Going to California

GARY GROTH: I think we were just entering our post-Carl phase. You were working for The Democrat Chronicle. How did you come to leave that paper?

DEBBIE DRECHSLER: A friend invited me to teach this class in New Mexico and I thought, "This is it! I'm going to California now." So I figured I'd quit my job, go teach the class and then wend my way to California. And I did.

GROTH: What was the lure of California?

DRECHSLER: Well, the summer of love. I decided that I wanted to move to California. It just took me a little while to act on it. It just sounded like heaven to me. I'm sure the things that made it sound like heaven had nothing to do with it actually being California, but you know how you kind of get ideas stuck in your head and then they just won't go away? Maybe it was just about needing to be somewhere other than where I was.

GROTH: Just to backtrack for a second, what was your relationship with your parents like when you were living in Rochester in your late 20s and early 30s?

DRECHSLER: It was weird. I mean, my parents kept telling us how close we all were and so we sort of believed it except that I sort of didn't. I was unhappy. I had a difficult relationship with both of them, really.

I did actually go into therapy for the first time toward the end of when I was living in Rochester, in the early '80s. It was because of my relationship with Carl falling apart. The therapy got away from Carl and moved on to my parents. So that was the first time that I began to be able to articulate how wrong my family felt to me.

GROTH: Was that the first conscious inkling you had that things were really wrong?

DRECHSLER: No. I can remember not being entirely happy as child because I had these killer nightmares that I woke up screaming from. It just was suppressed.

GROTH: Was your therapy in Rochester illuminating? What did you learn about yourself and your relationship with your parents?

DRECHSLER: Oh, man... That I was way beyond help? It was illuminating but to answer the rest would be a whole other interview in itself. You could say that I could never have made comics without going -- I learned to try, at least, to see myself and the world around me without illusion. "Try" being the operative word here.

GROTH: So you went to New Mexico and taught for a brief time and then moved on to California?

DRECHSLER: Yeah. So basically in the summer of '86, I traveled cross-country, visited various friends, taught for a week in New Mexico and stayed with someone who had been in my class for another week. I actually almost thought of staying in Santa Fe, but then I thought, "Well no, I have to go to California. I can always come back if I don't like it."

GROTH: Did you move to Berkeley?

DRECHSLER: That's where I moved first because the only person I knew in California was in Berkeley.

GROTH: How did you meet Richard Sala?

DRECHSLER: We were both freelancing for the Chronicle. This would probably be in '87. And I'd seen his illustration work around and really liked it so when somebody introduced us, I did the whole gushy fan thing.

GROTH: And Richard turned you on to comics again?

DRECHSLER: Actually, Richard and Michael Dougan. Michael contacted me to say he liked my illustration. I think I even knew he did comics before Richard. It was right around the same time, in any case. So the two of them kind of worked on me.

What struck me about Richard's work was that he also came from a more fine-arts background. And Michael's drawing, to me, still looked more like comics, but he was telling the kind of stories I wanted to do myself. Richard's looked like fine arts in comics, and between the two of them I thought, "Oh! This is like a really cool idea! I would like to do this."

GROTH: Did Richard's example make it seem more possible to move from your fine-arts orientation into comics?

DRECHSLER: I'd already given up on the fine arts. I had been working for the newspapers for a number of years by that time and was perfectly happy: "I'm an illustrator. This is what I do best. This is what I like. You know, fine arts, schmartz. Who cares? So I won't get respect? I can live with that." I think it was more that I had an unformed notion of combining words and pictures, but not having it be comicy. It seemed to me that there was a definite distinction between how people drew for comics, especially funny comics and illustration. I guess that's not true of drama comics, but to me there was like this funny comic where you use kind of thicker -- like Mickey Mouse, Charles Schulz -- simpler, more iconographic kind of art? That wasn't what I wanted to do. It didn't click with me. It's not like I thought it was bad or anything, but that was comic art to me. But Richard's art didn't look like that. His art looked like his illustrations. It was less iconographic and more painterly in a way, but it still did what comics did. It opened up a possibility for me that I hadn't seen before.

GROTH: Richard introduced you to a lot of comics?

DRECHSLER: He did. And he introduced me to a lot of comics people. I mean, basically he took me to a signing at Comic Relief for the first Twisted Sisters book, so I met Diane Noomin and most of the women, at least the ones who lived in the Bay area who were in that book. That's how I connected with Diane and ended up doing a piece for the next Twisted Sisters book. Richard sent my work to [Drawn & Quarterly publisher] Chris Oliveros and Michael sent my work to Mike Gentile at New York Press and other people.

After I saw the stuff that both of them were doing, and Richard took me to Comic Relief and basically said, "Here's Julie Doucet and here's Chester Brown," and that kind of thing, I took home all these comics and was like, "Whoa!" I sat down and started doing comics. I did a bunch that didn't get published, then the first one published was in Drawn & Quarterly, "Going Steady." After that one, I think I started trying to do the syndicated thing; the square with four panels.

