Released this past summer under the Fantagraphics Underground imprint, Doris Danger: Giant Monsters Amok tells the interwoven, eclectically elaborate and always clever story of Doris Danger, a journalist seeking the truth behind the appearance of giant monsters. The book takes cues from Silver Age monster comics and amplifies their absurdity to the absolute limit, whether it’s Army generals discussing the logistics of giant monster underwear, undercover agents incessantly reminding the reader of who they’re really working for, or humans masquerading as robots masquerading as humans.
Writer/artist Chris Wisnia’s faithful Jack Kirby-esque renditions paired with Ricky Sprague’s period-correct coloring might even fool the unaware reader into thinking they're holding a true found object published by Tabloia Weekly Magazine - and that’s the best part. An ongoing Wisnia project since 2004, with previous installments collected by SLG Publishing in 2009 and 2012, Doris Danger delivers delectable meta-absurdity through careful faux curation. It’s high culture postmodern theory joined with low culture pre-superhero monster comics, and between on-page scribbles from “brad g.” (juvenile owner of the in-story comics "scanned" to create this "archival" collection) and eccentric editorials from "Rob Oder" (the current-day editor of Tabloia Weekly supervising this "reprint"), it’ll surely put a smile on your face.
Chris and I spoke over computer screens to talk about this forgotten genre of comics, managing a story structure in a sprawling project, and how the whole thing got started.
-Jake Zawlacki
JAKE ZAWLACKI: First of all, I wanted to say how much fun Doris Danger is. It’s really refreshing to read something that plays with the comic medium, storytelling and reality in such a fun way.
CHRIS WISNIA: Aw, thanks, I really appreciate that. A large part of this project has been in exploring traditional narrative forms we take for granted: taking plot structures [and] relatable, realistic characters who develop through a logical, chronological beginning, middle and end, and turning all that on its head by pretending this book is a collection of old comics pumped out weekly to convince 10-year old kids they have to buy the next issue through excitement and cliffhangers, so that the story can’t ever really end and that you never catch the beginning. So, I’ll take “refreshing” as a compliment.
I figured “seriousness” would be a good place to start. Doris Danger is a very metatextual comic for all the reasons you just mentioned, but it goes about it with such giddiness that it almost seems too fun to have been the result of a really serious and intentional project. Were you really serious about making it?
It started as just a little wacky one time five-page experiment. I had met Dick Ayers and had this crazy idea: “Wow, wouldn't that be cool if I wrote a giant monster comic and drew it, and could convince him to ink it?” And so I pitched it to him as just a five-page story, and he said, “Yeah, sounds great.” At the time I was doing kind of a pseudo tabloid anthology called Tabloia Weekly Magazine, and I just figured it could be a backup feature showing off the history of this fake magazine, and the features it had over the decades. This was like, “Oh, we pulled this one from the vaults and republished it here, for your enjoyment!”
So I created a story such that it was just a ton of crazy elements. I was thinking kind of like The X-Files, doing Kirby-style giant monsters with all these plot twists and weird elements all over. FBI agents, a fez-wearing cult, the US army trying to suppress evidence, believing hillbillies, a Frenchman in a beret, superstitious African tribesmen, people unmasking to reveal they’re robots. But also thinking in terms of, like, the structure—or how I experienced the structure—of The X-Files back then. You know, you couldn't just binge watch all 30 seasons or whatever. You would just turn on your TV at 8:00 PM that Thursday night, and if you weren't available that Thursday night at 8:00 PM, you wouldn't see the episode. Then you'd cross your fingers that it would come into syndication five years from now.
And comics were the same, where you pick up an issue, and your mom doesn't take you back to the 7/11 for three months. So you buy the next issue and there's this big hole in your experience of what happened. So I was very serious about exploring these aspects of the enjoyment of comics, of having a story where you jump in the middle and you don't know what happens after it ends because you don't have the means to get to that, and then there's this mystique about what you've missed.
