Talking with Steady Beat's Rivkah
This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on December 19, 2006 Sign up now!
by Johanna Draper Carlson, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 12/19/2006
Rivkah Greulich, better known to the original manga community as simply Rivkah, rediscovered manga after high school and entered Tokyopop's Rising Stars of Manga contest. The end result is the graphic novel series Steady Beat with two volumes published (2005, 2006) and two to more to go. It's the story of Leah, a teenage girl who discovers her older and very popular sister, Sarai, is lesbian. PW Comics Week talked with the 25-year-old Rivkah, about her influences, her background and what she'd like readers to learn from her comics.
PW Comics Week: Steady Beat is set in a Texas suburb and has a strong sense of place. What's your connection to the state?
Rivkah: I'm a native-born and bred Austinite. Except for a few years in Pennsylvania and a few months in Savannah, Ga., I've lived in the Texas state capital my entire life. I've traveled quite a bit—I can't remember a year that went by when we didn't go on a road trip of some sort growing up—and I've been just about everywhere in the U.S. except Montana (I'll get there someday). I've yet to find a place in the U.S. that quite compares to Austin. It's a very mixed city, with its blend of conservative, liberal and moderate people and a strong sense of culture. We're considered the live music capital of the world, and there's an indy atmosphere conducive to local businesses. We also apparently have more books per capita than any other U.S. city. It's just a really great place with wonderful people, and I'm madly in love [with it].
I knew without a doubt that Austin was the perfect setting for Steady Beat. Being the state capital, there's a lot of political power centered in this city, and the two girls having a politician for a mother isn't that much of a leap. My own father (an old-school Republican) was a political science major. He has always been involved in his community and has a great respect for our U.S. House representative, Lloyd Doggett, even if he is a Democrat.
In Steady Beat, the area the main characters live in reflects the particular area of Austin that I grew up in, a very wealthy, more conservative neighborhood with ridiculously high property taxes—though it's called "Eastlake" instead of "Westlake" in the book. They go to the same schools and tromp the same stalking grounds. Even if not all readers recognize the places I reference in the book, I find it personally entertaining drawing from the places I'm familiar with and love.
PWCW: Is the rest of Steady Beat as personally influenced? Are any of the events from real life?
Rivkah: Pretty much everything in Steady Beat has its basis in real life. Sarai's coming-out story in the third volume is almost a line-for-line portrayal of how I came to terms with my own sexuality while in high school and my friends and family's and community's reaction to it. [Sarai's] reactions to the mother are very similar to how I felt about my father growing up—busy making the money and making sure we could go to a good school, but never really physically there for us. I respected and loved and admired him, but there was this disconnect. Even Sarai's love-interest, Jessica, has her basis in a girl I dated when I was 18 and whom I admired and respected greatly.
As for Leah. Yeah, that's me at 16. Interested in everything but not actually focused on any one thing. Leah's a fun character for me to write. I get to sink back into that younger, irresponsible self. Sarai more represents my oldest sister. The clash of opposite but similar personalities. But we both eventually learned our own ways and came to terms with one another.
The two gay fathers, Paul and Simon, get their basis from several of the youth leaders at the GLBTQ youth group I was active in through the end of high school. People say the flamboyantly flaming Paul is over-the-top, but seriously, he isn't at all! His partner, Simon, offers a good counterpoint—the gay man who'd lived his life as a heterosexual, only to realize one day he was living a lie. I've seen it happen more than a few times.
PWCW: The book is strongly message-driven, setting up readers to root for Leah's lesbian sister to come out of the closet. I'm guessing this is an issue you feel strongly about.
Rivkah: You could say this is a message I feel very strongly about. It was funny coming up with the plot for Steady Beat. I struggled with whether to write the story from the [point of] view of the gay or straight sister. This is a coming-out story, but I didn't want to hit readers over the head with too much message, either. Neither did I want my book to appeal only to GLBTQ teens. So I decided to tell the story from the point of view of the straight sister and be a little more subtle. It's been a challenge taking the less obvious route, but it's certainly been a rewarding one.
However, Steady Beat covers much more than the coming-out story. It's about family and tradition and community. It's about what exactly defines these people we call family and friends. I grew up in a family of nine. I dearly love my parents (and stepparents) and siblings, but I never really knew them very well.
