Guest Bob Sikoryak talks about Masterpiece Comics, mashing up high and low culture, the '80's art scene in NYC, the mainstream acceptance of comics, cartoonists and performance art, and why he can't stand the term "Graphic Novels".
The Virtual Memories Show
Season 2, Episode 14 - Classic Pop
[music] You're listening to The Virtual Memory Show, a podcast about books in life, not necessarily in that order. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and they say that time and tide wait for no man, but I contend that superstorms need to be added to that list, too. See, the big storm at the end of October left my neighborhood without power for eight days, and that ended up derailing four interviews I was planning to record for the show. On the upside, I got in a lot of reading, largely by flashlight, but it still counts. Also, I found myself motivated to write around a thousand words each night about the situation. I posted those in my blog as "The Hurricane Diaries" if you're interested in checking that out. So, ultimately, it was more inconvenience than disaster. I'm bummed that the business trip I was going to take to Seattle had to be put off because I'm planning to record some good conversations during my downtime there, but I'll get out during springtime, I'm sure, and most everybody can reschedule. My guest this episode is Bob Sikoriak, a cartoonist in New York City. Bob's best known for adapting classical literature into the styles of iconic comic strips is 2009 book Masterpiece Comics collects 64 pages of those stories, including Macbeth, Via Mary Worth, and Kafka's Metamorphosis by Way of Peanuts, and the comic that started it all for him, Dante's Inferno, told through Bazooka Joe's strips. The notion of mashing up high and low cultures like this would be great on its own. As Bob puts it, it makes for a great elevator pitch. What makes these comics so good is Bob demonstrates this real knowledge and care for the literature he's adapting, and he's also just pitch-perfect at mimicking the styles of all these cartoonists. Bob and I met at the small press expo in Bethesda, Maryland last September, and we had a great conversation about his work and books and cartoonists who we both drew over. We continued that conversation on tape at his home in Styetown last week, where the talk branched into the New York art scene in the 1980s and some of the existential questions about postmodernism and art. I hope you enjoy it. Just by saying, this is a new episode of the virtual memory show with my guest Bob Sikoriak. Bob or Robert? You can call me Bob. Bob's good. The cartoonist genius behind Masterpiece Comics, which I told you all about in the introduction. I guess my first question, where did you get the idea for Masterpiece Comics, that idea of mashing up classic literature and comics of a certain period? Well, I started making these comics in the 80s and I just got an out of art school and I think there was a lot of postmodernism in the air. So I think this kind of collision between literature and comic strips seemed like a natural fit. I started making them specifically when I was invited in a very surreal moment. I was invited to draw a page for Raw magazine, where I was working, but I never considered actually submitting anything to them. But they'd seen some of my work that was published in another magazine and they asked me to contribute something too raw, which for me was as good as it gets. It's better than it gets. Better than I thought it would get. So specifically for that story, I was already doing a lot of parodies. I always enjoyed playing with different styles. And I always found that I was very influenced by other people's drawings and I was a little afraid of being a second-rate version of a cartoonist I really loved. You were talking about Gary Panter before, you and I. And he's someone whose work I was totally enamored of in the 80s. And I certainly really enjoyed that ratty, organic, immediate style. All those styles that he used that were so handmade. But so many other people were already hugely influenced by him that I felt like I would be an imitator of one of his imitators at best. So in my search to find ways to draw that I enjoyed and that I thought I could play with, I came across a great quote from Marcel Duchamp about how you should only steal from dead artists, which really made sense to me. Now I don't only parody artists who are dead, but I do only parody artists whose styles are already iconic. I tend not to work. I tend not to parody artists who are unknown or who are just starting out. I tend to work with people whose styles are instantly recognizable. So I've already had a segue out of your question, but I'm going to try and pull it back in. I was asked to contribute to Raw. I only had one page to do something. And this was when Raw Magazine was a trade paperback. It was six by nine inches. So I didn't have a lot of room to do something, but I wanted to do something great. I wanted to do something that would have an impact. And I wanted to do something kind of epic. So I took one of the most epic things I could think of, which was Dante's Inferno. And I combined it with one of the stupidest iconic comics I could think of, which was Bazooka Joe. And I mean no disrespect to Bazooka Joe. They are very stupid. They are proudly stupid. And I had worked for Topps. I was writing gags for Topps at the time. So I was very familiar with the Bazooka Uver. And I put the two together, and it worked out really well. And I realized I had something. I was making this comic at a time in 1989 where Maus was in bookstores. The Watchmen was in bookstores. The Dark Knight Returns was in bookstores. The American Splendor was in bookstores. Comics were starting to reach a different audience. And people were starting to react