The Tao of Archie

GREG STUMP: So that first comic you did for the Breakdown was the story "The Junkie," which incorporates a diary section which was written by a friend of yours. Did the fact that someone else was doing the writing make you feel a bit less vulnerable considering that it was your first published comic?

JESSICA ABEL: It's a two-part story and it ran in two different issues. The part that was written by somebody else was the second part, not the first part. It was that meditation on the boy. But it helped inspire me; I identified with those feelings very closely at the time. It helped me think of the story. In fact, it's a pretty good first story, but it's not a complete story because it just trails off. It took me many, many years to understand what was the matter with it, what it was lacking. That was a huge battle for me.

STUMP: In terms of structure, you mean?

ABEL: Again, when it came to figuring out the three-act structure, my process was completely bass-ackwards. I did not know where to go to look for information or help with it. For years, I just flailed around, doing stories that kind of trailed off -- they'd have really good characters, maybe, and really good atmosphere, but no story.

STUMP: Are you talking about some of the things in Artbabe?

ABEL: Yeah, the minis, not in the Fantagraphics issues. The stuff that's in Soundtrack.

STUMP: My favorite issue of Artbabe might actually be the Xeric one, the "Four Seasons" one.

ABEL: That's exactly when I figured it out... or when I started to figure it out, because I still didn't have the words for it. All because of a conversation I had with Terry LaBan.

STUMP: Oh, yeah? Can you explain that a little bit?

ABEL: Yeah. I was at a release party for BLAB! -- I forget which one, but it was for Fantagraphics. Terry was in it, and he was at the party, and we were at a bookstore on Division Street. We were talking about whatever he was working on, I guess, because he said that he had been recently obsessed by Archie comics. He said they're pure, perfect crystallizations of story structure. I think it's an exaggeration, but his point was that each little story is complete. The characters are complete, the story is complete, you have the entire arc in six pages or even one page. And I thought, "Maybe this will be the answer, maybe I'll figure something out from the Archies." So the next day I was at work and ran across the street and bought a Double Digest or something. I actually made a little schema of all the plots in the book.

STUMP: Just in the simplest outline?

ABEL: Yeah, like "Archie wants Veronica. A-win contest-impress V.," and so on. And actually, I now use the Archies in class to teach three-act structure. Because it is a crystallization, but it's not a particularly interesting crystallization, so it's easy to see how it works: A character who is in some situation is presented with a change of some kind, and has to respond to that change in one way or another, and the response has to do with who that character is, and then there's resolution of some kind. And you may have different little loops and whatever but the arc is based on resolving that change in situation. I still didn't quite nail it right then, but I was literally in the middle of "Heart of a Turtle," I'd done like three pages of it or so when I talked to Terry. I was really struggling with it. I think we may have been talking about that specifically, actually. Because, I don't know if you remember the story but --

STUMP: I'm looking at it right now, yeah.

ABEL: The story is, this guy sees something in Chicago that makes him think of a time when he was in Louisiana when he was really sad. The end. That always was the story, but initially, it just kind of trailed off. He's sad. Boo hoo. But by looking at the Archies -- I have no idea what the thought process was that brought me to the actual conclusion that I came to -- I added in a little piece at the end, where the character is remembering his sadness, but doesn't tell his friend, he brushes it off with a joke.

STUMP: Right.

ABEL: Or maybe he's not remembering it, maybe it's a flashback to what actually happened but now he's put it away -- so at the end of the story you learn something about him. You learn about what he's willing to reveal about himself and what he's not, and how he felt then and it raises the question of how does he really feel about this situation and himself.

STUMP: So that ending that you had about the story was influenced by this realization that came about by charting all these plots?

ABEL: Some kind of alchemy let me come up with that. Actually I wrote an essay about it, it's going to be in a book about the education of cartoonists.

STUMP: Now that I'm going through this issue, "The Ant and the Grasshopper" seems a little bit more structured. ABEL: Well, that one is more structured because it's comedy; it's easier. It's OK to have a pat ending for a comedy. One of the things I've struggled with over time are the limitations that we put on ourselves as writers -- some of them reasonable, some of them unreasonable -- about what kind of plots is it OK to use.

