TALKING WITH THE CREATORS OF THE UNIQUES
I had the pleasure of meeting Adam Withers and Comfort Love at this year's Mega Con in Orlando, Florida. I was introduced to them by Rich Bernatovich, creator of the Sentinels - a self-published super-hero book that I've been a reader of since MOCCA Art Fest'06. Rich suggested that I would enjoy the Uniques, the comic created by Adam and Comfort. And he was correct. Adam and Comfort have melded their senses of art and storytelling into a fine debut comic that has me excited for more. Presented here is an in-depth interview that we conducted via emails in an attempt to learn a little more about these up-and-comers and the comic world they are building. Enjoy.
PART 1: CARTOONS, COMICS AND THE JOYS OF YOUTH
PETER JOHN RIOS: Heroclix. Battlestar Galactica. He-Man references. Cats named Obi-Wan and Annie-Kin. And parents named "Jim" & "Lee". From reading your bios on your website, I imagine you both were destined to be comic book creators wouldn't you say?
ADAM: First, may I applaud your pun-aptitude sir. Bravo. I'll never look at my parents the same way. But yeah, I think saying we were born to make comics would be fair. I was six years old when I made up my mind that I would be a comic artist, and I was an uncommonly committed little kid. Prior to that I was determined to be a paleontologist, but when I realized I'd never see an actual, living dinosaur I made the switch.
COMFORT: Well, for me I was not as young as Adam was when I said to myself, "I want to do comics." I had wanted to be an artist since I was very young, and I loved all the action/adventure shows like He-Man, She-Ra, Thundercats, and of course, Ninja Turtles. But it was my devotion to the X-Men cartoon in the 90's that brought me into the world of comics.
ADAM: Yeah, it might be better to just say we're life-long nerds who happen to also be storytellers. What better way for nerds like us to tell stories than comics?
COMFORT: Our stories, anyway.
PJR: Adam, six years old and you already knew? What were you reading at that time that fired your imagination? I don't remember when I started reading comics, but even at six it was still only the Richie Rich books for me.
ADAM: I can remember the first comic I read in vivid detail. It was a Daredevil issue that was given to me when my family went with friends on a boat outing. He was fighting a villain called Turbo. It was a fight issue, but at the end you saw a shadowy guy in one of those tall-backed leather chairs watching the whole thing on video and plotting against Daredevil in secret. I read that thing so much that the cover fell off.
But the first book I actually collected, starting almost immediately after that, was Green Lantern. I dug into the half-off back issue bins at my local shop and bought all the old Green Lantern Corps issues, from when there were only like seven GL's and they were all on Earth. Daredevil got me excited about comics, but Green Lantern got me hooked.
PJR: It seems the X-Men cartoon - which even to this day is a guilty pleasure of mine - brought many girls into comics. Comfort, I know of other girls who took the same path. What was it about that particular cartoon that captured your attention?
COMFORT: What got me into the X-Men cartoon were the characters, the human relationships they shared, and the fact that the girls on that show got to kick a lot of ass! Back in the 80's and the early 90's it was still rare to have female characters that could actually fight and not just get captured every episode.
ADAM: That's really true. Boys could find a lot of characters to relate to in any cartoon you chose, but most girls all the way up into the 90's were primarily there to be rescued.
COMFORT: Exactly! But not the X-girls! I was amazed by how strong, powerful, and sassy Rogue was - all juxtaposed with the tragedy, and the sadness she carried with her from her past, and the isolation of never being able to touch someone without causing them great pain.
ADAM: Rogue was tougher and more capable than Gambit was. And I can't remember a time she ever needed saving. It's what drew me to her character, too - that strength and depth she had.
COMFORT: I cried along with Cyclops when Jean died after the Phoenix Saga. I had never heard of the comics, and had no idea how that story would turn out - I was just heartbroken that she had died! There was even a story showing ordinary construction workers being angry with Mutants in part because people like Colossus took away their jobs, which hit home for me, growing up in Michigan. What other kids show dealt with stuff like that?
It didn't hurt that the action on the show was so intense. But that intensity came from what felt (at least to my 13-year-old mind) like drama that established a reason to care about the outcome of a fight. Action for the sake of action, that was okay. But action spurred on by a real story? Now that was engrossing.
PART 2: COLLEGE, A CHANCE MEETING AND AN IDEA FORMS
PJR: It's clear the comic bug bit you both early and strongly enough for you both to want to further your passions later in life through college and self-publishing. But did you go into college thinking "I want to create comics" or, as I imagine some people do, did you go into college thinking "I'll go to learn more about art so I can eventually fulfill my secret desire of creating comics!". Were comics an acceptable form of "honest work" from those around you: friends and family - were they supportive?
COMFORT: After I picked up my first comic - X-Men #56 with Rogue on the cover - and even though I didn't have much of any idea what was going on (it was the Onslaught crossover at the time) I loved it and I knew this was what I wanted to do… but most of the other people in my life didn't quite feel the same way.
My parents at one time told me that they actually feared for my well-being if I went into comics. They thought that the fans were 'strange' and that I might be stalked or kidnapped or who knows what - although, their attitude has done a 180 and they're a couple of our biggest supporters.
As for friends, I didn't really have any who read comics. It was always me alone riding my bike down to the local comic store and searching for hours through the back issues to find stuff I liked.
ADAM: Man, being into comics is a lot harder for girls. All of my friends dug comics - or at least were cool with the idea of them, you know?
COMFORT: Yeah, well there was no such thing as 'fan girls' when I was growing up. And boys thought I was weird and didn't know how to react to me. By the time I got to college I had decided that I was going to do comics - but I was going to try and take a different approach. I was highly influenced by David Mack at the time and I was disillusioned by a big changeup in the X-Men creative team. It was sort of the first 'reboot' that I experienced, where suddenly the whole team (right down to character personalities) changed and all but invalidated much of what I'd been reading up to then. And frankly, it just got bad and boring.
So when I got to college I went about learning, in as much detail as I could, every other medium under the sun. I almost had two full minors (Graphic Design I had and Fine Arts I almost had) along with my major in Illustration when I graduated. Something that I'm glad of since it was those other skills that helped keep us afloat during the beginning of our freelance career. But in doing so I drifted away from my traditional drawing roots. I was too easily influenced by other people (until Adam came along) telling me that comics weren't a viable option, or that they weren't 'real art.' I've had to do a lot of catching up with my pure drawing skills since collage to make up for that.
