[music] Welcome to The Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and you are listening to a podcast about books in life, not necessarily in that order. I'm coming to you this episode from the 42nd story of a hotel in Shanghai, which sounds kind of more cyberpunk-y or romantic than it should, really, kind of a burned-out wreck right now. See, it's the end of a big travel run for me. I had conferences in Orlando, and Chicago, and New York, within nine straight days in April, and then a fun trip to Toronto in May, followed by a business trip to Cleveland ten days later, and then a trip to Annapolis, which was fun ten days after that, but then three straight weeks of trying to write my top company's issue for the magazine, which I finished just in time to get on a plane for a 15-hour flight to Shanghai. So it's been a tiring run, as all I'm saying, and I'm doing all that stuff, and putting out three issues in my book, and doing this podcast. It can be a little wearing, but as I try to remind myself, it's not like I'm doing brain surgery or delivering babies or anything, and the podcast is an optional thing, although I put a lot of work into it. All of that is around about way of telling you that I haven't spoken to anyone in at least 40 hours at this point, except a nice tailor on Mao Ming Road who might make some shirts for me if I can get back out to his store without sweating through every single thing I own. This is seriously Shanghai as a swamp. I mean, it's a great city, but it's just really hot and humid right now, and the Chinese don't really sweat very much, so I've been making up for that for them. It's just been kind of tiring, the jet lag, and everything else. Anyway, on the plus side, I did manage to get my picture taken outside two of the Communist Party museums while wearing my George Orwell 1984 t-shirt from out of print clothing. So I know there's no room for irony in this world anymore, especially since the first Communist Party Museum is situated in an old 1930s, well, a bunch of buildings from the '30s era, which are all now filled with high-end shopping, and I mean, like, really high-end shopping. So trying to make a joke about Orwell in front of their little museum, given that at this very moment, the US justice system is trying to hunt down that Edward Snowden, and anyway, like I say, there's no room for irony anymore. And I don't really want to talk too much about my reflections on China because it's only been about 24 hours since I got here, and I'm kind of hopped up on New Vigil right now while I try to stay awake for dinner with a client who brought me out here. Depending on how well that stuff treats me, I might get a new short story started before I leave, and I'll share that with you. Meanwhile, let's get on with the show. Our guests this episode both come from the world of comics and cartooning. First up is Michael Copperman, who's known for two volumes of his "Tales Designed to Thrizzle" comic, the Mark Twain's autobiography, 1910 through 2010, and Snake and Bacon's cartoon cabaret. He's also the man behind Manister. That's a strip about a guy who can turn into a banister in order to fight crime. Really one of the key things about Copperman's work is that it's really tough to explain to people. You just sort of need to put a comic in front of them and see if they laugh or not. Conan O'Brien says he has one of the best comedy brains on the planet, so I'm glad me and Big Red think alike. My first Copperman's strip was something called "Tales of Deep Irony." It's a one-pager about this mad scientist who's working on a potion that'll give him the strength of 20 men. It works, but in the last panel his assistant informs him that there are 25 men at the door ready to beat him up. So of course, feats don't fail me now, you know. Anyway, "Tales designed to thrizzle" and the Mark Twain book are available from Mike's publisher, Fanographics. Mike and I recorded during the Toronto Comic Arts Festival in May, and he had a signing to get to, so we had to keep the conversation short, and that's why it ends so abruptly as I hope you'll hear. Our second guest this episode is Ivan Brunetti, a cartoonist who has a new book out called Aesthetics, a memoir from Yale University Press. In the mid-90s, Ivan made some of the greatest self-loathing misanthropic comics of all time under the title "Schitzo." Seriously, they're amazingly horrifying in terms of what they portray about this person and his worldview. At the time I read him, I would have laughed if you told me that within 20 years, Ivan was going to be a professor of cartooning, have a couple of books under his name, and be a cover artist for the New Yorker, but he managed to turn his life around, although we'd be kind of downplays that a little in our conversation, and he's built a career around teaching and becoming, well, a very thoughtful, practitioner of comics. But now, the virtual memories conversation with Michael Coppermann. So, my guest on the virtual memory show today is Michael Coppermann, the cartoonist behind Tails designed a thrizzle, and the author of Mark Twain, An Autobiography 1910 to 2010. Quite an interesting title. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Well, actually, why don't we start by talking about your comics and particularly your affinity for Mark Twain within the comics. Your books are rather absurdist in style. Where does your Mark Twain affinity begin and how to permeate your work in comics? Well, I think I grew up mostly in Connecticut, and since he lived in Hartford for I think 18 years, he's still a cultural figure, he's one of the few cultural figures in Connecticut. So he's very present, and there'd be musicals, and I remember commercials. There was one I don't think I'll ever forget that was for the Eastern Connecticut Buick Dealers, which had a Mark Twain impersonator saying, "I've been getting to know some of these Eastern Connecticut Buick Dealers, and they're right nice fellers." So he was already kind of around, and he just sort of stuck in my head. But of course, it's not really about the real Twain, he's a character that has become this picaresque rascal. And you've had those throughout your comics, as I've read them over the years, the, well, the mix of historical figures, pop culture, TV figures, and then absolutely absurdist characters like Snake and Bacon, who are, for anyone who hasn't read these, Snake and a piece of Bacon, who need to get put into various genre formulas and really, really entertaining in absolutely absurd ways. How did you just sort of hit on that style, that motif for your comic work? Well, I think it's just about me trying to entertain, and for me part of entertainment is surprise or doing things that are, if not completely unexpected, at least slightly unexpected. So for me, it's about the ball bouncing in a different direction than you think it will. And whatever I can bring in to make that happen, I will. It's funny with Snake and Bacon, actually, because there's such a limited joke. And I think in the very first comic, I think in the second panels, I'm going to say this isn't working, which is how I felt about it. But they became such a motif for me just because people kept demanding that I bring them back. The editor, my editor at Avon, when I was doing Snake and Bacon's Cartoon Cabaret, demanded that they be in the title. And then a few years later, the two writers from The Daily Show, Scott Jacobson and Rich Blomquist, wrote this TV pilot featuring them. So it hasn't really been my impulse to keep bringing them back and put them foremost, but other people have kind of steered me in that direction. Although lately, it's been Mark Twain and Albert Einstein as a duo, not even a crime fighting duo. That started pretty early for me, too. I just found something inherently amusing. And also in the fact that if you draw them in a very loose, sloppy way, they look kind of similar. Now, do you have any sort of absurdity police for your strips, anyone you check on to say, "Yeah, I know this doesn't make sense, but is it funny? Do you bounce anything off of people or are you pretty much going on gut instinct?" Because you make some very, very oddball flights of fancy and you're, "Yeah, I'm afraid I don't have that, really." I mean, my wife has a good sense of humor, I will say that, but she doesn't always find what I do funny, and she doesn't always find funny what other people might find funny. So I actually try to be careful not to expose material before I've completed it, because it will really shake my confidence if someone just is indifferent. Because, yeah, there are times I'll read your things, and my wife will be wondering what I'm laughing at, and I'll just say it's one of coverments. Oh, never mind. Okay, because you can't explain what's happening from nothing. It works when you explain it, but the comics themselves are hysterical. How do you, well, how do you stay surreal, I guess? How do you keep that sense of absurdity in your work? Well, it's not hard to keep the absurdity. It would be harder to be straight, but it's kind of just the way I am. And being absurd is sort of my stress relief mechanism. The refuge I take is by making situations absurd. So in some ways, the more painful and difficult life gets, the more absurd I get. No temptation to do any sort of still humorous, but more realistically premised work? Oh, no, definitely. I have been thinking about doing that, trying to tackle it, and maybe do a longer narrative and merge a kind of more serious subject with the absurdity and see if I can make that work. It just reminds me now of thinking of the language brothers. When they had that zoot comic from Fantagraphics, there was some insane looseness, and much like your Monty Python inspired absurdity to their work, and they ended up finding a way to sort of tie those into this very kind of heartfelt wrap up when they were finishing that series, but that's probably why they stopped doing that series once you finally find a way to tie it all together. Why comics in particular, how did you