* On some alternate Earth that is home to a Sean T. Collins with more money, more shelf space, and an even more absurdly patient wife, that Sean T. Collins has quite a few action figures for grown-ups, like the DC Direct Green Lantern Series 3 figures reviewed at FarePlay and the Target-exclusive Red Hulk Build-a-Figure Marvel Legends wave on display at Marvelous News (via Topless Robot). Stranded here in the infant universe of Qwewq as I am, however, this present Sean T. Collins can merely observe that action figures of superheroes and the stories that they are based on both bear witness to the simple fact that taking a character and changing his color scheme around is awesome.

Also, the Sinestro Corps storyline was great.

* Speaking of alternate Earths, Bruce Baugh imagines what the Star Wars movies would have ended up like had Obi-Wan’s original story about Darth Vader and Anakin Skywalker been the literal truth. He prefers this what-if scenario, me not so much (the prequels’ bobbling of Anakin can be ignored, while “Luke, I am your father” would be sorely missed).

* And speaking of Bruce Baugh, he (and his commenters) draws our attention to a couple of cases in which enterprising World of Warcraft players managed to loose gigantic, near-indestructible, killcrazy creatures into normally peaceful environments. Hilarious carnage results! As with an earlier incident in which players used their in-game pets to transmit a blood-borne pestilence from a dying demigod to an enemy city, thus wiping it out, WoW’s corporate overlords (the real gods of the game, apparently) quickly undid the catastrophic results of these ingenious shenanigans. I don’t play the game and maybe I’d feel differently if I did, but don’t you think they should have just let it be? It seems to me that if you are a resident of a fantasy world that’s crawling with bloodthirsty beasts and demonic entities large and small, roughly based on our own medieval past, the occasional apocalyptic plague and/or out-of-nowhere Godzilla attack is just part of the cost of living. Or perhaps it’s just that, as with that infamous massacre of the in-game memorial for an IRL deceased player, I’m amused and fascinated when players use the rules of a highly structured world against it, as it were. On the other hand, I can see how allowing such maverick moves to go forward unchecked would set up a lousy incentive structure whereby players would spend more time testing the boundaries of fairplay than actually playing. Then again, I’m sure that’s the case with a goodly number anyway.

* Jon Hastings argues that contra The Blair Witch Project (which he didn’t even like), Cloverfield‘s first-person hand-held camera conceit never rises above the level of gimmick, providing some grist for conversation among critics but never really influencing the stylistic and staging and writing choices made by the filmmakers. I think he’s mostly right, except that the limited perspective made for a hellaciously effective slow-reveal for the monster. I think the audience would have gotten pretty impatient if the filmmakers hadn’t allowed themselves that excuse.

* In the comments at this very blog, And Now the Screaming Starts’ CRwM questions whether nihilistic old Frank Miller has the proper sensibility to properly optimistic old Will Eisner’s worldview in The Spirit. I think he’s being willfully uncharitable to Miller (eg. jokingly singling out a sole comment Miller made about humanizing the Spirit by making him trip after a rooftop leap as though that’s as far as he’s going to go on that score), but I suppose more importantly I think he mischaracterizes Eisner (some of his later works are breathtakingly cynical), Miller (it’s tough to think of a creator as obviously in love with his characters as Miller with his Sin City crew or Batman), and whether Miller views the darkness of his own work as a sign of maturity (he’s always struck me as quite knowingly a kid in a candy store).

* Joe Quinones has finished his pretty rad series of Scott Pilgrim drawings done in a more “mainstream” style. (Via Scott Pilgrim creator Bryan Lee O’Malley.) Here’s Knives Chau:

As with Kevin Huizenga’s drawings of C.F.’s Powr Mastrs characters, I could stand to see a lot more of this sort of thing.

* Chris Butcher has posted a long out of print interview with Black and White cartoonist Taiyo Matsumoto, including a lengthy bibliography. The interview’s from 1995, which god help us all was thirteen fucking years ago.

* Finally, your quote of the day comes from Matthew Perpetua in response to Rich Juzwiak’s wonderfully repetitive “I’m not here to make friends” reality-show cliche montage:

Maybe that should just be the official motto of this country in the 00s.

America: We’re Not Here To Make Friends.

[Editor’s note: This is one of a series of interviews I’ll be posting that were rescued from WizardUniverse.com’s now-defunct archives. Originally posted on August 18, 2007.]

I CAN HAS COMIX?: JEFFREY BROWN

SUB: The ‘Incredible Change-Bots’ creator talks Transformers, his new Top Shelf series, directing for Death Cab for Cutie and why he’s so interested in sex

By Sean T. Collins

The night she first met Jeffrey Brown, a friend of mine went home and created a T-shirt that read “JEFFREY BROWN’S NEXT BOOK.”

It’s certainly hard not to be won over by Brown’s so-called “Girlfriend Trilogy” of graphic-novel autobiographies, the work for which he is best known. In Clumsy, Unlikely and Any Easy Intimacy/AEIOU, he chronicles the major and minor events in three separate relationships with uncensored honesty and humor, in the process creating three of the most instantly relatable comics in recent memory.

But there’s more to Brown than the autobio beat: He’s also a laugh-out-loud-funny humorist whose gag strips grace the collection I Am Going to Be Small, and who’s taken parody shots at superheroes with Bighead, his own brand of sensitive autobiography with the ultra-macho Be a Man, and this summer’s breakout sci-fi stars the Transformers in The Incredible Change-Bots, out next week from Top Shelf. Offbeat contributions to anthologies like Mome and a hilarious homage to his cat Misty in the hardcover Cat Getting Out of a Bag and Other Observations further push the boundaries of Brown’s deliberately sketchy style.

The extremely prolific Brown put down his pen long enough to spill the beans on his new upcoming comics series, his next graphic novels and just what those ex-girlfriends have thought about being immortalized in Brown’s books.

WIZARD: What kind of cartoonist would you describe yourself as? You’ve split your time evenly between a lot of different genres: autobio, parody, gag strips, fiction…

BROWN: Well, when I tell people what I do, I usually say that I draw autobiographical comics, just because usually when I’m telling people, they’re people who don’t really know that much about comics other than the superhero stuff. So that lends some amount of respect to it or something. But it is pretty half-and-half. I guess I would also maybe not want to be trapped in one element so much. I’m half-humor and half-autobiographical–although I guess the autobiographical is humorous too.

I guess that depends on your biography.

BROWN: Yeah. It depends on which part of the book you’re reading.

So is that a conscious choice on your part, not getting stuck in one genre?

BROWN: Well, yeah, partly conscious. There are definitely times where I go back and forth just so that I don’t get too bogged down in the autobiographical. One of the reasons that I did Bighead when I did was that I was writing Unlikely at the same time. It was a way to do something lighthearted and have my mind go somewhere else so that it didn’t get so insulated. But at the same time, I mean, I do genuinely really enjoy doing those other parodies and kind of letting loose with things. It’s definitely something that I make a conscious effort to do, but hopefully it’s something that I do to some extent anyway.

I guess that question first occurred to me when reading the comics you did for anthologies like Kramers Ergot, Drawn and Quarterly Showcase and Mome, which didn’t really fit into either of the Jeffrey Brown modes that we’ve come to know. It’s not Clumsy or Unlikely or AEIOU, and it’s not Bighead or Incredible Change-Bots or I Am Going to Be Small. That kind of work falls between the two poles of what you mainly do.

BROWN: That’s probably not conscious. You’re right. I never really thought about that, actually. I think maybe what it is…I mean, I have a lot of interest in exploring the autobiographical work and that I have a lot of interest in finding these parodies and more straightforward funny books. I think that when I’m doing something for anthologies, you don’t have the same kind of space to work with. The ideas that I use for the anthologies are things that I wouldn’t expand out into a whole book. Then it tends to be these kind of weird ideas that come up less often, that are sometimes a little experimental in form. Essentially, the stuff in Mome was just kind of me letting my mind babble a little bit.

So it’s tailored to take advantage of the short-story form?

BROWN: Yeah. I think that for me to do autobiographical stuff in short form is more difficult because I think that it becomes this lamenting thing, and you just end up with literally short funny pieces or something. I don’t think that it’d be as interesting. Then for the parody stuff, there are a few things like the “Cycloctopus” story, but that was for Project Superior, a superhero anthology, so it fit really well. It’s just easier when you’ve got a smaller space. You can kind of fool around, but there is a cutoff point and you know that you can escape at some point.

This also brings to mind the fact that you’re really, really prolific. It seems like you’re constantly drawing; I’ve gone out to dinner with you and all of a sudden I’ll turn around and you’ve got your sketchbook open and you’re drawing. Is it important to you to keep working and constantly produce comics?

BROWN: It’s not so much that I feel any kind of need to, at the end of the day, have a certain amount of pages published. It’s such a habit for me, though, that I start to get itchy when I’m not drawing a lot. Also, I have to keep coming up with ideas. I don’t know if it’s impatience or what, but I need to get it down quickly. If it’s an idea that I feel really strongly about, a lot of times if I don’t do it shortly after I think of it then I lose interest and I can’t do anything with it.

As an artist, you were first interested in fine arts.

BROWN: Yeah.

Yet your comic style sort of evolved into this…I don’t know. Is lo-fi a word that you would accept as a description?

BROWN: Yeah.

Is that to enable you to keep drawing and keep getting ideas down rapidly?

BROWN: Yeah. Part of it was just in response to fine art, because I was in art school and was getting so tired of overthinking everything and having all of this baggage to making a work of art, so I wanted to go back. Like, when you’re a kid you can just sit down and draw and draw. You’re not worried about things other than just trying to express something on paper. Part of it was just trying to capture that kind of feeling again. The other part of it was that my style does come out of wanting to be fast and sketchy. I guess that part of my philosophy of drawing is that when you’re not overworking a drawing, when you’re really just going at a certain speed, it becomes more expressive and more immediate because you don’t have time to hide your flaws. You don’t have time to tinker around with things. So, in a way, the meaning behind the drawing is kind of purer somehow because it’s unedited.

That reminds me of the indie-rock aesthetic, and it seems as though music is influential in your creative process. Do you listen to stuff when you work?

BROWN: When I can. I usually have it in the background, though I haven’t been lately. I used to draw in coffeehouses a lot, so there would be music playing and then you would have the additional background noise of people talking and people bustling around. Now I’m drawing at home a bit more, and if I’m by myself I can have the TV on and the stereo on at the same time. Usually what I do is I turn the volume down on the TV so that I can just barely hear that, and then I turn the music up, although if anyone else is there, most people start to get really freaked out by the overstimulation. Music is definitely something for me. Also, I think that music is deep into comics, because when I’m driving a lot of times I’ll just be thinking about whatever project I’m working on. So I’m driving and listening to music and also thinking about things. It’ll often deepen things even before I start drawing.

My therapist told me that when you’re driving in your car it’s a little bit of a sensory deprivation chamber, so when you listen to music in your car you tend to react a lot more intensely than you might outside. It tends to spur those deep thoughts.

BROWN: Yeah, that makes sense.

I kept wondering why I was getting so depressed: I was driving home from work listening to Azure Ray, and I’d see some roadkill and I’d want to cry. Then she explained to me how that worked.

BROWN: [Laughs] Yeah, you just need to switch the CDs that you’re listening to.

Having seen your sketchbooks, and occasionally some of the drawings that you put into your one-man anthology collections or even the cover for Bighead, you do have a style that is a lot more rendered and less sketchy and dashed off.

BROWN: Yeah. I’m fairly selective [about using that style]. Part of that is that I never want to be at a point where it becomes style over substance. I also don’t want people to get too caught up in looking at the visuals when they’re reading. So the cover is a good place to do the more rendered work. That’s some of the reason why the superhero stories tend to be a little more rendered. The way that they’re reading isn’t so internal, at least in my superhero stories, so I’m not as worried if the people are looking at the visuals a little bit more. Also, with the superhero stories, there are opportunities for more spectacular visuals just because it’s a fantasy. The other reason, too, is that the way that I draw the autobiographical books with these kinds of simple figures with these claw hands, there’s something about that I find kind of visually amusing. There’s something about bending arms and the physics of the room not working. There’s something about that offness that I like. If you’re drawing superheroes, you can draw them doing crazy, fantastic things. If you’re telling a story about real life where someone is walking down the street, there’s not that opportunity. Extracting the anatomy of people and using the bendy arms and things like that, that’s kind of a way to keep that in the books.

So it’s less a Scott McCloud-type thing in terms of reader identification with cartoony characters and more that you just find the look of it amusing and entertaining?

BROWN: There might be an element of the McCloud theory. I’ve actually fooled around a few times with the idea of drawing a story in a more realistic style. I think that for me what it comes down to is, for one, the more realistic the drawing, the less enjoyable it feels. I want to keep the books lighter; even when there’s something serious happening, in terms of the story, visually you can still have it be funny. There’s something that my instinct tells me: The way that I draw characters is more likable than these realistic characters. I also think that when you’re simplifying and abstracting characters like that, they do become somehow more identifiable with more people. They become a little bit more everyman than they would be otherwise.

As you’re talking about this, I keep thinking about your cat Misty in Cat Getting Out of a Bag. You drew her really cartoony, so she’s kind of an every-cat.

BROWN: Yeah.

Is there such a thing as an every-cat?

BROWN: [Laughs] There must be. There must be.

Which reminds me: I don’t know if I’d have recognized you if all I had to go on was your drawings of yourself. For example, in real life you’re pretty square-jawed, while Cartoon Jeffrey Brown has this sort of round head and not much of a chin. So two questions: First, why did you draw yourself like that? And second, since you’re obviously drawing real people who exist and whom you know, how much does that carry over with the other people in your autobiographical comics? Is getting their likenesses down important, or do you change things?

BROWN: Part of that is that just over time it’s become more stylized and so it’s kind of gotten away from any kind of consideration of looking like me or not. If you look in Clumsy, too, in that book more than any other book I wasn’t concerned with kind of capturing the likenesses and was just almost making these sort of symbolic figures for early characters. Long black hair or stubble would be more of an identifying characteristic than anything else. Now I tend to work a little more towards making the people closer to their likeness, but at the same time it’s more about maybe capturing the feeling of the person. It’s not just about what their personality is, but what my relationship to them is. In that way, it’s something I’m writing about for me, which is more important than whether it actually looks like them or not. People seem to be split actually on how much I look like my drawings. Some people tend to think that I look a lot like how I draw myself, and then other people seem to think that I don’t at all. I used to think that the more you knew me, the more my cartoon counterpart would look like me, but I don’t know that that’s necessarily true either. For someone reading the books, they don’t really need to know what people really look like. In that sense it’s kind of like if they don’t know me, the books might as well be fiction. I think that there’s something about knowing that something is real and true to life that people somehow find attractive, that quality in a book. But I don’t know if that carries over into what things look like.

I see what you’re saying. Is it a voyeuristic quality, do you think, that attracts people to reading that sort of stuff?

BROWN: I’ve thought about this, because there’s the whole scandal of James Frey where he wrote this book [A Million Little Pieces] and presented it as his memoirs, and it turns out that there were some things made up and some things that were really exaggerated. There was a class-action lawsuit and people were getting money back from the book. I think that maybe what it has to do with is something internal in humans that is about not getting fooled, or feeling that there’s an element of trust that needs to be there. Finding out that “Oh, that’s not really how it was” alters their perception, because when they’re reading something, especially when they’re reading autobiography, they’re reading it relative to their own experiences. So, when they find out something like “James Frey went through all these things,” they put that into context with their own past. Then they find out that he’s really something else. That undermines their understanding of human life, their experience. There’s something about that, needing to know whether it’s really true or made up.

As an artist it’s one thing, but as a writer, how important is the accuracy of how you depict events?

