At TCAF, POMEmag sat down with two of the three founding members of Love Love Hill, a Toronto comics collective that put together some of the most eclectic, charming comics anthologies around. If you’re looking to read about passionate, emotional men playing sports, girls with glasses falling in love, and everyday humor between friends, you’re in luck because LLH has tackled all of these subjects and more. We talk to them about their work, their favorite manly man stories, hot old guys, and a million years of comics you should be reading and buying.
POME: Tell us a little bit about Love Love Hill. How do you guys know each other, and how did you get started?
K: Love Love Hill is a very loose collective of mostly women artists, but not exclusively. It just turned out that way because we’re all friends with each other. We kind of find our satellite members online and through conventions like TCAF and just meeting people in general. There’s no requirement or anything, it’s just like “Oh I feel like I can work with this person” and that’s how we do that.
LLH’s main three members are me and Dirchansky as the main administrative members, and Wai is also a main member ‘cause she’s been there since the start. We just feel things out, and we do projects when we are free, and if you are too busy we’re very understanding. If you feel like you don’t want to do free work that’s also understandable, but we’re not like a publisher. We usually put out one anthology every year, and a few other side projects, but we also help each other distribute solo stuff. For example, one of our artists, Justin Lanjil, is here with us at TCAF for the first time and he’s bringing solo stuff, but he’s also in our anthology. So it’s a way of trying to get each other’s stuff at different shows even if we’re not there, and it’s also easy to sell your friends’ things compared to your own things, cause you can be like “This is the best comic ever!” versus “I made this, don’t look at it!” So, that’s our sort of power-in-numbers thing that we do. Yeah, that’s why we work as a collective! And that’s why people tend to like us, I think, too, because we’re atypical, at least in North American style self-publishing.
POME: So I saw y’alls new project “Cry to the Moon”, can you guys tell us a little about that?
D: So every year, one person, usually one of the core team, you were saying one of the core types?
K: I don’t know, we don’t have a name for it.
D: Yeah, I guess myself, Wai, and Kim, and we’re kind of like project leads, but in a very loose sense. So one of us will take on organizing the anthology for the year. This year in particular, it was Cry to the Moon, which is about delinquents and animals. Most of our anthologies stem from things that we like – so last year it was female-gaze in sports, because a lot of the people would watch sports, or read sports comics, or watch sports anime, or maybe even real sports? I don’t know if anybody watches real sports, and that ship real people. But we weren’t really in it for the game, we were in it for the passion and the emotion that people go through when they’re playing sports. But this year, it was animals, which is just something that I like… How did we get to delinquents? It started as a joke!
K: Everything starts as a joke and then it gets serious real fast, and that happens all the time. Fujosports was the same way, like all our glasses books were kind of the same way. Originally we made a book that was a BL glasses comics, and then the joke got to be like, “I’ll do a rival GL glasses book” and then it happened. So Cry for the Moon started off as a joke that became serious.
D: I’m trying to think of how the delinquent part came about. We were with Saicoink, who also works with us a lot, and she was just basically ending one of her series, OSCP, which has a lot of delinquents and animals in it for some reason, probably because she likes them. But I feel like it maybe had something to do with those jackets we got – we were trying to do girl gangs a lot.
K: Yeah we were talking about girl gangs and we got matching jackets for each other, and added patches to them, because we’re really into that. But then we were talking about girl gangs and I think that’s where delinquents came from. And just to make it more interesting maybe, we added the animals, I don’t know.
D: The feeling I was having going forward with the anthology was the really kind of buff, rugged-looking delinquents, and them having a very soft heart, or at least see that stray animal in a box that’s outside in their alleyway… that’s sort of the feeling that I was going for.
K: Or finding a companion if you have no companions, because you’re a lone wolf.
D: A lone wolf.
K: *howls*
D: Haha, we’ve been doing that a lot, because our cover has this girl going AWWOOOOO. So that’s what the new anthology is about. We’ve got 8 contributors. Most of them are Canadian, except for one who’s American, who’s also worked with us before. All original one-shot stories, 136 pages, it’s a pink cover this time which we are very excited about too.
