Rick Veitch is having the sort of career that most cartoonists only dream about. He drew his first comics at home; saw his work published at the end of the underground era with Last Gasp’s Two-Fisted Zombies; was a member of the first class of the Joe Kubert School (along with longtime friend/collaborator Steve Bissette), saw his work published in the glossy science-fiction magazines of the late ’70s/early ’80s; did movie adaptations (1941); produced creator-owned limited series and graphic novels (most notably The One); worked on the acclaimed horror title Swamp Thing; made his own contribution to the reworked superhero genre (Bratpack and Maximortal); was involved with Kevin Eastman’s Tundra; became connected with Image during its early days (1963); and is now riding the new wave of self-publishing with his dream diary Roarin’ Rick’s Rare Bit Fiends.

Rabid Eye: The Dream Art Of Rick Veitch ©1995 Rick Veitch

Through it all, Veitch has maintained a remarkably consistent visual style — equally effective at communicating the quiet lush beauty of a natural setting, the power of war machinery, or the childlike clarity of abstract symbols (from advertising to trademarked super-symbols). As an artist who has become as well known as a writer, Veitch has developed his style in large part due to an admirable ability to make a clear and insightful analysis of others’ work.

The purest blend of Veitch the writer and Veitch the artist can be found in his latest work, the aforementioned Rare Bit Fiends. Veitch’s work has a bold authority; one never doubts the honesty of what is being conveyed or the unsettling “feeling” of dreaming that Veitch nails right on the head. It is his best, and most ambitious, work to date.

Jeremy Pinkham explores the depth and breadth of Rick Veitch in the following conversation. [Note: Veitch posted a comic about his experience being interviewed here.]

SIN CITY

PINKHAM: What parts of your upbringing do you think were encouraging you to become an artist and what parts were against it?

VEITCH: From the time I was very little, I always knew, in the deepest part of my heart, that I was an artist. My environment was such that I was bombarded by a constant reinforcement that art was a dead end, that creativity was kind of suspicious, and comics, especially, were a subversive kind of thing — which is what probably drew me to it even more quickly than it would have normally. [Laughs.] I grew up in a dying mill town and my dad was a very good artist, a very creative person. He got into this situation where he had to work a regular job in a factory his whole life in order to bring up six kids. So there was a feeling I got from him that something was missing and he wasn’t connecting creatively with the deeper parts of himself. This translated in my parents relating to my art by saying, “Oh! You’ re such a good artist! It’s nice that you draw. But… you can’t make any money doing it. Forget it.” This message was reinforced all the time I was growing up. It became the great battleground of my adolescence, a fucked-up mindset I had to break out of to become a functioning adult. The town I came from was a roughneck mill town that was on the skids, was on the way down. There were a lot of poor people there, hard-drinking, hard-fighting, hard-livin’ kind of people.

PINKHAM: Which town was it?

VEITCH: Bellows Falls. Folks from other Vermont towns referred to it as “Sin City” [laughter]. There was always weird stuff going on there: police corruption, pornography. We had a gay bar.

PINKHAM: In the ’50s?

VEITCH: No, but in the late-’60s and early ’70s. And it was a big party town for all the hippies who moved to Vermont to get back to the land.

PINKHAM: Is this while you were in high school?

VEITCH: In high school and a couple of years after, too.

PINKHAM:  What did the people your age around you at that time think about what you wanted to do?

VEITCH: There was a deep fear and suspicion of anything creative in my town. Very few people I met growing up understood the nature of creativity and what art was about. People looked at it like it was bad juju. It’s hard to believe it in this day and age, but you have to remember this was a little valley town in Vermont where a lot of people had never been out of the town. My dad was originally from Scotland and brought up in New York so my family had a slightly more cosmopolitan attitude towards things. When I went to high school, the guidance counselor asked me, “What do you want to be? Let’s plan a course of study for you.” Of course I said, “I want to be an artist!” The guidance counselor said: “YOU DON’T WANT TO BE AN ARTIST!” And he had this chart on the wall of how much people make and right there on the bottom it says, “Artist: $3,000 a year.” And he said, “Look at that!” Then at the top of the chart it said, “Chemical Engineer: $50,000 a year.” So he said, “Why don’t we do a course of study for you in chemical engineering.”

PINKHAM: Did you doodle in class?

VEITCH: It wasn’t allowed, but I just did it. I didn’t really have to study to get by. It wasn’t because I was really smart, but I just learned early on how to take multiple choice tests and score fairly decent. There’s a certain trick to figuring out the right answers, and I sussed it out as a little kid. Basically I breezed through all my schooling with that simple skill. All the time though, I had my own little comic-book company on the side called “Sun Comics.” I wrote and drew homemade superhero comics starting at around 6, and really getting into it around age 9 and 10, and this continued all through high school right up until the underground explosion happened and I began to draw more personal comics.

PINKHAM: Who did you share those with?

VEITCH: Very few people. It was kind of a family thing, though. My brother Tom was 10 years older, so I’d always look at everything he was doing like it was the ultimate. He could draw pretty well — could do a neat Chester Gould kind of style [laughs]. I really dug it. But he wanted to be a writer more than an artist, and he concentrated most of his energy into writing. So it was a natural connection because as I got older, my drawing style began to jell into something, and we started to work together more and more.

PINKHAM: Was he the main person you read them with?

VEITCH: No, I had some friends in town I used to buddy around with that were my age who I read comics with. But they weren’t able to make that jump to creating comics. Somehow it just didn’t fit. I’d go around to all the local stores on Tuesday when the comics came out and I’d pack the comics for the guy and I’d put them on the shelf to make sure I got the Fantastic Four and The Flash. I’d have friends that I’d do that with, but I didn’t really show them the comics I drew, or if I did, their reactions were so blasé or misunderstood that I just felt I was doing it for myself. Comics were more an organic part of me; it was just something I did without asking why.

PINKHAM: What were the Sun Comics like?

VEITCH: The main run I did was called Hero Comics and I think I did 24 or 25 issues of that on a monthly basis! It starred a character called “Radioactive Man.” [Laughter.] They’re pretty crude, and it’s me learning to draw by copying Jack Kirby’s panels and trying to write Stan Lee dialogue. But at the same time, when I go back and look at them, I’m blown away by the personal myth that I’m laying down. I couldn’t have consciously told that to you that at 12, but I’m sure that if I brought my run of Hero Comics to a psychotherapist, they could probably tell you a lot about me. It was pretty detailed.

PINKHAM: Were you trying to express the same things in essence at that time as now?

VEITCH: They were just about who I was and what I knew. I’m much different now, a more complex person than I was when I was 11.

PINKHAM: [Laughs.] I’m sure!

VEITCH: But there is something pure about Sun Comics. I treasure them. If I publish a collected works of Rick Veitch, I’ll probably inflict some of them on humanity!

PINKHAM: You said you were reading Kirby.

VEITCH: I probably started out on the Julie Schwartz superheroes. That’s when I really connected with the form and began buying my own comics. Before then I had read Little Lulu, Carl Barks and all that stuff. They were comics that were brought into the house by other people. The Julie Schwartz DCs had me out there at the newsstands finding the ones I wanted. I was learning to draw the human form by copying Carmine Infantino. I’d do these perfect — or perfect as I could — pencil reproductions of the Flash covers every issue. They were really iconic. At the same time, the Big Daddy Roth phenomenon was happening, and I was loving that.

PINKHAM: Where did you find that stuff?

Rat Fink by “Big Daddy” Roth

VEITCH: It was everywhere. It was in the back of a Hot Rod magazine. My brother Tom was a mechanic at that time, he was working at the local Chevy garage. He had an old Model-A he was working on out in the back yard. He used to get Hot Rod magazine and Car Craft magazine. I would always flip to the back where Big Daddy Roth did these amazing ads, which I think were drawn by Robert Williams. I definitely connected to the whole Weirdo phenomenon which Roth begat. In fact, one of the great moments of my tender childhood was when I won an Honorable Mention in the “Big Daddy Roth draw-the-monster contest” in the Big Daddy Roth magazine. I got my name in the magazine. This was a real turning point for me and I can remember sitting there for hours holding the magazine looking at my name! [Laughter.]

PINKHAM: But I’m sure that didn’t convince your parents that it was a good career!

VEITCH: At that age I’d already begun a T-shirt company [chuckles]. I bought a bunch of Magic Markers and I learned to draw Rat Fink and a couple of other ones, and I’d hand-draw T-shirts and sweatshirts for kids and sell them for five bucks.

PINKHAM: And that worked?

VEITCH: It worked a little. I did it more because I loved it rather than because I was getting rich.

PINKHAM: But you ‘d see people walking around with your designs on them.

VEITCH: Yeah… well, not my designs — Big Daddy Roth’s!

PINKHAM: [Laughs.] That’s true! You said your Two-Fisted Zombies work was sort of influenced by Kirby and Creepy.

VEITCH: I kind of touched all those pop culture bases that came with being a baby boomer. Archie Goodwin’s Creepy was one of those amazing revelations. I think Tom sent me a copy from New York, then I began seeing it on the newsstands. It was my first brush with the classical approach to cartooning. To see all those guys, like Williamson and Krenkel and Frazetta, it opened my eyes to what cartooning could be beyond Kirby — not that I was tired of Kirby, but I was very much interested in what to me was a new approach. I began to go to the library and dig up old books with classical illustrators. Here’s this guy, Krenkel, and he’s working in a style that’s sort of like this guy who did pen-and-inks a hundred years before. I was trying to connect it up in my mind. “How does that happen? How can you work in this guy’s style like that?” Unfortunately I didn’t have any art teachers that had a clue, either.

PINKHAM: Did you have access to the tools of cartooning?

VEITCH: Just what I could figure out myself. First it was just working with pencil, then rapidograph, which came out in the mid- ’60s. On one of my trips to New York I went into an art store and they had some framed Peanuts comic strips on the wall. Those were the first original comic strips I ever saw, and I could see how the lines for lettering were made and that there was penciling underneath the inking and Zipatone on top of that. I tried to emulate this as best I could.

PINKHAM: Was there any more reciprocal influence between you and Tom, since you were the two who were into comics?

VEITCH: Oh yeah! All the time, even when he moved out on his own. One of these days you’ve got to interview him. He’s gone through some amazing changes. One of them was he became a Benedictine monk. When I’d finish an issue of Hero Comics, I’d pop it in the mail for him to read. I think he was also learning to ink — he had found some real ink brushes at the monastery, and he’d sometimes send back an issue and have inked a panel in it.

When he left the monastery he went to California and was hanging out in San Francisco. He came back in early ’68 and he had the first issue of Zap comics that he had bought — and of course that was a whole new revelation for both of us about what comics could be.

PINKHAM: Had he started working on Underground Comix at that time?

The Maximortal ©1992 Rick Veitch

VEITCH: He and I had started a strip called Crazy Mouse. It was a pretty lame, stupid, high-schooly attempt at underground comics. [Laughter.] But we were inspired and did a lot of it. We must have done a couple hundred pages of Crazy Mouse. Some of it actually got published in the local college newspaper, the Vermont Cynic at U.V.M. They published the whole run of the first Crazy Mouse one summer. Then in about 1970, Tom bought a printing press, and published his own poetry magazine called Tom Veitch Magazine. In that, he published one of our Crazy Mouse epics — it was about 40 pages. So we were working at it all the time. It’s weird, I’ve been thinking about this all week, how on one hand I relentlessly kept doing comics, but on the other hand I had no hope of ever becoming a professional cartoonist — it seemed impossible.

The other thing that was important at the time was that my family was coming apart. Tom lived a much different life than I did. When he grew up, the family actually kind of operated and functioned. By the time I got to age 10 or 11, when kids become aware of what’s going on, I could sense that things weren’t working right between my parents. They were drinking heavily. And my father’s years of sweating it out in the factory were really getting to him. He became really withdrawn and I didn’t understand it at the time. When he died, in 1970 I think, we found out that he had become hooked on tranquilizers. He was taking six different tranquilizers a day for many years. Now I understand why he walked around in a fog a lot of the time. I can also understand that his situation is rough — being a creative person, and yet he’s not able to express himself that way. Although he did dabble in paint, and he did a little commercial art on the side. My fondest memories of him were when he was actually painting. It seems to me that that’s when he was most content, and I think that was communicated to me on some non-verbal level which helped push me in the direction I ended up going.

PINKHAM: Did you feel like you were achieving a dream for him in some way?

VEITCH: No, I honestly didn’t do it for him, although his situation was clearly part of the motivation and inspiration. I think there’ s something deeper that connected me to comics, even before our family began to unravel. I’m not sure what it was, but at a very, very early age, I was very, very into comics.

LAST DAYS OF THE UNDERGROUNDS

PINKHAM: When did you end up going out to San Francisco?

VEITCH: I was hanging out in Bellows Falls, I graduated from high school … Hippie was big then and Vermont had become the destination of choice. All of a sudden there were hordes of hippies coming into the area and I did begin to meet interesting people. When I talked to them about doing comics, their ears and eyes would actually perk up. These were people from urban areas, who understood that creativity was important. Especially with the hippie era coming on, a lot of them saw comics as a way for the counterculture to break the hold of monolithic media. It seemed like there was a real war, a very tangible battle going on between the young and the old. I began to show more and more of these newcomers my comics. On a social level, I began to achieve some slight status, just for the fact that I was serious about doing this type of art and that was refreshing.

PINKHAM: It was Crazy Mouse that they admired?

VEITCH: Right. At the same time, the seedy, low-life guys I grew up with in Bellows Falls would actually feel threatened by the fact that I would sit around and draw comics. I was living at a crash pad at the time [laughs], and all my friends from childhood were becoming heavy-duty alcoholics and serious drug addicts. They were guys just in their early 20s, and they were going down the drain really fast. I’d have my bedroom off to the side and I’d have this crude drawing table set up, and instead of going up to the bar and boogying every night, sometimes I’d just sit and draw my comics. They would look at it, but they just couldn’t believe I would waste my party time on such shit! I can remember getting into a couple of fist fights over the fact that I drew. … If you knew the town, you’d understand.

PINKHAM:  Did those guys have regular jobs, or were they hanging out?

VEITCH: They would all hang out, deal drugs, collect welfare … You know, a very low-life scene. But at the same time, I thought it was a lot of fun to be hanging around people who were flushing their lives down the toilet! [Laughs.] It’s real exciting!

I credit my art with saving me because there was a point where I really could have gone all the way in that direction. I ended up trying a lot of drugs, but they just didn’t really do that much for me and I didn’t get hooked on any of them; I never took those steps that you can’t come back from. Some of these dumb bastards were shooting drugs into their veins and there was a kind of peer pressure to give the needle a try, which I resisted. So I feel very fortunate.

About this same time, Tom, who was in San Francisco, sent me a copy of Greg Irons’ Light Comix. It was a full-color, psychedelic comic. Tom had met Greg just as he was finishing the project. He asked Tom for a quote to put in the back cover. Tom wrote an apocalyptic, wild paragraph and they published it. Out of the blue, here it comes in the mail — “Wow! Tom really connected with somebody!”

PINKHAM:  All of a sudden, your brother is in comics.

VEITCH: Yeah, in a couple of months they had done The Legions of Charlie, which was this truly amazing comic book. The two of them really connected; Greg Irons and Tom Veitch were made for each other. And of course, as soon as I saw it was really happening, I said Yes! I had this old junk car and a couple of my friends hopped in and we drove across the country in four days nonstop just like in Kerouac’s On the Road. I crashed in Greg Irons’ barn and began drawing the opening sequence to what would become Two-Fisted Zombies. It was this weird sequence about these two ax-murderers and Tom showed it to Ron Turner, who runs Last Gasp, and Ron liked it. He had just come into some money and was doing a series of underground comics called All New Underground Comics which featured new artists. Tom said he’d write a script for it, and I was in — I never. even met Ron, because at that point I was pretty immature and still had a hard time showing people my art in terms of asking for a job. It seemed far beyond what I could handle emotionally at that point [laughs]. But Tom set the whole thing up and I went back to Vermont and moved back into the crash pad where all my buddies were.

PINKHAM:  Why did you decide to go back?

VEITCH: Actually, because Tom and Martha had just had a baby, so they needed to do the family thing and I didn’t have any money coming in yet. So my best option was to go back to Vermont, where I could collect unemployment while I did the book.

I moved back into the hippie pad, sat down and drew Two-Fisted Zombies, which probably took me nine months. So I put it all together, shipped it back out to Tom, and bing, bing, bing, before I knew it … It was amazing how fast things happened at that point — suddenly here was the comic in my hand! All of a sudden it’s real — I am a real cartoonist. I went back and looked at Two-Fisted Zombies the other day and it’s amazing how, when it came out it seemed incredibly wrong [laughs], but how today it would fit right into mainstream comics!

Two-Fisted Zombies ©1973 Rick Veitch & Tom Veitch

PINKHAM:  You mean “wrong” as in compared to any sort of comics that were out there?

VEITCH: It was politically incorrect in every way. The Kirby-esque art style and the general darkness, the fantasy … It wasn’t the peace-love thing at all.

PINKHAM:  Not Fat Freddy’s Cat! [Laughs.]

VEITCH: But I guess it did pretty well. We actually sold enough copies to pay off the print bill. At this point I was still pretty confused about having a career as an artist. I didn’t understand what I had even accomplished.

PINKHAM:  So you didn’t try to go further in the undergrounds?

VEITCH: I definitely did. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court came out with their landmark obscenity ruling, which gave communities the right to create local standards for obscenity. This knocked the blocks out from underground comics because the sex shops handled a lot of the comics and the head shops handled them too. You had to be careful because the cops were coming in and busting anything that smelled of counter-culture in a lot of communities. The whole underground thing was in the process of collapsing. It had been a terrific thing culturally. But it never evolved the kind of enlightened businessmen it needed to defeat the forces arrayed against it. Denis Kitchen had the right idea, I think, but the rest of the publishers seemed at a loss of what to do. Everything was drying up. Nothing was clicking. People were deserting the underground comix scene in droves.

PINKHAM:  I’m sure that really encouraged you.

VEITCH: I was getting deeper and deeper in my own private crisis. I got my girlfriend pregnant and was such an asshole about it that I ended up splitting Vermont and moved back to San Francisco. I worked as a bicycle messenger. It was a terrific experience but I couldn’t get anything going in comics; there was nothing happening. I did get to meet a whole bunch of underground people when Rolling Stone put on a publishing party for the History of Underground Comics. This project was generally seen as a big shuck by most of the undergrounders who were pretty much as iconoclastic as they get. Only the big names were going to get paid, and Rolling Stone wanted everyone to sign over rights to their work, saying “This is going to make underground comics come back!” I was quite willing to let them use my work in the book because I was unpublished and I needed to get out there, but a lot of people, including Tom and Greg, refused. At that party, Ted Richards got so pissed off he punched out the author, Mark James Estran. So you can see, tensions were running real high. The whole project just drove a wedge into the comix community.

PINKHAM:  Did you feel any pressure to not go into the book?

VEITCH: Yeah. I talked with Tom about it a lot and he was really militant about them not using his and Greg’s stuff. But he knew it was the best thing for me to get in there and he was willing to let his name be associated with Two-Fisted Zombies.

PINKHAM:  Did you hear anything back from them?

VEITCH: The book is probably in its 20th printing now. Somebody has made a whole bunch of loot from it — and definitely not the underground artists.

PINKHAM:  Well, I guess one punch out is not a large price to pay for that.

VEITCH: After that, I began to feel really guilty about leaving my girlfriend pregnant, so I moved back to Vermont. She had the baby and we got it back together and started family life together. But in terms of a career in cartooning, at this point it just seemed like I was doomed. There I was, I have a kid, I have a wife and I’ve got to have a house and a car, and pretty soon I’m working in a wood stove factory, welding wood stoves and just generally not connecting with my art in any meaningful way, shape or form. I had moved out of the Bellow Falls scene and got way out into the woods. We were doing a back to the land type of lifestyle, which I was getting a lot out of. I was maturing a lot, finally giving up my adolescence. I think parenting had a lot to do with that. Having a kid, as much as I tried to escape it, was really what opened me up and made me grow up. I know now, 20 years later, that that was the best thing that could have happened to me at that point. I probably spent three or four years living like that in Vermont. I was still drawing, and I was actually doing some commercial work once in a while like drawing logos for local rock bands. I was drawing a little comic strip here and there, but I wasn’t doing a lot of art at that point. When I turned 25 years old, I approached it like a rite of passage.

At that point I was actually mature enough to say, “I don’t want to weld woodstoves. I want to be a cartoonist, and yes, I can do it.” I was able to actually think about what steps I had to take in order to pull it off. The first step was to go to art school and learn to really draw. So I began to look around at art schools; I was a complete pauper, I had no money at all, but I didn’t let it stop me. Then I was flipping through The New York Times one day and there was a little, tiny ad down in the corner for the Joe Kubert School of Cartoons and Graphic Arts, opening that September. Somehow I managed to actually write a letter to him and mailed it off. He sent me back a postcard saying, “Yes, it’s going to happen. If you want to come down and show me your stuff …” I didn’t know anything about having a portfolio, but I put all these weird little comics I had drawn over the years into a little package and on top of it I put Two-Fisted Zombies — I was real proud of that — and down I went to Dover, New Jersey, and met Joe Kubert, who was one of the artists I had been following since I was a little kid. He looked at Two-Fisted Zombies and pointed at me and said, “You’ re just the kind of person I want in this school!”

So I was real excited — but of course I didn’t have a dime. But I got this terrific break: The government started a program called CETA, which was the Comprehensive Employment Training Act. They actually had training money for artists! This is unheard of today. Sure enough, they paid to send me to school for two years and gave me a monthly stipend which supported my family and myself. Bingo! It was really happening for me!

Logo for The Kubert School (formerly known as the Joe Kubert School of Cartoons & Graphic Arts)

KUBERT YEAR ONE

PINKHAM:  So you’re a member of the first class at Kubert’s school.

VEITCH: Yes. Joe had this dream for many years to teach cartooning. Not only is he a brilliant artist, but he’s got a good enough business head to really start and run his own school. I don’t have to tell anyone reading the Journal who Joe Kubert is — he’s one of the greats. He had found this old mansion, the Baker Mansion, in Dover, New Jersey and bought it for a song because no one else wanted it, and started his school. There were only about 20 or 22 of us in that first class, and five or six of those dropped out real soon. So we had this really small class, in this beautiful, old building — even though Dover, New Jersey is the armpit of the East Coast. We were off to the side on our own little five-acre estate with this old mansion with a swimming pool. It was just amazing how it all fell together.

PINKHAM:  Were you and your family staying there?

VEITCH: No, my wife and child stayed in Vermont, but we were still together at that point, I was just off at school trying to learn a trade, going home on weekends. It was an amazing group of kids that came in; and they weren’t all kids, there were some older guys there too. I was one of the older people at age 26, but there was a fellow named Ben Ruiz who was in his 50s, and there were a few others my age. Most of the students were 22 or 23. So it was a pretty good cross-section of society. The neat thing was, almost all of us were really into it, and we had been out in the hinterlands all over the country floundering about, not knowing how to connect with it, and here it was. We were thrown into this school environment and just lapped it up! [Laughs.] Joe hadn’t spent a lot of time creating a curriculum because everything was being thrown together on the fly. But we just created it as we went along that first year.

PINKHAM:  In a way it sounds like you got a better experience than maybe what’s available now.

VEITCH: It was real raw. I don’t think Joe was ready for it — he had been dreaming about this for so many years and all of a sudden here it was, and he was trying to juggle 15 or 20 students, some of whom were really fireballs. The emotions ran high a lot of the time — which I actually think is a really good environment for learning. It’s almost like a cauldron that you willingly get tossed into and you come out harder and sharper than you were before. We had a great bunch: Bissette was there and Tom Yeates was there that first year, and a whole bunch of other really interesting people. I learned a lot from that experience. We were at it night and day, day and night, comics, comics, comics!

PINKHAM:  What sort of teachers were there?

VEITCH: We had some really interesting ones: Dick Giordano taught that first year, he was just great; Rick Estrada was a terrific cartoonist for DC, and I really connected with him, he really knew how to teach, and he had a curriculum ready. I guess he had had some actual teaching experience. He really gave a lot to all of us and pushed us all to new levels and heights each week. We had Hy Eisman, who taught humor, and we had Kelly Harris there teaching production and mechanicals so we’d learn how to do paste ups; Lee Elias, and then there was Joe, who was really the heart and soul of the school. He would teach three classes a week on top of editing books at D.C. and doing covers, all at that same time. He was amazing. I have this memory of sitting at my table in the main studio room, and I could see into Joe’s office where he had his drawing board and he was doing a cover or something, and there was this incredible intensity of attention that he was giving the board that I had never witnessed before. One of the problems I always had in my own life in drawing was that I’d start drawing, then jump up and walk around — I just couldn’t really focus on it. I watched him giving his board this complete and total focus, so much that he seemed to be in a trance state! So I began to imitate and emulate that and my art started to really happen.

PINKHAM:  Did you start drawing more?

VEITCH: Well, it just started to come together right in front of my eyes, and I began to get a lot more out of it, I began to enjoy it more and look forward to it. I tried to organize my life so that there was a specific time set aside just for drawing; I tried to make sure I wasn’t going to be interrupted and dragged away, just so I could experience this … It’s like a deep meditation, I guess … There were lessons you got in Kubert’s school like that which were nonverbal. Joe himself had magnificent cartooning skills, and, if anything, was trying not to come on too heavy so that we all wouldn’t turn into little Joe Kubert clones — he was very afraid of that. But he took it personally when people didn’t do their assignments. There was a lot of tension and anger in his classes when it would come time to show an assignment and some of the people hadn’t gotten it together. He would really be pissed off at people. We lost a lot of precious time that should have been spent on drawing, just working out that anger that he had in him. I’m sure that after a couple of years he learned that at a college level it’s a waste of time to hassle people about doing their assignments. At that age, it’s got to be sink or swim. But when we were there, he was a real hard-ass about it.

PINKHAM:  That’s where you met Steve Bissette.

Rabid Eye: The Dream Art Of Rick Veitch ©1995 Rick Veitch

VEITCH: Yeah. He was from Vermont, and had heard about me and Tom. In fact his style at that point was very much influenced by Greg Iron’s. He had read all the Skull comix, and he had read Two-Fisted Zombies, and knew we were in Vermont and that kind of inspired him to do his own self-published, small press comic called Abyss. I can remember the first day we met: It was like meeting my long-lost brother. He is that kind of guy. I didn’t get his name, even though we shook hands — I was stoned or something — but he did hand me a copy of his comic, Abyss, which I brought home that night and flipped through. There were these two strips in there: “Cries of the Vegetable Kingdom,” and “Rudy Dreams,” and they were astounding strips. They just knocked me for a loop. I didn’t realize he had done them, so when I saw him again I said, “Hey, great comic — who did this ‘Rudy Dreams’ and ‘Cries of the Vegetable Kingdom’?” He sheepishly said, “That’s my stuff.” We were into a lot of the same things—comics and music and everything, and of course we were from Vermont — so we started hanging out and doing crude collaborations. At this point we’re still children playing with toys — we don’t really know what we’re up to yet. I began to get a lot from him in terms of how to create a story. I had always done comics as pure expression, how I felt. Bissette was the first person I met who consciously understood story structure, from films, and how important it is to place certain things in stories to create rhythm and resonance, and this was all a revelation to me. Even then he was famous for not finishing his assignments [laughter].

PINKHAM:  You got some of Joe Kubert’s anger there?

VEITCH: No — this was the amazing thing about Bissette. He could talk his way out of it! I can see him standing up in front of a class holding a page of his imaginary pencils and in one millimicron of the corner is a bit of ink, and he’s supposed to be turning in a finished assignment — but he could make up great stories about what it was going to be and why he didn’t finish it and how it connected to this film and this book and this record … Somehow he was able to snow his way through it! [Laughter.] He’s an incredible natural artist. People instantly loved his style. I saw it happen with many, many people throughout the years. Probably more than any of us, he picked up working with a brush and thinking as an inker. He developed a slashing brush style that was sort of based on Joe’s, but it had its own sharp edge to it, and was quite original. I think even Joe was impressed with how Bissette was turning out in the first year. Joe was editor of Sgt. Rock comics and cut some deal with DC so that he could publish the student’s work in the back of Sgt Rock. We all started to do what were called the “back-up stories,” which were these two-, three-, four-, and five-pager war comics that were done outside of the school curriculum, with Joe acting as editor — and we got actual money for those. Of course the stuff we were learning was much richer, much more powerful, much more to the point.

PINKHAM:  So he’d respond to you as an editor.

VEITCH: Right, no bullshit, this was it. You got to do it and do it right or we’re going to throw it out. That kind of pressure makes you do your best job. My nickname at that point was Veitch-a-matic because I just drew all the time. Joe didn’t make it easy by any means, but I finished every assignment and I did more of those back-up stories than anybody because I just loved it. I bet I did 15 or 20 backup stories for Sgt. Rock comics, in two years.

PINKHAM:  Did you get any response from DC over what you were doing?

VEITCH: They hated it. It was all tied up in the hideous DC politics which Joe and every other artist has been suffering through for decades. My whole life I had imagined how great it would be to work for DC Comics, and you go up there and it’s just horrible, everybody’s bummed out and projecting these negative job-sweat vibes, everybody hates the work they’re doing. The other weird thing about that time, for those of us on a student level who were totally into comics and really loved them, was a lot of the professionals we were beginning to meet were telling us that comics were dead. They’ d say that cartoon graphics were going to be important, but comic books were dead. They had every reason to believe it because the distribution network at that time was in the process of collapsing big-time.

PINKHAM:  Sounds familiar.

VEITCH: Yeah. But on a bigger scale. It was something that had worked for 40 years and was in the process of coming apart. They were losing money right and left, nothing was working for anybody. This was about the time that Mike Friedrich came to speak at the school.

PINKHAM:  He was working on Star Reach at that time?

VEITCH: He was also working as a consultant for Marvel.

PINKHAM:  On the direct market?

VEITCH: It was just being born. He was the first person I ever heard lay out what the direct market was, and had a vision for what it would be. As it turned out, he was reasonably correct, too. He kind of inspired me to think in new ways about what I could accomplish as a cartoonist, rather than just becoming the next person to do Fantastic Four.

PINKHAM:  Was it being discussed that it might help cartoonists to be able to do more mature work?

VEITCH: Yeah. Joe had been to Europe and met a lot of the Europeans like Hugo Pratt and Moebius and Drulliet, and everybody was impressed with what they were doing. Europe was really where comics were happening in the world at that point.

PINKHAM:  Were you seeing any of this stuff?

VEITCH: Bissette was the first person to give me a copy of Metal Hurlant. Of course as soon as I read that stuff, it was like, WOW! This is it! It was right after that that National Lampoon bought the rights to this stuff and started Heavy Metal. All of a sudden, it seemed like there were real possibilities here; comics were really trying to make a jump. But none of us realized how limited it was. In hindsight you can see its limitations. At the time, it was exciting and we were all trying to connect with it. We’d met enough middle-aged cartoonists who had become sad, broken and poor working for DC and Marvel, and we didn’t want it to be like that!

PINKHAM:  Did you ever think about Mad?

VEITCH: It wasn’t really my style. I wasn’t really a humor cartoonist. I was more science fiction, horror and even superheroes. At school, we were sitting around every night, talking, talking, talking, and we began to talk about superheroes. We all sort of vaguely sensed that there was a potential for superheroes that hadn’t been met as yet. We’d look at what Moebius was doing, and we’d ask each other, “Man, can we do this with superheroes? If we could just bring this new intensity to it … ” Although we couldn’t really formulate a new direction, we just intuitively knew there could be more to it. It wasn’t until years later that that would happen. But we were playing around with it back then.

PINKHAM:  Were there any other publications that you were working on while you were in school?

VEITCH: Yeah, I got a letter from a guy named Cliff Neal who was doing a book called Dr. Wertham’s Comics and Stories, and he had seen Two-Fisted Zombies and somehow had tracked me down. On one of my trips back home, there waiting for me was this letter from Cliff Neal. He said he had liked Two-Fisted Zombies and wanted me to do something for him. This was the first time it had ever happened to me. So I brought that back to school, and we sent him a bunch of samples; I included a bunch of stuff Bissette had done, and he loved Bissette’s work too, and he started to give us a regular berth in his book. Steve and I did a story called “The Tell-Tale Fart.”

“The Tell-Tale Fart” from S. R. Bissette’s Spider Baby Comix #1 (December 1996) cartooned by Steve Bissette & Rick Veitch ©1996 S. R. Bissette & Rick Veitch

[Laughs.] It was this humorous horror story, a retelling of The Tell-Tale Heart. That was kind of cool. We also were contacted by a guy named Larry Shell who was putting out a comic called Fifties Funnies. He lived right there in New Jersey and contacted the school and started feeding us work here and there. We also put together a book called Manticore. We did everything ourselves, edited it, printed it, collated it by hand, the whole thing. That was pretty cool. Then the year after that we did another one called Parade of Gore [laughter].

PINKHAM: What did Kubert think about this stuff?

VEITCH: Well, we were all feeling like we couldn’t do our wildest shit if it had Kubert’s name attached to it, so Parade of Gore was a reaction to that. We pooled our money and did it outside of school and tried to be as weird and outrageous as we could. One of the ongoing debates at Kubert’s school was about good taste. Cartoonists from Joe’s generation couldn’t understand the humor of our generation which was based on bad taste. Things like Saturday Night Live were just beginning to happen. It was just all so natural to us that we didn’t want to be restrained, and there were many debates about it. Sometimes you had to be able to defend something you had drawn as being worthwhile — and that was a good thing to have to do.

PINKHAM:  Did you ever worry about expressing yourself in that way in terms of hurting your chances of having a career in comics?

VEITCH: Something like that did get handed down. The plantation mentality that permeated DC and Marvel says that if the editor or publisher gets it in his head that you are an “underground artist,” you just won’t get work. It sounds crazy, but that’s the way it was. So there were a lot of guys working under pseudonyms so that the powers that be wouldn’t find out what they were really doing.

PINKHAM:  Was Kubert’s school where you first picked up the airbrush?

VEITCH: No, actually I had gotten that just before Kubert’s school. I had done a sign-painting job where they paid me with an airbrush. So I was struggling to learn it. I remember some of my samples to get into Kubert’s school were airbrush samples. I figured out a few of the tricks, although I definitely wasn’t good at it at all. Joe especially encouraged me to learn it and play with it in assignments because he thought it was a valuable tool. You could see that airbrush was an emerging look at that time, especially in color work, so I kept working at it. I did an airbrush story for Sgt. Rock, believe it or not. It was written by Bill Kelly and was a prose story that I illustrated. We broke up the type — this was before you had computers and you had to cut all the type out by hand — and put the illustrations all around it. I airbrushed them and we screened them, and it actually got published.

PINKHAM:  So it actually looked decent on that paper and everything?

VEITCH: A lot of people complimented me on that story, although by today’s standards I’m sure it looks like shit.

“Monkey See” from Epic Illustrated Vol. 1, #2 (Summer 1980) ©1980 Steve Bissette & Rick Veitch

PINKHAM: In Archie Goodwin’s introduction to the story “Monkey See,” in Epic, he said you and Bissette did everything on it: you both did the writing, designing, and finished art on it. Is that the way you worked together?

VEITCH: Yeah. That was probably a year or two later. By then, we were both somewhat capable in all levels of comics, although it became really obvious that he was a lot better at inking than I was. I was better at engineering pages, whereas he would sit around and think about it for weeks before he’d even start! [Laughs.] So I’d really get it going. We were simpatico on many levels, but on work ethic levels we were complete opposites. This was a source of much conflict between us. [Laughs.] But that’s his nature. I learned to work around it, and it was simply worth it because I think the collaborations would produce consistently higher work than what either of us was able to produce alone at that point in time. And it just felt good. I probably connected with him on a creative level better than anyone I ever had before. Still to this day, he and I will go sit down somewhere and start making up stories, just for the sheer creative joy of it. We used to do that all the time, we’d just be hanging out and we’d say, “Let’s… write a movie!” [Laughs.] And we’d just start creating a scenario and these characters and scenes. There is a real true energy between us that I really like a lot. I haven’t found that with very many other people, and it’s something I really value.

FLYING DUTCHMAN

PINKHAM: What was the second year like?

VEITCH: The second year was a lot different than the first in the sense that all of a sudden we had another class of maniacs showing up at our idyllic mansion. There were suddenly 35 or 40 of them and the place was all of a sudden crawling with cartoonists. We felt our noses were out of joint because we were used to having the run of the place. They jammed a lot of people into the dorms, so life just wasn’t as comfortable, and it was a real hard adjustment in the first month. But here was Tim Truman and here’s John Totleben, Ron Randall, Jan Duursema, Tom Mandrake, and a whole bunch of other guys — amazing, raw talent. And each of them brought something to the mix. Totleben especially was very shy, didn’t like to talk to people, but within a few days everybody knew there was this weird-looking guy in the corner room on the second floor endlessly sketching these brilliant Frank Frazetta-style monster sketches. It’s all he’d do. We were all flabbergasted by his work. Smaller groups started to form of the people who were really serious. When we graduated, we rented a big house in New Jersey and started hustling our portfolios in New York, getting any kind of drawing jobs we could. Somebody tagged the house the “Flying Dutchman Studios,” — Totleben, Yeates, Bissette and myself. Other groups from Kubert’s school did the same thing, formed these little bands and rented houses and apartments and began running a same game plan.

PINKHAM: Was there any sense of competition?

VEITCH: We all felt part of the same, big thing. There might have been something like competition between certain people but nothing turned ugly. It was a healthy competition. If I found an editor who responded well to my stuff, I would try to bring in as many of my friends as I could. Wherever we could find a door to stick our foot in, we would do it. At the beginning it was [difficult]. Yeates and I both had to work for Beaver magazine.

PINKHAM:  [Laughs.] I assume that was a porno magazine.

VEITCH: Yeah. DC had imploded, canceling dozens of titles, so there was no work at DC. We had thought, coming out of Kubert’s school, we were all set to work for DC. But there was no work, and the political situation that was all part of Joe’s life at DC was so bad at that point that it was just no use. We all went up there, but none of us got any work from them at all. So we said, “OK, let’s go over to Marvel!” Bing, bing, bing, we all started to get work at Marvel, mostly through Rick Marschall. He was editing the Marvel Magazine line then and these were mostly creepy magazines like Dracula and weird science fiction. I had the airbrush samples and I went in there and bingo, got a job. Bissette got a 20-page script, and I ended up helping him by airbrushing his backgrounds. So all of a sudden it was happening. Somebody, I think it was Bissette, found a way to get into Heavy Metal. All of a sudden they’re buying one-pagers from all of us. We’re not making a lot of money, but we’re doing enough to make our rent and buy some Fritos. [Laughs.] We all tried to get in at Warren’s, but didn’t have any luck. I came close by actually doing a couple of sample stories, but couldn’t make the grade. We were sort of cooking along when all of a sudden word comes along that Rick Marschall has convinced Marvel to do a Heavy Metal-style, full-color magazine which evolved into Epic magazine.

PINKHAM:  When did Archie Goodwin get involved?

VEITCH: Before the first issue was actually published, I think Marschall got bounced out. But he had bought enough for two or three issues. He bought “Monkey See” from Bissette and me and he bought a script from me called “Solar Plexus,” which I was in the process of actually doing. The interesting story about “Solar Plexus” was it was one of these kind of vague, Heavy Metal-type stories that didn’t really have a firm story structure, and word came down that Stan liked it but decided it needed a story structure. So he cooked up this one-page plot that I had to stick in the middle of it. I go off and do the story and word comes that Rick Marschall’s gone and Archie’s in. So I visit Archie and show him the story and he reads it and says, “It’s a good story, except for this one page … ” and it was the page that Stan had written! [Laughter.]

PINKHAM:  So you didn’t get to “collaborate” then.

VEITCH: At the same time, I was working as a sometimes assistant to Al Williamson. It wasn’t so much for the money as getting to know Al, immersing myself in what Al knew about comics, and the history of comics that Al was a part of. Al had a massive collection of books and old newspapers. So I was doing backgrounds and lettering for him, and at night I would go down to a little apartment he had where he had his old Prince Valiant collection, and within a couple of months I got to read the whole Prince Valiant, and the whole Flash Gordon. This was before they were collected. Al’s just a wonderful guy, he helped me out a lot, very patient. I became part of the family for a while. It’s a time I really treasure.

PINKHAM: Was Al working on Star Wars at that time?

VEITCH: It was the first thing I helped him on. I lettered The Empire Strikes Back, and I drew the Walkers because he doesn’t like drawing machinery. Also they didn’t have any photos of the walker, only two crude photos of the model. So once a month I’d go up there and we’d goof off a lot. We had a really good time. I met my wife-to-be — I left out the part how I had broken with my first wife —

PINKHAM: I was wondering, when you were in the Flying Dutchman house …

VEITCH: My first marriage ended then, but it was a long time coming. I met my wife-to-be, Cindy, who was working at the art store. That was a turning point in my life. I was in a really strong, positive relationship for the first time ever.

PINKHAM: Was she an artist too?

VEITCH: She’s a fabric artist. And we moved to Vermont. I didn’t make a lot of money because I’d spend a whole week on a page because I’d hear that’s how the Europeans did it. I wasn’t rich, but after all the bullshit I went through in my life, finally here it was, I had finally pulled it off. I was a cartoonist. Then I did a whole bunch of shit for Epic and Heavy Metal, hundreds of pages. I did a full-color graphic novel called Abraxas and the Earthman, which was 80 pages; I did a whole shitload of short stories. It was neat; I owned all the material.

PINKHAM: That must have been new for Marvel.

VEITCH: It would be a pretty new thing today! The contract was one page, and it only purchased one-time rights! It paid pretty well, and working with Archie Goodwin was a fantastic experience. I did another graphic novel for Archie Goodwin called Heartburst, but I was never too proud of that one.

PINKHAM: You’re not proud of that?

VEITCH: Well … I’m getting a little ahead of myself here. The reason I’m not proud of it is because when I had just finished it, I met Alan Moore. [Laughs.] He was doing everything that I needed to learn, and doing it brilliantly. The art was OK, but in terms of story structure, I was falling back into trying to express my feelings unconsciously rather than really thinking the writing end of it through. That is probably one of my weaknesses — if I don’t really push myself, I tend to approach things simplistically and I don’t think the reading experience is as powerful as it should be.

PINKHAM: You’re proud of Abraxas and the Earthman?

VEITCH: Yeah, I am actually proud of that. If I ever reprint it, there are certain things I’m going to go back and fix. But that’s a pretty neat story and it also — at least I thought at the time — it had a real original hook, although it turned out they were doing the same damn thing X-Men comics.

PINKHAM: What?!

Abraxas And The Earthman ©1981, 2006 Rick Veitch

VEITCH: [Laughs.] Yeah, mystical space whales. Kind of became its own genre thing!

PINKHAM: You did a graphic novel for Heavy Metal; the 1941 adaptation?

VEITCH: Yeah, Alex Toth was supposed to do the adaptation and he backed out at the last minute and they were absolutely desperate to get somebody, and someone said, “Well, there’s Veitch and Bissette!” [Laughs.]

PINKHAM: He was part way through it at that point, wasn’t he?

VEITCH: Yeah. But what he had done was try to make sense out of the shooting script, which wasn’t even funny. Spielberg’s people were pretty obnoxious, they didn’t trust us with anything, they didn’t want to give us reference photos; we actually had to steal them.

PINKHAM: How did you do that?

VEITCH: Spielberg’s people gave us this slide presentation. They went out to lunch and John Workman brought the slides down to the stat room and had them shot on the sly. [Pinkham laughs.] They were actually afraid we were going to take the photos and sell them to Time magazine. So anyway, we did the samples and got the gig and started work. Or at least I did. Bissette instantly got one of his famous artist blocks! I just threw myself into it and got the thing up and rolling. There was a lot of tension between him and me just because he couldn’t get his ass in gear. By about the second half of the book, he began to catch on and plug into it. He also at that point began to work on the editors at Heavy Metal. He was really good at that, so he got us another two weeks. And we got the goddamn thing done on the day we promised. We put it all on the floor of his cabin — actually it was the second half of the book because we’d already delivered the first half. We were just completely frazzled and exhausted and about ready to strangle each other, but at the same time we felt relieved to get it done. So we’re sitting there, and his neighbor’s dog runs in, completely soaking wet, and lies down on the pages.

PINKHAM: [Laughs.] That’s unbelievable.

VEITCH:  We just went, “AHHHHH!” threw the dog out, and began sopping up mud from the pages, and then we realized it really didn’t matter [laughter]. If you go back and look through the book, there are certain pages with big water marks, but it’s lost in all the craziness.

PINKHAM: Did you have anybody watching over you saying, “No, you can’t do that”?

VEITCH: They were desperate to get if done but we were also fighting all the time with the editor. We just couldn’t connect with her. Steve has always been much better at dealing with that end of it than I was. John Workman was just terrific though; he helped out with a lot of problems, and smoothed a lot of ruffled feathers. Bottom line was, we delivered the book on time so they could get it out before the movie came out. The only bummer was that the movie bombed. We came out of that whole experience kind of shell-shocked. We had also made a good chunk of money — I think they paid us $12,000 for the whole book, which doesn’t sound like a lot for that kind of work now, but at the time it was more than we’d ever made. We were able to have money in the bank and take a break for a while.

PINKHAM: Do you know if Spielberg saw it?

1941: The Illustrated Story by Alan Asherman, Rick Veitch & Steve Bissette ©1979 Universal City Studios, Inc. and Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc.

VEITCH: Yeah, he saw it — and was completely pissed off. He wrote a letter to our editor, which I actually have a copy of, saying that “Bissette and Veitch are savagely talented but demented.” [Laughs.]

PINKHAM: But he said that in a negative way?

VEITCH: It was a backhanded compliment. We thought it was hilarious! Of course I’ m sure he was feeling even more shell-shocked than we were. 1941 set new Hollywood standards for how bad a big movie could bomb.

THE DOER

PINKHAM: Is it true that before you started The One, you worked with Alan Moore?

VEITCH: No, that came after. Actually with the last issue of The One, I was doing both at once. It was crazy.

PINKHAM: Is that how you met Alan, via working together?

VEITCH: It’s a whole convoluted thing. I hadn’t met Alan when I conceived of The One, but I had read the first issues of Warrior that had Marvelman in them. He was kicking the gong with things I had rolling around in the back of my mind for years, about the possibilities inherent in superheroes — he had realized it on the printed page, and I was intrigued and excited by the accomplishment. I recognized a potential — but I wasn’t a good enough writer to follow through with what that potential might become at that point. I wasn’t a real thinker either; I was a doer.

PINKHAM: You said you didn’t like Heartburst because you weren’t a writer. How have you developed that?

VEITCH: Growing up as a kid, doing comics all the time, and having them as my main form of expression for my unconscious feelings and yearnings, comics became an organic part of life, right from the time I was a little guy. I never had schooling to be a writer. Beyond what I got in high school, anything I learned about writing comics, I learned on my own, from reading other writers or drawing their scripts.

PINKHAM: They have any courses at Kubert’s?

VEITCH: No. Joe had talked about putting a writing course together but it wasn’t easy to do. Once he realized what was involved, I think he felt, “We’ll need a whole ’nother school!” [Laughs.] I was fortunate enough to work with Joe, writing scripts for him acting as editor. Also some of the first professional scripts he had given me to work on in Sgt. Rock comics were by Robert Kanigher, who had one of the great classic comic-book writing styles. I began to work from there, developing a thinking process about how to build a story. But I was nowhere in Alan’s class — he’s one of the great comic book thinkers of all time! By the early ’80s, the comic-book shops were opening and I was reading everything that I could get my hands on, and here comes this black-and-white magazine from England, Warrior, with Marvelman in it. I read it, and the proverbial lightbulb went off in my head. I began to conceive of The One, not as a shameless rip-off of Marvelman, but as something to shoot for, to see how much depth I could bring to a semi-traditional comic book story. Marvel Comics was beginning to realize there was life in the direct sales market, and I think they were looking at books like Cerebus and Elfquest, and they were thinking, “Hey, we can do that!”

PINKHAM: You said you saw potential in superheroes. Reading The One, I’m picking out a lot of uses you made of them: adolescent virgins out of control; the object of a woman’s yearning for pure sex; military weapons; descendants of human heroes like Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart; Adam and Eve … Were you using superheroes because you thought they played an important part in these themes? Or was it that the only way you could express such themes in the comics market is through superheroes?

VEITCH: Although I probably couldn’t have articulated it in that day and age, I think what I was doing was trying to touch on the archetypal nature of superheroes. “Archetype” is one of those words that gets thrown around a lot and it tends to lose its precise meaning. But in the classic, psychoanalytical sense, archetypes are instinctual collective ideas often expressed as symbols. I was beginning to understand that superheroes represented something deeply ingrained in 20th century political culture. One of the subtexts of The One is the political confrontation between American superheroes and Russian superheroes. At the time The One was created, it was one of the things I was really worrying about. The nuclear showdown was getting heavier and heavier every day — our wonderful president Ronald Reagan was out there talking about the Evil Empire —

One, The ©1985, 1986, 1989 by Rick Veitch

PINKHAM: Making jokes about bombing.

VEITCH: Yeah, and they were shooting down civilian aircraft and all kinds of horrible stuff. It just seemed like things were beginning to spin out of control. As a creative person and an artist, this stuff becomes part of the mix as you’re conceiving stories. So I began to try to explore the nature of power on a political scale, and how it might be deformed by the existence of superheroes. It sounds kind of corny, but in 1984 and ’85, it really hadn’t been explored that much.

PINKHAM: Do you think adults are separated from these archetypes, or do they take a different form?

VEITCH: First let me try to define the archetypal nature of superheroes. Take a look at psychoanalysis in the 20th century, starting with Freud, who tends to concentrate on the repressed sexual nature of society. After Freud comes Jung, who I guess probably coined the term “archetype,” whose approach would tend to see the mythical — or mystical — aspects of the unconscious though processes. After Jung comes Adler, whose theory is based around the will to power. If you take those three main currents of 20th century psychoanalytic thought — sex, myth, power — you define what a superhero is. When you get right down to the bottom of it, that’s what I’m trying to bring out to the foreground. Superheroes boil down incredibly complex ideas, thoughts, feelings, yearnings, that are essentially collective in the general populace, and projected upon these little cartoons. As we come to the end of the 20th century, superheroes have taken on a real worth all their own and large parts of the capitalist system are actually driven by them. So I think it’s a little too early to say that they’re just worthless by-products of a culture gone mad [laughs]. Superheroes really flowered in America at the time that our political power in the world grew to the point were we were called a Superpower. This is not a coincidence. Beyond that, there are the futuristic aspects of superheroes. We live in a time when it’s not absurd to say that we will enhance our physical being through scientific means — either through having new parts put onto us, through integrating our thought processes with machinery —

PINKHAM: Drugs…

VEITCH: Genetic experimentation — all these things are coming. The human race is going to mutate.

PINKHAM: Or even just meditation.

VEITCH: Yeah, but that’s always been with us. 20th century industrial society has got us very close to the point where it’s going to be possible for you and I to have enhanced physical and mental powers by using new technology.

PINKHAM: And we’ll have the same awareness, and we need to develop a new one, I guess.

VEITCH: Yeah, obviously we’re going to have to develop an awareness to keep up with the potential of technology. So as crummy as all these superhero comics are, they tend to be exploring — in their own ridiculous adolescent way — these futures for us, kind of feeling around out there what’s good, what’s bad, what’s popular, what’s not. So these are the kinds of things that now I can try to describe, but in the early ’80s I didn’t really have words for it. I was just groping. Alan, more than anybody, got it down on paper. I think he was the first comic-book writer I ran into that really took the writing seriously. Even early on in his career I think he was casting a long shadow across comics. He definitely pointed a direction for where I wanted to go.

PINKHAM: You began The One with a news story you had found on the McCluhan Center, saying, “The shared myth of imminent destruction has physically changed the manner in which the billions of synapses connect in people’s brains. These changes will create a new attitude that will insure that the bomb will not be used, the certainty of continuing to hang on the edge of the precipice is necessary for the new attitude to emerge.” Had you read that before you wrote The One, and was it part of the inspiration, or was it a coincidence?

VEITCH: Probably I ran into it while I was conceiving the book, or was halfway through the first book, and it seemed like the perfect thing to express the esoteric nature of what I was trying to get at. Anyone who lived through the ’80s couldn’t conceive of what was coming: the collapse of the Soviet Union? I mean, whew! Now that it’s happened, we’re just blasé about it, but at the time it was a big thing.

PINKHAM: So you took this idea of the bomb and the clash of the superpowers, and you made the psychological force a physical one.

VEITCH: Right — the collective consciousness of the planet is a character in The One.

PINKHAM: The nukes could not actually be detonated because of the mass consciousness.

VEITCH: And that is an evolutionary step in the sense that we’re all part of a larger organism that is in the process of forming — which in the book actually forms, and the people on Earth end up living a sort of dreamlike existence within it. I played around with sequels that would have had The One going off and having adventures while all the characters still lived inside his head — but I never got around to doing it.

PINKHAM: Do you think that makes the impact of the story on the reader more or less suggestive to the reader, thinking about having this power? Or do you think they’re going to think, “Well, it would be nice if there was a superhero?”

VEITCH: What I’m trying to get at it is the superhero within us, and for readers to get in touch with the parts of themselves that right now they are projecting onto popular culture.

PINKHAM: You make it explicit: the characters rip off their faces and there is the hero within.

VEITCH: Right. I think the trick with pulling this kind of stuff off is to not really come out and say it, but to just show it as imagery.

PINKHAM: What were you getting at with the mass culture imagery on the covers?

VEITCH: Superheroes are a form a mass culture, and of consumer culture — little did I know how bad it was going to get! [Laughs.] I was trying to point that out, and of course I’ve just always loved logos and signs and weird packaging, and it seemed like a neat way to skewer those things, as well as Andy Warhol, on a comic-book cover. The times kind of demanded it as well. There were tons and tons of comic books then, although not as many as there are now. Every variation of a regular superhero comic-book cover had already been tried 10 times over, so it seemed it was time to try new graphic ideas, to spread it out a little bit.

(Continued)

Spawn #1 (May 1992) by Todd McFarlane © 1992 Todd McFarlane Productions, Inc.

Todd FcFarlane is a contented millionaire. Following a mega-popular run on Marvel’s Spider-Man, which was craftily marketed with a multi-cover scheme that created overnight “collectors’ items”and sold millions of comic books, McFarlane broke with the majors and, with such mainstream superstars as Rob Liefeld, Jim Lee, and Eric Larsen, created the Image Comics line. Todd doesn’t claim to be a genius, or even much of a reader, but he knows that he’s a success and that he produces work that the public likes. Criticism scarcely fazes him: when called “morally idiotic,” he chuckles and compliments his accuser’s wit. What makes him tick? Read on and perhaps you’ll find out …

— Gary Groth

CAPTURED IMAGE

GARY GROTH: Let’s start with the beginning of Image. It’s my impression that you were the ringleader — the guy who got the group together. Is that true?

TODD MCFARLANE: I think what you’ll find is, each guy’s got a different take on it. If you’re asking me, my interpretation is that Rob Liefeld and I were always talking about doing something on our own anyway. Rob had this idea for Youngblood, and I hadn’t really thought about what I was gonna do. I had quit doing Spider-Man because I had a new baby daughter. Then Rob announced his Youngblood … It caught everybody by surprise, it also caught me by surprise. “Robbie, why didn’t you tell me?” If I would have known this, I would have come up with my character and we could’ve done a crossover and whatever else.” It was like, “OK, cool. You’re gonna do it.”

We’d also been talking to Eric Larsen — he was going to do it anyways. Then it was like, “Well, since we got three of us, fuck, why don’t we push the envelope a little bit more and go for some of the other guys?” Why leave it too easy for a couple of the other guys to just be there … let’s create a vacuum, at this point.

Shaft, from Rob Liefeld’s Youngblood. © 2008 Rob Liefeld Inc.

GROTH: A vacuum?

MCFARLANE: It was just a matter of nudging people. Part of the nudging came from Rob. A lot of the nudging came from me. I was probably more of a pitcher than the rest of them, for a longer period of time. I think I had more time to convince people, just because I wasn’t working, technically, so … Yeah, maybe some people looked at me as one of the guys that put it together, but it’s not like this thing wouldn’t have existed without me, really. Maybe, maybe not. I don’t want to go that far.

GROTH: So you’re the one who called everybody else. Is that right?

MCFARLANE: Well, I was always working on Jim Lee.

GROTH: How well did you know all these guys?

MCFARLANE: I was even working on Scott Williams, the Italian fat guy. Every time somebody came to my house I worked on them.

GROTH: What do you mean, “worked on them?”

MCFARLANE: Dale Keown, fuck, I was working on him … Javier Saltares came up there. Whoever came and stayed with me for a weekend. When I was living on Vancouver Island I’d find out who was going to the next Vancouver show and I’d phone them up and say “You wanna come stay with me for a couple days? You know, I’ll give you my car and whatever, you can have transportation, I’ll pick you up from the ferry” and stuff … and then as soon as they got in the house I’d work them over.

GROTH: How did you “work them over?”

MCFARLANE: Well, mostly it was artists, so I just told them, for the most part, just ditch your writer, you know? Grab control of the reins … There’s a few teams that have worked over the years, but I find that the more people you have to answer to in life and any kind of decision-making, the less people that are in line, the less problems you have. Some of the guys were working with great writers, but I was just in this mode of “Everybody’s gonna become a writer/artist. You know, you’re just playing into the hands of the writers because they’re coming up with the ideas and you’re kind of getting into this and they’re stifling this.”

I mean, fuck that.

GROTH: Did it ever occur to you that a lot of these artists might not know how to write?

MCFARLANE: [Long pause.] You know, uh, that really didn’t occur to me because that never occurred to me, you know what I’m saying? I mean, fuck, I didn’t let some little thing like not being able to write stop me, so I didn’t really see where that should actually be that much of a problem. I just wanted to test to see how much balls people had. Some people had a fear, like “Yeah, you’re right, I can’t write.” Well, OK, that’s fine, then plot the thing and give it to a writer. And that’s one of the reasons why I don’t use a writer on my stuff: I think that’s almost an insult to a writer for me to want to plot it and then just give it to them to put words to it. Even though they do a hell of a lot better job than I would … I’m not going to get Alan Moore to just script my book. I’d have to go through the ranks, so I’d end up getting a guy who maybe was my 57th choice that said, “Yeah, OK, cool, Todd, I’ll do it.” And I knew, because I’m just a fuck, that in three months I would have been frustrated with him and I would’ve gone, “What kind of dialogue is that? I could do something just like that.” I couldn’t see where I was going to get a very good scripter, and that’s all I wanted, was the scripts.

GROTH: Right. You aren’t the one who wrote that letter to the Buyer’s Guide? About writers?*

MCFARLANE: No. I don’t get any of this stuff. Actually, you guys give me stuff, I’m on your comp list or I must’ve done a cover or something. But other than your books, really, unless I get it for free I don’t really pay attention to it. I never see the CBG.

The argument in CBG doesn’t hold any water, if you want my opinion, and of course I’ve got most of the answers to every single problem out there … that it doesn’t work that the artist or the writer should get an equal amount of royalties or, in some cases, the letters said they should get more. You see, my attitude is this; I think that the writers should get 99 percent of the royalty, and the artists, should only get 1 percent.

* [NOTE: Groth’s comment refers to an unsigned letter that appeared in the Comic Buyer’s Guide lambasting comic writers as useless and unnecessary. The letter drew irate responses from many comics professionals.]

I agree totally, 100 percent with those writers that say that. But you know what that means? Tomorrow, every fucking artist becomes a writer, because they want that 99 percent. So, in a dumb way, the more the artist and the writers fight for the royalty, the more writer/artists you’re going to see. I hate to say it. If they say that the writer should get 70 percent, you’re going to see a hell of a lot more guys turning into writer/artists, just because they’re going, “Fuck ’em. I’m cutting those guys out of the loop, I need to pay the bills, I got a family to raise too.” So if writers were a little bit smarter they’d actually do the opposite. They’d say “Let’s give more to the artists, so if they are comfortable just being artists and not infringing upon our territory.” That actually would be the smarter way to go about it instead of saying, “we deserve just as much as those guys, blah blah blah …” I think right now, I forget how the breakdown is, but it’s kinda weird at both companies. I totally disagree because they can write three or four books or whatever.

GROTH: You’re painting a portrait of writers and artists being warring factions. Is that the case in mainstream comics?

MCFARLANE: I don’t think so. I think you’ll find that in a lot of my thinking I’m probably the biggest oddball in comic books, next to you. My whole attitude, when I was doing comic books, was kind of foreign to a lot of guys. See, they wanted to co-plot together …

GROTH : Yeah?

MCFARLANE: See, I’m working with Gary Groth, OK? So, Gary’s sitting there going “Todd, I want your ideas. Let’s co-plot, let’s get to become pals.” My attitude was “No no no no. Here’s how we deal with this relationship. You don’t tell me how to draw, I don’t tell you how to fucking write, and we get along just perfect.” Because the first time you accept any advice or criticism or whatever I have about your writing, I have to reciprocate and say that you can now change my artwork and, unfortunately, I’m not big enough of a man to have some fucking writer change my artwork. So I’d go, “No. I don’t tell you how to write, and I’ll be Goddamned if you tell me to redraw a panel.” And it worked. It worked for two years with Roy Thomas and two years with Peter David and a couple years with David Michelinie. I mean, we didn’t war over it. I just kinda stayed on this side of the fence and never treaded into their territory, and they never came into my territory, and we got along. There’s better ways of doing it. I just don’t like to give up control of what I’m doing.

GROTH: So you couldn’t see yourself in a genuine collaboration where there’s give and take on both sides.

MCFARLANE: No. Not me personally. Unless it was Frank Miller. Partnerships don’t work in business and I don’t really see where they can work for any length of time in comic books either. When they do happen, Gary, they’re some of the best comic books that have happened over the years. You know, the Lee/Kirby stuff and even Eisner with some of his artists and writers. It’s not like it doesn’t happen. Even current stuff … The kids are really infatuated with Byrne and Claremont’s X-Men, so it can happen. It’s just that I weighed the odds and the odds of it happening are minimal, so why even try to get in bed with somebody when it’s not going to be worth my time?

GROTH: What was the impetus for you to talk all these guys into leaving Marvel and starting your own imprint?

MCFARLANE: Ninety percent of why I quit was I had a baby daughter. That might be something that still mystifies a lot of people. I was flying high on Spider-Man, I was making good money, I was famous … I had everything. Why would I walk away from that? For one reason: I had a wife that was very supportive, I had a daughter and I’d never been a father before … that was 90 percent of it. I saw that I had done well enough that I could actually take some time off because I wasn’t stuck in a 9-5 job. I don’t begrudge a 9-5 guy who doesn’t stay home with his family, but I had a chance to stay home with my family. The other 10 percent, though … just fucking was becoming a festering cancer within me, and the system … Anybody that knew me knew that I was bitching about the same things since five weeks into being a comic-book artist. I saw the flaws in the system and the only difference was that five years ago nobody would listen to me. Five years later I got a little bit of pull, and I got a little bit of might and so I can start to say things and people actually start to pay attention to them. The little status quo corporate America idiotic stupidity, more than anything else, was driving me fucking nuts. My mind was going on me. I quit once, Amazing Spider-Man when my mind went, and my mind had gone a second time, and I just went, “No, I’m not going to go crazy, I’d rather quit and throw everything that I have out the window, and walk away from it and just become a dad” than to fucking continue doing what was literally appalling, me.

GROTH: Now, what was it that made your mind go?

MCFARLANE: Just the stupid fucking stupid stuff.

GROTH: Can you give me an example?

MCFARLANE: On one panel on a book, everybody had a heart attack, so I asked them to send the book back and I wasn’t going to let them print the last issue. It wasn’t even that panel …That panel was representative of everything that I’ve had to put up with for five years. The bullshit is, that if you want to do a G.I. Joe comic book with war heroes, god forbid they’d actually advertise that stuff on a base.

GROTH: I’m sorry, advertise it where?

MCFARLANE: In an Army base or one of the military bases. If you did an aerodynamic or aviation book, God forbid they’d actually put that into the Air Force.If you did a rock ‘n’ roll comic book, God forbid they’d advertise that in Rolling Stone. If they did a kiddie magazine, whew! You wouldn’t want to make a commercial of that. Kids are supposed to telepathically know that there’s a kiddie comic book out there and stop playing Nintendo and rush to their comic shop.

Spawn #6 (November 1992) written and drawn by Todd McFarlane © 2005 Todd McFarlane Productions, Inc.

Like the mere existence of these comic books is good enough for them to sell. The promotional people are locked into a frame of mind … They don’t give a shit about more than issue #1. They hyped the shit out of Spider-Man #1 and I thank them. I’ll always thank them for that, but they dropped that thing like a cold potato for the second one and onward. Now, the book still was a top seller for the next year and a half, but it was no thanks to them, sorry to say. They didn’t give a shit about it. If we look at other things in life, no other company runs things the way comic book companies do. See, if Michael Jackson is hot, then they just don’t go “Oh he’s hot, we don’t have to promote him.” They fucking promote Michael Jackson! He’s got a video out, he’s got a movie, he’s got clothes, he’s got a hat, he’s got a T-shirt … Michael Michael Michael, to the point that they get people to get bored of him twice as fast as they normally would have. But, I’m just saying, they push the shit. Home Alone was a good example that Rob Liefeld told me. When the movie came out it was a sleeper, so when the video finally came out and they knew they had a sleeper hit, you couldn’t walk into a toy store or a Sears without a Home Alone video display. They didn’t say, “We only spent $2,000,000 making this movie, and we made $40,000,000. We’re happy. Let’s go on and promote the next piece of shit that we got.” They said, “We got a fucking good product, let’s fucking let people know that it’s there.”

Comi- book guys don’t do that, it’s just … totally mind-boggling, to say the least. That’s just promotion. That’s not even getting into editorial, and I don’t think you’ve got enough tape for that. It’s just those little things that wear you down until after four or five years, you’re a nub. You just go, “No more, I can’t take this.” Some people can, and I admire them, but I personally just couldn’t take the bullshit.

GROTH: Could you give me an example of an editorial interference that you objected to?

MCFARLANE: From the very beginning I was on Spider-Man there was a fight. “God, Todd, why are you making the eyes so big? Todd, why are you making those spaghetti webbings? Todd, why are you making so many webbings under his armpits? Todd, why are you curling his wife’s hair? Todd, why are you doing this …” It was like I was fucking with the status quo. Any company, I don’t care if I’m working for IBM, if you don’t do it their way, they instantly take it in their head that you think their way is wrong. It wasn’t that their way is wrong — and I’ll never make them understand it — it’s just that there’s more than one way of doing something. As a matter of fact, there’s 100 ways of doing most things. But, because they make most of the decisions, because you say “No, I’m not going to follow that path,” because they made that path, they think that you’re saying that their path is fucked. I’m just saying “Nah, it’s been walked before.” I like to go through the bush, I like more of a challenge going through the bush instead of a nice clear path. So they thought that I didn’t want to draw like John Romita because I hated John Romita. Quite the opposite. I was not stupid enough to try and emulate John Romita because that’d be like me becoming a painter and trying to draw like Michelangelo or paint like Rockwell. I was not going to go down in history as a good-John-Romita imitator. I said, “Nope, Todd, if you’re going to keep your career going, you got to live and die on your own merits.” That’s always been my attitude on all the books I’ve done. Why do I want to be almost as good as this guy or better yet I could be better than John Romita? That would be the best that could happen to me, but I would always be compared to John Romita. So I go, “Naaah, I don’t want to be compared to John, nor Steve Ditko, nor Ross Andru or any of these guys,” who I thought did beautiful jobs. “I’ve got to come up with something different from them, because I don’t want to be an imitator of them.” They took that as me being a fucking rebel: “How dare you screw with our icons?” Thank the gods that the sales went up because that’s the only thing that saved my ass on that whole fight.

Now if you look at the Spider-Man books, they’ve all got a McFarlane look to them, which is good for my career because it’s free advertising for me. They’ve all got the big eyes and the curly hair and the spaghetti webbing and lots of black in the tights. What happened was, I said “I’m not going to follow the status quo.” I continued, and now the status quo is some of the stuff that I laid down. It’s come back to haunt me. Besides, it’s flattering. It’s also somewhat frustrating that I’ve killed the monster and reconstructed another one. The next kid that comes in there is now going to be told, just like I was told to draw like John Romita, “Draw Spider-Man like McFarlane.” He’s got one of two choices: he either does it, and he does a pretty damn good Todd McFarlane type Spider-Man, or he goes “Fuck them, I’m not going to draw like Todd McFarlane, I got this cooler idea.” He’s got another fight and I’m going, “Why does that kid have to fight? How do you know that the next kid won’t be able to come up with something that’s 10 times better than I did?” Or 10 times better than Romita, or 10 times better than Ditko. You’re never going to see it if you keep putting them into a little shell and putting them off into a corner someplace. I wouldn’t do it, but then I don’t run the big companies so that’s not my call.

GROTH: So basically you were too much of a maverick for the system, heh?

MCFARLANE: A fuck? Yeah. I was very talented, I was a trailblazer and I was a fuckface and an asshole. To me they’re all the same thing, I wear all those names with a badge of honor. It’s a lot better than being afraid, or being content. To me, the guys who change the world are not the guys who follow, they’re the guys who lead, because if everybody keeps doing the same thing there is no change in the world. The only way that there’s change is if some guy goes “Ahh, fuck it, there’s another way to do this” and really puts his heart and soul into it, has to prove to himself that there’s actually more than one way of doing it. Then people go, “Oh, yeah yeah,” and then all of a sudden that becomes the way. It just starts all over again. The cycles keep going and going and going.

SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS

GROTH: Do you think you and the rest of the people at Image are going to be doing better work now than you did at Marvel? It seems to me that the only way you can support the proposition that change is for the better is if the work itself is better. If the work isn’t better, then why is changing the system better?

MCFARLANE: See, now I’d disagree with that. If I’ve got my sanity back, and I’m still doing the same work but I’m 10 times happier, and I’m a better father and I’m a better husband and I’m a better friend to the neighbors, who cares if it looks the same? It wasn’t that I had this miraculous calling that “This is the way you do superheroes,” it’s just that I just can’t take fucking orders very well. I’ve accepted that, so I just go, “Ah, instead of me being the thorn in their ass, and vice versa, the best thing to do is for me to just abandon it and do superheroes the way that I want to do superheroes.” Not that I got any great vision, but personally I’ll be happy. If I’m personally happy it should show up in my work. I’m not saying that that’s always necessary, but it should show up in the work. And, I’ll be a better husband and a better person, and that, ultimately, is 10 times more important than all the comic book stuff. That’s what was getting to me. They were sapping away my sanity. It was like, “Nah, I can’t do this.” I was accepting and doing things that I wasn’t willing to accept, and I just go, “Naah.” I mean, you’re right in some respects. If we don’t change something … but I just don’t think that because I want to do superhero comic books I should be shackled to Marvel and DC. Why can’t I do the exact same comic books with another company, which just happens to be Image? I like doing superhero comic books. Just because Marvel and DC does comic books, I shouldn’t be stuck at those two companies. I’ve heard that, and I think that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. That’s like telling Honda they should have never invented a better car because Ford already made one 100 years ago. Fuck Ford if they can’t come up with a good car. Honda made a better car. All that proves is Ford better get their shit together and build a better car because they’re going to have troubles, and they’re having troubles right now. Just because it exited and they were there, I don’t think that just because I wanted to break away that, necessarily, I have to have anything new and innovative. I hope I put a couple of things in there that maybe wouldn’t have existed in a Marvel comic book, but I don’t think there’s revelations.

GROTH: So what you’re saying is, Honda didn’t have to build a better car —

MCFARLANE: In some respects. In some respects what I’m saying, the guys working for Ford say, “Aw, fuck you, I can build just as good a car and I’ll be the one to give orders” and so he goes out there, and he goes, “I can build the same piece of shit you’re building” and lo and behold, he comes up with the same car or maybe a better car or maybe he hires some people that work out better. That might happen to us. Every company doesn’t build a better car than Ford. Some build worse, some build better, I don’t know where we’re going to land. I don’t know if we’re going to build the next Jaguar or we’re going to build the next little Hyundai. It’s too early in the ballgame to tell right now. I’m just saying, there’s the possibility for both things to happen, that we can come out with something that’s weaker but, stupid as it sounds, be happy doing it or do something that might be a little bit better.

Here’s where I get my satisfaction right now; we sold 1,000,000 copies-plus of Spawn. I work over my garage, literally. So, that would’ve been the day that anybody could sell 1,000,000 copies of a comic book that’s not mainstream. Rob’s book, with his re-order, sold 1,000,000-plus. I sold 1,000,000-plus. A couple of the other guys at Image, probably all of them sell 1,000,000-plus. That’s good, cool, whatever. Yes, guys are buying multiples, whatever, let’s not get into that right now. They came out with the new Batman, backed by Warner Brothers, and they sold 800,000. In some ways I’m bigger than Batman right now, during the Batman hype. All I’m saying is seven of us little shits sitting over our garage doing comic books right now, can sell 1,000,000 copies.