BROWN: Well, I’m maybe a little less anal about it now, but I do try to keep things…like, everything I’m writing is true, but things like what I’m leaving out and the timing of things and how I’m presenting things, that’s kind of the art of it all. It’s still important for me, in the autobiographical world that I built up, that it’s true to life, because once you start undermining, or if I were to write something that undermined one story, then it would bring the rest of the work into question too. At the same time though, in terms of timing and characters, once in a while just to not have so many people in a story I might have one person fill a role that was originally two people. I’m not putting words into anyone’s mouth, but how I set everything up can really influence how people are interpreting the story or whether or not I’m expressing the ideas that I’m trying to get at.

Do you think that knowing what you do for a living influences the behavior of people around you at all?

BROWN: I don’t really think so. I mean, for the most part, for people who know me, the books become this separate thing. People will joke sometimes, like, “Oh, you better be careful. He might write about that later.” But the minute that someone says that I might write about something is like a sign to me to not write about it because then there’s something. It’s almost like the people in the situation are too aware of the situation. So I try to write about things from an outside perspective, even though it’s autobiography. I still try to approach it from somewhere else, where there’s a different perspective than being in the moment. The people I’m friends with and the people that I spend the most time with know that. I certainly don’t live my life any differently. I don’t do anything with any kind of plan like, “Now this is something that I might write about later.” If I take a trip somewhere, maybe after the trip I’ll come home and be thinking about that, and it might be interesting and mean something on a more significant level, and I might want to write about that. But I don’t say, “Okay, I’m going to go to New York so that I can write a story about New York and what happens there.” Nothing like that.

So you’re not taking mental notes–or actual notes–as you’re doing things?

BROWN: I do always write from memory, and more often now I’m also writing as if more time has passed. I’m starting to work on a high school/college/art school memoir, so there’s quite a bit more distance in time from the events. I never keep a diary. My idea is that our memory is an editor for us, so when we’re sitting down and thinking about a relationship that we were in, our minds pick certain things out. We don’t always know why, but somehow those things are what become important about that relationship. On the one hand I use that as a tool: using memory as a way of editing things and getting at what’s significant in our experience. Then at the same time it’s also something that I’m interested in, the idea of how our memories work. It’s really interesting to me, why we remember some things and why some things take on such significance to us when often they’re not the biggest events.

One of the interesting things about your autobio comics are the way that they bounce back and forth between events that are fairly momentous within the context of a relationship and little moments that end up almost as important as a first kiss or a breakup.

BROWN: Right. There’s also the fact that most of my time is made up by these inconsequential moments. It’s like stopping to smell the flowers. Those things are important. Years later, when you think back on them, it might be something that you did every day and at the time was routine, but now when you look back it, it does mean something more to you.

Is that why in your first book, Clumsy, you told the story out of chronological order?

BROWN: Yeah. On the one hand I didn’t originally plan on writing just about the relationship. I wanted to collect stories that I would tell my friends–I’d be at work talking to someone, like, “The other day this happened”–so I was just going to take all of those stories, and the first few were about this relationship. Then I realized that I had enough of these stories about the whole relationship. I wanted to let my mind pick the order because it interesting how it had started to go back and forth. I think this is how we think about relationships. When we put it in our heads, it’s like, “Oh, here’s this really great first moment.” Then we might think, “There was this one time, it wasn’t anything special, but we went to dinner.” Then you think, “Then there was this one time where I was really pissed off.” You just go back and forth between these different feelings. I wanted to organize it in that same way. How our minds wander is how the book wanders.

Is there a reason why you stopped doing things in that way for the autobiographical projects you’ve done since then?

BROWN: Not specifically. With Unlikely, I definitely wanted to do something almost surgical in its chronology. That was because the one idea that I really wanted to write about was how I felt about losing my virginity. [I wanted to] capture the feeling about that one event. To set up the feelings around that I needed to do things chronologically and build up to it and then show the aftermath. The book that I’m just finishing up now, which is a collection of shorter autobiographical pieces, jumps back and forth in chronology too, but each story is from 10 to 80 pages and each story in itself is chronological. That gets back to the same structure of Clumsy where the context that things happened in isn’t necessarily the context that we put them in when we organize them in our minds. When we have things rearranged, that’s what heightens their significance to us–where they sit amongst the other things in our minds.

In Unlikely and elsewhere, you’re not pulling any punches when it comes to sex. Actually, that’s one of the most striking aspects of your work. Why sex?

BROWN: Because my dad is a minister, so I have a lot of repression issues that I was breaking out of. Also, sex is kind of interesting. [Laughs] There’s a reason why people are fascinated by it. There’s the psychological aspect and the physical aspect. But I pull a lot more punches now than I did then. I think that’s partially because it’s been stated already and I don’t need to go over that again. At the same time, because of the way I draw where it’s not realistic, for me, it’s not depictions of me having sex. It’s an abstraction. These characters are having sex at this point and it’s no longer so much like real people.

Is that the case for when you’re writing in general or is it more those specific scenes?

BROWN: It’s generally. For me to be as open as I am, there has to be that. There’s a disconnect for me in writing these books. It gets back to wanting to write about these stories from a different perspective, something a little more outside of myself. There are different levels to that: There’s the way that I draw the characters and the parts of the stories that I’m not putting in the books–all of that feeds into being able to have the characters and stories become their own self-contained thing. They come out of real life, but over time, being in the books, they become something else. It’s only showing parts and particular sides of things. Even though I try to write objectively, it’s obviously still my perspective in all of these books, and you’re only seeing certain events and certain things with the characters. There’s a lot more to everyone than that. That’s another way in which it’s a little less real.

How have people handled being the other half of these scenes?

BROWN: I mean, they handle it in various ways. [Laughs] Some people I don’t know because we’re not in touch anymore. I tend to have imagined what they might’ve felt about it. I try to be somewhat fair. I’m not pulling punches, but at the same time I’m not out to assassinate anyone’s character. I could certainly make everyone look worse or better than I do and still be true to the events; hopefully the people in the books recognize that. In a weird way, although the books are extremely personal, writing them doesn’t mean anything personal towards anyone else except myself. It’s not about who these people are, it’s about how I feel about these events.

So none of these are poison-pen letters or paeans to the one that got away or whatever–it’s more focused on your own reactions to what happened?

BROWN: Yeah, and not necessarily even me trying to get over something, but I’m interested in…you have this breakup and you have these feelings of sadness mixed with these memories of good things. There’s these bad things that happened, but you might start to idealize things. I’m just interested in exploring those feelings. It’s not that I use this specific person that I feel a particular way about to write about. I’m interested in trying to capture the feelings that I had at the time. That’s what I’m trying to get at.

Your life has changed substantially in the last year or so. You’re a family man now. You have a baby. How is that affecting you as a writer and as an artist, or is it at all?

BROWN: It’s definitely affecting me, even aside from the practical effects of time, figuring out when to get work done when you have this little person who’s totally dependent. For one thing, I see myself writing less autobiography about what’s happening now. Having a baby, you don’t really have time to process and think about things a lot. Maybe years down the road that’ll change and I’ll start to think about how I could write about having a family–I’ve written one story that touches a little bit on becoming a father–but right now I’m so much in the thick of it I can’t even imagine writing about that very much. It does change your perspective on life quite a bit, about what’s significant and what’s not. There’s this change to it where, I don’t know, you start to feel a lot older all of a sudden, and not necessarily wiser. You feel like a lot of the things that meant a lot to you suddenly mean a lot less. It’s hard to say exactly how it affects me, but the autobiographical work that I’m planning on doing is pretty dated, for the near future. I also think that maybe [I’ll try] to explore autobiography in a more safe form down the road, where I might tell stories from life but then try to find a way to set up more internal thoughts than I have in the past.

The industry has also changed. Your books do very well, you have famous fans like Michel Gondry and Death Cab for Cutie…I would imagine that since you started doing comics, the opportunities that are available to someone who does the kind of work that you do have exploded exponentially.

BROWN: Yeah, definitely. People are able to do serious comics and make more money from it. It’s not that people would go into comics just to make money, but if you’re a creative person…when you’re at a formative point where you’re thinking, “I’d like to make film” or “I’d like to draw comics” or “I’d like to write books,” it’s hard to make comics when you’re not making money from them because you’ve got to do something else to make the money, whereas if you decide to go into film there is a bigger opportunity to get to that point where you could make money from making the film. Now that’s something that comics has come into, where you can actually start to make money from doing it. That enables you to do more of it. The more people that are able to do that, and the more the outside media takes notice and you have publishers that realize there’s a market for these comics, it all feeds into itself and grows exponentially.

Do you still have a day job or are you doing comics full time?

BROWN: Up until a few weeks ago I was still working part time [at a bookstore], mostly to keep the health insurance, but my hours dropped down enough where I lost my health insurance. I still work one day a week because I really like books, and working at a bookstore is nice in some ways, but my income is basically all coming from the books that I have out and books that are coming out, and the occasional odd job here and there. I don’t really do any illustration work, but the things like the Death Cab video [I directed, for the song “Your Heart Is an Empty Room”] come up once in a while where it’s a little extra money.

What do you have coming out next? You mentioned the collection of autobiographical stuff and the high school/college/art school memoir…

BROWN: The collection is called Little Things. That’s due to come out next April from Touchstone, which is an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Then I’m still just in the scripting phase, but the other book is called Funny Misshapen Body. That would tentatively be scheduled to come out sometime the year after that, so 2009. Those are the two big projects that I’ll be working on for the next long while. At the same time I’m going to start doing a series of pamphlet comics with Top Shelf called Sulk. That’s going to be, again, my method of balancing out the so-called serious autobiography with the more humorous and free-flowing work. I’m going to do an issue with more Bighead stuff and an issue with 1 or 2 pages of funny autobiographical stuff, and there’s some other parodies that I want to do. That’ll maybe be 3 or 4 issues a year. It’s an idea that I’ve been kicking around for a while, and I’ve really started to figure out how it would work. I’ve actually got the first 8 or 9 issues scripted out, so it’s just a question of when I start to draw them.

Over the last year or two there have been a lot more actual alternative comics coming out, between the Ignatz and things like Uptight and Big Questions and Skyscrapers of the Midwest. It’s nice to see those things coming out from publishers again.

BROWN: Yeah. If you think about it, novels used to be serialized in magazines a lot. It’s kind of strange how the book market has become more profitable for comics. People have started to think, “Why do a pamphlet comic when I could just wait and do a book and have it on sale in both bookstores and comic book stores?” The nice thing about pamphlet comics is that for people who aren’t familiar with your work, it’s nice to have that little introduction. The Sulk series will be a place to put these shorter works that don’t necessarily have enough to them to fill up a whole book. I’m going to try to start [releasing] the series towards the end of this year, but that depends on getting it done. What I did wrong is that I started this one issue of Sulk where there’s 96 pages instead of 32 pages because it’s an Ultimate Fighting Championship one where there’s an 80-page fight scene. I started drawing that one first, so now I don’t want to put it down and come back to it. I feel the need to finish this one first, but I don’t plan on publishing it as my first issue. It’s kind of silly for me to draw it. Maybe I will put it down and just start Sulk. That makes sense. So November or December would probably be the next thing.

Finally, there’s The Incredible Change-Bots. I take it you’re a big Transformers fan?

BROWN: Yeah. I would get home from school and watch the cartoons, or on Saturday mornings when they were on. I had all of the toys and I read the comics. Transformers and G.I. Joe and Star Wars were the big toys for me. I haven’t done any comics for G.I. Joe or Star Wars yet, but there’s something fun about the idea of robots. I realized that I had ideas about things that are funny about Transformers that I could stick into a more extended thing.

So will we be seeing the G.I. Joe equivalent of Change-Bots from you at some point?

BROWN: I don’t know. The danger there might be that it’d be easy to get drawn into the politics and the real-world relations of things. It’s possible, but we’ll have to see if something inspires me down the road.

I write for “Twisted ToyFare Theater,” and I always amaze myself with the sheer volume of Golobulus and Dr. Mindbender gags I can come up with anytime we do a G.I. Joe strip.

BROWN: That’s great. In the McSweeny’s humor collection, there’s “The Journal of a Cobra Recruit.” He just talks about things like, “Today we ran forward holding a gun and screaming ‘Cobra!'” It’s really hilarious. It’s in the book that Charles Burns drew the cover for. You should definitely check that out. It’s so funny that I think it might make doing a G.I. Joe comic irrelevant.

* Because I wasn’t super-crazy about the film version of The Ruins I haven’t paid much attention to its impending DVD release, but apparently the director’s cut includes an alternate ending. I didn’t have beef with the ending per se, it was more an issue of its pacing, so I’m curious to see if or how that changed.

* In an appropriately dizzying post, Kip Manley connects the dots in the Grant Morrison DCU, from Final Crisis to Seven Soldiers to All Star Superman to Batman to (via Hypertime, or something) The Invisibles and beyond. (Via Douglas Wolk.)

* Rick Marshall (and a fan at an autograph signing) talk to Brian Michael Bendis about, among other things, the current status of the Powers and Alias TV series.

* The RZA’s making a martial arts movie called The Man with the Iron Fist. Marvel Studios, call your lawyers (although now that I think about it, they’re probably already pretty familiar with Shaolin’s Finest). (Via AICN.)

* I try to treat most people who worry that Frank Miller won’t “respect” Will Eisner’s creation The Spirit in his film adaptation thereof with the laughing disinterest they mostly deserve, but ADDTF blogfather Bill Sherman is a guy I take seriously, so I found his post about how Miller’s blog has and hasn’t assuaged his concerns on that score a worthwhile read.

* Speaking of Frank the Tank, I gave my response to Tom Spurgeon’s patriotism-themed 4th of July Five for Friday feature a decidedly Millerian spin. (Honorable mention: The Flash giving Don Rumsfeld rabbit ears during a press conference in The Dark Knight Strikes Again.)

* Chris Mautner assembled quite the critics’ roundtable on the topic of reviewing and ethics, specifically how people handle talking about projects by people they know and are friendly with. It’s funny, even though I’ve been burned once or twice in the past by repeated praise of a book that turned out to be by a buddy of the praiser’s, I find I do this myself in reviewing books by the likes of Shawn Cheng or Jeff Brown. In part that’s because I think I can still be fair, and in part it’s because in the case of pretty much all of my friends in comics, I became friends with them because I liked their comics, not the other way around. For me personally, a stickier area might be how to handle talking about stuff by people who publish or pay me–look over there under the heading “The Sean Collins Media Empire” and you’ll see a list of those who are a going concern at the moment. Due to my stated aim of blogging only about stuff I’m interested in and trying to avoid heaping snark and scorn on the target du jour, this hasn’t been a huge problem to date. Overall I like to think I’ve still been pretty honest and fair addressing what works and doesn’t work in projects relevant to those outlets, and a simple “if you don’t have anything nice to say etc” policy helps any time I’m tempted to really curbstomp something, but as I just said, that’s true of everything I write about. Bottom line: I have never and will never pretend to like something I dislike, or pretend to love something I like, on this blog. After all, I’m not here to make friends.

[Editor’s note: This is part of a series of interviews I’ll be posting that were rescued from WizardUniverse.com’s now-defunct archives. Originally posted on August 3, 2007.]

I CAN HAS COMIX?: JOHNNY RYAN

The most controversial man in humor comics talks his upcoming Marvel project, racism, boogers and what it’s like to work for both ‘Nickelodeon’ and ‘Hustler’

By Sean T. Collins

The first thing you need to know about Johnny Ryan is that his comics will make you laugh out loud. Hard. Embarrassingly. To the point of distraction for your co-workers. The second thing you need to know about Johnny Ryan is that his comics will make you gasp “Oh my God” and “Holy sh–!” just as loud, hard, embarrassingly and distractingly. The third thing you need to know about Johnny Ryan is that both of these things will probably happen at the same time.

