Q: Why are you called, ‘Mission Mini-Comix’?
A: We’re called Mission Mini-Comix because we started drawing in the Mission District of San Francisco, and most of the group books we make are very small. This is when we were young and didn’t realize ‘Mini-Comics’ were this whole big genre that ranged from sloppily photocopied tracks like ours to huge, ornate book binding projects with print runs of 8 with each issue hand bound using the fur of albino tigers. Needless to say, we keep it quick and sloppy. In fact, usually we print 100s (if not thousands) of each of our “issues”, and our comics are usually of the one 8.5″x11″ sheet of paper makes an 8 page mini-comic variety. So yeah, really mini. Then, there was the fact that a now defunct record store called “Mission Records” (that played all ages punk shows in San Francisco for a large part of the 90’s) played a prominent part in our youths, so the moniker was an unspoken homage to the home of the musical greats. The most common assumption about our name is that we are saying we are on some “Mission” to create mini-comix or that we are making mini-comix to fulfill some larger agenda. These are both correct interpretations as well, but they are wrong.

Q: How many people are in your collective?
A: It greatly fluctuates. There has probably been dozens of contributors over the decade or so we’ve been drawing together. These days the core group is probably somewhere around… 6? 7? I don’t want to name names, but some of you guys don’t show up as much as you used to. I think the most artists we’ve had in a single minicomic was 7… Although maybe it was 8. 8 would be the maximum unless people started doing something really fucking crazy like drawing pages together.

Q: What is your work process?
A: Well, generally, one person folds an 8.5×11″ piece of paper into 8 sections (once lengthwise and three times width wise… We will eventually have a video illustrating the process) and then draws a panel/page. If this is the first page drawn, then that is usually the cover, and is sometimes marked in some way to illustrate this fact. Then they hand off the piece of paper and someone else draws a page. This continues until all 8 pages/panels have been drawn on, at which point, they are taken to our friendly neighborhood photocopy dispensaries and mass quantities of comix are produced, assembled, cut and folded. This leads to some wacky shit, yo. Recently, we’ve tried a strategy where one person writes out the entire comic, and then everyone else draws the remaining panels/pages. This keeps the comic from being quite as wacky and introduces some continuity and author’s voice all up in there.

Q: Where does the magic happen?
A: That has changed over the years too. We generally meet at Mikey’s house, although we’ve also done it at Rio’s house, Antonio’s house a couple times… We used to meet at Muddy Water’s on 16th street almost exclusively, but now we are lazy and prefer environments where we can drink beer and don’t have to wait until people are done shooting up in the bathrooms before evacuating our bowels.

Q: Do you guys have a website yet?
A: Kind of