Jay Stephens has been around since the early ‘90s, when he burst on the indie comics scene, contributing to Reactor Girl, and his own anthology Sin (both for Tragedy Strikes Press). His success there led to animation, where he created the series Tutenstein and The Secret Saturdays (for Discovery Kids and Cartoon Network respectively). But his time in Hollywood took a personal toll, and he quit everything to put his life back together, taking a job at an art store in his hometown of Guelph, Ontario. In 2019 he returned to comics with Dejects, a collection of some of his strangest (and darkest) uncollected material, but it was 2020’s Dwellings that signaled a new chapter in Stephens’ career. Not just a new work, but a true reflection of his lifelong love of the horror genre, rendered in a perfect Harvey Comics-esque style, with a storytelling confidence that can only come from decades of experience.
I spoke to Stephens over Zoom about that long road to Dwellings, his struggles along the way, and how he’s finally accepted the medium he never intended to work in.
-Jason Bergman
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JASON BERGMAN: I'm glad we're talking, because you have a lot going on right now.
JAY STEPHENS: Yeah, I'm on the verge of too much going on right now.
Well, I want to go through all of them, or at least the ones I know about. But before we get to any of that, I want to go back to your early career, because you had a really interesting start in that you came out of the indie scene in the early 90s.
That's right.
But before that, you went to art school, right? You're an official art school dropout?
I am, as many cartoonists are. Yeah, I don't have many good things to say about art school, as those same cartoonists would agree. [Laughs] I'm from an era before there was any kind of academic comics training. So yeah, I went to regular old art school for “Fine Art”, and met my future collaborators there. Back then it was frowned upon to make any kind of artwork or any attempts at any kind of fine art that referenced comics at all. Any kind of sequential storytelling. So it started for us accidentally. Michel Vrana, who ended up being my publisher at Tragedy Strikes Press and then Black Eye Books, and is now again one of my current publishers… we've known each other for over three decades… he was working on this student paper and was rounding up artists from different disciplines that he could find to do a comics supplement at the Ontario College of Art and Design. I think the newspaper was called Flea Bite. And the comic supplement was called Itchy Tales. I was one of the contributing cartoonists for that one-off that disappeared faster than the student newspaper ever had before. And that early success encouraged us to make some mini comics that we were selling at the Silver Snail in Toronto. We were encouraged by ongoing interest and so continued to make comics. Nick Craine, also co-founder of Tragedy Strikes Press, was one of the other contributing artists, and he was the one that had the connection to Guelph, Ontario, where I still live. And that was it. We ended up dropping out. Well, Michel was in fourth year, so he graduated, but Nick and I dropped out of art school, moved to Guelph and started Tragedy Strikes Press. And the rest is a muddled history.
That would have been Sin?
The first Tragedy Strikes book was an anthology continuing from our mini comic called Reactor Girl. There were several contributing artists to that. Nick and Michel went to a convention in London, England in the early days too, and met Dylan Horrocks and Carol Swain. I think they were early contributors to the anthology before they got their own books with us as well. But it was an exciting time. I mean, we were entering black and white publishing right at the tail end of the boom. Not like the kind of comics we were making were going to benefit from any kind of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle fumes or anything. We were doing something quite different, or trying to do something quite different. But yeah, the aptly named Tragedy Strikes Press only lasted, like, a couple of years as the enthusiasm for black and white comics faded.
You were there at the end of, yeah, the post Ninja Turtles boom. But if there ever was a boom in alternative comics, it was right around that time that you started. You even had a strip in The Stranger1 at one point, right?
Well, that's just it. A boom for me personally, at least. I mean, I was doing a bi-monthly book, Sin right out of the gate, which is kind of ridiculous in retrospect. I don't know what I was thinking, but having that book out there, it reached enough eyeballs that I got calls pretty much immediately for more work. So yeah, I was doing alternative weekly strips. James Sturm [editor of The Stranger] reached out and that ended up being in a few other papers. Vice in Montreal and one in Albuquerque, I think. And Sara Dyer, too, was an early supporter of the work. She was doing her Mad Planet zine back then and Oddville! ran there as well.
You collaborated with Paul Pope too, right?
