Mark O. Stack Interview| Kickstarter Boost

Mark O. Stack explains how his creator-owned webcomic about a non-binary weekend-only superhero, background as a self-described “White-passing Chicano” comics journalist and a deeply conflicted relationship with mainstream “cape books” led to an inclusive publishing initiative, currently working towards a modest Kickstarter goal. Check out the campaign HERE.

I really enjoyed your comic WEEKEND WARRIOR, which I read on Tapas! What was the genesis of that project?

That comic was born on a short train ride home from San Diego Comic Con 2016. I was stilling doing the comics journalism thing, so I had just done the show for the first time. I grew up in San Diego and had done some college down there, too, but at the time I was living in the Central Valley of California. It’s full of farms, dairies, and Republicans. Not really liking where I lived or my day job meant that I put a lot of pressure on my trips to comics conventions to be a wonderful time away from my reality. At conventions, I experienced the joy of connecting with friends who I felt saw me for who I really was. And then on the train ride home from that particular show, I was overcome with sorrow at the idea that I hadn’t had enough fun to justify the time I spent back at home toiling away in obscurity.

I connected that feeling pretty quickly to the plight of heroes who are sent to other worlds. John Carter, Adam Strange, etc. I was able to take their experience and relate my own of being in comics to it. I was in the early stages of making my own comics, too, so I put all that worry and fear about breaking in into the concept to come up with a superhero story that (when it’s all told eventually) might be one of the most honest reflections I can manage about what it feels like to be in comics.

How did you come to partner with the rest of your team?

Weekend Warrior spent a little time in development as I ironed out the kinks, particularly how to mold and present the protagonist, and it stalled for a little bit after scheduling with the initial artist (a really good friend) I’d been talking to about it didn’t work out. I hadn’t thought about it in a while, but I was always on the lookout for artists to work with. I’d follow an artist on social media and then search their following list to see who they liked. That eventually turned me towards Anne Marcano, whose work just spoke to me as something filled with life. I saw a joy in her figure work, an ability to communicate great highs and potentially lows, that I saw as the key to making Weekend Warrior a relatable story. And that has turned out to be one of the most fulfilling creative partnerships of my short career. Couldn’t imagine what kind of work I’d be doing right now if I never met Anne.

And Danny Djeljosevic, our letterer… He’s the man. We met through a mutual friend in San Diego, and I found out we’d all been involved in the same comics scene at some point. We were once talking about this one book, a book I didn’t like very much, and I told Danny “I’m sorry” when he said he had read it. He came back pretty quickly to say that he wasn’t sorry because the inks were sick. That kind of sums up Danny. He’s a smart guy who knows how to engage with a variety of work without letting a lot of the outside conversation drive his thinking. He’s got an actual perspective, and it shows through the myriad of comics that he’s written and released (Big Fucking Hammer is also on Tapas and is very good). That body of work alone made Danny someone who I looked up to and wanted to emulate in my approach to self-publishing. So when I asked him to letter the comic, I was doing it knowing that I was getting a very gifted thinker who would know what worked about the pages he was working on and help bring those qualities forward.

How did that project become an anthology (as opposed to just a single title)?

I think most comics should have back-ups. Particularly superhero work. It’s a great way to try launching new concepts and new creators. So when I initially conceived of Weekend Warrior, I thought that it would be cool to feature short comics by other creators inbetween chapters. In part to make up for the wait between updates and in part to directly co-sign the work of people I believed in. However, I pretty quickly realized that I wanted to be working more in print. A minor obsession with British comics magazine Warrior, where Alan Moore and his collaborators launched Miracleman and V for Vendetta, meant that I was seeing a lot of possibility in that format. You may not like every feature in a comics magazine, but if there’s one that you really love then that might keep you coming back long enough for the rest to win you over.

How did you choose the other contributors to the anthology? Are they people you know “in real life”, online acquaintances or solicitations?

