Cartoonist and MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Fellowship winner Ben Katchor joins us for the first live episode of The Virtual Memories Show (in conjunction with the New York Comics & Picture-stories Symposium)! Ben & host Gil Roth talk in front of 50 or so people about Ben's new collection, Hand-Drying in America and Other Stories (Pantheon), as well as what he learned from his work in other art forms (like musical theater), the malling of New York, how publishing lost its identity, how he teaches cartooning, the move to drawing by computer tablet, his one critical audience demographic, the joy of imperfections, how to pronounce "Knipl," whether he has an ideal era for New York, what happened to his History of the Dairy Restaurant book, how fear of shame keeps him productive, how Google can help when you need to draw a Russian prostitute, the Yiddish humor strips he read as a child, and the one book the Library of America should withdraw. (And more!)
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 3, Episode 8 - Visible Cities
[music] Welcome to The Virtual Memories Show. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and you're listening to a podcast about books and life, not necessarily in that order. This is a pretty special episode of the show. I mean, they're all special, you know, given the amount of anxiety I go through before posting each and every one of them, you couldn't guess, but this one in particular was unique. First, because of the guest, Ben Catcher, who's a cartoonist and MacArthur Foundation genius fellowship winner, and if you're keeping track, and God knows I am, that means we've had three Pulitzer winners and one genius on the show so far, which means I got to step it up, I guess, with my upcoming guest list. Anyway, here's Ben Catcher's bio. Ben Catcher's picture stories appear in Metropolis magazine. His most recent collection of monthly strips, Hand Drying in America, and Other Stories, was published in March 2013 by Pantheon Books. Up from the stacks, his most recent music theater collaboration with Mark Mulcahy, was commissioned in 2011 by the Coleman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library and Lincoln Center, and was performed at both venues. He is an associate professor at Parsons, the new school for design in New York City. Now, besides Hand Drying in America, Ben's the author of a few collections of five or six collections of other comic strips, including cheap novelties, the beauty supply district, the Jew of New York, and the cardboard volleys. And his strips, they really are genius. It's not just the MacArthur Foundation that thinks that. Some of them featured this real estate photographer called Julius Knipple. He got away from Knipple in the last few years, and he's been working both on the Metropolis One Page strips and these stranger, more extended narratives. And if you're trying to find a common thread in Ben's comics, well, kind of say it's all about the pleasures of Urban Decay, which is the subtitle of the first collection of Julius Knipple strips. So that's barely scratching the surface for what goes on in his work. You really ought to immerse yourself in his comics, sometimes, trust me. He's saying something about the way we live now and the way we once lived that I think we all need to pay attention to. Anyway, Ben was kind enough to accept my invitation to appear on the show, but he had one stipulation, which is how we get to the unique aspect of this one. He said he would do it, but only if we did the interview at his weekly New York comics and picture stories symposium that he hosts over at the New School. And that makes this the first live episode of The Virtual Memories Show. We recorded in front of 50 people or so at the New School. The second half of this show is a Q&A with the audience because I realized during the first half that my questions were getting increasingly esoteric and would not have been a really good audience builder, I guess. So that Q&A section worked pretty well, and I think the first half also went nicely. One thing during the episode, Ben read a few of his comic strips, projecting them panel by panel on screen. I put the JPEGs of both of those strips on our website, chimeraupscura.com/vm, so you could read the entire piece if you want, in addition to having listened to his narrative of them. One other thing to keep in mind, this was the first live episode we did, and I was kind of figuring out microphone placement on the fly, so if I sound a little off, it's because at times I was turning towards Ben to address him directly and turning away from the microphones. I tried to get a third mic set up to pick up the questions pretty well, but there was a lot of processing involved. I'm just hemming and hawing and coming up with reasons for you not to listen to this one. In fact, this is a pretty awesome episode. So now, the virtual memories show live with Ben Catcher. Tonight, we're doing an interview with Gil Roth who has a podcast called the Virtual Memory Show. The Virtual Memory Show. Memories. Yeah. So, it's an interesting assortment of people you talk to, writers and cartoonists and others. Just anybody I find fascinating in the audience. Yeah. And you want to talk to them? Yeah. It's a great moment, it's like, before the licensing of radio, everyone can have their own radio show, so they're going to probably clamp down on all this pretty soon, but at the moment, yeah, these eccentric shows are happening, podcasts, and, right, this is a unique, it's a live thing for the comics symposium. So, we'll punctuate our conversation with a few readings from my strips, just for fun, just because people want to see things. So, this is a story, it's from Metropolis magazine, it's from the book that Ashton has back there from Barnes & Noble to sell, and this is a story called Public Housing. On weekends, Joshua Zaftebel leaves his luxurious apartment, taxi, to partake of the romance and danger of 1950s public housing, the light, air, and sun, the utopian impulse to provide affordable housing for all, the minimum requirements for a dignified dwelling place, resulted in low ceilings, small windows, near-vandal-proof elevators, and Frankfurt-style kitchens of worn-for-mica and stainless steel, a lot of some Thai food. It was a supposed breeding ground for a host of social pathologies, I feel like kicking someone's ass. To qualify for an apartment in the menu-mission houses, Joshua Zaftebel is obliged to hide his income and assets off shore, to cut off his $48,500 a year. Through the wall, he hears a child suffer an asthma attack. He kills some cockroaches with his favorite architectural magazine. He hears the chatter of a police walkie-talkie in the hallway. I wonder how Viola's doing, five-foot-eight Hispanic males seen entering building four. His friend chose to spend the weekend at her parents' country house. His air-conditioned and pollen-free. On Sunday evening, back at his primary residence, a disturbing thought crosses his mind. I may be depriving a low-income family of a place to live. Just then Viola arrives for dinner. How is your weekend? Wonderful. Let me tell you all about it. First I want to congratulate you on the new book. How did the position with Metropolis come about? Oh, when did that start in '80? What's the beginning of '80? Yeah. There was this moment. I don't know if this has anything to do with it, but there was a moment back then in the mid-'80s when a lot of magazines were sort of included a one-page comic strip on their back page. Like Linda Barry was doing a strip, I think, for Esquire, or, I forget, Esquire had a rotating back page, so it was sort of in the air like, "Why don't you have a comic strip in your magazine?" because comics were kind of excluded from slick magazines for decades, and the art director at the time, Metropolis, knew my temple strip, and he knew it's all about the built world, and asked me if I would do a strip, so it was that easy. And then waited a year, I wasn't sure that I could do a weekly end this monthly thing. And I thought it was a more, possibly a more demanding audience. I don't know what I thought. I ended up, I edit the page, so no one ever tells me you can't do it. It's Christmas. You can't do a strip set in the summer. All the things that people would tell you at another magazine. So it ended up being the perfect magazine for me to be in, because they want what I do, basically. There's been changes in editorial oversight or anything, like no new editors or anything like that. No one's given you any... No, because I am listed as an editor. I am the editor of my page, so the editors have nothing to do with my page. But the main editor, Susan, she's been there all along, and so yeah, it's pretty stable in that way. How's the strip, the metropolis strip, differ from the regular two-tier stuff that you do? To me, it reminds me of the Watterson Sunday, Kelvin and Hobbes, that sort of larger form thing. Do you approach it in a different way? It can be a little long, there's no panel requirement. It's just one page. That's no longer used in a different structure that you're used to for the regular weekly. Yeah, it tends to be a little longer, but not much longer, and it begins