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If you look at the back of copies of Tokyopop‘s hit manga series Bizenghast, you’ll see a cute little bio for creator M. Alice LeGrow. She’s a cosplayer, designer, Black Dhalia suspect and uranium smuggler. The first two are true: the latter - well, Sunset Boulevard is a great movie. Also true: she’s a lover of robots and sammiches, and she just happens to be one of my favorite people on the planet.

Last year, my coverage article of A-Kon, one of the biggest and best anime conventions around, was subtitled “How I Spent the Weekend Stalking M. Alice LeGrow”, because, though I had been a fan of the manga, I had not met the woman until she walked into a panel with Peter S. Beagle (she was dressed as Sarah from the ballroom scene of Labyrinth) and her personality just steamrolled me. That year, I described her as a mouthy broad in a ball gown, and my second A-Kon was spent, once again, in the gravitational pull of her unstoppable ability to be as outlandishly entertaining in person as she is on the page. During all the convention madness, I got to sit down for a while with her and talk about her designing, her future projects, and, naturally, the upcoming sixth volume of Bizenghast due out in August.

She was seated in artist alley during our interview, so we were interrupted repeatedly by giggling, star-struck fans who could hardly speak for being in the presence of the creator of the series Teen People pointed out as a must-read. But any time with Marty (as she is more commonly called) is good time, and when my time with her came, I immediately asked about her biggest current claim to fame, Bizenghast. The story centers around a girl named Dinah who lost her parents in a car accident. She ends up in the mysterious town of Bizenghast and somehow manages to fall into a contract with the afterlife helping spirits move on. The series has taken us through many ups and downs - from little green cat men with big mouths to major character deaths. My first question, naturally, was about book six.

“An awful lot of things happen in this book,” she said. “It’s very fast paced. A lot of the other books I try to build up a slow gradual sort of momentum in the story, but I guess you could say it’s when the shit hits the fan. A lot of really important things start tying together, a lot of loose ends that start matching up in book six and we learn a little more about the history of the town and there’s a big dark secret about Bizenghast that no one has really known about for many years that starts to come into play. It’s a very interesting book; it will leave readers extremely cliff-hung, I guess is the word”.

Though I protested that it couldn’t be worse than book four, when a very beloved character bit the dust, she laughed and said, “No, it’s pretty bad”.

I told her that if she hurt Edaniel, she might have a full-scale riot on her hands.

Edaniel, a little green cat, is Dinah’s helper and one of the funniest things about the series. Whenever Edaniel speaks, the voice, from verbiage to cadence, is Marty herself, as anyone who has ever met her (especially her retired army colonel father, who draws her little pictures of Edaniel) can attest. When she gets a little riled up, she has a tendency to switch into a loud roadie or carnival barker type voice.

“A lot of people wonder what is that puppet he has is. When he says, ‘We should go look for them, what do you think, Skidwidget?’. ‘I say we go for it!’ (she said in a high pitched, girlie voice). ‘Shut up!’. [Check out book three for that exchange] People ask what Skidwidget is, is it just a puppet that he has? I’m like, that’s his girlfriend that he’s constantly cheating on. He dates a puppet. And he’s like, ‘Oh, baby I love you’ and she’s says ‘You never buy me anything’. ‘Goddamn right I don’t!’ ” she roars. 

“Do we finally get to meet Edaniel and Edrear’s sibs?” I asked, and she lit up.

“Yes! Yes you do. You get to meet them both. I do like their sisters, I like them a lot. And Edaniel asks more people to make out.”

But Marty isn’t just about Bizenghast - since book six of the seven book run is on its way, she’s already going on towards new projects.

“I am working on the next series that I want to do after Bizenghast, after book seven. I’ve already pitched it to Tokyopop kind of unofficially, and they’re very positive about it, they want to see more of it, so, it’s going to be very steampunk and it’s going to have a lot more comedy, I think, than Bizenghast.”

“For those of us who follow you on Deviant Art, are there any pictures we should be looking for?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she answered, a little bouncy-like. “There’s character designs for that one short little blonde girl and the tall brunette man - those are going to be the two main characters. I haven’t really settled on their names yet, so I don’t really know them yet, but I do have most of the story written out and I’m working on it. Actually I do have a few little doo-dad drawings of them.”

And here she did the most amazing thing during the entire interview. She pulled out a well worn little brown leather journal and flipped it open. It was like looking into DaVinci’s journal and finding the secret of what was in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction. The thing emitted the sound of angels singing, and as she flipped pages (quickly, unfortunately) I could see backwards handwriting in droves, beautiful sketches, and something that looked mysteriously like a Bizenghast-y decoder ring.

