Unraveling Amelia Cole With D.J. Kirkbride

Creator D.J. Kirkbride has been tearing the comics industry in half with amazing work on the Amelia Cohle series from Monkey Brain Comics. The tale is a Harry Potter style adventure with a female heroine in the lead role. It is a dense trilogy of stories, and is now nearing the third chapter with Amelia Cole And The Enemy Unleashed. The creator also has some material on the way from Dark Horse entitled Never Ending. The following is spoiler free, and a good incentive to go pick up the first volume of Amelia Cole entitled Amelia Cole And The Unknown World volume one from Monkey Brain.

CBN: At WonderCon you mentioned that Amelia Cole is the person that you aspire to be, can you elaborate on that at all?

D.J. Kirkbride: Amelia has a can-do attitude. She doesn't wallow or allow herself to get so down as to be counterproductive. When she sees trouble or a problem, she runs toward it to try to help. I am prone to the reverse of all those qualities if I don't check myself. When writing her, I often ask myself what I wish I'd do in a given situation, and that's usually Amelia's course of action. I'm not sure if my champion of a co-writer Adam P. Knave feels this way in terms of his process, but for me, Amelia is a comic book version of my best self in a lot of ways. I even see her impetuousness as a virtue. Better to dive in and sort it out later than cower on the sidelines.

CBN: What has the process been like to adapt a MonkeyBrain comic into a softcover collected release?

D.J. Kirkbride: Since we essentially format the book as a standard-sized comic, the work mostly goes into the trade design, for which we got the great Dylan Todd with AMELIA COLE AND THE HIDDEN WAR. We figure out how many pages we have total, how many of that is story, how many are extras -- and then which extras will we include. It was actually fun to this time around, as Adam, artist Nick Brokenshire, and I were able to include some goodies we wish we had room for in the first volume. The actual wooooooork came in having to resize a bunch of pages to fit the print format. Nothing major that digital readers are likely to notice, but despite using a fairly standard page size, Nick still had to adjust quite a few pages slightly to make sure nothing got cut off or fell into the gutter, and our letterer Rachel Deering had to move and reshape balloons and captions here and there. Our IDW editor, Justin Eisnger, sent us notes and suggestions, but the process, though minor in the grand scheme of things, still seemed pretty endless. For this current arc, which will be collected as AMELIA COLE AND THE ENEMY UNLEASHED in November, we have all the IDW-specific layout and format info so that it should all fit nicely into their size parameters. This time it'll be all about the fun designs and extras.

CBN: What are your inspirations for this series? Would it be safe to assumed you are a Joss Whedon fan?

D.J. Kirkbride: Nick and I are definitely Whedon fans. Adam is, too, but he's gone on record as saying he doesn't love Buffy as much as, frankly, I think he should, doggone it! My quick convention pitch for Amelia is "Buffy meets Harry Potter," which usually gets a great response, because most folks like both, or have at least heard of them. Adam's main beef with both Buffy and Harry is the "chosen one" aspect of the stories, which I get and agree with -- and we've made sure not to include that in Amelia. While it might seem like she's more powerful or special than others, we try to get across that it's just that she TRIES harder. She won't quit, even if it sometimes threatens burn herself out or worse. Amelia's secret power isn't from some random bit of fate; it's from her own determination.

CBN: Are Amelia’s struggles in this book meant to serve as more extended metaphors for trials of life?

D.J. Kirkbride: There aren't many planned or specific stand-in's for real life events (only with magic!), but she definitely goes through some trials and tribulations we all go through at 20 or so -- and she seems to be skipping some due to her focus on protecting and helping, which probably isn't great for her development as a person. She doesn't see that yet, though. The book itself is a coming of age story for Amelia. She's growing with each storyline. She's a very different person at the start of UNKNOWN WORLD than she is when we meet back up with her in HIDDEN WAR.

CBN: Your consistent workflow is very impressive, can you mention how the team has managed to ship the comic so consistently?

D.J. Kirkbride: Our technique is to basically be ridiculous and ignore basic human needs such as sleep and relaxation. Adam and I have the co-writing thing down pat, especially with AMELIA COLE. Our system is faster than solo writing in some ways, and slower in others. There's lots of thought and debate that go into some bits, while others, we either are on the same wavelength right from the start. Everyone knows art is where the major desk time is spent in comics, and Nick is basically a madman when it comes to hard work and productivity. He's drawing Amelia, and now two other projects! It's wacky and amazing! Our color assistant Ruiz Moreno is up until all hours of the night creating the lovely palette, and then Rachel Deering is an amazingly efficient lettering machine, possibly cyborg. Together we get out the issues on a fairly regular basis! Also, to be completely honest, switching from 22 pages at $1.99 to 12 pages at 99 cents helped us not only with the price point, but the schedule, too.

