This week, Ian talks with Cartoonist Aaron Losty about his new graphic novel, The Hanging, out now from Strangers Publishing. Among other topics, they discuss formative works, collaboration, and making genre comics for a small press audience. In the back half, they talk about Aaron’s experience as a co-founder of Cartoonist Cooperative, the state of the organization three years after its inception, decision-making processes, and recent campaigns. Apologies for the audio quality of the interview.
Aaron Losty
- Bluesky: @aaronlosty.bsky.social
- Instagram: @aaronlosty
- Patreon: patreon.com/aaronlosty
- Website: aaronlosty.com
Cartoonist Cooperative
- Bluesky: @cartoonist.coop
- email: hello@cartoonist.coop
- Instagram: @cartoonistcoop
- Mastodon.art: @cartoonist.coop
- Tumblr: @cartoonistcoop
- Website: cartoonist.coop
- YouTube: @cartoonistcoop
Strangers Publishing
- Bluesky: @Strangers.bsky.social
- Instagram: @strangers_publishing
- Website: strangerspublishing.com
Then we share a portion of an interview from September of 2024 about the case of the H5, 5 people who were facing criminal criminal charges of human trafficking for providing humanitarian aid to refugees crossing the Polish and Belarusian border through the ancient Bieloweza forest. In this interview, we spoke with a member of Szpilla anti-repression collective. The members of the H5 case were acquitted this month in a legal victory, though the state might renew it’s accusation. Meanwhile, with fly-overs by Russian drones and planes in Estonia and Poland, we see an increasing militarization of the border from states on both sides.
. … . ..
Transcription
TFSR: I am here today with Aaron Losty to discuss his new graphic novel, The Hanging, out now from Strangers Publishing.
Aaron Losty: Yeah, no problem. I’ve been writing with the intention of improving for about 13 years, and I’ve been drawing my own comics with the same intention for about eight years. I’ve mostly self-published over the past several years. Obviously, I’ve collaborated with Ed at Strangers for The Hanging. But it’s been mostly flying solo. Well, not solo, but my wife and I collaborate a lot on our work. My wife is Becca Carey. She’s a professional letterer and a graphic designer in comics as well. I think that’s mostly it. I’m a co-founder of the Cartoonist Cooperative, an initiative aimed at raising the standards within the comics industry as a whole. And it’s been one of the more rewarding things I’ve done in comics in the last few years.
TFSR: That’s great. I have some questions for that that I’ll hold to the end, because I want to talk about your book a little bit first. I assume that most people who are into creating comics come from a background of reading comics. And I wonder what comics you grew up with. And what that culture was like growing up. You’re from Ireland, correct?
Aaron Losty: Yeah. As a kid, I was exposed to a lot of classic European comics like Tintin, Asterix and Obelix, The Beano and Dandy, if you’re familiar with those. They were newsprint comics. And I think Dennis the Menace as well. I always make the joke that I didn’t learn to read until I was 21 because I didn’t really read until I was out of my teens. I think the first comic I actually had was a ‘Looney Tunes’ comic my mom had brought back from New York. And the most fascinating thing about it was the ads that were in it. I still have the comic, but it felt like looking into a different world. This would have been in the early ’90s.
I didn’t actively start collecting and reading comics until I was probably in my late teens. I remember my sister actually bought me the collection of ‘Watchmen’ when I was 16 or 17. It was around the time the movie came out. That just went completely over my head. If this is comics, I don’t know what comics are. I didn’t really get the grip with it until later in life, when I revisited it. I think at the time, the first two comics collections I had were Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns. I knew nothing about Frank Miller when I got that leak, and it blew me away. This was in the 2000s, and I asked myself: ‘When was this made? This feels like cutting edge.’ And then I look at the credits, and it’s from the 80s or whatever. I felt like I was circling this odd world I knew nothing about. But I’d drawn all my life, and comics always seemed to spin back into my orbit throughout life, until I actually started making them. I didn’t draw comics until I was in my mid-20s, but I was writing since I was 20.
TFSR: When you started writing and drawing, did that foster a total reconception of the art form?
