Keen-eyed observers might have already guessed the artist behind today’s visual revelation: the indomitable Maya Kern! She’s a designer, illustrator, cartoonist, prose author, and musician, and is basically just an absolute creative powerhouse. I’m so glad that we had the opportunity to talk about this piece specifically, which felt like an attack on my very core, one from which I will probably never recover, please remember me as I was and bequeath my doujinshi to those who would appreciate them. Onward!
Good afternoon, Maya! Today, I am sitting in an imaginary glen. The light’s all dapply and nice. Come join me, won’t you?
Wow, thank you, it’s beautiful here! And I really appreciate all the cardboard cut out plants and the way the stage hands are moving them between scenes. Very immersive!
We strive to impress, here at the Fandom Emporium.
This image speaks to me on a very deep level, and I feel that it is in fact constructed from some sort of vast spiritual well of collective understanding shared by all tweens from a certain moment in time. Would you please explain it to the audience?
Yes, OK, this is Death Note fan art I drew when I was 14. For those who don’t know, Death Note is a story about a man named Light Yagami who has a magical murder notebook. He is trying to create a “perfect world” by killing all criminals. Obviously this is very bad, so there is a special task force set up to catch him and it is headed up by a mysterious insomniac named L who is WAY too into foot stuff. In the story, there’s a sort of cat and mouse dynamic, except everyone is simultaneously both the cat and the mouse at the same time. HUGE insight, I know, I should be a media critic — and I did the next best thing, which is drawing L and Light as a cat(boy) and a mouse(boy) way back in 2005.
Something that is very special about this drawing is the clothing, which I feel is just very 2005 American anime tween. There’s a lot going on here: fingerless gloves, big ribbons, a bell collar, a partially laced sweater, a tunic with side slits and more lacing, and fishnets on absolutely everything. I don’t know what to call this style of fashion except “It Was 2005 Don’t Worry About It.” Judging by all the tiktoks I’ve seen, teens these days have much better fashion sense, which is both a good thing and also truly, deeply sad.
I feel like to people who weren’t part of this era, this is a very strange image to look at, but for me this is just so deeply typical of basically everything I saw on deviantART at the time. Also, no, the characters in Death Note absolutely do not dress like this, this was my own doing.
When I was this age, I remember being a huge fan of creators like CLAMP and Koge-Donbo, and Copic markers were like a holy grail for me. Like if I used these markers, I would absolutely gain their powers. (And honestly, reader, I still feel this way. They’re very nice markers.) It seems like a lot of your work from this period of time was made using traditional media – what was driving you? Do you remember really liking something about the process or look of certain tools? How did you feel about your work generally?
God, yes, OK. I also was obsessed with creators like Koge-Donbo and CLAMP and Rumiko Takahashi, etc., and it seemed like they all used Copic markers. So of course I hoarded all my allowance money and spent it all on markers — Copics and Prismacolors and Tombows. This is back when Copics were like $3-4 a piece instead of $8+. Times, they have changed.
I think I really liked the control that markers gave me. With Copics in particular, they gave me a lot of blending capability. I’d never been good with paints or colored pencils and markers felt like something that I could actually work with and have some measure of control with. I also, I think, was just so enamored with the idea of using the same tools as all my heroes.
CLAMP in particular was super influential on me. I even tried to form art groups with my friends to emulate their circle. I remember I was really self conscious of my drawing ability (I grew up in an artist family and had undiagnosed anxiety, so I always thought I was very bad at art), but I had markers so I would ask my friends if I could color their drawings.
I don’t think I have any of those collaborations saved anymore, but I remember them very distinctly. There was one time my friend didn’t ink her drawings, she just gave me the pencil art, and I tried to color it and the markers mixed with the graphite and it got all muddy and gross. There is a particular slippery texture that is achieved when you apply heavy layers of alcohol based markers to normal gray 2B pencil lead on top of printer paper, and it is BAD! I remember being devastated that I had ruined my friend’s art and crying a whole lot.
Nooooooo!! That’s the absolute worst feeling! I hope y’all worked it out.
We did!! We met and became friends when we were four or five and remained friends well into high school. I learned years later that while I had spent years and years cherishing every single drawing she did and envying her drawing skills and feeling massively inferior by comparison, she had apparently felt the exact same way I did! Learning that was really funny and also sort of sad and painful. I wish we had been able to be more open with each other at the time!
I hear that you were really into Gaia Online at one point. Please… tell me everything. What was it like? What did you do there? How did it affect you?
YEAH… wow, Gaia was a whole era in my life. I joined when I was 13 and was instantly hooked. (Yes, I was one of those kids who very staunchly followed the age restrictions on sites, I was not cool at all.) I’d had a Neopets account before that but I never really understood it — the art competitions were too hard, the Neopets battle system was frustrating at best, I was really bad at drawing animals, and I didn’t even know there were Neopets forums until my wife was complaining about them a few years ago.
