Jane Irwin is a sincere, enthusiastic person who truly believes in her comic, Vögelein. This attitude endeared her to me before I even read the comic. Note to all small publishers/self-publishers: Critics like to put muscle behind the small presses and self-published comics, but we tend to respond best to people who are nice, dedicated folks who believe in their work. Jane Irwin personifies the sort of attitude we critics respond to. We tend to get turned off by arrogance or smart-aleck attitudes.
Of course, Jane Irwin could be the nicest person on the planet and not get my support if the comic weren't any good. I am pleased to say that Vögelein is one of the best reads of the New Year. It has mood, tone, an intriguing plot, and exceedingly interesting characters. The story of Vögelein, as Ms. Irwin explains below, concerns a clockwork fairy (don't groan, it's not a cute book) that has gained immortality and the semblance of a soul. Her weakness is the fact that she must be wound up daily or else she will cease to exist. The comic is as much a meditation on life, death, and loss as it is an exciting adventure.
I am very pleased to interview Jane Irwin, who is an intelligent and perceptive person, as well as a fantastic new talent. As a way of a PS, her art is something you must see to believe. I am hoping that one day she does a cover for Tart because I'd like you all to see how exceptional her work is.
Sequential Tart: Tell us about your background/who you are (name, what you were like as a kid, what you watched on TV, college experiences, that sort of a thing) ....
Jane Irwin: I was a total oddball in the family; neither of my brothers reads very much, and no one else in the family likes fantasy, sci-fi or comics at all. At about 13, the SF bug hit -- I started dragging home Anne McCaffrey and Xanth books, got completely hooked on the TV shows Quantum Leap and Beauty and the Beast … never really got into the Trek stuff, though. My tastes really changed when I got to college, and I almost completely dropped the TV element in favor of books and comics.
When I got to college, I fell in with the Gamers, and spent a big chunk of the next 4 years drawing fantasy pictures and character sketches. I did loads of conventions all over the country, and got a toehold in the SF fan base. I went to GenCon twice, and was trying to break into the RPG-illustration market, but had such bad experiences that I chose to not pursue that field. Instead, I took a day job, pretty much stopped doing cons and devoted the next 4 years to doing something that I really loved and cared about: my own comic.
ST: When did you discover comic books and which ones were your early favorites?
JI: Originally I was a Marvel Zombie. Starting from about tenth-grade, I bought all the X-books and all three Spider-Mans, and thought (like everyone else) that buying five separate, bagged issues of X-Force was a Wise Investment, or at the least I could get the Cover Price back for them … sigh. Thank goodness someone handed me a copy of Watchmen. I was seventeen, and a guy I used to work with lent it to me, and I went almost strictly indie from there. Immediately after that, I read Maus, and my head was never the same again -- that book completely changed what I wanted to do with my life.
Books I really liked in college were Maus, Bone, Sandman, Life in Hell, Ernie Pook's Comeek, Hepcats, Charles Vess, and work by a non-comics illustrator named James Christensen.
ST: When did you begin to create your own stories?
JI: I was a dreamer as a kid, and was always playing pretend with something or other. It helped that we lived on a farm and there were all sorts of cool things lying around to turn into toys and use for make-believe. You could give me a bunch of blocks, I'd disappear for a few hours, and by the time you tracked me down, I'd have a whole city built and would have elaborate stories planned about the people who lived there. When I was nine or ten, I stapled together these little one-joke mini-comics -- three or four page booklets with construction-paper covers, and sold them to my parents for a penny, a nickel, a quarter.
My first real attempt at a comic-esque story was in high school -- I did this big, angsty story about a girl who was going through a lot of the same stuff as I was, scribbled in pencil on a big pad of paper my mom found. It never went anywhere, but it was really, really cathartic, and the outpouring of emotion I got from creating it stayed with me.
ST: What about comics made you want to be a part of creating them?
JI: As far back as I can remember, I wanted to tell stories with pictures. The obvious choice of career was children's book illustrator, but that field is devilishly hard to break into, and most of the stories I wanted to tell were young-adult or older, so comics seemed to be the best fit.