Jane Austen is one of my favorite writers in the world. I think she's wonderful. I've read her books over and over, but I could never write a book like that, because they're about a girl wanting to get married, and getting married at the end, and being happy. They all are. They're also subtle explorations of people and relationships and who they are and how they interact with each other and all kinds of other stuff. They're very subtle, but the plot is trying to get married.

STUMP: This is something that you're working on for the textbook?

ABEL: No. I may use it there, but I wrote it for a book called Education of a Cartoonist that Steve Heller and Mike Dooley are editing. They did the Education of an Illustrator, it's sort of a series.

My education was completely bass-ackwards, always.

STUMP: Well, every cartoonist has to figure it out on his own.

ABEL: They do and they don't. They don't when they're in my class. A lot of boy cartoonists, especially, manage to have a crew who also do comics or like comics with whom they can figure stuff out. I never had that.

STUMP: It seems like it really helps if you have a professional friend that you can look at their working process, and even if you don't take everything from that, you can kind of fit your own thing around it, because everyone's process is going to be different, you know what I mean? I've definitely taken certain different things from comics, cobbled together all these different approaches and did something that you can't really teach, you know what I mean?

ABEL: But I have to think that you can actually teach a lot of this, of course; I'm writing a book about it. You can't teach everything, and everybody can pick what they want out of the mass of material, but I think there's a ton that could be taught, and the idea that you have to be out on your own, doing this on your own, it's really destructive. Unfortunately, it's very common in comics.

STUMP: The one reason I bring it up is I was talking to Jim Woodring about this, because I teach kids -- not older kids, but little kids. He was talking about James Sturm's new school that's starting up, and he asked me if I would contemplate trying to do something like that, teach a class like that. I like to teach kids, just because I like to teach younger minds. But he was pretty opposed to the idea that you could teach a cartoonist, or a cartoonist could be taught, and he said it was like saying you could teach someone to be a poet or something like that.

ABEL: I absolutely disagree with that point of view. I think it's a really common attitude for cartoonists to have, especially for cartoonists of his generation and older, and even more so for ones who had to go out on their own to do what they wanted to do, because they weren't working for Marvel or DC or whatever. That's what they did, they think that the only way to learn to be a cartoonist is to just flail around until you get someplace or, more likely, don't.

I really disagree. I'm very proud to say that my students do not come out of my class looking like me, none of them have. They come out looking more like themselves. I think I can teach them a lot of stuff. I can't teach them to be artists; I can't teach them the central spark.

STUMP: That may be what he was describing.

ABEL: I think he's saying you can't teach people -- for example, if you say can't teach people how to be poets. Well, you can actually teach people how to be poets. You can't teach them to be great poets, but you can teach them how to write, how to think, many things about structure, and the concerns that might be in poetry. You can teach them to look at other poems.

STUMP: You can certainly expose people to work that's going to transform their understanding...

ABEL: That's at a minimum. You can do a lot more than that. You can be taught how to write. You can be taught how to draw. You can teach somebody how to draw from life and how to draw from their imagination. I don't plan to do that, but it can be done. I think saying it can't be taught has a destructive influence on our world of art. It's a bad idea, that everybody has to individually struggle along on their own, and end up wherever they end up. For hundreds of thousands of years, artists have worked as apprentices. It's only in the last 50 that they haven't. And working as an apprentice is learning from the master -- copying, nothing wrong with copying for a while. I don't teach my students as if they're apprentices. I don't have them copy me and just do my grunt work, but I think that's one model for education that works.

You can tell, I'm getting a little heated. I don't like the idea that somebody like Woodring would say that it's a bad idea to teach comics. If somebody had said to me when I was 21, when I knew I wanted to be a cartoonist, "Hey, there's a place where they're good teachers and you could really learn," like James' school, that would have been magic. I don't know if I could have or would have done it in terms of money and so on, but it could have gotten me to where I am now, six years earlier. Why should I suffer? Why should I have to reinvent the wheel over and over again?

STUMP: I think there's a point to it. I think it maybe speaks just to the different styles of expression, too...

ABEL: I think he could have learned, too. He couldn't have learned to come up with Frank, but he could have learned how to use a pen. It probably took him a while to figure that out. He could have learned about composition. I don't know what he studied, maybe he studied art, maybe he didn't.

