Bill Ayers has led a number of lives in his time on earth. The 65-year-old Illinois native is likely best known as a co-founder of the late-60s revolutionary activist group, The Weather Underground, an aspect of his life that once again thrust him into the spotlight when Sarah Palin and John McCain began bandying about his name in their run against Obama. When Palin tossed out the phrase “paling around with terrorists,” she was almost invariably talking of the then senator’s fellow Chicagoan, Bill Ayers.

For the past 35 years, however, Bill Ayers has been deeply entrenched in education, currently working as a professor at The University of Illinois at Chicago, and penning a number of books on the subject, most famously 1993’s To Teach: The Journey of a Teacher. When approached to write an updated edition of that title, Ayers initially balked, and ultimately tossed his publishers a curve ball—he would do an update To Teach, so long as he was allowed to re-imagine the text as a graphic novel.

His publishers conceded, and Ayers nominated Ryan Alexander-Tanner for the project, a young Xeric-winning artist whose name—and work—is likely unfamiliar to even the most studious alternative comics fans. Alexander-Tanner ultimately moved into a recently vacated room in Ayers’s Chicago home, and two began work on what would become To Teach: The Journey, in Comics.

In April both artist and writer will attend the MoCCA Fest to promote the book (due out May 1st). Ayers will appear on the Sequential Activism panel, alongside Peter Kuper, Josh Neufeld, Tom Hart, and Ward Sutton. I will be moderating. Ayers, happily, agreed to discuss the project ahead of the event, calling from his car on the way back home from a political rally in Detroit.

Are you working on the weekend?

I’m working every day, doing something. I was speaking at a conference in Ann Arbor, and then I went down to Detroit to see a friend of mine, who I’m collaborating with on a project. We spent the day together and then I went to a political rally, and now I’m heading home.

Were you speaking about education?

Not this time. This is the 50th anniversary of the Port Huron Statement, which is the founding of Students for a Democratic Society. The first president of SDS lives in Ann Arbor, and he organized a conference called “Bring it Back, Take it Forward.” And there were a series of panels on a series of issues about the movement then and the movement now, it was a very interesting inter-generational conversation. I was on a panel with several folks I knew from the civil rights movement and several young people who are either students or activists in Michigan. It was fun.

Do you tend to compartmentalize these two parts of your life—politics and education? Or are they one in the same for you?

They’re very much the same for me. That’s partly because when I began teaching in 1975, I had been arrested in the first International Days of Protest against the war in Vietnam. I was 20-years-old. I spent ten days in jail, and in jail I met some folks who had started a freedom school as part of the civil rights movement. I marched out of jail and went for a teaching job. I had no idea that I was going to teach or wanted to teach. It became very much a life-changing event. And from that day, frankly, I can’t see teaching separated from issues of access, equity, recognition, justice—those kind of seem all tied up in my mind with teaching. It’s a lens through which I look at teaching.

You’re something of a teacher or teachers now. At what point did that begin?

It’s funny, because I was a teacher when I was 20, and when I was 22, I began teaching other teachers. I have a certain kind of approach to teaching teachers that I suppose is a little different than one imagines. It’s really based on how I got into teaching. I think of teaching teachers as allowing them to live the kind of discovery and surprise that they ought to organize in their own classrooms. So I organize my adult education classes the way I hope they’ll organize their kindergartens.

One metaphor for that is, I learned very early that you should put easels along one wall and put red, yellow, and blue paint in front of each easels. And, of course, the reason is because, just playing around with the paint, every month, every day, every year, some kid will come up to me and say, “Bill, look at this! Red and blue makes purple!” I could have said, at that moment of discovery and surprise, “don’t you remember? We covered that in the primary and secondary colors unit, you idiot!” Or I could say, “oh my god, how did you find that out?” and then we’re back to what I think learning is all about, which is the construction of knowledge and the construction of meaning and discovery of the world.

