Buggin' Out with Kathryn Calamia & Phil Falco!
Hey Friends!
We’re starting a new series where I (Scott Wilke) will interview some of our favorite indie creators outside Bad Bug and find out what makes them tick. Kathryn Calamia and Phil Falco, writers of Bombshell and Atomica, were kind enough to be our guinea pigs for this first outing.
Check out their interview below!
SCOTT: So, Mike’s gonna say that he made you both. He’s gonna say that Bombshell and Atomica put you on the map and that before him, you were nothing. Let’s set the record straight right out the gates, tell us a bit about your writer/creator credits.
PHIL: We separate our lives into two distinct periods: “Pre-Mike” and “Post-Mike”. We’ll have to think reeeeally hard to remember those dark “Pre-Mike” times. In all seriousness, Kat and I collectively have published around ten unique comic titles between us (give or take a spin-off, a one-shot, or a crossover).
We’re probably best known for our Webtoon “Slice of Life (GL)”, and more recently for our Dark NSFW Fairytale titles, “The Beast & Snow” and “Nightmare in Wonderland”.
We’re also known for creating and editing various comic anthologies, including “Bi Visibility: A Bisexual Anthology”, “Rainbow Canvas: A BL & GL Webtoon Anthology”, and “Hairology: A Celebration of Hair”.
And finally, we also have our own individual titles: “Like Father, Like Daughter”, “They Call Her…THE DANCER”, and “HAUNTING”.
SCOTT: Tell us something about yourselves you’ve never mentioned in another interview. It can be a fun fact, a hidden talent, an embarrassing moment…gotta front load that juicy, exclusive content!
KAT: Oh my, you're putting us on the spot. I drink a can of cherry coke everyday. Yes, this is important information you should know if you potentially need to bribe me. And yes, I’ve had two kidney stones!
PHIL: I have ommetaphobia - fear of eyes.
If you know me, then you know I’m a big fan of horror and gore…unless it involves eyes. I can barely tolerate looking at people’s eyes, let alone seeing anything touch or damage the eye.
SCOTT: Alright, let’s go backwards in time a bit. Tell us about Kat and Phil as children.
KAT: I’d like to think I was a good kid. Bad handwriting, but a good kid. I’ve always been into comics either through reading old Superman comics with my Dad or begging my parents to see Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man.
What did I want to be when I grew up? My parents are doctors. So I think every kid just regurgitates what they know. So I said, “I want to be a doctor like my parents.”
But I was also one of those dinosaur kids. So I wanted to be a veterinarian. Did I think I could take care of a T-Rex or was it my way of begging my parents for a dog? To this day, it’s a mystery. And that’s my origin story of how I became a comic writer! 😂
PHIL: I was as straight-laced as a little gay boy could get. If there was a rule, I was following it. If I somehow accidentally broke it, I was anxious about it for a month after. Ironically, I had (and still have) a tendency to befriend more adventurous troublemakers. But I like to think that we balance each other out.
My first “dream” job was actually a comic book artist. I never had much artistic talent, but damn if Little Phil didn’t try! Eventually, I realized that my passion (and talent) lied more in the writing/storytelling aspect than it did in the more visual aspect of the medium.
SCOTT: Jumping ahead in time, what were high school Kat and Phil like?
KAT: I was in the 2:30 club. Very happy to go home and take a nap! I was a good student, had a small group of friends, but mostly stayed close to my childhood best friend and my twin brother. Most people called us the triplets 😂
PHIL: I had the best of both worlds. I was in the 2:30 club for Freshman/Sophomore year of High School, and then the 7:00 club for Junior/Senior Year. For the latter half of my high school years, I got roped into a lot of activities (plays, clubs, volunteering). No sports, singing, or instruments, of course. I am very lacking in coordination and musical ability.
But I was the president of our school’s Latin Club (in case you needed any more evidence that I’m a dork).
SCOTT: Alright, time traveling again. We’re now to the point where Kat and Phil are writing their FIRST comic script. Tell us about it.
KAT: I wrote my first comic book in college, “Like Father, Like Daughter”. At the time, I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted to do, but I knew I wanted to work in entertainment in some way. I took a screenwriting class where I came up with the concept for the series, and once the class was over I knew I wanted to do something with the story. So, why not make a comic? Eight issues in, this superhero tale is still going strong, and will always be my baby.
Post-college, I went for my Masters in Writing and Producing TV. Along the way, I realized the best way to break into the entertainment industry was to actually continue to do what I love - create IP through comic books! Now the dream is to keep making stories we care about, and try getting those stories in front of as many people as we can.
