Comics Artist Marie Enger with Greg Baldino

Take a little walk to the edge of town, and go across the tracks to where the Schnappviecher looms like a… well, like a Schnappviecher, and you’ll find cartoonist Marie Enger binding that prickling shiver up the back of your neck into the shape of ink on paper. Co-creator on the recent graphic novels Where Black Stars Shine with Nadia Shammas and Underworld Kingdom with Christof Bogacs, they’ve self-published a slew of mini comics and art books evoking a hauntonomical weirdness that feels so knowable and close it should chip in on rent. In Marie Enger’s comics it’s always that August night of hot apocalyptic tension where the face of fear reveals its dread hungers.

I love the sense of place in your comics; you evoke the gothic dread of the Midwest like no one else I've seen, gas stations that feel like graveyards, that one cursed McDonald's that every town has, the cosmic fear of a parking lot lit by flickering halogen lamps. When you're considering a location for the page, whether it's a real place you've seen or one you've made up, how do you make the decisions of what makes it onto the page and what is left to the reader's imagination?

Thanks! All those places are real. All of that weird atmospheric shit? Welcome to Missouri! Failing infrastructure is TERRIFYING! You know about our radioactive fire in North City/County? The TCDD contaminated town of Times Beach? The Veiled Prophet? (Note: The Veiled Prophet is an annual parade and celebration in St. Louis dating back to the 19th century described by the Rector Walter Witte as an “honest to God cult of the affluent” and the “spectacle of the wealthy daring to parade through the neighborhoods or near neighborhoods of the poor”)

Even if you don’t, you know what it’s like to live in a place with failing infrastructure, toxic train derailments, violent gentrification/redlining, superfund sites that no one outside of your area knows about. I’m not the only one lying awake at night waiting for global warming, rising rent, and the fascist right to come for me. 

If it scares me for over a week, or for my whole life, it usually becomes a comic or a game. 

It’s definitely hard to shake after reading one of your stories. Reality in your comics feel so solid and real, yet your cartooning style could be described as minimalist.

I actually consider myself an unfortunate maximalist. I do a lot of HUGE (think over 200sq feet) eye spy/Where’s Waldo style illustrations for conventions and trade shows. Now I have to be VERY conscious and vigilant about not overloading my comic compositions with too much shit.

When we met at the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (CAKE) in 2023, we connected over our shared love of Clive Barker and his work. He’s a writer with a very strong descriptive quality to his stories. (The empty dovecote from The Damnation Game still haunts me.) You adapted a chapter from his Abarat series —

Ok, quick Clive Barker tangent ‘cause I JUST met him and got my copy of Abarat signed by him. Then I gave him a copy of the Abarat comic I did and he asked ME to sign it. Oh man… He was so gracious. It felt really special and nice. I’ll never forget it. Damnation Game is SO GOOD. UGH. Man. I love his stuff!

You've also collaborated with other writers on the graphic novels — most recently Where Black Stars Rise with Nadia Shammas and Under Kingdom with Christof Boigacs. How was it working on those books with collaborators?

I did Black Stars and Under Kingdom because I met both of my collaborators at ECCC, invited them for pizza with me and some friends after the show, and thought it would be fun to work with them. On both projects, we did all the outlining, character development, and pacing together. I saw the scripts after every draft, and my feedback was taken very seriously. I usually don’t look through anyone else’s writing and get excited, ‘cause I get included in the writing process. 

When you're looking through someone else's writing to try and tell it as a comic, what draws your attention?

What draws my attention is bad behavior. 

I’ve been at this for over 10 years, and I’ve made a lot of mistakes. I’ve trusted people who did not have my best interests at heart, so now I’m really picky about collaborators. Even if the story is the best thing I’ve ever seen, and it’s got everything I want to draw in it, if I don’t think I’ll work well with the creator (for any reason), I won’t. Comics are a grueling process. If you go into a group project thinking you’re in it together, but suddenly end up doing it all alone? As an artist? It’s not just bad, it’s dangerous. I won’t work on creator owned anything with someone I haven’t met multiple times, I won’t work with someone who’s shit talked self publishing at any point in their career, and I won’t work with a writer who has a history of saying “my book.” We are in this together, we must have each other’s backs. 