That's a little bit later, but yeah, you know, when you have some kind of regular presence out there, however small, you are going to make contacts and friends and it leads to other things. So this is an endorsement of continuing to produce work, regardless of how fresh you are at it. You’re going to get your hands dirty making work you’ll be embarrassed of later, but at least it [leads to] other stuff. For example, Sin also led to my very first work in television. There was a show on YTV up here in Toronto called Squawk Box, which was ostensibly a comedy sketch show for kids, starring kids, written mostly by kids. But they did have some childish adults also writing for them. I got hired based on the strength of my ridiculous comics. And so I became a television writer the same way I became a cartoonist, by accident.
I was going to ask how you moved into cartoons from alternative comics like that. And you also did a lot of kids' work in those days, like Chick and Dee, I’m thinking specifically.
I did. My long association with the OWL group, Owl and Chickadee magazines, also started in that period. I think possibly my advantage, sort of intellectually, spiritually, at that time, was that because I wasn't a trained cartoonist, I had no ambition to be a comic artist, even though I loved the medium. Honestly, I thought of myself as slumming while making comics for probably the first five years. I thought it was just something I was doing in the meantime, before I got back to like, making real art. That's how brainwashed I'd been by the prevailing culture.
Real art would have been in those days, like fine art? What was your ambition?
To be a painter. Yeah.
Like kind of post-punk paint, or like..?
Absolutely, yeah. A little bit of collage, a little bit of abstraction. I mean, honestly, probably not that different in tone from what I ended up doing in comics anyway. But because I wasn't taking my comic book work that seriously, it wasn't much of a leap for me to do weekly strip, do some television writing, do some kids comics. All of it was new, fresh, accidental, just another creative challenge. So to me, it was all the same kind of thing, all of a piece.
You've said some things about frustrations working in television, specifically your cartoons. So you kind of fell into it, I guess.
I did. I fell into everything, Jason. Everything's an accident.
But you did these full shows. And did you find that to be a, I don't know, demoralizing experience? Or did you enjoy it at first? What was the journey there?
Good questions. It's a mixture of both. There are moments in everything I've done in television that were exciting and wonderful. And there are other moments that were existentially devastating. So it's always both. The upside of working in animation is the opportunity to collaborate. And not just one-on-one with someone like Paul, who I've always had a great creative relationship with, or Mike Allred, another frequent collaborator back in those days. It's fun to jam. But when you have a team of like a hundred, where you're working on something, that gets really interesting on a different level. And if the right people are involved, it can be really satisfying and quite different from the hermitage of comics making. So there's a lot of good there. It's exciting. It's invigorating. It's creatively refreshing, or can be, but also, you know, television executives are, generally speaking, not creative people. They're purely business people. In all of the art forms I've worked in, there's always a bottom line attitude and creators are always cattle no matter how hard, or how strongly the people paying you profess that they respect you. There's always going to be that aspect. Television makes that very, very clear. They make it very clear how the hamburger is made. [Laughs] So it can be frustrating. But I have no regrets. And again, I was fortunate, you know, there are other creators I've met, like comic book makers that I've met over the years who I greatly respect, who have voiced regret over the years that they had an opportunity to transform something they'd made in comics into animation. And they were at that time too precious about translating the work, that it didn't go through. And in later years have regretted not just going with the flow. Not accepting that television's simply a different thing. So when you're adapting one medium to another, there's going to be sacrifice. And if you're okay with that, if you're like me and you've fallen backwards into every creative endeavor you've ever done, it doesn't really matter that much.
Was it exciting for you though? The first couple steps? Was JetCat the first cartoon you worked on?
JetCat was the first credited one. I mean, Wonderduds was technically my first. They were shorts on the aforementioned Squawk Box,2 but yeah, JetCat was the first comics adaptation, and it went really, really well. And so it spoiled me. It was an exciting process. There were very few of us involved. It was basically my creative producer, Fred Schaefer, one of the good guys in the biz. And Rafael Rosado, who's still a friend. And it was basically just the three of us. It really felt more like making comics. Those JetCat shorts for Nickelodeon's KaBlam! really felt like moving comics. It was a very personal effort. And I was happy with the results. But then…Tutenstein. That led to Tutenstein being picked up by Discovery Kids. That was like seven years of development hell. A big struggle to get that made. And even though I'd worked on the early designs and the series bible, developing a silly little comic idea into a show, by the time it was in production, I was pretty much shut out of the creative process. And the character no longer looked like my character. It was hard. It was a struggle. There was a moment where I was ready to walk away from that show, just say, “no”. Speaking to my friend and agent Jean-Marc Lofficier, who might be a familiar name to some, talked me out of it. I was in my backyard one day on the phone, just going, “I can't do this anymore.” And he said, “Look, is it still 50% your vision?” And I said, “Yeah, you know, a little more.” And he said, “That's pretty good. That's a lucky percentage.” I think he also said something like having a bad show on the air is better than having no show on the air.
