Come visit us at Booth 2003 in the Independent Press pavilion!
Fun at the Alternative Press Expo
By D. Lynn Smith
Earlier this month Kymera Press and yours truly were in San Jose at the Alternative Press Expo. This is a small convention, but it still has the fun that we’ve experienced at other conventions. Usually, I wouldn’t attempt to write anything while being this busy, but my friend Lorraine Watson suggested that I post pictures from the convention … so here we go.
First, I’d just like to say that Kymera Press is an equal opportunity employer. Here are my husband Paul and nephew Dustin working the table for me. Of course, I’m not paying them so I’m not really sure they qualify as employees.
Second, I did receive the graphic novel of Gates of Midnight the day before I left for the con. It looks great! Here, you be the judge:
Our cover artist for the wide release of Pet Noir, Katrina, is here at the convention as well! Here she is in her booth:
There aren’t many cosplayers, but this one was really fun:
Finally, there were two outfits I really liked.
I picked up some great indie comics in San Jose, as well as a couple of fabulous prints. It’s a small convention, but there was some really great work here.
A Shout Out to Men Supportring Women in Comics
By D. Lynn Smith
When I decided to found Kymera Press, I was somewhat hesitant because of all the press about online rape and death threats women in comics were receiving. I was afraid that might happen to me as well. However while some women continue be harassed, I have not been harassed at all. As a matter of fact, I have found men to be very supportive of what Kymera Press is all about.
At conventions I’m constantly talking to men who are looking for comics with strong, women protagonists that are drawn realistically to buy for their daughters. Recently, I got a letter from one of those men:
I am a long-time comic fan and have been enjoying this iconic form of storytelling since I was a little boy. I read the information you provided on your webpage and I find it fantastic that the medium has inspired you to create comics. I’ve recently realized the voice and experiences that people are not getting in the comic world due to the lack of women’s vantage points and style being present.
A woman’s ideas and vantage point are necessary to be able to get a full life’s experience and one of our greatest ways of sharing with one another is with storytelling. My daughters are amazing and I don’t want anyone, or more importantly any idea/culture breeding into their minds that they are supposed to be a certain way or have limits because they are females. I feel comics are a medium that can get positive, supportive, influential concepts, and cultural ideologies out there in our society even though so few people read comics. I admire and respect very much what you are doing with Kymera Press and the people who are doing it with you and I wanted to just say to keep on keeping on and to make more amazing female characters for women and men to appreciate.
Curtis Shellman
This is just an excerpt of a much longer letter. I can’t tell you how much it means to me to have men sending me letters like this. And I’m not alone.
I attended a panel at the Amazing Las Vegas Comic Con on women in comics. One of the women on the panel was Renae Geerlings, the managing editor of Darby Pop Publishing. When this issue came up on the panel, she also commented that she has received nothing but support from the men she works with and from male fans.
At the Amazing Las Vegas Comic Con, a Marine who was working at a recruiting station stopped by and picked up Gates of Midnight. He came back the next day and told me how much he enjoyed the comic. A marine! This told me I was doing something right with Raven’s character.
There is still a very real problem out there when it comes to women in comics. Just this past month at Gen Con a Women in Comics panel had all men scheduled on it. When women were added, the moderator interrupted and generally treated them with a lack of respect. So the fight for women continues.
However, as with all things, not all men are like this. But as with all news reporting, we only hear about the bad things that happen, and not about all the support many men are giving to the advancement of women in comics. So this blog post is a shout out to all you men who are supporting women in comics and are looking for a strong, women protagonist for your daughters. Thank you for your support, your comments, your reviews, and your letters. They mean the world to all of us.
What Do I Look For in a Comic Book Artist?
By D. Lynn Smith
I recently answered some interview questions, and one of them was something like what advice would I give to artists wanting to work for Kymera Press. I talked about getting your work up on sites like Deviant Art and not being shy about displaying your work. But I thought it might be helpful to tell you what I look for when searching for an artist.
Kymera Press is a new publisher and we want to support young artists so they can continue to grow and develop. This does not mean, however, that we are going to hire an artist just because they can draw. Yes, drawing is important. But more important is if you can tell a story with pictures.
My previous entries about the writer made the point that, for the most part, the writer of the comic book is invisible. That’s why I’m not a huge fan of narration. I’m constantly trying to cut back on the number of words that appear on my pages. That’s really difficult, but if you have a good artist, it’s much easier.
When I go to sites like Deviant Art, I’m looking for an artist who has posted more than just illustrations. I want to see sequential pages. I want to see how you arrange your panels, if your art tells a story that flows from one panel to the next, if you left some room for dialog bubbles.
