Kickstarter is an internet infant, having only been around since April 2009.  If its existence is news to you, I suggest that you read this excellent Publisher’s Weekly article from Terri Heard that illuminates some of the service’s history.  Most interesting to me was that its origins lay in the effort to keep Arrested Development on the air.  Oh, how I wish it had succeeded!

This month’s Wired Magazine also featured Kickstarter in its award-winning Start section.  It reminded me of specific Kickstarter success stories like the Calvin & Hobbes documentary Dear Mr. Watterson which is still openly accepting donations and generating mad cash.  In fact, it’s almost doubled its goal amount through Kickstarter donations.

I’ve lived a number of impulse purchase success stories, including the time I bought an orange coat I totally didn’t need but always receive compliments for wearing.  Basically, I’ve been a big fan of this model even before it existed.  The fact that it’s here now is so remarkable and unbelievable, I hardly appreciated it was real until someone I know well got involved.

Then I remembered an old friend from far away, Box Brown, had already made the Kickstarter system work for him.  Boxy makes the webcomic Bellen! and self-published minis until he won the Xeric to print his graphic novel Love is a Peculiar Type of Thing.  He recently ran a successful Kickstarter campaign that earned him $3,279 to print issues one and two of a new comic series Everything Dies.  We talked over email regarding his experience as a Kickstarter success story.

How long was your Kickstarter page active?

39 Days.

How long after posting it did you reach your goal?

Um, I’m not sure. I think had about 10 days left when I reached $2500. Maybe less. I ended up getting close to $3300. So, people just kept on donating even after I reached my goal.

Was this the first time you used Kickstarter?

Yes, it was.

How difficult has it been/will it be to get the right rewards to the right donors?

For the most part it wasn’t difficult. I thought it would be much worse. There were a few hiccups though: just a few people never got me their addresses! I thought there would be more and luckily the three people who did not send me their addresses were family friends, so I was able to hand them their copies. At least two of the envelopes completely fell apart before they reached their destination. One poor guy just received an empty envelope! But, it’s been fairly smooth sailing otherwise.

How soon after your Kickstarter closed did you receive the funds?

It takes a few weeks. It’s a few days for Amazon to set up and verify your bank account and then it takes two more weeks to transfer the funds. They transfer the cash directly to your checking account which ruled!

Did you think the percentage Kickstarter claimed for their services was worth-while?

For me it was totally worth the cost, it really gets transferred to the donors, kinda. You just have to factor that in to your goal.

How did you learn about Kickstarter?

I think the first one I saw was Jamie Tanner’s Kickstarter. I was totally blown away! But, then I saw Spike’s and the Tiny Kitten Teeth one gaining HUGE success and I thought, I think I could do that too.  Also, the Everything Dies project was really coming together in my mind and Kickstarter seemed like a good fit for it.

Everyone at the lowest levels of donation will receive books 1 or 1+2. This means you’ve pre-sold about 110 copies of your book! That’s awesome. Still, how does this compare to your usual sales? How many copies do you usually print in one run? AND how will do you intend to reach your potential audience for books 1+2 (by which I mean, people who did not participate in the Kickstarter fundraiser)?

Well, it was interesting. Having sold pre-sold all those copies was great. But, it also meant that my “base” had already bought books! These are the people who are great true fans and will usually be super happy to fork over a couple of bucks for books when they come out. So, the first week of actual sales was super slow (or at least it felt that way). Either way though unloading over 100 copies right away felt great for me. It usually takes a month or two to reach that goal (If I’m lucky!). I printed 500 copies of each book for the first run but they seem to be moving. We’ve still got the whole con season to go pretty much! I’ve been selling a few copies here and there on my online store but have been moving more books than usual at the few comic shops that carry my work. The audience for Bellen! and Everything Dies may not generally overlap unfortunately, but it seems to do much better with the analog comics crowd. I also have an ad up at The Comics Reporter.

I had a big book release party/Art Show here in Philly at a comic shop called Brave New Worlds. and books seem to be selling well. They’ve got a great set up there where the customers have to walk through the little art gallery to get the shop and I think that’s helped sales. I’ve already had to replenish their supply.

How does this compare to winning the Xeric? Is there more or less expectation, do you think? Did you ask for enough in your Kickstarter to help cover promotion of these books?

Xeric comes with more prestige for sure. There are plenty of people who will be interested in your book just because it’s a Xeric Book. Kickstarter doesn’t have that appeal. In fact, there are certain people in the business who have made Kickstarter controversial. I don’t know why. As far as promotion goes, I’ve spent money on it, but it really seems that the best promotion is free from places like The Daily Cross Hatch, other blogs and even the local media here in Philly. One thing I have spent money on is sending out promotional copies to lots of different places.

- – -

Just one statement confused me in Boxy’s response:
In fact, there are certain people in the business who have made Kickstarter controversial.

I’ve never known cartoonists to pooh-pooh free money and a built-in audience, but if there are legitimate arguments against using Kickstarter to help fund your next creative pursuit, I’d love to hear them.  Like with any self-publishing venture, if you rely on Kickstarter or your mom or your savings account or whatever, you should be committed to (and comfortable with) self-promotion or you’ll never move a single book.  Kickstarter could be a great resource for the right person, but many other cartoonists benefit from a publisher’s promotional arm or distribution ring.  You should stage a plan of attack, maybe if no one will publish your book, go for the more prestigious Xeric, failing that try for a modest Kickstarter fund, failing that rely on ol’ number one — you!

Additionally, depending on your level of success on Kickstarter, you should prepare yourself to make good on your claim.  Say someone will be written into your book?  Make sure that’s really something you’re comfortable with.  In looking at the high-rollers, it seems that the vanity tiers pay very well, but not everyone’s work lends itself to that kind of patronage.  Just remember that these supporters are investors as well, and you’ll want to make them happy with a prompt return so far as that is possible given your proposal.  The internet’s full of love, as Kickstarter has shown, but it gets pretty spiteful against those who flake on purchase orders and commissions.

I don’t know the statistics for failed comics projects, but here are some Kickstarter success stories:

One Night Stand

Everything Dies #1-2

SketchyCon: A Worldwide Conference of Dr. Sketchy’s Directors

And here’s a few comics-related projects you can still get behind:

Superhero Web Series

Dear Mr. Watterson

Johnny Recon Vol. 1 No. 2

James Kochalka + Pixeljam = Glorkian Warrior

FIXIT magazine for comics and art

Comix Journalism: Send Ted Rall Back to Afghanistan to Get the Real Story

Reading With Pictures: Getting Comics into Schools and Getting Schools into Comics

Good luck!

- Sarah Morean

I jumped at the opportunity to interview Graham Annable, upon being asked by his new publisher, Dark Horse. We haven’t heard much from Annable on the printed front since the publishing schedule at Alternative Comics slowed to what might be generously referred to as a crawl. In fact, the latest issue of the Annable-helmed Hickee anthology, published in 2008, is the most recent book listed on the publisher’s site, still carrying a big, red “NEW” graphic, atop the homepage.

