeah. Actually, that was a good doctor’s office, my doctor’s office just had Highlights.

Steve: Yeah.

HL: Uh, well, yeah they had Highlights and they also had Cricket. It was a little... yeah. His name was Doctor Mih [pronounced like me], which confused the hell out of me as a kid.

Steve: Yeah, “see here, me.”

HL: Wait he is doctoring me! Has it become kind of easier to collaborate over the years?

Steve: Well, we haven’t actually collaborated on a project that would be ours together for awhile. That was a conscious decision.

Sara: Yeah, because I want to establish myself in comics.

HL: Aaahhh.

Sara: The challenge when you are coming to comics as the partner of someone who is already in comics is how to not be coattails. And one way to not be coattails is to work with a bunch of other people so that people don’t necessarily assume, “Well, clearly, Steve must have done this.”

HL: Right. That’s probably a good idea.

Sara: But, you know, I think we still look over each other’s shoulders all the time, whatever we’re working on . I’ll point things out and he’ll point things out and we’ll show each other work in progress.

HL: Yeah, I was kind of wondering if you two influenced each other. At least get to edit each other a little bit; somewhat.

Steve: Oh, yeah.

Sara: Definitely. Although I think for Steve, some of that happens now in the studio.

Steve: Right, a lot of it.

Sara: And there’s a lot of people he can consult.

Steve: Yeah, and because most of what I do is taking other people’s ideas and bringing them to visual life the input that’s most important for me is just input on craft. That’s where having another illustrator look over my shoulder and say his head is twice as big as it should be is really valuable.

HL: Well, do you want to talk about the office?

Steve: Sure.

HL: Since you missed out on the explain what you do portion.

Steve: Yeah, I’m a founding member of Periscope Studios... Studio... you know after all this time we’re still not sure if it’s singular or plural. I’m going to go with singular. Periscope Studio. We’ve got four rooms, so I guess you could call it Studios, but let’s go with studio because that’s our URL. Periscopestudio.com.

HL: There you go.

Sara: It’s on the internet.

Steve: That’s on the internet, singular, which is inside your computer. Periscope Studio is a, there’s not a word for our structure, collective is closest, but we’re not organized like a coop either. It’s a whole bunch of freelance comic book artists and illustrators and comics writers who’ve got some space in an office building in downtown Portland, who occasionally collaborate together, often give each other feedback, and share creative technical and, I guess, business resources. I wish I had a good name for it, like, “We’re an art lab.”

HL: Art lab sounds pretty good. Art collective in a way.

Steve: Yeah, it’s a...

HL: It’s a less socialist collective.

Steve: Collective, yeah... it’s a whole bunch of capitalists who have formed a commune. I don’t know how to describe it. A marriage of convenience.

HL: Uh huh. So you basically run...

Steve: Nobody runs it. Who runs a group of 23 cats? I do a lot of miscellaneous things. I answer the phone a lot.

HL: So you’re kind of a secretary?

Steve: I’m a secretary and one of many honchos. Straw boss. There has to be a term for this. Nudge. I’m one of the nudges of periscope.

Sara: I think nudge is the best description.

HL: Do things come in individually? Do projects come in individually to a certain person or do they come into the studio?

Steve: Both. Everybody has their own clients that they’re working with whether it’s a big company like Marvel or DC Comics or Sony or an advertising agency or a design studio and then people also call the studio and ask to hire the studio to do something. What we do in that case is whoever talks to the client finds out what they’re looking for and makes a judgement call on who is the most appropriate person to work with this sort of project. Then that person, in our jargon, takes point. Heh, a term straight out of Vietnam I think. They take point on the project and if it’s a lot of drawing in a short amount of time, they might bring in some other artists to work on it...

Sara: In which case you have a board like homicide cops.

HL: Oh, wow. Nice.

Steve: Just a big white board with open job phases in red and closed job phases in black.

HL: I guess I was picturing more dead people on the board.

Steve: No.

HL: That’s probably not a good way to picture it.

Steve: No, no. I think we thought about trying clever project management software, but it’s still really hard to beat a white board. So long as you hang it high enough so that people aren’t going to brush against it with their coats.

HL: Right.

