The comics industry has experienced a rise in popularity over the past few years. Actually, it has been a full-on explosion of comics into mainstream culture.

Comic book series including Walking Dead are being adapted to television. Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake novels have been interpreted into comic books. And an increasing number of women are taking control of the pencil and putting down some seriously creative work.

Rebekah Isaacs is one such female. Her mission to pursue a creative career that satiated her passion to draw led her to become a comic book artist. The Georgia native grew up as an incredibly smart, though imaginative child, and always knew she wanted to pursue a career drawing. Despite being encouraged to apply her unique academic capabilities to professions including medicine or law, Isaacs stuck to her animated guns and followed her heart.

The story of how Rebekah Isaacs grew from a student at the Savannah College of Art and Design [SCAD] to a sought after artist is a tale of which dreams are made. After a fateful meeting at New York’s Comic Con, a lot of karaoke and an insatiable appetite to tell stories through art, Isaacs was able to professionally cultivate her craft.

Five years after starting to work in the industry, Isaacs now lives in Astoria and found her place as a comic book illustrator. No longer a starving artist, Isaacs now has time for her favorite hobbies, which include eating, studying Japanese, taking ballet classes, playing video games and participating in a little D&D. Read on to find out how she did it.

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Moxy Magazine: What ignited this interest in comic books and the artistry of drawing comics? 

Rebekah Isaacs: I’m kind of an anomaly in comics because I didn’t grow up reading them–the nearest comics store to my hometown was over an hour’s drive away–and I didn’t have an interest in becoming a comics artist until just a few years before I actually did. I was very big into animation when I was young, though, and knew the basic stories behind the major superheroes from television cartoons. I was also raised on Disney and discovered Sailor Moon when I was in middle school. So my aspiration was always to work as an animator when I was younger, but after attending an animation workshop before entering high school, I realized that the actual process just didn’t jive with me. I still wanted to tell stories through drawings somehow, though, and when I saw material on a SCAD summer program for rising H.S. seniors on Sequential Art, I figured I’d try it out. Luckily, the glove fit perfectly. I was by no means extraordinarily gifted at it, but the technique and the unique brand of storytelling that comics employs seemed to click with me very easily.

MM: How did you choose the schools through which you wanted to pursue your education and develop your craft? 

Isaacs: There wasn’t much debate for me after I attended the SCAD Rising Stars program in Sequential Art. I loved the curriculum, loved the professors, loved the work and the camaraderie between the students. I didn’t apply to any other schools and went straight back to Savannah after finishing high school.

MM: Did you receive support from family and teachers regarding the career you wanted to pursue?  What was the initial response to your desire to become a comic book artist?

Isaacs: I excelled academically in high school—4.0 GPA, 1480 SAT, valedictorian, full-time dual-enrolled in college courses through my junior and senior years. So when I made it clear that I was definitely pursuing a career in visual art, there were people around me who expressed disappointment. For them, a career in medicine or law just made more sense—if you had the academic record to practically ensure a lucrative career, why “blow it” in one of most notoriously low-paying industries of all?

Luckily, NONE of those people were in my family. My parents in particular have always been supportive of my goals and never pushed me to do anything I didn’t feel passionately about. I think it helped that both went straight from high school to career, and both chose careers they truly loved—my father a carpenter and restorer of classic Corvettes, my mother a seamstress. They often had to scrape to make ends meet but never had to compromise their passions for money and that made a big impression on me growing up. They love to tell people about what I do and show them my work, and they read every single page of every book I draw.

MM: You spent some time in Japan. Though you taught English, did you explore the Japanese branch of the comic book industry? How did your time in Japan inspire your creativity for drawing?

Isaacs: Not really. By that time my interest was solely in breaking into the American comics industry. The manga industry is very, very difficult for foreigners to break into—I know of only two people who have.

I wasn’t able to draw as much as I would have liked to in Japan because of the long work hours. But I thought about drawing constantly—I was teaching, which is something I enjoyed but was also very difficult for me—and I really feel that being unable to draw and create as much as I wanted for that year fueled my drive to do it professionally when I returned to the States. I knew unequivocally that it was what I needed to do with my life. And I had actually improved a lot without having much actual practice simply by observing so much around me and kind of mentally sketching things out in my head when I wasn’t able to actually put it on paper. And of course the incredible natural beauty and unique urban aesthetic of Japan continues to inspire my work today.

