[theme music] - Hello and welcome to Comic Culture.

I'm Terence Dollard, a professor in the Department of Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

My guest today is cartoonist Jules Rivera.

Jules welcome to Comic Culture - Hi.

Thanks for having me here.

It's great to be here.

- Jules, you are working on the legacy strip Mark Trail.

And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your approach to this character that had been-- well, I don't want to say stuck in a rut, but certainly stuck in a bygone era.

You've injected a lot of life into Mark, and I wonder if you could talk about your approach.

- Man, oh man.

So when I got handed the-- well, not handed.

I didn't get handed anything.

I fought tooth and nail to get the assignment.

Once my editor had contacted me-- Tea Fougner.

And Tea was like, we have this legacy strip.

We want someone to take it over, and we really like the stuff that you're doing with your other webcomic over here, Love, Joolz.

And I'm working on getting back to Love, Joolz.

I've just got to get caught up with the deadline stuff.

But anyway, they saw my work with Love, Joolz And so they wanted to see if I would do a test for Mark Trail.

Fought for Mark Trail, because I really loved how Mark Trail had this very kind of pulpy guy vibe from, like, the '40s, like "Lobsters pinched my face!"

And I feel like, wow, that kind of a job for me.

I would love to draw a story about dudes getting into fisticuffs, and especially doing it over a worthy as a cause as environmentalism and nature.

That to me has high, high callings right there.

So I feel like a lot of the strip in the past, especially with the two previous artists, Jack Elrod and James Allen, I get the idea that there was a certain reverence for the source material originally drawn by Ed Dodd.

And sometimes, it was inked by this dude named Tom Hill.

He was a very fitty inker.

I like his work a lot.

I feel like there was a lot of reverence for what had come by in the past.

That reverence can sometimes blind a creator in order to create something new to bring into the future.

Like you care so much about preserving the past that you forget it needs to be evolved upward.

So that's the task that I took on.

I wanted to take on these characters and just update them for how they would be in a modern setting.

For example, Mark is a nature journalist.

And always in the strip, he has been, like, this nature journalist.

And he has this one steady editor for freelance jobs-- literally one.

I mean, as a freelancer you can't even dream of that these days.

Like, you've one client and they call you all the time?

That's amazing!

What?

So anyway, his world previously to me showing up was easy.

And I wanted to show Mark's growth by putting him in a lot of situations that were going to be very, very hard.

This week, actually, on Mark Trail, we're talking about NFTs and why they are-- actually tomorrow is going to be the NFT primer.

I'm really proud of the artwork I did for that.

[laughs] So I guess long story short, now Mark nowadays, he has several different bosses.

He gets passed around.

He's a journalist, so he's got many different opportunities for assignments and working with little made-up magazines that I made for the story.

Like lately, it's been Hot Cash Magazine.

And before this, it was Teen Girl Sparkle.

Like I just love throwing that kind of left-field stuff at readers because y'all expect things to be, oh, he's just going to work for Fisher Guy Magazine.

And I'm like, well, let's make it interesting.

Let's make it fun.

Turn things on its ear.

But I do want to show that I also have that reverence for the past, because there was a lot of good stuff in Mark Trail from the get-go.

First of all, like I said, his calling is very high, caring about nature and caring about the wilderness.

Mark Trail started in 1947.

And let me tell you something.

American culture in 1947, it was not about caring about nature and wilderness.

Heck no.

It was, we won the war, la la la, communism is bad, we won the war.

That was where American sentiments were so.

For Ed Dodd to create a strip about nature conservation and caring about animals being poached or caring about the cleanliness of our environment, that was revolutionary for its time.

So it's in that core that I build out the current Mark Trail strip, because current Mark Trail still cares about nature.

He still cares about the environment.

He is definitely willing to-- I mean, he cares about nature enough to punch somebody in the face about it, OK?

And that is Mark's core appeal.

He loves nature enough that he's willing to fight about it.

And that's actually rare, because a lot of the times these days, you see just people in general are not very good at handling confrontation.

They're not really good at standing up for themselves and fighting for what's right.

