The Secret Origin of LILAH STURGES

Lilah Sturges has been writing comic books for 15 years, but she herself will say that people see her as a new writer – thanks in part to a ‘reset’ after writing The Magicians comic books.

But Sturges has had a decade-plus career in comics, from breaking in at DC’s Vertigo imprint to broadening out to DC’s superhero line and over to Marvel, IDW Publishing, and now at BOOM! Studios with the Lumberjanes OGNs.

And now in the latest of our “Year One”-style interview series The Secret Origin Of…, Newsarama talks with the Austin-based writer about her introduction to comic books, breaking into the industry, and her self-described ‘reset’ in the past year.

Newsarama: Lilah, before we dive into things, how are you holding up with everything going on?

Lilah Sturges: I am surviving! I have my cat and my daughters are here part of the time, so things are mostly okay and I don’t want to complain too much, but I do miss being able to be out and about and seeing my friends and all the things that lots of other people are missing. I’m trying to see this quarantine life as an opportunity to do… something, but I haven’t quite figured out what that is yet. Right now it’s an opportunity to take lots of naps. Which, there are worse things, I guess.

Nrama: Do you have any coping mechanisms that help you that you’d like to share that might help?

Sturges: Aside from the napping, I think what’s helping me most is reading a bunch and going out of my way to communicate with friends, and even try to jumpstart new friendships. I’m figuring that a lot of people have time to kill these days and are missing out on human connection so I’ve been reaching out to be people I don’t know very well and saying “Hi, guess what? We are friends now.” I have a 100% success rate so far.

Nrama: From what I understand, you’re from Rhode Island but now live in Austin. That seems like such a big move, did you have any feeling of culture shock when you arrived?

Sturges: I didn’t move directly here from Rhode Island. My dad was in the Navy so we moved around a lot when I was a kid. Being in all those different places gave me a lot to experience and a lot to think about, but it also kept me lonely a fair amount of the time, which is a good recipe for being a writer.

Coming to Austin wasn’t so much a culture shock as it was a feeling that I had finally come home. I love it here. It’s exactly the kind of chaotic good place that matches my internal settings.

Nrama: I can imagine it is lonely and yeah, writing is something you can take with you, what was it that gave you comfort in a way?

Sturges: Spending so much time alone gave me the opportunity to develop a rich fantasy life, and the kinds of daydreams and insistent images that consumed my mind as a child are the exact same sources of creativity that I draw on now. It was incredibly comforting because, unlike my real life in which I felt like I had very little control, I had total control over my imagination. I could take events and reinvent them, substitute others, make new worlds from scratch. For someone who feels invisible and lonely, this is a very tempting activity.

Nrama: When did you fall in love with writing? Because even before you touched a comic script you were in short story collections 20 years ago.

Sturges: My first writing was a Doctor Who fanfic I wrote when I was 12 years old. It remains unfinished to this day and is not, you know, good, but I remember that it felt really special to put words together on paper and to have written something. I’ve been chasing that high ever since, I guess.

For a long time I wanted to be a rock start, and spent most of my 20s chasing that dream, but it didn’t pan out and so here we are. Writing comics is a weird fallback position to find yourself in, but I’ve never done things in the proper order.

Nrama: What Doctor is your fanfic based on?

Sturges: Tom Baker! I discovered Doctor Who at a pivotal point in my development and the Tom Baker iteration left a huge impact on me. Witty and kind, outspoken and humane, that version of the character has always been sort of a baseline to me for what it means to be a good person.

My fic is lost to the ages, but it all took place inside the TARDIS and had something to do with a mysterious entity that had evolved within its recesses. The functionally infinite nature of the TARDIS interior is something that I’ve always been deeply fascinated with, and I always love stories that play with that.

Nrama: When do you remember really getting into comics? What were you reading?

Sturges: Backing up a bit – when I was 12 or so, I wandered into the drug store in the little West Virginia town I was living in at the time and picked up a Hulk comic from the spinner rack there. I was curious about comics, never having read one, and when I got home and read it, I was disappointed because it did absolutely nothing for me, so I tossed it and forgot about it.

I was very into wry British things at the time – Monty Python, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Tom Baker-era Doctor Who – and the straightforwardness of American comics in the early 80’s just didn’t hit for me at all. If only I’d been exposed to something like 2000 A.D. or Warrior at that age, my life might have taken a very different turn, but I didn’t even know that such things existed.

It wasn’t until I got to college and met Chris Roberson that I finally found comics that excited me. He has always been a comic book evangelist, and he started pushing things on me like Matt Wagner’s Mage, and Watchmen, and this new series that had just started coming out called Sandman. It was the recognition that comics could be sophisticated, artful, subtle even, that really got me into them. I started devouring all the stuff that would eventually become Vertigo, and the rest is history.

Looking back, the fact that I got to write two ongoing Vertigo titles during its run is pretty amazing and I’m filled with gratitude to Bill Willingham and Shelly Bond for making that happen. I was a very lucky duck – much more so than I think I realized at the time, even, and I wanted to pinch myself constantly.

