Kevin Church is a part time employee at my comic store, Comicazi. He also is a comic book writer for both print and web. I’m all for recognizing the indie writers, and so took a few minutes to conduct this awesome interview you are about to read! Thanks Kevin for your time ^_^
written by Shampoo150

1. What or who got you into writing comics, and did your writing career start off with comics?
There’s a convoluted path that leads me to writing comics. I’ve been an active comics reader since middle school or so and was a semi-active, derivative-as-hell prose writer for a large potion of that time. About a decade ago (god, that feels weird to say,) I started scripting comics as an exercise, generally tossing aside the material pretty quickly, but learning a lot about beats and timing, and taking things I’d learned from guys like Alan Moore and Grant Morrison and merging it with my own sensibilities, which may be more in touch with certain prose writers like William Gibson and James Ellroy.

In 2002, I started blogging ( http://www.beaucoupkevin.com/blog ) and in 2004, I became an obnoxious dick about comics in general on the internet, which caught some people’s attention. This included Ross Richie, publisher at BOOM! Studios, who hired me to do a webcomic for them, and webcomic begat a couple of remixes for their “What Were They Thinking?!?” humor books, which begat some “Cthulhu Tales” work, then “Cover Girl,” and now some stuff that I’m putting together for BOOM! as well as things for other publishers.

(I should blame Mike Sterling at http://www.progressiveruin.com for convincing me that blogging about comic books would be a good idea and getting me into this whole mess.)

2. Tell us a little bit about your web comic, “The Rack”
Short version: It’s a comic strip about a comics shop, located at http://www.therackcomic.com, and updated four times a week.

Long version: “The Rack” came out of “Nitroglycerin,” the promotional webcomic that I did with Benjamin Birdie for BOOM!. He and I, despite having very different tastes in a lot of areas, are remarkably sympatico in how we work. He came to me and said “Let’s do a “Penny Arcade” for comics” and I created a four-page bible for an ongoing sitcom about people in comics retail, which probably wasn’t what he was thinking, but we’re both very happy with it. “The Rack” become its very own beast in that we try to avoid pandering to the demographic too often and stick to doing character-based things that are funny or interesting whether or not you know comics well. The best, most positive feedback I get on the strip comes from people that barely read comic books, but like what we’ve done with our cast, which means the world to me. (That said, I absolutely loved it when Carla Hoffman, a retailer friend of mine, said they print the strip out and post it fairly often.)

3. You’ve recently done a 5 issue comic called, “Cover Girl”. Where did the idea for the story come from?
The core concept of “Cover Girl” was created by Andrew Cosby, who came up with the whole “female bodyguard helping an actor who’s in over his head” idea and plotted out a first issue before deciding he was too busy making awesome television with his Sci-Fi Channel show “Eureka.” I got a breakdown of the opening chapter, really liked what I saw, and dove right in. He gave me great feedback while leaving me to my own devices for the most part, and the end results got consistently good reviews, which shocked the hell right out of me.

4. How do writing web and print comics differ? Do you have a preference?
It uses a very different set of muscles – sprinting versus a marathon. With a webcomic, particularly using the strip format that we do on “The Rack,” every three-or-four panel installment has to have a setup and delivery. Honestly, I think I like to make things more difficult because “The Rack” has three formats: the traditional strip, the single-panel “Hee-Haw” gags on Wednesdays, and employee picks on Tuesdays. This lets us scratch our various nerd-itches pretty well. (That sounded horrible, didn’t it?)

With a print comic, I’ve got more space to make an impact. This benefits, by giving me more space to make an impact with the readers, even if it’s only eight pages, but it also leads to more bloat if I’m not careful. You still have to be very concious of each panel’s worth and not waste the reader’s time. I didn’t think of “Cover Girl” as a 120-something page graphic novel; I thought of it as five individual issues, each containing key story moments. One of the things I really want to do (and I’ve just submitted a proposal to BOOM! for it) is a “2000AD”-style finite serial that uses six pages per chapter per issue. It’d end up being a 72-or-so page story on its own, but with a pulp-influenced bam-bam-bam rhythm because of my need to make every chapter pay off.

That said, I do like multi-part stories in “The Rack,” where I build an ebb and flow between gags and character moments.

5. “Cover Girl” got mention in Wizard magazine, did this affect your confidence in your writing at all?
Not one bit. The praise I got from other writers, and readers, however, did.

6. In the comic book industry who are some of your influences and why?
Obviously, I’ve got to mention Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, and Warren Ellis. Each of them brings a huge amount of knowledge from outside of comics and uses it effectively on the page, which gives people a very different reading experience than work from guys like Geoff Johns and Brian Michael Bendis (as talented as they may be at engaging readers that want continuity-heavy superhero titles.) I also really like the “I’m in this to make myself happy” attitude that Garth Ennis and Joe Casey bring to the table, akin to Tarantino’s attitude with film.

I also get quite a lot from the indie comics end of things: Paul Grist, Jim Rugg, Dash Shaw, the Hernandez Brothers, Chris Ware, Ashley Wood – they’ve all taught me something.

Then there’s Kirby. I am not exaggerating when I say I learn something new every time I read a comic written and drawn by Jack Kirby, even the “lesser” works like “Silver Star” and “Captain Victory.” The man’s confidence in his own work, when combined with his imagination and willingness to just go for it serves as an inspiration.

7. You collaborate with different people on your projects, who has been your favorite person to work with?
That’s like picking a favorite sibling. That said: Birdie and I have worked together for over two years at this point and the lines over who made what choice get really blurred and I don’t think either of us really care, as long as we’re happy with the product. He puts in a tremendous amount of effort drawing the strip and I appreciate that as something I could never do unless we wanted to turn it into an all-stick-figures sort of affair.

I’ve been kicking around a lot of ideas with an old friend of mine, Josh Krach, who’s going to be my writing partner on a creator-owned thing we’d like to see get launched by the middle of next year if possible. He’s known me for over 20 years, so I kind of have to give him props, too, don’t I?

Also, everyone at BOOM!, from editors like Mark Waid to the Chip Mosher in marketing also deserves no small amount of attention for helping me make a “name” for myself.

8. Are any of the characters you write based on yourself or someone you know?
I think every writer puts a bit of their POV inside a character or two within their works, but there’s no direct correlation between myself and somebody on the page. I think the characters that are the most fun to write are the ones who aren’t like you at all.

That said: “The Rack” wouldn’t exist without me having the best, smartest bunch of friends on the planet. They inspire, constantly.

9. What advice would you give to aspiring comic book writers?
1. Three things you have to do every day: read something besides comics; write something besides comics; go outside and live.
2. Buy copies of David Mamet’s “On Directing Film” and Robert McKee’s “Story.” These were recommended to me some time back and while both relate directly to movies, they can really help a comics writer process the on-page process.
3. The web makes it very easy to get projects in front of eyeballs. Use it.
4. Create things that belong to you. Look at Robert Kirkman’s success and see how much of it comes from titles he owns and developed.

10. Do you have any upcoming projects? If so, can you tell us a bit about them?
I do, but I don’t talk about them until there’s an official announcement. I’m way superstitious about that, particularly in an era when somebody can throw “So, where’s that Giant Robot Porn Magnate miniseries you promised?” directly into my face a couple of years down the line.

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