to them and trying to figure out what this medium was. So I think by sort of taking these old styles and combining them with literature, I was trying to make work that would be instantly understandable for someone who wasn't necessarily into comics. Most people have chewed gum in their lives. So I thought Bazooka Joe made sense as a jumping off point. And I think it succeeded in that way. I was hoping to create something that people wouldn't be intimidated by or confused by because everyone knows how to read Bazooka Joe. But then hopefully once they got pulled in they would realize that the story of Bazooka Joe was the story of Dante being led by Virgil into Hell. And all of the fortunes and gags that are also part of the Bazooka Joe format would be elements of Dante's story but told in the style of those gum wrappers. Which again, I take as a stroke of genius. It was actually the first thing I had seen of yours. I remember getting that raw when I was about 17 or 18. And having my mind blown from, you know, page after page, particularly again, the ingenious moment of Dante's Inferno. Bazooka Joe, it works together. No, thanks. Thanks. I was so influenced by Art Spiegelman, whose classes I had taken, and Mark Newgarden and Paul Karasek, who also were involved with Raw. And they were also teaching at SVA. I had just gotten out of school a couple of years earlier. I had taken classes with all three of them. And it was very influenced by their approach to comics. Is there a sense of a certain scene? You know, I mean, it seems like there was a critical mass going on, particularly within New York. Did you feel that vibe? I got really lucky because I had a very sympathetic teacher at Parsons where I was going to school. And his name is Stephen Cornaccio. He's mostly known as an illustrator, but he does books and he does some comics. He's been in BLAB and other anthologies. And he knew I was really into comics, and he introduced me to Art in Francois at Raw. And by meeting them, that kind of put me into the scene. Raw had already been going for about six or seven years by the time that I started working for them, which was, well, I was working for them pretty avidly by 1987. I met them late '86, just as Mao's was first published in paperback. So I was sort of coming into this world just as the outside world was getting to know it. I literally met them at a release party for the first volume of Mao's. And so I was immediately introduced to all of their scene. And I quickly got involved with them. And then through Mark and Paul, who were putting on another magazine that was kind of a raw anthology. Yes, raw style anthology, exactly, called Bad News. I don't know if you've ever seen that. Don't recall this. It's probably pretty rare. Anyway, through them, I met a lot of other people and they published me first, so through them I got into Raw. But they were students of arts. It was a small scene, but it was a really, really vital scene. Was there any sense of overlap with the fine art scene in the city at the time? Well, I think when I talk about postmodernism, certainly I felt like that was what was happening in the art world at the time. I don't recall any specific galleries that were showing comics inspired art at the time, at least that I was aware of. Maybe David Sandlin was showing, but I don't know if I'd met him yet. He's someone who does comics but also makes silk screens and artist books that veer into comics. He was also published in Raw soon after I was. He is someone who straddles that world, but that pop art post-pop art, I don't even know what you'd call it, what was going on in 1985. People like Kenny Sharf, I guess, who would be putting the Jetsons into garish paintings and that sort of thing. It has some parallels, although they weren't narrative in the same way as comics. It was just a juxtaposition. Yes, the whole juxtaposition thing was happening. I mean certainly Bows was probably the most obvious sample of those to the general public. Although Raw was certainly combining religion and pop culture icons. There was a double page spread of the passion of St. Sluggo. That was Sluggo and Nancy in all these religious scenes and that was done by Art in Charles Burns and Evermulan. I did notice you don't knock off Nancy in Masterpiece Comics at any point. I wondered if it was one of those little too easy, too iconic or... I just haven't gotten to it. I have way more ideas than I'm possibly going to have time to do. It's very sad to me. I don't know if anyone would care after I'm dead. If someone else does my Nancy idea in... Don't tell. I'm not going to give you a date, but I don't think Nancy will be as iconic as she was by the time I get around to doing it. How difficult is it to mimic certain artists or how difficult is it in general to mimic these guys? Is there anyone you found too difficult to capture and had to surrender on? I haven't surrendered, but you can look at the book and decide for yourself if I should have. There are things that make me a little pain to look at when I look at the book now just in terms of places I feel like I failed capturing the styles, but I spend so long on these things. It's not like I wouldn't publish them. Once I'm two months in on a project where I'm writing it or starting to make sketches, I feel like I'm in. I'm actually working on a story right now. I'm very superstitious. I can't talk about ideas before they're actually in print, but I'm working on a story now where I always do this halfway through the process. I'm thrashing around thinking, "Is this actually going to work? Should I do this one?" By that point, I'm sort of wedded to it because I've done too much research and too much preparation. Is that in the sense of the art or the writing and consolidating? I would assume that's one of