A healthy Friday to you, gorgeous fans! This is a brief Author’s Note, an A/N if you will, to acknowledge the enormity of the month that has just passed. We hope you are well. If you have the means, please consider sending some support to an organization which advances BIPOC and Trans causes. Perhaps one of these?
And this is a sentence that will adequately prepare you for the tonal shift below, as we return again to the Fanart Zone.
Today’s guest is the powerful Gaby Epstein! Gaby’s a fantastic cartoonist with a ton of stunning work under their belt, including the (highly recommended) Breaking the Ice comics. (Seriously, take a quick break to read those and then come right back. We’ll wait.)
I cannot compliment Gaby’s work highly enough, but I sure can try, so let’s get into it!
Good morning, Gaby! Today, we appear to be seated at a hockey rink during a low-key practice situation. I’ve got fruit snacks if you want ‘em.
Morning Gale!!! Hell yeah. I’ll trade you some Wawa donuts I smuggled in. We’ll feast like kings. Also, feel free to use this complimentary Gritty blanket so your butt doesn’t freeze to the seats… it’s more likely than you think.
WAWA!! You’re too good to me!!!
Okay, SO. This is a delightful relic, and, if I can be real for a moment, I admire that you filled the page. When I was A Youth, I might have had a habit of… you know… messing up one face and calling it a day. Anyway, please tell me everything about this. How old were you? What was on your mind?
Omg, you’re so valid. I feel like that was half my sketchbooks, too (also the first, like, 5 sketch layers of every PSD now lol.)
This is a page out of one of many sketchbooks I filled with Danny Phantom in middle school. It’s from 7th grade, so I was about 13 when I drew this angsty bouquet of Dannys. For this page in particular, I was trying to redesign him. Give him some cool cyberpunk duds and I guess a baseball career, too. I just loved any AU that gave me an excuse to draw him in a cool pose. I was obsessed with the Teen Titans, Go! floppies at the time, which featured artists like Todd Nauck and Sean Galloway, so this is definitely me trying to imitate their flow-y styles. Except that intensely muscular Danny in the middle. That is… purely Jim Lee’s fault. God. You read Hush ONE TIME….
Plus, as I mentioned before: I had a tendency to turn the paper clock-wise as I drew to ensure that the Danny’s weren’t aligned. This was due to a tragic IncidentTM where I drew all my Dannys facing the same direction and a friend said they looked like they were sniffing each other’s butts, which is distinctly NOT emo. So. We have this (and a lingering fear of accidental butt sniffing…. to quote Linkin Park, “these wounds, they will not heal.”)
Was this fairly representative of what I might find in your sketchbook around that time? Did you draw a lot? What did drawing mean to you?
To a degree, yeah! But honestly there were even more egregious fan arts— I drew a lot of Danny Phantom/Crash Bandicoot crossovers where they team up to fight a big bad. Lots of Bart Simpson fan comics and angsty comics where Danny meets Hades/Osiris/other mythological beings. I’m so bummed I don’t have those drawings anymore because, regardless of the crossover, everyone was skateboarding. Just. All the time. I’m honestly surprised none of these Dannys have chunky Vans on.
And absolutely, I drew all the time! I always wanted to tell stories but was too impatient to write them out so I’d draw the juiciest scenes throughout dozens of notebooks. It was definitely a means of exploration and escape, but I think also a way to explore emotions I didn’t have the ability to verbalize at the time. I joke about angst and whatnot, but there’s a lot you aren’t taught how to process as a kid, and often it’s easier to externalize things like anger, jealousy, etc. into characters who can actualize those feelings— give and take a punch! Or maybe do a sick fakie bigspin on a rocket board with death, or whatever.
Why not both!! I definitely feel this, and distinctly remember cooling off after a few teen arguments by drawing Sad People Sitting In Corners. Drawing’s a great way to work stuff out.
Were you engaged in online fandom at all? What was that like?
I wasn’t really ‘online’ as a kid, or even as a teen (I didn’t really get ‘online’ til I got Tumblr back in 2014-15 in college), which makes sifting through online drama and history bonkers crazy to me. Like, I remember occasionally going onto ff.net to read Danny Phantom fic, and also spending some evenings waiting for one (1) Avril Lavigne AMV to load, but I never contributed anything. I had no idea that there were people not just making content but… arguing over it? That there were shipping wars and that kinda stuff— absolutely no concept of it.
I feel like an early paleontologist excavating the remains of what I think is maybe a lizard? a snake?? but it just gets bigger and bigger the more people I talk to and I have no idea how to piece it all together. I have no concept of DeviantArt or LiveJournal or the plethora of fanfic communities that apparently existed, so it’s wild to me that people have friendships spanning back til then. In many ways, I feel a deep sense of FOMO—so many of my peers developed amazing styles and aesthetics from those niche communities and from learning digital drawing at such an early age. It seems that’s how most of the comics community met! It’s very much a “while you were out doing idiotic tricks on a razor scooter I was busy learning The Blade” kinda thing to me haha. Then again, I’m partly thankful that I wasn’t posting…. the world would have a lot more angsty AMVs set to Marc Anthony’s sad salsa music.
