Aircel's One-Man Assembly Line

PATRICK McEOWN: We should fill in some detail here. There was a period after you and I grew apart from Barry (Blair) and he was still working and neither of us were drawing much. I was contributing the odd one-page thing to Samurai. This was around '82 or '83, maybe '84. I was getting into the local punk scene and you were definitely in bands. A friend of Barry's was in the insulation business, which bottomed out. This guy was looking for something to invest his money in, and Barry convinced him that comics were a good idea. So they started this publishing company --

DAVE COOPER: -- called Aircel.

McEOWN: They thought it was pretty irreverent to keep the name of the insulation company. How very, very imaginative. And that should give people an idea of the mindset behind the whole thing and what we had to struggle against. So they started this business and slowly hired everybody who had ever worked on the zines or the self-published stuff way back then.

COOPER: It became hugely popular. They were selling thousands and thousands of books and Barry was leasing a big Camaro or somesuch muscle car.

McEOWN: I think somebody bought a house. It was the black-and-white boom, before the glut.

COOPER: Well, Barry showed up at my house one night -- I hadn't seen him in years -- in this shiny new Camaro. I thought, "Holy shit! Things have really changed." To his credit, he always felt like he had to come back and hire people who were with him from the beginning.

McEOWN: At the same time, we knew the material. Who else was really going to do it? It's not like he could approach professionals or anything. He didn't know anybody.

COOPER: I guess he was under pressure to expand and get more books out there.

McEOWN: It quickly went from just the flagship Samurai thing, to two or three more right away. I don't remember.

COOPER: There was Dale Keown's one, Dragonring.

McEOWN: That was a lot later. When it first started, Samurai was the main one and then we started doing Elflord again. I was hired on while they were still doing Samurai. I was living on my own and working part-time and going to school part-time. Barry started getting me to do parts of the book. Quickly it was growing; the chronology was Samurai, Elflord, Stark Future, and maybe Dragonring. All of the other crap came later, when it started to be a money making thing. About a year or two after it started, you came back on board. You did some little pieces in Elflord and did Jake Thrash.

COOPER: I did a bunch of little short stories in many of those books, which were just incredibly awful. Completely un-thought-out and badly drawn. It was strange, because I really didn't have much interest in drawing, but when Barry came back and I saw that there was money to be made, I thought, "Well, OK. I'll do comics. What the hell?" But my chops were completely gone.

McEOWN: I disagree, but there you go.

COOPER: I'll show you some of that stuff, because I don't think you're remembering it accurately.

McEOWN: I remember when it came in. I thought, "Holy ... Wow."

COOPER: Are we talking about the same stuff? The stuff that was written by Gordon Derry? Those little short stories?

McEOWN: I can't remember the "plot" of this one, but I remember the King had a T-shirt that said "King" on it. A medieval story where everybody was dressed up in Star Trek clothes with labels saying what they were on them. It was awesome.

COOPER: Maybe you thought I was kidding! That's a good example of the level of research I was doing back then. I'm still the same way, actually.

McEOWN: It was pretty minimal back then. Your work is much more baroque now. But even then, you were working in color with markers and doing lots of rendering. The color in some of that stuff was incredible, even when Barry would get you to do bits in the actual Elflord story, the main feature. I remember being laid low by your grasp of color. The quality of the rendering you wrung from those crappy markers.

COOPER: Oh yeah. I don't think any of us knew about paint or anything like that. We were all just using markers.

McEOWN: Pantone markers. They were top of the line, but there are so many restrictions to working with that stuff.

COOPER: Oh, yeah. We were really pushing the envelope with that stuff; blending and doing stuff that they weren't designed to do.

McEOWN: Maybe it was par for the course with people who were doing industrial design, but none of us had any instruction. The thing about those markers is once it's down, it's down. You can't fix it.

COOPER: Few of us were using opaque paints to go over it.

McEOWN: Nobody knew anything about blue line. We were coloring on the originals, which is absolutely unheard of.

COOPER: It was crazy.

McEOWN: It was stupid. There was so much that we didn't know about craft. If we were cranking out underground comics or alternative comics or whatever they were called at the time, it wouldn't have mattered. But we were ostensibly trying to be professional.

