My Baby Has a Crush on Frankenstein: A Conversation with “Eternal Romance’s” Janet L. Hetherington

Sam:  I gotta tell you that I am really, really glad that Eternal Romance is back.

Janet:  Yeah.  Me, too.

Sam:  And I’m really glad that we can feature you and that on our site.  Well, I love your work.  You know that.  I’ve been telling you that for years. 

Janet:  Thank you.

Sam:  Oh, you’re very welcome.  And I remember one of the oddest coincidences in my life was meeting you for the first time one summer about eight years ago, and then that fall buying a giant bundle of Justice League comics from the 1970s and seeing this wonderful illustration which made me think, “Oh!  Look at that!  That’s really nice,” and reading your name on it and recognizing the name immediately and thinking, “Oh, wow!  That is really weird!” So this obviously tells me you were reading comic books in the 1970s, and I was just wondering about your origins as a comic fan?  What you were reading and how you got into it, because it seems to me it has always been a boy’s club especially in the 60s and 70s so how did you get into the whole thing?

Janet:  Well, it’s really funny.  I’d like to say that there was a comic, and I can’t quote the issue number, but I can describe to you the issue cover.  It was Wonder Woman.  Wonder Woman is running up some stairs, or an escalator, and she’s fighting a dinosaur, and I saw this on one of those spinner racks at a convenience store when I was a kid.  I was dying to buy it, and my dad didn’t want me to buy crappy comic books but that image of Wonder Woman running up the stairs fighting a dinosaur… well, I was totally into science fiction and I read a lot of science fiction as a kid, Ray Bradbury and Isaac Asimov and all the classic writers.  I immediately fell in love with the comic, but I couldn’t have it.  That made it more appealing! I think that issue must have come out before Batman came on TV, because when Batman hit the airwaves, suddenly it was okay for kids to read comics.  A lot of parents were still thinking of the book, Seduction of the Innocent by Dr. Fredric Wertham, and maybe they thought comics were questionable.  When Batman came on, it was such a big hit, I think that DC was tailoring the comics for kids.  Then, suddenly, it was okay to read comics, and I was given Batman comics for a Christmas present. That opened up the window for me to start reading and buying comics.  I started reading a lot of Archies, Batman, Superman and Supergirl.  Those were my favourites, Lois Lane and Supergirl.  I was a total DC junkie.  And romance comics!  What was so funny about the romance comics was that I used to go to the corner store and buy romance comics, and I’d put all the adventure comics like Superman and Batman at the top of the pile and the romance comics underneath, because I was so embarrassed about buying them. It was silly, because I was a girl and that was the market they were tailored for—but to me, it was okay to read about Green Lantern, but the romance stuff was too girly.  I read House of Mystery and the science fiction stuff and Weird War Tales and all of that.  I have one of those stories that when I left home that my mother gave away all my comics.  She donated them to the hospital so that was good.  I resumed reading comics when I was in university.

Sam:  Okay.  So what was popular at that time?

Janet:  It was the X-Men.  I started reading the classic (Chris) Claremont-(John) Byrne Hellfire Club storyline, and the death of resurrection of Phoenix, and that was wonderful.  Then I got really involved in organizing comic book conventions when I was at Carleton University.  We used to put on a show called Maplecon, and I was amongst the organizers of that. I was studying journalism, and I was writing about comics and doing articles for Amazing Heroes and other publications on a freelance basis.  I always kept the interest in comics, but as to creating comics, I really didn’t see it as a viable opportunity.  I was getting a degree in journalism so I could make a living writing, but I didn’t really translate that into creating comics.

Sam:  So what helped you get into the comic industry, and when did you begin creating comics?