Spawn #4 (September 1992) written and drawn by Todd McFarlane © Todd McFarlane Productions, Inc.

I don’t got no lawyers. I don’t got no PR people. I don’t got no licensing people. I ain’t got shit! I hate to say it but I just proved that half those jobs at Marvel and DC are worthless. They could get rid of all of those guys and it’s not really going to affect the sales of their comic books, if you’re doing a comic book that taps into the heart of what the kids want right now. You don’t need a battery of people to produce big sales. What you need is a comic book that’s either good, glitzy, or happens to be tapping into whatever’s hot that week.

GROTH: But you also needed to have worked at Marvel for several years, and worked on a popular character before you could sell 1,000,000 copies of your own comic.

MCFARLANE: Yup. Yup. Oh yeah yeah. They’re a training ground now. As a matter of fact, guys that I see that want to work in comics, I send samples of their stuff to Marvel for them. People say that’s kind of weird. No way. Marvel and DC, those are good places to be. You get exposure. You get to work on stuff, you get a steady paycheck. My attitude when I was working for them was, they were whoring me out, but you know what? I always knew that I was whoring them out because every time they out a Spider-Man drawing out there that had my name on it they’re doing me a favor. Because I knew eventually I wouldn’t be there. I’d just go, “Cool. You guys want to keep promoting the book? Beautiful, because you’re just going to make it that much easier for me to walk away some day.”

I’m not saying for people to stay away from those companies. All’s I’m saying is, once they’re there, they’re going to see that there’s options at a certain point in their life. I’m glad Dark Horse is succeeding, I’m glad that Tundra is succeeding, I’m glad that Image is doing good now and 50 other ones … Some haven’t done so well and some have, some have fallen to the wayside, Pacific and First. I’m just glad that another option has been given, so that you can succeed without having to live with the king. You can be a pauper but still have a smile on your face. There’s nothing wrong with that.

GROTH: But, your success is largely the making of Marvel. I mean, if you hadn’t worked at Marvel you wouldn’t be as successful as you are.

MCFARLANE: That’s the problem. You see, I disagree with that.

GROTH: You do?

MCFARLANE: U- huh.

GROTH: You think you would have sold 1,000,000 copies of Spawn if you hadn’t drawn Spider-Man for Marvel?

MCFARLANE: I’m again being the shit that I am. I owe Marvel one thing, and you know what that is?

GROTH: No.

MCFARLANE: They own the copyright to Spider-Man. That’s all I owe them. That’s all that I, pretty much, will acknowledge for them. I thank them for giving me a wide forum, I thank them for allowing me to hone my abilities, and I thank them for owning the copyright to Spider-Man. But if you think for one minute that Todd McFarlane would be a nothing right now without Marvel comic books … Gary, then you don’t know me very well, because, you know why? There’s a character out there called Batman that I would’ve grabbed, or I would have done something. Would I have been as big as today? Nah, but that was never my goal in life.

GROTH: But Todd, my point is you needed a pre-owned corporate character to become as successful as you are.

MCFARLANE: To be as successful as I am, right?

GROTH: Right.

MCFARLANE: But you’re assuming now that that was my goal, to be as successful as I was.

GROTH: No no, I’m not assuming that at all. I’m just saying that you wouldn’t be as successful as you are today, whether you wanted to or not, without Marvel or DC.

MCFARLANE: Right. OK, yeah, that makes sense.

GROTH: So your success is based upon Marvel. Although you’ve liberated yourself from Marvel, you couldn’t have become as successful as you are without them.

MCFARLANE: I guess it depends on what success is. See, you and I have two different definitions of what success is. You’re taking where I’m at right now, physically and mentally and that I’ve sold 1,000,000-plus copies of Spawn. Would I have ever sold 1,000,000-plus copies of Spawn? Nope.

GROTH: How do you measure success?

MCFARLANE: It ain’t in the number of copies I sell, I guarantee you. Got nothing to do with comic books. I’ve had enough people do enough interviews of me, and ask me how much money … Let me tell you what Todd McFarlane’s all about; I got a wife that I love dearly, I’ve always loved, that I’ve been together with for 14 years. I’m a rich man in that I’ve got a very understanding, caring, beautiful wife. I got good friends and family. You know what? They could take all the fame from me, they could take all the fortune from me. Just let me do comic books and sell 5,000 copies, just so I could eke out a living … and I would still do comic books, because I like comic books so much. The rest of it is a Western civilization success: if you sell a lot of copies, oh, then it’s OK for us to allow our kids to do comic books. If you make a lot of money, that’s OK for us to allow our kids to do it. That’s why it’s OK for doctors and lawyers to let their kids be doctors and lawyers. That’s why I was “wrong” to stop doing Spider-Man at the top of my career, twice, and willing to walk away. Because what people see as a success and as a big shot and as a fan favorite, that was never my goal in this business ever. I consider it a blessing more than anything else. I’ve had more than my five minutes of fame. Anything now is just bonus time. They could take it away from me in 10 seconds and I wouldn’t care one iota, to tell the truth.

GROTH: In an interview with you in Wizard you suggested you engineered your success a little more than you’re doing now. Referring to your “artistic” strategy, you said, “Some of the stuff I was doing on Infinity, some of the page design stuff — I try to do as much design work as I can, but I can’t make it too wacky or that 10-to-15 crowd gets a little antsy about the whole look of the book. The kids only want to work so hard to figure out the comic book, but once you get older, it’s kind of neat to have to delve into different layers. I have to make a marriage of both of them, so I can get a big audience base.”

MCFARLANE: Right.

GROTH; So were you interested in getting a big audience base? Isn’t that why you married the two styles you were talking about?

MCFARLANE: I’m a guy who likes challenges. As soon as they say “That can’t be done; you can’t sell 1,000,000 copies” — ah, just watch this. It’s not because I wanted to sell 1,000,000 copies that I made $1,000,000. It’s just because they said “It can’t be done.” Me being the little adolescent mentality that I’ve always had, it was like “Watch me. Or at least I’m going to die trying. Watch me.”

The toughest thing in comic books, I think, and you’re a publisher, you know this … is that there’s different groups of people. There might be 10,000 of each one of them, but there’s 10 different age groups that look at 10 different books. Now, if you can actually tap into all of them, there’s a potential to actually get 100,000 people to read your book.

To me, that became my goal, in that I just wanted to see if it was possible to cross the barriers. So it was like, “OK, if I do something that’s a little bit designy, then that will get the attention of the older audiences. But I still have to make the storytelling clear and somewhat simple enough that it wouldn’t confuse the 12-year-old, but I could still put a couple of underlying things so that the 20-and-older group would pick it up that the 8-year-old wouldn’t, but it wouldn’t affect the story.” You have to try and give just enough to everybody so that everybody went home satisfied. Does that mean maybe that if I was just aimed at one group I would have been able to do a better package? Yeah, probably. I would have been able to concentrate more, but I just wanted to see whether I could do it, just from a career point.

“Designy” panels in Spawn #5 (October 1992) written and drawn by Todd McFarlane © Todd McFarlane Productions, Inc.

I hate to say, but this business is weird in that they give you the next bone depending upon how well you did: “What have you done for me lately?” I had to prove my merit by saying “OK! Your business, as Marvel or DC, is to sell comic books, and you hire me to sell comic books, and I do that job very well. Whether you like my style whether you like the way I do it, whether you think that I’m good or not is irrelevant. I’m sorry to say, that’s irrelevant. Just accept the fact that I sell comic books. After you accept that, now we can delve into whether you think I’m actually good at what I do, but you got to get past the first hurdle, which is just accept it. Don’t like me personally, don’t like my style, don’t like the way I write, don’t like the way I lay out a book, just accept that I sell the comic books and don’t even try to understand it.”

You can talk to me now about trying to improve those areas, but they couldn’t even get past that first hurdle. “This is the way we’ve done comic books for 25 years, what’re you trying to do?” It’s like, “Jesus, who gives a fuck how I do it? Who cares if I give you 22 blank pages and I sell 500,000 copies. If that’s what the public wants … perfect! Let’s give it to them! It seems to work. They seem to like it. Who cares that 20 years ago they used to actually have dialogue on their pictures? The kids don’t like that any more, obviously. They want books that have 22 blank pages. Who are we to argue with them?

GROTH: Uh-huh.

MCFARLANE: Who are we to educate them right now? Give them what they want, I don’t got time to make world peace. I do that on my own time.

GROTH: Huh. [Long pause.] Let me ask you this: do you have any artistic standards of your own, or are your standards based entirely on what the public wants to buy?

*Buddy Saunders Sidebar

MCFARLANE: [Long pause.] I’d say, almost, right now, at this point, maybe a little bit of both. Although now with Image, actually I’d say … I just self-indulge myself, literally. And thank the Lord, even though I’m an atheist, that there’s enough people out there that are coming along for the ride. As long as there’s about 20 or 30,000 of them, I’ll keep indulging myself because I’m just a weenie like that. There’s a lot of guys who’re doing black and whites or doing independents that I think are literally doing the exact same thing that I’m doing. I just happen to be doing it in a more commercial form. So I sit there and I go “Aw cool, I like guys with capes” so, Spawn’s got a cape.

Spawn #2 (July 1992) written and drawn by Todd McFarlane © Todd McFarlane Productions, Inc.

No questions asked, I don’t got no editor that I got to clear that through. “Ah, I want to do this, I want to do this, I want … ” — it’s done! I mean, it’s done in seconds, and you want to know what? Does it all make sense? Nah. Ultimately it doesn’t have to make sense, really, because I’m having a kick. I’m just going, “Todd, this is cool. You want to draw a cartoon character? Ahh, let’s bring in a cartoon character. You want to draw a monster? Ahh, let’s bring in a monster. You want us to draw tall guys? Ahh, let’s draw tall guys. You want to do it at night time? Daytime?” It doesn’t matter what I do, I get up and I go, “Ahh, what’s going to entertain Todd McFarlane?” And, fortunately or unfortunately, depending on who you are, there’s a lot of people that get entertained by the same things that I do. They like funny little characters. They like guys with big capes flowing in the wind. They like monsters. So, I guess I’m, like I said, somewhat of an adolescent still. And there’s a lot of adolescent readers out there that go “Aw, that’s cool, Todd.” What I thought was cool, as a comic book reader, I put in my pages, and if those kids think it’s cool and if they turn into comic book artists and writers, they’re going to still put monsters and fights because that’s what they liked. I wish I had a major epic that I could put down on paper that would change the world, but I haven’t come up with that one yet. Right now, I just do kind of cool comic books. I don’t hang my head in shame; I’m proud that I do something that I like and that I’m somewhat successful at it. “Successful” being, in this capitalist society, that other people buy it.

GROTH: So you actually take pride in your work?

MCFARLANE: Yeah, sure I do. If I don’t then I’m going to become a dinosaur. I try to keep up with everything. I try to update myself. My style isn’t the same as it was five years ago, even two years ago. If you look at the first issue of Spawn that’s out, it’s not the way that I used to draw Amazing Spider-Man. It’s maybe not a quantum leap from there, but at least it’s not me just going “Ah, I’ve done it, this is how good I am, this is what I do, I don’t ever have to try anything different.” I try to change, whether the changes are for the good or for bad — again, that’s not my decision, because I’m not the one buying the book.

GROTH: Right. How did you feel about being complicit with Marvel’s pandering to the fraudulent collector’s market with Spider-Man — did that bother you?

MCFARLANE: Gary, I don’t have any control over the multiple cover idea. If you’re asking if that was my idea, the answer’s no. If they came up with an idea, it was maybe going to sell twice as many copies because of the idea … whatever! I mean, I’m going, “I don’t care. You can sell twice as many copies of my book? Whatever.”

GROTH: Do you think you should care? Because clearly what happens with all these “collectable” comics, such as your Spider-Man is that Marvel promotes them as collectable, retailers promote them as collectable, on down the food chain until they’re sold to gullible kids or avaricious speculators. They’re then hoarded by retailers, and then the market is manipulated by dealers and retailers who stock these things and only allow a limited supply that is just less than the demand. So, in other words, there is … your Spider-Man sold 5,000,000?

MCFARLANE: 3,000,000.

GROTH: There’s no way in the world that that comic, with a print run of 3,000,000, could be worth anything if the market weren’t manipulated.

MCFARLANE: Yeah … you know, you’re right. Everybody is either to blame or to be patted on the back for that, I guess it depends on your view of it. I couldn’t do nothing at that point. That I fight one way or the other, no that was a decision that I didn’t even have, that I didn’t say nothing about because I knew that my voice, at that point, was irrelevant, in the way that the system was set up. Do I think that’s a good idea of doing it? Well, take a look at the first issue of the Spawn, you see how many variations there are on that book. One comic book, you get it, that’s it. I’m not really a big fan of multiple covers, if that’s what you’re asking, because I think it’s cheating the public. I think that you’re selling them the same product twice. I can kind of live with the cover, even though I don’t have it on mine, but if somebody gives you a day-glo yellow cover … technically, if you just buy one copy of it, you’re still getting only the one cover. So, it’s really no different than the previous issue, it’s just the mentality of the people that are biting the hype and buying it, that are buying multiples of it, even those who just got day-glo, what’s the point of it?

GROTH: Aren’t you pandering to that mentality by [A] working at Marvel in the first place and [B] drawing Spider-Man?

MCFARLANE: Am I . . . ?

GROTH: In other words, it seems to me you have a decision to make, and that is, to draw a comic that is read or to draw a comic that is hoarded, and you know very well going into it that Marvel has exploited the speculator’s market more than any other publisher, and that by working on Spider-Man for Marvel you will be complicit in that exploitation.

MCFARLANE: OK, here’s my attitude when I took over Spider-Man. The sales were pretty solid. Spider-Man, I mean, it’s the status quo. My only thing that I wanted to do was, it’s selling 250,000 copies; my only goal was, not really so much to raise the level of the sales, was that Spider-Man is such an ongoing title that a lot of people have been collecting it for years. They’re going to buy it no matter who draws it, my mom could draw it and still sell 250,000 copies. So, the only goal that I had was, “I hope they read it before they shove it in their plastic bags. That’s all I can hope for.” The sales aren’t going to reflect any of that, but at least if they read it and they start talking about it, then all of a sudden Spider-Man is back on their lips again. Actually, it probably was almost a year before it actually reflected, in sales, what they had been talking about. “There’s this new kid on the book and he’s got this weird style, blah blah blah, he’s got a little bit of Ditko in it, blah blah blah,” but it wasn’t really reflected in the sales. If anything, “the sales went down initially because it was a new kid coming on there or something like that…so it was more that all those guys were just buying it because it was just to keep their collection going, were now stopping, flipping through it or reading it, and then shove it in their plastic bag. You’re up against certain obstacles at that point, but that doesn’t mean that because that market exists that I shouldn’t be entitled to do Spider-Man. That question is almost the opposite, that because the pubic is a certain way, that I should not be able to do something. I didn’t come on Spider-Man and do the status quo, quite the opposite. I went in there and said “Ahh, let’s fuck with it.” I was hoping to fuck with it so that it would actually be something that people would respond to, for good or for bad. Again, let them make the decision … but at least I got a reaction out of it. They’d be talking about Spider-Man now, and that was the central idea essentially that I was looking for in Spider-Man. And to some extent, I did what I set out to do. I got people going “Ah, Spider-Man … I’m going to collect it anyway.” They’re still collecting it, Spider-Man hasn’t been cancelled since I left. Far from it, the sales are as solid as ever. Whether that had anything to do with whatever I did, who knows? It’s just, maybe, a cycle it’s going through.

(Continued)

“The Head of Perseus” collected in Barry Windsor-Smith Opus Vol. 1 ©1999 Barry Windsor-Smith

This is my second interview with Barry Windsor-Smith. My first was conducted in (approximately) 1970, which would’ve made me a starry-eyed 16-year-old and (the pre-Windsor) Barry Smith a comparatively awesome 23-year-old grown-up drawing for Marvel Comics (and with an exotic accent yet!). I remember absolutely nothing of that first interview except for the atmospherics: Barry sitting on the floor of a dimly lit, rather plush Manhattan apartment, stereotypical New York street noise wafting in through the window, and me hanging on his every word. In retrospect, it must’ve seemed to me like the quintessential (not to mention, in retrospect, the oxymoronically) bourgeois/bohemian artist’s garret. (Barry told me recently that it was a friend’s apartment and that he never could’ve afforded such a place then.) Barry was gracious enough to give me a few drawings for a fanzine I published then, and we kept in touch for a couple of years, but eventually lost touch and hadn’t talked to each other until, literally, I contacted him about this interview last year.

Throughout those 25 intervening years we both apparently kept an eye on what the other was doing. Unbeknownst to me, Barry was reading the Journal through the ’80s (and tells a pretty amusing anecdote about the time he expressed approbation of the magazine to Jim Shooter). My own interests and aesthetic preoccupations moved me in a very different direction from what Barry was doing. I followed his Fine Art period when he manufactured prints and posters through his own Gorblimey Press, noted with insouciant horror his return to Marvel, was further mystified by his alliance with Valiant and had casually written him off as an unfortunate example of a superlative craftsman who was too smart not to know that he had made Faustian pacts with not one but several devils in a row. This saddened me because I remembered his kindness to me as a kid, remembered enjoying his growth as a stylist on Conan in the ’70s, and remembered respecting his move from Marvel to his serious pre-Raphaelite inspired painting. “Ah well,” I thought, “another artist who could’ve been a contender.”

Well, the good news is that he is indeed still a contender. His new book Storyteller is not just the best work of his career but, in my opinion, a major step beyond anything he’s done before, making his journey from corporate work-for-hire artisan to more idiosyncratically expressive artist one of the most circuitous in the history of comics. Admittedly, the look of Storyteller is off-putting to someone like me who has had it up to here with the infantile formalistic trappings of mainstream comics, but once I was able to set aside my prejudices (entirely justified 99 percent of the time, mind you) I recognized that Storyteller is a) his most personal work to date and b) essentially a comedy, which makes all the difference in the world. It is funny, charming, ribald, parodic, great fun, and beautifully drawn.

Originally I had intended to do a standard Journal career retrospective, but Barry preferred to have a freeform conversation about comics in general and his comic and career in particular and to let the conversation take us where it would, and that’s just what we did. The resulting discussion should prove unique because Windsor-Smith’s point of view is, uniquely enough, that of a second-generation comic book artist whose career was spent mostly in mainstream comics but who’s too self-aware and talented to continue working in that “tradition.” He’s now in the process of finding his own voice and that’s all to the best. I’ll try to get back to him in 2020 to find out how he’s done for himself. — Gary Groth

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 l 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.

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.

“Gypsy Face” collected in Barry Windsor-Smith Opus Vol. 1 ©1999 Barry Windsor-Smith

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 l 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…

“He Lives Again!” appearing in Machine Man #1 (October 1984) written by Tom Defalco, lettered by Michael Higgens, penciled and inked by Barry Windsor-Smith ©1984 Marvel Comics Group

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 10 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 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 cant 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, OK 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 4 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.

From Joe Kubert's Fax From Sarajevo ©1996 Joe Kubert and Strip Art Features

HOOK, LINE AND SINKER

GROTH: This brings us to a very interesting point about the whole history of comics. It seems to me that artists of Joe’s generation —people like Alex Toth and Gil Kane, the whole pantheon of superior artists — were cranking work out on such an industrial schedule, that they couldn’t really tailor their work to their own personal vision or personal expression so much as they simply had to draw as well and as quickly as they could; and since they were told what to draw and what they were told to draw was basically adolescent in nature, their styles either conformed to that adolescent context or never coalesced with it. And I think that has had a deleterious effect on them as cartoonists and on the artform.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Absolutely, I agree. That’s what you were saying to Gil [Kane]. And Gil of course agreed with you. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t finish [the interview you did with Gil], the last four or five pages. I just couldn’t go on — it was like reading one of the most depressing novels. I was thinking, “All right, I know how it’s going to end, I don’t have to slog through the last few pages.” [Groth laughs.] Gil, to me, is absolutely the prime example of what you just said. And here is Gil bemoaning that he hadn’t done anything, or that he still, at his age, in his twilight, wants to do something of weight, something grand, something that’s going to be remembered. And by Christ I understand his needs. I mean, my thoughts and feelings are with him for that, you know? But here is a guy who succumbed to every bloody cliché about the publishing industry — let alone the clichés in the comic book drawing side of it. And there’s all these reproductions of the books that he read, which I thought was so… Frankly I found it pitiful. Did he ask you to reproduce those covers?

GROTH: No, no, in fact that was my idea. We were trying to figure out how to illustrate parts of the interview that were almost un-illustratable.

WINDSOR-SMITH: I got you, OK.

GROTH: And I pulled those out of my own library [laughs].

WINDSOR-SMITH: OK, that’s all right then. That’s actually better because I was thinking: what if Gil said to Gary, “Gary, Gary, you’ve got to publish the covers so that people know what I’m talking about.”

GROTH: No, Gil didn’t even know I was doing that.

WINDSOR-SMITH: OK. That makes it a lot less painful then [laughs]. But, here is this guy who’s describing all the work he did on himself and reading modern philosophy and then reading ancient philosophy, reading the two combined, reading great novels… And yet he’s turning out bleeding Captain Action.

GROTH: Yeah not being able to apply that learning to his work.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Right, it’s simply like the ’twain never met. God, that is depressing. That is so… [sighs].

GROTH: Well you know, Gil is one of the few artists, I think, of that generation who has the self-awareness to know that.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah. Actually one of the lights that came on throughout the dark of that interview was that he knew the content of what he was saying. I think he could see the darkness and the irony of it. If he was saying this, and the interview was 25 years before, so rather than being in the industry for 50 years, he would be in the industry for 25 years, and he’s saying, “For the last 25 years I’ve done crap, no matter how much craft I brought to it, being able to draw a nice picture —I’ve done crap, it has no value, it’s not going to be remembered, it has no historical value whatsoever, just to my grandchildren…” If he said that 25 years ago and still had the energy to pull himself out and go on, then that interview would have been a reason for celebration. There would have been this guy saying out loud, “I’ve been wasting my bloody time, but I’ve got plenty of energy left and I’m going to turn everything around, you watch me.” So that was part of what made it depressing.

I wish… I don’t know what sort of circulation The Comics Journal has — I’m sure it’s not up there with Wizard —

GROTH: [Laughs.] You re right, there!

WINDSOR-SMITH: But I wish that some of the stuff, quite a lot of the damn stuff — this is going to sound like outright flattery and you know it’s not because I’ve got no ulterior motive to flatter you, Gary — but I just wish that you had some kind of a syndicate thing where you could publish ads for Wizard in exchange for them to do almost a public service to their readers by publishing some of the material that you put out. The Gil Kane interview comes readily to mind because there are so many people in this industry who are not going to know about that interview. Maybe they should. The young artists coming up who just have no idea about the potential of their medium because they aren’t using their humanism as a part of the medium. I forget where this was published, it might have been in your magazine, I don’t know, but Jean Giraud was talking about American comics and he said — and I’m probably going to slightly misquote him here, but in essence it’s correct — that American comic artists — and he was talking about the new breed, he wasn’t talking about Kirby or anybody like that — “American comic book artists don’t have any politics.” I think that’s exactly what he said. If you take that literally — and probably everybody did — it doesn’t make a lot of sense; it doesn’t mean anything. Like: ‘What, we don’t vote? Who’s to vote for? I don’t understand. I’m not 18 yet.” [Groth laughs.] But what he meant was, your Jim Lees and all this lot, their product hasn’t got anything to do with them, you know? There is no emotional investment.

GROTH: Well, more’s the pity, Barry: maybe it does.

WINDSOR-SMITH: [Pause.] …Oh shit! [Laughter.] Scathing, scathing, you bastard!

GROTH: Well, I really wonder if consciousness hasn’t been reduced to that level, where Liefeld and Lee and the lot of them really have invested a certain amount of conviction into the pap they draw — which at least Gil’s generation didn’t because they had a degree of perspective.

WINDSOR-SMITH: We all make the same mistake — I do, you just did, everybody else does, so we can’t blame anybody for this — but we always say, “the Liefelds and the Lees.”

GROTH: Yeah.

WINDSOR-SMITH… Rob Liefeld has nothing to offer. It’s as plain as bacon on your plate. He has nothing to offer. He cannot draw. He can’t write. He is a young boy almost, I would expect, whose culture is bubble gum wrappers, Saturday morning cartoons, Marvel comics; that’s his culture. Somebody was at his house and came back with a report: There is not a single book in his house — only comic books. I see nothing in his work that allows me to even guess that there’s any depth involved in that person that might come to the fore given time. I look at Jim Lee’s work, and the guy’s learning how to draw. He has some craft to what he does.

GROTH: Yes, right.

WINDSOR-SMITH: He is married; he has a child I believe: being married and having a child — facing life. Making a commitment to another human being. Creating. Co-creating another human being. This has got to put some profound thoughts in your head… Or does it? I don’t know.

“Princess Adastra” collected in Barry Windsor-Smith Opus Vol. 1 ©1999 Barry Windsor-Smith

GROTH: Well, in theory I would agree with you, but on the other hand, if you look at their work. Lee’s work is obviously more technically accomplished than Liefeld’s, but otherwise it’s conceptually comparable.

WINDSOR-SMITH: I can’t disagree. But what I’m trying to do is allow that… People who don’t have artistic inclination — and there are a lot more out there than there are people who do have artistic inclinations — they can get married at 19 and have three children before 25, you know? They can go through a hell of a life; they could be born in an interior of an urban slum. They see more of life before they’re 10 years old than a lot of people see before they die. They see fights across the street; they see the needle and the damage done; they see everything. If they don’t have an artistic bent, they could possibly grow up being really twisted by this — I’m not saying turn into monsters or anything — but have a real deep dissatisfaction with life, have no way to express themselves, express the hurt, or express outrage. The way of expressing outrage of course if you’re in that situation is to go out and hit somebody or rob a bank, or any number of goddamn negative things. But if you’ve got an artistic inclination, even if it’s on Liefeld’s level, there’s a way of expressing yourself. Here I’m going to go and put them both in the same bag again — but I don’t think the Liefelds and the Lees, I don’t think it has even crossed their minds that comic books can be a medium for intimate self-expression. They’re sort of like fourth generation from the Kirby type of comic, from the Marvel Comics entertainment shit thing that, it wouldn’t occur to them that this could be a medium for self-expression. And that to me is the biggest drag of all.

And that is what I think Moebius meant. Whether Moebius is drawing that bloke who flies on the pterodactyl or doing something more obviously personal, he has a personal investment in that, and you can tell he writes from the heart and the head, you know? Of course there are some people — me for instance [laughs] — I haven’t a bleeding due what he’s goin’on about! [Groth laughs] I get lost with Jean Giraud. But same old story: if you can’t figure out the bloody story, then just enjoy the pretty drawings.

GROTH: Getting back to what you said about Lee and Liefeld not knowing that this is a medium that is capable of personal expression: by “personal expression” you’re talking about something that can objectively be determined as meaningful, that has some determinant human relevance. But, I think we’ve reached a point, certainly in the comics culture, where people like McFarlane or Lee or whoever think that they are expressing themselves. I constantly read interviews with people who talk in grandiose terms about what they do, and then I look at what they do, and it’s just absolute pap.

WINDSOR-SMITH: I … didn’t … know … that. [Pause.]

GROTH: [Laughs.] See, things are worse than you thought, Barry!

WINDSOR-SMITH: Goddamn. I’m just reading the wrong magazines, Gary. Are you actually referring to the Lees and the Liefelds?

GROTH: Yeah, sure. If you read interviews with them, they really think that they’re committing themselves body and soul to this sub-literate drivel…

WINDSOR-SMITH: [They’re claiming] it’s personally valid?

GROTH: Well, in a specious kind of way. I think you and I would see it as essentially spurious. But, from their point of view and based on their educational level, they think that they are exercising personal expression. [Pause.] It would be interesting to call them up and ask them [laughs].

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah. Send ’em a fax.

GROTH: I think they’re obviously also thinking they’re entertaining, that they’re providing entertainment, but I also certainly think there’s a dimension there where they’re expressing whatever they’ve got to express; that they’re being artists.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Now I know from whence came your quick-witted put-down a few minutes ago. Maybe they are actually expressing themselves!

GROTH: Yeah. I mean, when they left Marvel, there were a lot of moral reasons bandied about, quasi high-minded reasons about creator autonomy and creator rights.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah, I fell for that hook, line, and sinker. I really felt they meant it. And maybe they thought they meant it, I don’t know. I don’t know why they would deliberately lie, come to think of it, because taking the moral high ground like that isn’t going to assure more sales. It’s not as if the kids are going to say, “Oh! These guys are more moral than Marvel! They’re the Moral Comics group!” [Laughter.] So there’s obviously no value in lying about it; maybe they thought they were being moral. I thought they were. And I applauded them, because I wished I had the financial wherewithal — when I quit Marvel in 1973, I walked out with maybe $150. And I spent that on my first Gorblimey print, and if it didn’t work, I would have been working at the diner. But when they left, a lot of them had a lot of money, and I thought they were saying, “Now’s the time to strike out. Now’s the time to sever the chain and throw the iron ball away. Let’s go out and do it, guys!” I mean, I was so idealistic about them doing that shit — and then this whole bleeding thing happened earlier this year with Liefeld and Lee going back to Marvel … Goddamn, I wrote the most scathing letter that was supposed to be a public announcement sort of thing just putting down everything about this. I never had it published, I never sent it out— I think [my attorney] Harris Miller talked me out of it: “Barry, don’t send that thing! You’re gonna get sued! Then you’re going to make my life more difficult!” [Groth laughs.] I faxed it to Frank Miller. Frank felt exactly the same way, of course, and had already made his attitude public. I guess Harris didn’t get to him fast enough … But it seems to me that they said, “Hey look, all those publishers are making all that money — let’s make it ourselves, guys!” Which is a good enough reason I suppose, just as long as you’re up front about it.

DECLINE OF CRAFT

GROTH: Could you elaborate on your lament over what you perceived as the decline of craft standards? I assume you were referring to the Marvel-DC kind of material, and their devolution over the last 30 years.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Well, I think we all know there are declining standards. It’s probably true of a lot of different media, you know? But then again, we have pockets of the good stuff. Thirty years ago we didn’t have anybody in the field who could write as well as Neil Gaiman. But by the same token, it was… Jeez, I can’t even imagine myself saying that there was a higher standard 30 years ago, because there certainly wasn’t — in drawing, or in academic stuff like that. I don’t know. I’ll probably really put my foot in it by getting detailed.

GROTH: There is certainly a sense where even the middling artists — I don’t know what you want to call them, “journeymen” artists, if you want to be charitable, or “hacks” if you want to be uncharitable — but people like Dick Ayers and Don Heck, that sort of middle-level artist is no longer around, and what you’ve got instead are inept kids.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Well there you are. You answered the question for me. [Groth laughs.] I don’t know if you know this, I mean, I know you made a goof once in public about Don Heck —

GROTH: Yeah, right.

WINDSOR-SMITH: But I can dig it, I can understand how you would have done that; I’d have done exactly the same as you — I’d have probably said that, and then I would have been very quick to apologize.

GROTH: Now he’s starting to look like a great craftsman! [Laughs.]

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah, really! But Don Heck, once upon a time used to be a good illustrator. He’s got some comics work in print — well, of course they’re out of print, but the stuff has been published, I don’t know when, I can’t think of the dates, but it was certainly pre-superhero Marvel; I think it was Marvel comics, before they hit the big time with Jack Kirby and all that — and he had a wonderfully illustrative style: closer to top-quality fashion drawings.

GROTH: Yeah, he did romance work.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yes, right. I’ve only ever seen one of his stories, and I was utterly intrigued by the beautiful drawing, the use of blacks, wonderful feathering with the brush. He used to draw the most gorgeous women! I mean, highly stylistic of course, but in that 1950s fashion sense. There was this tiny signature on the splash panel: D. Heck. I saw this long after Heck had become a hack. But I thought, “This guy really used to sing,” you know? What happened to him? Now, it wasn’t as if he was turning out six books a month for Marvel, so his average quality hadn’t gone into decline. He was only doing Iron Man or something like that. So what the hell happened to Don Heck? Well, it could be anything. I don’t know his personal history, nor do you. But could it be that it’s the same old story — that he was told to draw like Jack Kirby? Same old bleedin’thing that you’ve heard me rattle on about endlessly in different conversations. Obviously he was trying to be dynamic, he was trying to do big figures and the dynamic Kirby poses, but it just wasn’t working, because it wasn’t him. So there you have another poor wretch who fell to the demands of the early Marvel.

Now, I don’t know if I’m correct about that, this is just a guess on my part. But in regard to the new foundlings in the field: when I came in in ’68, I was pretty awful. I didn’t have a hang on anything, really. But I had gone through art school; I did learn how to draw properly. I had lots of accumulated knowledge, even for just an 18-year-old. But my comics drawing really didn’t display that, of course. But at least I was coming from the right angle … Oh, that’s so damn qualifying, isn’t it? [Groth laughs.] At least I was coming from an angle that did, in its essence, have genuine knowledge behind it. It’s been said a thousand times and it’s absolutely true: You’ve got to know the rules before you can break them. That goes from Picasso as the greatest example, to Jack Kirby. Jack knew the human figure. He knew dimension and perspective. Jack had drawn in many different styles over his career. But during his heyday in the ’60s when he would draw a leg or an arm, you only knew it was a leg or an arm because it was either coming off of the shoulder, or coming out of the pelvis. If you separated one of his Captain America legs and put it all on its own, just one single leg, no foot, no pelvis, and put it on a blank piece of paper, you’d be hard pressed to figure out what the damn thing was! It would look like a sausage from Mars! [Groth laughs.] So there’s Jack breaking all the damn rules for his own vision. But as I say, the man had the bedrock of knowledge to do that.

It seems to me what we have today is people who have not learned but have adapted. They are adapting, they are using a style of some nature that is twice or thrice removed from “pencilers” who didn’t have much knowledge about drawing in the first place. It’s just so far removed from any sort of classical knowledge. I can’t remember any of these people’s names, all the young kids: they all go into one blender for me.

GROTH: Yeah, me too.

WINDSOR-SMITH: But if you imagine any one of them reading these words, if they should even think of reading The Comics Journal which is unlikely, and imagine, them saying, “Oh what a fuckin’ old fart that Smith bloke is! He thinks we should go to art school! What an asshole!” [Groth laughs.] So be it. But as I say, there are these little pockets of some very good talent. You’ve heard me mention Travis Charts, who does something in Jim Lee’s set-up. The guy is just fine! He has a real understanding. That doesn’t mean he’s a good storyteller however. He’s OK, but he throws so many literary red herrings into the stories without even realizing it, I suspect. So, where as he can draw, I applaud him, I pat him on the back — but now go and learn the other half of the craft, which is telling the story. I really think the storytelling and the characterization is the thing that has really gone south [mimics an old guy] with modern comics, I don’t bleedin’ know!

GROTH: [Laughs.] OK, C. C. [Beck].

Panel from The Avengers #30 (July 1966) penciled by Don Heck, written by Frank Giacoia ©1966 Marvel Comics Group

WINDSOR-SMITH: [Laughs.] Yeah. It is characterization that I think has gone right out the bloody window. We can’t just pin it down to lousy drawing — however, if you can’t draw well, how can you create a good character on the page, how can you create a believable character from one panel to the next? So you can blame poor drawing to some extent. But if you can’t write well, how can you create a believable character with your words on the page? So we can also blame disinterest in writing. But really it’s the two combined, and even more so. Making comics today, it seems to me, isn’t about creating; characters or about involving the reader in a personality, and what that personality or groups of personalities are doing and how they feel about what they’re doing and what other people think about them. Instead, it’s about how cool the inanely overworked pin-up shot is. How many bleedin’ details can you stick up in the top left-hand corner before a caption goes over it. That to me seems like the very essence of what it’s about in commercial superhero comics. I would really like to read something that is – going to engage me, you know? But that’s not the criteria from Image and Marvel.

When I was doing that Wildstorm Rising thing about a year and a half ago — my one and only foray into Image — I… Well, for a start, I should never have bloody done it, and I wish I hadn’t. But I was talked into it and got kind of caught up in it, and it had to do with — oh man, it’s almost like a nightmare, only far remembered at this point — I was going through this hapless story where I couldn’t understand what anybody’s motives were. I was looking for motive. It wouldn’t come to me, I tried to read some of the preceding books and I still couldn’t find anybody’s particular characteristics — except for one guy was really big, or something like that. And then I had to draw these characters, these supposed characters.

GROTH: I assume you didn’t write this.

WINDSOR-SMITH: No, no. I mucked with the plot awfully, and the writer probably loathed me for it because I mucked around with the plot.

GROTH: [Chuckles.] He probably didn’t even notice.

WINDSOR-SMITH: No, no, he noticed. He was kind of miffed, so I heard from a third party. But I thought, “I’m just trying to improve the bleedin’ product, for crying out loud.” [Groth laughs.] But anyway, I did a real false start on it. I got three pages into it or something, trying every trick in the book to psyche myself into doing something like this. And it just wasn’t working. I was in a great depression over the story and I thought, “Oh God, this is the first time in my life I’m going to make an utter failure out of something.” After intense thinking, I realized what I was doing wrong: I was looking for characters! I know this sounds really glib as if I’m trying to build up to a funny line. But I’m really not. That was my problem: I was looking for characterization, and there was none. “There is no characterization! That’s what you’re doing wrong here, Barry!” They’re all ciphers!

Panel from Tales of Suspense #67 (1959) written by Stan Lee, penciled by Jack Kirby and inked by Frank Giacoia ©1964 Marvel Comics Group

GROTH: And you’re talking about characterization on the level of ’60s Marvel, right?

WINDSOR-SMITH: Oh, absolutely. We’re talking minimalism here: but at least something that we know as part of the comic book process. I mean, I wasn’t looking for Harold Pinter here. [Groth laughs.] Maybe a little bit of diluted Stan Lee. But when I realized there was nothing to look for, that’s when I thought, “OK, all right, now it makes sense!” So then I proceeded to draw the damn story.

GROTH: How did you ever get sucked into something like that?

WINDSOR-SMITH: Oh, you don’t want to know. Harris [Miller] talked me into it, you know?

GROTH: [Laughs.] OK. He is evil.

WINDSOR-SMITH: He really is. I mean, I love the guy and all that, but he gets me into trouble sometimes. He said, “This could be great for your career, Barry.” Yeah, right.

GROTH: Gil [Kane] tells me the same thing. He’s always calling him up saying, “You should do this new Image comic.” [Laughter.] Harris is always looking out for your careers.

WINDSOR-SMITH: That’s his job, he often reminds me. But yeah, I really think it is characterization that has sadly departed, whatever there was of it in comics gone by. For whatever we want to say about Stan Lee he did that thing with Spider-Man, where he actually had a point of view of the world and all that sort of stuff. So we can give him a short applause for that. And there really isn’t much of that any more.

GROTH: I don’t read mainstream comics much but we get piles of them in the office and I look at them once in a while. And because I read them as a kid and I can go back to that Kirby and Ditko and Stan Lee stuff and so on, I have this morbid curiosity about why they look like such unadulterated shit these days. I read interviews with contemporary creators who write and draw them and they seem to be very excited about what they’re doing. And I wonder about why the stuff is so wretched. I wonder if it’s just the Zeitgeist or if it’s just the creators themselves or if it’s me.

WINDSOR-SMITH: I know exactly what you’re saying. I have the very same wonders myself. You and I can just sit around and scratch our heads over the phone, because I don’t have any answer either. Yeah: is it the Zeitgeist? Are we missing something? Is it the same now as it was then but we just didn’t know because we were in a different position then? This sort of questioning comes to us all. It has been the standard cliché for decades now, from the ’60s with rock ’n’ roll, or at least the British invasion style rock ’n’ roll, where people would say, ‘They can’t play, they’re only playing banjo chords. Whatever happened to Ella Fitzgerald and Satchmo and hey, Frank Sinatra — now there’s a voice!” And all this sort of shit that I went through when I was a teenager, absolutely adoring everything I was hearing, from the Beatles to the Stones… Well, actually I was extremely judgmental even then: I fuckin’ hated the Dave Clark Five because I could see them for the no-talent copyists that they were! But I loved anything that I thought was quality, and I certainly thought Lennon and McCartney were.

I actually have this strong memory of an uncle of mine whom I greatly admired. He was a musician, played jazz. I was over at his house one day, I was only about 15 or 16, the Beatles had been around for about a year or so — at least in Britain; they hadn’t hit America yet — and he was sitting there just trashing them. Saying, “They can’t play any notes. You call that singing?” And I really disliked my uncle from that moment onward. I’ve never liked him since. Because he seemed to totally sell out himself as a musician. In other words, he wasn’t broad-minded enough to see that there is always new music. And he insulted one of my favorite things. So I’m dreadfully afraid that I’m doing exactly the same thing now!

GROTH: [Laughs.] You’re turning into your uncle.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah, I’m turning into an old complaining fart. There are so many people, I hear it all the time: “Oh my God, I’m beginning to sound like my dad!” It’s a standard routine for stand-up comedians nowadays.

GROTH: But seriously, there is a maturing process, and some people go through it and some people don’t. And I think in some ways you do start sounding if not like your dad, at least like people you remember as having antiquated attitudes.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Somebody you don’t like. I can remember a long time ago, you did a major interview with Jim Steranko.

GROTH: Whew—you’re talking 25 years ago.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah. And you seemed absolutely in awe of Jim at the time.

GROTH: I was.

Young Gods and Friends ©2003 Barry Windsor-Smith

WINDSOR-SMITH: And you were young. And Jim was lapping it up because we know what an egoist he is. But in recent times, or at least within the last eight or five years, I can remember when you totally trashed him in print for some reason. It wasn’t out of hand, there was some purpose behind it; I forget what it was. I was thinking, “Gee, what happened to Gary in the meantime?” Yeah, we’ve all changed our taste — I guess. And now, Steranko was pretty damn good at what he did. We know it was derivative to a degree, but some of it wasn’t. So for the people who were working at that time in that heyday of Marvel comics, Steranko certainly gave far more energy to his books than your average guy. Certainly he was no genius on the level of Jack Kirby, but who the hell was? So Jim’s material was innovative to a degree, exciting to a degree, good for what it was. So why do you not see Jim’s work in that perspective? Or do you?

GROTH: Looking at his Marvel work, I can’t help but see it as thin and anemic. Whereas Kirby was genuinely original, and Ditko was too, Steranko was a compendium of graphic tricks and gimmicks picked up from various sources inside and outside of comics. So I don’t think he’s… If you look at it closely it tends to fall apart. It doesn’t hold up to very close scrutiny.

WINDSOR-SMITH: I agree with you. I was thinking that way back when.

GROTH: Yeah. Well you were probably ahead of me because as you say, I was in —

WINDSOR-SMITH: I was right in the thick of it and I was functioning in the same capacity as a storyteller. So I could certainly see through Steranko.

GROTH: Right. And l was just at the right stage to be in awe of that mystique that he carries around with him like baggage. But since then I managed to educate myself. Also I lived with him for about three months when I worked for him, and I guess I learned a lot more about him than I wanted to.

WINDSOR-SMITH: That sort of thing’s happened to me too, that which you thought once was so cool or whatever, and after a mental re-tooling due to any number of insights you realize that which once delighted you is just some sort of pap and you simply can’t understand what it was you were into at the time. And this is almost like a circular action. It comes back to your question about what’s happening to comics today.

GROTH: Exactly.

WINDSOR-SMITH: It doesn’t hold up; after you’ve gained through experience, through school, through self-teaching and analysis, what stays solidly honest to you? Even though I’ve traveled so many paths since 1968 when I first drew X-Men #53, right after Steranko’s short run as it happens, so many things have happened to me — obviously personal things happen if you stay alive long enough, but I’m talking about my perceptions of art, my needs, the things that gratify me, in fact even what art is. I’ve siphoned it through myself and I think I’ve come out a better person and an artist who is capable of realization in word and picture. Of all the perspective I presume that I have today I can’t seem to deploy it to read those old comics from the ’60s any more, I can’t read Stan Lee’s writing, it’s like getting hot pokers in the eye trying to read those balloons — see, that to me is still a bafflement. How could I … So many things come into my head when I think of stuff like this. But Stan Lee’s writing, which used to flow through me and I thought was exciting, invigorating, stylish, any number of things… But today I cannot read a single balloon of it. And yet, the staging, the drawing, the drama, the natural intellect of Jack Kirby really hasn’t diminished, in my perception. And in fact I sometimes enjoy it all the more! Even though these are impossible heroes in blue tights. You look past that nonsense as you do when you look at a Picasso. We know people don’t have three eyes all on the left side of their head. There’s a reason that Picasso is doing this. There’s a reason for the extraction and the abstraction and the process of thought. Kirby still holds up! That fucking wonderful guy still holds up.

GROTH: Your bringing up Steranko made me think of something vis-a-vis Kirby. People like you and I can see the virtues of Kirby I think whereas a lot of people can’t. If you only look at the surface, I suppose it’s obvious why his virtues are difficult to see, because there’s something so adolescent about it. But it seems to me that as soon as you get into a kind of attenuated Kirby, like Steranko, Buscema and others the displaced virtues of Kirby just crumble. It has to be real Kirby or nothing.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yes, I agree. Perhaps if Steranko had continued to create comics instead of becoming a soft-porn distributor, perhaps he’d’ve pulled away from the early influences and become a great in the field for real instead of just in his own head. But at least Jim offered something to us in the’60s, whereas Buscema’s applications of Kirbyism was utterly vapid and empty.

GROTH: Well if Steranko’s work displayed more ingenuity than Buscema’s even then, but the way I see it is, everything we find admirable about Steranko’s work came from outside Steranko whereas everything we love about Kirby came from inside Kirby, and that’s a significant difference.

WINDSOR-SMITH: True. I’m walking a bit of a thin line here because one of my new titles for Storyteller is a direct homage to Kirby, you can tell by the title Young Gods if nothing else. I’m not drawing like Kirby, you know — the way I did in the ’60s — but my pacing and acting technique is derived from Jack. I started Young Gods about two years ago from an entirely different storytelling point of view but after I completed nearly two stories I realized that the only way I wanted to do the material was as a tribute to Jack Kirby, the characterization is not Kirby — the characters are very much my own types — but the pacing, the panel layouts, and the backgrounds are very much synthesized from Jack. I think I’m doing him justice with this because I believe I understand Jack Kirby’s work deeply. Each episode is dedicated to his memory.

GROTH: That’s an important point, though: you’re not using Kirby as a source of content so much as the scaffolding for your own content. Earlier we were asking ourselves how to account for this miserable state of affairs in mainstream comics, and quite possibly it’s because comics are being written and drawn by people who haven’t learned to distinguish between using an artist as inspiration and using him as the single source of your expression.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Most of ’em are perhaps too young to have learned the process of discriminating the valuable from the crap. You and I after all are talking from some perspective of the years under our belts, as it were. Within my parameters, my overview, say, when I was in my mid-20s, I honestly believed the comic books I was creating had value to them … not all of ’em mind you, Avengers #100 didn’t really rise above street level, y’know, but I had pride in something about those books like Conan, Doc Strange, and stuff I forget now. My drawing wasn’t always the greatest but I believe my storytelling had integrity because I had a background in books and plays and other literary endeavors that wasn’t just comic-books: Hell, I read Steinbeck when I was 14.1 don’t see intensity in modern Marvel and Image and what have you, no matter how abstracted it might be for the sake of the superhero genre, I can’t see it.

But when I read the entirety of Alan Moore’s Miracleman I was thrilled by his diverse experience and knowledge — you don’t find that depth in Youngblood.

GROTH: [Laughs.] But I wonder if maybe they just didn’t grow up reading comics … Good God, I guess it’s possible they grew up reading comics in the ’80s, isn’t it?

WINDSOR-SMITH: It is, and I know nothing about comics from the ’80s. Weren’t comics in the ’80s dominated by the John Buscema clones, art-wise I mean?

GROTH: I’m not sure, but I think it was just real garbage.

WINDSOR-SMITH: You really don’t see any evidence of John Buscema cloning in them any more. Now, John, who was a very good draughtsman, was the most feted penciler that comics had seen at that time. But for a man to have that kind of talent, that capacity to draw, or to cartoon, and yet have no intellectual basis and seemingly put nothing into those stories that you can come away with smiling … That to me was always the most bizarre anomaly, you know? He was a naturally talented man. I always compared him to Paul McCartney where Paul McCartney was obviously the best musician in the Beatles, there was nothing he couldn’t do, you know? He could play most all instruments, had a fantastic voice as regards quality and range, he was a terrific writer … He was all-round top-notch. And yet Paul McCartney’s work is vapid. He wrote some really terrific tunes every now and then I have to admit, like “Hey Jude,” I mean, God was sitting on his shoulder when he wrote “Hey Jude.” But in general, Paul McCartney gives you nothing…

GROTH. Just fluff.

WINDSOR-SMITH: He’s like the sweet tooth of music. And yet his partner, John Lennon, who could not play as well, could not sing as well, wrote some very good songs but really wasn’t as prolific as McCartney. But John [Lennon], just like Kirby, still stands up. Because there is an almost inexplicable value to what he was doing. I say “inexplicable,” but you could always try to point out what it all was, but to a degree it is inexplicable. If you’re touched with something, a vision, a hard-edge vision perhaps, even a soft vision, as long as you’ve got vision! As long as you’ve got vision and you can send it out, you can project it … That’s what Kirby could do with aplomb, it’s what John Lennon did, it’s what a lot of people did, I’m just using two popular icons right now.

So in the case of John Buscema, he could certainly draw the human figure finer than Jack Kirby but there was just no valid intensity to what he was doing. It was just pap. And now, just recently I heard that Buscema has retired. It took me a few seconds to understand that … How does an “artist” retire? One turns sixty-five years of age and one says to the wife ‘Well, dear, time to hang up the ol’ pencil sharpener. My time is done.” How can a real artist retire from being an artist? I understand John Romita retiring because he was the art director at Marvel: It’s a job you do and you get to a certain age and you leave that job and go fishing or something. But Buscema is an alleged artist and you can’t retire from art. So maybe John is retiring from drawing comics, is that it? Then, if that’s the case, John’s comics weren’t art. Is John now going to pursue “real art” in his latter life? Does John confuse painting at an easel with brushes and oils with the act of creating art? Buscema has been turning out comic books for 30 or more years … Why didn’t he make them art? Look at his work, even the Silver Surfer books that were among his most facile and pretty, and you won’t find art; you’ll find a journeyman talent wasted on a field that prefers his kind to my kind.

GROTH: I actually attended a chalk talk that Buscema gave the Marvel staff in the ’80s. It must have been around ’82 or ’83.

WINDSOR-SMITH: It was at Marvel?

GROTH: At Marvel’s offices in New York and the room was full of inkers and pencilers…

WINDSOR-SMITH: What the heck were you doing there?

GROTH: I’m not sure how I got in there. Well, first of all it was obviously before Marvel barred me from the offices [BWS laughs], but somehow I wheedled my way in and I taped it.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Is that so?

GROTH: And it was the most appalling thing I had ever seen. It could have been subtitled, “How to Become a Hack.’’ He was giving lessons on how to take shortcuts and how to do work quickly.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Oh fuck, really?

GROTH: And the most appalling thing about it was that it was done in all sincerity. He really thought he was teaching these people valuable job skills.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Sort of like the live version of How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way.

GROTH: Yeah.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Which is a book that should be burned. [Groth laughs.] I would never, ever agree to burning books, you know? But by fucking hell, if there’s ever a book that deserves it, it’s How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way.

GROTH: Exactly.

WINDSOR-SMITH: I only saw it by browsing through bookstores at the time. But we now have it in the studio as an icon. [Laughs.] So I had a chance to sit down and look at it properly one day. I was fuming! Absolutely fuming.

GROTH: I think we’ve probably said this before, but it’s tragic that someone with so much craft skill can apply it to something so vacuous.

WINDSOR-SMITH: You just said the word: he has so much craft. If ever anybody was confused — and I know a lot of people are — about the difference between art and craft, and that they do not go together like strawberries and cream, if anybody can really grasp what we’re saying here, that is, the difference between Kirby and Buscema, there’s your bloody fat dividing line. I mean, it’s a seven-lane highway, right between the two! The difference between art and craft. We said it here first.

GROTH: One thing that occurs to me is that what is explicable about art is the craft and what is inexplicable about art is that mysterious dimension that you cant put your finger on.

WINDSOR-SMITH: The spirit of it.

GROTH: Yeah.

WINDSOR-SMITH: I never saw Jimi Hendrix play, I never saw Jack Kirby draw, and these are two great losses — but I would have loved to have been near Jack Kirby physically. Not if he was doing a convention drawing, as in “Oh Jack, do me a drawing!,” but at the real times when he was really creating I’d love to have been present when he invented the Silver Surfer and when he created Galactus. He’s saying, “OK, I’m going to have this big guy who goes around eating planets.”

GROTH: Yeah, just watch him compose pages.

WINDSOR-SMITH: Yeah, and feel… I’d literally be a fly on the wall because I know he was supposed to be a very outgoing man, but I doubt very much that when he was on that level of creativity, that people were around him, or could watch him. It had to happen in private. It’s too fucking energetic. It’s too… It’s close to genius is what it is. Inside our field, it’s as close as we’re going to get for a bloody long time it seems. And I would love to have just been able to suck in, feel the energy, the spirit coming out of him. God, talk about being bathed by God’s light or something. This is back to what you were saying about the palpable and the non-palpable when it comes to art — I as a person wouldn’t have been able to understand and translate his power, because it’s entirely his own meta-energy. But it’s like you don’t have to understand what the sun is and how it works in order to get suntanned. I would have liked to have gotten a slight brush, metaphorically, of the heat that must have come out of Jack Kirby when his mind was really, really roaring. And to think he could translate it onto paper, with a stubby bleedin’ pencil to me is just one of the all-time gases of this world. And we are very lucky that we were around and at an impressionable age when that stuff was coming out.

]]> http://www.tcj.com/the-barry-windsor-smith-interview/feed/ 18 http://www.tcj.com/the-comics-journal-302-bloody-massacre-excerpt/ http://www.tcj.com/the-comics-journal-302-bloody-massacre-excerpt/#comments Thu, 28 Feb 2013 13:00:32 +0000 Warren Bernard http://www.tcj.com/?p=49736 Continue reading →]]>

Courtesy of Warren Bernard

Among the millions of readers of [Fredric] Wertham’s Ladies’ Home Journal article was Herbert Hannoch, chief counsel of the Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. He read the article and contacted Rinehart to get Wertham’s address. On Nov. 27, 1953, Hannoch sent Wertham a letter where he asked Wertham if he would be interested in testifying before the committee in either January or February.

They spoke Dec. 2 and discussed details about Wertham’s potential testimony. Wertham said he was busy, targeting the end of February or later in terms of timing. His testimony as they discussed then would have covered not just comic books, but also television and juvenile delinquency in general. Wertham needed lots of time, and asked for 90 minutes to two hours under oath in front of the Committee. Wertham also recommended that a member of the staff come up to New York to discuss how his testimony would be structured.

After that conversation, Hannoch wrote a letter to Assistant Chief Counsel Herbert Beaser, telling him he had engaged Wertham and that either Beaser or Richard Clendenen should take it from there.

Beaser finally talked with Wertham on Jan. 6, 1954. Beaser told him that hundreds of parents had written in to the committee about his Ladies’ Home Journal  article. Beaser confided to Wertham that they were moving against comic books and had already started the wheels moving. They talked about parents, comic books and whether Wertham had permission to use the pictures in the LHJ article — Wertham said he did not.

This was followed up by a visit by Beaser to New York to see Wertham sometime in January, as Beaser sent him a letter in early February thanking him and Mrs. Wertham for their time when he visited them. When they talked again on March 13, Beaser told Wertham about the one-year extension and passed along Senator Kefavuer’s remembrance of visiting Wertham during the 1950 hearings.

Two days later, on March 15, Wertham spoke to his agent, Rene de Chochor, about Herbert Beaser, the upcoming hearings and the imminent publication of Seduction of the Innocent. with either de Chochor or Wertham saying “they would make a mistake to wait for the book in the interest of the Committee.”³⁰ They noted the soonest that Seduction would be available would be April 14 and that Wertham should promise the committee advance copies.

On March 17, Wertham and Beaser spoke again. Beaser said they would like to do the hearings in the next two-to-three weeks. Wertham’s notes of the conversation say he told Beaser “not till April 15^th when book is out,”³¹ referring to his availability for testimony, as well as the publication of Seduction of the Innocent. They also went over some topics not to bring up, so the hearings would not get bogged down, such as sex, anti-Semitism and anti-Communism.

Arguably, an ethical line was crossed when Wertham made that request to hold the hearings to coincide with the release of his book. It is not known whether it was this request or other considerations (the senators’ schedules, availability of witnesses, TV schedules, etc.) that dictated the final dates of the comic-book hearings in New York, which in March had still not been determined.

Finally, during the March 17 conversation, Beaser told Wertham that a comic-book publisher wrote them that the attack on comic books comes from the “party line.” The party line was a Cold War euphemism implying that Communists are dictated to by the Soviet Central Committee of the Communist Party and must abide by their positions. Someone had clearly annoyed the subcommittee with inflammatory, Red Scare accusations.

EC Comics was not a factor in either Kefauver’s comic-book hearings in 1950 or the New York State Hearings on the same subject in 1951-1952. But in December 1953, its comic books suddenly came under attack. On Dec. 18, the Governor’s Council of Massachusetts asked that the state ban the EC title Panic because of one panel in a story showing Santa Claus with a “Just Divorced!” sign on the back of his Christmas sled. As saints such a St. Nicholas could never be married, this was an implied insult to such a holy being and to Christmas as a whole. The books were taken off the newsstands in Boston; Gaines took it one step further and took Panic out of total distribution in that state as a retaliatory move.

Eight weeks later, EC got hit again. The Hartford Courant on Feb. 14 began a multi-part series by Irving Kravsow on the evils of horror comics. The series proved so popular that, as had been done with the Wertham article, a pamphlet reprinting the series was produced and distributed by the Courant to members of the anti-comics citizenry. Pressure was beginning to mount on the comic-book publishing industry.

So when the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency announced on February 20 that they would hold hearings on the comic-book business, Bill Gaines had had enough.

Created by Bill Gaines Gaines and Lyle Stuart, drawn by Jack Davis.

Gaines, aided by EC’s business manager Lyle Stuart, created what looked like an ad that was embellished with drawings by Jack Davis. The ad had the headline “Are You a Red Dupe?” and concluded with the line “The group most anxious to destroy comics are the Communists!” Gaines sent the Committee what he thought was a joke about how only Communists are looking to censor comic books, and by implication, casting Wertham and the subcommittee as nothing but “Commie dupes.”

At the time, Al Feldstein was unaware that Gaines had designed the ad, no less sent it in to the subcommittee.

Gaines had this to say about the reasoning behind the ad:

I had a very good friend who used to amuse himself by going around until he found somebody haranguing a crowd on the street, and let’s say he would size the guy up as a right-winger, he found that if he went over and said, “You’re a Communist!” the guy would be incensed. Because he hates communists and somebody’s calling him a communist, and it’s the worst thing in the world you could call him. Well, I took this thing and said “Well, number one: everyone who is against my comics is a right winger. If I call them a communist, they’ll be furious!” The title was “Are You a Red Dupe?” And poor old Davis, who probably never read it, drew it, to his eternal dishonor, and that was it. It was one of my dumber things.

The accusation, even in jest, of saying that someone is a Communist was no laughing matter. The Red Scare and McCarthyism were in full swing. Since 1947, the United States had been through a long series of Cold War news events that on one side showed the nation’s resolve against Communism, and on the other side the erosion of civil liberties in pursuit of that resolve.

The period between 1947 and early 1954 saw Republican charges that the Democrats lost China and East Europe to the Communists, the explosion of the atomic bomb by the Soviets, the revelation that the atomic bomb secrets were stolen by Russian spies, the trial and execution of the Goldbergs as part of that spy ring, Parnell Thomas and the House Un-American Activities Committee investigation into Hollywood and the subsequent blacklisting, the Marshall Plan to restore Western Europe to help ward off Communist expansion, the development and testing of the hydrogen bomb, Alger Hiss/Whitaker Chambers/Richard Nixon and the cleansing of the federal government and academia of alleged Communists. Not to mention the anti-Communist witch-hunt tactics of Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.

Two days before the comic-book hearings were announced on Feb. 20, the House Appropriations Committee disclosed that the Commerce Department had fired 23 disloyal and subversive employees.³³ That brought the total number of federal employees dismissed for such reasons in 1953-1954 to 971. On Feb. 23, the Chairman of the Board of Higher Education of New York said that none of the Board’s 5,465 members were confirmed subversives, save an undisclosed number currently under investigation.

In the context of the times, it was not a wise move, jokingly or otherwise, to call someone a Communist, especially United States senators who were going to investigate your livelihood.

Needless to say, it was Gaines’ “Are You a Red Dupe?” ad that Herbert Beaser was referring to during his March 17 conversation with Wertham where they talked about “the party line.” Humorously red-baiting the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency was a large mistake that would come back to haunt Gaines in the weeks to come.

For citations and documents from the recently opened Fredric Wertham papers, go to www.tcj.com/warren-bernard-1954

“Reservoir” from Girlhero #3 ©1994 Megan Kelso

Megan Kelso and I first met about seven years ago, through a mutual friend who knew we were both cartoonists. I was excited to meet her, since a woman who draws comics is a relative rarity, but a little trepidatious about being introduced to someone solely on the basis of shared job description. To my relief, we got along easily, and on that occasion comics took a back seat to less obsessive conversational topics. It was only later, and over time, that the obsession would heat up.

Megan was, for the most part, blissfully unaware of the history and content of mainstream American comics, and it was clear that this was to her advantage. What thrilled me and the other cartoonists in our circle of friends about her early work was that she seemed to be inventing comics on the fly; she knew she wanted to tell stories with words and pictures, and was exploring how to do it free of the conventions relied upon by the rest of us. Her work forced us to reexamine a lot of the things we took for granted. We were all interested in tossing out the old hats of comics and haberdashing new ones, but while most of us were earnestly folding newspaper into pyramidal shapes, Megan and Jennifer Daydreamer were sporting velvet-covered, plumed bonnets festooned with ribbons and mother-of-pearl.

Over the years, Megan has continued to challenge herself, deepening her commitment to the craft and to the art of comics, selectively appropriating established conventions if they serve her needs, rejecting old habits that interfere. Even though her work ethic makes me feel like a hack, I am inspired every time I see what’s on her drawing table or leaf through the rough penciled pages of a story in progress. Most inspiring, though, is her obvious love for her medium of choice, and how that love serves her efforts to get at the more ineffable aspects of human experience. I’m very happy that there’s a bookshelf full of unwritten, undrawn comics by Megan Kelso waiting for me in the future.

Jason Lutes

Seattle

Sept. 15, 1999

GARY GROTH: Let’s start off by getting some background information, since I don’t know anything about you: where and when you were born, and where you grew up.

MEGAN KELSO: I was born in 1968 here in Seattle, and I grew up in Seattle. I lived in the same house for the first 18 years of my life on Capitol Hill.

GROTH: You may be the only native Seattle cartoonist still living in Seattle.

KELSO: Yeah, maybe I am.

GROTH: You went to Evergreen [College]…

KELSO: I actually went to art school first, I went to the Art Institute of Chicago, which is kind of a fancy, expensive school, and I lasted one semester.

GROTH: Was that directly after high school?

KELSO: Yeah. Well, actually no — I took the first semester off after high school and went to Central America and did some traveling. I started art school in the middle of the year, which may have been part of the problem. I just didn’t like it, and I knew my family was spending a lot of money, and I knew that I would be paying off loans for the rest of my life, and my main impression of what that art school was for was to launch you into the Chicago art world, and I didn’t see myself doing that, and the academics were really crappy even though they were supposed to be really good. It wasn’t working.

GROTH: By academics, you mean the actual courses in drawing?

KELSO: The studio classes I thought were OK — some of them — but to get a BFA, you also have to take Art History, English, all that stuff. And those classes were just shitty. And I kind of figured out in that semester that I did in fact just want a liberal arts education, I didn’t want to study just art at that point. I left after a semester, which my family thought was a bit premature, but I felt I was making the right decision. Then I took about a year off, and went to Evergreen.

GROTH: I’ll get to that, but let me go back to your upbringing. Can you describe your childhood, and how you got interested in art and cartooning?

KELSO: I’ve been drawing since I can remember.

GROTH: Was that encouraged?

“The Art of Being a Successful Business Girl” from Girlhero #3 ©1994 Megan Kelso

KELSO: I remember we had this drawer of scrap paper. My parents would throw paper into this drawer, and my sister and I could use whatever was in there. The two of us drew a lot together as kids. We would sit at the dining room table and draw lots of women in big bouffy dresses, Little House on the Prairie-type stuff. My dad’s an architect, so he could draw really well, but he didn’t like to, and I would always try to get him to draw pictures for me. He would say, “No, you should draw.” So yeah, it was encouraged, and I definitely got the props for drawing when I was a little kid. I’ve talked to a lot of cartoonists who experienced this: you’re in school, and people are really impressed that you can draw, and they want you to draw pictures for them, and that’s part of your character in class, and that was definitely the case for me.

GROTH: Any other siblings?

KELSO: Just one older sister.

GROTH: What was your upbringing like? If your father was an architect, I assume it was middle class, upper-middle class.

KELSO: Yeah, we lived on Capitol Hill. They’re pretty liberal; we lived in this funky old house. It was a really cool house, but it was the shabbiest, most unkempt house on the street.

GROTH: Mmm-hmm. Did you appreciate that?

KELSO: [Pauses.] Well, at the time I would swing back and forth between wanting more “normal” parents and feeling kind of proud. We did a lot of backpacking when I was a little kid, so it seemed like we were hardly ever home on the weekends. My parents weren’t the kind of people who were out there on Saturday working in the yard, making everything spiffy. And I didn’t watch a whole lot of television. I don’t remember any strict rules about it, but growing up all we had was this tiny black-and-white TV, and it just wasn’t a big part of life. My parents always had very definite opinions about aesthetics, taste and culture, and there was this sense of, “Of course you wouldn’t want to watch that stupid show!” So I think my sister and I were, to a certain degree, shamed out of watching a lot of TV, because there was a sense that it was a waste of time.

GROTH: A subtle pressure?

KELSO: Yeah, We’d go over to our friends’ houses and watch TV.

GROTH: You said that sometimes you wished your parents were more normal. Were they markedly unconventional?

KELSO: Well, as an adult seeing the larger scheme of things, they weren’t that unconventional, but I think most kids have this idea that everybody else’s parents are more normal than theirs. So I don’t think they were that offbeat, but l guess they were…

GROTH: Are they intellectuals?

KELSO: Yeah.

GROTH: Did that have a profound effect on your growth as a person and an artist?

KELSO: I definitely came from a bookish family, and both my parents and uncles made things — instruments, books, photos, crafts. Making art seemed like a normal thing to do in my family.

GROTH: Did you read a lot of books as a kid?

KELSO: Yeah. A lot. That’s pretty much all I did.

GROTH: So when you were a little older, in high school, what was that like? I mean, the American High School Experience can be traumatizing [Groth laughs].

KELSO: Well, I went to Garfield, which is one of the best public schools here in Seattle, but I would still say that about 75 percent of it was a waste of time, and I skipped a lot of school. I was disconnected from the high school life. I mean, I had friends, I had plenty of friends and I didn’t feel alienated socially in that way, like, “Nobody likes me.” I had plenty of intellectual pretensions, but very little interest in school. I showed up, did what I had to do, and left.

GROTH: But you didn’t feel inordinately alienated.

KELSO: No. And I had maybe three really good teachers over the course of that four years who kept me feeling like it was worth it. They had a really cool graphics program at Garfield, offset presses and stat cameras, and you could do silkscreens or print magazines… it was really amazing, and I wish I had done comics at that time because I could have self-published like crazy. But at that point I really hadn’t put it all together. Adrian [Tomine]’s probably the only high school student who ever has! So there were some neat things at that school — it wasn’t 100 percent horrible.

GROTH: At what point did you feel an affinity for cartooning and comics?

KELSO: [Pauses.] When I went to art school, I wasn’t thinking of comics or cartooning, but pretty much everything I did in my studio classes was trying to incorporate images and text in some way. The photography work I did, the drawing, I was always putting text in there and I remember getting a lot of flak from teachers about that. I remember this one drawing teacher I had kept asking me if I felt like my drawings weren’t powerful enough, so that’s why I was using the text, to kind of back them up.

GROTH: Hmmm.

KELSO: But I was never thinking of it as comics. When I look back on that stuff, I think, “Wow.” I was clearly headed in that direction.

GROTH: But you weren’t completely aware of that.

KELSO: No. I didn’t think about doing comics until I was at Evergreen. I’d been there about two and a half years, and I hadn’t really done any art at all —you know, art classes. And then I had this boyfriend who was really into comics, and he tried to get me to read some. I remember it was right at the point where Pete [Bagge] was finishing Neat Stuff and starting Hate, and then I saw one of Julie [Doucet]’s early issues of Dirty Plotte, and something came together. I said, “I bet I could do that, I bet that could work. “I knew that I wanted to tell stories and I knew I wanted to draw, and I knew I wanted to write, but I couldn’t figure out how it would all fit together; comics didn’t occur to me.

GROTH: It didn’t occur to you that there was a form already in place.

KELSO: I knew that comics were out there. Even in high school I knew people who read Love and Rockets, but it didn’t really sink in. Then it sunk in, and my last year at Evergreen all I did was work on getting out that first issue of Girlhero. I actually had an academic contract to do it.

GROTH: So in your teen years you didn’t read comics, you didn’t copy comics.

KELSO: No. I read comics when I was a little kid —Peanuts, the odd Richie Rich — but didn’t have any interest in comics, really.

GROTH: And your instructors in Chicago acted like this was an illegitimate hybrid you were doing, combining words and images?

KELSO: Kind of. They were sophisticated enough to know that images and text are OK in the art world, but there was this suspicion, like: “She must be trying to jack up the power of the drawings with the text.” Like that was cheating.

GROTH: But you wanted to tell stories?

KELSO: Yes, because I’ve always written. I was a very frustrated writer/artist before comics saved me [Groth laughs] — I always drew a lot and I always wrote stories. When I was a little kid I used to make books, I made a whole series of books as Christmas presents for my family — they had chapters and illustrations. But then I lost it somehow. When I was in college, it felt either/or to me for some reason.

GROTH: You put out Girlhero #1 [the minicomic, as opposed to Girlhero #1, volume 2] in 1991, while you were at Evergreen… what was the impetus behind publishing the issue itself?

KELSO: For my academic contract, I had to have some sort of final project. At Evergreen you can do these independent study projects. In my proposal I told my professor, “I will produce a comic book!” And I went around bragging to people that I was going to do this comic book for months before I actually started, and everyone was really impressed. I had no idea how much work it was. No idea.

GROTH: Explain how an academic contract works.

KELSO: Well, every quarter at Evergreen there’s a number of professors in the academic contract pool from a number of different disciplines, and if there’s something you want to study, you make a proposal to one of them, and then if they accept it, the two of you negotiate what you’ll read, what papers you’ll write, to make it a certain number of credits, and then you meet with the professor once or twice a week (depending on what you’re doing). My proposal was to make a comic book, and the guy who sponsored me was a science-fiction writer, he knew nothing about comics.

GROTH: Who was that?

KELSO: His name is Tom Maddox. He was great. Mainly what we talked about was the creative process. And I really didn’t know that people were doing minicomics, but everybody at Evergreen was off to Kinko’s, making zines. I didn’t discover that there was this whole world of minicomics until I graduated, moved back here and started meeting other cartoonists.

GROTH: So, what prompted you to actually do a comic? You finally realized that this hybrid form was ready and waiting for you?

KELSO: Yeah, so I told this professor and everyone I knew that I was going to making a comic, and I was not making a comic, and I was starting to get really freaked out. I started photographing what I wanted the comic to be, and it turned out to be 15 photographs and it was kind of telling the proto-”Bottlecap” story. It wasn’t a comic, but it was a story told with sequential images and text. Once I got that out, I started doing “Bottlecap” as a weekly strip (called Animata, after one of the other characters) in the Evergreen newspaper. So the first comics I did were just one strip at a time. I realized that wasn’t going to work for me, so I started expanding it into a story.

GROTH: How did you choose the subject matter (“Non-Biodegradable Youth”)? It looks vaguely autobiographical.

KELSO: The very first strips I did were these weekly Animata strips for the paper. But I wanted to have another story in the comic, and I’d co-written “Non-Biodegradable Youth” with my friend Joe just for fun. It wasn’t originally intended to be a comic; we were just messing around. But at the time it seemed easier to start with something already written and turn it into a comic, so I gave it a whirl.

GROTH: I see.

KELSO: By this point I was reading more comics, and I started getting a handle on what a comic actually was. “Non-Biodegradable Youth” was just me ripping off the hipster comics I was reading at the time — not autobiographical at all, really. I didn’t grow up in Suburbia, for instance.

