Share Tweet Forward 28th September 2017 | Ink issue #18 Read our previous issues Ink issue #18: Thought Bubble 2017 Hello and welcome, readers old and new. As you may already know, if you saw us wandering about in our matching t-shirts this weekend, we’ve just got back from our first Thought Bubble. This issue is dedicated to some of the cool things and people we discovered there, which turned out to be so many cool things and people that we’re overflowing into September’s Patreon exclusive. Find out more about that here. First, we take a look at IDW’s new imprint Black Crown, which is being led by long-time comics executive Shelly Bond. The project takes its name from the fictional English pub that ties together all the punky titles of the imprint. Intriguing and a little rebellious, it suggests an interesting time ahead for British creators. Although we have no reviews this week, this first feature also showcases some of the talented people we met throughout the festival. I recommend that you check out their work if you haven’t done so already. Next is a profile of Jordie Bellaire, who kindly gave up some of her evening to talk to us when she could have been working or drinking. Discussing Redlands, her debut title as a writer, the conversation often returned to the subject of women - in comics and in general - and the roles we are still expected to play. There’s strong language in this article, which I very intentionally left in, because the subject deserves it and because Jordie is a talent and a force that should never be silenced. One of our new writers, Serena Grasso, and I were also lucky enough to interview Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie of The Wicked + The Divine. We talked about their collaboration with colourist Matt Wilson and letterer Clayton Cowles to create characters and stories that can only be told through the medium of comics. Despite the early hour after a late night, the team gave us so much to think about that the full interview doesn’t actually fit in the newsletter. You can find the second half on our website. And finally, we give you a taste of our conversation with the inspirational Brian K. Vaughan, who is the most gracious man who ever launched a thousand comics fans. In this bitesize Q&A he tells us what it’s like to be an entry point into comics, the benefits of fame in a small industry, and a little about creating characters in Saga and Paper Girls. And that’s it for this week. As a thank you for their continued support, our Patreon supporters will also have access to the fully transcribed interviews and September’s bonus issue, which includes the rest of our chat with Brian K. Vaughan and a Q&A with Criminal and Kill or Be Killed artist Sean Phillips. Until next time, Steff Editor-in-Chief In this issue...

Black Crown

Feature Jordie Bellaire

Feature Kieron Gillen &

Jamie McKelvie

Interview Brian K. Vaughan

Interview IDW showcases creator-owned imprint Black Crown… … and other discoveries from Thought Bubble 2017.

“I love Thought Bubble, it’s my favourite convention,” several voices can be heard saying in the theatres and marquees that host the event in Leeds city centre this year. One of them, American, with a cheerful tone and dry humour, adds that “it’s such a great show because you guys understand the kind of comics that I love to create.” We’re in the front row of the stalls in the Carriageworks theatre, in seats just vacated by cosplayers wearing the curved horns of the people of Wreath. Minutes before, Saga creator Bryan K. Vaughan had spoken to a full auditorium about the only job of a comics writer being to serve the artist, and we are ready to be inspired again. Shelly Bond doesn’t disappoint, introducing her new project, Black Crown, a creator-owned imprint of IDW, with enthusiastic affection. “I wanted to create an imprint that was subversive, full of the coolest art, and the most innovative writers,” she says, before going on to explain the design and unique framing device for the brand, which was designed by her husband and “favourite artist” Philip Bond. “Black Crown is first and foremost a curated imprint - highly selective of incredible art and design - but it’s also the name of a pub that anchors this street. And the street is basically an area where all of the characters that are in these separate, singular-vision comic books, can co-mingle together. And they do this best in this book,” she changes the slide, “which is called the Black Crown Quarterly.” The idea grabs the audience. With its countercultural spirit and the composition of ideas into a shared universe, it’s one that is hand-crafted for comics. We’re on board before the line of creators on stage are introduced and we see their characters come to life on the giant screen over their heads. Rob Davis (The Can Opener's Daughter) takes over the mic to further explain the anthology. “Underneath every person in a pub is a story,” he says. “And the way the anthology works is it’s all about opening up story after story after story. And that’s what hanging around in a pub too often is like… It’s a bit like the Canterbury Tales. We get a different tale in each episode.” He gestures to show us the landlord, and the barmaid who’s the star of the first story, teasing that all the episodes will come together to reveal a dark secret lurking at the heart of the pub.



