BINCRAWLR

Soto: Well, it’s only been like five years or something, right?

Harkham: [Loud sigh] First issue came out in… OK, if I keep it at its shortest, the first issue came out in 2011. Yes. So five years. That’s fine. So I think the readers are OK.

Soto: Yeah. And is this the final chapter?

Harkham: No. Two more. Two more, two years.

Soto: I’m actually really interested in the setting that you’ve got it in. The ’70s, sort of. Is this sort of based on the Roger Corman thing?

Harkham: You mean the movie milieu? Or the visual milieu?

Soto: Mainly the movie milieu.

Harkham: This is the thing, Corman was always kind of a high-end player in that world. Right? So when you start reading Video Watchdog and Cinefex, or whatever, that’s the stuff you come to like, “Oh yeah, yeah.” Like the Coffy movies. AIP. But then, if you dig deeper… If you start watching a lot of Something Weird Video releases. Do you know that company?

Soto: Yeah.

Harkham: What you start seeing is that there’re these companies that existed that were really bottom of the barrel, but the people who ran them, that’s the thing I always found most fascinating. The movie would be a scuzzy movie based on the Zodiac Killer or the Manson killings, which weren’t that old at the time, right? But they’d be this scuzzy, disgusting—they would change them and add like porn to them so that they could play at different theaters. These are really bottom-of-the-barrel movies. And then the people making them, you read about them, and it’d be like, “Oh yeah, he was like a financier or a lawyer in Beverly Hills.” Like so weird! And that to me was always the interesting thing. There’s no connection between the work itself and the people who made the work.

Soto: Right. They’re just like people who wanted in on the business or whatever.

Harkham: No, they just took an opportunity. On the producer-level, yes. They’re just like... The one I like—the most charming version of this—is even earlier. You know that movie Eegah about the caveman? It’s Richard Kiel, the guy who played Jaws in James Bond. He plays a caveman that is discovered near Palm Springs.

Soto: Oh my god.

Harkham: And the movie title is E-E-G-A-H. Like “Arrrrgh!” [Laughter] Right? That’s a movie that’s like, next to Ed Wood, it’s in Clowes’s generation and Jaime’s generation. Like that’s their what the early ’80s stuff is for us. That’s what that is for them. That stuff is like so charming they love it, you know? That movie was made by a guy who wanted his son to be like the next Justin Beiber of 1967. So it’s endless scenes of his son with a huge pompadour playing a guitar. It’s cut with this caveman guy.

Harkham: And that whole world, it’s folk art. You know what I mean? It’s people just making shit, you know? It’s the equivalent now of like people making fan films on YouTube, basically. A lot of this stuff, you’ve got to think like, back then if you could make a movie and finish it, if you could finish the movie, that was the hard part. Like if it had something to sell it, like literally one scene of something, you could find theaters that would carry it. I mean, John Waters grew up on that stuff and that’s why his movies—he was smart enough to see through it and see what was good about it. And he’s like, “I’m making a movie with Divine and she’s going to eat shit and I’m going to have a guy open his sphincter.” He’s the first guy to champion that stuff, you know? So I thought that world was such a good corollary to comics, honestly. There’s a lot of—especially back in the ’70s—my lead character was in that first generation of guys that want to make garbage. You know?

Soto: Like he enjoyed the garbage and wants to be part of the garbage.

Harkham: Yes. And that’s a whole other subculture that you can look up. Monster kids. They call themselves monster kids. They’re the kids like in the ’50s who watched the Universal horror movies when they were like seven or eight years old on reruns late at night on TV. There was a horror host in every city, and they’d watch these old movies.

Joe Dante, and De Palma, and Scorsese, and Spielberg, all these dudes, they were the first generation of filmmakers who were fucking psyched about making a gangster movie or a science fiction thing, or whatever it was. Any other person, like any other movie you watch in the ’50s that’s a science fiction movie, or a horror movie, those guys are at the bottom of their careers and they’re embarrassed, you know?

I thought that was interesting too, because those guys, they’re like… I don’t like a lot of stuff that’s coming out now in that world, at all. It’s an interesting thing that there was a time in America where people could recite poetry. They could. They could just recite poetry. I was reading a Steinbeck novel and, at one point, a homeless guy recited poetry and this other one finishes the poem. And you’re like, “What the fuck?” [Laughter] This is so weird. That was America in 1950. America now is like people just talking about The Avengers, you know? So, in many ways, I think of like, those directors, those guys, they’re like the guys who invented the atomic bomb, you know what I mean? [Laughs]

Soto: Like it’s all down hill from there, kind of?

