Gabe Soria recently moved back to New Orleans from Brooklyn, NY. In the late ‘90s, Soria worked the Wednesday shift at Oak Street’s More Fun Comics (that’s new comics day for you uninitiated folk), where the store credit he earned slinging sequential art helped balance his comic habit with his fledgling career as a freelance writer. Soria bounced between Las Vegas and New York in the early ‘00s, where his work appeared in publications like Mojo, Arthur, Film Threat and Blender. His time in New York treated him well: in addition to meeting his wife and having a son, he got to network and become friends with a veritable Who’s Who of indie comics: Dean Haspiel (The Quitter, Billy Dogma), Jessica Abel (Artbabe, La Perdida), Matt Madden (Black Candy, A Fine Mess) and Paul Pope (THB, 100). So it’s fitting that as Soria returns to the city he once helped supply comics to he’s pushing a comic of his own. Life Sucks, co-written by Abel and drawn by Warren Pleece (Deadenders, Incognegro), is a cross between between Clerks and Buffy: the Vampire Slayer, if Buffy were a vampire and worked the night shift at a convenience store. Dave, an unwilling vampire in his twenties, sticks out his twilight hours at the Last Stop, a Los Angeles quickie mart that caters to the area’s late-night goth contingent and a clientele of vampires unlike any Anne Rice has conceived—the Last Stop is owned by Radu, an Eastern European vampire who stocks his store’s staff with reluctant bloodsuckers like Dave and often plays cards with other ancient, entrepreneurial vampires. Then you have Jerome, the classic slacker friend, and Wes, Dave’s nemesis and “brother from the same master,” a jerk and womanizing surfer who enters into a good, old-fashioned, straight-from-an-‘80s-teen movie challenge from Dave: the first to seduce Rosa (Dave’s crush and goth girl/wanna-be vampire), without using their powers, wins. With an interesting take on an established genre, dialogue and pacing reminiscent of The Office or Arrested Development and top notch artwork from British star Pleece, Life Sucks is easily one of comics’ truly entertaining genre releases of ‘08. Soria allowed ANTIGRAVITY to buy him a cup of coffee at the Marigny’s Coffea, where he talked about moving back to New Orleans, vampire realism and the intelligence of having the word “sucks” in the title of your book.
ANTIGRAVITY: How did the idea for Life Sucks come about?
Gabe Soria: It organically sprung out of a conversation I had with Jessica (Abel) and her husband Matt. It’s funny, because Jessica and I had an e-mail exchange this morning talking about how we both have slightly different recollections of it. How I remember, it happened about six years ago and the three of us were walking down Park Slope in Brooklyn, heading to a train to see Ghost World, and for some reason (and maybe I was reading The Vampire Lestat or something), but I started talking about how it’s weird that in most vampire literature or films vampires are always rich—their monetary situation is always taken care of. I wondered, “What happens when you’re a vampire just starting out?” You wouldn’t have an empire or limitless resources of cash—you’d have to pay rent on your lair, or whatever, and you’d have to get money somehow, especially if you didn’t want to rip people off or suck blood all the time. If you’re still new and relatively human, you’re stuck in the mindset where you have to pay for shit. We went and saw the movie and went out for drinks afterwards, and we chatted about it again, and the whole idea of a vampire working at a convenience store came out of that. [The idea of a store] owned by an older vampire master that has a chain of them in Los Angeles, and who’s also a member of a cabal of older vampires who had other night businesses made perfect sense. They stock their night employees with the vampires they make. It’s a willing workforce who can’t go anywhere. It’s a metaphor for having this messed up job in your early twenties. A lot of people feel trapped like that.
AG: Did Dave specifically spring out of all that? It’s funny that on the cover of the book, Dave isn’t clearly a vampire…
GS: It’s an almost mundane part of his life. He’s still going through all these motions and even though he’s a vampire he’s still got all this stuff to do, all this business of living, or unliving. No matter matter, you’ve got to have a place to go and occupy yourself somehow. To assume that just because you’re this supernatural creature you’d have this total paradigm shift in the way you look at the world…it wouldn’t work that way.
AG: How much of the story is a sendup of goth or vampire culture?
GS: I have nothing but love for the goth subculture, even though it is easily mocked. It’s more of a sendup of the idea of romanticizing someone else’s lot in life. Just automatically assuming that because somebody has something that their life is easier or better. It’s satirizing that sort of lifestyle. And goth culture is kind of absurd and fashion conscious. But that can be said for any subculture, metalhead or whatever. In the book, the goths assume that real vampires would be just like them and they would follow all these aesthetic tropes, and it’s absurd to think that if you’re a vampire you would go, “Okay, now I have to dress in black all the time and listen to really bad music.” It’d be more likely that they’d go, “Oh, I can still dress in t-shirts. I don’t want to wear a frilly shirt just because I suck blood now.”
