ROBERT J. SODARO INTERVIEW: THE DESIGN SPECIALIST/WRITER SPEAKS

Many know Robert J. Sodaro as Main Enterprises’ layout-artist supreme, but his creative inclinations go far beyond even those of the publisher’s pop-cultural zines.

Sodaro is an editor of words, a comic-book historian, and in conjunction with such, he has supplied book designs for DC/Marvel guru, Paul Kupperberg. To boot, Sodaro is a comic-book creator in his own spellbinding right, with such heart-hammering creations to his name as Agent Unknown, Hot Girl and Totally Hot Girl, Wülf Girlz and Girl Skout Wars.

I had an opportunity to converse with Sodaro regarding his activities and fancies, from which the following Q & A stems.

HOUSEL: You’re obviously a comic-book fan, Bob, but what drove you to contribute to the medium? What sources inspired you to create your own characters and storylines?

SODARO: I grew up reading comics. My uncle owned a small grocery store and as a kid, I used to sit on the newsstand reading them. At some point, my older brother and I used to make our own comics. In college I joined a couple of APAs where my contributions included some of my earliest characters. After college I started working in radio, and wound up at a radio station with a DJ named Mike Raub, who was friends with Mike Catron who was an editor at Fantagraphics, which published The Comics Journal and Amazing Heroes. I worked for Amazing Heroes for a while and eventually crossed paths with Deni Loubert, who was publishing Renegade Press at the time, and I pitched her Agent Unknown (which was based on some of the ideas I developed for one of the APAs to which I was contributing), which she published, and became my first published comic.

HOUSEL: How and when did you touch base with the prestigious Paul Kupperberg and earn the chance to design the covers for his historic overviews?

SODARO: A guy named Jeff Rovin was instrumental in truly launching my writing career into the stratosphere. Jeff told me to go talk to Paul when he was the editor of Weekly World News, Only before I could reach out to WWN it ceased publication. Sometime later, while my son went to the Academy of Information Technology and Engineering (AITE), a regional magnet high school in lower Fairfield County, CT, I met one of his classmates who (at the time) was watching Max, Paul’s son. I got Paul’s number from her, and finally made the connection with Paul. We became friendly over the years, and then one day he reached out to me asking if I’d produce some comics and books for him, which I naturally agreed to do, and now I’m preparing to produce Direct Currents, my twelfth book for him.

HOUSEL: You hold an obvious penchant for female characters, much in the vein of Cartoon Cuties creator, Rock Baker. On this basis, your females could be labeled “cuties” in their own right, but what distinguishes, let’s say, The Adventures of Hot Girl and Totally Hot Girl from Girl Skout Wars or Wülf Girlz?

SODARO: Ha! Good question. While the first two are meant to be humorous and involve female protagonists, Hot Girl and Totally Hot Girl, is a modern-day superhero story about a pair of 20-somethings being shepherded by an older, male hero who came out of retirement to train them in the ways of heroes; that was always intended to be a comic book. Girl Skout Wars is a story about a troupe of young girls living in a post-apocalyptic world hunting down various forms of monsters, that was originally intended to be an on-going on-line strip. Finally, Wulf Girlz is dark tale about a pair of prepubescent girls who are werewolves who hunt pedophiles. That story was intended to be a one-shot but proved to be so popular that I wound up writing two subsequent illustrated stories as well as a prose novella, and am now in the process of combining the illustrated stories and launching it as a crowd-funding project, and hopefully with more tales on the way.

HOUSEL: Are there particular DC and/or Marvel heroines that help mold your females? What traits may have influenced their powers and predicaments, that is?

SODARO: Oh, I don’t know, not really, but if I had to name some possible influences Wonder Woman of the ‘70s (when she was sort of a super spy), Carol Danvers as Ms. Marvel/Captain Marvel, The Black Widow. Honestly, though I think that the Young Adult novels I read as a teen that had female heroines that were written by Robert A. Heinlein probably had more influence on me than the comic-book heroines did.

HOUSEL: You clearly possess an artist’s eye, or more precisely, the instinct to know what works on the printed page. How have you fine-tuned your skills, and would you say that raw experience, more so than schooling, led you on the creative path?

SODARO: Yes, I’m sure that’s the case. Although I do work as a graphic production artist, I’m not an illustrator and never had any formal training as an artist. Whatever I learned came from a lifetime of reading comics, watching films, and just listening to artists talk about their craft over the course of my life and then interjecting my own concepts into the stories I’ve told.

HOUSEL: How did you come to hook up with Jim Main and Main Enterprises? How long have you collaborated with the renowned publisher?

SODARO: I’ve known Jim for some 40-something years. We met in the early ‘80s through mutual Connecticut friends who all lived in Western CT who were involved in comics. Then about 20 years ago or so. Jim put out a call that he needed a new graphic artist to do the layout on his various publications, so I offered my services, and we’ve been working together ever since.

HOUSEL: Main Enterprises remains active and prolific, while so many big-name, imagi-mags have come and gone. What’s your take on Main Enterprises’ endurance?

SODARO: Jim publishes magazines about some great old-timey stuff, pulps, old TV shows, and films, and he has some great writers contributing brilliantly written, insightful articles about all those topics; guys like Will Murray, Dennis Kininger, Malcom Deeley, Larry Johnson, yourself, and others. These writers are backed up by a deep bench full of accomplished artists including guys like Tom Ahearn, Jacob Dubi, Brad Olrich, Marc Lerer, Doug Hazlewood, Steve Shipley, Marc Haines, George Lane III, Scott McClung, Jack Bertram, John Lambert, John Muller, and more who regularly contribute to the various publications.

HOUSEL: Where do you believe the pop-cultural magazine/fanzine scene is headed? Is Main Enterprises a last hurrah or more of a carrying-the-torch force?

SODARO: As I’m sure you know, during the ‘80s & ‘90s, I contributed to virtually every comic magazine being published; every one from Amazing Heroes to Wizard, I was in them all. So, I got to see comics literally blow up going from something that was still an outlying pop-culture anomaly, to becoming the hottest collectible on the planet. Unfortunately that run of amazing publications all came crashing down in ’96 due to an oversaturation of the market. While we don’t have that kind of print coverage today, we do have big-budget films, TV; we do shows, heck, even entire networks based on comic-book shows. There have even been TV shows like The Big Bang Theory, while they weren’t based on comics, were deeply engrained in the pop-culture experience of comics.

As for magazines about comics, unfortunately, I believe that even though there are still small-press publishers like Main Enterprises and others still covering the medium, the era of dozens of publications about mainstream comics is largely gone. To be sure there are still many online sites talking about comics. However, most of those focus largely on the TV shows and films rather than the comics themselves. Needless to say, Jim’s magazines cover a more bygone age that mostly predates the huge popularity of comics, a simpler time of B&W films, TV shows staring puppets, old cartoons, and comic-book fandom and the fanzines that supported it, and what could be better than that?

HOUSEL: Not much, I dare say, Bob. Thank you for sharing your exceptional thoughts.