Stephanie Cooke Wants to Be the Comics Industry’s Ms. Frizzle
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Pillow Talk graphic novel cover art
Comics writer and editor Stephanie Cooke gave me my first freelance writing gig and throughout her career, she’s advocated for creator equity and industry transparency. In addition to creating Creator Resource, where comics professionals can report their earnings and experiences with publishers so others have concrete numbers available when negotiating contracts, she is also a member of the member-driven Cartoonist Cooperative, which seeks to protect comics industry laborers internationally.
Cooke loves making comics and believes in the power of storytelling, but has significant reservations about how severely the industry exploits its workers.
In the near-decade we’ve been friends, Cooke has become a prolific middle-grade graphic novel writer, penning two books in the Oh My Gods! series with Insha Fitzpatrick and artist Juliana Moon, Paranorthern and the Chaos Bunny A-hop-calypse with artist Mari Costa, the first book in the Racc Pack series with artist Whitney Gardner, and more. In April, Cooke released her young adult debut with artist Mel Valentine Vargas and colorist Sam Pointon, the unapologetically queer, coming-of-confidence sports romp Pillow Talk—based on the actual semi-professional Pillow Fight League (PFL) in Toronto, where Cooke is based.
Although Pillow Talk is Cooke’s first published foray into young adult, she tells me on a Zoom call (that’s one-part friendly catch-up and one-part professional interview) that this was always the age bracket for which she wanted to write.
“Paranorthern and Oh My Gods! were originally geared towards a teen/young adult audience. And I really love Clone High. So to me, Oh My Gods! was [about] what if Greek gods were in high school? How could I play with this and play in a couple of different sandboxes that really interest me?” Cooke says. “So I always wanted to write for that space. And then when we sent in the pitch for Paranorthern, my editor loved it, but she was like, ‘I think this would work really well if we aged it down.’ Initially, I was kind of skeptical about that. I was like, 'I don't know if that's the audience I want to write for. I kind of envision this for older audiences.’ But it turned out to be the best thing for me.
“Writing for the middle-grade audience and kids in general has been a true joy. It is hard. Sometimes things go out into the ether and you don't know if people are picking them up, reading them, and enjoying them because your audience isn't online. I struggle with that sometimes. I don't want to need validation, but I would sometimes like to have validation that these things exist and that the audience that will hopefully enjoy them the most is getting something out of them,” she continues.
Pillow Talk, she says, is the “hardest project” she’s written so far: “With the kids’ stuff, there are still themes, important themes in there and messaging, but you can put a lot of puns in it. You can be silly and you can have a lot of fun and kids are still going to enjoy that, whereas older audiences are looking for more,” she explains.
As for the idea, Cooke drew from her experiences in the now-defunct Toronto PFL. In 2016 (the year we met!), Cooke’s friend was the president and she asked Cooke to help with a pillow fight demonstration for a BBC series with comedian Romesh Ranganathan. Cooke says she assumed her friend wouldn’t put her in danger and agreed without asking any additional questions—something she later regretted.
"I showed up on the day of and I watched this petite woman do a demo match with him and literally clobber him until he fell to the ground with a pillow,” Cooke tells me. (“Oh my God,” I whisper at several points during this story.) “And then she put him in a pillow chokehold until he tapped out. And in this league, anything goes as long as the pillow is the first point of contact. So it was wild. I was like, what did I sign up for? Oh my gosh, I’m going to die. I have so many regrets. I did two demo matches and they kept interviewing me in between. They were like, ‘Oh my gosh, you're so good. Wow. Are you going to stick to the League if you make through tryouts?’ And I was like, ‘No, I'm not enjoying myself. Please.’
“I was fighting for my life, truly. There were three 1-minute rounds, I believe, and swinging around a pillow when someone else is coming for you is exhausting. It's terrifying and exhausting. I did do well, but I was fighting for my life. And in the second match, I rolled my ankle and I thought I broke it. I had to go to the ER and then explain to all of these people that I was in an extreme pillow fight,” she laughs. “But genuinely, it was my own fault for not doing research. I think if I had done research and known what I was getting into, I could have better prepared, but regardless, I just had a lot of fun.”
