Okey-Panky

I feel you on the character issue. For me, drawing naturalistic characters and environments is both intimidating and redundant. It's like when you realize you're in a lucid dream and you think, wait a second, I can do anything I want. We can draw, so why would we waste our powers recreating the world that already exists? 

The other side of that is that if I try to draw a room the way it really looks, or landscape, or a person, the success or failure of my effort can easily be measured by comparing it to the subject. That's the intimidating part. 

Yeah, you really hit the nail on the head. I always felt the same way, like I could draw literally anything, and I don't like drawing characters and behaviors that much. 

I think having a character "locked into" an environment, but still having thoughts and action narrated about it, is a pretty exciting visual disconnect. It keeps it interesting for me.

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Alhambra

After I read The Ocean I had to look up one word - Alhambra. That page has a strong gravity to it, and your image is provocative even beyond the reference. Can you tell me about the Alhambra?

As a writer I feel most attracted to individual words. Every word has subtle nuances and connotations attached to it. Even synonymous words have subtly different meanings. like "starving" and "famished" mean two different things contextually, and using the right one at the right time can be super effective. This is my absolute favorite part about writing and reading. Sometimes you just read that perfect word that really hits descriptively, emotionally, visually.

Definitely. The best is when there's something very specific you want to evoke, and you have a loose, searching grasp on it. The concept is there and all you need is the right word. Then a thesaurus can feel like an exciting candy store. And word-spelunking cuts both ways - you might find a word that makes you reevaluate the whole sentence. It's like falling in love. It's a great way to learn.

I had "Alhambra" in this log I keep of words that I find attractive, what they mean to me, and how I want to use them. I'm not sure where I first heard the name—maybe it's a real place in a shore town somewhere. I might have just taken it from Harry Potter or something. But it just sounds so grand and old to me, like you can just feel that a place called Alhambra has been around forever and has a ton of history associated with it, and I wanted this building in the comic to feel the same way. I used the word before looking it up, then I looked it up to make sure it was okay to use. I saw that ancient Islamic fortress in Spain, plus a bunch of theaters in Europe and the States, and I really liked that extra layer of history.

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Ghost Town

“The Ocean” reminds me of the Salton Sea. Have you heard about that? It's a manmade body of water in southern CA that dried up and become toxic because of, like, alluvial problems. It was conceived as a resort town—some people stayed after the decline, and a mutant species of tilapia fish even was able to survive in the fucked up water, which the people ate. It became this ghost town with a weird closed ecosystem. There's a good little documentary about it on YouTube.

I love places like that. Jia and I went to Cape May right after school ended. It was like mid-May, right before the opening of the summer season, but it was still actually very cold and kind of rainy/overcast. So all the stores and stuff were still closed, and there was absolutely no one walking around. It was just kind of a ghost town.

I had already started working on a different comic at the time, but it wasn't really working out. Jia suggested I do something based on the trip, and luckily I had taken a ton of photos, so it all kind of came together nicely as “The Ocean.” The original idea was the "ghost" series I've been posting on tumblr,

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Order of the Phoenix

Were you into Harry Potter? What was your fave book?

Oh man, I loved Harry Potter when I was younger. It was really cool, because Harry was 11 in the first book, and I was 11 when it first came out. A new book was released each year, and I'd be the same age as the characters, and the books kind of grew in maturity at the same pace I did. I think the fifth book is my favorite, it really switches to a more darker, serious work as Voldemort comes back into power. I haven't read the books in a while, I should do that sometime. I'm a Ravenclaw.

Is the fifth Half-Blood Prince? That was my favorite too. I'd want to be a Ravenclaw—it seems like the best deal because you're smart and virtuous but you don't have to risk your life fighting like Gryffindor. Can you appeal your house?

Trying to capture and express the weird feeling is a good way of summing up a reason behind making lots of different creative work. Or at least a good clue for when something has potential.

Did you start off making comic strips and stories, or was that something you broke into later? 

My parents gave me a lot of access to comics when I was growing up, so I made my first comic when I was about six years old. It was a Ninja Turtles ripoff, except the character was part leech and mosquito. He had a pointy Spy vs. Spy nose and big suction cup hands and feet like Leech from Masters of the Universe. He was called The Sucker, which was the coolest name I could think up at the time.

Throughout most of elementary school I drew a bunch of stories with various characters for my “comics company” called Real Foney Funnies (which briefly became Nightmare Comics around the time puberty hit). I was always hassling friends to contribute to it, and nagging teachers to give me photocopier access. 

By high school, I started to lose interest in making comics, but I still drew a lot and made little comic strips in my journals. It wasn't until I learned about '60s underground comics, and '80s alt comics that I started to really get back into reading and making comics. I hadn't considered that you could make comics about absolutely anything, and by my mid-20’s cartooning was at the centre of everything I did.

I drank water and ate food.

Alt and underground comics are freeing in their own way, but newspaper comics - dailies – deserve credit for being weird and exciting and liberated from genre conventions way before the undergrounds. So many of them are straight realism, or didactic on some hyper specific, niche topic, or about a made up world. I always appreciated that. Plus, their length limitation builds in a formal challenge, like haiku. 

Were newspaper comics a big part of your diet? Which were your favorites?

Oh yeah, for anyone who grew up when newspapers were still a thing, the funny pages were where most of us saw our first comics.

