Tini Howard broke into comics as a writer in 2014 with The Magdalena: Seventh Sacrament from the Top Cow imprint of Image Comics. Since then, she has written for Dark Horse, DC, Marvel, Black Crown/IDW, Oni Press, Boom! Studios, and others. Her work includes a wide variety of characters ranging from Barbie (yes, that Barbie) to superheroes, mutants and vampires, among others. She has collaborated with other authors, including her husband, Blake Howard, on several projects.
Blake Howard has been writing critically and analytically about film, screenplays, and narrative structure since his college days. He works as a writer in the entertainment industry with clients such as Grey Matter Productions, Butterfly Beach Media, Vault Comics, Paradox Interactive, and DC Comics. In past years, he has run games in the Dragon Con gaming room.
Daily Dragon (DD): Tini, your social media accounts say you’re currently on tour, with Dragon Con one of your stops, for a project called Marian Heretic from Boom! Studios. Before we dive into your path to this point, will you tell us what this project is?
Tini Howard (TH): Sure thing! Marian Heretic, out October, is written by me and drawn by Joe Jaro. It’s about a heretical nun named Sister Marian who hunts witches in the Sacred City of Vespers as part of a dark bargain with the church. One night, while she’s hunting witches, someone makes her an offer that changes her world. That’s where we start! It’s perfect for folks who love gothic stories like Castlevania or Bayonetta or comics fans who miss the bombast of nineties indie comics.
DD: Aside from Dragon Con, how many stops remain on the tour, and what are they?
TH: Let’s see, I’ve got Siouxpercon in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, then LA Comic Con in Los Angeles, and finally—the big one—New York Comic Con.
DD: In an interview with the Dragon Con Comics & Pop Art track in 2021, you mentioned that you had written fan fiction. How long did you do that, and what characters or teams did you feature in that work?
TH: Haha, oh, I wrote fan fiction for years. Years and years! It kept my writing muscles warm and strong. I mean, writing professionally is very, very different, but I had a good basis from years of writing for pleasure.
As for what I wrote? Haha, I’ve copped to some of it here and there. I’m a huge Anne Rice fan. I’ve made that known to the world. I think the thing people really want to know is twofold: 1) did you write about characters you’ve since written professionally, and 2) did you include anything from your fanfiction when you did, and the answers are yes and no, not really. Actually, there is one time, but you can ask me in person if you read this, and I will tell you, because it isn’t a fanfiction that was ever shared anywhere, so you didn’t read it.
DD: Back then, did you ever think you might write those characters or others as part of the comics industry? If not, what led you to try writing comics for publication?
TH: No, absolutely not. I went years where I didn’t even think of writing as a real job, and instead starting pursuing it as a side gig while I was bored on a very boring work assignment. The fact that I ever ended up in the position to think professionally about characters for whom I wrote for fun is a complete surprise to me.
DD: In 2017, your work appeared in Barbie Starlight (NBM/Papercutz), Hack/SlashResurrection (Image), and Magdalena (Image/Top Cow). How did you switch mental gears when moving from one to another of these very different projects?
TH: I get asked this a lot, and it always gives me pause! I want, no, need, several gears going in my mind at all times. Don’t make me work on just one thing at a time. I like my several “crockpots” going.
DD: Your Excalibur melded mutants, magic, and Arthurian legend. What was your inspiration for this series?
TH: Definitely the two biggest inspirations were Alan Moore’s Captain Britain work combined with several of his talks on magic and mysticism, followed by Bernard Cornwell’s The Winter King series. I love how those books take an incredibly cynical view of Arthur and Merlin’s (occasionally convergent, occasionally divergent) missions. That gave me some base ways to assign negative traits to these heroic figures. Moore’s Merlin is already a pretty sneaky guy, so it fell into place easily.
DD: You’ve written a number of X-Men books. What’s the biggest challenge to writing members of that team?
TH: Eh, talking about the challenge feels like a bummer. I’ll say this instead—one of my favorite ways to cast a team is to think of them like an adventuring party, like in D&D. I also like to think of the silhouette rule—if the team were in silhouette, could you still identify who was who? These are just some of the ways to think about team building. What are people’s roles, what do they do, both in a literal sense (fighter, mage, healer) and in a social-unit sense (team mom, wild card, The Face.)
DD: In addition to writing alone, you’ve collaborated with your husband, Blake Howard, and other writers. What have you found to be the biggest challenges and rewards of collaborating?
TH: Biggest challenge? There aren’t many, really. I guess what you would expect—sometimes you want to do something and the other person doesn’t? But I feel like we always get something better out of talking about it, in the end. Biggest reward? Having someone to help with the workload, having someone to talk about the story to, all of it, really!
DD: Since Blake has joined us, let me put the same question to him. Blake, what do you see as the biggest challenges and rewards of collaborating?
Blake Howard (BH): As in any partnership, there’s a degree of compromise required. For the most part, any time we find ourselves with creative differences, we usually allow one of us to filibuster the other, and by the end, either we’ve made our case or realized via talking it out that it was imperfect to begin with. That is, in essence, both the biggest challenge and the biggest reward of collaboration.
DD: The two of you have collaborated on Vampire the Masquerade, Vampire the Masquerade: Winter’s Teeth, World of Darkness, and Creepshow Holiday Special #1. What’s your process when you work on a joint project?
TH: Typically, we just start with a ton of brainstorming. I mean, we live together, so it’s easy enough to do. Once we’ve got a ton of ideas, then we start shaping them—around an outline, if one’s provided, or into one of our own. Then [we outline] the issue, just like we were working on our own. Sometimes one of us will take the lead on that—often the one who doesn’t plan to do as much scripting.
BH: We like to schedule hikes when we first get a project. There’s something about walking and talking out ideas that gets the creative juices running. I think if I ran a writer’s room, I would probably insist upon hikes.
DD: You also collaborated on six issues of Punchline: The Gotham Game. How do you see Punchline as a character, and how does she compare to Harley Quinn, whose book Tini has also written as a solo author?
BH: She’s the new girl on the block, and she already has two characters with whom she can’t avoid comparison—the Joker and Harley Quinn. We knew we didn’t want to make Alexis as sympathetic as Harley, who was manipulated into becoming the Joker’s sidekick. Punchline is a dyed-in-the-wool maniac.
TH: Yeah, she has no inner hero longing to break free. I think even her inner child is gleefully bad. Love that for her.
DD: What advice would either of you give to someone trying to break into writing comics?
TH: The material advice is to tell a small, killer story. Write and draw it yourself or collaborate with a friend or a group of friends. Make it look good and share it where people can see it. Ryan North used CD clip art of dinosaurs to make his comics, and now he writes Fantastic Four.
BH: Read a lot of comics. Not just to keep up with current storylines, but to get a sense of the craft. Look outside your usual tastes, be curious.
DD: Finally, is there anything about your work that either of you would like to highlight?
TH: I’m online in two places—Instagram and Substack. Anyone else is lying to you. Follow me there for news on Marian Heretic (out October 8) and my next upcoming announcements, which include another creator-owned series, a new DC series, and another tabletop gaming collaboration with Blake.
BH: For the past couple of years, I’ve run some pretty fun games here at Dragon Con down in the gaming room. I’m not running any this year, but if you’ve played previously, I’d love for you to stop by and say hello!
Additionally, I’ve got my Substack at blakemhoward.substack.com. I’ll be launching a ton of new tabletop gaming content there in the next few months, stuff you can use in your own games.
DD: Thanks for your time.
You can learn more about Tini and Blake Howard and their work by visiting their websites and checking out their social media:
Tini:
Blake:
