Ellen Forney Loves Comics and Led Zeppelin

This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on January 31, 2006 Sign up now!

by Ian Brill -- Publishers Weekly, 1/31/2006

Ellen Forney's I Love Led Zeppelin, due for release in July, may only be her second bound collection of comics, but she is already a cartoonist who's reached a fairly wide audience. She has produced strips such as "How to Be a Fabulous Fag Hag," written by comedian Margaret Cho, and her work has been published in the L.A. Weekly and many other alternative culture magazines and weekly newspapers.

PWCW: What is I Love Led Zeppelin?

Ellen Forney: My new comic collection from Fantagraphics! I'm really excited about it—I haven't put out a book since Monkey Food: The Complete "I Was Seven in '75" Collection, in 1999 [Fantagraphics]. The full title is I Love Led Zeppelin: Panty-Dropping Comics. The book collects the comics I've done for weekly newspapers [The Stranger, L.A. Weekly] magazines [BUST, Oxford American] book anthologies [Scheherazade, Secrets and Confidences] and selections from my solo comic book, Tomato (#1 and #2). Mostly single-page comics from the weekly newspapers, though.

The title I Love Led Zeppelin was originally kind of a joke, which I stuck on my list of possible titles to run by Gary Groth, publisher at Fantagraphics. I wrote next to it "Gary would never let me use this"—I meant it—which I'm guessing was the reason Gary was drawn to it. When I ran the title by my friends, they insisted I had to use it. I am a huge Zeppelin geek. This title makes me ridiculously happy. The song "Dazed and Confused" does play a major role in "The Final Soundtrack," a one-page comic about what song you might want playing on the radio if you died in a car crash.

PWCW: You've done comics for magazines that usually feature news and opinion articles. How do those assignments come about?

EF: Sometimes I pitch an idea, sometimes I'm given some sort of theme, sometimes I'm given a specific topic.

PWCW: In particular, how is it working with The Stranger in Seattle, a magazine with many ties to the comics world?

EF: It's great. I've had several runs of serial comics in the Stranger—"I Was Seven in '75"; "How D'ya Do That?" [later "How To"]; and "Lustlab Ad of the Week" (current). It gets my work in the public eye, and motivates me to build a body of work. I've been doing work for the paper since 1993.

PWCW: What reactions do you get from readers who aren't very familiar with comics but read your stuff in L.A. Weekly or the Stranger?

EF: The first thing that comes to mind is the reaction I got from a local sixth-grade teacher. He'd been offended by "How to Smoke Pot and Stay Out of Jail," and got his entire class to write me letters about how cruel I am, ruining the lives of the next generation. It's rare that my work is controversial, so it was very satisfying for me. "How to Fuck a Woman with Your Hands" generated both angry and positive letters when it ran in the L.A. Weekly, but not a peep when it ran in the Stranger. That brings up an interesting point, that many people who don't read comic books do read the local papers, which is another reason I like working for weeklies.

PWCW: How is it working with a collaborator like Margaret Cho, who's done a lot of writing but not a lot of comic book writing?

EF: It varies. The piece with Margaret Cho was a combination of e-mails and an interview, and I did the comic adaptation myself. Kristin Gore wrote "Sammy's World" as a comic piece with stick figures, modeled after American Splendor, and knew to keep the text short and the visuals pertinent. True, it's often hard to work with writers who are accustomed to a lot of exposition—sculpting an essay into a comic is tough and usually requires a lot of editing and back-and-forth with the writer.

PWCW: How is doing illustration for articles different than doing comics for a magazine?

EF: There's overlap—combining words and pictures in a dynamic way—but there's way more involved in making a comic. Most importantly, an illustration is static and is secondary to the text, while a comic is sequential and can even skip text altogether. I teach comics at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, and the semester is packed with concepts that might not be immediately apparent to the reader. Drawing and writing skills, of course, but also iconic language, panel shape and size, page design, lettering, character development, choreographing narratives. It's kind of like a making a film, but the cartoonist is the writer, director, actors, costumer—everyone.

PWCW: What projects do you have coming up?

EF: My current weekly spot in the Stranger, "Lustlab Ad of the Week", a comic interpretation of one of the week's kinky personal ads; a graphic novel with Sherman Alexie for Little, Brown; a three-page spread for Nickelodeon magazine about making comics exciting. I did a two-page spread for Nick in April 2004: "Star in Your Own Comic!", which won a prize from the Association of Educational Publishers.

One more thing: I've interpreted my work into performances (I toured a Monkey Food show in 1999) and intend to do another tour when I love LZ comes out. I performed "The Final Soundtrack" at Seattle's big Memorial Day weekend festival, as part of a literary magazine reading—in an 800-seat theater! It was a blast!) The local public television ran a promo for my performance through August. You can see the pubic television clip at http://www.seattlechannel.org/media/cityagogoAug05.htm

PWCW: How has teaching at the Cornish College of the Arts affected the comics work you do?

EF: My enthusiasm for comics as a medium has definitely been rekindled. It's a blast to see what the students come up with—"teachers learn from their students" is a cliche, but true. I've learned about manga (something many students are into, but I'd never taken to) and mainstream comics (same), as well as new cartoonists I hadn't heard of. It's made me more confident as a professional cartoonist—I do know the answers to many of the questions the students ask but not all! Keeps me humble.