Janet:  I was doing quite a bit of stuff with Amazing Heroes and actually, at Mid-Ohio-Con people were bringing me things from Amazing Heroes where I had done artwork, that I forgot about, for me to sign.  Those things are going back to the late 80s/early 90s.  But I guess I wasn’t really until the 1990s that I really thought that I could be a creator. That had a lot to do with meeting Ronn Sutton and getting together with him.  He was already a professional, and it really gave me the confidence to do it.  And one of the things we did, even before we met in person, was that we collaborated on some parody romance pages that were published in the San Diego Comic-Con Program Book (Summer Romance stuff) .That was sort of the springboard to what was to become Eternal Romance, because it was just so much fun going back and revisiting the romance comics that I grew up reading.  I missed romance comics, and it just seemed like a good opportunity to do something different and fresh.  And, of course, I loved the horror genre and the supernatural stuff.

Sam:  Well I think its a really crazy and original idea that you came up with combining horror and romance comics.  I mean do you know if it’d had ever been done before?

Janet:  Well, DC did a gothic romance comic.

Sam:  Yeah!  There was one short-lived title… House of Dark Gothic Romance Mystery… uh….

Janet:  Something like that.  I’d have to look it up. (It was actually Sinister House of Secret Love.)But you know what I think it was something that was meant to happen, because Joss Whedon created Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  In her earliest incarnation, in the movie, she was a valley girl cheerleader who was “the chosen one” picked to fight vampires and it sort of had that romantic slant to it, although my comic was more of a parody of the comics genre.  But there was a little bit of a convergence there, because John Lustig did his Last Kiss, and there were other creators who were playing with the genre a bit. I was happy to see that, but one of my key goals was to create comics that girls could enjoy, because at that time around 1996 and 1997, that was during the last wave of all the “bad girl” comics. 

Sam:  Like Lady Death?

Janet:  The “busting out” bad girl comics! Then Friends of Lulu, an organization of women readers and professionals, wanted to see more material for girls and women, so it seemed like a good time to do something different.  I had left Canada Post, where I had been working.  I took a buy-out and I wanted to freelance, so it seemed like a good opportunity to go ahead and do something on my own.  I did some writing and drawing, and did four issues of self-publishing (of Eternal Romance).  I did get picked up by Diamond, so it was distributed in all the comic book stores.  Then I did the trade paperback (Eternally Yours: Illustrated Stories of Eternal Romance), which got into bookstores.  It’s interesting that all these things targeting to women, going into bookstores, are things that all the comic book companies (DC, Marvel, Dark Horse) are doing now; they are very focused that way.

Sam:  Well, it seems that in the last few years the comic book field seems less of a boys’ club with Gail Simone and Jill Thompson and Amanda Connor that are really capturing a strong female market again.  Where do you think this trend is coming from?

Janet:  Things don’t happen overnight.  Eternal Romance came out in 1997.  That’s 10 years.  However, it has been happening all along.  Women have always been there, and Trina Robbins would be the first to point out all the wonderful female creators that have never been recognized.

Sam:  I was going to mention Trina Robbins, because in her books she talks about the 1980s as seeing a resurgence amongst women readers, with the New Teen Titans and the X-Men.

Janet:  The New Teen Titans was another one of my favourites.

Sam:  Well, they both seemed to have strong characterizations and a soap operatic feel to them.

Janet:  They also had very strong female characters, which are going to appeal to female readers. To be quite honest, one of my favourite characters to this day is Kitty Pryde.  I think she is a wonderful character, very spunky and smart, and never sappy.  What a wonderful teen-aged kid!  She saved the day so many times, but you didn’t feel like she was a “Wesley Crusher” type.  She was just a really great character.

Sam:  Have you been reading how Joss Whedon is treating her character in Astonishing X-Men?

Janet:  I have to confess that I haven’t been reading that.

Sam:  Well I’m not a huge X-Men fan, but I’m a Joss Whedon fan, so I’m buying the book because he’s writing it.  He’s really brought back the original Kitty Pryde, but grown up.  I think you’d like it.

Janet:  Well, I’ll have to pick it up.  I did get that mini-series that Paul Smith drew where she went to Japan.  I liked it.  I thought the art was quite innovative, actually. 

Sam:  So how long was the original run of Eternal Romance?