And, in discovering the world, even in a simple example like that, the main thing you discover is your own power to access the world and to perform in the world. That’s the lesson I want everyone to have. Not just because I think it’s the best way to learn, but because I think it’s the best way to be a participant, a citizen, an ethical person in the world. You have to believe that you have a mind of your own, and that it’s capable of discovery and new ideas. When you stop thinking that, you’re either a slave or a dogmatist, and that kind of amounts to the same thing.

That’s the big lesson to me, teaching teachers or teaching kids: you are a working in progress, each of you. You are living in a world that is not finished, that’s incomplete. And through your own imagination, curiosity, initiation, courage, in unison with others, you can not only rediscover the world, you can remake the world. That’s the big lesson to me about teaching.

In a sense, you’re structuring the classroom as a laboratory of sorts.

I think of the classroom as a laboratory for discovery and surprise, absolutely. And I think every classroom should be like that, whether it’s a geography classroom in high school or a physics classroom in college, or a kindergarten, it ought to be structured as a laboratory for discovery and surprise. And you can add other metaphors to that. You can say it also ought to be a performance space. It ought to be a place you can come to tell your story. It ought to be an artist studio. It ought to be a museum. But notice, all of the metaphors that you and I are coming up with aren’t it ought to be a factory [laughs]—it can be a workshop, but not a factory.

You want to stay away from homogenization.

I want to stay away from one-size-fits-all, because I think one size fits none. That’s part of it. And part of it is, I think it’s an absolute myth that we could ever learn the same things at the same time in the same way, 30 of us sitting, eyes up front, well-behaved. It just never has happened and never could happen. I’m interested in, as you say, a laboratory or a museum or something. We’re working away at materials in kindergarten, it’s the blocks and the clay and the paint. In a college classroom, it’s other materials. But working away at materials, interacting with the world, the big, big underlying hidden lesson is that you can discover and construct a world. You don’t have to wait passively for it to be given to you.

Had I taught those kindergarten kids lessons in primary and secondary colors, the hidden lesson of that would be, ‘I know and you don’t know. I know when you need to know this. You don’t know when you need to know this. I’m smart, you’re not smart. I’m active, you’re passive.’ And those are exactly the lessons I don’t want to teach.

Is it hard to maintain that sense of discovery as students get older?

I think when students come to me at the level of college or graduate school, they’ve already learned to play the gamed called “school,” as I have. I mean, we’ve all learned to play the game called school, and then we’re put into a certification concentration camp, where the deal is, you come in and act like you’re interested, and give me what I want, and I’ll act like you’re doing well, and we’ll have an exchange. You pay the tuition and I’ll give you a passing grade, and you go out and repeat the whole formula.

That’s a catastrophe for learning and for any kind of a human and intelligent future. So I try to break with that and say I’m not interested in that project or that deal. I try to undermine it and say to students, “look, you and I have all learned to play the game.” I say this on the first day of class. “We all know how to play it, and we were all successful at it. Not just you. Me too.”

And so, if I say to you, “pick a question of authentic interest to yourself. Something that you can really pursue by closing in on primary sources, by projecting models. But not by referring to secondary sources. Think of a question that powers your passion.” If I say that to a group of college students—and I say it, every semester—the response absolutely predictably, with no contempt, is, “okay, but what do you want?” And I get that. I get that. I’m there too.

I often say to students, after I’ve had them for two or three weeks, and we’re getting down and getting dirty, and getting interesting, “come on, guys, you know that if I put up a sign in the center of campus saying, ‘Professor Ayers will be under this tree every Wednesday at 5 PM. Anyone interested can come along. You won’t get credit and you won’t have to pay tuition. And Ayers won’t get paid.’ How many of you would show up?” And they always kind of giggle uncomfortably, and two or three sweet souls always say, “well, I would.” And I say, “great, I’ll be there.”