In his signature series Angry Youth Comix, his gross-out humor strip Blecky Yuckerella and his no-holds-barred parody collection The Comic Book Holocaust, Ryan has conducted a one-man jihad against good taste and unfunny funnybooks the likes of which comics has rarely seen before. He combines a pottymouthed penchant for bodily fluids that would delight a 9-year-old with a willingness to violate social taboos about sex, violence, race, religion and gender that makes Dave Chappelle look like Bill Cosby, all drawn in a style reminiscent of something you’d find in Alfred E. Neuman’s bookshelf (or bathroom). And ever since signing with Fantagraphics–publisher of Dan Clowes and Love and Rockets–he’s been one of the most divisive figures in the alternative comics scene.

With the 13th issue of Angry Youth Comix and the third AYC collection, aptly titled Johnny Ryan’s XXX Scumbag Party, hitting stores over the past two weeks, Ryan got up bright and early to dish on the secret inspiration for his craziest characters, the lines he’d never cross and the comics creators who just can’t stand him.

WIZARD: First of all, thanks for getting up early in the morning to talk to me.

RYAN: That’s okay. I’m up early in the morning every day anyway.

Judging by your comics, it seems like you’d be the type of guy recovering from a massive, massive hangover until about 4 in the afternoon every day.

RYAN: You’d be surprised. I have a pretty nerdy lifestyle. I’m not the party animal that I make myself out to be in the comic. [Laughs]

Yeah, we were wondering around the office what you’d be like: whether you would be reserved and it all comes out in your comics, or whether you were like Harvey Pekar and what you see is what you get.

RYAN: A year or two ago at the San Diego convention, Tom Spurgeon was saying that there were several people who had come up to him at the convention and said, “Do you know what was a really big surprise? It was how normal Johnny Ryan actually seems in person.” They expected me to be sitting in my own sh– and throwing toilet paper and bottles and things at people like I’m some kind of maniac.

Is comics pretty much your only outlet for that side of your personality, to the extent that you have it?

RYAN: I would assume so. I’m a pretty law-abiding citizen. [Laughs]

Speaking of San Diego, I first read your Angry Youth Comix collection Portajohnny there the year it came out. Up until then I’d pretty much thought that funny comic books were an urban myth; I really couldn’t think of a time when I had laughed out loud at a comic. I picked up Portajohnny from the Fantagraphics table, sat down to eat lunch, started reading it, and I was just dying. I was laughing out loud, which was unheard of for me.

RYAN: Well, that’s good to hear.

I’ve seen several other interviewers say much the same thing to you. What do you think it is that you’re doing right that gets that response from people?

RYAN: Gosh, I don’t know. I mean, I always approach my work trying to, I guess, make myself laugh. I’m trying to amuse myself and come up with crazy ideas that amuse me. As a writer of humor, I guess you want that. You want what makes you laugh to make other people laugh. That’s the hope. It’s just a roll of the dice, and hopefully it’ll work.

I know that you’re a big fan of Peter Bagge’s Hate–when you first decided that this was something you wanted to do, what else was making you laugh at the time?

RYAN: That’s a good question. When I first started out I wasn’t really reading Hate very much, but probably the Robert Crumb stuff from like the late ’60s, early ’70s. I really think that nothing can top that as far as amazing, out-of-control humor, especially with the sketchbook stuff. I had picked up one of those German sketchbooks that I think was his work from 1967 to 1970 and it just blew me away how much fun and how crazy it was. When I saw that I was like, “This is what I want to do. I want to do comics that are like this.” That was the inspiration.

Beyond comics, are there comedians or films that influenced you?

RYAN: Oh, sure. The Three Stooges. I’m a big fan of the Three Stooges. Those Hal Roach “Our Gang” shows are great. “The Benny Hill Show” was a big influence on me. [Laughs] That’s some of them. I also used to read Mad Magazine a lot as a kid. I think that was a big influence as far as parodying and making fun of stuff, which doesn’t really happen very much anymore, or at least in comics anyway.

I think that’s maybe one of the reasons why Angry Youth Comix took me so much by surprise.

RYAN: I mean, the humor scene in comics is just rough. It’s not really–I’m not just saying that because there’s slim pickings as far as humor goes, but at least to me it doesn’t seem like something that’s really welcome anymore. The alternative comics scene seems as if it’s concerned with being very literary and high-minded. They have these literary aspirations. They want to be regarded as a high art form, and I guess they…the overall feeling of the whole comics thing with humor, or at least the kind of humor that I’m doing, kinds of brings that down. I’m not going to get that interview on NPR or whatever.

I’ve definitely heard Fantagraphics co-publisher Kim Thompson crow fairly proudly that people will come to him and say, “I like everything that you guys do except Johnny Ryan.”

RYAN: [Laughs] Yeah. The thing is, though, that I think it’s sort of cooled off. When I first got picked up by them it was pretty overwhelming, the negative reception that I was receiving from comics–or at least from Fantagraphics–fans. It wasn’t personal; I wasn’t getting letters. But just the reviews and looking on message boards or whatever, the vibe I was getting was negative. I do have to say that I think it’s slowly turning around. I feel like because of the time passing, people are a little bit more accepting that I’m a bit more of a staple in the comics scene than I was initially.

Judging simply from the back-cover blurbs on your books, it seems like even if the readers of art comics, or whatever you want to call them, were slow to embrace you, you made fans of the people who actually make those comics pretty quickly.

RYAN: Some of them. I mean, it’s not an across-the-board statement, but there are some that are fans of mine and appreciate it. They see what I’m doing and appreciate it.

Do you know who likes you and who doesn’t?

RYAN: Well, usually the people that I’ve communicated with over the years. Gary Panter–I’m a big fan of his and I know that he likes my stuff. Dan Clowes has already been very supportive. The Hernandez brothers. Peter Bagge, of course. I mean, I get the feeling that I’m not on the Top 10 list of Art Spiegelman or Chris Ware or Seth for that matter. Usually, though–and this is probably even true for me–if you don’t like someone’s stuff, you just don’t pay attention to it or comment on it, because you just don’t want to get into it. I can usually get the feeling [from people]. I actually asked Eric [Reynolds, Fantagraphics editor] to see if Seth would be interested in doing the introduction to XXX and he turned me down. I thought that it would be kind of funny to mix it up. I said that he could say whatever he wanted, but no.

You did that strip that parodies him.

RYAN: It was sort of inspired by his lifestyle, I guess. [Laughs] And I had heard that he does a slideshow where he shows my comic and talks about how people keep asking him about it and sending him the comic and wanting him to comment on it, and he continues to claim that he’s never read it. I heard that after he shows the slide he throws the slide in the garbage. He has this whole thing. I was like, “Well, how about I let you do the introduction to my book? I think that would be kind of funny.” It’s sort of like when [Dave] Chappelle had Wayne Brady on. He just said, “No. It’s not a right fit for me.”

You’ve done a lot of parody work, from superheroes to classic strips to alternative comics. Have you had any other reactions like Seth’s, or on the flipside, really positive reactions? How do you feel about that sort of thing? If you get the sense that someone doesn’t like what you’re doing, does that make you feel good or bad?

RYAN: Well, it depends, I guess. [To answer] the first part of your question there, I had only heard about the whole thing with Seth’s slideshow and stuff second- and third-hand. I’ve never actually seen it and I don’t know what, exactly, he says. As far as people approaching me who had a bad reaction, the only people who have reacted to what I’ve done as far as if I do a parody of them are people that I probably already knew previously and was friendly with, like Peter Bagge or Rick Altergott or Dan Clowes. Dan Clowes actually told me that he didn’t think his was mean enough. [Laughs] So it’s people that I either already knew or I was already friendly with. As far as people that I didn’t know, I never got an unsolicited response from someone that I didn’t know who just wrote, “Hey, I just saw your parody of me. You’re an assh—” or “I loved it” or whatever. I was getting some people asking me, “Hey, will you parody me?” or “I was very disappointed to see that you didn’t do me.” So there was that.

And how do you feel when you hear or see someone’s outrage about what you’ve done? Does that feel like a badge of honor or does it make you uncomfortable?

RYAN: It can vary from person to person. It depends. Like, if I was a big huge fan of someone and I find out that they hate me, I guess that my reaction will be, “That’s kind of disappointing.” But in a way, it kind of frees me up. In a way it’s easier, if you don’t know the person and aren’t friendly with them, to totally slam them. [Laughs] So it’s actually a little bit more difficult if I was somewhat friendly with them. If I do find out that someone doesn’t like my work or what I’m doing, that almost encourages me to continue. If people make fun of you, you should just kind of wear it, and that way they’ll stop.

I saw that Back in Bleck has negative back-cover blurbs.

RYAN: Yeah. I think that out of all of the stuff that I’ve done, that might be receiving the worst reviews, and for some reason I just thought that it was funny to put those on the back. It didn’t just seem like they were bad reviews. It seemed like those people were enraged. [Laughs]

I’m surprised that you haven’t gotten even more flack along those lines. I’m not just talking about Seth being upset at you making fun of how old-fashioned he is. A lot of your work is fairly transgressive humor, with racial elements and sexual elements…

RYAN: There’ve been little things here or there, but nothing that’s been really crazy. I think that’s just because I’m doing an underground comic, basically. If this was on TV or if this was on the radio I would probably be hearing a lot more negative comments, but this is comics. I only sell a couple thousand copies of it, and because of that I’m not really going to get the same kind of attention that those other mediums get.

Do you ever worry that there will be some sort of fluke situation like the Gordon Lee case, where a retailer accidentally gave a copy of a Nick Bertozzi comic to a kid and there was nudity in it and now he’s been taken to court? Not so much that you have a national forum like Don Imus or something, but that maybe it’ll get into the wrong hands and someone might choose to make an issue out of it?

RYAN: Well, I guess that’s just a bridge that you’d have to cross when you come to it. I just see myself as an artist. I’m a cartoonist. I’m drawing what I think is funny and saying what I want to say in my comics. I’m just putting them out there, and as far as who gets them, I don’t really have any control over that. I guess that I would feel bad, and I would hope that stores would realize that this is adult material. I’m not making it for kids.

A title like Johnny Ryan’s XXX Scumbag Party will probably help out.

RYAN: Yeah. That’s for the kids. They’ll definitely be like, “I have to read this thing.” [Laughs]

That’s maybe the best comic book title that I’ve ever read.

RYAN: Oh, thanks. I initially wanted to call it Let’s Be Assh—s, but Eric said that we would have distribution problems. I’m hoping that maybe within the next 10 years or so things will get a little bit more liberal and I’ll be able to use that title.

I always find that sort of thing funny. When we run interviews with people who curse, we have a style as to how we abbreviate sh– or f— or whatever. It reminds me of how when you say “assh—” on television, they bleep out the word “hole,” but you can say “ass.” It’s interesting to me that the actual “hole” is the offensive part.

RYAN: Depending on what channel you’re watching and what show you’re watching…I was watching that Kathy Griffin show last night and she was at the Gay Porn Awards, and I was amazed at what they were getting away with. It was like “up the ass” and “dick”…I thought, “Wow.”

I guess it’s about context. Speaking of which, I believe XXX Scumbag Party is the first big Johnny Ryan release in the post-Imus, post-Opie and Anthony era. Thinking about it in that light, there are some people who can do really edgy stuff and more or less get away with it– Sarah Silverman, Dave Chappelle, “South Park”–and other people can’t–Imus, O&A. I was wondering if you have any thoughts on why that is.

RYAN: I’m not really sure. I guess that it has a lot to do with whether or not people like you. [Laughs] Or if someone has a bug up their ass against you and is willing to fill out the forms and bring you down. But there’s more to being funny than just cursing and using racism and all of that sort of thing. I think that you still have to be creative about it and come up with a funny joke about it and not just say “sh–” and “g–k” or whatever and think that people are going to laugh at it.

I think that’s one of the things that’s undersold about your work: There’s all the dirty stuff, obviously, but it’s also so weird. A strip will start in one way and then it’ll end up being about something completely different. There’s a fairly epic example of that in XXX Scumbag Party: the strip called “Dry Gulch Follies 2005,” which starts with Sinus O’Gynus getting a babysitting job and ends with a gigantic robot prostitute giving the moon a sexually transmitted disease.

RYAN: I think that’s one of the things that makes comics fun for me, and I guess it’s also just a part of my sense of humor. It’s that surreal element to my work. It’s sort of nonsense that I find funny, where it starts somewhere and who knows where it’s going to go and what kind of characters you’re going to meet and what weirdness is going to happen?

The quality of the art in your stuff also doesn’t get talked about enough. I went through the three Angry Youth Comix collections and the two Blecky Yuckerella books, I was just watching the progression of your line as it thickens and gets more and more lush and more self-assured. It’s really lovely.

RYAN: Well, that’s something that I’m actually pretty proud of, as far as where I began. If you look in the back of the Portajohnny book, there’s a really early Loady McGee comic that I drew in 1992 or ’93, and you look at how retarded it looks. It looks like I drew it with a pen in my ass or something. And how I moved from then to now–I’m always trying to improve and get better. I’m not always really sure exactly where I’m going; I just know that I want it to look clean and cartoony. I always feel like I’m practicing and trying to improve and get better all the time. I never really feel like, “Oh, this is exactly where I want to be.”

If you had to pinpoint one person as an influence for your artistic style as opposed to your comedic style, who would it be?

RYAN: Gosh, one person for my style. I’m not really sure. I mean, I want to say a cartoony style like Ernie Bushmiller or Al Jaffee. For the most part I would say that. But as far as the actual content, that would be Robert Crumb.

I guess that style helps you bridge several different worlds, because you’ve obviously done clean, all-ages humor comics for Nickelodeon Magazine and things like that. How hard is shifting those gears in your head?

RYAN: It’s not really hard at all. With my comics I’m doing exactly what I want to do with the stories that I want to tell and all of that, but for Nickelodeon, they’re hiring me to do a job. When you’re doing stuff for kids, they like that same kind of vibe that my comic has as far as the weirdness and the nonsense and the goofball aspects of it. That same sort of spirit I put into the comics for kids; it’s just not sex or violence. It’s like Christmas and pizza and boogers and barf. That’s sort of what kids like, and I just bring that over into the kid world. Even when I do my comics for adults I think that there’s still that same childish spirit that I bring to it, but instead of those things that kids are interested in, I do stuff that’s more for the adults.

Have you been working long enough that you’ve had kids come up to you who started reading your things at Nickelodeon and then moved on to–

RYAN: No, I haven’t. [Laughs] I haven’t experienced that crossover yet with the Nickelodeon fans. I’m assuming that kids are enjoying what I’m doing in Nickelodeon Magazine. That’s what I’m being told, but I’ve never received any comments from kids personally that say, “Hey, I’ve been reading your stuff in Nickelodeon and I love seeing your stuff in there.” I haven’t experienced that yet.

Are you looking forward to it?

RYAN: Oh, I mean, it’s always nice to hear if someone likes your work or not, whoever it is, unless they’re a total assh—. Then it’s kind of depressing.

There doesn’t seem to be any kind of self-censoring mechanism in your work. While that’s true of several other cartoonists I can think of–Crumb is a good example, obviously, or someone like Joe Matt doing comics about his porn collection–for the most part they tend to be geared inward at themselves.

RYAN: Well, that’s an interesting point that you bring up, because you’re bringing up two autobio comics artists, for the most part. At least the later Crumb years are mostly autobio stuff, and that’s a real prevalent genre right now. People are always talking about their lives, and it almost seems like a competition between all these autobio artists to reveal the most humiliating and degrading and embarrassing thing that they can in their life. It seems more about that than “Okay, I want to tell a story and make it compelling and interesting and funny.” For me, I don’t feel like I’m trying to do that same kind of confessional-type thing. I feel like I’m just trying to make people laugh. But I also don’t want to do any self-censoring because there’s things that make me laugh and that I think make other people laugh, but they’re ashamed to let other people, or the majority of Americans, know about it. “If everyone knew the horrible, awful things that I laugh at, they’d be disgusted with me. I laughed at someone farting, so people will look at me like an idiot or a fool.” Or whatever sort of transgressive or disturbing piece of humor. So I try not to censor myself in that way. That was the whole point of the Comic Book Holocaust book. I was going to put down whatever popped into my head, no matter how horrible it was. As long as I just thought that it was funny to me I was going to put it down, no matter how disturbing or horrible other people thought that it was. That was the whole point of that.