the most difficult aspects of it is literally the adaptation and figuring out what to include, how to include it, and to keep the spirit of the comic that you're doing the pastiche of at the same time? Yeah, it's all pretty complicated. I thought that maybe you were talking specifically about the drawing styles. It's not as if I do a full script and then I draw it. I'm always doing preparatory sketches. I'm reading a lot of the comic while I'm also reading the novel that I'm doing. I should mention that after that first one with Dante's Inferno and Bazooka Joe, the story slowly got more and more ambitious, I guess I would say. Not all of the ones that I do now are longer, but I've sort of expanded from one page to I've had a story in the book that's 14 pages long, and that was kind of mind-boggling for me to get to. Because I guess you could argue that doing a 14-page story is in some ways easier than doing a two-page story, but when it comes down to inking it, it's still a lot of manual labor. Yeah, so as I was saying, the process goes back and forth a lot between sort of studying the comic strip, studying the novel, kind of weeding out the parts that I think are appropriate for the style that I'm playing with. And whereas Bazooka Joe in Dante's Inferno was kind of a very frivolous combination. I don't think I thought that much about it other than massively important epic poem in tiny package of gum wrappers, but what's happened is I've done more and more of these is I've tried to find parallels between the characters and the source material. So that's gotten more complicated, and sometimes in the midst of another story, I clearly remember working on my version of Genesis with Adam and Eve portrayed by Dagwood and Blondie. And in that case, I do remember in the middle of it thinking, is this the dumbest idea that I've had? I'm spending months on this thing, it's three pages long, is this worth doing? But then hopefully as in that case, you find visual parallels that help you tell the story. So for the listener who remembers Blondie as photographically clearly as I do, you may recall that Dagwood used to carry sandwich makings on his arms. He walked from the refrigerator to his kitchen table to make one of his enormous Dagwood sandwiches. So he would have every ingredient on his arms, ketchup, mustard, Swiss cheese, bistrami. So when I realized that in my story where Dagwood is Adam, I could have Adam carrying apples on his arms from the tree of knowledge, the tree of good and evil. That made it clear to me, "Oh, okay, there are actually visual parallels I can incorporate." And Dagwood is an avid eater with no repercussions, but Adam is an avid eater with great percussions. And I guess I like playing with the morality of the characters in the comics versus the morality of the characters in the classics. I thought it was, and one of your more recent ones, it's not in the book that I just read back at an SPX, when we met, the idea of crossing Bartleby the Scrivener with Dilbert. Again, an absolute work of genius. As I was trying to tell my wife, these are things that you could write down and tell someone, "Look, we're going to do Bartleby through Dilbert," and everybody would have a chuckle on a laugh, but you managed to capture the spirit of both works within that strip. It's not simply recounting lines from Bartleby, but you do it in a way with those characters from Dilbert and that drawing style that I think just perfectly encapsulates the story and what it's about and what it continues to be about in our soulless, office-driven world, I guess. Thank you. I am sometimes concerned that my high concepts, which I take great pride in, and I'm a big fan of elevator pitches and compressed ideas that can be expressed very succinctly. I do worry that sometimes you hear the idea and you go, "Yeah, I get it," and then you just walk away and go, "Yeah, that's cute." So I'm glad that you felt that it paid off once you read it. The execution is everything for that. Thank you. Obviously, if you have seen my work, hopefully you realize that these things take me forever to do. I have this very schizophrenic work life because I sort of struggle with this all the time. I hate to tell people how long it takes me to do things because I want to get hired to do commercial work sometimes. And I am generally able to meet deadlines when a big magazine calls me or something, but for my own work where it isn't about the news of the day or the flavor of the minute, I do spend an inordinate amount of time refining and refining and refining. One reason I did that Dilbert Bartleby piece for the magazine that you saw it in the Cartoon Cryer was I knew I had a rather short deadline for that, and I thought, "Well, Dilbert should be relatively easy to draw," but there's a process of having to eliminate all of your instincts in terms of comic storytelling and trying to completely absorb the rhythms and the storytelling devices of the artist. And whether that artist is Windsor McKay, who was really daunting for me to try to replicate, or that artist is Scott Adams, who is someone who, in all of his books about his work where he provides commentary, he is constantly telling you that he cannot draw, and that, "Oh, yeah, I forgot to draw the tie on this character." "Oh, yeah, I didn't have a time to redraw this because I had to get to work." I was drawing these at four in the morning, and he's literally just sort of not exactly apologizing, but explaining how these are all the best he could do in an hour and a half. And I so wish I could have drawn those 14 strips in, what would that be, 21 hours, but no, it took me much longer than that. So even with a deceptively simple style, it can be a long process of really boiling it down, and again, sort of like taking my personality out