Janet:  It went from 1997 to 1999.   Four issues.  That was all.  Then I did the trade.  I cherry-picked the stories, plus I did a new story for that.  I wanted to make it totally girl- and kid-friendly, because there was one story in the first issue of Eternal Romance that, by today’s standards is not risqué at all, but there was a scene where one of the characters was wearing a bathrobe, so obviously she’d spent the night with her boyfriend.  I wanted to keep this book totally kid-friendly, and be able to hand the book to somebody at a convention and say, “Give this to your ten-year-old daughter.  She’ll love it.”  Or son, because there’s monsters. I mean, I know some boys have read it and they’ll say, “I liked it, but I don’t think the romance is that great’  But what are the origins of the word romance?  It really is more about adventure and passion and all that.

Sam:  Well, one of my confessions is when I worked at a comic book store in university, on long boring days when I was in the store alone and nobody was coming in, I read romance comics from the 60s for something to do!  The art in those were fantastic!  Nick Cardy was working on them, and Neal Adams was drawing the covers.

Janet:  Oh, it’s really fascinating to look through old romance comics.  I mostly collected DC, and the artwork is a real pop art experience.  But you do find these gems by Gray Morrow and Alex Toth.

Sam:  Are any of the strips that are online at www.MyRomanceStory.com new material? 

Janet:  What we are doing at first is serializing existing Eternal Romance stories.  Because of the scheduling, the first story that went up is “Angel or Alien?”  That’s kind of an interesting story, because it isn’t in the trade paperback; it was the cover story of issue #3, but it is more “superhero-y” more than any of the other ones. It’s less of an interpretation of what Eternal Romance is all about, but it’s a Christmas story, and the editors wanted to put up a Christmas story for the preview in December 2006. There is still a lot of romance in that story,  it’s what I liked about the superhero comics when I grew up is that they had romance and adventure.  They weren’t always just fighting the bad guys.  In the Legion of Superheroes, everybody was secretly in love with everybody else. “Angel or Alien?” is about this guy from another planet.  Working on the colouring for the strip brought back memories of drawing the story, and I remember why I didn’t put it in the trade paperback collection. One of the reasons is because there are some parts of the artwork I’m not 100 per cent happy with. Over the years, you’re going to grow as an artist, and you’re going to scrutinize your work and get more critical. But at the same time, I was reading it and I was enjoying it myself.  I’m also very happy about the opportunity to colour the stories, because I love colour comics. When I self-published the Eternal Romance series I was not able to do them in colour.  I just couldn’t afford it, and all the self-publishers were doing everything in black-and-white. I remember talking to Dave Sim (Cerebus the Aardvark), the godfather of self-publishing, before I did Eternal Romance, and telling him I wanted to do comics and how there weren’t any romance comics or comics for women out there. He just looked at me and said “just do it.”  That was his advice:  Just do it. Ronn was also being very supportive, so it just sort of put things in gear.  But financially, I wasn’t able to do the colour. However, romance comics and the web and colour works really well, so I’m having a lot of fun doing the colouring.  I’m doing a real mixed-media approach.  When I do convention sketches, I tend to use pen-and-ink, marker and pencil crayon so I’m spot-colouring a lot of artwork, scanning it, and then finishing it on the computer, so it’s a very different kind of look.  It looks like something I would do; it reflects my style.  I’m really having a good time bringing my vision into colour.

Sam:  So even if we’ve read the story before, we’re going to be able to see something brand new that we’ve never seen.

Janet:  Yeah.  It sort of brings a new vitality.

Sam:  Are there going to be any new, original Eternal Romance stories?

Janet:  I’m taking the opportunity to bring all the Eternal Romance stuff together, and there’s one story that I did which wasn’t really an Eternal Romance story, but I’m going to include near the end of the serialization. What we’re doing first is putting up “Angel or Alien?” and then reproducing the stories from the trade and the comics. Then, near the end, I’ll be bringing in some material people haven’t seen.  At one point, I did a mini-comic that was at the Small Press Expo.

