Sam Szabo’s(aka BrainBooger) comic, PermanAnt, is featured in My Pace 02, debuting at TCAF as we speak! Playful, funny and perceptive, Sam’s comics are always a joy to read--check ‘im out! 

1. We love the immediacy & spark in your comics. Do you do a lot of writing and plotting before you sit down to draw? Do you do much editing? What is your process like?

I don't know if I really have a single answer to this question. I try to diversify the kinds of stories that I tell, and each approach comes with its own process. A lot of my work is written stream of consciousness, with no penciling or writing whatsoever done beforehand - just straight up free-styling. That's how I worked for my first couple of years as a cartoonist, and even in my current output, that's probably where my "sparkiest" comics come from. Sometimes I'll look back at that stuff and it'll feel like it came from some other universe.

Nowadays, though, if I have an idea of the kind of story I want to tell, I put a lot of thought and labor into the writing. Typically, I'll let the idea germinate in the back of my head for a few days. Then, when it feels right, I'll scribble out a completely incomprehensible draft as quickly as I can. After that, I'll leave it to rot in my room for a few weeks (or months) until I have enough distance that I can bear to look at it again. Then I spend a really long time staring at my draft and overanalyzing every sentence I wrote. Then I corner a more talented artist and get them to explain basic concepts like shading and perspective to me. Then I pencil and ink it as fast as I possibly can. Then I'm done.

2. What sort of comics community do you have access to? I tend to be a pretty solitary worker, but I've been lucky enough to have access to comix folk from day one. I started drawing in college - a few friends and I took a class on comics together, got really charged up, and wound up starting a collective, the Oberlin Comics Collective. After that, a bunch of cool artists came out of the woodwork - most of us were new to comics and self-publishing, but we were all really earnest and supportive. We put out a bunch of anthologies and collaborations, and there was a lot of skill sharing going on - I learned how to edit on photoshop, how to operate a risograph, how to write legibly, etc. The OCC is still functional, as far as I know, and putting out incredible work.

After I graduated, I moved out to Portland, OR because it had a reputation as a Cool Comics City and because I had friends there who said I could crash on their couch. It took me a little while to find the scene, but sure enough, this place has a really supportive, diverse community of cartoonists (not to mention other zinesters and visual artists). I've made a lot of awesome friends. I'm in a sick-ass drawing group - shout out to the Wreckin Cru. I print all my zines at the Independent Publishing Resource Center, a nonprofit that exists to provide accessible printing resources to the public. The employees, volunteers, and patrons of the IPRC have been great to me and bestowed me with a lot of practical artist know-how. Lots to do in Portland, lots of opportunities to interact with your peers. The cartoonists in this city work unbelievably hard to keep the scene lively - there's festivals, performances, galleries, and book releases all the time. I feel lucky. Every time I go to a thing, I have to work really hard to play it cool and not freak out over how good everybody is at comics.

3. You've written auto-bio, gags, short stories and epic operas - is there a story length /form that comes most naturally to you?  I think the most natural mode for me is that stream-of-consciousness style that I talked about earlier. For me, the most natural way to draw comics is to draw four panels on a page and just fill 'em in without giving any thought to what came before and what came next. They're usually gag comics, in some sense, whether they're abstract or literal or autobiographical. I like to start the page with a weird premise, then follow it where it goes and see if I can organically land on a punchline (or a non-punchline) by the last panel. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but that's the easiest groove for me to slip into.

In terms of my more premeditated writing, I tend to gravitate towards one-one dialogues. Long, talky scenes. Usually awkward, mumblecore-y conversations between people who have their guard up. I like it when nobody really says what they're thinking. In terms of story length... As I get more competent at making comics, my story structures have been getting longer and more complex. Sometimes they collapse under their own weight, and I get exasperated and give up. Usually, a story line winds up being twice as long on the page as it is in my head. Right now, I'm finishing up the last chapter of a graphic novel that I started a year ago called "A Fresh Start On A New World." I wanted it to be twenty pages and it looks like it's going to be a hundred. Yikes.

I'll tell you one thing, though. Four panels. Four panels, in a messy grid. That, to me, is the most perfect, most natural, most creatively fulfilling comics page that anyone can draw. Nobody can tell me otherwise.

