Production 3C

Cathy Leamy is a respected comics artist from Boston, MA. Her mini-comic, Geraniums and Bacon, has had five issues. Here two most recent minis Greenblooded and Reggie & Brian and the Lousy Nickname She has appeared in several book-lenth anthologies, including The Girls Guide to Guy Stuff, put out by Friends of Lulu, and I Saw You…, which is based on Craigslist missed connection ads. She is also a frequent contributor to the Boston Comics Roundtable Anthology, Inbound, which the group releases on a biannual basis. Aside from mini-comics and anthologies, she also recently co-wrote the historical text for Marvel’s anthology Women of Marvel: Celebrating Seven Decades.

I actually knew Cathy’s work long before I met her. In the world of mini-comics, her work sticks out as confessional, funny, and thoughtful, frequently all at once. Her style is instantly recognizable, cartoony and fluid, and always paying attention to how comics can best be used to tell a story or make a point. While she clearly has a lot of nervous energy, she also is one of the most warm and giving people I’ve met. From how I’m writing, it should surprise nobody that I’m a fan, and I was very excited that she accepted my offer to be the first Production 3C interviewee.

C. CHÉ SALAZAR: One of your minis was actually the first mini-comic that I picked up (Invitation to Madness), so I wanted to ask you, what was the first mini-comic that you ever saw?

CATHY LEAMY: Oh wow, that’s great! I’m so happy to pay forward the mini-love like that. This is a tough one because I was attending the Boston Zine Fair for a couple of years before I started making my own minis, and there’s a huge crossover between the Zine and the mini community, so I know I picked up a bunch of zines, and I’m trying to remember the first one that was an actual mini-comic. You know, I don’t remember which one exactly it was, but one of the first ones that I picked up was Anne Thalheimer’s Booty . She’s part of the Trees and Hills Collective.

SALAZAR: Yeah, I really like that mini.

LEAMY: I love her series. I’ve been reading it ever since that first one that I picked up years ago. I picked that up at the first Zine fair that I tabled at. It was very cool to see other people do that kind of auto-bio approach, and it was just funny as heck.

SALAZAR: Did you set out to make mini-comics when you first started making comics, or did you just need something to do with your comics once you had made them?

LEAMY: The first comic I made for distribution among friends were actually more like a maxi-comic. It was tabloid sized, folded-in-half, stapled, maybe. I don’t even remember. I was going off the comic model that I’d seen, regular comics that we all read, and I just assumed, “Okay. It needs to be this big. It needs to look like this.” I had never seen mini-comics before, and it wasn’t until I started going to the Zine Fair that I started seeing how people worked in a smaller format. It made the art tighter. It made the package much neater. That’s when I started making the mini-format ones. Honestly, it was a bad transition because I tried to take those original maxis and shrink them down and the proportions just didn’t work out. After that point, I started working at the right size. That was the best avenue for getting it out. I saw other people doing it, and that’s how I worked on getting my comics out to other people rather than trying to go through actual publishing streams.

SALAZAR: Speaking of publishing streams, I know in your day job you’re a programmer, so I know you’re computer literate. Why did you go the avenue of mini-comics instead of web-comics? You did do some illustrations for a web-comic that somebody else had written.

LEAMY: It was Planet Wifey, by my friend Clarence Smith Jr.

SALAZAR: So how did you come to work on that comic, and why did you stop doing it?

LEAMY: I came to work on it because I know Clarence through our mutual friend Kevin Church, who’s also a webcomics writer and creator. We just bumped into each other at a convention, Comicazi Con, and he said, “Hey I have this idea for a comic. I like your artwork. Let’s try it out.” And it was a really interesting process actually. I’d never worked with a writer before, and I think it was one of his first stabs at writing comics, so we learned so much just sort of muddling through how the script should work, and who had what part of the creative process. I really enjoyed doing the strip, and it was a lot of fun to experiment with somebody else’s script, but eventually, real life and a day job just became a huge pressure. Also, with the webcomic thing I found myself scrambling at the last minute to get stuff done for deadlines, and it was a really stressful way of living, and not the way I want to live. I really liked it, but if I could schedule my time better, I think that would need to be a major factor.

SALAZAR: Next I want to ask you about influences. You mentioned that you like auto-bio comics, but what auto-bio comics do you read, and also what non auto-bio comics have influenced you?

