Tania Del Rio

Welcome to our occasional “print radio” feature, the ’ Nuff Said! interview.

For nine years Ken Gale, in conjunction with Ed Menje and Mercy Van Vlack, hosted and produced about 400 episodes of this comic-book themed series for New York’s WBAI radio station, broadcast from the Empire State Building and live-streamed over the Internet for the past several years of its run. Ken’s show covered all styles and all eras of comics, pointing out the diversity and richness of the art form to an audience who were often unaware of the versatility of sequential art.

’ Nuff Said! ended as a regular show in 2002, but Ken has done a number of specials and guest spots on other WBAI broadcasts, continuing to show how well our art form fits in with many different, seemingly disparate topics.

The ’ Nuff Said! archive, used with Ken’s full permission and cooperation, is a ‘snapshot album’ of the careers, influences, and often surprising opinions of a wide range of comics creators, several of whom, sadly, are no longer with us, and many of whom are seldom if ever interviewed by comics journalists.

This interview is with writer & artist Tania Del Rio, whom Archie Comics Publications entrusted with the task of giving one of their most popular properties, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, a daring new look. Sabrina is presently in her 49th year since her debut in Archie’s Madhouse; outside of the comics, she’s had a long life as a media star, both in TV cartoon series and live-action sitcom, but since the cancellation of the TV show, Sabrina’s sales were beginning to falter. Time for another reinvention, and Del Rio, whose work came to Archie executives’ attention after a contest in TokyoPop’s manga anthologies, was chosen to give a ‘teenager’ almost twice her own age a “Magical Manga Makeover”!

At the big Apple Con on 18^th September 2004, ’ Nuff Said!’s plucky gal reporter, Mercy Van Vlack, tracked down Del Rio to hear her plans for one of Archie’s flagship characters…

Mercy van Vlack: Hi, this is Mercy Van Vlack, for ’ Nuff Said!, deep in the heart of wherever we are – opposite Penn Station? Lead us not into Penn Station! And I’m here to interview Tania Del Rio, who’s doing manga comics for Archie?

Tania Del Rio: That’s right.

Mercy: That’s quite a departure for them. You’re writing and drawing Sabrina the Teen-Age Witch – are those Japanese characters on the logo there?

Tania: Yes. They’re katakana, the Japanese alphabet used for foreign words –it actually says, “Sa-bu-ri-na” right there… She has a cat, who’s actually a wizard trapped in a cat’s body…

Mercy: And we all WANT toys of this cat, he’s incredibly cute! And she has two boyfriends…

Tania: Love interests, yeah. Harvey and Shinji, Harvey’s been in there for a very long time, since the strip started, and Shinji’s new, he’s a wizard, and they’re complete opposites.

Mercy: So there was the original comic book, then the TV show, and now this version of the comic, which starts out with her – in the traditional Archie style – in a comic shop, looking at manga, then she thinks, “Gee, what if we were manga?”, and since she’s a witch, presto! They’re anime characters, including Salem. “Ack! I look like a stuffed toy!”

Tania: Yeah, but then she can take him to school as her mascot, so he can give her advice…

Mercy: And how good is he at giving advice?

Tania: Not terribly good. He’s a little full of himself, because he once was a very powerful wizard who tried to take over the world, and his punishment for that was to be turned into a cat.

Mercy: So how did you get involved in all this?

'Lovesketch' from the Rising Stars of Manga 2 anthology

Tania: I entered a contest sponsored by TokyoPop, who are one of the US publishers of manga, and they picked one of my stories to be in their anthology, The Rising Stars of Manga, Vol. 2. Then the folks at Archie read an article about me, and they contacted me to give Sabrina a new look. It turns out their offices are only about fifteen minutes away from where I live!

Mercy: It’s a real innovation for Archie, though, because they’ve for so many years had that house style that Dan DeCarlo refined for them, and this is so different. I have issues with anime – I really love Osamu Tezuka, but I’ve always had trouble with the cookie-cutter look of a lot of the manga. But your stuff is more of a combination of contemporary comics style with manga.

