‘I’ve always worn cute as a badge of honor’: The Jay Fosgitt interview

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Jake Zawlacki | October 14, 2024

In my interview with Jay Fosgitt, the word that kept returning was “heart.” It makes sense, considering his oeuvre. His simple, streamlined, cartoony figures weren’t just cute. There was something else there.

We find that heart even in his first creator-owned work, Dead Duck. A comic full of off-color humor, horror, parody, and an underground comics aesthetic inspired by Ralph Bakshi and Vaughn Bodē shouldn’t be able to draw you in with tender moments between an anthropomorphic grim-reaper-duck, his boss, and his partner, Zombie Chick. Yet, it does.

Dead Duck’s success would lead to a handful of comics for Ape Entertainment that were creator-owned in every way but the paycheck. Fosgitt wrote, penciled, inked, colored, and lettered multiple issues for the publisher, and even through editorial dictation and questionable concepts, you can still find his sensibilities coming through. It’s that same heart that would follow him throughout his work for massively popular franchises in My Little Pony, Marvel Comics, and The Jim Henson Company. And while his work for licensed properties is always at his best stylistically, you can quickly tell just how much Bodie Troll means to him when reading his creator-owned work.

First published as a four issue series by Red 5 Comics in 2013, then republished with additional material in 2018 by Boom! Studios, and now in a complete volume one “director’s cut” with additional material under Fosgitt’s own Cheeseburger Press, Bodie Troll follows a troll desperately trying to be scary but one who’s simply too cute to do so. Bodie Troll Volume One takes its readers into a fairy tale-inspired world with our namesake troll as the unlikeliest of heroes. But this isn’t to say it’s all sunshine and rainbows; there’s danger there too.

The world of Bodie Troll is also a world of adversity. While the premise is cute, Fosgitt shows readers that cuteness and depth aren’t exclusive concepts. There’s something deeply human about wanting to be something, and your friends and family and situation demanding you to be something different, something better. It’s this one foot planted in Fosgitt’s own experience that bring out the strengths in Bodie Troll, separating it from the often banal and soulless subject matter of “all-ages” fare.

I had the good fortune of speaking with Jay over computer screens about his career path, creative influences, work for hire, and the complicated aesthetics of cuteness.

JAKE ZAWLACKI: When did you start drawing comics?

JAY FOSGITT: If we're going by when did I start doing it for myself, I've been drawing since I was two and started doing my own comics by the time I was five. If we were going professionally, my first professionally published comics work was 2006.

When you were five years old, what kind of stuff were you doing?

It started off monsters and muppets. Those were my two biggest influences as a kid. Then I was a voracious follower of animation, mostly through television because Disney didn't have the grip on theaters at the time. Animated movies weren't quite the big deal that they would become twenty years later, so most of my animation fandom came from television. Popeye. Rocky and Bullwinkle. The Charlie Brown specials. All the weird Hanna-Barbera stuff from the seventies. It's all pretty evident in my work.

Were you reading funny animal and Disney comics back then?

Yes, I was still getting into comic books. Back then you could still buy those three or four in a plastic wrap pack at a grocery store and those would be Little Lulu, some Donald Ducks, some Pink Panther, stuff like that. I want to say Dell and Gold Key were still around in the late seventies so I was reading those pretty voraciously as a little kid, but eventually I discovered Archie because my older cousins would leave those comic books lying around in our cabin up north and I became a big fan of Archie. Eventually, that went further into superhero comics and things like that but at the same time newspaper comic strips were my jam. Charles Schulz in particular really, really shaped the direction of my career back then.

A lot of the early stuff you did were one- and two-pagers, so that fits within the genre. When you prefaced Dead Duck to me—which was great, by the way, I really loved it—

[Laughs] I'm glad to hear it.

It seemed like you were nervous about sending it. Was that your first published work?

Yes. Well, it's my first creator-owned published work. My introduction into the comic book industry was Dave Álvarez had a creator owned book called Yenny, which I can't remember who the publisher was — it doesn't exist anymore — but he went through a small publisher and we were friends online because we were both Muppet fans and had shared our Muppet fan art and he asked me if I wanted to draw a backup story for his Yenny comic so I wrote and drew a three- or four-page story that put his character in sort of a Fleischer Brothers/Betty Boop world and that was my first published work. I don't think anyone ever saw it but I loved doing it and it was a fantastic entry. But Dead Duck was my first creator-owned book that I fortunately found a publisher for. I was going to self publish it, but found Ape Entertainment.

This is jumping way ahead but you can see the seeds that would become Junk Drawer Comics later on down the road. And you're doing this while also working on all-ages material. How do you switch between these two pretty different audiences?

That's a fantastic question. Oh my gosh. My earliest publishing experience, not in the comic book industry but in general, was working on my school newspapers and the comics I was doing for them were mostly editorial and some satirical strip stuff that was very edgy. They would let you get away with quite a bit and I did some pretty bawdy stuff, for lack of a better term. When I started doing Dead Duck, that was a natural jumping point. With Dead Duck I wanted to do something that has the parody vibe of Rocky and Bullwinkle, the darkness of Tim Burton, I mean, it's so apparently influenced by Beetlejuice which I think I realized when I created Dead Duck at fourteen, but by the time I did the comic book, that was 2007. I started working on the graphic novel and by then I was in my late twenties, bordering thirty by that time, I can't remember. I didn't focus as much on, “Hey this is so influenced by Beetlejuice.” I just tried to make it my own thing, but I think it was an unavoidable comparison throughout the book.

There's an underground comics feel to it too.

Yeah. Oh god, I'm a big fan of the underground comics movement. Vaughn Bodē was a humongous influence, or I should say Vaughn "Bod-ay." A friend years ago said, Oh, it's pronounced “Bod-ay” and later on I find out it was Bodē. Somebody had asked me, “Did you name Bodie Troll after Vaughn Bodē?” I was like, “No, though I am a big fan of his work.” I wonder if it was a subconscious thing.

