 :: Thursday, February 05, 2004 :: Digging to Chynna, Part 2: Chynnese History (Deep Announcer Voice): “Previously on Supersized” “J: Wanting to go into some of the other stuff you’ve done. Probably your best selling single issue to date, and it’s not even your characters, the Ultimate Marvel Team up with Bendis. “C: Hey that’s no fair! That’s a main stream comic! It’s got Bendis, It’s got X-Men and it’s got Spidey it’s not fair to compare it to Blue Monday! “J: I’m not comparing, I know that Bendis was going to the artists and saying “who do you want to draw?” “C: Was he? “J: Well that was the implication that was given out from the beginning. Or did he just decide “Here, we’ll just give Chynna the most popular people possible.” “C: That was probably closer, but I don’t think that was what he was thinking. I think he came up with the idea and thought that I would do a good job with it.” And now part two of Digging to Chynna! SUPER CHYNNA RETURNS! J: Did you enjoy doing it? C: Yeah, it was great. I got to hang out at the mall for reference remembering what it was like being twelve and miserable. “Hey hot-dog on a stick! Alright!” No, it was a pretty good time, the thing is I never work on a comic with somebody who’s together with me in the same room. So, obviously with Brian, we just exchanged a couple of e-mails, and I talked to the editor of the book a couple of times, I just did my work and turned it in and that’s about it. No explosions. J: On time for once? C: I think it was… Yeah actually. Well, you know. J: You wanted to make a good impression so you could get more work? C: I'm usually late with Jamie only. I’m never Supersized style late with him, though, I just tend to drive him up the wall. Honestly, it's not on purpose- I just care so much about my creator-owned work, I stress over it a lot more than anything else, redoing things and freaking out. J: Now you’re not going to have anybody to assault at the Oni booth when you’re sitting around. C: Yeah I know, I think I’m just going to stop doing cons all together if Jamie’s not going to be there, it’s just not as much fun. I was contemplating causing his early demise by pelting him to death with Smarties. It'd be insufferably slow and painful, but clearly he deserves it. Man, I feel bad for anybody who is going to step in and try to take his place. J: I don’t think anybody really can. C: Oh no, they couldn’t, but somebody’s going to have to try to edit this fucking book. J: Well who would be your choice for editing the book? C: Jamie! The fucker can’t leave! I'll hold a lockdown! I don’t care, you can leave everybody else’s book, Jamie Rich, you can’t leave mine! J: So officially Jamie is much loved? C: What?! I don’t know what you’re talking about, I hate him. I hope he gets a big, rusty nail lodged in his foot as we speak. I hope he has a nosebleed right now. J: You hate him, you just can’t live without him. Okay, next up, with your panties having been put up for sale on E-Bay, by your lovely roommate… How much would you be willing to sell your panties for? C: I would *never* sell my panties. My panties are only available through being earned or stolen. J: Aw, c’mon, look at the price that was being offered there. C: Aww. I can’t believe that people actually bought into that. That’s what I’m trying to figure out. “Hey was she really selling her panties on E-Bay?” Are you fucking nuts? J: When I saw the final price I was thinking this has got to be a practical joke or Chynnas in grave danger and must move NOW! C: Yeah, no foolin’, Thank God it was a joke. People were on message boards at three AM asking if it was me selling my panties or “have you seen the price.” I mean, have you read my comic? That’s pretty much how I am. I’m extremely shy, believe it or not. I wouldn’t appear naked in a video by choice or sell my panties on the internet. I don’t do things like that. J: So is there a naked video of you hanging around somewhere? C: No Comment. J: Officially? C: Unfortunately there was an incident in High School that was very similar to that. Very close. J: And the perpetrators are still alive? Or their bodies haven’t been found yet? C: They are very much alive, I’m actually living with one of them now. He’s insisted the video’s been destroyed. “It was funny, you couldn’t see anything.” I tried for the life of me to get that thing back. I had no idea, I heard them giggling. I could not see the garage window across from me. J: Truthfully, I wouldn’t have destroyed that video. C: I’m still looking. J: Hey there’s a way to make shit loads of money! C: I wouldn’t put any of that up on the internet either. Just leave the no comment. J: You know that