ENKER: Before we begin I just want to thank you for agreeing to sit down for this interview. I’ve always enjoyed dropping in and having a read of Growth in my lunch hour at work. I’ll start with some general questions first. Have you long been a fan of games and anime?

NICOLE: Well, if you wanted to be technical, my first console was the 8-bit NES and my first console RPG was Final Fantasy. If I do the backwards math, that would make me a fan of games since 1990. My appreciation of anime a little more recent, that started around 1997.

ENKER: Is Final Fantasy your favourite RPG series and if so is VII your favourite installment?

NICOLE: Actually, it isn't. That honor belongs the PC games "Baldur's Gate I & II." Within the Final Fantasy series, I'd say VIII (yes, "eight") is my favorite of the pack - though I haven't finished II, III or VI yet.

ENKER: What do you have to say about the VI vs VII debate?

NICOLE: I think I have to finish VI first before I can comment intelligently on that.

ENKER: Have you got an all-time favourite RPG character and why?

NICOLE: As much as I want to keep this within the Final Fantasy universe (in which case, my favorite character would be Quistis Trepe), to be honest my all-time favorite RPG character is Viconia DeVir from "Baldur's Gate II." I like her because she's very sensitive, but she's not nice. Her character development and dialogue during the course of the game is excellent. She's one of the few prominent RPG figures I can think of who is offered a chance for redemption which may or may not fail depending on the way you play your game. What can I say, I'm a sucker for redemption themes.

ENKER: Are there any regular webcomics that you read?

NICOLE: So many that I can't keep up with them at times. So, when push comes to shove, I usually only bring myself to read three faithfully: Inverloch, Kagerou and Flipside.

ENKER: Ok, now we’ll get onto the subject of your webcomic. Would you care to summarise the basic premise behind it for our readers or those unfamiliar with your work?

NICOLE: Growth is a Final Fantasy VII webcomic based off of a fiction of the same name, which I also wrote. It takes place in an alternate universe because the story was created before the release of the "Compilation," which shot holes through a lot of my theories. The story starts five years after the destruction of Meteor with Vincent Valentine, who has become a mercenary for hire. World-weary, he journeys to Cosmo Canyon seeking advice from the elders there. What he finds instead is an unexpected adventure when he meets up with the alarmingly crazed Yuffie and the lonely, driven Nanaki. Together the three travel to the Northern Crater to find materia, answers and most importantly, a reason to keep on living.

ENKER: Your strips are hand drawn, would you care to walk us through the process you use?

NICOLE: When I first started, my strips were simply inked lineart with computer tones dropped in over them to fake shading and backgrounds. After a disastrous hard drive crash in which I lost nearly everything, I switched over to color. Currently, I use cold-press watercolor paper which I buy in bulk at my local art store and then cut down manually to roughly A4 size. I panel and sketch with a mechanical HB pencil and then go over the lines I want to keep with india ink. Pencil lines over the lighter areas are removed with a white vinyl eraser. Afterwards, I fill in solid blocks of color using a watercolor pencil. Then I re-color over the solid blocks with my shade tone. After all of that, I go back in with watercolor pencils only and drop in my backgrounds. Finally, I use a wet brush to moisten the pigment and make it look smooth; when all of that is dry, I scan it in and typically darken the image in Photoshop, and then add hair highlights, text and occasionally special effects using a tablet and stylus.

ENKER: How long on average does a strip take you?

NICOLE: I'd say storyboarding takes about 5-10 minutes maximum; sketching can last anywhere from fifteen minutes to a full hour, depending on the complexity of the page. Inking usually takes me another fifteen minutes to half an hour; coloring takes a while, anywhere from an hour to three depending on the complexity of the page. Text and finishing touches usually also take a while, anywhere between an hour or two. In total that makes the creation of one page last anywhere between two and half to four hours.

ENKER: How regularly do you update?

NICOLE: Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. I don't draw a lot in advance, so sometimes keeping to that schedule is pretty tight.

ENKER: Explain for us the reasons behind the selection of characters you have used? Your focus upon Vincent and Yuffie instead of some of the more popular (and non-optional) characters.