K: That’s pretty much it. It’s a pretty standard anthology. We didn’t do anything super crazy this time. Though it is a larger book.
D: It is a larger book, with more variety in different types of stories, styles.
K: It’s always really interesting to see the comics come in, and see what animals people picked. Or the sports people picked last year, or all the tropey things that came out of Love Lens, because that was about girls in glasses and love, and everyone had shoujo tropes. I think in every comic, there was a girl, falling over and injuring herself, and its interesting to see everybody’s different take, because everybody’s experience of that is different. And it’s the same for the animals. It’s like, “What animal did you pick?” Or is it a girl gang or a boy gang? Or is it indeterminate? Or is it a lone wolf?
D: We keep it kind of open-ended, because we work a lot with the folks that we are friends with, so I trust them to catch the right vibe and just run with it. And we don’t really see the submissions until they’re final. We approach people to work with us if they want to, but otherwise everyone has the creative rights to do whatever they want. As long as it’s within the rating of, you know, TCAF.
K: Yeah, of who the audience is gonna be. If it’s gonna be racy, we put limitations on swears and nudity essentially.
D: Or we’ll say we’re just going to do a nudity book, or a swear book.
K: Which is fine too! But yeah.
D: In terms of what animals there are, there’s a couple dog stories, there’s a cat story. I have a snake and a rat in mine. And there’s puppies, and some more cats…
POME: So when you guys are organizing things, do you just kind of shoot out an email to the people that you like working with and say “Ok we’re doing this anthology, this is the deadline” and then when things roll in, it’s the surprise you’re talking about?
K: More or less, yeah! Because again, we’re a collective, so we don’t try to edit people’s things too much. And this is kind of a way of getting newer people in. Like Justin Lanjil or like Laura Tryon, who are here this year also, they used to just be LLH fans essentially. And we don’t really keep fans very long, because we befriend everyone, so they go from being fans to friends really quickly. When we found out that they were artists as well, we looked at their work and thought “Oh yeah, this is along the same vein.” It always kind of turns out ok, because we do curate a little bit. We invite people that we just feel good about, essentially. When we do themed descriptions in that first callout email, we also try to give a good idea for the vibe that we’re going for. So it’s more about a similar feelings than having a similar drawing style or having similar tropes or a similar whatever. Like, we wanted sports comics, but about sports feelings, with innuendo, was the guideline, but people interpret that their own way. Or for this one, Cry to the Moon…
D: I gave a lot of examples that people could do – it could be actual animals who are delinquent, or human delinquents with animals, or maybe they have a brand name that has an animal on the logo.
K: Yeah, it doesn’t even have to be all that clear, but then you specify “We’re looking for heart-stopping stories, or very full-of-love shoujo stories”, and then that’s the thing that unifies everybody’s styles together.
POME: Cool! I really think that’s a cool concept. And also if you like the people and you know their work, you don’t really have to say “Do all these things.”
K: Yeah, and after the callout, that’s pretty much it. We send out reminders, people drop in or drop out, that’s totally fine. We’re never lacking for content, because we have such a large roster of people on that mailing list already at this point. People just do things when they have time, and that’s I think also the unifying thing – everybody does it if they like the theme and they’re in it kind of for love. Which is fine, because we don’t want to take anybody’s paying work time away from them. So we completely understand if you don’t participate one year but participate the next year. There’s not a blacklist or anything, it’s so casual ultimately, it’s very much just friends.
POME: Do you guys have any examples of submissions you’ve gotten for a theme that were a really unique, crazy take on something that really wowed you? Or where you were like, “I did not see this coming, this is so cool!”
D: I feel like that’s always the case. I’m always very happy and impressed by what people come up with. Because we also contribute to it and and then we have our own interpretations of that theme.
