Blankets: The Album, and Drawing to Music

HATFIELD: Blankets has the distinction of having a soundtrack -- not many comics do. How did that come about?

THOMPSON: I think Dan Clowes' Eightball had one. Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, yes? Someone's Eightball-inspired music.

I think the germ of the idea was Brett Warnock's. Brett and I were on this roadtrip from Portland to San Francisco. That's one of the most amazing drives in this country, you know? It's 10 hours -- you follow the ocean, you go through the mountains. There's this sort of profound moment where you leave Oregon, and the dense rain forests of Oregon just descend through the clouds into beautiful, sunny California. [Laughs.] It's a great roadtrip. We were listening to his friend's band, Tracker, and we were both really zoning out -- perfect roadtrip music, too, a perfect soundtrack for our experience. While we're zoning out to the music, he's like, "Yeah, this is my friend John, he's amazingly talented. John and I have talked about doing a collaboration before -- John's wanted to somehow integrate what I do, publishing comics, with his music. What do you think of the idea of having him riff on Blankets?"

I was game for it. So Brett approached John -- John Askew, who's the lead guy behind Tracker. He was really enthusiastic about the project. This is when the book wasn't out but I was finished. So we gave a set of photocopies to John, and he read it through, and he was on board instantly.

John came from a similar background, a very Christian background -- he was actually in a Christian rock band who used to tour with Sixpence None the Richer, which is a real pop radio-style Christian band. I remember him telling me that there's so much money in Christian rock: He would play a show and they'd get $2500, versus being in the indy-music scene now, where you go and play a show and you'd get maybe $50, if you're lucky, by the end of it all. [Laughter.] He kind of fell from his faith too, but still had a real connection to that world and what it means. He's from California, so he didn't know that much about winters in the Midwest, but he felt like the snow in the Midwest was similar to his relationship to the ocean, and we share a love of the ocean. The Northwest coastline has elements of the Midwest winter; it's kind of a brutal coastline.

HATFIELD: Very severe?

THOMPSON: It's a severe coastline, compared to sunny California, where it's all beach-bunny culture. So he had a similar relationship with that.

At first we had a few meetings, and we were throwing around ideas, like what it might sound like and what was going to happen, but then I just dropped back and let John have his own time and space. The first time I heard it was right before I left for my European trip, and I loved it. I did the design work right before I left for the trip, but didn't finish it at all, so there's a little bit of ghosting on the lettering and production work that my friend Aaron Renier did. Aaron has a Top Shelf comic coming out in summer 2005 called Spiral-Bound, which is going to be amazing.

Having the soundtrack's been fun, but of course it's not integral to one's reading of the book. The book stands on its own. The album stands on its own. But they also mesh well together.

We had this incredible event a month ago at a cool club in Portland called Nocturnal, where three bands played and the middle set was Tracker. They're a really amazing band live, because they have these vibes, they have the cornet and the trumpet that comes in -- they're just really loud and textured live. I was going to do art simultaneously while they were playing, and at first I didn't know the form that would take. I thought of using some sort of overhead projector, or drawing on some sort of tablet and projecting it digitally, but there's nothing "rock and roll" about that. There's nothing visceral -- it seemed like a pathetic and nerdy thing to do. Somehow I had to compete with the rockers. I had a huge stage to work on, so I pinned up these six-foot sheets of paper and I had to play around. I played with a big, fat ghetto marker, but it wasn't sensual. It's like, "Ahh, I'm just drawing with a frickin' marker on the wall." Finally I got hold of some sumi brushes and sumi ink, and I had a bucket of water, too, so as long as I kept those really juiced up, I was able to draw quick enough and fluidly enough. So while the band's playing I was attacking, assaulting the walls with my sumi brush [Hatfield laughs], and drawing from Blankets' themes: I drew the brothers, I drew the lovers, I drew the little trees and angels and demons, but on a scale a thousand times larger than I'm what comfortable with. It was really hard at first. We had a practice session that day, where it was hard for me to get the proportions right, because I'd have to step back because I was drawing so huge. I was drawing life-size, basically.

