Howard Tayler & Sandra Tayler Interview
The married co-creators of Schlock Mercenary and other properties sat for an interview.
I met Howard Tayler and Sandra Tayler at GenCon. I got the impression of lovely, joyful, and hilarious folks. There I asked them to do an interview about their creative relationship. We started right after GenCon and did this thing asynchronously through the fall up until shortly after Dragonsteel Nexus.
We have many great interviews slated for this year, so make sure you’re signed up to receive them:
Lancelot Schaubert — When was the first time you each had a speculative thought or imaginative moment?
Howard Tayler — Early childhood, I suspect. I read THE HOBBIT and the THE LORD OF THE RINGS when I was 10. But I was reading books by age 4, so I kind of read a lot.
Lancelot Schaubert — What stuck out to you?
Howard Tayler — If you're looking for "when was the die cast," it was probably when I began devouring SF/F novels in junior high and high school. I played D&D during that same time period.
Lancelot Schaubert — What about you, Sandra?
SandraTayler — At age 6 I lurked under the table looking at the Monster Manual while my older brother was DM for my other two older siblings. By age 7 I'd convinced them to let me play. Age six was also when I started writing my first Fantasy story titled The Purple Rabbit.
Lancelot Schaubert — Oh my goodness, that’s amazing. Did you teach them about any monsters? What was the purple rabbit about?
SandraTayler — It was about a rabbit that was purple. I was six, that felt very innovative at the time.
Lancelot Schaubert — I mean, a rabbit with blue numbers painted on its side is one of the key passages in ON WRITING by King, so trust that inner child.
Was speculative fiction frowned upon, supported, or ignored by your family, friends, neighbors, religious community, corporate, and civic structures?
I ask because I was pitilessly mocked and beat up for comics in school. I mean, I had nerd friends too, but as far as the majority goes…
Howard Tayler — My dad was the one who got me started on THE HOBBIT, and I don't remember experiencing anything but support for my reading choices at home. I didn't read comic books, but I read the comics pages in the newspaper every day, even into college, and nobody gave me any flak for that. I grew up in Florida, and we did see some "halo effect" from the Satanic Panic around D&D, but mostly it was kids talking excitedly about the urban legends of D&D players dying in sewers. Weirdly, I didn't see any pushback around the SF/F and D&D stuff until Sandra and I were raising kids in Utah. There were some 4th-generation Utahns for whom the Satanic Panic stuff was REAL, and they very much felt like our kids needed to be warned away from it. Our kids are smart, and we're (unsurprisingly) very supportive, so nothing came of it.
The simplest way to storify my path to creating Schlock Mercenary goes something like this:
4yo me: is already reading chapter books (Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, etc) unsupervised.
8yo me: tried drawing comics about dinosaurs.
10yo me: read THE HOBBIT and LOTR. Began devouring fantasy, including some notoriously problematic stuff like THOMAS COVENANT.
14yo me: Found a collection of Larry Niven short stories in my chemistry classroom. Over the next two years I haunted the bookstore looking for anything by Niven.
16yo me: DUNE was OMG the smartest novel ever. Meanwhile, BLOOM COUNTY, CALVIN & HOBBES, and THE FAR SIDE were my favorite newspaper comics. In college there were too many additional influences to list.
By the mid-90's I was busy with a software company job and a brief career as a record producer. And then in 2000 I discovered webcomics (SLUGGY FREELANCE and USER FRIENDLY) and thought that would be a fun and easy (!) way to tell a story. Very Dunning-Kruger, yes. I had no idea how little I knew. I also had no idea just how vanishingly unlikely it was that any given comic artist could make a living at comics. I just assumed that if I got good fast enough I could make it my job. I also had no idea how to enumerate my influences, but these days I can look at those early strips and pin things down a bit.
SCHLOCK MERCENARY is what happens when a rank amateur tries to take the "short serial + social satire" format of BLOOM COUNTY, the command-deck and planet-of-the-week story structure of STAR TREK (TOS), and the worldbuilding of Larry Niven's KNOWN SPACE and roll them into a daily, newspaper-format comic strip BEFORE LEARNING HOW TO DRAW.
SandraTayler — My interests in Sci Fi and Fantasy were either accepted or encouraged by the adults in my life. I went stealth on D&D in high school for social stigma reasons, but still read lots. Met Howard in college and de-stealthed.
Lancelot Schaubert — That’s a fascinating journey because I had a similar experience. The best support I had was actually from my church community growing up like we played DND with the pastor’s kids so I was very un aware of the anti-fantasy anti-D&D anti-Harry Potter stuff. It was more typical jocks, popular kids mocking me for sculpting clay models of nightcrawler in the oven or having my grandma custom sew me the most obscure cosplays for Halloween.
I mean we “forged” about a hundred swords for the Robin Hood play in my grandpa “Remmy’s” workshop.
Howard, what were the most important lessons you learned earlier when it came to learning how to draw?
Howard Tayler — First: don't erase the not-right pencil lines until you've drawn the RIGHT pencil lines. Second: Line weight matters. You can say a lot with a single stroke that changes thickness along its length. Third: The right tools matter. Once drawing becomes a full-time job you need to be able to do it full time, and that means your tools (paper, pencils, pens, table, chair, lamp, etc) need to fit your style and your body. Otherwise you'll hurt yourself.
