By Britton Summers

While Oklahoma City isn’t as iconic as other comic book settings such as New York City, Gotham City or Metropolis, it isn’t for a lack of trying.

There have been a lot of local comic book creators who have started to create Oklahoma centric comic books. 

OCCC professor and residential comic book aficionado Jeff Provine is the main curator and writer for the Okie Comics magazine that has been in print for a while. 

Okie Comics offers the chance for Oklahoma comic book creators to create Oklahoma centric comic books.

Provine was initially inspired to make Okie Comics after he met other comic creators at local cons and at local comic shops while promoting his own webcomic The Academy.

According to Provine, with there being a lot of great talents in Oklahoma, he wanted to find a way to show those talents. 

“While I was working on some articles for local free magazines (you know, the kinds outside of restaurants), I noted that the page rates were fairly similar to indie artists. So, I thought, “Why not a local comic book?” Marvel has always been applauded for its real-world setting of New York with Spidey web-slinging up Fifth Avenue, so why not tell stories with recognizable Oklahoma settings to appeal to our own audience? No reason why not, so I went for it!” Provine said. 

While Provine has been the driving force behind Okie Comics, he has not done it singlehandedly. 

Provine has met many of the artists that contribute to Okie Comics at conventions and has partnered with those who had a story that matched their styles. 

“So far Okie Comics has worked with dozens of artists with Oklahoma connections, whether living here or having lived here, and I’m always excited to meet more,” Provine said. 

The goals of Okie Comics are 1) to showcase talent in Oklahoma and 2) to show Oklahomans that they can make stories to be proud of. 

People express to Provine how they keep Okie Comics on their bookshelves and have been moved to tears by his portrayals, such as the Trail of Tears’ connection to rose rocks and of a widow visiting the Will Rogers Garden. 

While Provine is the main writer on Okie Comics, there are other writers/artists who contribute to the magazine. 

“Ideation is the tricky part of creativity, coming up with something that will take an awesome form once it’s worked on. With each issue being an anthology, I worked to jumpstart the process by producing lots of scripts. After we worked through most of what I worked up, more people were ready to go with their own ideas,“ he said. 

Okie Comics meets people who are passionate about writing and have submitted their stories to him. 

“We’ve worked on scripts together to polish them up for later publication. The publishing industry is turning a lot of interest to graphic novels and comics, and much of their push is writer-artists, which I can see since that cuts in half the odds of a life-event that interrupts the work,” Provine said. 

Okie Comics takes about six months to come together as a whole. 

Provine said that the idea usually comes first, then a few weeks to complete scripts, and a couple of months for the artists to put the artwork together from the scripts.

The art process is also broken down into stages: with the thumbnails and pencils coming first, then the inks, then coloring, and then finally lettering. Provine and the others then edit the story for typos, spacing and layouts with the stories and advertisements. 

Finally, work is sent to the printer, for production and distribution, either by hand or online. 

Okie Comics ran quarterly before COVID. Now they’re publishing online stories that are printed via internet crowdfunding sporadically. 

“As the world comes back together, I’m hoping to see more Okie Comics back on the streets again, and it will be interesting to see what form that takes,” Provine said optimistically.