and ends on that page, and it has color, the possibility of color. Not every strip is in color. But that's the main...I think early on they would tell me the themes of the issue, like lighting or restrooms. They're a thematic...there's a central part of the magazine that has a theme, and I would know it, and they said if you think about something that fits that thing, but then they just stop telling me about that, and I don't know the themes. Anything I do somehow relates to the magazine. So yeah, I was wondering in terms of the approach, how you see a page versus how you see a couple of panels, but if it's more surface and the potential for more square inches of image, but I don't know, yeah, that's a given. I don't have eight pages, I only have one page, so I do one page. I mean, that's the social and economic constraints on most...at least if you're working for a magazine, if you're doing it yourself, you can do anything you want. But if you want to be paid by a magazine, you work within those constraints. I mean, the newspaper would barely gave me that two-tier. That was considered, I guess, a big space for a comic strip originally. Those comic strips were one tier, a weeklies or one box or something. So that's the trade-off, you get paid, and you have those constraints. And you learn to use work with that constraint. Understanding the social, it's like, you know, why is the Sistine Chapel only that room? That's what they told them to paint, I mean, so yeah, it's all... I think as comics become sort of more of an art form, people will just say, "I'm going to do it my way, I don't want to be constrained by that." But it was a way to make a living and do comics, and that seemed like a good trade-off. In the New Yorker profile of you about 20 years ago, I did my research before I over-managed like that. You had a quote that said that, "The biggest influence is the strip itself, and the challenge imposed by each new empty panel." Does that sound familiar to you? I don't know if I ever said that, I think those are paraphrases, but that doesn't sound like my... The 20 years later, that's... But you know... That idea of the parameter is still what's there? Yeah, I know it, I mean, I love short, I don't think of it as short, I think of eight panels as a very long eight chances to build an argument, and 16 or 15 panels as twice as many. So in a way, I always think that if I can't... I think stories are divisible in a math geometrically, you can say I'm going to cut it into two panels and do a before and after, or I want to do, I mean, there's a mathematics to how you break down a narrative. So when these stories become two hour long, you know, music theater shows, I have a different half, two hours to break into so many moments, and you worship it out in that way. So it doesn't... That ever feels like a constraint. Well, what have you learned from those other genres you've worked in, like the musical theater outside of this experience, outside of the way you described it, just now. What other lessons do you pick up in relation to storytelling? Well, I mean, the big lesson is that it's fun to work, do what you have no collaborators to deal with, and just do what you want to do. I mean, at least the kind of theater I do has to be linear. You can't look back at the first panel in a diagrammatic comic strip. You look at this thing, this page, and you see the first panel in the last panel, and how you can grasp that diagrammatic logic. In the theater, each moment is effaced by the next moment, and you don't... It has to be broken down in a way that the reader is not compelled to say, "I wish I could go back," because then you've lost the audience. So that's...I mean, maybe in some kind of experimental theater, you can rerun the scene or something, but we do kind of linear theaters that runs from beginning to end. The narratives on a page of a comic strip can be much more complex, because they can demand a reexamination of that layout and what's going on diagrammatically. Within the patience of the reading, you can't push the patience of the reader, so they either get confused, or they feel like it's a hopeless project to keep figuring this thing out. I try to meet the reader halfway and say, "It might take a little work, but it should be...it's the payoff should come pretty soon within that reasonable amount of time." Yeah, how do you balance that in terms of working in longer form stuff? The Jew of New York was one thing, but the cardboard release was both two-tier strips, but also this permeating narrative that kind of carries the entire volume. Yeah, those were came about through accretion. So each episode was a self-contained little event, and then you start piling them up and you have a longer pile of short stories that sort of relate to each other, their characters come back, and in terms of plot, these are completely insane, rambling plots that go all over the place, and that's the way they were designed. But if you read each one, it has a little beginning in it, so it's...I mean, yeah, I like the short form for comics. Especially, yeah, it's a miracle anybody does anything that takes them away from a kind of fed media, like screens and things. So if they have the patience to read a full-page comic strip, that's about all I ask. It seems to be a lot to ask of people now, so what else do you think? I think we seem to be a good crowd of people who are interested in that. I've been a lot of representative sample necessarily of New York population, but... Well, New York is...I mean, yeah, it's by hometown, so people know this strip here. What is your New York? And how is the current New York out there diverging from that? Well, the mauling of New York is that it's taken over by New Jersey. Only large international chains can afford to rent space, so if you have the same coffee shop, like Starbucks appearing on every other block, it just becomes pointless to take a walk. Because what are you going to discover there? I mean, I guess the variations in Starbucks, you could probably send a child who's now looking at these places and saying, "I like that one. It's on..." I mean, they're on different locations, but to me it just makes it very boring to take a walk, knowing that I'm not going to stumble upon some completely eccentrically run coffee shop, but that's...so yeah, it's not good. And that, you know, it's one of the great things about the economic decline of America. That maybe that'll all end, and it'll be in the corporate. These companies, it won't work anymore. Like in publishing, it doesn't work to try to sell books on a large corporate scale. Never made money, and it doesn't...so maybe these places...I mean, there are stores on my block that have been vacant for decades, because the owner of the building is waiting for, you know, Starbucks to rent it, and they have a store down the block. I mean, you can't wait forever at some point. In some...there are some laws and some...I don't know if this is like an ideal place that someone made a law that if a store is vacant for more than a year, it should like be turned over to the commune, and it's...you've taken it out of commercial possibilities, a renter to her. You can't wait forever. At some point, the standard of limitation, you should hit the limit, and it should belong to the neighborhood. You've just defaulted on the store. So, you know, they do that somewhere. I forget where. There is some place where that. There's actually a law like that. Tencent Island. Where? Tencent Island. Yeah, maybe I made it up. I've heard of such a proposal. It's a proposal for some responsibility to the common needs of a neighborhood. We don't need vacant stores. We could use a Polish restaurant. We could use all kinds of things in that neighborhood. They can't afford to be there. Do you feel your strips are...I don't want to say more political, but more politicized, post-crash? Do you feel as though you're...you have more of a point to make in those terms? I mean, I guess you could see it as a subtext of every Julius Knippel strip, all these lost things to commerce. But I'd think it's there if you want to look for them. I never wanted to do overtly political strips where you know before you read it what the politics of the story are, because then, you know, half the world won't read it. So, the Metropolis magazine is being read by developers and architects and people who make industrial carpeting. And if I say this is a strip about why capitalism doesn't work, they're not going to read it. So, I want them to read it and then come to that conclusion. But, yeah, but I mean, the kind of overt political strip that sort of is telling you before you even read it what it's about or that, you know, you know, in the first panel. Do you feel any sort of self-editing process, do you ever find yourself starting to... No. Dramatic. No. It's already...no. It's this completely peaceful thing making...I mean, I'm not on the street breaking windows. And my impulse is to break the windows of Starbucks, but I'm not...I'd be arrested and I couldn't make my comics troops. I prefer to make comics about people breaking the windows. You mentioned traditional publishing houses and how it's sort of falling apart in the Amazon and Kindle