Barry Windsor-Smith Interviewed by Gary Groth excerpted from The Comics Journal #190

Together or Not

GARY GROTH: Just before I turned on the tape recorder, you said you didn't feel real "together," and it seemed to me that this would be the point in your career, doing what seems to be the best as well as the most personal work of your life, on the verge of a critical and commercial success, that you would feel most "together."

BARRY WINDSOR-SMITH: Well, the commercial bit we'll have to see about, but yes, I think I'm definitely doing the best work I've ever done. I think why I feel I'm untogether is... If this stuff works out there in the field, if it's a commercial or critical success, hopefully both, then I think I'll feel perfectly together and I'll be happy about it. But I'm drawing and writing and inking and coloring the fifth book right now, and I'm kind of in a vacuum. Somebody's always going to find something nice to say about my work, I guess, but I've received nothing but compliments from friends and associates: I need to hear what my critics have to say. I've got this hope, it's like a really idealistic dream that this is going to work, but there's no proof of it yet. Sometimes during the day if I get a good idea or I get something down just the way I want it to be and it makes me laugh maybe, I think, "That's a good piece of stuff I just pulled off there," then I feel good about it. But I tell you, there are times at 3 o'clock in the morning and I'm sitting around, because I'm a pretty bad sleeper, and I'm thinking, "Christ, what have I let myself in here for? This is really on the edge."

So that's what I mean by being untogether. I have faith in myself to a degree, I have so little faith in the public nowadays I have to say [Groth laughs], because I see what sells, what's been selling for the past decade. Of course everything I'm going to say is obviously my personal opinion, but just so much of the craft of this industry has just gone down the tube, and somehow, by wicked circumstance, the sales have gone up -- even though it's been going in the dump for the last year or so. But the stuff I'm producing is the antithesis of what would be a grand commercial gambit by the standards applied today. I think it's well written, I think it's well drawn, it has a literary edge to it -- it's all that shit that don't sell, you know? [Laughs.]

GROTH: Yeah, you're definitely not appealing to the quintessential fanboy who wants The X-Men.

{mosimage}

WINDSOR-SMITH: The X-Men, yeah, or the other stuff. I guess it's all the same thing -- all the X stuff, whether it's from Marvel or Image.

GROTH: Basically sex and violence for kids.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Right, on a very immature level. I've got violence in my books, but --

GROTH: [sarcastically] Unfortunately you've got humor, too. [Laughs.]

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah, see, that's a big drag. There's a drawback right there -- it's funny! So I'm really asking for trouble here.

GROTH: As an artist I'm sure you believe this, which also makes it a little bit more puzzling why you're concerned about what the reaction is going to be, but as an artist don't you think that ultimately you have to please yourself and that anyone else's opinion is really beside the point?

WINDSOR-SMITH: Well, for one thing, "art" is such a massive term. I guess it's just a personal thing with me that I feel if I can't please other people, it doesn't please me. Now, that's not to say that my goal is to please other people. But I don't do this for myself, you know? I certainly like to bathe in the glow of the title "Artist," but I also consider myself an entertainer -- not that that is my sole interest, either. I'm not here just to entertain, I'm here to do all sorts of things. But if I don't capture my audience -- and if I fail at either making somebody laugh or making somebody think about something, or just having somebody enjoy a drawing for its own sake or the color combination -- if it doesn't work for them, then we can call the product a failure; it doesn't necessarily mean that I failed as an artist but simply that I did not succeed as an entertainer.

So no, I'm not out just to please myself. Not in the least. I think that's one of the reasons why [I've had] such a hard work ethic over these years. If it was just for me, then gee, my work would be a whole different animal. I think there are people in this field who do it for themselves, and fuck the rest. But I'm referring people in the commercial side of the field. But somebody like Chester Brown is doing his work for himself. He's in a whole different field -- he's not writing The X-Men. And one can't say his attitude is, "Well, if you don't like it, fuck you." I really think that he genuinely 1) wants to explain himself, and 2) hopes that somebody, if not being entertained by it, at least can grok what he's saying. There's a value to that. It's all about communication. There's a good word. If my stuff fails to communicate, then it has failed, no matter what I did or how I did it.