Steve: It’s a really, really good way to organize the efforts of a whole lot of people and allow everybody to see exactly where the job is. “He’s three pages ahead of me. I better speed up or he’s not going to have anything to work on.” And we’ve had jobs where people work on their own. We’ve had jobs where two people collaborate. We’ve had jobs where we’ve put 15 people on it because there’s an insane amount of drawing that has to be done in a really short amount of time. And everybody’s got massive skills and tremendous technical ability and we’re all familiar enough with what each other does we can jump in and approximate someone else’s approach if necessary. As a result, if a client needs a ridiculous amount of drawing done in no time whatsoever, they know we’re a great place to come to because we take craft seriously and we take deadlines very seriously.

HL: OK, so, are there any projects that you can name that the studio has worked on?

Steve: So many of the good ones are NDA [I’m guessing this is an acronym for Non-disclosure agreement and not Next Day Air--whatever it stands for it means he can’t talk about them.] . One of the most enjoyable ones was we designed a whole bunch of floats and costumes for a parade at a Hello, Kitty theme park in Japan.

HL: Wow, that’s pretty nice.

Steve: That was badass.

HL: Do you have pictures?

Steve: A lot of them are on the concept art section of the Periscope Studios site (http://periscopestudio.com/concept-art/).

HL: Have you seen the actual, uh...

Steve: I’ve seen just a few snapshots on the website. It’s a small theme park with a very big parade and it’s hard to pick out individual elements. What I saw looked really, really neat. Just the meeting for that was incredible. I’ve never been bowed to before.

HL: So did they come over here?

Steve: They didn’t come directly to us, they came to Michael Curry Design (http://www.michaelcurrydesign.com/) an absolute wonderland of a design studio here in Portland. Curry can design and build anything that anybody asks for as far as I’m concerned. They’re like the Disney Imagineers of Puppets. They’re just brilliant. Curry came to us for the drawing part of it for making a bunch of cool visuals that his engineers could build and it was so much fun. That was a great project.

HL: So did the whole office work on that or was it an individual effort?

Steve: It was a whole bunch of...

HL: Was everybody kind of fighting for what to do?

Steve: No....

HL: Because it seems like everybody would want to do that.

Steve: That’s where having somebody, like I said, take point. “You are working on the coach with the strawberries and you are working on these two characters; come up with three costumes each. And you are going to do the four seasons floats.” It was just tremendously nifty.

HL: Uh, so, Steve, can you name some of the comic books that you yourself have worked on? Because I just read Whiteout, which is actually a really great book. I really liked it a lot.

Steve: Oh, thanks. Whiteout is what I’m best known for and it’s one of the things I’m proudest of. It’s a really nifty, um, if it’s a movie it would be an art house thriller.

Sara: And coincidentally...

Steve: And coincidentally, it is a movie. It’s not an art house thriller, it’s a Hollywood thriller.

HL: Really?

Steve: Yeah, it’s coming out from Warner in September.

HL: Oh, wow.

Steve: It’s going to star Kate Beckinsale and Gabriel Macht and Tom Skerritt.

HL: Wow, the Skerritt. Is he the doctor?

Steve: Yep. I haven’t seen much of the film, but I saw some rushes of him doing an important scene in the story and it’s just great. Boy, he’s got gravity, he’s got warmth, he’s terrific. I couldn’t have cast that role better. Other comics I’ve worked on: I’ve done lots of Batman comics for DC over the years in various parts of that whole Batman franchise. I did a character named Hawkman, who was probably best associated with my art school teacher Joe Kubert and that was nifty. When I came out of school, I was very, very influenced by Joe, both in approach to storytelling and in my handwriting, the way I use lines to create the illusion of form, so Hawkman was a natural for me. I just jumped right on there and... I was able to both figure out more about how I draw as opposed to how my teachers taught me to draw and I was able to do it on a book where my old influence--my undigested influences--made sense. So that was a perfect place.

HL: So was it a series of Hawkman?

Steve: Yeah, I did two and a half years on it, I think. I’ve done a comic for Marvel that was a part of a big spinoff. They have this overwhelming crossover series that effects all the books they publish, then they’ll publish, like--there’s gotta be a good metaphor for this--central books that everything else kind of revolves around. This series was called Civil War and I was doing the series Civil War: Front Line. And I did a whole bunch of stories about a character who was originally named Speedball, who was a bouncy, happy, light, lively character that we threw into prison and beat up for ten issues. We treated this poor SOB like, oh boy, it was a rotten thing to do to a very nice character. Some folks absolutely adored this series and some folks loathed it. I had a blast drawing it. It was a lot of fun to draw. Gosh, what else have I worked on.

