Who's Who In The CBU Update 2008

Who are... Park and Barb?

Barbara Lien-Cooper writes the comic GUN STREET GIRL at Panel 2 Panel, was an original founder of Sequential Tart, is the managing editrix of the 2004 Eisner award-winning print magazine COMIC BOOK ARTIST, and was named by Mark Millar (The Authority, Ultimates, Wanted) as one of the three most promising new talents in the next wave of comics writing.

Park Cooper started writing about comics at the now-defunct DC FANZINE website.

Ursula Vernon Interview Part II

By Park Cooper

Introductory blurbs CONTINUE to be for losers, man. Ursula Vernon does the webcomic DIGGER at http://www.graphicsmash.com just like Barbara’s GUN STREET GIRL. Get over there as soon as you’ve read this.


SBC: Hey, here's a wacky thought... what if instead of "two characters in search of a play", we actually played like this was a regular old conformist-style interview and I asked you about your life and stuff...

Ursula Vernon: Sure! Ask away! It's crazy, but it just might work...

SBC: Where are you from? Where are you now? What decade were you born?

Ursula: Well, I was born in Japan, and moved around a whole bunch, traveling the world with my family, which would have been very enriching if I wasn't six months old and remember none of it.

Ursula: 1977.

SBC: Why did you move so much? Military brat?

Ursula: But I grew up in Oregon and Arizona, and then moved to Minnesota for college, and down to Arizona just a few months ago.

Ursula: Yup, Dad was in the Navy.

SBC: How did you get into comics? Did you read comic books or did you just start drawing, then telling stories that way?

Ursula: Actually, I am a classic case of not having read comic books, because I assumed they were low-brow entertainment for the masses, and I was pseudo-intelligensia.

SBC: And has that changed now that you, and I'm sorry if I'm the first to inform you of the fact that this is what you do, write your own comic?

Ursula: Ignored 'em until I was in college, and then a friend who worshipped comics wanted me to work on a comic with him, because he thought I could draw. And I still didn't read any comics, but my attitude mellowed.

Ursula: No! You're lying! NOOOOOOOO!

Ursula: Right, well, actually, after the comic project died from having plotted two hundred pages or so without drawing a single panel, another friend dumped the collected "Sandman" on me, and I loved it.

SBC: So, I don't think that this would be a legitimate question for anyone else in comics, but I think it is for you.... are you shocked to suddenly find yourself a (web)comic creator?

SBC: Sandman, ah yes. I should have known, there's a little influence.

Ursula: But I still am not really a comic reader, as such--I don't really go buy comics at random, and I still really don't know HOW to get into comics--I mean, I liked the X-men movie, so I asked my husband how one started reading the X-men, and he started laughing like a hyena on nitrous.

SBC: Uh... do you know how Barb and I met?

Ursula: Not off the top of my head...

SBC: Ah, you're married, too, eh.

Ursula: Yup! He's read more comics than I have, actually.

SBC: Then you don't know it at all. As pen-pals from a Sandman fanzine.

Ursula: Hah! Cool.

SBC: She was in Minnesota, me in Texas. We've told Neil about it... it freaked him out a little.

Ursula: That's cool, though. Good way to meet. Annnnyway, in answer to the earlier question, yes, I am still sort've surprised that I'm a webcomic creator. It was a sort've mad lark to do the first two pages of my first doomed webcomic, and I was in no way prepared for the response.

SBC: Elaborate on that just a tad.

Ursula: Not really knowing comics very well--I'll read what people hand me, but if you start talking about the people running Marvel and DC I go completely blank, most comic news sites are this maze of confusion for me, which I feel bad about--I didn't really realize that there was this...I dunno...allure to comics.

Ursula: I mean, for me, they were just a couple of quick paintings in sequence. And I'm used to the response a painting gets. If I do a painting that tells a little bit of a story, people will sometimes write me to say they liked the painting, or it spoke to them, but that's it. But I did this first couple pages of a dumb little comic, and my in-box completely flooded.

SBC: Uh, I was gonna say something...