In some ways, it reminds of driving in your car and singing along to some horribly misogynistic and violent hip-hop song.

RYAN: True.

And you’re dropping N-words and B-words and cussing left and right and talking about killing undercover policemen.

RYAN: Or the latest G.G. Allin record.

That’s another good comparison. But at the same time you and I are both raised-Catholic, white, straight, American guys, and we have it pretty easy compared to a lot of the groups lampooned in your comics.

RYAN: Right. Well, the thing is that I see myself basically as a comedian making jokes. I don’t have some sort of political agenda as far as, like, I’m making fun of black people because they’re stupid and they shouldn’t have the same rights as white people. I’m not standing on a soapbox here. I’m just making jokes and trying to elicit laughter. I think that people have the ability to laugh at horrible things and yet still not go out and murder people, not be influenced to kill and discriminate and be an awful person. I’m not going to cause people to be horrible, awful people. If they’re already horrible and awful, it’s not me that’s going to inspire them.

So in your view, you’re not a racist or misogynist or a homophobe or any of those things?

RYAN: I don’t think so. I mean, those are usually terms that…I think if someone feels that I’m a racist or a misogynist, that’s their right to think so. Personally, I don’t think that I am.

You say that you don’t have a reactionary political agenda, but on the flipside, would you also say that you don’t have the agenda pointing that stuff out to make fun of it or lessen its power?

RYAN: No. I don’t think that I have that agenda either, as far as “I’m going to use the word n—– over and over again until the word has no meaning” or something like that. I think that the word is always going to pretty much have some meaning. You can’t get rid of it. It’s always going to be there. That’s sort of the point of using it, because it’s so jarring. I like to incorporate that troublemaking aspect into my humor. For some reason it’s exciting for me, when I’m drawing my comic, to think, “What can I do to really get people?” I try to use that shock element, I guess. Usually people use that as a derogatory term when dealing with movies or with any kind of art, but I think that it does have its place if used correctly.

There’s something exciting about it.

RYAN: Sure. Growing up as a teenager and watching a lot of those exploitation movies from the ’70s, I always thought those were really exciting and oftentimes more exciting than a lot of the mainstream stuff that they were showing. I wanted to use those kinds of elements in my work. It’s fun. It’s the same for the Surrealists from the early part of the last century. They were using a lot of that imagery just to really jar and shock people. For some reason it just makes the work exciting for me if I know that this is going to make people a little bit uneasy.

Do you feel like you’ve ever gone too far in that direction?

RYAN: If I have, I can’t think of any point. There have been moments when my wife has gone, “I don’t know about that.” [Laughs] Sometimes I listen, and other times I’m like, “F— it. I’ve got this gut feeling that I need to follow this through.”

In terms of a politicized reaction to your stuff, have you gotten a harder time from conservatives or liberals, or is that anything you’ve even noticed?

RYAN: Maybe from liberals more. I don’t know the statistics on this, but I think that’s because most people that read alternative comics are more of the liberal outlook, so I’m mostly hearing a lot of stuff from liberals. The more liberal and literary bookworms they are, the more they dislike my stuff. And the racism and all of that stuff usually makes them uneasy. Sometimes I’ll even get a positive review, like recently in The Comics Journal I got a pretty good review for The Comic Book Holocaust, but they were still mentioning how uneasy the racist stuff made them. I think that it’s more the liberals who get more uneasy about it.

I think the first context in which I heard of your work before I’d read it was the reaction to the “Gaytroit” strip, where a gay Captain America-type character kills terrorists using his “AIDS Breath.”

RYAN: Right. Well, that pretty much went nowhere. They were going on and on about how they were going to boycott Fantagraphics and they were going to picket, they were really going to go crazy and bring the whole company down until I was punished, and they were going to call GLAAD and all of this other stuff. It eventually just became nothing. They were pretty much calling me “the No. 1 Homophobe in Comics” or something like that, and I think that there’s a lot worse examples than me. Like those Preacher comics. Have you ever read that thing? I was amazed. When I read it I was like, “Whoever wrote this is obviously gay.” But it was written where all of the bad guys were gay and wanted to rape everything. It was sort of amazing that they were going to pick me over this guy. Gimme a break.

You’ve created several memorable characters. The first that come to mind are Sinus O’Gynus and Loady McGee, the stars of Angry Youth Comix. I’ve always wondered if they were your stab at like a “Beavis and Butt-Head” thing.

RYAN: No. When I came up with these characters it was little bit before “Beavis and Butt-Head.” “Beavis and Butt-Head” came on and I was like, “Ah, sh–. They’re stealing all of my jokes.” I’ve since come to really like that cartoon, but I think that the dynamic is different. Mine is sort of the jerk and the wimp, whereas “Beavis and Butt-Head” is two jerks. [Laughs] Loady is a jerk and a bully and Sinus just kind of takes it. Plus, Beavis and Butt-Head are just stupid and they’re always laughing and they seem to be having a good time. Loady is like always on a mission and is always in some kind of rage. And that’s not to say that either me or “Beavis and Butt-Head” are the first to do the duo-type cartoons.

Were they based on anything, or were they conjured out of the ether of your brain?

RYAN: Everything comes from something, but I guess it’s a sort of combination of different elements. Loady McGee came from a couple of different things. I guess it’s a sort of combination of Butch from “The Little Rascals” and Vivian from “The Young Ones” and this kid that I went to high school with who had the worst acne that I’ve ever seen in my life. Sinus came from another kid that I went to high school with. I think that was just sort of my inner wimp too, or something–I don’t know. [Laughs] The physical attributes of Sinus came from this kid that I went to high school with.

Next up is Blecky Yuckerella, who’s your spoof of a “children’s strip” character. You can see the roots of that with Little Lulu and Nancy and things like that.

RYAN: That actually came directly from this comic that I found at some comic stand in Seattle called The Little Monsters. I just picked it up and I saw this cover. It was some Gold Key comic, and the Little Monsters were these two boy and girl little Frankensteins. On the cover were these two little Frankenstein dudes, and in the back was a really mean-looking little girl. It was kind of like Blecky, with the curly blond hair and the little girl suit and the shoes and whatever, but she had a five o’clock shadow and a mono-brow. I was like, “Oh, my God, this looks like it could be the most amazing character that I’ve ever seen.” So I bought the comic and I read it. I was kind of disappointed to find out that the story was about this midget mobster who wants to go into hiding, so he dresses up like a little girl and goes hide with the little monsters. I was like, “Oh, this isn’t like some sort of transvestite-child type thing?” I thought I had to incorporate this into my work and do something with it, and create this transvestite monster child that actually has more of an upbeat attitude. That’s kind of where it came from.

I can see how it not being a transvestite child would be an enormous disappointment.

RYAN: Yeah. I was sort of like, “Oh, my God. This is the most amazing character I’ve ever seen–and in a Gold Key comic!” So, yeah, I was sort of disappointed.

I guess she’s mostly appeared in Vice Magazine, correct?

RYAN: Well, I initially started the script for the Portland Mercury. They asked me to come up with a strip, and I had this character and I thought, “Ah, I’ll give it a shot.” I was in the Portland Mercury with that strip for 4 years before they f—ing dropped me, pretty unceremoniously, for some new strip that is absolutely horrible, which added insult to injury. I would then color them and they would reprint them in Vice, but I’ve since stopped running them in Vice. I’m doing other projects for Vice. They have me do these full one-page things instead now.

How is your working relationship with them, as opposed to your working relationship with Mad or Nickelodeon or things like that?

RYAN: Well, Nickelodeon is definitely the best as far as working. [Nick‘s] Chris Duffy is the best editor. He’s very easy to work with. I’ve worked with, like you said, Mad, and I’ve done stuff for Hustler and National Geographic Kids, but I feel like he gets my humor and he likes my humor and I have a real place in the magazine now. Vice is good too. They’ve always been pretty supportive of my stuff. But I have to say that our relationship is a little bit more contentious because we’re always arguing about stuff.

About what? Content?

RYAN: God. It’s retarded, the things that we’re yelling at each other about. Well, they did that all-comics issue last year [which I guest-edited], and that was kind of a headache. It was just sort of like they wanted certain cartoonists in there, and I was like, “I don’t want those people in there.” It was just this back and forth. And a few years ago I was asked to do a one-page comic for the American Indian-themed issue. I asked the editor what the rules were and he said, “No penises and no Nazis.” So I drew a comic called “Chief Sitting Bullsh– vs. Nazi Penis.” And they didn’t run it. [Laughs] For the most part, though, they’ve always been good. Because they have Vice in the U.S. and they’re spreading out and now each country has its own Vice, I’ve been doing comics for all of these other countries, for all the other Vice magazines. I think it started when there was a Vice France and they asked me to do a comic that totally insulted the French people, so I did a page of gags that were insulting to the French. All of a sudden it started this avalanche of all these other countries being like, “Oh, do us!” So I had to do one for Italy. I had to do one for Spain. Then I had Germany on the line, and they were like, “Ah, forget it.” That would’ve been like the easiest one to hammer out.

Yeah. You kind of know exactly where to go with the Germans.

RYAN: I think there’s stuff there that you can’t make fun of. In the French one I was making of fun of them with stuff like them being f—ed in the ass by Hitler and things like that. That’s okay in France. But I don’t think that you can even show a picture of Hitler in Germany.

Angry Youth Comix #13 and XXX Scumbag Party just hit stores over the past two weeks. What’s the next thing that you have coming out?

RYAN: Right now, today, I’m working on this thing–Marvel Comics is starting this Marvel Underground series, and I’m sure you know that they have underground artists doing their take on different Marvel characters. I did a couple of pages for that. I’m working on that right now.

That was probably going to be my last question, given our readership. Obviously, a lot of the stuff that eventually ended up in Comic Book Holocaust took aim at Marvel’s material. I was wondering if you ever heard from Marvel about that.

RYAN: No, I didn’t. Someone else recently interviewed me specifically about this underground Marvel thing, and I even mentioned The Comic Book Holocaust and how I’d done the parodies of the different characters, and I never heard anything. The editor of this particular series is Aubrey Sitterson, and he seems like a young guy who’s just starting out there. He’s a fan of mine, where I don’t know how the old guard feels about that stuff. When I worked with him previous to this on that Stan Lee Meets thing–they did this whole series of tributes about Stan Lee and I did something for that. And he knew about the Mad Magazine where I had done a strip called “The Fantastic Four Has a Crap-Tastic Couple of Weeks” a while back. And even at that point he was saying, “Don’t let the other guys see that you did that or send up any of that art, because they don’t want to see that.” I don’t know if he’s keeping that stuff from them or what, I don’t know what’s going on over there, but as far as he goes, he likes my stuff and he wants me to do some work, so that’s fine with me.

Am I blowing your cover here, then?

RYAN: Who cares? [Laughs]

* Looks like one of potentially several Battlestar Galactica tv movies will be written by nerd-beloved scribe Jane Espenson, directed by BSG star Edward James Olmos, and apparently focus primarily on the show’s skinjob Cylons. (Via AICN.)

* And Now the Screaming Starts’ CRwM highlights the hyperrealist look of torture-porn films by contrasting a stylized scenario from Saw III with the horrifyingly mundane real-life waterboarding of writer Christopher Hitchens.

* There’s another Books of Blood adaptation on the way: IGN.com editor Christopher Monfette has written a screenplay based on the strange little (like, six pages long) Clive Barker immorality fable “Down, Satan!”

* Douglas Wolk and Joe McCulloch review the latest installment of Grant Morrison’s “Batman: R.I.P.” Doug calls bullshit on what he sees as a Magical Negro figure, but I didn’t see it way because the character in question a) seems to have no idea he’s doing anything magical; b) is a junkie. He also links to this Silver Age Bat-tale that answers a lot of the questions raised by the story so far–talk about a story depending on continuity!

[Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of interviews I’ll be posting that were rescued from WizardUniverse.com’s now-defunct archives. Originally posted on July 20, 2007.]

I CAN HAS COMIX?: PAUL POPE

The Batman: Year 100 and THB writer-artist on making his new art book, reinventing the fight scene and becoming a comic book rock star

By Sean T. Collins

Paul Pope once told me his approach to personal style was to look like he’d stepped out of one of his own comics. The same, it seems, can be said of his approach to interviews. Speaking with Pope about his work, and about art in general, is as dizzying and dazzling an experience as reading one of his books.

The creator of futuristically sexy series such as 100% and Heavy Liquid, intensely personal superhero projects like Batman Year 100 and the fiercely independent schoolgirl-action series THB, Pope boasts an astonishingly broad set of influences and references. Within minutes he’ll name-drop Frank Miller and Oscar Wilde, Pixar and Picasso, John Cassaday and John Cale, “Star Wars” and Toulouse-Lautrec–each in service of a fresh insight into his stylish, sci-fi-heavy sequential art and illustration.

Pope’s list of upcoming projects is just as wide-ranging and impressive. His lavish new art book PULPHOPE: The Art of Paul Pope debuted to critical acclaim and sellout sales at this summer’s MoCCA Art Festival in New York. At next week’s San Diego Comic-Con, PULPHOPE will be joined by the latest installment of THB, subtitled Comics From Mars; both projects are published by indie outfit AdHouse Books. Meanwhile, Pope’s working on more THB, as well as stories for the upcoming Marvel Underground indie-creators-on-Marvel-superheroes anthology, a massive action epic for First Second called Battling Boy, a pulp-hero thriller called Bionica and a dream-comic collection called Psychenaut for French publisher Dargaud, plus various ads, design projects and film work.

And between it all, the self-labeled “Comics Destroyer” somehow found time to talk to Wizard Universe about it all.

WIZARD: Congratulations on PULPHOPE. It was the book of the show at MoCCA and looks poised to be huge at San Diego.

POPE: Well, it’s good to see that people are into it. You’re sitting on a thing for 15 months and you reach a point where you’re like, “What am I doing? This is no good.” It’s so abstract until it comes out. Then you’re getting reactions from people because it’s not comics. Comics are different. When you do them it’s like, “Oh, this is funny and it makes me laugh.” But this stuff is like, “Wow. Is this too personal? Is this too maudlin? Is this too risqué?” It’s that kind of thing.

It’s interesting to see how much of the book are your essays on various topics and really kind of spilling your guts as to what you think and what your process is with stuff. Why did you go in that direction instead of just doing the big giant portfolio type thing?

POPE: Well, for one thing, as I’ve gotten more and more into book design and print design, I just honestly don’t think that I’ve seen a good cartoonist book yet. There are great monographs, but I feel like what I don’t really like with comics–I don’t think that it does a service to either the artist or the medium to have these hodgepodge books put out where it’s like a little bit of the sketches and this and that. The books that I’ve seen just feel like they don’t have much of a center. If I think of a well-designed book I’ll think of like Dave McKean’s John Cale book [What’s Welsh for Zen]. It’s either artists’ or musicians’ biographies, or monographs, or prints books–things like this. That’s kind of what I was thinking. Also, one of my favorite books is Iggy Pop’s I Need More. I’m sure that you’ve seen it. It’s very scattered and disjointed and it’s designed that you can read it any direction that you want, basically. It’s interesting, because you do get a sense of a person and a biography out of it, which is good. The other thing, too, is that aside from having all of this material that I wanted to publish, including erotica, which was personally sort of a challenge to publish, I thought, “I also write and I would regret it if I didn’t publish some of this stuff.” I mean, I did go to art school and spent time considering academia, and so the stuff is researched and is enjoyable. It seems like there’s this new crop of younger cartoonists who see me the way that I would see someone like Dave McKean when I was 19, kind of at the artistic end of the medium. I feel like there are always younger cartoonists asking me life-goal questions, guru questions, which makes me uncomfortable. So it was like, “Well, let me put a book out with some secrets in it and the wise reader will hopefully find what they’re looking for.”

