Creator Spotlight: Margaret Trauth

Today’s interview spotlight is with Margaret Trauth, creator of the ongoing comic Decrypting Rita, which has a snarky robot lady!  Which I find interesting for obvious reasons 😉  Margaret was so willing to share, I didn’t even really have to ask probing questions, which is a different interviewing experience for me 😀  Enjoy!

D: Tell me a bit about yourself, the person behind the art.

M: I’m Margaret Trauth and I draw stuff.

The basics: born in New Orleans in 1971, went off to Los Angeles for animation school in 1995. Spent a few years kicking around the edge of that industry, mostly doing Flash animation at Spümcø, burnt out on it and moved back home just in time for almost all my stuff to be washed away in Hurricane Katrina. I moved in with some friends in Boston, and ended up in a triad relationship with them for a few years. These days I live by myself in Seattle, with regular visits from my ex-with-benefits. Who is also an occasional collaborator and editor.

These days I keep on feeling like I’m living in the legalized-dope-smoking, casually-polyamorous world that I laughed at in a lot of the science fiction I devoured when I was a kid. I think that may mostly just be that I’m living in a West Coast scene full of science fiction nerds.

I spend more time playing video games than I probably should, especially in winter when I wonder just what the hell a solar-powered Southern girl is doing in a place that gets about six hours of cloud-obscured sunlight around the solstice.

D: Curse you winter! I grew up in AZ and now live in NJ, so I feel you. Any tips to make it thru winter? Or at least video game recommendations to ease the pain? 😉

M: I think my biggest tip for making it through winter is “avoid it”. I mean if you are the sort of person whose response to only getting five hours of sunlight a day is to keep the lights on all night long and crank out work then it’s great, but my energy level basically drops once the sun goes down.

Near the beginning of 2014, I got a two foot square sun lamp. It has helped make the 2014/15 winter somewhat more bearable; I feel like I’ve been more productive this winter than last winter. It’s still a fight though. I also take any excuse I can to visit my mother in New Orleans during winter; I love to walk from her place in Gentilly to Morning Call in the park. I’ll sit outside in the slightly chill sunlight and have a cafe au lait, some beignets, and draw. The walk is about an hour, and is part of the attraction – I find that staying physically active helps. Though a gloomy morning makes that hard, too.

I keep on dreaming of making enough money from my comics to justify renting a small place down where there’s sunshine for the worst months of winter. I wouldn’t want to live in LA full time again, but three months out of the year could be pretty cool.

As to game suggestions? Well, let’s see. Last winter I mostly spent with Skyrim, and Saints Row IV. Skyrim, I returned to as a lizard lady who ran through the Assassin’s Guild quest line under a “no killing anyone I’m not paid to kill” discipline, then later played it via Boot Camp and a whole lot of NSFW mods as a dark elf with a pair of horns permanently attached to her head, who I role-played as a succubus who’d lost a bet. SRIV, well, I basically made Rita in the character creator, and avoided bothering with the flight powers for a while because, hey, running. This winter has been spent with Dark Souls 1 (uncompleted, the home bonfire is now permanently out and I just don’t have the heart to press on), Kingdoms of Amalur (imagine Skyrim with art by the World of Warcraft team, it’s gorgeous) and Dragon Age Inquisition (my first Dragon Age, and really kinda boring IMHO.) Also I think it was this winter where I got Spyro The Dragon running in an emulator, set the resolution up high, hooked the computer to the projector, and spent several days happily going WHEE I’M A DRAGON a lot. I have dragon wings tattooed across the backs of my arms, from my scapulae to my elbows; I like pretending to be a dragon. (My main-quest run of Skyrim saw me refusing to kill any dragons that were not plot requirements.)

Basically winter is for big life-consuming open-world RPGs. I avoid them when I have the energy to actually get stuff done, but when I have no energy to actually think and write and draw, I may as well just hibernate in a virtual world. I’m out of new ones right now and still have no energy, so I’ve been kinda mindlessly grinding in Diablo 3 on the PS4. Which is really fun when my boyfriend’s visiting; we play co-op and do things like scream imprecations about ents (“HOOOOOM MOTHERF***ER! YEAH I KNOW WHERE ALL THE ENTWIVES WENT, YOU STONED BASTARDS!”) while killing giant trees together.

(I’ve also sharply restricted my consumption of big-budget games ever since I decided that I will not play an AAA game that doesn’t allow me to choose a female character. I spent enough time pretending to be a guy iRL, I’m not going to do it for fun.)

