Sequart Reprints: robin enrico

Robin Enrico is an interesting young cartoonist whose work has taken a dramatic step forward with the publication of JAM IN THE BAND. It's the story of the rise and fall of an indy-rock band, and the ways in which obsessing over one's art hinders and is hindered by relationships. Obsession and relationships have resonated in Enrico's other work, including minis like Controller (about video game obsession), Stupid and Unkind (a wholly unsentimental take on a relationship that doesn't really go anywhere thanks to the short-sightedness of one of its members), Party At Horror Beach and others. His simplified, iconic style is a perfect, direct conduit for his wit while providing a direct contrast to the bitterness and cynicism that his characters experiences. Enrico also co-edited the Friends of Lulu Anthology GIRLS' GUIDE TO GUYS' STUFF. Enrico will be at SPX this weekend with a JAM IN THE BAND 2 preview minicomic.
Background

SEQUART: Where are you from originally? Were the arts encouraged in your house growing up? Did you do anything artistic with friends and/or siblings?

Enrico: So this is a difficult one. I didn't see myself as an artist until I went to college. Where I had accidently enrolled myself in the Art Video department thinking it was the Communications department. I had grown up in a household with an alcoholic father who fancied himself a painter and who constantly reminded me that I was "stupid" for not "getting" art. So for me, the idea of being an artist was the furthest thing from my mind. I believed I would follow a straight-laced career path and live a normal life. Of course, that would have been a disaster. I am far too weird to ever make it in the house/car/kids world. Nor would I ever want to. But, I think why I have taken to comics with such vehemence is that I feel like I was cheated out of years where I COULD have been learning how to draw, but was so discouraged.

SEQUART: You've only been cartooning for five years. What was it like putting pen to paper for the first time as an adult? What was it about comics, above any other art form, that drew you into wanting to make them so much?

Enrico: I had originally want to be involved in film making when I went to college, having worked on my high school's weekly news program for a few years. But my nature is rather introverted and solitary, so I really was not cut out to be a director. Although I do think I make a pretty fine editor. Comics represents for me an alternative way to make films. And I don't mean this as a belittlement of comics. In some ways I think they are superior. Although in many ways they are SO vastly different, that it's rather ludicrous to compare them anyways. Comics allow me to tell exactly the story I want to tell, exactly the way I want it, with the only limits being my ability to draw something. Don't want to deal with actors? Draw them. Budget problems? Paper and pens cost next to nothing. You get the idea. Also, I have never been around such a welcoming and genuinely enthusiastic and positive group of people as the mini-comics community. After attending my first SPX with MK Reed in a non-creator capacity, I KNEW I had to become a part of the comics community, and I couldn't think of any better way than to make my own comic.

SEQUART: How did you maintain encouragement and confidence in the face of such a steep learning curve?

Enrico: I'm a son of a bitch, plain and simple. No, I kid. I just don't think I have EVER been involved in something as personally rewarding as comics. I talk about this in Controller, but I used to be majorly into playing video games. But when you spend hours and hours to beat a game, what is the real cumulative gain on your life for all that effort? Whereas each page I draw, each book I finish, it's this tangible thing that I can be proud of. And it translates to the outside world. Almost all of my friends these days were gained through comics. And if they are from outside of comics, they all appreciate that I am a passionately creative person. Beyond even that, I really don't know what to do with myself other than make comics. I just have an intense compulsion to make them.

SEQUART: How much drawing do you do on a daily basis that isn't directly related to drawing your comics? Do you draw from life and/or keep a sketchbook? Does the physical act of drawing bring you pleasure?

Enrico: I actually don't draw much outside of my comics. I never really drew before I started doing comics, so unlike many cartoonists I do not have to compulsion to constantly draw or sketch. I wouldn't say that drawing [is] painful for me, but it's not a joyful task either. [It's] an obstacle that must be surmounted. It's like Fitzcarraldo (film), all this intense and strenuous effort for one slight moment of triumph, which in this case is finishing the page. Although sometimes there are minor moments of joy when I surprise or amuse myself with things I end up drawing during the completion of the page.

SEQUART: You've mentioned Wimbledon Green, Blankets, Blue Monday and Love & Rockets as comics that have had an influence on you. Are you still a voracious reader ofcomics at this point in your career? From whom do you currently draw the most inspiration? How much investigation have you done into the history of the medium?

Enrico: I still love good comics. But I certainly don't read as much as I used to. That said, I still consume vast quantities of information. I am a voracious reader and an avid film watcher. So I really feel like I am drawing ideas from all over. But in terms of comics? I think my main influences haven't changed that much over the years. And by influences I mean people whose work I look at whenever I get stuck creatively. I always look back to Ghost World, more than any other book perhaps. Just look how Clowes handles a story where the primary action is two girls talking to each other, lessons abound. Other than that I look to Junko Mizuno a lot. Her books are what I WISH mine looked like. I think we're both kind of on the same cute but grotesque wave length. I also look at Bryan Lee O'Malley's work pretty frequently. With him, it's a bit different. I don't think I am copying off him, but more that we are both coming from a similar place with the whole video game influence. So it's interesting to see how some with much greater drawing ability expresses similar ideas.

SEQUART: Something that's certainly true about your comics is that even though most of them are just extended conversations, there's always some kind of movement or motion on every page, even if it's two characters walking from one place to another. This is obviously something intentional, correct?

Enrico: Look at Ghost World page 23 last panel. I have literally copied this panel in different forms at least 10 or 20 times. I think it really started to come to the fore when I did Controller. Stupid and Unkind has way too much sitting or standing around. So with Controller I wanted to do something to liven things up a bit. ALSO, I really developed a bias against autobiographical comics which were the narrator simply standing there telling you a story or narrating a story to you. So beyond the whole recounting of personal history through conversation, Controller was my attempt to render several different NYC locations under the guise of an aimless stroll. Again, it gets back to my whole "keeping the reader interested" thing. If the characters aren't walking, they're doing an action. Maybe that way no one will notice it's just the same two characters talking to each other for 20 pages. And both of these scenarios allow me to indulge in my interests in location and process. I've gotten way more into location as of late, as living in NYC provides a treasure trove of weird locations you can just wonder into. But I have always loved using comics to document a process, it comes from my love of the design sense of like air plane safety cards. You can see this even as far back as Stupid and Unkind with the infamous "bra unhook x-ray" shot.





SEQUART: Where did you attend college and what was your major? Were the arts a part of your college experience?

Enrico: I think I discussed this above, but I was an art video major in college. I was only moderately into the whole art scene up at Syracuse. What I will say is that the most influential thing to happen to me artistically was meeting MK Reed, who had just started doing her comics at the time. Knowing her is what got me into reading and making comics.

Style





SEQUART: Your comics are interesting in that they have a lot of influences from outside the medium. In particular, video games, graffiti art, rock poster art and zine culture all seem to have been processed by you to develop your style. What would you say is your most important influence, and how do you integrate your many different sources of inspiration?

Enrico: I hate to say it, but it's very much video games. I honestly try to downplay this in my work as much as possible by not making "gamer" jokes or having characters gain extra lives or things like that. But in my childhood, the whole video game aesthetic was the first place a westerner could really get exposed to manga and anime style designs. And again I hate to admit it, because I generally don't like manga and anime, but certainly that is a huge influence on me. Especially the super deformed style. I can literally trace my whole desire to draw my little bobble-head people to a short scene in Project A-ko.

I think the reason you see so many different styles and aesthetics at play in my work is because I often feel limited by my own drawing ability. I always trying to get so much information across, and all I have to do it with is my little bobble-headed puppets; so I end up giving the comics this sort of hypertextuality. I guess I figured I could somewhat mask the fact the my comics are all just people talking to each other by bombarding you with excess information and explosions of arrows and stars. But I think we live in a hypertextual world, so it's not entirely surprising that it works. This gets back to the whole video game thing, where you have menus and graphics telling you home much health you have left etc. And a lot of the things I include are things I am very interested in anyways. I love 'zines and posters, so it's a great thrill for me to come up with fake ones.
SEQUART: How did you end up with your particular style of line and character designs? Was it trial and error to see what worked, or did you have a particular vision of what you wanted your characters to look like?

Enrico: I always drew my bobble-head people. Over time the have become more realistic. I've added noses, realistic hands, made them less squat and sausage like. But it's just kind of the way I always drew people, so I'm sure it expresses some inner reality about how I view the world.

SEQUART: There's a clear progression of your style from Stupid and Unkind to Jam In The Band. On the one hand, your line is clearer and more confident, with a more expressive and effective use of blacks. There's much less over-rendering in panels where you clearly were trying to work through a "scene-blocking" problem. On the other hand, that greater confidence seems to have led you into a less realistic and more stylized overall presentation. Did your greater facility as a draftsman "allow" you to get more abstract and expressive in Jam In the Band?

Enrico: I got better? Really? I mean I know I did, but I am surprised you think the blocking is better. I feel all my work suffers from an over usage of the medium from the torso-up shot. I just don't see the expressive value in feet. We say so much more with our hands and face. And since my books function primarily in the emotional realm, I feel I tend to do the same shot over and over again. But here is what HAS changed. Jam in the Band is all hand-lettered, for one. I cover it up on computer, but before there was no lettering in the panels, so I was always squeezing it in, instead of accounting for it on the page. I think I certainly always wanted my work to be as expressive as Jam in the Band is. But you're right, I just didn't have the ability to pull it off. For me, the Jam in the Band's cover was a huge break point for me. I say it in the book, but that cover is a homage to the Japanese cover of Jet Set Radio. Once I drew that cover I knew I could draw in that style, a style I love, so I just started putting it more and more into the book. And I really think Jam in the Band has a different kind of energy than any of my other books. I think [it] warrants all the ridiculous, ephemeral, decorative abstraction. Like drawing music. How do you draw music? You could show the band playing their instruments. But no matter how much detail you showed, it wouldn't really convey music being played. But I remember reading this awesome old comic about Johnny Cash playing music and being on drugs. There was some great= ass abstraction in that. I'm pretty sure that had some influence on the direction I took with Jam in the Band.

SEQUART: Have you read Understanding Comics? Do you agree with Scott McCloud that a simplified, more iconic character design allows you to express a greater range of emotions than a more naturalistic style?

Enrico: I love Scott's book and certainly agree with it now that you've mentioned it. But it's not anything I was doing consciously. I think people certainly respond more to my characters because they are iconic. Having owned multiple Hello Kitty wallets, I of all people understand the appeal of Sanrio products. I am not saying that they are a huge influence but I certainly prefer character designs that are simplified. It goes back to your question about cute characters with somber themes. I think the disparity works. You're drawn in by the sugary coating of the character design, enough so that you don't realize you're swallowing a rather bitter pill until it's too late. But what people don't realize is how hard it is to deal with complex emotions on a simplified character. Minute adjustments of the eye position can change the level of sadness or anger a character is expressing. So I end up spending hours in Photoshop slightly adjusting the position of the eyes, nose, eye brows and mouth of my characters. Because when you are relying SO much on the performance of the simplified people, the emotion that you trying to convey has to be rendered in crystal clarity.