It does sort of have a Letters to a Young Cartoonist feel to it.

POPE: But it’s also partly like putting the young cartoonist in me to bed. That’s what that whole essay about being 35 years old is, because you just reach this point.…Earlier on, when I was first breaking into this industry, the real exciting part was getting to meet Steve Rude or getting a book signed by Chester Brown, that kind of stuff, and hanging out with whoever. Then you do it, and you reach a point where you get a sense that the people you’ve admired, whether that’s [Frank] Miller or [Mike] Mignola or Moebius, they are aware of you and there’s a certain level of respect that they have for you as a young guy. Then you reach a point of, “Okay, now what? I’ve seen my stuff in print. I’ve worked in superheroes. I’ve worked in indie. So now what?” This was hopefully a chance to make a definitive break for the next 35 years. That’s the deep purpose. That’s the depth-charge purpose.

The “comics destroyer” purpose?

POPE: Yeah, and that’s the other aspect of it too. Hopefully this book is going to raise the ante a bit. I mean, in all humility, we went through 10 drafts of it and put a year and a half into it. It was definitely not slapped together in a weekend.

I remember Chris Pitzer, AdHouse’s Publisher, telling Wizard about it a long time ago.

POPE: Yeah, and then [the proposed film adaptation of Michael Chabon’s] “Kavalier and Clay” happened. My life went into deep freeze for 6 to 8 months.

How was it working on that?

POPE: It was very enlightening. It was interesting and great. It was like a crash course in animation. I got to meet tons of people and made some great discoveries. Who knows where that stuff will go in the future, and especially for that film in particular. I hear routinely that it’s off and then it’s back on again and off and on again. They’re saying 2009, so we’ll see.

It seems like you’ve always had your fingers in various other pies. You mentioned the design conferences that you’ve already participated in, and you’re soon doing one with Pixar in Amsterdam. But in your book, you say that it wasn’t ever anything that you really envisioned yourself getting involved in.

POPE: I mean, look at the landscape that we have today. The thing that I’m curious about now is this whole nebulous aspect of contracts which entail online publishing. For comics, no one is quite sure what that is yet, and that’s exciting. I tend to think that from now on, publishing contracts have got to deal with it, number one. Number two, it will probably have to change every five years, the legal definition of what online publishing is. So I’ve been lucky to be at these design conferences. I’ve got lots of friends who do advertising and guys working in building software for Pixar and artificial intelligence stuff and just far-out creativity.

If I had to characterize your stuff in one particular way, as apt as “comics destroyer” is, I would think “comics synthesizer” first and foremost. You incorporate many different influences: illustration and fine art, manga and bandes dessinées, science fiction and romance, superheroes and indie comics, and then also these other disciplines that you’re interested in, like design and film and fashion and music.

POPE: That’s why I wanted to put that bit in–in fact, if there’s more time for the second edition of the book, I do want to expand on the essay about design and persuasion, because what I find is that it’s really communication arts. It’s rhetoric. It’s understanding how to manipulate symbols according to the audience, knowing what their expectations are and how you’re able to communicate effectively with people. I’ve been kind of troubled by this “indie” term. I’ve been talking to Coke about doing a poster for them next month, and I’m like, “Well, I don’t see how I can be indie if I’m doing work for Coke.” But then I’m working on this small-press stuff. It’s all over the map. I think that if anything, “indie” is probably just a term that people use loosely to sort of suggest a drawing style which isn’t your typical kind of Jim Lee American superhero–that kind of thing.

When I was trying to come up with a title for this column, I realized that all the titles that you’d use for something of this kind, dealing with essentially the “indie” or the “alternative” end of the spectrum, a lot of those terms don’t really mean anything anymore. ACME Novelty Library is published by Pantheon, part of a huge New York publishing house.

POPE: And it’s in The New York Times. So, yeah, it’s a strange one, isn’t it?

You seem like the kind of person who puts some thought into those definitional debates.

POPE: Oh, yeah. Especially having gone to art school and suffered under this high-art/low-art prejudice, which I’m completely against. I’m all in favor of craft. So [the high-art/low-art dichotomy] is another thing that’s worth destroying, I would say, because I feel like that’s an intimidation. That benefits curators. It doesn’t really benefit creative people. I’ve never been comfortable with that, especially considering that in art school, where I went to school, there was such a prejudice towards video arts, conceptual work, performance. Something that was traditionally craft-based–whether it was print making or life drawing, which is what I was interested in, and draftsmanship–it was really looked down upon, which really bothered me. In art school, I was actually kicked out, but eventually I got to the point where I would take in a toothbrush as my project and a lot of times I would get really good grades just because I would play the game.

That’s straight out of “Art School Confidential.”

POPE: Oh, yeah. I’ve got some stories like that.

One specific theoretical aspect of your work that fascinates me lately is the way that you did Batman in Batman Year 100. You put so much thought into how he looked and how he dressed and how he got around and did the things that he does.

POPE: Oh, yeah. Before doing Batman, I did a lot of research. I read every DC monthly comic for probably a year and a half. By the time that we got the contract for that signed, I had about two or three years to really think that thing through. I’d seen the Hong Kong action stuff by then. The “Star Wars” [prequels] were coming out and you could see what you could’ve done better with those and what worked and what didn’t work. The thing with Batman, and I’ve said this before, but with that character–I always look at something like that, which is so well known and above the radar, so to speak, and think, “What haven’t we seen with this guy yet?” I just feel like there isn’t enough physical action in superhero drawings. It’s exciting, and I love that in an action film: that sense of what I call hyper-violence, or not hyper-violence, but hyper-real. It’s like what [English writer] Kingsley Amis called “unreal estates.” He said in reading The Lord of the Flies, there were descriptions of the trees and the water and the beach that were almost feverish. It’s like you only sense these things when you have the flu. I love that notion, that you can put that much detail into a comic and it’s something that you would only sense if your senses were really tweaked, like if you had the flu or something. So that was kind of the inspiration there.

Seeing the combat you’ve portrayed in Batman or THB through the lens of the erotic work of yours we’re really seeing for the first time in PULPHOPE, I’m curious as to whether the physicality of both areas springs from the same mindset.

POPE: Actually, no. That’s one thing that’s been fascinating, doing more work for print design and for posters, illustrations for magazines. The conceptual work that goes into a single image or cover art, for that matter, books or comics, it’s very different. I talk to James Jean about this a lot. I find that if I do an illustration, even if it’s something where the drawing style is fairly breezy, you do a lot of conceptual thinking. It really makes me revalue the storytelling aspect of comics because it’s not necessary for any particular picture to be perfect or to be completely illustrative of this or that idea. The comic works as a series of chain links. I find that often in the time it takes to do…if you saw that Wired piece that I have out right now, the “Transformers” illustration that I have in the new issue with “Transformers” on the cover–it’s gone over really well and everyone is really happy with it, but surprisingly it took 30 or 40 hours to draw, all told. If that were a page in THB I could probably draw it in 2 hours with the same level of detail and everything, aside from coloring, which is its own issue. Conceptually, when it works as a part of the comic, somehow it’s just easier. That also goes for THB versus what I always call big-budget comics like Batman where you can really pull out the stops. Again, though, one thing that I’ve really noticed and appreciate about American superhero comics is that attention to detail is really important. People love and want to see all of the gadgets. If it’s a table it has to really look like a table. Otherwise, people not knowing George Grosz or Phillip Guston, it just looks like it’s kind of badly drawn when in fact it’s intentionally made that way.

But frequently I find that when you get to the action it’s not rooted in a sense of place or even where people are in relation to one another.

POPE: Everybody’s got their strengths and weaknesses. Someone who I admire a lot who works in comics would be someone like, let’s say, John Paul Leon. Even a guy like that has his strengths and his weaknesses. It’s funny. Even back before I was into comics, even as a kid, of course I read comics, but just on the artistic side of it. The kind of stuff that I liked was MC Escher or Hieronymus Bosch–anything where there was strong composition, a strong placement of figures and objects–and Edward Hopper. Realistic art, I guess you would say. It’s a taste that, as with food, your palette develops over time.

It’s interesting to hear you talk about comics in such visual-art terms. I feel like these days, with the exception of underground artists from avant-garde collectives like Fort Thunder and PaperRad, comics is mainly seen in a narrative tradition, along with film or prose literature. The exceptions tend to be less in your direction and more in the “20th Century Masters” vein. It’s like, “Look at the stuff from the good old days.”

POPE: You mean like pop art?

No, more like seeing a George Herriman Krazy Kat page up on the wall next to a Chester Gould Dick Tracy…

POPE: I see. Age has a certain authenticity. You do think about that. I don’t know. That’s an interesting one. I have a friend, Jenny Schlenzka, who’s a curator at MoMA, in fact–ironically, after [I was] dissing contemporary gallery stuff–but she did a big thing on [German filmmaker Rainer Werner] Fassbinder in Berlin recently. She’s curating a show about comics in the next year or so, and they asked me to come in and just talk to them about it. It’s not that I’m going to be in it, really, but [they wanted me to] just kind of approach it that way. I’ve been to some shows up there, and I’ve seen [Art] Spiegelman’s stuff there and maybe Katzenjammer Kids–some other old things too. So much of it must be a reflection of the Jewish diaspora, too, because so much of the New York experience is really immigrant. I think that comics are so much tied up with this emotional aspect of culture and New York culture and this kind of nebulous thing. I noticed that working on “Kavalier,” really.

I think that book helped form a conventional wisdom about what’s interesting about comics, and created a very specific narrative about how the art form progressed.

POPE: If you go back to the history of advertising, such as it is, if you think about clarity and design persuasion, there’s not a lot of substantial difference between cartooning and printmaking or advertising in the hands of someone like a Steinlen or a Toulouse-Lautrec, [Alphonse] Mucha, these kinds of guys. The drawing values are still the same. There’s an emphasis towards clarity and individual hand and style. I think that’s something that we always value. You might even trace that back earlier to the Austrian secession movement with guys like [Gustav] Klimt and [Egon] Schiele. Not to say that it’s the first time in history that there’s ever been simplicity in drawing, but you really did sort of start to see, in the birth of Expressionism, this sense of a triumph of style and the whole “art for art’s sake” thing. I think that was a pretty significant move. That’s getting pretty far out there though. [Laughs] That’s one thing that I feel so aggressive about. I want to really trumpet comics’ place in art history, because it belongs there, in art culture. Comics belong in art culture.

Do you feel like you’ve created a single work that you would point to as being your most successful stab in that direction?

POPE: In that sense I think that I would have to go in that music metaphor. You and I are both music aficionados. I think that being a cartoonist, as a sort of pop artist, you have popular hits. If you look at it like that, I think that 100% is a strong statement, I think that Escapo is a strong statement, as composite works. PULPHOPE feels pretty good. It feels like this is a statement. There are probably things in THB that feel strong in the same sense. Well, that’s a different work, that’s a living work that’s still going on, but there are a few things like that. Some of the stuff in Solo. Working on extended projects, the problem is that there’s a point where your creative acceleration–you still have the exponential curve of the more you do it, the better you get, the more you think about it, the more time that you have to research and reflect. That’s the hard stuff. I always feel like you’re two steps ahead of yourself in terms of the stuff that’s published being at least 8 months old. That’s one thing that I miss about the self-publishing, because you could have this great idea for a short comic and then be in print in a month.

Is that part of the impetus behind your blog, just a desire to get things out there?

POPE: The blog is an extension of the book. I can really credit Warren Ellis for this, because I had to buy a laptop and just get completely Darth Vader while I was working on “Kavalier” because I needed to be. Otherwise I was in trouble. As you follow it, I have a total ambivalence about this slouch toward cyborgism that our culture is currently having. We’re not going to go back again, short of nuclear war. I don’t see us changing, but it’s a tool that’s there and it’s an experiment. So I feel like the blog’s an extension. A friend of mine said that it’s sort of the DVD supplemental materials for PULPHOPE.

Much of your work is science fiction, and it tends to be near-future science fiction. It’s not so far out there, so it seems clear that you’re thinking about current technological issues.

POPE: I would say worrying about them. [Laughs] I’m worrying about them.

Which fits, because despite the futuristic content, a lot of the “Paul Pope vibe” has a sort of “ink-stained wretch” vibe to it.

POPE: I know what you mean. It’s funny, because I’m not totally happy with my visual style. I feel like after years of work I’ve reached a point where I can basically draw whatever I can think. It never looks like I intended it to work, which is why I really enjoy doing things like the big-screen prints or the big store installations or comics animation. It’s just trying to develop as much versatility as a visual thinker as I can. And I definitely like making objects. I like making things. That’s one great thing about comics: There’s actually a document of your time. It’s there. It’s mass-produced, and that’s great.

You were one of the first people to open my eyes in terms of the comic as an object. The way that you put it in PULPHOPE is that a story told in words or pictures is called “a comic” or “a graphic novel,” but so too is the thing that you hold in your hands in which that story resides. That had never occurred to me before.

POPE: Spiegelman said this ages ago. He said all outdated communication forms become art because they become useless. One thing that’s really been shocking to me has been the tendency that people now have to download entire movies onto an iPod. They’re watching them on there. I was talking to John Cassaday, of all people, another cartoonist, who said he was taking a flight that night and that he downloaded a couple of movies to watch on the plane. I said, “How does that work?” I could do it with my iPod, but I just don’t. I realize that the experience of watching a film on an iPod is not the same and is not intended to be the same and is not expected to be the same–it just isn’t–as watching it in the theater or watching on hi-def TV or whatever. I also think that this is something that comics as a two-dimensional-object-printing industry is going to have to deal with just because of how much encroachment we’re getting from films and games, from online. It has changed the role. I feel like we’re at the stage now where we can celebrate, and it sounds corny to say this, but comics as objects are hard to make and take a long time and are relatively expensive. Anyone can really do it, but it’s not the first thing that people think of anymore when they think about expression. I think that now the Internet has made things so quick. I noticed this with the blog, the immediacy of it. I do a drawing and think, “I could put this on the Web tomorrow.” Then you could start getting feedback from people if you have that enabled. The one thing that I always do think when I meet 18- or 19-year-old kids, first-year art school students, is that they don’t remember a time before computers. I do. I remember playing with Popsicle sticks as a kid and having hours to use your imagination. Now the only way to interface with my nephews is to talk about video games with them. Sometimes I go see movies with them and I watch where their eyes go on the screen. I had this weird experience with them going to see “Harry Potter” or “Spider-Man” for the first time with them. I thought, “Wow, I wonder if a kid this young can tell the difference between CGI and reality?” I think that you’re conscious of it if you’d never seen it growing up and it had never existed. But if you never knew anything but a world with mousepads and track-balls, who knows what’s coming next? So actually, rather than a weakness, it’s an advantage to have been born in the ’70s and to have grown up in that era because all the advantages of two-dimensional picture-making still exist. They’re timeless.

Even though I read webcomics, I just find it more satisfying to hold the object in my hands. I wonder if that generation will shake that taboo entirely.

POPE: Yeah, I wonder. I guess that we’ve yet to see all the different ways–I guess what’s going to happen is that comics will exist in the future in different formats. They’ll be like the ghost in the machine in the same way that film is now. I mean, film is film. It’s cinema. You go to the theater and watch it and it’s light projection, but really it’s the experience. I’m certain that this “Transformers” film is designed to be watched in slow motion on a laptop. It can exist in a number of functions. The “Transformer” virus, such as it is, can exist in toys and it’ll exist in games and it’ll exist in comic books. That’s good news, aside from the fact that Disney won the copyright and public domain battle, and Superman will win next. It’s good news for all the established entertainment icons. It’s good for Elvis.

