Richard: How did you discover your talent as a letterer?

Thomas: What happened was I couldn’t find a letterer for two of my short stories in Ronin Studios’ MEMORIES & ECHOES: REMEMBERING WORLD WAR II anthology in 2005 and decided to give it a shot. I had played around with Illustrator a few years before that and thought it couldn’t be too hard. It didn’t take long to get paying gigs after that, so instead of becoming a comics writer, I became a letterer. Reading up on lettering theory and being a little obsessive compulsive sure helped, by the way.

Richard: Why is a letterer important to a comic and is there more to lettering than just writing letters?

Thomas: The letterer is the comics equivalent of a movie score composer and can make or break a production with their work. We’re supposed to complement the art and writing to the point that readers don’t really notice the lettering is even there unless they actively look at it. Lettering should subconsciously guide you across the page from panel to panel and not try and stand out because that would take the reader out of the story. In AWAKENING, all sound effects for example are really muted because the artwork already tells the action so well; the SFX are just in there as small, integrated visual cues.

Richard: Do you find it easy to get work as a letterer?

Thomas: I definitely do. There’s more work out there than anyone could take on by themselves, so getting work is not a big concern. It usually becomes problematic when talk comes to page rates. There are so many letterers out there that it’s hard to negotiate a decent rate sometimes. Lettering (and coloring) budgets are always the first that get cut down in a project, so it happens a lot that you have to weigh the options of either foregoing a job or seriously underselling yourself. Creative teams and publishers get what they pay for, though, so going with the cheaper option may not be in their best interest at all.

Richard: What have you written and what editing have you done?

Thomas: As I said above, I really wanted to become a writer, but I only have a few short stories to my name to this date – most of them are even unpublished or unpublishable.

There’s “The More Things Change…” and “On the Waterfront” in the MEMORIES & ECHOES anthology. The former is somewhat biographical and deals with the “out of the frying pan into the fire” situation for many rural and small town (east) Germans before and after World War II, trying to keep their heads down in the face of petty local Nazi elite and revenge-seeking “Communist” workers and farmers respectively. The latter deals with D-Day at the Normandy coast from the German perspective and is based on some accounts by German soldiers who only started talking about their time in the war recently.

One of the unpublishable stories was part of an aborted horror anthology that continued the storyline of the previous story and took it into a different direction. Without the lead-in of the other story, I don’t feel it reads as well, though. Another story deals with the inquisition of a young 17th century woman accused of infanticide. It’s based on a paper I read a few years ago about what strategies women accused of infanticide in the Early Modern period were using to beat the system and asks the question whether confession actually was the better option when faced with the procedure of torture in a court of law. This sounds quite gruesome, but I wrote the story more in a Hitchcock style focusing more on the psychological and physical ramifications during incarceration instead of the act of torture itself. Still, it’s been hard to find a proper artist and even harder to find an anthology the story would fit into.

In terms of editing, MEMORIES & ECHOES was my first foray into that territory as well, followed by Ronin Studios’ Katrina charity anthology HOPE: New Orleans. Then there’s KILLER OF DEMONS by Chris Yost and Scott Wegener which will come out in mid-October from Viper Comics, THE FLYING FRIAR by Rich Johnston and Thomas Nachlik which is out from AAM/Markosia as a color graphic novel and which NEWSARAMA billed “the Superman Elseworlds DC didn’t dare publish,” and WILLOW CREEK from Zenescope Entertainment by Christian Beranek, Denny Williams and Josh Medors which is the story of what if Bigfoot were a cover story for werewolves. At Image, I share production editing credit with Steven Finch on POPGUN and have done book design on AQUA LEUNG, Mark Andrew Smith and Paul Maybury’s new OGN which takes a fresh look at the Atlantis myth. That book is selling like cup cakes, I tell you!

For a complete rundown of what I’ve worked on, you can have a look at this link: http://thomasmauer.blogspot.com/2006/12/comics-portfolio-in-chronological_11.html

Richard: How do you feel about being nominated for the Eagle Award?

Thomas: It’s quite humbling to tell the truth. When the nomination process started for last year’s awards, I blogged about why I didn’t think I deserved to be nominated yet for my work in 2006. It’s awesome to have gotten into the finals in the lettering category because it shows people think I’ve made sufficient enough progress to be up there with the likes of Chris Eliopoulos, Richard Starkings, and Todd Klein. Likewise, the AWAKENING nominations are a very pleasant and humbling surprise. I’m glad Nick and Alex let me be a part of this book and their evolution of a number of genres in comics.