So what I want to do with Marc Trail is-- I mean, I hesitate to use the term.

But I'm basically building a better white guy for the future.

[laughter] But I believe in the future.

And I believe we really need to be talking-- I mean, the more I research about climate change with Mark Trail, the more I'm like this is actually bad!

Ah!

And I spend so much of my time screaming about the environment now.

And that's OK, because you know what?

I need something to scream about.

I'm an Aries.

I'm a person who needs to go to war over something.

And you know what?

The environment, great cause, because it affects everyone on this planet.

Every single one of us is not touched by global warming right now and climate change.

And I think the real big hurdle in the past has been getting an artist to write about climate change because everybody has their own thoughts on that.

And I'm just somebody who happens to believe is happening.

It's happening now!

A whole bunch of species are endangered because of it.

All of our weather are getting screwed up because of it.

Ah!

Screaming, lots of it.

I see it and I'm willing to fight.

That's a super-long answer to your question.

I hope that covered some bases for you.

- It was a great answer.

And, I mean, it is interesting, because yeah, the original Mark Trail was trailblazing to, I guess, crush a metaphor or simile-- I don't know what I just did.

But it did lose its focus in later years.

I think the last story that happened before you took over, there was a movie that was going to be made.

And first, I'm hoping someday in the future, you will finish that story because I want to know what happens.

But one of the things you did was you modernized Cherry and you modernized Rusty so that they had clothing and hairstyles that reflected 2021.

So I'm wondering, when you're working on the designs for these characters, are you just thinking I've got to temporize them?

Or did you have a certain personality type in mind for each of these characters, and therefore, the wardrobe would suit that personality?

- Well, personality type definitely plays into it, because Cherry is a very rough and tumble countrywoman.

So I grew up in Florida and I've been around a lot of country women-- women who are, like, go write a country song about how they shot their husband or something like that, like "country women."

So I figured Cherry is going to be like this real kind of down-home kind of country gal.

She's going to be somebody who also cares about the environment because she is Mark's partner.

She is Mark's complement piece.

So she, too, has to be on the crazy train of let's care about the environment enough to smack someone in the face about it.

[laughs] But I wanted her to have her own angle on how she loves nature, because Mark is more about actual wildlife and research and going into the field, and taking notes and stuff.

Whereas cherry is a gardener, and that actually hearkens on my own gardening stuff that I got going on in my life.

It's funny.

I first started talking with the editors about putting together character designs.

I talked a big deal about how I wanted gardening to play a big role in the strip.

That's Cherry's angle on it.

She cares about gardening, but she also cares about wildlife.

Like, literally her first appearance is about her smacking Mark, because Mark had hit a bear that she was just chilling with Tiger Queen style.

I'm like, she's just chilling with this bear!

And Mark's like, whoa!

You got this bear, lady.

And he goes to attack the bear, which by today's standards, if I had to redo that strip, I would have maybe Mark shake the stick at the bear, not really hit the bear.

But he hits the bear with a stick.

But then Cherry really slaps him in the face.

Like, the way it's drawn, you're like, that actually hurt.

You're like, oh, man.

So you need somebody to understand how intense Cherry is.

And so it took somebody with a bit more of an edgy hairdo.

They wanted me to keep the hair short, so that she still reads as Cherry, because if she had long hair, she wouldn't really look like that anymore.

So yeah, and I found that making her like this kind of country girl who cares about-- and she's rough and tumble.

Like, there's jokes in the comic about how she has to gamble in order to pay Mark's incredibly, increasingly expensive health insurance bills.

Like, she's just a rough woman who's just lived a rough life.

But she's making it and she's having fun.

I pictured her as-- you know Renee Zellweger's character from Cold Mountain?

Yeah, just at one point, she has to pop that chicken's neck because it's bothering Nicole Kidman or whatever.

But I'm like yeah, like that, like a frontier woman.

With Rusty, I'm like, he's 12.

What is anyone like when they're 12?

They're just starting-- you think all the silliness starts with adolescence and literally at 13?

Oh no, he's 12.

12 is about the age where you start getting cynical and start questioning the world.