LEAMY: I feel like I learned more about auto-bio after I was already doing auto-bio. The first ones that really influenced me weren’t straight up auto-bio. It was comics like Too Much Coffee Man and Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, which aren’t flat out auto-bio, but when you read them, there’s a lot of personal true confession going on. Another one that actually was auto-bio was Evan Dorkin’s Dork, which has a mix of fiction and auto-bio, and it really stuck with me, taking your stories and making them visible like that. It was already something that I’d been doing all my life, but it was really cool to see other people doing it in a mass media format, not just in their diary.

SALAZAR: When you started seeing stuff that was more straight-up auto-bio, did that change how you saw your work? Or did it not really have any effect at all? Had you already developed your own voice?

LEAMY: No, I’d say it impacted me just for seeing what was out there, and looking for the niches that people don’t fill. I feel like a lot of auto-bio does just swoop around the same ground over and over again. There’s a lot about love, and being frustrated with love, and all that sort of thing, and it just makes me think, “What’s a story that I can tell, that people would like to read, that isn’t like what’s already out there?” Then I end up telling stories more about travel, or kooky real-life things like the Filene’s Basement bridal sale.

Originally by Cathy Leamy. All rights reserved.

SALAZAR: You also use that story to reflect not just on how crazy it is… Well I don’t want to say that marriage is crazy. Well, marriage is a little crazy.

LEAMY: There’s some craziness to it. It’s true.

SALAZAR: You do use that as a way to jump off to other kind of reflections. It’s not like Harvey Pekar, who more leaves those other things implied. For you it’s a way to think through something.

LEAMY: Yeah, in fact you know who has been a really influential auto-bio comics person that I’ve really looked up to recently – Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home memoir. I’d been reading Dykes To Watch Out For for years but this is the first time I’ve really seen her do a huge solid thing of auto-bio, and for me this is the first time I’d seen somebody taking a story and then re-approaching it from different angles and reinterpreting it from different angles. I like that it wasn’t just a straightforward, “This happened. This happened. This happened,” but she really ruminated on a lot of what was going on. With the Filene’s Basement bridal sale story, for example, I’m trying to take it in that direction, where it’s not just a straight up laundry list of exactly what happened, but also making you think of different implications, different angles. Why am I telling you this story beyond giving an itinerary of what just happened?

SALAZAR: Two related problems, at least how I see it, in autobiographical comics, is either being sort-of boring or being self-involved. Early on in your Geraniums and Bacon series you deal with those things by just acknowledging them, but that’s a trick that really can only work for so long, so how do you avoid it now? How do you hash through a story and think to yourself, “This is something that people would actually really like to read.”?

LEAMY: No, you’re right. A lot of the early Geraniums and Bacon stuff was recycled from very early auto-bio comics that I was doodling in a notebook throughout college, and eventually I thought, “I want to put these in a mini, so let me redraw them and readdress them.” So they do reflect somebody coming into awareness, still pretty self-involved, and not necessarily knowing, not what would appeal to others, but what other people in the world cared about hearing about, and might respond to.

SALAZAR: With the one about religion you feel how you’re not only working through the subject but working through the embarrassment of “Is this relevant?” I think it is, and I think it’s a really good comic, but it also has that turn where you didn’t quite feel comfortable just telling a story about yourself yet.

LEAMY: That religion story has actually gotten a lot of response from other people. People have come up to me and said “I feel exactly the same way. That’s so true.” Honestly, it was a very freshman in college, just reading things on the internet for the first time kind of exploration, and there wasn’t really a story to tell behind it. It was just lots of thought and lots of website reading over a long period of time. I’m trying to get away from that and trying to tell a narrative. You know, something self-contained and condensed, and not just ramble. I guess maybe I have some anxiety of feeling that I take up people’s time so I want to make it worth their while to listen to me. I know that’s definitely a factor in my life, so I think I kind of challenge myself more and more as I do the minis to think, “Okay, take a step back. Do people really care about this? Is anybody going to understand what I’m saying? Would I tell this to my friends right now over dinner?” That’s kind of the metric.

Originally by Cathy Leamy. All rights reserved.

SALAZAR: In a lot of your comics you do make references to history or sociology or philosophy that probably not everybody is aware of. Do you ever worry about talking over people’s heads, and do you have a method to prevent that, or is it something that doesn’t occur to you and it’s “This is me. This is who I am. I know this stuff. I’m going to write about it.”

LEAMY: I feel nowadays Kate Beaton has completely bulldozed all those concerns away.

SALAZAR: Okay.

LEAMY: Yeah, definitely. I love history. I love historical stories. I have a lot of British history in me, way too much British history, in my brain. I am such a bad American citizen for barely knowing the history here. I’m so ashamed.

