[Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of interviews I’ll be posting that were rescued from WizardUniverse.com’s now-defunct archives. Originally posted on July 6, 2007.]
I CAN HAS COMIX?: NICK BERTOZZI
The author of the surprise mainstream hit The Salon on working with Harvey Pekar, fighting for the First Amendment and channeling his inner Picasso
By Sean T. Collins
Nick Bertozzi is not Michael Chabon.
Of course, you could have fooled me the first time Bertozzi and I met, on a cross-country flight to the San Diego Comic-Con in 2001, when I mistook the cartoonist for the Kavalier & Clay author. He had the good graces to be flattered rather than irritated–a response indicative of the “nicest guy in comics” personality that goes hand in hand with his prodigious talent.
But these days, there’s no mistaking Bertozzi. This has been a banner year for the New York-based writer-artist, thanks to a one-two punch of historical graphic novels: Houdini: The Handcuff King, a biography of the famous illusionist and escape artist illustrated by Bertozzi and written by Berlin author Jason Lutes, and Bertozzi’s own The Salon, a supernatural thriller starring such turn-of-the-century artistic luminaries as Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Georges Braque and Guillaume Apollinaire. Bertozzi is also a presence in webcomics circles, where he publishes as part of the Act-I-Vate collective. His prolific and artistically restless career can be traced back to his Xeric- and Ignatz-winning comic-in-map-form Boswash, his harrowing short story collection The Masochists and his own Eightball-style anthology series Rubber Necker, which among many other tales contained chapters of the still-unfinished graphic novel Drop Ceiling. Upcoming collaborations with American Splendor‘s Harvey Pekar and “The Colbert Report’s” Glenn Eichler are set to cement his position in the comics vanguard.
An easygoing, extremely thoughtful interview subject, Bertozzi took time out of his outrageously busy schedule to reflect on The Salon‘s success, get angry about free speech, compare Picasso to Wolverine, talk up his next projects and chronicle the artistic civil war inside him.
WIZARD: Nick, you were the first comics professional that I ever really met, way back in 2001, and it’s amazing to think about the changes that have gone on in comics in that time. How would you characterize what your career has gone through since then?
BERTOZZI: I think the funniest part of that question was when you said I’m the first “professional” you’ve ever met. [Laughs] It’s really, for me, been a hobby. It’s hard to justify that it’s been anything other than a hobby. And it wasn’t until two years ago, when I finally started getting paid the bulk of whatever money I made that year, that I was able to feel like I’m getting validation for what I do. I don’t mean to make it sound like I want to make a lot of money being an artist, but I wanted to be able to live and be an artist, so that’s been the biggest for me. The biggest change since 2001 has been for me to be able to make a living at doing what I love. And externally, the things that have changed is that I can actually do the kind of comics that I want to do now. Whereas even five or six years ago, if somebody had said, “Let’s do a Lenny Bruce graphic novel with Harvey Pekar and Nick Bertozzi,” it would have been a small publisher, and if they would have given an advance it would have been a couple thousand dollars. It wouldn’t have been anything to live off, and it would have been what you did after you got home from your day job. And I thank the Art Spiegelmans and the Chris Wares and the Marjane Satrapis and the Dan Cloweses and everybody that’s come before to break that door wide open–Chester Brown, Will Eisner of course, and Tintin. [Laughs] I mean, you’ve seen it [happen], right? We couldn’t have SPX or MoCCA, we couldn’t have all these people making a living doing comics now if it hadn’t been for those people. How does that phrase go: “I know what side my bread is buttered on”? I sure do. And I thank all the lucky stars that came together to make that work.
For you, I think the best example of how things have changed is the success that The Salon has been having.
BERTOZZI: It’s awesome. We’re doing okay in comic stores, but it is cranking on Amazon. And I think I told you this at [MoCCA]: We beat Volume 14 of Naruto on Amazon for a couple of weeks.
Wow. Then you really have made it.
BERTOZZI: It sounds silly to say that, but I was like, “I guess there’s a bunch of people reading my book.” And it’s doing pretty good in bookstores, too. And then the press has just been nuts. And the publicity department at St. Martin’s [The Salon‘s publisher] has been incredibly good. And Abbye Simkowitz, the publicist there, works really hard. You know she’s really putting us under all the right noses. And it doesn’t hurt to have John Hodgman [New York Times book critic and the “I’m a PC” guy in the Apple ad campaign] talk about your book.
Again, that’s the kind of thing that would have been unbelievably rare a few years ago, to the point where it would have been a major news event: “New York Times reviews comics!” Now it’s almost commonplace.