get started in comics as opposed to writing prose or writing in another... Well, because comics are such an immediate thing over which you can have such control. It really attracted me because, you know, with a pen and a piece of paper, you can just create this thing, and then you can reproduce it fairly easily and distribute it, and it can have such impact. And to me, I'm the kind of person who really just likes to have a very direct control over what I do, and have that kind of close relationship with it. And I love comics. I think they combine two of my favorite things, art and humor, which are both to me about freedom, you know, freedom from the normal meanings that we're all forced to respect, and freedom from the quotidian every day. And what cartoon, Mr. Gereid, growing up? Oh, well, the big one for me, of course, was Tintin, which I read all his books, I think, starting when I was eight. Before that, they're not comics, but the "Moom and Troll" books were very big for me. And another huge influence was the Smithsonian Book of Newspaper Comics, which I got when I was 12, and I still have that copy. And it just is an amazing thing for me, an amazing object, all these amazing 20th century comics in one volume. So I think between that book and S.C. TV, kind of my sensibility was formed. Nice. Now, you mentioned, again, the immediacy or the sense of control over working in comics. How difficult was it stepping back for the "Snaken Bacon" TV pilot that was done, like not being in full control since? Well, to actually, I mean, I didn't have full control, but they certainly let me have whatever control I wanted. I actually, I directed the audio sessions, I selected the music from the stock library, I worked closely on the editing. In some ways, it was good because the animated parts were all taken from my books, "Snaken Bacon's Cartoon Cabaret," but the live action segments were written by Rich and Scott. So in a way, my thinking about the material had already been done. I just had to realize it for animation. So it was very satisfying. I'm very proud of that show, especially the animation. And of course, I'm sad it never went anywhere else. Is there any talk of either bringing that back or working on any other TV projects? Well, there's always the possibility of working on another TV project. And I've had a few pilot deals since then. They just never went anywhere, and you find that you're spending so much time on these things that you're not attending to your own work. So for instance, I had a pilot deal with Adult Swim again a few years later. It occupied a large part of a year, and when it ended, I just immediately threw myself into the Twain book because I wanted, again, to get back to work that I had to control over, that I had to say on. That Twain book is mainly prose with illustrations, is there anything in comic form? How much of a departure was that for you, or how different was that from the comic style you're used to using? It was a bit of a challenge, but it was something I really wanted to try. I was thinking of it as being something like the humor books from the 1930s that you see that have illustrations every other page and very bizarre comic vignettes. More prose stories ahead? Are you sticking mainly with comics? No, I think there's more prose in my future, yes. You're also doing animation now, including a, well, Twain short that you showed yesterday. How did that come about and what's the work process like? That came about because ThingX asked me to create some films, and so I decided to make three short Twain films. I made three films, and the first one has some pretty serious animation, which I made in a very eccentric way. Again, it was about having control and having a connection to what I was doing, because with animation, before I've always given the drawings to animators and they assemble them, but I wanted to see what I could do just drawing on my computer. It was about creating sequential images, and then I animated them, so to speak, using QuickTime Pro, and then put them together in iMovie 06. To me, at first, it was this simple way of doing animation, and of course, it turned out to be anything but simple and much more complicated than if I had just gone to an animator or went to an animation program. But there is an odd, unique look to the cartoon, I think, definitely. It's reminiscent somewhat of the TV playhouse on "S&L," to remind me a bit of that "Smykel" style, which I think it worked on. Yes, I've worked on a few projects with Robert. We were talking during the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, and he had a spotlight session yesterday, which consisted largely of you performing comic strips of yours, which I have to admit, A, were hysterical, B. I had never thought of your strips as performable in the slightest, much less performable by one man. How much thought goes into the performability of your strips when you're writing them? Do you think in terms of, "Oh, yeah, I can't really do this. This won't make a good perform panel," or, "This would be a fun thing to do live?" I haven't really gotten to that level of thinking about it at the creation stage yet. I more go back afterwards and go, "Well, I could perform this one," or, "I could perform this one," and it's been a development that took years. I started doing Robert Sacreic's carousel shows where he has different artists perform their work. I think maybe at least a dozen years ago, but at first I was simply too shy to get up on stage myself, so I would ask actors to perform it for me. Then gradually I started to do some voices, and then I started to do all the voices, and finally it was just more convenient, again, the control issue, to do all the voices myself. I've performed them with actors, which is wonderful, but I find that the really fast timing really helps the performance. For instance, at The Last Maka, where we performed, the actors read the first strip I did with me, and then I did the second one, and just barreled through it. It was interesting to see, and it's funny to hear that you were actually reticent about performing before, because you seemed completely natural doing this very, at least uninhibited yesterday during the performance. How did you, was it just simply a matter of reps getting up there and doing it, or was there some trick to finally reciting in front of an audience? I think I started to do a bit of it and felt that I actually was not bad at it. It was trial and error. I can be somewhat timid and find it intimidating to get up on stage, but I felt like that was something I should challenge about myself and really push myself into. The most frightening stage experience I've had, although it was also exhilarating, was doing the monologues at the UCB ASCAT night, where you have to get up and do, in this case, eight improvised monologues based on suggestions from the audience, which the improvisers then build on. That was absolutely terrifying, but again, it was something I felt I really should do to challenge myself. You have a number of professionally funny friends. Do you talk stage crafts at all with them? They helped you with any of the process of figuring out how to perform? My work is so unusual. It's not normal that I get input from other people that really is helpful in that way, actually. I do find it interesting to talk over comedy with people, but it's rare I got the opportunity. Although a couple of weeks ago I had lunch with Tom Sharpling and it was wonderful to sit and talk about the comedy we liked and what we thought worked and what we thought didn't. Have you thought of doing stand up yourself? I have. I've thought about it a lot. I may do it in the near future. Partly because when you're performing comics, I get invited to do comedy nights fairly often. The problem is the PowerPoint technology. I wish they would develop a stand-and-play, stand-alone, PowerPoint keynote projector, but until then you're dependent on a computer linking to projector, which is one step up for being a prop cartoonist. It's difficult. There is definitely a feeling I wish I could go somewhere and just get on stage and perform without having to have all this technical stuff. You think in terms of being a gag guy if you were doing stand-up or longer monologous performances? Yeah, definitely. I mean also just from my Twitter feed I could probably assemble a stand-up act pretty quickly. True. Ricky Gervais has made a second career out of that apparently. Is Twitter feed or? Yeah. Basically I've seen comedy specials where he'll stand there with a sheet of paper just reading things off. Yeah. Yeah that's not quite as... That's a little lazy. To be honest I think a joke on Twitter, even if you're going to use it in another medium, you do need to reshape it. It's not enough to just have that be the thing. You know. I've been working on haiku on Twitter instead figuring any of the extra set of limitations. Now what comics or prose do you read now, who are you into? Oh it varies. I read fairly voraciously although my time is very limited these days. I have a son and a family and you know, life is very full. But I frankly read a lot of garbage, I read a lot of airline novels as they're called, airport novels. Yeah I feel pretty good. The airport I was in on the way up here on the shelves was Philip Kerr, Robert Caro, and Max Brooks, World War Z, I thought you know it's pretty good as far as airplane reading goes. Yeah. I'm fine with that stuff. That's not bad. I mean I read Lee Child, John Sanford and so on. Right now actually I'm reading Rupert Everett's Autobiography which is absolutely wonderful. He's a great writer. Yeah. I've always heard good stuff about guys like Michael Caine and people like that who turn out to have a nice second career doing memoirs. Well Michael Caine, I read his first memoir at least and he has a light breezy style that's very funny and quotable. The line for instance about being in Jaws 4 I think it was and he's never seen the movie but he has seen the house that the money bought and it's wonderful, you