GROTH: But of course that could be less your failure than the public's failure.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Absolutely. The way I'm looking at it now, because I really do have a bit of some unsurety about the public, if I can't make somebody laugh with this stuff, well then, they've got no fucking sense of humor, you know what I mean?

GROTH: [Laughs.] Right.

WINDSOR-SMITH: [Laughs.] Fuck 'em all!

GROTH: I think that's a healthy attitude.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah.

Comics and Art

GROTH: One thing you said in an interview that you gave which was not to my knowledge published was, "I can't draw comics, or I can't make comics, and be a serious artist at the same time because they're such wholly different processes."

WINDSOR-SMITH: I think that was published. I forget who I said it to. But it's something I certainly believe right now also.

GROTH: Can you explain what you mean by that dichotomy between making comics and being a serious artist? Why do you feel that they're mutually exclusive?

WINDSOR-SMITH: I think that probably either you have mis-remembered it, or I mis-said it at the time. But what I really should have said, which is a slight difference with one single word, is a "painter." Because at that time -- that probably came from the Gorblimey Press years -- and in order for me to be able to transform myself from a fairly good comic book artist into a person who can create large easel works, as I call them, the difference in thinking, the whole difference in process, is absolutely phenomenal. There is simply no comparison. But just because a guy can drive a car 200 miles per hour at the Indianapolis raceway doesn't mean that he can fly a plane at 200 miles an hour. You're doing essentially the same thing, going from A to B very fast, but it's a whole different process of thinking, action and reaction.

When I first wanted to get back into comic books after 10 or 11 years of Gorblimey Press it was simply because I wanted to tell stories again. But I couldn't do it. I foundered totally. I had put comics totally out of my mind. The only connection I had with comic books for about 10 years was reading The Comics Journal.

GROTH: [Laughs.] No wonder you couldn't draw comics!

WINDSOR-SMITH: Well, actually I found it very depressing. I don't know if it was so much shit going down all the time, or you were just raking it up all the time. [Groth laughs.] But I was thinking, "Christ, what is this bleeding industry coming to?!" But, at any rate, I simply couldn't locate the skills I once had. I couldn't cartoon any more. That was an absolute nightmare for me. Over 10 years I had to learn how to really draw, and the whole process about cartooning had gone utterly out of my head. Nowadays, I've been drawing three different titles continuously since October or November of last year, every day, that's all I do. All I think about is continuity, pacing, staging, all the elements that make a comic book for better or worse. And you have to keep them in your head all the time. Eventually it becomes second nature, thank God, and now I can think that again.

But way back in the mid-'80s when I grabbed some old yellowed Marvel comics paper and tried to think sequentially and draw dynamically I found I couldn't. I just couldn't make it happen. So my good friend Herb Trimpe bailed me out on that by letting me work over his layouts for Machine Man. Then I picked it up again really bloody fast, a little bit too fast for Herbie because by the second or third issue I'd be erasing his layouts and putting in my own work. [Laughs.] But it was really like a whole re-learning process because I had become a civilian for a decade or more -- I became one of those people who can't understand comics. Do you know people like that? Who simply don't understand the process, the left to right, you read the balloons in sequence...

GROTH: I don't know if I know people like that. I know people who don't read them, but I don't know if I know people who can't read them.

WINDSOR-SMITH: There are many people who don't read them. But I'm talking about people who actually can't fathom the process; I have civilian friends who'll give it a try because they know me, but they have no understanding of the process of reading a comic book. A girlfriend of mine who was a fine artist, a sculptor and a painter, hip to the arts, tried to read my Weapon X... [laughs] I've just put myself open to massive criticism: "Nobody could read your bloody Weapon X, Barry!"

GROTH: [Laughter.] I wasn't going to say anything.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But she tried to read it because she wanted to know what I was up to. And she kind of looked at the page as a whole rather than starting top left. She looked at all the pictures at once, and gazed at all the balloons, probably from the middle outward or something. It's a bizarre thing! But for some time around just ten years ago I found myself in a similar situation of being unable to identify the graphic cues used in narrative storytelling. Nowadays, I'm glad to say, it's as natural as breathing.