STUMP: I think he didn't really study so much as he learned when he was working in animation or something like that.

ABEL: When he was an apprentice.

STUMP: Yeah, exactly, right.

ABEL: That's the attitude I'm fighting against. Part of our proposal for our book is specifically addressing that prejudice, and I think it is a prejudice. It's very much the Modernist ideal, the individual artist off in his or her garret struggling alone. That model is destructive and self-destructive. I don't think you come up with better art because of that. The myth is that it's the only way you come up with true, pure art, but I just don't buy it.

Our argument in our pitch for our book is that group learning is the best way. It's not the only way, and we will accommodate people who want to learn on their own, but our emphasis and our push all the way through the book is going to be: If students don't have the opportunity to go to a class with a teacher, encourage them to form groups and work together. Having feedback and having people look at your work and having other minds to help you think through problems, that will get you years ahead. Why struggle when you don't have to?

STUMP: Comics is such an all-encompassing form, too.

ABEL: It's so hard. I had to figure it out all by myself, pretty much. Why? It was just really painful. I think I might not be so burned out as to be putting it aside right now if I hadn't had to spend so much time doing bullshit. Finally, this last year, I've gotten way more disciplined about my work schedule. I have a number of pages I have to do per week, and I sit down and I do them. Even if I'm not feeling like doing it, I just do it. I got two issues done in a year, and one was 60 pages long. I am 35 years old. I just got it.

Discipline is a whole other issue but it's also a question of what to do when starting work. I sit and I set up the pen here and I put the brush here and I rule out the paper like this and it gets you into the work mode. And if somebody had helped me with that earlier on, it would have made me a happier person.

STUMP: [Laughs.] You're making a lot of good points. This textbook that you're talking about is going to be something where it's not just for a classroom, it's for someone that --

ABEL: It's going to have at least three different ways you could use it: in a classroom, which I think will initially be the least common of the uses, because there just aren't that many classes (although I hope eventually that will not be the case); the second way is to form a group, either online or in person, and we'll provide instructions on how to try to do that; and then third way is, if you insist, you can do it on your own, by yourself. But with the possibility of online groups, it just seems so silly not to find somebody who you can bounce stuff off of.

The Chicago Scene

STUMP: I'm wondering if you were interacting more with people in the comics scene in Chicago than you are now. Was that was part of your experience?

ABEL: Not really. I mean, I know most of the guys, and they're mostly guys of course, who are in the Chicago comics scene. I'm friends with a bunch of them, but we never spent a lot of time together or anything.

STUMP: What neighborhood did you live in?

ABEL: I lived in Wicker Park the last, whatever, seven years I was in Chicago. People moved around, and lived different places, but you know, Chris Ware lived around the corner from me pretty much the entire time I lived in Wicker Park. He lived a couple different places, I lived a couple different places, but we moved, each of us, within two blocks of where we had been before. Then Dan Clowes, when he lived there, he lived across the street from me. When he left, he gave me his armchair. It now belongs to another cartoonist. I passed it along. It's the chair in that cover that I did for The Comics Journal, a big green vinyl armchair with an ottoman. It was kind of busted when he gave it to me but I fixed it. I had it from... when would that be... like '93 until 2002. It was his childhood TV-watching chair.

STUMP: Wow! That's an important cultural artifact. [Laughs.]

ABEL: Now it belongs to Howard Arey of High Horse.

STUMP: That's where he used to watch Garfield Goose and The Bozo Show and all that stuff.

ABEL: I guess.

STUMP: Even if you weren't necessarily getting a lot of concrete advice or whatever from other cartoonists, just being around those two, Chris Ware and Dan Clowes, just being in their immediate surroundings, was that inspiring on some level?

ABEL: Dan I became friends with, just before he left, to the extent that I would hang out with him, once a month or something like that. It wasn't too often. We dragged him to a rock show one time, it was really awkward.

STUMP: Which rock show was this?

ABEL: I don't know. A Halcyon show or something. Some local show at Czar Bar, which was across the street from him. And some girl was like, [in a high-pitched voice] "Oh my God it's Dan Clowes! Can I sit in your lap?" And she sat on his lap. [Laughter.] I don't remember all what happened, but I remember him feeling like, "Wow, this is not my scene."

