I was able to catch Emmy-winner Andy Suriano (Samurai Jack, Star Wars: Clone Wars) and Tyler Shainline (Image Comics) at Motor City Comic Con. They were promoting their giant, 11″ x 17″ collection of Liberty Justice stories that have been seen in other comics, like Elephantmen and Burn the Orphanage. This book is gorgeous and was created giant-size to evoke the visceral, youthful joy of turning the oversized pages of your parents’ magazines as you immerse yourself into a sci fi world. Stop by to see them at your local Convention to pick it up or order it online!
How do you feel about the strength of smaller publishers right now in the comics industry? Is it easier to create comics now than it was when you first started?
Tyler:
I think it’s definitely easier now. The Internet alone busted everything wide open. I’ve been a part of comics from the retail angle, I’ve worked for publishers, and now I’m a creator. It used to be you had to go see somebody at a show, you had to go to conventions, you had to meet somebody. Now, I can email people. You can also print stuff yourself. I think it’s easier now than it ever has been before. The doors are open wider for all people to come in and do comics. It used to be a little more insular. You used to have to be a super comics nerd, you had to be ingrained in it. Now, a lot of people are coming into comics from animation and other backgrounds.
Did you work with publishers before you started creating to comics?
Tyler:
I work at Image comics. I used to be the Production Manager there for a little while, Traffic Manager, and now I do convention stuff for them. I took a step back from the company to concentrate on trying to write my own stuff and take care of my two-and-a-half year old son.
Has your experience on the other side of the desk has helped you with creating comics?
Tyler:
Absolutely. 100%. It’s actually let me make connections with creators and other people that I might not have been able to make. Or just had the balls to do. It’s really hard to go up to someone that’s been working in the industry forever and ask them for a chance or to become their friend. If you work with them on a regular basis, they can respect you a little bit easier.
Andy:
And you know who can pull through and who can’t.
Tyler:
Yeah, that’s been a huge thing, absolutely – knowing who can get a book done and who won’t. And even though I knew that, I still went and worked with Andy.
Andy:
We’ve gotten really great stuff with Richard Starkings. That’s been a big influence and very helpful.
Tyler:
And I think working with these different creators from behind the scenes, they know I get things done and they can trust me. It also helps in giving you an understanding of what people are looking for,too. I worked in various stores over the years, including Comic Relief in Berkeley, which was huge with a lot of independent creators. Adrian Tomine, Richard Sala, and Dan Clowes would shop there all the time. Getting information from them was always really helpful and talking with different creators, and being open to their input. And that’s a huge thing. I think a lot of people aren’t open to criticism. They hear bad things, and they shut down. I love hearing criticism because it helps somebody grow as long as you take it like that. I think getting to know people ahead of time helped me feel confident to go out and talk to people about ideas.
Where are you seeing the comics industry go? Where do you think it’s going to be in 10-20 years?
Tyler:
I am a fan of superhero comics but I think we’re moving far away from that now. I think that books like The Walking Dead and the TV show have opened people’s eyes, like ‘Oh, it doesn’t have to be a guy in spandex punching another guy in spandex. It can be about anything!’ There’s all kinds of books out there, like Rachel Rising, that have to do with things other than superheroes. I can’t recommend enough the books Saga and Revival. They are such amazing books and they show what’s out there. There’s nothing else like those books that I can think of. I think that opens up the door for more fans because old comic book fans are dying. New superhero fans are still being born. The Marvel movies, the Avengers movies are awesome, but I don’t see them bringing people in to comics. I don’t see that at all. I do see books like Saga, Revival as the ones bringing new fans in. I think the industry is just going to continue to grow. It’s going to continue to lean toward the independent creators and creator-owned stuff.
What do you think the comics industry can do to bring new readers to comics?
Tyler:
I would like to see every comic book store peel those Spider-Man posters that block everything out off their windows and let people look into their stores and see what’s in there. Or, instead of having all kinds of Marvel and DC stuff there at the front counter, have other stuff up there. Open up Diamond, and don’t just go to the two sections of Marvel and DC. Flip through that entire book, order stuff, take a chance on things. Don’t just order the stuff you always order. I was lucky enough to work at various stores that did that. They did extremely well and made tons of money doing that.
