In this episode we interview the creators of the highly popular online comic Girl Genius, Kaja & Phil Foglio. Phil had to step away soon after we started but my guest host, Puyallup librarian Bonnie Svitavsky, and I continued to talk with Kaja about mad scientists, the Tolkien-like Northwest, gender stereotypes and what makes a scientist. We end with great advice for aspiring sci-fi writers.
We hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did.
Image Courtesy of Girl Genius
http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
Click Here for Transcript
>>Here we go.
[? Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ?]
? Neutron, proton, mass defect, lyrical oxidation, yo irrelevant
? Mass spectrograph, pure electron volt, atomic energy erupting
? As I get all open on betatron, gamma rays thermo cracking
? Cyclotron and any and every mic
? You’re on trans iridium, if you’re always uranium
? Molecules, spontaneous combustion, pow
? Law of de-fi-nite pro-por-tion, gain-ing weight
? I’m every element of brown
Dr. Regina: This is Spark Science. I’m Regina Barber DeGraaff, and I’m here at GeekGirlCon. This is my second day here. And we’re in the exhibit hall. And we’re at the Girl Genius booth. I’m going to let the creator of Girl Genius, creators of Girl Genius, introduce themselves. And then we’ll get started on how awesome your comic is and how it relates to science and how it gets people interested in science.
Kaja: I’m Kaja Foglio and I am one of the co-creators of Girl Genius. And I also am one of the writers. My husband Phil and I write Girl Genius together and he draws all the pictures. We have a 3rd who does the color work, but he’s not here today.
Phil: Hi. I’m Phil Foglio and with my wife I write Girl Genius and I do the art and the colors are done by Cheyenne Wright.
Regina: So uh my friend here, Bonnie, who has been here the whole entire time, listeners. I have not introduced her yet but I’m going to introduce her today. She’s going to be part of this. I’m just going to ask. Yeah. I’m going to let you introduce yourself, what you do, and she loves Girl Genius. I’m going to say it for her because she’s not going to say it.
Bonnie: My name is Bonnie Svitavsky and I’m the young adult librarian at the Puyallup Public Library. I do teen programming, purchasing books, and do a lot of advocating for teens and library services and how great comics and geekdom is and ties in with that.
Regina: Excellent. So we’re just going to go right into this. Give us the premise of Girl Genius and how, in your view, you’re trying to get science out there for everyone.
Kaja: Girl Genius is a story of adventure, romance, and mad science. It’s very pulpy. It’s very silly. We’re both very interested in science and really enjoy listening to scientists talk, as you know from our conversation from before we started here. And um but in a lot of ways, what we’re doing with Girl Genius, it’s not hard science fiction. It’s very goofy, movie-magic, building a monster style science. We think scientists are really cool and we write stories about really cool scientists. But we’re not scientists. We are storytellers. And we are very silly people. And we write a lot of very silly stuff.
Now that said, we get people, because we’ve been doing Girl Genius for so long now.
Regina: How long?
Kaja: We started, we published the first volume in late 1999. And we started it as the 32 page flimsies, the magazine style that goes out to comic book stores. In 2005, we stopped making the little volumes, the little magazine style and we went to a web comic format. And what we have continued to do is when we have enough pages we put it together into a collection. So we now have 15 collections, and we are creeping up on needing to publish the 16th, which we just finished on the website.
We have been doing this long enough that we are getting people who are coming up and saying, “I am now in a science program at the university because of you, because I read this and it got me all excited about science.” And that’s terrific because we’re not telling stories of actual science, although we will throw jokes in there. We’re telling fantasy stories about scientists as basically wizards.
Regina: But you’re sparking an interest, right? Bonnie’s giggling because that term “spark,” and this is Spark Science, has some relationship to your story. Can you tell us something about that? Maybe I’ll let Phil fill that in.
Phil: Sure. The spark is what we call that really unquantifiable aspect that turns a person into a mad scientist, the inclination to kind of go out of control and say, “Well, yes, I could just, you know, put wheels on this thing, but instead of just wheels, how about treads and then maybe it shoots out lightning and then argh giant stomping feet and then it will take over everything!” That’s kind of the spark in a nutshell.
Regina: So being a scientist, you do get that mad scientist trope that a lot of people see. But, the good thing about your mad scientist character is that she’s not Doc Brown from Back to the Future, she’s a female, for one. And so it’s almost like you’re playing with the mad scientist stereotype in a way that’s slightly, it’s more complicated, it’s not one note, it’s not all good, it’s not all bad, it’s complicated.
I did want to say that, yes, even though you say that your stories are silly, but that’s how we can talk to people. That’s how we can spark that interest. That’s how we get people at least talking about science and not being so scared. I think silly is good. I love silly and I think you’re awesome.
Tell me something about this complex mad scientist identity.
Kaja: So because we cannot leave anything alone, we love playing with tropes. And with our main character, people always want to call her Girl Genius like she’s a superhero, but that’s not her name. The title of the book is Girl Genius. The character’s name is Agatha Heterodyne. And when we started working on her, and we started working on her back in 1993, we worked on this story for a long time before we brought it to publication.
We wanted to do a mad scientist girl. And we started with the basic tropes. We started with the wild hair and the distraction and the crazy. But the minute you start writing like that, you start thinking, “why?” Why are they like this? Why is it, why is this character evil? What would make this character evil? It’s so common to have a character, a villain, who’s so “Wahaha I’m so evil!” and never question why.
I think that’s how writing happens. You start asking yourself questions. You start with a really basic idea. So with the tropes, there are so many mad scientist tropes out there and they’re hilarious. They’re funny, and they’re silly. You say Doc Brown from Back to the Future. There’s the old Frankenstein movies, especially Bride of Frankenstein has Doctor Pretoriun? Doctor Pretorius. I’ve got his name wrong. I’ve just lost cred. But he’s another.