Exploring the gaps.
Yeah, and that was kind of innate in the creation of that first story. I came in kind of in the middle. I ended in the middle. So when Dick sent back the pages inked, he put a little note, “This was a lot of fun. Really took me back. Let me know if you want to do more.” And it hadn't crossed my mind to do more until then. Then it became a serious opportunity to explore that idea.
Do you see Doris Danger as a straightforward start-to-finish narrative?
Oh, god no. It jumps between a ton of different wacky characters, and it jumps chronologically at every turn. And then, every few pages, it ends in a cliffhanger, and it never necessarily returns to see how those characters got out of any of the cliffhangers. The story grows and expands and fills in holes you don’t realize are there.
[Tabloia is] this cheap publisher that found a stack of their old comics, and realized they didn’t have to pay artists and writers for new stories if they just reprinted these old ones. They think they can make a quick buck off all these dumb kids who like this stupid stuff for some reason. And since they hold it all in such low regard, they don’t bother to curate which back issues they include, or to even put them in chronological order. They publish the stack they found under the sink, in the order they found them.
How do you go about managing a structure like that?
Well, every new page I draw is an opportunity to take a previously published line of dialogue and create a story from it. “A giant monster was spotted in Indiana, but we suspect it was actually a Russian Spy masquerading as a giant monster!” Then I can have an Army general thinking out loud about how he apprehended the whole Russian Monster Masquerading Spy ring, and a Russian spy is in the room with him, undercover, thinking, “Hm!” Then I can have scientists talking about how the only way you can catch a Russian spy is if they laugh, because they always go, “Heh heh heh.” Then I can have a sequence of Doris in jail, and there are all these fellow captives in there going “Heh heh, heh heh.” You see, one thing happens and it allows for more ideas - before or after in time, and it’s ok. That can be part of the fun of the delivery of the jokes.
Kind of like these thematic leaps, but not necessarily narrative leaps, throughout the story.
I look at William Burroughs as a similar structure with his cut-up technique where he’d sometimes cut all the pages up into paragraphs, throw them in the air and then publish them in the order he picked them up. Elements appear and reappear in a seemingly random way, but one that is like a jigsaw puzzle, slowly filling in the big picture as you go. The difference is, I’m writing it out of order, and coming up with ways to fill in all the pieces as I go. "Oh, these two are similar, but it’s missing this one part." I have a general big idea of the story, but the fun is in realizing as I go what happened in between everything I’ve shown so far.
That’s why I put all the asterisks! I mean, it’s a convention in comics, right?, where something is said, and you put an asterisk on it, and then in the bottom of the panel, you place an editor’s note to give context or an insight about the character, for a more enjoyable reading experience. So I’m playing with that a lot. And then it catches you up. Who’s this guy again? A lot of readers don’t realize, if you flip back through the book, the Fantagraphics book or the books I did with SLG Publishing [Doris Danger: Giant Monster Adventures (2009) and Doris Danger: Monstrosis! (2012)]-- all those asterisks actually refer back to actual previous issues! Those “See issue number whatever, fans” - those are legit references! If I say "Doris met Private Buck Mercury in the jungle in this issue," and I’ve drawn their meeting, those issue numbers will line up! If I haven’t drawn that issue yet, it’s still placemarked for if I decide to do the story that covers whatever that topic was. It will be in the issue number that I quoted. I’m very serious and careful about that, I’ve got a whole chart and it’s not easy to keep track of, because I might reference dozens of previous issues on one page.
When did you first publish the first Doris Danger story with Dick Ayers?
2004. It was in my first self-published comic, Tabloia Weekly Magazine.
Being very meta-heavy, there's a vacillation between flattery and criticism of the monster era of comic books. Do you find yourself in a love-hate relationship with it, or is it something more complex?