There’s a punk aesthetic to the setting and its characters that reveals a deep cultivated edginess. Considering Bond’s two decades at the heart of Vertigo, the layers of Davis’ previous work, and the phenomenal talent attached to Black Crown’s upcoming line of comics, it’s clear that this brand has something to say. “So much of Black Crown is about comics and film and music, and all the things about pop culture that we truly love,” says Bond, as the audience is pelted with rubber cockroaches by Will Potter and Carl Puttnam from the band CUD, onstage to introduce their contribution to the anthology. CUD: Rich and Strange is a regular feature in the Black Crown anthology that imagines Will and Carl as older versions of themselves, living in an old people’s home on the street that brings the Black Crown universe together. Their escape seems to be thwarted by the band’s “supervillain” guitarist, who is living the high life outside the home on all the band’s royalties. “One of the funny things about this is that this comic will be going out in the States, and many people will read it who’ve never heard of the band,” says Potter. “And they won’t believe the band exists. And hopefully they’ll do a bit of research and discover all these YouTube videos and think we’ve spent an enormous amount of money creating this fake band. It’s a whole extra layer to it.” From the launch of the imprint at New York Comic Con in October, new titles will include Kid Lobotomy, about a family of hoteliers who dabble in brain surgery; Punks Not Dead, in which the ghost of Sid Vicious attaches himself to an unfortunate teenage boy; and Assassinistas, where a trio of retired bounty hunters get back together for one last mission and make it a family affair. Find out more about Black Crown at BlackCrown.pub New discoveries 1. What is home? - Anja Uhren Sheffield-based German creator Anja Uhren blew us away with her slice-of-life comics. Her artwork, letters and unusual yet striking colours are rendered in painstaking detail, so it's no wonder she's been tipped by Broken Frontier as well. 2. Moon - Dan Thompson, Steve Penfold, Ivanna Matilla (Beyond the Bunker) Small press publisher Beyond the Bunker's main title, Moon, re-imagines the celestial body as a suit-wearing, gun-toting crime fighter. With no face or mouth to emote or speak, this action hero moon is an ideal vessel to push the boundaries of comics. 3. Let's Watch Gremlins - Capitalette / Anna Assan This autobiographical comic from indie creator Capitalette is the story of a would-be threesome that ends up in an awkward Gremlins and Gremlins 2 viewing instead. Check out her webcomic Shaderunners, too. 4. First Date - Robin French

Storyboard artist and illustrator Robin French's queer-romance comic, First Date, is as cute as it is heartwarming. And she hails from our beloved Nottingham, which is always a plus. 5. Hitsville, UK - John Riordan and Dan Cox According to its creators, Hitsville UK is "the best, though possibly the only, musical-pop-art-soap-opera in comic book form" and they're most likely right about that. In Hitsvillle, UK, Riordan and Cox have conjured up a surrealist, psychedelic ode to pop music. 6. Unknown Lands - Rosi Kämpe The print version of the first issue of Rosi Kämpe's webcomic Unknown Lands that we picked up at her table serves as a perfect introduction to the world, its characters and lore. This is hard fantasy with a punk mentality. Steff Humm & Josh Franks Back to top Jordie Bellaire on Redlands The biggest issue in comics is representation of women and people of colour, according to creator Jordie Bellaire.