almost makes it sound worse. C: Actually that whole episode in Blue Monday is almost completely accurate. I should have just locked the camera in the room (it was under the bed at first, remember) and been done with it. J: You just didn’t think your way through it. C: I honestly thought it was the only way they could see in. What garage has two storeys in California? I thought that was an east coast thing. And with a window directly across from a bathroom window, which is level with the bathtub, with no goddamn blinds? I'm cursed! J: So was it aired on public television? C: No, thank god, it probably could have been if they thought of it. They were great at pirating radio stations, I'm sure they could have figured out a way to sneak it on channel 13. J: Okay, slipping backwards in the order these questions should be going: How did you get into comics originally? C: Ummm… How far back? Do you mean reading comics or breaking in and doing work? J: All the way back, the whole kit and caboodle! C: I started trying to read Archie comics when I was a whelp, literally before I could read, I liked the pictures. One of my earliest memories is watching an Archie cartoon sitting in my high chair trying to see it. And all I can remember is seeing the back of Archie’s head. Early on it was Archie, Archie, Archie! Then I started reading the Freak Brothers which my mother’s boyfriend left lying around, which probably wasn’t the best thing for a four or five year old to be reading. I decided from reading all of that crap that I wanted to be a cartoonist. So I kept that up, drawing constantly. Although during my childhood I read Archie, Mad Magazine, and what ever other books I could get my hands on, not necessarily comic books. I did read a few issues of the comic series Cherry. More damage there, I'm sure... I used to get dragged to the comic store by my Mom’s boyfriend who was really into mainstream comics , which is probably why I went indy. (Besides superhero books not saying shit to females, especially in the 80's.) Somewhere around age 11 or 12 I started sneaking off reading stuff I wasn't supposed to. The guy running the store wouldn’t let me read the Love and Rockets books he had, I wanted to buy them but he wouldn’t let me if I tried. So I’d come back in a year or so and he was like “Oh no, why don’t you try to be a cheerleader or something.” Finally I bought them as soon as I could and devoured them all, and they were awesome. I found Deadline and I started reading Jamie Hewlett’s stuff, and Evan Dorkin's Pirate Corps. All the while I kept drawing and drawing, but I didn’t think I’d be a comic artist- I thought I’d be an animator. I later got into Anime and became even more convinced that was the road I was going to travel. Then, the more I found out about it and how animation works, the more I thought it probably wasn’t for me... the lack of freedom, the problems with authority I have when it comes to creativity and people meddling with it. Having someone standing over my shoulder, having to draw the same shit over and over again. I realized I couldn’t do it. I still tried to get into the summer school of the arts for animation and when they rejected me I was just like: “fuck you then, I’ll just do my own stuff.” I figured I’d do better at comics, which was way more my style, a place where I would write and draw my own stuff. Things I love equally. After graduation I became dead set on becoming a comic book artist, I never had a college fund or anything like that so I didn’t really have the chance to go to art school. I knew my only choice was to learn the hard way. So I went out and worked and started making comics on my own, and found opportunities there. I’d ask people about what kind of stuff to use and how to get in and nobody wanted to talk to a girl about that, which made it tough. I was kind of like a joke to other people I guess. Some of the guys acted superior and condescending. Not all of them, but several. No girls were available to discuss comics with on any sort of level. Not the creation of them. So I was in a rut. Eventually I found one person who was willing to help me out with my questions. I was asking all kinds of things- what kind of materials to use, such as what kind of paper (I was still using 81/2 x 11 paper and sketch pads with sharpies, no one told me any different) I had no clue what was going on. But even that person tended to be elusive, because he liked to emphasize that everyone used different materials. No one could or would give me a straight answer. But I did finally find out through some of these people about Wondercon... my god, a whole convention centered around comics... (imagine