Without further ado, here´s our interview with the lovely Colleen Coover. If you´re proficient in german (or are willing to use software like the infamous babelfish), head over to the regular comic-section and check out the rest of our article on Colleen and her works.

Thomas Nickel: Please tell us a bit about how you got into comics?

Colleen Coover: I grew up with comics—I never really learned to make a distinction between reading comics and reading “regular” books, and I love to read, so they’ve been a part of my life from the very beginning. I was also drawing all the time growing up, and I always had an idea in the back of my head that I wanted to make comics. But I didn’t start creating comics in any serious way until I met and started dating my partner Paul Tobin, who had been writing independent comics for some time. Paul taught me most of what I know about telling stories in comics. Working with him on short stories gave me the experience and confidence to begin work on Small Favors.

Thomas Nickel: You have a very precise style of drawing and you seem to prefer clear panel-layouts. Tell us a bit about how you developed your style.

Colleen Coover: Paul actually lays out the panels when he writes the scripts I work on—it allows him to visualize the story in comics form as he goes. We like working with clear layouts because it reads more easily than if you get all trickey. My drawing style has evolved over time as I gained confidence in my work, and it tends to reflect the stories I’m working on. Banana Sunday and Small Favors are both light-hearted stories, so the art has a light touch. The Boogeyman and Freckled Face, Bony Knees are a bit more somber, and the art is a little looser and more dark.

Thomas Nickel: In your "girly sex comics", you do away with any idea of perversion or bad conscience entirely, which is the exact opposite of what pornography usually does, where a bad conscience and the idea of taboo usually is a prerequisite. Do you think yours is a particularly female perspective on sex?

Colleen Coover: I don’t know if it’s a particularly female perspective, but it is certainly my perspective. I don’t go looking to make myself feel bad when I’m reading erotica—it gets in the way. It’s a bummer, a turn-off. I just think that a sexual entertainment should be fun, and that’s what I went for with Small Favors.

Thomas Nickel: On the same note: is this an idealised version of sex? Do you actually think sex could be this free of guilt, that it could be entirely freed of individual psychological issues?

Colleen Coover: It’s absolutely idealized. It’s a fantasy. For an actual person to be entirely free of issues would not only be humanly impossible, it would be stupid. We in the real world have to be responsible about reproduction, about sexual health, and about our partner’s feelings.

Thomas Nickel: What do you think about other sex-centered works in comics? Especially those from Europe or Japan? Do you see cultural differences on the approaches to the subject?

Colleen Coover: There are not many American porno comics I enjoy—mostly they’re the same kind of crappy stories that make up American porn videos. There are exceptions, though. I really like Corey Barba’s stories because they’re cute and charming. And Gilbert Hernandez’s hard-core stuff is as good as his work in Love & Rockets, only with more sex!I really admire the works of Guido Crepax—they’re so lush and sensual. And a lot of Milo Manara’s work is beautiful. The Europeans seem to go for the fetish side of eroticism. I think my storytelling in Small Favors is most heavily influenced by some of the better erotic manga. The one published in the United States as Bondage Fairies is pretty, and often even sweet, though it occasionally take a sudden turn from relatively innocent bondage play to hard-core S&M, with the characters in “real” danger. That just creeps me out. I can’t enjoy a sex fantasy if I think that one of the characters I’m reading about may be seriously injured or killed on the next page! I really like Golden Boy, though I’ve only seen one volume of the manga, and it was in Japanese.

Thomas Nickel: Are we currently facing a general movemant towards a broader acceptability of porn? After all, even Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie with their Lost Girls are working in this field.

Colleen Coover: I think that a broader spectrum of sexual identity is becoming more accepted, so a lot of erotic work is going to be coming up out of the underground. But I also think there will always be periods of backlash from fearful people who want to maintain the standards they grew up with.

Thomas Nickel: Is Banana Sunday over now? Or is there a new story-arc planned?

Colleen Coover: There are no plans at the moment for any more Banana Sunday comics, but Paul (who wrote Banana Sunday under the name Root Nibot,) has written a series of novels and is working on finding a publisher for them.

Thomas Nickel: There is a lot of silent storytelling in Banana Sunday, where you're not using any captions or word balloons at all. These panels are used to great effect, oftentimes perfectly characterising your protagonists, monkeys or otherwise, in a very charming way and even more efficiently than dialogue would. Where did the idea for this come from? Do you have any particular role models for these silent bits?

Colleen Coover: All of that silent stuff was written in Paul’s script, including the action going on in the background. It’s like the “stage business” in a play. He’s a very visually-oriented writer! If something occurs to me while I’m drawing a panel strikes me as funny or interesting and it doesn’t interfere with the written story, I’ll draw it in. But most often if something is going on in a panel, it’s because it was written that way.