I’ve met most of our contributors in real life. Hugged many of them. But we weren’t all that close when I initially put out a call (with a link to a Google submission form) asking if anyone had any superhero stories they wanted to tell and if there were aspects of their identity that they had wanted to see reflected in the superhero genre. I think I had 20 respondents, but I was able to narrow that down pretty quickly by looking at what people had suggested as the story they wanted to tell. It all had to fit together in some way while also presenting a diversity of styles, so I was looking for the things that could best flow in and out of each other. There were some who I directly solicited for ideas just because I desperately wanted them involved. And there are some who had to drop out of contributing due to scheduling conflicts. With all that in mind, I think I landed at a very tight and exciting group of creators.

How did you make all of the other decision that presage a Kickstarter?

The Kickstarter exists entirely because there was no other way for me to afford printing enough copies to distribute comps to the creators. We could have wrapped production on the magazine and simply put it up for sale as a digital piece, but all the creators involved put in a lot of work that I thought they deserved to see in print. For one creator in particular, I think this might be the first time they get to hold a comic they created in their own hands. That’s a special feeling.

Page length was something I was always monitoring. The length of the comics, prose, and interview were dictated by me ahead of time to all the contributors in order to make sure we weren’t scrambling to fill pages so we could print without issue. Of course, one creator with a non-standard story length that I built a lot of planning around did end up exiting the project pretty late in our timeline which necessitated some scrambling as we went from a 40-page first issue to a 36-page issue.

The logistics that I had to figure out for this were how many copies I wanted to print, what would packaging materials cost, and how much it would cost to ship the number of copies needed to be sent out to the necessary number of backers for funding. I ran my numbers by a friend who runs a micro-press with several successful numbers, and she gave me the okay. I can not stress enough the importance of having someone with relevant financial experience to analyze your budget and cost breakdowns before you launch something like this.

Your comic reviews reveal a love and deep understanding of superhero comics, and, yet, you mention “It’s not always easy taking part in the genre when it seems to belong to an industry that is either forgetful of or downright hostile towards your existence!” Could you expound on that thought?

When I said that, I was largely thinking about other people, about friends. Let’s take this pretty recent example: Marvel Comics was doing this extended storyline where the original X-Men came to the present. During that storyline, the young Iceman came out as gay. That seemed like a pretty big breakthrough even as the circumstances of the scene in which he came out struck many readers as invasive and insensitive. But there was a chance for some progress to be made by taking this character present from the early years of the Marvel Universe and explore his sexuality in a new way that would be relevant to queer readers who may have already identified their experience with that of the X-Men. However, Marvel ended that storyline with the young X-Men going back to their original time and erasing their memories to preserve the timeline. So Iceman had to go back in the closet as a teenager.

I saw a lot of friends hurt by that online as it was pretty traumatic to see the character have to sacrifice the happiness that came from accepting his queerness. The thing is that Iceman didn’t have to go back in the closet. It was done to preserve continuity which isn’t actually an important thing. Editorial at Marvel Comics could have just decided that Iceman had now been out as a teenager. They change continuity all the time! But when it came to a character’s queerness, they didn’t. They opted to uphold the establishment. It’s pretty painful to imagine a publisher sending the message that their made-up history is more important than a narrative of queer self-acceptance. And then on top of all that, you have Sina Grace, a queer creator, alleging that editorial at Marvel Comics advised him not to write Iceman as “too gay” in his solo title. Who would ever want to read another X-Men comic, let alone anything from this publisher again, after that? Well, a lot of people. I have a lot of empathy for the people who grew up with these things, want them to be better, and are continually hurt by them. It’s a difficult thing to deal with.

What do you love about superhero comics?

This is a fun follow-up to me describing how hateful they can be! I love that it all builds off itself. Every work in the genre is following in the footsteps of something else, often pretty directly. There’s a history, there are archetypes, there are recurring themes… There’s a really strong tradition at play that you get to see people wrestle with in their own way. I think part of the reason you see recent books like Black Hammer become so popular is that it’s working within an existing framework but removing the subject from it in order to explore it under different circumstances. So what looks like League International Goes to Stardew Valley is allowed to comment on the work its riffing on and put it through a prism that allows the creative team to explore the genre and its history as a whole. It’s a highly literary mode of superhero work that people really respond to.

Which characters had an impact on you, and how has your identity and the perspective of adulthood changed or challenged your relationship to those characters?