know, things like that. Rupert Everett is much more elaborate, you know, he's much, I think, a much more serious writer in a way. You know it's getting far afield. Yeah. Richard E. Grant's film diaries. I did read that too, yes I enjoyed that very much. He's on my dream list of guests some days, you know. As you were once upon a time, someday I'll be able to get Copperman on this show. You mentioned having a young child, what sort of humor do you plan on exposing the kid to? Well I figure if the moment in which our senses of humor start to really coincide that could be a goldmine because then I can come out with a children's book. I mean when I can actually generate material to amuse him then, you know, maybe I can translate that into something else. But oh he loves to laugh and we love to laugh together, it's always, sometimes he finds just the idea that something is funny, funny, you know. I'll say that man is funny and he'll go yes, you know, and just exploded to laughter. See, an easy audience, that's good. Yeah. So what's your work process like for developing ideas for comics and the actual writing and drawing? What's it, has it all come together, what's the work day look like? Well, I mean it varies from day to day. I have to do a lot of different work just to kind of keep money coming in and keep moving. So it really can be a little kaleidoscopic and just hard to keep track of day to day because I'm moving from project to project to project. But as far as writing, I chew ideas over for a long time I'm ahead and start assembling them piece by piece. Sometimes it can take, you know, a couple of years to assemble a script for a comic. Just trying to think of that next point that will work and not be too mundane. And as far as my actual schedule, I start working at night after my family has gone to sleep and I'm completely exhausted. But I have to say it does make you focus a lot more because you know your time is limited and you only have so much of it and you have to really, you know, be prepared to do what you need to do. The main project you have now in comics is actually in comic book format. It gets collected as we saw with the new Tales Design to Thrizzle, which I enjoyed the heck out of. Thank you. My comic book, you know, pamphlet format itself, do you have a particular affinity to that or is there another motivation for working in that particular physical form? Well, I mean, when I started there were more people doing it. And it did seem attractive. I've actually sometimes wished I was in, if you'll pardon me, saying a crappier format. Like I actually asked if we could make it a cheap looking comic book with, you know, cheap paper and cheap cover. Although they pointed out the main costs these days are in distribution. So it actually wouldn't be any less expensive, which made me back down. But I've always liked, you know, having something come out regularly and floppies allow me to do that. Although I'm, you know, we're talking, I'm not sure if we're going to continue to release the Thrizzles physically or just digitally from now on. Because of course, comic sales are decreasing across the board. This is a function of, again, lack of distribution or lack of points of interest. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Distribution is the main one. I mean, I think that's when people think about the cost of printing, that's the big one, getting things from point A to point B. The printing itself has gotten cheaper and cheaper and, you know, more technically impressive. But again, finding some way to get it to people. Yes. Yeah. How's that changed? The social media aspect, you mentioned being on Twitter and being connected on Facebook. How does that help you connect with an audience or does it? No, I think it does. I mean, I think the whole world has changed very much from what it was when I started or when I was younger. And a lot of it now is based on perception, perception of status, you know, the idea of who you are, and I have tried to, you know, to work with that and to represent, as they say. And so that does become part of it, that enters into it. And the idea that you have a relationship with your fans, I mean, I think when I started when I was younger, I really kind of wanted to be the kind of artist who's locked away, you know, in his own hermetic reality and scratching out his comics and releasing them to the world, but having no contact with it otherwise. But that's just not practical anymore. And you know, I don't want to do myself by doing that. So. Was that a difficult process kind of reaching out much like getting up on stage? Oh, yeah. I think it's been, it's taken me years, you know, and it's very much, you know, adjusting to the new reality of the 21st century. So I think it's a process, I get better at it all the time, but it's still ongoing. And what's your next project? Well, I have several smaller ones. I'm very excited. I'm doing a comic strip with Sarah Thier who wrote a wonderful memoir called "Dark at the Roots" for a book that's going to be coming out from the big gay ice cream truck people. There are several other smaller things, and I'm trying to decide what my next book project should be. I'm not sure yet. I just did these films for Thing X, I turned these in last week, and I just did a fold-in for WFMU giveaway, you know, there's lots of small stuff all the time. So how do you balance, you mentioned having the bill-paying gigs and the comics, how do you balance what I assume is mainly illustration work like that with doing comics, and how do you keep one from affecting the work on the other? Well, it's tough. I mean, illustration is not happening as much these days, I think for anyone. It's really not a great environment anymore. The money's not really there, and I think the conditions for doing good work have really deteriorated in that field. One thing I did find with illustrations that my work, I felt my work was becoming more mechanical at a certain point, more dry looking, more than I liked. So I've tried to fight against that, because when you're working with a computer and you're working at high speed, you just look for the way to do it the fastest sometimes, and that's not always the most attractive. And how was that transition for you, going to -- you work mainly digitally now from what I gather? Yes. When we talk about it being a new century, how was that changeover from working at a physical pen and paper to a tablet? Well, I was working pretty much exclusively on pen and paper until some point late last year, and it just was logical because I was making all these parts of drawings, again for speed, so that I could assemble them quickly in the computer. So I didn't have any more real originals. I had these fragments of drawings, which really no one is going to want. And it just was making more sense to move into the computer, again, because it would speed things up. I wouldn't have to scan. I wouldn't have to, you know, do all these other things. But the other component was that I was feeling a little burned out on drawing on paper and wanted a break to be able to come back to it with some fresh perspective. Because I've been, you know, doing hundreds of drawings now and comics for years. And, you know, the joy of discovery and the joy of living on the page had sort of dried up a little. So I feel like I'm taking a short vacation and I'm going to go back to drawing on paper, probably not exclusively. I think a lot of my work will still be digitally, but just to be able to restore the freshness. Interesting. I mean, the performance aspect does come into it in the way that you get a feeling for what will really resonate with an audience. And that can extend back to the written work. Certainly. How did that, because again, the moment I sat down in the room and heard that first huge laugh over the sequence, you know, did you feel that, oh, that actually wasn't that funny when I wrote it, but, you know, the audience, they respond to things that maybe you didn't consider that humorous when they were, you get surprised by how well jokes go over. Right. Well, no, I always pretty much at that point assume it's going to be funny or hope it is. But I've gained a lot in confidence as a performer over the years. Certainly when performing my work, I've read also, you know, from the Twain book and other things. And that gets a good response. But it's a little disconcerting after reading comics, because with comics, if you're doing it right, you can get that laugh every, you know, 30 seconds, whereas writing it'll be much more of a slow build. Especially when you introduce cameos by Quincy. Right. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Any other oddball 70s, you know, TV icons we should keep an eye out for? I can't, I can't think of any. I still can't believe I did a Quincy comic. What was I thinking? Inception. It was, it was tremendous. It just, you know, you start rolling with something and kind of decide to keep going with it for whatever reason. Yeah, I didn't warn my wife about it before we sat down for your performance. So she was just, who is going to get this joke under 40? I don't understand. I find it funny. Yeah. Yeah. Then we keep putting out great comics and it's been a pleasure to have you on the show. Oh, thank you, Gil. Thanks. And that was Michael Copperman. You can visit michaelcopperman.com. It's Copperman with a K and two P's for more info about him and where he can buy his books or visit Fantagraphic site or Amazon. And now Ivan Brunetti, author of the new book, Aesthetics a Memoir. Well, I guess today on the virtual memory show is Ivan Brunetti, who's the, well, a cartoonist, author of an upcoming book, Aesthetics a Memoir, also a professor of cartoony. Illustration and I teach them some foundation level courses as well, are used to and that's mostly illustration, comics, graphic novels, history of illustration, stuff like that. Where you teach? Columbia College, Chicago, currently. I also taught at the University of Chicago, which is my alma mater. Now, I actually want to start with an on-ball anecdote about your comics. Okay. Always the best way to start. The way I tried explaining you as a guest to a friend of mine was basically that there's a long tradition of self-loathing cartoonists in the world. Your early work in a comic called Skitzo really, really, I would say lowered the bar, I suppose it was really amazingly self-loathing work. You have to lower the bar to raise the bar, I guess, in that sense. But in those terms, I actually did have a girlfriend who threatened to move out when she was flipping through Skitzo too. I apologize. It's okay. Actually, all things considered, I should have let her go with that one. But yeah, they were, I think what bothered her wasn't the content, but the fact that I was laughing, reading the content. Right. Yeah. I mean, I can't even look at that stuff anymore because I was just going through such a horrible time when I was creating those books. And it's really painful for me to look at it to the point where, you know, they don't even seem like they're funny to me, but I could see other people laughing at them anyway. But I could see her point of view on that too. It is kind of, there's horrifying material in there. I'm sorry I put it into the world, but I guess at the time if I felt compelled to do that. I certainly don't want anybody calling me out on who I was in 1995 or '96 either. So, you know. I hope I've grown somewhat since that are matured slightly. Well, actually that was sort of the question I wanted to start off the conversation with the later work that you've done, as well as in comics, as well as teaching and illustration for the New Yorker and such, would seem to be a very, very different person than the guy who was doing the very, very self-loathing comics of his mid-90s run. How do you feel you've changed or what really brought on the development or change in both your art and your personal life? Yeah. I've spent a lot of time thinking about this. I don't know if I have a good answer for it, though I think, I mean part of it was the kind of person I was when I was drawing my earlier issues, I guess that kind of person was just headed for some kind of breakdown or downfall and that's sort of what happened. And when that happens, I guess you either just stay crazy or get crazier or you try to step out of your insanity and take a look at where you've been going and maybe try to backtrack a little bit and get on a road to health and sanity and I think that's what I tried to do. It's been a long time, but I just had some insight into myself, I guess, after a lot of things just fell apart, like my marriage had fallen apart and there were other, just everything was going wrong, I guess, and I realized it was all my fault. So I could keep blaming the world or I could look at myself a little more critically, I guess, and try to change things that I didn't like about myself. Was there a sort of real key and you must change your life moment or, again, was it more of a process of... I don't know if it was one moment, I mean, you would have, you know, not you. I would have little epiphanies here and there when I would kind of get mired in this depressive state and then I still had a lot of anger. I'm thinking back to, you know, this is 15 years ago now, but I would be so angry and then sometimes it would just sort of hit me, again, like that I caused all these problems that I'm having and that it was me that was the problem and it would just, it would be this thing that I, it wasn't like a logical insight, you know, it was more like an emotional insight and I can't describe it any other way where it just, I felt it in my body that I had to stop blaming external circumstances for a lot of things and, I mean, there were, you know, there were issues that were external, but a lot of the problem was how I was reacting to those things and I don't know, I just kind of had to step back and decide that I just didn't want to live my life this way anymore because it had just led to more misery and that's how I could see ahead of me and so I can't say it was, you know, from that moment I stopped being a jerk or it wasn't quite like that, I had to work at it a little bit just to step outside my own head, I guess more than I had been. And how was that reflected in the work that you were doing? I think, well, it's hard to answer this because, you know, in a way like I see a continuity in my life, I see it as more of a continuum, even when I was kind of mired in my anger and I think that's reflected a lot in like the first issue of schizo, like how angry I was and the first few issues, even though I was mired in that, I also knew there was another part of me that was, I don't know, let's say overly sensitive or something. And I guess I see that as, that's always been there and I think of the anger as kind of a blip in my life where I think the, I think being a little bit sensitive to things that was sort of more the continuum and so for me was just kind of getting back to who I felt I truly was and I'd gone on this horrible path that was sort of straying from who I felt that I was as a person, I was becoming a person I didn't want to be. So to me, it's more like there's a continuum of somebody who was, I don't know, I mean, I guess I've always been kind of a serious person or I try to be thoughtful and sensitive to things and I just wanted to find that person again. I think that's, I just felt that I'd lost that so it was more of a matter of deciding to rediscover that part of myself and the, so the work I was doing, I think just became a little bit more self-reflective or something, I don't know, I just thought about things a lot more and questioned what I was putting into the world a lot more. And even though after that I still published some kind of horrifying comics, I think there was just more of a philosophy behind it or it was more aware of the purpose of it. It was just slightly, there was a slight difference there and the way I thought about it. Would you say your line change at all? It certainly seems looking at your later work that it's much more stripped down and I don't want to use the word iconic because it gets thrown around there or an iconographic look compared to the more detailed stuff you were doing in the past as well as some photoreal work you've done very, very early on. Well the photorealistic work, I didn't enjoy because I actually had to use photos because I'm not a good enough draftsman to just pull that stuff out without references and I didn't really enjoy that kind of drawing so much for cartoons, for comics. I didn't want to have to have photographs of everything. I guess now that would be a lot easier because we have Google image search but in 1995 that would have been a lot harder to find references for everything. So that didn't really interest me so much and I just didn't enjoy drawing the stories that I did that way. I always just preferred cartoons even when I was a kid so I think I just kind of stuck with that way of drawing. I think the first few comics that I did were so emotional that it would make sense to me now that the line is a lot more organic and sometimes even like there's a little bit of savagery to it I think. And as I started to think about things a lot more I kind of stopped myself a little bit before acting my anxiety based and panic based emotions I think that just led to a line, a way of drawing that was a little bit more considered. I was also trying to strip away all the kind of baggage and garbage from my life and I think I maybe that extended into the drawing without me really planning it that way I started to try to get to the core of my drawing. In a new book I actually have that there's a passage that reads one's drawing simply reflects the nature of one's life at any given moment despite delusion, despite subterfuge, despite skill. No mark is meaningless and every line is an ideology that seemed to be of a piece with this. That was a much better way of saying what I just said. I think that's why I prefer writing to speaking. How would you characterize the new book? How would I characterize it? I don't know. It's just yet another piece of autobiography I think everything I've done is autobiography. Even the two anthologies I edited for Yale press are kind of autobiographies for me in the sense that I was trying to figure out the stuff that shaped me as an artist or had like impact on me and in a way those books reflect not just my thoughts on comics but my own development as a cartoonist. So I think everything I've done even the cartooning book I mean that started as a self-help book and then it became like a textbook for a class but it's all autobiographical I guess. So this was yet another aspect of it. I didn't have a lot of comics that I've drawn in the last five, six years and so I think it's important every once in a while just take stock where your life is at that moment and then what have you done? What have you been working on and to give it some legitimacy I guess I try to say this to my students all the time as well because I do this and I see a lot of artists that do this. They sort of dismiss what they've been working on because it's not I guess what they would want to be doing or they think it could be better or they dismiss parts of their process as not being good enough to show people and I mean I do the same thing and just the same way that I tell my students like that all that stuff's really valuable and actually it's interesting to see all of that and that they should just respect whatever it is they've been doing and just say well that's my work because whatever you've been doing that's your work. It's not the stuff you've been thinking about doing or wanting to do it's what you've actually produced and so I guess I had to put my money where my mouth was a little bit if I really believe that so I just tried to gather everything that I've been working on the last few years including things that I kind of did just for myself or sometimes like little objects I made that were gifts for people or just decided why not just