Kate Leth and Matt Cummings Introduce Magical Girls, Guys, Moms and Fish in Power Up

Comics Features

The BOOM! Box imprint has been a source of some downright gleeful comic books in recent years, melding the well-established vibe and polish of the publisher’s cartoon tie-in books with brand-spanking new stories from fresh voices. The latest title to join the ranks of Lumberjanes, Teen Dog and The Midas Flesh is Power Up, written by Valkyries founder and Edward Scissorhands writer Kate Leth, and drawn and colored by magical new talent Matt Cummings.

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Power Up stars a much more eclectic cast than the Magical Girl anime that helped inspire it, and feels like the cool Canadian cousin to Cartoon Network tearjerker Steven Universe—which should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Leth’s work on the Bravest Warriors and Adventure Time comics. Cummings taps into the book’s animated spirit with exaggerated expressions, diverse character designs and cosmic colors that would make Sailor Moon proud.

With Power Up’s debuting yesterday, Paste spoke with Leth (via Skype) and Cummings (via email) to discuss the book’s reluctant cast, ‘90s Magical Girl inspiration, and the awesomeness of Kevin’s sparkly dress.
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Paste: Power Up is your first long-form original print project for both of you. Has it been challenging to introduce a concept from the ground up and adopt a more patient pacing?
Kate Leth: I got into comics writing licensed properties with Adventure Time. The first thing I ever did long-form was a graphic novel, which was crazy, because most people don’t start with something that big! But I was already a fan. Same thing with Edward Scissorhands. I tend to only pick things that I really love and that I’m familiar with, because I’ve been offered characters or properties before where I just think, You know, I’m not the best person to bring a voice to this.

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Power Up Interior Art by Matt Cummings

But you do have an established world and the audience knows the world. It’s not that it’s easier [with established properties], but it’s very different. When you have your own properties and your own characters, you have to establish that world and give people enough without telling them everything, and give them a reason to keep reading. It’s a challenge. Matt and I have been figuring it out as we go. He and I talk about it a lot, how much we’re going to reveal as we go. It’s fun.

Matt Cummings: Long-form projects have been a learning experience, for sure. The hardest part is waiting to show people. I’ve been used to immediate feedback in the past, but now I have to wait patiently for months and months before I can show off all my work.

On the formatting side of print, I count myself very lucky that I fell into a crowd a few years ago that was very active in the print comics/zine scene. I had no clue how print/CMYK/proper formatting worked before then as I’ve always been a primarily digital artist. They taught me a lot about future-proofing your work, even if it’s just for web at the time. You never know when something will be put in a book later!

Paste: The four core cast members of Power Up aren’t friends or even acquaintances when the series opens, and are at different stages of their lives. How easily do they adjust to being thrown together in this strange situation?
Leth: It’s very much dependent on their personalities. I think Amie has the hardest time because that’s not the kind of person that she is at all. She’s not a wallflower, but she goes with the flow. She’s an art school grad working retail. She’s not the kind of person who would ever volunteer to lead a group or be the star of a play, so I think it’s harder for her. Kevin is very chill, so he gets this crazy mystical costume and these typically feminine powers, but he’s pretty cool, he goes along with it. [Laughs] He adapts pretty quickly. And Sandy is a mom of teens, so she’s used to having some crazy stuff thrown at her. It becomes more that Kevin and Sandy can handle it better than Amie, so they all help each other as the series goes along. And Silas is a fish. [Laughs]

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Power Up Interior Art by Matt Cummings

Paste: I know fans online have already asked for assurance that Kevin, the washed-up, bearded young guy, won’t be played for stereotypical dude-in-a-dress jokes. Can you talk a little about your inspiration for his character and the choice to stick someone like Kevin in the most traditional “Magical Girl” outfit out of the team?
Leth: I’ve talked about this a bit before, but I do think it’s important to make it clear that he’s not a joke, and I never intend to play him as the butt of a joke. I don’t even want to see him mocked or made fun of because we see that so much. I want him to be a powerful character and an empowered character.

Strangely enough, the inspiration was when I was at Calgary Expo last year. There were a lot of little boys who came up to buy Lumberjanes and were really into it, and not put off at all that it was a comic all about girls. And I worked in a comic book store and sold Strawberry Shortcake and My Little Pony to so many boys who loved that kind of thing. I realized that that thing where women can be dressed as men, can be dressed in armor and these flight suits like Captain Marvel (which is not a very masculine costume but you know what I mean), that’s all seen as powerful. But when men wear traditionally feminine costumes, it’s not seen as powerful, and I kind of wanted to challenge that.