of it and trying to embody the personality of the artist. That actually raises the question for me, which I don't mean to sound any sort of great existential way, but everything I've seen of yours has been a pastiche of somebody else's art style. Is there a Sikoriak drawing style underneath it all? Is there another body of work that's Bob and how he draws? Not really. I've never really liked the way that my sketches look. I feel that my art style is, I mean, my style. Picasso said that I'm dropping all my big fine art quotes tonight. Picasso has a great line about how the way you draw a circle is your style. It's just like the simplest form that you can make, the way that you make that form is your style. I take that quote to mean that just boiling it down to the way your hand moves is your style. So I reluctant to say that the sketches that I do in preparation for my comics reveal a style, but if you take Picasso's line to heart, that means that essentially just the way the lines come out on the paper is your style. I have never really developed anything. Obviously, I've read a lot of comics in my life, and I remember even in art school, I had a roommate who was like, "If you read those junky comics, they're going to affect your style." And I sort of dismissed him at the time, but clearly he was right because that is the way I draw now. But I think he meant unconsciously, and I think I did pick up a lot of bad drawing habits from all of the, all of the, you know, middle of the road comics I read growing up. What were you reading back then? I was reading all the newspaper comics. I was reading Marvel comics. I grew up in the '70s and '80s. Yeah, yeah. I grew up in the suburbs of New Jersey, and when I was a kid, I didn't see that much stuff. I didn't see a great variety of stuff. I really remember seeing the Hernandez brothers, but that was in 1980, 1981. I was already 15 at the time, 15, 16 at the time. But at that time, the world was starting to open up. But before then, I was growing up with not even the best of the superhero comics. '70s were not a great period. There were memorable artists whose work I still really like, but a lot of it was lesser hands than even the '60s. I don't like complaining about artists who were working for paycheck, but, I mean, let's face it, that Kirby wasn't working as much as he was. I didn't follow the DC stuff that he did as much, and I think his later work confused me. Now, of course, I think it's the best thing he ever did, but at the time, it was a little baffling to me. At the time, I was a John Byrne, George Perez guy, and then looking back, "Oh, Kirby was still doing this, and I didn't get it." It could be a certain age for some of the students. Yeah, I mean, it's really clear to me that this is totally off topic, but I remember seeing, at an early age, the work of Frank Robbins, who was a great artist, but had more of a 40s, 1950s style, more like Milton Kniff than any of the superhero artists, but he was drawing superhero comics, and it looked really foreign and puzzling to me as a child. And now I look at it, and it's the greatest thing, but at the time, it didn't quite fit into my world, and it's kind of amazing to me how artists really can speak to a generation, and maybe that's it. I mean, I'm speaking of comics artists. I mean, certainly people like John Byrne had his enormous moment in the '80s, and Jack Kirby had his enormous moment in the '60s, and it's fascinating to sort of see, I mean, Kirby actually had more than just the '60s, but by the '70s, I mean, people who were hiring him were dismissive of his work, and it's just kind of astonishing. But I mean, that's a bigger issue about how geniuses are. The industry is totally screwy, and geniuses are not always appreciated. But there's something about the way Frank Robbins was of his era, and obviously with my work, I like playing with eras. I'm really interested in that, and my wife, Kriota, and I, we talk a lot about the way art is perceived by the next generation, and how when you make something, it's of your time, and it will be of your time no matter what you do. I remember hearing about forgeries of paintings being made in the '50s that were totally convincing to people in the '50s, but if you look at them today, they look like 1950s paintings. So there's no way of escaping kind of the era that you are living in, and I think perhaps one of the reasons I like playing with styles to get back to the question is that I'm obviously trying to sort of get out of my instincts, which I don't always think are good, although this whole postmodern instinct is definitely of my generation, and there's no way around that. But just visually, I like playing with styles kind of outside my comfort zone, and these, the kinds of comics I make are an excuse to sort of study how other people do things and kind of learn how other people do things. I don't necessarily see that being synthesized into something that I will make that will come out that will be my own style. I am not that interested with what's going on in my head in terms of like broadcasting that to the world, so I like telling people that I'm not interested in self-expression, although really if you read my book, it's very clear what I'm interested in. Which also gets me the question of where you started with classic literature, how did you get turned on to these sorts of books and get the breadth of knowledge that you had to be able to make these comics? Well, the breadth of knowledge just comes from rereading the book over and over again when I'm working on the story. I always took a school very seriously, and my father was also an English professor. He taught composition, not literature, but certainly words were important in my household. And I guess I have that little brow gene that