Uniques Editors bio’s
For The Uniques, the story has always been the most important thing to us. More than anything else, we wanted this book to be fun and interesting and to have something to say. But that can be hard to do, as any number of well-drawn but boring comics will attest to. We knew it would be a challenge, and that we needed other eyes to gauge our success.
These are the people who read and critiqued The Uniques in script-form and beyond. They looked at what we had done and told us honestly whether or not it was rubbish, and from their suggestions and comments we developed something that we’d never have found on our own. We call them our Editors, but they’re the people who keep us honest and keep us pushing to find the right way to say everything we’ve got to say.
Chris Karath
If The Uniques had a head editor, Chris would be it. When we came out with the first draft of issue #1 of The Uniques he was the man that had the balls to tell us that it was a good story trapped in terrible pacing. The man even went so far as the give us a set of note cards to layout what the story beats were, how fractured we’d gotten, and how to put it back together. From the first issue on, Chris has been open and honest about what works and what doesn’t. He’s also the guy that helps keep our art layouts tight and coherent, with a strong eye for composition. And when he was done with that, he helped us make this website! What a guy.
Along with helping us so much, and being one of our very best friends, Chris works as a graphic designer for a midwest retailer and runs a fantastic blog at chris-karath.com where he gives his out his own personal brand of commentary on a wide array of pop culture, comics, news, tech and other off-the-wall happenings.
Nicole Goff
Nicole is our de facto art editor. She has taken the time to go through each page and give us the lowdown on what needs changing and what works. She is unbelievably detailed and should be an amazing art director someday. We highly value her input to the book, even if we don’t always take her suggestions, but she gives us ideas on what to watch out for artistically and we appreciate her help greatly.
Nicole was born and raised in Phoenix Arizona’s scorpion ridden desert, but then ventured off into the Navy for a 4 year side track soon after High School. Nicole eventually saw an opportunity to pursue her passion for illustration thru slaving away at art school. She then left the military to become a bona fide Kubie by attending Joe Kubert’s School of Cartooning where she graduated with the Class of 2007. She now works to pay the bills, but draws to further her ambitions in illustration and self-publishing.
Jay Barron and Andy Hutchins
In 2002 Jay Barron read what was the very first real draft of The Uniques. At the time, Comfort was working on the book alone and he gave her quite a bit to think about. When we decided to do the book for real and as a team, his suggestions were still at the fore of her mind. Jay is a man who knows story. A really awesome writer in his own right, Jay’s expertise and knowledge of random-yet-important factoids has been invaluable. He and Andy are also amazing at scouring the book for grammatical corrections and incongruities.
A fellow illustrator, Jay works out of his home for places like Disney (and others), while Andy is always kind enough to invite all of us over for pizza so we can talk shop and hang out. They’re a lot of fun.
Dave Jablonski
Simply stated, Dave brings the funny. If you read The Uniques and something makes you laugh particularly hard, there’s a good chance Dave had something to do with it. He’s also a man of our generation, and not what you’d call a big comic buff, so his perspective helps us write something that people in or out of comics can enjoy.
We met Dave while we were in college and were instantly drawn to his amazing Pun capacity. He graduated from the Ferris State University program for Video game design and currently works on his webcartoon series Brass Seal - which in our humble opinion is Fucking hilarious, though we could be biased since Adam is one of the voice-actors. Dave can tell a joke that will make you groan and laugh and then groan again, and it’s guys like that that brighten this world. Space Jesus bless you, Dave Jablonski. And your heart.
Teshika Silver
Not only is she great at the regular stuff like grammar and spelling, Tesh is our sounding board for the comic. She is genuinely into the story and asks us questions that spark ideas for the future of the comic. We have long conversations with Tesh after she’s read the book and she gives us detailed analyses on the storylines and her perceptions of the characters. She is our head female editor and since we want so badly for our girls to appeal to and speak to women, having a gal like Tesh to tell us when we’re hitting or missing is a great asset.