After that, well, there are million little things I learned, but those were the most important early things.
Lancelot Schaubert — I noticed you were reclining more or less at the con. Is that standard?
Howard Tayler — It's the new normal. Long Covid manifests like chronic fatigue for me, so if I can work while sitting with my knees almost on the same plane as my heart I can work for much, much longer.
Lancelot Schaubert — Oh mercy i didn’t know you had long COVID. My comfort for your loss of energy. My dad and friend Zoe both died of COVID so I have a lot of sympathy and empathy there. Sandra did you de-stealth because of Howard or before? How did you meet and which college?
SandraTayler — The process of learning to own ourselves is a life long one. College was the beginning of when I started being willing to say "I like these geeky things even if they make me uncool." I was fortunate in that my decision to re-embrace Science Fiction and Fantasy co-incided with finding community in Howard and with a friend group. It also helped that the world at large was increasingly more accepting of "nerd culture."
(Sorry. The gif is probably not useful for the interview.)
Lancelot Schaubert — Oh no go wild with them i can use them 🎁
Sandra Tayler — I'm also nerdy/geeky about humanities, birds, books, sewing, and gardening.
Lancelot Schaubert — Haha yes that’s true. Did you ever imagine Comicon would be this huge? Any factoids about the above?
SandraTayler — Comic Con San Diego was big before Howard began cartooning, so the rise of Comic Cons was just landscape. Factoids:
Bierstadt paints the most luminous waves.
In person it is hard to believe it is oil paint and not backlit. Prints do not do it justice. Birds: we have scrub jays who will sit in our deck railing and stare at us through the window until we give them peanuts. For the other stuff, I don't really express love of a thing in memorized factoids? Context helps people appreciate things more.
Lancelot Schaubert — Are there any trunk stories that you’re sitting on that seem worthy of revision at some future date? Or perhaps something like a nemesis story that will neither die nor be made whole?
SandraTayler — I'm currently working on revising my non-fiction book Structuring Life to Support Creativity. I need to get that done before the end of the year. (People can still pre-order a copy if they want here). I've got a middle grade novel I'd like to finish, several picture books in various stages of drafting, and a collection of short stories and poems I'm looking forward to having time for.
Lancelot Schaubert —
Marriage — what's the collaborative process like for you both? How does it help / hinder?
Dream projects — both together or individually, with unlimited resources and time and team, what would you make? What would inspire it?
Dragonsteel — what is your involvement like with that? I don't think I realized you were directly involved outside of the Writing Excuses podcast.
Howard Tayler — In reverse order: 3: Neither of us are employed by, nor contracting for, Dragonsteel. We've been friends with Brandon for 15+ years, and we exhibited at Dragonsteel Nexus at the Salt Palace Convention Center last week. 2: Unlimited resources, time, and personnel? I'd make Schlock Mercenary movies. If we step back from billionaire levels of fantasy, and merely assume a few million dollars, I'd hire artists for the many graphic novel projects rattling around in my head. 1: No hindrance. We have our own workspaces in the house, and we collaborate or leave one another alone in the zone as necessary. We help each other with executive function sorts of things, and all our projects—professional, personal, household—get woven together in the schedule we share. It's a delightful arrangement.
Lancelot Schaubert — That's so beautiful.
SandraTayler — Howard answered #3 well enough for both of us. 2: If the funds are truly unlimited, I would fund several non-profits that I care about dealing with literacy, I'd also set up grants for struggling writers and artists to help them have financial space to create. If the scope is smaller, then I'd pay three artists to illustrate the picture books I've written. I'd finish my poetry/short story anthology and buy beautiful artwork for it. I would finish my middle grade novel. 1: At this point we've been married for more than 30 years and all of our processes are deeply collaborative. Howard described it well.
Lancelot Schaubert — I and my readers are so grateful to learn from you both. Keep making beautiful things you feel called to make and thanks for your example of a joyful, collaborative marriage.
If you’d like to refer another speculative fiction author or creator, have them email me at lanceschaubert (at) gmail (dot) com
See the archive of interviews here.
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Do you know what all I've finished?
A novel about carpenters pranking an oil company.
....that I narrated.
A fantasy that takes a metatextual approach to Die Hard, westerns, and Matilda.
A sci fi and fantasy anthology featuring Juliet Marilier.
A sci fi and fantasy anthology featuring Kaaron Warren.
A dark, vulnerable Indie Folk album.
An Americana EP album.
A photo novel exclusive (for now) to iBooks — a noir where the drug traded is coffee beans.
A children's book that encourages kids to face their fears.
A children's book that offers a simple response to nihilism.
Poetry written in Greenwood Cemetery before, during, and after the pandemic. Most of it's pretty romantic, greenwave, climate fiction, or fae inspired.
A fantasy short film.
A multi-collaborator transmedia story.
Short stories taking place in The Vale — YOU CAN GET ALL 15 FOR DIRT CHEAP.
That's only some of what I'm made available for sale, not what I've sold personally to other markets. A modified published works and portfolio is in the making. But I wanted you to have something like a broader list.