If anybody had told me back in the 1940s that there would be a museum dedicated to Norman Rockwell, I would have thought it was a joke. A museum for a Saturday Evening Post illustrator? Impossible. And me in that museum? Sheer fantasy.

In 1947 I was graduating high school. For the Senior play I was cast as somebody called Alfred. I had only one line in the play. When an actor very proudly showed me a painting he had just done, I said— and here comes my line: “Gosh, that’s almost as good as a Norman Rockwell.” That brought down the house. And no wonder. Norman Rockwell was not considered a serious painter. As The New York Times once asked—this in a headline– was he “a painter,” or “merely an illustrator”? That question answered itself.

More to the point, Norman Rockwell’s description of America was no America I recognized. It was, in many ways, a mythic and insular land—although, in fairness to Rockwell, it was a pure construct of his clients (and what illustrator, then or now, could fight a client?) That America belonged to The Saturday Evening Post, The Ladies Home Journal, Colgate toothpaste and Kellogg’s Cornflakes.

But the work was brilliantly drafted and lovingly depicted, and as I was later to appreciate, painted with the brush of an Old Master and, on occasion, the eye of a graphic designer.

Now who was I  back in the 1940s, this 17-year-old kid, to poke fun at Norman Rockwell? I wasn’t an artist, or even interested in art, although I was a student at the High School of Music and Art where art, or music, as the case might be, was a serious 5-day-a-week affair. I think I applied to the school because my neighbor was an artist—a young French lady, svelte and beautiful. Our neighboring apartments overlooked Central Park, and she had painted scenes of the park on her walls. One mural had a painted donkey (although there were no donkeys in Central Park that I ever saw)—and on the donkey’s rear end, mounted on the wall, was a light switch. She would ask me, “Buddy,” (that was my nickname then, Buddy)—“Buddy, could you turn on the light, please?” That was my introduction to art—turning on that light—and that turned me on to art.

After graduation I went to Oberlin College, where I took no art classes—as I mentioned, I had no interest in art or in becoming an artist. I did, however, have an interest in politics, and I drew political cartoons for the school newspaper. Cartoons with a stiff, brittle line that had no relationship to my present broken line – or, as it’s now flatteringly called by The Norman Rockwell Museum, an “Inquiring Line.”

At Oberlin I took a course in humor, a seminar taught by a Spanish friend and colleague of Luis Bunuel. As the final project for the seminar I wrote and drew a book called Titus Fortunatus, or Why Rome Fell. Rome. I may have drawn small, but I thought big. It got the worst mark in the class, a B-minus. My consolation came later. The only other student to get as low a grade was William Goldman, the novelist and screen writer of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Which shows you that sometimes nothing succeeds like failure. But I wouldn’t make a maxim of that.

After graduating, I showed my book to a publisher, Henry Holt, and was told, probably to get rid of me, “We’re only interested in something seasonal. Christmas. . . Thanksgiving . . .  something like that.”

But I took the suggestion seriously. I called an Oberlin friend of mine, and asked him, “Paul, do you know of any Christmas stories?” He suggested a medieval tale about The Juggler of Our Lady, which sounded Christmasy-enough for me to work with—which I did, in one evening, and that. I suppose, launched my career. It almost ended my career, too. Early success can be crippling. And you can make a maxim out of that.

It took me many years to realize that while my eye was good, my hand was rotten. I am very much a self-taught artist—the best kind, perhaps, as I had to work hard to create, to forge, a style. Sometimes artists who are more naturally gifted than I am become facile.

Now to return to Norman Rockwell.

Even into the late ’50s, Norman Rockwell’s work was downgraded. In 1956 Andrew Wyeth remarked that Rockwell made what he called “dead painting.” No real emotion. Not, he pointed out, the emotion of a Thomas Eakins painting at the Pennsylvania Academy, the “Gross Clinic,” where the surgeon, Dr. Gross, was shown with blood on his hands—blood that shocked the Philadelphia gentry. There was no blood on any Norman Rockwell hands. Not, that is, until the late ’60s when, fortified by his wife Molly who had decidedly liberal opinions, he was able to express his own distinctly liberal outlook. In  1965 he painted—not illustrated, painted—the murder of the three young civil rights workers in Mississippi. As part of his research, he even smeared blood on his own white shirt to observe and really feel what human blood was like on a person. With that painting, Norman Rockwell shook hands with Thomas Eakins.

Let’s go back in time again, not when I was a high school student in the 1940s, but an established illustrator in the late ’60s. My parents-in-law had moved to Stockbridge from Boston. They lived in the old Town Hall, two buildings from  Norman Rockwell’s Main Street studio. During a visit, I went to the precursor of this museum, the Old Corner House on Main Street where his paintings were on display. I went out of curiosity more than anything else. And it was a revelation. That illustrator could paint, and I mean really paint. And not only that, he could design. Those horizontal bars that made purely decorative statements, they were perfect grace notes. And the halos that sometimes framed his subjects–what wonderful and contemporary graphic statements they were. In fact, look at my drawing of the Lincoln Memorial. It’s in this room. It has a Norman Rockwell-inspired halo. Imitation has to be the highest form of praise. Maybe Alfred knew something then.

Reputations rise and fall, dizzily and unpredictably, on the Roller Coaster of Fame. When I did my Alka-Seltzer commercial—and when I said “did,” please keep in mind that I did the storyboard and drawings for it, not the concept or the voices— all of which were so integral to its success. When I did that commercial, Time magazine featured it in an article, mentioning the artist (me) not by name, but as somebody who was a cross between Jules Feiffer and James Thurber. Now tell me, where was I on Fame’s roller coaster then?

That is the problem every artist, every illustrator, actor, musician, and writer faces. What’s “in” one year might be “out” the next. And this may have nothing to do with quality but everything to do with whether something is new—which is good—or old— that’s bad. It’s today’s value system, although I suspect that it’s an age-old problem, but intensified in our fast-paced, publicity-mad culture. And if you think fame—or simply recognition—has no meaning to a creative person, just think of Franz Schubert who composed nine symphonies in his short lifetime– but never had a single one performed. Not one. No wonder he composed an Unfinished Symphony. Why finish it? Why bother, when nobody will ever hear it. Without the confidence that comes from recognition—that your work will most likely find an audience, any audience–too many creative people end up like Franz Schubert with unperformed music, or they end up with unfinished novels, poems, and paintings, or untried careers.

What’s “out” at one time was certainly Walt Disney, whose studio was eclipsed in the ’40s and ’50s by an upstart animation company, UPA, whose films featured the cutting edge, flat, stylized graphics of the period.

Walt Disney once remarked that he had a nightmare. His work might end up in a museum. Now look where he’ll be in a few weeks. One flight up, his worse nightmare come true.

And look at where I am, sharing a celebration with Walt Disney soon to be upstairs, me downstairs, in a museum dedicated to Norman Rockwell. An unlikely trio in an improbable setting, one that Alfred would never have dreamed possible.

And speaking as Alfred’s grandfather, I want you to know how unimaginably proud and pleased and gratified I am to be here.

Thank you very much for joining me this evening.

Thank You and Good Night

We have decided not to continue with BCGF. We had a great run and thank all of our colleagues for their support.

While rumors of troubles between the festival’s three founding partners had been spreading over the past few months, the announcement still took many by surprise. Since its 2009 founding by three prominent members of the independent comics world—Gabriel Fowler, owner of Desert Island; scholar and programming coordinator Bill Kartalopoulos; and Dan Nadel, publisher of PictureBox (and co-editor of this website)—the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival, held every winter at the Our Lady of Mount Carmel church in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, had become one of the most influential, admired, and seemingly successful festivals for independent comics in the United States, and was seen as a model for several similar-minded shows that arrived in its wake. The abrupt announcement of its demise led to widespread dismay and surprise.

One of those expressing surprise at the announcement was founding partner Gabriel Fowler himself. When asked late yesterday to confirm the accuracy of the announcement, Fowler replied via e-mail, “You’ll have to ask the person who posted it,” and added that the message was not posted with his blessing. Fowler says that he wished to continue the show, but was prevented from doing so by his partners. He blames “interpersonal fallout” for the show’s demise, and explained: “Dan wanted to step away from the show due to other commitments, and I then failed to come to terms with Bill. I wanted to continue the show on my own and was told that it was impossible.”

Fowler says that he ultimately proposed “transforming the festival into a non-profit organization with a larger board of directors to diffuse any interpersonal tension,” but says that this proposal was rejected. What exactly were the terms that Fowler and Kartalopoulos failed to agree upon? “I’d rather not get into this, but it hinges on ownership of the festival,” Fowler says. “I was also hopeful that the formation of a non-profit organization would diffuse ego-driven issues related to ownership.”

Dan Nadel acknowledges via e-mail that he and Kartalopoulos made the announcement without Fowler’s involvement. “Bill and I felt it was necessary, and the majority has always carried the vote with BCGF.” However, he disputes some of Fowler’s claims about the reasons for the show’s ending. “I don’t think it was personal so much as business,” Nadel wrote in an e-mail. “Due to various professional obligations and time constraints, I no longer wanted to be involved, but stayed on to (I hoped) ease the transition into it being either a two-person organization or to help bring in a third to replace me. This transition proved more difficult than any of us anticipated. Without getting into too many details, we could not agree on terms for how the show should proceed. We offered Gabe a number of ways to continue the show, but he refused all terms, and ultimately negotiations broke down. That was effectively the end. Without any way to resolve the issues at hand, we were forced to call it a day. I want to make clear that I really hope there’s no ill will around this. I have a huge amount of respect and affection for Gabe and Bill both. This bit of business just couldn’t be worked out.”

Reached by telephone, Bill Kartalopoulos says that the announcement “reflected a majority agreement of the partnership that organizes the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival.”

Asked to give his version of the events leading to the festival’s dissolution, Kartalopoulos says that “the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival has always been a collaboration between PictureBox (i.e., Dan), Desert Island in the person of Gabe Fowler, and myself. The festival has been a product of that collaboration. We collaborated for four years, we put together four great festivals. Even though I expect to continue to work with both of those guys in a variety of ways, we’re not collaborating anymore, so the show, which I think is very specifically a product of the collaboration of the three of us, has probably come to a natural end in part for that reason.”

Kartalopoulos elaborates: “The other thing I would say is that the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival has been a very successful event. Every year it grew beyond our expectations. I think anyone who was at the 2012 show probably observed that the festival was sort of maxing out the structure that had been built to support it. I mean both literally in terms of the space and also, I would say, organizationally. Growth is hard, and presents a lot of challenges. I think that the 2012 event represented the peak of what could be accomplished within the constraints of the current model. So even though I’m sad and upset in certain ways, I am happy to go out on a high note rather than start hitting walls.”

The upstairs exhibitor floor, during the 2012 show.

Kartalopoulos also dissents from Fowler’s characterization of the partnership dispute as hinging on ownership and interpersonal issues. “Among the majority of the members of the group I don’t think there were too many questions about the ownership of the show,” he says. “My point of view is that the festival existed as a collaboration between three people, and to the extent that for four years we were able to stay on the same page, it worked. I don’t know that I would say that there were interpersonal issues because I liked everyone who was involved with the festival. I think there were just differences on how to deal with the challenges of growth.”

Kartalopoulos says that once the partners were no longer able to agree on the same direction, the show was basically unable to continue. “I think that based on the results of last year’s festival, to continue we would need to rethink the event,” Kartalopoulos says. “We had a lot of shared momentum up to that point, and I think once three people start rethinking an event, there is a lot of possibility for them to start thinking about it in different ways that they don’t necessarily share.”

Asked to comment on Fowler’s proposal to turn the festival into a nonprofit, Kartalopoulos demurs. “There were a lot of ideas that were tossed around at various points over the years, and I don’t really want to get involved in any kind of re-litigation of any conversation about that kind of stuff,” he says. “I don’t think it is helpful or productive. I mean, you could probably come up with twelve different visions of the future we came up with at different points and I wouldn’t want to single out any one in particular. I think probably the more important barter point is just that we collaborated with a similar mindset for four years, and I think we responded to the challenges of the growth of the festival with different ideas. As a result of which we’re just not collaborating anymore.”

When informed of Kartalopoulos and Nadel’s responses, Fowler disagrees strongly. “While it’s true that the BCGF evolved into a three-person collaboration, it didn’t start that way,” Fowler writes. “It started with me alone, looking for venues and approaching artists and publishers. I started the show and would prefer to continue it, but I guess I don’t have the right if these guys don’t agree. What else can I say? I’m not a lawyer, but I resent being put in this position. All of the other details are meaningless to me.”

Chris Ware-designed poster for the 2012 BCGF.

One thing all three founding partners do agree upon is that despite some of the speculation on social media from outsiders, the show’s demise had nothing to do with financial issues. “The festival has been a ton of work for very little financial reward, but it was essentially self-sustaining,” says Fowler.

“It was both profitable and artistically rewarding,” says Nadel. “It wasn’t making a fortune, but by publishing standards it wasn’t bad at all.”

“As far as I’m concerned, money-making has never been a consideration,” says Kartalopoulos. “The festival just needs to support itself.” But he does think that the perception brings up issues worth discussing. “There’s a bigger infrastructural point here which is that a big part of the indie comics economy at this point seems to rest on the shoulders of people who work very hard for very little reward to create these festivals,” he says. “I think there are some structural issues that I hope people will start talking about, even if not as a direct result of this situation. It’s really hard and it’s really a lot of work to put together these festivals. No one is making money personally doing these things, and you can’t have an industry that depends on volunteer labor forever.

“These festivals have become so important, because there’s also a real distribution problem that the festivals are being asked to compensate for,” Kartalopoulos adds. “These are tangential issues, but they just come up in my mind when people talk about Is the festival financially sound? I’m like, Well, no! Duh! This whole industry is not financially sound. If it weren’t for people working against their financial interests we wouldn’t have an indie comics world.

“Putting that aside,” he continues, “the show always broke even, plus a little bit. I spent some time looking into larger venues, and I think that some of those could have worked out financially if there was the organizational will to make them work. With a bigger space certainly the costs do skyrocket in New York, but there was an opportunity to potentially include more exhibitors and increase those revenues. Even though it was always a part of our ethos to keep the table costs as low as possible, I think the festival was financially successful enough for most exhibitors that there could have been some logic to increasing the table cost a little bit to compensate for the increased cost of a larger venue. I don’t think it was any more unsustainable than any other festival.”

Nadel wishes things could have ended differently for BCGF. “Ideally Bill and Gabe would’ve figured out a way to move forward, but that’s not happening,” he says. “I sincerely hope something else pops up, or one of those guys starts their own festival.”

“I think we all feel a little sadness that the festival is ending,” Kartalopoulos agrees. “It’s the ending of a collaboration.”

But Kartalopoulos thinks it is important to point out the successes of the festival, as well. “A lot of things that have a big cultural impact don’t necessarily stick around too long,” he says. “The history of art and culture is full of things that lasted a few years, reached the end of their normal lifespan, but continue to have an influence. I mean, not to put it on the same level, but there’s a punk show at the Met, you know? Most of those bands didn’t last more than a couple of years. There’s no question that over the past four years the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival has inspired a lot of other festivals around the country. You could probably come up with a list of at least half a dozen festivals that have come up since then that have at least a little piece of the Brooklyn comics festival DNA in them, from having a really art-comics-focused festival, to a curated show as a model, to free-to-the-public as a model, to having a lot of off-site events that aren’t just all in some depressing convention hall, to using and integrating with the city. I mean, you could look at CAKE or The Projects. I’m looking forward to Autoptic in Minneapolis this summer, which I think should be really interesting. I think there’s a lot of this kind of stuff popping up now, and I think the show has had a really huge influence. If you are able to articulate a new vision specifically and clearly and powerfully enough you don’t necessarily have to say it over and over again, and I think in terms of articulating a different kind of vision for an independent comics festival in America, the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival could not have articulated that more clearly or loudly than we did over the past four years.”

Kartalopoulos ended on a further positive note. “I’m very proud of everyone who was involved with the show and what we accomplished, and I am just really grateful to anyone who ever exhibited at the show, came as a guest, or came to check it out, and am grateful to Gabe and Dan for all of the hard work they did to make it happen.”

This article has been slightly edited for content and grammar since its initial publication.

 You’ve reached your 75th LOAC release. In terms of concept and execution, what do you think your biggest successes have been? What about your failures? Are there titles that flew under the radar for you?

Bruce Canwell: I’d say our biggest successes have been: [A] discovering how Dean and I — and subsequently, we and later additions to the LOAC team — were so closely in sync as to what we wanted to produce in terms of content, design, style, and scholarship, and [B] being lucky enough to find an audience that, on balance, is in tune with our sensibilities.

I’d say our major failure has been the same one shared by all other players in this arena: we’ve all created high-quality collections of exceptional comic strips, but none of us have found a way to grow the audience so these books sell in the big numbers the material deserves.

Dean Mullaney: The fact that we have seventy-five (and counting) books in the imprint is, in and of itself, our biggest success. Seventy-five books in any imprint is impressive; when you look back at the Hyperion line of strip reprints in the late 1970s, Bill Blackbeard managed to publish twenty-two titles, one third of LOAC’s current output. I also like to think that we have upped the ante in terms of strip restoration so that modern readers have a better sense of what the original strips were supposed to look like

For me personally, the biggest success has been to bring Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates back into print, with the Sundays in color and with Bruce’s phenomenal essays that place the strip in its historical context. Each of the six volumes has gone through multiple printings and continues to sell.

If by “under the radar” you mean books that we feel should have received more attention than they did…I’d say King Aroo, the Chuck Jones book, and the Otto Soglow collection. It’s disappointing to note that in this day of bloggers and reviewers trying to constantly post new items ahead of the curve, detailed analysis tends to fall by the wayside. And let’s be realistic, in a crowded market, a more obscure “art house” strip like King Aroo or Barnaby needs perceptive bloggers and reviewers to help spread the word. And that’s not really happening.

I’ve often wondered during the reprint “boom” whether or not there’s an identifiable audience, beyond libraries, buying and responding to this work. Have you been able to identify one?

Canwell: Certainly — more than one, in fact! I suspect all the players in the market, not just us, benefit from the same audience. The long-time devoted collectors of comic strips — call them The Sons of Bill Blackbeard — are livin’ the dream at this point in comics publishing history. Many readers who were buying the first wave of comic strip reprints from the likes of Kitchen Sink, Fantagraphics, Eclipse, and NBM are upgrading their collections with the new editions being published today.

We also see an audience segment smaller than The Sons of Bill Blackbeard but still sizeable enough to be of note: folks who find their long-time interest in the latest comic books is fading. They’re shifting to strip reprints, finding the wealth of great material that’s available, and rekindling their love of comics. (I have an affinity for this group, because that’s the exact path I walked during that first wave of strip reprints in the 1980s.)

The Sons of Bill Blackbeard — the libraries and schools — the comic book fans who become comic strip fans — the parents who seek appropriate reading material for their kids and discover Little Orphan Annie or the Gottfredson Mickey Mouse books or (for the more precocious reader) King Aroo … all of those are important clusters of demographics for our little corner of the industry.

Mullaney: I’d add another key segment to that group: comics professionals and would-be comics professionals who want to learn from and be inspired by the master cartoonists of the past. It’s all fine and dandy to have heard that Caniff, Herriman, Raymond, Segar, Foster, King, et al were great, but unless their works are reprinted, it’s just talk. You need to SEE and READ the work — and we now have an unprecedented opportunity to study these classic strips.

Further, individual titles can broaden our market and reach a new audience. For example, Bloom County is our best-selling series to date because it captures people who aren’t specifically strip fans, but are Bloom County fans. Same goes for Star Trek – our best information indicates that the Star Trek strip book is being bought primarily by Star Trek fans, not strip die-hards.

Now, will Bloom and Trek fans start buying Li’l Abner and the Gumps? Probably not, but the success of any book in the line helps the entire imprint – not merely because it makes money but because retailers and wholesalers look more favorably on an imprint that has certified “hits.” There are a lot of marketing and sales factors that come into play and are not of interest to fans. And not important to them, either. It’s “Inside Baseball” kind of stuff that I need to be aware of, yet is irrelevant to the reader.

Is there a place for a “best of” Dick Tracy or Annie? Is that something that’s even possible with those strips? I’ve wondered if the seriality of the books is an issue (as well as being a virtue, of course).

Canwell: There are definite challenges to doing “Best of” collections, especially for a strip like Little Orphan Annie, where continuities could run for the better part of a year. Still, every problem has a solution — our first and so far only foray into softcover publishing is a Best of Dick Tracy. I think it’s a great little “Whitman sampler,” a way for someone totally unfamiliar with Tracy get an idea of what he’s all about. I wish something like this had been out there when I was first deep-diving into the strips back in the ’80s!

And to that end, I wonder that the next step is? Do you plan to start new series? Or stay entrenched with the numerous strips you have going now? If the latter, what is your criteria for inclusion in the LOAC? With so many classics covered already, how do you begin to decide on secondary titles?

Canwell:  Yes; we’ve had new releases every year The Library of American Comics has been in business. Why would we stop now? And as long as there is audience demand, why would we stop producing Steve Canyon or Li’l Abner or Skippy? Our criteri  is the same as it ever was: projects that appeal to Dean and me, that we believe will be fun to produce AND fun for the audience to read; informative, too, one hopes. One of the big disconnects in our society is the notion that “learning” and “fun” should be separate things. Alex Toth’s life is a STORY, as is George McManus’s, or Milton Caniff’s — our task is to bring that story to life in a way that informs and entertains in equal measure, because to us those two qualities go hand-in-hand. The timeless value of the material, of course, speaks for itself. ”… how do you begin to decide on secondary titles?” Probably by not worrying about meaningless labels like “secondary titles.” Who decides what is “secondary,” anyway? And how many other strata have these faceless arbiters created?

Mullaney: There’s no single criterion for what strips to reprint. Sometimes one of us has a particular favorite and we’re in the position to make it happen. Our long-term goal is to present a wide variety and a fair representation of strips that, together, tell the overarching history of newspaper strips. And we obviously need to be aware of commercial considerations. We’ll give some strips the complete treatment (Dick Tracy, Little Orphan Annie), while others—Bringing Up Father—will get the best years in sequential order treatment. Other strips might get a one-shot.

I doubt if there are any (or many) long-running series we’ll add to the line. But then again, new opportunities can come along unexpectedly, as in our getting the license from DC for the Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman strips. These series alone will add nearly two dozen titles to LOAC over the next few years. I’m current penciling in the schedule for 2014 and 2015 and trying to find slots for all the books we want to do!

I wonder if you can write a little more about the differences in approach between say, Soglow/McManus and Gray/Caniff. Beyond commercial considerations, do you think some strips are simply better than others in terms of the experience of reading the whole run? 

Canwell: It’s tough to make a broad generalization here, I think, because several factors come into play. A strip like Caniff’s Terry is so short, relatively speaking, that certainly it rewards being read from start to finish. A series like Bringing Up Father began in the comics’ first blush and has McManus’s name attached to it until the middle of the 20th Century: the concept stays the same throughout, yet in terms of format, look, and pacing the 1910s BUF is significantly different from the 1940s BUF. Would those early strips be of interest, given the art is far less layered and detailed, and Maggie & Jiggs’s routine has now been played out by TV imitators like Ralph & Alice Kramden, Archie & Edith Bunker, and Al & Peg Bundy (among others)?

Then think of how many strips got squeezed in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s by the shrinking real estate allotted to the comics page. Some series retain their appeal even in those cramped quarters because their creators still have interesting stories to tell or things to say (Steve Canyon, Li’l Abner), others less so.

Have there been any strips on your wishlist that just don’t make the grade, commercially? And if so, are there potential solutions to that problem?

Mullaney: We’ve got a list a mile long that’s probably not much different from the list my old pal Kim Thompson has made at Fantagraphics. Plus, we all have personal faves that are totally uncommercial; for example, I’d hung up on Fay King’s art, but aside from Cole Johnson, Trina Robbins, and me, I don’t know if anyone else would care!

One solution to the problem is our new series, LOAC Essentials. By offering a year’s worth of dailies (instead of 3 years’ worth), we can keep the price down so readers will be more willing to try something new. There aren’t a lot of readers, for example, clamoring for a gigantic $50 volume of the Gumps – but by presenting a shorter book, I think we’ll get those readers hooked so they’ll want a second Gumps storyline. We’d like to take similar approaches with other strips. For example, Bruce wants to edit a Cap Stubbs and Tippie book, I’m researching a top-notch Winnie Winkle continuity, and Jared Gardner remains hung up on Minute Movies.

You’re about to embark on a Russ Manning series. I’m fascinated with the relationship between Toth, Marsh and Manning, and Manning’s initial emergence from ERB fandom. How do you see the aesthetic relationship between Toth and Manning? Do you see a “California” school there? Were they in contact much?

Mullaney: The question of whether or not there was/is a “California school” is interesting. Regardless, there were certainly enough comics artists who migrated west or were native born.

Alex was a great admirer of Marsh’s although I wouldn’t say Marsh was an influence on him. I also don’t recall Toth having anything except a peer to peer relationship with Manning. Dan Spiegle (who remains one of my all-time favorites) also seems to be a singular talent. One could argue that Toth’s, Marsh’s, and perhaps Spiegle’s influence independently may have created a California school. Manning, of course, was influenced by Marsh and to a lesser degree by Toth; Manning, in turn, begat Dave Stevens, and on and on. The entire notion of a California school gets further complicated by the migration of East Coasters who were looking for sunshine and some Hollywood paychecks.

One point of debate in recent years is compensation for the estates of the artists involved. Do you have a stance on this?

Canwell: I would hope our stance is obvious, first by our statement of principles on page 325 of Genius, Isolated, page 349 of Genius, Illustrated — “Although some of Alex Toth’s earlier comics work may legally be in the public domain, there are some rights more important than legal ones. We ask everyone to respect Alex Toth’s memory and the moral rights of his children as the beneficiaries of his work. We urge those who wish to reprint any of that earlier work to contact the estate for permission: http://www.tothfans.com.” — and second by the fact we operate in a way that proves we apply those sentiments across the board, not just to Alex Toth and his heirs.

Mullaney: In fact, I first met Alex when I let him know that I’d be paying him money to reprint some of his public domain Standard comics. I started in the comics business in 1977 with the expressed purpose of establishing creators’ rights as the norm in the industry. I’m not going to pass judgment on other publishers/editors who don’t pay creators or their heirs for public domain work; that’s their call.

With long-running strips, it’s a little more complicated because anything that premiered in the early 1920s and earlier is public domain. Yet if the strip continued for a long time (Gasoline Alley comes to mind), at some point you hit a brick wall when the strips are still under copyright by the syndicate. So you can theoretically publish the early years and find heirs to pay, but once you get to the copyrighted material, you’re either paying double royalties (the syndicate AND the heirs) or just the syndicate.

The “moral rights” of the Toth estate: Can you expand on this? What are those rights, in your view, and how do they dovetail with the idea of public domain work?

Mullaney: Those rights are what we, as individuals, make them. The issue is totally separate from legal rights. From a publisher’s perspective, if I want to reprint Alex’s Zorro comics, I need to pay a licensing fee/royalty to John Gertz/Zorro Productions, who owns the trademark to the character and the copyrights to those stories. If, on the other hand, I want to reprint Alex’s comics for Standard or Lev Gleason, the work is apparently in the public domain, so no licensing fee or royalties are due. If the original publisher failled to register or renew the copyright or that publishing entity no longer exists, anyone is legally free to reprint the stories. In the course of my long career in comics, I have made the personal decision that — in the case of public domain comics in which there is no rights holder requiring a fee or royalties — I would pay the artist or the artist’s direct heirs. I still have letters of appreciation from Jerry Siegel, Jack Katz, Reed Crandall’s sister, Ellie Frazetta, and other creators whose work I reprinted in the 1980s and 1990s and for which I paid them.

These “moral” rights run parallel to a previously obscure part the 1976 Copyright Act, which allows artists, under specific circumstances, to reclaim the rights to their work after 35 years. The intent of the law is to allow creative people a second chance to own material they sold to a publisher earlier in their careers when they may not have had fair leverage. I think we can all agree that very few comics artists in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s understood what they were signing away – or even IF they signed anything away. It seems to me that if we are in favor of Siegel, Shuster, and Kirby trying to reclaim their rights, then we should similarly should pay them for reprinting that earlier work. In my book, it’s all the same thing.

With your recent deal to release DC character comic strips and IDW’s Artist Editions, do you see any hope in larger companies allowing other publishing entities to more aggressively publish work that is more or less trapped behind corporate copyrights? Here I think of Meskin, Cole, Maneely, and, of course, Toth, whose DC work is represented in Genius Illustrated mostly via original art, as opposed to the final (printed) work. It is the only real absence in Genius Illustrated.

Mullaney: I can’t speak to the Artists’ Editions because we have nothing to do with them; they’re produced with great finesse by Scott Dunbier at IDW. Whether the larger companies such as Marvel and DC will license their copyrighted material to other publishers, who knows. It’s a question best directed to them.

In the Toth books, the reason I chose to reprint most of his DC work from original art rather than from printed comics had nothing to do with copyrights. As an editor/designer, I believe the original art best represents Toth’s intent, and it’s what Toth fans want to see. If this were a book of straight reprints, I’d have used printed versions. But the Genius series is part bio/part art book; as such, we wanted to stress the art. Plus, we were fortunate enough to find some very generous art collectors willing to loan the valuable art!

Speaking of original art — what is your philosophy on original art vs. printed comics. When the work was printed in color, do you feel the image loses something as original art? Was Toth drawing for color, do you think?

Canwell: Isn’t this like asking, “When the ground beef is cooked up as a hamburger, does it lose something by not being served as steak tartare?” It’s still pretty tasty either way, isn’t it? As for Toth drawing for color — an intellect as keen as Alex’s would always keep the end result in mind as he worked, but remember [A] he was color-blind, so his own color sense was far from impeccable and [B] he knew what the coloring process was for comics during his heyday, and he knew how often it produced bad results.

Mullaney: Whether or not the image loses something as original art depends wholly on what the work is. I’m reminded of Alex’s Zorro comics for Dell, which for many of us was our first encounter with his art. I reprinted those stories two decades ago in B&W – with new tones added by Alex. Were they drawn “for color?” Yes, but the coloring sucked. Do they look better in B&W? Yes. Do they look better still in B&W with Alex’s new tones? Absolutely.

I could argue the other way for, say, Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four. Sometimes it’s a matter of personal preference, but in Toth’s case, in my opinion, his work ALWAYS looks better in B&W.

In the last years of his life, Wojnarowicz embarked on a book-length comic with Romberger and Van Cook in which he sought to chronicle episodes from his life: his early years and youth as a hustler and, later, his feelings regarding the AIDS crisis. Working with Wojnarowicz, Romberger edited the texts and drew the art; Van Cook (who is too frequently undercredited for her essential contribution) colored the pages after Wojnarowicz’s death. Published by Vertigo in 1996 and now reissued by Fantagraphics, 7 Miles a Second records raw and unsettling experiences by way of images and colors that are meant to disturb and to evoke the emotional tenor of a fraught—though occasionally hopeful—life.

Romberger and Van Cook are avid conversationalists, and we spoke also about their other projects, including Romberger’s Post York, which has been nominated for an Eisner for “Best Single Issue (or One-Shot).” So I was dismayed when, at the end of the lengthy interview, my recorder froze and erased the entire thing. But Romberger and Van Cook were game to try again after a week, and the second time held.

Their eagerness to talk about Wojnarowicz and the project, to remember all of it despite the pain of recalling his death, strikes me as a kind of bearing witness—testifying to Wojnarowicz’s life in much the same way the book does. Of that period in America, Avram Finkelstein, cofounder of Silence=Death Project, wrote, “What will be said of the first days of AIDS, long after pharmaceutical interventions have blunted our cultural memory? Hopefully we will say there was a time before we knew what we know, and many people died. There was an outcry and it mattered.”

How did your gallery, Ground Zero, come about?

Van Cook: In 1984, promoter Steve Lewis, of Danceteria, invited us to do a show encapsulating the East Village art scene, and so we spoke to the all the people and galleries around the neighborhood. It was called “The East Village Look Again.” After that, we did “The Acid Test,” which was an accidental curation on our part. Someone wrote in a gossip column that we were going to do a show called “The Acid Test,” so we said what the hell and did it.

Romberger: It was actually the doing of the guitarist and gossip columnist who was staying at our house, Tony Heiberg. There was a gallery called Sensory Evolution, and I said we should do an acid show there because of the name of the gallery and then it was Tony who wrote in his gossip column in the local newspaper, The East Village Eye, that we were doing it. So the next morning, I had to go to the gallery owner, Steven Style and, though I don’t think he liked our work, he said that since it was it was already in print, he’d let us do it for one night.

Who were some of the artists in those early shows?

Romberger: David was in “The Acid Test,” and a bunch of people we knew from the scene. We got to know a lot of the artists from doing “The East Village Look Again.” We also went to all the galleries, and they each gave us several artists, so in that way we got to know everybody.

Van Cook: “The Acid Test” had been very popular. We ran into Dean Savard, who ran Civilian Warfare with Alan Barrows, and he said he was moving out of that space and why don’t you have the keys and take the show there.

Romberger: Dean had shown David’s art at Civilian Warfare, but Dean himself was an artist and he didn’t show his own work, and nobody had ever asked him to be in a show. But we had asked him to be in “The Acid Test.” He was so thrilled that when we ran into him in the street he wanted to rent us his space, so we moved in and lived in the back and we put “The Acid Test” in the front. And that’s basically how we started running Ground Zero.

Van Cook: And then we made it to the front page of the Sunday New York Times. For our second show, we had Robert Costa curating. Critic Grace Glueck came by on her bicycle—she was doing a comparison of uptown and downtown galleries and set us up as the real deal. So our second show, in 1985, got the front page of the Sunday Times. Limousines were pulling up all day trying to buy the artwork that had been reproduced in the Times, and Calvin Reid—it was his work—didn’t want to sell it. So we said, I guess we’re in this business.

The comic strip, Ground Zero, preceded the gallery, right?

Van Cook: Yes, the comic strip was Ground Zero, and then the gallery became Ground Zero.

When did you start the strip?

Romberger: In 1984, in The East Village Eye. We had a whole page.

Van Cook: We wanted to reference, chronologically, the events surrounding where we lived and who we hung out with. It’s all in the comic.

Ground Zero strip from 1994 that was printed in the small press music magazine Pretty Decorating.

How long did you do the strip?

Romberger: It started out as a full tabloid page, then they got more strips—Gary Panter, who did Dal Tokyo, and Wayne White and Lynda Barry—so they cut everybody down to smaller sizes and had two pages that were two-tier strips, maybe four to a page. Then, a few months later, they cut them down to very small pieces and then dumped it entirely. So the strip lasted for about eight months in the Eye, because in a newspaper the first thing to go is the strips.

Van Cook: But conceptually we didn’t really want it to be in one place, and I had the idea that it shouldn’t be easy for the reader to access. I wanted to break up any sense of how narrative works, so we wanted it to be in different publications at different times, in different formats.

Was that notion influenced by your having studied Roland Barthes?

Van Cook: Yes, the whole influence of semiology and semiotics.

Romberger: So it was in East Village Eye, Red Tape, Avenue E, Pretty Decorating—many, many small-press publications.

Van Cook: This was reflected in our work at the gallery, too. One of the things that was different about our curations is that we invited comics artists to show, making a space that was somewhere between comics and fine art. We didn’t want to close down any avenues.

How did you work on the script with David for 7 Miles a Second?

Romberger: David gave me the material and asked me what would work for a comic, and I picked things that would work visually. He established more control over the first part—of when he was a child—because he wanted to show himself getting picked up on Times Square and then getting taken to Nathan’s and then to a hotel room. For example, he’d given me pages of monologues, a couple of different people talking to themselves, and I drew a scene where he goes down into Nathan’s. I took one of the monologues, an older guy talking about his own son and imposed it on the character picking up David, and then took another monologue of a woman talking to herself about getting caught up by her trick and not being able to go see her children and imposed that on another character. I then had the two conversations running together. David thought it was great because it efficiently used the space to get two conversations going at once. It wasn’t technically true to his experience, but that’s how you would hear it.

So you selected all the text for the comic from what he gave you?

Romberger: The general scope of the narrative we worked out together—but I did the selection and then the editing of his texts. I cut them down as much as I could to keep what I thought was the most beautiful language. You don’t want the text to be redundant with the image, so you’re cutting away the extraneous material to get to the nut of the text. The process was heavy on editing, and David approved all that stuff in the first two parts.

If there was a place that needed dialogue, he’d write a little something to put in the balloon. Or he’d tell me dreams. I selected a few of his dreams that would work for me to draw. The giant wasp hanging over a banquet was one, and I could do a double-page spread of that and use the cinematic scope of comics to show something you’d need a big budget to film. In a comic, you can just draw it.

The third part wasn’t completed until after his death. How did you manage it?

Romberger: When it came to the third part, I had a lot less to work with. David had given me the gist of what he wanted, which was “I want to show myself at the current time, mourning the deaths of my friends, but then in the end it’s a beautiful day and I’m happy to be alive.” But by the time I actually got to sit and draw this thing and edit it—after David’s death—there wasn’t anything like that in his texts. There was no beautiful day, so the book ends with him dying.

He had done this really magnificent bit of writing that was in part of the Artist’s Space book that had gotten him in so much trouble with the NEA, and he had told me, Draw me huge on Fifth Avenue. By that time, what I remembered being on Fifth Avenue was St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and David had once gone with Act Up to protest the church’s stand against public health and homosexuality, while mass was going on, so it made it sense to make Fifth Avenue St. Patrick’s and to draw him smashing it. These were decisions I had to make, but they are true to what his intent would have been, as close as I could approximate.

Did he think there would really be a happy ending to the third part? Or that there would be something good to end it with?

Romberger: In a way it’s a vulnerability we all feel—no one really sees themselves dying and if David had been able to hold on another year or two, perhaps the combination therapy that was developed within a couple years after he died might have saved him. A lot of people were brought back from the brink of death, and it is incredibly tragic that due to actions of people like David and others in Act Up—actions that got the medical establishment to loosen up on the approval of drugs trials—a lot of the work on AIDS and cancer was accelerated. And yet so many people died because things were being held off.

Van Cook: People were starting to be diagnosed and become ill, but that was something David wrote to us about in a letter—I’m rejecting that particular view of life and I’m going on to this brighter path. He didn’t want to be celebrating death and darkness anymore, as an artistic trope. He didn’t want to go down that artistic road, he wanted to go somewhere else. So even when things happened to him later on, he had embraced that more hopeful aspect.

What was he hopeful for, do you think?

Van Cook: A life that had some good in it. I don’t want to put words in his mouth.

Romberger: It wasn’t really born out by the factual matter of what happened. There’s a spread in the book of the train that’s referential to his own paintings of trains—he did several of them, in which he depicts the wheels spewing shit and language. That particular text is very bleak and nihilistic, but I think it’s unavoidable. On the other hand, I’m a little sensitive to the fact that a young person could read that material and feel a very dark place. I was a little hesitant to go that route, but you can’t avoid what happens in the end of the book—he dies.

Van Cook: He really loved our son Crosby, and there were a few times when David took him out in the stroller, but he was very nervous about what interacting with a child would do, because we didn’t know what the disease was about early on. David was tested three times before he had a concrete diagnosis. Emotionally it was terrible.

I think what James did such a good job of bringing out in the last part of the book is David’s distress, to put it mildly. It’s a response to real events, as opposed to living a lifestyle that manufactures anxiety.

That’s an interesting distinction.

Romberger: The first part is very pointedly about David’s trick and the lack of empathy the guy feels for what he’s making David watch through that hole in the wall. And David’s shocked—that the trick has no inkling of what the woman on the other side of the hole is feeling. I purposely made that the point of the last part, to come back to that idea at the end, where David is in his room and is alone, and it’s me calling on the phone. He lets the machine pick it up, and he thinks, People don’t know where I am, I start to hate healthy people because they can’t feel what I’m going through. And he talks about himself in the third person—“David’s in pain,” “David’s alone”—but it is about empathy, the only thing we have that allows us to touch each other. So if there’s anything positive to be taken out of the book, it’s that we should be working toward a more empathetic experience while we’re on the planet.

Van Cook: He had on his answering machine a song we had recorded, “I’ll Be Loving You,” that is extremely bright. The lyrics are “If I could sing a song as beautiful as you,” and it was on David’s machine from when we came back from Belgium in 1991. It just stayed on there.

(continued)

Mark Beyer: With/Without Text, The Ohio State University Urban Arts Space, January 8-February 23, 2013.

1.

Stepping out of With/Without Text I asked myself, What did I just see, an abattoir or heaven?

2.
The temptation in looking back at this compelling exhibit, which the Urban Arts Space described as “the first in-depth retrospective” of Beyer’s work, is to search for a trajectory, a progression from one aesthetic or subject matter to another concurrent with the artist’s biography or history. Retrospectives encourage this, don’t they? Well, it was there if you wanted it. Following the exhibit’s route, you began in “With Text: 1975-2011,” starting with mainly black-and-white comics, including a wall of original Amy and Jordan comic strips, and proceeding to the commercial art of New Yorker covers and commissioned album art and posters, where words became images themselves, and his animated series The Adventures of Thomas and Nardo, where words were only spoken. You concluded in “Without Text: 1975-2012″ which was largely comprised of silkscreens and reverse paintings on plexiglas, absent of words or motion.
And yet, any argument the show might have made about the progression of Beyer’s work by dividing it into “With Text” and “Without Text” was leveraged by the fact that each section covered Beyer’s entire career. On the other hand, Beyer stopped publishing comics in the late 1990s and has returned to the form, so far as I know, only once.

3.
So, yes, those contradictions and questions were there if you wanted them, but none of them seemed to matter much as I walked through the exhibit and none of them much interest me as I look back. With/Without Text told a story in fragments, suggestions and eruptions that was nonetheless held together by a considerably persistent vision, perhaps because all but one of the 130-plus items included here, seventy of them original works of art, were drawn from the private collection of the exhibit’s curator, Thomas Arlen Wagner. Unified yet tumultuous, thoughtfully arranged yet loose and ambiguous, the show was as complicated as Beyer’s work. The abattoir or heaven? Who says we have to choose? Who says we have a choice?

4.
It matters that Beyer’s illustrative style has not changed drastically over the years when it comes to figuration. The same misshapen, abused individuals in his early drawings and comics appear in his more recent single images. Whether they are human or animal or living geometry, their bodies are warped and savage. (Including the fish, and there are a lot of fish in these works.) What have changed are the environments in which those individuals find themselves. In the comics, rendered in black ink, they are besieged by urbanity; in the reverse paintings, they wander freely, if bewildered.

5.
Death and the end of society run through these works like blood through a bird’s heart.

6.
The “With Text” portion of the show focused primarily on Beyer’s most persistent characters, Amy and Jordan, featured here in covers from A Disturbing Evening, Dead Stories, and numerous originals from We’re Depressed and the weekly strip version of their manic exploits, which ran from 1988-1996 in New York Press and was collected in 2004 as Amy and Jordan.
It had been a long, damp, sunless winter in Columbus, which made it a dangerous time to read or look at anything related to Amy + Jordan (Beyer usually substitutes the “and” with a plus-sign), and so these diminutive, claustrophobic wonders were a test of will power and antidepressant dosages. Flattened and stretched as if caught under the ant-killing hand of God himself, the duo looks like Lou Reed sounds in “Paranoia Key of E” from his album Ecstasy. To read the minute, framed, glass-encased images and text, I had to hunch and peer, grumbling to myself about the hitch in my back and the pain shooting up my spine, the kind of ache you get only in the winter—and this seemed to be precisely the right way to encounter the endless oppression that afflicts Amy and Jordan, and that they inflict upon each other.

7. 

Amy and Jordan’s hapless misery grows tiresome pretty quickly, but Beyer’s artistry energizes this tedium, especially the inventive, even disorienting panel layouts. In one strip from 1993, a horizontal funnel repeated across five panels squeezes the air out of each, and in another—this one included on a poster for a Beyer exhibit in 1994 in Berlin—a bulldozer shoves the panels off the page while Amy and Jordan lie in bed, as if the artist-author couldn’t stand his own creations, at least that week. On one page from We’re Depressed wherein Amy and Jordan attempt to disguise themselves with paint, the half-bubble panels are stacked one atop the other; it’s a dramatic construction enveloping a farcical plot, and it redeems the farce.

Beyer’s use of patterns—cross-hatching, dots, quilts, whorls, and striated, nervous textures sometimes worried to the point of near opaqueness—anchors the comics in enough detail that they never lose touch with the twisted reality they emerge from. Usually the patterns are purely expressive. As a rabbit named Jack (get it?) talks on the phone with Amy in “Fish City Airport,” for instance, the woven diamond patterns behind him mock Amy’s omnipresent checkerboard dress in sympathy with the rabbit’s thoughts. The realist represents materials first—fur, terrycloth; the expressionist renders emotion first by coding it as material. That’s probably why the New Yorker covers included here—a beach scene and a city sidewalk, both largely dependent on clean, almost confident lines, at least by Beyerian standards—seem incomplete and innocuous, merely odd instead of unnerving. Meanwhile, back in “Fish City Airport”, the fingerprint swirls of the water morph easily into clouds, dirty and threatening. You can understand why Amy and Jordan are so damn anxious.

8.
Walking through the gallery, I wondered if I was supposed to think this was very strange artwork: “outsider art”—a term that needles me—or even simply the soul-killing redundancy that is the term “art comics.” Instead, Beyer’s work was uncomfortably, compellingly familiar. Not in an “I’ve seen it all before” sense, you understand; only the most trite art historian could remain unnerved by Beyer’s singular vision. And neither do I mean “familiar” in the sense of who Beyer has influenced, though you can trace that through RAW, Blab! and Kramers Ergot. No, this is the familiarity of a certain message: the world is not what it appears to be, but truer to what you suspect of it. The revelation in Beyer’s work is not entirely unlike what happens when Nada puts on those special sunglasses in the John Carpenter film They Live: the veil of the world is lifted, fascist slogans are revealed, and you discover that a big chunk of the humanoid population is in fact comprised of skull-faced aliens. Only here, you realize you’re an alien, too.

9.
As With/Without Text transitioned from ‘with’ to ‘without,’ it made the case that the city and all its nightmares is one of Beyer’s great subjects. In the Amy + Jordan strips, the city is the stage for a nihilist slapstick steeped in violence and crippling doubt about the worth of civilization, or what passes for it. In Untitled (Pooooo Drawing), a drive-by sparks helpless, guilty laughter. At its most benign, the city upends its victims with tilted, sharp perspectives, and they find themselves on the cover of Dead Stories, one of eight or possibly nine individuals ushered by the devil in a neat line toward what is either a row of apartment buildings or a prison. At this point in history, Beyer seems to ask, can we tell the difference, and do we care if we can’t? At its most menacing—Three Jerks on Beach Umbrellas, from “Without Text,” is a good example—the city prepares to consume you, or reflects your pleasure in consuming and then spitting your own body out onto the pavement. At least you’ve murdered yourself instead of letting someone else do it.

10.
Fittingly, city living killed Amy and Jordan. In 2012 Beyer told Paul Gravett in an article for Art Review that he’d become “completely burned out on Amy and Jordan” even if he wasn’t “burned out on the idea of making comics.” And so he wrote a comic, also published in Art Review and Gravett’s article, in which Amy and Jordan are shot dead by a loud neighbor, who then reflects, “I did what I felt I had to do, and I did it with passion, integrity, courage, and honor,” amidst beer cans, the couple’s feet, and what are possibly Cheetos. The comic mocks each one of those ideals, right down to the gnarled scrawl with which they’re written, but you also sense that no one in Beyer’s world would disagree with the man.

11.
I’m glad Amy and Jordan are dead.

12.
In truth, they were always dead. That is Beyer’s other great subject, the one that extends through all of his work: death and its various animations, by which I mean how our existence becomes a living death. In Amy + Jordan, zombie-living is status quo. These two mopes were dead from their first panel, and the mistake others have made when writing about them is to write about them as if they were alive—as if any actions they took in the absurd “disaster!” plots Beyer concocted would have mattered; as if they were ever anything more than what Gravett describes as a “pair of eternal victims…,” victims of life itself, at the mercy of ludicrous circumstances and forces (“enemies,” one strip vaguely calls them) and each other’s malevolence and relentless ennui; as if the idea of taking control of your life is anything other than a tremendous joke. Even if you wanted to, all you’d do is tear out your lover’s eyes.

13.
With/Without Text suggested that in Beyer’s comics, when the veil of lies is lifted and the truth is revealed, everyone shrugs. “Nothing to be done,” as Gogo would say. It’s a late twentieth-century nihilism, another reason why the strips were arrestingly familiar. There is no point to social critique when the very notions of a “society” or “critique” are irredeemably corrupt, or if what those words refer to have already been obliterated, living replaced by merely existing. This quality infuses every anxious line and skewed perspective in the Amy + Jordan comics, every intentionally hackneyed plot and redundant piece of dialogue. This is not nihilism in the service of building something new; it says we are living in the aftermath of an Armageddon and witnessing the slow trickling away of humanity. That’s why I can’t see my way into thinking that these comics are “bleakly hilarious and life-affirming” and “a testament to how strong life is even in the face of a hostile environment” as Jeet Heer described them in 2004. Life is the hostile environment. We’re just as hostile as anyone else, but we tell ourselves that we’re not, and we get used to living by this lie.

14.
In comparison to the mainly black-and-white “With Text” pieces, the silkscreens and reverse paintings of “Without Text 1975-2012″ erupted with color: lime, midnight, blood, clay. More open, more traditionally the kind of objects you’d expect to see hanging on gallery walls, the “Without Text” works shifted the tone of the show, replacing claustrophobia with movement, history with myth, passivity with imagination. What critics have tried to dig for in Amy + Jordan, you couldn’t miss in these standalone works: the ritual of art and the freedom of subjectivity are the only things that give us control over our lives, and thus the only things that give life-that-seems-like-death any worthwhile meaning.

15.
In the course of a conversation for the August 1982 issue (#74) of the Comics Journal (reprinted in Art Spiegelman: Conversations), Kim Thompson and Gary Groth talked about Beyer with Spiegelman. Trying to articulate a criticism of RAW, Groth noted that Beyer’s work was “so abstracted…from a naturalistic or realistic…,” at which point Spiegelman interjected, “Oh, representational.” A page or two later:

Groth: I see a greater sensitivity in your work than in Beyer’s work. It’s simply so abstracted and so divorced from any aspect of reality.

Spiegelman: But it’s not. It’s real basic reality, like AAAAAAAAAARGHHHH! is basic reality.

In With/Without Text, it certainly wasn’t difficult to see what both were talking about, but at the risk of adjudicating a conversation that took place early in Beyer’s career, Spiegelman wins by a landslide. The “basic reality” of Beyer’s work at the time was indeed a cry of alarm and exhausted pain (Spiegelman refers to it as “raw nerve screaming”). The implication is that this basic reality is essentially emotion that can’t be put into words, only sound, or ‘soundless’ images.

16.
Beyer’s single-image silkscreens, drawings, and reverse paintings would seem to be even more subjective, even more distanced or “divorced…from reality” than his comics. Calling to mind the late 1960s work of Hairy Who member Jim Nutt, who also painted in reverse on plexiglas, these wordless portraits and scenes of near-psychedelic intensity are populated by arcane figures more consistently abstracted than those in Amy + Jordan. But they are still figures, individuals, and—this fascinated me as I walked through “Without Text”—despite their wordlessness, they speak more compellingly than anyone in the comics.

17.
Beyer’s comics lampoon speech, exposing its dire inadequacies. Usually crafted in the hyperbolic language of a child, narration and dialogue are stiffened by image redundancy and heavy-handed exposition. On an earlier page in We’re Depressed (one of three included in the exhibit), the narrator informs us, “Last episode, Jordan got infected by the same disease germs that infected Amy,” the phrase “disease germs” sounding like all the realism an eight year-old can muster. In “Fish City Airport,” Amy trawls what looks like the river Styx with the aforementioned rabbit named Jack, and after being tugged along by a flying fish, she lands in an airport and thinks to herself, “Nice airport, but I sense imminent danger.” Immediately, armed men begin shooting their way through the crowd, to which Amy replies, “Ugh oh, terrorists!” Surviving, she telephones Jack, who thinks privately, against that mocking, checkerboard background pattern, “To [sic] bad, I had hoped that you would have been killed, I hate you, I hate you!” This sounds vaguely honest, since any eloquence in this world would be just one more fraud.

18. 
In the wordless images, Beyer’s subjects speak eloquently by looking at you. Not always, but often. The eyes of the doll-like figure in Untitled (Clown/Magician), a silkscreen from 1991, stare just to your right. The children huddled next to him likewise are just barely avoiding eye contact with the viewer; same goes for the floating seahorse and the spitting bird and the dogs. In one untitled piece, a rotund figure actually waves at you, and in the 1995 reverse painting Untitled (The Office), desk-bound schlubs stare at you, waiting for your instructions. One of them prepares to dissect a human head with a fish bone.
So many of these individuals’ eyes bulge, horrified, more convincingly human than Amy and Jordan ever were. The duo’s stories were closed off and insular: you weren’t welcome, and why would you want to be? In these single images, particularly beginning in the mid-1990s, urban society becomes the familial, the tribal. This would seem to be even more insular, but the effect is actually more inviting; these aliens who gaze at you have questions for you, warnings, premonitions, and lives of their own they dare to think might actually matter.

19.
The reverse paintings appear brittle, though they are painted into what we would otherwise consider a hearty artifact of modernity: plexiglas. Still, the vivid colors and sheen of the surface make it seem like the individuals contained inside could break apart at any minute.

20.
In that TCJ interview, just after Spiegelman refers to “basic reality,” Groth responds, “Primitive art, you mean.” Spiegelman relents: “Yeah, primitive…I’m trying to avoid that word. It’s a whole other can of worms.” Primitive, naïve, outsider—parse the terminology however you like, it’s a troubled idea, and one that often rears up when comics are displayed in galleries or museums. As Bart Beaty points out in Comics Versus Art, “In a field in which so few cartoonists have been elevated to the status of art world insiders, it is not difficult to see how the conception of cartoonists in terms of outsider art might seem so appropriate.” We know the dangers, mainly that the outsider artist is portrayed as an unsocialized, uneducated, genius-oaf whose raw talent and private visions are redeemed by an institutional art world that uses him or her to seem relevant and hip at the cost of derogating the artist’s skill, craft, and effort. Jean Dubuffet saw art brut as a permanent resistance to the institutional art world, but arguably, that world simply made room for outsider art, which, after all, only reifies the long-standing concept of what literary scholar Jack Stillinger called the “myth of solitary genius.” But does it always have to be this way? Is someone who’s entranced by what’s called outsider art obliged to call it that, and to enter into the cultural, aesthetic and political battlefield? By policing the borders of high and low culture, do we just maintain their division and the hegemony of the institutional art world? And if we avoid the question—which the Urban Arts Space did by never explicitly framing With/Without Text as an outsider art exhibit, presumably to let Beyer’s work speak for itself—are we just as guilty of maintaining the status quo? And here’s a more pertinent question: Is it necessary or valuable to think of Beyer as an outsider artist?
So, yeah, a can of worms. That’s enough of that.

21.
What is “primitive” in the majority of Beyer’s silkscreens and reverse paintings presented in “Without Text” is actually progressive. Though a core idea in Beyer’s comics is still in play—that, though we believe otherwise, we are living in a devolved society, staggering along in a radioactive haze, half-melted, devolved; there are few if any shadows in these works, as if the sun has gone out—the response to this idea in “Without Text” is, instead of a shrug, a question: Now that we have been stripped to our prehistoric marrow, what do we do now? The primordial nature of this question imbues these works with an affirming and surprising humanism, even in the Untitled (The Office), which, for all its bright grotesquerie, is contemplative and inquisitive. “[R]eal basic reality” in the comics is a scream trapped within a hopeless culture. In the silkscreens and reverse paintings, the nihilism of our society has created the opportunity to progress into a different kind of culture, one that is perhaps “real basic” but not solipsistic, one in which we are not victims but participants, grounded by a belief in the possibility of meaning.

22.
Though Beyer’s distortions would seem to breach the walls of reality, in actuality they push those walls farther afield, imagining into being a wider sense of what reality is.

23.
In so many of the Amy + Jordan comics, culture, which is epitomized by the city, turns life and death into meaningless jokes told on each other. Though the exhibit made no claims about a systematic philosophy on Beyer’s part, it seems significant that so many of his recent wordless images depict a culture more engaged with nature in the largest sense of the word, including the fundamental mystery of death and the possibility of what happens after. These images suggest that what we call the supernatural is just nature we hesitate to imagine out of fear, but if we have the courage to imagine it, living might become meaningful. This is captured most literally in Tunnel of Death from 1994. Here Beyer’s compositional flatness recalls antiquity: cave paintings, hieroglyphs. As souls float by on black water, the boatsman Charon holds a candle that emits lines instead of light. His eyes are ambiguous: flat, vaguely malicious, grim, and alert. This seems to be Dante’s version of Styx, the Fifth Circle of Hell, since we can spot the eternally hateful and morose Amy drowning in the water. But who is the soul being ferried across the swamp? He stands there passively, the size of a child, mummified and glowing, possessing both guilt and innocence, and engaged with life even if it’s slipping away.

All images courtesy Ada Matusiewicz, with the exception of “Clown/Magician”, courtesy Courtney Williams.”

Though one of the classic comic strips, Barnaby was never a popular hit — at its height, it was syndicated in only 52 papers. By contrast, Chic Young’s Blondie was appearing in as many as 850 papers at that time. As Coulton Waugh noted in his landmark The Comics (1947), Barnaby’s audience may not “compare, numerically, with that of the top, mass-appeal strips. But it is a very discriminating audience, which includes a number of strip artists themselves, and so this strip stands a good chance of remaining to influence the course of American humor for many years to come.”  He was right.

Barnaby’s fans have included Peanuts creator Charles Schulz, Family Circus creator Bil Keane, and graphic novelists Daniel Clowes, Art Spiegelman, and Chris Ware. It had many fans beyond the world of comics, too. Dorothy Parker compared Barnaby to Huckleberry Finn, and said: “I think, and I am trying to talk calmly, that Barnaby and his friends and oppressors are the most important additions to American arts and letters in Lord knows how many years. I know that they are the most important additions to my heart.”

It had a smaller following than other strips, but its fans were both more influential and more devoted. As Johnson wryly observed in late 1942, “If Dick Tracy were dropped from the News, 300,000 readers would say, ‘Oh dear!’ But if Barnaby went from [the newspaper] PM, his 300 readers would write indignant letters.” Though he didn’t say so, even reaching those 300 readers was an uphill struggle. If not for a chance meeting with an art editor, Crockett Johnson’s graphic masterpiece might never have been published at all.

 In 1939, Crockett Johnson turned 33, fell in love, and began considering a career as a syndicated cartoonist. He’d spent most of his career as an art editor — in 1927, for Aviation magazine, and then, in 1929, for a half-dozen McGraw-Hill trade publications. In 1934, he began contributing cartoons to New Masses, becoming in 1936 its art editor, a job that paid only $20-$25 per week.  He worked for the Communist weekly because he believed in its message, but, he thought, perhaps a daily comic strip would provide a better source of income?  Maybe it was time for a change.

Johnson was then facing other big decisions. After a half-dozen years together, he and his wife Charlotte had decided to divorce. In the fall of 1939, at a party either in Greenwich Village or on Fire Island (sources differ), the soft-spoken, taciturn Johnson met the outgoing, adventurous Ruth Krauss. Recently divorced herself, she was a slender five-feet-four. He was nearly six feet tall, with the build of an ex-football player. Complimentary opposites, they felt an immediate attraction to one another. Within a year, she moved into his West Village apartment, he left New Masses, and invented a strip that would become a minor classic.

Popularly known as The Little Man with the Eyes, Johnson’s first comic strip was nearly wordless. Reminiscent of Otto Soglow’s The Little King in both its spare, clean line, and its gentle humor, The Little Man made its debut in Collier’s weekly in March 1940.  Using only the caption and the movement of the central character’s eyes, the strip offered comic observations on life’s daily absurdities. During its nearly-3-year run, it became popular enough to inspire an advertising campaign for Ford later in the decade.

The Little Man was largely apolitical. Johnson, however, was very political. Seeking a strip with a wider range of expression than The Little Man, by late 1940 he had the idea of building a daily comic around a precocious 5-year-old boy living in a proper suburban home. He realized that he had always been thinking of the boy as “Barnaby,” and so that became the title character’s name. After drawing a few episodes, he realized that Barnaby wasn’t enough to sustain the strip. So, as he said, “I fumbled around, just like O’Malley, and O’Malley came in by himself.”

With the introduction of Barnaby’s cigar-champing con artist of a fairy godfather, Johnson’s strip found its source of narrative conflict, satire, and possibility. But Johnson couldn’t interest a syndicate in Barnaby. In any case, he was busy. When the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor drew America into World War II, he was not called to serve. Instead, in January of 1942, he co-founded the American Society of Magazine Cartoonists’ Committee on War Cartoons.  The following month at the Arts Students League, the Committee’s Artists Against the Axis exhibition made its debut. Charles Addams, Peter Arno, Maurice Becker, William Gropper, Syd Hoff, Charles Martin, Garret Price, Gardner Rea, Ad Reinhardt, Carl Rose, Saul Steinberg, Arthur Szyk, Barney Tobey, and of course Crockett Johnson all contributed work. The show would go on to tour the country, raising money for the Allied war effort.

Also in early 1942, Johnson and Krauss moved to the country — Darien, Connecticut. Only an hour’s train ride from the bustle of Manhattan, Johnson worked on the Little Man. It might have remained his best-known creation but for a visit from his friend Charles Martin, who had recently become Art Editor of the Popular Front newspaper PM. When Martin saw a half-page color Sunday Barnaby strip, he liked it and asked if he could bring it back to the city. Johnson said sure. Back in New York, Martin showed the strip to King Features. They didn’t like it. He showed it to PM’s new Comics Editor Hannah Baker, and she loved it.

Thanks to her encouragement, on April 14th, 1942, PM’s readers got their first glimpse of Barnaby — he is walking, looking skyward, and calling “Mr. O’Malley!”  This was the first of several ads announcing Barnaby’s debut the following week.

Though Johnson usually claimed that there was no one particular inspiration for Barnaby’s fairy godfather, he did admit that “O’Malley is at least a hundred different people.  A lot of people think he’s W.C. Fields, but he isn’t.  Still you couldn’t live in America and not put some of Fields into O’Malley. O’Malley is partly [New York] Mayor La Guardia and his cigar and eyes are occasionally borrowed from Jimmy Savo,” the diminutive vaudeville comic and singer. It’s equally likely that autobiographical inspiration for O’Malley came from Johnson’s father, David Leisk. He shared with Barnaby’s fairy godfather a creative mind, a taste for stories, a sense of possibility, and the fact that both men are foreigners. Born in the Shetland Islands, the elder David Leisk loved literature, wrote poetry, liked to sing, was a skilled carpenter, and had worked as a journalist before becoming a bookkeeper at New York’s Johnson Lumber Company — the source for his son’s middle name.

Crockett Johnson was born David Johnson Leisk in Manhattan in 1906, and grew up in Corona, Queens — which was then much more like the suburban neighborhood where Barnaby lives. Johnson’s childhood fondness for exploring the great outdoors may have led him to a comic strip about frontiersman Davy Crockett. He was not the only “Dave” in the neighborhood, but he could become the only “Crockett.”  In the 1930s, he used this childhood nickname for the first half of his pen-name, “Crockett Johnson.”  But he otherwise did not use the name as an adult. Friends knew him as “Dave Johnson.”

Though not given to talking about himself, Johnson, in admitting that Barnaby was based on no particular children, quietly acknowledged that the character comes from his own childhood. “I don’t get anything much from kids,” he told the Philadelphia Record’s Charles Fisher. “How can you? They are all different. And I don’t draw or write Barnaby for children. People who write for children usually write down to them. I don’t believe in that.” Told that children also like Barnaby, Johnson smiled and said, “I’m glad when I hear they do. You see . . . well, when it comes to knowing about children, it’s a terribly old thing to say, but everyone was once a child himself.”

Crockett Johnson also drew on his fascination with odd pieces of knowledge, the best example of which is Mr. O’Malley’s favorite expression, “Cushlamochree!” What does it mean? Johnson himself answered that question, responding to a letter from a Barnaby fan.

His etymology reads as if he were writing it while sitting next to the Compact Oxford English Dictionary, open to the entry for “acushla.” He was probably doing exactly that. Johnson enjoyed reference works, collecting peculiar facts — the very sort of information that O’Malley likes to cite, creatively mangling it in support of his latest scheme.

If O’Malley’s schemes resemble those ideas that seem compelling in the evening but not in the harsh light of day, that’s because Johnson was nocturnal, typically writing Barnaby between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m. Generally, he spent the first two nights writing the script, and the next two drawing the art. Next, PM’s type shop set Johnson’s dialogue in italicized Futura medium, and sent it back to Johnson. He cut out these thin strips of words and pasted them into each panel. He would either have to bring the strips into New York himself, or, if he was running late, rely on his neighbor Bob McNell to drop them off at PM’s offices on his way to his ad agency job. Sometimes, Johnson was running so late that he would bring them over to McNell at 6 a.m., the glue still drying.

By the fall of 1943, the strip was in PM, the Chicago Sun, Philadelphia Record, St. Louis Star-Times, Harrisburg Telegraph, St. Petersburg Times and Troy (N.Y.) Record. In terms of circulation, Barnaby was no Blondie or Dick Tracy, but it was already earning Johnson a $5000 annual salary — which, in today’s dollars, would be about $65,000. And it had prospects. As soon as he could find a sponsor, Johnson was planning on a Barnaby radio show. There was even talk, that spring, of creating a musical comedy based on Barnaby. That same spring, Johnson made his debut as a children’s-book illustrator with the publication of Constance J. Foster’s This Rich World: The Story of Money.

Amidst this busy schedule, Krauss was working on her first children’s book, A Good Man and His Good Wife, and was about to become a wife for the second time. After living together for over two years, she and Johnson formalized what most of their neighbors assumed they had already done. In June 1943, they got married.

In October, Henry Holt published Johnson’s Barnaby.  It sold its first printing of 10,000 copies in its first week, and would sell 40,000 before the end of the year.  The reviews were ecstatic. Pulitzer Prize-winning poet William Rose Benèt called Barnaby “a classic of humor” and declared Mr. O’Malley “a character to live with the Mad Hatter, the White Rabbit, Ferdinand, and all great creatures of fantasy.” Ruth McKenney, whose My Sister Eileen had become an Oscar-nominated film earlier that year, delighted in “that evil intentioned, vain, pompous, wonderful little man with the wings.”  As she put it, “I suppose Mr. O’Malley has fewer morals than any other character in literature which is, of course, what makes him so fascinating.” Dorothy Parker began her “Mash Note to Crockett Johnson” by confessing that she could not write a review because, despite her efforts, “it never comes out a book review. It is always a valentine for Mr. Johnson.” Lauding the book as “the best American creative writing of this year” and O’Malley as “the most brilliantly conceived character in many a year,” novelist and Book-of-the-Month Club publicity director Edwin Seaver nominated Barnaby for a Pulitzer.

At the age of 37, Crockett Johnson suddenly had fans. Life and Newsweek had both run features on Barnaby. Critics loved his book. However, adulation both pleased him and bemused him. It was great to be a success, but he also enjoyed not being the center of attention. And success seemed to bring more work, which used time he might otherwise have spent sleeping, reading, sailing, … or having a lamb sandwich.  He had not only to turn out six Barnaby strips per week, but also to make each strip meet his standards. “I never feel that I can let down,” he told a journalist in November 1943. “If I did, the stuff wouldn’t get to be just mediocre; it would be terrible.”  While Johnson felt that “There’s nothing worse than the obligation to be funny,” he also considered Barnaby “a pretty good racket.”  Racket?  Perhaps Mr. O’Malley’s great unacknowledged source is the life of Crockett Johnson himself — with the key difference being that Johnson’s “racket” was actually successful. Cushlamochree!

]]> http://www.tcj.com/crockett-johnson-and-the-invention-of-barnaby/feed/ 6 http://www.tcj.com/the-genevieve-castree-interview/ http://www.tcj.com/the-genevieve-castree-interview/#comments Wed, 17 Apr 2013 12:00:54 +0000 Naomi Fry http://www.tcj.com/?p=53709 Susceptible/ Continue reading →]]> Geneviève Castrée is a Quebec-born cartoonist and musician whose gorgeous, carefully observed autobiographical graphic novel, Susceptible, was published in February by Drawn and Quarterly. In her comics as well as in her one-person music project, Ô Paon, Castrée’s sensibility is poignant but never maudlin, even when, as she does in Susceptible, she recounts complex and often painful moments from her childhood years, growing up in Quebec with a young single mother. Castrée, who now lives and works in the small Pacific Northwest town of Anacortes, WA, spoke with me recently over the phone about making art as a self-conscious person, the difficulties of writing truthfully about people close to you, and the relative virtues of walking away from conflict instead of resolving it. -Naomi Fry

“I Mostly Have Psychological Reasons for Wanting to Live Here”

Naomi Fry: How long have you been living in Anacortes?

Geneviève Castrée: Well, officially, as in legally, for about eight years. Before that there was a lot of coming and going and immigration confusion, because my husband and I wanted to move to Canada, but we couldn’t figure out where we wanted to live in Canada, and in 2005 I finally said, although it wasn’t really my life’s goal to move to the USA, that we should move here. My husband was raised in Anacortes, and I didn’t really have a sense of roots anywhere. It’s a small town and there aren’t many young people, which actually gets difficult socially sometimes. It’s great for families, but if you don’t know if you want to raise kids [Laughs,] or you don’t know what you want to do with your life, this is a terrible place to be. You have to have something going on to live here.

It’s pretty unique for an active artist to live in such a small place. How does it work for you?

I mostly have psychological reasons for wanting to live here. It’s funny, I can talk a lot, and I can totally take up space in social situations, but overall I’m quite introverted as a person, and I really appreciate the space. I am rich in space here. It’s actually really nice that way. There’s this sort of magical power to Anacortes. The amount of money we pay per month to own a house here is probably half what somebody would pay to rent a place in New York. I have a room that I can close the door to and make a studio out of, and if I want to make music I have several options, there’s a room in my house that I can use for that, or we also rent this old Catholic church in town that some friends and my husband and I can access whenever I want and make music and practice. That’s the beauty of living in a small town. Since there’s always an exodus to the cities, the artists who choose to live in small towns have all these resources.

I often wonder what it would be like to live in a smaller place.

It’s kind of a total cliché to say this, but this is one of the advantages of this weird digital era we live in. If you’re a cartoonist or a musician or a writer there’s a long list of jobs that you can do from home, and it’s expanding. That’s the exciting part. you don’t have to be in a large city center anymore. I do miss the sense of community. Like, living in this town I really crave women peers who are closer to my age, who make art that I can relate to. Often, if I meet an artist who lives in this town it’s a seventy-year-old lady who does paintings of dolphins [Laughs.] And they’re like, “I know exactly how you feel!” And I’m like, I don’t think you do [Laughs.]

“In fact, I hope you don’t” [Laughter.]

“Weird, Bold Things”

Before Susceptible, your first book with D+Q, you were publishing with L’Oie de Cravan in Montreal, right? 

Yeah, I was a teenage cartoonist. The first book that I did with L’Oie de Cravan came out in 2000, when I was 18. I was a lot faster when I was younger. I guess maybe my style or the drawing itself was less developed. And then I did a couple more books with them. The third book, Pamplemoussi, was also a record. That was the first time that I made music. I thought, ok, I want to make a book and I want it to have music, and I don’t want anyone else to write the music, I’m going to do it. So I kind of had to teach myself how to make notes with the guitar, just to figure out a way to write songs and find a way to make some sounds come out of a guitar as I was singing them. And it was after that, in 2007, that I made another book that included a record, in collaboration with K records.

So you weren’t at all a musician before you made music for your own comics?

No, I wasn’t.

What was it about the connection between the visuals and the music that you felt had to happen?

I don’t know. It’s not like I’d never ever considered making music before. When I was a really really little kid I went to this arts oriented school, for the first grade, and we had violin lessons in the morning. We didn’t go very far, we played “Frère Jacques” and that’s about as far as it went [Laughs.] But I do wonder often now that I look back, maybe it just awoke something in me, the way a child who is exposed to a foreign language as a baby has an easier time learning languages as an adult. And I was really obsessed with music as a teenager and I did have a lot of moments where my friends and I would “jam” in a basement, but I didn’t know how to play guitar and I mostly yelled lyrics that I made up on the spot. But I did know for a while that I wanted to make music and this was sort of my chance. People can be really bold when they’re young. I was 20 or 21 when I first got the idea to make music. And I think you do these weird bold things you might not have the self-confidence to do later on. The more I think about making music the more embarrassing I think it is [Laughs.]

Isn’t the whole idea of creative endeavor sort of embarrassing? For me it’s writing, but whether you’re a cartoonist, or a musician, or a writer, isn’t there a level of self-consciousness about the whole idea of self-expression?

For me, with music, even if I just had a show to play tonight, just the act of getting up on stage in front of a bunch of people and singing from the heart (Laughs,) if you think about it too hard it’s never gonna happen: like, oh my god, look at me, I’m singing in this pretty voice, these lyrics that I applied myself to write. If you think about it your lyrics start to sound, like, who the fuck do I think I am? (Laughs.].

Before talking to you I went online to look at Ô Paon videos, and there’s this one clip where you’re wearing this green hood, and you’re singing in front of an audience?

Yes, this was here, in Anacortes, as part of this festival we organize, my friends and my husband and I, which we used to call What the Heck. That hood video, that’s a great example of how embarrassing it can be, the only way it can happen is if you don’t think about it too hard. I had this costume thing that I had made for this photo shoot I was doing with a friend of mine for this other music project that I do called Urine [Laughs.] I just had this costume and on the day of the show I grabbed it on my way out and as one of the organizers of the festival, I was working the door and telling these volunteers what to do, and there’s all this stress, cause I have twenty people staying at my house, and the only way I could switch to performer mode was just to put this dumb green coat over myself (Laughs.] In trying to explain it, in hindsight, it’s like, yeah, I’m wearing this green cloak, because green is the color of nature, trying to give it any other meaning sounds so stupid [Laughs.]

When you switch into performer mode, or even writer mode, or artist mode, you need some sort of theatrical permission to say: ok. I’m doing this. And recognizing this and finding that you need these switches to do these borderline ridiculous acts…

I think that “borderline ridiculous” is a really good way to put it, actually. Because that’s what it feels like sometimes. I know plenty of males feel like this, and I hate making these generalizations about gender, I’m most definitely a feminist and I hate being like, this is what men do, this is what women do. But socially, I think that even if your parents are the coolest, raddest, want to help you break gender boundaries… basically even if your parents are doing this tremendous job, you go out into the world and you go to school, and in school you’ll learn these dumb stereotypes you’re supposed to fit into. And little girls are told to be pleasant, and to please, and boys are told to be boisterous and sturdy and have confidence, and to lose that fragility as a woman, like, oh, people are going to take pictures of me when I’m doing these really ugly faces on stage and I have to be ok with it, it’s really empowering but it’s also… the only way to deal is to completely remove myself… I’m so self-conscious so much of the time that the only way I can be onstage is to stop thinking.

It sounds very stage-centric, what you’re talking about, but can it apply to your comics, especially because they’re so personal? Is it easier to write about yourself as a child and a teenager, rather than, say, as a 26-year-old?

With Susceptible, it wasn’t that embarrassing for me, because the things that happen in it are from such a long time ago, and when you’re a kid you’re just inherently more vulnerable, you’re in this position of, whatever stupid thing you do, it’s not exactly fully your fault yet. I mean, I haven’t really processed what it was like for me as a 26 year old. Also, there’s a part of me that wants to keep it private, since it wasn’t that long ago, I feel as if I’m in exactly the same place I was when I was 26 years old [Laughs.]

But, you asked if it was stage-centric, and actually, I do think it applies for a lot of forms of art. I didn’t go to art school. I just went to high school, got my diploma, and that was that. But I have so many women friends who I really thoroughly admire who have had a fancy-pants arts education and who don’t work in anything related to what they studied, and when they do make art, it sounds horrible to say, but it’s kind of weak, some of the time? Like, a friend who went to this incredible art school made an art show of felted things. I’m not saying that you can’t make something that’s felted and is rad, but if you make a show of felted woodland creatures, why did you need to go to art school? But I think it’s self-consciousness – “I’ve seen other people do it and it works so…”

So do you feel lucky in a way that you hadn’t had an extended arts education?

Yes, I often feel lucky. Mostly because I don’t have that debt to pay back! [Laughs.] But, I feel that I was really unruly, I got out of school and I just wanted to do my thing. Who knows how long I can keep this up? But for the time being… I mean, I stand by everything I made, at least from the point where I started having somebody else publish my work. I sure hope that I do better things now, but I’m not embarrassed by those earlier comic books. And I feel like maybe I had more time to do trial and error before making my D+Q debut, instead of having my D+Q debut be when I was twenty.

“It Took Me 11 Years”

How did the connection with D+Q come about?

Well this is really ironic to say after I’ve told you this story, but the first time I was actually approached by D+Q was when I was 20. I met Chris Oliveros when I was 18, we went to this comics festival in France and there was a big group of people from Quebec. And then when I was 20, I remember I got my first email from Chris in 2001, talking about how he’d like to publish a book by me. And so it took me 11 years to come up with something where I could say, would you like to publish this? [Laughs.]

So, seriously, you’ve been in touch for eleven years?

Yeah. Doesn’t that sound really really really dumb? [Laughter.]

So how did that work? Did you keep in touch occasionally, or did you just lose touch for nine years and then two years ago you were like, hi, I have a book? [Laughs.] This is really fascinating.

I don’t know! [Laughs.] Well, first I felt a huge sense of loyalty to my other publisher in Montreal. He would never have been bothered by me publishing with D+Q. Ever. He actually was very clear about it: if you do a book with D+Q it’s just good for me. I just felt this sense of, I was working on this book project for him, and I think there was a lot of leftover intense family stuff that I didn’t know exactly how to deal with. And the weird self-consciousness stuff got much bigger, and like a lot of artists I struggle with depression, and then I got involved in music, so basically I had too many things going on at the same time.

So this was this sort of thing at the back of your mind, going, I need to take that next step but I’m not ready now…

In all honesty, I don’t think I was ready. It was nice of Chris and so flattering of him to invite me and to see something in me that he felt I was ready to do a project. But I sort of didn’t know what story would be good enough, and then in 2009 I just came to the realization that the best story I have to tell is to get rid of this family thing. I kept feeling I kept telling the same story over and over but in these camouflaged, hidden ways, metaphorically, poetically, talking about the depression I felt related to my childhood. Finally I was like, I just need to take this huge dump and move on! [Laughs.]

Yeah, a lot of your earlier work was more metaphorical and fantastical, less realistic.

