Dave Roman’s name came up recently when I was chatting with my friend (and PULSE bigwig) Jen Contino and we got on the subject of creators she thought deserved greater attention. At the top of Jen’s list are Roman and John Green, the co-creators of Quicken Forbidden (and after their work, I agree with Jen's ranking). Quicken Forbidden is about the following: “Disappointed with the world around her, teenager Jacqueline "Jax" Epoch was always looking for a way out. She found it the day she accidentally fell through the Realmsend, a passageway into a different dimension. Upon finally returning home she realized that everything that was magic in the other realm had begun leaking into her own, causing her reality to fall apart. And now that a destructive force known as the Quicken has escaped into the NYC sewer system, Jax tries to make up for her past mistakes by using stolen magic to help out in this new world she is responsible for creating ...” As for Roman, here are his vitals: “Dave Roman is the writer/co-creator of the sci-fi/fantasy series Quicken Forbidden and the humor series Teen Boat. He has also written several stories for DC Comics’ Dexter’s Laboratory series and been paid to answer Scooby-Doo’s mail. Currently he works full time for Nickelodeon Magazine, where he is the comics editor for Nicktoons specials.” Most recently, Roman edited Broad Appeal: An Anthology of Comics for Everyone (presented by Friends of Lulu).
Tim O’Shea: An essential foundation to the whole premise of the book (and the nature of Jax's character) is that she is a kleptomaniac. I'm curious, is the kleptomania a response to her parents' separation or is that a notion you try to dispel with the narrative in the opening pages of issue 11?
Dave Roman: Jax being a bit of a klepto was intended as a simple but effective way of showing how she gets herself in trouble without even realizing it. It’s a quirk that’s carried over into all the facets of her personality. Before she discovered the portal to another dimension, Jax was already creating fantasy worlds for herself. Jax continually convinces herself she’s innocently “borrowing” to justify stealing everything: from simple things like post-it notes, to mysterious things like the magic boots and gloves, to dangerous things like the Quicken. So in issue #11, Jax’s narrative is quite defensive as she tries to avoid admitting her parents’ divorce had anything to do with her current mental state. But the more we learn about Jax, the more obvious it is that her personality and actions are a direct result of that separation.
TO: The story of a girl and her robot is almost a sub-genre in independent comics, if you consider Jax and A.M. as well as Paul Sizer's Little White Mouse. As a creator what was the appeal of injecting a robot (technology) in the midst of a tale that delves in the world of magic?
DR: Well, all cartoonists know that robots are really cool! And growing up in the 80’s they were really everywhere. So it’s hard to resist putting a robot or two in almost everything I do. In terms of the Quicken Forbidden series, it’s the sci-fi extension of the themes of magic leaking into the real world, and vice versa. The first robot in the series was actually in Issue #2. At first what everyone thinks is a giant red dragon, turns out to be mechanical creature that was created from the magical world and real world combining. And then we thought it would be neat if Jax’s lawyer was a robot, just because we liked the idea of being on trial and your future being decided by a pre-programmed machine. A.M. (short for Artificial Man), the robot the DAK scientists convince Jax to retrieve from the alternate dimension, was pretty much inspired by Tic-Toc from the OZ books, and especially the film Return to OZ. I just love the visual coolness of a young girl and her robot bodyguard. So when we were plotting Issue #4, it seemed more exciting for the scientists to have sent an advanced android through the magic portal rather than a simple test probe.
TO: Issue 11, unless I'm mistaken, features a cameo with Jen Contino (of PULSE and Sequential Tartfame). How often do you have these types of "real world" cameos in your fiction and how did you first come up with the idea?
DR: Yep, that’s Jen Contino—and she’s even wearing a Tart T-shirt! The other cameos in Issue #11 are cartoonists Jason Little (Shutterbug Follies) and Sam Henderson (Magic Whistle), who appear as giants playing a game of catch with a skyscraper. And in the post office scene (Johanna Draper Carlson) appears, along with some other folks who responded to a post we did SequentialTart.com asking people to email us photos if they wanted to be in the book. We knew that there were going to be a lot of extras and background people in the story, and John thought it’d be a fun way to thank some of the people who have supported the series. In Issue #12 there’s a guest appearance by Katchoo, the character from Terry Moore’s Strangers In Paradise series, which is sort of a fun reversal since John actually appeared as an extra in that book once!