Aaron Losty: Yeah, for sure. Because it’s one thing to understand the language enough to read it, but to understand the language enough to compose it in the sense of sequential images and what elements of storytelling are told between panels in the gutters. That’s the mark of a very coherent comic that your brain can fill in those gaps between the images. You know what? I don’t know if I have any memories of thinking: ‘Oh, I’ve cracked this.’ I just remember making stuff and just hoping it landed. I did actively study comics myself, in the hopes of improving my storytelling. The only reason I started drawing comics was that I couldn’t afford to hire artists. I never really wanted to draw comics, even though I drew all my life. But I couldn’t afford to hire anyone, and it just felt a bit cheap to ask people, even of my entry-level, amateur caliber that I was, to work for free. So I started drawing my own comics, and just figured it out from there.
TFSR: Coming up to The Hanging. Can you maybe point readers to the influences and the predecessors to your work there? Just speak to the concerns that informed it. From a visual perspective, I sense that it draws in pretty equal parts from both genre stuff and what would be conceived of as art comics. Would you agree with that?
Aaron Losty: Yeah, for sure, absolutely. I’m interested in the length and breadth of comics, from mainstream to underground comics, so I feel this kind of lands itself somewhere in the middle. I often feel that you couldn’t just pick up an art comic or an underground comic and give it to your friend who’s never read comics, and expect them to be able to read it, because comics are a language unto themselves. Whereas you could probably give most people a ‘Batman’ comic off the stands and say, ‘Read this,’ and they could, and they’d get what was going on. Honestly, I do feel like somewhat in my head I’m this out underground comic maker, but I’m also this hack that makes stuff that’s a bit more clinical and clean than that sort of world. You want to be an artist-artist, and you also want to be a mainstream artist so you can make some cash, this sort of thing.
TFSR: I think that, especially in the ways that we engage with comics in social media, it all seems to flop over each other. Everything seems to just exist in this one big pile now. The Hanging, I think, is a good example of that. But I also think that it comes down to how we’re all consuming things, if that makes sense.
Aaron Losty: Yeah, for sure. If you want specific names, artists, I’m looking at when I made this, it was Manuele Fior. Blutch, Rizzo, and Yvan Alagbé, if you’re familiar with those. Those were specific artists I was looking at. But then I can’t get away from Frank Miller, unfortunately, because it was such an inception point for my understanding of comics that I have, that I work a lot like that.
TFSR: Early stuff really goes down deep, and it kind of plants itself.
Aaron Losty: For sure.
TFSR: Would you say that The Hanging is in keeping with the concerns of your previous works? I wonder what kind of ideas and stories you tend to be drawn to telling?
Aaron Losty: Yeah, it’s definitely in keeping with previous works I’ve made. To name specifics, it will probably be Clear Water and Blaze Beyond the Pale in that, as far removed as they are, they’re somewhat social commentaries on where I grew up and the trends of stuff I’ve noticed around me. You know, all this, it’s not anything profound. These are all things we all see every day. Unfortunately, the stories that I gravitate to are more just the worries of the average person and the woes existing in society right now. I would say there’s definitely a through-line between The Hanging and Blaze Beyond the Pale, and in some ways, Clear Water, even though I made Clear Water between those two books, and I’m still making it. Clear Water is a prequel to everything, in terms of it being just caked with filth before it forms a clear idea.
TFSR: In the case of The Hanging, did the characters precede the plot, or was it vice versa? Because I find that there’s such a strong core to these three brothers.
Aaron Losty: It was plot first. I remember, it was a long time ago, I dabbled in filmmaking. I was making short films, and I had an idea for a short film that was essentially the concept of The Hanging. There has been an invisible alien invasion that has launched every nuclear warhead on Earth. The film would center around a mother and a son just existing in this world. And I remember at the time thinking, ‘I can’t write this yet.’ I have those ideas sometimes where I’m thinking, ‘This is a great idea, but I’m not ready to write this.’ I’m judging myself to say that I don’t have the chops yet, so I’ll circle back to this. That’s what I felt with The Hanging. I just knew that the hook was going to always be the invisible alien invasion, and then I just let the brothers take me on a spin. It’s hard to say where these brothers came from, but they just came alive when I knew I wanted the environment to have such anxiety literally hanging over the entire story.
TFSR: Well, that’s interesting that you mentioned having the chops. I wonder then, as an artist, is there an inciting moment when you decide you’re ready, or have you kind of worked your way through the other ideas, so now that one was next up? How does that work?