Illustrations and words are so much more powerful together than apart -- and I really want to help break the stigma that comics are only for juvenile stories. Some of the most profound books I've read have been comics (Maus, Nausicaa, Sandman) and they touch parts of you that can't be reached by just words or pictures alone.
ST: Had you done any comic book writing, or drawing, before?
JI: No, nothing that saw publication. In college, I drew some sketchbook comics, just pencilled gags involving RPG characters that were photocopied and given to friends. I also did two ten-page shorts -- they were both pretty awful, but doing them helped tremendously in my learning curve. They also taught me that I'm not a very good inker.
ST: Did you have formal training, or did you just fall into doing artwork and storytelling?
JI: For the formal training, I went to Eastern Michigan University and double-majored in fine art and literature. Originally, I wanted to get a degree in illustration, but in a horrible turn of events, both professors that taught illustration died of cancer in the four years I was there. I pushed for and got a book illustration class, and we soldiered through with a GA. With no other choices, I switched my major to life drawing because I knew that if I ever wanted to do illustration of any kind, I'd need to know the human figure inside and out.
My informal training was five or six years hanging out with some really wonderful SF illustrators. I still owe Heather Bruton, Diana Harlan Stein, Sue Van Camp and Robin Wood a huge debt of gratitude. They used to let me come over and would critique my work, give me all sorts of pointers, and show me how they did cool artist tricks. That kind of training was indispensable.
ST: Tell us about Vögelein. For instance, what's the comic about, how did you get the idea, what you're trying to accomplish with it, and so forth?
JI: Vögelein is the story of a clockwork faerie come to life. She was completed and first wound in 1671, though it took her creator, Heinrich Uhrmacher, over thirty years to finish her. She remains "alive" as long as she is wound each day, and remembers everything she has ever seen or heard as long as she doesn't wind down. If she does, she begins to lose her memories, starting with the most recent, and continuing to her earliest recollections -- the longer she remains stopped, the more she loses. The story opens with the death of Vögelein's Guardian, Jakob. Alone for the first time in fifty years, she must find someone to trust before she winds down.
Vögelein herself sprang from Jeff and I wondering what the diametric opposite of a real faerie would be. The answer of course, was a robot faerie -- but let's face it, that's just not romantic enough. Jeff and I turned it on its ear and ran with it, as the thought of a story involving an ancient clockwork faerie was just too good to pass up.
I guess what I'm trying to accomplish with Vögelein is to try and get more readers into comics. I think the best comics are those that try and bridge between traditional prose and sequential art -- books that try to appeal to people who don't often read comics -- one can only hope that Vögelein will be one of those books. I also really want to get more female readers involved, as well. Women authors and artists have been gaining a lot of ground in recent years, but we still need all the readers we can get -- readers that will be inspired to do their own work and become artists and writers in their own right.
ST: What inspired you to create this comic?
JI: The story got its start as a collaboration between myself and a friend, Jeff Berndt. We originally planned a kind of creative digest full of Jeff's short stories and poetry and my illustrations, and comics that he'd write and I'd draw. Vögelein was one of the stories, but it wasn't long before she outgrew the confines of her initial ten-page story.
Jeff penned the plot for most of the first three issues, but when I took over as writer, I had to make some pretty sweeping changes to make it my own. His original ideas still comprise the backbone of the story, though, and anything that reads like poetry is his doing.
Jeff and I had been working together creatively for a while -- most of the ideas we had stemmed from finding the wonder in the everyday, the beauty between the cracks in the cement, the wide-eyed charge of coincidence too good to be true. We travelled Ireland together, Jeff and I, hitchhiking and meeting friends and circumstances so amazing that the people back home didn't believe most of the stories. Standing on Maeve's Cairn, or visiting Glen Alt in County Sligo is enough to change you forever. Each time we turned round, it seemed as though some amazing force was setting all the events in place like tumblers in a lock … and it was that kind of magic that we both tried to carry into the book.
