ON DAILY ADVENTURE STRIPS:

VESS: Those kind of things. Just always really, really got a big kick out of reading them.

ON HIS DIGS IN NEW YORK:

BRAYSHAW: Where was the apartment in New York?

VESS: Upper West Side. When I first moved there, there were an SRO hotel (single room occupancy) and a whorehouse on the block. There were times when I'd open my window, and there was a little ledge that you could put your feet on and look out and you'd see down to the street and out front of the SRO hotel two people chasing another guy with hockey sticks. It got to be where you really didn't want to walk down the block. [Laughter] Over the course of twelve years, the whorehouse and the SRO became an upscale condo. People with fur coats and fancy cars looking at you like, "What are you doing in my neighborhood?" It was completely altered. It was kind of fun.

BRAYSHAW: What was it like outside of comics, all of a sudden being in a very large city like New York?

VESS: Well, it was wild, you got to go to the Met, which was across the park, the Museum of Natural history was down the street. All that stuff I studied in art school was right there in front of you. It really gets the point across that whatever art you've seen in a book, you haven't really seen it until you're standing right in front of the real thing. The color, the enormous scale of some paintings or sculptures, just the physical presence of it can change your life.

BRAYSHAW: So you definitely took advantage of the availability of that stuff?

VESS: Oh, yes. I did my laundry in the bathtub, I ate peanut butter and jelly, fried potatoes. Had no money for about 2-3 years. There was very little work at first so there was little or no extra spending money so I walked every where I wanted to go. I couldn't even afford the price of a 75-cent subway token... I had friends who worked in the Broadway theater concession stands and they would get me into opening night parties. There I would be a flat broke New York artist hanging out with Andy Warhol. And over there was Roy Scheider and some other name artist/movie star over there. There were laser beams and drinks galore and food. And I thought, "This is cool." I went to the opening night party of Animal House and danced to John Belushi singing on stage. Good memories.

ON SHARING A STUDIO WITH KALUTA
[Below right after Heavy Metal paragraph]

BRAYSHAW: Did the other studio members provide a conceptual encouragement, too, in a kind of artistic integrity or in producing material you believed in separate from commercial demands?

VESS: They'd all, at that point, quit comics, because again, like I was saying, there were no royalties, no return of artwork, and they really didn't pay much money. They all knew they had a large reputation in the field and knew their work was worth much more than they were getting. They had personal ideas about what they wanted to draw and there was no where(within comics) to do it. And those were the artists that I hung out with the most. I would walk many, many blocks down to the studio and spend many hours or days there. That built into me the idea that if you draw what you are personally involved in, the artwork is going to be that much better. I've never been so commercially minded that I could go and draw 'whatever' just to pay the bills. It was one of the theories of Kaluta that no matter how much money they offer you, don't take the job unless you want to do it because when you just do it for the money everyone can tell and it looks like crap and you have to live with it for the rest of your life. [Laughter] So their artistic integrity very much influenced me, all four of those artists. Bernie was working on his Frankenstein book, Barry was doing his beautiful works for his own Gorblimey Press, Jeff did so many gorgeous paintings just for himself (including what most people consider one of his masterpieces: "Blind Narcissus"), Michael was doing prints and posters. The art with a capital A was flying about them fast and thick. They were all sort of self-publishing at the time and making quite a bit of money off it. I was able to go to comic conventions with them and based on their influence get a table for myself. I might make $50 or something in two days trying to sell my art. They'd make thousands and thousands and invite you to have a sumptuous meal at a beautiful restaurant where they would all gladly pay for it. They had all sorts of artists visiting them and my interaction with those other artists was really eye-opening, interesting and educational.

BRAYSHAW: So the publication of print sets or portfolios: they were self-published and distributed through something like Bud Plant? Or were these things you bought from the artist at conventions?