After a moment, however, something occurred to me—thing is, we’ve never really heard all that much from Graham Annable in this area. He is that rare beast in the world of cartooning—an artist with a really good day job. In fact, he’s had a string of them, having worked in the animation and gaming fields for more than a decade and a half, working for Chuck Jones, LucasArts, and TellTale Games at various points in his career.

Annable is currently employed by Laika Animation—the former Will Vinton Studios, now funded by Nike founder Phil Knight. The cartoonist storyboarded the studio’s first feature—the nearly universally beloved Coraline. Nice work if you can get it, certainly, but its easy to also lament what such successes have meant for us comics readers: fewer Grickle books.

Of course Annable has been doing plenty of peripherally related work in his free time, from his YouTube Grickle Channel to his weekly TellTale strip, Dunk/Dank. Still, it’s hard not to find oneself hoping that any success that might arise from the coming release of Dark Horse’s The Book of Grickle will inspire a whole new spate of Grickle material.

As the author of the book’s introduction, Jeff Smith, will happily attest, there’s something magical in these strips—perfect little snapshots of tragicomedy, drawn deceptively simply by an artist who could clearly craft something more grandiose, given a little more time. But to do so would strip them of some of their immense charm.

You’ve got a new anthology coming out on Dark Horse.

Yeah. it’s very exciting. It’s past work and whatnot, but it’s awesome to me to get a lot of this back in circulation. The first Grickle book has been out of print for five or six years now. It will just be nice to have that available again, and I’m hoping, through Dark Horse, a whole crop of people will hear about the stuff.

So everything in here was on one of those Alternative Comics collections?

Well, most of the stuff in there is from the first two Grickle books—Grickle and Further Grickle—but there’s a bunch of pieces from self-published mini-comics that I’ve brought to conventions, over the years. And then there’s one piece that was an art piece that I did for a show in Switzerland, of all places, a couple of years ago. It was a thing where they invited each artist to do whatever they wanted with 100 Post-it notes. Because I’m more comfortable working in a linear story fashion, I just created a whole story with the 100 Post-its. I just feel like there are so many people who haven’t seen that piece, and I’m just really proud with the way it turned out, I reformatted that into one of the stories, as well.

Which one is that?

It’s called “Sea Life.”

The mermaid story.

Yeah, the one where the guy attempts suicide and then sort of has a new life under the ocean [laughs].

Now that I’m looking at it, it’s a little more obvious—it’s one of the few strips in here where the panels are perfectly square.

Yeah. And there’s a slight tone to it, because the Post-its were yellow or blue, depending on whether it was the ocean or above.

The back of the book abstract begins with something along the lines of, “Grickle is not a character or a place.” What’s the common theme in all of these strips?

Well, it’s kind of just been me just sort of following my nose on anything I’ve been inspired to write about. When I first started created the strip, I guess my goal was just creating stuff that I was interested in. I started the whole thing, because I was working as an animator for years. At the time, I’d been at LucasArts—the entertainment company, working on video games. And in the late 90s, everything turned into 3D software. Every game became three-dimensional. Up to point, I’d actually been hand-drawing stuff at LucasArts. That sort of went away from my daily work.

I really got into animation initially because I really liked drawing so much. I started doing the comic stories on my own at home, at night just to keep myself focused and working, using a pencil and paper and pen. After a while, I got a big pile of stories that I’d finished. I thought, ‘well, I’ll make them into a book.’ When I got to that point, I thought, what do I call this?’ And then it kind of hit me that when I was a kid, my dad had a million nicknames for me and my sister. Grickle was one of the ones that stuck for me. And I just thought, ‘well, all of these stories are coming from me, and this is whatever I want to focus on.’ The word Grickle just seemed to fit. It sort of covered the whole thing. It’s kind of stuck ever since.

Did you ever consider changing it, early on, based on getting that same question, over and over again?

Uh, not at this point. Like I said, it just kind of fits it. It does take a little extra explanation for anyone who is unfamiliar with it. And, you’re right, it does get a little weird, because it’s not a specific character—it’s just my style of drawing. It’s my storytelling, I guess, is the best way to describe it, at this point. But yeah, it’s just melded with it so much that I just can’t think of it any other way.

You lost some of the ability to draw at work when the studios made the transition to 3D art. Did you also feel as though you weren’t given the opportunity to be a proper storyteller at that point?

Yeah. I’m sure like many of these folks, it wasn’t quite the career path I had expected when I graduated Sheridan College, way back in ’92. For the first couple of years, I worked as a freelance animator in Toronto. During that time, I got an opportunity to work with Chuck Jones. I guess, at the time, Chuck Jones’s studio in LA was attempting to get theater shorts going again. They started reaching out to people from all different places to work on these six minute theater shorts.

The pre-movie shorts.

Yeah, from long ago, like all of the Warner Bros. stuff used to be. They liked my stuff. I had a little bit of comic book work at that time that I had been doing. It was enough to show that I could do stories. They contracted me to do the six minute shorts. I spent like four months doing it.

Then, toward the end of the project, I got flown down to LA and actually got to work with Chuck Jones for a couple of days. It was just an amazing experience. I left thinking, man, that’s it, I’m going to do storyboards. That just fits with my skill sets, and I just enjoy it so much. But I was so entrenched in animation that I didn’t really do anything to switch gears. I knew that I loved doing storyboarding, but I ended up animated for the next 14 years, pretty much, until I got the opportunity to come up to Laika, up here in Portland, to work on Coraline, and got back into storyboarding.

When you say “animating” versus storyboarding, do you mean doing actual cell drawings? What specifically does that entail?

Yeah, originally, when I was in Toronto, I was working on a bunch of different television shows. And I actually got a chance to work a bit on A Goofy Movie with Disney [laughs].

I am familiar.

Yeah. Not everyone is [laughs]. I was doing traditional, hand-drawn animation. It was great. I learned a ton. And then I got hired at LucasArts and moved out to California and was working in video games. I was still doing what I guess you’d call “traditional animation.” But for a number of projects, we were drawing with pixels and just moving 2D art around. But with some of the projects, we went back to the original method of drawing on paper and scanning it in. and then, at a certain point, all games transitioned to being 3D.

Did you have a computer background, at all?

Uh, not so much. Sort of, but not applicable. I was super into computers when I was, like 12. My buddy had a Comadore 64, and we’d try to write programs and stuff. I was kind of a computer nerd for a little bit, but by the time I got to art college, I was completely not computer literate at all. I still remember getting hired at LucasArts and they sat down and I had my own computer and e-mail and stuff, and I was like, “what the hell?” I really didn’t know how to use it. I really had to be shown how to e-mail. This was back in ’94. I was a bit out of the loop. I wouldn’t say I’m super tech savvy, but like all of us, I’m pretty comfortable using a computer, these days.

How difficult of a transition was that?

It was a little weird when I first got to Lucas, because I had just come off of working on A Goofy Movie, which, at the time, for me, was the most challenge job I’d had. The line work had to be a certain way. I was doing mostly cleanup and in-between on it. It was so precise.

Disney’s a bit infamous for the specificity of its house design.