age. All of your books have come from traditional publishers and not from comics like a fan of graphics or drawn in quarterly. Is there a history there or...? Yeah, in the early '80s, they had a fortune to spend on advances, so you could actually make a living doing...do it working for those kinds. But not publishing them, just not publishing the comics, but I'm saying comics don't actually sell. It's just a bad joke. On my part, I'll edit it out. Oh, no, no. They were the advances through these large conglomerates were very high at one point and you could make a living. So these independent publishers could never offer that. They'd offer you more like what maybe what the book would make. And these were subsidized. So what was that? Those are has the landscape changed at all in that respect? Well, in those years, whatever that bubble it was of corporate ownership of these publishing companies, they would subsidize literary fiction, which never made money, and things like my comics, though it was a strange model of Bertelsmann subsidizing experimental comics and weird things. So I took advantage of that. Yeah. So... So... So... So... Well, no. I think they're... I think the across the board advances have been cut and they're maybe not much more than an independent publisher. I mean, they're starting with lower advances now. And have you looked at any of those? Are you still... Is there a certain cachet of working with the traditional publishers for you, or is it just... No. This is how it's been. I'm... They paid more, but they... But no, they lost their identity anyway. They don't even know how to preserve it. I mean, all these companies once said very unique identities, they would publish certain kinds of books. I don't see any... They don't, like, run in the inside of their dust jackets, all of the books that they publish, thinking the reader of one would be interested in the other titles, because there's no connection. It's the book they were able to bid on and get, basically, and within some parameters. But yeah, it's... They don't have a strong identity than any more of these companies. So... Would you stick with them for the dance, or is it... Well, I feel some, you know, some... My agent who, you know, worked, got these deals for me. Their livelihood depends on me staying with those companies. I mean, they could sell it to an independent, too. If the money was the same, it wouldn't matter to them. They think probably they could get a little more, but I mean, it's... Again, it's the socio-economic, you know, pressures that make you do these things. So... I mean, everybody in Comix self-published at one point. I published the magazine for a while. And I worked for very small press magazines, and when there was a chance to make a living from this work, I took it. I mean, I didn't say I don't want to work for... I didn't even remember who owned random house. I think Newhouse owned them for a while, right? Yeah. So I didn't even... I didn't even know. I wasn't that politically aware that I would think about who owns this. I didn't know who owned any of that. I just took the best offer. And... And he was like... Oh, something. No. No, I don't... Yeah, maybe. No. They were so owned by themselves. I didn't know who owns that. But anyway. Now, who do you read in Comix, among your contemporaries, without well, with naming names? There's a book, well, just to plug a great book, Floront and Rupert, just put out the first... This team of French cartoonists put out their first English-language book called The Barrel. In English, a barrel of monkeys, that's what it's called. I mean, it's an international scene. So it's easier for me to read that in English, though, and that's a really good book. I follow my contemporary... The people who were doing Comix, yeah. So Peter Bleggvad did great strips that were collected in that book, Leviathan, trying to think. Great cartoon. Who do I read? Actually, at the moment, I'm not always reading Comix, because I'm doing research for things and that happen not to be in Comix form. So did you want to know what I'm reading, or specifically Comix or Peter? Yeah. They're prose writers, particularly. Yeah. I'm reading these histories by pretty academic histories, like the history of pedaling in Europe. Pedaling and stuff? Yeah. Pedaling like selling stuff. Okay. I just think sure was a nice thing. And what else in another book? I mean, other things, histories, because that's where I'll find my inspiration. So I can't... I don't just read, you know, for this aesthetic pleasure. I read for research purposes, I don't know. I'm trying to... Yeah. As a golden age of art comics, now, this was not, didn't exist when I started doing comics. It was sort of, most books so still would not carry a comic, even it looked like a comic. So I mean, I can't even imagine what it's like to be a young cartoonist now, when these things were taken seriously, and there's an audience for them. Maybe small, or maybe very divided a million ways, because the monopoly of publishing is sort of broken and independent among small publishers. But now, if you go to one of these festivals, it's just amazing. It's a whole... Or the fact that you're teaching. Right. Well, that it's being taught, right. Film came in first, I guess, in the '70s or late '60s. They started teaching film at a college level, but right, that they're teaching comics as a kind of an amazing turn of events. And not just at a trade school, but as a kind of art. I don't know what... I mean, it's not a trade, because it's not a business. It isn't art. It's like studying poetry, writing poetry or something. So about that, in that realm, as a business... How do you teach comics? How do you teach comics? Most people have been taught writing, whenever they teach writing in the first grade. So most students have a lot more of a background in using language than pictures. And then you sort of look at their pictures or you talk to them about what kinds of pictures they want to make, would like to make, and you try to get them to use one form as a kind of corrective of the other form. So the things you can't express with words, you might express with an image, or you can actually change an image by putting words next to it. I mean, there were all those combinations they look at. And that's how you do it. I mean, I have exercises in the first class. There are just two classes in making comics. And one in kind of illustration, more in performance, doing recitations and doing some toy theater. And it goes up to, we do shadow puppets. But the classes that are about more print-based or web-based comics, the first term we do exercises where there is very particular constraints upon what they have to produce each week. But they do something each week, short form, so they go from beginning to end. And they see how how does the story begin and how does the story end and what that arc is like. And the second term, they're self-initiated. And then they go off and do it. I mean, there's no graduate program yet in comics here, so it's all. And we look at each other's work as the first audience for the work. And they get feedback, whether it's legible to begin with, whether it makes it understandable on some level. And then we analyze all of the components of a comic strip. And then we see what the payoff is for the reader, these high-- you know, the students are the readers. And you know, they're hesitant to say something is just boring, but we say from one to ten, what is the payoff of the strip or the revelation factor? And they'll sort of be honest and sort of say what they think. But-- No, I was thinking-- you talk about the recitations and performance aspect of it. How much is that play into your construction of a comic? How much do you think about the performability like the public housing piece just now? Not too much. I think about it as the print thing. And if I'm making it from aropolis, and that's-- they're paying me for a print object, then I can pick-- some of them work as recitations, if they're not linear, they don't work as a recitation. They'd be really hard to read. So there are some that just don't translate, but a lot of them do. And what's the drawing process like for you? Have you changed medium at all? I can't see you sitting in front of a tablet at an iMac or something. Well, I draw on a Cintiq now because-- just for fun. I don't know because it's-- art supplies became really lousy in the last ten years. And I work for reproduction and all-- I mean, except for antique reproduction methods. Modern reproduction is all digital repressed. So you save that step of going from a piece of paper to a digital copy or a digital to begin with. And I don't know. And I play around with it. But I mean, I think it can work. I mean, I've only been doing it for a year or so. But your printed work is still-- What? Your printed work is still hands, you know, paper, or you're doing everything-- No. Oh, digital. Yeah. Oh, drawing digitally. And, you know, it's good there. No more originals to worry about. Whatever. To do it. And, you know, and people who want think there is some value in those objects there, they completely throw their hands up and say, what do you mean there's no original? That's the last