Sean T. Collins has written about comics and popular culture professionally since 2001 and on this very blog since 2003. He has written for Maxim, The Comics Journal, Stuff, Wizard, A&F Quarterly, Comic Book Resources, Giant, ToyFare, The Onion, The Comics Reporter and more. His comics have been published by Top Shelf, Partyka, and Family Style. He blogs here and at Robot 6.
(Provided that I deem them suitably fabulous, your name and message will be considered eligible for publication unless you specify otherwise.) Review Copies Welcome
[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.
* Don S. Davis, Twin Peaks' Major Garland Briggs, is dead. The Major was one of Twin Peaks' most likeable and fascinating characters, a late bloomer in terms of becoming a major player who evolved into a model of intellectual and emotional decency on a par with Agent Cooper himself, and this was surely in no small part due Davis's tremendous grace with everything the writers gave him to do and say. I'll miss him, for this magnificent monologue and more.
* Sean's friends are online part three: Kiel Phegley interviews incoming Immortal Iron Fist writer Duane Swierczynski. Saying Swierczynski has a tough act to follow after Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction's run (the only reason anyone cares about the character at all) is putting it mildly, so the start of his tenure on the title will be more closely observed than most.
* Guillermo Del Toro explains to SciFi Wire how he plans to tapdance between the raindrops of copyright issues on the one hand and the existing Lord of the Rings films on the other while making The Hobbit and (maybe) its sequel.
Mostly a small art book (part of D&Q's series of such, called Pétits Livres) than a comic, Bacter-Area spotlights Keith Jones's brightly colored, perspectivally flattened, manically busy drawings and sculpture. Spiritually it's akin to things you've seen from Elvis Studio and Marc Bell--little Where's Waldo-style depictions of town squares filled with non-sequitur billboards and weird looking monster-people and lots and lots of lines, a satire on the riot of visual information inherent in the modern urban landscape, that kinda thing. Jones's personal spin involves lots of tubular birdies, people shooting solid beams out of their eyes at other people, the occasional Guernica allusion, rubbery macaroni-like arms, and sometimes bands of shrouded faceless Brinkman-esque figures. With the possible exception of one imposing, almost Pentacostal portrait of a group of that last element, it doesn't hold together or add up to anything for me. The strung-together over-formal corporate nonsense he uses for dialogue is meaningless without being particularly meaningful about it, the color choice is bold but not particularly pleasant or powerful (a lot of Lee Loughridge-y greens), the character designs seem undercooked, and the big riot-of-detail vistas don't really have any "ins" for the eye. Ah well, I suppose at some point it was inevitable that even someone with my limited exposure to this sort of work would come across some that was less than impressive to me.
I read some critic saying he deserves an Oscar. Which seems far-fetched for a superhero movie, but then again he's dead and Academy voters respect that.
* Finally, I feel like it's been a while since we've seen a good old-fashioned indiscriminate spree-killer like Nicholas T. Shelley, whose eight victims in Illinois and Missouri over the past week or two include, "among others, a 93-year-old man, a child and a couple whose blood-soaked dogs were found roaming a motel parking lot."
[Editor's note: This is the third in a series of interviews I'll be posting that were rescued from WizardUniverse.com's now-defunct archives. Originally posted on July 20, 2007.]
I CAN HAS COMIX?: PAUL POPE
The Batman: Year 100 and THB writer-artist on making his new art book, reinventing the fight scene and becoming a comic book rock star
By Sean T. Collins
Paul Pope once told me his approach to personal style was to look like he'd stepped out of one of his own comics. The same, it seems, can be said of his approach to interviews. Speaking with Pope about his work, and about art in general, is as dizzying and dazzling an experience as reading one of his books.
The creator of futuristically sexy series such as 100% and Heavy Liquid, intensely personal superhero projects like Batman Year 100 and the fiercely independent schoolgirl-action series THB, Pope boasts an astonishingly broad set of influences and references. Within minutes he'll name-drop Frank Miller and Oscar Wilde, Pixar and Picasso, John Cassaday and John Cale, "Star Wars" and Toulouse-Lautrec--each in service of a fresh insight into his stylish, sci-fi-heavy sequential art and illustration.
Pope's list of upcoming projects is just as wide-ranging and impressive. His lavish new art book PULPHOPE: The Art of Paul Pope debuted to critical acclaim and sellout sales at this summer's MoCCA Art Festival in New York. At next week's San Diego Comic-Con, PULPHOPE will be joined by the latest installment of THB, subtitled Comics From Mars; both projects are published by indie outfit AdHouse Books. Meanwhile, Pope's working on more THB, as well as stories for the upcoming Marvel Underground indie-creators-on-Marvel-superheroes anthology, a massive action epic for First Second called Battling Boy, a pulp-hero thriller called Bionica and a dream-comic collection called Psychenaut for French publisher Dargaud, plus various ads, design projects and film work.
And between it all, the self-labeled "Comics Destroyer" somehow found time to talk to Wizard Universe about it all.
WIZARD: Congratulations on PULPHOPE. It was the book of the show at MoCCA and looks poised to be huge at San Diego.
POPE: Well, it's good to see that people are into it. You're sitting on a thing for 15 months and you reach a point where you're like, "What am I doing? This is no good." It's so abstract until it comes out. Then you're getting reactions from people because it's not comics. Comics are different. When you do them it's like, "Oh, this is funny and it makes me laugh." But this stuff is like, "Wow. Is this too personal? Is this too maudlin? Is this too risqué?" It's that kind of thing.
It's interesting to see how much of the book are your essays on various topics and really kind of spilling your guts as to what you think and what your process is with stuff. Why did you go in that direction instead of just doing the big giant portfolio type thing?
POPE: Well, for one thing, as I've gotten more and more into book design and print design, I just honestly don't think that I've seen a good cartoonist book yet. There are great monographs, but I feel like what I don't really like with comics--I don't think that it does a service to either the artist or the medium to have these hodgepodge books put out where it's like a little bit of the sketches and this and that. The books that I've seen just feel like they don't have much of a center. If I think of a well-designed book I'll think of like Dave McKean's John Cale book [What's Welsh for Zen]. It's either artists' or musicians' biographies, or monographs, or prints books--things like this. That's kind of what I was thinking. Also, one of my favorite books is Iggy Pop's I Need More. I'm sure that you've seen it. It's very scattered and disjointed and it's designed that you can read it any direction that you want, basically. It's interesting, because you do get a sense of a person and a biography out of it, which is good. The other thing, too, is that aside from having all of this material that I wanted to publish, including erotica, which was personally sort of a challenge to publish, I thought, "I also write and I would regret it if I didn't publish some of this stuff." I mean, I did go to art school and spent time considering academia, and so the stuff is researched and is enjoyable. It seems like there's this new crop of younger cartoonists who see me the way that I would see someone like Dave McKean when I was 19, kind of at the artistic end of the medium. I feel like there are always younger cartoonists asking me life-goal questions, guru questions, which makes me uncomfortable. So it was like, "Well, let me put a book out with some secrets in it and the wise reader will hopefully find what they're looking for."
It does sort of have a Letters to a Young Cartoonist feel to it.
POPE: But it's also partly like putting the young cartoonist in me to bed. That's what that whole essay about being 35 years old is, because you just reach this point.…Earlier on, when I was first breaking into this industry, the real exciting part was getting to meet Steve Rude or getting a book signed by Chester Brown, that kind of stuff, and hanging out with whoever. Then you do it, and you reach a point where you get a sense that the people you've admired, whether that's [Frank] Miller or [Mike] Mignola or Moebius, they are aware of you and there's a certain level of respect that they have for you as a young guy. Then you reach a point of, "Okay, now what? I've seen my stuff in print. I've worked in superheroes. I've worked in indie. So now what?" This was hopefully a chance to make a definitive break for the next 35 years. That's the deep purpose. That's the depth-charge purpose.
The "comics destroyer" purpose?
POPE: Yeah, and that's the other aspect of it too. Hopefully this book is going to raise the ante a bit. I mean, in all humility, we went through 10 drafts of it and put a year and a half into it. It was definitely not slapped together in a weekend.
I remember Chris Pitzer, AdHouse's Publisher, telling Wizard about it a long time ago.
POPE: Yeah, and then [the proposed film adaptation of Michael Chabon's] "Kavalier and Clay" happened. My life went into deep freeze for 6 to 8 months.
How was it working on that?
POPE: It was very enlightening. It was interesting and great. It was like a crash course in animation. I got to meet tons of people and made some great discoveries. Who knows where that stuff will go in the future, and especially for that film in particular. I hear routinely that it's off and then it's back on again and off and on again. They're saying 2009, so we'll see.
It seems like you've always had your fingers in various other pies. You mentioned the design conferences that you've already participated in, and you're soon doing one with Pixar in Amsterdam. But in your book, you say that it wasn't ever anything that you really envisioned yourself getting involved in.
POPE: I mean, look at the landscape that we have today. The thing that I'm curious about now is this whole nebulous aspect of contracts which entail online publishing. For comics, no one is quite sure what that is yet, and that's exciting. I tend to think that from now on, publishing contracts have got to deal with it, number one. Number two, it will probably have to change every five years, the legal definition of what online publishing is. So I've been lucky to be at these design conferences. I've got lots of friends who do advertising and guys working in building software for Pixar and artificial intelligence stuff and just far-out creativity.
If I had to characterize your stuff in one particular way, as apt as "comics destroyer" is, I would think "comics synthesizer" first and foremost. You incorporate many different influences: illustration and fine art, manga and bandes dessinées, science fiction and romance, superheroes and indie comics, and then also these other disciplines that you're interested in, like design and film and fashion and music.
POPE: That's why I wanted to put that bit in--in fact, if there's more time for the second edition of the book, I do want to expand on the essay about design and persuasion, because what I find is that it's really communication arts. It's rhetoric. It's understanding how to manipulate symbols according to the audience, knowing what their expectations are and how you're able to communicate effectively with people. I've been kind of troubled by this "indie" term. I've been talking to Coke about doing a poster for them next month, and I'm like, "Well, I don't see how I can be indie if I'm doing work for Coke." But then I'm working on this small-press stuff. It's all over the map. I think that if anything, "indie" is probably just a term that people use loosely to sort of suggest a drawing style which isn't your typical kind of Jim Lee American superhero--that kind of thing.
When I was trying to come up with a title for this column, I realized that all the titles that you'd use for something of this kind, dealing with essentially the "indie" or the "alternative" end of the spectrum, a lot of those terms don't really mean anything anymore. ACME Novelty Library is published by Pantheon, part of a huge New York publishing house.
POPE: And it's in The New York Times. So, yeah, it's a strange one, isn't it?
You seem like the kind of person who puts some thought into those definitional debates.
POPE: Oh, yeah. Especially having gone to art school and suffered under this high-art/low-art prejudice, which I'm completely against. I'm all in favor of craft. So [the high-art/low-art dichotomy] is another thing that's worth destroying, I would say, because I feel like that's an intimidation. That benefits curators. It doesn't really benefit creative people. I've never been comfortable with that, especially considering that in art school, where I went to school, there was such a prejudice towards video arts, conceptual work, performance. Something that was traditionally craft-based--whether it was print making or life drawing, which is what I was interested in, and draftsmanship--it was really looked down upon, which really bothered me. In art school, I was actually kicked out, but eventually I got to the point where I would take in a toothbrush as my project and a lot of times I would get really good grades just because I would play the game.
That's straight out of "Art School Confidential."
POPE: Oh, yeah. I've got some stories like that.
One specific theoretical aspect of your work that fascinates me lately is the way that you did Batman in Batman Year 100. You put so much thought into how he looked and how he dressed and how he got around and did the things that he does.
POPE: Oh, yeah. Before doing Batman, I did a lot of research. I read every DC monthly comic for probably a year and a half. By the time that we got the contract for that signed, I had about two or three years to really think that thing through. I'd seen the Hong Kong action stuff by then. The "Star Wars" [prequels] were coming out and you could see what you could've done better with those and what worked and what didn't work. The thing with Batman, and I've said this before, but with that character--I always look at something like that, which is so well known and above the radar, so to speak, and think, "What haven't we seen with this guy yet?" I just feel like there isn't enough physical action in superhero drawings. It's exciting, and I love that in an action film: that sense of what I call hyper-violence, or not hyper-violence, but hyper-real. It's like what [English writer] Kingsley Amis called "unreal estates." He said in reading The Lord of the Flies, there were descriptions of the trees and the water and the beach that were almost feverish. It's like you only sense these things when you have the flu. I love that notion, that you can put that much detail into a comic and it's something that you would only sense if your senses were really tweaked, like if you had the flu or something. So that was kind of the inspiration there.
Seeing the combat you've portrayed in Batman or THB through the lens of the erotic work of yours we're really seeing for the first time in PULPHOPE, I'm curious as to whether the physicality of both areas springs from the same mindset.
POPE: Actually, no. That's one thing that's been fascinating, doing more work for print design and for posters, illustrations for magazines. The conceptual work that goes into a single image or cover art, for that matter, books or comics, it's very different. I talk to James Jean about this a lot. I find that if I do an illustration, even if it's something where the drawing style is fairly breezy, you do a lot of conceptual thinking. It really makes me revalue the storytelling aspect of comics because it's not necessary for any particular picture to be perfect or to be completely illustrative of this or that idea. The comic works as a series of chain links. I find that often in the time it takes to do…if you saw that Wired piece that I have out right now, the "Transformers" illustration that I have in the new issue with "Transformers" on the cover--it's gone over really well and everyone is really happy with it, but surprisingly it took 30 or 40 hours to draw, all told. If that were a page in THB I could probably draw it in 2 hours with the same level of detail and everything, aside from coloring, which is its own issue. Conceptually, when it works as a part of the comic, somehow it's just easier. That also goes for THB versus what I always call big-budget comics like Batman where you can really pull out the stops. Again, though, one thing that I've really noticed and appreciate about American superhero comics is that attention to detail is really important. People love and want to see all of the gadgets. If it's a table it has to really look like a table. Otherwise, people not knowing George Grosz or Phillip Guston, it just looks like it's kind of badly drawn when in fact it's intentionally made that way.
But frequently I find that when you get to the action it's not rooted in a sense of place or even where people are in relation to one another.
POPE: Everybody's got their strengths and weaknesses. Someone who I admire a lot who works in comics would be someone like, let's say, John Paul Leon. Even a guy like that has his strengths and his weaknesses. It's funny. Even back before I was into comics, even as a kid, of course I read comics, but just on the artistic side of it. The kind of stuff that I liked was MC Escher or Hieronymus Bosch--anything where there was strong composition, a strong placement of figures and objects--and Edward Hopper. Realistic art, I guess you would say. It's a taste that, as with food, your palette develops over time.
It's interesting to hear you talk about comics in such visual-art terms. I feel like these days, with the exception of underground artists from avant-garde collectives like Fort Thunder and PaperRad, comics is mainly seen in a narrative tradition, along with film or prose literature. The exceptions tend to be less in your direction and more in the "20th Century Masters" vein. It's like, "Look at the stuff from the good old days."
POPE: You mean like pop art?
No, more like seeing a George Herriman Krazy Kat page up on the wall next to a Chester Gould Dick Tracy…
POPE: I see. Age has a certain authenticity. You do think about that. I don't know. That's an interesting one. I have a friend, Jenny Schlenzka, who's a curator at MoMA, in fact--ironically, after [I was] dissing contemporary gallery stuff--but she did a big thing on [German filmmaker Rainer Werner] Fassbinder in Berlin recently. She's curating a show about comics in the next year or so, and they asked me to come in and just talk to them about it. It's not that I'm going to be in it, really, but [they wanted me to] just kind of approach it that way. I've been to some shows up there, and I've seen [Art] Spiegelman's stuff there and maybe Katzenjammer Kids--some other old things too. So much of it must be a reflection of the Jewish diaspora, too, because so much of the New York experience is really immigrant. I think that comics are so much tied up with this emotional aspect of culture and New York culture and this kind of nebulous thing. I noticed that working on "Kavalier," really.
I think that book helped form a conventional wisdom about what's interesting about comics, and created a very specific narrative about how the art form progressed.
POPE: If you go back to the history of advertising, such as it is, if you think about clarity and design persuasion, there's not a lot of substantial difference between cartooning and printmaking or advertising in the hands of someone like a Steinlen or a Toulouse-Lautrec, [Alphonse] Mucha, these kinds of guys. The drawing values are still the same. There's an emphasis towards clarity and individual hand and style. I think that's something that we always value. You might even trace that back earlier to the Austrian secession movement with guys like [Gustav] Klimt and [Egon] Schiele. Not to say that it's the first time in history that there's ever been simplicity in drawing, but you really did sort of start to see, in the birth of Expressionism, this sense of a triumph of style and the whole "art for art's sake" thing. I think that was a pretty significant move. That's getting pretty far out there though. [Laughs] That's one thing that I feel so aggressive about. I want to really trumpet comics' place in art history, because it belongs there, in art culture. Comics belong in art culture.
Do you feel like you've created a single work that you would point to as being your most successful stab in that direction?
POPE: In that sense I think that I would have to go in that music metaphor. You and I are both music aficionados. I think that being a cartoonist, as a sort of pop artist, you have popular hits. If you look at it like that, I think that 100% is a strong statement, I think that Escapo is a strong statement, as composite works. PULPHOPE feels pretty good. It feels like this is a statement. There are probably things in THB that feel strong in the same sense. Well, that's a different work, that's a living work that's still going on, but there are a few things like that. Some of the stuff in Solo. Working on extended projects, the problem is that there's a point where your creative acceleration--you still have the exponential curve of the more you do it, the better you get, the more you think about it, the more time that you have to research and reflect. That's the hard stuff. I always feel like you're two steps ahead of yourself in terms of the stuff that's published being at least 8 months old. That's one thing that I miss about the self-publishing, because you could have this great idea for a short comic and then be in print in a month.
Is that part of the impetus behind your blog, just a desire to get things out there?
POPE: The blog is an extension of the book. I can really credit Warren Ellis for this, because I had to buy a laptop and just get completely Darth Vader while I was working on "Kavalier" because I needed to be. Otherwise I was in trouble. As you follow it, I have a total ambivalence about this slouch toward cyborgism that our culture is currently having. We're not going to go back again, short of nuclear war. I don't see us changing, but it's a tool that's there and it's an experiment. So I feel like the blog's an extension. A friend of mine said that it's sort of the DVD supplemental materials for PULPHOPE.
Much of your work is science fiction, and it tends to be near-future science fiction. It's not so far out there, so it seems clear that you're thinking about current technological issues.
POPE: I would say worrying about them. [Laughs] I'm worrying about them.
Which fits, because despite the futuristic content, a lot of the "Paul Pope vibe" has a sort of "ink-stained wretch" vibe to it.
POPE: I know what you mean. It's funny, because I'm not totally happy with my visual style. I feel like after years of work I've reached a point where I can basically draw whatever I can think. It never looks like I intended it to work, which is why I really enjoy doing things like the big-screen prints or the big store installations or comics animation. It's just trying to develop as much versatility as a visual thinker as I can. And I definitely like making objects. I like making things. That's one great thing about comics: There's actually a document of your time. It's there. It's mass-produced, and that's great.
You were one of the first people to open my eyes in terms of the comic as an object. The way that you put it in PULPHOPE is that a story told in words or pictures is called "a comic" or "a graphic novel," but so too is the thing that you hold in your hands in which that story resides. That had never occurred to me before.
POPE: Spiegelman said this ages ago. He said all outdated communication forms become art because they become useless. One thing that's really been shocking to me has been the tendency that people now have to download entire movies onto an iPod. They're watching them on there. I was talking to John Cassaday, of all people, another cartoonist, who said he was taking a flight that night and that he downloaded a couple of movies to watch on the plane. I said, "How does that work?" I could do it with my iPod, but I just don't. I realize that the experience of watching a film on an iPod is not the same and is not intended to be the same and is not expected to be the same--it just isn't--as watching it in the theater or watching on hi-def TV or whatever. I also think that this is something that comics as a two-dimensional-object-printing industry is going to have to deal with just because of how much encroachment we're getting from films and games, from online. It has changed the role. I feel like we're at the stage now where we can celebrate, and it sounds corny to say this, but comics as objects are hard to make and take a long time and are relatively expensive. Anyone can really do it, but it's not the first thing that people think of anymore when they think about expression. I think that now the Internet has made things so quick. I noticed this with the blog, the immediacy of it. I do a drawing and think, "I could put this on the Web tomorrow." Then you could start getting feedback from people if you have that enabled. The one thing that I always do think when I meet 18- or 19-year-old kids, first-year art school students, is that they don't remember a time before computers. I do. I remember playing with Popsicle sticks as a kid and having hours to use your imagination. Now the only way to interface with my nephews is to talk about video games with them. Sometimes I go see movies with them and I watch where their eyes go on the screen. I had this weird experience with them going to see "Harry Potter" or "Spider-Man" for the first time with them. I thought, "Wow, I wonder if a kid this young can tell the difference between CGI and reality?" I think that you're conscious of it if you'd never seen it growing up and it had never existed. But if you never knew anything but a world with mousepads and track-balls, who knows what's coming next? So actually, rather than a weakness, it's an advantage to have been born in the '70s and to have grown up in that era because all the advantages of two-dimensional picture-making still exist. They're timeless.
Even though I read webcomics, I just find it more satisfying to hold the object in my hands. I wonder if that generation will shake that taboo entirely.
POPE: Yeah, I wonder. I guess that we've yet to see all the different ways--I guess what's going to happen is that comics will exist in the future in different formats. They'll be like the ghost in the machine in the same way that film is now. I mean, film is film. It's cinema. You go to the theater and watch it and it's light projection, but really it's the experience. I'm certain that this "Transformers" film is designed to be watched in slow motion on a laptop. It can exist in a number of functions. The "Transformer" virus, such as it is, can exist in toys and it'll exist in games and it'll exist in comic books. That's good news, aside from the fact that Disney won the copyright and public domain battle, and Superman will win next. It's good news for all the established entertainment icons. It's good for Elvis.
How is it for someone like you?
POPE: Well, the responsibility is to not sell out and not to trade your brains off to the highest bidder to help flesh out their mediocre ideas if you know that you've got great ones. That challenge, frankly, goes for everyone, and I'm saying that quite plainly. I'm not saying that every idea I have is great, but I do think that I've had some good ones, and those are the ones that I want to be really loyal to in the future. But the great thing is that it isn't really either/or in the same way that indie/mainstream isn't either/or. I've done a lot of different types of work, and to varying degrees there are some that are more satisfying than others. Film is an interesting medium, too, because it's different from comics. It's essentially collaborative and it's political and it's slow, all this kind of stuff. Even the little bit of time that I've spent on it has shown me that.
How do you mean "political"--office politics or corporate politics or politics politics?
POPE: Well, you have a hierarchy, you've got personalities to deal with, and it's not like a family where you're kind of letting it all hang out. You have a sense of who's in charge and what you can do and what sort of liberties you can take and what sort of influence you can have. A lot of people in film are in love with it. There's such a love affair there. But I'm a little bit more ambivalent about it, having been aligned to print media. However, it's great stuff and great things happen in films and I'm not against it at the same time.
In terms of your ideas that you want to be really careful about shepherding, is there anything in particular right now?
POPE: Yeah, THB and Battling Boy. The problem with the long-form comics, especially living in Manhattan, is that it's hard to make a living. The cost of living in Manhattan is high. And it's hard also with narrowing down the possibilities, because you don't want to be this sensualist who goes for the newest thing, whatever it could be. Now it's billboard art or whatever. Do you know what I'm saying? Any of the possible things that come along that you could do. I think that there is a certain gregarious side to me that is interested in working on collaborative projects. I have a couple of things now that are collaborative for sure, where I'm part of a team. But in terms of creating a story, an identity, something like THB--at the end of the day that's really the thing that I care about. At this point I'm interested in trying to develop these different interesting projects that are out there on the fringes while at the same time having enough breathing space in order to do the personal work.
It seems as though at any given time you've got several different projects in some stage of development. Is there a particular appeal to that? Do you ever feel like you want to concentrate on just one thing at a time?
POPE: Well, I think that you have seasons of work. Like last year, in 2006, I did spend a lot of time working on other people's projects. Batman was a two-and-a-half-year project, and I basically just worked on Batman and THB during that time. In the last 12 to 18 months I have been working a lot more in what I would consider to be multimedia stuff, while at the same time really trying to get some of my personal stuff launched. I also get interesting opportunities, like to go out and meet guys from ILM and do a presentation for their animation department, and I got to see 10 minutes of "Transformers" on the screen there when they were cutting it. That's exciting. It's like, "Hey, what's going on? What are you guys doing?" That stuff is neat, and it does give you a lot to think about. The convention season is coming up, so there's a lot of travel and a lot of event planning and managing things like that, which is time consuming. But at this point it's definitely important and necessary to get 2, 3, 4 days a week to just shut things off and work. I've allotted more time for these other things, this sort of intangible area of work that combines meetings and contract-reading. Then you do the Wired thing--I had no idea how much time it was going to take. "What? 30 hours?" Okay, well, that's how long it took.
In terms of the peripheral activity that surrounds actually writing and drawing, there was one phrase that literally everyone I talked to at MoCCA who stood on line for the PULPHOPE signing used to describe you: "rock star."