SEQUART: You make extensive use of background details to tell your story (for example, the array of sex toys surrounding Becky Vice as she's telling a flashback)--is this a conscious decision to make the reader work a little bit harder for subtext rather than have it spoonfed to them through exposition?

Enrico: I was once told that not drawing good backgrounds was the hallmark of poor cartooning. I really took this to heart. And I realized that not expressing your ideas through your backgrounds was like trying to wrestle with one arm tied behind your back. I mean, you have this tool to further elaborate on whatever idea you are trying to get across, why wouldn't you use it? For me, subtext is REALLY important. I am always desperately trying to flush out characters, so anything I can do to get information across without having the characters directly say what we need to know about them, I do it. On top of that, the subtext is where I lay in most of my jokes. Becky Vice is a great example, she always acts as if no one else is in the room and just goes about her business as a pervert. Hopefully the audience can get a good laugh out of the ridiculousness of a person who doesn't even bother [to] clean up their dildos before being interviewed. But also, that should kind of inform you about who this person is.

SEQUART: On a similar note, what led your to having decorative aspects of your work often function as a form of emotional barometer?

Enrico: Again, it's getting information across. The style of my character is kind of limited. The eyes, nose and mouth are very simplified. At the same time, I am trying to cover a huge range of emotions. So I figure, since things are already so cartoon-y, there's no reason to not just have the characters' emotions spill out into the backgrounds. And besides that, it's usually an excuse to draw something more exciting than a character standing around discussing their feelings. Like in Jam in the Band 2, I have these dark tentacles of doubt wrapping themselves around Jennet while she discusses her artistic dilemma. In most cases I would have to be drawing a Hentai to have a reason to draw tentacles, but in this case it makes sense. Emotions are such an important part of my stories, why only hint at them subtly?

SEQUART: There's a flatness to your character design and your characters often tend to move in unusual ways through space. Is this the video game influence at play (a deliberate style) or a happy accident?

Enrico: Don't you get it? I can't draw! Ha ha. I don't know where I heard it. But someone once said. Comics can either be a schlocky movie or a kick- ass puppet show. I clearly fall more to the side of kick-ass puppet show. But it's like having the emotions spilling out into decorative elements. I know I am not really dealing in reality, so what does it matter if things don't function like they should? I certainly view the world I draw as having that whole paper cut-out on popsicle sticks aesthetic, but it rarely ever strays from that, and I think it generally makes the most of that. So like most things in my comics, it's just a happy accident that I just put my head down and ran with.

Girls's Guide To Guy's Stuff

SEQUART: How did you get involved in editing this anthology? How did your job as a video editor help or hinder you in this assignment?

Enrico: MK Reed called me up and wanted to know if I wanted to help her work on the anthology since we have worked together so much in the past. I of course said yes, since I wouldn't even be involved in comics if it weren't for her.

SEQUART: What was the most difficult part of editing the anthology?

Enrico: Getting people to contribute. Although mostly this was our own fault. Initially we sought out only the people we wanted, and only got a tepid response. But once we opened the submissions up to everyone, we were overwhelmed by the amount of awesome work we got.

SEQUART: What was the most rewarding part of the process?

Enrico: Just seeing some of the awesome work we got from not only artists we knew and loved (Hellen Jo, Liz Baillie, Dorthy Gambrell), but getting work from people MK and I had never heard of.

SEQUART: What was the process like in seeking out artists? What quality did the works you printed have that led to you choosing them? How much editing did you do on individual pieces? Did you ask artists to make changes on any pieces?

Enrico: When we started, MK and I made a list of all the female artists we liked (It was something like 100 artists and this is back in 2005, mind you, so it would be even more now) and emailed them about the project. However most of them were busy with their own projects, so we really weren't able to get a massive response until we sent out a press release to places like The Beat about how we were looking for submissions. We didn't really have to do too much editing on any of the pieces other than some minor lettering corrections here and there. We also had to chose a few pieces which just didn't fit the tone or caliber of the book. But in general it was a painless editing process.

SEQUART: How did you choose to sequence the comics in the book?

Enrico: A bunch of different criteria, actually. We would rank the pieces by how much we liked them, whether they were humorous or dramatic, what the artistic style was, etc. The main idea was not to load up any section of the book with too much of the same thing. I will say that we put Hellen's comic first because not only was it one of our favorites, but because it most exemplified what we were trying to do with the book. The whole "girl's comics aren't just pretty princesses and puppies" idea.

SEQUART: What was the eventual overall response to the book? How did it sell?

Enrico: You know, this is where I end up sucking. I don't really know how the book did. After I was done with it, I just got so wrapped up in my own projects that I forgot about promoting the book. But what the hell do I know about promotion anyways? I'll say this. Anyone who has read the book has enjoyed it. And I think that's what really matters. Is that FoL had a quality anthology of all female artists, that is accessible and enjoyable to both genders.

SEQUART: How did this experience affect your current understanding of how to put together a comic, if at all?

Enrico: I mean, MK and I had been doing comics anthologies as far back as college, so process-wise it wasn't super informative to me other than the whole getting it professionally printed part. There's nothing like being on the phone to LeBonFon in Canada where only one person there speaks English.

SEQUART: Who were the most pleasant surprises for you personally? Was there someone whose inclusion you fought for specifically?

Enrico: Hellen Jo. She is hands-down my favorite cartoonist working today. And someone I was hoping would get more attention from being in the book. I think that's something I didn't get across in your previous line of questions. What I wanted for GGtGS to do more than anything was, if at all possible, help further the careers of the cartoonists in it. I know Raina Telgemeier got her gig doing Baby Sitters Club because someone saw her piece in the previous FoL book, Broad Appeal. All I wanted was a similar success story to come out of GGtGS. Because I felt many of the women represented in that book certainly deserve wider recognition.

SEQUART: I believe you're still a member of Friends of Lulu, correct? What does being a part of that organization mean to you?

Enrico: I don't think I have been an active member for a long time, but let me say this. I think the issue of women in comics is honestly something I am estranged from. I say this, but I think my meaning is somewhat more complex. Most of the cartoonist I know are women, the two I am closest to (MK Reed and Liz Baillie) are women, [and] my non-cartoonist female friends all own and read comics. So I don't really see how there is a lack of female interest in comics. But on the flip side of this, I don't know shit about super hero comics. Like really, nothing. And I know women are supposedly into Manga, but again, I don't know dick about that either. I just feel like the whole women in comics thing is like the women who play video games thing. Like why is it still such a big deal? But this coming from a position of being around women who are into comics already, so what do I know?

The Comics Themselves

SEQUART: More than any other young cartoonist I know, you like to add text statements of purpose, inspiration and explanation at the end of your comics. What leads you to want to document your process and experiences making particular comics in such detail?

Enrico: Director's commentaries. Again, I am showing my film allegiance here. But if I enjoy a work of art, I always want to learn more about the artist and their art making process. Art isn't made in a vacuum. It's a response to the world in which we live in. So I assume my audience relishes being let into my mindset and my process as much as I do for other artists.

SEQUART: A running theme in your comics is the line between obsession and passion, and the ways in which your characters inevitably cross that line into addiction. Why is this idea so important to you?

Enrico: I grew up around addicts. I have bordered on junkie-ville many times myself. It's just something I know a lot about. Something I deal with just about everyday of my life. Even more so once I became an artist. Art making has become just like any of my other horrible habits. The William Burroughs character in Naked Lunch (film) talks about writing as being addicted to something that doesn't exist. I always identified with this. Because the highs I get from being an artist are quite unlike those from any other stimulus. Of course there's also something about the art making that enables my other minor substance abuse problems. Drinking (coffee or beer) goes hand in hand with my art making process.





SEQUART: The examination of obsession takes different forms in your comics. For example, Controller is about obsession-as-escape, and you stated that it's loosely autobiographical. The moment in the comic when Arlo says that his video game obsession was an attempt to fill a void that couldn't be satiated with material objects was a poignant one; did you have a similar lucid moment in your own life? Do you view creating art as a healthier form of working through obsessive behavior?

Enrico: Oh, most definitely. I am ALWAYS going to be an obsessive person. but art making allows me to channel that intense and dangerous energy towards a positive endeavor. Most of my other obsessions are about removing myself from society. And while sitting in my room drawing comics all day isn't that far removed from escapism, for me, the part of comics that is MOST rewarding is sharing my work with other artists and discussing art. Showing a new page to my two closest friends, MK Reed and Liz Baillie, and talking about comics is one of the highlights of my life.

SEQUART: In Stupid & Unkind, the surface obsession is Ronan's obsession with film, but the deeper one is his mental creation of this ideal woman who doesn't exist, and the way it cripples him socially and emotionally. Do you deliberately create your characters to be impulsive and short-sighted, to the point where it affects their ability to relate to others?

Enrico: What would be the fun of writing people who weren't fucked up and sabotaging themselves? I think this was my response to reading to many comics where the protagonist was either too perfect or cast themselves as the victim of circumstances supposedly beyond their control. I wanted to write a story about someone who IS impulsive and short-sighted and unable to compromise on their beliefs because that's more realistic and generally more interesting. Michael Hayes (Fabulous Freebirds) talks about how in wrestling, the best heels aren't the guys twirling their mustache telling you how evil they are, but the guys who do all kinds of fucked up things all the while maintaining that what they are doing is completely justified and in the right. So while Ronan acts like a total asshole most of the time, you can't help but follow what happens because he never once expresses any doubt about what he is doing.

SEQUART: Do you deliberately contrast your breezy, snappy dialogue and "cute" character design with your often downbeat themes?

Enrico: I think I start from the place of downbeat themes and then go about finding a way to make them fun. I've certainly been through some heart rending experiences in my life. But that doesn't preclude me from laughing about things and enjoying my life. I don't think my comics would be very interesting if they were told in a super serious and heavy way. I honestly am very disappointed if I can't include at least one or two funny or humorous things per page. I always feel like the audience will just toss my book down in disgust if things ever get too serious/dramatic. Also, this goes back to your question about subtext, I think people generally reveal more about their pain and heartbreak in funny and mundane ways than they do in dramatic moments. I worry sometimes that my dialogue is a little too contrived and a little too expository. Like would anyone talk to their friend about how lonely they are at the laundromat? But then I realize I have done this while hanging out and joking with my close friends.

SEQUART: Your comics resonate emotionally because it's clear that you're depicting a particular time, place and (most of all) scene. Why is it important for you to ground your themes so specifically in such temporal and physical settings?

Enrico: Because time and place are everything. I feel you go through emotional and physical phases in your life. There's the you, who you are in college, and this is tied to where you are and how old you are. And as you grow older and move on to different place, you change. And I think all these things reflect back in on each other. So I like to ground the narrative to a certain time and place in my characters lives to lend something concrete to the primarily emotional narrative.

SEQUART: Cartooning is a largely solitary existence. How important is collaboration to you? You've edited a book, you've drawn some comics that others have written (and vice-versa), and you tend to write about artists who work in collaborative fields (music, film). Why do you feel drawn to write about the collaborative arts?