BERTOZZI: From what I understand, he’s done a few columns on comics. He’s sort of the regular go-to comics guy, and he’s so erudite and well spoken when it comes to talking about them. Not only does he like comics, he understands them, which is a big plus.
With The Salon, the interesting thing is that there’s the fantasy high concept–this sort of “league of extraordinary Modernists” fighting this supernatural being from inside a painting. But at the same time it’s a really smart and erudite book itself. I mean, talk about erudite: Relationships between the characters, in some cases, hinge on their contrasting theories of Cubism. When you started, and you knew that you were going to be writing about these people in that way, did you look at that as a potential challenge?
BERTOZZI: First of all, thanks for saying it’s an erudite book. I appreciate that. I didn’t go out of my way to…I’m not somebody that goes to the thesaurus and goes, “What’s a more fancy way of saying this character went to the bathroom? Oh, he micturated.” In fact, I try to do the opposite. I try to make sure that the characters speak as they would have spoken in real life and not in this kind of…not in an unreal way of communicating, in which everybody’s got the perfect riposte. [Pause] Talk about pretentious–I just said “riposte.” [Laughs] Everybody’s got the perfect comeback and everybody’s sentences are well thought out before they come out of their mouths–I don’t think that’s quite truthful. But I think maybe the book deals with having to have a certain kind of intelligence. Like, [Pablo] Picasso and [fellow painter Georges] Braque and [composer Erik] Satie all had a certain intelligence about art and music and poetry. The whole group…in my research about them, it just comes through. It’s intelligence through passion. You don’t have to sound like an art history professor to get the story of Cubism across. In fact, I think it makes it even more confusing if you are an art history professor. I had one art history professor in college who would use this really flowery language to describe Cubism and it just made it so much harder for me to…it was like building a wall between me and my understanding of art. He would drop those phrases in the middle of his pontificating about art: “Picasso and Braque, vis-à-vis the fauvist movement, were part and parcel of dah, dah, dah.” It’s just so oblique and it’s just so hard to get through. And it just doesn’t make for a fun reading experience. I’m not saying that you’ve got to dumb it down, not at all. But I think you have to speak plainly, otherwise it’s going to be much harder to get your point across.
And besides, I think visually. It’s easier to tell a story for me in pictures than in words. So you’re better off showing and not telling. That’s Hitchcock’s maxim, and a lot of good storytellers say “show, don’t tell.” Especially since it’s a visual medium, it’s not as much about language as it is about showing what these artists are doing. Since they’re visual artists, that’s the point of the story: Showing them painting, showing them coming up with their ideas visually makes much more sense. And it’s much easier done in comics than in sitting in a classroom and speaking about what they’re doing.
That’s a good point. There are several really memorable sequences in which Picasso and Braque are swapping ideas and talking things through, and you show what they’re drawing or painting to show one another what they’re thinking.
BERTOZZI: Yeah. If anything, I always felt like the dumbest guy in art history class, the guy who was always trying to play catch-up, going “Well, I don’t understand. Why is this art movement so important?” And then you get this sense in art history class that these art movements…God reaches down from the sky and opens Picasso’s head and puts in this golden nugget of genius and closes the head back up, and then Picasso runs around and he’s a genius. No, it’s that he’s a hard worker, his father was an art teacher and he has a lot of talent. He has a very high level of artistic intelligence, but he’s also very lucky. He was surrounded by good patrons, like Gertrude Stein, and he had the luck and the fortune to run into Georges Braque at the exact right time. That’s what an art movement is made of. I really wanted to dissect that, show that that’s more the truth of things. People just stumble into greatness as much as they seek it out. Of course there’s the adventurers, like Marco Polo, who go out into the world and come back with this amazing story. But really, if you were to ask Marco Polo, did he go out seeking fame and fortune and wanting people to remember him for thousands of years? No. He went out because he wanted to find a quick way to make more money. And he probably had a lot of fun on the trip, too.
In The Salon, it seems like Picasso succeeds where Braque doesn’t, partially because he has such an outsize personality–which I think makes a big difference–but also because he’s less of a stickler for the theory behind the art. It’s almost as though he’s more willing to trust in luck to a certain extent and play a little faster and looser with things. Whereas the final image of Braque that the reader is left with is him stewing over Picasso’s success in almost sour-grapes fashion: He remains pure in terms of the theory but doesn’t have the success. First of all, am I characterizing it right? And second of all, do you sympathize with one or the other sides in that split between the two of them?