As I tried desperately to pick my jaw up off the floor, she said, “This is my secret little book that I carry everywhere. I write backwards because I’m left handed and I write with a quill pen and ink, so it would streak. There’s the key to all that stuff in Bizenghast but you can’t see it.”

As I contemplated jumping her, stealing the book and how to lay low so the law couldn’t get me until I was done with the book, she flipped to a couple of drawings and moved past my thoughts of blatant thievery.

“I think it’ll be a very good series. I want it to be a little more mainstream than Bizenghast was. I wanted to appeal more to both guys and girls. Obviously Bizenghast has a more female following because there’s lots of pretty outfits and a female lead.”

“I think guys would like Bizenghast.” I countered. “It re-introduced the word ’chump’ into my daily vocabulary.”

Marty laughed. “Chump and broad, because I talk like I’m from the fifties. The other day I rolled down my car window and yelled ‘get your car out of the middle of the intersection, broad!’. She looked at me like I was an old man, and I’m like, ‘Yeah you, lady, goddamnit!’. I always have female names for drivers I don’t like. ‘Come on, Belinda, move it! Let’s go, Stephanie!’. It’s kind of funny driving with me because there’s a constant conversation with me and the people in front of me.”

“I hear there’s a lot of that in Philly, people getting in front of you and not moving.” I said.

“It’s the city of brotherly love, and a love of yelling.” She confirmed.

About her shop on Etsy.com she said that she does what she can to appease her fans. “People always say why don’t you make more stuff for Etsy? I literally can’t make it any faster. These things take five days to make, and I made time for them. I try to do as much as I can with Etsy, and I really like doing it. It gives a nice break from working on page after page of art. When I do the comic, from day one of starting on each book I already know what each page is going to look like because I do thumbnails and everything, so it’s nice to sit down with a bunch of pieces and be like alright, I’m going to make something new right off the top of my head.”

“You have some crazy insane fans,” I said, thinking secretly ’I’m one of them!’

“I know, I know. Did you see my post on Deviant Art about all the toys I use to like? Somebody found that Precious Places gazebo on eBay and mailed it to me but they didn’t say who sent it! I don’t want to post a thank you because I’m afraid to encourage people to spend their money on this. I’m like, buy my book, then you’ll be supporting me and you’ll get something! You know, or just give it to a charity! It’s nice when they send me things but I’d rather they just keep their money. We’ve got a recession going on!

“You’re better than me.” I said.  “I’d be like yes, please. I’m a total present whore.”

“I feel bad. I actually have a whole shelf. I redesigned my house. I don’t like things to be ordinary all the time, I like change. So every time I have friends come in, they’re like, ‘Did you redecorate again‘? And I’m like ‘Those chairs have been there for two weeks, I’m sick of ‘em‘! So I just switched up everything again and I put up a whole shelf of things fans have given me, and they come up with the craziest things! Fans are so creative. When I went to go speak at a school, at a high school club they made me a little paper Mache Edaniel mask on a little stick! It’s so cute, and I can look through it and stuff. Somebody made My Little Pony custom Edaniel, Dinah and Vincent My Little Ponys, and they used one of those mini ponies so Edanial is smaller than the Dinah, and they covered him in clay so he has the tail and ears. It’s so amazing.”

The thought of Bizenghast My Little Ponies reminded me of something spectacular happening around the U.S. - t-shirts of Dinah have popped up, as well as a few other Tokyopop characters, in a handful of Targets.

“Do you know how the shirts did?” I asked. “Are we going to have more Marty merch soon?”

“I don’t know how we’re doing right now. I hope they’re doing well.” She shrugged.

“So are the rest of us.” I agreed.

“They’re only in forty Target stores. It’s kind of like a Willy Wonka hunt. I don’t even have one.”

And with that, my time was up. She bade me well, though I saw her repeatedly throughout the convention. Let me say this as plainly as I can: if you ever have a chance to meet Marty, go for it. She is, without doubt, one of the funniest and most entertaining people I have ever been in a room with, and can regale you with stories from the bizarre (standing in a trash can full of soda slush and dumpster diving for Krispy Kremes) to just being her highly theatrical self (bacon theater. I kid you not). She’s exactly the kind of person you want to be a fan of, because she’s approachable, a complete riot, and will leave you grinning like an idiot.

At least, that’s how she affects me.

(Follow Marty’s deviant art page at http://sadwonderland.deviantart.com/ and on etsy at http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=6730192 .)

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