Very rarely do I get jealous, especially when it comes to writing, only 3 times have I've got jealous of something someone else has written ("Chronicle" being one from recent memory) well now you can add another name to that list. While "Tower Of God" is getting quite a bit of shine these days (and it should)for putting Webtoons on the map, Webtoons is full of other gems, none more impressive than a little (currently ongoing series) called "Stagtown" drawn and written by Miss Marty LeGrow a.k.a FunwithPunko (as she's known). "Stagtown" is a currently ongoing horror series that is well-paced, well-written, and did I mention ongoing? I was lucky enough to get ahold of the author herself to ask her some pressing questions about the series, her plans for the future and whether or not she actually wears Spongebob underwear...and yes, that's important! Let's get to it!
1) Clearly, Junji Ito is an influence but who else has influenced your storytelling and artwork?
Definitely, Kazuo Umezu, who was himself a big inspiration for Junji Ito, and Kenji Tsuruta, who did the Spirit of Wonder series. I'm also a huge fan of Brian Froud and his collaborations with Jim Henson to do things like The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, etc. And I love Aubrey Beardsley's traditional techniques with pen and ink, as well as etched plate illustrations from the likes of John Tenniel, Gustave Dore, and so on.
2) The most jarring thing about you is that you're not what people would think of when they think of a horror writer, you're like this girl next door. Have you always been a horror fan? If so, what medium of horror do you enjoy?
I don't want to know what neighborhood you live in where I'M considered the girl next door. :D I have a life-size horse skeleton in what would be my dining room, if I could fit a dining table in there alongside the horse skeleton. I own more mannequins than I do kitchen knives (four mannequins, named Jim, Sawyer, Molly and Coco. Also a taxidermy deer head named Felix.)
Anyway, I've always liked horror, and I lean towards supernatural/psychological horror, though I prefer stories and games over movies. I think I like equal parts of horror and cute things :) My first series, "Bizenghast," had horror elements in it, but was more gothic and with more humor. This time around, I really wanted to go hard with the horror aspect, not so much the funny stuff.
3) Let's jump right into "Stagtown", what was the inspiration behind it?
I had a few ideas in mind for a while that all sort of coalesced into Stagtown. Originally I was going to publish it as a monthly issue comic, but thought it would be better suited as an online comic. When the first Webtoon contest came out, I only just heard of it and realized I had ten days to draw and post 5 episodes, at 30 panels each, before the deadline. So I basically didn't sleep for ten days :) I resurrected the concept of Stagtown from my pile of future projects because I thought it would be ideal and it was the most fully developed story I had at the time. I ended up getting an honorable mention for it!
Come to think of it, that's also how I got hired to Tokyopop back in 2005...I found out two weeks before the deadline that they were running a contest, pulled out the most recent story I had available and drew like the wind before throwing it into the mail, and got an honorable mention for it. I'm starting to think this is the only way I get jobs.
4) What I love about "Stagtown" is the 1st chapter, "Surveillance", I really like the idea of taking something as mundane as cameras and turning them into something sinister. A lot of horror writers do the obvious with cameras, the obvious being having someone creepy on the other end. But you flipped that in such a genius way. What was the inspiration behind that?
I'm a firm believer in the scariest things being that which we cannot name. The moment you can put a face and name to something, it becomes graspable...horror franchises always jump the shark when they take their faceless, nameless killer or monster and start doing prequels, giving backstory, history and motivations for murderous sprees. The more information you have about the thing you're afraid of, the more you start thinking of ways you might defeat or escape it. And once you've defeated it in your mind, you're no longer afraid of it.
5) Without getting into spoilers, do you have an ending for "Stagtown" or are you making it up as you go? I ask because there seems to be a solid form of continuity between stories.
I have a very solid ending in mind, but like all the stories I write, I like to keep the middle loose so I can adjust it as I go. I don't like to be trapped into a set number of rigid scripts all the way to the end, because you never know when you'll come up with a better idea right in the middle.
6) The thing I love the most about "Stagtown" is that it doesn't give up the goods too early. "Marble House" was such a strange yet sinister story that I never questioned why the old lady had marbles in her head or what she was in the first place I was more concerned about what would happen if she got ahold of Frankie. Tension like that is very hard to do and the climaxes to your episodes are very short but definitive is that something you plan for? Building tension by not revealing or explaining anything?