Cooke says the idea of a story about the PFL wouldn’t leave her mind. In particular, it felt like a "really fun vehicle for a coming-of-confidence story,” a phrase Cooke picked up from her friend Amy. In Pillow Talk, college freshman Grace Mendes AKA Cinderhella joins the Pillow Fight Federation (PFF) after attending a match and falling in love with the sport. She’s typically very introverted and she struggles with her body image, but when she joins the team and quickly rises to stardom as a dominating pillow fighter (with her very own dedicated fanbase!), she slowly begins to embrace who she is, how she looks, and how her body sustains and nurtures her and her dreams.
“A pillow fight sounds like a sleepover thing where you're having fun and being silly, but as you get older, it's a thing that gets sexualized and it's just like, ‘Ooh, girls are going to get into lingerie. They're going to have sleepovers, they're going to have a pillow fight,’” Cooke says. “And to me, [the Toronto PFL] was a really cool way to reclaim the idea of that and to have fun and be badasses. I thought it would be delightful to bring people to this world.”
The graphic novel PFF is very similar to the real-life PFL, but Cooke leans more into wrestling and roller derby with her version, and she changed the name to create distance. To maintain the original league’s essence, Cooke reached out to her friend who served as PFL president in 2016: “They were very gracious and they were the first person I sent a copy of the book. I was so anxious that I maybe didn't get it right or they wouldn't see the original league in there, the inspiration of it. But everyone who's been a part of [the league] so far and has read [Pillow Fight] tells me they enjoyed it!”
Although the PFL in Toronto no longer exists, Cooke brought it back for one night to launch Pillow Talk in May. She fought as her fightsona the Cookie Crumbler, alongside Frida Kallous, Hedda GrabHer, The Pillow Bug, Kitty Kaboom, MacAttack, and Stephanie Zamboni.
The Toronto PFL welcomed fighters of all body types and sizes, which Cooke wanted to represent in Pillow Talk as well. Artist Mel Valentine Vargas, whose portfolio Cooke reviewed among those from a slew of other, more established artists, “just got it"—and she immediately wanted to work together.
“Britney Young [from Glow] was a massive inspiration for Grace. I wanted her to not have come to terms with her own body and be confident in it. I wanted to put a lot of my own anxieties into Grace and how I feel. While I am not fat, I am bigger and I've gone through phases where I am larger and smaller and my body just kind of yo-yo sometimes based on how active I am, obviously, but especially early on, I hunched my shoulders all the time. I really tried to make myself feel smaller because I felt like I, didn't fit into a mold. Men made me feel weird for being tall. It was just this whole thing where I never felt like I fit into somebody's idea of a cookie-cutter body.
“Mel's portfolio had diverse bodies and you could tell they were passionate about it and it wasn't just for their portfolio. I sent all of these references and body types we wanted to have, and I wasn't afraid Mel was not going to deliver on that. With Grace, I was like, ‘ I want her to be fat. I want her to have rolls. I want her to represent.’ And the rest I was pretty okay with. I gave general descriptions and we went back and forth. Mel was brought on by the publisher, but we talked and I opened myself up to say, ‘Let’s have a call if you want. Please feel free to text me. DM me if you have questions or if you want to ask. I want these characters to be your characters, too, so anything you think could make these characters better, let's do it.’”
Vargas suggested that Grace be Cuban, which is part of their background. Cooke says this was just one of many contributions Vargas made to the characters in Pillow Talk, “and I was so happy for them to take the lead on that.”
As for making Grace a fat protagonist, Cooke credits me and other friends with helping her start to unlearn the anti-fatness she was taught from an early age: “When I was growing up, ‘fat’ was mean. There was no other way for ‘fat’ to be used. You and a couple of my other friends really helped me embrace ‘fat’ and understand that there are different body types and it doesn't matter if you're active or if you're not. Your body is just your body and that's okay. And it was really important to me for Grace to show that.”
She’s also grateful to her editor, Lily Kessinger, for championing the unapologetic queerness of the book. Cooke says she showed Pillow Talk to her local barista, who says, “That book looks like it has lesbians in it and I love it,” which is frankly just a fact. The book does look gay and the book is gay, and that’s wonderful.