Enrico: I tend write about the collaborative arts because I don't think they're that far removed from comics in terms of the dedication and effort you have to exert towards them, and the intense friendships you develop from them. I have a friend who has played in bands for years now and the language she uses to describe being in a band is almost interchangeable with the language I use to describe doing comics. I think it relates back to the whole community aspect of comics. Yes, I do draw alone a lot of the time. But other times I draw with large groups of people or close friends. And I am very lucky in that I always have MK and Liz to show my work to and discuss it with them.

SEQUART: A related question: how important is the idea of a comics community to you? Can you describe the ways in which your own immediate community has been important to you? What do you get out of going to shows like MOCCA and SPX?

Enrico: I have touched on this other places. But the comics community has meant just about everything to me since I graduated from college. I feel very blessed to know so many amazing and creative people through doing comics. And going to shows like SPX and MoCCA is a great way to see all those people who don't live close by as well as meet other artist I have never gotten a chance to meet yet. Not to mention that conventions give me the excuse to travel to cities like Portland and San Francisco. And the conventions usually serve as a great excuse for all us weird, socially awkward artists to get together and have a party. SPX is especially great as MK Reed, Liz Baillie and I have been co-ordinating our own awards show (The Nerdlinger Awards) and a post-Ignatz Karaoke jam for the last 3 years.

SEQUART: You've noted that Bianca is a version of yourself in Jam In The Band: the obsessive outsider, the driven artist focused on goals instead of relationships. Do you see her as a cautionary version of yourself? In particular, you've set up an opposition in the comic of one obsessing over one's art vs seeking human connections. Is this a balance you find yourself navigating as an artist?

Enrico: Most definitely. I don't even know if Bianca is a cautionary version of myself, because the more time that wears on, the more I find myself to be like her. Maybe it's the other way around. But certainly my artistic life and my romantic life have often stood at odds with each other. And even more so, and this was the inspiration for the book. I saw my friends subverting their artistic goals for romantic stability. At the time I felt like this was a huge betrayal. I think Bianca is meant to be less cautionary and more informative. As if to say, if you follow this path, there are rewards, but there are most certainly also huge prices you have to pay. I think that's the case with anyone who decides to reject a conventional lifestyle. If anything, writing Bianca has allowed me to stop caring about the isolation you deal with as an artist. I have my art, I have my friends, I have a very full life without being someone's significant other, why would I want to give up my freedoms?

SEQUART: Do you see this ultimately as an either/or decision, at least for yourself?

Enrico: Ha Ha, I love what a therapy session this interview has become. I really hope people don't think I am just a totally morose, cynical, dour motherfucker. I was at an all-Japanese rock and roll band concert tonight and had a fucking great time. Totally stage dived, my man. Anyways! I think this whole romance versus personal freedom thing in my personal life, it's like everything else in my life. I have to find a way of doing things differently from what's normal. I certainly haven't ruled out the idea of romance in Bianca's life, so it's hard to cut it out of mine. But for both of us it just can't be at the cost of our hard won personal freedom. I think that's the other thread running through Stupid and Unkind and Jam in the Band, and is probably my deeper message. Why settle for anything less than everything you want? Better to fail even though you gave your all, than to never even try.

I was listening to Metallica while I typed this, so here's some lyrics from their cover of Diamond Head's "Helpless" that were relevant to me even back in high school. I figure this is kind of thing Bianca thinks as well.

I can see the stars, I can see what's going on
Every night alone, I sing my songs just for fun
Only time will tell if I make it myself someday
The stage is mine, music is my destiny
Cannot squeeze the life from me

SEQUART: Do you see comics as a lifelong avocation, or do you see yourself wanting to try your hand at other arts?

Enrico: I certainly see myself as doing comics for the rest of my life. I am constantly advancing and learning more and improving my craft. No matter how tumultuous the circumstances of my life, comics has always provided me a welcome outlet for all my creative energies. And there's so many things I want to say through art, and I never found a better means to express them than through comics.

SEQUART: After the interview was completed, Robin wanted to elaborate a bit on a few of his responses:

Enrico: Rob, I wanted to say, your line of questions in this interview was good. Scary good, in fact. You seemed to hit on things that no one else even notices. But I felt like something got lost in all my responses. And that is this. For all my self deprecation and critique on both a personal and artistic level, I went out there and did it. I set out to make comics having NO drawing experience and I fucking did it. And I think the results are works that are really worthy of attention. So as heavy as this interview has been I am really deeply positive about comics as a motivating force in my life. They've helped me define myself and better come to terms with who I am. They've helped me make the dearest and truest friends I have ever had in my life. The gave me a voice when for most of my life I was told to shut up. They made me feel special when most of my life I was told I wasn't. I don't want people to think I am martyring myself for my art. But I do feel that art is one thing that is really worth sacrificing yourself for. And I don't want people to think that my art is something that makes me unhappy. It makes me happier than anything else. That's really the problem. I have a hard time being happy doing anything else but relentlessly making or engaging in other people's art. But I deep down hope I can serve as an inspiration to people who felt like I used to. Who feel like they don't fit in and just want to shout out their feelings. Because I did it and it was the best thing I ever did with my life. And as difficult as it is, every time I move farther and farther away from what is considered normal, and just ferociously go after the things I want and enjoy, the happier I am.

Sequart Reprints: MK Reed Interview

Mary Kate "MK" Reed (http://www.mkreed.com) noted at one point in her interview, "It's comics or suicide". She's part of a generation of comics artists that is simply in love with the form, despite the many obstacles in the way of following it as a career. She got her start doing a daily strip at Syracuse University and later remarkably getting an entire comics anthology funded. Some notable Orange alums in the comics biz include Kurt Busiek and Scott McCloud, and Reed has some ideas why there is such a remarkably deep talent pool at the school. She was a contemporary of well-known artist Nick Gurewitch of PERRY BIBLE FELLOWSHIP fame: http://www.pbfcomics.com/ While receiving little formal training at Syracuse, it's interesting to hear how Reed's English major was instrumental in shaping her worldview.

After a series of minis and attempts at more cohesive series, Reed broke through in 2005 with CATFIGHT. It's the story of three high school girls who are close friends, and the melee that eventually results when two of them have a misunderstanding over a boy. Reed's art is crude but expressive, and certainly quite functional for her purposes here. She's developed a style that nicely matches her writing, with a remarkable verisimilitude in her dialogue and the types of situations that teenagers get into. While she punches the story up with conflict, it's the quiet moments that make this a memorable read and a fine first major entry in her personal canon.

Reed just published a mini-comic called PALE FIRE (inspired by the Nabokov novel), about a girl fascinated by a boy who may or may not be a pyromaniac. One can see her composition clearing up as she demonstrates increasing control over the page, as well as her figure drawing becoming ever more expressive. Reed is also writing a comic called COPYKAT for Otazine, with Laura Tallardy doing the art. Finally, she's organizing a new anthology for Friends of Lulu, though she will detail some of the trials that have gone along with that opportunity.

Reed is exactly the kind of creator that I'll examine in 30 Under 30. Someone still relatively new to the artform (and the business), but who's clearly ambitious and making a move. Some of the creators I'll interview will be better known or better established than others, but taken as a whole it should cover a wide spectrum of indy comics creators.

Background and Influences

SEQUART: What year were you born and where did you grow up? Are you self-taught as an artist or did you have any training? You graduated from Syracuse; did you take any art classes there, and how useful were they?

REED: 1981, Northeastern NJ, in the town that the high school that Rev Run's kids are going to on that MTV reality show is in. I'm pretty much self taught, I've had a few unrelated art classes in different things here & there (some at Syracuse) but not really any devoted artistic training. I did take a lot of photography classes in high school, and a video class, and I worked in a camera store for a year then. That influenced me to go to Syracuse, because then I eitherwanted to do photography or go into film.
When I was at Syracuse, I was an English major, because there was insane competition to get into the communications school, and basically every one there applies to this one college, Newhouse, that's one of the top communications schools in the country. But they only let in three hundred people, and then they let everyone into the Liberal Arts college or the art school. So there's a couple thousand embittered wannabe filmmakers there, in the freezing cold for 7 of the 8 months that you're there, and most of them turn to alcohol. (That book Smashed, a memoir of a decade long alcohol problem begun as a teen, was written by a Syracuse grad who was there when I was. We're all quite proud of what's her name.)
But I took a lot of film classes anyway, which definitely had more of an impact than the art classes. (CATFIGHT was conceived in a film lecture after watching Straw Dogs.) As a Liberal Arts student, there were a certain amount of credits that you could take in the other colleges within Syracuse, so I took pretty much all of those in Film, and like two art classes, and one of those was a letterpress class.

SEQUART: What are your influences, both as a child, teen, developing artist and now? In particular, I'm interested in hearing exactly how and why they influenced you to read further and/or create your own work.

REED: I can't imagine that with all the thousands and thousands of hours I've spent watching it, The Simpsons wouldn't have an effect on me. (Though it's not what it used to be.) I can't really think of any specific books that would have influenced my writing. I just read a lot, but I don't know if there's really an author who I've patterned myself off of.

What I've been reading lately are AM Homes, and AL Kennedy, Amy Hemple, a little Lorrie Moore. Obviously, I like Nabakov, though I haven't read that much. John Steinbeck is one of my favorite writers, I think mainly because I never had him forced upon me in high school (never took an american lit class) and I was able to discover it on my own, and then East of Eden absolutely killed me, and Grapes Of Wrath too, though probably my favorite was The Moon is Down, which is the coolest propaganda ever made, even cooler than Lifeboat, which Steinbeck wrote & Hitchcock directed (Hitchcock is another big influence). It's short, and even the introduction was awesome. I listened to them while I was working on something... I think maybe towards the end of CATFIGHT. I have to listen to books on tape while I work because music is too distracting, but with a story I have an extra reason for keeping my butt in my chair. I like Bill Bryson, especially his science book, A Short History of Nearly Everything. I went through a Chuck Palahniuk phase, but I think it may have ended with his last book, which I only got one chapter into. Hopefully the next one will be better.

As to how they influence me, I pull bits and pieces from everything. It worms its way in, if not in style, in content. Comic wise, I love Chynna Clugston. BLUE MONDAY was like the first comic I read after someone gave me SANDMAN and got me sucked back it to comics, and I started looking for more stuff on my own. I read ARCHIEs as a kid, until I got irritated at the way they punctuated their dialogue when I was about 11. (It's all exclamation points and question marks, they DO NOT use periods. Which is totally lame.) Also, the content was just really stupid.

Eleven would have been a great age to read BLUE MONDAY, but there was just really nothing to read for me then, in terms of comics. So now I really appreciate anything that I would have liked to read as a teenager. HOPELESS SAVAGES too, though I'm waiting for Oni to print more stuff like they used to & especially Brian Lee O'Malley's stuff, he is writing some of the most fun comics ever. TEENAGERS FROM MARS I love. And I find that I like the French comics that are getting translated now, mainly through D&Q, I just read MAYBE LATER on the train today, and it was excellent. Liz Baillie's comics are fantastic, and now I get to see them as she works on them, which is excellent, although I don't get the thrill of reading them all at once and letting the tension unfold because she shows me the script.