guy I interviewed. The last guy I interviewed was Matt Walker, the Politico cartoonist down in DC who is able to sell his originals to the Hay Adams bar and get a nice tab going that way. So, you know, there is a trade-off for having originals. Well, yeah, I didn't-- I don't know. I didn't think about-- well, I don't know. People then, if there were a market for these originals that was sort of worthwhile, I might do it. But there isn't. And anyway, I don't sell them. I just keep them like a manuscript. I like the technology changes and, you know, paper and ink, that's high tech, that stuff. And really, you know, toxic, and it's one technology. And I think there'll be-- there can be another way to make pictures. I think as long as the hand connection-- it's a good interface between my hand and the digital files. As long as that's good, it's fine. It's, you know, get a lousy nib, breaks, you know, so what good is that? I don't know. I mean, yeah, people think like paper and ink, like grow, you know, like a natural thing. It's-- a paper factory is this horrible place. And again, the place where they-- it smells bad, and ink is-- you know, it's carcinogenic substance. It's, I don't know. I don't think those are things that-- they've been around so long that we think we-- you know, maybe people think they can never go away, but things change things. You're a kindle guy at all, or you-- digital reader? No, I don't like to read-- I don't like kindles, but I read a lot on a-- on an iPad or a computer, yeah. The e-books in particular? They're usually things that have been made into e-books. I just mean not web pages, but actually, you know, something that-- Whole books, yeah, I read a lot, because all of these great archives are digital now, and that's in the middle of the night. If I want to go to the British library, I mean, that's digital. I don't-- I can't go there all in the middle of the night. I have to use it. The-- we talked about it being a golden age for a cartoonist. I think one of the big aspects is the number of archival collections that we're seeing with Karl Marx, et cetera. Do you ever think in those terms of having a big phone book of Ben Catcher strips? Well, I'm still making them. So while you're making it-- Still, I'll put out the library of America with Philip Roth. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's really disappointing that the one picture book they did was Lin Ward, who I think is really mediocre. But I think they did that because it wouldn't-- it doesn't use writing, and it doesn't-- they don't have to say-- show that there were cartoonists who could write and draw as well as the greatest American writers. So they picked someone who didn't write. So that's sort of-- you can't compare him. But if they picked Harriman, you'd say, well, he writes any drawers better than most American writers. And it was a weird choice. But that's why they did it, I guess, to get rid of that writing competition element. But it's kind of-- that's a one book I think they should withdraw. But again, about an archival collection of your own work, you're just kind of-- Well, as long as-- You're still making it, that's it. In the heyday of newspaper comics, Dick Tracy and Little Off, and they didn't need to be collected. They were making a living doing it, so no, there's-- that's something for some archivist to do. I don't want to do that. All my books, but one are in print. And the one that's out of print, I have copies of this. So yeah, there's no need for it at the moment, gosh. I think when they all go out of-- I don't know if there is print, whatever there is, there'll be digital archives of these things that'll be around, I mean, as long as there's electricity and food. Somehow, these catcher strips will survive. That's the least of our problems, art fighting my comic strips. That were like a major social problem. How when are they going to archive-- Who do you consider your comic influences, the cartooning influences, because I got into an argument with a guy last week over Ditko, I was-- I see you see Ditko and Ben's work in this case. I don't see that at all. I was introduced to Western art, the tradition-- the whole idea of drawing for comics. I lived near the Brooklyn Museum, but that was not-- I was taking the very rarely. So my serious immersion in the traditions of Western art were from the corner candy store in comic books and in the new Sunday newspapers. So that's-- it can't be a bigger influence. I didn't see Pusan when I was a kid. And I don't know if I'd know what to make of it, because I wanted-- I wanted both drawing, but I also wanted fights and action and all this stuff. So I don't know what Western tradition would have-- Degas would have meant to me as a child. So you get-- I mean, there's a purpose for comics and for superheroes and all this stuff. This young, savage child loves this stuff, fighting and mayhem, horror comics, all this stuff. When you break into doing a regular strip, it's a real estate photographer. Yeah, I outgrew those stories. That's all that happened. And I found other kinds of stories, usually not in comics, but-- so in the back of my mind, I said, why aren't there stories like what I'm reading in contemporary fiction? Who were some of those writers? You know, it's the people I was reading, all the contemporary-- I mean, English literature, Saul Bello and the Bockoff, and I went to-- I studied literature in college. I read a lot of text-based fiction and nonfiction, so-- but, you know, so yeah, the mighty thought didn't interest me anymore. That's all. Those kind of stories just didn't do it for me. And then even as a kid, I remember that it was the drawings I thought were amazing, and the stories were kind of these half-baked things that just didn't live up to the drawing. So-- and I don't know, and I guess that's-- I don't know what I was going to say, but anyway, that's what I thought as a child even. And I pretty early on could outgrow them and find other things to read. And then were there comics? Yeah, I read-- as a kid, I discovered Edward Gory. I mean, picture stories, text, image things like that, Edward Gory, and specifically sequential things, I try to think who else. There were collections of New York cartoonists, things like that, I saw as a kid, and I thought those were at least interesting stories or ideas for picture stories. And then underground comics, I thought those were pretty interesting, those kinds of stories. I wrote Griffith in Crumb, and I said, well, yeah, there's obviously these-- you can make-- you can tell stories that might interest an adult reader like myself. Or interest me. I don't care about it. Yeah, sorry that it was interesting. It was interesting. And use this form. The form is a neutral-- I mean, it's paper theater, it's text image. It's like theater. It's not really the tradition of writing or the tradition of art. It's this theater tradition. So how old were you when you discovered those guys? The undergrounds I mean. Oh, when were they-- I mean, I saw copies of the East Village, other as a small-- whenever they were coming in, the '60s, '60s, yeah. And then I was in college where I was told to-- you know, the direction was to study painting or writing and not do both. So if I told my painting teacher, I was interested in the story of an image, he would say, look, if that's what you got to do to make this painting, think about anything you want, but I can't talk to you about stories. And so, no, there was no-- maybe in the film department, people would have understood, but not in the painting department and definitely not in the writing department. So it had to be done outside of the academy. Now how supportive were your parents? Very supportive. Yeah, my father wanted to be a violinist and his family couldn't afford to subsidize his studies. So yeah, very supportive. And you know, my mother grew up in America in the golden age of newspaper comics and thought of comics as this great thing. She didn't know much about the history of superhero comics or-- so she knew-- she was thinking of Martin Jeff and things like that and she thought that was a great thing to do with comics. My father didn't know he grew up in Warsaw, he didn't know American comics, so it was just this American-- it was the drawing, the idea that I was trying to study art seemed like a worthwhile thing to do. So yeah, when I hear about people whose parents-- I mean, it's hard enough to do such a thing, but to have your own parents telling you why you're wasting your time, it must be horrible. I would just run away from home with what most people do. But no, I had the exact opposite experience, very supportive. So I never thought about making a living, you know, from a middle-class-- it just didn't occur to me that they never made me think I had to do something that would make money or-- that was not ever-- I think schools did, so if you were a white middle-class kid, you were all tracked for science and math and, you know, not art was not even on the horizon, it was like a recess period, basically. It was not taken too seriously, you know, and knew you were where I went to public schools. I've been reading your stuff for 20 odd years now, so I've got a certain perspective on