Nate Garcia arrives at my apartment at 1:30 sharp, his face bedecked with a strap-on corpse mask. This likely owes something to the approach of Halloween, but if we’re being honest, I wouldn’t have questioned the decision regardless. When one asks for an interview with Nate Garcia, one does not balk at the results.
I had been wanting to interview Garcia for quite some time, since I first saw his work in 2021’s self-published Alanzo Sneak, which proved to be something of a breakout for the artist. Two things struck me then. First: the unfiltered, dirty-minded incivility of the work. Garcia, alongside his occasional colleagues and collaborators Simon Hanselmann and Josh Pettinger, belongs to a dissident element from the dominant strain of slightly well-mannered graphic novels from the past two decades. Not for them the tightly-wound cerebral density of a Tomine or Clowes, nor for that matter the rough, art school experimentalism of a Floyd Tangeman. Garcia harkens instead to the worlds of Shelton and Wolverton: unhinged, unfettered, and unapologetic about it all.1 It also owes something, perhaps to his chagrin, to the artist’s time as a caricature artist at the local zoo, a field which lent itself perfectly to the study of gross and grotesque exaggerations that reduce every personality to their most humiliating vulnerability.
That this makes Garcia’s work somewhat unlikely to catch the immediate fancy of larger, mainstream book publishers, is at least in some measure a point of pride for the cartoonist. Garcia is an artist who puts great stock in controlling his own output, even if that means adherence to a model of low print run self-publishing that makes his comics scarce almost the moment they reach the public eye. It’s self-consciously, proudly, a return to the underground, and an implicit (if not necessarily deliberate) rejection of a mainstreaming of comics that runs the risk of taming them in the process.
None of this is to say, however, that Nate Garcia’s work is chaotic or primitive: this is not some outsider artist scribbling his inner id over sheets of notebook paper. And that is the second thing I noticed about Garcia’s comics: he is absolutely and utterly in control of his work. Especially in the books that have come out since Alanzo Sneak, form is in sharp contrast to content: steady, uniform grids of panels, in which characters move with a perfect timing and comedic rhythm that matches the best of daily newspaper strips. This is chaos, but it’s chaos with knowledge, plan, and purpose; a grinning orchestra conductor speeding up "Flight of the Bumblebee" while an H-bomb cloud erupts behind him.
At that time, I presumed Garcia was someone who had been around the block - a veteran cartoonist whose work I was only then getting around to discovering. It was to my delight and horror to realize how wrong I was. Nate Garcia is hideously young, both in age and career. His first published comics came out in 2020, at which time he had just emerged–God help us all–from high school. It has only been in the past year that he has been able to support himself fully as an artist, without juggling the aforementioned zoo caricature day job. What we are looking at here is someone whose advancement into a full-fledged artist has happened at Beatles-like speed, and isn’t anywhere close to finished. It is with some trepidation, then, that I say this unavoidable truth: Nate Garcia is, already, one of the best young cartoonists at work today.
So, then, the interview. I spoke with Garcia in my living room in late October. The cartoonist Molly Dwyer was present, sketching on a notepad throughout; she will have a brief cameo late in the talk.
-Zach Rabiroff
ZACH RABIROFF: When we spoke on the phone earlier, I joked that I was going to do this interview Robert Caro-style, and start with an hour of background on your parents’ town in Texas. That was a joke, but also not really. You’re from San Antonio, right?
NATE GARCIA: Well, I was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, one hour from Philadelphia. But I lived in San Antonio from the ages of 3 to 9, when my family moved us to El Paso, Texas, and then moved us a few hours away to San Antonio for two years after that. So I lived in San Antonio for five years and El Paso for two years.
But your earliest memories are of Texas.
Yeah, for all intents and purposes. I have very little memories of Pennsylvania before anything in Texas. And then they moved us out of there when I was 9.
So what was that like?
Well, I thought the whole world was like Texas. When I lived in Texas, of course it is very flat. And when you are on the street, you see as far as the street goes, until your eyes turn blurry and there's nothing else. But I didn't have a lot of friends in Texas. Really. I had two friends that I walked home from school in elementary school with every single day: Calista and Thomas. And they didn't draw. So after school was over, and after we would walk home, that was pretty much it until the next morning when I saw them at school again. And as I was growing up in Texas, at lunch and stuff, I would just sit and draw. And a lot of my friends started to do their own thing, and then I just stayed drawing in school. And so a lot of my memory in Texas is drawing at home or drawing at school.
So drawing was always a big thing for you.
Yeah, ever since I was very little.
Do you feel like you fit in in Texas? Like what was the culture like there?
The culture? Well, the culture of 7-year olds back then was kind of like WWE and basketball.
What years are we talking about here, by the way?
I lived in Texas from like 2005 to 2011. WWE culture, basketball culture. A lot of 40-year old teachers that used to be young, maybe in the '90s or in the '80s, and they were just really, really uptight. But they looked to me how millennials look now, like they're actually older than that. Does that make sense? They kind of kept the same fashion. Like, I just remember a lot of never-ending scarves and bleached blonde hair and really dark skin. Artificial tanning was really big.
Did you feel like you fit in with that? I know you were young, but still.
No, I was just drawing back then. I didn't fit. I had one teacher that I connected with, [who] I made a bunch of these comics about when I was little: like, a hundred zines I made. And that's when I started making zines, was in 2008. Because she would tell all these really crazy stories of her roommates, and lovers, and ex-lovers, and parties, and concerts, and church drama, and family drama, and pet drama. And it was probably the most boring stuff, but we were her captive audience in those times. And man, I would just go home that same night, and do a comic about it, and give it to her. She has them all. And I'm actually on a crusade to get them back very soon for something.
What kind of zines were you doing? What did they look like?
It was something [this teacher] started me out with, because she would see I was drawing all the time. And one day she folded up four pieces of computer paper and stapled them, saddle-stitched, to make a folded, letter-sized zine of 12 pages. Just blank computer paper. And I had never been given the format of seeing it as an empty, finished product that I could add on before. Especially when you're young, and even as you get older, if you don't make a book ever, it feels like such an unattainable object - having a double-sided page with art on both sides. And I made it that night. And she would just keep on giving me them, and giving me them, until I realized how to do it. And so I started to get really, really glossy cardstock, that when you folded the paper [the] coating actually rips on the edge, to make glossy covers. And then I would ask my teacher to staple it, or sometimes I would just staple it myself.
It's interesting, because it sounds like it was the physical object of the book that you were being drawn to, rather than anything specific that was inside of it.
