In this episode Jeremy Whitley talks about the girl who fights.

Topics include self-rescuing princesses, being okay with being worshipped, well-meaning dragons, pirates, getting kids interested in comics, identifying strongly with the Hulk, questionable paternal motives, and what he’s writing!

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Transcription:

Kara: Welcome back to the show floor at San Diego Comic-Con in the podcast pit, it’s Slim and Kzam.

Matt: It never sounds attractive at all…

Kara: It’s not supposed to.

Matt: …when you say podcast pit.

Kara: It’s like a mountain of cardboard boxes behind you, we’re in a pit. We’re here with Jeremy Whitley, writer of “Princeless,” one of my favorite comics of the last few years, certainly.

Matt: Yeah, thanks for being here.

Jeremy Whitley: It’s my pleasure.

Kara: Jinx. I’ve got to tell you, I fell in love with Princeless just in the first few pages of the first issue, where we meet our heroine, Adrienne. Is it Adrienne or Adrian?

Jeremy: Adrienne. Either’s fine.

Kara: Adrienne.

Matt: Kara always adds that kind of a French accent to names.

Kara: Adrienne. She’s just hearing all of these fairy tale stories that her mom the queen is telling her. She’s like, “But why? Why is the princess waiting to be saved?” Then we get a little further in her life and she’s a teenager and she’s locked up in a tower with a dragon guarding her.

The prince comes along to save her, and he’s like, “I seek the fair Adrienne.” and she’s like, “Are you serious? Do you know what fair means? White. I am not white. You, sir, are incorrect. Get out of here, I don’t have time for this.” She’s just so sassy, and I loved her right away. Where did you get the idea for doing this kind of story?

Jeremy: A lot of it was, I was looking for something I could share with my daughter comics-wise. My wife and I were getting ready to have a daughter, and I wanted to have comics where she could see herself reflected in them. She could see characters who look like her. She could also get that positive female character with agency.

There weren’t a lot of them, and there were fewer that were appropriate to give to kids, especially that had lead characters who were women of color. I couldn’t find anything that was exactly what I wanted, so I started making it and I got hooked up with some great artists.

I wanted to make something that reminded me of the women in my life who are all intelligent, and stubborn, and obstinate, and their own heroes. That’s what I wanted Adrienne to be. If my daughter was going to watch princess stories, which I felt like was inevitable, then I wanted her to have that kind of princess to look up to.

Matt: It does have that kind of…Feels like it’s a movie that should’ve been made already. An amazing animated film, where she’s cooped up in the tower and she’s like, “F this, I’m going to find my way out myself and make my own way.” That feels like something that should be spread around as much as possible, to have a character do that, and go against the grain.

Kara: Not even that, she’s got a lot of sisters and they’re all locked up in different towers too. We need to have a talk with their dad.

They’re all in these different towers, and so Adrienne’s just like, “Well, I saved myself, so I guess I’ll go get them now,” so we’re just following her adventures.

Jeremy: Part of the story is that, not all of the sisters buy into the same ideas that she does. They don’t all want to be rescued by her especially. Some of them do want a prince to come rescue them. Some of them are looking for that.

Some of them, like her sister Angelica, who is in volume two, is perfectly happy where she’s at. She’s the most beautiful girl in the kingdom, and she’s got artists and everybody worshipping her. She has no urge to go anywhere and do other stuff. She’s perfectly happy where she is.

Kara: I love that. She’s just like, “Yes. Yes, they all love me. Why would I leave?” I’m just like, “OK, you do you. That’s fine.”

Matt: I think that’s the title of the next volume. “You Do You: Princeless.”

Kara: I also liked how Adrienne’s got a little posse around her. She’s got her dragon bestie, she’s got Bedelia the smith. Which was a really cool moment also when she’s introduced, because she’s been secretly making the armor that supposedly her dad’s been making.

When she shows Adrienne the girl options for armor, they’re like chain metal bikinis. They’re both like, “Well, I guess that doesn’t really work.” I love those little jabs, or little in-jokes. They’re just so, so cute. Do you have a favorite character in this series?

Jeremy: I kind of in love with all the characters in their own way. I really enjoy writing Adrienne. She’s so headstrong and goes face-first into everything. It reminds me a lot of some of my cousins and my sisters-in-law. I really enjoy writing her.

Sparky the dragon is also a lot of fun to write. She’s kind of terrible at being a dragon. She’s not much good at landing, she’s not very bright, but she’s a well-meaning dragon. I think one of my most favorite to write so far has been the character we introduced volume three, Raven. Who’s a pirate princess, who’s getting her own spin-off series now…

Kara: Issue one now available now on comiXology.

Jeremy: …She’s sort of a rogue type. She’s not above stealing, and mixing it up, and getting into stuff. Adrienne has this really one-sided point of view. She’s grown up in a castle her whole life, so the idea of Raven stealing is just deplorable, but for Raven, it’s normal life.

Matt: It’s life. How old is your daughter now?

Jeremy: My daughter’s four now.

Matt: Has she paged through and at least looked at the books?

