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In “Kimmie66,” writer/artist Aaron Alexovich gives DC Comics’ Minx line a science fiction edge, but he uses it to investigate all the issues of teen identity and coming-of-age against a social backdrop that any of the other titles might tackle — these are, after all, the major themes in any fiction of any medium geared towards the high school set. Alexovich does something different, though — he transposes the school setting into a futuristic cyber setting that offers up the ultimate cliques, as well investigates the rigors of hiding behind your public persona.

Fresh from his honeymoon, Alexovich took some time to discuss the issues raised in the age of the Internet — and his own scuffles in networked culture.

SB: You use virtual reality type stuff – nowadays it would be Internet communities – for the same purpose as a high school in any of the other books. What’s your personal interaction with that world?

AA: I didn’t do a whole lot of research because if you’re young enough, you’re doing research your entire life as far as the Internet goes. I do have some really strange experiences with the Internet. My first book “Serenity Rose,” it was a Web comic to begin with. The conceit of the series was that this was Serenity Rose’s actual journal, so I would go online and interact pretending to be Serenity Rose. I guess I have a little bit of experience with playing with identity in an online context — and actually this is the first time I’m thinking of the connection between that and “Kimmie66.” It’s really funny.

SB: Were people you were interacting with playing a role too? Or did you get the sense that they didn’t quite understand it was really you?

AA: I really did, it’s really bizarre. You would think that obviously, this person doesn’t have supernatural powers, it’s kind of bizarre, but I think a lot of people did take it very seriously. When I finally said, “I’m not actually that person, this is my real name,” a lot of them got really, really angry. I think they were mostly angry because I was a man. I don’t know why you’d make the assumption that I wasn’t. Obviously everything about the whole deal was just made up. It’s interesting how people — in an online context — get drawn into it. It’s like the dividing lines between fiction and reality get blurred in a way that they wouldn’t in the real world.

SB: My impression is that a lot of people may recognize that sort of thing as false but they’re happy to give themselves to it.

AA: Like they want so badly for that reality to be true that they decide to just embrace it online and say “Here online, it will be true.” That could be.

SB: Being online is becoming an important center of socialization for many people — it creates for some really odd friendships. In the book, you really do examine what a relationship is when you don’t really know who’s on the other end.

AA: That’s the central theme of the book — you can think that you know someone really, REALLY well, but if it’s all based on what is essentially a set of lies, how well can you know them without knowing the specifics of their real life? Their personality might come through, but is that the most important thing about identity?

In Telly’s case, the reason she’s the central character, and why I think she’s strong and different in this world, is that she’s the same online and off. She doesn’t even change her avatar; she’s the same person. Kimmie, you’re not even sure about through the whole book and even in the end, I don’t exactly reveal everything about Kimmie. You don’t know — she tries to come across as very strong online, but the only thing you really find out at the end is that she wasn’t ever really that strong. That’s all I reveal about her identity and that’s all Telly could really find out. That’s probably true online now — how much digging can you possibly do about someone?

SB: I imagine these are the sorts of questions that people ask themselves— especially kids who are just developing these skills.

AA: Not quite as much now, but in the future, people will be growing up in more and more unreal environments and they’re defining themselves based on these strange fabricated environments. What kind of personalities are going to come out of that is really hard to say.

SB: It’s hard enough to know a person completely when you’re sitting next to them.

AA: Oh, yeah, even in real life it’s hard to say, but you’re putting up these walls of fantasy, it seems like it would be more difficult. Then again, maybe it wouldn’t, maybe which fantasies people are selecting says more about them at anything else.

SB: When you were putting the story together in your head, were you starting out with the virtual reality thing, or the teen thing, or how were you coming to it?

AA: I didn’t really put in a whole lot of thought into the notion of the teen angle, I don’t think. When my editor was asking me for book pitches, I grabbed the first two that I was excited about doing, I didn’t really give a whole lot of thought to the fact that they’re putting together this teen line. It was really all about the virtual reality Internet exploration. I was thinking along the lines of Second Life and World of Warcraft and people I know who have been in those kinds of MMORPG virtual world things. It just seemed like it was changing their personalities in some way. In World of Warcraft, for instance, you get these people who are the geeks who are picked on in school and all of a sudden they put on an ogre avatar and they’re the mean jock who’s pushing everyone around. It’s interesting to think about how identity changes that way.

SB: So the teenage stuff just came along as you worked on it?

AA: I guess so. The character was always going to be a teenage girl, but it’s not like I sat down and said that I’m really going to get inside the head of teenagers, I just thought about if I were that age and I were in that situation, how would I react? I think that’s how you have to approach writing, instead of molding something to a specific audience, otherwise it can seem really, really forced.

SB: Do the editors at Minx give many guidelines for the audience they’re targeting or dos and don’ts?

AA: There were any dos and don’ts or anything, they just said that this book line is going to target teenagers in general, but teen girls specifically — but other than that, there weren’t any kind of guidelines at all. Not even language guidelines or content guidelines. I think if I had pushed things too far, they would have said, “We probably shouldn’t do this,” but at the time I was writing, I had pretty much total freedom. I don’t really sense from any of the books that it was some sort of compromised vision, I think there all pretty much what the artists and writers intended, which is pretty much all you want out of a publisher.

SB: You haven’t done much in the way of typical, male-oriented comic book work — it seems like you’re starting to specialize in female characters.

AA: I don’t know where that comes from. I actually think about that question a lot. I don’t know why all of my characters wind up being females. Even all the pitches I’m working on has a female lead. I don’t know what that says about me. Nothing bad. It’s never really been a conscious thought, I’ve never really sat down to think that it would be more interesting with a female in this situation, I just always start with a female character. It could be that I’m so not obsessed with gender questions — it could be just something as stupid as it’s more fun to draw a female character. It’s not like I’m drawing something like Adam Hughes, crazy pin-up girls or anything. But since I’m not really dealing with those questions of gender head on as much, I’d just as soon draw a female character.

This entry was posted by John on Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 at 9:13 am and is filed under Book articles, Comics articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.