I also got to read Hope Larson's next book, CHIGGERS, which is going to be great, she's improving with each book. And I'll finish my list with Alex Robinson & Aaron Reiner, who tell great stories, & Paul Pope, who just does the coolest looking action stuff and I am jealous of. Shit, wait, also Farel Dalrymple & Jim Rugg. for kinda the same reasons as PP. And Josh Cotter & John Pham. Okay, I read a LOT of indie comics. I can't tell you the name of an Avenger to save my life, but I can pick out a David Chelsea illustration across a crowded train.

Choosing Comics

SEQUART: Why did you choose comics to work in as opposed to other media? You were enrolled in a writing program at the New School (in New York City): how did this affect your development in comics? Do you have an interest in working in other media, and if so, which? Do you draw from life or keep a regular sketchbook?

REED: Mainly, comics let me tell a story with visuals that I could only otherwise do with film, but for no money and without having to rely on anyone else to do anything. All my video footage has me yelling at people behind the camera. I'm too impatient to wait for other people to do things for me. I'm interested in doing other things, but not patient enough to go out & do them.

I keep a bunch of sketchbooks on me at all times. At the moment, I'm at work and in my bag there's 8 sketch/notebooks. 3 of them are for individual projects I'm working on, either the scripts or notes about them, one is sort of a general book for sketching. One is just a couple pages of bristol in case I need to do something on that for some reason. One is my to do book, and then there's some tiny books I throw in in case I go somewhere that I don't want to carry all the rest of them but want to have something to write or draw in. (you're learning my terrible secrets Rob.) I wouldn't say I regularly draw in any of them, but when I feel like working on something, I have it on me.

The New School was good in that I got a book out of it, (read Pale Fire for a class) and it made me write, but mainly it made me want to work on comics more. When my time was split between writing prose, and not having as much time for comics, I really just wanted to be making comics. So I dropped out.

SEQUART: Do you consider yourself a writer or an artist first? Do you plan everything out ahead of time or improvise (both in story and art)? How long does it take you to finish a story?

REED: Totally a writer. If I thought I could get someone else to do the art in any sort of timely fashion, I'd have someone more talented do it. So I've just tried to get better at drawing things, and experimented with different techniques to make things look better. Everything is planned out in advance. I usually think about a story for a long time before I even write any of it. I'll do sketches and do an outline, and then, when a deadline starts to creep up, I'll start to actually do the work of writing. I write & thumbnail at the same time, so it tends to be composed as a whole page, and from the outline, I know that a certain amount has to happen within a page. It takes me a while to get a story straight in my head, and then I'll start writing it when I have 2-3 months left to write it, and about a month before I have to have it done, I'll start the art and do a page a day. CATFIGHT took about a year & a half from conception to finish, and there were huge chunks of time where I didn't "do" anything on it, but was thinking about the next sections. PALE FIRE took a year to get done, but that involved six months of not touching paper in between the first half and the second.

SEQUART: So it sounds like even though you're primarily a writer, the visuals are a crucial element for you. Would you say that you're a frustrated filmmaker in some ways? Do you consider your comics to be primarily cinematic in nature? (I recall 2 separate pages you wrote that have "montage" scenes with a song named as "background music" for the images.

REED: In some ways, "Frustrated filmmaker" is pretty accurate, and the more I hear from friends who've gone to film school, the happier I am with comics, though they've got their own terribly frustrating aspects. I don't know if my comics are that filmic, although there are scenes I can imagine as being really fun to film. But I don't think there could be a straight up adaption of CATFIGHT, there are some scenes in there that'd totally be cut, at least in the current film environment in the U.S., and PALE FIRE is too short as it is to be a movie. I have the freedom to make scenes as long as I want, and I can throw in stuff like Sam & Sarah talking about John Cusack movies because I don't have to edit things down to 98 minutes. I just have to take the time to draw them. Likewise, if an idea only sustains itself for 60 pages, I don't have to pad it out longer or never have it screened in a theater. I'm just limited by the amount of people that actually pick up my books.

I actually also had the first issue of CATFIGHT soundtracked, but I went back and took it out because I didn't agree with the choices I'd made 4 months later, and then also I though I was copying BLUE MONDAY and didn't want people to think that I was just ripping that off. As it is, you can kind of build your own soundtrack based on the music they're discussing in it, so I've stopped that for the time being. Then also, there's the problem that if you read faster than the song, you fuck up the whole timing. So now I generally have a few songs in mind while I'm writing, that generally shape my feel of it, and I'll leave it to other people to guess what they are. This is probably more in PALE FIRE, but it came up in conversation a few times with my one friend Robin Enrico, who has a unique insight into my comics because he knows a good deal about me & my life, and is one of the few friends I actively discuss my comics with.

SEQUART: Regarding your art, how do you think you've improved? Are you basically satisfied with how your art can now communicate your writing's ideas, or are you still searching for ways to improve and/or new techniques?

REED: I've come a long way since I started, and I'm actually at a point where I'm really satisfied with my art, up until I ink things. I have a lot of room for improvement there, mainly because I don't sketch in ink, or trace my art much outside of when I'm doing pages for my books, versus being able to sketch pretty much everywhere without much hassle. (no ink & water reserve to spill on other train passengers) I've experimented with different inks & brushes, and I've been playing a lot with brush pens lately, the Pitt/Faber-Castell ones, and some Japanese ones that you can pick up in Asian bookstores around NYC/Jersey pretty easily, but I'm not entirely sure I want to use them. Liz and Robin keep telling me that I should use them, but I like brushes. They have a nice feel to them, I just need to practice more to use them well.

SEQUART: How do you balance making a living with creating comics? How do you maintain motivation as an artist without exhausting yourself?

REED: First part: Poorly!
Second part- I work in spurts, and I tend to structure things around this. I've found that if I structure my books into more serial forms, they're less imposing and seem more do-able. I tend to structure things so that I'll have a new book for either SPX, APE, or MoCCA, because they're spaced fairly evenly apart (or used to be, til APE moved to April) and then I get some feedback on how well I've done. So, say now, when I'm trying to get something done for SPX- I came up with an idea in May, I've just written the first page of it a week ago (mid-July) and I realistically won't start work on it until the end of August, more likely September. I'll have to have it ready to make by the first week of October, and then once SPX is done, I won't want to do anything on it for months. It's the first 30 pages of a 90-100 page book, so it's not too tough. So really, exhausting myself is in the plans, and I account for it, but I know that eventually I'll get back into working if I give myself time away.

SEQUART: One of your strengths as a writer is your dialogue. In particular, you seem to understand how to write teen-agers. What goes into your process of writing dialogue, and how do you give each character their own unique voice?

REED: I usually think of how a scene is going to work before I start writing it, and then I sit down with my sketchbook and write & draw it at the same time. I try to give everyone a clear personality, and I won't put words in their mouth that they wouldn't use. Darren & Dwayne in PALE FIRE weren't allowed to use many multisyllabic words, and instead got to curse a lot. Dwayne really didn't get much more than a grunt. He was fun to write. Putting limits on what kind of language characters get to use is a fun challenge, and their dialogue comes out more real. Teenagers get to curse more, because I think they do in general.
Sometimes I'll pattern a character's speech off of someone I know. I listen to how people speak, I usually don't talk a lot in public, or if I'm in a group I tend to defer to someone else to tell a story. Good listening skills. I should put that on my resume. But I'll think about a scene for a while, and play it out in my head, and the best dialogue gets in. I had to learn how to cut down to what's necessary, because I could probably have a pair of characters talk for 20 pages if I didn't, and I'd never finish anything, so there's certain rules I keep for how much chatting can go on.

Comics and C

ommunity/Competition

SEQUART: Do you have a sense of community within comics? Is it particular to your generation--do you feel yourself to be part of a specific group with its own particular mindset?

REED: To the extent that there can be a community in a competitive marketplace, yes. There is a competitive part underneath it all, if there weren't everyone would be handing out their books to each person who walked by, for free. I think the younger cartoonists have an easier time going up to each other and talking about stuff, they haven't had time to get that bitter yet, so you don't really see that Comics Journal board, all-out bickering. I see my group as the school of comics centered on narrative and storytelling rather than art books. Less KRAMER'S ERGOT, more Alex Robinson tomes.

SEQUART: Do you enjoy the more abstract, KRAMER'S-style comics? What creators' work do you either actively dislike or just not understand their appeal?

REED: I kinda totally hate KRAMER'S. I think they're pretentious and kinda drug-fueled nonsense. Not all of the stuff in there, but I bought #4 at SPX when it came out, and I remember it was largely unreadable. Part of it is that certain types of pages that are difficult to read, because the flow of the comics is so contorted that I get a headache. Gary Panter, Ron Rege sometimes, Marc Bell especially. One time I was in Jim Hanley's buying one of Kevin Huzinega's first OR ELSE books, and the guy behind the counter saw me getting it and was like, "You should totally read Anders Nilsen's BIG QUESTIONS. It's so much better." (Which is a COMPLETELY asinine thing to be saying if you work at Hanley's, I don't think Nilsen & Huzinega are all that comparable.) And I politely explained that I preferred OR ELSE, avoiding confrontation, and walked outside and let loose with a 5 minute what the fuck rant with my boyfriend, who also thought it was bizarre. Sometimes stuff like that will happen where I'm sure if I was a guy I wouldn't have to answer.

SEQUART: What do you think of MOME (Fantagraphics' new flagship anthology)? Its goal was to present comics that were driven more by narrative than something like KRAMER'S, and I'm interested if you think they succeeded in this goal.

REED: It's kinda hifalutin'. I mainly bought it because John Pham was in it, with the bonus of Paul Hornschemeier (the SEQUENTIAL guy), and I liked Gabrielle Bell's pieces, but a lot of the others didn't do it for me. I'd like it to take itself a little less serious than it does.

SEQUART: What role have APE/MOCCA/SPX played in your interest in comics and becoming an artist, if any?

REED: They've kept me working, without them I'd never get anything done. Socially, they've also been great because I met my boyfriend at SPX, and they put me in touch with other artists and writers, and give me a chance to see what else people are working on. And there's generally some kind of shenanigans going on after hours there that I don't have in my daily life, so they're a nice break from reality. It's also good to see other people doing the same thing with their free time, whereas if I weren't going to these, I probably wouldn't know anyone else making comics. Not nearly as many, anyway.

SEQUART: You are still relatively new to comics--what are your long-term goals? Do you see yourself in comics indefinitely?

REED: My goals are to draw until my hands give out (I have arthritis, or I'm pretty sure of this without having a doctor confirm it) at which point I will hopefully be able to convince some other sucker to draw for me. Before this, there's a long story I'd like to finish on my own, ideally to critical acclaim and a bunch of awards 'n junk. It's comics or suicide.

Syracuse, CATFIGHT, PALE FIRE and Feminism

SEQUART: Let's talk about some of your past projects of note. How did you get the money from the Syracuse student union to publish BERSERKER? Describe the experience of putting together three issues of an anthology with fairly ambitious content and production values.