K: Yeah, and we don’t even really communicate with each other after a while. We’re just like “Did you do your comic yet” and we’re like “nooooooo” because usually we just kind of retreat to our holes and our own comics. I think one example of something that really surprised us I think was the very first TCAF that we did, we had a book that is very little-known. We printed very few copies, but we did a yaoi book – a old-man-on-old-man, or just old-man-on-other-man book, that was specifically like Italian, fancy-style old man. Like Basso, and that genre. And we thought “No one is going to like this”. I think you [Dirchansky] proposed the theme.
D: I don’t remember why…
K: You were just into LEON Magazine, you were just like “Can we just draw comics about these dudes banging?”
D: Right, old man, basically they give you all the money and you can do whatever you want.
K: Yeah and you’re a kept man or woman, I guess. But yeah, it was yaoi in this case. But, I think everyone was a little weirded out by the theme that time around. And we were like “I don’t know” but it’s kind of funny. But when we got the submissions in, everyone was like “I get it now, I see the appeal” after drawing the comic. Like, “older men are attractive, older men are attractive together, you’ve opened a new door to me”! Most of us started the project as a bit a of joke, it’ll be funny and it’ll be fine, but weirdly enough, everybody found their foothold and then it was one of the books we were the most proud of because there were a lot of really good stories. We do this thing sometimes with LLH where we get together and we read each other’s comics out loud to the author, and then that person is just squirming the entire time because they don’t want to listen to their terrible dialogue – especially for the old man porn book, which particularly had a lot of innuendo, and a lot of dramatic pick-up lines and stuff.
D: Shrimp alfredo.
K: Shrimp alfredo! It was called Expired Seafood, it was about grey prawns.
[everybody laughs]
K: See how everything starts as a joke??
D: And actually one of our contributors actually had no idea that that was the joke, that gray prawns was what we meant it to be until way after. And then she was like “Oh!”
K: Yeah and then she got the book and was like “Wait, this is why???” [mind blown sound effect]
POME: Do you guys have any favorite fictional hot old guys?
K: Hmmm anybody in Ristorante Paradiso. That was the demographic, essentially.
D: I haven’t been reading as much fiction. I’m mostly just creeping real people now.
POME: Real people are fine too. We’re opening up the arena.
D: I totally have a spreadsheet of this.
K: We have a spreadsheet, it’s called the Bang List. We have a shared spreadsheet with all of our friends, where if you’re in a committed relationship, these are the exception. “Please let me cheat with them one time because it will never happen and you will just have to understand”.
D: There’s also the marry list.
K: That’s only because there were shy people on the Bang List.
POME: Do you also have a kill list? Like, that’s the trio right? Marry, boff, kill?
D: No, we’re too love-filled. We’re just into banging and loving. Oh there’s the LEON guys.
K: There’s this Japanese magazine called LEON Magazine, and they have reader models, and it’s all these men that are super rich-looking, very fancy-looking, and just well-cut, well-groomed, very fashionable.
D: Oh I found it, it’s called the Debauchery List.
K: That’s worse than Bang List!
POME: So I know you guys have shoujo influences and we talked about it a little bit before. What are some of the comics or things that influenced your art when you were younger, or that became part of the foundation of LLH?
K: Fist of the North Star? I don’t know, it’s really weird. I think Chris Butcher was saying we’re so weird because on the one hand, we’re super girly, but then we also read the most manly, manly stuff that we can possibly find because we find it hilarious. I was really into Fist of the North Star for a while.
D: What about when you were growing up?
K: Growing up we were really into Hikaru No Go. That was the first the we did together, before we became LLH. LLH only became LLH when we needed to go to TCAF and we needed a branding strategy, because none of us could get into TCAF individually, but all together, with our powers combined, we could. We figured we’d have a debut book, we’d have an anthology, we’d have all of our zines, and we could fill a table and make up the table cost, which seemed very steep to us at the time. We didn’t know we’d make it back because the TCAF audience is so great. But the first project that we did was a Hikaru No Go doujinshi.
D: But even before that, you read a lot of shoujo stories.
