Know The Staff: Flynn Nicholls

Since we are still a new magazine with a mostly brand new crew we feel it is our responsibility to introduce ourselves to you, the new readers, so that we can be boiled down to archetypal characters and then placed into your FF7 fanfictions because you can only read about Cloud and Sephiroth banging for so many times.

Nerdcenaries: Greetings Flynn Nicholls of the Internet!
Flynn Nicholls: Hello!
N: Tell the readers of Nerdcenaries who you are!
FN: Oh geez. My name is Flynn Nicholls and I am an illustrator and comics person. I went to college for animation, which is another thing I do. I live in Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America.
N: When you call yourself a comics person, what do you mean by that?
FN: I am a person who writes and draws comics.
N: Are any of your comics online and if so, where are they at?
FN: I have a sketchblog at http://thrillstounding.tumblr.com/ where I post sketches and comics. Right now I’m posting a fantasy comic that I’m basically improvising as I go. It’s called Treasure Robbers.
N: And is there any official update schedule for that comic?
FN: It’s pretty loose. I mostly post things Monday through Friday but there’s no set days.
N: So what got you into drawing comic?
FN: I’ve basically been drawing my whole life. I was fueled by a lot of Saturday morning cartoons. My favorites were usually based on comics (TMNT, X-Men, Spider-Man) and a lot of my friends read superhero comics so I got into that pretty early on. I also read a lot of Tintin growing up.
N: So what got you into posting comics online?
FN: My friends had been telling me to do a webcomic for years before I actually did one. I’d actually tried to do one in high school with a friend of mine. He would do a stick figure layout with the writing, which I think he got from American Splendor, and would send it to me to draw. That comic did not last very long. Then in 2007 I started finding cartoonists who posted their comics on Livejournal, one of them being my friend Jamie Baldwin, who encouraged me to start one. So I started doing that in early 2008, just to see if I could maintain a regular schedule of drawing and posting material.
N: So if you had the option to draw for any writer, who would you want to?
FN: That’s a pretty tough question! Grant Morrison? I’m going to shoot for the moon and say Grant Morrison.
N: Who are your stylistic inspirations?
FN: This is kind of hard because I have a habit of switching art styles depending on what I’m doing. I don’t know if that’s a good thing to do or not. I know Art Spiegelman has a tendency to do that so there’s one. Jack Kirby, Mike Mignola Jamie Hewlett, Hayao Miyazaki, Moebius, Geoff Darrow, José Luis García-López and Fil Barlow are all people I like. I think that’s my pool of artists that inform me when I’m doing sci-fi and fantasy stuff. I also like Winsor McCay’s and Herge’s draftsmanship. I’ve been getting into Akira Toriyama more recently. Sam Bosma is another one, his work is amazing. There are a bazillion webcomics and general illustration work that I’m constantly taking in so it’s hard to give a coherent list.
N: If you had to compare yourself to a superhero, who would you pick?
FN: Hm. I guess Spider-Man? Is that dumb? I find Peter Parker pretty relatable but I think a lot of people do.
N: Does Bruce Banner find Peter Parker relatable. Does he?
FN: They’re both science nerds, right? Who got into accidents that gave them superpowers? So probably on some level?
N: Haha. Well, before you go is there anything you want to pimp?
FN: I suppose I could pimp Reissues. It’s been on hiatus for a little while but I’m looking to get it up and running again. It’s a project wherein people are free to submit their own renderings of album covers.
N: Awesome. Well thank you for your time and I look forward to seeing more of your work on Nerdcenaries in the future.
FN: Thanks!

Luke Herr

Luke is a writer and an aspiring professional comic writer who is also the editor in chief of Nerdcenaries. He currently is working on a graphic novel called Prison Spaceship.