Again, I like to remix history. I like to present facts from different angles. There are times that I take a step back, like if I were showing this to somebody else, could they get the joke without understanding it? It reminds me of Alan Moore’s first volume of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. You didn’t have to know who the characters were to enjoy a ripping yarn. It’s just a cool adventure story. If you know the characters, it made a different dimension, but it wasn’t required, and I try to approach stories like that. Every now and then, it gets a bit too obscure, but if that’s the case, I make it a one pager and then call it there. I don’t make people sit through too much, like the Buddhist thing at the end of Geraniums and Bacon #5. I have no idea if anybody got that, but it was sitting in my head for years.

SALAZAR: The next couple of things I wanted to ask about is your last couple of minis. So Greenblooded is about ecological feminine hygiene products. And Reggie and Brian and the Lousy Nickname is a children’s story. I think these two show the full spectrum of what you do. There’s kind of the two opposite ends of the spectrum. I wondered if you could talk about your different approaches, between doing something that’s not only informative and autobiographical but purely for adults, and something that is for adults and children but is mainly aimed at children.

Originally by Cathy Leamy. All rights reserved.

LEAMY: Sure, I can give you the background on both of those, and maybe that will go towards answering the question. For Greenblooded, honestly, my whole life, I’ve been drawing cartoons to explain things to people. A lot of times I just see myself as a translator, and the way I translate is not through music or art, but through cartoons. It’s how I spread messages. That’s what drove me into web development as a career – the whole idea of just being able to get that message out to tons and tons of people. Doing it with comics, you make it entertaining. So even in high school I was drawing cartoons for Academic Decathlon about the World Health Organization just to explain it to my teammates.

SALAZAR: So just as an aside, cartooning is how you explain your own thoughts to other people?

LEAMY: Not just my own thoughts but any kind of facts. I just have a natural tendency towards putting things in analogies or translating them somehow so that other people understand them, and comics are a great medium for teaching like that. They’re very engaging. You can make visual metaphors. You can make people have a good time while they’re learning. There’s just so much potential. It’s wonderful.

So Greenblooded, it’s a subject that had been on my mind for a long, long time. It really did irk me that whenever I picked up some kind of environmental book, nobody seemed to be talking about eco-friendly feminine hygiene. For a while I’d just been planning on doing a blog post and then I went to a Zine Fair presentation by Marek Bennett, from Trees and Hills, talking about how he uses comics for education. Both his own comics to educate others, and getting his students to draw comics as a way of conveying messages, and it was inspirational as heck. Honestly, it was exactly the kind of thing I’d been doing a lot in my life but hadn’t thought of like that. So I figured, “Let me take the Greenblooded topic and draw it as a comic instead.” I feel like it’s much more engaging, much more fun as a comic, that just as a standard blog post, which I think would be just skimmed and passed along like the rest of the internet. Pebble in a stream.

SALAZAR: That comic, I actually think it’s one of your funniest comics. It’s very informative, but there are parts of it that are really funny.

LEAMY: It was a blast to draw. I definitely got inspired by educational comics that I’ve read throughout the years, like the Horrible Histories series. It’s this British history series that shows the disgusting sides of history but with cartoons, and all those little asides and riffs on whatever they’re talking about, that’s the sort of thing I drew my inspiration from.

Originally by Cathy Leamy. All rights reserved.

So Reggie and Brian, speaking of British history stuff, the inspiration for that book was so mercenary. The problem was I went to the Maine Comics Arts Festival, and I didn’t have anything to sell to children, and it was a really child-friendly convention. So I came home thinking, “That does it. Next year, I need to have an all-ages book that I can sell to kids.” I’m tired of having to say, “No, no! Don’t pick that up. It’s about GWAR. Don’t do that!” So I came home and started brainstorming fun ideas: a girl with a herd of cats, something on the moon, blah, blah, blah. Then I thought of a fisherman with a monster pal, and what it made me think of was the town where my grandparents live in England. It’s very near the coast, and it’s very near all these old fishing towns with lots of history, and it brought me back to my youth. It brought me back to the first comics I read, which were British kids’ comics, very much in the style of Reggie and Brian, with repeating characters, sort of like Saturday Night Live for kids. They would have a character who has a theme and then every week they would get into a little wacky scrape and it’s usually one page long.

SALAZAR: What are the names of some of these comics? I’m actually not familiar.