4. Who are some of your comics contemporaries whose work you are most interested in? Hmm. Feels weird to call anybody my contemporaries. Here's some people have been blowing my mind lately: Andy Burkholder is doing some amazing stuff with deconstruction, repetition, animals wearing sunglasses, etc. Sometimes I'll draw something weird, and I'll be really proud of myself, and then I'll realize that Burkholder already did it in a cooler way.  Patrick Kyle is very next level. Olivier Schrauwen, Simon Hanselmann, Matt Thurber, Julia Gfrörer, all amazing. Noah Van Sciver truly is some kinda old school craftsman and he's been one of my primary sad-boy role models for a while now. Edie Fake is awesome, taking some deep exploratory dives into the architectures of the soul and the body. I met this one dude, Miles Wintner, at Portland Zine Symposium last year, and his zines made me laugh harder than just about anything. Daria Tessler is one of Portland's superstars. Her work is just visually bonkers every time. I think she may be some sort of wizard. She just put out a book with my friend Matt's risograph distro, Perfectly Acceptable. I'm extremely psyched for that one. In addition to being an ace printer, Matt Davis is one of the most inspiring artists I know. I wish he would draw more comics. MJ Robinson, too. Do yourself a flavor and check out MJ's work. Matt and MJ are two of the college friends that I was talking about earlier - we all started doing comics around the same time. I've learned so much from them.

5. Other than comics, what are some of your passions/interests? I'm obsessed with professional wrestling. The culture surrounding it is really complicated and fascinating. I really wish there was more academic discourse on the subject. It's cool to see the comics community finding its foothold in academia, but I'd much rather see more people writing papers on the ontology of wrasslin'. My pipe dream is to quit comics and go back to school to get accredited as a wrestling announcer, or maybe a referee. I enjoy the hip hop music. I like stand up comedy, and I get up at open mics whenever Im feeling an excess of self-confidence. I have a morbid fascination with early American history. I'm very passionate about my pet toad, Dave Matthews Toad. I have strong feelings, mostly positive, about 7/11 tacquitos. Other than that, comics. Just comics.

Megan Snowe’s comic, One One One One More, is featured in the newest My Pace anthology, available for preorder here.

1. You typically do not make comics. What types of media do you usually work with? Could you explain some of your past projects? I haven’t done comics since early high school! But animation and comics were both childhood dream carriers for me. Lately I’ve been working in installation and text, and combining the two. Rod and Cone’s Anthology My Pace was a wonderful opportunity to exploring pairing some drawn forms I’ve been working with with text in the space of a publication. It was perfect timing, really. My most recent projects have included an installation of texts in SOHO20’s +/- Project Space, Brooklyn, NY, called The Ambassadors. I explored the simultaneous non-verbal communications that can occur between two people in a face-to-face interaction. I installed the poetic texts in the project space so that they would overlap and be read in no particular order and never in their entirety. At the beginning of this year I made a small contribution to Title Magazine, Philadelphia, PA, with a collection of poems called The Attachments, focused on the residual experiences that can cling to your consciousness. Language is clumsy and, by using it with these subjects, I’ve felt able to explore the general impossibility of conscious and rational understanding of emotional lived experiences.

Often Full 2016 Excerpt from The Attachments, Title Magazine

2. What has inspired you to work more with text and language recently? What has been exciting about it? What has been a challenge? This has been a somewhat difficult question for me to answer in recent interviews…it has something to do with space, the dimensions of the psyche that text can penetrate as well as the multidimensionality of the proper composition of words. Language used to feel so dry to me. Something changed. Now it is thrilling and wet, gooey and so physical. I can feel it some how. The present challenge is to use it as a medium which is equally substantive if experienced aesthetically, as a linguistic composition, as part of a narrative, or as a form. I am excited about using it in ways to fictionalize elements of myself, bringing them up to a slightly increased extreme.

The Ambassadors 2016 text, installation installation view SOHO20 +/- Project Space Brooklyn, NYC 3. You have lived and studied in Finland and Russia. What are some things you took away from those experiences? Scale. I have a new appreciation for small scales and the productive richness of intimacy - ie. small groups, small audiences, small creative communities. I also feel like my expectations for myself and what my artistic career can be, what I want it to be, have changed significantly. Following any sort of particular timeline is not as important as it used to seem. I can go at, appropriately expressed here, my own pace (:-)) and not feel that I have failed in some way. Doing good, rewarding and enriching work is A #1 most important. In Finland, particularly, I felt that it is possible to be productive and personally successful on a smaller scale because you are able to build stronger relationships and spend more time with a subject matter versus expending all the energy on worrying about how big your network is. I’m sure that this lesson can be learned here in the US too, but I needed to leave to learn it deeply.In Russia I learned how to better live in the present, to follow flow and unexpected inclinations. That felt like a necessary survival skill there. I also got a sense of the rich intimacy there as well, but more in regards to one on one relationships. I don’t know if it was because of my time in Russia or if it is a born trait that complemented the social culture there, but I give a lot of myself when I choose to befriend or connect with a person. That was true for the bonds I made when there.  4. Five things you are reading, watching and thinking about right now.

1. Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love 2. Jussi Parikka, Geology of Media 3. J.L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words 4. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion 5. X Files, Season 2

Currently Reading^^^ 5. What are some future projects you are dreaming about right now?