look at everything illustration work that I've done I mean I had edited I didn't put every single thing in there but I started looking at everything and then it was a matter of whittling it down to the things that seemed that fit together or were kind of bouncing off each other when I put them together so it was like really long process of editing through a lot of this stuff I wanted to originally include a lot more a lot more sketches in there but then it you know that just sort of felt like that started to get oppressive so it's constantly editing and editing and editing. Well parts of the book do take you through that creative process particularly the New Yorker covers where you sort of describe the process of you know the original idea versus what it ultimately became that's it's that's sort of the pedagogical aspect of the book because having been again looking at my life that's what I've been focusing on the last you know five six years mostly has been teaching and I thought it'd be important to share some of these things like here's the process I never thought I'd draw a New Yorker cover I mean that just seemed completely like an insane idea that that would ever happen if you'd talked to me ten years ago or fifteen years ago. So part of it's sort of hopefully I still don't know I think well I think the reason it came about is I started to do slightly better work and maybe you know people started to notice that and then basically I got a chance to submit something I got on a magical email list one day that asked me to it was sent to a lot of artists but it asked to submit ideas on particular themes that were coming up this is I think at the end of 2006 and then riffing off of one of those themes I kind of spun it in a different direction and it's a collaborative process. France was a movie gave a lot of advice on kind of shaping the idea and that's reflected in the book that each of those projects was collaborative and the you know sort of bouncing ideas off each other and it's not like you sit down one day you draw it and you send it to them and there it is it's published maybe it is that way I don't know if there's artists that you know Lorenz Omatotti go through the same process. I think I mean I can't say I'm but I'm assuming that that's what I go through is a similar process to most other artists in that it's a it's a collaboration with the art editor and the other editors and anyway I just wanted to share that because that's what I do as a teacher I just try to take people through those steps to have them understand that especially since I've been teaching illustration which is an applied art and you're working for a client for the most part you have to kind of learn to work in that collaborative environment so I just thought it would be important to I mean for me it's important to share those things and kind of demystify the process and hopefully that inspires someone else to feel like they can do it or that they can try to do it and that's all it is you know it just makes it a good idea of how the sausages made and kind of yeah I mean otherwise these things just die out or something you have to teach someone else the stuff otherwise it's not going to continue. How did you get into teaching? That was another accident too. That was something I never ever thought I would do in fact one of the teachers that was kind of actually kind of saved my life during high school she had told me like whatever you do don't become a teacher just promised me that you know and I took that to heart and actually that just wasn't extra ever enough to do it anyway and it never even thought about it and I remember when this was it was at the end of 2002 I was working as a web designer for Columbia College Chicago so I met a lot of people around the school because my job was mostly to show people how to make a web page and how to make a website for their department and one of those departments was the continuing education department which since then has been discontinued ironically just talking to the you know the person that was training on how to make web pages I don't even know how it came up but you know he found out I was a cartoonist maybe because I had stuff in New City which is a weekly paper here in Chicago he might have seen something like that and you know there was a conversation oh hey I didn't know you were a cartoonist and then he wanted me to teach his 10 year old son about cartooning and I like be a tutor and I just I mean I said I don't think I could I don't think I could do that I've never taught anything and I don't know how he went from that to maybe you should teach a class because to me it would be the opposite okay just forget it so he just sort of threw it out there like well if you were if you were to do it like what would this class be like and so I just I wrote that up like I guess it would go sort of like this and he took that language and turned it into a course description which I could have never done either but he basically took my rambling thoughts and turned it into a course description and then he said how about if we do it you know I guess I needed the money at the time it was a little bit extra money I had all these you know bills to pay and I thought okay maybe I'll give it a try it was seven weeks you know I thought how bad can it be one day a week but I took it really seriously so I spent a long time shaping that first syllabus and that became the cartooning book that was published by Yale a couple years ago it was originally published by one of Interopress in 2007 I'm going to assume your career with Yale University Press is also accidental somehow is that that was more deliberate actually partially it's deliberate in that I was recommended to them by Chris Ware because he was asked to edit an anthology of comics for them but he had just finished McSweeney's number 13 the comics issue I just thought like I just did that I don't want to do that again right now I just finished it and and he recommended that maybe they talk to me and that maybe I could do something like because what Yale wanted to do was different from McSweeney's in the sense that it was more you know reprinting only things that had already been printed more of a historical take kind of you know they didn't have enough of a budget to pay like to commission people to do new work so it would it would all be reprints and I had a conversation with the editor there and it just so happened that I think the day before that there was an article about me in the Chicago Sun times and that happened because I think the reporter was supposed to interview a bunch of cartoonists and none of them wanted to do it and it was the last minute and so it ended up being an article about me and that had just appeared I think the day before that phone call for me also probably like I was a googled and that came up and it looked like I was more well known than I actually was because of Chicago comics something I don't know like it gave me legitimacy that I probably didn't deserve so after some conversations with the editor about like what you know discussing like what would this look like it's kind of like with teaching the class like well what how would you do this and you know they were pretty open minded about just seeing what I would suggest and so I wrote up a proposal and you know he submitted that to the editorial board and then they liked it and then I did it and I changed quite a bit from the proposal but I think that's pretty typical a lot of the I mean the artists that I wanted in there pretty much the same as my proposal but the way the book was structured changed pretty radically because originally I was going to try to do a chronologically and then by genre which is I guess the standard way one would do a book like that but I this is another accident I got asked to curate a show at Columbia College they were looking to do a comic show and I know the gallery director must have gotten angry with me because she said you know like well you could have as many people in it as you want and so then I came back with the list of 75 people and you know I think she was hoping like five or six but it turned into this massive project and doing that putting together that exhibit completely changed my mind about how I would structure the book because again I could have done the exhibit the same way let's put everything into these categories and I thought that was pigeonholing everything and I guess I don't I don't like that approach I mean I'd rather have something kind of holistic and a little bit mysterious where you have to sort of piece it together yourself as a reader or as a viewer so I just started to group things basically just visually like artists like artists that seem like they fit well together even if there was 50 years apart if they were 50 years apart or sometimes didn't even seem like they were doing the same kind of work do you remember any of those particularly good just something like you know having a really early Windsor McKay drawing next to a Gary Panter drawing and I just liked the look of that you know to try to rationalize that ahead of time I mean you'd have to write like a 10 page paper or something like about why you would like what the reason is that those things connect but I felt you know intuitively these things next to each other connect up and there was a little spark there where you saw like the whole history of comics in a way and I couldn't quite put it into words or if I did it would turn into a long rambling thing like I'm saying now and I thought like well if I'm getting this intuitively I'm sure someone else would also react the same way they'd see it without someone explaining it to them and so the show kind of went along those lines and I decided to make the book like that too kind of a little bit more free associative I guess then I had envisioned it when I wrote the proposal again it was the artist that I listed and even most of the stories that I listed are in the in the book but and they're in their in the proposal but the way it was put