ADAM: Yeah, Art Schools are rarely encouraging of comic art. That's changing a little bit, now, but you've still got Illustration departments run by older professors who want that illusion of that 'Fine Arts' prestige and look down their noses at comics. But that's what it's like all through the art field; everybody wants to look down on every other style of art because they know what's good and those other so-called artists are just posers. I see it in comics, too, as Western Style artists scoff at Manga and Eastern Style artists ridicule American comics, and it drives me crazy.
I think we're both really glad we went to art school, because we learned a lot of skills that have been invaluable in our work now - but most everything we know about making comics we had to learn on our own.
But I got luckier, in that my parents were both really supportive of me. I grew up in Flint, Michigan, and my Dad worked for GM my whole life. It was a miserable job, and really hard on him both in terms of the work he did and all the periods of lay-offs as the industry struggled. He always encouraged my sister and me to find something we loved to do and make that our career, rather than just taking some job we hated in order to make money. That was always taught to me by both my parents - better to be happy and rich in family and friends than miserable and rich in stuff and things.
So, as opposed to Comfort, I went into college knowing comics were my goal. I directed every project I could toward learning things that would help me become a better comic artist, taking a lot of independent studies and minoring in Graphic Design to learn digital color and pre-press. It took a bit to get going, but ultimately I was working harder than most of the people in my classes, so the professors were a little more willing to let me do my own thing.
PJR: To this day I bet some of my family still think of my comic reading as a "phase". And while I had a group of comic reading friends as a kid, I still had moments like Comfort - of walking miles to a comic store to pick out my favorites and then stuffing them in my shirt when I got home so my mom couldn't see them. They became a very private thing for a long time. Maybe in a way having the internet nowadays is actually a blessing for younger comic readers: they learn at an earlier age that it's okay to read whatever you're reading and that there are others out there like you.
And beyond all that, it sounds like all of this; your inspirations, your "history", etc., was what made coming together as friends, a couple and then husband and wife almost inevitable? While we all may relate to the comics you read or the path you both took to further your art, not many of us can say we have a partner that completely understands our passion for comics; reading, creating or otherwise. I gotta say that's pretty damn cool!
ADAM: I'd have to agree with you. I wouldn't trade this for anything. And maybe it was inevitable, but I'm not so sure about that. There are a lot of pairs of close friends out there who would never think of each other as viable romantic partners. What we have is rare and special, and that's unfortunate because I wish more people could experience it.
COMFORT: Yeah, we spend just about every waking moment together, either hanging out or working.
ADAM: Mostly working.
COMFORT: Mostly. But we're best friends, and that's fine with us. We've been together for eight years this October, and our 5th wedding anniversary is in June, but it still feels fun and fresh and new.
ADAM: We first met at college, and we were both at a big table where mutual friends were hanging out during a break between classes. I saw this illustration somebody had done of the Endless characters from Sandman on the table. Now, I had only just discovered Sandman at the time, so I was really excited to share my new passion for this great series with whoever had made the illustration. When I found out a girl had done it, I couldn't believe it. It's so rare to meet girls who like comics, and I was deeply intrigued.
COMFORT: At that time I was almost 20 years old and had been reading comics since I was 15 and had yet to find anybody who shared my passion for comics and that I could connect with on such a deep and mutual level. I had recently decided that I was going to get a boyfriend.
ADAM: Note her wording. Comf is like that - she thought it out and decided 'I think it's time I had a boyfriend.' But it isn't like those snobby girls, it's just that she's really that adorable.
COMFORT: I had several candidates picked out, but when I met Adam I knew he was the one I wanted to be with most. I just hoped that he would like me too. And as luck would have it he did.
ADAM: I really did. We started dating just a few weeks after we first met.
COMFORT: And it was awesome. Not only did we play kissy-face like other young couples do, but we also spent hours and hours talking about any number of subjects. It's our ability to talk and hang out together that makes our relationship as strong as it is today.
ADAM: We just had so much in common. We liked the same movies and music, we were both inspired by the same artists, and more than that - we liked what we did for many of the same reasons. People always comment that our art styles are so similar that it's sometimes hard to tell us apart, and that's in part because we were emulating the same people long before we met each other, and were trying to become the same kinds of artists.
COMFORT: Yeah, I focused a lot more on painting and Adam was a strict penciller, but we were both most interested in characters, emotions, and getting expression and feeling into the people we created on the page.
PJR: You know, from your responses so far, would I be wrong in saying that Adam is more the "emotional" part of the team and Comfort the "rational" part? Is that too easy of a label?
ADAM: It's a little broad, but I don't think labeling me as the emotional one and her the rational one would be too far off-base.
COMFORT: Yeah, that's pretty much the dynamic. I am an intense pragmatist, and Adam is very passionate and emotional. Not that we don't both switch roles from time to time - but that's generally how it goes.
PJR: Since you brought it up, and I promise we'll get to Uniques soon, your art styles ARE very similar. Actually, it
reminds me of the distinctions my mind makes when I look at the Kubert Brothers side by side. You know they come from the same background and you can see incredible similarities, but it's all the subtle stuff that makes them different and wonderful. Can you both quick list your art inspirations - comics or otherwise?
COMFORT: You can pretty easily boil it down to these guys: Chris Bachallo, J. Scott Campbell, and Adam Hughes. Generation X and Gen 13 were huge books for us, like they were for probably a lot of people around our age reading comics in the 90's, and those two styles seemed so fresh and new and interesting. Adam Hughes was a big one for Adam in a drawing sense, but I look to him more for inspiration in color. His naturalist style is so beautiful.
ADAM: Absolutely. For myself, I'd add Kevin Maguire to the list. Justice League International was one of the first books I read, and Maguire and Hughes' ability to draw expressive, emotional characters was something I tried to emulate even as a little kid - before I knew what it was I was emulating or why!
COMFORT: And I was drawn to the painters more, first with Alex Ross but much more strongly with David Mack. The first time I met him in person, it took two tries to go up to his booth and shake his hand. He was just so cool - and I'll admit it, I cried just a little after I met him.
ADAM: She was like those teenaged girls when the Beatles were performing. It was one of the most endearing things I'd ever seen.
COMFORT: Yeah, but I wasn't nearly as crazy frantic. It was a one of those 'I don't mean to cry, but I am' things. Anyhoo, I think our other source of artistic inspiration is animation. From Disney movies like Aladdin to Mulan, and the surge of Anime that took place in the 90's. The movement and emotive abilities that strong animation can achieve is something that gets us going even to this day. We tried to bring that animated flow to
our style and our comic.
ADAM: Not only that, but good television also. Series like Rome, The Wire, Six Feet Under, Battlestar Galactica, Journeyman-- these aren't so much art inspiration, but storytelling. And when you get right down to it, we approach art through story rather than the other way around.
