Which comic of yours feels like the start of your actual career? Because I know Angry Youth was a ziney thing in the beginning. So where does the official comics discography start for you?
As far as when I first started to feel I was getting good, it was probably around Angry Youth #7. I thought I was on to something. It looked polished.
What’s the cover on that one?
It’s just a bunch of floating heads of the different characters. But it wasn’t until #9 that I dropped the guy that I was doing it with and went solo.
What happened to that guy?
He’s still a friend of mine. His name is Matt Sanborn. When we started, I did the comics and he did the zine writing. He would review porn movies and write fake hate mail and other shit. The reason I did it with a partner was that I was sort of daunted by the idea of doing it on my own. I thought it would be sort of fun to have a friend to do it with. After about seven or eight issues, he got pretty bored with it. He didn’t want to do it anymore. I think he might have felt that he had more of a second banana role. He kind of phased himself out of it. Being thrust into doing it on my own was a kick in the ass. Like, “Now I really have to make an effort.”
Are you still friends with Sanborn?
I guess so, although he unfriended me on Facebook. [laughs] I guess this goes back to your question about whether I’ve ruined any friendships. Sometimes I think I might heckle a bit too much on people’s Facebook pages and then they get sick of me.
Every time I put up a Facebook post, I pretty much start a mental countdown until you come in and call me an asshole for whatever it was I wrote.
That’s why Facebook was invented. [laughs]
In fact, whenever I talk to you for more than a few minutes, you either make fun of me really brutally or tell me about making fun of another friend really brutally. Is that because you’re afraid of intimacy with other men?
[laughs] Probably. All humor is just a fuckin’ defense mechanism…
So it’s armor?
Armor, that’s all it is. I really must be fucking hurting, man.
I don’t see you ripping on women that way.
It depends on who they are.
Off the top of my head, the only women that we both know besides your wife are Laura Park and Lisa Hanawalt. Let’s use them as examples. If they put something on Facebook, I’m not expecting you to write some vicious shit in the comments. But if I or another man posts something, it’s inevitable that you’ll be fucking with it.
There are certain people that I feel like they get it, and mostly it’s guys that get it. But there are exceptions. There are women that get it. I find it surprising that some people are so sensitive.
Does Jenny get it? Do you do the vicious riffs with her?
Yes and no. Sometimes she gets it, and sometimes she’s not in the mood for it. You’ve got to pick your battles, I guess. [laughs] Or pick your jokes at least. You know, “Should I say this, or do I not want to be in the fucking dog house all day long and into the next week.”
But with your friends, it’s slash and burn.
Yeah. [laughs] But it’s not like I’m saying this shit to ruin friendships. I’m just saying it because I think it’s funny. My intent is never to be really hurtful. I just see it sort as busting chops.
No, I get it. And I’m the same way. For me, it’s a way to weed out the people I don’t want to bother with.
I don’t want to make it sound like I’m going to brutalize someone until they fucking unfollow me on Twitter or something. [laughs]
I know. That’s not what I’m saying. If someone can’t deal with it, it’s pretty much a good sign that…
You’ve got to be able to roll with it, dude.
That’s right. With the big dogs.
Yeah.
So, getting back on track: You were giving Sanborn a hard time and he unfriended you on Facebook?
I always gave him a hard time. A lot of the shit that I built my humor around in those early books was me picking on him. Like the Sinus O’Gynus character—a lot of that was him.
Oh shit.
You know, in a lot of those early issues, how he was really into Freddie Mercury and AIDS awareness? Sanborn really was into that whole deal. He would inject these things into our magazine like, “Wear a condom!”
Weird.
I was really humiliated by that kind of stuff, so I would try to counter it by putting lots of AIDS jokes in. [laughs]
So Angry Youth was self-published until…
#11.
And then Fantagraphics took over?
Yeah.
What did you think of other underground comics at that time?
Well, going back to when I was still in college, I would go to a comic book store at the mall. It was run by a retarded guy with a fucking dead eye. I used to go there all the time and buy superhero stuff even though I was starting to get tired of it. I was looking for something new. I can’t remember if it was a Drawn and Quarterly anthology or if it was just a copy of one of Joe Matt’s comics, but I bought that and read it and it made me so mad. I threw it in the garbage at a McDonald’s and I was fucking like, “I’m never reading or buying comics again.”
Why did it make you mad?
Because it was fucking stupid. It was all just like, “I got up. I brushed my teeth.” It’s just sort of that daily bullshit that nobody gives a shit about. Stories about non-stories, which I fucking can’t stand. I pretty much swore off comics for three years after that. It wasn’t until ‘98 that I started to seriously get back into them.
Still, you were making comics during the time that you weren’t reading them.
Oh yeah. But I was totally out of the loop. I was really unaware of any of the zine things that were happening, the minicomics. I didn’t even know that I was making them. I was doing it but I wasn’t going to conventions or talking to other artists, so I didn’t really know it was happening.
