DS Interview: Nicole Goux and Dave Baker talk “Punk’n Heads,” Indie Comics, and Collaboration

When you make art, it can be hard to find a creative team; whether it’s a punk rock band, a group of actors and actresses putting on a play, or an improv group. Sometimes when you meet another artist with the same creative interests, it just clicks. You want to hold on to it until you see it reach its full potential. This has spawned some of the greatest collaborations. While a good number of these can last many years, others that only last a handful. If you’ve spent decades participating in collaborative art, you’ve probably experienced both, but nothing beats finding the perfect person to work on a project with. This chemistry is something that shines through if you’ve read any of Nicole Goux and Dave Baker’s collaborative books.

While both creators have done great work with some of the bigger comic companies like IDW and DC, it’s their self-published work that shines. Their collaborative works, Fuck Off Squad, Forest Hills Bootleg Society, and Everyone is Tulip are full of fantastic storytelling and cross sections of life. Goux and Baker’s combined voice is able to capture youth and vulnerability in a way that would give John Hughes a run for his money. The emotions they are able to mine produce characters with feelings that are relatable and the adventures they get in feel real.

Their latest comic book, Punk’n Heads, uses these strengths to tell the story of Hannah Lipsky, an art school dropout who moves into a flophouse with an old high school crush whose horror punk band is in need of a new vocalist. When Hannah takes the reins, it changes the dynamics of the band for better and for worse in a story about life’s unexpected changes, even when you think you have it all figured out. Punk’n Heads is a meditation on scene politics, reinvention of self, and learning to grow up in a world that expects you to have it figured out already.

Dave and Nicole gave us some time to speak about Punk’n Heads, their creative process, and the realities of being indie.

(Edited for clarity)

Dying Scene (Forrest Gaddis): What came first for you guys, punk rock or comic books?

Dave Baker: Comics for me, for sure. Definitely comics, but I kind of was always into music. I played music, you know, I was in like weird, shitty bands. I also did like the dorkiest thing possible. I studied piano in the Suzuki method. I played competitive doubles piano, like classical piano competitions.

Nicole Goux: How did I not know that? That’s crazy.

Dave Baker: Oh, yeah, you know this.

Nicole Goux: I knew you played piano, but I didn’t know you did doubles competitions.

Dave Baker: I did doubles competitions where it basically would be like you would go and then you would be paired. This is the Beethoven team. These are the Tchaikovsky teams. These are the Mozart teams, whatever. It was almost like a Swiss round where everybody would compete and then rise through the ranks. It was me and this girl named Cassandra. We didn’t even really know each other. The way that the teams were paired up was by music. So, it was X number of students that were working in these various piano instructors’ kinds of systems. So-and-so knows Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and then they would be the team, and they had like doubles versions of it. Yeah, it was fun.

Dying Scene: I was gonna ask whether you played in bands growing up, because the band dynamics in Punk’n Heads felt very lived-in and real.

Dave Baker: I think part of that is a little bit of my experience with music, but I think it’s mostly just like, for this book, I think the reason why some of that stuff may or may not feel lived in is just that Nicole and I are both artists, and regardless of the medium, as long as you’re making a collaborative medium, those dynamics of people in different positions of power within the hierarchy of the internal organism of whatever it is, it’s kind of universal, right?

Nicole and I always talk about us as a weird little band. We’re going on tour; we’re making these things ourselves. They’re a reflection of where we’re at in our various interests in the life cycle of our craft.

Nicole Goux: It’s also just kind of that scene politics dynamic of being in a really close-knit and small community. Seeing your friends hook up, then destroy the friend group, and fall apart and do this and that. I wouldn’t say it’s universal exactly, but there’s replicable other versions. It’s not just music; it’s also comics.

Dave Baker: I guess the real situation there is, how far are we going to go depicting these subcultures in how kind of weird and sleazy they can be, you know? Like one of my friends was in like a shitty hardcore band and there was a guy that planned the tour around cities he knew people that he could hook up with. He was basically just like booking the whole tour to have one night stands with X number of people. 

Dying Scene: That’s a way to do it.

Dave Baker: Yeah. I mean, that’s, but that’s what I’m saying, like, that’s gross, but also you’re kind of like, I can almost understand why you would do that. Like, it’s something that you would think of when you’re in a depressive cycle. Maybe you’re not doing well. You’re just like, “God, I wish I was around so-and-so, or I could reach out to so-and-so. What if I just went to all these cities and then I could invite them to the shows?” And then, you know, you know what I mean?

Dying Scene: it’s still pretty creepy. 