But to your point, I didn't like the attention that Dead Duck was getting because I saw it as satirical and fun and I thought I was putting heart into it, but instead you had people emailing me saying, “I love Zombie Chick’s tits,” and really sexualizing it in a way that maybe I was just naive but I didn't see it that way. It bothered me. I wanted to create stuff a huge audience could appreciate like the Muppets, where it appealed to fans of different levels. Kids to adults could all find their way through it. That's why I created Bodie Troll and that's what got me into all-ages comics.

As far as jumping around goes, how difficult is it for me to do that? Not at all. Not at all because I have one foot in bawdy humor still and the other foot is in all ages stuff, be it Disney, Muppets, that sort of appreciation. I feel equally versed and it's never been difficult for me to differentiate between the two. Though I will say with Bodie, I try to avoid it being like saccharine and heavily edited. I still think it's got its own kind of edginess, but certainly not the kind you would find in Dead Duck or Junk Drawer Comics.

Yeah Bodie certainly has the humor for the adults reading it as well as the kids. There’s that fine line to it. Then you're working with Ape Entertainment where you do a trilogy of Little Green Men comics, Dino Duck, Old McMonster's Haunted Farm and they're all pretty thick comics. How were these developed?

So what had happened with Dead Duck was the graphic novel came out and I was really proud of it. The print run completely sold out but it was a very small print run and then Ape Entertainment, rather than doing a second print run said, “Well, yeah, maybe you can do another Dead Duck graphic novel but we really want you to do this.”

The other Ape Entertainment books were totally work for hire. To put the most positive spin on it, it was a great experience to break into the industry. This is before I'd worked on any licensed comics so it was a good way to figure out, “Hey, these people are coming to me with their property and now I'm going to do my best to appeal to what they want.” But I still had all this creative freedom to do what I wanted with it. It was a weird animal, all those Ape Entertainment books, because they came to me with a just a paper thin idea of a concept in some cases like with Little Green Men. Here are the names and then some other cartoonist I don't remember who had drawn his renditions of the characters and they're like, “We want the characters to look like this,” and I said, “Well, I don't draw like that so let me do my own thing.” So, I was influenced by his one-pager that he had drawn but in so far as everything else goes, I created it from the ground up. Those were like creator-owned books in a sense that I did create, but I didn't own. I have an odd relationship with them. I'm proud of them to certain degrees. Little Green Men I am proud of to a certain degree on certain points. Other points, I am not.

I am not at all proud of those other two books because at that point there was a lot more pushback about what they had to be like. Dino Duck, in particular, felt like it was totally disregarding the fact that I brought my own duck book to them. I know it's just my paranoia but at the time I felt like they thought they could do a better duck book than me so they want me to create a duck book for them.

And they have you do their “better” duck book.

Yeah, so again, it was weird. It was like they wanted me to do this and say, “This is how a duck book should be, but do it to our specifications.” I thought the concept was weak.

I was curious because I looked at a Little Green Men comic and saw that you did the story, art, inks, colors, and letters. But then I looked at the spine and I see two more names, of the CEO and COO, next to yours. I've never seen a comic in my life that had the CEO and COO of a company on the spine of a book, ever.

That was, yeah ... That was them staking their claim, and rightfully so. They owned the property but it was a property they basically had me create. In hindsight, it doesn't matter. It never went anywhere but as I'm creating Little Green Men for them, and originally when they wanted me to do it, they said, “We like your your sense of humor. We see what you're doing with Dead Duck, so we want the humor in Little Green Men to be like The Simpsons. I’m like, “Well, what I'm doing with Dead Duck isn't altogether different from The Simpsons humor, kind of edgy and whatnot.” But then I did it — I don't remember if it was the entire first graphic novel — but I did it and they accepted it but then they said, “We decided we want this to be all-ages so you can no longer have them get drunk or be womanizers or a couple other things that I had in there that they thought were pushing it. I had cigarettes in there at one point and they said they don't want any of that in there. “This is an all-ages book now.” I wish you would have told me that before I did the first one.

I had to reverse engineer it a little bit and at some point I created the concept of them meeting these other aliens called the “little blue men” who I modeled off of the Marx brothers. I loved doing these two stories with them and they let me do them but then they put a hard stop to it and said, “Yeah, we want you to focus on Little Green Men not ‘little blue men.’” I had much more fun writing and drawing the little blue men cause that was totally me.

After Ape Entertainment, the first four issues of Bodie Troll come out. How did that happen?

Well, I saved up enough money to bring myself and my then wife out to San Diego Comic Con. This was 2012 and I was determined to find a publisher for it, so I walked around with my portfolio, I even had like a little thumb drive with the stories, but I only had I think four pages of Bodie written and drawn and I had hired my friend Evan “Doc” Shaner to color the stories. You might know Evan's work from DC Comics. He's fantastic and I've known Evan since college but I hired him to color the Bodie pages for me because I wasn't confident in my coloring at the time. I colored Dead Duck all myself and I look at it now and it's a nightmare to me. I hired Evan to color those first three or four pages and that's all I had for my Bodie pitch. I took it around to different publishers, editors, creators, anybody who would give me a time of day and I found Red 5 Comics who I hadn't previously heard of. Their big claim to fame at the time was Atomic Robo and right from the get-go they liked what I had with Bodie. They pretty much agreed to it right then and there, no wait period.

But as soon as they agreed to it, I think we exchanged maybe one email, they're like “How soon are you thinking you'd want to put out some Bodie comics with us?” And I said, “Well, I'd like maybe six months to a year lead time.” And they said, “Okay, we're thinking in a month or two.” I'm like, “Oh crap!” I had all these ideas for what I wanted to do with Bodie and his ensemble characters but they were barely written down on paper. It was all in my head. I had to hit the ground running and all of a sudden establish certain things going forward with drawing these comics. And so we put out four issues and one Free Comic Book Day story initially. Then they did a trade which comprised those four issues and not the Free Comic Book Day story. Then I did one other full issue for them after that. And I don't want to get ahead of myself ...

Bodie comes out but then you jump into the world of My Little Pony, which is funny because you had a couple jokes in Dead Duck about My Little Pony.