I wanted to be a newspaper cartoonist throughout most of my undergrad, and it's definitely in the DNA of my Dailies. James Kochalka was my initial inspiration to do a daily comic, but the decision to format it as four horizontal panels came from newspaper comics.  I loved Peanuts and Calvin & Hobbes, though in cartooning circles I might as well say that I drank water and ate food. I legitimately liked Garfield too. I used to laugh out loud at Garfield comics during 4th grade silent reading period.  Some of the newspaper strips weren't especially funny to me, but I liked looking at the cartooning (Hagar, B.C., and Beetle Bailey come to mind). I remember being in awe of the drawings in For Better or For Worse, even though a lot of the subject matter was over my head.

As a kid, I tended to divide all media into “realistic” and “cartoony” (with a very strong preference for cartoony), so it really rocked my world view to see Lynn Johnston do both simultaneously. 

The Far Side was another big one. It's up there with Peanuts and Calvin & Hobbes in my personal canon. Gary Larson wasn't a stylistic virtuoso, but his cartooning was so efficient, clear, and exceptionally funny. I didn't have these words for it at the time, but reading The Far Side as a kid was the first time I realized that a drawing didn't have to be technically impressive to be good.

It was all in slow motion, and the only sound was orchestra music.

Oh man, yes, For Better or For Worse. Also without being able to articulate, I remember thinking something similar about it - for a cartoon whose characters were all human beings, it had a friendly realistic style. So on that continuum, Foxtrot would be all the way "cartoony" and something like Apartment 3G or Terry and the Pirates was all the way "real". Cathy and Momma would be on the cartoony end. Lynn Johnston's style was off in a sweet spot, maybe veering off more toward book illustration.

Did you ever see the Garfield anthology called Garfield, His Nine Lives? It was nine Garfield stories, written and illustrated in different styles by different artists. I found it very unsettling and used to check it out of the library a lot.

Yeah, I saw the Garfield: His 9 Lives book, and I know what you mean about finding it unsettling. There's always something a little disconcerting about seeing familiar characters in a different context, drawn differently, or behaving differently. The familiar becomes unfamiliar. I try to evoke that feeling in a lot of my strips. There's something about it that speaks to some kind of fundamental fear, and it's a feeling that's stuck with me since I was little.

For example, when I was a kid I'd have nightmares about cartoon characters where they'd look and act 'wrong' and it was absolutely horrifying. Even a few years ago, I had a dream in which Krusty the Clown's belly split open and candy fell out while Bart screamed in horror. It was all in slow motion, and the only sound was like orchestra music? Like a movie soundtrack? I'm not sure why I was treated to such an art house dream, but it made for decent comics fodder.

Chasing the dragon.

Did you have a cartooning breakthrough at any point where you understood where you wanted to put your focus, and how to execute the artwork? I imagine that kind of thing would have to happen in an immersion situation like CCS.

Breakthroughs can be a little like 'chasing the dragon' for me. When I was younger, it seemed like they happened all the time. Like, "Whoa, I drew Ralph gritting his teeth so hard that you can see his gums! I leveled up!" But those moments have become exponentially more rare as I get older. I've gotta work for months and months just to get a trickle taste of that sweet dopamine. 

When breakthroughs do happen now, they tend to happen when I'm not really paying attention, or when I'm messing around with a side project. When I try too hard, I get precious and immobile. Every decision becomes huge and insurmountable. It's when I feel like I'm just playing that the best stuff happens. Then I'm in the moment, and it's fun.  When I was at the Center for Cartoon Studies, the breakthroughs often occurred in relation to constraints. The first year boot camp takes away all your tools and comforts and habits, and slowly gives everything back to you as you re-learn the tools and techniques. So when I finally got the freedom to do whatever I wanted, there was this giddy energy like I was a dog who knew it was walk time. The comics I did at the end of that first year were a huge formal and emotional upgrade for my work. 

Years later, Nikki would tell this story in job interviews to illustrate why she disliked practising forms of journalism that were essentially promotional—publicising films and albums and tours and music festivals—and why she now wanted to work in public relations proper. It might feel more honest to be a publicist, she said. Nikki didn’t mention that her pay hadn’t changed in six years—she was ashamed of this fact—and she never gave the musician’s name, because it didn’t matter much in her telling, and he wasn’t well-known. Eventually she found a PR job. There were other consequences of the robbery. After the break-in, she and her boyfriend moved to a more secure building in a quieter part of the city, where they became friends with their neighbour upstairs, a man with what she considered an old-fashioned name: George. He guessed—correctly, as it turned out—that her name was short for Nikomachi: the winner of battles. She fell in love with George and married him, and he and Nikki had one child—a girl. The robbery, according to Nikki, was the very night that her life went off in this direction. When her daughter was 13 years old, suddenly curious about love, and came home from school asking Nikki to “give examples” of how two people might meet and marry each other, the story began with the break-in.

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In another city, somewhere colder, the musician also remembered the night that Nikki abandoned their interview. It shouldn’t be complicated: for a few years he made music, he was concerned with little else, but for good reasons it became impossible to continue with a full heart. Then he did something else with the rest of his life. Nikki was the last person who asked him those questions about music, and it made him cringe to think of how he’d answered. As far as he knew, his children had never listened to his old CDs. He didn’t play anymore, not at all, telling himself the house was too small for ten-year-olds and teenagers and his old instruments, too small for the person he used to be. It needn’t be painful: he’d left music behind. After he found work as a paramedic, his youngest daughter began referring to him as “Ambulanceman,” as if he were another superhero who eliminated every problem. At night, driving home, the former musician pictured the lounge room of Nikki’s old flat: a stereo speaker turned awkwardly, a paperback flopped open on the floor; something was about to be discovered, and he’d soon be leaving.

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