Harkham: Yeah. They start this thing where they love this stuff and who knew it would just become Star Wars. Six years from Seymour, you have George Lucas. My character Seymour. It’s interesting on that level for me too, you know?

Soto: In comics, there’s like the Roy Thomases and the Kurt Busieks or whatever.

Harkham: Exactly. [Laughs]

Soto: Who love the garbage.

Harkham: Roy Thomas always speaks a good game when you read interviews with him, but then you watch something like Fire and Ice, or you read any of those books, and you’re like, “Uggggh.”

Soto: Yeah.

Harkham: I’m dying. I’m dying.

Harkham: There was no youth culture until 1950. Literally as soon as that happens and stuff starts getting catered to kids, those guys grow up and they just want to make more stuff for kids. It all just becomes a thing and now all culture, even the New Yorker is writing essays about Game of Thrones or whatever. And not the book. [Laughs] The Game of Thrones TV show. You know what I mean? You go wider, and go, “Let’s step outside the culture,” and the whole “What happened to America?”

And then you start thinking about America and start reading about America. You think of Whitman and think of Kerouac, you know? All those Beat writers in the ’50s, and they’re vision of what it was and what freedom meant and what America meant. How that got totally twisted just by becoming popularized and becoming a fashion thing by the late ’60s. So like, in many ways, Blood of the Virgin is like the end of America. Like that’s the end. We’re already in the decline. It’s over.

Soto: The decline seems really relevant right now.

Harkham: All the research I’ve been doing for this strip is trying to figure out like politically where were they in 1971. Nixon is still president. How did Nixon become president? Nixon became president the same way Donald Trump became president. There were eight years of a very progressive Democrat. Maybe six months after Lyndon Johnson made it federal law that you couldn’t have segregation in schools, there were the Watts riots. So yeah, it’s weird. Doing the comic now, I’m like, “Oh my god.” I absolutely have the right space to make this very political and it would speak to now just by the nature of it. It’s all lined up. By 1971, that’s the thing, is that Americans were… That’s when you realize what’s going on in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, is that Hunter S. Thompson was going like, “We were doing it. We were making this huge change in America.” And then it was like, “Fuck it! Fuck it!” They just pushed back against the progressive agenda and so he’s like, “I’m just going to get stoned. Fuck it.” You become a nihilist, you know?

Soto: I definitely sympathize with that at the moment.

Harkham: [Laughs] Yeah, right.

[INTERVIEW BREAK]

Harkham: Initially I didn’t want to serialize [Blood Of The Virgin] because I find it so difficult to talk about work when I’m working on it. So part of not talking about it, is to save the energy. You know, we’ve all done that thing of like, “Oh man, I’m so excited about this story I’m going to work on.” And then you talk to a friend about it, which kills it. Like it’s dead in the water. You know, you learn that in your early 20s hopefully. Not to really talk about work. For a long time, I didn’t want to serialize it because I didn’t want to talk about it. But then it just becomes obvious that if I didn’t serialize it, I’d disappear from comics. And that’s insane when I’m reading about comics everyday and I’m thinking about comics everyday. I want to be part of the conversation, you know?

Soto: Yeah. You also have a title that, you know, happily you resurrected. Crickets started off as sort of explicitly like an Eightball, one-man-band kind of thing. You had Black Death, which was ongoing, but it sort of clearly seemed more like improvisational almost. Sort of slighter compared to Blood of the Virgin. There were a lot more stories and now it is a vehicle for this story and maybe you fit some stuff on the inside covers.

Harkham: Look, ideally an issue of Crickets would have one main thing, one short thing… One ongoing big thing, like a piece of Blood of the Virgin, a good short story that was like four-to-eight pages, one or two short, short strips. That’s a perfect issue. But the way this goes, is that everything ends up going into Blood of the Virgin. And it’s also very difficult to contain it to 48 pages and I don’t want to make an issue more than 48 pages. It’s just so long, you know?

So it’s become just The Blood of the Virgin thing for now, but I’m hoping—it would be really nice if the last chapter of Blood of the Virgin ran with the next chapter of Black Death” which hasn’t run in 10 years. Or something new. You know what I mean? It would be cool to be like, “This is another issue.” Just rolling, like this thing’s done and we’re just going, you know?

Mike Dawson: I think you said yourself that you don’t even fully have it scripted out. Is that right?