GROTH: How conscious were you in developing an approach to drawing cartoons, creating your own stylization? Is it something that just happened, or was it a calculated choice?

KELSO: Well, in the beginning I was really embarrassed by word balloons, I found the classic comics look… it just seemed so… It’s hard to say this because of what I know now, but at the time I hadn’t seen a lot of comics, and I just thought the whole thing was sort of cheesy, and when I did this story I felt like I was faking it. I didn’t feel comfortable doing it; it didn’t feel like me. So I was really into this idea of, “How can I do comics with no word balloons, and no borders, and no nothing?” That’s why “Bottlecap” looks the way it does. I really had a problem with the word balloons. And I tried to do comics without them, and then discovered that there’s a real good reason [Groth laughs] for their use — but I learned it myself, and I think that really helped me, actually.

“Bottlecap” from Girlhero #1 ©1991 Megan Kelso

GROTH: That’s interesting, because “Bottlecap” has this anarchic visual look to it.

KELSO: Yeah. Do you have the first issue? [Groth produces it.] At the beginning, I wanted to have everything flow from image to image. I didn’t want to chop it up into lots of little panels. I don’t know why… now I like lots of little panels. At the time, I thought lots of little panels were cheesy. Plus, I think I was also influenced by (this is kind of embarrassing) by, um, who were the guys doing those painted comics, the really sort of splashy layouts and stuff?

GROTH: Jon J. Muth, Kent Williams?

KELSO: Bill Sienkiewicz.

GROTH: Bill Sienkiewicz, right.

KELSO: I was really impressed by all that stuff. I really liked it. Because they didn’t look like comics, I guess.

GROTH: They sort of look like an art-school version of comics.

KELSO: That’s the part that I liked. So that’s where I started: I didn’t want my comics to look like comics.

GROTH: Can you tell me a little about your education in comics, and how you became more comfortable with using the conventions of comics?

KELSO: I have to confess that I really haven’t read a lot of the canon of comics. I feel guilty. I really think my education started when I met all these cartoonists in Seattle, they knew a lot more about how to make a comic than I did. Jason Lutes, Tom Hart, Jon Lewis and Ed Brubaker, James Sturm, David Lasky… I met all those guys at the same time: all of them were read-every-comic-ever-made kind of people, totally understood comics. And yet, they too were just starting out in careers of their own, so I was in the same place as them, but in another way years behind them. And I learned a lot just by talking to them, reading their comics, and having them tell me about mine.

GROTH: Let me get a chronology straight: you did your minicomics in school in 1991, then you went on to publish your first commercial issue — to use the term loosely — of Girlhero in 1993. When did you get back to Seattle?

KELSO: I graduated in spring of 1991 and moved back to Seattle that summer. And I didn’t do any comics until maybe the fall of ’91. There was this little newspaper in Belltown called the Belltown Dispatch, and the editor, a friend of a friend, called me out of the blue and said, “I hear you do comics, do you want to do a comic for the Dispatch?” And that got me back on to “Bottlecap.” The chance to do a comic in the newspaper got me doing “Bottlecap” again, and that’s where the first few pages of “Bottlecap” in Girlhero #1 came from. It got me back in the groove. So I was complaining to my sister Jenny about how I didn’t know any cartoonists and I was trying to do this comic all by myself, still exceedingly ignorant about how to make comics, really frustrated, and one day she said, “You know my friend is living with this guy who works at this comic book publisher here in Seattle, and his boss’s girlfriend is a cartoonist. It was Jason, he was working at Fantagraphics, and so she was talking about Julie [Doucet].

GROTH: Have you ever met Julie?

KELSO: I eventually met Julie, but not back then. So I met Jason, and through Jason I met everybody else.

GROTH: [Laughs.] Great lineage.

KELSO: Yeah, I don’t know what I would have done if l hadn’t hooked up with some fellow cartoonists at that point.

GROTH: Can you talk a little about how your circle, your generation of cartoonists, socialized and helped each other, and how you learned from them?

KELSO: Um… well, I met Jason —

GROTH: You mean Jason Lutes. Let’s keep the Jasons straight. Jason Little worked for us, too.

KELSO: Oh, right. I’m sort of exaggerating when I say that I met Jason, then I met everybody. I knew Jason almost a year before I met Ed, Tom and Jon, but anyway, Jason and I hit it off immediately. And I remember that he told me about the Xeric Grant, he read about it in The Comics Journal, and told me that he was thinking of applying for it. It was right about the time he was starting to get the Jar of Fools strip going in The Stranger, and I was working on “Bottlecap,” and we would get together and draw. Jason’s great, he’s a natural teacher. He could tell I needed a lot of help. [Laughter.]

GROTH: He was generous.

KELSO: It seems like we developed that kind of relationship early on, where we would occasionally draw together and I would go to him for help, because, my God, he just draws so well, and he understands comics really well. And then I met the other boys, Ed, Jon and Tom, and they had this vision of conquering the world through comics, and so they were all living and working together in this tiny apartment. To me they were an instant unit. So then I applied for the Xeric grant, and Jason decided not to, because he hadn’t gotten Jar of Fools together the way he wanted to, and I actually got the grant. It totally blew me away. I met Dave Lasky around that time too, because he had gotten the grant the same time I did and had moved to Seattle from back east. And then within a year, year and a half, Jason got a grant, Tom got a grant, Jon got a grant, and I really don’t know if we would have coalesced as a group if that hadn’t happened. All of a sudden all of us had the same concerns: How do you self-publish a comic? I think that was a really sort of galvanizing factor, all that Xeric money.

GROTH: So, would you guys meet regularly, or semi-regularly?

“Her Peas and Queues” from GIrlhero #2 ©1994 Megan Kelso

KELSO: Well, after I met all those boys, they basically couldn’t get rid of me, because it was this amazing discovery to find people who I liked personally and whose work I really respected. I’d hit the jackpot. Eventually we got this idea to have a more formal group where we could bring in our work and have each other critique it or help with a problem and just talk about comics. And for a while, maybe a year, we had real monthly meetings with a minutes and everything.

I remember everybody was pretty shy about critiques at first. I think often Jason would be the first one to offer a criticism, since he’d been to art school. But then it was like the floodgates were open and everybody would jump in and offer everything from suggestions for the plot to how you drew the panel border to perspective, how to draw certain objects. It could be overwhelming, but for the most part it was all very respectful and loving. But after a while most people came in saying “I only want comments on timing or transitions” or whatever because otherwise you’d get your whole comic revamped.

It sort of started out with a somewhat small group of people, and seemed to strike a chord, and suddenly a lot more people started coming. It got kind of big, kind of unwieldy, and became more of a social occasion than getting work done. And I — a bunch of us — dropped out at that point, because it just wasn’t going the way we originally wanted.

GROTH: It lost its focus and intensity?

KELSO: Yeah.

GROTH: Was there a sense among you — was there a sense of excitement that you were all striving to create art out of comics?

KELSO: Yeah, I think there was a sense of excitement over getting money too.

GROTH: Yes, that always helps.

KELSO: Yeah, I mean, I could speak for myself, and I think most everyone else when I say that there is real validation in being awarded a grant. But as it turns out, self-publishing is a total drag, and I for one felt pretty downtrodden by the end of my experience. But at the beginning, you send off this idea, this comic you’ve been working on and someone says “yeah, this is great, here’s some money, go knock yourself out.” It invigorated all of us, and everybody was just producing like crazy. It seemed like every meeting we had, someone showed up with a new comic and everybody was improving by leaps and bounds.

GROTH: Did you publish the first issue of Girlhero with the Xeric Grant?

KELSO: Yeah, and I had money left over so I published the second issue with that money. By that point, I would be able to make enough money to print the next issue.

GROTH: Tell me how you went about teaming to self-publish: how you went about formulating the first issue, and putting it out.

KELSO: To get the grant, I had the entire issue as my proposal for the grant, the entire issue penciled and about half of it inked. The second story I had actually written about a year earlier as a short story, and decided to turn it into a comic, and that’s how I started doing my early comics. Except for “Bottlecap,” really, I would write out all of the stories, then convert them to comics.

GROTH: So you literally wrote them in prose first.

KELSO: So I knew from the get-go what would be the contents of the issue, but as far as the cover, the printing, Diamond, Capital and all that, it was just a matter of talking to everybody, and my friend Jon Snyder (the boyfriend from college) who wanted to get me to do comics —

GROTH: Ah-HA!

KELSO: Well, he wasn’t my boyfriend any more, but he was doing this Star Wars fanzine called Report from the Star Wars Generation, so he was dealing with printers and Diamond and Capital. He knew all of this stuff about publishing, so I got a lot of information from him. He sent me to Port [Publications], this printer, and [pointing to a Girlhero #1’s cover] I was still very attached to photography. I still didn’t want it to look like a comic book.

GROTH: Well, you more or less succeeded. [Laughter.]

KELSO: Yeah. I got in on the tail end of when everything was pretty rosy in the industry. I had no problem being listed by Diamond, Capital and the smaller distributors. I didn’t get fabulous orders, but I knew I was going to make enough money to fund the next issue.

GROTH: What kind of orders did you get? Do you remember?

KELSO: Well, I did six issues, and I never got more orders than 1,000. I don’t even think I got to 1,000. I was always hovering… orders for #1 were at 850, then they went down like they always do, then they went back up again. I was always hovering between 800 and 1,000.

GROTH: Well, that’s not bad.

KELSO: And then, you know, all hell broke loose. Capital and all the other distributors went away, the whole thing was so depressing… I think I self-published for longer than any of the other boys who got Xeric Grants…

GROTH: You probably did.

KELSO: But by the end I was just so over it.

GROTH: What did you find unpalatable about self-publishing?

KELSO: It makes me feel kind of schizophrenic: you have to be doing your comics and be all artistic on one hand, and then a hard-assed business person on the other, because they all want to fuck you. They don’t want to pay you, and you deal with printers who mess up your cover or whatever and they don’t want to admit it, you just have to be a hardass with everybody. Well, I’m sure you know that.

GROTH: Of course.

KELSO: And then you have to exert all this energy trying to promote yourself, which I never had any energy to do. I mean, I had all these great ideas, and I never did any of them, because I just didn’t have any energy left for it.

GROTH: Were you a good hardass?

KELSO: Yeah! I have a job where I have to be a hardass, but I actually think I learned to be a hardass from self-publishing.

GROTH: What is this job where you have to be a hardass?

KELSO: Well, it’s only recently, really, that I’ve had to be a hardass. They have an art collection that they exhibit at SeaTac airport, and for years I’ve been the maintenance person, cleaning the art, installing exhibits, stuff like that. Recently I’ve been scheduling, coordinating who’s going to be exhibiting, moving art around, so I’m not just the janitor any more. I’ve been there for about six years.

GROTH: Really?

KELSO: Yeah. It’s a part-time job, it pays really well, really flexible hours, they know that I’m a cartoonist and that they’re not my priority [laughs], so they’re very supportive,

GROTH: You told me you’d go over to Jason’s house and work together. How would you work together?

KELSO: Well, he was working on Jar of Fools and I was working on “Bottlecap” or “Frozen Angel.” I’m sure I asked him questions about certain things I was having trouble drawing or figuring out… I remember asking him simple things, like “How much space do you put between your panels?” and what kind of equipment he used, oh, and I totally learned… when you draw something on tracing paper, then flip it over and redraw it, then transfer it over on to Bristol board. I learned that from Jason. So, I would say my whole process of how I did my comics I picked up from watching how Jason did it.

GROTH: Do you still use that technique of drawing on tracing paper and transferring it to Bristol board?

KELSO: Yes, but not for everything. I’m trying to loosen up.

GROTH: Now, when you guys got together —you and Ed, Tom, Jon, Dave and Jason — what kind of discussions would you have?

KELSO: We talked a lot about the comics that were coming out at the time. We were all really into minicomics and had this somewhat idealistic view that the minis, the labors of love, were where it was really happening. All of us shared a real passion for the storytelling part of comics and that the art had to serve the story. I think all of us, with the exception of Jason, struggled with the drawing more than the writing. I feel a little weird speaking for all of them, but it did seem like we shared that.

GROTH: When you say that you struggled more with the drawing than the writing, does that mean that the writing came naturally, or that you preferred it to the drawing.

KELSO: Well, nothing comes naturally. I know for myself, the writing always seems easier. I think that I spend more time worrying about and working on the art; I’m actually much more disciplined trying to improve myself with the art than I am with the writing. I sort of take the writing for granted. I felt like I shared with all those people a constant struggle to figure out how to tell the story in comics, you know, the old 11th-grade English class mantra: “Show, don’t tell.” Don’t over-narrate or over-explain.

We talked about comics a lot. Naturally, a lot of it was pretty negative, what was badly done in other people’s comics, what to avoid. I listened to the guys analyze and argue about why some comics worked and others didn’t. Then they’d start talking about old guys like Kirby and that guy who did Spider-man and then went crazy — Ditko? — and I’d kind of zone out since I hadn’t read their comics. I did a lot of learning by osmosis.

GROTH: One thing that’s funny, considering that you knew so little about comics, is your use of the traditional comics elements in the first couple Girlheros. How did you get the superhero connection? It seems completely incongruous with your recent work.

“Bottlcap” from Girlhero #1 ©1991 Megan Kelso

KELSO: I had this epic — this science-fiction, post-apocalyptic, feminist epic — to tell. I’d like to say that I thought, “Well, it had to have superhero elements to it,” since it’s a comic, but really that’s a lie, because I knew that there were plenty of comics without superheroes. At the time, I’d still on some level found the idea really compelling, the superhero idea — what would superhero girls be like, how would they be different? I guess I thought that this was a really original idea I was pursuing. So, I would say it’s just extreme ignorance about how people had already been deconstructing superheroes and that it had been pretty much taken it as far as it could go. Just my extreme ignorance in thinking I had something new to offer in that area.

GROTH: Where do paper dolls come from? I believe you thanked Trina [Robbins] for helping you with them.

KELSO: I totally got the idea from Trina. I saw her speak at San Diego [Comic-Con], and she was talking about how a lot of women cartoonists had first been fashion illustrators, so they did these paper dolls. I’d attempted paper dolls at various times throughout my life. I’d been into paper dolls on my own, but hadn’t thought of them in years. They struck a chord. I got legions of these paper doll fans, old ladies from somewhere in Pennsylvania trying to order my comic and order my paper dolls. But then they lost interest in me because I didn’t continue to do paper dolls.

GROTH: You’ve actually had more co-writers than most cartoonists of your age and tradition. Some of the first book was co-written by someone named Joe Ennis; Jon Snyder (who we later learned was your ex-boyfriend at the time) co-wrote some “Bottlecap” —

KELSO: Well… I would say that Joe and I definitely co-wrote “Non-Biodegradable Youth,” but not as a comic. Jon worked out more as an editor. I would send him a script and he would give me suggestions, I wouldn’t say that he co-wrote it. I’m not diminishing his involvement, he was a very involved editor. And then my father, he totally wrote the story [“Reunion”], but I made it into a comic. It was totally his story.

“Bottlcap” from Girlhero #1 ©1991 Megan Kelso

GROTH: Did he write it out in prose?

KELSO: Like a screenplay. I remember back from when I was a kid he had these fantasies about being a screenwriter, he had even checked a couple books out of the library on how to write screenplays. I knew if I asked him to write a screenplay, concentrate on the dialogue, he’d know what to do.

GROTH: So he wrote this specifically for you?

KELSO: I asked him to.

GROTH: Really? You knew about the story and asked him, or did you just ask him to write a story?

KELSO: You know, for years I’ve been after him to write me a story. I think he’s a good storyteller. But honestly, I just thought he’d write some mellow story about growing up in Ellensburg in the ’50s, I didn’t think it was going to be a monumental sexual coming-of-age story about this event in his young life. When he came to me with it I was really taken aback… I didn’t know if I could do this, it just seemed so heavy-duty.

GROTH: [Laughing.] It’s your Maus.

KELSO: I, uh — yeah, I was a little overwhelmed. I remember going to him, and saying, “Look, I really need you to just give me the story to do whatever I want with. I told him I had to make it much shorter, and switch things… there were things in there that wouldn’t work in a comic. He looked at me and said, “It’s yours. Do whatever you want,” So maybe he was easier to work with than Spiegelman’s dad.

GROTH: Since we’re talking about your dad’s story, I wanted to ask how precise his directions were as far as how you broke it down into panels.

KELSO: He wrote it as a screenplay. He just wrote dialogue, didn’t describe anything. For some of it I went back to him and asked, “Could you tell me what this looked like?” But for a lot of it I just made it up — for the Ellensburg stuff, I’d been there, so I just sort of made it up on my own. He didn’t describe panels or images or anything.

GROTH: Did you find that in a way helpful, though? Did it give you freedom to break it down?

KELSO: Actually, based on that experience, when I did Lost Valley, the environmental comic, I told the writer, “I don’t want you to tell me,” because he reads comics, and he had this idea that he was going to write “Panel one: blah blah blah.” And I said, “I am not going to work on this if l have to go by your panel descriptions. I just want you to write it, and I’ll figure out how to turn it into a comic.” Yeah, so I think my dad and I think that was a good decision. But really, that’s the only way I’d work with someone else’s material. It’s funny, because I’ve found that it’s fully as much work using someone else’s script as using your own. Even though I do tend to write out my own stories first, I’m picturing the whole thing, and I will write in notes about really vivid images that I have. So you get a story that somebody else has written, and you don’t have any of that work done. And it made me realize how much work I’m doing visually, even though what I think I’m doing is writing.

And so when I got my dad’s story I had nothing, I felt like I was just starting completely at square one. But on the other hand, I can’t imagine having to draw a comic where the writer was telling me about panels. It makes me really mad to even say it.

GROTH: That’s interesting, because one of my few theories about comics is that the writing really is part of the drawing, and the drawing is part of the writing.

KELSO: Absolutely.

GROTH: The two should really be indistinguishable.

KELSO: Yeah. And, that’s weird, too, when people tell you “You’re such a good writer,” after reading your comic. What did they mean? Are they just talking about the panels where there’s word balloons? Because the silent panels are just as written as the others.

GROTH: I think probably it’s just a shorthand for how the story is told. They’re probably combining every element without really being aware of it.

KELSO: Yeah, I really do agree with you. I write it out first mainly because I learned to write before I learned to draw, and that’s more comfortable.

GROTH: It seems like a flaw when you can tell that comic is “written” as you’re reading it, as you’re passing over the images. I think that’s why the best comics are always written and drawn by one person.

KELSO: Although I’ve got to say that the two experiences I’ve had drawing someone else’s written story, I feel like I’ve learned more about comics, and how to make comics, than doing my own. It’s easier to see how the whole process works. I would totally do it again under the right circumstances, but I guess I kind of agree with you, in terms of the final product, probably the finest work is going to be the one person doing the whole thing. But I definitely think there’s a place for having it split up.

GROTH: Now, the two examples of your drawing from someone else’s scripts: your father’s —

KELSO: And this environmental comic, Lost Valley.

GROTH: I want to talk about that later. Whew! That took me all night to read.

KELSO: [Giggles.] You’re probably the only person I know who’s read it all.

GROTH: That was definitely written. [Kelso giggles.] I didn’t envy you drawing that, actually.

KELSO: I learned a lot.

GROTH: Yeah, I bet. I bet. Just the sheer mechanics of it?

KELSO: God, we can talk about it later, but…

GROTH: Yeah. When I read Queen of the Black Black,  that was my first real experience with your work. I might have seen Girlhero, I think the serial “Bottlecap” overwhelmed me, and I put it down. When I went back and read all of the Girlhero, in succession, I discovered a clear progression in your work, in its proficiency and sophistication, and I was wondering if you could talk a little about that, specifically the six issues as a learning experience.

KELSO: [Pause.] Um… Could you prompt me?

GROTH: Sure. I’ll ask you a specific question: Correct me if I’m wrong, but there were several strips in the book collection that weren’t in Girlhero.

KELSO: “Queen,” and “The Daddy Mask.” Oh… some from other anthologies.

GROTH: I thought ‘The Daddy Mask” and “Composition’ were interesting, because they both tried to depict music on the printed page.

KELSO: Mmm-hmm.

GROTH: And I thought “The Daddy Mask” was a much better, more refined piece of work. Maybe I’m digging myself into a hole here, but was that done after “Composition?”

KELSO: Mm-hmm.

GROTH: That’s good. It seemed like you learned something from doing “Composition.”

KELSO: Glad to hear it.

“Composition” from Action Girl #3 ©1995 Megan Kelso

GROTH: I’m relieved to hear that because if you did “Composition” afterward, that would be a real setback for you —you’d have unlearned something. But it seemed like that was a very specific instance of you having somehow learned or discovered a much more sophisticated way of depicting music, which you would not have found if you hadn’t done the first strip. It was better on every level: the drawing, the story itself. “Composition” was —I don’t know what year you did that, but it was more adolescent —

KELSO: Late ’94, early ’95.

GROTH: —And ‘Daddy Mask” was, I think, much more subtle.

KELSO: A lot transpired between those two stories.

GROTH: Good. Tell me what transpired between those two stories?

KELSO: Well, I did “Composition” probably around the time of Girlhero #4, and the story “Whistle and Queenie” for Dark Horse Presents. And I do remember a turning point while working on that story. I finally had enough mental space to sit back and think, “How do I want to construct this story?” Before that, it was such a struggle to get the story out in any form at all — it never felt like I had any choice about how to tell it. But then I was able to make decisions about things like how time would unfold, how the pacing would work, transitions. I exerted more control over the story; before it felt like the story was in charge, not me. Since “Whistle and Queenie” it’s been a progression of learning that I can calculate, plan and strategize every aspect of the comic.

As for depicting music, my idea of what I wanted didn’t really change from “Composition” to “Daddy Mask,” I just got more skills. I got the idea of showing the music as a physical manifestation from Saul Steinberg — an old New Yorker drawing.

GROTH: It’s almost as if you had to get the rudiments behind you before you could concentrate on the refinements.

KELSO: Yeah! And I used to feel trapped by my stories.

GROTH: How do you mean?

KELSO: It’s hard to describe. You’d have to get the person from point A to point B, so then you’d be stuck drawing this boring sequence, of them walking down the street or down a hall. It’s dull, hard to draw, you didn’t really want to do it, but how else was the story going to work? I know now that if I think about it long enough, I can figure out a way to make something happen that’ll be fun to draw, that I want to draw. Does that make any sense?

GROTH: Yeah, yeah.

KELSO: So, that is definitely something I was learning between those two stories. I also made my peace with word balloons and panels. I started using lots of panels, felt fine about word balloons… I still do like to take the words out of panels and stick them in the frame if it makes sense, and if there’s room for it and it’s not going to be too confusing. I still like that — one of my favorite things about comics is that where writing stops and drawing starts is blurry, and by putting the words out there in the drawing is sort of underlining that fact, and maybe in this political way, forcing the reader to not be able to separate them, and as a reader they shouldn’t separate them. I think a lot of my early comics stem from this political urge to force a sort of confrontational art approach. I realize now that it’s not always appropriate, but I still sometimes want to control how the person is going to experience the comic, throw things at them like no word balloons, or whatever.

GROTH: Were you conscious in “The Daddy Mask” of trying to create a musical rhythm to the drawing, in the sequences?

KELSO: No, not really, or not specifically that story. I am very conscious of the rhythm in all the comics I do. It’s as if I hear in my head where I want pauses, silences, how long they should last… then I have to figure out how to draw it, to get that rhythm. Depicting the actual music was a separate issue. What I really wanted were these Robert Motherwellish calligraphic slashes that would represent difficult, arty “grown-up” music that kids hate, but it was hard to do it as boldly as I wanted without overwhelming the drawing, so I don’t feel that I was completely successful. But the whole story was supposed to convey the kind of incomprehensibility of the adult world, and I don’t know if readers took the music swirls as underscoring that…

GROTH: Yes, right. But there’s a lot going on in that story. That story might be the most successful in highlighting the qualities I like most about your work, this ethereal quality where you dance around certain intangible aspects like relationships or moods and so on, and by the time you finish the story you’ve seen them or felt them, but as a very subtle kind of evocation.

Why don’t I ask you about your use of metaphor — you seem to use metaphor more convincingly than any artist of your generation. A lot of cartoonists are very literal, and I think you use metaphor more than most. “Pennyroyal Tea,” for example, and “Queen of the Black Black” moves in and out of metaphor. It was realistic when the Queen refers back to her days as a student, but is more of a fantasia in the contemporary scenes… I’m not quite sure how that works, but it does work. Can you tell me why that works, and why you chose to do that?

KELSO: I think that I’ve wanted to work that way from the very beginning. I know “Bottlecap” ultimately failed, but it started that way. I wanted to have the right to make things very fantastical when I wanted to, and very real when I wanted to, and not feel like it had to be one or the other. Most of my favorite books are that way: it’s a way of writing and storytelling that’s always really appealed to me. I like fairy tales, I like sci-fi a lot, but there seems to be this current in sci-fi (and a lot of comics, too) where you’re really worried about the rules of the world that the story is taking place in, and it all has to be continuous, and… to hell with that. Not interested. I’ve always felt like it’s my right as a storyteller to do whatever I want, really. And sometimes I’ve confused the reader, but I’d rather confuse than over-explain. To tell the stories I want to tell, I need to occasionally do things that don’t exist in the real world, that don’t work in the real world — pretend there’s nothing weird about it. If you tell the story clearly, usually the reader will know. I am one of those people who knows what they want to say; I know what I want a story to communicate. But I do a lot of planning. I don’t naturally take the intuitive approach.

GROTH: So you pretty much know what you want to express, but it’s a matter of getting there.

KELSO: Recently I’ve been trying to be a little more loose. When I did that minicomic last summer, I didn’t know what the hell that was, I really didn’t have a plan.

GROTH: Well, since you know what you want to do before you do a story, tell me: the minicomic you refer to is Split Rock, Montana, and there are two versions of this. I don’t see why there are two versions; frankly I prefer the minicomic version to the one-page strip. Can you tell me what you were trying to convey in this story? It’s ambiguous.

KELSO: I wanted to do one of those comics that everyone seems to do eventually where the words and the pictures really have no relation to each other, but by putting them together they become related. And that’s where I started. I had this, um… well, it wasn’t really a dream, it was more of a fantasy, and it was the image of all these boys standing in a circle in a field, and me in the middle of the circle, so I just drew the images. I didn’t think too much about what it all meant. I just decided to do this exercise — and this was definitely an exercise. Then I decided to just write based on a general feeling I had about these images, but not trying to explain them, per se. In the process of putting them together, I came up with a narrative in spite of myself, though I tried to keep it oblique. I think it’s about desire: being desired, and that sort of creepy place where you have sexual fantasies about things you would never want to happen in real life, but you make happen anyway.

GROTH: Hence the fellatio.

KELSO: I… I like to draw blowjobs.

GROTH: You do? I haven’t noticed that.

KELSO: You know, I have drawn lots of other blowjobs.

GROTH: Really, where? I thought I looked at your entire oeuvre. I notice blowjobs.

KELSO: I just said that as a joke because my friend Jef Czekaj read Lost Valley and—

GROTH: Definitely not a blowjob in that comic.

KELSO: —and he said to someone else, “So where’s the blowjob? It’s a Megan comic, where’s the blowjob?” Here’s another…

GROTH: Right, there’s that one. That’s two…

KELSO: Oh, but there’s — [produces comic] a total of four, I think.

GROTH: Oh yes. I think I should make this a facet of all my interviews. Demand to know how many blowjobs the artist has drawn. I just interviewed John Severin, and I don’t think he’d ever drawn one. The blowjob in Split Rock, Montana was a little startling, just because of the context. It was unexpected.

KELSO: Yeah? You didn’t think it was going to be a sex game?

GROTH: I didn’t think it was going to be as explicit or literal.

KELSO: But you were expecting some sort of sexual something.

“Split Rock, Montana” reprinted in Squirrel Mother © 2006 Megan Kelso

GROTH: Yeah, I could see sexual metaphors rolling through the strip.

KELSO: Well, when I worked with my friend Virginia (who’s sort of my editor now), we talked about that, should I actually show the blowjob? See, the more literal story here is this somewhat unattractive girl in this exploitative situation, yet she’s willingly doing it. And in that story, the ugly girl would in fact give the guy the blowjob, so I didn’t want to leave that ambiguous.

GROTH: Yeah, I didn’t think it was a mistake, but—

KELSO: It was startling?

GROTH: It was precisely because it was startling that I thought it worked. Let’s see, where can I go from blowjobs? I wanted to ask you specific questions about some strips.

KELSO: OK.

From Outside Over There ©1981 Maurice Sendak

GARY GROTH: I thought Outside Over There was, if not your best book, among your greatest works.

SENDAK: Oh yes. That’s the one I feel closest … No, the one I feel closest to is Higglety Pigglety Pop!, that’s the one I feel closest to. I wish I could do another book like that. It just doesn’t seem to be. Outside Over There, in England, when it was published, it was called Inside Under Where.

GROTH: [Laughter.] No.

SENDAK: Yes. I mean they didn’t change the title. They thought it was a terrible book.

Now, I know that is a book that will become important someday, it’s just out of time. That’s the way it is.

GROTH: The book was full of some of the most painful, as well as some of the loveliest, drawing you ever did, I thought.

SENDAK: But that little girl, she was the little girl in the … I love advertisements. I did, I don’t any more. When I was a kid, the salt thing was a little girl in a yellow slicker and the rain coming down and it was the salt coming, they were advertising salt.

GROTH: Right, right, right.

SENDAK: And that’s where it was. It’s what you see as a child, it’s what you notice. It’s like when I was … the man who wrote a book that said Hauptmann was not the killer of the Lindbergh baby … and that’s bad. He made the terrible mistake of talking about his book at the Richfield Library. Richfield, this is the most right-wing, goyish a county that could ever be. And I went to the lecture, about eight people there — Who wants to hear about the Lindbergh kidnapping? — I kept raising my hand saying, “No, no you got that wrong, you got that wrong,” and afterward … he came over to me and said, “Can we have coffee? You seem to know an awful lot about his case.”

And I said, “I know when you made a mistake. You really haven’t done your homework carefully enough.”

So we went out for coffee and he said, “What is it about his case that … Why are you so involved in it, even now?”

 And I said, “Because when I was child, and I was shopping with my mother and she was holding my hand because I was a very little boy, and I passed the newsstand, and I saw a picture of the baby dead in the woods with an arrow pointing down to show it had to be him, and I took my mother to see it. And apparently nobody but me saw it.” So I was convinced that I was crazy and that I saw a dead baby in the newspaper. And I said, “It’s only in the past few years that I realized Colonel Lindbergh was enraged that that picture was used and it was taken off the afternoon edition; I saw the morning edition.”

I spent my whole life believing I saw that picture. But that to me is why children are so important: they see these things.

And then you have a mother who says, “You didn’t see that, that’s disgusting! Why do you think of such things?”

And I told my father and he says the same thing, “I don’t want you to talk about that!”

But see, children see those things. And when you take away the truth from them, you take away everything from them. And one of the passions I have about children is, we don’t know what they see, we don’t know what they really hear. And occasionally they are polite enough to let us in.

Was it you I told the story of the 9/11 event? Little girl, and I don’t know her, but I know her father and I know her mother. And the school was quite close to where the buildings were, and when they heard, they went crazy with alarm, and they ran all the way to the school and all the children had been put into the center playground and she was there, and they saw each other and she ran to her father and she said, “Oh, it’s wonderful, Daddy, we had a wonderful time. The smoke was all over and butterflies were flying all over the place. We saw butterflies!”

He took her home and they played TV, they played games, they played her favorite everything. They made her happy, gave her ice cream, everything they could to obliterate the day. And just before she went to bed she tugged on her father’s shirt and she said, “Daddy, I didn’t really see butterflies. They were people.”

When I heard that story for the first time I cried because I was a good friend of the father, and I said, “Do you realize she was protecting you?”

And he said, “Yes, we know what she was trying to do. She was taking care of us while we were taking care of her.”

She didn’t want you to suffer. A little girl. She had this thought process to make believe these burning people were butterflies.

I thought to myself, what don’t they tell us? What brave little creatures they are.  Just as I held that kidnapping in my head all my life, until I met this man in Richfield who, when I told him that story, he pulled out a paper and said, “You saw that, didn’t you?”

I said, “Yes, that’s the picture I saw.” I asked him how he got it and he said, “Well, I wrote a book, I had to do research, I had to do a lot of homework, so I got that picture and that’s what you saw.” I said, yes, that’s the baby. He asked me to draw it first on a napkin. “What was the composition like?”

I drew the tree and I drew the baby under the tree and whatever else that I recollected. It was all there. I could only have glimpsed the paper because my mother would have yanked me away.

GROTH: Isn’t that amazing how it can etch itself into your brain? Just a momentary …

SENDAK: Burrow in and stay put until it is understood. And when it’s understood it dissipates. It’s a horrible thing to have to suffer. To think I was the only one who imagined that picture. When the whole time I was afraid of being kidnapped.

GROTH: I know that affected you deeply. How old were you when the Lindbergh kidnapping … ?

SENDAK: Well, we were about the same age. He was a little younger than I was. I was about 2 ½ and he was about 1 ½. Babies.

GROTH: I don’t think I was aware of anything at 2 ½.

SENDAK: Yes you were; you just don’t remember. Of course you were. I think we are aware in a very particular way. We have to be. Even just chemically we have to be taken care of by our chemicals and … blah, blah, blah.

GROTH: Robert Crumb once told me, some years ago, that he was making at that time a concerted effort to remember as far back as he could. And I guess every night he would engage in a very concentrated exercise where he would try to remember farther back. He said he succeeded in remembering back to one or some very, very early age just by dint of that mental process of burrowing back.

SENDAK: It can be done.

I was in therapy for a long time and there was one particular question I had and my therapist and I talked about it, talked about it, talked about it and then he had a brilliant — at the time I thought insane — idea of going to a hypnotist. So, he and I went to a hypnotist and the hypnotist had me back in two minutes, and two minutes to that occasion, to that moment that I was arguing with my therapist about, and I broke into fluent Yiddish and went through the pantomime of what that was all about, in Yiddish. Every word was correct. I spoke Yiddish as a child. I didn’t speak English until I went to school.

GROTH: So that memory is just sitting there.

SENDAK: Yeah. Steaming away and we need it; we need it. It protects us; it’s not an evil thing. A child is a helpless little bundle of everything. Sometimes the thought of children’s vulnerability is terrifying to me.

This photo was taken by and is courtesy of Alan Gleason.

Keiji Nakazawa was born in Hiroshima in 1939 and was 6 when the atomic bomb was dropped on his hometown. Only a mile from ground zero, he miraculously survived with minimal injuries, but he lost his father, brother and sister in the ensuing holocaust. Growing up amid the devastation and poverty of postwar Hiroshima, he found solace in the manga of Osamu Tezuka. Inspired by his late father, who had been an artist, he showed his own flair for drawing at an early age. After leaving school to work as a sign painter, he began submitting cartoons to various manga magazines, eventually moving to Tokyo to pursue a full-time career as a cartoonist. In Tokyo, he drew sports and adventure manga for several years until an enlightened editor urged him to write about his own experience as an A-bomb survivor. The result was a 50-page autobiography in comics form, Ore wa Mita (I Saw It), which described the bombing and its aftermath in graphic and heartrending detail. The work inspired Nakazawa’s editor to give him free rein to create the epic graphic novel that would become his life’s work, Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen).

With a young protagonist, Gen Nakaoka, modeled after the author, Gen is an only slightly fictionalized account of Nakazawa’s life in wartime Hiroshima before, during and after the bombing. It was serialized in 1972 and 1973 in the best-selling boys’ comic weekly Shonen Jump, then anthologized in four volumes, becoming a hit with young readers, parents and teachers alike. Gen eventually filled 10 volumes, chronicling the postwar world in which Nakazawa grew up until the death of his mother from leukemia in 1966.

In 1976, a group of young Japanese peace activists walked across the United States as part of that year’s Transcontinental Walk for Peace and Social Justice. They were frequently asked about the Hiroshima bombing, and one of them happened to have a copy of Hadashi no Gen in his backpack. The Americans on the walk were astonished that someone had written a comic about nuclear holocaust, and urged their Japanese friends to translate it into English. Upon returning to Japan, several of the activists formed Project Gen, a non-profit, volunteer group, to do just that.

I encountered Project Gen quite by accident in 1977. I had just arrived in Tokyo to study Japanese music when I met some hippies living in a communal household near my apartment. They urged me to drop by and help out on some sort of translation project they were engaged in. I showed up one day to find a room full of young Japanese and Americans feverishly inking English lettering into blanked-out text balloons on photo-enlarged pages of Gen’s first volume. I only had to read a little of the story to be convinced that this was a project worth volunteering for, and I have been involved in the translation and publication of the Gen series ever since.

I have also gotten to know Keiji Nakazawa well over the years. (I even taught English to his daughter when she was in high school.) He is a feisty, stubborn and warm-hearted man who seems remarkably untraumatized by the unspeakable experiences of his childhood. Most striking is the passion with which he speaks of the need for people everywhere to recognize the horror and injustice of war. Yet you can also sense his rage, calmly articulated but undiluted by the passage of time, against those who perpetrate such horrors on innocent civilians.

Now retired from cartooning, Nakazawa lives with his wife in the suburbs of Tokyo, but he still spends much of the year in his hometown. His most recent project was a live-action film that he wrote and directed about young people growing up in postwar Hiroshima. He is currently working on another film scenario.

Project Gen eventually translated four volumes of Barefoot Gen into English, one or more of which have subsequently been published in French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, Norwegian, Russian, Korean, Indonesian, Tagalog and Esperanto. A translation of the entire t10-volume series is currently in progress. Gen has also been made into a three-part live-action film, a feature-length animation film, an opera and a musical that was staged in New York City to critical acclaim.  — Alan Gleason

[This interview was conducted in two sessions: one conducted in person on Jan. 11, 2003, with a follow-up conversation held via telephone on March 28. The interview was transcribed and translated by Mr. Gleason, who copy-edited it with Milo George. All images from Barefoot Gen and ©Keiji Nakazawa unless otherwise noted. Thanks to Alan Gleason for his permission to post.]

ALAN GLEASON: Among manga translated into English, Barefoot Gen stands out for several reasons. Not only is it the first book-length manga translated into English (in 1978), but it attracted the attention of readers and critics outside of comics because of its serious theme. Readers are aware that Gen is primarily autobiographical, based on your own experiences growing up in wartime and postwar Hiroshima and your direct experience with the atomic bomb. Can you tell us about your childhood before the bomb?

KEIJI NAKAZAWA: I was born in Hiroshima in 1939, less than a mile from the epicenter of the bomb. I was the fourth of five kids. In my earliest memories, we were already in the middle of the war. We didn’t have enough food; I remember we were always hungry, always scrounging for food.

GLEASON: So your earliest memory is of wartime?

NAKAZAWA: It was toward the end of the war. We were just hungry, air raids every day, hiding in the shelter. That was our everyday life.

GLEASON: Did that seem normal to you?

NAKAZAWA: As a kid, you just figure it’s normal. I don’t remember feeling afraid. I didn’t know any different life.

GLEASON: Even during the war, were you and your friends typical kids, wanting to play and have fun?

NAKAZAWA: We were just normal kids. We played games based on the war, Japan vs. The Enemy. That was pretty much all we did all day!

GLEASON: What was your father doing during the war?

NAKAZAWA: He was an artist, and a real eccentric. When he was young, he’d gone to Kyoto and studied lacquer work and Nihonga [traditional Japanese painting using natural pigments]. He was also in an underground theater troupe, with the actors Osamu Takizawa and Eitaro Ozawa. They did a lot of contemporary drama.

During the war, if you were caught with subversive works like that, you could be arrested. Well, they were engaged in an anti-war movement of sorts, and the whole troupe was arrested by the thought police. They took my father away and put him in jail for a year and a half. When I asked where he’d gone, my mother lied and said he’d been drafted into the Army. They held him in the Hiroshima Prefectural Prison. Apparently, they tortured him.

GLEASON: As a child, did you have any feelings about the police, the government, the military?

NAKAZAWA: My father was always saying the war was wrong, that Japan would lose for sure and that maybe then, and only then, the country would get better. He’s the one who shaped my views about the war.

GLEASON: Did that get you in trouble at school or with other kids? Did you notice his views differed from other people’s?

NAKAZAWA: I was just a first-grader; I couldn’t really judge, but I realized my father thought differently about the war than just about anyone else. As I wrote in Gen, word got around at school that he was against the war. But I think I felt kind of proud of that.

GLEASON: Where did your father acquire his anti-war viewpoint?

NAKAZAWA: From his friends and colleagues, I suppose. When he was in Kyoto, a lot of his friends were leftists who were opposed to the war. My mother was terribly worried when she heard him criticize the Emperor. My father would say that the imperial system was dangerous and had led to the creation of the military establishment that was pushing the war. He’d say “Down with the imperial system!”

GLEASON: And that worried your mother?

NAKAZAWA: Oh yes. My mother tried hard to keep his views from being known in the neighborhood. I didn’t really understand how radical his opinions were till after the war.

GLEASON: So you didn’t understand his point of view until you’d grown a bit older.

NAKAZAWA: Yeah, I would think, “So that’s what my father was talking about!” At the time, I didn’t really understand it.

GLEASON: So as you were growing up in postwar Hiroshima, had you already embraced your father’s views on the war?

NAKAZAWA: No, I was still just a kid. I wasn’t capable of thinking about things that deeply. But I would think, “This must all be the Emperor’s fault, like my father said. It’s the fault of the imperial system that we don’t have enough to eat and have to scrounge for food every day.” I learned that from him early on.

Now, I had an uncle, my mother’s brother, Miyake Yoshio, who was a submarine officer in the Navy. He participated in the attack on Pearl Harbor. After the war, he came to our house and said to me “Your father was right.” He told me how he had been ready to go to war and die for the Emperor. Just before he shipped out for Pearl Harbor, he came to see my father. They talked, thinking it was the last time they’d see each other. But just as the attack was to begin, his submarine hit something on the sea bottom and was disabled. They finally got clear, but by the time they surfaced, the attack was over. So he survived. After the war, he came to see us and told us what my father had said to him before he left for Pearl Harbor. “You think Japan can win this war? That’s absurd. We’ll lose for sure. Just come back alive. Don’t kill yourself for nothing. Down with the imperial system!”

When he heard that, my uncle said his heart nearly stopped. But Japan did lose, exactly as my father had predicted. That’s what my uncle meant by my father being right. That was how I was raised by my father, up until Aug. 6, 1945.

8:15 a.m., August 6, 1945

GLEASON: Tell me what happened that day.

NAKAZAWA: Even though it was August, we weren’t on summer vacation. Kids were required to attend classes all summer, the idea being it would turn us into “strong citizens.” I was on my way to the Kanzaki primary school. If I’d gone through the school gate a moment earlier, I wouldn’t be here. Just a little thing like that — I’ve often thought about it. Luck or fate is a strange thing.

As I was about to enter the gate, the mother of a classmate of mine called out to me. She asked whether they were holding our class at the school that day, or at a nearby temple as they sometimes did. They were always switching locations because some schools had been bombed in the air raids. I told her I didn’t know; she’d have to ask the teacher. I was standing right in front of the gate, and the lady was standing about a meter in front of me. Just then we saw a single plane fly overhead. “That’s a B-29!” I said. “Yes, so it is,” she answered. But there was no air-raid siren, like there usually was. The lady said that was really strange. Then, just at that moment, there was a huge flash. It seemed to rush at me. I remember the center was pure white, with blue-white around it and orange-red around that. I saw that flash for an instant, and after that I don’t remember anything.

From Barefoot Gen Vol. 1

The next thing I remember, it was pitch dark. It seemed like night. But a moment ago, there had been blue sky overhead. I felt something jabbed in my cheek, a nail — I still have the scar, see? I wondered what had happened. When I tried to get up I found I was under a pile of tiles and boards. The wall of the school had collapsed behind me. I crawled out from under it. In front of me, I saw the lady I’d just been talking to, but now she was lying out in the street. Her hair was all burned, her face and skin were black, and she was staring straight at me.

I went out into the street. It was a wide avenue with a streetcar track running down the middle. On both sides all the houses were collapsed, and the streetcar wires overhead were all twisted around like spider webs. I guess a homing instinct kicked in then. I wasn’t thinking anything except that I had to get home. I ran down the street. As I ran, the first people I met were five or six women walking along in only their underpants. They had all this glass sticking straight out of them, but on different sides — some on their left side, some in front, some on the right, some only on their backs. They’d been struck by glass from shattered windows. Then I saw people who looked like their bodies were colored blue. When you got closer, you realized they were completely covered with glass shards. Farther along I came to a place where people were lying along the roadside, like a human carpet. Their skin was burned completely black. Other people were crawling across the road to drink from a water pump on the other side. I kept going. I just couldn’t understand what had happened. What was really strange was that nobody cried out. Some were silently drinking water as fast as they could; others were sitting there picking the glass out of their bodies. I just kept running along the street till I got to my neighborhood, but it was on fire and I couldn’t get any closer to my house. That was when I first came to my senses, I think. I ran back out to the main street and started crying at the top of my lungs, “Mama! Papa!” running up and down the road looking for them.

There were throngs of people walking silently along, like a parade of ghosts. Their skin was all in strips. The heat from the A-bomb reaches around 5,000 or 6,000 degrees, you know; it melts the skin right off you in an instant. But human skin is pretty amazing stuff. It strips right off you all the way down to your fingernails, and just hangs there. So people were walking along with their hands out in front of them, the skin from their arms dragging on the ground. Just like a bunch of ghosts. When the blast from the bomb hit people in the face, their eyeballs would pop out and dangle from their sockets. So people were staggering along supporting their eyeballs in their hands. If the blast hit you in the belly, it would split you open, so some people had their intestines spilling out and were trying to stuff them back in. Another thing I noticed was that people wearing white clothing had those clothes on intact. But the rest of them was completely burned. Later I learned that the heat of the blast behaved like light hitting a mirror. It reflected off white clothes but was absorbed by dark clothes. Unfortunately, most people at this point in the war were in the habit of wearing dark clothes so they wouldn’t be visible to enemy planes at night.

So I was running through this scene, calling out for my mother and father. Miraculously, a neighbor lady recognized me. She was standing there, covered with glass, pressing her body to try to stop the bleeding. She told me my mother was by the streetcar tracks near a certain intersection. I didn’t think; I just ran. When I got to the intersection, I found my mother sitting on a futon she’d laid out by the side of the street. She was just sitting there staring blankly. I remember we just kept looking at each other; we didn’t have the energy to talk. Then I noticed she was holding something in her arms. It was a baby. The shock of the bombing had hastened the birth.

GLEASON: So she’d given birth right there, by the side of the road?

NAKAZAWA: Yes, just a little while before I got there. It was a girl. We just sat there staring at the ghost parade as it streamed by. People were fleeing the epicenter. We were a little ways outside of town. There were vegetable fields on both sides of the road around us, completely covered with bodies. People would collapse on top of the vegetables. It felt cool to their burned bodies, I guess.

At some point black rain started to fall on us. It had the consistency of heavy oil. No one knew what it was. Somebody said the Americans must be dropping oil on Hiroshima to make the fire spread. But we were very lucky. If we’d fled west, we would have been exposed to the full brunt of the black rain and would have died from the radioactivity. But we’d gone south, and only a few drops fell on us. To the west, so many people died of acute radiation sickness or later of leukemia. So we spent the rest of the day just sitting there. Then, at night, people all around us started moaning for water. We couldn’t sleep. My mother took pity on them and went to the pump to get water for them. They’d grab the bucket, drink the water down as fast as they could, and then, in a matter of seconds, they’d fall over — dead. Maybe it was a shock to their system or maybe they’d been hanging on for dear life, just craving water, so when they finally got some, they could let go and die.

When the next day dawned, just about everyone lying in the fields was dead. The stink of dead bodies was horrible. You couldn’t breathe, especially when the midsummer sun heated up. We decided to climb a nearby hill, Sarayama, where the trees would provide shade. But the hill was so covered with people, we couldn’t find any room to sit, so we gave up and went down again. Right about then I noticed that the back of my head and neck felt really itchy. It turned out I’d suffered burns from the bomb there. The school wall hadn’t completely blocked the flash and it had burned me on the head and neck. There was a first-aid station the Army had set up in a tent at the bottom of the hill, so we went there to get treatment for me. But they didn’t have any medicine at all. They told my mother to put juice from a squash plant on my wounds. She did that for a year and they healed.

There was nowhere to go, but we needed to let my older brother Yasuto know we were alive, so we went back to the main street near where our house had been and waited for him to return. My brother had been drafted to work at the Kure Shipyard outside Hiroshima — he helped build the battleship Yamato — so he wasn’t in Hiroshima when the bomb fell. Eventually he did find us, and then the four of us — with the baby — went out to a town outside of Hiroshima called Eba, where we had relatives. They weren’t happy to see us because they were already short on food.

GLEASON: You describe that situation in Barefoot Gen. Was it just like in the book?

NAKAZAWA: Yes, exactly the way I wrote about it in Gen. They let us stay in a storeroom they had, but they were really nasty to us.

GLEASON: When did you learn that the rest of your family had died in the fire?

NAKAZAWA: Not right away. After we arrived in Eba and settled down a little, my mother told me for the first time how they had died, just as I described it in Gen. They were trapped under the fallen beams of our house and burned to death there. My little brother Susumu’s head had been caught in the collapsed doorway, but he could still move his legs. My mother tried to pull him out, but she couldn’t. He was crying and crying how much it hurt, and my father was yelling for my mother to do something. But there was nothing she could do. She temporarily lost her mind. They were dying right in front of her. She decided she’d die with them, but just as the flames reached our house, a neighbor came by and dragged her away. He told her there was no point in her dying too. She could still hear the cries of my brother and father from inside the flames as she was pulled away. My sister Eiko had died instantly, thank goodness.

After a few days, I went back with Yasuto to where the house had been, and we found the bones of my father, sister and little brother right there where they had died. We put their skulls in a bucket and took them back with us. I still remember, when I held my little brother’s skull in my hands, the cold chill I felt through my whole body, even on a hot summer day. I was thinking how terrible it must have been for him, crying out for my mother, his head caught under that beam, his body burning. That was the first time I saw Hiroshima since we’d left for Eba. All that was left of the city was a vast scorched plain. The only structures still standing were concrete cisterns that had held water for firefighting purposes. These tanks were full of corpses, people who’d tried to escape the fires. You could see parents and children clinging to each other. They looked so human, even in death. As you got closer to the epicenter, the cisterns were overflowing with bodies. People had jumped into the tank, one after the other, falling on top of each other. It was very symmetrical, the way the corpses were piled up. The only things moving over the ruins were flies. There were clouds of flies everywhere. They’d swarm after you. I thought they were going to eat me alive. Downtown, below the bridge at the epicenter of the bombing, the river was filled with bloated, rotting corpses. They’d wash up and downstream with the tide. Every so often you’d hear a loud pop when the gas inside a corpse built up and its belly burst open. The whole city was filled with bodies. Everywhere I walked, there were charred, blackened corpses.

GLEASON: So you stayed in Eba for some time after the bombing?

NAKAZAWA: Yes, but we were treated so badly by people there — they clearly didn’t want us around — that we decided to leave as soon as we could. We started collecting lumber and when we had enough, we built a shack on the rubble back in town, not far from where the Atomic Dome still stands.

They reopened a school in Hiroshima within a month after the end of the war. But we had nothing to study with — no paper, no textbooks, no desks. We spent our free time climbing around in the ruins, like on the Atomic Dome. You could see all the way across what was left of Hiroshima from up there. Around that time, they had cremation fires burning nonstop. There were acres and acres of bones piled up from the cremations, everywhere you looked.

GLEASON: Did you have friends you hung out with, like Gen’s best friend Ryuta?

NAKAZAWA: Well, I was the worst behaved kid in my school. I was always getting in fights. I was the boss of my own little gang. We’d scavenge around through the ruins, picking up scrap metal to sell on the black market for pocket money. The black market was the only place you could get most necessities, and of course it was run by the Yakuza. You couldn’t avoid them. That was just the way it was then. Everyone was desperate.

Comics

GLEASON: When did you first discover comics, or start drawing?

NAKAZAWA: I think it was when I was in third grade, around 1948, when I first saw the comic book Shin-Takarajima [New Treasure Island] by Osamu Tezuka. The first I heard of it was when one of my classmates got a hold of it. I kept bugging him to let me borrow it, but he wouldn’t let me. I wanted it so badly. So I saved up my money from selling scrap metal and finally bought my own copy. I spent all my free time reading it over and over.

GLEASON: Had you heard of Tezuka before that?

NAKAZAWA: No, never.

GLEASON: Why did you want to see the comic so badly?

NAKAZAWA: We had no other means of entertainment then. Comics were new and exciting. Also, there had never been big, thick, book-size comic magazines like Shin-Takarajima before, only much shorter comics. The sheer size of it was thrilling to me.

GLEASON: So it was like the big manga weeklies we see nowadays, like Shonen Jump?

NAKAZAWA: Yeah, around 250 pages. Tezuka’s was the first manga I remember seeing, and that’s what I grew up on.

GLEASON: Were you already drawing before you first saw Tezuka’s work?

NAKAZAWA: I’d always been good at drawing, even as a little kid, thanks to my father’s example. I did well at art in school. Once I got hold of the manga, I started trying to copy Tezuka’s images. I became more and more of a manga fanatic as time went by. In fifth or sixth grade, I sent in a cartoon I’d drawn on a postcard for a contest run by a Tokyo publisher. I got an honorable mention and my name appeared in their magazine. I was overjoyed!

GLEASON: Did your classmates think you were weird for being a tough guy who also drew cartoons?

NAKAZAWA: Oh, it made me popular. Kids would line up at school and ask me to draw cartoons for them — I was that good! I think it was in my blood, something I inherited from my father. I loved pictures. I could draw for hours on end, completely in my own world. And if you keep doing something you love, you’re bound to get better at it.

When I entered middle school, I became even more obsessed with manga. By then I’d set my heart on being a professional cartoonist when I grew up. I wanted to go on to high school, but my family couldn’t afford to pay my tuition. So when I graduated from middle school, I was only 15 but I had to find a job. I wanted to do something that would help with my cartooning, so I decided to be a sign painter. Painting signs gives you practice sketching, lettering and coloring — all skills that you need for manga. So I painted signs all day, and when I got home, I’d draw manga. I did that until I was 22. I kept sending my manga work to publishers in Tokyo, won a number of prizes and gradually acquired more and more confidence in my work.

GLEASON: What sort of work were you doing?

NAKAZAWA: Period pieces — historical adventures, samurai dramas. Usually in 16-page installments.

GLEASON: How did your mother react to your desire to become a professional cartoonist?

NAKAZAWA: She was really against it. She knew what it was like to be married to an artist, how poor you’re going to be! She didn’t want me following in his footsteps. I’d get mad at her and tell her I was going to draw no matter what she said. I drew every day — I was a manga maniac!

GLEASON: So Tezuka was your biggest influence. Who are some other manga artists you liked?

NAKAZAWA: Eiichi Fukui, Noboru Baba, Jiro Ota — I really liked them. They all appeared in the manga magazines of the time. All of them — and Tezuka is the prime example — had something to say. They had a point of view and, you might say, a sense of justice. You could tell there was a philosophical outlook underlying their work. This had a big influence on me.

GLEASON: In the ’60s, some new genres of manga appeared — the hardboiled dramatic narratives known as gekiga, and the more avant-garde work by the angura or “underground” artists. What did you think of them?

NAKAZAWA: I just thought they were fads. I wasn’t sure they could even be called manga. The angura writers in particular just seemed self-indulgent. They made no effort to convey their point of view — if they had one — to the reader. Their attitude seemed to be, “If you don’t get it, that’s your problem.”

GLEASON: Yoshiharu Tsuge is often mentioned as one of the prime avant-garde manga artists. What do you think of his work?

NAKAZAWA: Some of it I understand, but a lot of it I don’t! I know a lot of people describe his work as art. Personally, I don’t see anything particularly artistic about it.

GLEASON: Do you have any favorite cartoons or cartoonists from the U.S. or other countries?

NAKAZAWA: When I was young, I really liked the Walt Disney comics, and Blondie. And I read a lot of 10-cent comics — Westerns and adventure stories — which I think were the inspiration for the Japanese gekiga genre. I thought American comics were second to none when it came to the quality of the drawing, but I wasn’t so impressed by the storylines. I don’t like the American approach you see in comics like Superman, where different people write the stories and draw the pictures. To me, that’s not real cartooning. A true cartoonist does both the story and the pictures himself. That’s what makes it a complete, integrated work. I don’t think the division of labor approach used in America lends itself to the best cartooning.

Some Japanese cartoonists have started imitating the U.S. approach, Takao Saito [creator of the long-running gekiga series Golgo 13], for example. He writes the scenario and farms out the drawing, and I don’t think the result is all that good.

GLEASON: In recent years, there have been more comics with a point of view, as you mentioned; comics that address social issues, as Barefoot Gen did. One famous example is Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Tezuka’s Adolf series also attracted some attention in the U.S. when it was translated. What do you think of works like these?

NAKAZAWA: I view them as orthodox works in the best sense of the word, because they express a point of view about the world. As I said before, I think the best cartoonists all do that. That’s why I admire Tezuka so much. Nowadays, though, writers use whatever it takes — sex, violence — to sell as many copies as they can. I have no interest in reading the stuff being churned out today.

Full-time Manga

NAKAZAWA: When I was 22, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I decided I had to draw manga full-time, so I moved to Tokyo. It was 1961. I found a tiny three-mat room in the Yanaka district, and started carrying my manuscripts around to different publishers.

GLEASON: Did you have letters of introduction or anything?

NAKAZAWA: Nothing. I’d just walk in and ask them to look at my stuff. Mostly they’d just say, “Looks interesting, come by again when you have some more.” Finally, I made my debut in the monthly manga magazine Shonen Gaho [Boys’ Pictorial]. It happened pretty fast, actually — I’d only been in Tokyo a year when I got the job. The title was Spark One. It combined auto racing and spy intrigue.

GLEASON: What was the connection between auto racing and espionage?

NAKAZAWA: One racing team was trying to steal the secrets of another team’s car design. That ran in Shonen Gaho for a year. I got another job doing a short sci-fi series called Uchu Jirafu [Space Giraffe] for the manga weekly Shonen King.

When those series ended, I started working as an assistant for Naoki Tsuji, who was a very popular cartoonist. During that time I also was doing short pieces for magazines like Kodansha’s Bokura [We], Shonen Sunday and Shonen magazine. I did all kinds of genres — sci-fi, baseball, samurais — I liked drawing them all, so I’d try my hand at anything.

GLEASON: Were you being commissioned by the magazines to draw specific types of stories?

NAKAZAWA: No, I’d draw what I wanted and peddle it around.

Then, in 1966, my mother died. I got a telegram and rushed back to Hiroshima, but it was too late; she was already lying in a coffin. I was so grateful to her. If it hadn’t been for my mother, who knows what would have happened to me. I would’ve been a war orphan — I’d either be dead or in jail, most likely. I went to the crematorium to collect her ashes. Actually, when you’re cremated, there are always some bones left — the skull, backbone, arm and leg bones. But there were no bones left in my mother’s ashes. Nothing. It was an incredible shock to me. I think the radiation must have invaded her bones and weakened them to the point that they just disintegrated at the end. I was appalled.

Since coming to Tokyo, I hadn’t said a word about being an A-bomb survivor to anyone. People in Tokyo looked at you very strangely if you talked about it, so I learned to keep quiet. There was still an irrational fear among many Japanese that you could “catch” radiation sickness from A-bomb victims. There were plenty of people like that, even in a big city like Tokyo.

From “I Saw It”

I was enraged that the bomb had taken even my mother’s bones. All the way on the train back to Tokyo, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I realized I’d never thought seriously about the bomb, the war and why it happened. The more I thought about it, the more obvious it was that the Japanese had not confronted these issues at all. They hadn’t accepted their own responsibility for the war. I decided from then on, I’d write about the bomb and the war, and pin the blame where it belonged. Within a week after getting back to Tokyo, I wrote my first work about the bomb, Kuroi Ame ni Utarete [Struck by Black Rain]. It’s about young people in postwar Hiroshima getting involved in the black market for weapons. The main character is an A-bomb survivor whose hatred drives him to kill an American black marketeer. He asks the Americans, “Who are you to talk about justice when you massacred hundreds of thousands of innocent people in Hiroshima, in Nagasaki, in the firebombing of Tokyo? Was that what you call justice?”

The editors who read Struck by Black Rain were very moved by it and told me to write more. I wound up writing five books in my “Black” series — Black River, Black Silence and so on. Black Rain was published in serial form in Manga Punch, an “adult” manga magazine by a small publisher, Hobunsha. The big publishers turned it down. They said it was too radical for them, too political.

GLEASON: What was it they objected to, specifically?

NAKAZAWA: They said they were afraid they’d get harassed by the CIA or sued by the U.S. government for writing about the A-bomb. When I mentioned this to my editor at Hobunsha, he laughed and said, “Hey, they can arrest me! That would be great publicity!”

But “adult” — meaning erotic — magazines like Manga Punch had a very small share of the market. I wanted to write on these themes for a bigger publisher. I was lucky to find a very good editor at one such publisher, Shueisha. His name was Tadasu Nagano. He really championed my work. He urged me to write more about the A-bomb, so I began my “Peace” series, starting with Aru Hi Totsuzen ni [One Day, Suddenly].

GLEASON: So by the late ’60s, you were writing manga primarily on themes like the war and the A-bomb. Did you write about your own Hiroshima experience in those works?

NAKAZAWA: Oh yes, I based a lot of what I wrote on my own experiences. But it didn’t really occur to me to write about what happened to me personally until the magazine Monthly Shonen Jump started running a series of “cartoonist autobiographies.” They asked me to write one about myself. At first, I didn’t want to, but they kept after me. The result was Ore wa Mita [I Saw It]. When Nagano read it, he told me, “You should do a longer series based on this. You can make it as many pages as you want and we can run it for as long as you want.” I could hardly believe it. That was the first time an editor had ever said anything like that to me. I was incredibly grateful, and felt I should do the best job I could. That was how Hadashi no Gen [Barefoot Gen] came about.

From “I Saw It”

If it hadn’t been for Nagano, Gen never would have happened. But after a year and a half, he was kicked upstairs and made director of his division, and another editor took his place at Jump. The new editor had different tastes, and decided to cancel Gen. After that, the monthly magazine Shimin [Citizen] picked it up for a year. They went out of business, so next Gen moved to another monthly, Bunka Hyoron [Cultural Criticism], where it appeared for three and a half years. Then that magazine ran out of money, so Gen moved to Kyoiku Hyoron [Educational Criticism] for another three and a half years.

GLEASON: What pace was Gen being serialized at in these publications?

NAKAZAWA: Sixteen pages, every month. That took Gen up to its present ending, 10 volumes’ worth.

GLEASON: Someone once told me he thought that Jump had cancelled Gen due to right-wing pressure. Is there any truth to that?

NAKAZAWA: No, none whatsoever; it was just the whim of the new editor. We expected right-wing pressure, but we never experienced any. When Gen first appeared, I warned my wife to be prepared to get hate mail or threatening phone calls. Not a thing. Gen only got praise. Even the right-wingers cried when they read it!

GLEASON: You’ve also mentioned before that the Japanese left wanted to use Gen for their own political agenda, and that at one point the Japan Communist Party pestered you to join them.

NAKAZAWA: Oh yeah, sure, but I just said no. They left me alone after that. Actually, you could say the Communists turned me down too; Bunka Hyoron was affiliated with the Communist Party, but they cancelled Gen when they ran out of money.

GLEASON: So for several years, you were kept busy with Gen. But you were writing other works, too, during that time, right?

NAKAZAWA: Oh yes, quite a few. I wrote for Monthly Champion and Manga Action. Mostly social commentary, but lighter stuff too. I did a manga called Yakyu Baka [Baseball Fool], about a kid who really was a complete fool for baseball. You get tired of doing serious stuff all the time! But I was also doing work in the same vein as Gen and Okinawa. I did a serial called Geki no Kawa [Geki’s River] about a boy growing up in Manchuria when it was a Japanese colony.

GLEASON: At some point, you also started giving talks in public. When was that?

NAKAZAWA: I guess after Gen first appeared as a four-volume set, so that would be in the mid-’70s.

GLEASON: You were speaking about your experiences as an A-bomb survivor?

NAKAZAWA: Yes, and about peace issues. To citizens’ groups, schools, teachers’ groups around Japan.

GLEASON: Are you still doing that?

NAKAZAWA: Not now. I’m tired. I was still doing it last year, but I don’t want to anymore. At the peak, I was giving 20, 25 talks a year.

GLEASON: What would people ask you about?

NAKAZAWA: They wanted to know what the war and the atomic bombing were really like. It was the first time people had heard the truth. That’s what they told me everywhere I went.

GLEASON: I’ve heard that Japanese school history books don’t say much of anything about the bomb. Why not?

NAKAZAWA: The government probably doesn’t want to risk encouraging anti-American sentiment. But the facts are the facts. People should be told what happened.

GLEASON: Americans, too, generally know about the two A-bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but hardly anyone knows about the extent of the B-29 air raids that leveled most Japanese cities before that. In Tokyo alone, 100,000 people were killed in one night of firebombing — that’s nearly as many as died in Hiroshima. And though most Americans know about the A-bombs, a common knee-jerk reaction to any discussion of their effects is “What about Pearl Harbor?” — that sort of thing. Even Americans who consider themselves liberals tend to have very mixed emotions about the A-bombs — whether they were necessary to end the war or not. Yet those who read Gen often say it is more even-handed than they expected in spreading the blame for the war. You don’t just blame America for dropping the bomb; you blame the Japanese militarists for starting the war, and the imperial system for allowing the militarists to wield such power in the first place. You definitely don’t come across as anti-American. Is that how you always viewed the war, even when you were young?

NAKAZAWA: Well, I spent a lot of time thinking about why it happened. And if you think it through, the answer clearly lies with the militarists and the imperial system. And as a young kid, of course, I’d heard my father criticizing them too.

GLEASON: As you were growing up in postwar Hiroshima, did you talk about things like that with your friends?

NAKAZAWA: Never! Everyone had their hands full trying to survive. I kept my thoughts to myself. If I tried to bring it up, no one wanted to hear about it.

GLEASON: When did you start talking about it?

NAKAZAWA: Pretty recently, I guess. It’s only lately that I’ve really started speaking out about how bad the entire imperial system is. For a while I only expressed those views in writing, through my manga starting in the ’60s.

GLEASON: But I gather that, even if you didn’t talk directly with your colleagues about your experiences, you could tell that people like your editor Nagano shared your views.

NAKAZAWA: I was really very lucky to have an editor like him. Without Nagano, I never would have been able to draw the “Peace” series. And he knew it, too. He’d say to me, “There are 40 editors here at Jump and I’m the only one who understands what you’re doing!”

GLEASON: Would you talk to Nagano about your views on the emperor?

NAKAZAWA: Not really, but he knew how I felt from my manga. And he never censored a single word of what I wrote.

GLEASON: Was there ever pressure from his higher-ups at the company about your work?

NAKAZAWA: Oh yeah. One series I did, Okinawa, was going to be published in book form by Shueisha. But the top brass pressured them to cancel it.

GLEASON: Was that before the U.S. had returned Okinawa to Japan [in 1972]?

NAKAZAWA: Before.

GLEASON: Do you think the cancellation was for the same reason you gave that Japanese textbooks don’t talk about the A-bombs — to avoid provoking anti-American sentiment?

NAKAZAWA: Certainly. That wasn’t my purpose in writing it, but they assumed I was criticizing the U.S. occupation of Okinawa. The top management at Shueisha was very nervous about such things.

GLEASON: Don’t you find it odd that they’d allow you to write about the A-bomb, but not about Okinawa?

NAKAZAWA: I guess they thought the Okinawa theme was more controversial because the situation was still “delicate” — it wasn’t resolved yet at the time.

GLEASON: Did you have any other run-ins of that sort?

NAKAZAWA: That was about the extent of it. The problem is that I got labeled as a lefty cartoonist. That’s still how I’m viewed by the media.

GLEASON: When did they first start labeling you as that?

NAKAZAWA: Ever since Gen, I guess. There simply weren’t too many other cartoonists taking on controversial issues like the war and the political system.

GLEASON: Are there any other cartoonists writing on such topics whose work you admire?

NAKAZAWA: Hmmm… Sanpei Shirato is about it. He wrote the Kamui Den [Legend of Kamui] series.

GLEASON: Recently there have been some examples of right-wing political manga, like the Gomanism [Philosophy of Arrogance] series by Yoshinori Kobayashi. Kobayashi made headlines recently when he defended Japan’s colonization of Taiwan, didn’t he?

NAKAZAWA: Right. What can I say? All I know is, if you live through something like the A-bomb, you know that war is too horrible not to be avoided at all costs, regardless of the justifications offered for it.

GLEASON: As we speak, the U.S. government is pressing for a war with Iraq. The polls suggest that many Americans support a war if they think it can be pursued from a distance, through bombs and missiles, so that American soldiers don’t get killed. What strikes me about the debate on the war, particularly among U.S. politicians, is that few express concern that even if hardly any Americans die, thousands of Iraqis probably will.

NAKAZAWA: I think it’s simply that Americans haven’t experienced massive bombings first-hand. All their wars in the past century were fought overseas. Vietnam is a good example.

GLEASON: The terrorist attacks on September 11 are often described as a turning point because they are the first attack on American soil to cause thousands of civilian deaths since the Civil War. Now the government seems to be calculating that it can do what it wants in Iraq as long as too many Americans don’t die.

NAKAZAWA: Japan is just as bad. Here’s a country that experienced complete devastation in the last war, and yet ultra-nationalists are crawling out of the woodwork again, glorifying the war and trying to rewrite the history textbooks. And as usual they talk about restoring the emperor to his rightful position of absolute authority.

GLEASON: Do you think there’s really a possibility of that happening?

NAKAZAWA: Definitely. That’s why I say we need to dismantle the whole imperial system.

(Non) Fiction

GLEASON: Let me ask you some more questions about your experiences growing up in postwar Japan, which provided the background for Barefoot Gen: You’ve said that Gen is mostly autobiographical, and the main character Gen Nakaoka is clearly modeled after yourself. How did you go about combining autobiography with fiction in developing your story?

NAKAZAWA: I definitely based it on my own experiences growing up. I was writing Gen in the late ’60s, so I looked back at what I was doing each year through the ’50s and ’60s, and what Japanese society was like at each point.

GLEASON: Some sequences seem like they might be straight autobiography, like when Gen’s family goes to live with the unsympathetic relatives in Eba right after the bombing. You mentioned earlier that this is lifted directly from your own experience. But, for example, you have a subplot in volume two about how Gen and Ryuta get work caring for Seiji, a young artist who has lost the use of his hands in the bombing, and how they inspire him to begin painting again, holding the brush in his teeth. Some of Gen’s adventures, like that one, are so dramatic I have to ask — did that really happen to you? And if not, where did you get the idea from?

NAKAZAWA: It didn’t happen to me, but it was a combination of true stories I heard and things that happened in my neighborhood. For example, there really was a young A-bomb victim who taught herself to paint with her teeth. And Seiji’s household, which is treated like a pariah by the neighbors, is modeled after a house we kids called the haunted house because a badly injured victim lived there. I wanted to tell the story of the artist to show how people can overcome the greatest adversity. If you can’t use your hands, use your teeth. As I wrote at the beginning of Gen, the real theme of the story is symbolized by wheat, which springs back no matter how many times it’s trampled.

GLEASON: One of the most significant characters in the first four volumes of Gen is Gen’s baby sister. Much of the story revolves around her birth, illness and premature death. I know from what you said earlier that this is based on what happened to your own little sister.

NAKAZAWA: Yes, she died after only a few months, most likely of malnutrition, and we cremated her by the ocean, just as Gen’s sister Tomoko was in the story.

GLEASON: At the end of the 10th volume, Gen’s mother dies. Did you intend all along to bring the story up to that point and end it there?

NAKAZAWA: Yes. Although I don’t really view the Gen series as complete, I wanted to tell Gen’s story up to that point at least. So far, that’s where I’ve left it.

GLEASON: Do you intend to resume it at some point?

NAKAZAWA: No, not really.

GLEASON: So the story itself is unfinished, but you don’t plan to add to it?

NAKAZAWA: That’s right. There’s so much more that could be told of Gen’s story, but now I feel that Gen can best live on in the imagination of the reader.

GLEASON: In later volumes of Gen, you write about kids in Hiroshima trying to survive in an underground economy — the black market, and what seems like the dominance of the Yakuza gangs in early postwar society. I assume that’s also based on what you saw growing up. How did you feel about that environment when you were growing up in it?

NAKAZAWA: So many kids in Hiroshima were war orphans, and if you were an orphan, your only means of survival was to join the Yakuza. That was just the way it was. Hiroshima was burned flat; it was a clean slate — it offered unlimited opportunities for the Yakuza. They moved in right away and engaged in furious turf wars. And the war orphans made perfect recruits — they had no relatives who would care if they died, and they wanted someone to look after them. If my mother hadn’t been there to take care of me, I would have joined the Yakuza too. There’s no question about it.