COOPER: The other night Julie and I were watching a movie and one of the characters was using a Pantone marker and Julie said, "God, I wonder how many brain cells you lost back then?" The rooms would be just thick with that weird, noxious smell.

McEOWN: You'd look at your fingers at the end of the day and they'd be black from all of the colors mixed on the tips of your finger.

COOPER: I remember working in my basement when I was 18 or something, still living with my folks. My dad would come home from work and he couldn't believe how thick the smell was down there. It was awful. The paper would get so saturated with whatever the hell those markers were made of.

McEOWN: You did incredibly layered rendering, like you were laying down glazes in oil painting.

COOPER: We just weren't informed, so we didn't know it wasn't the right medium to use. We just had an idea of what the outcome had to be.

McEOWN: Well, not even that, because the printing wouldn't even pick up the subtleties of the blending, but you were just so obsessed with making that thing look as cool as you could.

COOPER: Some of the texture we used to get came from four or five layers of different colors.

McEOWN: It's sad, actually, that we weren't really thinking about the stories or content. We were just trying to meet this demand, to a large degree. The work was pretty unsophisticated in a lot of ways, but pretty technically adroit for a bunch of kids. Well, let's just say it showed promise; it really stood out even then, I think in part because you were really working on your own, not in the studio. You weren't influenced by anybody's work in a huge way.

COOPER: But I also wasn't really motivated to make good work.

McEOWN: Well, good work on those commercial terms. We were churning out product.

COOPER: When I look back, I can't remember why I did it, except for the paycheck. I often tell people that I was a hack in the beginning and then became a decent artist. Most artists are the opposite, they start out totally uncompromising, working so that they can create something beautiful and then a lot of them gradually become hacks because they need to pay the rent. But for some reason, I was really into making money so I could go out drinking and do whatever. I remember we used to get a check for something like 2 or 3 hundred dollars every week, right?

McEOWN: I used to make $1,000 a month. At 17, that was a pretty big deal.

COOPER: We'd get the check on Friday, and I'd always have spent it all by Monday, just from drinking and going to restaurants and taking cabs everywhere. These odd little careers came very easy to us. Most people have to spend years and years trying to get a gig like that, and it just fell into our laps. For me, it came way before I even realized that's what I wanted.

McEOWN: For my part, I think I got locked into doing a particular kind of work really early and didn't really develop outside of perceived market demands in a way that I think you did. By being isolated from the studio, you weren't in the crush of the everyday grind.

COOPER: The atmosphere of the studio was definitely really nasty and conformist. More of a nerdy frat house and place to goof around than to get to the root of things and really find out what you're all about.

McEOWN: I would try and work personal elements into my work, but it was the wrong venue for it. It is very much like some of the animation studios I've been to, especially the degree of repression, sexual frustration and this really negative energy flying around.

COOPER: There was a lot of teasing.

McEOWN: A lot of back-biting.

COOPER: There was so much gossipy stuff going on.

McEOWN: Oh my God, I know! [Laughter.] It was always about whoever was in the other room. It kept us divided. It was completely unprofessional, and yet so typical.

COOPER: That was all initiated by Barry, as well. I remember he would bad-mouth one guy at breakfast, and I'd happen to be in on lunch the same day and he'd be having lunch with the subject of his breakfast bad-mouthing, but this time dissing someone new. He was like creating this whole fucking tumultuous weird energy. It really played with people's insecurities.

McEOWN: He'd get everyone to gang up on someone and then be ganged up on. It only happened to me a few times where I really felt it. Just be glad you weren't part of it. But do you think being apart contributed to your more unique approach?

COOPER: I don't know if it was as a result of that or not. The few times I tried to work in the studio, I'd spend all my time wandering around chatting and annoying everybody. Like we said before, I really prefer being alone with my thoughts when I'm drawing. And although I'm social, or at least I was when I was a teen-ager, drawing isn't part of that. Besides, that was an odd time. It wasn't really the way that I am usually, before and after my teen-age years. I'm pretty much a recluse as an adult and you told me that in school I was also really social.

McEOWN: You were super-gregarious, a class clown, when we were in junior-high school. But we were never in the same class.

