My name is Michelle Spadafore and I love making comics. I consider myself a comic book writer. But I also draw, ink, color, and letter comics. Inking and lettering are the most fun parts of the process. Writing goes the fastest and drawing the slowest. A lot slower. I always have a pile of scripts waiting to be drawn.
How did I start making comics? Well, zines came first. Short for magazine, zines are self-publications motivated by a desire for self-expression more than profit. Zines cover a myriad of topics from music to gender identity, from poetry to bike repair tips. If you’d like to know more, a good starting point is Stolen Sharpie Revolution.
My original zine, Haiku & Holga, contains haiku and 35 mm photos taken on a Holga camera with a focus on texture, form, and color. I started the zine after finding inspiration at the 2013 Brooklyn Zine Fest. My zine-making is also inspired by my grandmother. She was a poet, a painter, and a ceramicist. She made little booklets full of poems and drawings. We’d go to her local copy shop and post office to send them out to friends and family. I compiled her collected works into a book called A Reflected Life.
More zines followed. Urban Ephemera I and II collect graffiti found in New York City and Europe. Into the Greenwood has scenes from the cemetery in Brooklyn and Dem Bones takes you inside Muséum national d’histoire naturelle in Paris. 22 Colour Photographs riffed off of 122 Colour Photographs by Danish photographer Keld Helmer-Petersen. A haiku chapbook, New York City Haiku, contains my collected haiku. It’s available online, as is Objects at Rest, a mystery novella set in NYC.
I’ve been attending zine fests for years and saw other folks making comics. The comics were imperfect. Sometimes the art was very rough, but they had heart and something to say. I realized you didn’t have to be able to do fine art to make comics. You just had to have a story to tell.
I wrote my first comic book script for a queer noir comic called The Dame Vanishes. I’d never drawn anything in my life, but I wanted to make that script into a comic. So I drew it. And then I made the next one and the one after that. A new comic is always in the works like Rise of the Terrible Lizard (variant Riso cover featured below).