Ursula:

SBC: I'll say this instead... will you ever return to that lil Gothbat?

Ursula: Oh, heavens, I hope so. Gothbat's actually the hardest to write of any of 'em.

Ursula: Because I have to be funny, and I have one panel to do it, so I have to find a joke and then hone it within an inch of its life. Brevity, as I said, is not my strong suit.

SBC: Okay, musical interests... go for a sec.

Ursula: Every other artist on the face of the earth, as far as I can tell, will tell you that music is an enormous inspiration that drives them and inspires them. I'm not particularly like that. I like music well enough, but being mostly tone-deaf, what I like are good lyrics.

SBC: Yep, Barb's all about the music... her powerpop... which plays a big part in GSG.

Ursula: So I love...oh...Nick Cave's murder ballads, or folk music that involves lots of grisly murders or women dressing up as men to join the army or whatever.

SBC: YAY! you earned lots of points just then...

Ursula: Because of Nick Cave?

Ursula: Tom Waits is also God.

SBC: Okay, that's it, you can be on Team Barb.

SBC: You are earning such points now.

SBC: Fairport Convention, I suppose???

Ursula: My stepfather turned me on to Tom Waits--I was this teenage geek who thought that Alice Cooper was the height of musical achievement, and then my stepfather insisted on playing Rain Dogs in the car, and I was like "Whoa. That's really different."

SBC: Tam Lin?

Ursula: HA! Fairport Convention rocks my socks, along with Steeleye Span.

SBC: Barb: "Martin Carthy is god."

Ursula: Man, I'm amazed you've heard of these people. Terribly under-known, all of 'em.

SBC: Ursula, the United Republic of BarbPark is more about the music than your mind can comprehend.

SBC: I like Nick's Red Right Hand, myself...

Ursula: Yes!

Ursula: Actually, "Curse of Millhaven" is probably my favorite.

SBC: Hm, do you know who Charles Vess is?

Ursula: Illustrator, modern, stylistic descendant of Arthur Rackham and Winsor McCay?

SBC: He's slightly attuned to that Crazy Man Michael vibe... ah, you know him then.

Ursula: Well, not personally.

SBC: And boy, would you earn points with him for mentioning him in the same sentence as those worthys...

Ursula: Didn't he do some of the Books of Magic art? They're one of the few other comics I've read.

Ursula: I really like his style. It's a nice change from I guess what I think of as the sort've slickly photoshopped superhero thing.

SBC: Yes he did the Goblin Market one in issue 3... which brings us back full circle to a conversation we were having a month or two ago.

Ursula: Yeah!

Ursula: Wombats do pop up in the most unlikely places...

SBC: Then there's Vess' opera adaptations... But those don't involve wombats.

Ursula: I don't think I've seen any of those, alas.

SBC: Hmm... so you know Rackham and McCay, but do you know of Mervyn Peake and Gormenghast/Titus Groan?

Ursula: If Charles Dickens wrote fantasy and was a relentless foe of mankind.

SBC: Barb muses that DIGGER reads like someone with a predilection for the old stories... "The Handsome Cabin Boy"... do you know of Kate Bush?

Ursula: Although that may be a little harsh--they were really dark sorts of books, certainly.

Ursula: The name is very, very familiar.

SBC: I was going to mention Kate Bush to you earlier but I forgot. You need to look into her music. Okay?

Ursula: Ah! Yes, that's where I've heard it. I'll look into it.

SBC: I don't think Peake hates humanity, I think he was just very in touch with how dark it could be.

SBC: There are also some gentle and beautiful scenes in his work.
Ursula: I bought Titus Groan and Gorhemngast together, but I don't know if I ever found Titus Alone.

SBC: Eh. After saying all this great stuff about Peake, I admit I couldn't finish Gormenghast. I saw that our heroine and Steerpike would come to a bad end.

SBC: The BBC adaptation is terrible because they change the ending and make it a moralist tale that's very pro-monarchy.