AG: Rosa’s like that—she wants to be a vampire but doesn’t realize the problems that go along with it.
GS: [Laughs] Yeah, it’s not a solution to a problem—it opens up a bunch of real problems.
AG: The violence in the book is interesting; it’s played comedically, very comic book-like.
GS: If you’re an indestructible creature, it’d almost be like playing if you were hurt or hurt someone else. It is played for comic effect, but we tried to use the violence very sparingly; it wasn’t about the actual physical violence.
AG: What was the writing process like, with you and Jessica Abel? Was it more collaborative, or did you write specific parts?
GS: There was a lot of baton passing and was incredibly collaborative. It took a long time to figure out how to do it together—we had very different ideas of how it should go. A lot of times we’d sit down and plot out sections of the book, and we’d each take a section of the book, go and write it and then show it to each other and polish it. We were really precise about the panel division—Jessica especially; since she’s an artist and writer, she was sensitive about what we’d deliver to Warren—about how the pages would flow and things like that. I was a little … even though I’ve got a lifetime of reading comics, I was a bit naive about that.
AG: It seems very specific in how the panels are gridded. I read an interview with Warren where he said that drawing the book was a very painstaking process.
GS: Jessica and I are both very wordy. [Laughs] I’m sure when Dean Haspiel sees the book he’ll be like, “Too many words, man.”
AG: [Laughs]
GS: We tried to cram a lot of stuff in there. Of course, comics can be tons of different things—they don’t have to be purely visually based. You look at Marvel Comics in the ‘60s, and Stan Lee would write and write and write, and those panels would be filled with words. This isn’t an homage to Stan Lee, and maybe it’s over-writing, but I like that it’s packed.
AG: How did you link up with First Second?
GS: Jessica just talked to Mark Siegel [First Second Editorial Director] at a party. He asked her what she was up to, and she mentioned the story idea, and after she laid it out for him he said, “Great, let’s do it.” It took forever to get a contract done and forever to get the book done, but I think we were one of the first books that First Second acquired, besides some of the European stuff that was already done.
AG: And Life Sucks wasn’t the first name for the book.
GS: Oh, God—we went through a few titles. I can’t remember many of the old ones; I think we went through “Night Shift” at one point. Only in retrospect do I realize we have “sucks” in the title, which is like a big “Kick Me” sign.
AG: Have any of the reviews come in already?
GS: There was one review that panned the book, by Tom Spurgeon, who unfortunately gets a lot of ink with the Comics Journal people, but fuck him. [Laughs]
AG: I have a love/hate relationship with the Comics Journal. I like a lot of their interviews, but I almost feel belittled because I do like superhero comics too.
GS: Yeah, every once in awhile you want to ask these people, do you even like comic books? Can you imagine someone telling you that you don’t really like movies because you’re into Lord of the Rings? “Oh, you don’t like movies, you’re not really into movies.” I do understand that comics are much more than the superhero genre, and I don’t read many superhero books anymore just because I find them absurd, but every once in awhile there’s a superhero comic that’s really exciting or really fun, like All-Star Superman, and I’d consider Hellboy or BPRD comics to be superhero because they’re about extraordinary people in extraordinary situations. I’m an unapologetic lover of genre fiction, so if anybody tells me not to play Dungeons & Dragons I tell them to fuck off.
AG: [Laughs] Yeah, sometimes I wonder if the Journal realizes that people read [superhero] comics simply for entertainment.
GS: I’m fully into comics that are “about” things. I love stupid comedies; I love really affecting dramas, or crazy space operas. My favorite films of all time: The Empire Strikes Back, or Slacker, or George Washington, or Evil Dead 2. All the old Universal horror films; The Bride of Frankenstein is one of the best movies of all time, and it’s really pulp literature.
AG: Let’s talk a bit about you living in New Orleans and leaving for awhile. You worked over at More Fun Comics on Oak Street, right?
GS: Yeah, in the mid-to-late ‘90s, for store credit. My job consisted of getting picked up by John Ceder, who used to be in Blackula, at 8am on Wednesdays. We’d go get coffee, listen to Howard Stern or Monster Magnet (great comic book music, by the way), and wait on Carrollton for the UPS guy to pass. We’d wait for him to pass, and then basically do a highway robbery on him because More Fun was later on his route and we wanted the books as early as possible. We’d grab the books, bring them back to the shop and get them taken care of, and I’d sit around and sell stuff for the rest of the day. That’s how I was able to afford comics in the late ‘90s, when I was making no money at all. I’m not making much money now, either. [Laughs]
AG: Were you already a writer?