Yeah. It’s so much about a certain aesthetic you’ve got to follow. It’s really tough stuff. And, also, I was sitting at a desk at Lucas with 80 to 100 pixels, trying to make a character walk around. It was a weird switch. All of the animation fundamentals still applied, but the little pixelized guy was a far cry from the really meticulously cleaned up stuff I was doing for A Goofy Movie.

So, it took a little transition, but we ended up doing some really high-end stuff, I felt, at Lucas. The Curse of Monkey Island game, we traditionally hand animated almost all of that. We got pretty fancy with a lot of stuff on that project. But yeah, it was a little bit of a switch.

[Continued in Part Two]

–Brian Heater

In this final part of our interview with the Afrodisiac artist, we discuss the influence of vintage books, the power of homage, and the importance of context.

[Part One][Part Two][Part Three]

Is your work most heavily influenced by books from the 60s, 70s, and 80s? Do you draw inspiration from newer titles—or at least continuations of older titles?

I’ve been looking a lot more older comics than new stuff. But I don’t know why that is. Around the late-90s, I started reading indie books. They fairly quickly took over my reading, and that’s all I was reading for a few years. It’s just a cycle. I feel like I’m coming to the end of my 70s reading—although I picked up 2001, the issues I was missing, when we were touring around. I still like that stuff. I find it really attractive, even if I’m just flipping through it, at this point.

I don’t know how big of an influence it is. Obviously it’s influential in Afrodisiac, because that’s kind of the tone we were going for. But I started reading it way after the fact. If you ask me who my influences are, I’m going to name stuff I was reading when I was 16.

Obviously I have more now, but it’s harder to figure out what you’re seeing, because you just accumulate more and more stuff. When you’re 12 and you fall in love with a cartoonist, that might be like 95 percent of what you’re drawing, just copying this one guy. But as you get older, pretty soon you’ve gone through a phase of 150 cartoonists you like. It becomes harder to say, “oh, this guy is a big influence.”

Is it important to mask your influences? Do you not want to be too blatant an homage to, say, Kirby?

I don’t know if it’s important or not. There’s not one guy that I want to copy. If there was, if I got joy out of drawing very closely to somebody else’s style—the act of drawing has to be pleasurable, because it’s very labor intensive. If you don’t like what you’re doing, you’re just not going to do it. I just don’t happen to have one guy that I’m trying to emulate, specifically. If I did, maybe I would have more of a conflict of conscious, but it hasn’t come up.

I’m sure a book like this is especially conducive to comparisons. It’s almost a conversation piece about pieces of old pop culture.

Right. I got a lot of that this weekend. I like hearing that kind of stuff. Like I said, it’s often people who are really good storytellers, telling a highlight of a certain movie or comic. It’s a lot of fun to listen to that stuff. The nice thing about this book is that I kind of jump around. The Afroduck cover is next to the T. Rex. They’re drawn very differently. For me it’s a lot of fun, because I’m not just drawing in one style every day.

What role did the covers have in there? Some seem to play a larger role in the story, and others seem executed on whim, because you wanted to draw a fruit pie ad, or some such thing. Are they vital to the book, or did they act as a reprieve?

I think they’re vital. We were trying to suggest—almost like if you look out a window and see a little section of a tree or a fence in the neighbors yard, you can kind of imagine…. In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud talks about closure. There’s a character walking and behind him is just white space. If you see a character from the waste up, you can imagine that he has legs. There are a handful of artists that will draw a small corner of a room—a chair, a doorway—and you can almost picture the entire house around it. It feels like it has such a sense of being. You can almost picture this whole world that exists around this little corner. I wanted to capture that.

A lot of the books Chip Kidd has done on Plastic Man, Batman, or Superman, where he’s just showing a toy from the 40s and different clips of panels from this character’s existence, I wanted that weight to the character. Creating those covers, I was trying to achieve that suggestion. I was trying to get storytelling into the covers. A lot of those old covers, I loved how much story there was. You can see the hero in peril and some villain that you knew was a bad matchup for that hero standing over him, and it’s like, “how is he going to get out of this?”

I wanted to have some of that storytelling style, but I also wanted to imply the character’s existence as a fictitious character. You know what I mean?

Sure, with 200 issues having passed in the interim. Spaces that you can’t fill out over the course of a brief graphic novel.

And you wouldn’t want to. Would you really want to read 300 issues of Batman from the 1940s to the 1970s? It probably wouldn’t be the most exciting stuff. If you go back and read some of the Essentials from the early 60s, it’s not that much fun to read 500 pages of that stuff. It’s kind of where you cheat a bit.

But, conversely, I’ll often see a panel out of context and that panel is fascinating. And then you read the book or the story, and it doesn’t stand out at all. And I’m really interested in that phenomenon. Why does that change? And I’ve talked to people about that, and they kind of acknowledge that that’s true. They’ve experienced the same effect. But it’s hard to explain why that happens, why the panel is more powerful outside of the story’s context.

–Brian Heater

In this final part of our interview with the Market Day artist, we discuss the fine line between real life and fiction in Sturm’s most recent book.

[Part One][Part Two][Part Three]

When you’re drawing events from real life and running them through a filter of fiction, at what point in the draft making process does it become clear that this piece of your life is best told through the story of a rug salesman in turn of the century Eastern Europe?

Well, I don’t know. I’m not quite sure how to answer that. I think every novelist and any storyteller puts a little bit of themselves in every character, or else they couldn’t have created it. So, in that sense, that certainly holds for me. I think a lot of it starts with images. I know I wanted to set a book in eastern Europe. Over ten years ago—probably 15 years ago, I bought a stack of books of photos and drawings that I eventually used for reference in Market Day. I was just really attracted to these images, and I knew that someday I was going to use this as the setting for a comic.

I interviewed Jason Lutes at San Diego Comic Con, and that sounds very similar to the story that gave birth to Berlin.

Uh huh. Yeah, I think certain images work as an attractor. You’re sucked into it, and they resonate with you on some level that’s a little deeper than just language. For me, it was a matter of coming back to these images when I was thinking about another project—a children’s book. That evolved into Market Day.

Have you traveled there at any point?

No, I’ve never travelled to Eastern Europe. And, of course, the Eastern Europe in that book doesn’t exist anymore.

Do you think that might have helped the process?

No, no, not for that. There’s a certain kind of storybook quality to it. There are certain aspects of Market Day that aren’t very historically accurate. The emporium—I don’t even know if there was such a thing.

The mini-mall of the day.

Yeah, it’s like Wal-Mart. Did such things exist? Maybe, maybe not. The interior of that was based on this place down the street from my studio called Vermont Salvage.I went in there, did some sketches, and took some photos, and voila, you have an Eastern European emporium.

And there’s also some landscapes in there that look very Vermont and New Hampshire [laughs]. So, I’m concerned with making it convincing. I think, on one level, if it’s emotionally convincing, people will buy the environment. In my work, too, there’s a lot of telling details, but I try to strip out things that would really give me away.

You’re certainly not hiding the fact that there’s a lot of autobiography in there, though.