I feel that I’m done doing more fantastical things. Who knows, maybe in ten years I’ll be singing a different tune. But it’s weird, because as I was making this book based on reality, I’ve encountered people who’ve said, oh, I wish there was more fantastical elements in this. And I personally feel there’s enough fantasy out there, there are enough beautiful landscapes. In the past, I think there were two factors in making those kinds of fantastical comics. The first factor was mainly that I was terrified, because I felt I still was under this impression that whatever happened at my house when I was a kid was nobody’s business but my own. And the second factor was that I was lazy [Laughs.] My default mechanism was to draw landscapes that were more from my imagination, and that’s kind of easy to draw, because you can make your pencil go and not have to look at anything. And for this book, because I wanted it to be as close to reality as possible, I had to find images, and I had to think of what kind of tree there would be in this or that geographical place, and in some cases look at photographs too, and I personally feel a lot more complete now that I’ve done that, as an artist I feel that I can do this! I can pull it off! And I just feel like a grownup about it. Also I care way more than I used to about facts, I think that all stories deserve to be from… even if I’m making stories that are not autobiographical, that are totally coming from my head, I like the idea that there would be these facts that could anchor it to a specific place in the world.

So, how true-to-life is Susceptible?

These are all memories from my childhood. I changed all of the names. But all the events are exact or as exact as I remember them. I’ve done maybe five interviews about this and I keep saying the same thing because I don’t know how to otherwise put it: I think that real, true autobiography is pretty much impossible. But I did write down all of the stories that I remembered and that I was thinking of doing in the book, and then I crossed some of them off because they were too redundant, or they made the book feel like a total drag to read, and then… it’s really funny to think about it so casually now, because when I was working on it was really really draining and emotional…

It was emotional to read it!

[Laughs.] Yeah, it was definitely emotional to work on! So I would do one kind of harsher story, and one that was milder, and the stuff that I was most excited about drawing right after the one that was hardest to draw. It’s a bit of an illusion because it sort of make the book itself look more consistent, because from page one to page 70 you don’t see this drastic evolution in my style, that I got much better at drawing [Laughs.]

How long were you working on this?

For 2.5 years, but the first year I was allowing myself to do other things, and then the other year and a half this was my only thing I was doing as my drawing project. I went on a music tour but that was pretty much it. Like the rest of my time was just really long hours of working on the book.

“The Most Selfish Thing I had to Do”

This is a question that obviously gets asked a lot of memoirists, but was it difficult for you to present family members in a light that might be compromising, or might open up old wounds?

It’s pretty surreal to do something like this. I was agonizing a lot, especially about my mom. I kept thinking, what am I doing to her? My intention was most definitely not to hurt. Even if it doesn’t feel cruel to other people, if she read it… first of all, I have no idea whether my mom knows this book is out.

Are you not in touch with her?

No, I’m not, and so… here’s the thing. I try to protect my family in this way, that there’s a part of me that wants to protect my family, not talk about them as real people. But then there’s another part of me that’s like, I just did this book. I don’t want to be a hypocrite about it. Like, “Oh, well, you’ll never know” [Laughs.] I feel comfortable basically saying that I was agonizing because I know I’ve broken her heart numerous times, already starting a long time ago. It’s just this thing, I have this magical power to break my mom’s heart.

Well, it seems from the book that she can break your heart too.

Well, it’s this cliché of this mother/daughter relationship. This book is the most selfish thing that I’ve ever had to do but I needed to do it. I could never have called her up and told her all these stories, the minute I would start to talk about it, and this is not just because of her, it’s just the way these conversations go, when things are very tender and sore in a family, you start trying to bring something really intense up and you get interrupted immediately and it just snowballs, and the only way for me to get everything out was to write a book about it. And the reason I wanted to write a book about it was not purely because of me, I was also meeting more and more people who had similar relationships with their families, it’s not straight up abuse, it’s not like Daddy’s Girl by Debbie Drechsler.

Oh God, I’m still traumatized by that book! [Laughter.]

It’s these weird nuances that I was trying to talk about, where you can come from a family where there are these really strange gray zones, and you don’t really understand why it feels so terrible to everyone involved, to the parents, and to the children, but it’s a common thing, so I felt inspired to make this book about how a family can love one another but still do some pretty traumatizing things.

The situation in the book is obviously not like Daddy’s Girl, that’s monstrous, but just thinking about a child like you’re describing yourself being in the book, vulnerable and unprotected in certain ways, it was really powerful. Even though I realized that things were hard for your mom too, being a young mother with no support and so on, it really made me feel angry!

Thanks, I guess, and at the same time, ugh [Laughs.] I was trying to be fair. But that’s the thing. Sometimes when you have an audience or a readership when you’re in conflict with someone… I’m in a conflict with my family but I’m creating this readership so I have something on them. They don’t have that. They don’t have anyone to defend them. They don’t have anyone to say what you just said to me: well, things were hard, or, your daughter is just an ungrateful bastard [Laughs.] I guess with this book I was feeling a lot of anguish about what type of difficulties, of torture, I was creating for my mom. And I just have to accept that weather or not I was going be doing the book, my mom was already feeling tortured by me. I think that no matter what you get from the book, no matter how many times someone is like, well it’s a kid, it’s a kid, you were a kid and you were treated that way, my mom was also put in this horrible situation; having a child at 19, and having to raise it on her own, and the way single moms are treated in our society is totally unacceptable. They don’t have enough help. Another thing is that a 19-year-old having a baby probably thinks it’s going to be easier than it turns out to be [Laughs.] I don’t think that many children are wanted, that’s nothing new. I think a lot of 35-year-olds have babies they weren’t planning on.

Are you in touch with your father?

Yes, mostly over the mail. I haven’t seen him in seven years. He did read the book, and one good thing about that was hearing him say, “at least the parts that I’m in are exactly as I remember them.” So it was good to have that approval. And also I knew that I could be honest about him. I knew starting the book that I had his approval, whatever I wanted to do I knew him and his girlfriend would be like, “the kid needs to do this” [Laughs.]

And also, just the fact that your mother didn’t abandon you, that you lived with her, would probably make that relationship in some ways more tortured. Because maybe it’s easier when there is that distance that your father created.

It was really hard for my mom to see me getting along with my dad because he hardly put any energy into raising me… In fact, he put zero energy into raising me [Laughs,] and then to see me having this relationship with him… I think a lot of teenagers feel like they don’t belong, like they’re aliens, and to find a blood relative of yours, not just a blood relative but your dad, and to find things in common and to be able to have a real conversation, that’s incredible, and that’s something that’s been going on between me and my dad throughout my adult life. With my mother there’s so much that’s left unsaid, and with my father there’s always been this openness, where I can just say whatever I want, including when I’m angry.

You start the book with an epigraph from a Joanne Kyger poem – “but blood does bring curiosity.” What was your intention with this quote?

The way I interpret it is, you’re related to this person: what does it mean? I do feel that way about everyone on my mother’s side of my family, and my dad too. I’m constantly in awe that my dad is my dad. I’m like, what? [Laughs.] But then we look at each other’s features, our faces, our hands, our feet, and clearly we are the same. On the side of my mother’s family it’s sort of a psychological link that I feel. There is this darkness that doesn’t get talked about. I don’t want to expose too many private details but I do think there are a lot of amazing crazy stories in that family that nobody talks about. I was like, I have to finish this book! Because I think there are some cycles in my family that need to be broken.

“Walking Away is not necessarily that Evil”

There’s something brave about deciding to break the cycle, even if it means not being in touch with your family.

Yeah, you just said the magical words, about not being in touch. That was a lot of what went behind making the book. There are a million movies about families that are going through something hard together, and then at the end the kid finally says something to the parents, and the parents accept it, and they’re happy, and they have this tearful embrace, and in real life, things don’t always happen that way, it’s actually quite rare [Laughs.] I wanted to have this story that’s real in the sense of, you know what, you really can’t do anything about it. Move on by yourself.

Or create your own family, or find your own partner.

Yeah. Sometimes fixing a problem, the solution can be… if you’ve tried all other things, walking away is not necessarily that evil [Laughs.] And then this other thing, time heals all wounds, that’s pure fucking bullshit. Maybe it does for some people, but… [Laughs.]

There’s a lot to be said for moving far away from your family, particularly your parents. It makes things a lot easier, in some ways.

Well, sometimes it breaks that weird umbilical cord. The thing I regret with my own relationship with my mother specifically is that something I’ve observed happening with so many of my other friends didn’t happen. I saw many of these friends who finished high school, went to college, and then when they came back for Christmas or whatever to their families, there was this new relationship. The relationship had transitioned. It was not painless, in most cases, but there was this opportunity to know your parents as this new thing. And in my case, I came back, and I was expected to go back to the room I’d been sleeping, and stay there. Continue to go to school, but come home every night, or get an apartment with my mom and just stay there. The opportunity to have a new relationship never came up.

On the one hand it seemed like there was a lot of openness between you and your parents, too much openness. You were exposed to things kids aren’t supposed to be exposed to—drug use, alcohol use, sexual dalliances. But then on the other hand it seemed that your mother and your step-dad were also very strict with you.

My roles were different from those of other kids. I was expected to be more like a friend, from an earlier age – as soon as I was able to have logical conversation, I was all of a sudden a confidante, and I was expected to behave more like a grownup. It’s really funny: I was offered two extremes. I was offered to be like a grownup in some senses, and then in some other senses, I wasn’t trusted with some really simple things, like using the stereo.

Why was that, do you think?

Quebec used to be this place that was super Catholic, and while some of my Montreal friends who are close in age to my mom and her boyfriend, they had these childhoods where there were only two kids, and they’d go to the movie theater, my mom and her boyfriend came from very small villages where the church still held a lot of power. And with my mom coming from a family of 16 children, she came from a different era, and both her and her boyfriend had these values from these olden days. So while the two of them had emancipated themselves from this religious upbringing—he traveled to India, and she smoked hash sometimes, and they thought they were pretty cool people who listened to Pink Floyd—they were still like, “this is not the tone of voice you use to talk to your parents, young lady”. And their idea of what an appropriate punishment would be what I could easily imagine was something from their childhood.

 In one of the chapters, your mom comes and sits with you and a boyfriend, and she’s like, do you listen to Pink Floyd, and you want to kill yourself, “I’m so ashamed” [Laughter.]

Yeah, in those parts of the book I also wanted to show that I was kind of a snot, like, “oh, go away.”

I definitely identified with that. Now that I’m getting on in years and I’m a parent myself, I can totally see myself being the embarrassing mom, coming up and asking, oh, do you kids still listen to…

Belle and Sebastian? [Laughter.]

Exactly.

“I Just Procrastinate Until 3 PM”

What are you working on right now?

I’ve been getting into making porcelain volcanoes recently. The thing about this specific porcelain that I use is that it sort of collapses onto itself very easily. And so I’m trying to play with that. I can only build it up so high before it falls. So I’ve been doing things to the volcanoes to make them shoot out, all these tricks. I have made some porcelain sculptures in my house but lately I’ve been using this studio and it’s really great. One of the mad miracles of living here is I met this lady, Sue Roberts, who’s a sculptor, and she lives on the island right next to where I live in Anacortes, so I can ride my bike to the ferry for seven minutes and then the ferry ride takes seven minutes. It’s 15 minutes overall. It’s really exciting, you take a really fast boat and then you’re on the island next door, and I can work with porcelain in her studio. The great thing about porcelain as opposed to drawing is that I need to work a lot faster, and it’s never going to look like what I was planning in my head, so I just have to deal with what the clay is going to let you do.

So you’re saying it has less control than the drawing process?

Yes, probably because I’m just starting, I only started doing this three years ago, and I have so much other stuff going on that I’m definitely a novice. I don’t understand it as well as I understand the other stuff that I do.

How important is control for you in your process as a cartoonist? Do you plot out things in advance very carefully?

I don’t think I have that much perspective on my process. I may say one thing and then somebody else who has seen me at work might say, oh no, that’s totally wrong. I saw this in a couple of places, people saying that: the line is very controlled, and I was like, really? It is? [Laughs.] But, I guess I’m really fussy or we can say anal about how I want things to be, but I think that as I’m getting older, and also as I’m doing other things, I’m excited about the improvisation or mistakes that get made. I look at it and think, actually this looks much better or more alive than it would otherwise. You do things over and over and then there’s a little quirk that happens and you’re like, I’m going to leave it there!

What are you reading right now?

There was this cartoonist in Quebec in the early 80s called Sylvie Rancourt, and she did this autobiographical comic about being a stripper, in French, called Mélody. At the time it was translated into English and redrawn by this cartoonist named Jacques Boivin, and was published by Kitchen Sink. But I’m reading the original, that Ego comme X in France just republished. And it’s incredible, because this woman had no professional training. She sort of read some Tintin, and she sort of read some Archie comics… She decided to draw her adventures as a stripper, and she’d photocopy them or print them maybe and sell them to her customers in the strip club where she worked. And the drawings are really naïve but in a really beautiful way, it’s really rare, they’re always present, their roundness; somebody said that it looks a little bit Japanese inspired, though I don’t know where she would have gotten that from. So I’m reading it now and it’s blowing my mind.

And then this other thing I’m really excited about is this woman Ulli Lust, from Austria. I think she lives in Berlin now, and she has this comic that I read in French a couple of years ago, but Fantagraphics is publishing it now in English, and I’m thrilled. In English it’s called Today is the Last Day of the Rest of your Life. It also takes place in the 80s, and it’s a brick, it’s super thick, and it’s autobiographical. It’s about how when she was a teenager, she and a friend hitchhiked from Austria to Italy, and they were these punk kids, and I feel like, as an autobiographical comic it’s mind-blowing, because the subjects that she brings into her story are things that happen to so many women that aren’t really discussed, that feeling of meeting a young guy your age and he’s basically forcing himself on you, and that awkwardness, and being this open-minded woman, and you don’t really want the guy to touch you a certain way, and these really bad things happen, and you want to be badass about it, but he basically rapes you. And it’s an amazing book, because she never ever has any self-pity, and it was kind of tricky, reading it; I read it as I was working on my book, it was kind of crazy to read something like that, because I was like, I’ll never be able to make something this good [Laughs.]

Are you reading anything that’s not comics?

I’m reading a lot of Margaret Atwood. I’m going through this Atwood obsession, I’m reading this book of interviews with her, and I’m finding it very inspiring. I think at one point Joyce Carol Oates asks her to discuss her day and Margaret Atwood is like, “Oh, I don’t know I just procrastinate until 3 pm and then I frantically start worrying about writing”, and you’re so excited to read it and you’re like, oh, that’s my life! [Laughs.]

I know. You get to this age where you realize that what you’re doing—that’s the way life is. You keep waiting for this moment, you imagine it to be one thing when you’re younger, and when you become an adult you realize, I guess that’s the way most everyone is.

GC: She’s very prolific as a writer, she wrote a lot of great books, and so it’s exciting to think that… this is something’s that’s good and grounding, that people who are productive seeming have the same flaws you’re struggling with. And in her case what’s also exciting is that she didn’t start her writing career until a little bit later. She got it going between the ages of 30 and 35, which is also something I can relate to. And that’s good. I think we have this obsession with youth, and it’s getting worse now, in this digital age, everyone has to be the youngest singer, the youngest platinum-selling whatever… [Laughs.]

“Look at That, They’re all Ladies”

So you’re reading mostly stuff by women?

It’s funny; I’ve been feeling this duty to archive these comic books made by women lately. Often if I’m in a comics store and I find a comic made by a woman either in the past or from now, I’m more drawn to it. It’s not like I’m the sort of person who’s like, oh, I’m going to support sisterhood first before anything else. I just want to buy whatever I want. But lately, somehow, listing things that I’m reading and buying, I find myself going, oh, look at that, they’re all ladies.

Does it have to do with the autobiography thing? That you’re drawn to artists who are able to represent experience truthfully, and so you’re more attracted to women because it makes sense that they’ll represent experiences that matter to you more fully?

Partly. I don’t know what everybody thinks of my book, but a big chunk of the people who have given me good feedback on my book are women who can relate to it. And I assume it’s because the mother/daughter thing is not something many men can relate to. But I guess the reason why I’ve been feeling this duty to archive these women comics is, I do think that there needs to be more of a readership. I feel like it’s so easy to find an incredible woman cartoonist. I could go into a bookstore and I could find you so many women writers and cartoonists, and it wouldn’t be a big deal. But to find a group of women who are interested in comics, that’s a problem. I see some of these women’s books as masterpieces, for instance that book I was telling you about, Mélody, I think of it as this incredible thing, and also Ulli Lust’s book is a masterpiece. And I feel like, why aren’t these people more successful than they are, why weren’t they made a bigger fuss over when they were making these books I’m freaking out over? And people can be like, oh, it’s because of sexism, and I definitely think there’s a shit-ton of sexism, but I also feel like, who’s gonna read these book if none of my lady friends read comics? All these super awesome women I know are not interested in comics. Whenever I have women friends come over to my house I always put books in their hands, you should check this out, this big stack of things, and they’re always really into it.

So you think it’s a question of introduction?

Perhaps. A lot of my friends who I really admire and love and adore Kate Beaton’s comics, but don’t read anything else. And I agree, Kate Beaton is rad, but once you’re finished reading this one Kate Beaton book you have you can check out some other stuff, too!

All of these developments seem improbable and amazing for longtime fans of this collaboration. We talked to Lee and Kaluta about the return of the Starstruck universe to the comic book universe.

You can contribute to the Kickstarter campaign and check out the many deluxe packages here.

Was the republication of the original Starstruck in book form the impetus to pick up the story again? That book seemed to finally call the question of “to be continued,” which is almost Starstruck‘s motto.

Elaine Lee  – Two things have made it possible for us to end the “to be continued” curse and finally finish Starstruck; 1) Scott Dunbier from IDW called us to inquire about reprinting the earlier stories, and 2) Kickstarter came into existence.

And what you’re offering to do through Kickstarter is to create a 140-page addition to the Starstruck story. The Harry Palmer storyline, which you’ve worked on at several points over the years, will be completed and published as a 176-page book. 

Elaine – This book will have 80 new pages of very detailed sequential art that will need to be drawn, inked and lettered. Our basic goal is $44,000. That would allow Michael to finish the black and white artwork, me to finish the script and layout, pay for the lettering and print signed and numbered, hardback books and mail them. Plus, other incentives.

If we can get $69,000, the whole 140 pages will get new, fully painted, digital color. If we make what we need for the color, the painting can start right away on some of the many finished pages, while Michael is drawing new ones.

We’re hoping to finish the work by end of December of this year. Then we’re allowing a couple of months to get the books printed.

Can you tell us more about the storyline and where it fits into what we already know?

Elaine – We had planned to tell Harry’s Palmer’s tale over the course of a 12-issue Marvel Epic run decades ago, but 12 issues became six and the story was truncated. We had not planned to tell his story in one big book. That has changed.

Michael Kaluta – Yes, there was a story done in the 1980’s, that became enhanced in the 1990’s and further enhancement, and content was planned for the next step: all that will now be blended together with our 2013 sense of place and given the Full Treatment.

Elaine – I think of this story as the hinge between the two larger pieces of the Starstruck saga. The stories in the huge IDW Starstruck Deluxe Edition are told from the viewpoints of a number of characters. They skip around in time and space, between these various characters and their storylines. Harry’s story pulls all those storylines together. Every major character spends some time on a barstool in Harry’s bar. Some of our characters meet there. As Harry plays the detective, trying to figure out what happened to his missing pleasure droid, he’s also combing through his past with these different characters, making connections between their lives and stories.

You’ve had some very intense periods of collaborative work on Starstruck over the years, each of which seems to result in a substantial elaboration of its fictional universe.

Michael – One thing about Starstruck: if you let it “marinate” it grows on its own. Elaine and I were very much working together on the big IDW compilation between 2008 and 2011. While only a few pages of new art were created that moved the continuity forward, there was a lot of close work

Elaine – When Michael draws a starship, he knows what every bell and whistle is supposed to do. In order for me to do a glossary entry on that ship, I have to call him and say, “What’s that small cylinder under the starboard fin? What’s that accordion-like thingy?” Only then can I write an entry for the ship, or make up a trademarked name for that part of the ship.

Michael – When one works at the intense levels Elaine (and I) did during the play production, then during the first year of working what the play presented into a viable Comic Book Story, the story, the World/Universe of Starstruck took over our lives.

It got so we needed a translator when talking to folks not involved with the project. Charles Vess was a great guy to have with you when you went to a restaurant…  Elaine and I would gabble something to each other and laugh, Charles would chuckle and give our translated order to the waiter.

Revisiting and continuing Harry’s Story brings those early days back as Theme Music to our new book, evoking sights, sounds and Ideas from our first foray into The Gutters with our Ex-Proldier turned Bartender/Bar Owner turned Unstoppable Man on a Mission.

Elaine - I think the interesting thing about this book—Harry Palmer’s story—is that while Harry is revisiting his past, in his search through the world of Starstruck for his lost love, we’re revisiting our past, by telling Harry’s story.

Why Kickstarter?

Elaine – It’s a money/artist’s rights combo. The choice has traditionally been between keeping you rights, but forgoing the bucks, or taking the money and losing control of your work. Starstruck, in any of its incarnations, has been an incredibly labor-intensive project. We need money to survive while doing it. Especially Michael. We’re not living in the 1980s when the sales numbers were big enough that you could make a really nice fee plus royalties on a creator-owned book.

Has publishing changed so much that a workable traditional deal is out of the question? You did the recent Starstruck book with IDW.

First, I have nothing but good to say about IDW. Michael and I probably wouldn’t have gone back to Starstruck, if Scott Dunbier hadn’t called us about it, and we would work with him again in a heartbeat. But the Starstruck Deluxe Edition was primarily a reprint book. If we’re going to continue with it from there, we want to add a lot of new story. And that requires a large investment of time, energy and cash.

Publishing has changed a lot. Every aspect of the business has changed. But it’s been very gradual, over the past three decades. Starstruck was created at a time when even mainstream companies were experimenting with creator-owned lines. As mentioned above, back when we were first doing it for Marvel/Epic, you could do a creator-owned book, make a nice page rate and then get royalties down the road. We were considered a cult book, back in the day, even though we sold at numbers that an X-Men book might sell at now.

Kaluta and I—creators of our generation—have to take heat for some of the changes in the biz, as we were the generation who fell in love with adult comics back in the 80s. Comics stopped being newsstand fare for kids, and became direct market entertainment for older teens and adults. I remember Sergio Aragones saying that this was a mistake. There was no entry into comics for young readers. And he was right. We lost those kids to gaming and movies.

I have two sons in their mid-twenties who are very into science fiction and fantasy and they never walk into a comic shop. They buy a few of the collections online and they read web comics. One of my sons writes a web comic that’s been getting a good bit of attention. (And, by the way, a TV producer just picked up the option for his comic, a good example of why creators should hold onto their rights!)

But they are a generation that should have been comics buyers and, because they aren’t, sales have dropped and comics shops can’t afford to give shelf space to books that they aren’t absolutely sure will sell. Creator-owned books have suffered the most. Doing anything truly original is too much of a risk.

These days, many creators of original material can only afford to work with Indy publishers if they keep a day job, or are married to someone who has a job, preferably with good insurance. Over the past few years, how many benefits have we seen for aging creators who have no health care? Well, Kaluta isn’t married and I’m married to a musician, so we need to make money in order to make comics. Hence, the Kickstarter.

As a Starstruck fan, I’d say the Kickstarter premiums available to contributors look pretty attractive. For instance, being drawn into the book as a character.

Elaine – The big deal is the book itself, of course. Limited edition, signed and numbered. And you can get the book with a Kaluta sketch in the front. Or you can get a Kaluta drawing, even a drawing of yourself with a Starstruck character. We have all sorts of fun incentive packages.

Michael – As the days and weeks proceed, there’ll be other rewards posted: some we planned from the get-go, others that we thought of as soon as we topped the half-way mark, getting an idea as to which of the first list of incentives most delighted our funders… and I’m certain we’ll have other thoughts as to what to surprise folks with before the end of the project.

I had read Jimmy Corrigan and several issues of Acme Novelty Library.  I could answer the first question.

I ought to pick up his new thing, I decided.

The first day I left it on the dining room table for contemplation.

I thought, What is a book?  What rises to art?

I recalled Joseph Cornell’s boxes and Duchamp’s valise.

“B u il ding S to r(eyeball)e S,” the lid said, its letters of carefully orchestrated, varying sizes and fonts.  Some lay on sides; all floated amidst symbols and pictures – a building, a baby, a ring.  My gaze lodged on a rectangle in the lower right corner, framing a sleeping woman.

Is it, I thought, a dream?

A six-pound, two-ounce, sixteen-and-one-half by eleven-and-one-half by two-inch dream.

It contained, the lid said, “14 distinctively discrete Books, Booklets, Magazines, Newspapers, and Pamphlets.”  The capitalizations were deliberate, I thought.  So was the omission of the designation “Comics.”   It screened that pigeonhole from the dismissal of that slotting.  “(S)ometimes,” said the lid, “it’s reassuring – perhaps even necessary – to have something to hold on to.”

The second day I slit the cellophane wrapper.

Inside, wrapped in further cellophane, were brightly colored, variously sized and shaped items, from which portions of cartoon strips confronted me.

The inner aspect of the lid quoted Picasso: “Everything you can imagine is real.”

The third day, I slit the inner cellophane and decided to progress top-to-bottom.

ii

The first item was a fifty-two-page, nine-and-three-quarter by three-inch, wordless cartoon pamphlet.  It focused on a woman with a (presumable) husband and a daughter.  The husband is usually absent. The daughter grows from infancy into pre-pubescence.  She and her mother hug, swim, pick flowers, buy clothes, swim.  (Who are these people, I wondered.  What of significance about them am I missing?  What will I learn?)  Of the three, the woman registers the most emotion, and the emotion she registers most seems to be worry or concern.  The second item was a three and one-half-by-seven-inch, twice-folded sheet of paper, with cartoon panels on both sides.  It tracked a solitary woman along a snowy street, despairing over her “dead end job” and “dead end life.”  Once she “almost had a family” but now she is alone.  (Is this the same woman, I wondered.  What happened to the man and girl?  Were they another dream?)  The third item was a similarly sized, similarly folded sheet of paper, with cartoon panels on both sides.  It focused on an unnamed woman, her daughter (“Lucy”), and an unnamed “daddy” (somewhat absent).  The mother is concerned about Lucy; Lucy is concerned about life and change.  Except for one partially obscured detail linking Item Three to Item One, it is unclear if any of these characters are the same characters from either of the previous items.  This was partly frustrating and partly charming, and it certainly left one engaged and aware of how stories “work”:  what we, as readers or viewers, expect; what we require; what our role is in the process in the “making” of a story.  The fourth item, “Bradford the Best Bee in the World,” was a thirty-two-page, soft cover booklet, illustrated in the broad style and written in the cute language of a “child’s”book.  But the book imparted information about bees which may be beyond the ken of even the brightest junior naturalist.  And before its cliff-hanger ending, it inquired into the nature of God and the transmigration of souls and raised gender issues and revealed Bradford to be tortured by impure thoughts, all of which seemed unlikely to have been intended for children.  (Is Lucy reading this, I wondered.  If not, who is its intended audience and how does it fit within this work of Ware’s?)

The next three items, a seventeen-page hard cover book and a pair of sixteen-page soft cover booklets, focused on a century-old North Side Chicago triplex.  In the first, some strips centered on an elderly woman, the building’s owner, who lives on its first floor. Some centered on a married couple, who live on its second.  Some centered on a solitary woman – the same woman, the same detail confirms, as that of Items 1 and 3 – who lives with her cat on the third.  And a few centered on the building.  The action occurs on one day in September 2000, except for the last page which occurs in 2005.  The second of these three items centered on the couple.  Most of it occurred in the “present,” but two pages were set in 1991 –  and two in 2156, as if Ware wanted to demonstrate he could jump anywhere he pleased.  The third centered on the elderly woman as she recalls her past.

All the residents are unhappy.  The elderly woman has lived in this building her entire life.  Her father died when she was a child; her mother died after a lengthy illness, during which the woman cared for her.  She had studied art; she had worked in a department store; but, except for her parents, she never had a significant relationship.  The couple met when he was a rock musician.  Now he is a night watchman and she works days.  When they are together, they fight.  The solitary woman had hoped to be an artist or writer but is neither.  Her father is deceased; her relationship with her mother is strained.  She has met a man (Phil) to whom she is attracted, but she knows he will not call her.  She has, it is revealed, lost her left leg below the knee (the detail I had mentioned previously).  “What makes lives turn out as they do,” she wonders.  This speaks for all the residents – and resonates for us.

The building is not unhappy.  It is matter of fact.  It has seen 301 tenants, it informs us, 29 broken hearts, 11,627 lost childhood memories, 5 spiritual crises, 65,418 orgasms, 13,246 light bulbs…  It is all the same, it infers.  Things and hopes, they come and go.

One of the remaining seven items, a twelve-and-one-quarter by eighteen-and-one-half-inch, four-page “newspaper,” “The Daily Bee,” related the next chapter in the Branford cliff-hanger.  Another, which folds out into a quartet of sixteen-by-twenty-one “pages,’ revisited the residents of the triplex – with a surprise appearance by Branford, now drawn and written in conformity with Ware’s handling of the triplex’s world.  (The effect was illuminating.  It suggested that, as the form in which Branford had been presented previously had caused my “adult” sensibility to dismiss his life and musings as “childish” and laugh at the silliness of and errors in his thinking, so might a greater consciousness dismiss my “adult” attempts to understand of the mysteries of the cosmos.  It suggested also that all “comic books” be treated with respect.)

The remaining five items focused on the solitary woman.  (As far as I could tell, she is never named.  I shall refer to her as SW hereafter.)  Four of the five centered on her post-triplex life.  In these she has a husband (Phil!) and daughter (Lucy!), with whom she lives in a house in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park.  (In the item in which she lives in the triplex, a detail suggests that she indeed was the woman in Item 2.)  The couple and elderly woman are absent, but Branford is the central character in a book Lucy enjoys. Phil is essentially content and  Lucy  essentially untroubled.

But SW worries about her weight and the oil crisis.  She worries about potential disasters, natural, political, economic, social.  She feels guilty at her treatment of one former boyfriend and angry at how another treated her.  (Both contact her within a brief period, slightly straining a reader’s credulity.)  She is rocked by the deaths of a foetus, a friend, a pet, a varmint.  (Two of these deaths coincide so neatly that even Ware’s credulity is strained.  He reflects this by having SW chastise God for inflicting such an “obvious” “metaphor” on “the script of my life.”  But if any creator is to be held accountable for this strain, it is Ware.)

The aspect of these two deaths which bothered me was my inability to fix them in time.  In Item 13, they seem to occur in 2011.  (Obama is president, and a funeral is held on Friday, September 2; and 2011 is the only year after his election in which that date fell on that day of the week.)  But in Item 8, which is set in 2009 (according to the date on a cell phone), the two deaths have already occurred.  Perhaps this confusion represents Ware’s venture into the realm of parallel universes.  Perhaps it is a consequence of collecting pieces created over a period of years  into one unified work by a publisher whose editing budget was insufficient.  Or perhaps it results from an artist unwilling to re-write and re-draw enough to achieve consistency.  This is understandable but frustrating because one of the joys of Building Stories comes from engaging with Ware’s use of time.

iii

The work is an amalgam of puzzles, and a major one is trying to determine what is happening – or has happened – when.  Time is fluid to Ware, and he uses the comics medium to demonstrate this masterfully.  Time can shift from panel-to-panel, let alone page-to-page.  Decades collapse in the width of a border line.  The existing moment dissolves into dream or memory.  One must pay attention to a character’s size, hair style, dress color.  One must be aware of calendars and signs on buildings.  One must recognize that “Mr. Kitty” is not “Miss Kitty.”  One may think he has grasped the here-and-now, only to quickly realize his mistake.  (I was certain I had located a “present” in four panels at the end of Item 8.  But second thoughts pulled that rug from beneath me too.  The Lucy in these panels is an adult, and since she was unborn in 2000 and in first grade in what-looks-like 2011, that “present” must be “future” – at least what remains “future” for some years yet.)

Frequently, within what passes for a “present,” great portions of the narrative will occur in a “past” or “future.”  Characters spend so much time looking back or looking ahead, while barely registering their “now,” Ware calls the entire idea of  “present” into question.  All of time seems to exist as simultaneously as if he was channeling Krishnamurti.  (This supposition gains support from Ware’s omission of  page numbers.  While making it hard on someone who wishes to refer from his notes back to the text, it reinforces the idea that to think in terms of events proceeding in linear order is to be in error.  The physicist Julian Barbour has proposed that the universe be considered “a stack of moments,” like a deck of cards, which may be “shuffled and reshuffled arbitrarily to give the illusion of time…”; and Ware, who tells readers it does not matter in which order his items are read, may be suggesting that his  bindings be loosed and his pages treated in this fashion.  I half expect his next work to arrive as a jigsaw puzzle which, once completed, spreads across the floor in one gigantic “page.”)

SW is the primary character for Ware’s explorations.  She is, from when first met, back and forth across decades. a troubled soul.  On the North Side, she is possessed by a “hopeless loneliness.”  In Oak Park, she is imprisoned by life’s “unfairness.”  The disappointment which burdens her most is the imagined cost of her untaken paths.  Because she did not become the artist or writer she was “supposed to,” she fears she has been a “failure.”  All she can summon to balance against this accusation  is Lucy.  At times Lucy’s “joyful reality” makes SW promise never to feel badly again.  “I am happy,” she insists.  “Finally, I am happy.”  But the last images Ware leaves us with is two panels of SW’s face, blank and glum, after Lucy has asked her, “Will I be the most important thing you ever do?”  Her relationships and residences may have changed, but, as the Buddhists put it, “Wherever she goes, there she is.”

Ware’s use of the comics form to enhance the emptiness at his character’s core is superb.  If he possesses the illustrative chops of a Hal Foster or Alex Raymond, he resists all temptation to demonstrate them.  He does not render a richly detailed, lushly foliaged, deeply dimensioned world.  The life he sets forth is narrow, stunted, cramped.  Few possibilities for beauty enrich it.  Few periods of excitement enliven it.  The deepest emotions are registered through the slightest alteration of the dots and lines that constitute facial features.  The glories of speech are reduced to undecipherable squiggles, when overheard through a muffling wall, or converted to simplistic glyphs as if Ware was an Egyptian primitive employing a stylus on papyrus.  Emphasis can be attained by merely darkening or enlarging the letters that form a word.

If Ware does not have the huff and puff of extensive plotting to keep his readers churning pages, his technical skills motivate their flipping forward.  The variety of the size and shape of his books and pages and panels keep his readers alert and engaged.  The variations of his lay-outs send the eye on entertaining slips and slides.  Sometimes Ware sets them upon carnival rides, as when he provides gaze-directing “arrows” which slip through windows he has drawn and slither under doors.  One of his favorite devices involves centering a page (or a two-page spread) spread with an image that, while not sequentially connecting to the narrative unfolding around it, enhances that narrative thematically.  These images can also take on their own narrative progression, moving from a naked woman, to her skeleton, to (presumably her) vagina, to a “painting” of a vagina, to an orchid’s blossom.  Even his inchworm-like approach to story-telling can resound within a thoughtful reader.  One nods his head approvingly at his capturing how life works.  Yeah, one affirms, when you meet someone new, they rarely come with paragraphs of expository background information attached.  And, yeah, you don’t know from jump street which of them will prove significant.

Ware is also adept at documenting the nothingness at his characters’ cores. He will devote an entire page of a sixteen-page book to a solitary figure sitting silent, pining or regretting, not noting a single thought.  The author of a 300-page novel would have to spend nineteen pages repeating the same sentence to equal the effect.  The director of a ninety-minute film would have to hold his camera steady for nearly seven at a woman in a chair.  Readers would fling books at walls.  Moviegoers would stomp and whistle.  Under Ware’s spell, though, one just smiles and looks again to make sure he has not missed anything.

iv

Toward the end of Building Stories, Ware has SW ask herself why a “‘great book’… (can’t be) about regular people living everyday life.”  She poses this question after rejecting for vacation reading Proust, Dostoyevsky, Nabokov, Moby Dick, and Ulysses.  It is unclear why she does not consider Stephen Daedelus and the Blooms (or, even, Ishmael and Swann – ships and wealth notwithstanding) regular people or their lives uncommon.  Perhaps she means to ask why a great book can’t be written simply and straightforwardly, without ornate prose or symbolic overload or reference to Virgil and the Bible.  And perhaps SW’s thinking is to be distinguished from Ware’s for, while he has created a work about the ordinary lives of ordinary people, it is not simplistic or straightforward and seems to owe a debt to Joyce and Proust and, even, Melville.  But positioned at the end of Building Stories, as SW’s question is, it seems reasonable to conclude that Ware is asking to have his work measured against the literary greats and not dismissed because it is light on homicide or sex abuse or passion or whales.

By the way he frames SW’s question, Ware seems to accept that literary greatness can not be achieved by technical mastery alone.  Something which speaks to the human condition is required.  And for an evaluation of “Building Stories” in this regard, SW is, again, key.  She is its only fully developed character.  The elderly woman and the married couple vanish once she leaves the triplex.  Lucy is primarily a goad to prod reactions from her and Phil a more-or-less one-dimensional moon orbiting her gloomy sun.  And with SW, I confess… disappointment.  From her shallow insights into her discontents, to her chirps of protest against Starbucks and cell phones, she seems a familiar figure in contemporary literature.  She has suffered parental betrayal, romantic disaster, personal loss – and my jotted notes of “Beautiful,” “Sad,” “Poignant” remind me that at times Ware treatment of them broke through beyond the commonplace; but these moments were fleeting.  My body was never shaken into increased awareness, nor my soul truly stirred and educated.

Even SW’s amputated limb vexed more than moved me.  Having chosen to afflict his central character thus, Ware, in my estimation, did little with it.  I couldn’t help wishing he had ventured more deeply into its implications.  He does not reveal the amputation’s cause until his work’s final page, as if he has been withholding a mystery-solving clue; but little, really, has been made of the loss to this point, and the revelation does not seem to shed sufficient light on what has gone before to justify dramatically its concealment.  SW seems not only less driven by her loss than Ahab, but less effected than Captain Hook.  I would agree with Chekhov that if you are going to hang an amputated leg on the wall when the curtain rises on Act One, it better be stuffed down someone’s throat by the end of Act Three..

Building Stories is wonderful in many ways.  I credit Ware for engaging with the ordinary.  I credit him for waging this engagement beyond the familiar ground of the autobiographic.  But while “wonderful” is “very good,” it is not “great.”  For “great,’ you must stride further that Ware has managed, and, to me, SW’s unstuffed leg seems related this unreached goal.   Ware has handicapped SW in a way that may not seem true to her as a literary character, but it seems true to how all of us – readers and writers, reviewers and the reviewed – hobble through our days, all of us gifted in some ways and limited in others.  For Ware, at this point in his career, these limitations seem to assert themselves in the scope of his vision.  Life has more to offer artists than he has accessed.  There is more beauty, more hope, more blessings, and more grace.  There is greater pain and deeper pits of despair.  There is more wisdom to be unearthed and shared.  But Ware is still young.  He is talented and dedicated, and he has – if Krishnamurti and Dr. Barbour will excuse me – the time to discover more and mine it.

 MOVIE SIDEBAR

GROTH: Did you artists talk about movies?

INFANTINO: Sure. I’ll tell you, every one of us loved films. I did, Frank Giacoia, Alex, Joe Kubert … I think that was the thing that triggered most of our thinking.

GROTH: What kind of movies did you go to?

INFANTINO: I loved mystery films. Remember the director Carol Reed?

GROTH: Of course.

INFANTINO: He was my favorite. Him, Hitchcock … I used to go to Hitchcock films and see them four, five, or six times so I could study his thinking with composition. He was a genius at storytelling. And it was a very simple way of telling a story. Later on I learned that most of his films were storyboarded out ahead of time. And he never looked through the camera once, after he approved of all the sketches.

GROTH: He very meticulously planned them out.

INFANTINO: Yeah, isn’t that amazing? I didn’t know that until years later. But when you look at the film, you can see they were meticulous. Just brilliant.

GROTH: And you liked Carol Reed.

INFANTINO: I loved Carol Reed.

Third Man promo

GROTH: His most famous film, of course, The Third Man.

INFANTINO: Oh, that, and he did Odd Man Out —

GROTH: And The Fallen Idol.

INFANTINO: Oh, I loved that one. That was just beautiful: that was with Ralph Richardson, remember? And that young kid was terrific in that movie.

GROTH: Yeah, I don’t know her name, but she was brilliant.

INFANTINO: The pathos in that thing was just incredible. I love Reed. I think Odd Man Out was the first movie I saw of Reed’s.

GROTH: That was with James Mason?

INFANTINO: Right. That was the first time I saw Reed, and I was stunned by what he did in black and white. I really got hooked. And later on I loved George Stevens. I really got into directors more than the actors. The directors are what appealed to me. And Stevens with Shane, do you remember? That was unbelievable thinking.

GROTH: Are you a big John Ford fan?

INFANTINO: Oh God, yes. And I had read [Lawrence’s] The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and when they came out with the film about Lawrence of Arabia’s life, I was just enthralled with that thing. I was quite a fan of Lawrence: and that was well done, you remember it? Beautifully done. There were some subtleties in that, like in the very beginning — did you see when he’s driving in the car? And the glass is clouded. Did you notice that part?

GROTH: No.

INFANTINO: If you see it again, watch that. His life is passing by. That was the whole symbolism. And of course you know he got killed on a motorcycle that Bernard Shaw gave him. You know, he was such a strange man, and such a brilliant man, that when the Russians thought he was up to something — they made the English move out of Russia and back to England.

GROTH: I assume David Lean is a director you like.

INFANTINO: Oh yeah, I’m crazy about David Lean.

GROTH: Bridge Over The River Kwai.

INFANTINO: Right, and that other one, when Robert Mitchum goes up to Ireland?

GROTH: Ryan’s Daughter.

INFANTINO: Right, Ryan’s Daughter. That was lovely. The English had a way of taking a character and really playing it out.

GROTH: Yeah, in fact, Carol Reed was English, and Hitchcock was English.

INFANTINO: Yeah, right. They were my favorite. But of course Ford was the other exception. He was something else. And then that one director — he did the most violent stuff you could imagine, but it was unbelievable.

GROTH: Sam Peckinpah?

INFANTINO: Yeah, yeah. He was great.

CONTROVERSY

GROTH: There are a couple of controversial elements to your regime …

INFANTINO: Go ahead. If I can answer them, I’ll answer ’em honestly, or I’ll tell you I don’t want to get involved.

GROTH: One involved C. C. Beck and Shazam!. C. C. Beck was the artist on Shazam!. He was also the artist who drew Captain Marvel in the ’40s and ’50s.

INFANTINO: Right. C.C. Beck … I put him with Julie Schwartz. Big mistake. Like chalk and cheese. It didn’t work. I should have given him a shot at writing, editing, and drawing it. I didn’t. Big mistake — Period!

GROTH: Who wrote C. C. Beck’s material? Was that Denny O’Neill?

INFANTINO: I don’t know who Julie used. Did he use Gardner Fox?

GROTH: It might have been Denny.

INFANTINO: No, no. I don’t think Denny did it. I don’t think so. We should have used Denny. Denny would have been perfect on that. No. I think the best thing we should have done was put C. C. on it by himself in hindsight now. He never complained to me; I gotta be honest with you. If he had come to me and really bitched and complained, I might have sat him down and said, “Let me see what I can do about it.” Because when a guy’s that unhappy, I try and adjust it. But he never came to me. I found out about this years later that he used to go around talking — I think he hated Julie or something, right?

GROTH: Well, I think he expressed his dislike.

INFANTINO: Well, whatever. But he never came to me directly, which was a little strange.

GROTH: Actually, you were quoted as saying that, “The editor came to me and said, “I don’t think it’s right this way. Let’s sit down and talk with C. C. and go over it.’” And you said, “We did. We had him in, and I said, ‘Look, you’ve got any ideas, express them to the editors and maybe you can work it out together.’”

INFANTINO: Yes, that’s true.

GROTH: “But you don’t have the license to do this on your own.”

INFANTINO: Yes, that was a mistake. I’m telling you now; it was a mistake. Yes, I did. That’s true. That’s how it worked.

GROTH: That’s very interesting, that in retrospect you would think that was an error.

INFANTINO: But, you gotta remember, I had so goddamn many things to think about. But still, in all truth, I should have made the time, sat down, analyzed it, and seen what the hell … The book wasn’t going anywhere. And maybe that was true. C. C. felt that that was the problem. Maybe he’s right. I don’t know. I don’t know. But the thing is, there’s something else. When you give an editor a job as editor, you can’t cut his legs off with the artist and writer. Do you understand what I’m saying?

“The Plight of the Puppet Flash” from The Flash #133 (Dec. 1962) written by John Broome, penciled by Carmine Infantino and inked by Joe Giella ©1962 National Periodical Publications, Inc.

GROTH: You’re in a delicate political position.

INFANTINO: That’s right. You gotta be very careful there. And so I tried to make it out so that … Julie is a tough guy to work with. There were a couple things I had problems with. Alex Toth had big problems with him.

GROTH: Now let me ask you this, when you became the editorial director, and then you became president, you were essentially above the editors that you were under before. Did that create any kind of tension?

INFANTINO: I don’t think so. I don’t think so. We were still friends.

GROTH: It could. You could see a situation where it could create….

INFANTINO: It could, but it didn’t. It didn’t. I didn’t treat them any differently, you understand?

CONCLUSION

GROTH: I guess we can finish up with DC. I don’t think I heard that you were led out in handcuffs [laughter]. But I did hear (and I don’t think I heard it from anyone who was actually there at the time) that you left under unusual circumstances, that you were told by some higher up at Warner to not even clear out your desk, to simply leave that day.

INFANTINO: Oh, no. No. No.

GROTH: That is not true?

INFANTINO: What happened was the printer came to us early in the year and said there may be a paper shortage. And he said, “Marvel has upped their titles from 30 to 60 books a month. What do you want to do?” I said, “I’d better cover my rump on this theater. If I lose that space, I’ll never get it back.” I did the same. So, as you know, both companies lost a fortune that year.

GROTH: What year was that?

INFANTINO: That was ’76, ’75. And I said, “Well, that was the decision I made.” Well, they said, “We don’t agree with that decision.” And I said, “Well, then that’s it then. What am I gonna say?” And that was the end of it, simple as that.

GROTH: So did you resign?

INFANTINO: Yeah! But they weren’t thrilled with my staying there anyway; I must be honest with you. They weren’t thrilled with my being there, because they didn’t agree with what I did with that.

GROTH: With that particular decision?

INFANTINO: Yeah.

GROTH: I see. Can you tell me who they are?

INFANTINO: I don’t want to mention names. I’d rather not: because one of the guys is out of there. There were lots of charges about some of these people, as you remember, at one time.

GROTH: Sarnoff and the rest?

INFANTINO: Sarnoff. Above that, even. So what the hell? He’s not there. The guy who did it is not there.

GROTH: I see. Were you happy to leave at that point? Were you burned out?

INFANTINO: Pretty much. I didn’t care any more at that point. I was tired. I was putting long hours in, six days a week. You know, it was brutal. And I didn’t care. I really didn’t care.

GROTH: You had to have seen that as a tremendous opportunity, though.

INFANTINO: For what?

GROTH: For change. For being able to make decisions such as creating titles, and….

INFANTINO: It was great, but the pressures are great, too. It’s very good. It’s fun and games. But boy, when crunch comes to crunch…

GROTH: There must have been a tremendous amount of pressure on you.

INFANTINO: I tell you, I think if I didn’t I’d be a sick guy, because I was starting to drink like hell.

GROTH: Is that right?

INFANTINO: Sure, because the pressures were crazy there. And I was starting to drink at lunchtime, I was starting to drink at 11 o’clock in the morning, and holy shit! A friend of mine who’s a doctor said to me that time when he heard I was drinking, he said, “I don’t want you to have another drink again ’til six o’clock at night no matter what you do!” So, the pressures were getting to me.

GROTH: And these were primarily business pressures?

INFANTINO: Oh, sure. The other end was fun, but the numbers and the printers, and dealing with guys upstairs. You know, the terrible part of so many things is that the guys upstairs didn’t know anything about the business, and that was a problem, too. They’d make all kinds of decisions for you and. [an audible shrug] whatever. But anyway, it was nice while I did it. I enjoyed it, then. But I’m glad it’s over. It’s that simple.

Carmine Infantino encountered a barrage of criticism last year in the pages of The Comics Buyer’s Guide after he defended a decision he made while he was the editorial director at DC Comics in 1971 that was called into question by Mark Evanier. During Jack Kirby’s stint on DCs Jimmy Olsen comic, Infantino authorized re-drawing Superman’s head as drawn by Kirby, claiming that it was necessary to preserve the value of the licensed Superman characters, and noting that Kirby himself had no qualms with DCs decision to change his work.

Did someone else draw Superman’s head in this image from “A Superman in Supertown,” in Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #147 March 1972, which was written and penciled by Jack Kirby and inked and lettered by Mike Royer? ©DC Comics

Infantino claims that CBG and specifically editor Maggie Thompson have failed to allow the controversy to be aired fairly in CBG’s pages, demonstrating partisanship in supporting the paper’s columnist by giving preferential treatment to Evanier’s side while suppressing parts of and delaying publication of letters defending Infantino by as much as six months. Infantino also took umbrage with Evanier for trying to persuade Mark Hanerfeld, who wrote a letter defending Infantino, to retract his letter before it was published sans a paragraph (which Evanier suggested to Thompson be removed) that claimed Evanier had spread allegations about Infantino misrepresenting the sales figures for Kirby’s DC books (although that rumor had never in fact been printed).

The controversy was launched in Mark Evanier’s “Point of View” column in #1121 on May 12, 1995, when Evanier called Infantino’s decision the “the classic example” of people exercising authority simply to demonstrate their power. Although the retouching of the heads was done under the guise of consistency, Evanier stated, “the sad truth was that the office then had such a hatred of “Marvel-style” art that they could not cope with a “Marvelized” version of their sacred Superman, nor the possibility that it might outsell what they saw as the company created version.”

He also related a quote from the late artist Mike Sekowsky, who was editing for DC at the same time as Infantino. Evanier reported that Sekowsky said that Infantino felt he was “scoring some kind of victory over Marvel with this, somehow proving to the world that Marvel’s star artist wasn’t good enough to draw a DC star character, or that the DC editorial department could improve on Marvel’s best.” (Infantino called this accusation “garbage” and questioned Evanier’s use of “dead people for quotes.”)

Kirby’s heads couldn’t stand, Infantino said, because they were different from the standard versions of the characters, which would have diluted their value. He noted that the decision had legal ramifications; failure to protect a trademarked property might result in losing the rights to it. For an analogy, Infantino suggested that if Kirby were to be hired by Walt Disney, no one would find it odd if the studio altered Kirby’s version of Mickey Mouse to make it conform to the standard characteristics of the character.

Infantino responded strongly to Evanier’s column in the following letter, which appeared in CBG #1128:

I would like to respond to the pointless ramblings of one Mark Evanier in your May 12 issue in which he denigrates the editors and publishers for their attempts to protect the integrity of valuable comic book properties.

 Specifically, he laments the fact that other editors and I required that Jack Kirby’s work be corrected to conform to those established characters be was assigned to draw. It is an ancient piece of business but it seems Evanier has a habit of digging such matters and twisting them into some sick agenda to revise the fact and indeed to fly in the face of common sense.

 Whatever attachment Evanier has for the late Mr. Kirby does not give him the right to condemn the efforts of management, which expects an artist to deliver what he promised to deliver when he accepted the assignment — in my case, as publisher of DC likenesses of Jimmy Olsen and Superman.

For the record, I was not happy about having Kirby’s version redrawn by our staff. It was costly, time consuming and embarrassing, but I took the blame. The sales of the Kirby issues plummeted and we hastened to revert to our traditional artists. The sales soon recovered, proving my decision was correct. Evanier’s reckless quote, attributed to a person conveniently dead, said that “because Carmine Infantino found Marvel’s best artist not good enough for DC, Infantino was scoring some sort of victory with this.”

This is so idiotic and juvenile that I wonder how any person with a minimum IQ could believe it.

 Another thing: If you adore Kirby so much why do you dump on his reputation by revealing that both Marvel and DC bad to redraw his work? I am aware that you also spread the notion that I canceled some of Mr. Kirby’s books despite the fact that they were profitable. This is not fact: it’s fantasy. No publisher in his right mind would ever drop a profitable publication. For your information, these decisions are dictated by the distributor based on actual sales figures. Your ignorance is abysmal.

The truth is, despite my personal admiration for Jack Kirby’s raw pencilling, he was successful only when he worked under Joe Simon or Stan Lee. The only blockbuster he was associated with for DC was the return of The Sandman, and Joe Simon wrote that one and laid out the entire comic book. Get a life, Mr. Evanier!

Although he didn’t include it in his letter to CBG, Infantino also mentioned to the Journal that Kirby himself was told well in advance that his work was to be altered.

“I never did anything without talking to [Kirby],” Infantino said. “I said, ‘Jack, we’ve got a business problem. The heads are not like the accepted Superman heads.’ He didn’t see any problem with that. He said, ‘Absolutely. Fix ’em.’ It was no big deal.”

At the time of Infantino’s duration as publisher at DC, Infantino said, Kirby had grown tired of the poor treatment he was receiving from Marvel. The company never gave him appropriate compensation or credit for his role in creating the Marvel universe, and withheld his original artwork from him for years. Kirby wanted to make the switch over to DC, but there was one hitch; the creator was involved in a legal dispute with DC editor Jack Schiff, who had worked with Kirby for a while on Skymasters, a newspaper strip.

For whatever reason, Kirby took over the sole production of the Skymasters strip, and as a result, many people at DC were hesitant to hire Kirby because they felt he had wronged Schiff. Infantino maintains that he was the one who convinced the higher-ups at DC to sign Kirby on, and that it took him a great deal of effort to persuade them to do it.

Infantino said that he explained to Kirby when he came aboard DC that some of his versions of the characters from Superman would have to be modified in order to fit the pre-existing specifications. Kirby, Infantino said, didn’t have a problem with having his artwork altered, and viewed it as simply a matter of business.

After his response to Evanier’s column, letters poured in to CBG denouncing Infantino, from Frank Miller — who said that Infantino had denigrated Kirby’s work — to Bill Mumy, who said in #1136 that “having recently read Infantino’s letter to CBG kicking the ghost of Jack Kirby,” he could no longer enjoy Infantino’s work. Mumy added that Infantino’s justification of his decision did not ring true. And Miller said of Infantino’s “bitter attack” on Evanier that “once again, the old machine coughs out bad old oil.”

Richard Kyle wrote in #1134 that Infantino’s letter “demonstrates succinctly why he was a failure as an editor and as a publisher.” He neither respected nor understood his contributors, Kyle said, and accused Infantino of displaying great contempt for Kirby by forcing him to conform to DC’s “bland, corny” house style. “Because of Infantino’s ineptitude,” Kyle wrote, “a brilliant creator was denied the opportunity of his life.” And Jo Duffy wrote in #1132 that “Carmine’s judgment or his memory of what transpired must be seriously impaired,” in reference to Infantino’s statements about the sales on Jimmy Olsen. Duffy maintained that because the devices for determining newsstand sales didn’t reach publishers for months after books were shipped, his justification for taking Kirby off the book was invalid and his “whining, crying, and name-calling… [is] contemptible.”

In addition, Randy Buccini, Event Comics’ Kim “Howard” Johnson, and the University of Illinois’ Dr. Michael A. Pemberton (who said he would have been “mortified” to have authored such a “nasty, sniping” letter) also weighed in against Infantino’s response. Not everyone that wrote in came out against Infantino, however. Billy Harris cautioned against the “canonization” of Kirby, which denigrated his actual accomplishments (#1134). In #1147, Chris Zickrick stated that Evanier had “crossed the line,” and that the use of his column “to smear Infantino’s name by using the biggest and most legendary name in comics was tacky.” And John Coates provided the last letter (to date) on the subject in #1166 when he stated that Infantino’s decision was well within his rights as an editor. Coates’ letter, which appeared on March 22, 1996, puts the time span of the controversy at about 10 months from the date of Evanier’s initial column.

The longest statement in support of Infantino came from Mark Hanerfeld, a close friend of Infantino’s and the assistant editor to Kirby during his defection to DC. Hanerfeld wrote a letter to CBG defending Infantino’s reasoning in changing Kirby’s characters and emphasizing Kirby’s approval. But although Hanerfeld sent the letter on July 22, 1995, during the height of the controversy in CBG’s letters pages, CBG didn’t print it until the end of January, 1996. Only Duffy’s brief second retort in #1163 and Coates’ letter appeared after the printing of Hanerfeld’s letter.

And when the letter was finally printed, Hanerfeld said, a crucial portion of the letter was edited out. The paragraph in question related that Evanier had spread a rumor around about Infantino keeping two sets of sales books — one real, one fake — at DC, without ever identifying the “top executive” at DC whom he said gave him the information. The implication of the rumor was that Infantino had shown Kirby fake sales figures of Jimmy Olsen to justify taking him off the book.

“You censored, bowdlerized, expurgated, perhaps even exorcised the intent of that communication,” wrote Hanerfeld in a letter to CBG editor Maggie Thompson on Feb. 3, 1996, shortly after the edited version of his letter was printed. Hanerfeld said that this was despite a Jan. 21 phone conversation he had with Thompson before the letter was printed in which she agreed to print the letter in its entirety.

He then asked Thompson to publish a new paragraph that he had re-written which he felt “would restore the meaning of the intent” of his original letter:

I think that the crux of all this feud began a few years ago when you began the rumor that DC comics bad given Kirby false sales numbers on the books he did for them. You stated that DC kept a second false book that they showed to artists (and presumably to writers as well) and that they had given those false results to Jack. But you never gave that name. I asked you, and you said you couldn’t. Unfortunately, you’ve kept your word. You and the people around you have gotten to believe that unsubstantiated “truth” as gospel. You’ve never looked around for other accounts of your “truth.” Well, I have; and after many years and after many inquiries to varied professionals, from editors to accountants to even production people, none have substantiated that “truth.”

CBG declined to print Hanerfeld’s restoration. Thompson responded to Hanerfeld via letter that “I had assumed from your question on January 21 that you wanted to know whether we would not treat your letter as excerpted material — not that we would not edit it.” She went on to state that CBG edits every letter that comes in, making deletions for material based on the following criteria:

• Material that is so long it usurps more than its proper share of the letters column
• Material that is gratuitously insulting
• Material that is problematically speculative
• Material that perpetuates negative gossip
• Material that uses terms or pictures that are not appropriate for the fact that CBG goes into some grade-school environments.

The accusations made against Infantino regarding the false set of sales figures, Thompson said, never appeared in CBG, and that for Hanerfeld to speculate on Evanier’s motivations in such a manner would go against the CBG policy of refraining from printing rumors.

Hanerfeld said that Thompson reiterated this same reasoning over the phone to him when she declined to print the following additional letter that he sent to CBG dated Feb. 23, 1996:

This is in response to Jo Duffy’s letter that appeared in CBG #1163, which in turn was in response to my letter that appeared in issue #1161.

There was no imagination used in my forwarding of the facts that I’ve put into the writing of my letter. I was there, and I reported the facts as I remember them.

And by the way, I’m not ill, just disabled. In fact, I lost the ability to plot stories with the last stroke.

You inferred that I “cast unjust and ungentlemanly asperison’s [sic] on Evanier’s veracity.” “Ungentlemanly” — NO WAY! In the main, I posed facts and figures for Mark’s pondering and meditating his attitude towards Carmine. And, as far as “unjust” goes… well, that’s up to the opinions of those people who have delved deeply in the subject.

What “inherent illogic of Carmine’s act” is there to have Jack Kirby’s version of the Superman characters’ heads change? Is it logical to produce comics that are intended to sell to fans because it’s done by Jack Kirby? The heck with all those long-time Superman fans. It’s done by KIRBY! You’re talking about fanzine fare. Jack was a professional comics editor/writer/artist and onetime co-publisher (Crestwood was before your time). He produced those comic books to be sold on the newsstand. (He, several years later, produced a number of magazines for Pacific Comics that were intended for his fan-following, to be sold on the Direct-Sales only stands.)

After explaining that Kirby had agreed to the changes on his artwork, Hanerfeld wrote:

I assume this and the next paragraph will be censored out by the CBG staff, but I must put before you the following facts:

It seems to me that Mark Evanier has had his hand in the editorship of CBG far further than they will admit. You’re [sic] last letter (the one that this is written in response) saw print far sooner then [sic] a letter normally sees print in the CBG. Only two issues between both of our letters. Suspicious. Over the phone, last Friday (February 16th), Maggie recited from a letter she had written to me, one of the many reasons why they exorcised a crucial part of that long-delayed (it was initially mailed July 22, 1995) letter, as well as a following letter which they also refused to print. I have enclosed a copy of that letter with this letter. (She read the letter to me from her computer screen; she promised to send copies of that letter to myself and to Carmine Infantino, post haste; we’re still waiting for them). One of the reasons she cited was the length of my letter; that it was hard for them to find that much room for more than six months. Yet they found the space to print the letter from Robert Beerbohm (the letter that directly precedes your letter in the lettercol) which covers the Mike Tiefenbacher article about Marvel’s circulation history. Tiefenbacher’s article appeared less than two months previously. His letter took four and a half (approximately) columns to print, while my letter took four and three-quarters (approximately) columns to print. And isn’t that somewhat suspicious.

And isn’t it strange that when Mark Evanier gave me a call upon first reading the letter I sent him, be spent a good deal of the conversation trying to persuade me from having the letter printed in the CBG. He had just returned from the 1995 San Diego Con, and in his spiel he told me that Richard Kyle had a letter in the next issue of the CBG, supporting his stance. I find it very suspicious that he had specific knowledge of what will be printed in future issues of CBG’s lettercol. It seems that Mark had contacted many of his friends and coterie and asked them in helping to support his position. Including Bill Mumy,“the guy who produces the Jack Kirby fanzine (whose name still eludes me),” and you. Please correct me, if I’m incorrect, as to my conclusion that your response to Carmine Infantino’s letter was somehow prompted by Mr. Evanier.

It seems to me that much, if not all, of your information about this controversy comes almost exclusively from Mark Evanier. You’ve only heard his version. Why don’t YOU take the initiative, and find out the truth on your own. Contact those who were there. Sure, Sol Harrison, Murray Boltinoff, and others have died. But Jack Adler, Joe Kubert, Joe Orlando, Jack Schiff, Julie Schwartz, Arthur Gutowitz (the company’s then accountant), Gerda Gattell, former staff letterers, colorists, production people, are still around. Why don’t you track down these people and find out the facts for yourself? Why don’t you call Roz Kirby and ask her about the relationship between Jack and Carmine, and what the real situation was back then? And ask her the humorous anecdote about Carmine vis a vis Gefilte Fish at a Passover Meal at the Kirby California home.

Infantino also responded to Thompson’s reply, which was sent to him by Hanerfeld, with a letter of his own. Citing the CBG policy which declares insulting, speculative, and gossipy material to be unpublishable, Infantino asked, “Then explain why you printed a letter from John Morrow, in an issue dated July 21, 1995 (#1131) in which he stated that he corresponded with at least ten unnamed subscribers who had ‘firsthand knowledge’ of hearing that I made negative comments about Jack Kirby. Further, he related that one of those subscribers, whom he doesn’t name, claimed that he was in my class [at the School of Visual Arts] and I did nothing but knock Kirby.”

Infantino added that none of his former students that he had talked to could recall Infantino ever making such comments about Kirby in his class, and that he felt CBG was contradicting their letters’ “manifesto” by printing such a letter.

Although the Journal asked Maggie Thompson to explain her apparently selective use of CBG editorial policy, she declined to comment, saying that she preferred not to discuss in-house matters in public.

However, Evanier agreed to respond point by point to the allegations levied at him by Hanerfeld and Infantino. Evanier confirmed that he told Hanerfeld about the rumor to the effect that Infantino kept two sets of books, but that the only person he asked about it was Hanerfeld, who then informed Infantino that he was “spreading the story” around. And furthermore, Evanier added, he doesn’t even believe the rumor himself; he said he believes that artists weren’t actually shown the sales figures in the first place, which would eliminate the necessity for a phony version.

“What we have here is a situation where someone is denying a story that no one really charged,” Evanier said, noting that he never said it in print or at a convention, and that the incident Hanerfeld refers to happened back in 1977.

Responding to Infantino and Hanerfeld’s accusation that Evanier tried to pressure Hanerfeld into rescinding his letter before CBG published it, Evanier acknowledged that when Hanerfeld sent him a copy of his first letter to CBG, Evanier and Marv Wolfman, a mutual friend, tried to persuade Hanerfeld not to print it at all. The reason he tried to talk Hanerfeld out of printing the letter, Evanier said, was because he felt Hanerfeld “had misinterpreted things” and that to deny the “rumor” about the false set of books would have lent more credence to it when the “rumor” had never appeared anywhere in print and had only circulated “for about 10 minutes, 20 years ago,” Evanier said. “He was prolonging an issue that no one was talking about.” Evanier acknowledged that he suggested to Thompson that the paragraph in question be deleted, for the same reason that Thompson told Hanerfeld — the rumor had never appeared in print in CBG.

As for whether or not he believed that Infantino had taken Kirby off his slot on Jimmy Olsen even though it was selling well, he said, “I don’t know. At that time you’d hear one [sales figure] on Monday and another one on Wednesday.”

He added that although he believes Infantino harbors a grudge against Kirby, he was not made aware of it until Infantino sent him a “nasty letter” which made disparaging remarks about Kirby in response to the “Point of View” column.

As for Hanerfeld’s suspicions about Evanier’s knowledge of the future letters to be printed in CBG, Evanier stated that Kyle told him personally that he had sent in a letter for publication in CBG, and he denied the notion that he had solicited support from any of those who chastised Infantino in the letters section. In fact, Evanier said, he actually told a few people who contacted him with the intent of writing scathing replies to Hanerfeld not to do so.

And in regards to the quote from Sekowsky that accused Infantino of trying to score a victory over Marvel by changing Kirby’s work, Evanier said, “I just presented an opinion that I think a lot of people held at the time.” And no one other than Sekowsky told him as such in a manner he could attribute.

When the Journal asked Evanier if he thought CBG’s treatment of Hanerfeld was fair, he said “I don’t even have an opinion on that,” noting that “I think CBG has a right not to print whatever they feel like just like any other publisher.” He added that at the time Hanerfeld’s letter was printed, CBG had a large backlog of letters — many of which were printed with the same sort of qualifier that appeared with Hanerfeld’s, explaining that the letter had been received a long time ago, and had been delayed due in part to its length. But he emphasized that such questions about the timing and fairness of the way Hanerfeld’s letter was published were Thompson’s domain, not his.

Evanier was also willing to expand on his original criticism of Infantino. He said that to put Kirby on a title where his heads would have to be changed was, in his opinion, a mistake from the beginning. “Kirby didn’t enjoy doing someone else’s characters at any time in his career,” Evanier said. While Kirby said in his interview with the Journal in #134 that he requested to draw Jimmy Olsen, Evanier — who was Kirby’s assistant on his Fourth World series — said that Kirby chose the book because he didn’t want to displace a regular artist, and took Jimmy Olsen because the slot was open.

“I think Infantino has a problem here in understanding the criticism,” Evanier said. “There’s a difference between saying that he didn’t have the right to do it and saying it wasn’t a good idea… I think he’s taking this way too seriously.”

In conclusion, Evanier said that he hoped the matter, which he described as trivial, could finally be put aside.

Infantino was best known for his beautifully designed artwork characterized by a spare, abstract, modern-looking approach perfectly in tune with the late 1950s and 1960s, when he reached his creative maturity. Infantino was editorial director at DC Comics beginning in 1967 and served as the firm’s publisher from 1971 to 1976.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, May 24, 1925, Infantino found work in comics as a teenager while attending the School of Industrial Art (later the High School of Art and Design) in Manhattan. He and his boyhood friend Frank Giacoia worked as a team: Giacoia penciling and Infantino inking. Their first published work was the Jack Frost story in Timely Comics’ USA Comics #3, which hit newsstands just before the December 7, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.

Before long, the two friends switched roles, with Infantino penciling and Giacoia inking. Together and separately, they drew comics for Hillman, Prize, the Jack Binder shop (which supplied Fawcett with editorial content), and other companies. In 1947, Infantino got his first assignment at DC (then National Comics) drawing the debut story of the Black Canary in Flash Comics #86 (August 1947). Then he began work on the Flash and other features and became a favorite of editor Julius Schwartz. Like a lot of young artists at the time, Infantino admired Milton Caniff’s comic strips Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon: Infantino’s male protagonists took on the Caniff look.

“Flash of Two Worlds” from The Flash #123 (Sept. 1961) written by Garner F. Fox, penciled by Carmine Infantino and inked by Joe Giella, reprinted in Millennium Edition: The Flash Vol. 1 #123 ©2000 DC Comics

In 1956, Schwartz chose Infantino to pencil a tryout issue of a new version of the Flash. Working from a script by Robert Kanigher, Infantino’s pencils on “Mystery of the Human Thunderbolt!” in Showcase #4 (September-October 1956) achieved a new kind of superhero action, emphasizing design and movement, with a kinetic quality that was exhilarating. Infantino’s design for the retooled Flash — an all-red costume except for bits of yellow — was like a sleek, modern sports car. His visual conception, along with uncommonly mature stories by Robert Kanigher and John Broome, sold the reinvented character to the burgeoning number of baby boomers who were looking for something new and exciting. The success of the Flash led to the reinvention of Green Lantern and other Golden Age heroes at National/DC, which in turn inspired Stan Lee and Jack Kirby to create the Fantastic Four in 1961. Later comics historians would identify Showcase #4 as the kick-off for what came to be called the Silver Age of comics.

In the late 1950s, Infantino went to art school and his work changed. “There came a point where I felt I had to get back to school,” Infantino recalled in his book The Amazing World of Carmine Infantino. “I just felt there was something missing.” Infantino took classes at the Art Students’ League, and then at the School of Visual Arts with teacher Jack Potter. “What Jack taught me about design was monumental, and I went through a metamorphosis working with him. My work started to grow by leaps and bounds. I was achieving individuality in my work that wasn’t there before. I threw all the basics of cartooning out the window and focused on pure design.” Infantino’s work took on a dynamic quality that moved the eye across the page to focus on the point of each panel, rather than being distracted by background details. He continued to refine his style over the next few years on features such as Adam Strange. After this metamorphosis in his mid-30s, Infantino became one of the great comic book artists, as opposed to just a very good penciler.

In 1964, when Schwartz was given the ailing Batman titles to edit, he tapped Infantino to update the look of the Dynamic Duo. With Detective Comics #327 (May 1964), Batman and Robin had a “new look” designed by Infantino (with inker Joe Giella), the beginning of a new era for the characters. Two years later, when DC felt it was losing ground to Marvel Comics, Infantino convinced the powers-that-be to make him art director. He designed virtually all of DCs covers in an intensive campaign to make them more dynamic and eye-catching.

Cover image from Detective Comics #327 (May 1964) penciled by Carmine Infantino and inked by Joe Giella, reprinted in Millennium Edition: Detective Comics #327 ©2000 DC Comics

DC’s editorial director Irwin Donenfeld was ousted after the company was purchased by Kinney National Services (later Time Warner) in 1967, and Infantino was informed “you’re editorial director now.” One of his first moves was to promote artists to editorial positions. “The books were sterile-looking in those days,” Infantino recalled in his autobiography. “Julie Schwartz, Mort Weisinger, and Murray Boltinoff were purely literary men. My feeling was that we needed visual people also.” Joe Kubert, Joe Orlando, Mike Sekowsky and Dick Giordano became editors. Infantino also canceled old titles, revamped others and started a host of new ones. One of his coups was hiring Jack Kirby away from Marvel Comics in 1970. That year, DC’s lineup was very different than the slate of titles Infantino had inherited.

Infantino became DC’s publisher in 1971. In that capacity, he initiated the first company crossover, Superman vs. the Amazing Spider-Man, and consulted with writer Mario Puzo on the story for the movies Superman and Superman II. During this time, creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were engaged in a lawsuit to regain ownership of Superman, and Infantino worked — some said aggressively — to defeat their efforts. In 1976, Warner Communications ousted him. Infantino’s tenure had been stormy and many in the creative community felt he had been an effective editorial director, but wasn’t up to the job of publisher.

After leaving DC, Infantino sought other management positions in comics and related fields, but was never able to find one. Finally, he returned to freelance art, first in Warren’s black-and-white magazines, and then at Marvel Comics. He penciled that publisher’s highly successful Star Wars comic book for several years, and worked on a number of other series for the publisher such as Spider-Woman, Nova, Ms. Marvel and Iron Man. In the 1980s, he returned to DC Comics and stayed with it until Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1985 spelled the demise of the Flash.

A retired Infantino became a frequent convention guest in the 1990s, signing copies of his autobiography The Amazing World of Carmine Infantino (2001), which he collaborated on with J. David Spurlock.  During this time, according to Michael Dean in The Comics Journal #262 (November/December 2004), he engaged in a lawsuit “against DC comics, claiming it had stolen the rights to to several characters created by him, including The Flash.” Infantino withdrew the lawsuit shortly thereafter. In 2010, he was the subject of Carmine Infantino: Penciler, Publisher, Provocateur, a book by Jim Amash and Eric Nolen-Weathington. He was inducted into the Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1998 and into the Will Eisner Hall of Fame in 2000.

First and foremost I think I was totally out of line in questioning Pekar’s good faith. It’s an odd thing, when someone who is not an artist presumes to write criticism he is criticized for finding fault in something he could not do himself, and is accused of acting out of jealousy of artists. When an artist presumes to write criticism, he is criticized for having negative opinions about people who are better artists than he is, and is accused of being jealous of their success. The injustice is that under this reasoning an artist has less of a privilege of expressing an opinion on a work of art than someone who is incapable of producing one. Besides, criticizing someone else’s criticism is a mug’s game. You make the best case you can for your point of view about the work of art directly, and if it doesn’t stand up against someone else’s opinion that’s on you. It is even more of a mug’s game when you are on the side of the overwhelming consensus, and the critic you are criticizing is expressing an eccentric dissent.

The artist’s perspective is in a certain sense however a distorting lens. To be an artist is to put a theory of how art ought to be made into practice. Your judgment of other works of art is going to be colored by a notion of how art is to be made that is personal or idiosyncratic. Thus artists will often express opinions on the work of quite accomplished fellow artists that is shockingly harsh. An artist like Pekar, who was committed to a rather extreme ethic of naturalism, could honestly form a negative opinion of artists who use fanciful devices or the strategies of entertainment, and believe such artists were being praised unjustly. Such criticism can be wrongheaded or narrow-minded while still being a genuine aesthetic response, and an original perspective.

For a long time before this contretemps I had found Pekar’s criticism to be superficial and poorly founded, and had thought that if I ever got into a debate with him I’d make mincemeat out of him. As those of you who have read the exchange will note, mincemeat was not made, though it could be said that a hash was. At one point I actually try to out-high hat him, which was just bullshit. If you were in an argument with Harvey Pekar and were interested in “winning”, meretricious as that goal is, what you wanted to do was position yourself as the reasonable guy. Such thoughts might not occur to you if you’re suffering some masculinized equivalent of PMS, and don’t quite realize you’re being unreasonable. (Ask yourself if a masculinized version of PMS would be less virulent then the genuine article.) I was particularly impressed that he actually went out and read The Lost Steps. I imagine it’s possible that he just skimmed a few pages until he found something that seemed to contradict what I said, but I like to think he read the whole thing. (It’s a good book. I wish I myself had read it a little more recently when I referred to it.) As I recall the main reason I abandoned the argument was that Gary Groth had told me that Art Spiegelman was unhappy with the way I was defending his work.

My second biggest error was in going all-in to defend an ill-conceived offhand remark I made regarding Polish anti-Semitism. The proper answer to Pekar’s criticism of making the Polish characters in Maus pigs would have been to concede that of course pigs as symbols have a highly negative connotation, but that it is clear from the context of the book and the way characters are portrayed that this isn’t Spiegelman’s intention. I had a hard time believing at the time that the offense Pekar was taking was anything but a put-up job, but you know, people do get touchy when they been poked a lot. If you are as I am the kind of Italian American who takes a perverse pride in his ethnicity’s association with organized crime — if you were in fact disappointed when you learned that Italians were actually not any more prominent in that field than many other ethnicities, but had merely captured the imagination of the press with the secret society mumbo-jumbo they’d brought over from the Old Country — then you really have no equivalent of the humorous association of the Polish people with poor hygiene. To be sure there is the image of the greasy wop buried somewhere in the library of stereotypes, but the Italian in popular entertainment is as likely as not to be a sex symbol.

It’s not so much that Pekar was so brilliant in debate as that he was utterly tenacious in holding to his most absurd positions, and those absurd positions were seldom without at least some sort of basis. For instance, it is as ridiculous to argue that Animal Farm isn’t about the Soviet Union as to argue that Citizen Kane isn’t based on William Randolph Hearst, but it is true that Orwell would argue almost to his deathbed that capitalism was no better than communism. His main purpose in writing Animal Farm was not to join in Churchill’s Iron Curtain defense but to fight for the soul of socialism. I don’t know if people fully understand the appeal of Stalin. From Spartacus to the Paris Commune popular revolution followed a similar pattern. With the ruling classes in disarray, the revolutionaries roll up early victories, until they come to a point of indecision. Do they press the offensive? Do they negotiate? As the revolutionaries are having trouble deciding what they want to do, the ruling classes have united and they know exactly what they want to do: Kill the revolutionaries. The revolution ends soon afterwards. What Stalin represented was a revolutionary leader who could break this pattern by being as hard, mean and ruthless as the bosses themselves. He was not fully repudiated on the socialist left until Khrushchev denounced him. My particular idiocy was to go over and over an argument the reader almost certainly agreed with in a futile attempt to make Pekar admit he was wrong.

If there’s one thing I wish I would have stayed in the argument to take issue with it was Pekar’s use of the introductions to interviews I’d written for the book The New Comics to make me look hypocritical. This was a book where I was not even the principal editor, and in which presenting my idiosyncratic personal position on each and every subject was simply not my brief. Rather, it was to present a best case scenario. My opinion of Pekar’s comics is similar to David Hajdu’s. I think they can be good when he has a good artist and when he’s writing about something interesting, like the sideline he had in selling used records on his hospital job. The answer to the mechanistic plotting and bootless fantasy of commercial comics is not to present mundane experience shorn of any suggestion of drama but to create genuine stories that arise out of character. What I came to appreciate later on was Pekar’s importance in setting the stage for the art comics renaissance in the 1980s, in which his importance is in some ways similar to that of Robert Crumb in the first wave of underground comics. I’ve written about this a number of times since.

As for the subject at hand, a commenter on the Comics Journal message board some time ago referred to the argument, and said he thought that Pekar came out ahead. To this I replied, “Well, if you think he won the argument then he won the argument, didn’t he?”

The new volume, A Pedestrian View/The Vogelman Diary, is the realization of Weaver’s 1982 experiment combining fifty-three gouaches (“A Pedestrian View”) with scrawly, gnomic captions (“The Vogelman Diary”) originally filed in a ring binder: one project in two parts. Roob’s accompanying essay compares Weaver with contemporary Pittsburgher Andy Warhol. While the latter managed to transform his practice in commercial art into fine art, Weaver was never drawn to away from illustration, though this 1982 personal project represents a totally new direction from magazine assignments, which Roob calls “a self-portrait in the form of a kaleidoscope.”