Wandering the aisles of Thought Bubble’s marquees, with creators calling out like fishwives on market day, sketching peacefully behind their tables, or buried by queues of fans lining up to get their signature, it’s hard to imagine that women still feel like second class citizens in this industry. The atmosphere is at the happy end of chaotic, and female artists and writers are everywhere; something that the festival’s founder Lisa Wood has “actively tried to nurture”, as she explains in an interview with The City Talking. Unfortunately though, the event is in many ways a literal bubble, and plenty of the stories that are celebrated and sold there are built from experiences of inequality. “Can I be honest with you?” prolific colourist and writer of Redlands Jordie Bellaire says, as we squeeze in behind her table at the end of the day. Artists are packing up, the event closing down around us. “I don’t know if it’s my colouring voice, but in terms of me as an artist or creative person, my voice is one of spite and self-competition. “The spite comes especially from when someone tells me I can’t do it, and as a woman, that happens a lot - especially in comics. “People have confused me for someone’s fuckin’ intern. I’ve been called ‘princess’ before in this industry by an artist that it didn’t work out with. He said ‘It’s okay, welcome to comics, princess’. I was like, ‘You can fuck yourself.’” “It just got angrier as the world got angrier.” Redlands is a comic that is fueled by fire. In the first issue, the old-fashioned, sexist, racist police of the fictional town of Redlands, Florida are losing control of the place. A coven of witches decide they've had enough and take it from them with flames and blood. 40 years later, the three witches have an ostensibly peaceful rule over the town, but that comes at a cost. The trio discovers a multiple homicide with bodies staged to look like theirs. Someone is coming for them and the town; someone who knows their secrets. “I know that’s not a creative voice, really,” Bellaire says about her ever-present anger. “But it’s the driving force - it brings me to the desk. I am always trying to be my very best to the point that it actually hurts me, I think. I’ll take too much on or I’ll stay up way too late working, because I want to prove to myself that I’ll do my best work.” There’s subtext in what she says but it doesn’t sink in until a little later when she talks about the witches’ abilities, which were sparked from the depths of their personalities. “Ro is a bit of a shape-shifter, but she can only shift into a child, and it’s because she doesn’t get to play innocent because of who she is... [The second] - Alice - she clearly really hates people but she has this ability to persuade and... draw shit out of them. The person who hates people has to endure listening to them all the time. “And then the last character is Bridget, who is very much me in a way, because she’s the angriest of the three, and her ability is fire. It just comes out of her and she can’t really control it. “I think [these powers] are all representative of things women feel every day. Because we want people to like us, but we also don’t give a fuck. It’s really complicated. We’re all super fuckin’ angry all the fuckin’ time. And I think there is a bit of us that always infantilises ourselves to a certain point.” And at this moment it becomes clear that the characters of Redlands and Bellaire’s work ethic both say the same thing about women in society: that playing conflicting archetypes is an inescapable responsibility of gender. That a female identity is a role of public cognitive dissonance. “We don’t talk about it,” says Bellaire. “And I think that in some ways there’s things that we talk about that turn into such long-winded conversations that it’s nice to have archetypes we can point to.” The maiden, the mother and the whore. It’s a trope of witches that links to the idea that there are three faces of Eve. In Terry Pratchett’s satirical Discworld novel Weird Sisters and the Sandman comic series, the whore is replaced by the crone. “Yes, exactly,” Bellaire nods, emphatic. “Although all three of mine are kinda called whores. But one of them definitely is.” She tells us about a scene in an upcoming issue where this witch has to ask the devil to help her punish a man that calls her a whore. “It just makes makes me so mad but so excited, because, again, she’s this archetype of a whore but she falls right into playing a fuckin’ child, and she’s innocent all over again. And it’s fuckin’ crazy, but that’s how women have to fuckin’ feel all the time, we’re always on a fuckin’ balancing edge, aren’t we?” Working in colour Although she swears like a sailor on leave, Bellaire’s anger is equally matched by her talent and enthusiasm in all areas of comics creation. Graduating from Ringling College of Art and Design in her home state of Florida, she wanted to make her living as an artist but wasn’t confident with her ability, and so, on the advice of Declan Shalvey, who she met in New York, she started working as a colourist for some friends online who weren’t yet big names. When it turned out that she had an exceptional talent for the role, she was put in touch with a comics editor and