How about getting people to the stores in the first place?
Tyler:
And that is a hard thing. If there’s a local movie theater that’s showing Godzilla, ask if you can set up a table inside and have IDW’s Godzilla and other monster books like Giant Killer by Dan Brereton, other books that tie into it. You can’t just sit there and go , ‘No one comes to my store’. You have to go out and find the people. You have to find those customers. And that does cost time, that does cost money, but that’s how you get them in. And also, when people come into your store, look up. Don’t just sit there behind the counter. Stand up, engage your customer, recommend things. Just don’t shut down.
A big thing that a lot of stores miss out on is find out what local artists are in your area. There’s all kinds of amazing artists that exist in these cities, have them come into your store and do signings. One of my favorite things in the world is the store Challengers Comics in Chicago. They have this giant mural in the front of the place that Chris Giarrusso did, and it’s so awesome. It makes you want to go into that store immediately. Not these posters that Diamond sends you to stick in the window with tape and leave until they fade away. Go out there and find the customers. Leave your store for a minute.
If you had no limits of technology, a budget, or whether or not an audience would be there, what would you want to create, in your dream of dreams?
Tyler:
Honestly, I want to create things that don’t exist. I want to see more imagination. It’s hard to say anything specific. I do love horror comics and horror movies. and I don’t feel like there’s anything especially terrifying out there, so I’d love to be able to do, or somebody to do, an honest-to-god scary comic book. One that makes you terrified to turn the page. It’s happened a few times here and there. Revival does do that.
Have you read Bedlam?
Tyler:
Oh my god, yes, Bedlam! Yeah yeah! Nick Spencer and Riley Rossmo are some of my favorite people. That’s an awesome book, absolutely.
Now tell me about your book, Liberty Justice.
Tyler:
I’m working on this with Andy. He lives in L.A., I live in the Oakland/Bay Area. And we’ll be texting back and forth. I told him that I was watching like 12 different Pam Grier movies over a week, and I was saying that man, I wish Pam Grier did a sci-fi movie. She did Ghosts of Mars, but I don’t count that. I wanted Foxy Brown in outer space. And he said, ‘Why don’t you write it? I’ll draw it.’ About a week later, he asked, ‘So, what’s up? Did you write that script yet’, and I said ‘Oh, you were serious? Let me get on that script!’
Andy:
I love the genre, man. I’ve been a big fan of the genre, and that was the thing. I was actually tooling around with a mercenary girl in space badass, who looked very similar to Liberty Justice. In fact I tried to wedge those characters into so many things. When Tyler kind of broke the seal, it sparked that final thing. We were missing that one piece that kind of birthed that idea. And Tyler came in and had these ideas, and I was like yes, yes, that’s everything I was trying to get to and say! And like, he just did it, he said it. It’s been great. I’ve always wanted to work with Tyler, too, since I’ve met him. It’s cool when you find guys that are very nice that you share the exact same frame of reference. And the stuff that Tyler knows that I have no clue about, and it’s good to learn from, play off of, and grow from. And I think vice versa. We each bring something different to the project. We also bring something very collaborative and symbiotic.
Tyler:
There’s an honesty to the work we’re doing too. I keep hearing people talk about ‘doing books like the 70′s blaxploitation stuff but with a twist’. We don’t have a twist on it. We’re paying homage to these things that we love. We’re not going to try to hide anything in there. We’re just having fun. And Liberty Justice is that. It was inspired by Pam Grier, but [Liberty Justice] has just taken off on her own now.
Is this going to be a mini-series, ongoing series, or graphic novel?
Tyler:
It started out just as something we were doing as fun backups in our friends’ books like Elephantmen and Burn the Orphanage. But now we’ve got some interest from various publishers, and we’re looking at making it an ongoing series. Hopefully starting up later this year. Hopefully will have an announcements about that coming up in San Diego.
Andy:
We do have a collection of giant-size pages.
Tyler:
We have an oversized, 11″ x 17″ book. The book that’s too big for any bookcase. You have to build a bigger shelf just to put it on. A couple of the stores that we’re friends with are carrying it, but otherwise, you have to get it direct from us because it’s that good.