Ursula: They were another set of books that had some great visual elements. Generally I don't get much in the way of mental pictures--which is weird for an illustrator--but those were amazing. The Hall of Bright Carvings, the huge roofs, the dying starving aunts...wild stuff.

Ursula: Didn't see that.

SBC: We liked the first half... the actor playing Steerpike was very good, a modern Alex from Clockwork Orange... but we hated what they'd done so bad by the end.

Ursula: Steerpike was weird. He starts as a sympathetic character, and by the end...no.

SBC: Yes. You've picked up on just the right stuff. Those fantastic line illustrations of the Cook and the... the whatever-he-was.

SBC: I stopped before I disliked him.

Ursula: Ah...let me see, there was an artist about whom I'm somewhat ambivalent, but he did some good paintings of Gormenghast...

SBC: Okay, let's see... what else do they ask in normal interviews...

Ursula: Rodney Matthews, that was it.

Ursula: "If you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?"

Ursula: I got asked that once in a job interview, and have been scarred since.

SBC: What kind of tree were you? Larch? Birch? Willow?

Ursula: One that worked well with others.

SBC: Ooooooh that's good.

SBC: Sounds a little piney.

Ursula: I dunno, if I'm not trying to get a job, I'll admit I have a soft spot for madrone. I dunno if you get those anywhere but the Pacific Northwest, though.

SBC: Possibly not.

Ursula: They're neat. They have this slick red bark that peels off in thick sheets, and they're sort of gnarled and twisty.

SBC: Okay... talk about being a woman in an artistic field, in a medium that's mostly unrecognized (webcomics).

Ursula: Hmmm.

SBC: That's two things, in a way, so start where you like.

SBC: If the "allure" side of comics is a mystery to you, then you may not feel female alienation like women who work in print comics do.

Ursula: Since most of my illustration career has been via the internet, I never really encountered a problem with being a woman, or if I did, I wasn't really aware of it--art directors generally didn't care if I was a six-armed hermaphrodite with a third eye in the middle of my forehead as long as they got their art on time and to spec.

SBC: And you may not feel the sting of not being a print comic... Do people ask you if you want to be a print comic someday? Barb's starting to get a lot of that.

Ursula: But comics, that's another matter.

Ursula: Oh, yeah, all the time. "When is the print version coming out? Are there any plans for a print version?"

SBC: Are deadlines and schedule scary, or a pain for you at all?

SBC: And how do you feel about being asked that question (about print)?

SBC: And what's your answer?

Ursula: And knowing nothing of comics, I generally sort of flap a bit and say "Well, if someone offers to print the damn thing, sure! But I don't know how to get a comic published!"

SBC: It's not terribly hard to self-publish if you're rich and can find a reliable printer.

Ursula: Having been an illustrator, I know how to get a painting out there, but a comic? It's an alien world. Submit to Marvel? Madness!

SBC: Now, that is madness.

Ursula: I am so far from rich that I can barely see rich from here.

SBC: I'll tell you about what publishers for comics have what characteristics someday if you like, but as Douglas Adams' Man Who Rules The World might say, "That sounds like a story about the future."

Ursula: I'd like to do a print version, and I think Digger'd be fine as a print version, but I don't really know how to go about it. I mean, I never thought to submit Digger to any comic archives--meeting T. was a pure random chance.

Ursula: Sure, that'd be cool. Up to now, my comics career has been mostly random stupid luck.

Ursula: Getting back to the earlier question, deadlines usually aren't that scary.

SBC: So. We have your answer to the question... so how do you feel about the question? Confused? What do your readers do when you tell them the answer? Do they seem dissappointed? Confused at your response?

SBC: Or am I putting words in your mouth or making it a bigger deal than it is...

Ursula: Hmm. I generally have very supportive readers--a lot of 'em have been with me since I was fumbling around my first doomed attempts at webcomics, so they're usually pretty supportive about waiting around. Other than that, it's not something I spend a lot of time thinking about, honestly.

SBC: So... check me on this... Are there adventures of Digger before she got lost at the start of GS?