And he's growing into a young man.

12 is actually surprisingly old for a child.

People think that, oh, he's 12.

He should be playing with action figures and stuff.

And I'm like, OK, first of all grown men do that too, whatevers.

But I just felt like somebody-- I needed to tap into that teen angst angle, because the most annoying part about being a teenager is that you want agency and you don't have it.

That's most obnoxious part about being a person approaching young adulthood.

And he's 12 years old, so he's old enough to have crushes, and he's old enough to have, really, internet habits that you might have to have an awkward conversation about.

But I picture him as just this-- he's the voice of reason.

I write him as very kind of like-- he's the straight man, because his parents are kooky.

They're wacky nature weirdos.

So Rusty by that logic has to be the straight man.

He's got to be the one who's just like, OK, y'all are crazy.

No, OK, whatever.

I don't care.

And I also wanted to modernize Rusty and make him more into technology than his family is.

Because in the past, we don't really see Rusty working too much with the internet or technology or anything like that.

And these days, kids are glued to their smartphones.

So how do you write a 12-year-old not glued to their smartphone?

Have you met a 12-year-old?

Do you look at them directly with your eyeballs?

That's how kids are.

There's so much stimulation and so much creativity.

And in the story, I also have Rusty on a TikTok analog, BikBok.

Tea came up with that one.

I stole it from Tea.

[laughs] So Rusty makes videos on this video messenger service.

And as he's learning to make these videos, Mark learns to make videos as well.

And it's moving Mark Trail forward in a way that discusses technology in more of a contemporary fashion, because even the more recent Mark Trail before I took over, the way it talked about technology was a little weird, like a little-- how would I put it?

Just not contemporary.

It didn't sound like it was written by somebody who had anything more than a dial-up modem in the last 20 years.

Oh, that sounds mean.

Sorry, it just didn't feel up to date.

So that's what I'm working on doing, because we are a very, very, very tech-focused world now.

And we are seeing the rise of cryptocurrency and NFTs and what that means for our environment.

Long story short-- bad things.

It means all bad things.

And I think it's important to talk about these technologies.

If we're going to discuss things that affect our environment, we've got to talk about everything that affects your environment, up to and including things like capitalism and corporate greed.

- It's interesting, you talk about Rusty and the lack of technology.

Now, I go back to that last storyline.

They were talking about making a movie.

And I think Rusty would have been more at home talking about canning his own asparagus than he would have been about a Game Boy or an iPad.

And you've certainly created-- [interposing voices] - --never had a Game Boy, or like a video game, or anything like that.

I always thought that was a little weird.

But yeah, with Rusty, I wanted to show him-- like, be a modern kid.

And modern kids look like somebody with a piece of technology in front of them because it's cheap, it's cheerful.

Parents, you-- you're distracted.

And it's a safety measure, because if I'm Cherry, I want to keep track of where my kid is.

It's a fricken wilderness out there.

You don't know where he could be going.

The movie storyline, I thought about touching back on that.

I'm like, I wouldn't mind closing that loop myself.

I'm just trying to figure out the best way to do it.

I have some ideas of what I want to do with that actor.

But when it comes to picking up James Allen's work, I'm like, it's hard for me to guess where he would have gone with it.

So I feel like I'm still figuring it out.

But I don't want to leave it completely hanging.

I want to come back to it, but put my own spin on it.

But at the same time, you're continuing somebody else's story.

So it's like, hey, am I really working in service to the story, or would I do better just summing it up over here real quick?

Because I have an idea as to how it would all hash out.

Like, oh my god, summed it up, got it all tied up in, like, a couple of strips, or just somebody makes a snide remark.

"You remember that actor that came out to visit?"

"Oh, yeah."

"Yeah, he later went on a bender.

He's in rehab now."

[laughter] There's so many-- like, I just got done finishing up all of BoJack Horseman last night.

So I'm sure I could come out with all kinds of crazy things to do with a celebrity.

I used to live in Los Angeles.

[laughs] I know crazy celebrity stuff.

- So you talk about technology and its impact on the environment.