I really like to see artists experiment with panel arrangements. A comic that plays with this is Gotham Academy, written by Becky Cloonan and Brendan Fletcher with art by Karl Kiershl. I’m continually delighted by the creative panel arrangement in this comic. So play with the panels: maybe have a full-page illustration with panels arching across the page from the top left to the bottom right. Or have a two-page spread where the panels go across the top of two pages instead of just one.
Something different and interesting always catches my eye. I’m also looking to see if the artist draws a background. Many young artists draw the action, but forget that the characters are somewhere, not standing in the middle of a cloud of nothing. If they are in a restaurant, are there tables, people, wait staff? Is there food on the table, pictures on the wall?
So if you’d like a job as a penciller or inker on a comic book, post some pages of sequential art. If you don’t have your own story, ask a writer friend, or look for a script online and draw up one of the pages just as a sample. Show me you can tell a story in pictures.
One of my favorite comics is Bitch Planet written by Kelly Sue Deconnick and drawn by Valentina De Landro. In one of the issues, the action is happening in the foreground while a whole different action, the beginning of a prison riot, is happening in the background. It’s absolutely brilliant. And yes, Kelly Sue wrote it that way, but that’s because she also fills in the background, something I’m working on learning to do. The point is, the background can be as important as the foreground.
Many young artists post a lot of fan art. While these are usually interesting to see, it doesn’t show me that these artists are able to conceptualize their own characters. Building a character is a very important part of the storytelling process. I may post reference pictures for a character, but it is the artist who actually brings that character to the page. When I’m searching for an artist, I want to see if they can create original characters. Fan art simply doesn’t do that.
Finally I’m looking for consistency. When I’m doing a series, I expect my character in Issue #30 to look like she looked in Issue #1. Some artists have a problem recreating a face from one panel to the next.
These are the main things I look for in an artist. Of course there are other things as well, like professionalism, price and just plain niceness! Don’t underestimate the value of being easy to work with.
Translation of Comics
By D. Lynn Smith
Earlier this year, my friend Lorraine Watson started a discussion on Facebook about dialog. Since it was very interesting, I thought I’d give a synopsis of that conversation here.
Lorraine asked, “Do you know if word and/or bubble placement changes for comics written in languages read right to left?” I had to admit that I had no idea, but when you think about the popularity of Manga, it makes sense that the bubbles would be placed differently. Mary McFarland chimed in and said that Arabic and Hebrew were also read right to left. Mary describes herself as an Aramaic amateur researcher and a girl geek, so she was very interested in the answer to this question as well.
I went out to a board I’m on and that very same day, I had the answer courtesy of Laura Sneddon. She said, “Manhua, Hebrew and Arabic comics/cartoons are all read from right to left. Japanese, Chinese and Korean were all traditional right to left vertical languages, though left to right is now more popular, and Hebrew and Arabic are of course, right to left too—all comics and cartoons in these languages are right to left.”
I never stopped to think about how my comics would translate into other languages. My new colorist for Gates of Midnight, Sandra Molina, is a Spanish to English translator and has offered to translate Gates into Spanish. But that wouldn’t involve the kind of changes these other languages would entail.
So when Mary asked me how I would go about getting my comics translated into these languages, once again, I had no idea. This is where Chris Krone joined the conversation. Chris said he’d seen some manga which was relettered for English sales, the artwork had been flipped into a mirror-image before the bubbles were added.
So a new letterer would have to be hired to reletter the pages. However, that’s not what really struck me. When I was talking about writing each page, I talked about placement of some of the panels. The penciller does a lot of the arrangement, but the writer has a certain rhythm in mind—meaning I place things inside the panel in certain places for a story reason. To do a mirror image of the page, well wouldn’t that change the flow that the writer established?
I know this seems like a little thing, but it really got me thinking about the integrity of the work. Maybe the mirror image wouldn’t have much of an impact except in the writer’s mind. I mean, the pages would still be read the same way, right. But if you think about the bleed and the safety zone of the pages, how much you leave on the side so that art and words won’t get lost in the fold… I don’t know. I think there’s a lot more to this than simply printing mirror images.
The conversation then moved on to how the deaf and hard of hearing community who use sign language might be depicted in comics. A friend of Chris’ gave him a great link to a web comic that does just that. You can see it here.
You can see that putting together a comic book is much more involved than one might originally think.
I’d also like to say that this conversation was probably the most fun I’ve had on Facebook. It’s amazing how we have all of these connections where we can get answers to questions that stump us in less than 24 hours. Thank you Lorraine, Mary and Chris for expanding my mind!