PHIL: I’ve been writing for pretty much my entire life as a hobby. Mostly prose, but I dabbled in comic scripts as early as high school. But like many writers, I never really entertained the idea that it could be a career. Not until my last two years of college when I had a quarter life crisis and really threw myself into writing classes and groups.
My first comic, HAUNTING, was actually an adaptation of a prose story I had been working on. As a lifeline comic fan, I loved the idea of making my own comic. And seeing Kat’s success inspired me to take the leap. I crowdfunded my first project in March of 2020…yes, that March 2020. But it ended up working out pretty well for me. My HAUNTING Kickstarter launched right as Diamond halted distribution due to the pandemic. So I got a lot more readers willing to take a chance on a new creator to get their new comics fix.
It’s honestly been a dream come true since then. While I love Marvel/DC and would never say no to a WFH gig with them, they were never really the goal for me. I just wanted to tell my own stories. And that’s exactly what I’ve been doing these last few years.
SCOTT: People love a good success story…BUT, not as much as they love a good failure story. Tell us about the first failure you had in your writing career. If you’re like Allen Dunford and have a flawless track record, just make something up.
KAT: Honestly, with every Kickstarter there will be a failure. I know that sounds negative, but it’s actually positive. You should be learning with every launch, and if you stop learning then that’s the true failure. My first campaign looks VERY different from the campaigns we launch now.
With the first campaign on my profile (Like Father, Like Daughter #6), I was capitalizing on a queer relationship that hadn’t even happened in the book yet - without a prior queer audience. Maybe not the smartest move.
I had to learn how to make a striking page and that goes down to the little details of a page. Growth won’t happen in a day. It won’t happen because of one amazing choice you made. The little choices will culminate into big successes.
PHIL: We’ve been fortunate to not have any projects fail to hit their funding goal so far. But that doesn’t mean that every project has turned a profit. I would say that one of our biggest “failures” came in the budgeting of our first shared project: a crossover between Kat’s Like Father, Like Daughter and my HAUNTING.
While the Kickstarter itself was a success and our most-backed campaign up to that point, we made a lot of mistakes in estimating our budget for the project, which ended up being significantly more expensive than we anticipated. We also had some poor coordination on fulfillment which resulted in rewards being delivered a lot later than we expected.
While we always spoke positively about the HAUNTING/Like Father, Like Daughter Crossover in public, there was a long period where we did not look at it as a successful project. But like Kat said, you learn a lot from failure. And we used all of the lessons from this campaign to strengthen our planning for future campaigns.
And while it didn’t happen right away, we did eventually realize that you can’t boil a project down to “success” or “failure” based on only one metric. The crossover wasn’t a “success” in the Kickstarter profit department. But it expanded our audience significantly and made many fans of one series become fans of the other. And while it took a little extra time, the book did eventually turn a profit on post-Kickstarter sales and is now one of our best sellers and our favorite things we’ve ever written together.
SCOTT: At what point did you two decide to become an unstoppable writing team and make the rest of us look like amateurs?
KAT: I kid you not, it was one drunken Halloween night. We were joking around about making the above-mentioned HAUNTING/Like Father, Like Daughter Crossover, and we were like wait WHY DON’T WE MAKE A CROSSOVER. It was one of our easiest scripts to nail down because we bounced off each other so well. We were like we have to do this again!
Following the fun we had making the crossover, we both wanted to make a queer WEBTOON. So, we decided to create Slice of Life. Phil had the idea of an anime character coming to life, and we both collaborated to make it a marketable queer story for the platform. The rest is history!
SCOTT: Fun fact about me, I don’t work well with others, so I’ve never had a writing partner. I’m always so fascinated by how that relationship works. Tell us a bit about your partnership.
KAT: I couldn’t imagine doing this crazy ride with anyone else! We both have a very similar writing style, which helps. We plot everything together. Then, depending on the project, we’ll either separate to take on scenes that excite us or we’ll write them together. If it’s a new project, we’ll tend to write the first few scenes together to nail down the tone. But if it’s something that we know very well (like Slice of Life), we’ll usually write separately and trade notes.
How does it work? We learned early on that the two most important tools at making a healthy partnership are compromising and COMMUNICATING. If one of us is ticked off about something, we talk about it and try to see the other person’s side. And most importantly, we learn from that interaction. We don’t just say sorry and do the same exact thing the next day. We’re considerate to each other’s feelings and needs.
PHIL: We’re lucky that we tend to have a lot of the same opinions when it comes to storytelling. But when the inevitable disagreement rears its head, we try to always remember that a partnership is give-or-take. That means that in those rare moments where we’re on opposite sides of the fence, we are pretty good at letting one person have their way this time and letting the other person have their way the next time.