And I'm imagining it's somewhat of a double-edged sword, because you're creating Mark Trail and Love, Joolz on a tablet, it looks like, where you're using technology.

Now, on the one hand, it's saving you from having to use board and ink and everything.

But at the other hand, you do have to upgrade it every few years before it runs out.

So how do you make that decision?

- Well, great news.

I'm an artist.

I am broke AF, so I keep that service for a very, very, very long time.

I am doing this from a nine-year-old laptop, dude.

The answer to conservation is just straight-up poverty.

[laughter] So that's how I screwed that up.

I don't replace my technology very often.

And yes, what I do consumes electricity.

It would consume electricity anyway, even if I were working with a board, because number one, I would have to have a light overhead, or some kind of light around me.

And I'd have to have some kind of electricity setup for that.

I would probably have to have some kind of method of scanning all my pages because they still need to make it over to the other side of the country.

So I'm not going to pay for FedEx.

That would be ridiculous.

It's just easier to get everything done digitally, one-stop shop.

And I work with Clip Studio Paint, where it's just literally a one-stop shop when it comes to arting everything.

Pretty much, I only use Photoshop for maybe a couple of last-minute, like, tweak details for editorial or whatever, because there's certain technical formatting.

You've got to do whatever.

But other than that, like yeah, it's a pretty one-stop shop.

I care about-- and also remember, paper is still a tree.

A tree died for this strip.

So, I mean, everything is push and pull.

I mean, yes, one could make the argument that technology is a backwards way to approach a nature strip.

Perhaps, but this is not just a nature strip anymore.

This is an environmental strip, and environment has to include everything, up to and including all the stupid things we're doing in the environment, which includes technology.

And I'm glad to have expanded the strip beyond that, and also start expanding the strip to include the bigger climate change conversation, because we're going to have to have that talk.

I've already been doing it in Science Sundays.

I'm very proud of myself.

I named the Sunday Science Sundays.

Good job, me.

- The Sunday strip is different than the Monday through Saturday strip, because it's a standalone piece.

And it's usually some informative information about an animal or something that's happening with the environment.

So you talk about doing a lot of research.

Are you looking specifically for, oh, I want to look for an animal that's endangered, or do I want to find something that's misunderstood?

So when you're putting together those Sunday strips, what sort of angle are you thinking when you start doing all that research?

- How I approach the Sunday strips-- well, also, the Sunday strips will usually tie to an animal you see in the environment in the strip.

So recently, we had bats because of Halloween.

So I made sure to have a little sequence about bats.

I try to make sure that when I'm drawing the dailies and doing the nature strip that they coordinate, so that on October 30, there was the bats thing, where the bats take off out of the cave.

And then on the 31st, you had the Mark Trail strip about bats.

And bats are indeed misunderstood.

Bats are nature's little flying pest control.

They will eat their weight in mosquitoes every night.

So it's pretty exciting stuff.

I love learning new things about animals all the time.

Literally, my greatest joy on any social media anymore is just learning some weird fact about an animal I had no idea about.

On one post, someone was like, did you know, bats have gluteal muscles, which means they have butt cheeks.

And I'm like, my world will never be the same!

It's joyous, but also I try to make sure the storyline ties to these endangered animals.

I'm about ready to turn in something about salamanders because salamanders are endangered.

And I do lately talk more about endangered species-- which species are being the most affected by climate change, and how things are tied to environmental circumstances that are affecting these animals.

It's not just let's learn about an animal.

I mean, sometimes, that's fun too.

But other times, I do look for animals in the local environment where, yeah, it's a danger.

We're going to have to have this conversation.

I will shout my head off until I go gray that we still need to do something about this stuff because no one's doing anything.

I love researching, and I love just pulling that research together with the strips.

So it drives that love of researching nature, which is what Mark Trail is.

It is like shorthand nature and science education.

That was the whole point.

So it is pretty cool to stitch in those little educational elements in there.

People don't really notice I'm doing that, like with the NFT stuff.

Today, I had the joke where the guys, like, hey, a woman's had-- the director lady, she's having a hard time.