Aaron Losty: No, it’s not so much the idea falls out of you. When you’re writing or creative, you always have ideas. I have a black book of ideas, but they don’t mean anything until I actually get stuck in there. I guess it’s more like having the energy to think about this idea, because it might be a particularly heavy concept, and your body will just kind of tell you when you’re ready to write it. Often when I try to plan, what is my next thing, what I’ll do next, I’ll get stuck in, and I might write a draft of it. I’m not sure if this is the way. I might end up waking up one morning and writing a note about something, and then suddenly I just have energy for that, the fuse is lit, and suddenly that’s the next thing I’m making. I go through these meandering paths, and it’s hard to say, to plan, “This is my next book.” The Hanging wasn’t a book that was on the schedule. It just came alive. And I just thought: “Oh, I’m making this now, I guess.”
TFSR: This story feels very much drawn from life, even with the supernatural or science fiction elements. I wonder if you’re trying to tamp down or amplify the parallels that these stories have with real life? When was The Hanging written from the respect of what else was going on in the world, if you even map that stuff? That might be a pretty big question, I guess.
Aaron Losty: I’ll try to answer as best I can. I finished drawing The Hanging in January of this year, and I probably spent the best part of a year drawing it, so I think it was probably 2023, when I wrote the entire script and had something that could thumbnail. We had just moved to Canada from Ireland at the time. It’s hard to say, I feel like a lot of my work is born from just my frustrations with life. I don’t know if there’s any one thing that was going on that made me think, “Oh yeah, this is why I’m writing this.” More just an ongoing malaise of life, I guess. But yeah, I’m not too sure where to draw the parallels with what was going on in my life at the time. I just always have a lot to say about my hometown. I do feel like my anxieties with the world and my woes are certainly what drive most of my stories. I usually get called out for how some of my stories are.
TFSR: Can you talk about your use of color in this book? In Arpad Okay’s review in ComicsBeat, which is how this got onto my radar, they note the use of red, black, and green as evocative of Palestine. Was this what you had in mind? As a creator who is on the ascent, what is it like to read criticism of your work?
Aaron Losty: I love creative criticism. I feel that comics criticism feels like a friend group, and no one wants to actually critique the work. I always say I only ever make comics to entertain my friends. And I have friends who read everything I write, and almost every time I make a comic, I’m trying to entertain them. But in the back of my head, I want to disappoint this person in the sense that I want to throw a curveball. I want them to have something to say about the work. Personally, I like a good review, if it’s a good review. The review you mentioned was great, but I think it’s because it’s such a small ecosystem that a lot of critics are afraid they’ll upset people. I guess. I don’t know, it feels like that. I personally like to read criticism, because I like to improve. And I have a pretty thick skin. If someone has a scathing review and it’s completely off base, I don’t care about it. Even the good stuff doesn’t stay with me. Unfortunately, if you want to ignore the bad, you also have to ignore the good at times as well. But in terms of the color palette, this has been something everyone’s been asking me.
We had a soft launch at Tea Cafe in Toronto earlier in the year. Ed had come up for the show, and that’s the main thought. That was the main thing people noticed when they picked up the book: it’s the Palestine colors. I made this book without that in mind. I can tell you what the influence was. Akira, when it was originally published in Young Boy Magazine, because it was released in an anthology format, they would print the first four pages in a two-color palette. Each installment had a different palette, and I think the third chapter in Young Boy Magazine had this palette, so that’s where I robbed it from. And it’s just honestly a happy accident that it’s the Palestine colors, of course. I’m not upset that people are drawing that conclusion, because Free Palestine, obviously. I would love to say I was making a really profound political statement with the palette, but I just robbed it from Akira.
TFSR: Off topic – do you have that Akira club book?
Aaron Losty: Akira club? Yeah, yeah. A friend of mine was moving from Ireland, and they couldn’t take the box out with them, so I inherited it.
TFSR: Oh, so good.
Aaron Losty: Yeah, incredible
TFSR: Does producing genre material in the milieu of small publishing change anything about the work as compared to putting it out to a wider audience? I’m talking about both the conception and the reception of it.