Oh, that was totally unplanned. When I was a kid growing up, I was a child of the eighties. We had My Little Pony back then and we had a cartoon out back then that I would watch on mornings before I'd go to school. That was me just referencing something from my childhood and I knew that. I think that was right before Lauren Faust came up with the My Little Pony cartoon that we all know from the 2010s. I'm friends with Katie Cook who is very big in the comic industry, extremely talented, and love her to death. She dragged me kicking and screaming into working on My Little Pony because at that point Bodie was ending at Red 5 by my design, and I didn't know what was coming next.

Katie has always been a big big supporter of me and she was like, “Listen, I'm writing for My Little Pony now. You should come on and maybe at least do some covers or something. I'm like, “Yeah, I guess I'll get around to doing that.” Every time she'd see me, she’d say, “Did you get those samples sent to Bobby Curnow yet?” He was our eventual editor over there. I said, “Yeah, I'm going to get around to it.” But she said, “No, no do it now.” I ended up sending him some different sample drawings of what I thought I would do with My Little Pony and then right away he says, “Love it. You want to do a cover?” I’m like, “Great, let's do a cover.” I did a cover for My Little Pony: Friends Forever, number eleven I believe, and that was a lot of fun. Midway through doing the cover, he says, “Yeah, you want to draw the whole issue?” “I do!” Because I needed the work.

I should stress that I was kind of ambivalent about My Little Pony. Most of the people who worked on My Little Pony were already fans of the modern cartoon. I didn't have cable so I never even watched it. I just thought it sounds cool and I need a gig. It was a fun opportunity and that's how I fell in with My Little Pony.

It seems like a huge move from working on creator-owned comics with Red 5 to IDW and this huge fan base. When you were at conventions, did people see you as the My Little Pony artist?

So, gosh, how do I put this? When I started working on My Little Pony, I didn't realize how passionate the fans were. That passion could be very positive. There were some people who read my stuff on My Little Pony who were so supportive and said, “Oh, you're my favorite artist on the series.” Which, of course, given the level of talent on there I was like, “Yeah, let's be real. Andy Price is amazing.” I had some nice fans like that but there was also a vocal minority, maybe majority, who hated what I did on My Little Pony. They would tear me apart on social media. I was never a Twitter guy, but that's where most of the attacks were happening. I never went to the pony fan sites and I never read the pony fan newsletters and, at least initially, I never went to pony conventions. I was fairly protected from all of that.

Up until I would have people that were well intentioned but would come to me and say, “They're tearing you up online,” and I'm like, “I didn't need to know that. I was doing just fine being blissfully ignorant.” It became a bit of a burden to work on the comics knowing I had so much dissension, but that series came to me at just the right time and really helped me make my footprint in the comic industry, particularly working on licensed property. I'm always going to be thankful for that.

Did you have any uncomfortable experiences at conventions with fans?

Only once. Eventually, I was invited to only two pony conventions. One that’s called Cider Fest where they would hold it in Milwaukee, and that one was wonderful. The people ran it truly like a fan-run convention and they were so good to me. But at that show, one young guy, probably in his early twenties, came up to my table — and was who you would imagine an online troll to be like — and he comes up to my table and goes, “Hey, my friend has a message for you. He says, ‘Get better.’” I kept my cool and I just said, “Well, listen. He probably doesn't like my work from the way you're putting things and that's fine. IDW and Hasbro both like what I'm doing and they're paying me regardless of what you guys think. All you guys are accomplishing is making me dislike working on the book but it's not going to keep me from working on the book because this is my career.” He kind of backpedaled and was a little apologetic. He said, “Well, I can tell you're upset about this.” And I'm like, “No, it's just you know you came at me and you knew what you were doing and you're not going to get a rise out of me.”

What I didn't know at the time was my friend Cassie was there with me kind of assisting me and she's from Milwaukee and she was sitting behind me and someone from the show was physically holding her back from going over the table at the guy. She's this tiny little five- maybe four-foot something, five-foot nothing. Very talented artist in her own right and she was ready to throw hands on my behalf. That's the worst that ever got as far as a negative fan interaction.

I had also done the big pony show they have in Baltimore: BronyCon. I did it once and that was fun. That was actually fun. That was a positive experience. Not a lot of in-person negativity. I'm thankful for that.

That’s a very controlled response. I could see how you'd probably want to say more.

You're right. I can be a very emotional guy in positive and negative senses so I've always tried to maintain my cool when it has come to my work in comics when I've had negativity. Quick side story here. I got divorced in 2013 and I did my very first convention after the divorce and was still very raw emotionally. I was doing a show just outside of Cincinnati that doesn't exist anymore. A couple guys came up and scoffed at Dead Duck. They're like. “Dead Duck? What's that?” I say, “You got something to say about it?” The guy's like, “Well, I'm just, you know, whatever.” I let it go but then they said something snarky about Bodie which I had just created and I calmed myself down but it took some doing. I got very defensive right away. At that point I kind of put Dead Duck to rest and I moved onto Bodie. I'm much more precious about Bodie and that almost became a dust up, but you know how it goes.

After My Little Pony, you became a known quantity in the industry and you did backup stories for Marvel, Boom!, Source Point Press, and Image. And just last year you did a series of Marvel Beginnings board books. Hulk's Big Feelings, I Love You 3000, Spider-Man’s Spooky Halloween, and First Shapes, Colors, Numbers. What was your interest in doing board books?

Let me back up slightly here because this is kind of cool. The whole reason I got into any work from Marvel Comics directly — this was about 2016 — is a friend of mine, Heather Antos, had gone to college with my ex, and her and I remained very good friends after that. She saw me working on My Little Pony and said, “I want to get into comics too.” She decided the way she wanted to do it was through editing. So she got a job as an assistant editor at Marvel and right away she was championing me to do stuff for them. Sort of at that same time I was forming a bit of a relationship with the editor of the Avengers line at the time, Tom Brevoort, and Tom asked me to do my very first gig at Marvel doing a cover for an Avengers Annual. I also got to draw a character that was co-created by Heather Antos in Gwenpool.

Heather started pushing for me to do stuff for the books that she was an assistant editor on and I started doing a lot of Deadpool covers and Deadpool-adjacent stuff. Skottie Young, who at one point I had met at a con where he said his son knew of me because his son was a fan of Bodie Troll and I was thinking, “No way. Someone’s heard of that?” At that point Bodie was still published by Red 5, or had been. Skottie eventually asked me to draw an issue of Rocket Raccoon and Groot that he'd written, which was a blast. That's how I got my Marvel stuff.