But that’s just one way of kicking at the underpinnings of the hypocrisy of what we call ‘education.’ It’s really just a certification camp. And I really don’t want to be in the certification camp. But, there it is. And that’s why, incidentally, schools and universities and classrooms are contested spaces. We’re fighting over what they should be.

I don’t know if you saw The Times this morning, but, oh my god, new standards in Texas. It’s absolutely appalling. In Texas, the right-wing school board has won the day, and they’re going to teach only the good stuff about American history. And they don’t want you to see any peak of the dark side. It would be laughable if it weren’t so tragic. We already make that mistake, and we’re going to make it much, much worse. I think that’s what fuels me every day.

[Continued in Part Two.]

–Brian Heater

• Kate Beaton sold a comic to the New Yorker! The announcement was made official via her Twitter. Also news worthy from Ms. Beaton’s Twitter? Fat ponies.
• Rene Engstrom has a beautiful new blog.
• Phil Yeh and Geoff Bevington have written a new book, Steve the Dog and the Winged Tiger. Both authors will be present for the book’s launch event, March 19 and 20 from 11am-5pm at Open Books in Chicago. They will be doing a permanent mural inside the store and the public is invited to come and help paint. Yeh has painted over 1800 murals around the world and was honored at the White House for his literacy campaign.
• MoCCA’s Master Class Series in Comics Writing begins this Tuesday, with Chris Claremont.
• 81-year-old Jules Feiffer will be reading from his new book, “Backing Into Forward: A Memoir,” on March 18 at 4pm at Politics & Prose in D.C.
• Tyler Page spent $46,918.60 self-publishing his comics—and so can you! Find out how to spend a lot (or, fingers crossed, not so much) in his self-publishing tutorial.
• Liz Prince would like to remind you to wear a helmet.
• The Comics Journal has written an extremely comprehensive review of Jason Shiga’s choose-your-own adventure comic, “Meanwhile.”

-Athena Currier

[Above a child learns how to read through comic books, below the illiterate Dispatch.]

• “You can’t just read comic books!” Did you ever get that line as a kid? Well the independent documentary, Comic Book Literacy,  is looking to change those parental opinions.
• Choose your own adventure with Pop Culture Shock’s interview extravaganza at Emerald City Comic Con this weekend. Tweet them here with questions (oh and don’t forget to hash tag #TFAWEC3).
• Whedon has not been able to catch a break lately and with his shows getting canceled left and right, it leaves questions unanswered, especially about mysterious character Shepherd Book. Ask and you shall receive… a comic book explaining everything.
• In these post-Watchmen days, are the Superhero comics trying to outdo one another in tragic storyline–I mean when do these guys catch a break?
• Comics Alliance does a round-up of the top crazies in the comic book industry…funny thing is that most of them are considered pioneers.
• If you’re looking for something to do this weekend there’s always the Mega Con down in Florida.
• Get in on the comic book action this Monday and learn how to “Create a Graphic Novel Hollywood Will Buy.” Because what more could a person want than fame and fortune?

-Natalie Shoemaker

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

The near universality of the Internet in the modern age has granted a strange sense of immortality to contemporary art. There’s a feeling that, no matter how minute or trivial a work is, it will be stored for posterity for far beyond the life of its creator, in some form or another. That’s not to say, of course, that work created in this contemporary context is somehow more worthy of preservation than its predecessors—or even that newly created works are built with staying power in mind (heck, many contemporary artists have happily embraced the concept of the ethereal meme), it’s just that it’s hard to imagine creating a work today that one won’t be able to revisit at some point down the road, should it be deemed worth of re-examination.

It is, in many ways, the polar opposite of the approach that drove much of ‘zine and early mini-comix culture. And while the argument can perhaps be made that nearly every artist is—on some level—seeking greater exposure, there’s something romantic in the sense of hyper-specific culture to which such documents cater.  “It makes little difference if fifty or fifty thousand people read them,” Comix World publisher Clay Geerdes writes in 1983’s “The NeWave Manifesto,” reprinted in full in the introduction of this new collection. “Ideas and their expression are the issue, not quantity or quality…Newave is about art, not money.”

