Creator Spotlight: Martin Kirby
Today’s Creator Spotlight interview is with Martin Kirby, creator and artist of the sci-fi space-adventure webcomic Freelancer, among other things.
D: Tell me a bit about yourself.
M: Hey, my name’s Martin Kirby and I’m a 26 year old illustrator living up near Newcastle in the north of England. It’s cold and grim, but I love it all the same. I live with my girlfriend and our tiny, ridiculously fluffy dog and chug away as a visual designer at my day job. In the evenings I make comics, such as Freelancer! I’m pretty much self taught in terms of art, and kinda fell into comics as a means to practice and kinda fell in love with them haha. (I hope that doesn’t show too badly in Freelancer)
D: England! Fun! That means I get to ignore when my US autocorrect tries to spell things without extra ‘u’s 😉 Do you find that most of your online audience is British because you’re British, or is that irrelevant?
M: Erm, I think it’s fairly irrelevant for the most part! I do most of my promotion via twitter and I know a lot of my followers are American on there so I think that’s the major driving force behind it. I’ll admit I’m the absolute worst of at extracting information from Google Analytics, but apparently my readers are 93% American (!) which is pretty significant. I really hope they don’t mind my injecting vowels into every other word.
D: Fluffy dog! I want a fluffy dog, but our apartment complex doesn’t allow them. What type? Any chance you’d share a pic of him?
M: Man, yeah, at my first house (which I was renting) our landlord was this ex-military guy who loved everything to be military grade clean, so pets were a huge no-no. My SO really loves animals though so it was really crushing her that she couldn’t have one. When it was looking like we wouldn’t be able to move out for a little while, I arranged a visit with our landlord to see if I could talk him into letting us get a dog. Scariest talk of my life! But it paid off and he relented and now we have a little Papillon called Oliver. They’re possibly the most ridiculous little fluffy dogs ever, but I love him to bits.
D: How is working as a visual designer by day, comics by night? Is their similarity/difference a blessing or a curse?
M: To be honest, there’s not a huge amount of similarity between the two! My day job involves making revision ‘podcasts’ for students, but they’re essentially short semi-videos so there’s some minor animation in there too. However it’s all vector-based and has sort of strict visual guidelines so it’s relatively monotonous and really dissimilar to my normal work flow when it comes to illustrations. I think to be honest that it really helps me not get burned out since it feels like I’m working on two completely different things? I know some people who have art jobs that are more focused on design or illustration or what have you, and they find it tough to summon the drive to work on personal projects afterwards. I find designing to be the most exhausting part of any creative project, the actual translation from a thought to on-the-page drawing physically tires me out a lot if I do it in any sustained capacity so I can really see where they’re coming from. Plus, it frees me up from worrying about paying the mortgage and so on so there’s definite benefits to it! The downside, though, is that I don’t get a huge amount of sleep and my comic updates less frequently than I would like, but that’s the balance I guess!
D: Tell me about your creative projects.
M: Well, I have Freelancer obviously which takes up a decent chunk of my spare time. I also have another project I’m working on with a writer friend of mine called J.N. Monk which is in the early concept stages, but it’s a science-fantasy adventure story featuring a broken world filled with magic, mystery and maps! When I’m not working on those I manage to squeeze in a few commissions here and there and, if I’m lucky, work on a personal illustration now and then! I’m also involved in an upcoming project called 1001 Knights, which is going to be an impossibly huge anthology featuring hundreds of pretty amazing artists. It’s getting Kickstarted later this year, so keep an eye out for that!
D: Oh I know J.N.! I look forward to seeing what comes of that 🙂
M: Yeah! J.N. is great, and is a really skilled writer. I’d keep an eye on them, they’re gonna be involved in really great things in the future I can tell. If twitter is your bag, give them a follow.
D: Can you give me a brief intro to Freelancer? What’s it about, where the story is going (generally, obviously no spoilers)?
M: The short version is that Freelancer is about people who feel like they don’t know where they’re going in life. Or, more importantly, they feel like they know where they want to be, but they don’t know how to go about getting there. The long version is the same as the short version, but it involves more spaceships and punching.
Essentially, a girl called Elena Daniels finds her way to becoming a Freelancer, essentially the space-version of an odd-job person. They’ll traverse the whole galaxy looking for any work going and when it’s done, they move on. It’s got this mythos of being a daring job of derring do about it, but the reality is that a lot of them just end up moving cargo, making deliveries and so on. Obviously, different crews have different specialities and some of them lead very exciting lives, but the majority of it is pretty hum-drum. This is what Elena soon learns, and she feels a bit let down by it all. She signed up for adventure and fame and riches, but ends up mopping decks and cleaning crud from the ship’s thrusters and so on.
