[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.

* Hey, lookit this: In today’s Archive Spotlight at Top Shelf 2.0, you can relive the glory of me and Matt Wiegle’s action-adventure strip “Destructor Comes to Croc Town.” Watch one angry man in a suit of armor unmake a civilization!

* Discussion of Final Crisis #2 continues. Here’s Joe McCulloch wondering whether “good Grant Morrison superhero comic” and “good DC Comics event lynchpin thing” work at cross-purposes:

And then there’s that odd taste of self-awareness, even a little tiredness – Superman hoping the Martian Manhunter will be revived sometime in the future, Lex Luthor acting utterly bored at the death of some expendable superhero (in an Event comic! *yawn*). Like Didio implied, these characters have seen it all. Is it good for the health of DC comics, rather than the DC Universe? Hell, I don’t know. And while I’m aware that if things get so bad they board up the windows it’ll mean less chances for people like Grant Morrison to write comics, I still find it awfully tough to shift my focus onto what’s Good For the Industry when I’m trying to interface with a particular work – my problem, folks.

“Problem”?

* And in the comments at thishyere blog, Sean B. of the late, lamented Strange Ink addresses the nature of the threat presented by this series’ big bad guy, a Darkseid in human skin, as opposed to the traditional event-comic villainy:

It’s about the superfolk of DC coming to see that evil is not just the flaming spear flying into your Martian chest – beneath all their day-to-day conflicts with the various baddies of the physical world, the real battle has been fought and lost already. A crisis of faith – that what you do makes no difference at all when Secret Gods are pulling the strings. It’s almost Kirby by way of Lovecraft in a way?

That is dead-on and brilliant.

* Tom Spurgeon explains at length why the Claremont/Cockrum/Byrne-era X-Men worked. Tom’s tolerance for superhero stories is pretty low, so watching him unpack why these superhero stories clicked on any number of levels is pretty compelling.

* Jim Treacher recommends some genre novels by erstwhile comics writers Duane Swierczynski and Charlie Huston.

* Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis #2 came out today; Douglas Wolk has annotations, while Grame McMillan wonders if it’s too smart a book for its own good, or DC’s good at least.

* It’s a good day for reading Tom Spurgeon, as he spotlights 12 unjustly overlooked comics from the past 12 years (including works from Gilbert Hernandez and Michael Kupperman, as well as Chuck Austen’s wonderful, balls-out R-rated Marvel comic U.S. War Machine) and reviews Matt Furie’s brilliantly funny Boys Club, serving up your quote of the day:

Like some of the best comics out there, one can imagine the reading of Boy’s Club to be an act in the same vein as the way of life promoted in its pages.

* I like that I found out about the November release of a 28-DVD, 2-CD, 10-pound, $400 Complete Sopranos box set at The Soup‘s blog.

*And Now the Screaming Starts’ CRwM reflects on the sexlessness of torture porn.

* Brian Heiler salutes the 10 Greatest Playsets of All Time. I’m the proud former owner of three–the Terrordome, Castle Grayskull, and the Hall of Justice. Notable omissions: the USS Flagg, the Defiant, the Fright Zone, Snake Mountain, Ewok Village…

* Cryptomundo’s Loren Coleman examines the strange case of the Giant Alaskan Ocean Platypus. I have to say that a six-foot seafaring platypus would basically be the greatest water monster ever.

* Now that I’ve finally seen all three series in their entirety, it was my great pleasure to finally dive into Matt Zoller Seitz, Andrew Sepinwall, and Andrew Johnston’s debate over which TV drama is the greatest of all time: David Milch’s Deadwood (Seitz), David Simon’s The Wire (Sepinwall), or David Chase’s The Sopranos (Johnston). I still think they left out a David (Lynch and Twin Peaks); also, having followed a Netflix-enabled viewing of The Wire with one of Deadwood, I think I can say without fear of contradiction that Deadwood makes The Wire look like T.J. Hooker; but have you even doubted for a second that the debate (available in both podcast and text form) is a fascinating one?

* Since finishing Deadwood last night and thereafter immersing myself in whatever online commentary I could find (Seitz’s columns on the final season for the Newark Star-Ledger have tragically been disappeared), I’ve learned of the ignominious fate HBO relegated the show to and just gotten angrier and angrier with each passing hour. It’s to the point where I can check out this pretty bitchin’-lookin’ Deadwood: The Complete Series DVD set and merely be enraged that they have the gall to call it “the complete series.” Cocksuckers.