LEAMY: The one that I used to read is called The Beano, and the one my brother read is The Dandy, so those were the two that I grew up on. The Beano is fantastic. I have the worst soft spot for 1980′s Beano stories. It’s like when people think back on the Green Lantern they read as a kid. They’re like, “I know it was crap, but it’s wonderful.” I feel the same way. So I was trying to channel that sense of humor in the story, and that kind of sense of… I don’t know. A bit Britishness? I didn’t want to name the place exactly. I tried to bring in as many real life elements as possible to make it a very grounded story, and at the same time friendly and fun. Kid-friendly but not jut kid-focused, not just slapstick, something that adults could enjoy too.

SALAZAR: So in a way Reggie and Brian is also autobiographical.

LEAMY: Sort of, yeah. That’s true. Not necessarily the story but very much the elements. It does bring me back to my youth and honestly a lot of my heritage.

SALAZAR: Going back to Greenblooded for a second, I know you mentioned that you’ve managed to get that book out through Zine distribution. The world of mini-comics is sort of insular. At the most depressing times it feels like artists reading other artists’ work, like there’s nobody outside who’s looking at these things. But from the least depressing perspective, how do you try and grow your audience when you’ve got this thing that many people aren’t aware of?

LEAMY: I feel like everyone in the world has a huge soft spot for comics. A lot of people grow up reading comics. They remember comic strips. They remember comic books as a kid, so when you come to somebody with a topic that they know about, but done as a comic book, a lot of people perk up immediately and show interest. I think a lot of getting the interest outside of comics is approaching sources and saying, “Hey. I have this little pamphlet, if you want to call it that, or I have this little comic book. Are you interested in it? Are you interested in distributing it? Can I give you a few free copies just to hand around your office?” It is a matter of footwork and taking a step back and thinking, “Who will be interested in reading this besides my friends, and besides other mini-comics people?” One of the things I find is that if you don’t think about it as just a mini-comics thing, and you take a step back and think, “Okay, I have this thing that other people would like to read” – it’s pretty much not thinking of it as a mini-comic, but just thinking of it as a fun message that people would like to read and approaching it from there.

Greenblooded has had a lot of success through the zine distribution. Microcosm, they keep emailing me, saying, “Hey, we need some more copies. Hey we need some more copies again.” It’s been a really popular one, and it’s a good topic and a fun book.

Originally by Cathy Leamy. All rights reserved.

SALAZAR: Even though mini-comics can sometimes find readerships outside of mini-comics, there’s not that much interchange between mini-comics creators, until they come out with their big book. It’s fairly unusual to see an interview.

LEAMY: That’s true. The Comics Journal blog runs the Minis Monday column. I really like seeing minis get more airplay, so to speak. It can be a pretty insular community that creates great work, but it’s sometimes hard to get outside the community. I remember somebody told me that a pretty big portion of SPX’s attendees are the tablers themselves, which makes me sad. How do you get out and get the comics to other people and get the respect that they deserve?

SALAZAR: I think every mini-comics creator becomes an island by themselves. Other than the Roundtable, there’s not much of an exchange of ideas, at least not where a creator is profiled. Even blogs that talk about mini-comics, they just tend to talk about the comics themselves. There’s not much talk about process, or influence, or how these things get exchanged.

LEAMY: There’s not always a step back and examining some of the stuff you brought up like formats and how you get distribution, and how you decide what quality your book is going to be. You’re right. A lot of the people who do the reviews, I don’t know if it’s good or bad that they focus on just the content of the story. I don’t know if that’s cool because minis get respect on par with other comics or if they’re ignoring a lot of what makes minis unique. It makes me think of all the panels I’ve seen at conventions where it really is just about the creator and book-length publications. I’m trying to think if I’ve seen a minis panel at a convention before. I don’t know if it would be just preaching to the audience. People might not really bother going to one, but that’s a really good question.

SALAZAR: I think if you’re going to reach an outside audience and instead of, like you said, thinking of them as a calling card, if there was something that you could point to and just say “This is what this culture really is.” A panel like, I don’t know, “Everything you wanted to know about minis but were too afraid to ask.”

LEAMY: That would be really cool. But yeah, for a lot of people, minis are the stepping stone to real publication. They’re the calling card that’s a cheap giveaway on the table when nobody’s gonna buy their graphic novel, or it’s what you take to a publisher and say “This is what I’m capable of,” so it doesn’t necessarily have to be something substantial. It could just be something to show your art, or just a quick little thing you did for fun, which makes it frustrating if you’re looking for content in them.

