Unpublished Interview with me

I had a guy ask me for an interview like half a year ago. I answered a couple of questions, but it seems the plan to publish it never came to fruition. So, I have edited it a little for clarity, and let me put it here, maybe it will be interesting to some of you. It is not very long, so hopefully it is not too boring :)

INTERVIEW WITH MRS. Goanna G.

Q: You’re now on your fifth comic in the Mrs. G series, what initially triggered your idea to make comics?

Mrs.G: Yes, five so far, and the sixth comic book should be out in the next couple of months or so. I always wanted to tell stories, there is something interesting in the possibility to invent worlds, events and people. I never thought I would be writing comics though. Only when Patrick O'Donnell showed me some sketches he did based on my photos, and then I saw that he has done a short comic, I started thinking that this might be a real possibility. The idea that I might actually "dream up" something, and then I could see it in form of images, was too amazing to pass. So, we started collaborating with Patrick, and our collaboration ended up being my third comic book - Cartel's Carnal Chemistry.

Q: That’s awesome you dove in so spontaneously, the chemistry between you and Patrick’s collaborations is what drew me to your work. His drawings remind me of something that’s be in a old school Eros comic (obviously I’m a comic nerd lol). So were you always a writer?

Mrs.G: I love Patrick's style! It is really an honor to work with him. I'm also very happy with all the amazing artists I am collaborating with - P.R.Soliver, Christian Culicelli, R.R.Dos Santos, Nimesh Morarji. As for writing, I was interested in it - I would read books about writing like Orson Scott Cart’s “Characters and Viewpoint”, and would watch online lectures about writing, like Brandon Sanderson’s ones. But I never sit to write anything longer, only few months ago - I finished my first short novella “Mummy Issues”.

Q: Were those lectures about writing useful to you when writing comic book scripts?

Mrs.G: Some of it is applicable to comics, but not everything given how short the comics as a form are, especially if you want to tell a full story in a single comic book - You have let's say 30 pages, and on each page you might put from zero to maybe... two hundred words? That is a very short story - you can't do very much character development there, for example. And if you want to add erotic scenes which don't have nudity/porn, like I do, you have to find a way to weave those into the general story somehow too - lots of the work on comic book scripts I think is about frugality and simplification. I cut things out as much as I can.

Q: How do you come up with ideas for short stories, where do you gather inspiration from?

Mrs.G: The ideas for the stories are determined a lot by the nature of my character “Mrs.G”. From one side, she is someone who loves her husband, and doesn't want to have anything to do with any other man or woman, so she is kind of sexually conservative, and from the other side I need to bring her into erotic situations. To do that I actively think about non nudity/non porn situations in which Mrs.G would end up in unintentional erotic poses, and would get aroused too. This is one of the basic things I think about when trying to think about new script - I usually think of multiple scenes like that, and then I try to weave it into some form of mystery/detective story. I'm a big lover of Agatha Christie and A.C.Doyle. In fact in the next book - Mrs.G issue #6 will feature Sherlock Holmes.

Q:How does it feel to have a comic book version of your self have a life of its own?

Mrs.G: Inserting yourself into your works is usually seen as a sign of bad writing. But inserting myself into the comic was inescapable conclusion of how those comics came to be. And it also it turned out nice for me from author standpoint because it allowed me to play with some meta stuff - I made the comic book Mrs.G the author of the comics, which then led me to the overall story arch which will be revealed little by little through individual comics. By the end of #8, the whole saga will become pretty epic. And though I try to keep the comic book version of me very authentic both in character and visually, still it does provide one level of separation, which makes me comfortable with putting Mrs.G in situations and poses which I would definitely not want to be in in real life, lol. So, you are getting the two sides - the real and the imaginary to be so close, that depending how you focus on it, it makes it possible to see it in one way or the other - Yes, this is Mrs.G or - No, this isn't the real Mrs.G. Kind of like that rabbit-duck image :).

So, I don’t think comic book Mrs.G will ever be fully separate from myself. Not because of vanity, but I just think it makes it a more interesting character when you know it is based on a real person, and I also think a big part of what makes an art piece interesting is the artist and the process. And lots of my readers seem to agree with this.

THE END