May is the official month to celebrate Women in Comics (though I don’t think there’d be any objection to making that a year-round fest), and Dark Horse is leading the way with several of their female comics creators featuring here on Bleeding Cool throughout the month. This week we talk to one of the most interesting women in comics (and that’s no exaggeration), a trained zoologist, former zoo-keeper, co-creator of original graphic novel Heathentown from Image/Shadowline, writer on Boom’s Planet of the Apes, co-writer on Dark Horse’s Star Wars: Legacy series, which focuses on female lead Ania Solo, and the upcoming Dark Horse series Deep Gravity. Corinna Bechko is all of these things and takes a no-compromise approach to following her own star.
Here she talks with Bleeding Cool about her career history, what she thinks of Star Wars: Legacy heroine Ania Solo, and why there are still fewer female creators in mainstream comics than there ought to be.
Hannah Means-Shannon: How did you find yourself writing comics? Was this before, after, or alongside other types of writing for you?
Heathentown_FC-copy_smCorinna Bechko: It’s not easy to make a living doing creative work, and comics are no exception. My first book was a horror OGN called Heathentown, published by Image/Shadowline, which I did with Gabriel Hardman. I had written prose up to that point but we wanted to do a comic together and this story seemed to lend itself to what we had in mind. After that we worked on several Planet of the Apes stories for BOOM! and I gradually found that commuting 3+ hours a day did not jive well with coming home and writing after doing a full day’s labor as a zoo keeper, which is a very physically demanding profession. I’ve been writing comics full time for three years now.
HMS: Did it occur to you that there were fewer women than men in comics when you first started looking for comics work? What were your thoughts on that at the time?
CB: Definitely! It’s hard to miss that fact, especially since I’ve been going to conventions for years so I knew my way around the comics scene even before I considered this as a career. That said, I didn’t consider it an impediment. One of the things I love about comics as a medium is the ability to tell all sorts of stories, and that means all sorts of people should be making them. I was excited to be one of those people.
May is the official month to celebrate Women in Comics (though I don’t think there’d be any objection to making that a year-round fest), and Dark Horse is leading the way with several of their female comics creators featuring here on Bleeding Cool throughout the month. This week we talk to one of the most interesting women in comics (and that’s no exaggeration), a trained zoologist, former zoo-keeper, co-creator of original graphic novel Heathentown from Image/Shadowline, writer on Boom’s Planet of the Apes, co-writer on Dark Horse’s Star Wars: Legacy series, which focuses on female lead Ania Solo, and the upcoming Dark Horse series Deep Gravity. Corinna Bechko is all of these things and takes a no-compromise approach to following her own star.Here she talks with Bleeding Cool about her career history, what she thinks of Star Wars: Legacy heroine Ania Solo, and why there are still fewer female creators in mainstream comics than there ought to be.
Hannah Means-Shannon: How did you find yourself writing comics? Was this before, after, or alongside other types of writing for you?
Corinna Bechko: It’s not easy to make a living doing creative work, and comics are no exception. My first book was a horror OGN called Heathentown, published by Image/Shadowline, which I did with Gabriel Hardman. I had written prose up to that point but we wanted to do a comic together and this story seemed to lend itself to what we had in mind. After that we worked on several Planet of the Apes stories for BOOM! and I gradually found that commuting 3+ hours a day did not jive well with coming home and writing after doing a full day’s labor as a zoo keeper, which is a very physically demanding profession. I’ve been writing comics full time for three years now.
HMS: Did it occur to you that there were fewer women than men in comics when you first started looking for comics work? What were your thoughts on that at the time?
CB: Definitely! It’s hard to miss that fact, especially since I’ve been going to conventions for years so I knew my way around the comics scene even before I considered this as a career. That said, I didn’t consider it an impediment. One of the things I love about comics as a medium is the ability to tell all sorts of stories, and that means all sorts of people should be making them. I was excited to be one of those people.
Catch the rest of the interview at Bleeding Cool!
