I hope this flung you back in time, just all the way back, because it sure hit me. This delightful illustration was the work of none other than one Victor Martins – a deeply thoughtful, playful, cool cartoonist whose art and comics you should absolutely be eating up. They’re only getting more powerful, and frankly, it’s rude. Our enlightening conversation on fandom, community, and hyping up your pals, below:
Good afternoon, Victor! Today, I am imagining us sitting outside a cozy seaside cafe. There’s a warm breeze and cool drinks. Please ignore the birds, they are relentless if given any sort of attention. How are you today?
I’m well!! I’m actually a lot more on edge than I was thirty seconds ago, before I noticed how many of these ding dang birds there are, and how intently they’re staring at the ice cream cone I’m holding in my hands. Their sharp beaks, their beady eyes!!!
(Violin screech!)
For the readers at home who might not be well-versed: would you mind explaining what we’re looking at?
Well, it’s uh, a drawing of a character from the very famous, very popular comic Homestuck. Her name is Vriska. She’s a member of an alien species called “trolls”. There’s twelve of them, one for each zodiac sign, and she was my favourite. Vriska was also my friend’s very cool older sister’s favourite, so, of course, I drew this picture of Vriska for her as an inept teen Courting Gesture. Unfortunately, giving a buff 19-year-old Japanese Literature major/professional dog trainer/wannabe cop a picture of Vriska from Homestuck did not result in her wanting to date me.
Alas! If you had told Teen Me that fanart was not in fact a universal love language, I would have been just devastated.
When you made this piece, you were sixteen years old and deep into Homestuck fandom, which is just completely delightful to me. I am somewhat older than you and would love to hear about what your online experience was like growing up. What did fandom mean to you? Were you very active in fan communities? How did this influence your creative process?
I grew up really used to not knowing anyone who liked the things I liked. Then I started reading Homestuck and suddenly there were a lot of people who liked this thing I liked, and they all lived in my computer, where I could access them 24/7. The possibilities were endless! Unfortunately, as it turns out, I really didn’t care about talking to strangers on the internet. I knew it was supposed to be this wonderful, wonderful thing, though, so I kept drawing fanart and talking to people on forums and waiting to have a good time. It was sort of a bummer???
At some point I was like “fuck this, actually”, founded the Homestuck Fan Club of Central Brazil, and invited everyone I knew IRL who liked Homestuck to hang out at my house and do Homestuck-related activities. “Everyone I knew IRL who liked Homestuck” consisted of my sister, the aforementioned 19-year-old wannabe cop Japanese major dog trainer, a boy called Bacon, and me. We made up a recipe for slime pie and watched Con Air. It was fun! Bacon was the club treasurer.
I love this – you found a way of connecting with people that worked best for you! Which kind of leads into my next question. You’re a member of a comics collective called Hello Boyfriend, which is absolutely delightful. Hello Boyfriend has put out a number of collaborative comics now – some fiction, some autobio, all highly recommended – and I’d love to hear more about the process and mindset there. What does being part of a collective mean to you? How do you go about creating a comic as a team of friends? Would you recommend it??
I love being part of a collective!!! It’s so nice! Everyone should try it!
I think, for us, it started with this sense that we’d be better together? We were all sort of comics babies who had no idea what we were doing, and we were very good at psyching ourselves out by worrying about all the ways in which we could mess up without even realizing it, and very *very* good at finding excuses for not actually making comics. Doing collaborative work made us accountable to each other, which means it was a lot harder to bail on making things. It also meant we were learning from each other, and helping each other grow. It was really invaluable when we were comics babies, and remains invaluable now that we’re comics toddlers!!
How we go about making comics together changes a lot depending on what we’re making. I think the two most important things are that we want to have fun, and we want to try new things out (to see if they’re fun). I think making space for that kind of thing as an artist is super important. Especially for me!! I’m such a bummer, and it’s really easy for me to get really annoyed at comics, or really frustrated at myself, or bogged down in negativity. Having this thing I do with friends that has “please have a good time” so deeply embedded into its DNA really helps combat that.
Gotta say that it’s also a lot easier to hype comics to possible customers at a convention if they were made by your friends instead of you. And then your friends can hype your comics right back! It’s gr8.
I feel this so much!! My favorite thing is sitting in for friends when they’re taking a table break – I get to yell about their comics and maybe give them money afterwards, it’s super low pressure and fun.
And as long as we’re hyping up people’s art – your current comics and illustrations have this really appealing, loose, soft look that I love a lot; they feel very emotive and spontaneous. By contrast, it seems like your teen work involved more textures and rendering – they’re two very valid and different approaches. Do you remember when your focus started shifting in this regard? What was on your mind?
Oh, I didn’t have access to any sort of “being taught how to draw” until I was in college, so whenever I was drawing, I’d just mostly be scared out of my mind and super intimidated by how much I didn’t know. I wanted to be good so badly, but I wasn’t sure how, so I was just doing what I thought I was supposed to. Then I went to art school, learned the great secret of “this whole ‘being good drawing’ thing is bullshit and made-up, actually”, and now I don’t care at all! I like it when the lines go “woosh!”!! Whee!!!!!!!
Excerpt from Stay, 2018.
Wooshy lines are the best! I feel like there’s this very special, hard-to-learn quality that shows through when you’ve figured out how to not be too precious with your lines – it’s a kind of confidence I really admire. So what do your roughs look like, what kind of things do you keep an eye on when you’re planning out a comic?
