Drawing as Studying, Love, and Torture

HATFIELD: [Looking at one of Craig's sketchbooks, full of life drawings] So the studies in this book reflect a desire to...

THOMPSON: This is when I was trying to learn how to figure-draw.

HATFIELD: What period?

THOMPSON: Right when I was starting Blankets [1999].

HATFIELD: Have you studied [Gustav] Klimt?

THOMPSON: Yeah, there's some Klimt studies here -- his sensuality of line. It was a challenge to work with the brush and capture what was in front of me at the same time. I started out on the right foot, but then I started going in the wrong direction because I started drawing in pencil and inking afterwards, which is a really contrived way of working. I was too worried about the results, you know? So I sort of lost track of what the whole point was: to learn how to be spontaneous with my line.

HATFIELD: [Pointing:] This is dry-brush technique here?

THOMPSON: Yeah.

HATFIELD: Did you study Chinese brush-painting at all?

THOMPSON: Not really, not as much as I should. [Hatfield laughs.] I love that stuff.

HATFIELD: [Again, pointing to sketchbook] Now we're at 2002. Uh, looks like you're drawing from imagination here. [Thompson laughs.] So, Klimt, Pissarro, Modigliani?

THOMPSON: Yeah, I love Modigliani! Definitely.

HATFIELD: That chiseled "Craig" nose that shows up from time to time in Blankets --

THOMPSON: Yeah, that's exactly where I stole it from. Modigliani.

HATFIELD: Yes, the elongated bridge of the nose is bent just a little...

THOMPSON: The crook of the nose, yes.

HATFIELD: Yeah, that nose is a giveaway; it has the very distinct quality of Modigliani's portraiture.

THOMPSON: As far as my fine-art influences, Modigliani is a big one. I'm pretty old-fashioned, leaning towards all those turn-of-the-century Post-Impressionists. My first trip to Paris, the Picasso museum and Miro's work at the Pompidous were a revelation. Seeing Paul Klee at MoMA in New York was exciting. And of course, Picasso's "The Dream and the Lie of Franco" at the Guggenheim. That ones influential to lots of cartoonists. In Paris, I went to exhibit of drawings by Egon Schiele, Oskar Kokoschka and Mattise, and was just so inspired by their raw line work separated from their paintings. And more than I love Rodin's sculptures, I love his drawings; later in life, when he committed more to drawing than sculpture, he would have his models moving freely about the room and would do sketches of them, just like leaves falling from a tree. I love those drawings.

HATFIELD: Would you say that the discipline and tradition of drawing have had a profound impact on you over the last five years or so? It sounds like this has been a real transforming exploration for you.

THOMPSON: Yeah. It's one of these obsessions. It's something you can never perfect, and that's exciting.

HATFIELD: A lot of the sketches in the book in front of me seem to have been created during the period when you were thumbnailing Blankets.

THOMPSON: Yeah.

HATFIELD: So you're actually doing --

THOMPSON: I'm learning how to draw.

HATFIELD: On the one hand, you're doing breakdowns, which are essentially writing: You're writing, you're pacing, you're composing the tale. On the other, you have this drawing practice, which is in a way a run-up to the final stage of drawing Blankets. It's like two aspects, or two practices, balancing themselves out: the deliberate work of pacing the comics page, and, on the other hand, this meditative drawing exercise at the same time. So when you began to study the discipline of figure drawing, you started out by drawing directly in brush, but then at some point became mistrustful of that process?

THOMPSON: Yeah, I became too concerned with the end result. I thought, "There's no consistency to the spontaneous brush drawings." Sometimes they turned out, other times it was just a mess on the page. So I started using pencil, and the pencil was just a crutch. The drawings became more stiff. It's never a good thing to worry about the results.

HATFIELD: With Blankets, you wrote in thumbnails, then did the final artwork, say, a couple of years later. I assume you kept the thumbnails right there at hand while doing the finished art, but, drawing-wise, did you work directly in ink on those final pages, sans pencil?

THOMPSON: Well, I pencil. I do at least pencil.