REED: The short answer is that I exploited racism, but it's a funny story:
SU has a daily newspaper that's "independent" from the school, in that they're not directly funded by the school, though they're heavily supported by ads from SU departments. This is the Daily Orange. They had a daily comics page, and I started doing a strip for it in my junior year. Most of the strips were notoriously bad, though this is also where the PERRY BIBLE FELLOWSHIP & REHABILITATING MR WIGGLES came from, so there were actually people with talent there. (Neil [Swaab]s' stuff is at: http://neilswaab.com/) And actually, Laura [Tallardy] did a comic in there too, but after I left, so I never saw it.

So, one night they called a meeting, and they had everyone sign these stupid contracts because someone did a comic that caused them to lose the study abroad program advertising, it mentioned abortion or something. It's was like, $10k, so they were putting all these restrictions on us, and it was stupid. So at that meeting, I met Matt Finley, who wrote this crazy comic that I forget the name of, but was bizarre & hilarious. And the next day, they ran this comic that had a character robbing a place with a ski mask, and it was done in a stickman style, and then it got accused of being racist & using blackface. So I ran into Matt after that, and we got talking & hit it off, and we decided to try and get funding for a magazine, and we worked all the right angles, like we'd have more time to try and prevent offensive stuff from being in, which we totally didn't do.

The first issue we let the guys who did the blackface strip in to redeem themselves, and then also Nick [Gurewitch] did this one page thing with a snake in a woman's vagina that was kinda gross, which lost him some friends apparently. But when we went to the funding meeting, the student government gave us a standing ovation! And Matt and I were amazed we pulled it off! It was at a point after they had just had a recession, because there was some really questionable spending by one year's gov't. And they gave us like $5k to do it, and other people doing kinda more legitimate things were complaining about stuff they'd had cut from their budget.

But Syracuse had this amazing pool of talent. I think because there's not a lot to do other than drink and go to this obscenely huge mall, because most of the time it's really too cold to do anything and you're in this arctic hell hole, so if you're not into shopping or boozing (though a lot of people there are) or remotely arty, you end up spending a lot more time working. A lot of the best people doing comics weren't submitting to the DO because it was generally regarded to be really terrible crap. (There was a strip that was titled "Ass, Craps?" with that punctuation.) So we found them through the people we knew in the art school, Nick G & Albert Birney (who collaborated with Nick & some other people & is now in the Spinto Band, who you should check out because they're really good), and this kid Jon Moses who lived on the floor Matt RA'd.

And they were just crazy talented, so we had our weird little Art Comics mag, and we were all just experimenting with different stuff & trying to fill pages fast enough to get out issues. That tended to be really difficult, because Nick & Albert were in charge of the DO comics page when we finally had the cash to do BERZERKER my senior year, so they were doing a political/comment cartoon every day & layout & illustrations for the paper. And they were doing like all of it. I doubt that they even have any of that art. You could probably go to the DO office in the middle of the day, and dig through some piles of papers and walk out with a ton of their drawings, and even PBF originals.

So they were busy, and no matter how long you gave anyone to do something, they'd sit on their hands, and then a week after everything was due you could then start to say, "Guys, we really need it soon." And then a couple days later you'd actually get it. So we learned to plan for overshooting our deadline, and just made them really short, like 3 weeks, to make up for all the time we knew it'd take to actually get everything.

SEQUART: What was it like to work with and publish Nick Gurewitch?

REED: Working with Nick is like going to the dentist for some serious work- you understand that you need to do this and that afterwards you'll feel better and there will be something good coming from it, but the actual process when you can smell & taste the dentist grinding your teeth away is really terrible, even under heavy sedation. Nick is not a bad guy, just very difficult to work with at times. Though he's probably someone you should interview...

SEQUART: Talk about your experience doing a daily strip for your student newspaper. How did this help your development as an artist? How widely read was your strip?

REED: I think there was probably a distribution of 10,000 or so, it might be as high as 15,000, but probably not much more than that. Mainly, the paper was a method of distributing crossword puzzles to students so they didn't have to pay attention in class. People got angry when full color comic day happened, and they ran two pages of comics but they didn't run crosswords. They actually wrote letters complaining. So, as to how many people actually read them... I can't really say. Two or three people actually wrote to me saying they liked my comic, and my friends occasionally saw them hanging on doors (I used to mainly make fun of drunks, which a lot of strips did, but I guess I did it better?)

It helped to have a regular deadline (that I totally broke all the time, which is good in college when you actually have some work to do and it's not a hugely important thing that people really depend on.) and through doing the strip twice a week I had to learn to draw something the same from one panel to the next, so I kinda developed from this boxy, angular style where it was very easy to make stuff look the same again & again, which later morphed into a more curvy one that came more naturally after I practiced drawing a lot. But it was tough to draw a 3 or four panel strip, and when I started up again my senior year (after Nick & Albert took over as art editor) & did "Zombie Hunters In Space" I played around more within the space limits, to the point that you almost cannot read the words, they're so packed in the panels.

SEQUART: You seem interested in episodic, relationship-oriented stories. SENSELESS VIOLENCE was an early example of this. CATFIGHT was the first long-form story you finished. What do you think of this work now? How did you develop the story and characters--was this an adaptation of your experiences or mostly fictional?

REED: I tend to forget every comic I've done before CATFIGHT. They're just not as good, and it's not worth it for me to keep printing them up, so I've put them in a box and maybe I'll look at them when I move out. Maybe.

If I didn't do them in episodes, I'd never finish, because I would be so overwhelmed, I'd never start. I think I wrote about that though... CATFIGHT I love, it was just the right mix of action-story and femaleness. It's not out of any actual experiences, but more is a sense of me and my friends when we were in high school. None of us actually dated anyone then, and the area I grew up in isn't conservative in a religious way or anything like that, it's just really close-minded, and there are a lot of wealthy people, (I mentioned the Rev Run thing? It's all mansions and even modest houses in the area now go for like $7 or 800k and then torn down for McMansions, I'm sure you're familiar with the crazy high price of housing these days, but it's extra obscene in this part.) We weren't poor by any means, but our parents had grown up poor in the city (mine were from Newark which is still a terrible area, though it went into decline in the sixties with the riots and stuff) and busted their asses to get out into the suburbs and into comfortable jobs, my dad tortures himself to this day in as an comptroller, but his dad was a teamster loading trucks, and my dad did that for a few summers as a kid.

And so growing up in my area was really difficult, because my parents weren't raised like people from families that have always had money, they just didn't have that kind of mentality. My closest friends at the end of high school and I were really conscious of things that others didn't seem to notice, like we noticed that it was really weird that a lot of the kids in my grade were just given these brand new SUVs or sports cars, and never had to work to put gas in them or anything. And they were just total assholes about that, very spoiled. So kind of as a result of growing up in this area, I've developed a healthy socialistic/anarchistic world view, which is to kind of spit on the rich. (Working lowly service jobs also helps.) Not literally, but it certainly helps to be in the comics world with a disdain for great material wealth.

And my friends had this attitude too, (at least my three closest friends, who I based CATFIGHT around) and we weirdly gravitated to each other, and other people thought we were weird because we'd buy clothes from thrift shops and wouldn't spend hours trying to be pretty and attract the assholes in our school that we hated. We'd go hang out at the CD store and dig through the racks there and copy stuff for each other, and we were marginally involved in school activities. I edited part of my school paper and took over the literary magazine and basically made everyone who joined after me take these really strict editorial policies, and I wrote short stories and columns for both. My friend Morgan played sports and ran track. But we were kinda always separate from the herd. (The other two... didn't really do anything. They joined us occasionally on projects, but not often.)

The day after Columbine (this happened when I was a senior, towards the end of the year) they made our gym classes divide by grade and go into sort of therapy groups. My friend Justin, who Don is based on, was in my class and we sat next to each other, and all these girls were getting up to talk and saying, "I just feel so *sob*... confused ... and scared *sob* and anxious." Justin and I were trying not to burst out laughing at them, because we figured we were probably the kids at the top of the school's list of who were most likely to freak out. And we had really just stopped caring about what anybody said to us, because we'd gotten into college and were ready to leave. But I was still trying not to burst out with "Well maybe if you weren't all such BITCHES you wouldn't have to worry about getting shot in your empty head!"

So in CATFIGHT, it's not strictly autobiographic, in the sense that none of that really happened. But it's very much what I experienced at the time, a lot of alienation and grief from kids that thought they were hot shit, and looking for solace in the CD bins in my favorite record store. And some things that I wish had happened, especially where people taken down a peg. And when I did have fights with my friends, though this was later on after we'd gone to college, it was devastating. Huge, end of the world feelings.

The actual inspiration point was from a film class at Syracuse. I took an action film class one semester with a professor I loved, my friends & I tracked down a copy of the softcore porn he wrote that's kinda a rip off of Vertigo & got him to autograph it, and then he started to list it as "a cult favorite" in his biography in his books. But we saw Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and then Coffy with Pam Grier, and then the week after that, we watched Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs with Dustin Hoffman. And in Straw Dogs, Hoffman is pitted against these Scottish villagers who raped his wife and are trying to kill this retarded guy he's hiding in his house, and the guys are laborers and Hoffman is a mathematician, and he's obviously outclassed as a fighter, but he ends up brutally killing most of them through these backhanded tactics, like scalding them with hot water, and he takes this huge "man-trap" which is this bear-trap thing with spikes, but intended for people, and slams it into this dude and totally kills him. (I'm listening to the soundtrack for "Ravenous" while I'm writing this, it's fantastically tense & appropriate.)

And there's something really calculating and evil about him at that point that made me think "Dustin Hoffman fights like a woman." And having seen Faster Pussycat's fighting, & Coffy's fights which are brutal (hiding razor blades in her hair) it inspired me to do something based on how girls fight, and the whole rest of CATFIGHT is basically to give the fight 80 pages in all the fury and wrath it deserves. And then I needed an appropriate ending...

SEQUART: PALE FIRE is almost a distillation of your earlier work. The same themes apply; not simply relationships, but clearly people just now either choosing or having the opportunity to choose to enter into relationships, and the complications this causes. At the same time, you chose to add a level of dramatic tension: in CATFIGHT, it's the fistfight between two of the leads over a misunderstanding; and in PALE FIRE, it's the underlying tension of wondering whether the lead's intended romantic interest really is dangerous. When developing your stories, how important was it to add this level of tension/conflict?

REED: Conflict is everything. So there's another rule, that at some point in the story, there needs to be some kind of explosion. Not necessarily that something needs to literally blow up, but something in the story needs to. Everything stems from the tension, I build the rest of the story around it. I can't stand stories where people just sit around talking and crying. Or yelling, even worse. It's boring. If all that goes on is some yelling, I can do that at home on my own. Yelling doesn't resolve anything. When stuff 'splodes, then you have something. This is why Wes Anderson makes such good movies- he's got the internal character conflict, but he also blows things up & drives cars into buildings. (Wes Anderson goes into the influences list.)

SEQUART: Back to romance/relationship stories: what drew you to concentrate on this kind of story as opposed to something else?