Andy, can you speak to the transition between 2D comics and animation, switching between the mediums?
Andy:
Well, there’s a lot more drawings involved in comics. But there’s a lot less risk, for me, at least. It’s a labor of love. My day job is animation, and it’s fun. I am currently working on the Disney Mickey Mouse shorts. Really fun, three minute long cartoon shorts that have push the Disney animations forward in the more recent years. I do that during the day, and then at night, I let my, what’s the expression, freak…
Tyler:
You let your freak flag fly!
Andy:
Yeah, there’s that with just exploring these other worlds.
Tyler:
The Freaks come out at night!
Andy:
Yeah, it’s great just letting my id go, versus with animation, I worry a lot about deadlines, making sure everything’s on model and consistent. With this, it’s just something that’s purely out of my head. And that I own. I have a stake in. I don’t own Disney stock. As much as I love doing it and I love the health insurance that it provides my family, doing Liberty Justice and Cosmic Scoundrels, doing this giant book is pure a labor of love. We put up our own money to put this giant-sized book out to collect everything. We have a convention coming up in Seattle and I didn’t want to wait to get an approval from an editor to get it printed. I found a printer, got it made, debuted it at Emerald City Comic Con, and it immediately sold out. Which was cool. Taking a book in a format that everyone said wouldn’t sell and it sold out, it was very validating.
It’s just want to do something I remember loving as a kid. I wanted something fun. I wanted to work on something fun. I miss fun comics. All-ages books are fun, but I wanted something adult. I remember back in the late 70′s, early 80′s, my dad’s Omni magazines. And those science fiction covers. And even those Marvel Treasury size editions are epic, they had larger format books. So I wanted something to evoke that same feeling of the large format in your hands when you open it up. And that’s what I wanted to give that same visceral experience to somebody else. Make it an event, make it an overall experience, other than just reading something with your eyes and putting it away on the shelf. Here you have to find a shelf to put it on.
Tyler:
I think a lot of people forget that pretty much all comics are the same size. They all have that in common. They have the same dimensions, they drop in the same slot. And that’s why we wanted to do something bigger. Working in retail and for a publisher, I’ve heard from a lot of retailers ‘We don’t like big books. We don’t know how to shelve them.’ Well we continue to sell out of them. The stores that are open to having them in the stores have sold out of them. There’s definitely a market for it.
Andy:
There’s a shop in Burbank that I’ve had to restock 3 different time giving them 10 books at a time for 3 weeks. So that’s been great.
What’s your biggest challenge for taking something that already exists in motion, like an animation, and making a comic out of it?
Andy:
For something like Samurai Jack, this is something I actually worked on 15 years ago where you painstakingly take away the line art. I was trying to come up with a line quality that evoked movement, that evoked speed, and gave it that visceral sense of animating on a print page. So I came up with a looser line quality. So far, it’s worked.
Tyler:
I’ve heard from a lot of people, ‘Man I love that loose art that he’s doing on this’. I wonder if it’s going to translate well, and people have been absolutely open to it. Because a lot of people are used to seeing his stuff done pretty tightly on other things, and I’m really loving the loose style he’s doing on Liberty Justice.
Now there’s some controversies going on in comics, lack of diversity, lack of representation, sexism, harassment, people in the industry going at each other online. Do you think it will ultimately help or hurt the comics industry?
Tyler:
I think it’s doing both. I think it’s helping to identify the problem. But I think what’s hurting the industry are the people who put their arms up and say, “It’s all terrible! Why is everything so bad?” and not do anything about it. I mean, you want to see diversity in comics, make a comic that’s diverse. I could show you on the phone the amount of diverse people who have picked up our books today. You keep putting after book with some honkey in it, no one’s going to want to read it. Open the doors up. I don’t like people who complain and then do nothing about it. If you have a problem, fix it. That’s why I like these people who are identifying creators, or fans, or people who are doing bad things, and who are harming the industry with this. Because it is, it’s harming the industry to behave this way. You need to include everybody. It helps nobody to exclude people.
