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Interview: Lea Hernandez Few people have entered the industry with as stunning a debut as Lea Hernandez who in the first year as a writer/artist was nominated for an Eisner as Best New Talent for Cathedral Child. The Diva as she is called is now unstoppable and the next thing from her will be in Transmetropolitan #31 drawing the dreams of Spider Jerusalem. How would you describe CATHEDRAL CHILD and CLOCKWORK ANGELS? Dry factual: The first two of a series of books and stories set in a mythical Texas. High
Concept: Personally: I've written two books of the sort that I wanted to read when I began seriously (as in braving comics speciality shops circa 1983) reading comics. In 1983, there was just about nothing that wasn't superheroes to be found in comics stores. The few finds I did make, like the original run of Matt Wagner's MAGE, CLOAK AND DAGGER with Rick Leonardi art, the early issues of AMETHYST, PRINCESS OF GEMWORLD, AMERICAN FLAGG, Hempel and Wheatley's MARS, and Robert Loren Fleming's THRILLER, I wanted more more more of, and there just wasn't more. Things are far, far better now, and the market will support works like mine: quirky, personal, dense and romantic. Considering your background, was the next step doing manga? If you mean did the manga lettering lead to my drawing manga-influenced work, the answer is no, you have it backwards. I wanted to draw manga-styled books long before manga was being brought to the US. I couldn't get paying work doing that, but I was so madly in love with manga that I thought working on the lettering and retouch of them was the next best thing. Boy, was I wrong about that shit.
I can say that the pages (somewhere around 5,000 now) of manga retouch that have crossed my table have taught me something about drawing though, as I could study them and see what worked and what didn't, and see how many different artists solved the same problems in storytelling, and what succeeded and what didn't. 5,000 pages also taught me a lot about sound effects and lettering, and how to do both very, very fast and good in my own work. But, drawing comics wasn't an extension of lettering and retouch. Lettering and retouch is what I did to support my comics drawing habit. It didn't help me get my novels published. You have some very strong views about women in comics, how they tend to be ignored by the market in general, do you think their status in the industry will grow in the new millenium? All I can do is hope that it will, so there will be some shining day ten years from now, when the level of coverage of women creators has gotten the whole way to the 1970's. Okay, joking aside, I really don't know. A lot of this depends entirely on the women themselves. They aren't going to get covered unless they seek it out, then pursue it. Every time a woman sees a man being praised for something she's done first or better, she needs to write the person who wrote the article and point this out. And I don't mean, "Hey, micro-dick, if you weren't such a myopic fucking knuckle-dragger and could see past the length of your own cock, you'd notice I'd done this already." I mean: "I noticed you covered Pete Madras' use of anime idioms and magic realism in his forthcoming series WARSTALKERS. Did you know my own books also use these idioms and settings and were published last year and this one as well, and have enjoyed critical acclaim and brisk sales? I'd love to send you copies." (And have copies you CAN send out!) This doesn't always work. But it does nineteen times out of twenty. Women cannot be afraid to promote themselves. The other part of this question is about where women get recognition. In some venues, they will only be recognized for their proximity to an already-famous man or a tit job. That's pathetic, but they're not the only venues. Forget them already, and focus on ones where the energy won't be wasted. CATHEDRAL CHILD is a stunning debut for a newcomer into the field, where did it all come from? The
very, very farthest back starting point was an idea I had for a
science-fiction re-telling of Hans Christian Andersen's "THE LITTLE
MERMAID". Did you consider doing it in color or would that have cost too much? Never. Color would add another six months of work, and a huge amount of cost. CC and CA were meant to be black and white. Maybe someday, it'd be nice to do like Shirow Masamun did in GHOST IN THE SHELL, which was to start chapters in color, then gradually move to monochrome. What will we see from Lea Hernandez, come the third millenium? Bear
in mind this list is mutable, but here you go: What do you think of the idea of comics libraries? Is this a trick question? I love the idea. What would you say if I told you that I found 2 copies of CATHEDRAL CHILD in a comics library here in Copenhagen? SQUEAL! Are they dog-eared and look much-loved? They will be soon enough. How long did it take you to break into the industry? It
took me a couple years to get a job lettering something that wasn't
my own work--that was working as an assistant to Wayne Truman on
XENON from ECLIPSE/VIZ. I got the job because someone let
slip where Wayne lived, and I found out he was 20 minutes from my
home, so I got his number from directory information and called
him up. That does demand that you really want to be in the industry, doesn´t it? I simply could not do anything else to make my soul happy. Writing and drawing feeds my psyche, the way prayer or painting or gardening feeds others'. Would you have selfpublished CATHEDRAL CHILD if IMAGE had not picked it up? Not
just no, but fuck no. At least not as a paper comic. In 1997,
I made up my mind that was the last year I was pitching CATHEDRAL.
I think I was going to start an online version, to make an end run
around the hellishness that is self-publishing a comic in the U.S.
market. Besides, I had no money to print, and starting a comic company
isn't as easy as walking into a bank and getting a loan, no matter
what you've read. For one thing, banks don't make loans to publish
books and magazines, they're a poor risk. They don't make them without
this thing called collateral, which is something you own, like a
car (a good one), a house, property, or a business.
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