PWCW: How has the series changed since you began?
Rivkah: I originally planned on making Steady Beat a nine-volume project. But Steady Beat is my first full-length work, with all of the necessary teething pains most artists and writers go through in their early works. The only comic I'd made before Steady Beat was a short story called "Pink" (which is still available through my Web site). I never even went to an art school, so these two years, it's been a bit like being paid to go to college. So I've cut it down to what will (hopefully) be four volumes. Steady Beat isn't necessarily my brain-child, either. I knew in pitching this series to Tokyopop that they'd be taking a good majority of the rights, and I decided to pitch something that'd be fun and challenging. I'm pretty positive that the fourth volume will end it. Perhaps someday I'll do a sequel. Leah has a lot to learn from and say to the world. If Tokyopop lets me, I'd also like to collect Steady Beat into a single volume. I think it'd sell better all bound up as one volume for a $24.95 price point instead of individual volumes.
I'm already working on a children's series that I feel has much more room for expansion and is infinitely more marketable. I already have the script written for the first book plus character designs and setting. I've started keeping an eye out for inkers and toners so that I can get production up to three to four books a year. Now just to find a publisher.
I also want to create a stand-alone autobiography about my two years lost in a rural district of Pennsylvania named Lyndora. But I think I still need to get far enough past the embarrassment of those years. We do awfully stupid things when we're young, don't we?
PWCW: Why the single-name billing?
Rivkah: I read a lot of Japanese manga growing up, and I always liked the idea of single-name groups working on a concept. Also, admittedly, nobody knows how to spell my last name. And heaven only knows if I get married someday (again) and decide to change it, hence causing even more confusion. No. Just simple "Rivkah" has proven to be easier. There aren't too many of them in the world.
PWCW: What brought you to comics and then to Tokyopop?
Rivkah: I still have the very first copies of manga I ever bought at a local comic shop. Sailor Moon volumes 7 to 15 in the original Japanese. I was fascinated with the art and started teaching myself the Japanese language so I could read the stories as well. I was exposed to other stories such as Magic Knights Rayearth, Parasyte and Ice Blade (still one of my favorites) through Tokyopop's original incarnation, MixxZine. I even picked up a few comics by American creators through the store I bought my manga [from]—most notably Terry Moore's Strangers in Paradise—but I stuck mainly to Japanese titles at the time, because I had difficulty finding anything else that struck my interest. Thank goodness that's changed!
I never really thought I'd be actually drawing and writing comics. I took a few art classes in high school. After two years in a podunk town without even a bookstore and four months of misery in Georgia trying to avoid the fact I lived next to a crack house, I returned to Austin and discovered that, lo and behold, manga was now being translated into English. And they were being published as affordable paperbacks by Tokyopop. I was fascinated when I saw the Rising Stars of Manga contest and I decided, "Why not?"
Of course, that didn't bode well for the small fiction publishing company I had at the time with my business partner, David Baker. I gave up the majority of my time on the company to focus on making comics. I don't regret the decision.
PWCW: What advice would you give to an aspiring creator?
Rivkah: Draw a lot. Draw from life. Don't rely too much on style. Take life drawing and other art classes if you can afford them. Learn business. Love a little, live a lot and learn to write amazing stories from it.
PWCW: What else would you like your readers to know about you or your work?
Rivkah: I used to try and force humor into my stories, but I'm starting to learn that it's much more natural to just let the characters make fools of themselves, especially if they don't realize it. I'm also a huge fan of the visual metaphor. My favorite kinds of scenes are when the characters are talking about one thing but another kind of story is going on in the background. I've used references to [Hemingway's] "Hills Like White Elephants," War and Peace, a number of songs (mostly country) and a quantum physics reference to Schroedinger's Cat. My favorite author is Ray Bradbury. I'm also developing a love for Leo Tolstoy. I love how he moves from one character, following him or her to the next in the other room, and then circling back around to the original cast. He also does an incredible job expressing his characters' facial expressions and body language.
And there's no such thing as the word "no." It just means, "go back and do it over again, but better." I really do believe a person can do anything as long as you put your mind to it.
