Today’s interview is with a fabulous individual, Sierra Barnes! You might know Sierra from her amazing work across Twitter. Her book Hans Vogel Is Dead comes out in September so you should definitely preorder it here!
AJ: So to start out, can you introduce yourself for our audience?
Sierra Barnes: Yeah, for sure. I'm Sierra Barnes and I'm a comic creator in the D.C. Greater area and a huge history nerd. I love the intersection of history, mythology and memory. That was really hard to say for this morning. For some reason I haven't had caffeine yet. I love history, mythology and memory, and how they all react, relate, affect each other, and my work reflects this. My debut novel, Hans Vogel Is Dead, is coming out through Dark Horse Comics this September. Very excited about that, and I'm excited to be here talking to you.
AJ: I'm so excited for your book! I thought it was so cool! I love your work and I'm so excited to deep dive into it a little bit more. Kind of a first question. What's an essential comics run that you think our audience might not know about?
SB: Okay, so I've been chewing on this question since you sent it to me and I sort of started getting really into comics when I was in high school and indie web comics were taking off. So my essential comic runs are mostly indie, like web comics. Gunnerkrigg Court by Tom Siddell. I think I've mentioned on every podcast, it's been going for like twelve years. No joke. This comic is insane. It goes places. If you're one of the people who liked Harry Potter (RIP) but this is like a better Harry Potter in every potential way. It's got robots with cults, it's got angels, it's got ghosts, it's got everything. Man, I love this comic to death.
It was hugely inspirational for me, also Reimena everything she does, really. But specifically The Carpet Merchant of Constantinople or Konstantiniyya, I can't remember which one is the official title. Huge fan. Art is just insane. The illustration levels are off the charts. It's historical fantasy. It's got vampires, it's got crazy late medieval inspired illustrations. The art is God tier. This is what got me into historical fantasy comics big time.
Well, Gunnerkrigg Court is not finished, Carpet Merchant is finished, and Reimena has a new comic about Alexander the Great. That's also, I think, a must read. But yeah, those are two recs. off the top of my head, I've got a lot more that are unfinished, but those are like must reads in my book.
AJ: I'm kind of new to the web comic scene and am so fascinated by it. How do you feel about when they try to print out a web comic that's meant for scrolling on your computer and then they put it into a book? How do you feel about that? Because sometimes it doesn't always translate well.
SB: Haha. You can say Lore Olympus. It's fine. Yeah. So when I was like a baby cartoonist and doing things exclusively on the web, I really liked the Infinite Scroll format, which is what that's called, because I thought it sort of mimicked animation. Like, a lot of the things that I liked about animation without actually having to animate stuff. There's some cool things that you can do with it. Obviously, it limits your ability to print. So I've since stopped doing that. But I think with the rise of Webtoon and a lot of phone specific comic apps, you're seeing a return to that format. And I think it's fine. I think that adapting it into a regular comic template is hell.
I pour one out for all those poor editors out there who got to reformat it. I took a look at the Lord Olympus print edition because I was curious about that exact thing, how they were going to adapt it, because it really does make a great use of the infinite scroll format. I'm not going to lie, I was shocked at how bad the translation went. I thought it was an interesting decision to make the pages wider, the print pages wider than standard size, because the pages are not standard size. They are wider and shorter, which feels like the opposite of what you would want to do with that.
I'm not a formatter. I don't know what job that is, but yeah, it was a real wild way to adapt that particular comic. I'm sure that there are people who do it well, and there are also people who draw it initially draw their comics initially in the standard comic size and then resize it to the infinite scroll for Webtoons. God bless them. I tried doing that for one page, and I was like, This sucks, actually. I'm not doing that.
You have more patience than I, more power to you. But my pro advice is if you ever are interested in printing, even the slightest, tiny, itsy bitsy bit, just do it on a regular template. Pick an American comic book size template. They're all over the internet. Don't do what I did, which is make a weird random size comic book page and then end up reformatting every page in your book three times for two different publishers. Don't do that.
AJ: Wow. I absolutely know that anything trying to go to print is a horrific experience. It's just always a nightmare. Something always goes wrong.
SB: There's always some issue. I realized as I was formatting it for print, I did a print run of Hans Vogel on my own in 2020 when I finished the first book. And I realized as I was preparing it for print that the first five or six pages were just a different size than the rest of the book, just for no reason, different DPI, different canvas size, the whole nine yards. I was like, Why? There's no reason for this. It doesn't make any sense. But yeah, don't be like me. Use a template.
AJ: Now kind of going in a bit of a different direction. What's an essential music album that you think our audience needs to know about?
SB: Yes. Okay, I was prepping for this. Albums that changed my life, Jack Rabbit by San Fermin. The whole album is absolute bangers. I listen to it all the time still. I listened to it when it came out, maybe in 2015, 2016 ish. From the first moment, the first song, if you're like “Wow, I don't know if a baritone saxophone can do the work in alt prog rock band.” You're wrong. And this album will teach you that because it absolutely slap my whole body repeatedly. The lyrics are like, They'll hit you like a steam train. They do me every time. I still think about it. Just a very cool concept, very cool sound.
I saw them live. I grew up in Napa and they came to Bottle Rock one year, which is the big music festival there. Bottle Rock is a plague on society, but we'll talk about that later. But they were playing there, but they were playing solo at a local cafe after hours. And I was like, Oh, I'm not going to go to Bottle Rock, but I'm absolutely going to go see them. I saw them. It was like maybe 20 people and it ruled.