Your work deals almost exclusively with your interior landscape. It's an interesting thing because outwardly you're not this störm und drang kind of guy. I've had people ask me so many times what you're like. They assume that you're this reclusive Crumb-like misanthrope. But you're actually quite personable, and to the average person on the street, you're quite well adjusted -- unlike a lot of people in comics, who often have a hard time fitting in. That's changed over the years, obviously, as the medium has come out of the closet. But at the time -- 1987, or so -- there were only a few good things kicking around. Obviously, all of the people who were doing work in the '60s, a lot of them were still around. But that wasn't even really available to us in Ottawa. What came to be known as alternative comics were pretty scarce.

COOPER: We had very limited exposure to subculture stuff.

McEOWN: Chester Brown's Yummy Fur was happening. I think I was the only person I knew in our group who was reading that. Love and Rockets was probably the most successful in terms of recruiting readers from the mainstream, but even so...

COOPER: Most of us were totally resistant to anything that wasn't mainstream or a pale imitation of mainstream comics.

McEOWN: Totally. Most of what passed for "alternative" was just farm-league stuff by all of these people who had ambitions to work for Marvel.

COOPER: I remember when Yummy Fur first came out, I didn't even pick it up off of the rack. I thought it was just so crude looking. The only thing that I remember about it was some sort of censorship buzz because Diamond refused to carry it or something like that. It was actually you who pointed that stuff out to me a couple years later and said that it was worth giving a try. I don't remember the whole context of the situation, but we were in Arthur's, here in Ottawa. I guess I was saying that I didn't see anything in comics that really inspired me. I felt like we were just going along the same path we'd always been on. You pointed out the Ed the Happy Clown collection. That was such an eye-opener. I guess I was just totally ready to absorb that sort of thing. Ed was the most perfect book ever to me. And there was Joe Matt's stuff in Snarf. What else? Clowes, Bagge, Burns, all the greats. It was like the floodgates had suddenly opened. Crumb eventually, but you were into Crumb way, way before I was.

McEOWN: That was a little later, around the time Aircel was starting to break up for the first or second time. As I remember it, then there was a period when nothing was happening, around the time I moved to Montreal and you were still in Ottawa. Barry had sold the company to Malibu. Your last big project had been Jake Thrash, a miniseries that was never finished because it was a color series, which became too expensive to publish when the bottom fell out of the market. There was a switch over and you started doing stuff like Gun Fury for them. That's when I remember visiting you in your dad's basement. You had the electronic synthesizer drum kit on one side and on the other was this drawing area with stacks of books, markers and pages upon pages of finished and semi-finished artwork. You had it down like an assembly line. It was insane. You were just crapping it out -- you had cigarettes and coffee going all of the time -- in this darkened basement with one light.

COOPER: It was a gloomy, gloomy time. My parents and I had just moved to that new apartment. It was a duplex. I wasn't able to keep a traditional drum set, because it would have been too loud for the neighbors, so I had to sell it and buy an electronic one, which was completely useless -- even if I had my headphones on full blast, I could hear the stick hitting the plastic louder than I could hear the synthetic drum sound in my earphones. So it was just like, "clickety-click click," but with this Flock of Seagulls drum sound way in the distance.

The strange thing about that whole period when I was working for Barry like an assembly line, was that I was starting to really feel like comics could be an important form of expression for me. But at the same time, I'd put myself in a position where I was having to produce mounds and mounds of total garbage.

McEOWN: Well, remember it was around this time that you started working on Puke and Explode. There was a lot of carry-over from the approach you used for Gun Fury.

COOPER: I was using a lot of the same marker and brush techniques. And my storytelling skills were lacking. I was really into melodrama and poetic "meaning" that didn't mean much. I was reading way too much Kurt Vonnegut at the time.

McEOWN: And around this time, you started moving around Ontario, which fueled the next series, didn't it?

COOPER: Chronic Idiocy, and A Big Someplace? They were mostly about finding a voice as a storyteller. Learning what makes characters. I was really influenced by Peter Bagge at them time. I wanted nothing more than to be able to tell a good yarn the way he does. But gag cartooning simply isn't what I'm made for. So to look at that stuff now is pretty embarrassing; you're left wondering what the point was supposed to be. And the drawing is so weirdly stylized and obsessive. It's gross to look at.

[To read the rest of this interview, please see The Comics Journal #245.]

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