GLEASON: Did you have friends who did follow that path, like Gen’s sidekick Ryuta?

NAKAZAWA: Yes, Ryuta was based on a friend of mine. He was always in and out of jail. But he’s alive and well — and still a Yakuza.

Gen Abroad

GLEASON: How did the movement to translate Gen into other languages begin?

NAKAZAWA: While it was still being serialized, a Japanese college student named Masahiro Oshima came to visit me and said he and his friends wanted to translate Gen into English. I said it was fine with me and to go ahead and translate as much of it as they could. Oshima put a group of volunteers together and called it Project Gen. I think it wasn’t too long afterward that you came on board.

GLEASON: Right. I met Oshima and his group in 1977 when I’d just moved to Tokyo. They were still working on the first volume and they put me to work proofreading the pages they’d already translated and lettered.

NAKAZAWA: I have to admit, I was a little disappointed in that first English volume. The paper was cheap, and the lettering was all over the place.

GLEASON: Yeah, our letterers were amateurs who didn’t really read and write English that well. It was pretty messy. We didn’t know how to deal with the fact that Japanese comics read from right to left, either. Nowadays everything is automatically flipped in advance, but back then we were trying to stay true to the original. We cut out each frame and pasted them back in reverse order, and re-drew the speech balloons only if the sequence inside a frame needed to be reversed. We didn’t realize it at the time, but it was the first full-length manga to be published in English. We didn’t have any models to go on.

NAKAZAWA: I didn’t know that.

GLEASON: There was a lot of trial and error. By the fourth volume, I think it looked a bit better. We flipped all the pages at the outset, as most English manga publishers do now, and one of America’s best professional letterers [Tom Orzechowski] did the lettering for us. You gave that approach your blessing, but I wondered — how do you feel about seeing your work appear backwards, a mirror image of the original?

NAKAZAWA: I don’t mind. As long as the story gets told, it doesn’t really matter to me.

GLEASON: So you don’t mind when your characters all turn into southpaws?

NAKAZAWA: Nah.

GLEASON: There’s now a new group of volunteers called Project Gen based here in Japan that has recently been working on a new set of translations in various languages. How did that get started?

NAKAZAWA: It was just like with your group; I got a call from someone saying they wanted to work on Gen, and I said, go ahead. They already produced Korean and Russian editions, which have been published — all 10 volumes. Now they’re working on a new English version of all 10 volumes, an Indonesian version and a Thai version.

Filmmaking and Surviving

GLEASON: Gen has also been turned into several films over the years, including a three-part live-action series and a two-part full-length anime. Then, about three years ago, you produced and directed another live-action film about Hiroshima.

NAKAZAWA: Right. It was called Okonomi Hatchan [literally Young Hatchi the Okonomi Maker — “okonomi” is a Hiroshima specialty, a meal-sized, meat-and-vegetable-filled hotcake]. It’s about a young guy struggling to make a go of his okonomi business, and the different customers who come to his shop. One of them is a second-generation A-bomb victim, who gets in a fight with someone from Tokyo who makes light of the bomb. The story takes place in the present. That was my first experience at directing a film myself.

GLEASON: I know you were concerned about the possible effects of your exposure to radiation on your own children. You’ve told me that you were very worried before your daughter Keiko was born, and how relieved you were when she turned out completely healthy. How about yourself? Do you have any lingering aftereffects from the bomb?

NAKAZAWA: I’ve had diabetes for 30 years. That’s one of the designated A-bomb related diseases, one that many survivors get. In the past couple of years, I’ve had serious problems with my eyesight, but I don’t know if that’s a direct effect or not.

GLEASON: Do you associate with any organizations of A-bomb survivors?

NAKAZAWA: No, I don’t see any point in it. I say what I want to say about the bomb through my manga. I don’t feel the need to join a group to draw more attention to what we went through. I don’t join cartoonist associations either! I’m really a lone-wolf type.

GLEASON: I want to ask about your approach to cartooning. In Japan, it’s been traditional for manga artists —particularly successful ones — to set up a studio and hire assistants to do a lot of the work. What has been your approach over the years?

NAKAZAWA: I’ve always done everything myself. I start with the story, then I do the drawing. For years, my wife has been my only assistant. She draws the frame lines, erases the penciling, puts in the screen-tone, cleans it up. I do everything else. I generally don’t like depending on someone else. My wife’s the only one I trust.

GLEASON: When you first started out as a cartoonist in Tokyo, you worked as an apprentice. Do you think the assistant system is good for someone who wants to learn the craft?

NAKAZAWA: Yes, it’s a very good way to learn. It forces you to improve in the areas where you’re weak.

GLEASON: Didn’t you have young cartoonists asking if they could work as your assistant? Did you turn them down?

NAKAZAWA: Yes, I got asked. I did hire an assistant for four years at one point, but I didn’t like taking the time to teach him. It interfered with my work, so I decided I was better off working alone.

GLEASON: Then you’re very fortunate to have such a talented wife, I’d say.

NAKAZAWA: Oh, I agree! At first, she couldn’t do anything, but she was a quick study. Eventually, she was able to work so fast it was like having 12 assistants!

Summing Up, Looking Forward

GLEASON: Are you working on any new projects now?

NAKAZAWA: I’d like to make another film, and that would be about it. It would be about the children of divorced parents. Couples seem to get divorced at the drop of a hat these days. What happens to their kids? I’ve been writing a manga on this subject, Jizo no Matsu, about children of broken homes. Matsu is a young boy whose mother divorces his father and takes another lover. Matsu cries for his mom but she won’t come back. I’d like to make that into a movie. I’ve already finished the manga version, and I’m working on the film scenario. I would like to direct it myself, too. But movies cost a lot of money, so I don’t know.

GLEASON: You seem to be increasingly interested in film as a medium of expression. How does it compare with manga for you?

NAKAZAWA: Sometimes, drawing manga, you can become frustrated with the limitations. For example, you might want to show a dramatic action, or a flow of movement, that you simply can’t express in a series of frames on a page. Another thing you can have in film is real speech, the sound of the character’s voice. And you can add music and sound effects. You can’t do those things with manga!

Nakazawa looks through a lens while directing “Hatchan”: promo photo.

GLEASON: Do you find film so satisfying that you would put manga aside in favor of making movies?

NAKAZAWA: Yes, at this point I’d be happy just making movies.

GLEASON: Are you still drawing manga?

NAKAZAWA: No, I don’t draw anymore. I’m too tired.

GLEASON: It’s been over 30 years since you started drawing Barefoot Gen. How do you feel about Gen as a body of work now?

NAKAZAWA: Well, it was basically my autobiography, so I always felt as if I were recounting the first half of my life, creating a story out of the process by which I survived and grew up.

GLEASON: Looking back, do you have anything you would have done differently with the story?

NAKAZAWA: No, I feel pretty satisfied with how it turned out.

GLEASON: Gen has been translated and published in several languages. What do you think of the response it has received overseas?

NAKAZAWA: What struck me most was how poorly informed people outside Japan were about the atomic bomb and nuclear war. I’d like to think that reading Gen has helped people get a sense of the horror of the war and the bombing, as well as the danger of depriving people of their freedom of speech.

GLEASON: Are you satisfied with the exposure Gen’s story has received overseas?

NAKAZAWA: No, I’m very dissatisfied. I think the story needs to be told and heard far more widely than it has so far.

GLEASON: How do you think cartoonists should respond to the problems we face in the world today?

NAKAZAWA: No other medium compares to manga in its sheer mass appeal. So all artists — cartoonists especially — should be active at times like this. If an artist is angry at what is going on in the world, he should be writing about it.

Manuel “Spain” Rodriguez (nobody calls him Manuel) is unique even among his fellow underground cartoonists, certainly one of the most individualistic and disparate group of artists of any artistic movement of this century. Consider, for example, that he’s a working-class Marxist who actually worked in a factory; he was inspired by the work of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko; he belonged to a motorcycle gang and welcomed violent confrontation.

His first strip was published in 1967, an incoherent, psychedelic strip (by his own admission) called Zodiac Mindwarp that appeared in New York’s East Village Other. Before moving to San Francisco, he created “Trashman, Agent of the Sixth International,” a pulpy parodic Marxist character, equal parts sex and violence. In San Francisco, he hooked up with Robert Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, Robert Williams, Gilbert Shelton and Victor Moscoso to become one of the regulars in Zap. In the ’70s he started drawing autobiographical and historical strips, which appeared in various underground publications such as Arcade and Anarchy.

He was also a bit of a late bloomer (he was 27 before his first strip was published), which gave him the advantage of having lived a life full of incident and youthful indiscretion, which he would later recount in his comics. His work is usually considerably less internal than that of peers such as Justin Green and Robert Crumb — another anomaly among underground artists (and even post-underground, or alternative, cartoonists such as Joe Matt or Chester Brown).

His latest major works have been collaborations: Boots (written by Jim Madow), a paranoid conspiracy/mystical thriller of sorts; and Fantagraphics published Nightmare Alley, the 128-page adaptation of the novel by William Lindsay Gresham.

This interview was conducted over four sessions in the months of January and March, 1998. The interview begins this issue and concludes next issue. All images © copyright Spain unless otherwise noted.

-Gary Groth

THE IMPRESSIONABLE AGE

GARY GROTH: I think you were born and raised in Buffalo.

SPAIN: Right.

GROTH: I understand that you started drawing in the second grade —

SPAIN: Right.

GROTH: And that the comics you read when you were a kid included Captain Marvel and EC comics.

SPAIN: Right.

GROTH: And you stopped reading comics when the Code was instituted around ’53 —

SPAIN: Yeah, ’53, ’54. You could still get stuff like Johnny Dynamite and One Million BC; I think those were the last ones to hold out against the Comics Code.

GROTH: Could you tell me a little bit about what your upbringing was like? Your father was an auto —

SPAIN: My father did collision work, repaired car bodies.

GROTH: You were born in ’40 —

SPAIN: I was born in 1940.

GROTH: So the war was over by the time you were 5. Do you recall the war having an impact on you?

SPAIN: Yeah. I was at an impressionable age, and I remember all that war stuff that was going on, I remember the various phases of the war. Even though I got it through newsreels and movies, and that sort of thing, it had a big impression on me. I had older cousins who were in various branches of the armed services.

GROTH: I assume your father wasn’t involved.

SPAIN: No, my father, and me for that matter, we were just born at a time when we missed wars. It seems that wars come with a certain schedule, and both me and my father were just lucky to miss them — my father was too young for World War I and too old for World War II.

GROTH: Were you too old for Vietnam?

SPAIN: Yeah, I was too old for Vietnam. I had actually gotten a 4F, you know.

GROTH: That right?

SPAIN: Yeah, I worked hard to get it.

GROTH: When did they start drafting for Vietnam, in ’64?

SPAIN: Yeah, it must have been around ’65.

GROTH: You would have been 25.

SPAIN: Yeah. They sent me down to get a draft card in the early ’60s, but I had just lost my driver’s license. I wasn’t about to fight for them if I couldn’t ride my bike, so  …

GROTH: [Laughs.] Right, right. That’s reasonable.

SPAIN: So I just checked off all the stuff that I knew they couldn’t check up on. Except that I was gay. That was the one I couldn’t quite check off on.

GROTH: You wouldn’t go that far?

SPAIN: I wouldn’t go that far. But I said I pissed in my bed, and I had the clap, I got depressed and tried to commit suicide, and all that stuff. They sent me to a shrink, and everyone said, “You can’t bullshit this guy.” The psychiatrist was asking me leading questions. It was really easy to bullshit him. I could tell the guy didn’t like me when I walked in, it was that sort of thing, so it was easy to know what to say …

GROTH: Where was this, Buffalo?

SPAIN: This was in Buffalo, yeah.

GROTH: So you stayed out of the war in order to protest it here?

SPAIN: There was no war going on at that time.

GROTH: When was that?

SPAIN: That was in the early ’60s, so there was no real war. But at that point, I was already aware of the bullshit nature of the “established order,” so I wasn’t about to fight to preserve it — even though all that military stuff did, and still does, hold a certain attraction for me. The Army saw that I was the kind of guy that they didn’t want in the armed forces.

GROTH: You have sort of a love-hate interest —

SPAIN: Yeah, I have a fascination with that sort of thing, war, and all that stuff, which is basically history. I remember the first time I read a book of military history; it was clear to me — this is really what history is.

TAKING HIS LUMPS

GROTH: So would you characterize your dad as basically working-class?

SPAIN: Yeah.

GROTH: What was your upbringing like, what was your childhood like? Was it pleasant?

SPAIN: I had a lot of good times. I certainly took my lumps. My neighborhood had various ethnicities, it was an Italian neighborhood, a Jewish neighborhood, and a black neighborhood. The block I lived on was mixed, but if you went to the Irish neighborhood you had to worry about getting punched out by the Irish bully, the Jewish neighborhood you had to worry about getting punched out by the Jewish bully, the black bully, or the Polish bully, or —

GROTH: What were your parents’ ethnic backgrounds?

SPAIN: My mother was born here, but her family is Italian, and she grew up in Italy. My father’s Spanish. In Buffalo there’s a Spanish community, but it’s spread out; there’s no real Spanish neighborhood. Where I grew up there were all kinds of different people — Irish, Polish and Greek —

GROTH: Did they form cliques, like New York City?

SPAIN: Not so much in my neighborhood. The guys who grew up together were the real formation point. Even though most of us were from Catholic backgrounds, they wouldn’t let us into the Catholic Cub Scouts, but they would let us into the Jewish Cub Scouts. Jews were more liberal. For the Catholics, we were just bad kids. But what happened in the Jewish Cub Scouts was that all the bad Jewish kids ended up being in one den with us, and all the good Catholic kids and Protestant kids were in another den with the nice Jewish kids. And then there was this kid …  a Jewish kid, who was a Boy Scout. He was in charge of the bad kids’ den; he tried to foment a revolution. I don’t know, we were probably 11 or 12 or something like that, we were pretty young, and somebody was talking about having a revolution. We were going to split off from the nice kids’ den. We were all very earnest about it, we even wrote up Declarations of Independence. But each time we tried to make the edges brown (so it would look more official), we would burn up our document.

GROTH: You were in the Jewish Cub Scouts?

SPAIN: Yeah, right. Eventually they got tired of us and threw us out. You know, all the bad Jewish kids and all the bad Christian kids, that’s what became our gang.

GROTH: I thought you were a Boy Scout as well.

SPAIN: No, not really. I got to a few Boy Scout meetings, but at that point I was pretty much getting into being a juvenile delinquent.

GROTH: Did you like the uniform?

SPAIN: The uniform was kind of square …  the Cub Scout uniform was kind of like the cavalry in the cowboy movies. The bandana, the blue uniform and all that stuff.

GROTH: Yeah, right. I was always very excited on the day we had Cub Scout meetings because I went to a Catholic school and had to wear a white shirt, tie, the works, and the day of a Cub Scout meeting I could wear my Cub Scout uniform to school.

SPAIN: I went to religious instruction.

GROTH: You did?

SPAIN: Yeah. My family was not that religious. My mother was nominally Catholic …  but there was a church on the corner, so I just started going, I just got into it.

GROTH: On your own?

SPAIN: On my own, yeah. And my parents just let me go.

GROTH: At what age?

SPAIN: Probably from about 7 or 8 to 11 or 12.

GROTH: What prompted that?

SPAIN: I wonder, but it just seemed — it was an impulse to be “good.” Religion lays out a framework — if you want to be “good,” do this. As a kid, it seemed to make sense. Obviously, a lot of adults are doing it. You would go to the confessional, and you would have these little sins to confess. You’d have to think them up, because you forgot them: I disobeyed my parents seven times. I swore nine times.

Panel from “The Leather Nun Gets Hers” in Tales from the Leather Nun ©1973 Last Gasp

GROTH: Right, you just have to guess.

SPAIN: Right. In this half-assed, backward way they prompt you to lie. Who can keep track of all that stuff? And things like  …  you ate meat on Friday. What are you going to do? This is what your mom cooks. [Laughs.] One of the things that turned me around was …  I was making my Confirmation, and the nun’s instruction was you were supposed to go up to the communion rail and cut a round corner, but the kid in front of me cut a square corner. I thought maybe I heard it wrong. So I cut a square corner, too. I was temporarily confused. The nun snatched me out and sent me down to Father Bent, who was an ex-wrestler and a drunk. I came into raw contact with God’s hierarchy, and, I thought, being a good Catholic, he had some special insight from God, and if I sincerely told him the truth, everything would be OK. So I went down there without a sense of trepidation, and I told him what happened, and he just wasn’t hearing it. “We know you, you’re a wise guy.” And as a matter of fact, in religious instruction I was always pretty well behaved. I wasn’t going there because I had to, after all. But he just went through this whole Gestapo act and suddenly I realized that this guy didn’t have any insight from God. So it was a revelation …  the scales being lifted from my eyes, that this guy didn’t have any special knowledge, so it just opened the door to questioning …  well, if he doesn’t have any special knowledge …  And, in fact, the guy was a fool. What does this imply about the institution he represents? Even at the time it seemed very comical to me that he was making a big stink over some minor bullshit. I could see that this guy was a whole lot stupider than me, man. This was my first insight into the phoney pretentiousness of official authority. [Laughs.]

GROTH: You were 11 or 12?

SPAIN: I was 11 or 12, yeah.

GROTH: Did that pretty much end your interest in religious instruction?

SPAIN: Well, I still went to religious instruction ’til the next grade. Sister Richard was the teacher …  funny these names that they have. I sat down on the first day of instruction and suddenly she comes over and starts to flail away at me with a ruler. And I said, “What? What did I do?” She says, “That inkwell’s crooked.” When I told her that it was that way when I took my seat, she was not appeased. All she had to do was mention it, and I would gladly put it any fucking way she wanted it. Between this and the crazy “Square Corner Incident,” it was pretty clear that the Catholic Church was run by a bunch of sadistic loonies (and I hadn’t even read any history yet). At that point, I realized, “I’m not going to that crazy place.” [laughs.]

GROTH: You did not go to a parochial school?

SPAIN: No. My parents, especially my old man, were not especially religious.

GROTH: Were they agnostic? Or were they just indifferent?

SPAIN: A little of both — my mother was nominally a Catholic, but in terms of my dad, the Spanish experience with Catholicism is not a happy one, you know, they have an especially nasty history. My father just had no identification with the Catholic Church, but he was sufficiently in awe of authority in general that he didn’t express any overt hostility; on the other hand, he wasn’t about to support it if he didn’t have to. As a kid I remember him making anti-religious statements, but it wasn’t a big thing in my household. But on the other hand, some kids would have to go; I guess you did.

GROTH: Yeah. Seven years.

SPAIN: What was your experience like?

GROTH: I remember it vaguely being oppressive, but I also remember not really knowing any different. So when I would raise my hand and ask to go to the bathroom, and they said no, I eventually accepted these kinds of oppressive tactics as being the norm. I don’t remember any serious religious indoctrination, even though I went to a parochial school for seven years. I think it was possibly because I was just too oblivious to it or bored by it to absorb it, which might have been for the best.

SPAIN: Yeah, I think that Catholicism is so dogmatic that it just goes over most people’s heads. What’s interesting is that they tried to extend the Spanish Inquisition into the countryside, but they just lacked the manpower. Most people’s lives were just so much of a hand-to-mouth existence that they just weren’t intellectually sophisticated enough to be heretics. Local priests would advise people what to tell the inquisitors so they wouldn’t stumble and say something that appeared heretical.

GROTH: But you went through a few years where you did go to church, and you did —

SPAIN: Yeah, I would go to church every Sunday.

GROTH: So what did you get out of that?

SPAIN: Eventually I went through a period where I tried to go to church, but I would tend to fall back to sleep and end up missing mass entirely. When I did manage to make it, I tended to nod out.

GROTH: During the church ceremony?

Panel from “Mexico and Me” (1992)  in My True Story

SPAIN: Yeah  …  at some point I had art appreciation class in high school, I must have been maybe 13. So going to church became more interesting, because I could check out the architecture and stuff like that. That lessened some of the boredom. But after I hadn’t gone for a long time, or I had gone really sporadically, I went to “confession” and as a matter of fact it was the self-same Father Bent who was in the confessional and I told him I had missed mass about 30 times or something like that and he said, ‘“Why?’“ And I said, “I’d try to wake up for the 9 o’clock mass, and I’d fall asleep, same for the 10:30 mass and so on and I always oversleep.” There was a stunned silence. And then he went into some a long rant about how God had done all this stuff for me and I couldn’t even give him one lousy hour. He gave me — I forgot all this — 25 Our Fathers and 25 Hail Marys, but by that time the whole framework was just so obviously fallacious that I didn’t even finish them. I was told that when you walk out of confession you always feel better than when you go in. I remember even as a kid, coming out of confession and thinking, “Well now, honestly, do I feel any better?” And I would have to answer, “No, not really, if I’m going to be honest with myself,” which is what I understood you should be as a religious person.

GROTH: So it did not give you the guidance you had hoped for? Were you searching for absolutes? Were you searching for some sort of standard to measure yourself against?

SPAIN: I guess that’s what it was. Yeah. My case is a little unique, not having been pushed into it, volunteering for it. But it just seemed to me as a kid, not being very sophisticated, I wanted to be good, and I guess as you say it was some sort of standard by which you could define yourself as good. As you get older, you increasingly see the evil of the world. This seemed to be a way to attempt to counter that with some personal goodness. The first teacher I had in religious instruction was a very nice nun …  you know, she was like some nun out of the movies, a very kind old lady who expounded a very benign religious ideology, so it seemed cool.

GROTH: Now, your dad was working-class. Was he politically aware?

SPAIN: He was kind of a Cold War democrat. My parents were somewhat paranoically anti-Communist. Most people were at that time. My mom became a Republican at some point.

GROTH: Your mom?

SPAIN: Yeah, she’s read Ayn Rand, which — you’ve read Ayn Rand.

GROTH: Uh-oh.

SPAIN: She realized it was meant for her, you know.

GROTH: Is that true?

SPAIN: Yeah, that’s what I think as I look back. On the other hand, she was more open to discussion than my dad. My dad would kind of get pissed off if you offered a rebuttal to what he would say. But he was basically a working-class guy, and the first time I voted, I voted for the Socialist Labor Party. My dad told me it was a vote for Rockefeller, you know. [Laughs.]

GROTH: You’re wasting your vote.

SPAIN: You’re wasting your vote, yeah. The counterargument is that it’s better to vote for something that you want and not get it than to vote for something you don’t want and get it.

COMICS AS A KID

GROTH: So what was your interest in comics like when you were growing up? Was it intense, or was it —

Panel from “The Return of Savina” in Whiz Comics #3, drawn by C.C. Beck, written by Bill Parker ©1940 DC Comics

SPAIN: Yeah, intense. I’d read Captain Marvel religiously, and even joined the Captain Marvel Fan Club.

GROTH: Is that right?

SPAIN: Yeah. I was always searching for good stuff. I got that photojournalist’s review of comics, and I found the cover in there that scared the shit out of me. There was a store on the corner that would have a big stack of comics; I would go through that stack once a week. That’s where I saw that cover that just sent chills down my spine. My dad really didn’t like comics.

GROTH: For all the standard reasons?

SPAIN: For all the standard reasons. So I had a whole struggle just to be able to read comics. It happened at an early age, so by the time I was 10 or 11, I had established my right to read comics. I didn’t bring crime comics into the home, and avoided them, because I knew that my parents would really disapprove. But I liked Air Boy; Air Boy had a lot of imaginative stuff in there. As did Captain Marvel, and it’s funny how Captain Marvel was more imaginatively written than Superman. Superman always seemed kind of mismatched. He would punch out guys who were robbing banks, or numbers rackets, all this petty stuff, and he was bullet-proof; it seemed a little unfair.

GROTH: There was a lot more latitude in Captain Marvel? A lot more charm and humor? A richer fantasy?

SPAIN: Right. I remember a story about some guy from another planet who wanted to take the Earth’s resources, because they were running out of resources on his home planet. So Captain Marvel went back and checked the guy’s planet out, and they had cars that had 56 cylinders. Captain Marvel decides that the alien was not worthy of the Earth’s resources. I remember being intrigued by that idea, so I was attracted to stories that made you think about the world in unconventional ways. Then I discovered EC comics.

GROTH: Did you read Captain Marvel prior to EC; did your interest evolve into EC?

SPAIN: Yeah. Well, I’d seen them around. I mean, it’s funny how comics would go through periods where it didn’t seem that there were too many good comics around, so you’d be looking around trying to find something that was cool. I got into Captain Science for a while. I didn’t know who Wallace Wood was, but there was something about his drawing that stood out. My family went to Spain. I must have been about 11 or 12. On the way back, the ship stopped at Halifax, and I went into a used-book store, and they had a Weird Science with no cover. I looked at that, man, and I was just knocked on my ass. The story was intriguing, the artwork was better than anything I had seen. After that, I just started buying that stuff, grabbing it up.

From “The Insidious Doctor Khartoum” in Captain Science #4 (June 1951) by Joe Orlando and Wally Wood

GROTH: Before we get into your EC interest, when you were growing up, what were your other interests as a kid? Were you into sports?

SPAIN: Not so much, but I went through drawing phases of everything. I went through the French Foreign Legion, pirates, spacemen, knights … Teaching a class …  I taught for five years at the Mission Cultural Center, and I’d see kids’ interests. And they just don’t have those things I had when I was young. They just have superheroes. They do all kinds of stuff with superheroes. A lot of the kids are really kind of bloody-minded about it, too. One of my students did a great strip called Blood Hunter. The hero, of course, had big blades coming out of his hands. Lots of murder and mayhem.

GROTH: More so than when you were a kid?

SPAIN: It seems like it.

GROTH: Was it fairly innocuous compared to today?

SPAIN: I guess, but it was more varied, too. I mean, you understood that things were probably a little bloodier than what they were showing in comics. But on the other hand, there was a greater variety of subject matter, it covered a wider historical period, instead of this monoculture.

GROTH: Gunga Din?

SPAIN: Yeah, Gunga Din. I don’t know whether I ever quite got into that until I saw those great John Severin stories in ECs, but that stuff was around.

GROTH: How do you feel about the sort of narrowing that appears to be going on in kids’ culture?

SPAIN: I think it’s too bad. I understand what the problem is. There’s always a search to try to find something that’ll catch people’s attention, and all that superhero stuff has really been going on for a while. I was really disappointed that the new Two-Fisted Tales didn’t come off.

GROTH: How do you mean “didn’t come off?”

SPAIN: Well, you know, they only put out two issues. It just seemed that if that was handled better, that it might have stood a chance. There really is a lot of great historical stuff, tons of stories that are as weird and as intriguing as you can get.

GROTH: Were you into history when you were a kid? I mean, pre-juvenile delinquent?

SPAIN: No, not so much. It was ECs that developed an interest in history in me.

GROTH: That would have been Kurtzman’s war stuff.

SPAIN: Yeah, right. At the time I got into Hannibal, and Hannibal’s father, too.

LIFE OF CRIME

GROTH: Now, you would have been 10, 11, 12 when the EC stuff?

SPAIN: Yeah. Right.

GROTH: So in fact you would have been starting to be interested in history before your juvenile delinquent phase, which would have been, I guess, post-18?

SPAIN: No, no, it was kind of from about 13 to —

GROTH: To approximately now.

SPAIN: [Laughs.] 13 to 16. After they suppressed ECs, they had Picto-Fiction. Around this time I saw a stack of comics behind the counter in a drug store with a Picto-Fiction comic on top. They had that cover by Jack Kamen of the kid in a leather jacket with the switchblade. And I kept waiting for them to put it on the stand; about a week went by and the stack remained unopened behind the counter. I finally asked the clerk when he was going to put that particular book on the rack. And the guy said, “We’re not going to put it on the stand because it makes juvenile delinquents. Are you a juvenile delinquent?” And I said, “Fuckin’ A.” I guess that was a transforming moment.

Cover from Shock Illustrated #1 (October 1955) by Jack Kamen ©1955 EC Comics

GROTH: You liked that because it was a romanticized image of …

SPAIN: Some sort of recognition of disaffected youth like myself. At that time, my whole neighborhood was getting into that kind of rebellion. The whole neighborhood went on a crime spree that lasted until we were 16, when everybody got busted, and after that …  there were guys who became hardcore criminals. One guy, a guy I got busted in a stolen car with, made it to the top of the FBI Wanted list.

GROTH: Tell me a little bit about your criminal career.

SPAIN: Well, it was just juvenile delinquency; it was us against the world. We’d just go to other neighborhoods and rob the department stores, and then there was a big car-stealing spree that lasted for almost a year.

GROTH: Tell me how that worked. You’d break into a car?

SPAIN: Yeah, you’d get into a car. Well, things were a lot looser. A lot of cars would be open, there were certain cars that you  …  well, you’d get under the ignition and put some tinfoil or a church key or something, start them up, and this got to be a big thing.

GROTH: What would you do with them?

SPAIN: We would joyride, and do damage, run them into walls, run them over cliffs and stuff like that.

GROTH: And this career lasted between the ages of 13 and 16?

SPAIN: No, I was 15. It just lasted a few months. It lasted maybe a half a year. But I got busted …  this guy had stolen this car for my birthday. We were driving around the zoo and the back wheel came off, and I tried to help the driver, he had fallen out of the car, and I tried to help him across Delaware Park. They nailed us, and they eventually nailed the other guys a few weeks later. I said I didn’t know the car was stolen, and I got off.

GROTH: Were you ever arrested during that time?

SPAIN: Well, one time the cops took me home for playing chess in this little park area. The cop told me to wipe that look off my face, and I said, “It’s my face, I’ll have any look I want on it.” And the guy dragged me home and told my old man that any time I wanted to step outside with him, he would be glad to oblige me. He was a big guy, and I was about 14 or something. You really saw that things were not at all what was portrayed in the mass media …  at least not in our neighborhood. It was just a conclusion that most of the kids of that age came to, that things were extremely corrupt. But of course we didn’t really understand how corrupt they were. When you think about that period that conservatives allude to as some sort of a Golden Age, here you had the head of the FBI who was utterly corrupt, who was in bed with the mafia, just about literally, who was a homosexual denouncing other homosexuals. Hoover wanted a list of every homosexual in America, he was a rabid racist, and the mob, especially in New York, the mob, the mafia had really made inroads into the political machine. And where I grew up there was a general sense of this. We knew about the guy who was about to testify against the mob who had mysteriously fallen out of a 10-story window in a room guarded by police. How did he fall out? They don’t know. I don’t know if you catch any of that history of crime on TV. It’s fascinating, but this sort of thing was folklore where I grew up. Everything seemed to reinforce a deep-seated cynicism. Frank Costello was the guy who had all the political machinery oiled, so that guys like Lucky Luciano could live a luxurious life. So those were the guys who seemed like role models to us, you know. But for me, when I saw the people whose stolen car we were riding in, I felt bad. They were poorer than us. Also, after spending an afternoon in jail, I decided I didn’t want to be a criminal. I had other things to do with myself.

Panel from “The Breaks” in Zap #9 (1978 Spain)

GROTH: So you actually spent an afternoon in jail —

SPAIN: The other kids were under 16, but because I was 16, I spent an afternoon in jail. And then the other guys in the gang — it was really a despicable thing that they did. They ended up hitting this old guy over the head with a beer bottle, some guy’s store that we used to go in and shoplift. And there was no need to do it, because the guy was very old. He probably had Alzheimer’s, and one of our guys hit him over the head with a beer bottle; it was really a rotten thing.

GROTH: What other kinds of things did you do? You stole cars, and actually engaged in robberies?

SPAIN: No, it was mostly shoplifting, mostly petty, juvenile delinquency, that’s all it was. I mean, we would have liked to have been like them guys …  I, myself, probably didn’t have the balls to engage in major crime. Kids came through the neighborhood, and you would shake them down.

GROTH: So what prompted you to engage in that kind of activity?

SPAIN: It was basically hatred for established society. We just saw ourselves in a predatory world and we could trust one another. It was a sense of comradeship among the guys, but anybody else was just a potential victim. That’s the way the world was. The world is there to prey on you, and you have an arena where you can prey upon others. I think that that’s the way that all criminals see things, and that’s the way society is set up, really. It’s just that people on the top put a mantle of respectability upon their predation. But, on the other hand, who are you doing harm to? It’s really the bottom of the food chain, doing harm to this old guy. Mr. Blimey, we called him. Just some old guy, man, who had a store and probably was on Social Security, and here we were, victimizing this guy, and victimizing other people who were just like us. It was like there wasn’t really a class solidarity as such, just more of a solidarity among us guys. Which was a good experience, in itself.

GROTH: There was no class consciousness involved?

SPAIN: In a way, but it was more instinctual than conscious. There was antagonism between the squares and the hoods. Squares were mostly middle-class Pat Boone types. A lot of it was played out in the high school I went to, which was mostly middle and upper class …  my mother always tried to put me with a better class of people, which never quite had the intended effect. [Laughs.]

GROTH: You actually gravitated towards the criminal element? [Laughter.]

SPAIN: Yeah, right. When I was in art school, these were the only people I could really relate to.

GROTH: Now what was it about the social norms and authority that you so despised?

SPAIN: Well, one thing, when they suppressed the EC comics, I could see that any idea that there was freedom — it was like Father Bent; it was a farce. Growing up in America, we are told that we have certain freedoms. You heard a lot about this especially growing up during World War II: we had this propaganda about America standing for freedom. They can never suppress The Vault Of Horror, this is America, it stands for freedom. As you become a teenager — hey, wake up kid. The police would tell you outright, “You have no rights.” Of course there were some cops who were human beings, but I guess it’s the thugs and bullies with a badge that stick in your mind.

GROTH: Were your parents really disturbed by your getting arrested?

SPAIN: Oh yeah, they were really, right.

GROTH: What was your father’s —

SPAIN: Well, there was some point where he couldn’t beat my ass any more. I did get a shot on him, and he understood that the time for me to get my ass kicked by him was over.

GROTH: When you say that, do you mean you actually had a physical confrontation?

SPAIN: Yeah.

GROTH: So what was the subsequent relationship like?

SPAIN: Well …  It was clear that I was no longer a child.

GROTH: Were you ever close to your father?

SPAIN: Well …  In a way, yeah, and in a way, no. I finally came to realize that we really were the product of our respective backgrounds. It was something that took me a long time to realize: my dad just came from Europe, which is more authoritarian. In fact, even here that generation was less inclined to listen to what they regarded as back talk. My dad would have been coming from a more libertarian part of that tradition but, you know, basically you’re not expected to question. You just do as you’re told, otherwise you get your ass kicked. That’s just what it is. But my old man was always trying to do right by me, as he understood it. I was a spaced-out kid and now I’m a spaced-out adult, and to my dad it must have seemed as if he just had to knock some sense in to me. How’s this kid going to be able to survive? He couldn’t articulate that, and it was something that bothered him.

GROTH: So after he couldn’t physically intimidate you, what was your relationship like? How did he deal with these issues?

SPAIN: We would get into discussions, but at some point he would just get really pissed. We’d be watching television, and I’d say, “I hope that the bad guy shoots the sheriff.” Of course he never did, but my dad would get real pissed off at stuff like that. You know, he was a law-and-order, working-class guy, but at that point, I just had a dislike for the established order that I have today. It hasn’t changed. And it’s funny, my kid goes to school, and I understand that she needs an education, and I try to do my best to foster a respect for learning, and she certainly has a good attitude towards school, but my attitude hasn’t changed, man.

GROTH: Do you feel like the odd man out among other parents because you feel this way? As people get older and they become parents, they become more conservative …

SPAIN: What I try do is to encourage a good attitude toward learning about the world in all of its diverse aspects. This is what’s necessary, not only to survive and prosper, but to have a fulfilling life. My real attitude to official authority is the same as it has always been.

GROTH: Are you making a distinction between a good attitude and your —

SPAIN: And my attitude, right. That’s exactly the distinction I’m making. As a parent, I have to look out for my kid. I want her to know that learning is really fun. You see kids in this neighborhood, and I see people that I’ve known as kids and who have become adults, and I understand how they’ve been cheated because nobody has been able to convey to them the pleasure of learning and knowing things. So I was just lucky, for some reason. I was able to discover that, but not so much in school.

GROTH: You decided it’s a balancing act between instilling a skepticism for authority in your daughter, but dampening that self-destructive impulse which can go hand in hand with that?

SPAIN: Yeah, it can easily go hand in hand with it. I try to do that. In other words, I can’t lie to her …  just like any kid, she’s a kind of establishmentarian. She believes in all this stuff.

GROTH: Is that right?

SPAIN: She tends to. But on the other hand, San Francisco tends to be more progressive than lot of places, so she’s exposed to a lot of good progressive ideas: feminism, peace activism, things like that. She has an attitude that girls can do anything, which is a good thing. It’s often that I just tease her and say, “No, girls can’t do that sort of stuff.” And of course she just completely rejects it.

GROTH: Give her something to rebel against?

SPAIN: Right, exactly.

CONFORMING

GROTH: What other media did you experience in the ’50s? Did you watch television?

From Boots Vol. 1, story by Harry Kamper, art by Spain ©1997 Harry Kamper

SPAIN: Yeah. I used to listen to the radio constantly, and when TV came in, I’d watch anything in those early days. I’d watch Kate Smith, and all the stupid stuff —

GROTH: When did you get a TV?

SPAIN: We must have got a TV around ’52.

GROTH: You were 12, so that means you experienced TV in its infancy?

SPAIN: Yeah, right. And also what I experienced was the anticipation of TV. They used to have those great programs that came on between 5 and 6, the serials. And so just the idea — think of that, man, you can actually see that stuff on TV, like a little movie in your own house. When it finally came, I’d watch it intensely, but by the time I was 14, I hardly ever watched it. I would watch a few things, but it just wasn’t the completely absorbing thing that it was when it first came. My wife complains about my daughter watching TV all the time, but I think that if you let her watch it all she wants, after a while she’ll just get sick of it like I did.

GROTH: You said, “The thing about the stuff you read about in EC comics was that it was incredible. And somehow everything else you got in the media, you just knew it was bullshit, you just knew that even these people who were conformists weren’t really that way, they really weren’t these nice people, they were basically as rotten as everybody else. They somehow put on this goody-goody face. That was everything about MAD comics, MAD comics just got through that shit, and Veronica and Archie and all that stuff, hearing the voice of truth out of all the chaos of smarmy niceness.”

SPAIN: Did I say that?

GROTH: Yeah.

SPAIN: [Laughs.] That pretty much sums it up, yeah.

GROTH: Can you elaborate on what you meant by your reference to the conformist aspect of life in the ’50s?

SPAIN: Especially in high school. In high school you really got it, and —

GROTH: That’s where you really learned to conform?

SPAIN: Well, no. That’s where I learned to rebel. In grammar school, kids are put through that quasi-prison camp routine. And having taught, I can understand why they do that. But I think it doesn’t have to be that way. Teaching kids was some sort of karmic comeuppance. I had all these young boys from 8 to about 12, and they’d just love to bust your chops. I would do my best to answer any question they would throw at me. I would just answer them as straight as I could. Even if they were being a wiseguy. I mean, at some point you might just have to say, “Everybody in this class knows that that’s not a serious question, and you know it, too, and so you’re just taking up time in the class when we could be doing something that’s cool.” But that was a rare occasion. I still basically sympathize with those kids. I see them as kids who were just like me. At some point you might have to clamp down. They tend to get a little too bloody-minded. One time I showed them how to draw action in a sequence of panels. A car coming down the street, and they’d say, “Put a cat in it so it can run over it.” OK, so I would draw a run-over cat. “Oh, put a baby in there.” “Guys, now you’re going too far.”

GROTH: You had to draw a line.

SPAIN: Right, you had to draw a line somewhere.

GROTH: Did you see movies in the ’50s?

SPAIN: Oh yeah.

GROTH: The Wild One was my favorite —

SPAIN: That’s right, The Wild One. I remember seeing it with my parents.

GROTH: Is that right?

SPAIN: Yeah, my parents asked me if I thought what the bikers did was good. My enthusiastic response was that it was. It wasn’t the answer they were looking for.

GROTH: Did you respond to Brando because he spit in the face of hypocrisy and convention as embodied in those simple townspeople?

SPAIN: There’s something about the assuredness they have, in the way they expect you to accept your place as a cog in a productive system, which is not necessarily acting in your interests, or anybody else’s, for that matter. It’s really an insult to your intelligence, that they think you’re too dull to realize that what they’re claiming to be true is just not true. You can see it all around you. You can see that liberty and justice for all isn’t even a pretention with those who represent the law. The Pledge of Allegiance to the flag — I don’t have any allegiance to a flag. I have an allegiance to the concepts of the United States Constitution, the ideals of freedom, those ideas that are enunciated in the great documents. Those philosophical concepts are rational, optimistic ideas that I feel a strong allegiance to. But I don’t feel any allegiance to a flag, and there’s not liberty and justice for all. Under God? Why is it the government’s place to promote religion? Look around the world at places where religious fervor is intense, like Algeria or Northern Ireland or the Bible Belt here where they have all those kid-on-kid massacres. That whole thing spits in the face of the separation of church and state. Instead of the good-natured intelligence that has characterized the best in the American spirit, you have the cult of the flag, which has come to symbolize, especially among its adherents, unquestioning obeisance to authority. These guys are continuously exposing themselves for the pompous hypocrites that they are. Just look at the whole thing about Clinton and Monica Lewinsky. I give a shit whether he had an affair. The real political issue is having some moralistic pecksniff recording your conversations and getting into your personal life. That’s what you have to look forward to if the Religious Right ever takes over America. It’s a preview of things to come. And it’s dawning on people. It’s semi-heartening. The one thing about America, despite our present-day narrowness of vision, is that we don’t see ourselves as serfs.We don’t have to bow to anybody. But the opposite attitude is also there. Some people think that our problems stem from a lack of obedience to officially constituted authority. The ones who scream the loudest about “Big Government” are the same ones whose not-so-secret agenda is creeping Fascism. And the corporate elite will be our new lords. It’s just part of a struggle that’s always going on. Those guys are always going to try and con you. Why wouldn’t they? If you’re dumb enough to go for it, why wouldn’t they? Why wouldn’t they have you pledge allegiance to a flag in order to distract you from the fact that the people in the top one percent income bracket have more wealth than the bottom ninety percent and that’s somehow a meritocracy? We’re suckers enough to let them con us into it. All of their flag-waving is a distraction from this central condition of our existence. While they are quick to invoke the names of the courageous troops who died in battle as having died for “The Flag,” how many of those wars were for propping up corrupt dictatorships who were merely fronts for U.S. corporate interests? As a matter of fact, it was radicals and liberals who fought for free speech against the same right-wing loud mouths that are in the process of gutting the Bill of Rights even as they scream about “Big Government.”

GROTH: Would your conception of liberty and justice for all include economic equality?

SPAIN: Yeah, definitely, right. I think that most people who have a good balance between productive, fulfilling work and pleasure are basically happy. I think people get loaded all the time as a substitute for therapy. They are people who are trying to work something out. While things can and should be set up so that everyone has the material basis for a decent life, including work at decent wages, access to means of improving their skills, etc., some sort of opportunity has to be made to provide circumstances where even the fucked-up can be useful too …  I think everybody, whatever their ideology, wants to see a society of the useful rather than a society of the useless. And I think that there is a strong impulse in people to want to be useful. But the fact of the matter is the capitalist system cannot and does not want to create jobs for everybody. We’ve strayed off from comics into this politics, but it’s a prime motivating factor for my work. I don’t want to be a mainstream cartoonist. I don’t want to have to be a mouthpiece for what I consider unjust. I’ll do commercial work to make bread, but the great thing about doing underground comics is the fact that we can just say it as we see it.

GROTH: Yeah. Of course, the perverse thing now, though, is that the people who are doing mainstream comics really consider themselves to be almost entirely free to do what they want, because that’s what they want to do. So you have that new-found paradox where the kind of crap that people were essentially forced to do for commercial reasons is now being done out of some sort of inner need or inner impulse. [Laughs.] You can’t win, Spain.

SPAIN: I guess probably not.

GROTH: A lot of the corrupt values you’re talking about become internalized over the course of time, and a lot of that has happened over the last 50 years.

SPAIN: Yeah, I’m sure it’s true.

GROTH: You may not follow it as assiduously as I do, but all the people who fled Marvel and started Image did it ostensibly, they say, for creative reasons. And of course they’re doing exactly the same thing they did at Marvel. It’s the same neo-Fascist garbage.

SPAIN: Yeah, right. you’ve got to wonder. I don’t doubt it for a second.

GROTH: False consciousness is I guess what you call it.

SPAIN: Yeah, right. It’s a false consciousness. I have qualms about judging someone’s sincere expression. I feel obliged to defend anyone from government censorship, but I have to say, what that guy [Mike] Diana does, you know, showing young girls being tortured …  that stuff just repels me. I like good action stuff, the violence is OK with me, but the idea that somebody takes any kind of pleasure out of carving up some helpless girl just strikes me as being really somebody who’s fucked up.

GROTH: Now how would you handle the argument that that’s his form of rebellion? I mean, is that valid?

SPAIN: Well, I’m not quite sure what valid means in this regard. If somebody says, “I would like to carve up so-and-so, and just cram their guts up their ass, and fuck them up imaginatively.” Well, short of an overt threat to carry it out, I would have to say they’ve got a right to express themselves. I’ve thought of a story where a cartoonist does a story about a gruesome murder, and sometime later he’s walking down the street and some guy who has read his story ends up murdering him in the gruesome manner depicted in his story. It’s a dilemma. The idea that media creates violence is simply ahistorical. Societies have done unspeakably cruel things with very limited media. Hitler never saw TV. You can just go down the line. The idea that suddenly somebody’s going to do something that they’re not predisposed to do is not very plausible. Tamerlane used to kill everybody in cities he conquered and build pyramids of their skulls; it’s hard to top that. The only thing that media does is to present a concept as opposed to the real act, then you can consider how you feel about what has been presented to you. Certainly no one in the past who had the inclination and opportunity to carry out acts of despicable cruelty was ever deterred by not seeing it in some medium. I guess what media can do is make a case that some particular group, helpless young girls, for example, have it coming. But I think the real issue is access. It’s just harder to sustain an irrational hatred of a particular group when you see people as they really are, even with some of their less attractive features. Maybe that’s overly optimistic, but at some point I’ve hated almost every group I’ve come into contact with. But I find it impossible to sustain my feelings of disdain, because most people are just trying to get along, don’t want to harm anyone and will even help you out if they can. I think that if everyone gets a chance to tell their story we’ll just have a harder time holding all these false notions about one another. On the other hand, maybe it will just reinforce them, but I think it’s worth a shot. Trina [Robbins] tells me I have to be responsible. I’m not exactly sure just what she means. I’m responsible to my own point of view and my own ethical sensibilities.

GROTH: I know that on some level you have to believe that in order to do the work you do, and you must feel that you’re being responsible to your own needs as an artist.

SPAIN: Yeah. Well, it’s hard to differentiate my aesthetic needs from my philosophical commitments. There is a history of puritanism on the left that I don’t feel very comfortable with. I certainly don’t want to live in a puritanical society. But the fact of the matter is that sex orgies are not very democratic. Granny does not get invited to the orgy. Neither do the ugly babes. In some sense the Catholic Church, or any church, is egalitarian in that way, in that the beautiful people get to hang out with the not-so-beautiful people. That’s reflected in revolutionary ideologies that shun that pleasure principle. There’s an element of the pleasure principle that has a consumer’s aspect to it. But, just to show how complicated it is, the standards of beauty that come through mass media leave me cold. Like Jaclyn Smith. There are certain movie stars like that … they’re beautiful, but I find them unattractive.

GROTH: They’re sexless?

SPAIN: Yeah, they’re sexless. Playboy, it’s the ultimate example. I shouldn’t say that, because we’re trying to get Playboy as a sponsor  …  but I guess I have to say it. It seems as though women used to be more sexy in Playboy. They’ve become too smooth or something.

GROTH: I have the same reaction, but I wonder if it’s simply because I’m not 18 any more.

SPAIN: No, I don’t think that that’s it at all.

GROTH: You think that the photographic paradigm has objectively changed?

SPAIN: Yeah, I do, yeah. It’s a contemporary standard of beauty that is bland. I remember seeing a Miss Black America [pageant]. They had women who were overweight, women who were imperfect in many ways, but they were far more appealing and far more interesting. Those women were far sexier because of their imperfections. Perhaps it’s just because I’m a gnarly dude, but I don’t find those flawless women very appealing. I wouldn’t be motivated to hit upon them even if I were younger.

GROTH: It’s almost as if a false standard of beauty keeps evolving in our society. They keep perfecting their bodies, and you have to wonder, to what point? A funny thing happened …  my girlfriend and I were watching The Misfits with Marilyn Monroe, and there was a shot of her running, from behind. And my girlfriend said, “Is my ass that big?” And that was the worst trick question I had ever been asked, because first of all, it’s Marilyn Monroe. Like, how do you criticize Marilyn Monroe’s ass? But the subtext was that ass was too big. You couldn’t win. You know, if I said her ass is not as big as Marilyn Monroe’s, that could be bad. If I said it was, that could be bad, too.

SPAIN: [Laughs.] You had to say, “Your ass should be that big.”

GROTH: Right. Right.

SPAIN: You’re right, there’s a movie with Marilyn Monroe, where she’s an American in some Eastern European country and she’s involved with a prince.

GROTH: The Prince and the Showgirl, with Olivier.

SPAIN: Right. She looks great, man, you can see her belly sticking out a little bit. She’s looking good.

GROTH: Yeah, yeah, I think so, too.

SPAIN: I think it’s part of the age, where everything has reached its point of refinement where it’s devoid of the spice of life. There seems to be big interest in a lot of sleazy ’50s skin books. Like Cad, did you ever see Cad? And you look at those women, and they look like they had a hard life.

GROTH: Been around the block a few times?

SPAIN: Right. But they’re far more interesting. They don’t even show you their whole breast, it will be covered up. But even now it looks sexier, because it’s a big thing that she’d be even showing her stuff. But it’s something more genuine about that scene. It’s hard to idealize it, and you can really get an insight just what the problem of functioning in a hedonistic society is. It’s interesting to me, how the older generation dealt with it. They created an illusion that there was an ongoing crusade of rectitude. On the other hand, as we were talking about earlier, the guardians of righteousness were the gate keepers to a world of unbridled hedonism. The summer of love was only novel because the pretensions were dropped. The wall of illusion that our parents’ generation created was for us, for the kids. They wanted to protect us from the exploitation that seems to accompany those sybaritic scenes despite, or maybe because of, their almost universal attraction. My old man was a respectable, hard-working guy who came home and read the paper. My mom went to the PTA meetings. All appearances in my family were of conventional, if somewhat oddball, respectability. But the whole of society approved of and promoted a drug that is more dangerous than heroin, tobacco. My old man told me that before Prohibition he would drink every so often. And then when Prohibition came he just stopped drinking. And then after Prohibition he would just have a drink every once in a while. There were a lot of people like that. On the other hand, people were and are doing hard time for marijuana, compared to alcohol and tobacco, a relatively benign drug. Back then the most vociferous upholders of public rectitude were collaborating with the underworld, just as today the C.I.A. works with Central American drug dealers to bring cocaine into Los Angeles. The topper is that the “Drug War” is an excuse for dragooning people of the inner city into neo-slavery in the for-profit prison industry of America. I suspect that the reason that you don’t hear much about slave labor in China is that American officials were tired of having Chinese officials laugh in their face. To point out this obvious stuff will still elicit a response of indignation from people who think they have a stake in the illusion of “respectability.”

GROTH: From your vantage point now, do you consider that to be hypocrisy? Or was it a necessary artificial demarcation between …

SPAIN: I think that when you have a kid you get an insight into the dilemma that most people face. When I work on certain things, I try to cover them up …  not wanting my kid to see them. But my kid has a whole lot of information that she got from preschool. She knows a lot of things that I was unaware of, but in a child-like way. I try to keep the more raunchy stuff out of sight so she can be a kid and deal with the complexities of life when she’s better prepared. It certainly seems as if there is a similar effort on the part of many people to keep the general public in a child-like state, but their motive is clearly the bottom line. I know that the counter-culture world is not a world without casualties. My nephew said to me, “I really like your stuff. I can’t wait to go out and get into a gang fight and stuff.” And I started telling him that he should give some serious thought to the downside of all that.

(Continued)

Bone #13 (March 1994)

You’ll forgive Jeff Smith if he doesn’t always believe the hype. While many call the creator of the enormously popular self-published Bone “an overnight success story,” Smith not only remembers the lean months trying to get that project over the financial hump, but the 10 years of preparation, trial runs, and nightmarish dealings with newspaper syndicates that preceded the awards and adulation. While some view Smith as a fully realized talent that seemingly appeared out of thin air, Smith recalls weeding out the jokes that didn’t work and the long nights spent honing his craft working on drawings for animation. While certain individuals refer to Bone as a “distributors’ darling,” Smith can point to the research he did and the conscious business decisions he made in bringing his comic to the attention of a select few within the industry.

Get this straight: a lot of what makes Jeff Smith’s Bone a success is that Jeff Smith worked his tail off making it one. Smith didn’t try to place himself in the “all ages” section of ’90s pop culture, or market himself in opposition to corporate-owned, gimmick-laden ultra-violent superhero titles, or push his comic as part of a new trend In comics self-publishing. He benefited from one or all of these things because he and his work were ready to be discovered. Other people worried about how best to position themselves; Smith got good, did his homework, and refined the project he always dreamed of seeing in print.

Given their public reputations, Gary Groth interviewing Jeff Smith brings to mind a man with a bloody club chasing a baby seal across a snowy waste. In actuality, Smith more than holds his own. In this interview, conducted in October 1994, Groth met a Jeff Smith who wasn’t afraid to examine his formative experiences, life’s work, and place in the medium.

All images ©Jeff Smith unless otherwise noted.

AN EXTREMELY EXCITING TIME

GARY GROTH: From what I know of you, Jeff, it seems to me that you were more interested in newspaper strips than comic books.

JEFF SMITH: That was the kind of comics I wanted to do. It started in the fourth grade when I got hooked on Pogo by Walt Kelly. From that moment on I began to try to figure out more about cartooning, more about newspaper strips, what tools were used … I can’t remember where I first got the idea to get nib pens, but I got some. It’s amazing: when you’re a kid, you don’t have the ability to just get into a car and go down to an art store and buy a nib pen — God knows where mine came from, I can’t remember. But I was immediately trying to figure out how to draw, how to ink, how to do the reproductions so I could do a newspaper strip — like Peanuts, Dick Tracy, Doonesbury — all that stuff, I just loved it.

GROTH: You started reading newspaper strips when you were a kid.

SMITH: Oh yeah.

GROTH: I assume you must have been reading comic books as well.

SMITH: I was.

GROTH: But they didn’t quite captivate you as thoroughly as newspaper strips?

SMITH: Yes and no. I don’t recall ever wanting to do that when I grew up. Although right around the time when Neal Adams and Dick Giordano were working together doing Batman and the Green Lantern stuff, there was a moment in there where I was just mesmerized by anything Neal Adams did I had to find it. It didn’t matter if I found it with the cover torn off, I had to have it.

GROTH: Adams is not an artist that one would instantly think you’d admire as much as you do. Because your own work is as far from his as you can get.

SMITH: Everybody says that. No one really believes that he’s my number one comic book influence. But he is. I think if you look at my trees, or proportions, or drop shadows on the people, or the shadows cast by trees or inanimate objects … I see it very clearly. And Neal could make his drawings act.

GROTH: I understand your parents would read you the Sunday comics.

SMITH: Yeah. My dad used to read Peanuts to me when I was a kid. One of the reasons I learned to read was because he got me hooked on Charlie Brown and Snoopy and Linus.

GROTH: How old were you?

SMITH: That’s a good question! First or second grade? I really don’t remember. But that was a big event, on Sunday, my dad reading the Sunday paper to me.

GROTH: Were your parents encouraging of your artistic interest?

Bonelike drawings from Smith’s childhood

SMITH: They definitely were. I remember my dad sitting down and showing me how to draw Woody Woodpecker. It was a real simplified version – like drawing a crescent moon. I was 3 or 4 at the time. He showed me how to draw an eye; how it had the white part and the little black part was the pupil and that aimed forward. Very rudimentary stuff, but it’s still with me.

GROTH: What did your father do?

SMITH: He makes ice cream products. My cousin and my dad’s brother came out to visit and they wanted to see my office where I make comic books, then go to my dad’s plant where he makes ice cream bars. I was thinking that to this little kid, my cousin, this has to be a great vacation! [Laughter.]

GROTH: So each generation is corrupting children! [Laughter.] Now, you also watched a lot of animated features like Bugs Bunny, Tom and Jerry, Mighty Mouse …

SMITH: Yeah. I loved that kind of stuff. I have very clear memories of going on family vacations in the summer in New England where they had more cartoons than they had where I grew up in Ohio. You could see things that were exotic to me, like Astro Boy and Hercules, and some scary thing where the face didn’t move but it had human lips superimposed on it. That was an extremely exciting time.

GROTH: The time period when you describe your love affair with Neal Adams, that would have been around ’71, ’72, ’73?

SMITH: I started before the Green Lantern stuff, around ’69.

GROTH: Underground comics were coming out around then. Were you paying any attention to them at the time?

SMITH: I was a little too young.

GROTH: How old are you?

SMITH: I’m 34, born in 1960. So in ’69,1 was 9 years old. Didn’t go into headshops or anything! [Laughs.]

GROTH: Right — you weren’t reading Mr. Snoid at the time.

SMITH: No, but I knew about it. I knew about Fritz the Cat because that had broken out of the underground; I could go into a bookstore and see a Fritz the Cat collection. I knew I wasn’t supposed to get anywhere near it, but I did anyway. I knew about Robert Crumb, and for some reason I think I knew about the Fabulous Furry Freak Bros., but beyond that I hadn’t actually gotten into Zap or anything.

HANDS-ON EDUCATION

GROTH: You went to Ohio State and that was, as far as I can tell, the first time you actually drew a strip that was published, in the student newspaper?

SMITH: The first strip published, yes. This is where I redeveloped the Bone characters I’d made up when I was a kid into a Heavy Metal type of universe — cartoon characters who are trapped in a fantasy world that’s full of humans.

GROTH: It’s clearly a fantasy environment.

SMITH: The story that ran in the OSU Lantern was a work in progress. It’s where I created the world as I went and concepts solidified. Some of the jokes worked and some of them were incredibly sophomoric.

GROTH: How much of the current Bone material is a reworking of that?

SMITH: In overall structure, it’s very close. It’s the same idea of the Bones getting run out of Boneville and all the same characters are there. But the difference is, I was just going straight forward. I wrote it as I went, and I did it every day for four years and I got to know the characters very well, I got to learn how to write a lot better, and also this over-arching story came into focus. So I had the benefit when I first started doing the comic books, of going back and reading all that. I got to get rid of all the jokes that were really lame. I didn’t have to do those for a wider audience. I tried those out, they bombed, they’re gone. But I used all the jokes I got good feedback on. Also, since I know the end of the story now — which I didn’t when I did it in college — I was able to begin right away at the beginning with a structure, and add little incidents, little clues; I could foreshadow the concept that there was an ending, that it is all one story.

GROTH: Did the four-year stint at the college newspaper encompass the entire storyline?

SMITH: No.

GROTH: So if someone reads the end of that, they’re not going to know the end of Bone.

SMITH: No. In theory, you probably could piece together all those papers and if you read them all you would know some things. But I never did get to the actual ending. The real ending, the big, big ending, doesn’t exist yet. Well, actually, I have written it down now and the last three issues of Bone are written, but they’ve never been drawn out; they’re in prose form.

GROTH: How was the strip received at college?

SMITH: Mediocre. There would be people who thought it was great and were really into it, and there were a lot of people who just didn’t get it: “It’s a comic strip, so how come it’s not funny?” [Laughs.] I did cliffhangers and I guess they weren’t always obvious. You’d get to the end of the four panels, and to me it’s a cliffhanger as long as a revelation was made.

Walt Kelly’s July 22, 1949 Pogo strip is ©1949 Post-Hall Syndicate

Bone #12 (February 1994) ©1994 Jeff Smith

GROTH: This was ’78 to ’82?

SMITH: No, I didn’t go to college right away. I got a scholarship to an art school, but only made it until Christmas there.

GROTH: What art school was this?

SMITH: The Columbus College of Art and Design, which is a good school, but not if you’re interested in cartooning; at least it wasn’t in the late-’70s,

GROTH: Is it fine arts-oriented?

SMITH: There were two curriculums you could choose from: fine arts or commercial art. I wasn’t very interested in fine art at the time and I thought commercial art might be more towards illustration, towards cartooning. I thought there would be some progression that would get me towards what I wanted to do — but I was wrong. Although in that brief amount of time I did learn things. I learned color theory and stuff. [Laughs.]

GROTH: Which you use very well.

SMITH: Yeah, which is a big part of my life now! [Laughs.]

GROTH: How long did you go there?

SMITH: One quarter.

GROTH: [Laughs.] That must be a record. So then you took some time off?

SMITH: Yeah, I had a few different jobs, mostly blue collar. I worked in a college bookstore for a long time, did a lot of paste-up work, and I did a stint at my dad’s ice cream factory. It was quite an experience to know what it was like to work on an assembly line.

GROTH: Did it turn you off to ice cream?

SMITH: For a while! [Laughter.] You were allowed to eat as much as you wanted. There was no limit. That kept you from stealing ice cream, I suppose. If you eat 12 ice cream sandwiches before lunch on your first day, you don’t want any more!

GROTH: So what year did you finally get to Ohio State?

SMITH: 1982. I said to myself, “OK, am I really going to work in factories for the rest of my life? No, I think I’ll go back to college.” So I enrolled at OSU, and one of the reasons I went was because sometime in there I got really hooked on Doonesbury. I had decided I wanted to take a shot at newspaper strips. I carried around these three giant treasury-size editions, almost like Bibles. I thought they were the next evolution after Walt Kelly, for me. That was the most popular strip on campus at the time too. So I picked OSU mostly because they had the Lantern, which was a daily newspaper. It had a circulation of 50,000. In my mind, that was exactly the tool I needed to practice my vocation. I had come to the realization that I wasn’t going o be able to go to school to get taught how to do this, so the only thing I could do was find somewhere I could practice. So I took one journalism class in order to be on the paper and I enrolled as a fine arts student, then submitted some Thorn strips to the Lantern and they accepted them, and off I went.

GROTH: So you actually enrolled with the explicit thought of having a strip in the paper.

SMITH: Yes, absolutely. In art school, they explained to me that cartooning was just a complete bastard child of the arts and wasn’t real. That was kind of shocking to an 18-year-old. “Oh my God! You mean I’m not allowed to be a cartoonist? Is that what you’re trying to say to me?” So immediately I began looking for ways to use this system that didn’t accept me in ways I could at least use it. I went to 3-D concept classes, then went home at night and would start my comic strip about 9 o’clock at night, finish by 2 at the latest, and I did that every day for four years.

GROTH: So you’re an incredibly disciplined individual.

SMITH: It sounds that way when you say it … [Laughs.]

GROTH: But in reality you’re lazy!

SMITH: Yeah!

GROTH: But no, that really does sound pretty damn disciplined. To keep that up for four years on a daily basis …

SMITH: It does sound that way. And it is. If you’re going to do it every day, you have to do it every day. But you still go out and party and have a life. You just have to make sure you’re home in time to work on your comics.

GROTH: Your major was fine arts there … Did you actually learn anything about fine art?

SMITH: No, not really. [Laughter.] I was going to try to be nice about it, but no.

Bone Holiday Special (December 1993)

GROTH: Did you learn anything at the university that could be applied to comics?

SMITH: Yes. Not much of it was in any of the curriculum. What I got out of school was that I met other people with similar interests, and that was great. At the university at that time, Lucy Caswell and Milton Caniff were setting up a library based on Caniff’s papers, The Library for Communication and Graphic Arts (now the Cartoon, Graphic and Photographic Arts Research Library). I began to go there early on, and that was an incredible experience for me right at that moment. To be able to put my hands on originals. At that time I was using a #2 pencil and a nib pen on a giant piece of cardboard, and all of a sudden I could see blue lines underneath and inks that were laid down by a brush and they’re doing it with two-ply Bristol instead of the piece of cardboard that I was using. I learned how to network. I learned how to move about in the journalism building, and if I wanted to make sure that the comic strip I had done was going to work right, I went over and got to be friendly with the guy who was running the PMT camera and got him to show me how to shoot it, shrink it down and paste it up. So I learned exactly how thin a line can be before it drops out when you shrink it down. I learned a lot of mechanical aspects of producing a comic strip. So that’s what I got out of it. Getting to know people and learning how to use resources. As far as academics, the only thing I really got out of it was art history, which I couldn’t believe ended up to be a huge turn-on. I was absolutely amazed — this will probably sound really obvious — but studying Western art history is like studying the history of the West … I just couldn’t believe it, I really was interested in it. You take this class and start talking about art in Egypt and Greece, and the societies that supported it (and were supported by it). I thought that was fantastic. But as far as learning how to paint — I learned how to stretch a canvas in high school. Not much new in college: “Here, let’s throw some sticks on the canvas, and if they stick, then we have a piece of art.” That was pretty much what art was back then.

Bone #13 (March 1994)

GROTH: Did they teach you things like draftsmanship?

SMITH: No.

GROTH: Any fundamentals?

SMITH: No, in fact if my memory serves me, that was actually viewed as a weakness. Except for life drawing. That was good. I did learn stuff in that. I mean, when someone’s standing up in front of you naked, you pay attention. So almost by definition, you learn more.

GROTH: It sounds to me like the curriculum was really enslaved to abstraction.

SMITH: That was big at the time. Performance art was big: people sitting on stools yelling things with a slide show going on over them. Actually those are interesting to watch and I’m not putting them down as something … But I did want to learn some draftsmanship skills, and I thought there would be things I’d be taught that I didn’t get taught. I don’t know what they were. All I know is, academically, it was a bust for me.

Continued

©1989 Joost Swarte

The Dutch graphic designer and artist Joost Swarte, a giant of European cartooning since the 1970s and ’80s and a leading exemplar of the “ligne claire” style, is not a very familiar figure in the U.S., where he is known primarily for his work for Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly’s Raw and Little Lit series, European comics re-presented in the American Heavy Metal magazine and frequent illustrations for The New Yorker, including the cover. His design work has been seen on books like R. Crumb’s record cover collection and Odds and Ends, both published in English and French, but first published by Oog & Blik, the major Dutch publisher co-founded (with Hansje Joustra) by Swarte in 1992. In Europe, Swarte is known for his characters Jopo and Dr. Ben and Dee, published in such magazines as Vrij Nederland and Humo. He has been a prolific illustrator and designer of posters for events such as the Holland Animated Film Festival, and his work is often seen on European CD covers. Where Le Corbusier is better known for his architecture than for his paintings, collages and drawings, Swarte has moved in the opposite direction, making a name for himself first as a cartoonist and illustrator and in more recent years branching into architectural work and stained-glass widows, even creating furniture and fonts. He has worked with architects on the design of the Toneelschuur Theater in Haarlem and is a major consultant and contributor to the design of the Herge Museum in Belgium. Swarte founded Stripdagen, a biennial international comics festival in Haarlem, in 1990 and has himself been the subject of many exhibitions, including the World Exposition of Joost Swarte, which has traveled throughout Europe. I had Swarte’s home phone number from my contact in Germany, a comics dealer named ebi wilke. So one Monday morning in February, I pick up the phone and place an international call to a number in the Netherlands — in Haarlem to be precise. I tell the woman who answers, “I’m looking for Joost Swarte,” and after a short pause, a low but confident, friendly, male voice, with a slight Dutch accent announces, “Joost Swarte.” (pronounced Yost Svarta). I come straight to the point: “Can I interview you? Would now be a good time?””

“You mean now, over the phone? “ he asks incredulously.

“Well, yes, I guess so …” So I get started. My first question stumps him and he doesn’t know what to say at first. He has to think about it for a while before he says anything and then he proceeds to answer my question in no less than 741 words. He is very articulate, well versed in art, architecture and the history of industrial design, as well as music and comics. And, I might add, he speaks fluent English.

— David Peniston

Interview conducted over a number of sessions by David Peniston and Kim Thompson.

KIM THOMPSON: One thing I didn’t realize until I saw it on your CV is that you were knighted a few years ago.

JOOST SWARTE: Yes, that’s right.

THOMPSON: Does that mean we have to call you “Sir Joost”?

SWARTE: No, it doesn’t work this way. How does it work? I don’t know exactly, but at a certain moment, you’re invited to come to the town hall, and the mayor, in the name of the Queen of the Netherlands, pins a nice-colored ribbon with a sort of a cross on it on you. And, well, there you are.

THOMPSON: So you didn’t actually get to meet the Queen, she didn’t tap you on the shoulder or anything?

SWARTE: [Laughs.] No, unfortunately not. But you are invited to become a member of the elite of the country, something like that. I have it in a little drawer here in my desk, and only when I pick up my faxes do I see it, and that’s enough.

THOMPSON: Are you the only cartoonist in the Netherlands to be thus honored?

SWARTE: I don’t think so. I think Marten Toonder must have had one. He’s sort of the godfather of comics in Holland. Other than that, I’m not sure.

a set of Swarte stamps from 1984

THOMPSON: What specifically did you receive it for? Was it more for your comics, for the design work, the theater…?

SWARTE: They don’t specify. There’s a committee that selects people who’ve done something that benefits the society they live in. So, initiating a cultural festival — the Stripdagen festival here in Haarlem — I guess that must have been played some part. And having a comic artist who is, how would you say, enlarging his borders, designing a theater, making stained-glass windows, has had a wide field of artistic preoccupations — maybe that helped. But I’m not sure. They don’t communicate the reason why. I think they’re wise not to.

THOMPSON: Your career has been so eclectic, it’s hard to even guess.

SWARTE: Yes, that’s right. There are some artists, in the past, if I look at their career, you get the idea that it is possible to go in a variety of directions. Lyonel Feininger made woodcuts as well as comics and wooden toys, etc., as well as being known as a painter. So he was a great creative man. And you have in Holland, of course, Theo Von Doesburg, who was the founder of De Stijl movement, he also worked on a variety of things. He made stained-glass windows and architecture — he built only one little house, but he worked with architecture and interior decorations and he was also a poet.

THOMPSON: And you have Art Spiegelman composing an opera…

SWARTE: Absolutely. Art is one of the gang! And there’s Mariscal in Barcelona …

THOMPSON: Right, who has designed furniture and all sorts of things. That’s great, of course, but the downside to that, from our perspective as comics readers, is that the more cartoonists expand their horizons in that way, the fewer comics there are. We’re working right now on the complete collection of your comics we’re co-publishing with Oog + Blik next year, and I was surprised to see just how few comics there were.

SWARTE: Well, that’s the comics I made for adults. For children, it was about 400 pages. On the whole, it’s not that little, but I always said to myself, “It’s better to have a small amount of good comics, than a big amount of mediocre comics.”

THOMPSON: [Laughs.] Quality rather than quantity.

SWARTE: Absolutely. And it has also to do with the fact that I tend to go on adventures. And each time you come into a new medium, you have to discuss with people, you have to find out the possibilities — that adventure is part of my life, and I cannot do without it.

HEY KIDS! COMICS!

THOMPSON: I’d like to talk a little about your children’s comics. When you said 400 pages just now, that surprised me, I had no idea it was that much. Much of that must not be in print, then.

SWARTE: That’s right. Only three of the stories were published in book form.

THOMPSON: And that’s “Katoen en Pinbal,” or “Coton et Piston” in French — the characters we published in Measles as Hector and Dexter.

SWARTE: Right. And that’s what’s been published at Casterman Publishers. With the lack of success and the internal problems Casterman was having some years ago, they postponed the two best stories that we had saved to publish last of the five. I had in mind to publish five, and we had an agreement, but they postponed it. And afterwards, I was busy with the theater, and that takes a lot of time. So I just left it for a while. But if the interest is still there, and I can find the time to do the coloring, we’ll publish them as well.

“Katoen en Pinball” ©1997 Casterman

THOMPSON: One would hope that the big book project of your adult comics might re-ignite interest in your children’s comics, because I think they’re wonderful. Now, when you started “Katoen en Pinbal,” you’d only recently started publishing your underground work. How did you go from that to children’s comics? Was this just a job, or was it something you particularly wanted to —

SWARTE: Not really. Underground comics were really my thing — invent your own stories, don’t set yourself any limits: that’s the main thing. But I had to find an income, because underground comics had very low print runs at the time. So at one point a publisher of children’s comics saw my comics for adults and said, “This would be interesting, something like this but for children.” He thought people’s taste in comics was changing, and wanted to experiment by asking me to do children’s comics. After the first meeting, I never thought it was going to happen, but I made, as I’d proposed, 10 short scripts of one page, so I drew two, and I awaited an answer, and it was positive. From the beginning, I thought, “Well, it wasn’t my main goal to make comics for children, but why discriminate against children?” I mean, they have the right to quality as well as adults do. [Laughs.] It was fun to do.