PJR: Putting all of those things together (the similar art styles, your goals as creators, who plays what role in the creative process at any given time, the comic connections and the endless hours of discussion), what's the secret origin of the idea that would become known as the Uniques! (See? Told you we would get there!).
COMFORT: The Uniques was a story I had in my head as a young girl even before I started reading comics. It grew and changed as I got older, until one fateful night in a hot tub--
ADAM: Bow-chica-wow-wow…
COMFORT: Oh, honey, I love you. *ahem* Not like that. Adam and I were up late telling each other our different ideas for comic stories, and really talking about them for the first time. I was talking about Uniques and how some of the adult characters would reflect back to a time when they were part of a team of teen heroes. I only meant it to be seen in brief flashbacks, but Adam said that it was too important for that.
ADAM: Well, yeah - she was talking about all these trials and tribulations these people went through to get where they are, and I knew that that was a story we needed to see in order to really understand that growth. I started asking about who those other teen heroes were, what the team went through, how they came together, all that kind of stuff.
COMFORT: And I had never even really thought about it, but I was so excited and inspired by the ideas we started batting back and forth that by the next morning I had the seeds of this whole new set of stories in my head. We both had this plan to start our comics in college as school projects, using the excuse to buy us time to work on them. I wrote a first issue and started doing pages, and even published a few little vignettes in a school publication for the club Adam and I founded; The League of Sequential Storytellers.
ADAM: But we both decided we were too far below the skill level we wanted to tell our stories. We needed more experience, so we put our comics on the shelf and went freelance for a while. We were freelancing before we even graduated, trying to get as much real experience as we could so that when we did come back to our original ideas, they could be as strong as we wanted them to be.
COMFORT: So a few years ago, after a long, long period of showing our portfolios around and getting great reviews, but no jobs, we started to get the feeling that we would have to create a comic of our own before any publisher would ever take us seriously.
ADAM: Until you've been published, you can't get published, you know?
COMFORT: Not that we haven't been published, but just not in the right places. That and we were getting a little tired of working on pitch-books for series' that went nowhere. We did a bunch of issues of comics that never materialized, trying to find a way to break in. Eventually, we just decided that if we were going to go through all this work and all this trouble, we might as well do it on our own story.
ADAM: And by now we had worked out our style of collaborative comic art. It mostly grew from the necessity of having to juggle a gadzillion freelance projects at once just to pay rent and keep fed, but we found we really liked it and wanted to bring that fusion to a comic of our own. So we sat down and looked at my comic idea and her Uniques, and decided (based on a lot of factors) that hers was the strongest story to start with.
COMFORT: We started plotting the story for real in 2006, started writing scripts later that year. And finally, in November of 2007 we took a chance, putting most of our other freelance work aside, and started drawing the first issue.
PART 3: UNIQUES THE COMIC
PJR: J.Scott Campbell, GEN13, Disney, anime, Six Feet Under and hot tubs. Six degrees of the Uniques. And yet all very telling once you look at the final product. It's a handsome final product for a first issue from "newcomers". It has a great first issue hook, introduces a huge interesting world and yet still delivers a smaller personal story for a reader to follow. So the time and patience you allowed yourselves - to ensure you felt capable enough to deliver the story that deserved to be told - pays off.
With all the attention to detail both in the first issue and in the various character pages on your website, the sense of worldbuilding is very strong. It's not just Uniques the Comic, it's almost Uniques the Experience. Which is an especially smart move: provide more content, for free, for those interested enough in seeking it out to fill gaps, expand the universe, etc. Not to mention it gives you a little breathing room in-between creating new issues. When you put the first issue and the online content together, we have characters that have been around for decades, legacy characters, a timeline of events in how the Uniques changed the world around them, struggles between Uniques and Typics and much more.
The character that intrigues me the most when putting all this info together is Virtue. You mention on your Director's Commentary podcast the backstory of Virtue's creation. What could easily be seen as a Superman-archtype becomes something more when filtered through where you grew up and your parents' experiences. Can you elaborate on that more?
ADAM: Virtue is an interesting character because he comes from a concept that both of us had batted around for a long time, once again back to our youth. The name comes from a character I had created, and when Comfort was describing the idea of her Superman-ish character for The Uniques world, I suggested that Virtue could be a nice fit.
COMFORT: We went into this knowing that we wanted to build a whole world, with history and legacy. It’s one of the things we most love about some of the big comics, and the reason I called the book ‘The Uniques’ instead of ‘Telepath’ or the name of the team. It’s about more than just these people. But while our central characters will get a lot of face-time and be able to break all kinds of expectations, the supporting cast used archetypes a lot more heavily, just so the reader could more immediately get a grasp on the role some characters would take.
Virtue was one of those. You can look at him and see the similarities to Superman or Sentry or any of those iconic Men of Steel types, and you get him right away. Now, as we go, you start to find out how different and individual he is, both through his dialogue and his past, but we didn’t have time to spend explaining all that right away.
ADAM: We grew up in Michigan, as we’ve said, and I lived in Flint until I went to college. Growing up with a father in the auto industry, working in a factory, I saw something in the man he was, the town we lived in, and the struggles we had that was never reflected in comics. Many times, comics idealize rural America and the Big City as the only two options for heroes. Gritty, ‘real’ characters come from The City, while wholesome, earnest ones always grew up on farms. Nowhere was the shop-town, Blue Collar experience used as a motivating factor for these characters.
COMFORT: You could boil Virtue’s character down to the question of what would happen if Superman had been raised in a shop-town instead of on the farm, though there’s a lot more to him than that. He first became ‘Virtue’ in 1939, and would have been born in 1918. His father was part of the first sit-down strike, his mother was one of the ‘Rosie the Riveter’ type women during World War II. So he comes from a very different place, and has more of an Everyman touch.
ADAM: By now he also has an exhaustion to him. He just feels tired. He’s long since realized that he’s stopped getting older, and he’s had to watch so many people he loved die. Now he’s watching the children of people he knew when they were only children try to take on this same job. It’s that weariness and steely determination that draw us to him. His age, and his normalness.
COMFORT: He’s Bruce Willis with powers. Die Hard 1 Bruce Willis, not crazy-action-ü ber-hero Die Hard 4 Bruce Willis. He’s the kind of guy just about every blue collar man dreams of being and connects to on so many levels.
PJR: He became the other POV character for me as I was reading. Obviously, there's Telepath - as she fills in the gap of her missing two years (you gotta read it to find out why folks!), we're learning with her. Learning about what has happened in the past two years, how people are picking up the pieces of their lives, how the Uniques are handling their "new" status. And yet there's Virtue as well - the outsider, the keen observer. And I found I wanted to know his perspective as well. Because he has the info that Telepath wants and certainly the info the readers would want. And then there's a third player along those lines: Motherboard. She's the Typic - the normal human in all this - that is right smack in the middle of it all with a unique perspective for all sides. It's an interesting triangle.
