Stephen Emond

Hello, my name is Stephen Emond, or just Steve if you prefer. There isn’t much about that me isn’t be said in this excerpt from the HAPPYFACE page on amazon.com:

About the Author

Steve Emond does not have any superhuman powers, neat tricks, or famous relatives, but he’s a pretty cool guy who can draw. He is the creator of Emo Boy, which ran for 12 issues and two collections, and the comic strip, Steverino. He grew up in Connecticut, where he wrote and directed a public access sketch comedy show that only his grandmother watched.

I’m pretty sure my editor on the book wrote this to mimic my sometimes self-deprecating manner because I don’t remember writing it myself.

Anyway, I’m a creator, I guess you can say. I focused solely on drawing in my youth, wanting to be a comics artist. Not so much the kind I became, I was more interested in superheroes. Starting with Spiderman, which led to the New Warriors, which led me to following Todd McFarlane, Jim Lee, the guys that wound up at Image. I was a huge Image fan until a girlfriend turned me on to indie comics, which read more like the things that went on in my head.

Another thing I drew, that fed into my later love of writing, was a comic strip called STEVERINO. I did STEVERINO from my senior year of highschool, and for about six years after. Even after that, I returned to the strip off and on, the last stretch in ‘06. You can read those comics by clicking the Steverino box at the top of Stephenemond.com. I think STEVERINO really helped me develop as both an artist and a writer. The comic strip is a great way to learn writing, because every strip has a beginning, middle and end to it. It’s short, but you learn a lot in what’s interesting and how to set up and close an idea. I did twenty-five page books every month, three cartoons per page, and sent them to never more than thirty people. I worked through a lot of my own neuroses in those years, but it was a lot of fun.

Feedback for Steverino was generally positive. I won a national contest, Andrew-McMeels/Follett College Store’s STRIP SEARCH: DISCOVERING TOMORROW’S TOP CARTOONISTS TODAY and had my comic printed in a book of the same name. I had three or four local newspaper articles and ongoing dialogues with a few syndicate editors. There wasn’t really any hook, though. It was just me and my thoughts. They liked the art, they liked the writing, they thought it was charming, but you couldn’t sell it.

Eventually I had the idea for EMO BOY, which was “what if this emo kid had superpowers, but they were completely destructive and he was too emo to use them anyway?” It was a joke at first but my girlfriend at the time urged me to go on with it. I did a mini comic, ashcan style – 8 1/2X11 pages folded down the middle and xeroxed. In it, Emo Boy joins a garage band, falls for a pretty girl, kisses her and explodes her head in a fit of emo-nerves. The band is ready to beat him down when he comes up with a hit emo song about the experience.

I sent the comic to SLG Publishing, because honestly, who the heck else would publish it? In the meantime, I had so much fun with it that I kept making the books. I did four more issues, without the emo powers, just as a comedy comic about an emo kid and his happy-go-lucky friend Maxine. About eight months after I mailed the book to SLG, I got an email from Dan Vado asking if I was still looking for a publisher. Indeed, I was! I sent him the new issues to show how the art and writing had improved, although Dan did recommend giving him the powers back, as it lent the series a feeling of suspense, not knowing what was going to happen next.

EMO BOY ran for twelve issues. It started strong, but as is the case with most indie comics, sales slipped to a point that it wasn’t cost-effective to continue printing each issue. I was left with the option to do it as a digital comic, or to do a series of graphic novels. I decided to take some time off.

Durin