GIR Jem and the Holograms

Kelly Thompson: The lesson I hope is still put yourself into it, but understand that there's no way to please everyone and at the same time, try your best to listen to the complaints and to learn. Not all of them are going to be valid, but plenty of them are and we can only learn and do better. Jamie Broadnax: Welcome back to Get It Right, the podcast exploring the intersection of pop culture and social justice. I am your host, Jamie Broadnax the founder and editor of Black Girl Nerds.com and host of the BGN Podcast. We had such a great experience talking with G Willow Wilson about Ms Marvel and the comics world in general that we wanted to continue exploring what getting it right in comics look like. Joining us today are Kelly Thompson and Sophie Campbell, the writer and artist team who created the new Jem and the Holograms comic. I know. You might be thinking, "Wasn't Jem a toy from the 1980's?" but folks, Jem the comic is where it's at. Let me tell you, from its body-positive characters to its stories about trans identity and queerness, Jem is as progressive as it is entertaining. Don't believe me? Well, keep listening. I think you will. Thank you guys so much for coming on our show. Very excited to talk to the team behind the Jem and the Holograms comic book, by IDW Publishing. Can you introduce yourselves so listeners can match the voice with the person? Sophie Campbell: Yeah, so I'm Sophie. I drew Jem and yeah, I guess that's it. Kelly Thompson: You didn't really just draw Jem. She did The Incredible White Moon. I'll do it for her. Sophie Campbell: All right. Kelly Thompson: The incredible Wet Moon. She does Shadoweyes. She does Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and she drew Jem for about half of our run. She did 12 issues, and of course because she did the opening, she designed all those characters, she set the standard, she set the bar to which whenever she's not able to draw we're always aiming for. She's incredible. Sophie Campbell: Aw. Thanks, Kelly. You're so good at that. Kelly Thompson: I am Kelly Thompson. I write the ongoing Jem and the Holograms. I'm also writing the upcoming Misfits spin-off that comes out in December. I've also written A Force and I'm writing an upcoming Hawkeye that's coming out. Some people, very few of them, might know me from Heart in a Box which is a graphic novel I did with the current Jem artist, Meredith McClaren. We did that a couple of years ago. Yeah, I just launched a new create your own series called Mega Princess that, if you can believe it, dropped the day after the election, which seemed like the worst day ever to care about comic books but it is pretty joyous and happy. So if you need something light an uplifting, pick it up. Jamie Broadnax: Well, you know what? I have to say comics are a great way to escape and I see so many people comment to me about how they got into comics and even so much as to say, "Hey, comic books have saved my life." The work that you're doing is very important and I think right now a lot of people are turning to Jem and the Holograms as well as many other comic books to escape the craziness of what's happening in our political climate. Thank you for your work. Kelly Thompson: Thank you. Jamie Broadnax: Now, this might surprise the uninitiated, but Jem and the Holograms might be the most progressive comic on the market. Can you give our listeners an overview of the series and how it came to exist? This question is for the both of you. Kelly Thompson: Jem and the Holograms is basically an adaptation, a re-imagining, of the 1980's cult cartoon show, Jem and the Holograms which was basically a show for kids that's a fascinating mixture of romance. The song is fashion, adventure, and fame. Glitter, fashion, adventure, and fame. Something like that. That's really what it is because it's the story of these four foster sisters who are in a band and who get ahold of this crazy hologram technology called Synergy. The show seems like it would just be this weird romance show, but it's got this completely awesome sci-fi angle to it and they have these antagonists. Another band called The Misfits. It's just about the push and pull of these women's lives, so for our book we just took all of that and updated it to modern time. Then made some tweaks to some diversity issues to make it fit more in 2015, which was when it started. Sophie Campbell: I think Kelly and I heard about it simultaneously from our different editors and we were both like, "Who's editing Jem? Put me in contact with this person," and Kelly and I just put together a pitch. I remember Kelly you were super nervous about it. Kelly Thompson: Well, I thought they would want Sophie for sure, but I thought our pitch was really good. I've done a lot of pitches and I put a lot of work. You end up putting so much work into a pitch that even a book you didn't think you wanted when you started, you really want it by the end because you just fall in love with it. Jem was to this day I really feel like we hit it out of the park on the pitch, so I knew the pitch was good and I knew they would want Sophie. I had given Sophie permission to do it without me if they just didn't want me because at that point even though Heart in a Box was already in process and it was going to be coming out from Dark Horse, I was able to send the editors of Jem a huge chunk a Heart in a Box to prove to them that I knew what I was doing. I had published only four pages of comics in one anthology issue, so I knew I was a huge gamble on the ticket. So I was terrified it wasn't going to work out and it was my huge big break into the industry. Of course I was terrified. Sophie was like, "We'll totally get it." Sophie Campbell: Yeah, I've had a ton of rejected pitches over the years. Mostly from DC. Page 2 of 11 Kelly Thompson: Me too. Sophie Campbell: I'm extremely used to being rejected on pitches, but I don't know. I just knew. Jamie Broadnax: I'm curious. Can you walk us through what a pitch is? What is the process of doing that in front of comic book publisher? Sophie Campbell: It's basically a nightmare. Kelly Thompson: Sophie and I spent a lot of time talking about it. What we wanted it to be, what we were interested in, what we thought the themes were and everything. Then I started pulling stuff together for what I thought the first arc was. Who we basically thought these characters were. While I was doing that, Sophie was doing a Pizzazz. She did a Pizzazz image and a Jem image to both show them how she wanted to do it, what it was going to look like, and they also had her amazing fan art that had come out a few years before. Sophie Campbell: Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. Kelly Thompson: They sort of knew how she would approach it, but we took a little more realistic angle than Sophie's fan art, so she drew up a more realistic approach to that, but that also included how our approach to the music was going to be. Not fully, but you could see it within those images how we were going to approach it and the colors and everything. In that pitch we also included because we knew there were a lot of characters, and there was going to be a lot of breakdown, there was going to be a lot of stuff that we wanted to change but still hold onto the spirit of it. Body diversity was really important to us. Right out of the gate we requested that Jetta be black, which was actually a thing that was supposed to be in the original show, but put the kibosh on. We both felt really strongly that she should be there from the beginning. The Misfits were lily-white otherwise and I feel like that's my favorite thing that we've done of anything because Jetta's secretly one of my favorite characters. Especially she and Roxy together and their villainous BFF thing. I just love it so much. I totally want to write a spin-off of them causing mischief. Yeah, there were things like that within it, nut then there were also more broad- stroke things like, "Here are the themes," and we outlined lightly in summary what the first arc was going to be and what some of the character beats were going to be. I think we outlined the first arc that was supposed to be six issues, and then there was a summary paragraph pitch for what the next arc was supposed to be, and that was supposed to be four or five issues, and then we also talked a little bit about Dark Jem which was something we wanted to do right out of the gate.

Load more