The views are “pedestrian,” in the sense of a flaneur wandering the streets and in the process collecting legs, police barricades, pigeons, laundry ads, wheel-wells, restaurant clapboards, manholes, roller skates, and other ordinary waist-down urban sights. Weaver’s bric-a-brac recalls the effluvium that litters many teasing compositions by Saul Steinberg, but rather than Steinberg’s tidy figuration, here the objects intermingle, convoluted by radical perspectival shifts and interruptions of color. Weaver’s manner of seeing is extremely particular: an orange blob of umbrella octogonally commands a field of hashed-in grey cement, partly obscuring a hazily poetic puddle which reflects, out-of-frame, branches of a tree above. The scribble below reads, “A town is no longer a series of fixed-perspective views. But is abstract sculpture.”

“Pedestrian View/Vogelman” was one of Weaver’s several picture-cycles, essentially artists’ books, and the only one yet published. It’s the consummation of his desire to combine the model of single picture or design, in which all elements are frozen and equal, and the process of literary and musical development, where meaning is constructed through time. During his ruminations at the talk, James McMullan suggested that, steeped in Italian neorealist film and interested in the split-screen films deployed at the 1964 New York World’s Fair by Charles and Ray Eames, Weaver started to develop new forms of rhythmic development to his illustrations: in A Pedestrian View, many frames follow the ambulations of anonymous figures, legs and perspective constantly in motion, choreographing page by page the many vectors of pedestrians and the everyday signage of street life.

In 1972 Weaver commissioned four artists associated with the Terry Ditenfass Gallery to make comics for an issue of Graphis magazine focusing on comics (he is nicely bracketed by contributions from Alain Resnais and Milton Glaser). In his accompanying essay, “Experiments in Time-Art”, Weaver dilates on the power of the strip to transform visual art: “The artist working in the narrative strip medium can extend the single instant backward or forward in time. Not only can he move slowly or suddenly or not at all, change his mind, hold his audience in suspense, sustain a mood, surprise or destroy; he can virtually wire his pictures for sound.”

In A Pedestrian View, the balance of power between text and image is maintained in a tense relation of near-opacity. Weaver’s split-level book is constantly forcing the singularity of the image and that of the text together—but each as a contrasting autonomous entity, rather than a supplement. Weaver’s earlier work, which appeared in magazines like Esquire (where art director Henry Wolf employed both Weaver and Leiter) and Life, is part of a lineage of illustration now rarely practiced, apart from the occasional sealed courtroom (an obvious exception: Joe Sacco).

Reportage: illustration as documentation, artist as camera. This is, perhaps, surprising given Weaver’s loose and gestural style, with often disrupted traditional perspective and throbbing patches of violent color. On the page, they often seem to be trampling over the page, but within that framing all the devices converge on isolating a particular way of seeing a space. Art directors like Wolf used its specificity — like the new book’s combination of text and image — to set off, rather than explain, its corresponding article.

Accompanying Roob’s essay at the end of the book is an interview with photographer Saul Leiter, who recalls his long friendship with the illustrator and in particular one occasion when Weaver accompanied him on an assignment to photograph Warhol with his mother. In the photographs, Warhol is admiring some Weavers.

Weaver’s eyesight was poor throughout his life: Leiter remembered, during the discussion, watching him try to make out street signs through coke-bottle lenses. Perhaps that was the impetus that drove his vision away from photographic simulacra and toward a graphic interpretation. But the honing of his technique led him to capture the form of things as a kind of interior truth, but one defined by the manner of its expression and almost freed from the burden of its literal contents. The sprays of color of police tape, the interruptions of text from signage on the street, the akimbo legs of a roller-skater: in angles and juxtaposition they guard a fleeting meaning not derived from its subject, but kindled by its translation into art. As Weaver wrote in American Artist September 1959: “the artist should not merely reflect; in in an atomic era he should be the reactor.”

Near the end of the evening McMullan read from an artist’s book in which Weaver had scribbled down a personal collection of aphorisms (somewhat like Mel Bochner’s index card project, “Misunderstandings”) — some of them familiar: “If you can’t imitate him; don’t copy him (Yoggi Berra),” “If you are not skillful enough to sketch a man falling out of a window during the time it takes him to fall from the fourth storey to the ground, you will never be able to produce great works (Delacroix)” — and some of his own invention: “Art is what is left after the message has evaporated (Weaver)”.

The grand tradition of the flame war as a snapshot of the pressing issues of the day and as a catalyst for criticism that has its own literary worth is not new. (For the 1730s version, check out Jonathan Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room” and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s “The Reasons that Induced Dr S to write a Poem call’d the Lady’s Dressing room.”) At its best, before the Internet was widespread, The Comics Journal letter pages, dubbed “Blood and Thunder”, served essentially as a message board for the comics community. It was a forum where cartoonists, fans, critics, and professionals debated and dissected every development — aesthetic and commercial — in the medium at the time, whether it was the formation of the Direct Market, Creators’ Rights, “writing for the trade,” or “craft is the enemy of art.” (In other cases, they simply trolled each other; the insults in the great R. Fiore/Kenneth Smith showdown got positively Shakespearean.)

In this series of letters, circa 1989-1990, spurred by Leon Hunt’s “Pekar and Realism” piece in issue #126 (January 1989), American Splendor creator Harvey Pekar and critic R. Fiore argue over realism and genre fiction in comics. And Animal Farm.

The first letter, by Harvey Pekar, appeared in The Comics Journal #130 (July 1989):

Comics are as good an artform as any in existence. (How many times have I said that?) Therefore, comics critics should have high standards: a comics work shouldn’t just be good-by-comics-standards; it should be good period. If bad comics are produced, the creators are at fault since the medium they employ allows them as great a range and depth of expression as any other.

But most comics critics and fans have low standards. They like escapist, pulp-derived stuff that will transport them from “mundane” reality into what they believe is a more exciting, glamorous world of the imagination. They crave adventure stories in which life is at risk, where great fame and fotune can be won. Comic book humor tends to be exaggerated; the drawing in “funny” comics stories is generally cartoony. Lately some relatively well-educated comics critics have emerged; they’ve accumulated large vocabularies and claim to have read Ulysses. Unfortunately, most of them like the same dumb comics that ordinary fans adore — for example, they take Frank Miller’s work seriously. These critics attempt to legitimize their rotten taste by relating childish, genre-derived comics to classic mythology and to great non-realist literary works rather than admitting, “Hey, I know this stuff is junk, but I like it.” Most of us like junk of one kind or another; we can’t all have high standards in everything. I like junk food, but I admit it’s junk food. Beware the quasi-highbrow comics critic who tries to tell you Frank Miller and Howard Chaykin write well.

Realism

Many comic book fans don’t like to read about everyday experience; they say such writing is “bo-o-o-oring.” It may also be painful to them; they’d rather fantasize than contemplate their own world. When they become comics critics, too often even the most well-read among them praise and overrate flawed, escapist work.

Leon Hunt recently published a confused, if complimentary, article about me in The Comics Journal [“Pekar and Realism” in #126] that exemplifies the kind of criticism I’ve described above. Hunt said that he liked my work, citing its “fascination,” and that he generally agrees with critics who’ve praised it, but thinks it’s been misunderstood, and sometimes praised for the wrong reasons. Hunt dislikes realism. Most people would claim my stories are realistic and so would I. What Hunt does is cite stories of mine he likes, stories about things I’ve experienced and seen, and then claim they’re not realistic because of the way in which they are told.

His attitude seems to be, “If it’s good, it can’t be realism.” Let me oppose to Hunt’s comment on realism a definition I found in Thrall, Hibbard, and Holman’s Handbook to Literature: “Realism is, in the broadest sense, simply fidelity to actuality in its representation in literature… and in this sense it has been a significant element in almost every school of writing in human history.”

Spiegelman’s take on realism in comics: from Maus by and © Art Spiegelman

This definition of realism is more viable than the narrowly circumscribed one that Hunt provides. To him it appears that realism equals bad, hackneyed realism.

However, to me “realism” is not simply a school of literature that had its heyday between 1845 and 1925; it is a type of writing that, like “fantasy,” turns up in many eras and takes various forms. It has been argued, for example, that stream-of-consciousness writers are super-realistic because they attempt to convey the thoughts and sensory impressions of their characters so directly. Realistic styles have evolved and are evolving.

That having been said, I still think Hunt’s general description of realistic writing of the late 19th and early 20th centuries is seriously flawed and misleading.

Hunt claims that social realist novels, movies, etc., not only “attempt to record empirical reality as it is” and “people as they are,” but must record “events as they occur” in a linear manner and have “a closed system of producing meaning.” He notes that I don’t always use a linear narrative technique and that some of my stories are open-ended. Therefore, according to his definition, these autobiographical stories are not “realistic,” no matter how accurately the factual data and dialogue in them is presented.

I think Hunt confuses content and style. When he claims realists are concerned with presenting empirical reality, I agree with him, but when he says that realistic works must “record events as they occur” and have “closed systems of producing meaning,” I disagree. I looked at several definitions of realism after reading Hunt’s article; none cited “recording events as they occur” or “closed systems of producing meaning” as essential to realism. Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead is considered a realistic novel, yet in it Mailer departs from recording “events as they occur” and employs flashbacks, which many other realistic writers have done. As for “closed meaning,” Flaubert’s great realistic novel Sentimental Education is open-ended, a “writerly” text that raises questions and stimulates readers to think. Flaubert considered it his greatest novel, but when initially released public reaction to it was cool and it sold poorly, partly because his motives for writing it were not obvious. There are many other truly open-ended realistic novels, for example George Ade’s Doc’ Horne.

This novel contains chapters in which the elderly Doc’ tells a series of stories about his amazing accomplishments that his listeners at a seedy Chicago residence hotel find hard to believe. Still, the reader wonders about Doc’. His articulateness and knowledge imply that he has been more than a skidrow character. And near the end of the book, after a series of humiliations, Doc’ inherits a considerable amount of money from his sister, indicating that once he might have been well connected.

Ade never explains the mystery of Doc’s background, leaving the reader to wonder about it. Perhaps Ade’s major goal, however, is to describe a segment of Chicago’s underclass. This he does vividly and accurately while avoiding, however, making value judgments about his characters. He presents readers with information arid lets them draw their own conclusions. The last chapter of the book merely describes how Doc’, returned from a European trip, finds his companions scattered to the four winds. The novel is deliberately left unresolved. Readers can come to a variety of conclusions about it or none at all.

I believe realistic literature can jump around in time, can deal with multiple themes and points of view, and can be open-ended. Realist works can also be experimental. I have no objection to Ulysses being called a realistic novel; it’s autobiographical and a slice of life, taking place in a short period of time. Joyce’s writing, while experimental, deals with everyday existence. Perhaps it’s no big deal that my definition of realism doesn’t agree with Hunt’s, but beyond this there’s a real difference in our values. Hunt implies that “recording events as they occur” is outmoded. Though I sometimes depart from this practice, I disagree. The linear form is so basic that it’s going to be around a long time. All sorts of writers, including avant-garde stylists, realists, and fantasists, use it, including some Hunt praises. It’s a hard style not to use, especially when dealing with events occurring over a short time span.

Ambiguity or open-endedness is present in many of my stories. But in others I’m didactic, by which I mean that I try to inform, and to render, judgments, sometimes about political and social issues. Many comic book fans don’t like this; they call it “propaganda.” I think the reason they dislike didacticism is because they want to escape from their own and societies’ problems. Didacticism is fine; if writers want to spell out what they think in a novel or comic, it’s O.K. with me. The way they handle it determines whether they’re aesthetically successful, but there are plenty of great works of art in which it’s plain where a writer stands on some issue. We know from reading Germinal that Zola thinks French miners were treated badly, but it’s a great, moving (and not unsubtle) novel. Eisenstein’s left-wing bias is apparent in Potemkin, but it’s considered a great experimental film. Lenny Bruce was an avant-garde comedian who used art to advance his political beliefs, as do many satirists. You can take a stand and still be an experimental artist. Koyaanisqatsi is a highly unusual movie, but its environmentalist message is apparent. Some of the best comics artists — Crumb, Spain, Shelton — make their political positions obvious. But Hunt doesn’t like direct, frank statements of opinion in comics, novels, and film. In listing what he considers realism’s shortcomings, Hunt claims, “Realism is a closed system of producing meaning. For all its varying degrees of ambiguity or complexity, it essentially places us in a passive position as readers or viewers. Regardless of the desire to create confrontation, the effect is just as likely to be reassuring or bleakly despairing, which often amounts to the same thing — neither suggests that change is possible.”

Hunt seemingly considers realism outmoded and clumsy: “Most realist novels and films depend heavily on the economy, the linearity, the identification techniques of classic fiction. They tend to have a visible ‘point of view,’ a discriminative sense of relevance. We are left in no doubt as to why the story has been told.” Realistic writing can be open-ended, as Sentimental Education and Doc’ Horne demonstrate. Not only that, but didactic realistic writing — that is, writing intended to inform and convey opinions — can stimulate readers rather than anesthetizing them. The information contained in books with a “message” obviously can suggest that change is possible. This is so apparent that it leads me to believe Hunt was referring only to certain types of change. However, he never specifies the kinds of change he means. Certainly some didactic novels and short stories have helped, in any event, bring about political change. Their aesthetic quality has varied, but some — like Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches, which publicized the difficulties of the soon-to-be-emancipated Russian serf — are excellent. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle helped enact food inspection laws — that is, helped bring about change.

Talkin’ ’bout My Intentions

My intentions are a major focus of Hunt’s article. What do I want to do with the comics form? Well, let me spell it out here. Regarding subject matter: I choose to write about my life and times, as accurately as possible in most cases, to deal with events generally considered mundane, often so mundane that most writers don’t want to make them the focal points of their works as I do. Mundane events, because they occur so frequently, have a much greater influence on people’s lives than the rarely occurring “big” or sensational or traumatic events that readers through the ages have been so taken with.

I write about my life and times because I’m so well-acquainted with them, interested in them, and have more to say about them than about the experiences of people with super-powers parading around in Halloween costumes.

Many of my everyday experiences have, in a general sense, been shared by a number of people, so that they can identify with me and what I write about — if they have the inclination. Everyday situations are sometimes very dramatic; consequently, I have much to choose from when I want to write serious, tension-inducing stories. I can do pieces about getting and keeping jobs, a very important subject. As for heroes, I see them constantly, doing boring, taxing, low-paid work to keep their families going. Regarding humor: I see much funnier things going on at my workplace and in Cleveland’s neighborhoods than I do on TV. In writing about everyday life, I have a huge range of subjects to deal with.

I want very much to be an innovative writer. Dealing with mundane but important subjects other writers ignore is one way I try to do this. Beyond that, I’ve experimented with various narrative techniques, both literary and, in my capacity as an art director for American Splendor, graphic. I’ve asked the people illustrating my stories to avoid the idealized/genericized and cartoony drawing typical of comic book art. Much of the illustration found in American Splendor is realistic; but the realistic styles of Gerry Shamray, Val Mayerik, Paul Mavrides, and Drew Friedman are quite different from each other. Robert Crumb does have a cartoony style, but his work, because of its wealth of accurately observed detail, is also realistic.

Crumb experiments with a brush in “Hypothetical Quandary” (1984) Art by R. Crumb Story and © Harvey Pekar

Sue Cavey’s graphic style has impressionistic and symbolist qualities. Rebecca Huntington’s beautiful illustration in American Splendor #13 demonstrates how subtle pencil work can be. Kevin Brown’s bold drawing resembles woodcuts. Joe Zabel and Gary Dumm aren’t flashy, but they’re terrific at making their illustration complement a story’s text.

I employ various narrative techniques. Some of my stories are wordy but sometimes, as in “Broken Window” and “Making Lemonade,” I try to tell a story mainly with pictures. Sometimes I use tiers of meaning in my stories and write pieces that have more than one theme, such as “Presidents’ Day.” In “A Marriage Album,” co-written by me and my wife Joyce Brabner, a narrative style is used in which the authorial presence is eliminated and free association, flashbacks, and wordless sequences are featured to create a stream-of-consciousness effect. (I don’t recall any critic referring at length to this story, one of the best, most experimental, and complex pieces I’ve published.)

“A Marriage Album” (1985) Art by Val Mayerik Story by Joyce Brabner and Harvey Pekar © Harvey Pekar

I frequently use indirect narrative techniques and ambiguity and eschew punchlines, or place the most significant statement in a story somewhere other than at its end.

But in some stories I write didactically, making direct statements to the reader about political and social matters. As stated earlier, there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with this. What the federal government does, for instance, affects our lives, sometimes quickly and significantly. I’m aware of this. I keep up with political events; they concern me greatly. Consequently, I refer to them in my stories. This is perfectly valid, especially in an autobiographical work. The question is how to accomplish this in a fresh, non-hackneyed way. As Hunt notes, one of the ways I do this is by stepping out of my stories to address the readers as an author, not as a character. Instead of eliminating the authorial presence, as in “A Marriage Album,” I emphasize it (sometimes to spell-out and reinforce the point I’m trying to make, and sometimes, as in “Read This,” to create a humorous effect by satirizing the laboriousness of didactic story-telling at its worst — I agree with Hunt that it can be clumsy, as can other types of storytelling). Why not? The stuff I write about really happened. While I employ a lot of fiction writing techniques, I don’t try to disguise the veracity of my stories. Why be cute? Why not write about how political and social issues and problems impact on my life, sometimes jumping out of the story to do it?

What Are Comics Readers Really After?

What do Hunt and most other comic book fans want? Is he really so concerned with stylistic innovation, to which I also give a good deal of thought? Are his artistic standards as high as he would have us believe?

Hunt says approvingly that a modernist sensibility has crept into the work of such commercial writers as Stephen King, as if he believes King is underrated. In an earlier Journal article [“Popular Defective,” #125], he has nothing but high praise for Charles Burns’ horror stories and/or satires of them, never mentioning that in sticking with such stuff Burns, who has ability, is severely limiting his range.

Hunt sneers at Marvel fanboys, but praises what he calls the “estimable” work of mainstream comics writers Steve Gerber, Steve Englehart, and Doug Moench. Maybe these fellows exhibit more modernist tendencies in their work than is generally appreciated, but their stories are not estimable; they’re cliché-ridden. Modernism has been around a long time: Ulysses was published in 1922, Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives in 1909. Obviously, some modernist devices have had time to trickle down to commercial comics writers.

Hunt lauds Frank Miller for “demolishing” the super-hero, when Miller actually worships larger-than-life heroes in his confused way. Why does Hunt like the stories of these Marvel and DC hacks — because of their so-called modernism? I suppose if you wanted to, and looked hard enough, you could find “modernist” elements in a lot of comic book writers’ work. Does Hunt praise it because, although inconsequential aesthetically, the writing of Miller, Gerber, etc., is not the worst of its kind out there? Hunt seems to make a lot of allowances for writers who are doing genre, escapist stuff.

Hunt claims critical response to my work has been so positive that to call into question anything I’ve done would be considered blasphemous. He’s wrong. I don’t win comic book critics awards, like Art Spiegelman (a.k.a. art spiegelman) and the Hernandez brothers, who are treated as icons by their fans. Consider their outraged reaction in letters and articles to the Journal essay I wrote objecting to various features of Maus [“Maus and Other Topics,” #113]. But these people didn’t deal with what I said; they dealt with what they thought I said. Let me answer their objections here, because it relates to what I’ve written above.

Maus Reprise

I have no general bias against anthropomorphism and symbolism, as some readers assumed; rather, I thought Spiegelman handled them clumsily and sophomorically in Maus. What’s the point of using symbols and metaphors when they’re so thin and obvious as to be pointless? Spiegelman’s employment of them in his original 1973 Maus story, which was more of a fantasy, made more sense. There the father was not identified as “Vladek Spiegelman.”

Portraying Jews as mice and Germans as cats, as they are in his Pantheon book — which is plainly a biography and/or autobiography with anthropomorphism arbitrarily imposed on it — is just a gimmick. George Orwell used anthropomorphism in Animal Farm, to which Maus has been compared, but he didn’t identify the pigs explicitly as Lenin or Stalin. Orwell’s work was really allegorical; Maus is not, even though Spiegelman uses symbolism. (I’ve used symbols, too, but I’d rather they be felt than immediately understood. I’m not interested in playing games for the sake of playing games.) Spiegelman has been praised for “distancing” himself from his narrative with his anthropomorphism. What he’s actually done is dilute its intensity and, by doing so, unintentionally make Maus more commercially successful. It’s been claimed that people are inured to the Holocaust by now, that to get their attention with a Holocaust narrative you’ve got to package it differently. That’s baloney. Whenever Israeli politicians want to justify their brutality toward Arabs or ask for support from other countries, they drag foreign statesmen to their Holocaust museum, Yad Vashem, and show them documentary evidence of the horror. After touring Yad Vashem, most visitors are shaken; they haven’t seen cats and mice, they’ve seen real human suffering. People don’t get inured to Holocaust stories; it’s too terrible an event to be taken in stride. Spiegelman’s watered-down Maus, however, is not too painful for them to read.

Spiegelman could’ve used the drawing style he used in “Prisoner from the Hell Planet” in Maus, but that would not have been as arty as employing animals, and he has difficulty distinguishing between arty and artful, and between gimmickry and genuine innovation, as do many comics fans.

Another problem with Spiegelman’s anthropomorphism is that it stereotypes nationalities, which is particularly unfortunate in Maus in that Poles are shown risking their lives for Jews, yet are portrayed by Spiegelman as pigs. Jews were not treated as first-class citizens in Poland, but that doesn’t justify employing a doctrine of collective guilt to implicitly condemn all Poles by picturing them as pigs.

Maus by and © Art Spiegelman

This can lead to embarrassing problems. Chicago cartoonist Carole Sobocinski, a Polish-American, told me that while Spiegelman was autographing a copy of Maus she’d bought for her mother, she asked him how she might explain the Poles-as-pigs metaphor to her mother. Spiegelman disingenuously replied that he’d pictured them that way because Poles eat a lot of pork. (I regret having to use an anecdote like this to make a point, but do so because Spiegelman fans are so worshipful they can’t bear to read anything negative about him. You should hear some of the absurd rationalizations they’ve come up with for his using the Poles-as-pigs metaphor.)

While on the subject of Maus, let me also point out that I didn’t simply object to Spiegelman portraying his father, Vladek, negatively; I objected to Spiegelman’s writing a self-aggrandizing autobiography in which he went out of his way to make himself look good (that is, the long-suffering son) at his father’s expense, emphasizing the old man’s faults to the point of redundance, and de-emphasizing the affection and concern Vladek felt for him. This caused a Village Voice reviewer to conclude that Art was the hero of Maus — “this brave artist,” she called him — and Vladek, who lived through the Holocaust, the villain. Spiegelman claims his portrayal of his father is objective and sympathetic. Actually, it’s fake objectivity. He tries to disguise his hostility to his father. At one point, he shows himself lying to Vladek about not publishing information concerning his father’s early life, but Art says in Maus he’s doing it to humanize Vladek. So we’re supposed to forgive him the lie because he’s improving, humanizing Vladek’s image. Rather than come out and tell us the truth about his loathing of Vladek, Art puts the heaviest criticism of his father in Vladek’s second wife’s mouth. That way, he looks like a reasonably dutiful son and Vladek gets trashed.

Even when Vladek does something praiseworthy, Art sometimes negates it. For example, Vladek takes his son to a bank to show him a safe deposit box containing precious objects for Art to have in case of an emergency. But the emphasis in the scene is not placed on Vladek’s generosity but on his love of money, craftiness in hiding valuables from the Germans, and on his hostility toward his current wife Mala, who he denounces as mercenary: “Three times already she made me change my will. She wants that I should give nothing for my brother in Israel and nothing for you.”

I’m not saying this event didn’t happen, but Art describes it in such a way as to emphasize his father’s irrationality, miserliness, and sneakiness. The generosity and concern Vladek exhibits toward Art are buried.

Meanwhile, Art puts himself above the fray, makes himself appear a father to his seemingly childish father as he tries to calm him, saying, “Come on, Pop, Mala’s O.K.”

Maus by and © Art Spiegelman

But is Mala O.K.? Is Vladek wrong about her? She calls Vladek “cheap,” “more attached to things than people.” When Art says Vladek may have been twisted by his concentration camp existence, Mala claims that no one she knew that’d gone through the camps was as rotten as Vladek. And yet having known him for years and presumably thinking he was a jerk, she married him. Why? For his money maybe? Maybe Vladek’s right about Mala. “Why,” to quote from my earlier article, “is Vladek shown to be a crazy, petty, tyrannical miser at the beginning and end of two thirds of Maus’ chapters? What is the reason for this overkill?”

It’s probable that Vladek had faults as a father, the kind of faults many Eastern European Jews exhibited when they tried to impose their values on their kids in America, not realizing that the U.S.A. isn’t Poland. However, Vladek also had virtues as a parent. Art seems to have manipulated the facts in such a way as to put Vladek in a bad light while making himself appear sympathetic. Vladek is a complex person. Whatever his motivation, Art’s done a poor, confusing job of portraying him.

It doesn’t matter, for aesthetic purposes, whether Art likes his father or not; what I criticize Maus for is its artificial, contrived, and pseudo-intellectual qualities.

How do I explain Maus’ popularity? Well, for one thing, Vladek’s Holocaust narrative is compelling and full of interesting details. That alone makes the book worth owning.

Also, most people in the U.S. and Europe are so sympathetic to victims of the Holocaust that anyone who writes about them with any competence gets credit for being profound and a great humanitarian. You think I’m kidding? Check out the case of Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor who’s written a number of books about his experiences that are moving but not moreso than other Holocaust narratives, and, even though he’s not a great writer or brilliant philosopher, has been given a Nobel Peace Prize for constantly bringing attention to the Holocaust so the world will not forget it. However, Weisel has been criticized by left-wing Jews for not speaking out against Israeli persecution of Arabs in greater Israel, which leads me to believe that, rather than being a paragon of virtue, he is merely a Jewish nationalist. You see, and I say this as a Jew myself, not everyone who has survived the Holocaust or is related to a survivor is holy.

Because he’s dealt with the Holocaust, Spiegelman gets credit for being more skillful and humane than he is. Kim Deitch tried to defend him in an interview [“Kim Deitch,” Journal #123] by saying, with regard to my statements concerning cheap shots Spiegelman took at his father, “I thought he [Pekar] took it too seriously. All of Artie’s bickering with his father Harvey took as some kind of attack, whereas I felt it was done with real affection… Jews thrive on bickering. .. All of this bickering goes with the territory of being Jewish. [Laughter]”

Deitch’s statement is wrong. In Maus, Spiegelman writes about his having been in a mental institution, about his mother committing suicide, and about his lather’s bitter quarrels with his current wife, who denounces him viciously to Art. This is clearly not a Jewish family that thrives on bickering.

Comic book fans like Maus, in addition to reasons cited above, because it is an adventure story involving Vladek’s attempt to keep himself and his wife alive, to elude the Germans. They also love the anthropomorphism. To these fans, getting Jewish mice and German cats in an adventure story considered “serious” is like having their cake and eating it. They always knew comics were great and now their opinions are being verified.

Los Bros Considered

The reaction of comics fans to the Hernandez brothers is also interesting. I like their work; in fact, I wrote an introduction to a trade paperback collection of Gilbert’s stories, and I stand by every comment I made in it. It ought to be realized, though, that Jaime and Gilbert have their limitations. They certainly don’t outclass some of the best 1965-75 underground comics artists like Crumb, Shelton, Justin Green, Frank Stack, Spain, and Bill Griffith. Although Gilbert’s work differs from Jaime’s, both tend to employ characters that are idealized and/or genericized. Luba, for example, conforms too much to the hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold type, even though she’s a banadora, not a hooker. Maggie and Hopey are just too hip and perky — even when depressed they exude perkiness. They’re romanticized versions of real people.

The work of both Gilbert and Jaime lacks the intellectual richness of Spain or Crumb or Stack. Spain is plenty street smart, and he’s familiar with several street cultures. But beyond that, he’s well-read, he’s interested in politics, and his knowledge comes through in his work, makes it something more than just good popular art. Spain’s lower- and working-class people are seen by him in a larger overall perspective.

“Big Bitch” (1986) © Spain Rodriguez

So why do today’s comics fans praise the Hernandez brothers so much and ignore Spain? I think one reason is that most contemporary comic book readers, people in their teens to 30s, aren’t equipped to appreciate Spain. We’re talking about people who are less interested in politics than any generation of young Americans I’ve seen (and I’ll be 50 this year) or read about since the First World War, and who, from what I can observe, are not well-versed in good literature. A lot of the material that Spain uses, not just in his biographies of revolutionaries but in fictional works like Trashman, goes over the heads of today’s comics fans. It probably disturbs them, too.

The Hernandez brothers don’t transcend the traditional comics idiom the way Spain does. He doesn’t always write heavyweight, realistic stories, but when he does his characters are more individualized than the Hernandezes’, and physically uglier. A lot of comics fans don’t want to deal with Spain’s harsh, unvarnished world; it’s too much like the one they’re trying to escape. I’m not asking Gilbert to do political tracts; however, in his Palomar you don’t get enough of a sense of the poverty and oppression that most Latin American village dwellers must endure. Jackie Gleason’s New York bus driver Ralph Kramden expresses more anxiety about money than most Palomarans, who seem more like working-class U.S. citizens of Latin American descent than inhabitants of rural Latin America. That is, they seem to be modeled on people Gilbert’s known in California. Interestingly, Jaime has dealt with differences between Chi-canos and Mexicans in Love & Rockets #15.

“On the Road Ag’in: Part 2” (1985) © Jaime Hernandez

But they, the fans, love Love & Rockets, full of young and good-looking women they can fantasize about, full of young people of both sexes looking for adventures or having adventures, so that you forget some are supposed to have jobs. The Hernandez brothers know a lot about popular comics and movies, but most of these aren’t worth taking seriously. Locas needs more in it than one character who gains weight to give it credibility. Gilbert has written about serial killing and a witch’s visit to Palomar; his writing owes too much to genre literature, and at times it’s melodramatic.

Genre Literature

What is genre literature? It’s commercial, as opposed to fine art, romance and adventure — that is, science fiction and fantasy, detective, espionage, horror, and cowboy — literature. It’s not impossible to write a great novel dealing with these areas. It’s been done. We by Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin, for example, is an outstanding science fiction novel. Most American science fiction fans aren’t aware of it, though. Zamyatin is a “fine art,” not a genre, writer. His literary style is too advanced and complex for the average SF fan; he doesn’t employ the clichés genre fans are fond of. And writing an adventure story is clearly not his main purpose. We is a futuristic allegory in which Zamyatin denounces the totalitarian and highly regimented societies emerging in his day. (Hunt may not like We despite its modernist characteristics because Zamyatin’s political position can be so easily discerned. Maybe he’d call it preachy.) Acclaimed by scholars of top-notch fiction, We has little to offer the typical SF fan, who doesn’t care about politics but is fascinated by accounts of life on weird worlds, humanoids, and spaceship battles.

Genre novels rely for their appeal on contrived, tricky plots, sensational adventures in which lives, power, and wealth are at stake, idealized protagonists, too-good-to-be-true heroines, and other stereotyped characters. Obviously, they’re very popular. People who don’t take art seriously, who just want superficial entertainment, enjoy genre literature, TV, and movies. And yet genre fiction is derived from “fine art” literature. And most comics writing is, in turn, derived from genre literature, though sometimes not directly. The trickle-down influences can work like this: Ernest Hemingway, a “fine arts” writer (though one I have serious reservations about) influences hard-boiled detective writers, who influence adventure movie writers, who influence comic book writers, who influence worse comic book writers. By the time you get to the bottom level of these writers, they’re using nothing but solid clichés.

Genre writing is mostly schlock writing. Schlock is popular; there’s a big market for schlock of all kinds, including schlock comic books. (Almost all comic books are schlock, by the way.)

The Monsters and the Critics

Let’s get back to comic book critics again. I’ve mentioned Hunt, who likes Steve Englehart, Steve Gerber, and Doug Moench, who thinks Stephen King’s modernism is underappreciated, and who cites the TV show The Prisoner as an example of modernism. (The Prisoner was actually a genre series apparently synthesized from ideas taken from, or similar to, those of Lewis Carroll, Franz Kafka, and espionage novels.) There’s another genre fan, Donald Phelps, who, like Hunt, wrote a complimentary article about me [“Word and Image: Approaching Harvey Pekar,” Journal #97] — “one of the most engaging phenomena to appear among American comic books, Harvey Pekar’s… American Splendor” — but busted his butt trying to find something to complain about in my work. Since Hunt refers to and praises Phelps’ article, and since Phelps is an advocate of genre art who comes on like a highbrow, I’d like to deal with his comments. I suppose I should have done so in a letter to the editor years ago, but didn’t because I didn’t want readers to realize how touchy and vindictive I am. If you’ve gotten this far, however, the cat’s out of the bag, so I might as well go for broke and reply to some of the things Phelps said about my work — stuff I’ve been grinding my teeth over for years. You can skip this section if you want to; I work cheap, so out of appreciation the editor lets me indulge myself. However, if you read it you may find it interesting. Malicious though I am, I don’t put people down in print unless what I have to say is, in my opinion, valid and consequential.

Phelps really has a shaky idea of where I’m at. He credits me with “a loving, witty esteem for genre art” just because a scene from The Maltese Falcon film is shown in the background of an American Splendor panel.

I was exposed to a lot of popular culture as a kid, but that doesn’t make me a Dashiell Hammett enthusiast. You know by now that Phelps is wrong to say I’m a genre art fan. Let me also reveal that I didn’t really see The Maltese Falcon on the night I wrote about; I saw a Marx Brothers movie. But I told Gary Dumm and Greg Budgett to draw a scene from any old movie they wanted to in the background.

The Maltese Falcon makes a cameo appearance in the background of this panel from “Ripoff Chick” (1981) Art by Greg Budgett and Gary Dumm Story and © by Harvey Pekar

Phelps cites Paul Goodman as being among my influences: “I should be genuinely surprised if he did not know of him.” Brace yourself, Mr. Phelps, because at the time you wrote your article I hadn’t gotten around to checking Goodman out. Since then, I’ve read and enjoyed his Empire City, but what we’re supposed to have in common, except for being Jewish, is beyond me.

Phelps seems to view me as a new kid on the block. He adopts a “wait and see” attitude toward me. After all, I was only 45 years old when his 1985 piece about American Splendor was published, and had only been writing comics since 1972.

He praises stories I wrote and Crumb illustrated as “the most alert, clear-eyed, and richly attentive observations of black people in the daily professions that I have encountered in the work of white authors.” But he claims he’s detected a bit of patronizing toward Crumb in my assigning him these stories. What nonsense! First of all, the stories Crumb’s drawn for me involving major black characters amount to far less than half the work, in terms of pages, he’s illustrated for American Splendor. Beyond that, I have more daily contact with black people than members of any other ethnic group. I’ve always lived in or near neighborhoods with large black populations and worked mostly with black people, and I evidence this in my work, quite understandably. Phelps criticizes Crumb for accepting some of the pieces I give him to illustrate, implying that he’ll get into a rut by doing them. But the fact is that Crumb’s work for American Splendor includes some of his best and most unique illustration. Phelps has cited his wonderful drawing in “American Splendor Assaults the Media,” which contains some brilliant page layouts. To this I’d add his amazingly subtle drawing in “The Harvey Pekar Name Story,” which Hunt praises to the skies, and his outstanding work, employing a brush, in “Hypothetical Quandary.” This is the first time he’d published anything using this technique, by the way. Another stunning piece of work is his drawing in “Pa-ayper-reggs!!”

Phelps patronizingly advised me in his essay to guard against getting too “sentimental” in my work. Where he got that idea was that I’d deliberately pictured myself as self-pitying in a few of my stories dealing with a time in my life when I was single, lonely, and losing lots of money on American Splendor. Since 1983, my life has improved quite a bit; consequently, I’ve cut down considerably on the kvetching, although I’m certainly doing some here. Anyway, I stated in one of my stories in American Splendor #8, “I don’t wanna exaggerate though. I have the advantage over those funky Victorian writers in one big way, so y’don’t have to feel sorry for me. (However, I’d appreciate as much pity as you can give me.)” Shit, wasn’t it obvious that I was highlighting another in my panorama of faults? People think it’s O.K. to show myself as cheap, sloppy, and bad-tempered, so why not self-pitying? Many of us do pity ourselves, at times with some justification. To portray myself honestly, especially at that time, I sure couldn’t suggest that I was a stoic. But Phelps apparently thinks I intended my despairing thoughts to be considered as a body of philosophy — he talks about an internal monologue of mine as a meditation on the “What’s It All Mean” theme. Do I sound like a sentimental guy here? Actually, I’ve made it a point to avoid sentimentalism and romanticism. People describe my work as “grim” and “gritty.” In my story “Rip-Off Chick,” which Hunt wildly misinterprets, a major theme concerns my view that friendship is based on mutual exploitation. Does that sound sentimental?

Harvey Pekar spares no one, not even himself, in “Ripoff Chick” (1981) Art by Greg Budgett and Gary Dumm Story and © by Harvey Pekar.

Let’s consider Phelps for a minute, the fellow telling me to guard against sentimentality. Does he have tremendously high standards? No, he doesn’t. He once wrote an article for Zat magazine praising Little Orphan Annie very highly, claiming it was some kind of masterpiece. Baloney! Little Orphan Annie by the near-fascist Harold Gray is interesting as a period piece and a document of Gray’s craziness, but it has no literary merit. Phelps has nerve charging anyone with sentimentality or with being in danger of falling into a rut when his hero Gray was so corny he was unintentionally funny, and very repetitive, using the same plot devices year in and year out for decades.

I admire a lot of comic strip artists from the 1900-1950 period, including Winsor McCay, J.R. Williams, Elzie Segar, Gene Ahern, and Frank King. But Gray — don’t make me laugh. His stuff is aimed at people with the intellects of children (they are always in abundant supply), like himself.

Phelps and Hunt sling around the names of lots of writers and artists to let everyone know they’re knowledgeable and mean to be taken seriously. If only they could think better. Check out Hunt on Maus: “What Spiegelman has done in his use of funny animal characters corresponds roughly with what the Russian formalists call ‘making strange’… it refers to a process of defamiliarization, transforming the familiar, the routine, the everyday into something new and strange, thereby heightening our perception of it…” The trouble with this statement is that the experience Spiegelman deals with, the Holocaust, is not the familiar, the routine, or the everyday. He could’ve used some non-realistic style to illustrate his Holocaust story, but by employing animal characters he’s not heightening people’s perceptions, he’s watered down the intensity of his work. Comparing Spiegelman to Russian writers who empty ostranenie, or “making strange” (including Nikitin, who, in Daisy, wrote about a tigress from her point of view), doesn’t serve any useful purpose, though it lets Hunt display his erudition. A good example of ostranenie, or “making the everyday strange,” can be found in Yuri Olesha’s story The Chain, about a little kid who borrows his sister’s boyfriend’s bicycle, loses the chain, and panics, experiencing a waking nightmare. What’s next on Hunt’s agenda, an article about the influence of Krylov’s fables on Carl Barks?

Check these two out: Hunt, who likes Englehart, Gerber, and Moench, takes Frank Miller seriously, and gushes over Charles Burns’ approach; and Phelps, who finds a scene from The Maltese Falcon in the background of one of my stories “hypnotic in its off-hand charm,” and praises Harold Gray in terms more applicable to Winsor McCay.

Hunt apparently wouldn’t mind seeing comics remain in the genre ghetto. Maybe he’d like the average comic book writer to become more technically accomplished, but he doesn’t show any enthusiasm for stories dealing with the real problems of today’s world, perhaps because thinking about them would restrict his imagination’s ability to soar — that is, to escape.

Phelps is in love with genre stuff and may have a hard time dealing with non-cartoony illustration in a comic book; he dismissed Gerry Shamray’s superb illustration in “I’ll Be Forty-Three On Friday” as schmaltzy. Apparently, he wants pies in the face. Even Crumb, who I expected would consider Gerry’s work “too modern” or “too fancy,” likes it a lot, and has used it as a reference for his own American Splendor work.

Anyway — if more comics writers and illustrators don’t get away from genre influences, comics are going to continue to be viewed by the general public as a less-than-first-class art form, because they will so seldom see anything worth taking seriously.

Disclaimer

Now here’s the disclaimer: Some of you will notice that the kind of comic book writing I seem to be championing here, realistic and experimental, is the kind of writing I do. You’ll think that in writing this article I’m trying to further my career. That’s an acute observation — certainly, I’m attempting to do that, among other things. If you detect irritation here because artists and writers whose work I’m not crazy about are getting raves, your mind’s not playing tricks on you. But I strongly believe in what I’ve written here and hope that people who really think comics are a great and versatile medium (as opposed to those who think they can only tell adventure stories) take it seriously.

I’ve been lucky to get so far as I have writing comic book stories that are so alien to comic book fans. Really, I’ve done quite well. But we take things for granted; we get greedy. In six years, I’ll be able to retire. At that time, I’d like to be able to supplement my pension with money earned as a writer. The more non-genre-derived comic books there are around at that time, the better it’ll be for me. Not just realistic comics, but surrealist, impressionist, expressionist, anything as long as it’s not the kidstuff that dominates the market now. Comics need new, more demanding readers for their quality to improve, but to attract them better comics have to be produced. I don’t care which comes first, the chicken or the egg, but I’d like to see this process, involving better artists and writers producing better comics for more knowledgeable fans, catch hold. My idea of better comics is not the 1970s Howard the Duck written by Gerber, or Dr. Strange written by Englehart, or Master of Kung-Fu by Moench; it’s not Little Orphan Annie produced by Harold Gray on the best day of his life.

This June 1, 1934 Little Orphan Annie strip illustrates Harold Gray’s conservative political views, and is © 1934 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

This is not to say I think junk or schlock comic books like Superman and Batman and Thisman and Thatman should be banned any more than McDonald’s or Taco Bell food should be. They all fill a need; they give pleasure to a lot of people, including many (far too many) who read this publication.

But comics can be, and occasionally have been, more than that. There are tons of bad genre novels and movies produced every year that account for a huge percentage of their respective markets. But enough high-quality novels and movies are done to attract talented, uncompromising artists to these media. Gifted writers and illustrators may never encounter a good comic book, however, and consequently will assume it’s impossible to create one.

Hunt concluded his article by claiming he wanted to initiate a discussion about my work. It’s been a pleasure to join such a discussion; I could go on for many more pages, but I don’t want to continue offending all the Marvel and DC comic book readers out there, the ones that cause The Comics Journal to waste space on super-hero publications, the ones that make Fantagraphics publish Amazing Heroes so that they can earn enough money to print good comics that don’t sell.

I hope, however, that a few readers find this 
article enlightening. To them I say: Remember, 
I also make a very fine pepper jelly.

Continued: R. Fiore’s response

In 1987, at the tail end of his undergraduate art studies, Chris Byrne began a comic strip called The Magician. He returned to it in 2000. But then it developed into something else, only just finished in January 2013: 12 objects housed in, and dependent on, a facsimile of a magician’s box.

In the intervening years Byrne ran a gallery in Dallas, became an art consultant and curator (including his collaboration with Gary Panter on a Zap retrospective in 2011) and co-founded the Dallas Art Fair in 2009. He became very interested in Peter Saul and spent years selling and researching the older artist’s work, culminating in a primary involvement in Saul’s 1999 Paris retrospective. He learned something important from Saul, which was “to let the imagery go where it goes, as opposed to the materials-first approach of most modern and contemporary painting”. And like Saul, everything in his life could come alive and find its way into the project.

So what is it? Byrne’s succinct description of The Magician (published in an edition of 20 by Marquand Books) is: It’s set in a public bathroom. The Magician is this character that goes through and reconciles opposites. Every misunderstanding I have about the universe is documented in these objects. And creation myths, too. But it’s all tongue-in-cheek.” The Magician takes different forms. He is a sleeping figure. He is a hand. He is sperm. He is a cape.

Each book/object uses some element of stage magic in the Mandrake the Magician sense of the term. And each asks the viewer/user to in some way engage or create herself.

The first book, “Theogony”, depicts a birth of the hermaphrodite, uses oversized panels and a transparent hourglass shape, as well as pages that open and shut, creating (bathroom) infographic transformations of time and shape in order to achieve the toilet expulsion of The Magician.

Maybe the most successful book is “Handmade”, which summarizes the basic concerns of Byrne’s: birth, death, eating and sex, but using entirely the stuff of children’s art, like paper plate drawings, hand puppets, leaves and hand shadows.

The same book depicts the actual hands (no longer shadow puppets) creating structures of heaven and hell.

And still another uses the basic form of the toilet and corresponding plunger to tell yet another creation myth of birth in a toilet.

Maybe the most successful object is a folded poster, which, once unfurled, simultaneously resembles a magician’s cape and the actual hermaphroditic physiology. Bowtie included.

One of more ingenious bits is a moleskin notebook of pubic hair “drawings.” It functions two ways: What does one look down on when on the toilet? But then as a joke on the last 40 years of art. Are those process-based graphite abstractions? No, that’s pubic hair.” Or, as Byrne says, ““I’m not above school boy puns: That’s basically the magician.”

Another is a flip book of diamond patterns on toilet paper, emulating card handling.

Another book makes card patterns from sheets of toilet paper. Cards form patterns not for any real meaning but because they can, and life becomes a pattern of one thing on top of another, on top of another, until the whole thing gets flushed. 

Then there are a series of comic strips printed on specimen slides, which can be viewed through the lens built into the box. The strips emulate cellular movement. Another birth, another melding of forms.

A hardbound standard size “sketchbook” containing Byrne’s studies for the objects and imagery functions not as a “behind the scenes look” so much as an artifact like all the rest. As if someone sat there sketching the objects in the box – deciphering it.

The box works because it’s not only a container. It provides a soundtrack (endless flushing) as well as a screen for an animation (figures flushing), not to mention a lens for viewing specimen slides.

That’s a brief laundry list of some of the components. The obvious comparison here is to Chris Ware’s Building Stories, but aside from the multiple-book idea and interest in schematics, there’s not much in common. Byrne is not interested in narrative per se, more like psychological and physiological events, which he manifests one by one in each book object. It’s a drop-in on a life, in a way. It’s not a-to-b. It’s not even a-to-b with lots of diversions. It’s a kaleidoscope of experiences.

When Byrne talks about the project, it’s Saul and Gary Panter that come up again and again. And yet there’s not a hint of either man’s style in the work. It’s more their presiding spirit. It is Saul’s willingness to lay down concrete images and make the viewer view with them as they are – to accept or reject a full thought. There is much about Saul that is influential, but no one talks about his actual (brilliant) thought-to-object process. Byrne gets that, and demonstrates it in another medium entirely.And it’s Panter’s intellectual omnivorousness. Furthermore, both artists, like Byrne, are not afraid to be “dumb”. To go for the toilet gag because it’s true and yet part of a large thought.

And so Byrne, playing dumb, uses “Magician” not as a caricature but as a category. It’s like “magician” because of course – in the hokey rabbit in the hat way, that’s how things are created. Something out of nothing: It’s magic. So we begin with a simple trick in which a hermaphrodite is created. And we move on and on.

The experience of dealing with the box (because it’s kind of intimidating, and you kind of know you’re in for a lengthy viewing experience, means you’re dealing with it) is funny. It’s almost like someone talking really fast, ideas tumbling out and then each idea spread out on a table individually and carefully constructed into material being, with a full recognition of the absurdity of the enterprise. I mean, that’s art, to an extent, but rarely visual books and rarely aligned with comics. Byrne’s unique achievement here is to have built an absurd object containing multiple meanings – to have performed the trick and allowed it to remain onstage to be unpacked, gazed at and puzzled over.

Comics scholarship has its roots in fandom and in the efforts of freelance intellectuals such as Bill Blackbeard and Donald Phelps but in recent years has been making significant headway in the wider world of ideas. The University Press of Mississippi (UPM), by far the leading publisher of scholarly comics criticism in North America, has played no small part in this change, so it’s worth noting that acquisition editor Walter Biggins, who has crafted the publisher’s impressive comics list in recent years, is leaving his post to take up a position as senior acquisitions editor at the University of Georgia Press. Some history might be in order: UPM’s comics studies list was launched more than a quarter century ago by Seetha Srinivasan and Tom Inge. Under Srinivasan’s the press published groundbreaking work by Inge, R.C. Harvey, Joseph Witek, and others. Srinivasan retired in 2008, and the list was taken over by Walter Biggins, who had already been at the press for several years and had been acquiring books for publication even before Srinivasan’s retirement.

I’ve worked with Walter on several books, some of which I’ve co-edited and others which I’ve refereed. Watching Walter steer books into publication has been a fascinating experience because he’s an ideal acquisition editor: very knowledgeable about the field, passionate about comics not just as an academic subject but also as a living art form. I’ve sometimes regretted that he doesn’t write much comics criticism himself (although he blogs well on related topics such as film and contemporary literature). I thought the occasion of Walter’s leaving UPM might be a good time to ask him about his thoughts on comics and comics criticism. My hunch was right: Walter rewarded me with a typically meaty and substantive dialogue. (A list of the book’s Walter has acquired for UPM is appended below the interview).

Jeet Heer: I wanted to ask you about your personal history with comics. I seem to remember seeing a letter you wrote to Seth in an old issue of Palooka-ville, so my sense is that you had some interest in comics even before becoming active in the line. Is that right? And can you talk more about what sort of comics you’ve read over the years and have particularly liked?

Walter Biggins: I’ve been reading comics for as long as I can remember, probably starting with my own, as I’m an inveterate doodler who wrote (terrible) short stories in spiral notebooks, which were accompanied by (equally terrible) illustrations and typographical experiments in the margins, between the college-ruled lines, on the backs of pages, etc. In seventh grade, my life-sciences teacher marked three points off one of my exams, not because I’d gotten any of the questions wrong–I hadn’t–but because I’d doodled all over the exam sheets. It pissed me off at the time but I now concede her point that the illustrations were distracting. Still, I doodle on dockets and notepads during boring meetings, to the extent that I think my colleagues believe, wrongly, that I’m not paying attention.

Where does this minor graphomania come from? I blame Sergio Aragoñes. His quick, precise line–almost like handwriting–graced the margins of all the MAD magazines I grew up on in the 1980s. Those pantomimes, so tiny that I’d now have to squint to read them, were often better than anything they surrounded. I loved Groo the Wanderer. I bought MAD paperbacks of Aragoñes’s wordless comics throughout my childhood, usually at used-paperback stores. He still holds a special place in my heart, though I’ve not read him, or MAD, in a decade. Aragoñes introduced me to the poetry and movement of comics; MAD as a whole introduced me to the idea of using comics as a way of critiquing culture and deflating its pretensions. (Digression: My first issue, by the way, was #270, featuring a parody of a Bruce Springsteen album I’d never heard–or even heard of–which is decidedly funny, because that double album is now my favorite live record of all time, with the possible exception of The Name of This Band is Talking Heads.) So, seven or eight years before I read McCloud’s Understanding Comics or Matt Feazell’s Cynicalman, I was primed to see comics not just as a source of entertainment but as a critical apparatus, a lens through which I could view what the marketing world was trying to sell to me, and react to it in a manner beyond “buy! buy! buy!”

So, it’s always puzzled me that parents ever thought that comics numbed children. For me, MAD comics gave me a way of filtering and critiquing culture, of not taking the advertisements for granted–including those within the pages of comic books, and the merchandising promulgated by comics archetypes, such as the racial stereotypes inherent to American comics and the hyper-masculine ethos evident in the superhero stuff I read during the ideas. (X-Men and Alpha Flight were significant exceptions here, featuring multiracial communities where whiteness wasn’t necessarily dominant, but Wolverine and Cyclops were masculine types that I was never going to live up to. Nightcrawler was more my speed.) By the mid-1990s, during high school, I’d pretty much stopped reading superhero comics, and had veered hard into the b&w alternative scene, just about when Joe Matt’s Peepshow #6 was featuring in a squib of Rolling Stone. I think it was called the “Hot New Comic” or something. Anyway, I bought up back issues of Peepshow, hiding them from my parents, and I’ve never looked back. I got a letter published in Peepshow #12, I think, praising Matt’s new storyline (which became Spent) and the use of his use of the color red, but also telling him to drop the color if it would speed up his output. So, basically, I chastised him for doodling. *sigh* He printed the letter, minus my snide note.

You probably already know this but Art Spiegelman and Ivan Brunetti have spoken of the doodle as primordial unit of cartooning. This might be a good chance to talk about UPM’s comics list as a whole, since your taste in comics is very catholic, which I think is reflected in UPM’s list as well (among other topics you’ve acquired and published books about Harvey Pekar, Jack Kirby, Lynda Barry, and Osamu Tezuka, as well as the comics traditions of France, Italy, and Russia). I’ve already gone over the history and mission of UPM’s comics line in an interview with Seetha Srinivasan, but I’d like your thoughts on this. What’s your sense of the line’s purpose? Is it fair to say that it tries to the cover the full range of global comics?

Walter: I hadn’t heard of Spiegelman mentioning this but I’m quite familiar with Brunetti’s thoughts on line and doodle, having read Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice, and having tried and failed to complete the course offered by the book. (I’ll probably try again but with a workshop group of like-minded souls. Maybe that’ll keep me on task!) The line is a central element in comics because it can (and does) suggest everything in the form–smell, visuality, the demarcation between image and word (after all, what is a speech balloon, pictorially, but a curved line?), motion. Even now, the non-comics visual art that I tend to like emphasizes the line over, say, chiaroscuro or color shading. That’s not a value judgment, by the way, but merely a statement of my perhaps limited tastes.

In terms of UPM’s line, it’s a great question. When we began publishing in comics studies, over 20 years ago, the emphasis was clearly biographical and art-historical–i.e., placing the cartoonists and their work in socio-historical context. That’s probably because that largely hadn’t been done, and thus there was a need to establish a lineage, a tradition of comics that interacted with, and departed from, the worlds of literature and “high” art. Even in the “Great Comics Artists” series that I established, the monographs therein have a strong element of critical biography.

What has changed under my tenure is twofold. First, I think I’ve placed a stronger emphasis on comics theory and grammar–i.e., “What is a comic, exactly?” “What are its core elements, and the ‘rules’ for using them?” “What is comics as a form, and how is that distinct from other art forms, including those (literature and painting) with which it is forever linked?” My acquisitions have been largely concerned as much with global issues about comics–its production, its form, its grammar, and the discourse around all this–as they are about specific comics and cartoonists. This theoretical bent is in keeping with a more European school of comics criticism, which is more concerned with form than with history. This is all very odd to me, by the way, as I have absolutely no formal training in critical theory and what I know of it has been gleaned from my readings for the press and from, of course, MAD magazine. Anyway, Thierry Groensteen’s Comics and Narration, Jean-Paul Gabilliet’s Of Comics and Men, Hannah Miodrag’s forthcoming Comics and Language, and Elisabeth El Refaie’s Autobiographical Comics are all (pardon the pun) big-picture, macroscopic books rather than close analyses of a single cartoonist or set of works.

(And note that, in keeping with the European-leaning, “I’m a hippie socialist” tendencies, that none of the aforementioned authors are American.)

The second shift is a corollary of the first, and you’ve already touched on it: country-specific studies. I think it’s important to broaden comics studies–be it aesthetic, historical, or theoretical–beyond a U.S.-centric sense of the art form. From Joel Vessel’s Drawing France to José Alaniz’s Komiks: Comics Art in Russia, I hope I’ve helped in some small way in introducing international output to American audiences. This isn’t exactly comics-related but I’m really excited about Gigi Hu and Masao Yokota’s forthcoming edited collection, Japanese Animation: East Asian Perspectives, not so much because it’s about anime (a well-mined subject in the discourse) but because the scholars are East Asian and approach from a more informed, lived-in perspective that I think Western scholars can lack. That book is an extension of the internationally focused work that I tried to bring to UPM.

And I guess there’s a third shift, though this one’s more accidental. Over the last 4-5 years, we’ve produced several books–Gabilliet, A Comics Studies Reader, the forthcoming The Superhero Reader–that are intended specifically as course books, as foundational texts of comics studies from which scholars can branch outward. That’s been exciting, and perhaps our most consistent sellers in the field.

I agree that the main trends of the UPM line under your watch has been internationalization, greater theoretical sophistication, and a move to define the field of comics studies through textbooks. I’m wondering about some of the implications of these changes. In the early days of comics scholarship, a lot of groundbreaking work was done by independent scholars not really affiliated with any academic institution (I’m thinking here of Bill Blackbeard and R.C. Harvey, who has done a number of books with UPM). Is there still room for that sort of independent scholarship or has the field really shifted deeply into the academy and theory?

I liken comics studies to where film studies was in the 1970s and 1980s–cool and edgy in some precincts, a trivializing affront to the ivory tower in others, and lacking cohesion in part because there wasn’t an agreed-upon framework for criticism or even a relatively agreed-upon canon. It’s like scholars, in and out of the university, are flying blind, and as a result constructing multiple versions of comics’ lineage, with some overlap but also a lot of dissension.

So, for the foreseeable future, I think comics studies will feature a mix of independent obsessives and those affiliated with the academy. The independent scholars often are the ones who actually know the most about both comics and comics scholarship. I can’t tell you how often, even now, I receive proposals from a dutiful, earnest English professor about “this canonical work called Persepolis” or about “Chris Ware, the one true master of the form,” or from equally earnest grad students who haven’t read–or even heard of–any comics criticism other than McCloud’s Understanding Comics. What the academy does have going for it that independent scholars largely do not (though this is improving) is rigorous standards regarding how scholarship is done, how archiving is accomplished, how citations and sources can be determined as trustworthy (or not). Regarding comics studies, there’s a certain naïveté in the academy, but among the indies there’s an equally problematic clan mentality and fandom that often confuses enthusiasm for scholarship.

To change this paradigm, the territory needs to better defined. We need a canon. We need agreed-upon terminology–a Strunk & White or Chicago Manual of Style for comics criticism, if you will. And then, once we have that, we need that framework to be established in universities more prominently than it is now. In short, we need comics studies departments and graduate programs. Right now, the field, as it exists in the academy, is folded into English, sociology, history, and art history departments. Academic scholars come from all over the place, which indicates that there is enthusiasm for the discipline (that’s good!) but which also means that the studies are using a scattershot array of critical frameworks that often move at conflicting purposes and with some mutually exclusive methodologies (that’s bad!). Until there are comics studies departments established more readily in colleges, and there’s an established canon and critical methodology, the academy will need the Bill Blackbeards, Bob Harveys, Jeet Heers, Trina Robbinses, Bob Levinses, and Paul Gravetts of the world. I think we’re a decade away from such programs being normalized.

Even then, the indie scholars and archivists–and let’s remember that it’s largely through them that we have any original source material to work with–will often have a place in comics scholarship, simply because they are good writers who have lots of archival material (original art, interviews, newspaper collections, etc.) that would be otherwise inaccessible. But they’ll need to learn how to apply rigorous critical demands to their work and, in doing so, will debunk some of the many mythologies that have built up about comics production.

The comparison to film scholarship is very suggestive. I wonder if, growing out of the issues you mentioned, comics scholarship doesn’t suffer from the lack of big theories that can give the needed framework. Whatever you want to say about the auteur theory, it was a useful heuristic devise which could be both deployed and argued against. What do you think is missing in comics scholarship in terms of subject matter. Who are the cartoonists that need to be analyzed more (or the cartooning traditions that need reviving).

Film and comics are intriguing, in that the means of production–printing, typesetting, color separation–are intrinsically linked to the art itself. Here’s what I mean: Whether you publish The Thin Red Line in 12-pt. Times New Roman or 36-pt. Comic Sans Serif (because you, in this case, are apparently evil), whether it’s an e-book or printed on aged goatskin, the text remains The Thin Red Line. James Jones’s novel remains intact even with all these production variables; they do not fundamentally change the artwork itself. This, however, is not true in comics or film. I’ve seen Terrence Malick’s film adaptation of The Thin Red Line on a fuzzy VHS version but then viewed it projected in a pristine 35mm print, on a big screen, and it’s literally like watching two different movies. Any newspaper cartoonist can tell you horror stories of botched print jobs, and clueless typesetting that diminishes (or omits altogether, as happened early in Charles M. Schulz’s run of Peanuts) the experience of the art. With film and comics, both mass-produced arts, there are lots of moving parts that lie outside of the cartoonist’s control that ultimately affect the art itself.

So, it seems that auteur theory was necessary in film studies, in that it provided an overarching framework–even if you disagreed with it, as did Pauline Kael and several other critics–to, metaphorically, hang your hat on. It allowed for the acknowledgment of, and analysis of, a singular vision, extracted from an art that necessarily is made ultimately by hundreds of people, and that thus was unwieldy in terms of how to discuss critically. Comics studies certainly has its own version of auteurism, in that (in the U.S., at least) the criticism and study is very tied around a single cartoonist’s vision, often to the detriment of the historical and publishing contexts that aided and abetted him.

And it is mostly a “him” in comics, and that’s been one of the core flaws in comics studies so far–a decided lack of concentration on women’s contributions to comics’ aesthetics, production, and editing. Quick example: For all the attention paid to Art Spiegelman and the founding of RAW as a launching pad for alt-comics, there’s been almost no serious attention paid to Francoise Mouly, Spiegelman’s wife and RAW co-founder, despite the fact that she’s been The New Yorker‘s art director for over a decade. Her editorial guidance shaped RAW, and her use of cartoonists in The New Yorker‘s pages and on its covers has introduced a generation of cartoonists to the broader mainstream. As an editor, Mouly has been instrumental in shaping the “literary” comics, just as Diana Schutz has been absolutely key in shaping the “creator-owned” indies of the 1980s and 1990s. (We don’t have Paul Chadwick or, ironically, the hyper-masculine Dave Sim and Frank Miller, without her.) But, because comics scholarship is male-centered and auteurist-driven, industry-specific studies and/or contextual studies–i.e., ones in which women might serve a larger role in comics’ history–are woefully under-served.

So that’s a gap. There’s also a major gap in the exploration of work by nonwhite cartoonists, American or otherwise. The traditions of South American countries, African countries, and southern Asian countries are basically virgin territory in the academy. John Lent’s International Journal of Comic Art has done yeoman’s work here but, in monographs and edited collections, much, much more needs to be done.

Your point about how production and content are linked in comics raises the issue of how production and content are linked in comics scholarship. One thing that I’ve noticed is that in the last few years UPM has substantially improved the physical look of the books they do on comics (I’m curious if that’s also the case with the books on other subjects like film). The early UPM titles in the comics line were fairly standard looking academic books but the more recent volumes — the volume The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing Is a Way of Thinking is perhaps a good example — really do justice the subject by being handsomely and appropriately designed books. How did this change happen?

Mostly, this just happened as UPM’s designers got more familiar with the terrain. Pete Halverson, John Langston, and Todd Lape–UPM’s production/design team–are all superb book designers, and I’d like to think that looking at the comics (and comics is, let’s remember, an art of design as well as of drawing) inspired them to, as best as possible, emulate the work being discussed. Also, as our comics studies line grew in prominence, cartoonists wanted to be associated with it. I think it’s a (small) point of honor for a cartoonist to have her work considered seriously, and so artists such as Chris Ware, Dave Sim, Lynda Barry, and Daniel Clowes have all been willing to let us use their art (including sketches and rarely seen pieces) within the books and also on the covers. That flexibility has, in turn, allowed our designers to strut their stuff. Chris Ware, in particular, has been extraordinary generous, and has designed several book covers for us for free or for complimentary copies of the published book. He doesn’t have to do that, and his prestige is such that he could demand much more from us, so we’ve been incredibly grateful for that collaboration.

The truth is, though, comics design in general has just improved dramatically over the last 10 years, across the board. The archival collections published by Fantagraphics (Peanuts, Krazy Kat, Pogo, the various EC Comics and Ditko lines), Drawn & Quarterly (the Moomin and John Stanley lines are particularly gorgeous and insightful), and IDW have raised the bar for everyone

Any thoughts about the future for yourself, UPM, and comics scholarship at large? Will you be able to acquire comics related works at your new position in Georgia? Will UPM’s commitment to comics scholarship continue? And how is the field changing now that other publishers (notably Yale and Bloomsbury) are dipping their toes into comics scholarship?

UPM’s commitment to comics scholarship is firm. Over the next year or two, the press will publish monographs of Winsor McCay, an English-language edition (from the French) of Thierry Smolderen’s The Origins of Comics, and an English-language edition (from the Spanish) of Santiago Garcia’s The Graphic Novel, among others. I hope comics studies will remain a flagship at Mississippi. Popular culture–with comics as a key emphasis–is one of the biggest, most dynamic, and best-selling parts of Mississippi’s academic list, so I expect it will continue unabated.

The publishing terrain’s looking rich for comics studies, though mostly what I’m seeing in the university press world is one-off projects rather than sustained interest in the field. Ohio State University Press is a notable exception, having recently established a new series devoted to comics studies. (This isn’t exactly a brag, but it’s worth noting that the first book in that series is written by a previous UPM author, working on similar territory that he explored with us in his edited collection.) I’ve heard that Rutgers University Press has started a comics series but I haven’t seen anything emerge from it yet, though it has published projects on comics sporadically. Bloomsbury consistently does interesting work in this area–some scholarly, some more general-interest–and this looks to be a growing field for that press.

In some ways, what I’m most excited about are, as I mentioned earlier, the archival and recovery projects. There are so many gaps in our understanding of what’s been drawn and produced that our sense of comics’ history is limited. These new printings–especially those published by Fantagraphics, D&Q, IDW, and Sunday Press Books–feature the best reproduction, and among the best scholarly apparatuses, that I’ve seen yet. One of my favorite books of all-time is Sundays with Walt and Skeezix, which introduced me to Frank King’s Gasoline Alley at its appropriate size (super-big!) and which featured several great essays that helped me comprehend King’s achievement, his times, and the newspaper world more fully than I would have in any other format. What Abrams is doing with their art catalogs/monographs on single artists (Daniel Clowes, Jaime Hernandez) and Dan Nadel’s edited collections of “lost” cartoonists is nothing short of amazing. These sorts of recovery projects serve both aesthetic and academic functions.

In terms of my own stuff, my acquisitions at Georgia will be largely in African American, Caribbean studies, studies of the black Atlantic and its diaspora, and international relations. I hope to introduce to Georgia the idea of popular culture as a lens through which to view southern studies and diaspora studies, but I’m unsure how much of that will involve comics directly. (Media studies and cultural studies may well play a bigger role.) In some ways, that’ll be a blessing. Keeping up on comics scholarship has had the unfortunate side effect of weakening my desire to keep up with comics, and weakening my ability to read them with unadulterated pleasure. This, I suppose, is part of the reason I didn’t pursue grad school in English or comparative literature–I didn’t want my love of literature and my own writing to be diminished by literature becoming mere drudgery. I got into comics-studies editing partly by accident, having taken over a strong existing list from an outgoing editor. That doesn’t mean that I’m uninterested in comics studies but I resist becoming known as “the comics guy,” as I’ve always acquired in other fields–some of which interest me far more than comics scholarship. Over the last 2-3 years, especially, comics studies has taken over more and more of my everyday acquisitions, and it’ll be nice to step back and reflect, instead of being in the midst of it. So, the short answer is: Who knows?

list of comics studies books acquired, 2007-2013

** –forthcoming

Alan Moore: Conversations

Edited by Eric Berlatsky (Department of English, Florida Atlantic University; Boca Raton, FL)
Conversations with Comic Artists Series

Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures by Elisabeth El Refaie (School of English, Communication, and Philosophy, Cardiff University; Cardiff, Wales, United Kingdom)

**Comics and Language: Reimagining Critical Discourse on the Form by Hannah Miodrag (Department of English, University of Leicester; Leicester, United Kingdom)

Comics and Narration by Thierry Groensteen (independent scholar; Brussels, Belgium)

Comics and the U.S. South

Edited by Brannon Costello (Department of English, Louisiana State University; Baton Rouge, LA) and Qiana Whitted (Department of English, University of South Carolina; Columbia, SC)

The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing Is a Way of Thinking, edited by David Ball (Dept. of English, Dickinson College) and Martha Kuhlman (Dept. of Comparative Literature, Bryant University)

Dave Sim: Conversations

Edited by Eric Hoffman (independent scholar; Vernon, CT) and Dominick Grace (Department of English, Brescia University College; London, Ontario)
Conversations with Comic Artists Series

Drawing France: French Comics and the Republic by Joel Vessels (Department of History, Nassau Community College)

Drawn and Dangerous: Italian Comics of the 1970s and 1980s

by Simone Castaldi (Department of Modern Languages, Hofstra University)

God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-World War II Manga by Natsu Onoda Power (Dept. of Performing Arts, Georgetown University)
Great Comics Artists Series

Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics

by Marc Singer (Department of English, Howard University; Washington, DC)
Great Comics Artists Series

Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby by Charles Hatfield (Department of English, California State University at Northridge)

Harvey Pekar: Conversations, edited by Michael Rhode

History and Politics in French-Language Comics and Graphic Novels, edited by Mark McKinney (Department of French, Miami University)

Howard Chaykin: Conversations

Edited by Brannon Costello (Department of English, Louisiana State University; Baton Rouge, Louisiana)
Conversations with Comic Artists Series

Komiks: Comic Art in Russia by José Alaniz (Dept. of Slavic Languages & Literatures, University of Washington at Seattle)

Lynda Barry: Girlhood through the Looking Glass by Susan Kirtley (Dept. of English, Portland State University)
Great Comics Artists Series

My Life with Charlie Brown by Charles M. Schulz, edited by M. Thomas Inge (Blackwell Professor of Humanities, Randolph-Macon College; Ashland, VA)

Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books by Jean-Paul Gabilliet (Dept. of American Studies, University of Bordeaux), translated from the French by Bart Beaty (Dept. of Communication, University of Calgary) and Nick Nguyen (archivist, Library and Archives Canada)

**The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay by Thierry Smolderen (Department of Visual Arts, École Européene Supérieure de l’Image; Angoulême, France)
Originally published in French by Les Impressions Nouvelles in 2009

The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Contexts

edited by Paul Williams (School of Humanities, University of Plymouth; Exeter, United Kingdom) and James Lyons (School of Arts, Languages & Literatures, University of Exeter; Exeter, United Kingdom)

The Superhero Reader, edited by Jeet Heer (doctoral candidate at York University, Toronto), Kent Worcester (Professor of Political Science at Marymount Manhattan College), and Charles Hatfield (Associate Professor of English at California State University, Northridge)

We Go Pogo: Walt Kelly, Politics, and American Satire by Kerry Soper (Department of Humanities, Classics, and Comparative Literature, Brigham Young University; Provo, UT)
Great Comics Artists Series

Will Eisner: Conversations

Edited by M. Thomas Inge (Blackwell Professor of Humanities, Randolph-Macon College; Ashland, VA)
Conversations with Comic Artists Series

Moriarty is not exactly a cartoonist, per se; more of a painter who detoured into cartooning when he drew a remarkable, painterly, strip titled “Jack Survives” about he and his father for Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly’s Raw magazine in the mid ’80s.

Moriarty was born in Binghamton, New York, in 1938. In this interview, Jerry talks about his upbringing and his early life through his enrollment at Pratt in New York in the late ’50s. Briefly, then, after he graduated from Pratt, he worked as an illustrator for “girlie magazines” and tinkered with abstract art; but, as he wrote, “One night he decided to put four paintings together to make a square of four walls. He sat in the middle and awaited revelation. It didn’t come. Instead, the abstract canvas walls spoke to each other and left this kid out. Saddened at his uncoolness he returned to ‘content’ and tried to find its meaning in him. The kid swore he would never be seduced by Art or cool again…” And it appears as though he hasn’t. He has had occasional gallery shows —in Soho in 1974, in Chelsea (NYC) in 1984, at the School of Visual Arts Museum in 1999, and at The CUE Art Foundation in 2004. He does not sell his art and he does not navigate the world of fine art very adroitly, which may be to his credit. He is not only marginalized, but may be self-marginalizing, which may also be to his credit. He has taught at the School of Visual Arts from 1963, but was “fired” in 2012, being told that the school: “has no need for a class that involves drawing without using photo references.”

About the interview: I had intended for the interview here to be the first of several long sessions, but, alas, like so many well-intentioned plans, it went awry.  Not to put too fine a point on it, Jerry got pissed off for two reasons and decided not to continue the interview: a) He felt that I took too long to transcribe this interview and follow up with the 2^nd (and 3^rd); and b) that that therefore evinced an “I don’t think he is significant enough to bother with” (to quote Jerry) attitude from me toward him and his work. I cop to the first charge. The interview you’re about to read is only about two-thirds of the interview I’d conducted, because unbeknownst to me during the interview, the batteries of my tape recorder were running out, and the last third didn’t record at a speed that was decipherable. I felt so badly —or demoralized— about this that I dragged my heels getting it transcribed and copy edited so that Jerry could look it over. On the other hand, I knew what my own internal deadline was and didn’t think Jerry was in any hurry — I thought we could take our time, so I didn’t feel the same urgency Jerry felt. The second charge, however, couldn’t be further from the truth: I love and respect Moriarty’s work and my whole purpose was to give him his due as best I could: My goal was to publish a lengthy interview with him in the print edition of The Comics Journal along with a mountain of his drawings and paintings, showing the variety of his artistry, so that a wider readership could discover him and appreciate his work. Well, that didn’t work out, but fortunately, here is the interview I managed to do.

I love Moriarty’s guerilla-style, almost stream-of-consciousness conversational style. It’s filled with piquant observations of his changing social landscape and shrewd self-appraisals. I hadn’t gone into this first interview with an agenda, but as it turned out, we spent most of the time talking about Jerry’s life and his search for an identity. I think it’s fascinating stuff because his search to find himself within a succession of social milieus parallels his search to find himself as an artist. Jerry is a great, insightful talker and I’m only sorry there’s not more of it.

But, there is more of Jerry Moriarty here, and I recommend you see as much of him as you can.

Gary Groth, January 28, 2013

MORIARTY: See a Munch show at the Museum of Modern Art, and I love Munch. Munch is one of my more recent — not recent, maybe five years ago —

GROTH: That’s recent.

MORIARTY: I got hip to Munch as a guy who somehow made emotion visible even in the things he did, and he did it 1892, I mean, you go wow. This looks so far out even compared to the early Cubists’ stuff. I mean, Matisse is still pretty far-out looking. I don’t even know how I feel about him. He’s starting to get my attention, I got to say. I’m surprised and pleased with that. I’m pleased that in my old age, I’m starting to see things that I couldn’t get to unless I was pretending to be cool: now I’m actually understanding some of that stuff. I’m pleased that my brain hasn’t turned to cement at this point. I feel it sometimes, my brain farts. I forget names and do that kind of stuff.

GROTH: But you think you needed the cumulative knowledge and experience in order to appreciate certain people?

MORIARTY: No, I think what’s happened is I just got smart. Just straight-out, flat-out got smarter. Not smart — smarter. One of the things I always tell my students is, you get smart with art. Meaning, when they’re making the picture, they start out, where they were, in that frame of mind, and that intelligence functioning, and then as the picture goes along, they get smarter, because the picture is directing them in certain ways. I mean, it’s them, of course. It’s a subconscious thing, I think. And then they’re relating to it and keep things and leave things, and they make decisions along the way. It’s like a real chess game going on.

GROTH: They learn by making.

MORIARTY: Yeah. And at the end of the picture, they’re smarter than they were when they started. But between that and the next picture, they’re as dumb as they were before. You know what I mean? The pictures make them smarter: maybe not quite as dumb as they were.

GROTH: They don’t retain the smarts?

MORIARTY: They retain it to the degree —

GROTH: Wouldn’t they?

MORIARTY: The experience does have a residue, yes. There is something about that. But it’s not like you have that creative intelligence up at the top like you were at the end of the picture, when you decided that it was finished, and you completed the experience of it. So I just flip back to my civilian self, and then I sit back and I look at the pictures and sometimes I can’t understand if they’re any good or not, and sometimes I feel that they really are good when in fact, they probably are not so good. The ones I really like I’m really distrustful of, because I shouldn’t know that much about them already, it takes time. It’s like when you write something, sometimes you’re not sure about it, and then you look back and you realize, “Hey, that was a spontaneous, good moment there.” And it’s a jazz thing too: it’s improvisational luck, or improvisational things.

GROTH: I assume it depends on the picture, too. I assume you could get stupider at the end of drawing a picture, if the picture were bad enough.

MORIARTY: No, the bad pictures really teach you. It teaches you because you do everything to save it. It’s like the lost sheep, you’re trying to save this sheep here, and yet it still goes down the toilet. My feeling is that there’s a nemesis planet functioning here: you know that planet on the other side of the sun, in the exact same orbit that we are? That’s why we can’t see it? It’s on the other side of the sun.

GROTH: Perpetually, yeah.

MORIARTY: And that’s where the art gods are. And the art gods are fucking with us. And they say, “What’s this?” Whack! And so you get this bad idea. The art gods give you a bad idea. So you’re working on this bad idea, thinking all along it’s a good idea, because why would you even start it?

Then you get to that point where it’s pushing back and it’s not functioning and you do everything to save this thing. That’s where your chops start to fly, because you’re trying to save this sinking ship, and so at the end, you’re pretty strong, but the picture is dead on arrival. [Groth laughs.] Or, in fact, it may be actually a new experience, it may be really a good picture, but you know pictures — I do enough bad pictures to recognize that. I’m totally pissed, I’m not happy at that, even though I know they’re possibly a reward.

Because I’m only as good as my last picture, and if it sucks, I’m fuzzy and blurry [Groth laughs] and I’m not the me that I would like to be: the hero me. Because I make art, that’s the hero me. When I’m not making art, it’s the fuzzy pretender, the poseur. So when I’m making art, I’m the hero-me, but I don’t want to make art all the time, because I’m also a lazy bastard, you know? I have art guilt, so I make art because I get this kind of twinge of, “I’m out of focus, I’m blurry, I’m not me, and get off your ass and do something.” Then I get to work, somewhere near that thought, but not immediately. I put on the brakes and the gas at the same time.

There was a jazz musician that told me about what he called a geyser theory. And the geyser theory came from the notion that when you get into a slump, it’s like your brain telling you that it’s tired. Actually, this is something I came up with later, but it’s similar to what he was saying. You really shouldn’t try to fight that, you should let your brain rest. So when you’re ready to start work, you don’t really start it. You start building up this pressure inside you. You put on the gas and the brake at the same time. And finally, you can’t stand it any more, you take your foot off the brake. And then BWAAAAM! You know, you’re out there, like a shot. And it’s a geyser theory of creativity.

And this guy was like Burton Green, he’s like a far-out contemporary piano — I think he’s still around. He once came to SVA. I was someone who had been given the assignment of putting on jazz concerts there. Somebody else got him, and I had no clue, and he was really incredible. It was during that wacky — he recorded on the ESP label, which was known for far-out people. I think he had a trombone player and a sax player, or a trumpet player and a sax player, and he banged on the piano with a hammer [laughs]. It was crazy. He walked around, picked up the fan: started walking around this amphitheater holding this giant fan. It was performance, but he really did have — anyway, intermission time, he was trying to find the connection between art and music, how they were both in an improvisational relationship. I always believed that, anyway.