continued to work diligently until she became one of the brightest stars in the industry. Now, it seems that her name is on everything and she’s worked with some of the most influential artists and writers in modern comics. We are curious about the rules of colouring, particularly for the “big two” publishers, Marvel and DC, and whether palettes are tightly regulated at the top. “That’s really interesting actually,” she says. “Because, especially when I started working for DC, I wondered if they would have all these colour coded things that you need follow. But no, none of that’s there. Even now when I’m colouring Batman, I expected things to be a lot of [restrictions] like, “No, he always has to have this shade of purple”, but it’s not like that at all. You’re allowed to do what you want, freely and openly. “But I really just try to approach each book differently, like a film. Like with Declan Shalvey I often think about David Fincher, and Gabriel Walta I think about the Coen brothers. And with Greg Smallwood we always talk about Stanley Kubrick. Those are people I genuinely think about, and if I can link an artist to a filmmaker, it’s all the better because I can just channel that love and it all comes out.” The marquee is nearly empty now. Jordie is late for her dinner reservation. Red-shirted volunteers keep stopping by the table, encouraging us to leave. But, even though I can guess the answer, I need to ask: “So, what is the biggest issue in comics right now?” “I know my big thing is women,” she says. We’re hovering on the street outside the tent. The redshirts can finally leave. “But it’s not just women now, it’s representation. We need more representation, with black writers being able to write non-black characters, who [can] maybe write black characters if they want to. And I love Marvel so much, but we only just had two female black writers come in in the last year. “We don’t have enough trans creators feeling like they can be empowered and be trans while also not being tooted around like, “Hey, look I have a trans writer or a trans artist!” which is bullshit. They need to be able to choose, and the problem is that we’re not gonna reach that point until we correct the balance, so there is gonna be some tokenism at first, but people need to be able to choose what they’re getting. So you just don’t give a woman a woman character; we need to make it so that a woman feels confident that she’s being hired because she’s a good writer, not because she’s got a vagina. “So I think representation is the most important thing, and publishers need to stop making excuses for why they’re not doing it or how they are doing it, because how they’re doing it is normally marginalised bullshit.” Steff Humm Back to top Kieron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie on collaboration in The Wicked + The Divine The Wicked + The Divine creators talk Thought Bubble, working together and representation within the industry. Kieron Gillen: Anyway, I’m rambling. Steff Humm: Kieron, you used to be a journalist. What would you ask Kieron Gillen? KG: [Laughs] Where do I get my ideas from? Jamie McKelvie: Which superhero do you want to write? KG: I always end up over-analysing interviews. I’m quite an easy interviewee because I’ve done the job, and especially in comics criticism a lot of people are inexperienced. I think you have just one question to prove to the person that you’re not an idiot. You’re normally interviewing so many people in one day, so your first or second question needs to show that you know their work. I was never a good interviewer. I was always a bit too soft. I liked to be liked too much. I would probably interview myself badly. SH: In that case, we need hard-hitting questions about the work. Serena Grasso: You play with formalism a lot in the art and storytelling of The Wicked + The Divine (WicDiv). Why? The Remix issue comes to mind. KG: “Why be boring?” is my basic answer. JM: The origin of the Remix issue came from when we were doing Young Avengers, which was sort of our first experience with tumblr culture and fan-edits of our pages. That made us think, we have 32 pages to fill every month; we can do whatever we want with them thanks to Image. Why not do something interesting? KG: It sounds really banal, but I like comics as a medium. I want to write for comics; I’m interested in what the medium can do that others can’t. By definition, in almost any medium, the most interesting and powerful works are the things that can only be told in that medium. WicDiv is aggressively comic. The idea of WicDiv is to take readers on this journey through comics. It's kind of a four-year degree course. JM: And by the end, you’re massively in debt. KG: And you’ve got no future prospects. We like the idea of being able to pick up a comic and be unsure about it. The thrill of the new is underestimated. For a real indie book, we’re not that experimental at all. We work in a very classical story tradition, but why be boring? Pop culture is about the new, the idea that you could hear a beat in a slightly twisted way or with a stylistic flourish. SH: You’ve talked before about how you deliberately made WicDiv commercial. KG: We try. JM: We’ve joked before that this is our commercial project. KG: People were saying this is a really weird idea, but we were trying to sell out! SH: I’m just wondering where the line is. Have you found, when you’ve tried more experimental stuff, that you really couldn’t do that? JM: No, you’re sort of aware of your limitations and what’s going to work. KG: Nothing that we do is outside of our aesthetic. Even at WicDiv’s weirdest, there’s still a beat to it. There was this line about the Pet Shop Boys - “They’re the Smiths you can dance to” - and we’re a bit like that: the Watchmen you can dance to. SH: There’s a soundbite for you. KG: Did I really just say that? I don’t think Watchmen’s quite right… JM: But it is something you can dance to. One of the great things about a team like ours is that everyone has input. Everyone listens to each other. Matt [Wilson], I think, feels quite valued as he’s quite involved in the storytelling. KG: We often say that colour is the lead instrument in some issues of WicDiv. There are a lot of teams who don’t have their colourist on their table. I think we put a lot of value in our structure. SH: It makes a huge difference in terms of each character. I’m interested in how you all work together to create these characters from the inside out. JM: Every god has their own colour. Baal started wearing purple when he was in mourning, and now he’s going back to red. And that was Matt’s idea, not ours. Kieron had this bible at the beginning that showed where he wanted all the characters to go. I don’t do a lot of pre-page designs; the characters are pretty much in my head. It’s not formalised, really. We’ve been working together for 10 years, so a lot of it is based on mutual understanding. We don’t necessarily need to have those conversations. KG: There’s a lot of very soft counterpunching. It’s like dance partners. If Jamie takes a line that way, I’m able to see and understand what he’s doing. Occasionally, we need to have longer conversations, but that’s for long-term structural stuff. JM: Same with Matt and Clayton [Cowles] too. SH: Clayton’s lettering is sublime. JM: He’s brilliant. Storytelling through lettering - that’s the kind of thing he does. For Kieron’s 40th birthday, we made a poster of him surrounded by his characters, and they’re all talking. And for every one of them, their speech bubble was in the style of their book, which is the kind of thing that’s not always noticed. It was incredible. Clayton would come up with around 10 different versions of what the lettering might be like. KG: We talk about the options and what the actual aesthetic effect is. Lettering isn’t just words, it’s visual. SH: WicDiv is diverse in many ways, but the characters are all quite traditionally attractive in shape and body type. How do you feel about that? JM: I think we could’ve done a better job with it. The thing about comics is because they come out so frequently, you’re developing in public. You’re always aware that you could do a better job with something the next time. KG: Perfection is the opposite of good, in some ways. We could’ve done better. Pop star archetypes have different body types, but we ask ourselves, “Which body types could we have pushed further?” We could’ve made Baal a bigger guy. Morrigan is easily read as non-neurotypical, so having them be a larger character would’ve immediately opened another fucking can of worms. We did things like swap Beth out of the Norns and replaced her with a less traditional physique character. We were thinking, “How can we get a different fucking silhouette in this book?” We try really hard and we follow stuff through, but at the same time we occasionally make traps for ourselves. Yeah, we “mea culpa” that. SH: You could have all the reviews in the world, but you guys ultimately know what the strengths and weaknesses are with your own project. I find it interesting that you’re aware of that. KG: The dominant culture through history ends up reinstating the stereotypes through history. That’s one of the problems with historical stuff and that’s also built into the book: problematic people doing problematic things, including us. What I’m doing next involves a different selection of people and I’ve talked to the artist early on about what we’re doing with the characters. We’ll see how it goes. Head to our website to read the rest of our interview with WicDiv creators Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie. This interview has been edited for clarity. Steff Humm & Serena Grasso Back to top Five minutes with Brian K. Vaughan The creator of Saga and Paper Girls talks about comics fame and being a gateway drug. Ink: What’s your favourite thing about Thought Bubble? Brian K. Vaughan: That’s a good question. I love any excuse to come to the UK, so getting a free trip here is pretty badass. I think it’s just a chance to catch up with creators I love - I got to hang out with Sy Spurrier, and I went to dinner with Frank Quitely last night, which is amazing. He’s one of my favourite artists on the planet. So yeah, just getting to hang out with those guys is great and then everyone is so nice here. I love doing shows like San Diego Comic Con, but those conventions have become very movie and TV-focused. This is just a pure comics convention: people who love this medium. So