Thanks to our mutual friend, creator Joe Corallo, I got to talk with writer Keith Frady. Keith has a new project on Kickstarter, The Usual Choices, which is a collection of short comics. You can check that out here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/keithfrady/the-usual-choices. Keith is the winner of Mad Cave’s 2022 Talent Hunt and has also written for A Wave Blue World and Source Point Press. Let’s dive into things!
Austin Allen Hamblin: How did you start reading comics and what do you love about the medium?
Keith Frady: I read my Peanuts collections ragged when I was a child, but didn’t read beyond newspaper strips until I was in high school, thanks to a Christmas gift of the first Sandman volume. My brother-in-law took me to my first comic store, though we can’t recall what we got, and soon after on my own bought Scott Snyder and Jock’s first issue of their Detective Comics run. A bit of a winding road with lots of firsts–strips, series, issues–and I was something of a late bloomer, but comics helped me realize that I wanted to be a writer.
To talk about why I love the comics medium would require a full essay! At its basics, though, there’s simply an elegant strength to combining words with pictures and setting them next to each other. It’s how our brains function: parsing sensory stimuli from the world and forming it into reality. The magical gutter between panels is similar–we see the before and after image, and our brains work to put the two together. It taps into a core aspect of being a person, like film does with experiencing time, that resonates in a unique way to the human experience.
AAH: I always tell people starting out to try and do short comics first and not start with a 200 issue epic. What made you decide to start with short comics?
KF: I love short stories! I started with prose shorts first in my writing career, and in many ways I’m glad that’s where I started because it gave me a thick skin for rejection. But some of my favorite authors, like Borges or Munro, are primarily short story writers. There’s something special in short stories; they’re what you tell your friends around a campfire at night while the unseen shifts just beyond the fire glow. Short stories; big impacts.
AAH: What made you want to submit to the Mad Cave talent hunt?
KF: Mad Cave has been killing it on their creator-owned and IP titles over the last few years, and I wanted to be a part of a community fostering talent-led works. And let’s be honest, see my name on the shelves of my comic book store.
AAH: What was the process like after you found out you had won? Who did you tell first?
KF: I assume I told my partner first, but I was in a daze. I recall the email had a subject line referring to the contest, and I assumed I’d lost like I had before. Imagine my shock upon seeing the first line previewed on my phone notification said something to the effect of, “First off, congratulations!” It took a while to sink in.
AAH: What are some of your favorite short comics or anthologies?
KF: The European cartoonist Jason is one of my favorites. He is one of my favorite cartoonists. He’s so dry, insightful, and has no problem experimenting within his own self-imposed four-panel format (like sonnets). The Batman: Black and White anthologies always seemed to bring out the best in their creators, and possibly my favorite among them is an Archie Goodwin and José Muñoz comic, “The Devil’s Trumpet,” which, as the story suggests, is about a trumpet that could summon the devil. It’s an urban legend/folk tale perfectly fit for a character like Batman.
AAH: What advice would you give to a new comic creator?
KF: A piece of advice and homework. The former: your first draft will be bad. Full stop. If you’ve read someone say they only write first drafts, what they mean is that they edited as they went, or had people look at it as they went. You’ll maybe hit a homerun–amazing! You’ll still want to give it a second look. In fact, intentionally leaving parts of your draft with placeholder dialogue and descriptions is a great way to get it on the page, then fix it. And now for the homework: take your three favorite comic issues or chapters. Now reverse engineer the script from the page. How would you have described this for an artist? It’s invaluable practice.
AAH: How can people follow your work?
KF: I am on Instagram (@keith_frady) and BlueSky (@keithfrady.bsky.social)! The Usual Choices Kickstarter will go live on October 1st and last through the whole month. And immediately after that will be a second Kickstarter, a graphic novella called Good Grief, which will run for November!
AAH: Until next time, this has been another amazing interview by Austin Allen Hamblin from a cornfield in Iowa. If you are interested in following my work you can find all that info out here: https://linktr.ee/austinallenhamblin