Interview: Amanda Conner Talks About Her Latest Creator-Owned Title, SuperZero, From AfterShock Comics
If you’re looking for a new female protagonist in comics to get excited about, allow me to introduce you to Dru Dragowski from one of AfterShock Comics’ newest titles, SuperZero! Written by Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti, with art by Rafael De Latorre, it tells the story of a high school student who will go to any lengths to become the superhero the world so desperately needs. Even if she has to suffer a bunch of ant bites to do it!
Here’s the official description of the title from AfterShock:
With great power comes a bit of insanity, anxiety, and a dash of social alienation! Have you ever fantasized about being a super hero? Well Dru Dragowski does; that’s all this nineteen-year-old, comic book obsessed, high school senior thinks about. She needs to escape the normalcy of suburban life! Her plan? To become a real-life superhero by recreating the origins of her favorite comic characters! Hopefully then, she can become a hero not only for herself – but to protect everyone around her! If only that plan went just the slightest bit right…
I had the chance to chat with Amanda Conner about the wonder that is Dru, and discovered that Dru and Conner have a whole lot in common! Which is probably why I love Conner so damn much.
Teresa Jusino (TMS): I had a chance to read the first five issues of SuperZero, and [the protagonist] Dru is amazing!
Amanda Conner: (laughs) I’m glad you think so! Yeah, we really fell in love with her.
TMS: How did you come up with her? She’s so off the wall! She seems beyond, like, even Kick-Ass or something like that, where you have a kid thinking they can be a superhero. Like, she takes it next-level.
Conner: It’s funny, because Jimmy and I had this idea, I don’t know, it had to be ten or twelve years ago, and we were like Suppose you really wanted to be a superhero, but you went through all of the stuff that you read in comics, and can’t do it? (laughs) And it doesn’t really work out that well for you, because you’re just a regular human, you know? Bitten by an irradiated spider: in comics, gives you spider-like superhuman powers, but in reality you would get spider venom and radiation poisoning.
When we had tossed around the idea a long time ago, we were gonna go ridiculous with it. She was going to be doing all this stuff to herself. She was just gonna be a mess. Her hair was gonna be falling out, she was gonna have terrible skin legions…and then at a certain point Jimmy said We should probably rein this in a little bit? (laughs) I’m one to just, like, cross the line and just keep running. Jimmy’s kind of like my reality guru.
So, when we actually got the opportunity to give her life in a comic book, she’s a lot less of a mess than she was in my head ten years ago, but she’s still really interesting. We’re having a lot of fun with her.
TMS: Well, and there’s still time for her to progress. Fifteen issues in, I expect her to have skin falling off!
Conner: (laughs) We still don’t know exactly where we’re going yet, but if I have my way, yes!
TMS: Dru’s a young protagonist, and there are so many superheroes – like Peter Parker/Spider-Man to name one – where you have a high school kid coming to terms with getting powers, or wanting powers. Was she always a kid, and what made you stick with her being a teenager?
Conner: I don’t know why she started out as a teenager. I think it’s just ’cause when you’re a teenager, or a younger kid, you don’t really have that Wait a minute, this isn’t gonna work cork in your brain that tells you something is a bad idea.
A really good example, and I think Jimmy based some of this on me, when I was a little kid, both of my parents are artists, and I found some silver poster board and thought Oh my God, I can make Wonder Woman bracelets out of this! So, I did, and I either taped or stapled them on, and you’d think that would be enough, right? But no, I really wanted to be Wonder Woman. So, I had my little brother take his little plastic pellet gun and shoot me with it! Most grown-ups would be like, Oh cool, I can wear this for my Halloween costume. And that’s as far as they’ll take it. But kids are like I can really do this! I can be a superhero! Needless to say, I think I nailed maybe twenty percent of the little plastic pellets with my bracelets, but the rest of them just ricocheted off my head and neck area, and I’m so glad I still have my eyesight!
So that’s one of the reasons why it seemed more feasible that she would be a younger person.
TMS: How old is she supposed to be exactly?
Conner: Jimmy and I went back and forth about this. She’s a senior in high school, but we had her stay back. I thought she could be eighteen, but Jimmy said Maybe she’s nineteen…This is again going back to my own experience. There were so many times when I was almost left back in school. My grades could be pretty bad sometimes, but I had a little bit of an ADD thing going on, so there’s the attention span thing, and it was really hard for me to pay attention. So we thought if Dru were like that, it’d be totally feasible that she’d stay back a year. So, she’s supposed to be nineteen.
TMS: That’s one of the things that I liked about her: that she brings up the idea that traditional schooling is a waste of time for a lot of people. She seems like one of those kids that would fare a lot better doing more independent learning, but she’s stuck in a place that won’t let her not be mediocre.
Conner: That’s what we were trying to do. She is a kid that has stayed back, but she’s also super-super smart. Sometimes, schools that have a rigid curriculum don’t work for kids that are ultra-smart or ultra-creative. And that’s where Dru is at.
TMS: So, she’s nineteen, and she genuinely believes that being a superhero in this way is possible, and that there’s this huge conspiracy out there. Without spoilers, should we be thinking that there’s something wrong with her mentally? Is she gonna be proven right? What are we supposed to feel about that? What is your intention?
Conner: I was just about to say too much, and then I decided to say…you’re just gonna have to continue reading!
TMS: Of course I am… There’s a part of me that wants her to be right, and there’s a part of me that’s worried for her and her mental state. Now, the rest of the cast of characters is great too. Like Wax, the homeless guy who starts training her. Where did he come from?
Conner: He just started out as a character Dru hires to mug her parents, and then the story itself was kind of organic. Sometimes things take you in directions you didn’t want to go, and we just thought He’s such an interesting character. We can do more with him. He wasn’t planned from the very beginning, but he ended up being so cool and interesting that we wanted to keep going with him.
TMS: It’s interesting too, because — the fact that he is a homeless guy…We don’t usually get to see them being people in fiction very often.
Conner: Especially since we lived in New York for a long time…you do see a lot of homeless people, and sometimes you just sit and you go God, I wonder what their story is? Everybody’s got a story. When you’re a kid, you never think I’m gonna sleep in the street! So you think, where do they come from, and what brought them to this point? So, we wanted to explore his story a little more.
Issue #6 of SuperZero is due out in June, so you’ve got plenty of time to catch up if you haven’t checked out this book yet. Dru Dragowski is a character you’ll want to get to know!
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