Yeah. I tried to get her to read them, when she was a bit younger, with me. Usually, her attention span is a bit short for going through trades and stuff especially. She knows the characters. She calls Adrienne, “The girl who fights,” which I think is an appropriate name.

Her and I read a lot of comics for her bedtime stories. It’s funny, Princeless hasn’t been her thing yet. Hopefully it will be, but she’s got a couple of other comics that get pulled for her, that we read together now.

Kara: What are some of those books? We actually get a lot of questions from parents who are like, “What do we introduce to our kids. How do we get our kids to be into comics?” What do you read with your daughter?

Jeremy: One of her favorites is Lumberjanes, she really enjoys Lumberjanes. She was really excited because we got to meet Noelle [Stevenson] at Free Comic Book Day. I think that’s the first creator that she’s been legitimately excited to meet.

I do a lot of issues of My Little Pony with IDW, and she gets really excited every time we get a new box of My Little Ponys. Her favorite right now is Squirrel Girl. We read the first one of that on a whim, and it’s light and fun and exciting, and has a girl that really kicks butt in it. She’s been eating that one up.

Matt: My son will be five at the end of the year. We almost exclusively read Godzilla comics. He will die if I come back with a new IDW trade from work. We had to read it and sit through it.

It’s funny, because getting him to try digital things is very different than how you would think. Like, “Yeah this will be great, he’ll want to read digital.” He does love doing stuff digitally. He loves to sit and swing that thing around, thank god he doesn’t do it with iPad, and swing that around, and try to get me to read it.

It’s funny trying to get young kids into things that you grew up with, and it’s funny to see the disconnect, or the connection when it happens.

Jeremy: I was just talking with my uncle about this. He has a two-year-old who’s way into the Hulk. It’s like, “Yeah, at two my daughter was really into the Hulk.” I don’t know where she saw Hulk stuff, I guess in the cartoons and in comics and stuff. There’s something about two-year-olds, they’re like, “This guy gets angry and smashes stuff? That’s me! I connect with that.”

Kara: “I identify with that, as a two-year-old-child.”

Matt: That is a pretty good observation, that is their ultimate connection at that age. Destroying everything, angrily.

Jeremy: His little boy was walking around Hulk-smashing things, and then my daughter was doing that at two.

She loved to smash. She’s right now, I think, getting over smash and getting more interested in some of the other characters.

We’ve been playing the Lego Marvel Superheroes, and as soon as we earned Squirrel Girl, she started running around everywhere as Squirrel Girl and attacking people with flying squirrels, stuff like that.

Kara: Bring this back for a minute. One of the things that I also really liked about the story is that, we’re following Adrienne on her adventures, but we also are getting looks at what’s going on with her parents. Those seem like just little side pieces. Then as you get further in the story, you see that their pasts are really defining what’s going on so intensely.

The more you read you’re like, “Dude, what is your deal?” We need to have words with the king. The world-building here is really well done, the way it’s woven together. What made you look at this story about this girl and say, “Let’s really look at her parents too.”

Jeremy: I think part of how we started that is, when we first did the first volume, we then had a break. The artist who had done the first volume with me had gone off to Hong Kong and was teaching comics there.

We had a gap where we had our new artist working on volume two, Emily. We had a break where we needed something to fill it, and I was like, “Well, I have some ideas about who some of these other characters are. I want to do some short stories.”

We’ve done four issues of short stories which sort of plug in a lot of that in between stuff, a lot of that background stuff about some of the main characters. It’s interesting, as a dad, I look at some of these dad characters and I think, “Well they’re their own heroes in this right.

They think they’re doing the right thing.” Being a parent has a lot of crazy and tough decisions that come with it. I wanted to dig more into where her family’s coming from, what it is they do. Where they went that made them get to this point.

I’ve read some stories about her dad, who starts off as sort of a…I was using Henry V as a model. When he’s a kid he’s really out at tournaments, winning tournaments and being a braggart, and not being a responsible prince at all.

When things start to go south for his dad, he actually has to step up. Part of why he’s trying to hard to secure his legacy is that, he feels like he wasn’t ready to become king when he was supposed to. He wants to make sure that the same kind of things that happened to him as a teenager don’t happen after he’s gone.

Matt: Listen, parenting is hard. That’s what it all comes down to.

Kara: I’ll take your word for it.

Matt: It’s very hard. Jeremy, I appreciate you taking the time out. I appreciate you making the book. It’s a huge hit in our office, and we always get excited when other people read it and discover it. Thanks for taking the time out to chat with us.

Jeremy: Thank you, I really appreciate it. I’m glad to hear that it’s getting to people.

People are really starting to get into it, and I’m seeing more and more people that are messaging me when the new issue’s coming out. They’re like, “What’s going to happen next?”

We had to make sure to get the new issue bumped up on comiXology so that it would launch with the paper one this last week. We’ve got brand new stuff out, and we’re going to have two books a month coming out from this point.

Kara: Oh, cool.

Jeremy: It’s going to be great.

Matt: Thanks again and enjoy the rest of the con.

Jeremy: Thank you.

(Source: SoundCloud / comiXology)