This is a part of the movie where they’re being very “oh here’s our monster movie.” And they stop the whole movie for this goofball character to do this thing with he’s got little people in jar. I think because they had figured out how to make it look like their actors were tiny, and so, by golly, they were going to do that. So they wrote a scene into this story and you know those characters are so fun to play with.
Phil: And I think a lot of, a lot of what we go for with mad science is exactly that. “Hey, I just figured out a way to put people into jars! I’m going to do that!”
Kaja: Is that a good idea?
Phil: “There’s really no call for that.” “I don’t care! I can do it! This is a proof of concept!”
[Laughing.]
Kaja: Yeah, we do have fun with that. Our heroine is more the style of science hero, the type who’s, you know, theoretically a good guy, although sometimes she gets ideas that might not be the best ideas.
Phil: She relies on her friends.
Kaja: And she has friends around her who say, “Woah, babe, maybe not so much of that!” So we have a good time with that too.
Regina: So you were saying, I like that too though, that you’re telling a story that maybe scientists can’t work all on their own. That’s another mad scientist stereotype. You know, that they’re at the bench, they’re alone.
Kaja: The eureka moment.
Regina: Right. When, and that’s not true. Scientists don’t sit alone by themselves and have these brilliant things. It has happened in the past. It does happen every once in a while, but the majority of science is done in collaboration.
Kaja: I can see farther because I stand on the shoulders of giants. Something like that?
Regina: Right. But not even standing on the shoulder of giants, I mean, I think it’s more of like, we’re all standing together. We’re all standing on the shoulders. We’re all on this, this like, pyramid, like a, like a cheerleader pyramid. I don’t know, something like that. You know? Where it’s very huge.
[? Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ?]
? Early late at night
? I wander off into a land
? You can go, but you musn’t tell a soul
? There’s a world inside
? Where dreamers meet each other
Regina: If you’re just joining us, this is Spark Science. I’m Regina Barber DeGraaff. And today we’re at GeekGirlCon interviewing the creators of the web comic Girl Genius.
So I wanted to go back though in time because I ask all of my interviewers this, interviewees. How did you get into writing? Um what is your background? Why do you like science so much?
Kaja: Well that’s a hard question. As far as getting into writing, I believe, whether it’s true or not, I believe that children, and you know, are storytellers. Humans are storytellers. At a certain point in our development, some of us are told, “Leave it to the professionals; you’re not good enough.” Or it becomes hard, and kids don’t want to do it.
The ones that don’t stop, turn into people like me. I’m just kind of doing what I’ve always done you know ever since I was a child. You know imagine things and thought of things. And for me at least, and also for Phil, we didn’t get squished. So, we just kept on going.
Me, personally, why I like science, again I was always the kid out there like digging in the owl pellets with the other kids telling me I was a freak. And um always interested in you know astronomy and the science. I loved the science in school. It was always interesting. It was always fun.
I ended up going in an art direction rather than a science direction just because probably because it was easier for me, frankly, I’m ashamed to say. And because if you’re a storyteller, you kind of still get to have all that other stuff. But you know it’s like a great buffet. You can pick and choose, and you can play with whatever toys you want.
And so yeah, I don’t have a deep understanding of any one branch of science, but I do get to go and read up on a lot of different things because it interests me and because it’s exciting and because it sort of sideways relates to my work. You know I’m a science fiction artist and a science fiction author.
Bonnie: I was just going to say that I do notice this a lot–this is Bonnie–with the storytelling that you’re able to work in scientific concepts that readers may not be aware of. For example, you’ve got Higgs in the story. And his name is a tip-off.
And I think it a lot of the times then, readers, because there’s so much lore, so much background to the story, if they go and start to do that research, then it leads them into the directions of finding those scientific concepts and just learning more about them. And that’s one of the things that I enjoy, that this story is so layered.
Regina: Well I want to add to that because I think that we were talking about earlier where, how do you get non-one-note characters? Because you have to ask “why?” And before um before we started recording we were talking about this question of “why?” When we’re in undergrad, we really need to or when we’re college students or even children, we need to ask “why?” We can’t just memorize.
You were telling me a story, and I wanted to know if you wanted to share that story because I really like it. I think it’s really interesting that you said you liked writing and you liked science, but I see that connection of you asking “why?” about your characters and building that. But also in science you, at least in all sciences, we have to ask “why?” We can’t just memorize facts and suddenly we’re scientists.
Kaja: Cataloging things.
Regina: Cataloging.
Kaja: And cataloging things really has value. You know, if someone has catalogued a natural science, if someone has catalogued all of these critters that are out there, then it makes your research a lot more, a lot easier, because uh you already have these things laid out for you. You don’t have to go out in the field and hunt every single book down again–good luck with that.
So, the story that I was telling you is my crowning glory. I was one of these kids who was always terrible at math and always terrible at math and couldn’t memorize things well and couldn’t really figure out how to make the numbers work when I was thinking about them. And when I was in high school, I started to develop Crohn’s disease (although we didn’t know that that was what was wrong at the time), so I missed a lot of school. And there was a lot of “oh, you’re malingering” or “oh, you’re just, you know, whatever,” but um but what happened is I missed about half of my math course.
And instead of being able to just be a good little student and sit there and kind of listen and you know do OK in math–OK was never that great–uh I had to go home with my textbooks, look at my textbooks, think about them, go back–and my poor instructor–you know, I was in there at lunch, I was in there after school, I was in there before school, saying, “what about this? What about this? I don’t get this. I don’t understand this.”
And because I had to think about how those numbers were working together so that I could get the right answers–and academics were really important to me, uh I was that kind of kid. Because I had to work at it and think about it, I started to understand how the numbers worked together and why. I could start at the beginning and figure out how the math worked. And I got the best grade in the class that year.
And my proudest moment was that I um–there were a couple of questions on a test, and they were questions from something that I had been told not to bother studying because it wasn’t, we weren’t covering that material. It turns out I’d been told the wrong thing, so I had studied the wrong thing.
And I get here and here are these two really complicated, strange questions on this test that I thought, “I have no idea,” but I just worked them out. And I was later told that I was the only person in the class who got those questions right. And, so that was my, that was like my proudest moment in school ever. [Laughing.]
