"PUP"

SPURGEON: The other big project you're known for is "Pup," which can be found on the Serializer online anthology/site. I don't think I've ever talked with anyone about working for that family of sites. How long have you been doing "Pup?"

WEING: I was one of the guys onboard when the Serializer site first launched. They've added a lot more since then.

SPURGEON: Was there a community of these cartoonists that you were getting to know before that?

WEING: Yeah, for sure. I was completely blown away. I did a couple of Rover panels. I think the whole strip was literally 14 panels in its entirety. Weeks and weeks of work. It sounds kind of retarded in hindsight. I had learned a lot about coloring and Photoshop, and was interested in doing elaborate Photoshop pieces at the time. I had done maybe four or five panels at that point. I had been reading Comicon.com, keeping tabs on the online comics section of that site, which used to be way more active than it is now. Most of its energy seems to have been drawn off by various other message boards. But at the time it was pretty active with the people, the "Big Names" -- if you can sense the quotation marks around that -- of the online biz were posting on there. I did a couple of panels, and then I posted "hey, you should go look at my comic" in a "nobody will look at this and this will sink to the bottom" way. But right off the bat from that post I got responses from all of these guys. In hindsight -- I'm saying "in hindsight" a lot -- in hindsight it's not that amazing, but at the time I was like "Holy crap! Scott McCloud just looked at my comics! And he likes them!" So that was definitely encouraging.

SPURGEON: When did you hook up with Serializer?

WEING: At the time Modern Tales wasn't even up yet. Joey Manley had been hinting for a while -- and at the time he was just some guy on the board -- he was hinting that he was going to be doing some big project in the future. He was lining up a lot of other cartoonists at the time to do it. I'm trying to remember the sequence. Not long after Modern Tales went up, Manley contacted me about doing The Journal Comic, which I had recently started -- somewhere along the lines I had given up on Rover and started doing The Journal Comic -- anyway, he e-mailed me to ask if I wanted to do The Journal Comic for Modern Tales. I wanted to continue doing that for my own site, but I was interested in doing something for Modern Tales. I think he passed along my name to Tom Hart later, saying that I would be interested in doing something and if this would be a good fit for Serializer. I get the feeling Tom Hart basically did it as a favor to Manley [Spurgeon laughs] because I'm not sure The Journal Comic really recommended itself to the sort of sensibility that he was going for in Serializer. But he took Joey Manley's word and asked me if I wanted to do a comic. "Pup" was something I came up with for a cartooning class, and by cartooning I mean this was a class that was geared towards newspaper-strip formats. I think they're still on my Web site -- I'd done maybe a dozen "Pup" strips that were surreal little Jim Woodring-esque cartoons about a dog. I think there was also an old man in those strips. They weren't very nailed down, beyond surreal. I was still interested in doing something with those characters, even though they weren't very defined at that point, but just doing more with that concept. I tried to develop it into a more realized strip. Which is "Pup" on Serializer.

SPURGEON: When was it launched?

WEING: It's been running a little over a year now. Maybe late 2002, I guess.

SPURGEON: Give me a layman's rundown on how you work. Do you work from a tablet, or do you work by hand and then scan it in?

WEING: I like to play around a lot, so it could change from week to week. One of those big format strips like the "infinite canvas" strips, I draw all the panels on Bristol in ink and assemble and color it in Photoshop.

SPURGEON: Manley's sites work on a pay model, right?

WEING: Certainly not very much. Hopefully nobody's lied to you and told you it was a lucrative business.

SPURGEON: I've only heard vague allusions to checks showing up in mailboxes, which in comics is magic worth noting.

WEING: There are checks. Just about enough to buy a really nice dinner every month. It's an important step.

SPURGEON: Can you contrast the audience for "Pup" with that for The Journal Comic?

WEING: I still get a lot of responses, a lot of people are like, "I like The Journal Comic, but this "Pup" strip, I don't know. It's sort of weird." [Spurgeon laughs.] Which is strange, because I don't think it's an unapproachable strip.

SPURGEON: Jim Woodring is an early influence; are there others that come to bear?

WEING: I guess the number one is Krazy Kat, but I don't want to steal too much from any one source. The basic relationship was kind of taken from Krazy Kat, but I don't think it bears too much in resemblance to that strip.

SPURGEON: One thing I think is really interesting about your work is that you've never gone through a mirroring period, where one influence dominates.

WEING: I can see things in it that maybe other people can't. When I was in high school, I copied like a bandit. "Holy crap, this is what I should draw like now." I drew like Todd McFarlane for a long while. Then I found Sam Kieth, and I thought Sam Kieth was great so I drew like Sam Kieth for a while. And then I found Cerebus, and I drew like Dave Sim and Gerhard combined for a while. That comic I told you about that I was going to self-publish called A State of Bliss? That was my Sim-inspired comic. All the backgrounds were crosshatched, although not nearly as good. I was no child prodigy.

SPURGEON: From what I understand talking to you it takes a lot of effort to complete a comic. Something like the "Pup" strip "Heat Death of the Universe," how did you write that? How was that designed?

WEING: It takes me a long time, usually, to get the concept for a strip I want to do. Once I get that, it's usually pretty quick to work it into a prelim. I end up wandering around the house and staring off into space for a long while. Usually I find I get a lot of ideas right before I fall asleep. I try to keep some paper nearby so I can jot down something if something strikes me. There's a particular fertile period -- not dreaming, exactly, but you're so tired your mind, your barriers, drop. These aren't comics like dream comics, like Rick Veitch's Rarebit Fiends comics. I'm just trying to get my mind tired enough. It's not like dreaming, with this weird imagery, but you get your mind to the point you can make a connection or remember something that's striking. I probably get most of my ideas that way.