NICOLE: The first time I played Final Fantasy VII, I found the optional character Yuffie early on, but didn't find the optional character Vincent until the end of the game, when it was much too late for him to be useful at all. So, the second time I played the game, I took Vincent into my party early on. I also heard that Yuffie could "date" Cloud, so I selected her regularly just to see it happen. That both Vincent and Yuffie have distance weapons helped them grow on me too, I have to admit. I also watched the dialogue more carefully on my second playthrough. It gave me some ideas, especially the message that popped up when Vincent learned his fourth limit break ("I'm becoming less human.") Besides that, I always liked Nanaki as a character, and I didn't appreciate how his story was pretty much dropped after the Cosmo Canyon bit. It's a pity you can't kick Cloud out of your main party!

ENKER: Have you got a favourite character amongst your cast and why?

NICOLE: I think it would have to be Yuffie. She's annoying, loud, and in the possession of a frightening amount of power, but she's also very fragile and insecure in other ways. I like characters with issues and mental problems!

ENKER: You run a single story that runs chronologically from page one to the current page, do you pre-plan the plot?

NICOLE: Yes, the entire story was a fan fiction before it was a comic. I decided to translate the story into a comic medium in an attempt to improve my drawing skills. I now regret that I published the fiction first and made the comic afterwards, though, and I try to encourage readers to stay away from the fiction whenever possible.

ENKER: What are your impressions of the new FFVII sequels? Advent Children and Dirge or Cerberus have been controversial among fans. Personally I loved AC and hated DoC.

NICOLE: Hah, I guess I would be a bit opposite, as I thought Dirge of Cerberus was better than Advent Children - which isn't saying much, really. I don't really appreciate any of the sequels as anything other than eye candy. In "Before Crisis," they sprung a mate named Dinne for Nanaki out of nowhere, which directly contradicts the original game script. The miraculous canon resurrection of both Tseng and Rufus also bugs me; their original characters grew with their deaths, to have them casually come back as if being stabbed or blown up was no worse than having a bad hair day ruins that development for me. Additionally, I completely dislike what they did to Lucrecia in Dirge of Cerberus. There's a lot of speculation about the kind of woman she might have been in the original game; she's a delicious enigma and a perfect match for Vincent, who is also an enigma for much of the game. In the sequel, it's confirmed for us that yes, she really was just a pathetic, wet noodle who couldn't let go of her mistakes. Another issue is Yuffie, who in the sequel works for the WRO - who are very obviously funded by Shinra. Her original game character was based on a complete and utter hatred of Shinra, and yet in DoC she's Shinra's top Intelligence Officer. Did she get brainwashed? All of this is incidental, however - I guess, the biggest problem I have with the sequels is that they clearly explained the ending to the original game. Part of my love of FF7 were the questions that were left unanswered. Did anyone besides Nanaki actually survive? Was Holy trying to protect the planet from Meteor or from the humans exploiting it? What did Aeris do at the end, really? There were a lot of theories flying around out there, and the Compilation tried to answer them all neatly. In doing so, they made the George Lucas Mistake - that we really, really didn't want to know that "The Force" is just mitochondria and not something spiritual or greater than us.

ENKER: How long have you been running Growth now?

NICOLE: I've been drawing this comic since 2005, though I have had to take two major months-long pauses since I started.

ENKER: Do you think that the release of the sequel stories has altered your plans at all as far as the story of Growth is concerned?

NICOLE: Well, not so much, really. All it did was force me to slap an alternate universe label on the story before too many people started yelling at me about the canon breaks. I have altered the ending of the comic to diverge from the fiction, but that was in the works long before the Compilation came out, too.

ENKER: You’ve put a lot of thought into Materia and how it works in relation to people. Did that take much thinking about or did it just come naturally to the script?

NICOLE: I'm a bit of a game nerd. I like trying to explain the way things work, when obviously the answer is simply 'it has to be that way because it's a game, duh.' For example, if fully mastered Phoenix + Final Attack is such a sure-fire life saver in the game, why doesn't everybody use it, including Shinra soldiers? Or, why doesn't Cloud and Co. just summon Knights of the Round for every single battle, or use that HP / MP siphon killer combo? Trying to think of plausible answers for those game mechanic questions gave me a lot of inspiration.

ENKER: Do you spend a lot of time working on the jokes for your strip or do you just come out with them on the fly and hope for the best?

NICOLE: I don't really think too much about the jokes I incorporate into the strip. I've found that visual comedy is a lot different from written comedy, but it's just in my nature to make ridiculous jokes constantly. So I pretty much insert jokes wherever I see a possibility to slip them in, regardless of my story script. Which happens quite frequently, actually. ^__^;

ENKER: Is Growth your first webcomic?.