Sam:  I have it.

Janet:  You do!?

Sam:  I have it stuck between the pages of my trade.

Janet:  You’re a completest.

Sam:  Well when I go to a convention, the first thing I do is go and find you and Ronn, and then I buy everything new that you can sell me.

Janet:  Well, it’s not going to be new to you, but for most people it will be new.  There’s also a story that was in a Friends of Lulu collection, which was “I Was a Teen-aged Love Zombie!”

Sam:  Was there a movie called I Was a Teen-aged Zombie?

Janet:  There may have been.

Sam:  Maybe that’s what I’m thinking of.

Janet:   “I Was a Teen-aged Love Zombie!” is a Destine-Grayce story.  It was done more in an animation style.  For awhile I was flipping back and forth, and I was doing a bit of the traditional romance style and then I was doing more of a Bruce Timm style.  I’ve sort of gone back to the romance style again.  So there’s going to be some of the newer romance stuff, as well as some never-before-seen material and some lesser-seen stuff.  It’s going to be a very comprehensive serialization. The stories are six to eight pages usually, so they’ll be posting a little each day.  The nice part is that it’s part of the free viewing. The website, www.MyRomanceStory.com, generally does novellas that are more in the traditional romance style, and a lot of them are by subscription only.  But they also offer previews and free views for some stories.

Sam:  So why is Eternal Romance available for free?

Janet:  I’m there to bring people to the site, to discover www.MyRomanceStory.com, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Eternal Romance and to discover romance comics on the web.  I see it as a way to expose my work to a larger audience and to a new generation of readers.  It’s also a different kind of reader that reads comics on the web, and it’s a good way to reach that audience.  There is also a link to my website (www.best-destiny.com) and to my eBay store, so people can buy the printed copies if they want to.

Sam:  So it’s a good way to promote your work.  So besides the Eternal Romance realization, do you have any other projects in the works?

Janet:  Yes and no.

Sam:  Let me guess.  You can’t talk about them

Janet:  Well, I don’t want to jinx anything! You’re aware that I was writing Elvira, Mistress of the Dark for six years.  I just want to say that it was a pleasure working with Claypool Comics and Richard Howell, my editor.  The last two issues are coming out in January and February 2007, and I have stories in both of those.  It was a wonderful experience and a really good place to learn the craft as well.  When you’re a writer or an artist, the best way to learn the craft is to do it.  And when you’re writing and working with an editor, you’re only going to get better. It is interesting, though, because I go back and I look at Eternal Romance and I think, okay, how would I do that now?  You can benefit from all the things that you’ve learned, but I am happy to say that I think the material does hold up.

Sam:  Well, it’s fun stuff.  It’s very tongue-in-cheek.

Janet:  Richard Howell was aware of my Eternal Romance work, so when I was able to pitch him some ideas to him, he was aware of my writing, which helps.  When you’re pitching ideas to editors and they don’t know who you are, it’s hard.  It’s difficult enough when an artist has a portfolio and editors can judge your art immediately, but when you’re a writer, how do they know until they’ve read some of your work?  So that was very fortunate.  I obviously do enjoy writing humour, although I’d like to write something different.  I do like writing straight stuff as well.

Sam:  Is there anything in the works in your head?

Janet:  Yes.  When I was at Mid-Ohio-Con, I did get a chance to meet with DC editor Bob Shreck, who has moved over to Vertigo, so I’m going to send some ideas his way.  Who knows what’s going to happen?

Sam:  I’ve met you at numerous conventions now.  How important are conventions in what you do?

Janet:  I love conventions.  As I mentioned, I was organizing conventions at one time.  I think they are very important in terms of getting out there and getting seen by people, and getting your work seen. It’s funny, because now I’m on the other side of the table.  When I first started going, I was a fan and I did all the fan stuff, the masquerade and volunteering and all that stuff.  Now that I’m on the other side of the table as a creator, I really appreciate when people come and talk to me, and when people go through all the trouble to find copies of past work.  They come with Amazing Heroes or the Canada Post superhero comic (Perf & Gauge).  In a way, it boosts the ego.