I like to describe it as something you can look back on with such a fondness and enjoyment and magic, and also realize how schlocky and awful it is, right? And come to terms with the idea that it’s okay for it to be both. So, you say it's critical, but I think it's all in fun and just, “Hey, let's call it what it is.”
Yeah. Showing the reality of it. Where do you think Kirby-era monster comics sit in the collective imagination and comic fandom today? They're not necessarily a super-popular era. They're cool for some collectors, but they're also hard to get, expensive.
I kind of look at them as sort of almost ignored except for a very small niche. I think westerns are ignored more. [Laughs] But I would say they're definitely toward the bottom. But what's so fascinating to me is that these literally became the superhero comics. They were what came before, because this was the era where the publishers were just dabbling in whatever they thought those stupid kids... you know, they could con out of a quick 20 cents or 10 cents or whatever.
So they did the romance and the westerns and the ghost stories and different horror stuff and the war comics, and coming straight out of those horror comics [was] this bizarre sub-genre of horror comics, the giant monsters in underpants. You figure Kirby was watching all those giant monster sci-fi movies, giant bugs and stuff, and then, “Hey, these superhero comics seem to be doing pretty well over at DC,” and so you've got that first issue of Fantastic Four with the giant monster coming out of the ground, and the Fantastic Four aren't even in costumes yet. You're coming from these horror comics, and Stan Lee and Jack Kirby are just kind of signaling, “Okay, let's bring you over here into this corner from where we're coming from.” To me it's like this magical time right before everything just hit big. You've got these amazing talents that had been pumping out this schlock, and they're like, “Hey, why don't we try and do this our way?” It's like WWF wrestling right around '84. Right before they really hit that stride, where they're trying a lot of stuff and, “Oh, now we got it.” But when you look at that stuff, all these talented people, right before they landed on that magical formula, there's a lot of fascination for me.
Well, yeah, you think about how many superhero battles are just battles with giant monsters. They're more interesting because they have superpowers, but essentially they're pretty much the same thing.
You know, Stan Lee took a lot of the same names from those old monsters. Hulk, Sandman and Cyclops were giant monsters originally. Scientist Henry Pym shrunk himself down into an ant hill in those old monster comics!
And it’s worth noting that the entirety of the book is in dead-on Jack Kirby style.
Doris Danger is all blatant, unapologetic swipes and parodies of that work. Kirby is such a master of motion and action. All his work is so big, visually and storytelling-wise, and I've been trying to turn that on its ear and use that imagery to portray talking heads discussing absurd conspiracy theories. I feel that’s something that was absolutely not intended in any of the original work. Back then, comic books were about these amazing, larger than life images. So, you open the book and go, “Whoa! A splash page of a giant monster in an exciting, exotic setting!” In Doris Danger, instead I have pages and pages of really dense text. [Laughs]
I'm thinking of one page in particular where there's an MLA member and all these Kirby poses, but just straight dialogue. There's nothing actually happening. It's just all these dynamic, explosive poses, but nothing is actually calling for that. It's a fun interplay there.
And for the readers out there who are unfamiliar with Doris Danger, the MLA*, (you put the asterisk after it), and then in the footnote you describe:
*The Monster Liberation Army, Fans! A Commando Team Who’s Out To Protect Giant Monsters!
Do you see Doris Danger as a reclamation of this kind of forgotten era? A celebration? Within the lineage?
Those old monster stories tended to be five- to twelve-page stories, sometimes three-page stories, always self-contained. And always with a “shocking twist!” [Laughs] They tended to always be giant monsters who were either invaders from another planet, or were babies from another planet who just didn't know better, and then the parent giant monsters had to come scold them and bring them back. Or mad scientists who wanted their girlfriend to like them better, if they were only just a little more manly, bigger and stronger, and it went awry. The stories were very simple, and unlike what I was just saying earlier about stories with no beginning or end. These always had a very quick, concise, easy to digest, then wad-up-in-your-back-pocket-and-give-to-a-friend-because-you're-done-with-it type of an energy to them.