We’ve known Teshika ever since we started college all those years ago, and she has been an awesome friend to us ever since. She lives in Chicago now and works in Graphic Design. You can see her work here silvertesh.deviantart.com
Matt Dodd
Matt plays the role of the helpful cynic. He warns us when we skirt too close to clichés and alerts us when his cheese alarm goes off. A fellow writer that Adam met on the Heroclix message board, HCRealms, he’s not the sort to let you off the hook. Things that we though were working okay he’s gotten us to take another pass at, and it almost always yields a better result. Even if we don’t change a thing, we walk away more certain of ourselves and the book.
Matt’s lived in Hot Springs, Arkansas his whole life, but will be moving to the Dallas area soon in order to get back to working on his bachelors in Computer Science. He currently holds three Associates degrees, and has been working at his county's public library for a year and a half, helping them expand their graphic novel selection and was influential in starting a video game collection. Video games at your local library - now that is awesome!
Stephen and Kathi Love
Stephen and Kathi are Comfort’s parents. Primarily, they read the scripts and grill us on the psychology of the characters and the situations we put them in. Therapists by trade, they love getting into the history and headspace of real and fictional people. They make sure we understand the intention and impact of any particular scene and ask us questions no one else thinks to ask. Also, you don’t get people less into comics than your parents, so having them read the book keeps us from relying on comic shorthand. If they can read and understand what’s happening, then we’re really on to something.
They aren’t just Comfort’s parents, but over the years they have also become very good friends of ours. They come from Holland, MI where they live with their five cats.
Amy Blue
We met Amy as a student when she job shadowed with us last year. She’s an aspiring artist, not to mention a very practical reader. When others just accepted and ignored, she asked why, and if it could be explained further. In many ways, her reading of the script was what helped us get tight descriptions on things that ultimately helped us in the artistic process. She came into it late, when we thought we were basically finished scripting the early issues, and then reminded us that you’re never quite done with the writing.
Amy is currently attending the Center for Creative Studies in the illustration department and you can go check out her art at cthulhette.deviantart.com
Jeff Brzozowski
Jeff is not only our letterer, but also one of the people that reads our scripts for us. Jeff is a highly detailed and highly punctual person. We can always count on him to read through the scripts first. Jeff is also an incredibly nice and polite guy and his feedback follows suit. Jeff doesn’t usually have much by way of problems or suggestions for the book… but when he does, you can bet that it’s something that really needs attention.
You can read more about Jeff on his subpage of this site through the menu to the left, or by visiting his blog at kneelbeforeblog2.blogspot.com It’s as delightful as he is.
Corinne Roberts
Corinne is one tough chick. She’s quick, funny, smart, and doesn’t take no guff off of nobody. That being the case, she helps us keep our ladies (and our guys) tough. She paid particular attention to our females, and wouldn’t let us get away with anything less than full depth and dimension. If anybody got too one-dimensional, she’d call us out on it. We had a lot of long conversations with Corrine about the book, comics, and characters in general, and it was always a lot of fun.
Comfort has known Corinne ever since high school, where they met at the Careerline Tech Center. The two met back up when Corrine transferred to Kendall Collage, where the three of us majored in Illustration. Now she’s a freelance illustrator and aspires to do big-time children’s book work utilizing her cute, tough, quirky style. She’s got some really great stuff and we highly recommend you go check out her website at www.corinneroberts.net
Joel Bartlett, Will Jones, Kyle (something), and John Jansen
These guys are our cheerleaders. Ranging from age 17-18, they represent the next generation and their love of the book and the characters surprises and excites us every time. While all our other editors take a technical approach to the reading of the scripts, these guys read for the ‘cool’ factor. We can tell how well a scene is working based on their usage of ‘sweet!’ ‘aw man!’ and ‘bad-ass!’ When they read the book, it inspires us and renews our enthusiasm. It’s so easy to get discouraged by the process and the uphill battle of releasing a self-published title into a market that’s so hard to crack, but these kids help keep our engines fueled and primed.
All four of these young guys have been taking art classes with us for the last 4 years or so, so they’ve been able to watch The Uniques progress from something we really wanted to do into scripts and art and now an actual comic, and that’s just cool. All of them are really good kids, and let us tell you, it would be a whole lot harder to do this book if it weren’t for guys like them.