Interviews - Liz Plourde and Randy Michaels

On this episode of The Comics Alternative Interviews Andy and Derek are pleased to have on the show Liz Plourde and Randy Michaels, the creative team behind the new self-published series, How I Made the World. Liz and Randy are winners of a 2012 Xeric Award — the last year, in fact, that the Xeric Foundation gave out grants for self-publishing comic books – and they share their experiences applying for the grant, complete with last-minute postage anxieties, and how the award helped to propel their project both financially and for marketing purposes. The Two Guys ask them about the genesis of the series, the protagonist’s links to Liz’s own life experiences, Randy’s artistic inspirations, how the two of them actually met, their marketing strategies for the title, the reasons behind their choosing to self publish, and what the two of them might have in store for future issues of the series. (They already have a lot of material for issue #2 of How I Made the World!) At one point, Derek goes off the deep end with his in-depth Freudian reading of the issue’s core story, “The Monster,” but Andy chooses to stay in more formalistic territory…while both Liz and Randy sit back, amused at their academic antics. How I Made the World is a wonderful new title that might fly under the radar of many readers, which is all the more reason to listen to this engaging interview with the creators. It should inspire you to go out and get a copy.