Stacie Ponder eats, breathes and lives pop culture, one only has to read her weekly Toosday Toons comic strip in, The Sticks, to get to get a good look inside her fevered dreams of everything from Yoda and Darth Maul playing Connect Four to her love of horror flicks like Friday the 13th Part 2. Stacie also has a popular blog titled Final Girl where she muses about past and present horror movies. On top of all of that she works away as a professional inker for comic books such as the upcoming Bloodrayne: Plague of Dreams, based on the console video game.
What is most amazing about Stacie's work is her ability to create so much personality and detail with just a few simple lines. Just looking at one of her characters making a funny face will have you laughing out loud. In addition, Stacie has mastered comic timing in a comic strip, an art that is almost lost in the genre.
In what little free time she has left, Stacie forgoes sleep opting instead to play her favorite Mario games on her Game Boy Advance SP. Her love of this pudgy little Italian plumber from Brooklyn has inspired one of her latest strips for The Sticks, which shows the results of a fed up Mario getting sick of having to rescue Princess Peach all the time.
Q: How did you come up with The Sticks?
A: I don’t think there was any ONE thing that led to The Sticks...it was more a matter of several planets aligning. I had come up with a short script for a zombie comic that I had decided to produce myself rather than look for an art team. While doing character sketches for it one fateful evening, a little light bulb went off over my head and I thought..."Hmm. Stick figure zombies...yes! STICK FIGURE ZOMBIES!" and so I uh...drew They Won’t Stay Dead! using stick figures and my new style was born. Meanwhile, I had done a few autobiographical comic strips just for the fun of it, but I wasn’t terribly happy with them stylistically. Once I had settled on the stick figure style, though, I did a few more autobiographical strips and suddenly the two great tastes tasted great together. Or something like that. Anyway, it works for me and I’ve been doing Toosday Toons at The Sticks ever since.
Q: Where do you get your inspiration for The Sticks?
A: Literally EVERYWHERE! Toosday Toons is really all over the place and that’s what keeps it fun and interesting...for ME, anyway. One week I’ll just relate something that’s really happened to me (like buying and eating Klondike Bars or getting a song stuck in my head) or I’ll get inspired by a well-known property like Star Wars or The X-Files. It’s really just whatever strikes my fancy or whatever pops into my head...I just let the ideas come without over thinking it too much. The trick is then to take something mundane like eating a Klondike Bar into a funny and entertaining strip that people will actually want to read.
Q: Why Mario?
A: I’m a huge Mario fan! This strip idea actually came to me during a bout of Super Mario Brothers on my Game Boy (the super-sweet retro NES-controller-looking SP version!). Getting “The princess ain’t here!” at the end of each dungeon is the pits. I started to feel bad for poor Mario- he was going through an awful lot of trials and tribulations, only to be in the wrong castle every time. I know I’d get annoyed after a few wrong castles! Incidentally, I’ve never finished Super Mario Brothers despite having played it for years and years, since it was born on the NES. I’m ashamed of myself.