As I write this introduction, Harry Nordlinger’s Shadows Over Springfield has just concluded its fifth episode. The story—a black & white pastiche of vintage episodes of The Simpsons—unfolded, one page at a time, over the course of a week on Nordlinger’s Instagram account. It is almost entirely wordless. In its 22 panels, there are only three lines of dialogue, two of which are quotes plucked directly from the show's 1990s golden age. The silence itself is the story: the presence of an unsettling, inexpressible discomfort permeates from the opening panels, and builds steadily and unbearably with each day’s reveal. If we did not know going into Shadows Over Springfield that horror is Nordlinger’s stock in trade, we would understand it intuitively by the story’s end.
Nordlinger hasn’t been in the comics scene for long, but in the four years since he made his self-published debut with Softer Than Sunshine #1, a 2020 self-published collection of vignettes, he has emerged rapidly as one of the most skillful practitioners of a certain kind of horror in independent comics. There is surprisingly little gore in a Harry Nordlinger comic, and virtually none of the anarchic style that tends to characterize underground cartooning in general. It’s not so much that Nordlinger is averse to blood as he is fascinated by the leadup to bloodletting: his work exists in a perpetual state of rising tension, a near-boiling teapot that we hope against all odds will never start to whistle.
This owes much to the fact that Nordlinger has either learned, or innately possesses, a feel for pacing and rhythm in his storytelling that is often absent from self-taught cartoonists operating outside the mainstream. His work eschews the wild imagery of his '70s influences like Richard Corben, Greg Irons and Rick Veitch. His tools are deceptively simple: the neatly-ruled panel frame; the static figure; a single character, face forward, shown in medium close-up; the empty, silent progression of an action slowly, awfully coming to its end.
Of late, Nordlinger is proving himself to be more than an anthologist. Night Cruising–published last year through Floating World as Nordlinger’s first standalone collected story, and his first released through a press other than his own–was a dramatic step forward for the cartoonist: a slow drumbeat of mounting dread sounded over the bright spotlights and deep shadows of the L.A. freeway system. It reads as the work of a craftsman who is stepping out of his apprenticeship and entering his creative spring. We are, I think, on on the cusp of seeing Nordlinger produce something truly great, and I don’t think it will be long in coming.
One final, tangential note. At one point during the conversation that follows, I remarked to Nordlinger that many of the rising star cartoonists I have spoken to entered the field during or just after 2020. This, he pointed out to me, is not a coincidence: it was the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic stimulus, which provided a whole crop of cartoonists with the financing and latitude to create the projects that made their names. This realization has haunted me since our conversation. It suggests that there are hundreds, thousands of talented artists, writers, musicians - creators of every stripe, whose genius we will never know about simply for want of government support of the arts in these United States. It is appropriate that in a conversation about horrors, this has been the most unsettling one of all.
-Zach Rabiroff
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ZACH RABIROFF: I realized, Harry, that I don’t actually know where you’re speaking to me from. Where are you living these days?
HARRY NORDLINGER: San Francisco. I've been in the city for 10 years this year, but I've lived in the Bay Area my whole life. I grew up in Palo Alto, I went to college in Washington, but mostly I've just been around here.
Palo Alto - so you grew up in a college town. What did your parents do?
My dad worked in tech and my mom worked at Stanford, actually.
What was it like growing up there?
It was sick. I mean, Palo Alto was a cool place to be a teenager in the 2000s. You could bike everywhere. Everyone smoked weed. It was a very chill, kind of upper middle-class hippie type of vibe. But my dad and so many of my friends’ parents all lost their jobs in 2008. And then, basically, tech became a young person's industry, and that whole generation of tech workers all were out of work for decades. So my parents had to sell the house and leave Palo Alto, as did most of my friends' parents. And now it's just an ultra-gentrified millionaire mall. If you go down there, the whole town's like a tech campus.
What kind of student were you?
Bad. I almost got held back in seventh grade. I had really bad OCD, anxiety and depression, so I just would, like, not do work and not care. And I was always on different medications. I've never been a good student my entire life. I was just really into making comics, and I would draw comics in class and stuff. And I got-- this is a classic cartoonist story. I got sent to a counselor in seventh grade, because a teacher saw the comics I was drawing, and she was horrified by them. She thought I was going to be a school shooter.
What was in those comics?
Oh, it was so cheesy. I was really into Jhonen Vasquez. You know him? The guy who did Johnny the Homicidal Maniac. So it was a Jhonen Vasquez ripoff comic. It was about a beaver that murdered people. It’s stupid, I was an edgy 12-year old goth kid. And I remember my mom-- not crying, but being really upset and being, like, “They're going to ask me one day how I didn't see the signs!” They thought I was going to be a school shooter, essentially. [Laughs] Which was, you know - give me a little credit, Jesus Christ. I was never violent. I was a normal guy. I just liked gross, scary art.
How early did you start drawing?
The first comic I ever made, I was 6. I was really into Calvin and Hobbes and Captain Underpants. And in Captain Underpants, there’s a bunch of third graders who make comics who are the main characters. And that's when I realized, oh, I can make a comic. Like, that's something that a kid could do. So I drew a comic called "Hyper Man." That was my superhero parody. It was a superhero that was really bad at being a superhero. And then my friend Dylan got into it, and we made a whole team called the Super Gang. There was one guy called, like, Fat Man, who was a really fat, and he would fart. It was comics that an 8-year old would make.
I mean, you could have gotten Al Feldstein to run it.
Dude, I found them all in my mom's storage locker a couple months ago. It was really cool to see them all.
Which is funny, because it sounds like she was horrified by your comics, but she was also saving them.
Well, she loved that I was artistic. My parents are mostly supportive. They loved that I was artsy. They loved that I was always making stuff, and trying to tell stories. My brother and I would make movies all the time, but then [our mom] would always watch them or read [my comics], and be upset at what they were.