Page from Not Brand Ecch No. 14.

And you did Forbush Man.

Heather Antos approached me with a chance to both write and draw for an issue of Not Brand Echh, which was Marvel's Mad Magazine-esque book where they lampooned their own stuff. She had me create three one-page gags featuring Forbush Man, which was a lot of fun to do. I'd grown up with the character, and the humor was perfect for me. My only regret was a pitch I did for the comic that got rejected, which I called “Old Timey Avengers” — I drew it in an early 20th-century Fleischer Brothers style. I think it's one of the best things I've created that never saw print.

But back to those board books you're talking about. I had done San Diego Comic Con six years ago and the editor worked for Disney publishing where she was putting out a series based on young Donald Duck. He was going to school at this academy and had Mickey and all the other guys as eighth graders, basically. She asked me if I wanted to work on that because she saw my work on Bodie at my table and that inspired her to ask me to do that. I jumped on, obviously. And that was my entry into working for Disney publishing.

We did that series for at least three years. We did several books but they were only sold in non-English speaking Europe so I never got to really promote them. Jump ahead to, about at this point, gosh, three years ago, two years ago, the art director that I've been working with since those young Donald books asked me if I wanted to draw this new Marvel series and that's how I got into that. I always hoped to work in kids books in a proper sense like this but I've never had a literary agent or anything so I never had a way in. This was a great opportunity for me and that's how I started doing it.

It was ironic when he asked me. The art director said, “Do you think you could draw the Marvel superheroes?” And I said, “Well, obviously you don't look to my website very often. I've been drawing them since 2016.” There was still a bit of a learning curve because the way they wanted me to draw them was something that's entirely different. But that's how I broke into the Marvel board books.

One thing I should point out is that I draw the books but then he hands the artwork off to an artist in Italy and she digitally paints over my lines. For a brief period he was also using a very talented artist that I'm friends with, and who I recommended, Lacie Barker, who's in L.A., and she was painting over my stuff for a while there too because they wanted the books to have a very specific look to them. That sort of soft-painted look that isn't my specialty, but he wanted my design sense. To my understanding, the books don't cite the painters in the credits and they ought to so I try to make it a point. I wish I knew the other artist's name but I try to make a point to showcase them. I wish I was talented enough to have done those colors on my own.

What’s it like doing a board book compared to a comic book?

I like doing a board book compared to a comic book. I'll take doing a comic book any day though, to tell you the truth, because the board books are a lot more of a tightrope walk. You'd think it would be easier because you're essentially drawing one illustration versus a series of panels and trying to tell a sequential story but it's harder because they have co-publishers around the world who are going to put out these books as well as here in the States and those publishers might want to move the artwork around. For example, if I have Spider-Man standing behind a couch I have to draw his whole body as one layer and the couch as a second layer. That way those publishers can shuffle things around to their specifications. It’s like trying to predict what they're going to want and man, it is difficult sometimes.

I really hate the process, but as far as the final printed versions that you see here in the States, they're doing some great stuff with them and obviously they know what they're talking about.

Thinking of how large the children's book market is, there's tons and tons of content out there of non-licensed works. What would you say to a parent who's concerned that a board book or picture book of Marvel characters will be priming their toddlers as Disney consumers?

I would definitely recommend them. One of the neatest things I did, and this hasn't been the case with all of those Marvel's kids books, is I did a Spider-Man book where he's trick-or-treating with a bunch of kids. It’s one of those books where you see a black cat on a fence and I drew the cat but there's a spot on the cat's body where you can touch it. It's a little swatch of of faux fur. It's those kinds of touch and feel books that are really neat. I liked getting to work on that as I think they have great appeal for audiences. I'm very proud to be a part of that in any way because I read those books as a kid too.

For me, though, I was reading kids books at the same time I was reading comics. It was all kind of part of the greater appreciation. Highly recommend them. I think they're really good. Then again, as a fan of comics and a fan of kids books and everything there are so many artists working for different facets of Disney publishing who are doing a far better job than I am on those books. I wish I could excel to what they are doing. It's awe-inspiring to be working in the same kind of venue that they're working in because I'm so impressed by all these guys doing these books. They're very good quality. All of them.

I’m thinking about the market dynamics for heavily licensed properties where a lot of kids books are not always part of these much larger transmedia properties. You have Disney marketing to young kids who don't really have a way of filtering that even though the books may be objectively good.

I've seen licensed kids books that are trash, that are based on familiar properties but you can tell it's just a cash grab. They don't put much thought into why they even have a kid's book based on this character. Well, because it's a familiar property and their parents will pay for it. I feel differently about the Marvel stuff because those Marvel characters are as iconic as Mickey Mouse and Charlie Chaplin and characters that have been around for a hundred years.

I will say that working for Marvel Comics directly versus working for Disney Publishing, who are doing the Marvel books, are two different things completely. I have an obscene amount of freedom working for Marvel Comics. They allow me to experiment. I mean if they pull back the reins at all it's in ways that improve what I'm doing or it's so minimal. Whereas with Disney publishing, I have an editor. I have my art director. I have an editor on that book series. Then there is some sort of — I’m going to say a legal team at Marvel that tends to hate everything I do and I have to redraw it constantly. There are a lot more cooks in the kitchen doing the children's books than the Marvel comics. The Marvel comics are a lot more fulfilling for me creatively, but I'm still thankful to be in there at all.

Do you think the Disney production team leads to a better quality of products?

I can only say it on a case by case basis. I will say having me draw the books and having somebody else digitally paint them has made for a much more beautiful product than it would have been had I done that by myself. Insofar as these different tiers of editors, no. No, I don't believe so. In fact, I think it's a hindrance to be completely honest. I think it's a hindrance. But I would say that with any property I was working on. I think if you have too many people who are paid just to put their opinions in and those opinions aren't necessarily to benefit the book but because they're paid to put in their opinions, that's when things go sour.
I would dare say I have experienced that, but I am just a freelancer on those books and don't have a lot of say. Sometimes I have to remind myself, “You are the cog within this machine. You know you do your bit within the parameters they give you. You signed up for this. You have to accept that.” And it's difficult because having come into comics as a creator doing creator-owned stuff and to have to lose that freedom on licensed books, it's a learning curve.

