Creator Spotlight: Josh Conner

This week’s Spotlight is with Josh Conner, creator of webcomic Steel Salvation, and the man behind the awesome collab fiction project we’ve been working on the past couple of months, The Undying Voice of Julius Gordon.

D: I know that most comic creators do this part time, so I assume you’re no exception. How else do you occupy yourself?

J: Well, I just graduated from Cal State Long Beach in December with a degree in English Literature, so until recently the answer to this question was “school.” Now, my time is split between a part time job at the local library that I’ve held for the last six years, a hunt for the full time job that will hopefully tide me over until I can get a career in advertising as a copywriter, and night classes that will help me build a portfolio to pave the way for said copywriting career. It’s a hectic schedule, but that’s the way I like it.

D: You do have some beautiful prose. Care to list the stories and projects you’ve worked on or completed?

Thank you! I’ve been writing since the age of 12, when I started my first book (a terrible dystopian young adult novel called Xenomorph that at least preempted the current wave of terrible dystopian young adult novels, if nothing else). That project was eventually shelved as my writing chops and my self-awareness grew, though I still keep the chapters of Xenomorph on my hard drive for old times’ sake. I started another novel in my Freshman year of high school, and this one preempted the current wave of wacky zombie fiction. Unlike Xenomorph, I actually finished Rock Zombie, and even though it was still very much the work of a teenager enamored with Shaun of the Dead and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I decided to publish it anyway. Since I knew most publishers probably wouldn’t touch a sci-fi comedy about a rock star recruited by the FBI to mind-control an army of zombies with his guitar to fight the return of the Soviet Union, I published Rock Zombie myself through CreateSpace.

Self-publishing is both incredibly daunting and incredibly liberating, as you have full control over every aspect of your book, but at the same time, you have to have full control over every aspect of your book. You have to know how to format a manuscript for print, you have to know how to self-edit, you have to know how to make a cover (or at least know someone who knows how), and you have to take into consideration all the little things that publishers would normally take care of for you, like buying an ISBN number and organizing a promotional campaign. Some aspects of the project went even better than I’d hoped, like the interior formatting, but there are plenty of things that I couldn’t handle on my own, namely the promotional campaign and reformatting for Kindle, which probably killed sales since most self-published works typically flourish in a cheap, downloadable format. In any case, Rock Zombie is not the type of story I would write today, so I’ve stopped trying to push it.

My latest projects have all been short stories, which I got a taste for in college level creative writing workshops, but my attempts to get them published have yet to pay off. I have about five or six stories that I consider to be of publishable quality, and if you want to read more of my stuff, I’ve uploaded the story Nineteen Sixty-Five as an example. It’s got some mature themes and language – nothing gratuitous, but I feel like a disclaimer is in order nonetheless.

D: Why did you start working on a webcomic?

J: I think the seeds for Steel Salvation were first planted when I asked my friends and co-creators Alex Mattingly and Evan Ledesma to help me create a cover for Rock Zombie. While doing the line art for Evan’s drawings, Alex mentioned that our action shot of Tom Savery surrounded by rocking out zombies looked like something from a comic. It did, but nobody actually suggested that we make a comic. We were just focused on getting the book out at the time. The idea must have germinated in Alex’s head, though, because he sent us both a message several months later asking if we wanted to do a webcomic together. Evan and I agreed as long as we could come up with a story idea, so I gave it about a week of brainstorming and then we had something.

D: Why do you like to create?

J: It’s a simple question with a complicated answer. There are several main reasons why I create. For one thing, it’s a release valve for my imagination, which runs almost 24/7 and often keeps me up at night. The stories are in my head whether I find a way to express them or not, but if I don’t, I suspect they might begin to pile up and cause an aneurysm or something. Another reason is that, like a lot of writers, I crave attention but despise the spotlight. Storytelling is a way to connect with people while simultaneously deflecting their attention away from yourself. It’s a healthy outlet for introverts to indirectly socialize. Plus, I want to entertain people, because that seems like a much better option than hurting or exploiting them. I realize we are all hilariously tragic, flawed creatures, and I want to make our hilariously tragic lives a little bit better – as long as nobody has to look at me while I do it.