I had a friend who posted a picture of a horrible t-shirt about fangirls/coffee t-shirt on the Internet and people got on that guy’s butt because that was ridiculous. There’s no place for that. There’s no reason for it. I don’t even get the idea. Like why wouldn’t you want more people to come to this? People need to wake up. Comics could be a dying medium. There’s not necessarily new fans coming all the time. We have to get everyone we can, we need to open up the doors by doing new stuff. If we keep doing the same white guy in a costume, great then we’ll have the same white guys who buy that until they die, and then no one replaces them. I think there’s some websites that run reports on the diversity in comics, but I don’t ever see them necessarily doing anything about it. That just gets my dander up, pointing out problems without really addressing it or promoting some of the more diverse comic books out there.
One of the things that people are saying is that comics aren’t for kids anymore, that they’re getting darker and darker and the market for kids comics is getting smaller? What’s your response to that?
My response to that is, before I flew ut here, I was trying to go to the bathroom at home and my two-and-a-half year old was banging on the door and slipping comic books underneath the door that I’d given him. He wanted me to read the Scooby Doo comic I’d brought home. He wanted me to read the Batman comic I’d brought home to him. So I think that there are comic books that are out there for kids. I think the problem is that a lot of parents aren’t bringing them to the comic book stores. Because they walk up to the comic book stores, and all they see is violence in the windows. They see Spider-Man punching some guy in the face. They see Superman tearing somebody up or whatever. And that’s not inviting to a young child, necessarily. I don’t let my kid read violent comic books. I don’t let my kid watch violent stuff. I think that it is out there.
Andy:
I’d say this too, against people saying there’s no fun in comics. Well go buy some, support it, or do it. Me and Tyler, I think do all three. Because we both have kids, we are careful of what we buy them. We support all-ages comics, and we make sure we support the artists that do them, and I also do it for a living. I’m working on all-ages books. Not just kids’ books, but all-ages books. And then for fun and diversity, we have Liberty Justice. If there’s a vacuum in the industry, then this book, at its size, literally plugs it up.
Tyler:
Keep in mind, too ,that a lot of stores don’t help things. When they order kids books, they only order two or three copies, and then stick them on a shelf in the back corner and wait for kids to find them. Don’t do that. Put them in the front, put them in the window, and put them down at their level. Don’t put them up high where they can’t see them if they’re walking by. There’s a lot of people that want to bash stuff like Adventure Time and other tie-ins to cartoons, saying those aren’t real books. Well, they are to a kid. I bring Adventure Time home to my kid and he thinks they’re amazing.
My daughter eats them up.
Exactly! I think that kids want to read comics when they can find them. I think a lot of parents just don’t bring kids to the comic book stores at all. And also a huge problem too is when they used to have comics in stores like SafeWays and 7-11s, it was more approachable for kids to find them on their own. Now you have to go to a specialized store with a bunch of adults hanging around. It’s usually dirty, you don’t want to go in there, you don’t want to take your kid in there, that’s for sure. Of course you’re not going to have kid sales because the kids don’t want to come in. I know multiple stores that invite kids. Another great thing about Challengers Comics, they have have a whole room set up for kids to go in there and find stuff. It’s awesome, we need more of that. Try going out and finding where kids are. Take those extra books you have that you can’t sell. Instead of throwing them away or putting them in a quarter bin, take them to a local school or children’s hospital. That’s what we used to do. We’d take extra kids books to the children’s hospital, stamp our name, address and phone number in there, and it allowed those people would come in and buy more issues. Again, make the effort to get out there, instead of just going ‘Wah, no one’s buying’.
Andy:
I just want to add to the people that are saying that there’s no diversity, I get confused because people complain there’s no diversity in comics but I seek it out and I find it. I see diversity in comics. I collect those, I spend money on it, and I do it. I don’t understand the argument.
I think it’s referring to title characters, and the reaction to Miles Morales and Johnny Storm not looking like his sister Sue.
Andy:
Well yeah, those were made in another era. And I also say that online bullying is still bullying. It’s terrible, either way you cut it. It’s a problem everywhere, not just comics.
Tyler:
We need more comic fans, not less. That’s for sure.
Tammie Philpott
Tammie Philpott is a Spartan/Wings fan, Code Monkey, Super Mom, Gamer, and Comics Enthusiast. She's been reading comics for slightly longer than Image or Vertigo have existed, and had to bear witness to the unfortunate Supermullet.
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