ADAM: It is. And I always liked that Virtue is one of the most normal guys in the
book, even though he's arguably the most powerful and certainly the one who's been around the longest. He's got a perspective that nobody else could have. But Motherboard - she's the most down-to-earth person we have. The other kids in the team, as teenagers often do, get their heads filled with so much idealism and hopes and wishes, and they want this team to become such a grand, romantic thing… and then there's Motherboard to keep things practical and grounded. She's the living embodiment of one of our design goals for the whole series - finding the normal within the fantastic.
COMFORT: It's really one of the things I most love about the book - different people's perspectives on similar events. The most boring comics, or any stories for that matter, are the ones where everyone ends up having the same voice, as if one person is just talking through everybody. Experience, genetics (even just regular human ones), upbringing, and culture all have a part to play in how you interpret and react to the world around you. Having a chance to see and read about the variety of people, hopefully will allow our audience to get a deeper and richer idea of the world we've created.
PJR: Since the Uniques is story driven, what kind of stories do you have in mind? Will it always be super-hero-centric, can we expect smaller personal stories, multi-chapter epics, one-offs, etc? How far reaching are your plans for the series?
COMFORT: You could compare the story structure to something like Neil Gaiman's Sandman, where you're following one central story, but there is a lot of room for diversions and side-tracks that may seem like one-offs or short stories, but that all deeply contribute to the ultimate ending we have coming. We have a lot of one-shots planned that explore the history of characters like Virtue, Speed and Ghost (who you'll meet in Issue #2), and more characters coming than you can shake a stick at.
ADAM: But they're all personal stories. We start with this group of seven teenagers, and will follow them into adulthood and, eventually, up into their 40's. We'll see this generation grow and see the next one coming up behind them. While it will be super-hero centric in that the book tends to follow people with powers, our real focus is always on people not costumes.
COMFORT: In the short-term, we're going to see these kids acting their age. That means there will be a lot of mistakes and a lot of possibly uncomfortable situations - but let me also say that it means a lot of fun too. And even though these are kids, anybody who knows a teenager or remembers being one is aware the kinds of things you can get into, or how quickly the world can expect you to grow up.
ADAM: Yeah, there is an irony to the fact that, in writing a book that depicts teenagers realistically, we're creating a comic that kids the same age as these characters might not be able to read. We put a Mature Readers warning on our website, and it's because we are not going to shy away from any situation. We're going to hit all the big taboos - religion, politics and sex - and handle them in a mature fashion. One tricky spot is the swearing. People use bad language. It happens. And nobody curses more frequently or more creatively than teenagers. More than that, there are people who - although nice enough people - say some really offensive things sometimes. Creating a world that feels real means not adhering to some Politically Correct playbook, even if a vocal percentage of people would balk at super heroes acting or talking in such a way.
COMFORT: Now, let us be clear, when we say we want our world to feel 'real,' we don't mean that the way some companies do, where being 'realistic' means that nobody can have a good day, and it's just one horrible tragedy after another. Good things happen to our characters, and they have great successes. They also have horrible failures, but there's a balance, just like in life. And just like in life, they will cross lines and do things that can't be taken back.
ADAM: I'll take that one further and say that there will be no resurrections in our book. Dead means dead. And there will be no whitewashes or reboots or retcons. We are committed to everything that happens in the story, and everything that happens (good and bad) will have repercussions that they will deal with even to the very end of the book.
COMFORT: We do have a definite ending planned. The best comics have a beginning, a middle, and an end. If you try and stretch out a story forever, you run into a lot of problems. And we're setting up that ending from the very first issue, too. You'll be able to look back and see the seeds we were planting way back when.
ADAM: Long story short (too late), we are going to have all kinds of stories in The Uniques. The whole series is one giant, multi-generational epic, but is comprised of smaller epics, one-shots, interludes, and character studies, all with an emphasis on personal growth and emotion. Though most of the characters are 'Super Heroes,' we aren't approaching any of the stories from a traditionally Super Heroey perspective.
COMFORT: Just to clarify, though - this isn't just another comic that deconstructs super heroes. There are a ton of those, and they're fine, but we're more interested in just looking at people and what makes them tick. We aren't trying to put skeletons in everybody's closet, or to show that all heroes are secretly jerks in capes. We just want to be emotionally honest, which too few comics do.
PART 4: THE WRAP-UP
PJR: I know your next convention appearance will be the Pittsburgh Comic Con. Where else will you be attending? And any last words or shout outs to anyone involved with or surrounding Uniques and/or the comics community?
ADAM: After Pittsburgh, we're going to be at the Motor City Con in May, and Heroes and Wizard World Chicago in June. We've done the Mid-Ohio Con the last couple years, and expect to be at that show again this fall.
COMFORT: We did Gen-Con Indy last year, and hope to go back again this year. And finally, we're looking at Wizard World Philadelphia, to further our East-Coast credentials.
ADAM: To close, we'd like to say that the book couldn't have happened if not for the people who backed us up and helped us out along the way; our letterer and friend Jeff Brzozowski, our Fightin' Flatsmen who made the color possible with their tireless color separation work, and Chris Karath who helped get our website up and running and looking as slick as it does.
COMFORT: We want people to understand is the best work is made not just by one individual - but with and by the community that person builds up around them. This book is our baby, and our idea - and yes, we write, draw and color it. But it wouldn't be what it is without the input and help of the people who have helped and supported us through the process.
ADAM: We'd also like to say that, since we're working out of our savings right now and producing the book out-of-pocket, the future of The Uniques lives or dies by our readership. If people buy the book and support it, we can keep going. If they don't… we can't.
COMFORT: And we work hard to keep it as affordable as possible. You can order the first issue is 36 pages for $5 through our website, but we are also trying something very few comic creators do, and that's offering a full digital download in PDF or CBZ formats for .99 cents! That's a whole comic for the price of a song on iTunes. We've made this as easy for people to get as possible, because more than anything we just want to share what we're doing, and the story we're telling, with anybody who wants to be a part of it.
ADAM: We're working on issue 2 right now, and hope to have it ready for the Pittsburgh show - we'll make an announcement about that on our website in the next couple weeks.
COMFORT: And if you like the book, tell your friends, blog about it, and put it out there on forums. We don't have a big publisher to support us or promote us, so we need all the help we can get. It is the support of the readers that will allow us to continue and finish what we hope will be a grand, epic story that's as fulfilling for the people who read it as it is for us to dream up and create.