I was already making notebooks. My mom would buy me, every single week, a 50-cent spiral-bound notebook that was three subjects. And I would just fill them up. But I was very annoyed - like, I had all of these composition books that I would tape paper covers on top of to make a front and back cover, but I hated that it was lined paper, and I hated how the covers were. I had to put stuff on top; I couldn't just draw on them. So here was finally this ideal, holy object in my hands that I was able to do everything I wanted on. And that was really inspiring back then.
So then, you must have been reading comics before that, if you were inspired to draw them in the first place.
I was really into Junie B. Jones chapter booklets and Bone, because that first teacher, Kimberly, gave me a copy of the sixth book in the colorized Bone series called "Old Man's Cave," which is really good. But if you're reading that part of the story that it's collecting, it's really hard without context. So I didn't know what the hell was going on, but man, I was just so obsessed with it.
What attracted you to it if the story didn’t make any sense?
Just the artwork. Jeff Smith's artwork was just the best of the best for a 7-year old: the dragons, the lighting, the coloring-- those are the colorized versions. And you know, [Smith] talks about how Art Spiegelman convinced him to color that book. When Scholastic asked him, he wanted to do it in black & white, and [Spiegelman] was saying that it was a good idea, because Bone is about life, to do it in color. And I really would have to agree that if I was seeing that book in black & white, I would have probably had a different reaction to it. And I don't think it would've captivated a child's mind the same way as it being in color.
Which is interesting to hear you say, because your early stuff is in black & white.
The early stuff was colored in marker or whatever.
Yeah, when you were eight years old. I meant your early published stuff.
Yeah, the early published stuff is in black & white. But that was at a time when I was really obsessed with drawing, through sketchbooks, the trajectory of my personal life in every moment. So by the time I was in 10th and 11th grade, when I was making those first [published] comics, it was like I was just keeping sketchbooks the same way I was before. And that was really lending itself to black & white. Because I loved the idea of only needing one pen to draw in my sketchbooks.
We’ll work our way back to those books, but going back: you started with Bone. Did you keep reading comics after that?
Yeah, I read Bone, and then I heard that Jeff Smith really liked Pogo, and I wanted to find out everything I could about the guy who made that book. I was reading interviews and listening to interviews on the internet when I was very little--
You were listening to Walt Kelly interviews when you were 7?
Jeff Smith interviews. And he was saying that he liked Walt Kelly so much, and that drew me to [Kelly]. So I got a Fantagraphics collection of Pogo, because they were doing them in those big horizontal hardcovers.
Where were you finding that?
The school library. This was when I moved to Pennsylvania, maybe three years later. But I was always looking for it. And they had it in either the school library, or I asked my mom for Christmas about it. But in that time period, it was pretty much just Garfield and Bone. And then I found Derf Backderf in high school, and Robert Crumb. And even in high school, that was kind of everything I knew in my comics language and vocabulary: Derf Beckderf, Garfield, Jeff Smith, and Walt Kelly.
But you were starting to discover the underground guys like Crumb at that point.
Yeah. My dad had a copy of the [Crumb] sketchbooks somewhere that he actually threw away, probably from my mother making him. And they were gone for a long period of my life. But I had seen enough of them to never forget them, so I had seen Crumb at a very early age. And then, by the time I was in eighth grade, I had seen [Crumb’s work] again. And by the time I was older I found all the other guys that did that stuff.
You were spending a lot of time with books, it sounds like. Why do you think that was?
I would be in school, and I would be so depressed that my mom was mad at me, or my dad was upset with me, that my grades were really bad. Because I literally didn't know what was going on. I was just drawing. And so on all my tests, I was always just guessing, and always just copying my homework off of somebody else. Because, you know, they made it so if you did your completed homework, your grade could only be a certain level of low. And that was very useful for me.
Figuring out what the bare minimum was.
Yeah, and-- I lost track of the question.
Comics as a coping mechanism.
I would just be so depressed in the classroom, and the only thing I'd be excited to do was read this comic at home, or read this comic on the bus. Like, it was just always just the biggest dopamine rush when I'd open it after such a horrible, soulless school environment day after day.
Was this just a coping mechanism for you, or did you feel like it was something you could do “professionally” at some point?
I was really trying to be a serious artist about it all. I would try to make this grand idea of, like, a 1,200-page comic, and think that I could spend my whole life on it. I would draw the pencils for the first page and ink it, and then I would color it with marker and paint. And then I would think, “Yeah, the first page is done. I'll do the second page.” And I would mess up as I'm finishing, and it would ruin it, and it would just discourage me for like a whole week. And I would just feel like I could never do it. It felt so insurmountable - obviously, because I was putting myself up to these really dumb standards that you put yourself in when you're a kid, and your only comic exposure is this whole market of comics where they have to be in libraries, and they have to have a spine, and they have to be these really huge ordeals every time to make money.
Because the comic book store became very isolating for a kid. I remember many times I'd be excited about the idea of going to the comic book store, and I would ask my dad two weeks ahead. If I wanted to do something, I had to ask two weeks ahead. And I was like, “Okay, two weeks dad, we gotta go to the comic book store, please.” And I would be so excited about the idea of it every time. And then when I got there, I would feel like-- I'm just looking through, like, “Batman vs. the Robot of Mars” or something [up to] issue #591. And it looked so bad to me, and it was so far from my idea of what I thought comics actually were. And it felt so like a commercial.
Every cover was just this really bad cereal box commercial, and I didn't know why it was bad back then, but I was just really confused why it wasn't like my DVD-- there was this DVD I would watch all the time of Stan Lee and Kevin Smith interviewing each other. And it was the first time I was seeing the covers of all these very old comic superhero comic books, like Marvel and DC, and they'd have these really high res scans, full color saturated. And they would scroll from the bottom to the top of the screen as they're talking. And I would just pause it and go frame by frame so I could see the whole image as it scrolls down. And I thought that's what comics were. And when I would go to these comic book stores, of course they're not going to have those comics because they're hundreds of dollars. And it was very confusing.
So it was stuff you were reading in the library that got to you.
Yeah. It was libraries, pretty much.
You’ve talked about discovering other people in more of the indie scene of comics when you were in high school. You’ve mentioned Craig Thompson as a big early influence. When did that happen?
[Laughs] [Blankets] was in my parents' house in the basement. My dad had this very specific box of books, and I kind of knew you don't go in that box of books, because I would ask about this box and he would always have some kind of way about his demeanor.
The forbidden book box.
It was never outright spoken, but I saw, like, [Blankets] was a book about painting. And in my mind, the association with painting was naked women and naked men. This box was so alluring to me. And I finally had some alone time in the basement when he was gone, and I was able to look at this box. And I didn't even want to look through it, because I actually was very fearful of this book. I grew up very Christian, and I believed in going to Hell all the time. So I flipped through it really fast, and I saw-- there's a scene at the end where it's drawings of [the character] Raina that he drew naked in a sequence, and it's just two very simple drawings of breasts and scratchy pencil hatching for pubic hair on the bottom.