I loved hearing him talk like that, because even artists don’t talk like that enough, for my tastes. Talk about the creative process in any way. And we’re not particularly articulate, so it’s usually better to hear a writer talk about it, because they’re going through the same thing, like you guys work all alone late at night. Mostly writers work early in the morning, I think. But there’s no one to see what you’re doing while you’re doing it, and it’s all on individual judgment, there’s no response from an audience, so to speak, out there…immediately, anyway.

GROTH: Do you think all the arts have essentially the same creative process: writing, painting, making music?

MORIARTY: I think that they share. I think collaborative arts are different. I recognize certain tricks when I see Actor’s Studio guys on TV talking about their process. Christopher Walken, on one of the shows, he said something about, they’d all get their scripts, and he would go through his script and take all the punctuation out, so he wouldn’t know if it was a question or whatever. And so he delivered a line without any knowledge of whether it’s a question or exclamation, so the actor he’s playing to would freak. And I just love that, because it’d make the other actor improvise, somewhat. Of course, he’s in the dark himself, because he took all the punctuation out. I think that’s nice.

Another actor said that, on the stage before an audience, if you got to the point in the part where he’s supposed to cry, he doesn’t cry, because he wants the audience to cry — because if he did cry, then the audience wouldn’t have to cry, because he fulfilled what the need was. I love that, so when I hear these things, I find connections.  But I think the real distinction is collaboration, because they have to work with someone else in that moment, whereas writers and artists generally don’t. So, it’s like a tightrope, there’s no support at all. No net at all. You survive the fall, but you know the fall exists. There’s no support structure for you. It could be a lifelong thing, like the Henry Darger life — I don’t know if he sensed that. I think there are differences. Jazz comes the closest to my sensibilities.

GROTH: Why is that? Because jazz can also be very collaborative —

MORIARTY: Yeah, that is.

GROTH: — performing in front of an audience.

MORIARTY: Yeah, that is, and there is that sense of collaboration, but there’s more. The newer jazz has left the swing world, your friend Artie Shaw’s world. It’s left swing behind, as he would have gone, because he did do the next things, each time. He would have understood that, I’m sure.

GROTH: That’s right. He desperately wanted to leave that behind. They didn’t let him.

MORIARTY: Yeah. So the Anthony Braxtons, the Roscoe Mitchells, these are all names. These are not young people, like Anthony Braxton is 60 years old now, and Roscoe Mitchell’s gotta be somewhere near there. There’s Evan Parker, an English guy who plays soprano sax, and tenor. They have real music understanding of things, but my use of their work is when they play solo stuff. Not solo in a group, solo literally. They do whole albums as solo sax playing. It’s all saxophone for me, because I can’t abide any other instrument, for some reason. It’s the narrowness of my collecting [laughter]. It’s like alternative-comic people won’t give any attention to Marvel or DC. It’s as simple as that. [Groth laughs.] I’m the same way. I’m glad I’m that way, because it says I’m still in an opposing mode. Like, this is the mainstream and this is where I am.

GROTH: That might be even more narrowly focused: just the sax.

MORIARTY: Yeah. Just the sax, I dislike drums, intensely, because they fuck up the sax solo — especially the ones that hit the cymbals, and with CD recording now, you really hear that higher thing, where you didn’t used to hear that so much in LPs.  You heard ting ting ting, it’s like a car alarm in my ears, turn off the fucking car alarm, you know? [Groth laughs.] Because I want to hear the saxophone guy do his thing. So drummers, there are some who are giants, but I don’t know who they are — I can’t give you a name now. But mostly drummers are just to be tolerated. And they should never be given sticks, just give them brushes and say, “OK, tsch tsch.” Even the brush on the cymbal isn’t going do anything. So, that’s my feeling.

And then, trumpets, they’re too harsh for my ears, outside of Miles Davis, which is a conservative player, a commercial player, basically. But an inventor still. I mean, he sounds more like a sax — and he loves saxophone people. He always had great — Coltrane, Wayne Shorter — whoever he had with him was really top of the heap, saxophone-wise. So I always would get good sax with Miles.

GROTH: How about the cornet?

MORIARTY: Any of them, whether it’s mellow, or like a cornet’s a bigger sound, or the flugelhorn … I love them classically. You know, David [Brain], or whoever is playing Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto in D or whatever, [sings] Daa, DA da, dun duuun dun ta; I mean, I just love that. I love the flute in classic; I hate it in jazz. I love it classically, you know: piccolo, whatever, a Vivaldi piece, a baroque thing, even modern music to a degree. For me, it’s a chops instrument, so these people playing it with perfect chops. When I hear the saxophone played with perfect chops, I hate it.

GROTH: Oh really?

MORIARTY: I hate perfect chops on the saxophone, because it’s sort of like …

GROTH: Soulless?

MORIARTY: Yeah, it’s brought into the repertoire of, this is how one was really trained and taught. The saxophone doesn’t even belong in the orchestra, originally, it’s been allowed in through Ravel [who] wrote something, and Stravinsky wrote some things, so the alto saxophone’s been accepted into it. You know, the bassoon and the oboe and other instruments do what they think the saxophone will do. So I like its not-belonging kind of thing. Sort of like comics in the old days of comics, when comics really were outlaw. Even mainstream comics were outlaw. It’s like, “Don’t even like them.” So jazz and comics were outer-side. Rock and roll had the main place, or classical music, jazz was like, you wouldn’t find …

GROTH: Disreputable.

MORIARTY: Yeah, or it would be such a small little …

GROTH: Marginalized.

MORIARTY: Yeah. Or you couldn’t even find the albums. The catalog would be full of rock and full of classical. There would be this narrow place called jazz. You might as well say “other.” That’s what jazz seemed to be, unless it was mainstream, like the Kenny Gs of the world kind-of-jazz. That’s always going to be acceptable, but only because it doesn’t stimulate anger or frustration or any other emotion. That wouldn’t be acceptable.

GROTH: What do you think of masterly sax players like Ben Webster and Coleman Hawkins?

MORIARTY: Oh, Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster, I was very much into them, and then all of a sudden I just shut down. I mean, I’m sad. I’m not going to say they suck or anything, because they did top of the line, in their time, and they were right. But if I didn’t shut down on them, I couldn’t have gone to the next place. It’s fairly recent, that I’ve, all of a sudden — it’s because of the Internet. I started buying these CDs. I didn’t even have CDs; I didn’t even have a CD player. So I started looking around at names I did know. Ornette I already knew, speaking about Coleman — Ornette Coleman. That’s the only person left from that period that is still — aw, I don’t think you ever can catch up with him. He’s not that far out, but he’s just exquisite. He just had a new album come out, called Sound Grammar. On his own label again, he’s a guy who publishes his own things as well, like his own label called Sound Grammar. He’s 76 years old, and I’ve heard little takes online, and it’s just there, it’s all still there, and new, as well.

GROTH: It sounds like you’re into innovators; [Ornette] Coleman was a great innovator all the way back to the ’60s, right? And Braxton, certainly, is pushing it as far as he can push it.

MORIARTY: Yeah, oh yeah. And Roscoe Mitchell’s my new fave. He was from the Art Ensemble of Chicago, and …

GROTH: So what do you like about them, do you like the fact that they’re blasting apart old idioms?

MORIARTY: There is a sense of craft that’s allowed to be buried. You sense it’s still there, because every once in a while you hear it. One CD was so easy to get, it was so cheap, and I wondered, “Why is this Anthony Braxton album only six bucks?” So I got it, because I couldn’t lose, because I have this two-tray CD recorder, I don’t do it off the computer but I do the off the stands-alone thing, and I take the parts, only saxophones, out of things. So I only have saxophone CDs. I just have pure things.

So when I’m working, I’m listening to music, I’m just hearing absolutely the stuff I love. So I’m high on that alone. So it supports me and I float with it, it’s flawless. And I hear deeper, too. I hear the things I knew I liked, but then I didn’t know why, and I know a little bit better why. But there’s not everything there, there’s definitely areas in Braxton, lots of areas, that are still way too far out for me — I can’t get there — and same with Roscoe Mitchell. Maybe some day I’ll get there, or maybe it’s just not going to be the thing that I’m going to get. But the essence, I do get.

GROTH: By not “getting there,” you mean you can’t comprehend what they’re doing?

MORIARTY: It’s still another taste. It’s like Matisse. Matisse is someone I’m strangely interested in now, and I think comes along with the notion that my mind is opening up again; I went to this MoMA show, and I saw Munch, and Munch disappointed me.

I would have liked to have seen that show outside of seeing the books on Munch. I would have been interested, but not overwhelmed. But the books on Munch, with great  reproduction today, you can do it so beautifully, and it’s in your lap and I can actually look at it and contemplate, like I would a comic book, and I can look at it and really enjoy it. I built up this whole dialogue with Munch in my head, and read as much as I could about him, so when I go to the MoMA show and there they are, the real things, they were bigger than I thought, even though I saw the dimensions in the books.

He was not direct to my brain. First of all, because I’m in a room full of people, and it was a popular show, and it was the new MoMA, so we’re in the new MoMA now. I walked away not retaining anything of unusual import from it. I think it’s the same thing with music: live music doesn’t interest me as much as recorded music. I go for the ambience, you know, jazz club or whatever, and I love that, but …

GROTH: But that’s because you find it easier to contemplate it in isolation?

MORIARTY: Yeah, because I have kind of an anti-theater sensibility, which blocks a lot of stuff out. I can’t stand opera. I like Mozart, but I couldn’t stand Cosi fan tutte, or Don Giovanni, which is supposed to be the best opera ever written to people who like old opera. You can have a case for Philip Glass or something if you like more contemporary stuff, but that’s supposed to be the best. As soon as the voices come in, I’m out of there, because I can see them in their costumes mentally. If I went there, I’d have to deal with theater. I’d have to deal with people with these over-trained voices for my taste, and I wouldn’t hear the music, I would hear these other presences which are disturbing to me. In art too, installations, I can’t stand installations, because to me that’s theater. Sets, these are props, these are not things that are giving you illusions, they’re facts. You see an installation.

I don’t like sculpture for that reason. It sounds like a closed mind, but it allowed my mind to be open to other things if I just stop trying to work on stuff that’s not going to reveal stuff to me. I’ll walk up to a sculpture — I mean, I love Giacometti, I’ll say that, because Giacometti is almost not a sculptor. He’s so skinny, the things are so skinny, it’s almost as if I’m not even a sculpture: I’m a line in the air. And you go, “Yet I know you’re three dimensional, but you’re fooling me. It’s an illusion you’re giving me.” That I like. So sculpture isn’t totally shut down, it’s the fact that when they become realities, physical objects, if they fall on your foot they break your fucking foot, that’s too real for me. If a landscape fell off the wall, in the Metropolitan or any place, it hit my foot, “ooh that hurt.” It’s a whole landscape, but it didn’t hurt my foot, because it’s an illusion, it’s not a real landscape.

So I think as much as theater gets into it, meaning “real,” and then something bigger than real, and it’s like dramatically bigger. Plays I have a problem with.

GROTH: You can’t go to author’s readings too often.

MORIARTY: I like them on CSPAN, that’s cool, because they’re on a flat screen. I don’t know if I’ve ever been to an author’s reading, but if I imagine the screen’s there instead of me, then I can deal with it. I can go to jazz clubs, I haven’t recently, I haven’t in years, to tell you the truth. I used to go, you saw my jazz drawings.  I used to go, and I would be there but I would not be there because I’m jamming with them by drawing them. I’m not just the passive audience. That’s another thing, I do like passivity, to be there as this audience. I have the old punk-group attitude, this group I occasionally play with that Patrick McDonnell had called Steel Tips. They would let me play, I’d be the Rubber Tip, they were the Steel Tips. CBGB’s, whatever. Their attitude was, fuck the audience, we despise you. The audience loved it. One of the people in Steel Tips used to piss on the audience, literally drink beer and piss on the audience [laughs]. Take out his joint and piss. And he’d go, “How does an audience even tolerate that?” Even as a punk audience.

GROTH: You were part of the band?

MORIARTY: I was like the old guy who played an acoustic instrument that they allowed, because Patrick was in my class with Kaz and all the other people, different times. Joe Coleman was in the same class with Patrick and he was part of the group, too. He sang.

GROTH: Really? Joe was?

MORIARTY: He didn’t do geeking stuff then. Joe did a routine once that I thought was brilliant. He made up these songs, and he’d come out and sing, and he looked like a Wild Man of Borneo, he’s got this giant hair even then. He was even wilder. He has this rich hard tempera color, which is in jars, that people had in grade school, it’s really liquid tempera, and he would have blue and red and yellow and green, and as he’s singing he’s pouring it over his head, color is running down and he’s spitting it out at the audience. It’s water soluble, so he’s getting covered with blue. Then he’d pour yellow and there would be green now coming down, because yellow and blue are mixing. It was brilliant. I loved that. I was actually in the audience then, just to watch it. And afterwards, back in the dressing room, if you could call it that at CBGB’s, it’s just right behind the band thing, it was this little niche. The white of his eyes were yellow, not from the paint, but from some kind of chemical reaction to it. [Laughs.] It was strange, he looked like …

GROTH: Sort of spontaneous jaundice?

MORIARTY: Yeah, yeah. Then he used to light his shirt and explode, he had this explosion thing. That was part of his act for years after that, too. Yeah, he was part of the group. And that’s why I could be there, because no one knew who the fuck I was there, I was just standing there playing a — and I couldn’t even come near to playing what I can do now, we’re talking 1979, this is during the time of Blondie and the Cramps, and those people, and The Dead Boys.

The Dead Boys played opposite, this was really into punk time. The lead singer was a wannabe Mick Jagger. He’s really skinny and I think he OD’d finally, but he had a song called “Catholic Girl,” something about how he liked to fuck Catholic school girls or something like that. And the lead girl singer in the Steel Tips who is now Patrick’s wife, wore a Catholic school girl outfit, plaid skirt, and she’s a cute little button thing, and she’s singing these nasty songs. You could see it coming a mile away, but then it was still kind of new, you’re talking about 1979. Not really super new, people who were there knew what they were going to hear, because they were there for that reason.

So she decides she’s going to attack this guy because this first set was over. I had played with them that night, and I think the second set was The Dead Boys, and so when he got to that song, she was going to jump on the stage and beat him up — because he was so skinny, and she wasn’t big, she was really small, but she could probably do it. But she wanted a way to back him up, and the Boys’ singer was this giant guy, who was like Tommy O’Leary, they called his family “The Fighting O’Learys,” because everyone was like this big Irishman fighting each other, relatively young people. He loved rock and roll, and he was always getting in trouble. And he was the guy who used to piss on the audience. And so he’s going to jump on the stage if he needed to. But she said we all got to be around the stage in case somebody in the band gets wacky, because I’m going to jump on the stage.

And of course, she jumped on the stage, she grabbed the microphone away from him, and he kept pulling on it, and so she let it go and it whacked him right in the face, and it started to bleed [laughs]. It was a punk moment.

The reason why I like that idea, the punk idea, was it had some of the notion of the jazz that … there used to be a club called Slugs and places like that that was not really sophisticated, it was a sawdust-on-the-floor kind of place, and CBGB’s was clearly that. It hadn’t changed in years. It hadn’t been around that long, but it was pretty much the same.

So Patrick being in my class, he loved jazz, he loved Zappa more than anything. But he liked jazz, he liked strange things, And he liked lots of very interesting alternative rock, Captain Beefheart and things like that. And I wasn’t aware of any of that stuff; I had just totally given up on rock ’n’ roll, because I was hearing arena rock all the time. It was the day of Queen and Kiss … talk about theatre. And all that stuff. It had gone into bigger venues, and punk was the savior of that. It was low-fi, not stereo, and garage bands from New Jersey and really it was necessary, it was the perfect thing. It gave me faith in rock ’n’ roll.

GROTH: It was like an antidote?

MORIARTY: Yeah, it was better than … I hate disco, which was the other thing that was going on. Preppies were going to disco, and the Warhol crowd was going to disco, and punk was kind of real people, working people in a sense. Not that there weren’t any working people in the other arenas, but they went that way instead of this way, and so it was refreshing to be included in that. And he would just say: do it, play whatever you want, it doesn’t matter.

GROTH: Who all was in the band?

MORIARTY: Patrick McDonnell, his brother Mike, Karen O’Connell. [Patrick McDonnell] and Karen wrote the book on [George] Herriman, that very good book. And that’s way early. Joe Coleman … I can’t remember the bass player … Patrick O’Leary, and that was it. And me every once in a while, maybe four times. Max’s Kansas City, too. We played there with them once. They were almost the house band at CBGB’s. Hilly [Kristal] really kind of took to them.

So I would be visiting or something, and he would say, “We’re going to play now, you want to get your horn?” I’d jump in a cab, I’m in Manhattan, so I’m just all excited to get the horn. It wouldn’t matter, no one’s going to hear me, and I’m just going to have fun being up there and just look like the old guy. And I was 40, so I wasn’t as old as I am now [laughter.] But still it was fun, because I like the people. They didn’t demand anything of me, and they knew I wasn’t going to be a problem for them, and so it was OK. The irony is that some of the audience would come backstage, which is just this little room on the edge of the stage, it would be on the way to the bathroom. There’s not even a door, just a little curtain pushed back. All crapped up and stuff. And they’d come to me and say, “Oh I really liked you.” And your own eyes are rolling — they couldn’t hear you, of course. They’re just being nice about it. But it was fun.
(Continued)

This sequence is from Paying for It. ©2011 Chester Brown

It’s some sort of testament to Brown’s fearless honesty in addressing such a taboo subject, about which there is apparently only one publicly acceptable opinion, that so many reviewers have gone out of their ways to make known their moral — and, in some cases, physical — revulsion. New York Times critic Dwight Garner, in describing a scene where Brown admits to being excited by the possibility that he’s hurting a prostitute he’s fucking, adds: “I cringe even to type that sentence.” Brown has said in an interview that he was disturbed by this incident, too, but he didn’t cringe at portraying it. And although I’m frankly made a little queasy by that scene too, I also admire Brown, as an artist, for showing it to us without the cover of some preemptive self-castigation. The unattractive truth is that men (and women) are sometimes aroused by things that are, in the light of day, creepy, disturbing, degrading or cruel. (Though I should also draw a distinction here between enjoying such things in fantasy or consensual play and actually doing them.) One of my female friends said the book “confirmed some of [her] suspicions about the male psyche.” The part of Paying for It that most resonates with me is (annoyingly) not in the book itself but elaborated in an endnote; Brown explains how, every time he used to see an attractive woman on the street, he’d imagine that there was some theoretical sequence of events that would result in her having sex with him and immediately condemn himself as a coward and a loser for failing to ask her out.

Just to get this out of the way, I’m not wholly unsympathetic to Brown’s views on the subject of prostitution. No doubt about it: relationships and dating are a mess, and you do have to wonder, at moments of low morale, whether there isn’t some other option. As far as I’m concerned, he makes a reasonable and persuasive case for patronizing prostitutes. However, Brown is a lot less interested in making a case for being a prostitute, and seems a little naive or oblivious to the realities that might compel someone to go into sex work. I’ve never patronized a prostitute, but I am friends with one, and she’s not a junkie or an indentured immigrant, she doesn’t get slapped around by a pimp, she wasn’t abused as a girl, and she isn’t in the business against her will; she enjoys her work and considers it a vocation and describes some of her relationships with clients as truly intimate. Her experience is probably not typical, but she would argue that it should be, and it deserves to be heard in the debate over prostitution. I also don’t understand why the state involves itself in consensual sexual conduct of any kind, although since prostitution is a business as well as sex, the issue is a little trickier than Brown supposes. But it’s also pretty obvious to me that, although these are all legitimate issues, none of them are the real issues with Chester Brown. [1]

This panel is from I Never Liked You. ©2002 Chester Brown

What I find much more interesting than Brown’s ostensible thesis in Paying For It is the personal story here, a love story, one that the reader has to piece together for herself from inadvertent hints and clues because the author seems either oblivious to it or determined to suppress it. As with the faces of the prostitutes he draws, which are always turned away from us, covered by hair, or occluded by word balloons, there is something in this book so consistently omitted it becomes disquietingly conspicuous, haunting by its absence. I don’t know whether reviewers of Paying For It have been too obtuse or too polite to mention this elephant sitting on the divan with its feet up, but to me it seems that there’s no way to talk honestly about the book without bringing up this central deficit: It seems never to have occurred to Chester Brown to connect the fact that he’s structured his adult life to preclude any possibility of a romantic relationship with the fact that his mother was a schizophrenic.

[1] Brown’s default position on every issue is contrarian: he sees romantic love as a cultural delusion; he believes all government intervention (except the protection of property rights) is an outrageous intrusion; he sides with controversial figures like Thomas Sasz who debunk mental illness and drug addiction as legitimate medical diagnoses. This is all consistent with the worldview of Ed the Happy Clown, in which all authority figures are corrupt and suspect: the police are masked, porcine thugs with truncheons, machine-gunning convicts and disposing of inconvenient bodies; doctors smoke cigarettes over their open patients in surgery and bludgeon whimpering prisoners with pipes; President Reagan is a cranky baldheaded dwarf who’s controlled by his sultry pus-sucking wife; and divine justice proves to be just as arbitrary, cruel and beyond appeal as the kind doled out on earth. (The one exception, interestingly, is a minister, who first seems as if he’ll be a fire-and-brimstone caricature but instead preaches a sermon about love.) Reflexive mistrust of authority is probably healthier and less dangerous than blind deference to it, but it ends up being another kind of conformity; blanket skepticism is as automatic and uncritical, in its way, as blanket credulity.

 I think what we tend to overlook, perhaps because of our over-familiarity with the subject matter, is that not everyone can read comics… In an article for the Independent, Thomas Sutcliffe mentioned the ‘defiant pride’ some reviewers had exhibited when it came to discussing anything as lowly as a ‘graphic novel’ when he was chairing the BBC Radio 4 program, Saturday Review. On one show, two guests admitted to having real problems understanding comics, or graphic novels

…Of course it could be that they feel the need to decry anything that smacks of the vulgarity of pop culture, but it could just be that we need to do a better job of explaining to the uninitiated, how the various elements of comic books, the text, the typography, the colours, the drawings, all work together to tell a story.

I once found myself onstage for a TV book show and challenged to address the same question, as to why some people just can’t read comics. I can’t remember what I said as it was later edited out, but I think I observed that the same people have no difficulty navigating through the complicated mix of text and image in an average women’s magazine. My blather would have been mercifully cut because I launched into an insane mimicry of a theoretical middle-aged woman in tears from not being able to interpret the TV guide. If, in the aforegoing, you find me focusing somewhat upon women, as has just been pointed out by my proof-reader, this is because the people who have said to me that they cannot read comics have all been women. Before jumping on it, ask whether the statement, ‘the readership of comics in the last forty years has been predominantly male,’ is true or false.

I have in my l life met one or two people who were so well brought up that they had never read a comic. They tended to have an underdeveloped sense of humour. Whether there is a correlation between naughtily spending your lunch money on a Betty and Veronica Digest and having a well-honed grasp of the funny, I will leave to another time. But I have also met people, pictorially literate and unfazed by contact with the vulgar, who do not know what to make of a modern day comic book. I sympathise. The fact of the matter, make no mistake, is that I am on the side of the perplexed and mystified. Most comics today are visually unintelligible except to a few.

It could well be that you are one of the few, that you feel that comics publishers should not be pandering to the general public and that comic books are just how you like them, with their forty plus years of stylistic inbreeding and complicated continuity. Perhaps you are a kid and, like me, you think kids owe it to themselves to keep loads of stuff secret from their parents, and the secret language of comics is a part of that. Great. Comic book publishers love you. However, with the shrinkage of the market for comics, these same publishers are trying hard to get back that general readership they lost a long time ago.

Occasionally I see a well-regarded comic wander across the view of a regular person. It happened on my travels recently when I was a houseguest of a friend, a 70-year-old lady who makes her living as an artist. While I was there she was working on some etchings to go into a limited edition anthology of poetry on the subject of war. I mention this simply to show that this person understands pictures. The mail arrived and among it there was a volume of Bryan Talbot’s Grandville, which her husband had bought. She opened it and checked it, in order to let him know by phone that it had arrived. While idly looking at the pages she confessed to me, after putting down the phone, that she didn’t know how to read these graphic novel things. I took a quick look and said, “My first thought is that I can completely understand what you’re saying, because I can see that the author in this case has broken at least three of the basic rules of comprehension.”

Rather than ‘the’ rules, I should say rather that they are ‘my’ rules. These are a bunch of principles I quickly worked out once when I needed to give a college lecture about making comics, and had been encouraged to get a little bit technical if I so desired. So they are rules, toward a rhetoric of the art of comics, for the purpose of commanding the means of expressing oneself in the most effective way. If you don’t care for a curmudgeon like me making the rules, hey, it’s my gift to you. If you have no use for it, put it in the back of the cupboard. Just remember to serve the drinks out of it when I’m visiting.

So let me use Grandville as an example, and this is not to be construed as a review or an opinion of the book. It is published in the USA by specialist publisher of comic books, Dark Horse, and in the UK by mainstream publisher of books, Jonathan Cape. The book is thus useful because it straddles the comics store/bookstore divide. Furthermore, I’m using Bryan Talbot here, not because he would be my first choice to illustrate the points I want to make, but because he just happened to be the one on the table when the discussion came up. He’s an award–winning artist, with justification, and my purpose is to show that even the best of us are less than accommodating to those who are unfamiliar with conventional comic-book syntax. I don’t want to ambush him unfairly, being a brother of the brush, so it’s a page I know he’s pleased with as it was used in the promotion of the book. It is a decently vivid and strong comic book page, and you should be surprised that anybody could be unsure of it. If you show it to your granny and she has no trouble with it, that’s nice; give her my regards and light her pipe for me. It’s from the French edition, which doesn’t matter for my purposes.

There are some great and arresting images in Grandville, like the one above. The story is a complex piece of speculative fiction that was nominated for a Hugo award. Science fiction people love it.

Our page above is very much in the comic book idiom. By that I mean that it’s in the American style. They don’t traditionally call them ‘comic books’ elsewhere, except insofar as the American tradition has spread far and wide. Artists and writers who work in this idiom do not tend to be self-aware. To tell them this is just one idiom out of many would be like telling them they speak with an accent. As we know, it’s other people who speak with accents. All kinds of things go to make up this idiom, from the way the art bleeds to the edge of the page, and the way the figures stand in relation to their word balloons and the panel borders, all the way down to the brushed technique of the ink-lines. That the pictures are crowding in upon each other alarmingly is also idiomatic, and it takes a moment to figure out that the middle row of panels is not so much inset into the large upper panel as that all of them are set against a black ground, with slight overlaps.

The first of my rules that are in danger of being ruptured is

Rule #1: All the information necessary to understand the drama of a sequence must be contained in every panel of the sequence.

I extrapolated this idea from a 1960s interview with Bernard Krigstein where he complained that the fragmentation you get in many comic books works against pictorial logic and undermines the drama that the artist is supposed to be expressing. Thus, if you take Krigstein’s masterpiece, the short story Master Race, and look at the second last page (below), you will observe that in eleven panels, ten of them show both the man chasing as well as the man being chased. Add five at the foot of the previous page, and one at the top of the next one, and you get a run of seventeen panels all showing both characters (with only one break to insert a poster-like reminder of the camp commander in the time of his crimes). The subject of the drama is the relationship between them, and there isn’t a single panel, such as one cutting to a close-up or some other detail, where you could isolate it and say that we temporarily lose sight of this.

Looking at the Grandville page. It’s clear enough that the scene is an interrogation taking place in a small smoke-filled room, if we allow the ceiling lamp that we can see to stand in for the rest of the room that we can’t see. We are to presume that the badger is tied to a chair. There is no chair to be seen, or bound hands (having often read comics to little children, I would be anticipating the question “Why does the badger have no arms?” See elsewhere, my Rule #5: In a visual medium, a thing does not exist unless it is seen to exist). The chair may be on an earlier page, but that is part of the problem. Can we assume that the virgin reader knows they are supposed to look back there for the missing parts of the image? If you were to isolate the centre panel (below), is there enough information in it as a picture to make sense of what is happening without referring to all the other pictures? Do we still know it’s a smoke-filled room and that a character is tied to a chair? What is keeping that pistol grip suspended in the air? And to whom is that balloon tail pointing? Can we be sure the reader knows about the convention of characters speaking from off-panel, rather than the just-as-likely possibility that the balloon is coming from somebody over in the succeeding panel? (In this case, as it happens, the speaker is in a dominant position in the next panel, and the bridging balloon tail does arrive at the lettering spelling his name. A decent cartoonist will connect things together like this as he goes along.)

In panel #4 the dog and rhino seem to have moved in relation to the tied–up badger, but they’re back to their positions in the last panel, unless there is another dog in the room that I don’t know about. This creates a feeling of manic action, of a great deal happening that may not be happening. And finally, in the last panel on the page, where is that other character, the French Inspector Rocher, coming from? Was he in the corner of the room all along, or has he come through a door that is nowhere visible? Sure, every room has a door, but how much can we take as given? If the whole page were isolated from the book we might not even be sure it’s a room in a building. Without the indication of walls, we might think we’re in a hole in the earth. Naturally, reading the book from the beginning might alleviate such difficulties, but our virgin reader, having flipped through it, looking for a way in, an indication of potential enjoyment, an enticing excerpt, may not make that conclusion.

The second of my rules that are under threat here concerns the reading order of the speech balloons. There are worthwhile books, on the subject of making comics, which will tell you that the medium uses a ‘nested system,’ and that the reader is to absorb all the information in a panel before moving on to the next panel. In fact, this is not how things really work. The reader’s eye, even the eye of an experienced reader, will go where all the indicators tell it to go. After reading the contents of one balloon, the eye is likely to go to the next nearest balloon, even if that balloon is in another panel and the eye has not yet taken in all the balloons in the current panel. If the next nearest balloon is not intended to be the next one in the sequence, then the cartoonist risks losing control of their narration. Grandville has many pages like the above where all the balloons look, certainly to the lady that I was visiting, as though they are barrage balloons over a city, not interacting with the life and noise below, hanging there to keep invaders out, rather than invite readers in. One of the criticisms heard from those folk who don’t know how to read a comic, is that they don’t know which they’re supposed to do first, read the words or look at the pictures. Often the two appear to belong to separate systems, not completely integrated, and there are no cues on a page like this to make it clear what the reader should do.

Rule #3: Speech balloons should follow a system that can be intuited and doesn’t need to be explained.

On the Grandville page, the sequential problem occurs more than once due to the habit of placing balloons at the foot of a panel. In the top panel, with plenty of time to compose this page, the artist could have avoided putting that balloon in the same pictorial space as the dog, bisecting its arms. Is it possible that our virgin reader might find this kind of placement confusing? On another page there is a panel showing a character eating dinner. The panel contains just the character and his dinner, except that a speech balloon is covering his plate. This tendency is an indigestible aspect of comics’ technique that came with the ‘Marvel method,’ where the balloons were not composed at the drawing stage, but written and added in afterwards. With inadequate space anticipated for them in the plan, balloons are often placed on top of figures or other art details. Long-time comics readers are accustomed to this by now, but what is the unaccustomed reader to make of it?

After panel #2, at the left side of the middle tier, I’m reading the balloon at the foot of the panel. There is no way that I, even as an experienced reader of comics, am going to keep my eye from accidentally reading the balloon belonging to Rocher, in the coat and scarf, in the final panel, well ahead of his intended surprise entry two panels before this. You, likewise a practiced comic book reader, might just be able to avoid it, but I bet you don’t.

This touches on another Campbellian rule:

Rule #4: Timing only exists in comics if the reader agrees to play the game.

We talk about timing in comics, but really there is no time except in a periodical sense. i.e. ‘next issue’. All the pages of a comic book arrive simultaneously. If it happens that Magneto shows up surprisingly on the last page, I’ve never met a kid who didn’t already know this before he got the book out of the store (before you put your hand up, I’ve never met you). Unlike the movies, where good or bad timing is a measurable fact, in comics everything else on this subject is fiction. And like all good fiction, it requires a suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader. In fact it requires a little more than that. It requires complicity between the artist and his audience. This thing that we do, we are going to pretend that it is analogous to time. That is the unspoken agreement at the outset. And because it is unspoken, we cannot complain that a reader didn’t know about it, especially in these days when we expend so much effort in attracting new readers. We need to offer them a contract with no hidden clauses. And beyond that, we have no control. In prose novels it takes an act of choice to read the ending ahead of getting there, but in comics it can happen so easily by accident. Part of the humour, or drama, of comics should involve an allowance for that. As artists and writers we cannot prevent the reader’s seeing ahead accidentally any more than we can stop some lug from giving away the score of the match whose TV replay we are going to watch fresh later tonight. 

I find myself recalling a very clever piece of work that Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons made in 1983 titled Chronocops, where the whole short story was playing mischievously with the concept of time. The authors quite cleverly laid all the information before us in panel after panel but we didn’t see it because we were looking for something else. At one point the cops arrive back at HQ in an earlier time slot and have to avoid themselves in the lobby.

When we flip back the pages to the first appearance of this scene, we see what we didn’t see before because we weren’t looking for it, the two characters half-hiding behind the potted plant.

For me the conventional three-panel gag can never work again because I know there’s supposed to be a punch-line in the third one, and If I haven’t guessed it then I’ve glimpsed it. The third panel is not distant enough in space and time for me to avoid reading it simultaneously with the first. To summarize, if your piece of work involves some intricate business about the order of reading, a ‘spoiler warning’ ain’t going to cut it. You cannot depend upon conventions of the form. You need to work it into the fiction in some way.

On the one or two occasions when I bring out my rules for a lecture or something, I like to finish with one that was meant as a laugh, to deflate the serious complicatedness of the others:

Rule #10: Remember to put at least one pair of feet on every page.

It is also known as “the feet rule.” Sometimes it’s not needed, as for instance in the Grandville page it might create space that would diminish the claustrophobic feeling. On the other hand, sometimes just asking the question can help the artist see solutions to the problems that are being experienced by that hypothetical virgin reader. For instance, If we could see the badger’s shoes just once we’d probably also see the legs of the chair, and if Rocher were full figure, the door would probably suggest itself into the composition.

“But who cares?” says the lover of comic books, and I agree wholeheartedly.

For the curious enquirer after the rest of my rules not mentioned above, some are not as interesting and one was so stupid that, like the 18^th amendment, it had to be repealed.

Gabrielle Bell’s book, The Voyeurs, was released this past August. The glossy color of its pages made Gabrielle’s work particularly inviting, even as the actual stories were among her thorniest. That surface/meaning dichotomy is some of what I wanted to talk about with Gabrielle, as well as some basic everyday human stuff. So we caught up at my kitchen table in Brooklyn this past December.

DAN NADEL: I wanted to start by asking you about the story you did for Kramers Ergot #8 – “Cody”

GABRIELLE BELL: It is not autobiographical.

NADEL: I know it’s not autobiographical. [Laughter.] But it does allude to your upbringing. So, I want to know one, if it’s part of a larger fiction project, and two, tell me a little bit about your upbringing.

BELL: Well that story is very different from my upbringing. And it’s not part of a bigger project. I did grow up in northern California, but my parents were kind of drug-dealer hippies, and in the story it’s kind of opposite, like my mother is incredibly, morbidly shy, and then the mother in the story is like this outgoing socialite from New York. It’s sort of the opposite of my life, and — I guess people wouldn’t really get this, but where I grew up in Northern California, was in Mendocino County, which is the heart of pot country, and it’s all about growing pot, and then the story — it’s set in Napa, which is all about growing wine, or grapes for wine. It’s very different.

NADEL: But familiar country.

BELL: Yeah, yeah. It’s familiar. I feel pretty good, because everybody is asking me, “What about that story is autobiographical?” [Laughs.] And it’s really just a place. I guess there is, I suppose the relationship between the father and the guy Cody — is, there’s some inklings of similarity between my step father and people in his life, but I mean — I’m really proud of that story because people think it’s autobiographical [Laughs.] and I really did make it all up. It was based on a dream I had, and I’m also proud that I turned a dream to a fiction.

NADEL: That’s rare. But does that point the way to other fiction? Because it’s not something that you do that often.

BELL: No, I want to do more of that.

NADEL: Yeah, it felt like the beginning of something.

BELL: Yeah. I really want to do more. I had an idea for this story, and I wasn’t sure if I was ready to do it, because I didn’t know if I could pull off a murder story. So I had it on the shelf, as the story that I would maybe someday have the skill to do. I have a lot of those stories — that I don’t think I can do at that moment — but Sammy Harkham [editor of Kramers Ergot] pressured me into it for Kramers. I’m very grateful to Sammy — for pressuring me to do that. He also wouldn’t take no for an answer. I was like, “Maybe,” and he was like, “Great. OK, I want it on my desk next week.” It was the  same with the story that I did for him with the chair story. That story’s pretty similar, too. People think it’s autobiographical. And it’s very, very short, but there’s a lot going on in it. And also, the last line, of both stories. One of them is, “I never felt so useful.” And the other one is, “I’ve never felt so close to my father,” which is, basically, a woman being in a very bad situation, and taking something good out of it. Or turning around this whole bad situation. Anyway, that’s just what I was thinking the other day. I was thinking, these stories are similar that way.

NADEL: That’s funny. We’ll come back to that, but do you have a lot of stories that that are sort of on the shelf until you can —? What is it about them that makes you think you can’t do them? Because, that seems kind of unusual for a cartoonist to file away ideas like that, rather than, you know, fuck them up or something.

BELL: [Laughs.] Yeah, I just feel like my life is so chaotic, and I don’t have very much money, and so I’m always thinking about what I ought to do right now to pay my rent, and I’m always in a state of upheaval, and it seems like I really need to have time and money to sit down and focus and try to do something good. And so I do autobiographical pieces in the meantime because I don’t want to mess up the good ones.

NADEL: That’s funny though, because all along the way you’re doing these pretty rigorous strips. They don’t seem easy. [Laughs.]

BELL: Well straight autobiographical comics are pretty easy for me at this point.

NADEL: Right.

BELL: Like, if nothing weird happens. I really love to do them, but I like to challenge myself to do those other things too. It’s just, like I said, upheaval. Money. Problems.

NADEL: But along the way, you’re making all this other work. I mean, you did do “Cody” and then Voyeurs [Uncivilized Books, 2012]

BELL: It’s very slow.

NADEL: Voyeurs was a few years of work? 

BELL: Yeah.

NADEL: But, you were doing other things along the way.

BELL: Yeah. Kinda.

NADEL: [Laughs.]

BELL: I suppose I’m steady. I can do a page a week, maybe, which is pretty slow. But then again, I haven’t worked on comics for the past couple of months.

NADEL: What have you been doing?

BELL: I don’t even know. [Laughter.] I’ve been doing portraits on the Internet.

NADEL: Right, the Skype portraits.

BELL: And that takes a lot of time. And that’s pretty much it.

NADEL: And that was just straight up, you needed rent?

BELL: Yeah. Also, I just wanted to try it. Seemed like I was broke, and I had this idea, and I saw that nobody else was doing this on the Internet, and I was like, “Maybe I can corner this market.”

NADEL: Why Skype?

BELL: Last year I did it from photographs. That just didn’t work for me. It was just — I worked too hard on each one, and they always came out feeling stiff and awkward. Maybe because I’m not formally trained as an artist. I just don’t know what I’m doing. And then it took so long, and then the same thing is happening with the Skype project, but I like them a little better.

NADEL: But what’s the difference between a Skype image and a photograph?

BELL: Well I guess, for one thing, everybody is in the same position. I like drawing people’s portraits. So I guess the idea is that I’m sitting on a street corner doing portraits, only it’s on the Internet, in the comfort of my own home. That was the idea.

NADEL: And it’s like 40 bucks a shot?

BELL: 35, but —

NADEL: That’s cheap!

BELL: I know.

NADEL: You’re not charging enough!

BELL: That’s what people say, but —

NADEL: You need a business manager.

BELL: [Laughs.] I need a lot of things. And a lot of people.

NADEL: 35. And how long does it take you — each one? 

BELL: Well, the idea is that it would take me like an hour — 25 minutes to draw the person, and then another half an hour to fix it up and color it. But I don’t know — it takes hours.

NADEL: Shit. Hundred bucks would still be a bargain!

BELL: I’m going to try to do it for a hundred dollars after Christmas. But I also thought that if I charged a hundred, I wouldn’t get very many orders.

NADEL: So how many did you get?

BELL: Maybe like, 20? Or something? 20 to 30.

NADEL: That’s good.

BELL: It’s really fun. I love it very much.

NADEL: Why?

BELL: It’s just, I like to draw. I love to draw. So it’s like — getting paid to do this? But it’s also so hard.

NADEL: What do you mean when you say your life is in upheaval? Because the image I get from the comics is that you’re pretty much sedentary and drawing.

BELL: I guess I am, but — I don’t have a skill to fall back on. Like, I don’t have —

NADEL: Well a lot of people — most artists don’t have a skill to fall back on.

BELL: Most artists have illustration. Or something that they do, other than what — especially in comics. Everybody, most wise people have something that they do —

NADEL: Except for everybody that I work with. [Laughs.] But yeah, I agree. They are excluded from being wise, though. [Laughter.]

BELL: Especially with comics, because there are so many skills involved with comics. Graphic design, or illustration, or — that’s it, I guess. Writing. [Laughter.]

NADEL: You never tried illustration?

BELL: I did try it, but it just never worked out. It’s such a competitive field in itself, and I’m not a very competitive person, and I don’t really want to devote my life to illustration as a side job. I’d really have to push it, and I just don’t have that drive. I did some illustration for Jane magazine. It was such a hard job. So I didn’t pursue that.

NADEL: Right. So the money’s a struggle. Constantly?

BELL: For the past year, it’s been rough.

NADEL: Even with all the conventions? That doesn’t help? I’m curious about that.

BELL: Yeah — maybe I’m just not very good at budgeting myself. But this is living in New York. It’s expensive. And I don’t think I’m very good at making money or budgeting it once I got it. But, you know, I’m always trying to change that. I’m always like, OK, this thing will be the thing.

NADEL: What was the last thing?

BELL: Well, before the portraits?

NADEL: Yeah.

BELL: This [The Voyeurs]. This has been good. I’ve been making money at conventions, but then I end up — because I went on tour, and then it costs so much to go on tour right now.

NADEL: It really does.

BELL: But it’s good. I think it’s already paid for itself.

NADEL: The book? Good.

BELL: As far as the print run goes, I’m still waiting for the first royalty check. But it’s good. I’m really happy with what Tom’s [Tom Kaczynski, Uncivilized Books publisher] done.  I really didn’t know what I was getting into with it. I thought I did, but —

NADEL: As a book, or as a —

BELL: As a book. I didn’t really realize what a can of worms I was opening.

NADEL: Why — what do you mean? Because it was — a lot of the work was there, right?

BELL: Yeah, we had been doing those mini comics, and I was like, yeah it’s just like a big mini comic, but then Tom got a distributor, and became a real publisher.

NADEL: Oh, OK.

BELL: He really rose to the occasion. The occasion being, I didn’t even realize what I was asking him to do.

NADEL: Yeah, the way he tells it, he basically became a book publisher to accommodate the book.

BELL: Yeah for me, I just figured he would, we would do it the same as the minis, which is we would sell them on the Internet, and at conventions, and at the same time, I was like, “It’s going to be a runaway hit!” Somehow it’s just going to sell so many copies — we’re going to sell out the print run, and then we’ll do another one, all without a distributor. Like, I didn’t even think about a distributor.

NADEL: But you had a — you gave him the book.

BELL: Yeah. Yeah, I was trying to figure something out, and nothing was working out.

NADEL: Why didn’t it work out?

BELL: Why didn’t it work out? I don’t know.

NADEL: I’m curious because I feel like a lot of cartoonists our age are having similar problems— There’s a reason why Tom’s been so welcomed. Because, people are kind of looking for ways —

BELL: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of cartoonists. I mean — crazy competition right now, because of all the schools that teach it, and — there’s way more cartoonists than can — than, maybe than the market can bear.

NADEL: But you had a home.

BELL: With Drawn & Quarterly.

NADEL: Yeah.

BELL: Yeah, but I wasn’t really doing so well there. I was kind of languishing, I think. I wasn’t selling a lot of books. I think it was paying for itself, but not making a lot of money, although I’m not exactly sure what the numbers were, but I don’t think I was doing so well. And Drawn & Quarterly would’ve published The Voyeurs, but I don’t think that they were very — enthusiastic, or something? It’s just that, I think that they were like, “Oh God, not another one of Gabrielle’s books.” [Laughs.] No, they weren’t like that. Or maybe they were. But I think they probably wanted me to do a graphic novel, and they were going to publish this in the meantime, even though they probably wouldn’t sell a lot. And they would’ve done it, but — I felt like I had a better direct communication with Tom. And I don’t think that they would’ve done a good book like this. Just because of communication and time; they just wouldn’t have given it the devotion and time that Tom would. And I think that I probably sell about the same, or maybe less, but —

NADEL: Tom put together a really handsome package. And I thought that the coated paper was a really good idea.

BELL: Yeah, I would’ve had to fight with them every step of the way [Laughs.] and they would’ve been like, “Oh God, not another email from Gabrielle! She’s still not happy with this!” [Laughter.] Yeah, so the production — I mean, not that Drawn & Quarterly doesn’t do incredibly beautiful books.

NADEL: Yeah of course. Relationships are tricky.

BELL: Yeah, it’s really about the relationship.

NADEL: When did you move to New York?

BELL: Why or when?

NADEL: When.

BELL: 2001. End of 2001. Like, 2002. Almost exactly twelve years ago, yeah.

NADEL: Why did you move?

BELL: I moved here to be with Tony. But also, I always wanted to move to New York. I was done with San Francisco. Not that I was using Tony as a vehicle, by any means. But I was really excited to move to New York.

NADEL: What were you doing — how old were you when you moved?

BELL: I think I was 25 or 26? 26.

NADEL: What were you doing in San Francisco until then? 

BELL: I was doing comics there, and working at a bookstore, and working at a yoga studio.

NADEL: Got it. So you moved here. I guess yeah, I started seeing you around in 2003 or so. But then, I’ve always been surprised, because you do seem very involved with New York, other cartoonists in New York, and the Artists with Problems drawing thing, and events and things. But for somebody who’s so — on paper – so introverted, you’re out an awful lot. [Laughs.] I mean, do you like the community?

BELL: Well, I like people.

NADEL: You do?

BELL: Yeah.

NADEL: Generally?

BELL: When I moved to New York, I was pretty excited to hang out with other cartoonists. And especially really serious cartoonists. Just hanging out with people and drawing comics was pretty great. I can’t really work that way anymore, but just because, cartoonists work alone. And I haven’t had a day-job job in a long time, so, it’s good to go out and see people at the end of the day. I feel like it’s practice, and I do need material for comics. [NADEL Laughs.] It is true that if I just stay home all the time, I just start writing the same shit over and over again. Sometimes I write, draw in my diary, and it’s just me at the desk.

NADEL: I didn’t think of you needing material, but of course you do.

BELL: Well, I don’t know. Maybe a writer doesn’t need material.

NADEL: I don’t know. I would imagine writers need material.

BELL: There’s that quote from Flannery O’Connor that says, “Anybody who’s had a childhood has enough material.”

NADEL: [Laughs.] Right.

BELL: But maybe it’s not so much material as stimulation. Just like, seeing things from different perspectives.

NADEL: And why have you stuck with autobiography for so long? It’s been quite a while.

BELL: Yeah, no, I think that that’s kind of immature of me.

NADEL: Really?

BELL: Yeah, it seems like autobiographical stuff is something that one does until they move on to fiction.

NADEL: Some people make their whole careers out of it.

BELL: Yeah, but maybe those people are just very immature.

NADEL: [Laughter.] I’m not just talking about cartoonists, I’m talking about writers. There are plenty of writers that are just essentially memoirists.

BELL: Yes, but I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, and I’ve noticed that there’s a sort of disdain for autobiographical work, especially with fiction writers. Fiction artists, cartoonists. If somebody asks them if something is autobiographical, they’re like, “I do fiction!” It’s very defensive and, possibly, rightfully so, because fiction is harder, and more important, in a way.

NADEL: I don’t think it’s a question of importance at all.

BELL: I’m really trying to think about this a lot, because, for me, it is like fiction seems like the most important thing. Like, reading it, and doing it, it seems like the most beautiful thing. Because you’re tapping into something bigger, whereas autobiographical you’re tapping into just your own life.

NADEL: Well, I think that you can pick up The Voyeurs and read it as fiction. I mean you structured things. I always figured you were consciously paying very close attention to structure and staging.

BELL: I do think about that. I try to plant things at the beginning that will work out in the end. I do think there’s a lot of good autobiographic cartoonists though. I feel like the medium lends itself to it.

NADEL: Yeah, it does.

BELL: I think that with both autobiographical comics and fiction, people are reading it to read about themselves, and that’s the similarity. I mean, that’s the same thing. Like fiction and autobiographical actually is getting at the same thing. But I’d feel like a bit of a failure if I only did autobiographical stuff. Even though I love doing it and never want to stop.

NADEL: Have you learned more about it as a genre over time? Has it changed for you? In terms of your process?

BELL: Yeah, I think about it maybe more as like, personal essay rather than something I do for myself. But ultimately, it is something I do for myself.

NADEL: Well who do you talk about these sort of things with?

BELL: OK so this is what I was thinking about with autobiographical. There is a kind of disdain for it. People look down on it, sort of. They enjoy it, but they look down on it. They don’t love it — they don’t hold it in as high regard — they don’t think of it as a real art form. Same way with comics. Sort of second class citizen form. And I think I’ve been trying to get over that in my own mind. I think in things that people do look down on, there’s a lot of potential growth, for that very reason.

NADEL: Because it’s not being looked at closely, or because?

BELL: Because it’s not being explored as much. It has been explored, but it hasn’t been celebrated in the way that it could be. So there’s a lot of room for growth and exploration, but it’s just getting over that. I mean, looking at that, that prejudice that I have, and I think that most people have. There’s also the split between graphic novels, novels, and short fiction. The general mindset is that the full-length graphic novel is the thing, which leaves out a lot of potential. Like for me, I think that I’m a really good short story teller. And the point is not to become a great graphic novelist unless, you know, it’s right.

NADEL: So then what’s the process in assembling something like Voyeurs? Because it has a definite structure, and it covers a bunch of years. It doesn’t feel like a book of incidental pieces: it actually kind of felt like an arc. I mean, not only because relationships happen, come to an end —

BELL: I think it’s actually — maybe the reader imposes that arc.

NADEL: Really? That wasn’t intentional?

BELL: It was intentional, but I was only working with this big pile of stories.

NADEL: Right. But you must’ve left some out, and —

BELL: Yeah, but — also, there were stories that I left out that were relevant to the “so-called” arc that I left out because they weren’t that good … But I did, I definitely was trying to streamline it. I added a few pages in here and there. Like to begin and end Ron and my relationship, for example, so we didn’t just jump into it. And then also Michel [Gondry] and me. It’s kind of weird to have these two relationships in there, and they’re not really much to do with each other in the story. But mostly, I was just choosing the stories that were the best, or perhaps were reaching for something bigger, so in a way it was more like the natural — I mean, every story that we write, that one individual writes, is kind of the same story — they’re trying to get at the same thing, in a way. So, I think there are natural themes that come about, and that’s, in a way, the arc. As I was doing all the stories, I wasn’t thinking about it in the bigger sense — it was just each story I would try to do the thing as an independent unit. I wish I were more calculating though — if I could somehow make my life into a story.

NADEL: [Laughs.] But you do — I mean, the stuff with Michel in France is very story-ish. You know, you have set-ups, and comic beats, and there are gags in there, and there’s a story. You get there, and you leave, but in between there are these episodes.

BELL: I wish I could tell more of it. I wish I could — when I was working on the movie [Interior Design – a segment within Tokyo! (2008)] with him in Japan, I wish I could have told the story then. I wish I had kept the comics journals then, but we were working so much. We’d get up at 5, 6 in the morning, and then work until 2 in the morning, and there was no time to even jot anything down. But it was so much more interesting than — I feel like, in a way, I’m doing all the comics about the boring parts, because there’s nothing happening, so there’s time to do it.

NADEL: But do you have to do the comics immediately after or during the event, in order for it to work for you?

BELL: For me, yes. I seem to lose my interest after a few weeks.

NADEL: Really? It recedes that fast?

BELL: It really is kind of this weird thing that I developed. Like, if I have the time to do a comic about it right then, it’ll be pretty powerful, and I write everything — not everything, but I try to write — keep a journal all the time. But after a while I lose interest, and the interest in itself is what is going to make it interesting.

NADEL: Why do you think you lose interest?

BELL: It’s just — in the moment, it feels like a really interesting story, and then a few days later I’m just like, “Why did I care so much? It’s just some stupid incident in my life.” But I want to go back and try to recreate, or work on it again.

NADEL: That particular period?

BELL: No, not that particular period. Just, my whole life. I want to go back – I want to do an autobiographical comic from my entire life. [Laughter.]

NADEL: A memoir. After years of autobiography, she decided to do a memoir. [Laughter.] Thank God! We were all waiting. [Laughter.] No, that’s really interesting though, that there’s an expiration time for your memories.

BELL: I’ve been at this for so long, and I really have been doing it for such a long time.

NADEL: What is it, fifteen, sixteen years now? 

BELL: More than that.

NADEL: Jeez.

BELL: Maybe that. Yeah, but, sixteen, seventeen years? But you know, you develop certain habits and techniques, that nobody else can do it that way. I’ve just done it all myself. It’s so complicated. It works, but it’s very particular.

NADEL: Do you get nervous — this is probably a question that’s been asked before, but I’m curious. Like this book, all your books — it’s a very public — there’s a certain kind of autobiography, right, of a sort of Harvey Pekar-ish model, or Crumb, where they’re kind of, like — their sort of wacky narrative voice foregrounded, and it’s just, “Hey! Here I am! Blaaaah!”

BELL: “Look how crazy I am!”

NADEL: But yours isn’t that. You’re telling these stories, and there’re these scenes and multiple characters, and, I guess I wonder, and what point you forget that it’s public. Or do you forget that it’s public immediately and just —

BELL: No, I think of the public — I’m pretty aware of the public.

NADEL: Right, but there’s two ways to be aware of the public. One is aware of them reading your work, and another is aware of them thinking about you.

BELL: Yeah…

NADEL: When I write, I never actually think about the public thinking about me, ever.

BELL: Because — yeah, no it’s true.

NADEL: Because why would they.

BELL: Yeah it surprised me when I read all the reviews. The reviews often talked about me. And there were some crazy reviews on Goodreads, like, “She should get her meds checked.” And there was hints at me being mentally ill, and —just you know, it was that sort of sideline kind of thing, along with the discussion of the work, and I accept it. I’m OK with that. [Laughter.] I guess that’s the difference between being a writer and being some kind of public personality, or something like that.

NADEL: Do you think that you’re a public personality? 

BELL: Not exactly. I’m not like some celebrity — I’m not John Hodgeman or something. I think there really is a detachment that I have, a tone that I have. Because I always try to keep my comics diary, and it gets confusing, because then I’m like, am I writing in my diary, or am I writing for the public? And those do take different tones.

NADEL: They do. You’re conscious of it?

BELL: Yeah. And I think the tone has changed a bit. I’ve become a little more world-weary, or something. Cynical. [Laughs.] But I think I do need to take on that tone in order to make it public. It’s sort of some sort of attitude.

NADEL: Do the people around you get nervous?

BELL: They don’t say so. I think the people close to me are sort of used to it. Like Tony is pretty used to it. My mom there, she gets a little nervous.

NADEL: Right, because she’s morbidly shy.

BELL: Yeah. And also, I tend to take her to task. I think people, when they first start to know me, when they first meet me, they’re a little bit nervous about it, but they don’t talk about it. It’s interesting. I wonder if people are trying to be more interesting, or witty, or funny, or something.

NADEL: That’s like the classic thing. People performing for you.

BELL: I’m not aware of it. But maybe they are. I’m going to start trying to pay attention — see if people are performing. You’re not performing. [Laughter.] But, I mean, I’m cool with performing — that makes my work easier.

NADEL: Right. Because the funny thing about your work is that there’s no kind of hint of like, “this is authentic.” [Bell laughs.] You don’t really play that game, which I think is good. You’re just sort of presenting things, but with not claim about it. That’s what makes passages like “Inventory” so disconcerting, in a way, like when you go there.

BELL: Disconcerting?

NADEL: Yeah, like that, or the piece about your mom in SCUM [The SCUM Manifesto], that these things take on an obviously unreal —

BELL: Oh you mean, like when it gets kind of magic or obviously not true.

NADEL: Well, yeah, whatever you want to call it.

BELL: That’s the tone I carry, isn’t it?

NADEL: Yeah. You think? Because it’s also the actual things you’re describing.

BELL: Yeah, but I’m describing them with the same tone in which I would do with my regular stuff. That’s what, I guess, connects it. They should all teach tone in school.

NADEL: How do you teach tone? [Laughs.] The tone’s been hard won, though. It took you a while to settle into it. I mean, the tone that marks the work now. Do you feel in control of it?

BELL: No, I never feel in control, but a little bit more. I don’t know if this has anything to do with it, but I remember taking a dance class, like twenty years ago, and I was terrible at that kind of stuff, and I was the worst dancer in the class, but the teacher said something about, it’s all about, not so much getting the moves right, you have to get the moves right, but none of that is going to work unless you carry it in a certain way. It was like attitude or something. That’s totally pretentious, but it’s true. It’s all got to do with the attitude, the approach. Or the, holding it. Which has to do with practice. And then, fiction is also about tone. I guess, it’s like a costume.

NADEL: I wanted to ask you — one of the very first things you said — the way two stories ended. One was the chair feeling useful, the other one with the line about father. Is that, that feeling, and you just said, like you never feel in control. Is that feeling of use, or — there’s this thread that connects those things. Use, control, that kind of directedness in your life, or purpose, or ties? Is that what that is?

BELL: Yeah. Well, I think, just like anyone, I want to be a useful and productive member of society.

NADEL: Really? Yeah, I guess so. Ok. Never thought of it that way. 

BELL: I don’t know if I really am.

NADEL: [Laughs.] You’re something. You’re employing printers, at the very least. [Laughter.] Not to worry.

BELL: Yeah, I’m just trying feel more complete, but I don’t feel like I have a lot of control. Do you feel like you have a lot of control? There’s life and art. I feel like you don’t have a lot of control on either. I feel that I have just enough control to manage it.

NADEL: But that’s always a little tenuous?

BELL: It feels pretty tenuous, yeah. I don’t feel like I’m riding out the waves. Just struggling. I don’t feel like — well, every artist must feel this way though. I don’t feel like I could sit down at my desk and write a good story. I could sit down at my desk and write a story, and maybe it’ll be good, and maybe it won’t. It seems like that feeling is necessary.

NADEL: But do you want — I mean, is part of the comics thing — How much do your parents see of it?

BELL: I’m not really in touch with my step-father, who is kind of like my father. My real father, biological father, I don’t send it to him, but he may read my blog. My mother, I send her everything once it’s published. And then she deals with it. [Laughs.] She doesn’t have Internet. She doesn’t know how to use the Internet. I don’t know if she even knows what the Internet is.

NADEL: Where is she? She still out west?

BELL: Oh, in the mountains. Like in The SCUM Manifesto story, most of that is fiction, but at the time I was writing this, she didn’t have a car, and she didn’t have a phone, and she did hitchhike to town to use the payphone.

NADEL: So she’s still sort of a hippy?

BELL: Yeah. For sure. And while I was writing the story, she got herself a cell phone, which was a major step up, and now she’s doing better. And she has a car, or a truck. And it’s been really hard for her through the years. Sometimes she’s got a running truck, and sometimes not. Last time I talked to her, she was doing pretty well, considering.

NADEL: And you have brothers and sisters, right?

BELL: I have three brothers.

NADEL: Are they there? Do they look after her?

BELL: None of us look after her as much as we should. But my youngest brother is nearby. My oldest brother, he’s nearby too now, and the other brother is in Korea, teaching English.

NADEL: Your brothers don’t show up in your stories much. 

BELL: Little bit.

NADEL: Little bit?

BELL: But not so much, yeah. We’re not totally close. I’m not a very good family person. I’m pretty neglectful. The only time I see my family is when I go on tour in California.

NADEL: But you’re a very good friend person.

BELL: I try to be.

NADEL: It seems like it, at least. 

BELL: I mean, I try, but it’s hard, because there’re so many people in the world to be friends with! [Laughter.]

NADEL: Especially if you’re so popular. It’s very difficult, I know.

BELL: But friends are important.

NADEL: You should try my technique and not make any. [Laughter.]

BELL: You’ve got your friends. But yeah, it’s organic. Yeah, my mom’s getting old, and I’ve got to do something, because she can’t live up there forever. I worry about that. She’s also very healthy.

NADEL: That’s good. 

BELL: I mean, that’s one thing. We really have nothing — I inherited nothing — I had no help whatsoever, but I got really good genes — good health. My mom has really good health too, and that seems to be enough. Well, so far.

NADEL: Why have you stayed in New York all this time? It’s a tough city to do what you do.

BELL: I know. I like it.

NADEL: What do you like about it?

BELL: People are smart here. People are very hard working, ambitious, serious.

NADEL: Right.

BELL: When I leave New York I feel so impatient. I feel like New York challenges me. Also, I grew up in the country and in the woods, and I think my sensibility was always, even from a very small child, like I rarely even saw the city, but I always wanted to live in the city. It was just like — my mom was the opposite; she grew up in the suburbs and always wanted to live in the country. But there’s something about the urban feeling that I just never get tired of, even though I am kind of like a fish out of water. And I do miss the country. But California. Seems like there’s a West Coast sensibility and an East Coast sensibility. Grew up on the West Coast, but I think that I have a bit more of an East Coast sensibility. I don’t know. Nature. Nurture.

NADEL: Who were your — who are your work buddies these days?

BELL: I don’t know; I’ve been a bit more isolated lately. I go out sometimes with Richard McGuire and Leanne Shapton, and that’s pretty fun. I think those two are really fun.

NADEL: Yeah, Leanne’s a really interesting person. We should’ve interviewed her a long time ago. 

BELL: You should. Yeah she’s smart.

NADEL: Yeah, a very interesting storyteller.

BELL: Yeah. A great artist. I loved her book.

NADEL: Which one?

BELL: Swimming Studies.

NADEL: Yeah I haven’t read that yet. Is it really good? 

BELL: She’s very careful with her work. She’s so disciplined. I think I like these Canadian writers. [Laughs.]

NADEL: Alice Munro.

BELL: Well I’m Canadian, too. My grandmother is Canadian, and there’s a certain kind of Canadian sensibility I really like. It’s not too self — not too advertising of one’s self, I guess. And there’s something careful or something about it.

NADEL: Right.

BELL: Not to just generalize about a whole country. [Laughter.] But yeah, I’ve been kind of isolated lately. I met Geneviève Castrée recently on my tour. She’s cool. We have a similar sensibility. Another Canadian artist.

NADEL: Yeah. A really good artist.

BELL: Yeah.

NADEL: Do you feel competitive with other cartoonists? You mentioned competition before.

BELL: Yeah. Is that wrong?

NADEL: Uh-uh. Not at all. But in what sense? For readers? For?

BELL: It’s just an irrational — Well, no, it’s probably rational. I don’t know. I don’t want to talk about it. [Laughter.] I don’t want the other cartoonists to know I’m competitive with them. [Laughter.]

NADEL: The other cartoonists. [Laughs.] Yeah.

BELL: No, I tend to get more envious.

NADEL: Oh really?

BELL: Yeah, I get envious of, well I guess, anybody I guess. If read something that somebody did that’s really amazing, I’m like, “Oh, I wish I did that!”

NADEL: Right.

BELL: I mean, I get envious of other people’s accolades, even though I’ve got my own. And I get smug sometimes, even though I don’t really have much to be smug about. [Laughter.]

NADEL: Yeah, I mean, it’s a weird career thing. Take it where you can get it, I guess. 

BELL: Yeah. Even though I’m really distanced from comics — like I don’t read a lot of comics — and I really feel like I should. But I don’t buy them that much, because I can’t really afford them [Laughs.] and they’re expensive. Even when I do buy them, I’d so much rather read a fictional prose book. It takes me a lot of – I have to force myself to read comics. But I’m still in love with comics. I feel like so much can be done with them, I want to spend my whole life trying to figure out what can be done with them.

NADEL: And that’s sort of, that’s an internal process. In other words, some cartoonists turn themselves into historians and pure-iticians and God knows what else, but for you it’s the loving it and figuring it out —

BELL: But I should really read more comics, because maybe everybody’s already done the stuff that I’m thinking of. But yeah, it just seems like, even though it’s becoming more public and becoming more recognized, there’s so much that can be done with it, and we’re just kind of scratching the surface.

Perhaps the greyest part of the city that April had been a side street in the 11th arrondissement. It was as long as a tennis court, and along one side ran a simple block of a building with blank walls and municipal edges. On the other, cramped and asymmetrical shopfronts leaned on one another like people on the back seat of a bus. A sign above one of them read Art KERBLOOEY, punctuated with a cartoon explosion. The door below it was covered in decals and advertisements, clipped from newspapers. And behind that, a slightly stooped man in a blue shirt and braces wrestled with bolts and deadlocks before inviting me in. Can I get you a drink?, he asked in a creaking Texan accent. Are you sure? How about a beer?

This was Gilbert Shelton, one of the true greats of American underground comics. Back in the sixties he spliced the Three Stooges with the emerging counterculture and created The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, a perfectly funny strip that has never been out of print. Its stars are Freewheelin’ Franklin, Phineas, and Fat Freddy, three flat-sharing, patchouli-oiled poltroons whose exploits became increasingly Munchausen-esque as the series developed. In the early strips, they’d try to conceal their marijuana plants from the police. Yet by the end, they’d founded a corrupt, pseudo-mystical religion and become the richest men on the planet. At their heels for each step of this labyrinthine journey was Fat Freddy’s Cat – a sarcastic, sexually voracious feline with a Jimmy Durante nose and a habit of clawing waterbeds. In their wake came a slew of modern cartoons that aped the trio’s blend of pratfalling and satire, The Simpsons included.

Gilbert pointed up at it.

Gilbert Shelton: That drawing’s from one of my newer strips – Not Quite Dead – which I’ve been working on with Pic, the French cartoonist. It’s about an aging rock band.

Elliot Elam: I read the latest issue! But I struggled with the title. How do you say it? “Last gig in Shan-ga-rig”? “Shag-nar-lig”?

Heh. Most people struggle with that. It’s “Shnagrlig”.

You know, when I last met you, years ago, we had the briefest of discussions …

I don’t recall the meeting. Sorry.

It was at the Institute for the Contemporary Arts. We were looking out along the Mall in London and you were impressed with the architecture. It’s something I’d always found in your comics. That, you know, the buildings and the setting are almost characters themselves, and I thought, “Oh, maybe he knows a lot about architecture.” So I tracked you down and emailed you, thinking it could make an interesting piece: “An Underground Cartoonist’s take on Parisian Architecture” or something like that. And it turned out that you …

… Didn’t know too much about it at all. But I like the eccentricity you find in English architecture, and New York is good too. It has weird parts. There’s a nice book about architecture and traces of old Paris you should look at. It’s called Metronome, by a guy named Deutsch, I think. And it has pictures and also tells you where to find these traces. Old Paris isn’t very old. There are a few Roman ruins, but there’s hardly anything older than about eight hundred years.

Did you expect to find more when you moved here?

Yeah. I didn’t realize that it was a relatively new city. I’d lived in Barcelona before and Barcelona is very old.

And there’s all of that Gaudi architecture to look at.

It was interesting how he worked. He used a team of craftsmen to add the decoration to his things. He had the basic ideas and he had other people add the trim and so on. He designed the major shapes, but he just left it to the sculptors to do a lot of the detail.

Where in Barcelona did you live?

I was in La Floresta, just over the hill from Tibidabo.

And when did you move to Paris?

At the end of ‘84. Moving here was sort of an accident: We had come to France for a comic book signing tour, and while we were here our charter airline went bankrupt, stranding us.

That’s quite a reason.

Yeah. To get back, my wife and I had to buy a ticket and in those days, a round-trip was the same price as one way. So we had tickets back to Paris. We went back for a while …

Back to Barcelona?

To San Francisco. We lived in Barcelona from 80 to 81. But yeah. We went to San Francisco for a couple of months and then we came back to Paris.

So, what is it that’s kept you in Paris for so long? It seems to have been somewhere that you’ve been quite happy to settle.

Well, my wife is a literary agent, and she’s very busy here. She speaks good French and there’s a need for communication between the Anglophones and the Francophones. Communication between the two is usually very bad.

And when did you start working with Pic? When was that?

’92, I think.

And that just came out of a friendship, or a need to work?

Both. I find it difficult to do things by myself. I’m too slow. And I’m better if I have a collaborator. It makes me feel like I should show up for work. Pic has his own career of course, We’re getting ready to start a new Not Quite Dead book, but the sales on the last issue had been pretty disappointing.

It’s pronounced “peak”?

Yeah, but all the Anglophones instinctively say “pick”. The short i sound is incomprehensible to the French. They think “pick” and “peak” are the same word, just like we can’t really pronounce the French r. And they can’t usually pronounce th.

How good is your French?

Oh, I can get by. I can read better than I can understand conversation. I can read all right.

I find that I can understand what the conversation might be about, but I can’t respond too well.

Sometimes I can’t even understand what it might be about. But if it’s one-on-one then I can get them to repeat and I can get by.

You mentioned in an email to me that French people wear too much black.

I know. You can’t see them at night.

You’ve not hit anyone, have you?

No. But it’s a nuisance, driving a car here. The people pay no attention to traffic lights.

What do you drive? That’s another thing that was always clear from your books – your love for cars. There’s an almost obsessive attention to detail with them. All these wonderfully rendered Citroens and, of course, Cadillacs …

I used to be an enormous fan of cars. I’m not any more because it’s so unpleasant driving in France, but they’re still in my work. We’ve got that 1959 Cadillac in the Not Quite Dead story. We had the model in the window made up for us in Japan. It makes it a lot easier to draw.

All of this stuff on the walls, it looks as though you prepared it for a show.

We had a publication party for Not Quite Dead, and a lot of this is just left over from that. But one of these days I’m going to maybe make a little art gallery out of this. That’s why I redesigned it and put in the lights and stuff like that. But I’ve never actually done anything.

Was I right in thinking that you’d written another Freak Brothers strip which never got drawn?

I’m working on one right now.

Really?

There are a couple of pages here and there, but not very much.

Gilbert told me how the new strip was set ‘in whatever city it is; the big city. Presumably San Francisco or New York or something like that’ and said that he had lived in both. As I understood it, The Freak Brothers had first appeared in The East Village Other, an underground New York newspaper that played a huge part in launching the careers of cartoonists like Robert Crumb. But Gilbert corrected me:

Not quite. There was an Austin Texas underground weekly newspaper called The Rag and they started in that. And then I moved to New York and worked for The East Village Other. Then I lived in Los Angeles and worked for the Los Angeles Free Press. And then I was in San Francisco and so on.

Do you still find that you have a real passion for it?

For comics?

Yeah. Or just for drawing.

Ah. It’s always been a hassle for me. I’m the opposite of someone like Robert Crumb. He’s a compulsive worker. I’m a compulsive shirker. I like to finish. It makes me happy to finish something.

I think I first saw your work when I was about eleven. My dad had a copy of the first Freak Brothers collection, which I’ve actually brought along with me.

In the UK, Knockabout Comics republished the Rip Off Press editions with a couple of minor changes because they couldn’t import American books. Those were banned. But if you published in England it was okay, you just couldn’t import the things.

I met Crumb once and he said the same thing had happened with his work.

One time, my British publisher brought some books over to France for the comics festival here and when he tried to take them back home he had them confiscated.

Well, here’s the copy my father had.

This is one of the early printings, but it’s not the very first one. This is the second or third, I think. Oh no, this isn’t. This is a Knockabout printing. It could be the first Knockabout edition.

I think there was a certain age where he must have felt that maybe I could look at it, and not be corrupted.

Yeah. Even little kids like Fat Freddy’s Cat. All the scatological humor. They love it when he shits on the pillow.

Is Fat Freddy’s Cat in the new strip you’re doing?

No. In this strip, Phineas becomes a suicide bomber.

Gilbert opened out a large, flat folder onto the floor in front of us. Inside were two or three comic pages, mostly drawn in light, unfinished pencil but with a few panels that had been detailed in scratchy black ink. The Freak Brothers and their apartment looked the same as they had in the mid sixties. In one panel, Franklin sat in an armchair reading a graphic novel adaptation of Lolita, credited to Alan Moore.

He’s reading an Alan Moore book.

One that doesn’t exist as far as I know. He’s good, is Moore. But when I read From Hell I was disappointed when I got to the end and found that he hadn’t done all of that research himself, he’d just taken it from pre-existing books.

It’s great reading that book and living in London, though. Because you’re full of information about the city that you can bore people to tears with.

Heh. I guess that’s true.

It’s funny how your characters age, or rather …

… They don’t. There was one little strip where they were old men, in the future, but it’s one of those comics where they stay the same.

How long does it take you to do a page?

Oh, I don’t know. Forever.

One of the things I’d heard you say is that when you moved to France, you were able to finally tell people what you did. That there was a prestige afforded to comics that you didn’t find in America.

Yes. I used to tell people that I’m in the publishing business. But here I can probably say that I’m a cartoonist, or a “dessinateur de bande dessinée.”

Did they know your stuff well here?

Yeah. It’s well known. It’s been around for a while. The problem is that the French comic book industry publishes around four thousand new comic books every year. That’s more than a hundred a week. And the bookstore owners can’t cope with that. They know the Freak Brothers and they know they can sell some, so they can order that.

Who translates it?

Different people. Jean-Pierre Mercier and Liz Saum did a lot of the early ones. Nowadays the wife of the publisher does it, Christine Kaddour. She did this one. It’s a new collection.

Why did you redraw that cover?

I redrew all of them for the French editions.

Did doing that kick open any old memories?

Not really. I just wanted to improve on the early stuff. These newer ones are watercolor. We used every conceivable technique in the early editions, to get the Freak Brothers in color. The redone ones are generally better than the originals.

Gilbert handed me a thick, paperback collection of his strips. On the cover, the Freak Brothers were loping along a litter-strewn city street, holding a middle finger, a fist and a peace above their heads as the traffic buzzed behind them. The cover, Gilbert told me, had originally been drawn for High Times – a monthly magazine dedicated to the pleasures of marijuana. His work had become a regular feature in High Times by the late seventies, providing comic relief between articles by the likes of William Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson. It was also in the late seventies that Shelton had begun collaborating with the cartoonist and fine artist Paul Mavrides. With the writer Dave Sheridan (who died of cancer in 1982), they created some of the most epic and detailed of the Freak Brothers’ adventures and worked together on the sublime Idiots Abroad, where the trio globe-trot with Scottish terrorists, a South American cult, and a mechanized chicken.

There was a wonderful strip in High Times, set in Holland, which even had you in it, along with Paul Mavrides, and you found the Freak Brothers on a houseboat in Amsterdam.

That was the last one we did. Mavrides and I were invited to be the judges for a marijuana seed grower’s contest. When we arrived in Amsterdam they gave us each thirty samples to smoke in five days. Six per day.

Wow.

By the time I’d smoked three puffs of the first one I was so stoned that I couldn’t tell the difference and I gave them all the same score. But Mavrides smoked all of the samples and wrote a lengthy critique of each one.

What’s he doing now?

Well, I hope he’s going to work on this new strip with me. He still lives in San Francisco, in a rent-controlled, cheap apartment. So he’s not that motivated to do any work.

Who knows if we can, but to get back to the architecture thing, you were saying as well that there was a building in Paris you’d like to see torn down.

The Montparnasse Tower, which is full of asbestos. They’re talking about tearing it down. That would make Paris even nicer. I like the Métro stations, too, of course.

The Hector Guimard stuff. Am I pronouncing that right?

Yeah. There are about a half dozen Hector Guimard buildings but not many.

I was reading about him. He moved to New York in the end. And I read how the press tired of him. Not of his work, exactly, but of his “personality.” It seemed a very ambiguous thing to say.

I’m afraid I don’t know too much about about Guimard. I do like his work, though. My favorite building in the world, however, at least for the interior decoration, is the Municipal Building in Prague, decorated by a dozen prominent Art Deco artists. I like the Art Nouveau stuff in Brussels, too, including the building that houses the Belgian comic book museum, which is a very nice building – and a very nice museum – specializing in great Belgian cartoonists, of which there are quite a few. Europe knows how to celebrate that kind of thing.

A friend went to Hanover to see a huge retrospective on Ronald Searle. I think Searle left all of his work to the museum after his death, too. That must be quite something.

Why Germany?

I think he saw himself as a European, and felt like he could do better work there. He moved to France like you. It seems to be a theme with cartoonists. My friend got to know Searle a little bit, and now runs a blog of his work, I’ll send you the link.

I’m a big fan of Searle’s but I don’t know that much about him.

He died earlier this year. In England, I think a lot of people thought he was already dead.

Oh yeah?

Yeah, For his 90th birthday, there was some interest. There was a wonderful exhibition of his work at the Cartoon Museum in London, for example. But until then, we’d pretty much ignored him. That’s the way we do it in England. We celebrate you once you’re gone.

That could be true.

While I’m here in Paris, whose work should I look out for?

In the world of comics?

Yeah.

Here are a couple of my favorites. Fluide is maybe the best comics magazine. Fluide Glacial. The name comes from a practical joke novelty that you put on cushions and it freezes your ass. Something like that. There’s some funny stuff in it. This guy’s great – Lindingre. Frank Margerin is funny, too. Here’s a cartoon about marijuana-smoking rats. It’s well drawn, but I couldn’t tell you how funny it is. It’s a good magazine.

So you’re still very much on top of it, the comic scene.

Yes. These are my French lessons.

There seem to be a lot of Americans here, and Paris seems to be a draw for people from the States. It’s as if it’s the place where they can be artistic, and create their masterpieces.

Well, that’s the legend from the Lost Generation. Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound. Gertrude Stein. All of that.

Woody Allen seems to buy into it, too.

It’s a myth of course. There might have been some truth to it in the twenties and thirties. But I don’t know. There’s not much of an ex-pat community. The people I know here are well integrated. The American Center went bankrupt. In fact, that’s one of the architectural masterpieces that Pic wanted you to see. Do you know about it? It’s in the 12th. A couple of blocks south of here.

I’ll go see it. So, you don’t see people walking around in berets and a black turtlenecks?

If you do, you know it’s an American. Old French men still wear berets, but the French didn’t wear any sort of hats at all for a long while. Hats weren’t really in style here for a long time. They started to come back into fashion a bit. With baseball caps and that kind of thing.

Gilbert reached down under his desk, taking out a huge map of the city and rolling it out across the floor.

One thing you should see, perhaps, is the Bibliothèque Nationale. Apparently, when they built it, they didn’t know you shouldn’t have sunlight directly on the books.