[Laughs] Not exactly an encouraging push. But at the time I had a mortgage and two kids. So I went with it. Tutenstein was hard. It was a bigger struggle. But it led to the other big show, The Secret Saturdays. At that point, I decided that if I was going to continue in animation, that instead of struggling with an adaptation from print to film, I would just create something for film. And so Saturdays was never a comic. The behind the scenes shifts and changes over that five years of development are at least invisible to the general populace. That embarrassing struggle was behind the scenes. And I'm very happy with how that turned out. I ended up being an executive producer on that. I was much more involved than I was on Tutenstein.
But you were less precious with it, as it was an original creation.
Absolutely. And by then I’d learned a lot from the previous shows, the previous work. I'd learned how to let go a little better, learned about what a collaborative process animation is. I'd accepted it at that point, resigned myself to it.
So then what led to you leaving animation?
For one thing, it was the travel. I mean, Saturdays, I'd spent the better part of a year in Los Angeles while that show was in production. As I said, I was much more involved in that. This was back in 2006, 2007, I think. So it wasn't that long after 9/11. And I had been actually Gitmo’d at the border, stopped as an attempted illegal immigrant, and had been detained for hours at gunpoint for no reason. I don't know. It was just stressful, man. And it was the end of my marriage. So while I was in Los Angeles, I thought I was selling out for a cause, working hard on animation for my family, but it ended up being the wrong effort. I just found it too alienating. I wanted to get back to more personal work. That was the real takeaway. By that point, it had been more than a decade of my life in animation, and I found it to be very stressful. Also I was talking to people that I trusted. At some point during Tutenstein, maybe it was a little before Secret Saturdays, I reached out to my friend Darwyn Cooke, and asked him if he'd be interested in being a director on Secret Saturdays. I think. It might have been for Tutenstein… there’s a bit of overlap. And he gave me a hard pass on that. It was a definite no. And in fact, he went further, and said he thought I was making a terrible mistake.
Wow. I mean, he came from animation, too.3
That's right. But he was traveling in the opposite direction. So he was trying to convince- well, he wasn't trying to convince me of anything. He was just telling me that I was moving in the wrong direction. And he said straight out that it's going to ruin your family. And as usual, Darwyn was right. His bedside manner was sometimes wanting, but he was often right.
But eventually you did walk away from animation. And then how long was it before you came back to comics?
Directly following Secret Saturdays, there was a lot of personal stuff going on. I've talked about this pretty openly, so I don't mind committing it to print. But after the end of my marriage and that explosion of my self identity, I actually had quite a mental breakdown and was institutionalized for a few months. I do have some neurological issues. That was part of the shift, too. And then coming out of all of that disaster, the ruins of my previous existence, I did have this lead that had been going on in the background with another friend, Bob Weber, Jr. for a daily strip. Yet another accidental side career. So it seemed like a lovely safety net for Bob to be writing these gags, these old-school classic kids comics that I loved.
That would be Oh, Brother?
Oh, Brother, yeah. And we were both parents to an older daughter, younger son relationship, which is what the strip is about. And all I had to do was draw them, not sweat about the writing. It was fun to do. But… directly out of Secret Saturdays, we launched a failed daily strip. I was drawing a daily strip every day for a year. There's about 400 of them, I think. I mean, we weren't making money on it. It was the wrong timing again. You know, entering the newspaper game at a time when comics were being cut, sections were being cut, ad revenues were down… yet another problem with timing.
It was also a big strip, right? Big panels and full color?