GROTH: With the idea of getting into an alternative weekly?

DRECHSLER: Right. Which worked. I did. I started publishing in the New York Press. I published for a year. I worked with Mike Gentile. I'm pretty sure Michael Dougan just sent Mike the sample comics that I had sent him. The next thing I know this guy's calling up and saying, "OK, you can be one of our comic artists." I was like, "Whoa!" It was like totally lucky.

GROTH: And the material you did for the New York Press is what eventually ended up to be the book, Daddy's Girl. Is that correct?

DRECHSLER: More or less. It also ran in The Stranger, like maybe a year after it ran in the New York Press. Actually there was probably some overlap. Basically I did it for a year and realized that that just wasn't where my storytelling desires lay.

GROTH: You've said that the Daddy's Girl material was "what propelled me into comics." And that you felt that you drew that material in a --

DRECHSLER: Trance-like state.

GROTH: Yeah. Can you describe how you chose that subject matter?

DRECHSLER: Right. Well, I moved to Berkeley, lived there for four months and then I moved over to San Francisco where I proceeded to have something like a nervous breakdown: I started having nightmares. I started having disturbing visions, even while awake, and I felt really depressed. At first I thought, "OK a new place, you have a hard time moving, blah, blah, blah." Then I figured, "OK, you have to go back into therapy." But I really didn't want to, so I figured "Well, I'm in California, so I'll go to a psychic instead," which I did and she was the one who proposed the idea, "Well, maybe you are dealing with incest." Part of me was like, "Oh, you silly ass. Why would you say such a thing?" and the other part of me was like, "Oh, all of these little anomalies in my life -- suddenly there's a place to put them." She said, "I can give you the name of a therapist." And I can remember saying, "OK, if I have to go to a therapist, fine, but if it's not incest, can she still help?" She goes, "Oh yeah." So I started seeing a therapist again. I had forgotten the incest stuff and moving away from my parents made me feel safe enough to remember it, which is probably partly why I didn't leave my parents for all those years.

In any case, I'm in the Bay area. I'm establishing myself as an illustrator. I'm meeting Richard Sala and Michael Dougan, who do comics. I'm in therapy dealing with this incest stuff and it just all came together. I can't remember sitting down and doing the first comic, but it didn't take long to get to my teen years, which probably was because of Lynda Barry. I'm not really sure. Who knows why stuff like that happens? Although, it's interesting because most of the incest, I'm pretty sure, didn't occur between those years. It just worked better artistically to put them there, for the most part. I mean, the early stuff I did, like "Visitors in the Night," clearly that's time-appropriate. It happens at the right time, when I was in about second grade in that story. Actually, I guess my earliest stories did take place when I was younger. It's too bad I don't keep a journal so I could remember why I made the decisions I did. Anyway, at some point, it was like, "I don't have a choice. This stuff is what I'm writing about and that's that."

GROTH: So when the psychic brought up the subject of incest, was that the first time that you became really consciously aware of it?

DRECHSLER: Oddly, it wasn't. I told you I was seeing a therapist in Rochester. I actually brought it up to her. I don't entirely remember -- what I do remember is that I kept going into bookstores and picking up fiction that was about incest. Without knowing. I'd say, "Oh, this book looks interesting," and I'd take it home and start to read it and it would be about incest. It was like, "OK, this is getting really freaky." I just didn't know why that was happening, and so I think I must have said something to her about that and she totally dropped the ball. She really didn't want to touch it and made every effort to get away from it, so I dropped it. I was well trained about that by that time. So the psychic visit was the first time somebody else said to me, "Well, I think you might have experienced incest." Instead of it being this weird, crazy idea in my head, somebody else said it to me. Of course, it was only a psychic. It was a psychic, which made it easily discountable, I think -- if I wanted to do that, but for whatever reason, I chose not to.

GROTH: To choose that as the subject matter for your first professional comic seems to me pretty courageous.

DRECHSLER: See, you're thinking I was actually trying to establish a career in comics. Basically what happened was, I had this material that I needed to get out of me, and at the same time I discovered comics, which perfectly suited it; doing paintings about incest wasn't going to cut it for me. Obviously, I couldn't put it in my illustrations.

GROTH: You needed a narrative framework.

DRECHSLER: Right. So I met Richard, re-discovered comics and -- Oh! There's this incest topic to cover. What I remember is sending this stuff out. I figured nobody's going to like it. First of all, I already knew most of the people reading comics were young men, so I figured, "OK, this stuff's going to go out there. They're going to hate my guts and want to kill me or they're going to be titillated by it or they're going to ignore it. This is not going to affect anybody in any kind of way. But I just have to do it and that's all I care about. I'm working as an illustrator and making a living. I don't have to make money at this stuff." That's how it happened.

GROTH: So this wasn't exactly a pragmatic career choice.

DRECHSLER: Right. You can just go on the assumption that I have never done that in any way in my life.