POPE: Yeah, well, there's the performance aspect. My girlfriend is a performer and a lot of my friends are performers--circus performers, burlesque performers, musicians. There really isn't a stage in comics and what works for performance doesn't really work for our medium, but I'm an expressive person and I'm into fashion and I'm into music. I get a ton of inspiration from it. I mean, there is definitely Oz and then the man behind the curtain, but I'm pretty much the way that I am. If I walk around the streets I'm the same guy that I am now. Part of that is acute agoraphobia. It's just easier to focus things so that I'm able to meet as many people as possible in 1 day and basically I don't have to see anyone after that for 6 months. [Laughs]
So it's not like a tour rockumentary where you're ready to throw yourself out the tour bus window?
POPE: No, definitely not. [Laughs] I suppose there are some rock star moments, but I'm not sure exactly what that term means. It doesn't mean what it used to. It must just mean complete license to be an assh--- in public and get away with it, or just kind of like--it's the old Dionysian/Apollonian thing that Frank Miller always likes to talk about. It's the battle of cleaving to the senses or cleaving to reason. I guess that if you look back on the history of it, too--I've always been interested in kind of trying to trail this back--if you look at someone like Oscar Wilde, you could probably describe him as a rock star in some sense. He was this larger-than-life character. I don't know. I think that what's important now when I look at musicians I respect or artists I respect, someone like Matthew Barney, I think that it's [about] really going for it, really believing in what you do. It sounds banal, but being very definite and determined about your expression. Ultimately, we just sort of fabricate ideas and we weave them together in some format.
In terms of the aspects of your persona that have those rock star echoes--
POPE: Well, everyone that I hang out with looks the same way. [Laughs] It's totally normal where I come from.
That's kind of what I'm getting at. It could easily be used as an excuse to act like an assh---.
POPE: No, I'm definitely respectful of people, especially at something like MoCCA where it's like, "Christ, you people bothered to show up! Thank you." I mean, you take a guy like Jon Spencer [of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion and Heavy Trash]. I can't say that we're good friends, but we're friends. We've collaborated before and we talk once in a while and we hang out once in a while. He's one of the nicest guys that I know.
Maybe things will change in comics now that major media players are much more involved, but in general the crazy assh---s are well known and one can steer clear of them if one wants.
POPE: Yeah, and they would probably be assh---s if they were plumbers. They're probably just assh---s.
That's a good point. I had a similar conversation with Nick Bertozzi about how perhaps the "rock star" aspects of Picasso are overvalued and the fact that he was a workhorse who thought a lot about art and tried really hard was undervalued.
POPE: Yeah, he gets a bad rap too just because of the whole macho aspect to his character. He was definitely public enemy No. 2 or 3 when it came to art school. The political correctness crowd definitely doesn't go for him. He's quite an amazing and prolific character. Obviously, he's a big influence on my creative thinking, a huge inspiration. But the important thing too is that I buy Marvel comics. I love Carl Barks. I read 100 Bullets. I wouldn't want to come off as some sort of elitist. I guess that I am in a sense, but I'm curious, and I'm into the stuff that I'm into, that's for sure. If anything, I've kind of narrowed my comics library down to basically the first 5 years of Heavy Metal, the manga that I'm into and some European artists. There are a couple of exceptions there in Jeff Smith, Jim Woodring…Hugo Pratt, but he's European. At a certain point you have to shut off the spigot and look at your own work because there is so much stuff to look at and think about.
And we're really in a golden age of reprints. Things I could only read about when I first got into comics, I can now buy the entire run of.
POPE: It's funny, too, because I have some friends who teach up at SVA [School of Visual Arts], and having gone up there, it's probably the closest to a sense of envy that I ever felt. I thought, how different my life would be if I were a student entering college in a position where I could study at SVA under Marshall Arisman and my graduating class would've been people like Yuko Shimizu. Well, probably not, because she was much later than me, but you see what I'm saying though. But then again, I probably wouldn't have had the determination and probably the "anti" attitude I had just because of the hostility that I felt from the schooling that I had. It's amazing: If I were 18 or 19 going into school with an interest in arts, I would be very excited because I feel like there's a real need for people who draw, whether that's ultimately illustration, animation, comics.…It's become magic, because it's hard to do and it's not something that, even if you can cheat fairly well, you can cheat at and become great. I think that's what we value in a guy like a Mignola, who's had enough time and concern to develop a style that is persuasive. Or the Hernandez Brothers, because I love them--or anyone, for that matter, who has a strong style.
You just have to hope that, like the Hernandez Brothers, they have the confidence, whereas an artist like Mignola is almost overwhelmed by his own perfectionism.
POPE: I understand that feeling. In fact, he and I have had this discussion a couple of times. A couple of my things got close to looking like they were going to come through for film stuff [but didn't]. I mean, there's definitely a downside to that aspect of it. But then again, I think that you look at a guy like [Alex] Toth--he's one of the biggest mysteries in the comic industry. If anything, everyone has a timeframe, like an arc, if you want to think of it in that way. Some guys are intended to draw for their entire lives, like [Joe] Kubert, and some guys like Bernie Krigstein draw for a very short time. I think also when you're good like Mignola and you have a good idea, something that's really strong, the opportunities get bigger and bigger. It'd be interesting if you could interview someone like Warren Ellis or [Neil] Gaiman and ask them about that. I've often wondered, ultimately, about those guys. Look at someone like Gaiman who essentially isn't a professional cartoonist. He's definitely put in a lot of trench work in comics, but I think that he's the next guy to break out and really become even more like a public figure for comics. I think that he's going to be big.
I guess that he already is. I mean, his prose novels certainly do him well.
POPE: Yeah, but you've never seen Stephen King direct a movie, do you know what I'm saying?
Well, you have, but it was "Maximum Overdrive," which by his own admission the worst Stephen King movie ever made, which is saying something. [Laughter] To shift gears, what are you working on now and what's coming up next?
POPE: I have a new issue of THB [THB: Comics from Mars #1, on sale at the San Diego Comic-Con]. I'm excited. I've been to Ray Kurzweil's website. Do you know this guy?
The Singularity.
POPE: Yeah. He really blows my mind, and I'm like, "Man, I'm tired of seeing good ideas that I come up with appear in other places. I have to start getting this stuff out." So that was a huge inspiration for me. Then I'm working on some sort of announcement for THB, which I hope to have together by San Diego. In the short term I'm gearing up for a number of other things. The joke is that I have a dog in this fight and a dog in that fight, and a friend of mine said, "You have so many dogs that you have a dog sled." [Laughter] I've got a few illustration things coming up. I'm doing more work for Wired and GQ and I'm doing some sort of project for Coca-Cola. I'm not entirely sure what it's going to be--some sort of poster. That's just the illustration and advertising side of it. I'm kind of preparing for this design conference in some form in Amsterdam. I need to get a better sense of what the thesis will be for the talks, but I have an idea what I'm going to do for that. Then in the short term, or I guess in terms of comics, I'm working hard on this French book that I'm doing called Bionica [for publisher Dargaud]. And I'm trying to get enough Battling Boy [from First Second] together. I've been working on this thing for a year. We're not publishing like a one-shot for San Diego, which we've discussed. It's too soon to do that, but we're definitely going to have sequential stuff to show people. It's a 400-page book. It's huge.
That's got to be the biggest thing that First Second has published.
POPE: It's the biggest thing they've done. After Batman I felt so contained because of how long I was taking. [DC VP-Executive Editor Dan] DiDio was like, "Hey, can you cut some of this material?" That was better for [Battling Boy] because it forced me to learn how to edit for comics, which has only been strengthened by working in film and getting to know film editors and really watching the process and how it's done. But in this case I can actually use the 400 pages, in reaction to Batman and feeling like I could make this 20-page fight sequence 35 pages. So that's going to be the fun there. It's designed to be a story that's fairly simple and fairly mythic, so it's hopefully fairly universal, but there's a lot of room for character development and fantastic imagery. I've got a few things going in there that have hopefully never been seen before in comics. That's really what I want to do with this thing, in the same way that when you watch "Crouching Tiger" you're like, "Holy sh--, I've never seen that before."
Absolutely. I remember that so vividly.
POPE: That's what I want. There's massive destruction in Battling Boy. There's tons of fights and crazy things. Building on Batman, I really want to get into the physical aspects of the hero, the superhero. I've got a huge cast of villains and they're all really funny. There's a whole bunch of little eddies of storytelling. There are little petty disagreements that the monsters have amongst themselves that play back into the main storyline. It's the kind of stuff that I do in THB; I'm just giving myself some breathing space to improvise. It's in full color, which is nice too. That's the great thing about Solo and Batman. Having done enough stuff in color--that's a challenge when you've done probably done 1,000-plus pages in black and white. Making a jump to color is a new way of thinking, because suddenly it's like going into a new dimension. Color establishes so much of a mood and timing and these other aspects, control with the eye looks. Well, I don't want to say that it's another dimension, like 2-dimension to 3-dimension. It's just different somehow.
And you're doing a dream-comics thing too?
POPE: I've got this ongoing thing [called Psychenaut] that it looks like Dargaud is going to publish in French, and I'm sure that we can find someone here. It's reacting to the body of work that Rick Veitch and Winsor McKay have done in dreams. I know that other people have done some--David B.'s done some. There's an interesting…I guess you have to call it a sub-narrative to dreams. I find that I have repetitive imagery in my dreams. That's the thing. I just do these for myself. I was in Spain with Yves Schlirf, my editor for Dargaud, and was like, "Oh, check these out." He was like, "These are great. Let's publish them." So I have 20 or 25 of them, and there's really no rush on this. It's just when I get the time and the interest on getting the next one down. When we get enough, we'll publish it.
That's a lot of projects.
POPE: I know it's a lot, but it keeps me out of trouble usually. Sometimes, anyway. At least before midnight.
* And Now the Screaming Starts' CRwM highlights the hyperrealist look of torture-porn films by contrasting a stylized scenario from Saw III with the horrifyingly mundane real-life waterboarding of writer Christopher Hitchens.
* There's another Books of Blood adaptation on the way: IGN.com editor Christopher Monfette has written a screenplay based on the strange little (like, six pages long) Clive Barker immorality fable "Down, Satan!"
* Douglas Wolk and Joe McCulloch review the latest installment of Grant Morrison's "Batman: R.I.P." Doug calls bullshit on what he sees as a Magical Negro figure, but I didn't see it way because the character in question a) seems to have no idea he's doing anything magical; b) is a junkie. He also links to this Silver Age Bat-tale that answers a lot of the questions raised by the story so far--talk about a story depending on continuity!
Pizzeria Kamikaze
Etgar Keret, writer
Asaf Hanuka, artist
Alternative Comics, 2006
100 pages
$14.95 Buy it from Amazon.com
Now this is kind of weird--here's a comic I appreciate almost purely on a plot level. Adapted from the short prose story of the same name by Keret, Pizzeria Kamikaze is hamstrung by its bland, depthless characters, the sort of twentysomethings cartoonists use to show how boring and purposeless life is for twentysomethings. The flickers of difference that some of them display frequently just flicker out due to storytelling inconsistency--asshole party-boy Uzi's sweet fondness for his family, for example, is demonstrated through repeated calls to them during his and main character Mordy's road trip, until at a later point he apparently forgets about them entirely. Meanwhile, Hanuka's silvertoned black and white art is easy enough on the eyes but more functional than anything else. And in terms of the high concept--the afterlife for suicides is pretty much like the regular world, except maybe even more aimless and dull--certain aspects took me out of the story as much as pulled me in. (If everyone bears the marks of their method of self-destruction, shouldn't the suicide bombers be a lot more fucked up? Shouldn't Uzi's musician friend Kurt have a giant fucking shotgun hole in his head?) If there's some sort of "inner meaning or 'message,'" to quote Tolkien, it's not a particularly powerful one. (Life can devolve into rote and routine, didn't you know? Young men can invest all sorts of their own issues into an idealized female who inevitably fails to warrant such objectifying devotion, also.)
But the book's relentlessly deadpan tone pays off when the story takes a turn into left field during the final act. Within fairly short order the main character relationships are upended (mostly in amusingly vicious ways) and the world-building expands in an unexpected and refreshingly sudden fashion. What seemed like an exercise in seen-it-all-before ennui suddenly perks up, plotwise, and in the process becomes a more judgmental and therefore more punchy (and more entertaining) little tale. It's still on the slight side--it really does feel more like a short story than a graphic novel--but that ending is a hoot.
[Editor's note: This is part of a series of interviews I'll be posting that were rescued from WizardUniverse.com's now-defunct archives. Originally posted on August 3, 2007.]
I CAN HAS COMIX?: JOHNNY RYAN
The most controversial man in humor comics talks his upcoming Marvel project, racism, boogers and what it's like to work for both 'Nickelodeon' and 'Hustler'
By Sean T. Collins
The first thing you need to know about Johnny Ryan is that his comics will make you laugh out loud. Hard. Embarrassingly. To the point of distraction for your co-workers. The second thing you need to know about Johnny Ryan is that his comics will make you gasp "Oh my God" and "Holy sh--!" just as loud, hard, embarrassingly and distractingly. The third thing you need to know about Johnny Ryan is that both of these things will probably happen at the same time.
In his signature series Angry Youth Comix, his gross-out humor strip Blecky Yuckerella and his no-holds-barred parody collection The Comic Book Holocaust, Ryan has conducted a one-man jihad against good taste and unfunny funnybooks the likes of which comics has rarely seen before. He combines a pottymouthed penchant for bodily fluids that would delight a 9-year-old with a willingness to violate social taboos about sex, violence, race, religion and gender that makes Dave Chappelle look like Bill Cosby, all drawn in a style reminiscent of something you'd find in Alfred E. Neuman's bookshelf (or bathroom). And ever since signing with Fantagraphics--publisher of Dan Clowes and Love and Rockets--he's been one of the most divisive figures in the alternative comics scene.
With the 13th issue of Angry Youth Comix and the third AYC collection, aptly titled Johnny Ryan's XXX Scumbag Party, hitting stores over the past two weeks, Ryan got up bright and early to dish on the secret inspiration for his craziest characters, the lines he'd never cross and the comics creators who just can't stand him.
WIZARD: First of all, thanks for getting up early in the morning to talk to me.
RYAN: That's okay. I'm up early in the morning every day anyway.
Judging by your comics, it seems like you'd be the type of guy recovering from a massive, massive hangover until about 4 in the afternoon every day.
RYAN: You'd be surprised. I have a pretty nerdy lifestyle. I'm not the party animal that I make myself out to be in the comic. [Laughs]
Yeah, we were wondering around the office what you'd be like: whether you would be reserved and it all comes out in your comics, or whether you were like Harvey Pekar and what you see is what you get.
RYAN: A year or two ago at the San Diego convention, Tom Spurgeon was saying that there were several people who had come up to him at the convention and said, "Do you know what was a really big surprise? It was how normal Johnny Ryan actually seems in person." They expected me to be sitting in my own sh-- and throwing toilet paper and bottles and things at people like I'm some kind of maniac.
Is comics pretty much your only outlet for that side of your personality, to the extent that you have it?
RYAN: I would assume so. I'm a pretty law-abiding citizen. [Laughs]
Speaking of San Diego, I first read your Angry Youth Comix collection Portajohnny there the year it came out. Up until then I'd pretty much thought that funny comic books were an urban myth; I really couldn't think of a time when I had laughed out loud at a comic. I picked up Portajohnny from the Fantagraphics table, sat down to eat lunch, started reading it, and I was just dying. I was laughing out loud, which was unheard of for me.
RYAN: Well, that's good to hear.
I've seen several other interviewers say much the same thing to you. What do you think it is that you're doing right that gets that response from people?
RYAN: Gosh, I don't know. I mean, I always approach my work trying to, I guess, make myself laugh. I'm trying to amuse myself and come up with crazy ideas that amuse me. As a writer of humor, I guess you want that. You want what makes you laugh to make other people laugh. That's the hope. It's just a roll of the dice, and hopefully it'll work.
I know that you're a big fan of Peter Bagge's Hate--when you first decided that this was something you wanted to do, what else was making you laugh at the time?
RYAN: That's a good question. When I first started out I wasn't really reading Hate very much, but probably the Robert Crumb stuff from like the late '60s, early '70s. I really think that nothing can top that as far as amazing, out-of-control humor, especially with the sketchbook stuff. I had picked up one of those German sketchbooks that I think was his work from 1967 to 1970 and it just blew me away how much fun and how crazy it was. When I saw that I was like, "This is what I want to do. I want to do comics that are like this." That was the inspiration.
Beyond comics, are there comedians or films that influenced you?
RYAN: Oh, sure. The Three Stooges. I'm a big fan of the Three Stooges. Those Hal Roach "Our Gang" shows are great. "The Benny Hill Show" was a big influence on me. [Laughs] That's some of them. I also used to read Mad Magazine a lot as a kid. I think that was a big influence as far as parodying and making fun of stuff, which doesn't really happen very much anymore, or at least in comics anyway.
I think that's maybe one of the reasons why Angry Youth Comix took me so much by surprise.
RYAN: I mean, the humor scene in comics is just rough. It's not really--I'm not just saying that because there's slim pickings as far as humor goes, but at least to me it doesn't seem like something that's really welcome anymore. The alternative comics scene seems as if it's concerned with being very literary and high-minded. They have these literary aspirations. They want to be regarded as a high art form, and I guess they…the overall feeling of the whole comics thing with humor, or at least the kind of humor that I'm doing, kinds of brings that down. I'm not going to get that interview on NPR or whatever.
I've definitely heard Fantagraphics co-publisher Kim Thompson crow fairly proudly that people will come to him and say, "I like everything that you guys do except Johnny Ryan."
RYAN: [Laughs] Yeah. The thing is, though, that I think it's sort of cooled off. When I first got picked up by them it was pretty overwhelming, the negative reception that I was receiving from comics--or at least from Fantagraphics--fans. It wasn't personal; I wasn't getting letters. But just the reviews and looking on message boards or whatever, the vibe I was getting was negative. I do have to say that I think it's slowly turning around. I feel like because of the time passing, people are a little bit more accepting that I'm a bit more of a staple in the comics scene than I was initially.
Judging simply from the back-cover blurbs on your books, it seems like even if the readers of art comics, or whatever you want to call them, were slow to embrace you, you made fans of the people who actually make those comics pretty quickly.
RYAN: Some of them. I mean, it's not an across-the-board statement, but there are some that are fans of mine and appreciate it. They see what I'm doing and appreciate it.
Do you know who likes you and who doesn't?
RYAN: Well, usually the people that I've communicated with over the years. Gary Panter--I'm a big fan of his and I know that he likes my stuff. Dan Clowes has already been very supportive. The Hernandez brothers. Peter Bagge, of course. I mean, I get the feeling that I'm not on the Top 10 list of Art Spiegelman or Chris Ware or Seth for that matter. Usually, though--and this is probably even true for me--if you don't like someone's stuff, you just don't pay attention to it or comment on it, because you just don't want to get into it. I can usually get the feeling [from people]. I actually asked Eric [Reynolds, Fantagraphics editor] to see if Seth would be interested in doing the introduction to XXX and he turned me down. I thought that it would be kind of funny to mix it up. I said that he could say whatever he wanted, but no.
You did that strip that parodies him.
RYAN: It was sort of inspired by his lifestyle, I guess. [Laughs] And I had heard that he does a slideshow where he shows my comic and talks about how people keep asking him about it and sending him the comic and wanting him to comment on it, and he continues to claim that he's never read it. I heard that after he shows the slide he throws the slide in the garbage. He has this whole thing. I was like, "Well, how about I let you do the introduction to my book? I think that would be kind of funny." It's sort of like when [Dave] Chappelle had Wayne Brady on. He just said, "No. It's not a right fit for me."
You've done a lot of parody work, from superheroes to classic strips to alternative comics. Have you had any other reactions like Seth's, or on the flipside, really positive reactions? How do you feel about that sort of thing? If you get the sense that someone doesn't like what you're doing, does that make you feel good or bad?
RYAN: Well, it depends, I guess. [To answer] the first part of your question there, I had only heard about the whole thing with Seth's slideshow and stuff second- and third-hand. I've never actually seen it and I don't know what, exactly, he says. As far as people approaching me who had a bad reaction, the only people who have reacted to what I've done as far as if I do a parody of them are people that I probably already knew previously and was friendly with, like Peter Bagge or Rick Altergott or Dan Clowes. Dan Clowes actually told me that he didn't think his was mean enough. [Laughs] So it's people that I either already knew or I was already friendly with. As far as people that I didn't know, I never got an unsolicited response from someone that I didn't know who just wrote, "Hey, I just saw your parody of me. You're an assh---" or "I loved it" or whatever. I was getting some people asking me, "Hey, will you parody me?" or "I was very disappointed to see that you didn't do me." So there was that.
And how do you feel when you hear or see someone's outrage about what you've done? Does that feel like a badge of honor or does it make you uncomfortable?
RYAN: It can vary from person to person. It depends. Like, if I was a big huge fan of someone and I find out that they hate me, I guess that my reaction will be, "That's kind of disappointing." But in a way, it kind of frees me up. In a way it's easier, if you don't know the person and aren't friendly with them, to totally slam them. [Laughs] So it's actually a little bit more difficult if I was somewhat friendly with them. If I do find out that someone doesn't like my work or what I'm doing, that almost encourages me to continue. If people make fun of you, you should just kind of wear it, and that way they'll stop.
I saw that Back in Bleck has negative back-cover blurbs.
RYAN: Yeah. I think that out of all of the stuff that I've done, that might be receiving the worst reviews, and for some reason I just thought that it was funny to put those on the back. It didn't just seem like they were bad reviews. It seemed like those people were enraged. [Laughs]
I'm surprised that you haven't gotten even more flack along those lines. I'm not just talking about Seth being upset at you making fun of how old-fashioned he is. A lot of your work is fairly transgressive humor, with racial elements and sexual elements…
RYAN: There've been little things here or there, but nothing that's been really crazy. I think that's just because I'm doing an underground comic, basically. If this was on TV or if this was on the radio I would probably be hearing a lot more negative comments, but this is comics. I only sell a couple thousand copies of it, and because of that I'm not really going to get the same kind of attention that those other mediums get.
Do you ever worry that there will be some sort of fluke situation like the Gordon Lee case, where a retailer accidentally gave a copy of a Nick Bertozzi comic to a kid and there was nudity in it and now he's been taken to court? Not so much that you have a national forum like Don Imus or something, but that maybe it'll get into the wrong hands and someone might choose to make an issue out of it?
RYAN: Well, I guess that's just a bridge that you'd have to cross when you come to it. I just see myself as an artist. I'm a cartoonist. I'm drawing what I think is funny and saying what I want to say in my comics. I'm just putting them out there, and as far as who gets them, I don't really have any control over that. I guess that I would feel bad, and I would hope that stores would realize that this is adult material. I'm not making it for kids.
A title like Johnny Ryan's XXX Scumbag Party will probably help out.
RYAN: Yeah. That's for the kids. They'll definitely be like, "I have to read this thing." [Laughs]
That's maybe the best comic book title that I've ever read.
RYAN: Oh, thanks. I initially wanted to call it Let's Be Assh---s, but Eric said that we would have distribution problems. I'm hoping that maybe within the next 10 years or so things will get a little bit more liberal and I'll be able to use that title.
I always find that sort of thing funny. When we run interviews with people who curse, we have a style as to how we abbreviate sh-- or f--- or whatever. It reminds me of how when you say "assh---" on television, they bleep out the word "hole," but you can say "ass." It's interesting to me that the actual "hole" is the offensive part.
RYAN: Depending on what channel you're watching and what show you're watching…I was watching that Kathy Griffin show last night and she was at the Gay Porn Awards, and I was amazed at what they were getting away with. It was like "up the ass" and "dick"...I thought, "Wow."
I guess it's about context. Speaking of which, I believe XXX Scumbag Party is the first big Johnny Ryan release in the post-Imus, post-Opie and Anthony era. Thinking about it in that light, there are some people who can do really edgy stuff and more or less get away with it-- Sarah Silverman, Dave Chappelle, "South Park"--and other people can't--Imus, O&A. I was wondering if you have any thoughts on why that is.
RYAN: I'm not really sure. I guess that it has a lot to do with whether or not people like you. [Laughs] Or if someone has a bug up their ass against you and is willing to fill out the forms and bring you down. But there's more to being funny than just cursing and using racism and all of that sort of thing. I think that you still have to be creative about it and come up with a funny joke about it and not just say "sh--" and "g--k" or whatever and think that people are going to laugh at it.
I think that's one of the things that's undersold about your work: There's all the dirty stuff, obviously, but it's also so weird. A strip will start in one way and then it'll end up being about something completely different. There's a fairly epic example of that in XXX Scumbag Party: the strip called "Dry Gulch Follies 2005," which starts with Sinus O'Gynus getting a babysitting job and ends with a gigantic robot prostitute giving the moon a sexually transmitted disease.
RYAN: I think that's one of the things that makes comics fun for me, and I guess it's also just a part of my sense of humor. It's that surreal element to my work. It's sort of nonsense that I find funny, where it starts somewhere and who knows where it's going to go and what kind of characters you're going to meet and what weirdness is going to happen?
The quality of the art in your stuff also doesn't get talked about enough. I went through the three Angry Youth Comix collections and the two Blecky Yuckerella books, I was just watching the progression of your line as it thickens and gets more and more lush and more self-assured. It's really lovely.