Tania: I do read a lot of manga, but I also read American comics, I have a lot of influences, I think you see a blend of both there.

Mercy: I’m surprised at what Archie are letting you get away with, with some of the demonic bad guys. How long have you been doing this?

Tania: I’ve been working on it for almost a year, but so far only three issues are out, I’ve managed to get a little ahead of myself. Archie are giving me a lot of freedom to explore their world and have fun with it. People think that Archie is old-fashioned, but they’re not nearly as strict about things as I thought they’d be. It seems to be going okay so far!

Mercy: Do you have your own comics that you work on besides Sabrina?

Tania: Well, I don’t have the time to work on them now, but I have a small company with my boyfriend called Steelriver Comics. I used to do a comic called Realm Denizen a couple of years ago, and we’re still working on projects.

Mercy: That’s good, because even if you’re doing the mainstream stuff, you still want to keep up your own work too…

Tania: Yeah, although I do in many ways think of Sabrina as my own project, because even though I don’t own the character, I do write and draw the whole thing, so I get to add a lot of personal stuff, that makes it more special to me.

Mercy: So what’s the process, do they have to approve the script and pencils?

Tania: Once they approve the script, I just work up the pencils and then send them to my inker, Jim Amash, and it’s taken from there.

Mercy: It’s great that you’re so near to the offices, because so many people these days are working with fax machines or e-mail documents these days…God forbid your computer breaks!

Tania: It’s neat that I can just meet with my editor, Victor Gorelick, and discuss things, it’s just so more convenient. Victor Gorelick’s been working in the comics for a very long time, he’s very cool, very supportive.

Mercy: Are there a lot of women working at Archie Comics?

Tania: I don’t really know, because of course a lot of them are freelance. I do know one woman worked on Sabrina immediately before I did, Holly G., but she’s working at the Jim Balent studio now. It’s better for me to be freelance rather than in the office, because I work best at night, I can get really creative and work all night long on my stuff. I’m kind of a night owl.

Mercy: It’s the right influence for Sabrina – when witches fly! Are the folks at Archie more older people now, or are they all different ages?

Tania: They’re all different ages, there’s a lot of younger creators coming in, but a lot of the folks who’ve been doing this for a long time are still there, and can share their experience and inspire younger people.

Mercy: You want to keep it young, because it’s a comics series aimed at youngsters. I worked for Harvey comics in the 1980’s, doing stories for Richie Rich, and everybody there was about a hundred years old! (laughs) And it was hard to come up with something fresh, because they’d been doing Richie Rich for 40 years, so by the time I got there, every time you came up with something; “Oh! How about a hang-glider made out of money?” “Eh, we did that…” “Skiing down a slope of money?” “Eh, we did that.” I would write sheets of ideas, and every time, “Eh, we did that…” (laughs) so hard to come up with new stuff. But you’re providing such a fresh take on Sabrina, there’s no limits to where it could go.

Tania: Yeah, but it also helps that she’s a witch, so with her magical powers there are endless possibilities. But I am trying to set some ground rules in place as far as the magic’s concerned, because otherwise it can be too limitless. That’s why there’s the Magic Council, and the Magic Realm, there are laws and rules…

Mercy: And she has to go to school! Charm School! That’s fun! So will you be drawing on people you grew up with, on your own experiences, for this?

Tania: To some extent, the school experiences, the teenage love triangle, the fights, the emotions, the little things that get you upset when you’re in school, everything like that, I do draw on my own experiences, but I also exaggerate them, it’s more dramatic – it’s based on the shojo manga style, which is very melodramatic – everything is either a disaster or it’s wonderful – and I want to bring a little bit of that to Sabrina.

Mercy: It’s a very emotional time in someone’s life, they’ve suddenly got all these things to do that they never had to worry about before.

Tania: And in addition to all that, she’s got to conceal from everyone at her regular school that she’s a witch! She’s hiding herself from half of the world around her, and that just adds to her burdens.