It was all downhill from there. [Laughing.] Now I get to you know write silly stories and I don’t actually do a lot of math unless it’s for fun.
Regina: Well that see that’s really important. I wanted to add to that that you were basically shown problems that you’d never seen before you know, and you had a foundation in which you could tackle those problems efficiently. And that’s what . . .
Kaja: Yeah, I’d been given the tools so I could work with them.
Regina: I feel like one of those tools is the breaking down the barrier of actually forcing yourself to ask “why?” You know? And for my students in physics, hopefully some of them listen to this show, if you can tackle a problem that you’ve never seen before and you do OK, that means that you have a great foundation. You know, that means that you actually ask “why?” and that means that you are aware of what you have gaps in.
So I think was telling you this story, you and Bonnie this story, about this sheet I give my students of algebraic um really common algebraic arithmetic errors that happen over and over again. And that moment in which you’re taking a test and you instantly remember something. My friend used to call them the “math angels.” The math angels would come down and help you remember that. And every time you make an algebraic error, you kill one of those math angels, so please don’t make these algebraic errors.
I really really love this idea of connection between writing characters and doing physics. I love this connection that we’re talking about. Is there any kind of science that you love talking about in your series?
Kaja: You know what I really love? I’m really interested in the history of scientific discovery. I’m really interested in how people started getting interested in asking these questions. And, I mean I’m no expert, but I love reading books about the enlightenments and how people started um that transition between natural science–that actually it’s more–if you go farther back, it’s the transition between wizardry, I swear, and alchemy into a more quantifiable science and how that worked out and some of the weird stuff that happened in between where people weren’t sure what questions to ask yet. So they asked all the questions. It just got very strange.
I enjoy that a lot. [Laughing.] And I will say for me it really felt–I always used to joke that–it felt like the math fairy had come down and hit me on the head really hard with the math wand and said, “You will now understand it! Bam!” And I was like, “Suddenly it all makes sense! There’s a pattern to this! This isn’t just random stuff that cruel adults are making me memorize. This all has a pattern. It all makes sense. Oh!” [Laughing.]
Bonnie: So one of the things that I, when I try to share Girl Genius with potential readers, is um how much I enjoy that it has a strong female lead and a really diverse set of characters that are working as her friends, as sometimes henchmen, and other sparks who also reflect other different diverse cultures. Even though it’s set in an alternate era, I was hoping you could talk a little bit about the representation of women in the comic and having so many strong female characters like Zeetha and Violet, as well as Agatha. Put you on the spot with this one.
Kaja: We just write a lot of female characters. I don’t know! It really isn’t a conscious, you know like, “Oh, we have to have these people, we have to make sure we’ve got this quota,” you know, we just write a bunch of people in. And I know that Phil likes to draw a lot of different kinds of people, so he draws a lot of different kinds of people.
And we’ve got some silly world building stuff in there that we enjoy that may or may not ever come to light. You know things about why you’ve got all kinds of people with different skin colors in this part of Europa or that part of Europa.
Bonnie: Or multiple arms and legs.
Kaja: Yeah, and people with lots of extra bits. Especially in a city like Paris where you’ve got this major university with a lot of people working there who are having a lot of fun and so uh that’s all fun for us.
Bonnie: I really enjoy getting to see um the representations, like once you got to the librarians, the great library, I was just thrilled. And that you have this, yes, you have this giant warrior librarian who’s out there.
Regina: That there’s a warrior librarian is not a spoiler. We won’t go into–yes, yes.
Kaja: There’s a whole culture of the great library where they take their acquisitions very seriously and they’re armored for it. And in some cases they have to go out to very strange, remote–so this is a world where we have lost laboratories out in the waste lands where somebody was working on something and bad things happened. The heroes came through or something.
And now you’ve got you know–we’ve certainly got our share of lost temples and that standard pulp sort of thing, but we also have lost laboratories. You know, those guys probably have some pretty good books. And those librarians want them. So, you know, but they need their Indiana Jones type characters to go out and get them. It’s no joke to go into some of these places. So we haven’t actually told any of those stories, but we think about them.
Regina: I really need to start reading this. I really like that question because I think that, and this is just for my own personal thing, but I watched AMC as a kid obsessively. I would like stay home from school and watch AMC. And like I don’t know why. AMC is the um channel with the like 1930s, 1940s movies. It’s the old-timey movie channel is what I would watch.
I remember as a kid thinking that back when there were just no people of color because they weren’t in the movies.
Kaja: Apparently not.
Regina: Right. So I would see like an old western or an old 1930s movie and they just weren’t there so I just assumed. And I think that this is a common kind of misconception that people of color didn’t exist in these regions.
But what I just overheard you saying that you have these stories in the back of your head of why these people of different cultures are actually in Europe is so refreshing to me and is so wonderful because of course they existed. There was trade! You know like of course there were people that intermingled and talked to each other and learned different languages and so um I just want to say thank you for thinking about these things and why.
Kaja: It seems really natural to us. And I–if we tried–I’d hate to be shoehorning things in, but I’d also hate to not be–I’d hate to only be drawing white people all the time. I mean I’m not even the one drawing most of the time. You know, he’s the one.
Regina: It’s Phil. It’s Phil.
Kaja: But you know it would be hard for us being the writers that we are to try to constrain ourselves, so we just do whatever we want and then we just make up backstories for why.
Regina: You have a million more books to do.
Kaja. Yeah, yeah. You know the other thing that’s happening in Girl Genius is the story began kind of out in the sticks, I mean at Transylvania Polygnostic University, but you know so that’s like a small college town. It has slowly been moving to more cosmopolitan areas. And our Europa, the more cosmopolitan area you wind up in, the more diverse it’s going to become.
Regina: That seems fairly realistic.
Kaja: I think, in my experience. [Laughing.] You know, and so they are currently in Paris, and then they’re heading to England, so they’ll be in London, which is all underwater, so you definitely know it’s not our world.
[? Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ?]
? There’s a world inside
? Where dreamers meet each other
? Once you go it’s hard to come back
? Let me paint your canvas as you dance
? Dance in the trees
? Paint mysteries
? The magnificent droid plays there
? Your magic mind
? Makes love to mine
? I think I’m in love, angel
? Take me back to Wondaland
? I gotta get back to Wondaland
Regina: If you’re just joining us, this is Spark Science, and today we are talking about mad genesis with Kaja and Phil, the creators of Girl Genius. So can you tell me about any any other projects? I know you have so many Girl Genius fans, including my good friend Bonnie here. Are there any projects that you work on that aren’t Girl Genius that you are working on now or that you did before that you want your listeners to know exist?
Kaja: I–you just saw me signing the Magic: The Gathering book. Back when Magic: The Gathering the trading card game was new, we worked on that and we did a lot of artwork for that. Uh we don’t do that anymore, but that was fun back in day.
And Phil has done a lot of different stories over the years. He did a gaming comic called What’s New with Phil and Dixie back in Dragon magazine, um back when I was 10 years old. Cough cough. He did XXXenophile, which was an adult title. He did Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire, which was a science fiction title, uh more hard science fiction.
I started right out of university with Magic: The Gathering. So that was extremely lucky. It was very very lucky. Uh and and really baptism by fire. [Laughing.] And kind of went straight into Girl Genius from that. Uh so I haven’t really done a lot of other work.
I’ve done some magazine covers here and there. I’ve done some card art here and there. I don’t do a lot of painting anymore. Mostly I like writing better. I would like to get back into painting, but I’m so busy and I’m–I do a lot of graphic design too. So I do all the graphic design for the comics.
I run our website. I do all of the–I don’t know–Phil draws the pictures and then I take it and I have to do the other stuff.
Regina: You have to know a little bit about computer science and that kind of stuff to do your website.
Kaja: Oh yes. Oh yes. We do. We. I. Me, me, me. I, I, I. [Laughing.]
Regina: You’re saying you’re like not a scientist, that you don’t do these things, but the more I talk to you, and . . .
Kaja: But I have an interest. I am an interested amateur. [Laughing.]
Regina: I don’t know. I–I believe in what Sid the Science Kid from PBS says. And what Sid the Science Kid says, and he’s a Jim Henson uh creation, a Jim Henson company creation. He’s a preschooler, I believe. He goes to a very expensive preschool cause there’s only four of them and one teacher! [Laughing.]
Kaja: Oh my!
Regina: Yeah but uh the cartoon has these four kids with their teacher and they have science journals and they–the beginning of the show is like, “You’re a scientist. What do you think?” And I believe in that.
I think that if you ask questions, if you’re interested, if you can think up an experiment and actually run through it and like answer it–and it doesn’t have to be–it can be a thought experiment, you know–I think you’re a scientist.
So and I think you’re good at math, you do computer science, you run a website, you do Girl Genius, you’re a scientist. I’m going to say it right now.
Kaja: And I’m just going to go, “Squee! That’s awesome!” Oh no. That’s funny.
Too much knowledge of the scientific method makes helping your kid with the science fair really hard. Ohhh. It’s awful.
Regina: What–what was your child’s science fair project?
Kaja: Oooh. Well, we did the mold on bread thing. I really try to let them do it as much as possible. And so we don’t come up with the more spectacular stuff. But you know I’m always on the sidelines going, “That’s not the scientific method!”
Regina: “That’s not a hypothesis!”
Kaja: Argh! Yeah, exactly! [Laughing.] Like that is a volcano! Argh!
Regina: Why do they all want to do a volcano?
Kaja: We never did the volcano.
Regina: Do you watch Bob’s Burgers?
Kaja: No. I . . .
Regina: Ohhh.
Kaja: I don’t really watch much of anything that’s not anime.
Regina: OK. Well it’s animation. So. On Fox. So I think you would like it. The–the TV show.
But so is there any future plans for Girl Genius as an animation, as a movie? Please tell me yes.
Kaja: Well that–that takes other people. Because we’re not animators. I know–Phil you–I know you took your minor in animation, but that was enough to learn that animation is a lot of work. It’s–I mean, we can barely get the work we’re doing done.
So–you know–we have an agent. Um if somebody came along and said, “We want to make a movie. We want to make . . .” Um that would be really–we’ve had people who have been interested in the past. Nothing’s ever panned out.
I want anime. I want a BBC miniseries. And I want a video game.
Regina: Oh my god, yes!
Kaja: Those are my three loves. You know, I’m like, those are the things I like. Probably will never happen. But that’s . . .
Regina: We’re gonna put it out there with my 60 listeners, and one of them will work for the BBC, and we’ll make this happen. Just–just–give me some access and that’s all I care about.
Kaja: We’ll use old Red Dwarf sets. [Laughing.]
Regina: Oh my god, yes! This is in–you need accents, you need people in Europe helping.
Kaja: Yeah, it’s true.
Regina: The BBC’s where it’s at
Kaja: I don’t know. I just like what they do. I like their work. I even like their cheesy work.
Regina: So you’re thinking like live action BBC.
Kaja: Yeah. Yeah. You know when I talk about live action I’m like, “Oh, the BBC. They’re awesome. Yeah.”
Regina: So this is gonna be like Steampunky, like BBC, like British, French…
Kaja: You know what’ll happen is–I keep telling my kid–because I’m like–I’ve got two children–one of them has started taking an interest in the business, the other one is more interested in making her own stuff, which is just terrific! Uh but I tell them, “Someday you’re going to be stuck with this, and the B-Team or the second generation of creators that comes along.”
Because because if you make a thing, there’s always the thing you make, and then there’s the thing that whoever comes along later makes once you’re dead. And uh I’m like, those guys, the second generation of creators, at least they’ll have a lot to work with, and they’ll probably do a better job like making it all tidy and flashy than we are.