what your strips are like, but are there younger readers or newer readers for your stuff? Does the audience develop in a way? Do you encounter anyone who's coming to your strips without, you know, 20 years of background of it? I think the old monopolistic system built in an audience. There were two weekly papers in New York, and if you were in one or the other, thousands of people could see your work, so that helped. The fact that that's not in place and that, you know, book buying is done a lot online and people don't wander in bookstores where you're forced to look at the newest books from the major publishers. Yeah, it's opened up. There's a lot of other things to look at now, so I was in that little bubble of monopolistic publishing, so I don't know, yeah, I think it's harder to build an audience now. I don't know how people are doing it, I think they're having trouble, but, you know, that's the something to work at. Do you encounter new readers to your stuff? I mean, do people think of something new and have no idea that there's, you know, this body of work? But I don't, I meet fewer, I mean, I think at festivals, yeah, I meet young people in Europe and then, yeah, who read it and discover it. I also hear of the people who come up to me and say, "My husband was your greatest fan. He passed away last year." That's the flip side of the lost fan. It's a really sad thing, but you have a window, a demographic, you have to be alive, to appreciate my strips. I can't be read in the beyond, in the grave, it's a minor, a minor commercial problem. This one is called "Lossless Things." The sorrow and regret associated with the loss of a cherished object is a thing of the past. My dear, you're missing an earring. Every personal possession is routinely synced to an online registry. User name is Lorelai, my password is, "Should the object be misplaced through accident or theft, its whereabouts can be instantly established via a global positioning system, north-west corner of Uvella Avenue and 13th Street. An embedded ship can initiate and receive audio and video communications. This earring belongs to Mary Cusbar, it's of no use to you. Instead of triggering a spate of legal restitution, he's ignored all of my messages. Does he speak English? Knowing where the thing is, blunts the sting of its loss, he keeps it on his dresser next to a fetish figure. The desire to press criminal charges subsides. A week after he found it, he sold it on the street to a Moldavian tourist. Give me ten dollars, and it's now in the ear of a teenage prostitute in Odessa. The urge for repossession is completely lost. As long as I know where it is, I feel better. In old age, one can fondly look back at all of those possessions that were borrowed and never returned. My first iPod, now at the bottom of Randall Prake-Up's underwear drawer. Possessions that were stolen in broad daylight. My twenty-four-inch dysmorphic mirror in an upstate thrift shop. Possessions that were accidentally lost. My little Eva doll in a garbage dump on Staten Island. Possessions that were callously misplaced. It's all still there. I realize the only other questions I have are really, really metaphysical Jewish tradition one. Instead, I thought I'd open up the floor for you guys. Anybody have questions for Ben at this point? Firewhite. Ben, I fell in love with your stuff like I think a lot of people with Julius Nipple and those black and white greats zones. Your stuff has a melancholy nostalgia. Where is the use of color coming to you? Because when your stuff is not going away. It's to destroy the melancholy nostalgia color. That's why I use color. And plus they have color printing. I got one more question. How influential was or was he called Jerry Moriarty at school visual arts that I get his name right? Jerry Moriarty. Yeah, I had... Jack survives. Well, I had him for painting at visual arts. So I met him as a teacher. And he wasn't doing comics at that time. He was painting. And in those years he got more interested in comics. I mean, students were bringing in comics. So yeah, he was a great teacher. And I was... In terms of playing on him, you're just a role... I don't know. I don't see that he influenced me in that way. Or in terms of storytelling, he became a painter who also wrote stories. He also writes prose sometimes. Yeah, he was a great... I had two great teachers. I had Robert Weaver and Jerry Moriarty at visual arts for a term each. I mean, I think their work was more taught me more than them. Otherwise I don't think I would have known their work. They were not that visible, especially Jerry. He wasn't being published. He was just painting for many, many years. So Jack survives with much years and years after I had him as a teacher. So yeah, the work was just great comics. I don't know that it influenced me. I don't know how anything influenced me. I know I liked their work and it inspired me to keep making pictures. So that's the main thing. I guess it was the idea of an unpolished drawing. Well, I don't know whether you'd pencil yourself. No, no. I'm drawing directly whatever I'm drawing in. So I never, that whole assembly line thing never meant much to me. And that's from, I guess, studying with people who were painters and they wanted the process to show whatever that means. Yeah, so that was an influence. Definitely, yeah, that influenced me. I never, no, by then I had no interest in kind of the commercial comics world. So that whole look, it wouldn't have appealed to me anyway. I wanted something more immediate. I wanted all my accidents to be there, part of the drawing. So, yeah. What else? So, one of the first lectures that I attended when I moved to New York was a talk you gave on half-tone printing in the Jewish intellectual press. Right. And-- The Yiddish paper. Oh, Yiddish. Okay. That was just about newspapers. Yeah. So, thinking about that, I've always thought about the image portion of that until very recently it never occurred to me that the text portion of that was also something that may have had influence on you or it was like a certain important piece, right? Can you tell us all about that? About the Yiddish press? Yeah. As a kid, I didn't read, I couldn't read Yiddish as a child, but my father would read to me from these papers, the fry hide in particular, and they had a great humor column. So there were these jokes. I don't remember them actually, but I know they were very funny jokes, and he would read them to me probably in Yiddish, and then maybe if I didn't know, understand it. But I learned much later to decipher that Yiddish and learn to read it, but I didn't read widely in Yiddish, just the books I inherited and things, but so that's not, I wouldn't say. Were you disappointed to be in the foreword after it became an English paper? No, I thought that was kind of a default. I used to say to the editor at the time, "What am I doing in this kind of paper?" And he said, "This is probably where you belong, I mean, you end up where you belong." I mean, I don't know, I wasn't doing a strip that they'd run in the New York Times, so. But now my literary experience is mainly in English. It's more the sound of the language, more of a conversational Yiddish, I heard a lot of Yiddish. Is this something about the aesthetic of that particular kind of press? The aesthetic. Well, bad printing. They didn't have much money, so it was kind of degraded half tones. Yeah, I like, I love tabloid design. I mean, I hate, the whole idea of, you know, it's called like fine book design, things you see like at the "Grawl Your Club" doesn't do much for me. I rather look at the daily mirror as a design object. So, yeah, I like newspapers, sort of the crummy or the better. What do you do? As a design typographical aesthetic, but I don't know why. Just because, again, the socioeconomics of it appeal to me that they're cheap and disposable and everybody can read them. So a rare book, you know, beautifully, types of books just puts me to sleep. That's interesting. Several of the books you put out were designed by Chip Kidd. Do you have any, I know he's very reverent for certain styles. Do you have any interaction with him in the design process? He just has kind of does the covers, which is a weird thing. The insides are done by another person, so there's a schizophrenic design team. He's the cover man who like, you know, he knows how to get past the sales department. Those are the people who decide whether the cover is good or not, and he knows they kind of believe him. So, he can get away with things that other designers probably would have trouble getting away with, and so, you know, he's, I mean, I don't know, that's, again, another concession you make if you want to self publish, you can design your own covers. I mean, it's mainly the placement of type. They're not designed, the images, I just, I say this is the image, you just, he just designs the type, basically, so it's designed, but what type of graphical, in my case. But? Hi. Hi Ben. I wanted to bring up a couple of things that you mentioned earlier, just recently about bad printing, because I actually, I did some production work on one of Ben's books, and the process of transferring these beautiful wash paintings into photo staffs that we