NICOLE: No, actually, it wasn't. My very first webcomic was one I worked on with a fantastic artist from Singapore by the name of Lian. I only did scriptwriting for that; unfortunately, it didn't pan out because the story premise we were working with was inherently flawed. You can still see the results of it, though, right here: http://uruk.smackjeeves.com/

ENKER: How long have you been making comics, and what background do you have in the art world? Is there any professional training in there?

NICOLE: Well, I've been drawing comics seriously since 2005. I did major in Studio Art in college, and took a few further education courses while living in Europe, but I never applied comic art to any of my actual coursework or jobs, which were usually more programming-oriented. I do think my studio background has helped me immensely in lots of small ways when doing the comic, and I don't mean just drawing techniques. Eating harsh critique gracefully, project planning and overall professional presentation, those are all things my education has helped me bring over to the comic itself.

ENKER: What prompted you to do your own comic?

NICOLE: My attempt to get the equivalent of a MA was going through a low point when I started the comic. Whereas I had been fairly successful with both my BA and my job afterwards in the States, I crashed and burned trying to do the same in Germany. Artistic taste, ideals and expectations are completely different over here, and after a while I got very tired of hearing professors telling me how much I sucked. I actually tested my theory, too: I brought in a print that had been given to me by Randy Burton, a visiting artist who had been invited to conduct a show at the museum in my old university. I purposefully didn't mention this to my German advisor, and he assumed it was something I made, and then proceeded to tell me about how much it sucked and why it would never be considered 'real art,' etc. After that, I kind of lost my faith in the school and switched from being very depressed to very angry. Eventually, I dropped out and dedicated myself to improvement without any 'helpful' supervision. I have to say, my mental state and self-confidence has improved about 300% since I made that decision.

ENKER: Have you got a favourite moment from the run so far?

NICOLE: Oh, hmm. Well, as much as I love comedy and romance, I think my favorite parts of the comic so far are all of the bittersweet flashbacks each of the main characters have had, thinking about their different pasts and regrets.

ENKER: Have you had much fan reaction since launch?

NICOLE: Oh, the reader response to this comic has been overwhelming, and I can't express how grateful I am for it. There's been a fiction contribution in addition to lots of wonderful fanart, and most importantly, a never-ending plethora of comments on the comic pages themselves. While it is, admittedly, a very nice ego boost, as I mentioned before, I started the comic at a time when I was full of a lot of anger and doubt about my own abilities. Every single reader comment, email and even artwork submission has helped me regain confidence in myself as an artist. Even so, to this day it still bewilders me that so many people actually enjoy this comic, and I really am quite thankful for each and every reader.

ENKER: The curse of using a games setting is that they can never be in print, I myself run a Megaman X webcomic. Does it bother you that you can’t make that step?

NICOLE: It does bother me somewhat, yes. It didn't at first - as I said, I started the comic as an exercise and I wasn't really sure if it was going to go anywhere. Now, I do often find myself wishing I could spend more time on my original comics (and I do work on a few, though mostly as a scriptwriter). But, creating Growth has been fundamental in teaching me about making comics in general, and so I want to stick with it until its conclusion. I figure, the worst it can do is improve my skills even more so that when I finally get around to doing my original comic, it'll have much better artwork and layout. And, I am a very patient and obsessive compulsive person.

ENKER: Do you attend conventions?

NICOLE: Never really regularly. Had I stayed in the US, I probably would, but the last US convention I attended was Otakon in 2001, well before I was making comics. I do sometimes attend the Spiel & Comic Con held in Essen, Germany, but never as a table artist or anything, just as a simple visitor.

ENKER: Have you any advice for beginners?

NICOLE: Well, the most basic piece of advice I have is to stick with it no matter what. If you're serious about making a comic, plan it carefully, make a schedule, and then do it as if it were a real job, regardless of the feedback (or lack thereof) that you receive. You can learn almost everything by doing, from drawing and paneling to effective storytelling. The only thing that you can't pick up from experience is dedication - you have to bring that with you from the start, or you'll never get anywhere. Also, my second piece of advice, which is sort of related to the first, is that if you want to make a comic, tell the story for yourself. Having readers and fans and such is a nice side effect of having a popular comic, but it shouldn't be your reason for starting one. The desire to tell a story of some kind should be there before anything else.

ENKER: Thank you very much for your time today, it’s been a pleasure contacting you and picking your mind on these subjects. Feel free to drop by Coloring Dragons any time!

Growth can be viewed [HERE] and is regularly updated with new material.