* Finally (for now; I’m guessing I’ll have more to say about this show in the future), here is a lengthy, must-read encomium to the fight between Dan Dority and Captain Turner, the most brutal and best fight scene I’ve ever seen.

* Is it just me, or does this USA Today article on the Avengers movie bury the lede? It quotes Jon Favreau as “revealing” the character line-up every nerd on earth already knew (Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, the Hulk) but sorta glosses over the fact that, according to the article at least, he’s actively working on the Iron Man sequel he supposedly hadn’t even been contacted about. I don’t know if it’s just an assumption by the reporter or what, but it seems like news. Anyway, I’m making this the fourth item in this post because I care about it a lot less than I care about Deadwood, but what’s up with the rest of the nerdosphere? Did I miss something? (Via SciFi Wire, who also whiff.)

* Clive Barker continues to actively protest the treatment of the upcoming CB adaptation The Midnight Meat Train. This time he’s publicly laying the blame for the film’s supposed burial at the feet of new Lionsgate honcho Joe Drake, who he says is deliberately scuppering projects shepherded by his predecessor Peter Block, Meat Train included. If you’d like to politely contact Mr. Drake and ask him to reconsider his studio’s plans for the film, you may do so by emailing jdrake@lionsgate.com or calling (310) 449-9200 and asking for Joe Drake’s office.

* Dread Central’s Johnny Butane has a post on an interesting-sounding showcase of the reality-horror films [REC], Butcher, and Home Movie at the upcoming Fantasia Festival.

* Speaking of [REC], quick question, horror fans: Why can’t I find this movie on Netflix? Am I doing something wrong?

* Shit the bed, it’s a Quintesson action figure! These suckers duke it out with Golobulus and Cobra-La for the title of “weirdest addition to a major ’80s action-figure/cartoon franchise.”

* Finally, Nigel Tufnel’s green skeleton shirt…Chris Knight’s “I HEART Toxic Waste” tee…bouncer shirts from the Double Deuce…”STEPHEN KING RULES” from The Monster Squad…FoundItemClothing.com is one “BULL SHIT” t-shirt from The Jerk away from being the greatest t-shirt retailer ever.

That’s the video for the exuberantly sleazy “Pay for Me” by Whale. Even back when it first came out, when I was still in the throes of being very very very fucking serious about everything I listened to, I saw that hilarious first shot of them using a vinyl copy of Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy to scratch with and thought “GodDAMN that’s fucking VICIOUS.” That sort of blow against tedious authenticity brings a smile to my face I can only compare to the look on a supervillain’s face when something evil is about to go down.

And because I know you’re hankering for it now:

* Would you like to watch all four seasons of Lost online for free? Then go here and here, because ABC has recently signed a deal with Veoh to stream their series online

* B-Sol at the Vault of Horror concludes his series on the modern zombie movie, taking us from the mid-’90s video game Resident Evil through the 28 Days Later-inspired zombie renaissance to the present day. If anything, I think he undersells the degree to which this decade has seen George A. Romero’s zombie films, particularly Dawn of the Dead, enshrined as the apotheosis of contemporary horror, the template against which other horror movies are now judged by critics.

* I was pretty convinced I blogged about this when I saw it but apparently I didn’t: Quentin Tarantino says that his long-discussed World War II action epic Inglorious Bastards (which I didn’t realize was a remake, of a movie by Enzo Castellari) will be split into two parts, Kill Bill style.

* Kristin Thompson notes that the London Times has largely retracted an article that made it sound like Christopher Tolkien was trying to singlehandedly take down production of the Hobbit films in some sort of grudge match.

* Lara Flynn Boyle rounds out her week of blogging about Twin Peaks. As with past entries you wonder if she correctly remembers who any of her female castmembers were, but aside from that it’s a fun glimpse into just how green she was at the time.

* In referring to The Happening as a fun and original B-movie, I think Adam Balz has found another way to accurately describe the deliberately off-kilter tone I was trying to describe with my “satire with violence instead of comedy” formulation. Anyway, please see the comment thread in my post for interesting back-and-forth between Jason Adams, Jon Hastings, Shaggy, Rickey Purdin, and hopefully myself if I get a few minutes.