REED: Most of the romance/relationship movies out there are about this kind of stupid, half crazed woman all concerned with having a boyfriend or being in love more than the dude she's actually with, and they just seem so retarded. Most women's roles are terrible, they're like hollow shells that only serve to help further the male character's story, and that's not even just in romance movies, that's in most movies. And they're shallow and annoying, and make me want to throw things at the screen.

Books aren't so bad, namely because a lot of women write, although chick lit probably suffers from this sorta thing but I don't read that so I couldn't say for sure. But comics really have a huge problem with female characterizations, and half the time they're like hanging out in the background making pies or tied to a chair waiting to be rescued. And real women actually do things and talk about music and movies and books and not just men, and bitch about each other and how they hate people. And you don't see a lot of that. There's a lot of "angel of the stairs/house" and "sexy bad girl," (in film, there's the feminist term "to be looked at-ness" that kinda sums this up) and not a lot of actual people. So I write the kind of roles that I want to see elsewhere, and write stories that could ostensibly happen, even if they don't actually.

SEQUART: Are you mostly talking about superhero comics here, or indy comics as well? Are there particular indy comics you're thinking of?

REED: No, superhero stuff is more widely acknowledged, because that's where the worst of it is. Horror-type stuff has a lot of it too. Indy comics has it and manages to think that they don't. There are many dubious female characters out there, and even really good writers will turn them out occasionally . It's a problem you generally don't see in female written comics, unless they're poorly written, because they know what they're talking about, and you don't see as much with guys who are married or have good relationships with women, because they live with women and spend time with them and even if they don't realize it, they gain some understanding of them. You see it a lot in emo/ lonely boy comics, where guys pine about girls a lot and aren't able to sustain relationships with any of them, and this is maybe not so much in the dudes that are getting published as in minis people hand out at cons.

SEQUART: Do you see your writing as explicitly feminist?

REED: I have kind of a strained relationship with feminism. I can't not be a feminist, I'm a woman. But there's so many different strains of feminism with the blanket term, and pretty much each strain conflicts with every other, so basically each woman has to decide her politics for herself. So "feminist" is really the most offensive f-word to some people. When I was young, I believed in all the equality things that feminism promotes, but I always defended myself with "But I'm not one of those (god forbid) *feminists.*" (Of course, this was the generation after the 70's feminists, after the backlash, so growing up in the 80's probably warped me in that area.)

At some point when I was in college, this changed. This is in part because the "English" department at Syracuse is actually called "English Textual Studies," which is not so much what you do in high school English classes, and writing about authors and stuff, as going into things on a theoretical level. We approached texts (not always books, a lot of film students end up double majoring in English because there were so many classes devoted to film within the ETS department) under the lens of Marxism, feminism, postmodernism, and occasionally psychology & colonialism. (Effectively, at the end of studying there, you become totally paranoid about anyone's motivation and reasoning behind anything. There were many comparisons made to choosing the right pill in the first Matrix movie, which were pretty apt.)

There were a lot of gender studies classes within them, and highlights in my memory include trying not to laugh out loud at a room full of girls, all basically dressed the in the same mall-store clothes, loudly proclaiming that women's fashion magazines haven't influenced them in the slightest, while half my head was shaved and I was wearing used combat boots from the Army-Navy store with someone else's name written in them in permanent marker. (Not those fancy Doc Martens.)

Another fun time was when we watched a short film about a woman who performed as a bearded lady in the circus, with a beard, and everyone got grossed out when they saw that she also had armpit hair. It was kind of a depressing place to discuss feminism, but I felt the need to get on the other side of the feminist fence, as these other girls were also loudly proclaiming they weren't *feminist.* It's still a struggle to figure out where I am politically. I'm more conservative in some areas, and really way liberal in others, but just enough of a blend to be frustrated with most other people. Somewhere in the middle.

As for my writing, I try to feature very independent, strong, ornery women, and make them as smart as their place in the story warrants. (That is not always very smart.) CATFIGHT I think is full of fun feminist things, because on the one hand you have the main girls bonding together very tightly for support, but then they go and beat the hell out of each other over a guy. And then every other girl in the book is almost out to get them, like in the fight in the first part with Andrea & Shell, really over nothing. I'd like to think I create good role models for younger girls who read my comics, and that good lessons can be taken away from them. That might not be the case... but that's what I hope I do.

Friends of Lulu, the Problem with Comics Stores, and What's Upcoming

SEQUART: Let's talk about current and future projects. You are collaborating with artist Laura Tallardy on COPYKAT, published by Otazine comics. What is your general approach to collaborations? What is it like working with Tallardy? How did this gig come about, and do you feel odd writing manga given that your output hasn't really resembled that sort of storytelling to date?

REED: I actually responded to the only good ad I ever saw on Craigslist & sent Laura a link to my website, and she picked me out of whoever responded. She had the deal to do the book, but didn't want to write it, so she hired me, and it's at the printer now, and we're waiting to see what happens to see if we get to keep doing it. (which would be awesome.) I don't generally collaborate on stuff, every time I try it ends up with me owing people a script, or them not being able to do the art and nothing gets done. So this is kinda new.

We talked about what we wanted to do in terms of the story, (Laura lives in Brooklyn, so it's easy to meet up with her) and then I wrote the script & did page breakdowns/layouts, and then Laura cut a bit and rewrote some parts, mostly to make it quicker to finish. We've only done the one this way, and we kinda had to rush to get it done in a month, so I dunno if it'll go the same way next time, but it's been good. It was a huge adjustment to see how someone else would translate my script. It's kinda funny, at first when I got the roughs back, I was all, Crap, this is MANGA! (Because I'm not actually a fan of manga. I kinda hate it.) And it seemed really different from what I'd written. And then I kinda came to my senses and realized that I was doing work for a manga publisher, and reread it, and I realized that it was a decent manga-style comic, and will probably do pretty well. Laura has a good sense of how to draw manga, and she's a good illustrator, and I like how it's turned out. It was odd at first, but not anymore.

SEQUART: What else do you have going on in terms of the future?
REED: Other stuff I have going on:

1) the Lulu book, which is a headache sometimes and at others (when I actually get comics back) really cool.

2) I'm supposed to do a small book with John Marr of MURDER CAN BE FUN, about people falling in wells for next year's APE.

3) there's a piece coming out in [AdHouse Book's] PROJECT: ROMANTIC about a girl & a bear.

4) the next mini I'll get done is for SPX, and it's called CROSS COUNTRY. It's about a guy stuck in a car with his jackass boss, for an entire summer, on a company sponsored marketing road trip.
5) there's been a story I've been working on since before CATFIGHT, that I don't know when I'll actually start it or finish it, because I think it'll be pretty long, but it's a romance about how people do really stupid things in their relationships, and how histories keep affecting futures. I have done like a thousand sketches for this, and there's about ten pages written that I haven't touched in months. So it keeps getting put on the back burner while I work on shorter stuff.

SEQUART: What is the nature of the Friends of Lulu anthology? Why is it important that it be all-women? Why and how you put the theme together? What are your thoughts on the creators involved?

REED: There's a lot of weirdness going on in regards to the FOL, a lot of people have strained relationships and stupidness over what should really be an easy decision. Of course women should read and make comics. If you love comics, and you aspire to love women, you should want women to read comics, because it makes it that much easier to approach a woman and talk about something you both enjoy. And there's so many unappealing aspects of comics to women.

The stores, for example, are not cute and trendy and don't make women feel comfortable. (In general, there are some spectacular exceptions to the rule.) For the first two years I went into comic stores, I had to be accompanied by a boyfriend or another male friend, and if it was my boyfriend I didn't let go of his hand or move more than three feet from him. I was hugely intimidated by these stores that were totally off-putting, and it took me a while to even realize that I felt like that. The world was dangerous enough that I didn't need to go looking for trouble in comic shops alone. Especially when you go in, and see some guy behind a counter making fun of what someone's reading, or commenting on your selection. The record store, where I was inevitably complimented on my excellent selection, or asked if I'd heard about another awesome similar band without any derisive comments about what I was paying for, was much preferable, and the boys there were usually much cuter and less spazzy, and made conversation much more easily than the laboring nerds did. This is why music nerds can get more girls. Music is sexy and easy, and guys are singing their hearts out for their ladies.

Comics are completely antithetical to this attitude. (This was 2000 or so, which was really almost a completely different market, right as things were starting to pick up for graphic novels.) Here are these places with cutouts of some bimbo with a gun and enormous juggs in the damn window, before you even walk in. People are walking out with the bags they sell porn in that you can't see through. And this is why most women don't want to go in. I think this is a part of the manga rift too, because it sells so well in chain bookstores, where women feel totally safe shopping, but not well in stores. I've seen a lot of stores that can't sell much manga, despite its "alleged" popularity.

One thing I've learned is that dudes can have their heads completely up their asses about things that women think everyone knows. I once taught a comic class to kids in the Bronx, 3rd graders, and DC sent the place some comic books, which was nice of them, but not their Cartoon Network, kid friendly books- the hero stuff with lots of violence. And the boys were excited to read them, and the girls didn't want to look at them, because 8 year old kids know that those comics are "boy's stuff." I think the best comment I got that day was that Wonder Woman "should have some self-respect and put on a tank top."

So guys take offense that women take offense to their comics, which is an attitude that I think was not exceptional back in the sixties in regards to most things, not just comics, but really has no place in today's world and/or comics market. And so we had a few goals with the anthology, and we gave it a theme to:

-help combat the FOL's image problem. (And having worked at the Lulu table a few times, I know firsthand they have one.)

-expose male readers to female talent they may have ignored, in a book that won't be threatening with "girly comics" about unicorns & periods, etc, or anti-male attitudes which make you feel bad about being a guy

-give some fantastic & overlooked ladies a print venue.

I've also been discovering a ton of overlooked women while doing this. A lot of people have given me names of people I've never heard of, so I've been checking out a lot of websites and seeing people I've passed by before. Er, the theme, which probably should have come earlier, is "The Girl's Guide to Guy Stuff." We wanted a theme to make the artists focus on their comics more, and tie the book together a little more nicely than the previous anthology had been. So far it's been great, except that we need more comics to fill the book, and that's a bit stressful...

SEQUART: What would you say specifically is Friends of Lulu's image problem?

REED: Well, we seem to get these very argumentative older guys who come up to the table and debate whether or not there's actually a problem with women in comics. It's like talking to WIMBLEDON GREEN characters. I don't even understand why they're at the same shows I am. I think there may be a touch of the "man-hating" belief flying around, but the thing I hear most about (because everyone owns up to it) is the kid-friendly stuff, where kid-friendly somehow makes it automatically woman-friendly, insinuating that women are somehow childlike. That's the one that EVERYbody says is stupid to me.

The sexual harrassment fund thing kicked up some guff too, as I heard from my friend Marion who's the new treasurer, but I don't really know because sometimes I just stay in a little bubble that things don't penetrate. But they got flack for that apparently.

SEQUART: Back to the FOL anthology, could you give some brief descriptions of who's in the book and what they're doing?

