I am a Cartoonist. An artist who’s dedicated their life to the unsung craft of building stories on the two dimensional plane of a piece of paper. Like many of my peers, these stories range in content from high stakes action-adventure stories to intimate, coming-of-age romance comics.
My most recent effort, titled Punk'n Heads, was created in collaboration with the amazing illustrator and writer Nicole Goux. It’s a young adult romance comic about a group of teens and 20-somethings who live in a punk flop house and play in a band, while dressing in pumpkin themed costumes, while trying to navigate the gap between being a teenager and becoming an adult.
It’s about first love and fumbling your way through the arduous and ever circuitous maze of attempting to make a life as an artist. But more than anything, it’s about the emotional unknown of “what comes next?”
I’m originally from Tucson, Arizona. People don’t typically make a living as an artist where I’m from. Unless it’s from painting gouache cactus imagery or the Ever Noble Native Warrior ™. The desert is a cruel master, it would seem. It’s a place that is as inhospitable as it is beautiful. Or, at least, that’s what I’m told repeatedly by the snowbirds who visit for three months in the last quarter of every year.
Growing up in this place, I sought refuge in the printed page more times than I can count. At a young age, I discovered the works of Lucy Maud Montgomery. Specifically, Anne of Green Gables. I was obsessed with the book, completely enraptured by its fictional setting of Avonlea, its red haired central protagonist, and its palpable sense of yearning.
The wind swept oceanic vistas still live vibrantly in my mind’s eye. These were all new and enticing experiences to my young mind. I felt a keen empathy and kinship with Anne. So much so, in fact, that I made my own fan films. Granted, the sweeping vistas of Pima County weren’t exactly the same as the mist kissed coasts off of Definitely Not Nova Scotia, but, as a young artist, one must improvise.
I conscripted my two younger sisters to play all the supporting roles in these fan films. My mother was granted the dubious honor of being the cameraman, script supervisor, and producer for these fledgling cinematic affairs. Me? Of course, I was the writer, director, and star. Did I reposition the protagonist as one of the male characters or as Anne’s older sibling, Matthew Cuthbert? No, I was Anne. And at the end of the day, I’ll probably always be Anne.
There’s a loneliness in the deepest and darkest parts of Anne of Green Gables. A serpentine network of roots. It’s not a big story. It’s a little story, and that’s why it’s important. This dichotomy and the friction between these ideas are exactly why I first started writing Punk’n Heads.
Punk’n Heads is about an art school dropout, who, after a series of poor decisions, finds herself fronting the previously mentioned horror punk band, and then, in an even more ill advised decision, starts dating the bassist of the musical outfit. As one might imagine, broken hearts, broken dreams, and broken futures ensue.
Obviously, there are no power chords or scene politics in Anne of Green Gables, but there is a yearning sense of understanding and community that is extremely enticing to a young person. There’s something about the desire for an artistic community that feels intrinsically linked to youth, for me. I don’t know if that’s because I came up in the punk community or because I always wanted a scene of artists to be a part of. But it’s a major component of Punk’n Heads.
I feel that Anne would think the same way. That’s obviously not a part of the actual novel, but I like to think of her sitting in the Cuthberts’ house, looking out over the ocean and drawing early in the morning.
I often think about that time in my life when I was first trying to make things and extremely frustrated by the process. My younger sisters had little to no interest in seriously pursuing the arts. Sure, they tolerated me and helped me with my hair-brained short films, stop motion projects, and weird DIY movies. But they weren’t true collaborators, in the traditional sense.
My mother, on the other hand, was about as supportive as any human being could be. A fact that I will go to my grave, absolutely indebted to her for. It’s something that has kept me going through many of the seemingly unending waves of rejection that you get as a Freelance Artist ™.
But more so than that, when I think about the book as a whole, I think about Anne’s connection to Nicole. Nicole Goux, my collaborator and creative partner on this project, is the reason this book exists.
Not only did she draw all of its 200+ pages, but she’s also the reason I wanted to write it in the first place. This book is as much a love letter to her as it is an exorcism of my demons. Finding an artistic partner in the sea of potential dead ends is an existential respite that I completely lack the words to describe.
Perhaps it’s a criminally naïve endeavor, but over the course of making this book. I repeatedly thought to myself, “If I can make the reader understand and empathize with Hannah half as much as I do with Nicole, this book is sure to work.” It also doesn’t hurt that Nicole ostensibly co-created everything about this book. She came up with the name, the high concept, and the story's rough trajectory.
And then, much like twin blacksmiths, we hammered on it for literal years, trying to breathe life into these fake characters that we both believed so deeply were real. And that’s the key that separates me from Anne. She never really had anyone dragging her down the uncertain path of creativity. I have Nicole. And at the end of the day, who needs an Anne when you have a Nicole?
Order your copy of Punk'n Heads right here, and take a peek at some more of the pages below.