No, no. I’m not hiding it [laughs]. The guy’s wife’s name is the name of my wife, Rachel. But to tease apart what the differences are between what’s my life and what’s this guy’s life, there’s a ton of difference. What writer doesn’t mine his own life for material? Phillip Roth and Paul Auster—they’re characters within their own novels. But I think it would be a mistake or misreading of their work to say that this is strict autobiography. It’s a discredit to their literary imaginations, as well.

Do you feel like straight autobiography is too well-tread at this point in comics?

If it’s done well, it’s not. Any historical fiction could be lame. Is it well-tread? Certainly there’s been an interesting tradition of it in comics, especially over the last decade or two. And there are people who are really good and can do it in a compelling manner, and there are people who do it and it doesn’t feel so inspired. I wouldn’t shy away from it. If I felt I could do it well, I would do it in that way. I just don’t feel like, given my own toolkit as an artist, that that’s the best path for me.

Is it something that you would steer students away from? In some respects it almost feels like a default mode.

No. I would never discourage any of my students from pursuing a genre that they felt passionate about. There are a lot of people doing autobiographical comics and journal comics. And maybe this is their throat clearing before they utter something a little more profound. Maybe this is where they’re going to learn the material that’s readily acceptable to them and excites them.

I encourage them to do it. I Just try to ask pertinent questions and suggest people that they would like, and go from there. I do autobiographical comics, too, but they’re usually in my sketchbook and not for public consumption. But no, I don’t have any problem with the genre itself.

You have a sketchbook of full comics that you never want to release?

Oh, sure. I’ve got full sketchbooks that are just comics. And, again, if I felt I was going to publish them, I would probably have a different approach toward making them. Usually when I’m involved in a graphic novel, it’s pretty all-consuming, and I’m not sketching and doodling as much. And then when I’m spinning my wheels, waiting to get traction, I’m usually very active in my sketchbook. And sometimes sketchbooks have a certain theme. Market Day came out of a sketchbook drawing. I definitely mine that material for other projects.

When you do a graphic novel, every panel has a story of something you’re trying to articulate. The drawings can’t have as much fun in a way, for the way I work. In the sketchbooks, the drawings are the boss. You go with it. And I think that approach to it is probably more apparent in my drafts, where, before I nail things down, I try to have a dialog where things are being blurted out.

–Brian Heater

“I found a lot of common ground between superhero comics and blacksploitation,” Jim Rugg explains. “That was another thing that I connected pretty early on.” The sign of a well made piece of post-modern pop art is the ability to connect the dots between seemingly divergent cultural milestones.

Rugg found kindred spirits in the low budget films and pulp comics of the 70s, tying the genres together in a new way. It’s something that has come to define much of Rugg’s work in the medium, from Street Angel, to Afrodisiac, to the title’s the artist is currently readying for release.

[Part One][Part Two]

Are you interested in working with some of the franchise characters?

Yeah, I guess I would be, but I’m not interested enough right now to go through expensive pitching processes. And, commercially, I don’t know if it’s that much better than doing your own material, these days. Because it takes a long time to get through the pitching. I know a number of guys who do that, and it’s like pitch and revise and pitch and revise and you wait around forever. I don’t know, I think that’s very frustrating, creatively.

There’s a certain amount of re-booting in any series, but there’s also all of that backstory that you’ve got to work with. Is that off-putting?

Yeah, right now, something like X-Men, I’ve got no idea what’s going on right now, and I have no idea how you would even figure that out, if you haven’t read it for ten years. I don’t know where you’d begin. And I think it would be frustrating to have to worry about tie-ins and cross-overs. It’s probably just beyond my creative ability, right now.

A lot of what I’ve been doing is the opposite spectrum—a four or six page story. I really like the short format. I’m surprised that more people don’t work short. Did you see the Spike Jonze/Kayne West short film that he did right after he finished Where the Wild Are? It’s about 13 minutes long. It was one of the best movies that I saw last year. It was 13 minutes. Fantastic. Better than the last three movies that I saw that were two and half hours of bloated garbage. And I realized, having four pages to tell a story doesn’t limit that story’s ability to be great.

It’s harder to package a short film or a short story, though, right?

Well, maybe. I bet I’ve done as much short work as I have long work, because, as an indie creator, whatever that means these days, there are tons of anthologies and stuff. So there are outlets for it, especially if you want to put it online.

Are you working online?

Not exactly, though I plan for my next creator-owned project to probably be online. The other thing the short work does is it allows me to see it all at once. I’m always amazed at people who do big, long graphic novels, because I don’t know how you can keep things straight. How do you figure out how things connect? I see it all as one long composition, except I can’t keep 150 pages straight in my head. I need to break it into chunks, so I can manage it. I have a one-page strip in an oversized anthology coming out at MoCCA this year.

The way Brian [Maruca] and I work is, we usually write a story that could almost be prose. Once we’re completely happy with that, I go down and break it into panels and we go through that. The first step is the story and then we worry about script formatting and stuff like that. So we write this page out—it’s like 22 x 16 inches, it’s really oversized. We write out the story and I break it into panels—it’s like 30-some panels. And then I sit down and start working on the page, and then I couldn’t figure out how to start the page.

Normally, you’ll have like four or five panels. You kind of build your page around a panel or two. Whenever I had like 30 panels, I just couldn’t visualize it. I couldn’t keep it straight. It’s a pretty interesting thing to see a graphic novel that way. it’s amazing to me that somebody that’s just starting out will come out with a 200 page book.

What turned a short Afrodisiac strip into an entire book? Did you feel as though there were just too many more possibilities to explore with the character?

Yeah. That’s part of it. You do cut a lot out. We write a story and then realize that it’s 12 pages, but we have only four pages in the book. I think it’s good to cut out. A lot of the problems that I have with Hollywood film, right now, is that they don’t cut anything out. Every movie is two hours. They should all be 88 minutes and people should be docked pay or fingers for each minute over that.

But, yeah, with Afrodisiac, we’d come up with a four page story and then end up with 30 other pages, maybe four of which were worth drawing. It kept growing that way. And then once we started thinking of it as a series, we mapped out a lot of stories and story arcs for the characters. That made it even easier to create new material that would fit in. in our heads, we could kind of see how these stories would fit together.

You feel like there is an arc throughout the book?

Yeah, I think so.

There’s a reason that even the most plotless action film has exposition. It’s almost too much to have a full movie or graphic novel that’s just all action.

Right. There’s definitely a kind of ebb and flow. You see it in long series. My friend, Tom Scioli, talks a lot about the dip points of a series. Everything has it. Preacher has it. Lost has it. It’s inevitable. That’s just the way it works. The thing is, the people watching it may look at different points as point the low points in the series, because it’s a personal reaction as to which parts are your favorites.

But it’s not going to be consistent, otherwise it would be really flat, like you said, if it was all one big car chase in an action movie, or nothing but shooting guns. The person that loves the gun shooting likes that for a few minutes, and that would be enough. The next thing we’re going to do will probably be a meditation on the action stuff.

Blacksploitation is often a subset of that genre, right?

A lot of them are action. A lot of the ones I like are probably action. It’s not quite what I had in mind. I was thinking more of the super mindless 80s action. I found a lot of common ground between superhero comics and blacksploitation. That was another thing that I connected pretty early on.