So everything went brown, or bleached?

That’s right. So they had to hang shutters on all the windows.

There’s a library in South London, this huge glass structure. But people kept smashing the windows, and so they had to cover the whole thing in wire mesh.

What happened to that old generating plant?

Battersea Power Station?

Are they still going to make something out of that?

I think so, but nothing yet. You know the Pink Floyd cover?

Of course.

Well, it was the anniversary of that record being released, and so they floated this great pig over the top of the power station. I got the train into the city one morning and there was this huge pig floating about.

Ha ha.

But no, they’ve done nothing yet as far as I know. I hope they don’t just turn it into flats or stick a McDonald’s in it. I quite like the fact that it’s empty. It’s like an old ghost in the middle of the city.

There’s a place in Barcelona. This old brick amphitheater they used to use for bullfighting. And what they did with that was, they raised the whole thing up fifteen feet and put a shopping center in at ground level.

Wow.

And here’s something. You see this building across the street? This was designed by Hausmann, the redesigner of Paris. He did the Grand Boulevard, and all of that. This building isn’t anywhere near as substantial of course. In the Second World War, it’s where they shipped off the Jewish children. It’s a historical monument, but I don’t know if it’s that great a piece of architecture. I mean, it’s not a tourist area around here.

Is that why you chose to live here?

No. It was just by accident. We inherited someone’s apartment and we liked the neighborhood. It was convenient. It has the cemetery of Père Lachaise and that’s about all. That’s the only tourist thing. Place de la Bastille, maybe.

Shall we go and eat? And would you mind awfully if I took your photo, Gilbert?

Sure.

Gilbert sat back in his chair and smiled as I took a few snaps. Afterwards, we walked to Brasserie Le Rey at the end of Rue de Voltaire. “They do great salads,” Gilbert said as I looked through the menu. The waiter brought a carafe of wine.

It’s strange how the French can drink wine in the afternoon and then go back to work.

Oh God, I know. I’ll be asleep later. Hey. I wondered something. Does it feel like home around here?

In Paris? Yes. In fact it’s boring.

It really is home, then.

I like to have an excuse to go tourist-ing when people come to town. When I first moved here I used to walk everywhere. But now I know the neighborhood so well, that I have to walk for an hour before I find anything interesting.

Is there much about America that you miss?

I prefer American food. This whole deal with having to eat out at restaurants the whole time – I find it tedious. And they feel sorry for you here if you eat by yourself.

I see there’s a McDonald’s next door.

It used to be a Burger King and then McDonald’s bought out Burger King in Paris. I prefer Burger King, I go there whenever I go to Amsterdam.

Apparently J.D. Salinger was a fan of Burger King too. They found a letter he wrote to a friend, and in it he recommended the Whopper.

One of the food critics for Esquire magazine said, years ago, that he liked McDonald’s. It was a scandalous moment.

So what do you have planned for later?

A friend of mine is a cartoonist, and he’s up at this cartoon art gallery up on Rue Saint-Honoré. I’m going to go to that. There’s another great gallery you should see – Galerie Martel.

I forgot to ask. Did you ever get chance to get into the catacombs?

Yes. I’ve been in the secret catacombs. There’s three hundred kilometers of them, but only maybe three or four which are open to the public. The rest of it you have to get a teenage guy to take you down there.

Didn’t the police go down there and find a fully working cinema?

That’s right. There was also a place that had been the wine cellar of a big restaurant. The catacombs were about sixty feet underground at this point and there was this long, winding staircase down to the cellar. These kids got in through the wall from the catacombs and drank up all the wine. And now the stairway back to the surface has been taken out.

I bet.

That’s one of the funnier stories.

What’s it like down there?

There’s a few puddles and stuff but it’s fairly clean. It’s sandy, but not muddy.

How long did you stay down there?

Oh, all night. Especially since while we were down there somebody blocked up the exit.

How did you get out again?

Oh, one of the guys eventually got the concrete blocks out of the exit, but it took him about two hours.

Terrifying.

Our interest was more in the old peripheral railroad tracks. There was a line that circled Paris and I think the tracks had been taken up but much of it is still there, I think.

In London there was this old, automatic and driver-less postal train that used to run between Paddington and East London somewhere. It started up in the twenties and shut down about ten years ago, but apparently all of that stuff is still there underground. All of the old boxes and signs and stuff. And all the lights still work.

Oh yeah? Can you see any of it?

Yeah. Well, if you can get down there. Some guys did just that and put their photos online. I’ll find a link about it and email it to you.

The waiter brought our food. Gilbert had chosen a piece of roasted lamb that made my dish – a salad overpopulated with boiled eggs – look bland and pathetic.

Look at that. You know, I’m getting obsessed with eggs. I seem to eat them in everything. I’ll soon be eating nothing else.

But you know if you eat nothing but boiled eggs you can starve to death. They lack essential vitamins. The same with rabbit.

All those hunters who ate nothing but rabbit and died of malnutrition.

That’s right.

Another thing I read was about food in the Franco Prussian war. A whole cat would sell for about 10 or 12 francs because Paris was surrounded and people were starving.

People would trade their pet cats with other people so they didn’t have to eat their own pet. And they ate all the animals in the zoo.

Including two of the prize elephants, right?

Yes. That’s a true story. They ate two elephants.

Afterwards, the waiter cleared away our plates and asked if we wanted coffee. I nodded, a little drunk, and turned off my tape recorder. Gilbert seemed relieved at that, and that we could be quiet for a while. Behind him, a rusty mirror reflected the all but empty restaurant while, on the street outside, people zipped back and forth and the traffic beeped. “This is a nice place,” he said.

Later, back at his studio, I asked Gilbert if he would draw something in my notebook. “Sure,” he said and, within a few moments, Fat Freddy’s Cat was scampering across the pages. “I’ve drawn him so many times now.” Gilbert said, putting the cap back on his pen. “I could probably draw him in my sleep.” The cat looked like I did after all that wine, and all that talk about secret catacombs and marijuana competitions and elephant steaks. Its eyes were lidded and dizzy, and a huge bleary grin had spread across its face.

The suit startled people in the comic-book world. (Presumably, it also startled Amazon, which yanked the cartoon from its website.) As far as these people knew, Crumb had lost the rights to “Keep on Truckin’” long before 2005. The source of this belief was Crumb himself. He had been strikingly clear about it. He had blamed that loss on his former lawyer, Albert Morse.

In April 1988, The Comics Journal had published a 70-page “definitive” interview of Crumb, conducted by its editor Gary Groth. In that interview, Crumb described a lawsuit 15 years earlier, which had ended with another federal judge declaring “Keep on Truckin’” in the public domain. Partly, Crumb had said, the decision had come about because he had defied Morse – whom he described in passing as a “twisted dude” and “asshole” by refusing to testify against a publisher, whose use of the cartoon on a business card without a copyright notice had potentially dropped the cartoon into the public domain. And partly the decision had been due to Morse being “so tactless and rude” that he had antagonized the judge. Even though Morse had told him a fortune was at stake, Crumb said, he had refused to appeal. “That was kind of the end of my relationship with him,” he told Groth. “Actually, he stopped practicing law after the whole thing was over.”

This interview, in which Crumb also blamed Morse for subsequent trouble he had with the Internal Revenue Service, was reprinted in R. Crumb, volume three of The Comics Journal Library, and relied upon by Patrick Rosenkranz in his comprehensive history of underground comix, Rebel Visions. The cartoonist had previously seeded interviews in the Berkeley Barb, Relix and People with these accusations, but in the Journal, he let them flower fully; and they came to define Morse for the ages.

Robert Crumb photographed by Albert Morse

At dusk, on Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2006, 16 days after the passing of the man Robert Crumb had disparaged, about one hundred people gathered on a Sausalito houseboat for a memorial service. They talked and reminisced and chanted. His niece, a rabbi, sang a prayer of consolation and recited kaddish. One guest played Peruvian prayer bowls and another an ocarina and a naked woman a didgeridoo. Albert Morse had been a man whose outrageous humor and overflowing enthusiasms lit others’ eyes when they were asked to recall him. He had been someone who could blithely – and falsely – inform strangers that his mother had posed nude for Man Ray or that his other car was a Rolls Royce in which he was customarily chauffeured by a team of midgets. He had been someone who, if a friend’s marriage had collapsed, leaving him with two un-refundable airline tickets for a Venezuelan vacation, could step into the breach on a moment’s notice and not only accompany the dispirited husband but leave him recalling not heartbreak but visits to noteworthy Caracas cat houses and the delighted children who flocked to them on the street because Morse could pull scarves from their ears. He was, they said, the friend they would miss the most. “Anytime you saw him,” they said, “it was ‘Oh my God, Albert is here!’”

He was also a man frequently riddled by self-doubt and lacerated by despair. He was abstemious when it came to drink or recreational drugs. (Grapefruit juice became his bar beverage of choice, and at a time when, within his social and professional circles, they were more common than after-dinner mints, he may have never smoked a joint.) But he was a glutton when it came to food or other pleasures of the flesh. He lived modestly in some respects, but in others, indulged himself, Nero-like. He represented many of the major cartoonists of his time, breaking new ground on their behalf, but walked away from his law practice without glancing back. He authored, within three years, two books that were distinctive and compelling and influential, but did not do another in his last 30 years. And over his earthly run, he fashioned a life that was among the most alluringly off-kilter as any in post-1950s America. During a period when the competition for such styling sometimes seemed Olympian, he stood like a Watts Tower in a crabgrass field.

Everyone at the service had received a paper mask on which a photograph of his face had been reproduced and a candle which could be inserted at the nose and, when lit, illuminated the night. The guests could see themselves surrounded with flickering, distorted, partial images of Morse that they could carry in their memories against the erosions of time.

In my prime EC Fan-Addict years, 1952-to-1954, during which I was ten, eleven and twelve, the Pulitzer Prize for fiction went to The Caine Mutiny (drek), The Old Man and the Sea (suitable for pre-publication in Life), and “None.” The Best Picture Oscar went to An American in Paris (drek, with dancing), The Greatest Show on Earth (drek), and From Here to Eternity (drek, Montgomery Cliff and Deborah Kerr notwithstanding.) And the most popular songs were Leroy Anderson’s “Blue Tango”, Percy Faith’s “Theme from Moulin Rouge“, and Kitty Kalen’s “Little Things Mean a Lot”, none of which have been publicly heard, outside of an elevator, in decades.

This is not to suggest that daring, mind-challenging works were not coming into existence. Invisible Man, The Adventures of Augie March, and Junkie were published. Beat the Devil and The Wild One were released. And Hank Williams, Big Mama Thornton, and Hank Ballard made their way up niche-market charts. But none of this was within immediate reach of the eyes, ears, or grubby fingers of those of us at Henry C. Lea Elementary.

Is it any wonder EC made an impression?

1.

I have no major disagreement with Gary Groth’s recent remarks. I applaud his formulation that a comic’s value is “intrinsically literary.” I swallow, with only a slight gulp, his recognition that EC’s prose was often cliche-ed, formulaic, “overwrought and fatuously earnest.” But as one who had his world rocked by – and sped to the newsstand each Tuesday and Thursday to skim the cream from its most recent deliveries – I take umbrage (“Take my umbrage… Please!”) at his equating ECs to “decent” noir B-movies.

You think Lee Marvin tossing hot coffee in Gloria Graham’s kisser was something? You ought to see that ranch hand after its owner smote him with her branding iron. You consider Kiss Me Deadly perversely erotic? How about that cheating wife and her lover whose heads were transplanted onto each other’s bodies by her cuckolded husband?

Decency, as Mae West might have said, had nothing to do with it.

Sure, with ninety-minutes at their disposal, B-movies may have deepened and shaded characters more than EC could in a six-to-eight-page story. And maybe this time allowed movies to present more disturbing world views. (Or maybe not. EC damn well frequently disturbed me.) But in two areas critical to the interests of red-blooded American boys, EC kicked the ass of anything 1950 Hollywood films – A, B, C, or D – could offer.

I am talking SEX and VIOLENCE. Many EC alumni have expressed displeasure at or remorse over their involvement with such matters. Gary barely mentioned them when assessing EC. But I see no reason to treat S&V like one more crazed aunt locked inside an attic. (Which reminds me of that young man chained in the attic by that old hag… But I digress.) I consider sex and violence central to EC’s glory and responsible for its elevation in my personal artistic pantheon.

The Hays Code, remember, had tethered Hollywood since the 1930s. The silver screen dared not tarnish itself with too much licentiousness or brutality. But EC could strew its pages with rotting flesh, exposed body cavities, amputated limbs, and eviscerated organs. It could flash the kinkiness of an interplanetary explorer defrosting for his pleasure and disposal one beautiful woman after another and offer for its juvenile readers’ contemplation what exactly transpired once the salivating maniac or fanged beast or pulsating blob got his hands or paws or tentacles on the scantily clad damsel set like a canape before him.

EC cadged us toward the carnival’s back tents. It spot-lit corners of the mind we would need to master. If in the process, it drew us toward a higher class of text and illustration than our dimes usually purchased, that was good too.

But it was not the main thing.

2.

One problem with viewing comics as “literary” works is that, unlike fiction and poetry, they do not have a single author but, like films, are collaborative ventures. Our culture has accepted a film’s director as its auteur. By the same token, it seems, a comic’s editor should be considered its. If so, Al Feldstein, who is usually traduced for his tone-deaf prose, stone-handed drawing, and having usurped Harvey Kurtzman’s throne at MAD, was EC’s Orson Welles. Feldstein edited six of the seven horror, crime, and sci-fi books, where EC’s sex and violence glowed most stunningly. He wrote twenty-seven of these comics’ twenty-eight stories, usually from ideas fed him by Bill Gaines, EC’s publisher, who’d scribbled them down while up half the night from the Dexadrine he was popping.

In the interviews I’ve read, Feldstein has not seemed the introspective type. His stance has always been of the “Just-trying-to-create-good-comics-and-make-a-living” variety. But something in his psychic wiring must have found certain of Gaines’s snippets particularly compelling for him to elaborate upon them so frequently. Convenience alone can not account for the number of avenging corpses rising from graves, nor mere coincidence explain the many wrong-doers undone by similar wrongs snapped back on them, amplified. I’m especially intrigued by the frequency with which children slew parents in Feldstein’s stories. This wasn’t going on in many places, but I can recall four examples – and I haven’t read these comics in sixty years. But that could be my own psychic wires clicking.

Feldstein was a Jewish kid from Brooklyn. He grew up in the Depression and quit school to serve in World War II. (Of EC’s fourteen primary artists, all but Al Williamson, who was too young, mirrored his war service; nor did any, as far as I can tell, graduate college.) He was about twenty when the death camps were liberated and Hiroshima bombed. I can only imagine that the rage and terror, repulsion and guilt trapped within him, powered those tales in ways he did not care to explore. I do not doubt a personal vision as strong as Hemingway’s pounded upon Feldstein, compelling his imprinting it on the page. And this vision resonated with children like myself, fearful, powerless, groping for our own strengths, needing to test ourselves against terrors in order to move beyond them.¹ So maybe Ryan is right.

I have more trouble with the sexual aspect of Feldstein’s work. While freer than most writers of his era to indulge his fantasies, he was also more punitive toward the characters who acted them out. John Updike tormented adulterers with depression and guilt. Feldstein lopped off their heads or burnt them alive. If they received a scarlet letter, it was branded on their flesh. In real life, sexual misbehavior might have cost one alimony. Feldstein made Shahira law seem like Thomas Jefferson had drafted it.

Feldstein reflected a society which, while fascinated by sex, was terrified or ashamed of this fascination. How these reflections played out on latency age males like myself is interesting, if embarrassing, to consider. As a rule, during a movie’s “mushy parts,” we headed for the refreshment stand to stock up on Jujubes, while the six-shooters re-loaded. I don’t think a Saturday matinee smooch stays with me, whether planted by Burt Lancaster or John Wayne, whether on Virginia Mayo or Gail Russel. But Feldstein scripted and EC’s artists delivered sexually charged images I have never escaped.

I suspect that my friends and I, while knowing little of the realities of sex, sensed something important and forbidden going on. Those panels seemed one of those fog-filled streets, at whose end something tempting yet dangerous lurked.

3.

Gary posed the question whether ECs were ‘good’ only in comparison to other comics or “good” by more objective standards. I am not sure objective standards exist by which to measure art. (Which standards, for instance, would mount Duchamp’s urinal in any museum or perform Cage’s “4’33″ in any concert hall?) Certainly, EC’s comics were the best of their time, and if you measure art by its influence on other artists or its cultural impact, EC was, at least, significant.

For one thing, its excesses helped blow-out America’s tolerance of comics and, through the resultant Comic Code, gut them of content for a generation. This oppression instilled in those of us left bereft a new respect in the First Amendment. It also left a vacuum, which the underground cartoonists would more than fill. Inspired by what EC had wrought, they surpassed it in new subject matter and attitude. And this assessment does not even consider “MAD,” one of the most influential periodicals of the decade.

But as devoted an EC fan as I am, I can’t recall recommending them to anyone, except as artifacts of socio-cultural interest, since a niece and nephew were pre-teens. The Code may, in retrospect, have come at a convenient time. It forced my circle, once we’d tired of thumbing through our “Poor” to “Fair” condition holdings to seek alternatives. We then found Kurtzman’s war books simplistic compared to All Quiet on the Western Front and Johnny Got His Gun. MAD paled beside Lennie Bruce and Jules Feiffer. Mickey Spillane and Playboy addressed the urges Feldstein had stirred.

Still, this does not settle the matter. While comics may be a literary form, and few of Feldstein’s words may remain with me, I can recall dozens of images spun from them. They adhere more firmly than any part of Mrs. Dalloway or The Idiot. I can’t contend that EC’s mix of the erotic and sadistic was helpful to my navigation of those foggy streets, but it was certainly compelling. My friends and I would not have lingered for a moment over a “romance” comic, but we devoured Feldstein’s. They touched something elemental within us.

The SEX and VIOLENCE endure. Is that not the most to ask of art? Does that not confirm EC as GREAT?

ROY CRANE: Well, I think so. It largely depends on what you call “adventure.” C.W. Kahles, who did Hairbreadth Harry — she [his wife] has been very eager to establish her husband as being one of the very greats, and with reason. He had the misfortune to be about the second or third along who would do certain things. Well, I always thought of it as being a satire on the old, melodramatic plays of the earlier 1900s. And I read an article in which he was quoted as saying it was satire.

Continuity? C.W. Kahles’ 1924 Hairbreadth Harry strips were reprinted in Nemo #15 (October 1985).

And in 1924, soon after I went to NEA, there were also all the people there, who were trying to figure out what the hell it [Wash Tubbs] should be. And Landon’s first thought was, let’s give him a background: He works in a grocery store. Well, that made George Swanson mad because Swan had a strip, Salesman Sam. What were the gags to be like? Were they going to be joke things or would it be stuff sort of like DeBeck had. They had little twists on the end, but they weren’t exactly jokes. Or there was The Gumps, that was going very big. He had a bunch of wisecracks all through the thing. And everybody had a different idea. And I didn’t pretend to know anything about comic strips, and for a while I went along with this, and then the president of the syndicate had a brainstorm. I guess he would have called it that. He figured out that everybody liked the movies. Why not make a strip about the movies? There was no other strip about the movies. So they sent me to New York, and I think I spent about two, at the most three, days at the movie studio. Watching them make a picture. And that was supposedly to give me enough background so that I could do a strip about the movies. Well, I didn’t like that worth a damn. I was being pushed around and so forth, and I wasn’t good at getting jokes. This was the day of the jokes. He-She jokes kinda thing. Or the Mutt and Jeff He-plus-He jokes. And the cartoonists were stealing them right and left. A joke would come out — hell, they’d change it very slightly and use it. And it was so bad that on The Cleveland Press, one day the same joke appeared in two strips and the next day it appeared in a third strip. That’s how bad it was.

And I tried to do more or less original stuff, but I would sit there and listen to the old New York Central trains go by and, out in the distance, it’d be the ships coming in, [makes sound of ship foghorn] whistling and, oh boy, I wished that I was out of there. I did not like that at all, being muscled around by everybody in the place, telling me what to do. And I thought, I wanted to do a story, an adventuresome story, take Wash to the South Seas. That’s where I wished that I could be at that time, and well, I told him about it, and he said, “Well, OK, provided you bring in these movie people at the end and they save the day.” I think Wash was with a bunch of cannibals or something, so I had to bring those damn movie people in. Fortunately, by the time that I finished the story, which was a very, very poor adventure story, it was mainly continuity. There was a villain named Tomalio, I think his name was. He used to sharpen his knife and glare at Wash. Then he threw him overboard. And I pulled my first really big boo-boo: I had Wash thrown overboard in shirtsleeves; the next day he was floating out at sea and he had his coat on. I don’t know how that happened. [Schwartz laughs.] Well anyway, it’s about time I finish this little story. The head of the company was no longer there, so we dropped it after the movie people came in, we dropped it very shortly after that. And I didn’t do a good job on that adventure story thing.

After the crash in ’29, within a couple of years the papers were feeling the pinch, and they were wanting to drop comics, and they were wondering which ones were the ones to drop. And when they dropped the adventure strips, people squawked like heck, because they wanted to know what was going to happen next. And it was a great surprise to most everybody, including the editors and publishers of papers. And they would take polls, and heck, I’d be right there on the top almost. The good panel things would generally come in first, because there wasn’t much reading and the person would get it in just a flash, but we were running ahead of the joke strips and the like. And of course the joke strips were being dropped right and left, and syndicates then wanted nothing but adventure stuff. Well, it didn’t have to be an adventure story, a knock-down drag-out fight sort of a thing. There are other kinds of stories. “Well, we want adventure!”

Crane’s June 4-6, 1945 Buz Sawyer dailies. ©2010 King Features Syndicate

So much so that… Merrill Blosser who does Freckles, Freckles and [His] Friends; it was a cute little kids’ strip at that time. And we went out to California and saw him, quite a bit of him. We went out there two different years; I think it happened in between the two years. He was told by Ferguson to age him 10 years, overnight, and send him out on an adventure. And Blosser did. He’s a very methodical worker — I used to envy him for that — and he would pick up a strip a week, so that at the end of the year, he could take a nice vacation. And this was about the summertime and he was all ready for a plan to vacation up in Oregon for a month and he said, “Well, now, I would like to get in a vacation first.”

And Ferguson: “Start the thing now! Now! Tomorrow!” And by God, he had to start it tomorrow, and he aged him 10 years overnight and he sent Freckles on a safari in the darkest Africa. And that’s the way things were going. Some of the joke strips tried to convert.

SCHWARTZ: Let me ask you a question, because it’s gone full cycle again, as you know.

CRANE: Yeah, yeah.

SCHWARTZ: And I was curious; I was going to ask you what you thought was the reason that the circle has been completed, 360 degrees, and we’re back to the joke strip. I would assume, and you can comment on it for me, size and the television too, obviously the squeezing down of the comic, the dimensions of the television screen, are given as reasons for this decline in the adventure strip. And it’s probably quite true. But what are your feelings about this?

CRANE: Well, I feel that continuity strips, at least my strip, Buz Sawyer, which I started during the war, that adventure strips were never stronger than they were during the war. And that certainly goes for [Milton] Caniff, who had his stories tied together and he got quite a lot of impact out of it. But now, the jokes that came after the war, the types of gags that were used in The New Yorker, changed the type of humor.

SCHWARTZ: It became more sophisticated.

CRANE: Yes. And, Chic Young certainly came out with a different way of telling a story, then. He would have his maybe four pictures and the third one would be his gag thing, and then in the fourth picture, he would give the reaction of the people, which is in [John] Gallishaw’s book on how to write a short story. Now that was picked up by a lot of people. I did it in Sunday pages and the like, where you maybe had humor and everybody else did.

SCHWARTZ: That’s interesting.

CRANE: So he told jokes that were completely different there. Much fresher-sounding, and they’re built around character, too. More strongly on character than ever before. So it may have been that this cycle would have snaked around anyway, but in this wartime period, the price of newsprint went to hell and gone. And a long time, we were turning out five-and six-column comics, I guess. Anyway, it wasn’t long after that that they cut the comics down to four columns, that was about eight inches wide, and when they did that, you just couldn’t put in four pictures very well. And well, I saw that immediately we would have to go to three. And it wasn’t long before everybody, I don’t know that they did it because of my doing it, but they probably found out for themselves that they couldn’t put all that in four pictures. Now that made this difference in a story that would run 12 weeks. You had, I think, it’s 72 fewer pictures in which to tell a story. That meant that you left out something in there. Either you had to leave out the character-building or you had to leave out the blood-and-thunder adventure stuff. And at the same time, a reader wasn’t getting as much as he did before. The readers began to squawk. Well, the stories dragged. So the editors, the publishers, they would jump on the cartoonist to liven them up, shorter stories. Shorter stories wasn’t the complete answer. You just didn’t make the impact on a reader with three pictures in a strip as you would with four.

With the opening of the Fredric Wertham papers at The Library of Congress, researchers finally have access to Wertham’s side of the affair, including Wertham’s hand-written notes of his telephone calls as they related to the Senate hearings.  The records of the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency held at the National Archives also held previously unseen documentation. Combined with the power of such newspaper search sites as Proquest Historical Newspapers and Newspaperarchive.com, both available at the Library of Congress, this allows us for the first time to understand the full story of how the Senate comic book hearings came to be.

From the beginning,  I had in mind opening to the comics world the various letters, articles and other documentation surrounding the history of the famed comics hearings of 1954. The best remedy for the many long-perpetuated misconceptions and misrepresentations on this subject is to bring all of the pertinent supporting documentation to light.

Warren Bernard

February 2013

*The entire Interim Report on Juvenile Delinquency (referenced in end notes #43, #44 & #49) is at the bottom of this page due to length.

1.  N.W. Ayers & Sons, Directory of Newspapers and Periodicals: 1953 Edition.

 2. United States Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, Census of Housing: 1950, Washington, D.C.: United States Government Printing Office, 1953.  XXVII, Table J.

3. Judith Crist,“Comic Books Are Called Obscene by N.Y. Psychiatrist at Hearing,” New York Herald-Tribune, Dec. 28, 1947.

4. Norman Cousins, Letter to Fredric Wertham, Jan. 5, 1948, Fredric Wertham Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

5. Fredric Wertham, Letter to Norman Cousins, Jan. 11, 1948, Fredric Wertham Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

6. Judith Crist, Letter to Fredric Wertham, Apr. 6, 1948, Fredric Wertham Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

7. Memorandum of Understanding, August 1953, Fredric Wertham Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

8. Horace S. Manges, Letter to Rinehart & Co. Inc., Oct. 27, 1953, Fredric Wertham Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

9. Monroe Froelich Jr., Letter to Rinehart & Co. Inc., Nov. 2, 1953, Fredric Wertham Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

10.  George T. Delacourt Jr., Letter to Stanley Rinehart, Oct. 30, 1953, Fredric Wertham Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

11.  James W. Rodgers, Letter to Fredric Wertham and Robert E. MacNeal, Oct. 30, 1953, Fredric Wertham Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

 12.  Fredric Wertham, Letter to James W. Rodgers, Nov. 4, 1953, Fredric Wertham Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

13.  McLaughlin, Stickels & Hayden, Letter to Rinehart & Co. Inc., Nov. 16, 1953, Fredric Wertham Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

14. Robert C. Hendrickson and Estes Kefauver, A Joint Statement from the Offices of Senator Estes Kefauver (D-Tenn.) and Robert C. Hendrickson (R-N.J.), Mar. 4, 1953, Records of the U.S. Senate, 83rd Congress, Committee on the Judiciary, Accompanying Papers (SEN 83A-E11), S. Res. 88 and S. Res. 89, Record Group 46, Box 72, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

15. Robert C. Hendrickson, Study of Juvenile Delinquency, May 28, 1953, Records of the U.S. Senate, 83rd Congress, Committee on the Judiciary, Accompanying Papers (SEN 83A-E11), S.Res. 89, Record Group 46, Box 72, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

16. “Senate Authorizes Delinquency Inquiry,” Baltimore Sun, June 1, 1953.

17. “Delinquency Probe Gets Chairman,” Washington Post, Aug. 5, 1953.

18. “Juvenile Probe May Take in City,” New York Times, Sept. 19, 1953.

19. “Investigating Crime by Teenagers,” Chicago Tribune, Sept. 21, 1953.

20. “Senate Inquiry Seeks Causes of Youth Crime,” New York Daily News, Oct. 15, 1953.

21. “Youth Crime Inquiry Set,” New York Times , Nov. 6, 1953.

22. Eve Edstrom, “Senators Begin National Inquiry Today into Causes of Delinquency,” Washington Post, Nov. 18, 1953.

23. Peter F. Oliva, Letter to Senator Robert Hendrickson, Nov. 6, 1953, Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee of the Judiciary, National Archives Building, Washington, D.C.

24. Carl F. Hanna, Letter to Senator Robert Hendrickson, Nov. 3, 1953, Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee of the Judiciary, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

25. Herbert Hannoch, Letter to Fredric Wertham, Nov. 27, 1953, Fredric Wertham Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

26. Fredric Wertham, Personal notes on phone conversation with Herbert Hannoch, Dec. 2, 1953, Fredric Wertham Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

27. Herbert Hannoch, Letter to Herbert Beaser, Dec. 2, 1953, Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee of the Judiciary, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

28. Fredric Wertham, Personal notes on phone conversation with Herbert Beaser, Jan. 6, 1954, Fredric Wertham Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

29. Fredric Wertham, Personal notes on phone conversation with Herbert Beaser, Mar. 15, 1954, Fredric Wertham Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

30. Fredric Wertham, Personal notes on phone conversation with Rene de Chochor, Mar. 15, 1954, Fredric Wertham Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

31. Fredric Wertham, Personal notes on phone conversation with Herbert Beaser, Mar. 17, 1954, Fredric Wertham Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

32. Gary Groth and Dwight Decker,  “An Interview with William M. Gaines,” The Comics Journal, #81, May 1983, p. 76.

33. “Commerce Dept. Fires 23 ‘Disloyals,’” New York Herald-Tribune, Feb. 19, 1954.

34. “Find No Red Teachers At Colleges,” New York Herald-Tribune, Feb. 23, 1954.

35. Seduction of the Innocent ad, Publishers Weekly, 1954, 2-3.

36. Lloyd E. Smith, “Protest against ad for Wertham book,” Publishers Weekly, Mar. 26, 1954, 1399-1400.

37. Fredric Wertham, Letter to Frederic G. Melcher, Mar. 26, 1954, Fredric Wertham Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

38. Frederic G. Melcher, Letter to Fredric Wertham, Mar. 30, 1954, Fredric Wertham Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

39. Frederic G. Melcher, Letter to Stanley Rinehart, Mar. 30, 1954, Fredric Wertham Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

40. Elsie M. Quinlan, Letter to Fredric Wertham, Apr. 7, 1954, Fredric Wertham Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

41. Elsie M. Quinlan, Letter to Fredric Wertham, Apr. 16, 1954, Fredric Wertham Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

42. “Senate Committee Approves More Youth Inquiry Funding,” Washington Post, Jan. 19, 1954.

*43.-44. See Interim Report at bottom of the page.

45. “Sharp Rise In Juvenile Crime Noted,” Hartford Courant, Nov. 20, 1953.

46. “Senate Begins Probe Into Juvenile Delinquency,” Cleveland Call and Post, Nov. 14, 1953.

47. Ed Mowrey, Letter to Herbert Beaser, 1954, Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee of the Judiciary, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

48. “Denver Waywards Traced To Slums,” New York Times, Dec. 15, 1953.

*49. See Interim Report at the bottom of page.

50. Executive Session Meeting Notes Apr. 5, 1954, Robert  C. Hendrickson Archive, Bird Library,  Syracuse University.

51. Senator Robert Hendrickson of New Jersey speaking on Juvenile Delinquency April 8, 1954, Congressional Record, 83^rd Congress, 2^nd session, 1954, Vol. 99, pt. 10.

52. “Hendrickson Sees Need To Curb Probes,” Baltimore Sun, Apr. 6, 1954.

53. Fredric Wertham, Personal notes on phone conversation with Herbert Beaser, Apr. 15, 1954, Fredric Wertham Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

54. Fredric Wertham, Notes on Hendrickson Committee, Apr. 21, 1954, Fredric Wertham Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

55. Al Feldstein, Unpublished interview by Warren Bernard, Feb. 23, 2012.

56. David Hajdu, Ten-Cent Plague (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), pp. 254-255.

57. Robert C. Hendrickson, Subpoena of William M. Gaines, April 16, 1954, Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee of the Judiciary, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

58. Witness Schedule, 1954, Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee of the Judiciary, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

59. “Background Statement — Mr. William M. Gaines,” 1954, Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee of the Judiciary, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

60. “Background Statement — Dr. Fredric Wertham,” 1954, Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency of the Committee of the Judiciary, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

61. Al Feldstein, unpublished interview by Warren Bernard, Feb. 23, 2012.

62. David Hajdu, Ten-Cent Plague (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 254.

63. Lev Gleason, Letter to Senator Robert Hendrickson, April 22, 1954, Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency Papers, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

64. Estes Kefauver, Letter to Fredric Wertham, Apr. 19, 1954, Fredric Wertham Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

65. “Foul Conspiracy,” Hartford Courant, Apr. 18, 1954 .

66. Al Feldstein, Interview with Warren Bernard, Feb. 23, 2012.

67. Gary Groth and Dwight Decker,  “An Interview with William M. Gaines,” The Comics Journal, May 1983 #81, p. 78.

68. Al Feldstein, unpublished interview by Warren Bernard, Feb. 23, 2012.

69. “Horror Comics for Profit,”New York Herald-Tribune, Apr. 23, 1954.

70. David Hajdu, Ten-Cent Plague, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008), 284-286.

71. “Slump in Comics,” Barrons, Jan. 17, 1955.

72. Nyberg, Amy Kiste, Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code, (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), pp. 125-126.

73. Gary Groth and Kim Thompson, “An Interview with the Man Who Brought Truth to the Comics — Harvey Kurtzman,” The Comics Journal #67 October 1981, p. 8.

*43. U.S. Congress, Senate, Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, Juvenile Delinquency — Interim Report of the Committee on the Judiciary. 83^rdCongress, 2nd Session., March 15, 1954, p. 9.

*44.  U.S. Congress, Senate, Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, Juvenile Delinquency — Interim Report of the Committee on the Judiciary. 83^rd Congress, 2nd Session., March 15, 1954, p. 8.

*49. U.S. Congress, Senate, Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, Juvenile Delinquency — Interim Report of the Committee on the Judiciary. 83^rd Congress, 2nd Session., March 15, 1954, p. 14.

Juvenile Delinquency: Interim Report

Thus we see, for example, the recent argument about the 1950s EC comics, started by Ng Suat Tong: “Over two millennia ago, Aristophanes was brilliantly mocking the tragedies of Euripides (Women at the Thesmophoria) and risking prosecution with forthright attacks on the leaders of Athens. Contrast this with what we get in Mad…”

And this: “‘Master Race’ is, however, a children’s story… As a children’s story, it does not contain one iota of the humanity found in a thirteen year old girl’s famous diary during World War 2-enshrouded Amsterdam. It is pathetic that it should still be considered one of the finest stories ever created in comics.”

We might not get laughed out of the room, but the question is, would we want to be stuck in it with some guy who would ask: Since we already have Aristophanes, who needs Kurtzman? Since we have Erasmus of Rotterdam, why would we want Steve Martin? With Wagner still available, who cares about the Firehouse Five? Furthermore, would we let that guy organize the party music?

What appears at first to be taking a more stringent view is in fact applying irrelevant criteria. It dismantles the idea of a comic and leaves the parts hopelessly undone.

The argument was picked up by Chris Mautner, who does not while away his lunch hour with the immortals on Parnassus like the above critic, but just wants a fair serve of story for his buck. And he sees the story as exactly the one that can be summed up in terms of the “plot.”

“Rather than saying ‘Mad was great,’ we should be saying which stories in Mad were great…” “’Pirate Gold’ … is a fun, jet-propelled story of an amnesiac sea captain out for revenge…” “…stories like ‘Contact!’, a simplistic, jingoistic ‘us versus them’  tale that naively suggests America will win the Korean War solely because ‘we believe in good’” … “’F-86 Sabre-Jet’, a mesmerizing tale of derring-do aeronautics…”

This critic does not have the pretensions of the first one, but is still reducing a comic to its “story.”

Jeet Heer, in the comments following Gary Groth’s response to Mautner, shows more inclination to recognize the pictures, but he too, apologetically, wants to separate them from the package: “Most of the EC books belong to the history of American drawing & illustration rather than the history of American comics.”

Heer is choosing to ignore the fact that a narrative drawing is still a narrative drawing even when isolated from its story setting. Removed from its context it will just be telling a slightly different story. All the drawings in an EC comic are narrative drawings. Indeed they are the particular species of narrative drawing that belong entirely and exclusively to comics. If you dismantled the running order of an EC comic story, threw out the ending and mixed more than one story together, the drawings could still only belong to the history of comics (to express it in the terms of the given argument).

Let me fix the Kurtzman war comic in the reader’s mind before moving on. Here is the cover of Two-Fisted Tales #26, March 1952. There is a whole story in it and the way the story is told is quite sophisticated. A soldier in the middle of a historical action is already referring to it in the past tense. The first time I saw Kurtzman’s war comic art I wondered how on Earth he was able to get away with something so radical as that choppy cartooning, so far removed from what one would expect in war art. (Ng Suat Tong wants us to know he would be expecting no less than Goya.) He used the same choppy drawing on the early Mad covers. Notice how the Mad example, #7 October 1953, also tells a whole story. It took Kurtzman months, years, to distil this ink. That’s a story too.

Comics have had different kinds of critics at different times. I recall an earlier phase, in which the French critic Maurice Horn (I think it was he) took pains to compare comics (he was writing about Tarzan and Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon) to eighteenth-century opera. In studying opera, in this theory, it is not wise to attend too critically to the story material, with all its pleasant pastoral business with the shepherds and the nymphs. Our attention is more fruitfully applied to the dramatic use of the music, and to the beauties that the attentive ear can find there. Note here that if you isolate the music it does not cease to be dramatic-narrative music. It remains quite different in form and purpose from the more abstract music of an instrumental sonata. Applying the same principle to comics, the art is to be found in the story the cartoonist tells in his graphic strokes, his deployment of the whole panoply of cartoon effects and ways of seeing and representing. In the work of an exceptional artist there can be a whole other story happening. It was well explained by Robert Fiore in his response to Ng Suat Tong, though I don’t think anybody else has so far seized upon it:

What comics give us most of all is the experience of comics. What I mean is the way a given cartoonist portrays the world- the particular kind of subjectivity that is the cartoonist’s special privilege- and the way the cartoonist tells his story from panel to panel. You can get this experience from comics whose intellectual content is fairly negligible.

By way of a comparison, think of the great Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit”. It is a fine literary poem, set to music, and its author could have found no better singer to put it across. But a die-hard fan of Billie Holiday, the kind who has most of her recordings, is more likely to put on something from her earlier Columbia series of recordings, like “You’re a Lucky Guy” or “Billie’s Blues”  (“I ain’t good looking, and my hair ain’t curled”). A good number of the songs she had to sing during that period weren’t particularly good songs by high critical standards, and she didn’t have much choice in the matter, but the important thing is the musical alchemy by which she turned them into something precious. That and the happy accident of the first-rate jazz musicians she found herself playing with, such as Teddy Wilson and Lester Young. Every time she sang she told her own story, whatever the material she was working with. I’m not talking here about technique, a set of applications that can be learned, or about an aesthetic aspect of the work that can be separated from the work’s primary purpose. The performer’s story is the essence of jazz music. The question should not be whether the ostensible “story,” the plot and all its detail, is worth our time; stories tend to all go one way or another. The question should be whether the person or persons performing the story, whether in pictures or speech or dance or song, or all of the above, have made it their own and have made it worthy.

Here’s another example. Read Umberto Eco’s essay “Casablanca, or, The Clichés are Having a Ball”.

…aesthetically speaking (or by any strict critical standards) Casablanca is a very mediocre film. It is a comic strip, a hotch-potch, low on psychological credibility… And this is the reason it works, in spite of aesthetic theories and theories of film making… When all the archetypes burst in shamelessly, we reach Homeric depths. Two clichés make us laugh. A hundred clichés move us. For we sense dimly that the clichés are talking among themselves, and celebrating a reunion. Just as the height of pain may encounter sensual pleasure… so too the height of banality allows us to catch a glimpse of the sublime.”

To explain the value of Casablanca by its plot would be lame. To represent Billie Holiday’s work in terms of song lyrics would be to do her an injustice, which is not to say that there weren’t felicitous moments. The true appreciation of all this stuff demands a less linear mind.

Moving sideways at this point takes me to another recurring argument that falls within the jurisdiction of the present rant. I refer to the incessant debate over who authored Marvel Comics, was it Stan Lee or was it Jack Kirby? Like the above, the critics of the current crop have a tendency to look at the situation in a linear way. Since it is a “story,” it must have an author, they reason. However, like Eco with his dissection of Casablanca, it needs to be seen as a conglomeration of accidents, any one of which on its own would not amount to much. The end result of these accidents, Lee at Marvel, Kirby at Marvel, the chance that an imitation of DC’s Justice League might sell a few books, was the simple idea that we have come to call “the Marvel style.” Kirby, continually feeding the hungry production machine, needed a script but there wasn’t one ready. Lee improvised a “plot” for Kirby to take home, with the intention of inserting the dialogue after the fact. For the purpose of my thesis, the plot need not have been anything special, as the stories were all variations on a theme, whether they were monster stories or romance stories or westerns.

The literaries are inclined to debate whether the furnishing of a plot is enough of a claim to authorship, or whether the real writer in this case was the artist. Once the argument gets started it can go in any direction, and is just as likely to deny that a plot was ever given in the first place, because it is obligatory that everybody who wasn’t there have an opinion and take sides. None of that has ever mattered, as far as I’m concerned, though I acknowledge that the ownership of successful movie franchises could make a difference to this party or that. But the movies do not interest me and I do not care. None of them have ever captured the thing that made Marvel comics exciting to me in 1965 when I discovered them for myself.

That thing is only to be found in the actual old pages of the comics and it is what we would attempt to describe with the words “Marvel style.” “Marvel style” is not just a different way of arriving at the same result, meaning a story in the literary sense, but a way of arriving at something different. The essence of this different thing tends to elude conventional literary analysis, so that the old Marvel comics attract a lot less respect these days. Here’s a page from Tales of Suspense #85, January 1967.

Two characters, Captain America and Batroc, are depicted and three others are mentioned. The others are Stan and Jack, the artist and writer, and the addressee, called “frantic one,” being of course the reader. “The wise man knoweth when to speak and when to shuteth up! Sly Stan knows that no words of his can do justice to Jolly Jack’s great action scenes… And so…”  “See what we mean, frantic one?”  If our theoretical literary critics could bring themselves to contemplate the piece after such a delightfully disheveled piece of writing (you mean moronic, I hear Ng Suat Tong mutter in my inner ear), they might be inclined to discuss it in terms of “breaking the fourth wall,” which would be the intrusion of a latter-day literary concept. Recognizing the artist in the text is hardly an innovation. There have always been cartoons with that happening, for example “Battler Herriman perches at the ringside and sees Jim Flynn win.”

What we’re looking at is in fact the return of a very old idea. The configuration, a page showing two figures in continual action, with the extreme casualness of the two captions, could only be arrived at by a method in which the art came first and the writer, in the parlance of another age, is “writing up to the pictures.” This is exactly how it was done a couple of hundred years ago in illustrated storytelling, before Charles Dickens arrived on the scene with the intention of making a more serious literary enterprise of the writer’s craft. He then had to go to some trouble to change things around so that the words came first. I wrote about this on my blog a while back in relation to Pierce Egan’s Life in London (1822), quoting a passage, like this Marvel page, in which the text acknowledges the picture: “…we were assailed by some troublesome customers, and a turn up was the result, (as the Plate most accurately represents.)” (The writer then tells how he lost and then recovered the notes for the piece you are reading.)

The simple fact of putting the pictures before the words creates a lively spontaneity that comes across almost as improvisation. In a sense this is true; once stories start expanding over a number of issues, there’s no going back to fix what happened last month. We are made to feel that the work is being created while we watch, and that anything is possible. The logic of a worked out plot takes a back seat and bits of pictorial business are allowed to lead to other pictures, and so on. A comic put together this way feels quite different from one thoroughly plotted on a typewriter at the outset. The famous example of a result of working this way is the anecdote Lee has told of how the penciled pages of Fantastic Four #48 came in and as he sat down to dialogue them he noticed, amid the cosmic crackle, an oddly anomalous little character on a surfboard…

Now, I am cognizant of the fact that the multitude of kids reading that Captain America were just thinking about what Cap and Batroc were doing to each other. But for me this page, and others of a similar stripe, opened up a whole new different way of thinking about comics (I was nine; I’d been thinking about them for quite a few years). And many years later, when I was doing Bacchus, there was a period when I had a fellow writer helping me out. I always made it clear to him that I was happy to buy in writing but that once the pictures started going onto the paper everything could change and I reserved the right to rewrite it. (I wonder if that makes me a villain in the eyes of the literaries.) On one four-issue series I found that narrative logic, the hand I was holding at the given moment, dictated that all the villains had to be killed in the third issue. Indeed, the momentum of the pictures demanded it, something that couldn’t have been foreseen at the writing stage. My co-writer, for whom the villains still played a role in his synopsis for issue #4, argued that this was crazy, but sometimes there’s just no stopping the train. Issue #4 now had to find something better than villains

To bring things full circle, how does that Marvel comic stand up if you take away the pictures? It doesn’t. Does that make it worthless? The literaries would say undoubtedly. Wee Eddie Campbell would say it was an act of magic, the way the whole thing worked, with Stan and Jack, and the frantic one.

A long time ago, when comics started getting complicated and written continuity was needed, a job opened up for people who could write the stuff. I’m talking as long ago as 1920 and The Gumps, when cartoonist Sydney Smith started using the story suggestions of a traveling jewelry salesman named Sol Hess. Writing comics is a special skill quite different from writing prose. But before you take it all apart, ask: can you take the pictures out of a sports cartoon, or reduce a clown’s circus performance to its plot? Can everything about a musical performance be conveyed in a stave of notes, or can everything about a film be known from its shooting script? Sometimes, while everybody else was watching the clock, the clown, the actor, the singer, the cartoonist, the writer even, because writers never have as much freedom as we think they have, have slipped their own story in between the tick and the tock.

If comics are any kind of art at all, it’s the art of ordinary people. With regard to Kurtzman’s war comics, don’t forget that the artists on those books were nearer to the real thing than you and I will ever be. Jack Davis and John Severin were stationed in the Pacific, Will Elder was at the liberation of Paris. Maybe we should pay attention to the details. Who knows what we’ll find there? The little bird on the machine gun may appear rather twee to your fine literary sensibilities, but that kid looks dead to me.

Provided by Jacques Tardi.

KIM THOMPSON: [Regarding Tardi’s current project about his father's World War II experiences]: Why did you wait so long before proceeding with it?

JACQUES TARDI: I don’t know … I don’t know. [Pause.]

THOMPSON: That’s a reasonable answer. And are you doing it in black and white or in color?

TARDI: There will be three gray screens, three different percentages. My daughter Rachel is doing that, on the computer.

THOMPSON: You haven’t worked with gray screens for a long time. You did a lot of it in the 1970s and ’80s, but in the last 15, 20 years much less so. You’ve either used simple black line-work, or color.

TARDI: Mmmm. Well, it’s necessary in this case, because I need to set the moods. Black-and-white drawings … I was going to say that after a certain point they end up being tedious, but that’s true of gray tones as well — I mean, it’s not exactly resplendent colors

There is a lot of text, so I worry that … Because it really is one guy’s impressions, day-to-day life, the showers, the food, the reveille, the work. He ended up working on a farm for a while, because he was hungry. At the time he was a junior officer, so in principle he wasn’t supposed to work, but he let them take him anyway because he thought he’d be able to find something to eat at the farm where he’d be sent to work, he figured he’d kill a chicken or find an egg somewhere. Which turned out not to be the case at all. So that’s what it’s about: Hunger, these guys’ daily problems, dreadful things that were done within the camp, even among people who are in the same straits … and then, afterwards, as the war wound on, the arrival of the Russians after the end of the German/Soviet [Non-Aggression] Treaty, because they were right next door, and then this departure at 30 below zero, in the snow. We were talking about movies earlier — imagine the cinematic possibilities inherent in that kind of situation!

And, of course, they’re the losers. They are not given a particularly warm welcome by the American soldiers. Things would get better later on, but initially they aren’t welcomed very well at all, and as he put it, that makes perfect sense! That makes sense: we were the losers, we were nothing, we hadn’t put up much of a fight.

THOMPSON: And Americans do have a fixation on winners and losers.

TARDI: Right. So my father was convinced they had far more respect for the Germans than for the camp’s prisoners. Also, during that return trip, led by the German soldiers, they kept a list of the towns they’d crossed through, along with the distances traveled, in a little notebook — along with the food problems, what they’d eaten, how long they’d stayed, etc. And tracing it on the map, you realize that the itinerary they pursued was totally disjointed, they went in circles, etc. At that time the Germans had gotten into their heads, or someone had put into their heads, that they would now be charging the Russians alongside the Americans. That idea didn’t last very long, but that explains why they didn’t turn themselves over as prisoners right away. And during that journey there were still guards, who were vicious. The war was over for them, but right up to the end they were beating the prisoners with rifle butts, and one day my father said, “OK, enough of that, we can’t take it any more,” and the prisoners took five German soldiers, disarmed them, and hanged them on the side of the road. [Pause.] That was probably just days before the end of the war. And again, why did they hang them? They’d disarmed them, why didn’t they just shoot them in the head, why hang them? It seems complicated. Maybe they wanted them to be seen, because he said that when they saw them, the other guards took off and were never heard from again.

When they linked up with the American soldiers, it happened in a town in Germany, and there was a field in which the weapons that had been seized from the Germans were stockpiled. Specifically cannons — small-caliber ones, of course — with matching ammunition, and right away, I don’t know whether it was the French, the Belgians, or who — maybe the Americans — they used those cannons to bombard, to raze part of the village and shoot at the column of Germans who were fleeing the combat zones. It was the end of the war, these were the horrors of war, there was nothing glorious about it, but you have to understand their state of mind. They weren’t exactly living a passionate love story with Germany right at that moment.

So there you go. I think all of these stories need to be told, because these people have not been talked about much. And when French cinema took on those subjects, it was always with a slightly comedic edge, portraying the Germans as big dopes, gluttons, sauerkraut- and potato-eaters, and the French of course were clever, etc.

THOMPSON: Oh, Americans have plenty of movies and television shows like that.

TARDI: Yes. But I don’t know of any movies, American or French for that matter, that really tell the story of the day-to-day misery of these guys who brewed infusions with bark stripped from the poles the barbed wire was hung on, who spoke of nothing but hunger, hunger, hunger, hunger, hunger — you would’ve eaten anything. Who pulled potato peels out of the garbage … Now, they did receive packages from home, of course. They had the right to two packages a month. The Germans respected all that stuff, they’d signed the Geneva Convention. And anyway, if you don’t want me to mistreat your prisoners, don’t mistreat mine. (Which in 1943 applied to the American prisoners, but not to the French, since there hadn’t been a single German prisoner in France since 1940.) But anyway, when the packages arrived, they would be systematically opened, of course, to make sure they didn’t contain any weapons or anything along those lines, and the tin cans were opened with a bayonet, there was a soldier who, hunh! would jab in his bayonet, use it as a can-opener, and empty all of it, the jam onto the sausages or whatever, everything would be all mixed together, and the guy would leave with a sort of mush of all the food he’d been sent. His only option was to eat it all right away.

From “Moi, Rene Tardi …” ©Jacques Tardi

For his escape attempt, my father needed a compass, maps and money as well, which my mother sent him over a period of months — inside those jars of jam, in fact. How did he manage to communicate with my mother? The letters were read, censored … That’s another question that remains unanswered. And he managed to take receipt of all of this because there was a prisoner in the camp who worked in the mail department, who slipped him his packages, so they didn’t undergo the search and systematic destruction. Of course, there were some soldiers who took malicious delight in doing that, but there were also decent guys, and you should also bear in mind that most of the guards were older and some of them had fought in World War I, so they were less vicious.

So there is all of this human potential that needs to be evoked, needs to be told, because people do, as with World War I, with the poilus [slang for French infantrymen, especially during World War I] in their trenches, have a very stereotypical view. And so I’m going to try to deal with these different aspects, of course, especially the bitterness and the humiliation, the shame that my father felt and that he lived with, obviously very badly, to the end of his life.

Shortly before his death, there were times when he lapsed into a delirium, into a semi … not a coma, but an extended sleep. I was there, in the room, in the hospital, by his side, and he explained to me that at one point an anti-tank cannon had been getting ready to shoot at him but he’d shot first, there was already a shell engaged in the barrel of his cannon, he pulled it out in order to insert the appropriate shell, and he fired very, very quickly at this anti-tank battery, and then he crushed the two soldiers who were manning this battery; they rolled right over them. He stopped the tank to see what was going on behind him and there was this magma of meat, of crushed bodies that had passed under the tank’s treads, and he said fortunately they’d been given booze, very, very strong alcohol — they had it in their canteens — and that was what gave them the strength to continue on and go hide in the woods. He was 25 years old at the time, and those are very powerful experiences. He was visibly haunted by them for the rest of his life.

THOMPSON: Remind me what the title of the book is again?

TARDI: I think it’s a little long, but I wanted to call it Moi, René Tardi, Prisonnier de Guerre au Stalag IIB, Mon Retour et la Suite [I, René Tardi, Prisoner of War at Stalag II-B, My Return and What Followed]¹⁴ — in much smaller type, of course — because if you want to understand the story, it doesn’t end with the stalag.

THOMPSON: That’s an important point to highlight, otherwise you might mistake it for a Steve McQueen kind of deal.

TARDI: The Great Escape? You know, that took place in a camp that wasn’t far away from there: Sagan. That huge escape did take place, but it didn’t involve a single American [laughs] even though the star of the movie was Steve McQueen. It was basically Englishmen. If my information is correct.

In my father’s stalag, digging tunnels was out of the question. It couldn’t be done. On top of which, it was a gigantic camp, there were 15,000, 20,000 guys. There were several smaller camps. You can find the location of the camp on the Internet, you can see that it was very, very big, near a lake; you hit underground water pretty fast, so digging tunnels wouldn’t have worked.

My father didn’t talk about this, but the Belgian soldier I mentioned earlier, who was a prisoner in the same camp, told the story of the escape of two French soldiers who spoke perfect German. They made civilian clothes for themselves, they put on swastika armbands, and they walked around the camp, speaking German, one of them measuring things, the other one writing the measurements down in a little notebook. When German officers would come by and ask them what they were doing, they would explain they were there to do some work, and so they measured, they measured, they moved toward the exit, and they quietly walked out measuring for future work that of course did not exist. Now that story, which was described by this Belgian soldier, shows up in a movie, Jean Renoir’s last movie, which is called The Elusive Corporal [1962], which is adapted from a novel by Jacques Perret, who tells exactly the same story. So what’s up here? We almost come back to the issue of witnesses we spoke of earlier. Is it a myth? Is it a fictional story — which of course worked beautifully in a movie? Did it really take place? My father never mentioned it. It allegedly took place in the same camp. I may mention it, adding a caveat — although I have no reason to doubt that Belgian prisoner.

So, that’s where I’m at.

He was asking the right person, or so he thought. Maurice must have seen some of the advertising I had done—ads for Alcoa,  Time Magazine, CBS,  IBM,  Alcoa,  and a full page cartoon strip for D’Orsay Perfume in The New Yorker .

“Well, you go around with your portfolio,  Maurice,”–I fumbled — “ and you hit all the agencies, and. . .   well, Here. Here’s a list, Maurice. These are the agencies I’ve worked with.”

I doubt that he ever visited a single agency. I doubt if he even assembled a portfolio . But I enjoyed seeing him again, and happy that it was on my  turf.

His turf could not have been more different  than what passed for style in 1950s New York. Back then, walls were stripped down to the raw brick, lamps were Noguchi parchment globes, candles were stuck in  wax-encrusted wine bottles, and  occasionally, for somebody in the graphics business, there was a floor-to-ceiling cork wall. That was how we escapees-from-home lived in the ’50s. But not Maurice. He lived in a 19^th Century  duplex on West Ninth Street. Dark and redolent with age, the décor was Jamesian—appropriately. His polished mahogany bookcases were lined with volume after volume of  first edition Henry James. His collection was second only to that of Leon Edel, the  eminent James biographer.

I had read some Henry James in the past, but only his short stories: The Aspern Papers, The Beast in the Jungle (that terrifying tale of procrastination and missed opportunity), and  The Turn of the Screw,  but never any of his novels. “Maurice,” I asked, “could you recommend a novel of James? What’s your favorite?” He hesitated, but only for a moment. The Wings of the Dove.  And that began my first reading of James’ novels—although the convoluted syntax of Henry James made me reread the first few pages several times before I could move on to finish the book (I am not a patient reader).

My relationship  to Maurice was. . . well, how can I put it? Distant but close. We thought of ourselves as friends, but we saw one another rarely, probably because we were two workaholics more committed to our work than to our social lives. Maurice put it this way when he wrote an introduction to my 1980 book Behind the Lines:

Bob and I are typical colleagues/friends—we hardly ever see each other. This is more my fault. His exquisite wife, Moisha, has often asked me to visit. I’ve never even seen the Blechman children. This doesn’t, I hope, make me less a Blechman friend. It only points up that infernal, insistence on work that imperiously contradicts one’s normal, gregarious inclinations. The Blechmans understand this. My best friends in the profession  are people I rarely see but whose natures and work I love.  I have no recollection of how Bob and I met—when or where—or the number of times we’ve seen one another. We are, nonetheless, solid friends, and that feels good.

Neither do I remember how we first met—where or when.  But I recall that we met again in 1966.  The occasion was a joint exhibition at The School of Visual Arts with Edward Sorel,  David Levine, Jules Feiffer, Robert Grossman, and several other illustrators. Maurice admired a drawing of mine—something on the  Vietnam War which I had done for The Village Voice. He asked if we could swap drawings. “Sure.” Why not? After the exhibit’s closing,  taking it down from the wall, four-thumbed -me dropped it on the  floor, crinkling the edges, effectively ending the swap. To this day I brood about that mishap.

We met again in 1977. I was asked by  PBS to create an hour special for the Christmas holidays.  I remembered having received a Christmas card from Maurice which he had done for the Rosenbach Foundation. It consisted of six panels, and portrayed a waif who magically turns himself into a Christmas  tree —  a gift to other children (an apt metaphor for the sacrifice an artist makes for others).  I thought his card would make a lovely animated opening for the program, so with Sendak’s blessing my studio set to work on the project. And work it was! It took four months to produce the one minute segment—four months of laborious  hand-watercoloring to imitate the original card. I later asked Maurice, as well as the animator, to sign some of the watercolors. He signed them, and why not? Although they were only based on his work, the watercolors were beautiful.

A frame from the film signed by the animator and Sendak

I originally thought of calling the program “What Happened to the Child?’” which would have been appropriate to Maurice’s piece and to so many of the other  program segments. But it seemed to be too overtly religious, so I changed the title to “Simple Gifts”—a rather anodyne title, I now think.

Over the years our relationship was more epistolary than actual.  But in the late ’80s—probably around 1986– I received a telephone call from Maurice  “Bob, I was asked by Glyndbourne to do the sets for their upcoming production of Ravel’s  L’Enfant et les Sortileges.  Would you be interested in doing animation  as backlit projections for the sets?   Would I?! After doing commercials ad infinitum and ad nauseum for clients , some of whose products I would never want to use, I welcomed the opportunity to do work of a  purely artistic nature. The director was Frank Corsaro, renowned as the librettist and director of both The New York City Opera and the Metropolitan Opera. The opportunity to work with Maurice and Frank Corsaro was thrilling.

I went to Maurice’s home in Ridgefield, Connecticut, a rambling 18^th century structure housing a bewildering display of art objects: drawings by some of his favorite illustrators such as Beatrix Potter and Jean de Brunhoff, German lead soldiers, stuffed Wild Things, Mickey Mouse figurines, and—to my eyes, something to genuflect before—an original Maxfield Parrish. We discussed the project, swapped  a few ideas back and forth, and met again the following week to clarify our thoughts..

There was no other animator I wanted to work with than the late Tissa David, a brilliant artist with a superb story-telling sense, and the ability to read music scores.  Who better to collaborate with? And here I wish to correct a popular misconception. Although I am often referred to as an animator, I am, rather, an animated filmmaker. I do not create the actual animation. People like Tissa David did, and often with an ability to enhance and expand upon the drawings and story lines they were given. She—like the best animators– did not merely “move” drawings.

It turned out that Tissa was reluctant to work on the project. “But why, Tissa?”

“Because I  would want to see how the animation would relate to the sets—I would have to be in England to understand the setup—I would have to . . .” and so the litany of reasons went on and on and on. It was clear that under no conditions would she accept the job.

I would entrust the work with no other animator. Besides, the pay was low, and it would have been something done for the love of the project. Something Maurice could afford, but not me.   At that point in his career his books probably outsold the Bible.  But I had a studio to support. . . weekly payrolls to meet. . . I wasn’t sure that I could afford  to take on the project.

“Maurice,” I called him the next day,” I can’t take on the project, much as I would love to. Really.”

Maurice was upset.  And no wonder. He was counting on my participation. But without Tissa’s animation, I could not—or rather would not—accept the undertaking.

End of chapter. The book was closed. Or so I thought.

A  year later,  my wife and I were having dinner at a restaurant opposite Lincoln Center, when Maurice walked in with a small group.

“Oh, God!” I turned to my wife. “It’s Maurice!”

Maurice spotted me, his eyes widened, and he walked to our table.

“Bob, I’m so glad to see you. I didn’t think you would attend the premiere.”

“Of course,” I stammered.

We exchanged small talk, and Maurice left with his small group for their table.

“Quick.,” I said to my wife. “ Forget the dinner. We have to get tickets. Thank God the Met is just across the street.”

It turned out that tickets at the Metropolitan Opera were not cheap. Several hundred dollars for orchestra seats. But we had no choice. Out went my wallet, and out flew several hundred dollars.

At least the seats were good—near the front center.  Sitting back in our plush red seats, the ceiling lights grew dimmer, and up went the curtain, revealing . . .

“Hey, Moisha,” I turned to my wife in a loud whisper, “What ARE those sets?”

“They look Russian ,” she replied.

And  so they were. We had bought tickets for Boris Goudonov.

Leaving the theatre (after the first act. Who would want to stay longer?), we passed The New York City Opera where posters announced their production of Ravel’s  L’Enfant et les Sortileges, with sets by Maurice Sendak.

Right night. Wrong theatre.

Maurice and I met several years later. I can’t remember the occasion except that it was at my studio,  a wood paneled penthouse on West 47^th Street that once housed the architectural offices of the early 20^th Century architect Bertram Goodhue. Maurice  showed  me a watercolor he had done, and wanted my opinion. “My opinion? Maurice, it’s fabulous.” He hugged me.

I could not believe that hug–  could not believe that he doubted the worth of his watercolor. Years later I read something he had said about his artwork: “A little part of me whispers it’s no good.”  I suppose you can leave the shtetl of Brooklyn  (as Maurice once described his birthplace), but the shtetl  can never wholly leave you.

In June of this year,  I drove into Manhattan from my country home, two hours north of the city.  Maurice had died the previous month.  Friends and colleagues were gathering to bid him a final goodbye.  The venue was The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the auditorium was packed.

Excerpts from film interviews were screened, and speakers talked of the enormous role Maurice had played in their lives

A favorite poem of his was read,  John  Keats’ “Welcome Joy, and Welcome Sorrow,” two emotions the poet and the artist must have deeply and intimately shared. It put me in mind of the Christmas film I had produced based on Maurice’s Christmas card. After it was screened for him, he turned to the composer and said, “Your music is perfect. It is so Schubertian.”

So Schubertian!  How Maurice that was. And how unlike our culture’s general take on classical music where Schubert and Schumann, Mendelsohn and Mozart, blend into a musical stew where flavors are barely distinguishable.

But Maurice’s comment should not have surprised me.  Maurice Sendak was a supreme autodidact, a classic polymath, a person for whom artist, critic, music lover, scenarist, author, and bibliophile were bundled into one splendid, unforgettable and unique package.

Introduction

Ed Piskor is one of the most fascinating young cartoonists in America. Self-taught as a child, Piskor broke into the industry when he was invited by Harvey Pekar to illustrate an American Splendor story. Impressed with the young artist’s chops on that strip, Pekar hand-picked Piskor to collaborate on several graphic novels, including Macedonia and The Beats: A Graphic History. However, although grateful for the opportunity to work with one of the most celebrated writers in comics’ history, Piskor’s fascination with ‘80s popular culture compelled him to branch out on his own and explore the fascinating world of early computer hackers. Initially self-published, Wizzywig was eventually released in 2012 by Top Shelf Comix and the fictionalized historical graphic novel earned a spot on many critics’ year end lists.

But Piskor’s dream project, which he began serializing as a web-comic on the eclectic pop culture site, boing boing, is an exhaustive history of the hip hop music scene. Partially inspired by his work with Pekar and also his own obsessive passion for the subject matter, The Hip Hop Family Tree quickly mushroomed into a monumental project, chronicling, in retro-comic vivacity, all sorts of intriguing minutiae related to the “viral propagation” of the subculture. Meticulously researched, and drawn with a keen eye toward historical accuracy, Piskor’s exploration of hip hop immediately earned him the respect of cartoonists and musicians alike, as well as a book deal with Fantagraphics (due in 2013).

Having watched Piskor develop over the years, since discovering his first self-published mini-comic, Deviant Funnies #1, all the way back in 2004, I was excited to interview him about the trajectory of his career and his plans for the future. We spoke by phone for several hours on November 29, 2012, the same night the world lost the great underground cartoonist, Spain Rodriguez.

Marc Sobel
January 21, 2013

“Drawing and Withdrawing”

MARC SOBEL: To start off, can you give me a quick background on yourself, like where you’re from, your family background and so forth?

ED PISKOR: Sure. I’m the first born of four siblings. The youngest one is eighteen years younger than me. She’s twelve now. We’re from this area of Pittsburgh called Homestead. It’s one of those areas where the only source of economic income for the town was the steel industry and that went away like two years after I was born. So we were pretty poor and there wasn’t much money to do anything but luckily pencils and paper were cheap so I was able to hang out and draw.

Also, I was one of the only white kids in my neighborhood, which was no big deal until I started getting a little bit older, like middle school age, and then it was weird. After one summer, coming back to school, suddenly race was an issue. It was confusing to me because we were all friends the previous year and then when we came back, some epic thing must have happened that I was just completely ignorant of because suddenly race was a factor. So after that I just became withdrawn and hung out by myself and drew.

I was also one of the only kids whose parents were still together, and, as weird as this sounds, that was an embarrassment to me because people would make fun of me. It’s so weird but I was really susceptible to that kind of stuff. Dudes were like ‘aw man, you live like Leave It to Beaver,’ and shit like that. Now it’s completely obvious that dudes were just jealous that I had a mom and dad who got along, but at the time I was just like, ‘oh man.’ I didn’t fantasize about them getting divorced or anything but I was like ‘why can’t I just be like everybody else?’ That sounds so pathetic, though, right?

MARC SOBEL: <laughs> No, it’s interesting.

ED PISKOR: Yeah. I guess that’s really it. Well… I could take it to a dark place. In high school, when I was 15 years old, I got really, really sick. That’s not something I like to get into but it informed where I’m moving in terms of an art career and stuff, because… I got very sick to the point where, in tenth grade I was home-schooled for the last two and a half years of high school. That provided me with copious amounts of time to hang out, draw and read comics.

The way the schooling was structured, two teachers from the school would come once a week each, after school to my house from 3:00 to 5:00pm and that’s all I had to worry about per week. So I only really had four hours of school a week.

MARC SOBEL: Wow!

ED PISKOR: The rest of the time I spent drawing. And because all my friends were in school all day, they had to go to bed early, so I started hanging out with older kids and even people in their twenties. Those guys introduced me to graffiti and things like that. I wasn’t good enough at drawing comics yet back then, but still I had this urge to put work out there and have it seen, so at that time, graffiti was my outlet to express myself publicly. Once I got better, I would stay out all night and do graffiti, then come home, crash, wake up at like 3:00pm, have my teachers come over, do that school shit, and then just do it all over again. This went on for a couple years.

MARC SOBEL: So you were sick for two years?

ED PISKOR: Yeah, but honestly, I was sick for like a year, but the recovery process took forever. What’s weird is that since getting into comics, I’ve met a bunch of guys who had that same problem. It just has to do with being so anal retentive and obsessive. It seems to be a common thing amongst a lot of creative people, which is something that the doctors told me as a kid.

MARC SOBEL: There’s definitely something about creativity and control. Comics gives you almost complete control over the world that you’re creating.

ED PISKOR: Yeah, for sure. And especially as a kid, you have zero power over anything else so you try to control that little world. Plus, you spend a lot of time in your head and it just bleeds over. But, like with everything that I do in general, during school I wanted to be the best student, but my mind isn’t a sponge for information. I know some people who learning comes easy for them, but that’s not me.  I always got great grades, but I had to work my balls off for that. So that shit just caught up to me after a while. After I got sick and I was recovering, I sort of made a change, but it still creeps back now and then and when I find myself getting really obsessive, I have to take a break.

To be honest, when you first called me up, I was going through a big-time depression. It just happens every now and again because I spend so much time drawing and withdrawing. This time it was because the guys at Fantagraphics had just sent me my advance for the book and so now… I’ve never borrowed a dollar from a person in my life so now I feel like I’m in their debt, you know? I feel a big responsibility to make it as good as possible, so I just put this weird pressure on myself. I’ve always done that.

“I Can Do This Stuff…”

MARC SOBEL: Obviously, I’m guessing that you were a huge comics fan growing up?

ED PISKOR: Yeah I was. I was a huge X-Men fan as a kid, but what really opened my eyes was… One day, I think it was on the A&E television channel, that documentary from the ‘80s called Comic Book Confidential.

MARC SOBEL: Sure.

ED PISKOR: That was one of the most important things that ever happened to me, coming across that documentary when I was eight or nine years old. I remember flipping through the channels and seeing Spider-Man on the screen, so it was during the Stan Lee portion of it, and that took me aback because it was like, ‘whoa, Spider-Man’s on TV. Cool. I’m going to check this out.’ Then what follows right after the Marvel Comics stuff is the undergrounds. So they get into Crumb and Harvey Pekar and there was one scene when Crumb was talking about the transformation of Fritz the Cat and he said something like, ‘Fritz the Cat was just this character that I drew in comics as a kid,’ and they showed this image of a comic that was drawn on notebook paper. That was incredibly important to me, because, even at a very young age, I immediately made this connection, like ‘ok, I can do this stuff.’

That documentary includes all of my major influences, both at that time and forward. Everybody in that film is the jumping off point for where I would go in terms of finding other comics. Kurtzman, Eisner, Kirby, Charles Burns, Jaime Hernandez, all those dudes were super important to me.

So I watched that movie on a Friday on regular television and literally the next day I made my mom take me to the library and there was this book, it was the only book on comics in the entire library, called Comix, with an ‘x’ by Les Daniels from the ‘70s.  It was great because I watched that documentary, got schooled a little bit, and then I got that book and almost everybody that was discussed in the movie is talked about in that book. Plus, there were actual, full excerpts of stories by people like Robert Crumb and – rest in peace – Spain Rodriguez.

MARC SOBEL: Yeah!

ED PISKOR: So, I feel extremely lucky because I was exposed to underground comix before I hit the double digits of age.

“We’re Gonna Be Fucking Billionaires”

MARC SOBEL: I know you went to the Kubert School for a year, but are you mostly self-taught?

ED PISKOR: Yeah.

MARC SOBEL: Talk to me about how you learned to draw. You started to touch on it when you mentioned all the free time you had, but can you give me a little more detail?

ED PISKOR: Yeah. I relate hip hop culture a lot with my learning to draw because… There’s this certain mind frame. All through school I was definitely one of the worst people at most things, but with drawing I could at least hold my own. There was no way I was going to be able to beat anybody in any kind of organized sport or anything like that but I was at least a contender in the drawing thing. And the hip hop mind frame helped because people would snap on my work. They’d say something like ‘That sucks, man. I can’t believe you drew that,’ or, ‘do you need glasses?’ Shit like that. We would just bust on each other for being able to draw. So that provided a natural incentive to do better work because I thought, ‘oh man, I have to blow these dudes’ minds next time.’  Of course that never happened. Even when I got to a point where I was reasonably sure that I was better than them, they could still cut me down, which was cool. It was character building.

MARC SOBEL: So you were putting drawings in front of all your friends on a regular basis?

ED PISKOR: Yeah, we all were. When I was in sixth grade, there was this weird period where comics were really popular with everybody. Even a lot of the jocks were into them. This was after the “Death of Superman” and the first coming of Image Comics.

Everyone was buying these things, even football players, but most people were never looking at them.  A lot of dudes would have Comic Buyer’s Guides, the new ones, or their Wizard Magazines in class all the time and they would be calculating their wealth. <laughter> It was like, ‘oh man, I’m worth $15,000 this month.’ So the cool people were into this shit for a brief time and it was really a cool thing to do.

And a lot of people were drawing too. Recently I sent a bunch of my friends this clipping from an old Entertainment Weekly from around that time where, there was this guy named Chap Yaep, who drew Team Youngblood.

MARC SOBEL: I remember that guy.

ED PISKOR: Yeah. He was 19, so he was only a couple years older than us, and the article was like, ‘Cartoonist rookie stands a chance at making $250,000 this year.’ <laughter> That’s fucking crazy, man, but we were all like ‘yo, we’re gonna be fucking billionaires drawing this stuff.’ So me and all these dudes, we were submitting work to the Extreme Studios talent search to try to get an opportunity to draw Brigade comics, or Bloodstrike, or whatever.

MARC SOBEL: Wow.

ED PISKOR: It was pretty cool. So a bunch of us were always drawing and we would show each other stuff, but… We were encouraging in as much as we’d bust on each other. Like, ‘dude, you suck, man. It looks like you drew an arm where his leg’s supposed to be.’ <laughter> Then another dude would be like, ‘Ah, you’re a fucking dick,’ and then everybody’d just keep drawing. But eventually those dudes discovered chicks or something like that whereas I was just stubborn enough to keep going. I think I recognized that with each little piece I was drawing, my stuff was getting a little better. So that was incentive enough to keep going.

Another big school of cartooning for me as a kid was I would copy full comic pages off of existing books. So for a period of a few years there… and I still have some of this stuff… I was drawing whole pages from Spawn comics and Youngblood, or Rob Liefeld’s X-Force. Then my tastes gradually got more sophisticated and it got to the point where I was drawing pages from Dark Knight Returns and John Romita, Jr. Daredevil comics, and then it was EC Comics. Finally it was like, ‘ok, time to start drawing my own stuff.’

There was also an art school in town for kids.  It was just one of these extracurricular things where every four quarters you could sign up to take a cartooning class. So I participated in those and I absolutely adored those classes because it was a little bit healthier of an environment in terms of learning. It wasn’t just about making fun of each other.

The best part was that eventually they put together these comic book production classes at that school. So what we would do is for eight weeks, we would work on a four or five page strip and then, at the end of the course, the teacher would go and print them up into this little anthology book.  I mean, this thing was bound and saddle-stitched and it was a real comic. Everybody would get 10 copies of the book and that really started my addiction with the print medium. There were 10 or 15 people in this class so that meant there were 150 copies of my story out there. I think I did like five issues of that stuff, and it was just so great because I could pour all of my creative energy into that for those eight weeks and then I’d have a real comic book. It felt magical, like I stacked up against anybody else, even though it’s so apparent when you look through those things, that I’m literally the only person that took that stuff seriously at all. Every other kid was just there to be babysat. Like, it would give their parents three hours with the kid out of their hair. <laughter> I’m still friends with that teacher to this day and he was like, ‘dude, I always knew that you were going to end up drawing comics.’

“My Version of Art School”

MARC SOBEL: So was Deviant Funnies #1 your first real mini-comic?

ED PISKOR: Yeah, and the material that’s in that mini, those are the same strips I sent Harvey Pekar that put me on his radar. He gave me a call after checking out some of that stuff, although I actually hooked up with him before I printed that book up.

What I would do is draw a four or five page strip and submit that to Fantagraphics and Top Shelf with a proposal for what I would want my Eightball-analogue comic to be. My idea was to do a personal anthology, but all those stories were pretty crappy. My proposals had such naiveté attached to them, but, to an extent, I feel like that was an important component to getting published, at least for a guy like me where everything’s pretty gradual. I’m not James Stokoe, or whoever, with all this great natural ability. I have to really break my balls

So, I put myself out there and I think that was an important part of being able to get started. Nowadays, I could never see myself sending stuff to a cartoonist who I love, like ‘oh man, it would be great to work with you, Harvey Pekar.’ That’s a crazy thought to me now.

MARC SOBEL: You had that one-page strip in Deviant Funnies about Harvey calling you up, but can you elaborate about how you guys first started working together. You started out doing American Splendor strips, right?

ED PISKOR: Sure, yeah. So, like I said, I would send stuff to Fantagraphics, Top Shelf, Alternative Comics, all those places but I always would get rejected. So it was like, ‘what am I going to do? I’m just going to do these strips only to get rejected by these five people?’ That seemed kind of whack, so I started sending stuff to cartoonists that I dug. Basically I would do a strip and send it out to maybe 50 or 60 guys. So I found Harvey’s address on… I had lots of old American Splendor comics, but there was one recent one that I had and on the cover it had a photograph of his face. And it was mocked up to look like Time, or some other subscription-based magazine, where they laser print your address on the cover whenever they ship it. So it had an address and I was like ‘I’m going to send my strips to this address and just see if it gets rejected, or if it’s even a real address.’  I didn’t hear anything, but since the packages never came back, I just assumed they got to the guy.

So, the American Splendor flick comes out (in September 2003) and I dragged a bunch of friends to go check it out and just a few weeks later, Harvey Pekar calls the house. That was what that strip’s about. I just couldn’t believe it. It seemed insane. So he’s like, ‘yeah, I dig your stuff.’ Also, I think there was a part of me being from a sister city to Cleveland that was interesting to him. The fact that I was young also helped because he felt weird asking a lot of the old-timers to work for $100 per page. That’s not a lot of money.

So from when I first spoke with Harvey, it was about one year later before we actually started working together. It was this crazy waiting game. I would be in touch with him fairly regularly, maybe every couple of months or so. I would call to check in and see if it was still real. Like, ‘Hey, Harv, do you still remember me?’ He’d be like, ‘yeah, yeah, yeah, what are you talking about? Yeah, I remember you, man.’ He was like, ‘I’m still working on this thing, and as soon as it’s ready to go I’ll get these strips to you.’