Yeah, it was a panel as opposed to a strip. So we were using the traditional Dennis the Menace panel dimensions, but I liked the idea that I could use that rectangle to have circular inset panels or tall layouts. It was a very exciting comic creatively. And yeah, I insisted on doing my own color because the sort of in house coloring for newspaper strips was wanting. I love working in color. So it was a really fun project to do, but it was disastrous financially. And after the stress of the previous year, that was it. I was out. So after Oh, Brother ended, I actually kind of retired from comics making, from any ongoing freelance work, and became the manager of the local art store for a few years.
How was that? Was it nice to get out of your head and just go do a job every day?
Very much so.
As compared to art where it's constantly pulling from your head.
Yep, just a straight up paycheck, you know, clock in, do the work, clock out. And you're hanging out with other artists all day long. It was also the kind of social interaction I desperately needed after a year of being chained to my desk for Oh, Brother. So yeah, that's kind of what happened. And then during that period, I was still dabbling. There were a few how to draw books that I did during that period. Monsters, Robots, Heroes, and then the Freaky Fun Activities. So there were these side projects I was doing. A couple of comics projects would still trickle in, but I just wasn't pursuing anything. It was a long road back.
When you came back, the book was Dejects?
Yeah, so the first dipping of my toe in the water again came from OWL magazine, my old friends at OWL. I was doing some monthly strips for them again (X-Tra Curricular and Arrowhead). And that got me back into the game. Then Michel Vrana, my old pal from Black Eye…I don't remember the first convo about it, but I think he was having a bit of a midlife crisis moment, where I think he'd been going through old digital files to back them up, he was going through all the old Black Eye files. He reached out and said, “Can you imagine making comics today? All those things we only could dream of. Full color, no money down, you can crowdfund this stuff so it's just pre orders. You know how many to print, we're not warehousing this stuff.” He was pitching it as this kind of paradise moment for indie comics, the things you could do now. And he asked me if I had anything that I'd like to experiment with, just for fun. A collection like Dejects was the obvious choice, because I’d been doing a similar thing separately. I had all these un-reprinted, one-off comics I’d been digitally organizing. And quite a few of them. These weird, sort of orphaned strips, and longer form comics that had never been collected, never been reprinted or never been published because they were straight up rejected at the time. And I'd been filing those away. So I said, “Yeah, I think I have a book of weird shit.”
It's a really dark book, to be honest.
[Laughs] Yeah. And as I was going through it, revisiting that stuff more intimately, and coloring it for this collection, because we had the opportunity to do so. That was really deep looking at how obvious my chemical imbalance was from the beginning of my career. [Laughs] Signs that I should have certainly been seeing.
Well, I mean, there's Irwin, which is, “He try to have fun but he can’t.” [Laughs] Every strip is him trying to do something and can’t.
[Laughs]
Is Twerp the most autobiographical one of those? That's the guy and his wife, where he's just sad all the time.
I’d say so, yeah. Notes on a divorce.
[Laughs] But yeah, it's a very dark book.
Thank you.
Which brings us to Dwellings. So, Dejects brought you back to publishing, but what kicked off Dwellings? Why straight-up horror?
So Dwellings came directly out of Dejects in the sense that Michel and I did a little book tour for Dejects when it came out. There were a few shops that had been supporters of ours over the years, friends of ours over the years - Strange Adventures in Halifax [was one]. And we did a signing at The Beguiling of course, The Dragon here in Guelph. But then I did a signing at Drawn and Quarterly, and a little lecture in Montreal, and Michel and I were staying there for a couple of days. And I think it was a question from somebody at the lecture who was saying that it was great to see in Dejects that thing that I did best - combining sort of cute, colorful characters with dark truths. And I’d never considered that as being, you know, what “I did best”. It never occurred to me that subversive was my thing. So I was thinking about that a lot that night that we were staying in Montreal. At the same time, prior to that, one of the other things I've been sort of dabbling with over the years, outside of comics, is I had friends here in Guelph that were filmmakers, Black Fawn Films, who were making low budget horror flicks. And I'd worked in the art department on a couple of those. And I’d been thinking about writing them a pitch for a horror script, because I'm a big fan of the horror genre, specifically horror cinema. So I did have a couple of horror ideas that existed in print that were meant for live action. I hadn't conceived of them as comic stories at all. And then the other element is that, just for fun on my Instagram, I’d been drawing these sort of like fake Harvey-style comic covers of kids from horror movies. And that was it. That one night after that lecture, the three disparate elements just came together really quickly. I asked Michel if he thought it was a dumb idea. And he said, “No, we should do it.”