would then use for reproduction was such an arduous process, and I remember, I'm sure in the, in the New York press also, there definitely was that crappy printing that you love so much. They were from, from half toned prints, this is pre scanning, there was no digital, I gave them, I'd make half toned prints, positives with a, with a half toned screen. V-locks. Yeah. Well, that was, yeah, there were half toned positive half tones, and they were, if there was dust in the room, there was dust, but I don't know, but then they were printed on a newsprint, on a high speed, you know, web prep, web newsprint things, so they degraded even more, so, yeah, I don't know, yeah, you, it's hard to build that kind of degraded image into digital, but you know, you give someone Photoshop who doesn't know what they're doing, they can mess up an image, I mean, the color shifts, the minute somebody touches any control on Photoshop, they can degrade an image more than a hundred printers, I mean, they just shift the whole color into some insane, so it can still be, and I don't mind it. It's sort of artificial degradation, like the lens flare, you know, CGI images. Yeah, well, no, it's real because it's, they don't know what they're doing, it's real sacred, it's not done on purpose, people just manipulate stuff, so, but that, yeah, that goes on still, but well, it did, was there a question it was leading to, did I cut to it, oh, how do we? You actually got to it. Oh, I was wondering about the difference between now that you were digitally, you work as, I think it's slow, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm still figuring out how to, I don't always have time to spend on these drawings because of these deadlines, so I wait till the last minute, hoping I come up with a better strip, and I, the drawings are usually done very quickly, so, but the ones where I have more time, I think you can, with a lot of layering, you can build pretty interesting color things with in Photoshop or whatever you draw it, but it's, it's an aesthetic to be invented, I don't know what it is exactly, maybe, sometimes I, I'm frightened of it, but I think I have to move in that, figure it out, whatever it is in 10 years we'll see if it was a mistake, but I don't know, it's just this, this technology that's too irresistible to, yeah, I, when I think of your work, I think there's a real consistency in style, your work, I can, you can tell it's your work no matter if you're reading the latest book or the earliest work, I wonder, you talked about the steep with which some of your strips have done, and kind of, and reacting to what you have to work with, or I wonder if there was ever a point at which that you really kind of worked on style, or you worked on how your, the basic look of it, or how something might read as comics, especially initially when you were, when you knew you were going to do a bunch of comics. Yeah, when I started a weekly strip, I just did it week to week, I, I saw what developed, I mean they, yeah, it just developed week to week, by doing a lot of comics, it wasn't a planned style, it just evolved. Do you go back and then look at some of the earlier strips? No, right, no, no, I can't look why, I mean, no, there's no, it's, they've been, it's too late, it can't be fixed, so I don't want to go back and redraw them, I think the first nipple strip in the, and cheap novelties that literally I redrew, because I really didn't like it, something about the way, the way it was drawn, but other than that, I never had time, or I think it's a seer, you want to see, either it's getting better, or getting worse, or the, I'm running out of ideas, you want to see that, that's one of the pleasures of a serial production, the style, whatever happens with the style, how things change, but it's, it's, you know, it's not a, a, a style I sort of manufactured and said I'm going to make it, it was a very, the way I was drawing at the time, which you know, had nothing to do with commercial art styles, I was looking at all kinds of European drawing, water, you know, watercolors in line, and it's my kind of pathetic attempt to get that look, that kind of texture, so, yeah, there's no time to think about it when you're doing weekly things, or you just barely do it, how much of a barrier is it's technology as far as being able to speak through the computer programs that you use, and you mentioned that you wanted accidents, how do you account for that in the digital medium, well, it's still controlled by my hand, and my hand makes the same mistakes, I can either, I mean, whatever you, that thing is, if you call it a mistake, I leave the good ones and I fix the bad ones, but I was, I was a type-setter in the 70s, so I was using digital front ends for type-setting when they first became available for small companies, as soon as they invented desktop publishing, things like that, so I was pretty comfortable with Macintosh computers from the very beginning, so that's not something I had to learn at that later in my life, yeah. And if I may, can you talk about accessibility issues as far as distributing your work through the publishers that you use, or the digital media, some people can't afford these books being so expensive, or they don't have access to the internet? Well, it was in a newspaper was the perfect thing, it was in a free newspaper, so anybody who had the energy to pick it up, it was free, so yeah, I think that was great, that was my ideal venue, and then when I was dropped by the New York, or the voice, I put my strip in a box at Papaya King up on 86th Street, and at the B&H Dairy, these illuminated boxes are about that big, and you could go there at night and have a hot dog and a papaya drink and read my comic strip, that was also an amazing free venue, so I'm all in favor of that. I mean, I guess you can get online in the library, free access points, all the metropolis things appear every month online for free, and somebody will probably bootleg the other books and I'll be there for free, so I think, I mean, yeah, if I can make a living in some way, I don't need for every, in newspapers, you make a living through the sale of advertising, and then the newspaper is free, so that seems to be a good, that's one model, but now, you know, that's a print model, that doesn't work anymore. I think there's enough to look at, I mean, I spend my time on the British Museum website looking at stuff from the 18th century, I don't even need to look at living artists' work, there's tons of stuff I want to look at, that's fascinating to me, so, and that's all subsidized, I guess, by the British government or something, that website, I don't know who but, so I think if you have online access, there's a lot of things to look at, but the free newspaper is, yeah, it seems not too viable right now, I remember seeing, well, I've seen your work in a number of places, and you were just talking about some of the different contexts that it's appeared in, I know that in like the 80s and early 90s, you read some issues of raw magazine, and that puts you in one sort of pure group, like by artists who were part of raw, like, you know, art speedle men, you know, Charles Gudge's and later Chris Ware and some people were in this room, but what's interesting to me also is that you, you edited two issues, I think two issues of an anthology yourself called Picture Story Magazine, and that included some of the artists who you mentioned earlier, like Peter Blakebad and Jerry Moriarty, I'm kind of wondering if you had like, your own sense of those artists as being maybe a pure group of yours who's aesthetic resonated more strongly than maybe some of the artists who you were next to and other venues, was there some particular kind of idea about comics or picture stories that you were trying to put forward in that magazine? It was work that I liked, I mean, you know, yeah, there were tons of comics, nobody would just, those magazines couldn't be distributed through comics channels, they were distributed by this literary magazine publisher who never paid anybody, so there was no commercial, you know, it looks bad now because there's so much being done, and I mean more than the audience can probably absorb, but no, those were hand-picked friends or people whose work I liked, not just because they were my friends, but I liked their work, and they had no other venue, nobody was publishing this stuff, so it's hard to imagine that today, but you know, it was stuff, I think it was just kind of outside of the aesthetic of phantographic, so they wouldn't have published it, so there was no other kind of venue at that time, so I think it was out of necessity of people self-publish, like they do today, but yeah, it was work I liked, and they were a living artist who I know, yeah, I mean, so I would love to be able to choose the artists I'm next to in a magazine, but you don't always have that opportunity unless you're self-publish, so yeah, it was, I don't know what else to say, that answer that question, yeah, they were my peers in work I liked, right, we didn't reprint too much old, I think one or two old things, historic things, but that wasn't the main direction, it was all to be contemporary work, and yeah, it was easy to get, people