I had known him longer, but I actually only became friends with him within a year of when he left Chicago. Right when I was just getting out of college, he had a sort of group that would meet at Earwax Café one day a week. It was him, Chris, Terry LaBan, Gary Leib, and Archer. I think that's it. Maybe Ivan? I don't remember why I knew to go there. Somebody told me I should come in and show them my stuff or something. Maybe it was Dan? So I went in this one time and it was totally embarrassing, because I was passing around my sketchbooks and they were like, "Yeah, nice. Great." [Stump laughs.] You know, I'd done a few comics in college and stuff. But it was just too embarrassing to hang out with those guys.

STUMP: Yeah.

ABEL: I think it was that first time I went to Earwax, Dan looked at my stuff and said something like, "So, are you planning to make this a career, to be a cartoonist?"

I said, "I want to be a cartoonist, though of course, I don't expect to be able to make a living from it."

And he goes, "Why not? I do."

He denies now that he ever said that. He's like, "I would never say that," and I'm like "But you did."

That was something I clung to for a long time.

STUMP: That's funny.

ABEL: And they mocked me for using Speedball pens for drawing.

STUMP: As opposed to...?

ABEL: Regular steel dip pens. Speedball pens are lettering pens. They're like, "Look at this! She uses a lettering pen for drawing, ugh!"

They teased me. I didn't know what to do; I'd never known any cartoonists, really. I mean, I knew them in college, but I didn't hang out with them drawing or anything. I never knew anybody who knew anything about materials. It was very humiliating. But what was really nice is Dan told me that Jaime, who is my hero, used the Hunt 22. I was making mental notes. Then Dan actually bought me some pen nibs and brought them to me at work. It was really nice. He brought me some Hunt 22s.

STUMP: And that was when you were using a pen?

ABEL: Yeah, I used that pen a lot back in the early '90s, definitely. I didn't switch to a brush until '95 or '96, around then. I was doing it a little bit before that, but it was very intimidating to use a brush. That was my first good drawing pen.

Journalism

STUMP: Those short comics-journalism pieces you did for the NewCity paper are actually some of my favorite things of yours. Do you have any interest in doing a more long-form project with that?

ABEL: No.

STUMP: Not at all?

ABEL: It's too hard. I mean, the longest thing I did was Radio, and I'm really proud of that book. I think it's a good book, and it certainly turned out better than I expected and better than I think Ira [Glass] expected. Ira thought he would get just a piece-of-crap superhero pastiche [Stump laughs] or something like that.

STUMP: Oh, I'm sure he didn't. He was a fan of your work before you did the comic book, I assume.

ABEL: No, he wasn't. He had one strip of mine from NewCity that he clipped and saved, and he had it his folder for four years. He had never seen anything else I did. He actually looked me up in the phone book -- I'd moved to Mexico, but I had a forwarding message on my old number for six months. It was like five months after I'd moved that he called my old number in Chicago and got my number in Mexico and then called me in Mexico. You can't imagine how weird it was to have Ira Glass calling me in Mexico City out of the blue. I was a huge fan.

STUMP: I can imagine that would be weird. What was your initial reaction to the proposal?

ABEL: I thought it sounded great.

STUMP: Even though you had already set up shop in Mexico?

ABEL: I was coming back all the time anyway. I had been doing this strip called Chicagophile for the University of Chicago Magazine since '96, every two months.

STUMP: Do you still do this?

ABEL: I just did the last one. It hasn't come out yet. It's my alumni magazine, it comes out every two months. They were flying me back to Chicago every six months to research a few strips, and then I'd go back and draw them in Mexico.

STUMP: So you kind of combined the two?

ABEL: I just put it together, yeah. Plus my mom is there; it's not like I would never want to go to Chicago again.

STUMP: So you spent an actual, solid week in the offices with the crew of the show.

ABEL: Well, I was there every day, but not all day. I made sure I was at all the events. But you know, most of the day they sit there staring at the computer screen, moving little bits of sound around. It's not very interesting. [Stump laughs.] I mean, it is very interesting to them, and I could see how it could be interesting to do, but watching them is not interesting.