THOMPSON: How many albums’ worth did you actually complete?

SWARTE: Three albums were published, but there were nine stories; on one of them I wrote the script, and I had an assistant make the drawings; he was so very slow that he didn’t end up finishing the whole 40 or 44 pages, and I think his story ended up at page 28. [Thompson laughs.] But the other ones were 40 or 44 pages.

THOMPSON: Do you think that doing these stories taught you anything in terms of your later comics work, just the restrictions, or simply on the technical level?

SWARTE: No, I don’t think so. Just that you have to make your deadline each week.

THOMPSON: That’s a valuable lesson. [Laughs.]

SWARTE: Absolutely, and if you’re not on time, then a week later, it’s not possible to get it colored, and another week later, there’s just going to be a big white space in the magazine. So it taught me that.

THOMPSON: Do you approach your work for kids — such as your Little Lit story or your early “Katoen en Pinbal” — differently from your other work?

SWARTE: Not really. I won’t use complicated words for kids, or refer to politics or sex as I do for adults. But I stay with my liberal anarchistic way of thinking.

RAW DAYS

THOMPSON: You’re probably best known in the U. S., even now, for your contributions to Raw in the 1980s and 1990s. As an underground cartoonist and reader, I assume you were familiar with Art’s work even before he contacted you about Raw…

SWARTE: Of course, I knew his work. I don’t remember exactly where I first saw it, it could have been in Bijou Funnies, but I’m not sure. And then came Arcade magazine. I was a fan of Art’s work and also of Zippy the Pinhead and Bill Griffith…

Anyway, before Art even started to work on Maus, he visited Amsterdam with his new wife, Françoise Mouly, and he phoned me to ask if we could have a meeting. He would propose to me at that meeting, wouldn’t it be nice if we could publish some of your works in our new magazine, Raw? And we made an appointment at an Amsterdam café, and there on the table he placed two pots of ink, one for him and one for me. At that period, I had a portrait of myself, drinking the ink, dipping my pen in the beer. And Art had, of course, his book Breakdowns, with himself drinking the ink on the cover, so he thought it would be a good opening for our conversation. From the beginning on, we had a very good relationship.

©1980 Joost Swarte

THOMPSON: Most of the work that appeared in Raw was reprinting material from your Dutch undergrounds, although you did some new things, including the famous cover image for Raw #2, right?

SWARTE: Yes, that was done especially for Raw. There was also a story, “Sweet,” that was in Volume 2 #2, I believe. And something later on too, I’m not sure.

THOMPSON: What do you think of Raw as a magazine?

SWARTE: Great. It was a sort of a showcase of everything that was happening in the world, everything of interest.

THOMPSON: Did you enjoy working for it?

SWARTE: Working for Raw was a fantastic experience. I was given all the room I needed. The comment was always intelligent. I felt at home in what I now consider one of the most important periods in my career.

THOMPSON: It was really the first real international magazine to combine all these different and yet related strains of innovative comics of the late ’70s and early ’80s.

SWARTE: And also with a good eye for what had happened in the past. If I remember correctly, there was the article on Henry Darger: that was something that Art gave me. I don’t know if it had been published before or not, but it opened many people’s eyes to this obscure artist. And Fletcher Hanks too, no?

THOMPSON: Yes, they printed a Fletcher Hanks story in RAW. Art and Françoise have very wide-ranging, eclectic and, I think, excellent taste.

SWARTE: Yeah.

THOMPSON: And of course, your relationship continues to this day, with your contributions to Little Lit — and you still work with Françoise on The New Yorker, don’t you?

SWARTE: Not directly. Françoise works on the covers, mostly. I don’t know exactly how it’s divided there, but I work most of the time with Chris Curry.

“The Last Word in Fashion,” a comic collected in Read Yourself Raw ©1975 Joost Swarte

COLORFUL CHARACTERS

THOMPSON: What is the origin of your Jopo de Pojo character? What did you hope to accomplish with him?

SWARTE: I think I created him in 1972, together with a bunch of characters: Het Trio Interessant. They were sort of anarchist type characters, like the Marx brothers. There was one with a tin can on his head like Happy Hooligan — a black Tintin — and a rock-and-roll hairdo with an oversized coat. I pressed all their physical characteristics in their head, so that they would stay expressive as a close-up. Jopo de Pojo was also composed from elements of archetypal comic characters.

Consider this an homage to my favorite characters. His golf- trousers come from Tintin. The badge on his jacket is the symbol from the title of the Krazy Kat comics. His head is inspired by old Disney bug characters, and a sort of early Felix the Cat. As I am a music lover I included elements of a musical note in his head. A (shiny) black ball as his head, and a hairdo like the flag. Jopo the Pojo inherited my love and ambition to be a rhythm-and-blues musician — all my doubts and my feelings of not being connected. I never thought I would accomplish anything with him, or with any of my comic characters. My characters help me to express my thoughts, and to make friends with similar ideas.

Collected in Culture and Technique ©1990 Joost Swarte

DAVID PENISTON: How do you color your drawings? Do you use watercolor?

SWARTE: Yes, mainly.

PENISTON: Or gouache?

SWARTE: No, not gouache. When I started, I did it with Pantone dots.

PENISTON: Oh yeah. You cut out the color and pasted it on.

SWARTE: Yes. Though not the color, I didn’t cut out a color. I cut out the percentages in black dots. So I made color separations. And that still helps me. When I now sit beside a technician with a computer I say, “I want a color that’s composed of a 20-percent yellow and of a 10-percent cyan and of a six-percent magenta.” And then we have an off-white newspaper color. And that’s great to do. I mean, they always are astonished that you know which percentages gives what color. But it helped me in that way, but also if I do it with watercolors, with my color inks. I have six pots of color — red, magenta, which is sort of a pink, and then a turquoise blue, and a marine blue, and two different yellows — and I can combine them to whatever color I like. That all comes from these techniques that I learned from doing the separations.

PENISTON: And you don’t have to do separations any more.

SWARTE: No, no. Now we have such great scanners. The first comic that I did, I had made prints, one-time prints on a very solid paper with aluminum in it to avoid shrinkage under the influence of watercolor. The black line of your drawing was on a line film, and the color on this solid sheet was scanned and was printed in color. In these techniques you could come up with a very neat black line. And it was a traditional way of inking or coloring comics. But now you can color it on the original, and you put it on the scanner. If the scanner scans fine enough, you’ll have a very nice black line. So you don’t have to worry about these problems any more. And on your screen, you can make corrections. That’s great. It makes it a lot easier.

PENISTON: So your work now is more in color these days.

SWARTE: Well, depending. I still love just black and white What I often do, when I’m asked to do a poster design, I know that the four-color printing is sort of a, it’s a choice for the poor colors. Because it’s always printed in yellow, cyan, magenta, and black. And the combinations … You cannot make a beautiful turquoise with it. If you combine turquoise, it seems to be nice, but if you compare it to the real stuff, it’s almost gray. So if you want good coloring on a poster — a very, very violent color — then you have to start with other pigments. You have to combine them and come up with the right inks. And I often design posters that don’t start with the four-color printing. But I choose a palette with four different, sharp colors, and I use the combinations of it. That’s a technique that I also used for the poster that I designed together with Charles Burns. There is a black on it. But what I did for that poster is that I decided to color the drawing of Charles’ with three different colors, and not with the four-color idea. And the black in the poster would be — the black in his drawing — would be a combination of the three. So the black in his drawing isn’t totally black. It’s a sort of a dark brownish grayish black. Then what I could do is around it print a matte black ink, and then you get the effect that is similar to what you see in a cinema. A black on a projected screen is not the same black as the surrounding. The surrounding is blacker than the black on the screen. You see it also with television. And that gives a sort of cinema appeal to the poster.

A WEALTH OF INFLUENCES

PENISTON: Can you name a few of your favorite artists or designers that you admire or who have had an influence on your artwork?

SWARTE: Well, when I was still studying industrial design, I learned about artists that worked for the De Stijl movement and the Bauhaus movement.

PENISTON: Like Gerrit Rietveld?

SWARTE: Yes, exactly. And I was very much interested in it because they seemed to work in the artistic field without making a choice on a medium. Rietveld started out as a furniture designer, as a carpenter, and he developed his interest in this field and just enlarged his disciplines. Besides him, there was the Dutch artist Theo Van Doesburg, the leader of the De Stijl movement, and he started within the funny borders of the Dada movement, which had an idealistic side. That is to say that Dada was a reaction to what happened in the First World War and they were artists that didn’t understand that culture, although everybody was always proud of European culture. But even within this culture it was still possible to have a disastrous war like the First World War and they reacted with their Dada movement. Now, I don’t know exactly if the war was the main goal, the impetus for it, or maybe the culture was already ready for a movement like Dada, but they made fun of whatever they liked to make fun of so it was sort of a ‘nothing is sacred’ movement.

PENISTON: Anti-Art.

SWARTE: Yes.

PENISTON: Anti-everything.

SWARTE: Not necessarily “anti-everything” because they had their own things they liked and wanted to do but nothing was sacred, which means also that they almost worshiped individuality so they gave freedom to the artists to do whatever they liked. Now if you at that period had said, “I like to make beautiful paintings,” that wouldn’t be considered as very Dada. But the reaction of the whole European culture, well, it was fun in a way and it made me also think. What made a great impression on me as a youth was the Provo movement in Amsterdam. That was young anarchists that made fun of the police, etc., and I thought it was very funny.

PENISTON: They were against the police?

SWARTE: Yeah, they made fun of the government, the local government, they made fun of the police. They didn’t care.

PENISTON: So, they were anti-establishment?

SWARTE: Absolutely. And that came about the same time when I think rock ’n’ roll was already on its way with pop music and the youngsters letting their hair grow against the will of their parents.

PENISTON: In the early ’60s?

SWARTE: Yes, so all these movements were going on and it separated the youth culture from the official culture.

“Good Taste” a cover for Humo. ©1991 Joost Swarte

PENISTON: The generation gap?

SWARTE: Yes, exactly. So that made a great impression on me and I think my interest in Dada came also from what was happening in society at that time. But at the art school — it wasn’t really an art school — when I was 18 years old, after a disastrous high-school period where I didn’t work very much, I was sent to, or chose to go to, a school of industrial design and that grabbed a lot of my interest. I could make nice drawings and had some skills in this field and, besides that, I was interested in technique and technical things. So it was a proper education for me and when I was in this art school, we visited the Van Abbe Museum and saw things from the Bauhaus and the De Stijl period, and at the same time, I saw also pop artists. Many of the American pop-art artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol were shown in this museum. There was a huge show, I think in 1966 in Stockholm, of Andy Warhol and the same exhibition came to Eindhoven, the town where my academy was, where I was studying Industrial Design. It was such a relief to see that, what I always liked in the supermarkets, which was packages lined up in a row and the idea that if you had one ugly package, you have a totally different visual …

PENISTON: Concept?

SWARTE: Yes. Now there was an artist who accepted package design to show them in a museum but, on the other hand, what my reaction was was if packages from the supermarket are now in a museum, why not consider the supermarkets themselves a museum? So I went to the supermarket with a set of different eyes and I looked at all the things around me and I saw them with a different view, so this was a very influential period in my life.

PENISTON: An eye-opening experience?

SWARTE: Yes, absolutely. And parallel to this in all sorts of magazines and underground magazines that I read I saw the work of, first of all, Willem, a Dutch artist who lived in Paris. That is to say he went to Paris in 1968, but I had read his work before, when he was still living in the Netherlands. That was also quite influential, and the comic stories which I liked as a child, now grew up with my generation, and my generation didn’t want to leave the comics stories in the children’s room and it developed a new field. So after Willem, I saw for the first time the Krazy Kat stories that were reprinted in Holland in a magazine, in a sort of anti-establishment underground magazine. They reprinted Krazy Kat. That was about 1965, I guess it was, and I thought it was absolutely fantastic. And then came the underground movement from the United States like Robert Crumb, and I remember also that I liked very much Skip Williamson at the time, because he had two things: On one hand, he had the freedom of the underground press and, on the other hand, he made drawings very meticulously. That appealed to me as a lover of the De Stijl movement, so that developed continuously. I mean, every time there were new artists coming from the United States that I liked very much, I choose another certain moment. I continued to make drawings while I was studying industrial design —

PENISTON: Kind of on the side? You were making cartoons and comics?

SWARTE: Yes, I decided to make comics and luckily enough I was quite successful from the start. That is to say, I had the possibilities to publish them, which isn’t the same as being financially independent from it. I mean, you cannot earn money with it in the beginning but I had fun making it and people like to read it. That’s the important artists for me but, as I developed my interest in comics as well as fine arts and also architectural design, it was a broad landscape of people that I liked and I learned about photographers like Martin Munkacsi. He was a Hungarian photographer who went to New York and made photos for, I think it was, Vogue magazine. He introduced movement in fashion photography and I liked him very much and Rietveld of course, the Dutch architect, he was very important to me.

PENISTON: I can see that. He’s very clean-line, isn’t he?

SWARTE: Yeah, that’s right, and he’s very sober in surfaces.

PENISTON: And also very colorful.

SWARTE: Yes. And colorful in a way but also a minor thing of these movements was that they restricted their means. For instance, Mondrian, who wasn’t one of my real favorites but I liked him as an artist and from what I read about him and his life, but he restricted too much. He said, “I do just horizontal and vertical because that’s my ideal,” and he had a whole theory around it.

PENISTON: So he was too minimal?

SWARTE: Yes, if you can make fun with your own work then it’s OK, but if you’re going to believe in it, it becomes almost religious and —

PENISTON: It kind of was with him, wasn’t it?

SWARTE: Yes, I guess, but that’s too much for me. I [enjoy] the freedom. You can choose whatever you like; that’s the fun.

PENISTON: Now when did R. Crumb show up in Europe? He started in San Francisco in the 1960s. Did they have Zap Comix in Holland at that time?

SWARTE: Yes. That was very important in Holland and, even before Zap Comix, I already saw or heard of him before. I don’t know, was Zap earlier than Snatch?

PENISTON: About the same time. Zap was the one that made him famous. Snatch and all those other underground, X-rated, adult comics were even more underground than Zap.

SWARTE: Yeah, that was important in Holland. There were people interested in comics and, yeah, there were good comics shops and the first in the world was in Amsterdam: Lambiek’s comics shop. Have you ever seen their website?

PENISTON: Yes I have: It’s huge.

SWARTE: Thousands and thousands of biographies on it.

PENISTON: You have many more comic bookstores and shops and things like that than we do over here.

SWARTE: Well, right. That’s right. In France it is —

PENISTON: Especially in Paris.

SWARTE: But in France and in Belgium and also in Haarlem, they have a lot of comic shops. Down here in Haarlem, which is a town of 150,000 inhabitants, I think there are three comic shops, really specialized comic shops.

PENISTON: Really?

SWARTE: And I think that’s a lot.

A card celebrating the 10-year anniversary of Het Raadsel, a comic shop in Amsterdam. ©1994 Joost Swarte

PENISTON: I can see why you like Rietveld as far as clean line. How about Hergé?

SWARTE: Yeah, of course, of course. He was a major influence. The fun was that at a certain time, I wasn’t too much satisfied with my own drawing skills, my cartoon skills. In the underground, the social comment and the content was the main thing and there were some good artists like R. Crumb but there were also artists who preferred the content to good drawing. I had a very good friendship then with the artist Evert Geradts; he was the artist who created Tante Leny Presenteert [Aunt Leny Presents], which was a Dutch underground comic. I, myself, had my own underground magazine, which was Modern Papier, and from time to time we joined together and he had good contacts with people from the United States and I had more contact with people in Europe. That is to say, to other artists and we exchanged books and we could also always show each other the new acquaintances and he showed me great, great books like the American artist Albert Hurter. I don’t know if you ever heard of him. Do you know who he is?

PENISTON: No, I don’t think I know his work.

SWARTE: Hurter worked for the Disney Studio. He was hired to come up with ideas. There was a fantastic book that I saw at that time with [his] ideas for the toys in the toyshop of Gepetto of the Pinocchio movie from Walt Disney.

PENISTON: So, he created some of those crazy toys in that woodshop?

SWARTE: That’s right. If you see some of the clocks and the crazy things [in the shop], those were invented by Albert Hurter. So that was somebody that you never learned about. I mean, nobody knew it, but I learned it at Evert Geradts’ house and he came also with work by … there was a fantastic reprint by Dover Comics by an American artist Milt Gross, which was called He Done Her Wrong. And it appeared in different titles, I guess, and that was a story, very quickly drawn but absolutely dynamic. That was fantastic. He did a story with no words, and there was only one balloon where the main character in the story needed to tell something that he saw in the past. But how do you tell — no words means always present time that’s happening and that’s evolving into something else. But you follow the timeline. But at a certain moment you can, if you want to, tell something from the past. And he solved the problem by a text balloon. And in the balloon he drew an eye and he drew a saw, which phonetically says “I saw.” [Laughs.] He solved it that way. This sort of freedom that this artist took, this Milt Gross, that was fantastic. Fantastic. That was a great story. Sort of a love story which was so efficient and lively. It was so funny. I mean all these things. From my side, I found books from artists like John Held. What I know from him is he made, in the ’30s, illustrations and covers for a magazine and he made woodcuts and road maps, maps of the United States and he was a great, great artist. Very, very great, nice art-deco style things that he made.

PENISTON: He is an old-time illustrator, even before Hergé’s time.

SWARTE: Yeah, I think he worked in Esquire.

PENISTON: Yeah, Esquire, Time and Life magazine, and I think even Vogue.

SWARTE: That’s right, Vogue too.

PENISTON: And he has a great style of illustration that’s very similar to yours.

SWARTE: Yeah, yeah, he was an influence, no doubt. I found these books on these artists always in Amsterdam. There was an underground comic shop called Real Free Press, and they were interested also in illustration, etc., and a lot of these artists I discovered through books that I bought at this shop.

PENISTON: When you were young.

SWARTE: Not really, I mean, I was about 20 … maybe 25 or something, or 22 or something, I don’t remember exactly. But this John Held Jr., he was great. I mean the poses of his figures and his stylish, elegant way of making his illustrations. And then he also did comics. No, I loved it.

PENISTON: Yeah, his illustrations are very comical. And his caricatures that he draws remind me a lot of yours, the way he draws the nose and the round face.

SWARTE: The round head, yeah.

PENISTON: Like Hergé does with Tintin.

SWARTE: Yeah, the older Tintins you see it, too. And I also bought once a book he did on “Frankie and Johnny,” this song, illustrated in woodcuts. It was great. And he made maps. Yeah, whole countries, etc. But beautiful, beautiful. How do you say, a cartographer?

PENISTON: Yeah. A cartographer. So you first saw his stuff when you were in your 20s, in this bookstore?

SWARTE: I guess so, yes.

PENISTON: Who else did you see in this bookstore?

SWARTE: Of course, there was the old Popeye by Segar. That’s great stuff. And there was also this great big character, sort of a spooky character with a fur coat on and a head as small as a cat, with long arms. I don’t remember the name. [Alice the Goon.] And at a certain moment I think, wasn’t it Fantagraphics that brought out a complete series of Popeye by Segar? I subscribed to this series, so I could have them all. Another one that I loved a lot was Roy Crane. Roy Crane made fantastic adventure stories of Captain Easy. It was Wash Tubbs at first, and then it changed to Captain Easy. I even once wrote a little article about his work, and he could fantastically draw water. That was a specialty of his. But it was very adventurous and moving. It was like a film. Hergé, that was influenced by film, and that’s also true of Roy Crane. He was fantastic. And Plastic Man was popular, of course. I loved the work of Plastic Man. And then I liked Rube Goldberg a lot, wth all his crazy machines. In the early years of my career, I did a series definitely inspired by the Foolish Questions of Rube Goldberg. He had a series, Foolish Questions.

PENISTON: Who would you then say was the biggest influence on your work?

SWARTE: Well, I think it started with the underground comics. First of all the underground comics in Holland. We have an artist here called Willem. He was quite important. And of course when we discovered the American underground, the Zap comics and Robert Crumb were very important. Mainly for also telling young artists that you can have whatever freedom you want. I mean, that’s an important thing to know, and from that moment on you do what you want. In the graphic field of comics I was inspired by Will Eisner’s Spirit. If I see these title pages, the constructions in his title pages, and what he does with the lettering, that was very interesting. And then another thing is, I love the older comics like Little Nemo and Lyonel Feininger. And I was interested also, because I studied industrial design, so in my study time I learned also about the Dada people in Holland and Germany, and Bauhaus architecture and design world, in which there are almost no borders. I mean, people do whatever they like. Then you have the older artists like Tatlin. They designed their own clothes, they do architecture, they do flying machines, they do painting, they do everything. I mean, it was always nice to know that if you want to do different things, that you’re not standing alone. That somebody else did it, and they survived. I loved the work of Frederick Burr Opper. Happy Hooligan. This loony, loony character with a tin can on his head. I mean, that’s already something, that you can recognize him by this little tin can. That’s fun.

PENISTON: Reminds me of Krazy Kat and Ignatz.

Jooste Swarte’s cover for the “Real Press” Krazy Kat reprint ©1974 Jooste Swarte & Real Press

SWARTE: Of course, Krazy Kat is great. And I learned also about Bringing up Father that I liked a lot, which of course, in a graphic way, was an influence on me. But Krazy Kat was less traditional and more an open-minded thing. No, that was great, and this book shop that I talked to you about, Real Free Press, they also published books. And I did book covers for them. So the first thing they asked me to make was a book cover on a book about Gustave Verbeek. He was the man from the Incredible Upside-downs. So I did a book cover for that one, and then they come up with the idea to do Krazy Kat books, and they did a Bringing up Father book, and a Percy Crosby book, Skippy. I did the covers for all these books. And even for Krazy Kat, I was crazy enough that — normally you should take beautiful art by George Herriman and compose a typographical thing around it, and you have a good cover. But at that time I earned so little money that the cost for a print of a George Herriman drawing seemed to me more of a problem than to make a drawing myself in the George Herriman style. So I decided to make covers and make drawings in George Herriman’s style. And people didn’t even recognize it, that it wasn’t a real George Herriman, but it was a Joost Swarte. But I didn’t sign it George Herriman. I mean it said “George Herriman Krazy Kat in the title but the drawings were always signed “JS.” If you know it, maybe you can see it now. But at that time I couldn’t even see it myself. It was a sort of a pastiche. Let’s call it a little homage. But it was fun to do, and I learned a lot about another way of drawing.

PENISTON: Yeah, so you experiment with different styles.

SWARTE: Yes, in the beginning I really did. You do until you find the costume that fits you, in which you can express the way you want to express yourself. If you want to show architectural designs, then probably a neat line works better than the George Herriman thing. But I still admire his work. I mean, it’s great.

PENISTON: What did you like about Verbeek’s work? I’m not that familiar with him…

SWARTE: I was very much impressed by the idea that if you turn around the page you have an extra page. You have not six images, you have 12 images. You just have to turn them around.

From Prime Cuts #7 1988 Jooste Swarte

PENISTON: It reads a different way if you turn it upside down?

SWARTE: Sure, and the story continues. And then influenced by this Gustave Verbeek, I tried to make one page myself in this manner. And I did, and I published it in Tante Leny Presenteert, in the underground magazine, but for this publication by Real Free Press I just did the cover. In that case I used an original drawing by Gustave Verbeek and I composed my lettering around it.

HANGING WITH HERGE

PENISTON: What about comics when you were a kid? Or book illustrators? Who do you remember?

SWARTE: The first things that I saw when I was a kid was probably Mickey Mouse. The old Disney stuff. And I remember when I was a child — I must’ve been about four or five years old — that I had scissors with me, and I cut all the characters from the pages and composed them on the floor. That was my first memory with comics. And then later on there was a Belgian comic called Suske en Wiske, in French it’s Bob et Bobette, and these are quite popular. [Various English language editions have given the characters different names: Bob and Bobette, Spike and Suzy and Willy and Wanda.] And later on the more expensive comics, the hardbound books by Hergé, came in, and that was great stuff. I remember as a kid I found it fantastic, because he traveled around the world and took you along with him. You came in to all sort of different cultures. That was very good.

PENISTON: So you learned a lot from reading Tintin, too.

SWARTE: Yeah, absolutely.

PENISTON: Do you have a favorite Tintin book?

SWARTE: The Blue Lotus is one of my favorites. That’s great because that was the first book that he did on another culture where he did very serious research.

PENISTON: The Chinese culture, with the opium dens and all that.

SWARTE: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. That was a very nice book. But there are more. It was at a time, in a period of the 20th century where not everybody could go to the cinema, because it’s quite expensive. Hergé wanted to make sort of a cinema for children. So he was very much influenced by cinematographic laws. Where do you place your camera? Is the hero always coming from the left? What’s the relation between foreground and background? All sorts of terms that he used come from cinema. How do you frame your pictures? I mean, he was a master at framing pictures.

©1979 Joost Swarte

PENISTON: Absolutely. The composition and the amount of detail and research that he undertook to produce those.

SWARTE: Yeah, that was great. He had great influence while I was a kid, but later also you can learn some tricks of the trade by properly reading the Tintin books. Hergé is somebody like Alfred Hitchcock is in cinema. If you want to know how to do it, just go to an Alfred Hitchcock film and he’ll teach you how to do it.

PENISTON: In your work it seems like you do a lot of research also. You pay a lot of attention to detail.

SWARTE: Yeah, I do pay some attention to detail, but mostly I design the details myself. — in the early comics that I did, the ones that were published in America in Heavy Metal, the comics that were published in my book Modern Art. At that time, I was still interested in showing not only how to draw a car, but also that people can recognize the brand of the car. But later on, I changed to designing cars myself. Because I had fun inventing something. So that made a difference. Of course, I do some research, but more so I don’t make any mistakes, but not that I make my drawings after the research. Just that I find out myself what I want to do, and then I search if I made any mistakes.

PENISTON: So you draw a lot from your imagination and your fantasies.

SWARTE: Yeah, that’s right. And then you also have your freedom to organize the backgrounds of a drawing in function of the storytelling, and not in function of recognition. That people can recognize a certain building is less important than they feel that the building is there and they understand your storytelling.

PENISTON: So it’s your composition, and you use your creative license to alter that to fit the story you’re telling, and therefore you can be more creative and invent things.

SWARTE: I feel more free this way, yeah.

PENISTON: Have you seen the biography of Hergé by Van Opstal?

SWARTE: Yes, sure I have.

PENISTON: Is that available only in Dutch?

SWARTE: It’s available in two languages, Dutch and French. The French edition was published by a Belgian publisher called LeFranc.

PENISTON: It’s really beautiful.

SWARTE: It’s incredible. And he did a lot of research without searching in the studios, where there’s a lot of work. Now that I’m adviser for the Hergé Foundation for the new museum, I know that there is even a lot more in there, in their files, than what was published in that book.

PENISTON: You mean unpublished works by Hergé?

SWARTE: Yeah. For instance, sketch concepts for calendars, and you see 12 quickly made drawings in color and that were never published. Many, many things. Many documents. It’s really involved.

PENISTON: Wow. You know Van Opstal?

SWARTE: I knew him. That is to say, I knew him from the time that I started as an underground artist. He was always interested in cartooning or the underground movement and wrote articles about it time to time. At that time, he was a friend of Evert Geradts and Aart Clerkx. I think I learned of him through Evert Geradts and I lost [track of] him about 10 years ago and then suddenly he came up with this Hergé book that he made and it was a fantastic work that he’s done. Later on, I was the initiator of the comics festival here in Haarlem —

PENISTON: The Stripdagen?

SWARTE: Yes, and at a certain moment we had a goal to have also a comic center here in Haarlem, and he [Van Opstal] wanted to be the first director of the center. So we invited him and he started working on it. But that’s where the problems came and after one year of work, trying to have this center resurrected, we said, “Probably that this is not the right combination. I mean, this won’t work, so better that we stop this effort.”

PENISTON: I see.

SWARTE: I could talk [to you about] that in detail if you want but it’s quite complicated. So from that time on, I don’t know what is happening with him and, as he worked, he was used to working very individually. He worked on this Hergé book for more than, I guess it was about 12 years without anybody knowing about it. There were only one or two friends that he involved in the project and, when it was published, it was a really big, big surprise and it took a lot of attention. I hear very, very little from him, so probably he is working on a new secret project.

PENISTON: Do you remember the first time you ever saw Tintin or works from Hergé?

SWARTE: Oh yes; that was during my childhood. That was when I was about six, I guess, or seven years old, and at that time, all the Dutch translations of the books came to Holland. It made a real big impression on me. Later, in the underground times, the style of drawing seemed not always to be the main goal of the artists, and I thought my own work lacked some of the magic that some of the artists had for me, and especially the work of Hergé. The characters seemed to come alive and now I know that it probably had something to do with his cinematographic approach to comics. Hergé really had an ambition of being a film director, and if you see what camera angles he chooses, how effectively he tells his stories, you can just judge it by his drawings and it works. But in the beginning, I thought it had to do something with the style of drawing. I tried to work in his style just to see if my own work could get the magic that I considered his work always to have, but I found out that the style of working is not the same as the magic. Storytelling needs to be the main thing, although the proper style helps. It’s like a language: If you have language, it’s a duet with the storyteller and the listener and you have certain regulations, certain words mean something, and if you use them in a proper way, you can really have your story come across. I think I learned that from Hergé; it’s not only the drawing. If you have that proper language, then comes the storytelling.

From Measles #6 ©2000 Jooste Swarte

PENISTON: Did you ever meet Hergé?

SWARTE: Yes, I met him twice. I was invited in 1975 by the Rotterdam Art Foundation. They were quite progressive at the time and they invited me to participate in an exhibition on Hergé. I didn’t have too much confidence in this field because I really wasn’t what they call a “Tintin-ologist.” I loved his work and I had all his books, but I didn’t know everything. So I invited with me two other guys who were specialists and, with a team of this art foundation — they had a gallery, a huge gallery in the center of Rotterdam — we worked on this Tintin exhibition and that was a very nice experience working together. For that reason, we visited him two times in his studio: one time to discuss what we should show in this gallery and the second time to write a story about him in a magazine. So, [I visited him] as a journalist.

PENISTON: What was he like? A nice man?

SWARTE: He was a nice man. He was willing to talk about his work. It was about nine years before he died and his career was almost over. He was still working on one book, but it took years and years, and he told us about what he was working on then and what he said to the press and whatnot. But I think with us he felt more open, although he didn’t say everything; he knew what was good for his company and what was less good for his company.

PENISTON: So he was a little guarded?

SWARTE: I guess so. The first time that he was more open was in the book of Numa Sadoul. He was a young French journalist and he visited Hergé and then Hergé started to talk about his depressive periods, also about how he left his first wife for one of his assistants.

PENISTON: He had a nervous breakdown, didn’t he?

SWARTE: Absolutely. And those stories he told for the first time, as far as I know, to Numa Sadoul. And it was about at that period that we also visited him so he already lifted some files from his past and, yeah, he wasn’t too shy about it. So we had a very nice contact and he took all the time possible; if we came, for instance, at about two o’clock in the afternoon we could easily sit there for four hours talking to him, without him telling us to leave. And it was all in his studio and his main assistant, Bob De Moor, came to sit beside him and we laughed about things. I don’t know if I can find the cassettes that I took at that time, but they even started singing together, some Frank Sinatra [laughs].

PENISTON: So he was guarded, but still chatty?

SWARTE: Yeah, that’s right.

PENISTON: What was it like working on the Hergé Museum? Did you enjoy working on that?

SWARTE: Yes, I was asked by the director, Nick Rodwell, who was the second husband of the widow of Hergé. We worked together before on the huge Tintin exhibition in Haarlem during the comic festival. That was on the Blue Lotus book; there were 34 originals shown and a lot of publications from that period and sketches in the museum here in Haarlem.

PENISTON: Was that the show you were also included in?

SWARTE: No, I wasn’t included in it; I was involved in the organization. And then I got to know the director, Nick Rodwell, and some years ago he asked me, why not do something for the new Tintin museum? We need a scenario for the museum; we have 80 percent of Hergé’s work, the originals, and we have a lot of publications, etc., and his widow decided it would be good to have a Hergé museum. I formed a group with two other people: Philippe Goddin, the man who makes these huge catalogs of his works [Chronologie d’une Oeuvre] —

PENISTON: You mean a catalogue raisonné?

SWARTE: Absolutely, that’s the right word. He was part of the group and, later on, also Thierry Groensteen; he was director the comics museum in Angoulême in France. So we had a nice group; me more as a designer with a designing point of view and Thierry Groensteen with his museum background and then Philippe Goddin who knew everything about the collection of Hergé. So we came up with the report of what we thought … there was a certain total square meters given but for the rest, how to divide it and how many rooms and what to show in these different rooms, that was up to us. And we presented our report about one year or one year and a half ago, to the Fondation Hergé and they accepted our idea. The architect is a French architect, Christian Deportzamparc; he is a quite famous, Pritzker Prize-winning architect. He is designing now the museum with our scenario, and I continue to design the permanent exhibition of Hergé’s work in the museum.

PENISTON: So the museum hasn’t opened yet?

SWARTE: No, I think it will be opened in about 2009. But, as you know, with all building processes you never know exactly when they will be finished [laughs].

PENISTON: So you worked on the interior design. Did you help out with the catalogue raisonné?

SWARTE: No, I didn’t. On one end it’s nice to work on such things and it’s nice to see in the files — what’s all there about Hergé — but if I spend too much time on such research, I forget my own work. You have to make choices in life [laughs].

PENISTON: Why isn’t it being built in his hometown of Brussels?

SWARTE: Well, the first idea was to raise this museum in Brussels, but the negotiations with the municipality of Brussels … they didn’t want to make an extra effort to make it happen. If a community gets an offer and the museum doesn’t ask for money or the exploitation of the museum and, on the other hand, will bring a lot of visitors per year to the city, then the city could do something extra; they could come up with a proper site for such a museum and, in that field, there were always negotiations. If they would have seen the value of it and treated the Hergé foundation normally in such a case, it probably would have been in Brussels. But at about the time when negotiations with Brussels didn’t go in a positive way, then suddenly there was a small village not far from Brussels — about 20 kilometers from Brussels — which is called Louvain-la-Neuve, that was a newly built city, in the early ’70s, with a university and almost everything around this new university. And they needed there a new energy to develop the city again and this cultural thing that could help them. So they were more than welcoming to get a beautiful site in this village to raise the museum.

PENISTON: So they were happy with the project and the proposal?

SWARTE: Oh yes, this village or town — I don’t know exactly how you’d describe it — they were very happy with the idea, they welcomed the Hergé museum. I think they’re wise. On the other hand, from the point of view of the Hergé museum, if people come to a museum in the city, you do more museums in one day; if you go to a museum in a village, you stay as long at the museum as you want [laughs]. So they can probably have economic profit from that.

PENISTON: And of course they’re going to spend the night and go out to restaurants and stay in hotels.

SWARTE: Well, maybe so, although 20 kilometers from Brussels isn’t that much. But at least if you go to the Hergé musuem and you take lunch there and you buy some books in the museum and often, in a bookshop in Brussels, that’s good for the exploitation of the museum. So I guess it’s an easy work there.

TONEELSCHUUR THEATER

THOMPSON: Now the Hergé Museum is actually your second big architectural project, after the Toneelschuur Theater. How did that come about? I have to assume it was something you enjoyed.

SWARTE: It was a great experience; I mean, if you’re talking about an adventure, this is really a great one. It all started with a theater — Toneelschuur was sort of an avant-garde theater here in town. They started as squatters in an old building, and afterwards it went official and they received subsidies from the town. The old building was designed for 20,000 visitors a year, so when they began receiving 40,000 visitors a year, they thought, “Wouldn’t it be good to have another building?”

In discussion with the city council, they came to the conclusion that a new building was necessary, and so money was set aside by the council, as well as by the province of North Holland, as well as the state government. They had an amount of money reserved, but it wasn’t enough to make the building. Now, at that time, the politicians here in Haarlem had other things to do, and it wasn’t the first action on the list any more. So the Toneelschuur Theater formed a group of expert advisors, and they came with the idea, “Instead of waiting until the city council comes up with the extra money, why not take the lead in this play, and we start making the building? We don’t have any money to hire an architect to do a sketch version of a new building, but we have a program for the new building, we know what side it would be on, and we have worked for years with an artist who knows our work very, very well, and who is extremely interested in architecture.” So that’s why they asked me. I advised them, in this process, to do it in steps, and at each step, I had a back door to sneak out. [Thompson laughs.] But in fact, after the first night, I knew I would never walk away from this.

So, I thought of the most important thing: How can you bring a truck with a theater set into the smallest area of an old medieval town? That was the first thing: If I could find a solution for that, that rest would be peanuts. I found a solution the first day, the first evening, and then I didn’t trust myself, so I thought of different solutions, but the first one was the best, and after one week, I phoned and said, “I need a meeting.” So I just continued with the work.

The first year, I developed the new building, I made floor plans for it, I made sketches, I made four silkscreens that would present the building. I proposed to make a portfolio that would help them press the city council into accepting the plan; I thought that would be a fantastic way to present the project, and it could also help later to ask certain industries for money to get it financed. If you have a good presentation, it helps. After I did the floor plans, it was calculated, and the building price seemed to be very reasonable, so I made together with the theater an audio-visual presentation in the theater for the politicians in town, then we waited for one year.

A journalist came to me and said, “What did I hear? Did you, a comic artist, design the new theater?”

And I said, “Yes, I did. But I ask you one thing, don’t publish.” I know you can never ask journalists to not publish such a scoop, so I said, “I want to do something in return. Come to me two weeks before we do the presentation, I’ll tell you all about it, and you have that scoop as well.” And she accepted, and the funny thing is that, after the presentation in the theater, the newspaper with the color image on the first page was there to be picked up by the politicians as a souvenir of this afternoon, and that had a great impact, so that helped. It was embraced by the city council. Then came the problem: How to make a real building?

And for that reason, I had a contract with the architects from Mecanoo, a very well-known group of young architects. They found it interesting to work with someone who was, let’s say, the organizer and the aesthetic master of the project. But as they work with quite a big studio, they found it interesting for the young architects who work there to show that each project has different ways of development. I was very happy that they accepted.

And I must say they changed some major things. I had this small theater hall, because there were two theater halls, two cinemas, etc., and the smaller of the theater halls was, in my first drawing, north-south, and they turned it 90° so there was more room in the foyer. I mean, that’s a simple thing, but it was a very wise decision. And they also had as many rooms as possible on the same level, so you don’t have to install too many elevators, all such practical things. It was very good.

THOMPSON: How long did the entire process take, from the first sketches to the actual opening —

SWARTE: Well, it was 1995 when I started, and 2003 when we had the opening. So it was eight years.

“My Favorite Book” appeared on a blank French card ©1992 Joost Swarte

THOMPSON: How did it feel to finally actually step into basically one of your own drawings?

SWARTE: It’s around the corner from my studio, so I had the opportunity, especially in the last three months, to be on the site every day. So I followed it very closely, and I could have some minor changes, at the end. But yeah, it’s quite bizarre. When you develop a building, you live in a fantasy land, and when it becomes concrete, it’s something else. When I first saw the rooms I thought, “It looks quite small.” But when it was all finished, it came back to what I imagined.

STARTING STRIPDAGEN

PENISTON: Tell me a little more about Stripdagen.

SWARTE: Stripdagen was an idea that came to me I think in 1988. There always was a comic festival in Holland organized by a society of comic lovers. It was a welcoming festival on one hand; on the other hand they didn’t have the money and the proper organization to make good exhibitions, because you needed some professionalism around it, as insurance is involved — and the proper publicity. I think I was quite influenced by what I saw in France in the Angoulême festival, that a smaller town is always better for a festival. I visited also comic festivals in Paris, for instance, but the minor thing of such a comic [festival] in a big city is that after the doors of the festival are closed everybody makes his own way in town. And especially these informal meetings around the festival, around the book fair, are what makes it worth going to because there you can easily get in contact with artists or publishers.

I thought that in the Netherlands, if a festival would be organized somewhere, it should be in a provincial town, like Haarlem. I had my experience in Haarlem. They dedicated a major exhibition to my works in the Frans Hals Museum — not only mine but also other illustrators, and I thought they would probably be interested. And if they are interested in presenting a show with comic works during such a festival, probably another museum in town will follow — that’s what I started with. I started by asking this Frans Hals Museum and they were interested. I visited the Tylers museum and they joined, and what I said to them was that the organization would coordinate the festival and make publicity around the program, but the museums themselves should organize the show with their own money, like they normally do. The organization didn’t have the money to organize such an exhibition, but the advantage to such a museum is that they get a lot of new visitors inside their museum that normally wouldn’t have visited a museum. So they accepted this idea and, before I knew it, almost all cultural institutions in town got interested in the idea. At the first festival we had about 20 exhibitions in galleries and concert halls and we had a play in a theater and we had also film in the program and there were a lot of comic artists with exhibitions in a museum. So that made it more a cultural festival than a commercial festival.

PENISTON: Does that happen every two years?

SWARTE: Yes.

PENISTON: And it’s going to happen again this June?

SWARTE: That’s right, the first weekend of June.

PENISTON: How long does it last?

SWARTE: For the public, two days. But that doesn’t mean that the exhibitions last only for two days because if a museum or a gallery starts an exhibition, mostly they will have this exhibition for one month. The initial idea was often that the openings of the varieties of exhibitions were the week before the public festival so that the comments in the newspapers on these exhibitions were also publicity for the festival.

PENISTON: Who are the artists that will be featured this year in the festival?

SWARTE: Well, I’m not in the organization any more but what I heard is that there is a group of artists from Finland that will be focused on.

PENISTON: So artists and publishers come from all over Europe to participate?

SWARTE: Yes. In the past, there was also a year when it was focused on artists from Brazil and another time from the United States; we had invited here Chris Ware and Daniel Clowes and Robert Crumb, and often Robert Crumb played with his musical band here, he played one or two times with the Cheap Suit Serenaders and also with this French group, Les Primitifs Du Futur.

PENISTON: Does he play at all the fairs, like Angoulême?

SWARTE: No. In Angoulême he played once, I guess, and that was probably when he was president of the festival. But I preferred to call him the emperor of the festival [laughs].

PENISTON: Is he a bit of a recluse or do you know him well?

SWARTE: We meet from time to time. When he was in Haarlem for the festival, we ate together; here in my house, we organize a breakfast for fellow artists. So the Sunday morning breakfast is with artists here in the house and Robert and Aline were there.

PENISTON: Because you work pretty closely with him on his record covers and Odds and Ends books?

SWARTE: Yeah, that’s right. In ’92, I guess it was not only the first festival but also the start of the comics publishing house Oog & Blik, which I started together with a friend of mine who was a distributor in imported comics. This man, Hansje Joustra, has become a very good friend of Robert and visits him from time to time in France and Robert has gotten interested in publishing a special project with us. I think we started with his little box with collecting cards —

PENISTON: Yes, trading cards.

SWARTE: Yeah, trading cards on musicians. And then at about that time too we made a record-cover collection book.

JOOST SWARTE, PUBLISHER

THOMPSON: Let’s talk about Oog & Blik a little. At the time Hansje was running a store?

SWARTE: No, not at that point. He had the idea to start a store, and at the moment that he mentioned it to me, we knew each other already from the music business. He had a record company called Torso, independent music. I’d drawn covers and some labels and things for him. He had the idea to start a comics store. And I said, “Well, in 1984, Futurpolis is going to publish a collection of my stories, Swarte Hors Série, and it would be nice if the book could be imported in Holland, too. Would it be something for you, as a future comics-store owner, to import the book?”

So he went with me to Paris, and then he became the importer of the Futuropolis books in Holland. And after the success of this company called Het Raadsel, which means “The Riddle,” he said, “Well, forget about the comic store, distribution is my task,” and he also began publishing books under the name of Het Raadsel.

And, at a certain time, he was advised to separate the publishing business from the distribution business. That was the time to start a new company, and that became Oog & Blik, and it was an initiative from Hansje and from me. It’s, for a small country, a very interesting publishing company.

THOMPSON: Of course, it’s a great publisher. Did you co-finance it?

SWARTE: Well, we decided not to take any income from the company in the first year. But it was wise, because then it could become an independent publisher, and it was possible to publish a lot of beautiful books. After the problems with Het Raadsel, they went bankrupt about two years ago. Fortunately, the advice at that time given to separate into two companies was very wise advice, so Oog & Blik is strong and continuing to make publications.

THOMPSON: Yes. In fact, next year, they’re going to be publishing your complete works.

SWARTE: Yep, that’s right.

THOMPSON: Is that their biggest book project? That’s a pretty sizable thing.

SWARTE: Yes. But I guess, well, you never know in advance how much time it’s going to take. It’s going to be as a comic book, quite a big book. But this book in France, Hors Série, was quite a big book as well. And even the book I composed myself as a catalog for the exhibition in Germany, this book Leporello — that’s the official name for an accordion-folded brochure — was quite large.

Book that led to Oog & Blik

THOMPSON: So looking over all of your work that’s being collected into this collection, does anything strike you about it? What’s your response to excavating your past from the ’70s and ’80s? Have you looked at that material often, recently?

SWARTE: Well, yes, of course, for this new collection, I re-read my old comics, and I thought, “Well, there’s a lot of weird personages walking around here in these comics.” [Thompson laughs.]

If you consider an artist as somebody who’s giving the reader something which [the reader] then finishes off in his head, then I think that in the beginning, the artist in me was more somebody who wanted to show people these crazy things. Now I think I show less. I want people — and maybe they do, well, I guess they do — to finish the drawings in their head, so you give them enough information to finish the drawing. In that way, they get connected with the drawing.

PENISTON: Are you still working on publishing books with Oog & Blik?

SWARTE: Well, yes, my own books. But I’m trying to step out of the company because it’s sort of a responsibility and my field that I work in has brought them so much that I need time to spend on my own work. So I will be doing less things, like comic festivals, and working on books. But I wouldn’t leave that field of bookmaking — probably from time to time I will work on projects — but not in the way that I did for this publishing company, Oog & Blik. Not so much any more, I guess.

Promo photo provided by Joe Kubert

Joe Kubert has led a charmed life. He started apprenticing in comics production “shops” in ’38 at the age of 11; from then until now, his has been one of the most successful careers in comics. Starting with his tenure as artist of Hawkman in the late ’40s, Kubert has been a major contributor to mainstream comics in every decade: The Viking Prince and Tor in the ’50s, Enemy Ace and Sgt. Rock in the ’60s, the Tarzan books in the ’70s, and what seems like every other DC cover from the late ’50s through the ’80s. And he is not merely a prolific and reliable journeyman professional: he is one of the best draftsman the art has ever seen. If that isn’t enough, he has been happily married for over 40 years, with three sons, one daughter, and more grandchildren than I can count.

An interview with Kubert is like a tour through the history of comics. He and his longtime partner Norman Maurer were primarily responsible for the first 3-D comic books that later flooded the market in the early ’50s. He and Bob Kanigher were the architects primarily responsible for building the DC “war books” to their highest level of popularity in the late ’60s. In 1976, Kubert started his namesake school, which remains an ongoing concern.

Kubert is a paradigmatic member of his time and place. His parents were immigrants, and he has the gratitude toward America and the respect of middle-class virtue characterized by the children of immigrants, as well as the optimism suffused in those who benefited from the post-WWII economic boom. Unsurprisingly, he respects professionalism as much as he accepts the parameters of his profession; these values doubtlessly correspond to those of his generation, and therein lies an education to the modern reader.

Did I mention he also plays a mean game of racquetball? We played racquetball for the second time in early ’94; I was looking forward to playing Joe and his son Andy (who not only plays racquetball, but draws comics as well) because our first games were the kind where everyone is damned near equally matched and the adrenaline never stops pumping. I almost stopped pumping altogether midway through the first rematch, though, when I careened off a wall and landed on my right leg, nearly snapping it in two and blowing out two ligaments in the process. Ever since, this has been a grand source of merriment between Joe and me, as I would periodically give him progress reports on my recovery and eventual reconstructive surgery.

I remember I during one of those conversations Joe sounded astonished at the level of damage I did to myself and casually remarked that nothing like this ever happened to him. Like I said, Joe Kubert has led a charmed life, and sometimes you just can’t help but hate the guy.

- GARY GROTH

A BOY’S LIFE

GARY GROTH: I’m going to want to dwell on the ’40s because you’re one of the few guys around that still has his marbles who can talk about that period in comics history… [Kubert laughs] … cogently.

JOE KUBERT: I’ll accept that.

GROTH: I understand you attended the High School of Music and Art. Now, this was in Manhattan?

KUBERT: Manhattan.

GROTH: And you lived in Brooklyn at that time?

KUBERT: Brooklyn.

GROTH: Can you give me a general description of your upbringing? Was it middle-class: Were your parents immigrants?

KUBERT: They were immigrants, and I would classify my upbringing as being perhaps below middle-class, but not lower class: perhaps upper-lower-class [laughs].

GROTH: Or lower-middle-class.

KUBERT: Yeah, well, to really give a better explanation, both my parents worked. My mother ran a restaurant, and in the back of the restaurant were three rooms in which I, and my four sisters, lived with my mother and father. My father was a kosher butcher. He went to work in his store, which was maybe five or six blocks from home. That was in east New York, in Brooklyn, where I grew up.

GROTH: Where were your parents from?

KUBERT: Both my parents were from Poland, and I was born in Poland. My mother was pregnant with me the first time they made the attempt to come to the United States back in 1926 and, because she was pregnant, they would not permit her to go on the ship until she gave birth. So they returned to their home in Poland. I was two months old when they went back to the ship in South Hampton, England, and finally came to America. So I was about two months old when I got to the United States.

GROTH: What was your childhood like?

KUBERT: I can remember from my earliest years a love for drawing. I was really blessed and fortunate in that I could pursue that which I loved to do. I’ve been drawing since I was 3 years old, since I can remember. I recall that when I was a kid of 3 or 4, I used to be given boxes of chalk by the neighborhood people: penny boxes of chalk, so I could draw in the gutters. They enjoyed seeing me draw. My parents came from the type of background where if you didn’t do something that would eventually result in getting a job, they would not permit you to “idle away your time” in that manner. That’s the way most people thought at that time, especially immigrants. But like I say, I was lucky. My parents saw how much I loved drawing, and they encouraged me in every possible way, never deterred me; they did everything to help me. I was very, very lucky.

GROTH: What were your formative influences when you were a kid? You must have gone to the movies.

KUBERT: Yeah. Movies cost 10 cents for admission. I remember seeing the original Public Enemy, I think it was, with Paul Muni and …

GROTH: James Cagney?

KUBERT: Cagney. Right. Scarface was with Paul Muni. I remember also as a kid coming home from having seen Frankenstein on the big screen and looking in all the alleys. I was sure this monster was going to come out as I walked — no, ran home. So I guess my formative years were influenced by those movies. But newspapers, where the comic strips were, were really my world. For me, and most of the guys who came into the business at that time, I think Hal Foster fostered …

GROTH: No pun intended.

KUBERT: [Laughs] … more cartoonists than he ever dreamed possible. There was a newspaper, the N.Y. Journal American, that carried Prince Valiant. And Tarzan was still being published in the New York Daily Mirror. The Journal American was a big, tabloid-sized newspaper and every Sunday when the color comic strips came out I’d lay on the floor and just kind of wrap them around me, around my mind. That was the world I lived in. Guys like Foster and [Alex] Raymond and [Milton] Caniff, as I said many times before, have inadvertently fathered an incredible number of cartoonists.

GROTH: Now, this would have been around ’34, ’35?

KUBERT: No, maybe 1930, ’31, ’32. I was born in ’26, and in ’37 or ’38, I got my first job. I was about 11-1/2 years old. This was when comic books were just starting to come into being, just starting to hit the mom and pop candy stores, where they were sold next to Collier’s and Saturday Evening Post.

I got started in comic books in the following way, Gary. A young fellow by the name of Melvin Budoff, and I don’t know what the hell ever happened to Melvin, who was a student in grammar school in my class, just previous to junior high school. His uncle, who I think was [Louis] Silberkleit, was one of the founders and owners of what is now the Archie Group, which was at that time MLJ. I was always drawing “muscle guys.” One day, Melvin said, “Joe, why don’t you take your drawings and bring them up and show them to my uncle? He publishes comic books.” I thought, why not? So, I guess I was about 11. I started out for Manhattan. They had an office on Canal Street in Manhattan, and I wrapped my drawings in newspapers. For years, old newspapers were my only portfolio in which I carried my drawings. The first time I went up to MLJ, guys like Mort Meskin and Charlie Biro and Harry Shorten, people like that, were sitting and drawing. Names, I guess, a lot of the young guys today never heard of.

GROTH: And these were all obviously your elders.

KUBERT: Yes. They were very kind to me and extended themselves in every way to help me. This snotty kid comes up asking a bunch of ridiculous questions. Subways were only a nickel and it took me maybe a half hour, three quarters of an hour to get up there from where I lived in Brooklyn, in east New York. They allowed me to come into what we today call the bullpen where the artists were working. These guys, a half dozen or so artists, would let me look over their shoulders while they were working, kind of giving me clues into how it’s all done. Bob Montana, the man who created Archie, was up there at the time. He was very helpful to me. I inked Archie over Bob Montana’s pencils when it first came out as a comic book. He gave me the opportunity to do that. Irv Novick was there. He gave me my first lesson on how to draw a German helmet.

GROTH: Did you actually get to talk to Silberkleit? Did you get to see him?

KUBERT: No, no, no. I got to see the editor, whose name I forget now, but Harry Shorten was a writer. Only a writer. Harry later became editor-in-chief.

GROTH: Is this what would have been called a “shop” at the time?

KUBERT: No. This was a publishing house. A “shop” is a more appropriate description of the place run by Harry “A” Chesler. Harry had a shop with about 10 or 12 artists and writers, and he would package different kinds of comic books for a variety of publishers. In those days, you could be a publisher in an office the size of a closet. Put your name on the door and you’re a publisher. You don’t have to hire any artists. You don’t have to hire any writers. You go to Harry “A” Chesler. Harry puts a whole book together for you. “Whaddya need? A mystery comic book? You want a humor book?”

Tor #4 (July 1954) ©1975 Joe Kubert

He’d not only produce the editorial and creative artwork, but he’d create a package, including the coloring, separations and plates — everything just short of doing the printing and distributing. Harry was a great guy. No more like him around any more.

HOT DOG MONEY

GROTH: Let me just get back to MLJ — when you were 11 or 12—

KUBERT: Rein me in, because I’ m already off on a tangent [laughs].

GROTH: You just hung around the offices. Now, how long did that last?

KUBERT: I didn’t actually hang around, but I’d go up as often as I could. They were all helpful to me and continually gave me bits of information. One artist would suggest, “Watch this figure, kid. Start doing this … learn how to draw that.”

And I’d ask, “Can I come back again and show you when I do what you’ve told me?”

“Sure, kid. Come back anytime.”

So maybe once a week or as often as I could, I’d come back, sometimes at the cost of my attendance in school. That’s the way I got my first jobs. I’d be there when the work was going out. And every once in a while the editor would say, “Think you can do this, kid?” That’s how I got the opportunity to ink Bob Montana’s Archie strip. Just like that.

GROTH: You were 12 years old?

KUBERT: 12 years old, yeah, or thereabout.

GROTH: That’s amazing.

KUBERT: It was amazing. But I didn’t realize that then. It just happened.

GROTH: How did they pay you, or was this more of an unpaid apprenticeship arrangement?

KUBERT: I don’t remember getting paid for that work. I may have, but I don’t remember. It didn’t make the slightest difference to me whether they paid me or not.

GROTH: I understand that the first work you actually did was for Harry “A” Chesler in ’40 or ’41 where you worked 1-1/2 hours a day after school for $5 a week.

KUBERT: Yes and no. The $5 a week he gave me was really like a present. I never asked for money; he gave it to me on his own. What he said was, “Hey kid, get yourself a hot dog,” The Depression wasn’t that far behind us and things were still very, very tough. He would say, “Here, take this five bucks and buy yourself a hot dog.” And five bucks was a lot of money at that time.

GROTH: How did you find Harry Chesler?

KUBERT: I had started high school at the High School of Music and Art in Manhattan. Schools in all five boroughs were permitted to send students to Music and Art based on passing a test in art or music. Then you were permitted to attend the school. Which happened to be an hour and a half from my home in Brooklyn. So I traveled three hours a day on the subway for a nickel a ride back and forth to attend the school. While at Music and Art, I met my buddy, Norman Maurer. I met him in my first year at the school. Norman and I hit it off because we both loved cartooning. People with common interests, especially cartoonists, have a tendency to gravitate together. And what we’d do is we’d attend school two days a week and use the other three days to take our work around to all the different publishers. Sometimes we would walk all the way from 135th Street, where the school was, down to 23rd Street where Chesler was, trying to hit every publishing company in between to show them our work. How the hell we ever made it through high school is still a mystery to me. Just by the skin of our teeth, I guess.

GROTH: So it was on one of those expeditions that you met Chesler.

KUBERT: Yeah: either through the indicia inside the book or a referral. Somebody in some publishing house who suggested, “Hey kid, go down and see this guy.” That’s the way it worked.

HARRY “A”

GROTH: Can you tell me who Harry “A” Chesler was? I mean, almost nobody knows who he is any more.

KUBERT: Harry “A” Chesler was a dinosaur even at that time. Harry originally came from the advertising business. From Chicago. He got into the comic-book business as a result of his knowledge and experience with printed matter. He figured that comic books might be a good way to make a buck. That if he got a whole staff of artists and writers together — guys like Charlie Biro, Rube Moreira, Rafael Astarita, and Charlie Sultan, he’d be in business. George Tuska went through that shop. There were a bunch of terrific artists. They’d all come over to my table, “How you doin’?”

They’d all come over and give me suggestions.

Anyhow, Harry figured that this was a good way to make a buck. He could package comic books if he could get enough artists and some writers together. Letterers. And service all these publishers in a business that just started to bloom.

GROTH: So he didn’t really know that much about comics.

KUBERT: No. Most of his experience was in advertising.

GROTH: Now, his was what you would call a shop.

KUBERT: Yes.

GROTH: Can you explain physically what this shop looked like?

KUBERT: Yeah. I can still see the place in my mind’s eye. Incidentally, it was not terribly dissimilar from Jerry Iger’s shop. Jerry Iger was Will Eisner’s partner.

GROTH: That you also worked in.

KUBERT:Yeah. Harry’s shop, as I recall it, was on the third or fourth floor of an old building on 23rd Street, about a block west of Broadway. The elevator was so rickety that none of the guys would take a chance riding the thing, and instead would walk up the three or four flights. The guys were a wild and crazy bunch. I’ve been told stories where — when business was bad for Harry — he would hang an extension cord outside the window and plug it into a pole outside, foxing the electric company. I don’t know if that story was true or not, but they swear to me that it happened.

GROTH: It’s a good story nonetheless.

KUBERT: It sounds like a cartoon gag, but they tell me that it really happened. Let me describe Harry to you: He was a short, heavyset guy with a perpetual cigar in his mouth. Always wore a hat. Always wore a suit with a tie and vest. He would chew a cigar back and forth as he was talking to you and he would have one hand in his vest pocket with the jacket pulled back. He looked like a promoter.

GROTH: A real hustler?

KUBERT: A hustler, but without the negative connotations. He was honest, but he looked like the kind of guy you wouldn’t trust beyond a 10-foot pole’s reach. He had an exterior that was as rough as nails but he was one of the kindest, nicest guys you could ever know.

GROTH: How old of a man was he at the time you —

KUBERT: Around 50, 55. An interesting part of this story is that I moved to Dover about 30 years ago. I guess this occurred when we were starting the school, about 17 years ago. My wife was at a framing company to get some pictures framed. She was selecting some frames when this guy waddles up to her and says, “Excuse me, ma’am, is your name Kubert?”

He saw the name on the package that she was carrying. She said yes. Then he introduced himself and asked where Joe is? And my wife said, “He’s home working.”

“Do you mind if I follow you home? I’d like to say hello — if it wouldn’t be an imposition.”

GROTH: Thirty years after you started working for him.

KUBERT: That’s right. I hadn’t seen the guy for about 30 years. He must have been 80 or thereabouts. So I’m home working and Muriel called to me — my studio is downstairs — she called me upstairs. The moment I saw him, I recognized him. He had not changed one iota. I learned that with the money he had made through his shop he’d invested in real estate and practically bought out the whole town of Succasunna, New Jersey. Real estate paid off. To the tune of having sold one of his pieces of real estate, a place called Horseshoe Lake, for a million and a quarter dollars. He’d walk around with the check in his pocket. He would derive great pleasure in pulling the check out, “Hey Joe, take a look at this.” [Laughs.]

I had just started my school at that time and he was extremely excited about it, and we talked about it a lot. We gave a super “Harry Chesler” Christmas party two or three years after I started the school. We invited all the guys that were still around who had worked for Chesler. We had a wingding of a party at my school celebrating Christmas with Harry and the guys. Christmas was an important event for Harry. A time when he let the bars down and was very outgoing. Otherwise he was gruff as hell. But the party was just great.

GROTH: You were going to describe the actual shop itself.

KUBERT: The shop was one large room. The room was probably the size of this area here, about 40 by 30 feet. There were perhaps eight or 10 artists at drafting tables. There were windows on one side, as I recall it, looking out on 23rd Street. Two or three of the better artists sat by the window. Everyone else suffered inside the room. I sat the furthest from the windows. My table was way in the back of the room.

GROTH: The back of the bus.

KUBERT: No problem. Each guy had a tabaret and table and light setup. It was sort of a crazy time. Rafael Astarita, an incredibly good artist, eventually went into fine arts. I don’t really know what happened to him or where he wound up, but he did not continue in cartooning. At the time, though, he used to lift weights and he worked out regularly. We would kid around and he would grab me and say, “Joe, get a hold on me, and I’ll show you how easy I can break it.”

He must have been in his early 20s at the time, but I was a heavy kid, and I got a real good head lock on him. He broke my hold, but it wasn’t easy for him. It was crazy stuff like that.

GROTH: Right in the shop.

KUBERT: Right in the shop, on the floor and in the hallways. It was nuts. But it was fun.

GROTH: How many artists would be in a shop?

KUBERT: Anywhere from between six to 10 artists at that time. It varied at times. And they would come over to my table and give helpful suggestions. I would hesitate to go and look over their shoulders for fear that I’d interrupt their train of thought. I kept a schedule. After school, on my way home to Brooklyn, I’d stop off at 23rd Street. About 3:30. I’d stay at Chesler’s ’til 5:30 then go home. I’d work at Chesler’s for about two hours. He would give me scripts that weren’t in use. Just to practice. Eventually he sold them, but that was included in a bunch of old material that he sold when he went out of business. But the work of mine that was eventually published during my time with Chesler was not meant for publication. The first job I was actually hired for was done for Holyoke. The editor was a guy by the name of [Frank] Temmerson. The story title was “Volton.” That was my first formal piece of work published. Six pages. Pencils, inks, and lettering.

GROTH: And that was in Catman comics.

KUBERT: That’s right.

GROTH: That was for a place called Holyoke?

KUBERT: Holyoke Publishing. Their office — singular — was on 42nd Street in the Times Square area. Right off Broadway. A small, dingy place that smelled of old comic books: I loved it.

GROTH: Did you do your first published story after Chesler?

KUBERT: Yes. The stuff that I did for Chesler was eventually published, but that was not the purpose of the work. He had some scripts lying around that weren’t going to be used. So, strictly for practice, he gave them to me to practice on.

GROTH: Did you pencil, ink, or what?

KUBERT: I penciled and inked.

GROTH: At the age of 12.

KUBERT: Yes.

GROTH: And they eventually found their way into publication.

KUBERT: Amazing, huh? I don’t even remember where I saw the stuff published.

Tor #3 (May 1954) written by Joe Kubert, penciled and inked by Joe Kubert and Alex Toth ©1975 Joe Kubert

But going back to the look of the place, it was in an old tenement type of building. The wooden floors creaked as you walked. There was dust everywhere from the cracks in the wood as you walked. The windows were wide open in the summer. As for air conditioning, forget it. It was hot as hell in the place. Nobody seemed to mind, though. We sat and did our work. Nobody complained. Not that I can remember, anyhow.

GROTH: Was that a straight eight-hour, 9-to-5-type job?

KUBERT: For all the other artists, yes: 9 to 5. And if the guys were making 50 bucks a week, that was a lot of money. In fact, I doubt if they were making that much. If I was getting $5, they were making maybe $35. But that was a lot of money at that time. I was told later that Harry’s gag line at the time he doled out salaries was, “Well, how much do you need this week?”

GROTH: Were there people in the shop that did nothing but write?

KUBERT: Yes, but I never saw them or met them: The writers were not in the same room as the artists. The writers were someplace else.

GROTH: Maybe at home.

KUBERT: Maybe at home. Harry had another office downstairs. He was not in the same room as the artists, either. He had his own office elsewhere.

GROTH: The executive office.

KUBERT: Yeah, right. When the guys heard the elevator coming up …

GROTH: They had to work?

KUBERT: [Laughs.] The sound of the elevator coming up was a warning that Harry’ s coming up. Get back to work. It was like kids at play. For me, too.

GROTH: Were they paid per piece or per hour?

KUBERT: No. They were paid per week.

GROTH: They were employees.

KUBERT: That’s right. And they were responsible to do whatever work was given them. They had no choice or selection. Western, crime, horror, it didn’t matter. You drew whatever story you got, and that was it.

GROTH: So let me just make sure I have the system down: Harry would give people scripts.

KUBERT: Right.

GROTH: Now back then, were there pencilers and inkers — was it broken down into an assembly line?

KUBERT: No. Every artist did a complete job. Even over at MLJ, Meskin never had anybody ink his stuff. They completed all the work themselves. The only one who allowed a little inking I guess was Bob Montana. The small amount of stuff I did for him. That was not a regular job. It was because he was in a hole and needed some immediate help on his deadline. So I inked a story. But it was not a steady job by any means.

THE GUYS

GROTH: Where did the artists come from back then? People like Irv Novick? Can you give me a general idea of the age group of the artists? Were they mostly in their 20s?

KUBERT: Yes, most of them were young guys. You know it’s hard to judge their ages, because everybody was older than me!

GROTH: Everybody was ancient.

KUBERT: [Laughs.] That’s right. At 12 or 13, everybody else is real old and decrepit.

GROTH: Right.

KUBERT: I think that most of them were in their early or middle 20s. A guy like maybe in his 30s would be considered to be an old-timer. By me, anyway.

GROTH: Were these essentially guys who grew up like you did except they were a few years older and just wanted to do comics?

KUBERT: Doing comics was usually not a matter of choice, for most artists. I guess they felt the real brunt of the Depression a lot more than I did. The Depression hit in ’32 and we were slowly climbing out of it through the ’30s and into the early ’40s. It was actually World War II in ’41 that generated work and jobs. Especially when everyone else was starting to be drafted. Most working cartoonists came from extensive art backgrounds. Jobs were tough to come by, and it was hard for people to make a living. I guess you can say I came from a poor neighborhood: East New York. But I never felt deprived. My mother always had food on the table. Good food. She was a wonderful cook; I never wanted really for anything. At one time I used to sing in a choir when I was a kid, about 8 or 9. I used to get paid for singing in the choir 25 cents a night, weddings and bar mitzvahs. This was a Jewish choir. Before that I sold newspapers. Yeah, that old stale story about selling news knocked on the door and I was ushered in to see papers. Every kid I knew sold newspapers. You could make a couple of cents a night, easy. So I never really felt deprived; I never felt poor. I never really felt hard times. I’m sure, however, the adults, the mothers and fathers felt it, and felt it deep.

GROTH: It’s my impression, without having done a sociological survey, that most of the creative people in comics in that era came from lower- and lower-middle-class economic backgrounds and that they used comics to try to get out of that, just as blacks use boxing to try to get out of—

KUBERT: It was a way to make some money, that’s all: pure and simple. Nobody considered it an art form. Nobody was proud of being a comic-book artist. Matter of fact, it was a couple of steps below digging ditches. Syndication was recognized success. If you could get to do a syndicated strip, my God, that was the answer. But comic books were considered for many, many years to be a shameful occupation. Most of the guys in the business, if you asked them what they did, would never admit that they were comic-book artists. “I do commercial artwork,” or “I just draw for a living.”

GROTH: Is that right?

KUBERT: Yep.

GROTH: It was disreputable?

KUBERT: Not so much disreputable as just low. Disreputable gives a connotation of perhaps underhanded. It was just not considered a proper way for a grown person to make a living.

GROTH: Not sufficiently middle-class.

KUBERT: Yeah. It’s not what your parents raised you to be [laughs].

GROTH: Right. Not like an insurance salesman.

KUBERT: Or a doctor or a lawyer. ..

GROTH: How long did you work for Harry Chesler?

KUBERT: I would say probably the better part of a school year.

GROTH: Can you tell me who they were and how you got involved with Holyoke?

KUBERT: This was when I just started high school: Music and Art. I picked up a Catman comic book that was being published at the time. On the inside cover was their address. That’s the way Norm and I would make the rounds. That’s how I got their address. No appointments or anything. We’d just go up and knock on the door.

GROTH: I’m sure a lot of the people reading this don’t know who Norman Maurer is and his relationship — he’s a relative of one of the Three Stooges, correct?

KUBERT: Norman was the son-in-law of Moe, the stooge with the bangs. He married Moe’s daughter, Joanie, who’s still a very close and dear friend. Norm and I started out together in the business. We met in the High School of Music and Art. High school was merely a takeoff point for us. Three days a week we’d take our stuff and make the rounds to the publishers. Norm was one of the brightest guys I ever knew. I say “was” because he died four or five years ago. We have a scholarship in his name at the [Kubert] School which will be in effect for as long as the School is in existence. Norm had a terrific mind, terrific talent, and we played off each other really well. He was a good friend, a very dear friend. He started in the business with Charlie Biro and Bob Wood on Crimebuster and Daredevil, back in the stone age of comic books.

GROTH: And then of course later on you worked very closely with him on Tor.

KUBERT: We were partners when we put out the three-dimensional comic books. Mighty Mouse, which was the first 3-D comic book, and a whole series of other 3-D books. That was in 1952.

“THIS IS REALLY A GREAT BUSINESS”

GROTH: Now in 1944 I understand you finally landed a job at DC, which was National Periodical Publications at that time.

KUBERT: I’m not sure of the date but I’ll take your word for it.

GROTH: That would make you 18. Sound about right?

KUBERT: I guess.

GROTH: I understand your first effort for DC was Doctor Fate. Can you tell me how you got a job at DC?

KUBERT: I was working at All-American Comics, M.C. Gaines’ publishing company, down on Lafayette Street in Manhattan. I’m not sure when Gaines sold his business to DC, but I believe that that was when I started working for DC.

GROTH: Then how were you introduced to All-American Comics? Same process?

KUBERT: No. All-American Comics came earlier on. I [met] Sheldon Mayer. He was my first mentor. He gave me a job, I was going to high school at the time, I was perhaps 16. And I had a problem. Deadlines. I was the guy who worked until he got a couple of bucks together then didn’t work until the money was spent.

GROTH: You were one of those.

KUBERT: [Laughs.] That’s the way it was.

GROTH: Publishers hate guys like you.

KUBERT: That’s right. That’s why I tell all my students, “Don’t be like I was.” [Laughter.]

GROTH: That’s right. So Shelly Mayer worked at All-American Comics. He was an editor there.

KUBERT: Yes, he was editor-in-chief.

GROTH: Was he the first editor you worked for?

KUBERT: He was really my mentor, my first real editor. He took a serious interest in me: also, in Carmine [Infantino] and Frank Giacoia. Lee Elias and Irwin Hasen were also working there at the time. There weren’t many editors who could draw — most of them were writers — and Shelly was one of the few who did draw. He taught me that to communicate was the most important element in cartoon illustration. He was extremely helpful and effective with all the artists that worked for him.

GROTH: Can you tell me a little bit about Shelly Mayer, what kind of a person he was and what kind of an editor he was?

KUBERT: He was one of the nicest, most patient guys I ever met. As I told you, I was kind of loose with deadlines. He would call to find out where the work was, and he’d speak to my mother. I’d be standing right by the phone when he’d call and my mother — who spoke with a heavy Jewish accent— would say: “Mr. Mayer, I’m sorry, my son was working late last night and couldn’t get the work done. Please, he’ll bring it in tomorrow.” Shelly, patience personified, would accept the excuse. I think he knew the truth, though. He was just super, super great.

GROTH: How exactly did you land this job at All-American?

KUBERT: Like I said, I went up and showed my stuff.

GROTH: And then they just gave you a script.

KUBERT: Yes. Shelly gave me a script. First one was Hawkman. I think it was about the fifth or sixth issue after Sheldon Moldoff had left the book. For whatever reason Moldoff wasn’t interested in doing Hawkman, so Shelly gave me the job. And the covers.

GROTH: Do you even know who wrote your stories?

KUBERT: I think it was Gardner Fox, but I’ m really not sure who it was at that time..

GROTH: You’re not real close with the writer. You were handed a script and told, “Draw this.”

KUBERT: Yeah. It was only in later years that I would meet the writers. Until 10 or 15 years ago, the artists never had any input as far as the writing was concerned. The artist was given a script. “You don’t like the story? That’s too bad. You don’t want it? Fine. I’ll get somebody else to do it.” That was it.