But Gaia… wow. I was at the end of middle school then and really just cementing my place in the world as a Huge Nerd. I’d just gone on a two week exchange trip to Japan earlier that year and I came back with a CD Walkman full of Utada Hikaru CDs that my host sister had burned for me. I had a couple friends in middle school who were into anime, but for the most part it was just me, my Walkman, and the 200k word Fushigi Yuugi fanfiction I was utterly obsessed with. (Fun fact — I had limited computer time and these chapters were LONG so when a new one came out I would beg my mom to let me print out chapters so I could read them.)
Gaia was like the holy trinity of fun art activities, fellow nerds my age, and a forum I could actually find. One of my middle school friends introduced me to it and then got me in her RP guild and I was hooked. I did so many things there… I ran a ton of art stores and took commissions for Gaia gold to draw other people’s characters or their avatars. I ran an adoptable shop even though I thoroughly did not understand how adoptables worked. I RPed a LOT. I even ran some big group RPs, one of which in particular I put a ton of time and love into. There were magic people and dragons and it was all Very Big And Epic and it was a lot of fun.
I was most active on Gaia from the ages of 13-17 and during high school I had a ton of school friends who were also on Gaia. After I hit college I still checked on there every now and then, but a LOT of things had changed. I still keep in touch with a couple people I befriended on Gaia, which is just very fun! We’re all adults now and it’s really funny to look back on the weird fun we had as kids.
More than anything, I think, Gaia really encouraged my creative writing and it fostered a love of RP in me, which I mostly now exercise through playing DnD.
Something funny that came of this was that in 2014 I actually ended up working for Gaia for a year! It was honestly wild. It was fun and hectic and stressful and absolutely crazy. My coworkers from that time are some of my all time favorite people I’ve ever worked with and I’m still friends with a lot of them. However, I was very bad at doing pixel art and not nearly fast enough so after I developed a repetitive strain injury at the end of 2015 I decided to leave.
That is such a journey!! Imagine telling your younger self that you’d eventually end up working there?!
And speaking of journeys…
Your beloved webcomic, Monster Pop!, ran for about seven years and concluded just last year – an incredible run! I’m always so curious about this: what was it like to move from participating in fandom to creating a source of fandom? Was it difficult working on one big project for that amount of time, and how did it feel to step away?
Monster Pop! was such an era of my life and I have so many things to say about it. First off, I guess, I should say that I don’t actually have a very long fandom history. As a kid, I always liked books and comics and TV and everything, but I didn’t often draw fan art or engage in fandom. I sort of skirted the Harry Potter fandom as a kid. I’d consume other people’s fan content and I sometimes RPed in the Potterverse (though mostly original characters), but I didn’t really engage with it directly. I also read a TON of webcomics but never really did fan art.
I think a big part of this is because I missed out on LiveJournal. I tried several times to get into LiveJournal during high school but the site layout was too confusing for me so I let it go. And then… I found Tumblr.
I joined Tumblr in 2010 or 2011. At first I wasn’t very active there. Then my dear, wonderful best friend Sydney, who I befriended at the ripe old age of 13, did the worst and best thing she has ever done to/for me: she introduced me to Homestuck. I was home from college for the winter holidays and I was working on schoolwork. She really wanted me to read a new webcomic but I took one look at the art and the eye bleedingly bright text and was like “are you fucking kidding me?” But Sydney would not be dissuaded. She ended up sitting next to me in her kitchen and reading Homestuck OUT LOUD to me for literally hours while I worked on homework. Eventually, I was hooked.
For the first time in my life, I drew fan art constantly. I think a big part of this was that the art in Homestuck was so minimal that the characters’ appearances were really up for interpretation. Usually, I’d be too nervous to show people my fan art because I always felt like I drew the characters wrong (I still feel this a lot even now). It also didn’t hurt that the characters in Homestuck were so much like me and my friends — weird, awkward nerdy teens.
I got in really, really deep. I didn’t just draw fan art, I also made covers of songs and changed the lyrics to be Homestuck related. I made a ton of Homestuck friends and we did draw jam meetups and cosplay and big parties. I did some work for What Pumpkin (the Homestuck company), including vectoring some shirt designs, drawing calendar art, that sort of thing. I also made an original song that ended up making it into one of the Homestuck albums.
During all this I was still in college at MCAD studying comic art. I’d loved comics from such a young age and I’d always wanted to make them and MCAD was the first place that really embraced that side of me. I’d made TONS of failed webcomics. In fact, I was making them constantly. I’d come up with these huge, epic ideas and start making comics immediately without really ironing out the world or the full story or the structure or anything like that, and within 10-40 pages I’d get frustrated and quit. I was also making a bunch of short comics for my school classes. I’ve always been deeply into fairytales and folklore and most of my school comics were weird dark retellings of fairytales or where otherwise fairytale inspired.