That leads me to this quote. We're at the Bodie Troll: Volume One Introduction where you write, “I'm doing everything I've always wanted from the characters in the world totally unencumbered by the public, editors, numbers, and teachers telling me I can't draw people who look like Muppets.” Why do you want to draw people who look like Muppets?

Oh gosh, that is a big question right there. Jim Henson is my all time hero. I have so much connectivity to him and his creations as a fan. When I was eleven years old, he and I corresponded a few times and he encouraged me to come and see him at the Henson company after I graduated high school because he really liked my artwork. I sent him some things when I was eleven years old, and he saw something in me. Granted, he could have just been being nice but years and years later I find out that he saved my letter and a copy of his response to me in his personal file.

In 2013, right when I was in the middle of my divorce and I was in such a low point in my life I wasn't sure what my future was going to hold, I get this email out of nowhere from Karen Falk who is the archivist for the Henson Company. She said, “You don't know me, but I found this letter that you'd written Jim back in 1986 and he wrote you back and he obviously saw something in your work. So I went online to see if you became an artist, like Jim saw in you, and you did! I'm so excited for you and it’s so nice to meet you. Here's a couple scans of the two letters” — because I'd lost the letter years earlier — “Please come and visit us at the Henson offices in Queens anytime. We'd love to have you.”

I have been there a few times and I'm friends with those people. It was so life affirming and career affirming and it's been my true north as far as my career goals and my life pursuits. It's everything to me still. So, that's why my characters looked like Muppets when I was in the first grade and why there's still such a heavy Henson influence on everything I do today. Sometimes you really got to look for it. Sometimes it's totally apparent. Other times you see how that might be Henson adjacent or whatever.

You wrote and drew Fraggle Rock.

Yeah. That was one of the few times they let me write and draw a licensed property. That's only happened to me twice now. The Henson Company recommended me as one of the artists on that Fraggle Rock comic through Archaia/Boom! Studios. They said they liked my work and really wanted me to be a part of this. I got to write and draw that one volume. “Rough Side of the Rock,” which I came up with the title and basically an anti-bullying story. Such an honor and probably the best thing I could ever do for the Henson company. It's such a cliche to say a lifelong dream fulfilled, but it's what it is.

You also did some art books for the Henson Company too.

Yes. I've been very lucky. There was a gentleman who was the liaison at the Henson Company who has since passed away and he was the nicest guy and a big proponent of my work. One of many proponents of my work at the Henson Company, but he's the one who not only had me work on that, but also said, “Hey, I bet you could do some cool stuff with Labyrinth and Dark Crystal.” Even though my stuff is more inherently cartoony than you might think of with these Brian Froud-designed characters. I had the best time working on those in a couple different art books, an adult coloring book, and even a cover for a Dark Crystal spin off comic book that I don't think I ever got any copies of.

Yeah, to say that I've worked on those. I even worked on the Sesame Street comic. When I was still with Ape Entertainment, and this was at the tail end of my tour with Ape Entertainment, I was almost done doing their books and all of a sudden I had heard they got the Sesame Street license. I called up one of the publishers and said, “I'm just going to tell you now, you're not going to find anybody more fit to work on a Sesame Street book than me. You already got me on staff here.” He said, “Oh, we were going to let you know. We were going to let you know.” I don't think they were going to let me know, but I really pushed to get on that.

I was one of several artists and writers that got to write for that as well. It was a delicate process because by then Sesame Street, Sesame Workshop, had become a lot more bureaucratic than in the days when Jim Henson was alive and still working for the company. There was a lot more specificity in what they would allow me to do and I didn't mind jumping through the hoops that Sesame Workshop gave me, but Ape Entertainment had made a couple decisions that I wasn't at all happy with. They needed some art changes and rather than having me do it they handed it off to the colorist to kind of redraw in my style which really angered me at the time.

It was a double-edged sword working on the Sesame Street comic. The highlight for me working on the comic was some years later. Ape had lost the license but the guy who was the editor on the book managed to get the license back to produce one more issue and they used artwork of mine for the cover. That comic appeared on the Rachael Ray show. It was a Halloween episode and her and her husband came out dressed as cavemen and then Snuffleupagus walked out on stage with Marty Robinson performing him—I got to meet Marty years later, which was really cool — and they had the comic right there. They held it up and there's my cover. Vindication! It was great. Jim Henson was a huge, huge, huge influence.

Do you have a philosophy behind why he was so influential to you? It seems more than just stylistic.

Oh yeah. What I love about Jim is that he wasn't satisfied to just do one thing. He had all these different things he wanted to do. Even if people were telling him, “Well, that's so different from the Muppets. You shouldn't be doing that.” Or, “You should be concentrating on this.” Or, “Maybe you should stick to the familiar here.” He put his money where his mouth was and took a lot of financial gambles and sometimes lost, sometimes broke even, sometimes won. But he was always trying new, different kinds of storytelling, different types of characters.

When he did Dark Crystal, it was a whole other galaxy from what he was doing for 20 years with the Muppets. He was like, “No, this is what I want to do.” I look at it from that perspective as well. People probably have set ideas for what I do. I think the industry looks at me like, “Oh, he's an all-ages creator because he's a cartoony guy.” I think that's not so much unfair to me as it is to anyone with a cartoony style to say you have to do kids comics. You have to do all-ages comics. You have to do kids books. They've never heard of Vaughn Bodē. They've never looked at the underground. They don't read R. Crumb or look at Ralph Bakshi's animation which is a huge influence on me. Or look at Bill Plympton's animation, another big influence. The greater populace that takes in comics and animation has such a limited view of what a comic style should be used for. I look at what Jim Henson did, breaking his barriers, and I try to break barriers my own way.