Because we’re just kind of you know writing this serialized thing. We do know how it ends, but you know, the getting there is still kind of all over the place. And we have–we’ll get an idea and we’ll go off and do something fun that amuses us but that would never fit into a movie.
So I know whoever comes along and does that secondary stuff–I think they’ll do a good job. I hope they’ll do a good job.
Regina: You have so much faith.
Kaja: Well, they’ll have a lot to work with like I said. You know–I look at–I finally sat down and read all of the Song of Ice and Fire books.
Regina: I did not.
Kaja: I have not watched the show. Uh I have no idea. But I enjoyed the books and they were fun. And I understand from my friends who have watched the show that they’ve made a lot of changes. But–and some of my friends think they’re very very good changes. I keep my ears open even when I don’t watch the thing.
Regina: Right.
Kaja: And you know I’m like sometimes the people who make the movie they make really interesting stuff. You know I love Jane Austen and I love watching the Jane Austen movies. And I’ve got a couple of Emmas that I watch back-to-back because, between them, they make one really cool movie.
Regina: Right. I’m not a Jane Austen reader. I am–I’m–sadly listeners, I came late to reading in my life. I wasn’t a big reader. But I’ve watched like every Jane Austen everything, and and I get . . .
Kaja: Some of them are really boring, but some of them are really good.
Regina: I get into huge fights, and I probably will get into a fight with you about this, about the Pride and Prejudice the miniseries versus the new one with Keira Knightley. I really really like the Keira Knightley one. And I…
Kaja: It had really nice things in it that had nothing to do with Jane Austen, but they were still nice.
Regina: Right. And I really liked that one. And I, yeah. See, see, see.
Kaja: I’ll admit I was sort of–watched the Keira Knightley one and went, “Well that was interesting.”
Regina: Thank you.
Kaja: I went, “OK.” Um but it had . . .
Regina: I know it’s not accurate.
Kaja: It doesn’t have to be accurate to be good though. You know. That’s my point with my work–is, oh my gosh if they tried to film Girl Genius exactly accurately–frankly I think they’d be missing some tricks. I think there’s some stuff in there that people who are really good at film could do that we never even thought of or couldn’t do. And I’d hate to have them not do it just because it wasn’t in there.
Regina: That’s very open-minded.
[? Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ?]
? Take me back to Wondaland
? I gotta get back to Wondaland
? Take me back to Wondaland
? I gotta get back to Wondaland
? The grass grows inside
? The music floats you gently on your toes
? Touch the nose, he’ll change your clothes to tuxedos
? Don’t freak and hide
? I’ll be your secret Santa, do you mind?
? Don’t resist
? The fairygods will have a fit
Regina: If you’re just joining us, this is Spark Science. I’m Regina Barber DeGraaff, and today we’re at GeekGirlCon interviewing the creators of the web comic Girl Genius.
I also get in fights with people about Stardust, the movie of Neil Gaiman. And I saw the movie first, and then I read the book. I loved the movie. And I’m a kid who needs escape. I’m an adult now, but I was a very kid that needed that escape, you know. I needed that happy ending.
I like Disney. And I remember hearing somebody talking–I think it was Chris Hardwick who’d made a flippant remark and he was like, “I don’t like Disney because I had a horrible childhood.” And I was like, “Oh my god, is that why I like Disney?” Because your life is so crazy that Disney was so stable and so happy ending. It was like where the good feelings were.
Kaja: It’s easy to bash Disney.
Regina: Yeah.
Kaja: Because they’re a great big, giant sitting duck.
Regina: Yeah.
Kaja: Their work is positive and happy. I mean, sometimes, you know, if you’re a person–I have a rotten core to my soul and I’m kind of a bad person and so I kind of do get that eye roll going sometimes. But then there’s that other part of me that says, “Knock it off, this is happy. This is nice. This is positive. There is nothing wrong with that. You can go watch your surly stuff if you want to. It’s out there too.”
And boy do I have some evil stuff that I like, but I also appreciate that positive. Like the world can be good. That’s a message that I like to hear sometimes.
Regina: Right.
Kaja: The world doesn’t have to suck. It’s nice. Look, this is happy.
Regina: In the end of Stardust, in the book, like many Neil Gaiman books, kind of just kind of trails off. And it just keeps on going, and it’s not as happy as the movie ending, which I loved.
I did want to talk maybe with Bonnie about Disney. Can I talk to you about Disney real quick?
Bonnie: OK. Yeah.
Regina: Because we can talk about Disney just for a sidenote right here. I was talking to somebody, and, being a woman scientist, you get a lot of like princesses and Disney and don’t let your kid wear pink and all this kind of stuff.
But Disney was one of the first companies that actually had somebody that actually had black hair. Do you know what I mean? Like and it was one of the first companies that had cartoons I watched that had somebody who wasn’t, who maybe looks like me, you know.
And it was, for me, it had so many characters, so many characters that there was one . . .
Kaja: There wasn’t one that looked like me.
Regina: OK.
Kaja: I was an ugly kid
Regina: No, no, no! [Laughing.] I wasn’t the most . . .
Kaja: I mean, I was one–I had the lighter hair, but I never thought any of them looked like me.
Regina: Yeah.
Kaja: Oh, if only.
Regina: Like the closest thing I had was Snow White because she had black hair. That was all I had. For me, Disney was happy. Disney had so many characters that, even if it didn’t look like me, there was a personality that I was like, “Oh, maybe we’re the same! You know, maybe we have something.”
And like, I think um they had Mulan and there’s so many–there’s so much commentary about, “Ugh, the princes need to save them and none of them can fight” and they go on and on and like, “have you forgotten about Mulan?” She went to the army.
Kaja: She was so late in my experience. She is so late. But I don’t know. When I was playing a princess when I was a kid, I was up in trees and I had a bow and arrow because I was some kind of Robin Hood princess I guess. So I never had a problem with the princess thing. I was like, “Yeah, I’m a princess and I’m out here killing monsters or whatever.” I just loved that stuff.