GROTH: I don't understand the difficulty someone would have reading a comic. Do you have a theory as to why a literate person would have such difficulty?

WINDSOR-SMITH: I don't have a theory, it's just an alien process to some people. But the reason why I brought it up was my renewed efforts to create a sequence of drawings left me baffled, even though I had literally drawn scores and scores of comic books in the years beforehand. But I just went through this 10-year process of exorcising it, getting it all out of my system, out of my mind. So from that experience I learned a little bit about the straight civilian perception of comic-books And that gave me a some perspective to realize why our field of endeavor is so often misunderstood. Along with many other things, like that guy [Greg] Cwiklik brought up in his "Inherent Limitations" piece, which I think was really well done -- yes, there are lots of reasons why comics aren't acknowledged in America...

One very essential re-perception I had at that time was just how chaotic comic-book images were, how literally ugly most of the pages and characters and colors were. By the mid-'80s, as I began looking over the current work published by Marvel I was appalled by the lack of harmony and synchronicity in the art itself. I had become highly sensitized to the aesthetics and poetry of the visual arts and all other forms for that matter, and, I tell ya, to pick up the latest Incredible Hulk, Spider-Man or what-have-you and to try to make sense of the cacophony of it all, the hopelessly bad drawing, the garish, misapplied colors and the ineptitude of the words just cluttered everywhere and anywhere-- most comics just looked like colorful garbage dumps to me. No wonder the average adult cannot understand their appeal -- comic books can be truly ugly and, of late, ugly appeals to children more than beauty and harmony does. Thrash metal and lukewarm punk has replaced the three part harmony of the Beatles or even the Stones for that matter. All I could see in these publications was a riot of immature ramblings! And it's just a bleeding American comic book I know but, quite frankly, I find such products, aimed at children, to be grossly disturbing on a level far more sensitive than the moral majority could ever comprehend.

GROTH: I have the same reaction not just to comics but to much of contemporary pop culture, but what you're describing practically defines postmodernity, I think: fractured and incoherent displacement of traditional modes. Not that structural experiments can't prove artistically fruitful, but when they're not applied appropriately and become a standardized approach by tenth-rate hacks, they prove the worst of each world: avant-gardism in the service of the same old shit. Art Spiegelman eschewed his more experimental mode when he did Maus, for instance, because he thought it wouldn't be appropriate.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Now, Maus was so easily read. It was that box format of panels, and three pages into it, the formula was there for you, you didn't have to think about it any more, so the narrative was so simplified, and of course the imagery, as Cwiklik pointed out and everybody knows, was brought down to a minimum of understandable images. But it was a very raw minimum. And I think that allowed certain civilians to be able to wade through it. The subject matter is something that everyone knows about, but if it was a science fiction book equally as well written, equally as simplified in its drawings, but involved space monsters, would the civilians have looked at it? Would it have won a Pulitzer prize?

GROTH: The content was there; when people opened the book up, they knew what to expect, I think, and that must have helped them get into the medium.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah. But ask yourself, if Spiegelman had done it on something that wasn't so appealing to the public...

GROTH: Yeah, I don't think there's any way it would have achieved either the acclaim or the readership.

WINDSOR-SMITH: I doubt it very, very much. So it's like a false victory for all of us working in an unrecognized field, a comic book was awarded a bloody Pulitzer. Yes and no but, not really.

GROTH: Right.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Have you seen Joe Kubert's Fax from Sarajevo?

GROTH: I've seen some pages from it, I haven't seen the whole thing yet.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah, I haven't either, I just saw the pages in CBG. I didn't read the article or the interview about Kubert, but an immediate comparison has to be made, you can't help yourself, with this serious subject matter of Sarajevo, and Maus. I ask myself, "Would Joe have done this if not for the success of Maus?" And Joe Kubert's style was one of the things that disturbed me awfully about looking at those pages. Spiegelman's style with Maus was Spiegelman's style; he didn't have to re-tool and re-fit himself. He didn't have to downgrade, didn't have to upgrade. That's the way he does things, and it's certainly the way he saw it and it came up with a plum. In the case of Kubert's Sarajevo, as I say, I don't want to criticize the work because I haven't read it, but I'm looking at the pages and I'm thinking, "Blimey, this looks like Our Army at War." Right?