K: Yeah I was into Keiko Nishi and her shoujo stories, and just old shoujo. Like, whatever Matt Thorn put out when he was still at Viz, I was super into that. Growing up, what did you read?
D: My formative moment was reading Saint Tail.
K: Saint Tail, yeah! You were super into Hoshin Engi.
D: Umm what else was I into…
K: I read so much Viz. Ranma 1/2…
D: I read Nakayoshi.
K: Yeah you read Nakayoshi cause you were in…
D: I was in Hong Kong.
K: Yeah. I read anything I could possibly get my hands on that was in English here, so Maison Ikkoku, which was probably a little racy for my age but I still read it. There’s Ogre Slayer, it’s really old. I was super into that at the time because it was dark, and all I wanted to draw was like, black-winged angels. Yeah, that just dark influence, like Angel Sanctuary. Even growing up I was into Evangelion and stuff, but I cannot watch Evangelion now cause I just feel like I would hate it. But anything I could get my hands on at the time. Kare Kano was really awesome. We watched all of Kare Kano at the anime club at the university as high school students, when we didn’t realize how weird everybody was because we were high school students and we didn’t understand. I’m trying to think of our old anime days. I was pretty into Trigun.
D: Yeah, angel wings and elf ears stuff.
K: Yeah, I was also into Oh! My Goddess.
D: Oh I was totally into that!
K: Which I wouldn’t be into now but I was so into it at the time.
D: Yeah but I was into Weiß Kreuz too. Just awful.
K: Yeah! So bad. Oh, and Gravitation. Gravitation was a big turning point as well. I wasn’t into fanfic, which was fine. I knew that it existed and a lot of girls get into BL through fanfic. I’m still not super into BL, but I was never weirded out by it or anything. It was the first BL thing that I watched, and the first mainstream thing where I was finding out about the different tropes and how all of that works and all the specialized yaoi terms that you need to know as a teenager. That was probably through Gravitation.
POME: So since so much of your work contains either content or has a style that might appeal to a more traditionally-coded feminine audience, do you go out of your way to target that readership?
K: Yeah, we don’t want to market as a “girl thing”.
D: Yeah, like when that weird old man book came out, when a dude would come by, we’d be like “Are you sure you want this? There’s some stuff in here that a stereotypical man may not want to look at.”
K: I had a friend, and I found out about this later, but Wai was selling the books in Vancouver and one of my friends was a bike messenger that day and came in and was like “Oh, a book fair! Oh, really nice handmade printed books!” And she was like “It’s pretty… it’s a little racy… I don’t know if you want it.” And he was like “It’s ok! I just really like how it’s made” and he bought it and was totally fine. I found out it was my friend afterwards. And she was just weirded out by the whole experience, like, oh “he just really likes print media, OK” and she thought he was an attendee but he was actually in the middle of bike messengering. But yeah, we don’t say exclusively that we’re women only, or that we market it in that way… I mean it’s not even that feminine, it’s just that outside of this general, mainstream-y way of doing things, our work still speaks to a lot of women and other genders.
POME: Yeah, like the right people will find it.
K: Exactly!
POME: Ok so I have two final questions for you, answer them in whatever order you like: What are some things in comics right now that you are really excited about? And then, do you have any personal projects to plug?
K: Well, I’m really excited that Steven Universe and Bee and Puppycat and these people that have shoujo or anime influences, even if it’s not shoujo. So I’m really excited for Natasha Allegri and Rebecca Sugar and Hellen Jo. Everything that they make is awesome. We also have some friends, like Hilary Florido that are really great. I super love Kris Mukai, and her podcast “Young Talk.” Gotta plug that because it’s funny.
D: What is it about?
