This week, we’re interviewing freelance writer/artist/colorist extraordinaire, Jules Rivera. Jules is a 2005 graduate of the University of Central Florida with a degree in electrical engineering, but made the radical leap to a career in comics. She’s self-published several works including Marsh Rocket, two volumes of Misfortune High, and Valkyrie Squadron, and she freelances on ComixTribe’s Oxymoron. Below, Jules tells us the remarkable story of how she got into comics and what advice she has for anyone who wants to follow in her footsteps.

So your resume says that your college degree is in electrical engineering. A year later, you’re working in comics and animation. How on Earth did that happen?

Moonlighting. Lots and lots of moonlighting. I figured out I wanted to go into art halfway through my engineering degree. But the state of Florida was footing the bill, so it didn’t make financial sense to change midstream.

But it started with a visit to JACON, an anime convention in Orlando. I had seen independent artists there, including Gina Biggs of Strawberry Comics and Filthy Figments. And they were doing entire comics by themselves! It blew me away. I had stories I wanted to tell too. But I only had them in script form. I wasn’t sure what to do with them. But after that JACON visit, I started thinking, “yeah, comics.”

Did you have any art experience before that?

I had been experimenting with webcomics since my sophomore year of college. I would’ve been about 19-20.

Are your oldest webcomics still “out there” somewhere? As a college student, what were your goals in producing these comics?

I don’t even know where my oldest webcomics are. At first, I just wanted to tell the story. Eventually, I thought I wanted some recognition too, but it never came.  Still, that didn’t stop me from trying to get my stories told.

So you did actually get into engineering after graduation, or did you jump ship to comics right away?

I was broke and in debt after college, so I needed to get paid. I started working as an engineer in 2005. That’s when I moved to Melbourne, FL for the first time. I worked as a logistics engineer for defense for six years. All I did all day was shuffle spreadsheets. It was exactly as awesome as that sounds (not very). However, after showing some of my work in a couple of public places, I landed a couple of freelance logo design jobs. There weren’t that many jobs to be had, but I was still inspired to pursue more freelance work whenever it would come. All the while, I kept up work with my webcomic, Marsh Rocket.

Marsh Rocket was the story of cyberpunk mercenaries going after a mysterious briefcase. The story is touches off when one the younger guys in the team makes a Faustian deal to retrieve the briefcase from some baddies to save his own neck, and ends up causing a lot of death and destruction in his wake. Think Trigun, but way less inspired.

It was a weird time for me. I was experimenting with a lot of stuff and trying to figure out my voice. The thing that got the most comment on Marsh Rocket was the experimental color schemes. Each scene was colored in these weird color schemes. I partly did it because I thought it was cool, but I also did it because I didn’t think I could color a comic on my own. An ironic thing to think now that coloring IS my job.

So after Marsh Rocket, you made a dramatic change in your work for Valkyrie Squadron, your next webcomic.  What brought about that change?

In 2010, I had an eight year-old niece who was coming into reading age, and being the terrible, subversive jerk that I am, I wanted to get her into comics. Nobody else in my family is into comics. So, I wanted to expose my niece to comics with strong female leads. I thought this would be easy, you know? The “Big Two” have a strong stable of cool female leads. I myself grew up on X-Men cartoons.

Here was the rub: there were very few comics from the Big Two in 2010 that were appropriate for young girls.

Sounds about right. Were you just walking into shops, perusing, and finding nothing wholesome?

Yeah, more or less. I mostly read webcomics, but I tried to look into stuff like Supergirl or Wonder Woman. Most of this stuff wasn’t age-appropriate for my niece. I mean there was some stuff that was all right, like Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8^th Grade, but one comic does not a habit make.

So… I got mad. I got annoyed as hell. And I thought to myself: “No. I’m going to FIX THIS.” And that was the inception of Valkyrie Squadron.