With such idealism in mind, it’s easy to understand why the life of so much of this material has proven so finite. In fact, in many respects there seems to be something of a gap in the history of underground comics between the UG revolution of the 60s and 70s the alternative renaissance that really caught fire in the 90s. Newave attempts to plug some of that, and while the book certainly doesn’t claim to be anything approaching a definitive catalog even with its staggering page count (just under 900), the book certainly offers a formidable cross section of the artists who helped define the era.

As one might no doubt suspect from such an undertaking, there’s also a wide variety of quality in these pages, but much as the manifesto would have you believe, there’s little doubt that each creator was brimming with ideas and the desire for expression when they embarked upon their pieces. After all, when money is truly removed from the equation (whether due to idealism or the simple economic realities of such an endeavor), there’s little room anything but passion.

And while a good deal of strips contained herein may not offer specific value for the reader with little context outside these pages, there’s certainly value in the abstract—the package. Taken as a whole, Newave presents a portrait of an era that might otherwise be overlooked as a vital link between, say, Zap and Eightball. For those with little invested in such contextual views of the medium, the book also succeeds as an intriguing little curiosity—the perfect shape and size for the “periodical” section of, say, a Spencers Gifts.

In either case, the book is a veritable treasure trove of material that would otherwise have been lost to the ages. And, perhaps most importantly, it’s a hell of fun read.

–Brian Heater

At some point, for those lucky enough to realize their dreams, passions morph into careers. A blessing, to be sure, but certainly not entirely devoid of its own built-in curses. The line between love and obligation is often simply a matter of obligatory repetition. It is with that in mind that Lewis Trondheim declared his retirement from the form in 2004. And while deeming his venture dubious would be a touch generous, it speaks to a greater truth in art: transforming a passion into a job oft has the tendency to extinguish that initial spark.

No better is this double-edged sword demonstrated than in the world of the diary strip. Plenty of noble intentions give rise to such things. They can serve as a fantastic tool with which to hone one’s line or pacing or simply help an artist keep track of otherwise fleeting memories. Somewhere along the line, however, such intentions fairly often give way to obligations. Whether for public consumption or private reference, a diary strip holds little value if it’s not maintained.

As with all passions-turned-obligations, the question inevitably arises—has the value of such a pursuit been eclipsed by a sense of responsibility? What value, after all, is there for a reader in a work born of habit? Here, often, is where things get weird, with flights of artificial fancy, or, as is more often the case, simply peter out.

And then, of course, there is Trondheim. Its unfair to suggest that the artist thrives on the mundane. Doing so would discount the stellar work he brings to the table in nearly every genre he tries his hand out. Rather Trondheim embraces minutiae with the same zeal that he applies to the fantastic.

Take, for the sake of comparison, the work of James Kochalka, another pillar in the world of the contemporary diary strip. As is often (and rightly) reiterated in reviews of American Elf, the appeal of Kochalka’s diary only truly becomes apparent in the abstract. Repetition is the reader’s friend. If he or she does not surrender to boredom or bafflement, the payoff is great, the pieces of the puzzle coalescing into a truly human portrait.

But while American Elf is something akin to a serialized novel, the same descriptor cannot be applied to Little Nothings. Trondheim’s diary work is more comfortable compared to a book of poems. Every strips is a self-contained meditation. And while the nature of the genre certainly necessitates some degree of overarching story arc, the book presents little, if any, learning curve for the reader.

As the series’ typically self-effacing title and artwork (a happy middle between a sketchbook page and an art class watercolor) suggest, Trondheim seemingly welcomes with open arms those readers who approach the work with a cavalier sensibility. And while Trondheim’s own nonchalance is likely as deceptive as his seemingly simplistic artwork, there’s something to be gained in even the most cursory reading of the worked contained herein. It’s funny, it’s charming as hell, and it’s almost painfully relatable. And best of all, it’s not work.