Aaron Losty: Oh yeah, definitely does. When I’m working with Ed or I’m self-publishing, it’s no holds barred. Obviously, I could release stuff in short format issues, but I’m not worried about the restraints. I can do what I want. I don’t have an editor looking at me, if that’s what you mean in terms of collaborating with a larger publisher. It definitely changes it because, whereas I’m writing for myself and to entertain my friends, and my wife reads everything I write – I’m trying to entertain them, whereas if I’m working under an editor, I’m trying to appease the editor, you know. So that’s something you have to take note of, that you have to neuter yourself to a degree. And it’s not something I’m opposed to. I’m just saying that’s just the reality of working with an editor. And obviously, a great editor isn’t gonna get in your way, it’s like the invisible person in the room looking over you when you’re conceptualizing these things. When you’re working by yourself and self-publishing, you’re never thinking, “Oh, I don’t know if they’ll go for this”. It’s what I say goes. It doesn’t matter, in a sense. Obviously, there are pluses and minuses to having such freedom. I’m sure we could all do with a great editor who could tell us where to trim the fat and where to feed the pig, you know?
TFSR: I think that an often-overlooked feature of making genre comics, in particular, is the happy surprises that come in collaboration. You’ve worked with a few different people now, and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what makes for a good collaboration or a fruitful one.
Aaron Losty: I love collaborating. I love just going crazy and being by myself, just doing whatever, being a complete vision of what I wanted or what I was trying to say. But I do love collaborating. It’s a true fruit of the industry itself. I worked with Matt Emmons recently on ‘Daystar’, and that was an incredibly fun time Matt and I had. What makes it a fruitful collaboration is just communication; honestly, it’s equal parts communication and trust. When I’m collaborating, often I’m collaborating with people I know, and I’m not second-guessing their decisions. When they decide to go one way and it’s unexpected to me, I’m not questioning it. I’m on the same road as them. And they might feel the same way when I make decisions.
I’m typically collaborating with people as a writer, as with Matt Emmons on ‘Daystar’. We had been meaning to collaborate for a couple of years, and we just couldn’t get anything to stick. Then I just said to Matt, “Just tell me what you want to draw. Tell me what you want to draw, and I’ll write a story.” It was a very organic way to work with Matt. We have very similar sensibilities. And the inception point for that book was a meteor that struck a boat in the swamp. I have a little sketch. I did that and I sent it to Matt. A meteor strikes a hamlet of animals that live in a boat that’s shipwrecked in the middle of a swamp. That was the inception point. I knew vaguely where we were going, but I would just send him a paragraph for a scene, and he would say: “Yeah, that’s sick.” Then I’d script it. If anyone has read the book, you’ll notice it’s almost like diary entries, the chapter breakdown of the story, just little snapshots of Mesmo’s life. Certainly, Matt and I are great friends, and again, with very similar sensibilities. There’s no fear in suggesting anything, critiquing anything, or raising concerns about things. Again, that’s paramount to collaboration, and I love to collaborate. It’s one of my favorite things about comics – that’s such a collaborative process. I mean, I say that I’m solo, but every book I’ve done is designed and lettered by my wife, and she’s, as I think Stephen King used the term, the ideal reader. His partner was an ideal reader. I always know, if I pitch it to Becca, and if she says: “Yeah”, I will say: “Okay, I’m on the right path.” But when she says “No,” I will say, “Okay, let’s get back to the minds and figure this out.” So I’m saying I’m by myself, but I’m really not. Every story passes through the filter of my wife, because I trust her over everybody, you know.
TFSR: Does your wife bring things out in your storytelling that you might generally overlook?
Aaron Losty: That’s hard to say. She’s definitely my North Star in a sense that I can float her something else, and she’ll say: “But what’s the point? Why would a character do that? Why is she going here? Why is he doing this?” It’s very easy to get lost in the weeds by yourself, and you’re just writing something that isn’t entertaining. And ultimately, that’s the goal. I scrapped whole ideas based on conversations with my wife, where I think, “She’s right. This isn’t gonna float.” It’s a rare occasion where I pushed back against her sensibilities, and then she said, “Okay, you’re right. I couldn’t see the path.” That’s very, very rare, to be honest. So it’s almost great that we trust each other that much that I know she’s the moral compass of it all, that she’ll keep me on track.
TFSR: Okay, so as a storyteller, what considerations go into denying a reader a tiny resolution?
