CREATORS SPEAK OUT
We asked 16 of the top gay creators in the comic industry their thoughts, and here’s what they had to say.

What is it that first drew you to comics, as either an occupation, or a source of enjoyment?

Howard Cruse: I enjoyed telling stories and had a talent for both drawing and writing. The connection to comics was natural. Other forms interest me as well, like playwriting, screenwriting, and text-based fiction. My desire as a grown-up has been to participate in the marketplace of ideas using whatever art forms were available to me. For the most part, that's been comics.

Jose Villarrubia: They were cheap, easily available and imaginative. The hobby led to the profession.

Eric Shanower: Ever since I was little I wanted to write and illustrate my own stories. Comics are a natural way to fulfill that desire. I can't remember NOT liking comics, so I don't really have any idea what first drew me to them.

Robert Rodi: What I loved, and continue to love, best about comics is the combination of serial fiction -- being able to follow characters over a period of years -- and the sheer sensual appeal of ink on paper.

Greg Fox:The beautiful artwork, coupled with gripping storytelling. It's a unique combination, and something I immediately felt drawn into completely.

Devin Grayson: The relationship between Batman and the original Robin, Dick Grayson. I had a normal corporate job and was working on a normal Great American Novel and had never read a comic book in my life when, channel surfing one afternoon in my then San Francisco apartment, I caught an episode of the Batman: Animated Series on TV and was immediately riveted. I wanted to learn more about those characters, and to do so, I had to follow them into their primary medium: comics. And yes, absolutely, the Homo-erotic subtext didn't hurt.

Roberta Gregory: Well, I read a lot of comics as a kid, and my father wrote and pencilled Disney comics, so they were something that people actually did, in my mind, rather than things that just appeared on the racks at the corner store. So that was kind of early on to have both factors in my life. I wrote and drew my own little cartoons and strips with animals with word balloons over their heads, so that was just something I always did. I thought the stuff I did, later on, was too weird ever to be published. I did have gay characters in them (well this was when I was in middle and high school, just before Stonewall, but I had a male sheep and goat who were AWFULLY good friends, an alien guy from outer space who had a rather intrusive relationship with one of his colleagues who was a subordinate and not entirely thrilled with the idea, but what could he do, etc. Nothing even really that out front, but *I* knew what was going on with them.)

Brad Rader: I was drawn to comics in 1971, as a 12 year old, before I hit puberty or had any inkling of my future sexual preference. There were no gay characters in comics at the time. However, this was the era of 'Relevant Comics’. I remember thinking, since Blacks, Indians, Jews, Women were all striving to take their rightful place in society, what would be the next taboo group to do this? Why not Homosexuals? This remained merely an intellectual question for a couple years, till I discovered I could jerk off successfully to my own drawings of Nick Fury and Jonah Jameson going at it.

Ariel L Schrag: comics are the most successful way for me to tell a story.

Tommy Kovac: I’ve always loved drawing. I had every single Peanuts Gang anthology when I was growing up, and I used to draw these horrible cartoons with a dog and a cat. Then when I got older, my drawings started getting weirder and darker. I was really into Edward Gorey. I also think the "Moomintroll" books by Tove Jansson (a children’s series from Finland) influenced me heavily because They’re illustrated by the author with these awesome, really expressive line drawings. I’ve read each one about 20 times, obsessively. It wasn’t until I saw "The Land of Nod Treasury" by Jay Stephens, though, that I realized there was some really different, funny and interesting stuff being published in the comic book format. I’m talking about Stephens’ FIRST anthology for the Land of Nod. I loved it because the drawings looked so freely done, like something you’d do in Algebra class to make your friends laugh.

Sharon Cho: Women in skintight outfits beating up men. Just kidding.

Seriously, I was a sickly child, spending probably two-thirds of my childhood sick in bed. Back then, nothing made me feel better than to read comics and see myself as a superhero, being strong and powerful and caring - all things I couldn't really do in reality because of my health. I remember having dreams where Superman flew just outside my window and waking up and not being able to tell whether I lived in the world of superheroes or not.

As an occupation, let me clarify here that I'm an agent first and foremost. I represent artists in the comics industry. As a side interest, I also write comics - Nobody.

I became an agent because I felt that artists, while creatively talented, might need help in their business deals. To me, I was just bringing art to the world at large and making sure the artists didn't get screwed along the way.

As a writer, there are some stories that work much better as comics rather than prose of screenplays. Most of my stories are written in prose form (in fact, if you talk to Alex Amado and Charlie Adlard, they'd probably tell you my scripts are more like prose). But for Nobody, I wanted the images to tell one story and the words to tell another. The only medium that could easily accommodate this was comics and hence, Nobody became a comic book.

The review in Popimage illustrates how the words and pictures together form a different story than either words or pictures alone.

Marc Andreyko: I remember being really into the heightened reality of comics from an early age. The colors, the art, the characters. As I have said in many an interview, I learned to read at 4 from spider-man comics and Sesame Street.