GROTH: You were pretty green at this point — did Mayer make you redraw anything?

KUBERT: Not too much. Very little. I was a bit obstinate. Young, you know. It’s a funny thing — I’ve seen Shelly Mayer verbally rip a guy apart. I’ve seen him take original pages and fling them right across the room because he felt the guy didn’t do a good, quality job. It happened to Irwin Hasen. Irwin and Shelly were good, personal friends, but when it came to the work there was no fooling around. If Shelly wanted to make a point, that’s what he did. For some reason, he never did that with me. It may have been because … well, maybe he figured that I wouldn’t accept it. I was younger — and bigger — and maybe he thought I’d pick him up and throw him out the window. Maybe he was right. I just can’t accept that kind of dressing-down. I figure people should act towards me as I would act towards them. Otherwise, no discussions. We have nothing to talk about. And I guess maybe Shelly recognized that. But he was kind and tolerated all this crap from me without any of that kind of abuse.

GROTH: Now you’re referring to your work as “crap” or…

KUBERT: Well, the work was crap. That goes without saying. [Laughs.]

GROTH: But he was a tough editor with others.

KUBERT: And with me. He was tough in terms of putting across his point. He would say, “Joe [pounds fist on table], you’re supposed to be drawing a kid. This kid doesn’t look like a kid. The kid looks like a 20-year-old dwarf.” I listened with half an ear. The younger you are, the more you think you know.

GROTH: Right.

KUBERT: I would say, “Uh-huh. Uh-huh.”

But I would ignore a good deal of what he told me. Naturally, a lot did sink in. The points that he made were cogent and right. He had the patience to put them across consistently. Eventually he saw his suggestions coming out in my drawings. In fact I did heed his words and I think my ability to draw and to tell a story improved markedly.

The first job that Shelly gave me, teaching me a lot about storytelling and characterization along the way, was Hawkman and The Flash. Lead features and covers. On a monthly basis. That went on for several years until Gaines sold out to DC. I think that subsequent to that — I don’t recall this precisely now, but I eventually found my way into DC, one of my first jobs being inking over Mort Meskin’s Vigilante.

GROTH: Can you talk for a few minutes about what kind of a man Shelly Mayer was?

KUBERT: Yes. As I mentioned before. Shelly was wonderful to me. Shelly withstood my dalliances as far as deadlines were concerned and was patient with me. And he loved the business. He loved drawing. His Scribbly was, of course, an autobiography and the biography of most people who wanted to get into the business at that time, especially if you were very young. I could see myself as Scribbly. Maybe that was why Shelly was so understanding. Because he saw the same things in me that he created in the Scribbly strip.

GROTH: When you worked at All-American with Shelly Mayer, you were still very young, at 16.

KUBERT: Sixteen or thereabouts, yeah. I think I was a junior in high school at that time.

GROTH: And Mayer must have been in his late 20s?

KUBERT: In his middle or late 20s.

GROTH: Did you see Max Gaines when you worked there?

KUBERT: Perhaps once, in all the time I was there. I wasn’t actually working in the office. I was still going to school, and I’d go up perhaps once or twice a week to bring a job in or to pick one up.

GROTH: Did artists socialize with editors back then, or were there social barriers between them?

KUBERT: No. There was no actual social hierarchy at all. As a matter of fact, despite our age difference, Shelly was the one who got me into horseback riding, something that was completely alien to me. So despite the disparity in ages, we still went out together. Me and Irwin and Lee Elias. Shelly was really “one of the guys.” Despite the offers of all kinds of money Shelly was offered to be editor-in-chief when All-American went to DC, he refused to accept the position. No matter what they offered him, he refused. He wanted to draw. To be a cartoonist. He stuck to his Scribbly dream.

GROTH: Is that right?

KUBERT: That’s a fact. I’ve spoken with him about that many times.

GROTH: Now, that wasn’t true of Max Gaines. Wasn’t it true in general that artists didn’t socialize with publishers? Weren’t publishers considered on a different tier socially?

KUBERT:I can only gauge by my own experiences. It was very rare that I would even meet publishers. They were on a higher level. They were the money guys. They were the guys who dealt with the bankers, with lawyers. Not with the schleps who were doing the cartoon drawing work for the publications. I understand Shelly had a good relationship with M.C. Gaines and often talked with and about him. For me, Gaines was this guy in the clouds. Very few of the artists, even Lee Elias or Irwin Hasen, ever had the opportunity to meet or talk to Gaines.

GROTH: Do you know the circumstances behind Gaines selling out to — was it [Harry] Donenfeld?

KUBERT: Not really, I didn’t pay a hell of a lot of attention to that facet of the business. My understanding was that All-American was doing very well. There was a relationship between Gaines and Donenfeld for a long time.

Donenfeld, I understand, was originally a printer. He knew most of the people who were in the publishing business. He eventually went into doing comic books because there was money to be made. So I would imagine that Gaines and Donenfeld had that kind of a relationship. Here was a new business that was doing well. “Let’s make it larger, let’s buy some more titles.” Perhaps Gaines at that ti me was all set to go out and to retire. He was an older man, maybe in his 60s. Gaines felt that perhaps he had enough.

GROTH: Was there any change when All-American was sold to DC in terms of management or in the way you think the company was run?

KUBERT: Yeah. Well, Shelly was no longer there as editor. He had led me around by my hand, so to speak, and made sure that I was busy, that I got the work. With Shelly gone, I had to make my own way. Whit Ellsworth was the editor at DC. He too was a very nice guy. But an older guy and not an artist. Strictly a business kind of guy. He was the editor.

GROTH: So he was involved in both editorial and the business end.

KUBERT: Yes. You know, you’ve prompted some images I’ve not thought of for years, Gary. I remember coming up to DC the first time. In their outer office, there was a waiting room. This was at 480 Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. A massive building. This was where draftees reported before they were shipped to Army camps. The DC offices were beautiful. This was uptown. When you came into the waiting room, there was this big, beautiful painting of Superman with arms akimbo in the outer office. I don’t know what finally happened to that painting. I remember Sol Harrison had put it someplace, I don’t know where. It was really impressive and as a kid, when I went up and knocked on the receptionist’s window, and they asked who you wanted to see, I could feel this painting behind me. “This is a really a great business,” I thought. “Something I can be proud to be a part of.” Because like I said earlier, most people tried to hide the fact that they were doing comic-book work.

When I was permitted to go into the office, a lot of the freelancers were there. They came in every day. The facilities were beautiful and it was right in Midtown. Restaurants all around. So the artists, instead of renting an office or a studio elsewhere, would come into DC. Meskin used to work there. I guess Meskin was running into a problem with deadlines. And the penciler/inker syndrome was just beginning. It was a relatively new procedure. “Hey kid, would you like to try to do more inking?”

My answer was a quick “Absolutely!”

Meskin’s pencils were beautiful. Why I wasn’t scared to death putting a pen and brush to his work, I don’t know. The blissful ignorance of youth, I guess. I just blithely went ahead and in doing so I learned an incredible series of drawing lessons from inking Mort Meskin’s pencils.

GROTH: Did you ink much more of Meskin’s work?

KUBERT: Yeah. I did a lot. Including Vigilante and Johnny Quick and others.

GROTH: Did you know Meskin?

KUBERT: Yeah.

GROTH: What was he like?

KUBERT: He was a very shy person, and he had a terrible stutter. The first time I met Meskin was when I was about 11 or 12 years old when I went up to MLJ. He was up there on staff. One time I was looking at the work of Moreira and Meskin. Mort was sitting last in the row by a window. “That’s beautiful,” I said as my jaw dropped to the floor when I saw his drawing. Mort said stutteringly, “D-d-d-do you like the d-d-drawing?” I said, “Yeah, I love it.” He says, “G-g-go tell that guy th-th-that you like it.” What he wanted me to do was to tell the art director that I liked his work. I was rather naive, so I went over to the editor and said, “Gee, I like that guy’s work.” He said, “Hey Mort, what did you tell this kid to say?” [laughs.]

Because the editor knew Mort, and realized that Mort had put me up to it.

Mort was the kind of insecure person that never fully appreciated his own abilities. Often, he was pushed into doing a lot of stuff that was really beneath him. In terms of quality of work, he was an outstanding artist. Alex Toth loved Mort’s work, and still does. And justifiably so. I consider I did a passably OK job on Mort’s pencils, but he never put me down. I’d say, “Gee Mort, I’m a little unsure about this…” He’d say, “D-don’t worry, k-k-kid. You’re doing fine.”

Again, this is a good example of the kind of guys in my profession. They’d never do anything to hurt anybody.

GROTH: You said that during this period, where people started penciling and inking …

KUBERT: It was just starting up.

GROTH: Now, you might not know the answer to this, but can probably take a better guess at it than most: do you think the assembly line method was initiated because of production needs? There were people who could pencil faster …

KUBERT: Absolutely. And I think that’s why they put me to work on Mort’s stuff. His work was terrific. So what they wanted, the publishers, was to get more production out of him. His pencils were great, so they got several inkers — Charlie Paris was one, and Jerry Robinson was another who was inking Mort’s stuff. In that way, Mort was able to do much more. Other stories they were able to put him on. So Mort was working and supplying several inkers with his beautiful pencils. He didn’t object because he was making a bunch of money. And that’s still what leads people into doing inking or penciling only.

GROTH: Do you remember how much you were getting paid per page?

KUBERT: Vaguely. I think at that time I was getting maybe 10 bucks for inking. A good rate for a page was about $25 for pencils and inks. Which, incidentally, was a lot of money. When I finally generated an income of $10,000 a year, I said to my wife, Muriel — we were married at the time, we’re married 40 years now — I said, “I don’t have to make any more than this for the rest of my life.” [Laughs.]

GROTH: Did you write any of the strips that you drew? Was this another case of your being given scripts?

KUBERT: I did no writing until the time Bob Kanigher left the editorial reins at DC. I wrote Tor, in the early days, but that was different. That was my own material.

A LOT OF WORK

The Brave and the Bold #36 (July 1961) written by Gardner Fox, penciled and inked by Joe Kubert ©1961 DC Comics

GROTH: Now you worked for DC or National Periodical Publications between ’44 and ’49. Was that four or five year period pretty routine? Did you work in the office or did you work at home?

KUBERT: It was freelance all during that time. I worked at home.

GROTH: You picked up a script …

KUBERT: I was just out of high school. I was doing a lot of stuff. In fact, I did a couple of Newsboy Legions.

GROTH: You didn’t pencil and ink …

KUBERT: I inked Jack Kirby’s pencils. That was a very interesting and pleasurable experience. Jack’s penciled pages were all linear, no blacks or shadows. So the inker has to spot the blacks himself. Of course, it was easier for Joe Simon, Jack’s partner, and I used samples of their work as a guide, and did my work accordingly. I think I probably didn’t do it as well as I would have liked, but it was a pleasure to work on it. At least they didn’t fire me for it.

GROTH: Did you know Jack? Meet Jack?

KUBERT: I had not met him at that point in time.

GROTH: So an editor would just give you his penciled pages …

KUBERT: “Here are the pencils. Go home and ink them.”

GROTH: Who did you pal around with during that period?

KUBERT: Carmine [Infantino], Joe Giella, Frank Giacoia. Those are the three that come to mind. Yeah. And Irwin Hasen and Howie Post and Hy Rosen. And Alex Toth. I met Tex Blaisdell when I worked up at Will Eisner’s studio in Tudor City. I’m kind of wandering now. I met Chuck Cuidera there. Bob Powell, too. When he was doing Mister Mystic for The Spirit magazine. This was way before the war. One summer while I was still going to high school, during the summer vacation, someone hired me to go up to Stamford, Connecticut, to ink on The Spirit that Lou Fine was penciling. Alex Kotzky was inking The Spirit up there at the time. So I spent the summer doing that, working on The Spirit, inking on Lou Fine’s pencils. Gil Fox was up there, too.

GROTH: This is in Eisner’s studio?

KUBERT: No. This was after Eisner’s studio. Maybe a year after. Two years after Eisner’s studio. I was maybe 15, 16 at the time.

GROTH: You’re referring to Eisner’s Spirit, but it was after his studio?

KUBERT: I worked for Will, but not on The Spirit. I was hired during the summer of ’40 or ’41 by Eisner for 12 bucks a week to sweep up the place and erase drawings and do cleanups. In fact, I think that Will referred me to Jerry Iger and I got a job up there later. Working on The Spirit with Lou Fine, inking, was a couple of years later. It must have been in ’41 because I was 15, and Will had gone into the Army. Lou Fine, who had a bad leg, wasn’t drafted. He was doing The Spirit up in Connecticut and I was inking over Lou Fine’s pencils.

GROTH: Over Lou Fine’s pencils?

KUBERT: Yep. Me and Alex Kotzky.

GROTH: That must have been intimidating.

KUBERT: Yep. And nope, I think I was too young to be intimidated.

GROTH: But it was Fine himself who hired you to do that.

KUBERT: I don’t remember how the hiring actually came about, but I don’t think Lou had any direct involvement in it. There was a business arrangement, I think, between Will Eisner and Quality Comics. It may have been somebody up at Quality Comics that set me up to do this work.

GROTH: Who else was working on The Spirit? Was this similar to a shop, where there was a group of people in a room?

KUBERT: Yes. It was Lou Fine, Alex Kotzky, Gil Fox, and myself. Somebody was doing the lettering. There were just four people in a small office in Stamford, Connecticut. My summer vacation consisted of taking the subway train from Brooklyn to Grand Central Station, then taking the train up to Stamford, Connecticut, over two hours each way. Every day. I never stayed over. That was the first time I ever ate an un-kosher meal [laughs].

GROTH: In Stamford, Connecticut.

KUBERT: I think it was bacon and eggs [laughs]!

GROTH: Now, during the ’40s when you were doing this, I’m curious as to what the general attitude of all the artists was. I mean, the attitude today, even among artists who work on the same kinds of comic characters you worked on, is that they regard themselves as Artists, with a capital A. They have the sense that they are producing “art.” Now, did you have that sense, that you were involved in a burgeoning art form?

KUBERT: I never even thought about it. I know that I loved and enjoyed what I was doing. I got a thrill out of seeing a good piece of artwork. When I saw stuff that Lou Fine or Will Eisner did, it would raise the hair on the back of my neck. I kept saying to myself, “If these guys can do this kind of work, then maybe I’ll be able to be that good — or better.”

It never intimidated me — just the opposite. It gave me more incentive to go ahead and do my own stuff. But an art form, or a lower form of art? I never thought of that. I just loved to do it.

GROTH: You didn’t sit around and theorize about it.

KUBERT: No. And neither did the guys I knew.

GROTH: Was that a generally held —

KUBERT: I think that it was a generally held feeling. Where questions as to art quality came up was when someone gained an opportunity to make more bucks. When someone had the chance to go into advertising or illustration, he’d take it. Most didn’t do it because of the art. In fact, I think most would have stayed with comic books if they could make an equal amount of money.

GROTH: Because it was more enjoyable.

KUBERT: Right. Because comic books is rather singular in that it allows you to take chances. It allows you to make mistakes. In a 16-page story, all of it doesn’t have to be perfect. You can really go out on a limb and take chances. And, sometimes, those chances work great! And that makes you feel good. If it fails, fine. The majority of the effort does work OK. So it encourages you to take more chances and a lot of guys were able to do exceptionally good work in that way. Comic books also gives you a bigger canvas upon which to work. ’Cause when you’re doing syndication or advertising, there are six guys sitting on your back giving their suggestions. “Turn this a half an inch,” or, “Move this figure to the-left about three inches.” That’s what they’ re getting paid for and that’s what they’re gonna do. But there isn’t enough time for those small changes in comic books. So you had more freedom. To let your imagination run. I find that there is no other area in commercial art that allows you this kind of freedom. To design pages. To design complete books. To generate emotion into a story.

And you find out later that somebody read that story and actually felt the thing that you drew. When I first came into this business, I never dreamed that my work was read beyond the next block. I was doing it because I loved to do it. I really like to see the characters in my head appear in graphic and pictorial form. And when I learned that people around the world get the same effects, it was like having whipped cream put on top of the cake.

GROTH: Your circle of friends and peers, how sophisticated or educated were they?

KUBERT: Most of the artists that I knew came from a classic art background before coming into comics. Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Rembrandt. Most of us admired certain people in the business. Lou Fine was admired by every comic-book artist. We would wait for his books to come out and grab them to see what new thing Lou had done. Most of the artists came from a fine-art background. Gone to college. Done illustration and things like that. They had the foundation of figure drawing and proportion and anatomy and composition, and they applied all these things to their comic-book work. I guess a good example is Jack Kirby. I don’t think Jack could exaggerate and foreshorten proportions that look right unless he had a very sound foundation in good drawing. Most of the guys that came into cartooning were like that. That’s also why a lot of the things that I see in comic books today, to these tired old eyes, seem worse than a lot of the bad stuff I saw in comic books 40 years ago. At the very least I could read the stuff then. I could at least make out what the hell was happening.

GROTH: Well, you’re behind the times, Joe.

KUBERT: [Laughs.] Yeah. I gotta get my glasses changed, I guess.

GROTH: Let me get back to your career. You actually didn’t work with Eisner — I didn’t realize he wasn’t there at the time you worked on The Spirit.

KUBERT: As a matter of fact, when I worked up at Eisner’s in Tudor City, when I was 12, I would rarely see Will. His office in Tudor City was actually an apartment, and it was composed of several rooms used as offices. Tudor City — as opposed to where I lived in Brooklyn — was like the East Side Kids. Remember the East Side Kids looking up at this big apartment house? That’s precisely the way I felt.

GROTH: Where was Tudor City in New York?

KUBERT: Tudor City is near the U.N. building. On the east side of Manhattan around 42nd Street. I used to play handball during lunch hour with Tex Blaisdell. I did not see Will very often because, since the office was set up as an apartment, one of the rooms in the apartment was his office. That’s where he would work.

GROTH: But in the outer part of the place he would have other artists working?

KUBERT: Yeah. Chuck Cuidera. Tex Blaisdell. And Bob Powell. Nick Cardy was there drawing Phantom Lady. That’s where I met all the guys. Dave Berg was there, too.

GROTH: Was Eisner’s studio comparable to Chesler’s?

KUBERT: Oh no. Eisner’s was smaller. Tighter. In a really high-class neighborhood. My biggest “coup” was to do a half-page filler in the eight page Spirit magazine.

Interesting story: Blackhawk was being produced in the studio. Chuck Cuidera was the artist. Blackhawk was for Quality Publishing and the work was being done here. My job was erasing and whiting out on the pages. On one cover in particular — I’ll never forget it — there was a shot of Blackhawk climbing down a rope. A hemp rope. Chuck Cuidera rendered just a couple of little hairs on the rope to show texture. My job was to white out and clean everything prior to sending the art to the engraver. I inadvertently whited out some hairs. I put some back in. I kept putting more hair in. I couldn’t stop! I just kept putting in more lines. Chuck Cuidera blew his stack. “Look, kid. You’re not the artist. You do cleanup. I do the art work!” He was right, of course. And we had lots of laughs about it in later years.

GROTH: Now, Eisner and Iger had their own shop together at one point. Was this before or after that?

KUBERT: They were not combined when I worked for them. Not physically. I never saw Eisner up at the Iger shop.

GROTH: But they were partners.

KUBERT: Yeah. But Eisner set up in Tudor City. That’s where Will operated. In truth, I really don’t know what their business relationship involved. But I made it up to Iger’s and he hired me. His shop was similar to Harry Chesler’s. Larger and with a lot more artists.

From “War Party” in Our Army at War #151 (February 1965) written by Bob Kanigher, penciled and inked by Joe Kubert ©1965 DC Comics

GROTH: Did you all work for Iger?

KUBERT: Yeah. I was working up at his shop there for at least a couple of months during the summer.

GROTH: When did this occur?

KUBERT: It’s hard for me to place it, time-wise.

GROTH: After Chesler?

KUBERT: Yes. After Chesler.

GROTH: What was Iger’s shop like?

KUBERT: It was a few levels higher than Chesler’s. In a nicer section, closer to Midtown. On the East Side near the elevated train. Third Avenue elevated train, which no longer exists. The El, that is, or Iger. His shop was on the second floor of a commercial building. A big, open room where at least two-dozen artists were working. He had a separate office with a glass wall so he could see what was going on but separate from us. He put me at a table there and I went to work. I may have met Murphy Anderson but I’m not sure. Murph worked there shortly after or during the time I was there.

GROTH: Who else worked for Iger and was in this shop when you worked there?

KUBERT: I really don’t recall. There were no notables. I recall Bob Lubbers. It seemed that all the artists had similar styles, though. Lubbers is the only one that stands out in my mind.

GROTH: And the Iger shop was another 9-to-5 gig where you came in, did your work, left.

KUBERT: That’s right.

GROTH: So it wasn’t as loose as Chesler’s?

KUBERT: No. Much more regimented. No wrestling or fooling around. After all, Iger was right there with us. Clean place. The tables were newer. The tabarets were newer. Material was better.

GROTH: What was Iger like? Did you know him?

KUBERT: Yes. Very business-like. Sharp dresser. Came in with a suit and tie and all that. He was the boss, and acted the part.

GROTH: Was there definitely a class distinction between him and the artists?

KUBERT: Oh yes. He was the boss. It was real apparent.

GROTH: Did the artists at all resent that he was making so much more than all you guys even though he wasn’t doing the art?

KUBERT: I think we were more envious than resentful.

GROTH: Any possibility of a worker’s revolution in the place?

KUBERT: No way. Most of the older guys would poke fun at him on the sly. I was still a kid at the time and it really didn’t mean anything to me. They would describe him as a “ladies’ man,” which I do not know whether that was true or not. Maybe that was their way, their only way of getting at the boss.

GROTH: When you worked for Chesler, Iger, All-American, were you always paid and paid on time?

KUBERT: Always. Never had a problem with getting paid. The only time I can remember ever having a problem with money was with Bill Finger.

GROTH: Oh yeah, he co-created Batman without even knowing it.

From “The Ice Prince” in The Brave and the Bold #5 (April 1956) written by Bill Finger, penciled and inked by Joe Kubert ©1956 DC Comics

KUBERT: That’s right. And Bill’s situation was, I think, one of the sadder things I witnessed in this business. Bill was sweet man, a nice guy, and a great writer. He had a lot of tough luck. I don’t know why but he always seemed to be broke. Never had a buck on him. I recall that one day I got a check up at DC for some work I had done. I never even cashed the checks usually. I would bring them home and give them to my mother. This one time Bill Finger was at the office when I got paid. I knew him, and had spoken to him many times. And I admired him. He wrote a lot of the scripts, including Batman and Hawkman. Apparently, he was in financial trouble — again.

“Joe, I got a problem. I wonder if I could borrow some money from you, just for the weekend?”

I said, “It’s late, Bill. The banks are closed. I don’t know where to cash the check.”

“Oh, I know a place,” he said, “a grocery store that I know downtown.” He was living down in the Village at the time. “We can get it cashed there.”

So I went with him. He asked to borrow 200 bucks I think it was. Which was a lot of money. He said it was just for the weekend.

I asked, “Are you sure 200 is enough?”

He says, “Ah, maybe another 50 bucks.”

Three years later I collected that $250. But I collected it because I sent a collection agency after him.

GROTH: Holy hell.

KUBERT: It was just before I went into the Army. But I really didn’t have any animosity toward him. I felt very sorry for him because he did have problems.

GROTH: Was he your age?

KUBERT: Older. He was in his mid-40s even at the time. I was around 20 or so.

(Continued)

[Ed. Note]: This interview was given in response to a 1987 debate about Marvel and DC rating comics (fueled by a comic shop being closed due to community pressure/the obscenity charges facing Friendly Frank’s, which eventually led to the formation of the CBLDF). DC announced new guidelines, with new ratings — “Universal, Mature Readers, and Adult”  — and certain creators, including Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Marv Wolfman, and Howard Chaykin, among others, objected to not having been included in the decision-making process.

GARY GROTH: The first question I wanted to ask you is: Do you consider it a victory of sorts that DC has dropped the “Universal” label from their comics?

MOORE: Well, from my own personal point of view, it’s not something that I consider a victory because I never really considered that I was waging a war. I mean, obviously I’m not speaking for Frank [Miller] or Howard [Chaykin] or Marv [Wolfman] or any of the other creators that signed the various petitions during the furor about the ratings system. But, for my part, it was never intended … well, as a conflict. It was simply a case of DC announcing that they were basically bringing in a new system, which I strongly disagreed with.

Watchmen written by Alan Moore, drawn by Dave Gibbons, colored by John Higgins ©1986, 1987 DC Comics

I signed the petition to make them aware that I disagreed with it. DC reiterated their stance upon the rating system, which seemed to me to indicate that they had no intention of changing their position. And when that became clear, I simply quit. It was as simple as that. I certainly didn’t want at any point to indulge in any form of moral terrorism. I’ve stressed this very clearly to Karen Berger. When I was talking to Karen over the phone, she was asking me, basically, what sort of chance there was of me coming back to DC, and what DC would have to do for me to work at DC again. I explained to Karen at the time that there was very little chance of me returning to work at DC because, basically, that wasn’t what I’d been attempting to do. I hadn’t been quitting DC as a bargaining point, but simply been quitting DC. To me, that was the full stuff. It wasn’t an attempt to say, “Well, I’m going to quit DC unless you do this, this, and this,” because that, in my opinion, would have been bringing the same sort of pressure on DC as I was criticizing the various retailers of bringing to bear. So if I had been angling with DC to try and get them to cave in, I certainly wouldn’t have told Karen that there was no chance of getting me back because that would have been the only possible bargaining tool thrown straight out the window. But I was very adamant about that, that it wasn’t an act of moral terrorism. It was purely the only way that I thought that I had been left of registering my disapproval of DC’s new system.

I mean, this is all something that happened six months ago. It seems very much like a closed book to me now, and it was simply a matter of me quitting the company when I no longer felt that I could abide by their practices. It wasn’t an attempt to bend back that company to my particular way of thinking, and I think that if you re-read my editorial in the [Comics] Buyer’s Guide (printed in Journal #117), I think that somewhere in there I do stress very strongly that if DC wishes to bring in a rating system, then they have every right to do so. But, as a creator, I’m under no obligation to go along with that, and I have the right to take my work elsewhere. So, that was my basic position. So from my point of view, no, I wouldn’t say that I thought it was victory. I’m glad that DC has abandoned the rating system, obviously, because I didn’t agree with the rating system, I thought that was bad for the comics industry. But, I don’t feel any great sense of victory about it.

GROTH: Well, let me ask you this just to clarify this particular point. If you quit working for DC because you couldn’t abide by their newly instituted policies, and they abandoned those policies, on what basis would you still refuse to work for them?

MOORE: Well, this gets down to sort of personal things, because in the petition that we put in the Buyer’s Guide, we originally said that we didn’t like the new system that DC seems to bringing in. And, if at that point DC had said, “Oh, well, we hadn’t realized that we’d done anything wrong, but let’s all talk about it, [see] what we can come with,” then I should have mentioned that there would probably have been no problem at all. But instead DC decided to stand by their decision, which is of course their right, and as a result I left.

Now, since then there have been a number of other factors. One is that in the time since quitting DC, I’ve put DC completely out of my mind, more or less, and have been thinking about other things that I’d like to do. So, you know, just on a purely personal level there are other things that I’m interested in doing now, that don’t really involve DC. On another level, just the behavior of DC as a corporate entity during this time of troubles has, to my mind, left much to be desired. I was very upset about the firing of Marv Wolfman. And I remember that before Marv had been fired, when he was worried that he might be, I said to him that certainly anybody who fired somebody for standing up for a moral position, could not really count on my services in the future. And that’s something that I still feel. I don’t really want to work for a company that fires people over mailers like that. And there was various other things that I don’t want to go into too deeply, but certain other attempts at coercion and things like that, and perhaps things that would have been better left unsaid, things that I found a little bit unseemly in a major comics company. And, I have no desire to rake over these other things that to me are yesterday’s breakfast and six months dead. There were certain factors during the time since announcing my decision to quit working for DC and the present day, which have not really enhanced my opinion at DC Comics. So there’s a certain amount of disillusionment with DC. It’s nothing that I want to make a great noise about. Like I said, they’re perfectly free to carry on doing business the way they see fit. But, to a certain degree, I’m disillusioned with them, and really have no plans whatever they’re doing regarding the rating system, to work for them again. Although, I certainly applaud their common sense in abandoning the rating system.

GROTH: Your disillusionment with DC would indicate that you think they’ve abandoned certain principles that they previously adhered to. And what I’d like to ask is: What principles do you think they’ve espoused that they’ve abandoned?

MOORE: Well, I’d say that it does come down to specific incidents, sort of personal things. I mean, I’m not in a position to say what they’ve abandoned because I don’t really know for a fact what DC’s moral stance was in the first place. And I’m sure that you find this when talking to professionals, “Well, I’ve heard of a couple of instances when people are alleged to have been treated less than fairly by DC, but they have never attempted to mess around with me.” So, until they do so, I’ll keep an open mind on the subject. However, there were sort of veiled threats, and things like that; you know, not big, serious, major threats, but sort of little niggly attempts at coercion which I found a little bit distressing because I don’t really like to be treated in that way. There was some abrasive and personal comments, which, again, I found distressing, because I went out of my way not to bring personalities into it. And indeed in the Buyer’s Guide article I didn’t even mention DC Comics. I was talking about publishers in generic terms. But certainly, I never wished to isolate individual people at DC or indeed anybody as being the villains of the piece or castigating them in any way. And one of the things that upset me a lot about the entire ratings debate was that I did see an awful lot of personal malice flowing around through the air, which is something that I wanted to avoid — obviously still do wish to avoid. But, for all that this leaves its mark it makes me feel … well, I couldn’t actually pinpoint any one particular principle, which I feel DC has abandoned. I mean, as I say, I don’t really know what principles DC had to start with.

Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986) written and penciled by Frank Miller, inked by Klaus Janson, colored by Lynn Varley ©1986 DC Comics

GROTH: Right! [Laughs.]

MOORE: It is just a sense of personal dissatisfaction, and if I don’t feel 100% happy with the people that I’m working for, then this makes the work itself less enjoyable, and I’d rather be working elsewhere. That’s basically it.

GROTH: Did you think that the way in which DC reacted to your protest was … well, did that surprise you?

MOORE: No. It didn’t surprise me. We were making the protest because it was a protest that needed making. Some things you do whether they have any hope of practical success or not, just because you consider them to be right. Which was why we made the protest.

Now, I would have hoped that DC, in the first place, would not have gone about the ratings or the labellings or whatever affair without consulting the creators. I would have hoped that in the first place, that we would have had a chance to discuss this before the whole thing ever reached the public eye, so that all of this could have been avoided. But that didn’t happen. I was a little surprised by that. We felt that the only way we could tell DC how we felt about it was in the form of the petition. Now, I suppose that DC had gotten a clear choice when they saw the petition, that they could always have said, “OK, it looks like we might have made a mistake here, let’s all sit down and talk about it, and see what’s going on.” Or they could have done what they chose to do, which was to take a tough, hard-line, no-nonsense stance — by simply buying the opposite page in the Buyer’s Guide to print their guidelines as a way basically of telling the petitioners on the opposite page that there was nothing going, and that petitions didn’t make any difference to DC’s position at all, and that they were going to go ahead and do it whatever [they] felt. That was the stance they took. I think that it was misguided. I think that if you ask the people at DC now they’d probably agree.

I couldn’t say that I was that surprised by it, Gary. I’ve dealt with big companies before, and sometimes a corporate entity makes grotesque mistakes that the individual people comprising it perhaps wouldn’t make if they thought about it on their own for a little while.

GROTH: Did DC at any time ever call you up after the protest and in essence say, “Perhaps we were undiplomatic about this, and let’s talk it over”? Anything to that effect?

MOORE: Well, I don’t actually recall anything specific along those lines. I mean, DC were anxious to reestablish contact once they realized that we were serious. You see, after the protest, I made it clear to DC that it would affect the chances of me working for them under those conditions. That there wasn’t much likelihood of me working for them under those conditions. And I think that the attitude at DC was that we were over-heated prima donnas who’d soon cool down. Well. I suppose that for all I know we may have been over-heated prima donnas, but we didn’t cool down. It was a thing which we did feel strongly about. So DC basically took the gamble of saying, “No, we’re not budging from our position.” Which, as far as I was concerned, left me no choice other than to quit. Since then, DC has made attempts at reconciliation. But, they’ve mainly been along … I mean, we’ve offered better financial deals which I found a little distressing because I wasn’t asking for a pay raise, and I would have hoped that no one thought that I was asking for a pay raise. So, there have been various attempts at reconciliation since that point. But nothing has moved me terribly. And, there’s nothing that’s been effective, as far as I’m concerned. Like I said, this is something of a dead issue. It’s a thing where I quit and that was a final decision. And nothing has happened between then and now to make me change my mind.

GROTH: When you protested … well, DC did two things, one is they instituted the guidelines, and the second is that they instituted a ratings system. And I assume you protested both. Were you protesting the motivations as you understood them, behind implementing these two policies? Or were you protesting the policies themselves? Or were you protesting both?

MOORE: Well, the policies … it was both, I’d say, Gary. The policies themselves are ones that I don’t agree with. If DC came to me before instituting the guidelines and the ratings and they asked we what I thought, then I would have debated it hotly with them. Because my personal feelings about it, as I’ve expressed probably at tedious length elsewhere, are that really it does children no service at all to restrict their access to information about the world. I think that adults have a very distorted view of what childhood is actually like which is clouded by huge pink billowing drifts of nostalgia, and I think, often misplaced nostalgia, and I think that, certainly where I live, the world in which the children find themselves is not by any means a pleasant one. There are intrusions into it by a lot of very grim facts. There is violence in everyday life, there is sexuality, often violent sexuality intruding into the child’s world, and in my opinion, the only way that we can possibly help our children is to give them the information that they need to deal with that.

So, from a personal point of view, as a parent and as a writer, my position was that I do not believe that a ratings system of that sort should be implemented. Now, beyond that, I was also very worried on a political way about the way in which this seemed to have come about. Because it seemed to me that because of pressure being brought to bear by people who, in my book, have brought an extreme moral and political stance, DC were basically caving in in a fashion which I found to be morally cowardly. And which I also associated very strongly with the current political blight upon the American landscape, at least as I perceive it from over here — the moral groups, the moral pressure groups suddenly being able to exert enormous power for themselves simply by the weakness and acquiescence of other people. I mean, it would seem to me that these groups don’t have any real moral or logical reason for assuming the sort of, the positions that they do. It’s certainly nothing which the rest of us should feel honor-bound to respect. I don’t really personally feel that these groups have any automatic right to be listened to. It seems to me that the only reason that they do have the alarming amount of power that they have is because everyone’s frightened of looking immoral when these moral pressure groups are basically making their political stance sound like the ultimate expression of good Christian morality. And it puts people in the position of saying, “We are against good Christian morality.” And many people are too frightened to actually put their case properly or to resist that sort of pressure and that is something which to me, perhaps it’s being melodramatic and overstating the case, but to me that links it very strongly with the concept of “the good German.” It’s people basically not being willing to make a stand against something, even though, in all probability, it’s something that they don’t necessarily agree with. I find that such an alarming prospect, it’s something which I felt, politically, bound to oppose. I didn’t want DC making my decisions for me. If DC wanted to bow to pressures from those sort of sources, then I can’t really argue against them doing that. But, I don’t want them to take me along with them as an employee. So it was a matter of abandoning ship at that point. It was basically a decision on two levels. Personally, I don’t like the idea of a ratings system, I don’t like the idea of guidelines. But, in that particular instance it was also more distress at the way it was being handled politically as well.

GROTH: Well, I have about 30 questions based on that answer. Let me confirm first of all, that a large part of this is due to your perception of DC’s cowardice in the face of outside pressure groups?

MOORE: Yeah.

GROTH: Well, let me tell you this. At the San Diego Con, there was a panel on ratings. And Dick Giordano was on it, and since Dick and nobody else at DC would answer questions about this for six months, I stood up and asked him a question. I’d like to read the question and answer to you and then ask for your reaction. What I said was: “I don’t think that Dick answered the moderator’s first question fully, which was ‘Why did DC initiate the guidelines and ratings when it did?’ Frank Miller and Alan Moore and other creators asserted that DC initiated the guidelines and the ratings system in direct response to outside pressure groups and right-wing organizations, adverse media publicity, and specifically from letters from Buddy Saunders and Steve Geppi. I’d like to find out if that’s true or not.” And Giordano replied, “Our standards were planned as far back as April of last year. We received Buddy’s letter in November of last year, A second or third draft of the standards was shown to Frank Miller before the letter from Buddy Saunders arrived, so I think that we’ve well established that this was the case.” So, in effect, he’s denying that there was any outside pressure. Now, do you think that’s —

MOORE: I have heard this line before. I mean, I’m not saying it’s a lie. I’m sure that Dick said it in all honesty and good faith. But, it was put to me that the DC guidelines had been something that they had been considering for a long time, and I’m prepared to believe that. At the same time, there was a letter, I believe in the Buyer’s Guide, you could check this out better than I could, Gary, that was from, I think it was from Buddy Saunders [owner of Lone Star Comics], it might have been from Steve Geppi [owner of Diamond Comics Distributors], I’m afraid this is a long time back for me, and I’m not even sure of the details of the thing. There was a letter from I think Buddy Saunders — if indeed it was Buddy Saunders, and please check this out before you print it — saying that he had a letter of support from Paul Levitz at DC Comics which he had received after sending his letter to the company. [Moore is actually referring to a letter written by Steve Geppi, not Buddy Saunders. The reader is asked to keep this in mind when reading the next four paragraphs.]

Now, I mean, I’m not sure how else to square those two bits of information together. Either Buddy Saunders is lying, in which case he has put DC into a very difficult position, and I wouldn’t have thought they’d have been terribly pleased about that. Or it’s true, in which case, I don’t really know what to think. I would say that looking at this, I’m not sure whether this happened or not. But what I believe probably happened is that it wasn’t a case of downright evil, but more a case of bad luck and ineptitude. I think that what probably happened was that DC had been considering the guidelines for a while, but that still didn’t stop them choosing that particular opportunity, upon receiving the letters, to try and make a small amount of political capital out of it by appearing to appease the retailers and distributors by saying, “Yes, we go along.” I mean, as far as I remember, the quoted substance of the letter from Paul Levitz to Buddy Saunders was that DC agreed on many of the points in his letter and he could count upon their support, basically. I mean, that’s paraphrasing, but I think that was the basic gist of it. So, it would seem to me that there’s at least the possibility that DC, and they may have been considering a rating system of some sort for a while, but that it was still the letters from the distributors and retailers concerned that actually made them choose that particular time to implement those policies. In my book, it doesn’t really make an awful lot of difference whether they’d been planning them for a while or not, if that was the case, because there was still, as it seems to me, an attempt to maybe make political capital out of the situation by appeasing the pressure from outside. In which case it’s simply morally immaterial whether the guidelines had been discussed previous to that. That’s my thinking on that, Gary, but, as with all these things, I’m living in Northampshire, and this is all happening in New York, in America. I’m relying upon second-hand information for all of this.

GROTH: Let me ask you something else about DC. Is there anything necessarily nefarious about Buddy Saunders sending DC a letter saying something to the effect that, “I would like your comics to be more moral according to my standards,” and Paul Levitz theoretically sending back a letter saying, “Yes, we would like to be moral and responsible publishers, too”?

MOORE: Well, let me just think about that for a second. Well, I don’t think that … well, it’s a free country, Gary.

GROTH: So they say.

Watchmen written by Alan Moore, drawn by Dave Gibbons, colored by John Higgins ©1986, 1987 DC Comics

MOORE: Buddy Saunders has got the right to send a letter to DC, as indeed has any reader. Anybody in the country has the right to send a letter to DC, and suggest certain changes that they might feel would enhance the company’s product. I mean, we get thousands of letters like every day.

GROTH: Right.

MOORE: Given Buddy Saunders’s position, it perhaps makes it slightly more disturbing, because he can bring a certain amount of financial pressure to bear upon DC, even though probably not a great deal, but there is that element to it. But still, for all that. I would be prepared to say that he’s got an absolute right to send stuff to DC. And to send a letter to DC and ask them to take a more moral position.

Now, that is Buddy Saunders’s definition of moral, and I believe that he explained it pretty clearly in his letters, and I’ve read stuff in the recent Journal where he modifies various statements, but from the initial letter, with the talk about boy-scout super-heroes and, well, he more or less suggested that the characters and the creators themselves were mental and moral wrecks. [Laughter.] Which maybe from Buddy Saunders’s point of view we are, which is fair enough. But it is, at least in my book, a moral opinion which does require a certain amount of debate. Certainly DC has got the right to send a letter back to Buddy Saunders, and to say, “Yes, we’ll go along with everything you say.” That’s fine.

The morality of that is so vague, nebulous, and subjective that I barely want to get into it. But the result of it is that, on a purely practical level, DC were allowing a rather extreme moral stance to go unquestioned, were accepting without consulting any of the other sort of interested parties. I’m not saying that it was actually immoral or the sort of the thing that they’re going to burn in hell for forever. But it wasn’t the way that I’d rather that they’d done business with me. It was something that I found personally upsetting. And, as I said earlier, it was something that I didn’t feel that I could go along with. It wasn’t a matter where I was thinking that Buddy Saunders was evil for sending the letter. Although obviously his morality is totally different from my own. It’s not a question of me thinking that DC are evil for sort of acquiescing to it. Although DC’s reaction lacks a certain amount of spine.

GROTH: Right.

MOORE: It’s mainly that I felt that DC had unfortunately created an untenable position as far my relationship with them went, because they were including me in a decision that they were making regarding the way that they responded to the distributor’s letters, which I really didn’t feel that I wanted to go along with. Did I answer your question, Gary? I’ve lost track of it; I’m quite through.

GROTH: You might even have answered three or four questions, Alan. It seems to me that one of the things you’re saying is that publishing companies can behave morally. And one of the reasons you’re leaving DC is because they breached what you consider to be some sort of moral contract, an implied moral contract between the corporation and its authors. Is that accurate?

MOORE: Ye — Well, it’s not inaccurate, Gary. The word “moral” is a very strong and loaded one. I mean, to some degree, I’m not naive enough to expect any big corporation to behave morally. They don’t. I don’t think I’ve ever come across one where I could say that this corporation has behaved in all instances in the way that I myself as an individual would have. So, yeah, to some degree, anybody who is working for any corporation is morally compromised to a point. And I suppose it just becomes a matter of where you draw the line. There had never been any situation when working with DC when I personally felt that I would be morally compromising myself. I suppose, yeah, you could argue that while working for a company like Warner Brothers, or while working for DC, if they’ve done anything wrong then you’re morally compromised. And, yeah, I suppose that there is a case for that. On the other hand, the first job I got working in the industry was for the music paper Sounds, which was owned by Spotlight Publications which was owned by a company which made missile guidance systems — you know, you’re up to your neck in shit the moment you step into the industry.

GROTH: Right.

MOORE: So that’s something that you do, and you adjust to it. There is a point where, well, it’s if you never bought vegetables from any country in the world that’s got something politically wrong with it, then you’d starve. Much human existence does involve a certain degree of compromise. As long as that’s at a tolerable level, then that’s fine. But, whereas before in my relationship with DC I had never felt morally compromised beyond that basic level of compromise which it seems we must always deal with, in this instance, I did feel that it had overstepped my personal mark. It seemed to me that DC were basically bowing to pressure, either directly or indirectly, from a group of people that I considered to be actually evil. People that I would use the term immoral about, and, so, although that’s a subjective thing in my mind now, I felt that DC had gone beyond the line that I’d drawn.

GROTH: OK, I want to skip back, because there was a period where you said about a dozen interesting things, and I want to follow up on a few of them. If 1 understand you correctly, you were talking about the criticism levied against comics by certain right-wing organizations, the kind of criticism levied by people like the Moral Majority and so forth. And, if I understand you correctly, you were saying that you thought that they were imposing a criticism that lacked an authentic moral authority and that DC was in essence acquiescing to this not because they searched their own conscience and found their conscience to be compatible with the people who were criticizing them, but out of a sense of cowardice.

MOORE: Yeah.

GROTH: Now, I’m wondering if you think that morally based criticism could be levied against DC (or other comics publishing companies) that was in fact legitimate enough for DC to honestly respond sympathetically, and respond to accordingly.

MOORE: I really don’t know. Morality is sort of a dodgy area once you try to extend it beyond the personal, Gary. I mean, certainly — this is not DC, this is all comics — there are certain places where I will pick them up and I will find expressions of sexism, I will find unconscious racism or tokenism, I will find expressions of things that to me do seem to be morally wrong. However, whereas I might write a letter of protest, or promise never to read those comics again, I would never extend it beyond that point. I would never write to DC, or get up a pressure group demanding that they eradicate sexism from their comics, because although it’s something that I feel very strongly about, I wouldn’t feel that it was my right to impose my moral perceptions of the world upon them. This is only my stance, but I really do believe in freedom of speech. This has certainly gotten me into trouble with some of my more radical friends, because I have, in the past, said that I believe that even the National Front, the British Nazi organization should not be denied freedom of speech, which I believe is almost a suicidally liberal stance, but is one that I feel totally compelled to stick to. You know, I’m free to object to any stuff that I hear and don’t like. I’m free to object in public to any stuff that I don’t like. That’s my right. I might level personal moral criticisms about a company that had actually done material that I found offensive, but I wouldn’t expect DC to heed them. It would be nice if they did, sure, but I wouldn’t expect them to necessarily take any notice of them. I mean, it depends whose morals you’re talking about. Please don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that Buddy Saunders doesn’t have morals, I’m sure he does. I’m sure that Steve Geppi has morals. But I’m equally certain that they’re not my morals. And I’m not certain that there is an objective morality. I’m not certain that that’s how the world works, in practice. So, to me, even though I might object to the war-mongering aspects of a book like G.I. Joe, for example.

“The Diplomat” G. I. Joe Vol. 1, #9 (March 1983) written by Steven Grant, penciled by Mike Vosburg, inked by Chic Stone ©1982 Marvel Comics Group

But my response to that will not be to try and get a campaign to get G.I. Joe taken off the shelves, or put on a higher shelf, or put in a plastic bag, or given a rating on the cover. My response will be to contribute to something like Real War Stories, which will make me feel that I’m redressing the balance in a positive way, rather than trampling over the opposition through sheer brute force. So yes, there may be areas in DC Comics which I would find morally reprehensible…

GROTH: Well, now what is the reason —

MOORE: … Certainly not ones that I would try to eradicate by censorship.

GROTH: Well, would you try to eradicate them through persuasion?

“Chicken!” Two-Fisted Tales #22 (July-August 1951) written by Harvey Kurtzman, penciled by John Severin, inked by Will Elder ©1951 EC Comics

MOORE: No. I mean, what I would try to do was to eradicate them by trying to do something better. I mean part of my attitude to comics regarding say, the work on Swamp Thing and Watchmen is that if I can state my case with greater lucidity, greater impact, then I have a chance to basically make people lose their tastes for those sort of things, hopefully. At least that’s my ambition. If people did start, say, for example, treating women more accurately and realistically in their comics, and if those comics were well enough crafted to be superior comics then I would hope that through a process of Darwinian natural selection that there would gradually be less and less sexist material appearing in comics because they would be perceived by the readers as being more and more dated, more and more offensive. That form of pressure I have no qualms against bringing upon people because it seems to me to be perfectly fair and equitable. And there’s no guarantee that I’ll succeed in it. Any other sort of pressure, I really don’t go along with.

GROTH: I hope you don’t think I’m belaboring this, but I just want to drag you into deeper philosophical waters here. It seems to me that you’re talking about a similar strategy in terms of persuading people to do something or not to do something. In other words, you’re trying to provide something positive rather than something negative, but my guess is that you would probably support a columnist’s right as a writer espousing his principles, to say that you shouldn’t vote for Ronald Reagan because of such and such, which is a negative way to persuade people, rather than saying that you should vote for somebody for these reasons. And —

MOORE: Well, in my instance, that’s a bit of a funny analogy, because I’m an anarchist, Gary.

GROTH: Ah-ha!

MOORE: At least as far as I’m able. I really don’t think we should vote for any of the bastards. [Laughter.] Which perhaps is a pretty negative stance to take. I don’t know. You know, sort of —

GROTH: That could be perceived —

MOORE: Well, obviously, in my comics. Well. I’ve probably done more comics about the horrors of nuclear power than I’ve done about the delights of windmills.

Watchmen written by Alan Moore, drawn by Dave Gibbons, colored by John Higgins ©1986, 1987 DC Comics

GROTH: [Laughter.] Right.

MOORE: Which I suppose is a vague parallel to what you were saying. And, yeah, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with commenting upon the negative aspects of things, but I think that there is something wrong in actually putting pressure upon … I mean, if there were elements in DC comics that I didn’t like, I would try to do something which could hopefully be strong enough to replace them. Now, in the course of that work, yeah, there will probably be lots of things that said that I thought Ronald Reagan was a bad president and that the Arms Race was wrong and all the other usual liberal concerns that my readers are so familiar with. But I still don’t see that that is actually putting any form of unfair pressure upon people. I really don’t think that Buddy Saunders is doing anything unfair by pointing out what he considers to be negative aspects in comics from his moral point of view. I think that it would get a bit tricky if, having decided that sexism in DC comics was wrong, I would then go to Dick Giordano and say, “Unless you get rid of all the sexism in DC Comics, Dick, I’m leaving.” No, that would seem to me to be putting an actual, hard, physical financial pressure upon DC Comics to do my absolute moral will. That would be wrong. If in a private conversation I said to Dick, “I think there’s too much sexism in DC Comics,” and he said, “I don’t agree with you,” then I’d say, “Fine.” And it would go no further than that, because other people have got their right to their opinions, too. Including Buddy Saunders, including Steve Geppi. It’s like the right-to-lifers consider that they have the right to stop women from having control of their own bodies. The pro-abortionists, as far as I know, don’t actually go around and insist that they have the right to give women abortions whether they want them or not. It seems to me to be similar to that sort of situation. All I’m trying to do is to defend my own territory, I’m not trying to encroach upon anybody else’s, and so whereas I’m only too happy to state my case and to make moral arguments of my own in a forum where people are free to accept or reject them as they see fit. I would never bring pressure, of the kind that I perceive DC bowing to, upon a company to subjugate themselves to my moral imperatives.

GROTH: Right, right Hmmmm.

MOORE: If I sound like I’m being evasive, Gary, then please tell me, because it’s not intended. I’m just sort of —

GROTH: No, no, I think you’re making an interesting point. What you’re saying, I suppose, is that there is a point beyond which you won’t lobby to impose your own moral view on other people.

MOORE: Yeah. I would lobby to make my moral view heard, but not to impose it. I’ve marched with anti-Nazi demonstrations, but I would not go along with the members of those demonstrations who wish to gag the National Front. I believe in making it plain that there is an opposing view, and this is what the opposing view is. But not in trampling upon the view that you oppose.

GROTH: OK. I certainly don’t want to beat that horse to death. I was just going to say that putting pressure on organizations that you oppose morally or politically is probably a recognized device in democratic societies, and whether it’s the Moral Majority or whether it’s Norman Lear’s group [People for the American Way] or whoever, there doesn’t seem to be anything terribly nefarious about that. And one —

MOORE: Well —

GROTH: — of the intellectual pollutants in this whole debate seems to me to be that the anti-labeling faction is content to criticize people like the Moral Majority for trying to put pressure on not only DC but the music industry and the entertainment industry, whereas I think it might be a much better strategy to confront the moral basis for this criticism head on, rather than to simply say that putting pressure on DC is in itself wrong. Do you see the distinction I’m trying to make?

MOORE: I see the distinction that you’re trying to make. I mean, for me, in the instance of the Moral Majority, there are problems. It’s very difficult to actually confront the moral issues of the debate with people who actually do believe literally in the Old Testament.

GROTH: [Laughter.] Yes.

MOORE: I mean, it’s very difficult, as I’ve said in the past, it’s very difficult to mount a rational moral argument against the extremist born-again Christians, when all they really need to do is notice that DC is publishing at 666 Fifth Avenue. I’m not trying to be glib there, but the stuff that I’m hearing from over that side of the Atlantic with the apparent satanic messages recorded in record groups … How do you rationally argue against something like that? How do you rationally argue against zealots? I can see that this is a muddy situation. I understand the Moral Majority’s position, I don’t like it, and I feel pretty much the same way as I do about the National Front in this country regarding the Moral Majority. But it sort of seems to me that I’ve got less against those organizations themselves than I have against the people who capitulate to them. If it seems to me that they’re not capitulating out of finding themselves in moral agreement with the people making the decisions, but out of financial considerations, or other sort of anxieties and fears. That’s what strikes me as frightening and sinister, especially when you get to the state where you can have The Wizard of Oz and Catcher in the Rye and The Diary of Anne Frank taken off of library shelves. That is serious shit.

V For Vendetta written by Alan Moore, drawn by David Lloyd ©1988, 1989 DC Comics

GROTH: [Laughter.] Right.

MOORE: That is a dangerous line for civilization. I don’t think that to be alarmed at that can be purely written off as liberal paranoia. You’re getting into very deep waters there. In my opinion, if that is allowed to go unopposed, then it could have disastrous consequences. Now, the question is “How do you oppose it?” You could adopt the same tactics as the people you are opposing, which is something that I’ve always felt very, very uneasy about, because it seems to me that you’ve lost before you’ve won, before the fight starts. From my point of view, I might learn that, for example, DC might in the future learn that…well, let me think this through. I would like to think that hopefully in the future maybe comic companies would not have such an automatic knee-jerk response to that sort of pressure. I would like to think that if this whole debacle has actually done anything of any worth, that the issues have been aired and that people in the future might think, “Well, hang on, why do we have to automatically fold in the face of this sort of pressure? Are there other alternatives?” I suppose that that’s my ultimate hope for the situation.

GROTH: That’s pretty optimistic, Alan.

MOORE: Yeah, I know, it’s incredibly optimistic, but I’m that sort of boy, Gary. I don’t know, you’re probably right. I doubt that it’s really going to change an awful lot, but if we didn’t nurture these spouts of optimism in our breasts, it would be a pretty grim old world, wouldn’t it?

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GROTH: [Laughter.] Yeah, right. Well, let me ask you to comment on this, because I think your position is different in at least the nuances from that of Frank’s and Howard [Chaykin’s] and Marv’s. You’ve said that you don’t intend to work for DC in the future, and that it didn’t particularly help their case that they did eventually capitulate to your protest. Now, at the San Diego Con, Frank said that he felt that the difficulty between him and DC was “completely resolved.” And the question I have is, if in fact DC did capitulate to the climate of the times, or to opprobrium from outside in instituting the ratings system and the guidelines, and now they to capitulated to four creators who protested, is it overly cynical to question why a creator would work for a company that simply capitulates to whoever they think has the most clout?

MOORE: Well, I think I’ve already answered that one from my point of view. That’s not the of basis that I think a comic book company should work upon. I didn’t think so when it was Buddy Saunders involved, and I didn’t feel that it would be any better if I was making them capitulate. Which is why I said straight away that I didn’t want to work for DC again, and that really, there was no point in making concessions to me, because they wouldn’t alter things. Now, as far as Frank and everybody else goes, I really don’t feel qualified to comment upon that, because I’m, well, great friends with Frank and with all of the others, and also because I’m a long way away. Now, as I understood it, the last time I spoke with Frank, he hadn’t actually said that he’d straightened out all problems between him and DC. I think he was asked by Jenette Kahn, “Does this sort out your problems with the rating system?” which it did. Like I say, if DC had at the beginning after receiving the petition, sat down and talked with us and then said, “Yeah, well, we can see you’ve got a point, and we hadn’t really thought about it, but now we won’t have a ratings system,” then that would have been completely different. That would have been fair enough, and I could have carried on working for them. But, they did, they have now belatedly done the things which could have saved the situation then, so I suppose that on a pure practical level, yes, I can understand Frank saying that the situation is resolved. Now, as I understand it, and this is again at long distance, so it’s probably completely garbled, I believe that Frank has actually said in the Buyer’s Guide that DC’s announcement that it’s going to drop the ratings system means that the ratings system is no longer the obstacle between Frank and DC. Which I don’t think is quite the same as saying that it solves everything. There might be a question of nuance there, Gary, which sort of redefines things a bit, but it’s something that I don’t really feel competent to comment upon, not having actually heard or read what Frank said upon that. But, I suppose that I can see that maybe on a practical level, we were sort of distressed that DC should be bringing in a ratings system and now they’re not. I suppose that one level, yes, they have fulfilled the practical considerations of whether they have a ratings system or not to some degree. Like I say from my point of view, I didn’t want them to buckle under to my moral demands, which is why I left rather than made threats to leave. But I really can’t comment upon anybody else’s stance upon this, because there’s an awful lot of distance, I only speak to Frank about once every six months, probably no more often than I talk to you, Gary, and I wouldn’t want to actually comment on Frank’s stance, or Marv’s stance, or Howard’s. We weren’t doing it, as I saw it, as a solid pressure lobby, because, I know for a fact there are differences of moral opinion between all of us. This is one of the classic dilemmas of the left, I suppose, in that they do not have one consistent model that they can turn to, whereas the right tends to. Do you know what I mean?

GROTH: Sure.

MOORE: So I was never under any illusion that we all felt the same way about things. This was just something that we happened to come together on in that instance, that none of us liked what DC was doing. From my point of view, I would not have wished DC to capitulate to pressure from me, and I did not attempt to do that. And I can’t really comment for anybody else.

GROTH: Let me ask you this, and the reason I’m asking you this is because I don’t think anybody involved in this has been very consistent on the matter, and that is whether or not DC is censoring the creator when they demand or request that the creator change the characterization of a character the company owns.

MOORE: No. I was going to ask you this later Gary, because I’ve seen your bit in that panel discussion about creators asking to do Minnie Mouse and turning her into a prostitute. And if Disney says no, is that censorship?

GROTH: Right.

MOORE: No, it’s not. In that instance, I thought that was perhaps a bit of a strained analogy, because, yeah, if I was going to work for the Disney studios, I would know what sort of product they were doing, if I was working for Star Comics or Harvey Comics, I’d know the same thing. I’d know that, I shouldn’t show Top Dog getting rabies and biting a school child or something. I’d be aware of that. But it was not so much a matter of censorship, as a matter of — yeah, I think that the outside bodies, the right, the moral pressure groups that I was referring to were trying to impose censorship. I mean, I wasn’t saying, “DC is censoring me,” because they won’t let me do Batman the way that I like it or whatever. DC does have, as far as I understand it, predominantly a teen-age audience, certainly a different audience than the Disney studios. And also an audience which does respond in the marketplace, apparently, responds well to stories with a more adult treatment. So, as I saw the conditions of the marketplace when I was working upon it, I took over Swamp Thing, and I probably made the character more adult. We didn’t get any letters of complaint, the sales went up.

“The Nuke-Face Papers Part 1” Saga Of The Swamp Thing # 35 (April 1985) written by Alan Moore, penciled by Steve Bissette, inked by John Totleben ©1985 DC Comics

Which didn’t surprise me, because as I perceived the audience, the audience wanted something that was more adult; DC encouraged me in giving them something that was more adult which seems to be a pretty straightforward transaction. And as such, because those arc the sort of stories that I enjoy doing. I was still quite able to carry on working at DC. Now, regarding Batman, for example, I suppose you could say that is traditionally a children’s comic book character. At the same time, me and Brian Bolland have got a graphic novel coming out sometime early next year, I believe, which is certainly just as disturbing a portrayal as in Dark Knight. Maybe even more so. I mean, there are some scenes in there I found quite horrific. Now, I suppose that if you feel aesthetically that that is an inappropriate way of doing the character, that’s fair enough, obviously you’re entitled to your opinion. But, in my opinion, that what’s happened with Batman over the last ten years, can’t clearly be labeled as a children’s character, has not been portrayed exclusively as a children’s character over the past ten years. There have been attempts to give him adult edges, and sort of make him like that, which has not gone amiss with marketplace or with the company. DC has not caught Minnie Mouse with Batman, you know. Whereas I personally at the moment have no great desire to do super-heroes again, while I was doing that particular book, DC seemed to be happy with what I was doing, I was happy with what I was doing, Brian was happy with what I was doing, and then there were the readers who liked it. Yet, it might be too extreme, I don’t know. But if DC had said to me at any point, “We don’t think this is right for Batman … ” Well, say for example, when I sent in the synopsis, they’d have said, “No, we think this is the wrong treatment for Batman.” I would never have accused them of censorship. I mean, I’ve sent synopses in to DC, which, on occasion have been rejected for those sort of very reasons.

GROTH: You’re referring to the Joker graphic novel?

MOORE: Yeah, I was referring to the Joker graphic novel. I’m sorry. Batman’s in it as well, but it is the Joker graphic novel, The Killing Joke, that I’m talking about. I have sent synopses in to DC with other characters, and DC has written back, and said, “Well, we like the synopsis, but we do think that it is a bit extreme to try Plastic Man as a male prostitute” or things along those lines. At which point, that is their right. And I would not accuse them of censorship for doing that, which I think was the thrust of what you were saying.

Batman: the Killing Joke (1988) written by Alan Moore, penciled by Brian Bolland and inked by John Higgins ©1988 DC Comics

GROTH: Yes.

MOORE: Yes. Of course I wouldn’t. I mean. I know that there are some characters that DC do regard as being primarily for children, or exclusively for children. So, for example, when I wrote my Superman stories, I think that you’ll find that I was touchingly reverent, to the institution of Superman. I had Krypto in there, I didn’t have any big revelations about Superman’s sexuality or anything like that. Whereas with a character like Batman I think that there is precedent for saying that there is more leeway with the character, that he has been treated in an adult or semi-adult fashion over the past ten years, of course with Dark Knight and its success, which proves that to some degree the readership do enjoy that sort of presentation. It seemed to me fair game that I should do what I’ve done with Batman and the Joker in this Joker graphic novel. But, if DC had said at the beginning of that instance, you know, “No, we don’t think that Batman and the Joker should be treated like this,” then I would have either said, “OK, I’ll change it,” or “Well, OK, in that case, I don’t really feel like doing the novel because that was what I wanted to do.” But it wouldn’t be a matter of DC censoring me.

GROTH: Yeah. You wouldn’t begrudge them that editorial prerogative.

MOORE: No. There again, if I had been working on, say, Swamp Thing and they had suddenly said, “Well, you’ve been doing these adult stories for the past ten issues, but we don’t really think that it’s working out, and we’d like you to make it back into a more simple super-hero-y sort of character,” then, I wouldn’t have called that censorship, but I would have retained the right to say, “Fair enough, but in that case I’d rather you got another writer for the book, because that’s not the sort of stuff that I’m interested in writing.” I mean, I’ve got my options open. I can do whatever I want. If I went to the Disney studios and they said, “Look, Alan, we want you to write Minnie Mouse,” and if I were to say to them, “Well, yeah, but I really would like to do Minnie Mouse as a prostitute, because I’ve got a really good story worked out there,” and if they considered it and said, “Yeah, well, actually you could have something. This will be fine. Try and see how it goes.” And then the results had been good, and they liked it, then that would be more comparable, absurd as it sounds, to the situation that I was in at DC. No, I wouldn’t call it censorship, Gary. I don’t think I’ve got the right to, DC owns those characters, and they have got a right to say how they think they should be treated, and we as creators have a right to work on them or not, depending on how we feel about DC’s opinions in the matter. That’s not a censorship situation as far as I’m concerned. I suppose what I’d call censorship is if I’d done those Swamp Thing stories in good faith and then they’d come out with scenes omitted from them or changed after the fact. That’s censorship. But I know what I’m getting into when I take on a character like Superman or Batman, and I send in the synopses and say that this is what I’m going to be doing, and this is going to be very heavy, and we’re going to have some quite chilling and frightening bits here and stuff like that. To me it seems like a fairly equitable transaction. There’s no problems there. But censorship to me is something that occurs after the fact. I wouldn’t say that if DC were to say to me that they wanted a very anodyne version of Batman, I wouldn’t say that that was censorship, that would just be them expressing their prerogative over a character that they own.

GROTH: I also wanted to talk to you about, well, your objections to labeling comics. First of all, you could just tell me exactly what your objection is to that, and then we can delve into that just for a few minutes.

MOORE: I would say that when it comes down to labeling comics, if we lived in a perfectly innocent world, then I’ve got no objections to labeling comics, because to some degree just putting a title on the comic is giving it a label. To a certain degree. But I don’t believe that we’re just talking about labeling here. I think that DC is making great distinctions between the terms “labeling” and “rating,” and I’m not exactly sure if there is a difference there. It’s a very, very subtle one that I’m not quite able to spot. You say we’ve got a rating system in films with R, PG and whatever the other one is.

GROTH: Yeah, X.

MOORE: Yeah, but in comics we’re not having a rating system, we’re having a labeling system. In which it will either be “Suitable for Children,” or “Suitable for 1 to 16 Year-Olds,” and “Suitable for Adults.” I don’t see the difference there at all. Certainly in that respect, I see that putting a rating system upon the front of the comic is, in practical terms, a very dodgy move, because, for example, in the interview that you did with Buddy Saunders, there was talk about the Mylar-bagging practice, and I think that Love & Rockets was used as a specific example. If there were issues that had got things which Buddy Saunders considered to go beyond the line as far as his principles were concerned, those issues, like the one with full frontal nudity in it, would be Mylar-bagged and the other issues wouldn’t be. He pointed out that putting the things in Mylar bags would probably harm the sales, right? Now, it strikes me that although he is not actually forcing writers or artists to do anything different, it wouldn’t take very long before publishers perhaps less scrupulous than yourself, Gary, would say, “Well, look, this is not selling very well. Perhaps it would be better for you financially if you did start toning down this sort of stuff.” And there are a number of ways in which publishers can put pressure upon creative people. I’m not saying that Buddy Saunders hasn’t got a right to sell things in his store the way that he wants, but I think if that precedent was enforced upon the entire industry, if all the X-rated books are being Mylar-bagged as adult and are not selling so well, then publishers are going to start putting more of their money where it’s safe, into books that the readership will have free access to. And I think that that would gradually and inexorably lead to a decline in the standards of the market. And also, I’m a little bit leery about the actual apparent principles behind it. I don’t mean to beat upon Buddy Saunders, because like I say, I’m sure that the guy does follow his own moral principles and rights just a much as I do mine. There was just a comment upon Watchmen. And he said, I thought about it, and I thought, well, if the early issues of Watchmen had been Mylar-bagged, it would have harmed the book and it wouldn’t have done so well. Now, you’re getting into dodgy territory there, because presumably from what he was saying there, Watchmen hasn’t been Mylar-bagged.

GROTH: Right.

“Bullnecks and Bracelets” (January 1987) in Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories ©2003 Gilbert Hernandez

MOORE: However, later in the interview, he’s talking about full-frontal nudity, and saying that is one of the things he would Mylar-bag a comic for, as regarding the Love & Rockets decision. Now, there is full-frontal nudity, male full-frontal nudity in most issues of Watchmen. Now, if you colored Manuel’s dick blue, would that solve his problem? Or is it the fact that Watchmen sells a hell of a lot better than Love & Rockets?

GROTH: [Laughter.] I’d have to talk to Gilbert [Hernandez].

MOORE: Yeah. But do you see what I mean, Gary?

GROTH: Yeah.

MOORE: There just seems to be some sort of discrepancy there. It strikes me that books that don’t sell millions, books that don’t sell tremendously well, like Love & Rockets, would be the ones that would suffer from that, because even if he told you something that the artist internalized subconsciously, if Gilbert and Jaime start thinking, “Shit, we need this money to pay the rent or whatever,” stuff like that, “and we’re not getting very much money coming in,” then, “Shall I do this particular story for the next issue, which I was thinking of, or should I drag up this story, which hasn’t got so much sex in it?” It’s something which I think makes for a potentially dangerous situation regarding the future of quality in comic books. I’m not sure how a labeling system is practically of any use, because, as far as I’m concerned … is it enforceable? Are any of these regulations ever truly enforceable? As a kid, I could get hold of anything that I wanted. I believe most children can, if they want to. And I don’t think that sticking a label on the front, and especially getting children to find something saying that they will not buy restricted books for their friends. I mean, I found that ridiculous. And I would have certainly found it ridiculous if I’d been asked to sign it as a child. And if I’d have signed it, I would at least have been clever enough to know that it didn’t mean a damn thing, because, as a minor, signing something, it’s just not worth the paper it’s printed on.

GROTH: Was that in the Buddy Saunders interview?

MOORE: No, but I believe it was in that issue of the Journal, that there was the actual form that parents have to sign…

GROTH: Yeah, I knew about the parents’ form.

MOORE: … that their children are allowed to buy from the other category. And at the bottom there was a subsection for the child himself or herself to sign, saying that they would not, if their parents had agreed that they could buy books rated 1 to 18, that they would not buy books for friends of theirs whose parents weren’t so lenient, which is just stupid. I mean, anybody who knows children and expects that to be binding is, I think, living in a fantasy world. All it’s going to do is just make people more furtive. I really don’t think, and if parents think that a rating system like that is going to stop children from seeing these books one way or another, then I think that they’re deluding themselves as well. So I would question that actual practical worth of the labeling system. I would also question the effect that it’s likely to have on the industry. I think that it would be a bad move for the industry and it would lead to a decline in standards.

GROTH: Are you talking about —

MOORE: Also, from my own personal point of view, as I said earlier, that I really do not think that we should restrict information to children. And I think that, basically, I know that there are a lot of parents that don’t agree, would not agree with me upon that, and of course they have the right, but as long as it’s kept upon a parental level, I’m not too worried. If parents are making the decisions that their children can or cannot read this sort of book in the home, that’s fair enough. The parents can take the consequences of that. It won’t necessarily stop the children reading it, but at least it’s a transaction between the child and the parent and it’s the parent taking responsibility for their children, which is fair enough. I take a more liberal stance in that I prefer to let my children read anything, but I want to know what they’re reading, and if there’s anything they come across which might be disturbing, then I’m always on hand to talk about it with them. Which, to me, seems to be the responsible attitude. What I object to is that there was, again, a mention in Buddy Saunders’s (or in the panel debate, or in the interview with Buddy Saunders, I can’t remember which), but there was a reference that, “We are aware that there are parents out there who can’t keep an eye on what their children are reading, and appreciate the help that we’re giving them in this.” And that’s where to me it starts to get sinister, the parents, I don’t care whether they can or whether they can’t, it’s their responsibility. They’re fucking parents. They shouldn’t hand over that responsibility to an outside body, and along with it, hand over the responsibility of all those other parents who have been finding it quite easy to take an actual personal interest in what their children are reading and to monitor their reading habits themselves.

GROTH: Well, let me ask you something that might ruffle your libertarian or anarchist feathers a little. Do you not think that there should be any kind of social or communal restraints on what children are permitted to buy? Because your argument presupposes that the parent will have followed his child or children everywhere they go until the time they turn 18.

MOORE: No. It doesn’t presuppose that at all, it presupposes that the parent will have established a basis of trust between himself and the children. I mean. I’m not going to follow my kids around. But I know that they’ve got nothing that they’re going to hide from me. Because there’s no reason to hide anything from me in terms of what they read. I’ve tried to establish a sensible relationship with my children, where there is mutual openness. Where they are allowed to exhaust their curiosity, and if they do, say for example, look at an issue of Zap Comics, because the color looks pretty, then I can say to them. “Yeah, well, there are a couple of stories in there which you might think were funny, but there’s also some stuff by S. Clay Wilson with men having their penises chopped off and it’s pretty horrible, and you can see all the veins in the middle, and you’ll probably find it a bit sickening, and you might not want to read it just before you go to bed.” In which case, they’ll either say, “Well. I think I’ll read it anyway.” or, more often than not they’ll say, “Well, in that case I’ll read something else” But if I said, “No, you can’t read it,” then that would probably mean that they would be sneaking into the bedroom in a week’s time, and looking at it. And then they wouldn’t be able to tell me that they’d looked at it, and they wouldn’t be able to discuss their reactions to it with me. That was the way I was brought up, Gary. You know, we weren’t allowed to mention that sort of stuff, so we did it anyway, and then coped with it ourselves. Which I don’t think is necessarily the most efficient way of doing it. So, in answer to your question, do I not think there should be any restraints on what children are sold, in terms of, well, I think that children have got as much rights as anybody else, and I think that —

GROTH: Well now wait a minute.

MOORE: — it should be left in the hands of the parents. Now, personally. I’ve got no objections to my children buying anything, as long as I know what it is, and as long as the relationship that we’ve got together, because I know that they’ll show me, that they won’t hide it from me, that I’ll be able to talk to them about it.

GROTH: Well now when you say that you think children have as many rights as anybody else, I mean, that’s not true. They can’t vote.

MOORE: It’s not, but I think that they should have.

GROTH: You think children should he able to vote?