And I knew in my mind what that was. I was remembering when the fire alarm in my house went off when I was very little, and my mother was in the shower and she came out naked. I was so young, and I remember this. So I knew what that was, and I didn't look at that book for years and years. And then, in middle school and high school, I found it at the library. My mother would drop me off at the library all the time when she would go and babysit - she would go at 5:00 in the morning and then come back at night and pick me up. I'd stay there in the summer all day before I was able to work a job at 14, and I would just sit in the graphic novel section. And I found Blankets again there.
And that is actually one of those comics that for me was like, I can't wait to keep reading this. Because it was just so immersive. Like, it was very small details that make a room feel lived in for my very young eye. It was like sustenance and nutrients to read those comics. Because there was this very new teenage love arc happening in this book that was a little bit mature for the age I was reading. And it was very weird, also, even if I was the right age. So I understand people kind of laugh when you say "Craig Thompson's Blankets" as an influence sometimes, because as an adult making comics, you might see that as juvenile, or, like, teeny bopper-y. But when I was really little, that was like--
Well, you were the right age for it.
Exactly. And I would hate for Craig Thompson to read that, and I'm sure it came from a very repressed and young voice inside of him remembering that stuff. But I [learned from Blankets] that comics had this power to evoke memory and process something at a very young age. And I think people growing up reading comics might only get a certain view of it, like superheroes or funny animals. But if you see an autobiographical book at a young age, that shows you that if something bad happens in your life you can really overcome it and make something beautiful out of it through this thing called comics. That can really give a child a lot of power and dominance over their emotional stability and their art, I think. And I think that really is why it stuck with me.
I think that’s a good opportunity to start moving into the stuff you actually published. And that really starts with Hornrim, right?
Yeah, that does start with Hornrim. That was when I really just wanted to make a comic like the underground comics that I found. When I turned 18, I was watching the movie Crumb. And in that movie they show all the covers, and they talk about other underground cartoonists like Spain Rodriguez and Victor Moscoso, who I didn't know about at all. So I was starting to put names to covers and I'm like, “Okay, so that peanut cover of Zap, I know Crumb didn't draw that.” And it was all connecting. And I found on the internet a collection of all these underground comics. And I finally bought them - they were like $20 for the lot of them.
And they came to my house, and I was finally able to see that a comic can just be one page. A comic can just be nonsensical. A comic can just be a bunch of stuff that looks good, and can be really overworked for just one single panel, and then loose for everything else. It was like everything I needed was in front of me, and I didn't feel bad about not making a comic that I thought had to be really long, or like some beautiful odyssey or something, you know?
It was liberating to not have to do a longform narrative.
Yeah, yeah. So then I was like, “Well, I can just make one of these underground comics, like how it's all just one guy.” And then after Zap, I found Eightball, which is such a standard trajectory. But I think that's a good trajectory, because it's kind of in order. That's even more liberation, because there's the underground comics, the ones that don't make sense and they're all on drugs, but it looks beautiful and it's all one guy. And then there's the '90s, where it's all one guy, and it looks beautiful, and it makes sense, and it makes you feel something crazy when you read it: emotional, funny, scary, creepy, gross, itchy. It's like, that's perfect.
You can feel a definite Clowes influence in those Hornrim issues.
Yeah, I was just so unbelievably excited to have found these comics. And I was thinking, and sleeping, and dreaming, and talking about comics. It was like every single hour of my day was a snowball getting bigger of my love for comics. And it wasn't always connected to drawing them, because comics felt so unattainable to me artistically that I was just so happy to read any comic. But it was finally when I found Daniel Clowes and Robert Crumb that I felt I could also use this energy of loving it to make something. I was never thinking I could actually even get there [to the point of] having a book. But I just loved the comics, so I thought that I would finally make them and not care if it's bad.
You had no idea what the outcome of Hornrim #1 was going to be while you were working on it?
Well, I spent eight months working on that first issue. I was doing sketchbooks all the time in high school, and drawing all day in ink from cheap pens from Ross Dress for Less. And I started making comics for fun, just for myself, thinking only of them existing in a book that I'm not going to look at for years. Once I'm done with it, I'll start a new one. And then my mom got this scanner, and there was a black & white photocopy button on it. I had stolen newsprint from my art class, and I put the newsprint in this printer, thinking, "Ha ha, what if this works?" And then I photocopied the sketchbook page, which was just, like, a bunch of stupid crosshatched drawings. And it printed out on the newsprint, and there was enough space on the other side that I flipped it and put it back in. And then I took it out, and I folded it, and there it was: it was a front and back comic book in my hand. And that was it.
You were broken from then on.
I was like, “I can't believe it took me this long to realize how easy it actually was to just do that.” After that, I spent eight months drawing comics in my sketchbook. Like how I was before: not thinking about size, not thinking about scale to whatever the paper would be. I thought, “I'll figure it out later. But now that I know I can do it, I'm just going to make them and only think about that.” And I thought, “I'm going to give this to my friend Dylan, I'm going to give this to my mom, and I'm going to walk around my neighborhood and throw them on houses, and leave them in restaurants, and leave them in coffee places, and I'm just going to keep publishing them like that. And I don't know what publishing means, but if it's out in the real world, on the streets in Philadelphia”-- this is when I was living in Philadelphia. I thought that it would be enough to know that they're just floating around somewhere.
So you were just drawing all of these on notebook paper with cheap pens, right? Had you learned anything up to that point about what tools professional cartoonists used, or were you just making it up?
I knew that Jack Kirby used a brush and a Rapidograph, and I knew Robert Crumb used a Rapidograph. And I tried to use a Rapidograph for a year in the pandemic when I was 18; a lot of Hornrim #1 is drawn with a Rapidograph, and Hornrim #2. But I took such good care of them, man. I was cleaning them with a little red balloon, getting all the air out of it before I put them away, making sure there's no stains, even if it's just cosmetic. It was really like they were cars to me. But the paper would get bunched up in the nib, and it was just irreplaceable. And, of course, you could buy replacement nibs, but money doesn't grow on trees. So I stuck with Micron pens on very toothy, absorbent paper. I didn't really care at that point. It was most important to me that I had a comic that was done, because I wasn't trying to waste any time anymore.
What do you mean by that?