K: It’s about comics, but they do readings a little bit and then they talk about stuff in general. It kind of veers into Animal Crossing and DnD sometimes. So it’s a little meander-y, but I think it’s way more interesting than other comics podcasts sometimes, because those are so white-male-centric, and kind of bad in a way, whereas this is more like sitting down with friends and talking. I also super love Nozaki-kun, everything about it is amazing. I love Kaoru Mori a lot, I love her. Everything she loves are things I love! Like maids, and glasses, and butts — ladies’ butts! And suits! And uniforms. I feel like she could be my homegirl if she wasn’t so damn famous. I just got into Sophia Foster-Dimino‘s stuff; her stuff is amazing.
Oh, we should talk about Pixelles. So I’m also kind of doing work with Pixelles, which is a women’s game initiative. They’re expanding a lot in Montreal. We’re an incubator; it’s not exactly like a school or anything. It’s a program that’s almost like camp – you hang out with people, other women, that are interested in making games and have never made one before. I was a co-coordinator for the last round, and we give a lot of guidance without really teaching, in a sense. I don’t know anything about programming, but I know 5 dudes that know something about programming. I know that they’re cool and I know they can make these girls feel comfortable, so I can refer them. And all of these women come from all these different backgrounds, and they’re all amazing in their own right, and they’re not stupid. The reason they haven’t gotten into games is not because they’re lacking in ability or lacking interest or lacking in ideas or whatever, it’s because they don’t feel welcome. And this is a way of feeling welcome. And then it also helps the Montreal games community hugely because it starts bringing more women into all the other events, which for the guys is super great. And it’s also good for other women, even if you’re not a part of Pixelles, even if you’ve been in game dev for a billion years. If you’re a game dev crone, you can suddenly come to the hot new game dev mixer thing because you know that there’s gonna be 10 other women there because the Pixelles are all going to be there together. And it’s very loose, it’s not a membership thing. Even if you never make a game again afterwards, it doesn’t matter because you made one and you know you can do it and you’re empowered in some other way and you can move on with your life how you choose. But there are also women who got industry jobs after Pixelles, after having that in their portfolio, which is a very powerful thing. And knowing that it’s such a good program, and all the big studios in Montreal know about it as well. Like for my round, we borrowed space from Bioware, and so many of the girls were so excited because Dragon Age just came out and everybody was just like “DRAGON AGE” and they were there and just being like “oh we’re in the building!” and knowing that the community cares, and big industry cares. Even if you’re not interested in big industry, even if you’re never looking to work at Ubisoft or Bioware. But knowing that that’s accessible, or knowing that’s a territory you can walk through, even if it’s scary to walk through right now, or terrifying, or not your life path, you still know that you can do it, and that’s still better than not knowing.
POME: That’s so cool! Do they have anything like that in other cities?
K: They don’t but the thing is that it just requires a couple very good people. ‘Cause the girls who started Pixelles, Tanya and Rebecca, are very good people. And it’s even the same with TCAF – it was started by a couple of very good people. It’s the good momentum, the good feelings and the way that they treat people moving forward that keeps it alive and what makes people feel like “yeah I will contribute to this,” because you never contribute something to a community for the idea of a community. You contribute because you feel like you’re a part of it, because your friends are all the community, so you feel like you’re doing something for your friends. And then it benefits the general community. You never do something because you’re like “well I would like to make a difference in the world!” I mean you want to think that you do that, but no one ever actually really does that. But you can make a difference in the world if you just help out even the people kind of in your periphery with what you have.
D: I’m excited about Guild Wars 2 expansions, hahaha. I don’t really know why, it’s just an expensive chat program to me, but I dance naked with the avatar. Comics-wise, I’m basically excited by most things that look very different from what I put out personally. So I actually haven’t been reading a lot of manga even, myself. Now I’m gonna try to read something that’s different from what’s there right now. So I’m one of those people that gets very excited by my friends’ work. So like when you guys put out new things and everyone on my twitter list puts out new things, I get really excited.
K: Like who? Name some names.
D: I’m always excited by Johnny Wander. I’m also excited by Victoria’s stuff, the Spera stuff I also really like. I really like Victoria’s goog character, I just really like animals. I’m excited for Ken Niimura’s stuff, I have actually not read his work but I’ve heard really good things.