makes you want to know the classics and know the culture. So that's part of it. When I was in art school actually, I had to take a literature survey class that got me very excited. I guess I was just at the right age then. I read crime and punishment over a summer break in high school, and I remember reading it. I don't remember what it said, but I remember reading it. That's just the act of reading that very heavy paperback, but it was a hot July, not unlike it was in St. Petersburg, but I don't feel like an expert on literature. I hope I have something to say about the books that I adapt, but that comes merely from focusing all my energies on trying to unlock them and put them in my stories. Do you feel there was any formative book growing up, anything that sort of turns you in this direction? I do feel like it was that one literature class. It was just a survey class of Western literature, but I felt like it was the right time for me to get into it. Because I was in art school, maybe I didn't have as much academic work to do, so I kind of embraced those few classes that I had to take. I really was interested in chemmoo. I was really interested in existentialism, which I think you said earlier. Because you were in your early 20s. Yes, I was the right age for that. And I think that one of the other stories in my book is called action chemmoo, and it's in the style of Superman. It's the story of The Stranger. And that was a book that had a big impact on me. It just spoke to me when I was that age. I'm proud of that, the 9 Rand. Oh, yeah. Yeah, Kriota wants me to adapt in the 9 Rand, but I don't even know where to start with that, so I watched the movie. And Evan Dorkin already did a great 9 Rand in Hollywood 4-panel strip. Oh, I'll have to look that up. Oh, yeah, it's one of those where, again, you can do that economy. Just a few panels, you can nail it completely, and Evan's the king of that stuff. Sure, he's great. Have you ever had a real surprising response to the strips? Any teachers or students ever come across them and basically have this as their introduction to the classics? Well, that's funny, because when I started doing them, I felt like it was sort of a smart-ass thing to do. It was just sort of like, well, I'm reducing the classics to these dumb little bubblegum rappers, because that was the first story I did. So I was very aware of that one. But I didn't really hear that from people. Most I heard from people that they thought it was very amusing, and that was really the response I wanted. I didn't want people to be appalled by what I was doing, but I didn't want to surprise them. I didn't want to startle them, I guess, if that's possible at all. Maybe it was more possible in the 80s, I don't know. But a website published, well, they posted. Pirate is probably about a term ago. I didn't want to say pirate, because he was a nice guy, and ultimately I was glad that he put it up, because it got me a lot of attention. And he thought it was out of print, so I think he had for a reason to do it, but it actually got me a lot of notice, which was great. But he posted my -- and it's still online for those people who want to find it -- my version of Dosteevsky Comics, which combines crime and punishment with Batman, because -- And the old mob came -- Yes, in the 1950s, in the classic 1950s, Batman style. Again, I was trying to use the most iconic style, although there are many, many iconic Batman styles. In any case, he posted that as a fan, and there were all these responses in his comments section from Russians who were incensed at how Americans were stupid and destroying culture, and George Bush is a terrible president, this was in 2008. So that was amusing to me, that people were very upset about that. So that was the sanctioned version of Dosteevsky? Yes, and they didn't quite understand that I was -- well, I guess it's hard to understand what I'm trying to do, but I am trying to be reverent to both sources, which is inherently impossible, which is what I like about it. But I guess I can understand why people were upset, although it was kind of amusing. All the Americans were like, "Eh, get over," and all the Russians -- many of the Russians were appalled, appalled. It's an idea that, you know, in other countries they actually hold authors as saints virtually. Yeah, and I mean -- It's not a knock on you, it's just one of those things that if you sort of marvel how in other countries you can actually have that sense of a -- It's nice. I mean, it's funny. I didn't think it was too soon to make fun of Dosteevsky. I mean, again, I'm not making fun of Dosteevsky. I mean, I think if you read the story, it's like kind of picking apart Dosteevsky and Bob Kane at the same time. It's definitely too soon to pick apart Bob Kane, just kidding. Well, yes, maybe it is. But what has happened since then -- that was before the book came out. Since the book came out, I've gotten a couple of responses from teachers who I think teach high school classes. And they say, "Oh, this will be a great introduction to the classics, to use your book." And I am -- Hopefully you would dread. I'm never going to discourage someone from reading my book, or using my book in the classroom. And I previously heard people say, "Oh, I teach Dante in a college class, and I use the Zuka Joe for that." But it seems to me that if you're using my book to introduce the classics to people who have never read the book before, I don't think I want Batman in my head the entire time I read Crime and Punishment the first time. Maybe I would have remembered more of it, though, if I had Batman in my head when I was a teenager. So maybe that would work. But indeed, with Ziggy. Yes. Well, no one knows who Ziggy is anymore, although still that drawing style. I shouldn't -- no offense to Tom