For more on the Uniques, the various cast of characters, creators, galleries and more - check out UniquesComic.com. You can see more art from the creators on Adam's and Comfort's DeviantArt pages. For a sneak peak at issues 1 and 2, visit thecomicforums.com. And you can order Issues 1 and 2 off the main website or at this weekend's Pittsburgh Comic Con.
PART 1: CARTOONS, COMICS AND THE JOYS OF YOUTH
PETER JOHN RIOS: Heroclix. Battlestar Galactica. He-Man references. Cats named Obi-Wan and Annie-Kin. And parents named "Jim" & "Lee". From reading your bios on your website, I imagine you both were destined to be comic book creators wouldn't you say?
ADAM: First, may I applaud your pun-aptitude sir. Bravo. I'll never look at my parents the same way. But yeah, I think saying we were born to make comics would be fair. I was six years old when I made up my mind that I would be a comic artist, and I was an uncommonly committed little kid. Prior to that I was determined to be a paleontologist, but when I realized I'd never see an actual, living dinosaur I made the switch.
COMFORT: Well, for me I was not as young as Adam was when I said to myself, "I want to do comics." I had wanted to be an artist since I was very young, and I loved all the action/adventure shows like He-Man, She-Ra, Thundercats, and of course, Ninja Turtles. But it was my devotion to the X-Men cartoon in the 90's that brought me into the world of comics.
ADAM: Yeah, it might be better to just say we're life-long nerds who happen to also be storytellers. What better way for nerds like us to tell stories than comics?
COMFORT: Our stories, anyway.
PJR: Adam, six years old and you already knew? What were you reading at that time that fired your imagination? I don't remember when I started reading comics, but even at six it was still only the Richie Rich books for me.
ADAM: I can remember the first comic I read in vivid detail. It was a Daredevil issue that was given to me when my family went with friends on a boat outing. He was fighting a villain called Turbo. It was a fight issue, but at the end you saw a shadowy guy in one of those tall-backed leather chairs watching the whole thing on video and plotting against Daredevil in secret. I read that thing so much that the cover fell off.
But the first book I actually collected, starting almost immediately after that, was Green Lantern. I dug into the half-off back issue bins at my local shop and bought all the old Green Lantern Corps issues, from when there were only like seven GL's and they were all on Earth. Daredevil got me excited about comics, but Green Lantern got me hooked.
PJR: It seems the X-Men cartoon - which even to this day is a guilty pleasure of mine - brought many girls into comics. Comfort, I know of other girls who took the same path. What was it about that particular cartoon that captured your attention?
COMFORT: What got me into the X-Men cartoon were the characters, the human relationships they shared, and the fact that the girls on that show got to kick a lot of ass! Back in the 80's and the early 90's it was still rare to have female characters that could actually fight and not just get captured every episode.
ADAM: That's really true. Boys could find a lot of characters to relate to in any cartoon you chose, but most girls all the way up into the 90's were primarily there to be rescued.
COMFORT: Exactly! But not the X-girls! I was amazed by how strong, powerful, and sassy Rogue was - all juxtaposed with the tragedy, and the sadness she carried with her from her past, and the isolation of never being able to touch someone without causing them great pain.
ADAM: Rogue was tougher and more capable than Gambit was. And I can't remember a time she ever needed saving. It's what drew me to her character, too - that strength and depth she had.
COMFORT: I cried along with Cyclops when Jean died after the Phoenix Saga. I had never heard of the comics, and had no idea how that story would turn out - I was just heartbroken that she had died! There was even a story showing ordinary construction workers being angry with Mutants in part because people like Colossus took away their jobs, which hit home for me, growing up in Michigan. What other kids show dealt with stuff like that?
It didn't hurt that the action on the show was so intense. But that intensity came from what felt (at least to my 13-year-old mind) like drama that established a reason to care about the outcome of a fight. Action for the sake of action, that was okay. But action spurred on by a real story? Now that was engrossing.
PART 2: COLLEGE, A CHANCE MEETING AND AN IDEA FORMS
PJR: It's clear the comic bug bit you both early and strongly enough for you both to want to further your passions later in life through college and self-publishing. But did you go into college thinking "I want to create comics" or, as I imagine some people do, did you go into college thinking "I'll go to learn more about art so I can eventually fulfill my secret desire of creating comics!". Were comics an acceptable form of "honest work" from those around you: friends and family - were they supportive?
COMFORT: After I picked up my first comic - X-Men #56 with Rogue on the cover - and even though I didn't have much of any idea what was going on (it was the Onslaught crossover at the time) I loved it and I knew this was what I wanted to do… but most of the other people in my life didn't quite feel the same way.My parents at one time told me that they actually feared for my well-being if I went into comics. They thought that the fans were 'strange' and that I might be stalked or kidnapped or who knows what - although, their attitude has done a 180 and they're a couple of our biggest supporters.
As for friends, I didn't really have any who read comics. It was always me alone riding my bike down to the local comic store and searching for hours through the back issues to find stuff I liked.
ADAM: Man, being into comics is a lot harder for girls. All of my friends dug comics - or at least were cool with the idea of them, you know?
COMFORT: Yeah, well there was no such thing as 'fan girls' when I was growing up. And boys thought I was weird and didn't know how to react to me. By the time I got to college I had decided that I was going to do comics - but I was going to try and take a different approach. I was highly influenced by David Mack at the time and I was disillusioned by a big changeup in the X-Men creative team. It was sort of the first 'reboot' that I experienced, where suddenly the whole team (right down to character personalities) changed and all but invalidated much of what I'd been reading up to then. And frankly, it just got bad and boring.
So when I got to college I went about learning, in as much detail as I could, every other medium under the sun. I almost had two full minors (Graphic Design I had and Fine Arts I almost had) along with my major in Illustration when I graduated. Something that I'm glad of since it was those other skills that helped keep us afloat during the beginning of our freelance career. But in doing so I drifted away from my traditional drawing roots. I was too easily influenced by other people (until Adam came along) telling me that comics weren't a viable option, or that they weren't 'real art.' I've had to do a lot of catching up with my pure drawing skills since collage to make up for that.
ADAM: Yeah, Art Schools are rarely encouraging of comic art. That's changing a little bit, now, but you've still got Illustration departments run by older professors who want that illusion of that 'Fine Arts' prestige and look down their noses at comics. But that's what it's like all through the art field; everybody wants to look down on every other style of art because they know what's good and those other so-called artists are just posers. I see it in comics, too, as Western Style artists scoff at Manga and Eastern Style artists ridicule American comics, and it drives me crazy.
I think we're both really glad we went to art school, because we learned a lot of skills that have been invaluable in our work now - but most everything we know about making comics we had to learn on our own.