VESS: At conventions, through the mail. Sometimes they would advertise in I think Comics Buyer's Guide. It was a smaller field then and everyone knew what the four of them were up to. They'd get calls/offers all the time from publishers, art dealers, entrepreneurs trying to exploit their art... They did the limited edition prints, the photo prints. Selling the originals for quite a bit of money. Then you sold the publication rights time after time, making money off your artistic vision long after the original piece was gone. This business of art was very eye-opening. I thought to myself, "Wow. This is exactly what I want to do." At that time, during those four years of the studio, the whole comic industry, the whole illustration field was changing. Publishers started returning the originals to the artists that had done them. One of the main proponents of the "I want my art back" movement was Frank Frazetta. I believe it all started with Frank Frazetta's wife saying "Frank, that's a nice one, I want that painting back." He (being a very physical type guy) made the art director give it back. [Laughter] And then there was Neal Adams really advocating quite a bit for creators rights in the comics, so the publishers gave in and started returning the art. It was quite a bit later, into the '80s, that the idea of royalties made from ones work became a reality. Jim Starlin was very instrumental in starting up the Marvel royalties and getting the contract figured out for that. But the independents had started it going. Ground level is what they were called back then. Bigger names were going to these small publishers headed by young idealistic lovers of the art of comics. Because there was more creative freedom with these smaller companies more and more talent was leaving the Big Two. DC and Marvel started getting a little nervous and knew they had to do something. Royalties became the norm across the board. The whole world was changing and artists began to be paid more for their work. The publishers had to start admitting that the creators had something to do with the books selling. They wouldn't admit it for a long time. They opened up a whole new world, didn't they?

SHERRY WHAT'S-HER-NAME

VESS: Is she still in Seattle, do you know?

BRAYSHAW: She was in Vancouver for the Vancouver Writers Festival on this bizarre panel that consisted of her, Chester Brown and an editor at Dark Horse, Ryder Windham.

VESS: Oh God!

BRAYSHAW: Which was conceptually about as diverse as you could get. The topic was autobiography in comics. Of course, Chester and Sherry had a lot of things to say and Ryder Windham didn't have much to say at all. It was fun to get to meet her, to see some of her work projected. As far as I know she's still in Seattle.

VESS: OK.

ON ANNE OF GREEN GABLES

BRAYSHAW: I guess as a Canadian I should know this, but when the books were originally published, I'm not sure if they had been illustrated at the time or if they were just text.

VESS: Just text with the paintings on the covers. I don't think they were really illustrated until now, until the television shows, then the little red-haired girl became incredibly popular down here. There seems to be all this merchandise out now. Our publishers were going to fly us to PEI and Japan and we thought, "Cool! It'd be great to see all this stuff."

BRAYSHAW: Did that ever come about?

VESS: No.

ON OTHER ARTISTS
[After Aragonés]

BRAYSHAW: Are you aware of new artists in the field that show that cross-genre hybridity that is so important to your own work?

VESS: There are a lot of my contemporaries that I've talked, especially artists in other countries that are constantly searching for a fresh view point: Mike Mignola, Dave McKean, P. Craig Russell, Kaluta, to name just a few. In America, with the younger, up and coming, people their interests seem to stay in their own field . Whatever I can do to open their eyes, great. Everyone else should try to do it, too. The more great artwork there is out there, the better it is. It's exciting and makes for better work. If you think you're the only person doing anything good what you're probably doing is boring. It's much more exciting to be surrounded by interesting, aesthetically diverse artists.

ON ACME AND OTHERS

BRAYSHAW: I'm curious to know if you've followed Chris Ware's work in Acme Novelty Library.

VESS: Oh, I have all the books. I would say I haven't read all of them. Again, it's sort of this incredible, mind-blowing graphic sensibility that I love. I love that they're all different sizes, I love what he's playing around with, but I don't get that involved with his characters so I don't need to read them right away. Though I have a lot of comics and graphic novels and things that I've never read, that I'm going to hit a certain time in my life that they're going to click. I remember as a kid hating Alex Toth and thinking, "He's not drawing," and then sometime in college looking at a face he'd drawn with three dots on it that had more expression on it than anything I'd ever seen and you can sort of feel your world shift a little bit. That's really fascinating to me when that happens. When your perception of the world shifts as you learn something new. A lot of the movies I watched in college that I thought were great, I watch now and get bored and only get a half-hour into them and cut them off. Sometimes you just have to hit it at the right time.

BRAYSHAW: With somebody like Toth, would your objection be like -- your art is very volumetric, portraying character sitting in a fully rendered, three-dimensional space, whereas he seems to flatten out and to abstract forms into large patches of flat black and flat white. Would that have been where you -- ?

VESS: When I was young, I wanted Hal Foster and Frank Frazetta and Al Williamson. These pretty-looking people dashing around in a beautiful fully rendered landscapes. As I've gotten older, I've gotten more graphically sophisticated and I can look at things like Toth or Mazzucchelli or Seth, and I can see more in that work than I can see in some photographically-rendered scene of some cityscape. They're brilliant artists.

Trimmed from The Comics Journal #218

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