By Zack Quaintance — This week, we’re rolling out new interviews with Kickstarter comics creators basically daily, starting with writer Mark O. Stack, whose project Young Offenders! just launched earlier today. You can read all about the book below, before heading over to the Young Offenders! campaign page to back the project…enjoy!

ZACK QUAINTANCE: So, you’re launching a new Kickstarter this week called Young Offenders...can I start by asking you what the elevator pitch is for this story?

MARK O. STACK: Young Offenders! is almost like the tie-in to an event comic that doesn't exist, but much better because it's not actually a tie-in. It takes place six months after a crisis *wink* where major heroes and villains throughout the world disappear, and these mismatched and jumbled up kids have to come together to pick up the pieces. It's the superhero equivalent of your parents leaving you the house for the weekend and knowing you're A) going to trash it and B) have to put it all back together in time for them to come home.

ZACK: What inspired you to take on superheroes for this project?

MARK: I've been working in the indie superhero sphere for a little bit with my magazine project, Weekend Warrior Comics, last year and my graphic novella, The Scent of May Rain, this year. There's a little bit of a hanging "why do superheroes?" question when you're an indie comics and can do literally anything, so I've tried to infuse my work with new ideas that are grounded in already existing literary traditions. Young Offenders is a really earnest attempt to tell a young adult story that deals with all these stages of identity development from diffusion to achievement with the most blown out of proportion stakes imaginable. It doesn't get bigger than saving the world, but it also doesn't get smaller than mixed up kids learning to deal with their feelings and overcome traumas. So that's a juxtaposition that I (and the countless others before me) have found and continue to find enthralling.

ZACK: Mike Becker’s work is great. How did you two connect for this project?

MARK: Twitter may be bad for our democracy, but it is weirdly good at connecting creative people. Mike and I followed each other for probably about a month before we connected on this project because either he had posted art I dug or I had said something or other about comics. It was March, early in the stages of lockdown, and I had all this time on my hands because I had been laid off. I wanted to make a fun comic book, so I just tweeted out that I wanted to do that and Mike responded saying that he wanted to jam. And when someone who lays down insane work like Mike does says he's game, you know there's nothing you two can put together that isn't going to succeed on a fundamental artistic level. That's really how smooth it's gone throughout the process. I say "hey, I think this is a good idea" and Mike will "yes, and" with an even better evolution of the idea until we're both going back and forth about the philosophy of costume design or the storytelling power of certain ideas from Superman Beyond 3D.

ZACK The scope of superhero stories always feels grandiose...what’s the scope of this project? I know it’s early, but are you thinking spin-offs, sequels, or anything like that?

MARK: Young Offenders! is going to go places. With a couple of exceptions, the characters on and off the team come from other comics I've released or had in extended production. It felt more honest to the team superhero genre to assemble a cast out of what I had available and make them work in the new team book context rather than do everything wholecloth. I've been slowly putting together and exploring a universe with related one-off projects I've done over the last couple years released under the Weekend Warrior Comics banner with the goal being that each project is in some sense a superhero comic while having wild variance in style, tone, and genre in order to tap into the rich veins of comic and literary traditions available to us as storytellers. One story might be a Vonnegut inspired rumination on identity while another is a tender coming of age story that crosses Perks of Being a Wallflower with My Hero Academia. 

So there are already comics out there written by me that fit into this universe (the aforementioned The Scent of May Rain, Herakles, and Joey in the Wilderness aren't required reading for Young Offenders but they do share characters and are available on my gumroad page). There will be more coming out in the near future, too, like a webcomic featuring the character of The Lark that went live on Tapas last week and will update in October.

ZACK: Finally, I’ll wrap up with one of those standard comics interview questions...when you were a Young Offender yourself, so to speak, who were your favorite superheroes? 

MARK: I didn't read about him in comics until I was older, but I loved Static Shock on TV. I dug how that character had a whole universe unto himself in his hometown with rich characters that were always interacting with each other in new, exciting ways. That show made Anansi cooler than Batman! But to have a comics answer, Mike and I have talked a lot about having this one in common: Robert Kirkman, Cory Walker, and Ryan Ottley's Invincible was the teen superhero comic. I'll admit to having fallen off of it at some point, but what I read was really one of the funniest and most authentic stories about growing up even as it was filtered through this lens of presenting the absurd as almost painfully mundane. Everyone got more emotional depth than you were expecting. In that way Young Offenders! has a similar goal to almost surprise you with how much you end up liking these kids.

Young Offenders!

Young Offenders!
Writer: Mark O. Stack
Artist: Mike Becker
Young Offenders! is a story in the vein of teen/young adult super-team stories like Young Justice and Young Avengers. When the world’s leading superheroes disappear in a galactic crisis, the planet’s defense is left to a group of young adults who you wouldn’t trust with guarding a Kia dealership in this 44-page comic book.
Back It Now: Young Offenders! Campaign Page

Check out our past small press previews!