Dave Baker: It’s super, super, super, super creepy. A hundred percent.

Nicole Goux: Sometimes you just get lonely, man.

Dying Scene: The road’s a lonely place. 

Dave Baker: Honestly, “The Road Is Lonely” is the title of everything that we do. Like, it’s a weird wasteland where there’s no cavalry, and it’s Nicole and I trying to figure out how to make stuff and get things made, either through the system or independently.

Nicole Goux: I think the thing that’s maybe the hardest about it, because the work itself isn’t that bad, but the thing that’s really tough is the waiting. There’s a lot of just like, “Well, we’ll see.” Someone might say yes.

Dying Scene: I know the Punk’n Heads are a horror punk band. Were there specific bands, songs, or anything that you were thinking of while creating this?

Dave Baker: I think when we first started out, the two kind of north stars were early-era Misfits, like Walk Among Us, Static Age-era Misfits, and My Chemical Romance. The theatricality, as well as The Smiths. I know The Smiths isn’t punk, but it’s that mixture of that kind of retro horror aesthetic with the sad emo thing. Also, the two primary singer-songwriters having a really weird, complicated relationship. You know, a John and Paul, or even the way that Frank and Gerard and the other members of MCR are all kind of there, but it’s really Gerard.

Initially, that was kind of the idea, like, Oh, Hannah will be the missing piece. She’ll step in, and she’ll be the Gerard Way to these other people who kind of got a system going. Jerry, we were thinking, would be like a Tom Morello type, where he would be very technically inventive but didn’t have the vision for it. And then, you know, Hannah would kind of step into that Zach De La Rocha Rage Against The Machine thing. Ultimately, when we started putting the book together, all of those things just kind of melded. I really liked that emo band Further Seems Forever, specifically their first record (The Moon Is Down).

Dying Scene: That’s a great album. 

Dave Baker: For me personally, with Further Seems Forever, I didn’t like their subsequent work as much as I liked The Moon Is Down. There’s a tension between Chris Carrabba’s voice and the kind of post-hardcore, new-wave emo thing that they were doing, kind of melding together. When he left, it felt like they were just chasing, “How do we figure out how to have another Chris Carrabba?” That’s not a good way to build a band.

In our book, there are info pages that tell you the history of the band and the life cycles of the different lead singers that have come and gone and whatnot. You know, we were thinking of some examples of a unit that maybe didn’t jive with the front person, kind of like Audioslave or Further Seems Forever or any of those things where they try and replace the lead singer and it doesn’t really work.

You kind of end up in this weird wandering ronin phase where you’re just like, “People know who we are, but they don’t like this version of the band.” The high concept is like, what if one of those bands was able to reinvent themselves and had a new lead singer that could step into those shoes and really propel it to the next level? We were also thinking a lot about… it’s funny because in the amount of time that we’ve been working on the book, the band has just skyrocketed, but the hardcore band Turnstile.

A lot of the stuff from that history of the band page is just like Nicole redrawing Turnstile record covers with me being like, “Just draw something that looks kind of like this record. This will be the one where they kind of tried to be a little funky, but it didn’t really work.” I have no idea how much of that comes through in the finished product or not. I don’t even know that it needs to, really; it’s kind of just for me. The music and the idea of being in a band is like the commercial hook that we hang all of the character work on top of. Do you like Calabrese? Do you like Koffin Kats? Maybe you’ll like The Punk’n Heads.

Dying Scene: The jokes in the book land really well too. Do you have comedy influences there as well?

Nicole Goux: I don’t have a specific comedy influence. That’s the way we talk. That’s our lives. You know, there’s a decent amount of big-idea stuff that is derived from our experiences or our lives, but the comedy in all of the books is just how we talk to each other. You know, we’re just like 40 year old shitty kids, just like making jokes at each other.

Dave Baker: Yeah, I agree with that. I think there’s also a component of, I come from a theater background. My mom is a theater director. I grew up in the theater. I’ve done a lot of performing, both comedy and non-comedy stuff. I think some of that stuff, just like the timing of some of that shit, it just becomes infused in the writing. Nicole and I are both interested in timing, specifically. The building of a scene, whether that scene’s terminus be a moment of depression and sadness or a chuckle or a single tear that runs down your cheek at two in the morning, and you go, “No one understands me.” Hopefully, they’re all pieces of the same engine. They’re all cogs that work together in concert.