Nrama: Take us to getting your first comics gig. That was Jack of Fables, right?

Sturges: Jack of Fables was my first published comic, yes. Somewhere at DC there is an inventory issue of Fables written by me and drawn by Tony Akins that I was given as a tryout of sorts. It was my first comics script and it was a complete mess, but between Bill and Shelly and Tony it managed to be something almost salvageable. It’s never seen the light of day and is probably lost to the ages, and that’s probably a good thing.

Luckily for me, I got to write the first five issues of Jack of Fables with Bill, and he taught me pretty much everything I know about the basics of comic book writing in those five issues. I’d write a scene and send it to him, and he would very patiently explain all of my mistakes to me and then I’d redo it until it worked. I was literally getting paid to learn how to write comics. See what I mean by lucky?

Nrama: Was your first script really that bad?

Sturges: Yes.

Nrama: What do you remember about the learning curve with writing comic scripts?

Sturges: I think the most frustrating part is how long it takes to get a “feel” for how an idea is going to play out in comics form, how your script is likely to be interpreted, how much space a given bit of dialogue is going to take up on the page, how readily a given artist is going to be willing or able to interpret some aspect of it. A lot of writing comics – for me, at least – is based on feel, not any kind of formula.

It was also hard to let go of control, coming from prose writing. Not having my hands on every lever was something I had to learn to enjoy. I would fill my scripts with all sorts of detailed instructions to the artist in order to make the pages look the way I saw them in my head, not appreciating that artists are perfectly capable at laying out pages on their own and are very very likely to do a better job than I am. My scripts today are probably half as long as the ones I wrote 15 years ago.

Nrama: Do you remember when it all sort of clicked?

Sturges: It took a while. The first single issue of comics that I wrote where I turned in the script and was like “Yeah, this is it. This feels exactly right,” was the issue of The Spirit I wrote, that was drawn by Victor Ibanez. I did an absurd amount of research in order to write that single issue and so when I sat down to actually write the script, I felt like I had control over what I was doing in a way I hadn’t before. I still think it’s one of the best things I’ve ever written.

Nrama: Let’s back up then, how did you connect with Shelly Bond and Bill Willingham?

Sturges: I met Bill through a mutual friend who worked at my local comic store, Austin Books and Comics. Chris Roberson and I had been going to that store for years, and Chris was friendly with Mark Finn, who is now an acclaimed Robert E. Howard scholar, but at the time was just our friend that worked at the shop.

When Bill moved to Austin, he was casting about for some folks to start a writing group with, so it ended up being me, Mark, Chris, and Bill. We created this shared-world storytelling universe called Clockwork Storybook that was kind of an online magazine type thing that was a lot of fun. We even published a few books under that rubric before it all kind of fell apart. But by then Bill and I had become friends, and he was back at DC doing Fables. So when they decided to do Jack of Fables, and Bill wanted a co-writer, I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.

Nrama: Looking back at your Jack of Fables work, do you have a favorite arc you’re still particularly proud of? Especially during your time on Jack of Fables and in that world?

Sturges: The arc that I especially loved in Jack of Fables was the arc we did in which Jack’s son goes to this crazy fantasy/science fiction world with robots and monsters and witches and all kinds of wild stuff. It’s not a comedy story and Jack is barely in it. It was a hard left turn for the book and left most readers scratching their heads, but it was so much fun to write. We had a lot of fun on that book, just kind of doing whatever we felt like, and we just didn’t care if people liked it or not. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt so free writing a book.

Nrama: So you were really drawn into deep fantasy and most of the Vertigo line, what was it that drew you in the most?

Sturges: I loved Sandman – we all loved Sandman – but I probably had more of a personal connection to Shade: The Changing Man. It was the first series that I collected a complete run of; it spoke to me in a deep and personal way. I’ve always had a soft spot for doomed love stories, and Shade really delivers on that front. Also, Chris Bachalo’s art is so stunning and easy on the eyes. It was the perfect book for me. I still have every issue, one of the few series I never sold off when I went to trades.

Nrama: Within two years you’re over at DC in their superhero lines with Shadowpact and Blue Beetle, as well as House of Mystery. You talked about how Hulk made you sort of cavalier – had your affinity with superheroes grown by then?

Sturges: By then I’d read a lot more superhero comics, and I’d been exposed to things like Watchmen, Miracleman, Batman: Year One, and The Killing Joke so I saw that there was enormous potential in the genre to explore. I found my way into it through that stuff.

I don’t think I ever really opened up the throttle on what was possible with superhero comics, though. I always felt like a bit of an impostor, having not grown up reading superhero books, and so I always played it a bit too safe. I think there are some standouts. With Final Crisis Aftermath: RUN, I was encouraged to go off the rails and do something totally bananas and having that permission allowed me to do something pretty different.

The best superhero books I wrote were the fill-ins I did just as my time at DC was winding down. I was doing fill-ins for books like Power Girl, Zatanna, and the aforementioned The Spirit, and those are some of my best comics because at that point nobody was really paying any attention to what I did, and I felt comfortable taking more chances.

