Zoe Thorogood is living up to her reputation as the future of comics
The autobio comix auteur is branching out into some bold new territory (while not losing herself)
Coming off her Eisner win for 'Most Promising Newcomer', comics artist/writer Zoe Thorogood isn’t resting on her laurels — or staying in the same autobiographical lane that has arguably built her reputation. Following recent news that Thorogood would be writing and drawing a new Hack/Slash series for Image, it’s also been announced that she’s writing a comic book series spinning out of the popular game series Life is Strange for Titans Comics as well.
Thorogood will be the writer of Life is Strange: True Colors, launching in December. Although primarily known as a writer/artist, she’s only writing this series, with the regular Life is Strange art team of Claudia Leonardi and Andrea Izzo returning for the new miniseries. (Previously, Emma Vieceli was the writer on Titan’s Life is Strange comic franchise, based on the Square Enix video game series; she’d written the title from 2018 through last year.)
This isn’t the first time Thorogood has worked in just one creative category on a project; although her Image Comics project It’s Lonely At The Center of the Earth is the comic most known her from, Thorogood was also nominated in this year’s Eisners for her work on Joe Hill’s Rain, an Image/Syzygy project on which she was “only” the artist, with Hill and David M. Booher as writers.
This might be the model for Thorogood’s career moving forward: balancing personal projects that she writes and draws with external work on pre-existing properties that she’ll dive into temporarily. It makes sense, to a degree; this is, after all, a creator who specifically thanked her younger Pokemon-loving self in her Eisner acceptance speech — and therefore understands the value of big brand names to fans, in addition to her more indie, personal work. Think of it as the comic equivalent of movie director Steven Soderbergh’s apocryphal rule of “one for the studio, one for me,” and then imagine just how long, and how successful, a career Thorogood is likely to have by pursuing this approach.
Maybe Kieron Gillen was ahead of his time when he called Thorogood the future of comics.
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