by Whitney Grace
Contributing Writer
Adam and Comfort Love are to independent publishers as ice cream is to hot fudge, they both go well together. The couple and I met each other at DragonCon and our common interest in comics led to a brief chat. Their unique stories and art style stuck out in my head and I tracked the pair down for an interview.
Whitney Grace (WG): As most standard interviews start out, would you tell me what drew each of your to the comic medium? What are some of your favorite titles?
Comfort: I think, for both of us, it was the stories. We drew a lot as little kids–
Adam: As in, four-year-old kids.
Comfort: Yeah, and when we came across comics, we were completely wrapped up in the idea of using drawings to tell a story.
Adam: Comics were a revelation for me. From the first time I read a comic, I was drawing my own.
Comfort: I was the same way. I knew this was what I wanted to do. Some artists want to make comics because they like drawing cool pictures, and others want to make comics because they like telling stories. We’re definitely storytelling artists.
Adam: As for what we read, our current favorite books are Invincible by Kirkman and Ottley, Unwritten by Carey and Gross, Saga by Vaughan and Staples, and Mice Templar by Glass and Santos.
Comfort: And Naruto. We’re stupid-big Naruto fans.
Adam: For sure. We came late to the game on that book, but we fell in love quick. Other manga we’re enjoying at the moment are Bakuman, Death Note, and Bleach (again, really late to the party, though we had watched the anime and loved it).
WG: Judging by your art style, I can tell you two animation and anime fans. What do you like about animation that cannot be done in a comic book? Also would you please name some favorite movies or TV shows?
Comfort: It’s the movement and emotional quality of animation that we look at the most. We try to find ways to use the animator’s art of exaggeration to make our characters feel more expressive and alive.
Adam: It’s too easy for comic art to get stiff, or for artists to come to rely so heavily on photo-reference that their characters become flat and dull. We want our style to combine the structures of realism with the fluidity and personality of animation.
Comfort: And now–our All-Time Top 5 TV Shows! The Wire, Game of Thrones, Avatar: The Last Airbender (including Korra by extension), Battlestar Galactica (the modern remake), and Doctor Who.
Adam: And our All-Time Top 5 Movies: American Beauty, Ghostbusters, Moulin Rouge, L.A. Confidential, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Comfort: We tend to enjoy TV more than movies, though. It’s easier to get into layers of character and plot and really care about what’s going on with good TV. Movies are so short you’re always relying on archetypes and shortcuts.
WG: You two met in college, would you please describe your initial encounters and when did it hit each of you that you have found a creative and life partner?
Adam: It didn’t take long!
Comfort: No it did not.
Adam: I was aware of Comfort from my freshman year. It wasn’t a big school, and people talk about a girl with a name like “Comfort Love.”
Comfort: People always remember my name. And we had a class together our freshman year, but it was art history and we never interacted. Or even saw each other, really. It wasn’t until our sophomore year that we wound up in the same circle of friends. The big group of us would sit together at a table in the commons during lunch, showing off our art and just hanging out.
Adam: I saw a Sandman piece on the table, and I had only just finished reading that comic for the first time and wanted to look like a big shot, so I asked who had done it.
Comfort: It was mine.
Adam: And I was like, “A giiiirl?!” At the time it was much more rare to find girls who were into comics. I was instantly intrigued, and we started talking a lot.
Comfort: I had decided it was time for me to get a boyfriend. I had made a whole list of potentials, but then I met Adam and threw the list away cuz I knew he was the one.
Adam: We were all but inseparable right from the start. We started dating within a month, and never looked back.
Comfort: One of the reasons we loved being together so much was because we could work together so well. We liked the same artists and styles, we read a lot of the same books–
Adam: And what we didn’t already have in common, we could share with each other. We made each other more rounded people. It was a great time of discovery and growth, I think.
Comfort: Since we came together at an art school, it was natural to look at and critique each other’s work. We both have things we’re better at–I helped Adam get better at color, and he helped me draw better.
Adam: And over the years, we just started drawing and coloring right on each other’s work. The style we developed of writing and drawing and coloring together on everything was a very natural outgrowth of the kind of relationship we have.
WG: What were both of you studying in college?
Comfort: We both majored in Illustration and minored in Graphic Design.
Adam: Comfort carried a second minor for a while, but dropped it when all the extra work got to taxing.
Comfort: And because I didn’t want to keep spending all that money on a minor I wasn’t going to need in my career.
WG: How has your relationship influenced your body of work? How do your individual styles differ?
Comfort: We do everything together! Our styles have always been really similar. We like the same artists, and we wanted our art to have the same kinds of aesthetics.