How is it for someone like you?

POPE: Well, the responsibility is to not sell out and not to trade your brains off to the highest bidder to help flesh out their mediocre ideas if you know that you’ve got great ones. That challenge, frankly, goes for everyone, and I’m saying that quite plainly. I’m not saying that every idea I have is great, but I do think that I’ve had some good ones, and those are the ones that I want to be really loyal to in the future. But the great thing is that it isn’t really either/or in the same way that indie/mainstream isn’t either/or. I’ve done a lot of different types of work, and to varying degrees there are some that are more satisfying than others. Film is an interesting medium, too, because it’s different from comics. It’s essentially collaborative and it’s political and it’s slow, all this kind of stuff. Even the little bit of time that I’ve spent on it has shown me that.

How do you mean “political”–office politics or corporate politics or politics politics?

POPE: Well, you have a hierarchy, you’ve got personalities to deal with, and it’s not like a family where you’re kind of letting it all hang out. You have a sense of who’s in charge and what you can do and what sort of liberties you can take and what sort of influence you can have. A lot of people in film are in love with it. There’s such a love affair there. But I’m a little bit more ambivalent about it, having been aligned to print media. However, it’s great stuff and great things happen in films and I’m not against it at the same time.

In terms of your ideas that you want to be really careful about shepherding, is there anything in particular right now?

POPE: Yeah, THB and Battling Boy. The problem with the long-form comics, especially living in Manhattan, is that it’s hard to make a living. The cost of living in Manhattan is high. And it’s hard also with narrowing down the possibilities, because you don’t want to be this sensualist who goes for the newest thing, whatever it could be. Now it’s billboard art or whatever. Do you know what I’m saying? Any of the possible things that come along that you could do. I think that there is a certain gregarious side to me that is interested in working on collaborative projects. I have a couple of things now that are collaborative for sure, where I’m part of a team. But in terms of creating a story, an identity, something like THB–at the end of the day that’s really the thing that I care about. At this point I’m interested in trying to develop these different interesting projects that are out there on the fringes while at the same time having enough breathing space in order to do the personal work.

It seems as though at any given time you’ve got several different projects in some stage of development. Is there a particular appeal to that? Do you ever feel like you want to concentrate on just one thing at a time?

POPE: Well, I think that you have seasons of work. Like last year, in 2006, I did spend a lot of time working on other people’s projects. Batman was a two-and-a-half-year project, and I basically just worked on Batman and THB during that time. In the last 12 to 18 months I have been working a lot more in what I would consider to be multimedia stuff, while at the same time really trying to get some of my personal stuff launched. I also get interesting opportunities, like to go out and meet guys from ILM and do a presentation for their animation department, and I got to see 10 minutes of “Transformers” on the screen there when they were cutting it. That’s exciting. It’s like, “Hey, what’s going on? What are you guys doing?” That stuff is neat, and it does give you a lot to think about. The convention season is coming up, so there’s a lot of travel and a lot of event planning and managing things like that, which is time consuming. But at this point it’s definitely important and necessary to get 2, 3, 4 days a week to just shut things off and work. I’ve allotted more time for these other things, this sort of intangible area of work that combines meetings and contract-reading. Then you do the Wired thing–I had no idea how much time it was going to take. “What? 30 hours?” Okay, well, that’s how long it took.

In terms of the peripheral activity that surrounds actually writing and drawing, there was one phrase that literally everyone I talked to at MoCCA who stood on line for the PULPHOPE signing used to describe you: “rock star.”

POPE: Yeah, well, there’s the performance aspect. My girlfriend is a performer and a lot of my friends are performers–circus performers, burlesque performers, musicians. There really isn’t a stage in comics and what works for performance doesn’t really work for our medium, but I’m an expressive person and I’m into fashion and I’m into music. I get a ton of inspiration from it. I mean, there is definitely Oz and then the man behind the curtain, but I’m pretty much the way that I am. If I walk around the streets I’m the same guy that I am now. Part of that is acute agoraphobia. It’s just easier to focus things so that I’m able to meet as many people as possible in 1 day and basically I don’t have to see anyone after that for 6 months. [Laughs]

So it’s not like a tour rockumentary where you’re ready to throw yourself out the tour bus window?

POPE: No, definitely not. [Laughs] I suppose there are some rock star moments, but I’m not sure exactly what that term means. It doesn’t mean what it used to. It must just mean complete license to be an assh— in public and get away with it, or just kind of like–it’s the old Dionysian/Apollonian thing that Frank Miller always likes to talk about. It’s the battle of cleaving to the senses or cleaving to reason. I guess that if you look back on the history of it, too–I’ve always been interested in kind of trying to trail this back–if you look at someone like Oscar Wilde, you could probably describe him as a rock star in some sense. He was this larger-than-life character. I don’t know. I think that what’s important now when I look at musicians I respect or artists I respect, someone like Matthew Barney, I think that it’s [about] really going for it, really believing in what you do. It sounds banal, but being very definite and determined about your expression. Ultimately, we just sort of fabricate ideas and we weave them together in some format.

In terms of the aspects of your persona that have those rock star echoes–

POPE: Well, everyone that I hang out with looks the same way. [Laughs] It’s totally normal where I come from.

That’s kind of what I’m getting at. It could easily be used as an excuse to act like an assh—.

POPE: No, I’m definitely respectful of people, especially at something like MoCCA where it’s like, “Christ, you people bothered to show up! Thank you.” I mean, you take a guy like Jon Spencer [of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and Heavy Trash]. I can’t say that we’re good friends, but we’re friends. We’ve collaborated before and we talk once in a while and we hang out once in a while. He’s one of the nicest guys that I know.

Maybe things will change in comics now that major media players are much more involved, but in general the crazy assh—s are well known and one can steer clear of them if one wants.

POPE: Yeah, and they would probably be assh—s if they were plumbers. They’re probably just assh—s.

That’s a good point. I had a similar conversation with Nick Bertozzi about how perhaps the “rock star” aspects of Picasso are overvalued and the fact that he was a workhorse who thought a lot about art and tried really hard was undervalued.

POPE: Yeah, he gets a bad rap too just because of the whole macho aspect to his character. He was definitely public enemy No. 2 or 3 when it came to art school. The political correctness crowd definitely doesn’t go for him. He’s quite an amazing and prolific character. Obviously, he’s a big influence on my creative thinking, a huge inspiration. But the important thing too is that I buy Marvel comics. I love Carl Barks. I read 100 Bullets. I wouldn’t want to come off as some sort of elitist. I guess that I am in a sense, but I’m curious, and I’m into the stuff that I’m into, that’s for sure. If anything, I’ve kind of narrowed my comics library down to basically the first 5 years of Heavy Metal, the manga that I’m into and some European artists. There are a couple of exceptions there in Jeff Smith, Jim Woodring…Hugo Pratt, but he’s European. At a certain point you have to shut off the spigot and look at your own work because there is so much stuff to look at and think about.

And we’re really in a golden age of reprints. Things I could only read about when I first got into comics, I can now buy the entire run of.

POPE: It’s funny, too, because I have some friends who teach up at SVA [School of Visual Arts], and having gone up there, it’s probably the closest to a sense of envy that I ever felt. I thought, how different my life would be if I were a student entering college in a position where I could study at SVA under Marshall Arisman and my graduating class would’ve been people like Yuko Shimizu. Well, probably not, because she was much later than me, but you see what I’m saying though. But then again, I probably wouldn’t have had the determination and probably the “anti” attitude I had just because of the hostility that I felt from the schooling that I had. It’s amazing: If I were 18 or 19 going into school with an interest in arts, I would be very excited because I feel like there’s a real need for people who draw, whether that’s ultimately illustration, animation, comics.…It’s become magic, because it’s hard to do and it’s not something that, even if you can cheat fairly well, you can cheat at and become great. I think that’s what we value in a guy like a Mignola, who’s had enough time and concern to develop a style that is persuasive. Or the Hernandez Brothers, because I love them–or anyone, for that matter, who has a strong style.

You just have to hope that, like the Hernandez Brothers, they have the confidence, whereas an artist like Mignola is almost overwhelmed by his own perfectionism.

POPE: I understand that feeling. In fact, he and I have had this discussion a couple of times. A couple of my things got close to looking like they were going to come through for film stuff [but didn’t]. I mean, there’s definitely a downside to that aspect of it. But then again, I think that you look at a guy like [Alex] Toth–he’s one of the biggest mysteries in the comic industry. If anything, everyone has a timeframe, like an arc, if you want to think of it in that way. Some guys are intended to draw for their entire lives, like [Joe] Kubert, and some guys like Bernie Krigstein draw for a very short time. I think also when you’re good like Mignola and you have a good idea, something that’s really strong, the opportunities get bigger and bigger. It’d be interesting if you could interview someone like Warren Ellis or [Neil] Gaiman and ask them about that. I’ve often wondered, ultimately, about those guys. Look at someone like Gaiman who essentially isn’t a professional cartoonist. He’s definitely put in a lot of trench work in comics, but I think that he’s the next guy to break out and really become even more like a public figure for comics. I think that he’s going to be big.

I guess that he already is. I mean, his prose novels certainly do him well.

POPE: Yeah, but you’ve never seen Stephen King direct a movie, do you know what I’m saying?

Well, you have, but it was “Maximum Overdrive,” which by his own admission the worst Stephen King movie ever made, which is saying something. [Laughter] To shift gears, what are you working on now and what’s coming up next?

POPE: I have a new issue of THB [THB: Comics from Mars #1, on sale at the San Diego Comic-Con]. I’m excited. I’ve been to Ray Kurzweil’s website. Do you know this guy?

The Singularity.

POPE: Yeah. He really blows my mind, and I’m like, “Man, I’m tired of seeing good ideas that I come up with appear in other places. I have to start getting this stuff out.” So that was a huge inspiration for me. Then I’m working on some sort of announcement for THB, which I hope to have together by San Diego. In the short term I’m gearing up for a number of other things. The joke is that I have a dog in this fight and a dog in that fight, and a friend of mine said, “You have so many dogs that you have a dog sled.” [Laughter] I’ve got a few illustration things coming up. I’m doing more work for Wired and GQ and I’m doing some sort of project for Coca-Cola. I’m not entirely sure what it’s going to be–some sort of poster. That’s just the illustration and advertising side of it. I’m kind of preparing for this design conference in some form in Amsterdam. I need to get a better sense of what the thesis will be for the talks, but I have an idea what I’m going to do for that. Then in the short term, or I guess in terms of comics, I’m working hard on this French book that I’m doing called Bionica [for publisher Dargaud]. And I’m trying to get enough Battling Boy [from First Second] together. I’ve been working on this thing for a year. We’re not publishing like a one-shot for San Diego, which we’ve discussed. It’s too soon to do that, but we’re definitely going to have sequential stuff to show people. It’s a 400-page book. It’s huge.

That’s got to be the biggest thing that First Second has published.

POPE: It’s the biggest thing they’ve done. After Batman I felt so contained because of how long I was taking. [DC VP-Executive Editor Dan] DiDio was like, “Hey, can you cut some of this material?” That was better for [Battling Boy] because it forced me to learn how to edit for comics, which has only been strengthened by working in film and getting to know film editors and really watching the process and how it’s done. But in this case I can actually use the 400 pages, in reaction to Batman and feeling like I could make this 20-page fight sequence 35 pages. So that’s going to be the fun there. It’s designed to be a story that’s fairly simple and fairly mythic, so it’s hopefully fairly universal, but there’s a lot of room for character development and fantastic imagery. I’ve got a few things going in there that have hopefully never been seen before in comics. That’s really what I want to do with this thing, in the same way that when you watch “Crouching Tiger” you’re like, “Holy sh–, I’ve never seen that before.”

Absolutely. I remember that so vividly.

POPE: That’s what I want. There’s massive destruction in Battling Boy. There’s tons of fights and crazy things. Building on Batman, I really want to get into the physical aspects of the hero, the superhero. I’ve got a huge cast of villains and they’re all really funny. There’s a whole bunch of little eddies of storytelling. There are little petty disagreements that the monsters have amongst themselves that play back into the main storyline. It’s the kind of stuff that I do in THB; I’m just giving myself some breathing space to improvise. It’s in full color, which is nice too. That’s the great thing about Solo and Batman. Having done enough stuff in color–that’s a challenge when you’ve done probably done 1,000-plus pages in black and white. Making a jump to color is a new way of thinking, because suddenly it’s like going into a new dimension. Color establishes so much of a mood and timing and these other aspects, control with the eye looks. Well, I don’t want to say that it’s another dimension, like 2-dimension to 3-dimension. It’s just different somehow.

And you’re doing a dream-comics thing too?

POPE: I’ve got this ongoing thing [called Psychenaut] that it looks like Dargaud is going to publish in French, and I’m sure that we can find someone here. It’s reacting to the body of work that Rick Veitch and Winsor McKay have done in dreams. I know that other people have done some–David B.’s done some. There’s an interesting…I guess you have to call it a sub-narrative to dreams. I find that I have repetitive imagery in my dreams. That’s the thing. I just do these for myself. I was in Spain with Yves Schlirf, my editor for Dargaud, and was like, “Oh, check these out.” He was like, “These are great. Let’s publish them.” So I have 20 or 25 of them, and there’s really no rush on this. It’s just when I get the time and the interest on getting the next one down. When we get enough, we’ll publish it.

That’s a lot of projects.

POPE: I know it’s a lot, but it keeps me out of trouble usually. Sometimes, anyway. At least before midnight.

* Holy smokes–the hour-plus of footage that’s been lost from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis for 80 years has been found in a museum in Buenos Aires! (Via AICN.)

* Meet a man-made water monster: the Sawfish Submersible Chainsaw, designed to fell submerged trees. You know, until it falls into the wrong hands.

* At The House Next Door, Sheila O’Malley waxes rhapsodic on the career of the great William Holden.

* Your quote of the day comes from Jim Treacher on Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight:

I read some critic saying he deserves an Oscar. Which seems far-fetched for a superhero movie, but then again he’s dead and Academy voters respect that.

* Finally, I feel like it’s been a while since we’ve seen a good old-fashioned indiscriminate spree-killer like Nicholas T. Shelley, whose eight victims in Illinois and Missouri over the past week or two include, “among others, a 93-year-old man, a child and a couple whose blood-soaked dogs were found roaming a motel parking lot.”

* Don S. Davis, Twin Peaks‘ Major Garland Briggs, is dead. The Major was one of Twin Peaks‘ most likeable and fascinating characters, a late bloomer in terms of becoming a major player who evolved into a model of intellectual and emotional decency on a par with Agent Cooper himself, and this was surely in no small part due Davis’s tremendous grace with everything the writers gave him to do and say. I’ll miss him, for this magnificent monologue and more.

* Sean’s friends are online part one: Justin Aclin launches ToyFare magazine’s official blog, FarePlay. I would have gone with Fare Balls, but that’ll work.

* Sean’s friends are online part two: Zach Oat runs down comics’ 10 Worst Women in Refrigerators. If you don’t know what that term means, this will be quite an education.

* Sean’s friends are online part three: Kiel Phegley interviews incoming Immortal Iron Fist writer Duane Swierczynski. Saying Swierczynski has a tough act to follow after Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction’s run (the only reason anyone cares about the character at all) is putting it mildly, so the start of his tenure on the title will be more closely observed than most.

* Hey, it’s David Bowie talking about his favorite David Bowie songs. The picks are idiosyncratic and interesting, as is Bowie’s take on each–equal parts erudition, self-effacement, healthy ego, and occasional 30-year-old-axe-grinding. (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* Hey, it’s Paul Pope blogging about his upcoming action epic Battling Boy. If “godlike kid squares off against a continent-sized city overrun by monsters” doesn’t tickle your fancy–well, you’re probably not reading this blog. (Via Heidi MacDonald.)