–Brian Heater

• New alternative comic convention alert: it’s the Minneapolis Indie Xpo! Founded by Andy Krueger and the Cross Hatch’s own Sarah Morean, the first-ever “MIX” will take place on August 21 at the Soap Factory in Minneapolis. Register your booth now!
• Red Light Properties, Dan Goldman’s relatively new webcomic about a Miami Beach real estate firm specializing in exorcisms of haunted homes, continues to update at a jaw-dropping pace of eight pages a week. The story is already 80+ pages long—so start reading!
• The grand opening of COVERED: Artists Re-interpreting Classic Covers was this past Saturday, but you can still catch the show in Los Angeles, or think about buying one of the amazing pieces by perusing the collection on Flickr.
• Danielle Corsetto will be signing copies of “Girls with Slingshots” on Wednesday, March 10, from 12-6pm, at Zeus Comics in Dallas.
• Also this Wednesday, Raina Telgemeier will be speaking about her creative process and her new book, “Smile,” at 3:30pm in the Queens Library.
• It’s MegaCon weekend in Orlando!
• And Emerald City ComiCon weekend in Seattle!
• Asaf Hanuka was recently spotlighted on Meathaus for The Realist, a fantastic series he has begun posting, which chronicles the story of his family’s search for a new home.
• Meanwhile, Inkstuds got chatty with KC Green.

-Athena Currier

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

Hive is a theme-less comics anthology that’s edited by J.M. Shiveley and printed by Grimalkin Press — Shiveley’s ambitious DIY publishing company. To wit, the third issue of Hive is being sold through a Barnes & Noble store.  See?  Ambitious.

Yes, individual B&N stores have a history of carrying books from small-time publishers, but those titles tend to cover local history and still look like “books.” You know, soft- and hard-cover vanity-pressed books.

None of these terms describe Hive 3 which is folded concertina-style and has a double-sided letterpress cover. Hive 3 is certainly a fat 2-in-1 booklet, which is something I thought I’d never see in a big box bookstore.  I’m calling that an achievement.

That said, while printing experiments in comics are admirable, there are some clear issues with the publication style of Hive 3.  It’s eye-catching, sure, but there’s just too much going on with the printing of this book that doesn’t make sense for the material.  I guess if you’re going to charge $10 for a self-published hand-made black-and-white anthology, it should really have something distinctive going on, but I’m afraid this issue has crossed the line from unique to gimmicky.

To be fair though, a book shouldn’t be judged entirely by its cover, and what Hive 3 presents deep down inside is a high-quality selection of short comics and art.

Hive 3 a is simply outstanding collection of comics.  Every story is excellent.  It captures a full array of styles and subjects and I enjoyed every minute spent reading and re-reading it.  Contributors for this issue include Karl and Matt Kindt, Malachi Ward, John Kinhart, Dax Delap, Hawk Krall, Andrew Drilon, Jon Freihofer, Eamon Espey, Chad R. Woody, Joe Decie, Joshua W. Cotter, Mostyn, J.M. Shiveley, Douglas Wilson and Mark Leicht.

Krall’s contribution is a series of “Summer of 7-11″ recollections, in which he describes a summer job as a convenience store clerk. His stories are full of crazy, incomprehensible, foul characters. It’s awesome. And his drawing style is perfect for expressing the wild, nasty people he encounters in the store.

Ward tells a science fiction story that takes place partly in a cave and partly in the protagonist’s mind. It jumps swiftly from strange to eerie and is rendered in his lovely brushstroke style and with gray accents.

Drilon tells a story that is a sobering mix of memory and mysticism for a man in the Philippines who struggles with his family’s response to his first homosexual relationship.  He uses interesting stylistic devices to distinguish between past and present.  In the present, his drawings are layered and realistic and tonally more grown-up.  The adult years are also narrated by type-written text, rather than hand-written text.  When he looks back on his past, the illustrations have a clean line and look more playful.