SALAZAR: That’s sort of the double edged sword, right? That anybody can get published. It’s exciting, because I’ve come across minis that you would never be able to read or see as anything but a mini-comic. It can be wonderful. There are people who are playing with the form like the Pandora’s Box mini [by Ken Wong] or Kenan’s fold comics. Also, people who, like with Booty, are not necessarily great artists, so you’re not going to get picked up right away by an indie publisher, but you might be a great storyteller and really funny. It’s a way to get your artwork out there. I think that’s worthwhile, but for everybody else, it feels like a stepping stone, but because it feels like a stepping stone, it’s not that satisfying.

LEAMY: Satisfying is definitely the word I would use. I find that I buy fewer things at conventions now from just buying minis that I thought were going to be great and feeling burnt because they weren’t satisfying. It’s hard to tell people, “Hey, put more care into this disposable thing that you don’t actually care about.” I don’t really know what the mini-comics community is. I know I see it when I go to conventions like SPX, and I know there are people with long histories who have been doing this sort of thing for a while, but it’s tough to find that kind of discussion. Where the crowds are who like doing minis, and are comfortable staying with minis, who aren’t trying to make them into a pitch or a stepping stone for something else?

SALAZAR: For my own minis, they’re more playing with form, but over time there’s been this realization that I just want to create comics, and what attracted me to mini-comics was that they were a way to create my own comics and have a way that I could work through something for myself. I’m moving to webcomics now because if you want to get your artwork out there, that’s a better way to approach it, and work through some of the formal stuff.

LEAMY: I think you’re right. If I could achieve with webcomics what I feel like I get out of mini-comics, I would probably be doing more webcomics too. I don’t know, the expectations behind webcomics feel like they’re so high, that I don’t want to commit to that, but it makes me sad because you do get a much wider audience through doing that. Potentially. Potentially a wider audience. There’s a lot of web-comics to fight against.

SALAZAR: A lot of your stuff is really dense. I think that’s why people know it. Shelli Paroline, who’s also part of the Boston Comics Roundtable, and part of the editorial board for Inbound, she sometimes talks about seeing your minis and being excited by them. I’m paraphrasing here, but I know she’s said that it was something that she wanted to do when she saw your work. It’s like anything else. If you really care about something and work on it, it will be satisfying. I think that’s something that people get out your comics, that they are satisfying, in what most people who don’t read mini-comics think of as a humble format.

LEAMY: You’re right. I think it’s easy to dismiss mini-comics because they’re so small and short. And my opinion is that things are satisfying when they’re dense and they don’t just take thirty seconds to read, mini-comics and mainstream comics alike. I like it when I put it down and feel like I’ve invested time in it, and I’m taking something away, that I didn’t just breeze through it. That’s something I try to do with my mini-comics, making them substantial, making them not a quick simple read, but it’s also a personal preference for me. I don’t like reading comics where there aren’t any words, where it’s just the art, because I like words. I like dialogue. I like things that really make you stop and read, and for me, it’s so easy to just skim through the artwork.

SALAZAR: But words..are..pictures, Cathy!

LEAMY: You just blew my mind, man!

SALAZAR: But seriously, that’s the focus of a lot of my work, and sometimes I feel like I’m doing something interesting, but other times I’ll look at something that I worked on for hours or days and it’s like, “Why did I spend so much time on this? This isn’t interesting at all. This is like bad concrete poetry.”

LEAMY: It does also remind me of what I’ve talked about with my friend Charles Snow. We just have different interests of what we want to make comics about, and what’s satisfying to one person, is not necessarily satisfying to somebody else, and vice versa. So I’m sitting here saying, “Oh, I hate comics without words so much.” On the flip side, there’s somebody who loves comics without words so much, and will gladly take all of mine off my hands. If you make the comics you enjoy, I feel like your passion will shine out through your comics, and it’ll engage the right people, as long as you put the effort into getting your message out. It will reach the right audience, somebody will react to it, and even if it’s just a small audience, those are people who will just be struck by it, and it’ll stick with them forever. It’s such a Hallmark sentiment, but I feel like it’s so true and it’s what I’ve found. Even with my own experience, thinking of comics that I’ve read, maybe a mini-comic or a zine here or there, where there’s just one tiny grain of an idea that has just lodged itself in my brain and in my heart, and maybe only five people ever read this and appreciated it, but they did.

You can read Cathy Leamy’s work and buy comics at Metrokitty.com.

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Click here to read Part 2, where Cathy and I do a complete 180, and talk about superhero comics.