K: Well, we’ve never been able to! Well we could probably read I Kill Giants but we have all this stuff of his in Japanese that we can’t read, like we literally just can’t read it.
D: I’m particularly excited by just zines, generally, not even the big publisher stuff, cause I know I can get that at any point. I get excited about zines and the way things are made. Sam Alden also has a new book, it’s all pixel art.
K: Did you know about his mom?
D: No?
K: You know that tumblr, Mouse’s Houses or something? It’s like these little felted mice.
D: Oh that’s his mom?
K: That’s his mom! There’s even a Sam Alden mouse. It’s when he won some award, and it looks like him. It’s just a mouse with glasses and a plaid shirt, I don’t know.
POME: So what else are you guys into right now?
D: I also love Kris’ work, Kris Mukai.
K: Oh man, Kris Mukai, rising star. I’m so sad she couldn’t come this year.
D: She’s doing a lot of paid work.
K: She’s in Sweden, I want to say, right now. Somewhere Scandinavian, I’m sure I got that wrong.
D: I’m trying to think of who else is on my twitter list. Especially if I like you, I will like your work. It’s kind of the baseline. There’s people whose work is fantastic, but if I don’t like the person then I will not engage in your work.
K: Yeah, I think that’s hard for me too, a little bit. I know it’s weird and petty, but it’s hard for me to separate authors and their work sometimes. Cause even if you’re writing fiction I feel like everything is so deeply personal ultimately, in some way or another. Or you’re doing something extremely formal, like form-based, and that means I don’t care as much, just cause of my own tastes. I’m interested in form, sometimes, but not… really. Or it gets dry, it’s like trying to separate yourself from your stuff and trying to look at the form alone is very hard because everything is informed ultimately by yourself and sometimes it just feels like they’re lying. Like, “oh I’m so neutral” but no, you’re never neutral.
D: I like Guy Delisle, and also John Porcellino’s work. Great storyteller, he’s very good at kind of keeping it, not necessarily neutral, but telling enough of the story that you will think “is he thinking the way I’m thinking, or is he thinking a different way”, which is very interesting. And then John Porcellino’s very poetic, kind of? I don’t even like poetry, but it’s like poetry in comics. He also has a cat that he really likes, there’s a lot of stories about his cat. Animal stories, I’m excited by animals!
K: For European stuff, there’s Beautiful Darkness, which came out by Drawn and Quarterly and was so scary. There’s the Quebec people, like Pow Pow Press, who are kind of my friends too. It’s very exciting, because they’re translating a bunch of stuff, which has never been accessible to English speakers before, and deservedly so. I’m really glad that they’re doing it, even though I really love that their comics are in French too, but I think it’s so important for them to translate so that other people can read them. There’s an author from Pow Pow named Cathon, and she has a book out that’s new called Vampire Cousins that we’re really excited about. Super excited, it was one of the stretch goals and they didn’t meet that stretch goal but they were like “we’re going to print it anyway”. And I was like “YAYYYY” cause that’s all I wanted. I bought a lot of her zine work locally, and it’s so amazing, and everyone should read it. There’s another title from France called Les Crocodiles (The Crocodiles), and it’s this book about street harassment in France. It’s different women’s accounts of different levels of street harassment, and some of them are really dark. And some of them are very light, or turn out to be mistaken but the whole point is that all of the men are drawn as crocodiles, and even if they’re good crocodiles they’re still a crocodile. And that’s such a good analogy for it, and how women ultimately feel. All the women characters are drawn differently, and they all have very different experiences. And all of the men are like reduced to be creepy predators. The first couple of pages I skimmed were like “haha this is kind of funny.” There were a couple of “get back” stories, like good comebacks or good comeuppances for the crocodiles. But there were a couple that went really dark, it’s not all funny. I think it’s great, I’m super stoked about that book.
D: I guess another thing I’m excited about is just this general idea of the zine culture that’s kind of uprising in the anime fandom, like people getting really into making books and not just shiny prints. And what I’m most excited about is for that to pass the fanzine category and go to original, personal work.