That summer, I started on designs for the first iteration of Valkyrie Squadron and began phasing out Marsh Rocket as my “flagship” webcomic. By early 2011, Valkyrie Squadron had launched, and it was the first comic I had ever done in full color. I wasn’t sure that I could do it, but lo and behold I made it work. Granted, there was still a lot I had to learn about coloring and making all-ages comics in general. But it was a start.

So what’s Valkyrie Squadron about?

Here’s the plot: a team of four female pilots are engaged in a space war against robot drones. Civilians are disappearing from colonies en masse and it’s up to the Valkyries to find out where these people are going and if they can be saved.

Unlike Marsh Rocket, I didn’t want this to be a run and gun story. I wanted it to be more of a mystery, with layers to peel away and intrigue (though there are still plenty of guns and running; old habits die hard).

So it’s not just “fight the robots”–there’s more to the plot than what we first encounter in the story.

Yeah, and there’s character relationship stuff too. It’s a sci-fi made by a woman for girls. I was really inspired by the work of Tara Tallan at the time. She does a webcomic called Galaxion that’s incredible.

Who’s the target audience for this book? Readers like your niece?

My target audience was “all ages,” which effectively made it a grown up story with way less violence and profanity. But it wasn’t really a kids’ story when I put it out. And the reboot won’t really be a kids’ story either. In fact, I went the other direction updating the costume designs to be a bit more adult, with less bright colors.

But you wanted to produce something that anybody could read which wasn’t bogged down with sex, nudity, cursing, or anything else that would embarrass a kid.

Exactly. You could show it to your grandma and not be mortified.

So what made you decide to reboot Valkyrie Squadron?

I’ve learned so many new things since Valkyrie’s start, I wanted to incorporate those new skills and direction into the story in a refreshing new way. I’m really proud of my reboot artwork and I want that to be the face of Valkyrie Squadron to last through time.

Let’s hear about your “leveling up.” It seems that you didn’t have any formalized art schooling until 2012.

2012 was when I started school in Los Angeles, where I rebuilt my fundamentals from the ground up exploring perspective drawing, figure drawing, color theory and even animation.  I made huge leaps in a short period of time, and made lots of friends there.  One of the best career moves I ever made.

How easy was it to juggle Valkyrie Squadron with your new studies?

Juggling a webcomic on top of art school was hard. Watching Valkyrie Squadron’s web numbers plummet was demoralizing, so I put Valkyrie Squadron on hold to focus on my studies. But then something interesting happened.

Before I started school, I got approached by a writing colleague to collaborate on a new comic. Long story short, I turned the comic idea into a full-blown pitch with concept sketches and everything. I pitched it, but talks had broken down and I had read that as the publisher moving on. Still, I thought the idea had legs and that became Misfortune High.

So Misfortune High was your first print book, not a webcomic?

Marsh Rocket and Valkyrie Squadron were webcomics that made it to print, but this was the first book I ever designed to be a strictly print book. I wasn’t even sure I was going to take the book to Kickstarter when I was producing it. I just knew I wanted to take a non-webcomics approach to this new project. So the book got done in April of 2013.

What inspired you to produce Misfortune High?

I went to a high school in the ghetto. I love fantasy and anime, but any time you’d see a school story, they always took place in the most elite schools. I never saw myself represented in the things I liked.  I got annoyed with this. I always wondered why we never saw magic schools in crap neighborhoods.

I wanted to see something like Harry Potter have, you know, brown kids in it. Fantasy stories never have magical ethnic people, unless they’re “magical black people” whose only purpose is to serve the white main characters, a la Bagger Vance or The Green Mile.

Again, I got mad. My best stories happen when I get mad at stuff.

Did you feel “shut out” of a lot of stuff like Harry Potter because it’s so anglo-centric, intentional or not?

Hell yeah, I felt shut out. Britain has people of color last I checked.

But the main cast of Potter is all white, with a few non-whites on the side, like Cho.

