JIM OTTAVIANI: I'd like to start with Our Cancer Year, and the first thing you see when you encounter it. Your cover is very vibrant, and subtly introduces the emphasis (the daily struggles), personalities involved, and setting (the new house, the yellow ribbon) of the book. I also think it benefits from the best reproduction of the whole book. Did you work up a number of cover ideas? How did you choose this one?

FRANK STACK: When Harvey works with artists, he usually writes some kind of idea for the cover. I think Harvey and Joyce agreed on this idea. I had taken some photographs of their house in Cleveland (not in the snow) and I just did a pastel mock-up for a cover, sent it to them and asked them, "What's this look like?" -- imagining it in the snow and coming up with the yellow ribbon. They had said that people in the neighborhood had them on trees, but hadn't mentioned it for the cover. I guess it was my idea to stick it in there. I hadn't intended that to be final -- it was just an idea. I'd intended to paint it in watercolor or acrylic or something. That was just a pastel with ink added to it. But they liked it the way it was. I did work on the figures a bit after they approved it. They seemed to be pleased.

OTTAVIANI: When did Harvey and Joyce approach you to do the book?

STACK: Let's see... it was shortly after the chemo was ended. I can't remember exactly. When I first visited them, Harvey was still feeling pretty bad -- nothing like when he was going through it, though. I talked to him a few times on the phone while he was going through it. Joyce called me and just told me flat out, "Harvey's got cancer." The few times I tried to call him and talk to him about various things while he was going through it, he was, I'd say, virtually incapable of talking on the phone. He seemed to be obviously in pain, obviously hurting.

STEVE LIEBER: This is a really big project. Did you hesitate to take it on?

STACK: Yes, I did. [laughs] I think it was mostly because I was concerned about -- I couldn't have taken it on if I didn't have a leave coming up that I could apply for. I couldn't have worked at my job and done it at the same time. It was too much, and it ended up taking over six months. I tried hard to finish it between May and December of '93, but I didn't actually get it done until March '94.

One of the reasons I wanted to do it is that you never know how sick somebody is when they have cancer, and I thought it was possible that this might be the last thing I'd ever do with Harvey, or maybe that anyone would. He seems to be doing well, though.

OTTAVIANI: This is one of your few works (with the exception of "The Lying Ear" [Blab! #6]), that has not had a strong humorous slant, if you will. In Our Cancer Year, you sustain a more consistently serious mood for a longer period. What was that like?

STACK: It was more like being an illustrator. Usually, for the comics I do at least, I think of the primary point is to be funny. But I think, like Harvey does, that there's no reason that comics, or things done in that "expressive drawing narrative sequence format" -- I don't see why it has to be limited in the kinds of ideas that it describes.

LIEBER: Did sustaining that mood present any problems for you in doing the work? There were bits in there, of course -- the workman, the nurse -- where you did get to indulge more in caricature, though you really had to keep a straight face and work with solemn material about your friends all the time. What special problems did that present?

STACK: Well, I don't know that the mood of the story necessarily expressed my mood. I would say that the things that I found difficult were the long passages where there wasn't anything particularly interesting to draw [laughs]: you know, somebody coming to the door and they have a conversation. I don't think that I ever found doing it particularly depressing. I've had people tell me that they just can't read it because, well, "My father had gone through chemotherapy" or something. But I don't actually think that the story is necessarily a downer for the reader. Some reviewer said that there was no humor in it. I don't agree. I think it was very briskly written with some very witty passages.

But I guess I enjoyed working on the most challenging passages, like the scene in the chemotherapy room where they have the flap with the nurse -- which was one of the most difficult ones, too. I almost hate to say it, but I enjoyed drawing the parts where things got hairy between Harvey and Joyce. Since it was their story and not mine, I enjoyed it most when I got to do some expressive drawing. My feeling about comics is always that it's a chance to let artists get a chance to do some of the things that writers usually get to do. Tell stories in pictures. In other people's work, I'm always interested in seeing some special thing that they'll do with the drawing. That's what I'm interested in about comics, both when I read 'em and draw 'em. I always try to make my own things somewhat interesting in terms of the drawing. I think that's a problem with comics, that you still do have to tell a story, it still does have to make sense. It means that you have to draw a lot of stuff that you wouldn't draw otherwise, that you wouldn't find interesting as a drawing problem.

OTTAVIANI: We were talking about this the other day: Many contemporary cartoonists layer a lot of information on their page, using complex layouts, lots of details, etc. -- almost presenting a page as an organic unit. Where do you think this comes from, and what are the advantages and disadvantages of doing this? You employ this sparingly, it seems.