But I got luckier, in that my parents were both really supportive of me. I grew up in Flint, Michigan, and my Dad worked for GM my whole life. It was a miserable job, and really hard on him both in terms of the work he did and all the periods of lay-offs as the industry struggled. He always encouraged my sister and me to find something we loved to do and make that our career, rather than just taking some job we hated in order to make money. That was always taught to me by both my parents - better to be happy and rich in family and friends than miserable and rich in stuff and things.
So, as opposed to Comfort, I went into college knowing comics were my goal. I directed every project I could toward learning things that would help me become a better comic artist, taking a lot of independent studies and minoring in Graphic Design to learn digital color and pre-press. It took a bit to get going, but ultimately I was working harder than most of the people in my classes, so the professors were a little more willing to let me do my own thing.
PJR: To this day I bet some of my family still think of my comic reading as a "phase". And while I had a group of comic reading friends as a kid, I still had moments like Comfort - of walking miles to a comic store to pick out my favorites and then stuffing them in my shirt when I got home so my mom couldn't see them. They became a very private thing for a long time. Maybe in a way having the internet nowadays is actually a blessing for younger comic readers: they learn at an earlier age that it's okay to read whatever you're reading and that there are others out there like you.
And beyond all that, it sounds like all of this; your inspirations, your "history", etc., was what made coming together as friends, a couple and then husband and wife almost inevitable? While we all may relate to the comics you read or the path you both took to further your art, not many of us can say we have a partner that completely understands our passion for comics; reading, creating or otherwise. I gotta say that's pretty damn cool!
ADAM: I'd have to agree with you. I wouldn't trade this for anything. And maybe it was inevitable, but I'm not so sure about that. There are a lot of pairs of close friends out there who would never think of each other as viable romantic partners. What we have is rare and special, and that's unfortunate because I wish more people could experience it.
COMFORT: Yeah, we spend just about every waking moment together, either hanging out or working.
ADAM: Mostly working.
COMFORT: Mostly. But we're best friends, and that's fine with us. We've been together for eight years this October, and our 5th wedding anniversary is in June, but it still feels fun and fresh and new.
ADAM: We first met at college, and we were both at a big table where mutual friends were hanging out during a break between classes. I saw this illustration somebody had done of the Endless characters from Sandman on the table. Now, I had only just discovered Sandman at the time, so I was really excited to share my new passion for this great series with whoever had made the illustration. When I found out a girl had done it, I couldn't believe it. It's so rare to meet girls who like comics, and I was deeply intrigued.
COMFORT: At that time I was almost 20 years old and had been reading comics since I was 15 and had yet to find anybody who shared my passion for comics and that I could connect with on such a deep and mutual level. I had recently decided that I was going to get a boyfriend.
ADAM: Note her wording. Comf is like that - she thought it out and decided 'I think it's time I had a boyfriend.' But it isn't like those snobby girls, it's just that she's really that adorable.
COMFORT: I had several candidates picked out, but when I met Adam I knew he was the one I wanted to be with most. I just hoped that he would like me too. And as luck would have it he did.
ADAM: I really did. We started dating just a few weeks after we first met.
COMFORT: And it was awesome. Not only did we play kissy-face like other young couples do, but we also spent hours and hours talking about any number of subjects. It's our ability to talk and hang out together that makes our relationship as strong as it is today.
ADAM: We just had so much in common. We liked the same movies and music, we were both inspired by the same artists, and more than that - we liked what we did for many of the same reasons. People always comment that our art styles are so similar that it's sometimes hard to tell us apart, and that's in part because we were emulating the same people long before we met each other, and were trying to become the same kinds of artists.
COMFORT: Yeah, I focused a lot more on painting and Adam was a strict penciller, but we were both most interested in characters, emotions, and getting expression and feeling into the people we created on the page.
PJR: You know, from your responses so far, would I be wrong in saying that Adam is more the "emotional" part of the team and Comfort the "rational" part? Is that too easy of a label?
ADAM: It's a little broad, but I don't think labeling me as the emotional one and her the rational one would be too far off-base.
COMFORT: Yeah, that's pretty much the dynamic. I am an intense pragmatist, and Adam is very passionate and emotional. Not that we don't both switch roles from time to time - but that's generally how it goes.
PJR: Since you brought it up, and I promise we'll get to Uniques soon, your art styles ARE very similar. Actually, it
reminds me of the distinctions my mind makes when I look at the Kubert Brothers side by side. You know they come from the same background and you can see incredible similarities, but it's all the subtle stuff that makes them different and wonderful. Can you both quick list your art inspirations - comics or otherwise?
COMFORT: You can pretty easily boil it down to these guys: Chris Bachallo, J. Scott Campbell, and Adam Hughes. Generation X and Gen 13 were huge books for us, like they were for probably a lot of people around our age reading comics in the 90's, and those two styles seemed so fresh and new and interesting. Adam Hughes was a big one for Adam in a drawing sense, but I look to him more for inspiration in color. His naturalist style is so beautiful.ADAM: Absolutely. For myself, I'd add Kevin Maguire to the list. Justice League International was one of the first books I read, and Maguire and Hughes' ability to draw expressive, emotional characters was something I tried to emulate even as a little kid - before I knew what it was I was emulating or why!
COMFORT: And I was drawn to the painters more, first with Alex Ross but much more strongly with David Mack. The first time I met him in person, it took two tries to go up to his booth and shake his hand. He was just so cool - and I'll admit it, I cried just a little after I met him.
ADAM: She was like those teenaged girls when the Beatles were performing. It was one of the most endearing things I'd ever seen.
COMFORT: Yeah, but I wasn't nearly as crazy frantic. It was a one of those 'I don't mean to cry, but I am' things. Anyhoo, I think our other source of artistic inspiration is animation. From Disney movies like Aladdin to Mulan, and the surge of Anime that took place in the 90's. The movement and emotive abilities that strong animation can achieve is something that gets us going even to this day. We tried to bring that animated flow to
our style and our comic.ADAM: Not only that, but good television also. Series like Rome, The Wire, Six Feet Under, Battlestar Galactica, Journeyman-- these aren't so much art inspiration, but storytelling. And when you get right down to it, we approach art through story rather than the other way around.
PJR: Putting all of those things together (the similar art styles, your goals as creators, who plays what role in the creative process at any given time, the comic connections and the endless hours of discussion), what's the secret origin of the idea that would become known as the Uniques! (See? Told you we would get there!).