Sam:  Well how many people have brought you the Justice League of America or Batman Family drawings?  Has there been anybody besides me?

Janet:  Yeah, there have been.  They bring the Batman Family issue where I redesigned Robin’s costume and have him wearing bell-bottoms. 

Sam:  I had to buy an entire set of Batman Family comics just to get that one issue.

Janet:  No, no, no!  Don’t tell me that.  But I was one of those people that were always writing letters.  I was really into it.

Sam:  I would have never noticed that JLA drawing if you hadn’t put the Black Canary in it.

Janet:  Yes.  We love Black Canary.

Sam:  Yes we do.

Janet:  Ronn and I find that we are looking at the conventions we attend a little more closely these days, because we want to reach new audiences.  However, we love Toronto; we keep going back year after year.  Ronn is from Toronto, so there is a family connection.  We hadn’t been to the Mid-Ohio-Con in some time, so we really wondered how good of a show it was going to be.  As it turned out, it was a real good show for making professional connections, because you had more access. And we had more time to talk to fans, too.

Sam:  Well, I only went to one show this year, which was the Paradise Con (Toronto Comicon) in Toronto, which I had never attended before, and I think it’s the best convention I ever went to.  It was so laid back and you could just sit around and actually talk to everyone.

Janet:  That was a really good show too, because we had the Women of Comics symposium. 

Sam:  That’s right.  You moderated the panels for that.

Janet:  That was a wonderful opportunity to have more women creators in the spotlight.  What was nice was that they weren’t the traditional “Women in Comics” panels as if we were another kind of species or something.  We were professionals in the comic field, and we happen to be women. 

Sam:  Now as you know, I am a HUGE fan of your art and I have a fairly large collection of original commissions from you that all hang in my home, framed.  Well that’s what originally drew me to you, because I remember looking through your portfolio and thinking that we were on the same page with the characters.  I was a DC kid too, and my main interest seems to be in female characters.  I was just wondering what is the oddest piece somebody ever had you draw – weirdest character or thing?

Janet:  I draw a lot of existing characters; I draw Supergirl and Wonder Woman.  I love drawing Wonder Woman, Black Canary and all those traditional heroes.  But sometimes I do my own characters, and I’ll draw fairies and princesses, and sometimes they have different skin colours.  Well, I guess I had done one that was sort of an elf character.  She was green, and had large ears, and somebody came by and looked at it and said, “I really like that, but can you draw one of these for me” but she’s diseased and got spots all over?”  I may have done it.  I don’t recall, but that was odd.

Sam:  Doesn’t our subculture scare you sometimes?

Janet:  On the whole, I’ve got to admit that I’m very fortunate.  I don’t get people coming up to me and wanting me to draw Supergirl naked or Wonder Woman and the Huntress in a seductive pose together.  I don’t get those kinds of requests.  I get very straight, very traditional and very heroic requests.  Or very fun requests like the ones you ask me to do.  I enjoy doing them.

Sam:  I think part of it is if you look through your portfolio the work is straight and is heroic and has a real fun, and even cute, quality to it. 

Janet:  Somebody was saying to me that all my characters are smiling, and if you look at all the characters on the comics racks, they all look like they need constipation medicine.  They’re all grimacing. Somebody else described my art work as “old school” and guess it’s true.  I really am rooted in that 60s and 70s type of illustration. That’s the way I draw.  As I said, I had a flirtation with the Bruce Timm animation style, which I still enjoy doing because it’s so clean, and I love the clean lines.

Sam:  Do you have any dream projects or wish list that you wish you could do?

Janet:  Oh.  Dream projects.  Well, you know, it would be wonderful to do something about Supergirl or something about Wonder Woman.  I don’t know if I want to do the current ones.  I don’t feel a connection as much with them.  Supergirl is Kara again apparently but she’s got the little skimpy outfit and she’s a teen-ager.

