Growing up, one of my mom’s nicknames for me was Monster Baby. You’d think the nickname would age with me – Monster Baby becomes Monster Girl, which becomes Monster Lady – but, no. At age 30, even my dad still calls me Monster Baby sometimes. I always asked exactly what kind of monster I was, and never got a straight answer. Hopefully, it’s a monster as cute as Daniel M. Davis’ little monster girl, KlawBerry, who sports horns, black claws and an eye patch. Eye patches rock.
PRG: Can you tell me a little about KlawBerry?
Daniel Davis: KlawBerry is a book about a monster girl who gets her eye stolen and her quest to get it back. It’s sort of inspired by world folklore and Grimm’s fairy tales, but also the look of it is inspired by Kawaii, Japanese candy wrapper design and mascot advertising. So, I tried to make a super iconic, Hello Kitty kind of character that was this cute and spooky little girl.
PRG: She is very cute. She reminds me a little bit of a Powerpuff Girl, but more goth.
DD: Sure. She has a big head and I think they draw from the same well. That super deformed sort of look, but KlawBerry’s different.
PRG: Where did KlawBerry come from?
DD: It really evolved out of another idea I had called Spooky Cute, which was the cutest little characters I could come up with, the moment before something bad happened to them. I was thinking about making a book out of that. Out of that design evolution, KlawBerry was born. She was one of the characters and for me, she was just the kind of character I loved, so I thought I should make a book about her and scrapped the other project and started down this other path.
PRG: Are you doing your artwork by hand or digital?
DD: I’m fully digital. I’ve been a graphic designer for 14 years. When I went to school for fine arts, I was trying to design tight, camera ready characters. So once I stumbled on becoming a graphic designer, I was like “this is it, this is what I should be doing”. I did that for a while, paid my dues, and now I’m taking it back to making my own art, instead of art for “the man”.
PRG: So, are you at the point where you don’t have to do art for “the man”?
DD: No, I still do art for “the man”. I work at a credit union where I do the advertising and web marketing for them. I use that as much as I can to learn about how to market.
PRG: How is this going for you so far?
DD: Great. I should have started this ten years ago. In my head, I made it so much harder to do a project like this than it was. It’s hard, but in my head it was a hundred times harder. Once I went to Comicon 2005 and started meeting creators, I realized that there was nothing magical about them being on the other side of the table. I put everyone creative up on a pedestal like I didn’t have that same magic. I finally got over that and decided to just try it out and get it done. Now, we’re trying to publish a book a year with our company, Steam Crow Press.
PRG: When you’re ready to start, do you work from a script?
DD: No. I try different things for each book. We only have a couple of books under our belt. I start with a general idea. Like with KlawBerry, I knew that there would be a little girl in this spooky world and so I just started illustrating part of her journey. Then we filled in the blanks and wrote the story. We kind of did the art and built the story around it. Our first book, Caught Creatures, is a monster haiku book, so it’s just about this guy Duke Davis who’s the world’s greatest monsterologist. He captures monsters and writes haikus about them. That was a lot less linear.
PRG: How have you been marketing Klawberry and Caught Creatures?
DD: Primarily online and going to a lot of conventions. We do five or six a year and try to build up a fan base that way. And we’re in a handful of stores like Super 7 and Mayhar Dry Goods.
PRG: This looks like something that might find its way into animation at some point. Is that something you’re looking at?
DD: Sure, but it’s one of those things where I get some animation companies wanting me to pitch designs and ideas, but I really want to do my own stuff. With KlawBerry I think I’ll end up doing my own animated trailer for it. The problem is doing this all myself, there aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything I want to do. She’s built for it, but ugh.
KlawBerry is part of Pink Raygun’s “Couldn’t Make APE?” prize pack. Subscribe via email for a chance to win. KlawBerry and Caught Creatures are available for purchase at the Steam Crow Press website.
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Lisa Fary's earliest influences are Princess Leia, Rainbow Bright, Astronaut Barbie, and her 6th grade teacher, Ms. Palmer. She's angry that it's 2011 and she still doesn't have a hovercraft, but will accept a jetpack as consolation. That jetpack had better be pink with a rhinestone monogram. 
Cool looking books. I’ll check them out.
Your uncle Tom started with monter baby and it stayed with you!