Interviews from APE: Ruben Fernandez

I’ve never liked the comic strips Cathy or Luann, mostly because I find the characters to be whiny, but also because they embody insecurity, which I don’t find particularly funny. However, growing up, they were the only comic strips in the local paper that were about chicks. Penny by Ruben Fernandez is a comic strip I would like to see in my local paper. She’s a nerdgirl with glasses, which is something I can identify with.

Pink Raygun: Tell us a little bit about Penny.

Ruben Fernandez: Penny’s an impractical person in an overly-practical world. She’s a smart, passionate woman aspiring to be a poet while doing time as a low-wage warrior. She also has a fantastic side – Penny has fantasy scenes where she’s a jungle girl attacking her boss. She’s big on alien stuff – she can’t wait for them to finally come down and save us.

PRG: Is Penny based on an actual person?

RF: She’s a composite of some gals I’ve known, but she’s more my feminine side than anything else. I share a lot of traits with her.

PRG: Where is Penny being published now?

RF: Nowhere other than online as a webcomic, but I want to get it into the papers. I’ve submitted my strips for years – I’ve done different strips throughout the years and most of the time you get a rejection letter without any sort of commentary, so you don’t know which direction to take things, what was liked or not. My perception is that a lot of publishers want to second-guess the public, so I thought I’d take it directly to the public, and they can tell me what they think. That’s what I’m doing here at APE. If you go on the King Features website, they’re very proud of the female perspective strips from females. My position is that I don’t mind a gal writing about men. I don’t think that women should only write about women, men should only write about men, teenagers should only write about teenagers, insects should only write about insects – you know. It’s ridiculous.

PRG: Have you tried submitting Penny for publication in the alternative papers, the city weeklies?

RF: I’m trying that too, but I think they think Penny is too mainstream.

PRG: Have you considered writing and drawing your strip under a female pen-name?

RF: I was considering submitting my work as Robin Fernandez, because that name could go either way and remove one level of resistance to a female oriented comic strip drawn by a man. But then again, maybe the fact that Penny is a comic strip about a woman drawn from a man’s perspective is what makes it unique. It’s a hard call, it’s hard to know.

PRG: At a glance, I would tend to say that the artwork on Penny looks as if it were drawn by a guy. Maybe it’s the bolder, thicker inklines that just read as more masculine? The heavier hand?

RF: In my experience, newspaper comic strips drawn by women tend to have a more delicate line. I’m heavy handed by nature. One of my big influences from a drawing perspective is Al Capp. I also draw this way because it reduces better if it’s a bold line. For something intended for newspaper publication – it gets shrunk to the point where you need a microscope to be able to read it. I’ve had offers to run Penny on different websites, but I’ve got to get better at promotion and following through. Part of my being here at APE is to help me define what it is that people see when they read my work, and find a good way to market it and get it in front of readers.

Beginning Monday, May 14th, Pink Raygun will run daily installments of Penny by Ruben.

Win free stuff! Subscribe to Pink Raygun by Email, or Subscribe via RSS