Regina: Yeah.
Kaja: I didn’t get to wear pink because, you know, it was the seventies and um feminist girls didn’t get to wear pink.
Regina: Awww. That’s sad. But if you liked it . . .?
Kaja: Too bad. You weren’t supposed to. You weren’t allowed to and it was bad and wrong and you were supposed to be doing what the boys did.
Regina: Right.
Kaja: I have issues.
Bonnie: Right. Me too. Me too. You know what’s funny is that I’ve got a friend who has a 7-year-old who is very much of the mind that if she’s hanging out with boys she needs to not like pink, she needs to not like girly stuff. But she’s just recently–because her mom has started to tell her, “It’s really OK. You can like what you like and that doesn’t mean that you can’t then play with these boys. You can enjoy pink and still be tough.” Um and it’s been really wonderful to see her starting to warm up to being able to to do that.
Regina: Right.
Bonnie: You know. And accept that.
Regina: Right. And I think that the message that I try to give college students and other seven years–cause I also have a 7-year-old–my 7-year-old and the 7-year-old she was just speaking of are friends. But I want to tell them that like–what is wrong with being feminine?
There’s nothing wrong with being masculine and there’s nothing wrong with being feminine. And there’s nothing wrong with things that are in between or ambiguous. And obviously they don’t understand those words because they’re seven, but I say like, “you can like what you like.”
And what I can do as a mom is I can expose them to as many things as possible and let them choose. Tell them that if you feel pressure to not like pink or you feel pressure to not like Batman, that that is not OK. I’m going to give you all these things, and you pick what you like, you know? But I don’t know if you have the same issue.
Kaja: I had a weird–well I’ve got a boy and I’ve got a girl–and I had a weird moment many years ago now where my son had the My Little Pony shirts and was gonna wear them off to school. And I had that moment of like, “Is that–are you gonna get killed?” And like it turns out–and you know this is like a big shoutout to the Seattle school district–hey rock on you guys, you’ve done a good job. He wore those My Little Pony shirts to school for ages and nobody ever . . . it turns out the schools are really different than when I was there. And . . .
Regina: Very different.
Kaja: It makes me stand up and cheer you know. As things go, My Little Pony is pretty weak sauce as far as getting you beat up, but it might have back in the day. And I don’t know, they’re just–the more I listen to the guys at the schools and the things they like and the things they talk about, I’m just like, “The world is getting better!”
Regina: Yeah!
Kaja: This makes me happy.
Bonnie: This excites me as the parent of a 4-year-old boy. We try not to be like–we try to be very gender-neutral with the way we do the toys, clothing, things like that. And it’s like, do your thing. But also not like–I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like you can be overly careful at that.
Kaja: You know you’ve got a kid and you’re afraid that somebody’s gonna smack ’em. But because the world is scary and you know. It turns out it’s not as scary as you might think. Hurray.
Bonnie: That’s nice to hear. And I–I see that . . .
Kaja: In this area. In this area anyway.
Regina: Yeah. In the Northwest.
Bonnie: I also say, working with teens, I see so many of them come in who um you know they want to be brownies. They’re into anime and they’re guys and maybe they enjoy like a good romantic anime. And I’m just like, “yes!” Let’s do this. I can help you meet other people in the library who share this.
Like one of the best things we hear at library programs from teens is when they get to meet people of shared interest and get to go, “Oh, I’m not the only one who’s into cosplaying or into this sort of storyline.” That’s so exciting to be able to make that kind of connection. It’s nice to hear that the school district does it too.
Kaja: As the kid who was always you know it seemed like–it turns out, oh no everybody was a nerd. I don’t know where they were.
Regina: Yeah.
Kaja: They sure weren’t at my school. But you know as the person who sat there reading the Lord of the Rings and taking endless amounts of crap for it, it’s really nice that they now have the internet and the librarians who will point them at the other anime fans and the other you know people who like that stuff.
Regina: And that’s why this con is so important, GeekGirlCon. I feel like um and Bonnie, and you’re so important and the library and dealing with teenagers. I feel, like you said, we’re in an age where information can be shared so easily that you can find that person so you’re not alone. I mean that feeling of alone–I 100% agree with you. Where were all these geeks? I remember in school being made fun of because I would rush home to watch Batman the animated series. In my teens, I loved that series; it meant so much to me.
Kaja: It was really good.
Bonnie: So good.
Regina: My friends–again air quotes, listeners–would tell me, “Why do you like a cartoon? We’re older than that. Why do you do that?” And I’m just like, “Because it’s awesome, you know!” And I went to college and I majored in physics and the people started making fun of me because I didn’t–I hadn’t read Lord of the Rings. And they made fun of me! And so I spent a whole summer between 2 years of physics reading Hobbit and Lord of the Rings through the whole summer. And I fell in love with it. And I was looking at the hills north of Seattle, which basically look like Hobbiton. Right. It looks like, you know–it looks like the world.
Kaja: I see it too.
Regina: I was just immersed in it. It’s just so crazy how this idea of belonging and identity is everywhere, right?
Kaja: You know what we take from this? Humans are mean. We will take whatever we can get to pick on each other and be terrible to each other. Maybe we need to grow out of that as a species. We will, I have faith.
Bonnie: Yeah.
Regina: I wanted to live in that hill. I wanted to go hiking. And then I . . .
Kaja: That one hill–as you’re driving north to Bellingham from Seattle, there’s this one that just needs a castle on top of it.
Regina: [Inaudible.]
Kaja: Yes!
Regina: Every single time–my sister went to UW; I went to Western growing up. And we would drive to Seattle and drive back so many times. And I was reading Lord of the Rings at the time, and it was in the summer so you know the Northwest is so beautiful and green in the summer. And I would look at those hills and I would be like, I was like, “We’re just going to hike those and I’m going to read these books and I’m going to immerse myself.”
Kaja: There’s amazing hiking up near Western.
Regina: Yeah.