But I loved the kinetic elements of it, where to make a line I'd have to jump or extend my entire body. It was almost athletic -- almost a dance performance for me. [Hatfield laughs] In a worst-case scenario, that show would've been so incredibly awkward and dorky. It would've been a rock-and-roll band playing, and then this weird, nerdy cartoonist guy trying to draw. But it ended up being very graceful, and worked really well, where people were really captivated. The other bands that played were really happy to participate in the event, because they're like, "Wow, that was not a typical rock show. Nobody was talking, everybody was totally captivated by the process of you drawing." For me, it was kind of nice, in the same way that Carnet de Voyage was a way to get outside of my tiny, reclusive studio and be part of the world and draw instantly. Here I was, having to get outside of my little, quiet, hanging-in-the-backdrop sort of cartoonist's world and be a performer, be at the forefront and also try to make it entertaining for people. It was so stressful, everything up to that moment, but the end result was great, and people were really happy. Everyone was coming up, people that were music fans and don't read comics, people that love comics too. It was a helpful thing, because it's like, "Oh, cool, you cartoonists gotta do more events like this, make comics less of a reclusive activity, and more something that people might actually encounter as rock and roll." [Laughs.]

HATFIELD: Bob Sikoryak spearheads a series of slideshow/readings back east called Carousel, consisting of cartoonists' performances. Readings with accompanying images, I guess, is the premise there -- not as physical as the act of drawing, but...

THOMPSON: Well, Eric Drooker does a great presentation, where he does something that's like a combination of slideshow and him chanting, singing, drumming -- very Beat Generation. He'd had those collaborations with Ginsberg, so it's natural that he does this sort of rhythmic protest drum-art. It's captivating. Scott Morris and Jim Mahfood also do this thing, which I haven't yet witnessed, where I think they do live music and draw really large on the wall or a huge piece of paper --

HATFIELD: It's a lightning-sketch act?

THOMPSON: It is.

HATFIELD: ? in the old vaudeville sense, just as Winsor McCay used to do.

THOMPSON: Unfortunately, I haven't gotten to witness it yet, but I think they might be doing the exact same thing. Also, there's a thing going on in Portland called Comic Art Battles -- another thing I've not participated in.

HATFIELD: Sounds like a comic poetry slam.

THOMPSON: It is a comic poetry slam! I have a sense that this is a little bit more dorky, but I was gone traveling while this was going on in Portland. It's like some sort of giant contest of cartoonists drawing-fast-and-furiously against each other, having fun and entertaining an audience simultaneously.

So, anyway, the album is primarily instrumental; there's a final track that has vocals. The rest is instrumental -- it's moody, it's mellow in some ways. A lot of it is atmospheric.

HATFIELD: It's ambient?

THOMPSON: It is ambient, and then there's parts that become really raucous -- funky, even, building to a crescendo. Ultimately, yeah, it is an ambient album, an album you can conceivably put on while you're reading the book to create a sort of mood backdrop. But certainly it's not like those old read-along records; it's not synchronized, synched up with scenes from the book. It's music inspired by the book. John read the book, he loved the book, and this is the album he recorded drawing from a lot of those themes and emotions. It works on its own, and obviously the book works on its own, too.

HATFIELD: It's a response.

THOMPSON: Yeah.

HATFIELD: That to me is the most interesting kind of adaptation -- it's a response, where clearly one sensibility is responding to another.

THOMPSON: Yeah, and when I drew onstage, performing with them, that was kind of my response to them. I was letting the energy of their music carry me. Certainly I don't think I would've had the guts to be up there, except once they started rocking, I'm like, "Okay, I'm in the zone and I'm just drawing."

Kissability

THOMPSON: Recently, there was this cute girl at a party in Portland who was really excited to meet me, because she works at a bookstore and had never read comics before. But she said when Blankets shipped and arrived in the bookstore, and she saw the object, she just picked it up and kissed it. That's like the best possible response someone can give you. She said, "It wasn't like a novel, where you open it up and it's cold text, or typography. It was all hand-drawn, and had this beautiful weight to it, and felt really good in the hands, and I just... I didn't read it or anything at that point. Just to see it and hold it, I had to kiss it." Holy God! That's probably the most flattering thing anyone's ever said about my work.

HATFIELD: Now you have a really high standard to live up to. You have to achieve kissability in every subsequent book.

THOMPSON: I'll be apologizing soon enough for a trend of 500-page books in the comics industry.

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

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