With my Doris Danger stories, I feel that I added this element of later comics and of later TV series with the binge-watching aspect of it. I’m also a card-carrying skeptic. I don't believe in UFOs or cryptids or any of that stuff. When The X-Files was coming out, I was in college and I enjoyed it for the fun of wanting to believe, but I have never been someone who has wanted to believe. In tackling a story about giant monsters, I had to come up with a structure that I could allow my own beliefs to seep out of these stories. I took that sort of X-Files attitude, but from the other direction, "This is all pretty absurd everybody, did you notice?" That's where I feel I'm kind of breaking out.
It makes for an unusual reading experience because it feels like the Doris Danger universe gets bigger and bigger the more you read, but then it becomes more and more difficult to hold all the moving pieces in your head. There’s this rhizomatic aspect where everything is connected but you can’t maintain the connections at all times, and have to digest it in small chunks.
I have a friend who told me he found the book increasingly taxing to process because he felt like there just got to be so much to keep track of. All the characters and their bizarre eccentricities or goals. All the locations, the plot twists. So as he read along, he found himself slowing down, reading it in smaller doses, just physically for his brain to work its way through all of it, and to process it.
I tell people, this is a really exhausting read. It’s a slog! But maybe the issue is, it wasn’t created to be read that way, to sit down and experience it like that, start to finish. I’m thinking like old comics, where you didn’t buy issue one and then read every issue. You bought issue 86 because it looked interesting, and then it was a month before the next issue came out, if you even bothered to get the next one, and you’re collecting 10 other books to keep track of what’s going on. The publisher knows that, so when you see a character, the character will say out loud, “It’s me, Dirk Doole, and I’m an aspiring actor whose dad is a mustachioed millionaire politician with an eye patch,” and now you know all you need to know about that character. Now you’re all caught up and can enjoy it from there.
Have you picked up those collections of Fantastic Four #1-20 or whatever? When you see them all back-to-back, one after the other, that’s when you realize, "Yeah, I don’t really need to read all these." I don’t need to see the Human Torch razz the Thing and they smash up or set the lab on fire again. I don’t need to hear another villain boast that they’re going to defeat them, then get beat up and think, “They’re so much stronger than I realized!” and then make a desperate escape, regroup with their master plan, then get defeated again anyways in the end. Or see a guest super hero and the FF have a misunderstanding and fight each other, and then realize their mistake, then team up to defeat the actual foe. You know?
I have an X-Men omnibus and I couldn’t get past #10 for this very reason.
The conventions just repeat, over and over. It gets redundant. Just pick up the first appearance of Doctor Doom or the team-up with the Avengers, and those are good ones, and basically that’s what happens in all the other ones too, so you don’t need them.
I tell people, just put this book in your bathroom, on your toilet, and then whenever you happen to find yourself in there, just open it randomly to a page and read a few panels, and you’ll figure out the gist of it, you’ll probably get a couple laughs, and then just put it down when you’re done in there. That’s all you need. And then do the same again next time you’re in there, and you’ll get a couple more laughs. That’s how it was meant to be experienced!
You’re talking about the story structure, but there are also meta-aspects on the pages themselves. There's the infamous “brad g.” scribbling on the pages in crayon. Pencil and marker lines. Black & white original art-looking pages. Torn pages. Printing errors. And tons of other mixed media. So, was it a lot of Photoshop? Good old-fashioned cut and paste?
I wrote and penciled and inked and lettered everything. On the page. Original art. The old-fashioned way. I did not work on pages as big as they used to do back then. I just did 11” x 17” pages with brush and ink. Then I lettered with micron pens.