But yeah, I mean, there are tons of people I love. I love David Sedaris. I love David Foster Wallace, who I think doesn’t get nearly enough credit for being genuinely hilarious. “Consider the Lobster” is both insightful, thought-provoking, and downright a good chuckle fest. That thing is great. It’s so good. There are lots of influences, but I think the reason the book is funny is what Nicole is talking about. It’s a synergy of both of our interests, and it’s me just playing court stenographer, trying to capture whatever the dumb joke that she made was or that I said was.

Nicole Goux: I was saying this earlier: I don’t always know if these books are funny to other people because they’re hilarious to me. They’re just rife with inside jokes and ways of saying things, or silly little turns of phrase that I know exactly how Dave would say them. You know, like, when I get a script from Dave, it feels like a kind of personal love letter to me. All the jokes are for me. I don’t know if this reads as hilarious for anyone else, but I love it.

Dave Baker: When we work together, I almost feel like, yes, there is this document at the end of it that gets printed and shown to thousands of other people and distributed across the globe sometimes. But I really do feel like it’s more of a command performance for Nicole. I’m trying to write things both that she will want to draw and will think are cool images and also, you know, kind of create a fossil record of either things that we’ve experienced or things that we have complained about or things that I wish that we had experienced or, you know, whatever. There’s a, there’s a, there’s a weird balance between personal exorcism and a gesture-filled Vaudevillian, you know, sideshow.

Dying Scene: When you guys work together, what’s your workflow like?

Nicole Goux: We do a ton of workshopping upfront before anything gets put on paper. Basically, every book is different. This book happened to be a dumb joke that I came up with. We took that seed of a joke that is really just the pumpkin, Punk’n head pun. I was like, “Okay, I think it would be really silly to do a book about a group of kids who play in a punk band and wear pumpkin masks.”

We can tell some stories about them. They live in a flophouse together and have a little scene politics and go on little adventures and do this and that. From that, we kind of built up these characters, built up the stories. Then, essentially, once we’ve kind of had a baseline of like, okay, this is what we think we want it to be, these are the people that we want to tell the stories about. Then Dave goes and writes a draft, and we come together again and do a full table read of the script where Dave reads all the scene direction and I read all the characters, and we both make notes on the whole thing. This works. This doesn’t work. I think we need this here. This character totally wouldn’t do that. Or this character is too mean, you know?

Then he does it again, writes another draft, and we do it again until we get to a script that we are happy with and confident that I can go draw. Then, kind of the same thing, maybe a little bit less back and forth with the art, where I’m always showing him what I’m doing. Getting, not his approval, but making sure we’re on the same page, telling the story the right way. Most of the time I get a big old thumbs up. Sometimes Dave is like, “Hey, this could be different,” or “I kind of imagined it this way,” or “that storytelling just doesn’t work.”

Dave Baker: It is very rare. I would say most of the stuff doesn’t even need anything other than a rubber stamp from me because we’ve talked about it so much, and we’ve gone through the process so many times. We’ve restructured or thrown out whole issues or whatever. By the time Nicole is drawing, the goal is that she’s drawing like a third draft or a fifth draft of something. She knows the characters, she knows the world, and she knows where things are going.

 So she can visually set up things, mirror things, you know, introduce formal visual mechanics that will then pay off later. Every once in a while, there are things that either just go sideways or you’re just consumed with other things. It’s helpful to have a second pair of eyes to be like, “Did you mean for this thing to be this way or whatever?”

Nicole Goux: When you’re drawing over 200 pages, they can’t all be winners.

Dying Scene: I like that you guys table-read. That’s a cool way to edit together.

Dave Baker: We also like to have sessions in between table reads. If I’m struggling with something, or if these pages aren’t coming out well, or if she’s just bumping on something, we’ll go to a park by her house and play catch. We have kids’ baseball gloves and a shitty baseball, and we throw it back and forth to each other. We break story and talk. A lot of our brainstorming sessions involve either us going on walks or literally just throwing a baseball back and forth to each other, saying things like, “I don’t know, what is this book even about? I hate this. This sucks.”

Nicole Goux: You know, how do we make this better?

Dying Scene: Is Punk’n Heads considered a young adult book?

Dave Baker: For us? I don’t fucking know, man. What do you mean? I guess?

Dying Scene:  What’s the difference between adult and young adult? Like, how does a publisher make that determination when you bring it to them?

Dave Baker: I think it’s supposed to be like the age of the protagonists, where the protagonists are like 15 to 17 or 19 or something. Yeah. So technically, our characters are a little older than that.

Nicole Goux: I think it technically fits in the “new adult” section. But, you know, barring some cuss words and a little bit of sex, it’s a YA book, you know?