I’m fascinated by all of this, because it sounds like the seeds of your later work might be in this stuff that you made as a kid. But when did you start going from these MAD magazine superhero parodies to more twisted kinds of art?
Well, the Super Gang - there was actually some twisted stuff in there. I was always into horror, although I was also very scared. I was a very scared kid. Like, I would not be able to sleep at night. I would see a trailer for a horror movie, or I'd see a DVD cover of a horror movie, and it would freak me out. But I was fascinated. So we'd go to the video store and I would go just look at all the horror covers knowing that I was too scared to watch the movie, or we'd go to the bookstore and I would go look at all the horror novel covers. And I remember actually being really affected by these H. P. Lovecraft John Jude Palencar book covers, which I just posted about recently, that are really nightmarish. And I was 5 or 6 when I saw them.
Then I watched The Simpsons' “Treehouse of Horror” specials. Those were the bloodiest, goriest things I'd ever seen. I remember the zombie one and the one where the teachers are eating all the kids really affecting me. So I made an actual two-part comic, which was pretty advanced for the time, of the Super Gang fighting a zombie army. I was probably 9 when I made that. And that was the first horror, gory thing I ever did.
I’m not surprised that you brought up “Treehouse of Horror,” because obviously The Simpsons has a pretty large influence on your work - both directly, in Shadows Over Springfield, but also in the mix of horror and comedy that I see in a lot of your comics. It sounds like that came into your work very early.
Yeah, I guess so. You're right. Because Super Gang, I was 9 when I made that, and that was definitely a horror comedy. And then I was probably 12 when I discovered Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, which in retrospect are not very good comics, but when I was 12 they were the greatest thing I'd ever seen in my life. And looking back on them-- the art is still really good, but the writing is so late '90s edgelord. But for a 12-year old in the early 2000s, that was perfection. And that balance - where it's so gory, and it's so horrifying, and it's so existentially dreadful that it becomes absurd in an almost Far Side way.
And I think that was fascinating to me because I'd always been such a scared kid. Like I truly couldn't sleep. I would sleep in front of the TV, I would sleep in my parents' bed. I was traumatized by night fears my entire life, which is why that movie Skinamarink had such an effect on me, because it recreated that for me. So then, to see horror recontextualized as a joke and to be something to laugh at, I think was subconsciously empowering in that I'm like, “Oh, you can take all the stuff that is scary, and you can make it into a joke, and maybe you can overcome it in that way.”
So, in a sense, the humor helps exorcise the fear and horror.
That’s probably what it was, because I got into the parodies of horror before I got into real dark, scary horror.
Were there other influences that had a big effect on you?
Basically, the timeline of my interest in stuff is Calvin and Hobbes and Captain Underpants when I first started drawing comics around age 6. Then when I was 9, I saw the Spider-Man movie with Tobey Maguire, and I loved it. And I was like, “I want to read some Spider-Man comics,” because I’d never read a superhero comic. So I got really into the original Steve Ditko [The Amazing] Spider-Man, the '60s ones. And I read a bunch of superhero comics, but specifically the Silver Age because I just loved the art so much. And those are still my favorite superhero comics that have ever been made.
The Silver Age in general, or Ditko in particular?
Both, but Ditko’s Spider-Man is probably, as far as a classic superhero comic goes - I don't think it gets better than that, art-wise. And the fact that he understood that a superhero should be a soap opera, which is what makes it so good. Around 12, 13, I had the triple punch of-- I read Watchmen, I read Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, and I read Ghost World. And that was essentially my graduation into adult comics, where I'm like, I still like superheroes, but this is what adults are reading. They read Watchmen. Watchmen blew my mind when I was 12, even though I only understood maybe a quarter of it. Just the storytelling and visuals really affected me.
And then Jhonen Vasquez and Daniel Clowes, I was like, oh, now this is what I'm into. I am now an indie comics guy, that's what's up. I read Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, and then I basically ripped it off: I got this little notebook, and I filled the notebook up with pages of my surreal road trip comic that was just a knockoff of Like a Velvet Glove in Cast Iron. And I never finished it, but I hope that's in the storage unit somewhere, because that would be an interesting one to find. Then I read Charles Burns and Al Columbia, and my love of '90s Fantagraphics kind of took over. And the other Alan Moore - I think I read From Hell when I was 17. And that also had a huge effect on me.
Were you taking any formal art classes, or were you just kind of teaching yourself?
I did very basic, high school level Art 101 stuff. When I was 9, 10, 11, I got all these Christopher Hart 'how to draw comics' books. He did, like, how to draw scary villains, how to draw dynamic superheroes. They were these very simple, cartoony, three-step processes, and I would just copy all of those. Then when I was 16, I applied to a school called Oxbow in Napa, which is a one-semester art boarding school. And I got in, and it was, to this day, the best academic experience I've ever had in my life. It was truly incredible. I went and lived at this campus in Napa. There were only, like, 40 students, and we all lived in the studios and made art for a semester. We did also do science and math and stuff, but predominantly just focused on art, and the stuff I learned, practically, was amazing. Living in basically a commune was the most inspiring and influential period of academic learning I've ever had in my life. And then I went to college, and it was so disappointing compared to that.
What were you studying in college?
I studied literature in Washington for a few years, and then I dropped out and went to art school in San Francisco for a while, and I dropped out of the art school. I remember [thinking], this sucks compared to how cool Oxbow was, because I learned a lot of practical information [at Oxbow]. It’s a very technical art school where they're like, this is how you shade, this is figure drawing, this is how anatomy works. Very practical information. But the school operates like a scam. It's essentially a real estate scam, and they've actually been sued by the city multiple times for, like, unsafe housing. And I basically got slum-lorded by them, where they put you in these dorms that cost way too much money. So it was a terrible school as far as the setup of it goes. And all the students were video game and anime nerds. It's a weird community. Wasn't my jam. But I learned some practical stuff, and then eventually I just realized I hate school. I had a full-time job, and I would do work and then get paid, and then I would do a bunch of homework and not get paid. And I'm like, why am I doing this? It never clicked for me.