I think a prime example of that these days is my Junk Drawer Comics, which is the webcomic you mentioned at the beginning that I've drawn for a couple years. I wanted an outlet where I could tell any kind of story I wanted. I didn't have to commit to a graphic novel or years-long narrative. Instead, I could do these one-pagers that I kind of feel like is a tribute to the Sunday comic strips. Even though in some cases I use profanity or I do political satire or I do horror or whatever, sci-fi, some slice of life stuff. Probably my most popular strip I did was a slice of life about a woman that I was in love with who ended up passing away a couple years ago. That comic outlet has allowed me to be so expansive and experimental. I think that's what Jim Henson was doing his entire career. That is definitely something I take away from him and his art.

It leads to this question about Bodie Troll, which is all-ages. What would you say about Bodie Troll to skeptical adult comic readers who might say, “Oh, that's kid stuff. That's animated stuff. That's cartoony.”?

It's so hard to change someone's mind and heart from what they believe a comic should be, especially a cartoony comic. What I would say is, “Well, you have to open it up and discover it on your own territory.” Look at it like the first person to read Lord of the Rings. They could have thought it was going to be this cutesy little fairy tale. Disney animation had tried to do Lord of the Rings at one point in the early sixties and probably would have done that to it but a lot of people thought this is what fairy tales are supposed to be. Then they read Lord of the Rings and how expansive — I mean it's more expansive than the Bible — and it changes their perception.

Read Bodie Troll yourself. First read it by yourself, discover the material, discover the characters on your own. Within Bodie I do not do parodies of popular fairy tales but I definitely have touchstones with familiar tropes within fairy tales, folk tales, Appalachian folk tales, and stylistic things from those so they can discover the material on their own and see what they think of it. If they're a parent, then sit down with your kid and read it with them and see how they relate to it. More often than not, I have parents coming up to me saying we read Bodie every night. This goes as far back as when Red 5 was publishing it and then Boom! eventually published it.

Even now parents will say, “We read this. We've re-read it multiple times.” Which is an honor to me because my mom read to me as a kid and to create something that they can experience like that together means everything to me. I created Bodie because I wanted to create something with heart, stories about kindness, even when the humor can be a little mean spirited at times it still comes back to that heart and caring and warmth. The kind Disney at its best can pull off. Henson always pulled off. That's what I aspire to do. I think adults will find that if they give it a chance, and adults reading it with their kids, boy, that's going to be an experience for them.

What was it about the character of Bodie Troll that made you want to commit to such a long project?

Bodie is a culmination of ideas I have had as far back as the mid-'90s and it wasn't something I ever set out to do. I wasn't like I'm gonna just start collecting these ideas and one day combine them all into something. It happened organically. I had some comic strips in college that I had created that were — I would go so far as to say failed attempts at syndicated comic strips. Cholly was originally a college student that I wrote a comic strip around in the '90s and she had this sidekick who was this monster named Gunk. He had no connection to Bodie whatsoever. Doesn't look like him, nothing like that. But unintentionally I ended up bringing Cholly over into the Bodie strip and thought, “Wow, I guess that dynamic is kind of the same as when she was with Gunk.” These things happen in my head unconsciously and that's been the whole nature of Bodie.

I've always loved fairy tales. Been a long time appreciator of fairy tales. My grandmother would sometimes, through the oral tradition, tell me these stories that I don't even think were existing fairy tales. She would make them up as she went along and inspired me with that. Then I loved the satirical way that Rocky and Bullwinkle handled fairy tales and how Sesame Street handled them with Kermit the Frog interviewing nursery rhyme characters and things like that. That was all stewing within me to come out into my own fairy tale world where I was going to have my own monster.

Bodie started off as a failed pitch to Mike Mignola. Around 2010, already a huge fan of Hellboy, I was friends with Guy Davis who at the time was drawing B.P.R.D., the spin off Hellboy book. I had a little bit of encouragement from him but it was something I really wanted to do. I took it upon myself to write and draw, and I might've hired Evan Shaner to color that one too. In any case, I came up with this kid Hellboy story and through the story you find out Hellboy's first crush was a girl troll and that became the proto-Bodie. When Mike, who enjoyed what I showed him, said he just didn't have a place for the story at the time, I decided I kind of liked this troll character and that I was going to develop it a little bit. It was going to be a girl troll originally but then eventually became more and more autobiographical. So Bodie became a boy and Bodie took on some of my scrappier attributes. Trying to be one thing and people see you as something else and being a little bit grumpy in the process, being absent-minded. Bodie is easily distracted. I am easily distracted.

There's a lot of elements that are semi-autobiographical and fully autobiographical about Bodie. Cholly and Bodie are both essentially adopted kids of Miz Bijou. Miz Bijou is Cholly’s fairy godmother and she's sort of a surrogate mother to Bodie even though more often a pain in the ass employer to Bodie, the way he sees it, but I'm adopted. I definitely think it wasn’t something I set out to do, but I think it helped inform the trajectory of the Bodie stories and those relationships.

I want to ask about your aesthetics of cuteness, but need to preface it a little. The cover for Bodie Troll Volume One reads “So Cute It’s Scary.” Bodie Troll and pretty much all the other characters are really cute by design and I thought of Werner Herzog acting in The Mandalorian. When he spoke about first seeing “Baby Yoda” he described it as “heartbreaking” and said that it brought him to tears because of how cute he was. I think it gets at this weaponization of cuteness in a long history of marketable cuteness from all over the world. How do you understand cuteness to work on an aesthetic level?

It goes right back to my earliest experiences with Jim Henson. Jim Henson knew how to use cute. I mean that guy reinvented what cute was. If you saw puppets pre-Muppets, they were frigging hideous. Like Howdy Doody is a nightmare and Kukla and Ollie were butt ugly and almost every hard-headed little glove puppet where the mouths didn't move were nightmarish. Jim Henson came along and had this mid-century modern WPA animation style to his designs that he brought into building the Muppets and Don Sahlin realized them in the physical world through fabrication. I think that was my introduction to what cute could be.

Now some people do again use cute like you were saying. A kind of weaponization of it to make it more marketable. That was never my goal with Bodie and as a matter of fact I found myself reverse engineering my designs for Bodie and my intent behind the designs for Bodie to avoid that when I was creating him. Just before I started committing to drawing the first story I realized, “Okay, there's going to be inevitable comparisons here right away.” The big black eyes that I gave Bodie were reminiscent, not intentionally, but were reminiscent of Stitch [of Lilo & Stitch]. I'm friends with Chris Sanders, who created Stitch, and he's always had my back in this. A couple times I've had some dissenters saying I’m ripping off Stitch, and I'm like I got Chris Sanders on speed dial and he'll tell you otherwise. Chris said to me, “Yeah, you should have had him call me!”