HATFIELD: In the final drawing?

THOMPSON: Yeah. Again, I would like to work toward this style [i.e., drawing directly in ink], not needing to do pencils.

HATFIELD: To ink directly to the page and produce your comics that way?

THOMPSON: Yeah. That takes a lot of practice and discipline. I'm not courageous enough yet.

HATFIELD: Here's a bald generalization: It seems like there's a couple of different kinds of cartoonists. There are those who whose work has the immediacy of the moment in it -- they keep it spontaneous, to a degree -- and then there are those who are very meticulous and deliberate, like Spiegelman, who don't really find the drawing process at all cathartic or energizing. Obviously they take pride in the process, but more than anything else there's a deliberateness, a Kurtzman-like deliberateness, to making the page. It seems like you've been trying to allow yourself to have that deliberateness when it comes to writing the page, but also to have a sense of freedom in the execution.

THOMPSON: I want the line to be alive.

HATFIELD: Yeah, and these sketches and studies in the run-up to Blankets seem to me to show that.

THOMPSON: Yeah. The line is still alive. I do like these drawings more than I like -- here's an image, for instance, that I recycled into Blankets, and I much prefer it here in my sketchbook, where it has all the vitality of the moment when I was executing it.

HATFIELD: You said you like the line to be alive; Chris Ware has said in reference to his own finished work that he likes the line to be dead. He likes his lines to look dead on the page. That may be why the sketchbook work that he's had published is so startling compared to, say, the finished pages in the Acme Novelty Library.

THOMPSON: Yeah. There are these two different schools of thought, what I'd call the "calligraphy" versus the "typography" school of cartooning. Chris talks about there being separate kinds of drawings. I apologize to Chris for clumsily paraphrasing, but I'm trying to recall something he said in an interview about different modes of drawing: drawing from life, learning to look at life and draw it, versus drawing as typography -- which seems to suit the "sheet music" form of comics, where the drawing is a symbol easily translated into an idea. An icon, a typeface. And I meditate on both as forms of comics drawing, calligraphy and typography, because both are valid and have their own power. Ultimately, though, I'm more excited by the calligraphic.

In fact in my new book, Habibi, I'm drawing from Arabic calligraphy, and the immediate and natural connection to this style of communicating. Most people who write Arabic can't really interpret the calligraphy because it's so tangled -- it's sort of like American graffiti, where you turn words into objects. The fluidity, musicality, of those sort of lines, I'm really obsessed with that.

HATFIELD: It's a form of visual poetry: pure inscription people can't necessarily read.

THOMPSON: Yeah, Arabic calligraphy has been called the music of letters, and I certainly think of comics as a music of pictures. Chris Ware, I believe, compares composing comics to writing music, the careful attention to rhythm.

HATFIELD: Eisner likened cartooning to calligraphy.

THOMPSON: Yeah, I've certainly drawn a lot of inspiration from Eisner and his fluid, calligraphic line.

HATFIELD: [Pause] Curveball question: Do you think of drawing as a meditative practice?

THOMPSON: Yes, it definitely is. Writing is sort of torturous, and it takes a lot of sweat. With drawing, I can zone out, my breathing slows to a more proper level, a deeper level. It's often meditative, and nourishing. I'm always healthier when I'm drawing. I mean, emotionally healthier -- this past year, drawing hasn't necessarily been physically healthy for me.

HATFIELD: You've described drawing before as a somewhat passive process. You mean in comparison to the process of writing?

THOMPSON: No, I never quite communicate what I mean; I'm clunky with words. In my collaboration with James Kolchalka [Conversation #1] I called drawing "worshipful," because it has that sort of reverence to it -- this sounds cheesy, but you become like a vessel, you look without judgment. A profound act of observation and appreciation. I'm specifically talking about the act of drawing something you're looking at, something you see --

HATFIELD: Drawing from life, from the eye to the hand?

THOMPSON: Yeah. But drawing comics is meditative too. Or maybe inking is meditative. Composing a comics panel can be just as strained as writing, because it's contrived...