Who had the weirdest accent. It was Chinese-Scottish. She was incomprehensible. How could Harry like her? You can’t understand the words coming out of her mouth! And then you had the Patel twins. And that one black announcer kid. And that was it.

Misfortune High was my answer to that. I mean pop culture creations are kind of a dialogue, aren’t they? One person has one idea, which inspires another, which answers another, which parodies another.

So once you finished the book, how’d you go about getting it “out there”? It seems like everyone with a half-baked idea is on Kickstarter asking for money. How did you make yourself stand out to really get this out to the public?

Well, by the time I had launched the Kickstarter, I had built a following (from Valkyrie Squadron). Even though Valkyrie Squadron’s audience wasn’t very vocal, they were still there. And I have a respectable twitter following, making a name for myself on social media as an artist. I have a brand. I manage it. It’s a thing I do. I hate to say things like “manage my brand” because it sounds so buzz wordy.  But it’s real. It’s how you survive these days: put a public personality out there and entertain people. But to be honest, the Jules Rivera brand and the Jules Rivera person are more or less the same. I just swear less on social media managing my brand.

Yeah, you’re definitely all over the web. You have at least two websites, a Twitter, a Facebook, a Tumblr…what else.

Instagram. People like my art previews. They like my joking, and they like my insightful discussions.

So how do you balance all the marketing, blogging, etc. while still finding time for your craft?

I’m not sure I actually do. Multitasking? I don’t know. I have to pay the bills, so my freelancing is first priority. Being home all day alone makes me a little crazy, and I crave human contact, so I’m regularly on social media throughout the day just to keep my sanity.

So your fans are, in a way, a support system.

My fans are my enforcers.

Let’s switch gears to your current projects. What freelance stuff are you on right now? You’ve got some Oxymoron stuff over at ComixTribe coming out right now.

I’m the colorist on Oxymoron: The Loveliest Nightmare and also on Gutter Magic to be published with IDW. I’m lucky to be on such awesome projects.

Oxymoron is the story of a female cop faced with stopping a clown maniac who is terrorizing her city with murder and mayhem. The high concept there is “what if the Joker came to Gotham City and there was no Batman?”

Gutter Magic is the story of a guy who lives in a world where magic is predestined. People are born with magical abilities, and he’s one of the have-nots. However, he’s determined to find a way to become a wizard through crime, treachery, and deception.

“Gutter magic” is the term in the story for cheap, sleight of hand tricks that the have-nots use as their “magic.” It’s a great story and I’m super jealous of that title. If I were smarter, I would’ve thought of that title for Misfortune High first. I love that title.

And you’ve also got the Valkyrie Squadron reboot coming soon.

Look out for it later on this fall.

Do you have any convention appearances coming up? Baltimore is in a few weeks; will you be there?

I’m afraid not. It’s right on top of the Alternative Press Expo. But I will be at NYCC and I’ll have Valkyrie Squadron preview books on hand. They came out so great!

What advice do you have for all the aspiring Jules Riveras out there who want to break into comics but don’t know how?

Don’t wait for someone to give you permission to create things the way you see about creating them. Don’t be afraid to have a strong vision. Making things because you think it’s what the industry will like will make you a pale copycat, as opposed to someone with a real story to tell. Don’t be afraid to screw up. It’ll happen. It’s part of the process.

Your vision will make you special.  It will make you stand out.  Believe in it.

Last question: What advice does Jules Rivera 2015 have for Jules Rivera 2006?

You’ll spend a lot of years discouraged and sad because you feel like you aren’t getting anywhere. But you are. Slowly and imperceptibly, you are. Keep going. Push through the bad times. You know that old AA saying: “Don’t stop five minutes before the miracle happens?”

The miracle will happen. Just don’t ever stop.

Jules Rivera can be found all over the internet, including on her website, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr. Valkyrie Squadron and Misfortune High can be previewed on their respective websites.