Co-created by writer Dave Baker and artist Nicole Goux, and published by Top Shelf Productions, Punk’n Heads is a graphic novel that features an ensemble cast of young artists trying to find their way in the Los Angeles DIY punk scene.
The Beat met with Baker and Goux to discuss their passion for comics craft, their interest in artistic journeys, and how this beautiful new book builds on their previous collaborations.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity, and includes an exclusive look at Goux’s character design sketches.
Adam Karenina Sherif: I wrote about Everyone Is Tulip for Panel x Panel so this makes the second time you’ve pulled me into my bi-annual comics criticism gig.
Nicole Goux: (laughs) Very honoured.
Punk’n Heads interiors by Nicole Goux
Sherif: It’s very hard to make something and send it out into the world at this moment in time. Shoutout to you both for doing it. What was the process like, production-wise, pulling it together?
Dave Baker: Adam, you don’t even know the half of it. We went through multiple publishers – publishers who signed the book and then went “sorry guys, things are too tight”, “we’re shifting editorial vision”, whatever. So now that the book is making its way out into the world, I’m so incredibly thankful and proud of the work Nicole and I have done. And just as with Mary Tyler Moorehawk, I cannot say enough positive things about Chris Staros and Top Shelf. They have succeeded in earning the reputation of being a publisher that goes where no one else is willing to go – and the broader ecosystem of comics is better because of it.
Goux: This book has been in the works for many, many years. And as is evident from our output, we’ve had to work on it alongside other projects. For a long time this book was backburnered – Dave was working on Mary Tyler Moorehawk and I was working on This Place Kills Me. But this has been the thing that we’ve wanted to put out into the world together. We’ve had to navigate our schedules and energies to make sure it came out now and not 25 years from now.
Baker: That’s also just the process with every project. Comics are a disposable, frivolous, and non-essential thing. And the only reason they do exist and people have a chance to connect with them is because of the will of a small number of people. And for this one that was me and Nic trying over and over and over again.
Sherif: Maybe comics are inessential goods, but as you say in the book, “survival is not enough”.
Baker: Survival is not enough.
Sherif: We still need color, we still need stories and art. And I love how sincere this book is about artistic journeys – departures, left turns, intuition, conscious intention. In the backmatter, you mention the character Hannah’s story as the book’s core vehicle. What is it about her journey that propelled you?
Goux: When you think about most stories about creatives making art, the arc of the stories is “don’t take no for an answer”, “stick to your guns”. The idea that what you have to do is follow that path to the end. And I think there’s value in those stories, but that’s not everyone’s experience with art.
This was our attempt to show a different version of that story. Hannah’s still creative, she’s still making things, she’s still following her passion – but her passion is leading her in a different direction than she thought she was gonna go. And if she held on so tightly to the idea of what she thought she wanted, maybe she would be a great painter – but maybe she wouldn’t be happy. Life changes you as you move through it. And whether you’re a creator or not, that is a lesson we can all get something from.
Punk’n Heads character sketches by Nicole Goux
Baker: To me Hannah serves as a vehicle through this weird underworld of lost souls attempting to be creative. But more than that, she serves as a sigil of people trying to make things. She’s a person who hasn’t got her shit figured out, she’s picturing herself as a fine art painter and life throws her a left turn. Initially she takes it begrudgingly, and then more and more finds it’s something she’s interested in. Which is something I think every creative person has had to deal with in one form or another.
Nicole and I are from Los Angeles, and one of the best experiences I’ve had here was when Meltdown Comics existed. They’ve now gone under. But they had a comedy venue, open mics, zine fests, independent toy pop-ups, zine making workshops. They held comics classes, they had a podcast network that I had a show on. It was such a great third space where you could get an intimate window into the DIY and also professional industries – because a lot of movie and TV people like comics and shopped there. This book isn’t that scene, but it’s informed by it.