* Speaking of back and forth, I enjoyed a little comment-thread debate I had with my favorite music writer, Matthew Perpetua, about the new album from renowned sample-pirate Girl Talk–go here and here. I also recommend you listen to him offer a pretty even-handed assessment of GT’s ouevre generally and new album Feed the Animals specifically on NPR. I think I finally grok his objection to the aspects of GT’s work he doesn’t like: the result of its juxtapositions are sometimes merely additive (eg. cocky rap vocals plus cock-rock metal anthem equals cocky cock-rap) or non sequitur (eg. big hip-hop beat plus Dawson’s Creek theme song equals “haha that’s hilarious!”) rather than “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” (eg. Young Jeezy’s “Soul Survivor” plus “Scentless Apprentice” plus “Passin’ Me By” plus “Juicy” plus “Tiny Dancer” equals a song about the horror of being trapped in a seemingly inescapable sociopolitical/mental environment and the euphoria of transcending it).

* In labeling The Incredible Hulk a failure with interesting visuals, Reverse Shot’s Matt Connolly serves up a couple of great lines about facial hair and your quote of the day:

As if in response to Lee’s intellectualized (which is not to say intelligent) infusion of convoluted psychological underpinnings into comic book mythology, director Louis Leterrier and screenwriter Zak Penn have streamlined their film’s focus to the body itself, specifically the male specimen: how it flexes, morphs, and bulges in frightening and entrancing ways.

This makes a lot of sense. After all, what else is Tim Roth’s Emil Blonsky looking for but gamma-Viagra, and what else is the purpose of the scene where Bruce refrains from bedding Betty due to his uncontrollable prowess than proof that his Jade Giant is bigger than Blonsky’s?

* The next best thing to being there: Tom Spurgeon reviews Heroes Con 2008, to which I was invited but regrettably could not make it.

* Evil on Two Legs looks at Camp Crystal Lake fashion. It’s, um, not hot.

* Check it out: Monster Brains’ Aeron Alfrey has a creature gallery of his own–1,000 beasts strong!

* Long ago, when reviewing Children of Men, I wondered if the film’s depiction of anti-immigrant hysteria amid economic privation of the sort that could be alleviated by immigrants made sense given what one would think would be the native people’s self-interest. This post from Matthew Yglesias points to a real-world analogue that shows it makes all too much sense, unfortunately.

SPOILERS FOR THE HAPPENING AHOY. Sorry, I tried, but I just couldn’t do without.

Before you read anything I write about M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening you should stop and read everything Jon Hastings has to say on the subject. He does yeoman’s work as a Shyamalan apologist, trying to defend what were (to him and to me) obviously conscious choices made by Shyamalan in this movie against critics whose (to him and to me) increasingly comical and depressing conservatism led them to believe Shyamalan was trying to make a completely different movie and just screwed it up.* A movie that knows its place, basically. For god’s sake, do these people not understand there’s more than one way to skin a cat?

As you can gather I liked it. I’m not over the moon for it–in Shyamalan’s oeuvre I prefer The Village (haven’t seen The Lady in the Water but I sure am gonna now, and while Jon is quite right to point out that it’s doing something entirely different than Spielberg’s thematically and structurally** similar War of the Worlds, I find I prefer what War of the Worlds did. But the vituperative response to it is really completely unjustified. And while I know it’s a mug’s game to dismiss critics on an ad hominem basis, it’s tough for me to see the hostile reaction as anything but its own ad hominem rejection of Shyamalan for being too serious and too big for his britches, refusing to deliver the crowd-pleasers he’s apparently supposed to be delivering. That, and as I alluded to above, I’m literally sitting here shaking my head that people could watch (say) Mark Wahlberg’s performance in this movie, or John Leguizamo’s, and it doesn’t occur to them that they weren’t gunning for The Departed in terms of acting style. It’s like people complaining that Nicholson was over the top in The Shining.

I think the way to look at The Happening is as a satire with violence instead of comedy. (I’m a big fan of this kind of substitution, hence my theory that Eyes Wide Shut is a horror movie with sex instead of violence.) What you have here is a film in which the Earth basically decides to take a small corner of itself and murder all the people on it that it can. Then it stops, and then at the end of the film it picks another corner and starts again. Throughout, the horror imagery is of people calmly methodically killing themselves–in essence, reducing everyone’s personal stories and goals and ethics to a bloody punchline.

The death that struck me hardest is that of John Leguizamo’s grumpy, sort of unlikeable math teacher. Here’s a guy who despite the possibility of losing his own wife still finds the time to make his buddy’s wife, who he’s never liked, feel like a piece of shit; who also has the presence of mind to help keep a fellow survivor calm by getting her to work through a math puzzle in lieu of freaking out; then BOOM, he wanders out of a car wreck that killed his fellow passengers, plops himself down in the middle of the road, grabs a piece of glass and goes to work on his wrist. And when you think about it, what are the final two scenes–life goes on with Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel, while life ends in Paris–but that same sick joke writ large?