K: Yeah I agree. Every time we do an anime convention, it’s always very encouraging to have young people, like these 19 year olds (who think that we’re 19 year olds cause we look like garbage teenagers apparently) be like “oh you made this? I can’t believe you made this book, it’s a whole book! That’s amazing, that’s so much work, that’s all I want to do but this is what makes money.” We talk to them and we try to convince them to make books and stuff and we’re like “no it’s super easy, if you ever have anything to ask you can ask us, take our card, you can always ask us.” If you don’t know how to put together a zine or you don’t know how to put together a thing, we will tell you. We are really into sharing knowledge, because we talk, well, I talk a lot.
D: Well, we want people to do more original work.
K: Yeah, and we want the original stuff to sell better, because that’s what we come out of. We come out of Japanese doujinshi, wanting to be Japanese doujinshi artists essentially. Not even mangaka, just doujinshi artists, hahaha
D: Draw weird stories about things we like and then not have editors.
K: Yeah, exactly! I mean, my opinion and hers has changed a little bit but I think it came out of there. But that’s how fandom is in Japan, and it’s nothing like it is at an anime convention here, which is ridiculous. We just like books and we want comics, and that’s not what people are producing. Even though we know that for a lot of the artist alley kids, this is what they want to do, they just don’t feel like they can. It’s the same thing with the Pixelles. They feel like they don’t have access to it, or they don’t have a guide through it, or it’s not even on their radar as a possibility sometimes until they come to our table and see it. I feel like even if we are eventually outdated by anime trends and people won’t buy our stuff if we go to an anime convention, that’s fine.
D: It’s already happening.
K: It’s already happening, which is fine, because we just draw what we want to draw now. We don’t draw fanart of series we don’t watch to make money because we don’t need to make money anymore. Not to say that we’re super rich or anything, but you know, your values change when you’re out of school. So the money you make at an anime convention, even if it’s a lot, isn’t that much ultimately in the grand scheme of things.
D: For some people it is.
K: For some people it is, but not us. But I also feel that’s a weird trap. I always feel very sad about it. My friends that do make a lot of money out of it, I wish they would also graduate past it, because it means that they’re always stuck drawing other people’s things, other people’s property and kind of towing the line.
D: Yeah, that’s kind of why I don’t do it as much, just cause I’d rather be known for my own work as opposed to my work of other people’s things. Fanart is great though, I still love it.
K: I think it’s great, I think it’s super great to do fanart. But not for money. I don’t think fanart for money is a good thing ever. I think it’s fine, because it’s just sad. I feel sad for the copyrights of the artist and the rights of the artist, but I feel more sad about the individual fanartist. You make this, and you can make this for years, but this delegitimizes you, even though you’re so talented and you know how to do so many things, and you know how to make this much money, but you’ll never do this for your own properties. That’s super sad, and I’m more upset about that than I am about JK Rowling not getting her royalty dues from somebody’s Harry Potter fanart. Even though I think like, legally, yeah that’s the wrong thing to do.
POME: Yeah and you guys have resources too. You’re always reblogging stuff or writing stuff on tumblr.
K: Yeah absolutely. Even like, “comics taco” was a thing we wrote about. People are always like “we don’t like to be at the conventions after the convention’s done because we just want to go home and lie in our pajamas”. We just have a really quick way of taking down and setting up, and people make these elaborate PVC pipe things, and we’re just like “guys, you don’t need that, you really don’t”. You’ll probably sell more sometimes by just being present at your table and talking to people, and you just feel so much more motivated and energetic. And then it’s easy to clean up at the end of the day and get out of there when you’re fed up with peeps.
[Interview devolves into conversation and sandwich-eating]
You can learn more about Love Love Hill by checking out their website and following them on tumblr. You can check out (most of) the anthologies we mention in this interview in the Love Love Hill Store. You can also follow Kim, Dirchansky, and Wai on twitter. Now go buy Cry to the Moon!