The stuff really follows the arc of the superhero comic, because, typically, you have one guy who’s facing enormous odds, whether it’s corrupt government or corruption in his neighborhood. So you have one guy standing alone.

What sort of 80s films are you drawing inspiration from? Diehard?

Predator. Predator was one of the first movies that I saw in a theater. It has been burned in my brain. The other one I love—Rambo III is like the greatest thing, ever.

Getting back to your question about working on franchise characters. I almost feel like, if I want to do a story with one of those characters, I’ll just do it, and put it online. Because once it’s online, if they tell you to take it down, you can take it down, but it’s always out there.

And you can feasibly do, say, a Batman story with one of your own characters.

Yeah, you could do that. Or you can use the exact characters. We wrote a script for a Punisher vs. Galactus story—depending on how things shake out over the course of my life, I can see myself just drawing it and putting it online. Who cares?

[Concluded in Part Four.]

–Brian Heater

“Every time you go to the drawing board,” James Sturm tells me, “it’s fraught with peril.” It’s the sort of sentiment that’s likely simultaneously encouraging and depressing for the students of The Center for Cartoon Studies, the school that Sturm founded in 2005, in his home of White River Junction Vermont.

It’s not that making comics is no longer Sturm’s passion, of course, it’s just that, well, all of these years and graphic novels later, the process is still challenging for the Market Day artist.

In this third part of our interview, we discuss just how difficult that can be while opening a school and raising a small family.

[Part One][Part Two]

Market Day explores the possibility of giving up one’s art in the face of economic hardship. You haven’t fallen prey to that, however. You’re still making books for Drawn & Quarterly, and you’re teaching the next generation of cartoonists at CCS.

Yeah. it’s funny, I don’t necessarily see that as being so tied to the making of the art, in a way. I would say, in some ways, that Market Day was a cautionary tale to myself. When we were trying to get escape velocity for the school, during the first two years, it just takes everything out of you. And I have two young children.

What do you mean by “escape velocity?”

Well, to get an institution up and running and off the ground. To go from this kind of fragile idea into an institution that has a solid foundation, that’s an intense and draining journey, and it can consume as much of you as you will allow.

And with young kids, you have to be there for your children, and the way I’m built, I have to be there for my own work. I can’t give that up. It’s really hard sometimes to muster the energy after putting the kids to bed or getting them to school or having to write a grant proposal or interviewing applicants for the school and putting together the brochure—cartooning is such a labor intensive medium.

If you’re writing a graphic novel, you really need some time to sink into the material. It’s very difficult. You have to learn to do work in smaller increments of time. you also have to keep doing something, because if you don’t do anything, the rust gets into the pipes, and it’s that much harder to get going.

There are obvious bureaucratic elements to starting a school or writing a grant proposal. When you’re creating a comic book on every level, are there aspects of that that feel like a “job” and not just a passion?

The work at CCS, I feel like I’m one contributing factor to this dynamic community. I don’t feel ownership of it at all. It always takes me aback when someone—even jokingly—says, “well, it’s your school.” I don’t feel that way at all, and the fact of the matter is, I don’t feel that way because it’s not the case.

There are a lot of people who have invested their time and energy and are as much a part of this—if not more so—at this point. Yes, I had the idea that got the ball rolling, but that was a while ago.  Sometimes the energy you’re putting in, you’re not quite sure how it’s going to flower or pay dividends, so to speak.

The graphic novel, it’s a long, arduous task too, but I’ve done a couple of these, and I do feel much more ownership over a book. Market Day is clearly a book that wouldn’t exist if I didn’t do it. It’s much more of a personal statement for me. It feels more personal and I feel like I have much more ownership over it. I feel a little more vulnerable putting it out there, because this is you, this is your work, this is as good as you can draw, as good as you can write. With the school, it’s something that doesn’t necessarily reflect on myself in such an intimate way.

When a book comes out, is there an extra pressure that comes with being so closely tied to the school? Do people view your books in a more technical light? Do critics look at you under a microscope?

That’s a good question. I’m not sure. I think because I started the school, if anything, there’s probably more people looking at the work. So, in that sense, it’s probably more of a blessing than a curse. I don’t know, I feel like one of the nice things about teaching is that you have to practice what you preach. At least I do. You try to hold yourself to the standard that you’re talking about. So I think you put the work out there and you hold yourself to a high standard and I think it’s fair game. Lord knows the books I create aren’t everyone’s cup of tea.

I do remember at the point before I decided to go start the school, I did think—this was when I was 39—that I felt like I really had to know what I was doing my comics before I can actually start one. But there was a point when I just decided to start it, because I realized that I’ll never really feel like I know what I’m doing. Every book is a very difficult process. At least for me, all my self-doubt surfaces. I question my ability to draw and whether I even know what I’m doing. Every time you go to the drawing board, it’s fraught with peril. If I waited to really know what I was doing, or felt like I had arrived as a cartoonist, I never would have felt secure enough to have started a school.

In terms of the pressure that’s on you when you sit down at the drawing tabling, is that increased or decreased when you, say, win an award. Do you gain more confidence?

You know, I don’t think about it, honestly. I mean, I like winning awards, but I don’t think, “oh boy, this better be better than the next one!” I think every cartoonist plays certain tricks with themselves in order to clear out a space to create. First of all, you can’t feel like there are a thousand eyes on your page. It only has to be the dialog between you and the work.

My approach to carving a space out for myself is just to work in drafts. I just throw down anything. I just throw down a really scratchy, grungy draft, and I tell myself that I’m just going to go through this again and thin about it a little deep. Move things around and think about the characters more or find some good dialog for the scene. I just casually draw another draft.

I feel like every pass just gets tighter and tighter and there’s never one moment where I feel like, “here it is! This better be good!” Because it’s such a gradual coming together of so many personal and aesthetic concerns that coalesce into this graphic novel over the course of several years. There’s never one moment when I feel that kind of pressure.

Certainly when a book comes out, you don’t want it to be ignored or hated or dismissed, but I’m fortunate enough in that enough people read my work that there’s a range of opinions about it. And I feel like I have a pretty good sense of my strengths and weaknesses as an artist. Usually when there’s an informed critique, even when it’s negative, I might shed a tear and be like, “they’re right!” But what can you do? You move on.

And then, other times, you get critiques that are a bit overly generous, and I don’t shed a tear for those, but you also know that they’re a bit off, too.

[Concluded in Part Four]

–Brian Heater

If there’s one thing even more clear in Afrodisiac than Jim Rugg’s love for 70s blacksploitation flicks, it’s his passion for the highs–and lows–of books from that same decade. In this second part of our interview with the artist, we discover that the book, recently published as a single-volume graphic novel by Adhouse, was originally pitched as a 40 issue series, one that mimicked the storytelling rollercoaster ride that is an on-going comics series.

[Part One]

Between the storylines and the fake ads and covers, it seems like you’ve shoved everything you had into this book. Is there anything that didn’t make the cut?

