For a self-identifying "misfit, Emily Hampshire has really never been more popular.
Between filming new television shows and movies and several years on the clock as Stevie Budd at the Schitts Creek Motel the Canadian actor recently found herself in a position to bring yet another extremely relatable character to life.
I was approached to do a comic book, which I'd never thought about in my life, Hampshire said. I've been writing a lot for television and stuff, but not comic books.
Hampshires first graphic novel, Amelia Aierwood: Basic Witch, (Z2 Comics, April 2023) was born from a juxtaposition of childhood reminiscing and a present-day viewing of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.
[As a kid] I didn't feel like there were comics for me as much as there were for my brother, she said. I liked the misfits in the kind of YA books like 'Ramona' or Judy Blume, so I wanted to take that misfit character and put her into graphic novels for my younger self. Like, if there was a graphic novel I would want to read as a kid, it would be this.
Amelia the character, the black sheep of her famous witch family, was fully conceived from a night of guilty-pleasure television. Hampshire said that an episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians made her think: If she had been born into a similar situation, she had no doubt she'd be "kicked off the show" just like Amelia, sort of.
Amelia is not not me, she said. That was kind of where Amelia came from the black sheep of this very famous family of super witches. She gets kicked out, cut out of the show, and because her magic is a little off-brand, she has to find her own kind of magic that had been percolating.