RYAN: Well, that's something that I'm actually pretty proud of, as far as where I began. If you look in the back of the Portajohnny book, there's a really early Loady McGee comic that I drew in 1992 or '93, and you look at how retarded it looks. It looks like I drew it with a pen in my ass or something. And how I moved from then to now--I'm always trying to improve and get better. I'm not always really sure exactly where I'm going; I just know that I want it to look clean and cartoony. I always feel like I'm practicing and trying to improve and get better all the time. I never really feel like, "Oh, this is exactly where I want to be."
If you had to pinpoint one person as an influence for your artistic style as opposed to your comedic style, who would it be?
RYAN: Gosh, one person for my style. I'm not really sure. I mean, I want to say a cartoony style like Ernie Bushmiller or Al Jaffee. For the most part I would say that. But as far as the actual content, that would be Robert Crumb.
I guess that style helps you bridge several different worlds, because you've obviously done clean, all-ages humor comics for Nickelodeon Magazine and things like that. How hard is shifting those gears in your head?
RYAN: It's not really hard at all. With my comics I'm doing exactly what I want to do with the stories that I want to tell and all of that, but for Nickelodeon, they're hiring me to do a job. When you're doing stuff for kids, they like that same kind of vibe that my comic has as far as the weirdness and the nonsense and the goofball aspects of it. That same sort of spirit I put into the comics for kids; it's just not sex or violence. It's like Christmas and pizza and boogers and barf. That's sort of what kids like, and I just bring that over into the kid world. Even when I do my comics for adults I think that there's still that same childish spirit that I bring to it, but instead of those things that kids are interested in, I do stuff that's more for the adults.
Have you been working long enough that you've had kids come up to you who started reading your things at Nickelodeon and then moved on to--
RYAN: No, I haven't. [Laughs] I haven't experienced that crossover yet with the Nickelodeon fans. I'm assuming that kids are enjoying what I'm doing in Nickelodeon Magazine. That's what I'm being told, but I've never received any comments from kids personally that say, "Hey, I've been reading your stuff in Nickelodeon and I love seeing your stuff in there." I haven't experienced that yet.
Are you looking forward to it?
RYAN: Oh, I mean, it's always nice to hear if someone likes your work or not, whoever it is, unless they're a total assh---. Then it's kind of depressing.
There doesn't seem to be any kind of self-censoring mechanism in your work. While that's true of several other cartoonists I can think of--Crumb is a good example, obviously, or someone like Joe Matt doing comics about his porn collection--for the most part they tend to be geared inward at themselves.
RYAN: Well, that's an interesting point that you bring up, because you're bringing up two autobio comics artists, for the most part. At least the later Crumb years are mostly autobio stuff, and that's a real prevalent genre right now. People are always talking about their lives, and it almost seems like a competition between all these autobio artists to reveal the most humiliating and degrading and embarrassing thing that they can in their life. It seems more about that than "Okay, I want to tell a story and make it compelling and interesting and funny." For me, I don't feel like I'm trying to do that same kind of confessional-type thing. I feel like I'm just trying to make people laugh. But I also don't want to do any self-censoring because there's things that make me laugh and that I think make other people laugh, but they're ashamed to let other people, or the majority of Americans, know about it. "If everyone knew the horrible, awful things that I laugh at, they'd be disgusted with me. I laughed at someone farting, so people will look at me like an idiot or a fool." Or whatever sort of transgressive or disturbing piece of humor. So I try not to censor myself in that way. That was the whole point of the Comic Book Holocaust book. I was going to put down whatever popped into my head, no matter how horrible it was. As long as I just thought that it was funny to me I was going to put it down, no matter how disturbing or horrible other people thought that it was. That was the whole point of that.
In some ways, it reminds of driving in your car and singing along to some horribly misogynistic and violent hip-hop song.
RYAN: True.
And you're dropping N-words and B-words and cussing left and right and talking about killing undercover policemen.
That's another good comparison. But at the same time you and I are both raised-Catholic, white, straight, American guys, and we have it pretty easy compared to a lot of the groups lampooned in your comics.
RYAN: Right. Well, the thing is that I see myself basically as a comedian making jokes. I don't have some sort of political agenda as far as, like, I'm making fun of black people because they're stupid and they shouldn't have the same rights as white people. I'm not standing on a soapbox here. I'm just making jokes and trying to elicit laughter. I think that people have the ability to laugh at horrible things and yet still not go out and murder people, not be influenced to kill and discriminate and be an awful person. I'm not going to cause people to be horrible, awful people. If they're already horrible and awful, it's not me that's going to inspire them.
So in your view, you're not a racist or misogynist or a homophobe or any of those things?
RYAN: I don't think so. I mean, those are usually terms that…I think if someone feels that I'm a racist or a misogynist, that's their right to think so. Personally, I don't think that I am.
You say that you don't have a reactionary political agenda, but on the flipside, would you also say that you don't have the agenda pointing that stuff out to make fun of it or lessen its power?
RYAN: No. I don't think that I have that agenda either, as far as "I'm going to use the word n----- over and over again until the word has no meaning" or something like that. I think that the word is always going to pretty much have some meaning. You can't get rid of it. It's always going to be there. That's sort of the point of using it, because it's so jarring. I like to incorporate that troublemaking aspect into my humor. For some reason it's exciting for me, when I'm drawing my comic, to think, "What can I do to really get people?" I try to use that shock element, I guess. Usually people use that as a derogatory term when dealing with movies or with any kind of art, but I think that it does have its place if used correctly.
There's something exciting about it.
RYAN: Sure. Growing up as a teenager and watching a lot of those exploitation movies from the '70s, I always thought those were really exciting and oftentimes more exciting than a lot of the mainstream stuff that they were showing. I wanted to use those kinds of elements in my work. It's fun. It's the same for the Surrealists from the early part of the last century. They were using a lot of that imagery just to really jar and shock people. For some reason it just makes the work exciting for me if I know that this is going to make people a little bit uneasy.
Do you feel like you've ever gone too far in that direction?
RYAN: If I have, I can't think of any point. There have been moments when my wife has gone, "I don't know about that." [Laughs] Sometimes I listen, and other times I'm like, "F--- it. I've got this gut feeling that I need to follow this through."
In terms of a politicized reaction to your stuff, have you gotten a harder time from conservatives or liberals, or is that anything you've even noticed?
RYAN: Maybe from liberals more. I don't know the statistics on this, but I think that's because most people that read alternative comics are more of the liberal outlook, so I'm mostly hearing a lot of stuff from liberals. The more liberal and literary bookworms they are, the more they dislike my stuff. And the racism and all of that stuff usually makes them uneasy. Sometimes I'll even get a positive review, like recently in The Comics Journal I got a pretty good review for The Comic Book Holocaust, but they were still mentioning how uneasy the racist stuff made them. I think that it's more the liberals who get more uneasy about it.
I think the first context in which I heard of your work before I'd read it was the reaction to the "Gaytroit" strip, where a gay Captain America-type character kills terrorists using his "AIDS Breath."
RYAN: Right. Well, that pretty much went nowhere. They were going on and on about how they were going to boycott Fantagraphics and they were going to picket, they were really going to go crazy and bring the whole company down until I was punished, and they were going to call GLAAD and all of this other stuff. It eventually just became nothing. They were pretty much calling me "the No. 1 Homophobe in Comics" or something like that, and I think that there's a lot worse examples than me. Like those Preacher comics. Have you ever read that thing? I was amazed. When I read it I was like, "Whoever wrote this is obviously gay." But it was written where all of the bad guys were gay and wanted to rape everything. It was sort of amazing that they were going to pick me over this guy. Gimme a break.
You've created several memorable characters. The first that come to mind are Sinus O'Gynus and Loady McGee, the stars of Angry Youth Comix. I've always wondered if they were your stab at like a "Beavis and Butt-Head" thing.
RYAN: No. When I came up with these characters it was little bit before "Beavis and Butt-Head." "Beavis and Butt-Head" came on and I was like, "Ah, sh--. They're stealing all of my jokes." I've since come to really like that cartoon, but I think that the dynamic is different. Mine is sort of the jerk and the wimp, whereas "Beavis and Butt-Head" is two jerks. [Laughs] Loady is a jerk and a bully and Sinus just kind of takes it. Plus, Beavis and Butt-Head are just stupid and they're always laughing and they seem to be having a good time. Loady is like always on a mission and is always in some kind of rage. And that's not to say that either me or "Beavis and Butt-Head" are the first to do the duo-type cartoons.
Were they based on anything, or were they conjured out of the ether of your brain?
RYAN: Everything comes from something, but I guess it's a sort of combination of different elements. Loady McGee came from a couple of different things. I guess it's a sort of combination of Butch from "The Little Rascals" and Vivian from "The Young Ones" and this kid that I went to high school with who had the worst acne that I've ever seen in my life. Sinus came from another kid that I went to high school with. I think that was just sort of my inner wimp too, or something--I don't know. [Laughs] The physical attributes of Sinus came from this kid that I went to high school with.
Next up is Blecky Yuckerella, who's your spoof of a "children's strip" character. You can see the roots of that with Little Lulu and Nancy and things like that.
RYAN: That actually came directly from this comic that I found at some comic stand in Seattle called The Little Monsters. I just picked it up and I saw this cover. It was some Gold Key comic, and the Little Monsters were these two boy and girl little Frankensteins. On the cover were these two little Frankenstein dudes, and in the back was a really mean-looking little girl. It was kind of like Blecky, with the curly blond hair and the little girl suit and the shoes and whatever, but she had a five o'clock shadow and a mono-brow. I was like, "Oh, my God, this looks like it could be the most amazing character that I've ever seen." So I bought the comic and I read it. I was kind of disappointed to find out that the story was about this midget mobster who wants to go into hiding, so he dresses up like a little girl and goes hide with the little monsters. I was like, "Oh, this isn't like some sort of transvestite-child type thing?" I thought I had to incorporate this into my work and do something with it, and create this transvestite monster child that actually has more of an upbeat attitude. That's kind of where it came from.
I can see how it not being a transvestite child would be an enormous disappointment.
RYAN: Yeah. I was sort of like, "Oh, my God. This is the most amazing character I've ever seen--and in a Gold Key comic!" So, yeah, I was sort of disappointed.
I guess she's mostly appeared in Vice Magazine, correct?
RYAN: Well, I initially started the script for the Portland Mercury. They asked me to come up with a strip, and I had this character and I thought, "Ah, I'll give it a shot." I was in the Portland Mercury with that strip for 4 years before they f---ing dropped me, pretty unceremoniously, for some new strip that is absolutely horrible, which added insult to injury. I would then color them and they would reprint them in Vice, but I've since stopped running them in Vice. I'm doing other projects for Vice. They have me do these full one-page things instead now.
How is your working relationship with them, as opposed to your working relationship with Mad or Nickelodeon or things like that?
RYAN: Well, Nickelodeon is definitely the best as far as working. [Nick's] Chris Duffy is the best editor. He's very easy to work with. I've worked with, like you said, Mad, and I've done stuff for Hustler and National Geographic Kids, but I feel like he gets my humor and he likes my humor and I have a real place in the magazine now. Vice is good too. They've always been pretty supportive of my stuff. But I have to say that our relationship is a little bit more contentious because we're always arguing about stuff.
About what? Content?
RYAN: God. It's retarded, the things that we're yelling at each other about. Well, they did that all-comics issue last year [which I guest-edited], and that was kind of a headache. It was just sort of like they wanted certain cartoonists in there, and I was like, "I don't want those people in there." It was just this back and forth. And a few years ago I was asked to do a one-page comic for the American Indian-themed issue. I asked the editor what the rules were and he said, "No penises and no Nazis." So I drew a comic called "Chief Sitting Bullsh-- vs. Nazi Penis." And they didn't run it. [Laughs] For the most part, though, they've always been good. Because they have Vice in the U.S. and they're spreading out and now each country has its own Vice, I've been doing comics for all of these other countries, for all the other Vice magazines. I think it started when there was a Vice France and they asked me to do a comic that totally insulted the French people, so I did a page of gags that were insulting to the French. All of a sudden it started this avalanche of all these other countries being like, "Oh, do us!" So I had to do one for Italy. I had to do one for Spain. Then I had Germany on the line, and they were like, "Ah, forget it." That would've been like the easiest one to hammer out.
Yeah. You kind of know exactly where to go with the Germans.
RYAN: I think there's stuff there that you can't make fun of. In the French one I was making of fun of them with stuff like them being f---ed in the ass by Hitler and things like that. That's okay in France. But I don't think that you can even show a picture of Hitler in Germany.
Angry Youth Comix #13 and XXX Scumbag Party just hit stores over the past two weeks. What's the next thing that you have coming out?
RYAN: Right now, today, I'm working on this thing--Marvel Comics is starting this Marvel Underground series, and I'm sure you know that they have underground artists doing their take on different Marvel characters. I did a couple of pages for that. I'm working on that right now.
That was probably going to be my last question, given our readership. Obviously, a lot of the stuff that eventually ended up in Comic Book Holocaust took aim at Marvel's material. I was wondering if you ever heard from Marvel about that.
RYAN: No, I didn't. Someone else recently interviewed me specifically about this underground Marvel thing, and I even mentioned The Comic Book Holocaust and how I'd done the parodies of the different characters, and I never heard anything. The editor of this particular series is Aubrey Sitterson, and he seems like a young guy who's just starting out there. He's a fan of mine, where I don't know how the old guard feels about that stuff. When I worked with him previous to this on that Stan Lee Meets thing--they did this whole series of tributes about Stan Lee and I did something for that. And he knew about the Mad Magazine where I had done a strip called "The Fantastic Four Has a Crap-Tastic Couple of Weeks" a while back. And even at that point he was saying, "Don't let the other guys see that you did that or send up any of that art, because they don't want to see that." I don't know if he's keeping that stuff from them or what, I don't know what's going on over there, but as far as he goes, he likes my stuff and he wants me to do some work, so that's fine with me.
Batman: The Story of the Dark Knight
Ralph Cosentino, writer/artist
Viking, 2008
32 pages, hardcover
$15.99 Buy it from Amazon.com
I stumbled across this book purely by accident at my day job, and golly am I glad I did. A for-kids distillation of the sort of ur-Batman mythos--the basic origin, accoutrements, methods, villains and such that everyone recognizes--it boasts sumptuous art from Cosentino that comes off like a cross between the Bruce Timm animated look and high-end commercial illustration. I pretty much love his version of every character he draws--Thomas and Martha Wayne never looked like a better mommy and daddy, just for example, while Batman is square-jawed to the point of iconography rather than portraiture. It's basically the most sophisticated art you'll ever see in a potentially throwaway licensed book for ages eight and under. Like Tim Burton's first Batman film or The Animated Series, the book's a grab bag drawn from any and all of Batman's appearances: '40s-style crooks in fedoras, very very old-school-looking Joker and Catwoman, DeVito-inflected Penguin, non-1966-TV-series baddie Two-Face, a cameo from Killer Croc at his most reptilian, those preserved suits of armor from the Burton Batman's Wayne Manor--anything that works and creates a kid-friendly portrait of a guy who works really hard to stop crime by scaring and/or beating the stuffing out of bad guys. Its unusual and notable emphasis on young Bruce Wayne's years of physical and mental study even impart a valuable lesson about hard work, not to mention not being afraid to pursue your really weird dreams. It's great. I'm gonna give it to my nephew.
* Because I wasn't super-crazy about the film version of The Ruins I haven't paid much attention to its impending DVD release, but apparently the director's cut includes an alternate ending. I didn't have beef with the ending per se, it was more an issue of its pacing, so I'm curious to see if or how that changed.
* I try to treat most people who worry that Frank Miller won't "respect" Will Eisner's creation The Spirit in his film adaptation thereof with the laughing disinterest they mostly deserve, but ADDTF blogfather Bill Sherman is a guy I take seriously, so I found his post about how Miller's blog has and hasn't assuaged his concerns on that score a worthwhile read.
* Chris Mautner assembled quite the critics' roundtable on the topic of reviewing and ethics, specifically how people handle talking about projects by people they know and are friendly with. It's funny, even though I've been burned once or twice in the past by repeated praise of a book that turned out to be by a buddy of the praiser's, I find I do this myself in reviewing books by the likes of Shawn Cheng or Jeff Brown. In part that's because I think I can still be fair, and in part it's because in the case of pretty much all of my friends in comics, I became friends with them because I liked their comics, not the other way around. For me personally, a stickier area might be how to handle talking about stuff by people who publish or pay me--look over there under the heading "The Sean Collins Media Empire" and you'll see a list of those who are a going concern at the moment. Due to my stated aim of blogging only about stuff I'm interested in and trying to avoid heaping snark and scorn on the target du jour, this hasn't been a huge problem to date. Overall I like to think I've still been pretty honest and fair addressing what works and doesn't work in projects relevant to those outlets, and a simple "if you don't have anything nice to say etc" policy helps any time I'm tempted to really curbstomp something, but as I just said, that's true of everything I write about. Bottom line: I have never and will never pretend to like something I dislike, or pretend to love something I like, on this blog. After all, I'm not here to make friends.
[Editor's note: This is one of a series of interviews I'll be posting that were rescued from WizardUniverse.com's now-defunct archives. Originally posted on August 18, 2007.]
I CAN HAS COMIX?: JEFFREY BROWN
SUB: The 'Incredible Change-Bots' creator talks Transformers, his new Top Shelf series, directing for Death Cab for Cutie and why he's so interested in sex
By Sean T. Collins
The night she first met Jeffrey Brown, a friend of mine went home and created a T-shirt that read "JEFFREY BROWN'S NEXT BOOK."
It's certainly hard not to be won over by Brown's so-called "Girlfriend Trilogy" of graphic-novel autobiographies, the work for which he is best known. In Clumsy, Unlikely and Any Easy Intimacy/AEIOU, he chronicles the major and minor events in three separate relationships with uncensored honesty and humor, in the process creating three of the most instantly relatable comics in recent memory.
But there's more to Brown than the autobio beat: He's also a laugh-out-loud-funny humorist whose gag strips grace the collection I Am Going to Be Small, and who's taken parody shots at superheroes with Bighead, his own brand of sensitive autobiography with the ultra-macho Be a Man, and this summer's breakout sci-fi stars the Transformers in The Incredible Change-Bots, out next week from Top Shelf. Offbeat contributions to anthologies like Mome and a hilarious homage to his cat Misty in the hardcover Cat Getting Out of a Bag and Other Observations further push the boundaries of Brown's deliberately sketchy style.
The extremely prolific Brown put down his pen long enough to spill the beans on his new upcoming comics series, his next graphic novels and just what those ex-girlfriends have thought about being immortalized in Brown's books.
WIZARD: What kind of cartoonist would you describe yourself as? You've split your time evenly between a lot of different genres: autobio, parody, gag strips, fiction…
BROWN: Well, when I tell people what I do, I usually say that I draw autobiographical comics, just because usually when I'm telling people, they're people who don't really know that much about comics other than the superhero stuff. So that lends some amount of respect to it or something. But it is pretty half-and-half. I guess I would also maybe not want to be trapped in one element so much. I'm half-humor and half-autobiographical--although I guess the autobiographical is humorous too.
I guess that depends on your biography.
BROWN: Yeah. It depends on which part of the book you're reading.
So is that a conscious choice on your part, not getting stuck in one genre?
BROWN: Well, yeah, partly conscious. There are definitely times where I go back and forth just so that I don't get too bogged down in the autobiographical. One of the reasons that I did Bighead when I did was that I was writing Unlikely at the same time. It was a way to do something lighthearted and have my mind go somewhere else so that it didn't get so insulated. But at the same time, I mean, I do genuinely really enjoy doing those other parodies and kind of letting loose with things. It's definitely something that I make a conscious effort to do, but hopefully it's something that I do to some extent anyway.
I guess that question first occurred to me when reading the comics you did for anthologies like Kramers Ergot, Drawn and Quarterly Showcase and Mome, which didn't really fit into either of the Jeffrey Brown modes that we've come to know. It's not Clumsy or Unlikely or AEIOU, and it's not Bighead or Incredible Change-Bots or I Am Going to Be Small. That kind of work falls between the two poles of what you mainly do.
BROWN: That's probably not conscious. You're right. I never really thought about that, actually. I think maybe what it is…I mean, I have a lot of interest in exploring the autobiographical work and that I have a lot of interest in finding these parodies and more straightforward funny books. I think that when I'm doing something for anthologies, you don't have the same kind of space to work with. The ideas that I use for the anthologies are things that I wouldn't expand out into a whole book. Then it tends to be these kind of weird ideas that come up less often, that are sometimes a little experimental in form. Essentially, the stuff in Mome was just kind of me letting my mind babble a little bit.
So it's tailored to take advantage of the short-story form?
BROWN: Yeah. I think that for me to do autobiographical stuff in short form is more difficult because I think that it becomes this lamenting thing, and you just end up with literally short funny pieces or something. I don't think that it'd be as interesting. Then for the parody stuff, there are a few things like the "Cycloctopus" story, but that was for Project Superior, a superhero anthology, so it fit really well. It's just easier when you've got a smaller space. You can kind of fool around, but there is a cutoff point and you know that you can escape at some point.
This also brings to mind the fact that you're really, really prolific. It seems like you're constantly drawing; I've gone out to dinner with you and all of a sudden I'll turn around and you've got your sketchbook open and you're drawing. Is it important to you to keep working and constantly produce comics?
BROWN: It's not so much that I feel any kind of need to, at the end of the day, have a certain amount of pages published. It's such a habit for me, though, that I start to get itchy when I'm not drawing a lot. Also, I have to keep coming up with ideas. I don't know if it's impatience or what, but I need to get it down quickly. If it's an idea that I feel really strongly about, a lot of times if I don't do it shortly after I think of it then I lose interest and I can't do anything with it.
As an artist, you were first interested in fine arts.
BROWN: Yeah.
Yet your comic style sort of evolved into this…I don't know. Is lo-fi a word that you would accept as a description?
BROWN: Yeah.
Is that to enable you to keep drawing and keep getting ideas down rapidly?
BROWN: Yeah. Part of it was just in response to fine art, because I was in art school and was getting so tired of overthinking everything and having all of this baggage to making a work of art, so I wanted to go back. Like, when you're a kid you can just sit down and draw and draw. You're not worried about things other than just trying to express something on paper. Part of it was just trying to capture that kind of feeling again. The other part of it was that my style does come out of wanting to be fast and sketchy. I guess that part of my philosophy of drawing is that when you're not overworking a drawing, when you're really just going at a certain speed, it becomes more expressive and more immediate because you don't have time to hide your flaws. You don't have time to tinker around with things. So, in a way, the meaning behind the drawing is kind of purer somehow because it's unedited.
That reminds me of the indie-rock aesthetic, and it seems as though music is influential in your creative process. Do you listen to stuff when you work?
BROWN: When I can. I usually have it in the background, though I haven't been lately. I used to draw in coffeehouses a lot, so there would be music playing and then you would have the additional background noise of people talking and people bustling around. Now I'm drawing at home a bit more, and if I'm by myself I can have the TV on and the stereo on at the same time. Usually what I do is I turn the volume down on the TV so that I can just barely hear that, and then I turn the music up, although if anyone else is there, most people start to get really freaked out by the overstimulation. Music is definitely something for me. Also, I think that music is deep into comics, because when I'm driving a lot of times I'll just be thinking about whatever project I'm working on. So I'm driving and listening to music and also thinking about things. It'll often deepen things even before I start drawing.
My therapist told me that when you're driving in your car it's a little bit of a sensory deprivation chamber, so when you listen to music in your car you tend to react a lot more intensely than you might outside. It tends to spur those deep thoughts.
BROWN: Yeah, that makes sense.
I kept wondering why I was getting so depressed: I was driving home from work listening to Azure Ray, and I'd see some roadkill and I'd want to cry. Then she explained to me how that worked.
BROWN: [Laughs] Yeah, you just need to switch the CDs that you're listening to.
Having seen your sketchbooks, and occasionally some of the drawings that you put into your one-man anthology collections or even the cover for Bighead, you do have a style that is a lot more rendered and less sketchy and dashed off.
BROWN: Yeah. I'm fairly selective [about using that style]. Part of that is that I never want to be at a point where it becomes style over substance. I also don't want people to get too caught up in looking at the visuals when they're reading. So the cover is a good place to do the more rendered work. That's some of the reason why the superhero stories tend to be a little more rendered. The way that they're reading isn't so internal, at least in my superhero stories, so I'm not as worried if the people are looking at the visuals a little bit more. Also, with the superhero stories, there are opportunities for more spectacular visuals just because it's a fantasy. The other reason, too, is that the way that I draw the autobiographical books with these kinds of simple figures with these claw hands, there's something about that I find kind of visually amusing. There's something about bending arms and the physics of the room not working. There's something about that offness that I like. If you're drawing superheroes, you can draw them doing crazy, fantastic things. If you're telling a story about real life where someone is walking down the street, there's not that opportunity. Extracting the anatomy of people and using the bendy arms and things like that, that's kind of a way to keep that in the books.
So it's less a Scott McCloud-type thing in terms of reader identification with cartoony characters and more that you just find the look of it amusing and entertaining?