Nrama: So I want to talk about your coming out as trans. At the end of 2016 you announced how you’d begun HRT and now you’re Lilah. But it seems like from what you’ve posted you’ve always been Lilah in a way. What do you remember about that moment of coming out to your fans and readers before pushing that post button?

Sturges: Oh, it was terrifying. I had no idea what would happen.

The Facebook post I came out in went through five or six revisions and I spent days and days just fiddling with the wording, deleting it and rewriting it from scratch, you name it. It was such a huge moment because there was no coming back from it – once I posted it, the cat would be out of the bag and there’d be no luring it back in. I’d get ready to post it, then chicken out and delete it. This went on and on.

But then Carrie Fisher died, and I saw a quote of hers that said “Stay afraid but do it anyway,” and that felt like a pretty strong message, so I did it that very day.

The response from readers and people in the comics industry was immediate and overwhelming in its positivity. There really were no bad reactions. I was very very fortunate to have come out at the time I did in the climate I did.

Nrama: How have you felt your place in the comics industry has changed in four years after your transition?

Sturges: Yes, immensely. I’m still the same person who wrote a lot of those pre-transition books in some ways, but in other ways I’m very different, although I think the most different thing about me is that I’m able to be a lot more vocal and forthcoming about my concerns and feelings and interests. I’d wanted to write LGBTQIA+ themed stories for a long time, but that didn’t feel right when I wasn’t out yet as a creator. You can find hints and nods to it in my pre-transition work, most notably House of Mystery, but mostly I kept myself pretty well hidden.

So after coming out, I got the opportunity to pitch for The Magicians, and from there I got the job writing the Lumberjanes graphic novels, and those two books kind of reset people’s expectations about me as a writer, and introduced me to a lot of readers who had never heard of me before. I think there are a lot of people out there who think my career started in 2019!

I’m happy. I love where I am in my career. It feels like a fresh start and it feels like a different industry. It’s one of my favorite things about having transitioned.

Nrama: As a comics veteran do you see yourself as a sort of go-to mentor to new creators who are also coming out?

Sturges: I would love to be one – sometimes it comes up, but again a lot of people don’t seem to be aware that I’ve been doing this since 2006. That said, I feel like I’m learning so much from the people who are up-and-coming in comics that I am definitely getting the better end of that bargain. I’m happy to feel like a newcomer again. It works for me.

Nrama: How has your personal life changed, especially with your relationship with your daughters?

Sturges: It’s nearly impossible to describe. I could throw out a word like “reborn” but it would sound melodramatic, so let’s just say that I finally feel like myself, and I finally feel like I can just be who I am without hiding any part of me. So much of my past life was about hiding, and when I didn’t have to hide anything anymore, that felt pretty revolutionary. So that worked out well.

One of the best side-effects of that has been my relationship with my girls, who are teenagers now. We’re so much closer than we used to be; we have a tight bond. We’ve been through a lot together as a family and we’ve come out the other side of it with so much love and understanding. It’s kind of a dream come true.

Sturges: So for those that don’t know, you have this sort of giveaway fund with #TransPizza. Can you tell us a bit more about that and where people could maybe donate?

Nrama: #TransPizza is a thing I do on Twitter, in which I ask people in the trans umbrella (transgender, non-binary, genderqueer, agender, and other gender-nonconforming folks) reply to a tweet, and then pick a winner (or several) at random and send them some money to buy pizza with that is donated by other folks. All I really do is facilitate the giving of money from one person to another, but it’s fun and everyone seems to have a good time doing it.

It actually started as kind of a joke tweet where I said I was going to give a trans person $20 to buy a pizza because there was this running joke on Twitter that if you really wanted to support trans people, you would buy them a pizza. It just kind of snowballed from there. I never really intended for it to become a thing, but I’m still doing it a year and a half later, so I guess it’s become a thing.

Nrama: There’s this adage in comics about how it’s easier to get your foot in the door than it is to actually stay there, did you find that it was difficult after everything?

Sturges: It’s always difficult. It’s never not difficult. At times I’ve been on some pretty good runs where it felt like I had plenty of work to do and I wasn’t going anywhere, but even in the best of times there’s this fear in the back of your head that it’s all going to fall apart and the thing you’re working on will be your last.

When I transitioned there was a time when I had very little going on in my career – the one book I was working on had been canceled and I had no leads on other jobs. I seriously considered quitting comics for a while because I couldn’t figure out how to get things going again. But then I got the call to write The Magicians: Alice’s Story out of the blue and things picked up again. I’ve just been really lucky, I think, to keep getting opportunities.

Nrama: You’ve been in comics for about 15 years now, where do you see yourself in another 15?

Sturges: I have some ideas, but I try to focus more on whatever the next project is, rather than looking too far ahead. I know I’d like to do a sprawling fantasy epic. I know I’d like to do a series of detective novels in comics form. Mainly I want to just keep having ideas and have the ability to get them made into comics! As long as I can do that in some form or fashion I’ll be plenty happy.