GROTH: [Laughs.] Right.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Because Kubert is such a stylist. And also he's going for the same kind of panel things that he's done over the years, which is his own style, and it's very commendable -- it's not Jack Kirby window-type panels. It's insets and stuff like this. So I'm looking at that and I'm thinking back to my girlfriend who couldn't make any sense of the Weapon X stuff: "Why is that panel laid over that one?" "It's just a style, that's all." "Oh, O.K. then. I'll try and read it." I actually had somebody look at one of my pages once, a Conan page from "Red Nails" when I was still drawing it in the '70s, and she absolutely adored my work -- she was the sister of another girlfriend of mine, she was about 18, in college or whatever, a smart kid -- and she was looking at one of my original pages, a big drawing of Conan, and she asked, "Why does he got all those lines all over him?" And I said, "What?!" I was across the table so I wasn't really looking at what she was looking at. But she said, "Well, there are lines all over his face. What are they?" I leaned over and I said, "That's the way I draw it." She didn't get it. What she thought they were, were tattoos. You know that funny queer inking I used to do in those days? She thought that those lines on his face were not part of the construction of pen lines I used, but tattoos or something. She couldn't get it, she couldn't figure it out. I was in no mood to explain it, so the whole thing kind of shoved off. [Groth laughs.] But that was another example of how even the smartest or the most commonplace of people will look at some form of stylism and not be able to recognize it. Now, this was a stylized visualization of a man -- you knew that because he had eyes, a nose, there was hair on top of his head -- but what she saw were tattoos on his face, and on his arms and legs. He was tattooed all over the place! No he wasn't -- he was drawn by me! [Groth laughs.] Now, as I say, there was nothing wrong with this girl's understanding; she just was faced with an alien art form.

GROTH: That would tend to prove that people have not assimilated the conventions of comics.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yes.

GROTH: There's a certain suspension of disbelief in any artform -- if you're watching theater, you don't sit there constantly thinking, "These are actors on a stage."

WINDSOR-SMITH: Right -- then you've blown it.

GROTH: Right. And that just tends to prove to me that people have not assimilated the vocabulary of comics and allowed themselves the distance that the necessary artifice of any artform requires.

WINDSOR-SMITH: The entire bleeding industry hasn't put anything out over these 50 or 60 years that is going to attract the civilian to want to understand, to care enough about it to say, "My goodness, look at this: this is a whole language here that I have never even known about. And it's an American artform -- let us embrace this." Because, as Cwiklik said -- and it's not as if he's the first one to say it by any means -- "Who the hell would give a shit?!" [Groth laughs] The content of American comic books is by and large just low grade garbage. Who would want to get themselves soiled with this kind of thing?

Big digression. So back to the Fax From Sarajevo. I'm looking at these pictures and I'm assuming that Joe's sincerity is deep and profound. But did Joe ask himself, "Should I draw this in my Sgt. Rock style? What is my style for Sgt. Rock? How understandable is it, except for kids who grew up with it?" This stuff is supposed to be pathetic, it's supposed to be horrifying; the little girl getting blown up by a Joe Kubert explosion. I think that's what I'm trying to say: It's a Joe Kubert little girl, and it's a Joe Kubert explosion. And there's a sound there that's a Joe Kubert sound effect: Ka-boom!, or some such. It just left me confused.

GROTH: I had the same exact reaction.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Good! Well, not good for Joe, but good for the point.

GROTH: Yeah, and I respect Joe very much, and I respect his drawing. And I certainly respect the kind of seriousness he wants to bring to the project. But you know, Spiegelman is somewhat of a stylistic chameleon. He tailors his approach to every individual project.

WINDSOR-SMITH: I did not know that. I'm not really that familiar with Spiegelman's work.

GROTH: He tried to do Maus earlier in an entirely different style, a much more detailed and labored approach, which he later deemed inappropriate and he really worked hard to get that simpler style.

WINDSOR-SMITH: This is actually documented, is it?

GROTH: Yeah.