I just remember from when I was little, I would become so discouraged by overworking these pages, and trying to make them perfect. And I was still really, really precise and anal about pages. I mean, I would redo pages three times back then for just the most stupid mistakes that were very Wite-Out-able. But I just didn't want to waste any [pages] starting over. I just wanted to be able to finish comics that were bad, and accept that, and use that fuel to make ones that are better. But here's the thing: by the time it was done, I didn't even hate it as much as I thought I would.
I wasn't as self-critical as I thought I would be. Because it was kind of emotionally separated from my brain. I looked at it, and I objectively knew what it was, but it didn't emotionally affect me, because it was an object and it was done. You know, when a paper is half-finished on the table, it can always be fixed and turned into something. But when it's a book, that exists frozen in time, and the possibilities of it ever being something else are gone. And that's really freeing, because you can always look at something and think, “It can be this great thing that will be amazing if….” But once it's done, it is what it is, and it doesn't matter what it could be. What you're working on now is what something else could become.
The first Hornrim issue has all these different short stories, but you also set up what would be your first recurring character. So, were you giving any thought to the idea that this was going to be the first issue of something that you could carry on, or were you just making stuff up?
No, it was the pandemic. I was making stuff up. I wanted everything. I wanted fish. I wanted cowboys. I wanted drama. I wanted recurring characters in the same issues with the same title. I wanted a self-insert story. I was like, this is my variety show. But it was never, in my mind, something that I had to feel I was responsible for in any other time other than the present.
I made it a habit - every time I had an idea that I thought could be funny, I would write it down, even if it was stupid. And like two weeks would go by, and I would be done drawing whatever stupid page I was working on, and I would see all these ideas, and it would connect with another one on the same page. And it never was able to stop then.
My original goal was, every single month I'll do one full comic that's a story that I write, that I care about. And then one collection of sketchbook drawings that exist only as single-image illustrations that are non-narrative, every single month. And if I worked a job that made it so that I was able to pay the rent, and I wasn't unhealthy, I thought that's really how I could be happy in life. When I was 18, I told my mom and dad that I wasn't going to go to school-- because I was actually enrolled to go to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. I had gotten a bunch of scholarships, because I just applied to every single one. And I had art on exhibition there for a short time, because I won the Scholastic Award from my high school. And because of that, they gave me a scholarship.
But it was such a small dent in the big amount of money this college was. Like, I could not in a million years have the money for this school for four years. I had the calculator app open: I was multiplying things by four, and I was thinking about the money that I could make in a year's time in the best-case scenario. And it was just not at enough at all. And I kept looking at this piece of paper that I had, [a pamphlet] that had all of the photocopies in my sketchbook as I was thinking of this. And, of course, when I'm looking at this pamphlet, I'm not thinking of what the pamphlet actually looks like, because it's printed so bad, and it's upside-down on the other side, and it's kind of cut off. But I was able to see this, and know that it would be possible to do something that was more like a book, versus this stupid scholarship.
So Hornrim was an escape from that kind of grind.
Yeah. I'm like, “Well, I don't want to do all of that school stuff. I can just work at a restaurant or at a grocery store. And after work, I just have this comic all the time. One every month. I can do that.” Because I grew up watching those documentaries like I was talking about, with the Stan Lee DVD. But I would watch ones on YouTube a lot, and they were talking about how Jack Kirby would draw, like, six books a week or something like that. And in my mind, I'm thinking, “Wow, six books a week. Man, I really gotta get this going!” [Laughs] So I held myself to this really ridiculous standard, but at that age, it actually fueled me. It didn't discourage me. I thought I could really do this. But I ended up doing a book a month for a really long time. Hornrim #1-3 is like one or two months in between each.
You were producing each of those issues in a month?
Yeah. It was really important to me to put the month and the year on every cover. I wanted to have those comics as a very personal, organized time capsule. And I knew I would be happy doing that.
One of the interesting things about that first issue is that it’s the only time you show up as a character in one of your comics, right?
Yeah. That's just very lazy, wanting to do an autobiographical comic and thinking that anybody actually gives a shit about you.
That kind of goes back to the Blankets thing.
I'm not sure I was even thinking about Blankets. In high school, I would do self-portraits, just because I really hated myself. And to see [myself] in a drawing helped me not feel so bad about my looks, and make it something to laugh at instead. And I actually was a caricature artist from the age of 14 to 20. And caricatures were really fun for me. When I was bored at a certain time in my high school life, I would just draw a stupid caricature of myself. I liked this one drawing, how I drew glasses, and I think I just wanted an excuse to draw that a lot. And because maybe I couldn't think of a character.
That [autobio] comic specifically is a very, very, very bad comic. It is about the pandemic. And it's about the emotional weight, and how it's really making me put my thumb to my chin about it. And it was really because I was scared. But it is executed so poorly that it comes off as if I am the only person in the world knowing about this pandemic. [Laughs] I think there's a lot of cartoonists in this contemporary world of publishing where they don't [get] past that mediocre, yawning reaction of what it feels like to read one of those [autobiographical] comics. I guess maybe they haven't read enough comics and yawned at them and [therefore] known they suck. But they just keep doing this autobiographical stuff that is not in any way masked, or transformed, or executed to make anything more interesting at all.
So do you feel like there are elements of what you were trying to say in that autobiographical comic that have shown up in the fictional characters you’ve come up with since then?
Absolutely. Every fictional situation comes from a real-life situation, and I'm liberated in the writing of that because I can just make up all the other parts. And you can enhance it, and make it something that's actually captivating. With just the smallest bit of effort, you can make an autobiographical comic more captivating and fun to read by just not making it so exact, you know? Sometimes it's just, like, I don't understand why this person feels the need to make their comic about their very boring life. When really, if they took a thing from their boring life and added fiction to it, it could have meat to it.
The flipside of that autobiographical comic is Alanzo Sneak, who also shows up in that first issue [of Hornrim]. Tell me about where Alanzo came from.
I wanted to draw a cowboy with big shoes - modern running shoes, like Nikes or Skechers. I was watching Toy Story from a very young age, and drawing cowboys all the time because of it. And becoming very obsessed with Clint Eastwood and anything cowboy-related. So I was drawing them in my sketchbook with the big shoes, because I thought that was funny. “A cowboy that doesn't have boots, ha ha, nobody's ever thought of that.” And I just made the [first] comic as an excuse to draw him four times. A lot of these early comics are me giving myself an excuse to draw something in a repetitive way. I would draw in my sketchbook one thing, and then I would keep drawing the same thing next to it with the most slight variations, but very obsessively.
And a comic made it so I could actually do that, and it would have a purpose. All I'm doing is putting a box around it. And then that last panel is a big close-up, and that's my reward for drawing him three times. [Laughs]
How much of a character did Alanzo have at that point? Or did you really just want to draw a guy in a cowboy suit and sneakers?