BERTOZZI: That is a fantastic question, and that is the heart of the book right there. That’s exactly what the whole book hinges on. It’s a great question because for me, personally, it’s unanswerable. I want to be both. At times I feel like I’m doing art because I want to do art, and then other times I feel like I want to be Picasso because I just want to have that freedom, or that lack of inhibition–to allow myself to paint nude, for example. Obviously that’s shorthand for Picasso’s artistic intelligence, in that he understands that art is about being playful. I don’t think anybody understood that quite as well as he did. And it’s just about play. It’s just about accessing that kid-brain inside of you. But then on the other side, Georges Braque represented the analytical, adult, editorial function of the left-brain, if you will, the organizing brain. And obviously I pushed both those elements in both those characters to make sure that they always represented [opposite] sides of the argument. But the history of Braque is that he…I wrote an epilogue, another 10 pages or so that takes place after World War I, so you see what happens to all the characters of The Salon. It kind of asked more questions than it answered, so I dropped it. But the very last sequence in that is when Braque and Picasso are walking around together and Picasso…it kind of reiterates the point of what you said, where Picasso has become this famous painter and Braque, he tells Picasso, “Be happy with your gift, use it well, but be careful with it,” as if to warn him and say, “You can’t be one or the other.” I think a good artist is somebody that is a little bit of both, and has to understand their crazy right-brain side but also has to be able to step back and be able to look at what they’ve done. Once they’ve painted nude and they’ve gotten paint all over themselves and all over the floor and there’s paint on the ceiling, then they can look back. If it takes an hour a day or a week, they can come back and let their editorial function take command and come at the artwork with a new perspective. It’s this weird duality that I think every good artist has. I’m so glad you brought it up because it’s what I really wanted to get across in this book: to show people that not only are legends false, in the sense that artistic movements are not handed down by God–they’re created by wackos who are really funny and cool and yet annoying–but also that art is not just about being popular and just being so playful like Picasso. It’s also about being somebody like Braque, but it’s not all about being like Braque. It’s a balance that you got to ride. I’m just blown away because you got it, and I’m glad to hear that.
I think that balance does come through in the book, because obviously Picasso has the success, he’s also kind of an assh—, whereas Braque is a nicer guy but is kind of a stick in the mud. So even putting aside their merits as artists or as thinkers about art, in terms of their personalities there are obvious pluses and minuses to the way they approach things that are fairly clear and enable the audience to sympathize with both of them at different times.
BERTOZZI: Good. Well, Picasso I think is just such a…he has that kind of…really, I didn’t write Picasso. I know it sounds completely clichéd and cheesy, but he was speaking to me. That’s the first time it’s ever happened to me. Writers say, “I’m just channeling this character”–well, yeah, that happened to me with Picasso. After doing a bunch of research, he just sort of started talking on his own. And he is an assh—, but he’s a charming assh—. And he’s very loyal, and that’s a very attractive quality. You know, in the final analysis, he wants to be a better artist, and he’s working to become a better artist. He calls himself the greatest artist, but he works for it.
Right. I think that perhaps in terms of his reputation and in terms of what artists take from the Picasso model of being an artist, the wild, womanizing, egomaniacal, painting-naked stuff is kind of overvalued, while the fact that he did work hard and that he did know his stuff is overlooked.
BERTOZZI: He did. He did. Yeah. The other thing about him, sort of my other comment on art in that last scene at the actual painting salon, is that he’s a celebrity and people want [that]. [Painter Henri] Matisse says to Braque, “If you don’t understand this is about Picasso as a celebrity, then this century’s going to be really hard for you.” [Laughs] And then we wind up with Warhol. I think there’s a lot of value to Warhol, I’m appreciative of pop art, but I think you can definitely go way too far in that direction. Being a celebrity artist, I think, requires a level of balance that a lot of people forget about. And now I’m sounding like a Buddhist monk or something. [Laughs]
Whatever reservations one might have about his legacy in some ways, you can tell how powerful Picasso’s voice was to you in the book. I mean he’s like the Wolverine of 2007 alternative comics, you know?
BERTOZZI: [Laughs] The Wolverine of 2007.
He’s short and larger than life and crazy.
BERTOZZI: And he’s the best there is at what he does. [Laughs] Absolutely.
I hadn’t even thought of that one. But that’s definitely true.
BERTOZZI: That’s to me what’s so attractive about Picasso, too. I feel like I’m much more in the Braque vein–not that I’m a shrinking violet or anything like that, to throw in another superhero [EDITOR’S NOTE: He’s referring to Legion of Super-Heroes member Shrinking Violet, believe it or not.], but I’m definitely very attracted to that idea of just being able to be uninhibited. I really wanted to be able to access that more often, and I have been. In my comics lately I’ve been getting more…I think it turns out that both my Braque side and my Picasso side are both getting healthier as an artist. You know? I’m allowing myself to do more, just trust my instincts more, which has been really helpful. But also knowing when to edit to yourself, that’s something that takes maturity, and you really have to trust your friends and take your ego out of it. And that’s hard to do.