So it was this long build-up and then I did a four-page strip for American Splendor: Our Movie Year. And that was it. I was like, ‘ok, well, I did that. Cool.’ And that was going to be it until the book was wrapping up. Apparently he was contractually obligated to make it a certain number of pages and they were like 25 pages shy. So, it’s like a week before my birthday and Harv calls me up and he’s like, ‘hey, do you want to do a bunch of pages in a really short amount of time?’ I’m like, ‘alright, yeah. Sure, man.’ He needed this 24 or 25 page story in like that many days, maybe even fewer, like 20 days. So I’m like, ‘OK. Cool,’ and I put my birthday on hiatus. I was just like, ‘I’ll celebrate after I’m finished with the strip.’

That turned out to be a real cartooning boot camp for me because of the tight deadline. I really didn’t want to disappoint him, so I worked my ass off to get the work done. But after some time, it became apparent that he was testing me a little bit. I mean, I’m sure we did have a tight deadline, but right after delivering, he was like, ‘Ok, man. Do you want to work on this 150 page book with me?’ Obviously I was delighted.

MARC SOBEL: This was Macedonia?

ED PISKOR: Right. And when he called it “Macedonia,” I was like, ‘this is fucking awesome. Harvey is turning a new leaf. We’re going to do a comic about Alexander of Macedon, and shit like that. We’re going to do a story about this guy taking over the world.’ I was already thinking about referencing Pythagoras and Diogenes and all these old philosophers. But then he was like ‘no man, it’s about the geopolitical de-stabilization of the Balkan region through the story of this young college girl.’ <laughter> I was just like, ‘Fuck! …Alright I’ll do it.’ <laughter> But then I got the script and I’m like, ‘holy shit!’ He had told me that it was derivative of this girl’s thesis and I’m like, ‘yeah, it reads like a fucking thesis, man.’ <laughter>

MARC SOBEL: There’s very little visual narrative there. Was it tough to work on a story like that?

ED PISKOR: It was SO tough, and I absolutely wasn’t ready. I wasn’t good enough to translate that in any way. Also, it should have been maybe a 300 page comic, so there are pages that have maybe fifteen panels on them, and each one is just loaded down with copious amounts of dialogue. It’s like an EC Comics amount of dialogue hanging above all the characters’ heads.

That is the reason I describe Wizzywig as ‘my first book.’ All the Harvey Pekar stuff really was my version of art school. I’m embarrassed by those books because they’re some of Harvey’s last work and I didn’t show up properly. I’m not saying that I hacked that stuff out. I did my absolute best for my skill level at the time, but my skill level was just not there, you know? It just absolutely was not there and the result is that that’s some of Harvey’s last work and it’s seen through the lens of a fucking 23-year-old jerk-off.

MARC SOBEL: What would you do differently with those books if given the opportunity now?

ED PISKOR: Well, it’s been a while since I really looked at that stuff, but I would definitely try to just gussy it up with some visuals. I would try to give it room to breathe, and the overall aesthetic of the art would obviously be way better. But, to be honest, Macedonia was a hard book. I still really have never read it. I sort of read it as I went along. I read it initially in script form and was just like, ‘Fuck!’ I can’t say no, but I don’t think I’m the guy for this job.’ But I just had to do it. I wanted to draw comics so bad. I don’t know. It was so long ago. It honestly caused me a lot of pain because we don’t have Harvey around anymore and I look at some of that work I did with him as a blemish on his career. I was just so inexperienced and stupid.

MARC SOBEL: What about The Beats? How do you feel about that work? It looks to me like your art came a long way in terms of improving and tightening and developing into the style you’re working in now from where you were on Macedonia. Would you agree with that?

ED PISKOR: I would, but I still hate that artwork a lot, too. It definitely got better from Macedonia but it’s still pretty hard for me to look at. I can see all this Dan Clowes wannabe stuff, and I was using rulers on every line so it looks kind of dead or maybe constipated or something like that. That shit is tough for me to talk about. I don’t know what I was trying to do.

MARC SOBEL: Beyond just checking in periodically, did you have much of a personal relationship with Harvey? Did you guys ever meet in person or anything like that?

ED PISKOR: Yeah. In that first year waiting period, I travelled out to Cleveland and we hung out. And then he was a guest of honor at SPX one year, so we hung out there, and we gave a talk at a few colleges, too. So maybe like five times we hung out physically, but for two and a half years, I spoke to him almost every day on the phone. And that was really cool. That guy was really, really funny.

MARC SOBEL: Yeah?

ED PISKOR: Oh yeah. Every now and again, you would catch him when he was in the doldrums or whatever, but I never once got that sense of… You know how people use that word ‘curmudgeon’ whenever you bring up Harvey? I really think that’s the power of television because that’s the character he portrayed on Letterman, and therefore that’s what people remember, but he absolutely was not that guy. He was super magnanimous and cool. I never once got that ‘bah humbug’ vibe from him. If anything, there would be times when he was just kind of sad or something, but never a big grump.

Alan Shenker, New York, December 1972. Photograph by Patrick Rosenkranz.

Alan Shenker gave up a good job at the Post Office to join the underground press in the late 1960s. When he quit his steady civil service position as a letter carrier he knew he had to make his new career work. He learned the craft of cartooning on the job, by hook and by crook, like many of his contemporaries. He had no formal art training but before he knew it, he was art directing several publications.

“Everyone got experience with underground papers, which was great,” he said. You didn’t have to be professional. You were able to learn the trade as you did it.”

He produced illustrations and comics for the East Village Other, Gothic Blimp Works, The Rat, Kiss, and the New York Ace. He also produced pages for several underground comix, including Douglas Comix, Illuminations, Insect Fear, and the paperback collection Swift Premium Comics.

It was a free for all subterranean publishing heyday during the 1960s and 1970s but like all good things the counterculture press eventually met the end of the era around the same time the Vietnam War was done. Yossarian also blamed the demise of the East Village Other on mismanagement.

“It just kept getting worse and worse. It went from weekly to whenever. It lost typesetting. It just got to the point where the staff walked out and started their own paper and that folded EVO. There were always shit heads running EVO. It was always mishandled.”

However, the sexually oriented tabloids that debuted about the same time survived and even thrived through the next decades, and Yossarian found work as an art director at Screw magazine. That’s where he met his long time friend Maryann, who got a job at Screw as a receptionist when she was a 19-year-old punk rocker.

He remained a well-known character in the Lower East Side, said Maryann, and he easily crossed the generation line. “He stayed in contact with a lot of old friends and made many new friends with the younger people who moved in.” He managed to accumulate vast collections of pop culture items over the years, including signed baseballs and icons from the 1940s. “He was a wonderful man who was a good friend to me. He will sorely be missed. He was probably the most decent person I have ever met.”

The characters he developed in his strips included The Funny Nazis, Nancy Kotex, and Miracle Milton, among others. His subject matter was rude and crude, and often done in deploringly bad taste, which made it a perfect fit for the taboo-busting underground press. Yossarian had a fetish for bald women and self published several issues of The Razor’s Edge, which featured women shaving their heads. He was seldom satisfied with the quality of his work, and he didn’t draw much after the underground went under.

Simon Deitch wearing Yossarian designed t-shirt for Cartoon Workers of America at Berkeley Con 1973. Photograph by Patrick Rosenkranz.

He was visiting his friend Spain Rodriguez in California when the Cartoon Workers of America was formed and he drew a logo for the group showing America being stabbed in the heartland. He said he enjoyed the camaraderie of the comix boom in San Francisco, but preferred New York, where he lived in the same rent controlled apartment in the Lower East Side until his death.

Vinal Solution: Jam with Spain and Kim Deitch.

His friends described his lifestyle as a “flaneur” or a “downtown habitué.” “He did what all New Yorkers do,” said Maryann. “He complained about everything. He sat around drinking coffee at cafes. He talked to everyone. He was totally righteous and he never sold out.”

His old friend Rex Weiner, who co-founded the New York Ace with “Honest Bob” Singer, relates an anecdote about his old friend in an obituary in The Paris Review. He describes how the East Village Other was on its last legs in 1972 and the Ace was the new kid in town. Yossarian drew a cover for the new paper showing a meat cleaver chopping an eyeball in half.

“With this cover he’d created especially for us, Yossarian was declaring his allegiance to the ACE, betraying EVO, to which he’d contributed many cover illustrations, and its paternal leader,” said Weiner in the obit. “EVO’s logo was the all-seeing eye, and for our cover Yossarian had placed an eyeball on a chopping block split by a butcher knife, as if to say, “EVO … You’re DEAD!”

Yossarian was sweet and shy, said Weiner and as a good Jewish boy, he was conflicted about his art. “He had a fetish for bald women you know, but he was out front about it. There was a nice militancy about his cartoon work. He believed that cartoonists should be organized and independent and he was proud of being part of that underground movement.”

Weiner last saw his old friend in spring 2012 when The New York Times and NYU hosted an event at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, called “Blowing Minds: The East Village Other, the Rise of Underground Comix and the Alternative Press, 1965-1972.” For several weeks, a series of articles by former staffers chronicled the deep background of the infamous underground newspaper. It had been years since he had seen many of his former comrades from that tumultuous time, and it was great to see them all again, he said, including Yo.

I met Yossarian in December 1972 when we arranged to do an interview at his downtown apartment. He used the pen name Yossarian for several reasons, he told me. “Basically my parents didn’t want me to use the family name. Plus if you choose a name, you have a lot more leeway. People start to accept you the way you want to be, rather than some name that your parents chose twenty years earlier and forced on you. Plus it’s nice to be semi-anonymous. I can go into a certain situation as Shenker and get better feedback on my work, because they don’t know I was the one who had done the work.

He gave me all nine issues of the New York Ace as well as a file folder full of clippings that Tuli Kupferberg, one of the founders of folk/rock/satire band The Fugs had left behind and didn’t want anymore. There were tear sheets from many underground papers outside of New York as well, including obscure ones like The Great Speckled Bird from Atlanta, the Austin Rag, Detroit’s Fifth Estate, and the New Left News. I still have them.

I got to his place in the afternoon but it was dark by the time we finished talking. I was apprehensive about walking back to the subway station by myself with a bag full of camera gear so he generously offered to escort me. The streets looked scary to me but he was comfortable in his surroundings. We stopped by the Peace Eye Bookstore to take a few photographs. That was the last time I saw him.

On the Facebook page recently opened for Alan Shenker his sister Diane posted this suggestion:

“Those of you who need to do something in honor of his memory will probably come up with an appropriate idea on your own, but if you need one—think trees. He loved them and the creatures living in them. So plant a tree (he especially loved the underrated Rose of Sharon) or contact the Arbor Day people.”

Diane Shenker

Luddite sister

Ironically, his most recent published work, which he actually drew forty years ago, appeared in the resurrected anthology Someday Funnies, called “An Affair of the Heart.”

“Under Cover!” Shock SuspenStories #6 (Dec. 1952–Jan. 1953) Story by Al Feldstein, art by Wallace Wood.

Dan asked me to respond to Chris Mautner’s “skeptical take” on EC. I’m not sure how much I have to say specifically about Chris’s review of the first two books in our new EC series (Corpse On The Imjin And Other Stories by Kurtzman and Came The Dawn And Other Stories by Wallace Wood), but let me start with a couple of general observations about EC and its place in comics history.

Let me take a minute to set the stage. It was 1950. 1947, if you want to get technical about it, when Bill Gaines inherited Educational Comics from his father, Max Gaines — who, it’s been said, more or less invented the comic book format. Gaines neither knew nor cared about comics and took over the company unenthusiastically at the request of his mother. In 1950, he changed the company’s editorial direction, transformed it into a series of genre titles — war, science fiction, crime, horror — and recruited several new artists while retaining a few of the better ones who were already working for the company — Graham Ingels, Johnny Craig, Al Feldstein, Wally Wood. He had no grand ambitions beyond keeping the company alive. But, somehow, he got caught up in it, transformed into a discriminating enthusiast, and quickly became, for a few short years, the best comics publisher in the history of commercial comics.

Keep in mind that in 1950, the comic book was a mass entertainment targeted at adolescents, teenagers, and lowest-common-denominator adults, and stigmatized as sub-literate, which it mostly was, even before the Senate Subcommittee hearings in 1954 institutionalized the medium’s demonization.

News flash: The prospect at that time of a comic book publisher achieving high art was precisely zero. Today, there is barely a sustainable market for art- or literary-comics; in 1950, there was no market whatsoever because no one — the buying public, the publishers, the artists themselves — had even considered the idea; it was literally unthinkable. Conceptually, comic books that embodied literary values simply didn’t exist except perhaps as a private, inchoate, ontological construct on the part of a handful of practitioners. There was no artistic community to speak of; there was barely a professional community because comics was barely a profession. There was no critical establishment to argue the artistic merits of comics because adults weren’t interested enough to even read about comics (comics weren’t even movies!). There was no educated public who bought them. On the rare occasions comics were mentioned in newspapers or magazines, they were denounced as crap, which they mostly were, or vilified as socially and culturally harmful, or viewed as a bizarre and aberrant sociological phenomenon.

Neither Gaines nor Feldstein were literary mavens or theorists, they did not see comics as high art, and they were not evangelical about the artistic potential of the form. As Feldstein cheerfully admitted to John Benson, “These stories that Bill and I wrote were commercial ventures to produce a magazine that would entertain and SELL.” (Emphasis Feldstein’s.) But, they were smart, open-minded, and hip to pop culture, had a contrarian streak, and a better intuitive grasp of aesthetics than anyone else in their respective positions at other comics publishers.

They had unerringly good, if somewhat circumscribed, taste, and hired the best artists they could afford, two of whom, at least, were also restless and ambitious innovators (Kurtzman and Krigstein), and to whom they were willing to give far more creative latitude than any other publisher at the time. The artists they published were superb draftsmen, sophisticated stylists, and, in varying degrees, deeply committed to their craft and art. Gaines (and Feldstein) never aspired to create literary comics; they simply wanted to create better comics than anyone else at the time, and this drive combined with good judgment and a little luck propelled them to create some of the best commercial comics published in the first 50 or 60 years of the medium.

Gaines’s EC had an integrity lacking in every other publisher. By integrity, I mean that Gaines himself cared enough about the quality of his books to participate directly in their creative execution and took pride in the final result (most publishers couldn’t have cared less). He and editor Feldstein would spend four days out of five in story conferences hashing out the plot details for their books, based on premises and plots Gaines would bring into the office on those mornings. No other publisher was this personally involved or invested in his books.

In the impoverished cultural context of comics publishing at the time, the EC line was an astonishing achievement; Gaines’s EC came as close as a mainstream comics publisher could to being the comics equivalent of Barney Rossett’s Grove Press. What other comics publisher would even think of adapting stories from the Saturday Evening Post, use stories by Guy de Maupassant, or steal from the best — Ray Bradbury?

While I’m extolling EC’s virtues, let me enumerate a couple more before I get into the thornier questions of where EC resides in the history of comics and how to even make sense of that question.

I mentioned that Gaines and Feldstein had excellent taste when it came to choosing artists, but that’s an understatement.

First, with the exception of Orlando (who was obviously overly influenced by Wood) every one of the artists was a unique stylist, very much his own man. Gaines and Feldstein never asked their artists to imitate other artists (unlike so many publishers’ edicts to that effect) and encouraged them to establish their own distinctive visual “voice.” And within what was often a highly regimented and unified editorial vision, the artists they chose ran a spectrum — from “auteurs” like Kurtzman and Johnny Craig — who write and drew their own work and were quintessential cartoonists with a degree of abstraction and exaggeration as an integral part of their work — to the more illustrative or representational artists like Crandall, Williamson, and Evans, who, though coming from a different tradition, were still superb storytellers.

Then, you had chameleons who could be both illustrative and cartoony as the story warranted — Severin, Wood, Elder, and Davis. (Did you notice that the regulars in Kurtzman’s war books and the standard against which he measured all other artists who tried out for him, were equally good at dramatic and comedic work? I wonder if it was the absence of this humanizing quality that turned Kurtzman off to otherwise fine craftsman like Alex Toth, Gene Colan, and Russ Heath.)

Stylistically, Ingels and Kamen fit somewhere in between and were as instantly recognizable as the rest. Bringing up the rear, you had Krigstein, perhaps the most ambitious of the artists, who genuinely wanted to propel comics into literary territory (even more so than Kurtzman).

Next, portraying drama in comics form had never been one of the form’s fortes. In fact, it had almost never been done successfully. The best newspaper strips over the first half of the century — Moon Mullins, Happy Hooligan, the Katzenjammer Kids, Mutt and Jeff, Barney Google, Popeye, the Gumps, Skippy, Mickey Mouse, et al. — always couched their drama in comedic terms (usually a mélange of slapstick, vaudeville, and gags) that also, miraculously, reflected a dimension of (usually) lower or middle-class life as most urban Americans experienced it. Slapstick + kitchen-sink drama. There were only three significant exceptions that I can think of — Little Orphan Annie, Dick Tracy, and Gasoline Alley, two of which were couched in adventure terms, and all of which had humorous elements to leaven the drama or make it palatable to what the newspaper editors or artists thought was their audience.

There was certainly drama of a sort in strips like Krazy Kat and Little Nemo, but it was the graphic element of the strips that propelled them into the first rank. There was melodrama in such strips as Rex Morgan, Mary Perkins, and Mark Trail (and probably others I don’t care to think about), but these were hokey, dull, tepid soap operas. There were adventure strips — Flash Gordon, Captain Easy, Prince Valiant, Terry and the Pirates — but these, too, were not first and foremost drama (with the possible exception of Valiant) so much as melodrama within adventure, sci-fi, or fantasy trappings where the latter were just as important as the former.

But EC attempted to do straight drama in comics form, undiluted by comedy or slapstick or adventure trappings. True, most of EC’s dramatic stories were bound within genres — crime and suspense and science fiction — but they played it as straight as they could within those — and their readership’s — limitations. The preachies were the most naturalistic, many unrelentingly grim and tough-minded, such as “…So Shall Ye Reap” and “In Gratitude.”

“My World” is in Weird Science #22 (Nov.-Dec. 1953) and was written by Al Feldstein and drawn by Wallace Wood.

And what other publisher would have conceived of “My World”? — a touching and uncondescending paean to childhood enthusiasms as well as an expression of love for the intimacy of the medium itself. These were the earliest glimmerings that comics were capable of expressing a level of dramatic seriousness or reflection — even though it wasn’t until the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s that such ambitions truly paid off (e.g., many of the underground cartoonists, such as Justin Green, and later, Harvey Pekar, et al.)

The stories — or the writing — weren’t as consistent as the drawing, ranging from the pure gross-out pop of the horror comics to the Bradbury adaptations or the Kurtzman war comics and Mad. Somewhere in between, in my view, were the Johnny Craig-authored (and often drawn) crime comics and Feldstein’s vast output. EC’s limitations here are all too obvious: the stories (especially Feldstein’s) were often burdened by formula and cliché, the writing prolix, overwrought, and fatuously earnest.

But the level of craft often heightens the experience; the Craig work particularly is formally inventive and often clever. But the writing, which was at least intelligently conceived, was helped immeasurably by some of the best cartoonists of their generations. It was Krigstein who said, “You simply cannot underestimate the effect of an artist on a drawn story. You simply cannot underestimate that.”

The stories occasionally rose to the level of a decent noir movie — never at the level of, say, Night and the City, but closer to a programmer or B-movie such as Somewhere in the Night; Bill Mason likened one of Wood’s short stories in Came The Dawn And Other Stories to Storm Warning, a 1951 “preachy” starring Ronald Reagan and Ginger Rogers (and an almost unrecognizable Doris Day), which I thought was on target. Many of EC’s suspense stories were roughly coterminous with an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents or one of TV’s 1950s dramatic anthologies like Four Star Playhouse (aired the same time as EC was publishing) — not literary by any means, but not too shabby, either.

The question of how artistic values apply to comics was rarely ventilated by its practitioners in the first 50 years of the comic book and for good reason: the entire context of the comic book was devoid of self-understanding or self-reflection. The wider culture never took comics even as seriously as it took its movies, never demonstrated any appreciation for it, never rewarded achievement in any way — because the wider culture never saw an achievement there worth rewarding or cheering, and mostly for good reason.

The artists toiling in comics who cared about such matters were few and far between and usually at the level of craft, not art. The few artists who did have a sophisticated grasp of the concept, or the integrity to implement their beliefs, toiled in obscurity (such as Barks or Stanley) or were marginalized (like Kurtzman and Krigstein). There was no place for them. (The cultural context of newspaper strips was entirely different, but the cartoonists in that area still thought of themselves as something less than artists — as newspapermen, cranking out dandy entertainments to build readership — of which Caniff was probably the nonpareil practitioner and proponent. Although George Herriman thrived in this context, thanks to the patronage of Hearst, the absence of a genuine aesthetic context had its drawbacks — just as our more self-conscious age of artistes has its own set of drawbacks.)

You may have noticed that I’ve used the term “literary” pretty casually here, and I’ve noticed that it’s used at least as casually in reviews or even as short-hand, as in “lit comics,” to differentiate them from commercial or mass market comics. But can the term in fact be properly and accurately applied to comics? I often wrestle with how artistic standards ought to be applied to comics, and I’ve always concluded that the artistic values of comics are intrinsically literary. To me, there’s no getting around it; comics is no less a literary form than prose simply because images are an essential component of the former. What constitutes “literary” values won’t be disposed of in this paragraph, but maybe we can agree that form and content have to be successfully married to create something of human relevance, depth, and substance, or otherwise offer the play of pure aesthetic pleasure. Comics, after all, share many of the same or equivalent qualities that we associate with literature — narrative technique, narrative structure, fictional representation, verisimilitude, expressionism, tone, texture, authorial voice, etc. The key is to understand that the visual element is every bit as much a part of its literary expression as the words (and often more so) and that the medium has to use its own unique properties to embody what we may loosely refer to as literary values.

As an aside, it’s worth pointing out that looking for literary values in comic books from their inception in the ’30s through at least the ’70s and ’80s is a pretty fruitless task. This leads us straight into the territory of Manny Farber’s elephant art vs. termite art, but, put succinctly, there are a lot of fascinatingly recondite or rarefied or compartmentalized aesthetic virtues to be found in commercial comic books, none of which should be dismissed out of hand, but in terms of fully realized literary works — or oeuvres — very few.

I should mention here the obvious, which is that there is no consensus as to what exactly constitutes literary values. My dear friend, Don Phelps, who is on the side of termite art, has argued persuasively that strips like Little Orphan Annie, Dick Tracy, and Popeye are examples of literary visual art.

“The Flying Machine” is from Weird Science-Fantasy #23 (March 1954) Story by Ray Bradbury, adaptation by Al Feldstein; art by Bernard Krigstein, recolored by Marie Severin.

At this point, the next most salient question to pose is: Were EC Comics “good” only relative to the miserable or nonexistent standards of their competition, or were they good by any more objective standards? A mixture of both, I think, but most importantly for the purposes of this discussion, there were individual stories within the EC books that represent genuine artistic or literary achievement. Among them, for example, would be “Master Race,” “The Flying Machine,” and several of Kurtzman’s war stories — “Corpse on the Imjin,” “The Big If,” and a handful of others. In terms of the dramatic use of comics, these are as good as the medium had offered up to at least this point and probably for many years thereafter, only exceeded in artistry by a handful of poetic-graphic masterpieces, most prominently Krazy Kat and Little Nemo.

“Air Burst!” is from Frontline Combat #4 (Jan. – Feb. 1952) Story and art by Harvey Kurtzman.

I suppose the most efficient way to point out some of EC’s merits is by taking issue with some of Chris’s judgments in his critique. He admits that “the most well-known stories still hold up” (I would say they do quite a bit more than “hold up”), and praises, slightly, the stories “Air Burst!,” (I assume this is what he meant when he referred to “Air Raid”), “Kill!,” and “Big ‘If’!,” rightly so, but then proceeds to fault several other stories written and drawn by Kurtzman, beginning with “Contact!,” dismissed as “a simplistic, jingoistic ‘us vs. them’ tale that naïvely suggests America will win the Korean War because ‘we believe in good.’”

“Contact!” is from Frontline Combat #2 (September 1951) Story and art by Harvey Kurtzman.

Though it is marred by that sentiment on the last page (which Kurtzman himself lamented in the accompanying interview we published and called “dreadful”), the rest of the story is neither naïve nor jingoistic, and this criticism strikes me as emblematically glib and short sighted, almost willfully blind to its virtues. One of the characters, Durkee, is indeed jingoistic, referring to the North Koreans as ‘gooks,’ which is challenged by another soldier who fires back, “Always using that dumb word ‘gook’! You make it sound like you’re a big-shot American superman! You’re no superman! You’re just a big bag of …”

Pages three and four, in an eight-panel sequence, is a masterful depiction of violence, culminating in Durkee repeatedly stabbing an already-dead North Korean soldier in a psychotic rage (“That’s right … Durkee! Knife him, Superman! Knife him after I’ve killed him, big shot!”). This is the exact opposite of the comic-booky violence prevalent through its history; it’s viscerally repellant and retains its force today. (One can see how Kurtzman’s depiction of violence here inspired Jack Jackson’s aesthetic disposition toward his depiction of American history.) The tension here is as much between the American soldiers as it is between the U.S. and North Korean forces. After retreating in the face of heavy casualties and a superior force, the remaining troops call in artillery and air support, with one page devoted to the North Koreans being pulverized. One of Kurtzman’s goals was to show the savagery of war for what it was. (Contrary to what Chris writes, Kurtzman was not a pacifist and was not anti-war, per se.) One of the themes Kurtzman would return to over and over again was how mechanization amplified the horrors of war; he here depicts death being inflicted remotely, by tanks and aircraft.

“Rubble!” is from Two-Fisted Tales #24 (Nov.– Dec. 1951) Story and art by Harvey Kurtzman.

Chris peremptorily waves off two more stories: “But even stories that appear to emphasize Kurtzman’s anti-war leanings, like ‘Rubble!’ or ‘Dying City!’ (done with Alex Toth) paint [the] Communist side in such simplistic, negative terms (leaving the Americans to always come off as [the] sympathetic guys who fight because they have to, gosh darn it, not cause they want to) that it’s hard to feel as thought there isn’t more than a little flag-waving going on in the background.”

I see no flag-waving in either story. Quite the opposite: both sides are implicated in the two stories. In “Rubble!” the Chun family builds a home — meticulously shown over three pages of seven panels each — which is destroyed by “a single artillery blast” in one panel. When the U.N. (i.e., the U.S.) rolls in looking for a good position for a gun emplacement, they dispassionately bulldoze the remains of the house (and the family, earlier shown killed beneath the debris!) and put up their 155 mm cannon so that they can pummel the enemy — showing how war reduces both sides’ actions to sheer utility, and thereby diminishes their humanity. The last panel shows that the gun has been moved again, presumably to a more strategic location; the fate of the Chun family is a matter of complete indifference to both sides.

“Dying City!” is from Two-Fisted Tales #22 (July – Aug. 1951) Story by Harvey Kurtzman, art by Alex Toth.

In “Dying City,” collateral damage is again the subject: A young patriotic North Korean zealot leaves his family in Suwon and eagerly goes to war — a sickeningly familiar scenario in every country that goes to war. When he returns, he finds that his father was “accidentally” killed by his own side, and he himself is subsequently blinded by a bomb dropped from an American plane. In the last panel, “American tanks roll into the blackened ruins of Suwon! Once more, the city has changed hands! The black smoke from burning oil of blasted war machines rolls over the sky, and amidst the rubble, an old man mumbles to a North Korean soldier whose body grows cold and begins to stiffen with rigor mortis!” Whose flag is being waved here?

Both stories can be faulted artistically (I could certainly do without all those exclamation points!). I see them more as being compressed than simplistic, and they could perhaps be more profitably interpreted as fables than as naturalistic war stories. But, in these two stories — “Rubble!” and “Dying City!” — Kurtzman demonstrates an admirable empathy toward both sides of the conflict, and in seven short pages tells eloquent and humane stories remarkably — though perhaps not entirely — free of ideological bias.

To bring us back to the original question of where EC resides in the history of comics: As I said, EC’s flaws are pretty obvious: Even when the artists were striving for greater seriousness than the ironic gore of the horror stories or the outrageous early sci-fi plots or even the clever but predictable crime and suspense stories, the writing was often overwrought, prolix, and ham-fisted, and the artists were straightjacketed by EC’s rigid visual grid (which Kurtzman and Craig avoided by writing their own stories, and Krigstein rebelled against time and time again).

They were Entertaining Comics first and foremost, but they also seemed compelled to break out of their commercial formulas, however finely realized, and publish stories that were fiercely honest, politically adversarial, visually masterful, and occasionally formally innovative. But, taken as a whole, the company’s output was a mixed bag. I don’t think that there’s any question that the language of the medium has grown and matured since the time of EC Comics, and that in the hands of comparable craftsman today, comics have become more eloquent and nuanced than Bill Gaines, Al Feldstein, and the artists who worked with them could imagine — or perhaps as eloquent and nuanced as they could imagine, which would’ve been no small feat in 1950.

At CCS, Forsman met a Belgian cartoonist named Max de Radigues, who was at the school as a fellow. He and de Radigues worked on a beautiful broadsheet anthology comic called Caboose that served as a love letter to the Vermont school’s town of White River Junction. De Radigues, like Forsman, liked writing about teenagers and the ways in which they engaged life’s dramas, using his loose, scratchy line to do short minicomics series like L’Age Dur and Moose. That eight-page format influenced Forsman to do something similar with his own series, The End Of The Fucking World (TEOTFW). Soon, Forsman offered to distribute Moose in the US through the shop on his web page, along with a similarly-formatted series, Melissa Mendes’ Lou.

Lou is another series about children, this time chronicling quotidian moments from a family of five. As the series progressed, violence enters into the story in an unexpected way, giving this series a very different feel from Mendes’ past work. From there, Forsman decided to approach others about publishing in this format. The titles he’s published fall roughly into three categories. The first are comics by fellow CCS alums, which include Dumpling King (a promisingly sprawling murder-mystery with psychosexual undertones by Alex Kim), Gagger (a Dane Martin comic that shows off his singular, scratchy line and dark, almost desperate sense of humor), and Word & Voice (a mostly mute comic by Aaron Cockle that deals with the aftermath of some kind of apocalyptic event). The second category includes established artists who wanted to do something in the Oily format, like Elizabeth of Canada (a new Michael DeForge series that seems to be historical fiction) and Flayed Corpse (a brisk but typically unsettling comic by Josh Simmons. Finally, Oily is acting as an incubator for new and emerging talent in comics like My Sincerest Apologies (a gag-filled zine with drawings by former Drawn & Quarterly employee Jessica Campbell), Real Rap (a hilarious comic about a loser who imagines himself a rapper by Benjamin Urkowitz), Close Your Eyes When You Let Go (James Hindle’s story about a father dealing with fears surrounding his child), and Background (a story by Andy Burkholder that employs jagged lines and oblique storytelling techniques surrounding a judgment).

In this interview, I wanted to focus on the day-to-day work of running a micropublishing company, the financial realities therein and his own impressions of the comics he’s publishing. Forsman was kind enough to share a lot of details regarding the financial details of Oily Comics in an open and forthright manner, for which I thank him.

Background

Rob Clough: What year were you born, and where did you grow up? Was this a rural, urban or suburban area?

Chuck Forsman: I was born in 1982 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The youngest of three boys, I lived in and around a small town west of Harrisburg called Mechanicsburg. We lived in an old Victorian house in town until I was 6. Then we moved out into the suburbs, surrounded by farms and growing developments.

Did you grow up reading comics? What sort of comics did you read?

I did. Up until around age 9, I think, it was the newspaper comics. My favorites were Peanuts and Blondie. I did read Garfield, but in my small brain that was my older brother’s comic strip. Does that makes sense? Garfield was his thing. I think it’s interesting that I read Blondie. But I remember it always being the very first comic on the top of the Sunday page. Maybe because it was first, I considered it to be important information. I had a few comics books that my mother probably bought me, but somewhere around 1991 is when that same older brother started getting into Marvel comics and the early Image stuff. Well, I latched onto that. He quickly lost interest, but I basically inherited his collection and kept it going. I guess my main comic was X-Men. I remember very early on that I learned the artists and how they drew. I could tell them apart. A few years later, Sam Kieth’s The Maxx came out and I just loved that thing. It never really made sense, but I loved how strangely Kieth drew, especially next to everything else on the shelf. That is probably the book that veered me away from superheroes, and I eventually found Hate and a friend let me borrow some Eightball issues.

Did you grow up drawing? Were you encouraged in this pursuit? Did you draw with friends or family members?

Yeah, my mom wasn’t a working artist, but she could draw, so she was quite encouraging. And again, my older brother was a good artist and was drawing his own superhero characters and Spider-Man. I soon got sucked into that. We had a copy of [How To] Draw Comics the Marvel Way in the house that I would just read over and over again. I drew with my brother at times, but it was more on a competitive vein than for fun. I just wanted to draw better than he did. I had one friend my age that liked to draw super heroes, but again I feel like we rarely drew in the same room. Unless it was at school in art class. That is definitely something that I pretty recently learned about myself. I really don’t like drawing around other people. I mean, it happens on occasion but I just don’t enjoy it.

What led you to CCS, and what was the experience like for you overall?

I stopped drawing regularly after high school and didn’t really take it seriously for probably 5 or 6 years later. I was just moving around, working a bunch of different jobs, playing music, not really figuring anything out. I was living in Los Angeles with my brother around 2004. I didn’t have a lot of friends at the time, and I was in this giant city. Eventually, I wandered into a comic shop and fell back in love with it pretty quickly. I then decided that I needed to go to school. I had dropped out of high school for a few reasons, but I had reached a place where I wanted to learn and I was open to being taught … something that I hadn’t felt since I was a kid. So I moved back home to Pennsylvania and enrolled in Harrisburg Area Community College. And to my surprise, I loved it. I was really eager to learn at the time. Around this time I learned about CCS starting up, probably from Scott McCloud’s blog. I loved the idea behind it, and it seemed like a good fit for me. I eventually applied and was accepted into the second class at the school. It was pretty shocking to me that I got in. My application comic for CCS was the first comic I think I had ever completed. I was not the most experienced cartoonist to enter this school. I had a long road in front of me. But that is what CCS can do well. I was able to fit in a ton of work and experience into two years there that would have taken me a long time to do on my own. I had a really great time there. It felt almost like a slingshot for me. For years I was doing nothing, but once I got into that school I felt like someone had given me permission to take comics seriously.

Did the job of librarian at the Schulz Library have an impact on you as a cartoonist?

I think working at the library certainly helped broaden my scope of comics. That place is a treasure and is filled with a little bit of everything. I think the two areas that I remember diving into the most were the old newspaper strips section and the zine garden started by Robyn Chapman. Oh, and all the Comics Journals they had there. I still wish I lived near there just so I could read more of those. I think just being at that school as a whole had a big impact on my cartooning.

What effect did winning two Ignatz awards early in your career have on you? Did it give you more confidence?

I am very grateful to have won those awards, but it certainly was a double-edged sword. Winning an award after only making comics for two years was very validating. I’m sure it did give me confidence for a bit. But I am also naturally imbued with a healthy amount of self-doubt. I definitely felt like I did not deserve them, and it sort of became this thing I had to live up to. I had  some weird periods after that summer where it wasn’t so easy to make comics, because I was thinking so much about made-up expectations.

The Business Model

Let’s talk about your earliest encounters with comics and finance. I know that at CCS, you are always encouraged to publish your work as much as possible, even if it means self-publishing. The earliest active merchandise page I know of from CCS is the now-defunct I Know Joe Kimpel website, and I recall a few of your comics being on there. Was that already in place when you arrived at CCS?

I don’t think I ever actually had anything on I Know Joe Kimpel, except for the first Sundays anthology. The very first comic I made at CCS as a finished book with a screenprinted cover, I took down to SPX ‘06 and sold exactly one copy and gave a ton away. I wish I could find all of those and burn them now. But yeah, selling one book was a sobering lesson in comics finance. I knew that this was not going to be easy.

You’ve always seemed to have the publisher/editor itch. You founded Sundays Press with Sean Ford, Joe Lambert and Alex Kim and very quickly became a visible presence at conventions with these well-designed and edited books. What was the experience of that like? How much of your business came from website orders, and how much was dependent on conventions?

Sundays was a pretty special thing to me. Anthologies are great things for young cartoonists, because it’s a bunch of you building this bigger thing that you are maybe not yet capable of building by yourself yet. Sundays started with the guys you mentioned plus Bryan Stone and Jeff Lok, who eventually left after the second issue to start Funny Aminals. Anyway, we were all in the same class and I think it was Sean who got us all together. At first, I think we just wanted to work together outside of class, sort of as an extended critiquing group. I think we came together because we all had a similar drive and taste. Out of that came the first Sundays book, [of] which we made an initial run of 150 if I remember and brought them down to MOCCA Festival in 2007 and sold them all. That was the exact opposite experience from the one I had at SPX just months before. At that time, the majority of our sales came from conventions. I think I may have built a simple webstore online and IKJK was selling them but to my memory conventions were the thing we focused on.

How much did the ultra-simple formula of producing a 12-page mini serve as a reaction to the experience of publishing increasingly complex and formally intense anthologies like Sundays or even the huge roster that a broadsheet comic like Caboose had?

I think you are right on the money with this one. When I started out, I definitely had it in my head that I needed to make these fancy productions to get readers interested. Which certainly does work and I enjoyed doing that, but I think I slowly began to lose interest in that idea. The other thing that spurred it on was when Max de Radigués gave me his first issue of Moose during the summer of 2011. That comic symbolized a freedom from expectation and the labor-intensive pages of a book I was working at the time called Celebrated Summer. I was doing these big pages with lots of cross-hatching and up to 12 panels per page that took a lot of focus. I wanted to do something that was fun and fast, and because I know it would be cheaply printed and sold for a dollar, that took away much of the expectation that I tend to put on myself.

It seems like the genesis of Oily Comics was fairly organic. Did it start off from simply having a place to sell the comics of you and your girlfriend Melissa Mendes?

I had been selling my own comics and Melissa’s work online for a few years. The idea of Oily came about after I started doing TEOTFW. I started doing them on a monthly schedule and I asked Melissa if she wanted to do something in the same format. She started Lou and then I asked Max de Radigues if I could print Moose to sell in North America. Suddenly, I had three comics that were coming out pretty regularly and so Oily just came from that.

At what point did things tip and did you decide to reach out to others to do Oily comics?

I think once there were three books, I realized that I could handle the production and I really loved doing it, and that is when I sort of jumped into [doing more Oily Comics]. It felt like a lot of baby steps and still does. I think the next person I asked was Jessica Campbell. I knew how funny she is and I had had this idea of doing a humor magazine that I wanted her to be a part of. That project never came to fruition but I immediately thought of her when I decided to start expanding Oily.

What considerations did you have in mind when asking the artists? Are there people who have turned you down?

I sort of look at Oily as a whole. Almost like I am editing an ongoing anthology. All of the people I have invited are cartoonists I like. That is the simplest answer I can give you. I can’t think of anyone turning down the invitation. I think I have gotten a lot more maybes and eventuallys than flat out nos.

(continued)

Ron Rege Jr.’s workspace, Los Angeles. Photo by Jay Babcock.

Ron Rege Jr. was born in 1969 and grew up in Plymouth, Rhode Island. He broke into comics at age 5, and has been bending them to his will ever since in an unending flow of radiant pen-and-ink. Lifted out of ‘90s Boston DIY mini-comics legend/obscurity and into actual published book world by the championship of sainted Tom Devlin (first thru Devlin’s Highwater imprint, which published Rege’s bizarro fable Skibber Bee-Bye in 2000, then via Devlin employer Drawn & Quarterly, which published 2006’s The Awake Field and the 2008 Against Pain collection), Rege has spent the last few years doing random jobs of commercial artwork, playing drums in the on-again, off-again cosmic-peace folk-rock band Lavender Diamond and, most important for our purposes here, immersing himself in the world of Western mysticism—Esoteric thought—New Age stuff. Usually that way madness, delusion and life-damage lies. And indeed, a casual paging through The Cartoon Utopia, Rege’s just-published 148-page hardcover survey of dozens of major occult thought-streams in words-and-pictures form, shows not just a radical transformation—heightening?—in Rege style, but also a degree of… Yikes! Has Ron gone crazy? The trademark Rege cuteness is still there in the human figures, but there’s no narrative, no word balloons. Instead: cascading masses of block text drawn in 3-D profile, cross-sections of micro and macro-cosmos, action squiggles and diamond zaps, chromosomes and galaxies and plant leafs and on and on—a spookily obsessive, vibrating crunchola that recalls Egyptian and Mayan hieroglyphics, ‘70s Jack Kirby at his trippiest, Howard Finster’s folk-Christian exhortations, and, of course, every genius featured in the landmark 1986 LACMA show catalog, The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890-1985. If that sounds like too much—it is! Rege himself advises that The Cartoon Utopia should not be read all at once, or even in any particular sequence, which begs the question: how did he survive making this beautiful, deeply weird thing in the first place? To find out, I left my Joshua Tree desert home in late October and ventured back into Los Angeles, where I’d first met Ron in Fall 2003. Over cups of hot green tea in his cozy Echo Park apartment, we circled the atom heart of the matter. Here’s some excerpts from our conversation.

Jay Babcock: When did you come in contact with Maja D’oust, whose lectures on occult subjects form the basis for the book?

Ron Rege Jr.: She knew Sammy Harkham years ago. I think I may have met her for the first time from him, or just from around, from cartoon people in L.A. I vaguely knew that she worked at the Philosophical Research Society but I didn’t know what it was. I knew she had done these shamanism lectures and I was like ‘I gotta go I gotta go’ and I didn’t go.Then she was doing a series called Alchemy and Relationships,’ which I decided to attend. I walked into this place and I was like I don’t know what this scene is gonna be and I look around and half the people there are in bands that I already knew in L.A. All of these people are here listening to this friend of mine?!?

JB: When was this?

RR: This was around Christmas 2008: Lavender Diamond stopped playing, me and Becky [Stark, Lavender Diamond’s singer] had broken up. I went to see my family, came back to L.A., saying what the fuck am I doing here? Who do I even know in LA anymore? No one. Who are my friends? What the hell. And went to Maja’s lecture.

JB: Ah…

RR: So, after one of her lectures we hung out for a few minutes, and she was like, ‘Do you wanna go see [Philosophical Research Society founder and scholar/author] Manly P. Hall’s library?’ And I went in there and I said something about one of my books, and she was like, ‘Yeah I’m a big fan of Skibber-Bee-Bye. You made this great abstract graphic novel about the shaman’s journey.’ I had no idea what she was talking about. I was like, What do you mean? I look at it now and it’s like, yeah, that is what it is. I had no idea. I always had this kind of philosophical yearning in what I was doing…but I also don’t feel like I invented what these characters are and what they do [in Skibber-Bee-Bye]. I feel like it was kind of dictated to me. In a way. NOT in a direct way like I went into a trance and channeled it. It wasn’t like that. But, I think that’s kind of what it was.

JB: What did you think you were doing when you were making it?

RR: At the time, I didn’t really know. I wrote it all before I drew it. I really think of it as being channeled, in my way of understanding things now. I didn’t make any ‘decisions.’ I see a lot of cartoonists making works now and they’re trying to make a movie, make some plot structure that makes sense. I’ve never had any interest in that. I wouldn’t change what I’ve written. It just came to me and I wrote it all down. I wrote it in script form, like ‘she does this, and then this, he looks at this,’ and actually…

JB: This took about…

RR: About five years.

JB: When did The Cartoon Utopia start to take shape? I remember you were doing residencies around that time…

RR: I did a week residency in Vancouver Island. And a residency in Montreal, in 2008. The trip to Montreal was when I started doing the stuff that led into what this is. I was frustrated with comics. Didn’t know what I wanted to do anymore. Didn’t want to draw regular comic strips. Didn’t have any ideas for characters, stories… Oh, I’m DONE. I’m not going to draw comics anymore. I’m done with comic strips, I’m done with narrative. Maybe I’ll start doing fine art — so I started doing all these big drawings. I had taken the Process Media biography of Manly Hall with me on the trip and was reading it on the trip. WHAT?!? Finally understanding him and what all this stuff was and was kind of using that inspiration to make these big pictures, all the ones that are in the beginning [of The Cartoon Utopia - pages 8, 9 etc]. I did these in Montreal. Talking about serendipitous stuff: I was getting this idea of, ‘What is alchemy?’ That’s part of the biggest shift in my consciousness, going from one kind of way of thinking about stuff to another. From, ‘Oh alchemy is this stupid shit from the past that was about turning lead to gold. It’s this backwards stuff from before science’ to  ‘Well, oh no it isn’t, it’s to do with a lot more than that. It’s the basis of everything, that informs everything.’ It seems like a pretty simple thing to understand but it’s a big jump for people to think of it in one way or the other.

Serendipitous things happened in Montreal. I was walking down the street and I saw this little paperback lying in the middle of the sidewalk that said ‘Alchemy!’ on the cover—really dry, all physical alchemy, but there it was. And I was actually thinking about [alchemy] at the time!  The book was all dogeared and taped together like it’d been read 10,000 times. And this was in a desolate, warehouse-y part of Montreal. I was like Okay, this doesn’t belong here, I’m not taking this from anyone, it’s lying on the sidewalk, it’s gonna get blown into the gutter in half an hour or rained on or something, so I picked it up.

JB: Whoa…

RR: But really, The Cartoon Utopia, in the way that it’s done, is an extension of one story that I did called “We Must Know/We Will Know” that I did for the Drawn & Quarterly anthology. It’s pretty much an adaptation of a book I read all about math called Fermat’s Enigma. I read the book and  highlighted parts that I thought were interesting. It’s ten pages of short individual pieces that  all fit together as a whole. And the way that I did this, of taking something that was academic, or, you know, even though it’s a ‘popular science’ book but it’s somewhat academic, and turning it into a comic strip, is what [Cartoon Utopia] is. I started going to Maja’s lectures and I started reading 10,000 esoteric books, highlighting them the entire time, and wove it together. So, this is an extension of this approach to cartooning…which, I didn’t realize it, but Sammy Harkham wrote this piece recently saying that this is actually a pretty standard way of doing comics now: doing a whole bunch of stories that equal up into a story. And I did it first…?

JB: Well, you did it there, at least.

RR: Sammy says that I invented it. [laughs incredulously] And he wrote a little article about it. I feel weird saying it but when I did this, I didn’t really think a lot about what I was doing, but I definitely didn’t get the idea of doing this from anyone else. And I had never seen anyone else do it.

So I guess I was the first one to do it? Which seems weird now, cuz there’s a lot of people who do stuff that way. And I don’t think that Clowes was thinking about what I did when he did… It’s just having the same idea at the same time, of a way of approaching comics.

But yeah, that story is how I ended up, it’s like that desire, ended up [being] how I did this thing.

I’m curious what the comics world is going to say about this book, how this is ‘comics’ at all. I did this on purpose. Because I love comics. The nerdy discussion of comics that has gone on for the last decade has always been something that’s been super-important for me. And I DEFINITELY did this on purpose, as far as that regard goes. I KNOW that there’s no word balloons, and there’s no characters, and… Part of doing this, besides just being inherent for me, was just being about pushing the medium as far as I’d already pushed it, pushing it even further, and making it specifically my own. Not like I had to fight it, it was a natural progression, but it was definitely on purpose. How can I take this form and make it my own voice, truly and honestly, in the way that I want to do it, in a way that’s exciting to me, that’s really far away from the traditional narrative sense of the medium. But it’s still words and pictures together.

I’d like the book to be viewed as a kind of textbook, that’s it’s not meant to be read and absorbed all in one sitting. People should use bibilomancy—randomly opening to a page—to access the information if they’d like. Nothing in the book tells you to treat it that way, but I think people will get the idea anyway.

JB: I have a very specific memory of being at your and Becky’s place and seeing your sketchbook and saying Ron, you need to pursue this visual style on a bigger scale, it’s really great. And you said Oh that’s just what I do when I’m not really working. I remember saying, Maybe you should try doing that when you’re really working! I don’t remember what you said.

RR: [laughing] I was probably dismissive!

JB: I think you were probably already headed in that direction. That, to me, watching you kinda shift, bringing that aesthetic into your to-be-published work, is the real breakthrough in this book…

RR: Which is true.

JB: That seemed to happen around…

RR: 2008.

JB: Remember when you did the ArthurBall poster artwork? In 2006. I hadn’t seen you do that for published work before… I’m not saying that was the first time you did that, I’m not sure.

RR: But it was, really! It’s here. [Point at endpapers for Against Pain] This is… To me, it looks kind of amateurish. I would be like, Yeah this is just junk, this is just me goofin’ around, trying to do fine art or something like that. This, to me, looks like really undeveloped versions of everything that’s in here. Like, I hadn’t quite figure out where the squiggles go yet. I was just starting.

JB: In 2008…

RR: I felt that I had exhausted comics. I just started doing… I ruled out these square panels, and I just had a pile of them. I just started doodling on them. It was just a way of producing a lot of work and I thought I could sell them. Ad I must’ve because I don’t have any of them anymore. I sold some at the Hope Gallery show. And basically started doing it, doing the whole Cartoon Utopia idea, because I started putting words into them. Slogans. Under the Becky influence, and Lavender Diamond. At the height of that. And just, all of these things at the end of the book: Utopia! I talk about, We can have Utopia now! They must learn the ways of Peace! I just started making panel after panel.

JJ: For the “Peace Comics” strip we ran in Arthur by you and Becky, you were using your old style but you were using these ideas…utopian ideas.

RR: The Cartoon Utopia. I don’t know when I came up with that word, but it’s a good catchphrase for everything.

JB: You had a real clear idea for this book. I remember you saying you always saw it as a book.

RR: I went directly from those panels that are at the back of the book, that are like these abstract things, and then I started doing these all in the front… [pages 15, 16, 17] The first five pages are from the first two lectures of Maja’s that I went to. I was just doing it panel by panel. And then as I started reading the books and highlighting, doing it panel by panel, I was like, THIS is what I want to do with comics! Alright, I’m FINALLY interested in comics again! It’s words and pictures, there’s no characters, there’s no storyline, but I felt like there’s this information that I’m SUPER excited to present with words and pictures put together. I don’t know if it’s comics, or what it is, but I’m just gonna do it. And I was fascinated, to this day, of doing it that way. Instead of doing it panel by panel, yeah, I slowly started breaking it up into page-size stories and then had them all laid out.

JB: There’s an awful lot of stylized text. When you look at the book, do you see lettering or art?

RR: I see them being pretty inseparable. What do you mean?

JB: You spend so much time and space on lettering per page! The amount of text design per square inch…

RR: Yeah that’s true.

JB: You hand-draw each letter. And they’re not letters —they’re outlines of letters, so there’s even more work.

RR: Yeah exactly. I actually did them really quickly. It is a ton of lettering. I don’t think this book can be published in another language. I was about halfway through and I was, What a fuck-up! Cuz nobody can re-letter this in another language [laughs]. If they want to re-letter this in another language, I don’t know how they’re gonna make it fit. Cuz there’s no extra space… I feel like if somebody wanted to re-letter it, I just could never look at it, because it would make me insane, cuz it wouldn’t fit.

JB: What was your process for this book?

RR: I did the lettering first. I would grid out the pages, and I would put the lettering in and then I didn’t know what the images were. The entire book was done, the panels with the words in it, without having the slightest idea. [looking at pages 81-83] Oh look, I did this one at your house! Like this one, for instance, I would’ve brought this to Joshua Tree, had no clue what was to be drawn in here. And that’s what, like every week, I’d be like I have to do these four pages this week, what the hell is gonna go…? Having not read the material in a long time, cuz it was all done out a year in advance, I would just look at it and then I would slowly…  I knew what it would say. But how to visually represent this? I didn’t know beforehand. I just knew the information that I wanted to relay, and I had to figure it out, and in that way I ended up doing things where this is actually the same character and he goes through to page 82, 83… There are characters that come through that were just invented for a short space.

JB: The Fantagraphics promotional text for this book does make a small attempt to say that there is some kind of narrative to this. “Beings from the future” etc.

RR: [laughing] That’s based on this page only! It’s a little bit of a ploy, and I think it’s a great ploy, to get people who like comics to pick this up. I don’t think I’m really going to be fooling anybody, but what the hell! I did want to do a graphic novel, a cartoon utopia, with beings from the future living… I was going to have them all living on a mountaintop, and maybe I’ll still do it, I kind of doubt it, where they’re living in a mountaintop but then there’s a post-apocalyptic Idiocracyland happening down below. There’d be all these higher consciousness people above… but I don’t think I’ll really do that, because now I view that kind of… I don’t know what the word would be…

JB: Elitist?

RR: [laughing] Yeah exactly. Elitism in looking at humanity, which is prevalent in so much of this material.

JB: A lot of the book is exclamations, affirmations…

RR: Yeah, exclamations and affirmations, intensely, one after another. For 150 pages. It’s kind of hard to take, I would think. [laughs]

JB: And then exhortations, like “We must… / We need to…”

RR: Yeah it’s kind of rallying up the troops or something like that. A pep rally. Whether I personally feel that way doesn’t really matter. [laughs] Anyone who knows me personally will know that on some days, I feel that way.

JB: It’s also just simply a survey of what you’ve been reading, without judgement.

RR: Lavender Diamond and this book have the same view of creating artwork. Really intense, positive reinforcement of a positive message. Being unrelenting in that aspect of it. In reaction to all culture that I’ve been exposed to my entire life. To just try and make something different. And the negativity of that just becomes so inherent that I don’t see anything being produced in any medium that isn’t so inherently negative—there doesn’t even seem to be like any alternative to that anywhere that I look around and see.

JB: You started into this vein with Becky, Jim Drain, Peter Glanz, Pshaw, that whole gang… That whole enthusiasm, brightness, positivity, humor, playing with the idea of corniness… seemed to me to hark back to what the Pee-Wee Herman TV show was doing.

RR: Definitely, yeah. I look back to it being tongue-in-cheek but also being sincere. Are you REALLY being sincere? The most important thing to me is trickery, in all aspects of art. The opposite of being confessional or autobiographical is to present this stuff in a way that almost makes people question your sincerity. Because it’s so intense. Which to me is a little bit of a trick, y’know?

JB: Just because it puts them into a space of…?

RR: Yeah. Opens them up and puts them into a state of like…wonderment. Of confusion.

JB: Which you think is inherently helpful…?

RR: Yeah, I think the best art slash entertainment is meant to dazzle you and spellbind you into being in that state. It’s really supposed to spellbind you and hypnotize you into being in a certain space to be taken into a fantasy.

JB: That would be the work of a trickster, or shaman, in some sense.

RR: Yeah, definitely. But I feel like I came into it without even knowing that’s where I was going! [laughs]

JB: Do you feel like you’re a solo practitioner of it, or do you feel like you’re part of a fraternity?

RR: NOW I feel like I’m part of a fraternity. But yeah, I felt like I was a solo practitioner for most of my life [laughs] and then I met Becky and I felt like she was the only other person I’d ever met who was into that. It doesn’t seem as weird, anymore. All of a sudden, just in the last few years, I feel like there’s a lot of things that are happening that have this similar message. So it makes me really happy to have this book come out right now, where I don’t feel alone at all anymore — I feel like there is a vast network of people that are approaching creativity in the same way.

JB: In LA, that would be people like…

RR: Gosh, it’s hard to even say, specifically. People like Mira [Bilotte, of White Magic]. Alia [Penner, artist]. Guy [Blakesleee, of The Entrance Band]. I’m just naming all the people that go to Maja’s lectures with me! [laughs] But then I feel like there’s a lot of musicians who I don’t even know whose stuff, like Cameron Sun Araw, he’s someone who, when I met him, and just talked to him for five minutes, I realized, Okay you have the same basis to what you’re doing, and you’re putting pyramids in there and stuff, it’s not just fashion, why you’re putting that content into your work. This isn’t a fashion—using occult symbols in what you’re doing.

JB: This stuff has been in comics forever, and in a lot of major work in the last 20 years. I know I can say but Ron, you were never alone, not even in comics! There was Jodorowsky and Moebius’s Incal series. Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles. Alan Moore and JH Williams’  Promethea. But you never read any of that stuff.

RR: No, not really. I would’ve been out of superheroes by then and it’s hard for me to LOOK at that stuff now. And I LOVE everything that those guys do, without necessarily being that familiar with their work. Every video I see of Alan Moore speaking is an enormous inspiration to me.

JB: You don’t judge the stuff you cover in this book.

RR: A lot of people of my age, or a lot of people in general, dismissed this stuff a long time ago. I for some reason just hadn’t come across it until I was however many years old. [laughs]

JB: You never say like, You know what? I’m not really down with this guy, or so-and-so makes a mistake here. Or, this isn’t very useful. Or, we now know this is caused by… There’s no critical analysis. You just kind of present the stuff. You remain in a state of not taking a side…

RR: Yeah. That ties into the idea of seeing alchemy for what it really is. Because if I’m going to talk about the fact … what the fuck was wrong with Tesla? I read the biography of Wilhelm Reich, and oh, this whole idea of tying the orgasm to the aether is amazing, but it sounds like he was an alcoholic that beat the shit out of every woman in his life. Those are the stories that are used to dismiss the work that all of these people did.

JB: That’s true, but there’s also stuff where it’s just like, dude, that’s a nice theory but it’s wrong—that’s not an aura, that’s just your eyes getting crossed.

RR: Yeah, I wasn’t interested in that. I was more interested in the magical, inspirational part of it that’s positive.

JB:  Almost all of the book is borrowed wisdom.

RR: Almost all of it, yeah.

JB: It’s not experience of Ron Rege.

RR: There’s some very small parts that are mixed in.

JB: Why isn’t there more experience of Ron Rege?

RR: Because in the process of making this I was just so overwhelmed with all these other ideas that were brand new to me. I just felt like I wanted to tell everyone.

JB: “Hey, this exists. There might be something here for you that will send you in a positive direction.”

RR: Yeah, pretty much.

JB: What happens now? You’ve surveyed all these things. What conclusions have you drawn?

RR: I thought when I was doing this that I would be doing these kinds of comics forever, because the more I would get into stuff, the more there was that I wanted to do. There is more of what I’ve experienced that I want to put into them, but I had to cut if off to make it a book. Cuz this could have been a three or four hundred page book and would’ve taken another ten years doing this. But I knew, I gotta cut this off.

JB: Where do you see your personal spiritual practice going, outside of art?

RR: I don’t know right now. I’m at a point of mystery with it, at this exact moment.

JB: But you don’t find yourself drawn to a certain school, or lineage? Or… ‘you know what, I think it’s really the Alchemists for me.’

RR: No, I don’t.

JB: Like, ‘Now I really want to head to the east…’ Or, I want to go deep on this one.

RR: No, I don’t think there’s any one in particular that I want to delve more into. I wanna keep being open to all of the different aspects. I didn’t attach to any one. I’m not like gonna get into Zen now, or any particular one. From what I know, there’s probably even more obscure aspects that I’d like to look into, but I still am very generally fascinated by the wide gamut of everything. And I want to keep that enthusiasm. To me, it’s important to not pick one little thing. If anything, it’s about the unity of everything and everyone into one thing. It’s weird to me to go and talk to somebody who’s into one thing and doesn’t know about another thing. To be like this weird little section. Which seems weird because it’s all so interconnected.

JB: What about going beyond belief and speculation? What about practice?

RR: That’s something that I definitely struggle with. I don’t have a very great practice of anything. My practice has come through my personality and the way that I approach other people, and deal with other people, and then issues with my life. I’m very interested in my dream practice right now: the differentiation between waking life and sleeping life.

JB: You have a strip in there about the Tibetan dream yogas.

RR: Yeah. But… I definitely am going through a period of really ultra fascination with everything. Life seems like — and I don’t know if it’s the life that I’ve created for myself, or if it’s just experiences that I have — I’m just fascinated all the time. The lights look brighter. The colors on the trees look more green. The things that people say seem way more significant. The vibes that I’m getting from people…the give-and-take, the push-and-pull with other human beings. And then I’m just amused and fascinated by they way that people act. Usually if I go out in a social situation, at one point during the night I’ll be just like, ‘Humans are ridiculous creatures! Just ridiculous!’ And I’ll think about all the interplay in social structures, different people I know — just what we’re eating and drinking, and the way that we’re… I feel like I’m a squirrel [watching the humans]… Suddenly I have this weird awareness of how utterly ridiculously fascinating everything that we’ve created is.

JB: Like a continuing elevated consciousness?

RR: Yeah, I definitely feel like I have a richer consciousness, but as far as practice goes… I don’t have very good meditation yoga, or even diet, or those kinds of things. That’s probably an aspect where like maybe it would be good if I picked some specific practice to follow because I’m all out there with all of it.

JB: The other thing a shaman — not necessarily the trickster — does, traditionally, is heal…

RR: [pauses] I think that we’re all trying to help. I’m hoping to help awaken people through doing this [book]. I think that Lavender Diamond is the same way. I feel like most of the people that I know that create art are pushing their stuff in the direction to awaken people to what they might recognize in themselves.

JB: You’ve made a tremendous sacrifice to do this work. It’s not like it’s lucrative.

RR: That’s true.

JB: These last few years haven’t been easy for you, I know. Anyone who’s followed you knows that you didn’t have a book contract. Last year, you directly asked for patrons on your website and through Facebook, which worked to a degree…

RR: It’s funny, it’s such a story of how comics get made. Cartoonists talk about it a lot, but [usually not in public]… I definitely sacrificed a lot to do EXACTLY what I wanted, to do this. And then, to have it rejected [by the first publisher I approached]. Everyone at Fantagraphics has understood it and has been really supportive of me doing exactly what I wanted to do. They gave me a blank check to do exactly what I wanted because obviously I had a mission, I wasn’t just fucking around, and based on my previous work. They just let me do whatever I wanted. Cuz it was all gonna come down on me.

This material, and working on this book, yeah, it’s definitely been a difficult time in my life for sure. On a personal level, financial level — midlife crisis, ground zero, starting over. This book definitely comes from a time in my life of upheaval. Everyone probably experiences it in different ways, it’s pretty common. It’s not ‘I got divorced and lost my job!’, but [laughing] you might as well just think of it that way. Yeah, “I turned 40 and had zero dollars in the bank, a bunch of debt, got divorced and lost my job!” I didn’t [literally], but it was totally like that. Yeah, I completely lost, and then…made this. And if I didn’t have this, God only knows what would have happened to me.

JB: Well I’ve seen how focused you’ve been on doing this for these last few years, in spite of other difficulties. You’ve kept it very together. And I think that’s important to note, because I think when people look at this book, after they see the beauty of it, they also go… [whispering] “Has Ron gone crazy?” This looks like the work of a crazy person or a person who’s suddenly started taking very heavy psychedelics.

RR: I was really worried about that—

JB: But you are not a crazy person, you’re very focused—

RR: And I’ve never taken psychedelics. [laughs]

JB: How is it possible you’ve never taken heavy psychedelics?

RR: I don’t know. [laughs] Cuz I had too much work to do? Yeah, I also look at it like this was my self-therapy. My “escape,” my “shelter,” my “running away from my problems,” my “not paying my bills, not answering the phone,” was the fact I was doing this. My self-therapy was creating this work. And it could’ve just easily been playing video games and getting high or something like that. For some really great reason, my therapy — my way of getting through it—was creating this work. I feel super-blessed and lucky to have that avenue, to have the insight [to do that]. I could have made a bunch of shitty work that was completely disjointed or didn’t have any value to it or something [but I didn’t].

JB: I still feel like you’ve hedged your bets a little on this book.

RR: [laughs]

JB: Because so much of it is others’ words, and ideas!

RR: Mmm hmm…

JB: Which is totally fine, and totally good, and a totally worthy book… but what will happen when you take that approach of … when you push the medium…  I think you’re going to need to put yourself out there a little further in order to reach the next level of what you’re capable of. I really see this as a transitional work! An EXCITING transition. I see so much formal experimentation, so much clear enthusiasm and excitement, on every page. It’s so obvious that this is a work of real devotion. Those are levels rarely seen. But: you haven’t done, except in a few pages, the William Blake saying — “If a man doesn’t make his own system, he’s a slave to someone else’s.” Or the Howard Finster, or any number of people who have…

RR: Yeah, that’s true.

JB: I think that’s what a lot of us want to see…next!

RR: That’s why the next thing I have in line is more in this direction [points at new work, set for publication in Abraxas]…. but maybe I won’t end up doing it.

JB: Sun Ra is in the new book. Now that’s not one of the things you were introduced to by Maja…

RR: Sun Ra is not new at all to me. I’ve known about Sun Ra for 25 years! I liked his music from the musical aspect, I liked his performance from the wackiness of it. I liked him the way I Iiked whatever weird shit that I’m into — Butthole Surfers, etc.—Sun Ra is one of those things. ‘He’s a crazy black guy that thinks he’s from space!’ And yeah, I read his biography. But now when I go and look what he was talking about… Am I the one who’s crazy now because whatever speech Sun Ra is making is 100 percent what I want! And I hear EXACTLY  what he’s saying and it doesn’t sound crazy to me at all. It sounds like the rest of the world is crazy. For 20 years, I was like, he’s just talking some crazy-ass space shit, whatever…

JB: Did you always conceive of this stuff in black and white, or color? Do you wish some of it was in color?

RR: No. I’ve always been a black and white cartoonist. The graphic aspect is so hard that even adding grey to it, it’s such another…universe. I’d like to maybe integrate color into my work and not use the computer. Because coloring on the screen with the computer, I can do it, but I’m not super-inspired. The idea of taking all of this work and coloring it on the screen, just would’ve deadened it. If I could integrate a little bit of color into my work in real life, maybe I would…

JB: You told me earlier this year that the Mayan artwork you saw at the LACMA ‘Children of the Plumed Serpent Show,’ you saw a similarity to your sutf…

RR: I’ve always known about that. At some point in art school [I recognized it]. But I never felt like that stuff influenced me. I was like, Yeah my stuff looks like Mayan art. It’s always been there. I’ve looked at codexes before and been like, WHOA, this looks like a language written in my style.

JB: I also see a lot of cosmic Kirby stuff in your comics — the abstract Kirby with the energy lines —

RR: Another guy I was never particularly into! [laughs] Even though everyone says that. I don’t know what it is. I never disliked Kirby, I always thought his stuff looked really cool. I’ve looked at his stuff but I’ve never thought of it as an enormous influence.  I guess I only read the superhero comics that were coming out in the years that I read them. So I read John Byrne. I read Alpha Flight and The X-Men because that’s what was coming out between ‘85 and ‘87.

I’m not always interested in the stuff that’s really close to what I do. I don’t know if that’s common or not. It’s funny, I don’t know… Maybe this is the way of all artists?  When I was growing up on Cape Cod, you could go and see Edward Gorey, he lived in a big Victorian house and we all knew where it was. If you were a teenage punk boy, he would really want you to come in the house and watch Baywatch with him. He was really into Baywatch!

JB: So what are you working on right now?

RR: I’ve been doing band stuff. I’m figuring out what I’m going to do next. I have an idea of what my next book is going to be but I’m not ready to start working on it yet.

What I’ve been super into lately is Jodorowsky’s Psychomagic. A year ago, I would’ve been like, Stop the presses! I gotta put in 20 pages about psychomagic! In this goddamn book. I want everybody to know about Psychomagic! Got super into the ideas and the practice of that, even separate from his Tarot stuff, anything else that he does. And the performance art tricksterish part of it. The book is made up of two interviews, where he contradicts himself continuously. You’re saying very adamantly the complete opposite of what you’re saying here that’s earlier in this book from ten years ago. Watching videos of the guy online, he’s always so excited. It’s just all a joke! And then him finally saying, yeah who cares if Carlos Casteneda is a big joke, and Don Juan didn’t exist? It’s nice, because I’ve heard people be inspired by it, and then deflate it, for like 20 years, and to have him suddenly be like, That’s not the point. Which is a little bit the way I’ve been approaching a lot of this stuff.

JB: One more thing that people might not know: how big an influence Yoko Ono is on you.

RR: The influence on me.

JB: I think it really comes through in the exhortations in the book.

RR: Oh, that’s cool! I’m glad that you see that.

JB: And she comes out of Fluxus, which you were into…

RR: Yeah, and why can’t anyone understand that? [Yoko’s art] is not crazy. Why is it such a big mystery…? I understand the whole shadow, her being presented as the whole Yoko/Beatles thing and that being reflected on her, if it didn’t have anything to do with that, there wouldn’t be this mainstream view… Seems like she’s been pretty clear and concise and direct with her message for her entire career.

JB: Which has always been one of…

RR: Positivity! Peaceful loving message without any irony or sarcasm to it— which blows people’s minds…still!

JB: You adore her. I have a great CD compilation of her music that you made for me. I think you were giving that to a lot of people.

RR: The pop mix. Trying to make a concise pop record out of all the gems that are buried.

JB: Another thing about your work: you’re so into women! [laughter] You had women teachers, gowing up—Catholic nuns. And then: Yoko Ono, Becky, Maja….

RR: [laughs] Witches!

JB: Do you feel like your work comes from a masculine point of view, or a feminine point of view? Or is that not a thing you think about?

RR: I think about it constantly.

JB: Really?

RR: Definitely. I’ve always considered myself a feminist. Whether that’s a loaded term… I definitely see myself as a male artist, but I’ve always related much more to the feminine point of view. Always. In my personal life, and in my work. Against patriarchy, machismo — those kind of aspects [of masculinity]have always been something that I’ve worked against, in my life and in my work, so yeah, I definitely take a feminine — not a female! — point of view. The way that I see myself is also in my chart from what I understand, is about being a bridge between the two. I see myself, and I see my work, especially right now, of being about bringing masculine and feminine together. I feel it within myself, enormously, in the struggles of all aspects of my life, my personal life and everything, as being this… kind of caught in between the two, and wanting to bring it together in my work, by focusing more on the feminine in the balance.

I definitely think about that. I think it comes out in a really interesting way. You can talk about my work being really feminine and appealing to women, and there being sex in here, but I’ve been thinking about it differently. I’ve had this funny idea after doing this, like, I might want to do some erotic artwork. I don’t know how I would go about that. Even though there’s naked ladies in this book, and even though there’s people having sex in this book, I certainly have never made work in the classic sense of comic book or pulp artist making erotic work.

JB: Making work that’s designed to arouse…

RR: Yeah. Or it comes from a completely male view. [in leering voice] Ah, very sexy lady!

JB: Yeah, these seem more… they’re not clinical, they seem more objective, more sweet.

RR: Yeah. It’s like goddess worship. Which I’m definitely into. I even see it as being a balancing thing. Let’s have some more goddess worship to make up for being in a culture that’s 99.9% in the other direction, that doesn’t have any room for it.

JB: You were saying that you already feel like The Cartoon Utopia is going to reach the audience you want it to reach…

RR: I think so. They had advance copies at SPX and APE and they sold out of them both. Then I went to the New York Art Book Fair—I saw people out of the crowd seeing the cover, looking at it, and coming over and picking it up and being like “I WANT THIS,” without even opening it. I think it was people being drawn to it just by the picture on the cover. This is one of those “I AM” images. Like “I am presence”— but it fits with everything in the book. I just copied one of their drawings. It’s from one of the hundreds of groups that I’ve inspired by for the book. Their stuff has imagery that describes this idea of…whatever this stuff is! The etheric body, the cosmic body, the aura: the kind of concepts that all of these groups, all of these belief systems, seem to have in common.

I made the cover look like this so it’d reach more than just comic book people—and at the New York Art Book Fair, I saw it work. There’s this huge crazy mass of stuff shouting for your attention and I was just sitting there, watching people do [a double-take seeing the book’s cover], and I was just like: That’s what I want!

The splash page from the second episode of Barefoot Gen, Weekly Shōnen Jump, 1969

Nakazawa, a lifelong smoker, died of lung cancer.

Although famous for the manga that graphically illustrated the horrors of the atom bomb, when Nakazawa began his career he had vowed to never speak of the bomb again, and in fact avoided discussing his childhood experiences with the people he met in Tokyo.

Nakazawa was born March 14, 1939, in the city of Hiroshima. His father, Harumi Nakazawa, was a painter in the traditional Japanese style who was imprisoned during the war for his anti-war activities. The young Keiji and his family were ostracized as traitors, yet his father was unrepentant. Keiji was just six years old–in the first year of primary school–when the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, killing no fewer than 70,000 people in the initial blast, among them Keiji’s father, older sister, and younger brother. Keiji, who was just 1.2 kilometers from ground zero at the time, was spared because the wall of a building shielded him from the flash of heat. Keiji’s mother, Kimiyo, was pregnant at the time, and seeing her husband and two of her children trapped in their burning home, her daughter already apparently dead, her son screaming for help, tried to run into the blaze in order to die with them, but was restrained by neighbors. The shock caused Kimiyo to give birth prematurely, and the baby, a girl, died four months later.

“Spark 1,” 1963–Nakazawa’s debut work

After graduating junior high school (high school is not required in Japan), Nakazawa began work for a sign maker in order to improve his technical skills. He would paint signs every day, draw manga every evening, and on Sundays watch three movies in a row at the local cinema. During these years, Nakazawa submitted his work to such boys’ magazines as Omoshiro Bukku (“Funny Book”).

In 1961, at the age of 22, with the equivalent in today’s dollars of about $600 in his pocket, Nakazawa moved to Tokyo and began working as an assistant to manga creator Daiji Kazumine. In 1963, Nakazawa made his professional debut in the magazine Shōnen gahō (“Boys’ Illustrated”) with Spark 1, a story of car racing and industrial espionage. Having grown up subject to the prejudice faced by survivors of the atom bombs, Nakazawa was determined to make a fresh start in Tokyo, and none of his earlier works even hinted at his past. That attitude changed dramatically in 1963, when his mother at last succumbed to the effects of the radiation poisoning she had incurred 18 years earlier, just eight months after Keiji’s marriage to Misayo Yamane. Following the traditional cremation, it is customary to gather certain bones that can be relied on to survive the fire and place them in the family grave. Yet Kimiyo’s bones, apparently degraded by radiation, did not survive the procedure, and only a fine powder remained.

Gamera vs. Gyaos, 1965–Nakazawa’s manga version of the monster movie

With the birth of his first child, Keiko, in 1967, Nakazawa began to work at a fevered pitch, focusing on manga with commercial potential, but also seeking a publisher for “Pelted By Black Rain.” At last the story was accepted by Manga Punch, an adult-oriented magazine that specialized in borderline pornographic manga. It was to be the first in a series of eight “Black” stories, each dramatically illustrating the various cruel ways the atom bomb and war had destroyed so many lives. The unifying themes of these and his later Hiroshima tales are anger, mad grief, and a throaty, insistent “J’accuse!” directed at the U.S. government, the wartime Japanese government, weapon makers and war profiteers. The characters in his stories are not saintly martyrs, forgiving those who wronged them and appealing for world peace with Buddha-like serenity. They are ordinary, flawed people with modest dreams whose lives are torn apart by forces far beyond their control, and they are angry.

Moero guzu Roku (“Burn, Dimwit Roku”), 1969

In 1970, the war in Vietnam was heating up, and Japanese students were marching in the streets to protest Japan’s role, which was (and is) largely dictated by Japan’s Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security with the U.S. Nakazawa’s anger was rekindled, and given new urgency by fears that his own daughter might join the ranks of the children of A-bomb survivors who, despite having been born years after the war and far from Hiroshima or Nagasaki, were being diagnosed with leukemia at higher rates than the general population. Nakazawa created a new story, planned to be 60 pages long, about a Hiroshima survivor whose son develops leukemia and dies. When Nakazawa showed the pencilled draft to Jump editor Tadasu Nagano, the editor broke down and cried. He told Nakazawa to make it 80 pages, an unheard of length for a single piece in a boys’ weekly. More realistic and hopeful than his earlier (and appropriately titled) “Black” series, “Aru hi totsuzen ni” (“Suddenly, One Day”) resonated powerfully with young readers. Nagano gave Nakazawa a slot in Jump to write more anti-war stories or a regular basis

In 1972, Nagano asked Jump’s contributors to create short stories based on actual events in their own lives. Nakazawa’s, published in the October issue of Special Edition Shōnen Jump, was to be the first, and by far the most dramatic. The 48-page “Ore wa mita” (“I Saw It!”) was the first work in which Nakazawa had set down his own experiences of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in pictures and words.

“Chōkan Fujimi” (“Supership Immortal”), 1968

After reading “I Saw It!,” Jump Editor in Chief Nagano asked Nakazawa to do a long series based on his autobiography. Barefoot Gen began serialization on the pages of Weekly Shōnen Jump in June 1973. But the window of opportunity provided by the times and by a visionary editor proved to be a brief one. Nagano was promoted and replaced with a new editor in chief. The oil crisis had caused the price of paper to soar, and the magazine had to cut back on the number of pages per issue. More importantly, though, the content of Barefoot Gen was ill-suited to the fast, action-oriented pace of a weekly magazine, where a creator is expected to pump out one 16-page episode per week. The series was cancelled, unfinished, after just a year and a half.

Times had changed, and publisher Shueisha was now reluctant to have its company associated with a politically controversial work in the form of a Barefoot Gen trade paperback edition. They also believed a manga about the atomic bombing would not sell. In 1975, Nakazawa finally found a publisher for the Gen paperbacks, Choubunsha. The edition drew the attention of the media, and contrary to the predictions of Shueisha brass, was a massive commercial success. The ongoing story of Gen went on to be serialized in three different magazines: Shimin (“Citizen”), Bunka hyōron (“Culture Critique”), and finally Kyōiku hyōron (“Education Critique”). All were left-leaning magazines, the last being the official publication of the Japan Teachers Union. Both Citizen and Culture Critique had to cancel the series for financial reasons, but Barefoot Gen was finally completed in the pages of Education Critique in 1985.

Gen describes Japanese war crimes and refuses to sing the national anthem at his junior high school graduation ceremony.

Barefoot Gen was first dramatized as a series of three live-action theatrical films in 1976, 1977, and 1980. In 1983 and 1986, it was made into two animated films, and in 2007, it was adapted as a two-part live-action television drama. In 1981, it was performed as an opera. The animated version of Gen was once widely shown in elementary schools, but some scenes are so horrific that parents complained of their children being traumatized. Many schools have since replaced Gen with “softer” alternatives. Nakazawa himself was characteristically blunt on the subject: “I would hope that children seeing the animated version would be traumatized, and learn to despise the atom bomb.” In his autobiography, he even went as far as to say, “Children who screamed and wept! Thank you! You now know the true horror of the atom bomb.”

Barefoot Gen was translated into English beginning in 1976 by a group of student volunteers who called themselves Project Gen. It was the first multi-volume manga series to be wholly translated into English. In 1980, Leonard Rifas spearheaded the first partial publication of Barefoot Gen in the United States as Gen of Hiroshima. Other foreign-language editions include French, German, Italian, Korean, Russian, Spanish, Indonesian, Thai, Norwegian … even Esperanto. Yet Nakazawa had said that of all people, he wishes most of all that Americans would read Gen. He was quoted as saying, “I wish that President Obama would read it with his daughters.”

“Meido kara no shōtai” (“An Invitation from Hell”), 1979

Nakazawa hated platitudes and whitewashing. He generally avoided the annual peace memorial observances in Hiroshima, considering them pointless. “They never demand accountability. They make their call for peace, they ring their bells. That’s not what it’s all about. You need anger.” He had no use for doves. He was plainspoken, and he repeatedly and loudly proclaimed the late Showa Emperor to be ultimately responsible for the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His stance on the Emperor system and Japanese war crimes, as well as his apparent communist sympathies, earned him the hatred of Japan’s right wing.