were dying to be printed, in color, I mean, color cost thousands of dollars, they have color separations, I must bankrupt me to print this. I was wondering if you were talking about your collaborations of Mark Mulpaney on the music and how you guys would come up with a concept with the subject matter that you both would equally aspire to, but only to find it too, yeah, it started because I was hired by this group called Bang on a Can to do an opera, a libretto in pictures for them, a new music group, and we did this one thing called the carbon copy building, which you can hear online for free now, it's on their website, and I realized that that theater and sort of music theater or opera, or whatever, new opera was a form that I was interested in, and I wanted, and that was kind of new in the new music world, they're like the generation after Steve Reich and Phil Philippa, I was like 10 years younger than those people, so I knew, I'd heard this pop musician, Mark Mulpaney, and I thought, I liked how he set speech, very normal speech, I thought he could set speech to music, and I approached him, and he knew nothing about music theater, and all I do is I give him a text, and it comes back this, you know, finished thing, he's really good at it, what? Have you mostly generated the concept, like, let's do something at the Rosenbox, or? Well, some of them are based on strips from Metropolis, I think three of them, and two others were original things, we just started fresh, and the new one is also a new idea. At the beginning I thought it was safer to pick out of a lot of existing things and pick something I really like rather than come up with a story that might not be the best story I could come up with, so we had a choice of, you know, hundreds of things to pick from, but that's it, I mean, it's a really fortunate collaboration because he doesn't sort of judge my text, I mean, he sort of goes with my text, and then I like the music, I don't think the text is anything until he sets it, I mean, he really makes it into something that's amusing and theatrical, so, but that's how if it doesn't work, you end the collaboration, so this went on, it goes on, we don't have fights about any, we like what happens, so. Then when do you do the pictures, you give them the text? I do the, yeah, I get the music back, and then I, listening to it, I figure out what kind of images, how many we need or what the, I don't know what the timing is of the pictures, that's later, yeah, so it's a lot of work, but it's not the effort, there's no strain in the collaborating with him, and then he works with musicians who are absolutely, you know, in sync friends of his who do exactly what he has in mind, so otherwise collaborations are a nightmare because everybody comes in on a different page and, you know, one guy wants to make it a Broadway musical, and one guy wants to, I mean, then those are disasters usual, so we're pretty much on the same page aesthetically for whatever that's worth, I mean, if you don't like it, you don't like it, but, you know, but that's a whole other question. Yes, Arlen? Ben, where does your, this nostalgic forgotten New York come from? Where did you grow up? That you seem to have this feeling where you make it. Yeah, I'm very, if you grow up in a city of the age of New York, you're just conscious of living in the past, like this is an old office building that we're in, and I think about, I mean, how can you be oblivious to that? If I maybe if I grew up in some new suburb, I wouldn't think about the past, but it's all around me. Do you know how Robert Crumb was into, like, the '30s, and, you know, other artists have a time frame? Do you have a particular time frame where you feel like the end did, like, the goal in the age of New York ended or early '60s or something? No, I hope it gets better. No, I don't know. I don't have too much. So I don't even call it nostalgia. It's just about an old city. But I'm not nostalgic for the, an old, there's, I wish it were more interesting, more complex city. But that I miss, but that's not the, I want something new to happen, not, I don't want to, I don't think I want to go back to the thing, I mean, I don't like museum cities. These old European cities where the facades are all in place. It's kind of boring. That's as boring as a, as Starbucks, anyway. So it's hard, you know, I like that it changes. And the, in the '90s, you spent a few years in Providence and how did that either inform your New York or decompress you from that? I just was living there. I came, I kept that place here. So I never really became. But the experience there didn't sort of change any perspective you had on the city? It was, yeah, I was really glad to get back to the city. There's no, that's, you know, if you get sick of New York, just leave it for a while. And then take a bus, the midnight bonanza bus or whatever that is, and come in, you know, get 12 o'clock at night and you say, "Oh my God," and then go back to Providence. I mean, I would almost slit my throat every time I came back. It was a quiet college town. It had its, it had already been, had a big urban renewal thing. So I think a lot of old Providence was gone by the time I was there. It was kind of a Ivy League college town with an art school, and I stayed in my room and worked. I didn't have much to do with this. It was a strange place to live for a while, but anyway. Are you still involved in an investigation into Derry? Yeah. Someone asked me about that, yeah, it's almost done. I'm almost, the techs part is some thing. Well, my mother was asking about that, she ordered that for me on Amazon, it disappeared. Yeah. It's never let that go. It's coming. It's coming. I have to do it. What is it? Sorry. It's called, it's a history of the Derry restaurant, but it's a worldwide history, so it took a lot of time. And I'm not a professional historian, so I had to do a lot of research. And yeah, it's coming. Next book. It has to be the next book. They won't publish another book until it's a little overdue. So that's the plan, is it has to be the next book. So we go ahead. Wait, wait. We have one question over here, first. Hi. I'm wondering how you generate ideas for your strips, what your process is like, or just kind of the content of what you want to talk about. Well, you live in New York, you have to be born in New York, that's the first. And then you read a lot and look at a lot of pictures, and then, yeah, synthesize that. I mean, it's not, I don't know, the people ask you what your influences are, how do you come to do something? A lot of people looked at all the stuff I looked at and they're doing something else. So it's not like an equation like you look at, you know, you read Saul Bello, and you look at Pusan, and you put this, it's not that, it's not an equation. So it's brute force, they're put together like somebody making a chair, like struggling until it gets harder and harder too. That's the other way. It's agony now to make a strip, because I've exhausted all of the obvious ideas in the first year. It's agony. I mean, it gets harder, right? Absolutely. People think like you know how to, I mean, to get even an average strip is agony. So to get a good one is like a miracle, I mean, it's a miracle. And that's mainly, so- You got to do it while you're young. Right. Yeah, I don't, I mean- You got to now is the time for you young people to work hard. Yeah, I mean, I would just kill myself to come up with these stories. So you know, I don't know if that, I mean, I don't know any other way to answer that. It's not like there's no process, just brute. I mean, the deadline, I made a living for many years meeting these deadlines and getting, and it was an absolute necessity to come up, and it was humiliating to put a strip out that wasn't good. I mean, that was this horrible pressure at the beginning, that is this, I just kept saying, this is not good enough, and I'll be publicly humiliated. This thing will be out there, and I'll hate it, and everyone will think I'm an idiot. So that drives you to come up with a better strip, I mean, yeah, it's fear of shame. I don't know how to put it in any other way. What? Whatever it takes. Yeah, I mean, that's a big part of at least for me. But you know, that's anyway, Jude. When I was reading your comments, I would always say, this is like smart people comments. Now that I'm like, this thing dude, you're actually saying, no, I'm from the street. You know, how much of that do you care about? I don't read too much modern philosophy or, no, I read, I read a lot of fiction, and I looked at a lot of pictures and paintings. Yeah, I mean, I, the Karl Marx and Karl Marx, I'm interested in all these theories. But I don't think that's, yeah, it's so clear. Right, I don't think I had to read Karl Marx and know about the way business works, I mean. So, I don't know, smart, I mean, what if I were doing superheroes, we just have doing stupid people's comments. I mean, it's just not about topics that most traditional comics were about, but now comics are about all kinds of subjects and all kinds of things, and it's of medium, just like theater. So, you can have burlesque and you can have, you know, Harold Pinter and you can have Christmas panthemimes, you