Mercy: Like Bewitched, where she had to watch it in front of the regular folks, and couldn’t be seen to be doing any of that weird stuff. In Sabrina, there’s this gal Amy, who’s following her around, because she likes Sabrina’s boyfriend…

Tania: The catty rival that we all know in high school! (laughs)

Mercy: So what are you hoping to have in future issues?

Tania: Well, I’m just hoping to develop the characters a bit more, build up the romance, start to mix up the relationships a little – I’m just working on the Valentine’s issue right now – but the underlying background will always be Sabrina’s other world, the magic world, where even though Sabrina lives in the Mortal Realm, everything that happens in the Magic Realm has an influence on her.

Mercy: So it’s literally a parallel world?

Tania: It is. Normally, all wizards and witches live there, but a few choose to live in the Mortal Realm, like Sabrina and her aunts.

Mercy: What happened to Sabrina’s parents, do you get into that at all?

Tania: I haven’t addressed it yet; in past issues, they said that she had a mortal father and a witch mother, they’re not dead, but for some reason she’ll lose her powers if she lives with them, but that never made a whole lot of sense to me, so I’ll be trying to figure that out.

Mercy: You’re heavily manga-influenced. Was that because that was mostly what you read when growing up – where did you grow up, by the way?

Tania: Oh, a whole lot of different places, I lived in England for a time, Colorado, Minneapolis… I’ve read a lot of American and Japanese comics.

Mercy: What are some of your favourite American ones?

Tania: Wendy Pini’s Elfquest… she inspired me because she was a female creator doing her own stuff, and you still don’t see that too often.. Colleen Doran, too, with A Distant Soil. But I also read a lot of mainstream stuff, the Marvel stuff, so my influences are everywhere – Ben Dunn was another American creator working in the Japanese style, with Ninja High School; Disney animation is another influence – I studied animation in college.

Mercy: Well, comic books and animation certainly owe a lot to each other..

Tania: Oh, absolutely, they’re very similar, a comic book could be an animation storyboard, in a way. Comic books can sometimes show more, though.

Mercy: Because you can slow down the action and speed it up..

Tania: Exactly.

Mercy: And with comic books, you can go back and look again at story points, I always liked comic books better than animation because I like to dwell over the artwork.

Tania: And of course with comic books you can put in all the detail, which is hard with animation, because it’s such a time-consuming process. Obviously, if you’re a big studio with hundreds of people you can do that, but I did my own independent films in college and a lot of times you couldn’t even do backgrounds, drawing frame by frame, you just have to focus on the characters, and everything else just falls off to the wayside!

Mercy: How many drawings per second do you have to do for animation?

Tania: For video, it’s something like thirty frames a second… I had a lot of fun with it, but in some ways comics is more satisfying because it’s more dimensional, you can show characters thinking.

Mercy: Some people in comics, like Jim Shooter at Defiant, were really against thought balloons, but that was the heart of the X-Men, all those (silly voice) “Oh, Jean, Jean, what’ll I do?” “Scott! I love you so much but I can’t tell you…” all that stuff, it’s hard to think of them leaving that out, or just muttering to themselves.

Tania: I like the thought balloons myself, it gives you a window into their personalities, it’s too obvious if they have to say everything they think. I like peeking into their brains…

Mercy: I think Wendy Pini, when she was doing Elfquest, brought a lot more women into comics stores, a lot of women were picking up her work, and they came from science-fiction fandom, which is a lot more balanced – go to a science-fiction convention, you’ll see that it’s 50% women, because there’s more for them there.

Tania: That’s definitely what attracted me, once I realised that other women were doing this too, and it made me realise that it wasn’t just a guy thing!

Mercy: I was having a conversation with someone at work about comics, and showing them some of my work, Miranda, and one guy was flipping through the comic and said; “Well, she always comes out on top in the end…” and I said, “Sure, I’m writing it!” (both laugh)

Mercy: She’s going to be successful, there’s no need for her to get stepped on, there’s enough of that! Comic books that don’t have women characters, I’m not that interested in.