He had a character. He was Cowboy Blue. It was this character that I created when I was in 7th grade: this cowboy with a blue bandana and a polka dot thing. And he had this whole story, which I won't go into at all due to the subject matter, but I didn't know any better and I was very young--
Can you explain what the subject matter was that’s stopping you from going into it?
Well, that would defeat the purpose of not going into it, I would imagine.
Okay. Vague hints.
This was a very strongly racist cowboy story, inspired from the only exposure of cowboys I had, which was the visual, cartoony side of watching Toy Story, and then the very, very, very offensive western movies that I would watch.
Ah. The John Wayne of it all.
Yeah, absolutely. But Alanzo is not the same cowboy; he is just the evolution of it. But he had this way of speaking that was very specific. And I wanted it to be in the specifics of his demeanor, but not necessarily his life, if that makes sense. I did this really old comic of him where he is in a street market, and there's a guy asking him to buy cigars, and he's like, “Cigars. Cigars. Cigars.” And then it was a really dramatic picture of his face: he says, “No, man, I don't smoke…”
And then he lights up a cigarette, and he says, “…cigars.” And he walks away. And that was the first page of this very long comic I wanted to do in the 7th grade with him. That never evolved until that gag comic [in Hornrim]. And by that point, I just wanted a whole comic that was just jokes like those cigar jokes. That's what it was to me at that time: transferring the moodiness of his character, and keeping that alive in this new body with shoes.
So, if you had to describe Alanzo Sneak the character, who is he?
He is a very troubled, insecure cowboy who is too short, and very, very protective of his horse, who is his only companion in the world, Sheena. And navigating his emotional responsibilities and problems with his best friend Huff, who is a dog. And Alonzo's father was a doctor, and gave his only daughter a lot of money, who is Monty. And she is one of the only horse doctors in their town and city. So she is a very unreliable doctor, because she has all of this money, but not any kind of knowledge or passion for the practice. And Alanzo kind of is in the middle of these people, and he's kind of the most impressionable one, but also the most mean to the only person he can be mean to, which is Sheena. And so they have a very interesting mother and son romance-- oh, sorry. Mother and son relationship. A romantic relationship, and also a pet relationship too.
A lot of people see the crassness of a cowboy and his horse being in love, and think sex - and, like, underground, disgusting porn. But it's very, very, very, very real. The love is very, very real to them. To them it doesn't matter that it's animal and man, it's just that they're two beings that are connected to each other.
How much of that emotional core did you already know existed when you did that first story?
It was in the first one. The only thing he cares about is Sheena, and he says that on the first page. I knew deep down that was not just a cliché to me. I thought, "Yeah, he really does love her." And [that] was revealed to me with every story I made past that point. But it was never seen to me as just funny. I thought [Sheena] would be probably the only person he talks to.
So you did this first issue [of Hornrim]. What happened then? How did you distribute this? How did you get it out there?
It was 10 people from my high school bought it on an Etsy account that I made the day that I printed Hornrim. And I thought, "Okay, this will be fine... probably nobody will buy this." And I posted it on Instagram. See, here's the thing: in high school nowadays, my generation born in 2002 and after, you can be in high school, and it's very possible for you to have 1,500 to 2,000 followers on Instagram and have absolutely no reason for it. Because you just follow everybody in your school, right? So I posted [Hornrim], and 10 people bought it, and then the rest I just sent to cartoonists that I admired, or gave them to my family, who were very confused about that stuff. My mom was really confused and really upset. But that doesn't matter.
But the distribution of it was, like - I would get one sale a week on Etsy if some idiot's scrolling for long enough on the comic category. But it didn't really matter to me. I would write two-page thank you notes for every single one, handwritten, and just draw them stuff. I was just, “Wow, this is so crazy! You want this!” And it didn't matter to me as long as I was able to afford any kind of necessity like rent.
So did you end up making your money back from it?
[Laughs] No. But I was able to survive at that point from the amount of money I got from the government during COVID. We should go back to 2020 here. In the summer of 2020 I unenrolled in my college I was supposed to go to, a month before I was supposed to go to it. And that summer I worked at a hot dog restaurant in Allentown, Pennsylvania, called Yocco's, The Hot Dog King. And it was only old people buying these hot dogs with cash in March of 2020. And my mom has multiple sclerosis, and it was a really bad idea that I was even out there in the first place during this pandemic, because I thought if I got COVID and gave it to my mom that she would probably die.
But I was able to get on unemployment, and by the end of the summer I had $14,000, give or take. And I was looking at the money I had to pay for college, and I was thinking, in the context of life, to start out with this much money is actually like I'm a millionaire. Like, I can afford four months’ rent deposit, and my rent for this whole entire year with this money. So I thought, well, I can get a job, and get ahead of the curve, and go to college, and maybe make something like half of what this money is in a year. Or I could just not go to college, and use this money to live and make comics. And I did that until I ran out of money, and [then] I worked at the zoo drawing caricatures, continuing my time with the caricature company I worked for when I was 14.
Did you ever think of sending this comic to a publisher to see if somebody else would pick it up?
No. Because the money was so irrelevant to me. I also didn’t think I had enough of an idea that it was deserving of it being published by someone that wasn't me. It would be kind of like making a sculpture of my own, and then going to MoMA and asking them to hang it up - that’s what it felt like to ask a publisher to publish me at that time. Even now, it's like, "This is my own." I'll keep it hung up in my own frame, in my own house. Why would I give it to you? That's so rude. It's so gross. It's so personal - and not yours, first of all.
Actually, don't even take it away from me. I didn't want them to take it away from me, and make it something it wasn't. I wanted to print them all myself, and I wanted to draw them all in the same house that they're printed in, and say that they were published in this house. That was really important to me, because it was a very personal time capsule, even though it looks like a commercial comic.
By the time you move on to issue #2, it seems like you're getting a little more ambitious in the length of the stories you're telling. I think about half of that issue is dedicated to the one Bobcat story. Were you pushing yourself a little bit more in that direction?
Yeah, my sketchbook by that point was not focused on drawing. And I had a big problem about this, emotionally, because I had felt as if these sketchbooks for so long were a place for me to be completely free. And now, every time I was drawing in my sketchbook, I wasn't drawing a comic. I was becoming a perfectionist, and that was debilitating my own personal growth. So I'm like, “This is too much.” I was becoming very upset, so I just thought, okay, every time I'm drawing in my sketchbook, I'm going to think, “What's my new comic?”