Sara: Co-author of the Idiot’s Guide...

Steve: Yes, I’m co-author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide of Creating a Graphic Novel. A current project is, I love saying this, a spelunking thriller.

HL: Nice.

Sara: That crowded, crowded genre.

Steve: I just... yet another entry...

HL: 1850 to now, that’s where it jumps.

Steve: Yes, another entry into that well mined vein of storytelling, the spelunking thriller.

HL: Is it for a local group or just...

Steve: We don’t know. A nice thing about having sold a movie is that I can just develop a graphic novel in my spare time and not worry initially about where it’s going to go. A couple of publishers...

HL: Pretty cool.

Steve: Yeah, we can get the thing done or half done or whatever and then shop it around and see who’s the best place to publish it. It’s written by my friend and frequent collaborator, Jeff Parker, and...

HL: That name sounds familiar.

Steve: He’s a local comics creator. He started off as an artist, these days he’s better known as a writer. He’s written comics like The Agents of Atlas, The Interman, which he also drew, X-Men: First Class, among other things. He’s one of Marvel Comics enormouStevey rising stars. He’s about as good as anyone I’ve ever met or ever expect to read, at juggling personal expression and just really, really crowd-pleasing entertainment. He can play every note on the scale in telling his stories.

Sara: Well, and I think something, too, about him is that, it really shows that he’s coming from having started as an artist.

Steve: Very much so.

Sara: That’s actually something I envy about him, because he knows exactly what it’s going to take to draw any page that he writes. He’s never going to make that mistake of, you know, “Panel one: The 2, 000 person army comes over the hill.”

Steve: The trick for any comics writer is writing visually. If the story’s communicated by pictures, you have to be able to visualize pictures to write.

Sara: I can tell the lesson one comics writing story.

Steve: Go for it.

Sara: One of the first times that we tried to collaborate, we were going to adapt a story that I had initially done in prose and there was a passage that I was very proud of where I was describing the moon and it was a big, yellow summer moon and it was hanging in the sky. And Steve looked at this passage of prose and drew a circle and said, “There’s the moon.” He drew some lines around it. “Now it’s shining. Now tell me something that advances the plot.” So that was a very good visual storytelling lesson.

Steve: It was good for the marriage, too.

HL: That would be really hard to deal with as far as writing.

Steve: I can get that visual information across in the corner of one panel. Four or five square inches of precious page space. It is a hard thing for writers to have to internalize the fact that the actual words that the audience is going to get to read are going to be limited by the size of the page.

Sara: But now I’ve completely embraced that and now it’s more common for me to have to go back and think, “Oh, yeah, I guess that needs some words.” Just about every short comic that I start, I think, “Maybe this one’s wordless,” but I have not yet actually written a wordless comic.

Steve: I think it really is a useful approach to think of text, and particularly text to advance the narrative, like there’s a tax on the letter. As another collaborator of mine, Greg Rucka, is always saying, “Start the sentence as late as possible and get out as early as possible.” And that applies also to the narrative itself. Start as far into the action as you possibly can.

HL: Interesting. I had never thought about that. Or the fact that you could actually write a wordless comic. That it’s not just an artist doing something... I mean I’m sure there are artists who do that, but I just hadn’t thought about it.

Steve: Yeah, you know, silent movies had script writers, too.

HL: No, that makes sense.

Steve: And that’s one to grow on.

HL: So, anyway, [makes ding ding ding noise]... so I kinda want to end with, well, I kind of want to end so I don’t take up the rest of your day, just basically the idea of...

Steve: Hour nine.

HL: I will never be able to listen to this all. Basically, just kind of why Portland, on two levels. Why Portland as far as comics, just because it really seems that Portland is huge into comics, especially something like Milwaukee, which is now owned by Dark Horse Comics, right? And also, why Portland for both of you, because you’re both not from here. So, if you want to take a stab at why Portland for comics, feel free and then we can do the personal one afterward.

Steve: We’ve tried to answer this one before.

HL: That’s kind of what I figured.

Steve: And there’s a whole lot of hand waving, hemming and hawing...

HL: Well, I don’t want to put you in any weird spots.