When you went to art school, was it comics specifically you were thinking about, or just art in general?
I knew I was doing comics. I've known that since I was 12 or so. I was specifically trying to get better at drawing so that I could make comics.
Coming out of school, what was the next step for you that got you into doing comics in a professional way?
Well, I was under this illusion that you had to get published, or someone had to give you a break. Someone had to hand you a career. So I was making comics the whole time, little one-page strips and things. And I would always look for anthologies to submit to, or see what publishers were putting out. I was not good enough to make full-length stories, I was just doing little one-pagers, and two- or three-page stories. I had self-published in middle school-- xeroxed, not really self-published. But I had xeroxed copies of my comics, and sold them on Myspace. But for some reason, I didn't think that self-publishing was legit. It didn't occur to me. And then when I was 25, 26, I literally sent a package of loose pages to Fantagraphics, and I was like, what the hell am I doing? This is stupid.
And I realized that no one cares unless you have a book. No one wants to see your swipeable comics. I mean, they do, but swipeable comics on Instagram don't get you anywhere unless you have a book. Posting on Twitter doesn't get you anywhere unless you have a book. You need to have a physical art object that people can look at. So around 2018 or ‘19, I was like, fuck it, I'm just going to do it. I'm going to collect all my stories, and just self-publish a little thing. And that was the first time I self-published: Softer Than Sunshine issue #1. And I think I printed 100 copies and sold them on Big Cartel, and I did a popup at Mission: Comics, and I did [San Francisco] Zine Fest. And it wasn't a good comic, and it didn't sell well, but I did it, and I had a thing, and I was like, that's how you do it. I realized that publishers and [other] cartoonists, everyone wants to see that you made a book before they take you seriously.
It was proof that you had made comics, and could make comics.
Yeah. And they were bad. People spend so long perfecting. I have a friend who's been working on an album for, like, eight years, and he keeps rerecording and remastering, and I'm like, forget perfecting it. You need to just put an object out and have people see that you put something out. And I think the literal releasing of it into the world is as big a step as making it. I just had to convince myself that I could release something, and then it got easier from there. And now I've published, I don't know, eight comics.
You say that Softer Than Sunshine was bad, but in what way do you feel like you weren’t doing it right?
I just don't think the drawings are good. I like a lot of the ideas. There are a few of them where I'm like, this is a good comic, I would like to redraw this. I was trying to do a thing where-- I was really into abstract video art. I wanted to create this non-narrative sequence of imagery and ideas in a comic where it's not a story, it's more just an amalgam of images. And I did them, but I don't think they read that way to people. I think people just thought it was lazy, which it was. It was lazy, because it was too difficult to do sequential narratives. I think some of those are cool in concept, but I do think that they were unskilled and lazy, artistically. Every two or three years, I hate the art that I made before that period.
And I remember I would meet up with Mark Badger, and I would show him my pages, and he would give me really good, practical advice. And one time he looked at my pages and he was like, “This is just lazy.” And I was like, you're not wrong. And then he would sometimes look at my page and he'd be like, “This is good. You just need to be better at drawing.” And I was like, yeah, you're not wrong. He also told me to swipe, which I always thought was frowned upon, but he was like, “Just swipe your faces. This face sucks. A Ditko face would work great here.”
Did you take that advice?
Oh yeah. You can see it in Softer Than Sunshine #2, just straight Kirby and Ditko faces. And the point is, you swipe until you learn what they're doing right. And then you can recreate those features without swiping, etc., etc. But he was like, “Generations of people have already learned how to draw these things. Why should you learn from scratch instead of taking what they did?”
It does seem like you were taking all of this to heart, because over the course of Softer Than Sunshine, there’s a coherence that develops in these stories, just narratively.
I feel like Softer Than Sunshine #2 was a graduation, where it ends with this 12-page story that was at the time the longest thing I had ever done. I put out Vacuum Decay #1 while I was working on that, and I was like, this is me graduating from this into an actual storytelling kind of comic.
Since that takes us into Vacuum Decay, tell me some of the backstory of how that came about.
I've always been a huge fan of underground comics. You know, the old San Francisco undergrounds, but specifically the horror comics: Slow Death, and Skull, and-- not quite underground, but Death Rattle.
The Corben and Irons and Veitch stuff.
Exactly. And Stephen Bissette did a bunch of stuff for that. And we were in a place where that didn't exist in 2019. There was no good horror anthology that I knew of. There were great indie comics, but no one was doing horror. Comedy was very in. Comedy is still very in, which is cool, but it's not what I wanted to do. So my friend Karmichael [Jones] was living in San Francisco at the time, and we would hang out and draw, and talk about comics and stuff. And I wanted for a while to do a horror anthology, and finally I was like, all right, let's do it. Now that I have one person who's interested, let's actually do it.
So I started compiling it in late 2019, early 2020. I started reaching out to people. I had met Mike Diana at Comic Arts Brooklyn a few months earlier, and he was super-nice and chill to talk to. So I hit him up, and he was surprisingly on board. And my buddy David Enos, who lived in the city, was on board. So I got a handful of people, and then the pandemic hit, and I immediately was on unemployment and got a stimulus [check]. And I was like, all right, well, there's the printing money. And I think it was the first month of lockdown that I sent Vacuum Decay to the printers.
This is a sidebar, but I’ve now talked to maybe half a dozen people who all managed to publish their first “real” comic because the pandemic hit, and they had both time and stimulus money.
The pandemic created what will be looked back at as-- I don't know if it's a golden age, but an age of indie comics. There is a generation of indie comics that exists because of the pandemic, for sure. I would have done Vacuum Decay anyway, but I might not have gotten four issues out before my unemployment ran out. I just spent two years collecting unemployment and drawing comics. And I don't think that would've happened without the pandemic. And also, people were buying comics. There was a huge online community, because everyone had free time and a little bit of money. Definitely, the pandemic is responsible for this indie comic boom that we're still in.
