Gisele Lagace is the creator of Cool Cat Studio and Penny & Aggie. On both webcomics, she currently shares the reins with T Campbell who scripts while Lagace handles the artwork. Lagace and Campbell recently announced the return of Cool Cat Studio, a webcomic I really liked during its initial year 2000-2001 run. And Lagace also recently quit her day job to do comics full-time. It seemed like a great time to find out more about Gisele Lagace so I caught up with her recently via email to talk about comics.

I’d like to take a little time to talk about creative ways to integrate text into comics. When I first started making webcomics, I didn’t give much thought to how the text would become part of my images. I drew the art, scanned it and typed in the words in the last stage of the production. This led to some very awkward passages in my webcomics.

Usually, text is used in speech balloons; sound effects; narration boxes and in very rare cases, the words become part of the image themselves. But sometimes artists stretch these standards to make something truly innovative in their work.

A friend of mine, reading my last article for ComixTalk ("A World of Fantasy"), wondered how I could write a whole piece on fantasy webcomics without mentioning Girl Genius by Phil and Kaja Foglio.

So I had to admit that it was only the artwork and some of the dialogue that got me through the very slow opening section of that comic. And just as I was finally gleaning enough information to get a feel for the character and the setting, they tear the character out of the setting and throw her down some place new. I've tried, but Girl Genius just isn't for me.

Thinking about it, though, and with this summer's Comic Con International still on my mind, I realized that several webcomics that I do read were also once published on paper. So here I am, writing about Girl Genius without actually writing about it so I can focus instead on Finder by Carla Speed MacNeil, Xeno's Arrow by Greg Beettam and Stephen Geigen-Miller, and Galaxion by Tara Tallan.

Shayna Marchese is the creator of Voids, a webcomic about Sara, a young woman in New York City.  I like Voids a lot -- it's a quiet comic that casts a careful eye on its main character as well as the city she lives in. I caught up with Marchese via email earlier this month to find out a little more about her and Voids.