Sophia Wiedeman got her MFA at the School of Visual Arts. She currently lives in New York. When she isn’t drawing or working off debt, she fills time by walking, stopping strangers on the street to pet their dogs, and disinfecting dog bites.

Her excellent comic The Deformitory won a Xeric grant in 2008. Right now she’s completing The Lettuce Girl, a re-imagining of the fairy tale Rapunzel, which should be out in time for MoCCA.

View more of her work online at sophiadraws.com and follow her blog at sophiadrawscomics.blogspot.com. You’ll also see her work featured on Top Shelf 2.0 and printed regularly in Time Out New York.

(Remember: Click to enlarge.)

– Sarah Morean

“Timing,” Peter Laird proclaims wistfully, “in a lot of ways is everything.” A quarter of a century after first introducing his most famous creations to the world alongside long time co-conspirator Kevin Eastman, the artist has had plenty time to reflect on such things. It’s hard to argue with the sentiment. The introduction of The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as a black and white comic in the fall of 1983 was about as perfect as timing gets.

Three years after the release of that first book, the Turtles had been successfully translated into an animated series and action figure line. Soon after that, Eastman and Laird’s creations would become a bona fide cultural phenomenon.

Even after the cartoons, and the movies, and the breakfast cereals, however, the duo have never forgotten their roots as struggling independent cartoonist who, in the face of rejection from power house publishers, Marvel and DC, took a leap into the often rocky world of self-publishing. Eastman, for his part, launched Tundra in 1990, publishing works by artists like Jim Woodring, Scott McCloud, and Mike Allred. Laird took things a step further, creating the Xeric Foundation, which since 1992, has been a major force in self-publishing, having issued grants to such future big name artists as Jason Lutes, Adrian Tomine, Tom Hart, Jessica Abel, and Gene Yang.

We had the fortune of bumping in Laird in amongst the gauntlet that is The New York Comic Con Artist Alley. We spoke to the artist about his journey from self-publishing to pop-cultural icon.

Is it ever hard looking at those old books? What’s your first thought when someone hands you one of the originals?

I’m not really sure, I mean, it does take me back, definitely. Twenty-five years is a long time–almost half my life, in fact. But it does take me back to a period in my life when it was incredibly exciting to be doing our comic book. Even more it was exciting because it was a comic book that people seemed to want to buy and read. For Kevin and I both, it was a fantastic time for us.

When did the decision to self-publish come about?

We wanted to work for Marvel and DC. Back then, that was really 95-percent of what you could do in comics.

It’s still pretty close to that, right?

Yeah, yeah. Although there are a lot more avenues these days. Back then there was a certain amount of self-publishing going on, but not nearly what it is today. And we did a couple of things for different companies and got rejected. We saw what the Pinis were doing with Elfquest, what Dave Sim was doing with Cerebus, and of course we were aware of some of the underground comics. We finally said, “screw it, we’ll do it ourselves.” That’s the power of self-publishing. No one else wants you, so you do it yourself. So that’s what we did.

The work seemed to straddle the fence between the more traditional stuff and some of the more comedic underground work, like, say R. Crumb—were artists like him an influence on the work?

Oh yeah, that was an influence maybe not so much on content, but definitely on spirit. It was exciting for us to see people getting that kind of distribution on their own. Obviously it wasn’t getting the kind of distribution of a Superman or a Fantastic Four, but it was getting out there. Clearly you’d read these books and you could tell that these were people who really passionately wanted to do this. They had something to say, and this was a great avenue to say it.

The early books seemed geared toward older readers. How did the Turtles end up skewing so young?

Well, it was a natural progression. Kevin and I did the comics for ourselves. We did them the way we wanted to read them. When the toy company and then the animated series came along, of course it was obvious they were going for a younger audience, which was fine by us, because the way we looked at it, we could compromise and make the Turtles skew younger for that audience because we still had the books and we could make them the way that we wanted, which we continued to do.

Was it hard to take that first step, in terms of letting your creation get away from you?

Yeah, though at the time we were pretty star struck. I’ve been thinking about it as I’ve been pondering the 25th anniversary, and it was only three years from the date of publication of the first comic until the animated series started. That’s mind boggling. Two yahoos in their living room in New Hampshire, publishing the first issue with 3,000 copies and it goes in three years to become a major toy line and a major animated series, and in the following years number one in both fields. It was very bizarre.

Ultimately, in a sense it’s become the creation of a lot more than those first two people. Have the cartoons and the other work that has been projected on the characters affected the way you write them?

Some, but not a lot. It is difficult sometimes, but it is possible to compartmentalize that kind of stuff. One of the things about creating something like this is, once you’ve created it and it gets out into the public, it takes on a mind of its own. I’m not gonna say that none of what has happened outside of my hands has influenced me—it has. Although I still think I have a real powerful sense of the way Kevin and I originally perceived and created them, and when I write a comic that features the Turtles, I still write from that inner place.

Did you ever feel as if you were working against that external force? How important was it to stay true to that original vision?

You know, in a lot of ways, when we signed the first deals to the first series and the first line of toys, it was our first time at bat with that stuff and we were somewhat naïve. For the most part, we had good deals, but we didn’t have a lot of approval rights. Right now I have a lot more. I’m a lot more savvy about that stuff. But at the time, it was about compartmentalizing. We understood that to get a whole time line and get those out into stores, to have  a TV show broadcast nationwide and to get it all over the world, we had to compromise, to take our characters and soften them up. But for the large part, we let other people do that, so we could focus on our own work, which was the comic books.

It seems like it’s also been fairly important for both of you to give back to independent publishers. You’ve both had a fairly large role in that, whether through the Xeric grant or starting your own publishing house.