Richard: You’re the Production Manager for Silent Devil and AAM/Markosia. What does that entail?

Thomas: As the production manager for these two companies, I’m responsible for coordinating the production chain on all of their books, prepare the books for print, do book design, output previews for the web, create PDFs for services like WOWIO, and send all files to the printer. I used to go under the moniker of “Pre-press and design technician” but “Production Manager” sounds cooler. Haha.

Richard: How do you feel about web comics?

Thomas: Love them. In fact, I read web comics long before reading print comics, and was trying to get a web comic off the ground long before deciding to go for a career in the comics medium. Web comics are a great marketing tool and production is as cheap as it can get because you don’t have to worry about printing and shipping costs (and whatever else is necessary to put out a single issue). You build and continue to grow a fan base, and eventually the fans want to get a print collection for their book shelves. Web comics are the first step in the digital comics revolution that will change the face of the industry completely in a few years when digital paper and a viable online distribution model will change reading habits of all print media across the globe.

Small press publishers will finally have proper marketing budgets because they won’t need to print single issues any more. That in turn will shift the balance in genre popularity because comics reading audiences will be reachable that aren’t at the moment. Print collections won’t go away either, because as the print collections of web comics show, fans want to have physical copies.

Also, read http://www.youllneverdie.com – Taki Soma’s awesome revenge web comic that she lets me letter.

Richard: Would you like to do more writing?

Thomas: Hell yes, I do. I have some short story entries in future POPGUN and OUTLAW TERRITORY volumes at Image, though the scripting isn’t quite finished on some of them. In the future you’ll be able to read stories like “Heavy Hangs the Head…” and “Salt of the Earth” (both westerns – the former a farce, the latter dealing with the first worldwide stock market crash in 1857, the resulting xenophobia in the Midwest, the second Great Awakening as a tie-in, and lynching as a symbolic means for a community to cleanse itself). Another World War II story that still hasn’t been drawn yet is supposed to go into a future POPGUN volume. It’s called “The Cellar” and deals with war crimes.

There are also a few historical graphic novel projects that I’m doing research for at the moment and that will hopefully get off the ground soon. Oh, and I also need to get my butt in gear for a STARSHIP TROOPERS one-shot, a mini series, and a short story for AAM/Markosia.

Richard: Which industry professionals do you look up to?

Thomas: Bill Rosen and Tom Orzechowski are my lettering heroes, and I look up to Alan Moore because of his writing, experimentation, and strong convictions.

Richard: Which comics do you read now and did you read as a child?

Thomas: Back in the Eighties, I only had access to the East German monthly comic MOSAIK (which didn’t and to this day does not contain creative team credits!) and the occasional Disney comic when we visited my cousin who got Mickey Mouse from some western relatives once in a while. These days, I’m pretty much a TPB and OGN reader. While I do like to read the street level Marvel characters, I’ve shifted more and more to small press. Favorite genres are historical fiction and crime fiction.

My favorite comic right now is STARSHIP TROOPERS (and not just because I work on it). I also urge everyone to read ATOMIC ROBO from Red 5 Comics by Brian Clevinger and my buddy Scott Wegener. The book is up for an Eisner Award as best limited series and series colorist Ronda Pattison (who also colored KILLER OF DEMONS) is also nominated for her sweet work. ATOMIC ROBO is a great pulp sci-fi book about a robot created by Nikola Tesla in 1925 who battles giant ants, mummies, Nazi robots with brain jars, and even Steven Hawking! Can’t go wrong with that.

A DUMMY’S GUIDE TO DANGER: LOST AT SEA from Viper Comics about a PI duo made up of a guy and his best friend who’s a ventriloquist puppet, and Image/Shadowline’s CEMETERY BLUES about two lazy and cowardly monster hunters also make me laugh with every issue. Check them out either as singles or in the trade collections that are due out soon for each of them.

Richard: How can someone contact you?

Thomas: There’s a pretty long link list to MySpace and the likes on my blog at http://thomasmauer.blogspot.com/ and you can also email me at tom.mauer.1977@gmail.com .

Richard: Any final words of advice?

Thomas: Ignorance is bliss, so don’t read the Necronomicon. It’ll drive you insane.