BROWN: There might be an element of the McCloud theory. I've actually fooled around a few times with the idea of drawing a story in a more realistic style. I think that for me what it comes down to is, for one, the more realistic the drawing, the less enjoyable it feels. I want to keep the books lighter; even when there's something serious happening, in terms of the story, visually you can still have it be funny. There's something that my instinct tells me: The way that I draw characters is more likable than these realistic characters. I also think that when you're simplifying and abstracting characters like that, they do become somehow more identifiable with more people. They become a little bit more everyman than they would be otherwise.
As you're talking about this, I keep thinking about your cat Misty in Cat Getting Out of a Bag. You drew her really cartoony, so she's kind of an every-cat.
BROWN: Yeah.
Is there such a thing as an every-cat?
BROWN: [Laughs] There must be. There must be.
Which reminds me: I don't know if I'd have recognized you if all I had to go on was your drawings of yourself. For example, in real life you're pretty square-jawed, while Cartoon Jeffrey Brown has this sort of round head and not much of a chin. So two questions: First, why did you draw yourself like that? And second, since you're obviously drawing real people who exist and whom you know, how much does that carry over with the other people in your autobiographical comics? Is getting their likenesses down important, or do you change things?
BROWN: Part of that is that just over time it's become more stylized and so it's kind of gotten away from any kind of consideration of looking like me or not. If you look in Clumsy, too, in that book more than any other book I wasn't concerned with kind of capturing the likenesses and was just almost making these sort of symbolic figures for early characters. Long black hair or stubble would be more of an identifying characteristic than anything else. Now I tend to work a little more towards making the people closer to their likeness, but at the same time it's more about maybe capturing the feeling of the person. It's not just about what their personality is, but what my relationship to them is. In that way, it's something I'm writing about for me, which is more important than whether it actually looks like them or not. People seem to be split actually on how much I look like my drawings. Some people tend to think that I look a lot like how I draw myself, and then other people seem to think that I don't at all. I used to think that the more you knew me, the more my cartoon counterpart would look like me, but I don't know that that's necessarily true either. For someone reading the books, they don't really need to know what people really look like. In that sense it's kind of like if they don't know me, the books might as well be fiction. I think that there's something about knowing that something is real and true to life that people somehow find attractive, that quality in a book. But I don't know if that carries over into what things look like.
I see what you're saying. Is it a voyeuristic quality, do you think, that attracts people to reading that sort of stuff?
BROWN: I've thought about this, because there's the whole scandal of James Frey where he wrote this book [A Million Little Pieces] and presented it as his memoirs, and it turns out that there were some things made up and some things that were really exaggerated. There was a class-action lawsuit and people were getting money back from the book. I think that maybe what it has to do with is something internal in humans that is about not getting fooled, or feeling that there's an element of trust that needs to be there. Finding out that "Oh, that's not really how it was" alters their perception, because when they're reading something, especially when they're reading autobiography, they're reading it relative to their own experiences. So, when they find out something like "James Frey went through all these things," they put that into context with their own past. Then they find out that he's really something else. That undermines their understanding of human life, their experience. There's something about that, needing to know whether it's really true or made up.
As an artist it's one thing, but as a writer, how important is the accuracy of how you depict events?
BROWN: Well, I'm maybe a little less anal about it now, but I do try to keep things…like, everything I'm writing is true, but things like what I'm leaving out and the timing of things and how I'm presenting things, that's kind of the art of it all. It's still important for me, in the autobiographical world that I built up, that it's true to life, because once you start undermining, or if I were to write something that undermined one story, then it would bring the rest of the work into question too. At the same time though, in terms of timing and characters, once in a while just to not have so many people in a story I might have one person fill a role that was originally two people. I'm not putting words into anyone's mouth, but how I set everything up can really influence how people are interpreting the story or whether or not I'm expressing the ideas that I'm trying to get at.
Do you think that knowing what you do for a living influences the behavior of people around you at all?
BROWN: I don't really think so. I mean, for the most part, for people who know me, the books become this separate thing. People will joke sometimes, like, "Oh, you better be careful. He might write about that later." But the minute that someone says that I might write about something is like a sign to me to not write about it because then there's something. It's almost like the people in the situation are too aware of the situation. So I try to write about things from an outside perspective, even though it's autobiography. I still try to approach it from somewhere else, where there's a different perspective than being in the moment. The people I'm friends with and the people that I spend the most time with know that. I certainly don't live my life any differently. I don't do anything with any kind of plan like, "Now this is something that I might write about later." If I take a trip somewhere, maybe after the trip I'll come home and be thinking about that, and it might be interesting and mean something on a more significant level, and I might want to write about that. But I don't say, "Okay, I'm going to go to New York so that I can write a story about New York and what happens there." Nothing like that.
So you're not taking mental notes--or actual notes--as you're doing things?
BROWN: I do always write from memory, and more often now I'm also writing as if more time has passed. I'm starting to work on a high school/college/art school memoir, so there's quite a bit more distance in time from the events. I never keep a diary. My idea is that our memory is an editor for us, so when we're sitting down and thinking about a relationship that we were in, our minds pick certain things out. We don't always know why, but somehow those things are what become important about that relationship. On the one hand I use that as a tool: using memory as a way of editing things and getting at what's significant in our experience. Then at the same time it's also something that I'm interested in, the idea of how our memories work. It's really interesting to me, why we remember some things and why some things take on such significance to us when often they're not the biggest events.
One of the interesting things about your autobio comics are the way that they bounce back and forth between events that are fairly momentous within the context of a relationship and little moments that end up almost as important as a first kiss or a breakup.
BROWN: Right. There's also the fact that most of my time is made up by these inconsequential moments. It's like stopping to smell the flowers. Those things are important. Years later, when you think back on them, it might be something that you did every day and at the time was routine, but now when you look back it, it does mean something more to you.
Is that why in your first book, Clumsy, you told the story out of chronological order?
BROWN: Yeah. On the one hand I didn't originally plan on writing just about the relationship. I wanted to collect stories that I would tell my friends--I'd be at work talking to someone, like, "The other day this happened"--so I was just going to take all of those stories, and the first few were about this relationship. Then I realized that I had enough of these stories about the whole relationship. I wanted to let my mind pick the order because it interesting how it had started to go back and forth. I think this is how we think about relationships. When we put it in our heads, it's like, "Oh, here's this really great first moment." Then we might think, "There was this one time, it wasn't anything special, but we went to dinner." Then you think, "Then there was this one time where I was really pissed off." You just go back and forth between these different feelings. I wanted to organize it in that same way. How our minds wander is how the book wanders.
Is there a reason why you stopped doing things in that way for the autobiographical projects you've done since then?
BROWN: Not specifically. With Unlikely, I definitely wanted to do something almost surgical in its chronology. That was because the one idea that I really wanted to write about was how I felt about losing my virginity. [I wanted to] capture the feeling about that one event. To set up the feelings around that I needed to do things chronologically and build up to it and then show the aftermath. The book that I'm just finishing up now, which is a collection of shorter autobiographical pieces, jumps back and forth in chronology too, but each story is from 10 to 80 pages and each story in itself is chronological. That gets back to the same structure of Clumsy where the context that things happened in isn't necessarily the context that we put them in when we organize them in our minds. When we have things rearranged, that's what heightens their significance to us--where they sit amongst the other things in our minds.
In Unlikely and elsewhere, you're not pulling any punches when it comes to sex. Actually, that's one of the most striking aspects of your work. Why sex?
BROWN: Because my dad is a minister, so I have a lot of repression issues that I was breaking out of. Also, sex is kind of interesting. [Laughs] There's a reason why people are fascinated by it. There's the psychological aspect and the physical aspect. But I pull a lot more punches now than I did then. I think that's partially because it's been stated already and I don't need to go over that again. At the same time, because of the way I draw where it's not realistic, for me, it's not depictions of me having sex. It's an abstraction. These characters are having sex at this point and it's no longer so much like real people.
Is that the case for when you're writing in general or is it more those specific scenes?
BROWN: It's generally. For me to be as open as I am, there has to be that. There's a disconnect for me in writing these books. It gets back to wanting to write about these stories from a different perspective, something a little more outside of myself. There are different levels to that: There's the way that I draw the characters and the parts of the stories that I'm not putting in the books--all of that feeds into being able to have the characters and stories become their own self-contained thing. They come out of real life, but over time, being in the books, they become something else. It's only showing parts and particular sides of things. Even though I try to write objectively, it's obviously still my perspective in all of these books, and you're only seeing certain events and certain things with the characters. There's a lot more to everyone than that. That's another way in which it's a little less real.
How have people handled being the other half of these scenes?
BROWN: I mean, they handle it in various ways. [Laughs] Some people I don't know because we're not in touch anymore. I tend to have imagined what they might've felt about it. I try to be somewhat fair. I'm not pulling punches, but at the same time I'm not out to assassinate anyone's character. I could certainly make everyone look worse or better than I do and still be true to the events; hopefully the people in the books recognize that. In a weird way, although the books are extremely personal, writing them doesn't mean anything personal towards anyone else except myself. It's not about who these people are, it's about how I feel about these events.
So none of these are poison-pen letters or paeans to the one that got away or whatever--it's more focused on your own reactions to what happened?
BROWN: Yeah, and not necessarily even me trying to get over something, but I'm interested in…you have this breakup and you have these feelings of sadness mixed with these memories of good things. There's these bad things that happened, but you might start to idealize things. I'm just interested in exploring those feelings. It's not that I use this specific person that I feel a particular way about to write about. I'm interested in trying to capture the feelings that I had at the time. That's what I'm trying to get at.
Your life has changed substantially in the last year or so. You're a family man now. You have a baby. How is that affecting you as a writer and as an artist, or is it at all?
BROWN: It's definitely affecting me, even aside from the practical effects of time, figuring out when to get work done when you have this little person who's totally dependent. For one thing, I see myself writing less autobiography about what's happening now. Having a baby, you don't really have time to process and think about things a lot. Maybe years down the road that'll change and I'll start to think about how I could write about having a family--I've written one story that touches a little bit on becoming a father--but right now I'm so much in the thick of it I can't even imagine writing about that very much. It does change your perspective on life quite a bit, about what's significant and what's not. There's this change to it where, I don't know, you start to feel a lot older all of a sudden, and not necessarily wiser. You feel like a lot of the things that meant a lot to you suddenly mean a lot less. It's hard to say exactly how it affects me, but the autobiographical work that I'm planning on doing is pretty dated, for the near future. I also think that maybe [I'll try] to explore autobiography in a more safe form down the road, where I might tell stories from life but then try to find a way to set up more internal thoughts than I have in the past.
The industry has also changed. Your books do very well, you have famous fans like Michel Gondry and Death Cab for Cutie…I would imagine that since you started doing comics, the opportunities that are available to someone who does the kind of work that you do have exploded exponentially.
BROWN: Yeah, definitely. People are able to do serious comics and make more money from it. It's not that people would go into comics just to make money, but if you're a creative person…when you're at a formative point where you're thinking, "I'd like to make film" or "I'd like to draw comics" or "I'd like to write books," it's hard to make comics when you're not making money from them because you've got to do something else to make the money, whereas if you decide to go into film there is a bigger opportunity to get to that point where you could make money from making the film. Now that's something that comics has come into, where you can actually start to make money from doing it. That enables you to do more of it. The more people that are able to do that, and the more the outside media takes notice and you have publishers that realize there's a market for these comics, it all feeds into itself and grows exponentially.
Do you still have a day job or are you doing comics full time?
BROWN: Up until a few weeks ago I was still working part time [at a bookstore], mostly to keep the health insurance, but my hours dropped down enough where I lost my health insurance. I still work one day a week because I really like books, and working at a bookstore is nice in some ways, but my income is basically all coming from the books that I have out and books that are coming out, and the occasional odd job here and there. I don't really do any illustration work, but the things like the Death Cab video [I directed, for the song "Your Heart Is an Empty Room"] come up once in a while where it's a little extra money.
What do you have coming out next? You mentioned the collection of autobiographical stuff and the high school/college/art school memoir…
BROWN: The collection is called Little Things. That's due to come out next April from Touchstone, which is an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Then I'm still just in the scripting phase, but the other book is called Funny Misshapen Body. That would tentatively be scheduled to come out sometime the year after that, so 2009. Those are the two big projects that I'll be working on for the next long while. At the same time I'm going to start doing a series of pamphlet comics with Top Shelf called Sulk. That's going to be, again, my method of balancing out the so-called serious autobiography with the more humorous and free-flowing work. I'm going to do an issue with more Bighead stuff and an issue with 1 or 2 pages of funny autobiographical stuff, and there's some other parodies that I want to do. That'll maybe be 3 or 4 issues a year. It's an idea that I've been kicking around for a while, and I've really started to figure out how it would work. I've actually got the first 8 or 9 issues scripted out, so it's just a question of when I start to draw them.
Over the last year or two there have been a lot more actual alternative comics coming out, between the Ignatz and things like Uptight and Big Questions and Skyscrapers of the Midwest. It's nice to see those things coming out from publishers again.
BROWN: Yeah. If you think about it, novels used to be serialized in magazines a lot. It's kind of strange how the book market has become more profitable for comics. People have started to think, "Why do a pamphlet comic when I could just wait and do a book and have it on sale in both bookstores and comic book stores?" The nice thing about pamphlet comics is that for people who aren't familiar with your work, it's nice to have that little introduction. The Sulk series will be a place to put these shorter works that don't necessarily have enough to them to fill up a whole book. I'm going to try to start [releasing] the series towards the end of this year, but that depends on getting it done. What I did wrong is that I started this one issue of Sulk where there's 96 pages instead of 32 pages because it's an Ultimate Fighting Championship one where there's an 80-page fight scene. I started drawing that one first, so now I don't want to put it down and come back to it. I feel the need to finish this one first, but I don't plan on publishing it as my first issue. It's kind of silly for me to draw it. Maybe I will put it down and just start Sulk. That makes sense. So November or December would probably be the next thing.
Finally, there's The Incredible Change-Bots. I take it you're a big Transformers fan?
BROWN: Yeah. I would get home from school and watch the cartoons, or on Saturday mornings when they were on. I had all of the toys and I read the comics. Transformers and G.I. Joe and Star Wars were the big toys for me. I haven't done any comics for G.I. Joe or Star Wars yet, but there's something fun about the idea of robots. I realized that I had ideas about things that are funny about Transformers that I could stick into a more extended thing.
So will we be seeing the G.I. Joe equivalent of Change-Bots from you at some point?
BROWN: I don't know. The danger there might be that it'd be easy to get drawn into the politics and the real-world relations of things. It's possible, but we'll have to see if something inspires me down the road.
I write for "Twisted ToyFare Theater," and I always amaze myself with the sheer volume of Golobulus and Dr. Mindbender gags I can come up with anytime we do a G.I. Joe strip.
BROWN: That's great. In the McSweeny's humor collection, there's "The Journal of a Cobra Recruit." He just talks about things like, "Today we ran forward holding a gun and screaming 'Cobra!'" It's really hilarious. It's in the book that Charles Burns drew the cover for. You should definitely check that out. It's so funny that I think it might make doing a G.I. Joe comic irrelevant.
* On some alternate Earth that is home to a Sean T. Collins with more money, more shelf space, and an even more absurdly patient wife, that Sean T. Collins has quite a few action figures for grown-ups, like the DC Direct Green Lantern Series 3 figures reviewed at FarePlay and the Target-exclusive Red Hulk Build-a-Figure Marvel Legends wave on display at Marvelous News (via Topless Robot). Stranded here in the infant universe of Qwewq as I am, however, this present Sean T. Collins can merely observe that action figures of superheroes and the stories that they are based on both bear witness to the simple fact that taking a character and changing his color scheme around is awesome.
* And speaking of Bruce Baugh, he (and his commenters) draws our attention to a couple of cases in which enterprising World of Warcraft players managed to loose gigantic, near-indestructible, killcrazy creatures into normally peaceful environments. Hilarious carnage results! As with an earlier incident in which players used their in-game pets to transmit a blood-borne pestilence from a dying demigod to an enemy city, thus wiping it out, WoW's corporate overlords (the real gods of the game, apparently) quickly undid the catastrophic results of these ingenious shenanigans. I don't play the game and maybe I'd feel differently if I did, but don't you think they should have just let it be? It seems to me that if you are a resident of a fantasy world that's crawling with bloodthirsty beasts and demonic entities large and small, roughly based on our own medieval past, the occasional apocalyptic plague and/or out-of-nowhere Godzilla attack is just part of the cost of living. Or perhaps it's just that, as with that infamous massacre of the in-game memorial for an IRL deceased player, I'm amused and fascinated when players use the rules of a highly structured world against it, as it were. On the other hand, I can see how allowing such maverick moves to go forward unchecked would set up a lousy incentive structure whereby players would spend more time testing the boundaries of fairplay than actually playing. Then again, I'm sure that's the case with a goodly number anyway.
* Jon Hastings argues that contra The Blair Witch Project (which he didn't even like), Cloverfield's first-person hand-held camera conceit never rises above the level of gimmick, providing some grist for conversation among critics but never really influencing the stylistic and staging and writing choices made by the filmmakers. I think he's mostly right, except that the limited perspective made for a hellaciously effective slow-reveal for the monster. I think the audience would have gotten pretty impatient if the filmmakers hadn't allowed themselves that excuse.
* In the comments at this very blog, And Now the Screaming Starts' CRwM questions whether nihilistic old Frank Miller has the proper sensibility to properly optimistic old Will Eisner's worldview in The Spirit. I think he's being willfully uncharitable to Miller (eg. jokingly singling out a sole comment Miller made about humanizing the Spirit by making him trip after a rooftop leap as though that's as far as he's going to go on that score), but I suppose more importantly I think he mischaracterizes Eisner (some of his later works are breathtakingly cynical), Miller (it's tough to think of a creator as obviously in love with his characters as Miller with his Sin City crew or Batman), and whether Miller views the darkness of his own work as a sign of maturity (he's always struck me as quite knowingly a kid in a candy store).
* Chris Butcher has posted a long out of print interview with Black and White cartoonist Taiyo Matsumoto, including a lengthy bibliography. The interview's from 1995, which god help us all was thirteen fucking years ago.
* Finally, your quote of the day comes from Matthew Perpetua in response to Rich Juzwiak's wonderfully repetitive "I'm not here to make friends" reality-show cliche montage:
Maybe that should just be the official motto of this country in the 00s.
Neverland
Dave Kiersh, writer/artist
Bodega, 2008
32 pages
$6 Buy it from Bodega
Dave Kiersh's visual representation of our mutual home-area/zeitgeist of Long Island doesn't match up with my experience of it. He puts together vistas of water towers, telephone poles, stores, and parking lots in an almost map-like fashion, giving the suburbs a depth and dimensionality that I've never really felt from them. I see Long Island as flat sets, buildings and houses glimpsed while passing them horizontally in innumerable car rides and Long Island Rail Road commutes. I certainly don't see the swirling repleteness that Kiersh conveys with his increasingly accomplished linework.
Yet it all still feels true, somehow. His observations of teenage and immediately post-teenage life on Long Island are spot on: convenience stores and driving, "the video store is my culture--Saturday nights in front of the TV," walking through a parking lot at night and remembering girls you hooked up with. The main theme of Neverland--split up the compound word, as the cover design does, and you'll see where he's going--is not the romantic escape from this sensual boredom he yearns for in sexualized Peter Pan fantasies and idealized relationships, but that yearning itself, that desire itself, inextricable as it is from staying right where you are and not actually escaping. A coda likening any future success he and his beloved might have to a forgotten tourist attraction I myself patronized as a little boy adds a further complication of comfort in futility. This is a sophisticated comic that nearly tricks you into thinking it's twee and easy, which is no mean feat.
[Editor's note: This is one of a series of interviews I'll be posting that were rescued from WizardUniverse.com's now-defunct archives. Originally posted on August 31, 2007.]
I CAN HAS COMIX?: JORDAN CRANE
SUB: The writer-artist of the all-ages adventure 'The Clouds Above' and the grown-up series 'Uptight' on why he loves short stories, ghost stories and Geof Darrow--and why he hates animation, puns and 'The Walking Dead'
By Sean T. Collins
If it weren't for Jordan Crane, I wouldn't be here.
At the same time as Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's New X-Men reignited my love affair with superheroes, an impulse purchase of Crane's gorgeous, wistful graphic novella The Last Lonely Saturday was my ticket to a world beyond the spandex set. From there it was a short trip to Crane's meticulously designed anthology series NON, a clearinghouse for undiscovered or underappreciated indie talents like Nick Bertozzi, Brian Ralph, Paul Pope and Ron Rege Jr.--starting a journey that deepened my love for the sequential art medium, changed my career trajectory and landed me here at Wizard.
So it's no exaggeration to say that Crane's work literally changed my life, even while it rapidly changed in and of itself. Crane has careened from whimsical children's projects like The Clouds Above--Wizard's Best All-Ages Comic of 2006--to brutal ghost stories like his Western short story "The Hand of Gold" to lending his talented design hand to Fantagraphics' anthology series Mome. His current focus is Uptight, a one-man pamphlet-format comic he'd like to see last as long as Love and Rockets.
Crane peeled himself away from his pet project to reveal his animation-industry origin story, tout the value of making beautiful things on the cheap, explain why winning the prestigious Xeric Grant hurt more than helped, and explore the one thing all comics must do (aside from changing lives, of course).
WIZARD: How did you get interested in comics?
CRANE: I read lots of comics as a kid and as a teenager. I think that's pretty standard. I swore them off a number of times, trying to be an adult, then always went back to them. At first it was kind of like exploring, like, "Oh, what's this? What's that?" Then I started looking for things that personally resonated with me and got into more non-mainstream stuff. The first thing that really clicked for me was when I got the first couple of issues of [Steve Purcell's] Sam & Max. I was like, "What the f--- is this?" I loved how cartoony it was. Then I found [Marc Hansen's] Ralph Snart, which is another weirdo comic, and [Dave Stevens'] The Rocketeer. That's when I started going into the world of weirdo comics. It was something that kind of just naturally evolved.
But in college I studied a lot of animation. I really wanted to go into animation because I thought that it would be really cool. I made a couple of short movies, then I went out into the real world and started showing the movies I had made to some people at different animation houses around town. I went to Film Roman, the people that do "The Simpsons," and Nickelodeon, and Klasky-Csupo, and a guy at Film Roman was like, "Wow, look at this reel! You could really get a good job--in China." I had no idea that no animation is done here; it's all key frames. I had these dreams of getting hired by Nickelodeon--"All right, come up with awesome stories and you'll animate them and we're just this big animation-loving world"--when in fact you would be lucky if you got to key-frame someone else's story, and then maybe, if you're really good at that and outgoing and have the wherewithal to write stories on your own, then maybe 10 years later you can actually write the animation or select the key frames. I basically thought that the animators were also the people that made the stories. That's how guileless I was. So going into the real world was like a big f---ing crap on my birthday cake when I realized that those two things didn't go together like I thought they did.
That was when I turned back to comics, because I was like, "I can actually write and draw everything I want." I had been doing animation for about 3 years, but I still drew comics and was the comics editor at the school newspaper, so I was still drawing comics every day. It was really terrible because I really liked gag strips, but at the same time I was going through a really big existentialism phase. So the strips were supposed to be funny but were extremely unfunny. They had a bunch of puns in them and were about ennui: Imagine Godard's retarded brother doing really bad puns. Puns are like the lowest form of humor. But to do a story in animation it takes about a year, so I come back to comics thinking "I'm going to do comic stories now instead of 4-panel gags." I thought that I could just sit down and write all this stuff out. Having a little more room, I could start to mess around with things. I wasn't tied down with it having to be funny in 4 panels, so I could go for a different kind of funny and a different kind of setup, a more long-term or ongoing story that wasn't necessarily funny, but stories that would build. And I could do a story fast because it would take only 4 months instead of a year. So that was pretty much it. As soon as I figured out that animation was bullsh--, it was comics all the way.
What came first? Was it your anthology comic, NON?
CRANE: Yeah, that was the very first time that I ever did long comics. I had made a couple of aborted attempts. There was one when I was 17 and I had tried to do a post-apocalyptic comic about all the coolest sh-- ever. It had hovercrafts and hotrods, you name it. Then in college I tried to do some kind of pretentious poetry thing that didn't work out either. Both of those were abortive attempts; NON was the first time that I finished an actual comic story. I made the decision to start publishing because at the time there was all this Internet money floating around; I was making a lot of money.
What were you doing?
CRANE: I was a designer. This was about '96 or '97, and the Web thing was starting to gain momentum and I was making good money, which was certainly enough to publish. So I started that and was able to get a really good boost and not have to worry about making my money back. I think I priced everything really cavalierly [laughs], because I could, and I thought that I should. Because my whole intention with publishing was to make work that people could read. And I think that it still remains that way. It was to get people to read it first and worry about making money later.
Even today, your series Uptight is comparatively inexpensive for that format. The few pamphlet-format alternative comic books that exist tend to be not as cheap.
CRANE: My intention with Uptight was slightly different. I really got sick of waiting for 2 or 3 years between books. It was also brought on by the fact that I had kids, and my working time, while they were young, was cut down for a couple of years. I was having trouble getting in as much work as I could, so it took a long time to get pages done. The Clouds Above took a long time to get out, and that's what I was working on when they were babies. All I had done up to that point was books: I had The Last Lonely Saturday and Col-Dee and then Clouds Above, and I was working on Keeping Two, too. I was like, "God, I've been working this whole f---ing time and nothing's come out." Every time I would see people I'd be like, "Oh yeah, I'm working," but I wanted to be around and be like, "Yeah, I've got a new thing--here it is." And I was getting sick of doing webcomics, because even though it was nice to have the deadline, I f---ing hate reading online. I just hate it. I don't even like reading newspapers online. I do, but I only skim them at best.