REED: Emily Flake on her & her boyfriend's record collections, Dorothy Gambrell on a man who ate a lot of cheese, Abby Denson's friend who went to a Clash/Sex Pistols/Siouxie show and lost things, Tatianna Gill's neighbor, Liz Baillie's biography of jazz anomaly Billy Tipton, Lark Pien's video game additction, con survival guides for women, lady chickens turned off by their burping chicken boyfriends, secrets of hunting, boobs, living with and smelling like boys, childhood toys and why The Terminator is the best love movie ever. That's the quick version.

sequart #203: Five artists to seek out at SPX 2008

There are over a hundred cartoonists I'm interested in seeing at SPX this upcoming weekend (October 4th and 5th). Many of them publish with companies like Fantagraphics, Sparkplug, Drawn & Quarterly, NBM, etc. I'd like to identify six self-publishers worthy of greater recognition who will be attending the show. I've reviewed many of their comics (mostly mini-comics) over the years, and this group of artists represents a fairly wide range of styles and tastes.

1. Leslie Stein. The creator of the Xeric Grant-winning YEAH IT IS is now creating my favorite minicomics series, EYE OF THE MAJESTIC CREATURE. The current issue is up for an Ignatz Award for Outstanding Series, and it's well-deserved. There's a manic quality to her drawing, and the newsprint she publishes her comics on adds to the gritty, visceral feel of the series. Snap up every issue of this bit of autobiographical surrealism. She'll be at table W49b.

2. Juliacks. Her SWELL is up for a Best Minicomic Ignatz, and I thought it was the best minicomic released to date in 2008. Her integration of text and image is ambitious and unusual, while her page design is truly innovative. She's one of many multimedia artists now working in comics, bringing a unique voice to the medium. Find her at table W40.

3. Will Dinski. I've been reviewing his minis for quite a long time, and his progression as an artist has been remarkable. His recent comics ERRAND SERVICE and BEAUTIFUL, COOL AND IRREPLACEABLE were two of the best minis of 2008. There's a tartness to his wit, a painful cynicism, that makes the twists in his comics all the more painful. He'll be at table D3.

4. Molly Lawless. Lawless's comics are crisp and witty. She writes about topics not often seen in comics, like her experiences as a marathon runner or major league baseball's least glamorous moments (especially in the deadball era). Her recent collection INFANDUM! AD INFINITUM is a great place to start with her work. She'll be at table D11a.

5. Jesse Reklaw. Reklaw's been around so long (having created SLOW WAVE as a weekly syndicated strip for a number of years) that I think he's become underappreciated and taken for granted. As such, I was happy to see SLOW WAVE nominated for a Best Online Comic Ignatz award. While SLOW WAVE continues to be good fun, his best work has come in the form of some remarkable minicomics. COUCH TAG #2 and #3 were simply stunning autobiographical works given distance through the use of certain strategies. BLUEFUZZ, up for an Ignatz for best minicomic, was named minicomics of the year for 2007 by Tom Spurgeon of the Comics Reporter. He can be found at table G11 and will have copies of his new SLOW WAVE collection, THE NIGHT OF YOUR LIFE.

I could very easily come up with several more lists of five artists to seek out. Here's a partial list of some more artists to consider: Katie Skelly, everyone at the Sundays anthology and One Percent Press tables (all former CCS students), everyone at the Closed Caption Comics table, everyone at the tables for Partyka, Fantagraphics, D&Q, Sparkplug, Secret Acres, Bodega Distribution, PictureBox, Buenaventura Press & Tugboat Press, the mighty table featuring Julia Wertz, Sarah Glidden, Laura Park & Shannon O'Leary, the table with MK Reed, Robin Enrico & Liz Baillie, John Kerschbaum, Kelli Nelson, Ed Piskor, Joey Sayers, Raina Telgemeier, Marion Vitus, Rob Ullman, Drew Weing and Eleanor Davis....and more still that I'm forgetting.

Sequart Reprints: SPX 2006

Introduction

I've written extensively about the MOCCA festival for this website, but the event that truly changed the course of how I think about comics was the Small Press Expo, or SPX. It opened my eyes to the world of mini-comics and was a significant inspiration in my decision to write about comics. Many a deal has been made at this con; Top Shelf Productions was essentially born out of SPX. It is not uncommon for young artists to grow up with the show, from attendees to tabling to becoming significant forces in the alt-comics world. From 1998 to 2005 (with the exception of 2001, when the show was cancelled in the wake of 9/11), SPX took place at a Holiday Inn in Bethesda, Maryland. The hotel was small and became increasingly run-down over the years, but its placement in an area jam-packed with restaurants, bars and shops made it an ideal location for the show. Everything was ideal except the venue itself.

The fact is, SPX really outgrew its old space several years ago. Demand for tables always outstripped supply. The multi-room setup was unwieldy and many artists felt like they were exiled in smaller rooms. A very small group of dedicated volunteers runs the show and it was getting increasingly difficult to meet the needs of SPX as it grew in popularity. SPX almost became a part of the Baltimore Comics Con back in 2002, an announcement that was not exactly met with cheers by most in the small press scene. While the Baltimore Con is a comics-oriented event for the most part, many felt that its mainstream nature would endanger SPX's unique identity.

The nature of that identity has shifted somewhat as alt-comics themselves have evolved in the past decade. When I first started attending SPX, the industry as a whole was in bad shape. There was talk of the total collapse of mainstream comics and thus direct-market stores. Digital comics were in their earliest, crudest form. The concept of a bookstore market was laughable, as the promise shown by MAUS had dissipated for an art form not quite ready for that level of exposure and mass distribution. Despite that, SPX was an oasis of sorts, as the artists found an audience and vice-versa. Because no one was worried about making money, it was a sort of elaborate but devoted hobby for all involved. The sheer love of comics was palpable, especially in the hand-made and hand-xeroxed minicomics that were such a revelation to me.



Venues, Tribes, And A New Room


Scott McCloud refers to SPX as a "gathering of the tribes" and this is an accurate description. Despite the fact that it's all about comics, there are always groups of creators that are fairly easy to identify and categorize. There are those artists whose work is difficult to distinguish from mainstream comics. These tend to fall into the camps of horror, fantasy or (less often) super-heroes. While the names of these creators at SPX have changed over the years, their presence has been a constant. Of course, this con is largely focused on art comics, either from larger publishers like Fantagraphics or Drawn & Quarterly or a bevy of mini-comics creators whose works are often designed to function as much as art objects as they are narratives. Then there's what's often called "new mainstream" comics--general interest fiction, slice of life, etc. Top Shelf's output largely tends to be of this sort, with companies like Oni producing even frothier types of stories. The newest group to join the proceedings is that of the ever-proliferating web comics artists. They really are a breed apart from the others, even if they share similar interests. I've noted before that a lot of up-and-coming artists tend to flock together for support geographically, but the web comics folks run in parallel groups that don't often cross over.

What this means is that the experience for the show can be radically different for both fans and creators, depending on their interests and their circles. With a bigger room and more creators tabling than ever, I found it impossible to see everything and everyone I had come to see, much less have time (and space) for other discoveries. That was especially true since I was only able to attend Saturday's show.

The one positive of the old SPX venue was that the cartoonists staying there basically took over the joint at night, and the result was a rowdy bit of camaraderie. The Marriott felt a lot more like where the grown-ups were hanging out, and everyone needed to be on their best behavior. Of course, the contrast in the other events taking place (a bar mitzvah that some SPX folks crashed, a Japanese wedding) had a way of making the proceedings all the more strange. Nostalgia aside, there were a number of ways in which the new venue was an improvement. The amenities were better, there was more space to breathe, and best of all, every artist was displaying in the same room. After many years of artists being segregated into different rooms, with many feeling exiled in the smaller ones, there was at last equality for all.

Or was there? Some of the artists stuck in the far corners grumbled a bit about their placement. Kim Thompson, co-publisher of Fantagraphics, was one of the publishers in a corner, and he thought that they were placed there because their audience would come looking for them. This made a degree of sense, as Oni was in the opposite corner and both seemed to do well. The general sense at the show was that Friday was extremely slow but that starting at noon on Saturday, there was shoulder-to-shoulder traffic and folks were in a mood to buy.

Some were a bit overwhelmed by the size and appearance of the room (the colors were garish to the point of trippiness), and some actually missed the more modular venue at the Holiday Inn, but overall most everyone seemed please with the change. Co-executive director Karon Flage was optimistic on Saturday morning about the change, and the throng of comics fans in attendance certainly bore her out. One of the reasons why the SPX steering committee was considering a move to Baltimore several years ago was a lack of other suitable venues. Finding someplace new was imperative, given that the Holiday Inn was undergoing renovations. This particular Marriott didn't even exist when the steering committee was looking for a new site several years back, and it's a nice compromise. While its location (in North Bethesda) is nowhere near as hip as the old neighborhood and some wished the new digs could simply be plopped down in Bethesda proper, it was certainly the best solution available.

One thing I noticed was extensive publicity for the show this year. There was a feature in the Washington Post and a TV ad, and both paid off. The fact that the guest of honor was the great Jules Feiffer had to help bring in non-comics readers who were familiar with his extensive career.


Tidbits

** I ran into Gina Gagliano of First Second Books. Look for lots more Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim in 2007. Sfar will team up again with Emmanuel Guibert, this time with Sfar writing and Guibert doing the art.

** The monstrous bounty from Fantagraphics continues unabated. They debuted Matthias Lehmann's HWY 115, a couple of new Ignatz books (look for a long profile on them soon), Ben Catmull's MONSTER PARADE, among other things. Kim Thompson spoke excitedly about the upcoming Popeye collection looking especially gorgeous, with cream-colored pages and an intricate cover.

** Paul Hornschemeier noted that THE THREE PARADOXES, his long-awaited new book, was finally done. It'll be out in 2007, and its release should allow longer chapters of "Life With Mister Dangerous" in MOME. Whatever he does next, it likely won't be as drawn-out a process as THE THREE PARADOXES.

** Dylan Williams of Sparkplug Comic Books had an ashcan of WINDY CORNER magazine from Austin English that looked beautiful. Look for an interview with Austin here soon.

** Gabrielle Bell, whose LUCKY debuted and sold out at Drawn & Quarterly's table, was passing out copies of her fantastic new mini, MY AFFLICTION. It's a return to her magical realist style of her earlier days.

** At the door, copies of Kevin Huizenga's HOW TO START THINKING ABOUT LEARNING TO DRAW COMICS were given away for free. This is the clever brochure that he designed for the Center for Cartoon Studies, who had a booth at the show as well, featuring comics from their current students.

** The always-delightful Josh Neufeld was manning the Alternative Comics booth, which debuted his THE VAGABONDS #2. I reviewed the "#1.5" issue of this book for MOCCA last year, and while the new issue reprints much of that material, the whole package looks gorgeous and there's plenty of new stories in there as well. Alternative was also debuting the new issue of the Meathaus anthology (#8, "Head Games") and Dash Shaw's THE MOTHER'S MOUTH. It was a bit odd not to see Jeff Mason there, the company's publisher. At its height, he had a huge table for Alternative and a slew of new releases, but he's scaled back a bit in recent years.