Maybe that’s because the first thing I read of yours was The Masochists, and it’s hard not to be more optimistic after that, but it seems like your work is getting more optimistic overall. Is that a strand in your own stuff that you’re picking up on? And do you think it has something to do with learning to trust yourself more as an artist?
BERTOZZI: Being more optimistic in my own art has more to do with looking for interesting stories to tell. When I wrote The Masochists, and as I’ve been writing Drop Ceiling, the ongoing story in Rubber Necker–they’re pretty dark stories, in that I would call them kind of pessimistic. Definitely not optimistic. So it seems to me that when I tend to write stories based on life experience, my life experience, it’s kind of a downer. So I’ve been looking for other stories to write about that are…well, The Salon, for example, is something that is divorced from me, so I can find the balance in it better–again, to go back to balance. I can find the happiness in the story. And I think my writing brain automatically goes to tragedy just because you need dramatic conflict, and of course there could be a lot of tragedy in dramatic conflict. But I’m also able to more easily access the fun side of a character’s narrative arc. You know, in the Shackleton piece I just did, it’s this incredibly…these six guys have to cross 800 miles of the worst ocean in the world in an open boat in the Antarctic Sea and find a 25-mile-wide island in the middle of the South Atlantic, and if they miss it they’re going to end up in Africa. That sounds like a very tragic story, but really it’s a story of hope and overcoming these incredible odds. So I’ve been finding that there’s a lot of good stories out there to tell in comics that I need to…it makes it easier to find the hope in those stories. I think if I were to write my own stories all the time, they’d suffer a little bit from a very pessimistic viewpoint.
You seem to be attracted to period pieces, going back as far as Boswash, but also obviously The Salon and Houdini and Shackleton. Is there a particular reason?
BERTOZZI: I’m not good at drawing cute little hipster girls.
Really? That’s it?
BERTOZZI: It probably is partially that, and also that I carefully chose stories that took place before the current copyright act went into place, 1923, so that I didn’t have to pay any kind royalties or anything like that. And that sounds maybe a little callous and mercenary, but that way I wouldn’t have to deal with anybody else’s interpretation. I can just make my own interpretation of these events. That was a little bit of it. And then the large part is just the subject matter. When I came across the Shackleton story I knew immediately I wanted to make a comic out of it because there are some good documentaries, but the Kenneth Branagh miniseries doesn’t do the story justice. The story really needs to be told in a visual medium, dramatically, to get to the essence of what was so amazing about that story. And in The Salon‘s case, part of the initial wanting to do that story was just I wanted to learn how to get better at composing, to be a better draftsman and compose images better. So the genesis of that project was that I could create a story around having to redraw all these famous paintings and kind of get inside them–an excuse to copy from the masters. To get inside a DeLaCroix or something like that, or get inside a Gaugin and really try to pull it apart and rebuild it a little bit. It just so happened that I was really interested in Gaugin and that led me to being really interested to why Cubism was so important, because having taken art history classes, like I was talking about before, there was that wall between me and my understanding of why this art movement was so important. I learned a lot more about just how to make art from that, how the picture plane works and little things like that. It just so happened that all those pieces turned out to be period pieces. And then out of the blue I get called to do the Houdini book. It’s set in 1908. I guess you could make a joke that I only like to do comics that are set 100 years ago. All right, you know what? It’s fun to draw people in suits, too. I like drawing suits and I like drawing carriages. My joke about Houdini is if I never have to draw another goddamn bowler hat again in my life I’ll be happy. They’re hard to draw.
Are they really?
BERTOZZI: Yeah. They’re really hard to draw. Cowboy hats are hard to draw and bowler hats are even harder for me to draw. Technically I’m not the best draftsperson, so it takes me a little extra time to make it look right.
I feel like the anxiety of influence of René Magritte would be hanging heavily over any attempt to draw a bowler hat.
BERTOZZI: Yeah. Well, that guy, I saw pictures of him painting: He would get up and dress in a suit and walk to the other side of his house and start painting in his suit. I mean, there’s a level of dedication right there.
I appreciate a sharp-dressed artist.
BERTOZZI: Yeah. Me, too.
I was trying to contextualize your art style for myself and I’ve always found it kind of hard. There are certain schools in alternative comics, for me: I can sort of recognize Highwater Books-type people and Dan Clowes-type people and Chris Ware-type people and Paul Pope-type people, but I don’t see you and see anybody else and think, “That’s kind of similar.” It’s almost sui generis. Who do you consider your peers? Who do you connect with as a visual artist?