I had all of this responsibility to myself to make all these comics that I really wanted to make, that I knew I probably couldn't live long enough to make. And I still feel that way. But as much as I love to draw in a sketchbook, to me it was just time that I was wasting not making what I really wanted to make. And I have a good balance with it now. But back then, it was just fueling me to make all these longer stories. And one of those longer stories was this Bobcat comic that I just started writing.
And then next thing I know, it's a 14-page story, which at that point to me was really, really new, because in Hornrim #1-- that took me eight months for, like, 14 pages. I could not finish a page without feeling like I ran to San Francisco and back from suburban Allentown, Pennsylvania. And I thought, this is really how it is to make a comic? How do people do this? I feel like I'm going to die.
But it was getting easier.
It was getting easier by the second issue. I was like, I can see the finish line because I did the first one, so I know it's not so insurmountable and impossible. And then it was very natural, and I think that's how it should be. And, of course, that's how people end up making comics for, like, 20 years: because they know it's going to be done one day, but they don't care about how long it takes. And I didn't care about how long it took to make a page. I actually was really happy that it took long, because I felt like I was existing and with the work, and it was just like Heaven on Earth to work on a page. So these stories just evolved naturally to be longer and longer.
By the time you got to issue three, the big change was the shift to a big, magazine format. What prompted that?
That was many, many weeks of printing out big pieces of paper. I did so many printed drafts of Hornrim #3 in different size variations. I was emailing cartoonists I didn't even know in real life and asking them what they thought of the size difference. That size difference really mattered to me, because all the zines I'd made at that point were folded 8 ½” x 11” pieces of paper. That's a very specific size. It's not comic book size. It's like a really stout magazine, but a magazine is such a completely different thing. And I thought it would be too big to read. I thought that it would be annoying to hold. I thought it would be obnoxious and egotistical to do something that was that big, that took up that much room. And I was just so hung up on that, and I decided that I'm hung up on this for a reason, so I'll just do it. And I really liked it, actually. It was a good choice, because I think that it should be big just to see that artwork.
Was your art style changing because of the size?
Not really, because I was drawing at magazine size pretty much since the start. It was more that printing them myself made it so they had to be small. But with the size change, I was printing them on demand, so I could make it bigger.
Your style does seem like it's getting a lot simpler compared to that first issue. It's getting more streamlined.
Oh, interesting. By that point I was trying to whittle down from the crosshatching, and trying brush pens, and drawing inspiration from minimalistic manga from the '80s. Like, the way I would draw air motion and action, and the way I would shade things. I was looking at Daniel Clowes. I was looking at manga. And I wanted to make a simple line and with a brush, and have it be really cartoony. A lot of people told me that it looks like Peter Bagge, those comics. And I didn't really read any Peter Bagge. I just didn't draw any elbows.
It's interesting that so many people see influences that it sounds like you weren’t looking at. Like, it sounds like you weren’t reading Wolverton by that point.
I was not reading Basil Wolverton. Everybody says Basil Wolverton - that’s so crazy. I don’t know what the deal is. But I love Wolverton, and I see it now, and I feel like, actually, from people saying that, I’ve fallen into the manifest destiny of seeing that influence. I am now actually very influenced by Basil Wolverton.
The next thing you did was spin off Alanzo Sneak into his own book. What made you decide you were ready for one big story with one character?
Well, I had this idea for Hornrim #4, which was going to be “Kosma,” which I still really want to do. And it was a sci-fi comic that was going to be really, really long. And I was listening to a lot of [the band] Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard at the time, and I was listening to this album called Infest the Rats’ Nest. I had sci-fi apocalyptic imagery in my mind, and I was so obsessed with this in a really teenage-obsession way: I was just drawing explosions and stupid stuff that I thought would be cool for a comic. And then I was like, I want to do this cowboy story too, where Sheena gets taken away by meat hunters who want to turn her into this hamburger.
And I thought that was really funny to me that it would be this emotional, action-packed cowboy comic, and they're not trying to kidnap [Alanzo]; they're not trying to shoot him. They just want to make food out of his horse, which I thought was really funny, and really, like, American. And almost like a funny animal vibe. And I was choosing between these two [ideas], and I kept wanting to spend more time doing this cowboy comic. I just did so many pages of it that I was like, “Well, now I don't really have to do any backup comics for this comic. I'll just make it this.”
And also I was having this problem in my mind, too, that a one-man anthology comic felt really one-dimensional to me by that time, because I had to keep on making up new characters all the time. And I didn't want to keep doing that, and have these stories that only existed for this one situation. I thought I would want to see the same people go through different situations together and grow. And I've actually felt more free by using the same character in different stories than coming up with a new one every time. Kind of like in Seinfeld, when Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld have an idea for an airport sitcom episode, they're not going to make a whole new show called Johnny at the Airport. They're going to put Jerry and Elaine and everybody in the airport. You know what I mean?
So it was important to me that his name was the comic, and it was completely separate from the [previous] series. I was thinking “I don't want it to be Hornrim #81, and people are going to be like, ‘Oh, I don't have all the other ones so I can't buy this.’” Because that’s what was starting to happen: Hornrim #3, nobody bought that because I didn’t have enough money to reprint Hornrim #1 and #2 at the same time. So people were like, “Well, I'm going to wait until Hornrim #2 and #1 come back into print.” And I'm like, “Come back into print? You think I'm Simon & Schuster? I can't do that!”
Process-wise, how much of that first solo book did you plan out in advance, and how much were you just making up as you went?
I made that up as I went, truthfully. I had some script ideas in my sketchbook. Here's the thing: I would be going to sleep, and I'd be feeling so dumb the whole day, like "I can't think of anything." I would get to a part of the story and I wouldn't know what the hell to do, and then I would go to sleep. And then as I'm falling asleep, I would think of it. I would just look at the ceiling, and then it would come to me, and I would think, “Okay, I'll remember that in the morning.” And then I would try to go to sleep, and I couldn't go to sleep because I would be so worried I would forget about it. And then I would be stuck with this comic and not be able to ever finish it.
So I would wake up, and on a piece of computer paper, I would write this idea that would solve this problem that I've been working on. And then I would keep that same paper as I'm drawing the comic, and by the end of the week, it would be filled with the smallest text written in all different kinds of directions. Some were segmented off with shapes, so I knew that they weren’t connected to other lines of text. And then there it is in front of me: an entire book. All I’ve got to do is connect the pieces.
And I was able to just, boom, boom, boom, connect them all. It felt like a bunch of socks laid out on my bed that were unmatched. And of course your brain is always connecting things subconsciously. So all the ideas did fit together, because they were all for one purpose. But that's exactly how I was writing that.
So is that still how you work now?