Yeah, definitely something I aim for. I remember once I was listening to the director's commentary of a Red Vs. Blue DVD and Burnie (one of the creators of the show) said something very important, which was that when you set up a cliffhanger or mystery in your serialized online story, animated or otherwise, your audience has a week to sit around and figure out plot secrets and they will eventually figure it out before the next episode, which was why he always tried to aim for dropping hints in the same episode that eventually had the big reveal. When I string along a series of clues, I either bury them so deeply that it's very difficult to see where the story is eventually going to end up, or I do the big reveal all at once because otherwise your big reveal will just be dissected, guessed at and eventually figured out by a hundred people before the next episode even airs.
This doesn't apply to the codes and ciphers I put in my different series...those are things intended to be unraveled by readers so they can follow along with a parallel story as the series progresses. I think you'll find that the mystery of Stagtown is eventually going to bleed off of Webtoon and into other sites and media, almost into a sort of ARG experience.
7) I think the best horror is unexplained/unexplainable. While "Uzumaki" offered kind of an explanation of why Kurouzu-cho was cursed (the ancient spiral city beneath the city) but that didn't quite tell the full story. "Stagtown's" "curse" if it is a curse seems to be different do you have an explanation (known only to you) or will Frankie start connecting some dots?
I do have an explanation, but I think even when we do arrive at it, there will still be a lot of unexplained things, for which readers will have to try and fill in the gaps. I think the most interesting thing about Ito's works is that he doesn't explain a lot. There's no definitive reason why Hellstar Remina headed to Earth, or why the holes in the cliffs were made in Amigara Fault, or who Tomie really was and where she came from. I think a lot of western horror stories are lessened by overexplaining, by a human need to provide completion. It's when we don't have all the answers that our minds keep returning to it, trying again and again to solve things. However, I think it's just as bad to simply say "it happened just because" at the end of a very long serial...that's not a mystery ending, that's no ending at all! So I think it's a tough balancing act and one I'll have to perform carefully to make sure readers get a great ending for Stagtown.
8) You can write some incredible horror but have you or will you dabble in other genres?
I've done a lot of other things...I did a short series of comics about happy talking puppies for a toy line once :) I actually do a lot of stuff for kids. My most recent job was as a concept artist for a toy company. My other current comic series with Action Lab Entertainment, Toyetica, is a purely fun and kid-friendly adventure series, and one we're looking forward to porting to Webtoon very soon. I like to do funny comics and I hope to get the chance to work on more of that in the future. My desire to do silly things and horrifying things are evenly matched.
9) Who was the inspiration behind Frankie? I'd say it was you because you're both women with traditionally masculine names and once again very girl next door-ish but is she a character you've always envision taking on "Stagtown"?
I'd say Frankie is the total opposite of me. She's very practical, very logical and has a severe lack of imagination, as well as not much of a sense of humor. She's very uncreative and in her off hours, she just watches TV or reads the news on her phone. She gets up at the same time every day and goes to sleep at night, she's very routine. I'm very unpredictable and never awake the same hours each day. Some days I don't sleep at all, or forget to eat, because I'm too preoccupied with work or some weird new thing I'm currently obsessing over. I don't watch or own a TV, Netflix, etc. but I love to watch hours of Let's Plays on Youtube. I spend most of my time on various art projects, inventions, or riding my bike around town in the middle of the night to get ideas. One of the biggest differences is that I have an overactive imagination and find it hard to concentrate or sleep sometimes because of that, while Frankie has barely any imagination, which I think makes her less likely to be scared of some of the weird things in Stagtown. She's not imaginative enough for her mind to invent monsters in the shadows or lurking in the basement. She pretty much takes life at face value.
One important thing I wanted to do with Frankie was make a character who never makes a choice most people wouldn't make. In lots of horror movies, the characters act like idiots, exploring the clearly cursed house because "Come on guys, what're you, scaaaaared?" You, as the viewer, are not as afraid of the threats in those kinds of movies, because you're too busy yelling, "Oh come ON, any idiot would have left by now!" at the screen. You feel safe from the danger because you wouldn't make the choices these morons are making. It's when the main character makes all the same choices you would make and still gets killed, that's when the threat feels inevitable, like it could happen to you and you wouldn't be able to stop it with better decisions. So when I write Frankie, I keep in mind my rule that Frankie will never make a choice that the average person wouldn't also make. If she lives in a creepy town, she's saving up her money to move out of there as soon as she can. If creepy kids know where she lives, she's blowing her meager savings to move as far across town as she can get and she's trading in her car for a new one. If she hears mysterious scratching in a dark room, she's leaving right now. If she loses a pocket knife in the scary room with the mysterious scratching, she's leaving it and buying a new knife.
