Kenneth Laster is a long time contributor to ComicsXF as well as a digital artist and cartoonist. He recently released his comic Champions Of The Wolf on Gumroad and sat down with us to discuss it.
Zachary Jenkins: Kenneth, you’ve been writing for us for a while now, and have had your art featured in some of our design columns, but people might not know you for comics. What’s your backstory there.
Kenneth Laster: So my fun little secret is that I’ve been making comics for awhile– not all have been published/finished/or coherent but I’ve been writing/drawing stuff on and off since early highschool. I recently found some notebooks full of #lore and world building for stories I wanted to tell through comics so it’s always been a thing in the background. I’ve done collaborations with The Comics Jam, a few shorts for anthologies in college (two of which I don’t think got published and I wasn’t thrilled with my work on) and took up a role as the cartoonist for the school newspaper in my senior year–Then covid hit and I decided to try and do some shorts on my own terms just to pick at in my spare time while I listened to podcasts and see through to the end. The first two were pretty simple and drew from sketch writing experience I had from school, but this one very much drew from the big scope high school lore nerd and had him meet the Kenneth that got distinction on his screenplay he did for his college thesis. Long story short–a lot of practice off screen that led to me feeling like a semi-confident storyteller.
ZJ: The most striking thing about this story to me was the character designs. The Knight and The Baron specifically are very evocative. What was going through your head as you thought about their designs?
KL: I really enjoy character design and I feel like I’m usually pretty conscious of how I took a design somewhere and why, but I feel like I blacked out somewhere from my starting point to my end point on The Knight. I know I wanted him to be very sci-fi/fantasy but with a rugged but classic build. I was thinking Morrison/Morales Action Comics Superman but in a sci-fi setting– Then I think I watched a youtube photoshop kitbash of some wolf armor which I thought looked cool. Then…I think I looked at a picture of Jeffery Wright, and also those little jerseys medieval knights wore and said “neat!”. Then I guess I thought about Batman & Robin for 15 seconds and voila!
The Baron is a much easier explanation because I watched Spirited Away for the first time, saw Yubaba and thought, “There should be more people with big ass heads in things” and I did my part to further the agenda. As someone with an absolute melon of a head, I am glad I got to put this representation out there.
ZJ: This is a story about the power of community. Why is that a theme you wanted to explore?
KL: That’s a good question! In the wake of last summer and our cultural conflict with the idea of the police made me think about how much of the hero, the superhero specifically, has tied into “crime fighting” and how it feels harder and harder to divorce the concept of a superhero to some form of policing. As many single panels we have that we can point to for ACAB moments in comics, the genre pioneered by the “Champion of the Oppressed” consistently has a lot of nasty ties to the oppressors. So I wanted to revisit what a “Champion” would look like in opposition to “crimefighting” and policing. From that goal, along with the rise of a culture around mutual aid (shoutout to @pc_pools as an excellent collective to follow and support) it became really clear that radical heroes, and champions wouldn’t be lone individualist saviors punching bad guys, but people putting effort into protecting and nurturing their communities. I’m not sure if it will provide 50+ years of entertaining comics stories but it’s a narrative that I think should take hold.
ZJ: This is a complete solo project for you. What aspect of making this provided the biggest surprise for you?
KL: So I ended up lettering this comic twice, because I wanted to send a copy to a few things and hadn’t finished coloring it yet–but in this second lettering pass I definitely appreciated just how many small elements can make or break the lettering in a panel. I switched the font for the narration and it made just *so* much difference. Spacing, location, tail width all can do a lot to a page. It’s not my first time lettering but my first time in Clip Studio, and it was fun to learn and play with.
ZJ: You use a soft and bright color pallet for this comic. What made that the right choice for this fantasy tale?
KL: I infamously don’t have formal training with color theory, so a lot of my work is colored purely on *vibes*. This was my first time both using Clip Studio, and coloring a longer piece consistently. A lot of the softness was an attempt to keep the colors consistent through adjustment layers and also to cover for my learning curve into the program. However there’s a lovely coincidence when the vibrancy hits, it’s me learning about gradients and getting my groove when it comes to rendering and also happens to come at the point where shit hits the fan in the story so it all worked really well to serve the story.
ZJ: What’s next for Kenneth?
KL: I’m currently working on a story for the Off Into the Sunset Anthology edited by Brentt Harshman which is launching on April 14th on Kickstarter. I think I pitched my story as Mr. & Mrs. Smith meets Orville Peck in space. So that’s fun! It’s featuring a character from a longer story I’ve been wanting to make happen for a while. Otherwise I’m still wearing my critic hat in various locale’s on the internet, specifically calling Hank McCoy a war criminal on this very site.
Zachary Jenkins runs ComicsXF and is a co-host on the podcast “Battle of the Atom.” Shocking everyone, he has a full and vibrant life outside of all this.