BERTOZZI: Another great question. I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately. I’ll give you a little back history on that. The comics that imprinted on my brain as a young kid were Tintin by Hergé and R. Crumb’s “Mr. Natural.” My dad used to read those to me before I could even read. He would leave out the swears and the nudity. So if you can picture somebody between those two poles, that’s probably me. I love the ligne claire, but then I love the earthy influence of R. Crumb. And I think those two elements combined make up my comic sensibility. If you look between that spectrum, often my work is between those two poles–I’m not saying in the level of drawing ability because I hope to someday be able to draw as well as they do. To answer your question, I think the difference between me and most comic artists is that I don’t fetishize the image quite the way they do. And that includes people that draw in all different styles. You said the Highwater style and James Kochalka style or something–they approach comics much more from an art point of view. And for me the art, while not secondary, the intent is the most important. It’s not about striking a pose, it’s about striking the right pose to tell the story. [In] my comics, I think the art is never foremost and the words are never foremost. The story is foremost. Maybe that’s a false argument, but I think that’s what sets me off from most comic artists. And the peers that I have? I think I don’t…I love too many comics to…[Laughs] My peers. That’s a good question. I don’t know if I can answer that. I mean, my friends that I talk to all the time about comics, you know, Dean Haspiel and Jason Little are certainly doing comics but they have their own styles. You see a Dean Haspiel comic, you know it’s his style. Or you see a Jason Little comic and it’s his. Or you see Paul Pope’s comic, you know it’s his. I think I’m a little more chameleon-like than that. A lot more chameleon-like. But I think of it more along the lines of you’re just trying to use a different cinematographer. If I were making movies I’d be using a different cinematographer. That cinematographer just happens to be me for each movie or each project.
You also seem to be more open to the possibilities of collaboration than a lot of people.
BERTOZZI: I like to learn. That’s why I like to collaborate. [On Houdini] I got to collaborate with Jason Lutes. I mean, he’s one of the best cartoonists going right now, and I get to draw from his thumbnails? Yeah. Sign me up. Oh, you’re going to pay me, too? Hell yeah, I’ll take it! But the best part about being an artist is you get to look at [Krazy Kat creator] George Herriman’s artwork and get insanely obsessed with it, and then do a comic like the Shackleton comic where you’re trying to figure out the psychological repercussions on the reader of using a fat panel border as opposed to a thin panel border, and rhythm, and all the techniques that Herriman had down pat, that wonderful, dreamlike, surrealistic quality but that power to move a reader across the page that he had. I really try and take that apart and kind of use his style outright. And maybe you wouldn’t be able to see it in the Shackleton piece that I did, but I really feel like I was just ripping him off wholesale. Comics is a lifelong apprenticeship, and I feel like I’m always going to be taking in new influences, or new to me I should say. I knew of Herriman, of course, for years and years, but it wasn’t until recently that I realized just how good he was. And I had to pull it apart in order to figure that out. The same goes with Hergé. I didn’t really get to understanding why I loved Tintin so much until I did a four-page Tintin satire in Herge’s style, as much as I could. I mean he’s so good, it’s hard. You see that round head and you think it’s just a circle. No, it’s all about proportion and getting the eyes exactly right on the face. There’s an incredible amount of thought and precision that goes into making up a Tintin page that I hadn’t really noticed before. Maybe in a Picasso way, like Picasso having to repaint his favorite Velasquez or something like that, I have to do the same thing and actually have to just do it physically in order to get it. In that sense I’m not like Braque. I’m not an analytic person that I can look at Herriman’s page and go, “Okay, well, he does the four-panel tier here and then he leaves a big open space, and that means that he’s trying to do this and that.” No, I need to just pull it apart, copy it and just get inside the style. I’ll be doing that for the rest of my life, and that makes me very happy because I like to learn a lot. If I ever have a set style, I think that’s going to be a very bad thing because I’ll get bored. Maybe I have ADD or something like that.
You’ve also been open to the possibilities of webcomics: The Salon was on Serializer.net, and as a member of Act-I-Vate you’ve done Shackleton, Pecan Sandy and Persimmon Cup. Is there a reason for that from a philosophical or artistic perspective, or is it just a way to get comics out there quickly?
