Sasha Matthews lives in a well-ordered, sun-strewn apartment in the Upper West Side, and her room, which doubles as her workspace, is somewhat typical of what you'd expect for a cartoonist with a burgeoning comics publishing house. It's a utilitarian affair; against a far wall is a floor-to-ceiling series of wooden cubbie cubes, which house squared piles of notebooks, the attenuated spines of novels, doorstop-sized reference texts, and an anatomical model of the human body, one half vivisected to show an off-white rib cage and a human brain. A wooden mannequin is paused in a gravity-defying arabesque on a dresser. On her desk are two shoebox-sized containers cradling rows of inking markers, a MacBook, and a spotlight lamp. The room is expected.
That is, except for a princess castle perched on top of the highest row of cubbies. But this makes sense, too – Sasha is only 10 years old.
Matthews' publishing operation Rumble Comics is more in line with a cottage industry than a small traditional press, but her success can still, even at a microcosmic level, be measured against entrepreneurs three times her age. Praise from George O'Connor, author of The Olympians series, and Boing Boing editor Mark Fraunfelder – who proclaimed, "I've seen sample childhood comic book art from great artists (like R. Crumb) and she is better at age 10 than they were" – only aid in upholding similar analogies. As does her prolificness: within less than a year, she's released two historically based titles, Sitting Bull: A Life and Pompeii: Lost and Found, both of which can be found in bookstores spackled across the Upper West Side.
Matthews is definitive when I ask her what she does: "I'm a self-publisher," she proclaims, adjusting her horn-rimmed glasses. She tucks a chin-length lock of hair behind her ear and tilts her head toward her right shoulder.
Matthews has been an avid reader of comics since the age of eight, when her father, freelance photographer and fellow comic fan Scott Matthews, gave her an compilation of X-Men comics ("I think I have five of them, five giant-sized," she added). Her tastes grew to other comics genres, lines that are both humorous and cerebral, like Calvin and Hobbes.
An avid drawer, her interests soon shifted and evolved, and she developed a desire to create her own content, and attended an art class to teach her the basics in plotting, spatial point-of-view, and panelling. Her first comic, titled Plant Girl, was done entirely in pencil and featured a titular protagonist with the ability to control, well, plants.
But Matthews was dissatisfied: she soon realized that historical events provided parameters within which to work; she found discipline and the remnants of the past to be the most freeing.
"Well, Plant Girl was very bad," she acknowledges. "I found it easier to make a comic with historical guidelines than to make a comic with no guidelines."
Sitting Bull, her first professionally realized work, came from school extension work. "It was easy," she says, "it's drawing and writing, and I like to do both."
The idea was well-timed with her coursework, which at the time orbited around the U.S. Civil War and its event-based offshoots. Using reference texts she already owned (her favorite a book titled A Concise History of The World, which she cracks is "definitely not a concise history of the world") and the Internet, Sasha took comprehensive notes to bring a sense of accuracy and contextual intimacy to her work.
After that, Matthews went through a drafting process that could be considered extensive even to a seasoned professional, going through multiple storyboards, figuring, and paneled drafts, with an eventual slog from pencil to colored pen.
It was her grandfather who suggested that they print issues of the comic for her classmates at a professional printers; the leftovers became Matthews' first shipment of stock.
Her first unofficial shop was in the lobby of her apartment building; Sasha sold copies of Sitting Bull, priced at $3 a pop, from behind an old desk the Matthews' had no more use for, accompanied by a sign that read "Comics By Kids For Kids."