Adam: The longer we’ve been together, the more alike our work has become. There is still a distinctness, but I think it’s natural that two artists who live together and work together as much as we do would rub off on each other after a while.
Comfort: Some styles might be opposite magnets that push each other apart over time, and both would get less similar. But our magnets had the same charge. We just keep getting closer.
WG: You have two titles: The Uniques and Rainbow in the Dark. In a single sentence how would you summarize each series.
Adam: The Uniques is like Teen Titans if it was on HBO.
Comfort: And Rainbow in the Dark is an urban fairy tale about a world of black and white and a world of color at war over what gets to be reality, but the people in the gray world don’t know it’s happening.
WG: Your comics offer a different take on the standard superhero comics. Why this approach?
Adam: We wanted to make a comic that was more honest in how we treated the characters.
Comfort: Uniques is about people who happen to be superheroes. Who they are inside the costume is more important than their powers or codenames or persona. It’s trying to be more realistic without having to be dark and grim all the time. Life isn’t like that–there are ups and downs. It can get pretty bad, but it can be pretty good too.
Adam: We write Uniques the way we do because we want our characters to feel more like people you know. We want them to be your friends. We want people to have crushes on our characters. We want them to have depth and interest and meaning. This comic is about their relationships, their friendships, and their lives.
Comfort: The Uniques is a comic that not only has crazy awesome fights in it, but where the characters would go bowling, or go to karaoke, or have a board game night and it would be totally natural. This stuff is important! If you care about and love these characters, then when bad things happen to them or a fight happens, you’ll be invested in it and have an emotional connection to the action scenes.
Adam: Most of all, we wanted to tackle the two things that superhero comics do the least: growth and change. The characters are teenagers at the start of the comic, and by the end of the series they’ll be in their 40’s-50’s. We’ll see their lives unfold, watch them change, watch a new generation grow up under them; we’ll see how they change the world and how the world changes them. Everything that happens has consequences–
Comfort: And those consequences matter. Even just in the first nine issues of the series, there have been actions taken that will impact the characters for the rest of the series.
WG: Loners and society outcasts are a common theme in both of your works. Does any of this stem from your own experiences? How would you avoid making this a tired archetype?
Adam: Part of the issue is that stories tend to be driven by characters at odds with some part of a society. If you’re going to be standing against something big and powerful like that, you tend to be an outsider in that society. What do insiders have to rebel against? What problems do the powerful have that anybody can relate to or care about?
Comfort: But it can be an issue, if you aren’t careful. We try to take a 3D view of everything in our writing, just as we try to in our own lives. We don’t look at an issue in simple terms, but try to understand it from everybody’s side. Somebody told us that something they enjoyed about Rainbow in the Dark was that every character was sympathetic, and there weren’t any pure, moustache-twirling villains in the book. I’m proud of that.
Adam: The trick is writing people like people. Any archetype can get tired, no matter what it is. If you approach your characters like human beings, with all the flaws and virtues we humans can have, you’re less likely to fall into a trap of writing the same people over and over again.
WG: What was some of the feedback you received when publishers said they would not print your comics?
Adam: Our art was too cartoony. That was the number-one problem.
Comfort: At the time, we were trying to get The Uniques published, and publishers don’t want to take on superheroes and try to compete with Marvel and DC. It was a long-form series (around 100 issues) and publishers prefer short-series of 4-6 issues. It’s got swearing in it, and that makes them nervous.
Adam: Oh, and we had one complain that we used upper and lowercase lettering rather than all-caps. It was a deal breaker for him.
Comfort: To be fair, we were much rougher around the edges in the beginning. We had a lot to learn.
WG: What led you self-publish?
Comfort: We started to feel like nobody would believe that readers would like our work until we did it ourselves and proved them wrong. We wanted to make comics so badly that we weren’t going to wait around for a publisher’s permission.
Adam: It was something I was really scared of, personally. I’d heard and read so many self-publishing nightmare stories that it was a last-case scenario that I wasn’t at all sure I wanted to attempt. But we were doing a lot of “pitch-books” for people at the time–
Comfort: That’s when a writer has an idea for a series but needs art so he can pitch it to publishers. We’d do a few pages, half an issue, maybe a whole issue, and they’d go off to try and sell it. It never worked, and we felt like it was becoming a dead-end.
Adam: Finally, we had two potential projects in front of us. One that would pay, but we weren’t sure could find a publisher, and the other that would definitely get published, but who were really evasive about whether we’d ever be paid. We decided if this was the risk we had to take, why not take that risk on our own comic? On something that really mattered to us personally?