The crew she has ended up with, however, do have a slightly more interesting speciality than most: They track down and sell artifacts, specifically artifacts tied to a mysterious race of aliens that once had a huge empire, but then mysteriously disappeared. Their artifacts are able to summon items into the physical world via a digital interface. Through some hijinks Elena finds a pair of gloves that can do just this: They seem normal at first but she soon realises they can turn into giant, wall-busting power gloves. With these she hopes that all her dreams of being a rich, famous badass will come true but it remains to be seen if she’ll actually manage to get there!
(I’m really bad at writing summaries, I’m so sorry)
Anyway, that’s the story so far. As to where it’s going, I have a few fun ideas laid out. The initial story is planned out to be about 5 chapters long, roughly around trade volume size. Since Freelancer was my first comic, and I absolutely hate the idea of not finishing a project I set myself on, I wanted to write a story that had a definite conclusion that was within a reachable distance. I’m still uncertain what will happen once it’s finished, whether I’ll continue with a new story using the same characters, or the same universe or something completely different, I don’t know. It all depends on what happens over the next few years! But this is absolutely why I wanted to write it to be a relatively (in webcomic terms) short story. I wanted to make sure people got a story that was complete and would leave them satisfied if I wanted to pursue other stories or projects. However I’m aware this is also the first time I’m announcing this, so uh…I should mention that more?
D: Sounds like a good summary to me 🙂 I think that having a definite end to the story in mind makes in stronger, as you know where you are going with it.
M: Thanks, yeah definitely. Even though I’m terrible at forward planning, having a definite outline really helps to shape the whole story and makes sure you don’t end up meandering.
D: So do you think you might make more FL stories, or just this one? What’s the next big plan?
M: Like I say, it all kinda depends what comes along between now and the end of the story! I’ve definitely got ideas for where I could take the Freelancer universe after this story, and I’d love to explore them one day, but I also have about 20 story ideas in various stages of completion sitting on the back burner so I’d like to give some of them a chance to see the light of day at some point too. Especially since I’d be able to apply to them what I’ve learned over the course of Freelancer, hopefully they’d be better for it. So basically, all the projects. All the projects is my plan!
D: Have you learned any lessons from creating and running your comic you could share?
M: Oh definitely, I don’t think it’s possible to go into making a comic without learning a million different things. It’s definitely a trial-by-fire sort of thing! As for what I could pass on, hmm. Okay.
– Don’t get lost in the planning stages. It’s really easy to worldbuild and worldbuild and worldbuild and draw concept art endlessly but at the end of the day that’s all just prep work, and it can get real easy to run into problems and talk yourself out of the project before you even begin. Freelancer has lived previously as about 3 other stories with completely different worlds which I prepped to hell and back and, ultimately, abandoned because they got too bloated. Just write your character arcs and your plot outline, detail it as much as is needed to give you a start and dive right in. The only way to make the comic is to actually make it. You’ll work the kinks out as you go
– Have a work schedule, but feel free to leave yourself some flexibility. I admit, this won’t suit every creator out there since everyone works differently but I’ve found that Freelancer gained a much better tone and was more interesting to me when I only started thumbnailing / writing dialogue a scene ahead of myself. I have the outline, so I know where things are going, but I only write the details when I reach them. That way, it keeps things fresh and dialogue a lot more natural (in my experience). You’ll also think of things you wouldn’t have before hand and get to include them seamlessly. Plus it means that as your art / writing improve, you get to incorporate that, rather than being held back by pencils you did months ago, for instance. There’s nothing worse than throwing out a whole chapter’s pencils when you’re 5 pages in because you know you could do them better already (not that I did that….or…..anything…*sobs*)
– Comics are a marathon, not a sprint. Pace yourself, look after yourself and don’t let them take over your entire life. It’s incredibly unhealthy, and so very easily done so keep on top of it.
D: Any advice for creators or readers?
M: Creators: Create the things you want to see in the world. You have a voice, use it wisely.
Readers: Support the creators creating the things you want to see in the world. Your support is your voice.
D: I’m giving you a soapbox. Anything you’d like to talk about?
M: Erm. Not that I can think of! Read Freelancer, it’ll cure what ails ya
D: Lol. Thanks, Martin!
And everyone, I happen to agree. Freelancer is great, and I’ll probably be writing up a “Why I Read” review of it at some point 😀