Fun story from another work-for-hire script we worked on about a year ago:
Kat wrote a scene where a character dramatically cries a single tear when looking at an old photo. I thought that this was too melodramatic, but Kat felt strongly about wanting to keep the moment. Ever since, we’ve referred to writing disagreements where one person really wants to keep something that the other person wants to cut as “teardrop” scenes.
SCOTT: Love ‘em or hate ‘em, cons are the lifeblood of indie comics. Tell us your favorite con experience and your least favorite con experience.
PHIL: I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a creator who hates Conventions. There’s honestly no better feeling than getting to connect with fans and peers at a Con. And like many creators, we found some of our most loyal fans through direct connection at Comic Cons.
Of course, we can love them and still acknowledge that they are hard. Especially the three and four days Cons. Kat and I are introverts, so by the end of a long Con weekend we are pretty much ready to lock ourselves in separate rooms and not talk to anybody for a week.
And don’t even get me started on Summer of 2022…we did back-to-back conventions eight weeks in a row. Basically the entire Summer. Thankfully, we’ve gotten better at planning since then.
KAT: Favorite con experience: meeting new readers who come back and say they’ve fallen in love with our work. It’s also really fun to see readers you know from Kickstarter or Slice of Life’s comments come to your table!
Least favorite: when people read the whole comic book in front of you, and you have that awkward moment of how do you nicely say that you can’t read the whole book in front of the creators who make a living off these stories.
SCOTT: You guys are always busy writing, but I’m sure you’re still making time to read. Tell us what’s on your recently read and to-be-read pile.
KAT: I’m a Wednesday Warrior. So I read a lot of stuff through the direct market on a weekly basis. My favorite indies right now are: Dark Ride (horror and theme parks, sign me up), and Kill Your Darlings (literally every issue is a master class in how to write a comic) - just to name a few.
PHIL: We try to read comics across as many mediums as possible. As Kat mentioned, we love the Marvel, DC, and Indie direct market books. And we also make a habit of checking out as many Kickstarter and Webtoon series as we can! Personally, I’m a big fan of Wendy Lian Martin’s Castle Swimmer on Webtoon and Charlie Stickney’s Glarien of the White Ash on Kickstarter. And bonus mention to Garth Matthams’ Witch Creek Road, which was both a Webtoon AND a Kickstarter comic.
SCOTT: Back to Bombshell and Atomica real quick before I let you go. Tell us what you made you guys not only interested in tackling this story. What all went into sculpting the shapeless globs of clay we gave you into these well-rounded characters. Oh, and this question is from our Editor John. What’s the soundtrack you envision for Bombshell and Atomica?
KAT: Don't get your heads too big!!! But honestly, we genuinely enjoyed the content you were putting out. You guys craft some wonderful NSFW titles, and we love seeing the different genres you tackle.
PHIL: Kat has gotten to play in the superhero sandbox for so long now that I was getting jealous! And if it isn’t obvious, we really love telling character-driving queer stories.
You guys came to us with such a fun collection of concepts and such a fun setting that it was easy to shape the story into what it would eventually become. Right away, we knew that we wanted to play with the idea of Betty and Veronica being married to men as they navigate their feelings with each other. And from that basic set-up, we built up our four leads - starting with their relationship to wartime (both in the factory and on the battlefield), including their traumas, their nostalgia, their queerness, etc.
We really enjoyed the freedom you gave us to shape the story and characters. You were always engaged and excited with feedback, but really let us drive the story.
Kat: Soundtrack: I’d say some postmodern jukebox! Modern songs with classic genre twist.
SCOTT: I appreciate you guys being my guinea pigs for this first entry in Buggin’ Out! To thank you, take this moment to plug all the stuff you guys have going now.
KAT: Check out Nightmare in Wonderland if you want to see the NSFW mashup of an ASSASSIN ALICE and QUEEN SLEEPING BEAUTY stuck in a Nightmare version of WONDERLAND!
And if you’re looking for more queer storytelling, it’s the perfect time to catch up with WEBTOON’s Slice of Life with our 200+ page graphic novel collection!
Read a warm story about an anime character that comes to life and falls in love with a kind-hearted cheerleader!
PHIL: And if you want regular updates on our stuff, you can subscribe to our Substack newsletter here!
NOW ON KICKSTARTER!
Cupid
BOMBSHELL AND ATOMICA
HORUS IN HELL #2
FLICKERING LIGHTS #3
Leave a comment telling us which indie creator we should interview next!
Bugs and Kisses,
Bad Bug Crew