Women In Comics Month: Interview With Comfort Love

In honor of Women in Comics this March, PREVIEWSworld talks with Comfort Love!

PREVIEWSworld: Tell us a little bit about yourself! What are you currently working on? 

Comfort Love: I am one half of the award-nominated comic creating duo, Comfort and Adam. My husband and I co-write, co-draw, co-color, co-letter, and self-publish our own works - we are the two headed hydra of comics! Currently we’re working on our passion project, a story I started concocting when I was 13 years old, The Uniques. It’s a superhero story about growth and change that’s kind of like Teen Titans if it were an HBO show. The first collected edition is a featured item in this very catalogue!

PREVIEWSworld: How long have you been working with sequential art? What titles, companies, and creators have you worked with over your time in comics?

Comfort Love: I’ve been creating comics since I was a teenager. But I would say my true professional career didn’t start until Adam and I broke out on our own in 2008 with the first run of The Uniques. By the end of 2009, creating comics and self-publishing was our full time job, and we’ve been at it ever since.

Adam and I are best known for our series Rainbow in the Dark and The Uniques, and a short anthology series Uniques Tales which we produced and edited. In 2015, we released The Complete Guide to Self-Publishing Comics with Random House. It was a longtime dream for me as an educator and creator to be able to make the kind of how-to book I wished had existed when I was getting started. We were honored to have 72 of the top creators in American Comics, American Manga, and Webcomics give sidebars sharing tips and tricks they’ve learned along the way; people like Mark Waid, Adam Warren, Scott Kurtz, and Jill Thompson - it was an amazing experience!

Since doing our own books keeps us so busy, we only take on other small projects every now and again, contributing small pieces to comics we love like Mice Templar by Oeming, Glass, and Santos for Image, and The Dreamer by Lora Innes for IDW.

PREVIEWSworld: Did you have a mentor or hero in the industry that inspired you to pursue a career in comics?

Comfort Love: Both Adam and I are largely self-taught when it comes to comics. For most of our lives, we only had each other and the work of our heroes (Neil Gaiman, Brian Bendis, J. Scott Campbell, Adam Hughes, to name a few) to inspire us. We were lucky enough to meet and become friends with Bryan J.L. Glass (writer/co-creator of Mice Templar, Quixote, Furious, and various Marvel Projects), and he really took us under his wing, helping us navigate the world of comics as we were just starting out. We would not be the creators we are today without his wisdom and guidance.

PREVIEWSworld: In your opinion, how has the comic book industry evolved in terms of gender?

Comfort Love: When I think back on it, the change that’s happened is incredible. Adam and I started working Artist Alleys in the convention scene back in 2003 when there were basically no women to be found. And I’m not just talking creators, I’m talking actual attendees. People we’re baffled by my very presence, sure that I could only be a wife or girlfriend that was dragged there against my will. I had several people refuse to believe that I had any hand in writing or drawing comics. There were people who just ignored me entirely at the table, like I wasn’t even there.

But today - holy cow, it’s like night and day! There are women everywhere; at cons, online, and all over the industry. It’s mind blowing to see where we’ve come in 13 years. We’re being respected as creators, now, and there are so many up-and-comers waiting in the wings, it’s incredible. We aren’t where we need to be just yet, both in terms of gender and race, but we’re getting there. It’s starting to feel like the tide change is inevitable, and I couldn’t be more happy about it!

PREVIEWSworld: What stereotypes do you see surrounding women in comics? How could people of all genders go about breaking those stereotypes?

Comfort Love: When I was reading comics back in the ‘90s, just about every female character had big boobs, big hair, and wore next to nothing. And even though I believe that kind of character shouldn’t be totally snuffed out (diversity isn’t exclusionary), I’m happy to see that, as an industry, we’ve decided to include a little more variety.

The best thing we could do to combat this already dated stereotype is to just continue writing great female characters who look and feel like real people. Continue hiring female creators. Who better to write and draw real women than real women? The more we have truly deep and well-rounded female characters, the more it will just become the norm - common place in storytelling. And when there are more female characters overall, it won’t matter as much if a few sex-bombs or distressed damsels are involved, because they won’t be representing all women anymore. The more characters are out there, the more room there is for everybody’s favorites. We can all win!

PREVIEWSworld: How do you want to see women represented in comic books 10 years from now?

Comfort Love: Look out everyone, cuz the ladies are coming! We may not have as many female creators as we’d like to right now,  but give it ten years and we’re going to have more than we ever expected! I look around at the aspiring creators at Anime and Comic conventions I go to, and the girls often outnumber the boys 3-1. And this isn’t just at cons; people are seeing it across the country in schools and colleges. Women are going to become a more dominant force in comics just by having more numbers.

With this enormous change, which is happening right now and appears to only be the start of a larger, longer trend, the industry will continue to change. Someday, and not too long from now, I see a world where men and women are equally represented in all aspects of comics, both on the page and as creators.

PREVIEWSworld: If you could give advice to any aspiring editors, executives, writers, or artists, what would you tell them?

Comfort Love: The female market has only begun to be tapped, and the success of media like The Hunger Games, or Saga, or even the new Supergirl show says that women, men, boys, and girls can and do enjoy reading and watching stories about kick-ass ladies doing awesome things! My advice would be for us all to work together, both as women and our male advocates and supporters, to show that this isn’t a hostile takeover but a positive stride that brings benefits for everybody in every kind of story. I include the push for diversity of race and sexual orientation in this, too, because I think our efforts are linked and have more commonalities than we have differences. Only by working together, holding each other up, and trying to always push for positivity and inclusivity – even of stories we might not want to read personally – can we make this tent big enough for all kinds of creators and fans to find the stories they love most in comics. Variety is the spice of life, and the more we include that variety the better and stronger all of us will be.

PREVIEWSworld: And lastly, are there any up-and-coming women creators who you would recommend readers check out?

Comfort Love: Oh gosh, Lora Innes, Penelope Rivera Gaylord, Chandra Free, Danielle Corsetto, Jennie Breeden, Nina Matsumoto – there are so many! As many awesome ladies as are already doing big-time mainstream work, there are even more ready to hit the ground running. Them winds, they are a changin’ everybody. And when this ship blows into port, I think everyone is going to be all the better for it.

See more Women In Comics Month interviews in our special section on PREVIEWSworld!