I actually had to go draw a comic to find out the answer to this question, cause off the top of my head, the answer was “I dunno!”, haha.
I think a guiding principle for me is that I wanna go fast and put in just enough information for the reader to know what’s going on. It’s actually a really fun way to work, and I like the way it looks!
So the questions I ask myself are: does this thing look like the thing is supposed to be, and can you tell what it’s doing? Like, can you tell these anthropomorphic bananas are making out? Can you tell this is a small alien inside a big robot trying to figure out how to make the robot walk? This kind of splits up into two questions:
- Am I giving people enough information? I had this wonderful painting prof who told us “if you want people to know it’s a knife, you gotta make sure people see the handle and the point”. I ask myself that all the time, especially because I tend to spend about .5 seconds on something before thinking to myself “wow perfect beautiful incredible i’m an art genius let’s move on”.
- Is there anything I can do to make it clearer? Like, how can I make *sure* you’re seeing that handle and knowing it’s a handle, and seeing that point and knowing it’s a point? Shape language?? Silhouette??? Line of action???? Other art-related words?????
I also think compositions are extra important for going fast and putting in just enough information. Since there aren’t a lot of nice drawing things to distract people from how my pages/panels are set up, I feel like it’s really noticeable if things are placed in a way that doesn’t make sense. I also find composition is one of the easiest and most effective ways to let readers know about character’s relationships to each other, states of mind, etc. Good stuff!
Also wanna put out there that I’m hecka still learning, so me thinking about this stuff doesn’t always translate into me successfully implementing it, but at least I have fun.
Fun is so crucial!!
Which brings us to my next question. How do you feel about Homestuck today? Do you feel like the way you engage with it, or fandom in general, has changed since you were a teen?
I dunno! It turned into such a huge, huuuge thing. The fandom got a really bad reputation (no opinion on whether or not it deserved it, again, I was too busy living in Brazil trying to court a wannabe cop to know what was going on). It was really important to me as a teen, and really helped me get through some bad stuff. I’ll always be grateful for that, and it will never not be this thing that really influenced me, but I think the fact is that I’m not the target audience for it anymore. And that’s ok! Overall, no strong feelings about Homestuck as a piece of entertainment.
As for engaging with fandom, it’s still p much the same in that I’m really mystified by it but really happy when people like my drawings of characters I like.
Speaking of which — what are you into now?
Too many things!! Half of them are nap-related! Lemme tell you about cool stuff I’ve read recently instead.
There’s this really fun manga called The Way of the House Husband about a former Yakuza member turned house-husband that’s p great. Smash gender expectations!!! Also there are some straight-up great tips in there. It made me really want to try making potpourri.
Delicious in Dungeon is wonderful, I love love love the way Ryoko Kui approaches food and eating. I’ve cried while telling librarians why they should buy this series for their school. Seven Little Sons of The Dragon is a collection of short stories by the same author that’s also pretty wonderful.
Akiko Higashimura has this series about super cool samurai/transmasc icon extraordinaire Kenshin Uesugi that’s super cool! It hasn’t been translated into English yet, but it did get a French translation (it’s called Le Tigre des Neiges). Oh, also Our Dreams at Dusk!! Shimanami Tasogare! All four volumes are out!! In English!! If you haven’t read this yet, what r u doing???
Laura Knetzger’s Bug Boys just got a fancy beautiful full-colour hardcover release from RH Graphic!! I love Bug Boys, and I think the book looks beautiful.
I’ve also recently re-read We Both Laughed In Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan. It’s a collection of the diaries of the first gay trans man to be in the U.S. public spotlight as a trans rights activist. It’s a sad read, but it feels so full of light?? If that makes any sense? It’s also the kind of book that has like ten bajillion things to teach you about writing, Lou Sullivan wrote so nicely and the editors clearly put *so* much care into this book. It’s great!
Any advice for young people who might want to make comics with their pals?
Do it, yo!! Do ittttttttttttttttttt!!!!!!!
But, seriously: I can only really speak to my experience, but if you’re like me and were really scared to start, I’d say, think about doing whatever you can to make the stakes as low as possible.
The first time we made comics together, we decided on a setting, created some characters, and then made mini comics about each other’s characters. Each person also did pin-ups of characters to accompany the comics. We didn’t know who these people were, and didn’t really care about them either way, so that helped. We also had a strict page limit (4 pages each, one comic per page). Keeping it small made it a lot more manageable, but since there were three of us and we were all also making full-page drawings of each character, we still made a respectable-sized thing!
Having an outside deadline also really helped. It’s super easy to tell your friend “ah, i just need a little more time!”, but, if you’re working towards having something printed for a show or a fair, you gotta make your deadline!!
Also don’t worry about the comics being bad. They’re probably gonna be bad. It’s okay to make bad comics.
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…?
Omg yes!!
- I did an issue of Ley Lines about Virginia Woolf and queerness and whiteness, which you can grab from their store. You can still get a 2020 subscription, which gets you three other super neat high art x comics zines. It’s good!!
- Hello Boyfriend has an online webstore with digital versions of a bunch of our comics. It’s all PWYC right now!
Also, thank you to Christine Wong (@onechrispy) and Chris Rentschler (@ummbug) for all the hot manga recs.
Awesome! Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have about eight thousand pages of webcomic to catch up on. Thank you SO much for your time!!
This was super fun, ty, Gale!!