I’m thankful I got to experience some of that positive fandom energy later on in college through the Legend of Korra fandom, which is how I met a lot of my online friends now. I cannot begin to express how much I grew as an artist and person through participating in that fandom. It was my first time posting fic and art and dealing firsthand with competing interpretations of a text, and although awkward and painful at times, it helped me recognize what I want out of characters and stories. Also, it helped me understand that notes/likes aren’t the end-all-be-all of modern online art making. Differentiating between what you actually enjoy creating and what you create because you rely on the external validation is hard, to say the least. But dang, is it liberating.
You still participate in the Danny Phantom fandom today, even recently organizing a charity zine to benefit RAICES (reader, you can buy it here). Have you noticed any changes in your relationship with the show as you’ve grown older? What do you think keeps it in your heart, fifteen years later?
Ahh, that’s a great question! I think as a kid I was drawn to the show because of how anachronistic it was at the time for me. I was a strictly Nicktoons kid, so the stories I was exposed to were very American in the sense that they were simple 11-minute comedy specials that had no long-running chronology or character arcs. Things like Spongebob and Rocket Power just reset after commercial and generally didn’t provoke any deeper thought. That isn’t to say that the comedic track was bad or anything, but I think that’s why this show was interesting to me in comparison. You had a teenage protagonist who wasn’t happy all the time— he was very insecure and anxious. He deals with bullies, low self-esteem, and although the show does its best to tip-toe around it, yes, he deals with death and grief. And we get to see him grow overtime— he learns to embrace his powers and the fact that, yeah, he’s weird and his parents and most kids won’t understand, but it’s ok because his true friends do.
There’s just something that’s so *chef’s kiss* about teenage superheroes that still gets me to this day. All the expectations on you are ten times as intense, and figuring out your powers and your values as a hero while dealing with the same issues on a personal level is…AHH I could just scream about it forever. But Danny Phantom takes that to an apex where he literally stands at the intersection of life and death— he’s half ghost! The fact that he exists between the boundaries of reality is something that I think has so much untapped potential. To this day I still text friends about possible things they could’ve explored in the show. Danny meeting death! Danny performing exorcisms! Ahhh!!
Now, looking back, I think there’s also a huge amount of queer subtext that I think was also appealing to me, whether I knew it or not. And I think that’s what draws a lot of new fans to the show, even over a decade after it ended. Danny having to be ‘in the closet’ about his alter ego and dealing with his parents’ hatred of ghosts while public sentiment swayed depending on how ghosts were politicized by the town mayor…. it’s so on-the-nose it’s almost funny it wasn’t intentional subtext. It’s not something I recognized as a kid, but it’s something I smile at now and definitely appreciate.
Plus, on a more superficial level, I just love the designs more and more as I look back through them. Stephen Silver (the designer for Kim Possible) was a part of that preproduction team and it shows— each villain was absolutely iconic, and those bold, jagged shapes and fluid lines have influenced my art style since!
I somehow missed out on Danny Phantom the first time around, but, uh, you’ve sold me. I need this.
And speaking of getting people right in the heart, you’re the creator of Breaking the Ice, a series of short choose-your-own romance hockey comics. I love this idea and I love the execution – they’re absolutely darling, and a much-needed mood-booster.
You spoke in this great profile about how your time playing hockey as a teen later became fuel for a number of story ideas. Young storytellers are often reminded to live their lives, because those experiences will later inform their work; how do you go about making use of those memories now? What advice would you give to people who are figuring out how to translate important aspects of their lives into comics? Am I just abusing this interview format to ask for pro tips? MAYBE??
Haha, thank you so much!!! And that’s such an interesting question. I think some things that seemed like a random series of events can only be strung into a story with a certain amount of distance. I don’t think I could’ve written a hockey story while I was in HS because it was too close to me. Only now that I’m older and a bit more secure in myself can I look back and find through-lines: friendships that existed without me knowing, rivalries that were really crushes, etc.
So, if one is struggling with translation, it might be because they haven’t lived the necessary words yet. And I think that’s ok! Not every story needs to be told right now because you feel you have to or because the publishing market says it’s what sells. Sometimes, it’s just what you’re ready to talk about. And for me, currently, it’s been my completely unrecognized gay crushes in HS haha.