GS: Yeah, I’ve been writing since I was nineteen, and I’m thirty-five now. I’d been an editor at a video game magazine in Las Vegas, which was owned by Larry Flynt publications.
AG: Prestigious!
GS: Oh, yeah. [Laughs] Larry Flynt Publications is basically the Roger Corman and New World Pictures of journalism. So many folks have gone on from Flynt to bigger and better things. An old buddy of mine, Evan Wright, who was an editor at Hustler, has an HBO mini-series coming up that’s based on a book he wrote called Generation Kill. There are so many other dudes and ladies who earned their bones working at Flynt in the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s. I was doing music journalism for a Los Angeles magazine called Fizz; I worked for Film Threat, another Flynt publication. When I moved to New Orleans, I wasn’t doing much writing and working at a coffeehouse.
AG: When did you move away?
GS: I moved away in ’99 because I’d applied for and gotten a job as a video game designer in Austin, TX. I moved away for a year, until there was a big round of layoffs. I came back to New Orleans for a few months, and I happened to have some money and decided to go to New York and visit an old friend from the Rue de la Course. New York’s one of those places, man. I was up there for ten days, and I was like, “I’m moving. I can’t take New Orleans.” I came back, got all my stuff together and left. Then the really missing New Orleans thing started. I was like, “Oh, fuck, what did I do?” [Laughs] I moved from the greatest place in the world, but I got a lot out of New York.
AG: Where did you work in New York?
GS: When I first moved, I got a job at a comic book website called Psycomic.com. There’s an amazing comic book community in New York. That’s how I met everyone in the NY comic industry. Everybody knows each other there, and it’s such a cool community. I met Paul Pope, Dean Haspiel, Tom Hart, Nick Bertozzi, Jessica and so many others, by going to house parties. Then Psycomic folded and I worked for Blender for four years. I did a hell of a lot of freelance, and I started my comic book career. I’m so happy I moved to New York, and I also met the woman who’d become my wife, and got her pregnant. [Laughs]
AG: Did you visit New Orleans often?
GS: I’d come back once or twice a year. I’m not saying anything new, but once you move away you realize why so many corny songs are written about this place. “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans” says it all. My wife says that I wouldn’t shut up about moving back to New Orleans. I left behind such a great group of friends, people who are like my brothers and sisters, folks like Robert Starnes, Bailey Smith, people I’d take a bullet for. Coming down after the hurricane, I started to feel guilty. I wondered if it was survivor’s guilt because I didn’t lose anything like so many of my friends did. I realized it was an unconstructive way to think about it. The last time I came back was last October, when I came to play with the Noisician Coalition.
AG: At the Voodoo Music Experience?
GS: Yeah—you had a big photo of me in your magazine that next month.
AG: [Laughs] All of a sudden you looked really familiar.
GS: It almost made it as a double page spread in Spin! An editor friend of mine e-mailed me and said, “I came in this morning and there’s this big-ass photo of you being considered for a two-page spread, but it just cropped weird.”
AG: Ah, well.
GS: That week we spent down here was a really powerful week, full of creativity, full of joy. My wife and I talked about it, and I’m a freelance writer and she’s a chef—we were in a position to make the move. We were very sad about leaving our friends in Brooklyn, but we’re excited to be here. It’s a very interesting time to be in New Orleans. Despite all the bad things, it still retains all the things that make it a unique, vibrant and amazing city. I’d hope that, in whatever small way, I can be a part of the renaissance that’s going on here by voting with your feet, as they say. I’m excited about being here. I believe in New Orleans, and I would like to stay here for the foreseeable future.
AG: With Life Sucks about to hit, you probably have the next batch of projects in the works. What’s coming up?
GS: I’m feeling very ambitious right now. I’m starting another book for First Second, with my buddy who used to work at the Rue, and Jessica and I are waiting to hear about a sequel to Life Sucks, and in addition to that I have a few comics projects that I’m working on, including one about New Orleans that I keep calling “Loser Noir.” New Orleans kind of lends itself to mystery/crime fiction, and hopefully I’m be doing that book with Ronald Wimberly, who just did Sentences for Vertigo. It’s kind of about the lowlife I was, and still am to an extent, something set in that milieu—the bars that are open at 6am. Not quite James Lee Burke material, but with your anti-hero protagonist who likes to drink, musicians to some extent. I’m really hoping I can get it done before David Simon’s TV show about New Orleans comes out. How can I compete with the guy who created The Wire?
Gabe Soria will sign copies of Life Sucks at More Fun Comics (8200 Oak Street, New Orleans) on Saturday, May 3rd as part of Free Comic Book Day.
Interview and photo by Leo McGovern; Artwork copyright Warren Pleece and used with permission of First Second. This interview first appeared in ANTIGRAVITY Vol.5 Issue 6 (April ‘08).