BERTOZZI: I could lie to you and say that “it’s the vanguard of new storytelling,” but really I just want more people to read my comics, and it’s a great way for people to read my comics. I get a big ego stroke every time I put a comic up and somebody comes back and says, “Wow, I love this comic.” It’s as simple as that. It’s just a one-to-one equation where it’s just like, “Put up comic, feel good about yourself for a week.” [Laughs] Also, I get to work in color that way. I was recently putting together some comics that I thought I was going to publish in black and white, and I decided to recolor one of these pieces that I had done for [the three-man anthology comic] Triple Dare because I wasn’t very happy with it. And I realized–and here’s where I’m not an analytical artist, and here’s where it takes experience for me to understand things–I realized that a lot of the artwork that I’d done prior to The Salon was art that was done for color even though I was drawing it in black and white. It was for-color art, and that’s because I was so influenced by Hergé and just hadn’t even realized it. So going back and recoloring this piece, it’s a completely different piece and so much of a stronger piece. Usually I would say if a piece is drawn for black and white, leave it as black and white. So I’m not somebody that says every comic must be colored. I love black and white artwork. So the stuff prior to The Salon is definitely drawn for color. Knowing that, now I love color. I love being able to work with color for nothing online, whereas a color comic is going to cost you an arm and a leg, and you’re going to have to be selling one color comic for $4.95, and you’re going to need to sell, I don’t know, 5,000 of those, 10,000 of those to break even. I mean, that’s extremely daunting in this day and age.
It’s funny that you should bring color up, because it was actually my next question. Again, talk about sui generis–not to be constantly blowing smoke up your ass…
BERTOZZI: No. Sui generis is code for weirdo. I like it.
Maybe it’s just because on my desk right in front of me I have the cover you did for the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund newsletter, Busted, up on the wall, so I’m seeing that green all the time, but I’ve been impressed with your use of color since The Masochists. That not-quite pastel palette that you use isn’t something you see all the time. Sometimes I can look at the color in a comic and say, “Okay, I see what they were doing.” Like the color in Watchmen–it’s kind of bright and garish, but it’s not the primary-color garish that superhero comics are. It’s scaled back slightly.
BERTOZZI: Right. It’s a play on the Charlton Comics.
Right. But what’s going on with these greens and blues and purples and pinks that you use?
BERTOZZI: Well, in The Salon in particular, it was just that the colors had to change from scene to scene. That’s something I set up right away. Rather than having a caption heading on the beginning of each page that said, “And then…” or “The next day…” it was much easier to show that and not tell it. And to show that a scene changes, what better way than to change the color of it? That’s just something that’s peculiar to comics and it seemed like a fun, small, little, cool idea that would fit in and not take over the story and hopefully not be too jarring. But my color sense comes from knowing the color wheel since I was a high school student. I’ve understood it and really tried to stick with it a lot, color theory that is. When I worked at Alloy.com, which is a teen fashion catalogue, part of my job was to do the website graphics and to do the big part of my job was putting together the catalogue–which was a horrible, horrible job, but you’re dealing with color all day. “What works with these pants and that skirt and that hat and that hoodie?” A big part of that was just trying to find colors that worked within all these other colors and trying to find the base color, trying to think a little more analytically about color. But we would also go to these Japanese fashion magazines that have just these crazy amazing designs and we would just copy their color schemes, too, after a while: “Oh, we’re going to do magenta with blue today.” It looks garish and awful, but if you’re only using a couple of colors, it’ll work as a good banner across the bottom of this page and will actually hold the page together and it will bring the person’s eye to the clothes or something like that. Or it’ll separate the text information from the picture information. That gave me a good insight into how to use color. And the other thing about working with The Salon in color is I knew I just didn’t have time to use more than two colors. There’s a background color and there’s a foreground color. The characters appear in one color and that helps them pop off of the backgrounds because the backgrounds are another color. Very often they’re complementary colors, not always. Using color in The Salon achieves a lot of storytelling that I would have had to do in another way. Or I would have had to be a much better inker. [Laughs] I don’t know. I’m just going to be self-deprecating here, but just to put a point on color, it’s probably the one part of my art where I can be completely playful and just play, but then I also understand how to edit myself with it. It’s probably the more successful part of my comics, I think.
So you’re Picasso and Braque with that?
BERTOZZI: Yeah. Definitely. Definitely.
It was funny hearing you use the word analytical again when you’re talking about colors, because it keeps coming up. And you teach at the School of Visual Arts as well. Does that draw on that side of your brain, too?
BERTOZZI: The teaching has been one of the best things I’ve had to do in comics because it’s forced me to be more articulate about what I do–not only more articulate with my students but more articulate with myself. I can have arguments with myself about choosing a particular panel. I’m much more inclined to be more analytical about my comics now that I’ve been a teacher. And I think it’s really helped my comics a lot.
Since you have this professorial side to you, and since you’re also just a nice guy, I couldn’t believe it when news broke of the Gordon Lee case, where this comic shop owner is being prosecuted for accidentally distributing a sample of The Salon containing nudity to a kid on Free Comic Book Day. I was like, “Of all the people in the world whose comics this could center around–Nick?” I just I couldn’t wrap my head around it. I wanted to ask you what that’s been like.