Steve: No, no. I think I may have this. Because.

HL: Because it’s Portland.

Steve: Because it’s Portland, man.

HL: What else are you going to do?

Steve: The alpha of Portland comics is Mike Richardson and Dark Horse. He founded a very successful comics company that gave people a whole lot of creative breathing room that... he really encouraged great work from the people he published. Some of them were already here because when you start a company you’re going to find local talent and others moved here because there’s advantages in being close to the office. And that started an immigration of cartoonists to Portland. Once they’re here people in other cities who, well, they’re not that happy with where they’re living and they talk to a friend and the friend says, “Portland’s great. There’s a great music scene and all these wonderful brew pubs. The weather’s dreary...”

HL: “You’re gonna have to work.”

Steve: “You’re gonna have to work, but you never have to shovel rain.”

HL: Until this year.

Steve: Yeah. It’s a city full of bright, literate people. It’s a book reading place. It’s nerd tolerant. And it’s a city on the west coast where you can buy a house and support the mortgage on a middle class income. For now.

HL: Yeah, so don’t come here.

Steve: Stay away. I suggest Bend.

HL: I hear it’s a booming town.

Steve: Eugene is terrific. And for all these reasons one cartoonist after another said, “Check the place out. We’ve got Powell’s Books.” You go to Powell’s and realize you know.... One thing people have speculated on is that Portland is one of America’s bike friendliest cities and there’s a lot of cartoonists, myself among them, who don’t drive. And I think that might actually be a part, too.

HL: Why? No, I was just thinking about some people I know who draw cartoons and they don’t drive either. Do you think there’s just a weird coincidence there?

Steve: It could be the nerd thing. It could be...

Sara: Visual information processing.

Steve: Yeah.

HL: That’s kind of what I was wondering, like, you guys go slower.

Steve: I’d love to see a study of that. It could maybe explain myself to me and that would be interesting. And, of course, my cartoonist friends who do drive would say, “It’s got nothing to do with it. You lame coward.”

HL: I didn’t mean to sidetrack you, go ahead.

Steve: I think that that might be a contributing factor.

Sara: I would say, too, the sort of do it yourself impulse. Because we’ve been talking almost entirely about comics that are being published by comics publishers, but there’s massive self-published comic scene that stands right next to the zinesters and has a lot of crossover.

Steve: Right, the IPRC [Independent Publishing Resource Center] is a huge resource.

Sara: Yeah. And then more and more webcomics. So people who are just doing their own thing. And I think that this has been just a really supportive place for anything do it yourself, whether it’s jewelry or music or zines or whatever.

Steve: And because of those initial strong seeds of growth, now there’s getting to be really useful resources. A lot of people come to Periscope and intern with us and some of them wind up living here. Or wanting to live here and go home and tell their friends how great it is. There’s three comics publishers here in town, which hire people and people move here, again, to be close to their publisher or because they have a job there and that stretches the scene.

HL: What are the three? Dark Horse, Oni...

Steve: Yeah, Dark Horse, Oni Press, and Top Shelf, which is actually half here. Top Shelf, if I understand their structure correctly, they are a bicoastal company with one owner-manager here in Portland and one in Marietta, Georgia. When you have an internet, you don’t need to pay for a Manhattan office.

Sara: I would say Tugboat, too.

Steve: Oh, and Tugboat Press, an up and coming independent publisher. And a couple of other small publishers, too. Because we’ve been accumulating cartoonists like a ship does barnacles, there’s a spectacularly deep bench of serious talent in this town. Everybody who works in comics knows five or six other people whose talents are being underutilized. If you’ve seen other people create start ups and become successful artistically and financially, you think, “Why can’t I do that, too.”

Sara: I think another reason that comics are flourishing here is the reason that we ended up here and that is the library system. This has been... you know, we moved here because I got a job with Multnomah County Library. Very early on, the library was buying comics. In the last few years, we actually have a zine collection that’s cataloged so that, if you need your vegan cooking recipes, you can find the vegan cooking zines along with the cookbooks.

HL: Even in the very small North Portland library, they’ve got a whole section of zines. So, yeah, I was always pretty amazed about Multnomah County Libraries.

Sara: Yeah, so I think that goes along with Powell’s and with Independent Publishing Resource Center and all of these other sort of local literary-writ-large kinds of resources. Reading Frenzy. Places that have just really supported comics and self publishing.

