ON HOME OWNERSHIP WHILE UNEMPLOYED

GROTH: What were you doing when you put out the first issue of Girlhero? You must have had a job of some sort.

KELSO: Right, I -- I bought this house with my sister in 1992. At the time I was unemployed.

GROTH: How did you buy a house while you were unemployed? I think everyone would like to know this.

KELSO: [Laughing] Um, let's say I had a lot of help. My sister Jenny really wanted to buy a house and my mother wanted to help, but she felt it was really unfair to just help one sister, so I was 23, and I got kind of dragged into it. I mean, now I feel really lucky, but at the time, the last thing in the world I wanted was to own a house, but there was no way really to turn it down... so anyway, I was unemployed and I freaked: I took a terrible job with the city of Bellevue. Boring, administrative... I was the worst employee ever. I would have gotten fired if I hadn't quit. Right about that time I decided to apply for the Xeric, and so I convinced them to let me work 4 days a week just for one month while I worked on a proposal. I'd go over to Jason's and we'd work. That process was just so great that I said, "What am I doing working full-time? I'm never going to work full-time again in my life!" 'Cause I can't do comics and work full-time. So right after I sent my grant application I quit my job. It was totally a leap of faith type of situation, because I had no idea if I would get the grant or not, but I just decided I didn't care if I got the grant. This experience has told me that I am not cut out to have a full-time office job, I really do want to be an artist; somehow I am going to find a way. Then I got the grant, and it seemed I'd made the right decision. And then, one thing led to another, and by the end of the summer of '93 I had this airport job, so it all worked out.

ON FANTASY

GROTH: Well, it's been corrupted by so many crappy conventions.

KELSO: Yeah, so when I say "fantasy" people think of this whole crappy genre thing, and that is so not what I'm interested in. But that said, some of my favorite books like C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia, Tove Jansson's Moomintrolls, King Arthur stories. And Maurice Sendak -- he negotiates that real world/fantasy world thing beautifully. He's been a huge influence on me in that sense. I've always liked fairy tales, and um, yeah, I totally feel freed up, because I don't have to worry about what they do for a living, whether they have a record player or CD player, and all that crap.

ON THE COMICS GROUP

GROTH: Now, I wanted to ask you, when you guys were meeting -- has that period passed you? Are you still meeting, or -- ?

KELSO: Well, everybody moved away. Tom Hart moved away, and Jon Lewis moved away, and Ed's not living here, but, um... you know. Jason is still here... I took my sketch for my cover over to Jason for help the other day. It's really forced perspective, and it's not intended to be realistic, but it still has to work and one part of it was not working. And I still totally rely on Jason for a lot of that kind of help. He sat me down and gave me a lesson on perspective just before I drew the queen story, because I knew I had to present these big places, and I can't really seem to teach myself anything about drawing unless it's specifically in the service of a story I'm working on. I can't sit down and say "I'm going to learn perspective just for the hell of it." I didn't really care that much about it, but I was doing a story where it just wasn't going to work unless I could play with it more effectively.

So, those days are over in the sense that they're not all still living here, and it's hard to see people's ongoing work when they're far away.

Trimmed from The Comics Journal #216

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