STACK: Of course, one of the standard interpretations is that the more complex it gets, the more difficult it is to read. A penalty that I paid in Our Cancer Year -- you noticed that the cover was the best reproduction in it -- is that sometimes, when you get real fancy about drawing complex tones, bad reproduction just makes you seem like a fool. You draw it and it just turns into this blotchy mess when they don't reproduce it well. The newspaper strip artists just assume that it's going to happen. It doesn't always, but it's a fairly safe assumption that somebody's going to screw it up. So they don't do anything complex. I remember something in one of those Pogo books that Eclipse was doing in which one of Walt Kelly's mentors at Disney referred to complex line systems as "banjo work." [laughter] In one of the Pogo strips he had this banjo... Of course, artists do this because they like it. I like to think that tone work is kind of like painting tones, and I sometimes like to do it, but it complicates things and sometimes causes reproduction problems. And when you're drawing hundreds of pictures, there's just a limited time that you have to do that anyway.

There's another issue: somebody praised me one time for keeping the page layout simple, you know, six panels to a page. There is a reason that I do that. It makes editing relatively easy. Say I decide I need another panel, I can just reshuffle panels and move them to another page and they'll still fit.

OTTAVIANI: What kind of editorial hand did Harvey and Joyce exercise in Our Cancer Year? They described how they modified the scripting for the book, making significant changes in Harvey's usual approach.

STACK: What I worked from was essentially like a film script: some descriptive patterns, the dialogue laid out like it would be in a play. Harvey, colon, he says what he says. Joyce says what she says, then Harvey says this. Whereas Harvey would usually give me very rough page layouts with stick-figures, and notes like, "Jack is 50 years old and balding." If it was really important what the character looked like, he'd send me a picture, otherwise I'd just cast it with somebody that I knew that looked like that. If it was seriously wrong he might say something, but usually wouldn't.

There were a couple characters I changed after sending it to them. One of them I didn't really like changing much. I drew one of Joyce's sisters, and she hadn't provided me with a picture. She said, "Oh, she isn't dark haired, she's blond." I was a little annoyed at having to change a dark-haired character to a blond, because I figured she should have told me that ahead of time. But in another instance, they just said, "Here's this neighbor." and I figured that this was possibly an older person. And since I hadn't drawn many older people in there I made her maybe 60-70 years old. And they got it and said, "Well, since we actually used her name, and she's actually pretty good looking..." [laughter] He said it really wasn't that important to change it, but she might have her feelings hurt. They still didn't send a picture, but I changed her and made her better looking. But generally, they let me do the characters pretty much the way I wanted to. I never objected if they gave me some help, which they did in a few of cases. I got photographs of maybe six people, and met the female doctor and took some pictures of her, and took photographs of the chemotherapy room. Boy, I'd have been in big trouble trying to imagine what a chemotherapy room looked like if they hadn't set something up where I could see it.

I spent four or five days in Cleveland doing research. It wasn't exactly party time, but I like Harvey and Joyce. Harvey wasn't feeling very good, and since it wasn't a very long time, there was a lot of taking care of business. For instance, I went to see their old apartment, which they didn't live in anymore, so we went over and scoped out an apartment like it. One afternoon I just drove around the streets of Cleveland snapping random pictures of it. I wanted to take pictures of the Cleveland skyline, but it was so foggy the whole time that I never saw the Cleveland skyline. I took as many pictures as I could of just their house, because so much of the action went on in the house. And then we spent an evening at the cancer hospital. You really have to be careful about taking pictures in a hospital. Generally it's verboten, and if they catch you doing it without permission it's like they're going to arrest you or something, because invasion of privacy and stuff like that.

OTTAVIANI: Harvey and Joyce said that things got a little tense on occasion, especially during that part of the research.

STACK: Yeah, they were reliving some intense business, but it didn't seem particularly tense for me, except for watching some things. I would say it got more tense between the publisher and them than it ever got between me and them. They said a little about it in that independent American Splendor book [published by Dark Horse Comics]. In fact, I was talking to the publisher a lot and hearing things Joyce would say about him, and things he would say about her. I never did want to take sides in that. But no, as far as things being tense between Harvey, Joyce, and me, there wasn't much.

Life After (And Before) Our Cancer Year

LIEBER: Were you eager to get back to single image work after finishing the story?

STACK: Oh yeah. It was a while before I wanted to do any comics again. [laughs] I didn't go to the Chicago convention that summer. But when the book came out, there were some nice opportunities to go to San Francisco and New York. But as soon as it was over with I did lots of oil painting and figure painting. I'm doing a comic right now about the life of Caravaggio. I'm doing it faster than I would like to meet an end of year deadline for Monte Beauchamp and Blab!. ["No Hope. No Fear" appeared in Blab! #8.] They're the ones that published the "Lying Ear" that you mentioned earlier.

OTTAVIANI: We were curious, but almost all the biographical/slice-of-life work, and all of yours we've seen, has been in black and white. This may be an economic artifact, but given your druthers, would you rather work in color?

STACK: Yeah. I haven't ever had too much opportunity to publish comics in color. But yeah, I'm a painter, and like painting. I don't usually try to tell stories in my color work. It doesn't seem suited very well for it to me.

LIEBER: Does that extend to your black and white single image work as well? I've got the Etchings and Lithographs book in front of me.