HATFIELD: Well, composing a panel is writing. Right? It's a form of composition: writing with images.

THOMPSON: Yeah.

HATFIELD: I've seen you work conventions, signing book after book for people, and I've read, of course, the things you say in Carnet de Voyage about meeting and making drawings for people. And sometimes it seems like a hurtful process. There seems to be pain -- the pain of tendonitis, or rheumatoid arthritis, always some sort of pain -- associated with it. Is it sometimes physically painful?

THOMPSON: Yeah, I have rheumatoid arthritis, so it gets seriously painful. Certainly during those conventions and other extreme-deadline workdays, I suffer a lot of pain. In some ways I think that's a carry-over from my brand of, like, martyrdom Christianity -- something that's psychosomatic or self-inflicted.

HATFIELD: "This feels too good, therefore it ought to hurt. I'd better make it hurt?"

THOMPSON: Maybe. I think it's the physiological component to internal self-loathing. Destructive thought or emotional patterns can actually damage the body -- for instance, with cancer -- and I'm operating from such a typical cartoonist's self-loathing sort of personality. I'm trying to get over it, but in the meantime, hand pain is one of the physical manifestations of that mindset.

HATFIELD: There's something I've often heard from cartoonists -- they have dreams about their hands. Anxieties about their hands. You frequently have pictures of crabbed and barren trees that look skeletal, which even you have likened to your own hands. They look distorted with pain. [Pause.] Is there an emotional difference between drawing for yourself and drawing for others? When does drawing feel like a process you own, and when does it feel like something that is not yours? I'm thinking of that passage in Carnet wher eyou quote Blutch as saying, "Drawing is my private life" -- does that apply to you? When does it apply to you, and when does it not?

THOMPSON: [Long pause.] That's a difficult question.

HATFIELD: More specifically, how much of your drawing is not manifestly meant for other people to see?

THOMPSON: Blutch was specifically talking about these drawings of his "ex," and they were very vulnerable, intimate portraits. They were documents of moments shared between them. But they were also frickin' gorgeous drawings that I wish everyone could have the pleasure to see. Blutch is a master, but maybe we'll have to wait 'til his death for publishers to exploit his juiciest work. Like Chris Ware's amazing drawn diary... I hide many of my own drawings, too: There were ones of Hillevi from Carnet that I didn't include in the book. Rather I used the ones I found more discreet.

HATFIELD: In terms of the process itself, not simply the private drawing of a lover, partner, or friend, but --

THOMPSON: Well, I don't print my particularly bad drawings either.

HATFIELD: To draw for yourself, without an end in mind -- is that something you're able to do within the schedule of your other work?

THOMPSON: [Pause.] I think that my drawings of girls are certainly that. They're as much about a relationship and a moment as [they are about] a line or a final drawing. It's when I'm most content with myself and with what I do... or at least, I really do get lost in the process. Maybe at some point I'll use those drawings, collect them and put them in a book, but they're not executed to that end. They're about slowing down a moment with another person, and they're about the process of making a drawing.

HATFIELD: There's a moment in Carnet -- actually, it's that moment when you're seeing the drawings Blutch made of his ex-girlfriend -- where you liken drawing to breathing, and to love. That same passage, though, talks about drawing until you bleed, drawing to the point and past the point of pain. And there are these several images in Carnet of, for example, piercing your hand or your arm --

THOMPSON: Once again the Christian symbolism.

HATFIELD: -- with a stylus. So, does pain necessarily have to be a part of it?

THOMPSON: [Sighs.] It's that Christian upbringing... the martyrdom myth. No, I don't think it's necessary, but it's a way I've been conditioned, a cycle or way I've been programmed to think and I do think... I refer to it in Blankets too, when Raina's father talks about how the pain of winter opens up an entire world of beauty. I think there's some truth in that. The negative experiences we go through enlighten us. Life is always simultaneously beautiful and horrible, so maybe it's sensible to keep a knowledge of suffering while engaging in some pleasurable activity.

[To read the full version of this interview, please see The Comics Journal #268.]

All site contents are © 2002