In this episode Thomas Mumme and Tim Yates are innovators.

Topics include awful elves, enchanted ships, magical merfolk, damsels in not-distress, character development, gilled ribs, Slim and Kzam’s good looking cameo, all ages comics, sitting in a dark basement drawing but it’s cool cons make it okay, and what they’re reading!

Links:

Transcript:

Kara: Welcome back to comiXology Conversations, our interview podcast feed. Hey, Matt.

Matt: Hello.

Kara: I’m Kara and I’m here with Matt and we are talking with Thomas Mumme and Tim Yates of Anne Bonnie fame. Hello guys.

Tim Yates: Howdy, hey, this is Tim Yates.

Tom Mumme: Hello, hello, this is Tom Mumme.

Kara: Anne Bonnie is one of my favorite comics right now.

Tom/Tim: Aww.

Kara: It’s a girl who dreams of being a pirate because she’s inspired by the lady pirates in the world that she inhabits, and so one day she just takes a magical pirate ship and adventure ensues.

Tom: As we do, as we all do.

Kara: As we all wish to do in our lives. Where did the idea for this story come from?

Tom: This man’s brain, right here.

Tim: Yeah, it was a crazy night. Yeah. I wanted to do a story about pirates because I love Pirates of the Caribbean. I mean, who doesn’t? I wanted to have a female protagonist. I started researching real life pirates to try and see if I could pull a character from history. Just learning about pirates so I could have little bit of knowledge before I went into the project. I learned about Anne Bonnie and she’s awesome. She’s redheaded which makes a great lead character. I started doing some research on Anne Bonnie and there’s not a lot written. I put a fantasy spin on what’s known about her, took the characters from her story and just told it from some of the ideas that I had.

Matt: I think that’s what’s different, that sets this book apart is maybe just from the surface you think it’s a pirate story, but there’s a ton more layers to the book-

Tim: Yes.

Matt: That most people would not expect at all. Obviously, the ship, which is held together by these chains, these mystic chains. You need a secret key to unlock it. It’s got a mind of its own. There’s a lot more sci-fi, so to speak, in this book than one would expect.

Tim: Right, yeah. I just kind of combined all of my favorite things, you know? It would be cool if we had pirates, but I also want wizards and mermaids and elves and just mashed together all my favorite things into one. Oh, and elves are d*cks.

Matt: I don’t think there’s any other pirate themed book that also has all those elements in it.

Tim: Yeah.

Matt: It might be the first of its kind, I think.

Tim: Yeah, I hope so. I hope I’m an innovator. I mean, it’s not like-

Matt: He just called himself an innovator, and so now you have to keep it up.

Kara: Own it.

Tim: I’m taking all my favorite things from other things and putting them into my thing. Yeah, no. There was actual pirates in my book too. Issue one, two and three, no pirates at all. Not a single one.

Kara: Magical merfolk, yes. Pirates, ehhhhh.

Matt: The book is, it has the name Anne Bonnie and you think you’re going to read a book about Anne Bonnie but it’s really about this young girl who wants more out of life. She eventually decides, screw this, I’m going out on my own. The book starts out with a little bit of Indiana Jones kind of vibe with her. She gives herself these names. She’s this adventurer, this treasure hunter. She does it like ten times. She then finds the ship and she’s out on her own which starts off a whole other series of events.

Tim: She’s a force of nature. She decides what she wants to do and goes for it, torpedoes be damned. The veteran characters, I guess, in the world she interacts with try and hold her back and say, “You can’t do this, you’re going to die.” She just doesn’t listen to them and goes to do her own thing. A lot of the series is her getting rescued from the awful situations she gets put into by her magical ship and her mentor, Shen Kenoshi. Some of the crew she brings onto the ship. A lot of it is her just defying the powers of the world. Doing what she wants, saving the day.

Tom: When we first talked about the character, not only was the Indiana Jones inspiration there but also we were thinking Jack Burton from Big Trouble in Little China.

Tim: Yeah.