Have you always been into horror, and horror movies?
Very much so. I'm at least as passionate about horror, the genre, generally, and cinema specifically, as I am about cartooning and comics. At least as much.
What started you down that road? In my experience, superfans have a horror origin story.
[Laughs] Yeah, I have a trauma story. I have an origin story. But let's just say that horror was really big in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s. So when I'm a kid in the ‘70s, you know, that's an era where monster content is everywhere. Like I think prior to this experience, I think I had a Frankenstein Mego doll. I was a monster cereal kid. You know, Franken Berry - no, I think Boo Berry was better. Anyway, I already had a healthy concept of monsters. And I'm reading, you know, Casper and Hot Stuff. So I know what those things are, and they are a little bit scary. I think the Marvel comics at the time were pretty horrific, too?
There were all the Jack Kirby monsters, right?
Yeah, for sure. The Ghost Rider, Morbius era. So stuff was already a little scary. But when my parents broke up, when I was about six years old, my mom had to go back to work. She was a nurse, and she had two kids at home, so she would work night shifts. We had a babysitter, who was a teenager named Susan who lived down the street, who would come in after dinner and just sit with us, tuck us in until my mom got home from her shift. And Susan was a huge horror fan. And one particular night somewhere in there, she did something naughty, as babysitters often do. She had seen there was a film festival of rare films. [They] were showing banned Warner Brothers cartoons. And later, a couple of hard to see Hammer horror films. And she's like, this will be great. I'll take them to watch the cartoons, they'll fall asleep, and I get to watch Dracula, Prince of Darkness. I pretended to fall asleep in the theater and watched, you know, full on Hammer horror as a six year old. And when we got back home, I was freaking the fuck out. I could not sleep. I was hallucinating Christopher Lee's Dracula throughout my bedroom. It's almost like the deep sea bends, you know? I was having a reaction to horror that once I got through, I think for the next year, I couldn't stop talking about how much I liked Dracula. It was one of those weird, I don't know…I got hazed?
Did you walk around in a cape?
Absolutely, yeah. [Laughs] And after that, I got pretty creepy. I think once the fever broke, and I got over it, I think that thing happened pretty quickly. I think this is how you get through. The shock of horror is that it didn't take me long in my kid brain to realize that if you side with the monsters, if you're one of the freaks, then they're on your side. [Laughs] So I think I decided I was a werewolf.
You mentioned Harvey, you'd been reading Hot Stuff and Casper and all those, so these two things happened more or less at the same time?
Yeah. And actually, there was a real juxtaposition at one point, too. So I had a comic collection at my grandparents house who lived down the street from us. This would have been, you know, a year later. Probably when I was seven or eight, we moved back to Brampton, Ontario. So this was after I'd been kind of a monster fan, or I'd gotten used to the idea that horror was cool. But my grandparents were British expats, they'd lived through rationing. My grandfather was a coin collector. And they understood the idea of holding onto things. So I got lucky that I had a comic collection there, and they encouraged me to collect them and take care of them. And when they saw I was excited about certain comics, they would drag me to flea markets and garage sales and help me hunt for good comics. So very cool. My grandparents, Dennis and Doreen helped me or encouraged me to draw as well, encouraged me to draw and encouraged me to collect comics. They were also unabashed horror fans. So Doctor Who was always on in the background at their place. And that fourth Doctor era is pretty scary shit, too. One day… I can't remember the exact year, but The Exorcist was on television for the first time, the TV edit. I was at my grandparents’, they were babysitting, The Exorcist was on in the background, and I was reading my Hot Stuff comics. And this is the true origin of Dwellings… that weird idea where they're talking about the devil on the screen, it seems really fucking terrifying. And I'm reading about this cute devil and I couldn't tell if the comic was right, and that you shouldn't be scared of the devil or if or if The Exorcist was right, and I should. And I guess I've never really reconciled those concepts until now. It's both. It's both.