The Duskie (that rather unpleasant fellow you meet at the end of issue one) comes directly from that sense of wonder. He actually predates Vögelein by several months, getting his start in an oil painting. At Jeff's request, we tried using them in a story together, and the rest, as they say, is history. I believe that the fair folk grow to look like their surroundings -- water faerie, forest faerie, underground faerie -- the Duskie is a faerie that has been forced to choke down coal smoke and car exhaust for five hundred years. He provides a yang to Vögelein's yin -- she's a perfect, beautiful, artificial faerie; he's a bedraggled, soul-tired true faerie.
ST: Who are some of your artistic influences?
JI: The Pre-Raphaelites were an enormous influence on me, as well as turn-of-the-century illustrators like Mucha, Howard Pyle, Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Rackham, N.C. Wyeth, Maxfield Parrish. Modern illustrators that I like include James Christensen, Bernie Wrightson, Ted McKeever, Bev Doolittle, Charles Vess, Michael Whelan, James Gurney, Edward Gorey, Alan Lee and Brian Froud. One of my earliest and most important influences was Trina Schart Hyman, whom I have loved since I started receiving Cricket magazine in kindergarten.
ST: Who are some of your writing influences?
JI: Anne McCaffrey was my first love, but I confess I'm quite disappointed with what she's done recently. Currently I'm fascinated by Ray Bradbury, Neil Gaiman, Tad Williams, John Crowley, Charles de Lint and Jeff Noon. The Harry Potter books are my current "potato chip" reading.
ST: Since this is an independent comic, you probably don't pay your bills doing it. What do you do to pay rent?
JI: I had been supporting myself by doing web design for a small local company, until the dot-com crisis happened. I'm currently unemployed and looking for more illustration and design work, though I really loved working on the web and hope to get work in that field again as soon as the economy recovers some.
I think it'd be really difficult for me to hold a dayjob that required me to make art -- because by the time I got home I wouldn't feel like creating any more. Having a workplace that's a little irritating actually makes me all the more eager to dive back into the art at the end of the day.
ST: Did you find your day job affected your comics work and vice versa?
JI: The only way my day job really affected the comic was in the amount of time it took to complete the book. Because I was working forty hours a week, I'd pencil each issue all at once, and that'd take about a month to do, and then each page would take a week to paint, and then it'd take about another month to scan and letter each issue, and another two weeks after that to do each cover. That's why it took four years for the book to come out.
ST: How disciplined do you have to be to produce your own comic?
JI: Very. The main discipline, the one that I have to work on hardest with myself, is just chaining yourself to the drawing board and creating it. That's how you become a better artist -- you draw and draw and draw until it becomes rote. That's how you get a book done -- you work and work and work until it's done. It takes an awful long time to get it done, too, unless you have the luxury of not working -- so the hardest part is simply sitting down to do it.
ST: How often do you break your own rules?
JI: I don't really have any rules, per se … the only principle I tried to stick with was no motion lines and no sound effects words, and I never deviated from that. I do have to say that it's really difficult to indicate certain subtleties without them -- like the nod of a head.
ST: Any advice for budding self-publishers?
JI: Go out and buy a copy of Dave Sim's The Cerebus Guide to Self-Publishing. Read it again and again and again. Say what you want about Dave Sim, but his essays are harsh, truthful, and to the point. Read them and familiarize yourself with the hard realities of self-publishing. Dave tells it like it is, and I've found darn near everything he said to be true. Snarky, but true.
Draw. Draw every day. Take a sketchbook with you wherever you go. Draw in it until you get nervous being without it. Make it your security blanket. Sketch crowds, people in malls, babies in strollers, musicians. Get familiar with people and things and how they look, not how your brain thinks they look.
Take your portfolio to comic-cons. Make ashcans and minicomics, distribute them freely and get yourself known. Take constructive criticism to heart -- the pros used to be beginners, too, and all of them had to pay their dues -- and if they tell you to work on something, (hands, faces, proportions) do so. These guys can tell you what'll get picked up and what won't. On the other hand, ignore malicious criticism. It's the rare artist that will be cruel to someone with a portfolio, but they're out there.