COMFORT: The Uniques was a story I had in my head as a young girl even before I started reading comics. It grew and changed as I got older, until one fateful night in a hot tub--
ADAM: Bow-chica-wow-wow…
COMFORT: Oh, honey, I love you. *ahem* Not like that. Adam and I were up late telling each other our different ideas for comic stories, and really talking about them for the first time. I was talking about Uniques and how some of the adult characters would reflect back to a time when they were part of a team of teen heroes. I only meant it to be seen in brief flashbacks, but Adam said that it was too important for that.
ADAM: Well, yeah - she was talking about all these trials and tribulations these people went through to get where they are, and I knew that that was a story we needed to see in order to really understand that growth. I started asking about who those other teen heroes were, what the team went through, how they came together, all that kind of stuff.
COMFORT: And I had never even really thought about it, but I was so excited and inspired by the ideas we started batting back and forth that by the next morning I had the seeds of this whole new set of stories in my head. We both had this plan to start our comics in college as school projects, using the excuse to buy us time to work on them. I wrote a first issue and started doing pages, and even published a few little vignettes in a school publication for the club Adam and I founded; The League of Sequential Storytellers.
ADAM: But we both decided we were too far below the skill level we wanted to tell our stories. We needed more experience, so we put our comics on the shelf and went freelance for a while. We were freelancing before we even graduated, trying to get as much real experience as we could so that when we did come back to our original ideas, they could be as strong as we wanted them to be.
COMFORT: So a few years ago, after a long, long period of showing our portfolios around and getting great reviews, but no jobs, we started to get the feeling that we would have to create a comic of our own before any publisher would ever take us seriously.
ADAM: Until you've been published, you can't get published, you know?
COMFORT: Not that we haven't been published, but just not in the right places. That and we were getting a little tired of working on pitch-books for series' that went nowhere. We did a bunch of issues of comics that never materialized, trying to find a way to break in. Eventually, we just decided that if we were going to go through all this work and all this trouble, we might as well do it on our own story.
ADAM: And by now we had worked out our style of collaborative comic art. It mostly grew from the necessity of having to juggle a gadzillion freelance projects at once just to pay rent and keep fed, but we found we really liked it and wanted to bring that fusion to a comic of our own. So we sat down and looked at my comic idea and her Uniques, and decided (based on a lot of factors) that hers was the strongest story to start with.
COMFORT: We started plotting the story for real in 2006, started writing scripts later that year. And finally, in November of 2007 we took a chance, putting most of our other freelance work aside, and started drawing the first issue.
PART 3: UNIQUES THE COMIC
PJR: J.Scott Campbell, GEN13, Disney, anime, Six Feet Under and hot tubs. Six degrees of the Uniques. And yet all very telling once you look at the final product. It's a handsome final product for a first issue from "newcomers". It has a great first issue hook, introduces a huge interesting world and yet still delivers a smaller personal story for a reader to follow. So the time and patience you allowed yourselves - to ensure you felt capable enough to deliver the story that deserved to be told - pays off.
With all the attention to detail both in the first issue and in the various character pages on your website, the sense of worldbuilding is very strong. It's not just Uniques the Comic, it's almost Uniques the Experience. Which is an especially smart move: provide more content, for free, for those interested enough in seeking it out to fill gaps, expand the universe, etc. Not to mention it gives you a little breathing room in-between creating new issues. When you put the first issue and the online content together, we have characters that have been around for decades, legacy characters, a timeline of events in how the Uniques changed the world around them, struggles between Uniques and Typics and much more.
The character that intrigues me the most when putting all this info together is Virtue. You mention on your Director's Commentary podcast the backstory of Virtue's creation. What could easily be seen as a Superman-archtype becomes something more when filtered through where you grew up and your parents' experiences. Can you elaborate on that more?ADAM: Virtue is an interesting character because he comes from a concept that both of us had batted around for a long time, once again back to our youth. The name comes from a character I had created, and when Comfort was describing the idea of her Superman-ish character for The Uniques world, I suggested that Virtue could be a nice fit.
COMFORT: We went into this knowing that we wanted to build a whole world, with history and legacy. It’s one of the things we most love about some of the big comics, and the reason I called the book ‘The Uniques’ instead of ‘Telepath’ or the name of the team. It’s about more than just these people. But while our central characters will get a lot of face-time and be able to break all kinds of expectations, the supporting cast used archetypes a lot more heavily, just so the reader could more immediately get a grasp on the role some characters would take.
Virtue was one of those. You can look at him and see the similarities to Superman or Sentry or any of those iconic Men of Steel types, and you get him right away. Now, as we go, you start to find out how different and individual he is, both through his dialogue and his past, but we didn’t have time to spend explaining all that right away.
ADAM: We grew up in Michigan, as we’ve said, and I lived in Flint until I went to college. Growing up with a father in the auto industry, working in a factory, I saw something in the man he was, the town we lived in, and the struggles we had that was never reflected in comics. Many times, comics idealize rural America and the Big City as the only two options for heroes. Gritty, ‘real’ characters come from The City, while wholesome, earnest ones always grew up on farms. Nowhere was the shop-town, Blue Collar experience used as a motivating factor for these characters.
COMFORT: You could boil Virtue’s character down to the question of what would happen if Superman had been raised in a shop-town instead of on the farm, though there’s a lot more to him than that. He first became ‘Virtue’ in 1939, and would have been born in 1918. His father was part of the first sit-down strike, his mother was one of the ‘Rosie the Riveter’ type women during World War II. So he comes from a very different place, and has more of an Everyman touch.
ADAM: By now he also has an exhaustion to him. He just feels tired. He’s long since realized that he’s stopped getting older, and he’s had to watch so many people he loved die. Now he’s watching the children of people he knew when they were only children try to take on this same job. It’s that weariness and steely determination that draw us to him. His age, and his normalness.
COMFORT: He’s Bruce Willis with powers. Die Hard 1 Bruce Willis, not crazy-action-ü ber-hero Die Hard 4 Bruce Willis. He’s the kind of guy just about every blue collar man dreams of being and connects to on so many levels.