Thomas Nickel: How does the creative collaboration with Root Niboot / Paul Tobin work? How much of a say did you have in the plot of Banana Sunday or particular scenes?

Colleen Coover: Paul writes out the scripts entirely before I see them, so the initial story is all his. I’ll sometimes ask him to change a word here and there, or point out something that seems a bit off, and he’ll take a second look at it. Sometimes he’ll agree with me that there needs to be a change, and sometimes he’ll convince me that it’s better to keep it the way it is.

Thomas Nickel: Everybody loves monkey and apes, especially gorillas. What´s your personal connection to them?

Colleen Coover: I adore them. I’m like a kid when I see them, on TV or in zoos. They’re fascinating. I think it’s because we recognize so much of ourselves in them, but they have the innocence of animals. And they’re fun to draw, really!

Thomas Nickel: After your previous, usually very funny works, The Boogeyman is another huge change of direction in my opinion. Could you tell us, how this story came about? The contrast between the very cute drawings and the really sad story made quite an impact on me.

Colleen Coover: Diana Schulz asked me to contribute a story to the anthology Sexy Chix at a time when I was making the transition between working the impossibly happy Small Favors, and the outrageously silly Banana Sunday. I wanted to take the opportunity of working on this short story to do something the opposite of what I was already known for—I wanted to do the saddest story I could think of. Telling the story of a woman wrestling with her grief was a real challenge; satisfying, but it made me really sad! That’s how I was pretty sure that I had done a good job.

Thomas Nickel: With Small Favors, Banana Sunday and short stories like The Boogeyman, you´ve worked on quite a couple of different subjects. Are there more subjects you´d like to work on? Or subjects you´re not interested in?

Colleen Coover: Right now I’m working on a graphic novel written by Paul, called Freckled Face, Bony Knees, And Other Things Known About Annah. It’s a story about a young woman named Annah who believes she has a long lost “twin sister” who was made from a part of her own brain; an area known as the Penfield Homonculus. Annah insists that the loss of her sister Ginger has caused her to lose her ability to feel emotions. However, the story is told by the people around her, so it remains a question whether her story is true, or if Annah is a bit crazy.

I’m so focused on working on that story it’s difficult to think about what else I’d like to work on, though I think it would be nice to do more stuff for younger readers. The only genre I’m really NOT interested in doing is auto-biography. I just don’t have the urge to expose my life in comics.

Thomas Nickel: You said yourself, Freckled Face, Bony Knees, and Other Things Known About Annah would be a much darker story than Banana Sunday. Well, I guess about any story would be darker than the very cheerful Banana Sunday. Could you tell us a bit about it?

Colleen Coover: It’s a character study of a woman named Annah, told from the point of view of people around her. Annah believes that she has a missing twin sister named Ginger who was created by her mad scientist father from the part of her brain known as the Penfield's Homunculus, which is sort of a map of sensory perception. She blames the loss of her “sister” for the fact that she is sometimes emotionally unstable, but her observers point out that the creation of Ginger occurred during her parents’ messy divorce, and may be purely a figment of her imagination.

Thomas Nickel: Where are you headed now? You did great works in porn, in children (or rather all ages)-Comics and showed everyone, that you can handle serious matters. Do you want to stay in comics or do you also have other things on your mind?

Colleen Coover: I do want to keep doing comics forever, but I don’t have a clue what might come after FFBK, at least, not yet! I also want to do more illustration work. I’ve been doing some for a couple of weekly newspapers, and I think it would also be nice to do some book covers. Maybe for romance novels!

Thomas Nickel: Looking at your illustrations, you seem to really like the 50ies and 60ies....

Colleen Coover: I love traditional cartooning and illustration, and I grew up with the comics of the late sixties. I think that’s why I’m attracted to contemporary artists who have retro style, like Seth and the Hernandezes—because they apply classic styles to modern themes. I love that!

Thomas Nickel: What other pencillers or writers do you like? Which of them do inspire you?

Colleen Coover: Los Bros Hernandez and Milton Caniff are my two biggest influences, but I absorb style from whatever artists I’m enjoying at any given time. Right now, Seth, Jordi Bernet, and Aaron Renier are at the top of my list.

Thomas Nickel: What do you do when you´re not working in comics? I heard, you like for example video games... how about movies?

Colleen Coover: I mostly watch movies from Asia these days; Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea, especially. I was heavy into Bollywood for a couple of years, but the Hindi film industry seems to have moved away from the silly romantic comedies I adore and gotten more into action thrillers, which they’re not very good at. I do like video games, though, especially role playing adventures with good storylines. And I read books!

Text Copyright: Thomas Nickel 2006
Illustration Copyright: Colleen Coover