Milkfed Criminal Masterminds, the creative headquarters of comic book rock stars Kelly Sue DeConnick (Bitch Planet, Captain Marvel) and Matt Fraction (Sex Criminals, Hawkeye), occupies an inconspicuous green house in the sort of shady suburban Portland neighborhood where you might conceivably find porn in a tree. Inside, the word "inconspicuous" doesn’t apply, but when you’re in the home of the author of a book called Bitch Planet, subtlety isn’t the order of the day.
In front of a wall of cerulean bookshelves loaded with comics and action figures, sprightly executive assistant Kit Cox assembles the team around the kitchen table while Fraction putters in the kitchen and DeConnick organizes colored pencils by hue. Along with Cox, the crew includes Managing Editor Lauren Sankovitch and "Majordomo" Wendy Klein, who manages most of the household duties. Here’s what DeConnick and Fraction told me about running their company, crossover appeal between their comics, and how compasses work.
On day-to-day operations at Milkfed Criminal Masterminds:
KELLY SUE DeCONNICK: It’s like a theater troupe. It takes a lot of people to get these books out the door. There are people who sit and do the whole thing themselves, top to bottom. Those people don’t live in my house.
MATT FRACTION: We were lucky enough to get to a place where we could hire these three amazing, competent, capable people to help us run our lives both professionally and personally, so we could not just be the writers we wanted to be, but the parents we wanted to be.