Aaron Losty: Oh, none, I don’t care. I don’t. Hassan Otsmane-Elhao is a letterer and a designer. He was editor of panelxpanel, he’s fantastic, one of the best letterers in the game. I think it was he who said, “Never trust a blurb Aaron Losty has written.” I can’t remember exactly. And it’s true, I almost don’t like putting blurbs on my book. The Hanging mentions aliens and an invasion. The interior of the book doesn’t have a fucking single syllable about any of those things, not in a forthright sense. I don’t know. I just never like to write the obvious answer as an ending or a conclusion to a story. I just like a quiet ending. These aren’t superheroes, and there isn’t a world-ending event every week or every month. I feel like Happy Endings need to be earned. I would say that ‘The Hanging’ ultimately has a happy ending, or at least it’s not a super-downer ending. I feel like it’s almost like a game, for anyone who regularly reads my work, where, like these build-up, these characters – they deserve something. Are they gonna get it? They may or may not. They might not get it in the form you expected. I just find that too-clean-an-ending really disappoints me in all our work, so I try not to give super clean endings.
TFSR: Maybe it comes down to a demographic thing, who’s buying what. But do you think that, in general, the comic book readers today are more permissive of subtlety and more willing to spot the creator? Do you know what I mean when I say ‘to spot the creator’? Some degree of giving them a wider berth to do what they want.
Aaron Losty: I think it really depends on the reader. I would say the majority of people who are going into a comic book shop to buy monthly comics are probably happy with what they’re buying, and stories are being told. And they should be. A lot of them are great. It’s probably an editor-to-editor basis as well – how much they’re allowing the writers to leave in the gutters. Do they need to over-explain everything? But certainly, I feel that people who are reading indie works don’t need their hand held. I’m sure if someone just randomly picked up my work, I don’t know how accessible it is to be quite honest, but I would love to think that anyone could pick up my books.
TFSR: So, if I could shift gears a little bit here, can you talk a little bit about your experience as a co-founder of the Cartoonist Co-op? It’s in year three now?
Aaron Losty: Yeah, this is the third year. We just celebrated our second anniversary in March. Honestly, it’s been fast. I’ve never been involved with anything of this level of organization. It made me realize just the talents I have and do not have. But just seeing a community come together is crazy. I think we’ve 1500 active members, and it’s just been incredibly rewarding. Now, I’ve had a pretty cold summer with the co-op, because I’ve just been so busy, and it’s obviously a volunteer basis. But our membership is just incredible. The amount of time and energy so many people put into our efforts – it’s awe-inspiring. During the summer, we had our first online-only month-long digital comic book festival called NIF, which is named after our mascots, Nibford and Inkling. It’s just amazing. We’ve recently announced our first awardee of our digital laureate. They’ll be supported by the efforts of the co-op for the next year. I don’t know how much you would like me to look into that…
TFSR: I am very interested. First of all, I’m interested in whether the reality of it is at all in keeping with what you had initially envisioned.
Aaron Losty: Oh, not at all. And I mean that in an incredibly positive sense. When we first started during the pandemic, it wasn’t the co-op. It was a Discord that Sloan Leong had settled. And I’d say there were maybe fewer than 100 cartoonists in the Discord, and it was just a place for us to hang out, share work that we couldn’t share online. Then Sloan floated the idea that maybe we should do mutual aid, in the sense that we all promote one another. We had several creators in the group who had just been burned by publishers who had taken all the rights for their book. They’re not getting great advances, and they’re also not putting any marketing money behind the books and they’re not selling. So then, what’s the point? I could have just done this by myself on Kickstarter and made more money and been rewarded in that sense, and still own all of the POI [point of interest data]. So that was the initial inception: we should just agree that we’ll all self-promote each other and actively do that.
And then it snowballed within the space of a few weeks. We were talking about organizing a large group of people and having actions against publishers and raising the quality of the industry. My initial thoughts were that we’re going to help people set up Kickstarter pages, and we’re going to have self-promotional or mutual-promotional threads on Twitter and in our newsletters. And then, suddenly, a much more vast picture of our goals was painted for me, and I was like wow. And then suddenly I just found myself as a co-member of the co-op. At the time when we, the six members founded the co-op, I just had a lot of time, and I was super active on the Discord. I loved being part of Discord, sharing my art, and looking at everyone’s art. I just had a lot of energy for the cause when I realized just how big it was. Discord was a place where people could go. The importance of that space… I just cannot understate how important the space is for cartoonists. It blows me away when I go to shows and we do stamp rallies and stuff, and people swing by my table, just hordes of people swinging by that just want to be involved. I had no idea what I was getting myself into, and I’m glad I didn’t.