I then sent digital cleaned-up scans to my buddy, Ricky Sprague. We spoke at length about how to make these look like the old comics we grew up on. And the comics we grew up on specifically came out of quarter bins. They were in quarter bins because this was back before people realized they were rare and fun and collectible. They were often torn, smudged. The ones I picked up were '70s reprints of the original late '50s, early '60s copies. And my copies always said, inside each story, “Originally published in Tales of Suspense number whatever, Fans.” So mine were newer, but '70s comics were still newsprint, a little smelly. I knew some shops when they put them in quarter bins, they put them in the longboxes and then they would shake up a can of spray paint and spray a red stripe over all of them and that would signal, “Okay, that's in the quarter bin if it's got a red stripe on the top edge.” Or if they sprayed it in green, then that's a 50 cent comic. They were never respected books.
And then you add to that, that the kids who were attracted to these books in the '70s were the kids not attracted to Frank Miller Daredevil or John Byrne X-Men or whatever. These were just kids who went, “Oh, wow. It's giant monsters.” And you know kids handle comics differently. They were all beat up. This was a conversation I had with Ricky. How can we make them look old and worn like that?
In addition to that, we talked about all the weird deficiencies in just the coloring process back in the '60s or '70s, and how sometimes colors were misaligned. Someone with blonde hair, their whole face might be blonde. Or every character in the background of a scene, a crowd of 20 people accidentally got the brown color of the ground or whatever. We wanted to just do an über version of all those deficiencies. Ricky said that he aspired to make his coloring as obnoxiously out of control as he felt my writing and art was. Just look to that as the standard for how far to take it.
So he did a lot of that digitally, but he also found papers. I think he’d find old newsprint, leave it in the sun, and then he’d scan them in. He scanned old yellow tape. And he actually fried bacon and then dripped it or set it on paper, and then would scan that. He was so clever. He studied old comics and their color palettes, and all the funny accidents he’d find, they were carefully researched. I don’t know if anyone realizes how much thought and work he put into how he approached this.
I tell people, our industry is in desperate need of a new comic book award category: funniest coloring. No one could compete with Ricky for that.
There's an excellent Spanish bootleg of one of the pages and it's so heavily inked and so over the top, but it fits. It just fits the whole vibe for sure.
Oh man, this is awful, I’m building Ricky up, and you just cited the only page he didn’t color! I colored that one! But Ricky took out all the lettering and he translated it into Spanish and created his own kind of wonky-looking font to make it look like some super cheap company had found a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy and just splotched their own font over the top of these old pages.
You've been working on Doris Danger since the early 2000s, but how long have you been working on this book specifically?
When this book came out, it was the 20-year anniversary of Doris Danger.
Oh, really?
I want to say I started it around 2013. I was working on it and another big project. Kind of a little back and forth over that 10- or 11-year time. And the second project is the next one coming out with Fantagraphics. We've signed the contract, so that's in the works. So you could say maybe half of those 10 years in actual time. Then, from the time I signed the contract with Doris Danger [Giant Monster Amok] until it finally came out, we went through COVID and all this stuff, and so it took I think three years. I completed it at the signing of the contract and then I think it took another three years for its release.
That brings up another question. There's a communal construction to the book with lots of pinups from various artists, wide-ranging artists: Art Adams, Mike Allred, Geof Darrow, Bill Sienkiewicz, to name only a few. I noticed the pinups have far-ranging dates too, with some around 10 years ago. What was the process like getting those pinups? And how did you pitch this to the artists?
When I met Dick Ayers about doing the story for Tabloia Weekly Magazine, I had been going to cons and meeting artists and just seeing if anyone might be willing to do pinups of my stuff. At the time—this was late '90s, early 2000s—years before I started actually self-publishing, I liked how Neil Gaiman would have Sandman pinups, or even in old Marvel Fanfare issues there'd be little pinup sections, and the one that really spoke to me was Mike Allred who I feel has this sort of just super-fun attitude of, “Aren't comics the greatest, everybody? We all love everybody's comics and we're all friends. And here are some of my friends who drew Madman for me.” It kind of embodied for me some of those best feelings that Stan Lee’s Bullpen—at least you assumed—were going on way back when. In approaching all these artists, pretty much no one was interested except Dick Ayers, which led to making the giant monster story.