GROTH: This was what you had to do at that point.

DRECHSLER: Right.

Not Getting Kicked out of the New York Press

GROTH: How did the New York Press react when they got the first few strips in?

DRECHSLER: Actually, the people working for the New York Press were wonderful and I got a lot of reader mail. People who wrote were really supportive. There wasn't as much hate mail as I would have expected. I mean, there were a couple who thought it was offensive and disgusting and there were some people who wanted to religiously convert me.

I actually saw something in The Comics Journal that I meant to respond to, but never did. There seems to be this notion around that they dumped me, and they never did. I left on my own. I chose to leave. Mike wasn't happy about me leaving. He wanted me to stay. And they gave me complete artistic freedom. Nobody ever asked me to change anything that I sent in. He was really supportive when I had writer's block. He was really good about talking to me on the phone and giving me pep talks. Just to lay that rumor to rest, I was not kicked out of the New York Press!

GROTH: No, I don't want to propagate that. Were you able to maintain a weekly schedule?

DRECHSLER: Yeah. One of the things that I didn't like about doing the weekly comic was that you really have to crank stuff out; "OK, I need a story this week!" I mean, most of them ran more than a week obviously, but I would need a new story and would just take whatever came into my head. When I was putting the book together, I tried to make them work together better.

GROTH: How did you go about conceptualizing how you would depict this world, how you would break it down visually and how you would write it? You hadn't done this before. Did you study other specific cartoonists to learn the techniques?

DRECHSLER: Well, Lynda Barry was my primary role model for comics. I had seen her work when I still lived in Rochester and had just been utterly smitten. You can certainly look at my strips and say, "Oh yeah, I guess she's been looking at Lynda Barry."

GROTH: You definitely owe a debt to her visually.

DRECHSLER: It's really weird how comics work for me compared to all my drawing and painting. I mean, when I draw, or even when I was doing my own painting, I'm always in control for the most part. But the comics ... I've heard novelists talk about their writing like it's channeling. Pretty much, that's my experience with comics. My illustration drawing style is really different from my comic style -- at least, my comic style changes with the story; I draw to suit the story, and so there isn't a lot of conscious decision-making. The story's there. It declares itself and how it wants to be written. I do some organizing, but to a large extent, it creates itself. That makes it sound easier than it probably is. There's kind of a mixture. It's not like I sit down and write a story and then say, "OK, what pictures am I going to do with this and what format?" Because, when I'm writing a story, I'm seeing it visually. I usually write a first-person plot -- like, this happened to me, blah, blah, blah -- but that's just to get it down on paper, so really I'm thinking visually.

GROTH: When you write the story, I assume that must, to a large extent, dictate the drawing.

DRECHSLER: Right, exactly. That's because the drawing is so much a part of the story that it's not like they are two separate things. When I think about people who separate out things like the inking and the writing, I just can't even imagine how they do it because it just doesn't work that way for me.

GROTH: Do you write the entire story first without drawing anything?

DRECHSLER: Well, yeah. When I say, "write the story," basically I just write down the very basics and what it is, it's pretty much to put me into that trance state. The act of writing moves me into the place where things I don't know about the story start coming forth while I'm writing. So once I'm done with the writing part, there's less of that magic part happening. It is more grunt work. Sometimes I'll get caught up in details of the writing, but I try hard not to. I'm setting forth the story so that I'm working out all the details, because usually when I sit down to write, it's not like I know everything that's going to happen. I know something, and sometimes even that changes. I start out with something; a scene or an idea. And then, I work off of that and, as I write, it takes on its own life and grows and changes. So the writing for me is solidifying all that. And then I storyboard it in a really rough kind of way, and then I get to work on drawing it.

GROTH: How much difference is there between your storyboards and the final version?

DRECHSLER: A huge difference. My storyboards are really simple breakdowns; I use typing paper and draw these little rough squares with stick figures in them.

GROTH: So there's a lot of decision-making done in the drawing process?

DRECHSLER: Yeah. Well, my drawing process has three stages. I hope to change that. I start out with a tracing-paper version, where I work out composition and facial expressions and that kind of stuff, and then I blue-line it onto a board and then I do the inking. And it is really tedious. I do actually like tedious stuff, to a certain extent, but with comics it can get really tedious because you draw so much stuff over and over again. If it's something that you've drawn four times -- that's like 12 times because you've done all those little stages in the drawing.

GROTH: And for someone like you who likes using patterns, that's got to be especially excruciating.

DRECHSLER: Well, actually, in Nowhere I used computers. Also, I only draw the patterns in the final inking or coloring. I did just the barebones inking for Nowhere in pen and ink and then scanned it into the computer and did all the rest of the coloring and pattern stuff in Photoshop.

GROTH: The patterns of the dresses?

DRECHSLER: Yeah. You can copy those out and transfer them from page to page and shrink them and enlarge them as you need to, so it does make that a lot easier.

[To read the rest of this interview, please see The Comics Journal #249.]

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