* Guillermo Del Toro explains to SciFi Wire how he plans to tapdance between the raindrops of copyright issues on the one hand and the existing Lord of the Rings films on the other while making The Hobbit and (maybe) its sequel.

* Finally, in case you missed it, Curt Purcell at The Groovy Age of Horror interviews me about my comic book Murder.

Well, how about this–the great horror blogger Curt Purcell of The Groovy Age of Horror has posted an interview with yours truly about my anthology of short comics, Murder.

The comic’s available here, if you’re interested.

[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.

* At the Comics Reporter, Tom Spurgeon has posted an obituary for the late Michael Turner with an admirable focus on his work and its impact. It features extensive quotes from me, which is humbling.

* At Marvel.com, I interview artist Mike Perkins about his upcoming Stephen King adaptation, The Stand.

* In this month’s Maxim I’ve got a little piece on ugly movie heroes, tying in with Hellboy II: The Golden Army. I don’t think it’s online, but there are worse ways you could spend a few bucks than for some nerdy snark and sexy ladies.

* Good Lord look at the cover for Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library #19.

* I’m not gonna post them myself because they’re kind of spoilery, but Bloody Disgusting has yet another pair of deeply impressive stills from The Midnight Meat Train. Meanwhile, BD’s Spooky Dan notes that the film has an anti-meat subtext, a welcome addition to any horror movie (cf. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Hostel) and a surefire way to make me even angrier that the movie’s getting buried due to office politics.

* Back over in Spurgevillie, Tom has posted YouTube clips of entirety of his New Art Comics Panel with Alvin Buenaventura, Sammy Harkham, and Dan Nadel from Heroes Con the other weekend. These guys are doing important work and it’s well worth a viewing.

* This trailer for the next James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, is pretty great. Looks like the hints toward the reemergence of SPECTRE from the first Daniel Craig Bond film are gonna pay off.

* They’re maybe gonna make a sequel to 300 with Frank Miller and Zack Snyder. Um, okay. (Via Whitney Matheson.)

* Becky Cloonan draws Cesare from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari…with sexy results!

* This piece comparing and contrasting the summer event comics Secret Invasion and Final Crisis by Pitchfork columnist Tom Ewing (via Big Sunny D) has a couple of things going for it: 1) It’s quite thoughtful and fair in addressing the strengths and weaknesses of each series, angrily dismissing neither; 2) it will hopefully force Pitchfork-reading hipsters into thinking they have to read Secret Invasion and Final Crisis to be “with it.”

[Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of interviews I’ll be posting that were rescued from WizardUniverse.com’s now-defunct archives. Originally posted on June 22, 2007.]

I CAN HAS COMIX?: GILBERT AND JAIME HERNANDEZ

In Wizard Universe’s new alternative comics interview column, Los Bros Hernandez reveal how their shared love of punk rock, sexy girls and Silver Age classics helped their epic series Love and Rockets launch the indie scene as we know it

By Sean T. Collins

I’ll admit that it took me a while to hitch a ride aboard Love and Rockets.

Despite the near-universal acclaim the series and its creators have received over the 25 years since the series’ first issue took the comics world by storm and kick-started a small-press revolution–the fruits of which can be seen at this weekend’s MoCCA Art Festival in New York City–there’s something daunting about it. For starters, it’s not just a straightforward one-man show: It’s an umbrella title for the work of Los Angeles-born brothers named Gilbert and Jaime (and sometimes even older sibling Mario), collectively known as “Los Bros Hernandez.”

What’s more, both Gilbert and Jaime have developed their own mini-mythoi within L&R, featuring enough characters to rival your average superhero universe. In Gilbert’s case, you have the busty, hammer-wielding femme fatale Luba and her friends, lovers, family and enemies, all swirling around the fictional Latin-American town that gives Gilbert’s “Palomar” saga its name. Jaime’s stories center on unlucky-in-love mechanic Maggie and her obnoxious punk-rock best friend/sidekick/sometimes-lover Hopey, wild women who are the stand-out members of a loose-knit group of L.A. ladies dubbed “Locas.” Both casts of characters age in real time, meaning some people who started the series as teenagers now have teenagers of their own, with their own adventures. The warts-and-all presentation of the series’ leads (particularly Jaime’s, in my case) can leave you as pissed of as you’d be at your own obnoxious friends.

And to top it all off, Love and Rockets has spawned two separate ongoing series using that title, a raft of trade paperback collections, two massive hardcovers housing nearly the entire “Locas” and “Palomar” sagas, and countless spinoff miniseries, graphic novels and even adult comix. Put it all together and it’s enough to make the friggin’ Legion of Super-Heroes’ continuity seem easy to follow.

Until now.

To celebrate L&R‘s 25th anniversary, publisher Fantagraphics recently began releasing awesomely affordable, handily portable softcover digest collections, starting at the beginning of both brothers’ epic storylines and giving readers their best chance ever to get in on the ground floor. With the first volumes (Jaime’s Maggie the Mechanic and Gilbert’s Heartbreak Soup) already in stores, the second installments–The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S. by Jaime and Human Diastrophism by Gilbert–launched this week, with some of Los Bros’ best work ever on board.

I could go on about both brothers’ mastery of character development, creating people as flawed, funny, and fascinating as your best friends. I could wax rhapsodic about their sophisticated storytelling, which relies on the readers’ intelligence as it bounces back in forth in time and between dozens of characters. I could point out that at different times, it’s the funniest, raunchiest and scariest comic you’ll ever read. I could talk for ages about the gorgeous art–Jaime’s sharp, sexy, stylish classicism and Gilbert’s earthy, equally sexy surrealism. And I could say that while you hear a lot about “creating a universe” in comics, no one’s ever done it better than Los Bros–when you read an L&R story, you feel like you’re catching just a small glimpse of a world as big, sprawling, messy, funny, horny, heartbreaking and real as our own.

Instead, in this joint interview with Gilbert and Jaime, I’ll let Los Bros themselves explain the inspiration of the series, reveal the dark secrets of the stories in the new digests, and announce their pick for the greatest superhero comic of all time. Through it all, it’s clear that when it comes to creating thrilling uncategorizable comics in Love and Rockets, the brothers are still armed and dangerous.

WIZARD: Take us back to 1981 when you guys started the books. What made you say, “Let’s do this”?

JAIME: Let’s see, 1981…I was being paid to go to junior college, so I didn’t want a job. I was just taking art classes and stuff like that. I wasn’t thinking about what I was going to do with my life–I just liked drawing comics. By that time we were drawing comics for ourselves, but we were starting to draw them with ink on the right paper and everything, not just on a piece of typing paper with a pencil. We wanted to print it somewhere but we didn’t know where, because it wasn’t your normal Marvel or DC fare. There wasn’t really much of a market for this stuff, we thought. We were still punk rockers in bands and we were just doing comics. We wanted to draw comics the way we wanted to see them, and we weren’t really seeing much of them out there.

GILBERT: Comics were our amusement for years, and what we were into was not what the mainstream companies were into at the time. We figured that by printing an underground magazine we would get it out there, mostly to see what the response would be–just something to do, really. It turned out that when we finally got our stuff together and put out a 32-page Love and Rockets comic, a fanzine/underground type thing, we were luckily noticed right away by Fantagraphics. The timing was just right–they were ready to publish their own comics. It took a little climb to get Love and Rockets going, but the response was very good, even in a small way at first, so that encouraged us to continue.

It’s not too often that people in the alternative comics area have that kind of success right out of the gate, but I guess you guys didn’t have a lot to compare it to. Before Love and Rockets there were the undergrounds, but they were sort of a different beast.

GILBERT: Yeah. Cerebus and ElfQuest were actually encouraging in the sense that it could be done, getting a following for a black-and-white comic. It wasn’t necessarily mainstream. Even though they were both geared for that audience, they were successful on their own.

Jaime, you had more “mainstream” elements in your early work, with its sci-fi flavor. Was that an attempt to tap the normal comics-reading audience, or was it just you following your bliss?

JAIME: It was pretty much just me. I liked drawing rockets and robots, as well as girls. [Laughs] It really was no big game plan. It was almost like, “Okay, I’ll give you rockets and robots, but I’ll show you how it’s done. I’m gonna do it, and this is how it’s supposed to be done!” I went in with that kind of attitude.

That’s definitely a punk attitude.

JAIME: Yeah. I’d see something was being done in other comics and I’d say, “Ah, no, no, that is not the way to do it. This is the way to do it.” That gave me encouragement to just do it. In the beginning, I was putting my whole life of drawing comics since I was a kid into this comic. When the characters started to take over, the other stuff started to drop out because it was getting in the way.

And the result was a book that’s been credited with inventing alternative comics as we know them, though that couldn’t have been your intention at the time.

GILBERT: I think that we did create a path, at least, using all our influences and what we saw about comics that we knew of since we were kids. That developed into mainstream comics in the ’60s, and undergrounds in the late ’60s, and then in the ’70s you’d have mainstream companies that would also publish black-and-white magazines–different things bouncing around here and there with a different format. That was encouraging to us as well. I think what happened with Love and Rockets is that since there really weren’t the kind of comics we were doing, that is bringing our mainstream influences into a new kind of comic, a new kind of underground, let’s say. An underground with more going on, hopefully. [Laughs] At least I would like to think so. It basically created a path for everybody to at least get on, not necessarily making it easier, but just [having] something there. It was just a different road to go down, and I think that is what we did somehow.

In each of your main storylines, you’ve both created these big, sprawling, interconnected casts over the years. Is that something that two of you talked over, or did it evolve spontaneously and separately out of what you both were interested in doing?

JAIME: I would say that it just kind of happened as the characters started to write themselves. I think because Gilbert started creating all-out characters, it just seemed like a good idea to me, or something. On my end, I basically just created characters that would fill in the gaps of the story. If I needed someone to say something in the back that was totally unrelated to the characters, I would create a character later on. What started out as a drawing of just somebody, I decided, “Hey, I’ll make that someone’s boyfriend.” While in the beginning they were just there to color up the place, after a while they started to take on lives of their own. That is how the characters started to multiply. What about you, Beto?

GILBERT: It would probably be my mainstream influence, with me. Like in, say, Peanuts: You could follow the strip with Charlie Brown and Linus for a few days, and then it would shift to Lucy and Violet. But you wouldn’t lose what the strip was about; it was because all the characters were so well informed that you are always in the Peanuts world. Even if sometimes it was about Snoopy or Sally Brown or whatever, you were always there. That’s on the high end, but in the middle there would be the Marvel Universe, actually, for me. I always liked what fans complain about now: the fact that they were all interconnected. If you needed something heavy and metallic and electronic, you went to Stark Industries. If you needed power, you went to Reed Richards’ unstable molecules. I always liked the crisscrossing of that. Of course it went into madness eventually [laughs], but at first it was very intriguing to a kid. It was something new for superheroes, that interconnecting. In the Hulk comic you could mention Stark Industries, and Iron Man or Tony Stark was nowhere near it but you knew what they were talking about. That is what I liked about it: that interconnecting, even when stuff is off camera. That is pretty much what inspired me to go ahead and do that with mine. That way, you just have a larger canvas to work from.

That’s a big part of L&R‘s appeal–you get the sense that we are following this handful of characters right now as they do things during the course of their day, but that if we just took that camera and moved over a couple of blocks, you could catch someone else in the middle of what is going on in their lives, too.

GILBERT: Yeah, and another aspect is that is how our family worked as well. That’s something we brought from home. Our family, our cousins, aunts and uncles were all interconnected the same way. That was an influence as well, the family unit.

JAIME: Yeah, it was a big family. Our aunt had six kids and our other aunt had six kids.

Talk a little bit about your main characters. In your case, Jaime, it’s Maggie and Hopey, the stars of The Girl From H.O.P.P.E.R.S., and with Gilbert it’s Luba, the main attraction in Human Diastrophism.

JAIME: Maggie started back in high school, where I wanted to create a character I could put into any type of story I wanted–send her to outer space, back to time, to her grandma’s house. She was just a drawing at first, and I just started to think wherever I go, Maggie goes. It took a while, but I put a lot of my thoughts into her, and that’s why she’s the main character and the stories follow her. I created her friend Hopey out of just wanting a sidekick, and seeing the punk girls in L.A. at the time; that was when I was first going to the punk shows. They just kind of hit off together. My Betty and Veronica, you could look at it that way. Or my Batman and Robin. [Laughs] They just worked. When we did the first issue, that was the first response I got: “I like your girl characters.” I went, “Cool, because I like doing them!” [Laughs] That is basically how that started, and Maggie continues because I know her so well and I can put a lot of stuff into her.

GILBERT: My work around the beginning was similar to Jaime’s: a science fiction, two-girls-hanging-out-type thing. Once Jaime’s came out, the response to it was immediate. I could see how much more defined it was [than mine] and how much potential it had. Jaime had already grabbed it and was working that side of it just fine, so I abandoned my stuff and thought, “What is it I really want to say that’s different?” I just kept going back to the idea of this imaginary Latin-American village [called Palomar]. The more I thought about it and the more I felt it out, the more it seemed right. It was completely different from what Jaime was doing. Even from the beginning I thought that Love and Rockets should be a bigger thing. It shouldn’t be just all the same thing, and since Jaime was taking care of that part of it, then doing something completely different but still on the same page would make Love and Rockets a bigger thing, a bigger work of art. So that’s where the encouragement came from, bouncing off the fact that Jaime’s was done and already the response was good, so all I had to do was fill in the rest. I was a little freer, actually, to do something that might not have been commercially viable. I think that Palomar was a little chancier than doing the girl/rocket stuff at the time.

JAIME: I could tell you that Gilbert’s approach helped me a lot in taking the girls out of the science fiction, to handle stuff more at home. Gilbert was the older brother, anyway, so he really did everything before me, ever since we were little. [Laughs]

GILBERT: What’s very interesting about the science fiction stuff is that the question we get asked the most, at least out loud, is “Where is the rocket? That’s the real Love and Rockets.” Oddly, that’s the smaller segment of the audience–they’re just more vocal. The real audience is the one who followed Maggie and Hopey’s adventures as real girls, so to speak, and the Palomar stories. That is the real Love and Rockets reader. But for some reason we have the most outspoken ones saying, “When are you going to do the rockets? It’s called Love and Rockets!” That’s fine, we love doing rocket stuff, but the real Love and Rockets is what we are famous for.

You mentioned that the audience has changed, and now the less genre-y things are actually more commercially viable. Jaime’s had his work published in The New York Times, your recent collections have gotten major mainstream-publication review acreage–could you ever have seen this coming?

JAIME: I think that for me, it was more a case of, “One of these days, sure, I’d like my character standing next to Charlie Brown and Betty and Veronica and Superman.” But I was just hoping we would be able to continue doing it and hopefully make a major living off of it because I didn’t want to do anything else with my life. It was like, “Oh boy, I can continue!” But “How long is this going to go?” I wasn’t even thinking about it. Twenty-five years later, I’m going, “Wow, a quarter of a century and I’m still allowed to do this?” It’s amazing. I just think back to all the talented people I knew in the past who had to stop because they just couldn’t live off of doing their comics.

GILBERT: The one time I got thrown was when we were getting a lot more attention doing Love and Rockets and people were really accepting what we wanted to do in it. What really threw me was when I got to a point where readers would tell us, “I used to read Batman, but now I read your stuff.” I thought that was really creepy. I’d go, “You mean you’d rather read us than Batman?” Batman, Superman, all that stuff–they were icons when we were growing up. Nobody ever thought somebody would rather read stuff that wasn’t that. It just threw me and was something I never really thought about, that someone might like a different kind of comic outside of the Big Two. For us it was always a note of encouragement: “We just better step up to the plate then. If this is what they are saying about us, if this is what they like about us, then we better be good!” And we’ve done our best to stick to our guns about giving the most honest comic we can–coming from our point of view, of course. But it threw me for a bit. It seemed like we were being scrutinized for a while, like, “Okay, this stuff is getting more attention than The Incredible Hulk, so let’s see what they’re gonna do next.” We were like, “Oops!” The only thing you can do is try to get better. Otherwise you’d crumble if you tried to compromise or change things.