BERTOZZI: I’m glad to hear that I present myself in the world so that I come across as being a nice guy. But I know I’m a nasty drunk and there’s a real dark side and that side comes out in comics. If I didn’t have comics maybe I’d be in a death metal band or something like that. There’s a lot of dark stuff that’s got to come out, especially when I think about the situation with Gordon Lee. You know, it’s not even about him, it’s about people willing to take the First Amendment and just step all over it. And it makes me enraged. At the reading [of The Salon] I did last night in Chicago, I could feel myself getting so angry that I’ll start yelling. I was telling the story of the case after I gave my reading, just to kind of give a pitch for the CBLDF: “If you get a chance, go donate 5 bucks, 10 bucks, 50 bucks, a thousand bucks if you can, because this is about your rights and my rights.” And it’s not about one little guy in Georgia. It’s about a whole process of people trying to destroy your country. I know I sound very overbearing when I talk like that but it gets my goat real bad. I can’t wait until it’s over, and I’m sure the CBLDF will crush the D.A., and if they don’t I’m sure they’ll go to appeals on it and they’ll crush him there. The comics community has been fantastic about supporting the CBLDF. I mean, [the organization has] spent 80 grand so far. They’re probably going to spend another 20 grand on this case, and if it takes more than that, they’ll pay it. A good thing about being in comics is that most people that like comics are pretty smart people. They’re readers and they’re thinkers, so they don’t just accept the received wisdom that “he’s giving out porno to kids.” No. I mean, there’s a lot more to it than that. Thankfully we’ve got a community that’s fighting. It’s also heartbreaking to think that there’s people in this country that think it’s okay for a district attorney to fight your little petty battles. That whole thing about the guy just getting dismissed in North Carolina, the district attorney in North Carolina with the Duke rape case, shows quite plainly that people are willing to misuse power for their own ends in just the most ridiculous [way], destroying not only the lives of the lacrosse players–whether you may think they’re spoiled brats or not, they’re going to take that with them for the rest of their lives–but destroying and abusing the trust of the strippers as well. Anyway, I’m getting way off course. But the CBLDF hires the best lawyers and the jury will hear from the best lawyers, and unfortunately that’s what you’ve got to have in this day and age. You’ve got to lawyer up. That’s really the saddest part about it. $100,000 could have gone to how many scholarships at the Center for Cartoon Studies? Or SVA? This is what we’ve got to spend money on? Is it really? Is this really what we have to spend money on? Really?
I think that’s the thing that gets me the most: how much money the CBLDF has to burn through for any time one of these things happens–just what a stupid waste it is.
BERTOZZI: I thought we were over this.
Yeah.
BERTOZZI: But that being said, thank God they’re there. There’s going to be more of this stuff. And the more we’re prepared for it, the more we can just nip that kind of stuff in the bud.
Yeah. I thought the situation in Missouri case where Craig Thompson’s Blankets and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home got pulled from the shelves is a much bigger deal than anyone really realizes. Comics have been under the radar for so long that we’ve gotten used to having a lot of freedom. But the dark side to comics’ increased exposure is that, as a visual medium, certain images are going to rub a lot of average library-goers or bookstore-shoppers the wrong way. I think we need to be vigilant and articulate about what they’re really about.
BERTOZZI: Yeah. And we have to be honest with ourselves: Yeah, it’s a visual medium and people treat visual media differently than they do pure text. You can’t fight that. You can’t say that text and rated-X books and rated-X movies should be treated the same. It’s going to require some new thinking. Exactly. And I’m optimistic in one way, in the sense that the CBLDF is out there and they’re preparing. But you’re right, there’s going to be a lot of backlash. And manga–there’s something where there’s pretty out-there stuff that’s very acceptable in Japanese culture, but we’re a different culture. I think sometimes I belong in Japan. [Laughs]
So tell us what you have coming up next.
BERTOZZI: The very next project I’m working on is going to be the biography of Lenny Bruce written by Harvey Pekar, drawn by myself of course and published by Houghton Mifflin, publishers of Fun Home. And I’m really looking forward to that because the editor, Deanne Urmy, has been just really cool to deal with so far and I’ve only hear good things about her. And I finally got to talk to Harvey and he’s a card. [Laughs] He’s a character. [Imitating Pekar] “Did you get your bread yet, man?” He wanted to make sure I got paid. Very kind that way. [Laughs] So that’s next. And then I’m doing a book for First Second with a writer for “The Colbert Report.” He’s writing it. It’s called Stuffed. His script is being edited right now and hopefully I’ll get that pretty soon. I think that will be 2009, and hopefully we’re shooting for the end of 2008 for the Lenny Bruce book. And then after that, to everybody that’s been asking me at the conventions, I’m going to be trying to finish up…
Drop Ceiling?
