Taken from twitter.com/henchgirl_comic.
In my time reading comics, there have been precious few I’ve found that have been as accessible and fun as Kristen Gudsnuk’s Henchgirl comic. Serialized in eleven issues by Scout Comics, the full series is now getting a release in a book due out from Dark Horse Comics later this month.
Henchgirl is a comic about a twenty-something, young woman named Mary Posa who dreams of a better life, but pays her bills by henching for an unappreciative archvillian. The book is very funny, a parody of the superhero genre, with gags on pretty much every page.
Kristen Gudsnuk is in Seattle through this weekend for Emerald City Comic Con, where she can be found at table AA-15 in the Artist Alley, on a couple of panels on Sunday, and on Friday at 6pm at the Dark Horse booth (1708 on the show floor). Dark Horse also put out a gorgeous, hardcover copy of Henchgirl that is a convention exclusive. It’s my favorite thing I’ve picked up so far.
I spoke with the hilarious Kristen Gudsnuk after a signing at the Dark Horse booth on Thursday afternoon. Below is how our conversation went, lightly edited for clarity and length.
I guess I should start at the beginning. How did Henchgirl come to be?
Well, it’s kind of funny because a friend of my boyfriend’s is a comic book artist. He was at some convention and afterwards there’s a “Drink and Draw” and I drew this thing. I won a free comic-making class. Then I was like “I should make a comic!” When I started, I came up with the idea for Henchgirl, mostly because I needed to use this voucher. It was really random, but also because I always loved making comics. I just started working on it just for fun, and then the story just kept building. It just turned into this more epic-scale story than I had initially intended, because I first was like “Oh, it’ll just be a five-page gag comic about superhero tropes.” Then it just kind of kept morphing as I kept pouring my feelings into it.
It’s really taken off, too. I mean, you started it as a web comic, didn’t it? So then you put it out as a serial.
But first I was self-publishing it. Then Scout Comics put out the single issues. It just kept kind of like building up, and then Dark Horse started putting it out. Really cool.
How did it come to be that Dark Horse is putting out the collection of 11 comics into this one book?
I met them at or near Comic Con one year, and they were interested in it. I was like “Hey, can you do a trade? Thank you!” It was back when I was under the radar. I still kind of am.
Could you talk maybe a little bit more about how the character evolved, how Henchgirl kind of evolved from going from just starting out as a five-page comic into this?
Yeah. The first page or so she’s like “Ah, these mean streets. They eat you up and spit you out.” I was like “That was my gag comic, was gonna just be a street.” Then there’s a street villain who’s eating a car and people and stuff. It’s literal, street eating people. Then I just kept going on from there. I mean, Mary who is the titular Henchgirl … She’s like a 20 something girl who can’t really find what she wants to do in life; career prospects are completely dried up, and she’s just kind of underachieving and slumming it. It was pretty similar to my own life, you know. I was just working a 9 to 5 and I was feeling like I should be doing more. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I kind of poured all my feelings in there from my job angst or whatever, because for the past several years, it’s been really hard for people to get jobs.
That’s kind of where it started from. I was thinking “What kind of person would I be if I were in a superhero world? If I were in, say, the Batman animated series.” And I was like “I would totally be the guy in the background holding the bag of money who then is like “Oh, it’s the Bat!” And gets blown up. That would be me! So that’s where it started from, just wanting to shine focus on the less-impressive people in the world.
One of the gags I loved was from Henchgirl #1, where she has the bag that says “money” and has it crossed out and says “laundry” on it.
Yeah, actually on this convention cover I did a similar gag to try to tie it together: it’s “stuff I paid for.”
I can’t help but make jokes. It just comes out in my writing, even if I’m writing a really serious scene. There’s always going to be jokes in it.
I love that because there’s always something funny going on in each scene. Were you always drawing before that?
When I was a little kid, I would draw comics to entertain my friends in school and stuff. I would make up these weird characters and just make ongoing, horribly-drawn gag comics. Even my old journals were full of comics. Really bad ones, not anything that anyone would ever want to see. The art of Kristin Gudsnuk. There’s one … This is really dumb, it was a story about this … This was in my journal when I was around ten. It’s a story about this girl who goes to a concert and then someone pulls her onstage and she sings. Then she gets a record contract and then she gets killed by a drunk driver. Her parents are like “We should have appreciated her more! She was so great!” It was clearly me as a kid being like “Why don’t my parents appreciate my genius?” Super transparent. I always did comics for fun, but I wasn’t very serious about them for much of my life. It was more of a weird hobby.
You didn’t see it as becoming a career?
I didn’t think it could be a career! I thought I had to work a corporate job, and then I was like “Actually, it’s weirdly easier to do comics sometimes than it is to be a regular worker employee.” I applied to Starbucks once and I got rejected, and I was like “Damn. Why is Starbucks so hard to work for?” I don’t know. Who knows why.
But so, there must be a lot of Kristin that’s in Mary.
Yeah. Yeah, she’s similar to me. There’s differences. I don’t think … I’m not a bad person. I don’t steal things from people, other than their hearts.
Right. Well, so what else should people know about Henchgirl? Anything that we didn’t talk about?
Okay. What do I say about Henchgirl that we didn’t really talk about? It’s got lots of trope parody, kind of similar to Venture Brothers. A lot of people have said it’s like Venture Brothers, and a little bit like Scott Pilgrim too in terms of tone and art style. For those who haven’t seen it yet, that’s sort of like a portrait of what Henchgirl’s like, kind of where she comes from.
Okay. Are you going to do anything more with the Mary character?
Not currently… But maybe in the future. I would have to come up with … I’d have to write it, draw it and all that.
I should say what my next thing is I’m working on, currently, I’m working on a book for Scholastic Graphix. It’ll come out next year.
Excellent. I can’t wait to see that. And of course, anything else that you want to say while the tape recorder’s running?
Hi, Mom!