And I also wanted to finish something, because when you're working on books it's every 4 or 5 years that you finish something; other than that you're not finishing anything. The whole thing about finishing something is that you learn things, because you're able to look back at it and go, "Well, that didn't work" or "I should have been more adventurous with that part" or "I should have put more thought into that." You're able to look at it and see how you're telling a story and see how your drawing or lettering worked and see how everything fit together, because it's done and it's a whole thing. I was only getting that every so often and I just didn't feel as if I was growing at all; if I was, it was just glacially. So I really wanted to do short stories because I get to finish things. And I just really love the short-story form and reading short stories.
I think that actually ties back in to comic books. I really like comic books as opposed to graphic novels because it's just a quick thing as opposed to sitting down and devoting yourself to something. The other thing is that if you don't like it, it's over. You can get a taste for something and know if you're going to like it or not. If you do, you can get a nice little taste and you don't need to have this giant meal all at once.
[For example,] I was just reading online about this comic book called The Walking Dead, and I was like, "F---, man, it's a comic book about zombies and it's called The Walking Dead. How could this be anything but f---ing awesome?" Then I go to the store and it's on issue #40, and I'm like, "Wow. Well, maybe I should start at the beginning." And of course they don't have single issues and I have to buy a $10 graphic novel. Then I get home and read it and I'm like, "F--- this!" and I just threw it into the trash. So there's 10 bucks gone for this totally hackneyed comic book. It's just so bad, formulaic and dull. I was disappointed just because it was called Walking Dead and that's a great title, and I just didn't understand how it could be bad. But if it was just a single issue I wouldn't have been so pissed off because I'd just be like, "Ahh, you know, it's not my thing." With just 30 pages and 4 bucks I'm not going to be super-bummed-out about it.
The short form is nice. I just really like the short, quick thing. And maybe that's just a function of my life right now, because I don't have tons of time to devote to any one specific thing. But I wanted to do a comic so that I would have something that would come out regularly. I wanted a regular deadline, something that I could keep pace by. If I wanted those things, I figured the most important thing would be that I get to do those things. So I'm printing it as cheaply as possible until the numbers get up and it can support itself, so Fantagraphics doesn't go, "You know, we can't afford to give you your own vanity project." I want to do it so that they can afford to do it and it not be a money-losing situation for them. I'd love to make it fancier, but that's going to require numbers--and maybe I won't even do it once I get numbers because I do like how simple it is. It's almost like a minicomic. It will be nice to have the option of doing something different, like a full-color pullout, if I have the numbers there, but I don't know. Maybe I won't even do that. It might be nice to just have it be profitable instead of breaking even. But the most important thing is to just be able to do it. The book is really where you can go all fancy, whereas this is straightforward, read-it-here, no frills.
But it's not as though you're a stranger to frills. Take the very elaborate NON #5, for example--it's a die-cut cardboard container holding three separate graphic novels wrapped within a hand-silkscreened cover. Why is design so important to your work?
CRANE: NON #5 is definitely a little different than all the rest of them. NON #5 took that shape because it had to. That was the only way to collect it all together. I was originally going to have Col-Dee and [Kurt Wolfgang's graphic novella] Where Hats Go in the [main NON] book. That was the original plan. But then Kurt and I got Xeric Grants to print them and we were able to overlap projects, which theoretically would save me money. It would've been a hell of a lot cheaper just to print the book as one big book, now that I look back on the whole thing. Those Xeric Grants were actually a hindrance. I was like, "Thanks for the $8,000 that ended up costing me $5,000." [Laughs] Since those were Xeric Grant books, I wanted them to be a part of the package, but they had to work separately because they were going to be sold separately as well.
So that was my solution to that problem: I looked at the budget constraints of the book and tried to figure out how to make it as cheaply as possible. "How can we make it and still turn a profit?" It was just accepting the constraints and not being like, "I'm going to push my publisher to spend money that they don't have." In one way the form isn't the point. In the biggest way the form isn't the point. It's about working within those constraints and creating the most high-quality work that is possible. It's giving the proper attention to creating a book. That's pretty much the problem that I'm trying to solve every time that I approach a book. I'm like, "How can I make this as nice as possible?" That's one of the things that I love about old stuff: I don't love the fact that it's old necessarily, I love that there's a doorknob that somebody looked at and said, "Okay, this is a handle that needs to be turned in order to open a door. How can I make this as nice as possible--as beautiful as possible?" Not just, "How can I make this functional?" If it's in a public place, somebody is going to be touching that doorknob 1,000 times a day, and at least half of those people are going to look at it. It would be nice if when they looked at the doorknob, it lifted them rather than it just being there. I like making something that doesn't have to be beautiful, beautiful. I appreciate it when other people do it, so I try to do it myself.
When I got into comics after graduating from college, NON was the first anthology I'd come across. But we're now in a heavily anthologized era: Kramers Ergot, Mome, Drawn & Quarterly Showcase...
CRANE: I know. Now I don't have to do NON anymore! It's great! I love it! [Laughs] That's why I was doing NON: There was all this great work and none of it was published, and I wanted to publish my own work and this other stuff too. It wasn't that I necessarily set out to do an anthology, it was that I just wanted to put all this other stuff into this book that I'm paying to print. But now there are so many damn anthologies that there's practically no one that isn't getting printed. I'm glad that I'm not publishing an anthology right now. And in a way, NON was really easy. It was a bunch of very obvious choices, because all these great guys were not being published. I was like a kid in a candy store. It was not a hard anthology to edit. [Laughs]
You've told stories in a wide variety of contrasting tones. For example, The Last Lonely Saturday is about an elderly couple and how they're reunited after death, and it's an incredibly sweet and romantic all-ages tale. But in Uptight #2, your story "Take Me Home" takes almost the exact same idea and spins it into this brutally grim, EC-flavored morality play. How do you handle this aspect of storytelling?
CRANE: Whenever a story occurs to me, I just want to do it. I don't have one particular type of story that I'm interested in doing. If a story is exciting to me, then I work on it; if that story gets finished, then I can put it out. I don't really have a filter, because with comics you can do anything that you want! That's the great thing about comics. Anything that strikes my fancy is what I follow until the fancy has been stricken to death [laughs], or it actually winds up going somewhere.
So with The Clouds Above, you didn't sit down and decide to do a children's book?
CRANE: No. I love children's books. And it's not a children's book--I was trying to do a children's book, and they're f---ing hard. I like fantastical stories with kids and I wanted to do an adventure story. There was a certain mood that I wanted to create in the story. It wasn't that I was thinking that I wanted to hit a certain age group. If anything, Clouds Above isn't malicious and f---ed-up enough. It needs to be way more malicious--which would remove it from the age group that it's about and make it practically unreadable for kids. But there are plenty of kids' stories that are totally f--ed up, and kids read them. I just wanted to create something that struck a certain emotional tone. That's how I tried to go about it.
Who are your artistic influences?
CRANE: I could trace influences, but I don't really look at anybody to see how to draw so much as I really like the way something makes me feel. At the very beginning I really liked Geof Darrow. Some of the basic things about the way I wanted to draw are that I don't want to do half-toning and I don't want to do cross-hatching. I want a straightforward black or white line. But apparently, somewhere along the line, it's become okay for me to do washes [laughs], which seems to be completely against anything that I initially wanted to do. But I just love the way it looks. So washes are okay, apparently. As far as the line art, it's always been clean-line art. No cross-hatching--it's either black or white, and trying to make an image out of black and white. So to that end Geof Darrow really hit on something that I wanted, and I looked to him for a while. Then his influence fell off after a while, as I was trying to do less lines and trying to hit the actual thing without a lot of wrinkles and junk. But there are people whose art I feel a certain kinship with. For example, I like what Hank Ketcham does with black and whites. It's amazing. He does a lot of cross-hatching and I don't want to do that, but the things that he does with spaces of black and white is insane. And José Munoz draws so messy but it all makes sense, and he doesn't give a f--- where he puts black. He's crazy. He just throws it on the paper and it's really exciting. There's just such life to his drawings. It's the same with Jaime Hernandez--there's so much expressiveness and he just lays down the black. It's crazy. And then there's Hergé, who practically doesn't lay down any black. He does, but it's very selective and there's a lot of life to these apparently simple drawings. They really bounce, and they have a lot of heft and roll to them.
I think that covers the spectrum. You can see why I feel a kinship to those people, because it feels like there are similar aims, at least drawing-wise. Those are people that I feel are doing the drawing right. I agree with some aspect of their drawings and it makes me excited to feel this kinship with it. And it's not like that's the only kind of artwork that I like. I love John Porcellino and Kevin Huizenga. Kevin is another one that I feel a kinship with because of the simplicity and cleanliness of the way he draws. And Sammy Harkham, who I share a studio with--there are definitely things that he does that I really like. It's mainly cartoony stuff, like the way he draws a puff of smoke coming out of someone's eye.
Is E.C. Segar an influence on you? I see him mainly in your character designs, I think.
CRANE: I'd love to say yes, but I don't think that I could draw anything as crazy as Segar. I really like how crazy he gets, but I guess I haven't looked at enough Segar to say that he's somebody I really pore over. I love his work. Frank King as well: I haven't read enough of him to cite him as an influence. I like a lot of the old-time cartooning where it's very simple, and there are areas of black and white and it's very clear, and the character design doesn't overwhelm the pacing. It all reads along at the same pace. I guess I'm trying to get away from the super-detailed.
And when you ask about influences, I don't cite anybody outside of comics because I think the art for comics is very different than the art for illustration. A finished panel for a comic is an incomplete thing because it's attached to the thing before it and the thing after it. If it's complete then you're at a kind of a standstill, so it needs to be incomplete. It needs to be not a full statement, and it's kind of a very hard thing to do. Jaime does it really well. If you isolate any one of his panels, they just don't work on their own. There are a couple which are intended to be complete statements, but by and large they don't work on their own. Even some that you'd think would work when you're isolating them don't work. I'm doing a screen print with him soon, and I was going through a lot of his comics and trying to isolate panels that I thought would be awesome prints, and it took a lot longer than I initially thought. You'd think that you could take anything from Jaime because it's all brilliant and amazing, but it actually doesn't work on its own. So that's why I'm citing only cartoonists, because I think it's a very different style of drawing.
You're also not mentioning any animators.
CRANE: It's true. I don't like animation anymore. [Laughs] The love affair is over. I had a really big appreciation for the early Max Fleischer stuff, but it's not like I want to draw like that. It definitely is something that did not have an influence on me.
What are you working on now?
CRANE: Uptight #3!
Is Uptight the plan for the foreseeable future?
CRANE: Yeah--for the rest of the future, as far as I can tell. I just want to do Uptight. I'm obviously going to collect them, but it's a place for everything that I'm working on so that I can have something regular come out. Short stories are necessary because you want there to be a finished thing in it. But I can also catch all the incomplete sh-- that I'm working on too, because comic books do that as well. That's what DC and Marvel are all about, because all that they have are incomplete stories. I'm working on some stories for the next issue of that, and possibly some new Simon & Jack stories. And also the usual terrifying and f---ed-up ghost stories. I keep on doing ghost stories because I still haven't read a good one, so I want to try and write a good ghost story.
I'm always happy when people whose work I enjoy come out with comics on a regular basis. I think that some cartoonists have benefited from working in the long form--like the impact that Craig Thompson's Blankets had just from being this giant phone-book-sized graphic novel--but it's fun to get short-form comics as a fan.
CRANE: I think the short form keeps you engaging. That's the most important thing for a comic to do, to be engaging--for it to demand that as a reader you give something to it, and you give it. To do that, each part should be complete--not just each story, but each part, each page, each row of panels. It's subdividable. I mean, being utterly leadenly serialized is bad too, but…If you look at a novel, it's made up of paragraphs and sentences, but each one of those is complete. When I look back at something like Col-Dee, which I worked on in long form, I see that parts of it are incomplete--not by design, but just because I didn't see it.
So from now on, I don't care if I never learn anything more about drawing. [Laughs] I just care about writing, and being engaging as a writer. I mean, that's your f---ing job. Whether you look at someone like Stephen King or someone supposedly "good" like Flannery O'Connor, both of them, aside from their numerous differences, are engaging. That's the hardest thing to be, the most important thing to be. If you can be engaging, f---! [Laughs]
* I'm going to the San Diego Comic Con this year after all, it turns out, courtesy of Jonah Weiland and the fine folks at Comic Book Resources. If you are a comics-related person whom I previously told I wasn't going, I take it all back and I hope to see you/interview you there. Here's the Thursday programming line-up for the show.
* Meanwhile, lots of nerdmedia news seems to have broken, or "broken," in the past couple days. To wit:
* The Exterminators, Simon Oliver's late, lamented Vertigo series, is being developed as a TV series by Showtime.
* The remake of Red Dawn will be written by Carl Ellsworth (who wrote Wes Craven's Red Eye and a screenplay for Y: The Last Man, which I guess isn't being written by Brian K. Vaughan anymore) and directed by Dan Bradley, a second-unit/stunt guy who's worked on movies from the Spider-Man, Indiana Jones, Bourne, and Bond franchises.
* Jeepers Creepers III: Cathedral is in the works, with molesty writer/director Victor Salva again at the helm and original JC actress Gina Phillips all growns up and reprising her role. (Via Dread Central.)
* Our last bit of fresh news is that Darren Aronofsky is in talks to direct the Robocop remake, maybe, possibly. Like Red Dawn I'm not sure this is a film that needed to be remade--you're simply going to lose something that made the great ultraviolent Reagan-era action films so great when translating them into this decade, unless your name is Sylvester Stallone--and moreover this is like the twelfth nerd-wet-dream project Aronofsky has been associated with (remember how he was going to make Batman: Year One and/or Ronin with Frank Miller?), but it's out there as a possibility. (Via Topless Robot.)
* Meanwhile, some folks is talkin bout nerdmovies. For instance:
* On the comics front, Big Sunny David Allison discusses the fool's errand of searching for strict one-to-one allegory in Jack Kirby's Fourth World Saga at the expense of enjoying its weirdness, invention, and emotion as-is.
Water Baby
Ross Campbell, writer/artist
DC/Minx, July 2008
176 pages
$9.99 Buy it from Amazon.com
Ross Campbell is the cartoonist laureate of skanks. For real, when one of the characters in his latest saga of kinda hot, kinda sexy, kinda goth, kinda punk, kinda slow, kinda gross young people uses that term to refer to another, it was a real eureka moment for me. At last, the proper term to describe these beautiful, languid losers! Campbell doesn't judge them for it, neither do I and neither should you.
The central skank (you're unlikely to hear her referred to as such in the marketing materials!) here is Brody, a surfer girl whose leg is bitten off in a shark attack. Plagued by recurring nightmares in which shark-creatures consume her, she spends a lazy summer with her best friend and her slutty ex-boyfriend, until she gets fed up enough with the latter to drive him from her Florida home back to his mom's place in upstate New York. Along the way they pick up a sexy-'rexy hitchhiker girl and eventually receive a good-samaritan ride from Mario Van Peebles (not kidding)...and that's basically it. For what it's worth, the only real difference in tone or style between this project for mighty DC's young-adult-female imprint Minx and Campbell's indie series Wet Moon and Tokyopop zombie OEL The Abandoned, both of which are very good, is a lack of bare nipples, as far as I can remember. (BTW the horror material here, as in The Abandoned, is very gory and very effective.)
Mostly, what I take away is a sort of dazed awe over what a demimonde it is that Campbell has chosen to chronicle and the way he's chosen to chronicle it. From the dawn of my self-identification with fringe culture, I've never had what it takes, be it gumption or a near-total lack thereof, to simply drift--to go for weeks without showering, to not for a second worry whether my rattiest most offensive t-shirt is appropriate grocery store attire, to wake up in a vomit-soaked apartment and immediately go on an overnight road trip with no planning and without telling anyone, simply coasting on the waves provided by sketchy friends, horror films, metal, lust, and junk food. That Campbell lets his characters go there is impressive to me. That he does so in such an almost anti-plot fashion--no multi-act structures, no real character arcs, no big climaxes--is the kind of thing that no one would pay any mind to were his art style more firmly in the altcomix tradition as we know it, but drawing in a beautiful, mainstream-accessible, hotsy-totsy style as he does, with each character drawn for maximum realistic sexiness and trashiness, it's almost a revelation. Like, people really live this way. I really liked living with them.
* AICN's Quint talks to director Guillermo Del Toro about Hellboy II: The Goldeblahblahblah yeah yeah yeah he asks him about The Hobbit and its sequel. Del Toro says his past comments regarding possibly not making the second film if they can't "find the story" have been "taken out of context," and that if they didn't think there was a story there to make, the idea of a second movie would never have come up in the first place.
* Speaking of Del Toro and Hellboy II, I tend to be more credulous regarding reviews of his work if they're written by people who, like me, didn't much care for Pan's Labyrinth and Hellboy, and that's the case with The House Next Door's Jonathan Pacheco, who (also like me, most likely) treats the film as a way to read the tea leaves regarding Del Toro's pending work with Tolkien's material.
* And speaking of Tolkien, Kristin Thompson notes that an upcoming video game will be based on the premise "What if Frodo didn't destroy the Ring?" This is totally alien to any kind of storytelling Tolkien would approve of and totally rad for nerds.
* Jim Treacher makes the case for Hancock, in both non-spoilery and spoilery fashion.
* Evil on Two Legs takes a look at the use of pop music in horror films. "Goodbye Horses" FTW. (Though I thought the version from the film was by Q Lazzarus.)
* If you'd like to hear how America has been torturing its prisoners, here you go.
[Editor's note: This is one of a series of interviews I'll be posting that were rescued from WizardUniverse.com's now-defunct archives. Originally posted on December 30, 2006, I think.]
TV Q&A: DAMON LINDELOF
Co-creator Damon Lindelof reveals the secrets of Season Three's second half--from the truth behind the Others to the return of Walt and Michael to that damn four-toed statue
By Sean T. Collins
It's coming.
After an intense six-episode "mini-season" that barely tided the show's fanatical fans over, "Lost" heads back to a TV (and water cooler) near you on February 7, 2007 for 16 back-to-back, rerun-free episodes. But the show's countless mysteries have kept us talking all season long. What's the real story behind the sinister Others and their plans for prisoners Jack, Kate and Sawyer? Why was kick-ass character Mr. Eko killed? What really happened when the Hatch exploded? And what's up with that four-toed statue, anyway?
Wizard had one choice--either give up working on the magazine and debate these questions full-time, or turn to the man with all the answers, "Lost" Co-Creator and Executive Producer Damon Lindelof, for guidance. So find a comfortable spot in your polar bear cage and sit back as Lindelof dishes the dirt on the best show on television.
WIZARD: The first six-episode mini-season is over. Did you guys accomplish what you set out to accomplish with it?
LINDELOF: I think that in many ways, yes, and in many ways we wish that we could've done more. Our über-goal in the first six episodes was to really begin to set up the mega-story of the season, which is who the Others are and what they want and why they took Kate [Evangeline Lilly], Jack [Matthew Fox] and Sawyer [Josh Holloway]. I think that we at least answered the third question. We feel that we told that story fairly compellingly and well.
The Others were such shadowy villains for so long before these first six episodes. Did you consciously shift gears on that by fleshing out Ben and Juliet?
Well, yeah, that's always been what the show has done, which is that you sort of look at a character in one way and then suddenly you completely shift their perception.
By the end of the first season, one half of the audience was convinced that Locke [Terry O'Quinn] was a bad guy and the other half that he was a good guy. Now I think that everyone has come around to thinking that he's a good guy, but they don't really know him yet. So we've done the same thing with the Others, which is whether they're villains or not--and I think that they've done a lot of villainous things--it's our jobs as writers to explain why they're doing those things in a real and emotional way.
[These Others] dress up in these hillbilly clothes in order to purposely deceive the passengers of 815 and they've abducted people and taken children. What does all that mean?
Those are the acts of a villain. So that is the secret recipe of "Lost," which is, "Why do people do the things that they do, and can we give the audience an understandable explanation as to why they do the things they do?" That is the über-goal of Season Three as a whole.
Will we get explanations on the supernatural stuff like the smoke monster and Desmond's new psychic abilities?
Right out of the gate in one of the early episodes, we are going to explain what is happening with Desmond [Henry Ian Cusick] and what the story function of that is. The monster is something that we use very sparingly on the show. We know what it is. We know how it functions.
It killed Eko! Why eliminate such a fan-favorite character?
We feel like the death story of Mr. Eko [Adewale Akinnouye Agbaje] accomplished really two things as storytellers. The first is that it told the audience that, "Yes, we are willing to kill characters that you love as opposed to characters that you just want us to kill, like Shannon and Boone or Ana-Lucia." That was an important thing to do, because I can't think of a character that was more beloved than Mr. Eko, at least in terms of Season Two. Secondly, we furthered the audience's expectations for what the capabilities of the monster are. That is to say, is it just black smoke, or can it take the form of other things? What does it know about our people? What is its function--is it supernatural or is it technological? All of these things are still very much in play. I think we tend to use the monster when it relates directly to informing character, as opposed to just an arbitrary plot device that can move the trees around and make scary noises.
Two of your most prominent characters right now are Nikki and Paulo, the castaways who were introduced during the mini-season. Did you guys think that it was risky to introduce them that way?
Well, that is a case where the separation of the season actually hurts you, because Nikki [Kiele Sanchez] and Paulo [Rodrigo Santoro] are actually part of a larger story that has not yet quite activated itself, and what you have seen so far is really setup for the big payoff that happens in the middle of the season, around episodes 13 and 14. It's just a scenario where all I can say is that we think the payoff of the idea is very cool, and you just have to trust us a little while longer.
Nikki and Paulo have talked to each other about one of the complaints that some critics of the show have, which is that in this big group of 40-odd survivors, there are really only a handful who do stuff that matter. Are Nikki and Paulo going to be used to further that element at all?
I remember there was an episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" called "Below Deck." Basically, the entire episode was told from the point of view of the guys who were bouncing off of your primary characters. So it was like, "Oh, yeah. There is a whole other crew to the Enterprise that's around, but never f--king does anything." The idea of hearing what they had to say is inherently interesting to me. We initially talked about doing that with Nikki and Paulo, but it was like, "Do we want to do that out of the gate, or do we want to see them in a couple of stories first, and then have the audience go, 'Who the f--k are these guys? I would've noticed them--they're spectacular looking. So what are they trying to pull on me here?'"
Every idea on "Lost" that excites us is one that starts out as a terrible idea that should be impossible to execute. Then we go, "All right, that's worth doing because the degree of difficulty is so high." I think great episodes of "Lost" are separated by very little from the terrible episodes of "Lost." But the thing that they all have in common is that we were trying to execute a very difficult dive. Anyone can jump off of a diving board and land in the water, but not everyone can do a triple back flip and go in without a splash. For me, the only reason to do the show is to attempt difficult dives. Otherwise it's not going to be interesting anymore.
What's up with the four-toed statue? Are we going to start seeing four-toed people running around anytime soon?
Well, I can't tell you that we're going to see four-toed people running around, but I can tell you that the statue does become a big part of the storytelling in much the same way that you have to wait for things on "Lost."
At the time that we showed the statue, it was a reminder to the audience that this island has been around a lot longer than the Dharma Initiative. At the end of Season One, we showed you the Black Rock, which is a 19th-century slaving vessel. At the very least, it's a very old ship. It basically says, "Oh, yes, this island has been here and people have been coming to this island much longer than the Dharma Initiative."
There is this incorrect way of thinking about the Others in that they are the remnants of the Dharma Initiative--the foot was sort of a not-so-subtle reminder that this island and its mystical aspects have been in play for many, many hundreds of years, as opposed to just 1980 when the Dharma Initiative started making their little orientation movies. The origins of the foot and the rest of the statue and all of those things will be revealed in time--probably not soon enough for a great majority of the fans, but at least it has activated their imaginations.
With the return of survivalist Locke--as opposed to button-pushing Locke--will his tormented side continue to come out from time to time the way it did when he was pushing the button?
Yeah. I think Locke is constantly tested. I mean, the reality is that his character archetype is that of a seeker. So he is seeking meaning for his place on the island and understanding as to why he's been given this gift from the island and what he's supposed to do. I think that what was interesting about that story the first time we did it was that he wanted purpose, and the island said, "Okay. Your purpose is to push this button every 108 minutes." And he became very angry at that being his purpose. It felt mundane to him. And he basically got punished for doubting the fact that that was his purpose. Not having pushed the button has basically…The characters don't really have any understanding quite yet of how momentous it was to not push the button. Other than the fact of the not-pushing of the button is what crashed Oceanic 815 in the first place and brought them all there, the idea that the sky turned purple and the island shook… Events in the finale last year catastrophically screwed them all in a way that they don't really appreciate yet.
Another loose end from the season finale of Season Two is what became of Michael and Walt.
It would be a massive and depressing cop-out to not see them again and to not fundamentally understand what happened to those characters. I would be loathe to say that we will never see Michael [Harold Perrineau] and Walt [Malcolm David Kelley] again, but in what context--whether they actually made it off of the island or any of those things--is all up for grabs. I would say that you'll not be seeing them again any time soon.