STUMP: Yeah, I guess the grunt work behind the scenes is not necessarily fascinating.

ABEL: Yeah, there's a lot of it.

STUMP: You didn't necessarily have any desire to go out and report any of the stories with them, or had that already been completed?

ABEL: My idea was to do the genesis and whole story of one show. Of course, they'd done the research months before because it was the show of that week. So I didn't have any choice. I did have raw tapes from it.

STUMP: To listen to and pick out things?

ABEL: Yeah, to use bits of it. I used some quotes.

STUMP: It's hard to figure out whether it's engaging to me more because I like the show so much that I know everything that's being discussed. I even recognized the particular episode that you watched them put together.

ABEL: I hope not. I don't think so, though. I've gotten a lot of feedback over time. The book was just reprinted in Italy, obviously they don't listen to the show. But people really like the book there.

STUMP: Well, you did a really good job of capturing Ira himself, it seems.

ABEL: That's for the people who love the show. I sneak in a lot of stuff about what comics are and how comics work visually while I'm talking about radio, and that's for people who love comics. Also, I talk about narrative and how you make narrative and what's important. And that's valuable for anybody.

STUMP: There's that panel where Ira's talking about removing the background music in a piece, and then you remove the background in the panel, and how it just makes everything stand out so much more, when you're subtracting something the reader or the listener has gotten used to.

ABEL: Yeah, that's definitely the most obvious one. That was a good and satisfying book, but it took me three or four months of backbreaking work to put it together. Not that I wouldn't do that again for the right piece, but it would have to fall in my lap. I'm not looking for it.

STUMP: There's a freedom in doing fiction, obviously, that you don't have when you're doing journalism. You don't have to have that same loyalty to the facts.

ABEL: But there's a freedom you have in doing journalism that you don't have when you're doing fiction, which is that you just have the materials there, although obviously you have to put it together. I always liked going back and forth when I was younger, doing shorter pieces. It felt like a really good balance, doing something for the NewCity and doing some Artbabe stuff or whatever.

STUMP: You seem like you have the personality for it, though, unlike most cartoonists, like you were saying.

ABEL: I think I have an analytical approach to stuff and the ability to put things together in some kind of narrative.

STUMP: And also talking to people, you know.

ABEL: Yeah, and talking to people, I don't love it, but I can do it, definitely. I also have a distance on things and a willingness to keep myself out of it. One of the things a lot of people do in nonfiction is they stick themselves in the middle of it and talk about how awkward they feel, how it was like for them -- I am in my stories sometimes, but only when I feel it will be enlightening about what the place is like or what the thing is like. I'm not the story. I think that's something a lot of cartoonists haven't mastered, mostly because they haven't tried, I don't think that most cartoonists ever give it a shot.

We make our students do it; not necessarily interviewing, but doing a nonfiction story. It is like pulling teeth. It's the hardest thing they do all year. They just don't have the analytical abilities, you know; the education system fails everybody, pretty much. [Stump laughs.] They don't have the skills to put together an essay, essentially. I think the highest form of comics journalism is the essay. It's not a front-page New York Times story. It's something where you have a point to make, and you make it, based on fact. Because there's not enough room to just get all the facts in and letting the readers make their own decision.

STUMP: You must be a fan of Joe Sacco's though, right?

ABEL: Yeah, definitely. I think he's a master essayist.

STUMP: When you see something like that, you don't necessarily feel compelled to do the same thing, though?

ABEL: Hell no. I see that and I run the other direction.

STUMP: [Laughs.] Right.

ABEL: I think he's brilliant and wonderful and I'm so glad he exists, but man, do I not want to do that.

STUMP: I can understand that.

ABEL: The actress Mia Kirschner called me up -- she was putting together a journalistic comics project for Amnesty International. It's still going on, comics about areas with huge human rights problems. Phoebe Gloeckner is doing one about murdered women in Juarez, Mexico. Anyway, she asked me to go to Chechnya. I was like, "Uh-uh." [Laughter.] (A) I am not going to Chechnya, and (B) I don't want to draw the comic.

STUMP: Right. So you're not champing at the bit to do more journalism.