TO: How and why did it come to be that you only draw the dream sequences in the series. And how important do dreams play in the overall theme of the book?
DR: Dreams are fun because you can just go crazy and make them as surreal as you want. It’s also a way of foreshadowing upcoming events, while at the same time being so cryptic that most people won’t catch all the hints till after you go back and re-read the series. So far, I’ve drawn two of the dream sequences and will draw one more before the current story line concludes. The idea being, these three are intended to be dreams that the Quicken and Jax are sharing rather than the usual ones Jax has alone (drawn by John). If I remember correctly, I ended up drawing the first one (in Issue #2) because when I was trying to explain what it should look like to John, I could see it perfectly in my head but was having a hard time verbalizing the details. So John just told me to draw it instead of struggling to explain it. I always do lots of doodles in the script stage, so it just ended up being a more finished version of that.
TO: While when the series first started her parents were separated, but they apparently have reunited, will this be something that will be delved with in future issues.
DR: Yeah, hopefully we will. John and I get so carried away with creating crazy magical stuff for Jax to do, that we sometimes don’t leave enough room for some of the more real-life stuff. A nice perk about AIT-Planet Lar collecting the first 5 issue into tradepaperback form was getting to create a new 4-page epilogue. I was able to go back and flesh out a bit more of Jax’s past, so that when you read Issue #6 and the later issues that deal more with her parents divorce, it feels like a smoother transition. And since it appears after the end of the story and is mostly told in flashback, it hopefully won’t come across as revisions Lucas/Spielberg Special Edition tactics!
TO: When you started Jax on this journey, did you and John Green have a finite end for the series in mind, or are you taking the book wherever it leads you creatively for an indefinite period?
DR: We didn’t really have a specific end or issue goal in mind, but we definitely knew where we wanted it to go. We wanted things to get to an Akira level of post-apocalyptic mayhem, where magic had taken over the world and combined with technology. We wanted Jax to be a make-shift hero and a pretty powerful sorceress. So everything was supposed to be a set up for that. And that’s basically what we did with Issues #1 through #10. By the time we finished #10, we already knew we were moving a bit too slow and that if we let the story unfold at its own pace, the series would end up being around 30 or so issues. And if for some reason we couldn’t afford to keep self-publishing, we might never get to finish it. So knowing that Issue #10 would complete the second story-arc, we made Issue #11 several months into the future just so we could get to the stuff we had always been building up to. And continuity-wise, it was the perfect place that we could always go back to, and create stories that take place in the missing months. In fact almost all of our short stories that have appeared in anthologies like SPX 99, Son of Rampage, Imagination Rocket, and Scott Morse’s Substance Effect fit into that timeframe. Now, if we keep to the current plan, the Quicken Forbidden story line will end with Issue #15. But hopefully after that we’ll do more self-contained stories about Jax Epoch that have different subtitles like Jax Epoch and the Really Cool Robot Party.
TO: Am I right in thinking that after Jax, Christina, Cal and Tedd are your favorite characters to write? (if not, who is?) Would you ever consider doing a limited series or a standalone issue just focusing on those three?
DR: Writing the dialogue for Cal and Tedd is fun because they are sort of like a classic comedian-and-straight man team. Every time I see a sci-fi movie where the scientists act like stereotypes, and do things because being a scientist (or army general, etc.) is “who they are,” I’m happy Quicken Forbidden has Cal and Tedd who are bit more silly and human than that. Even though they are in the book to represent a “science-versus-magic” theme, hopefully they also come across as emotional people who have lives outside their jobs.
Like a lot of things in Quicken Forbidden, we came up with a lot of back history for the scientists and the organization they are a part of called DAK (The Data Analysis Keep). They’re sort of a secret conglomerate of scientists that have collected vast amounts of research and test results over the past two centuries. We give a glimpse into their world in Issues #6-8, but it if enough readers were interested, it would be great to go back and do some stories that further expand upon what we’ve established. That’s what’s probably the most exciting part of working on a comic book like Quicken Forbidden. Jax’s world is so open ended, no matter how much we show, it always feels like there’s even more left to explore.