together and the way it was structured was a lot more organic and that wasn't something I could have predicted when I first had that conversation with the editor did you focus more on contemporaries or earlier they wanted mostly to have it be kind of a survey of contemporary cartoonists but to also have some historical work then was something we'd agreed on to that it should have some historical work in there to kind of give some context and but it would mostly focus on the last 20, 30 years I can't remember if we had an exact cut off we didn't really it was just whatever you want to call contemporary I guess in my mind that was you know stuff from the underground comics onward. And who do you like reading among your contemporaries? All the people that are in the anthology I mean it's so many I can't list them all and that's the thing like I just kept adding more and more contributors because I liked all that stuff and since those anthologies have come out there's even more cartoonists I mean I can't keep up anymore I feel like I did that anthology at the right time because trying to do it now there's so much out there there's been this proliferation of graphic novels you know I for the first time in my life you know the last few years I feel that I cannot keep up with it I don't know every single cartoonist I don't know all their work there's books I haven't read that are comics that I've never looked at and there's people I haven't heard of that I'm still finding out about and you know if you talk to me 10 years ago or 15 years ago that would not have been the case I would have probably been aware of everybody in some way or other. It was a very different world in the 90s when you had a sort of canonical peep bag damn clouds Hernandez brothers wear and you could sort of start from that and kind of get the rest of the universe around them. Yeah there just wasn't as much stuff being published you know and I think after the success of the Jimmy Corrigan book we've just seen a lot more graphic novels it's not just because of that one book but that definitely had a big impact on the graphic novel becoming this kind of accepted thing and you know libraries started buying them bookstores started buying them and people were looking for new ones so college courses also. College courses starting yeah all that stuff's relatively new and I mean I think if I were 20 years old today I would be too intimidated to go into comics. I was going to ask how do your students maybe differ from or what differences do you see between them and who you were and who the cartoonists you were working around when you were young. Do you see any sort of contrast and who they were and who you guys were? Well it depends on who you're asking me about because I have so many different kinds of students. The school where I'm teaching has a generous admissions policy so we have a really big spectrum in every class of ability and even familiarity with the subject so I guess I'll limit myself to the better students that are really more serious about being cartoonists because you know a lot of the people that take my classes are just sort of interested in it a little bit they're not necessarily going to become cartoonists. Well yeah let's go with the ones who actually want to be cartoonists. So if I'm focusing on the ones I mentor more specifically there are a lot more well they're aware that it's such a huge field it's sort of like an established thing you know and for me that's so different because I just thought it was something nobody cared about because there weren't that many people that cared about comics they were pretty much dismissed. There was no college class on comics that was around and so these students are taking courses in college that are based on comics and it just feels like there's an established structure there or something that pre-existing that they have to either fight against or work within and for me it was sort of like this is all outside the radar of everything. There's a couple of books that everybody's heard of in comics or something like Miles for instance people were aware of that you know and it just seemed like it took a long time for the promise of that book to really come to fruition in terms of seeing a lot more graphic novels you know because there was like a gap in there where it took a while for people to absorb I think what Art Spiegelman did and then and then you know takes a decade or 15 years and then and then you have this explosion of graphic novels it didn't happen you know right after Miles I think it started a little bit but you know it had to gestate for a while so I look at the students that I have now and I sort of think of them kind of in that state of they're just figuring this stuff out they've you know they've I try to expose them to things that I think they can learn from or I hate to use sports metaphors but you know up their game and like think about comics much more seriously and they have this advantage of people giving that to them whereas for people my age or older you kind of had to figure it out all out yourself everybody you had to hunt things down and I mean most cartoonists were self-taught because that was just a reality whereas now they're you know they still to some degree have to be that that type of person it's kind of an auto-dedact but you know they also have a structure out there of you know there's the best American comics every year there's the anthology side did there's McSweeney's there's you're entering something that is less nebulous maybe but it's also a little more nerve racking because you're you have to make your work stand out I think that's maybe harder to do today because I don't know I mean it maybe it's just the the bar has been raised you know so it's a little more intimidating what do you learn from teaching what have you learned about cartooning in that process of again writing a syllabus writing cartooning philosophy and practice and the years you've done teaching what have you really what do you what do you internalize what what's come out of that process for you well I think at first it was really useful to me because it made me uh the force me I guess it didn't force me I chose to look at it this way I thought about um how did I learn this stuff because I couldn't point to schooling you know I couldn't point to a class um so I thought well how did I learn this stuff how did I teach myself this stuff um and I had a breakdown that process and so I came up with this idea of like let's start with a doodle and then structure things into a a panel you know a composition and then think about subdividing that into four panels and I mean it just I had to try to break it down into this um structure that was based on learning composition I think that I mean that's and I guess you know I just was an insight to me like that's really the art of comics was that like understanding composition because that that's pretty much what they are I guess anything is but it's it's very important to learn that and I don't know if that was necessarily stressed in a lot of manuals before that so and even like incorporating one panel cartoons in there which um I thought of as a way they were a means not an end I mean I sometimes see people take ideas from my my syllabus and they're kind of misunderstanding the spirit of it where um they're they're looking at things that are to me they're they're means towards something and they're looking at them more as the ends of something um so I had particular reasons for why I wanted to include one panel cartoons and it had a lot to do with um that was a necessary step toward getting into breaking the panel back down um anyway so there was a particular method that I didn't really have much of a much guidance I guess to create that so it was useful for me to understand you know how do these things work so I mean I I some some of that must have absorbed but it become absorbed but it's also took a lot of time so I you know I'm making a lot less comics that's going to have the time to do your own work now um I have a lot less because I mean teaching is a very demanding job um people give short shrift to teachers all the time it's sort of its own art form in a way I mean I I enjoy mentoring students like when they're I enjoy mentoring more than teaching because it's a big difference when the students are engaged and interested and you see them push themselves and a lot of like you know my favorite students that I've become good friends with they're the kind of people that they push themselves I mean farther than I would push myself and I respect them I mean I respect them as people and as artists and some way I mean I get something from being around them too because they still have hunger and energy and like a like the romantic spirit of they want to do something great and a lot of my favorite students they're they're not the type of people that think they're there they want to work toward it they're like working toward it and they know it's going to be a long process and I think that's a good attitude and I try to take a little bit of that from them myself so I'm I'm learning something from them as well at least again it's the with the best students it's a two-way street do you feel there's anything you could have taught yourself as a younger cartoonist at this point oh yeah I mean I could have taught myself to draw a lot better than I do um I was getting better up like you know when I was around 11 or 12 I started to expand a little bit beyond drawing cartoon characters and I just never had the encouragement from anybody I mean I had an active discouragement about pursuing that so I just kind of gave up on it I didn't really draw during high school I mean very little um during the middle of college I started to wanting to draw cartoons again and started just kind of doing doodles you know and um I just wish I'd been a lot more serious about it and had more um more of a fighting spirit like this is what I want to do I will do it but I was just easily crushed and defeated um and that's something I