SPURGEON: What form does this idea take? A visual? A few words?

WEING: Sort of a concept. It will be like, "Pup floats through space and watches the end of the universe." Then I have to work that into some usable form. It's usually not so hard to layout the strip because I guess, speaking for myself, I think in comics a lot. The picture will be in my head, I just have to translate it on paper. Successfully or unsuccessfully. I'm sure that's been said a million times before.

SPURGEON: Where do you place yourself on the spectrum of online comics? Are you traditional or out there? You do make use of the variable canvas.

WEING: There are definitely guys out there who are taking advantage of the Web more than me. It's weird; there are also about 20 million people who are basically interested in doing a daily joke strip, the kind that runs in a magazine or whatever. There's nothing wrong with that. That's the mainstream of online comics. It's probably healthier in a sense than the mainstream of print comics in that there's no particularly genre that's taken hold, outside of that joke every day.

SPURGEON: You seem to find a lot of artistic merit in traditional or regimented formats, but you also play a lot with narrative effects, size of the page, how something is read.

WEING: I guess I'm basically a traditionalist, but one that doesn't feel confined by the physical borders of the paper. I'm not interested in trying to push the Internet aspects harder than that. I find that to be sort of gimmicky. Some people have done some really amazing stuff, and I'm not trying to cast doubt on that, but I'm hoping that over time my stuff will stand up better. In comparison, there's Patrick Farley who does some amazing things, he's one of my favorite online comic artists, I think he's a really good example of someone who is trying to push at the limits. The way he mimics actually being on the Internet at certain points in his comics, like having to click on certain areas to access other areas. There are a lot of people who do that type of thing. It's not a gimmick, but it's probably not going to hold up.

SPURGEON: There's a reason comics hasn't worked like that before?

WEING: It's more like what we think is neat now is going to seem sort of clichéd ten years from now. But, if you're just dealing with straight imagery, which I think "Pup" does... There's nothing in "Pup" that couldn't be reproduced on paper if the paper were significantly large enough. Maybe that's not really pushing anything, but I think it will stand up better.

SPURGEON: Your use of color in "Pup" is pretty far advanced for that kind of work -- how did you develop those skills?

WEING: I think Photoshop helped. I know a lot of people hate Photoshop because of how gimmicky it can make your stuff look. A lot of comics colored in Photoshop are just done terribly. People using every filter effect they can come up with. But I think its existence really helped me learn how to color, and develop my own color style, so to speak. I really wasn't doing much in color until I started doing color stuff on the computer. Almost every traditional medium you can do color in it's very unforgiving. I don't suppose that's 100 percent true, but it felt like that me. I don't have a natural gift for color. If you make a bad choice when you do a painting I guess you can paint over it. But I make so many mistakes it's hard to fix in traditional media, so I had less interest in doing it.

SPURGEON: Does it help to see what it will actually look like rather than having to guess the effects of a printing process?

WEING: That's true, but I hadn't really thought about it. I think the benefit is mainly that you can play around with stuff with very little consequence. That can lead you down a terrible path, though. People are still debating the merits of Frank Miller's Dark Knight Strikes Again. Whether or not it was done in an intentional fashion, that was Photoshop drawing attention to itself. A lot of comics are colored in a similar fashion, not out of any particular sophistication but because people go crazy in Photoshop.

SPURGEON: Is there anyone who uses color that you look to?

WEING: I think I look a lot to old newspaper strips. I really can't think of anyone specific to comic books. Coloring in comics doesn't particularly have a great history. [Spurgeon laughs.] The early newspaper strips are pretty good... no, they're good. I was going to say it might be nostalgia, but I really think they were good. After that everything went to hell. Not only didn't you have a good sense of what it was going to look like, the goal wasn't so much to make a good color scheme as much as a vibrant one.

I've really developed the way I color on my own. People think Photoshop is a terrible thing. I think if used as a tool it's probably the most useful I've found. I can put down all those colors, look at them and ask if they harmonize. I can put down some basic naturalistic colors -- the tree trunk is gray-brown, and the grass is a light green -- and then lay colored filters on top of it. I guess in painting it would be like doing a wash of a certain color, so that all of the colors have a little bit of blue in them or whatever. You can harmonize your colors that way.

SPURGEON: Anyone who's done something interesting in color I've talked to seems to feel like they had to invent it all for themselves.

WEING: I can name a dozen or two dozen artists that have inspired me throughout my career, but I can't think of anybody, any colorist or artist who uses color, that has particularly struck me.

SPURGEON: Do you use color as a narrative tool or is it primarily decorative?

WEING: I think I use it as a mood tool. I almost never do that thing where it's a surprise panel and the background is all red or something. I think my particular goal is to establish a mood through the use of color. Almost like weather -- it's the weather of the comic strip. Since I also use a lot of outdoor settings in "Pup," you can really capture the feel of the day. Like if it's kind of a cold, winter day, you can overlay blue and gray everywhere. Sort of a cross between naturalistic and narrative. Most of the time I try not to make it obvious, like bright red if you want to make people angry. I'm trying to instill a mood, but subtly.

[To read the rest of this interview, please see The Comics Journal #259.]

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