Harkham: I don’t script it out. I mean, with this story, unlike most things that I work on, the basic plot outline—the big beats—all came to me at once. The whole arc of it and the whole shape of it. I didn’t even really write it down or anything. I just know the order. Some of those scenes and ideas will sit in my mind for years and I think, “Oh, that will be like a five-page sequence and this thing will be a page.” What ends up happening is that you cannibalize a lot of stuff, so by the time you get to that scene, the whole rhythm is completely off from what you imagined you thought you were going to do.

Harkham: Because you’re really just feeling your way through it and some scenes end up being much longer and some scenes end up being much shorter. But it’s better because it’s sort of living and breathing. It can evolve and change, while still sticking to that basic plot structure. I wouldn’t say it’s changed a lot, but I can definitely infuse more into the characters and into the world. That’s what I mean by it can grow with me. Instead of having all these sort of set ideas or script. I’m against having a script, you know? You can write something that’s so great on paper, but that’s a different medium. That’s a written word on a piece of paper. That’s not a comic. A script should just sort of be a collection of all of your notes and ideas, sort of organized in some form. It’s important to look at the page as a page and the more you draw comics, the more—you guys know this—the more you do it, the more you can actually physically see… Like looking at the page, is this joke good? Does this angle work? Is this moment happening? You know, that’s one of the great joys of comics is that you can really see the finished thing in front of you as you’re doing it. It’s almost like if you could shoot a movie while you edit it and did sound design. A script gets in the way of that, I think.

Harkham: As I was finishing the last issue, I was doing a page a day. I had to stop myself from doing a page a day.

Dawson: Why would you stop yourself? Did you feel like you were rushing?

Harkham: I think it’s too fast. I don’t want to start rushing it. Just because I can pencil and ink a page in five hours doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s a good thing.

Soto: Right, right. So you can sit with it.

Harkham: Yeah, just for the day. Just pencil it and if you’re done after two hours, then awesome. Go do something else for a while.

Soto: You just work one page at a time? You don’t do batches?

Harkham: I usually work on a scene. I won’t pencil a whole scene, but I’ll thumbnail in a notebook or on typing paper. I’ll thumbnail the basic thing. “OK, this is about four pages.” Then I’ll just start. Even going from thumbnails to bristol board, it will change. It can often change within that, you know?

Soto: Yeah.

Harkham: But I always feel like I’m working in chunks, depending on how long the scene is.

Soto: I really feel like the scene-to-scene transitions... Obviously the book is about movies. You’re obsessed with movies in your real life and a lot of this stuff is based on real people, or at least a real “scene” in the ’70s or whatever. Blood of the Virgin really does have that cinema feel to it, with the cuts...

Harkham: I don’t know. People say that. People say that, but I don’t know if I see it. I think of like Jaime Hernandez and his crazy transitions. Gilbert does two-panel scenes and jumps forward and back in time. In two-panel increments, you know? So I don’t know. Other people have said that, but I’m just not sure what that means really. I definitely don’t want it to feel like a movie.

Soto: No. I was sort of wary of saying that.

Harkham: It’s fine. I’m not passing judgments.

Soto: “It’s comics” [Laughter]

Harkham: I’m not passing judgments.

Soto: When I’m reading Blood of the Virgin—I read it again today just to get back into it…

Harkham: You read the whole thing?

Soto: Yeah, I read the whole thing. 

Harkham: Oh my god.

Soto: Just to get back in the headspace. I was really impressed. You’re not doing anything un-linear. You’re not jumping around in time or anything like that, but there are narrative… Not shortcuts. It’s like you’re cutting out the fat.

Harkham: That’s the thing. You do realize at a certain point if you’re writing long enough, that the difference between the good story—whether it’s a movie, or a book, or a comic—isn’t that there’s just one good scene, or two good scenes. It’s that everything is the choice bit, you know? So if there’s material that you’re not excited to do and it’s only you going, “Oh, I need to include this thing” purely just for exposition, then fuck it. At a certain point, you realize fuck it. You don’t need that shit. Just fold the exposition into… Add it as another piece into an already existing idea and that will make that scene better. That way your comic, ideally, is just made of your best bits. Not just like, “Oh, he clearly wanted to draw the head-melt part and all this other shit is super boring.” You know what I mean? [Dawson Laughs]

Harkham: That was kind of a big revelation when I did that first issue because I had more scenes planned that were in-between what is currently there, but I didn’t have it in me. Comics is so much work. I spend… Especially back then when it would take like 20 to 25 hours to do a page. 30 hours to do a page. Man, to draw a scene just because I needed some sort of piece of exposition thrown out there is a ridiculous reason to do a page. Now, maybe if it feels like “cutty,” then maybe that’s just because I’m trying to condense. This fucking thing just keeps on getting longer and longer. And it’s telling. Not that the story keeps getting longer, it’s just that trying to just tell the story that I have in my head… This thing was supposed to be a three-pager initially. [Laughter]

Dawson: Really? How many more issues will there be? How many chapters?