Yeah, the biggest thing—there are a few that stand out. One was to explore the devil character, a bit, because in our mind, he was this Batman figure. If you were the mayor, or whatever, Batman was this character cleaning up crime in the poor part of town and preying on street-level characters. But if you happened to be from that part of town, he’s this fascist, brutal vigilante. If you know the guy that he beat up or left in the hospital, he doesn’t quite look the same from that point of view. So that was a character that we really worked hard to something with, but almost everything we worked on was longer than we wanted to put in the book.

It ended up with two covers, as a two-part crossover. One would take place in the devil’s comic, so you could kind of see it in his point of view, where he’s the hero, and one that would take place in Afrodisiac’s book, where Afrodisiac is clearly the protagonist. Maybe one of these days…

The other idea that didn’t make it in, that I was really interested in, was doing a story set in the early 90s. it would have been a time travel story/re-launch. It would have been volume two of the series. Volume one would have ended in the early 80s, and this would have 10 years later, trying to get him a new series, because you know how they do that.

The re-boots.

Right. And we had everything set up for that, perfectly. If he would have arrived in the early 90s, the Image books are really distinct, visually. They have really garish computer coloring. I thought that would be a really great contrast to the 70s coloring. And theb, with his nemesis, Megapute, the supercomputer, getting ready to global with the Internet. It would have been like armageddon. Even the whole world would have change. Hip-hop, by the early 90s, had expanded to the suburbs and become a very commercial pop music. I thought there was a lot of room for material there.

And also, the space stuff. We pitched the book as something longer, something like a Vertigo series. It would have been a series with a finite story ark.

A series of trades?

No. We envisioned it as an on-going series that would have run, like, 40 issues. The idea was to mimic the arc of a lousy comic series from the mid-70s, because this series would run like 70 or 80 issues—a series that wasn’t very successful. Powerman and Iron Fist seemed like it just kind of clogged along. It ran 125 issues. That’s unheard of now. In the course of doing that, they jumped the shark, they shook up creative teams, they did all of these things to try to spike sales.

You always hear about some creator taking over on a book that was on the brink of cancellation or some creator coming in and saying, “give me the book that’s selling the worst.” It’s kind of that idea. So, our thought process on the space stuff was, “if you’re going to really jump the shark with the Afrodisiac stuff, what would be the setting you’d put him in?” That would be space, because it’s the most counter-intuitive, worst place. That would be like putting Daredevil in space.

So, had we done a much more expanded version, that would have been a part of the jumping the shark moment. What if this book completely lost direction?

Is there a way to do that, while cutting out the boring bits? The slump in the middle? Could you have done a 40 arc series and cut the slow stuff out?

I don’t know. See, that’s the nice thing with the way we ended up doing the book. It’s a lot more like a movie trailer than it would be a real book. In hindsight, it probably works a lot better than it would in that format. And, even if we did another volume like this, where you’re able to condense down the storytelling and cut out those parts—another thing that got me thinking about this kind of storytelling is, one of my favorite things at shows is talking to some cartoonist and getting them on some kick about what books they liked when they were a kid. These are the storytellers I most like, so to hear them talk about some book they read as a kid is fantastic. And if you go and track down the comic they describe, it never lives up to their description.

Traditionally people do homage to those things they consider high art. It seems as though you’re as—if not more—interested in some of the low points of comics in the 70s.

I don’t think it’s just comics in the 70s. I think it’s pop culture in general. I grew up watching pretty lousy pre-cable movies on a Saturday. It was so great to just have a monster movie. But if you watch those movies, they’re not well made. You watch them because Godzilla is kicking over a cardboard building. you watch some element of the movie that attracted you—a monster or some crappy horror movie, or whatever. And you just block out the 95 percent of the movie that’s inept. And that’s what you remember.

Sometimes when I go back and watch these old movies or read old comics that I remember from when I was a kid, I don’t even recognize them. In my mind, I remember the story, but it’s not even the story that was in the old movie or the comic book.

That’s the purpose of the trailer, right? Distilling the two or three most exciting moments of the movie.

Yeah, exactly. And I think that there’s a lot of options in comics, where you can skip that dense storytelling and speed up the slow parts. People don’t do it as much lately, especially in the mainstream, when comics moved more toward the decompressed. Whenever comics started doing decompression in Marvel and DC in the late 90s and early 2000s, it seems like people hadn’t quite figure out the format.

What do you mean by “decompression,” exactly?

Whenever people started writing for the trade. I think initially there were some growing pains. What might have been a one or two issue story was suddenly a four or six part story. I think it took people a while to figure out how to ramp up the density, so that you’re using that space well.

It’s the TV soap opera syndrome.

I don’t know if I would even say it’s like that. there’s a lot of padding. The soap opera stuff is more like the Claremont X-Men, when it was all subplots. That’s when I started reading X-Men. That’s my favorite X-Men stuff, around issues 240 or 250. When I started reading it, it’s because I heard X-Men was good. In the first issue, I had no idea what was going on. It was a subplot advancement. But then, over the course of three or four issues, you have enough subplot that you can kind of link it together. I really like that kind of storytelling, I guess because it was kind of my entry point.

[Continued in Part Three.]

–Brian Heater

In this second part of our interview with the Market Day author, we discuss the factors that brought Sturm, then fresh out of SVA’s graduate program, to Seattle. While in the Emerald City, the artist helped co-found the alternative weekly, The Stranger, alongside Tim Keck, one of the founders of The Onion. Sturm now has another prominent cartooning-centric day job, as the founder of the Center for Cartooning Studies in his current home of White River Junction, Vermont.

We discuss the importance of such labors of love on the life and career of an artist, and whether or not its worth giving it all for a She-Hulk mini-series.

[Part One]

Was it Fantagraphics and the subsequent cartooning scene that originally brought you to Seattle?

Yeah. Three things brought me to Seattle. One is that I had finished SVA. My studio space in Manhattan was no longer going to be available to me. I was feeling kind of isolated in this little apartment in Astoria, Queens. I like collaboration and I like working with other people—and I also like spending hours and hours by myself at the drawing table.

You picked the right career.

Yeah [laughs]. So I moved to Seattle because I had finished school. Fantagraphics had just started publishing The Cereal Killings, which was my first attempt a graphic novel. And a friend of mine from my undergraduate days at the University of Wisconsin was starting his second newspaper—he had already started The Onion. He was starting a newspaper in Seattle called The Stranger. He asked me if I would come out and be his first art director. So, between Fantagraphics and The Stranger and having graduated, it was an easy decision.

We you working on The Stranger in the capacity of being a cartoonist?

Yeah, I edited all of the comics and tried to get as many in the pages as possible. I featured a lot of cartoonists on the cover. Any cartoonist that was willing, we’d put on the cover of The Stranger in the mid-90s, from Jim Woodring to Chris Ware to Llyod Dangle—the list goes on and on. We got all of them involved in the paper, in one way or another. We published early Michael Kupperman, when he was known as P. Revess. Early Snake n’ Bacon and Sam Henderson strips, Tony Millionaire and Kaz. I did that, I wrote for them. I was their theater reviewer, for a really short period of time.

That’s what really fun about startups. You have to wear a lot of hats and think on your feet. I sold advertisements, I distributed papers, when need be. You do a little bit of everything. You lend the paper money, just to keep it running. At the same time, I was working on The Cereal Killings book for Fantagraphics. So it was a very intense part of my life, but when you’re young and in your 20s, you can do that.