WINDSOR-SMITH: That's very interesting. See, I thought that was just serendipity -- of a natural style that fell into place at the right time. So he actually worked on that.

GROTH: Yeah, I think it was a very calculated choice on Spiegelman's part -- and of course it worked perfectly, I thought.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Then I congratulate him for that.

GROTH: But the difference I think is, Joe's drawing is subordinate to his idiom, and I'm not sure the idiom he's engaged in for 50 years is appropriate to a story about Sarajevo.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Well, if he's done that in Our Army At War, then how sincere can it be? You know? I think Joe wrote this too, right?

GROTH: I think he wrote it in the sense that he sculpted it from faxes from his friend in Sarajevo.

WINDSOR-SMITH: That's right, I just read that, of course -- the guy with the outrageous name, Magic something...

GROTH: Right. But I think you could say that Joe was the author in the sense that he shaped it.

WINDSOR-SMITH: All right, then I would like to presume -- and again, I didn't read any of the balloons in those reproductions -- but I would like to presume that Joe scripted this thing without the outrageous hyperbole that "Our Army at War fighting dinosaurs" had. Now, say it's pure assumption on my part, but you're going to be hip enough to say, "I can't write this with lots of exclamation marks after everything. I've got to adapt for the sake of the content of the story." And yet here I am looking at the drawings and I see a Joe Kubert explosion. And there is no sense of horror in it whatsoever. Because frankly I saw Sgt. Rock get blown up a load of bleeding times, and he hasn't died, you know? [Groth laughs].

GROTH: Yeah; I remember a drawing of the family with a little girl, the mother and father, and there's a romanticization to his depictions.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Absolutely. There was that one shot -- the group of the family huddled together -- and the guy looks exactly like Rock except he's going bald, and of course Joe draws the most luxurious women.

GROTH: Beautiful women.

WINDSOR-SMITH: And he tries not to, but he can't help himself. So here is a man who is absolutely burdened by his own style. So if he can't step outside of what he does, perhaps he cannot be recognized as a serious storyteller, because he has a style that will not enable it. Now, just in this tiny topic of Joe's latest work, we've got a whole area there that opens up so much criticism about the value of comics and what they can and cannot do. An interesting possibility is that perhaps the serious content of Sarajevo might attract favor from critics unfamiliar with mainstream comics as a whole and, because such art or literary critics have not enjoyed Joe's Our Army At War etc. from all these years he's labored in our field they won't have the same reaction we do: they won't say "I've seen this all before," so perhaps an overused graphic stylism of Joe's may be perceived as inventive and intelligent by a fresh pair of critical eyes. Could happen.

GROTH: Yeah, I sometimes wonder if knowing as much as we do about comics -- too much, perhaps -- could prejudice our eye. But, on the other hand, it almost seems to me that the difference between what we're seeing in Joe's work on Sarajevo and what we'd like to see, is the difference between Hollywood and European films.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah.

GROTH: And if you look at Andre Wajda films from the '50s, the people in there are ordinary looking, they're not Burt Lancaster and they're not Kirk Douglas, they're just the most ordinary human beings you've ever seen dealing with obstacles, exercising a degree of courage and so forth, and one of the problems with Joe's work is that the characters and context look like they came out of Hollywood.

WINDSOR-SMITH: They look like Hollywood heroes and heroines. This is what was required of Joe when he started at DC. Surely Joe's first scribbles when he was four years old didn't look like the Joe Kubert we know today. So at some point he developed that style, it got stronger and stronger... I think it was actually Viking Prince which was just glorious, and very much Kubert -- you can see it's Joe Kubert even today, even though that was 30 years ago -- and that was the beginning of this fluency that he has with the brush, something you can't get around. But when talking about visuals here, what if Joe said, "Oh, fuck this brush stuff. I'll ink it with a crow quill. Let's see if something more telling comes out; let's see if I can draw something -- no pun intended -- out of my art that I can't do because I'm capable of drawing and inking three pages a day of high stylism." I would have been thrilled if Joe had stretched himself. If he thinks that stretching himself is putting down Sgt. Rock or whatever the hell it is that he's drawing nowadays, and picking up Sarajevo, then he's missed a point.