Comfort: So we made one final push to get picked up by a major publisher, which went pretty far but kept coming back with the “too cartoony” complaint. They didn’t want us, so we went off and made The Uniques. We haven’t had to stop since.
Adam: And when we did find ourselves in the situation of actual publishers taking an interest in Rainbow in the Dark, early on we found that it was better to just stay self published rather then go with any of them. It’s harder, but overall it’s ultimately much better for us!
WG: I spoke with a big comic person, her name will not be mentioned but her best friends are elves, who was a pioneer in the self-publishing industry in the 1970s and 80s. She told me that it is extremely hard to self-publish successfully these days. What is your opinion on this?
Comfort: It’s extremely hard to do any job in comics, so why not make your own? This is the golden age of the self-publisher. It’s never been easier or cheaper to make your own comics and get them in front of an audience. It’s an extraordinary risk, but the rewards are just as extraordinary.
Adam: You have to be the kind of person who is a fit for this job. Ask any person who runs their own business and they’ll tell you that some people just aren’t cut out for it. You have to be very driven, very focused, and very determined. You have to be willing to work ten hours a day, every day, without vacations or time off. You have to be willing to give up a lot of financial security and most of the material stuff you might want to own.
Comfort: You’ve got to be both an artist and a businessperson. You’ll be balancing budgets, working with printers and distributors, doing all your own marketing and promotion–you have to do every job yourself.
Adam: But let’s be honest, you’d be doing 90% of that with most modern publishers, anyway. They don’t work very hard to advertise or market you, they don’t contact comic shops on your behalf, they don’t eat most of the costs of publication–you’re doing all that.
Comfort: And if you have to do all that work anyway, why not take on the extra 10% of the work so that you can keep 100% of the profits? It isn’t easy by any stretch of the imagination, but if you’re the type of person who is made for this business, nothing else you could do would ever be as rewarding as this.
WG: What is your top piece of advice for self-publishers?
Comfort: Get ready for hard work! If you can’t be a totally driven worker, self-motivated and with a nose firmly to the grindstone, this ain’t the job for you!
Adam: The most important thing is to have a great comic. No matter how hard you work, how much networking or marketing or advertising you do, if you can finally get people to take a chance on your comic it has to be amazing. You’re competing for attention against the Walking Dead, and X-Men, and Batman. It isn’t enough to be as good as the other comics on the rack, you have to be better.
Comfort: Yeah, because if people have to make financial decisions about which book to cut, they will almost always cut an indie book they love so they can keep reading whatever Marvel or DC comic they’ve been reading since they were little. The better your book, the more likely they’ll stick with you through thick and thin.
Adam: I’d also say that it’s important to know that you can do this. I was really hesitant at first, scared by all the stories I’d read and listened to, but we’ve been doing this full-time since 2009 and it’s only looking up from here. It is absolutely possible to make a career out of publishing your own comics. You can do it your way telling the stories you want to tell, and don’t let anybody convince you otherwise.
WG: Rainbow in the Dark is being released in an omnibus edition. How did you two conceptualize this series?
Comfort: As an epic movie trilogy.
Adam: Yeah, each of the three acts is like a piece of the trilogy. In fact, originally the first three issues were all we were going to produce.
Comfort: We had more of the story ready in case the initial miniseries took off and we needed to do sequels, but it became obvious while pitching the idea to our friend and mentor Bryan J.L. Glass that Rainbow wouldn’t be complete without the whole tale. So we set out to do it all and eventually release it as one big tome.
WG: Strong girl heroes are not a rarity in comics, but they are a minority in the bigger comics world. How did you break this with your characters Donna and Raina and why did you feel compelled to write your characters like this?
Adam: Writing interesting women that female readers can relate to, root for, and get excited about is something that’s very important to both of us.
Comfort: As a girl who grew up feeling like a weirdo because she loved comics, it was even harder sometimes when it felt like even the hobby I loved didn’t completely want me. We both want to give girls comics that can be as much for them as they are for boys.
Adam: We also don’t think it’s all that hard to write female characters with depth. It isn’t different from writing interesting male characters, you just have to be willing and interested in going through the same work from a female perspective. You have to be empathetic enough to get into their heads and see the world through their eyes. It’s all the same stuff you do for male characters! I’m constantly stunned at how hard some writers seem to think it is to do good female characters.