Yeah. Something that really played a large part in the creation of the Xeric foundation is the fact that, if Kevin and I hadn’t been able to borrow some money to create that first issue, it might have taken us months, maybe years before we could do it, and who knows what would have happened if that amount of time had passed, because timing, in a lot of ways, is everything.

–Brian Heater

And How
by Gregory Corso
Powderfinger Books

The common definition of insanity, as I’ve heard it, is to expect different results from predictable courses. For instance, if you have a preferred route to work, and each day it takes you to the same office, that’s predictable. If you think that by following the same route, you will reach a volcano, that’s insane. By extension, if Steve Urkel thinks that hounding Laura Winslow will somehow get him a date when she says no every time, that’s also insane. Something else must occur to evoke change; he must partake of the Cool Juice and become Stefan Urquelle. You see?

Without directly addressing the subject of insanity, And How is a perfect and eerie portrayal of it. Through use of repetitive imagery and blithe, empty expressions, Gregory Corso builds a weird and fascinating story about a boy’s search for peace, a woman’s search for unity, and a man’s search for Bigfoot.

The book’s first use of repetitious panels was surprising. I thought Corso was being lazy and that his book was just another example of an artist skimping on production time by making the most of a single panel. A close-up of a woman’s face, then her hand holding a page, then her hand holding a page, then a close-up of her face. Similar enough, but changed ever so slightly to cover his tracks. As more panels began repeating, a pattern finally emerged. Soon whole dialogs were carried over multiple pages while re-using the same drawing. The book is broken up by parts, and the last two give completely different conclusions using many of the same drawings – the final insane twist.

There are also repeating symbols and themes. Particularly bees and the geese, flying and buzzing and growing and taking over whole pages as the story unfolds. The combination of repeating elements becomes a kind of circus. In the re-read, I noticed that actually there is a repetitive use of panels on the first page, but I’d blown over it. The first two panels are identical, rectangular, and full of black ink.

Dark and light are also big themes in this book. “The only difference between day and night is what you’re able to see,” says the father to his son. In the final two parts, scenes take place simultaneously in the day and night time. The son is flying a plane over the woods in daylight to help his father search for Bigfoot, the next panel shows the same plane against a black sky with a moon hanging above the horizon, and in the next panel it’s light again. It’s not the passage of time, it’s a device. These and other details makes for the kind of expository reading experience that separate comics from mere fiction. The book plays with visual symbolism in a way that is very truly unique to narrative art.

It’s a nicely drawn book that makes equal use of expansive black space and thin jagged lines. The characters themselves are drawn with bland, cheerful expressions. Their faces are muppet-like, with nearly-triangular noses, wide split mouths, and comically large ears. Their posture is often directed out of the page, rather than into their conversations, so they cheat outward as stage actors might. Each seems to be in his own world, disconnected.

And How won a 2006 Xeric Grant.  It is available for $6 through the artist.

- Sarah Morean

My Alaskan Summer
by Corinne Mucha
Maidenhousefly Comics

Bless the Xeric Grant. Without it, what would have happened to Corinne Mucha’s adorable travelogue? At 96 pages, it’s too long to be a self-published mini and it lacks a main thesis that would draw in a publisher. Still, the sweet, meandering drawings and stories are too good to lay forgotten in some sketchbook. With Mucha’s unique multimedia mode of design, cultivated illustration style and quirky storytelling voice, the Xeric seems to have been the perfect backer to print this lovely book.

My Alaskan Summer is the sort of book I always expect to see rolling from the Xeric-funded presses but rarely do. The Xeric Foundation is a great resource for cartoonists whose work deserves attention in the world of indie comics, those who don’t need the design assistance of a publishing house, and for projects that are too ambitious to meet hand-made mini standards. However, Xerics are often awarded to small potatoes productions and saddle-stitched operations as well as truly outstanding books, so in this case it’s important to make the distinction that here is a book truly in-line with the fund’s core vision and this is one artist in particular you should notice. The result of these combined efforts is something markedly indie and personal and funny and thick and hopefully en route to your local comic book store: Mucha’s My Alaskan Summer.

On the heels of Into the Wild and Grizzly Man (two Alaskan adventure stories gone awry) and the shocking introduction of Sarah Palin to mainstream American politicking, most people are just starting to realize there actually is a state nestled on the shoulder of Canada – and they’re starting to form an opinion of it. Mucha’s story about a summer spent working with her boyfriend at a family-owned Bed & Breakfast dispels and explores some of the myths surrounding “The Last Frontier” but mostly relates quaintly one version of a girl’s first foray into adulthood after graduating from college. Without directly attacking big topics like oil and ecotourism, Mucha gently skirts these issues while she talks realistically and figuratively about the highs and lows of living in Alaska.

Mucha personifies objects throughout the book, acting out delightful imaginary conversations that address restaurant food, vacuuming and excess daylight. A highlight comes when her boyfriend-at-the-time Sam grumbles about what’s wrong with Alaska and points out the flaws of their local newspaper. He complains about the inferior Anchorage Daily News, preferring his beloved New York Times, and in response to his sigh, “Oh Times. I miss you,” the next panel shows the Times at a desk with a window overlooking the New York cityscape, dreamily touching a picture of Sam and saying “I miss you, too.”

The style of Mucha’s illustration is focused but chaotic, implementing all sorts of textural elements and Gumby-like motions with quick swipes of ink applied all over by a single pen. It has the overall effect of a greeting card image in some respects.

The images are rendered in black and white, the book is perfect bound with a color cover. It’s available from the artist’s website for $10, or at last weekend’s SPX at the debut price of $8 (provided you have access to a time machine).

- Sarah Morean