You were doing all of those things then and now you’re running the school and still making books. Do you foresee a point when you’re working on your comics full-time?

I kind of feel like I need both of these things. Maybe I could make a living doing comics right now, if I wanted to write a She-Hulk mini-series, or something [laughs]. I’m not interested in that. Not that I wouldn’t work for Marvel. I have and, who knows, I wouldn’t rule anything out in the future with them or DC or any of these publishers who would pay you to do a series like that.

The kind of comics I really enjoy working on and doing, they don’t necessarily pay any bills. And I don’t want to do that work just for the money. I guess, in some ways, working at CCS feels like a real privilege and an honor, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that, on certain days, it feels just like a day job, and I’d rather be in my studio, working. That sounds a little like whining, doesn’t it [laughs]?

Does the day job detract from your ability to make books?

It’s so hard to say. I try to have the work I actually produce be shaped by my life and my interior temperature. Something like Adventures in Cartooning, which, at least from a commercial standpoint, might be the most successful book I’ve done, I couldn’t have done that without my two collaborators, who are first year students at CCS. That book is as much theirs as mind. So to say that, had I taken the school out of the equation, would I have been more prolific, well, that book would have never gotten done.

It’s clear how a book like is that pulled from your real life, but many of your books are period pieces. The new one is old eastern European. Are you still drawing from every day life for those?

Yeah, absolutely. I feel like any of those books I’ve ever done could have been an autobiographical comic. If I would have put me in the middle of it, it would have felt too self-serving. I would have had to deal with all of the issues with how I present myself. By fictionalizing aspects of it, it gives me a certain distance from the material, where I’m in a better position to shape the material.

The book clearly parallels the life of the modern artist. It speaks to something we were just discussing—not being able to support a family on an artist’s wages. Was that your life at one point?

Sure. It’s still my life. How many graphic novels are there out there that are best sellers in the way that literary best sellers are? Like Jonathan Lethem—something that’s published as a book, and you know it’s going to sell 50,000 or 100,000 copies. It almost feels like I’m entering an issue of What If? I don’t know how to respond to it, because that isn’t what happened. Could it have better? Could it have been worse? I know I wouldn’t have had as many rich experiences in terms of starting the school.

It’s been fantastic, in terms of the relationships that have been forged with faculty members and people that helped start the school with me. Learning so much about cartooning from all of the visiting artists that we’ve had. Feeling for the first time in my life like I’m a good citizen and having a stake in my community. All of that stuff is wonderful. When you come of age as an artist, you feel like it’s so devalued by society that you get into this kneejerk response of protecting every moment, that the time is a precious commodity. You just want to protect it and barricade yourself into your studio cave. I feel like I was reacting from that place from a very long time.

Now I realize that there’s something that you’re shutting yourself out of, when you do that. It’s another thing when you have kids, as well. You can’t just be functioning on everything is going to be funneled toward my art. It’s a position that you can’t sustain for many reasons.

[Continued in Part Three]

–Brian Heater

Pittsburgh-based cartoonist Jim Rugg has been making his rounds in the industry for a number of years, producing books for the likes of Dark Horse, Image, SLG, and DC’s short lived YA imprint, Minx. It’s Rugg’s latest book, Afrodiasiac, co-written with Brian Maruca for Adhouse, however, that truly finds the artist coming into his own.

The book explores the rich fictional history of the titular character first seen in Rugg’s five-part Street Angel series. The book is a lovingly rendered homage to a seemingly endless parade of pop culture touchstones from the 1970s, most notably the eras Marvel books and blacksploitation titles.

It’s a scrapbook devoted to appearances of an imaginary hero from a series that never existed. It faithful captures the decade’s diverse aesthetics with the manner of chameleon-like draughtsmanship rarely seen outside of an issue of Eightball or Schizo.

And while Rugg and Maruca certainly play fast and loose with the form, the work rarely enters the realm of parody. It’s clear that the people who created the book are fans, first and foremost.

You just got back from your mini-tour.

Right.

How was that?

It was really good. Friday night we had really terrible weather, but even with the weather it was pretty good. Saturday and Sunday were fine.

What do the appearances generally consist of? Live reading? Signing?

Mostly just signing and drawing in people’s sketchbooks. On Sunday we were at Heroes Aren’t Hard to Find in Charlotte. I guess they have a reading discussion group. They did Afrodisiac this week. They have a main guy who moderates. He reads the book fairly carefully a few times and then comes up with a list of questions. We had a little bit of discussion.

Generally when you do a reading group, the author of the book isn’t present. It’s got to be a strange for you, doing the deconstruction with you around.

Yeah. I mean, it was pretty complimentary. No one was really attacking the book. It was almost like a panel or something. I liked it a lot. I’ve done a couple of store signings locally in Pittsburgh, but I haven’t done anything quite like that. I enjoyed that part of it. it was almost like a Q & A session, while I was sketching in people’s books. It was pretty laid back and nice.

What kind of feedback are you getting, generally?

Mostly positive. The discussion itself went around to all sorts of stuff, from the influence of blacksploitation films to things like Kirby comics—pretty general stuff. In terms of the book, I’ve been pretty surprised by the feedback. I expected to get maybe a little more of a negative reaction than we’ve gotten so far.

We’re you treading lightly, taking on something like blacksploitation, which is so clearly steeped in themes of racial identity?

I don’t know. The book itself happened pretty organically. It’s wasn’t like we said, “we’re ready to confront the issue of race. Let’s do that in our next graphic novel.” It just didn’t work that way.

You weren’t writing a Frantz Fanon book.

We weren’t. It certainly isn’t confrontational in terms of race. A couple of people brought that up, especially before the book was published, so I was kind of bracing. I thought it could get heated. But I usually tell people to read the book a little bit before they get too fired up. I guess race is involved because the character is black, but it’s much more an homage to blacksploitation movies and 70s Marvel and DC Comics and exploitation movies in general. It doesn’t deal with race much. It’s much more nostalgic for that era of films.

So the potential for that feedback wasn’t something that had occurred to you until you started seeing comments about it?

I was pretty nervous right before the book was printed about people declaring me a racist or something. And I’ve been very relieved that that hasn’t happened. I don’t know. I don’t feel like the book is offensive.

When you sent me an e-mail about the possibility of reviewing the book, you mentioned that we had already review [Vatican Hustle].

Right.

Were you worried when another blackspoitation comic came across your radar?

You know, I just discovered reviews of it in the last week or so, and I haven’t had a chance to track down a copy yet. I’ve been debating whether to order a copy. I probably will order it from my local shop. I am curious about it. But I’m not worried about it in any way. If it’s great, good. It’ll give me a good comic to read. Have you seen Black Dynamite yet?

I haven’t.

It just came out last year. It was a small indie film. I saw the teaser for it, maybe two years ago. I guess they put that together to raise money from the film. It was cut with a lot of actually blacksploitation sequences—car explosions, chases. All the stuff that would have cost money was actual clips from the original movies. It was intercut with new characters and new material, most of which was talking heads, which I guess would have been cheaper to produce.