What do you think of the new digest versions of your work?

GILBERT: For me, I just trust our publisher. I don’t have the say of how it is going to be packaged, because I couldn’t tell you how, so I have to trust them a lot. I think it’s great if it’ll just give us shelf space. Don’t colorize it or something like that. [Laughs] But as long as it’s presentable and someone will put it on their shelf, that’s all I can ask for.

Jaime, your latest digest includes “The Death of Speedy” and “Flies on the Ceiling,” two of your best-known–and darkest–stories. How did each of them come about?

JAIME: Back before “The Death of Speedy” and “Flies on the Ceiling,” I did this story about Speedy talking to his friend about his sister Izzy. He mentioned how she was all normal and then she went to Mexico and came back weird. When I wrote that, I didn’t know exactly what happened to her. I got that question every time: “What happened to Izzy in Mexico?” I’d say, “Oh, I’ll tell you one of these days.” But to myself I was saying, “Yeah, when I find out!” [Laughs] It took almost 10 years to write. It all came from that, and it took on many forms and shapes and sizes till I finally did “Flies on the Ceiling.” With “The Death of Speedy,” certain continuity was building up in the drama, and all of this was building up to where I wanted to kill somebody. I wanted someone to die. But it was another one of those things where I thought, “I’ll show you how to have someone die.” I was going to challenge myself and everybody else. Speedy became the guy just because of the way things were going: I wanted to kill a main character, and he was a victim of my plans. [Laughs] It didn’t have to be him, but it ended up being him. Years after that I asked myself, “Should I have ever killed him?” It was just one of those things that he fell victim to.

Do you ever wish you could bring him back to life, Superman-style?

JAIME: That’s the cool thing with Love and Rockets: You can always have flashbacks. It doesn’t mean they come back to life; you just tell a story that happened not to screw with history. Which I get really close to, sometimes, just because it’s tempting. I can always bring Speedy back–just in the past. I don’t want it to become formula. I have to do it right.

Gilbert, in your case, again, it’s fairly dark material, since “Human Diastrophism” is about a serial killer preying upon Palomar. What made you let loose this violence on these characters in this town you created?

GILBERT: There was no direct line, no conscious effort to be that dark. It just sort of came out as the stories were developing. Whatever darkness there was is from my unconscious. I don’t really know what the source, but I just wanted darker stories. I was also tired of the cramped format, doing a few pages an issue; I wanted to do a longer story, and the longer the story is, I feel I have to give more. I was basically doing stories unchecked, throwing everything in that I could. In those days I would write stories thinking, “When I finish this story, if I get hit by a truck the next day, then I’ll be satisfied that this is my last story.” I don’t do that anymore. Now I think, “Oh, that was my first story,” and that works just as well when I work. “This is my first story, I’m just getting started, I’m just learning.” In the old days it was the other way around: “Okay, if I’m done with the story then I’m done, but I better get down to business.” I wanted to do the world in a microcosm that had death and rebirth. Everything that you can imagine in an epic story, I tried to stick it in one big story. Like Jaime’s story, I chose a character because whenever you are dealing with a story that big and that universal, the characters that you hurt the most have to be ones you care about, unfortunately. You can’t just make up a character and kill them, because it doesn’t matter. If it’s a character that the readers cared for to a degree, that’s what gives the story more resonance, especially in a large story like that. We don’t really do it to shock or anything, but it’s just part of life.

That is what I was going for with that. And once I was done with it and it did get very good response, then what do you do after that? You just start all over and do your damnedest not to cheapen the story. You try not to refer too much to that story, unless it’s little things you need that you left out or something. Jaime and I are clever enough to bring back those characters in a legitimate way, without cheapening it. In Jaime’s “The Death of Speedy,” you never really see what happened–it could have been somebody else and not Speedy who was killed. There’s that little twist that you can do and make it convincing. The same with Tonantzin setting herself on fire in my story. I could very well say it wasn’t her, it was a set-up. I’m just saying that we’re able to do stories where we can make it work–we’re just not going to. It’s too easy, it’s too pat, and it just cheapens the earlier story.

The characters in both the “Locas” and “Palomar” stories aren’t like the ones in Peanuts or in Riverdale High or in the Marvel Universe–they age in real time. Why’d you make that choice, and do you ever regret it?

JAIME: First of all, it was Gilbert’s idea to actually age them. I’ll let him explain.

GILBERT: I was thinking of a sprawling epic that took years to complete. I think I aged them too quickly for my taste now. I definitely regret that it was a little too quick compared to how long we have been doing it. We’ve been doing it for 25 years and that is not really too quick, but it is in terms of comics because I’m still doing them. I’m not done with the characters that are getting older. What happens is you get the “Tiny Yokum syndrome”: The old strip Li’l Abner was about a bachelor who was being chased by a lovely woman, [and eventually] they married and had a kid. Well, now Li’l Abner is responsible. He can no longer have wacky, nutty adventures because he’s married and has a kid. He has to stay home and take care of the family. What they did was create a character, his little brother, named Tiny. Basically, Tiny had the adventures that Li’l Abner could no longer have–but we don’t know Tiny, we know Li’l Abner. The problem that happened with aging my characters too quickly is that I had to come up with characters to replace the older characters, and it’s not as good. I’ve had several characters to replace my main character Luba, but none of them are Luba. That presents itself in that way, even though some readers probably don’t even know who Luba is because they only read the new ones. That’s fine, but it’s something I regret a little bit, and I keep pushing the main characters back.

Jaime, earlier you compared Maggie and Hopey to Betty and Veronica, but in this case there’s no Archie. Both of you focus on female characters. Was that a conscious choice? Did you just like drawing girls or did you really think you had something to say about women?

JAIME: I think it all started when I was a budding teenager and Gilbert was a teenager, and he said, “Jaime, you should start drawing girls.” And I went, “No, I can’t do that–Mom will kill me!” And he just goes, ‘No, it’s cool,” because he was drawing girls left and right. I started and I thought, “Oh God, I can’t draw girls–[mine] are so terrible!” Then after a while you couldn’t stop me. It all started from wanting and liking to draw women. They are much more fun than drawing men. I thought, you can have your cake and eat it too if you do your comic starring the women instead of the men. You can have men, but you get a lot more done if you are drawing a character you like. At the same time, it’s something Gilbert talked about earlier: When I was young, I always felt that if I was going to put something in my comics, I had to back it up. I had to step to the plate and be responsible. So there was always talk about T&A–“You just like women as objects” and stuff. I was like, “No I don’t–look!” So I started making them characters. I thought, “That’s easy! Just do it! I don’t have to feel responsible to create 10-hundred male superheroes to 10 female superheroes–I can just concentrate on the female superheroes!” That’s how it started for me. Gilbert was well on his way before me, being the older guy. I just followed along.

GILBERT: A lot of Love and Rockets is just simply what we wanted to do, even superficially–if we feel like drawing a person wearing these clothes, doing this thing, just because we feel like drawing that. Most of the time it’s a woman doing it. Then we started giving the characters personalities, like Jaime said, having our cake and eating it too. There was a weird little rub there because we kept getting asked, “Why are you doing women?” Just the fact we were asked that all the time, it was like, “Something is wrong here if you have to ask us why. Why do anything? Do people ask Frank Miller why his stories are so violent?” People are fine with violence but they’re nervous about women for some reason. So we are always up to the challenge. We stick our elbows up and go, “Look, we’re gonna do this and we’re gonna do it as best we can.” We kept getting encouraged–the more we did it, the more good response we got. Then every once in a while, “Why do you do women?” and I thought, “It is really a boys’ club out there, isn’t it?”

JAIME: It was almost like the more they told us not to, the more we did it. It was like, “I don’t see anything I’m doing wrong here. What am I afraid of?”

Who do you consider your peers? What other comics out there interest you?

JAIME: It’s harder for me to say now, because I’ve gotten so locked in this Love and Rockets world of mine, creating my stories and not looking at anyone around me, so I don’t know. I guess it’s competition on the shelves: “Who’s taking up my shelf space?” That’s how it is [now]. When Gilbert and I started out, it was like we were welcomed by the mainstream when the comic first came out, but we didn’t have the heart to tell most of the mainstream, “We don’t want to do what you guys are doing.” I didn’t want to be an assh— about it or anything–we were getting all this support–but we thought, “Oh, so you’re gonna do Secret Wars? After we talked about how there’s a new comics world, you’re gonna go back and do that? Well, fine, you do that, but don’t ask me why I’m not.” It wasn’t till more alternatives and people with their own goofy comics like ours started popping out that we started to get these peers coming out of the woodwork. I would say when the Peter Bagges and the Dan Clowes started coming out too, we kind of formed this little… I don’t want to say club, because everyone lived in a different state. [Laughs] But we liked seeing each other at conventions and events like that.

GILBERT: Were you talking about peers now?

That would be the follow-up. Are you also “head-down,” like Jaime?

GILBERT: I am, pretty much. I’m just so focused on getting work out that I look for influences and for other things to inspire me, [and] rarely is that another comic book these days. One reason is that alternative comics, as far as series go, are barely there anymore. Love and Rockets is one of the few that comes out on a relatively regular basis that continues this old tradition that is pretty much gone now. It’s mostly graphic novels and online comics. It’s just different, and a different way to get ahold of comics. The alternative comics they call pamphlets now are simply not around like they were. I don’t look at comics on the Internet. I don’t really look at the Internet too much. I’m focused on writing the best comics I can, and that takes up most of our lives, really. I don’t want to dis anybody or ignore anyone–I’m just not really focused on things outside at this time.

JAIME: I find that when I go to a comic store I leave with an old Marvel or DC archive 99 percent of the time.

It is kind of a golden age for that stuff. The sheer volume of old stuff that is coming into print in really nice books is amazing.

JAIME: Gilbert told me recently that they did the complete [Steve] Ditko Amazing Spider-Man, and I’m just achin’ to go and get that.

GILBERT: Actually, that just came out, and here is a plug for Marvel. I think that now that that’s collected, the Ditko-[Stan] Lee Spider-Man, I think we finally have a book to show and put down and say, “This, for me, is the best superhero comic ever right here.” There has been stuff that has been pretty close, like [Will Eisner’s] The Spirit and [C.C. Beck’s] Captain Marvel and other things, but this, to me, is the grail of superheroes. It’s great to have it in a package like that. Which means I have to rebuy it. [Laughs] I’ve bought that stuff so many times now in different formats.

JAIME: So this is what we’re influenced by, see? [Laughs] We have nothing to show about the new stuff–this is all stuff we liked when we were kids.

What does Love and Rockets have that would appeal to the kinds of readers who haven’t said yet, “I used to read Batman, but now I read you guys?”

JAIME: It’s more difficult these days, because there are more ways of getting ahold of comics with the Internet and different things now. I think what hooked people, the mainstream readers, from reading Batman or Superman and went to Love and Rockets is that [we] were serialized at the time. New stories about Maggie and Hopey were continued from issue to issue, new stories about Palomar continued from issue to issue. The reader could identify with that, reading a serialized adventure that was similar, superficially, to reading a Batman comic. Now Love and Rockets is different, a little more fragmented, a little more experimental, a little more idiosyncratic, I think. It’s different from how mainstream comics are read now. I get a bunch of free [mainstream] comics every month, and I look at them, and you got to be really into them to know what’s going on. You have to be a fan of that particular book to know what is going on. It’s a different day now, a different way to look at comics now, so it’s probably not as easy to grab that audience these days.

I know when I started getting into you guys it was difficult because of the array of formats and editions that were out there: You had the ongoing series, the trades, the spinoffs…But I feel like now, with the digests, it’s nice and easy. In the same way that now a lot of the superhero comic book companies are collecting the complete Lee-Ditko Spider-Man and all these big giant historical runs of series in these easy-to-follow collections, it’s now a better time than ever to get in on the ground floor of Love and Rockets and start from the beginning pretty easily and affordably. I’ve seen it happen around the office–those digests spread like wildfire.

JAIME: I imagine that is what is going to happen with reprinting this old stuff. It’s sort of like seeing 11-year-old kids with Ramones shirts now–three of the main Ramones are dead. [Laughs] Their music is over 30 years old now, and 11-year-olds are into the Ramones! So you never know. There could be a Lee-Ditko Spider-Man comeback with kids. Who knows?

GILBERT: I met an 8-year-old kid a couple of years ago whose mom kept badgering him: “This guy draws comics! Tell him who your favorite Spider-Man artist is!” And the kid, under his breath, goes, “Ditko.” I was like, yes! [Laughs]

JAIME: Ditko quit in ’67, so it was a long time ago. It’s kind of cool, things being in perpetual print.

Any closing words of wisdom?

GILBERT [in mock-pretentious voice]: We’re not only mainstream geeks here– we’re actually progressive artists. [Laughs] I’m kidding. I don’t know about the progressive part and I don’t know about the artist part. [Laughs] We’re going to continue doing Love and Rockets projects that strike our fancy. And I have a couple of other books coming out. One will be a Dark Horse miniseries which will eventually become a graphic novel called Speak of the Devil–that’s in stores this July. I have another graphic novel coming out in June called Chance in Hell, and that’s my first actual graphic novel with Fantagraphics. It’s in the digest size–not quite as small as manga, but around that size. Hopefully, the casual reader will be like, “Hey, there’s a small book–it must be manga!” [Laughs] That could help!

* Guillermo Del Toro is kinda walking back the notion that there will be a second Hobbit film–in essence he says he’d like to do one but he’s not going to force it if it turns out that the material in the books for which the filmmakers have the rights (The Hobbit and the three Lord of the Rings books including the appendices in The Return of the King–all the other ancillary materials are off-limits) doesn’t readily yield a story. (Via Jason Adams.)

* For some reason, DC Comics prevented the inclusion of an excerpt from Paul Pope’s excellent Batman Year 100 in this year’s Best American Comics. What a country!

* Brian Ralph likes He-Man figures too!

* Finally, here’s something I’ve been putting off linking to for some time. Just when you thought you’d heard the worst story of incest and child abuse that could possibly surface this year, you see this story about a Czech woman who over a period of months partially skinned alive her son, who she kept chained in a basement naked in his own filth, and consumed the flesh along with her family, including a 34-year-old woman posing as the boy’s 13-year-old sister, all of whom were members of the Grail Movement cult; the crime was discovered when a neighbor installed a baby monitor that accidentally picked up live footage of the imprisoned boy that his mother would watch for pleasure.

Enjoy your weekend.

This morning I woke up to the sad news that artist Michael Turner has died. (Via Tom Spurgeon.) Presumably this is as a result of the cancer that he’d struggled with for years and years. A few years ago, while I was working at Wizard, I helped put together a book about Mike and his art–I literally wrote the book on Michael Turner–and during the days I spent with him I was really struck by what a kind, friendly guy he was. It’d be pretty easy for a dude with Turner’s looks and superstar-artist-in-the-Image-mold status to be a conceited jerk, but he wasn’t, at all, and that was evident not just from my own interactions with him but with the obviously genuine love and devotion his friends, co-workers, and family displayed about him. I know his art comes in for abuse over its excesses, but I always thought it had a real glamour to it–indeed, the original idea for my David Bowie sketchbook arose from me wondering “If I get the chance to get a Michael Turner sketch, who should I ask him to draw.” I would love to have seen what he’d have drawn in that book, and now I won’t get the chance. He was really way, way too young for this to happen to him, and I’m terribly sad about it.