Wilson either. I worry that my references are getting older, although that's another issue. But yes, maybe Ziggy and Candide would be inappropriate, too. In any case, I'm grateful that people think it's useful, and you can't control how people use your work, and if they want to use it at all, that's wonderful. So I'm glad teachers feel that there's something there of substance, because I certainly hoped it would be there. But I think it says something about the way the culture has changed since 1989 when I did my first story, and comics were still this thing like, oh, they're for adults now, I thought they were just for morons or children. And now we're at the point where librarians are totally embracing comics, which I think is great, but it's a little surreal to me to sort of live through this transition in America where, oh, nobody reads anymore. So comics are actually great. My local library, I walk in, it's one of those things, a whole section of good contemporary collections. I'm like, OK, when I was a kid, I was checking out how to draw comics, the Marvel Way book from here, and I was the only person taking it out again and again as an eight-year-old, but it's kind of amazing to see how that acceptance is-- It's very, very surreal. I mean, honestly, I said, I met Art at a release party for Mouse, and that was one of, if not the pivotal change in the acceptance of-- Well, I think so. Well, I think so. I think so. And it's a term we hate using. I know, I couldn't get it out. I know. I couldn't get it out of my mouth. I couldn't get it out of my mouth. I couldn't get it out of my mouth. And I'm-- For lack of a better term. It's funny. I mean, that's part of the domestication. The domestication of comics is that term. I mean, I put comics in the title of my book for a reason because that's really important to me that there's still comics. I mean, my work is also funny, so it's-- Yeah. But I'll still use comic even for something like Mouse without using art's co-mix, you know, neologism. I think he's kind of given up on that one too. Oh, good. And Mouse isn't a novel. No. It's nonfiction. I mean, the graphic novel, the term just has so many stumbling blocks besides the fact that I just choke every time I try to say it in an interview. Although people understand it. I mean, it's marketing and I also understand marketing. I guess the question I have when we talk about the idea of your books being taught, you also perform comics. Yes. And I've yet to see one of these performances. I've heard they're great. Can you sort of tell us what you do and how that all came out? Sure. I came about from a very different series of events. I was very interested in performance art when I was in school. In the '80s, again, performance art and graphic novels were starting to happen in the '80s. HBO would do specials of performance artists, not just standard comics. And Magnuson was-- Yeah. Yeah. Something. I started working with an artist named Michael Smith, who had a Showtime special, which was a variety show that he hosted. And he's a performance artist. He's worked with William Wegman and lots of other people in his somewhat surreal, mostly funny videos in the '80s. And he's done a million things since. And I helped--I did stage work on his one of his shows--I mean, just, you know, stage hand. I was stage hand on one of his shows that ran for a number of years. And that was really fascinating to me. I was really interested in performance. I mean, I mentioned Duchamp before. People like Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage were huge influences on kind of my ideas of making art. I mean, I think even the way that I combine comics and literature, I mean, it has everything to do with Mad Magazine. I mean, I can't overstate the fact that this really comes out of Mad Magazine, Harvey Kurtzman, you know, all the things-- Did you ever get to study under him? No, I never met him. Is it SVA, right? Yeah, he was at SVA. And I took some classes there, but I never met him, and I really--I'm really sorry that I never did. He's a big influence, you know. Not everyone, yeah. Yeah, pretty much. So anyway, so what I do comes from Mad Magazine, but also comes from people like John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg talking about incorporating the world into their art. And I guess I take the world to also mean pop culture into their art or into my art. So, you know, what I saw in the newspaper like Blondie and Ziggy and Peanuts and so many others were part of my world. So that kind of became part of my art. The world is so saturated with pop culture. It's hard to know the distinctions anymore. But I was interested in performance. I was seeing a lot of performance. I was doing a lot of performance art type stuff. I do a lot of live painting. I've always kind of done a lot of performative work. I have a website for the show that I do Carousel, which is these cartoon slideshows that I do. The reason I started doing those was I had happened to see Rauschenberg perform some of her gag cartoons in a performance. It was a group show. It was all different kinds of performers, and Rauschenberg was one of them. Most of them were performance artists. It was at a space called Franklin Furnace that would present all sorts of performance art in the 80s style. And Rauschenberg came on stage and started reading her comics, and they were projected behind her. She seemed a little nervous, a little out of place on stage, but it was the lone artist out of her element on stage in front of these enormous projections of her gag cartoons. It was visually striking, and what I perceived as her nervousness quickly dissipated. As soon as the audience started laughing, I felt like she completely warmed up, and the audience completely embraced her. I just thought