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RAPHAEL SOOHOO
Raph believes in comics.
Raph has an un-ending supply of enthusiasm for the medium and I don’t think I could see him not working somewhere in comics… ever. He works in a comics store, heads up a comics podcast and talks at length about anything comics to anyone willing to listen. Frankly, he lives and breathes the medium, because he believes in its validity.
And honestly? You might disagree with him a lot. Raph has some unpopular opinions… but that’s not as bad as it sounds. When you get right down to it, that just means he has fan-balls. That’s what we need. The industry needs a mix of opinions and it needs people who aren’t afraid to admit what they like, no matter how embarrassing it may be. After all – Alan Moore saw something in the medium when it was very unpopular to like comics, and he helped the whole industry transform.
So when I started HC with LeBeau back at the beginning of the year, I wanted to get Raph involved. I knew Raph was a writer, but I’d never seen what he had. I wanted to see how all that enthusiasm and energy translated into a script. It took a few months of Jason nagging him, but in the end of it, Conkulo was born.
BILLY MAYHEM
Buuuuut I took one look at it and thought; ‘I can’t draw this. This has to be cartoony.’
Naturally, we tried to pass it on to our resident cartoon genius (& web designer) Nate Bear, who collaborated with me on Anteaters. At the time he was busy on his very brilliant personal projects and had to decline.
Then the search to find Conkulo a face started.
We’ve had a lot of people work on this project and many more people signed up to work on it in the future… but no one available seemed to have an energetic cartoon style befitting of the script Raph submitted. We just couldn’t find anyone…
Then by pure coincidence I ran into Billy Mayhem at the last Otakon (where I was helping my wife sell art). This young guy was just sitting at a table drawing comics. What really shocked me was how he drew them. Without any layouts or preparation he seemed to just let his ideas pour out of his pen and onto the page in these weird Earthworm Jim/Invader Zim type style. He was making all this weird trippy shit up as he went along.
If you’re a reader and not a creator, you might not know how rare it is to find someone who works that way. One of these days I’ll show you all the various stages I go through to make my pages – and try to put it into some kind of time frame for you. Billy knocked out half a page whilst I stood talking to him. Bastard.
Anyway, alarm bells rang, the art seemed like a perfect match.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