Harkham: Two more. Two more. I’m really hoping they don’t go beyond that. The challenge is going to be to tell all this material in 48 pages. This next chapter that I have, there’s a lot. Don’t cut corners. It’s a nice challenge. I love really dense one-pagers, you know? To me, a great cartooning challenge is to go, “You have one page. Make it fit.” How to fit all this stuff in there. It’s not a thing about being lazy or trying to make it just a way out for yourself. I think that is the best version.

If every page of your comic is just full of material, that’s great. In the last issue, it opens up and becomes six panels a page as the main character leaves that party with the girl and stuff. I was like, “Oh, I’ve earned it now.” I’ve earned having six panels per page after all these really dense sequences. Just to have two people stare at each other on the hood of the car, you know? Stuff like that hopefully is more effective after coming after all this really dense, layered stuff, you know? It’s all intuitive. I just try to think what do I want as a reader, you know? And what I hope to contribute to this conversation of making comics and loving this stupid medium. Wanting to make something really good. You’re trying to make something really, really good, so, that’s it. I don’t know.

Soto: I have a bit of a question about… I don’t want this to sound like a back-handed thing, or whatever. The wife character…

Harkham: Uh-huh.

Soto: She’s like a real good character, right? But maybe it’s because Seymour’s so oblivious, but she never quite edges into having much of a voice in the book. How much of that can you talk about?

Harkham: Well…

Soto: She’s having her own story, right?

Harkham: Here’s a piece of news, I guess, for anyone who likes the story. Here’s a scoop. [Laughter] The next issue is focused solely on her. And I’ve been, for the last two years, wanting to get there. But I’ve had to just wait. It contributes to the overall story. It’s not just to shift perspectives necessarily. I think the overall themes that are talked about so far can still be… That’s one of the cool things in fiction is that you can do something that feels completely separate from what you’ve already done, but it adds another component to it, you know? I’m insecure about it. Like when I give the issue to friends, I’m always like [sighs] this is such a sausage party.

Soto: So far, Mike and I were talking about the theme of the book, and obviously it’s about how selfish you have to be to be an artist. So far it’s about men and how fucking hopeless they are. I really feel a lot when I read the book so far. It reminds me of me in my 20s or early 30s when I was just so far up my own ass. I mean not that I’m not completely… [Laughter]

Harkham: But now you’re aware that you’re up your own ass.

Soto: Exactly. [Laughter] I actually found some online journal stuff that’s private, and I was reading it. It’s from 10 years ago and I’m like, :What an asshole,” you know? But it actually made me think of that when I was reading it today. I was like, “Oh, wow.” You know? Anyway, it really struck me that she’s a great character, but...

Harkham: She barely gets any room.

Soto: Exactly.

Harkham: I haven’t had an… Every time I’ve had an opportunity to do anything with her, I try to make the most of it, you know? I try to hint at more with the little bit that she’s there. But yeah, the next issue is really going to be all about her, you know? Most of it. And I’m excited to get into it.

Soto: It will be exciting.

Harkham: Yeah, I know. I’m excited. And I do think it will add a lot to the book. Not that it will create… I don’t mean that in sense in the sense of a new perspective on how to look at scenes.

Harkham: It’s like totally she’s living her own life because she’s away.

Soto: Yeah.

Harkham: I’m excited.

Dawson: Was that always the plan, or was that a realization?

Harkham: You know, it wasn’t always the plan. But I mean, you know, I started drawing this strip 10 years ago. It wasn’t there 10 years ago. But maybe it was there seven years ago. [Laughs]

Soto: Yeah.

Harkham: It’s been there awhile.

Soto: When did the first issue come out?

Harkham: The first issue came out in 2011. The beginning of 2011 or end of 2010. But it took me two years… Look, I started drawing it and made the kid 10 months old because I’ve got a kid and he’s 10 months old. And that will help me because I can draw him. [Laughter] That went out the window very quickly, obviously, because now he’s 10 and a half. And that baby’s still a year old. So it’s always been there for a while. The thing that’s interesting to me is that I knew I wanted to do it, but then there’s that part of me that’s read about writing. Like the rules of writing dramatic fiction. And you’re like, “Why? What are you doing? What’s the point of it?” Because I don’t know the themes. I was just like this is the title and this feels right.