This is a very full anthology and covers monsters, the Civil War, sex, and death.  It is also 140 pages long!  This could have easily been two issues instead of one.  Still, Hive 4 is on its way to the presses and it seems Shiveley has no shortage of willing contributors for future issues, so there was really no reason to space out the material.  That’s a good kind of problem to have. I am just befuddled by the way Grimalkin Press decided to handle these pages for the publication of Hive 3 which, as I mentioned before, uses a concertina fold.

If you’re not familiar with concertina folds, just imagine two mini-comics that share a back cover. Once you finish with one side, you flip over the book to find a second booklet. This can be a very cool way to print something if you have the right reason to do so. 140 pages is admittedly a lot of paper to deal with, and a concertina fold can break that up into manageable parts, but its use in this instance is so entirely uninspired. The book as a whole doesn’t share a theme or have a “flip side” perspective — its content is all over the map. There is no logical way to break up the content to begin with, so separating it physically into two parts is just arbitrary compartmentalization that clearly reduces the comics to their page count. It just looks like, because the previous two issues were fold-and-staple, they went that way a third time by default. For a DIY publishing company that aspires to think outside the box, this is a pretty disappointing display of their talents.

There are so many interesting ways that they could have bound flat pages, or worked in signatures, or something even crazier than my mind can conjure. Finding ways to hand-bind 140 pages as a single book is a challenge, and I’m not impressed by the way Grimalkin Press chose to meet this challenge in this instance. Not to mention, the two booklets each need a face trim (a cut that makes the pages flush on the right side and easier to turn). Any self-published book that wants to be taken seriously ought to have a face trim. The technology is simple: cutting board + metal ruler + razor blade = go!

The double-sided letterpress job on the cover is another story. It’s very cool that they went letterpress with this issue, but the intent of the letterpress is confusing. The cover stock is so thin that impressions compete with each other and end up creating very little indentation on the page at all. Plus, letterpressing both sides has had given the effect of streaky ink, which you’ll notice in the cover photo accompanying this review. Whether or not that effect is desirable comes down to taste.

The title of the book was printed on a proof press with large type. To see the whole title, you’d need lay out the whole cover flat (more or less). The way this effects how text appears on the cover is interesting. The effect of the broken-up subtitle leads to a misrepresentation of the book as a “quarterly comic journal” instead of “a somewhat quarterly comic journal.”  However, most confusing for me is that it’s not even a journal!  It’s an anthology.  I realize that coming from someone at The “Daily” Crosshatch this must sound like the pot calling the kettle black, but as someone who works with real journals all day in a library, I couldn’t not notice the cheeky disregard for nomenclature. There is not a single journalistic element to the book, just comics and bios.  The editorial selection process of culling talent for publication does not make a book a journal.  That’s an anthology.

The take away from all this is that when it comes to Hive 3 — just read it.  Don’t think too much about it. I’ve thought about it enough already for all of us.  Just read those lovely comics and remember that Hive 3 is likely just the third publication that Grimalkin Press has worked on. They’re clearly ambitious and have their heart in the right place and will continue to promote amazing artists and work on unique books for many years to come. This particular issue just rubbed me the wrong way.

If you’d like to be rubbed wrong by Hive 3 — it’s $10 + shipping through the Grimalkin Press etsy shop.

Hopefully they’ll be around producing books for many years to come and dare to push the envelope of self-publishing a little farther and more masterfully with each attempt.  I’m sorry that the first time I’ve discuss their catalog it sounds so negative, but I really do believe if they live up to their creed and gain more experience they’re going to be amazing.  Watch out for these guys.  They could eventually cross a line where all these confused printing mechanics get used in a most incredible and inspiring way.

- Sarah Morean

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