“They put our fat main character on the cover and they let her not have a romantic subplot throughout this. I never thought this book would get picked up. I'm so grateful that it did, and I'm so grateful that my editor allowed me the space to play with that story because I was not interested in making Grace have a romantic journey,” Cooke says. “I wanted her to be on a journey of asexuality and for this to be about her and her own journey with loving herself. If I tried to pitch this book now, I do not think it would get picked up.”
Beyond Pillow Talk
Cooke recognizes how privileged she is to have several graphic novels on shelves, all of which are championed by independent booksellers and reviewers. However, being a published writer doesn’t mean she can always make ends meet—which is an industry-wide issue, especially for marginalized creators.
“When we met, there was not a world where I could fathom that this would be my life. I did not think I was good enough to be published. I love writing. I love to make things, I love to tell stories, but I did not foresee that this was where I would end up,” she tells me. "And when Paranorthern got sold, I was in a bookstore where my aunt used to get me a gift certificate every single year at Christmas because we couldn't really afford books. I'd make my parents take me on Boxing Day when the sales were on so I could get the most out of my gift card and get as many books as I could. And when I got the news that Paranorthern was being acquired, I was in that store and it was really, really special. I had a meltdown in the aisles. I am sure somebody was just like, ‘What is going on with this girl? Is she OK?’”
At the start of the pandemic, Cooke was forced out of her day job and turned to full-time creative work, which has its pros and cons. She says she doesn’t “not appreciate how cool” it is, but she is also one of many authors who’s been directly impacted by publishing mergers in recent years. Graphic novel sales in the book market are also down overall, but kids’ titles are still doing decent numbers—if they have the marketing, which many graphic novels from traditional publishers aren’t getting in the chaos of consolidations, layoffs, and repurposing of funds.
“I am grateful for the position I'm in. I'm grateful if I never get another thing acquired again. I've made it so much further than other people have, and I'm not unaware of that. But I really struggle with the way publishing operates. I struggle with the way they treat not only creators, but their own staff. I always go out of my way to be so nice to every single person that I talk to from the publishing. Anyone at our publishers isn’t paid enough to deal with anyone being a diva. They're just not,” Cooke says. “I guess what it comes down to is that I struggle with the late-stage capitalism behind publishing, and I wish creators were getting living wages.
“We're doing the best we can, and it's still not enough. It's not enough to always tell people to protect themselves and there's always new talent willing to do anything to get ahead. I went to an industry night recently for new grads, and one of the kids literally said that. He was like, ‘I'll do anything.’ And I was like, ‘Ooh, don't. Don't do that.’ It's hard because I'll do cons and festivals and stuff, and if anybody asks me at my booth, I will tell them my very honest opinions. It's hard to straddle this fine line between being grateful and happy and loving what I'm doing and then also acknowledging that it's rough out there. It's hard to get things acquired. It's hard to stay in the industry. It's hard to build an audience. It's hard to get people to buy your books. When we are in a cost of living crisis, it's hard to—” She pauses, then says, “I feel like in my soul, I want to be the comics Ms. Frizzle.
Ms Frizzle welcomes students onto the Magic School Bus
“I want to say, ‘Welcome to comics! Make comics! Be happy! I'm so happy you're here. I am happy to answer questions. I'm happy for you to email me. I'm happy to talk to you about things,’” Cooke explains. “But then there's a dark side where I'm like, ‘Please protect yourself. Please take care of yourself. Please don't burn yourself out. for publishers that don't care about you, please. If you want to make books and you're being offered shitty contracts, don't take them. Get somebody to advocate for you if you're afraid.’ It's hard to know how the sausage is made and to always be chipper about it. I'm chipper about storytelling. I'm chipper about art. I'm chipper about people putting themselves out into the world and trying to find an audience, even if it's just one person. But yeah, it's hard knowing what all of these publishers are doing at every level and still encourage people into the industry sometimes. I really do wrestle with that.”
Cooke launched Creator Resource five years ago, when the comics industry and the world looked very different. She’s thrilled to see the Cartoonist Cooperative and other groups with more reach and resources taking up and expanding that work now, especially since she juggles so many gigs to support herself. Ultimately, she wants the comics industry to thrive, and that starts with its beating heart—the creators whose work facilitates the existence of publishers, distributors, etc.