It's almost as though, if we had some kind of ongoing financial support for artists, we could always have this kind of artistic output.
You might almost think that's why countries like France and Canada have such good comics, just because people can live.
You talked about some of the people you brought on for Vacuum Decay, but how are you finding people to contribute?
Most of the people in Vacuum Decay are people who I know personally. A lot of them are people I've been fans of for a long time, and I've just reached out and gotten lucky. Like, Joakim Drescher I've never met. But I just hit him up and he was down. Same with Mavado Charon, who's in Spain, or Chloé Burt, who's in France. I've just been lucky that people are willing to give me their time and effort and energy. Some of them are personal friends of mine who I know in person, but a lot of them are people who I've just emailed or messaged and gotten lucky that they've responded. I get a lot of people messaging me and submitting stuff, and I used to respond to all of them, but I don't have time to respond to them anymore. But once or twice I've been like, oh, this is actually impressive. Actually, I can't think of an example of someone who submitted to me and then I ended up publishing it at the moment. But it has happened. [Laughs]
What is the Vacuum Decay process? What’s your role in putting it all together?
Basically, I reach out to people, I see what they're into, what they can do. They then give me all their comics, and I see how many pages I have left to fill, and then I try to make my [own] story match that length. And really, Karmichael and I do it all, in the sense that I'm the brains and Karmichael's the heart of it, in my opinion. His comics are what make it what it is. He has really low self-esteem, he’s like, “Just publish it without me.” And I'm like, there will never be an issue of Vacuum Decay that you're not in. So often part of making it is convincing him to make a comic. [Laughs]
So I have to be both the editor and a little bit of a cheerleader. I think he's the best cartoonist alive right now, but he doesn't think that. So in issue #5, I got a 20-page story out of him, and he was going through a lot of personal stuff at the time, so it took a while, and he kept being like, “Just publish it without me.” And I'm like, I will wait as long as it takes to get this comic from you. And then he gave it to me, and it's the best thing I've ever published. His comic in issue #2 I think is the best comic of 2020. But anyway, it's mostly that I have everything together and ready to go, and then I'm the last one left, because I'm still a slow artist.
And have you decided in advance what your story is going to be, or are you waiting to see what other people contribute, and fitting in your story based on that?
I usually have my story figured out already. I'll have it thumbnailed and written, but then I'm just slow to make it happen. And I try to always have some diversity in tone. Like, there'll be maybe one comedy story, or one super-gory body horror story. And then mine are usually surreal, “existential,” weirdo stories. So I always know somewhat how the tone shifts and feels throughout [each issue].
Editorially, do you exercise any kind of real oversight, or is it just sort of 'anything goes' from your contributors?
I'm bad at saying no to people. I'm bad at putting my foot down. I'm a people-pleaser to a degree, but I have had to say no, and I have had to tell people to fix things. Or I will go in and just fix spelling mistakes or grammatical errors. I think indie cartoonists don't take spelling or grammar seriously enough. This is a real stickler nerd, homework point, and people can make fun of me all they want, but spelling and grammar is part of your craft. Writing and drawing are equal components of comics, and spelling and grammar is part of writing. People will write “to” instead of “too,” and I'm just like, Photoshop another ‘o’ in there. I also have made people redo the lettering if the lettering was done digitally, because the main rubric for Vacuum Decay is hand-drawn, hand-lettered. Somebody did their whole thing hand-lettered, and then their name at the end was in [digital] text. And I was like, you have to redo the name. I'm not going to publish it like that.
You’re pretty serious about recreating the underground comics vibe.
That's part of it, but also I just hate digital everything. I don't read comics that are inked digitally or have digital text. It is so against my aesthetics.
For your own work, what’s your process like for your stories in Vacuum Decay specifically, but also for making your comics more generally?
Well, usually I will have either a tone or a mood in mind, or a single image, and then I'll think of how to get to that image. So, I'll have an idea, and then I'll just think it out, and write little bullet points of what happens, like this, then this, then this. Then if it's longer than four or five pages, I'll actually write a script, and then I'll thumbnail it. I used to not do thumbnails, but they are literally the most important part of making comics, I've decided. So I'll thumbnail it out, and then I tape the thumbnails up to my drawing table so I can reference them constantly. And then I’ll start to pencil it. I’m still really slow. It takes me sometimes a month to do a six-page comic. But in 2024, my goal is to do 100 pages, so I'm trying to do a page every three days. We'll see if I can make it work.
How has that been going so far?
I'm exactly on track. I was ahead of track, and now I'm exactly on track. Today’s the 13th [of January]. I've done four pages, so I have to get another page finished before the 15th to be on track. If I get a page finished tomorrow, I'm doing good. We’ll see. I mean, it's only two weeks in, so I’m sure I’ll fall behind.
It’s interesting that you talk about starting with a single mood or image, because it really does feel like a lot of your stories are built around one big emotional effect.
I love comics, and comics are a huge influence, but I think I'm almost more into film. Part of me wanted to be a filmmaker, but it's just too hard. With moving image and sound, it’s so easy to create an atmosphere. You can hold a shot really long, you can use a droning sound, you can bring the lights way down. There are these ways to make atmosphere and mood and tone in film that are really effective. And my favorite thing in the world is tone and atmosphere. So I was like, okay, how do I create that in a comic? What is the comic equivalent of tone and atmosphere?
And what I decided on was a lot of sequential panels. Instead of just one action in one panel, drawing the action out over multiple panels; having multiple pages of it between dialogue. Trying to do as much chiaroscuro and shadows as possible. And I'm still trying to be, like, how can I create the tone that a David Lynch movie has without a droning soundtrack and slow shots? Shadows over Springfield is essentially me being, I'll take these pre-done characters and these pre-done settings, and I'll just place them in a way so I can maximize the atmosphere. The one I just did with Homer, I think there's two speech bubbles in the whole thing. It's almost entirely him looking over his shoulder, [panels of] faces and windows: things like that where I'm really trying as hard as I can to find an atmosphere, and to find a tone.