But I will say Frankie and I share the same hobby of lockpicking.
10) Ito was more body horror, if we're being honest about his work (Hellstar Remina and Gyo, for obvious citations) your horror seems to be far more psychological. Once again that idea of taking something mundane or borderline silly and making it terrifying. Like oh yeah, there's a camera over there, whatever...And there are 7 more over here...and over there...or okay a little girl spit out a marble, kids eat dumb things all the time....oh she's still spitting out marbles....ummm...Are these things you personally find scary?
I don't find cameras or marbles or other things in Stagtown scary, but I've gotten messages from people complaining that I've ruined marbles for them :) And I'm like, "bro how into marbles were you before this, really?" I like to make mundane things scary because that sticks with people. A monster you see once in a movie is not going to pop up in your day-to-day thoughts again, until maybe when you try to fall asleep. But a normal thing that you see all the time takes on a whole new light when presented as an object of horror. You don't think of how often you see it in life until you read the story and suddenly realize it's around you all the time. And seeing it again will remind you of the story.
I try to imagine what other people's most common fears are and work backwards from there. My only fears are live theater and discarded hair. I'm working on the first one though...I saw Spongebob the Musical live! It was a lovely show.
11) Let's talk about "Red Dart" what came first the minis or the story?
Do you mean, what came first, the paper models or the story? The story came first. I make the paper models early on in scripting, in order to help with drawing reference.
12) What was the inspiration behind "Red Dart"?
I had been working on another idea for the Webtoon contest and was quite a ways into it when I decided to take a nighttime bike ride to work some stuff out in my head for the plot. So I rode around a bit and randomly thought of a video game I saw recently that had an old, beat up vending machine in it, and I was idly thinking of how much I like old vintage vending machine aesthetic, and I thought, "Hey, what if there was a machine that would vend anything you wan-"
And I didn't even finish the thought before I started kicking myself and sped back on my bike towards home to scrap my story and work on a new one, which became Red Dart.
13) The thing I love about "Red Dart" is how the vending machine is amoral. Horror is so much better when the entity or whatever is amoral. Was that a choice or was that something that came about organically?
The machine was always going to be amoral, because it's merely a reflection of what humans themselves do. The prices it gives for objects, drugs, organs, humans, are all prices we ourselves have set. And just like in real life, buying something safe and legal has very little risk of backfiring, while buying something very illegal, or without thought to if you can even pay for it, carries greater risk. I think when we do stories about some magical object granting wishes, we always mentally find a way to absolve ourselves (and thus escape the fear/guilt that we might have also become a victim) by saying that the person whose wish goes bad was wishing for something bad and got punished, or didn't follow the rules, or trusted a device that was obviously too good to be true and thus were greedy or naive. We assign blame to the victim for being foolish, selfish or immoral, or we assign blame to the magical device itself, for being evil or cursed. We like to think that we would never make that mistake and that karma and justice still exist as a constant in the universe. We want to believe that life is fair, if only for a moment , and that if we make the right choices in life, nothing bad will ever happen to us.
14) I loved the drug dealer angle to "Red Dart" how did that come about?
Just logic...if a machine can sell you anything you want, someone's gonna use it to buy drugs. They invented the internet and people immediately used it to buy drugs. They invented Craigslist and people immediately used it to buy drugs. If you invent a way to buy or sell something anonymously, someone's gonna buy drugs with it.
Originally there were five episodes, with the missing episode titled "Money," wherein the machine would act as a sort of pawn broker and pay out money for items that were offered to it, but I scrapped that episode. Maybe someday I'll draw it and add it back in.
15) Have you always been an artist/storyteller?
Always always! Ever since I was a little kid. I started to write a book when I was ten, and finally wrote a novel at 16. Sent it in the mail via 37 manila envelopes to 37 publishers, received 37 rejections. I do not blame them. It was terrible.
16) How did you learn to draw?