Dave Baker: I mean, there’s nothing crazier in our book than there is in Twilight. You know what I mean? Like Twilight has vampires imprinting on babies and shit.

Dying Scene:  No, no, I got you. I’ve always wondered, what’s the line on that?

Dave Baker: The line on that is whatever the marketing department decides that it is that day.

Dying Scene: The book is very LA-centric. What guided your choices for the locations the characters visit?

Nicole Goux: At least a couple of them are adventures or misadventures that we actually went on. You know, like the Hollywood Forever scene is based on the fact that Dave, for every birthday, has a tradition that we go to a grave of someone that he admires or, you know, really loves their work. And so we went to Joe Shuster’s grave at the Hollywood Forever cemetery.

That whole chapter is based around going there, seeing the peacocks, and finding the columbarium and that whole experience. And so, a few of the issues come from us living here and running around and doing stuff.

Dave Baker: Yeah, I think making comics is as much a lifestyle as it is a craft, and due to that, it’s very difficult to turn your brain off. When you’re out in the real world, you’re always thinking, “Oh, what would I do if I had to set a comic here?” “How could I turn this place into an interesting comic?” Because of that, so much of the work that Nicole and I are interested in making melds well with that idea. Like, does Punk’n Heads literally need to be in Los Angeles?

It could be in New York or any city. It’s just about the idea of crushing capitalism, preventing you from pursuing the art you want. But all art is autobiographical on some level. For this book, I think the parallels between the work that Nicole and I do and the work that Hannah, Jerry, Morgan, and Birdie do are pretty much one-to-one. I think, even not knowing who we are, this feels lived in a way that like these people who made this book live in a city and are trying to do stuff.

Nicole Goux: We always talk about that LA has this energy of people who are striving for something. I’m from here, so I don’t feel it as much because this is just what I know. Dave is from Arizona and so has come here to make a living in Hollywood. You always talk about this energy here, where, unlike other places, people are satisfied or more satisfied with, “I have this day job and I work at a desk and I do this all day.” There is a good amount of that, but mostly every waitress, every person behind a desk, also secretly has their screenplay tucked in a drawer, or every third person is talking about some movie they’re trying to get made. For the large part, most of those people will fail. They’re trying for something, even if that something is cringey and annoying. You’re trying to be Extra #35 on that Disney Channel show. You’re trying to have some sort of artistic output. I think LA does have this sort of energy to it.

Dave Baker: I think there’s something existentially calming about that to me personally. I don’t know that everybody sees it that way. I really do like going into a coffee shop and seeing five middle aged salt and pepper haired, recently divorced white guys typing on computers. I’m like, “I fucking love you, dude. I fucking love you.”

Nicole Goux: I think most people would find it depressing and/or annoying. But yes, I get it.

Dave Baker: Yeah, but I think it is those things, that’s the beauty of life. It’s bittersweet, and I think there are people that lives are going nowhere. I’d rather be going nowhere, swinging for the fences, trying to leave my mark than just careening into the eternal abyss, shedding a single tear.

Dying Scene: Each of the books I read has a restaurant called Shiver Me Timbers and Cheapo Foot Boats. Is that the way to show the books are in the same universe?

Dave Baker: Yeah, basically, in all of the books that we make, there’s a fake burger chain called Shiver Me Burgers, which is a pirate-themed burger restaurant. There’s a comic book character that’s kind of like a Phantom or The Shadow pulp character from the ’30s called The Lurker. There’s a discount shoe emporium called Cheapo Foot Boats. They’re usually like supporting characters, but there are a couple of characters that show up in each one of the books. I don’t know that it’s relevant in any way other than like, we just think it’s funny.

I think it’s an authorial stamp, right? The things that Nicole and I are interested in have a specific through line. There are a few hallmarks or creative tenets that were very interesting in examining, like, “Oh, what happens if you turn it this way, and what happens if you do it that way?” I think the connective tissue of those background details functions almost like a narrative radiation that permeates through everything we do, which, you know, allows for an enriched reading experience if you are someone who likes the stuff we make.

Dying Scene: Nicole, can you talk about your color choices?

Nicole Goux: Yeah, this book is all single color through the whole book, but each chapter is a different color. The big idea that we landed on, which actually came pretty late in the process, it’s sort of backwards rainbow progressing towards the epitome of this band as a whole. We used orange to represent the band because they are the pumpkin heads.

As each chapter goes, you’re getting a little bit closer and closer to the color orange so that when we have that final chapter and they’ve kind of reached their full potential and they’re really doing it, we’ve got that in full orange color.

Dying Scene:  Some of the art reminds me of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs in some spots.