Tania: Same here. Even with novels, if there aren’t any strong women characters, I’m just “ehhh..” You like to find someone you can identify with in any given work

Mercy: So, are you still reading the super-hero books?

Tania: Not so much. I’ve been kind of busy! (laughs) I’m enjoying Fallen Angel at the moment, which isn’t strictly a super-hero book, although she does have super-human powers, but it’s a very mysterious, mystical series. That’s written by Peter David…

Mercy: He had a really good run on Supergirl, when she was this kind of Earthbound Angel reincarnated in the body of a local Bad Girl, it was really imaginative oddball stuff.

Tania: But mostly I’m reading manga right now. There’s something refreshing about the Japanese style of comics storytelling. They take their time. In American comics, it seems like they’re really rushing to cram as much as they can into an issue, as if they think it gives readers more, which in a way it does, but with the Japanese comics, they’re normally serialized first then released as Graphic Novels, so you have 120 or so pages to tell your story. They pace themselves a little bit more.

Mercy: And over here, you’re trying to tell it in what, 28 pages?

Tania: Exactly. I’m rushing it a little bit there! (laughs)

Mercy: But what I like about your Sabrina is that you’re still giving us complete stories, it’s not a serial. Marvel always does that, they’ll print a piece of a story, like a chunk, and you’re all “Wait! What happened there? What happens next?” and you have to wait a month or whatever to get the next one. That’s hard.

Tania: My stories are generally self-contained. They do have elements that carry over into the next issue, but you can read and enjoy each issue by itself.

Mercy: Do you think your Sabrina will be collected into Graphic Novels? Is Archie doing that?

Tania: I hope they will. Archie is doing that with some of their other material, they’ve done a few paperback collections, so I’m hoping they’ll do it with this. I know a lot of readers have written in saying they’d like a smaller collection, a digest format.

Mercy: Like a manga! I’ve noticed a lot of girls in comics shops who take away all these tiny little digests. Although there’s a huge range of manga… I’ve seen these ones about baseball and golf, that are the size of phonebooks, and it’s interesting that they have such a range of subjects, where we’re pretty much just action and adventure.

Tania: It is interesting to read stories like that, which you’d expect to be rather boring, but Shonen Jump, they’ve been putting out stories aimed at boys in these big thick anthologies, and one of them was a tennis story, and its bizarre, but what the artist and writer do with it, they make it exciting, it’s kind of like watching a sports movie, I guess.

Mercy: You can change the focus to make any topic at least visually interesting. There’s the famous Wally Wood ‘lazy layouts’, where he shows you all sorts of ways you can get around those scenes where it’s just two heads talking.

Tania: Oh yeah, I was really lucky in college, one of my teachers, Peter Gross, who works for Vertigo and just recently did Chosen for Dark Horse, he was really good at telling us how to get the most storytelling out of a page, especially those talking head pages, because they can get flat really fast.

Mercy: Do you think you’ll be exploring different mythologies more in your stories?

Tania: I’d like to. Particularly in the Magic Realm. I think the Mortal Realm will be kept kind of plain, something that readers can relate to, but in the Magic Realm I want to use all kind of mythologies and experiment with different styles. Shinji, for example, he lives in the Magic Realm, and his area looks like Japan, I like to blend in different cultures and influences, because you can have pretty much anything you want going on there.

Mercy: And where is the Mortal Realm? Is she still in Riverdale?

Tania: No, it’s called Greendale, it’s near to Riverdale.

Mercy: And she just zaps over to the Magic Realm whenever she feels like it?

Tania: She has to go for night school – Charm School – but she also goes there a lot just to hang out.

Mercy: Has Archie been putting any promotion behind the new look?

Tania: Oh, they’ve been very good about letting the magazines know, particularly at the beginning, it got featured in Wizard, and most of the other trade mags mentioned it, so when the website’s up and running..