try to be aware of like with students I've never really been I never said anything really negative to anyone you know I I always phrase things like how can something be better I never told anyone something I did was bad I just I tried to be mindful of that because um that could be really crushing you know so I think things can be better and I wish I had somebody encouraging me that would have kind of taught me that distinction you know of looking at something being bad and versus looking at something as not quite there it needs improvement and you can work on it but I was just kind of I don't know lost an isolation so if I could go back in time and fix everything that would be that would be something like where I would have forced myself to really um stick with it more I guess fight for a little bit more because you know when you try to fight for it later um you're trying to regain something it's a lot harder it's having a day-to-day life and job and everything else I'm sure yeah I mean you know if you look at the people that are like the great geniuses of whatever field you know they started young and stuck with it their whole life and you know most of us for one reason or another aren't going to be that kind of person because many times circumstances get in the way or we have our own weaknesses or or what have you but I always think that wherever you are um that's what you got to work with so I have to say that to myself and that's something that I try to impart to the students too like wherever you are you can get better from there you know that much you can do that's just hard work speaking of where we are we're currently recording in Chicago in a little hotel room while I'm here for a trade show what does the city mean to you uh I'd have been here so long I can't even answer that because uh my family moved from a small town in Italy when I was eight years old um we went from that actually I was on my grandparents farm for a little while for about a year or two a year and a half before that and um and then we moved to the south side of Chicago this is where all the steel mills and other factories were I mean now they're just kind of rusted out or torn down um it was just like a like moving to another planet or something and I think it was so traumatic for me to leave um and go like from one world to another world that I've just been afraid to ever do that again to uproot myself in any way like that because the first time it was sort of beyond my control I think I was like this is what we're doing and it wasn't explained why so it just seemed random like okay all right I guess we're doing that go learn this language yeah yeah exactly and so um I just I think I've just liked feeling rooted and planted somewhere and I've been afraid to leave here so it's just it's come Chicago it's just completely seeped into me like I mean I think of this as my hometown um this is it's like this is where I'm from even more than Italy in some ways and um yeah I don't know if that's everything feels right I've only gone back a couple of times I'd like to go I never gone back to the town I was from I'd like to go um I like to go soon and um just see that again because obviously I mean I lived there for eight years the first eight years of my life so uh I know it had impact on me and in some ways I've never felt 100% American either I feel somewhat oh I am aware like I am a foreigner here this isn't my culture my country and you know um I feel a little bit like an alien like sometimes I don't understand everything about I mean I have to look at it like uh I am an immigrant I guess and you know I have to look at it through those eyes like it's um some things are just kind of strange to me because they're different and then but then you realize everything's strange where I'm from is just a strange to the people here so it's it's kind of forced me to step outside myself I guess um maybe that's common for people that have two cultures that have shaped them you know where you get a little more objective about both maybe because you have to look at them more objectively how long did it take you to pick up English I asked just because I'm wondering when you it was pretty quick my father had moved here um almost like a year before my mother and me and my sister so um when we first came to America he had already learned to speak it enough well enough that um so that my sister and I would learn faster we just kind of spoke English um in the house then and so and I and there was I moved into a neighborhood with you know lots of Italian Americans so um we just kind of that made it easier to kind of like go back and forth between the two languages yeah so do you feel it helped at all with the the notions of composition that you have that idea of learning English a little bit further along in your life I'm thinking not to compare you with Conrad and Nabokov but I'm thinking of yeah I'm nowhere near that so but guys who you know picked up English later and seemingly in the process it informs the form in which they write in the way that they can sure I mean I prefer Latin words like when a there's perfectly good Anglo-Saxon and Germanic words that we'll do just fine but in my mind um the Latin the Latin words remind me of the language I grew up with or the the rhythm of that language and the music of that language and the cadences so I kind of probably overuse those things when I write um do you feel it impacts in sort of a meta level your idea of composing and and how you tell a story well when you're when you're plopped from one place into another you it forces you to almost like I got I was saying like you're like literally an alien and you're looking at everything and trying to figure it out um it's almost like uh I think this is what autistic people go through we're you know trying to figure out the world and um you're looking at you know you're getting all this sensory input and trying to piece it together almost so I mean yeah you have to piece it together you don't just automatically understand it and maybe that that's analogous to what has gone on with comics with me or anything I have to kind of step outside of it and try to break it down and then put it back together now some things like a car I've never figured out how that works but with comics I was sort of able to do it at least to to a passable level but I'm not that good with a mechanical thinking you know I'm actually terrible with that but I guess in the mechanics of storytelling and and laying out a page that yeah I think maybe the like being forced to almost step outside yourself and take all this stuff in and then simplify it break it down to understand it and then kind of put it back together into something else and then when you put back together um sort of like oh now that I say it it's sort of what I've had to do with myself is I've had to piece together a person that is you know Italian American so it's two things and um it's I don't know maybe it's neither nor but it's a little bit of both and it just becomes its own weird hybrid I guess we do that with words and pictures with comics you're sort of taking both of those apart and then putting them together and then it just comes out like this new thing and I guess that's what happens when a man and woman have a baby also it's sort of taking a piece of one thing and another and you don't know how it's with the percentage of what is gonna you know it's gonna be taken and melded and it turns into something different that's neither nor and it's both but it's something um it's something also that has an unpredictable aspect to it of how it's gonna come together and it's never existed before I think maybe cartoonists are all trying to do that in some weird way like the way everybody puts words and pictures together ends up with some combination that's just different from everyone else I mean one of the worries I have with um comics becoming kind of part of the academy and being taught and you know I'm part of the problem here is um maybe that unpredictable aspect is being it's like eroding because of this because if you break it down too much and then you're sort of instructing people on how to put it back together and you don't want to instruct people on how to do that you want to set up something where what gets put back together is unique and I try to always think about that as a teacher as well like I don't want to be instructing anyone I want to set up a a template by which something will come out that is not predicted by me so more setting up constraints or parameters rather than a theoretical yeah just a starting point it's almost like um even those constraints and parameters like people break them and that's fine too like you just want to set up something where you don't know what you're going to get like I don't want to walk into a classroom like with a critique and I know what I'm going to see up there I want to I want to be surprised I want the students to make something they couldn't predict beforehand I give them a starting point some guidelines or little challenges like we'll just worry and sometimes they're mechanical challenges and they you know they don't understand that those are simply a template by which whatever they're going to put into it will flow and then something I can't predict or something they can't predict is going to come out of it that's the ideal situation so if I say you know make a page with all the panels the same size that's not a that's not the end goal that's a means what it does is it allows somebody not to have to worry about the panel like they're all the same size and then it's a constraint like okay I'm stuck with that but then almost anything could be put into that and then and then the way you might put those together changes but in the process of doing that you start to see also like how you might change it or how you might vary something like that and again they're all I try to break it step by step with these challenges where the students might think they're solving a technical question but actually what I'm doing is