Comfort: We have the benefit of being able to build our own characters from scratch, and to be able to populate our casts with multiple girls. It’s easier to allow female characters to have a range of attributes and quirks when you have a few to work with. When there’s just one girl in the cast, she has to become a stand-in for all females everywhere. That’s a lot of weight on her, and if she has any overt weakness it starts to feel like a slam on all female characters. Black Widow has to be pretty perfect to represent all girls in the Avengers movie. Peggy Carter’s flaws feel much more stark in Captain America when she’s one of only two women in the whole film with a speaking part.
Adam: I think the idea of “strong female characters” can become a trap all its own. Being interesting is more important than being some generic badass. Nobody would say that Gaius Baltar was the strong male character in Battlestar Galactica, yet he was one of the most fascinating, well-crafted characters in all of science fiction in large part because of his flaws and shortcomings. Women want to read about interesting women. And, like Comfort said, it usually takes more than one female character in a cast to be able to make that work to its best potential.
WG: Music plays (pun not intended) a large part in the story, the characters even speak in song titles or lyrics sometimes. Why insert music in a “silent” medium? What songs particularly shaped the story?
Adam: It was a challenge we took on partly because of a speech we used to make all the time in the classes we taught for years. We would say that comics were among the most powerful storytelling mediums in existence. There is almost no story you can’t tell with comics, and some stories can only work as comics. The only possible exception is a story that requires sound, because there’s no audio.
Comfort: So, as we were building the concept of Rainbow, we thought about trying to do it as a rock opera without sound; to make a comic that gave you the feeling great music gives, when your fist is in the air and you’re ready to rebel and change the world.
Adam: We settled on lyrics as dialogue because, for me, whenever I hear somebody say something that reminds me of a lyric, the song jumps into my head. We wondered at the possibility of building a sort of subliminal soundtrack for the comic. Can we fill people’s heads with songs even though they can’t hear anything? It was a fun challenge and added a whole other layer to the book.
Comfort: We have really eclectic musical tastes. It’d be impossible to pick only a couple songs that influenced Rainbow. Each character was based off of a different genre, and we tried to let that influence aspects of who they were. But in the end, it was more the idea of what good music can do to change the way people see the world around them that was our inspiration.
16. You mentioned that each character represents a music genre. I am guessing that Donna is 80s Pop, what about the other characters? What are your personal favorite songs or genres?
Comfort: Yeah, Donna is definitely girl-rock. Even her name, which was originally Madonna, came from that.
Adam: Initially all the names would be plays on the genres they represented. That didn’t work out, but Donna and Rocky (Rockabilly) are echoes of that early idea.
Comfort: Kenji is New Wave & Synthrock, Luke is Psychedelic Rock, and Raina is Brit-punk. The side characters followed the same design rules, with Jackson representing Classic Rock and Folk, and Nina as a sort of ‘90s hip-hop style. You’ll spot a lot of genre-characters in the backgrounds.
Adam: In terms of our personal favorites, I’m a sucker for a lot of the different shades of rock, particularly Prog and Alternative. My favorite bands are U2, Muse, Queen, Billy Joel, and Thrice, but I love a lot of stuff.
Comfort: If you scrolled through our iTunes, you’d see a pretty huge range. Muse, Dream Theater, Bruno Mars, Fair to Midland, Lady GaGa, Tool, Harvey Danger, Trampled by Turtles, Sufjan Stevens, George Michael, Queensryche, Tori Amos, Iron Maiden–we like finding artists to enjoy in all kinds of different genres. Music is a pretty big part of our lives.
Adam: It’s really hard not just listing tons of bands, right now. You have no idea how hard I’m having to fight myself not to just keep going and going…
WG: You make full use of color and black and white, when most comics are in one or the other. Do you want readers to experience the comics similar to Dorothy waking up in technicolor Oz or the Pleasantville protagonists joining the real world?
Comfort: Color is obviously a big metaphor in Rainbow. We just didn’t want it to be as simple as “the good guys are in color and the bad guys are gray.” The big villains are also in color, but they’re enforcing the Gloom. What it means to be in color is central to the overall story, but we’ll say that entering into color in Rainbow in the Dark is only the beginning of a person’s journey.
Adam: I can’t remember which one of us said it, but when we were brainstorming concepts to come up with an idea for a new series, one of us said “What if we did something that was like Rainbow Brite, but mixed with Mad Max?” The idea of using the crossing over from grayscale to color and back again was almost immediately a core of the idea.
Comfort: The first time color breaks into the page, it’s a great feeling. It starts peeking in slowly, and your eye is caught and intrigued, but then the rebel band comes roaring in in full-color and it’s a revelation, both for the reader and for Donna who’s watching it all happen.
WG: On a first glance, Rainbow in the Dark comes off as a happy go-lucky teenage dramedy, yet there is death and violence in each issue. What are your reactions to having the “happiness” ripped apart?