What was it that got you back into reading comics?
I think I was getting tired of feeling so isolated. I wanted to know what else was out there, who else was doing comics. I started to actively seek things out at that point.
And what did you find?
I found a lot of other shitty comics that people were doing that I actually really liked. But they were by people who eventually gave up—very talented and funny people that couldn’t take it anymore and quit.
Like who?
Doug Iannucci who, did a funny comic called Sham, and Aric Calfee, who did a comic called Deathfart, and another guy named Bruno Nadalin who did a comic called Churn. But also, I was starting to discover Kaz and Underworld and I was reading Love and Rockets, checking that shit out.
What was your day job in DC when you were starting to get into reading comics again?
I was working at another Borders books. But I left DC in the summer of ‘99. I moved back up to Massachusetts, where I did a couple temp jobs in Boston. That was only until the end of October, when I moved to Seattle.
Why did you end up in DC in the first place?
A girl.
I figured. You don’t go to DC and work at some random Borders if it’s not for something like that.
Yeah. The girl I was dating at the time was moving there so I was like, “Fuck it, I’ve got nothing happening here. I might as well go.”
Was this the 40-year-old with a bunch of kids?
I had broken up with her.
So this was girlfriend number two. What was her story?
I met her at the first Borders I worked at, in Hyannis, Massachussets. She was a lot younger than me.
You went from a 40-year-old to, what, a 16-year-old?
[laughs] I was 28 and I think she was 20. Is that horrible?
No. Maybe dating the 40-year-old for so long was like serving time in purgatory and it earned you the right to date someone younger than you for awhile.
And then enter Inferno?
What was this girl like? Why do you think she was attracted to you?
We were both kind of nerdy. She liked comics and things like that.
Was she your usual physical type? Jenny told me that you don’t like flat chests or short hair.
At that point, my physical type was “someone who likes me.”
But now, if have your druthers, you lean toward zaftig.
Yeah.
Where do think that predilection comes from?
It comes from sucking my dad’s fat tits.
That’s all I wanted to hear.
Interview over.
Tell me about your animation deals.
I have maybe one and a half going. I’m definitely working on something with Dave Cooper. It’s a kid’s show for Nickelodeon. Right now we’re sort of in the Bible-writing stage. I’m the writer, and it’s Dave’s drawings. That’s how we work together. We used to collaborate for Nickelodeon magazine. We would do this thing where he would come up with three or four characters and then send them to me and be like, “OK, write something.” I’d write maybe a two-page comic. We took that way of working, developed a new idea, and sold it to Nickelodeon—the network.
How much of your time does that take up now?
It’s like a part-time thing. It fluctuates. When we first started, I had to write a little trailer and Dave had to do all the work of animating it. Now I’ll write a whole bunch of shit and then send it over to Nickelodeon to review. I think if it gets past this point and on to actually making the show it might get a little bit more intense.
And the Bible you mentioned, that’s like a breakdown of all the characters and their backgrounds, right?
Right. All animated shows have a Bible with breakdowns of the characters, drawings of the turn-around of all the characters, descriptions of the land that they live in, episode ideas, and so on.
OK, that’s one thing. What’s the half thing? It’s something that’s more your own, right?
It’s a thing I’ve pitched to Adult Swim. It’s basically like an Angry Youth Comix idea for a show. But it’s not.
Are you going to use characters from Angry Youth?
No. I’m pretty much ripping myself off and creating a show that’s very similar in tone and in character to Angry Youth Comix but it’s not Angry Youth Comix. We pitched it to Adult Swim, and they liked it on some level. Initially it was about the two main guys, much like Angry Youth was about the two main guys. Adult Swim wanted it to be more of an ensemble thing, sort of like Archie.
You said “we” pitched it. Who is “we?”
It was developed by me and Eric Kaplan, who was the guy behind that Maakies series, The Drinky Crow Show. He has an animation studio and he produced that. He took our idea to Warner Brothers Animation and they wanted to do something, so it’s basically me and Eric Kaplan and Warner Brothers Animation. Then we took it and pitched it to Adult Swim.
Let’s talk about the Blecky and Sinus-y and Loady era of your work now. I want to hear about how you would start a story in the Angry Youth days. Was it via doodling or sketching? Did you ever begin by writing notes?
It can vary. The most ideal situation is when an idea pops into my head and I can immediately jump right in and do a complete finished comic. That doesn’t happen all the time.
When that happens, is it the punchline that pops into your head?
There have been instances where I’ll just have a really great idea for a comic but I don’t know what the punchline’s going to be. I’ll just have an idea. There are a lot of variables—it can often depend on how much time I have. Like with a Blecky Yuckerella strip—that was stuff I had to get done in a certain amount of time. There would be weeks when I didn’t fucking have shit. I didn’t know what I was going to do. But I’d start jotting down notes or doodling and then, hopefully, I’d have the kernel of an idea. Something I could build around.
