First, we asked the artist if she had any life-changing influences that might have helped her with her art and art style in general when it comes to her comics.
"My earliest influence is the daily comic strips in the newspaper when I was a kid. I'd read them all. Garfield, Peanuts, Ziggy, even the serials I didn't understand, like Mary Worth. As I got a little older I started reading the alternative newsweeklies that had great independent comics in the back pages. I was really into the work of Lynda Barry, Tom Tomorrow, and Ruben Bolling, just to name a few. Having my strip, Thingpart, picked up by those weekly papers years later and appear alongside some of those strips, was a huge honor!"
Art, in any kind of form, takes a lot of time not only to practice but also to produce, therefore we asked Joey Alison how long it takes her to fully finish her comics.
"It really varies quite a bit! Sometimes I'll get an idea in a flash in the middle of the night. If I'm lucky enough to remember it when I wake up, sometimes I'll sit down and draw it out then post it online twenty minutes later. More often I'll come up with a germ of an idea, then mull over the script for days. Then I'll sit down and labor over the visuals for hours because something just won't look right. In the end, I'm not sure anyone but me can tell which process led to the final strip, so I should probably just work on having more midnight ideas!"
Being an artist is not easy, one can easily encounter a lack of inspiration, burnout, etc, so we wanted to ask the artist about her ideas for the comics.
"Mostly I just have a brain that's wired to make strange connections between different things, and an almost compulsive need to make jokes. I've always been shy and anxious and my way to wedge myself into conversations and social situations is to try to say something funny. Since I also like to draw, the natural medium was comic strips. I guess if I was more outgoing I would have ended up as a stand-up comic, or if I didn't like making jokes I would have ended up doing fine art. Hmm. Now I'm starting to question my career choices."
As we mentioned before, sometimes creative work can cause quite a burnout, therefore we asked the artist how she dealt with that as well.
"Sometimes I do. I write and draw a biweekly comic for thenib.com and I write the syndicated daily strip Alley Oop (drawn by the amazing Jonathan Lemon) and those two projects take up a lot of my creative energy. Not that I'm complaining! I spent many years with a surplus of creative time and I'd still get burned out from time to time. The trick for me is to just vary the things I do in a day and also to have a magical watch that lets me pause time and get everything done while the rest of the world is frozen like statues."
We also asked the artist about how people reacted to her work.
"I'm lucky that for the most part the reaction spectrum runs from apathy to enjoyment. Some of my comics are really personal, so it's stressful to see how people react, but it's usually pretty positive. Sometimes my more political work gets the attention of mean weirdos who post nasty comments, but I know deep down at the end of the day they have to crawl back into their stinky caves and eat rotten fish, which is the fate of their miserable little lives."
The creative process is not easy, but there are many enjoyable parts to it as shared by the artist.
"I really enjoy the writing part. It feels like magic. Sometimes a whole script will just pop into my head, fully formed. And sometimes it's like sculpting a huge block of marble - I'll know that somewhere inside there's a joke and I just have to chip away at it tiny bit by tiny bit until it comes out. It's fun, even when it makes my brain hurt from bashing it against that block of marble for too long."
Digital art and art, in general, is not easy and requires a lot of patience, time, resources, and in most cases even money, therefore we wanted to know how the talented comic artist started her own career in digital art.
"I started drawing comics long before the internet existed, so I've always enjoyed creating with pencil and paper. I still sketch out my ideas in an analog format first. But I've happily embraced technology as it's come out - it makes the process so much easier.
Back in the day I'd coded my own website with HTML and posted stuff there. I had a LiveJournal for a few years and just keep moving to new platforms as they come out.
I've always been someone who works in lots of media. I paint, I do paper sculpture, and I play music. But my one true love is comics."
Artists tend to get motivated by a lot of things such as curiosity, the search for beauty, or even meaning. Therefore, we asked Sayers about that too.
"It's the search for the perfect joke. It's out there, and I think I've come close a few times. It's like the Grand Unified Theory of physics. Once I crack the code, and solve the equation for the quintessential punchline, we can all retire and live in a humor utopia!"