How did the team manage to build such an impressive world for the book?

D.J. Kirkbride: It's the first ongoing series for Adam, Nick, and me, so we approached it as our ULTIMATE COMIC BOOK OF ALL TIME EVER. What if this was our only shot? What did we want to do? World building and big ideas along with fun were all huge parts of that. We didn't want to miss anything just in case. Now we all have gotten or are getting opportunities to do other books, but that ALL IN approach to AMELIA COLE remains. It's the book Adam and I would love to write forever, so we need a thoroughly built world (or worlds) for all these adventures to take place in. Nick's amazingly artistic attention to detail makes it all the better.

CBN: Has fan response been a payoff to creating this title? The industry seems to recognize there is something special in this book.

D.J. Kirkbride: Thanks so much for that. It's been a slow build, but we're noticing that warm and fuzzy feeling, too. That's been the best part of going to conventions, actually. Parents are very excited to have an all ages book to not just give to their kids to read, but to read WITH them -- especially parents of girls. That's been very rewarding. We're all still pretty new to this, but to see a kid's face light up when looking at the book is just an honor and a joy. We've been getting more folks coming up to us and telling us they are already fans, too! I'm used to the hard sell, so that kind of reaction has been wonderful. We hope it continues to grow. It does feel like there is a lot of goodwill directed at the book -- now we just need to get it into the hands of more readers so we can, frankly, afford to continue doing the series.  

CBN: What can readers expect from the rest of Amelia Cole: The Enemy Unleashed. Is there any information available on when the arc concludes?

D.J. Kirkbride: ENEMY UNLEASHED is just a lot of madness as a result of all the build up and shocks that happened in HIDDEN WAR. A lot of what to expect is right there in the titles, too. Whereas all these evil machinations were once behind the scenes and in secret, now word is getting out! By the end of the storyline, almost everything will be different. If ComiXology readers were surprised by the reveal at the end of HIDDEN WAR, they are going to be thrown for several loops with what we're doing for ENEMY UNLEASHED. All of this is planned very extensively up through issue 30, which will be the conclusion of our fifth arc. It's crazy now trying to keep the story straight scripting for the still-secretly-titled volume 4 while doing revisions on volume 3, ENEMY UNLEASHED, because the situations are so different. It's part of the joy of doing our own thing. While it'd be amazing to work on a licensed book of some sort, and we all hope to, there is a joy of doing whatever we want in the playground we've built at Monkeybrain and IDW. It's a blast to just let the story dictate where we go without outside concerns. This current ENEMY UNLEASHED arc will conclude digitally around the beginning of September.

CBN: Can you say a bit about Never Ending coming from Dark Horse?

D.J. Kirkbride: Sure! It was great to write something completely different from AMELIA COLE with Adam and bring artist Robert Love, as well as colorist Heather Breckel, letterer Frank Cvetkovic, and inker Felix Perez, Jr. for issue 3, into the mix. It started as an idea I'd had in various forms in my head for years. A superhero story about the fear of completely outliving your loved ones, with our time-hopping, heavy internally-monologue'd format, even when combined with powerful superhero art was a tough sell, and we're so happy Dark Horse took a chance on us. It was different doing something planned as very finite after the world building of AMELIA COLE, but I think we were able to pull it off. The trade comes out in July. Our editor Philip Simon and designer Adam Grano did an amazing job putting that together, and we're hoping some new readers take a shot on the book now that they can get the whole story in one handy collection.

CBN: Is there any other work coming from you in 2014 that I missed?

D.J. Kirkbride: I have a four-issue mini-series that hasn't been announced yet, so...I shouldn't do that here, I guess. It's exciting and scary and weird and fun to be working on that. IDW's AMELIA COLE AND THE HIDDEN WAR trade is out on May 7th, and I hope folks give it a shot -- and also pick up AMELIA COLE AND THE UNKNOWN WORLD if they haven't. It sold out right before Christmas last year, so hopefully any readers that missed that know it's back in print. Adam and I are also working on other pitches together and separately, so hopefully there will be a lot more comic books soon!