Also, I think the biggest thing I’m learning about this process is extending empathy to all the participants involved. Yeah, at the time maybe a person was being mean to me and said x, y z— but as an adult, I can look back and realize ah, they were going through a tough time at home or they were struggling in school. And, all of a sudden, what was a very one-sided me vs the world ideation becomes a story with multifaceted characters. To be honest, the hardest part for me has been extending empathy toward myself. I did and said a lot of cringe-y stuff— most of it fueled by rage, grief, insecurity, rejection— all these ugly emotions we don’t talk about and that girls especially are told we shouldn’t exhibit. One’s past is a much simpler story to interpret if you’re the antagonist, because then all the bad things that happened to you seem to make more sense. But I think allowing your past self the breathing room to make mistakes, and accepting those of yourself and others lets you see a fuller picture and makes for more good stuff to translate into your current stories. I think. I’m still figuring it out.
Lately, you’ve been working on a few Baby-Sitters Club graphic novel adaptations (yesssss)!! You’ve worked on a variety of other IPs, including Lumberjanes, so you’re an old hand at interpreting characters that already exist. That said, I’d be curious to know how prose adaptation has been treating you! Any surprises? Any creative takeaways you’ll be bringing to future work?
Ha! I’ve looked to you on that front! You and Raina laid all the groundwork for my process on BSC, for which I’m eternally grateful. There was also a Patreon post of yours that you made public that saved my life. It was a detailed account of how you broke down a story, wrote the beats and considered what translated visually…it was absolutely indispensable. THANK YOU SO MUCH for taking the time to write that up! (AW HEY.)
Because of you and Raina and the amazing team at Scholastic, adapting BSC has been incredibly fun. I never got to read the series as a kid, so this is all fresh to me— the histories, friendships— the DRAMA— so juicy. I love it. Frankly, I was surprised at how much Ann M. Martin was able to fit into each book. The cast would only get bigger and bigger and there were always a bunch of side plots going on featuring younger siblings and other family members with their own arcs and whatnot. What’s that wolf puppy quote?? Everything happens so much.
Condensing the story into visual bites has been some of my favorite work. You get to kinda step back and focus on what’s important: the character arcs and how, now matter what, the BSC are gonna be there for each other in the end. It also makes me really appreciate the differences inherent between comics and books. Not weighing them against each other, but truly understanding through translation that it’s not a one-to-one thing. A graphic novel isn’t a novel or a screenplay— it’s its own art form that has its own very unique interpretation of time, which means beats are inherently gonna hit differently, and you have to account for that in the writing. I love the translation work for that because, really, even if you follow the book to a T, illustrating every single tiny detail it mentions, you’re still inherently gonna make a new, different work because of the medium. So, you might as well go hog wild, you know?? Full credit to the editorial team at Scholastic for really understanding that difference and leaning into it. The graphic novels truly feel like their own series and modern interpretations— they’re so fresh and fun and man, I’m so grateful and happy to be a part of it with y’all.
Yes! Yes to all of this! It’s kind of like fanart, in a way – everyone’s going to see the same story differently and interpret it with their own focus and priorities.
And SPEAKING of priorities… what are you trying to get all your friends into now?
AHHHHHHHHHHH OK! UM!!??
I’ve been getting a lot of people into the new She-Ra reboot. The show just ended in spectacular fashion, but in my opinion it’s much, much more than that. It’s one of the best written shows I’ve seen and it features a mostly female cast— there aren’t words to express how refreshing it is to have absolutely none of the conflicts in a show be the result of girls fighting about a dude. Unreal. Plus, it’s got a shit bag cat girl antagonist, so. Yeah.
Delicious in Dungeon: My roommate lent me the first book and I read the next 6 in, like, a week. It’s so funny and sweet and just plain FUN to read. I never thought procedurals could be so inventive, but here we are in 2020 getting our emotions wrung out by crustacean armor.
Snapdragon: One of my favorite graphic novels HANDS DOWN!!! *Stefon Voice* This book’s got everything: witchcraft, motorcycles, lesbians, cute dogs! The intertwined histories and magical realism make this book feel colorful and alive in a way I haven’t experienced many times before. Also Kat Leyh’s art is out of this world!!!!
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…?
I WANNA SHOUT YOU OUT! You are, in my eyes, the contemporary master of comics composition. Your lines are so fresh, fun and detailed!!!! Every page you craft is a visual bounty. But, as if that wasn’t enough, you are also so, so incredibly skilled in bringing heart to everything you touch. Just having your books on my shelf is like having a piece of sunshine permanently stationed in my office. I can’t WAIT for your next BSC book, and everything else you’ve got cooking! (READER, I AM ACTUALLY SOBBING,,,,)
And I guess keep your eyes peeled for more Scholastic announcements! I’m currently illustrating another super cool YA graphic novel with Scholastic Graphix and the inimitable Christina Diaz Gonzalez — it should be announced later this summer, and I’m super stoked about it! Definitely a story I wish I had growing up.
Wahh, you’re the best! Thank you SO much for your time!!
Go follow Gaby! If you’re reading this in a timely manner, they might still have charity commissions open!!