Yes, except now I grid thumbnails, stick figures with the words. And then I have specific drawings of things if I have an idea that is really specific. But I control it now, where it's kind of revealing itself to me under my jurisdiction. So time is of the essence: I'm not sitting around waiting for inspiration. I have a really practiced repetition of cartooning now, and I'm able to control time for writing, and time for ideas, and specific tools to help me not feel writer's block or feel like a blank.
By the time you got to that first Alanzo Sneak comic, and then especially with [the follow-up] Muscle Horse, you had a really surprising control over the pacing and the humor in your books. How were you learning to do that?
Well, I didn't think of that. I never thought that they were controlled. They seem really like they don't know where they're going to me, if I look back at them. I'll tell you one thing: it's from television. I watched TV all the time when I was drawing. I would have to say that ALF, the sitcom about the alien from outer space in the '80s, is probably the most influential piece of media to me. Like, I think the first season of ALF is one of the best-written sitcoms ever made. All the characters are so perfectly bland that if any character was a smart, cheeky bastard on that show, it would completely defeat the purpose of ALF. He can't be funny without them being boring. So I feel like that subconsciously gave me a template of pacing.
I watched all of How I Met Your Mother probably two or three times while working on comics from 2020 to 2022. That is also one of the most influential shows to me, especially in Muscle Horse, where they're jumping back and forth through time. I feel like in that comic, it-- I worry that it fails to make it clear that it's jumping through time. In that show, you're easily manipulated by sounds to know when something is going back in time. Maybe they'll put a swishing sound for a flashback. But in a comic, it just cuts.
One tool I did notice you using for that in Muscle Horse was color. It seems like a big thing for that book, to use color to delineate time and mood. What was your process for thinking through that?
I used Photoshop, because I was very afraid of doing a comic in color. But I had colored a three-page comic for an anthology, the very first anthology I ever was published in.... It was the only Alanzo Sneak comic I did in color. It's called “DVD Player,” and it's not published anywhere else. And up until that point I thought I'd never do a comic in color. But it was actually really fun to see these characters look like they were alive with color, like truly alive and consistent throughout each panel. And I wanted to see if I could make a whole [book] just like that. I had experience coloring a lot of stuff, because I would do these really elaborate illustrations in high school and in middle school, like 11” x 14”, full-color paintings.
I was really influenced by Robert Williams - hyper-detailed cartoon paintings is what I really wanted to do. And this painter John Patrick Byrne, who painted the original cover of [the Beatles’] the White Album when it was called "A Doll’s House" - a lot of people think it's really a bad [illustration] of them, but I think it is one of the craziest, most accurate cartoon likenesses of the Beatles ever drawn in the history of Beatles caricatures. And I just really wanted to make these elaborate cartoon paintings. And a lot of that entailed layering colored pencil and marker to make very specific shadows, and very specific colors. And computer coloring was so much easier than that. So I kind of was able to not feel as intimidated on a computer.
I’m also interested in the color logic at work here. Because you have, like, that hallucinogenic scene--
Yeah, the hallucinogenic scene in Muscle Horse where Alanzo is running with Sheena away from the boot.
Yeah, exactly the one I’m thinking of.
Wow. That's really insane that you picked up on that. All the colors in there are really saturated. I felt like nobody would notice that, but I just wanted you to feel this kind of heat from something, and not necessarily see it. I could make them sweating. I could make them say, “Ah, I'm really hot.” But I wanted you to feel it, and not pay attention to it, but have that feeling. So I knew if I just made the colors really jarringly saturated, for a very small part in the story, it would create that feeling of intensity. And who cares if it's not like that [in real life]?
Of course, when I did that, it made me want to make the entire book that saturated. And I actually wish I did do that, because the next book I did was Gecko, and all the pages in that were 100% saturation on all of the print files. And the problem is, that book is drawn shittier than Muscle Horse. And I wish that, because Gecko was kind of drawn kind of quick, and Muscle Horse I spent a lot of time on the pages-- I wish that [Muscle Horse] was fully saturated with those highly rendered drawings.
That's interesting. I didn't know if the shift to a simpler style in Gecko was deliberate, but it sounds like maybe you were just doing it faster.
Yeah, I was doing it faster. I was doing it smaller. I was just wearing myself out completely [making Muscle Horse]. And I hated the pen I was using, which was the Tombow Brush Pen, which I still use in moderation now. But I was using it to create every single line, and I was really falling out of love with that kind of cartoon. It felt very, very obnoxious. Like Sammy Harkham has mentioned before, drawing with a brush is like you're screaming on the page. Like, I wasn't drawing a panel with really thick lines for emphasis; the emphasis had to be created in your own mind from seeing it. So, for example, to draw a car crash in the middle of a conversation [between two characters]: I'm not putting any more effort into that car crash as I am drawing that conversation between those two people. And I was reading Sammy’s comics, and he's saying that you could actually be more immersed in a comic because you're not thinking about how hard the cartoonist worked on drawing the accurate shading of the explosion on this car. You know what I mean?
And that really spoke to me when I tried it out. I wanted to see if I could do a whole comic like that. And in color, it popped so crazy to me to have a thin line. And I could do this so much faster: I'm not spending so much time on these pages anymore. And it was simpler, and it breathed more, and it felt like there was more authenticity and more beauty. And I felt artistically more touched by it.
The other thing I notice by the time you get to Gecko is that you’re working in a pretty strict grid format, even though the subject matter that’s contained inside the grid can be incredibly experimental. Why were you deliberately retraining yourself more, at least formally, by this point?
Three people—Sammy Harkham, Simon Hanselmann, and Kamagurka & Herr Seele who did Cowboy Henk—really showed me the beauty of a 12-grid comic. Not a 9-grid comic where there are rectangles. I'm talking 12, where they’re square, and you’ve got to fit everything you need in that square. And when you read it, it's hitting you like an animated movie. If you do the same scale of a character on a 12-panel grid page, you see more movement on that page than you see with, like, a Looney Tunes cartoon, because it's inside of your head. And that was so liberating, because I wasn't thinking about the page layout. I was thinking about the substance in the comic. I was thinking about how I want this scene to feel, and how I want this page to be interpreted in the grand scheme of the story itself.
And that was like the answer to me for a really long time, and still kind of is. I think a lot of artists who are inspired by Sammy Harkham and Simon Hanselmann's generation, like myself, Josh Pettinger, Nathan Cowdry-- those are the three that come to my mind really quick. But I feel like we saw that what they did with the 12-grid, and just grids in general, and the blockiness of that, and saw that it's more freeing than it is limiting. I don't think Josh Pettinger would like that I said that, because he probably doesn't want to feel like he's being boxed in or something. But I think that in his comics, you can tell that there's a freeness in them from having that grid.