MM: How did you land your first job drawing? How incredibly satisfying did that feel?!

Isaacs: My first job was technically a Twilight Zone graphic novel. It was organized through SCAD’s publishing arm and honestly, it wasn’t too difficult for me to get as they were deliberately hiring new graduates, so the standard of work wasn’t as high as for a company like Marvel or DC. Although I worked for a couple years during and after that gig, I consider the true start of my comics career to be when I landed my first “Big Two” (Marvel & DC) work in early 2009.

I had had about a year’s gap in freelance work and was working in food and service to make ends meet—a string of soul-sucking job after soul-sucking job. I still found time to draw in the mornings and continue to improve my portfolio, but nobody seemed to be biting. Then I went to New York Comic Con in February ’09, thinking to myself “If this doesn’t work out I’m probably gonna have to leave the city”—my worst nightmare. I hoofed it around all three days, talking to everyone who would give me the time of day, leaving portfolio copies with every editor I met and even submitting my work to the Talent Searches that Marvel and DC organize at the big cons. I didn’t make the cut for either list, but a Marvel talent scout I’d met earlier saw me looking for my name on the list at their booth, and asked me to come by the second round of reviews anyway. The editor I met with there pretty much ripped me to shreds, and I’ll admit that after I left the con that day my emotions got the better of me. Later I had a more hopeful encounter with an editor at DC who had seen my work in an email and seemed to really like it. I met up with him and a group of freelancers for karaoke later and we chatted a bit more, but by the end of the con I was still jobless, discouraged and utterly exhausted.

But just a few days later, I got two emails—one from the Marvel talent scout, introducing me to Steve Wacker, editor on my very first mainstream issue Ms. Marvel #38, and a second email from Brian Wood, who was working with said DC editor/karaoke buddy on DV8: Gods and Monsters, which became my second mainstream gig and is still the defining moment of my still very short career. Needless to say, those were two of the best moments of my life. It was like something out a movie, a turn of events so perfectly timed and so desperately needed that they couldn’t possibly be real!

MM: You are a successful, sought after comic book artist; what are the goals you seek moving forward from this point? 

Isaacs: I’m keeping it simple—go easy on myself and be happy if I can make every issue better than the last. Like most artists, I’m a perfectionist, and I have to remind myself that there will always be someone better than me, but if I can just keep improving and hopefully give readers something entertaining and engaging, every day is a little success. I hope that when people look back at the progression of my work in 10 years, even if they don’t see dazzling, prodigious talent from the beginning, they’ll see non-stop improvement through perseverance and constant self-challenge.

MM: Is there one bit of information you wish you had as a young artist, which you were forced to learn along the way?

Isaacs: Draw what you want, the way you want. Draw what makes you happy. If that’s superheroes, great. If it’s not, great. The reason publishers are more interested than ever in hiring female artists is because they often bring a very different perspective than male artists, many of whom grew up aping the same mainstream artists. If you have a unique style that’s different from what some people expect from mainstream styles, you might get accused of “drawing like a girl”–which is simply ludicrous considering [there are] male artists with non-mainstream styles–but don’t let that discourage you. Emphasize your own personal style, keep pushing it. All publishers are looking for new and different styles these days, and I see more and more artists with styles that would have been considered too “indie,” too unconventional, too experimental not only get steady work but become very, very popular for it. And not surprisingly, many of these artists are women!

As far as general advice goes: Be generous. Be kind. Don’t talk sh**.  It took me a while to realize how close-knit the comics professional community is, and how it’s really not necessary to employ the same dog-eat-dog tactics to get ahead that you might have to in other artistic fields. I still slip up sometimes and don’t always follow these rules, but the times that I’ve remembered them have been repaid triple-fold. Same goes for being professional and meeting deadlines!  It’s almost more important than raw talent.

Article written by Dorothy Crouch for Moxy Magazine, August 2011. Photo credit: flickr.com user quinn.anna.