Kaja: Oh we had so much fun. I went to college at Western for years, so I have a little bit of knowledge of the area up there. But when I was little and we would take road trips and we would go east and we would cross the Cascades, those were always the Misty Mountains for me.
Regina: It’s going to Mordor, right?
Bonnie: Yes! [Laughing.] So OK, so I’m sorry. When we moved up . . .
Regina: I love that you . . .
Bonnie: We moved up from southern California um and my husband and I were both super excited to be going somewhere where it was going to be green. And his favorite author is Terry Brooks. So as we’re driving through Oregon, he is pointing out these hills to me and he’s explaining–and I’ve read through the Shannara series; it’s been awhile–and he’s pointing out the hills to me and he’s going, “This is what he was writing about! This is this area!” And it was so exciting to be moving up to this place that was just like lush and just beautiful.
Regina: And has water.
Bonnie: And has water and not so much smog! [Laughing.] So.
Regina: But Smaug exists in the uh series.
[? Janelle Monae singing Wondaland ?]
? We should dance
? Dance in the trees
? Paint mysteries
? The magnificent droid plays there
? Your magic mind
? Makes love to mine
? I think I’m in love, angel
? Take me back to Wondaland
? I gotta get back to Wondaland
? Take me back to Wondaland
? I gotta get back to Wondaland
Regina: Today we’re talking about the intersection between geek culture and science at GeekGirlCon.
I just I love geeking out with you. I’m going to let you man your booth soon, but I could do this forever. I could do this forever.
But I’ve been asking all of my interviewees two questions. One–because this is a Con and I’m dressed up as Doctor Light, which my listeners hopefully know about by now–if you could have a superpower, what would that superpower be, and what would be your origin story? Now you are writers, so, this better be good. No. No pressure.
And then second question, how do you see your profession? So this is science fiction writers, I would say, or graphic novelists. How do you see them portrayed in the media and you know in pop culture and movies? And how accurate is that?
Kaja: OK, superpower first because that’s easy because we already you know talk about that question all the time. And I’m like–so I play a lot of WOW. And . . .
Regina: Oh my god, me too! I used to play and then I got pregnant and I had to give it up a month before because I didn’t want to ignore my baby.
Kaja: Well, fair.
Regina: So that was 8 years ago.
Kaja: I would–I always wanted to be a healer and I have never had time to learn to be a good healer in WOW, so I would take the healing superpower. [Laughing.]
And as for origin story, I have no clue.
Regina: Like, maybe that healing is some mystical origin and you were on top of the mountains in Bellingham and . . .
Kaja: There you go. I guess, hmm. . .
Regina: You fell into a lake of healing.
Kaja: [Laughing.] Spring of drowned girl. No um, yeah I guess, um sure.
Regina: I love that you were sharing with me your dreams of BBC and like all that kind of stuff because I have so many dreams. This show is one of them, and it’s doing OK. But this other dream I’ve always wanted to have this graphic novel, this story of robots and like very Steampunky but like very epic story but with robots and you know a monarchy and like government overthrow. I would love to do something like that, so I love that we’re, you know, we’re open to saying these things, and maybe they’ll happen.
How are writers, how are science fiction writers portrayed? How are graphic novelists portrayed? How hard is this job, and how are they not showing that on TV?
Kaja: You know, I’m drawing a blank as to . . .
Regina: There’s Castle.
Kaja: Which I’ve never seen.
Regina: Me neither.
Kaja: I’m sorry, I don’t watch television. I have to go all the way back to Chasing Amy.
Regina: That’s not that far.
Kaja: [Laughing.] Oh it is for me.
Regina: Not for me.
Kaja: Where the guy is sitting at the booth and the poor anchor is sitting there and the fan is giving them this terrible time about “well you’re just a tracer, you trace.” Well no, they draw the stuff. And I know–I’m a terrible inker, but I know how important a good inker is and I know that they’re not just tracing those lines and I know the difference because I’ve seen it with Phil. He’s used a lot of different inkers over time, and I have seen what different inkers bring to the artwork, and so that makes me laugh.
But it’s also a really good, a really good representation of how people will walk up to the booth–and so the nicest things people say to you are at conventions. People will come up and they will literally say, “I am dying” or “I have cancer” or “I was getting through this” or “I was in the military and reading this helped me get through it” and that’s really overwhelming and you kind of have to go lie down with a cold cloth on your head and huh-huh hyperventilate a little because . . .
Regina: You saved a life.
Kaja: Well I don’t know if I’d go that far, but we helped, helped them distract. We gave them some wonderful escapism, and I love the word escapism, and I love escapism. And I think as the type of animals that we humans are, we need it. And I don’t think it’s bad.
But also the worst things, the most horrible things people say to you are at conventions. People will walk up and say the most appalling things!
Regina: Oh my god, I need to hear this now.
Kaja: Well I’m not really, you know, up for any of the–they’ll come up and they’ll be like, “Oh that part where you wrote this bit you know, that really sucked.” Or they’ll make fun of you for something that they think you got from something you’ve never even heard of. Or . . .
Regina: Like they think you stole it.
Kaja: Yeah. Oh yeah. Especially–that’s calmed down now that we’ve been around for awhile, but at first, you come out with a new story–and this goes out to all the new creators out there–you come out with a new story–you totally got it from somewhere else for the first several years, you know. You obviously were, you know, stealing it from X, Y, or Z. And then it will calm down.
And uh you know there’s like the great story pool out there of–if you look at TV tropes for any length of time, you will be crushed as a writer, but you will also realize that none of this is new. And there’s always something people can point to and say, “You got this from here or there.”
But just you know I mean anything from personal comments about how you look or what you’re wearing or to comment about your writing or how they didn’t like this or didn’t like that or you know the people who feel the need to tell you that, “Well I haven’t actually read any of this.” Well that’s OK. That’s alright. Most of the planet has not read this. It’s alright.
Regina: You don’t assume that everyone in the world has read your comic.