** I caught up with Megan Kelso, whose THE SQUIRREL MOTHER was one of my favorite books of the year. Her young daughter was at the show, taking a few turns around the room with her husband. Megan is actually done with the pencils for her most ambitious project yet, ARTICHOKE TALES. They were actually finished last year, but she took some time off to promote her new book and just be a mom. The completed product should hopefully be released sometime next year.



The Panels



SPX's programming has not always been a strength of the show. When it used to be held in conjunction with ICAF (International Comics Arts Festival), that latter event not only added an academic dimension to the proceedings, it also led to some spectacular guests and fascinating panels. With the two events now separate, last year's programming was "strictly perfunctory", as one observer labeled it. There have been many years where the programming felt like an afterthought, put together at the last minute. There was always a guest of honor of note (frequently someone a bit more mainstream, like Frank Miller or Neil Gaiman), but the daily programming was often quite thin.

For 2006, the task of running the programming track was given to Bill Kartalopoulos, editor of Indy magazine (http://www.indyworld.com/indy/). There was a nice mix of more traditional single-author spotlights with more focused roundtable discussion, with every artist involved worthy of the scrutiny. Putting together Friday was easy, considering that it was a no-brainer to feature Jules Feiffer and Tony Millionaire, two of comics' best raconteurs. What took more skill was designing Saturday's programming track.

I can honestly say that I wanted to attend each and every panel on Saturday. Of the ten panels, I was only able to attend two in their entirety. I missed Craig Yoe's multimedia ARF lecture, the Maryland stop on Scott McCloud's 50-State Tour for MAKING COMICS, his newest book on theory, and the focus on Brian Chippendale. His NINJA was the biggest buzz book of the con, collecting many pages of his complicated and intricate crazy adventure stories. I missed a workshop from Robyn Chapman of the Center for Cartoon Studies, a panel on political cartooning featuring the ever-controversial Ted Rall and the always-hilarious Tim Kreider, and panels on the comics canon and writing one's first graphic novel. I did catch a bit of a panel on how to draw thinking with three favorites (Gabrielle Bell, Anders Nilsen and Kevin Huizenga), but was too exhausted to take notes. Attending just one day of the show made it hard for me to explore the big room and take in every panel I wanted to see.

The first panel I attended was "Ways of Drawing", featuring Frank Santoro, Megan Kelso, Ben Catmull, Onsmith and John Hankiewicz. There was some spirited debate on the act of making marks on paper, its relationship to narrative (if any) and one's control over the process as an artist. On the latter topic, the outspoken Santoro (currently collaborating on a series with Ben Jones for Picturebox, the most art-for-art's-sake of all comics companies) noted that when working on someone else's script, he felt an enormous loss of control, that he was trying to chisel something out of stone.

Kelso referred to herself as a "cartoonist who can't draw", that she would have images that she simply couldn't translate on paper to her satisfaction. When moderator Austin English suggested that she had refined her style, Kelso replied that it was more a matter of lowering her own expectations, that she had given up trying to draw that comic with characters suspended over the Grand Canyon. Gag cartoon artist Onsmith (a former student of Ivan Brunetti's) talked about the "math equation" process of writing a gag, that one had to measure certain elements as to whether they made a gag funnier: backgrounds, single lines, solid blacks, etc.

Hankiewicz's comments added a lot of insight into his work, which can sometimes be opaque to those searching for a conventional narrative. He noted that early in his career, he often felt that he didn't have a lot of control over his draftsmanship, but his mistakes led to "happy surprises". The process forced him to improvise and keeps drawing and narrative fresh. Kelso chimed and said that there's a difference between happy accidents and an artist consciously trying to pull of a style but failing--a reader can spot the difference and loses trust in the latter artist. Hankiewicz went on to say that a true "drawer" has humility and recognizes their mistakes. Catmull agreed and thought that it was important that an artist shouldn't be trapped by a style, that they should experiment as much as possible. Going in as many different directions and not being afraid to screw up a style are both important things to do for any artist.

The artists debated narrative vs mark-making at length. Santoro thought that too many comics were conservative and boring in that the images were slaves to the narrative and over-rendered. He noted that Diamond recently rejected one of his comics and actually told him how he should have drawn it. Others pointed out the the KRAMER'S ERGOT phenomenon is making a lot of people give alternative styles of making comics greater credence.

Kelso came down more on the narrative side of the equation, but noted that something she gave a lot of thought to was finding ways of making narratives more visually stimulating. She reasoned that if she was bored drawing a particular sequence (even if the narrative demanded it), then the reader might be bored looking at it. As a result, she's tried to find other visual solutions to work out particular sequences. She's also used a method of visualizing her stories more extensively before actually sitting down to draw, which has led to less aggravation in terms of corrections on the page, a lessening of her "fear of drawing".

Hankiewicz spoke about his approach in making comics. For him, creating a story is a matter of feel. The decision to use certain lines, tones or crosshatchings depends on what emotions they invoke. In much the same way abstract expressionist paintings depicted emotions without recognizable iconographic reference points, Hankiewicz's comics depict a sort of emotional narrative. In this way, they are not unlike poetry. Hankiewicz noted that in some of his comics, the use of mundane, repetitive imagery (like a chair) was the equivalent of a rhyming device. It was up to the reader to immerse themselves in his imagery, to yield to the emotions that the panels generate.

As interesting as that panel was, the spotlight on Ivan Brunetti was downright inspiring. Brunetti is one of my five favorite cartoonists, and I've admired his transformation from misanthropic and outrageous gag-master to a more nuanced, less frantic style. In this career retrospective, he touched on his past work, the new issue of SCHIZO and what changed his drawing style, his career teaching comics, being the editor of a significant new anthology fro Yale University Press, and the relationship between depression, art and spirituality.

Brunetti understandably is uncomfortable with the first three issues of SCHIZO, which will soon be collected under the title MISERY LOVES COMEDY. He described these heavily rendered comics as his "tortured autobiographical work" made by a "depressed, angry person". These comics, made in the 90's, were drawn during a period of manic-depression. The "spikes of mania" led to these comics, followed frequently by years of depression-fueled inactivity. Perhaps the ultimate expression of this was HAW!, a book filled with "horrible, horrible cartoons". The cover image was Brunetti walking past a burning building, and the fact that it was released the day after 9/11 was just a ridiculous bit of horrific synchronicity. After SCHIZO #3, he found he was hating drawing, hating himself and didn't want to produce "another issue of bile".

To that end, he wanted to find a way to rediscover the joy that drawing used to give him as a child. He remembered that the simple act of making marks on paper used to make him happy, especially drawing cartoon mice. So he did a strip featuring mice, which helped him break through a bit. Then a strip done about the retirement of Charles Schulz, done in a simplified, "purified" style proved to be a turning point for him as an artist. The strip, titled "Whither Shermy?", was no less intricate than his earlier work but the stripped-down style made both creating and reading it a very different experience. This cartoon would prove to be the template for his next 31 strips, both visually and thematically. The intricacy of his new style was evidenced by a fascinating look at every stage of creating "Presenting Val Lewton", from the earliest doodles and dialogue to the initial thumbs and breakdowns, to a color chart to its final product.

In particular, Brunetti started to become obsessed with hermits, and artists/writers who would become recluses. Brunetti was obviously interested in them as reflections of himself--partly as a different kind of autobiography, and perhaps partly as a sort of cautionary tale. The other important strip for Brunetti at this time came about as a result of his interest in Buddhism. He did a wordless strip not originally intended for publishing that illustrated certain Buddhist doctrines. It was not meant to be funny, clever or entertaining, and this intentionality was liberating for him. One way that he felt trapped as an artist was that he was trying to entertain too much sometimes. His interest in Buddhism (though he dismisses himself as a "spiritual dilettante") led him to understand that the relationship between his spiritual state and his art was a direct one. Quite literally, it's not just drawing, it's how one sees reality, and the two have an effect on each other. The simplification and purification of his style had a direct correlation to what was happening in his own life.

Brunetti's career teaching how to make comics came about unexpectedly, but he has found the experience to be highly rewarding. A number of the discoveries he made while refining his style were put to use in the classroom. He starts each student off at the most basic level: doodling. Brunetti believes that we derive an emotional reaction from making marks on paper, that this experience is rooted in something instinctive that we translate into line drawings. So he starts his students at that point and then goes to progressively more complex forms of comics, from single panels to 4-panels to longer stories. The method will be published in the new issue of COMIC ART, so Brunetti wryly noted that while anyone could now learn from him in the article, they won't have the benefit of his "soul-crushing critiques".

Finally, Brunetti discussed AN ANTHOLOGY OF GRAPHIC FICTION, CARTOONS AND TRUE STORIES. Selected to edit it by Yale U Press, it's a "literary anthology" in the style of MCSWEENEY'S #13, "made to be read, not looked at". As such, he thought some of his choices were fairly conventional, without a lot of formal experimentation. While Houghton-Mifflin came out with their own BEST AMERICAN COMICS 2006, this book was in the works long before that volume was published. He noted that he had to add the "cartoons and true stories" tagline because some of the contributors objected, saying that they didn't write fiction. Brunetti understood their point and isn't comfortable with the entire "graphic novel" label that non-superhero/alternative comics have been saddled with by the mainstream press, but understands why it's used. All told, this was a remarkable, candid discussion of one man's journey as an artist, with a number of hilarious moments.

The Ignatz Awards and Some Final Words

This was the 10th anniversary of the Ignatz awards, the brick given to artists in various small press categories. While a jury selects the candidates, the attendees determine the winners. As a result, the award essentially becomes a popularity contest and tends to skew towards "new mainstream" books as a result. The awards ceremony was emceed by Heidi "The Beat" MacDonald, who ran a brisk and amusing show. The room was way too small for the event (held in what looked like a tiered med-school lecture hall) and as a result, the room was overflowing. I don't think the organizers had any idea that the show would be this crowded for some reason, even though the free food and plentiful drink tickets made this the con's big gathering. I won't go over the results, which can be found here and speak for themselves: http://www.spxpo.com/ignatzwinner06.shtml .

How to ultimately judge SPX 2006? Newness was certainly the way to describe the proceedings--not only the new site, but also an astonishing number of first-timers. By the same token, many long-time participants weren't there, for one reason or another. The show's heart is the main floor, and while some are put off by the sight of hundreds of cartoonists all desperate to sell their comics as the main attraction, it's heaven to me. That said, the new space has dozens more rooms that could be used to make the event more of an art festival. I'd love to see a room or two used strictly to display art--no commerce involved. The success of the programming track showed that it could be expanded even further. In particular, I'd like to see more hands-on and how-to events, like the sort that Robyn Chapman facilitated. Of course, the organizers had to be a bit conservative this year, not knowing how the new site would work or what kind of crowds it would draw. The fact that the show was such a success should hopefully embolden the steering committee and help the show evolve even further.

In the end, SPX turned out much the same way it always does. There is an exhilaration from being around the like-minded and a disappointment that it isn't an individual's Ideal Show. Each different "tribe" would always prefer the show to be more like their particular camp, but the reality is that the experience of the show is always a localized event. SPX will never quite be an arts-show, or a "new mainstream" show, or a gag-book show. Instead, we must settle for glorious chaos, appealing imperfection and an enormously satisfying muddle.