Which characters will we be seeing flashbacks from soon?
I will say that we will be getting a Desmond flashback in the near future, coming back from the break. And I will not be specific as to who, but we might be getting some flashbacks from the Others sooner rather than later. And there is definitely a Hurley [Jorge Garcia] flashback in the first batch of episodes.
You've said that there is a sort of five-season plan in place for "Lost." Are you guys still on track for that plan?
Did I say that?
I think you said it…
I think that's one of those things that has been attributed to me that no one has actually said. There have been sort of vague questions as to how much story we have or what the plan is, and I think that the only thing that I've ever said on the record is that if we were in a position to actually end the show on our own terms, that it would probably be at the end of four years. That would be the ultimate nexus point for the show. But unfortunately, it's completely moot whether it's four years or five years or seven years, because I don't own the show and [co-creator and executive producer] J.J. [Abrams] doesn't own the show and [executive producer] Carlton [Cuse] doesn't own the show - Touchstone and ABC own the show. And as long as it's a show that is popular and that people are watching, they'll never let us end it, which is sad and depressing.
I guess as far as problems go, that's not a bad one to have, that people love your show so much.
I know. That's right. But I feel for the fans that are desperately waiting for the big answers. The reality is that there is an inherent catch-22 there, which is "Who killed Laura Palmer?" Once you give up who killed Laura Palmer, why watch "Twin Peaks"? Once Dave and Maddy kiss, why watch "Moonlighting"? So I feel like once we give up those big answers, the really compelling reason to watch "Lost" will be over and done with. I would really like to answer those questions because I think that the answers are very cool.
Mome Vol. 11: Summer 2008
Kurt Wolfgang, Al Columbia, Killoffer, Nate Neal, Ray Fenwick, Eleanor Davis, Dash Shaw, John Hankiewicz, Emile Bravo, Andrice Arp
Conor O'Keefe, Tom Kaczynski, Paul Hornschemeier, writers/artists
Eric Reynolds and Gary Groth, editors
Fantagraphics, March 2008
120 pages
$14.99 Buy it from Fantagraphics Buy it from Amazon.com
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Mome is a heckuva value on the dollar for fans of alternative comics. Itss range of style, tone, and (yes) quality simply give you a lot to chew on. In this particular volume, for example, some contributors hand in their best stuff yet. Al Columbia essentially creates my ideal horror comic (as my past stabs at the stuff would probably indicate) with the possibly BTK-inspired silent story "5:45 A.M." Tom Kaczynski produces the knockout he's clearly had in him for some time with "Million Year Boom," another one of his psychoeconomic fables, one where his trademark mounting sense of disconnection and dread wind their way through several symbolically engrossing episodes (a beautiful mystery woman, strange stone circles, phantom poopers) toward a legitimately surprising and powerful conclusion. Eleanor Davis metonymizes last-minute life-saving action in a series of still panels soaked in loose watercolor in "The 10,000 Rescues." Dash Shaw combines his love of science fiction and clever use of color with his art school background to uncomfortable effect in "The Galactic Panels," a story an artist and his acolyte that demonstrates an astute understanding of how to manipulate time within a story. Paul Hornschemeier's wordy short prose story "The Guest Speaker" nearly garnered a "tl;dr" from me, but after I bit the bullet I was impressed by the Vonnegutian address he grants the title character and the overall tone of jealous resentment and loss we feel regarding our college-aged selves. (At least I do. Don't you?) And of course, cover artist Killoffer does his thing with alarming alacrity; it might be nice to see something that doesn't involve a million Killoffer doppelgangers get translated, if such a thing exists, but I'll take it.
Yet at the same time a few contributors explore blind alleys. Emile Bravo does another pictogram-heavy political-commentary strip, and at this point I'm kinda like yeah, okay, this is what you do. Newcomer Nate Neal and regular Ray Fenwick do the umpteenth "they're cute and vulgar, yuk yuk yuk" underground-indebted comics you've seen. Neal's chops are there and his color palette is ambitious but the parts never feel like a whole. I preferred the work of the other new additon, Conor O'Keefe, whose wispy line is reminiscent of Winsor McKay had he exchanged manic whimsy for melancholy, though the dialogue feels forced. I'm a little concerned that the book's gestalt comes off a little undercooked, but I'll be back for Vol. 12, duh.
* It's been a bit of a mental shift to adjust from "not going to San Diego Comic Con" to "going to San Diego Comic Con" with less than two weeks to go before the event itself, but I'm managing, I think. The complete programming schedule for the show is up, along with the artists' alley listing (I am ready for this show to destroy my David Bowie sketchbook), the autograph listings, and the exhibit hall map.
* And while I wait for individual exhibitors to produce their own at-the-booth signing schedules and so on, other interesting tidbits begin to materialize, like a screening of The Midnight Meat Train nearby to the con on Friday the 25th.
* Evil on Two Legs' Jon continues his look at pop music in horror films, this time highlighting some very effective sequences in Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead and Frank Darabont's The Mist.
* Victoria Large of Not Coming to a Theater Near You on Hellboy II:
It’s a visual feast (Could we expect less from director Guillermo del Toro?)
* If it seems like I'm disproportionately harping on Del Toro lately, it's just because I feel such a disconnect from my fellow genre enthusiasts regarding his work. It's like I'm going out of my way to be a one-man CW-buster. That being said, it sounds like the folks at Reverse Shot like his stuff even less than I do, backhanded compliment for Clive Barker notwithstanding.
* Could all those dinosaurs with nostrils on top of their heads in the dinosaur books you had as a kid actually have possessed trunks? That's the conclusion of Bill Munn, the designer of that awe-inspiring Gigantopithecus model from the American Museum of Natural History's "Mythic Creatures" exhibit, as Loren Coleman reports.
One of the most frustrating aspects of being a horror fan who reads comics is that most Western cartoonists' attempts at the genre rely on a surface "scariness" that delivers little in the way of actual fear. It's a bit like if every horror movie was still shot on the same cobweb-shrouded Universal sets. That's why it's so compelling to see artists like Nilsen, Tom Neely, Jordan Crane, Al Columbia and others take things in a much more unorthodox and visually sophisticated direction.
[Editor's note: This is one of a series of interviews I'll be posting that were rescued from WizardUniverse.com's now-defunct archives. Originally posted on March 30, 2007.]
TV Q&A: 'BATTLESTAR GALACTICA'--MARK VERHEIDEN
The writer of the stunning Season Three finale takes us behind the shocks--and tells us what's in store for Season Four
By Sean T. Collins
WARNING: SPOILER ALERT! If you haven't yet watched the "BSG" Season Three finale, stop reading here, for the love of gods!
Have you lost sleep or sanity (or countless work-hours gathered around the water cooler) trying to process all the series-rocking revelations in last Sunday's "Battlestar Galactica" season finale? Blame Mark Verheiden. As the writer responsible for the episode, titled "Crossroads: Part Two," he set Gaius Baltar free, revealed four more secret Cylons, brought Starbuck back to life--and showed us Earth.
Wizard went to action stations with the veteran TV and comics scribe and "Battlestar" co-executive producer to look back on Season Three, look forward to Season Four and learn whether Cylons--and Starbuck--can really be trusted…
WIZARD: How did you land the writing chores for the season finale? Is that a real plum gig, or a real hard gig?
VERHEIDEN: Well, [executive producers] Ron Moore and David Eick make the decision of who writes which episodes. Some of it is rotation-based: "Who's up?" Obviously, when you're on the last episode, you get to be here longer. So there is that aspect, but I was flattered to be asked to do it and I had a great time doing it. I can't really tell you exactly why [they asked me], but it's nice to be trusted with it. By the way, I think that any of the writers could've handled it. It's a great staff here. But it was great that I had a chance to do it.
You had a lot of balls to juggle in that final episode: Baltar's trial, Laura's cancer, Adama's relationship with both Laura and Apollo, Starbuck's return, the shot of Earth, the opera house dream sequences, the appearance of the Cylon fleet, the revelation of four out of the final five Cylons.…How do you even go about weaving all those threads together?
VERHEIDEN: When you're here through the entire process, you've been following the strain of these stories all along. We all have ideas where we're going with each one of those stories anyway. It just becomes an issue of sitting down and trying to order them up and figuring out a way to bring some of them to fruition or a close, and which ones do we want to continue into the next season. That's really a process that comes out of working with Ron and David and in the writers' room with the rest of the writers; we call that breaking the story. For every episode we do the same thing: We sit down and we look at the balls that are in the air, the stories that we want to tell, and then we break it down on note cards and put it up on a board and say, "This is how we think it should go."
The interesting thing with "Crossroads" parts one and two is that ultimately, in the editing process, material from what was in part two ended up in part one and stuff in part one ended up in part two. It's a little bit of a mix-and-match process. Even at that stage, we're rethinking and configuring what we want to put in the show. Again, with so many balls in the air, I think that even after the fact--when you're editing, obviously--you're thinking, "Well, where do we want to present these? Where do we want to cut a story off and pick up the next story?" There are decisions like that, and it's really just part of the process of figuring out the story. That's how you do it. You do have a lot of things in the air, and that frankly makes it more fun.
Really? I was wondering if you went into it sighing, wondering how you're going to pull it off.
VERHEIDEN: We do that with every episode. [Laughs] But it's not so much a sigh of defeat, but more like, "Wow. A lot of challenges here." It's really great, though. One of the wonderful things about this show is the fact that there are so many places that we can turn. We have such a large cast, and each of them has their own idiosyncratic issues that they have to deal with. We have the Cylons. We have science-fiction conceits. We have interpersonal conceits. There are just a lot of ways stories can go. So rather than that being challenging--well, it's challenging, but it's also a wonderful opportunity because you've just got so many choices that you can make. You're not locked into any one thing that you sort of need to do or tell. That's great.
One of the big reveals for this episode was the identity of four new Cylons: Colonel Tigh, Chief Tyrol, Anders and Tory. Around my office, at least, we had a lot of people who couldn't possibly wrap their heads around people like Tigh and the Chief being Cylons. I know that Ron Moore has said in interviews that they are, but I want to get as many people on the record as possible. So, are these four Cylons? Pinky swear?
VERHEIDEN: [Laughs] They are Cylons. No, this will not be a "Dallas" dream episode where you wake up and go, "We're not Cylons!" Without getting into any kind of spoiler territory, we will be exploring what that means as we go into Season Four, but they are Cylons. So, harbor no hopes that it's some kind of dream or nightmare. When we do something like this, first of all, it's not without considerable thought and planning, and second of all, we don't do it so that we can pull the rug out from under the audience and say, "We were kidding." Not with this one anyway.
I've seen fans of the show comment that because of the leadership role these characters played in the New Caprican insurgency, it essentially makes that conflict a Cylon civil war, even if these characters weren't consciously aware of that. Is that one of the long-term planning points that you're referring to?
VERHEIDEN: Well, I think that what happened on New Caprica will certainly be an issue that we have to think about as we go along. Basically, they are Cylons and we're going to approach that. I really don't want to give anything up about what we're doing next season… [Pause] …that… [Another pause] well, what can I say? I'm trying to think what would be interesting here. [Yet another pause] Well, I think that I've said it. We will be exploring what it means to have these guys being Cylons for sure. Oh yeah, I was going to say… [Super-long pause] Well, no. I will end there. [Laughs]
Clearly, they're a breed apart. For example, we've seen a younger Tigh in flashback sequences, so it seems unlikely that there are thousands of regular, aged Colonel Tighs walking around on some base ship somewhere. Are those different rules for these guys something that will be coming up in Season Four?
VERHEIDEN: All stuff that we'll be exploring. We do know who they are. So in terms of, like, if we're just winging it and backpedaling as we go? No. We know who they are, and that is going to be a big part of what we get at in Season Four.
Switching gears for a moment, I loved Apollo's courtroom speech in Gaius Baltar's trial. It showed that he's such a noble, likable character even when he's doing something that you don't agree with, and it also tied in all these events from the past where characters from the Galactica have committed horrible crimes of treason and been forgiven. How did that speech, and its references to those plot points from all three seasons and the miniseries, come about?
VERHEIDEN: That was a culmination of something that Ron Moore really wanted to do. The entire idea of the trial of Baltar was to explore the concept of guilt or innocence within the fleet, and also to suggest that this is a fleet that only had an ad hoc justice system. We've never really seen the justice system in the fleet, and I think internally we always assume that the captains of each ship always dealt with whatever issues came up on a summary basis. So we were interested in just trying to explore how you create justice in this world.
The second question, which is the one that Lee attacks in his speech, is "What is justice?" What does that mean in this particular world, where we've basically been reduced to 38,000 people and vengeance and attempts to get retribution for things in the past might not be as valid as they would, say, in a different circumstance. It was also fascinating, I think, that Baltar was the elected president of the 12 colonies and found himself in an untenable position. Lee's speech was an attempt to address the practical realities of the situation that they found themselves in, and pull us out a little bit from us screaming for blood. That's where the impulse for that came from. And again, one of the great things about working on a show that has such a rich background as "Battlestar" is that you're able to pull from a lot of events that happened in past shows to demonstrate how the fleet's justice system or sense of justice has been tested or not tested, or how forgiveness has been the rule of the day.
Internally, we thought one of the more interesting moments pointing out that [President] Laura [Roslin] had pardoned everyone, so we're not quite sure why that pardon didn't manifest itself all the way to Baltar. How come he got excluded from that when we forgave everyone else who may have actually done more heinous crimes than him? Of course, the horrible thing is that Baltar, in fact, is at least complicit in the genocide of the whole civilization, if you go back that far, but that's kind of one that we can't really prove. I'm sure that he would have a very facile argument as to why he wasn't to blame. "It wasn't me!"
As the proud owner of a homemade "Free Gaius" T-shirt, I was happy with the verdict.
VERHEIDEN: [Laughs] He's free. Sort of.
Oh yeah--he's been whisked away by the Cult of Gaius, or whoever these people are. Is that storyline going to dovetail with the religious aspects of the show, or is it a separate beast?
VERHEIDEN: It doesn't really give anything way to say that we've always explored the role of religion in civilization and in the fleet. It's certainly an issue that will come up, whether Baltar's story goes that way or not; that remains to be seen. But absolutely, the role of religion is an issue that we will continue to explore. Certainly, in the fleet and in what we've said already, religion has played into it, as well as faith and the "polytheist versus monotheist" situation. Those things have all played a role in how we ended up where we are.
Speaking of which, at least in terms of prophecies and visions and things of that nature, Starbuck is back and has apparently discovered Earth.
VERHEIDEN: That's what she says.
Should we trust her, Mark?
VERHEIDEN: Well, you know-- [Laughs] I trust her. You don't trust her? She said it with great enthusiasm! You'll just have to see. I say that not meaning it in one way or the other; it doesn't mean to trust her or not to trust her. It means that obviously, when she comes back with a piece of information that relevant, it will become an issue as we go forward.
Even just the choice of that final shot, pulling back through the Milky Way and zooming back in and showing Earth, seems to be sending a message that the goal line is in sight.
VERHEIDEN: I don't know if the goal is in sight, but certainly the goal of the fleet is to find Earth. That [shot] was a really wonderful sort of wish of the fleet, to be there. That's how you can take that. You've seen Earth. What Earth is and what it might be is stuff that's still up in the air, but the goal of the fleet is still to find Earth. Obviously, we're going to be exploring that. When Kara comes back and says something like that, it's not a thread that will be dropped. Let me just put it that way.
And speaking of Earth--I think--this episode used the Bob Dylan song "All Along the Watchtower." How difficult was it to thread that song in? That's a huge earthquake in terms of fans' interaction with the world of the show.
VERHEIDEN: Right. Well, Ron has said that you shouldn't take that as meaning anything specific to, say, Bob Dylan in the '60s when he wrote the song, except in the sense that for all we know this song and these lyrics have existed on many planes. Maybe Bob Dylan is the one who picked it up here, in our place. It gets kind of mystic here, but I don't think that you should draw too much from that, except that there are connections and there are very many interesting eddies and byways in the universe of "Battlestar" that remain to be explored.
On a more pragmatic level, "All Along the Watchtower" was there because Ron Moore has always wanted to use that song and use it in some way where we were, again, thrilled with how it worked into this final episode, and also with the version that ["Battlestar" composer Bear McCreary] did. I thought it was suitably evocative and eerie and really worked well. In fact, I thought that the music in that episode was just fantastic all the way through.
It really conveyed the sense of borderline chaos that was gripping the fleet throughout the entire show. It lent the episode an air of weirdness.
VERHEIDEN: It really did hammer that home. I especially loved the music when Tigh, Tory, Anders and Tyrol got together, which just seemed to raise to this crescendo of, "What in the world is going on?" which is exactly what they were thinking and what we hoped the audience was thinking when we got to that point. Again, as they said, a light switch clicked, and the music was really helping to push that moment.
When Tigh walks into that scene, I believe his exact word was, "Whoa." It was a funny moment. Even Gaius, despite having been in a very tortured and tormented place the entire season, was calling Gaeta "butterfingers" at the trial and got back to his smarmy self when the trial was over. Was it a conscious choice on your part to inject those humorous elements into what was such a momentous episode?
VERHEIDEN: Well, the Baltar character, by definition, has sort of an ironic disconnect with himself at times. I wish I could take credit for everything, but the "butterfingers," I believe, was something that [Baltar actor] James Callis came up with. It was perfect. I mean, it was just so perfect. A lot of that is how he plays it. We think that James is a fantastic actor and brings so much to the part, and he brings this sort of naïve malevolence, or, well, I don't even know how to put it. It's this odd, almost disconnected from his own understanding of what he's done, sort of defense. It's a moral relativism, which gives so much more to each scene that he's in.
But conscious choice? Yeah. Obviously, we scripted it, and he brings an attitude to the show that is very unique to him. It's always fun to go to him because he brings something unusual. I don't think that funny is necessarily the right word, but sort of ironic. Well, in the case of "butterfingers," it was just funny.
Tigh also shined in this episode. His arc in the third season was more of a downward spiral than an arc, but this moment that one would think would shatter him became his finest hour. I found it moving.
VERHEIDEN: I'm glad. I'm glad that came across. Michael Hogan is a fantastic actor, and the Tigh character has been through a very, very difficult season on the show. There is something reassuring [about] hearing him say that he wants to reassert his humanity despite what's happened. We'll see where that goes, but I think that of all of the [newly revealed Cylons], he's certainly the one who, discovering that that's true about himself, has the most to catch up to, given what's happened to him in the past. If he's a Cylon, then it's interesting what's he gone through. Well, he is a Cylon, and so it is interesting what he's gone through.
Given that only these four came together, can we take from that that the fifth Cylon is elsewhere?
VERHEIDEN: I think you can take that the question is still in the air.
It seems as though there's a different explanation for Starbuck's reappearance than the old Cylon-recycling trick, right?
VERHEIDEN: Well, again, we're getting into where we're going in Season Four, and we're awfully early to be giving up things.
You can take the Fifth. There's a lot of that going around these days.
VERHEIDEN: Yeah, I think I will take the Fifth on that. I feel more comfortable with that. [Laughs] It's a question that's hanging out there, and it's a question that will be explored. In terms of who it might be and is there a fifth one--those are all things that I'd just as soon not get into because there are surprises to come.
Do you have a favorite character whom you love to get your hands on when you're writing an episode?
VERHEIDEN: They're all great--which is the standard answer, but they really are all great. One of the fun things about the show is that their voices are all so different. Adama's voice--I mean, I really love writing for Adama. It's really fun to write for Laura Roslin. I think that Tigh brings a pathos to his character that's very interesting to try to find. His voice is one that has a tragedy to it that's maybe even stronger than the others. But I'll tell you, they're all so rich, and the show has managed to invest them with such rich backstories and textures, that they're all great to write. If I was going to pick one where when you get to them you go, "Wow, we can really go to town here," then Tigh is someone who fascinates me, but also Adama and Laura. Both of those bring very strong personas. I say those, but I'm certainly not excluding anyone else. Starbuck is always fun and crazy. She's such a live wire that to try and capture that is always a blast.
Is there anyone who's been difficult to get a grasp of?
VERHEIDEN: I don't know if it's been difficult. I will say that when we started doing the stories on the Cylon base ship, that was a learning process internally here--just trying to get a handle on how to play those scenes, to figure out their interpersonal dynamic. It's obviously a little different than with the humans, since there are multiples with each of them. I would say that in the two years that I've been here, working that out and trying to understand how that world worked was a challenge. That would be the one.
Even besides the basic nature of the Cylons--they're not human and are fundamentally a different species, in at least some ways--there was also a different storytelling rhythm during scenes on their ships, even in the way cuts are made from shot to shot and from scene to scene.
VERHEIDEN: Yeah. We made a conscious choice to sort of present the base ship in a different way than we presented the Galactica, our side of the universe. Those were conscious choices. That also [involved] just trying to understand how these creatures, or these robots, or machines, or half-human half-machine entities, communicate with one another--an interesting and different, and yet understandable to us, way of communicating. All of those things just took time to figure out what we wanted to do there, so as challenges go, that was one of the bigger ones, trying to understand those people. By definition they are alien to us, and it's necessarily harder to empathize with them, to understand what they're saying and where they're coming from.
Until the episode that focused on Boomer and Caprica Six back on Caprica, where you saw things from their point of view and learned that they truly are multidimensional characters, I was pretty sure that they were all evil all the time and everything else was just a false front. Convincing viewers that these are more than just Terminators must be a challenge.
VERHEIDEN: Right. In a way, to say that the Cylons are like the Terminator or soulless, empty machines diminishes their capacity for anything. I was going to say evil, but I don't know that you apply evil to that. Certainly the genocide of the human race was an inherently evil act; however, that was prompted and didn't come out of nowhere. It wasn't just sociopathic, it came out of things that had happened prior. So it's sort of an "understand your enemy" point of view. I don't want to speak for Ron and David Eick, but we never wanted to end by saying, "We're up against this soulless mechanical army." We wanted to say that they had their points of view, too. That's why we actually went over to the Cylon side for a while.
In many ways, the most interesting relationships on the show are in these pairings of a Cylon and a human, whether it's Six and Baltar or Athena and Helo or Boomer and the Chief--although it turns out that that's not a Cylon-human pairing after all.
VERHEIDEN: Well, Chief and Cally…
That's true--you've created more of those relationships with these new revelations.
VERHEIDEN: Yes, and we also created a situation where people have a secret. And strictly from a dramatic standpoint, that's always interesting to explore. We've got four guys with a pretty big secret now.
How does it feel to work on a show that is this good?
VERHEIDEN: It's fantastic. You can take one step back and watch a show and go, "Wow." I mean, I'm a fan of the show, too. So when I can take a step back and look at the first five episodes that we did this year--and look at most of the episodes, actually--I can go, "It's really a wonderful thing to be on a show that you can be so proud of." I'll tell you from a writing standpoint, too, the great thing is being able to explore concepts and conceits and political dynamics and nonpolitical dynamics and character interactions that you just wouldn't get to do if you were doing--not to put down cop shows, but you just couldn't go there. By being a science-fiction show and by having created the political dynamics we have, we can go and explore relationships and philosophies and things that you would get in big trouble if you tried to do in sort of real-world terms. But since it's one step removed in our "Galactica" universe, we can explore them with an abandon. That's been almost a liberating experience, as a writer, to do. It's been just great.
Does it burn you at all that you guys haven't been recognized by the Emmys? I know it's baffling to a lot of fans. Is that something that's even on your radar screen?
VERHEIDEN: Do we read the nominations when they come out? Sure. [Laughs] I speak for myself, but you can't live your life worried about whether or not you're going to win a prize. You have to go ahead and do the best show you can, and if we get recognized, great, and if we don't, we still know it's a great show. I mean, we did win a Peabody, which is one heck of a recognition. I don't feel like we're under-recognized in terms of people who have found the show and can appreciate what we're doing. In terms of Emmys, it would be wonderful, but does my world turn around it? No.
I guess this is a fatuous question considering your job, but how much attention do you pay to "The Sci Fi Channel is picking the show up for 13 more episodes, and now it's 22, and now there's a special two-hour movie-type episode in the middle?"
VERHEIDEN: I pay intimate attention to that. [Laughs] Those things I do pay a great deal of attention to, because that impacts what we're doing here.
It obviously makes a big difference in how you write the show.
VERHEIDEN: Yeah, and it's great to have 22 [Season Four episodes] for sure, I'll say that.
I just don't know how I'm going to wait until 2008 for them.
VERHEIDEN: Well, there is the two-parter that will be on before that.
Of course! Do you know when that's airing?
VERHEIDEN: I have not heard. Maybe someone else knows it, [but] I've only heard the generic term of "fall." So hopefully you'll have that.
* And now, a bunch of interesting (note: consult thesaurus for synonyms of "interesting") reviews of older things...
* Inveterate person who doesn't have much use for superheroes Tom Spurgeon takes a look at Joe Casey and Frazer Irving's beautiful-looking, underappreciated miniseries Iron Man: The Inevitable.
* Bruce Baugh takes a look at Rian Johnson's po-faced high-school noir Brick. I watched both this film and Donnie Darko for the first time right around the same time and started to reimagine high school as a sort of heavily medicated flat-affect genre-revisionism wonderland.
* Matt Maxwell, like me, found much to admire in Francis Lawrence's I Am Legend--at least until the ending with its forced Shyamalanisms and Hollywood inversion of the titular concept.