Years and years of practice, art classes in high school, went to Savannah College of Art and Design and graduated with a BFA in Sequential Art, picked up drawing books from the discount bins at local bookstores on different topics, watched tutorials online, you name it. :)
17) What equipment do you use?
Up until recently, all my comics were done by hand on 11X17 comic boards, but now I use an iPad and Procreate.
18) What do you recommend reading or watching? Doesn't have to be horror.
Gravity Falls, forever and ever and ever. Just put it on a loop on a tv in your room and let it play until the eventual heat death of the universe.
19) What gets you in the "Stagtown" headspace?
I usually ride my longboard or bike on the back roads near me at 1 am or so because it's how I mentally work out my plot. If I'm stuck for an idea, I'll go for a ride up and down the empty street at night and detour through all the side apartment complexes. It's very peaceful and there are few distractions. Maybe not the best idea, as riding in the pitch dark on your bike at night is dangerous, but that's my process! And I know the location of every pothole, so that's something at least. Please wear your helmet and ride only during the day. I don't make good life choices.
20) When "Stagtown" is done what can we expect next? And will it be on Webtoons or will you be seeking your own website someday?
I think Webtoons has an incredible format and I'd like to stick with it! I'll most likely be continuing Toyetica, and since that will be coming to Webtoons sooner rather than later, I have a feeling it will still be running on there when Stagtown ends.
21) You're on Twitch. Twitch is something I haven't jumped into. Do you game? Do art tutorials? What do you do on Twitch? If you're a gamer, what do you play?
I play games, do art tutorials and do chat comics, wherein the chat comes up with plotlines at random and I draw a short comic about it, which usually turns out pretty funny. I also do cosplay work, make some of my paper models, we watch really old tv shows together, and one time I translated all of Dante's Inferno from Italian to traditional translation to plain speak, while working on some cosplay stuff. :) We had a lot of fun with that because not a lot of people realize that Dante's Inferno is the world's worst self-insert fanfic and frankly pretty hysterical. I need to put those vids up on my Youtube archive. Also one time my best friend Paul did a pacifist run of Undertale while I drank heavily and did all the voices. My channel is kind of bizarre.
The games I play are fairly random, but I lean very heavily toward slow, narrative-driven things that favor exploration over combat and have a creepy or indie feel, and give me lots of time to have relaxed discussions with chat. We've played DARQ (cannot recommend enough!), Little Nightmares, Bendy and the Ink Machine, American McGee's Alice, etc.
22) Who does Marty LeGrow look to for an opinion? Be it about a video game, a story, or a movie?
I try to judge these things on my own first and not lean on other people's opinions, but I will say I really love the LPer TieTuesday and often want to know if he likes a game before I play it. Everything else, I look at it myself before asking opinions.
23) You're a cosplayer as well? Is that something you do often?
I've cosplayed since, 1999? 98? Long time. Been going to cons and competing since 2000, though mostly I like to cosplay as a fun casual hobby with my friends. I was in an episode of Cosplay Melee, I think episode 3? We filmed our episode first but I know they aired out of order. I made a fallen angel with big paper wings.
24) I totally forgot you worked for TokyoPop, what exactly did you do for TokyoPop? Also what work do you do on Miraculous Lady Bug?
Unfortunately the Miraculous comic has been put on hold due to ongoing talks with ZAG Entertainment and now, I suspect, general COVID shenanigans. :P For Tokyopop, I drew and wrote their top-selling original English manga series, Bizenghast, which spanned 8 graphic novel volumes from 2005-2012 :)
25)Webtoons have been getting a lot of shine now with the Crunchyroll originals and "Tower Of God" getting an animated series, has anyone approached you?
Unfortunately, I can't discuss specifics about any current talks I'm in. I can only say that I;ve gotten outside offers for licensing/alternate publications on every series I've worked on :)
26) Do you really wear Spongebob Underwear? That's a joke, I remembered the story you shared about a girl finding her way under your dress.
I DID until they stopped making adult sizes of the ones I liked!
You guys can find FunwithPunk @ the following links and you can read Stagtown HERE!
Instagram: @FunWithPunko
www.youtube.com/c/FunWithPunko
www.twitch.tv/FunWithPunko
http://ko-fi.com/FunWithPunko
And you can follow Frankie (the main character of Stagtown) HERE
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