An Interview with Gabe Soria, Comic Author and Artist

We're so excited to welcome Gabe Soria to the Trinity City Arts community as a teacher and mentor. He'll work in collaboration with our youth artists and writers to develop Issue #3 of Trinity City Comics.

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Gabe Soria is the author of the all-ages, supernatural adventure comic MegaGhost from Dark Horse Comics and Albatross Funnybooks, the graphic novel Jimmy Olsen’s Supercyclopedia from DC Comics, the Midnight Arcade series from Penguin Workshop, the Bright Family series for Epic Creations, the original Regular Show novel Fakespeare in the Park, and he collaborated with Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys on the music noir graphic novel Murder Ballads. He has also written for several more comic books, including Batman Adventures and Batman ’66. A former music and film journalist, he’s also penned liner notes for multiple records, including Dr. John’s Grammy-winning record Locked Down. He lives in New Orleans, where he’s hard at work writing more Sword & Backpack novels, new graphic novels, screenplays, role-playing games and card games, and more...

Mat Schwarzman (Trinity City Arts Co-Director) sat down with Gabe to learn more about what brought him to this art form, and his experience teaching with TCArts so far.

"I cannot remember a time when I was not interested in comic books," Gabe told us. "I grew up in a golden age of stacks of comics being left around either by my older brother or my uncles. Batman, Star Wars, Spiderman, all that stuff. I also enjoyed Sunday comics, like Peanuts, about people just talking to each other. Human beings have long since loved stories about people with strange powers and abilities beyond those of regular humans, like in superhero comics. And all the strange humor you can convey in one panel– the things Charles Schultz could do with three or four panels in a daily strip were incredible. 

"When you're reading a comic, you’re actively engaged with making the story happen. You're reading, you're viewing, but you're also in control of how fast it's going, and you're always in charge of how you are accepting it. With comics, there’s so much to fill in: hearing characters’ voices, almost seeing them moving because you're filling in spaces within the panels and between panels. They’re also aesthetically very pleasing. The cool vibrancy of comics, especially superhero comics and weird fantasy comics– things just look interesting.

"It’s also an indelible art form that’s easy to revisit. When I was a kid, if you wanted to rewatch a movie, you either had to wait for it to come on TV and hope you caught it, or hope to see it screening again at a movie theater downtown. But with a comic, you have it and can experience it over and over and over again, until the cover comes off, like holy texts. 

"Nowadays, I still love writing superhero and fantastical works, but I equally love comics that are about how we live our daily lives. I like journalism comics, and I love comics that are avant-garde and have no meaning other than being pieces of sequential artwork on paper. I love it all for its infinite variety and infinite possibilities. 

"Teaching at Trinity City Arts so far, I'm learning new things about comics. I'm learning about how to convey my passion for them and my belief in them as an art form to kids who might recognize it or not; kids who might not even realize that that's what they are. They're an art form. I have a syllabus starting to form in the back of my mind about what to show students and how to convey the passion I have for comics. I just want to share how glorious they can be, how strange and unlimited. You can do anything with a comic– anything! 

"Often, working in the comics industry, you’ll hear from people about what a comic is and isn’t, what it should be, how many panels there should be on a page, how much dialogue. There are people who do sparse dialogue and think of it as a primarily visual medium; there are people who, like myself, love putting lots of words on a page and doing strange things with them. 

"Working with Trinity City Arts, I’m starting to develop an understanding of what I know and what I don’t know. I’m trying to figure out how I can convey all of this while being motivating and letting students know: you can do this! All this is possible, with a little bit of work and a little bit of stick-to-it-ness– it’s all possible."