Tom: Jack Burton is the main protagonist, but really he does nothing right the entire movie. It’s always the sidekicks that are helping him out, it’s always the other people who help him out. We felt that way about Ariana, how she just basically gets everyone into these situations and then everyone else has to save her. Not damsel in distress-

Tim: Right, she’s definitely not a damsel in distress. She has a super power, which is her far sight. Which lets her see pretty much anything and gives her super accuracy with her pistols. Technically she’s the most dangerous woman on the water because she can shoot people from super far away. She’s not even all about just killing people. If it turned into that kind of book, which it won’t, because it’s an all ages series. It adds an interesting layer to it, because you know the latent potential behind Ariana as a character and just how she reacts to situations and deals with it. It has been interesting to write.

Kara: One of my favorite scenes in the story so far is when she rolls into port with this giant sack of gold and just starts spending it. Everyone is like, “What are you doing? Why would you do that?” She’s young and excited. “I’ve got money and I’m going to spend it”, but she’s not thinking of some of the consequences that the older people are.

Tom: I think by the end of the first arc she does realize that she was a little willy-nilly with that and got the town in trouble basically. The town was burnt down later because she just started throwing gold around. I think she does realize, and that’s part of the character development of her, is that she does realize that maybe she shouldn’t just rush into everything without thinking about it first.

Tim: Yeah, her actions cause unfortunate series of events for people around her. Then she starts to realize some of the things I do might have consequence for other people, you know? She’s headstrong about herself, but when she starts realizing the impact she has on the town she meets, because pirates love gold, so what’s going to happen when she’s throwing gold around? It’s been a lot of fun to write.

Kara: Tell us about the merfolk in your story and how they differ from what one normally thinks of when one thinks of merfolk.

Tim: The merfolk? The merfolk in my story are a little more fishy. They still have arms but they’ve got fins on their face and hair instead of beards and hair. I put their gills on their ribs. I don’t know if anybody’s done that before but I thought it was cool. That’s where lungs are, so they could actually breathe on land and underwater, because the water goes out the gills slits. I don’t know, it probably wouldn’t even work-

Matt: That’s the scientific explanation.

Kara: It’s a magical world, things happen.

Tim: Yeah, but they’re fishy. They don’t have noses, like Voldemort I guess. There’s a very visual description of the merfolk in my story. The merfolk are very territorial, so when the characters come across them, they have a relationship with the character, with her mentor character Shen Kenoshi. Something about what Ariana does and what she brings on the ship makes them angry because they’re on their territory, breaking their rules. They have a face off with the merfolk. You know you have to read it to see what happens.

Matt: You do, you do have to read it.

Tim: There’s an interesting twist with the merfolk relating to some of the crew that I think is pretty fun for the readers.

Tom: I do like in the first arc how she basically creates enemies in her wake, so we’re just setting up a bunch of enemies that will then be future characters down the line.

Matt: Yeah.

Kara: Issue six was just available on comiXology very recently, wrapping up that first arc, and some familiar faces were in that book.

Matt: Yeah, some great looking people I think, in my opinion.

Tom: It’s very easy to draw good looking people.

Tim: Yeah, they weren’t the nicest people in the book either. They said some pretty bad things.

Matt: They were.

Kara: I enjoyed the flagon of ale that I was wielding.

Matt: How important to you as a creator is an all ages book? Was that something that was in the forefront of your mind or was it just, you wanted to write something and it turned out to be an all ages book?

Tom: I have to dial him back from killing people sometimes.

Tim: I’ve tried to do things that Tom has said, no, not really. Guns and pirates, this person should die, that person should die, but the all ages just made sense because my drawing style is so cartoony. I never wanted to write a dark book. If you’re not going to go super gritty and dark with pirates, you might as well dial it all the way back and have it all ages. It’s been such a treat for me seeing kids enjoying my book. It 100% solidifies my decision to make it an all ages. Just seeing kids enjoying my book and getting into comics because of it is-

Tom: Especially young girls. Young girls absolutely love the character, which is great. It’s an empowering character over all.