STACK: Oh, well I like to do the etchings and lithographs. I think of them as black and white images, but I like to do color stuff. The stuff in this Caravaggio thing, and probably in the Van Gogh thing, too, is pretty much related to the etchings and lithographs in terms of technique. I guess I might do things in color if that was the way people usually published them. But the kind of stuff I do is not any big force on the market. I did a color piece for Drawn & Quarterly once. If The New Yorker came along and said, "We'd like to do something in color from you every three months" or Playboy said, "Let's do some color cartoons," I'd certainly do it.

LIEBER: Speaking of Drawn & Quarterly, you did some strips for them on a very thinly veiled George Bush. Is there some background on that?

STACK: People kept saying that they liked him. My father, an oil field supply salesman and district manager, had worked with him in Midland, Texas. George Bush was a junior partner in a drilling company. I don't remember George Bush at the time. I was in high school, and if I'd met him, he certainly didn't make any impression on me. But my father had told me at one point that he'd liked him. So years later, when George Bush was a national figure (vice-President or President) I said to him, "Well, I don't like him, but I know you do." And he said "No, I don't!" [laughter] And then as George Bush became more important, I began to ask him more questions about his memories of him and what kind of a guy he was. Most of the claims in the Drawn & Quarterly stories, like that George Bush answered the phone at the CIA office on the day of the Kennedy assassination or the day afterwards and said that Lee Harvey Oswald had never worked for the CIA, are actually based on a news report that I heard. Somebody at the CIA office, who identified himself as George Bush, did do that. I don't believe that the CIA would have ever permitted somebody who hadn't been one of their agents to be their director. I think they swung enough weight that they could've stopped that from happening. So since George Bush said that he had never been a CIA agent, I just assumed that he was probably lying -- that he'd been an undercover CIA agent. I based the scenario on how he may have acted immediately out of the Navy on the way adventure stories had run in the newspaper. As in Steve Canyon, or Buz Sawyer, not only was it alright in the general population's view for these former war heroes to become international spies, it was seen as a way of continuing their adventures. Which is what Buz Sawyer did. Buz Sawyer got out of the Navy and just wanted to keep flying and having adventures, but it wasn't possible in the civilian population. So when the government asked him to work for them under various covers of international activities, he said, "Sure." He certainly didn't have any notion of our country as a bunch of villains, but he could be convinced when he saw villainous behavior. The CIA was established in 1946, and George Bush was in Yale getting an M.B.A. in 1946. Anyway, I put that story together from various bits and pieces. You might notice that it's never been published in the United States, either. [pause] That's a joke. [Drawn & Quarterly is published out of Montreal.]

OTTAVIANI: Except for these Paddy Booshwah stories in Drawn & Quarterly, we've not seen much of your work that's overtly topically political. This seems incongruous coming from -- or rather, not coming from -- the first underground cartoonist.

STACK: Oh, I did lots of them. In fact, the first time I appeared in public as a cartoonist, which was relatively recently: in Chicago, the year Dorman's Doggie came out from Kitchen Sink. I went there to promote the book, which didn't do much good. But when I appeared, I had some little right-wing nerd ask me a question from the audience, "Was I going to continue my radical political cartoons?" as if hadn't I gotten over that, or learned better or something. Well, given the opportunity, I'll continue doing them [laughs], certainly as long as the country keeps producing jerks such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan and George Bush. And Limbaugh and the riff-raff that have taken over the country right now. But obviously, satire doesn't work and doesn't have any effect on anything. It doesn't keep Phil Gramm from doing whatever he's doing. I guess after a while it gets so you think, "Ah, what's the point? Who cares anyway?"

LIEBER: I know [Ralph] Steadman declared a moratorium on drawing politicians, because he didn't feel there was any politician worth a cartoonist's attention.

STACK: Yeah. It's Pat Oliphant's business, so I guess he can't stop doing it either. But I get the idea that that's sort of what he feels about it, too. [laughter] It's an embittering experience, I think, to try and involve yourself in it and just realize that your only outlet is commercially based, and all these people that own everything buy power, and buy off magazines and TV networks just like they'd buy off anything. I think people may complain that the networks are too liberal, but there aren't any liberals anymore. Liberals are utterly disenfranchised. There's just right-wing, more-right-wing, and even-more-right-wing as far as I'm concerned.

OTTAVIANI: Do you consider yourself a liberal?

STACK: At least. Except I'm conservative about a whole lot of things. I don't consider the people that call themselves conservative to be interested in conserving anything usually, except more privileges for themselves. I consider myself a person of fairly ordinary political ideas. I feel like the country should be run for the benefit of the people of the country, not for a bunch of rotten, power-mongering, paper-shuffling assholes who think work is to buy cheap and sell dear. [laughter] The country's just a pack of fools right now.

LIEBER: Fertile ground for satire. What are you setting your sights on these days?

STACK: I have a serialized Jesus story starting. I've got the first episode drawn and don't really exactly know how the next one's going to go. The impetus of it is the O.J. Simpson trial. I was planning to have Jesus set up and going to trial.

OTTAVIANI: For murder?