TFSR: Can you go back a little bit to your comment about learning what you’re good at and what you’re not good at?
Aaron Losty: Honestly, I’m a personality who has no skills when it comes to organization. I’m very tech-illiterate. I do as much of it as I can, and I can teach myself, but just a lot of stuff doesn’t sink in for me. But when there’s an opportunity to host a panel or go talk to an organization in a Zoom Call or speak to this prospect member – that stuff is easy, that stuff’s great. You want me to do an interview? I’m great at organizing in the room when you tell me to be somewhere at 7pm, and I’m there, and I’m delegating. Perfect, great, fantastic. Not so much anymore, but initially I found it difficult – when this space was online. Even though I come from the generation of forums and message boards. It felt like I was in a different realm for a while. Yeah, to be harsh on myself, I’m an in-person person, as opposed to an online person. If that makes sense.
TFSR: It does make perfect sense. There’s a lot that’s been done. But can you give listeners some highlights as to the bigger actions? I’ve seen some skill-shares and stuff like that around. From your perspective as an insider, what have been the big moves that you’ve made within the co-op?
Aaron Losty: That’s a great question, because I’m not entirely sure what I can speak on right now. Okay, the online convention that NIF felt like such a huge thing. Just bringing others together on this incredible catalog of creators. But in terms of actions…
TFSR: If it’s helpful, maybe campaigns would be a better way to put it.
Aaron Losty: As much as I’ve had time to be part of the campaign committee, that has been incredibly fruitful. We have a submissions program where members can submit a book, most the time that hasn’t been published yet. And we will organize a promotional campaign for the book. That was actually the main objective of the co-op. Before we spread our wings, there were these promotional campaigns. And, yeah, it seems to have been incredibly fruitful. We’re running internal data collection right now to see, actually, how fruitful these campaigns have been. Obviously, we’ve just ended our second year, so we’ve run several campaigns now, and we have a lot more data to comb over just to see how impactful these campaigns have been and where we can improve. Obviously, with social media, it’s not as fruitful as it used to be, but other avenues have become more fruitful, and it’s just bending to that sort of ecosystem.
TFSR: So to wrap up there, but there might be one more question after this. The members of the cartoonist co-op are at varying stages of their respective careers. Would it be fair to say that they have, among them, different goals for themselves?.
Aaron Losty: Oh, yeah.
TFSR: In preparation for this interview, I was looking at some of your Bluesky stuff, and you mentioned a need for better-composed emails. Can you talk about doing comics as a profession? In your conception, does that simply come down to making a living at it? Does it come down to how you carry yourself among your peers? What does that look like? What do you think the benefits of whatever kind of self-conception are? Does that question make sense?
Aaron Losty: Yes, well, to speak on my goals. Personally, I’ve tried to do other things, and I simply cannot. This is the only thing that keeps me sane, and the goal has always been to make a living. And by that, I mean earn a modest living so I can pay rent and pay for food. And that’s not by choice. That’s because that’s what I have to do. This has to be fruitful. I would love it if I could just be a full-time artist with no questions asked, and there’s a universal basic income that I get, but that’s not a reality. I have to make a living. Ultimately, if I won the lottery tomorrow and never had to work, I’d still be making comics. If I were forced back into full-time employment, to do a job I don’t care about, I’d still be making comics. Unfortunately (haha). What was the other part of that question? The goals of the co-op? Or the goals of the members of the co-op?
TFSR: I guess talking about comics as a profession, and what your conception of a professional is. Is it just dedicating a certain amount of time to it? Is it living on it?
Aaron Losty: I don’t know. Professionalism. Professionals. Anyone who’s making a comic, to me, is a cartoonist. To any quality. None of this is easy. If you’ve had the gusto to make the comic, you’re a cartoonist. You wrote it, you drew it, whatever. Maybe you and your few friends made it. I don’t really care for drawing these lines. I’m happy to respect everybody. I’m not going to disregard someone’s work just because of their end goal. Whether it’s a summer project or they want to work for Marvel and draw Spider-Man, I think those are all valid goals. The ultimate umbrella over everything is that we’re all just artists and storytellers. I guess that’s somewhat of a nebulous answer.