Mercy: That is a headache with websites, keeping them up to date, but it’s necessary. One thing I noticed is that your name’s pretty prominent on the series, and Archie didn’t used to give credits like that. Because so many times, companies don’t give credit – I never got my name on Richie Rich all the time I worked on it…

Tania: It was so frustrating when I read those kind of comics, because you could distinguish between one artist and another, but you never got their names!

Mercy: Yeah, it was “This is the good artist, this is the weird one, this one’s got a smoother line.” Dan DeCarlo’s stuff always jumped off the page because it was so bright and cheerful, but some of the other ones were just “icch.”. Like whoever was drawing Sabrina back then couldn’t draw cats! It was terrible! Poor Sebastian! No, wait, that was Josie & the Pussycats, the magical cat was Sebastian there… Maybe Sebastian should cross over and drive Salem crazy! “What? You’re a real cat? Eww!”

Tania: I’ve actually done a short story that has Archie and his friends, and Sabrina, and Josie and the Pussycats in the manga style, just to see how fans would react.

Mercy: It’s exciting to see Archie willing to take a chance on one of their characters like this, because your work is such an amalgam of the US and the manga styles.

Tania: Archie has taken a risk, but so far it’s been very popular, and I’m hoping it’ll pay off.

Mercy: So, what other projects are you involved with? Is Sabrina taking up all your time right now?

Tania: It’s pretty much full-time, though I do the occasional freelance thing, but it’s a monthly book.

Mercy: Oh boy. Do you do a page a day?

Tania: I try to do a couple of pencilled pages a day. I wish I could do more, I wish I could do three a day – I can if I really cram, but generally about a page & a half a day. I gotta keep ahead of myself. I can take a week off here or there, but it messes me up a little.

Mercy: You don’t ink it yourself.

Tania: No, I’d never get it done if I had to ink it myself! I have a great inker, Jim Amash, and he’s very good.

Mercy: He’s got a very precise line.

Tania: He really improves the art, I think, he has a line weight that I don’t do in the pencils, a little bit of hatching, lots of things that I don’t do in the pencils, and which add a lot of dimension to the art.

Mercy: He really makes it pop, he’s got the thick and thins working. So many people ink with markers, and that’s like inking with a Rapidograph, it’s only one thickness of line, you want to get more depth.

Tania's final issue

Tania: I think he uses a brush mostly, and a little bit of nib for details and backgrounds.

Mercy: Have you ever been involved in Wicca or magic yourself?

Tania: Not really. I have a couple of friends who are. It’s very interesting, and I’m wondering if I should start adding some elements of that into Sabrina’s character… A lot of the nature stuff I really like, and I’m thinking of bringing that into the magic realm.

Mercy: That’s really big with kids, too, the nature stuff. They’re the ones who recycle, and who’re interested in saving the planet – and living here!

Tania: I definitely want to bring more of the nature influence in, make the Magic Realm a very natural place, rich with different plants, like you’d wish the real world to be.

Mercy: Well, anything else you want to tell our listeners at WBAI?

Tania: Only that if you’ve been following the series, I hope you’ve been enjoying it, and if you haven’t check it out – hopefully you’ll find something you like!

Mercy: Catch the magic! This is Mercy Van Vlack –

Tania: – and Tania Del Rio –

Mercy: – Signing off! (mutters) ….If I can figure how to turn this off…

Following this interview, Tania Del Rio wrote and drew Sabrina from 2004 to 2009 (with occasional fill-in art by Chad Thomas and Lindsay Cibos), ending her run on the title with issue #100. She also wrote and drew for Marvel (Spider-Man/Arana) and other Archie series, including Sonic the Hedgehog. After a four-issue “Young Salem” story arc, which Del Rio had no involvement with, the Sabrina title ceased publication. Archie has announced that Sabrina will be getting a re-launch in 2011, but Del Rio’s name is not presently attached to the project, though she continues to write for the mainstream Archie titles.

interview by Mercy Van Vlack, transcription and framing text by Will Morgan.

See also a review of Tania’s Sabrina run.