it was very dramatic to watch her kind of flower in front of this audience that was totally enamored of everything she did. And it just struck me that that was more dynamic theater than anything else that I was doing. So I got interested in doing that. And I designed stats. I worked with Michael Smith on a number of projects. I did performance. I did some theater things as an actor, like downtown Goofy shows. Nothing. He didn't arching career heading towards Broadway. No, nothing like that. So I started doing slideshows pretty much because I saw what Raus did, and I don't know how much of it was pre-meditated, but it just struck me that there was something really dynamic happening there. So I knew a number of other people who were doing slideshows of their work. More from the performance world or the fine art world, but I found a band of people who were interested in doing this, and we started doing shows together. And that grew into Carousel, which these days is mostly focused on cartoonist performing their work. At the time, in the early '90s, which is when I saw Raus, we were using 35 millimeter slides, which is why the show is called Carousel. And I sort of think of them as radio plays. I reconfigure the artwork, so it's one panel at a time. Sometimes I'll take out the word "bloons" or otherwise adjust the artwork to sort of fit the format. I find music, sometimes I do all the narrations, sometimes I have actors reading the narration with me, which is really fun, because then it almost becomes like a radio play. They wouldn't work without the visuals, but there's a sense of performance beyond the reading you might get from a single author. And I love that stuff too, but there's something about the collective experience and the collective act of presenting these shows that really appeals to me. Again, it's completely opposite from what I do most of the time. It seems like as you mentioned, shoring up the tension between classic literature and goofy lowbrow comics, it's also the public performance by cartoonists who were stereotypically shut-ins who were perched over a table, spending three months on a three-page strip. Is that part of the allure, that idea of kind of exploding the "I'm doing all this work completely by myself?" There's one thing when it goes out to press, but is there a sense that the performance becomes a sort of more immediate, I don't want to say immediate gratification, but that notion of sharing it with a world in a different way than seeing it in print? Sure. And when I started doing the shows, I felt like I was sort of exposing a different audience to my comics. It's different now because it's very accessible to create slide shows and PowerPoint, and people perform their comics all the time. I mean, Ross Chast didn't invent it. I certainly didn't invent it. You know, I mean, Windsor McKay would show his animated cartoons. I mean, there's precedents that go back at least to the beginning of the century. If you don't want to talk about scrolls with artwork on them being spun while someone narrates a story, which goes back to, if you hold Japan, I'm not sure where that comes from. There's a number of visual storytelling things that have gone on forever, but certainly the act of reading comics in front of an audience is very hard to miss. If you live in New York for a while, you'll trip over someone doing a cartoon slide show, which is great. It gives me more people to invite to put in my shows, and I really like anthologies. I mean, I love working at RAW. Masterpiece Comics is kind of an anthology in that every piece is a different style, and they're all sort of written by someone else, even though it's my adaptations of someone else's writing. And similarly, my show Carousel, each show generally features six to eight performers reading their own work, so it becomes a variety show in a sense. And I'm always trying to pull in more people to do it, so to keep it interesting. Your wife's a cartoonist. Well, you mentioned sort of her critiquing of your work, or at least talking through it. How much do you two interact in relation to each other's comics, just in critiquing each other's work or understanding what the other one's doing? Well, Kriota actually is a cartoonist these days, but she has a pretty wide career in the arts in lots of different areas. We met when she was a choreographer, and we were both sort of more involved in the theater scene, so that was kind of our connection previously. And she and I collaborated on a number of theater pieces deeply collaborated. I'm grateful that we could do that and not drive each other entirely crazy. And we did some great work for those downtown theaters, none of which none of those shows made it to Broadway. But as a choreographer, as someone who makes visual art, like the needlepoint on our wall of an MRI of a brain, and as a cartoonist, she works in a lot of different areas. I always read my comics by her, but I think we talk about the art in lots of different ways. Her sort of move toward cartooning is unexpected to me, but also really interesting because she's coming from it from a very unusual perspective, which I think is great. She actually read as much Dick Tracy in Wonder Woman as I did as a kid. She grew up in Washington State and her mother was a librarian, so she read all the comics that they had in their library. We have a lot of the same taste in old comics and cartoons, but the kinds of comics that she's making right now are based around medical themes. They're gay cartoons about pathology, and this is probably a whole other conversation, but they're very technical, and they're very funny, and part of the joke is they're too technical for a lay people to understand, so she has the foot-noted cartoons, essentially. And she also put out a book about self-care