Monster Pop! was meant to be a break from all that. I started it in 2011 or 2012 while I was still very much into Homestuck. In all honesty, I just wanted to make something lighthearted and fun without much need for world building and without a huge epic plot. Something I could pick up and leave as I needed to — something easy that I could just spend a couple hours on a week as a nice break from schoolwork.
I’ve always liked slice of life stories and shoujo manga, but I never really made those sorts of stories, so I decided to just give it a shot. I honestly don’t know how I kept MP! going for seven years and I really should have ended it in 2015. I absolutely love what I wrote for MP! after 2015 — especially the last chapter. But in 2015 I was already chomping at the bit to make something new and feeling like I was outgrowing MP!
I’d laid the foundation for MP! with not much thought or care and it was very frustrating. But ending the story where it was in 2015 (with the main character finding out her crush had feelings for someone else) felt like a terrible ending and an absolute disservice to the fans. I ended up writing more to it and really loved what I was writing — but it was just too much. I’d keep getting excited about the next bit of story and telling myself that I just needed to get to the end of it, but the end kept getting further and further away.
This was also all happening at a time in my life when everything was majorly in flux. I wasn’t participating in fandom anymore, I was working odd freelance jobs, was dealing with parasocial relationships (before I knew what those were), was in a really weird place in my interpersonal relationships, and had just moved across the country for the second time in two years. Monster Pop! was also my first original work that other people had really loved the way I did. I’d gotten some attention for some of the short comics I made during school before, but it wasn’t the same as having a dedicated fanbase for an ongoing comic. I think ending MP! would have just been too much change all at once so I clung to it even though I had outgrown it.
You are currently writing a queer fantasy romance novel, Spitfire, which is awesome (and is exclusively for people eighteen or over, so wait it out, kids). What has the transition to prose been like for you? Is it really nice just to write out the words “he pushed his way through the large crowd”? What’s that like?? MUST BE NICE.
But seriously, would you say there’s a difference between your prose brain and comics brain? How do you approach your various creative outlets?
OH MAN IT HAS BEEN SO NICE. Obviously prose comes with its own whole bag of difficulties — do you know how hard it is to think of WORDS? Wow. And, like, describing outfits, particularly non-modern or fantasy outfits. I have to balance specificity with understandability (I think most people know what a tunic looks like, a good number of people know what a doublet is, but how many people can you reliably count on to know what a cuisse is??) and do it all without being boring or too wordy. In comics, I can just draw whatever the fuck I want without 1) having to be able to communicate what it looks like to the reader without visuals 2) having to remember what everything is actually called.
(Reader, I did in fact have to google “cuisse.”)
However, the benefits far outweigh the setbacks. Since my outline is already written and it takes care of most of the heavy lifting, I can bang out a 10k chapter in a week between my other work and it’s not even that difficult. Do you want to know how long the later chapters of Monster Pop! took?? A year. A year and a half. Not including outlining and scripting. JUST THE DRAWING. And it took so many hours per week to do that; it was honestly more time than I could afford.
And again, I grew up RPing, I’ve always loved writing. There was actually a long time when I had planned to go to college for creative writing because I didn’t think comics were viable. And I still don’t regret going to school for comics, but my life post-graduation has been filled with many hard lessons.
Included in those is the fact that while I love drawing and telling stories, I don’t love drawing comics. There is nothing in the world that makes me hate my art more than trying to draw comics. It is deeply unhealthy for me and that is ultimately the reason MP! ended when it did — six months before it would have likely actually been completed. For me, there is a huge difference between my comics brain and my prose brain and the main one is that my comics brain is a horrible nasty bitch that hates me.
My prose brain isn’t the smartest or the coolest, but it’s relatively laid back and it’s fine with the fact that I’m doing this for fun and that I’m still learning.
I also, on occasion, write and sing music and my music brain is a whole other beast (she is both incredibly maudlin and supremely fickle).
I’m so, so glad you found creative outlets that treat you well! It can be hard to recognize when something isn’t working for you and make the choice to go figure out what does, and I really admire that.
It’s been SUCH a relief and I feel like, in so many ways, I am living out baby Maya’s ideal life. I didn’t end up sticking with comics, but after about a ten year gap of basically not writing any prose at all, I am now consistently writing almost every day, just like I did as a teen, and I absolutely love it.
What are you into now? Any good recs??
YES. Mostly prose, I’m sorry, I’ve largely been on a break from reading comics because it’s still difficult sometimes. However I am still reading Skip Beat! (as I have been for nearly 17 years) because I am very stubborn.
