Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I always have a tendency to take on too many things.
It's not hard to figure out when you're not welcome.
Just make the comics you want to see, and people will notice.
Hopefully, comics will be enough to support me after I graduate.
I didn't get into comics until college, and it was sort of an accident.
I swear slightly more when there aren't children around, but not that much.
Some comics are made to be displayed digitally, and it doesn't degrade them.
I went to Maryland Institute College of Art, and I studied illustration there.
It seems like everyone in my peer group has more 'Pokemon' knowledge than I do.
I love the female characters in 'She-Ra.' There isn't another show quite like it.
I do more research about 'Lumberjanes' than I did for a story of medieval knights.
I think comics has this rap of being misogynistic, and that's certainly not untrue.
Kids aren't dumb - they might not get something, but they're going to figure it out.
I think almost anyone is capable of doing things that are evil or hurtful or harmful.
I really want to see normalization of queer sexuality - as well as the lack of sexuality.
The first movie I saw was 'Prince of Egypt' - that was the first movie I saw in theaters.
I was always looking for the female characters in sci-fi and fantasy who were more than just the girlfriend.
I'm very lucky to have been given a lot of freedom in my career, but it's also fun to play in other people's playgrounds!
It took me a really long time to get past all of that internalized dissociation with being female that I was being given by media.
I feel that kids are smart, and I feel that kids will understand things even if they don't understand them from personal experience.
I am very interested in female characters and bringing a new perspective to mediums where not necessarily that's been valued at all.
I know that when I was a kid, and I was reading whatever I could get my hands on, I didn't associate myself with the girl characters.
I've been a huge animation fan since I was a kid, so the idea of seeing my characters in full motion on the big screen is completely mind-blowing.
Social media is basically the entire reason I have a career right now. Like everything, my readership for 'Nimona' came because I was active on Tumblr.
Question everything. Don't try to emulate someone else's path. Look at what you have, the tools you have, the place you're in; know the rules, and break them.
I've always liked shape-shifter characters. I gravitated towards characters like Mystique from 'X-Men,' Zam Wesell from 'Star Wars,' and Tonks from 'Harry Potter.'
'Winnie the Pooh's Grand Adventure' - the movie where Rabbit adopts a baby bird and raises her, and then the bird grows up and flies away and leaves him - I cried.
Usually I start with a concept, which I then sketch out so that I can get a feel for the character. The character doesn't really become real to me until I draw them.
'Runaways' was exciting because it was something brand-new and fresh, and I'm hoping to be able to bend the rules in my own way of what a Marvel superhero story can be.
I don't think naturally I tend toward anything that's really distinctly branded as adult. I feel like I sort of write for myself as I would've been at 12 or 13 years old.
Support the female voice in all its forms. Support other female creators and work to make an environment that is inclusive and allows female-led projects to thrive organically.
Not long after I started posting the first 'Nimona' pages online, a literary agent reached out to me, and I ended up signing with him before I returned to school for my senior year.
I think my lack of 'Pokemon' knowledge and complete confusion at the descriptions makes people think I'm adorable, like a lost baby duckling or your grandmother trying to use an iPad.
Even in stories that I like, with a female character that I love deeply, it always feels like there's something that she has to prove to the male characters before she can even get started.
I kind of understood inherently - and I wasn't really conflicted about this - that comics were not for me or by people who looked like me. That was just something that I accepted about the world.
Like a lot of young women, I went through an entire period where I hated female characters - I didn't want to read about them! I thought I was going to be the cool girl who was not like other girls.
'Nimona' is about identity and if who you are is defined by what you look like. It's not a book about body image at all, but I would be lying if I said that wasn't in there even at the conception of it.
There's a whole world of people out here whose experiences are not being reflected in the media that they're reading. And that does affect the way we view ourselves... and the people we think we can be.
Fantasy is usually considered an escape, but it's also a way to deal with weighty real-world issues from a safe distance and in a context where you usually have some kind of power that you don't have in real life.
There are some things that are more appropriate for different audiences. But the goal with all ages is to create comics that anyone can read, that don't talk down to kids. Kids can handle a lot more than people think.
The first time I shopped at a comic shop, it was because I had been published in a comic book. As I became more involved in comics, I started going more and more, usually to support my friends or lady-friendly comics.
It felt like a huge risk when I first started putting my comic online. It was very scary to put myself out there that way and to open up something that I cared about very dearly - and to be the only creator involved with it.
I think technology is changing and growing, and the best approach to have is to be self-aware and aware of what's going on around you and also have some idea of who you are and how to make that ever-changing climate work in your favor.
I tend to bristle at people praising alt comics as some kind of perfect comics paradigm, because there's quite a lot of misogyny in its history as well. Like, in my first comics class, every single great comic creator we studied was male.
I've always had a lot of story ideas rattling around in my head, but 'Nimona' felt very tangible very early. I knew the ending. So I just started making more and more pages, and then I made it a webcomic, like, 'OK, I'm really gonna do this.'
I've always kind of gravitated toward characters who are a bit distant from the narrator or the point-of-view characters, so that's kind of important to me, to set up a different character who would be the point-of-view character for the story.
We can make this industry and this environment and comic book shops and comic book conventions and comic books themselves, we can make them a thing that is accessible to everybody so that nobody feels unwelcome, and nobody feels like this isn't their place.
It was not until Web comics that I saw stories about women and stories by women and things that were aimed specifically at female readership. It was just kind of this free-for-all that was achieving something amazing with creativity. That was where I got my start.
I was a junior at school, and I had just taken my first comics class, and we were doing an exercise for this other class where we had to create our own characters,and 'Nimona' just kind of came out of that. I decided that I liked her so much that I wanted to do a comic with her.
It was definitely a very appealing prospect to be in a company, especially as an art student: we had it hammered into us that the odds of us finding a job, especially fresh out of school, was very slim, and we could expect to work as a bartender for the next three years after we graduate.