She's like, oh, I'm having a hard time.

I had to break up with my business people back in California.

And he's like, tell me what happened.

I'll understand anything.

And she's like, I had to leave NFTs.

And he's like, OK, I don't understand what that is.

[laughs] And at least to the audience-- and understand that, from an audience perspective, they may also be like, what the heck is an NFT?

[laughs] What is that?

Why, huh, when?

And so that keeps sparking that curiosity within the strip and getting people to learn about real-world issues that are actually happening.

Like a a whole strip-- it was the last maybe, like, four or five months have all been about educating people on zebra mussels, and how zebra mussels are getting into our water supplies and screwing everything up royally.

Like, this article happened in my lap on a lark.

And I'm like, holy smokes, zebra mussels really are screwing everything up.

Oh no.

Oh my god.

Someone's got to do something about it.

So yeah, that's what I try to do.

I try to bring that love of knowledge into the nature strip and inform the storylines and move them forward.

Like for example, the team is currently dealing with this zebra mussels thing.

And they're going to get to the point where corporate goons are going to come after Mark and his friends, because that's what happens in the real world when you're an environmental activist.

Corporate people want to shut you down.

So yeah, I mean, I try to adhere to actual, real-world stuff that happens to make it really exciting.

And really, the thing that saves me the most with Mark Trail is truth is stranger than fiction.

I will never run out of material for Mark Trail ever.

If this were a me strip where I had to write about my own stupid self, forget it.

I'd run out of material in about a year and a half.

But nature and the environment?

Oh, I could be doing this for the rest of my life.

I mean, eventually, I'll step aside and let somebody else have a crack at it.

Fine, sure, awesome.

But look, I just feel like it's always going to stay fresh, because nature is fresh.

It's the world we live in.

- You mentioned if you were doing a strip about your own life you might run out of material.

But if I'm not mistaken, there's a character that you've put into Mark Trail that might be an avatar for you.

And-- - Yeah, I love to go under the guise of any resemblances living your dead or completely coincidental.

But come on, you can definitely see that Diana Dagger is inspired by my story.

And I made her an anti-hero.

[laughter] That's the best part.

I make her into a villain, because real talk, it's more fun to write villains.

Heroes don't have the same freedoms that villains do, or anti-heroes.

Like heroes-- Mark can't throw to first punch in a fight.

That is actually something dictated down to me from up high above.

Mark cannot be a guy who-- he can't be Han.

He can't shoot first.

But Diana Daggers can.

And she can play dirty in a fight, or she could just say things that Mark couldn't get away with.

She could stand to do a lot of really bad and awful stuff that Mark just needs to stay away from.

And that's OK. Mark needs to set the better example.

But I also like talking about environmentalism and STEM work and entertainment work from a woman's perspective, because everybody thinks of the industry, the creative industry, the movie industry, and videography industry that everything is all hunky-dory.

And I'm like, yeah, try doing that if you're a woman.

Try it that way, yeah.

I mean, it's interesting that I can take the angle of she's an antihero, and she's definitely saying and doing things that are beyond the pale.

But at the same time, you see that her world is affected by her particular [inaudible] so to speak.

That's an anime nerd joke.

- Well, I see we have about a minute left in our conversation.

I feel terrible that we didn't get a chance to talk about Love, Joolz.

So if people wanted to find out more about your work, where can they find you on the web?

- They could just find me on my website www.julesrivera.com.

I got links to Love, Joolz Probably in the next month, or so I'll get the links back up so we can start selling books again.

I've just been at a standstill because I've just been so cramped with deadlines.

If you want to find me on Twitter, I'm just @julesrivera on Instagram.

I'm Love.Joolz on TikTok.

I'm just lovejoolz without the dot.

I'm a mess.

- Well, Jules, thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to talk with me.

I know you've got deadlines.

So I do appreciate it.

- It's a living.

[laughter] Yeah.

Thanks for having me, and I appreciate all these thoughtful questions.

- I'd like to thank everyone at home for watching Comic Culture.

We will see you again soon.

[theme music] - Comic Culture is a production of the Department of Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.