Kyle Starks Talks The Art That Brings Him The Most Joy - Creator Owned Art

Kyle Starks is a writer and artist best known for his work on Peacemaker Tries Hard, I Hate This Place, Sexcastle, Rock Candy Mountain, Rick and Morty, Pine and Merrimac, and Karate Prom. Later this year, Starks is writing the Lobo Cancellation Special for DC Comics. His heartfelt and humorous work has earned him 3 Eisner nominations as he’s become a fan-favorite creator in the industry.

I spoke with Starks about his favorite piece of art from his collection as part of a new series called “Creator Owned Art.” Check out my previous discussions with Josh Trujillo, Annie Nocenti, and Mark Waid. Here’s what he said:

I am betting most people who get asked to do this have something super cool, super neat - all sorts of options to choose from. But I don't buy original art because my wife won't let me put them up, and my office is an unfinished basement. And - this may surprise you - it's not like the artists I love are falling all over themselves to do trades with me.  I have some Evan Dorkin original pages I got in the 90s, but I don't know where they went because I got them 30-plus years ago. And of ALL the artists I've worked with, only one ever hooked me up with a page from a script I did with them, and I'm not going to show that one because while I am honored by that page, if you saw it, you would see they did all their actual lifting digitally.

So, if I'm being asked to show meaningful original art I possess-  what is it going to be? What could it even be? 

I mean, I honestly didn't have any idea.  

But then I remembered I have something that will, no doubt, go right on that office wall if I ever get it. And it requires a little explanation, a little history because, of course, it does—how else will you know why it's meaningful to me?

First of all, the first comic I ever made was Legend of Ricky Thunder which I posted digitally, unpromoted, for my own purposes of just finishing a comic in approximately 2011-2012 when I was 35 years old and I fell in love with making comics and telling stories and went full on obsessed with doing it. So I did a Kickstarter in 2013 and was told I needed to go to comic conventions, so I used the profits of those Kickstarters to go to conventions and the second show I EVER attended was HeroesCon in Charlotte and I tabled next to another not-even-in-the-industry Erica Henderson and we hit it off immediately. We became quick friends.

The NEXT year, I made another book I Kickstarted that was SEXCASTLE, which - thanks to another very good HeroesCon origin story - would go on to be published by Image and nominated for an Eisner. And that next year, Erica and I were one step closer - she was working for a very small publisher and was in talks with Marvel for what would become the start of her incendiary and incredible career, and I was about to be relatively successful with my first book at Image. Stay with me; this is all going somewhere.

I was pretty happy with this new comic hobby that I had made that brought me - like most hobbies - immense joy and, unlike most hobbies, was profitable rather than a loss. I have a very nice union factory job in my home town, I had two young daughter - things were going great.  I was starting my third going-to-Kickstarter graphic novel called KILL THEM ALL and was maybe 2/3 done when the hedge fund that bought that factory decided to close it on Christmas Day seven years ago.

I would say I was in a panic, but with some urgency, I needed to complete that graphic novel so I could do the Kickstarter and shore up the capacity to feed those two kids and my wife. In January, I did 90 pages to finish that trade so I could get it to Kickstarter - which is an insane number and productivity I could not do again, I don't believe. I called on my few friends to help with some postcard art. My best friend, virtual studio mate, and frequent collaborator, Chris Schweizer, came through strong. Andy Hirsch - a super-talented creator, delivered. And my very good friend - now in the middle of her iconic run on Squirrel Girl, took time to not only make my art for the Kickstarter but also send me the art.

So what is the art?  

It's this:

Erica Henderson's representation of the Tiger's Daughter from KILL THEM ALL, which she then proceeded to send me the original out of the kindness of her heart. I love this image so much.  There was a little bit of fan art for Sexcastle on the web, but this piece was the first time - no disrespect to those kind and generous artists - this was the first time I saw the best version of the thing that lived in my head. What potential they had in better, defter, more talented hands. I simply adore this image for how good Erica is, for it being in some ways part of the book that I really like and that also really really sort of started my comic career (I got Rick and Morty soon after, and did Rock Candy Mountain later that year), but you know what it really is?  

It looks like friendship to me. And I prize that more than anything.

Also, a small add-on, when I pulled this piece of art out of the safe corner of my house where it lives, still safely inside the FedEx envelope it was sent, I found ANOTHER piece of art. Which I know is cheating because I was only asked for one. But I found this Chris Schweizer piece that he did for his Makers Comics: Fix a Car! book that I adore because it's such a great piece of art, and it emotes such a clear place and time and feeling and I was waiting to see if Chris was going to sell it. And I think I offered to maybe do a trade, but I'm pretty sure he just gave it to me as a birthday gift.  But look how dope it is.

Thanks, Kyle, for doing this! You can find more information about his work, original art, and activities on his website, Patreon, and Twitter! We strongly recommend giving him a follow and supporting his work.