Don't slag others. The comics field is a closed ecosystem, and if you're catty, it'll get around.
ST: Is the urban fairytale tone of Vögelein an homage to the fairy tale? Did you like fairy tales as a kid? If so, which ones?
JI: I loved faerie tales as a kid -- but I tended to like the more serious versions. I remember reading the Grimm Brothers' version and thinking "This is how faerie tales ought to be". I developed a serious yen for dragons from about fifth-grade on, and loved "knight-in-shining-armor" tales.
I never much went in for the "small-winged-toadstool-sitter" type of faerie-story, even from a young age; I always felt like someone was insulting my intelligence. I liked the stories of noble faeries, the Sidhe, the Yeatsian Seelie Court.
There is some definite homage going on, but it's mostly in the urban setting -- Charles de Lint and Neil Gaiman write the kind of stories I want to emulate.
ST: What projects are you interested in doing after Vögelein?
JI: I would actually really like to take about six months and do a series of oil paintings that have been rattling around in my head for about four years now. I really love the Irish music scene, and want to do some dignified portraits of pub musicians.
As to the future of Vögelein, all I can say is that it's up to the readers. I have several more plot lines and tons of exciting characters I want to write about, but it all depends on readership. If people like the first five issues and want more, and there's a strong enough reader base to justify it, I'll keep going. I love painting the comic, but it really does eat up all the free time I've got!
ST: How hard was it to start a small press, deal with distributors, etc?
JI: Not really hard at all. The hardest part was just finishing the comics.
The small press was started by going to the County Courthouse and filing DBA (Doing Business As) papers, which cost a whopping $10. Then I opened a checking account in the name of Fiery Studios. This is a bonus, because I funnel all the money through it and pay for all expenses and supplies out of the account, and it helps keep things nice and tidy for the IRS.
To get picked up by Diamond, you have to have at least 3 issues, with covers, in the can. I started the book back in '97. If I'd just inked it, it'd have been done much, much sooner, but I really loved the paints and the effects I got, so I kept on painting. With the day job, it was about one issue every six -- eight months.
When I finally submitted the package in October 2000, Diamond accepted my book with no problem, and I've had really good experiences with them so far. I hope things go as smoothly in the coming months.
ST: Could you give us a bit of a run through of the process of taking an idea like yours from idea stage to published stage?
JI: Well, I don't really know if the way Vögelein saw press was typical, as it took a lot of odd turns along the way, but I can give you a quick runthrough of what I did to take it to press.
First we wrote the story. Beginning, middle, end. I would caution anyone wanting to write her own comic book to complete the story before starting to draw the finalized pages. If it's a artist/writer team, then the artist should do no more than conceptual sketches whilst the author finishes the story. I learned this the hard way as I had to re-draw the first five pages of issue one three times because the story changed. Spare yourself the work and never set pencil to board until the story is written and finalized, even if it's just written in your own head.
Then, I drew and painted the comic -- all the pencils for each issue at once, then all the paintings. I scanned in the paintings in two swipes of a desktop scanner, added the gutters with Photoshop, put on word balloons using Illustrator, and strung the pages together with Quark. I tried submitting to a couple of publishers, but got turned down flat, so at that point I decided to self-publish.
After I got the first three issues completed, I printed ten or fifteen ashcans and sent them out to all the authors I liked. I got exactly one response, but it was the response I needed. Mark Oakley, in an unprecedented fit of generosity, printed the entire first issue of Vögelein in his comic, Thieves and Kings. In addition to PR, Mark gave me all sorts of tips, including the name of his printer. I also hit a couple of comic-cons to start gauging the market, seeing what kinds of props and advertising worked, and to pester local pros for advice.
I called up the printer, Quebecor, and spoke with them extensively, asking every stupid question I could think of, then called Diamond Distribution, and did the same thing. Spending a few minutes on the phone with each company was incredibly informative, and everyone I spoke with was quite patient and answered everything I asked. I burned the entire issue to CD and shipped it off to Quebecor along with a check. A week or so later, a blue-line-proof (the entire comic printed in blue) arrived and I proofread it and discovered several errors, to my great embarrassment. I faxed a page with all the errors, the printers fixed the mistakes and the book was off to press. Two weeks later, two thousand comics showed up.