It's also a way of controlling the pacing, right? Because so much of horror especially depends on pace and speed, and it seems like that would be much harder in a comic than in a movie or TV show.
Yeah, because part of that tone and atmosphere I love is that it’s slow. I love things that are drawn out and really slow, and you can do that with film. Film has a prearranged time that it happens over. Comics happen as fast as you read them. You choose the time. So how do I force a pace? Spreading things out, stretching things, trying to make moments last longer - there are ways to do it that I'm figuring out. And not to give myself too much praise, but I don't think enough cartoonists think about pace. I think pace is something that people forget about, because comics don't focus on it.
I was talking about Steve Ditko or the EC Comics-- if you read Mr. A., which is an amazing piece of art, each panel is like a day apart. It's these characters in an office talking, and then the next morning, and then the next. Its pacing is so frenetic and crazy, this one page takes place over the course of a week. But I want to do the complete opposite of that, where one moment of Homer packing a suitcase is an entire page.
That’s like the Dave Gibbons Watchmen technique, right? Using the grid to very slowly pace out a single event.
And that had a huge influence on me for sure - where Dave Gibbons will slowly zoom in on something, and it'll recreate the feeling of a Hitchcock slow zoom. I'm going to finally, this year I think, start my longform comic, and I have a bunch of scenes where I want, like, three pages of a character getting cereal out of the drawer, pouring a bowl of cereal, eating it. I want to experiment with making tasks last as long as possible. It might be so tedious, I might hate it as soon as I do it, but it's something I want to try.
Just visually, it seems like your style on Vacuum Decay has really evolved over the time the series has been coming out. You have sort of a rougher, heavier style than you did when you first started. And I wonder if that’s been a conscious choice for you?
Yeah, the first two issues of Vacuum Decay are great, but I don't like my art in them. I think that I'm still not a very good artist [in those issues]. And when cartoonists are in the infancy of their careers, they improve so rapidly that it almost is unrecognizable. Like if you look at Daniel Clowes-- if you look at “The Uggly Family,” Lloyd Llewellyn, Eightball #1, they're like three different artists, and they're all within a two or three year period. You evolve so quickly in that time, and then you get to Eightball, and he's kind of been in that style since. He's improved it, but it's like he found it. I still have not quite found it, but there's definitely a huge jump. I think [Vacuum Decay] issues #5 and #6-- #6 is the one where I'm, like, this is mostly what my art, I think, will be from here on.
We may have entered the mature Nordlinger period.
Not quite. We're entering the beginning of it. I'm still not very good at drawing. Drawing's really hard for me. I'm not a skilled draftsman in a technical way. I learned that I left way too much empty space. My old comics are full of these empty white spaces, and I've learned to hatch more, to fill in blacks more. I think it was Alex Toth, he said, “When in doubt, black it out.” And that's something I've been trying to do, because I would just leave empty space. I wasn't confident enough to just put big black shadows and big black splashes. And I'll look at cartoonists where they'll draw a face, and half the face is black with just a little white sliver, and I'm trying to do that now. But I didn't have the balls to do that for a long time. It takes a lot of confidence to just splatter ink all over the place.
While you’ve been continuing to put out Vacuum Decay, you’ve also been doing solo minicomics, like Marsha/Darcy. How do you decide what goes into Vacuum Decay, and what stands on its own?
It's mostly format and size. Vacuum Decay is standard comic book size, and it's [drawn] on 11” x 17”. The other thing is, I want Vacuum Decay to be good. Marsha/Darcy was like, I want to crank something out, and I want to be able to do it at work. So I did it at a much smaller size, and it's really rough. There's no Ames lines for the lettering, which I actually regret. I didn't rule out any lines, everything is an organic line. And I made up the stories as I went. I did little thumbnails, but I didn't write a script. And I did it at 9” x 12” instead of 11” x 17”. And Marsha/Darcy wasn't popular. People didn't like it except for-- I had one big fan, which was cool. And I self-printed it at home, which I think maybe if I'd gotten it printed nicer, it would've caught on a little bit more.
But it was also an experiment of-- I'm really into Marcel Duchamp, and Expressionism, and Russian Constructivism. There's also an American movement called Precisionism - this guy Charles Demuth, who I really love. So I was like, all right, I want to incorporate these abstract shapes and figures into a horror comic. And [Marsha/Darcy] was kind of the experiment of, how can I do that? So I roughed it out really quickly with Marsha/Darcy, and then I was like, okay, I don't like the sloppy, quick elements, but I do like the expressionist, modern art element. So Night Cruising was [putting] the expressionist, modern art elements onto one longer story.
And Night Cruising is really the first longform story that you’ve done, isn’t it?
Yeah. I think there was a story called “Yawning” in Vacuum Decay #4 that was 20 pages, which was the longest thing I'd done at the time. And then Night Cruising is 24 pages, which sounds very short, but it's the longest thing I've done.
A full comic.
Yeah, it's a floppy. It's a one-shot.
So what made you decide that you were ready to sort of take that jump into full-length narratives?
It's literally that Josh Pettinger and Nate Garcia gave me a bunch of shit for not having any solo comics, and they were right. Josh was like, “People don't know your name, they know Vacuum Decay.” And I was like, well, I think that's pretty cool. But then somebody on Reddit referred to me as “the Vacuum Decay guy.” And I was like, that's cool, but also they're right? I should have a solo comic. The other thing was, I would meet cartoonists who I admired, and I would hand them Vacuum Decay, and they'd be like, “This looks great!” And I'd be like, oh, I didn't draw that.