The third part to that answer (and the least interesting) is that I’ve always had a way with words. I don’t know why. I barely passed my upper division grammar class in college, so clearly I don’t understand the mechanics of writing. I just know how to fit the words together in a satisfying manner. It’s the only form of artistic expression that I’m not terrible at, so that’s how I choose to release the stories bouncing around in my head and, hopefully, entertain a few folks in the process.

D: Where would you like to be, creative wise, with your works in 5, 10 years?

J: In a dream world of my own construction, I would be a full-time fiction author writing novels and short stories for a living. Alternatively, I could see myself as a comic writer, though that’s a relatively new field for me and as far as dream worlds go, that one isn’t quite as fully fleshed out. I’m not sure what kind of comics I’d be writing, who I’d be working with, or even if I will still enjoy writing comics 5 or 10 years down the road. I know my passion for prose will never die, so that’s a safe bet.
In a more realistic world, I plan on working as a copywriter by day and a fiction author by night. Maybe I’ll get a book published, maybe not, but at least I’ll have a creative career to fall back on and keep me going until I do publish something worthwhile.

D: Any cool stories?

J: Well, I do work at a public library, so while I don’t know if I’d call them cool stories, I have a near-endless supply of weird, awkward, and disturbing stories. Here’s one off the top of my head. One day, I was working at the checkout desk when a young guy with a hippy vibe came up to me and asked if any administrators were available.

I asked why, and he said “Well, we found these quails out in your park, and they’re not supposed to be there. In fact, they’re not even supposed to be in North America. We were hoping you could keep them in a box or something until animal control can pick them up.”

In case you’re wondering, this isn’t a normal question for us at our library. There is no department for Quail Storage. Since I didn’t have a good answer prepared for him, I pointed him toward administration. He then walked outside and came back with his friend, who was carrying two paper Trader Joe’s bags. I couldn’t help staring at the bags as they walked past. I had my suspicions, of course, but surely these guys weren’t just going to barge into our library with two bagfuls of quail. How would they have possibly gotten them into the bags in the first place? I was just about to dismiss my first instinct as completely ridiculous, but as they walked past me, I found that completely ridiculous was indeed on the menu that day. There were talons scratching inside the bags, and as I watched in shock, something fat squirmed against the paper.

I was so surprised that I forgot to mention that all the administrators had gone home for the day. I kinda wish they hadn’t. I would have loved to see them plop two quails in paper sacks on my supervisor’s desk.

Since nobody was around to help them, the hippies came walking back out a couple minutes later. The first guy said they would find a box for the quails and take care of them until someone else could return them to their homes, wherever that may be (at least we can rule out North America). I don’t know what happened to the hippies or the quails. I’d like to think they became attached to each other and the quails refused to go home. Now they’re all living together in some kind of bizarre sitcom-esque situation. A guy can dream.

As a weird coincidence, a week later I was talking to one of our regular homeless patrons when the guy suddenly opened up his pocket and showed me a baby bird he had rescued after it fell out of its nest. The bird was just tucked into his jacket pocket and it seemed to be totally okay with this state of affairs. I don’t know what happened to that bird either. I should keep better track of all the bird-related shenanigans going on since they’re becoming more and more frequent.

I’ve got more stories, but I could go on for quite awhile and I feel like I’ve already taken up enough of everybody’s time. Maybe I’ll write a book about our library someday. Some of my co-workers have suggested it. We’ll see how that whole fiction thing works out for me, and if it doesn’t, I suppose I can always fall back on retelling dumb library stories.

Thanks again, Josh, for interviewing with us and for working on The Undying Voice with us.  We look forward to working with you in the future.

Does anyone have any questions for Josh?  If so (or even if not), you should check out his work at the links above and leave some comments below 😀