Naifeh Knows Goth and Manga

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on Dec. 13, 2005 Sign up now!

By Chris Arrant -- Publishers Weekly, 12/13/2005

Best known both for his Eisner-nominated kid's series Courtney Crumrin and How Loathsome, an acclaimed adult fictional investigation of the sexual underground, Ted Naifeh continues to break ground in two new works. Naifeh is writing Unearthly, an original manga teen love triangle for OEL manga publisher Seven Seas, while also moving back to a familiar niche with Polly and the Pirates, a girl-adventure series that he'll write and draw for Oni Press.

Naifeh's specialty is gothic tales of girls in distress. "It's good to start off in a niche," he explains. "When Greg Rucka hit comics, he was in the crime drama niche [with Queen & Country]. Now, he can do whatever he wants. Fans of the spooky-girl niche were already out there, waiting for creators to take advantage of it. I knew how to handle it well, so I did well with it. Now I want to branch out, try different styles and flavors."

Unearthly features the classic teenage love triangle with an unexpected invasion in the form of an identity-snatching extraterrestrial. Accompanied by artwork from newcomer Elmer Damaso, the story allows Naifeh to explore the characters' relationships.

"I wanted to play around with the conventions of the typical teen high-school drama," Naifeh explains. "The popular girl isn't necessarily a ruthless, uncompromising bitch, and the shy, bookish heroine doesn't necessarily have a heart of gold. In high school, we geeks all wanted to believe the worst about the popular kids." But Naifeh says the reality of it is generally very simple. "From my own experience, I found that the popular kids were popular because they were likable, whereas we geeks were unpopular because we weren't."

While Naifeh enjoys working as a writer for Unearthly, the change isn't permanent. "I consider the art too important to the act of storytelling, and I'm too much of a control freak to give up that amount of control permanently. It's fun once in a while, but I love designing characters and creating emotion through expression. I love pacing out the pictures to create drama or comedy. For me that's an integral part of storytelling. "

In the new Oni series Polly & the Pirates, Naifeh effortlessly slides back into the guise of writer and artist to produce a work similar to but divergent from his previous work. The books star a prim and proper young lady named Polly-Anne, a boarding school student who finds out there's more to life than studying after a fateful run-in with a tawdry pirate crew.

Although she's similar in some ways to Courtney Crumrin, Polly-Anne's character is a bit different. "Polly is chipper, where Courtney is dour; she's a good girl where Courtney is a bad girl. It's just been fun to take a somewhat similar character in the opposite direction, and have a completely different sort of adventure."

Naifeh's work is usually found under the category of young adult fiction, and he says writing for young people is really a calling. "Something called me to the young adult fiction world. Some instinct told me that in comics, it was quickly becoming an underserved market, especially as more and more comics started trying to be so 'adult,' " says Naifeh. "I got on board with comics along with a huge number of other readers, with [Frank Miller's] Dark Knight Returns and [Alan Moore's] Watchmen. But I find most comics that try to reach that level of maturity to be rather contrived—with a few noteworthy exceptions, of course."

Although teen-oriented manga is prevalent in the bookstore market these days and American consumers have always associated comics with kids, there has been a dearth of comics material aimed at young U.S. readers until recently. "When I started Courtney Crumrin, it stood out," says Naifeh. "There were few other comics out there that could really call themselves children's books, and there didn't seem much of a place for them in the comics shop world."

The manga boom has changed all that. "A whole new readership was springing up, seemingly out of nowhere, made up mostly of young women," Naifeh says. "Courtney suddenly had a place to go and an audience ready for it. It was a really lucky break for me, and you can bet my publishers jumped on it as fast as possible."