Martina Fugazzotto

You may have seen Martina Fugazzotto on MTV.  But she's over that now.  She's moved on.

These days she draws mystery comics about how she lost her virginity.






What were you doing before working as a designer for gURL.com?

I was pretty much doing the same thing, just not getting paid to do it... I used gURL.com when I was a teenager (it was one of the first myspaces in the 90s) and it had a gURLguide to html that helped me build my first website when I was 15. Let me just tell you about this site because I was really proud of it: it was called "MartinaWorld" and the title bar featured a solarized photo of me surrounded by roses. The rest of it was photoshop-filtered photos of my boyfriend Jimmy and journal entries, which I guess would now be considered "blogging". But back in my day, we didn't have fancy words like that to describe the internet. The "net" just WAS.

Anyway, the design sense of gURL (both the visual design and the web architecture) really affected my overall understanding of design because I was so into the site when I was developing my own skills. I started
working at gURL while I was still in school at Pratt Institute. Before that, I was doing freelance illustration. Before that, I was on a show on MTV for a while. But that has nothing to do with design. I wanted to be a celeb socialite.

Working for gURL.com and being in your mid-twenties obviously takes you back to when you were a teenager, wrestling with issues that teen girls still deal with today, but what's the best part of reminiscing? Is it the hindsight that lets you laugh at it, the comfort that it's over, or something else?

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As regressive as it may be, I think I was most comfortable as a teenager. I was just really good at it and I had alot of fun. A project that forces me to reminisce is my real-life-experience comic series that I create for the site. The most recent one I created is "The Sex Mission", which is about being in highscool and assuming I was the only virgin left. Of course after the whole incident I realized I was the first NON-virgin out of all my friends. But making comics about my naive teenage experiences helps me turn them from embarrassing repressed memories into funny stories. And I get ALOT of emails from teen girls who read my comics and can relate, and hopefully I can give them some insight to help them make better decisions for themselves.

In creating content for teenagers as an adult, I've come to realize that the know-it-all attitude they have (and I had) is actually a positive thing: for example, if I hadn't been so confident about MartinaWorld, I wouldn't have spent so much time and effort perfecting my html. I've also realized how creative teens are. Teenagers are alot more aware than us "adults" give them credit for.

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How does your own style and your other art, your illustrations, compare to the scheme of gURL.com?

My personal work is incredibly similar to gURL's style, except I would say that the work I do for gURL is like "Martina Jr". They both use bright colors and big shapes, and screw around with the pop culture concept of "girly". But my personal work is about fantasy and has ended up having alot of sexual energy in it, which is something that just happened subconsciously. I didn't even realize it until people started telling me they were excited by my drawings. Then I thought, oh... I guess that's why I draw them. But I never do anything that's overtly sexual.

I have a character who lives in my mind named Jessica and I've felt compelled to draw out her life, so she's become very real to me. She's the subject of everything I create, whether I place her in the piece or not. I've even started dressing like her. I guess that sounds a little creepy. I've never actually seen that written out before.

I heard you make action figures?

I make Jessica dolls! I'm actually creating a Living Dead Doll right now for a show that opens on Halloween. I'm going to make a dead Jessica, of course. But I'd love to make my own serious quality Jessica dolls. At comic-con this year, I saw a display of beautiful Japanese figurines that were the most delicately crafted action figures I've ever seen. They were as skillfully and tastefully done as classic sculptures. That's what I want to make.

Some of your illustration work outside of gURL.com has a similar feel to it but I find it a bit sexier. How would you describe your illustration style?

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gURL.com is about being strong and honest about yourself as a girl, and it deals with things that all girls go through but might be too embarrassed to talk about. The internet is unique because it's interactive but also offers anonymity. Adversely, my own work can't be anonymous, so it's highly personal even when it's not about me. I'm totally into girliness, but not exactly REAL girliness. The girly girl image that I portray in my work is a heightened version of "girl" that mixes every female stereotype/fantasy I've ever known. I have multiple heart and star tattoos. I like that image of girliness.

Websites

http://www.martinamartina.com
http://www.gURL.com
http://www.mezcotoyz.com/lddartshow2006.html

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