that!) I had never heard of anything like it. That was about ’94. I tried showing my stuff around and that lead me in the direction of Bob Shreck. Shreck sat me down let me talk to him, told me to keep on working. According to Jamie Rich, Bob told him to keep an eye on me. So I started talking to Jamie and kept working. I ended up talking only to Jamie the majority of the time, finding out what I could do and what I needed to work on and such. Finally I got a point where he could publish me a few years later, in Dark Horse Presents, for just a one pager. Then I got a six pager a short time after that. A few months later some DH people were like: “What’s this shit doing in here?” so Jamie told me not to worry, that’s when he helped me get into Action Girl for a little while, I got to work with Sarah Dyer, who kicks serious ass. But Jamie dug my comics, and still wanted to work with me, but no one else really supported my being published where he was working. Later on, he pushed getting me published at Oni. It took a while. I worked as hard as I could on improving. And finally after six or so years, I’m now doing Scooter Girl as well as Blue Monday out of Oni. It was worth the stress. J: Okay after all that I just remember one of my other questions for I meant to ask earlier: What have you been reading? Not Comics. C: Actually I just finished reading and eleven hundred page book called London by Edward Rutherfurd. Its a long history of London, but it’s all through fictional characters... they interact with actual people from the various time periods cited. It’s a very cool read (I wasn't so sure at first, but I'm glad I stuck with it) and my god- I can’t even imagine the mounds of research he had to go through to write it. I mean EVERY page is packed with so many facts and so much detail. It just boggles me. J: So is that why you do a lot of your stuff based on your own life? So you don’t have to do the research? C: I actually love research, to be honest. I had to do a bit for Scooter Girl, I wanted it to have accurate fashion, for the most part. I wanted to view it as a social history, and be fairly accurate in that way. The same with Blue Monday, as far as being a social history (in the smallest sense, of course) I just thought my friends were so funny that they should be recorded somehow. My enemies were pretty hilarious, too. They all needed to be written about. J: Record them for posterity? C: My own amusement really. No, posterity, too. They did so many funny and awful things back then, and still do, that I don’t want to lose any of it. I just want people in the future to see how I saw them. You know what I'm saying? J: Oh yeah. Remember I’m in Canada, land of the autobiographical comic. That’s one of the things I really like about Blue Monday, mentally I know it’s and Autobio comic, but it doesn’t read like one. C: Yeah, it probably helps that everything’s a little exaggerated. You know, the Jesus heads, Giant Otters all that stuff. J: Ahh, the drug hallucinations! C: Actually, most of us didn't use drugs in High School, if you can believe it... which is weird. J: You waited until after graduation? C: Umm, yeah actually, or until we dropped out. Ha. I can’t say that about everybody. I didn't drink until I was of legal age, at least. I don't do anything else. Before I moved to live with my father when I was fourteen, I was surrounded by really, really bad elements. Drugs never appealed to me as a result, I saw what they did to people. Everyone else ended up being fascinated by them once they got out of school or were close to getting out. Hey, there’s one of them who didn’t do anything ever, though. J: Which character is based on them? C: That’d be Erin. Hey, what were we talking about? J: We were talking about London, and then we diverged back in your own work. C: Oops. Didn’t mean to do that. Right now I’m reading Don’t Tell Alfred, which is a continuation of the stories of one of my favorite authors, Nancy Mitford, and then there’s one after that called Love in a Cold Climate which sounds all fluffy and romancey, but it’s not at all. It’s pretty much pure comedy. London took up a lot of my time. J: Yeah, well it’s a big honking book. C: Yeah it is. Excellent description. J: because when you put it down it honks. C: It pretty much does. Oh yeah, Conversations With Wilder. My favorite film maker. J: Okay what about some of your favorite films? *** Okay we’ll leave you there to return on Monday for what should be the end of the Digging to Chynna. (Don’t ya love a good cliff hanger). (As if any Chynna readers can’t guess what her favorite film are.) ‘Till next time. -Jay 8:04 PM + Jay D'Ici + permalink |