Now, if a publisher throws a licensed script at me like a slab of meat and says “$350 a page, the script is done, you won’t be talking to the writer,” I’ll say hell yeah. There is no skin in that game for me, it’s pure j-o-b. I love a pure job that has no emotional component to it. 

That’s partially why I drew the Abarat comic. I wanted to prove to myself that I could do adaptive work on my own. And as far as adaptive work goes…It’s really more about what makes sense sequentially instead of what excites you, which is a bummer. There were some passages from that chapter which were REALLY COOL to read but just…wouldn’t have made sense as a comic. 

One of the things I've been learning to appreciate in comics is how inking and coloring create light on the page and how much that contributes to the story. You recently posted a page of unfinished pencils to Instagram and it was a real surprise to see so much white on one of your pages. What are some of the influences, from inside and outside comics, that have helped shape your approach to lighting and color?

 HA! You’re talking about Black Dog/Black Wolf (from my upcoming book, Controlled Burn, with Penguin Random House)! You caught it in its pencil stage, hence all the white. When you see it in its final form, it’ll be mostly blue, black, and yellow — though not in the ways you’d expect!

I think folks would probably associate acid green (PMS 387 U) and neon magenta (PMS 812 U) with my work — but I am not personally a huge fan of neon colors. For some reason they’ve kinda followed me all my life and I can’t escape ‘em. So much of my work is atmospheric — tornado green, puce, gray, grey, grae… uhhh… (how many other ways can you spell gray?) ocher, rust, and liver ‘cause those are the colors I see around me (in my weird little rust-belt midwestern city). 

I go out on a lot of walks and I take a lot of pictures of really dumb stuff. Then I use the little eye dropper to save all the ones I like in palettes. A big reason my worlds FEEL real is because I am a shameless thief who steals color from the real world. Then I bump the saturation waaaaay up ‘cause I was OBSESSED with the [animated TV series] Mission Hill color design as a kid.

Your booth at CAKE was so fun to visit. There's so much variety with your works. Your comics are all different sizes and formats, you've got all your different enamel pins, and you've even designed washi tape. And this is just in your illustrative capacity; last summer you make a project to make "100 Ugly Cups" where you sculpted and glazed exactly that. How in your process do you figure out the tactility of a given project? Do you start with "I wanna make an accordion book, what kind of story can I tell to fit that format?" or is it like you look at finished pages and think "You know what will land this? Deckled edges."

Oh man, I wish I had some grand artist’s statement about this, but like I tell folks at the ceramic studio, “I fuck around and find out.” If I have an idea for longer than a week — I usually do it. 

Sometimes it works out really well (Casket Land, Death to the Wizard Kings, Super Secret Mystery anything…), sometimes it suuuuuper doesn’t (that super-specific horror themed Washi, my precious accordion book that is impossible to display at conventions…), and sometimes it DOES, but the monkey paw curls and you gotta store 100 Ugly Cups in your apartment until you can photograph, format, and Kickstart a book. 

It can be really hard (especially if you’re like me and you have a style 50% of folks don’t like) to figure out what to produce that is interesting, sellable, shippable, and environmentally conscious. It can also be super expensive! I certainly did not take big risks like the Schnappviecher accordion book until I was more “established” in my career (aka, freelance commercial illustration, cartooning, and game design) and had the cash funds to survive if the book wasn’t a hit (and it wasn’t, really). 

But here is the biggest secret of it all — I know what to ask for. Since I specced hard into self publishing, I’ve ended up with a lot of people in my life who have helped me learn HOW things are made. Once you know the how, anything you want is possible, you just have to ask for it. If you don’t know WHAT it is, ask. While I can’t speak for all independent/self publishing creatives, I am happy to tell anyone who asked what I’ve done to a book — and how much it cost to do it. 

I wanna go back to the accordion book you mentioned. You described it as a risk that didn’t work out like you hoped. Can you share a little about what went on with it? 

