Like Her Comic Book Character, This Santa Cruz Artist Is On The Fast Track To Fame

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Anyone who walks into one of the thousands of independent comic book shops around the world Saturday on Free Comic Book Day will get a free copy of a book drawn by a Santa Cruz artist who is a rarity in the world of colorful fiction.

Evan Stanley only 20 years old, but despite her name, she is a woman in a very male-dominated business.

"It's amazing that she's from here and so young," said Joe Ferrara, owner of the Santa Cruz comic book store Atlantis Fantasyworld, where Stanley will be signing the comic and maybe doing some live sketches for fans Saturday at 10 a.m.

Stanley works on Sonic the Hedgehog comics, a video game-inspired franchise owned by Archie Comics in New York. The story of how she got her job sounds like it's right out of a comic.

She entered a contest which was looking for drawings of Sonic, the 22-year-old character from a Japanese video game by Sega. The return email she got two years ago didn't just tell her she won; it asked if she wanted a job.

"Ahhh," she says. "I've been very lucky. It's such a great opportunity. I give it 100 percent every day. My goal in life was to work for Archie comics. That's pretty much the tops of what I had in mind for my life. Unfortunately, I got there early. My goal now is to get better at illustration and find a new outlet."

That could be working for a film studio such as Pixar or Dreamworks, as well as writing her own comics and creating her own characters. She's minoring in creative writing to help with that.

Raised in the woods near Henry Cowell Park between Scotts Valley and Santa Cruz, she was homeschooled and started attending Cabrillo College at 13. She got her Associates Degree at 18 and transfered to San Jose State University, where she is studying animation and illustration.

"I have an unusual relationship with comics for someone working in the industry," she says. "I didn't grow up with comics. I was into Calvin and Hobbes, and had some of their book collections, and my mom read me comics, like Bone."

But she got her first taste of super heros from the movie Spider-Man 2, her favorite comic outside the Archie line.

"Free Comic Book Day is very important to me," she says. "It was one of the first times I got to get a stack of comics and read them all. It opened my eyes that there was a whole industry out there."

Free Comic Book Day started in 2002 as a way to help independent comic stores survive competition with convenience stores and the Internet, and is held the first weekend in May every year.

Anyone visiting the stores can walk out with one-time printings of a panoply of comics from Superman to the Smurfs. (See the complete list here.)

Stanley, who is called a penciller, works from home creating the art on the comic book page. The penciller draws in black and white each panel of a comic book based on what the author suggests or the dialog he or she creates.

Like a movie director, Stanley is the one who creates the vision for how the panel will look. After her, an inker fills in her line drawings with colors. Each job is its own specialized art form.

"For me it's the most exciting job," she says. "You decide how everything is shown. It's a huge part of the story. It's really powerful."

Stanley started drawing her own comics when she was 9, but didn't really know they were comics.

"I've always felt connected to sequential storytelling as a medium. I was doing it in my sketch books. I was telling stories sequentially. I just didn't know it was comics."

In 2011 she did a poster for Sonic that was given out on Free Comic Book Day. "That was the cornerstone of my very short career," she says.

The pay for her work, she says, is "not bad, but not good either." She gets $70 a page, the industry's entry-level salary. She can produce a page a day. Artists with more experience can do two or three, but that's rare, she says.

Artists often support themselves by selling the original artwork online. And, she adds, everything she does is a tax write off because it is for research.

"Artists are getting more respect and rights for the characters they create because of all the lawsuits," she says.

Her role models are Bill Watterson, who does Calvin and Hobbes, and Scott McCloud, who wrote the 1993 book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, which she bought at Bookshop Santa Cruz and she says, "taught me everything I know."

She went to the world's biggest gathering of comic book creators and fans called Comicon in San Diego for the first time last year, and because she didn't understand the registration process, ended up paying, even though she was a featured artist.

She'll know better next year.

"I was so happy to meet the people I've been working with for a year and everyone was so nice and enthusiastic and I got to have great discussions about the books."