Hello everyone, I had the opportunity to interview the prolific creator of Grrl Scouts: Stone Ghosts, Jim Mahfood. I interviewed him a few months back when he was publishing the book weekly. But now that I’ve had the chance to catch up with him at New York Comic Con, we decided to discuss his recent work.
Q1. What’s it been like when you started Grrl Scouts: Stone Ghosts in comparison to now after completing the book?
JM: It’s a huge relief for me that it is done and out. The reaction to it has been extremely positive. I’m really proud of the work. I’m really proud of the work. I’m really proud of the trade and the collection. Shout out to my designer Carmen Acosta who put it all together and did a beautiful job. All of the variant cover artist friends of mine like Peach Momoko who was just here a second ago (she stopped by the table with her husband to hand Jim some snacks) and gave me the original art for the cover she did, so this blows my mind. So yeah man, it was two and a half years of work to kind of put the six issues together and release it through image and have the trade come out. It’s been really great, and it’s just nice to see it done and out. I was certainly able to move on as soon as it came out to doing other Grrl Scouts stuff. I’m doing a weekly grrl Scouts thing for Zestworld.com. So I’m doing new weekly stuff for them, it’s almost like a Patreon where you subscribe to it. And then at the end of my year with them, I’m gonna do a print version of all that material. That’ll either be crowdfunded through image or whatever.
Q2. As a closing question, you’ve been going against the grain as an illustrator and storyteller for many years now. What is it that young illustrators should be taking note of when working on their craft?
JM: The first thing is having all the basic academics down such as drawing anatomy, perspective, light, and shadow. Because when you’re doing comics you’re responsible for every version of visual drawing and art it’s gonna be happening in your book. Whether you want to draw it or not it’s up to you, but you’re gonna have to draw backgrounds you’re gonna have to draw people for the most part, so you want to develop that vocabulary and learn how to do it correctly first. And then you can twist it and add your style to it which I basically did. It’s pretty apparent in my work that there is so much style infused into this. At the same time I’m still rooted in an academic drawing of some sense of correctness to it or else the style falls apart. If you’re young and starting, you do want to get all that academic basics down and then start playing with it and have fun.
As always, it was a pleasure to interview you Mr. Mahfood. Looking forward to the next projects coming down the pipeline. Thank you for your time.
Brian Isaacs - Executive Editor / Publisher