So I wanted to have a thing that was almost like a business card, where I'm like, this is just me. Look at it: I drew every page. It's all me. Also, I would go to L.A. for these Permanent Damage shows that Keenan Marshall Keller puts on. I went down three or four times, and I would stay in Santa Monica at my aunt's house, but everything would be way east in Hollywood. So at night I would drive 40 minutes back to Santa Monica. And driving in L.A. at night is so ghostly and weird and haunting. And I remember reading about or listening to a podcast about the Night Stalker, and how he would murder people and then he would just drive 40 minutes away and murder someone else. And those were two different police precincts, so they didn't catch him for years. Because L.A. is this network of small cities, so in the '70s you could do anything and they wouldn't catch you, because they're all separate cities. So driving around L.A., and listening to all this goth music and late David Bowie, I was like, I need to do a liminal space horror about the L.A. freeways. That, plus my desire to do a solo comic, birthed Night Cruising.
You talked before about sustaining one mood or effect for the stories you do. When you’re working over the length of so many more pages, is that more difficult?
It was not hard. I mean, it was hard to draw. Drawing is always hard. But the flow of the story came a lot easier than I thought it might. I had bullet point ideas of, you know, this scene, this scene, this scene. And I also knew that the majority of the comic would be visual vistas. It would be shots of the highway, shots of cars. I wanted it to be very much about the light and shadow, the lights on the highway, the bird's eye view of the networks of highway. I wanted it to feel like a visual thing.
There are a lot of top-down shots, looking from above the streetlamps at the cars on the freeway.
Yeah, because I wanted the comic to be more about the place than the story - the place being the highways. So I knew that whatever story I came up with, even if it was too short, I could fill it out with all this imagery. And, I also-- this is part of what I said earlier about wanting it to be slow. It's a very short story, but I stretched it out to make it as visual as possible. So I came up with the scenes and then I thumbnailed it out to 24 pages. I thought it was going to be 20, and then I stretched it to 24 because I wanted more visuals. And then I was like, okay, there's four dialogue scenes. I want every scene to be separated by languid, slow imagery of cars at night. And I hate cars, and I hate drawing cars. So I don't know why I did it to myself.
You made up a story about cars on the freeway and you hate drawing cars?
I know, I know. It was tough, but it was weird. I literally bought, like, a toy 1972 Pontiac just so I could have it on my drawing table, and see it from every angle. But, yeah, now I feel better about drawing cars, at least. [Laughs]
Night Cruising is still very much a horror story, but it feels like you’re operating in a different mode of horror. It’s very human, very rooted in something plausible in the everyday. Did that feel like a shift to you?
A little bit. It's funny, because I didn't consider it explicitly a horror story. But to me, everything is horror. Simon Hanselmann posted this painting of [his character] Megg on the stairs with her eyes peeking through the bars. And I was like, that's the scariest thing I've ever seen. And he’s like, “That's just a goofy little painting.” I'm like, no, I see horror in that. I look at everything through a lens of unsettling creepiness.
I definitely wanted to do something that was more like a human drama. But I also really wanted to do a scumbag portrait - a character study of a sociopath. Somebody who is a detestable person, but you're spending the whole comic with them. Also, the other thing I wanted to do was-- and it's up to the reader if I'm successful, is to have you not know until the end who this guy is or what his deal is until the last four pages, when you're like, “Oh, that's who he is. Oh, okay.” You know, at first it's just a teenager, and then it's like, oh no, there's something much, much deeper than that.
There's a scene in a diner, where I feel like by that point, you're like, “Oh, this is darker than I initially thought it would be.” Hopefully. It's funny, because people have had different reads on it. Some people immediately understand that it's the Night Stalker. Other people just think it's some guy. But either way, you get the same ending.
I'm also really into this whole liminal space thing that's happening on the internet right now. Specifically, it taps into my childhood fears. I mentioned Skinamarink earlier, but that movie really got under my skin, and it did what Softer Than Sunshine was trying to do perfectly. I was like, I want to do this haunted space feeling about L.A., and about the highway. So that's the main goal more than the story itself.
You have a native Bay Area resident’s feelings toward Los Angeles as a horrifying liminal space.
Well, I do. It’s funny, because I always hated L.A. But going down for Permanent Damage, I've had great times in L.A., and it's specifically because I'm there for a reason. I go there to do an art show, and I'm with other cartoonists, and I have some friends down there. If I lived down there, oh my god. I can imagine it being a hellscape. I can imagine how like a nightmare it could become.
You certainly do an effective job of capturing what it feels like to be on the L.A. freeway at night, and you mentioned your use of light and shadow for that.
I was like, okay, how do I convey light and shadow? Well, there's the obvious: literal darkness with reflecting lights and stuff. But then, in the second half, when he takes acid and is driving on the highway, I wanted it to be just this burst of shapes. So I tried to create light and shadow in an abstract, expressionistic way. It was kind of a visual experiment to do that, and I think it turned out all right. This was also me specifically fighting against my whole [attachment to] big, empty white spaces. So I'm like, this is going to become almost all black.
You’re also using what I have to assume is a computer simulation of old school Zip-A-Tone.
In Night Cruising it's mostly fake, but you can buy the actual screentones, and I use them as much as possible. I want my comics to be as traditional as they can be. But with Night Cruising, they're just too expensive. It's like $20 a sheet, they get delivered from Japan. So in a lot of my comics you can see that I'm actually cutting out and pasting real screen tone, but with Night Cruising I just scanned the sheet of screentone and then digitally placed it over. So it still is an actual screentone texture, it's not a digital texture, but it is digitally placed.
How do you feel like the book turned out?
I'm really happy with Night Cruising. I think it's the best thing I've done so far. I now am probably going to do more floppy one-shots with Floating World. I love Jason [Leivian, who runs Floating World], he’s really cool and supportive. I also think that they're a brand that I want to be a part of.
This is the first time you’ve worked with a publisher that isn’t just yourself, isn’t it?