Harkham: This element feels right. And it’s totally just following a feeling. All these elements, I don’t know what they mean, but they feel good and I’m going to build this thing. Then the idea of doing a chapter that would be of a different character on another continent. It’s exciting and I got excited, but then the rational part of my brain goes, “Wait a minute. What are you doing? How does that work? How does that fit?” At a certain point, I said forget it. I don’t care. I have to do it. If it feels right, I have to trust the intuition. If something feels necessary, I should go with it and it will sort itself out. And then in the meantime, you know, I have sort of figured it out because now I understand the book more. A lot of things that are intuitive I now understand. The same way when you look at a story that you’ve drawn years later and go, “Oh, wow, this is clearly about my relationship with this person.” Or it’s clearly about my feelings, you know what I mean? So that happens if you work on a long story. Like, I now know as I’m wrapping… I’m going to be on this thing for another year, the goal now is to not hit any of those themes on the head because now I do know what it’s about, for me. You know? So the trick is not to tie it up too neat and tidy, you know?

Harkham: The big revelation to me came once I realized that I spent 10 years working on Blood of the Virgin—it’s not going to be Maus. It’s not going to be Jimmy Corrigan. There’s a very good chance it will come out and sell like an issue of Crickets. Crickets sells really well for an alternative comic. I make money on it. But it may not be some sort of massive hit, you know? So I have to have to enjoy the process of making it. I have to feel good about what I’m doing everyday. And part of that is about the process. You start thinking about your daily life and how you’re living. You’ve been talking about trying to switch up your schedule, you know?

Soto: Yeah.

Harkham: You were trying to do like mornings. Tim Hensley does that. But for me, I moved last year. So a lot of it was setting up a proper studio space and not having any books in the room that I didn’t feel gave me a good energy. And that now carries through to everything in the room. And it started to carry through to my commute to work, you know? It became all about like finding this zone where I feel good, you know? And where I’m in the moment. Then you start going, “I guess that’s life.: When you get older, you’re just trying to peel back the onion. As you get older, just trying to peel back the onion of finding the right way, you know? So, so much of that is wanting to enjoy making comics. You want to enjoy just being in the moment. You’re not concerned about what the life of this thing is beyond just right this minute.

Harkham: What you want to do, is just… My mornings are very important. Kevin Huizenga talks about this thing where if you do your work and get it done—your two or three hours… Two hours, literally, if you’re in the zone, even an hour penciling, you can get so much done if you’re already in the zone with a strip. 

An hour is a huge amount of time. If you do your work, the rest of the day you’re floating. Not only that, but you look at other people who are frustrated, and you’re like, “What are you stressed out about? It’s a beautiful day.” You feel so good if you can just do your work and get it over with, you know? And then if you’re in the zone, then you just carry that through. Maybe you come back to it at night and tweak your work or look at it. That’s not that different from most fiction writers, I think. They try to do two or three hours in the morning.

Harkham: Alexander Mackendrick was a filmmaker who started out as a cartoonist and he talks about when you’re trying to write a scene and you hit writer’s block, he’s like the best thing to do is just don’t do it. Get up and go have lunch, or go ice-skating, or go bowling, or get drunk. He’s like the mind—and I find this to be true—is that you’re going to work in the morning and you’re going to go to your day job. It’s even better if you’re not actively thinking about your work. Your mind is doing it. Your mind is working. It is thinking about it. There’s so many…

I remember for the last issue of Crickets, I knew I wanted it to start with some sort of nightmarish dream, but I couldn’t come up with what that would be. So I was thinking about all these cheese ball quote, unquote “nightmares” that he could have. I was just like, “Forget it. Forget it.” Then over the course of two months, I had this perfect dream, you know? It was handed to me like, “There you go.” You keep thinking your car’s in drive and you keep going in reverse into a fucking black chasm, you know? [Laughter] I totally believe that the subconscious is working. Cormac McCarthy talks about this a lot. Our active minds, our conscious minds, does some of it, but so much is happening that we’re unaware of, you know? I mean it’s useful for writing characters, but it’s also useful to know that even if you’re not actively thinking about your strip, your brain is doing the work.

Harkham: Every… [Laughs] Every decision in your life should lead to you making better work and feeling calm and healthy.

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