It feels like, in all of your books, including this new one, Flippy, that there’s a kind of ongoing saga of these characters you’re developing. Do you have an end point in mind? Do you know where this is going?
I know where it is going up until a certain point. I want Alanzo Sneak comics to be something I'm always working on, because I can always tell any kind of story I want with the character. Even if it becomes a thing where it's only characters that you thought were side characters at first, and then it comes back [to Alanzo]. I mean, I'd love it if there was a comic out there that was a perfect mix between Love and Rockets and Scooby-Doo. Those are the two that I think of the most when I think of the end product of a book: something that's ongoing, and ever-changing, and not watered down with time, but that still stays rich and colorful, and can be anything.
You know, like in the Ralph Bakshi Mighty Mouse cartoon, there would be some Mighty Mouse episodes where you don't even see Mighty Mouse. You're just dealing with these city people, and that's an episode of Mighty Mouse, and you still know it's Mighty Mouse, and you still think of Mighty Mouse's face. Imagine if that show went on and on, and, like, became dramatic and there were different arcs for characters. Yeah, I know a lot of what's going to happen for years [with Alanzo Sneak], but it's going to be ever-changing, always. But I like that freedom of having it happen with those characters. So I think of them as seasons. I would say every comic from Alanzo Sneak to Plum Pocket was season one of this-- whatever it is that I’m doing.
So Plum Pocket is the season finale for season one.
Absolutely. That’s Sheena’s birthday on the beach. It is absolutely the season one finale, and it leaves a cliffhanger. And season two is starting out with Flippy. I hate to use television vernacular, but I think television vernacular is actually perfect, and doesn't have to be associated with television. So season two begins with Flippy, and I know a lot of what's going to happen, and it's all being processed slowly through these books. And I also like the idea of having a long-running show, or long-running comic with the same characters, because I feel as if I've always processed my life through comics, and understood the world that's in front of me through the comics I make.
And it helps me emotionally. And it's gratifying in a cosmic way of just understanding general life. Comics is such a beautiful way of freeing yourself of emotional barricades, and patterns that will hurt you with time. I'm sure any cartoonist would probably say the same when they're older. They're processing different things that they're noticing and realizing, in their own head and in real life. And I don't think doing that with new stories every time is a way of storytelling that I'm attracted to. I think that could be very one-dimensional and forgettable.
As you get more and more continuity behind you in the ongoing story of Alanzo and Sheena, do you have any dreams of getting a 'complete works' published at some point? Or even a collection of your past work published with someone?
Yeah, I've been talking with publishers about it for one, two years, but there's not enough material that I would want it to be a book of. There's so many more comics that need to happen first. And I also have to examine, when those comics are done, if it's even something I would want to have in a book. And comic book cartoon pamphlets are very important to me as an object, and as a form of sellable media, because I can directly make my month's rent with a 32-page comic that is self-published; that is printed with low cost per unit. And I can do that indefinitely, forever, and without anybody else's permission, or anyone else telling me [what to do], as long as there's still paper in this world.
So I am not thinking about that right now, because the way I'm telling stories is in zines. And I wish that self-published alternative comic books had more of a distribution to them at, like, CVS. I was at the pharmacy yesterday, and for $5.99 you can get a “how to carve a pumpkin” pamphlet, and it has a glossy cover, and it has newsprint on the inside with these pumpkin illustrations. And I'm sure kids are not buying this, because kids have iPads with Pumpkin PornHub. Maybe parents are buying it, but I guarantee you that they're losing money on these pumpkin zines at CVS.
And then I'm thinking to myself, if people just knew about this stuff-- and I know that this is a dialogue that's been going on in comics for so long, but maybe it's still going on because people keep on trying, and then forgetting that they wanted to actually do that. But we need comic books in delicatessens in New York City, and any place where they're accessible. We need them in CVS pharmacies. Think about it. MAD magazine was in the CVS, it was in supermarkets. Why can't we just have magazines that nobody's buying that are good? Because we have pumpkin arts and crafts. We got almanacs, we got farmer's manuals, we got horoscopes, we got adult coloring books - dude, people have got Facebook, they’ve got Twitter, they're not buying these. So if we're losing money anyway, can we have some conversations about other books that no one else is going to buy, that maybe have some sort of quality, and emotional importance to troubled people in America who are locked into their phones, and don't ever get a real, human, emotional thing? They could replace that terrible imagery with something of substance made by someone. It can be an escape for these people that's literally a pure escape; that's not just reminding them to buy something.
Do you feel like there is that kind of honesty in your work? You know, underneath the horse porn.
Yeah, I'm talking on a really broad scale of alternative comics here. Not even talking about me. I'm talking about comics as an escape, as something by real people. Not Marvel and DC, because obviously that didn't work. Nobody is buying that, because when you go in a comic book store it's t-shirts, it's action figures, it's Funko Pop!s, and it's manga. And manga has a very, very large variety in their storytelling. They will do a story about anything, it's not just the same superheroes rehashed by 500 people every month. People need to know that there's more to comics than just that.
I'm not the first person to ever say this. I'm probably the millionth. But the thing is, people forget when they go through their career, and they just make their books for the libraries, and they stay in their room, and they get really old, and they die. And then you have these books in the libraries, and they never even tried [to change the industry].
MOLLY DWYER: Well, I think your work provides a true sense of escapism, though.
But if it is a comic that has no ads in it, that's the escape really just being paper.
So a comic has to, in some sense, be uncommercial to be true?
No, it can be-- it can be commercial. Like, you could advertise other comics.
DWYER: That’s different, though. I mean, I won’t answer for you. But it’s still like what you’re saying [if they only advertise other comics]. It’s like the Holy Land. You can still do whatever you want without Big Brother.
So are you making a living at comics now?
I'm making barely a living at comics now.
But you’re not working as a caricature artist anymore.
No. I make my living solely on original art and zine sales. And sometimes I'll do a bunch of pet portraits on Facebook groups from very specific regions of Pennsylvania that I'll not reveal. I get in these Facebook groups, and I do pet portraits, and it is my dirty secret. And every cartoonist has a dirty secret, and a lot of them will not tell you. I'll tell you, it was Facebook pet portraits in very specific regions of Pennsylvania. And if I really need to, I can bash out, like, 10 pet portraits in a week, full-color, and make a lot of money that way. But otherwise it's original art pages sold.
But you see yourself doing this for the rest of your life.
Well, you know something? Joe Matt, he was drawing comics until he died for no money and not having to spend a lot of money. And that is such a beautiful thing. So I don't know. I like the idea of a life of drawing comics, because I like comics a lot.
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