Suzana Harcum and Owena White, a lesbian couple from Tucson, AZ, and Worcester, MA, respectively, are an artist-writer duo making LGBT-centered comics. Their collaborative efforts blend Suzana’s art with Owena’s storytelling, crafting stories that explore communication, self-discovery, and acceptance. In creating together they seek to share their perspectives and experiences growing up queer, through heartfelt slice-of-life comics. They enjoy making relatable stories for readers, aiming to foster a sense of community and understanding through their work.

I had the opportunity to interview Suzana and Owena, which you can read below.

First of all, welcome back to Geeks OUT! Could you tell us a little about yourselves?

Thanks so much! We had a great time at Flame Con this year, GeeksOUT is always such a pleasure to work with and their conventions are really fun and well-run!

We’re Suzana Harcum and Owena White, a married lesbian couple living in Massachusetts. Owena is from Mass, and Suzana is from Arizona – we met online in an art forum and fell in love while making art for each other and writing story snippets together. We kept up with the hobby after we moved in together and began dating, and making comics together is the form that takes for us today!

What can you tell us about your series Tripping Over You?

TOY is a slice-of-life romance featuring Milo and Liam: two young men who met and became friends in boarding school. After having harbored secret feelings for each other for years, they finally (and with great fumbling) begin dating right as their time at school together is about to end. Milo and Liam face the challenge of turning their relationship from a would-be school romance into something that survives the pressure of coming out to friends and family, bridges their very different universities and career paths, and tests their communication skills.

Tripping Over You was originally a webcomic before being published by First Second. How would you define any distinctions between the original version and the newly printed one?

The first four chapters (100 pages) have been completely redrawn, to update the art and to match the style to the later chapters. There are also some art updates and story updates (and even some extra pages) sprinkled throughout that add context and fresh content to the story. The overall end result is a lot smoother to read in book form; we’re really thrilled with how it turned out!

How would you describe your general creative process?

There’s a lot of back and forth between us that we’ve learned over the years. While Owena is our writer and Suzana is our illustrator, we both have an equal say in our hopes for the end result. Suzana often contributes writing notes and proposes ideas for future chapters and plots. Owena does the thumbnails for pages, and flats/colors pages to help with the workload. We’ve become pretty good at figuring out where we can help each other out if the work hits a funnel. 

What are some of your favorite elements of writing/illustrating? What do you consider some of the most frustrating and/or difficult?

Owena: My favorite part of our process as a whole is when I first get to see a page that Suzana has translated from script/thumbnail into a sketched out page. I love that first moment of seeing an idea pop into tangible existence, and to see it specifically translated through the lens of her vision. She always finds ways to surprise and delight me, sometimes to the point of laughing out loud when I catch a detail she snuck in just for me. Thumbnails are totally the most frustrating part for me – translating script into visuals, thinking of how to imply movement from panel to panel, and pacing them fluidly can be such a struggle for me, so getting to see the next step come to life makes it so worth it.

Suzana: My favorite thing is getting to make a character come to life, there’s a lot of fun in identifying the personality and traits unique to a character and putting them to paper. Drawing emotions and exaggerated movements are some of my favorite things to draw, though sometimes tying it in to still work with the environment or background without feeling silly or off kilter is hard. I love drawing backgrounds a lot, but they can get very hard when you have something a character needs to interact with (like cars or motorcycles or instruments). I spend a lot of time trying to keep consistent when I need to draw those things.

As a creative, who or what would you say are some of your greatest creative influences and/or sources of inspiration in general?

Suzana: I’ve always been influenced by animators and comic artists. I love a wide variety of styles and I love trying to emulate things I enjoy as I doodle, or try out new things within my own art when I find something new that I enjoy. I grew up with the standard newspaper comics like Calvin and Hobbes and Garfield, but I started devouring webcomics and graphic novels as soon as I discovered them back in the early 2000’s. Animated movies and shows have always been something I love, too. My first animation love was The Last Unicorn. I recently watched it again and was in as much awe as I was the first time I saw it.

Owena: Music is a big one for me; I often get new sparks of inspiration when listening to music, even songs I’ve heard a million times before. Lately I’ve been glued to my Oliver Tree playlist, but I also really like MISSIO, half•alive, and Noah Kahan. I also love revisiting my old playlists for bands like The Weepies and Steel Train.

What’s a question you haven’t been asked yet but that you wish you were asked (as well as the answer to that question)?

This was really tough to answer, but I’ve decided – as a big coffee nerd I’d love to be asked what my favorite coffee is so I can gush about it. The answer is Mexican Chiapas; Dean’s Beans is a worker-owned co-op in Massachusetts that carries a medium roast Mexican Chiapas that 100% fuels our creative process. 

What advice might you have to give for aspiring storytellers out there?

Just start! The beginning will never be as good as you want it to be, because you’ll always improve each time you do something – so by pure necessity, the next page will always be better. But that’s not a bad thing! The best way to improve is to find your groove and turn the process into a habit, and just accept everything you made before today as foundational. And you can fix it in post!

Are there any other projects you are working on and at liberty to speak about?

We’re currently making a webcomic called Living in Future Tense, a sequel to Tripping Over You set a couple decades after its ending. It features tired gay dads trying their best – and also follows Milo’s younger sister Sylvia while she heals after a tragic accident she suffered while filming.

You can read it at www.liftcomic.com!

Finally, what books/authors (LGBTQ+ or otherwise) would you recommend to the readers of GeeksOUT?

We just had a lovely panel at Flame Con where we got the chance to recommend some of our recent favorites! If you like good horror with interesting ties to magic and mental health, Hello Sunshine by Keezy Young is an amazing read! Strange Bedfellows by Ariel Slamet Ries is another book with fantastical artwork tying magic to sci fi beautifully. If you’re looking for a fun queer story with a medieval twist, Ladies of the Knight by Fiona Marchbank is a beautiful read, too. Always Raining Here by Hazel and Bell is a great story that also started as a webcomic and was printed with First Second with updated art, it’s gorgeous and definitely worth checking out!