In the summer I greatly prefer small arcadey things. I’ll buy anything Jeff Minter puts out on a system I have, I still dip into Pac-Man Championship Edition DX now and then, I had a lot of fun with Super Time Force… and every now and then I try to replay Jet Set Radio, but I just can’t get past its terrible camera. I’d pull out Jet Set Radio Future but I can’t find my copy; I guess I’ll just have to wait for Hover, the open-world JSR-alike I backed on Kickstarter, to come out for that fix of brightly-colored cityscapes to trick and grind my way through.

D: Tell me a bit about your creative projects.

M: The current one is a graphic novel called Decrypting Rita. It’s about a robot lady dragged outside of reality by her ex-boyfriend; she’s got to pull herself together across four parallel worlds before a hive-mind can take over the planet. It started as my attempt to make something more mainstream than my previous project, but it’s ended up being aggressively experimental, to the point where I joke about it being my PhD on the nature of time in comics. It’s close to being done, which is pretty exciting; I’m about to draw stuff I’ve been planning towards for four years. I learnt a hell of a lot doing it – both about telling stories, and about all the self-promotion and business stuff surrounding them.

Before Rita, I spent a year doing a Tarot deck. It was called “The Tarot of the Silicon Dawn”, with art and text by me. It’s a strange little beast, both irreverent and solemn.

And before that, I was doing on Five Glasses of Absinthe, a fantasy sex comedy co-created with and scripted by my then-boyfriend. I would be finishing it up around now if not for the fact that we broke up after moving to Seattle. I’ll be returning to it when I finish Rita, as he is now the ex-with-benefits I mentioned earlier.

I’ll also be working on “The Drowning City”, about a girl slowly turning into a monster while elves invade New Orleans. It’s a dark story full of metaphors for a lot of my past pain; it started as an expression of missing New Orleans when I moved to Los Angeles, and just sort of… accreted… over the next two decades. If I wasn’t going to be returning to Absinthe I’d be doing something light-hearted alongside it; it’s got chunks of my trans angst, father-dead-on-my-12th-birthday angst, and Katrina angst. All of which I had to work through before I felt like I could finally start drawing the thing.

I have a few vague ideas for stuff I may work on after that, but I figure Absinthe and Drowning City will carry me through to around 2020. Something will be ready by then. And I’ll probably draw it in Illustrator like everything else for the past fifteen years.

Oh yeah, and back when I was in the animation world I mostly worked on “Weekend Pussy Hunt” (a John K noir about a dog who was spending a weekend hunting down a cat to wreak horrible vengeance) and “Booty Call” (a choose-your-own-adventure series about a fratboy trying to get laid). Neither of those was anything like the kinds of stories I wanted to be telling, which sort of sums up a large part of why I left animation – I didn’t want to spend twenty years trying to climb the hierarchy to the point where I could have some hope of creating a show. (I mean also there was the whole ‘coming out to myself about gender issues and not wanting to go through transition while trying to make it in animation’ thing. But a life of telling other people’s stories just didn’t appeal.) I learnt a lot about drawing and perfectionism during my time in that industry, though, and I wouldn’t dissuade anyone from chasing that particular dream.

D: Those are some interesting sounding stories and projects! What are some lessons you’ve learned through making them?

M: I think the biggest lesson is that I can actually plan, and finish, large projects. That sort of feels like a surprise somehow.

And a big part of how I do it is this lesson: it doesn’t matter if you only got a little work done on the big project today. You got some work in, and that’s what matters; if you only got a half hour in then hey, that’s a half hour closer to the end. If you got into the groove and worked for four hours straight, that’s pretty awesome – but that’s by no means a requirement.

Also: when you’re in that place where you can only pull together a half hour’s worth of work on any day, your schedule can and will go out the window. Do not spend that precious half hour putting together a page/strip/whatever that is solely an apology for not having a real one on schedule. Spend that half hour doing something related to future pages, and eventually you’ll have put in the time to create the next page-or-whatever.Rita became a lot less stressful to draw when I adopted an official schedule of “aim twice a week, but don’t fret if life gets in the way” versus the rigid “tues/thurs” schedule I started with. If you’re doing a long-format work like I am, people will mostly read it in chunks anyway.

D: A potentially deep question: why create? Webcomics in particular, but stories/art in general.

M: Because it makes the universe a little more interesting.

I am lucky enough to be living in a situation where I don’t have to scramble for a roof over my head or food or the like. I can do something frivolous like “draw comics about a robot lady with PKD problems”. I mean, really, this is pretty high up on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. But I like to draw; I spent half my life learning to get good at it, what else am I gonna do?