In 1947, when Nakazawa was still in elementary school, the Showa Emperor visited Hiroshima. The school children were lined up along the route, given flags, and told to cheer “Banzai!” when the Emperor passed. The young Keiji had no doubt that this was the man who had killed his family. As the limousine passed, he kicked a shard of roofing tile, striking the car. Describing the incident in an interview in 2007, 60 years later, the anger was still fresh.

“Maboroshi no sanjūroku-gō” (“Phantom Fighter No. 36″), 1965

Now on to the list, presented more or less in chronological order. Believe it or not, this is the tip of the iceberg. We missed plenty. Se you in 2013!

Features:

Gary Groth wrote about his experiences with the late Christopher Hitchens.

Matthias Wivel reported from Angoulême in three parts: one, two, three.

Jim Rugg interviewed Jason Karns.

Bob Levin wrote about Yiddishkeit.

Rob Clough interviewed Matthew Thurber.

Eric Buckler interviewed Wilfred Santiago.

Gary Panter sent questions to Bill Griffith.

Michael Dean reported on the state of affairs for the Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art on their 10th anniversary in March, filed a followup report after the museum announces closure in July, and then wrote about their move to the Society of Illustrators in August.

Tim Hodler interviewed comics writer Chris Roberson after he announced that he would no longer be working with DC Comics because of the way the company treated creators.

Our Jack Kirby roundtable was somewhat controversial.

Nicole Rudick conducted a fantastic, revealing interview with the great Diane Noomin.

Hayley Campbell interviewed Tom Gauld.

Michel Fiffe’s article on the “dying” genre of one-artist anthology comics started an ongoing debate.

Chris Mautner interviewed Eddie Campbell.

Ryan Standfest reported on the pivotal University of Chicago symposium, Comics: Philosophy & Practice.

Joe McCulloch interviewed Richard Corben about adapting Edgar Allan Poe.

Bob Levin wrote about Chester Brown’s reissued Ed the Happy Clown.

Chris Mautner talked to Jessica Abel and Matt Madden.

Sean Rogers on Flex Mentallo brought in all kinds of neurotics.

Joshua Glenn wrote about Gary Panter’s long-awaited Dal Tokyo, the book which also prompted the return of Comics Journal legend Carter Scholz.

Dave Sim tried to open up public negotiations with Kim Thompson regarding Fantagraphics and a potential reprint of Cerebus. No one post on the site has ever spawned so much discussion.

Matt Seneca spoke to Benjamin Marra.

We ran a series of essays on Chris Ware’s Building Stories.

The remarkable R.O. Blechman wrote about his friend, the enigmatic Ed Sorel.

Marc Sobel talked with Theo Ellsworth.

Michael Dean reported on legal moves from the Harvey Kurtzman and Al Feldstein estates to reclaim copyrights from EC.

Patrick Rosenkranz brought us a couple of insightful, affectionate profiles of legendary underground figures: S. Clay Wilson and the late Span Rodriguez.

Sean Michael Robinson conducted a massive interview with Carter Family co-creator David Lasky.

Dan Nadel, Tim Hodler, and Frank Santoro spoke for several hours with Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, and recorded it all.

Tim Hodler spoke to cartoonist and publisher Tom Kaczynski.

Columns:

We published lots of Cartoonist’s Diary features this year, including work from Leslie Stein, Tom Scioli, Emily Flake, Dylan Horrocks, Ryan Cecil Smith, Sara Varon, Noah Van Sciver, MariNaomi, John Porcellino, and Mark Siegel.

Parenthood and book obligations kept Jeet Heer from maintaining his normal super-human levels of production, but he did contribute a few doozies this year, including a column on some recently rediscovered and published stories from a very young Robert Crumb.

Tucker Stone brought his super-popular Comics of the Weak column to our site (not to mention frequent collaborators Nate Bulmer and Abhay Khosla). It’s hard to pick just one, so let’s just highlight his debut.

Matthias Wivel brought back his Eurocomics column under a new name, Common Currency. His first piece took on Fabrice Neaud’s uncharacteristic move into superhero comics.

To our knowledge, R. Fiore has never written a boring paragraph. His Funnybook Roulette column continued to be great—his piece on The Dark Knight Returns was enjoyable, if you don’t know where to start.

Ken Parille’s close-reading-based “Grid” column was on fire this year. His piece on musclebound homoeroticism in superhero comics spawned a million comments-thread arguments.

R.C. Harvey’s work is must-read. His latest column, on the ever-underrated V.T. Hamlin is no exception.

Rob Clough delved into the world of international small-press comics.

Richard Gehr profiled New Yorker cartoonist Arnie Levin.

Craig Fischer wrote about Jonah Hex.

Shaenon Garrity put out the word that she would review any webcomic submitted to her—and then followed through.

Ron Goulart launched a new comics history column with a tale of his correspondence with Howard Sherman.

Frank Santoro charted the new talents all around him and went on tour.

In his “Say Hello” column, Sean T. Collins brought us several notable interviews, but his big scoop with Uno Moralez is a particular favorite.

We had to say goodbye to Mike Dawson’s TCJ Talkies podcast — a particularly good episode this year featured Dylan Horrocks.

In his ever-popular, ever-stellar This Week in Comics! column, Joe McCulloch tackled Chris Ware, Alan Moore, Christy Marx, and fifty more.

Ryan Holmberg continued exploring forgotten byways of manga lore, made the case for Shit-Grin Manga and blew open comics history.

Reviews:

Grace Krilanovich wrote about Charles Burns’ The Hive.

Frank Santoro wrote about Motorbooty.

Kim O’Connor wrote about Gabrielle Bell’s The Voyeurs.

Nicole Rudick reviewed Kevin Huizenga’s Gloriana and Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother?

Jeet Heer reviewed Otto Soglow and The Little King.

Dash Shaw reviewed Jeffrey Brown’s cat comics.

Rob Clough reviewed Nelson.

Matthias Wivel reviewed Carl Barks.

Sean T. Collins reviewed Jillian Tamaki’s SuperMutant Magic Academy.

The novelist Rudy Rucker reviewed two books related to William S. Burroughs’s attempt to create a graphic novel.

Notable Comics Figures Who Passed Away This Year:

John Severin

Sheldon Moldoff

Jean “Moebius” Giraud — plus tributes.

Josep Maria Berenguer

Maurice Sendak — plus tributes

Tony DeZuniga

Joe Kubert

Spain Rodriguez — plus tributes

Keiji Nakazawa

The Minneapolis-based artist and publisher Tom Kaczynski is a fixture of the alternative comics scene for many years who has made major strides both artistically and professionally over the past half-decade. Most of his comics work to date can be divided into two major groupings: 1) casual and digressive mini-comics essays on technology, politics, history, alienation, and utopia (many of which will be collected into a forthcoming book called Trans Terra), and 2) conceptually dense science-fictional stories about contemporary urban (and suburban) life he created for the discontinued anthology Mome, reminiscent in both subject matter and tone to the fiction of J.G. Ballard, William Gibson, and Bruce Sterling, and which can be found in the new collection, Beta Testing the Apocalypse. He is also the founder of a relatively new publishing company, Uncivilized Books, representing a roster of accomplished artists including Gabrielle Bell, Jon Lewis, James Romberger, and others. I spoke to Tom via Skype in late November. During a bit of back and forth about the weirdness of talking to each other via videophone, Tom mentioned another recent Skype call he’d made with the cartoonists Kevin Huizenga and Dan Zettwoch. We join the conversation in progress…

TIM HODLER: …Wait, so does that mean that you’re going to be publishing Leon Beyond?

TOM KACZYNSKI: It’s part of the next season. The next season is figured out, from March next year until July or so. That’s four books. It’s gonna be Amazing Facts … and Beyond! which is a Leon Beyond book, the David B. book, Les Incidents de la Nuit, which is Incidents in the Night. That’s gonna be translated by Brian Evenson! [Laughs.]

Oh, that’s a great get!

Yeah, I’m really excited about that one! Then, Zak Sally is doing Sammy the Mouse Vol. 2 with me. He’s almost done with it. And I’m doing this book with Peter Wartman, who’s a brand new cartoonist… Not many people know anything about him. This is his first book. He’s in Minneapolis. He graduated from MCAD a couple years ago. I want to support the Minneapolis scene. [Laughs.]

So, Uncivilized Books. When did you decide that you wanted to become a publisher?

That’s a difficult question to answer, because I feel like I’ve been publishing all my life in a weird way. As a self-publisher to begin with… but even when I look back at my comics, I was doing them as a little kid. There was a comic I drew when I was 10, where I drew it, I stapled it, folded it, then drew a logo on it. I gave it a print run, gave it a price and everything. It was one of the very first comics I ever made, and it was already a complete product. [Laughs.]

How many copies did you make?

It was just the one copy. [Laughter.] This was back in Poland, I didn’t have access to a Xerox machine or anything. It was water-colored… It was this weird object that already had all the trappings of being published: a cover, a logo, everything.

Did you try and sell it?

No. [Laughter.] I just remember that always, whenever I drew comics when I was a kid, I always made sure it had a cover, and all the little information that it needed.

But Uncivilized was at first created mainly as a self-publishing vehicle. At some point, I was talking to Gabrielle [Bell], because she was coming to Minneapolis for the Rain Taxi Festival, and we decided to do this mini-comic together. It was just a one-off for this show, but it went really well, we got some good feedback on it, and we decided to make more of them. In the meantime, I thought, “Well, it’s kind of fun to do other people’s books.” So I started adding other artists to the mix, with Jon Lewis and Dan Wieken, who’s an artist in Minneapolis. At some point Gabrielle decided not to do The Voyeurs at Drawn & Quarterly, and asked me if I wanted to do the book. At that point I was just a mini-comics publisher. It took me a while to think about it. To really do justice to that book, I would have to become a proper publisher. That’s where it started snowballing. Once I said yes to that book, I was like, “Okay, distribution, I gotta figure that out. I gotta figure out where this is gonna get printed, I gotta figure out all that stuff.” Started making a plan to become a publisher, which is where I’m at now, I guess.

Do you have any idea why Gabrielle thought that was a good idea? Since you weren’t a publisher I mean?

I don’t think it was any bad blood with Drawn & Quarterly or anything. We just were working well together. We were getting some good feedback on the mini-comics, and she really liked the way I was designing her comics, the way I was working with her. We just meshed together pretty well, and she wanted to try something different, and we decided to make a go of it [Laughs.]

So you first started putting out the minicomics around 2010, is that right?

I think it was 2009 actually. The first one was L.A. Diary, the next was just called Diary, and then came San Diego Diary, July Diary, and The Voyeurs.

And you were doing your own Cartoon Dialectics at the same time.

Yes, Cartoon Dialectics, the little Trans mini-comics, and Jon Lewis’s True Swamp and Klagen.

But you had originally put out Trans-Alaska and Trans-Siberia before starting Uncivilized…

That’s true, those started out before Uncivilized Books became Uncivilized Books. Even the first issue of Cartoon Dialectics had a short life before Uncivilized Books. I think I was just calling myself Robot 26 Publishing or something like that. It was a kind of a nondescript, brand-less publishing venture [Hodler laughs]. Uncivilized Books was an attempt to create a publishing identity which looked bigger than just me.

From the outside, The Voyeurs seems to have done really well in terms of publicity and getting into bookstores and things like that. Is that accurate from your experience, too?

I’ve been very happy with it. We set certain targets for the book and the book has been meeting those targets, so it’s good. That’s the business part. In terms of publicity, I’ve definitely been very happy with what we were able to get. A lot of that work was done by Gabrielle. She did a lot of self-promotion and pushed that book and was able to get it well placed. The fact that we got the nod from Publishers Weekly for one of the top five graphic novels, that was really gratifying. And kind of amazing for a first book, too, so there’s really nothing I can complain about. I’m very happy with how it turned out.

As a new small publisher was it difficult to get into Barnes & Noble?

Well, not really, because I have a distributor. I’m working with a distributor, Consortium, and they work with Barnes & Noble. They work with pretty much everyone. They’re a pretty big distributor, so pretty much the whole book market is open to us right now… which is kind of amazing. They distribute Nobrow as well. For a publisher like me, with no backlist, it was a pretty amazing opportunity to be able to hook up with these guys and they’ve been great. They’re kind of new to comics as a distributor, but they’ve been trying to learn more about them. I think they’re talking to other publishers. It might become a nice place for small comics publishers to have a home in the book market. So, once I got the distributor, it wasn’t that hard to do Barnes & Noble, but it took a while in the beginning to set that up.

Are you a hands-on type of editor, or does it depend on the project? Let’s take The Voyeurs—was there a lot of back and forth on that?

Gabrielle mostly did what she wanted, but she did ask me to help her weed out weaker strips in the beginning. We started out with maybe 200, or a little bit over 200 pages of material and we whittled it down to 160 pages. I was helping to get through that, but she had the final cut. She sometimes took my suggestions, sometimes not. Occasionally I would suggest she redraw a panel or something, and she sometimes did it, and sometimes she didn’t. I like editing actually quite a bit. I’ve been working with Peter Wartman, the new cartoonist that I’m publishing next year, and we did a pretty heavy edit of his story. I made a lot of suggestions about how this story could develop and move along, suggestions in terms of panel sequencing, etc, etc. I was pretty heavily editing that one. Everything else… it just kind of depends on the project. Like with the Leon Beyond book. There’s not much editing to do other than to pick which strips are in or not. I’m pretty much letting Dan [Zettwoch] and Kevin [Huizenga] do that.

And with True Swamp, you are basically just republishing the original book, correct?

Yeah … that’s the older material. But Jon did a lot of restoration; he spent a lot of time to make it a little bit more legible.

Yeah, I talked with him a little bit about that a while back, and it seemed like it was gonna be a big project, and take a lot of redrawing.

Yeah, he was missing about 20 pages of original art. It was something we couldn’t rescan. We ended up having to scan from the comics themselves. He had a collaborator helping him out with that, and it took a while to get the scans to look good and print well, etc.

I know you have been friends with Jon and Gabrielle a while, and it seems as if Uncivilized kind of grew organically out of your relationships with them.

Yeah, I met both Jon and Gabrielle at AWP: Artist With Problems, a drawing group that we used to be part of in New York. But I’ve liked True Swamp for a long time; I never thought I would get a chance to publish it. It’s work that got buried a little bit in history, and it deserves a new lease on life. I was friends with both of them and before we published anything. With James Romberger it’s more — I met him at the Brooklyn festival last year, I think he wanted to do a piece on Gabrielle’s book, and we just started talking about comics and it turned out he has all this amazing work that’s unpublished [laughs]. This Post York story had been sort of simmering under his hat for a while, and he showed it to me and we just decided to do it.

And what is Post York exactly?

I think James was taking a film class, and he wanted to do this story where as he was drawing it, he was finding new ways of continuing it. There’s a point in the middle where something happens but then the story continues in another fashion, where it takes a different path. [Tom later added that here he was "inartfully trying to describe Alexandre Astruc's 'Camera Stylo,' 'the camera that writes,' and James's translation of the technique into comics form.] It was a really interesting experiment, and I loved his drawing. I’ve loved his art ever since Seven Miles a Second way back in the ’90s. It just seemed like a no-brainer for me to do this.

And it also comes with that record, which is interesting.

Right, so the main character is based on his son Crosby. It’s lament for the kind of world we’re leaving or our children. Crosby just happens to be a young hip-hop musician and ended up doing this song for this story. We were trying to figure out how to include that as part of the project, and I found out that you could still get flexi-discs made [laughs], so we went ahead and did one, and it turned out pretty good. We had some production snafus … Did you try playing it?

Yeah, it works!

Great! [Laughter.]

I’m always amazed when those things work. I haven’t seen one of those in a long, long time. This is Post York #1 — are you planning on publishing more issues with records attached?

There’s really no specific concept as to what other music could be attached to future issues, if there are any. James has expressed interest in continuing the series. Originally it was just gonna be a one-off, and then we slapped a #1 on there just to see. [Laughs.] But he’s interested in doing more work for it now, so we’ll have to figure out what form the next issue takes. He’s been liking a lot of these big newsprint comics, so maybe it’ll be a different format. I don’t know, it’s too far in the future and too unformed at this point to even discuss. [Laughter.]

I won’t make you do it then. One thing I’m sure you’ve heard a lot from other people is that both The Voyeurs and True Swamp look really great, I mean as objects, and they really stand out for that. I know you have a graphic design background, but had you done much book production before?

Not too much book production. I’ve obviously designed and produced a lot of minis, and I have done print production before. I worked at newspaper for a long time as an art director, as a graphic designer … one of my first jobs in college and just post-college… I was working for the Minnesota Daily, which is a student newspaper. I did a lot of similar work before, so it wasn’t too difficult to transition to book design. I mean, there are small things here and there in those books that I regret a bit now, but overall I’m pretty happy with the way they turned out.

Maybe you don’t want to say, but what do you regret?

It’s just really tiny details that most people probably aren’t noticing, but I’m just like, “Uh, I wish that was a little bit more to the right, or if that wrapped just a little bit differently, it would’ve been so much better.” Just small, small things. But I’ve always wanted to design books, and it was nice to finally get the opportunity. Originally, my own Trans Terra book was going to be the first book for Uncivilized Books. I was working towards that… I wanted to experiment on my own work so I wouldn’t have to worry about other people. But then the book with Gabrielle happened, and ended up being first, so I ended up practicing on her book. But it was really fun. We worked a lot on the cover design, we went through probably 20 different variations. It was pretty fun to do. I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out.

Has being exposed to the business aspects of publishing comics changed the way you think about your own cartooning career?

I know more about what’s going on in the background I guess, so if I’m negotiating contracts and things like that [laughter], it’s kinda like, “Yeah, I know what’s going on back there.” So I can probably negotiate more from a position of knowledge than before. But in terms of my own comics, not really? I was happy that, with my book for Fantagraphics [Beta Testing the Apocalypse], Eric [Reynolds] pretty much let me design the whole thing. I just had some production help from them. I feel more comfortable doing that kind of work since starting Uncivilized Books.

Now, your upcoming Trans Terra book is basically a collection of the four minicomics?

It’s the four original Trans mini-comics, plus a bunch of new material that wraps up that whole train of thought… or train wreck of thought or something. [Laughter.]

Those books seem to be part of a tradition in comics you don’t see that often any more—the kind of free-flowing rant or essay comics with the cartoonist walking around and acting as the narrator, like Clowes used to do, and Crumb and Peter Bagge. Were you consciously engaging with that tradition?

All those guys are big influences on me. I wasn’t consciously trying to do that, but when I’m looking back, I’m like, “Oh, yeah, well, duh, they were doing similar things.” [Hodler laughs.] I maybe get a little bit more overtly intellectual on mine —where I quote actual books and people — whereas they were a little bit more casual with their pontificating or whatever. [Laughter.] What I was doing originally with the Trans books… basically the first book was a kind of panicked, “I need to do something for the first MoCCA festival!” And I just kind of regurgitated all this stuff I was thinking about at that time very quickly. I got a pretty good response to it, and I was like, “Well, I might as well follow up, ‘cause I didn’t really finish my train of thought on the first one,” and I just kept going with that. Each book is more and more carefully thought out. I’ve been searching very slowly… hopefully when this book is out, I will have found something resembling a coherent thesis. [Laughter.]

The first three you did pretty close together?

Yeah, the first three were pretty close. I think they all came out within a year, year and a half. In the middle of that I got the opportunity to contribute to Mome, so that derailed the production on the Trans books for a long time. I always thought of these Trans books as a little bit more casual, little bit more off-the-cuff, but the more I got into it, the more fascinated I got with using comics to explicate ideas. The more Mome stuff I was doing, the more I wanted to go back to the Trans comics and do more of that kind of work.

Did you ever consider doing that kind of thing for Mome?

I didn’t think it would fit. I thought about it, but I got in this very specific groove for Mome, that was a little bit Ballardian, a little bit science-fiction, and I just wanted to keep that going. If Mome had continued past issue 22, I may have done more of that kind of work in the future, but yeah, in Mome I wanted to keep a certain… a different level of work… a different kind of me. [Laughs.]

A Polish author you briefly mention in one of the minis, Witold Gombrowicz, wrote a novel—which I haven’t read—called Trans-Atlantyk, and I was wondering: Does that have anything to do with the titles of those minis?

No and yes. [Laughter.] I had read pretty much everything that Gombrowicz had written way before I did Trans Alaska. I read Trans-Atlantyk but it’s something that I had forgotten, and it wasn’t a conscious influence at first. When I did the Trans Alaska book, the title actually came last. I didn’t know what it was gonna be, so I was like “part of it is set in Alaska, so I’m just gonna call it Trans Alaska.” I decided to keep the “Trans” for the other books. I was writing about Atlantis in the third book, and I remembered that Gombrowicz did Trans-Atlantyk. I ended up calling the third book Trans-Atlantis. It wasn’t a specific reference, but more of a happy coincidence. But Gombrowicz definitely influenced me quite a bit, he’s one of my favorite authors. Just in terms of how he writes and more importantly his diaries. He was an émigré author, he left Poland at the beginning of World War II, and ended up living in Argentina for many years. If you read his diaries, it’s all about being a Polish person in the New World and his struggles with that. That was really important for me when I was younger. I identified with that kind of struggle.

I’ve meant to read him for a long time.

Ferdydurke, his first novel, is amazing I think.

(continued)

DAN NADEL: I wanted to start with Ti-Girls. First of all, it’s Ti-Girls, like tigers.

JAIME: There you go.

NADEL: So what took you so long to do a full superhero story?

JAIME: I just didn’t have a superhero story ’til now— I kept putting it in the background in the regular comics, and there was the time Gilbert said, “I want to do a superhero comic on the side, a color comic.” He goes, “One that doesn’t make sense, like an old ’40s one that has no explanation, just superhero stuff.” And I was like, “Huh, yeah, that’d be cool.”

So I was thinking of doing this one, too. And so we were gonna do one together, but my story got too big, and it was gonna be something on the side, like maybe Dark Horse or something. I was going to go to them to have it done. When we changed formats on Love and Rockets again and we went to the 100-page one, I had no story for the new first issue. I just decided, “Well, I’ll put it in here.”

It was just something that I was going to have fun with and it just built into something more than that. I did get a review recently that it had no soul.

NADEL: Really? Because I thought it was incredibly soulful. I found it really moving. It seemed like a lot about motherhood. Which obviously you’ve covered before, but not quite so explicitly. This seems about about motherhood as a double-edged gift, and fear of parenting. And then also a lot of Gilbert’s recent stuff has so much to do with mothers and daughters, and has for a long time, but it seems especially in these stories.

GILBERT: Well a lot of that has to do with simply editing down the stories to remove all the men, really. Because usually more stories start out having equal parts men and then I just whittle it down to the lovely ladies I want to draw.

HODLER: Is it just for that reason? Because of what you want to draw?

GILBERT: There’s always a lot of reasons to do stories but that’s how it starts off. I want to draw these girls, and then the story evolves from there. And then it gets “serious.” But at first there’s more males involved in the stories, but I only have so many pages to do, so I’m constantly chopping down stuff. It’s easier now ’cause we have so many more pages in Love and Rockets — 50 pages each, but then that, right away, then that starts getting too long. I have the new issue of Love and Rockets— it’s not out yet — that I’m working on now, it’s basically the mother and daughter thing again, but it literally has two pages that I can’t squeeze into it, because I ran outta room.

HODLER: Did the reviewer say why he thought Ti-Girls was soulless?

JAIME: No, he liked it, he said the only thing was it was soulless, and I wish he could’ve done something more with it, and I got the feeling that for him, he wanted it to be a Marvel comic, or …

HODLER: Yeah, that’s soulful. [Laughter.]

GILBERT: What we’re getting these days is that when we stray away from what we originally did, what got noticed in the comics — the soulfulness, the deep-hearted family dramas, that stuff — a lot of the critics just won’t go there with us. They’re just simply stuck on the older work, as if everything else is lesser. It’s like, “don’t do the lesser work.” I completely don’t agree. I think I can do whatever I want.

Love and Rockets is a comics store that we grew up in — well, there weren’t comics stores; there were newsstands. But there’s a comic-book rack and there’s Blackhawk, Archie, My Love, and they were all comic books. It wasn’t like, “This is real comic books, and these are fake comic books” — no, they were all comic books. So we just take every subject we do in that way. Jaime did a superhero epic, that’s because that’s what comic books were. I’ll do a romantic story, soap opera thing, that’s what a comic book was, too. I’m not gonna do Westerns, ’cause I’m not interested in that. Same with war comics, we don’t do that stuff ’cause it’s just not what we’re into. I’ll read one, but they’re not that interesting to me, except for the Harvey Kurtzman ones.

But back to the thing … but yeah, the soullessness could either be, “well, you didn’t make it a serious superhero story, you didn’t make Dark Knight Rises … you made, uh, The Inferior Five. Why’d you do that?”

NADEL: It’s so funny, because I thought it was so serious. It’s really fun, but it was really sad, and really, really moving. It seemed like, in a lot of ways, stuff that you hadn’t really covered before, specifically mother-daughter stuff. It’s like the best version of superheroes; it felt like ACG superheroes. And Richard Hughes is a great writer who paced stories in a commonsense way that seems related to Ti-Girls.

JAIME: Yeah, I also felt that superhero fans these days are holding onto this thing to make superheroes worth reading. They have this thing about the myth of the superhero and stuff, and I think, I’m guessing that’s what didn’t have the soul in it, that I didn’t follow the myth of the superhero, which I didn’t care about, ’cause I don’t know what the hell the myth of the superhero is … [Laughter.]

NADEL: How did God and Science become more than just a lark? ’Cause it’s pretty heavy in parts …

JAIME: Because I don’t know how to cheapen things. It starts off as a funny romp. The more I’m writing it, the more I’m thinking about who the character is that I’m putting through this romp. And then the whole thing about the mom: It was part romp and then part if superheroes were in the real world, she’s got these powers, her mom has the “talk” with her about responsibility, that whole thing. So there’s like a jump back and forth, like, I’m not taking this too seriously, but at the same time these characters are very serious to me, so I need to treat them with the respect of being human beings, instead of just who they’re going to sock next. You know that’s fun, but you know.

GILBERT: I’m just gonna ask you, OK, I’ll shoot myself in the head here … but is Spectra, the Granny-Goodness-looking gal, is that Xochitl or is that a new character?

JAIME: It was … it’s a long story. [Laughter.] It goes back to that, when I started creating ’em, I was going, “Oh my God, I’m creating more characters that look like other characters.” So that’s when I came up with that twisty thing of, “Hey, why doesn’t it be some old characters in a different dimension. “It’s “Hey, Rocky is the Weeper. I’ll use Mini Rivero as Golden Girl, and then she looked a lot like Xochitl.” But in the end, she didn’t really. I mean, if you look at Xochitl there’s similarities, but she really didn’t and I thought, “Why, I guess I didn’t have to after all.” So that’s why I kinda made it when she and Maggie meet — Maggie goes, “I’ve got a cousin that kinda looks like her.” [Laughter.] So that just made it even more that this dimension, this different dimension thing was weird, there was more to it than just, we’re the same people in this dimension, too, but we have different roles. [Laughter] I was covering my ass a lot.

GILBERT: OK, no, I just wondered, ’cause that’s the type you draw now, I was just wondering what was going on …

JAIME: Yeah, I like that pumpkin-head goofy face. [Laughter.] I like drawing that.

GILBERT: Funny, because I’m the opposite; I like drawing Killer over my other less attractive characters.

HODLER: That’s like that story you told at your SPX panel about how you created Fritz’s sister. How you just drew her face wrong…

GILBERT: Oh, on the first issue of Birdland, you mean?

HODLER: Yeah.

GILBERT: Yeah, it was supposed to be Fritz on the cover of Birdland, and it didn’t look like her, and I didn’t feel like whiting out everything. Her hair was too straight, and I went, ehhh, I’ll give her a sister. It’s porn, and you need more girls in it. That’s that. For some reason in the old, very halcyon days of porn movies I’d see with my friends at the drive in, a film would have one girl and a bunch of guys instead of one guy and a lot of girls. Who likes the former? [Laughter.] Who’s that for? Except for Russ Meyer. He got it right.

Well, anyway it was that. And I used to get pooh-poohed for that, but that’s how stuff’s created. It’s an image that you just work with from scratch. Dan Clowes does that all the time, you just draw somebody and … Wilson was just a drawing, he said, and then he did a whole book from there.

HODLER: Is that how you usually create characters? It’s kind of accidental?

JAIME: Sometimes! Those happy accidents, so those will work out. Some of them don’t work out as well, but the ones that like, it turned out perfect … and I didn’t know.

HODLER: Do you think of a lot of background for them before you start the stories or does it just kind of come out as you write?

JAIME: I would say sometimes we plan them, right?

GILBERT: Yeah, not too far in, but just enough to get us going, and to build a story around, but a lot of times we just write. It took me 25 years to figure out who Fritz was, that’s why she’s in it all the time now, because I finally figured out who she is.

JAIME: And in Tonta’s case, I’ve just started with her. You know, I go, OK, she’s a teenager, with a goofy face, and then she’s Frogmouth’s sister. OK, we’ll see what’s gonna come out of this as I do her. Maybe she’ll fail. You know, maybe I won’t want to do her after a couple issues, but I’m hoping that I’m gonna run with her and even where she becomes a supporting character to others, but …

HODLER: I just read the issue yesterday. I like how even when you introduce a new character the story will read like it’s been going on for a long time, and just coming in it’s like, did I miss 12 stories about Tonta? [Laughter.] It’s kind of an interesting effect that gets created.

JAIME: Sometimes you start smack dab in the middle, and so, people feel they know her in a way or they want to know her. Sometimes you have a person walking up in the distance and that’s the beginning of that character’s story. It’s also editing. Tonta, I didn’t want to have her origin. [Laughs.]I just wanted you to see this big goofy face right away, BAM! Who is this girl? And then follow from there.

NADEL: When you guys talk about writing, what do you mean? Are you doing scripts?

JAIME: No, writing in the sense that you are literally writing when you’re drawing a face. This, which is going to be this. Yeah, that kind — for us, it’s writing. You know, just drawing the figure, too buff, not buff, skinny, whatever, well, she’s too skinny for … I already have a character that’s too skinny, that kind of thing — you start to write that way so you can build it up.

HODLER: I might be misremembering, but I believe I read an interview with you where you said that when you create stories, you kind of work at the beginning and the end and the middle all at the same time.

GILBERT: It’s different all the time. That’s probably most of the way I worked. Sometimes, I would just draw the last page real sloppy because I’m tired, I’ll do that as I start the story, and if I know what the ending is, I rarely know what the ending is, but I’ll draw the last page early on if I know what it will be. Like, Marble Season, my Drawn & Quarterly book, I drew the last page when I was halfway done with the book, because I didn’t want to get to that last page feeling, “I’m tired, I don’t wanna draw this page!” [Laughter.] That lesson came from one of the early Barry Smith Conan stories, it was “Red Nails”. Was it the end of the first chapter, or the whole…? The page where you can tell, Barry Smith, it was probably 4 in the morning, and he just couldn’t do it much justice.

JAIME: I thought the whole second issue was …

GILBERT: I think it was the last page of the first chapter, ’cause the first part was real intense and Conan gets chased by the dinosaur and he has to carry Valeria; and then at the end, it was the last page of the chapter, it looked like Smith handed it to Vinnie Colletta to finish.

NADEL: Oh, Colletta finished it?

GILBERT: No, it looks like it. Or Pablo Marcos.

NADEL: Oh. [Laughter.]

GILBERT: I can tell because it looks like Barry Smith was fried at 4 in the morning, and he’s gotta get it into the office and it’s not done. I don’t wanna do that, so the trick is to do that page before you get to the end. Yeah. And the sloppy page might be in the middle of the story now, instead of the very end but not a lot of people notice. It’s very telling when it’s at the end.

I learned from those mainstream guys, that’s one thing. And I think a lot of indie artists don’t. And that’s why they can’t freakin’ tell stories or structure stories or have stories, ‘cause you gotta learn from the mainstream, the nuts and bolts of putting a comic together, anyway. Like Dan Clowes said, “You watch enough episodes of Mannix and The Twilight Zone, you learn how to structure a story.” These guys don’t. You know, story structures. I mean, they might be talented in their own way, but you’re not getting stories there. And I think that’s what makes our comics kind of awkward in the indie scene, ‘cause they’re actually stories. No plots, but stories still.

NADEL: Yeah, I don’t know what the indie scene is anymore.

GILBERT: I don’t remember the names … half the stuff we get at the conventions, we look at it and we see some struggling artists that are good, but it’s not structured as a story, or potentially as a story.

NADEL: Is that different than it was 15 or 20 years ago?

GILBERT: It might be individuals, because the ones who can do the story thing are around still and the ones who couldn’t aren’t around. Dan Clowes, Chris Ware, Adrian [Tomine] … it’s all storytellers, and they’re still around, and the other guys aren’t.

JAIME: One of the differences I find now, that when I hear about indie comic artists is they don’t care about the old way of doing things as far as we do a comic and then we finish one and then we do the next one after that. Just by hearing them talk it’s kind of like, “Yeah, I’m gonna do some comics this summer.” [Laughter.] And they’ve been doing illustration or something somewhere else, but it doesn’t seem like they seem to care about the series part of it; I’m not saying that’s bad, but it’s hard for me to relate, as far as comics. They’ll go, “Yeah, I got some comics this year to bring to the show,” or “I’m not gonna come to the show ‘cause I don’t have any comics.” And, kinda like, “Well, maybe I don’t wanna do comics anymore.” That’s just so different from the way I think. For me, it’s born in me, you know, I have to do it.

HODLER: Well, there’s also now the emphasis on graphic novels, so a lot of times, an artist will be working on the same thing for years before it’s ready, and he won’t have anything to show until it happens.

JAIME: Yeah, that’s true.

GILBERT: The problem is the Kubrick Syndrome, when you start something and it takes a really long time to — it’s outdated by the time it comes out. Like, Kubrick apparently was sad when The Shining wasn’t as scary as other movies, because he took so freakin’ long to do it [laughter] and then 20 other movies that were scarier came out during that time he was making it. “I’m so damn slow, and everybody’s scarier than me now.” This is what I heard, anyway.

HODLER: Well, he’s an unusual case —

GILBERT: Oh, sure. Artistic dreamer or tech head? Wanker, as one of my brothers once said.

HODLER: People still watch that and get scared.

GILBERT: Not me. I don’t judge a horror film if it’s scary to me or not. I’m a grown up; I can get startled like anybody else, but scared? I’m not scared of special effects or fancy editing or camera work. I like it if it’s well made or at least funny.

SANTORO: Well, what I’m also noticing with the Tumblr generation is there’s more of an emphasis on just image-making, just like they just wanna put up an image or one page or something that’s not so much of a story, and then they get like an instant gratification, instant Likes, or somebody will say something about the image they made, and a lot of those folks might make comics, you’ll see them in a collection later, but they’re not really telling stories …

NADEL: They’re not cartoonists. That’s different.

SANTORO: They’re not cartoonists. They’re kind of image-makers, but they’re getting play in the comics circles because of the imagery, and so there’s a lot of stuff. But what I’ve noticed also with the indie scene or the younger guys, the reboot of Love and Rockets and also, ’Beto, your stand-alone graphic novels, you know, there’s a lot of intimidation with the younger guys trying to get into Love and Rockets, I’ve noticed. I would talk to younger guys over the years and they would say, “It’s been hard to get into Love and Rockets,” but now, with the stand-alone graphic novels, like Michael DeForge, Jonny Negron, they’re telling me, “I’m really into Beto’s stand-alone graphic novels and that was my entry point,” so you’re kind of providing new entry points and I think Jaime with Browntown and some of these other stories and the new collections allowing people different entry points, I just wondered if you guys can riff a little bit on the stand-alone graphic novels and how that’s provided a new audience for you.

JAIME: Yeah, I’m just happy they found it. [Laughter.] ’Cause it’s Fantagraphics who figures out how to package it and stuff like that, and I just say, “Oh, OK, that’d be cool. Send me a check.” [Laughter.] But, I mean, I’ve seen that first Mechanics story just reprinted 80 million times.

And I always expect other people to think the same way I am, like “Oh my God, we got that again?” But I got no real answer for that other than I’m just glad. [Laughs.] I’m just glad that they’re finding it, and it’s really cool to be appreciated by this generation who I’m used to not even knowing who we are, you know? Even the artists that draw kind of like me and Gilbert who were copying the third generation person now, who don’t even know where it came from.

SANTORO: Gilbert, how do you feel about some of the reaction you got at SPX, I felt like it was just really nice to see you with some of the younger guys. How do you feel about that?

GILBERT: Oh, I feel great! It is a resurgence of interest, and I think if it is those stand-alone graphic novels, I’m happy on one end because they’re easy to get into, especially with the second two, Troublemakers and Love from the Shadows, but they are horror stories, they are crime stories, so that’s gonna bring them in. That’s what I’m interested in, I can’t wait for Marble Season to come out ‘cause that’s something else, that’s something of me, what I’m actually more known for, that these guys haven’t gotten to yet, and I think they’ll be pleasantly surprised. I hope it’ll pull ‘em into the rest of my stuff. So, yeah, but I like the stand-alone graphic novels myself; I think Troublemakers and Love from the Shadows are the best things I’ve done. I guess Speak of the Devil too, even though that was problematic, because that’s when the critics started pulling out the machetes. But in my defense, it wasn’t about Palomar, it wasn’t about Love and Rockets, it wasn’t about any of that. [Using a grumbly voice] “Well, you’re just doin’ horror comics.” Well, these are my horror comics. You don’t have to like it. Some shit-for-brains failure in The Comics Journal wrote, “Well, you didn’t do high school gymnastics properly.” [Laughter] I guess I didn’t get the crotch shots right for this [censored] loser idiot.

JAIME: Oh, I remember that one.

SANTORO: That was pretty funny. Yesterday you guys were talking a little bit about trying to do different things. We always want our favorite artists the same.

GILBERT: OK, some of the stories I’ve been doing, the slasher thing, the crime thing, now I’m doing the zombie thing, those are normally by other artists, and the readers will accept that. But coming from one artist who’s known for a specific thing, like the Palomar stuff, then that’s when the criticism comes in. I’m reading between the lines, “I don’t want you to do those comics, I want you to do this. I don’t want you to do that part, that’s icky, stop doing what I don’t want you to do.” [Laughter.]

NADEL: Speak of the Devil is one of the best things you’ve ever done, and [laughs] same with Love from the Shadows…

GILBERT: Those are two of my most cynical books yet, so …

NADEL: Yeah, but they’re also really pure. They feel like a chance for you to engage with one aspect of comics, and go in really, really, really deep, which is fascinating. Why did you pursue that and what are you looking at to get there? But also the other funny thing about these books is that they’re all connected. Well, sort of, like Speak of the Devil is the real-life version of Troublemakers.

GILBERT: Yeah, or no actually, the book Speak of the Devil is the real life version of a Fritz movie, but I don’t need to do the movie version ’cause I’ve already done the true-life one. [Laughter.]

NADEL: It’s a little confusing. But does the real-life/movie thing come in after, or are you there already and —

GILBERT: Well, I hadn’t done graphic novel stories yet except for Sloth; my books were  collections, and I was ready to get going on doing graphic novels. I gotta get into this, because I know I can do this, this is my area, but I’m not getting there. I’m so busy with other stuff, and I thought, well, I gotta fill these graphic novels, and I gotta do ’em quick, and I gotta do ’em to where I want to do them, instead of just coming up with, like, I think I’ll adapt a Bible. No, it was more like, what do I want to do? And at that time I didn’t care about being taken seriously.

JAIME: Had enough of that.

GILBERT:  Yeah, I’d had good reviews for being a do-gooder, but I liked the idea of Fritz becoming a B-movie actor, and I started developing stories and I thought, well, I’ll put them into short stories in Love and Rockets, but then they started to have a life of their own. “This would be a cool crime story. I’ve never done that!” But I gotta do that in a graphic novel, so that’s double-duty. I said, “Fuck it, I’ll just put them together.”  Then it was about  making the books movie-versions of crime stories— and I knew that was a leap. I’m going to do-or-die doing this. It’s going to take me somewhere and I don’t know where. But I wanted to do it anyway, ’cause I thought, “Well, if I use my Bat-cleverness skills to do a good graphic novel, they might not notice that it’s a monster movie or a B crime movie, or something. Yeah, right.

SANTORO: It also allows you to experiment formally with each new iteration of the book, like Troublemakers, you’re using that fixed CinemaScope grid, and there’s a really nice rhythm to that, and I think, unless you explore things that maybe you wouldn’t, you’re not going to do that necessarily.

GILBERT: Exactly, that was it. So I figured on the Fritz books as sort of throwaway books really, just summer reading, just a cheesy paperback crime novel, and looked at that way. But I didn’t realize, there’s no audience for that, nobody wants that, at least from me; they want the next issue of Optic Nerve, not exploitation comics. But then Fantagraphics, considering it was my first graphic novel series for them, they wanted to do-it-up: hardcover, we’ll sell it as your first graphic novel from Fantagraphics. Because I’d done my first real graphic novel Sloth for DC, but I had to go through the DC ropes, I had to be edited, re-edited, you know, argue on the phone, that stuff. So in a way it taught me how to do it. So basically I did it the hard way the first time, which is good, because I learned a lot.

SANTORO: Oh, can you tell that Iron Man story, how you pitched that — [laughter] — No, for Strange Tales, you did an Iron Man story.

NADEL: Yeah, a great story.

SANTORO: But then you pitched it as a whole series.

GILBERT: I pitched it as a miniseries, as literally “The Search for the Original Human Torch.” It was supposed to be a story to lead up to Fantastic Four Annual #4, where they find the original Torch. The Human Torch before he was spread out to become Wonder Man and the Vision and Ultron, and others since, probably. I thought, because as a kid, my favorite Marvel characters were the old gold robotic Iron Man and the original Human Torch. “Ah! I’ll use Toro, and Toro will use Tony Stark to help him find the body of the Human Torch,” which had been missing. They get a line that one the Marvel robot master villains has the Torch’s body as a novelty item. They’re going to have to deal with the Mad Thinker and his goofy, big clay android, they’re going to have to go through Leader and his pink androids, they’re going to have to go through the Puppet Master and his menacing eighteen inch high puppets.  The editor at Marvel just said, “Too retro.” Click. Bye. And I just dropped it. And then another Marvel guy said, “Hey, I know. You can sell that story but OK, Toro’s a fireman, and he gave me this backstory that was like —

NADEL: Oh, Jesus.

GILBERT: — Make him a fireman? Toro STARTS fires! And then he goes, “Yeah, he’s fighting fire and stuff, and he’s jaded, and he opens up his coat and there’s the Toro symbol.” And I think, “Toro didn’t wear a shirt!” [Laughter.] I went through all that and I just dropped it. And then it wasn’t until a couple of years ago when another editor wrote to me and said, “We have an opening for Strange Tales. You can do anything you want as long as you remain true to the characters.” I went, “OK, I got an Iron Man/Toro story.” I don’t think he knew who Toro was. [Laughter.] And that’s how that happened. It’s just because I had a chance to do an old Marvel-type story and I said, “Well, I’ve got this story hanging around, so I’ll just do a condensed version.”

HODLER: So were you ultimately happy with how Sloth came out, or was there too much interference?

GILBERT: I am, because I did take a lot of lumps and it was really hard and it drove me crazy. I mean really crazy. From the first page to the last it changed completely. Because it was about something else, and I just started pulling stuff out. It just wasn’t happening and DC was getting antsy, because they pay a lot of money. And the more they pay you, the slower you start to work. [Laughter.] That’s the weird thing, I don’t know why. I guess I can’t blame them.

JAIME: It’s kind of like when you have a lot of money, you don’t check your bank account so often.

GILBERT: Yeah, yeah it’s true. So you don’t push that much.

JAIME: Yeah.

GILBERT: Yeah, when I don’t have money, like zero in the bank, I’m working like crazy. But anyway, like I said, it was a learning experience. I had never done anything like that in one fell swoop. It was always a series or whatever. And I like the way it turned out in the end, even though it’s not perfect. It’s shy 4 pages, because they just wanted to get it out and I was taking way too long. There were four exposition pages that kind of explained things a little bit more. [Laughter.] Oh, we’ll just blame it on David Lynch-type obscure storytelling if the story’s confusing. And I give my editor credit for that. She put up with a lot. They put up with a lot. And it turned out well. It wasn’t 100% mine, but I could see the problems they were having with it, because I didn’t know — I was learning.

HODLER: What didn’t you know how to do?

GILBERT: Just to make it a cohesive whole, to have the most important things rise to the top, to have a story arc, that sort of thing. Like I said, nuts and bolts. I learned nuts and bolts there, and that’s why I think I’m able to be a little more [prolific?], because what I’m about now is the nuts and bolts of telling a story. And then when I applied that to Chance in Hell, that’s not perfect, but it’s closer to what I was looking for. And then by the time I got to Troublemakers and Love from the Shadows, I’m pretty happy with the way I drew those.

NADEL: How does that learning experience then funnel back into Love and Rockets?

GILBERT: Like I said, nuts and bolts. You just learn a lot quicker to spot the weaknesses and what’s important, and where the arc is, and where it’s gonna end. Sometimes you end up with 3 pages to end the story, sometimes you have a panel to end the story. But either way works, because I always remind myself that the reader doesn’t see it ‘til it’s in their hands. So they’re not going to go, “Hey! You knocked out that page you promised in your mind!” And I think a lot of artists second guess themselves. They might think that the reader’s going to find them out. I’ve had panels that were without words because I’d reworked the word balloon so many times that I felt “None of this is working.” So I completely remove the word balloon and it works better. And the reader doesn’t know that. They’re just reading a story. So I don’t beat myself up to much for it.

HODLER: You did a Strange Tales thing and then something for the DC version of that, but have you ever gotten requests from them to do anything longer or more involved like Gilbert has?

JAIME: Um, I think they just stopped asking.

HODLER: You never had interest in doing that?

JAIME: I never had interest in involving myself in something long. Outside of Love and Rockets. So the interest? Yes. Would I want to draw Wonder Woman? Yes. Do I have to draw a whole damn book about it? No.[Laughter.] Can I just draw her beautiful body flying? Yes. Do I want to do a graphic magnum opus about her? No, never. [Laughter.] I just don’t have the energy and the interest to follow her or even the research to follow her, the myth behind Wonder Woman. No. I know Wonder Woman looks good, and she looks good kicking people’s ass. That’s about it.

SANTORO: Yeah but you were also saying, maybe in the early days they needed you or something, they didn’t have artists that could copy what you were doing. But now all these generations like … we were talking at SPX and you were saying you look on the shelves and they have these types of artists that are sort of close enough to you or whatever, sort of aping some of your stuff or just the look or something enough that they don’t “need” you like they used to.

JAIME: Yeah, and also they have artists who are drawing them the way they want to. The way the mainstream embraces art now. They have that. They don’t need me. My style is outdated for them. They’ve gone a certain way that they don’t need my style anymore. I mean I’m sure there’ll be an editor that’ll say, “We got a concept here that’ll be perfect for Jaime.” And I do get those once in a while. But other than that, they’ve got all their computer coloring, their rendering, that stuff, and it’s all fine for them. They’re just happy. They don’t need anything else.

NADEL: I wanted to ask you about the recent stories. It was interesting that you did God and Science and then “Browntown” and “The Love Bunglers”. Was that an arc that you were thinking? Or was it just that’s where things slotted in and chips fell?

JAIME: I was waiting to finish the superhero story, and then the next one I said, “OK, now it’s time. I can bring Maggie back.”

NADEL: And bringing Maggie back meant concluding that part of the story in a way, I guess? That was an interesting move, because you did it in a really unassuming way, and then all of a sudden it was an incredible story. But it was funny that it had just dropped in there. It’s great. A great surprise.

JAIME: Yeah, it wasn’t planned. It wasn’t a big plan, other than I was done with the superhero story in time to move on, and I think … Because sometimes I think people get tired of Maggie. Because I do a lot of Maggie. And sometimes I think people want a break, so I give them a break. Especially after a long story where I run her through the mill and then it’s done. I’m like, oh shit, I can’t do anything more with her. So I’m gonna give her a break and work on someone else. And when I … I don’t remember exactly how “The Love Bunglers” started, but yes, I wanted to continue the Maggie/Ray thing, because I go, “This is going on for years!” He’s chasing her for years. And so I think I gotta wrap it up. I didn’t have the ending yet, but I did want them to kind of come to a conclusion somehow. I didn’t know what it was going to be. And then “Browntown” just came because … I can’t remember exactly how it came, but I wanted to do Maggie in Palomar, because I was so tired of her environment. I wanted her to go somewhere where there was very little, few backgrounds, life was less complicated, and it was that perfect story of that lost three years that I had mentioned years ago. And I thought, I’ll put her in some desert town where nothing happens. And I found out it worked for the better, because the less she had, as far as background, the more story I had to give her. I could just focus totally on their lives, with nothing intruding around, nothing interrupting their boring lives. So that’s how that came about.

NADEL: And when did you figure out the ending? Because that ending is a doozy.

JAIME: By the time I was finishing that first one, where I said, “OK, I kind of know what’s going to happen —

NADEL: First one?

HODLER: “Browntown.”

JAIME: — but also, it was because my wife made the small remark where she read one of the latest Maggie stories, and she said, “What are you doing now? What are you working on now?” And I go, “Oh, I’m doing a Maggie again, Maggie and Ray, and this and that.” And then she goes, “If you run Maggie through the mill one more time, I’m never gonna read your comic again.” [Laughter.] And I kind of understood. She wanted some kind of happiness for her, and I was just giving every time, Maggie’s living a normal life and then it goes [Jaime makes a sound effect like a car swerving off course].

NADEL: [Laughs.] Yeah.

JAIME: And I kind of agreed. And I thought, well, I guess it’s time to give her her happy ending. But not before shit happens, bricks fly.

HODLER: I don’t know if you heard this or not, but some people weren’t sure if the ending of this was a fantasy, or if it was real or not.

JAIME: That’s what Heidi [MacDonald] was saying yesterday.

HODLER: Like this mirror scene [page 12 in Love and Rockets #4], it looks like maybe she’s imagining a possible future. Was that intentionally ambiguous?

JAIME: No, but I did, reading back, think, “Hey, this could be a fantasy.” [Laughter.] We were discouraged against captions a long time ago. Captions would just take care of so much of our confusion, but they were discouraged by Gary and other people at Fantagraphics. “Oh, you don’t need to do that. The reader’s intelligent enough to pick it up.” And not true, not true. [Laughter.]

SANTORO: That’s why you said that you were using a lot of different grids in some of the … to use the grid to differentiate between what story it was. Like it was Ray’s point of view or Maggie’s, and you said that “Because I don’t do the thing where it says ‘5 minutes later’” and you were using, I think it’s an interesting formal device to come up with that.

JAIME: Yeah, when it comes from Ray’s point of view, it’s the 6-panel grid with captions.

GILBERT: I’m just going to start doing the “Meanwhile,” “Six years later” stuff again, because it is problematic. I get whole different views of my stories that aren’t accurate.

JAIME: But no, it’s all real.

HODLER: Well you can tell once you get the next issue that it’s real.

NADEL: It’s real, yeah. This was also a funny page that a lot of people talked about, the very first page of issue 4.

HODLER: What’s that?

NADEL: A lot of people just haven’t quite figured out what it’s referring to, or if it was meant to be Maggie and Ray like 50 years in the future.

JAIME: Oh, I didn’t think of that. That was just an idea for a 1-pager I had in case I’m ever in an anthology or something, because I’m trying to do shorter stories on the side, but they always end up in Love and Rockets. I always turn them into these characters, so I just thought, “Well, I’m doing a story called ‘The Love Bunglers.’ Let’s see another side of love.” Then I did that and then I thought, “Hey, I’ll make it the first page.”

NADEL: Were you relieved to give Maggie a little happy ending?

JAIME: Yeah, because it worked well. It just worked right and I was really happy with the emotional part of it. But also the gears started turning again. I’m not done. Maybe with “The Love Bunglers,” but more to come with Maggie’s love life.

NADEL: Oh, so it freed you up a little bit.

JAIME: Yeah.

GILBERT: I want to interrupt you real quick before I forget the thread here. But the reason I think we’ve been able to continue and thrive and people remain enthusiastic about our work is because there is that link, there is that thread. Jaime created Maggie early on, and she became his character, his speak-through. So any other character to speak through, like he does with Maggie, is a lesser character to him. I’m speaking as an artist. That’s why Maggie’s always there. Nobody can match Maggie for him to express himself. There’s no real reason for Jaime to do stories without Maggie, because if they’re linked to Maggie, it has a resonance and it builds towards something.

Same thing with the Fritz books for me. If I wasn’t doing Fritz as the main character in those books, it would be a lot harder to get to. But knowing that they have that teeny-tiny link with her being Luba’s half-sister. Basically, in those Fritz books, the characters she’s playing are aspects of her personality that she doesn’t show normally. She’s pretty much a blank in the Love and Rockets stories and always has been, but that’s what the whole character is: she’s a blank, but then she expresses herself in acting. She has a genius I.Q, and she was a psychotherapist. In a way that’s like an actor, and she learned acting from talking to people and having a blank look and not freaking out at her patients and yelling, “You stupid idiot! Just don’t do that.” She has to talk calmly in that therapist reserved way. So she applied that to acting, and now all aspects of her personality are coming out in these stories. So that one link, which is not apparent or even important to the reader keeps me interested and pushing forward and getting into it.

(Continued)

Photo by Teresangela Schiano, 9/7/1999, 11:04am.

1.

The second issue of Derik Badman’s self-published MadInkBeard comic book (Spring 2012) is a collection of photocomics—comics whose images are photographs rather than drawings or paintings. Badman titles the entire issue “in the nature of navigation”, which nicely describes his photocomic aesthetic: the pictures Badman assembles into sequences read like a first-person account of an unseen observer navigating through various industrial and natural spaces. In “40.071619, -75.124485”, a wordless piece, there’s parallel movement towards two areas in a garden, one sunlit and one in shadow. Here is an example of the progression towards the light, from the point of view of someone (Badman himself?) walking towards sunshine:

The piece immediately after “40.071619, -75.124485”, titled “Night Walking”, also feels like subjective sight: it’s a sequence of photos taken at nighttime of neon streaks and blurry headlights, reminding me of Stan Brakhage’s hand-held camera in Anticipation of the Night (1958).

In this issue of MadInkBeard, there’s also an essay by Badman about photocomics. Derik mentions popular examples—Harvey Kurtzman’s photo-based stories in Help!, Latin American fotonovelas, Guibert, Lefèvre’s and Lemercier’s The Photographer (2009)—even while pointing out the reasons that photocomics are marginalized by comics fans and readers:

Within the realm of comics, I don’t believe there is much respect for photographic works. In general, the world of comics has a long history of focusing on craft: a snobbishness about drawing skill and style as the primary factor in appreciation. Photocomics work against this traditional sense of craft. I also can’t disagree that most photocomics are pretty ridiculous, especially when attempted with genre material. The goofiness of the bad genre photocomics is partially because we tend to see photographs as images of the past and, as such, actors dressed in silly costumes just look like actors in silly costumes. (2)

After this bad news, Derik then lists a number of photocomics that he does consider worthy of attention, including books by Marie-François Plissart and Benoit Peeters, Chris Marker (the ciné-novel version of his famous short film La Jetée [1962]), Deborah Turbeville and Guy Bourdin. I’m grateful to Derik to discussing these photocomics, many of which I’d never heard of before, but after reading his essay, I wondered: is there an artist traditionally associated with American-Anglo comics culture who uses photos extensively in his/her work?

Photo by J.P. Carlin, 9/4/2003, 5:46pm.

2.

In virtually all of the books he’s produced in the twenty-first century, Eddie Campbell has abandoned the nine-panel pages and pen-and-ink style that characterized Alec and From Hell in favor of new approaches to storytelling rendered in new media. In Batman: The Order of Beasts (co-written with Daren White and with “digital finishes” by Michael Evans, 2004), the art is a combination of ink, ink wash, and painted colors, and Campbell revealed at a 2008 San Diego Comicon panel that he always preferred to paint but that he drew his earlier comics in ink because of printing and budget limitations. Campbell has stuck to Beasts-style painted art for several subsequent projects, including the 19th-century crime drama The Black Diamond Detective Agency (“inspired by” an unproduced screenplay by C. Gaby Mitchell, 2007), the wittily self-reflexive The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard (co-written by Dan Best, 2008), and the naturalistic The Playwright (written by Daren White, 2010).

Possibly Campbell’s most groundbreaking recent book is The Fate of the Artist (2006), a whirling collage of painted art, extended prose segments, and photography. Fate is also an anguished chapter in the Alec autobiography, and the most obviously personal of Campbell’s recent works. In photographic sequences featuring (and ostensibly narrated by) his daughter Hayley, Campbell describes the onset of his brutal mid-life crisis after closing down his comic-book company in 2002. I suspect that Campbell’s relentless experimentation of the last decade has been fueled by that mid-life crisis, by an acute personal need to find a fresh artistic path. Campbell’s new art is at least partially inspired by the aesthetics of photography.

In many of his recent books, Campbell combines changes to his visual style with stories about the satisfactions and challenges of being an artist. Fate of the Artist is all about Campbell losing himself as a cartoonist, father and man; on the first full story page of the book, Campbell declares (in third person) that “the artist has come to despise his art, his self and his readers.” “You can all go to fuck,” he says to us while in bed, exhausted, lying in a pose that echoes Henry Wallis’ famous painting The Death of Chatterton (1856) and the rest of Fate is an assemblage of vignettes and narrative games that display the symptoms of Campbell’s mid-life crisis, including hypochondria and writer’s block. Fate ends with Campbell’s adaptation of an O. Henry short story, “The Confessions of a Humorist” (1903), where a successful humor writer, a twin for Campbell himself, grimly strip-mines his family and friends for ideas (“I became a harpy, a moloch, a vampire”). The humorist only finds peace when he quits writing and takes a new job as an accountant for a mortician, and it’s clear that Campbell wants a new job too: he’s tired of exploiting his family for material, tired of being a comic book auteur, tired of being.

Black Diamond is a more upbeat tribute to the power of art, particularly in the character of Sadie, an artist hired by the Black Diamond Detective Agency to draw an accurate portrait of John Hardin, a fugitive on the lam. By listening carefully and asking questions of people who’ve seen and spoken to the Hardin (“What was it about his eyes again?” “They were like my father’s, after the war. Sad, far away”), Sadie produces a perfect likeness of Hardin’s face, even though she has at that point never met the man. I read Sadie as Campbell’s surrogate in Black Diamond—her work reminds me of Campbell’s own job as a part-time court sketcher—and Sadie begins to work on the portrait only after her photographs of the crime scene (a train blown up by a bomb) refuse to yield the information the agency needs. Like David Hemmings’ character in Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966), Sadie discovers that her photos of the train disaster are all “murky”: “Go in close and there isn’t a single recognizable object. Stand far enough back and it might as well be the lives of insects.” Sadie’s portrait, however, captures the essence of John Hardin, and Campbell suggests that the sympathetic conscience of the artist elevates art as a medium over photography.

Some of these ideas from Fate and Black Diamond reappear in The Playwright, the low-key tale of a middle-aged author, Dennis Benge, haunted by the fact that he is still a virgin. In the first chapter, White and Campbell tell us that the playwright “never wastes good material” that he can steal from his life and pour into his art—and is currently estranged from his parents because he wrote a screenplay based on the circumstances of “his older, retarded brother.” Benge is an updated version of O’Henry’s humorist, and his story ends in a way similar to “The Confessions of a Humorist”: when Benge is finally in a sexual relationship, when he gives up being (in O’Henry’s words) “a harpy, a moloch, a vampire” and fully commits himself to life, his motivation to write vanishes. In The Playwright’s last scene, as we see Benge settle down into bed with his woman, the wry third-person narrator notes that “the playwright has reached his conclusion…and he never writes another word.”

Campbell illustrates much of the playwright’s story in medium and long shots, but sometimes breaks up the steady progress of the story by repeating and enlarging key details of previous panels. Also in chapter one, during a scene where Benge stares at a woman on the bus, Campbell “zooms” in on both the woman’s chest and Benge’s face.

Lines grow thick and splotchy; Campbell moves from a “lives-of-insects” long-shot perspective to the close-up materiality of lines themselves, to the space where we begin to lose our sense of “recognizable objects.” Is Campbell again wishing for deliverance from a life devoted to art, and is he paradoxically scouring his own drawings for clues as to what a life without art might be?

Campbell’s most recent book is The Lovely Horrible Stuff (2012), a two-part autobiographical treatise on money. In the book’s first section, Campbell talks about how money affects himself and his family; he revisits tropes from previous Alec stories (his insulting letters to deadbeat publishers, his tendency to mentally “leave the building” whenever financial discussions get too complex), even while he describes in awkward detail his anger when his father-in-law delays paying back money Eddie loaned him. The second section of Lovely Horrible chronicles a trip Campbell and his wife Anne took to Yap, a western Pacific island where large stones called Rai have traditionally been used as currency.

Open to any page of Lovely Horrible, and you’ll see photographs everywhere. In three panels on page 31, Campbell dreams about an alternate career as a “funny person on television,” a talk show “raconteur,” and the visuals are, appropriately, straight-up photos of Campbell as he sits in a chair, grinning. Elsewhere, and frequently, Campbell places hand-drawn characters against complicated yet unobtrusive photographic backgrounds, as in the sequence (pages 8-9) where Eddie visits his own fantasy version of the Café Guerbois and dishes with Will Shakespeare about the hassle of collecting debts. Sometimes Campbell mixes art and photography in more surprising ways, as in the several images throughout the book where he merges photos of his real hair with drawings of his face and profile.

Campbell has also begun to “paint” in Photoshop, in order to trick the reader’s eye into seeing elaborately constructed combinations of art and photography as straight-up photos. A couple of months ago, in an e-mail, Campbell sent me two versions of an image, one large and one much smaller and roughly at the size it appeared in Lovely Horrible on page 81:

Campbell then explained these images: “I avoided using computer colouring until I figured out a way that I could use it like I’ve always used paint. Enlarged, that figure looks like this, but at print size the eye reads it as a photo (the actual photo of the background helps the illusion along). Understanding light and shade is the key to making it work. The disc and the other disc in the background were imported from another photo.”

Campbell’s Photoshop technique both extends and challenges the ideas about pictures and representation he presents in Fate, Black Diamond, and The Playwright. Fate is a collage of different image-making strategies—one page is a photograph, the next page presents three examples of Campbell’s Honeybee comic strip, etc.—and Lovely Horrible brings that collage aesthetic to the level of the individual panel, where Campbell splices together disparate photos, Photoshop “painting,” and hand-drawn marks into a unified composition. The panel only really comes together, however, at the proper scale, when Campbell (and the printing process) shrinks it down and prompts us to read the image as a photograph. The concern for scale exhibited by Black Diamond’s Sadie (her vacillation between “lives-of-insects” long shots and indistinct close-ups) and the blow-ups of The Playwright has been channeled in a new direction.

Yet it also seems that Campbell has reversed one of his earlier implicit arguments. In Black Diamond, Sadie’s portrait is more important to the case than her photos of the train wreck—art is a higher medium than photography—yet in Lovely Horrible, Campbell aspires to create panels that look like photos. Why? Perhaps because Campbell divorces his photos from their original contexts so thoroughly that they’ve lost any connection to the actual people and objects they initially recorded.

In the Yap section of Lovely Horrible, Campbell emphasizes that money is an abstraction, a metaphor for labor that often slips away from its original purpose to take on new associations and meanings. On page 57, Campbell mentions that the Rai replaced a more unwieldy abstraction (decorative carvings of various shapes and sizes) with the discs, and later discusses a specific incident that has fascinated Western economists. The first page of Campbell’s version of the incident:

The stone sank in the water as it slipped off a raft in the middle of a storm. According to anthropologist Furness, “It was universally conceded that the mere accident of its loss was too trifling to mention…and that a few hundred feet of water offshore ought not to affect its market value. The purchasing power of the store remains as valid as if it were leaning against the owner’s house.”

Campbell summarizes how various commentators have interpreted the Rai in the sea. For John Maynard Keynes, it was a perfect example of (in Campbell’s words) “the kind of abstraction that typifies modern finance”; Milton Friedman drew similarities between the incident and a 1932 exchange of gold between France and the United States; Michael F. Bryan argues that the stone money is identical to contemporary coin money; Dror Goldberg denies that the Rai are truly money at all; and Campbell himself asserts that many Rai “have an aesthetic dimension,” like sculptures.

In other words, the Rai are slippery, polymorphous signifiers, just like photographs. Like money, photos have a basic value—they are a metaphor for a slice of the real world at a specific time and place—but they are also representations that, over time, take on unintended, non-referential, diverse and sometimes contradictory ideological and aesthetic meanings. In Lovely Horrible, Campbell is able to assemble images that look like photographs only by treating the actual photos that he splices into his collages as signs untethered to their referents, as raw material that he’s free to alter at will. Is it Campbell’s desire to leave art behind that attracts him to photographic aesthetics, and to the creation of dense, painted, Photoshopped collages that nevertheless look “real”?

Photo by Bryce Vanderberg, 2/4/2008, 6:47pm.

3.

I teach film history and theory, and I assign to my Introduction to Film students what I call a “photography assignment,” a simple task designed to inform them about the photographic basis of pre-digitized motion pictures. I got the idea for my photography assignment in 1999, while re-watching one of my favorite movies of the 1990s, Smoke (1995), directed by Wayne Wang and scripted by Paul Auster. Early in Smoke, there’s a scene where cigar-store owner Auggie Wren (Harvey Keitel) shows his artistic “life’s work” to novelist and widower Paul Benjamin (William Hurt). Auggie’s project: he’s taken a picture of the exterior of his cigar store every morning for the last ten years, and assembled the resultant thousands of pictures into photo albums. During the scene, Paul leafs through several of these albums, stumbles across a photo of his dead wife inadvertently taken by Auggie, and has a cathartic cry. Here’s a section of the scene, from YouTube:

I like how this scene captures photography’s representation of the real world. Susan Sontag famously argued that a photo is in some measure “a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.” Most photos capture the actual presence of people and objects in a particular place at a particular time, and retain a “material vestige” (as Sontag puts it) of these people and objects in a way that paintings and other visual representations can’t. Paul discovers a trace of his dead wife in Auggie’s photo album; Auggie’s project as a whole is the collection of such traces into a long-term visual history that captures the reality—or at least one version of the reality—of his “own little spot.”

Of course, I can’t expect my students to keep a photographic record as thorough as Auggie’s, so I came up with a different, but related, assignment that I’ve given every semester since 1999 to everyone who takes my Introduction to Film class. The assignment is this:

Get a camera and take a picture while standing anywhere you want on the flight of stairs in front of the old Belk Library, the building with the bell in front of it. What is included in the picture (people, buildings, grass) is up to you. Then immediately write down the date and time (to the minute) that you took the picture. Get a hard copy of the picture made, and give it to me, along with the information about the date and time, by the due date.

Why am I having you do such a simple assignment? We’ll use your photos as part of our in-class discussions on framing, film stock, and the photographic basis of “motion pictures,” but I also want you to realize that taking a photo means capturing a time-contingent part of the real world. As Yoko Ono—an important avant-garde filmmaker, and not just John Lennon’s widow—once remarked, film is “like wine. Any film, any cheap film, if you put it underground for fifty years, becomes interesting. You just take a shot of people walking, and that’s enough: the weight of history is so incredible.” (The above quote is from Scott MacDonald’s interview with Ono in A Critical Cinema 2.)

After we discuss the photos, I’m going to be like Harvey Keitel in Smoke, and mount them in an album that I’ll donate to Belk Library after I retire from teaching. (I also hope to put the pictures up on Flickr soon.) Perhaps students in fifty years will drink the wine of your pictures and understand a little better the history of our campus and its students.

Although we haven’t produced a day-by-day chronicle of our own “little spot,” my students and I do produce dozens of photographs—taken twice yearly—of the area in front of the old Belk Library on the campus of Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. And we’ve done so for the past thirteen years, even though time has changed the particulars of the project somewhat. In 1999, for instance, most students took their pictures with traditional emulsion cameras, but in 2012 virtually all of them handed in digital photos. In addition to following the changes in architecture and undergraduate fashion in our corner of the world, our project also tracks the rapid conversion of photography from chemical to digital technology.

Early on, the project also became personal to me. In the very first batch of photos I received, a student named Teresangela Schiano handed in a picture of two mothers walking two young children in strollers around the university quad. One of the mothers was my wife Kathy, and one of the kids was my son Nate, even though T didn’t know either of them; it’s a bizarre echo of the Smoke scene, though I’m happy to report that my wife is alive and healthy. There is something uncanny and poignant, though, in looking at Nate as a toddler, riding in his stroller, and then seeing him today, almost sixteen years old, now taller than me and smarter in so many ways. The weight of history is so incredible.

I store all the student pictures in a series of photo albums on a shelf in my office. In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud defines the comics medium as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response in the reader.” Not that McCloud is the final word on the nature of comics, but…have my students and I inadvertently assembled, in the pages of all those photo albums, a long-form comic book?

Photo by R. Martin Stamat, 1/25/10, 10:12am.

Died November 28, 2012 in San Francisco, California

Spain Rodriguez brought a unique perspective to comic art – a hard-edged outlaw’s attitude coupled with a voluptuous sensuality that also espoused class struggle and a universal quest for human dignity. His characters were die-hard individuals who ceaselessly fought the oppressor, powerful women who demanded respect – by force if necessary, and many of the real people who inhabited his life. He excelled at science fiction fantasy, gender warfare, heroic tall tales, and the dramatization of his own experiences. He also created many non-fiction works on historical figures and events, including Joseph Stalin, Che Guevara, and Lily Litvak, the Rose of Stalingrad. He was a genuine Marxist who fought fairly and with club spirit.

He had a lot of stories left to tell, he said in a recent interview for his autobiographical collection, Cruisin’ With the Hound.

“If I live long enough, I’ll do stuff about other periods, like here in San Francisco when I first got here and on the Lower East Side. They were replete with many adventures.”

Now it’s too late. Those stories went with him.

He was born and raised in Buffalo, a blue-collar city in upstate New York, where his colorful and formative upbringing provided a wealth of anecdotes and legends for his later comic stories. He picked up the nickname Spain at around 12 years old, when he heard some kids in the neighborhood bragging about their Irish ancestry. He defiantly claimed Spain was just as good as Ireland, so they began calling him that. It stuck.

“When I was a kid I wanted to be an underground cartoonist. Whatever that was. I would draw pictures of American airplanes having a dogfight with the Japs. He would say, ‘you son of a bitch.’ This was when I was about 11 or 12. That was racy stuff back then. My parents made me get rid of that one. My early forays into learning how to draw the female body came from copying Rulah of the Jungle.”

He attended Silvermine Guild School of Art for three years, punched a time clock at the Western Electric plant for five more, and rode with the Road Vultures Motorcycle Club on his own time. His artwork caught the eye of the red squad in the Buffalo police department when they discovered a mural drawn on the wall of a friend’s apartment showing cops getting run over by motorcycles and a naked Lady Bird Johnson.

He created one of the first major comic works in the nascent underground press in 1967 with the 24-page, tabloid-sized Zodiac Mindwarp, and became a staff cartoonist for the East Village Other, where he introduced Trashman, Agent of the Sixth International, an urban guerilla warrior, and designed many covers and editorial illustrations for the weekly paper.

He moved to San Francisco in 1969, ground zero for the underground comix movement when he was invited into the Zap Comix Collective by Robert Crumb. He continued the saga of his best-known character, Trashman in three issues of Subvert Comics, edited three issues of Insect Fear Comics and contributed to many other underground titles during the peak years of that era, including Skull, Mean Bitch Thrills, Sleazy Scandals of the Silver Screen, Thrilling Murder, San Francisco Comic Book, and Young Lust.

He drew an eight-page story about rumbling and riding with the Road Vultures Motorcycle Club for Zap #6 in 1973. “’Evening at the Country Club, which was the first Road Vultures story was a breakthrough for me. Right, that I was able to tap into my own life and use that as a source for inspiration.” He continued to illustrate RVMC adventures in Zap and Blab! and collected many of them in the 1994 compilation My True Story.

The usual suspects often criticized him for his depiction of violence and sexual activity, but he didn’t really care. “I’m just a crude dude in a lewd mood,” he would reply. Comics were his chosen medium of expression and he wielded his pen and brush with impunity.

“It seems to refer to the core of the American vision or the democratic vision, that there’s an aspect of yourself that you owe to your society in terms of omission and commission, but there’s an aspect of your life that you don’t owe to anybody. This is something that there’s a constant fight over. In terms of underground comix they certainly broke through that fifties fantasy that conservatives are so dedicated to maintaining, despite that fact that it was a fantasy in the fifties, and now it’s an absurd charade. Comic books are really something that are part of some core of this country. And that’s the struggle.  Liberty and justice for all should mean you can say what you want. Unless you can show some tangible harm I’m doing to somebody, fuck off. That’s the battle line I want to be on. I intend to remain here until they carry me away on my back. If it doesn’t sound too grandiose, I think the undergrounds were really a continuation of the American Revolution. Hell, it sounds too grandiose, but so what?”

A longtime resident of San Francisco, Spain actively participated in a variety of artistic causes and political action groups, including the Cartoon Workers of America, San Francisco Mime Troupe, and other grassroots organizations, as well as teaching comic art to school children in the Mission District. He also created posters, murals, rubber stamps, skateboard decals, movie sets, record albums and inaugurated one of the earliest on-line comic experiments, Dark Hotel for Salon magazine.

He drew covers and illustrated many books, including Boots, Alien Apocalypse 2006, Sherlock Holmes’ Strangest Cases, Nightmare Alley, Che: A Graphic Biography, and Yiddishkeit: Jewish Vernacular and the New Land.

He was recently honored with a lifetime retrospective art show at Buffalo State College’s Burchfield Penny Art Center, Spain: Rock Roll Rumbles Rebels & Revolution. It was a struggle for him to attend the event since he was weakened by his ongoing battle with cancer but it brought him a lot of satisfaction to see his whole career fully displayed in the place where it all began. It gave him hope that his work would continue to be read and appreciated by future fans.

“I get satisfaction knowing that stuff is going to be out there. Ramses the Second built these four gigantic statues to himself. One of the faces is still intact. The impulse of art is the impulse of immortality, just like those guys in the caves. At some point it must have occurred to them this stuff is going to be around. Today we have a different strategy. We can’t call upon the resources of the state to tell our tale. You do these highly vulnerable books on this paper that’s prone to rot and you hope that in time some of these will survive. You have these periods in history of outbursts of creativity and people telling the tales that would otherwise not be told. This is a factor. I think as it goes out there, somebody is going to hang onto this stuff. Someone is going to say, this is great.”

The author and Spain.

I visited Spain at his home in October. He had a doctor’s appointment that morning for another round of treatment that gave him a lot of discomfort, but he was in good spirits. He and his wife Susan and I sat around their kitchen table and had coffee and tea with scones. I asked if I could take a photo with him so we went downstairs to his unfinished wall mural and shot a few. They offered me a lift and dropped me off at 16^th and Mission where we said goodbye. I’m glad I got to see him one last time. I greatly admired him as a person and an artist. He was ruthless to his enemies but generous and considerate with people he liked.

“I’ve enjoyed immensely being a Zap artist. I’ve enjoyed being an underground cartoonist. I generally wish everybody well.” - Spain Rodriguez, 2012

Spain and his fellow Zap artists Robert Crumb, Paul Mavrides, Victor Moscoso and S. Clay Wilson meet to work on the jam “Important Comics” for Zap #14 in 1998. Photo by Rebecca Gwyn Wilson.

————————

Gary Panter:

If you are lucky, a few exciting things will happen in your life that don’t kill off the species. ZAP comics, which, as you know, filtered out of San Francisco in the late ’60s, was one of those things–a thing one was hoping for in the void. An unprecedented (MAD didn’t have dicks, vaginas, amputations, and LSD) phenomenon of defiance, audacity, pornography, bad advice, good advice, information, transport forecasts, historical ravings, a passle of approaches to cross-hatching and stylized image-making, steady or fractured or nonexistent narrative, interlocking drug-fueled collaborations, dazzling colors and shapes, references and synthesized oddments you had already been tracking like rabbit runs in the field out back. A rabbit hidey hole cubed. The few artists represented in ZAP fit like unlikely puzzle pieces somehow. It was a nitro fueled brew served in an electric phosphene hideout.

I had seen and followed Crumb from greeting cards, Williams from hot rod mags, Shelton from Wonder Wart Hog, Rick Griffin from surfing magazines, Moscoso recently from psychedelic posters, Wilson was new to me and a shocker and I had seen SPAIN’s TRASHMAN in a paperback collection with Bode and Shelton. Here they were all jammed into the same projectile!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! How could this be? Jackpot.

SPAIN looked to be exploring edgy scenes and choosing to do bad things and hang out with violent sociopathic folk in his comics and past at least–people that did BAAAAADD things!!! And also he was some kind of ultra left revolutionary–a bit intimidating. I was trying to be good. SPAIN was marching into bars breaking bottles over bozos. His style was Kirby-like but really only Spain-like. The other guys in ZAP were more anal. SPAIN’s style was anal and precise. Yet the other guy’s were even crazier than SPAIN. They made the motorcycle gang member into ‘the nice one’ with their tight anal approaches to putting it to the man. The other guys finished their stuff right out to the edge or the nth degree, and one got the feeling, true or not, that SPAIN might be hatching knit hose onto a hard calf or a hard center shadow onto a breast when he would drop the pen, get up, go outside, go down to the garage, grab a brew out of the fridge, get on a hawg and fuck the comics blast off down to Berdoo then come back four days later after cracking a few heads and get back to it the shadow. This is a fan’s concoction–babble.

I only talked to SPAIN a few few times and he was a gentleman and solid SPAIN. The SPAIN I was hoping to meet. Courageous good people go to good places. SPAIN’s art will keep making a ripple going on out.

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Mario Hernandez:

I met Spain at some comics-related event or another back in the late ’80s. He was a great admirer of my brothers’ work and always was encouraging me to do more stuff.

We found that we lived a couple of blocks away from each other in San Francisco and he asked me if I knew anything about cars. I told him I worked on my own vehicles some. He owned one of the most gigantic Buicks from the fifties I’d ever seen. I failed to get it going.

We became good buds after that. He and his terrific wife Susan were fairly frequent guests at each others houses for barbeques and stuff.

He gave me and my wife an original Trashman page for our wedding that I treasure. He was very generous and I loved to go to his place where he would show me all sorts of things he was working on, comics, paintings (a really cool painting of an Aztec warrior battle still sticks in my mind), and all the amazing stuff he did for movies and things.

We would often discuss history of all kinds, both of us being history buffs and fans of EC stuff like Two-Fisted Tales and such.

The last time we were together was at The Latino Comics Expo at the Cartoon Art Museum in SF. I had moved out of our old neighborhood and we only saw each other at different cons. We were being interviewed together and were asked what our dream project was and we both came up with a new Two-Fisted Tales type book that we both had talked about for years. I am glad to keep that happy memory.