Here's the thing about the Schnappviecher Accordion Book — while I personally think it was a very cool idea that I executed well, it's a failure of a book. It was somewhat expensive to print, it's a subject matter most people don't know about or have no interest in, and it's truly a pain in the ass to display at a convention. At home? On a cozy fireplace? In a winter setting? Hell yeah, it looks great — but I gotta sell a 5ft long book on a 6 ft table at a comic convention most of the time. If it's not completely extended on the table, no one picks it up, 'cause people don't really flip through books at comic conventions. A lot of audience members feel VERY uncomfortable if they go up to your table and don't purchase something (but they shouldn't, I also do not buy every book I pick up at a comic convention), so they just won't approach at all. Then the book just sits there, untouched, taking up an asinine amount of space. If they DO pick it up, 9/10 folks have no idea what it is. Now we're all stuck in a 10+ minute conversation where I have to explain an incredibly niche book format and monster. I love to talk, but I really understand why folks would just walk past it. 

It's cool! But it was also SO indulgent that making it hurt me in the long run. Oh well! Gotta learn somehow! 

Can you tell us about "Death to the Wizard Kings?" Which has so far manifested as stickers and patches and comics and games, and probably even more forms that I've yet to see. (Personally I'm hoping for DttWK artisan cold brew, but that's me.)

You sure you wanna get me started?! I could talk Vat Spawn/Death To the Wizard Kings ALL DAMN DAY. But I’ll… I’ll keep it brief lololol. You are a Vat Spawn — a crime against nature — formed deep in the belly of the Bongcano by the exiled Wizard King Blot’Tor, and imbued with forbidden magic so that you might forever do his terrible bidding. 

THE WIZARD KINGS ARE DEAD. 

Now what?

Death to the Wizard Kings is a comic/TTRPG (table top role playing game) character creator that invites you to explore who you were, are, and want to be now that you can be anything at all. 

I just wrapped up the first comic/game (that was Kickstarted last year), and honestly — I have no idea what’s next. A guidebook to the Bongcano? A fetch-quest adventure supplement? Socks? Hand-thrown mugs? Honestly, I’m kind of waiting for my Kickstarter backers to tell me what they want — because I want to do it all. 

I’m pretty upfront with everyone I work with that if I had the stability to quit all my other jobs and do Death to the Wizard Kings, I would. It is a JOY to work on,  and people have been incredibly supportive and IN. TO. IT (despite never really knowing what IT is). 

I’ve had 6 people tell me Death to the Wizard Kings helped them on their gender journeys, I’ve seen cubicle bros buy the poster for their walls, I’ve had boomers wear the windbreaker to their factory shift. The Kickstarter backers? They’re the best. They’re the best. Hey, Kickstarter bakers, if you’re reading this, you’re the best and the book is double the size I promised you. 

But I want some DTTWK cold brew too — so who’s got the hook up? HMU. Let’s talk rising up and killing the dudes you work for over a cold, cold, cup.

Before we part, what projects do you have coming up?

Some stuff I got comin’ up in the future is CONTROLLED BURN — which is a collection of short horror stories for Middle Grade ‘n up. At home we call it Cornzumaki. It’s got all sorts of terrible things like hereditary eldritch mental illness, a dog that looks like a dog…but probably isn’t, and a best friend’s funeral. It’s based in the town I grew up in, and the city where I live now. Last year, the hotel that burned in the book burned down the day before my birthday. It was super weird! RIP GARDEN WAY! 

I’m also working on more Death to the Wizard Kings, the second issue of Nosferatu Hunter E, Under Kingdom book 2, Casket Land…More short…horror comics…another hundred ugly cups oh my god, I gotta get outta here. Thanks Greg! BYE!

Be seeing you, Marie!

ABOUT

MARIE ENGER is a St. Louis-based cartoonist and illustrator. In addition to the many works described above, their comic work has appeared in the anthologies CORRIDOR, RAZORBLADES, and DAGGER DAGGER. Purchase their works at http://soengery.com

GREG BALDINO hangs around the Midwest reading, writing, and turning up unexpectedly. His work has appeared in the anthologies WAR: THE HUMAN COST and BATMAN DESDE LA PERIFERIA. He’s one microscopic cog in a catastrophic plan, but iced coffee helps.

All art and photos by Marie Enger