can have all these things. What I know I'm wanting now, and I'm just saying, like, are you hearing about reputation? No, because I was in weekly newspapers with next to the ads for, you know, massage parlors. It wasn't in an elevator, I was never in a literary magazine, and I would resist being in those magazines. If they asked me, I hate to be. I was in the back of a free weekly palma, just how long, how much love did you get? I mean, it's, it's crazy to think that these were some kind of elitist, smart. When would it need to be a devil's advocate that you have like a show? No, I had a show at the Jewish Museum. That's, that's not the way, no, I, I think it's probably better than the Whitney, but that's another question, but no, I don't, I always saw comics as a popular art form for people who wanted to have a slight, but I want to make strips that were slightly challenging to the reader, not boring. So, so, I don't know what these reputations, the people who read it, it's not, I mean, in Metropolis magazine, it's the light part of a magazine, it's the easy read. The rest of it is about theories of, you know, sustainability that's, I'm the light read in that, if I were in New York magazine, I might come across as this ponderous thing, but that's all depending on the venue you're in. So, and where did you see them in the newspaper or in books? No, not yet. In collected books. Well, books are a little, those after the fact, the book, the book is sort of the entombment of the thing. The thing was living in a magazine and a weekly newspaper and those are hardly, that's as far as you can get from an elitist venue, I don't, I thought, but, you know, I don't know. That's... Well, you were one of the artists that jumped out of the humor section and you were in the front of Barnes & Noble's, if I'd walk in. Yeah, maybe they, yeah, they paid, they paid for placement, a random house could pay for placement in Barnes & Noble maybe, but I don't know. I don't know if that's across the board. I just think of it like humorous fiction. I don't think of it as an academic or, I don't know, overtly intellectual. It's humorous fiction, so I don't know how many people see it. I don't really, either people don't read it. The only common denominator among my readers that I've heard is that they'll say, I don't read comics, but I read your book, otherwise there's no, I don't know otherwise who the readers are. But that's something I hear very often I say, I don't know what comics are not for me, but then I read you, I like your strips, so it could be this comic as a medium, it colors people's, the people who like comics, look at it and say this is some kind of high brow thing. Yeah, for other people. One or two more. Yeah, I want to rewind to the process thing, but I think maybe she was going for it, but I want to know, just on a really technical, it's deadline night. Right. Do you script the thing out? Do you thumbnail it? Do you know your page layout? Yeah, it's written first because I can write in any posture and I can write in bed, I don't have to sit at a table or a board. So I write it and then I do a rough breakdown, like a script. These are the eight, if it's an eight panel. Depending on the size, I look at the story and I say, how many moments does this thing need to be played out like scenes in a little play? And then I draw it and as I draw it or letter it, I'm reconsidering the text because I say, well, maybe there's a better, I almost completely rewrite it usually. I don't know, I just, as I'm lettering it and rereading it, I always re- critique it in my mind and I say, maybe there's a better way to say that and then I, you know, but that happens up to the deadline and I finish it and I send it off and I forget about it and I'm very happy. I mean, I don't know if anybody works on a deadline. It's the most elating feeling to meet a deadline and get over it, but that's my only pleasure I get in, is meeting my deadline. It was fun and interesting that the New York Times, which never had a daily editorial comic, and now has a weekly color strip here, I mean, it's in the magazine or in the experience of... It's in the Sunday, you know... Brian McFadden, it's called the... Right, yeah. Oh, I don't know, I don't look at the Times at all, much less than credit. I read, there's a million other papers I look at, but I didn't know that. No, why? They're trying to look, you know, preserve their, not look like an obsolete thing, I guess. I don't know why they won't comic suddenly, but that's a paper that just thought the form. Yeah, the form to that meant idiot or something and they wouldn't use it, yet all the illustrators who work for it are cartoony usually, so it was a kind of a strange, that's just this, it's because it's published and edited by writers who don't know much about pictures, that's the main problem. That's the main problem, if it were edited by, you know, artists it would be a different kind of thing, but anyway. Last question, Ben, for a guy that directly inks work, you don't pencil, your people are remarkably acutely observed, they look very real, are you doing that just from your collective memory people? Yeah. If you work from photographs, like you're, you know, you've got people down, almost like Charles Schultz, in just a few lines, you really capture the realness of people, but your style is very quick and simple. Yeah. If I were doing a story about this, I might immerse myself in looking at a lot of pictures of some area, like I look at like a thousand group photos of physicists and say, "What is it?" Just to remind myself of, you know, I could, if I had time, I would go out and visit them, but I don't usually have the time. So, yeah, the internet is this amazing visual... It's like the Rocco Institute, the saleswoman, they look like people I've seen, or we've seen in the picture. I do research. I look at Russian prostitutes. I don't know, I've taken eyes right now. I look at them, but that's all. I know. I do research, visual research. If it's over the street, I look out the window. If it's of a factory that I... People. Yeah. I look... I mean, since this great archive of pictures that you have access to 24 hours a day, I mean, I wanted to have some sense of the real world, or the observed world, but if I had time, I would do even more research. I couldn't... I mean, your style of works, you so perfectly captured really just a few lines of a very realistic for such a cartoonies. Yeah. It's also a facade of the illusion of that I know what in a prostitute in a decimal looks like. I don't really know. It's just in a little... It's a facade that you build up in a story, and you believe it. And it's... it has that little veneer of believability. A bigger simillitude. Yeah. Yeah. If you showed it to a Russian man, he'd say, no, no prostitute, he looks like it's completely wrong. But it's good enough for the crowd. It works in the strip, in the context of the strip. I think it's been all the time we have, I don't know if we can do some symposium news, but... Oh. Right. Yeah, thank you. I appreciate everybody coming out for this. And that was Ben Catcher at our first live episode of The Virtual Memory Show. I really want to thank everyone who turned out to attend it and everybody who asked questions. Did a great job carrying the second half for me. They're very supportive. My whole fear of public speaking kind of went out the window when I got to look out at all those cheerful people who were coming to hear Ben and not me talk. You can find Ben's new book, Hand Drying in America and Other Stories from Pantheon in bookstores and Better Comic Shops. And Ben's site, Catcher.com, that's K-A-T-C-H-O-R, has loads of info about his work and what he's up to, including those musical theater collaborations with Mark Mulcahy that he talked about during the Q&A. And if you're interested in the New York comics and picture stories symposium, visit nycomicsimposium.wordpress.com. And that's comics plural, so it's a double S with comics symposium. It meets just about every Monday in the city and Ben organizes some great speakers and topics. And that was The Virtual Memory Show. You can subscribe to the show at iTunes and you can find past episodes there as well as at our websites, chimeraobscura.com/vm, and virtualmemoriespodcast.tumbler.com. New episode comes out every two weeks and I'm really, really fighting the impulse to post more often than that because I'm starting to build up an inventory of some really, really good episodes. But I'm convinced that if I ever do that, that it'll all dry up and I'll never post another one again. So you're stuck with me and my anxiety, that's what I'm saying. And while you're checking out the show, if you would go over to our iTunes page at rate and review the show, that would help. And I could use the encouragement or creative criticism and I think iTunes likes you better if there are reviews and ratings put up. Also hit our Facebook page, facebook.com/virtualmemoriesshow. Once again, S's are back to back because it's memories plural. And like us, for the same reason, I need the encouragement. Until next time, this has been The Virtual Memory Show. I am your host, Gil Roth and you are awesome. Keep it that way. [MUSIC]