NYCC 2022 Interview With Marvel's Peach Momoko on Demon Wars

Peach Momoko at NYCC 2022, explained

Peach Momoko arrived at New York Comic Con 2022 as one of the most sought-after artists at Marvel. She won an Eisner Award for best cover artist in 2021, and she had already launched Demon Days as part of Marvel's Stormbreakers class of 2020, a series set in her own Momoko-verse that blends Marvel superheroes with Japanese folklore. In it, the Hulk appears as an Oni.

This NYCC 2022 interview with Marvel's Peach Momoko is built from an e-mail exchange, and it fills in what the convention coverage could not: how she got here, how she works, and what is coming next in Demon Wars. Her answers are brief and plainspoken, and several of them puncture assumptions fans have made about her.

Momoko is known for her love of anime and Studio Ghibli, and for early pieces of wide-eyed, stoic-faced young girls with a haunted quality. Her husband and art manager, Yo Mutsu, described the approach on Marvel's Voices: she is not chasing cute or pretty images but the inner beauty and darkness of girls going through adolescence, shown with almost no facial expression, so that emotion has to come through the eyes.

Where the name Peach Momoko comes from

It is natural to read the name as a nod to Princess Mononoke or the folktale of Momotaro, the Peachboy. Momoko says no. Peach Momoko is her illustrator pseudonym, she wrote, and it has nothing to do with either. She came up with it in school while goofing around with friends, and it stuck.

It is a small answer, but it sets the tone. The interview does not build a myth around her.

Watercolors in a digital industry

Her signature tool is watercolor, which takes more time, space and attention than the digital methods most modern comics creators use under deadline pressure. The payoff is a look that readers can spot immediately, with shapely designs, careful skin detail and very expressive eyes. Her covers have become highly coveted for that reason.

Asked to pick a favorite among her designs, she declined. She said she is happy with all of them, and that she feels able to find just the right characteristics of both yokai and Marvel characters.

From fashion design to Heavy Metal

Her career began as a middle-school passion for designing fashion and clothes. Early work leans into anatomy, identity and the changes of adolescence, and in another life she might have been a tattoo artist, which suits an artist whose watercolors share something with tattoo art. She was never a working tattooist, she clarified, only in the process of learning. She gave herself a milestone of age 30: if she was not making a living in art by then, she would apprentice under a tattooist. Before 30, comics were working, so she kept going.

Her first break came in the winter 2013 and spring 2014 issues of Girls and Corpses magazine. The magazine's owner, Robert Steven Rhine, took her to her first major convention, Comikaze, where she met an editor from Heavy Metal. Through that connection she took part in the magazine's 40th-anniversary art exhibition in summer 2017, and she met Grant Morrison, then Heavy Metal's editor-in-chief. Short stories that she wrote and drew ran in issues 288 and 290, and they drew attention from the big publishers, Marvel among them.

She still thinks of herself as an artist first and a writer second. Her advice on finding a style is simple: draw every day, visit museums, read art books, comics and manga, watch anime and CG animation, and study as many styles as possible. Mostly, she says, she just enjoys drawing.

Culture shock in Portland

Momoko moved to Portland, Oregon, in 2010 to live with Mutsu, whom she has been married to for over a decade. About a year in she experienced her first jolt of culture shock, which was hard to live through and also sparked her art. Longing for home fed a body of work steeped in Japanese influences and culture, and she moved back to Japan in 2013.

Demon Wars: the Momoko-verse takes on Civil War

Demon Wars is Momoko's sequel to Demon Days and a reimagining of Marvel's Civil War storyline, the same one that inspired the 2016 film and appears in the Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 video game. Momoko writes and draws it.

The story follows Mariko Yashida, often portrayed as Wolverine's romantic interest. In this version Logan is her pet dog, a twist that earns the series part of its charm. Demon Wars: Iron Samurai set the tone with a world that is half fairy tale and half demonic nightmare, a stark but lightly colored setting that mixes traditional comics with hints of manga technique.

The second part, Demon Wars: Down in Flames, brings Civil War into contact with another classic Marvel storyline, the Phoenix Saga. In a Marvel press release, Momoko explained her thinking. She writes by considering which Marvel characters suit yokai roles, and she wanted to introduce Hi No Tori, the Fire Bird, because it stands for life and destruction, themes of Demon Wars. Jean Grey, as Phoenix, was a perfect fit. Magik, she said, had the characteristics of a punkish oni, so she is part of the Momoko-verse too.

She enjoyed drawing Phoenix and Magik communicating mainly through fire. She also admitted she was not familiar with the Phoenix Force stories, so she researched them for the issue.

For readers new to the Momoko-verse, the entry point is easy to state. Demon Days introduced the world and its folklore redesigns, and Demon Wars continues it with a story that borrows Marvel's best-known crossover shapes. The approach is consistent: Marvel characters are cast into yokai roles, and their personalities decide the casting.

Her recent cover work gives a sense of how far she reaches. Variant covers include Fortnite x Marvel Zero War #3, Ant-Man Vol. 3 #3 and Star Wars: Revelations #1.

What happened at Peach Momoko's first NYCC signing

Momoko made her first-ever podcast appearance on Marvel's Voices around this time, and she also made her first New York Comic Con appearance. The appearance became the subject of a controversy that Popverse, ReedPop's own site, covered first.

According to the testimonies Popverse collected, she was signing up to 10 items for free for every visitor to the table. The generosity was real. The problem was that nothing stopped people from rejoining the back of the line, which created one of the worst traffic jams of the convention and, in the account of Mutsu and others, collectors taking advantage of her. Early reports said a fight broke out. Both Momoko and Mutsu ended up leaving the booth.

Mutsu described the moment in an e-mail to Popverse. Momoko had earphones in, he said, and heard loud yelling at the same moment he did. Security went over, he followed and told the person that they were no longer welcome at the signing. By then she was overwhelmed and scared, blamed herself for creating the problem, struggled to breathe, and hid under the table. She was shocked that people would fight over a signature.

The account above rests on Popverse's reporting and on Mutsu's statement to it, and the details come from those testimonies instead of a published timeline.

The incident is part of the story of her first convention, and it needs no embellishment. A creator who offered her fans a gift found out how quickly a free-signing policy can turn into a crowd-control problem.

Sources

• Peach Momoko, Wikipedia — career, awards and Marvel work