PJR: He became the other POV character for me as I was reading. Obviously, there's Telepath - as she fills in the gap of her missing two years (you gotta read it to find out why folks!), we're learning with her. Learning about what has happened in the past two years, how people are picking up the pieces of their lives, how the Uniques are handling their "new" status. And yet there's Virtue as well - the outsider, the keen observer. And I found I wanted to know his perspective as well. Because he has the info that Telepath wants and certainly the info the readers would want. And then there's a third player along those lines: Motherboard. She's the Typic - the normal human in all this - that is right smack in the middle of it all with a unique perspective for all sides. It's an interesting triangle.ADAM: It is. And I always liked that Virtue is one of the most normal guys in the
book, even though he's arguably the most powerful and certainly the one who's been around the longest. He's got a perspective that nobody else could have. But Motherboard - she's the most down-to-earth person we have. The other kids in the team, as teenagers often do, get their heads filled with so much idealism and hopes and wishes, and they want this team to become such a grand, romantic thing… and then there's Motherboard to keep things practical and grounded. She's the living embodiment of one of our design goals for the whole series - finding the normal within the fantastic.COMFORT: It's really one of the things I most love about the book - different people's perspectives on similar events. The most boring comics, or any stories for that matter, are the ones where everyone ends up having the same voice, as if one person is just talking through everybody. Experience, genetics (even just regular human ones), upbringing, and culture all have a part to play in how you interpret and react to the world around you. Having a chance to see and read about the variety of people, hopefully will allow our audience to get a deeper and richer idea of the world we've created.
PJR: Since the Uniques is story driven, what kind of stories do you have in mind? Will it always be super-hero-centric, can we expect smaller personal stories, multi-chapter epics, one-offs, etc? How far reaching are your plans for the series?
COMFORT: You could compare the story structure to something like Neil Gaiman's Sandman, where you're following one central story, but there is a lot of room for diversions and side-tracks that may seem like one-offs or short stories, but that all deeply contribute to the ultimate ending we have coming. We have a lot of one-shots planned that explore the history of characters like Virtue, Speed and Ghost (who you'll meet in Issue #2), and more characters coming than you can shake a stick at.
ADAM: But they're all personal stories. We start with this group of seven teenagers, and will follow them into adulthood and, eventually, up into their 40's. We'll see this generation grow and see the next one coming up behind them. While it will be super-hero centric in that the book tends to follow people with powers, our real focus is always on people not costumes.
COMFORT: In the short-term, we're going to see these kids acting their age. That means there will be a lot of mistakes and a lot of possibly uncomfortable situations - but let me also say that it means a lot of fun too. And even though these are kids, anybody who knows a teenager or remembers being one is aware the kinds of things you can get into, or how quickly the world can expect you to grow up.
ADAM: Yeah, there is an irony to the fact that, in writing a book that depicts teenagers realistically, we're creating a comic that kids the same age as these characters might not be able to read. We put a Mature Readers warning on our website, and it's because we are not going to shy away from any situation. We're going to hit all the big taboos - religion, politics and sex - and handle them in a mature fashion. One tricky spot is the swearing. People use bad language. It happens. And nobody curses more frequently or more creatively than teenagers. More than that, there are people who - although nice enough people - say some really offensive things sometimes. Creating a world that feels real means not adhering to some Politically Correct playbook, even if a vocal percentage of people would balk at super heroes acting or talking in such a way.
COMFORT: Now, let us be clear, when we say we want our world to feel 'real,' we don't mean that the way some companies do, where being 'realistic' means that nobody can have a good day, and it's just one horrible tragedy after another. Good things happen to our characters, and they have great successes. They also have horrible failures, but there's a balance, just like in life. And just like in life, they will cross lines and do things that can't be taken back.
ADAM: I'll take that one further and say that there will be no resurrections in our book. Dead means dead. And there will be no whitewashes or reboots or retcons. We are committed to everything that happens in the story, and everything that happens (good and bad) will have repercussions that they will deal with even to the very end of the book.
COMFORT: We do have a definite ending planned. The best comics have a beginning, a middle, and an end. If you try and stretch out a story forever, you run into a lot of problems. And we're setting up that ending from the very first issue, too. You'll be able to look back and see the seeds we were planting way back when.
ADAM: Long story short (too late), we are going to have all kinds of stories in The Uniques. The whole series is one giant, multi-generational epic, but is comprised of smaller epics, one-shots, interludes, and character studies, all with an emphasis on personal growth and emotion. Though most of the characters are 'Super Heroes,' we aren't approaching any of the stories from a traditionally Super Heroey perspective.
COMFORT: Just to clarify, though - this isn't just another comic that deconstructs super heroes. There are a ton of those, and they're fine, but we're more interested in just looking at people and what makes them tick. We aren't trying to put skeletons in everybody's closet, or to show that all heroes are secretly jerks in capes. We just want to be emotionally honest, which too few comics do.
PART 4: THE WRAP-UP
PJR: I know your next convention appearance will be the Pittsburgh Comic Con. Where else will you be attending? And any last words or shout outs to anyone involved with or surrounding Uniques and/or the comics community?
ADAM: After Pittsburgh, we're going to be at the Motor City Con in May, and Heroes and Wizard World Chicago in June. We've done the Mid-Ohio Con the last couple years, and expect to be at that show again this fall.
COMFORT: We did Gen-Con Indy last year, and hope to go back again this year. And finally, we're looking at Wizard World Philadelphia, to further our East-Coast credentials.
ADAM: To close, we'd like to say that the book couldn't have happened if not for the people who backed us up and helped us out along the way; our letterer and friend Jeff Brzozowski, our Fightin' Flatsmen who made the color possible with their tireless color separation work, and Chris Karath who helped get our website up and running and looking as slick as it does.
COMFORT: We want people to understand is the best work is made not just by one individual - but with and by the community that person builds up around them. This book is our baby, and our idea - and yes, we write, draw and color it. But it wouldn't be what it is without the input and help of the people who have helped and supported us through the process.
ADAM: We'd also like to say that, since we're working out of our savings right now and producing the book out-of-pocket, the future of The Uniques lives or dies by our readership. If people buy the book and support it, we can keep going. If they don't… we can't.
COMFORT: And we work hard to keep it as affordable as possible. You can order the first issue is 36 pages for $5 through our website, but we are also trying something very few comic creators do, and that's offering a full digital download in PDF or CBZ formats for .99 cents! That's a whole comic for the price of a song on iTunes. We've made this as easy for people to get as possible, because more than anything we just want to share what we're doing, and the story we're telling, with anybody who wants to be a part of it.
ADAM: We're working on issue 2 right now, and hope to have it ready for the Pittsburgh show - we'll make an announcement about that on our website in the next couple weeks.
COMFORT: And if you like the book, tell your friends, blog about it, and put it out there on forums. We don't have a big publisher to support us or promote us, so we need all the help we can get. It is the support of the readers that will allow us to continue and finish what we hope will be a grand, epic story that's as fulfilling for the people who read it as it is for us to dream up and create.
For more on the Uniques, the various cast of characters, creators, galleries and more - check out UniquesComic.com. You can see more art from the creators on Adam's and Comfort's DeviantArt pages. For a sneak peak at issues 1 and 2, visit thecomicforums.com. And you can order Issues 1 and 2 off the main website or at this weekend's Pittsburgh Comic Con.
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