Most of the legwork now is making housecalls to the local comic shops, talking to other pros for tips, and talking up my book wherever I can: E-mails, message boards, local newspapers and radio shows. I'm exceedingly lucky as Ann Arbor is one of the most fertile comics markets in the nation, supporting no fewer than six viable comics shops in a ten mile radius. Selling the book on consignment (they give you the money after it sells) allowed me to make Vögelein available all over town, and it's been pretty successful. I also poster all the lamp-posts in town whenever I can … if rock bands can do it, why can't I?
So there's the story. I guess my best advice is to ask lots and lots of questions. Every pro I've spoken with has been terrifically nice and helpful, willing to look through portfolios and offer advice. All of them had to pay their dues, and listening to their advice can save you some serious headaches.
ST: Do you plan to be at any conventions this year?
JI: Yes, I'll be at Motor City Comic Con in May and November. If sales merit, I may try Chicago or Mid-Ohio, and if I'm really flush, SPX in Bethesda.
ST: Do you prefer to work in silence or with background noise? Does this help shape your ideas?
JI: I survive on a steady diet of NPR, talking books (usually of the old-classic or SF variety), Irish music and the occasional TV DramaSoap, like ER, Oz, and Homicide: LOTS. They cut off my cable not too long ago, and I've made a pact with myself to live without TV for the forseeable future.
ST: Favorite comics/movies/books?
JI: Comics: The Tale of One Bad Rat, everything by Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman or Charles Vess; Maus, Clan Apis, Finder, Metropol,Thieves and Kings, SIP, Bone, Castle Waiting, Scary Godmother, Cynicalman, Little White Mouse, Milk and Cheese, Battle Angel Alita, Gloomcookie, ACME Novelty Library … the list goes on and on. If it's indie, I'll usually give it a whirl.
Movies: I don't watch many, but I love all the Roddy Doyle movies, the Kevin Smith movies, The Usual Suspects, American Beauty, and anything with Jackie Chan.
Books: Anything I can lay my hands on. Lately, newer Charles de Lint, Ray Bradbury, Ranier Maria Rilke, JK Rowling, and Richard Millhauser.
ST: What do you love/hate about the comic book industry?
JI: Love: That it's finally starting to grow up, and that most readers are starting to shy away from the hype and head for quality. That indie books are finally beginning to get their due in the mass media. (Go NPR!)
Hate: Gigantic boobs. Books that continue to sucker readers in with "cliffhanger" endings, alternate universes, and incessant rehashing of the exact same plot line. The fact that you can count on two hands the number of indie artists that make a decent living from doing what they love.
ST: If there's one thing about the industry you'd change, what would it be?
JI: I'd start an aggressive marketing campaign to introduce the more intelligent books out there to "people who don't read comics". Readership has fallen off by a staggering amount since the '80s, mostly due to the fact that the kids who were preteen readers of "cape" books outgrew (or thought they outgrew!) them and never found anything more intelligent to keep them reading. The main problem these days is that the cultural image of the average comics reader is that fat guy from The Simpsons. Reduce the dork-stigma and you'll increase the reader base.
ST: If someone were to make a movie of your life, what genre would it fall under, and who would play you?
JI: Tough question. I think the movie'd be filed in the "small town girl moves to the small city" bin. The actress? Someone who's not too skinny. I'm closer to a Reuben's model than a supermodel.
ST: Words to live by?
JI: Spread kindness. It does the world good and it feels really great when it comes back around.
ST: What achievement are you proudest of?
JI: Sticking with Vögelein until it was published under my own imprint.
ST: Where can people get hold of your work?
JI: The comic will be available bimonthly starting in the January issue of Diamond's Previews, which means it'll be appearing on store shelves in March, May, July, September and November. Trade paperback to follow when I can scrounge up the money to do so.