Women In Comics Month: Interview With Jennifer Hayden

In honor of Women in Comics this March, PREVIEWSworld talks with creator Jennifer Hayden! 

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

Jennifer Hayden: My latest book, The Story of My Tits, came out in October 2015.  Currently I’m finishing up a diary comic called Rushes (available online at thegoddessrushes.blogspot.com), which I kept for the last three years or so, documenting the process of finishing The Story of My Tits.  I’m also starting a new graphic novel, which seems to be taking me for the first time from autobiography to fiction.

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

Jennifer Hayden: I’ve been drawing and writing original comix for a decade.  I started in 2005 by plunging into The Story of My Tits, which was just published by Top Shelf (now an imprint of IDW).  Along the way I joined the Act-i-vate webcomics collective in Brooklyn and developed Underwire there as a monthly strip, which Top Shelf collected and published in 2011.  Then I started another short-form webcomic called S’Crapbook (also available on Activatecomix.com), while I was finishing The Story of My Tits.  At the same time I also started posting my diary webcomic, an excerpt of which I self-published (Rushes: A Comix Diary) in 2013.

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

Jennifer Hayden: I was inspired solely by my own experience to draw comics, having loved them as a child and rediscovered them in the form of original graphic novels while I was recovering from a mastectomy in 2004.  I didn’t know anyone who was making comics at the time.  I just knew as soon as I saw the format that this was the way I wanted to tell my stories.  A few years later, a friend showed my work to comics rock star Dean Haspiel, who invited me to join Act-i-vate and mentored me from then on.  I owe him so much.  He and Chris Staros of Top Shelf made me feel that what I was doing really mattered.

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

Jennifer Hayden: I’ve only been involved professionally for the last six years and I only know the indie comix scene, not the superhero scene.  Women have always made amazing independent comix—Lynda Barry, Roberta Gregory, Marjane Satrapi, Julie Doucet, Gabrielle Bell, Julia Wertz—in fact, that’s where my reading started as I was discovering graphic novels.  Later, when I started going to conventions, I felt in no way ignored because I was a woman.  Being middle-aged and living in the suburbs was more of a factor than my sex.  But I do hope to see more women of all kinds creating comix and contributing stories that a female as well as a male audience can relate to.  This must already be happening, because I see more women at shows all the time.  The superhero world is going to be slower to change, I’m afraid, because more money is involved and women are perceived as a financial threat.  Ridiculous, because the broader the spectrum of work being created, the larger your audience and the bigger the money pile.

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

Jennifer Hayden: In superhero comics, I just see boobs and butts and tiny waists and costumes for strippers and that’s cool if you’re horny, but it’s not grownup.  If we’re writing for grownups, then we’re writing stories that are universal, which is what art is.  Not “men’s comix” or “women’s comix”, but comix for all of us who are human, who work hard, have sex, usher children into the world, grow old, and think about what it means to be alive on this earth.  We all desire power, love, and understanding.  After attending an all-girls school as a kid, I had a stereotype of men as sex-crazed idiots and women as the only gender that could really think, work hard, and produce art.  Slowly I was proved wrong.  I thought only women would relate to my comix when I started, but I have met the most wonderful male artists, writers, publishers and readers, who consider my stories to be as true for them as for anyone else.  Let’s all keep raising the bar together.

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

Jennifer Hayden: Well, in superhero comics, they’re going to have to wise up about what women wear to work.  Generally I’d just like to see women represented as the human beings they are, as the hero of the story, struggling to acquire individual power in the face of opposition and after many adventures, offering the reader what wisdom they’ve gleaned.  We all live the same life arc.  Let’s make it into art that all of us can share.

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

Jennifer Hayden: Editors and executives: use your powers for the forces of good, not evil.  Tend your creative people like a farmer tends the crops.  Writers and artists: tell us your stories, what it’s like to be you, to be alive.  Find the story in your heart and then find the heart of the story.

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

Jennifer Hayden: Absolutely!  Leslie Stein is a mind-blowing talent.  Her new book Bright-Eyed at Midnight is groundbreakingly original and so full of emotion.  Also check out: Kate Beaton, Mimi Pond, Joyce Famer, Rutu Modan, Vanessa Davis, Nicole Georges, Mari Naomi, Andrea Tsurumi, Laura Lee Gulledge, Sarah Glidden, Ellen Lindner, Ulli Lust, Lilli Carre, Miss Lasko-Gross, Summer Pierre, Glynnis Fawkes, and Connie Sun.  And always dig back into the past for the artists who paved the way: Julie Doucet, Dame Darcy, Roberta Gregory, Elizabeth Gilbert, Dori Seda, Aline Crumb, Diane Noomin, and Pheobe Gloeckner, to name a few.

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