“The industry is plagued by extremely passionate and well-meaning people who love comics but have no business sense, and it's not a knock on them. I understand they're trying to do better. I get it. I want the direct market. I want the traditional market. I want everybody to work with creators. These publishers are nothing without the creators. They do not have books to publish if the creators do not give them books. And if they're not willing to negotiate, we should not be giving them our IP. If they're trying to take 100 percent of your IP, you should not give them your original ideas,” Cooke says.
As passionate as Cooke is about her work, talking about creator rights and equity lights her up.
“I want transparency. I want publishers to say, ‘If you're submitting to us, this is what you're signing up for. These are the terms.’ I think these contracts should be negotiable at every level. I think more contract people need to be brought on board at all publishing houses and they should be capable of working with agents. We need to stop telling creators that agents will hinder them if sign with one. We need to stop trying to scare creators out of protection for themselves,” she continues. “I just want better for everybody. I want people to be able to tell stories that are meaningful to them. I want them to be able to find a home and have people back them and publish their books.
“Self-publishing is so much work. If you want to reach a wide audience, it's not as easy as saying, ‘Self-publish.’ That's valid and beautiful, and I've done that too. But that's not the same as having a book published with Marvel, DC, or a major book publisher. That's just not comparable. It's still valid. But there are two very different levels of work that you're putting into those projects. And I would argue that people who are self-publishing are even more apt to try to underpay themselves because they're not going to take into account things like distribution. With grants and stuff too, there's a lot of fine print about how much you can pay out to yourself,” Cooke adds.
“I struggle with a lot of the industry. I want this to be a place where people aren't burning themselves out to death. I want people to be able to have deadlines that work for them and for that to be okay. Traditional publishing is acquiring a lot less now because they were in this big boom to fill a gap. The direct market wasn't doing kids comics. And so the traditional market flooded to that. And I'm so grateful to be a part of that. Thank you to the publishing industry for that. But now they're realizing they didn't really know what they were doing, and they're realizing how much time it takes to make a comic, how much money it takes to make a comic, both in paying creators and in printing comics. And they're realizing now and kind of pairing back substantially. I wish that they had just talked to some people beforehand and figured that out, and I wish people would understand what they're getting into instead of just flying by the seat of their pants.”
What’s next?
Cooke and artist Whitney Gardner revealed the cover of The Racc Pack: The Prince and the Pawper, which is slated for release in January 2025. The third book will follow a year later, in January 2026. Cooke also teased a new project on Instagram with an image of two swords crossed against a black background. I don’t have insider info on that, but her post says it’s coming soon to Kickstarter.
In addition to the Racc Pack series, Cooke has written several other comics about critters aimed at young readers.
“I really do love writing for that age group. It is my jam and I'm so grateful that I came by it like that,” she says.
Outside of comics, she’s also on the writing team at Kitten Cup Studio, which released the cozy cat tea cafe game Pekoe in early access for Steam in 2023.
And she hopes to keep writing graphic novels for young adults, too: “I literally have this whiteboard beside me that has a bunch of pitches I'm slowly working on. I'm trying to do prose, too, but prose does not come as easily to me. I feel perpetually pulled in 12 thousand directions and sometimes struggle to stay focused on something, especially if I hit a slog moment with it. It's a real struggle because part of me wants to do some projects that could potentially lean toward external validation, but I know that that's not the way to go. I know that's not the way to tell a story that's going to be genuine and connect with readers.
“I really believe in the things I've done so far and I really want for people to find those. I just want to write stories that make me happy. Paranorthern saved my life. I was working such a shitty job and Rogues Portal [the website Cooke used to run, where we worked together] and writing that book saved my life. I want to have that relationship with my stories again, and I also want to have the support of a publisher.”
Pillow Talk, The Racc Pack, Paranorthern, and Oh My Gods! Books 1 and 2 are available everywhere books are sold. The Racc Pack: The Prince and the Pawper is available now for pre-order. To keep up with Stephanie Cooke, follow her on Instagram.
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