Literally, this was my first legitimately published comic. This is the first time something was in Previews, it was sick. And it sold to shops, and it sold so much better than my self-published stuff does, just by virtue of having a real distribution channel, and a publisher that does marketing.
I had met Jason a few times. I'd been a fan of Floating World for forever. I think they're one of the publishers that's never put out a bad book. I hate the word "brand," but they have a great brand, and a great roster of cartoonists and projects. So I've always been stoked. And then I tabled next to them at Short Run 2022, and I talked to Jason. He's been buying Vacuum Decay, so we've talked on email and stuff before, but that was the first time I met him in person. And then at the end of the show he was like, “If you've got more comics, I'll take him for the shop.” So I sold him a stack of comics, and then I was like, hey man, I got this idea about this scumbag guy driving around L.A. Would you want to publish it? And he was like, “Yeah.” I was like, really? He was like, “Yeah, sure.” I kept expecting it to not be real. I kept thinking he's going to back out. He's going to say no.
So I literally sent him the script, because I was so worried about the content - there's racism, and implied rape. And he was like, “Yeah, it's great.” I’m like, really? And then I sent him the first few pages. He's like, “It's great.” I'm like, really? I kept expecting it to not happen. And then it happened, and it worked, and it went wonderfully. I definitely am going to do more comics with him. He seems to want to, so I definitely want to.
How do you feel about the reception it got?
I don't really know. It sold really well. It got an amazing review by Ryan Carey, which really made my day. It got a negative review by this guy, Lars Ingebrigtsen, which also really made my day. I loved it. It is not on a lot of end of the year lists, which I also expected. I think it went as well as it could go. I don't know. I was shocked at how well it sold.
How is the comic scene in San Francisco, where you are?
There isn't one. It's bad. It used to be, around 2019, Karmichael lived here. David Enos. I had a couple friends making comics and I was like, let's do it, Vacuum Decay will be a predominantly local anthology. And then Karmichael moved away, some other friends of mine moved away. Cameron Forsley moved away. All the old underground-- because San Francisco used to be the Mecca of underground comics. It was where it all happened. Crumb, and S. Clay Wilson, Trina Robbins, all those people are dead or moved away now. Trina Robbins still lives here, but she doesn't draw anymore, she does editing, which is cool. Last Gasp is still here. Ron Turner's still here. I hung out with him recently. There's still people in the East Bay: Daniel Clowes is in Oakland, Richard Sala lived in Oakland until he died. But it's really gone. And it's hard, because it's just unaffordable. It's not a good city for art. There's a great music scene here, and there's a good fine art scene, but it's not a good city for comics right now.
My buddy Floyd [Tangeman], he's a wild character, but he almost lives in New York half the time, and most of the people he publishes are from New York. And Silver Sprocket is here, but most of the people they publish aren't from here. Floyd and I did a comic show last year that had a good turnout. People came, and then we did it this year, and nobody came. And I did Zine Fest, which is the only organized show we have here. And I had a moment at Zine Fest where I was looking around, and I was one of three cartoonists there. And I was like, this just sucks. I need to stop pretending that this is cool, 'cause it's not cool.
So have you given any thought to going somewhere else?
I don't know. When I go to Portland, when I go to Seattle, when I go to L.A., when I go to Philly, I'm like, oh my god, like, look at this. I'm in a comic scene with my colleagues and peers, and there's an audience here. There are these cool shops, there are publishers. And it's this amazing revelation. And I would love to have that more than just four or five weekends out of the year. But I also love San Francisco for a bunch of other reasons. I don't know. I'll probably just move to Vermont and live in a shack. That's probably the next step for me.
Your most recent release is another minicomic, Days of Rage.
Yeah. That was just a little zine that I made for Permanent Damage.
Where did that come from? It’s clearly inspired by medieval illuminated manuscripts, for one thing.
I've been into medieval art forever. One of my earliest zines, before Softer Than Sunshine even, was me doing copies of medieval monster art. I've always loved medieval illuminated manuscripts and marginalia, as they call it. But it really came from a Max Clotfelter mini called Bugs on Drugs that's the same size as Days of Rage. And I was like, that's cool, I would love to print a tiny, little thing that I could just cut in half with a straight cutter, and have be this little tiny $2 zine. So I literally started with the format. And then I was like, okay, what do I do it about?
And I was like, okay, well, it's eight pages. What if I did days of the week? Okay, something happening over the course of a week. And then I had the Bosch image, and I'm like, okay, I want to do a Bosch thing. How do I work backwards from there? It's another thing where it's not going to be a consistent story with an A to B. It's going to be more like every day is a different surreal image happening, ending with the Bosch image. So I worked backwards that way, and then I printed it way too small. I learned my lesson when I printed it. The Bosch drawing I did big, and it's full of all this little detail. And then I printed it, and it's so small you can barely see it. So I'm like, all right, well, lesson learned.
Smaller than a Chick tract, is how it turned out.
Yeah. It's Chick tract size or even smaller, and you have to really stare at it to see the last panel. That's why, when people bought it online, I sent a full size print of it too, because I’m like, look at that, it’s fine.
Have you thought about reprinting it in a larger format?
I've thought about reprinting it, but it's also a $2 or $3 zine. It's fine. If people buy other stuff, I'll throw it in for free. It's not something I'm going to focus on fixing up too much.
Why the biblical apocalypse as a subject, then?
I don't know. The end of the universe is obviously something that I've done a couple times, or at least I've hinted at a few times. I mean, the phrase "vacuum decay" means the end of the universe - not just the end of the world, but the end of all matter. And it's an idea of-- the [biggest] horror is death, obviously. That's the thing we're all the [most] afraid of. But what about the death of absolutely everything, which is something that we can't even comprehend? I did Days of Rage because I wanted to be like, what if the biblical apocalypse unfolded in a really surreal way, where things are happening kind of nonsensically? And then it ends with this full-blown Bosch, medieval hellscape. And then I just cranked it out, because I had a week before Permanent Damage, and I was like, all right, I’ve got to get this done and printed so that I have something new at the show.