It was me and my best friend, 20 randos and the band, and we were standing right in front of them. I got to talk to them. It was great. I bought the album on vinyl because I was like, This is it, baby. I haven't unwrapped it because I want to frame it, except I want to play it. I love this album. Yeah, San Fermin, Jack Rabbit. All of San Fermin stuff is good, but Jack Rabbit was my Earth shattering album. A big fan of Jethro Tull. I know it's a bit of a throwback, but again, if you like weird... Jethro Tull, very influential in the progressive rock scene, very wild concept albums, big on weird instrumentation, rock flute.
AJ: That’s amazing.
SB: Yeah. Ian Anderson is the lead and the lead flutist and singer, and he's still playing. I'm going to go see him in August. I'm super stoked about it. He's a lot of fun to see in concert. Band is great. I would recommend Aqualung is a classic. Probably a good starting place before you get into their weird folk albums, which I also very much enjoy. Yeah, thats my two picks. Should probably keep it to a rational number.
AJ: No worries. I'm adding on every person that gives me music recommendations. I'm making a huge playlist that's going to go on the newsletter and we're going to see the whole bizarre taste of the whole comic industry by the end of this.
SB: Oh I love that!
AJ: It's just fun getting weird random music recommendations and just seeing how similar everyone is with comics, but then seeing how diverse everyone is with music is fascinating.
SB: That's really cool. I love setting up playlists for different projects. I have a Hans Vogel playlist. I have a playlist for all my different projects that are vibes, but they're all individual songs that I'm like, Oh, man, this has given me Hans Vogel vibes. And there's nothing tying them together. I'm pretty sure on the Hans Vogel playlist, there's a song from there's Hozier there's The Who, there's Sabaton, there's an instrumental piece from Vivaldi. It's all over the place.
AJ: That's amazing. Actually bouncing off of that for Hans Vogel, you've expressed interest in mythology and historical fiction. What made you want to go down that route with your book?
SB: I think I started on that route, honestly. The original idea for Hans Vogel, I had in high school. So this has been kicking around for a while. I drew a lot of pages. I still have some of my old pages from 2010, which, yeah, they're cute to look. It's cute to look back on your old book. Love your past self. But yeah, I always had this idea of playing with World War II is a big moment, if I can say that, in everyone's collective memory and mythology. And as that living generation, the generation who lived through it dies off, we're in this weird position where it's leaving memory and entering mythology. And I think that it's always been a very heavily mythologized war. I mean, from the moment that it was when it was happening, Hollywood was making a bunch of movies about it. We were very interested in controlling the narrative from the start.
This is the point where Sierra’s rabbit started causing trouble and we had to take a break. Highlight of the interview
SB: Back to WWII stuff! I grew up with Indiana Jones and punching Nazis and stuff. And then as I grew up I researched and studied German. I majored in German Studies and History in undergrad at the University of William and Mary. A lot of that was focused on World War I, the interwar period, and WWII in Central Eastern Europe. And a lot of that was unpacking what does this mean? What did these wars mean to individuals looking at art from the period and art from after the war? I got really into German postwar surrealists, which I know sounds insufferably academic, but a lot of artists went through the war and went “That was weird.” Then they made a lot of weird art about it. And I was into that because my family was very involved in the military as well. So there's a lot of family history and mythology and memory in that my grandfather fought for the Americans in World War II. There's a lot of family stories about that. So I grew up with that as the background noise of my life.
So looking at how these wars are portrayed, looking at how people remember these wars, and then looking at what actually happened in those wars, it's such an interesting contrast that I was percolating. And then on top of all of that, I went to live in Austria for a year after I graduated on Fulbright scholarship. And I basically just asked everyone, well, it was the 100 year centennial of World War I, 2014. So I was asking everyone, "what do you guys think about the war?” And in Austria, for a lot of people, the war is World War I, which is like the forgotten war in America. So it's interesting to see World War I as the important war, which I have very spicy takes about World War I and World War II. The spices, which being it's the same war. It's all one war. But that's another issue. But yeah, it was just a different way of looking at it, talking to these people who are grappling with this very horrible legacy in a very public way. What do you do if everyone's pop culture in America is based on punching Nazis? What do you do if that was Grandpa?
How do you handle that? And that was something that was really interesting to me. So all of these things percolated into Hans Fogel, and the political situation was wild in 2014 in Austria. They were just straight up electing Nazis. There were a lot of demonstrations. I mean, the political situation was wild in the States, still is. And I was like, it came back from Austria in 2015 and went, yeah, let's make this comic. So it's an anti fascist fairy tale. It's two of my favorite things.
AJ: That's the best combination, I think. But before we wrap up where can people find you and do you have anything else you want to promote?
SB: Yeah, you can find me on the Twitter.com as long as it's still functional @SierraBravoArt. Just one word. I'm on Instagram @ SierraBravoArt, and my website is Sierrabravoart.com i got a lot of other projects wiggling around in various stages of being pitched and being formulated, and I'm always working on zines and mini comics. I feel like weird history and weird nerd stuff, follow me.
Thanks for another great newsletter and a wonderful interview! I first discovered Hans Vogel Is Dead on Webtoon, I can’t wait to pick it up from Dark Horse.