MOORE: As far as I see it as a parent, there are some areas where I will take responsibility for the way my children live, I will tell them what to do. Like, “Don’t play in the traffic,” or “No, don’t go out and play in the street, because it’s getting too dark, and there are some funny people about.” I will still exert more authority upon children that otherwise I would not do upon other adults. So, yeah, you’ve got a point. When we decided to have children, we were taking responsibility for their upbringing, which is a high responsibility for anybody in that, a big and potentially dangerous thing, and we thought about it and we knew what we were doing. So, consequently, as long as I’ve got this relationship with my children, I will take responsibility for them in some areas. In every other area, I will try to encourage them to take as much responsibility upon themselves as possible. Including the choices of reading matter or listening matter or stuff like that. That is, as I see it, up to them. Now, other parents, who don’t have the same sort of slant on things as I do, if they don’t want their children to read certain stuff, then they can say to their children, “We don’t want you reading books that have got pictures of naked ladies in them,” or “We don’t want you reading books that have got this amount of violence in it” or stuff like that.

Lost Girls #2 ©1996 Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie

That is what parents have to do. They have to tell their children these things, it’s part of the relationship between parents and children, and to deny that responsibility, to say, “No, we don’t want the trouble of getting into an argument with our children over what they can or cannot read, we’d rather that some outside third party took all this sort of stuff off of our hands and just refused to sell the kids the comics. Then that would solve our problems and we wouldn’t appear to be heavy-handed.” As far as I’m concerned, if parents want to stop their children reading certain things, then they should tell the children that and face the consequences. The feeling that I have is that the responsibility is the parent’s. If, as I have done, the parent then chooses to give as much of that responsibility to the child as he thinks the child can handle, that’s one thing. I find it’s very alarming and disturbing, the thought of handing it to outside bodies who would then be able to say that my children couldn’t read these things if they wanted to. It becomes a bit more problematic then. To me, everything’s fine as long as it’s parents imposing or not imposing, as long as parents are taking responsibility for their children, to the degree that they think is appropriate, then that seems to me to be perfectly fair and equitable. And it’s when it gets beyond that, that I start to find it alarming. As I say, I take an extreme stance, and I’m aware that it’s an extreme stance, but it still grows out of me taking responsibility for the children. It’s just that in some areas I try to give them as much responsibility and the freedom that comes with responsibility as I possibly can. It’s still a difficult abstract sort of moral point. [You can question whether there] should be any sort of material that children shouldn’t be allowed to buy. And you can say, what about those magazines with women being fucked by dogs, and stuff like that. I would always say that if parents have got a realistic relationship with their children, they would be able to tell children honestly about that sort of stuff, make them aware of what it was, and probably the children wouldn’t grow up with illicit burning desires for that sort of materials. To me, it seems that much more sensible, just total openness. I think that enables the child to make his own decision upon what he does and what he doesn’t want to read. I mean, my oldest daughter really, really likes Dark Knight, likes some bits of Maus, but found some of it boring, as she did with Watchmen. She thought some bits of that were boring.

GROTH: How old is your daughter?

MOORE: Nine. That’s the oldest. This was when she was eight.

GROTH: Right.

MOORE: Yeah, she might be an exceptional case. I don’t know, but she certainly was not disturbed by Dark Knight, and she’s read it four or five times. We can talk about all the bits in it. Anything that I think she might have had trouble assimilating, I can say, “What did you think of this scene?” It seems to me to be perfectly healthy. She is not reading it under the covers, she is not reading it behind my back, in case I shout at her. And the same goes for anything, I mean, there isn’t a thing which I will not discuss with her. Which I think is not the case with a lot of parents because a lot of parents are too embarrassed to discuss sexual matters or, indeed, anything pertaining to the real world with their children. And I don’t think we should encourage that sort of behavior by setting up outside bodies which encourages the parents to abandon all responsibility for their child’s reading and entertainment, because I think that does lead to a potentially threatening situation, where you have got restrictive bodies able to exercise their own prejudices upon children.

GROTH: So if you were a bookstore owner, you would have no qualms about selling children hard-core porn or anything that anybody would —

MOORE: Well, I certainly would have legal qualms. Gary.

GROTH: No, no. I meant moral.

MOORE: Moral. Well, obviously, I chose an extreme example there [pause]. And now I’ve got to defend it, haven’t I?

GROTH: [Laughs.] Yeah, right.

MOORE: All right. Well, there’s a certain level of common sense. If a child came into a bookstore that I was running and said, “Yes, I would like to buy this hardcore pornography,” I’d like to think that in a perfect world, I’d say, “Sure, sonny, have it, here it is.” Because I would know that they’ve got a good relationship with their parents and so on and so on, and it was something that they felt they were ready for. In practicality, I would perhaps, in an extreme case like that, say, “Well, maybe you could, if you really want this stuff, if you came back with your folks.” When I say “child,” I’m talking about somebody under the age of, say, 14. Well, 13 probably, I don’t know, I mean — if a fifteen-year-old came in the shop and asked for a copy of a porno magazine I’d sell it without any qualms at all. But if you’re talking about a seven-year-old…

GROTH: But there is a point—

MOORE: I don’t know. I might ask them to come back with their mother, you know. I know it sounds monstrous and perverted but it is an extreme example, and one I used, I suppose deliberately. But—

GROTH: But there is a point at which you would restrict the sale of material to children?

MOORE: There is a point where I would perhaps try to take precautions, and I can see that. You get into muddy areas when you talk, I realize that retailers do not want themselves to be busted, and I mean especially when you’re living in an area where the police are particularly heavy on that, or there are moral pressure groups, I can understand this is a very real fear for a person’s livelihood.

GROTH: No, no, no. I was disregarding any legal problems and I was just trying to probe the extent of your moral extremism.

MOORE: The extent of my moral … . Yeah, well, I suppose the extent of my moral extremism, when we’re talking into the vague, abstract sort of hypothetical cases, then, I meant to make a point, I can say, yes, I don’t believe that even hardcore pornography should be restricted to children. I would think that in reality there would be a certain sort of common sense element creeping in. I would try to handle it in as non-authoritarian a fashion as possible.

GROTH: Right, right. Would you have any qualms about porn shops advertising directly to children?

MOORE: Uhm …

GROTH: Would you governmentally restrict that?

MOORE: Well, if I had [qualms], I could protest in the ways that are open to me. I could write letters to the papers saying, “I would hope that all parents would be warning their children about this,” which would be legitimate, or I could protest in the ways that are open to me. But, in terms of sort of porn shops — mean, I’m getting a bit wary now, Gary, because having made such an extreme sort of example for meself, what can I say, it’s sort of … porn shops advertising to children, well … .

GROTH: I’m testing your libertarian principles, Alan.

MOORE: Yeah, you certainly are. Porn shops advertising to children, well…

GROTH: Considering the greed of the marketplace, I don’t see why you should preclude that possibility.

MOORE: I shouldn’t, really. I don’t feel any worse about that than I do about certain BB-gun manufacturers advertising to children, or the makers of, well, the war comics, or whatever advertising, from my personal view. I don’t like advertising of any sort, basically. I don’t want to defend people’s right to advertise, because I don’t like advertising, but in a hypothetical situation, then I don’t find anything more disagreeable in advertising pornography to children, than advertising cigarettes. I mean, I’m a smoker, I’m saying that children do notice cigarette adverts because they portray a view of what it’s like to be grown-up and manly, and I think it’s kidding ourselves if we say that those adverts only reach the adult audience that they are nominally intended for. Children see them. The same goes with liquor, or whatever. Advertising which children certainly see and perhaps do get the impression that this is how grown-up people behave, and if they want to be a grown-up, as a lot of children do, might see it as quite tantalizing. I think that our society does tend to have a very curious preoccupation with sex and hiding it. To me, these sort of talks always get into strange areas because of the predominance of sex in the discussion. That human sexuality seems to be the only real area of concern, which is something that I have a lot of trouble with. It’s always the sexuality that upsets these people. They can watch people having their brains smashed in one issue of Miracleman. They can watch people having their guts ripped out, and a human being blown into several pieces in one issue of Miracleman, and there will not be a word of complaint.

“Scenes from the Nativity” Miracleman # 9 (September 1990) Story ©1986 Alan Moore. Art ©1986 Rick Veitch/Rick Bryant

But the childbirth in the next issue will have them foaming at the mouth. There seems to be something wrong there. From my point of view, in terms of testing my libertarian principles, no, I would find it no more disturbing to have pornography advertised where children could see it and be affected by it than I do having most of the other facets of our glorious society advertised where children could be exposed to such advertisements. I’m somewhat dodging the issue, but I really don’t like advertising of any kind. But I don’t find the advertisement of pornography to be particularly disturbing when it’s right next to the advertising of, oh, Combat & Survival Magazine. All those other aspects are in their own ways different sorts of pornography. I don’t even find the advertising of pornography terribly insidious as far as children are concerned, when compared to the advertising of some of the ridiculous, yucky dolls that children are given to play with. In some instances, I think I would find the advertising of pornography less insidious to children than I would find the advertising for the Care Bears. I would hesitate to say which one would give a child a more destructive sort of social lesson.

GROTH: Right. Well—

MOORE: Does that answer your question. Gary? Without landing me in jail.

GROTH: Yeah. I think so, but let me just ask you if you don’t think you’ve relativized it to such a point that you would find nothing, whether it’s sex or violence, impermissible to advertise to children?

MOORE: Probably not. Like I say, you’re dealing with the wrong person. Gary, because I am extreme and cranky.

GROTH: [Laughter.] Uh-huh.

MOORE: I recognize this. I really don’t think that it would serve any point — well, I don’t like the idea of advertising. I’m not saying that people should advertise these things, but advertising is a part of our society, and will be until we find some way of getting rid of it. But given that, there’s already plenty of advertising for violence, or the accessories of violence, that is either aimed at children or is accessible to children, and one level, it could be argued that the person whom all the G.I. Joe merchandising is aimed at today is the person who’s going to grow up to be the person buying Soldier of Fortune tomorrow, and buying a rifle and heading for the library tower the next day. I mean, I don’t know how all that works, Gary, but I’d say there’s a case for saying that. But, if we’re going to have any sort of advertising, then, it strikes me as a bit bizarre and illogical to pretend that you can make the situation all right by banning the advertisements of particularly violent stuff to children or stuff like that. Because they see it anyway, they live in a completely violent world, and I think that when they’re reading the newspaper and seeing the news every day, they’re having real violence advertised to them in a way that’s much more, well, effective.

GROTH: Yeah, right.

MOORE: Sort of brutalizing — any sort of adverts of this stuff. All that I’m after, Gary, is honesty, basically. I mean, it does sound like I’m relativizing it out of existence, but—

GROTH: Yeah. I’m wondering if there are degrees of propagandizing directed toward children that society shouldn’t allow?

MOORE: I don’t know. As a parent, I already believe that there is vast amounts of propagandizing aimed at my children.

GROTH: Yeah, there is.

MOORE: So I try to create a relationship where I can make them aware of that. I think that going to assembly in the morning at school is a level of propagandizing that I personally would not choose if I were creating my model society. Because I’m personally not a Christian, and I resent the fact that my children were being forced into an acceptance of Christian icons and practices at school.

GROTH: Right, well we have that debate—

MOORE: As I’m sure that many of the Moral Majority would feel upset if their children were being brought up according to the way of Islam.

GROTH: Or even according to the Wizard of Oz.

Poster from the film Cannibal Holocaust

MOORE: Or even according to the Wizard of Oz, certainly. So, to me, yes, there are lots of unacceptable levels of propaganda that are aimed at children, but, given that that is not likely to change, I think that it just seems a little bit inconsistent and strange to single out specific aspects of that. To say that giving children sexual information is worse than giving them religious propaganda or violent propaganda, or even the propaganda that is inherent in a lot of the dolls that children are sold. Because they do suggest a certain lifestyle to the child. So it’s all propaganda. We’re all bombarded with it every second of our lives. From waking up in the morning to dropping unconscious in the evening, it’s unfortunate, unavoidable fact of 20th-century existence. And to me, the only way that I can protect my children from it, is not by building a wall between it and them, but by giving them the astuteness, the perception and breadth of perception that it takes to recognize that sort of stuff for what it is, and to deal with it accordingly I really can’t think of any other sort of practical solution to that problem that any parent can hope to bring about. You can’t just put your child in a bubble, and try to shield it from all this stuff, because eventually it will have to come out of the bubble and then it will be suddenly dealing with stuff that it had no knowledge of before, or the bubble will be broken by incidents from outside, or the child will break its way out from inside. I just don’t think it’s the best way of doing things. I think that, to me, the only solution to it is for a better relationship between the parents and the children, a more honest relationship, where the parents will actually talk to them a little bit about the reality of the world that we live in, and try to prepare children for it in a real way, rather than to try and prepare children for the parents’ idealized and sentimentalized view of the world. That’s the way I feel about it, Gary, anyway. And, yeah, I’m sure there are a lot of specific examples that you could find that would make me sound pretty irresponsible. Cannibal torture films, would you like your children see these? And the answer is probably yes. After I sat down and explained what the films were all about, why I thought the directors had made them, what I thought the artistic concept was. You know, once I’ve been able to talk with the kids about that, then I let them make their own minds up, because I think that, even though that perhaps does sound like a radical and dangerous thing to do, I think that it’s safer in the end, and I think that it’s kinder to the child in the end.

Riding the crest of DC’s explorations of the adult comics market in ’86 and ’87 was Watchmen, perhaps one of the most thoughtful renditions of the superhero genre. Scheduled to finish its 12-issue run this summer, Watchmen has shown comics fans and professionals alike that a comics series employing literary techniques — such as the layers of theme and plot inherent in each issue, the intricate and precise attention to detail evident not only in the writing, but also in the artwork, and the desire to portray the genuine crises the world faces today — could be both a commercial and a creative success. The following is a discussion on the influences and thought behind Watchmen between series creators Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons at the UK Comic Art Convention in London on Sept. 21st, 1986. Moderating the panel discussion is British comics writer Neil Gaiman.

NEIL GAIMAN: I thought I’d start off by asking Alan and Dave a couple of questions about the genesis of Watchmen — how it started out way back when Alan was asked to do something with some Charlton superheroes, and how it evolved into the rather remarkable comic it is now.

ALAN MOORE: We weren’t asked to do anything with the Charlton superheroes. I just thought that they were all lying around, up for grabs, and I hadn’t heard of anything else that was being done with them. They were just a nice, innocent little bunch of characters, which is always fair game, really, and there was a self-contained universe with four or five characters, and I thought it’d be nice to just take that and do whatever you wanted with it. So I started mapping out a few ideas, and originally it was just a murder mystery, “Who killed the Peacemaker,” and that was it. We sent all this stuff to Dick Giordano and some of it was extreme. We were going to treat the Question as a lot more extreme than he’d been treated before. Dick loved the stuff, but having a paternal affection for these characters from his time at Charlton, he really didn’t want to give his babies to the butchers, and make no mistake about it, that’s what it would have been. He said, “Can you change the characters around and come up with some new ones?” At first I wasn’t sure whether that would work, but when Dave and I got together and started just planning these things out, it all really snapped into place and worked fine. I’m much happier now doing it with original characters. It’s worked out much better than it would have done if we had used Captain Atom, Blue Beetle, and all the others, and I’m pleased with it. Me and Dave have been wanting to do something together for a long time, so when this came up I said I’d be happy to work with Dave and Dave said he’d be happy to work with me and that’s it.

DAVE GIBBONS: Yeah, I’ll go along with that. People ask me how I got involved in it, and I can’t really remember. I remember Alan sending me a synopsis. We’d done quite a lot of things that we’d tried to get done with DC — we were going to do Martian Manhunter and Challengers of the Unknown, and some of the aspects of that led into Watchmen.

MOORE: Some of them, yeah. There were projects that we’d talked up that we both wanted to do, and it all just came out. The thing was that with Watchmen if you read that original synopsis it’s the bare skeleton. There’s the plot there, but it’s what’s happened since then that’s the real surprise because there’s all this other stuff that’s crept into it, all this deep stuff, the intellectual stuff. [Laughs.] That wasn’t planned. The thing seems to have taken on an identity of its own since we kicked it off, which is always nice.

GAIMAN: How much feedback is there between the two of you to create what we see now?

GIBBONS: Alan did quite a detailed synopsis plot-wise, but I visualized it first as being the Charlton characters, but I seem to remember as far as the design of the characters goes Alan came up with the names and a sort of character description, but not anything specific about how they would dress. I didn’t actually sit down and say, “I’m now going to design the Watchmen.” I did it at odd times and spent maybe two or three weeks just doing sketches. There was one day that Alan came to my house, and we spent the day going through the sketches and talking about possibilities. To me now it seems like the Watchmen have always been there. Because we’ve done so much with them since that, I’m hazy about where they came from.

MOORE: When me and Dave fall out in a couple of year’s time, this is the sort of thing we shall argue about. There’s little things like … when did we decide not to put any clothes on Dr. Manhattan? We were talking about it and I remember saying, “Will they let us get away with that, just not putting any clothes on him?”

GIBBONS: “Shall we? Yeah.” And in fact, no one has made any objection to that.

MOORE: It looks so innocent. If you make it coy, then it looks weird, but if he’s just walking around stark naked and nobody’s taking any notice of it then somehow it does look really innocent. We’ve got male full-frontal nudity in issues # 3 and #4, and you don’t even notice it, really. It’s there, but so what, it’s really casual.

GIBBONS: I was looking at some of the original sketches the other day, and many of our first ideas have made it through. The ads that DC have run for the Watchmen come from little doodles Alan did on the day that we spent together, and they are just copies of what we ended up with. The whole look and design of the book with the clock going round and everything is our primal instinct with very little compromise.

GAIMAN: What was DC’s reaction to a book that didn’t have people fighting on the cover and a plot with people dripping blood and so forth?

MOORE: There’s bound to be a certain amount of nervousness, but to DC’s credit they backed us all the way on it. It could be said that it’s commercial suicide just having a badge on one cover, a statue on the next cover, a radiation symbol on the third one and so on, and it was a new title with no known super-heroes in it. You’re going to sell a few copies on me and Dave’s names I suppose, but there’s nothing else there that’s going to grab the reader. You’ve got the title on sideways so that it’s not always easy to see it on the racks if they don’t have flat displays, but DC could see what we were doing, that we were trying to produce a package that looked radical, that was maybe going to interest people who weren’t interested in comics, that you could put out in Waldenbooks or something like that and people would say, “Oh, this doesn’t look like a comic. I’ll buy it.” DC backed us all the way on that and have been really supportive about even the most grotesque excesses.

GIBBONS: I remember the covers in particular. We hemmed and hawed for a long time about what would be on them, and we knew that whatever it was, it wasn’t going to be fight scenes or full-figure superheroes. After drawing the first issue I thought, “Perhaps we could have the smiley face on the cover,” and drawing it and immediately having a really good idea of where the series was going, another six cover designs popped into my head. I think the fact that what we sent to DC wasn’t, “Here’s this smiley face, the cover of the first issue,” but six or seven covers that all worked as bits of graphic design, was what really sold them on it. Subsequently, it was Alan’s idea to take it a bit further and make each cover the first panel of the story, and that’s a really strong idea as well. The way that we rationalize it to ourselves is that it’s a crossover. The cover of the Watchmen is in the real world and looks quite real, but it’s starting to turn into a comic book, a portal to another dimension. This is the kind of thing we think about while we’re doing it.

MOORE: Watchmen has just got to be more and more hard labor as it’s gone on. We started out with all these innocent ideas like making the smiley badge on the cover of the first one the first panel of the story, and then to be really clever we’ll make it the last panel of the story as well, and have it on the last panel of the book. Then we did that with the statue in the second issue as well, and by that time it’s a feature and you’ve got to do it every issue. Then there’s the little quotes at the end of the episodes that didn’t get into the first three issues, but now they’re running OK and tying the whole story in with a quote. That seemed really clever and stylish and smart and sophisticated, but by the time you get to issue #8, you’re thinking, “Christ …” It’s like all those titles beginning with “V” [in V for Vendetta] and you make a rod for your own back sometimes. The story’s just gone on getting more and more complex.

GIBBONS: This might come up when you’re asking questions later, but it’s where we really ought to have the Twilight Zone theme in the background because there’ve been some really spooky coincidences. For example, the issue that’s just out, #5, is about symmetry and there’s a scene in it where the two detectives we feature are called to this apartment where an aging hippie … [looks at Alan; laughter from the audience] … has just butchered his children rather than have them killed in a nuclear war. Alan, as he usually does, made lots of suggestions for the decor of the apartment and I thought, “What they really need is a ’60s rock poster,” and I don’t know anything about ’60s rock groups …

MOORE: [Disbelieving] Oh ho ho.

GIBBONS: Well, I know lots about ’50s rock groups. I thought that it could be a Grateful Dead poster, because that ties in as these kids are dead, and they ought to be grateful … [laughter from the audience] … so I’d like to stress that not possessing any Grateful Dead albums, I got a book called The Album Cover Album and looked up Grateful Dead in the index for a cover, and it’s an album called Aoxomoxoa, which is a symmetrical word.

MOORE: It’s a Rick Griffin cover as well, which is absolutely symmetrical.

GIBBONS: And it’s got a skull on it, and throughout issue #5, there’s the skull and crossbones of the pirate ship. Also, this skull has an egg in its hands, and the book starts with Rorschach breaking an egg. And also on the facing page of the book there’s an album called Tales of the Rum Runners and I forget who it’s by but at the beginning of issue #5 we have the Rumrunner Club. [Tales of the Rum Runners is by Robert Hunter, with the cover also designed by Rick Griffin.]

GAIMAN: John Higgins wasn’t able to make it to the panel, so I thought it might be nice for Alan and Dave to comment on the coloring, which is rather unlike anything else ever seen before.

GIBBONS: It was my idea to use John because I’ve always liked the really unusual way that he does color, and I was struck coincidentally enough by a story he colored that Steve Dillon drew and Alan wrote, an ABC Warriors story [in the 1985 2000 AD Annual]. I thought it was such good work and not only did I really admire the color, the great thing is that he only lives about eight miles from me, which means that we can actually discuss it and have some kind of human contact rather than just sending it across the ocean. I couldn’t be happier with the way it’s colored. I could be happier with the way it’s printed, and I think what with the success of Dark Knight if DC had their chance again, they’d make it a full-color book like Dark Knight, but within the restrictions that he’s given I think John does some really startling stuff.

MOORE: I’ve always loved John’s coloring, but always associated him with being an airbrush colorist, and frankly I don’t like airbrush: it’s just lacquer. It looks to me to be too smooth; even though I can see there’s a lot of artistry and skill involved in doing it, it’s a bit plastic. So although I liked John’s coloring, I didn’t think airbrush would be right for this, and so Dave put that to John and he said, “No, I’ll do this in European-style flat color,” and he showed me the samples and they were wonderful. He just has different coloring ideas. I know that a lot of people don’t seem to recognize the amount of work a colorist does. That has been changing recently what with people like Lynn Varley, who are obviously really wonderful colorists, and John is in that category as well. In most comics the colorist will say, “Okay, here’s Superman — his cloak’s red, his costume’s blue, and his boots are red,” and he’ll go through the whole issue first and colors Superman’s costume making sure that it’s the same color the whole way through. What John does is go through and say, “OK, this is Rorschach — his coat’s a sort of off-brown, but if he’s in a bar and there’s red lights in the bar, it’s going to be a different color. If he’s out in the street and there’s sodium lamps or just moonlight, it’s going to be a different color,” and so the color of the characters’ costumes change according to what lighting they’re in, which is much more emotional and much more atmospheric than very straight plastic color all the way through. I’m knocked out with what John’s done, and some of the scenes have really come alive with color. We’ve thought about it when I’ve been doing the scripts and Dave has been dong the artwork, and we know that John’s going to do a real good job with it and plan around it to a certain degree, thinking, “That’ll look good, that’ll look nice,” like Dr. Manhattan on Mars, blue on pink.

the coloring shifts with the light

Something that’s really good about John as a colorist concerns issue #6: It’s the Rorschach story, and it’s really depressing. Lock the razor blades away before you read this one. The cover is a Rorschach blot, a card from the psychology tests just lying on a table, a pretty simple cover. John colored the cover and colored it really warm and cheerful, and it looks really nice. And Dave was saying, “Look, this is a bit of a bleak issue. Why have you colored it warm and cheerful?” And [John] said, “Well, that’s my plan. It starts off really warm and cheerful, so you color them that way, and on page five we make it a bit darker, and on page seven darker still, and it’s like the lights are going down the entire issue, so when you get to the end it’s really dark and really black.” Emotionally, John is using the colors to really take the readers down, which is really clever. That’s the kind of thinking that we’re trying to do with the art and the story, and it’s real nice that John is trying to put the same thing through with the coloring.

GAIMAN: Let’s throw it open for some questions.

FROM THE AUDIENCE: In Alan’s interview in Q Magazine there was a quote pertaining to Swamp Thing saying that if ever a country needed scaring it’s America. Do you feel Watchmen is taking this further?

MOORE: Yes. This is not anti-Americanism, it’s anti-Reaganism, and these are only personal opinions, not necessarily shared by Dave or John. My personal feelings, because I’m the writer and can do anything that I want, is that at the moment a certain part of Reagan’s America isn’t scared. They think they’re invulnerable. There’s this incredible up mood that leads at its worst excesses to things like the Libyan bombing and things like that, and they worry me and frighten me. The power elite in America and an awful lot of the people who vote for them seem to have this … I think the best example is a quote that Clive Barker dredged up for one of his books, The Damnation Game, from an explorer called Freya Stark, a wonderful old woman who went everywhere in the world, an incredible pioneer, and she wrote an awful lot of travel books and said some really bright things, and one of the things she said is, “The society that knows fear is not the society that’s faced with extinction. It is the society that has forgotten fear that is faced with extinction.” The society that just thinks that they can do whatever they want because they’re invulnerable, they’re not afraid, and they can gloss over the terror of the nuclear stockpiles, the world situation and all that and just think, “Hey, we’re doing all right, we’re OK.”

That’s unhealthy. I know it’s only a tiny little comic book that goes over there every month and gets seen by a relatively small number of people, many of whom perhaps agree with us anyway, so it’s difficult to see what it’s doing, but I was consciously trying to do something that would make people feel uneasy. In issue #3 I wanted to communicate that feeling of “When’s it going to happen?” Everyone felt it. You hear a plane going overhead really loudly, and just for a second before you realize it’s a plane you look up. I’m sure that everybody in this room’s done that at least once. It’s something over everybody’s head, but nobody talks about it. At the risk of doing a depressing comic book we thought that it would be nice to try and … yeah, try and scare a little bit so that people would just stop and think about their country and their politics. It’s not that America’s worse than England, that we’re any better than them, because we have our fair share of strange political leaders as well. When I’m doing V for Vendetta it’s aimed at England, and Watchmen is aimed at an American audience and the intention was to try and make people feel a little bit uneasy about it.

FROM THE AUDIENCE: To what extent have you had to fit into an American mode?

MOORE: It affects both of us. Dave is drawing for Americans and I’m writing for Americans. I was anticipating an awful lot of trouble when I started doing Swamp Thing, which is supposedly set in real America, just getting things wrong. You see how some American writers have handled England with the little thatched cottages in Charing Cross and things like that and you think you’re probably going to do the same thing over there, and it’s worrying. When we got into it I found that because Britain’s probably a cultural satellite of America anyway, I’d absorbed so much American TV, movies and records, books and comics that you tend to know the speech patterns. I still make mistakes, but you tend to have a feel for American speech patterns and stuff like that. With Watchmen we’ve got a little bit more leeway, particularly with the art, because it is a parallel world.

GIBBONS: I think that one of the mistakes I’ve made in the past is to switch into the American mode. Certainly the Green Lantern stuff that I did was “Let’s draw an American comic book,” but what I’ve actually done with Watchmen is to switch into the Dave Gibbons mode, and that’s the most successful way to do it. I do view America as an exotic culture, an exotic, far-off country, and I think that’s the approach to take, and because of the perspective you’re probably getting more to the reality of America than if you actually live there.

MOORE: I think by the fact that Dave’s changed some bits about the American landscape, like electric cars, slightly different buildings, everyone’s wearing double-breasted suits, there’s little spark hydrants for recharging your cars instead of fire hydrants, it perhaps gives the American readership a chance in some ways to see their own culture as an outsider would. There are enough elements of difference. When Americans read American comic books that show the American landscape, they tend to blot out the backgrounds, because it’s familiar to them, they don’t need to pay any attention, whereas in Watchmen I think people are being drawn into it and looking at the panels closely because it’s obvious that we are putting lots of little details in the background. With a bit of luck it will help to get across that feeling of an alien culture to an audience who lives there, which is what we want.

GIBBONS: That’s a really liberating thing to be able to say that it isn’t this world, because I don’t have to get a load of reference books out and get bogged down in reference. I can give it the feeling of America without having to draw a certain model of car, or a certain building or a certain place. I draw the Chrysler building, the sort of art deco thing, and by putting that in it just gives it that tie into reality to make it convincing.

FROM THE AUDIENCE: I’ve heard a rumor that Watchmen has been optioned as a film and a screenplay’s been prepared.

MOORE: The screenplay’s not been prepared, but the rumor’s absolutely true — it has been optioned for film, and it’s looking good. It was a substantial amount of money that was offered for the screen rights. We all know that a Silver Surfer movie has been being made for the past 20 years at least, so a lot of films get optioned, and I can’t promise that it will ever get made, but everyone seems very eager with the project. It’s not Walter Hill, and I don’t know where this Walter Hill story came from. I think it’s probably because 48 Hours was directed by Walter Hill and produced by Larry Gordon and Joel Silver, and it’s Larry Gordon and Joel Silver who want to do it. I spoke to Joel Silver on the phone, and he seemed like a real nice bloke. He was saying that he wants me to write the screenplay, starting next year maybe, and he also said, “Can you do it panel by panel like the comic book?” which I don’t think will be possible because that would make a real crap movie. It was written to be a comic, not a movie, and they’re not interchangeable, but the fact that he wants it done like that speaks volumes to me. They’re not going to give Rorschach a friendly waggy-tailed dog. Although that might be a good idea, mightn’t it? [Laughter.]

GIBBONS: As I remember, that’s one of my ideas! Blot the Dog. [More laughter.]

MOORE: So it looks good. I don’t know when it’ll be made or if it’ll be made, but the signs look healthy that it might be a good film.

FROM THE AUDIENCE: Do you actually own Watchmen?

MOORE: My understanding is that when Watchmen is finished and DC have not used the characters for a year, they’re ours.

GIBBONS: They pay us a substantial amount of money. ..

MOORE: … to retain the rights. So basically they’re not ours, but if DC is working with the characters in our interests then they might as well be. On the other hand, if the characters have outlived their natural life span and DC doesn’t want to do anything with them, then after a year we’ve got them and we can do what we want with them, which I’m perfectly happy with.

GIBBONS: What would be horrendous, and DC could legally do it, would be to have Rorschach crossing over with Batman or something like that, but I’ve got enough faith in them that I don’t think that they’d do that. I think because of the unique team they couldn’t get anybody else to take it over to do Watchmen II or anything else like that, and we’ve certainly got no plans to do Watchmen II.

FROM THE AUDIENCE: Is it possible to handle the superheroes realistically without the fascist overtones creeping in?

MOORE: I think that when Watchmen was first announced everybody assumed that it was going to be Squadron Supreme, the superheroes take over. We never said that. We said that we were going to try to treat them realistically. I think that because there’ve been a lot of fascist overtones in Marvelman [Miracleman] people assumed that the superheroes had taken over. There aren’t really any fascist superheroes in Watchmen. Rorschach’s not a fascist; he’s a nutcase. The Comedian’s not a fascist’ he’s a psychopath. Dr. Manhattan’s not a fascist; he’s a space cadet. They’re not fascists. They’re not in control of their world. Dr. Manhattan’s not even in control of the world —he doesn’t care about the world. I think that while people expected that, we’ve not investigated the idea of superheroes as fascists the same way that Frank [Miller] has in Dark Knight, or the same thing they’ve done in Squadron Supreme. It wasn’t really our intention. Our intention was to show how superheroes could deform the world just by being there, not that they’d have to take it over, just their presence there would make the difference. It’s what we try to show in Watchmen #4. From the point where Dr. Manhattan appears, it slowly starts to go downhill from there — everything starts to change. He doesn’t take over the country or make people subservient to him, but just his presence there makes everything begin to change. Yet on another level, if you equate Dr. Manhattan with the atom bomb, the atom bomb doesn’t take over the world, but by being there it changes everything. That was more the idea that I was trying to explore. I’d say it’s possible to do superhero stories that are realistic without getting into that Nazi mode.

FROM THE AUDIENCE: Is the Black Freighter anything to do with Bertolt Brecht?

MOORE: It certainly is, you clever cultured boy. For those cultureless people in the audience, Bertolt Brecht, Bert as I call him, wrote The Threepenny Opera with Kurt Weill. It’s a magnificent story set around the coronation of King Edward in England. It’s where the song “Mack the Knife” comes from, and it was originally a very nasty bloody song, whatever Bobby Darin did with it. One of the prostitutes in the story, a girl called Jenny, sings a song called “Pirate Jenny.” She works in a hotel, scrubbing floors, and in her head she’s thinking about all these guys smoking cigars who’re sneering at her, and there’s a black freighter waiting out at sea and one day it’s going to come into town with guns firing from its bow, and the pirates are going to teem off the ship and run through the town, and they’re going to be piling up the bodies. It’s this horrible black vision of this ship coming in with a skull on its masthead. Everything’s still in the town, with everyone wondering what’s going to happen, and then this prostitute says, “I step out, looking pretty in the morning with a ribbon in my hair, and a cheer splits the air.” In her dream, she’s the pirate queen, and they’re going to kill all the rich people and they’re going to say to her, “Shall we kill them now or later?” and she’ll say, “Kill them now.” At the end she goes out on the Black Freighter. It’s such a powerful image, this death ship coming in, and in the Watchmen another sort of death ship is coming in — the nuclear war that’s looming. The idea of death that you can do nothing about just coming in on the tide just seemed to tie in so nicely that I thought, “I’ll rip that off. I’ll take the ‘Black Freighter’ and bring it into the Watchmen as one of the pirate comics,” using it as a counterpoint.

GAIMAN: Anything from Dave on the pirates and the “Black Freighter”?

GIBBONS: I’ve never heard of it.

FROM THE AUDIENCE: How did you actually conceive and put together the universe of the Watchmen? And question two is “Who watches the Watchmen”?

GIBBONS: As Alan said, it’s a universal world that’s deformed by the presence of superheroes, and I think Alan is more concerned with the social implications of that and I’ve gotten involved in the technical implications of it. You’ve got electric cars and airships because of the technological breakthrough. Dr. Manhattan could transmute metals and create supplies of rare metals and so there probably wouldn’t be as much need for the petrochemical industry because you’d have clean electric cars. I’m not putting this very well. They can’t make electric cars here because the batteries are too heavy, and there’s a thing called polyacetyline something, but you need lithium to make this, and lithium is a very rare metal. Of course, Dr. Manhattan can actually form lithium, so there’s as much lithium as you want, so that’s why you’ve got electric cars.

GAIMAN: What about the cigarettes?

GIBBONS: They were just to give a small element of strangeness. It’s something they obviously smoke, but doesn’t look like anything people here smoke.

MOORE: It’s like a water-cooled pipe or something like that, something to cool the smoke. It’s a slightly different sort of cigarette, and there’s the Gunga Diners. It was Dave’s idea to have Indian restaurants instead of McDonalds, and that made sense because there’s a different political situation in this world, there’s going to be wars in different places. In our story, some sort of conflict in Asia has caused a massive famine in India, so there’s been a massive amount of Indian and Asian refugees teeming into America, and consequently you’ve got Indian food catching on, and you’ve got this stream of Gunga Diners stretching across the country. There’s lot of little things like that and all of them are semi-logical, they all follow from the idea of superheroes. The comics are different because people are fed up with superheroes, there wasn’t a big superhero boom like there has been here, and so all the little details are worked in. That’s how we came up with the world. We took a central premise and worked it from there. As for “Who watches the Watchmen?” we didn’t know were the quote came from until I had a phone call from Harlan Ellison, who phoned up just to tell me because he’d seen us expressing our ignorance in Amazing Heroes, and wanted to put us out of our misery. Apparently the original quote is “Quis custodiet custodies?” which means “who guards the guardians,” “who watches the watchmen,” and it was said originally by the satirist Juvenal, and it was the quote that got him slung out of Rome and placed in exile. It’s a dangerous political quote. Who’s watching the people who’re watching after us? In the context of Watchmen, that fits. “They’re watching out for us, who’s watching out for them?” That’s where the title comes from. It’s also a nice bit of graffiti, so you get little snatches of it in the background.

FROM THE AUDIENCE: What’s the quote for the third comic?

MOORE: It’s “Shall not the judge of all the Earth do right?” The quote from issue #l’s “At midnight all the agents” is from a Bob Dylan song: “At midnight all the agents and the super-human crew go out and round up everyone who knows more than they do,” from Desolation Row, which fits in pretty nicely with the first issue. The second one is “Absent friends” from The Comedians by Elvis Costello: “I should be drinking a toast to absent friends instead of these comedians,” which with the second issue being about the Comedian fits in nicely. The third one is from the Bible and it’s from that bit in Genesis where God’s going to nuke Sodom and Gomorrah, and one of the prophets goes out and tries to barter with him and says, “If there’s a couple of good people there perhaps you could spare it,” and God says, “Yeah, all right,” so he says, “What if there’s one good person there? Is it OK?” and God says, “Shall not the judge of all the Earth do right?,” so that also fits in nicely. It fit in very nicely with the story because there’s an awful lot of judges of the Earth there: the news vendor who is giving his judgment of the Earth earlier on, the President and the people in the war room at the Pentagon who’re obviously judges of the Earth in a very real sense, because they’re the ones who’re going to decide when to set the nukes flying and there’s Dr. Manhattan. At the end with that last panel where he’s sitting there on Mars looking up at the sky it should have said, “Shall not the judge of all the Earth do right?” So that’s where that one comes from. The rest of the issues will all have the proper quote at the end.

GAIMAN: Which comes first for you, the quote and the title or writing the episode?

MOORE: What we do is think of the actual story and what’s in it and then try and come up with a quote that’s appropriate, and then when we’ve got the appropriate quote I write the script, and write in lots more bits that are appropriate to the quote to bring it more into the center of the story.

FROM THE AUDIENCE: Is there any chance of turning Under the Hood into a book?

MOORE: No, because there’s only three chapters of it: it’s not a real book you see.

GIBBONS: Ooohhh.

MOORE: If you opened it up, most of the pages are blank. Originally we thought, “OK, we’ve got 28 pages of comic strip in here and what are we going to do with the rest of them? We thought “letters page. But there’s no letters coming until issue #3, so what shall we do to fill the first three issues? Shall we do something self-congratulatory that tells all the readers how wonderful and clever we all are for thinking up all that?” And we thought, “No, because that should be obvious, shouldn’t it?” So we thought we’d do something that tied in with the story and threw this Under the Hood stuff in because it was mentioned in the book. By the time we got around to issue #3, #4, and so on, we thought that the book looked nice without a letters page. It looks less like a comic book, so we stuck with it.

All images written by Alan Moore, drawn by Dave Gibbons and colored by John Higgens. ©DC Comics

For readers unfamiliar with her work, it might appear that Alison Bechdel came out of nowhere to receive critical acclaim for her comic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, published in 2006. But her devoted fans, who have been following her career for more than two decades, were well aware of her talent as both an artist and a writer. With its political commentary and spot-on observations of lesbian culture, her enduring bi-weekly strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, continues to thrive in print and online.

©Alison Bechdel

Bechdel took some time out of her busy schedule of writing, drawing and promoting her new book to talk about her work, her career and having her book banned in Missouri.

— Lynn Emmert

LYNN EMMERT: So far, your graphic novel Fun Home has been named “Book of the Year” by Time magazine, “#1 Non-fiction book” by Entertainment Weekly, one of the top 10 books of by the London Times and New York Times Magazine, and made the New York Times list of “100 Notable Books for 2006”: pretty heady stuff, there. Did you expect this kind of reaction to the book?

ALISON BECHDEL: No. [Emmert laughs.] Well, you know, I say no, and that’s true, but at the same time, I think, I don’t know. Somewhere deep down I knew that it was a good book, [laughs] like it should get attention. You know? So, while I am surprised, I’m also just really deeply gratified.

EMMERT: On your website, you talked about working on the “fringes of acceptability,” and now getting all this establishment recognition.

BECHDEL: Well, yeah. It’s been touch-and-go for me. I really didn’t know until now —January of 2007 — that I really probably am not going to have to get a day job. I’ve just been living with that possibility all these years and it’s been … scary!

EMMERT: Do you think the reading public is now more accepting of work that is outside of their comfort zone?

BECHDEL: I do. I think things have changed a lot in the 25 years since I started doing this.

EMMERT: How long have you been working on Fun Home?

BECHDEL: Fun Home took me seven years.

EMMERT: Wow. [Laughs.]

BECHDEL: Yeah.

EMMERT: I figured it was a pretty lengthy process, just because of the size of the book, but I had no idea.

BECHDEL: Well, I was having to do my comic strip concurrently, so that slowed me down, but I still feel like I needed that length of time just for it all to gestate properly.

EMMERT: So was it hard to work on that kind of project while doing your strip, all through that seven-year period?

BECHDEL: It was always difficult to grind to a halt. I alternated: I had two weeks on the memoir, two weeks on the comic strip, something like that. The transition days were very difficult, because I mostly just wanted to keep doing the memoir, but in the end, I think I would never have finished the memoir if I hadn’t had that constant prod of having to stop and start and switch gears. The memoir was so introspective and personal, it was really good for me to get out of my own ass [laughs], and think about the world and the stuff I write about in my comic strip, at regular intervals.

This cutaway is also featured on Fun Home’s orange cover, under the dust jacket. ©2006 Alison Bechdel

EMMERT: So that was sort of a break in between those periods of introspection. I could see how that would be helpful in some ways.

When you came up with the idea for Fun Home, did you approach your publisher, or did you produce the work and then shop it around? How did you get it published, ultimately?

BECHDEL: I had an agent, and at the point where I got the agent, I had some of the work done, but not very much at all, and it wasn’t really in any kind of coherent form. I had this really wonderful agent who worked with me to get the material in some kind of package so she could shop it around. What we did was, I finally came up with a synopsis of the book, when I was maybe halfway into that seven-year period. [Laughter.] I was able to do a chapter-by-chapter synopsis. On that basis, she was able to sell it.

EMMERT: For the benefit of the Journal readers that have not read Fun Home, can you describe what it’s about?

BECHDEL: It’s about my childhood growing up with my closeted gay (or possibly bisexual) dad. He was a high-school English teacher who was obsessed with interior design and spent all his free time restoring and redecorating our Gothic Revival house. He also worked as a funeral director at the family funeral home in the small Pennsylvania town where we lived.

EMMERT: What was your family’s reaction to the book? Did you let them preview it before you published it?

BECHDEL: Wait. Can I say one more thing about the synopsis? It was an illustrated synopsis, laid out like comic-book pages, because there’s just no way to —

EMMERT: Yeah. Well, with a graphic novel, yeah, that would be hard.

BECHDEL: So I didn’t have a whole lot of the drawing done, but enough to give a sense of what it would look like. OK, now my family. What did you ask?

EMMERT: Well, what was their reaction to the book? Did you let them preview it before you published it?

BECHDEL: Yes, I did. The big hurdle was my mother. [Pauses.] Early on, a couple of years in, I showed her a draft, and that was a very … I didn’t tell her until I’d been working on the book for a year, that I was thinking of doing this, because I didn’t want her reaction to inhibit me, I really felt like I needed to just work on it in that kind of —what am I trying to say? I wanted just some free space in which to think about it, to get a handle on the material myself. It was very difficult for me even to tell her I was doing it, and then to show her the stuff, and then to get her reaction. She never told me not to do it, but I knew that it was painful for her; it was always very upsetting when I’d get her reaction to whatever draft I sent. It was really quite emotionally tumultuous.

EMMERT: Did you do any editing based on your family’s reaction to parts of the book?

BECHDEL: Yes. I changed a few little things. There wasn’t much that they really asked me to change, but most of their requests I implemented. Some of them I didn’t, we sort of argued about those. I wanted them to know what I was doing all along, so I showed it to my brothers, I showed it to my mom. My brothers didn’t have as strong feelings about it as my mother, but it brought up a lot of stuff with them too. We all had very different experiences and stories about our relationships with my dad.

EMMERT: And your own points of view about it.

BECHDEL: Yeah.

EMMERT: The wave of autobiographical graphic novels in the ’80s and ’90s, it seems to me, was a bigger percentage of independent comics then than it is today. But it sounds to me like that didn’t matter to you, that this was something that you wanted to do, so that wasn’t really an issue for you.

BECHDEL: I always felt like there was something inherently autobiographical about cartooning, and that’s why there was so much of it. I still believe that. I haven’t exactly worked out my theory of why, but it does feel like it almost demands people to write autobiographies.

EMMERT: It’s interesting to me that it looks like all the members of your family had some sort of artistic talents. Is that true for your brothers — well, at least your parents. Is that true for your brothers, as well?

BECHDEL: Yeah. One brother is a musician, and my other brother, he’s sort of an outsider artist. He has great drawing skills, but he doesn’t really do anything with them; he puts all his energy into model cars and planes and things, which I guess is creative in a way, but I see that he can do beautiful drawings, but he doesn’t.

EMMERT: Doesn’t really do anything with them as far as art or getting them out there to the public.

BECHDEL: Yeah.

EMMERT: One of the themes in Fun Home I picked up on is of course the literature and reading and, in particular, I found that part when you talked about one of the times you felt closest to your father was when you took his English class. Does reading still play an important part of your life: Is that sort of a habit now?

BECHDEL: You know, I feel very bad about this, but I don’t read as much as I used to. And I’m not sure why. But I do think part of it is that the work that I do, you know, doing cartoons is very time-consuming. Especially when I was working on the Fun Home project, I really didn’t have time to read. I know that sounds crazy —

EMMERT: No, I understand.

BECHDEL: But I was working from the second I got up until the second I went to bed on that thing.

EMMERT: Wow. That’s a pretty rough taskmistress, there.

BECHDEL: I don’t know. I guess I am kind of a slow, methodical worker, but I don’t know how else you would do this stuff. You not only have to write it, you have to do all this painstaking drawing, and then you have to do design work, and it’s just all-consuming.

Bechdel and her father bond in Fun Home. ©2006 Alison Bechdel

EMMERT: One of the parts, too, in Fun Home that I like is when you were taking your English courses and you resisted your instructor’s desire to interpret the books you were reading. How does that feel now, though, that readers and critics would be doing the same thing to your work?

BECHDEL: [Laughter.] That’s pretty funny. I was just thinking about that, how hard it was for me to understand symbolism and literary interpretation. I feel like it’s almost like a developmental stage, I think, that people need to go through. Like, 17 or 18, I just wasn’t there yet. I really didn’t understand how things could be about something other that what they appeared to be. But now I’m all about that, kind of: seeing behind the surface.

EMMERT: Certainly, a lot the things that are going on in your family are like that in the book. The surface lives people are living are very different than what’s going on behind that.

BECHDEL: Yeah. Yeah, but I didn’t know that then. And now I do. And now I look at the simplest [laughs] — I’ve just become very cynical and hyper-interpretive. Like, I don’t know, the other day, somebody told me to watch something online: It was this very moving story about a father with a paraplegic son and how the father does all these marathon races pushing the son in a wheelchair. And while it was very moving on the surface and this guy seems like such a great dad, [laughs] I just started coming up with all these twisted psychological motivations for how he was like actually — I don’t know.

EMMERT: Exploiting this situation? [Laughs.]

BECHDEL: Exploiting the kid, yeah. For his own personal gratification. Having this kind of critical perspective makes life very complicated.

EMMERT: In your book, you talk about your father going through therapy. If you’re willing to share that, is that something that you’ve done, and has that helped you, as far as —

BECHDEL: Oh my GOD, yeah —

EMMERT: — putting this book together?

BECHDEL: Yeah, I couldn’t have done the book without having done lots of therapy. I was very clear that I didn’t want the book to be about my therapy. I think that would have been really boring. But, it wasn’t just the emotional benefits I got from therapy, but a whole way of learning to think psychologically. Understanding what we were just talking about, these layers and layers of motivations behind people’s behaviors. Also, I think I even learned a psychoanalytic way of thinking: interpreting my life as if it were a dream. Even to the extent that dreams are a kind of visual language, and I don’t think I could have told this story without images. That was part of my syntax.

The evolution of Bechdel’s attitude toward literary theory. ©2006 Alison Bechdel

EMMERT: And then, did you feel like putting Fun Home together and getting it out there was part of that process, as far as working through your life and trying to get meaning out of it, and that producing this work was part of that?

BECHDEL: Yes. Totally.

EMMERT: It certainly was evocative for me. My life was very different than yours in some ways, but there were a lot of similarities too, and it made me really think about how one’s past shapes one as a person now, and how our relationships with our parents has a very lasting effect on our interactions with other people later in life. So, for me, it was just a really moving experience to read the book. It was one of those things: I bought it, and sat down and just read it all at once. I couldn’t put it down. I had to find out what happened. I really appreciated your willingness to be so out there about your family.

BECHDEL: Well, it’s almost a kind of compulsive behavior. I have this compulsive truth-telling syndrome. You know, there’s a chapter in the book about my obsessive-compulsive stage as a child, when I was terrified of lying. I feel like that’s really true of my life in general, growing up in a situation where there were so many secrets, I think I’ve swung maybe a little too far the other way. [Emmert laughs.]

It’s an incredibly revealing book, and I don’t know why I feel like I want everyone to know these intimate things about me. I know other writers who have told me they can’t imagine doing something that personal. It does feel a little crazy. I don’t quite understand it.

EMMERT: Well, I personally admire your courage for doing it.

BECHDEL: Well, but it’s not courage. I guess that’s what I’m trying to say. It’s insanity.

EMMERT: Not necessarily. I don’t think so. I saw it as a very positive thing — for me as a reader, anyway — and reacted to it that way.

BECHDEL: Good.

EMMERT: [Laughs.] I’m sure that’s why all the critics are raving as well, because there is just so much truth there, and that’s something I think, even in autobiographies, is quite frequently missing, that even people telling the stories of their lives don’t really tell it truthfully, in many cases.

BECHDEL: Well, mine’s full of lies, too.

EMMERT: Artistic license.

Bechdel demonstrates her “truth-telling compulsion” in Fun Home. ©2006 Alison Bechdel

BECHDEL: Yeah. I think it’s important in any autobiographical effort to acknowledge the limitations of your methodology, of your ability to tell the truth, and I feel like I did do that in Fun Home.

EMMERT: So what was your reaction to Fun Home being banned in Marshall, Missouri, along with Craig Thompson’s Blankets? [Laughter.]

BECHDEL: My first reaction is: What a great honor! My second reaction is, it’s a very interesting situation, and it’s all about the power of images, which I think is something people need to talk about. I can understand why people wouldn’t want their children to accidentally think this was a funny comic book and pick it up and see pictures of people having sex. I can understand that. I think banning books is the wrong approach. If you don’t want your kids to read it, make sure they don’t get a hold of it. But I do understand that concern, because yeah, drawings are very seductive and attention-catching.

EMMERT: Do you think it had as much to do with the subject matter as it did with the fact that it was illustrated?

BECHDEL: Oh, I think it had everything to do with the fact that it was illustrated. I’m sure that library’s got all kinds of gay material in it. But if they’re just regular books with no cartoon illustrations, there’s not the same kind of concern about it.

EMMERT: I think that goes back to what you were saying about the power of images. I think one of the things, at least in the United States, that so-called graphic novelists have had to struggle with is the idea of the comic book versus the graphic novel, that comic books, in the U. S. anyway, have been so long identified as children’s reading material, or superheroes or things like that, that were pretty innocuous; but then when you combine that with adult themes and adult illustrations, that sort of presses a hot button for folks.

BECHDEL: Yes. I see this Missouri case as part of the whole evolution of the graphic-novel form. In that way, I’m very honored to be a part of the fracas, as the discussion evolves about what this form is.

EMMERT: I don’t know how much you know about European graphic novels, but it’s a very different sort of approach in terms of the culture. When I was in France one time, I was outside of what one would call a comics store, I guess, and people in business suits with their briefcases are walking in to buy their comics. And it’s just a whole different way of thinking about the medium.

BECHDEL: You know, I didn’t know much about the European comics scene until quite recently. I was just in France last fall, and got a glimpse of that and also saw this huge body of work that I had no idea existed. It was incredible stuff, a lot of which hasn’t been translated here. I’ve never seen it.

EMMERT: Right, yeah. One of the things that I will give kudos to Fantagraphics for is the fact that they are trying to bring some of that to the United States, like their translation of Epileptic and Lewis Trondheim’s work, because it’s just totally unknown here. Again, not work for children; it’s for adults.

So it’s something that I would personally like to see, and I think your book does a lot to change that perception.

BECHDEL: Yeah, that makes me happy too, when people just talk about it as a book, and not as a graphic novel. The fact that it was Times’ #1 book, that hasn’t even really quite sunk in, yet, that’s just really mind-boggling to me. It’s very similar for me to my struggles as a marginalized minority artist. I was just living for the day when I could be a cartoonist instead a lesbian cartoonist. That’s very similar to wanting my book to be seen as a book and not a graphic book.

EMMERT: That was one of the things that excited me too, that it was seen as a book, or that it was seen as a nonfiction book —

BECHDEL: Yeah, yeah!

EMMERT: Or that it wasn’t classified as one of the top 10 graphic novels of the year, that it was classified as what it is: literature.

BECHDEL: Yeah. It has made a couple top-10 graphic-novel lists, but I’m kind of dismissive. I know that’s really wrong. I mean, I’m very grateful to be on any top-10 lists, whatever the category, but I can’t help feeling like, “What do you mean? It’s a great book!”

EMMERT: Has the mainstream success of Fun Home been celebrated as a good thing in the gay and lesbian media? Has there been any criticism from the community?

Fun Home ©2006 Alison Bechdel

BECHDEL: I haven’t heard any criticism. Mostly people seem really on board, you know? Really excited to see a subcultural artist who’s been kind of a community fixture for the past two decades cross over to a certain extent. I think the queer community has sort of taken it personally. People feel some ownership, like the book’s success is about them too. And of course it is.

EMMERT: Well, we’ll have to see what happens when all the comic awards come out this year, to see if you make any of those lists, the Harveys and the Eisners. [Laughs.]

BECHDEL: You know, I’ve never even understood those contests or entered any of them. That’s how out of the whole comics world I’ve been.

EMMERT: Well, you might end up in it, this year. ’Cause I would imagine it would be nominated for one of those.

BECHDEL: I haven’t even been to a big comics convention. This year I’m doing the trifecta: I’m going to Angoulême —

EMMERT: Oh wow!

BECHDEL: — San Diego, New York Comic Con, MoCCA.

EMMERT: I’ve only been to the San Diego Comic-Con and I don’t know how you can prepare anyone for that experience.

BECHDEL: I’m a little anxious about it.

EMMERT: It’s actually interesting, if you look at it as sort of social phenomenon. That’s how I do it. It’s easier to deal with than trying to take it all in, because it’s just kind of unbelievable.

I’m curious too, about the sale of your books. Obviously, with all the accolades that Fun Home is getting, has this helped increase the book’s sales, and has it also affected the sales of your other work?

BECHDEL: Well, it is having good sales. I just got a report, it’s like 40 or 45,000 copies, which, I don’t really even know what to make of that.

EMMERT: For a graphic novel, that’s really fantastic.

BECHDEL: When I’ve published Dykes collections, it would be great to sell 8 or 9,000 in the first year. So that’s my framework. So, this is just orders of magnitude beyond my experience. In terms of whether it’s affecting the sales of Dykes, I have no way of knowing that yet. I don’t think so, partly because many of them are difficult to get a hold of, many of the old books. But this is my great hope, that eventually the Fun Home frenzy will translate into more acceptance of the Dykes to Watch Out For books.

EMMERT: Were sales of the Dykes to Watch Out For collections mostly to gay/lesbian and women’s bookstores?

BECHDEL: Well, in the early days, they certainly were. But now there are only a handful of gay and women’s bookstores left. So … sometimes I can find Dykes to Watch Out For on the “gay and lesbian studies” or “gay fiction” shelf in a chain or independent bookstore. But not often. I don’t know where the bulk of them are sold nowadays. Maybe online?

a sample of Dykes to Watch Out For ©Alison Bechdel

EMMERT: How has being published by Houghton Mifflin, a big-name publisher, been different from your work with a small publisher in terms of editorial control and marketing?

BECHDEL: Light years different. I was a little anxious going in about what would happen editorially, whether people were going to try and make the book less … I don’t know. Queer. But that never, ever happened. My editor genuinely wanted this book to be itself, you know? And she really helped me to find its true shape. I’d never worked with an editor before, so that was a huge gift. And the marketing? Man, that was incredible. Partly, this was Houghton Mifflin’s first graphic novel, so I was the beneficiary of a lot of marketing and PR attention. I’d also been worried about getting lost at a big publisher, that I’d just be one of hundreds of authors, but that didn’t happen either. Working with small presses all those years, I worked with dedicated, talented people, but they had tremendously limited resources, and they were usually doing five or six jobs each. At Houghton, I had all these specialists — people focusing on the cover design, the bookstore displays, the media coverage. It was an unimaginable luxury.

(Continued)

Someone once said that Maurice Sendak, children’s book author and illustrator, drew “little old people worrying away their childhoods.” It’s true: Sendak’s work is remarkable for its lack of sentimentality and its depiction of childhood as it really is, a time of coming to grips with the sometimes unpleasant and frightening world around you — a reality that children’s literature often tries to ignore. What his work also contains is a genuine sensitivity to the complexity and intelligence of children.

Sendak was born in 1928 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Jewish-Polish immigrants. He received little formal art training. One of his first professional illustration jobs was filling in the backgrounds for the Mutt and Jeff comic strip after classes in high school. Sendak’s best-known work is Where The Wild Things Are. With that book he perfected his own unique picture book format, characterized by the complete integration of a rhythmic poetic text with engaging and dynamic illustration, a relationship reminiscent of choreography.

In December of 1987, The Cartoon Art Museum of San Francisco held a symposium on children’s book illustration. The main attraction of the event was a question-and-answer session with Maurice Sendak, an abridged transcription of which follows. At that time Sendak was illustrating a book, based on a Wilhelm Grimm fairy tale newly discovered in 1983, which would come to be titled Dear Mili.

MAURICE SENDAK: In this article, which I saw the other day, which is really very funny, I am referred to as “Morose Sendak” [audience laughter]. Actually, the use of that as my first name has been frequent for people who think the books are over-serious, or that I treat children too seriously, or I’m not comical enough. That has been my name for a good part of my life, including childhood, when my sister used that on me, too.

I can talk about what I’m working on right now. I haven’t illustrated a picture book since 1980. My last picture book was something called Outside Over There, and then I began designing for the stage, sets and costumes for operas and ballets, which is my new profession at this point, with occasional dipping back into books. Only occasionally, because I feel as though  I’ve done most of the books I want to do at this point in my life.

But then this Grimm came up. The Grimm is a fairy tale that’s never been published before, and it was found in a letter, seven years ago, that Wilhelm Grimm wrote to a little girl. Her mother had died and he was trying to console her and, like all adults who are trying to console children, he made a mess of it. He was using language and she was only feeling at this point; she couldn’t figure out his language. So right in the middle, he quit trying to explain this complicated business called death and said, “Just let me tell you a story.”

He told an original fairy tale, which has never seen the light of day because the family kept the letter through all those generations. The letter was sold, got to America, a dealer bought it, got it to a publisher, and I’m now illustrating it. The Germans are fuming. They were very anxious and upset in Europe because this will be the first Grimm tale that has not been published in Germany, or with the original stories back in the early 19th century. I work with the publisher, and so I will thus be the first illustrator to illustrate this story, and America will be the country that will publish it [audience applause].

I agree with you. We keep the story hidden in a vault because would a German passing through New York happen to see it, he could translate it instantly and it’ll get published in Munich before we know it. So there are only three copies. Mine is at my bedside, the other is in a vault in New York, and somebody else has it out in California. Anyway, it’s been three years since I’ve been working on it. I’ve done all the studies, did all the sketches, had problems with it because it’s a religious story, I’ve never illustrated a religious story. Frankly, I have difficulty with that kind of subject. Having spent a year researching it, I vacationed at a monastery in New York State, not because I’m religious, obviously, but because they breed German Shepherds and I’m a German Shepherd freak, so the idea of dogs and monks was terrific. They actually helped me with the story. The father up there is a very — now — excellent friend of mine. For the past year, starting last January, I started painting. I’ve just finished the book, a full year’s work. I have to go home after this trip and do the jacket and deliver the book by Christmas and it’ll be out next Christmas. So this will have been a long three-year job on this book. I’m very emotionally invested in this little girl and in her mother. Like all the people you work with, imaginatively speaking, in a book, I’m going to miss her very, very much.

The story about the Grimm tale I was telling you about is in many strange ways a continuation, at least in my own head, of Outside Over There, because Outside Over There had a mother, two daughters — the elder daughter trying desperately to get rid of the younger daughter, which is typical of households. My sister was nine years older than I, so she was my mother, basically, and both adored me and brutalized me at the same time. When I came to do the Grimm, I couldn’t get rid of the same image of the mother from Outside Over There, so she now comes into the Grimm fairy tale. It’s like Ida, the oldest girl from Outside Over There, has moved to a big town and the baby is now about five or six years old, and so the story takes up with the mother and the baby.

The reason I do this is because I didn’t write the Grimm story, and in illustrating someone else’s book, unless I can find some way of investing myself emotionally into the material, even pretending it’s my story, then I have a difficult time drawing pictures for it. But I have to be inside the book, tremendously. I have to really admire the text very much, the form of the writing, the subject, the emotional content, all of it. If I can get inside to that extent then I’m going to do something that I will enjoy doing. Otherwise I’m going to be just illustrating a book, which is of no interest to me at all whatever at this point in my life.

[Responding to a question about his commenting on how bad his work is.]

SENDAK: My pleasure comes when I officially begin the book. The excitation of starting. Getting the images in my head. That is absolutely the best part, in laying out the book, in designing it, in the characters appearing under your pencil. It’s absolutely true that whenever I finish it doesn’t look anything like what that first vivid impression was. I see all my faults. I see how badly I draw feet. I see how badly I do this. And those are faults which are inherent in my style, which maybe other people — I hope ­— do not see or dwell on as I do, but I really don’t like my pictures when I’m finished with them. I give them away to a foundation. I don’t have anything of mine hanging in the house [except for] a few favorite pictures from books. There’s one of my dog Jennie from Higglety Pigglety Pop. But that’s because it’s her, not because I drew it.

From Higglety Pigglety Pop!

I don’t get pleasure from finished drawings. I get pleasure from finishing the book and the release from having finished it, and knowing that it’s the best I can do. I redraw everything that must be redrawn. I’m not lazy. But even in the end, the totality of it is disappointing to me.

QUESTION: So you see this picture in the mind’s eye and you draw it out, and it never comes out like that?

SENDAK: It doesn’t look like the picture I saw, no.

QUESTION: I have a similar question. When you do illustrated work that deals more with characters than animals or people, do you also see the backgrounds on the paintings?

SENDAK: That’s a curious question, I think, because both things happen. I sometimes see characters, I sometimes see only backgrounds. I don’t often see whole settings with characters and backgrounds. At other times, I don’t see anything at all. I just have a feeling, a very excited, happy feeling, but I have to explore that feeling on paper, and then my hand begins to do it.

If you saw that whole documentary [a film on Sendak from the PBS series American Masters], the best homework I can advise is sketching. It has certainly worked well with me as I sketch to music. Put the record player on, and you take a blank sheet of paper. You start at the top, and you have to finish that sheet of paper by the time that piece of music ends. Since it’s one sheet of paper, it’s best that you don’t work with the symphonies; it’s best that you work with a sonata or a quartet or a popular song, whatever music excites you. But the exercise is, start at the top, get to the bottom when the music is done, and it must be coherent. It must have a plot. But you must not think about the plot. It must simply flow out of your hands, almost like unconscious writing. I find music is such an incredible stimulus to the unconscious. Usually I’ll pick the composer, maybe Mozart or maybe Haydn, whoever. I’ll draw a picture, a little fantasy sketch of them, and then draw about something that happened in their lives. But I must come to the end.

Of course, you end up with dozens of horrendous drawings. But, in fact, you also occasionally end up with some very good drawings that are fresh-cooked right out of the head, and that tell you the direction that you’re going, or that tell you what you’re thinking about. It’s like forcing your dreams out on a drawing paper. That is the only exercise. It’s like playing the piano every day so that when you get to the concert you really play the piano. I think, when you’re illustrating a book, you have to be drawing all the time, and using the muscles in your imagination all the time, so when you get to it you are ready to work.

QUESTION: Have you ever thought about just printing your sketches?

SENDAK: Yes; the sketches always have a freshness, and they’re always vivid. They simply aren’t good enough. Maybe in an art book where you’re showing all the stages of your work, then it would be fun. People who saw the sketches I did for the Grimm said, “Publish it just that way.” Spontaneous. Then people who saw the work pencil drawings I did based on the sketches said, “Do it that way, publish the book this way.” What you have to do is, one, don’t show anybody anything, which was the mistake I made, and two, wait until you know that you have finished with what you’ve done.

I’ve never, ever, ever done sketches that I felt were adequate. They’re all lively, and there are qualities in the drawing which are unrepeatable, we all know that, but there’s something else that’s missing. There’s composition that’s missing, there’s emotional content that’s missing, and there’s something that’s appropriate to the text that’s missing. So in my case, I can’t do it. I keep them; I enjoy them. But I haven’t published them.

[An audience member asks about how Sendak broke into the publishing business]

SENDAK: OK. The question was about my apprenticeship to my editor, how did it begin, how did it work. Her name’s Ursula Nordstrom and she ran Harper and Brothers then. She was enamored of young people and of training young people. I came off the street in New York.

This was the early ’50s, when there was no such thing, really, as big-deal children’s books in America – I was very lucky to have gotten on the ground floor. It was a little pokey department, which they gave to the women in the office. The macho pigs decided, “We don’t want to be embarrassed by running kiddie-book departments, that’s a peculiar thing to do.” They gave it to these incredible women. And had the women been smarter, they wouldn’t have made such a great success of their departments because, eventually, the most ingenious, adventurous, exciting stuff was coming out of the juvenile departments in America, like her department at Harper’s. And we began gradually to make money, which was the beginning of the end, because then we came to the notice of the goons who ran the publishing houses and then these wonderful women were dumped, unceremoniously. Then you had these other people, who maybe were good bankers but not good children’s book editors, coming in. I speak not of the people we know, Barbara. I speak in general.

But in fact, it was an incredibly ingenious time between 1950 and 1965, where we were all trained. Me and Tomi Ungerer and Ezra Jack Keats, and all the people — kids who came off the street. I had no taste whatsoever. I didn’t know anything about bookmaking. I did not have any art training. I was really just an ignoramus. Ursula simply spoon-fed me the time she spent working with me on books. The first book I wrote, Kenny’s Window, in ’57, she was up there every weekend guiding me, and I was at her house working out the text.

The books she gave me to illustrate were all chosen by her, based on what she thought was proper for my development as a young illustrator. I didn’t know how to pick them. I would have done anything because my only interest was to get enough money to move out of my house in Brooklyn and have my own apartment, so I would have illustrated the walls of the subway or the urinals; it would have made no difference. So, without her guidance …

I can look back on my backlist now, and there is not a single dud. I may have done badly illustrated books, but the books I illustrated were all terrific books. I now know that. I didn’t then. I would just do as I was told. And that kind of guidance, which was not narcissistic, which was not egocentric on her part, which was really to bring me out as an artist, to find the things that develop my particular talent, was what she was doing. What maybe half a dozen women of that period were doing at various publishing houses in America.

It was an extraordinary apprenticeship. You got the full blast of these people’s attention and gradually you grew up.

You learned right from the beginning. I read manuscripts at Harper’s. She forced me to read manuscripts, to critique them. I ran errands. I hung around. It’s something I would like to think is true today, but I’m not sure is. I don’t think it is true, actually, because I have taught and I know how difficult it is to get into the business now. But back then it just wasn’t a business. It was an incredible privilege to be drawing pictures and hanging around.

QUESTION: A technical question. I noticed on the film that you were placing an overlay; it looked like an ink-drawing overlay over the painting. Is that the way you always work?

SENDAK: No. Actually, that book was done in four-color process. Meaning, you do the color separate from the line. It is a less expensive way of doing it. And also, to a certainty, your line will be clearer that way, because of the printing problems in doing a book. Most of my books are full color, and they’re printed as full-color works. But I wanted, in Night Kitchen, to really look like a comic strip. I wanted it to look like Little Nemo. I wanted it to be Winsor McCay. I wanted to do a facsimile of a comic book, and in separating you have the perfect clarity of the line, and clarity of the color, and then they’re superimposed on each other, and you’ve got a comic book vividness. That’s why it was done that way.

[An audience member asks how Sendak controls his blending of fantasy and reality]

SENDAK: It’s difficult to tell you what the trick is. What is the turn-around from a fantasy situation into a reality situation in a child’s life? Like Max in The Wild Things. One minute he’s talking to his mother and the next the trees are growing out of the walls, and then he’s talking to wild things. To me, that is a normal day [audience laughter]. I really don’t think that is a trick.

I think we assume that only children have this incredible flexibility — they talk to newspapers; they talk to tablecloths; they talk to bowls of water; and we say, “How charming, how cute.” We do it, too, but we don’t do it aloud. Because we have grown up and we have gray in our beards and we’re supposed to be adults and we’re all just nervous wrecks, basically.

Children have the privilege because we have endowed them with the privilege of having this fantasy life. So they move in and out of fantasy all the time. But, I think, people always say how wonderful that you can do books for children; you have your childhood intact. They give me this really ridiculous sentimental aspect, because I think we all do; I think it’s a survival tactic; if we didn’t live in fantasy most of the day, we’d all be off your famous [Golden Gate] bridge over here, for the most part.

So I think this trick you’re talking about is no more than the observation of real life.

QUESTION: I was referring, though, to how you can have that baby talk but make it believable. Some of the editors would say, “Well, this is a little contrived to think that a fish can rescue a jade bracelet.”

SENDAK: Well, this conviction has to come from you. If your fish is talking, then it’s got to be a perfectly reasonable thing that your fish is talking. If your fish is talking and it doesn’t come really from you, then your editor is correct. That’s a contrivance. Children will know instantly. Kids know instantly when you’re patronizing them, when you’re giving them ersatz fantasy or it’s coming genuinely from the middle of your gut; they know. They are not impressed with the fact that you’ve won the Caldecott Award or that you like Mozart or any of those things; they could not care less. The book goes flying across the room. You notice from their letters; “Dear Mr. Sendak: I hate your book. I hope you die soon. Cordially…”

[Audience laughter.]

So this famous trick you’re talking about just didn’t work, as far as this kid was concerned. They are the most brazen audience, because they will not tolerate being bored. They won’t tolerate listening to your blither. You have got to get to it. They know the real thing from the false thing. This gets lost or fuzzy as they get older, we all know that.

But the same principle upon which they function day by day by day is the same principle upon which we function. It doesn’t change. We just get more astute at hiding it, at pretending that we’re grown-ups. They have the privilege of being natural until we stop them.

QUESTION: Do you ever envision your books pictorially, before the text is developed?

SENDAK: No. I really do think in terms of language. Even though my life has been predominantly as an illustrator and I’ve written a very small percentage of the books that I’ve illustrated, I do think in words. I prefer words. If I weren’t an illustrator, then, why aren’t I a painter? You put me in front of a canvas I’m dead as a doornail. I need language as a springboard, or I need music as a springboard. My work doesn’t generate without language. So when I think of story, I think absolutely in terms of text. And pictures come long after that.

QUESTION: What do you think about developing a story in that manner, where the stories are developed pictorially?

SENDAK: Stories shouldn’t be developed pictorially, initially. They should start out textually. Your stories should be immensely constructed by the time you’re illustrating it. You should only be worrying about your text and making something marvelous. Writing it and rewriting it and writing. Let the pictures come later. They’ll take care of themselves.

QUESTION: Are you saying that if you removed the pictures from the story that it would work just as well?

SENDAK: No. Well, that could happen. But I think what happens is if you’ve got enough confidence in yourself and you’ve resolved the text, that the pictures then do a second story, not be a mere echo. “Jane walked into the room and was eaten by the plant.” You don’t need to draw that, although maybe you’d like to draw that. But, in fact, you should draw something else. There should be a counterpoint between your pictures and your text. The best-illustrated books are the books where the text does one thing and the pictures say something just a little off-center of the language, so they’re both doing something. Otherwise you have an echo chamber. The most boring books are where the pictures are restating the text.

Who needs that? The text said it much better. So you cannot separate the pictures from the text, you shouldn’t be able to, not in a well-constructed book. They should fit in like machinery.

QUESTION: How you do research for a book?