* At The House Next Door, Will Lasky discusses M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening, comparing the director's oeuvre to Rod Serling's and declaring that since his films rely on their protagonists' dramatic self-discovery, they really do require The Twist--not as a matter of pyrotechnics but of dramaturgy.
* Looks like they might remake, and by remake I mean cut the balls of off and otherwise ruin, The Monster Squad.
* There's a trailer for Frank Miller's The Spirit out there, if you can still find it, and believe me, it's nuts. Somehow I don't see the fan/critical community that rejected Speed Racer and is increasingly divided about 300 appreciating this thing at all, but time will tell. Since I really don't care about the Spirit as a character or franchise, the chance to see my favorite cartoonist take movie-making tools and go as absolutely bananas with them as Lynn Varley did with Photoshop while coloring The Dark Knight Strikes Again tickles me pink.
* In the comments downblog, Jon "The Forager" Hastings discusses the strange case of Guillermo Del Toro, throwing his career into relief by comparison to similar disreputable-genre visual-stylist nerd icons Tim Burton and Peter Jackson.
* Over at Loren Coleman's joint, paleonotologist Darren Naish debunks the trunks, throwing cold water on that awesome "dinosaur with a trunk" image I posted yesterday. Oh well.
* And now, a bunch of interesting (note: consult thesaurus for synonyms of "interesting") reviews of older things...
* Inveterate person who doesn't have much use for superheroes Tom Spurgeon takes a look at Joe Casey and Frazer Irving's beautiful-looking, underappreciated miniseries Iron Man: The Inevitable.
* Bruce Baugh takes a look at Rian Johnson's po-faced high-school noir Brick. I watched both this film and Donnie Darko for the first time right around the same time and started to reimagine high school as a sort of heavily medicated flat-affect genre-revisionism wonderland.
* Matt Maxwell, like me, found much to admire in Francis Lawrence's I Am Legend--at least until the ending with its forced Shyamalanisms and Hollywood inversion of the titular concept.
* At The House Next Door, Will Lasky discusses M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening, comparing the director's oeuvre to Rod Serling's and declaring that since his films rely on their protagonists' dramatic self-discovery, they really do require The Twist--not as a matter of pyrotechnics but of dramaturgy.
* Looks like they might remake, and by remake I mean cut the balls of off and otherwise ruin, The Monster Squad.
* There's a trailer for Frank Miller's The Spirit out there, if you can still find it, and believe me, it's nuts. Somehow I don't see the fan/critical community that rejected Speed Racer and is increasingly divided about 300 appreciating this thing at all, but time will tell. Since I really don't care about the Spirit as a character or franchise, the chance to see my favorite cartoonist take movie-making tools and go as absolutely bananas with them as Lynn Varley did with Photoshop while coloring The Dark Knight Strikes Again tickles me pink.
* In the comments downblog, Jon "The Forager" Hastings discusses the strange case of Guillermo Del Toro, throwing his career into relief by comparison to similar disreputable-genre visual-stylist nerd icons Tim Burton and Peter Jackson.
* Over at Loren Coleman's joint, paleonotologist Darren Naish debunks the trunks, throwing cold water on that awesome "dinosaur with a trunk" image I posted yesterday. Oh well.
Starting your comic by cooking a live cat in a microwave is a pretty good way to make me say "fuck you, I'm not reading your stupid fucking comic." I don't think it's funny, I don't think it's provocative, I don't think it's daring, I don't think it says anything about humankind's endless reservoir of unthinking cruelty to animals that I haven't already heard. Mostly it makes me think of the guy on MSNBC's Lockup who bragged about cooking his murder victim's cat in the microwave because he didn't like that it was nibbling on the corpse, or how my high-school biology teacher used to brag about catching stray cats, sticking them in burlap bags, lighting the bags on fire and throwing them off rooftops, and any number of other real, live human beings who think torturing cats to death is really no more unacceptable a misdemeanor than keying someone's car. I hate them.
I also realize that this is my kryptonite as a critic. Sure, cruelty to animals is an unbelievably easy way to shock--"any idiot can get sympathy from an audience," George Lucas was once known to say, "just grab a kitten and wring its neck"--and I'd very much like to see cartoonists who deal in the rough stuff try harder, but there's beyond that there's probably no principled objection I could make here that I wouldn't also have to apply to depictions of humankind's endless reservoir of unthinking cruelty to humans as well. I'm certainly not going to argue that we have to stop doing this because people might imitate it, because those sorts of people are going to be sociopathic monsters anyway and we can't live our lives that way. I'm simply a vegetarian cat owner who stopped eating meat on cruelty grounds and gets very, very upset about glib depictions of animal cruelty. And I do think it's pretty glib here, simply playing into the dead-baby joke punchline that closes the opening chapter of Espey's loosely connected collection of nightmarish short stories and Bosch-like diptychs.
But the book does get better from there, smarter, sharper, more intelligently savage. Espey's vocabulary as a cartoonist is indeed that one-two punch of cruelty to children and animals coupled with sexualized violence that we've seen from Josh Simmons, and to a certain extent Hans Rickheit or even Al Columbia at times. As with Simmons and Rickheit, Espey's line is a thick thing, deliberately ugly, all hyperthyroidal eyes and short, squat, grotesque figures, occasionally flourishing into what can only be described as bad-acid-trip vistas of depravity. He broadly lampoons every sacred cow in the herd--the Pope, the family farm, childhood, science. He undermines collective-unconscious root storytelling--fairy tales, mythology, primitive religion. to quote The Exorcist, he wants us to see ourselves as animal and ugly, shitting, killing, fucking, torturing, raping, lying, screaming, crying, cowering. His work is effective. Whether it's an effect you care to experience is perhaps another question.
Carnival of souls: special "help me interview Brian K. Vaughan" edition
* In a few days I will be interviewing Brian K. Vaughan, writer of Lost, Y: The Last Man, Ex Machina, Runaways, Pride of Baghdad, Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, Doctor Strange: The Oath, The Escapists, and so on, for a cover story in The Comics Journal. Is there anything you'd like me to ask him? Please post your questions in the comments to this post.
* Bad people ruining comics for the rest of us part one: Chris Butcher calls out the owner of the San Diego Hyatt for donating $125K to support an anti-gay ballot initiative. He suggests that you don't patronize their facilities any more than you can help it during Comic Con.
* Bad people ruining comics for the rest of us part two: Tom Spurgeon examines the catastrophic (pending) failure of Platinum Studios, a "comics" "publisher" run by obvious grifters. He suggests that we as an industry and art form should be able to agree that this is a morally bad way to run a business.
Comics Time: Legion of Super-Heroes: The Great Darkness Saga
Legion of Super-Heroes: The Great Darkness Saga
Paul Levitz, writer
Keith Giffen, Larry Mahlstedt, Richard Bruning, artists
DC Comics, 1991
192 pages
$17.95 Buy it used for an exorbitant amount via Amazon.com
I don't know how much you'd get out of this book if you weren't already a superhero comics devotee. It doesn't have the revisionist sophistication of Alan Moore or Frank Miller, the high-level craft of the modern-day big-name creators whose work you see praised on blogs like this, the easily recognizable wild imagination of Lee/Kirby/Ditko or even Claremont/Byrne. But for someone like me, who can derive pleasure from variations on familiar themes, this was an engaging read and, I'm betting, a pretty important touchstone for today's superhero mainstream.
Though the cover gives the game away, what's interesting about this story is that while it relies on the now-traditional--indeed, almost de rigeur these days--"mystery villain" device whereby our heroes are plagued by sinister, shadowy forces whose true nature and intent are learned only after extensive confrontations with his minions and much fretting and wild-goose-chasing by the heroes (and, just as importantly, the readers), this mystery villain doesn't just lurk in the background, popping up in a panel or two every other issue to remind us that he exists before he finally reveals himself. Instead, he's the good guys' main antagonist throughout--his presence is constantly touted by his minions, he directly addressing both them and our heroes, he even physically confronts them from time to time, all while his identity remains hidden from heroes and readers alike. This strikes me as a far more daring narrative strategy than that used in such '00s-era arcs as Kevin Smith's Daredevil: Guardian Devil, Jeph Loeb's Batman: Hush, Grant Morrison's New X-Men, Brad Meltzer's Justice League of America and so on: It practically dares the reader to figure it out, get tired of it, or call bullshit, hoping that if it calls their bluff and they stay involved, they'll be even more excited by the eventual reveal than if it was just a tease here and there. (In terms of current comics it seems like Morrison's ongoing Black Glove storyline in Batman comes closest.)
I don't know enough about the historical circumstances regarding the status of Jack Kirby's Fourth World New Gods within DC fandom at the time these issues were originally published to know if the identity of the villain was as obvious to readers then as it is to readers in this Kirby-worshipping, Final Crisis-reading era. For me it would have all clicked when that "servant of darkness" who rides that recognizably weird little pipe-lattice started talking about the Astro-Force and getting called "my son" by his master. But I enjoyed the mystery element even so as I was slowly shown exactly how Darkseid was putting his plot into action because, in a fashion reminiscent to me of how Geoff Johns has been working with the Green Lantern franchise, Levitz cleverly drew strength for the arc from a hodgepodge of DCU components. What kind of villain has the power to create evil clones of Superman and a Guardian of the Universe, then brainwash the Krypton-like planet of Daxam into a genocidal army of 3 billion Supermen? When you hear a question like that, you either give a shit about the answer or you don't. I did.
Meanwhile, the book did a solid job of conveying the appeal of the Legion concept, which had been largely elusive to me up until now: It's its own superhero universe within the larger DCU. Besides the fact that there are, like, forty thousand Legionnaires, each with their own cute code name and baroque power, they live in an era and environment connected enough to the things we recognize from more popular DC franchises to be familiar, yet it has the freedom to take them in weird new directions. (I suppose having a heroic Brainiac with a crush on Supergirl is the most fundamental example of that.) It's kind of like the way Star Trek: The Next Generation opened up, expanded, and riffed on the original series in the service of a different aesthetic. Moreover, as a friend of mine recently pointed out to me, the team is so big and so stuffed with conflicting personalities that writers need not indulge in either the hoary old "team of best friends" or "reluctant team that comes together in the clutch" cliches--I'm pretty sure some of these people never even set foot in the same room or exchange a single word, and there are obvious cliques and couples and enemies and exes and so on, yet in the end the all kind of do their thing and get the job done, like a particularly big extracurricular activity in high school--the glee club, say. And that's appropriate enough considering that they all seem to be about college-age by this point in the series. Finally, there are just so goddamn many Legionnaires that figuring out who's who and starting to recognize and appreciate their names, costumes, powers and so on feels like an achievement, god help me.
Now, is this a great comic book? No. It's too rooted in house-style artistic aesthetics, expository dialogue, self-referential continuity, corny jokes, and everything else you'd expect from a basic superhero comic of the early '80s. As in so many comics of the period I have to wonder if the creators ever listened to human speech. But it's an effective comic of its type, at times quite so--you've got to imagine that there's an endless ocean of inferior junk above which this floats. It certainly goes to great pains to convey the menace of one of Jack Kirby's great creations as well as any other comic I've read. On a personal note, as a superhero fan, I wish today's writers and editors would display similar care when dealing with the real cream of the villain crop, from Darkseid himself to Lex Luthor and the Joker to Doctor Doom and Magneto and Galactus and the Green Goblin--like, oh crap, when that dude shows up, we're in trouble. We nerds would be better off for it.
* The Dark Knight came out and I'll probably go see it this weekend, god help us all. If I blow another gasket I'm blaming all of you personally.
* With The Dark Knight came a Watchmen trailer. I liked it, other people really liked it, while I've heard some skeptics too. (It could do with a smidge less slo-mo, but that was the case for 300 as well.)
* Meanwhile the movie's on the cover of Entertainment Weekly (it's good to own the magazine, eh Warner Bros?) and they have an extensive look at the film's road to production, featuring mildly disconcerting quotes from director Zack Snyder about how much ass he's gonna kick, as well as a sizable interview with writer Alan Moore, featuring mildly disconcerting quotes lambasting films he's never seen.
* Jim Treacher has a pretty extensive Watchmen-news roundup that I recommend browsing, though Jason Adams is the one asking the hard questions. So to speak.
* EW has also posted a preview image gallery of things that we'll be seeing at San Diego Comic Con, including shots from Frank Miller's The Spirit, a page from The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol. 3, and other nerdy things.
It's got everything you could ever want in an adventure comic: a forbidding prison island, robots, a cast of monsters, dragons, a huge fight, a heart-felt ending, a diagram... It's that impossible-to-ever-actually-create strip that you always wanted to draw when you were a kid. But it works, and all in only 12 pages.
He's got a lot more to say about the strip, including an appreciation of its lack of context that really makes me feel good about doing the strip that way, and an evocation of both Moebius and the Cocteau Twins, which I can always get behind. If you like, you can read the review, read the comic, and buy the collection.
(Now there's a play-on-words you're not gonna see a lot of!)
WARNING: SPOILERS ABOUND.
The Dark Knight, I'm legitimately happy to say, is superior to Batman Begins in nearly every conceivable way, but the most important one is definitely the script. I'll tell you, watching this thing makes it even easier than it was before to blame superhero-hack David S. Goyer for the gaping plot holes, leaden dialogue, and wild internal inconsistencies that had me ready to storm out of the theater watching this film's predecessor. In fact, since the entire moral lynchpin of this film--whether or not Batman could or should kill the Joker, and what it means for him and for Gotham City if he won't--is completely invalidated by Batman's murder of Ra's al Ghul (and that's exactly what it was, folks) at the end of the first film, this makes ignoring Begins not just fun but practically necessary.
I feel like this movie got what Batman's about much better than Batman Begins, too. The first film portrayed him as a neurotic, driven to distraction by crime, obsessed with fear, and repeating those two words over and over again like Rain Man. This movie drops those leitmotifs almost entirely, giving us a character it makes sense for the public to refer to as the Caped Crusader--a guy who, when a Chinese mob financier skips town, flies to Hong Kong, cuts off the electricity to his goddamn skyscraper, glides in on his Bat-cape, beats the snot out of his guards, grabs him, leaps out of a building on a hot-air balloon that a jet then snags to whisk them away, and brings the dude back to Gotham, dropping him unconscious on the steps of police HQ with a note to deliver him to Jim Gordon. Gone are the days when his primary on-screen crimefighting sequence involved running over police cars for some reason. Even Christian Bale's growly Bat-voice seems to work better here, perhaps because his actions better match the superhuman conviction his monster voice implies. (And on a purely nerd level, they find an excuse to give him all-white eyes behind his mask, which pretty much made my evening.) Overall, I feel like I understand why he's doing what he's doing--that it's more than an anti-littering campaign on steroids, it's truly a drive to put a dent in crime in the city--and why people might choose to support him in this endeavor rather than run away screaming.
And the movie also gets the Joker. Now, I insist that Tim Burton and Jack Nicholson also got the Joker, mind you. All camp is not created equal, and too many people have this reactionary attitude to it (post-traumatic Adam West disorder) as though camp begins and ends with Schumacher rather than Sontag. But camp can be serious business in a world (even in a fandom, sadly) where rigidly patriarchal concepts of what constitutes seriousness hold sway, and Nicholson's larger than life gay-vaudeville-pimp-comedian-dandy-performance-artist was compelling in his refusal to be normal. This is by no means mutually exclusive with being frightening, by the way. "And now...comes the part...where I relieve you, the little people...of the burden...of your failed...and useless lives," says the Joker without blinking an eye just before gassing downtown Gotham City. He's killing the squares. That's subversive and that's horrifying.
Ledger's Joker is a creature in that vein, but instead of being larger than life, he's smaller than life. I know that seems counterintuitive given the for-the-ages performance he turned in--surely this will be the most-referenced portrayal of a Villain since Anthony Hopkins's Hannibal Lecter--but what the Joker is is a human being reduced to only cruelty and glee. Earlier in the day I watched a documentary about Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, who in the '80s terrorized Los Angeles and San Francisco by breaking into people's houses at random and killing and raping with no pattern. Once Ramirez was caught, his affect throughout his trial was of someone having the time of his life--shouting "Hail Satan!" at the cameras, sneering at the victims' families, growing his hair long and wearing sunglasses and flirting with his groupies, proclaiming that he is beyond good and evil, reacting to his sentencing to death by saying "Big deal. Death always came with the territory. I'll see you at Disneyland!"
That, I think, is the Joker in this movie: A guy who loves hurting people the way you or I love our favorite meals or television shows, just loves it to pieces. The film's plot and set pieces make it quite explicit that his goal is to see our worst suspicions about human nature confirmed, and reinforce it with how it introduces him to us: No big entrance, no "origin," he's just standing there on the corner waiting for his ride. Just by existing he stands as a reproach to the trifecta of Batman, Gordon, and Harvey Dent: They believe in the better angels of our nature, and the Joker is just havin' a blast showing us that there's no such thing.
He's also got a great, great music cue, a neverending crescendo of discordant strings, which reminds me again how much better this movie was than the first one, which had no memorable music to speak of despite boasting two separate composers. In addition, The Dark Knight had better fight choreography that takes advantage of its environment and is easy to parse from beat to beat, making the consequences of each maneuver easy to grasp. It had a better car chase sequence, one with stakes and with genuine antagonists. It had better performances from all its recurring players, perhaps because they weren't hamstrung by one of the dumbest scripts of all time, but in general they all (Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine, and especially Gary Oldman) seemed more comfortable in their skins and with their role in the story. It had a much better performance from the love interest, now played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, who unlike Katie Holmes made the bold choice of imbuing Rachel Dawes with, get this, recognizable human emotions. It had genuine shocks--I was totally convinced that Gordon was dead, for example, and stunned that the news hadn't leaked. It was visually much more sophisticated--the staging of Batman and the Joker's final conversation, little touches like the Joker's Harvey Dent campaign sticker, the bravura opening sequence, the snuff-film hostage tapes, and on and on. There was no dopey doomsday device. The one time it danced up to the ridiculous moral inconsistencies of the first film, Lucius Fox's sudden objection to Batman's methods when he discovers he's spying on the entire city, it actually had Fox make his objection on specific grounds that made sense--too much power concentrated in the hands of one man--rather than asserting that a guy who spends his days helping a masked vigilante run around breaking people's legs to get them to talk is suddenly in high dudgeon over warrantless wiretapping.
It wasn't perfect, though. It felt long, it sagged when the Joker wasn't involved, and even though the film did yeoman's work in making us understand just why Batman and Gordon were so high on Harvey Dent's transformative potential for the city, it still overestimated the degree to which we (or at least I) were invested in his saga, so that when it saved the big ending for a resolution of his plotline rather than the Joker's, it felt miscalculated and anticlimactic. And perhaps ironically, leaving the Joker alive at film's end was more of a fourth-wall-breaking reminder of Heath Ledger's truly tragic death, though I don't know if there was any way around that. I also wish there were some way for Batman to talk about his crusade without sounding ridiculously overblown and pretentious, but there may not be any way around that either.
Overall, though, I feel like here's a movie that conveyed what the Joker and Batman mean to me: the most gleefully pessimistic take on human nature imaginable, and a rageful insistence that it need not be so. Good job!
Ganges #2
Kevin Huizenga, writer/artist
Fantagraphics/Coconino, 2008
32 pages
$7.95 Buy it from Fantagraphics
I seem to remember not being as impressed by Ganges #1 as everyone else was. Mostly this was because I really, really, really loved Huizenga's other ongoing (?) series Or Else, and thought the best material there set a standard for depicting transcendent moments in everyday life that this new stuff, keenly observed and gutsily drawn though it was, failed to live up to. No such quibbles about Ganges #2. Huizenga makes it look easy in this tale of dot-com-boom-era follies. Along with "Jeepers Jacobs" it's one of his most straightforward stories, yet it still employs the techniques of elision and conflation that make his more abstract stuff so powerful.
It actually does start out abstract, with a pair of dueling creatures (boasting almost Marc Bell-ish designs) expanding and colliding in baroquely geometrical ways. No sooner do you realize that their conflict is working almost like a video game would, complete with life meters at the bottom of each image, than you discover it is a video game being played by Huizenga's everyman Glenn Ganges. This sets him off in a reverie about his old job at an overcapitalized dot-com start-up, one where his actual job consists almost solely of utterly meaningless business jargon and a set of company goals so nebulous as to be nonexistent, but where his co-workers' marathon after-hours first person shooter sessions provide both their most genuine and heartfelt human interaction and, as the company's spirit heads south with its finances, becomes almost a point of pride.
Kind of like those rare movie comedies that are actually shot well in addition to being funny--your Annie Halls and your Big Lebowskis--what you're getting here is something that didn't need to be as beautifully done as it ended up. So while you're enjoying the astute Office Space-style corporate-culture takedown, you're also noticing Huizenga's choice to only ever show Glenn's wife Wendy, who was largely ignored by Glenn during his time with the company, facing away from us. Or you're seeing how Glenn and his white-collar information-industries coworkers' subtle idealization and thus dehumanization of the company's long-time pink-collar secretary, Fritz, is conveyed simply by giving her the broadest caricature in the book. Or you're realizing the extra effort Huizenga put into really capturing the appeal of the video games Glenn plays--the beauty and specificity of the environments in the ostensibly stupid shoot-'em-up, say (one is a perpetual winter morning in a mountain monastery), or the crazy dream logic of the all-ages video game he used to be into, which is described in this brilliantly dead-on passage:
He had always preferred games like, say "Yipper Yap World," controlling science adventurer Grandma Lagrand as she gathers Fruitclumpz in Death Forest (you need the monkey rocket suit), avoiding the roller skating spiders (by double rocket jumping) in order to throw the fruit at a giant caterpillar who had spun a coccoon in the only satellite dish on the Island of Special Thanks, which had messed up cable TV for the native tribe of Rasta-Ostriches, in exchange for which they give you the moon salsa you need to bribe the Volcano Witch Triplets."
Maybe Huizenga overwrites the ending, where Glenn and his coworkers all assign their in-game avatars the handle of a fired colleague. I'm trying to figure out if there's a way to have shown that without explaining it. Maybe there's not. Maybe it's better with the captions to explain it and thus take the air out of the moment a bit, lest it get too grandiose. However transcendent that moment might have been for the players, there were still pink slips with each of their names on them waiting in the wings. They could be heroes, but just for one game.
* Curt Purcell liked The Dark Knight less than I did, it turns out, but I still think his is the most cogent explanation of why the ending felt out-of-balance, and what could have been done to fix it, that I've seen so far.
* Matthew Yglesias points out that there's almost no conceivable reason this movie was rated PG-13 rather than R aside from the MPAA simply rolling over for a great big studio's great big blockbuster. Seriously, children, even older children, have no business being at this movie. Not only would it scare them, I think it'll be tough for them to appreciate the themes. And the length--there have been 2 1/2 hour movies that kids have loved in the past, sure, but those have tended to have Ewoks or Orcs in nearly every frame, not serious men in neckties debating ethics.
* While I enjoyed the film a good deal, if you take this quote from Heidi MacDonald and swap out Batman Begins for The Dark Knight...
we didn’t think BATMAN BEGINS was the Dostoyevsky-level masterpiece most fellows think it was.
...you'll get how I feel about it. It was a good movie and it's growing on me as we speak, but No Country for Old Men or There Will Be Blood it wasn't, and as you see an increasing number of statements like "Take away the Batsuit and the clown make-up and you've got an all-time-great crime movie" you'd be well advised to compare it to actual all-time-great crime movies and keep this in mind. Heidi groks this, which I appreciate.
* The part of David Edelstein's now-infamous-in-fandom pan of TDK that struck me the most was when he specifically lambasted its action choreography, which I thought was quite strong, by unfavorably comparing it to BB's, which i thought was horrendous no matter if that was what they were deliberately going for.
* Similarly, I still remember when Jim Henley called my review of Batman Beginspicayune and wrongheaded--I used it as a tagline for the whole blog for a while--so it's funny to watch the tables turn and see him be harder on The Dark Knight than I was on specific points where I really gave BB the business--the dialogue, the costume, and the Bat-voice, for example. Still, he mostly liked it and gives his usual smartly reasoned reasons for doing so.
* Which reminds me, SFF publisher Tor has launched a new web presence centered on pretty terrific thinkblog anchored by Jim (their superhero correspondent) and his fellow ADDTF fave Bruce Baugh (who's working the RPG beat). Notable posts thus far include Jim's common-sense note that mainstream audiences do, in fact, like superheroes, duh, and that the comparative obscurity of superhero comic books has more to do with the format than the genre. If you said this kind of thing back in 2003, which I did (warning: like all my posts from that era, this one goes to 11), Dirk Deppey, Chris Butcher, and Tim O'Neil would kick you out of the art club. (J/K, guys! LYLAB!)
* Back on Bruce B.'s home blog, he's put up a twofold post I really appreciated regarding Zach Snyder. First, in light of recent, somewhat vapid interviews he's given regarding Watchmen, Bruce suggests that the director is better at making movies than talking about them, and that that's fine. Second, he has a brief but detailed and full-throated defense of Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake as far more thoughtful filmmaking than even many of its defenders give it credit for.
* Meanwhile, Matthew Perpetua says that Watchmen trailer's use of a Smashing Pumpkins song from the Batman & Robin soundtrack and overall '90s/early-'00s-ness in terms of its superhero imagery is a deliberate bait and switch on Snyder's part, in the same way that the original comic used contemporary superheroisms in order to subvert them. How about that?