ABEL: I've been asked to do various comics -- not just Chechnya, but others that would not have been as war-torn. But they would have been just as life-consuming for a period of months or even years, and that is just not my mission, it's not what I'm best at.

STUMP: The unfortunate thing with something like that too is that it seems by the time you get done with it, its ability to affect situations is decreased.

ABEL: I disagree, because of the essay form. I think it's really important, even if it's after-the-fact, to learn from the situation. No, Joe Sacco can't stop a decimation of the population that happened a year before even he showed up, but he can help us be aware of how it happened and who the people are who did it and know in what ways they're like us. I think all those things are crucial.

Trimmings

STUMP: Have you gotten feedback on La Perdida that's affected how you told the rest of the story?

ABEL: Yeah, definitely, over time. I can't even pinpoint what, it's been so long, but I talked to a lot of people about it over time, and it's helped sort of deepen my thinking about it and so forth.

STUMP: I guess since there isn't a letters column in La Perdida you don't really get a sense of whether you have a different fan base now that you're doing this different type of story than you did in Artbabe.

ABEL: I've never had one before, either.

STUMP: OK, I don't know why I just assumed that you did, hmm.

ABEL: Nope, never had one.

STUMP: Do you get more or less, though, letters from readers?

ABEL: Oh, a lot less, yeah. I think it's just the times, you know, that when I was doing Artbabe, I was much closer to doing minicomics and the culture of minicomics was much closer to existing, in a way that it doesn't really anymore.

STUMP: Right.

ABEL: And I had a lot of people I was in correspondence with, because I had sold them my minicomics through the mail and stuff, so I got a lot of feedback -- not necessarily really useful, but like, "Hey, loved the new issue," you know.

La Perdida is, I intentionally designed it to look like a book, and I feel that readers find that somewhat hermetic.

STUMP: It's not an open forum, necessarily.

ABEL: Yeah. I've gotten a lot of response to it over the years and a lot of nice, interesting e-mails, and people pointing out interesting things about it or responding to it, but only if they feel very strongly. Nobody -- well, not nobody, but very few people just write me to say, "Hey, nice issue." It has to have really moved them or there's something really important that they wanted to say, and so they'll write to me about it.

It's like there's a hump to get over.

STUMP: I wonder if the tone of the story, the fact that the tone is a little bit different, has something to do with that, in a sense.

ABEL: Oh, I think that too, probably. I think it's a combination of things. It doesn't feel as chitchatty or whatever. And the old book had sort of an editorial page, not really an editorial but I'd write something, and they're be pictures of me, or my house, or whatever... it was much more personal.

STUMP: Right, right. I think that was also probably more common just in comics in general in the '90s, where serial comics were more of their own thing, rather than simply a graphic novel in installments. There used to be a lot more "bonus" features -- like plugs, letters, editorials?

ABEL: Oh yeah, and it was definitely the holdover for me, from the way that I approached my minicomics and approached my readers at that point, which was again, more personal and intimate.

STUMP: What do you think about just the trend in general away from that? I mean, is that personal connection something we're going to lose completely when periodical comics fall by the wayside?

ABEL: I think we've kind of already lost it. It's not a huge horrible thing ? it was nice, but once we went from actual paper copies of letters and things to e-mail, we'd already kind of lost it.

STUMP: Sure.

ABEL: You know, and the idea of sending $2 through the mail would seem completely ludicrous. That underpinning was gone. I mean, that was the minicomic side of it, and it was also mainstream comic side, where people were really involved I think. That got moved over to the message boards and... as far as I can tell, it doesn't need to be within the comic itself.

STUMP: In particular when Eightball would come out, I used to really enjoy just that whole idea of it being sort of like a continuum, especially in the letters column. And obviously, I don't enjoy the comic any less -- I think if anything, it's better, of course -- but it doesn't seem like it has that same kind of thrill when you would get a new Eightball or something like that. Just because it doesn't have that some kind of continuity.

ABEL: Yeah, I guess. I never liked them that much, I was never that interested. The letters pages, as a reader, they just never grabbed me, particularly. It almost never occurred to me to write a letter to a cartoonist. And so, when I was doing comics, it didn't occur to me to put a letter column in, so I didn't.

[To read the rest of this interview, please see The Comics Journal #270.]

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