When you get right down to it, it’s kind of what life does. The universe tends towards maximum entropy, but you get these little isolated pockets of decreasing entropy. I’m just doing what life does: arranging the raw material of the universe into complicated patterns.

D: How did your recent con go? Any fun experiences to share?

M: Pretty badly, I’m afraid. Last year was a blast; I came close to breaking even, despite it being my first time at the con, I got some sunshine, there was a little nerd Mardi Gras parade rolling through the show intermittently, I got to tug on the tiedown rings at the end of Bondage Harley Quinn’s horns. This year? They added 200 new tables but ended up having low attendance. Probably in part because it was earlier in the year; nobody had their January paycheck to recover from Christmas yet. And there wasn’t even the occasional parade. Financially, it was the second-worst con I’d ever been at, surpassed only by the time I went to a queer comics con in Burbank and sold all of about three Tarot decks on the first two days, then gave up and hopped on the bus to Santa Monica to bum around on the beach instead of sitting behind the table feeling sorry for myself. I bought a coffee table book of staircase pornography, drew some things, and generally redeemed that visit; I wish I’d had the sense to do that for Wizard World New Orleans 2015. Though it was generally cloudy while I was there anyway.

It was with a heavy heart that I did not register for next year. Because I really had a great tie in 2013. But with a date for next year of “TBD”, I didn’t feel like buying another crapshoot of potential misery. I’ve sold well at enough cons to know intellectually that there are many, many factors besides “my modest display is not up to snuff” and “everyone hates my work” but after a while I start wallowing in those fears when I’m stuck at a bad table.

My next con is ECCC in a few months; it should go a lot better. It’s here in Seattle, with a huge attendance, and I’ve got two booths in a good location that I’m splitting with some friends.

(I am starting to come to the conclusion that it’s really just not worth it sticking around for the last day of a three-day con if I haven’t at least made back my table by Saturday. Bail and find something else to do.)

D: Do you have any advice or general thoughts you’d like to share? A soapbox to talk about a pet topic? Anything?

M: General webcomics advice: make ‘em, expect nobody to read them even if you’re coming in with pro-quality art and writing from day one. Everyone says it’s about five years from “starting your comic” to “paying the bills with your comic” and I’m finding that to feel pretty true, I’ve been doing Rita for four years and Patreon is potentially paying about half my rent on a productive month.

Advertise the comic, not the Kickstarter/Patreon/other future ways to make money. But make sure the comic is full of polite links to those money-making methods – I put a little green banner in the corner of every page of my entire site when I have a Kickstarter going, and there’s a little ‘psst! wanna help crowdsource a page-rate for me?’ link to Patreon under every page. Plus a Patreon link in the top nav bar, and one at the end of every chapter along with a suggestion that you can also help me out by just telling your friends and/or favorite tastemakers about Rita.

If you can support yourself on something else while you spend those five or so years building up an audience, then spend the money that comes in from the comic on advertising. I have been sinking most of my Patreon money into ads and that’s helped a lot. (Your first few cons? Those fall under your advertising budget too.)

I don’t care what you or your web developer has learnt about adaptive layouts; do NOT shrink your pages to fit the user’s browser. You will get lots of people complaining that your text is illegible, and they will be right to do so. Shrinking photos and illustrations to fit a given space can look cool, but it kills comics. Especially if your text is too small. Which it probably is when you begin.

Drawing advice: Go here, get the Preston Blair book, and start doing these exercises by master animator John K (creator of ’Ren & Stimpy’). You will get a lot better, a lot faster.

Writing advice: Have a place you want the story to end. This makes writing a lot easier and keeps things succinct; you can say “how do I get from where I am now to the end”, then say “how do I get from where I am now to that halfway point”, then just repeatedly ask that question until you’re down to a single sentence worth of stuff that fits on a page.

(And here is an exercise: take a short comic you like, write single sentences describing what happens on each page. Now you know how much stuff fits on a page with the kind of pacing that story has.)

If you want to just make a set of cool characters and follow them around wherever they may go for a while, you can freely ignore that writing advice. I mean I was recently reading Stephen King’s book “On Writing” and he completely just follows characters, his bank account says that works pretty well. I like having an ending; I don’t want to draw Rita forever.

Read a lot. Good and bad. Books, comics, whatever. The more you read, the more you can tell good writing from bad; apply that sense to your own writing and fix stuff that doesn’t measure up. And your own drawing, for that matter; I have old sketchbooks with terrible drawings… and notes beside them analyzing just what I felt was wrong with them.

Do stuff, make mistakes. Make a lot of mistakes, and try not to make the same one more than once.

And as to a soapbox?

Be polite to robots.