We’re not trying to make a progressive political statement with the comic, but we thought it’d be cool to have a character who embodies those traits and is comfortable with them and likes them. And he’s cool! And neat. And fun. I understand the concern and I know why people would be worried because we are so used to seeing a guy in a dress and it’s supposed to be funny, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I know men who wear traditionally feminine clothing, I know nonbinary and trans people who dress however they like. I just wanted to have a character that shows everyone, not just little boys, that it’s fine to wear a dress, it’s fine to wear pink and sparkles and still be a rad superhero.

When we first came up with Kevin, we talked about him being really shocked by the costume and having to adjust to it, but the more we talked about it, we realized it made a better statement and was more interesting if he was okay with it. That sets a better precedent. Maybe it’s not as relatable right off the bat for most people who would be uncomfortable with that, but that’s okay. [Laughs] I think people are going to read it waiting for someone to make fun of him, but I don’t intend for that to happen. And if anything did happen, you can pretty much bet that the rest of the characters would come to his defense.

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Power Up Interior Art by Matt Cummings

Paste: Amie is the focus of the first issue—will she be our viewpoint character for the whole series, or can we expect to experience Power Up from Silas’ perspective?
Leth: Silas…there’s going to be a treat at one point with him. It does shift perspective and there are moments with the characters away from Amie, but she is our entry point. In Steven Universe, Steven is the main character, but he’s also not. In Sailor Moon, you meet all the different scouts and their lives. So Amie is sort of our protagonist, but Kevin, Sandy and Silas are all important.

Paste: Matt, you’re handling art from top to bottom. The first thing the reader sees when he or she cracks open the first issue is a gorgeous—and ominous—cosmic spread, and the colors in particular are stunning throughout. What informed your designs for the series? Do any major inspirations stand out for you?
Cummings: First of all, thank you!! I thought long and hard about that first page, as it sets up the cosmic scale of the series. The look of that page and so much of the series at large is informed by ‘90s anime, Sailor Moon and Cardcaptor Sakura in particular. I love the bright, poppy pastels and dreamy washes those series used and I’ve been trying to bring some of that to the backgrounds in Power Up!

Paste: Kate, what do you want to say about Matt’s contribution to the series, and your first collaboration together?
Leth: I have always wanted to work with Matt. We’ve been friends for a couple years, live in the same province, have met a bunch of times and I loved the covers that he did for a lot of different BOOM! properties. I love his sense of color. He loves that old traditional Sailor Moon scenery and cell-shading, and I love how his art looks like animation. When you read the comic, it looks like a cartoon. It’s so animated and so lovely, and it really works for the series.

In my head, I’m writing it like a cartoon. It’s very episodic, and there’s a monster of the week in each issue, but there’s also an overarching story. I can’t say enough good things about his art, and each time I get a finished piece in my inbox, I swoon and swoon. [Laughs] Power Up wouldn’t be what it is without Matt, and I definitely write for his art. He’s so great. Matt’s colors, how they change every time you flip the page—there’s a scheme for each set of pages, but when you read it in a PDF, you don’t even realize—I was flipping through and going, Ugh, he’s such a genius, this is so good. [Laughs] And I love his faces, they’re so silly. It’s a total joy to work together.

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Paste: Speaking of monsters of the week, the evil alien that shows up in the first issue has a really striking, scary design and way of speaking. What went into designing the baddies for the book?
Cummings: The baddies in Power Up are all very unique from issue to issue, but are connected by a common thread of being drawn to our heroes. They come from many different places and backgrounds, so it’s been a fun job bringing each one to life. Kate is very involved in the design of the opponent characters—she loves scary stuff, turns out!!

Leth: I don’t want to give too much away because part of it is a secret that’s going to unfold, but the monsters in every issue are going to be very different. In shows like Sailor Moon, they were all similar: disguised as a human, sapping the energy, you can count on that. But these are wildly, wildly different, as if they were almost from different books or different universes. We’ll find out as the story goes on why they’re so different. They don’t speak the same language, they don’t all look the same, they don’t all attack the same, and it further adds to the environment of “WHAT IS GOING ON?” (Which is basically the theme of the first issue.)

Paste: For a lot of nerds our age, Magical Girl stories like Sailor Moon, Cardcaptor Sakura and Magic Knights of Rayearth were among our first exposures to anime and manga. Were these stories inspirational to either of you growing up? Are there any Magical Girl genre tropes you’re actively trying to reject in Power Up, or anything that stands out as a major influence on the series for you?
Cummings: Those series were all very important to me, for sure! I feel like I’ve carried so much of the aesthetic side of them with me as I’ve gotten older, and still see them as high watermarks for art/animation. The minutiae of the magics and monsters have faded from my memory, however, and left me with only how I felt about the characters when I first watched. I hope that, from my art side of things, I can leave people with a similar feeling and mood when they read Power Up! I want people to come away from the story feeling happy that they met these characters.