I tried to avoid using colors that were too either reflective of pre-existing characters or were too commercial. I could have made Bodie My Little Pony colors: bright pinks and Easter colors. Instead, I'm like no, no he's a troll. I want him to be cute, but I want him to be earthen. When I started coloring Bodie myself, which was originally a necessity because I couldn't afford to hire a colorist, I had to learn how to color. I'm still learning after all these years, but I'm finally in my groove where I'm happy with what I'm doing. I would always go with muted earthen tones as much as possible, not bright primary colors or anything like that. That would have been more commercial and would have been weaponizing cute like My Little Pony or Care Bears or something.

I do my best. My work is inherently cute no matter what I do. Even when I was doing horror comics for Rue Morgue Magazine or in Junk Drawer Comics. My style is inherently cute. It's unavoidable. I don't run from it too much but I also don't feed into it by making certain color choices or things like that. Cute is looked at so derisively in our society, like it's cheap or manipulative. I've always worn ‘cute’ as a badge of honor where my work was concerned. And if I can make someone smile or cry or suspend disbelief through the cuteness in my comics, I'd be very proud.

How does violence exist in a cute world?

I want there to be violence where it fits in the story. Not violence for violence's sake. If you think about any Disney animated film even up until recently—there are moments in Zootopia with the violence of kids picking on the fox in the flashback sequence that was positively horrific, but it fit the story. That's what I consider when I'm doing these things with Bodie. There's a story where Cholly gets beat up pretty bad and it's scary. My readers hopefully are going to follow along and worry about what's happening to her. I think that fits the story. That's not violence for violence’s sake. It plays into the greater narrative I'm going towards but it's also going to build concern for the character the readers are going to worry about.

You can't just do it because it's meant as an all-ages comic — which I kind of hate the term, it's just a comic anyone can read — but you have to trust that the audience can handle these things. Now, I keep certain things in mind. I'm not going to show someone sticking a knife into somebody necessarily. But in Bodie, there's Hokum, my warrior character who hunts monsters. She's obviously killed a couple monsters in the hunt but I'm not showing their heads being chopped off or anything like that. I do put certain considerations in there but at the same time, this is the type of story I’m telling. I’m not Alan Moore. I’m not Frank Miller. I’m not trying to be that graphic. I do comics like that where I will willingly show something like that, but that’s not meant for Bodie. The focus is the story. It’s not gore necessarily.

I love drawing Bodie cutting loose, especially when he’s protecting Cholly, his best friend. There are a couple stories in there, especially the last one where he interacts with full grown trolls. I’m the biggest Popeye fan in the world so of course I’m going through E.C. Segar and the Fleischer Brothers and thinking about the violence there without making it too comical. Bodie punches a monster that’s got three mouths and punches one at a time going upward. Making it visually appealing while still having a real concern for the characters. I love that.

I won't stop doing that.

If I ever had a parent come to me and say they're concerned about the level of violence in Bodie, I would say, “Well, it's your right and your choice as a parent to decide if that's too much for your kid.” Me, personally? I think it's just right for anybody. I don't think it's too much violence for anybody and I think it serves the story. I would be doing a disservice to my story and my characters if I tried to temper that.

Do you have a whole idea of who your audience is when you make a comic?

Honestly, no. When I started creating Bodie, my first thought was that I want everyone to be able to enjoy it. I want the widest possible audience. When I was doing Dead Duck, it was like I'm doing this for college age kids and older. That sort of Mad Magazine, underground comics kind of bawdiness. At that time I was fed up with with getting lecherous remarks about Zombie Chick and some of my other characters and some of the stories. I was like, “I just want to do something that people are gonna find appealing.” Some will find it sexual, or whatnot, in wherever they look. It depends on the individual. You can't avoid that. I've had people tell me they have crushes on Cholly. Fine. If it goes beyond that, I don't want to hear it. Sometimes I tell them a little too late.

But I don't think of the audience overall. I think I know what's best for this particular story. I've set this trajectory and I'm just going to follow that to the best of my ability. I have yet to have a reader pick up Bodie and complain about it to an extreme like that. Obviously, I'm doing something right.

I would like to build the audience more than it already is, but it's a very grassroots approach now that I'm self-publishing it. To tell you the truth, even when it had the last two publishers it was a grassroots approach because I often felt like I was the only one really doing the legwork to promote it. Which is why I ultimately ended up self-publishing.

What's the current market for cute and funny animal independent comics?

That’s a good question. I don't do market research. That's the thing. A lot of creators who are way smarter than I am think about these things. They wouldn't even create something like Bodie before thinking, “Is there a market for this?” I never thought about that with Dead Duck. I never thought about it with Bodie, Junk Drawer Comics, any of my creator-owned stuff. I'm like, this is the kind of story I want to tell and I went by the dictum of the old Looney Tunes animators where they said, “We were just creating cartoons for ourselves and if a lot of people liked it, so much the better.” That's the same way I created.

But again, there are smarter cartoonists and probably much more successful cartoonists than me who do research things like that and are much more savvy about things like that. I'm not. Everything with me is instinct and that goes even into my storytelling. I'll write entire scripts for Bodie and then I'll sit down and start drawing them — I don’t even thumbnail — I just start drawing right on the page and then I'm like, “You know what? This wording would be funnier or more succinct.” And, “Hey, I should draw this action in the background here because it'll kind of tie into what happened here.”

It's all improv because I'm a theater guy, by the way. I have a theater background, so improv plays largely into my storytelling ability. Everything is improv with Bodie, even when I try to plan, things get changed on the spot, off the cuff, every time.

Have you met other comic creators working in a similar genre as you are right now?