When I came up with that idea, “Oh, I'm going to bring back the Kirby-style giant monsters and have Dick Ayers ink them.” Now I had something I could show all these artists that I've been meeting at these conventions. Now I could say, “Hey, I've got this fun idea. Everybody loves giant monsters. You don't have to draw a particular character. You can just draw any giant monster that comes up in your imagination. It can look any way you like. You can put it in any setting. You can put as much or as little detail as you care to,” and it really just opened up possibilities. I think that paired with, “Oh, this is an actual project now, and Dick inked it,” to most comics creators, whether you love or hate those old books, you’re aware of them. And Doris is an actual, conceptualized idea now. Some of the earliest pinups I got from my earliest publications before Fantagraphics picked me up, I published Mike Mignola and Gene Colan and all three Hernandez brothers. John Severin and Dave Gibbons and Peter Bagge and Tony Millionaire. Neal Adams. I’m stacking up more and more of these absolutely breathtaking, amazing pieces. And meanwhile, I'm pumping out more stories with Dick Ayers, so then I could take all this around to approach more artists. I think I was able to kind of build the supposed prestige in ways like that, for artists to want to be included.
As far as the wide-ranging dates, it's because I've been doing this since probably five years before I actually published the first book, and then I continued doing it for years after. At this point, I've got a mortgage and two kids and I can't really afford to offer artists to pay for these gorgeous pinups like I used to. Not to mention I've been doing this for 20 years and it doesn't really make any money. It's a labor of love, but I feel that in attaching my project to this history of comics and to acknowledge that history and people I admire, that it hopefully speaks in an additional way to the love of the project.
Will we see Doris Danger again?
I have one more series of interlocking stories that would, I assume, make one more volume about the size of this volume. I have a few other ideas that could fill out all the pre-Fantagraphics stuff I've published into a volume about the size of this latest volume. That would make for a total of three volumes. I'm curious to speak with Fantagraphics and how they feel about this volume, and if they feel it warrants collecting the old stuff and adding a few new stories or doing a new volume at some point. But we haven't had that conversation yet. I know this volume is doing well compared to their expectations. I also know it's a Fantagraphics Underground book that didn’t have a big print run, so we'll see how that plays out.
I've read one review that said this book is for a very niche audience, but I think anyone who picks it up and reads it will think it’s hilarious. It's giddy, like you're saying, with all the things that make reading comics feel like when you were a kid. But there’s also this cleverness. There's an intellectualism behind it to show you these different eras, how these stories were constructed, and what they mean. It’s a wonderful pairing. Where can fans of Doris Danger find your upcoming projects? Where can they see your future work?
I am on all the usual social media, including my YouTube channel and my website, and I'm always trying to post a lot of what I'm up to or have been up to, in all those places.
A last question for you. What are your favorite giant monster stories of the last, let's say, 10 years? In movies, TV, comics? Any recommendations?
[Laughs] I have recently been trying to get out of my cave. As someone with a day job and trying to fit every spare moment of my time producing all this artwork, I don't have a lot of time to look out and about at things. Most of my enjoyment of things is in reminiscing flashbacks of things I've enjoyed in the past. It's what I know. It's what I gravitate to. Since the Doris Danger book came out, I have been trying to meet new creators. Being in the Fantagraphics booth, I'm finding myself more drawn to a lot of memoir, more personal work and less giant monster-oriented work. [Laughs] I haven’t really read any new giant monster stuff for some time. Although I did a piece a few years ago for the Criterion Godzilla boxset. That was fun to revisit those films. Those “new” films made in the ‘60s or whatever. [Laughs] Oh, I heard Kaijumax by Zander Cannon was great and picked it up recently. It's in a growing stack by my bedside but I haven't gotten to it yet.
