MotU Creator Spotlight: Taxidermied Cougar

Welcome back to our creator spotlight series! We interviewed some of the creators from the Musuem of the Uncanny anthology, which is now live on Kickstarter. Today’s spotlight features the team who is bringing you “Taxidermied Cougar”: writer Leah Loertscher and artist Sierra Barnes.

How long have you been creating comics or working in your role?

Leah Loertscher: This is my first time creating comics; I’ve been writing in different formats as a hobby since I was a preteen.

Sierra Barnes: I launched my first webcomic Hans Vogel is Dead in 2015, and have been doing comics ever since!

Who or what are some of your creative influences?

LL: In general, I am inspired by fantasy, when I was a kid, I was greatly influenced by reading The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Lord of the Rings has a soft spot for me still to this day. Other than that, I try to tell life lessons or draw from experiences that I have had to make sure what I write is meaningful.

SB: I’m a big fan of art styles from all over, some of my favorites include Mucha, Bilibin, and medieval European marginalia. I’m a sucker for stark lines and interesting use of shapes!

What drew you to working on indie comics in particular?

LL: A friend said that I should give writing a script for a comic a try, so I did! It’s been a wonderful experience.

SB: I started making indie comics because I felt like there was a space there for me to explore stories that were weirder, that swapped genres, that played with conventions in new and fun ways. There’s a freedom and intimacy when the space is smaller that I really love, and the community has been nothing but supportive and welcoming!

What inspired you to write this particular story?

LL: For this comic, I looked to my past experiences of what was scary and unexplained. Mountain lions make a variety of creepy noises, and since I grew up on a ranch, sometimes you’d really hear something a little hair-raising calling out from the dark. At one point, I even saw a bear from much closer than I found comfortable moving out of the light and back into the shadows. I tried to capture some of that uncanny feeling, but also to have the cougar do something that would be worthy of putting it in the museum.

What did you enjoy most about making this story?

SB: Jamieson pitched me on this story by saying it was a monster cat that spoke with a human voice, and I am a total sucker for drawing a big scary critter. She doesn’t show up a ton, but I really liked getting to draw her–and her looming presence!–through the story!

If the object in your story were real, would you want to see it in the museum—or avoid it at all costs?

LL: I would probably avoid it; another reason I decided the object should be a taxidermied animal is that all of those things sure look creepy and unsettling to me. I grew up in a culture where some people’s houses were just full of animal heads, staring down at you from the walls, and I’m just like…

SB: Unlike most of our exhibits, I think our pretty kitty is pretty safe taxidermied! Though I guess I’d prefer she would be alive and on a wildlife preserve somewhere, or maybe a really ethical zoo.

What are some other comics or projects you’ve worked on (past or current)?

LL: I went into teaching English because I loved writing, and at the time I thought I’d have time for both. It turned out I only had time to teach; I wrote a lot of grants, lesson plans, and a few news articles (show casing what kids were up to, mostly). I got out of teaching not too long ago, so I’ve only recently started to return to writing. This is the first comic I have worked on.

SB: I have contributed to every Very Big Comics anthology so far, from Pub Crawl (writer), Fairytales from Mars (artist), and now Museum of the Uncanny (artist), and have also contributed to the Lower Your Sights charity anthology put on by Mad Cave Studio. As well as numerous other self-published mini comics, my big project is Hans Vogel is Dead, which began as a webcomic in 2015 and is now in print through Dark Horse Comics.

Which project are you proudest of, and why?

LL: It’s not really creative writing, but I reached out to several organizations in Idaho for a grant for the school I was teaching at and got a $21,000 grant to modernize the library. It was still using a card catalog and book check out was on a computer still running DOS. The printer was one of those that screams – a good old dot matrix printer. Most of the rooms were storage for trash – things teachers couldn’t throw away without doing paperwork that had accumulated for over thirty years. With the grant money and a lot of help from different students, I was able to get the library cleaned up and put in a computer lab. All that to say, formal writing is boring but useful sometimes.

SB: Hans Vogel is Dead definitely! It’s over 600 pages at this point of entirely my work, from writing to hand-letters to art to formatting.

Are you working on anything exciting right now that you’d like to share?

LL: I have recently put together a crochet pattern book – but I dunno if that’s the sort of thing this audience will care about. I’m working on writing some novels, but those take a long time and aren’t in sharing condition!

SB: Gotta plug Hans Vogel is Dead again! It’s an antifascist fairy tale about a German air force pilot who is killed in the Battle of Britain and wakes up in an afterlife of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, who must unpack his upbringing in Nazi Germany and become a better person. I love working on it and I’m very excited that Volume 2 will be released in December 2025 through Dark Horse Comics!

How can we find you online and learn more about your work?

LL:

SB:

Website: https://www.sierrabravoart.com/
Webcomic: https://www.hansvogelisdead.com/
Bluesky: @sierrabravoart.bsky.social
Instagram: @sierra_bravo_art

Head over to Kickstarter to get Museum of the Uncanny, which contains “Taxidermied Cougar” along with several other awesome stories.