When you started working on Dwellings, you had this idea, this idea of a kind of subversive, dark version of Harvey. But then where did you go from there? Where did that first story come from? Did it all just come tumbling out, adapting your screenplay, or..?
The first story was pretty much ready to go. It is an adaptation of one of those film scripts I'd had. “They Know,” the first story, already existed in a kind of a pitch form. So I'd been thinking about that story for a while. Most of them actually come from previous notebook ideas. But I knew that one was ready. And when Michel and I decided to do it for Black Eye, we didn't know if it would just be a one off. We just wanted to do the experiment. So that's part of the reason that they're self-contained stories… we didn't know if the first would be the only one. And the Harvey veneer, you know, that kids comics look, is really sort of an in-joke for me. Most people under a certain age have no idea what that's supposed to look like. And I didn't know if it was going to fly… is this too niche, like too, too specific? But the thing is, I really think that those Harvey Comics designs, the look… Warren Kremer's version of Casper, Hot Stuff, they're adorable. They're iconic. And I thought, well, it doesn't really matter. If at least what's getting across is it’s supposed to look cute, and it's supposed to look like an old comic, like a flea market, you know, antique mall find. That's the joke. For me, I wanted to express the idea of nostalgia and of going backwards to that moment in the past where you're a kid reading Hot Stuff, and you're traumatized by The Exorcist. And so that first one was an experiment, and it went over really well. And so then we decided to make it a series and then it became more complicated creatively, because I didn't want to just repeat myself. I like to think that all six of those stories are their own thing. Almost like they're different films.
But they're all set in the same town.
That's the conceit.
So you're slowly building your own world. They have connections. There are characters that are shared between stories. Are you planning to build towards something larger now, or are you going to continue the one-off approach?
There will be more Dwellings someday soon. And if it's not broke, don't fix it. I'm going to continue making standalone stories. There is a background narrative. But see, I like the uncomfortability of horror. I think horror franchises and films more often than not ruin things by trying to define or over explain the background. The unknown is far more frightening than the Biblical devil. When you don't know what it is, I think that's far better. So I promise to keep an element of the unknown in Dwellings. But yes, the town itself will build and grow. There is a backstory that will be told. But I hope I don't make the mistake of over explaining things. I think issue four, the “Being of Sound Mind” story has probably the vaguest ending, and it's one of my favorites. Well, I don't pick favorite children, but I love that it doesn't explain itself and is just an uncomfortable, uneasy end.
Are you also going for the Stephen King-esque town where things happen? Is that conscious? Are you building on that?
It's not truly an homage. I mean, you could also say Twin Peaks, it’s kind of Lynchian. The stories in Dwellings are in a lot of ways, each of them, are sort of vaguely, maybe unspecifically, drawn from real stories. Or real conversations anyway. I've lived most of my life in southern Ontario in these sort of quainter towns and cities, where you have, you know, older homes, mill towns that got built up early so there's still old architecture. There's always these old stories of ghosts and murders in these towns that nobody really talks about. Right near me, around the corner from where I live is a place called Baker Street. It's been a parking lot for decades. It used to be a graveyard. And this is very Poltergeist, but this is true! This is happening around the corner for me. Years ago, they moved all the bodies to the bigger official cemetery, close to the outskirts of town, Woodlawn Memorial Park. They decided recently to dig up the parking lot and they're building a new library there, a larger structure. And as soon as they broke ground, they found bones, meaning they’d only moved the headstones. “You son of a bitch, you left the bodies and you only moved the headstones! You only moved the headstones!” That actually happened. And so it's this kind of vibe that I was trying to capture. So even though it definitely ends up feeling like a Derry, Maine, or ‘Salem's Lot kind of thing… which I don't mind, I'm a big Stephen King fan… it’s really more about the town just because of how personal the Dwellings stories are to me and where I live. I'm writing things that feel real. The characters feel like people I know and Elwich, the town itself, for that first story, I just had to create something that felt like a place I'd lived. And because of that, it's become a character in its own right.
Well, I want to talk about some of your other current projects. How did you get hooked up with the new Gold Key?
Yeah, that seems like an almost too perfect matchup. Speaking of somebody that's obsessed with nostalgia.
Do you know their story? Like, how they acquired the rights to Gold Key?