for cartoonists to avoid injury and carpal tunnel and bad backs and other things like that. It's almost instructional comics that she's making. One of the reasons she made the book about self-care was we taught at the Center for Cartoon Studies last year. She teaches anatomy for cartoonists, and sometimes we teach this together, where she has a lot of background in body sciences, and she teaches anatomy to dancers, to lots of different artists, and she started teaching anatomy to cartoonists. So she'll have a model in the classroom, and she'll draw on the model, the muscles, so it gives the students a way of organizing the figure they're drawing through the musculature and through the skeleton. And through teaching cartoonists, she realized that the 25-year-olds that she was teaching were all going to have really bad posture if they didn't start exercising and sitting up straight, and that sort of thing. It's a stereotypical shut-ins, as I said. It's not just shut-ins, it's just anyone who hunches over her desk, although she was specifically focusing on cartoonists, because that's who she was teaching at the time. So that's what led to this 60-page comic that she put out. Called No Pain, I should mention the name of the book. Excited to the end of the case. One other question, teaching comics at CCS, and the resources that exist now for comics as a curriculum. I'm assuming nothing like this existed at all when you were at Parsons. You mentioned that being lucky to have a professor who didn't dissuade you from it. Right. How do you see that transition, like we said, to comics being accepted in the library, now seeing it accepted in the academy? Yeah. What's it like? Again, it's sort of surreal. I'm not sure what I could add to what I said before, just that I did not foresee this happening. I mean, when you're 22, what do you foresee happening? But I'm astonished at how the world's embraced comics. I mean, there have been schools. One of the teachers I taught with at CCS, Steve Bassett, went to the Joe Qbert school in New Jersey, which was going in the 70s, which I think is when he went. I think he may have been in the first class. Is that true? That would make sense with the timing of when he started drawing with Alan Moore. Yeah. I mean, he went in the 70s. I can't remember which class it was, but I mean, he was there and he has an amazing encyclopedia of knowledge. If you have Steve Bassett on your faculty, you probably have pretty much a photographic memory of most comics already. But the way that the embrace in the academic world and the literary world of comics is wonderful. And I mean, maybe we'll have a better perspective on it in 50 years. I'm kind of overwhelmed. I'm so gratified that I kept making comics long enough to be able to have a beautiful looking book like this published by drawn and quarterly. I always thought I would do a book, but who knew what that would be? It's an awfully nice one. Well, thanks. They did. They're wonderful to work for. I would say we were talking about libraries and access to things. One of the things that really shifted my perception of comics was something I found in the Parsons Library, which was Breakdowns, which was already Speakleman's book of comics from the 70s. It was recently republished with a new introduction, with a new introduction, which is great in its own, right? But Parsons happened to have one of the couple of thousand copies that were printed, you know, ten years earlier. And not even ten years earlier, probably five years earlier. Anyway, they had a copy of it in the library and seeing his early work and his experimentation was really inspiring. And his appropriation, he would use Rex Morgan cartoons and other characters. His character painters. Yeah, and he would use laws of the tropes of comics. And certainly that helped the light bulb go off over my head, to say the least. I mean, honestly, I can't imagine if Mouse didn't come out, I really can't imagine where comics would be right now. 'Cause I think Tom actually said, someone said that every anthology that comes out these days is kind of a tribute to RAW in a certain way. It's the strongest precursor. And when you had drawn in quarterly as an anthology of MOM, everything, you know, you're going to hold it up against that yardstick. Yeah, yeah. Just picking up my old editions and finding the Bazooka Joe strip, flipping through it and realizing all of those cartoonists I was being introduced to at 18 or 19, Loostal and Mattotti and all these other ones. It was just, you know, this mind-blowing experience, which, you know, it's wonderful that kids now can get more access to things. But it's still that idea of, you know, having somebody, you know, showing you, "Oh, look, these are the great comics from this country in this era." Yeah. And of course, the great high-low pastitias that you made. Anyway, Bob Zicoryak, I want to thank you so much for your time and letting me into your home. I really appreciate it. Oh, you're very welcome. This was a lot of fun. And that was Bob Zicoryak. You can find his website at rsicoryak.com. Okay, I'll spell it for you. R-S-I-K-O-R-Y-A-K.com. The site for Carousel, his live comics performances, is CarouselSlideshow.com. Masterpiece Comics is published by Drawin Quarterly, and you can find that at good bookstores and comic shops and Amazon. And you can find more about Bob's wife, Kriota, and her work at duramader.org. D-U-R-A-M-A-T-E-R. And that was a virtual memory show. Thanks for listening. You can subscribe to the show and find past episodes on iTunes, or at my website, chimeraobscura.com. I'm not going to spell that one out for you. But I do plan on launching a podcast-specific website with a much easier URL next year. I'm your host, Gil Roth, and you are awesome. Keep it that way. [Music]