Colleen Coover Q&A

I recently had an opportunity to chat with indie artist Colleen Coover. Perhaps best known to mainstream comic fans for her acclaimed back-up features for X-Men: First Class, she was kind enough to answer a brief Q&A I sent her.

James Freeman: First off, how long have you been working in the comic book industry?

Colleen Coover: I started dabbling as a sort of serious hobby in the mid 90's, working with Paul on short pieces for his Slave Labor book Attitude Lad. After that, we tinkered with some stuff here and there, until around 2000 when my adult title Small Favors started at Eros/Fantagraphics. Then in 2004 we did the all-ages mini series Banana Sunday at Oni Press, with Paul writing as Root Nibot. I did illustration and other commecial art work for a while, and then wound up doing short pieces for Marvel.

JF: Were you a comic reader while growing up?

CC: I was a comic book reader before I could actually read the words on the page! My grandmother worked at a Five & Dime store and would give my older sister and me the unsold stripped comics from the newsstand. My sister prefered the horror titles Marvel and DC were putting out in the 70's, and I liked Archie and Harvey comics. We also had a few superhero comics, including a “Famous Firsts”-type anthology issue that reprinted key DC origin stories. That combined with newspaper strips and the wealth of classic superhero content on TV (Super Friends, the Shazam Power Hour, syndicated 60's Batman reruns, and Spider-Man on the Electric Company) gave me a pretty solid basic foundation in comics lore. I went on to read X-Men in the 80's like every other kid, plus my sister's Heavy Metal and Epic magazines, which led naturally to Elfquest in junior high, and Love & Rockets in high school.

JF: What are some major influences on your work?

CC: See previous answer! Seriously, laying out all that early reading history is a pretty good breakdown of my aesthetic. I consider Los Bros Hernandez to be my most direct influence. They showed me how comics heavily informed by Archie and Harvey (which their work is, without doubt) could be applied to mature storytelling.

JF: In recent years, you’ve done a number of works for Marvel. How did this come about?

CC: It started out when my studiomate Jeff Parker, who was writing the X-Men: First Class Special to cap off the initial 8-issue series, asked his editors Mark Paniccia and Nate Cosby to have me draw three single page humor strips. Then he wrote a short story with Marvel Girl and the Scarlet Witch, and then another, and pretty soon I was getting short story and humor strip assignments fairly regularly.

JF: Do you have a contract with Marvel, or are you still freelance.

CC: Free as a bird!

JF: How did you first meet Paul Tobin?

CC: We first became friends when I frequented the comics shop where he was working, back in 92 or 93. Soon we started dating seriously, and we've been together ever since! We got married in August of '07.

JF: For your Marvel work at least, you often illustrate scripts from Paul. Do you have any ideas for stories at Marvel that you’d like to go solo on.

CC: I'm having a lot of fun focusing on the visual side of storytelling, especially since I've been working with some of my favorite writers in the business. I won't rule out writing something someday, but I'm not pursuing it right now.

JF: If you were given a chance to work on a monthly book, would you?

CC: Working on a monthly would leave me no time to work on my own projects, and I kind of prefer having the opportunity to dabble in a variety of short pieces, like a bee flitting from flower to flower!

JF: Are there any creators right now who you admire?

CC: I love Kate Beaton's web strips, because they're funny and smart and unlike anything I could ever do. And she writes about history, a subject that interests me though I know very little about it, mostly I think because history books are usually pretty dull. I bet she's tired of being compared to Sarah Vowell, but I'm gonna do it. She's like a Canadian cartoonist Sarah Vowell.

Another artist I'm watching closely is an intern at Periscope studio right now, Ben Dewey. Ben is a natural at comics, and he has the discipline and the will to produce; and even though he's quite good now, he's got the curiosity and desire to learn that will allow him to grow as an artist. We more veteran comics guys in the studio have been fostering his work for the past few months, and there's been a marked improvement. Oh, and he works two day jobs and is a bluegrass musician as well.

JF: Lastly, do you have any projects on the horizon we could all look forward to?

CC: Paul and I have an original graphic novel called Gingerbread Girl scheduled for publication sometime in 2010 from Top Shelf. It's a character study of a young woman who may or may not be a little crazy, told over the course of a single evening by a variety of narrators in the world around her. The woman, Annah, believes that when she was nine years old, her father extracted the part of her brain responsible for sensory feelings and used it to grow a twin sister for her named Ginger, who is now missing. Annah believes that Ginger's absense is the reason for her own emotional withdrawl, but the people around her wonder if there is not a more logical explanation. Like I said, it's a completely different sort of thing than what people have seen from Paul or me before, so I'm looking forward to the day when you all can see it!

Wow. Good stuff. She's such a perfectly balanced blend of TRUE indie and total mainstream. That's a tough line to walk, and she manages to dance on it.

Very true. I think it's awesome that she can work for a big dog like Marvel and still do all these indie passion projects.