TFSR: Well, I think it was a nebulous question.
Aaron Losty: But, yeah, no, I don’t know. It’s hard to define. I would call myself a professional, and I make a meager income. On the email question, and it’s a similar comment I had on criticism in comics: that everyone treats it like a classroom. They treat it like a playground in the school, the schoolyard. People speak in too familiar a voice. For example, you email me about an opportunity, and you don’t send me your portfolio. And then I have to Google you, then I find your Bluesky, which is under a different name, and then you don’t have a link to your portfolio online. Then I find the portfolio in some random Bluesky post, and when I go on it, when I click on the images, they don’t enlarge. The images are like these minuscule things on the screen. I don’t know if that’s just common sense or what. I did preface that post by saying my call to action, I’m putting together a small anthology, and my call to action was super casual before all that. Learn to send an email, a coherent email with clear actions for what you want from me. You’re asking to be part of something. Especially that I don’t know 90% of the people who [contact] me. And they’re not sending a portfolio. I don’t know.
TFSR: I should have asked this earlier, and I meant to: Can you say a little bit about how decisions are made in the co-op? And maybe as an example to talk about the recent announcement of the fellowship, how that was decided upon.
Aaron Losty: So we have an internal committee called the Steering Committee, and as of right now, all six positions are held by the six founding members of the co-op. We organize internal votes because we will hopefully be transitioning to a nonprofit organization, and we will have membership that will vote internally on any decision we make as a collective. Unless it’s a very obvious question that is in line with the mission of the co-op. Then the entire membership gets a vote on decisions. It’s not specifically run by the Steering Committee. We’re just steering in a sense, hence the title of the committee. That’s typically how we do it. And we obviously have a quorum.
TFSR: When you meet, is it an asynchronous meeting? Do you decide what is to be voted on, or are you all together in a call? How does that work?
Aaron Losty: We have a specific Steering Committee meeting once every quarter, and that will be all six members, or most of us, maybe five, maybe four, and we keep minutes so people can catch up. A lot of our meetings are also recorded, so people can catch up at a later date. Once a month, we have an open meeting for the entire membership. We usually designate a speaker and someone to keep the minutes. Then, the members can just drop in, and it’s just a town hall meeting. We keep all of our membership up to date with current committee actions and initiatives. We also have maybe 10 different sub-committees, like the Actions Committee, By-Laws Committee, Benefits Committee, Campaign Committee, to name a few, and all of those committees have meetings on a regular basis as well. So typically, of any decision that’s going to be made that will affect the membership, it’s brought up at the monthly membership meeting, and then we organize.
TFSR: From both a career perspective and from a co-op perspective, whichever order you would like: What are you excited about coming down the pike?
Aaron Losty: I don’t know what I’m excited about right now, because we’re getting kicked out of Canada. We have to go back to Ireland next year in March. So honestly, I’m just riding the wave right now. It’s hard to get excited or make super dense plans. Honestly, I’m just trying to find someone to give me some money. That’s my goal. Will someone pay me to do this thing that I do for free every day? Yeah, so unfortunately, I don’t have a very exciting answer, but in terms of work, I am working on a small horror anthology with a couple of buddies that I’ll probably Kickstart next year. I’m trying to think what else I’m involved with right now. I don’t have anything spectacular to announce. I’m mostly focused on getting back to Ireland in one piece.
TFSR: Well, I hope that that works out really well. Where can people find you?
Aaron Losty: I’m the only Aaron Losty in the world. So if you Google Aaron Losty, you’ll find me. I’m on Bluesky. I’m on Instagram. Bluesky is where I’m most active. And obviously, check out the Cartoonist Cooperative if you are a cartoonist. Again, I’m the only Aaron Losty in the world. So you’ll find me if you’re looking for me.
TFSR: Sounds great. Well, I hope everyone goes looking for you. Thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me.
Aaron Losty: Thanks so much. Ian, it was a pleasure.
TFSR: You take care. Okay?
Aaron Losty: Cheers. Thank you.