BERTOZZI: …because I want that story to be over too. I want to tell everybody what happens.
In terms of the amount of time it’s taking you, Drop Ceiling is the new Black Hole.
BERTOZZI: [Laughs] Yeah. Exactly. A thousand years in the making. It’s almost been five years, I think, since I started it, so that’s an awfully long time to go with only six chapters done. I’ve probably got another four more chapters, maybe five. I’ve got to cut it off.
Is it hard to get back in the headspace that you were in when you started it?
BERTOZZI: Yeah. It is. I had written the end of the story already, but it takes a little while to just get into that way of drawing because I think I draw a lot better than that now. But that being said, I was rereading it recently and it still reads really well. So you’ll know it has been made over a long period of time, and it will feel like a quilt as opposed to a one-color, uniform thread-count duvet. It’ll be a little patchy but hopefully the story will be so enticing that people will be biting their nails. And then I’m also working on Persimmon Cup on Act-I-Vate, which is my ongoing sci-fi fantasy story about–well, you’ve just got to read it. It’s just weird. I don’t know how long that’s going to be. I just finished drawing the 200th panel of that, so we’ll see what happens. I don’t even know where that one’s going. That’s been a really interesting Picasso-esque experience, for me where I’m just sort of letting go of the rules and just kind of flying by the seat of my pants, and it’s been really, really fun.
For an analytical guy, that’s quite the leap of faith.
BERTOZZI: Yeah. But all the other work I’ll be doing this year, or I have been doing, I’m working with somebody else’s script and having to be very precise in what I draw. And this way it’s just letting my id out and letting it go crazy on the page. That’s been so much fun with Persimmon Cup.
On your website, on the page where you posted links to your comics, you write, “Putting together words and pictures is the best way that I can get you to listen to me.” I thought that was really striking in both its openness and its sense that you have something to say. What is it that you want people to listen to?
BERTOZZI: Did I really write that? [Laughs] No, just kidding. Sh–. What was I thinking? It’s not so much what I want to say but it’s how I want to say things. It’s important to communicate with people around you in any way you possibly can. And if I have real trouble getting my point across during a conversation, I’m not a good arguer. I never would have been on the debate team. I wish I had; I would have had a little bit more confidence in myself. But what I want to get across is just that very basically everybody has a different experience and everybody does not think the same way that everybody else does. That is so easy to forget when you’re just walking down the street and you bump into somebody and you get pissed off and you think, “Well, why wasn’t that person looking where they’re going?” Maybe they have glaucoma so bad and you just never took the time to figure that out. That’s a very small example of what I’m trying to talk about. A larger example is that I’ll never understand what it is to be Muslim. I could go live [in a Muslim nation] for the rest of my life and I probably would never understand it. When you grow up in a very particularly strongly religious household…it’s something I just couldn’t be familiar with if I wanted to be. But I want to be open to that way of thinking so that I don’t automatically dismiss somebody out of hand the way I would, saying, “Why did that person bump into me? They’re not looking where they’re going because they’re selfish. They don’t care about anybody else.” That’s probably not the whole story. It’s true, they might be selfish and they might not care about anybody else, but there might be some other issue at hand. They might have some issue I’m not even aware of. So my comics are a way of getting to that place where I seamlessly take you into this little world, whether it’s 1907 in Paris or 1911 on the Antarctic Sea or it’s in this fantasy world I’ve constructed for Persimmon Cup or the Creamytown of Pecan Sandy’s world or the Pawtucket, Rhode Island, of Dennis from Drop Ceiling. All these disparate worlds, but hopefully you enter into them and the world balloons are consistently done and the art is clear and the intention on each panel is clear enough so that when you get to the end of the story you’ve just entered into somebody else’s brain and took a little trip in it. Obviously, I didn’t come up with that way of thinking. That’s what the best film directors always try to do: [Stanley] Kubrick just wants to drag you into that world, and every moment has to be so precise so that you never for a moment think that you’re watching a movie. You’re sucked into that person’s brain. That’s what I mean by “That’s the only way I can get you to listen to me.” It’s the best way I can get you to listen to me.
I thought I had you stumped for a minute.
BERTOZZI: No. Being a teacher you can’t be stumped. You’ve got to come up with some good bullsh– like that. [Laughs] I’m just kidding. That’s not bullsh–. Nobody asks me those questions, so it feels good to be able to actually say stuff like that.
If there’s anything I left out, the floor is yours.
BERTOZZI: Well, you got it all. We kind of approached it from all angles. I’m definitely spent in terms of thinking about my intentions in comics. [Laughs] We’ve covered all the bases.