Ursula: Being in print is not terribly important for me--money would be nice, but since I think I assume it wouldn't be terribly lucrative, I don't think of it much. I mean, I've already had the thrill of going into a store and seeing my work on the shelf, so I don't have the whole I-must-break-into-print thing goin' on.

SBC: Understood.

Ursula: Not that I know of--certainly nothing I've written down. I think part of the key to Digger on GS is that she's a very down-to-earth character who is NOT used to this questing hero thing and just doesn't react in the accepted ways.

Ursula: So if I was doing a prequel, it'd be "Digger goes to mining school" or something, and I'm not sure if that'd be of interest to anybody.

SBC: Yeah but she's kind of clever. A thoughtful character.

SBC: Yes it would.

Ursula: I think there's a real lack of thoughtful characters in fantasy--at least, non-introspective thoughtful characters. They're either Conan, who never thinks about anything, or Rand, who overthinks everything until you want to stave his head in with the collected works of Tolkein.

SBC: There's a thing you'd like in the world of the indie Graphic Novel... CLAN APIS... it's sort of the life of a bee... a real bee, except with communication added...

Ursula: Cool--I'll check it out. Is it the sort of thing they'd have at a comic shop, or is the indie graphic novel a rare beast I'd have to find somewhere else?

SBC: They'd have it at a really good shop... other than that, someone may more likely have to order it.

SBC: I warn you, though, that when this interview goes up, I guarantee you your readers will start pestering you for DIGGER GOES TO MINING SCHOOL. Digger the Teenage Wombat.

Ursula: I can check around here. Unfortunately, one thing I lost moving from St. Paul to Arizona was access to a really first rate comic shop--the ones here are okay, but I go in and get the immediate I-am-the-only-woman-to-come-in-here-in-the-last-decade thing.

Ursula:

Ursula: Oh, well, I can just throw it on the pile of projects I should really do more of...

SBC: Say... Digger strikes me that if she was human, she'd be about your age maybe... or am I wrong? Hm... no, she'd say something if she had a husband or partner at home, especially if there were kids.

Ursula: I dunno, Digger's ancestors might have done something interesting, at some point...

SBC: At what age DO wombat people have kids, anyway?

SBC: Whoa, they'll bug you for that, too.

Ursula: I think she's about twenty in human terms...she's living on her own, but she doesn't have any attachments.

SBC: Do wombat people... well... Digger seems really well-adjusted. Is there gender equality?

Ursula: God, I dunno. Assuming they live the usual human lifespan, probably late twenties to early thirties...

Ursula: Absolutely, and it'll come up.

Ursula: Wombats in my world are pretty much identical, except for the pouches and the suggestion of cleavage, and it's hard to oppress somebody who can swing a pick-axe just as well as you can.

SBC: I recall a quote from Ursula K. LeGuin's THE DISPOSSESSED: "A man is stronger, certainly, but a woman can work in the mines longer, they have more stamina. I've often wished that I could work like a woman."

SBC: I'm paraphrasing a bit, but that's how my mind works... Ursula, gender equality, a very different society, and mining could not have POSSIBLY failed to produce that quote from my memory banks.

Ursula: Hey, that sounds good.

SBC: Ah, yes, the pouches... which, if you don't have kids, has almost no interesting story function whatsoever.

SBC: A marsupial character in a sci-fi book I once read hid an important item in there, a key, but it was... unhygenic.

Ursula: Exactly. And if we wanted to get technical, marsupials have this neat trick where they can hold a fetus in suspended animation almost indefinitely, so all our issues about pregnancy and casual sex wouldn't apply either. Although I doubt that's gonna come up.

SBC: Digger's very much a problem-solver, it seems to me. One likes that sort of character... Barb certainly always does.

SBC: Ah yes... maybe Digger's pregnant right now!

SBC: If she's in this new location all alone for years, she could just... you know.

Ursula: She could be, but I doubt she'd choose to--err--go to term while so far from home.

SBC: If she got lonely. For her kind.

SBC: That's a good point.

Ursula: That's true.

SBC: Hope I didn't spoil anything there.

Ursula: No, actually I hadn't thought about it.












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