Nicole Goux: That’s such an interesting pull because I loved that book. I read it a lot. I would not have said that I was trying to, you know, take reference from his style at all. I think that these things seep into your style. Everything that you read, everything that you’ve taken as an artist, it becomes a part of you in a certain way. Maybe you use some of it, maybe you don’t, maybe you use parts. I don’t know, maybe sometimes I will kind of define shape with lines, contour lines that follow the form. That’s the thing that he does. I’m blanking on the name of that illustrator, which is very shameful. So maybe there are things I’m pulling from, from that. I read that book all the time as a kid.

Dave Baker: Judy and Ron Barrett published Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs through Athenaeum.

Nicole Goux: That’s funny. They published us.

Dave Baker: Yes, they published Forest Hills Bootleg Society. 

Dave Baker: Literally, we made it because one of my friends did it in high school.

Dying Scene: Punk’n Heads left itself open for a sequel. Have you ever thought about doing a sequel to this or any of your other books?

Dave Baker: First, we would love to have the opportunity to make a book that is financially successful enough that it needs a sequel.

Nicole Goux: I think we actually have a pitch for a Fuck Off Squad second part. I think we could do continuations of these stories if we wanted to. I think Everyone is Tulip should not have one. I think the whole point of that book is that the end is ambiguous.

Dave Baker: Yeah, I mean, I would love to do a sequel. It’s more just like, is there an audience that wants a sequel? I would love that. I think that would be great. I think more so than maybe in our other books, like The Forest Hills girls, I don’t think they know each other as adults. I don’t think they reconvene. You’re probably following one of those kids as they go off and do things somewhere else. Whereas the whole point of making this book is like, what happens when you’re kind of still a kid in an adult body, and you’re trying to figure out how to make things work with somebody that you have this tension with.

The next stage would be now you guys are adults and you’re dealing with real problems, not problems that you’re making for yourself. As an artist, you’re always kind of looking at the next rung up and being like, “If I could just get there.” Then you get there and you’re like, “This isn’t what I thought it would be. I’ve got to get to the next one. If I could only get there.”

Nicole Goux: It would be so easy, and they become champagne problems, right? We used to Xerox zines and go to $15 zine shows, and we dreamed of having books published. Now we complain about this or that publisher doing this or that or not marketing in the way that we want them to or whatever. It’s like, you know, ten years ago, we would have just absolutely dreamed of this. Even to have a publisher not do what we want them to do, but put out the book and have people be able to access it in Barnes and Noble, that was an absolute dream. I think it’s a very easy step that you could take with these characters. So, the band, maybe they’re successful, and then maybe they’re dealing with the actual industry, curtailing their creativity, or this or that, or whatever, like all the problems. Somebody is married and has a kid and doesn’t want to go on tour and blah, blah, blah.

Dave Baker: I think it would be more so than the other books. I think this book would support more effort from us, but we got to sell some units for that to be financially something that we’re probably going to do.

Nicole Goux: We’ll see.

Dave Baker: Yeah, we’ll see. Exactly.

Dying Scene: Your books feel like they can be easily adapted into films. Has anyone ever approached you guys about adaptations, or are you guys kind of in the Alan Moore camp about that, where you’re just like, “Nah, these are comics”?

Dave Baker: I mean, I think it’s both. Nah, these are comics. We are not making things in the hopes of having a movie deal. That being said, Nicole and I are very protective of our rights. We own all the books that you’ve mentioned, we own everything because the history of comics creators not betting on themselves and getting fucked over. It’s not even the history of comics creators, it’s the history of the medium, like everybody gets fucked. We’ve had situations in the past where our books have been optioned, and they’ve gone through the system and then ultimately not been made.

Why, Forrest? You got a million-dollar royalty check? You want to option a couple books there, big guy?

Dying Scene: Nah, if I did, you guys would be a close second. The first would be, “Let’s get John Waters and make one more movie.”

Dave Baker: Hell yeah. Yeah, let’s pair him up. Can we get John Waters to make the Punk’n Heads? Can we get him to shoot the pilot?

Nicole Goux: Dude, that would be crazy.

Dying Scene: I’ve always said if I ever won the lottery, I’d be like, “I don’t care how much it costs. Let’s get one more.” You need one more. You need like a retirement movie. You need one more to go out on.

Nicole Goux: I love the idea of a retirement movie. Like, you’re not allowed to retire until you do this one.

Punk’n Heads is available through Top Shelf Productions. Please check out the websites for both Nicole and Dave. If you want to support some indie creators, they are a great start.