February 19, 2019

Anna Sellheim ’16 creates the web comic Everything Is Fine and helps run Square City Comics, a comic collective in the DC area. She did the following interview with Angela Boyle ’16.

What is your favorite thing to teach about comics?

My favorite thing to teach about comics is the various ways you can get your characters to emote. Whether that’s facial expressions, body language, or use of emanata (one of my fave lessons is teaching emanata). My comics are all about characters and emotions, so I love helping students learn how to make their characters express themselves.

Do you have any tips for teaching based on age range?

I’ve had classes with students 5–10 years old, middle school students, high school students, and a single class with students 14–65 years old. The real key to curriculum isn’t as much age range as skill level. It matters some (I’m not gonna ask my high school classes to draw a comic about their favorite video game, for example, even though all elementary students want to do is draw Minecraft and Pokémon). But with a CCS summer workshop I TA’d with Luke Howard ′13, Jon Chad, Alec Longstreth, and Dean Sudarsky ′16 (another TA), all of the students were beginning cartoonists, so the broad age range (14–65) didn’t matter that much; they were all learning the same things.

What do you do to help run Square City Comics? What are the difficulties with managing a group of 100 people?

The key to running Square City is that I don’t do it alone. There are seven organizers (called the Inner Square). My two main tasks are social media and getting the team together for meetings. I refuse to do things I’m not interested in (for example, I will not do anything involving their finances). The group, unlike CCS, focuses on casual cartoonists. Virtually all of our members do this as a hobby. So you have members come in and out of the group. We average about 15–25 members a meeting, nowhere near the full 100+. But I will forever be thankful to Square City because I joined them and then got serious about comics, which is what lead me to go to CCS.

How often do you come out with a new zine? Are they typically in the Everything is Fine Series?

I come out with a new zine every 3–5 months on average. The last year has been crazy hectic, so my output has suffered, but I have now come up with a schedule with my therapist that I do a new zine minimum every 4 months. The first issue that will come out will be Volume 3 of Everything’s Fine, called “Everything’s Fine: Let’s See Where This Goes.” This will be a stand-alone volume (like all of the others) about how being in my romantic relationship has affected my mental health (spoiler alert: being in a good relationship hasn’t solved all my problems!). Everything’s Fine is a series I’ll be doing for the rest of my life, but I do other stuff, too. Right now I’m in the middle of three zines: the Everything’s Fine zine, a zine about how my dogs are terrible (but still great because they’re dogs), and a fictional love story about a girl struggling with a binge eating disorder.

What are your favorite drawing tools?

• Strathmore 300 series Bristol—either the one made specifically for comics with non-photo blue lines at 11×17″ or regular unmarked at 11×17″ or 9×12″
• G-nibs
• Speedball Super Black Waterproof India Ink
• printer paper at 11×17″ or 8.5×11″
• 11×17″ light box
• Staedtler non-photo blue pencils
• Staedtler Mars Plastic Erasers
• Prismacolor pencils