![]() Were these things you thought of initially when formulating the characters, or just natural extensions of the kinds of stories you wanted to tell? Your work has had lots of multimedia crossover…with SuperF*ckers you had the animated series (which you did a voice on too), and with Glorkian Warrior you’ve got the video game. I don’t need permission to do books with other publishers, but I always talk it over with Chris Staros before I do. I asked Top Shelf’s advice before bringing it to another publisher, and they were all for it. I thought the book would fit in well with their line, and I wanted to see what a new publisher could do for me. What made you go with First Second as a publisher for the Glorkian Warrior series? He’s elastic and springy, and he does silly things. What makes me a living being is the same thing that imbues Glorkian Warrior with life. The spark of life that Glorkian Warrior has is my spark of life. And then when I quit American Elf, and my elf-avator stand-in was gone, I suddenly started to think of Glork as my stand-in. ![]() Now, with Glorkian Warrior… I was working on this at the same time I was working on my autobiographic comic, the American Elf diary strip. Basically that’s how I create my characters, I just doodle until one of the doodles has an undeniable spark of life. As soon as I did the first little doodle of the guy, he just felt so real to me, so alive. What is it that keeps bringing you back to Glork? ![]() The Glorkian Warrior has been a resilient idea, starting with a short comic for Pop Gun, going into a Kickstarter-funded video game with Pixeljam ( Glorkian Warrior: The Trials of Glork ), before your current three-book deal. I drew my first graphic novel when I was a kid in the 1970’s… which probably marks it as one of the first graphic novels ever drawn, although noone has seen it beyond one of my childhood friends. Long before I knew that mini comics were a “thing” I was making them and selling them to my friends at school. There was only a very brief period of not drawing comics… the first couple years of college I didn’t draw any comics, but the rest of my life I was always working on something. I have over 2000 pages of comics saved that I drew when I was a kid. I read them constantly as a kid, and drew them constantly too. It all happened within a period of about two years or so… from discovering Eightball to becoming a professional cartoonist and quitting my job as a waiter at a Chinese restaurant.ĭid you read a lot of comics as a kid, or was it something you got into later as an artist? Excerpt from The Blue Drip (1976) Before very long I trading my own mini comics with other cartoonists through the mail, and soon after that I was a full time professional cartoonist. In The Comics Journal I think I saw something about some mini comic, and decided to order it through the mail. I had never encountered that magazine before. Then, a couple months later I saw there was an interview with him in The Comics Journal, so I bought that. Professionally? Well, that road began when I bought an early issue of Eightball by Dan Clowes. We got a chance to chat with Kochalka regarding his career as well as his lovably bumbling hero, the Glorkian Warrior. His newest work, the Glorkian Warrior series, sees the release of both a video game based on its characters and the second book in the series, The Glorkian Warrior Eats Adventure Pie. His long running online comic strip American Elf continues to have a strong fan base, and his SuperF*ckers comic book has become a popular animated series on YouTube’s Cartoon Hangover channel. James Kochalka, the first Cartoonist Laureate of Vermont and an Ignatz and Harvey award winner, has had quite a varied career, ranging from fronting his own band (James Kochalka Rockstar), to creating comics, to collaborating on video games.
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