Superman is the big one. Loved that character as a kid. Really bought into all the hope and inspiration talk. I still do, to an extent, but it’s been tempered. The character is challenging, though, in part because his message has been watered down over the years. The character, before he became a real icon, landed on the scene beating up abusive husbands and holding people in power accountable because he alone had the power to do that. That latter part is still there to an extent through Clark Kent’s role as a journalist, but DC will regularly flirt with and then shy away from presenting a Superman who is truly radical as befits his origins as the creation of two working class Jewish cartoonists

But here’s what really challenged Superman and the comics industry for me. I heard that the editor in charge of the character at DC Comics was a sexual predator. That information was out there long before that brilliant and necessary Buzzfeed piece on Eddie Berganza. A lot of people knew and there were people trying to get the story out. But it took a long time. And I felt my ability to wholeheartedly love these characters diminish as a result of knowing that the men in charge could commit such terrible acts and the people above them (who are still at the publisher!) would protect them. There’s no coming all the way back from realizing that the thing you love is in the hands of bad people and the corporate culture was seemingly designed to protect them from consequences.

I still love the superheroes published by Marvel and DC. I still read some of them pretty regularly, but I can’t ever fully give my loyalty or love to anyone after what I and others have learned. I’m ready to drop everything and walk away from them (like I’m doing with Marvel) at a moment’s notice. It’s the difference between being a child and an adult, I guess, and actually having to think about what we’re choosing to support and how that reflects our vision of what the world should be.

How has the mainstream let you down, as a Latinx creator?

For me personally, I’ve felt like my existence has been largely ignored by the superhero comics industry. I’ve got a pretty particular experience, though, as a white-passing Chicano, so even when a positive Chicano representation like Jaime Reyes, the Blue Beetle, shows up it doesn’t make the largest impression on me (even as the character has rightfully meant a lot to plenty of people). I think lot of that has to do with that and other characters being written by a lot of white men whose approach just hasn’t really resonated with me. So, in essence, I don’t feel like we’re given a lot of range. We get a few stock stories or presentations. I’ve felt more represented by characters on CW’s The Flash than I ever have by their comic books. I think it’s a weird truth that televisions projects based off of these superhero projects tend to do a better job of presenting diversity.

What about your approach to this anthology improves on the current superhero landscape?

I think it’s more of a supplement. We’re supplementing the current superhero landscape by trying to create a space that embraces the genre and its history while being creator-owned and pushing inclusivity as a founding ethos as a result. No one can tell us “no” and people’s stories are in their own hands, and I think that has the potential to lead to some really exciting material free from the constraints of larger publishers.

Tell me a little about how you have pursued your comics career. You’ve mentioned feeling more “pro” and that industry pros have begun to recognize you as a peer. What has your journey been to this point?

I think that element of being recognized as a peer just comes from putting work out and sticking with it. I keep slowly putting out new work and working with really cool people. It just happens to be that the people you make friends with because you share the same passion start rising up around you, and they more or less pull you up a little bit by association. I’ve been fortunate enough to make friends with people I’ve met at shows after shoving one of my books into their hands and in online spaces where we all get together to talk about these things. I started off feeling like an annoying kid, but I’ve managed to settle into some confidence thanks to the recognition from people whose opinions I really value.

You are calling this #1. What is in store for the future – both for your own “Weekend Warrior” comic, the anthology and your other work/career?

I desperately want to get back to the Weekend Warrior story, but Anne I have some other irons in the fire that we’re waiting to see some development on first. So that story might take more of a backseat to other work. As for the magazine, I’ve got a model in mind for how to do it going forward that I’m pretty excited about. This first issue acts a lot as a pilot or proof of concept, so I’m hoping it signals that there’s interest in more ahead. There’s also more ahead in the very near future that is going to act as a supplement to what we’re doing with Weekend Warrior Comics with a bit of a literary aim. It’d be fair to consider it a sister title, and that will either be presented toward the end of this year or the start of the next one.

Beyond backing the Kickstarter, how can those invested in your worth best support your efforts?

Beyond sharing the Kickstarter, share the work from people you believe in. As a general rule, try to give your money to independent creators over giving it to larger corporations with unethical practices. That creates an environment where a lot more people can succeed outside those structures which will help us all.

Lastly, please give me any links you wish to direct people towards.

We’re at weekendwarriorcomics.com!