Touring with James

HATFIELD: This past summer [2004], you and James Kochalka collaborated on a comics booklet billed as Conversation #1. How did that come about?

THOMPSON: James called me, and he had this idea for a project: He was going to do a full book of conversations with several cartoonists. He was calling around to gauge interest. I think he had at that point Jeffrey Brown and Frank Miller on board. He was fishing for some other people, and he was curious if I had any interest. I was like, "Yeah, I could be interested in that." A couple weeks later, he sent me half a panel. We did it all digitally, so he e-mailed me a half a panel, which showed himself and -- actually he filled in the background, so I didn't understand that I was supposed to then digitally superimpose myself on that panel with word balloons. So I started the next panel. It took us a couple of panels before we realized the rhythm of what we were supposed to be doing, where one of us would do half a panel, and then the other would complete that panel, both [drawing] the background and filling in themselves. You can kind of tell: [pointing to the book] This first panel's awkward, like there was a space here. He had intended for me to put myself there, and I didn't understand that at first. In fact, when he sent me that first panel, with this first word balloon interrogation, I suddenly thought, "I don't want to do this," and I called up James: "I don't think I want to do this." But he convinced me that it would be fun, and it ended up being really fun, and very addictive. We were doing a half-panel apiece per day, so one panel would emerge each day, and -- no, I think it was almost two pages a day.

It was something I did after my regular work was finished, and it was addictive because I never knew what would happen next. It was entirely in the hands of another person. In that sense, it was a very exciting creative process. It's funny, because there are times in there where it seems like we're kind of not getting along, or we're arguing, but as far as I was concerned, the process was graceful the whole time.

Then we finished it and Chris Staros said, "Oh, we're going to publish it as-is, because the other cartoonists who were involved still haven't come through on the collaborations. We don't know how long we have to wait for the other cartoonists to do their conversations, so we'll just publish this one as-is."

I'm like, "But wait -- it's only eight pages!" And James is like, "No, it's 48 pages," because all along he had been conceiving it as a panel-per-page sort of book, whereas I was laying it out on my computer as a six-panel grid! My thought was, "Oh, eight pages apiece, that makes sense. If he does 20 eight-page conversations with different cartoonists, he will have a book." Apparently that wasn't the intent. So there's this part of me that is frustrated with the end result, because I was hoping that my conversation with James would be part of a bigger whole, with all kinds of cartoonists involved. At some point it will be that, because now each conversation will be its own little booklet, and at some point it'll be collected in one book. But I do have that frustration.

But that frustration is totally cancelled out by the tour I got to go on with James. I had known James before, but in the course of that I got to know him a lot better, and had a lot of fun. Touring with another person made the whole experience of signing in stores much more of a celebration. There would be times when James would just break out into song in the middle of a signing, and everybody in the store would stop talking and listen. That was awesome. We had some pretty good times. We went from New York to Chicago, Phoenix, San Diego and Portland, doing signings. In Phoenix we were set up by Samurai Comics, and when we arrived in Phoenix, we're like, "Oh, this is going to be one of the worst of our signings," because Phoenix, as a city, is all urban sprawl, you know? Lots of strip malls, national chains. Samurai Comics looked at first like a very mainstream, superhero-comics sort of store; nobody's going to come and see us at a superhero comics store. But in fact that was probably our best signing, and they treated us really well. They had us set up in this hotel out in the mountains; it was a resort complex, so James and I spent an afternoon at the swimming pool, at the wet bar drinking margaritas. It was indulgent. That tour was like being in a band, in some ways: We got to know each other really well, and we were drunk, jumping from town to town. That was really fun.

I think I broke a record for the number of consecutive days spent on the road for an American cartoonist. In Europe alone, I was in three countries in three days: one day I was in Marseilles, France, the next day I was in Geneva, Switzerland, and the next day I was in Barcelona, Spain. From the Festival in Barcelona I jumped to a bunch of signings in Paris, a festival in Amsterdam, a festival in London, a festival in Germany. Along the way I saw Joe Sacco, both in Barcelona and in Haarlem. I saw Chris Ware and Seth both in Haarlem and in London, but none of those cartoonists followed me along that whole route. Then when I came back to the States I had that tour with James, then the summer convention season, all on top of each other.

HATFIELD: I see from looking at the Conversation booklet that it takes about five or six spreads or openings before you begin working in the same panel. Until then it's James on the left, Craig on the right, but gradually it comes into focus...

THOMPSON: It works out well that way.

HATFIELD: [Reading from the book] "It's one tinkle of God's pee!" Was that your idea?

THOMPSON: Yeah. Sometimes, you know, it was fun because we would be irreverent about the preceding panel. So if James was doing this dramatic panel where he's reaching out his hand, and the rain drops on his hand like this magical, random accident, then I would just be irreverent. In my panel it just happens to be God's urine. [Laughs.]

HATFIELD: Well it does resonate with that particular scene in Blankets (readers will know the scene that I mean). Yeah, it's a very James Kochalka moment -- the random raindrop, the happy accident -- but then it's trumped by...

THOMPSON: I think as a whole that final book is going to be amazing. It'll be interesting to compare the conversation he has with, say, Frank Miller to the conversation he has with me, or someone like, I dunno, Gabrielle Bell. As far as I know, she's not signed on the collaborate, but that'd be amazing to see.

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

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