removing that worry because that's already that that's already been taken care of you've got the the structure there now what what are you going to put in there and then as they do that they kind of find their own content I think and then they also find ways to break my structures as well and that's what I'm sort of slowly leading them toward and I you have to look at every student separately and try to bring out whatever it is they're doing and push whatever they're doing further and that's going to be different for each person and that makes it hard to teach that way but I that's more satisfying to me than to simply set up something where okay here's what we're going to do and then you're instructing people and then they do that and then they either get an A or a C depending on how well they followed all these rules and I guess I have no interest in that as a teacher doing it that way and probably makes life a lot easier I think some teachers do teach that way and they're instructing that way and I it's probably a lot easier for them to be a teacher doing it that way and certainly there are some subjects where that's appropriate because you can break it down that way if I were teaching mathematics I guess I should want that but not art. I met Bill Griffith the Zibi cartoonist a few weeks ago and he was doing a slideshow at this at Mocha in Manhattan and flashed on a couple of panels of Nancy the comic strip and described it as the dictionary definition of what a comic strip is and I know you in the 90s had tried out for the role of drawing. What education did you get out of working within those parameters with trying to copy something it's a very iconic but very different sort of strip than maybe you were working on before. Yeah I always think of that period of doing that try out as sort of like my art school. For one thing it was an artist that was very different I think in a lot of ways from myself it's almost like Nancy has all the qualities that I wish I had you know like the kind of the organization the crystalline structure of it. I tend to this is probably not apparent from like my finished work but I'm kind of a sort of I think like a messy kind of artist and I'm a disorganized person for the most part when I'm working everything's completely a mess and then it gets really chaotic at some point and my studio is just piles of stuff all over the place and that drives me crazy though and there's this other part of me that needs to clean it all up so I mean maybe I'm blending both of those things and Nancy's about kind of this cleaned up world you know I think I don't remember if maybe Bill Griffith actually said this where you know if a if a vase breaks and Nancy the drawing of the broken pieces you could clip them out of the newspaper and probably glue them back together and it would make a vase you know it's that that precise so I guess I wish I was like that or my brain worked that way because I try to bring the chaos back to something like that but I don't know so it was just valuable for me to it made me more careful as an artist and I there were just so many aspects of comics that I hadn't been thinking about before that and that is intensely anyway kind of how the pages come together fit together how different parts of pages and stories are all part of one larger composition the whole book is a composition I mean I mean definitely mouse was something that kind of introduced those ideas into my head but it seems so advanced you know like I'm never gonna get there that's it was you could just see like every I mean you to this day every time I read mouse they discover something in there that I didn't notice before and I mean you could spend a lifetime exploring that book and learning more about cartooning and with Nancy I think it was a little easier to see some of those things and to be able to kind of break it down because I mean you know it was ultimately a humor strip and it was meant to be something kids could read so I think maybe some of those compositional lessons were easier to pick up from something like Nancy like by just having a copy or any Bushmiller's compositions I learned a lot more about structuring a panel and structuring the flow of panels and just cleaning up the clutter and I think the process of minimalism a little bit like of maximizing something with minimal means was a really important lesson from copying that because I tend to also kind of noodle a lot in my own drawing and if you you know my own sketches are really rough and just kind of chaotic so I think it just they gave me that balance of like I'm learning how to maybe even structure the approach I had a little bit so it kind of formed into something so I mean I learned a lot from doing it I recommend it to anybody like just pick an artist that seems really different from you and then spend nine weeks copying that artist or you know or whatever it is 10 weeks just give yourself a time frame even if it's just I mean even tracing you know like it just will make your brain work in a different way. There's that story about Hunter Thompson retyping an entire Hemingway novel probably in speed but just to at least get an idea what it was like to actually write you know. There's something where for a second you forget that you know someone else wrote it and it seems like it's coming out of your fingers and so you realize like this could come out of my fingers theoretically because it had happened those words were typed or this drawing was you know was made you know with my hands even though it's a copy but like then you can take that and just say like all right now I have to start with my own thing but you've seen your hands in your mind yeah capable or you can see that you could at least imitate the surface of something but I think even in the process of imitating that surface you start to see beneath the surface. I mean if you type a Hemingway story you start to probably realize like there's just a lot in your own writing that you don't need to have in there you know it's um it's going to force you to trim down like the next thing you're going to write is going to be it's either going to be a lot slimmer and trimmed and just like the the fat's all been removed from it or you're going to hate it so much that you're going to write the most ornate you know Henry James level thing you know afterward because you either embrace what you're learning or fight so much that you have to destroy it and make the opposite I think so either way the the copying I feel like it's not stressed enough in uh in art school like them like learning how to copy stuff because there's so much you learn from it if once you understand that it's not really about just making a copy. Who do you consider besides say Bushmiller and Spiegelman to be your your biggest influences? Well I would say definitely like Charles Schulz probably even bigger than Nancy so peanuts I mean to this day basically I'm doing peanuts I feel like the structure of the rhythm essentially copying Charles Schulz even that's sort of kind of minimalist approaches from there as well. Definitely you know Chris Ware has been a huge influence on me just in many ways except work ethic wise because I don't have one and he has an amazing work ethic. I mean there's a lot of stuff in the of course Robert crumb raw magazine weirdo magazine those like all the artists in those anthologies really um shape my thinking or I don't know just kind of led me to think a little more deeply about comics um I know I'm just probably forgetting obvious stuff but in the in the the new book I did a lot of my influences are kind of on the cover if you look if you look at uh actually that's all they are is my influences and inspirations and a lot of them are cartoonists so that's why I spent my time trying to decipher some of the images on them and I uh I want people to hopefully try to figure figure it out although um I don't want to ever I'm not ever going to actually admit what's on there I like to leave a little mystery let people you know try to sort of solve the puzzle. Yeah there will be a key somewhere but but no. After I'm dead people can find it. Well a lot of the images on the cover represent more than one thing too so and there's a there's also a matrix it's a matrix it's not just a bunch of stuff I'll just say that much. I'm going to be staring at this cover a lot more. Ivan Brunetti author of aesthetics a memoir and cartooning philosophy and practice. Thank you so much for coming on the virtual memory show. Thank you for having me really appreciate it. And that was the virtual memories show. You can find Ivan's books aesthetics a memoir and cartooning philosophy and practice from Yale University Press at better bookstores and online. His comics are available at Fanta Graphics. My coverman's books are also available at Fanta. His tales as I defrizzle books are on digitally at comicsology if you want to check them out on your tablet. Visit michaelcopperman.com for more info. And you can find more episodes of this podcast on iTunes by searching for virtual memories and clicking through to the show's page. In fact why don't you do that and and poster a view of the show while you're there. I'd really love to get some feedback from listeners who aren't directly related to me. And you can also find the show at our website chimera obscura.com/vm. If you visit the site you can make a donation of the show via PayPal and help offset my web hosting costs and otherwise you know just let me know that you value the show a little with money. And if you do I'll send you a copy of the short story I wrote recently or the one I'll try to write while I'm here in Shanghai hopped up on nuvajal. We're also on tumblr at virtualmemoriespodcast.tumblr.com on facebook at facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow and on twitter at vmspod. It'll be a new episode every other Tuesday if I have anything to say about it and I hope that my travels wind down for a while and that I get a little rest. Until next time, I am Gil Roth and you are awesome. Keep it that way.