Do you? Did you look that up?
Yeah, I did! And I was kind of shocked by that whole thing. It is a weird tale.4
It is very weird. I mean, I never thought I'd see that logo reappear on a comic. So yeah, they reached out, I guess once they'd acquired the trademark. They were looking for a way to use it. New to publishing, but not new to comics. I thought [it] was a brilliant move for them to reach out to the estate of Boris Karloff, to reach out to Sarah Karloff and ask if they could do a new Boris Karloff Mysteries.5 Brilliant. That's a great way to rebirth the brand. But then, Gold Key was known for having the best kids comics. They simultaneously had the Disney license, Hanna Barbara license, and the Warner Brothers license. They were doing all the cool kids comics for quite a while there. And Gold Key was looking for somebody that could work in that style without them having to pay, you know, Disney money. [Laughs] And so my name came up. They actually reached out to me in the very early days of Dwellings. Like I don't think they'd even seen Dwellings yet. I think their interest was based on the JetCat stuff. We were in talks from basically the time they acquired the logo, so it was a long time coming. But it was a yes for me right away. I definitely needed a break from the horror of Dwellings. I have to say living with that in your head ongoing for a while, can be a little dark. So doing an all ages book felt perfect. And also, no offense to my friends at OWL magazine, but, you know, these days, making a comic that's for kids has to go through a lot of filters. I think you're supposed to have a degree in children's education to write kids comics these days. It's just no fun anymore. It has to be educational. There's so many things you can't say or do. In Figgy [Furthermore], I have this boy Howzie running around on hydro wires. I get to do crazy shit, which is exciting for me. It's uninhibited, it's a fun comic. The kind of comics that I would’ve liked as a kid.
It's also, if you don't mind my saying, that first Figgy story is like, one panel away from Dwellings.
[Laughs] Yes! Like, it's the gateway drug to Dwellings.
[Laughs] Because you've got, you know, the rats, the ghost, there's robbers and a secret hideout. Like, all you need to do is change one panel and that punchline at the end, and it's a Dwellings story.
Well, you know, that's awesome for you to notice and say, because I also think that if you just changed the last panel in every Casper or Hot Stuff comic, it would be Dwellings. Like if at the end of a Hot Stuff, he has some kind of adventure with ogres, and he just says at the end, “What they don't know is they're going to fucking hell.” [Laughs] Or they don't know they're in hell, or, you know, at the end, Casper just cries and says, “You know, I wish I hadn't been hit by that truck.”
[Laughs] Or there’s just like a shotgun against the wall.
[Laughs] Or yeah, at the end of a Casper comic, he says, “Oh, no, it's July the eighth,” and then just a hole opens in his head and starts to bleed, you know. Yeah. “It's the anniversary of my murder.”
Yeah, they never really talk about how Casper got to be Casper. And it's not a good story.
No, but like most kids, I always wondered about it. Or I don't know, maybe I was more morbid than most kids.
I think you were the right kind of morbid. The other thing that's been announced is that you're part of the team working on new EC books for Oni.
Yeah, yeah. I’m glad that's finally out there.
I know you can't really say much about it. But are you excited to be part of that team?
Very much so. I think by the time this comes out more official announcements will be made, but they have announced the names of people involved. They've announced my name. I like Hunter Gorinson's approach to this at Oni, which was, EC has never come back as new comics for a reason. It's been reprinted often, thank goodness, but it's so specific. The EC stuff is so specific in tone. How do you do new EC comics without it feeling like parody, which has also been done often? So we were having a long talk about what made EC work. Like what if EC Comics hadn't been censored out of existence, in ‘58 or whatever, ‘57, ‘56, I think.6 What if there was still an EC brand today, what would that look like? Sort of like asking yourself when you look at a Spider-Man comic from the ‘60s and you look at a Spider-Man comic now, there are radical differences, but there is a core thing that has not changed. And so we were talking about that. They'd still be making anthologies. [A] core group of creators, so even though it's an anthology, you know what you're going to get. You get some consistency in your anthology. Short horror stories with a slightly dark humor bent, but not necessarily. Some of them are straight up gross. And social commentary. That it has to be current, and it should be upsetting some people. It should be upsetting the wrong people. And if not, it's not EC. I'm very excited about it. So I'm one of the contributing writers, I will not be drawing cute EC comic stories.