It doesn’t seem like it comes out of any religious background of your own.
No, no, no. Not at all. I just love the imagery. I was raised casually Christian, and also Jewish at the same time. My dad's side is Jewish, and I went to Jewish school, but they gave up at some point. When I was 8 or 9, they were like, “Forget being Jewish. Let's stop that.” We moved to different town, and I didn't have Jewish friends. So we stopped doing Passover and Hanukkah, I stopped going to a Jewish school, and then we were just Christian in some vague sense.
And then when I was 9 or 10, my friend whose parents were crazy Born Agains-- even at 9 or 10, I knew that they were over-the-top. We would hang out at their house, and all the VHSs tapes they had were Bible story cartoons, and I was like, all right, this is too much. But his dad gave me this whole talk once about Hell, and being damned for eternity. And it was so horrifying to me that it would exist at all. It really messed me up. I was kind of traumatized by it for a long time. But what was deeper than the fear of Hell was that it made me realize that none of this is real. And that was even scarier, where I'm like, actually, this is all fake. And that's the worst thing to think about.
So at age 9 or 10, I had a literal existential crisis - there is no afterlife, there is no Heaven or Hell, there is no God. I was depressed, I was actively sad about it. And whenever God or Jesus would get mentioned in movies, or TV, or whatever, I'd recoil from it. I talked to my mom, and my mom's like, “You should try reading the Bible.” And I did. I read a picture book version of the Bible. And then eventually I was like, you know what? It's not real, and that's fine.
Around 13 or 14, I was like, none of this is real. There is no God, there's no Heaven, there's no Hell. And I kind of accepted it. But the weird, traumatic fear of religion is still definitely there. And I still feel it when I see super-religious communities, or people, or kids. It definitely is triggered inside of me. I also had a huge anti-religion phase because of it, where I was like, religion's horrible, it's the worst thing. I was campaigning against it, which is a very teenager thing to do. “Oh, God's wack, dude.” At Oxbow, my big thesis project was this giant painting about how destructive religion is. It was all about the Crusades, and Israel-Palestine, and all these horrors that religion has wrought upon the world. And I still feel that way, but I don't think about it that often. I don't care if people are religious. I'm not mad about it like I was at the time. But also, in retrospect, I had every reason to be mad. They messed with my head when I was a little kid. It’s a pretty traumatic thing.
What’s your sense of the independent comics publishing scene right now? Is it possible to make a living doing this?
That I don't know. I know people who do make a living off of it - a very meager living. I have friends who live in Philly, or even in L.A., who make a living off of it. I think if I didn't live in San Francisco, there's a world where I could. I don't make money off Vacuum Decay, but I make money off commissions, and I make money selling original pages and stuff. And I feel like there is a world where I could make a living off of it. I really want to draw for a living. I don't want to have a day job anymore. I'm trying to get straight-up illustration work. But the indie comics market is huge right now, and it's sick, and there's so many people doing it.
And there's such a big audience for it. Going to Short Run in Seattle, going to the Philly Comics Expo - just the amount of people that came this year and last year was mind-blowing. There's so many people doing it with social media and the internet. It's so easy for people to market, and make, and sell their comics. So we have this huge influx right now, and I was talking to people, and it is almost a golden age of self-published indie comics. A lot of it is not good, but people are able to make it, which is cool. And, you know, 10, 15 years from now, people will look back on this era kind of the way we look back on the '90s, where we go, “Oh, remember all those amazing comics?” And the bad ones will be forgotten, and the good ones will be remembered. But I think this is somewhat of a boom. Like I said earlier, the pandemic created a boom that I think we're still in right now.
I think one difference between now and the '90s, though, is that it's sort of every person for themselves to a much greater extent. Back then, you had more people working through established publishers. Now you're publishing it on your own. You're promoting it on your own. Does it feel like it's more work to try and get noticed and be seen on top of all these other cartoonists that are flowering?
Yeah, I guess you're right. I never thought about it that way. Everything came through Fantagraphics, or D&Q, or Slave Labor. Whereas now every person is a cartoonist and a marketer. Like, you have to be your own marketing and PR person. And there are some incredible cartoonists that just can't do that part. I know cartoonists that should be way more successful than they are, but they're not good at the marketing, hustling, PR part. And there still are institutions that can boost and help people, but everyone has to be their own advocate, which is definitely tough.
And it's also really stressful. I hate being on social media all the time. I hate having to post all the time. I hate to be on Instagram every day, but I can't sell comics without it. Also, the algorithm: I mean, I'm sure you've heard every cartoonist complaint about the algorithm recently. But the algorithm now doesn't favor art. And my reach has significantly suffered. Even Simon Hanselmann, who's as successful as a cartoonist can be, says his audience is diminished on Instagram. Why? Why are our careers dependent on some giant corporation and their technology?
So we are on our own, but there still are big companies that we’re at the behest of. There still are gatekeepers that we have to appease and play nice with. If I post something too risqué and my Instagram account gets banned, that's my entire platform. If I don't have Instagram, I don't know what my comic career looks like.
Do you feel like you're in a good place as a creator? Are you happy with where you are in the comic scene?
I'm happy with where I am in the comic scene. I'm very happy with where my art is. I'm incredibly upset, financially. I work a day job, and every minute I'm at work, I'm not drawing. I go to Short Run, and people know who I am. People come to my table, and it's such a disconnect. When I used to just make comics for fun, and no one knew who I was, I didn't mind having a day job. But now if I made a comic, people would read it - but I'm not making a comic because I have to pay the rent. And it really feels like I'm missing out, like every moment that I'm not drawing comics, that I'm working a day job, I'm missing out. So it's a double-edged sword, where every time I get success in indie comics I'm stoked, but it also makes me more upset that it's not my full-time job.
