Being Geek Chic is a blog about one woman navigating the male-dominated industries of production and tech. It's written by Elizabeth Giorgi, Founder, CEO and Director of Mighteor - one of the world's first internet video production companies. Learn more about Mighteor here.
Picture this: you’re a young fashion designer with a background in engineering and a physicist for a best friend. Together, you create a time machine, allowing you to venture seasons ahead in time, seeing trends and looks well before they hit the runway. As a result, you find yourself on an adventure that may jeopardize New York’s most elite and change the future of fashion forever.
Sounds pretty amazing? Thank sisters Shawnelle and Shawnee Gibbs, the writers and creators of Fashion Forward. It’s a new webcomic that just debuted last month. You can download the first issue on Comixology, an online digital comics platform, here.
The Gibbs sisters are the definition of a dynamic duo. The award-winning writing team from the San Francisco Bay Area started their careers in indie animation when they began creating their own webtoons and animated shorts while in college. The Gibbs gals have a mission that we can totally get behind: telling contemporary and timeless tales with female protagonists.
Read on for their interview with BGC!
Q: How did you arrive at the premise for Fashion Forward?
Shawnelle: It was at least 5 years ago now that the idea came on a road trip on the California I-5 from our hometown in Oakland back to Los Angeles. Since the view of cows and dry grass gets pretty redundant after a while, there’s nothing much to do but talk or listen to music and we were in the talking phase of the 5.5 hour trip. I was telling Shawnee´ about a book I wanted to write about a Fashionista who time traveled for ideas. It started a discussion that started snowballing and became the webcomic that became the book. I still get excited thinking about it.
Shawnee: Shawnelle had me with the magic words “time travel” and “stilettos.” We’d been working on all sorts of out-there ideas about ghosts, an early 1900s circus performer and stuff about aliens, so a time traveling adventure was right up our alley. Shawnelle has a bit of a background in fashion–she’d produced on the show Project Runway and had briefly gone to school for fashion back in college, so it manages to spill out here and there. To start an idea, we first have to pitch it to each other (and we can be the toughest critics of a pitch). Sometimes we have to work extra hard to convince the other person of an idea before we write it, but I was immediately onboard with this one and I’ve gotta thank the long and monotonous California I-5 highway for it!
Q: How do you hope Fashion Forward will inspire readers?
Shawnee: At the core of the story is a tale of a young woman in a workplace environment that doesn’t value her very much. When you’re starting a job, particularly creative ones, (which we have a bit of experience with), wages are low and expectations are insane. Sometimes you’re treated terribly and you don’t know what to do. For those that don’t quit entirely, a lot of people grind it out and find themselves in a position where they can either be a part of the problem (the old horrible boss phenomenon) or rise above it all and create a new model.
We’re hoping our readers recognize the importance of staying true to yourself no matter how crazy the fill in the blank world is that you find yourself in–in our protagonist Sam’s case, it’s the incredibly unique and competitive world of haute couture. We hope our readers take away the idea of going against the grain and realizing you can take a stand no matter how much muslin you find yourself tied up in.
Shawnelle: My hope for Fashion Forward is that it encourages women to dream big in the STEAM world while making decisions along the way that they can live with.
Q: Talk about taking the story from script to comic book art.
Shawnee: Shawnelle and I come together to write the script where we plan the story, dialogue and early layout for the panels of a page but it’s our artists who really bring it to life. And we’re so, so lucky to have found two very talented young ladies: Linda Chung, our interior page artist and J.M. Tolman who’s our cover artist for the first half of the series and takes over sequential art for our later books, when Linda moved up North to do amazing things in the gaming world.
Our jaws dropped at these young women’s portfolios and they’re skill and work ethic is just phenomenal. These girls both have talent oozing out of their fingertips and we’ve been lucky enough to have them both on the team!
Q: When did you discover you were “geeky”?
Shawnee: I got the sneaking suspicion that I might have been a geek when Shawnelle and I were kids writing our own comic strips in grade school. But I think the big sign post geeky moments were being in high school opting to hang out late in our English Teacher Ms. Pyeatt’s room editing and drawing comics for the school newspaper while other kids were hanging out at football games and parties. I knew for certain that I was a geek at that point, and I was cool with it.
Q: If you could take any fictional character out for a drink, whom would you choose and what would you drink?
Shawnee: It would have to be Doro the Immortal from the Octavia Butler Patternmaster series. We’d probably drink Scotch—neat…as I try to pry the mysteries of the world out of his cold heart.
Q: What would you tell your 13-year-old self?
Shawnelle: Someone is going to offer you fried oysters in a few years, avoid them. And just go ahead and keep being your special brand of weird, you’ll end up totally fine.
Emma Bauer is a Being Geek Chic Contributor. Clearly, she’s got great taste. She is a PR enthusiast, dog lover, tea drinker, art appreciator, and of course, aspires to Be Geek Chic. Follow her on Twitter: @emmalynnbauer
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