* Also on the Watchmen beat: At AICN, Matthew "Ozymandias" Goode speaks to Capone about his character and the film, revealing that he concocted a backstory for the character that involves Nazi Germany, which isn't so hot, and that he looks a lot like David Bowie, which is.
* Grant Morrison discusses Final Crisis and Superman Beyond at length in an interview with Newsarama's Matt Brady that will also hopefully continue to increase Geoff Johns's hipness quotient, since as usual Morrison goes on and on about how good his stuff has been lately.
* I'm not sure if I ever blogged it, but Morrison also relaunched his website recently, putting a "blog" section behind a registration wall that's really worth climbing. The most recent entry practically bursts with enthusiasm for The Dark Knight, which it compares to the book version of Watchmen in terms of the impact he thinks it will have on superheroes in its medium. He then gushes about the movie version of Watchmen, and indulges in yet another of his periodic, richly entertaining insults of Alan Moore, whom he derides as a grumpy old fundamentalist operating on counterculture-approved lines for wanting nothing to do with Hollywood in general and this movie in particular.
* Hubba hubba: Very talented comics artist Cliff Chiang is posting pinup-style portraits of great women from nerd entertainments. (Via J.K. Parkin.) My personal favorite is his Teela from He-Man (I know it's technically called Masters of the Universe, but I never asked my brother if he wanted to play Masters of the Universe with me):
I'm going to the San Diego Comic Con tomorrow morning
I'm not sure what you can expect from me post-wise beyond the usual thrice-weekly reviews, but you know, keep your eyes peeled. I'll be working for CBR at the show, so look around there, too.
Core of Caligula
C.F., writer/artist
PictureBox Inc., June 2008
8 pages
$2 Buy it from PictureBox
I gather this short but effective minicomic is compiled from even shorter minis, each of which contained one two-page chapter. Removed from their usual overt sci-fi/fantasy setting, C.F.'s slight line and dreamlike narrative can here be seen as either a straightforward story of a man adrift amid forces that seek to monitor, control, and disorient him, or the delusions of a mentally ill man who believes this to be true. It's funny how simply removing the fancy costumes and creatures from a C.F. comic yields this subtle and troubling a (potential) depiction of schizophrenia, yet there you have it. The protagonist's zoned-out facial expression, the graphic nudity, the temporal lacunae all yield the sense that there's something a little terrible about what's going on even though there's nothing overtly so. I may like this better than Powr Mastrs, though it's easy to see why even if blown up into that project's size and scope it might not garner the same level of attention and acclaim.
Postscript: I'm going to choose to believe that the main character getting thrown from a helicopter naked and surviving is an Ultimates homage.
Cold Heat Special #3
Frank Santoro & Dash Shaw, writers/artists
PictureBox Inc., 2008
16 pages
$3 Buy it from PictureBox, maybe
I was an enthusiastic early supporter of Cold Heat--you may know me as the guy who wrote about it for Wizard, which is certainly how its creators know me. Perhaps it's the associations raised by that experience that make me think there's something fitting about co-creator Frank Santoro spinning off a Cold Heat-verse, complete with guest artists, kinda like what Mike Mignola is doing with Hellboy and the B.P.R.D. This particular one-shot guest stars rising star Dash Shaw, who seems to do handsomer work every time I look at a new thing from him. In this case, though, he surely owes a lot to the layouts provided by Frank Santoro, who makes excellent use of the pages' landscape format by providing plenty of images that lend themselves to that type of framing--protagonist Castle sneering out a bus window at a cop passing by on horseback in the foreground, a cavalry of knights galloping through a forest or charging directly at the reader, Dark Knight Returns-style. For his part, Shaw draws faces like no one else in comics (as usual), effectively conveys the cacophony of mass-transit public address systems, and crafts an striking fold-out cover.
Until we see the conclusion of Cold Heat it's difficult to tell whether this alt-genre romp will amount to more than the sum of its parts or less, and I could see that being a point in the minus column for potential buyers of such books as these, but for now I'm enjoying the ride.
Cold Heat Special #5
Frank Santoro and Ryan Cecil Smith, writers/artists
PictureBox Inc., 2008
20 pages
$8 Buy it from PictureBox
As if in response to my questioning if there's steak beneath Cold Heat's sizzle, along comes CHS #5, which reads like Cormac McCarthy's The Road as filtered through Dave Kiersh's after-school special aesthetic. Set after some unspecified "bomb" has made refugees of regular CH heroine Castle and her aging father, it concerns Castle's search for food for her starving dad, and how far she and others are willing to go for it. The centerpiece sequences are harrowing depictions of the killing and attempted killing of dogs for sustenance; the horror and heartbreak of gaining an animal's trust for the express purpose of betraying it, the core of all human carnivorousness, is laid bare in unflinching detail. As always when I come across depictions of animal cruelty in altcomix I have to wonder if the point is shock value or a genuine consideration of the issues at stake, but the mournful tone Smith lends to his figurework coupled with the comparatively simple and straightforward layouts provided by Santoro give me the sense that we may well be dealing with the latter rather than the former here. That's kind of a hefty price point, though, so make sure you're up for it.
* I had a wonderful time at the San Diego Comic-Con this year and I'm happy to say so up front.
* It had been four years since I last attended, which, Jesus, that was as long as I spent in high school or college, huh? In that time I feel as though the show got bigger (duh), but also better organized, since they've now had several years of total pandemonium under their belts. The aisles are wider, the attendance was capped, the air conditioning was cooler yet not glacially so, there's a FedEx in the building now, I was able to purchase at least one good veggie sandwich through an in-house vendor, and I didn't have any significant trouble getting where I needed to go or attending the things I needed to attend. (Granted the only truly massive panel I tried to get in was Watchmen, but I got by with a little help from my friends on that one, and I knew I was gambling by not camping out anyway.) It seems to me that the Comic-Con people are, as they say, the best they are at what they do.
* I was a little overwhelmed at first in terms of my responsibilities--this was the first time I was properly working the show, for Jonah Weiland and the good folks at Comic Book Resources, and finding the balance between TCB and R&R took Wednesday evening through around Thursday lunchtime. Once I found that balance, though, it was a real blast.
* That being said, between going to panels, hunting down creators, conducting interviews, transcribing and writing pieces for CBR, saying hi to friends, shopping, getting Bowie sketches, wandering around, and occasionally bathing, something had to give, and that something turned out to be eating. I ate one and a half to two meals each day, and didn't sit down in a chair in front of a table to do so until Saturday afternoon.
* I do want to give major props to Jonah and the rest of the CBR crew for being terrific workmates and bunkmates. Jonah in particular, besides simply paying for me to be there, gave me pretty free reign to roam around the floor and cover whatever I found worth covering, leading to a pretty eclectic mix of Collinsy articles. Any website that allows me to interview both Bryan Hitch and Matt Furie is okay by me.You can find a running list of my con reports here, and there'll be more coming all week I'd wager, but for now, here's what's up there:
* I know I wrote a report on this, but it bears repeating: Watchmen dominated this show. The Owlship and swag bags at the Warner Bros. booth, the big panel and its excellent footage, the complete lack of any remaining copies of the book in the whole building by Friday afternoon, the giveaway t-shirts and limited-edition t-shirts, multiple Dave Gibbons panels, residual Dark Knight trailer vibes...that book was everywhere. Which was nice, actually, because of all the comics for people to get excited about, that would be in my top ten, and is without question the superhero book I'd hand to someone who'd never read one and wanted to try it.
* A while ago I noted that while goodthinkful critics everywhere hate Zack Snyder because 300 is supposed to be a parable of neocon adventurism and the Dawn of the Dead remake lacked the Romero original's ever so subtle satire of consumerism, they'd probably have to work at it to find a reason to dislike Watchmen on political grounds given its roots in Thatcher-era British Leftism and Snyder's stated intent, backed up by his work on 300, to stay as true to the comic as possible--not that they wouldn't try, of course. During the Watchmen panel I realized what the line of attack will be--that the gory footage of Dr. Manhattan and the Comedian running amok in Vietnam is glorifying American war atrocities. I bet you I'm right.
* I really, really didn't like when Jane Wiedlin and a platoon of stormtroopers presented at the Eisners. First of all, they caused a delay to the show and turned out not to be worth waiting for. Second, when they finally showed up, they entered aaaaaaaallllll the way in the back of the hall and we spent pretty much the entire Imperial March waiting for them to make it to the stage. Third--and I say this as someone who has the Rebel Alliance insignia tattooed on my arm and entered my wedding reception with my wife to that selfsame Imperial March--we were supposed to be celebrating the absolute best that comics has to offer. For that matter, Brad Meltzer and that horrible "Speedy and Halle Berry vs. rubble" issue of Justice League of America notwithstanding, a lot of the winners in their categories--Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, Taiyo Matsumoto, Dave Stewart, Ed Brubaker, Fletcher Hanks, etc.--really were the best that comics has to offer. And this is how we honor them? It was like the Rob Lowe/Snow White number from the Oscars. Tom Kenny was funny and Barry Windsor-Smith wrecking shop via a written statement read by Gary Groth was too, though.
* I don't want the show to move to Las Vegas. As you know I am an all-purpose nerd and have no problem with the Hollywood panels and presentations. I do kind of have a problem with the horrible, moneyed people who come with those panels and presentations. Watching people who view all of this as a paycheck descend into my beloved realm of nerds makes me feel like William S. Burroughs in that documentary about him where he comes across as a gruff old grandpa until there's this one scene where he starts getting really angry and saying that gays should literally arm themselves, take over an island, force the straights out, and establish their own kingdom which they should defend with lethal force, like gay terrorists. I can only imagine that the sort of people who make me want to turn into a nerd terrorist will thrive in Las Vegas.
* I don't know if I've ever sweated so much in my life. I'm including running the mile in high school gym class, the pit at Ozzfest '98, and marathon, borderline-uncomfortably-long bouts of sexual intercourse during college. It's lugging around about 90 pounds of electronic equipment and con guides and Bowie photo ref that does it. I apologize to anyone who had to look at or stand near me.
* Friend-wise, I wonder if that by virtue of being around comics for seven years I just know too many people to be able to see everyone I want to see. (It's just that I've been around for a while, not that I'm so damn irresistable.) I had decent-length conversations with a lot of people and actually hung out with a handful--including both Tom Spurgeon and Chris Butcher, for really the first time ever in both cases, which was great--but there were at least as many people I saw for a split second or not at all, including some I fully intended to seek out and completely whiffed on doing so (Tom Neely, Rick Marshall, Batton Lash, the people at First Second--my bad!!!). Eating aside, I think maybe it was here that I made the most sacrifices in order to get my work done. (I would have chased more Bowie sketches too, actually.)
* Still, I was surprised how easy it was to bump into people I knew in a gathering at least twice as populous at any given moment as my hometown. I even met up with four different old classmates of mine I hadn't seen in at least five or six or seven years.
* The con is in an awkward position with press passes. On the one hand they're admirably egalitarian: Anyone with a printout of a website or a bylined article can get in, and SDCC's spokesman told me that they consider websites and comics publications their mainstream press because we cover them 12 months a year instead of four days a year. But he also told me they issued 3,000 press passes this year, out of a total attendance of 125,000. This results in the passes being a devalued currency--they're not even color-coded and they don't get you in anyplace, except I think you can stand in the convention center lobby before the opening rather than standing around on the sidewalk. As a result, press are more likely than almost anyone to complain (to me and to anyone who'll listen) about how hard it is to get into the events they're there to cover. Part of this is the narcissism of the fourth estate but part of it is also a legitimate gripe. I have no idea how they solve this, though, short of doing a press day like E3 which would add a lot of expense for exhibitors and retailers without much direct benefit.
* Favorite celebrity sighting: I sat next to Garbage's Shirley Manson in the Marriott lobby, which made 19-year-old Sean T. Collins the happiest boy on earth. She was gorgeous, pale, big-eyed, red-headed, stylish, and Scottish.
* Second favorite:
Guy on escalator: Nice bag! Me, walking past with my giant Watchmen swag bag: Pardon? Guy on escalator: Nice bag! Me: Oh, thanks. [brief pause as I realize that guy on escalator is Patrick "Nite Owl" Wilson] Ohhh my gosh! [I then cover my mouth with my hand, because apparently I am a startled girl from the 1950s]
* Third favorite: Lou Ferrigno being denied access to the exhibit hall prior to opening because he didn't have an exhibitor badge.
Here are some projects I heard about at the show that I'm looking forward to.
* Geoff Johns and Ethan Van Sciver's The Flash: Rebirth. Beyond the basic appreciation for that beautiful costume and wonderful power set that most superhero buffs have, I have no attachment to this character(s) or franchise whatsoever. But the same thing was true of Green Lantern before Johns and Van Sciver did Green Lantern: Rebirth and The Sinestro Corps War. I'm looking forward to liking this character, and my hope is that they can do something as expansive and fun for his mythos as this whole rainbow of Lantern Corps has been for GL.
* Darwyn Cooke's graphic-novel adaptations of Richard Stark/Donald Westlake's Parker novels. I feel like Cooke has spent his whole career waiting to get to do a project exactly the way he wants to do it, and it sounds like this is his chance. Throw in an amoral protagonist that will mitigate against Cooke's more nostalgic side and this series of OGNs should be pretty tight.
* Darren Aronofsky's RoboCop remake. Just think how much worse this project could have gone!
* Zack Snyder's adaptation of Watchmen. I think Snyder has made two fantastic genre films so far, Watchmen is one of my favorite comics of all time, the cast all seem to be compensating for their earlier ignorance of the book by working overtime to pick it apart in terms of how it sees their characters, and the footage that was screened looked beautiful.
* Neil Gaiman on Batman. Every high-profile writer who works on this character earns a trial read of an issue or two from me since he's the one character I feel an affinity for independent of who's working on him. I seem to remember a Comics Journal interview in which Gaiman echoed Alan Moore's retrospective dismissal of The Killing Joke as utterly irrelevant to the human experience, and since I don't agree with either of them on that score I'm curious to see where this goes.
* Damon Lindelof's Ultimate Wolverine vs. Hulk. Those two issues or three issues or whatever it was were fun, right? Are they gonna get Leinil Francis Yu off of whatever he's doing to finish it? Will it be awkward to have this book come out while serial franchise-ruiner Jeph Loeb is doing whatever he's doing to Ultimate Universe continuity in Ultimatum? Stay tuned!
* Mario Hernandez's original graphic novel. The more full-time cartooning Hernandezes the better, I say.
* Mike Mignola, Fábio Moon, and Gabriel Bá's B.P.R.D.: 1947. This is the first time since Guy Davis (and Richard Corben, now that I think of it) that artists were selected to work in the Hellboy-verse because they don't look like Mignola, and I think that on the surface they're the most aesthetically alien to the established sensibility of the franchise of all the artists who've been tapped to take on the various miniseries thus far, so it should be an interesting series to see.
* Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe. Perfect title for a sequel to the movie, which is named Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, by the way.
* A prequel to I Am Legend involving both Francis Lawrence and Will Smith. A better ending and better creature effects are surely in the works given how universal the cries were for same, right? Because such a movie would be really good.
*Seaguy 2 and Seaguy 3. Volume One was the best of Morrison's creator-owned works of that period, I think. (Well, We3 was also pretty tremendous and not incidental to my decision to become a vegetarian to boot.)
Here is what I got at the show.
BOOKS
* Baobab #3, by Igort (Fantagraphics)
* Boy's Club 2, by Matt Furie (Fantagraphics)
* Love and Rockets: New Stories #1, by Gilbert, Jaime, and Mario Hernandez (Fantagraphics)
* Mesmo Delivery, by Rafael Grampa (AdHouse)
* Pixu I, by Gabriel Bá, Becky Cloonan, Vasilis Lolos, and Fábio Moon (self-published)
* Scott Pilgrim Full-Colour Odds & Ends 2008, by Bryan Lee O'Malley (Oni)
* Tales Designed to Thrizzle #4, by Michael Kupperman (Fantagraphics)
T-SHIRTS
* Parker (freebie!)
* Scott Pilgrim
* Sinestro Corps
* Watchmen (freebie)
And that giant Watchmen bag. I had hoped to pick up Against Pain by Ron Rege Jr. from Drawn & Quarterly and Tom Neely's strip-collection mini, but again, whiff! Anyway, look for reviews of all those comics in the coming weeks.
* Thank you very much to Alvin Buenaventura at Buenaventura Press, Mike Baehr at Fantagraphics, Alex Segura, Pamela Mullin, and David Hyde at DC, and everyone I interviewed for your invaluable assistance. Thank you very very much to Dave Paggi at Wizard, Tom "The Comics Reporter" Spurgeon, Patrick Carone at Maxim, Chris Butcher at the Beguiling, Jason "Shaggy" Ervin, and especially Jonah Weiland, Seth Jones, and Lincoln Morrison at CBR for your hospitality and companionship. You guys made the con for me.
Pixu I
Gabriel Bá, Becky Cloonan, Vasilis Lolos, Fåbio Moon, writers/artists
self-published, July 2008
48 pages
$8 Buy it from Khepri.com
The second group effort from partners Becky Cloonan & Vasilis Lolos and brothers Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá following their anthology with Rafael Grampa, 5, Pixu is more of a true collaboration. Though each artist is telling a separate story, they're all telling interlocking horror stories about people living in an apartment house where, apparently, sinister forces are afoot. It's kind of like Uzumaki with a scribble instead of a spiral, crossed with Four Rooms, only not crappy.
Good, in fact. While I think the inkier half of the group, Lolos and Cloonan, will ultimately produce more disconcerting images - Cloonan already served up shots of vomit, the eating of human hair, and a Stephen Gammell-esque screaming skull that have me on edge - all four seem on track to yield solid, creepy short horror stories, effective work in a genre Western comics touch all too infrequently and ineffectively.
BALLANTINE BOOKS TO PUBLISH BOOK INSPIRED BY THE WEBCOMIC GARFIELD MINUS GARFIELD
Collection to be published simultaneously with Garfield 30th anniversary book
NEW YORK, NY – July 30, 2008 – Paws, Inc. and Ballantine Books, a division of the Random House Publishing Group, announced last week at Comic-Con International that Ballantine will publish a book inspired by the popular webcomic Garfield Minus Garfield.
Garfield Minus Garfield (www.garfieldminusgarfield.net) made its online debut in February 2008 and quickly became an online sensation based on a simple premise: What would Jim Davis’ Garfield comic strip be like without its lasagna-loving fat cat? Without the presence of Garfield and other characters such as Odie the dog and Nermal the kitten, the strips “create a new, even lonelier atmosphere for Jon Arbuckle…Jon’s observations seem to teeter between existential crisis and deep despair.” (New York Times)
The full-color book format will give readers the experience of having both the original and doctored Garfield strips together on the same page for comparison. Dublin, Ireland-based Garfield Minus Garfield creator Dan Walsh will provide the foreword to the book.
Garfield creator Jim Davis was intrigued by—and pleased with—the concept. “I think it’s an inspired thing to do,” Davis said. “I want to thank Dan for enabling me to see another side of Garfield. Some of the strips he chose were slappers: ‘Oh, I could have left that out.' It would have been funnier.”
Garfield Minus Garfield site creator Dan Walsh says, “When I looked at Jon and laughed at his crazy antics I thought ‘He's just like me.’ As it turns out, I wasn't the only one saw myself in him: millions of visitors from all over the world visit Garfield Minus Garfield and tell me they think the same thing. Now, thanks to the awesome generosity and humor of Jim Davis, Garfield Minus Garfield is going to become a book and I'm absolutely honored to be part of it.”
Ballantine Books has been publishing Garfield books since 1980, and thirty-three Garfield titles have made the New York Times bestseller list. Thirty Years of Laughs and Lasagna: The Life and Times of a Fat, Furry Legend, will be published by Ballantine Books in October 2008. This hardcover anniversary collection will include a foreword from Dean Young, Blondie cartoonist, and exclusive content from Jim Davis.
ABOUT PAWS INC.
Paws, Incorporated was founded in 1981 by cartoonist Jim Davis as a creative house to support Garfield licensing. Today, the company, located in rural Indiana, handles not only the creative angle, but also the business concerns of the corpulent kitty worldwide. Paws boasts a staff of more than 50 artists, writers, and licensing professionals.
Paws, Inc. is a privately held company and the sole owner of the copyrights and trademarks for GARFIELD and GARFIELD Characters.
ABOUT BALLANTINE BOOKS:
Ballantine Books was established in l952 by the legendary paperback pioneers Ian and Betty Ballantine. Today, Ballantine is one of America's largest publishers of hardcover, trade paperback and mass market paperback books -- spanning a remarkably wide variety of subjects. Publishing talented writers from every category and genre, its hardcover program is particularly strong in commercial fiction. Its impressive list of bestselling authors includes Suzanne Brockmann, Julie Garwood, Tess Gerritsen, Kristin Hannah, Linda Howard, Jonathan Kellerman, Lorna Landvik, Judith McNaught, Anne Perry, and Jeff Shaara. Visit the Ballantine website at www.ballantinebooks.com.
Garfield Minus Garfield is a site dedicated to removing Garfield from the Garfield comic strips in order to reveal the existential angst of a certain young Mr. Jon Arbuckle. Garfield Minus Garfield began in February 2008 and quickly gained a large following. It has been covered in such publications as Time magazine, Rolling Stone, the Washington Post and the New York Times. Garfield Minus Garfield is a journey deep into the mind of an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness in a quiet American suburb.
* Everyone's saying they're sick of hearing about the San Diego Comic-Con, but for pete's sake, why? Is reading a blog post really that arduous an ordeal? You can turn the computer off, you know. Have Bloglines mark your RSS feeds as read, I dunno. There are in fact a lot of interesting things to say about San Diego and what went on there and what was announced there, and Tom Spurgeon's con report covers most of them.
* I'm still doing a little catching up with news that broke right before San Diego. One such announcement is that MTV is remaking The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Listen, I'm not sure how I feel about this. I met my wife because we were the only two people at a wedding reception who knew how to do "The Time Warp," so I feel pretty strongly about this film. I played Brad twice and MC'd when Yale finally revived Devil's Night showings of the movie. The two years me and the other people responsible for bringing it back it was in the top ten most well-attended campuswide events at the whole school I think, and it was also completely wild - they let people into the dining hall where we did it with booze and drugs, heck, they let us onto the stage with booze and drugs, everyone dressed up and/or stripped down, it was truly bacchanalian and awesome and in tune with the spirit of the movie. Moreover, after I discovered Bowie and glam, I've been listening to Richard O'Brien's excellent soundtrack with fresh ears, and that music's terrific. Finally, there's really no way around it, Tim Curry Is God. So a big part of me is like "fuck MTV, they ruin life, and fuck remaking Rocky Horror no matter who you are." At the same time, however, that movie was genuinely liberating for me and countless other nerds and freaks and outcasts, and maybe updating it for a new generation wouldn't be so horrible if that message remains intact. Then again, with its increasingly horrifying reality shows, MTV has truly given hedonism a bad name--there's nothing subversive about a bunch of drunk people making out in hot tubs, it's actually maybe one of the squarest things you could possibly do at this point--and I don't trust them to get this right, like, at all. If they must do it, however, I suggest they follow my wife's casting ideas and have Zac Efron and Ashley Tisdale play Brad and Janet.
* Another pre-San Diego item: the trailer for Caprica. It looks pretty and emotional, and my hope is that starting a new series will help the Battlestar Galactica franchise refocus on ideas and emotions rather than continuity and mysteries.
* I like seeing big sites use their clout to do something other than talk about the newesthippestlatest releases, so I appreciate this interview with Frank Darabont by AICN's Mr. Beaks, the topic of which is the simply the ending of The Mist. Because this is where we're at as genre critics, potential political metaphors are discussed, but don't let that stop you from reading it--there's some stuff I had never thought of in there about how the ending was an obstacle for getting funding for the film.
*I'm kind of irritated by Rich Juzwiak's ability to blog entertainingly about everything from R&B to America's Next Top Model to Cannibal Holocaust. He's done a few horror-related posts lately. First up, here's a spoilery, animated-gif-heavy tribute to Neil Marshall's wondrous post-apocalyptic hodgepodge Doomsday. And because I know you want it:
NOTE: This depiction of animal cruelty is okay because it's obviously fake and stupid.
* Next, Rich did a round-up of some of the landmark films in the "POV horror" subgenre--Cannibal Holocaust, The Blair Witch Project, [REC], Cloverfield, Diary of the Dead, and The Butcher. By the way, fuck Cannibal Holocaust. Torturing animals to death in real life? No, no, no, no, no, sir, fuck YOU.
* Finally, as a horror-centric sequel to his awe-inspiring "I'm not here to make friends" reality TV montage, Rich gives you "Put down the camera."
Earlier this year I was a headline writer for the Onion News Network, their video shows, until other commitments forced me to drop the gig. One of the ideas I came up with in my very first batch of submissions was this:
I phrased it as "Al Gore constructs rocketship to help infant son escape our dying planet" and submitted it as an idea for the crawling text that scrolls across the bottom of the screen. It kept getting bounced back to me for reworking, and I kept tweaking the phrasing, and they kept telling me that wasn't what they meant, so eventually I gave up, but anyway yeah, that was beginning of January, and now here it is. Neat, I guess.
![[rss]](/images/rss.gif "ATF RSS Feeds"){kind=small}
