comics. I’ve talked before about the timing of sitcoms and the way you have to keep all of the fluff out. It revolves around advertising, so it’s all about keeping a really tight structure and keeping the viewer involved. The pacing of the jokes and the way you suck people in—that’s why I stick to the grid. It’s easy to read, and it’s fluid. I try to get really realistic pacing to immerse the reader. Megahex came out the year that I finished high school and started college, and I remember so many people who were never particularly into comics reading that book and getting into comics because of it. I remember having a copy and loaning it to multiple friends, and then seeing those friends buy their own copies of it. I definitely think a part of its success can be credited to it’s readability for people just being introduced to alternative comics. Yeah it became like a gateway comic. People say to me at festivals, “This is the first comic that I’ve read.” and I see reviews that say “I don’t read comics, but I got into this.”
How have you developed your technical skills as a cartoonist while on a constrained budget? Have you changed the materials you use over time? Watercolor is something I kind of learned on my own. I learned because when I was first dating Calvin he was really into watercoloring. I didn’t do any color. I was like, “No! I’m just doing black and white! Jaime Hernandez and Charles Burn’s style all the way! Never color! Fuck color!” I didn’t even like cross hatching or grays or anything. I still like that the best. But he was like, “Just try it!” so I bought a watercolor kit and was like, “Oh shit! This stuff is actually pretty intuitive. I was just messing around with it. After testing different papers and pens and stuff, I found that the way I did most of my paintings in the 2010s—it was always on Arches watercolor paper, with a pocket Pentel brush pen with watercolor on top of that. It was a look that worked really well for me and people really liked it. So I did that for a long time. I was making a lot of paintings in that style. Then I just got sick of it because it’s so labor intensive. I really love making paintings and constructing these sort of narrative compositions where
“I really love making paintings and constructing these sort of narrative compositions where there is a story. You don’t know exactly what it is, but something is happening. But those pieces are very time consuming.”
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