Tana Ford is a Hugo, Eisner and Locus award-winning artist who has worked on such titles as Silk, Black Panther, Venomverse, New Warriors, Jem and the Holograms, Star Trek, and The Amazing Spider-Man. Her most recent work, The Space Cat, which is an all-ages graphic novel, just won a Locus Award and was a finalist for this year’s Hugo award.
Daily Dragon (DD): Welcome, Tana! Before we talk about your many current and recent projects, please tell us when you knew you wanted to make art your career.
Tana Ford (TF): Always. Being an artist isn’t just something you DO it is something you ARE. My life must follow this path; it is the way for me.
DD: What led you to work in comics, and what was your entry point in the industry?
TF: I self-published first. Then landed a gig at Marvel. I think it was handy to be able to show editors my finished work. I garnered a LAMBDA literary award nomination and a Prism Comics Queer Press Grant when I was just starting out, and those early wins gave me the confidence to keep at it.
DD: In what media do you like to work?
TF: I work both traditionally and digitally. NEVER AI. Human hands and human art are the creative engine of the universe.
I like to do my layouts digitally– being able to manipulate the angles, the positioning of my characters, the way the page will lay out is so much cleaner in Photoshop. Then I print my layouts lightly onto real paper and pencil and ink them. Then it’s back into Photoshop for the cleanup and colors and word balloons.
DD: How do you approach the art on any particular project?
TF: It depends on the project. With LaGuardia I knew I wanted all our alien species to have a basis on creatures already living on Earth, so I looked at tons of reference photos of the strangest flowers and mushrooms and sea creatures and worked from that.
With mainstream superhero comics it matters which version of the character you are drawing. So, Marvel (or whoever) will make sure to send you the reference photos and turnarounds for each superhero. When I worked on Star Trek, I had to make the collars of the Starfleet uniforms match the Kelvin universe, not, say, Deep Space 9 or Next Generation. There are small differences, but in comics that stuff matters.
DD: What’s the most fun about working on Silk?
TF: She’s the best superhero! With great power comes great accountability, right?
It was a joy to be able to bring Cindy Moon to life on the page. In our run (written by Robbie Thompson), we unpacked big challenges like talking about your mental health, balancing friendships and real life with the crushing responsibility of being a Superhero, and we did it with joy and celebration.
Long live the Silk Squad!
DD: Is there any particular challenge to working on books in the Spiderman universe?
TF: The trick to anything is having a solid team of co-workers and collaborators. On Silk we were lucky enough to have an A-list team of creatives: Ian Herring on colors, Stacey Lee and Veronica Fish. Dave Johnson designed the suit (her most iconic!) –it was truly a team effort.
DD: Didn’t you create a comic about a birthday trip to Greece?
TF: I did! It was one of the self-published books that helped me land paying work in comics. It’s called That Time I Turned 30 in Greece, and it features stray cats, poems my friend Katie sent me, mopeds, monasteries, and being trapped on the island of Paros which almost made me miss the flight home. It’s a charming little adventure, and I always have a copy or two at my table during shows.
DD: Who is Uzaru?
TF: Her name means blessing! She is the Black Panther character I co-created with Nnedi Okorafor who gets to bond with the Venom symbiote in our elseworlds run on Black Panther: Long Live the King. I got to design her look and her uniform, which was a real treat. She transforms into a dragon creature and a grasshopper and all kinds of earthy-inspired alien forms.
DD: You also collaborated with Nnedi Okorafor and colorist James Devlin on LaGuardia. How did that come about?
TF: Nnedi and I met on the Black Panther title and got along so well we decided to branch out on other projects together. Karen Berger, the legendary editor, was starting her own book imprint and picked up LAGUARDIA right away.
It is the story of alien immigration and an examination of what it means to be human, to be other. LaGuardia airport is now an interstellar airport with aliens visiting earth, and earthlings having strong feelings about that. We won a Hugo and an Eisner award for that work, which was very gratifying.
Nnedi and I went on to work on The Space Cat next, which just won a Locus Award and was a finalist for this year’s Hugo, and we’ve got some future projects in the works that we can’t quite speak about yet.
DD: What’s next for you?
TF: I’m traveling a bit and doing illustration work for now. I’ve got a creator-owned book cooking up in 2027 that is shaping up to be quite beautiful, actually.
DD: Thank you, Tana!
TF: Thanks for taking the time!
DD: For more information about Tana Ford and her work, visit her website, https://www.tanaford.com.