Are you planning to keep the formula? Or are you going to break the classic EC formula of set up, betrayal, shocking twist on the last page?
You mean like Dwellings? [Laughs] I think it's in my blood. It's in my storytelling makeup. So I'm going to try to do it. I've got three stories that I'm starting on right now. And I hope that they don't come across as parodic, that it's not like some kind of pastiche. I hope it has that same pace. I'm going to try to have the same pacing without it feeling like it's corny. So we'll see. We'll see how it goes. And I have no idea which artist or artists I'm going to be paired with yet, which is also exciting. That's a fun thing. And I am doing Dwellings-style parody covers for every issue, as a fun nod to the original EC. Oni asked me if I would be interested in doing homages. And it'll be the only thing - as far as I know - it'll be the only thing about the new EC comics that has any connection to the original runs. Where I'm doing riffs on Johnny Craig and Wally Wood and redrawing those layouts in a Dwellings style. So those will be really fun. They're very, very fun to do. I'm pretty excited about that, too. The other strange part of that is because we did the variant for Epitaphs from the Abyss #1, the Gaines estate loved it and, to my delight, just by accident, it ended up being the very first approved new EC cover, since ‘56. How weird is that? Like, who could have imagined? [Laughs]
You have at least one more project that I know of this year, which is collecting The Land of Nod.
Yeah, that's been a long time coming. Michel and I, after we did the Dejects book, we just decided ambitiously to gradually reprint all of my stuff for anyone that might be interested. Especially because, let's face it, that's a pretty small audience, and crowdfunding this stuff makes way more sense. With this new crowdfunding model for comics, you can sell to the 500 people that care about your work and make it worth your while in a way that if you sold 5,000 to the direct market, you wouldn't break even. So yeah, we're still doing that. We're gradually bringing back all of my out of print stuff. And Land of Nod is next, which is exciting and weird. So I'm revisiting that, coloring that work, and getting close to it again. It feels like a different person. I feel like I'm doing some kind of weird classic underground reprint that I've never seen before.
Looking back on everything, you've had this journey now, from alternative comics creator, or wannabe fine artist, to cartoons, to cutting yourself off entirely and going back to a day job. And now you're doing all this new work, while bringing your old work back as well. How does it feel? Are you in a good place now? Is this where you wanted to be all along?
Yeah, I definitely reconciled. It’s Dwellings that did it. Not so much Dejects. Dejects almost felt like a reunion tour, you know, like the Pixies playing Doolittle back to front. So that was great. But when I made Dwellings and people seemed to like it, I think after all these years I finally accepted that comics is actually my calling. I'm not saying I won't do comic strips, or work in television again. But comics is where I'm supposed to be. I accept that now. And I won't be leaving again.
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- Seattle’s The Stranger is still around as a quarterly arts magazine, but in the early ‘90s it was the alternative newspaper of record when Seattle was the epicenter for the alternative music, art and comics scenes.
- If you’re curious to see his first animation work, Jay has put that episode of Squawk Box up on YouTube.
- That is a bit of an understatement on my part. Cooke was not only a titan of comics, but he was a storyboard artist and writer on many of Warner Brothers’ best series in the ‘90s and early 2000s, including The New Batman Adventures, Superman: The Animated Series, and Batman Beyond, which features his art prominently in its opening title sequence.
- The shortest version of this truly bizarre story goes like this: Robert Willis, an infamous hacker and spreader of misinformation, owned the trademark for Gold Key (how exactly this came about is a little unclear), and traded it to Lance Linderman, an alliteratively named comic book dealer, for a copy of the first issue of Eastman and Laird’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Linderman recounted his side of the story in an interview with YouTube channel Carlos Collects Comics.
- Boris Karloff Gold Key Mysteries, an homage to the classic Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery was the first title from the new iteration of Gold Key..
- EC stopped publishing their marquee horror titles in 1954, following the establishment of the Comics Code Authority (whose very existence was a thinly veiled scheme to shut down EC’s horror line). As Jay correctly says, EC more or less shut down in ‘56, although Mad continued on (albeit as a magazine and without the EC name on the cover).