Sherif: I recognise so much of it from my own experience of the DIY music scene in South London as well as comics-wise when Orbital was a thing – gig nights in the back of the shop, exhibitions, talks, film screenings.
There’s such a particular energy when people gather around things in that way, and I think you capture it really nicely in the book. The ensemble element’s well balanced and it feels like every character is on a meaningful journey – not just there to be a support character around Hannah.
Goux: That was something we worked very hard on – making sure that every character got their due, even the background characters. With the band itself and Vickie who is the former singer, we wanted them all to have really full stories. Originally we had more characters, but we realised as we were making it, that certain characters were not getting the care and attention that we care so much about.
Space is very expensive in comics. There’s only so much story that you can fit in a 200-page book. A 200-page novel vs. a 200-page comic is a very different thing. You can have so much more story and so much more plot in a novel because you can fit more on the page.
Punk’n Heads character sketches by Nicole Goux
Baker: Originally there was a comedic manager, based on someone we know, but there just wasn’t enough food to go around, narratively speaking.
Goux: And one of the things we talked about is how as creators you don’t usually get a manager. If you’re lucky you have someone helping you, but most of us are just doing it on our own.
Balancing the idea of having to spend all your time and energy creating the thing, and then also having to go out there and promote it and book shows or go to conventions takes an entirely different set of skills and an entirely different energy that is completely separate from the thing you’ve spent your life developing. Like, doing podcasts was not a skill I had before I started promoting books.
Baker: That was something I had to learn the hard way. Now I’m industrious and I’ll pitch anybody anything. But there was a period before I realised how vital a skill that was where I thought very naively that when you get a publishing deal, all this stuff just happens. I thought you sign on the dotted line and then you just have to make the thing and the publisher will promote it, the publisher will market it, the publisher will sell it. But that could not be further from the truth. Nicole and I always say “the cavalry’s never coming”. Everything is do-it-yourself, regardless of the scale.
Goux: And that’s if you even get to the part where you‘re being published by someone. To get there you have to be able to put out a certain amount of output, so people can know you exist and that you make things and they can hire you. You have to be out in the world, telling people about the thing. And that is a tension that every artist grapples with.
Sherif: You explore it in the book through music, but it speaks so effortlessly to publishing as well. It feels like a way for you both to reflect on that and share it publicly via another medium.
Baker: Adam, don’t out us!
Goux: Look, we all wish we could just be J.D. Salinger and go live in a hut in the woods, but that’s not the reality.
Sherif: I always say, you can’t just be Fran Lebowitz anymore. Those options are not there anymore. And they were only ever there for very few people.
Punk’n Heads is deceptively clever in how it’s structured. It reads easily because the chapters are well organized. The two-tone color shifts set the mood for each chapter. The three-panel flashbacks give us glimpses of the past, but keep the book in the now. How did you come up with the overall formal structure, and what informs those formal choices as you get to them?
Baker: This is my favorite topic, this is all I ever want to talk about!!
Goux: Dave and I, for at least a year before we started on this book, had been talking about how both in comics and in television, everything had become so incredibly serialized. So comics, even coming out monthly, were written for trade. And TV shows, instead of 24 episodes where you get to hang out with people and discover their lives, get deep into character – it was one arc with one character, and you just follow that story. We missed the idea of hanging out with people, getting to know their lives through their B stories, through their smaller interactions.
So we wanted to make a book that had single stories that worked together as an arc, but if you wanted to read them by themselves you could. Part of being able to do that, and again this is a real estate issue, is having enough space. And then’s what Dave came up with “that was then… this is now”. We’re getting really quick extra information, extra context to the backstory of our characters. And then “this is now” is the three little beats before we dive into our actual story.