I have several projects coming up this year - some big, some small - that will allow me to hone my budding writing practice. The two most highly anticipated projects this year will be a play and a book - two things I’ve never written before. I will be taking part in SPACE Studio’s Art & Technology Residency in London this summer/early fall where I will write and hopefully produce a video production of this play, the current working title is (Enter The Face). The play is about a near-future technology that can be surgically implanted to assist the patient with physical emotional expression. This device translates the activity of the nervous system into emotive gestures that represent the patient’s feelings and intentions more accurately than their natural system of expression. The book will be part of an installation in a group exhibition slated to open in November, 2016, at EFA in New York.

The contribution to My Pace is an excerpt of a larger work that I would love to finish and publish this year (2016). I would like to make The Attachments into a series of monthly email poetry “publications”. I’m applying to various residencies to continue the series of drawings, Bodies, that are related to the ones in the piece featured in My Pace, so we’ll see if any of those residencies come through.

Body Body 2015 graphite on paper installation view Sorbus Gallery Helsinki, Finland

1. You were also a singer-songwriter. How does making comics reflect or differ from the process of writing & playing music?  Was songwriting as autobiographical?

My songs were very autobiographical--very in the moment and very similar to the comics I am making right now (although my comics have a lot less break ups in them!).  One of the reasons I was so drawn to songwriting as a medium was that songs have this powerful emotional shorthand--they don't have to be specifically about YOU but they can feel like it. In a sense, when a song hits you right, it can feel like the song hears you instead of the other way around. When I stopped being a musician I discovered that this feeling of being "heard" was in so much of the art, books, etc. that I loved--it's not just songs that can do that.  When I started making comics it felt like I was tapping into the same emotional landscape as the songs I wrote. My friend Jennifer Hayden once remarked that my comics read like songs and that made me so happy.

All this being said, it's probably no surprise that I find making comics very similar to songwriting. When I draw out the panels it feels a lot like putting music down--a rhythmic system to organize the words & story.  It works.

(one of Summer’s album covers! ^)

2. What book / band did you worship growing up?

The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton was the book that made me write as a kid and I worshipped at the altar of S.E. Hinton from age 11-16. Same with the Tintin series by Herge.  Music was so much part of the atmosphere of my upbringing that I didn't feel like any music was entirely "mine" until a boyfriend slipped me his Violent Femmes tape when I was 16.  That album still gets to me.

3. You’ve written really thoughtfully about the ups and downs of a creative life & career.  Could you talk about what sorts of things help keep you making art?

I've simply been blessed/cursed with the artistic habit.  Some people are naturally athletic--it's not hard for them to run for miles. For me, it's not hard for me to draw for miles.  That doesn't mean it's "good"--it's just that I am prone to do it. It's not hard for me to keep drawing and writing--in fact, my well being depends on it. I still go in and out of the "groove" of making work, but I am old enough to recognize this as a temporary phase, just like inspiration is a temporary phase.  I've learned to just keep going, make stuff, play, get plenty of exercise, and drink water--something eventually happens.

4. What is your peer group in comics like? Do you strongly identify as a parent in comics?

"Peer" is hard to define, but I seem to have arrived at a time when there are more women and more life stories being told in comics than ever before. It feels like a very rich and alive time for those things. I can say that I've been hugely fortunate to come into this comics community at around the same time as my two colleagues/friends/comics wives Glynnis Fawkes and Jennifer Hayden. I met them at the first comics event I ever went to and liked them right away, not knowing that we all came to comics with extremely similar paths and trajectories: being middle aged mothers with serious backgrounds in other artistic fields. That being said, I don't strongly identify as a parent in comics. In the beginning I did a lot of comics about my days and experiences with my young son, but I have phased out of that for the most part.  Some of that has been a natural progression in what stories I want to tell and some of that has been a careful consideration to honor my son's experience over my own.

5. Do you have any dream projects on the backburner, if money & time were no object?

I guess the Big Dream Project that I hope to do when the threads align themselves is a book length graphic memoir about my weird Northern California, post counter-cultural upbringing. I've always wanted to write about it and I think it would be an interesting story. To be honest though, I feel like I am pretty much "living the dream"--which is, I am able to tell the stories I want to tell. As someone who has struggled to be clear on what that meant, it's hugely satisfying to actually do it.  Of course, I don't have as much time as I'd like, but I've also learned that daily life stuff of home and work is a healthy part of my life and art. I love what I do and I just want to keep going.

. . .

Rod+Cone will be debuting its newest comics anthology “My Pace 02,″ featuring @summerpierre & 5 other artists, this weekend at TCAF in Toronto! (You can also preorder it here.)