Adam: To tell a story with the scale and scope we wanted Rainbow to have, it needed stakes. You needed to feel like genuine danger was lurking out there for the characters. Death had to be on the board, and suffering too.
Comfort: The successes feel that much richer because of how much was sacrificed, how hard the struggle was. What they’re trying to achieve isn’t a small thing. We felt like it wouldn’t be fair to the readers or honest on our part to suggest that this grand ideal they’re fighting for could be won without a lot of pain.
Adam: I think you need to be willing to write violence and show it. I find it far more insulting when stories whitewash all the violence and have all these characters fighting without anybody ever getting hurt. We always want violence in our comics to have consequences so that nobody can pretend that it’s fun or something to be lauded or glorified.
Comfort: And it does rip away some of the happy-go-luckiness, but that’s part of the story of Rainbow. As much as people were blind and ignorant in the Gloom, the free radicals were just as naïve in some ways. To reconcile the needs of everyone, you have to get a little more serious. Like the best fantasy stories, it has darkness in it. We hope, though, that there’s still enough fun and cuteness and humor throughout the book that it never becomes a “dark” fantasy.
WG: Have you faced any criticism for including an ethnically diverse cast or lesbians in Rainbow in the Dark?
Adam: Not really, but then maybe offended parties aren’t talking to us.
Comfort: We weren’t expecting that much, to be honest. This is a book primarily for people 15-25, and that age group is so much more open and accepting that it’s stranger to give them stories without diversity!
Adam: I think that the idea of the central romance of the story revolving around a lesbian couple is far less shocking than the lack of a straight, white, male lead character. I’m glad people have been so excited by it, so far. It was really rewarding to hear people so moved by feeling included. I wasn’t sure what reaction we would get, but the overwhelming positivity has been humbling and encouraging.
Comfort: It might also be self-selecting. I mean, it’s possible that the people who would be offended by some of our choices just wouldn’t have been interested in a book like Rainbow in the first place.
Adam: Too busy trolling web comments, fighting for men’s rights or decrying reverse racism?
Comfort: Har har.
WG: Do you have any favorite moments from writing the series?
Adam: My favorite writing moments are honestly watching Comfort read over my edits. When we write, Comfort always takes the first draft, then I go through and do a draft, and we go back and forth until we have a script we’re both happy with. There is nothing I love more than the look of delight on her face when I’ve written something she really loves. Whether it makes her cry or giggle, I know I’ve done a good job if I get a reaction out of her.
Comfort: Yes, this is true, I love reading Adam’s edits. And for me, conceptualizing and writing all of the stuff for the Veratu, the main villain, was my favorite. He’s a fascinating, multi-layered character that goes through more changes than just about anyone in the series. My favorite scene with him was when he was confronted by all the other Veratu in issue #5. In a nutshell, that scene is the motivation/thesis for the character and I was truly pleased with how it came out.
Adam: For me, Donna & Raina scenes were always my favorite things to write. I loved them as a couple and as individuals, and they were always so sweet and fun together. If there’s anything I’ll miss with Rainbow being over, it’s writing those two girls. I also loved writing Kenji’s puns. I promise the readers that any puns in Rainbow were largely my fault, and you can put all the blame on me.
21. Anything to declare?
Adam: INDEPENDENCE!
Comfort: BAGGAGE VALUE!
Adam: WAR!
Comfort: …What is it good for?
Adam: Absolutely nothing! In seriousness, I just want to thank everybody who has come out to support Rainbow in the Dark and all our comics over the years. As a self-publisher, you’re much more keenly aware of how much you rely on your readers to keep going, and the fact that we’re still here after five years making comics is all thanks to them.
Comfort: And I want to let everyone know that if you have yet to read Rainbow in the Dark or The Uniques – you should totally go do it. As a matter of fact, Rainbow in the Dark: The Complete Saga is out in comic shops across the country! And in Amazon, or at In Stock Trades. It’s 368 pages of awesomeness and you should totally go pick it up! Hard-sell, hard-sell *wink*
Adam: …and if you want to follow us on the web, go to www.ComfortAndAdam.com – it’s got links to our Deviant Art pages, Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, and everything you need to know about The Uniques and Rainbow in the Dark.
Comfort: Lastly, we both want to thank everyone for reading.
Adam: Yeah – we tend to talk a LOT. So the fact that you made to the end here is commendable.
Comfort: Thanks for reading, and thanks to you, Whitney, for taking the time to interview us. It was a pleasure.
WG: As was mine. Check out Rainbow in the Dark, folks. It’s a psychedelic trip.