Punk’n Heads interiors by Nicole Goux
Baker: We were talking about Silver Age stuff specifically. The books were structured differently: you would get three stories, each story would be eight pages, and the beginning of each story would have a half splash page that would almost function like a trailer for the story you were about to read. You even see it in the old Mort Weisenger stuff like Superman’s Pal: Jimmy Olsen and Superman’s Girlfriend: Lois Lane where the covers would even do that sometimes. “Superman has an ant head!” or “Superman is blowing ice and freezing Jimmy Olsen to death!”
Young Romance #102, pencils and inks by Jack Kirby
They also do it in Young Romance. You have those [Joe] Simon and [Jack] Kirby romance comics where the half splash gives you this bite-size narrative chunk that maybe isn’t even in the story. “My husband is away at the war and I’ve fallen in love with the baseball player next door!” How do you take some of those old narrative mechanics that people might not be as familiar with, dust them off, give them that Nicky G. polish, and reposition them for contemporary audiences?
And like Nicole said, every chapter starts with that half page splash, then three panels on the bottom, then a six panel grid. The top three are “that was then”, the bottom three are “this is now”. And that allows you to construct very concise small character vignettes that inform whatever the plot is, but don’t hamper the forward momentum.
Goux: The two things that I care about most when making comics are character and atmosphere. The thing you can win me over with in any comic is atmosphere. Panels of the skyline with some wires and birds. Someone kicking rocks with their shoe. Building out the feel of a world with extra narrative information. Again, real estate is expensive. How do we bring more texture into our story without it literally being part of the plot, and taking a little less effort than a full comics page. And not to be callous about the amount of time that comics take, but that is important.
Sherif: What you said about atmosphere, Nicole, is a common thread in all of your work. You feel a sense of atmosphere and a sense of mood. And you get that with each of the chapters in this book. It radiates.
Dave, in the backmatter you talk about collaborating with Nicole, finding a new phase of your work together – and this idea that each of the successive things you’ve done builds on the previous. Having read Fuck Off Squad and Everyone Is Tulip, I can feel what you’re saying about book finding new avenues both thematically and in terms of craft. What was new for you both in the collaborative experience with Punk’n Heads?
Baker: I think one of the things that was new this time was how much re-writing we did. We’ve done multiple drafts of our previous works and massaged them as they were produced, but with this book because it was created over such a protracted amount of time, there wasn’t as much of a breakneck “needs to be written tomorrow” deal.
I liked the re-writing process – how do we make sure this is great before Nicole starts drawing? How do we figure out where the proper place for ellipses is, for a period, for a jump scare? The overarching thing is basically the same as the first draft, but it’s the details, the fine tuning, the repositioning. And in between successive drafts, Nicole and I would do live table reads.
Goux: Before Dave started writing anything we talked for a long time about who we wanted these characters to be, what we wanted the story to be. And Dave and I do this thing now where we go to a park and toss a ball around – we bought these kids’ baseball mitts. We toss the ball back and forth say things like “I don’t think this character would do this” or “this character needs more development”, “what if we added a scene here?”
And before, during, and while I’m drawing, we continue to do that stuff. And for me as an artist I feel very invested in the script because I’m so much a part of it with this one. I always have been to a certain extent, but with earlier books, we’d come up with an idea or Dave would, I’d give a couple notes, and then we’d make it. But with this book, because we had such a long time and because it comes from my spark of an idea – you can’t pull this book apart and say who did what, in terms of story. The story is so interwoven in our collaboration that you can’t pick it apart.
Does Dave write the script and do I draw? Yes, absolutely. But in terms of creating who the characters are, what the stories are, what we care about – it’s just very interwoven.
Sherif: It feels like a shared voice, like the book is both of you speaking. I loved it and I’m glad for the chance to discuss it with you. I read your work and I can feel how much you care about what you’re doing as creators. I know there’s intention, feeling and effort behind it. It’s palpable, it comes through in the work.
Baker: Thank you.
Goux: Thank you.
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Punk’n Heads is in stores now, and if there’s any artistic justice in comics it’ll be making those 2027 Eisner shortlists already
