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Colleen Doran
Artist
W.i.g.: Tell us how you got started:
Colleen: I started out as a commercial artist when I was 15. When you're that young its like being in a pigsty with a big juicy chop tied around your neck. ...you've got a sign around your neck that says "exploit me." But as I got older I got a little bit more savvy. Then I ran into a new problem which I didn't expect, and that was being told that comic books are for boys and that it's difficult reading comic books drawn by a girl. One of the things I did learn to do really early on is I learned how to "draw properly" which means I can change my style radically from project to project. That helped me get a lot of jobs. I worked on Clive Barker's Hellraiser at the same time I did Walt Disney's Beauty and the Beast. As time goes on I very rarely get the stigma of the girl-artist, although A Distant Soil [from Image Comics] is very pretty and scrolly. That has ultimately worked to my advantage because, in a depressed comic book market like the one we have today, being different is an asset. [But] if I were to draw a superhero comic the way I draw A Distant Soil, they would kick me out of town.
You've been accused of drawing too pretty-why is that?
When I was a kid I daydreamed a lot about glamorous people and clothes and settings. There are plenty of adolescent male fantasies available in the comic book industry. It's nice to have a female fantasy. That's the way I feel about A Distant Soil.
What do you think about comics versus art by definition?
The only way to determine what is good art and what is bad art is what lasts and I'm not going to know this in my lifetime. I get a lot of criticism, actually, for being so academic in my style from people like Scott McCloud who wrote "Understanding Comics." He idolizes the iconography of the comic art form; the simpler and the more reductionist it is, the more he likes it. The reason why he says that's better is because it gives the readers the chance to project their own mental associations onto the blankness of this iconographic design. I personally do not believe that every reader in the universe is so narcissistic as to want to project themselves onto every design of a character they see.
Is A Distant Soil autobiographical?
The little girl, Leana, is a lot like me when I was a kid. When I was creating this series as a child, she started out as this buxom and voluptuous superheroine. As I got older, she got younger because I realized that I didn't have to take this ego-projection with me throughout my entire life. I could allow her to be the little girl that I couldn't be any more. That has actually been very liberating for me. Being 15 was very child-like in some ways but very mature in other ways because by then I was already a professional. I actually took a lot of the ways that I felt kind of exploited by being a very young professional and put them into [Leana's] character as someone who was exploited for her abilities as a kid.
Tell us about the Japanese invasion.
We're basically being hired to go there and be consultants and they want to know about the American market. [Japanese comics] have a wide variety of story material even if the art isn't as varied as we would like. But then again it's no more uniform than your average superhero comic here in America. [In Japan] every artist has many assistants. It's like the McDonald's of comics. However, they do have some real advantages. For example, they have 500 working female professionals who are full-time creators in the Japanese comic industry. We sure as hell can't say that.
What do you think about female power and sexuality represented in comics?
Women who pass judgement about sexuality of other women are buying into a Victorian ideal of feminine power; that the only way a woman can have power is to make herself as dowdy as possible. We are not living in the Victorian era where a woman has to swaddle herself in layers and layers of clothes in order to be taken "seriously." A man would have to be pretty dumb to give me a job because he thinks I'm cute. I had problems with getting groped and jumped by dirty old men, particularly when I was younger, but now I have a reputation for being somebody who would kill you.
I didn't wear make-up for a while, I cut off all my hair and it didn't stop any of it because it has nothing to do with how you look at all. It's about power. When women say "we need to be taken seriously," well then take yourself seriously. You can dress and behave any way you want but if you're a real feminist, you won't pass judgement on other women.
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