As a matter of fact, yes. I have several friends who do independent comics. One of my closest friends, K. Lynn Smith — she’s worked on books for other writers but has her own line of comics that she's self-publishing such as Plume and The House of Lowther and she goes through Kickstarter. She's one of those savvy creators I was telling you about. She knows how to market her stuff. She knows how to work social media and has a presence that shows she is her entire being from her table set up and she's genuine. She doesn't try to be someone she isn't but she has made who she is such an integral part of her comics and her presentation that people love what she is doing and deservedly so. I like everything she does and I pay strict attention to it. I could never be her or be that same level of discipline because I am so loosey goosey with my process, but I admire it in her.

There are other creators as well. I was in the National Cartoonists Society for a number of years and I knew some people through there who did indie comics. Southeast Michigan, where I live, has a big comics community here. David Petersen, who does Mouse Guard, lives out here. Katie Cook, who does Nothing Special, lives out here. Jeremy Bastian, who does Cursed Pirate Girl, lives out here and we've all been pals for sixteen years or something. I’ve been very influenced by the way they handle themselves. I don't feel like I'm disciplined enough to do things as tightly and possibly successfully as someone like David Petersen because that guy is just — how do I say without sounding pretentious? – he's just smart. He is extremely smart in his choices. He's a brilliant creator, but he is also an extremely smart creator and I try to be smart with my choices but I know ultimately I steer things from my heart and in the spur of the moment impulse more than anything which may or may not work against me. I've been a full-time comic creator since 2008 so I'm obviously doing something right.

What are some of the difficulties of navigating a career that goes between work for hire for and independent?

Work for hire always pays better. To tell you the truth, work for hire is what really saved me. Coming off of Ape Entertainment, where I was making the bare minimum I could make and still cover my share of the bills while living with my ex-wife at the time and I was making it work back then but it was tight. Then the divorce happened and I was like, “How was this going to work? Am I going to have to find some other day job or something to supplement things?” Then My Little Pony happened and more and more things happened.

Word of mouth was been everything in my career. Recommendations from other people. People that have seen me or know me personally or heard me through the grapevine or whatever. That's how I've built my career. I have been extremely lucky and some people say it's not luck, but I do believe in luck. Luck takes effort and I put plenty of effort into my career, but if it weren't for luck and it weren't for people having my back like Heather Antos, Katie Cook, David Petersen, people like that, I wouldn't be anywhere. I'm thankful to them and I try to do the same thing for other creators as well as to the best of my ability.

It can be feast or famine, but I'm also extremely frugal. Which is something I learned from my mom and that saved me a lot too. During the lean periods, I would still have money because I set it aside. I've never in my entire career not been able to cover my bills. Sometimes it's just dumb luck. I’d like to say I planned, but you can only plan so much. Things can go awry and it's dumb luck that’s filled in those gaps. So far it's always worked out. Sometimes it's scary. Sometimes it's really scary but the fears have never overtaken things and it's always worked out.

There’s a huge character reveal in the last story of Bodie Troll Volume One and there's lots of crumbs for later developments. What's next for Bodie?

Volume Two is done in so far as I've written it all, drawn it all, and colored almost the entire story. Volume Two is going to be coming out this time next year. I am going to go deeper into the one big reveal. Gosh, I wonder how much I should — I’ll go so far as to say it's something for Cholly and so Cholly’s story will go into greater detail in volume two. But it doesn't answer all the questions at all.

The crux of any of my Bodie stories and any volume of Bodie is that Bodie is kind of clueless. He wants to be the villain in the fairy tale world but inevitably he's the hero every time because he cares so much and his caring gets in the way of what should be his selfishness. “I want to be scary but I've got to care about my best friend. I got to care about Miz Bijou.” Very rarely is he a willing participant in these adventures but he eventually sees his roles in them and, begrudgingly or not, he plays his part and does what he feels needs to be done. Even if it's against his own best interest. That comes into greater play in Volume Two as well. You see some of that in Volume One.

In Volume One, there’s a story with a little girl who becomes just totally enthralled with Bodie to the degree where he's almost a prisoner within her world. He finds a way to do what's best for the situation even though it goes against some of his instincts. I think that's kind of biographical too because I've been forced into certain situations in my life, plenty of situations in my life, where I'm like, “I don't want to do this, but I got to do this.” Like most artists out there, I can be anti-social and I get very nervous in big situations. I never wanted to go to San Diego Comic Con because I knew I'd be overwhelmed by everything but I knew I needed to, at least in those early days, to start making connections. I forced myself out of my comfort zone and do that. That’s the same thing Bodie is doing.

He's going to grow as a character in Volume Two but there are more stories to be told. Miz Bijou, who has a lot more to reveal, which won't even happen really until Volume Three, but there are some pretty big hints at what's happening with Miz Bijou’s story in volume two.

Where can people see more of your work?

They can always go to jayfosgitt.com and I've got links to all my social media on there. Currently you are able to order Bodie Troll Volume One through the website. It's the only item in my online store right now, but i've worked laboriously with my friend Jay Jacot, my best friend who is also the designer of Bodie Troll Volume One. He laid out all the pages for me and fixed some issues that I didn't even know existed because he is that talented. Not to mention a talented artist in his own right.

Jay helped me with that and then he's helped me set up the online store so he's been my partner in crime, honestly. He'll be working with me further on volume two as well. So yeah, go to jayfosgitt.com and my email's on there. I'm pretty receptive if people want to even email me to ask me questions. It's nice just to connect with other artists and fans. I'll be at a convention and someone will come up and ask me questions about how to go about doing this or doing that. I willingly share any information I have because that's what people did for me. I'm a firm believer in paying that forward.

Any last thoughts?

Oh my gosh, I'm just so excited to finally say I am making a living off of doing my creator-owned books. Doing my creator-owned stuff was always been a component of my career, but wasn't necessarily something I was making money off of. Now, with me finally releasing Bodie through my own imprint, Cheeseburger Press, it's happening.

Little by little, gradually, to varying degrees, but it's happening and I'm so thrilled. I mean that was the next big step for me in my career and I can't wait to see where it goes from here. Yeah, just absolutely thrilled to be able to say I'm creating Bodie for a living. It's contributing in a big way towards my greater living and the fact that I've been able to say I'm a professional full-time cartoonist for sixteen years now is just the best feeling in the world. It's all I've ever wanted and I'm very thankful for that. I'm very thankful for this next step and for every step that comes after. I'm just appreciative of it and excited for it.