Kara: What’s the kind of response that you’ve been getting at cons in general when you get to meet people who read your book?

Tim: The response has been great. I have a lot of parents coming up and asking for the book for their kids. People coming back with the book telling me what they thought about it. As a creator, the cons are what keep me going. It’s what sustains me. A lot of making comics is sitting in a dark basement drawing. Just spiders and dust around me. When you come out to the cons, it reminds you the reason you do it. The people that actually read your book are basically the reason I keep going. I love making stories and having people enjoy my stories is basically a dream come true.

Matt: What about the creative process? I noticed that you co-write and then you did finishes on the issue. What is that? I don’t think I’ve ever seen that combo before in a book. What is that process like?

Tim: Basically for the first few issues, I was figuring out my process of making a book. I was conceptualizing the story with a friend of mine, a good friend Lelan Estes. He’s a great writer. I was just brainstorming the story with him. We came up with the first issue. He scripted the first five or six pages that we were going to make as a pitch. We were just collaborating. Through working with him, we realized it was actually harder to collaborate on a writing project than it was to have just one person write. You have to constantly be in touch and constantly put your ideas together to make sure they match up. We found ourselves wandering off in different directions. It made more sense to have one person doing the writing. He’s definitely my brain storm buddy, but he was crucial to setting the tone in the first book. I think the first page has a great kind of intro type poem type thing. That was all him. I have a lot to thank him for.

The layout artist, Tony Vassallo. I was having some trouble laying out my pages and Tony was the guy I always went to for help with my art. Because, as you know, I broke into the industry as colorist. I guess drawing comics…it’s a steep learning curve.

Matt: Yeah.

Tim: It was a lot of trial by fire. I had webcomic was doing, but full comic pages, you know, it’s a whole thing to lay them out. He’s kind of a genius at it, I feel like. I would always pick his brain and ask him for advice. He helped me so much. I couldn’t do him anything but give him credit for it.

Matt: What do you guys read in your free time? What do you recommend outside of obviously Anne Bonnie, which would be number one?

Tom: Free time?

Kara: What’s that?

Matt: Do you have anything that you guys seek out or you hold up to a higher standard?

Tom: I think we’re both big Saga fans.

Tim: Saga is amazing.

Tom: I think everyone is a big Saga fan.

Matt: Saga is amazing. What else?

Tim: I just recently read Gotham Academy. The art style was amazing, the story is cool.

Matt: Yeah.

Tom: East of West.

Tim: Yeah. Rocket Girl.

Matt: We just chatted with-

Kara: Reeder/Montclare.

Matt: Yeah, they do Rocket Girl. We just chatted with the creators of Rocket Girl, because they’re doing Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur for Marvel next.

Tim: Nice.

Matt: That was cool to talk about another potentially-

Kara: All ages.

Matt: -All ages book that might reach people that never read comic books.

Tim: Nice. I’m a big manga fan. If you don’t like anime, give manga a try if you’re a comic fan. I love Naruto and Dragon Ball Z. I have all the graphic novels sitting on my shelf at home.

Matt: We were inches away from the creator of Naruto. We were doing live interviews at the twitch stage, so we were in the green room and it was a posse there. I was like, what’s going on here? I looked at the scheduled list and saw-

Kara: -And they were like, “Masashi Kishimoto”-

Matt: -Oh, I guess who that is.

Tim: By relation, I’m inches away from him by being inches away from you?

Matt: Three degrees-

Tom: Three degrees of inches away.

Tim: Your chakra was just flowing with this weird energy.

Matt: You’re exactly right.

Kara: Thanks guys so much for taking the time to talk to us.

Tim: Thanks for talking to us.

Kara: Absolutely. Great to get to dig a little deeper into the world of Anne Bonnie and we can’t wait to see what happens next.

Matt: Thanks guys.

Tom: Thank you, thanks guys.

Tim: Yeah. Have a good one.  

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