The guy was a giant of a talent, and to paraphrase Maynard G. Krebs, “A real human being.”

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Brandon Graham:

I grew up with my Dad being into Underground comics. He’s into Gilbert Shelton’s Furry Freak Brothers, S. Clay Wilson’s Captain Pissgums and Trashman by Spain Rodriguez. He told me a story once about a friend of his taking him to meet Spain and them waiting outside of Spain’s apartment for hours and him never showing up. As uneventful as it sounds it was my Dad’s brush with underground comics.

Years later I got my first short comic published in Donna Barr’s Ersatz Peach anthology and Spain was in there too. I got to brag to my Dad about how I got closer to Spain than him.

I also like his work. His comics are great, I like how unique to him they feel, I like how he drew cars and sounds. His work feels to me like he was showing his freedom and what he could get away with.

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Danny Hellman:

By 1982, I’d outgrown the superhero comics I’d read steadily through my teen years. To fill the void, I was buying all the undergrounds I could find at various long-lost quirky NYC comic shops like Soho Zat. As is typical, Crumb was the gateway drug. Fritz the Cat led quickly to Zap Comix, and while I loved nearly everything I saw between Zap‘s covers, I was particularly drawn to Spain Rodriguez’s bold pages that looked as if they’d been drawn by Wally Wood on four hits of blotter acid. Spain was sketching a world I desperately wanted to visit: brutally violent, brazenly sexy and relentlessly hip. Spain’s vision is a paranoid sci-fi fever dream where insidious corruption trickles down from the hidden seats of power, while leather-clad culture warriors fight that power in the name of the people’s revolution. Good stuff.

Roughly a decade and a half later, in the midst of a notorious legal jam, I found myself reaching out to many “big name” cartoonists in the hope that I’d score contributions for my benefit book. I was struck by the generosity of Spiegelman, Crumb, Robt. Williams, Kim Deitch, and some of the other underground greats, but again, I was especially touched by the kind spirit of Spain Rodriguez. During a visit to San Francisco, Spain graciously spent most of a morning driving me around town in his vintage auto, sharing stories about the city he loved, his underground comix collaborators, and other anecdotes from the kind of life that would make any sane person green with envy. From the Road Vultures to the ’68 Democratic Convention and the Mitchell Brothers’ O’Farrell Theater, this was a man who’d been given a front row seat to the spectacle of mid-Twentieth Century America in transformation. Luckily for his readers, Spain had both the intelligence to understand what he was looking at, and the skill to share his insights with us in ways that were both moving and beautiful. In this instance at least, the cliched caveat that one should never meet one’s heroes was entirely wrong.

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Jim Blanchard:

Spain’s card from Mondo Suburbia Trading Cards.

What strikes me about Spain was how calm, soft-spoken, and patient he was– Hard to equate that with the ass-stomping biker he was early in life– Maybe he got all his violent ya-yas out when he was young, I dunno– I saw him maybe a dozen times in the last 25 years and he was always kind, and genuinely interested– I remember being intimidated about calling him and asking him to contribute to a card set I was assembling in 1990, but he readily agreed and never mentioned money– We spoke for 30 minutes about EC comix, undergrounds, and weird Topps sets like Mars Attacks and Civil War News– His 60s and 70s work was an inspiration and influence on me as a young wise-guy artist in the 1980s, particularly his unique thick line graphic style and tough guy subject matter– Also his beautiful, hand-separated color covers– Big dot zip-a-tone was never employed better than by Spain– Spain was a real life Working Class Hero whose art will live forever– He will be missed!

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Trina Robbins:

In 1967, Walter Bowart, editor of the New York underground paper The East Village Other (EVO), showed me the new comic they were running, “Zodiac Mindwarp”, drawn by a guy named Spain. I liked the art — it was strong, and you could tell he knew how to draw — but the story was incomprehensible and awful. Shortly after that I met Spain and found out from him that he hadn’t written the damn thing — the writer had been Walter Bowart. I also found out we were both big Wally Wood fans, and thus began our friendship.

We didn’t always get along. In 1968, when a bunch of us were crashing at the EVO loft, Spain threatened to hang my cat, and in 1970, when most of the New York underground cartoonists relocated to San Francisco, and I had become a full-fledged feminist, Spain believed that the sole purpose of the Women’s Liberation movement was to turn women into Lesbians. But we remained friends through it all (I knew he wouldn’t really hang my cat!) and in fact, during my very lonely first years of the ’70s, when none of the other guys in the underground wanted anything to do with me, Spain stayed my friend.

In 1977, Steve Leialoha and I ran into Spain with Susan Stern at a movie theater, and I said to Steve, “Omigod, Spain has changed! Susan Stern is a strong feminist and she would never date Spain if he was still sexist!”

Spain’s art was always excellent, his recent graphic novels are already classics, and he had high standards. I won’t mention some of the things he said to me about certain other cartoonists! I collected the terrific posters he did for the SF Mime Trooup every year, and I have a great flyer he did for Earth Day that he signed, “For comrade Trina.”

And here’s something he drew in 1969.

I’ll miss him terribly.

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Glenn Bray:

[Glenn sent along some little-seen Spain original art from his collection]

Nestor Makhno, c. 1976.

A 2003 commission.

Spain’s 1980 contribution to the Underground Comics portfolio.

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Carol Tyler:

The news came in via Ron Turner’s email yesterday afternoon. My husband Justin Green was out running errands, so I called him from the house. It went like this: “Justin, pull over.” “What?!” “PULL OVER NOW.” “I’m in an intersection. you’ll have to wait two minutes.”  I was glad for that gap of time because I knew what I had to tell him would be devastating.

For those who don’t know, Justin and Spain were roommates for about a decade during the ’70s/’80s.  I remember visiting their place on Coso Avenue in 1982. Try to imagine a San Francisco bohemian-style bachelor pad, complete with a months-old turkey carcass in the refrigerator, nasty towels in the bathroom, and walls filled with great artwork and posters. I loved it.

They had been friends since the early days of the Undergrounds. And even after Justin moved out, they maintained the connection. Over the years, it’s been funny to watch how much they grew to look alike as older gents, with their full heads of matching gray hair.

OK, so now the two minutes were up and I read the email aloud to Justin. He let out this agony-from the-depth-of-the-soul sound, like I’ve never heard before. Heartbreaking. And since then, quiet.

Except for last night. He recalled the time “when Dave Sheridan died. Spain got together all his toy soldiers, came in to my room and set them up there on the floor. I was at the drawing table and he was on the floor playing. We were just there together and neither one of us said a word.”

Our best wishes go out to Susan and Nora.

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Joe Sacco:

I have long admired Spain Rodriguez’s work.  There is something so visceral about his drawings.  They are not perfectly precise, but full of glorious life and dynamism.  His work seemed rooted in the real and bigger world.  I responded to his subject matter and his anti-establishment views.  I was lucky to get a chance to work with him.  I was in the middle of Safe Area Gorazde and broke.  An opportunity came up to work with Spain on a multi-part Internet story about the Balkans through the writer and comics editor Bob Callahan.  Bob’s story was a mess, but I needed the money, and I liked the idea of collaborating with Spain.  I flew down to San Francisco to sort out our working relationship.  Spain was a gentle and sweet man.  I remember a display case in his house full of toy soldiers.  I met him only that one time.  We basically mailed strips back and forth and drew on the same panels.  We were on the phone fairly often discussing scenes and dividing up the work.  Early on, I called up to ask when the first batch of strips would arrive as they were quite late.  “I’m blazing away on them,” he told me, but he hadn’t seemed to come that far next time I called up to inquire.  He was still “blazing away”.  I was beginning to panic.  Then suddenly a whole mess of strips arrived.  He seemed to have done them overnight, or that’s how it seemed to me.  His parts were beautifully rendered.  I’m thankful for that working experience with Spain even if the results can’t be counted among our best work.  Spain was one of the great solid anchors of the underground comics scene.  I loved his work.

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Mary Fleener:

It was 1994, and La Luz de Jesus Gallery had a show for the upcoming Zap Comix artists. Everyone was there: Moscoso, Robert Crumb, S. Clay Wilson, Gilbert Shelton, and Spain. Juxtapoz just came out and they had an article about the Zap guys, so I got everyone to sign my copy of the magazine. When Spain signed mine, I asked him, “Hey, is it true that Moscoso will ask me for money to get his signature?” “Well, if he does, tell him I’ll kick his ass,” Spain replied with a twinkle in his eye.

So I go up to Moscoso, and say, “Hey mister, I want you to sign my magazine, and if you want money, Spain says he’ll kick your ass if you do.”

“Oh YEAH?” says Moscoso. “Gimme that pen!”

Moscoso then proceeded to sign HIS name in huge script over every other Zap guy who’d signed my magazine.

You just gotta love guys like that.

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Justin Green:

“But he was alive just yesterday,” protested the youth.

That Spain’s passing was felt in a visceral way by so many is testimony to the greatness of his heart and spirit. I won’t add “soul” because that might touch off an argument with him. Like others who knew him well, we’ll be hearing his voice for the rest of our days and even as I tap out these words I can feel him peering over my shoulder. What a wonderfully explosive laugh he had!

On the evening of his death day, the full moon loomed low over the horizon in downtown Cincinnati. I was driving through the old city and the crumbling facades were evoking Spain’s architectural studies of Buffalo–those stark buildings which provided such compelling backdrops for those ink-noir Road Vultures scenarios. It is the rarest of artists who can enter our eyeballs, so that we apprehend visual reality through their aesthetic sensibilities. Now those sensational saucy sagas are finite in number. Had he lived until 2040, there would be countless more because his youth was a constant fount of inspiration. He had a phenomenal memory (going back to ‘42, when he was two). Now that body of work can be parsed and footnoted, as it
well deserves to be.

Who was the character that realized he had strong feelings for the dame who had been the plaything of the entire Road Vultures motorcycle gang? At a weekly meeting he testified of his devotional love to all fellow members, threatening that he would no longer tolerate disrespectful remarks directed at her. Does he show up in other episodes? Or what about those pizza proprietors in the African American neighborhood who wore holstered pistols while they served their dripping pies? You can’t make this kind of stuff up. Spain may have majored in art and minored in writing, but I believe the authentic social commentary and character development so pervasive in his work qualify it as true literature. More Beat than Hippie, he often coined phrases as he spoke with an effortless vernacular delivery that was uniquely his own (for example, Stalin “marshaled his ass-kicking forces.”)

Incredible as it might now seem, until the ‘80s you couldn’t write for publication without a typographer getting in your business; nor could you render oversize artwork for print unless it got processed by a photostat worker. In ‘75 Spain and I were the stragglers for a non-negotiable Arcade deadline. We had to bring our finished pages to a South-of-Market typographer and then hand deliver them to the printer. He arrived at my Noe Valley digs at dawn in his ‘53 black Buick. Though exhausted from the all-nighter, I was honored to ride shotgun in a mentor’s classy car that was vintage even then. He suggested that we take a detour through the financial district. As we wheeled slowly through the priciest real estate in town he spoke like a jaded tour guide, “This is the best time of day to check out chicks. They are totally buffed out in their finest clothes, fresh out of the shower. You can almost smell the shampoo.” I surveyed the local fauna with newly appreciative, yet bloodshot, eyes. Then, onward to the photostat place.

While we were waiting to have our work reduced to print size, I heard one of the clerks critique my “Gates Of Purgatory” panorama: “This guy is a faker.” I would normally have let the remark go and brooded about it for ten days, but in the presence of the great Spain, I was emboldened to defend my work. “Oh yeah?” I heard myself bellowing, “I’m a faker, huh? That’s why I’m out here and you’re in there!”

When I had to turn to sign painting for the survival of my new family Spain never abandoned me as a peer. In fact, he appreciated the art form. After the divorce, at the nadir of my life, he took me in as his roomie. I was lucky enough to have had a Japanese girlfriend for a couple seasons. We had major language difficulties, but she was capable of zingers. My favorite was “Room mate is happy man.” That was absolutely spot on.

Fully engaged in his work, his community of friends and fellow travelers, he was the polar opposite of me, a tormented religious nut with OCD and major relationship problems. Our dynamic was replicated in our drawing styles. He would be ensconced in an easy chair in front of a day/night TV, dashing off authoritative and bold ink lines from minimum penciling. If I wasn’t painting a sign, I’d be hunched over a standard drawing table. My preliminary pencil drawings would be the pretext for halting tentative ink lines that would require additional cross-hatching and a fair amount of white-out. In the years of working near him, I made a quantum leap in skill because I gained some of his pen command through osmosis. He was a cartoon Zen master. You’d have to have some skin in the game to understand the courage it takes to slash bare white space with a bold inking technique. And it also takes a lot of guts to draw the title/splash panel first, then come up with the story later, but once in awhile, he did just that.

Back then, the only mouse in our house was a real one. Everything was hand-made, even Lost Dog notices. We didn’t think of ourselves as “content providers,” though in the new computer age we would all gather under that umbrella. It still surprises me that he was one of few original Underground artists able to transition to the computer, while still maintaining the integrity of his traditional craftsmanship. But long before he became a master of Photoshop we had parted ways.

I never knew him as a family man, either. By the time I moved, his roving eye became locked on a certain beautiful and talented woman who would later bear his child. I started a new family, too. Large chunks of time passed between our visits or calls. But when we connected, it was effortless. His lively intelligence and political awareness revealed that his zest for life had only increased. His output continued to be prodigious and showed no signs of faltering. His taking on the Che project when well into his ‘60s is the crowning achievement of a career that never faltered. He was productive to the very harsh end of his life. More importantly, he remained kind and conscious, forever to be beloved by friends and family.

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R. Crumb:

So, the great Spain is dead, gone from this world. His troubles are over. He had a full life. He was a working class hero, the only person I ever knew who was a bona fide card-carrying Communist, a rank-and-file member of the Communist party. His hatred of bourgeois values never dimmed, never diminished. You could count on it. He was crystal clear about it. It wasn’t just an abstract stance with him, it was a visceral, abiding hatred. Spain had strong sympathies for the Soviet Union and a rare level of knowledge of its history, its inner workings, its culture. I suspect that it was to some extent a posture of defiance, a way to give the finger to American bourgeois capitalism. You can read all about it in his many comic stories. His proletarian origins and youthful rebellion are well-documented in his work. The stories of his youth in Buffalo are a unique graphic glimpse into blue collar American life.

I first met Spain in New York in the fall of 1968. He was living with Kim Deitch and doing a one-page strip for a weekly “underground” paper called The East Village Other. Kim was also doing a weekly strip for this paper. Spain had left Buffalo for good, left the world of outlaw bikers behind and embraced the East Village hippie scene, though there was a lot about the hippies that Spain didn’t like. “I ain’t no hippie,” he used to say. His allegiance to radical left-wing politics and his proletarian class identity were stronger and clearer than most of the youths in the hippie subculture, the “counter-culture,” as it was called. His politics were driven by genuine, authentic class anger, class hatred. I liked that about him. It was always clarifying, bracing, to discuss politics, social and cultural issues with him. Plus, he had a sharp sense of humor which leavened that anger. He was not your typical “humor-impaired” leftist, nor was he a dogmatic Marxist, spouting slogans or left-wing terminology. I appreciated those discussions with him, as he helped clarify certain things for me, politics, economics, history. He was well-read, self-educated in these areas.

Spain was an atheist. He despised religion. He even had contempt for Eastern religions and viewed the fascination with Hinduism and Buddhism as bourgeois decadence. He also had a certain contempt for the animal rights activists. “I’m at the top of the food chain and I’m proud of it,” he once said.

He also could make some great lasagna. Now that I think about it, geez, I’ll never again be able to go to his house and have that delicious lasagna of his. Wow… he’s really gone. It’s starting to sink in…

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Lorraine Chamberlain:

There is no perfect time to tell someone their dearest friend has died. I learned of it moments before I planned to bathe Wilson and take him to his doctor. Not a good time. In the following two days, I couldn’t reveal it right before going out on errands, leaving him alone with a caregiver. And an evening announcement would be too painful. So I settled on Saturday morning, when I knew Paul Mavrides could come over with his abundant supply of comfort and laughter. When he arrived, Wilson stretched out from where he had curled into a ball on the bed, and Paul stayed beside him for nearly two hours, swapping tales about their friend. It was exactly what perhaps they both needed.

S. Clay Wilson and Spain went out to lunch in North Beach at least once a month for the past 12 years, since I’d moved in with Wilson. But it had been their tradition long before I arrived. (When he returned, belly full, Wilson would often lie down for a nap, announcing that Spain sure could eat.)  Every now and then they would invite me along, and occasionally I accepted. I never got a word in edgewise, of course, but I didn’t mind, as I loved listening to their rapid-fire conversations.

When Wilson suffered a traumatic brain injury four years ago, I asked Spain to be the conservator of his estate. This was a tedious process, involving numerous trips to lawyers, Social Security, the bank, and appearances in court. I always went with Spain on these frequent (and frequently annoying) appointments. I loved riding along while he told me stories from his youth, stories about Wilson, art,  politics, and heated rants about our mutual hatred of bicyclists. I grew to love Spain like a brother. He was a loyal friend to Wilson, and was gently patient with me and all the decisions that came with his care. I could depend on his counsel and support.

At Spain’s house, there is a room filled with his incredible toy soldier collection. They are pristine, under plexiglass. When he visited us, he would often stand at our mantle, chatting with Wilson while meticulously cleaning the crowded collection of figures living there. You could always tell when Spain had been by, as you could see where he’d stopped dusting.

When I had a benefit at 111 Minna for Wilson in 2009, Spain sat at a table nearby, drawing. When I’d finished, I approached the table to see what he’d been doing. “Oh, I love that!” I announced. “It’s not done,” he said, “but you can have it.” He signed it sideways, and handed it to me. I have had it framed and on the wall ever since.

I will miss his fertile mind, his biting sarcasm, his irreverence, and his sudden laugh. Mostly, though, I will miss his kindness and his company. Ride easy, dear Spain…..and keep it on one wheel.

 

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Noah Van Sciver:

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Art Spiegelman:

Haven’t been able to put Spain’s bones to rest in my head since last Wednesday morning’s call from his wife, Susan. Ever since late May when Crumb, who’d just visited him, told me he was seriously ill I made a point of staying in more regular phone contact. Mostly Spain sounded so much like himself, and remained so fully engaged in his work, that I wasn’t braced to find out he had actually Checked Out in the middle of his still high arc. He drew til almost the end and died at home with beloved wife and daughter at his bedside—but he deserved more pain-free time, though that has nothing to do with how things work.

Shit! I remember when 72 used to seem Ancient-Egypt old!

I don’t know how to conjure up Spain’s combination of passionate engagement, curiosity, intelligence, humor, humble-but-proud self-acceptance, his fiery idealism, and his warmth… though all these attributes can somehow be found in even his most feverishly hardcore comix.

I first met him in the Lower East Side in ’67, at the beginning of the EVO days. The eight-year gap in our ages made him seem like a full-fledged and potentially dangerous grown-up, what with the leather jacket and gangbanging biker talk. But the aforementioned warmth kicked in right away and the 19-year-old insecure-and-paranoid-hippy-wimp incarnation of me found a reassuring older brother. I saw him get downright pugnacious a couple times, but the only time he raised a fist near me was to show me how to draw one so it would look less like my usual cluster of bananas. (I still haven’t gotten the hang of it, but remain grateful for the lessons and for his acceptance and interest in what I was doing even before I was sure what that might be.)

My memories overlap with so many already posted here. I remember riding on errands in his jalopy back in the Arcade days and his useful pointers about (and at) women; and I remember visiting him a few years back, sitting on his stoop so I could smoke after eating his homemade powerhouse lasagna. We’d talk for hours about art (we argued about Warhol, since there was a poster of the Marilyn print in his kitchen and Spain—for all his Marxism—had a lot more sympathy for the old huckster than I could muster) and we gassed about comics, our kids, movies, politics and all the usual. He said something wistfully positive about Stalin and I quoted Sue Coe (my only other unreconstructed Commie Friend) who’d told me: “the main thing wrong with Stalin was, he just over-purged.” Spain laughed hard but said he knew where she was coming from. In all our conversations he’d at some point veer off into a blow by blow description of a WWI or II military battle he’d been reading about or a detailed synopsis of a movie he admired and invariably lost me somewhere. But I sure enjoyed his cadences and enthusiasm.

Looking through decades of his work over the last few days, I realized that I’d sometimes get lost following the storylines of his comics as well, tho the cadence of the drawings kept me with him, and he sure got the storytelling consistently under control over recent decades in the lifelong and relentless pursuit of his craft. His drawing always reminded me of rock-solid carpentry built out of rough-hewn lumber. Despite his serious chops and his testosterone charged adventure comics influences, his art was just too quirky and filled with too much conviction to veer into the glibness that could’ve found him a comfortable home at a “mainstream” comic company. It’s what made him an underground comix star.

I remember visiting him once in the ’70s while he was working on a very long story. He had piles of pages strewn all around the room. Some were ruled out and partially lettered, some boards were only lightly pencilled with intense rendering on only one or two scattered panels, some almost empty with just a car or a torso randomly inked. I was baffled and asked if he always worked that haphazardly since I’d have blown a fuse trying to get anything done that way. He said he figured as long as he kept his hand moving it would all get done eventually.

A stray memory (I apologize for the randomness of these thoughts, I just figure if I keep my keyboard moving it’ll help me get the bones to settle): Walking down Telegraph Avenue in the early ’90s with Spain on one side and Bob Callahan, his collaborator and my one-time friend, on the other. Anyway, one of em on each side, both looking like versions of Jimmy Rushing’s Mister Five by Five. We needed a wider sidewalk, especially because all three of us were prone to gesticulating wildly while talking. First I’d get squeezed out of our formation, then Spain would be forced off the curb, and nobody trying to walk by us could possibly get past our moving human blockade. Sigh. In our last phone call a few weeks ago I asked Spain how he was doing and he said he’d lost a lot of weight but that he didn’t recommend this method to anyone.

Callahan died about four years ago and Spain stayed close, visiting him in the hospital right up to the end. He cajoled me to make contact with Bob when he was slipping, but some unhealed wounds kept me from doing it. Spain had plenty of reason to harbor some similar feelings, but— have I mentioned Spain’s generous spirit?

Funny to think of Spain as a Road Vulture, though he conjured up his tough guy days with great precision in his recent Cruisin’ with the Hound anthology. He brought his dead-end friends to vivid life, a slice of life I’d never wanna get within miles of in the real world, but was thankful to see through his comics panels. It’s as if he escaped his “misspent youth” by finding some sort of redemption (though not the Catholic kind) by devoting himself to art—to drawing the violence rather than living it—and he matured into one of the greatest Mensches (though not the Jewish kind) that I’ve ever been lucky enough to know. As I’ve done for the past few days, I’ll crank up my old Russian language version of the Internationale again tonight in his honor.

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Gary Groth:

I had the privilege of publishing most of Spain’s book collections, four in all: Trashman (1989), My True Story (1994), Nightmare Alley (2003), and his last book, Cruisin’ with the Hound, earlier this year (2012). I also enjoyed spending many hours with him conducting a 50,000 word interview that appeared in The Comics Journal in 1998. So, my relationship with him was both personal and professional, and the two were essentially seamless — publishing him seemed to me an act of or an extension of our friendship — or maybe it was the other way around, it was hard to tell.

Once I got a decent handle on comics history (sometime in the ‘70s) I came to admire the underground comics artists, thought of them then, as I still do, as the artists who dragged the comic book out of the artistic dark ages and moved the form definitively from a commercial medium with adumbrated or compartmentalized bits of artistry to a full-blown, unified personal form of expression. However unostentatious, they thought of themselves as genuine artists, refused to compromise, committed their lives to their art, and didn’t take guff from publishers — which was a different work than mainstream comics. I made it a point to publish interviews with and reviews of underground cartoonists from the early days of The Comics Journal, despite the fact that underground comics had by then become nearly moribund. The very first “graphic novel” we published was by a compatriot of Spain’s, Jack Jackson, who, like Spain, maintained his fierce integrity until the day he died. Once Fantagraphics established some momentum publishing comics in the early ‘80s, one of my grand ideas was to republish underground cartoonists in book collections. To this end, I talked Robert Crumb into letting us publish The Complete Crumb Comics (comprising 17 volumes) in 1987, with others to follow.

I was a little too young to have experienced the underground comics in their heyday, so by the time I discovered them, they were already surrounded by myth — at least to me. I’d read enough of Spain’s comics so that the anticipation of meeting this blue-collar, ex-biker-gang-member, Marxist ass-kicker was both thrilling and intimidating. But, in fact, it turned out to be charming and low-key. I forget the exactly circumstances, but I visited Spain’s apartment in San Francisco in the mid ‘80s and he took me out to a local pub. I remember very little about it, except that he was convivial, put me at ease, and discourses at length talked about the Russian Revolution, about which he had a deep knowledge, and that we got along swell. By the time I met him, his hell-raising days were behind him, but I could still see the tough guy beneath the surface. He just channeled that energy into his political commitments, about which he never wavered. Unlike most ideologues who can be shrill and one-dimensional, Spain was firm but charming.

I kept in touch, and at my urging we assembled a collection of his Trashman comics in 1989. Five years later, we published a collection combining autobiographical stories and historical pieces under the title My True Story, which held a double meaning, of course — true in both the experiential and historical senses.

Spain was always easy to work with. Partly this is because he was incredibly unfussy. He was all about the content, let the packaging up to us, and was mercifully uncritical about it. (The design of those first two books makes me cringe a little, but they served the purpose at the time. We upped our game with the next two and I’m pleased with both. I look forward to one day seeing a more comprehensive series of Spain books.) Spain was a street-smart intellectual and a meat and potatoes artist who felt he could tell truthful stories without any frippery. He was heavily influenced by EC comics (as most of the underground cartoonists were) and Jack Kirby (as most of the underground cartoonists weren’t) and he often displayed the same puissant storytelling physicality as Kirby — Kirby’s short “Street Code” is certainly a narrative kissing cousin to Spain’s stories of youthful carousing in Buffalo. This lack of formal play was evident even in his inking, which was carved out in heavy, solid, no-nonsense lines and sensual, tactile brushstrokes, as well as in his crowded compositions, bursting at the seams and packed with information, each panel a fully realized picture. Sex and violence were constant elements in Spain’s stories, but there was almost always something else going on beneath the surface — social observation, political undercurrents, an inner life. His characters fucked and fought and bled.

I learned that Spain had cancer during the production of Cruisin’ with the Hound. I lived with this knowledge for nearly a year, during which I was lulled into a false sense of … denial. Every time I spoke to Spain, which was often during the six months or so his book was in production, his voice sounded strong and he sounded optimistic. And I wanted to believe he’d beat it. I don’t know if he was genuinely optimistic himself or putting on a false front, but he handled it with understated grace.

Mutual respect is important, of course, but comradeship is something else again, and that’s what I always felt with Spain, from practically the first time I met him, an implicit acknowledgement that we were on the same side. That meant a lot to me.

I can’t imagine two artists being any more different, but I remembered something that Richard Ellman wrote about Joyce: “The function of literature, as Joyce and his hero Stephen Dedalus both define it with unaccustomed fervor, is the eternal affirmation of the spirit of man, suffering and rollicking. We can shed what he called ‘laughtears’ as his writings confront us with this spectacle.” That’s how I see the twin pillars of Spain’s life and art — suffering and rollicking, full of ‘laughtears.’

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Sam Henderson:

When I was about 11 or 12, there was a bookstore in my hometown where they didn’t mind us not buying anything and sit around reading their comics. This would have been about 1980 or ’81 or so. One day there were these other comics. They cost a lot more than the other comics, and were black and white with no ads. Even though they said “Adults Only” on their covers, the owner of the store didn’t mind us reading and buying them.

One was this new magazine called Weirdo. It was put together by Crumb, but also showed the work of his contemporaries. It cost a little bit more than my allowance, so it was one that I sat in the store to read. In the second issue was a story called “Big Bitch”. The last panel had something none of us kids had seen before. Big Bitch was getting her vagina licked. It was beyond anything any of us knew about. Sure, somebody had told us what blowjobs were (one kid even claimed to have gotten one), but nobody had any idea it could also be performed on women. It wasn’t in any of the magazines anyone hid under their bed, so every kid in town had to see this comic. It may be debatable among the few recipients whether I was ever good at it, but I credit this comic with being the first instance of seeing the concept.

The owner of the bookstore was able to expand his inventory of underground comics as more were going back into print. Later, I discovered Zap Comix. Of course, I recognized the slapstick antics of Gilbert Shelton and the all-around cartooning of Robert Crumb, two of the artists that stood out from the comics a couple years earlier. S. Clay Wilson and Robert Williams were too busy for me to comprehend with my still-forming brain, and Griffin and Moscoso I knew even then were trippy sixties drawings, but I remembered the work of Spain (I had no idea what his last name was) from the cunnilingus comic I had seen earlier. His work looked closest to the EC Comics my father had saved from his childhood. (When I tell friends my father saved these comics they say, “He must be so cool!” No, just a packrat.)

By then the other kids went on to other pursuits and I was still reading comics. I was now able to appreciate these comics for the art and not just because they were dirty. I had also discovered Subvert Comics and some of the more “serious” underground titles. There was a comic store now about 50 miles away I was able to visit every few months that sold comics you couldn’t get at regular newsstands. They were mostly the same as newsstand comics, except with nudity. It was the ’80s, before what we would call comics was considered a completely different entity from Marvel and DC. When anything that didn’t have a bar code was considered “out there.” There was an anthology from a then-nascent Fantagraphics called Prime Cuts. Prime Cuts had the work of a lot of newer cartoonists, but a few of the older underground artists, one being Spain (I was finally able to find out his actual name that was “Manuel Rodriguez”). But instead of the Marxist superherodom of Trashman or the proto-feminist adventures of Big Bitch, these stories were more introspective, showing his memoirs as a delinquent greaser biker.

Anyone who does comics not for hire owes their existence to the first generation of underground cartoonists. They were the first not only in being uninhibited (and not doing heroic fantasy); they were also DIY pioneers long before the punk movement. Such a thing may not have even occurred to anyone before. Now even though what they do might still be “kid stuff” in some circles, it’s taken for granted you don’t have to answer to “the Man.” Nobody says “you can’t do that in a comic book” anymore. I may bemoan the literary and high art aesthetic in comics today, but I’m glad it can be done without question. Independent comics would not have basically melded into underground comics. There wouldn’t be additional venues. “Comics aren’t just for kids any more” would still be the opening line of every article that mentioned comics, not just the magazine for the proverbial “old lady in Dubuque.”

Spain Rodriguez is not the first of the original generation of underground cartoonists to go, but his passing reminds us now that many of them are in their sixties and seventies and facing mortality themselves. He did his first comics in his late twenties, a reminder that it’s never too late for anyone to start. Soon all will have left us. Not only will we not be able to see new work by the artists we grew up with and watched mature, but how will pre-adolescents get their kicks?

Godspeed, Spain Rodriguez.

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Jeet Heer:

Impact was the title of an EC comics series, one best remembered for featuring Bernie Krigstein’s immensely influential “Master Race” story in its first issue. I’ve always loved Impact as a title because its so suggestive of the aesthetic that EC Comics both pioneered and passed on to young readers like Spain Rodriguez. The best EC stories left a mark on readers, they possessed a fervent intensity in their image-making that was hard to forget. The chief lesson that Spain learned from EC, one that never left him, was that comics have the power to make a difference, to have an impact. Like the comics he loved as a kid, Spain’s best work wasn’t cerebral, cool, detached, abstract, or disinterested; rather it was in-your-face, blunt, abrasive, visceral, partisan, raucous, and incendiary.

Impactism, if we think of it as a philosophy, had implications for life as well as art. Since his death, many have testified to the impact that Spain the man had on them. These memoirs uniformly testify to a warm, hearty, lively, engaged, and earthy man, a man who even in pursuing the relatively reclusive or hermetic life of an artist still managed to leave an impression on all those who met him.

Unlike those who knew Spain, my encounters with him were second hand, mediated through print and also the passage of time. I was a mere babe in arms when Zap Comix #1 came out in 1968 and ignited the underground comics movement, so I encountered Spain’s pivotal early work many years after they were first published. I first saw Spain’s comics when I was 11 when I came across Comix: A History of the Comic Book in America (1971) in the library. Rather remarkably, this book reprinted some key underground works, albeit PG stories rather than the genuine X-rated stuff. It was in Daniels’ book that I first read Crumb’s “Meatballs”, Kim Deitch’s “Doc Destiny”, and Spain’s Manning the cop (a two-fisted satire on police brutality). It took another few years before I encountered more of Spain’s work when I finally found a store that sold old copies of Zap and Arcade.

The 1980s of Reagan and Thatcher was a very different time than the 1960s and early 1970s. Yet despite the passage of time, the best underground comics had lost none of their urgency, none of their punch, none of their impact. This was especially true of Crumb, Deitch, and Justin Green but also of Spain, who belongs with those three on the small list of my favorite underground cartoonists.

Aside from Chris Mautner, I’m not sure if anyone has noted how versatile Spain was in the number of genres he work in. As Mautner noted, Spain did “just about everything – sci-fi, noir, literary adaptions, satire, political gags, sometime all rolled into one.” The underground movement was divided in various camps but Spain managed to straddle these differences and do work with both the angsty intellectuals (the historical strips he did for Spiegelman and Griffith’s Arcade) and the more lowbrow genre-inflected entertainers (the EC-influenced artists of Slow Death Funnies). Spain is perhaps the only cartoonist who could usefully be compared to Spiegelman, Harvey Pekar, Wally Wood, Jack Jackson, and Jack Kirby.

Mautner also went on to note that Spain’s best work was his autobiographical stories, a judgement I share although I would expand it to include his historical work. The series of stories about the Road Vulture Motorcycle Club that appeared in Zap deserve to be singled out for their ferocious unapologetic honesty. As far as I know, no one else has ever described the world of a biker gang with such intimacy and accuracy. What united Spain’s autobiographical stories with his historical studies was his fierce and unforgiving class consciousness, a property which is incredibly rare in modern North American culture. His plebeian defiance was the source of his artistic energy, the fire that drove him to fill countless pages with impassioned drawings.

Spain’s work had an impact on me and countless other readers. He will not soon be forgotten.

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Sharon Rudahl:

I remember reading Trashman in the East Village Other and being blown away, at a time art in New York meant all black canvases and featureless steel cubes. Visiting Spain’s home in Bernal Heights as a beginner cartoonist, I felt welcomed and treated with respect. I recently participated in a 40th anniversary of Wimmen’s Comix show in San Francisco, and several women agreed that Spain was unique among the male cartoonists. Not only was he not a jerk who came on to us or patronised us, he actually volunteered useful graphic tips.

Many times over the decades, when I have doubted if there was any point in continuing to draw comics that aspired to more than crude entertainment or shallow shtick, “Spain” was always the name that came to mind. Spain kept to his own high standard all these years, kept working for peanuts or nothing to support worthy causes, kept pushing himself to share his vision.

There’s so much more press about assorted comix artistes, with one eye on their navels and the other firmly on the bottom line. Spain was the real thing. It was an honor to know him.

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Kim Deitch:

I don’t know where to begin. I’ve been reading all the great posts here all week. I’m glad they’re here. He won’t be forgotten. That is crystal clear.

All my life I’ve been pretty lucky. I have work I enjoy doing. I stumbled into a vocation that I love and it keeps me going. I had the great fortune to be in the right place at the right time to get in on the ground floor of an exciting art movement. A major part of that good luck was rooming with Spain for a key year and change of that early time. It wasn’t like we had a lot in common. Spain wasn’t really a hippy although I think he was more so at that time than some may remember. I didn’t see much in his political point of view. By the time I’d left home I’d had a bellyful of left wing politics and was just getting over a few years of considering myself a Republican when I first met Spain. Parental rebellion takes curious roads sometimes.

More to the point I was younger than Spain and far less accomplished than him as an artist at that time, and even considerably less accomplished as an adult human being. He knew it and showed a lot of patience toward me. He was a true friend to me in every sense of the word. I learned from him.

The first thing I learned was pretty superficial. Spain always had a way with the ladies. I studied him in action and almost overnight got to be twice as good at picking up women myself; but I digress.

He was tough on me over my lack of drawing chops, as well he should have been. He gave me a much clearer idea of what it was going to take if I ever expected to get anywhere as an artist. I didn’t always realize it at the time but this was a priceless gift.

We had all kinds of crazy adventures. These are yarns I could dine out on for the rest of my life if I had nothing better to do and, frankly, I’m glad others have brought some of that stuff up in this forum so I can pass over it.

He was an amazing artist. I can’t think of another artist that I have known, Crumb excepted, who had a better stockpile of drawing chops at the beck and call of his drawing hand than Spain did. It was quite astonishing and a little daunting sometimes too. It seemed to be almost beyond his complete control. What I mean is, it came out anywhere and everywhere. There were virtually no digs where Spain spent any amount of time that didn’t seem to have an ongoing mural by Spain on it in progress. Archeologists will probably be unearthing these in various states of completion for years to come. And as many more will probably be lost forever. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. He left little pieces of his monumental artistic talent virtually everywhere he went. I remember one time that I was visiting Spain, and there was a porno paperback lying around. I picked it up and in the large space on the page at the end of every chapter was and anatomically correct drawing of some activity that the chapter covered, a beautiful spontaneous Spain original. Where is that book today? Where so many other similarly wonderful pieces of art that Spain produced on his journey through life?

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Craig Fischer:

I feel a bit sheepish about submitting one of these tributes to Spain, because I never met the man, although I’m a long-time reader and admirer of his comics. After his passing, I found myself especially curious about Spain’s life before he began his career as an underground cartoonist (as Sam Henderson notes, he “did his first comics in his late twenties”), in part because we were both born and lived our formative years in Buffalo, New York. I decided to contact some fellow Buffaloians to see what they could tell us about young Spain.

Before I begin with these first-hand testimonies, however, I should talk about the political and social climate in Buffalo during the 1960s—especially at the State University of New York at Buffalo, a school typically called “UB,” the University of Buffalo, by locals. In the 1960s, UB was a campus in full counter-culture bloom. In his book High Hopes: The Rise and Decline of Buffalo, New York (1983), urban studies scholar Mark Goldman described UB’s 1960s energy in these terms:

Enrollment had grown rapidly and steadily since 1962, not only increasing the size but dramatically changing the character of the student population. An increased number of New York Jews—the children of cab drivers, high school teachers, and civil servants who now could for the first time afford to go to college—now poured into Buffalo, bringing with them the excitement, color, and creative dynamism of their culture and their city. By 1967 UB had become the most stimulating and avant-garde cultural showplace in all of Western New York. (252-3)

UB students also participated in the leftist political activism that characterized the late 1960s, often provoked by events specific to Buffalo politics. In April 1964, for instance, the members of the House Un-American Activities Committee traveled to Buffalo for hearings designed to ferret out “communist activities” in the community and the UB faculty. The Buffalo left—a loose and not-always harmonious assembly of students, community organizers and union leaders—responded by organizing successful, highly publicized protests against HUAC’s presence in the city.

One of the men I contacted about Buffalo’s 1960s counter-culture history was William Sherman, a prolific and well-regarded poet with several chapbooks (among them Heart Attack & Spanish Songs [1981] and Tahitian Journals [1990]) to his credit. According to Bill, Spain “was a huge presence on the scene, but I wasn’t ‘close’ to him (or to Cindy [Spain’s sister], though I remember we went out once). In fact, it wasn’t all that long after meeting Spain that I finished my doctorate and taught film that summer, and then headed off to England where I had been offered a university lectureship.” When Bill heard about Spain’s death, he wrote a poem on his blog about Spain’s role in the HUAC protests, presented here with Bill’s permission:

Spain: Buffalo Days

Hunched in an old felt green armchair at 1001 Lafayette Ave.
Must have been Jeremy Taylor introduced us all
Because of the demonstrations against HUAC.

Hunched over a small acoustic guitar,
He played in the classical style
Almost painfully sweet these melodies he was inventing
Moreso coming from a man of such power.

He had drawn the cover of Landscape of Contemporary Cinema
My first published book, co-authored with Leon Lewis.
His work even then defined Iconic.
And Cindy, writing short stories under the name N. Howard.

Riding security with the Road Vultures.
Protecting by this act many young undergrads
Otherwise might have been beaten that day
During the protest at the McCarthy-era Committee’s
Leaving D.C.’s confines first time in years….
Given the keys to the city, Buffalo, 1964.

Around the monument across from City Hall they rode
Spain in the lead, holding aloft
(Was it in his right hand, or his left?)
The black anarchist flag
Of the Spanish Civil War.

It was truly a sight to behold!

As stated in the poem, while in Buffalo Bill co-wrote a book, Landscape of Contemporary Cinema (Buffalo Spectrum Press, 1967), with Leon Lewis, then a graduate student in English at UB. (Leon is now my colleague at Appalachian State University in North Carolina, and it’s thanks to Leon that I’ve been able to connect with the Buffaloians who remember Spain.) Leon told me that many people called Spain “Manny” back then (Spain’s given name was Manuel Rodriguez), and that Spain and the Road Vultures actively participated in the era’s protests and events. Leon also said that he also didn’t know “Manny” too well, although he loved Spain’s illustration for the cover of Landscape:

Also mentioned in Bill’s poem is Jeremy Taylor, a 1960s Buffalo activist that I also contacted. (Jeremy is now a Unitarian Universalist minister and dream interpreter.) Like Bill and Leon, Jeremy cautioned me that his encounters with Spain weren’t intimate: “I need to tell you that I had virtually no face-to-face contact with him other than in relatively large, public venues, where we acknowledged each other’s presence in a very friendly fashion, but seldom even talked directly with one another.” Still, they collaborated on at least one project:

My most satisfying and intimate connection with him was when I was Editor of the SUNY at Buffalo student newspaper The Spectrum. I introduced a comic strip called Suny Daze which I wrote and drew myself at the beginning, and when it was threatening to become the tail that wagged the dog of my journalistic life, I prevailed on Spain to draw it from my scripts—which, I think, makes me the first person to collaborate with him as comics artist, as well as the first to offer Spain a regular outlet in a periodical (weekly) for his work.

Even when he was doing the art work for my scripts, we seldom talked! His vision and mine meshed so smoothly, I had no reason to do anything but congratulate him and thank him each week when and even more brilliantly drawn strip than the week before appeared in The Spectrum!

I haven’t been able to find any samples of Suny Daze, though I would love to read some. Likewise, in an e-mail to me, Jeremy also mentioned Spain’s sister Cindy: “I did have two fairly deep political/cultural conversations with [Spain’s] sister, in which she mentioned her brother’s views as having a great influence on her own. From those conversations, I gathered that ‘Manny’ was more of a Marxist than I ever was, although we shared a hero-worshipping interest in Buenaventura Durriti, and some of the other populist anarchists.” Is anyone currently in touch with Cindy? I would love to read a tribute from her.

The messages that Jeremy sent to me also address the Buffalo biker culture that he and Spain shared. Let me quote extensively from an e-mail from Jeremy:

The local (Buffalo Police) “red squad” regularly harassed us both. They were convinced that Spain and I were “co-conspirators,” mainly because we both rode motorcycles, (without ever noticing that we never rode together!). All that stuff about the “Road Vultures” in Spain’s comix is true, at least to the extent that they describe events and attitudes, some of which I experienced directly, and most of which I heard about second-hand. They really were bad asses, just as Spain described.

I knew the Road Vulture “fellow traveler” Tom Bell (see page 19 of My True Story [1994]) in some ways better than Spain himself, because, although he was also loosely affiliated with the Vultures, Tom preferred riding Triumph motorcycles to Harleys (a detail that shows up in Spain’s affectionate portrait). Tom would occasionally show up riding solo at some of the same bars and other hang-outs that I also frequented occasionally, and he and I would talk—often about Spain, the comic strip, and Buffalo police/mafia gossip generally.

Later in Jeremy’s message, a note of uncertainly and critique about Spain’s involvement with the Road Vultures creeps in:

I confess that I have always wondered why Spain worked so hard to neutralize the Vultures’ notorious and inescapable racist bullshit. In retrospect, I realize that it was a stunning achievement, one that Spain must have taken some considerable pleasure in! His full, public membership in the “club” was, as far as I could see at the time, a direct result of what a brilliant, talented, uncompromisingly cheerful and tough guy Spain was. It always seemed to me that that the Vultures made a special exception, in his case, for him alone. I always wondered, why—and even how—he managed himself when their racist crap erupted in confrontation with others when Spain was physically present. I never heard any stories about that, not even from Tom Bell, whom I actually asked about it…

The main problem from my point of view was that I had no taste for the brawls and other drunken bullshit that the RVs regularly engaged in, to the extent that the few times when they showed up en masse at the same locations that I was already at, I usually saddled up, waved cheerfully to Spain (who waved back, also cheerfully), and then I rode off, only to hear days later about the fights and police actions that almost always followed.

Spain was a deeply “affiliated” biker, and I was deeply “an independent.” He rode Harleys, and I rode BMWs. He wore black leather, and I wore brown. He didn’t wear a helmet, and I did (even before it was legally mandated in New York State). We never rode together, or talked politics face-to-face, always beginning “in the middle” with the shared assumption of our mutual distaste for “fascism” in all its serpentine permutations.

I’m very grateful to Bill, Leon and Jeremy for sharing their memories, and I’m especially struck by Jeremy’s aversion to the Road Vultures—it’s easier to read about their exploits in My True Story than it was to be the real-life target of their anger and prejudice. Yet I also discovered information that made me respect Spain more than ever, especially Spain the rebel, Spain the Road Vulture who protected the HUAC protesters from the police, Spain the man who stood against The Man in my hometown.

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Charles Dallas:

Barely twenty years old, I arrived in San Francisco in 1972 with little more than a portfolio of comics I had drawn and the desire to become an underground cartoonist. My first stop was Gary Arlington’s San Francisco Comic Book Company in the Mission District. Gary must have seen something that he liked in my amateurish efforts and suggested I pay a visit to Jack Jackson. Jaxon became a generous and helpful friend and mentor, and at some point introduced me to Spain Rodriguez. Spain was a little intimidating, not because he was brilliant, opinionated, and incredibly talented; he was all those things, but always remained down to earth and was a genuinely nice guy. He was intimidating because he was one rough dude you would not want to mess with. But he was also very friendly and eager to help me develop as a cartoonist. I was just a kid, not on his talent level at all, but he was kind and supportive and eventually invited me to submit a story for his great horror anthology, Insect Fear. I remember when I showed him the artwork, he said, “Yeah, this is ok, but you have to make it more scabrous.” I had to go home and look up “scabrous” in the dictionary. Of course he was right, and he was definitely the expert when it came to making things look scabrous.

One time we sat on a panel discussion together at a small comic book convention in Cotati, California. Someone asked if it was necessary to study anatomy to draw comics. I said yes, you need that background and training before you can take off on your own. Spain said no, just do your thing. For him, that worked. He had so much talent that he did not need that reference point. Drawing for him was easy and natural and the images flowed like water from his mind’s eye, through his hand and out onto the paper. I remember being at his house and marveling at how he could sit on the floor cross-legged with a drawing board on his lap and just draw, undeterred by whatever commotion was going on around him. No preparations or fancy equipment were needed, no rituals were performed; he barely even sketched in pencil before inking. He just drew and he was the Zen master of his art.

I once mentioned to Spain how depressing it was to be between projects, unfocused and unsure of what to do next. He somewhat incredulously replied that he never had that problem, that he always had a million story ideas and couldn’t wait to finish one and move on to the next. Judging from the body of work he produced, he never lost that enthusiasm and creativity.

I hope someday he gets the credit he deserves as one of the greatest artists to ever pick up pen, brush, and ink. It was an honor to have known him. Thank you, Spain.

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M.K. Brown:

I first met Spain (he was Rod Rodriguez then) at Silvermine Guild, a small art school in Connecticut. We were about 19 and exploring what we were meant to do as artists. Neither of us actually graduated, but we certainly benefited from the variety of media and teachers the school offered. My future husband, B. Kliban, also attended Silvermine Guild, which is strange, given the school’s limited size and non-interest in cartooning at that time.

We didn’t meet again until the early ‘70s at a party in Victor Moscoso’s garden. I was introduced to a fellow named Spain, recognized his smile, and realized this bearded biker guy was Rod Rodriguez. What a happy shock! We spent a lot of time talking about art school and catching up.

Over the years, we kept in contact—at Bill Griffith and Diane Noomin’s house when Arcade Comics was forming, at comics cons, and going for a few drives in his huge Buick with zebra seat covers. He became my touchstone, someone to confer with about comics and politics and always the days at art school. We laughed about having a Silvermine Guild alumni show: Spain, M.K. Brown and B. Kliban and we actually gave it a bit of thought.

The last time we talked, a month or so ago, I thanked him for sending his latest book, Cruisin’ With the Hound. His inscription in the frontispiece was, “Hey, what are you doing in my book?” and my first reaction was, “Uh, oh.” But it was a typically generous mention in his interview with Gary Groth. He was always encouraging and supportive to other artists.

He made characters like Fred Tooté and Fissure human. They were real and stylized at the same time. The element of danger was always there which sharpened the humor of the hoods fussing with their ducktails in store windows, grousing about food. He said he had lots more stories to tell from that time.

Before we said goodbye, I invited him to come out with Susan and Nora for lunch and a walk. He said he didn’t walk much. He also said, “Susan takes good care of me.” These comments made sense later, of course, when I realized how ill he was, something he never mentioned.

I’m grateful that this lovely man had a peaceful home with Susan and Nora, of whom he was so proud, and that we have his work to remind us of his spirit. But I sure hate to really say goodbye.

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Jay Kinney:

If I’m late with my tribute to Spain, it is largely due to my having been preoccupied with finishing off two of Spain’s art jobs that had been left uncompleted when he took to bed for the last week of his life. Both were on tight deadlines and Spain kept hoping he could complete them, but rather suddenly it became clear that he was just too ill to continue.

According to Spain’s wife Susan, I was the only artist he’d approve of to do the job, which was simultaneously a great honor and a nearly impossible and intimidating task. So I spent the weekend before and the two weekends after his death being, in effect, Spain’s ghost.

The only way I could cope with what amounted to severe stage fright was to perform a kind of mind-meld with Spain and just barrel on through, working at a pace that allowed very little looking back. It was an oddly intimate way to mourn his departure, and one side effect was that it postponed it from really sinking in. Only now am I beginning to fully feel the enormous gap that he’s left behind.

I first met Spain in the fall of 1969 at the offices of the East Village Other on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. I’d just transferred to Pratt Institute from a small college in Ohio, and at the top of my list of priorities was meeting the EVO cartoonists, who were already legendary, as far as I was concerned. I took the subway from Brooklyn to the Astor Place stop, walked the block and a half to EVO’s offices above the old Fillmore East, and asked after Spain. “Oh yeah, he’s in the darkroom,” someone told me, so I penetrated that spooky space, lit only by a dim red light, and gave him my greetings. He was at the tail end of developing a Photostat and told me he’d be out in a minute or two.

When he emerged, I was confronted by an imposing figure clad in his Road Vultures colors, looking for all the world like Trashman minus the trench coat. He was gruff, but friendly, knew my work from Bijou Funnies and the Gothic Blimp Works, and gestured over at the shelves of EVO back issues and graciously told me to take what I wanted. I subsequently hauled an enormous stack of tabloids back to my art school dorm room, and reveled in all the comix that Spain, Kim Deitch, and Trina had drawn for the paper. Alas, I only saw the EVO artists a time or two that fall before they pulled up stakes and drove ’cross country to San Francisco to join the burgeoning underground comix scene. I followed the migration in 1972 and have had the privilege of friendship with Spain ever since.

I always felt that Spain was like the older brother I never had, and as the years went by, I thought of him as my best friend. I’m not sure how many others shared that notion, but he was certainly a loyal and enthusiastic friend to many of us. As a cartoonist, I earned his respect, in part, by being able to draw “good looking chicks.” Even after I largely left cartooning behind to concentrate on editing and writing, he was still supportive of my work, and there was no diminishment in our friendship.

Spain’s work ethic was second to none. He loved to draw and it’s fair to say that he lived to draw. Every time I’d stop by his place, he’d be working on a new comic story or poster or illustration job. In my opinion, he was woefully underpaid for most of these, but he was so prolific and hard-working that he somehow managed to make a living at what he loved most.

We once decided to collaborate on a story for Young Lust #7 (1990), “Slave of Ishtar”, a puckish meditation on our forays together over to the Mitchell Brothers’ Theatre, where we got to do ample “research” on female anatomy, strictly for Art’s sake, mind you. But I soon discovered that collaborating with Spain was not an easy task.

While I had envisioned inking Spain’s penciling and him inking mine, I discovered that Spain didn’t really do pencils. He did the roughest of sketchy penciling and then did all the tight detailing as he inked. His art was all in his head — full-blown — and I was mostly relegated to co-authoring the story, lettering it, pacing and layouts, and some background detailing. Spain had no problem working from others’ scripts or layouts, but his real pleasure was in carving out his stylish universe with pen and brush. In the end, it was difficult to distinguish between our collaborative strip and a solo Spain strip. Spain’s artistic vision was constant, unwavering, and dominant. Imagine trying to collaborate with Niagara Falls, and you’ll get the picture.

Spain was, when all was said and done, an unrepentant Stalinist who believed in the need for “strong leaders” in revolutionary situations. At the same time, he was not dogmatic about it and was open-minded toward competing left currents, particularly anarchism. When I came up with the idea for Anarchy Comics c. 1978, he was a strong supporter of the project and perhaps the most consistent mainstay of the comix series.

When Anarchy Comics: The Complete Collection (PM Press) finally came out this late fall, the publisher brought over printed copies on Nov. 28th. My first impulse was to rush a copy over to Spain, by now confined to his bed. It was only then that I found out that he’d died that same morning at 7 AM.

So long, my brother. We’re all missing you, like you can’t believe. It was an honor and a privilege to have you as a friend. If, by some fluke, there is an afterlife, I fully expect to see you again, still drawing comics for the underground press in Heaven, and still challenging God to strike you down if He really exists.

In his comics, though, he alternates between observer and innovator, a cartoonist who on one hand can create minutely observed, sometimes inexplicable human dramas (“Minutiae”, “Portrait of Ella”), and on the other hand is capable of producing work that changes the way a reader thinks about the page, or even the purpose of comics (“The Raven”, his “Pear” series, his various Ulysses-related projects).

David’s new book, created in collaboration with writer and colorist Frank Young, is The Carter Family: Don’t Forget This Song. Its publication represents the culmination of half a decade of work on the part of both men, some of which I was fortunate enough to observe or participate in, both as an early reader at the rough-draft thumbnail stage, and later as a pinch-hitter inker on several dozen pages. David and I sat down for a few hours one recent weekend to discuss the book in the context of his two decades worth of innovative minicomics and short stories.

SEAN MICHAEL ROBINSON: What did you think when you opened the book for the first time?

DAVID LASKY: Well, I was pretty psyched. I had a lot of anxiety after working three and a half, four years. Did we screw something up?

It was such a relief to open it up and see it looks good, the paper is great, the production’s great. It exceeded my expectations and gave me a lot of relief.

ROBINSON: I had a book come out this year, and when I got the advances, the first thing I did was look through it to look for printing errors and misspellings and stuff.

LASKY: Frank’s been through it and found a few minor errors but it’s nothing to have a headache over. I feel like whatever errors got through, we did our best effort to try and catch them. Did you find stuff in your book that drove you crazy?

ROBINSON: Yeah. Really minor. For the most part it looks exactly like I hoped it would, which is good. Of course, there’s a lot of frustration on the road to that satisfaction.

LASKY: Every publisher I work with, I find something that’s disappointing and I’m frustrated, but then I hear about someone else’s publisher or read some story about some horrible thing that happened to a creator, I’m like, oh, I’m so lucky. [Laughs.]

ROBINSON: Would you consider yourself an optimist then?

LASKY: Yeah.

Robinson: You’ve had a fairly long career, but a lot of your peers have had much different trajectories. I think of Matt Madden and Jessica Abel and Tom Hart and people that were part of the same scene. For people that didn’t read many comics then or who weren’t really dialed into that scene, this might seem to be your debut work. Is that a strange feeling to you?

LASKY: It feels a little overdue, but it’s also a good feeling. Are we on tape now?

ROBINSON: Yeah.

LASKY: Let me formulate a better answer. [Laughter.] I never wanted to rush putting out a book just to have a book out. If I did it, I wanted it to be something I was really happy with. And this is something I’m really happy with. I think I maybe just move a little slower than some of my peers. And I have other peers who are still just making the occasional minicomic and who look at this book as something really amazing. Whereas up here, Ed Brubaker is a huge celebrity in comics. We all have our own pace we’re moving at. I don’t really feel too … I mean, it feels overdue, but at the same time I don’t feel self-conscious about not having done a book earlier.

ROBINSON: I guess I was wondering how much you think that has to do with the self-promotional aspects of it, the small scene that comics is in terms of networking. You see people that are very good at taking what cachet they do have and spending it out into something else.

LASKY: I’m not a huge self-promoter. I did do conventions through the late ’90s, and got little bits of attention and made a lot of friends. But there were certain people who just had the luck of having the right editor passing by their table or the right agent seeing their work and that just never happened for me. I was not the kind of person who would seek out those editors or agents and I didn’t know how to find them, or I didn’t even know that they existed, really. It was only by 2007, after my peers had moved to New York or were getting published and had contacts in the publishing world, that I visited New York and was informed that everybody has an agent and these publishers are really interested in graphic novels. Living in Seattle I was clueless to all of that.

ROBINSON: That was definitely the peak of the bubble as far as that goes, right? People like David Heatley getting like a $50,000 advance or whatever.

LASKY: I totally missed that train, or I heard about it as it was leaving the station. I just enjoy doing the work and getting it out there. The promotion is something that I’ll do to a certain degree, but like a lot of artists I’m not entirely comfortable aggressively going after a deal or contacting editors and saying, “Hey, so, how about publishing this?”

ROBINSON: Of your peers from that wave of American comics, it’s hard to think of much work that’s as satisfying as your best stuff. I think about the 24-hour comic you did that’s supposedly titled “Minutiae”, but it says …

LASKY: “Four Alarm Orgasm.”

First page of “Minutiae”

ROBINSON: Yeah. I mean, a piece like that, or I think about Tom Hart’s best stuff too, like the first Hutch Owen book. Those are things that are just really strong conceptually and are strong thematically and have more resonance to me than most of the work that was coming out at the same time. And I was surprised that you didn’t have a book earlier, or that someone didn’t come up to you and say, we want a book-length version of this.

LASKY: I’ll confess that someone did come up to me.

ROBINSON: Oh really?

LASKY: Brett Warnock at Top Shelf has been coming up to me for years, saying, “Dave, let’s do a Lasky collection,” and I just wasn’t ready. I haven’t been ready to collect stuff until now. I can’t explain why. It’s what I was just saying: if I wanted a book put together I wanted it to be something really good that I was happy with. I was very honored and flattered that Brett continually would say, “Let’s do a Lasky book.” But the sense that I got was that there was this rush to get it to press, and I would see my peers often put out books that — I’d just read it as three of four minicomics, and now it’s a squarebound book, and was it worth making into a book?

When it’s a minicomic you can take certain risks and there’s no danger. It’s a low-budget operation. But when it becomes a book some publisher is putting up a lot of money and then it’s out there in bookstores and libraries and it’s representing alternative comics to the world. And if it’s not a very good book, I cringe. “Oh, why did they put that out?” I’m not saying that my peers put out a lot of bad books. I think there’s a lot of great books. But if I put out a book I want it to be my best thing possible. So I have had publishers express interest, but … partly I wasn’t ready, partly I felt they were maybe just overeager, or maybe were gonna put out something that wasn’t my best material.

ROBINSON: Would you call yourself a cautious person?

LASKY: Obviously in this situation of putting out a book, I’ve been very cautious. I think when the stakes are lower and I’m just making a zine or a minicomic, I can throw caution to the wind and say, “Let’s make something totally crazy,” and make ten copies of it. And then I can really experiment in that situation. But if I’m playing around with someone else’s money, I don’t want to be so crazy or experimental.

ROBINSON: You touched on this a little bit in “Portrait of Ella”, but I was curious what your fine-arts background is, because it seems like a lot of your minicomics, especially, are really strong conceptually.

LASKY: I went through a liberal arts college, William and Mary in Virginia, and got a bachelor’s degree in fine arts with a minor in English, which I thought was a good combination for doing comics. It was a very traditional school; they didn’t have a comics class or program, they didn’t even have a photography class because they thought that’s too vocational, and “We want to teach the fine arts here.” I was in a very 19th century fine-arts program, where we would look at Van Gogh, but beyond him we were looking at very few 20th century artists. We were just learning the very basics of figure drawing and still life, which was a fantastic education for me as an artist, as a draftsperson. It gave me good eye for looking at the world, and it helped a lot in making comics.

And the minor in English, I tended to gravitate toward classes that were more in the 19th and 20th century. I especially got to love modern novels and modern writers of the early 20th century. James Joyce became a huge influence, though I didn’t like his work at first. It grew on me. I think everything he did with themes and metaphors in Ulysses informed my earlier comics, and even up to the Carter family book there’s a whole lot of Joyce influence.

ROBINSON: How so?

LASKY: Picking the 1930s comics style and blending it with my own style. Part of my admiration for Joyce is the way he picked other literary styles and combined them with his writing. In one of his chapters, he’s imitating the style of popular novels. So it’s “bad” writing, but he’s putting enough of himself in that it’s really good writing. That’s the kind of thing I strive for when I’m doing a different style of art, as in The Carter Family.

One reason I think I’m not more well known is that I didn’t come up having a certain style and sticking with that style, so people look and say, “Oh, that’s a Lasky.” Maybe people do that, but for each project I pick a different style, and there’s a certain way I draw that I can’t avoid, but I try to bend that as far as I can toward a certain look that serves the project itself. And I think that’s been a drawback as far as marketing goes.

ROBINSON: So what I’m picking out as a conceptual art influence is more of a modernist fiction influence. When I look at your Ulysses mini, what’s interesting about it to me is that the concept itself — the idea itself — is the most valuable thing. Do you know what I mean? The fact that you thought, “I’m going to adapt a thousand-page book of incredibly dense, experimental prose into a twelve-page minicomic.”

The fact that you made that conceptual leap is the value of it. If you just tell some about that they almost get the effect that you actually do from reading it. And then actually executing it is the icing on the cake. But if you gave the comic to someone who didn’t know who James Joyce was, didn’t know what Ulysses was, and asked them to read it, they might be amused by some of the drawings, but they’re not necessarily going to get the actual effect of it. In other words, the object itself, the fact of its existence is the important thing. To me that sounds like a kind of ultra-modernist art move.

LASKY: Well Ulysses specifically just came out of having the book assigned in a college class, and I’m a very visual person and the book is a very textual book, and it wasn’t helping me — it wasn’t painting any pictures for me. It was saying, “Come into this world of words and luxuriate in the words and the way they sound and bounce against each other.” And that was hard for me, and I just thought, “Why isn’t there a comic-book version of this to help me?”

I later figured out that is good marketing, to find a need and fill it. And I ended up the year after college starting on this adaptation. I was just doing it for my own benefit, and then I discovered that there were thousands of people out there who also wanted a visual, a comic book basically, of Ulysses. I guess because I was working in minicomics—that was all I was doing at the time—that was the format to do this in. And I got the humor of “Let’s condense it as far as possible.” If I had got the idea now I might say, “Let’s do a graphic novel.” But at the time, the minicomic was my format. I got the joke of it, but I wasn’t prepared for other people getting the joke. I wrote this intro without really thinking about it. “Some details had to be left out.” I see people pick up the book and that intro is what cracks them up and the rest of it, I had to execute it and I did a lot of research to get it all correct. But that notice is the real joke of the thing. It’s one of many things where I just wrote it, almost with a straight face and then realize, “Oh, people think that’s funny.” [Laughter.]

The first page of Ulysses.

ROBINSON: Do you find things are like that in your daily life as well?

LASKY: Sometimes I’ll make a comment or have a conversation at work and not realize that people are cracking up over what I’m saying. Once I was in this office job and the vice president of the company came down to my part of the office and was bantering to me, and I was just bantering back at him, and I was like the lowest guy on the totem pole, and I didn’t care that this was the vice president. And after he left my supervisor was like, “David I can’t believe how you were talking to the vice president.” But at the time it didn’t register that I was doing anything wrong or funny or …

ROBINSON: Is that ever disconcerting?

LASKY: I think I’m kind of socially dysfunctional that way. It’s maybe why I’m not able to play the game very well of marketing my work, because I don’t take things seriously, I don’t know that I’m supposed to take certain things seriously, or I don’t know how to talk to serious people, maybe. I’m slowly learning these things as I age.

ROBINSON: So you have built up a framework around certain interactions that helps you navigate them a little bit differently? You say you’re learning– what does that entail?

LASKY: Learning how to have a serious conversation when the occasion merits it, I guess. Not banter with somebody if they’re speaking seriously. When I was a teenager and in my early twenties I couldn’t take anything very seriously. A lot of people in college suddenly get serious and go, “Now it’s time for me to wear a suit and go out and get that job.” I was an art student and I never had that moment. It’s probably arrested development.

Life forced me eventually to get serious and try to hold down a job, but I’m kind of in slow motion doing that thing that other people did in college of getting serious and being a professional. I think I just wanted to devote my energies toward becoming an artist. I think a lot of artists are this way — the serious stuff is just a necessary evil that we deal as minimally as we can and then we get back to creating the art.

(continued)

S. Clay Wilson by Tim Forcade, 1969.

Dante’s Limbo–technically the first circle of hell–includes many of the great heroes, thinkers, and creative minds of ancient Greece and Rome as well as such medieval non-Christians as Saladin, Sultan of Egypt in the late twelfth century, and the great Islamic philosophers Avicenna (Ibn Sina) and Averroës (Ibn Rushd), along with many of the major figures from the Hebrew Bible.

He’s now a “kinder, gentler S. Clay Wilson” according to his wife Lorraine Chamberlain, not the loud, boisterous, hell raiser he once was.

“He’s more tender and sensitive and loving now and more demonstrative than he was before,” she says. “I make sure he knows that I love him. I try to make him laugh. It’s my goal every morning at breakfast to crack him up, or tell him an interesting story about something, or read him poems, postcards or emails people have sent. It’s one of the times of day I try to engage him and make him feel happy and get his brain going, make him feel good.”

Wilson’s favorite word is still “No!” He used to be a motor mouth but now he’s mostly monosyllabic. After a long life dedicated to being the baddest boy in comix, he’s become a grand old man, but he’s no longer in his right mind. He used to be able to out-talk, out-booze, out-cuss, out-draw, and outrage almost anyone but he doesn’t drink, smoke, snort or draw dirty pictures any more. He doesn’t walk much either and seldom leaves the house, and only in a wheelchair. He used to start each day answering a stack of correspondence with a variety of pens, rubber stamps and assorted collage materials, and then spend each day listening to talk radio while diligently drawing comics and commissions in his small home studio. Now he watches movies on TV while lying on the couch or in his hospital bed. The last drawing he did was over two years ago. He hasn’t been out to a comic convention or art gallery or movie theater for a long time. Once an active, exuberant, larger than life phenomenon, he is now a shadow of that former irrepressible self. There’s a pall of depression in his jam-packed man cave on 16^th Street, where he’s made his home for more than thirty years. Nearly everything he’s ever owned is in that place, including his Cub Scout uniform and his favorite Raleigh bicycle. Everything except his artwork. He usually sold it and shipped it off as soon as it was completed. Only a few of his last pieces remain. Hardly anyone stops by to visit these days and it’s definitely not as much fun as it used to be.

*                        *                        *                        *                        *                        *

In 1968 Wilson’s friend Gus moved him and his lady Nadra to San Francisco in a VW bus, but in Wilson’s imagination, he was roaring into town with the Checkered Demon and the Hog Riding Fools to kick start his career in the underground movement. He’d been an anomaly in his native Nebraska, and he couldn’t rustle up the large audience he craved in Lawrence, Kansas, but after years of honing his chops and formulating his attitude, he was ready to “let slip the dogs of war” in the big city. By the end of his first year in the Bay Area, he and his bold new artist friends Crumb and Moscoso and Griffin had achieved worldwide fame with Zap Comix, which succeeded in shocking, delighting, and dismaying readers everywhere, thanks in part to Wilson’s psychotic comic landscapes, peopled with pirates and perverts, dicks and dirks – the complete antithesis to common decency and restraint. He just didn’t listen to that same inner censor that lets most of us know when we’ve gone too far. That was a valued asset in those days of rebellion.

“I have this morbid fascination with deviancy and I like drawing it,” Wilson once said. “I find it entertaining. I’m sure a shrink would have a field day trying to figure out why I did it. I just find it fun. People can take it or leave it.”

1977 Wilson image from Zap.

Over the next forty years he created a copious stream of work that continually explored the extreme boundaries of human nature. His draftsmanship and literary skills increased in complexity and subtlety, as his fertile imagination guided his archetypal characters through lustful intrigues and convoluted plotlines set in a mythic place somewhere between the Wild West and the Barbary Coast.

Wilson felt an affinity for tall tales and yarns, a trait he claimed he inherited from his hillbilly ancestors. “I think a comic strip, like jazz, is pretty American. The variations of how much stuff you can cram into a comic strip or how far you can stretch the envelope in a form of music or a comic strip is pretty endless, you’re limited only by your imagination. You get aesthetic debates and nuances of details and shit. But just draw the motherfucker and argue later.”

Wilson led a celebrated life as an iconoclast cartoonist of the first rank, but it all came to a bad turn on a dark and stormy night on Landers Street, a few blocks shy of making it home safe just after Halloween 2008. Some Good Samaritans discovered him lying in the rain gutter between two parked cars and called an ambulance, but never identified themselves. At the hospital they diagnosed him with massive brain trauma and he spent a few weeks in a coma on life support. Some people said he was mugged, others thought he fell down and hid his head. He had his wallet and watch and only his head was injured, so a mugging seems less likely. He rallied, and his friends thought he was going to recover, but the progress didn’t last and his health deteriorated. “He got better for a while and then that was the end of getting better and now it’s a slow decline,” said Lorraine.

Some of his visitors saw signs of his sense of humor returning. When Grux Faustini visited him at the hospital he took note of some of Wilson’s odd new expressions.

“You have great skin, don’t let ‘em talk you out of it.”

“Where do you usually get your pens?”

“I build them, they gotta be about 8 feet tall!”

“Can you get me one?”

“There’s the rub. I need to get 10 pieces of lumber, a crate of ink and most importantly  MOHNAY. I need the bread up front sister. See what you can do.”

Wilson asked Lorraine to bring his art supplies to Laguna Honda Hospital and he made a few drawings – some watercolors and a ten-page Checkered Demon story for Zap #16.

“The talk bubbles were real odd,” she said. “Sometimes they didn’t make any sense, but some of the drawing was really fantastic. I was amazed.” In Wilson’s new compositions his characters stood around wondering what to do. His muscle memory put them on paper, but they stood in silent rows, holding their dicks in their hands.

After a year of slow and difficult physical rehabilitation, the doctors finally said he could go home with Lorraine. “When I brought Wilson back he said, you have a very nice home here. He didn’t recognize it and I realized he wouldn’t have noticed if I moved anything. It’s sort of like an old museum of Wilson. Even though I would like to change it and clear off all these surfaces I don’t have the heart to do it because it’s Wilson’s stuff. I try to treat all this with respect for him. I only want him to have a comfortable happy life as long as he can.”

The Wilson – Chamberlain wedding.

S. Clay Wilson and Lorraine Chamberlain were married on August 10, 2010. “We’ve always really liked each other,” she said. Sparks flew when they first met at the Blue Moon Tavern in Seattle in 1969. “I always thought he has the funniest, most interesting fertile mind and I kind of like it that he’s sentimental too. There’s a whole side to him that’s very sweet. He was always saying that he’s asked me to marry him a thousand times, and I’ve always said I wouldn’t marry him if he were the last man on the planet. He liked that challenge. I decided to get married to him because it’s always something we talked about and because I wanted him to know that I would always take care of him. Marrying him meant I wouldn’t just up and leave him. I would take care of him.”

*                        *                        *                        *                        *                        *

Wilson’s boldness and artistry inspired artists of his own generation as well as countless younger cartoonists who came after him. He enjoyed telling stories, celebrating life, and holding forth and always had opinions as audacious as his sexual imagery.

“I love that aspect of him, especially considering he’s a cartoonist,” said Jim Blanchard. “You look at the young modern cartoonists and none of them are anything like that. He’s this boisterous big tall drunkard guy, party animal. The Zap guys and the underground people in particular were so different from your alternative cartoonists nowadays. They’re all so mild and meek. They’re not beer drinking fun loving guys. They would never get on a Harley or get into a fistfight or anything like that.”

Jim Blanchard and S. Clay Wilson.

“Sex sells and I like drawing dirty pictures,” Wilson told High Times in 1983. “I think some people who are offended are reacting to their own reactions. The drawing they see is a key that goes to the eyeball keyhole. Click! A door flies open and stuff they’ve been suppressing flies out, right? It unlocks their own repressed bogeyman or skeletons in their mental closets and this is upsetting to them, because they’ve been repressing it and the drawings are a springboard for that chain reaction. Sidewalk psychology, but I think it’s true.”

In an application for a Guggenheim grant in 1999 he wrote “Throughout my career I have had to constantly defend my art work against critics who wish to censor it because of its depiction of aberrant imagery. My work, for example, was seized and burned in December 1991 by the Royal Mounted Canadian Police (This is Dynamite in Taboo #5) because its imagery was considered too obscene and violent for importation to Canada. It upsets me that some critics wish to censor and go so far as to destroy my artwork because of its subject matter. People are shocked that I, as an artist, would choose to depict the themes that I do. I am not the characters I draw, I am the artist that draws the characters or, in other words, just because I depict evil does not mean that I am evil.”

In a 1998 interview with me he talked about the legacy of his underground comix. “I think this stuff will become more important. I think history will sort it out and give it its proper place, primarily on how it’s influenced people’s thought and artwork, other artists. I think that’s the crux. That will make it historical or pivotal by the influence it has had, or the innovations it’s created, or the inspirations it’s caused. I think it’s already in gear, but how far do you go back? To EC? It’s like we’re carrying it on.  EC did it for me, like we’re doing it for the next batch of cartoonists, like passing the baton in a race. Here’s the historical big pen or whatever you want to call it. It’s passed on.”

He was a gentleman and an intellectual when he was sober. He was hell on wheels when he started doing shots with a beer back. There was very little middle ground in Wilson’s world. You loved him or hated him, but if he decided you were his friend, he was loyal to the end. He didn’t keep records or plan far ahead. He didn’t see a rainy day as an opportunity for savings, but as a chance to wear one of his many stylish hats. He was a creature of habit who could sometimes be totally unpredictable. He was able to make a decent living as an artist but now he’s dependant on the largesse of bureaucratic agencies and the kindness of his friends and fans who donate to the S. Clay Wilson Special Needs Trust. (www.scwilson.com)

Lorraine cooks, cleans, and cares for Wilson 24/7. She had a botched spinal surgery a few years back but doesn’t have time to take care of her own painful medical problems. When Wilson got back from the hospital last summer after his recent brain surgery, he’d lost much of his mobility, she said. She hired a part time caretaker so she can get out of the house to run errands, buy groceries, and meet appointments at Medicaid and Social Security offices. Wilson doesn’t like strangers in the house. “Get away from me,” he shouts at a woman who comes twice a week as she tries to get him to take his medicine. When Lorraine arrives back home with the groceries, she greets him warmly. “Hello Darling. Do you still love me?” “Yes,” he answers, reaching for her. “As long as we love each other, nothing else matters,” she tells him. True romantics until the cows come home. If only life were that sweet and simple.

“It’s become a difficult activity to envision the future now because Wilson is not getting better,” she admits.

*                        *                        *                        *                        *                        *

I’m currently writing S. Clay Wilson’s biography and editing his retrospective. I thought I knew a lot about him when I started on this a year ago, but I’ve discovered much more about the real Steven Wilson behind the bluster and theatrics after talking to so many of his buddies, colleagues, former girlfriends, school chums, publishers, etc. He was still on an upward spiral when his life changed and his art ended – and his income with it. As with many tragedies, we may ultimately only have ourselves to blame, but it’s a sad last act for one of the 20^th century’s great artists, who ought to be recognized in his lifetime for his contribution to art and artistic freedom.

“I guess I’m going to remain cult all my life and never cross that bridge to chic-ness, but I’m still selling artwork. What would be nice is some medical insurance or a cottage someplace, you know.” - S. Clay Wilson

Photo by Rebecca Gwyn Wilson.

Haunt of Fear #8 ©1951 William M. Gaines.

The Journal has learned that legendary EC writer/editor Al Feldstein and the estate of Mad editor/cartoonist Harvey Kurtzman have filed notices to reclaim the copyrights on their work. Feldstein confirmed the filing and told the Journal he has already reached a settlement with the William M. Gaines Agency, which owns all the EC horror, science-fiction and crime properties that Feldstein worked on as editor and writer in the early 1950s. Those titles include the classic Crypt of Terror, Vault of Horror, Tales from the Crypt, Haunt of Fear, Weird Fantasy and Weird Science. Gaines agency administrator Dorothy Crouch confirmed the agency has reached an agreement with Feldstein, but declined to comment further.

Harvey Kurtzman was the mastermind behind the launch of Mad, which began life in 1952 as a comic book before changing to a magazine format with its 24^th issue in 1955. Literary agent and publisher Denis Kitchen confirmed that papers have been filed to reclaim the copyrights for the Kurtzman estate. The Gaines agency no longer owns Mad, however, having sold the property to Time/Warner/DC. Kitchen told the Journal the relevant parties are in early stages of negotiation, but declined to make any further public comment.

The claims filed by Feldstein and the Kurtzman estate are based on the Copyright Law of 1976, the same law that allowed Jerry Siegel’s estate to reclaim its share of the Superman copyrights. The law was intended to address the fact that, over the years, the terms of copyrights have been extended again and again, giving them a value far beyond the compensation originally paid to authors. The extensions have kept properties like Mickey Mouse from falling into the public domain. When Siegel and Shuster sold their rights to Superman, the initial term of a copyright was 28 years. When that term expired, the copyrights could be renewed for another 28 years. The Copyright Law of 1976 and the 1992 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act allowed copyright terms to be further extended, but provided that authors could reclaim their copyrights whenever they came up for renewal by the corporate owner.

That opportunity, however, is only extended to authors who created the property independently and then sold the rights. If a property is created under the direction of an employer, then it is considered work for hire and the employing company is considered the “author” of the work for copyright purposes. In recent cases, creators or their estates, including Marv Wolfman and the Jack Kirby estate, have found it hard to prove their work was created beyond or outside the terms of their employment. Even Siegel’s estate, which obtained a ruling in its favor in 2009, is still fighting appeals by Time/Warner/DC.

The papers filed by the Kurtzman estate call for the termination of DC’s copyrights for the entirety of Mad #1-7.  The termination of the copyrights on issue #1 is to take effect in July of 2013, with the terminations for each subsequent issue taking effect every two months