Let's Make Comics Interviews: Melissa Sayen

In this first installment of our interview series, we sit down with the founder of Let’s Make Comics: artist, podcast host, and recreational axe-thrower Melissa Sayen.

Let’s Make Comics: What inspired you originally to put together a comics group?

Melissa Sayen: I ran a sketch group meetup in Dallas and when I moved to Chicago I looked around for something similar. I found a brand new comic group on Meetup and went to their first meeting (at AlleyCat!) - it was a lot of fun, but the organizer vanished and there weren’t any more meetings. It was disappointing because I really liked the idea. Comic making can be very solitary and I wanted something to get me out of the apartment and to meet new art friends. So I started my own group on Meetup.

How did that first meeting go?
I honestly don’t remember? Not particularly well, I bet—for the first couple of years, I was lucky if more than one person showed up at a meetup, or if someone showed up more than once. I started the group in 2013, and it didn’t really take off until 2015.

That's hard to imagine, since the group was really thriving by the time I got involved [in the fall of 2017]! Do you think it just took time to find the right people, or did you have to make some changes to the format of the meeting?
Our format hasn’t changed much—the Tuesday night meetups have always been our primary event. I think it was a combination of things:
1) We didn’t have a lot of resources to attract members. I didn’t have money, or connections, or a snazzy space (it took a while just to figure out where the good library study rooms were). All I had was time and the stubbornness to keep scheduling meetups. Time and stubbornness are good foundations, but they take a while to grow into something.
2) The comic industry shifted. Webcomics and indie comics started thriving, publishers started opening graphic novel divisions, manga moved out of its bust phase. Attendees went from the occasional dude who wanted to draw superheroes to all kinds of folks who wanted to draw all kinds of things. More and more people realized they could make comics and started looking around for a community.

And there I was, waiting!

You say "waiting," but really, you were doing work that whole time, persisting with the Meetup group and making yourself visible. Do you think that was part of the driving force of that industry change? A lot of people like you making a space in the comics world?
‘Like me’ feels a bit strong, but I do think I was part of a wave—a huge number of folks who discovered manga in the early 2000s and realized there was way more to comics than cape books. Those people started making their own work which, combined with the unprecedented visibility the internet gave us, started to move the industry.

Let's Make Comics is gearing up for our sixth comic anthology. How did the first one come about?
It was February 1st, 2015—Hourly Comic Day. The group, which was a decent size at that point, met up at the Panera across from the Art Institute. We talked a lot about comics and one of the guys, John, suggested doing an anthology. I’d wanted to do a group project for a while, so I ran with it! Mars wasn’t fancy—1-2 pages a person, half letter size, printed at FedEx and hand assembled by the group—but a lot of love went into it. About half the participants are still active group members, which is pretty good!

Fun fact: Feb 1st 2015 was also the day of the 5th largest Chicago blizzard, which cut our meetup a little short. Getting home was an adventure.

How has the anthology experience changed over the years? Do you think the books themselves reflect this?
They’ve definitely gotten more complicated! Adding a Kickstarter triples the amount of work involved. But we’ve also gotten better at making them, so maybe it evens out. The biggest change to the books themselves has been upping the page size (half page to 8.5x11) and upping the page count per story. This has literally given folks more space to explore the themes for each book.

Has running the group changed the way you read comics? Or the way you make them?
I don’t think it’s changed the way I read comics, really. It’s changed the way I make comics in that I do occasionally make them, these days. At least once a year!

What are some of the biggest challenges you've run into over the course of Let's Make Comics?
My biggest challenges have been learning to delegate, and its pair, learning to lead an admin team. I ran the group solo for...five years? And then brought some folks in but didn’t give them much to do. I came very, very close to burning out after the 2018 anthology, and I’ve been trying to do better since. It’s a work in progress!

What are you most excited about for the group over the next year?
I’m excited about the anthology - each one has been full of unique stories and I can’t wait to see what folks do this year. I’m also excited to see folks in person again, but the group’s adaption to a digital community has been really heartening and I hope we can keep that up going forward.

Excerpt from “Bittersweet Blue” by Melissa Sayen