Steve: And all the other small things. There’s the Illustrator’s Open, The Drink and Draw, Dr. Sketchy’s... all these places that build a sense of community.

Sara: Stumptown. Not a little thing, a big thing. Getting bigger all the time. And actually by that I mean the comic convention and the coffee.

HL: I know, I was going to ask.

Steve: Comics can be a desperately lonely profession. One of our greats, Wallace Wood, said that a career in comics is like being sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labor in solitary. And, if cartoonists have a chance to live near someone who is solving the same problems and dealing with the same issues, it’s really great to have a few like minded people to share your ideas with. [There’s a very long discussion about music, isolation, Flavor Flav lipsynching his “Yeah, boy,” at a show I saw, Girl Talk deciding to be a performer rather than laptop looker, and Tom from cars & trains method of live music.]

Steve: There’s something to be said that it’s applying the same strategy. I run into a lot of artists who cite music as an influence on their comics and it’s weird how you incorporate an influence like that, because there’s very little that you can import directly. They operate so differently. But there’s creative strategies that you bring in, there’s attitudes that you can bring in.

Sara: Then there’s a lot of young adult authors who actually do playlists for their books now. So it’s like the books, er, the music that you’ve been listening to as you write or songs that you feel somehow represent the characters.

HL: Well, like Largehearted Boy, he always asks authors to list 10 songs and he’s been doing that for years. So, it’s always interesting how music plays a part in other art forms.

Steve: I’ve learned stuff about effective storytelling from some singer-songwriter types. Jello Biafra has a way of tossing out really, really potent and effective images that... and bring those images back as refrains in the song that I think tranSteveate really well to comics. John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats, who doesn’t really craft narratives in his songs very often, but gives you slices of a story--incidents--and they often have really powerful visual images. And really powerful juxtapositions of images. [There’s several pages of discussion over obsession, Steve Martin, the internet, and intellectual property. Maybe it’ll see the light of day at some point.]

HL: OK, just to finish things up.

Steve: In conclusion.

HL: Yeah, sorry. So you said that you moved here because of Multnomah County, so does someone want to go from there. Were you together at that point?

Steve: I moved here because she had a job.

Sara: Driving the moving truck across the country was actually our honeymoon.

HL: Nice.

Sara: It was awesome. We liked the Badlands.

Steve: I met a buffalo. I came out of the restroom at Badlands National Park or something like that...

Sara: It was something like that.

Steve: And, uh, I stepped out of the john and there was just a buffalo standing there, like he was waiting for me to come out. Sara got some great photos of me kind of just looking at the buffalo looking at me.

Sara: But once we hit Portland, it was so serendipitous. Steve clearly knew that Dark Horse was there and that there were some comics things happening, but really it was just, you know, this seemed like a good job and we needed to get out of Ann Arbor because I didn’t have a job there. We hit Portland and it was like, look at all of these writers. Look at this awesome library. Look at Powell’s. Look at all of this stuff. Hooray! But we really didn’t know that much about it and we got here in the fall of ‘97, so it’s more than 11 years now.

Steve: Yeah. I came here and I had just finished up a project at Dark Horse so getting here just in time to make a few changes before it went to press. A couple of weeks later there was a convention in the area and that was where I ran into my old editor at the very beginning of my career, Bob Schrek, who had just started his own comics company, Oni Press and he was scouting for someone to draw this book that Greg Rucka had come up with called Whiteout.

HL: Oh yeah, there’s a little story about him meeting you in the version I checked out from the library.

Steve: Good, good. We were talking about intellectual property stuff. [leans into recorder] Go ahead and take Whiteout from the library, you can read the entire first chapter for free online, I know that there are lots of places where people are bootlegging it online, read it there. If you do, you’re gonna want to buy it, you’re gonna want to own it. Yeah, um. Legally, I have to say please don’t bootleg my book, but it’s not going to hurt my numbers at all.

Sara: So, in conclusion, Portland was just the serendipitous place to land.

Tom of cars & trains talks shop with Sole of anticon/mansbestfriend, et al. | READ ARTICLE

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"Are you taking orders or are you taking over?" - The Clash

Josh Hooten

The public school system vs. Josh Hooten of Herbivore Magazine. | READ ARTICLE

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