Kaja: Put it in the–people will put it in this very strange way where I’m supposed to be offended. [Laughing.] Yeah. So I don’t know. The point is that conventions get very emotional, and they’re extremely draining. Even the good stuff, which I love to hear, can be very surprising and make you really think about what you do.
They showed a little of that, and I think it’s because the people who made that movie–the Chasing Amy–had some fingers in the industry, in fact I know they did, and so they know what they’re talking about.
But, boy, anything more recent–I guess when you see a writer in a story, it’s usually a guy, and he’s usually out in the wilderness with his dog and, no wait, that’s author photos. [Laughing.]
Regina: Yeah. Well I mean I really like that you’re talking about this idea of uh the realism of what an inker actually does, because I have no idea. None.
Kaja: Well I didn’t until I was a high school student and I got ahold of–there was Elfquest, which I loved. There was a new story, a new Elfquest story, and I bought it from the comic books store, and I’m looking at it and I’m think, “something is subtly off about this. There’s something different here.” And it took me, as a dopy kid, forever to figure out what it was. And it’s because I just wasn’t savvy about the process and how things were made. But I could see. I was like, “Something’s different. Something’s different.” So the inker’s um touch is very much in there.
Regina: So I’m going to talk–I’m going to ask this question, this last one, to both of you, um Bonnie. And we’re going to say–if you could give advice to a writer, because I know there’s so many people who come to these Cons that love science fiction, love fantasy, and they’re like “I’ve got this great story,” what would you tell them? We’ve already gone over like ‘ask why of your characters,’ which is, I think, probably number one for me. But what other advice would you give them?
Bonnie: I feel funny about answering this because like I went to school for creative writing and then decided to do librarianship instead.
Regina: You’ve read a lot of books.
Bonnie: I’ve read a lot of books, but I keep thinking, “You should try writing.” Oh man. Anyway. What I would say to the people who I see who are aspiring writers, who have just had work come out, are trying to get this on, is to just continue at it, to just make time for it. Practice all the time. Because, even the authors that I love and admire and am just passionate and fangirl about, a lot of the times, I see the development that they’ve done over the years and how their writing styles has changed and that it improves. This is like any skill. Just practice. Do it as often as you can. And keep at it.
Kaja: Part of what I would say is the same thing. The most important part of writing–and I have to tell myself this by the way because I’m still very bad about sitting down and getting my fingers on the keyboard except when I absolutely have to, which is you know three times a week when I’m lettering comics. The most important thing is to get your butt in the chair and your fingers on the keyboard or your hands on the pen–however you like to write–and just you know spit it all out.
And the biggest, hardest thing to get past is that utter knowledge that you suck. You know you’re terrible. But it’s OK. That’s alright. Because most people do and you’ve just got to get it out there and then you can tweak it and then you can mess with it. And as you say practice–you’ll never get that practice if you don’t allow yourself to get the stuff down that you know is kind of ehh, that you feel like–I personally feel like every idea I have is so cliché and can be mocked for being “Oh it’s so cliche. I’ve seen it so many times.” And the stories I love I see so many times. And then I tell myself, “How much Shoujo manga do you read?” How cliché is half of that stuff? Most of that stuff? Do you care? No. You read it anyway, don’t you?
Just write your stuff! It’s alright! [Laughing.] And you know once you’ve written it, you write the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing. And you get better every time. And maybe that first thing doesn’t sell or you put it out there yourself and it just sits there like a dead fish, but at least you did it. And that puts you head and shoulders above everyone else who didn’t.
So there’s bravery. There’s bravery involved. And there’s getting past that voice in your head that tells you you shouldn’t, you don’t deserve it. It’s OK. You do. Go! Again, the internet culture has helped us with that. We no longer have the gatekeepers we once did. So you can make your thing, and you can show it to the world, and it’ll be fine and it’s OK.
My son writes fiction and he puts it on 4chan and asks for um–he’ll write stuff and he’ll put it on 4chan and say, “What do you guys think?” If that isn’t bravery, I don’t know what is. And you know they’re awesome. Because as long as you’re not an arrogant jerk, they’ll actually tell you what they think. And if you don’t get all sad, you’ll learn something. So they’re not really as evil as everybody says they are. [Laughing.] Well oh yeah no they totally are! You guys are super evil. It’s all good.
Regina: It’s all about being positive. Like you were just talking about um–you were just talking about–this whole thing is really about being positive and staying positive and trying to tell that evil voice in your head, “Shut up” and “I’m gonna do it anyway.”
So thank you so much for talking with me. I had a great time. And thank you. And I’m going to read your comics now. I’m gonna do it. Thank you so much Kaja. Thank you Phil. You are both amazing. I’m going to give you hugs.
Kaja: [Laughing.]
Regina: Thank you for joining us. We just interviewed the creators of Girl Genius at Seattle’s GeekGirlCon. My cohost today was Puyallup librarian Bonnie. If you missed any of this show, go to our website sparksciencenow.com or go to kmarie.org and click on the podcast link.
Today’s episode was recorded on location in Seattle, Washington. Our producers were Regina Barber DeGraaff. The engineer for today’s show is Natalie Moore. And special thanks to the organizers of GeekGirlCon. This is Spark Science and we’ll be back again next week. Listen to us on 102.3 FM in Bellingham or kmarie.org, streaming on Sundays at 5PM, Thursdays at noon, and Saturdays at 3PM. If there’s a science idea you’re curious about, send us an email or post a message on our Facebook page, Spark Science.
This is an all volunteer-run show, so if you want to help us out, go to sparksciencenow.com and click on donate.
Our theme music is “Chemical Calisthenics” by Blackalicious and “Wondaland” by Janelle Monae.
[? Blackalicious rapping Chemical Calisthenics ?]
? Lead, gold, tin, iron, platinum, zinc, when I rap you think
? Iodine nitrate activate
? Red geranium, the only difference is I transmit sound
? Balance was unbalanced when you add a little talent in
? Careful, careful with those ingredients
? They could explode and blow up if you drop them
? And they hit the ground
[End of podcast.]