Rebekah Isaacs is a comic artist known for illustrating issues and covers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel & Faith, and her creator owned projects like Reaver and Money Shot. While she was a guest at Baltimore Comic-Con, Isaacs chatted with Scoop about her work in science fiction and fantasy titles, current projects, and more.

Scoop: Are you having a good time at the show?
Rebekah Isaacs (RI): Having a great time. It’s my first time here in 15 years, but it’s like I never left.

Scoop: What do you like about Baltimore Comic-Con?
RI: I think it’s the focus on the creators. This show and Heroes Con especially, I think, are the two that are really known for focusing on comics creators and really putting the highlight on the writing and the art.

Scoop: What do you like about meeting fans at shows like this?
RI: I love it because I do think that it’s kind of an underserved area for big conventions. I mean, it’s relatively close to New York, but New York is just so inaccessible for a lot of people these days. And it really allows them to have more personal connections and interactions with creators that they wouldn’t be able to see if they didn’t go to a show as big as New York or San Diego.

Scoop: What was your experience like drawing the Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel characters?
RI: Oh my god, absolutely amazing. It was so fun to get to play in that universe and do things that maybe the fans would have loved to see, but you just can’t do on television, you can’t do on a screen. Being able to work without a budget, basically, without a special effects budget and with the very gracious gift that we had of all of the actors allowing us to use their likenesses. It was so fun to work with those characters.

Scoop: Do you find it easier or more difficult to illustrate characters based on real people?
RI: More difficult, for sure. It’s definitely more difficult to work with likenesses. Anyone who read Angel & Faith and Buffy, I have to say thank you for bearing with me when I was getting my bearings on how to draw some of these characters. Obviously, some took me longer than others to get a grasp of their faces and likenesses, but it’s such a fun challenge too. It’s really fun to find your version of a person where you’re not necessarily drawing what they might look like in real life, but what they would look like in the comics world. It’s a very different approach than drawing like a photorealistic portrait of someone. It’s a lot of fun once you get it.

Scoop: You’ve got some creator-owned books here as well. Why don’t you tell us about some of those books?
RI: Yeah, I’ve got Reaver, which I did with Justin Jordan and Alice Guimaraes. We did a sort of a Dirty Dozen, high fantasy Dirty Dozen. It’s about a group of prisoners. who get broken out of prison and ordered on a death mission to infiltrate an even worse prison that’s been taken over by a rogue blood magic mage. And their task is to assassinate him. But it doesn’t go well for anybody involved.

I’ve also got Money Shot. That’s my favorite to pitch. It’s by me, Tim Seeley, Sarah Beattie, and Kurt Michael Russell. And it is about a group of scientist friends who get fed up with having their research funding pulled by the government. And so they devise a plan to make amateur porn in space to raise money. And it’s in a world where there has been contact made with aliens. So, they’re able to go to alien worlds and interact, quote unquote, with alien species to do so. Also, I can’t forget my current creator-owned series that just came out. It’s called Prima Apparata by me, Olivia Dufault, and our amazing colorist, Marissa Louise. It is about ballerinas piloting giant mechs in space for the amusement of enormous, unknowable gods who could blow them up in a moment’s notice.

Scoop: You’ve worked a lot in science fiction and fantasy. What do you like about those genres?
RI: Oh, I love working in any genre where I can just make up everything. I love doing research to some extent. I like to do a slice of life story or a story that’s set in our world where if I’m drawing a room, I have to do research into what the furniture is going to look like, what kind of clothes are they going to be wearing. But at some point that starts to get a little boring because you’ve seen it all before, right? But with sci-fi and fantasy, you get to design everything. If somebody’s sitting in a chair. It’s a fantasy chair. It’s a sci-fi chair. So just those little things makes every part of every panel so much fun to draw.

Scoop: Are there any sci-fi or fantasy titles that you haven’t worked on yet that you would like to illustrate?
RI: I was just telling someone earlier actually, I would love to do a Star Wars book, especially one that focuses on Princess Leia. There was actually a small chance that I could have done that a long time ago, but editorial shakeups made it impossible, unfortunately. Yeah, that. I’d love to do a Tron book. Yeah, fantasy-wise, anything in the Lord of the Rings arena would be incredible. Yeah, I think that’s about it.

Scoop: Tell me about your work with Ignition Press.
RI: Our new book, Prima Apparata, is from Ignition. They’ve been around for about a year now. They’re currently publishing 25 titles, I believe, and we are lucky to be one of them. They’re amazing to work with. They’re so creator focused and they really are willing to take chances on books that other publishers might not take a chance on. Like for example, our book is about young dancers. So, when you open it up, you just see a bunch of little girls dressed in pink leotards. But it’s also a body horror story. It’s a cosmic horror story. It’s very dark. It’s very adult. And I think a lot of publishers would have an issue with that. They’d be like, who are we marketing this to? Who’s going to open this and not think that it’s a book for young adults or for kids when it’s not? And so, Ignition really pushes us to even make it weirder, even make it stranger, even make it more different than anything anyone’s ever seen before in comics. I love that.

Scoop: What advice would you give to somebody who wanted to start working in comics?
RI: That’s tough. It’s so different than when I got in because everything is on the internet these days. I broke in sort of the old fashioned way back when. I think some publishers still do portfolio reviews at conventions and that’s amazing. But I know so many artists are discovered online now. So you really do need to have a good Instagram presence. I think that’s the most important thing.

And what’s really important is to, on your Instagram or whatever you choose, to showcase your art online, is you have to show sequentials and you have to show interiors. I see so many young artists who only do splash pages, only do pinups, only show people looking beautiful, you know, with like a fantastical background behind them or no background. You have to be able to show that you can show human beings interacting with spaces around them in perspective. That is like the number one thing I hear from writers and editors when they’re looking through young artist portfolios is like, “Okay, this is beautiful, the style’s great, but I don’t see an interior in here. I don’t see people inside of a building doing things in the building.” And if you’ve got that, if you can show that you can do all of it, you’ll get hired.

Scoop: Is there anything else you’re working on now that we haven’t talked about yet?
RI: No, it’s still in the middle of Prima Apparata, actually. It’s a five-issue series. It will be a complete miniseries. It tells a complete story. After that, I’ve got a few things, a few irons in the fire, but nothing I can talk about right now, unfortunately.

Scoop: Okay, so last question, are you doing any more shows this year?
RI: I don’t believe this year. Yeah, nothing I’m 100% sure about. Yeah. I might be going by Thursday evening to New York Comic-Con, but I don’t know when or where exactly.

Scoop: Well, thank you so much.
RI: Thank you.