Leth: I think there’s a lot that we’re doing to sort of turn it on its head, where the characters are not people you’d typically see in a Magical Girl cartoon. You have a burly guy, a woman of color who is not a size two, a mom and a fish—well, there would be a fish. You can’t reject the Magical Animal, it’s one of the best parts of Magical Girl anime. My original idea was, “What if you had a Magical Girl group that wasn’t Magical Girls in the way you think of Magical Girls,” and it sort of expanded from there, challenging the way it unfolds and the way that they deal with it. It’s not just Magical Girls, it’s things like Buffy or Harry Potter too, the Chosen One. We’re sort of playing with that. What if you’re the Chosen One but you have no idea what you’re chosen for, or what to do with it, or how it works?

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Power Up Interior Art by Matt Cummings

Paste: Matt, you’re creating Power Up with Kate, who’s a talented artist in her own right. How involved has she been in design? Have you taken a more traditional writer/artist split or is the book more equally collaborative?
Cummings: Kate and I are incredibly conversational in our collaboration. We’ll bounce story and art ideas back and forth before an issue goes into full production. After that, it becomes a little more traditional. We both have a very strong shared vision for the series, so she gives me a ton of freedom when it comes to the art/panel direction of the book.

Paste: Kate, I also wanted to ask you about Ink For Beginners, the tattoo guide your wrote and illustrated. Did the experience of putting that together influence how you write for other artists, or make you want to do more long-form art in the future?
Leth: I had done my own work for a long time, but Ink For Beginners was the longest project I did on my own and it was crazy. I had never drawn a full issue of anything. I’d written plenty, but not drawn, and it is crazy how much work it is. And it’s a small book, with nowhere near as much detail as Power Up, but it definitely gives you a different understanding.

My scripts are so funny and very Canadian because they’re so apologetic. They’re full of, “There’s a crowd scene, I’m so sorry!” or “They’re on a bus, please forgive me!” [Laughs] I think writers who are also artists definitely come to it with an understanding of what’s going to be difficult and what’s going to be fun. I try to leave a lot of design choices up to Matt. If you saw Sal and his husband in the first issue, that was all Matt, and I love them. Describe the things that you know would be really confusing and let the artist kind of run free on the stuff that you know is going to be fun.

Paste: Power Up is currently a six-issue mini-series, but BOOM! has a pretty solid track record of turning successful minis into ongoings. How far out have you planned the story of Amie and the rest of the gang?
Cummings: There’s a really solid arc for the six issues, but Kate and I also crafted the universe of the books first—we could tell this story for a long while, yet!

Leth: It’s huge. We have a way to zoom out massively if we do end up going further. It’s funny, because I’m just writing the fourth issue, and the way I’m going to write the last one will obviously be very different if we find out that there’s going to be more. So it’s like, you know as much as I do how it’s going to end right now. [Laughs] But we do have a plan, we have other characters and other worlds and ideas if it does end up going on, but we promise it will be a satisfying ending if it does end at six. Or at least we hope—I guess I can’t guarantee!

I felt a lot of pressure, because it’s my first series and Matt’s first series that’s original, and you really want to bring your A-game, you know? This is sort of the thing that our work will be judged by for future projects, and I really want to do something fun. Hopefully people like it! I want to make it very clear that it is an all-ages series. I think people knowing me weren’t so sure, but it’s definitely all-ages. Someone my age or older can read it, but I think it will be fun for kids, too, because it’s so silly and weird.

Paste: Kate, you’ve been tweeting lately about supporting your friends and peers, and being happy for their successes. Are there any series or artists that you want to recommend to Power Up readers?
Leth: There are so many! There’s been a lot of talk about the lack of support of people of color creating comics and Spike Trotman, who does Smut Peddler (which I guess doesn’t really go with the all-ages stuff) was tweeting a lot of awesome webcomics by people of color and by marginalized people. If you look any of those up, there are some amazing suggestions in there. I can’t remember all of them, but I love Agents of the Realm, which is Mildred Louis’ comic. Victoria Grace Elliott’s balderdash! which is about young witches in love, and there’s a lot of baking stuff in it, which is so cute. Eth’s Skin, which is done by my friend Sfe, is a really awesome comic about selkies and nonbinary people living in a sort of fictionalized British Columbia. Melanie Gillman does an amazing comic called As The Crow Flies. Those are some of my favorites and the ones I check on most often. Melanie Gillman is also doing The Other Side, a queer paranormal romance anthology. I’m doing a story with Katie O’Neill for that that involves gay ghost girls.

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