Sam:  I refer to her as Britney-El.

Janet:  And Wonder Woman, from my understanding, has killed someone.

Sam:  Well, you know in the pages of 52 they brought back Egg Fu.

Janet:  They did?

Sam:  Egg Fu is one of the main villains.

Janet:  I think Egg Fu is just hilarious!

Sam:  Egg Fu is one of my favourite silver age villains.  Hey!  Do you think next time we meet you can draw me a picture of Wonder Woman, Black Canary and Zatanna fighting Egg Fu?

Janet:  The old Egg Fu or the new one?

Sam:  The old Egg Fu.

Janet:  That would be fun!  Didn’t Egg Fu have a brother?

Sam:  I don’t know.

Janet:  We were talking about this at Mid-Ohio-Con.  He had a brother and his brother fought the Metal Men or something. This is why I love comics.  They’re just so funny.  I love the Legion of Super-Pets.  I would love to do a Legion of the Super-Pets comic! I have another character I’d like to write about, but…

Sam:  We’re gonna keep that one under your hat?

Janet:  Yeah, because actually I just started doing some research on it.

Sam:  Well I have one final question.  Now I’ve asked a lot of creators this but it has been said that the comic book industry is dying.  What’s your opinion on that?

Janet:  I don’t know if it’s dying as much as it’s evolving.  We’re seeing more comics moving onto the web.  I think the web is an unexpected new medium.  I don’t know how much longer comics in the pulp magazine form will remain.  They’ve been saying it’s going to die of for years and years and years, and it’s still around, although it’s certainly not as healthy as it was in its heyday. But look at all the graphic novels that you can get now in the libraries.  Now you can get them in the bookstores.  We were talking about that some years back, and now it’s starting to happen.  Now kids are starting to get their hands on them again. I think that’s what important is the new generation not only reading comic books, but reading at all, because they are growing up with TV and the Internet and gaming and all that.  But the whole idea of stories and pictures is going to stick around.

Sam:  Do you find that the tendency for the comic industry to write comics as an adult medium hinders kids from getting into comics?

Janet:  I think part of it is the content, but a lot of it is the accessibility.  As I said, when I was a kid, I could just walk into the corner store and pick up a comic book, and now you can’t really do that.  It’s somewhat encouraging because I do notice some corner stores carrying them again, but they are definitely in the bookstores and they are definitely in the libraries. I remember one wonderful moment, and Ronn was there.  There’s a bookmobile that comes to a mall near us, and that’s where Ronn goes to get our library books.  Ronn was walking up the stairs to get the books that we ordered and there’s a kid coming down the stairs, bouncing down the stairs, with a big grin on his face, holding an Essential Fantastic Four.  Ronn looks down at him and says, “I’ve read that one.  That’s a great one!” Those are classic stories.  They definitely hold up, and they are going to appeal to kids.  I think that there should be comics geared to all age groups. 

Sam:  Well I guess that it.  I’m not going to keep you much longer, but thank you so much for talking with me today, Janet.  Hopefully I’ll see you at a convention in 2007 or sometime!

Janet:  Well, if you ever come to Ottawa, you’ll have to come and visit.

Sam:  I would love that.  I am in Ottawa every now and then.

Janet:  Are you?  Well, call us!

Sam:  I definitely will!

Janet:  Come and see the studio!

Sam:  Next time, I’ll make sure I call.  Well, thanks again, Janet!

Janet:  You have a good evening.  Bye now.

Thus ended my conversation with probably once of my very favorite reoccurring convention guests.  Janet’s strip is still being serialized at www.MyRomanceStory.com.  Check out the site.  It’s an interesting project.  Also, Janet’s collected trade paperback of “Eternal Romance” is available through her web-site   It’s a clever and whimsical read so make sure to check it out.  Finally, if you see Janet and Ronn at a convention near you this year make sure to stop at their table, buy their stuff and check out their art.  Its the first thing I do every convention I go to.