But my understanding is that the actual movie doesn’t use the clips. I thought that would have been neat to use actual clips from the original movies. I don’t think that’s what they do. I think that was just for the teaser to raise money. I think it’s very similar in tone to Afrodisiac, so I’d be more worried about that. I haven’t seen it yet, because it hasn’t come to Pittsburgh.

Looking at the IMDB page, Arsenio Hall apparently plays a character named “Tasty Freeze.” Seems like it might be straight up satire.

I don’t think it’s winking at the camera, exactly, but it’s very knowing of the source material.

Afrodisiac feels mostly like homage—there are points that are clearly winking jokes, but for the most part it feels as though you’re playing it pretty straight. Is it hard to take on such a well established genre and have it not be a full-on satire?

It’s too obvious, I think, to straight up parody it. It would be too obvious pretty easy to make a Mad Magazine version and pretty hard to make that any good. There’s some tone similarity between [Afrodisiac] and Street Angel, in terms of the way we approached the two books. We started out with maybe not the best intentions, by thinking that the material is ripe for being mocked.

But comics take so long to make that you have to mine them for what you like, in order to find that enthusiasm necessary to make them. Especially for work like that, which you’re not doing for a paycheck. You do the book because you find something interesting in it. We wouldn’t have done it otherwise.

The way we work, there’s a lot of brainstorming and passing story ideas back and forth. One of the first things we did with Afrodisiac was a short anthology story. In the process of doing that, we ended up with 20 ideas for the character that don’t fit or aren’t fully formed. In collecting those idea, you decide that you want to do more with the character. That’s what happened with this character. And then we started watching a lot of blacksploitation movies and started reading some black crime fiction. It became a very rich world to explore.

[Continued in Part Two]

–Brian Heater

Arriving in spring of this year, Market Day marks James Sturm’s first major solo work since founding the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, VT. Though set in a turn-of-the-century Eastern European market, it doesn’t take too much digging to surmise that the book is as much a comment on life as an artist in modern America as anything that might have affected the lives of artisans 100 years ago and half a world away.

Sturm, now a father of two, clearly invested much of his own life into the story of a rug weaver forced to make a choice between his art and his growing family. Happily, however, the author seems to have largely avoided such forced choices. In 2001, Sturm moved his young family to Vermont. Three years later, CCS was opened in an abandoned department store in downtown White River.

All the while, Sturm has been steadily releasing titles, including 2007’s children’s book, Saitchel Page: Striking Out Jim Crow, and last year’s Adventures in Cartooning, a how-to book co-authored by two CCS students.

You’re in Vermont full-time?

Yep, I live in White River Junction. Moved here in 2001.

Did the location of the school come out of your residency there, or were you really looking for a spot to open it when you moved?

In 2001, The Golem’s Mighty Swing had just been published, and I’d left my job at the Savannah School of Art and Design. My in-laws had a second home in Hartland, Vermont. They rented it out over the years. The tenant was leaving, and my father-in-law was retiring, and it was going to be vacant. We moved in until we figured out what we wanted to do. We really liked this area. I couldn’t find an opportunity to teach that I really felt comfortable with, so the opportunity to start a school here came up.

When you say “opportunity,” you mean in the sense that it was presented to you?

Well, opportunity in terms of there was this great little village I fell in love with, White River Junction. In terms of space that was available. I had a good friend who was a state senator, who is actually now running for governor. He was able to plug me in to the Vermont legislature, in order to restore an old dilapidated department store on Main st. he introduced me to other people in the area to help build an organization.

Unlike a graphic novel, you can’t just sit down and do it. You’ve got to bring together a lot of resources. You need people and money and even institutions to help you do such a thing. That all just started coming together up here. in 2002, my youngest daughter was born, so that’s when I moved out of the very rural home I was living in in Hartland. When my second was born, there was just no way in the world I was going to get any artwork done. I got a studio in White River Junction, and started working out of there. I really just began this love affair with the village.

So, in a sense the school was born out of the studio?

It wasn’t born out of the studio so much as it was born out of this perfect storm. White River was a depressed village that was very welcoming—a small art school was a perfect fit. It already this artistic community thing going on, but it was a struggling down town, so I think they were very open to that. Another domino that was in place was, this 2002-2003, when graphic novel fever had hit the country. Everyone had that feeling that comics had finally arrived. It wasn’t so outlandish to think that there could be a college devoted to comics—that you could get an MFA program in comics. It made sense.

So, in terms of the national mood regarding comics, and this local mood towards economic development at White River Junction, those two stars aligned. And there’s still this idea that’s discussed with economists about the “creative economy,” and how factors like investing in the arts is almost as important as investing in the physical infrastructure. There were studies being commissioned then that said, if you invest in zones that are rent-free for artists and try to subsidize small businesses—it’s like, once upon a time, Greenwich Village wasn’t a nice neighborhood. The artists move in, and then the rents go higher.

Gentrification.

Yeah [laughs]. Though back in White River, I don’t think we’re ready for that quite yet. So that idea certainly felt very pertainant, at the time.

There’s clearly a difference between starting a school like SVA in New York, versus starting CCS in a small town in Vermont. Do you feel like the area is more conducive to academics, in terms of removing the distractions and making people almost band together?

I certainly think that’s a big element to it. it is a bit more isolated, so it does breed a sense of community. If you’re an undergraduate, let’s say, at SVA, after class is over, the city just kind of swallows you up. I actually went to graduate school at the School of Visual Arts—you have a friend in Queens and you live in Brooklyn or Manhattan, months go by where you don’t see somebody. That’s normal. Even though you live I the same city, you don’t feel like you’re crossing paths all that much. But in a place like White River Junction, everybody is everybody’s neighbor in a very intense sense.

Are you finding that people are sticking around the town after graduation?

Yeah. Every year there’s two or three or four people that just wind up staying. Some stay for a few years. The school’s only been here since 2005, but we people from that graduating class that still live in town. So, yeah. There are a lot of cartoonists now that are either alumni or just came to White River because it seemed like a cool place. So that’s kind of neat. And of course there’s faculty. Jason Lutes moved out here to teach. Steve Bissette moved closer.

It’s funny, you hear about planned communities—pre-fabricated suburbs developed after World War II. It sounds almost as if you’re creating an artistic enclave version of that.

Well, the community is almost a bi-product of creating the school. Almost in the same way that, when Fantagraphics moved to Seattle, a bunch of cartoonists moved with them, and it because this really great cartooning town. But I don’t think Fantagraphics set out to create a community of cartoonists. They just wanted to publish more books, and it made more sense to move out to Seattle, for whatever reason. So, I mean, I love the fact that there’s a really rich community of alumni and graduates and just local artists that all play and work together and share studio space. I think that’s terrific.

I never said, “how do I plan a community?” I’m just trying to put together the best curriculum together. That said, we try to have this major production lab in our flagship building, and we make sure out alumni have access to it. Alumni are encouraged to attend presentations by the visiting artists. And I’m working with four alumni on various projects. It’s fun having everybody around, so I guess we do try to encourage community in that sense.

[Continued in Part Two.]

–Brian Heater