Seven Blades in Black — an absolutely phenomenal read about a gun toting buff bi warlock bitch with a shit list of people to hunt down. Super engaging, probably the most fun I’ve had reading in years, which is saying a lot because I also read all the following books in the same year and they are EXTREMELY GOOD.
Red, White and Royal Blue — very cute slice of life romance book about a fictional First Son of the United States falling in love with the prince of England. It’s fun, witty, charming and so incredibly heartfelt. After I finished it I had to immediately go back and reread it, and then go back again and reread all my favorite scenes. The author is also working on a new book with LESBIANS and TIME TRAVEL and DETECTIVES and I’m very excited about that.
Gideon the Ninth — big hot buff sword lesbian in space with necromancers. NEED I SAY MORE?? Tamsyn Muir has a way with words that is absolutely infuriating because it is so good. It has a phenomenal mix of beautiful prose and weird, super specific descriptions that are infuriatingly precise AND funny. With such phrases as “Lo, a destructed ass!” and a section where she describes a man as being so uncomfortably buff that he looks like a sack full of lemons. I’m literally putting off rereading this book until Spitfire is over because reading it makes me wildly angry that I can’t write like that. The sequel is coming out later this year!!
In Other Lands — super sweet and cheeky book about a boy who discovers there’s a place with fairies and mermaids and elves and shit. The main character is a huge twerp and you’ll either love him or hate him, but I absolutely adore him and this book was so much fun that after I finished it I immediately went back and reread it.
Ninth House — what if Yale was haunted and all the old societies were secretly doing dark magic? This was such an engaging reach. At times it was awful and gut wrenching, but there is just something so unique and special about it. I do need to give a content warning for mentions of rape and pedophilia and drug use, but it is handled well (in my opinion) and not in a gross way. By the same author as the Grisha books, which are getting a Netflix adaptation!
Whew, OK, sorry I know this is long, but I feel like prose needs more of a pitch than comics because you can’t just look at the art and go “hey I like that.”
Hahaha yes!! Hang in there, authors.
Any advice for young people with epic stories to tell?
This is hard, I think, because everyone is different and it’s difficult to give good advice to someone without knowing their situation. Ultimately, you just gotta do what is fun and what you love. Don’t feel bad about your story not being good enough or other people not reading it. Making it is part of growing and the love you foster for your own stories is incredibly important. I would also say, don’t feel bad if you need to move on from a story. Sometimes you outgrow even the things that are dear to you and that’s OK. That doesn’t make them any less meaningful or important and it doesn’t make them go away.
I would also say, no matter what your medium is, find friends who also love to create and root for each other. Help each other out and work together. No one reliably strikes gold on their first or third or tenth story and it’s good to have a support system who will cheer you on (and yell at you when you kill their favorite character).
Anything else you’d like to mention? Upcoming projects, people you’d like to shout out, things I really should have asked but didn’t think to…?
Yes, OK, first and foremost I would like to shout out my wife, Devin, who has been nothing but loving and supportive even as I fall down the hole that is big epic erotic fantasy novels.
I’d also like to shout out a few friends who have been instrumental in Spitfire’s development, from reading my early (shitty) outlines, to encouraging me to make this at all, and to proofreading my drafts.
First, Sydney, who is still my best friend all these years later. (Yes, our friendship survived high school, Gaia Online, AND Homestuck, and if that’s not friendship, I don’t know what is.) When I told her I was finally going to bite the bullet and write a romance novel (it’s been on my bucket list for ages) and that I was going to make it extra difficult on myself and add PLOT and WORLD BUILDING she was just like, “Yeah that seems about right,” and then proceeded to wade through all my outlines and rough drafts.
Next, Ariel, who is the person responsible for just how much plot and world building ended up being in Spitfire. I wanted it there but didn’t want to do the work and she not only held my face to the fire and forced me to sit down and do it, she also came up with a ton of helpful suggestions when I was stuck in Problem Land.
Finally, Chelsea, who has been so unendingly enthusiastic and supportive. I can’t emphasize enough how meaningful and important it is to find a friend who is fully there for your brand of bullshit and who loves it fiercely, and she has been exactly that.
My only upcoming projects are whatever apparel ends up in my store once things with COVID calm down a bit and we can begin manufacturing again, and Spitfire. So basically, for now, just Spitfire — which, if you don’t know, is my VERY spicy queer fantasy novel. If you like your smut with dragons and blood magic and royalty and people who absolutely do not know how to manage their emotions in a healthy manner, give it a shot!
Do it, appropriately-aged reader! And, Maya, thank you so much for your time!!
This was so incredibly fun, thank you for letting me talk your ears (or eyes?) off about the shit I love.