that’s really the best part. Ink: We’ve talked a lot about being ‘comics famous’. Being the biggest name in comics doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re known on a wider level. What’s that level of celebrity like? BKV: That Z level of celebrity is the absolute best, because on the convention floor you get a small taste of what it’s like to be famous and then the second you set foot outside, you’re back to being anonymous. So it’s like all of the good parts of experiencing fame with none of the horrible parts. I cannot recommend being ‘comic book famous’ enough. Ink: Saga has been such a long journey already in the five years since you started writing it. So much has happened to the characters. Do you have any favourites that you’ve been sad to say goodbye to, even though you felt like the story needed it? BKV: I once threatened to do something bad to Lying Cat and Fiona [Staples] was like “Nope! I’m not going to draw that.” It seems like that’s the one bridge we’ll never be able to cross. It was really hard seeing the first image of The Stalk that Fiona drew. She was one of the most beautifully designed characters that’s ever been in a comic book, and I knew that I was going to be killing her off in just a couple of issues. That was a particularly brutal one. I started writing Saga right after my daughter was born, and she’s been aging almost in real time with Hazel in the book. So Hazel will always be my favourite character, and the story’s from her perspective so she will hopefully be around for a while. She’s my favourite. Ink: How do you write the voices of young people? Is Hazel’s quite close to your daughter’s? BKV: She’s sort of an amalgamation of my son, my daughter and their friends, I guess. I steal pretty liberally from all of them. Ink: What about in Paper Girls? Obviously the characters are a little bit older; they seem so mature and yet still 12. BKV: When I told my mum I was working on this book set in 1988, which is when I turned 12 years old, I asked her if she had a photo or two from back then. She sent me this creepy dossier she had saved of every paper I wrote when I was 12, and it was really interesting to go back, because I think of 12 as being really, really young. I read some of my writing from back then, and looking at some of the homework I had to do, I was like, “12-year-olds are badasses.” You learn a lot when you’re 12, and we’re more sophisticated at that age than adults give us credit for. I just try to write the girls to the top of my limited intelligence and it comes out, I think, hopefully sounding like a 12-year-old. Ink: When did you start writing? Have you always been a writer? BKV: Probably when I was about 12. That’s another reason why that age is a big part of Paper Girls. I don’t know when you guys discovered comics, but when I was 12 I read Watchmen for the first time and that’s when I realised, “Oh, there’s actually a person behind these comic books that I love” and I wanted to start doing that too. I started writing plays and short stories. At 12 I just did it as kind of a hobby and then by the time I was in college, I knew I wanted to find a way to trick someone into paying me to do this. Ink: You’ve said before that, as a writer, you’re working in service to the artist, and that’s the most important thing to remember when writing comics. How do you collaborate with Fiona Staples when creating characters? In Saga, Fiona designs the most astounding creatures. How much say do you have in that process before she takes it and runs with it? Early on, during that first arc, I was maybe a little more descriptive. But even then, I was pretty vague; I said Marko was a guy with horns and Alana was a woman with wings, and Fiona was the one that said, “Do they need to be white?” and that it would be much more interesting to write characters of mixed ethnicity, and I loved that. It’s obviously brought so much to the book. I think it was after those first couple of issues that I realised Fiona is just a machine; just get out of her way and give her the loosest descriptions so she can have the space to put herself in each character. It’s almost 100 percent her. Ink: How does it feel to be so many people’s entry into comics? BKV: It feels very nice to be a gateway drug. When I started dating my now-wife, who’s a playwright, I was so eager for her to share in my interests. I just wanted to write comics that she would enjoy that don’t require years of history, aren’t complicated to follow from panel to panel, and are just accessible. So when that works out, it’s very heartening. Support us on Patreon and you'll receive full access to our unabridged interview with Brian K. Vaughan, as well as other exclusive content. Steff Humm & Josh Franks Back to top If your name is featured here, it means you’ve supported us on Patreon. And THAT means that you’re an amazing person. Pledging your support on our Patreon page entitles you to all sorts of rewards, including special mentions below and on the Ink website, exclusive bonus content, and the chance to tell us the comics issues that you want us to talk about in future issues. For more details and to join our community, head to our creator profile. Ink’s supporters: Derek Coward

C.A. Riley