It's likely that comic book fans know Amanda Conner from her work as an artist on the Harley Quinn series for DC Comics.
Conner also has a history, though, of working with both DC and Marvel, as well as with Mad Magazine. She's known for her work on such iconic characters as Power Girl, Supergirl, Birds of Prey and Painkiller Jane.
Now, Conner - along with her Harley Quinn partner in crime and husband Jimmy Palmiotti - have a new comic book series, Superzero, with AfterShock Comics. Superzero is about a young girl, Dru, who so desperately wants to become a superhero that she'll go to great lengths to gain superpowers, including recreating the famous origin stories of current comic book heroes.
In an interview, Conner recently spoke about Superzero, as well as her experience working with AfterShock Comics.
With Superzero, you decided to publish with AfterShock Comics. How and why did you make that decision?
Actually, two of our old friends approached us about it. And we did work with them before: Mike Marts and Joe Pruett. They work on the books, they edit, and they said "Okay, we're working with this new company now and do you have any ideas?" And Jimmy and I had this idea rolling around in our heads for quite a while - I'm going to say 10, maybe 12, years - so they were like, "You want us to do that idea with AfterShock?" And I said "'Yeah," so that's pretty much how it came about: nothing dramatic, just we thought, "Oh, this is a good place for this."
So what originally inspired this character of Dru?
We just thought it would be funny, like if a real person tried to do what they do in comic books, and what the real results would be. It was a little bit crazier when we first had the idea for Dru. She was going to be much worse off, like she was going to try every single superhero origin story and the effects on her were going to be what it would be on regular human beings. You know, like don't get too near an exploding nuclear bomb because you probably won't turn into the Hulk, you'll probably get incinerated. And we just had her doing that. So we were going to go in that direction: we were going to turn her into a real mess.
Part of me - you know, this is like the Mad Magazine part of me - wants to still go extremely in that direction and Jimmy is like, "Well, we don't want her to die of radiation poisoning, so let's reel it in a little bit."
I liked the ants, I thought the ants were hilarious.
Yeah, that totally makes sense because there are a lot of bugs down in Florida. There are fire ants, there are spiders, all sorts of things, so we could actually do that experiment and see if it works.
I really like new takes on female protagonists in comic books like this. Is that something you think about when writing a title like Superzero?
Jimmy and I love working on female characters and Jimmy was a writer, actually, way before I was. I don't really count myself as a writer, I count myself as an artist who does some writing stuff. Jimmy has always found female characters to be really, really fascinating. And he's never been one of those, "I'm just going to put them in tights and let them beat each other up" kind of guys. He really likes to delve into what's going on in their heads and how they would act and react. So it's really great to work with him on it because he wants to take - like "I'll say let's take it in this direction," but he'll say, "Yeah, we can do that, and can take it a step farther." And when it comes back to me, I'll go, "Okay, let's take that even a step farther." So we bounce stuff off of each other.
You can do a lot with female characters because a lot of times in year past, they've just been sort of not very multi-dimensional - that's not the case in all characters and there are so many female comic book characters from decades past that I just love so much. But a lot of times, people just have it in their heads where they pigeon-hole a female character into a certain category. And it's much more fun to just take a character and run with it.
How different of a process is it working on a creator-owned series?
I don't really know. I've had so much luck with the editors that I've had at the big two. And the luck that I've had is that they trust me and they trust Jimmy. They trust our instincts and they're sort of like "Okay, these guys know what they're doing." With AfterShock, they're equally as hands-off, which is really nice.
Since Jimmy has been writing a lot longer than I have, he's had cases where editors are a little bit heavy-handed. And it's nice to have a creator-owned thing at an independent company because you get to exercise your vision for that, and they're relatively hands-off with it. Not to say that the stuff we do, with Harley Quinn, they trust us a lot and they sort of let us run with that, too.
But it's more common when you own your own thing to be able to just exercise your vision for it.
One of the things I love about this series are some of the little details, for example, the LED waterproof strips in Dru's bathtub. What inspires those details - where do ideas like that come from?
That, in particular: Jimmy's been wanting to put LED strips everywhere in our house. So I think it's part of that. We think about what we want and what we fantasize about having, and then we're like, "Well, if I can't have it, Dru is going to have it." Or "We're going to put it in this comic book."
At first, this series feels like a comedy, but there are some serious issues, too, such as Tana's home life. How do you balance out those moments out in the story?
I think when you put the heavy stuff - that's how real life is. In real life, we always strive towards the gleeful part of life, but it's always punctuated by heavy stuff. I don't want to tell too much because some of it gets addressed in some of the issues that you haven't read yet. But yeah, that's how real life works: you always want to have the fun.
Pretty much everybody is, for lack of a better term, working for the weekend. And you want your comics to be fun, but it adds an element of reality to it when you do have this realistic situation. And then, some people can identify with it, too.
