We recently connected with Joy Lin-Siegle and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Joy thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you tell us about a time that your work has been misunderstood? Why do you think it happened and did any interesting insights emerge from the experience?

When you share your artistic work with the world on the internet, it’s impossible to please everyone because of people’s various backgrounds and experiences. I’ve been called a slew of names that I don’t care to repeat here. I’ve made an effort to reflect and make sure that I didn’t give people a good reason to do so, but sometimes it is difficult to not get upset.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My artistic journey started out with comedy. I had always been a fan of standup comedy, going to comedy clubs on a weekly basis. One year, I was in Fort Worth, receiving the “Innovator of the Year” teaching award from Texas Classroom Teachers Association. I had written a somewhat humorous speech, and it made the whole room laugh out loud. Later that night, I went to a local comedy club that was having an open mic. I remember sitting there, thinking, “This is terrible. My speech this morning made more people laugh than this!” I went home to Austin and wrote my first comedy script to memorize and perform. Luckily, I had a great audience my first official time on stage, and I just kept going from there.

About a year into standup comedy, I realized I had so much material about bad dating that I could turn it into a screenplay. So, unlike most writers’ first script, my first script was a full-length feature instead of a short script. I learned (badly) how to set up a screenplay myself online. Looking back, it’s pretty embarrassing how terrible my formatting was. Luckily, the judges at several film festivals were able to look past it because my first screenplay won several screenwriting awards that actually paid me monetary rewards. I tried my hand at short scripts after that, and my first short script also found similar success, and my screenwriting career grew from there.

Shortly after I became a screenwriter, Hachette Children’s Group in UK reached out to me after having watched my 6-part animated series on TED-Ed “If Superpowers Were Real” to write a 4-part comic book series “Superhero Science.” The series explored the real-life implications of having superpowers in a fun and educational way. After that series was well-reviewed by many book critics, they commissioned me to write another 4-part comic book series “Monster Science” that explored the science behind popular monsters. Once that series hit the shelves, I did my TED Talk on how to interest students in science with fun pop culture references, and I have been invited to speak on the matter 6 times at San Diego Comic Con and at pop-up events at museums.

Somewhere along the way, I started dating a hilarious guy Alex who kept me laughing. As a love letter to him, I commissioned a talented young artist Nohra Johnston fresh out of art school to create web comics for us. It was only meant to be a short-term thing, but Alex ended up commissioning Nohra to do a special comic to propose to me, forever cementing her importance to us. We kept sending Nohra short scripts to draw, so our web comic Alloy Comics (Alex+Joy=Alloy) documented our courtship, engagement, marriage, parenthood, and our child’s infancy and toddlerhood. Once we had accumulated enough episodes, we started publishing them on social media to grow a following.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

As an educator, I am very proud of my 8 published comic books as well as the 6-part animated series on TED-Ed. Making science more fun and relatable has been my life-long mission. I travel to different conferences to teach other teachers how to be more engaging with the curriculum, and I hope I can continue to do that for the rest of my career. The most rewarding aspect is knowing that what I teach doesn’t just end in the classroom. By teaching other educators, there is potential for my lessons to ripple out to generations of learnings. I’d like to imagine that my books, videos, or lessons somewhere inspired a child to eventually grow up to invent the magic carpet so I can fly upstairs when I’m old. The possibilities are fun to imagine.

Do you think there is something that non-creatives might struggle to understand about your journey as a creative? Maybe you can shed some light?

Different artforms have different core demographics. One thing I’ve encounter that has been very frustrating is people’s anger towards my creations when they are not my main audience. Many people online would make it a mission to try to hurt your feelings if they do not enjoy your work. It takes a lot of discipline to not engage negatively with those people. I think sometimes it is difficult for non-creatives to understand that not all content was created for them specifically. If it’s not their thing, they should just scroll past it instead of choosing to be hateful. In general, everyone could give everyone else some grace and assume best intent. Easier said than done, of course, I struggle with it myself sometimes, but at least I try.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.patreon.com/AlloyComics
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/alloycomics/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AlloyComics/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joy-lin-austin/
• Other: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/AlloyComics https://www.reddit.com/user/AlloyComics/ https://www.webtoons.com/en/challenge/dashboardEpisode?titleNo=747447