SENDAK: Well, I love doing homework for a book, I like the research part of it. The most obvious case is the Grimm, because I’m working on it. I wanted to set the Grimm in the correct time, which means 1800. It happens also to be my favorite time. It’s Mozart’s time: it’s the end of the 18th century, beginning of the 19th century. I like the way people looked then. I think the costumes were fabulous at the turn of the century. And that’s where the Grimm comes from, that’s the air that it lived in. So I’ll do lots of homework, reading about the brothers. I read every book published in English about the brothers. And they’re all very bad; let me assure you. If anybody here publishes books, do a translation of a serious book about the brothers Grimm: we desperately need it. It’s all about these cute brothers who write stories, and it’s fatuous.

From King Grisly-Beard: A Tale From The Brothers Grimm

But I did that, then I looked at costume books of the period, films of the period. Not of the period, but films about the period. There was a movie which I saw, which was wonderful, by a French director named Eric Rohmer, and it was The Marquess of O by Heinrich von Kleist, who’s one of my favorite playwrights. The setting of that movie and the look of the woman in that film was very much the smell and the sense of the Grimm I was looking for. So, you do about as much of that as you wish, and then you start sketching and you start drawing. What you hope is that the homework, kind of like a big blender, goes into the inspiration and comes out into the book.

Continued

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Author’s note:  A few months after this interview took place, Wilson sustained disabling brain injuries requiring special care.  Contributions maybe sent to Wilson’s Special Needs Trust, PO Box 14854, San Francisco, CA 94114 or you can make a contribution online here.

S. Clay Wilson has been termed “The Legendary Underground Cartoonist” so often it seems part of his name the way “The Last of the Red-Hot Mamas” was part of Sophie Tucker’s. He was born in 1941 in Lincoln, Neb. The state university schooled him in anthropology and art. The Unites States Army trained him as a medic. In 1968, following a brief stint in New York City and a longer, more formative one in Lawrence, Kan., he moved permanently to San Francisco.

Upon his arrival, Charles Plymell, a poet he knew from Lawrence, introduced Wilson to Robert Crumb. Crumb, who was in the process of publishing Zap #1, which is generally regarded as one of the pads from which all of underground comix launched, invited him to contribute to Zap #2. His comic sex-and-violence extravaganzas, featuring a repertoire company of demons, pirates, bikers and dykes, executed in a style that combined the details of a master etching with the energy of an abstract expressionist, have been in every issue since, as well as in a variety of publications ranging from those (Playboy, The Realist) substantial enough to have helped bedrock American popular culture, to others (Barbarian Women, Maggotzine) whose lifespans paled beside that of the mayfly. He has written and drawn several solo comix. He has illustrated work by Hans Christian Andersen and Charles Bukowski, William Burroughs and the Brothers Grimm. He has drawn album covers and book jackets and matchbooks for a Chicago bar. His work has been praised by Burroughs, Ken Kesey, Harvey Kurtzman and Terry Southern. It has been exhibited at museums and galleries in Los Angeles, New York City, Rotterdam, San Francisco and Zurich. In recent years, he has concentrated on commissioned drawings — rotting zombies playing baseball, dykes ravishing nuns, demons beheading ogres — which have sold for prices in five figures.

"Pursued by the Brugly Others, The Checkered Demon helps Star-Eyed Stella allude Capture through the cavern in the Tavern of Lost Souls ..." ©1995 S. Clay Wilson

I met Wilson when I profiled him for the Journal in 1995. (Available from Fantagraphics, in Outlaws, Rebels, Freethinkers & Pirates.) He had been impossible. He canceled appointments. He damned me to my editor as “a wannabe.” He demanded half my fee. He drunkenly harassed my secretary. (Having been married to a junkie tenor player, she rolled with the flow.) But when the article appeared, he loved it, and when I ran into him at conventions, we buddied around. When the Journal decided it was time for a “definitive” career-and life-spanning interview, he announced he “wanted to stick with one guy, like Boswell” and insisted I get the job. “I don’t want the usual ‘How’d you meet Crumb, blah, blah,’ he told me. “I’ve been asked the same questions so many times, I ought to interview myself. That way, I’d get the check.”

He had a point. And since Wilson, who claims to have inherited a “talking gene” from a grandmother who had won the Blue Ribbon at the Iowa State Fair Talkathon by besting two cranked-up truck drivers, has never given a dull interview in his life, and since, furthermore, he had landed me the gig, which was more than any agent ever had done, I solidified his cooperation by offering to split the fee. Then, to push his confidence in me further, I brought along a sixpack of Red Tail. Wilson, apparently hoping to push mine, already had Spaten in the fridge — and Mendocino burley for smoking.

Wilson lives in the same eight-room flat in the same row Victorian as when I had first visited him. The newspaper clipping about the octopus’s penis is still posted on his front door, but the coffin that served as his coffee table — and the crocodile skeleton that sat on it — are gone from his living room. His hats and swords and fetishistic figurines have been joined by a 36-inch Panasonic TV, an answering machine and e-mail, civilities attributable to Lorraine Chamberlain, with whom he has resided for the past seven years. (Chamberlain, an artist, who is the ex-wife of John Chamberlain, ex-roommate of Nico and ex-consort of Frank Zappa — it was she who was framed with him in the famous 1964 Cucamonga porn-tape/sexual-perversion bust — is an interview subject in her own right.) His hall is still lined with waist-high stacks of videotapes of old movies and piles of read books. (In Cold Blood, The Wild One and Satyricon provide a fair sample of the former and The Great Dali Art Fraud, a biography of the mid-20^th-century bank robber Slick Willie Sutton, and a two-volume compilation of Russian gangsters’ anti-Nazi tattoos the latter.)

Wilson sat on a floral-patterned sofa, beneath a lavender abstract of a Kansas twister. He wore a herringbone Harris tweed jacket, an off-purple turtleneck, matching socks, black slacks and black faux alligator loafers. He has blue eyes, gray collar length hair and a gray goatee. When I asked his height and weight, he replied, “Forget that!” He did not, he said, wish to be too easily known, citing James Joyce’s requirements for a productive artistic life: “Cunning, stealth and exile.”

BOB LEVIN: Since we last spoke formally, I understand you’ve added a new hip.

S. CLAY WILSON: [Laughs.] I’m all fine. Everything’s fine. You don’t have to list my ailments. There’s too many and probably use up most of your tape. How much are you getting per word? Four cents? Where’s the medical reports? I’ll read ’em off to you.

I think you told me that you’ve added Robert Hughes to your list of testimonials.

I met Robert Hughes when he was coming out of Fanelli’s Bar [Author’s note: An establishment in New York City’s SOHO district]. I was with Rebecca at the time. (Dare I mention her name? I bear her no ill will. It was fun while it lasted.) She had a bunch of Pork comics, and she’s bopping around, “There’s Robert Hughes! There’s Robert Hughes!” She’s like a celebrity-search girl anyway. “There’s Robert Hughes!” I said, “Really?” She immediately runs over and starts giving him Pork. He was like, “What?” I guess he was 86ed from Fanelli’s. He’s a heavy drinker. You know the Aussies have their motor-oil-sized cans of Foster’s Lager Bitter. All he did was, he looked at it. And she says, “This is S. Clay Wilson.” And he yelps, “Wow! S. Clay Wilson! I love your work!” So that was the quote I put on the Grimm Brothers thing.

He was wandering off, but Rebecca’s kind of a mixer, and Robert Williams really wanted to have approval from Robert Hughes; so she was, “Ask him what he thinks about Robert Williams’ work,” nudge, nudge, nudge.  [Slurred] “Wha’y’ thinka Robert Williams’ work?” He turns around. [Aussie accent] “Robert Williams? He’s a loada shite,” at the top of his lungs. Then he waved and lurched on down the street. (If this is printed … Oh, the hell with it. Let Williams discover it. It might cause undue friction, but I think it’s funny.)

Added any new celebrities to your collectors?

I don’t know. The artwork I’ve been doing, I don’t put names on ’cause it has legs that way. And people buy artwork from galleries, and it has more legs if they resell it.

Henry Miller has been quoted as saying all artists and writers work out of uncomfortable positions. What’s your favorite?

Now that I’m older I kind of like Matisse’s deal. Just lie down and pass moving pieces of paper over the ceiling. Once I start drawing, it’s in that little rathole over there. [Gestures.] That is forbidden territory. That is my turf, right there, in that fucking room. (I’m trying to get some continuity here. What was the question again?) All of ’em are uncomfortable. I’ve got a big drawing table and chair that adjusts. When I’m working, I’m in this zone. That’s why I have to get my eyes checked all the time. Got to use a magnifying glass. But don’t mention anything about what I use to do the artwork. I want to keep all that a mystery. Actually, I don’t even do the artwork. You ought to see the guy. He’s in there working right now while we’re out here drinking beer from Munich.

[Shouts] Faster! Faster! More dwarves! More bells and whistles! Put more highlights on that cutlass!

When you told me you wanted to avoid the usual questions, I decided to check some different sources. One was The Paris Review’s writers’ interview series. Here’s some of those: Do you work every day?

Try to.

How do you get started?

By waking up. The way I work … I’m always behind. I sell everything up front. I don’t want stock laying about, clogging up this room ’cause I have to fill it with movies and art books. It’s easier to keep working, I’ve found, if you’ve been working than to start working if you haven’t been working. I always quit when I want to draw more, so I can’t wait to get back after it, rather than beat myself up to meet deadlines. So you enjoy what you’re doing, rather than hurry up and bop it out. Like Spain [Rodriguez]’s doing this huge, long bio of Che Guevera.  “What page are you on? 107?”

“I wish.”

I quit work when I still want to work, and when you get to this point, in your dream life, your brain is on your side. If you’re working on something, it’ll show you more of it. It’s like a slide show. Billions and billions of crosshatching techniques, or the way light hits, or water color techniques. It’s like a huge catalog, but real specific. P-Chink. Wow! Chink. “Enough already!” My subconscious is nagging me.

From "Hog Ridin' Fools" Zap Comix #2 ©1968 Apex Novelties

I know writers’ll keep a notepad by their bed …

Oh yeah! Right! I’ll do that, and I’ll get up 2:00 in the morning and scribble on a piece of paper a detail of a drawing or something.

Do you find the process of drawing pleasurable?

It’s probably the most fun I have. ’Cause you have absolute control, and if you fuck up, it’s on you. I mean, I’ve always done it. It’s the life I chose. I never had a real job, y’know. A book store once. A million years ago.

Adele [Levin] wanted me to ask, what you’d have been if you hadn’t been a cartoonist?

Uh. Probably an ax murderer. See, I always liked art. My mom collected all my drawings. I was drawing all the time, and when I discovered EC comics …

Hold on. Sounds like we’re getting dangerously close to the autobiographical. You ready for that?

Yeah.

I have you born July 25, ’41, in Lincoln, Neb.

I guess I’ll let that stay, but I hate Lincoln, Neb. Can we change it to Lawrence, Kan.? [Laughs.] Nobody knows the difference, Lincoln, Neb., Lawrence, Kan., if you’re from New York. What are these places, right?

Anyhow, the reason I wanted to be a cartoonist was EC comics. My uncle, Millard Townsend, who was a druggist from Ponca, Neb., would come down to visit my father and go see Nebraska’s football team. “Go Big Red.” Or as I say, “Go Big Redneck.” I hated football. He brought down these big boxes of books my pa loved, detective magazines and stuff; and I was going through this box, and a Piracy, with a cover torn off, was my satori, as you’d put it if you were a Zen Buddhist.  This beautiful drawing just popped up. And it was a [Raised voice] comic strip with [Reraised voice] great artwork. It was Reed Crandall’s “Blackbeard.” And each individual artist did their own individual story in their own style. So I immediately started drawing comic strips, at age 14, roughly. “I wanna be one of these guys. I wanna be a cartoonist.” I had eight pounds of ’em. I sold ’em all.

From Reed Crandall's "Blackbeard" story in Piracy #3 (Feb.-March 1955) ©1955 EC Comics

Were you drawing comics before you saw ECs?

Kinda. I did funny drawings, and me and kids in the neighborhood had jam sessions. I was always interested in art. I always drew. I went to the art school in the museum in Lincoln, Neb. I won awards. I was in the newspaper.

I’m pre-TV, y’know. I love radio because I have fond memories listening to the radio with my dear old dad. Inner Sanctum, mysteries and stuff in the ’40s. My fantasies were always cooking. TV, it’s somebody else’s pictures, but if I’m hearing a story or reading, my memories are more vivid than the movie I saw last night. So the EC comic really flipped me out.

What did your parents do?

Mom worked as a medical stenographer in Lincoln Nebraska’s state insane asylum. She was a little nutty herself. A real intense woman, God rest her soul. She was a whiz with algebra. She was very smart, though neurotic and weird. She’d get real upset; she was kind of nervous, and I take after her. I’m nervous all the time, and kind of depressed, off and on, just like ma.

Pa was easygoing. From the Blue Ridge Mountains. West Virginia. He was a machinist. He ran a steel lathe, and he could make anything, including crossbows, like the one in there [indicating dining room], which would punch a hole through solid marine plywood — THOK! He made furniture. He made fuel pumps for Offenhausers. He was a whiz woodcrafter, steel lathe operator and mechanic.

I wanted to get a vehicle. “How about a car?”

“Get your own car.”

The only thing I could afford was a Harley Davidson. So I hung out with these biker guys, and they’d come over and need a part for their motorcycle, and Pa wouldn’t say whether he could do it; he’d say, “When do you need it?” Maybe I got my craftiness from pa, some oblique path. ’Cause when I’m working sometimes with a magnifying glass, I remember seeing my pa doing real detailed work with micrometers. I was always fascinated, and I wish I’d learned the steel lathe. He was always waiting for me to ask him, “Please teach me how to run the steel lathe”; but, I don’t know, there’s some kind of friction between the son and the father. [Clears throat.]

Were you into guns as a kid?

I was a gentle soul, but Pa got me a .410 shotgun, and going pheasant-hunting with my hillbilly father was a pleasant memory. I always felt real bonded. There was no talking. It was just silent walking and stalking. Then I shot this bunny, and “Wait a minute. I don’t want to do this.” It’s when I quit hunting, disappointing my father. Pheasants are one thing, but this bunny was blown apart. There was nothing left to eat — BLAM!

And my uncle, Pa’s brother, Eli, he had his own flea market in Council Bluffs, Iowa, in a railroad terminal covered with vintage circus posters and honeycombed with used guns, coins, antiques and all kinds of amazing stuff. He had one son was a rock ’n’ roll star. Everybody liked Mike [redneck accent] “’cause he sounded just like a nigger” when he sang. Then his brother was a gay male nurse, who had a palomino horse covered with a fucking silver saddle and bridle; and when the horse died, they had him stuffed and had the horse, with all the fucking stuff, in the living room.

I got my collecting gene from [Uncle Eli]. He would sell me any weapon. I had fucking Civil War cavalry sabers, matching flintlock pistols, percussion stuff, war clubs from the Fiji Islands. We played guns with real guns. Once I had to make a sandwich, and my cousin Mike said, “Here’s a knife.” It was a Luftwaffe dagger for cuttin’ up the hot dogs.

Any siblings?

My sister. She’s five years younger. She was my proofreader, when I did comic strips.

I read all the time that our generation was influenced by growing up “in the shadow of the bomb.” I can remember the drills where we learned to duck under our desks for protection, but I don’t recall ever thinking I was threatened by nuclear extinction. That factor into you?

In high school, I was conscious primarily of the first mass murderer, Charles Starkweather. [Interviewer’s note: Another Nebraska boy.] I liked to draw. I was drawing, drawing, drawing. I was obsessed with chess and drawing. I was a recluse, drawing comic strips compulsively. So I was called a “squirrel,” which, at the time, meant “egghead” or “geek.” I hated everybody, except for Ace, who I still see, and his now dead brother, Muth, my Army buddy — and himself a brilliant artist. We were alienated and beat. We wanted to be beatniks. Like, “Hey, man, let’s, like, fall down by the Zoo Bar and, you know, whatever, you know.”

On The Road came out in ’57, but before that, when you were still a kid, what besides EC were you into, books or movies or music …?

I liked Little Richard — and Howl. I hung out with the Jewish intelligentsia boys. They kind of liked me, but I was this weird squirrel. I had great-looking girlfriends. (I still have some of their drawings.) Lots of the artgirls were real sexy. Scads of beautiful Latvian lassies. Arty and sexy. In high school, nobody ever got laid, but everybody fought. When I was 14, James Mosely insulted my mother in art class.

“Take that back.”

“I’m not gonna take that back. Fuck you.”

“Fuck you.” So I had to be macho. Like if you’re in jail, you have to show heart. So I had to fight Mosely. But a sailor had this parrot, Mabel, I was looking forward to buying that evening to go with my pirate fantasies. So I thought, “Fight Mosely. Get it out of the way. And if you live, you can buy the parrot for dessert.”

So anyway, we meet in the bathroom. I hit him as hard as I could. He hit me back and mopped the floor with me; but, OK, now I can relax, put my nose back in shape, and buy this fucking parrot. But people kept fucking with me. “Wilson’s a squirrel. Wilson’s a squirrel.” So when Charlie Starkweather went on his rampage, I identified with his sister, who crept, huddled, down the hallway. “There’s Charlie Starkweather’s sister!” And [they were] throwing shit at her and stuff. I went to school with her, and my mother, when she worked at the Coney Island Café in Lincoln, Neb., used to feed him breakfast. Charlie and the whole family. He wanted to be a drawer, too, but he went the other direction.

From "The Kitty Killer Kids" in Taboo #1 ©1987 S. Clay Wilson

Anyway, getting back to my trial by arms. So I’m getting ready to buy Mabel, and this guy says, “You were crazy to fight Mosely, because he’s Junior Golden Gloves champion,” which I didn’t know. I was a piece of candy to him. Anyway, I blew that off and didn’t think anything about it.

But a little later, some rednecks were, “Hey, Wilson, ’ey Wilson.”

“Shut up, you Neanderthal assholes.”

And suddenly there’s this booming voice in the back of the room, and this big, black track star said, “If you’re fucking with Wilson, you’re fucking with us.” I had this whole fucking black cadre behind me, because I showed heart and fought Mosely, and I’m a fucking squirrel. I’m more of a minority than they are. So fuck all of you. It was my best moment in high school.

That and my date with Astrida.

What kind of influences were working on your art then?

Carl Barks. G.I. Joe, Babe Darling of the Hills, and all ECs. (It’s EC for me, see.)  I always wanted to be a cartoonist, but when I saw EC, it gelled, because they’re different styles and they’re more artistic by miles than comics of the time. I liked that. “Wait a minute! You can draw anything you want.”

After high school, you attended the University of Nebraska?

I had won this Hallmark Greeting Card scholarship. I shoulda taken it. I don’t know what I would’ve ended up being — richer or not at all; but Hallmark involved the Kansas City Art Institute, which was kind of a mill, and my mom was: “You should get a college education. Blah blah blah.”

You were an art major?

Anthropology, primarily. I was switching between the anthropology department and the art department. There was, like, friction. It was schizophrenic. I liked anthropology more than the art department because of — not to mention any names — Gale Butt (God rest his soul), a sadistic fag who couldn’t draw or paint. He’d destroy my paintings and hit on me, too. “No! No! No! You’ll never be an artist.” And his work looked like Ford Times magazine covers — awful abstract expressionist stuff.

I preferred anthropology. “Wilson, you should be in anthropology, not art, because you’re hated in the art department.”

What kind of work were you doing?

Figurative stuff. Call it comics. Call it illustration. Call it your momma. I was always doing the cartoon thing, but, at the time, abstract expressionism had hit. So I wasn’t learning how to draw like, pencil drawings in deep perspective, or none of that. I wasn’t learning anything. I thought, “This is bullshit,” and to show that their idea of art was bullshit, I did a Dada gesture and went and looked at the art magazines. “OK, Jackson Pollock. OK, Willem de Kooning.” And I gotta buncha paint and a buncha canvasses and did abstract expressionist paintings and filled the hallway.

They said [whispers], “Wilson, these are strong in their own way.” It was all horseshit. It was a complete put-on. It was a whole bad scene of bad memories. I was thrown out of school and I had to go back and I barely got the degree. I shoulda took the scholarship, but you gotta start from where you are.

After college, you went into the service?

The University of Nebraska was a land grant college, so you had to have military training. And I’m like [bellows], “What am I doing? I coulda gone to the Kansas City Art Institute, getting laid, having a good time, doin’ art, instead of learning the M-1 fucking rifle.” (I would’ve preferred another weapon. The Thompson, perhaps.) And the reason I was thrown out of school was you had to wear the Army uniform for drill. If you didn’t, you needed an excuse. I had this excuse I used over and over. “Wilson, where’s your uniform?” Sarge Ryan would ask.

“You won’t believe what happened. I got drunk last night and threw up all over it” — and show him — as usual — my frayed laundry slip.

Signed by "S. Clay Wilson, Medical Corpsman, U.S. Army" ©2001 S. Clay Wilson

The Sarge stopped buying it. “And get that hair cut, Wilson!” And if you’re out of ROTC, you’re out of college; and if you’re out of college, you’re up for the draft. So I go in the Army.

Did you do two years?

Six months active. Basic training, infantry, at Fort Leonard Wood; then medic training in San Antonio. I’m a fucking trained medic. They gave me an ambulance. “Drive this.” BAM! Right into a tree. “Fuck y’all. You drive the ambulance.” It wasn’t like the Marines who kick the shit out of you. This was more docile. The cooks loved me, though, because I had access to meth tablets. I thought they were salt. I was clueless. And morphine styrets. So if you wanted to go up or down, I could get you both places.

The cooks said, “Wilson, you’re a medic …”

“Yeah.”

“You know the extra-strength salt tablets, that big brown bottle … Get us one of those.”

“Sure.” So they loved me.

[After active duty] I joined the Nebraska National Guard. I had meetings every month and the two-week fucking trip to Pikestone, Minn., or some such hell hole. I was like, “What the fuck? This is really fucked up.” Vietnam was rumbling in the background, and I’m a medic, and they’re going to send my ass to the rice paddies to save the guy you don’t want to save, the guy who was giving you shit. All these rednecks wanted to go. I didn’t want to go, thank you very much. I thought, “I’m not gonna do this.” I’m too chickenshit.

Finally I saw a Jewish shrink and [laughs] … Thank God for Jewish shrinks. You kind of remind me of him. I said, “I’m too sensitive. I can’t hack that situation.”

He said, “Don’t worry about it.” He was anti-war — and I was certainly anti-war; so he wrote me a thing and got me out, and I missed that fray.

What did you do after you got out of the service?

I go back to school to get this fucking useless degree; and I still had to go through ROTC, uniform, weapon, the whole nine yards; and they said, “You can’t wear that uniform.”

I said, “I earned this. I’m the only one here who has rank. I went to the Army. I came back and still went to school. What do you want from me?”

And then?

I did New York for a while. My friend Jack Shurbach, who’s a homeboy, he moved to New York, so eventually I split and went to look him up. “Where can I get a job?”

He said, “Go see Mark and David. They’ll hire you.”

“Who the fuck are Mark and David?”

“They run Mark and David Jonish’s Leather. Six Jacob Street.”

So I strolled down there and said, “Can I get a job?”

“Yeah, catch.” He threw this big fucking roll of split cowhides at me, and I caught it. “Put it up there.”

“OK, thank you.” They were these short guys, and I was six-four, not an ounce of fat on me. They hired me on the spot.

Mark and David Jonish taught me about fucking work. Those guys worked harder than anybody I had ever seen, ever, anywhere. They dealt in these shitty split cowhides, and they’d emboss fake alligator hide, or snake, or whatever onto [them] to be made into cheap wallets. It was like cardboard. It looked neat but it was dreck. That was OK. I had a job. [Yiddish accent.] “Y’vanna piece-a herring for lunch?” I liked those guys. They wore pajamas. They were like moles. Huge amount of these split cowhides and a whole crew and myself. There were five or six or seven different languages spoken there. Jewish, Puerto Rican … When the blackout hit, it was like the Tower of Babel. “Yeahhh! We can get the fuck out of here.” This midden heap of split cowhide. I also caught the train strike. I was only there six months but I caught a lot of urban activity.

What were you doing?

I was measuring split cowhides — Fshht! “Nine-fifteen” — through this machine — Fshht! — with either Mark or David.

[Yiddish accent] “You like Chagall?”

“Yeah.”

“Me too. Eight-fourteen.” This naked bulb fraying above the measuring rig. It was cozy. It was neat. It kinda reminded me of my pa’s shop. They know where everything is. You don’t; you’ll learn if you hang around long enough. So that was my job. Then I dropped some acid and decided to get out of New York.

Were you doing drugs when…

I was doing real early acid. My friend Stewart Hitch, God rest his soul… He’s a painter — gone — and all these people showed up from Lincoln, Nebraska on Christmas Eve, 1963, ’64, somewhere in there. First time I heard the word hippy. “Are you a hippy?”

“What’s a hippy?”

Anyway, I hooked up with these guys — one had a suit — and they were hustling the streets of old New York. [Yokel accent] “Garsh, it’s real Bohemian. Kinda exciting.” Away from the cornfields, y’know. These people wanted to celebrate Christmas Eve. They said, “Let’s get some of this acid.”

“What’s acid?”’

“It’s a doctored sugar cube. But you can get really fucked up.”

So we got acid. “Who’s gonna try it and see what it does?”

“I’ll do it. I’ll let you know. I’ll be back in touch.”

We didn’t have any money. We bought each other Christmas gifts, but you couldn’t spend more than a dollar. A tender moment. I got a black-and-yellow Twilighters baseball T-shirt with black stars. I was wearing this and dropped some acid. So they’re looking at me and asked, “What’s going on?”

We had smoked pot before, but this was a different ball game. So the acid hit, and I said, “It’s great. C’mon up.” So they dropped acid, and we wandered around the Lower East Side, and it was a real magical evening. It was real gentle, tinsel blowing down the street. I moved back, but Hitch had such a good time on his acid trip on the Lower East Side he decided to live there and became a well-known painter.

Another little detail, which will amuse the readers … I lived in the toy-warehouse district, down on Ludlow, 153 Ludlow, by Katz’s Deli. My rent was $38.50 a month, and I had my own toilet, which I thought was paradise. In the district, there were like several Jewish lightning fires, you know, people burning down their places to get the insurance money. Before my Midwest buddies split, we found huge crates of puffy, pink doll arms. They thought it would be a good idea to take them back. So they had this big huge Buick full of doll arms — arms on all the door handles — going to Nebraska.

Why did you leave New York?

Due to a bad acid trip. What freaked me is … I decided to take acid again because I was intrigued by it, and this was before the propaganda came out: Everybody jumps out of windows and shit. (I didn’t know anybody who did that. Not anybody from Nebraska, certainly.) At one point, I was on the top of my building, looking across at this gray urban mass, over this vast city of New York. For a split second, I was hallucinating these are trenches in World War I, and I was in No Man’s Land. So I went inside, still loaded on acid, and I was staring in a mirror, and in the reflection I saw smoke rolling out of my eyes. Fuck! And at that moment, somebody’s pounding on the door. All that was going on, and I was freaking out. (“Freaking out,” yes, that’s the word that comes up, “freaking out.”) Somebody knocking: BAM, BAM, BAM, BAM. I’m like, “Why am I hearing that? They don’t know who I am. They don’t know where I am.”

And “Wilson? Wilson? Are you in there?” This girl’s voice. “Wilson? C’mon, open up. I’m scared. I don’t like this building.”

“I don’t like it either. Who is it?” It was Ellie May Moritz, who’s an old girlfriend of mine, who visited me but didn’t call ahead or send a postcard. She was freaked out because the building was full of meth addicts and syringes in the hallway. I could go on and on about this building. So she split, and later told me, “That was me at the door”; but I thought I was hallucinating.

These visions stacked up, so I thought, “Just sit here and maybe it’ll go away.”

Wasn’t there some point when you worked on archaeological digs?

This was mid-college. My mom worked for the Smithsonian Institute somehow. So they hooked me up to a dig on the Crow Creek Indian reservation in South Dakota. That’s where the peyote guys were hanging out, but I wasn’t doing peyote then. I was tempted because we had Indians on the crew. The way this worked, OK, was when you went on a dig you had aerial photographs showing vegetation changes since the area had been plowed up. They wanted to know what happened to the people before their tribe. The Mandan Indians. Sedentary corn growers. They were fucked. You need that horse to get out of Dodge.

So we’re on this dig. It’s hotter than hell, and I’m wearing a straw cowboy hat, and I discover a cache pit burial. It’s my first touch with death, close up and personal. We dig a test trench and then we profile it. We plow up the ground. If you see a circle in the test trench a different color, it’s gotta be connected to another circle, which means it’s the arc of an earth lodge. It means you’re in a village. If you’re in a village, where’s the next house? So I’m digging a test trench, and here’s like an orange peel. (I get chills even thinking about it.) It’s spongy and organic. I’m scraping, and there’s more of it. The crew leader comes over and says, “Here’s your spoon. Go into that hole. You’re in a cache pit burial.” A cache pit is the ice box where they store the food. A cache pit burial means … They didn’t have horses. You wanted horses so you could hunt, hunt and gather, not just sit and grow corn, ’cause if the corn is gone, there’s nothing to eat. It’s winter. You’re done in. So that hole that used to have the food is where you end up. There were seven skeletons, children and adults.

I was loving this. Everyone’s pissed at me, but I wanted in on this job, since it was easier, cooler work. “This is my project. Fuck you guys. I’m gonna find out what happened here.” You had to put [the skeletons] in this thermostatically controlled truck from the Smithsonian Institute in exactly the same location as they went into the hole. The skull, when the sun hit it, went orange and kind of elastic, so whatever was going on with the earth and the dead was interchanging. I was watching it change color. It was rubbery and elastic and orange, and I’m trying to get it cold and into the truck. It was like 110 degrees, coming straight down. It went from organic orange, like an orange peel, to white, then white-ish grey, then it turned into fucking chalk. I was finding all this great stuff like razor-sharp buffalo-hide stone scrapers. And they’re on us, like we’re gonna steal this shit. Who, us? I talked a lot, so time would go by in case you weren’t discovering a cache-pit burial. I’d be blathering away, and they’d say, “Wilson, shut the fuck up.”

From The Checkered Demon #2 ©1978 S. Clay Wilson

“Man, you shut the fuck up. Y’hear the one about …?” Just blathering, like I am to you. It was mid-week, a real long day, hotter ’n hell, so they made a deal with me. The bet was KP and seven Seven-and-7s — Seven Seagram’s Seven and 7-Ups — I could keep quiet all afternoon. We were in Pierre, S.D. We weren’t supposed to go to Fort Pierre, because that’s where the fun began with all the drunk Indians and cowboys. It’s across the river called Bad River. It’s a different time zone. There’s nothing but bars, and they stay open two more hours. You go there, if you’re dressed like a cowboy, you’d better be one. But they’re goading me, really trying to get me to talk. They’re insulting me, but I didn’t give a fuck. So I win, and we immediately go to Fort Pierre, and I line up my seven Seven-and-7s. I’m banging them down: PANG! BANG-BANG! It’s getting real foggy, and the next thing I know, somebody picks me up in my chair and sits me down in the alley. So we went to this other bar, The Snake Pit. All these Indians are there, spending their dole, getting shitfaced. Everybody’d buy a round until everybody’s broke. They’re whooping and yelling, and the place is painted like hell. Flames painted on the walls and stuff. A little sparkly sign: The Snake Pit. I got pretty fucking drunk there too. But I survived. I thought I was having a good time.

Two-Fisted Tales #27 (May 1952) written by Harvey Kurtzman, penciled and inked by John Severin ©1952 EC Comics

JOHN SEVERIN: Every once in a while I’ll remember something because it stands out for some reason, but normally, I’m a waste of time.

GARY GROTH: Well, part of my job is to pummel you into remembering everything.

SEVERIN: I bruise easily. [Laughs.]

GROTH: That’s what they all say. I’d like to know a little about your upbringing before getting into your career proper.

SEVERIN: My career was never proper.

GROTH: Uh-huh. [Laughter.] I understand that you were born on December 21, 1921.

SEVERIN: No. I have a half a dozen different birth dates depending on what year you happen to… getting down to the facts… I was born in the 26th.

GROTH: That’s interesting, because there’s an encyclopedia of comics, and your birth date is given as December 21.

SEVERIN: Truthfully, I was born December 26, 1921.

GROTH: And you were born in Jersey City?

SEVERIN: Right.

GROTH: Can you tell me a little about your childhood and your upbringing? You were born approximately eight years before the [stock market] crash, so I don’t know if you see that as a demarcation point in your life?

SEVERIN: No. It was for my father but they kept me unaware of what was going on.

GROTH: You were insulated from that.

SEVERIN: Yeah. “Just stand down there and eat that cold potato and shut up.”

GROTH: [Laughs.] So you didn’t notice that anything changed dramatically.

SEVERIN: Oh, yes.

GROTH: You did?

SEVERIN: Yes. But not as much personally, as much as my observation of what was going on around me. There were people who were living next door to us who had a rather large chicken coop. This was not in Jersey City, you understand. This was now out in Long Island. They had a rather large chicken coop that they cleaned out completely, put in a heater, and had some old folks living in it. I don’t know whether they were related or what, but they had a husband and wife in there. They had it all insulated. Offhand, people were doing all kinds of things to help one another. In a way, it was similar to the way people helped one another during World War II. I guess you need some sort of a great calamity for everyone to pull together.

GROTH: When did you move from Jersey City to Long Island?

SEVERIN: We moved from Jersey City when I was approximately one month old, and I moved into Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. From there we moved out to Long Island to start school.

GROTH: Wasn’t Long Island at that time much more rural?

SEVERIN: Very much so. I was around chickens and farmers and boats constantly. And beaches. God, I can tell you all about beaches in the old days. There were beaches that weren’t beaches [chuckles] until years later when somebody would discover them and totally wipe them out as far as I was concerned and bring in stands and admissions for all kinds of things.

GROTH: Kind of a Coney Island atmosphere?

SEVERIN: Right. It was really, as you said… the rural atmosphere even extended to the beaches.

GROTH: May I ask you what your father did?

SEVERIN: Lemme see… what was he? [Laughs.]

GROTH: Your sister listed him once as a major influence on her; was he an artist?

SEVERIN: Yes, he was. He did some commercial art, but in the main he was an accountant for a number of… He started out in the oil companies.

GROTH: Like Standard Oil?

SEVERIN: There was another one…Tidewater Oil Company. I don’t remember the other one. He was an accountant for a number of things, started working for Elizabeth Arden and she selected him because of… I don’t know how he started doing some artwork for her, but he she liked what he did.

GROTH: Now, Elizabeth Arden was a fashion designer?

SEVERIN: No. Cosmetics. He ended up doing designs for boxes, and… You know that little blue horse? Well, you probably don’t. Anyhow, he was the one who started that ball rolling. He worked for Elizabeth Arden for years, and years, and years until he died.

GROTH: So he made his living as a commercial  illustrator, a designer.

SEVERIN: More or less. He split 50/50 between being an accountant, which is kind of weird, being an accountant and an artist at the same time… [Laugh.]

GROTH: Did you inherit any of his accounting skills?

SEVERIN: God no. Lordy, lord no. [Groth laughs.] I understand math, but I can’t do the arithmetic.

GROTH: Did you inherit any of his accounting skills?

SEVERIN: Amen.

GROTH: And I assume your mother was probably a housekeeper?

SEVERIN: Yes.

GROTH: I mean, she kept the family?

SEVERIN: Yeah. In those days, that’s what mothers did. It was their home and they fixed it and kept it and held the family together and made arrangements for everything.

Panel from "A Platoon" in Frontline Combat #6 (May 1952) written by Harvey Kurtzman, penciled by John Severin and inked by Will Elder ©1952 EC Comics

GROTH: Do you have more than one sibling?

SEVERIN: No, just one.

GROTH: Just Marie.

SEVERIN: Contrary to popular belief, she’s not my wife. [Groth laughs.] I read that somewhere. So and so, so and so and his wife Marie. [Laughs.]

GROTH: We’ll make sure everyone knows that after this interview. [Laughter.] Can you tell me what your childhood was like? What it was like growing up? What you did? What the atmosphere was like? What your parents were like, and so on?

SEVERIN: Very friendly…very friendly people to me. They were friendly to other people, too, I gather. Least ways, we didn’t have any enemies that I know of. I enjoyed total freedom. I wandered hither, thither, and yon with and without anyone. I didn’t necessarily have to have somebody with me to take off and go a half a dozen miles. Walk the railroad tracks, go swimming, bicycling all over the countryside. Swipe pumpkins—only around Halloween I’d swipe pumpkins. I hope that the police aren’t still looking for me. I used to be good at it—boy! [Laughs.] I just think I had a very normal childhood. I had a very pleasant childhood. I enjoyed the openness of the countryside, and at the same time everything was more or less convenient. Convenient in the terms that you’d use in those days. Today, if you have to walk a half a mile, it’s a very inconvenient thing. Whereas, you’d do that every day to go to the store. No problem. It was nice. Houses weren’t jammed up together. There’d be two or three right together and then there’d be a whole block or two of nothing around. When you got a normal block, the number of cars might be maybe three. Kids would play out in the street and play stickball. When they paved the streets, why, you’d play roller-skate hockey. You weren’t worried about being hit by a car. In the first place, the dumb things only went about 25 miles an hour.

GROTH: Is that right?

SEVERIN: Well, you know, the speed limit. I remember one of my uncles coming back, he had taken a trip, and he says to my father, “Jack, you know, I really hit it. I was going 50 miles an hour most of the time.” He put on his goggles. [Laughs.]

GROTH: My father played stickball. Can you tell me what stickball is? That’s not something people know about now.

SEVERIN: It’s baseball with a rubber ball and a stick, which you would take from a broom, or a mop, or what have you, whatever you’d find. When you played in the streets, you’d pick sewers, or trees, or maybe a telephone pole as your bases. We always pitched underhanded, like softball. There you were!

GROTH: Did you play it with a stick and a rubber ball because no one could really afford a baseball bat and a baseball?

SEVERIN: No, the baseball bat and gloves—I had them when I was a kid. The thing is, you’d have to go to a lot or out in the sand dunes. Well, hell’s bells, not in the sand dunes. You can’t play baseball in the sand dunes. You need more area when you use the hard ball. We’d play hardball all the time. Do you happen to remember a book written by Booth Tarkington… Penrod and Sam?

GROTH: I know the author, but not the book.

SEVERIN: Well, in there they had a game called “bonded prisoner.” I thought it was great, so I got it going amongst the kids. What it was there were two sides and everybody had a stick sword. If you managed to touch the other guy he was your bonded prisoner. The only way he could be freed would be by a member of his own team coming in and touching him with the hilt of the sword. Of course, it was kind of difficult to defend yourself and touch your friend with the hilt of the sword at the same time. That was the trick of it all. We all had a big kick out of it.

GROTH: Sounds like there were a lot of kids to play within that area.

SEVERIN: Well, yeah. In those days, in spite of the fact that there wasn’t much money around, people seemed to have bunches of kids.

GROTH: Was there a school nearby?

SEVERIN: Not nearby by today’s rules! Sometimes I would take a train for one or two stops. Sometime I’d just bicycle the whole thing. It wasn’t terribly far. At most it was three miles, and in some cases it was only maybe two miles. So it was walkable.

Panel from "Justice" in Two-Fisted Tales #36 (January 1954) written by Colin Dawkins and John Severin, penciled and inked by John Severin ©1954 EC Comics

GROTH: So as a small child you would take a train and walk?

SEVERIN: Fortunately, as a kid, I was lucky enough to live only about a half a mile from school. There wasn’t much problem there. And two of my cousins were going to the same school, so that helped.

GROTH: I believe that you said you primarily got interested in comics through a love of newspaper strips rather than comic books.

SEVERIN: Yeah. I go along with that. Newspaper strips were very attractive to me and I followed them all. I got in on [Hal] Foster’s Tarzan as soon as it started. Good God, I remember comics that people don’t even believe existed. I loved comics, especially the Sunday comics. Matter of fact. I’d even go over to my cousins’ house every Sunday afternoon and they got a different newspaper than we did. I’d go over there and borrow their comic’s thing [section] because I’d finish the one that we got.  But comic books… I was totally unaware of comic books. When I got into my teens, I saw one comic book on a stand, it was a Western (I don’t remember the name of it). It was an artist I had seen in pulps. I used to love pulp magazines, Detective Doc Savage, Daredevil Aces, Battle Aces, and all that stuff. G8’s Battle Aces. After I picked that off the stand and looked at it, I didn’t see it any more. It wasn’t until I was in the army and I passed one guy’s place in… it wasn’t exactly a foxhole, sort of a tent foxhole. There was a boy coming into it. So having all sorts of important things to do, I sat down and looked through this boy commando thing and found it rather interesting. I had never really perused a comic before. I got out of the service and I still wasn’t aware of comics being in existence. It seems hard to believe now, when I think about how much time I’ve put in on comics, that I was totally unaware of it.

GROTH: As a kid, would you say that you were much more interested in comics than most kids, that you had a much more heightened interest in newspaper strips?

SEVERIN: That’s kind of hard to say, because at that time, there wasn’t much to amuse kids. They had to make do and use their brains. Everybody read the comics. The kid who lived in the lot behind us (he didn’t live in the lot, but you know what I mean) had an aunt over in England who used to send him English comics. I remember his name. God Almighty, it came to me just now as I was saying it, isn’t that weird? Georgie Hoyt. Don’t put that down. He’ll sue me! [Laughs.] He used to give me the English comics when he was through with them. She’d save up about two months and send them all at once. It seemed like everybody read comics.

GROTH: There was so much less media to entertain at the time.

SEVERIN: You had your radio. You had…

GROTH: You didn’t have television.

Panel from "Bird-Dogs!" in Frontline Combat #11 (March 1953) written by Harvey Kurtzman, penciled by John Severin and inked by Will Elder ©1953 EC Comics

SEVERIN: No. You had the radio, stealing pumpkins, going out fishing, playing baseball, all of the normal things that people sort of did. Mow the lawn or a nickel… all kinds of crazy things. Much more interesting. If you weren’t aware of what’s going on today and you were to go back and compare the two lifestyles, it was more interesting. And yet, we have more things of interest today. It may not make too much sense. I wouldn’t go back to those days, because I like what we have today. But living in those days was much more pleasant.

GROTH: It’s interesting that you say it was much more pleasant but you wouldn’t go back to those days.

SEVERIN: Well, in the first place it’s ridiculous—you can’t go back. Oh, I don’t mean physically. Even if they were to throw away everything, you could never regain the feeling, the mindset that people had in those days because they’d gone through a number of years to get to that mindset. You just can’t come upon it. It has to build up.

GROTH: I assume your family listened to the radio?

SEVERIN: Oh, yeah.

GROTH: Did you all listen to it together, like people today watch television together?

SEVERIN: Well, sometimes. Unlike the ads on TV that show the old days, mommy, daddy, little boy, little girl, and even the cotton-pickin’ dog, all sitting around that little old radio… No. [Laughs.] Maybe if an atomic bomb went off, everybody might come to the…

GROTH: But that wouldn’t have happened in 1921 either.

SEVERIN: That’s true, too. No, you’d listen to the radio. Like, I’d be lying on the floor doing my homework and I’d turn on the radio and… Of course, that was the best way to do your homework, is to listen to the radio it the same time!

GROTH: Did you listen to radio drama?

SEVERIN: Yeah. Sometimes they were almost a half [an] hour long. The 15 minute ones were the best, because they were in and out and gone. The writers really wrote well, because they had to [in order] to get it all in 15 minutes. I heard the first Buck Rogers and I heard the first Tarzan. Did you know Tarzan was on the radio?

GROTH: I’m not sure I knew that.

SEVERIN: And the first Buck Rogers, I’d just turned the radio on. It was afternoon, after school—maybe it was in the summer time for all I know. I was by the radio and I turned it on, and I heard this booming voice [lowers voice] “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.” And all this noise. Of course, the announcer was like the caption in comics. He kept the thing going. He would tell you what was going on, and they’d give you the background music for what was happening, and then the actors would come in with the sound effects and all that.

GROTH: I assume that it was probably as vivid and exciting to you then as television and the Internet is today for kids.

SEVERIN: Certainly. As a matter a fact, it was for me… You have to remember I went through that, so maybe I’m putting myself… It was better for me because I was using my imagination and I could create a lot more inside my head without even trying than they can do with all of the effects that they give you on TV, although I certainly enjoy the stuff. If it weren’t for the imagination, your comic artists wouldn’t be able to do a damn thing.

(continued)

]]> http://www.tcj.com/the-john-severin-interview-parts-i-ii/feed/ 3 http://www.tcj.com/the-kevin-eastman-interview-part-2/ http://www.tcj.com/the-kevin-eastman-interview-part-2/#comments Tue, 03 Jan 2012 13:00:43 +0000 Gary Groth http://www.tcj.com/?p=27407 Continue reading →]]> From The Comics Journal #202 (March 1998)

TCJ interviews tend to break the Internet. Due to length, this has been broken into two parts: Part 1.

TUNDRA

GROTH: Next up is Tundra. I’m not sure where to begin with Tundra.

EASTMAN: Let’s skip the whole Tundra thing! [Laughs.]

GROTH: Let me start off by asking you this. You had virtually unlimited resources, at least relative to what an alternative comics publisher needed. And yet Tundra crashed and burned in three years. I’m not sure how that’s possible.

EASTMAN: With me, anything’s possible. No, that’s a bad joke. Where to begin: Like you said, it’s a good question. Tundra was started as a follow up to the Creators’ Bill of Rights, coupled with this concept I had mentioned to you earlier, like when I would meet artists at conventions — comic creators, artists, writers — that were always sort of hacking out all this stuff for other companies to pay the bills, to support wives and families. They’d say, “I really just wish I could get ahead enough where I could devote the kind of time I want to do the ultimate thing for me, the most creatively satisfying thing of my career!” And I really started to fall in love with that concept of “What if?” So after a lot of these same kinds of examples, that’s where I decided that I had the financial resources, and I felt that I had learned so much from Mirage, and I felt I knew everything, which was obviously the first mistake. I had resources to put in place a first-class facility with the ability to bring in qualified key people that could run it, instill a “philosophy,” to give the creators a home, a place to go to, where they could get the financing to explore this great creative novel that was inside of them, and see it through to completion in a well-done, potentially well-publicized sort of venue! They would have approval over very nearly every aspect, and they would be totally involved. They would realize that if we wanted to run a series of ads, then those ad costs would come out of the share of the profits, until the book recouped its costs. I wanted them to feel in control. They would sign off on everything, every step of the way. They approved everything from pre-press to ads. They would have total say over their projects, and profits. All of the earlier contracts were an 80/20 in their favor —

GROTH: — this is 80/20 of net?

EASTMAN: … 80/20 of net, at recoupment of cost. What they wanted, for the most part, and what we tried to do, was make them aware of every cost. “Everything in the front window.” It was like, OK, we’ve got a couple bids on pre-press, and this is the lowest one, and this is the one we recommend, you choose one. It’s going to cost $120 a page for that bid, and we want your OK now that you know it’s going to cost that much. This is what we’re going to spend on advertising, and it’s going to cost this much. Do you approve? Because it’s “your money” as well that we’re spending here.

Bratpack ©1992 Rick Veitch

GROTH: You would tell creators this?

EASTMAN: Yeah, in nearly every case. That’s how Rick [Veitch] worked on Brat Pack. All of the early ones were done that way. Steve [Bissette] worked like this on a number of his projects. We did the same with Dave McKean, with everyone, all the creators. Tundra was something I created — I wanted it to be the Apple Records of comics, done with that kind of a philosophy of giving complete creative freedom to the artists. You allow them the best studios and support to put out these great things and it should succeed, right? But I didn’t want it to end like Apple Records ended. Well, it’s still around today, but you know, when it ended the first time or whatever.

GROTH: Yeah. For all intents and purposes, it ended.

EASTMAN: What basically happened was, I let it get out of control, in every aspect. I took on way too many projects, way too soon. With the staff — I had this great idea, and even today, as stupid as it sounds now, I still think that it had some merit. I thought if I found people that would be put into specific positions within the company that had experience in outside business, but not experience in comics, then they wouldn’t know the limitations that “comics” people know. If you went around and got Bob Schreck from there and you got so-and-so from here, they would only know comics stuff. So if you said, “OK, Bob, we need to promote this.” Or whomever. And they’d go, “OK, we’ll go to the Journal, we’ll go to CBG, we’ll go to Wizard, and who’s the other one? End of list.” Those were the limitations I wanted to move beyond. I felt that someone that wasn’t from within the industry wouldn’t stop there. What would stop them from going to Rolling Stone, or from going to other places that might really find this work interesting and find us that “new” audience. So, I hired my uncle Quentin, as the president — I mentioned him earlier, he lent us some money to start the Turtles. As much as I might say that I know it was a wrong choice now, for sure, I’d like to think I made the decision on the guy for his qualifications. He had been a sales rep for printing companies, he knew the printing industry, he knew pre-press, he’d been in those business for four or five years. Then he’d been in computers for a few years. He was running an office of 70 people when I hired him away from a consulting company. I feel and believe that I hired him because I felt he brought in some real-world business knowledge, and not just because he helped us out and I wanted to thank him. But even in my own mind, it’s a pretty fine line there.

GROTH: It’s hard to know.

EASTMAN: It’s hard to know. Ultimately he came in and he had a set of his own rules on how to run a company. He’d say, “You can’t give 80 percent of the profit to the creator, because we can’t run a company on the 20 percent.” I said, “Well, look. We’re going to monitor all the costs. We’ll be able to recoup those costs, all of them, so why can’t we be satisfied with 20 percent of the profits!?” I really threw him into an environment and set up rules that no normal business can survive under.

GROTH: Did he explain that to you?

EASTMAN: Yeah, a lot of times.

GROTH: He told you that no business can survive adhering to these rules?

EASTMAN: Mm-hm, but “I knew everything,” right?!

GROTH: So then, what did you do with that advice?

EASTMAN: I believed that it could. I said, “How do you know?” He said, “You know, you’re just not leaving enough margin for errors.” And I said, “These books are going to be really successful. And these books are going to be really profitable. These books will be able to, through this company that we’re building, be taken into Hollywood, and we’ll be able to exploit them into properties where we can receive a portion of the revenues if they become movies, TV shows, or toy concepts. It’ll all work out. It’ll balance out.” [Laughs.]

GROTH: So you hired someone for his knowledge, and then refused to use his knowledge. [Laughs.]

From Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1 (1984) ©1984 Mirage Studios

EASTMAN: Exactly. I really crippled him. A lot of this was — and I certainly take all the blame for it — a lot of this was Steve Bissette, and Rick Veitch and other people, who were helping design this new thing that would break all the rules. With me leading, and saying, “Well, what else should we do, guys? How should we make this really fair?” And they would give input, of like, “Well, this is all the bad stuff that happened to us. Let’s find a way around this. Let’s find a way to do it right this time!” Now there’s no fucking way possible you can give a freelancer in Minnesota health insurance from a corporation in Massachusetts. We tried to do stuff like that, and it was just … [Groth laughs.]

GROTH: You tried to do that?

EASTMAN: We tried to insure these people, and give them benefits, things they needed but couldn’t get with any other company.

GROTH: I guess in retrospect it’s better you didn’t or the company would have only lasted two-and-half years. Tundra’s fascinating. I want to go through it, and I don’t want this to be just a litany of horror stories. But one thing I don’t understand is why … it appears to me that from the very beginning it was disastrous. But what surprises me is that steps could not be taken over the course of three years to slow down this runaway train of losses. It’s just hard for me to comprehend at some point that you, or someone you hired, wouldn’t step in and say, “OK, this has got to stop. And these are the concrete steps you have to take to stop it.” I guess you know that we have a lot of internal documents from Tundra.

EASTMAN: Oh, cool! I have all of mine as well!

GROTH: Minutes of meetings and year-end reports and things of that nature … and they’re grimly hilarious in the sense that everyone is floundering around. Everyone knows there’s a crisis, but no one knows what to do about it. Let me just start from the beginning. One of the criticisms I’ve heard is that there was a lot of nepotism involved.

EASTMAN: There was a lot of nepotism because I hired my uncle?

GROTH: Well, you hired your uncle to be president. And then you hired your cousin Michael to be production assistant.

EASTMAN: Yeah, that’s correct.

GROTH: And then you hired your brother-in-law to be in charge of sales and distribution.

EASTMAN: That’s correct also.

GROTH: And your sister to be the director of the Words and Pictures Museum. And none of the relatives had any experience in comics or publishing. That seemed like a bad move. [Laughs.]

EASTMAN: Not to justify any of those moves, because I made them and still stand by them, but in the case of Kelly Meeks, who married my sister Maryann, besides being an extremely bright, hard worker, Kelly was troubleshooting computers for Union Mutual and major companies like that. He knew how to set up systems, how to manage systems, he’d been an office manager where he worked, and yes, because he was related for sure. But, he had the exact skills we needed for Tundra, “computer networking,” big time.

Michael Eastman, he was actually brought in in a different way, as a summer intern at first, and it evolved from there to a full-time office position, and it wasn’t working out. At the point when he was going to be fired, Mark Martin said, “Look, I really think Michael has some merits, and I like him as a person, and I want to try and make a place for him in the company.” So Mark moved him to the art department.

Maryann, as far as hiring her for the Words and Pictures Museum, it’s something that she approached me on and I was very excited to work with her. I had started actually with another person that wasn’t working out; it was floundering around. I basically felt she could do anything she put her mind to and she grew up around my art. She was the best person for the job in my mind. The Museum would not be here if it wasn’t for Maryann or Fiona Russell. They pulled it out of my dreams and made it a reality. But yeah, there was some nepotism there for sure.

For Tundra, whether there’s nepotism or no nepotism, you have a leader that’s unclear about his message and is saying yes to projects when people are screaming at you that you have too many already! Tundra was growing in a way I thought was appropriate, but in reality it was way too fast, and I never got the foundation solid. Under any rules, it just doesn’t fly.

I had this crazy plan of building this empire that would ensure success. We’d have Heavy Metal in the States; that would reach one specific audience, a big one, of older comic readers. Plus, there were a lot of European creators that I wanted to work with as well as to be able to sell Tundra’s projects overseas for reprint rights that would help offset some of the costs. There also were a lot of British creators that I was already working with, when I met Dave Elliot, and founded Tundra U.K. There was a recording studio in Maine, the story of my life: when I looked at it, it was making money so I bought it, and suddenly it became something that was losing money! I bought it to interact with some “comic meets music” projects I wanted to do to reach another new audience. We were going to work on this project with George Pratt called See You in Hell, Blind Boy, which would have a blues track recorded along with it. A graphic novel not unlike the Voodoo project Bill Sienkiewicz did. We were also doing some adult audio books; we wanted to do some children’s audio books. We were trying to look at things that worked in the real publishing world. Christ, we had Ian Ballantine, who was consulting for us, pointing to things that were working “out there,” and I desperately wanted to do something to make the jump into bookstores, which was probably the biggest fucking joke.

From the Tundra edition of Understanding Comics ©1993 Scott McCloud

The only Tundra thing that I actually got through to bookstores was the first printing of Understanding Comics. But, fuck. I believed I was armor-plated and unstoppable. I thought I would have all the resources I needed with some of the finest work from some of what I thought were some of the best creators in the field, and that this would be the “comics company” that would break down some of those barriers. By the time I arrived at the cold “reality” of my “fantasy,” I’m killing myself for something that’s never going to work: it’s too late! This whole time, as long as I’m physically awake, I’m working. Either related to Mirage or related to Tundra: In a bed that I made myself, for sure. And I was just getting fucking tired. I really thought that Tundra would be something. But it was ludicrous. I thought I would spend a year forming this brilliant company that would break all the rules. I’d bring all these talented people in and then expect them to climb inside my head, read my mind, and try to make these impossible things happen. At the same time I’m a poor leader crippling them. Quentin would say to the staff, “We can’t do this and this and this,” and the staff would come and see me, and say “Quentin said we couldn’t do that.” And I’d say, “Fuck it, go ahead. Yeah, you can do that.” And it crippled his ability to be a president, to do his job. So there I was in the middle of it, fucking it up, but still thinking I’d spend a year, and get it underway, and then I could go back to drawing, and be one of the creators working for this amazing company. It was an epic clusterfuck.

FROM DAY ONE

GROTH: Let me skip back for second. When you first were forming Tundra. The first thing you did was hire your uncle Quentin.

EASTMAN: Yes. Quentin then hired Susan Alston, who went on to the Comic Legal Defense Fund, and Dave Sim’s better half. [Laughter.]

GROTH: That’s redundant.

EASTMAN: [Laughs.] And then Kelly: Kelly Meeks was brought in. He was there setting up the computer systems. Then I hired Mark Martin who was definitely one of the first four or five. I wanted somebody that knew the process of finish art to finished book, and he could do it all.

GROTH: At this point, you were pretty hands-on. You were hiring people, you were telling them what you wanted done …

EASTMAN: Yes, and I was working out the brilliant business plan mentioned above.

GROTH: Because I’m curious as to how hands-on you were throughout the three years, versus what was delegated.

EASTMAN: I would bring in employees and artists. The creators would talk to me, and we’d set a deal. And I’d pass it off to legal, and for various reasons it wouldn’t get done, so then I wouldn’t hold up the creative work, I’d pass it off to the crew — we didn’t have an editorial staff. I had this idea that we’d have people that would be straw bosses, that would help shuffle the project through the “process” the way the creator wanted to see it done, without giving editorial comment, but they ended up becoming editors if the creators wanted feedback. And that was clearly fine. So I’d bring them in and try to make everything agreeable and then sort of pass it on, probably ill-informed, and without enough detail, without enough personal follow-up, to a staff that I expected to do miracles.

GROTH: One of the things that Steve Bissette said in his interviews was, “Some things were askew from day one. Much of what was set up at Tundra was set up with this kind of fishing rod philosophy. ‘We will take ideas that sound good, or look practical from different sources. For instance, Dave Sim says editors are bad. We won’t have editors.’ That’s clearly nuts.” And I guess you discovered that it was indeed clearly nuts after a while. [Laughs.]

EASTMAN: Yeah, that’s one of my favorites, and Dave Sim wasn’t the only one complaining about editors, by the way.

GROTH: You actually thought that you didn’t have to have editors?

EASTMAN: Yeah. I didn’t think we needed that “intrusion” on a creator’s work, and the reason for this was how many horror stories have we all heard from somebody that’s working for DC, or whoever, that would describe this: “You’re dealing with an editor that’s a fucking frustrated writer because they’re not good enough to become a writer, so what are they? They’re an editor. So then you have this editor person who is perceived to be, in their own mind, a very talented writer.” Then you have this writer who has to deal with this, say, “Man, I had to put in three sex scenes, and two other crazy scenes, that I knew the editor would take out so they could justify their salary and wouldn’t fuck with the rest of my story. Now, if you just let me do it without an editor, I would get the exact kind of story I wanted.”

So I said, “I don’t want an editor as far as what the traditional comics sense of the editor is. I want somebody who’s going to proofread the work, to make sure that there’s no spelling mistakes, that all the pages are in the right order, that this work is shepherded from creator to pre-press back to creator for approval, to printing with their approval, to advertising with their approval, and out the door.” So we called them straw bosses. I didn’t want an editor saying, “Jeez, Dave McKean, I really hate that scene on page 24 of Cages #3, where you have this character saying, “Blah, blah, blah … You’ve really got to change that, or I’m not going to let it go through.” That’s what I perceive as an editor. And I don’t agree with that. Dave can write his own stuff. Period!

GROTH: So it took you a while to realize you needed straw bosses: to get the work in, organize it, move it through production, and so on.

EASTMAN: Well, there were straw bosses from early on. Mark [Martin] was a straw boss for a number of projects. Paul Jenkins was brought in to be a straw boss for certain projects. Quentin shepherded Brat Pack through. That was one of the first ones that went through our own pre-press company, we bought ourselves part of a full blown pre-press operation because we were trying to save money and doing this pre-press thing in house would be cheaper, so there’d be more profits all around! Have you got notes on that?

GROTH: Oh, yeah.

EASTMAN: That’s a good one, too! But, anyway, that’s the straw boss thing. Also, F.Y.I., there were a lot of different kinds of straw bosses. Steve Bissette was a straw boss, at least for Taboo and a couple other projects he brought in; so he was editor, art director, and called himself the publisher.

From “Cable” by Bernie Mireault, collected in Taboo ©Bernie Mireault

GROTH: But clearly not a centralized … one person to report to the production department to say, “We have four books we need to do.”

It sounds like you had four people all descending on the production department saying, “Here, here’s my book.”

EASTMAN: Exactly. I’d have a meeting in my office with somebody, and I’d really love their book and say, “OK, you’re in. Let’s do it.” So I’d go out and say, “Here, you guys, it’s all yours, so make sure it happens and put it on the schedule.”

GROTH: And then you basically wouldn’t have the support staff necessary to do that.

EASTMAN: Not even close, so then we’d start hiring more people to create a support staff, which then caused the office overhead to go through the roof. But I’m still like, “It’s OK, it’s OK, we know for the first year there’s going to be a lot of investment, and a little bit of a learning curve, but once the books start getting out there, then our “percents” of the profits will help offset those losses, and we’ll run hopefully even-steven.” But, by now it’s 70 projects and counting. Fucking epic.

GROTH: Getting back just briefly to hiring your uncle Quentin, Bissette told this anecdote about Quentin. He said, “The first month of Tundra operations in their new offices, Quentin said to Veitch and me. ‘You know what? What Tundra needs is a good superhero property that we would own.’ Rick and I went to great lengths to explain to Quentin that the notion was contrary to Tundra’s whole creator ownership promise. This schism continued to eat at the shaky foundation of the company. On the one hand, you need to publish profitable comics in a superhero-driven industry, which was, you’ll recall, absolutely opposite Kevin’s original stated intentions, became more and more attractive and by the second year imperative.” It sounds like one of the problems is that the president of the company didn’t fully understand the mission, as you saw it, of Tundra.

EASTMAN: Right. Well, it’s two-fold. It’s actually he didn’t understand completely the “unrealistic” mission [laughs] I wanted for the company, but also, as I said, he was trying to bring in some “basic/evil” corporate structure. He felt if we had a superhero thing and stuff that we owned, like the Turtles, it would help bankroll all that stuff that wasn’t working. So again, I would cut him off at the knees. I’d say one, look, we have the Turtles already, and that’s helping fund “this” company so don’t worry. Now, I have two projects that I own, Melting Pot, number one, and Underwhere, number two, that I’m putting through this company. “Look how brilliant I am” — thinking, “I did it with the Turtles, obviously my next two things are going to be fucking huge, right?” We won’t even need the Turtles because we’ll have my “really profitable” new stuff!

GROTH: Uh-huh. [Laughter.]

EASTMAN: Hello! And so I said, “These two projects of mine will be that foundation, like the Turtles are for Mirage. I will have those for Tundra and Tundra will “own” my projects and keep all the profits because I’m already filthy stinking rich, and that will help make everything OK. So, we’re OK, because they’re my properties, and it’s my company, and they’ll support and offset all these losses for all the other things that we were doing and it’s Fat City time. But, that’s where Quentin came from perspective-wise, the corporate world. He understood that if you have something like the Turtles that the company owns, a structure like DC or whatever, plus he was trying to learn a business that he didn’t know. The first logical thing was to apply some 666 Madison Avenue-style practices, when they used to be there, anyway. And I’m like, “No, no, no! We don’t want to do that. We want to do something kind of similar, but it’s with my stuff, not with the other creators’ stuff. We want to keep their stuff off to this side so only they own it. That is what we do with their stuff. But my stuff will be the ‘part’ of the company. You know what I mean? It’s cash cow.”

MUST HAVE!

GROTH: About the very beginning of the company, Bissette said, “In our first meetings, Rick and I understood that Kevin intended to start a small, select roster of projects and build it slowly, year by year, without needing to turn a profit to nurture Tundra. By the time he went to his first convention as Tundra, he returned with something like 70 projects. It was mind-bogglingly out of control in its first few months.” And Veitch basically corroborates this by saying, “Steve and I and Kevin sort of worked out a plan for what we thought Tundra could be. The original plan was to do five titles the first year, and 10 the second year, and then cap it at 15. Kevin lost control of it very early on.”

EASTMAN: Totally, that’s totally correct.

GROTH: “That first summer at San Diego he bought into 65 projects.” [Laughter.]

EASTMAN: That’s right. I blew the fuck out of that plan.

GROTH: Didn’t you realize … wasn’t there a sense that if you brought back 65 or 70 projects that that would overwhelm the modest infrastructure you had built?

EASTMAN: I guess, but you know, it was like this. OK, Dave McKean comes to you with a project and it’s Cages, and you flip. “Fuck. This is amazing. All right. This is a name and we’ll look great with him on board!” Then Neil Gaiman comes to you with Violent Cases. “Holy fuck! That’s really amazing. We can’t pass on this. We really can’t.” Then George Pratt comes to you hot off the success of … the … Enemy Ace book, why can’t I think of the title? And he wants to do No Man’s Land. It’s beautiful and I’m like, “Must have!”

Cages is ©1990 Dave McKean

GROTH: How can you turn it down?

EASTMAN: If it’s not going to go to me, it’s going to go to somebody else who’ll publish this — I want it! So I said, “Look, all right. We can staff up to handle this in my mind, and I don’t want to see these slip to another publisher. Yeah, let’s take it on. We’ll figure out a way to make it work.” I mean, we got this pre-press house to save costs, and, all these other pieces are coming together, we’ll make it work. Besides, these are guys that are selling great number of books for other publishers. I’m saying, “Look what they’re doing elsewhere in the business, if we apply that thought to the Tundra world, how can we lose?” You justify it almost logically, like OK, it’ll work the same here. We’re going to lose more money the first year than I intended by investing in all of these projects, but when they start coming out on a regular schedule in the second year, we’re going to be twice as rich! Or 65 times as rich and profitable because you’ve got this base of so many amazing things that are all going to work!

GROTH: You just said you didn’t want it to go to another publisher.

EASTMAN: Yeah.

GROTH: Why is that? Because if it went to another publisher, it would get published, and the purpose of Tundra was to publish work that would have trouble finding a home elsewhere. Right?

EASTMAN: Right, for the most part.

GROTH: So why did you care if it went to another publisher?

EASTMAN: Uh, probably greed or “project” envy or something. I thought this Tundra thing is going to be amazing and I wanted it to be the coolest fucking company on the planet as well. I thought those projects embodied what I wanted coming out of Tundra. I didn’t want people to say, “Tundra is this kind of company, or, Tundra’s a superhero company, or no, no, no wait, Tundra’s a company that does really fucked-up, esoteric art books.” No, no, I wanted Tundra to be a company that was doing all of the above. I didn’t want to pigeonhole it. Thus we did things like we never put the logos on the front cover like an Image or Marvel or DC book. Our logos were on the back, or on the inside or not on the book at all at first. We did all these different things that I thought were important. And they were important, they were important because I wanted a Tundra book to help define what I wanted Tundra to be, not its logo. And ultimately, they all suffered because of my over-zealousness.

GROTH: When you say “greed” you don’t mean greed in the economic sense.

EASTMAN: No, I wasn’t saying, “Let’s do this because we’re going to make a load of money.”

GROTH: You just wanted to be …

EASTMAN: Tundra to be really cool and yet self-supporting. Also to be looked at and respected. I’m certainly not saying it because you’re here, but Fantagraphics, Kitchen Sink, a few other publishers were doing stuff that was original and cool: the stuff that I was buying. They were doing the stuff that was of true merit and artistic quality and that was interesting. They were pushing the boundaries of what comics were. They weren’t selling for shit, but they were winning awards. And I said, “Well, you know, I have a place in here.” Perhaps there’s a way that we can all continue to age up our audience by putting out such great work. But “they” didn’t want comics to grow up. When Maus won a Pulitzer Prize, it was downplayed by critics of its origins by saying, “Well, that’s not really a comic.” Well, it’s a fucking comic. You know? And I’m thinking, “Well, let’s put this all together.” And I wanted to be part of the “changing tide.”

GROTH: It sounds like you were a kid in a candy shop.

EASTMAN: That’s correct, and with all my Christmas money to boot.

GROTH: When you started Tundra, you would have been 28.

EASTMAN: Close; I was 27. I’m 35 now. I turned 35 last May.

GROTH: Let me ask you this. I don’t mean to criticize you, but do you think you had a clear conception … a really concrete conception of the kind of material you wanted to publish? I was looking over the Tundra list, and it’s all over the map. You’re publishing Paul Mavrides sketchbooks, a lot of horror stuff, underground stuff, quasi-superhero stuff. I couldn’t see a cohesive aesthetic.

EASTMAN: No, there wasn’t. The aesthetic was that it was creator-owned, creator-driven, something that they believed in. I tried not to set any boundaries or limitations. I would try to look at things that I liked and publish them, because I liked them. I would say, “I would like to read this.” I read a lot of different and weird shit. What I think is cool stuff, cool shit, weird shit, whatever, it’s the same thing. And I didn’t really want the company to be pigeon holed as a specific kind of publisher. I wanted people to be intrigued like, “Jeez, what are they going to do next.” So I would publish things like Barron Storey’s Marat/Sade.

GROTH: [Laughs.] That must’ve sold 12 copies.

The Marat/Sade Journals ©1993 Barron Storey

EASTMAN: I bought six of them, I think. No, I’m kidding. It sold very little, but I loved that book. I love that book to death. I love Rain. I love Bonesaw and Cages. I loved all of them a lot, and you combine that with the feeling of having someone I admired like Bernie Wrightson doing Captain Sternn again. It was incredible. It was very much a high. It was hard for me to say, “No.” When I’d have George Pratt hanging around the studio working with one of the designers putting together No Man’s Land. You could feel the excitement in the air, that sort of thing.

GROTH: I guess what I’m trying to get from you right now is a sense of what it was like to live through this. Trying to deal with this runaway train.

EASTMAN: Here’s a good analogy. We just stole a bank truck full of money, we’re going down a really steep hill, drunk, the breaks are gone, and it’s like, “No point in steering now.” [Laughter.] No, I may be kidding but sometimes it felt like that.

About the time I realized what I had done [laughter] a lot of people that were working hard at Tundra really believed in what we were doing, even though they weren’t exactly clear on what it was beyond losing money, at times, and that’s because they didn’t have a very strong leader. By then I was starting to lose it. By this time, I had let Quentin Eastman go, and I was in the president’s chair myself, trying to bring under control a wide variety of projects, and each one had a million individual problems, whether it was delays, artists not turning work in, artists that were pissed off and needed extra T.L.C., so many things that needed attention, and the proper amount of catering to. That plus the process of getting projects in the door and out in a timely fashion to create a “following” and it was impossible! We would have to bring in another 50 or 60 people: you know what I mean? The legal stuff wasn’t getting done; the accounting stuff wasn’t getting done. It was too big. I had created something that was too fucking big.

Not to fast-forward into the second half of Tundra’s history, but well into the first 24 or so months, it was, “I need some help here,” and I need somebody because one, I had gone through with this thing because I had this “damn the torpedoes” idea but I wanted to eventually get back to the drawing board, which was now light years farther away than it was when I only had Mirage. But you know, even to this day I debate whether I created Tundra because I was scared to get back to the drawing board. I was doing all this business stuff and Tundra was certainly no way to get back to drawing. I started feeling those pangs that I want to be a creator again. I want to make things simple again. But at the same time, I want Tundra to work. And I had a brief meeting with Mike Richardson at Dark Horse to find out if we could bring the two companies together. Mike never cared for me for whatever reasons, I don’t know why, but I just got that weird vibe from him, it’s like, “I really don’t like you, you little pissant”: but whatever. Not that he ever said that. It was a feeling and it was probably my own paranoia. But I got a very bad feeling from him. He was like, “I only do stuff for profit. And that’s it. None of this esoteric shit.” So I was like, “Next.” Probably because I was embarrassed — if he ever looked at our year-end statements, he’d shit purple Twinkies!

GROTH: That was pretty much the end of that conversation?

EASTMAN: That was pretty quick: a breakfast meeting at San Diego, over at the Westin. Then I thought about Denis [Kitchen]. I knew that he was scraping to keep his business going, but at the same time, like yourself, he’d been in the business for a long time, and I felt that a lot of people respected Denis, that perhaps, I felt, he was the figure-head I couldn’t be. A survivor. I thought that if we brought the two companies together, he’d be able to fix everything and set it right and then carry on to see this dream completed. And I still felt I owed him something. Denis turned me on to my first publisher; he was one of the few people that wrote me back. Maybe this was an omen, like, my chance to pay him back for that inspiration so long ago. I don’t know, but I felt he was the right guy for the job. So that’s when I started talking with him. I flew out to Wisconsin, and started a series of meetings with him. And that’s where it started.

SIX MONTHS IN

GROTH: Let me ask you this: by my reckoning, about six months into Tundra, you must have realized things were chaotic, that you required better organization and so on. But, six months later, you actually started expanding the Tundra empire to include Tundra U.K., a movie production company in L.A. that might be called Limelight …

EASTMAN: That’s correct.

GROTH: … a recording studio in Maine, invested in a pre-press house called Pro-Media, as well as something called Cleare Communications, or Cleare-Com.