Let your kid watch Predator and they might grow up to be a successful comic book artist

Most parenting books would advise you not to let your 10-year-old watch Alien or Predator. But it's possible those books don't know what they're talking about, because if Mississauga, Ont. comic book artist and author Megan Huang hadn't been allowed to watch those movies as a child, she probably wouldn't have grown up to work on Superman or Star Wars or Scooby Doo.

"I was a huge fan of [Alien and Predator] when I was, like 10-years-old," she says. "Totally reasonable, and I mean, my parents shouldn't have let me watch that stuff, but [both series] had their own comic books, so I started reading those, and then I moved on to The Walking Dead."

Still, Huang says her early love of Alien and Predator, and presumably Alien vs. Predator, didn't set her on a straight path towards comic book creation. Instead, she says, she was looking for a career that would let her draw full-time. 

"I didn't want to stop drawing," she says. "When I got into high school, I didn't know what I wanted to do with it yet, and I was thinking 'Animation? Illustration? Concept art?' and then I thought about comic art and I was like 'OK, this is what I want to do,' and I just zeroed in on it."

She says that her early comic influences included Jim Lee — now DC's Chief Creative Officer — and Sean Gordon Murphy, best known for his Batman: White Knight series. Among her peers, she cites French artist Bengal and French-born, Canadian-based Sweeney Boo as two of the artists she admires the most. She says that French artists have a style that appeals to her.

"I think they have a certain flow in the way their lines are drawn," she says. "It's like the waves of the sea, versus like this rugged cross-hatching that Americans do. There's not a lot of heavy blacks in the French art style. Which leaves a lot more room to explore different ways of colouring that space.

Huang is best known for her work on Star Wars and in for DC. She says that working on established properties like that has it's pros and cons. The con is that you don't get as much room to be creative, the pro is that the assignment is clear. You know what your editor, and your audience, wants. On her own original comics, like the fantasy series Rangers of the Divide — which she both wrote and illustrated — she had to build an entire fictional universe from scratch. It's something she says is both challenging and exciting.

"I put everything into it," she says. "I wrote the script. I did the letters. And the thing is, because I'm the writer, I can change whatever I want. Like the panels and everything. So I really did have that freedom with this book to go and fully express myself."

She adds that for some artists, moving into writing might be a challenge, but for her it felt like a natural transition.

"Ever since I was little, I've also liked to write stories," she says. "It is fun to write, and I find it calming."

Huang says one of the biggest challenges of working on her own original material is the fact that she is largely responsible for promoting it, too. As someone who says she got into this line of work in part "so I can draw at home, alone, with my dogs," she finds it challenging.

"Promotion is not fun, and it makes you feel weird because it's sometimes so self-indulgent," she says. "You're like 'Buy my book. It's so good!' And it's so uncomfortable to say that."

Even doing this interview, which took place at Toronto Comicon, is a part of the promotion process, and the kind of thing it took Huang a while to get used to.

"The first few times I did a con, I was like, ill, you know?" she says. "I just did not like it… promoting myself, getting myself out there, meeting people, making connections, all that stuff, it was something I had to force myself to do. I'm more used to it now."