Did you know there are comics out there other than Spider-Man or the Green Lantern? Shocking, I know. Kevin Church writes a bunch of them, and he was nice enough to talk to me about them. 

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For those of us who don’t know you, wanna give us a rundown of your nefarious history?

Born in 1974, died in 2658 after my robot lungs finally fell victim to the Europan genophage. In between, I wrote comics for my own imprint, Agreeable Comics as well as BOOM! studios and hopefully a few others in the near future.

Have you ever done any cartooning and art , or are you strictly a writer?

I draw like you gave a methed-up crab a pencil and said “Mona Lisa! Now.” So no, I’m strictly a writer.

I know you’re a comics writer, but are an all-around fan of quality writing whatever the media type.  What is it about comics as a medium that you’re drawn to writing?

With comics, you control everything in a very meticulous way. You can draw out single moments for pages or cover a millennium in a panel. (This isn’t something I do, really, but it’s something I love about comics.) I also love the smaller-scale collaboration of working with just a few people instead of stage or film where there’s a quantum leap in the number of participants.  Also, I get bored writing prose. BORED.

Comics have a history of being a traditionally short-form type of literature. Comic books are single issues of 19 to 22 pages or so, and comic strips are 3 to 5 panels at the most.  Arguably, long-form storytelling in comics is a relatively newer thing.  I bring this up because a lot of your comic writing seems to skew heavily in favor of long-form storytelling.  Do you specifically prefer writing longer overarching stories in comic form, or has it just subconsciously sort of happened that way?

If you think it’s happened, then I’ve not really noticed it? Yes, there are longer things I’ve done (Cover Girl for BOOM! and She Died In Terrebonne) but I tend to fuss over the individual dose more than think about longer arcs. Of course, as I write that, The Loneliest Astronauts is in its big final story that’ll go on for at least another 10-15 installments and The Rack is doing a soap opera thing and I’m beginning to put together a new long-form supercrime thing with an established artist whose work is just astonishing.

Maybe I don’t really know what I’m talking about.  I do obsess over whether or not an individual installment is compelling on its own. I get weary of seeing people just stick up pages of their OGN every week without any though about how as an individual piece it’s going to help get new readers interested.

Even though you write as opposed to draw, do you still feel like comics is a unique challenge that requires a sense of visual storytelling in order to “just write?”

Oh, yeah. It’s basically writing a screenplay + directing it just a bit and then working with the artists to get what you want if it’s not there on the first pass. I’m incredibly lucky to have that not be a problem, either because I work with great artists or they’ve trained me to write with them in mind.  Probably both!

Is there anything at all you find particularly difficult about writing, out of every aspect of it? Tracking time and setting, character names & backgrounds, stuff like that? I hate to go to the film comparison, but in filmmaking, you have a whole job more or less dedicated to that (script supervising). You’re not working with an editor as far as I know when it comes to scripts, so it’s all on you.

I hate plotting longer form things. With most projects that are finite, I just know how they end and I try to get to that point by any means necessary, winging it a bit, but I’ve found that I lose a bit of an edge if I’m not being panicky and trying to connect the dots. I recently came across the first plot synopsis of She Died In Terrebonne and it’s not nearly as engaging on any kind of emotional level. This thing I’m working on now with the new artist (who I won’t name until we’ve actually got something in the can) is more ambitious than anything I’ve done, so I’ve worked out a lot of character beats and motivations in advance.

How far ahead do you plan when it comes to scripts?  Does it vary from project to project?

I have a stickies program on my desktop where story notes get stuck that I can’t use right away, so it varies wildly. Sometimes I’ll bring something up from a joke box buried in 2004.

An arguably amazing aspect of comics is that a lot of times, you can build them around simple but appealing ideas. “What if zombies battled vampire sharks!”, “Wouldn’t it be wacky if a robot worked in a record store?” or “What would happen if super-VILLAINS became super-HEROES?” Have you ever had one of those moments? Or do you try to avoid that when brainstorming comic ideas to focus on more thought-through stuff?

The next big project that I keep talking about sounds like it’s one of those things, but it just came out of an extrapolation of me thinking “I want to do modern noir, but it’s been done to death lately” and kind of sliding it away from there into pulpier and slightly more cerebral areas. I think for me, a comic at its core is about the characters, even if it’s just a goofy sitcom strip. You want to get people invested in characters and once they care about them, they’ll follow you pretty much anywhere.

There’s also a romance thing in my future, simply because I want to try my hand at it and there’s not enough webcomics that tackle it.

And finally, the shallow question.  Writing hero?  Doesn’t have to be in comics, just in general.

He’s a fucking asshole, but David Mamet. Not just his dialogue style (which I try to avoid) but the way he structures his stories and meticulously paces them out. I could never do what he does, but he inspires me to do what I do.