So yeah, what I like about The Happening is that it’s the anti-Signs Not that I didn’t like Signs, because I do, it’s just that this movie is nihilistic where that one was optimistic perhaps to a fault. Is Shyamalan really this angry about climate change? Did the critics just break him down? Who knows, but I’ll eat it. As Wahlberg sing-songily deduces his way through the catastrophe, people keep dying and dying, and as he and his wife (and the poor little girl they’re supposed to be keeping safe) decide to make one last grand gesture of love, the dying stops, and ultimately it’s all sort of meaningless. Meanwhile a billboard outside a model-home McMansion poised to turn the middle of nowhere into an exurb proclaims, in the familiar and infuriating language of American advertising, “You Deserve This!” Indeed.

* Surely the Betty Buckley sequence illustrates that Shyamalan knows how to be really, really scary and could do so throughout the film if he felt like it. He didn’t!

** Very similar, in fact: initial urban outbreak, flight through the highways and byways, commandeered cars, the shattering of ad hoc groups, savagery among survivors, offerer of refuge becomes immediate threat and also happens to be nuts, last horrible moments, threat peters out, kinda happy ending. Shyamalan just adds an extra scene that shifts the balance, which is just one reason why, as Jon says, it’s incorrect to view him as a Spielberg manqué.

Because I fail at self-promotion I’ve neglected to mention that my comic book Murder is on sale at the Partyka table at Heroes Con right this very moment. If you’re there you might consider buying it. If you’re not, you still might consider buying it.

* Reviews of things I haven’t seen part one: Tom Spurgeon reviews Jason’s new collection of old material, Pocket Full of Rain.

* Reviews of things I haven’t seen part two: my pal TJ Dietsch reviews Jack Kirby’s OMAC.

* Reviews of things I haven’t seen part three: Jon Hastings keeps on talkin’ up M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening. This time he’s asking potential audience members to go in with the assumption that Shyamalan, for want of a better phrase, meant to do that.

* Review of thing I have seen: Jim Treacher talks about The Incredible Hulk.

* Crisis at DC Comics: Dick Hyacinth offers a wide-ranging musing on the failure of Final Crisis to ignite the audience, while Douglas Wolk focuses on its implications for New Gods/Fourth World continuity.

* Lara Flynn Boyle is continuing to blog about Twin Peaks.

* Jason Adams spotlights his five favorite monsters from the films of the ’00s.

* Looks like Clive Barker is getting behind a fan campaign to persuade Lionsgate to give Midnight Meat Train a wider release. Here’s a brief statement from Clive to that effect (via STYD), and here’s a longer, more formal letter from Barker on behalf of an email drive. Hey, why not? Polite but firm pleas to expand the film’s release beyond the rumored 100-theater limited run may be directed to Lionsgate investor relations at keasterling@lionsgate.com, or Lionsgate as a whole at general-inquiries@lionsgate.com or (310) 449-9200.

* In the interest of accuracy, here’s the SciFi Channel’s response to earlier reports of an extended back-half ofBattlestar Galactica‘s final season. They’re only confirming that the finale “extends beyond the time allotted for the episode.”

* Carlos Pacheco will be joining (read: subbing in for) J.G. Jones on the art chores for Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis. Pacheco is actually a terrific superhero artist, better than Jones in some respects in fact, but this just doesn’t bode well for the management of the series, particularly given how its writer has been publicly saying he wrote the scripts long enough ago for other recent series to not yet have been a twinkle in their editors’ eyes.

* Lara Flynn Boyle is blogging about Twin Peaks. Man, what an awesome sentence that was to write. Sample quote:

A lot of kids went to college and they talk about their college years as so great. I never went to college; for me, college was Twin Peaks. I was able to have David Lynch direct me beautifully and slowly into a scene. That was my kegger.

(Via Whitney Matheson.)

* This video for the Junior M.A.F.I.A.’s “Get Money” constructed from edited footage of Destro (in the role of the Notorious B.I.G.) and the Baroness (Li’l Kim) from G.I. Joe is very very funny, but it also has the effect of all great Biggie tracks, which is to flabbergast me that Puffy was ever responsible for something this good. (Via Topless Robot.)

* Jon Hastings expands his defense of The Happening and the work of M. Night Shyamalan generally, and I continue not to read it until I’ve actually seen the film.

* Curt Purcell continues his critique of Sigmund Freud’s “The Uncanny” by poking holes in the way Freud addresses primitive/superstitious beliefs.

* Finally, no one defies Golobulus and lives. No one!