In light of his successful debut at San Diego Comic Con this past weekend, we may well be seeing a slew of new Masterpiece Comics strips debut from the R. Sikoryak camp. Of course, given that the first book took roughly 20 years to produce, perhaps it’s best not to hold our collective breath for another anthology.

In the meantime, I’d like to take this opportunity to encourage the artist to instate some manner of Internet-based suggestion box—not because I expect or even really hope he’ll elect to tackle proposed strips, but rather because proposing theoretical pairings of literature and comics is, simply put, a lot of fun.

Heck, I couldn’t help suggesting one of my own in the third part of our interview, and while Marma Dick wasn’t a creative high point for me personally, once you put yourself in that mindset, such suggestions can’t be helped. But ultimately, I suppose there’s a reason why Sikoryak is the master behind Masterpiece Comics.

[Part One]
[Part Two]

Have you considered doing something book-length—or at least longer than a couple of pages?

I would love to…the thing that’s tripping me up about doing something really long is that, at a certain point, if you do a parody that lasts 100 pages, it can stop being a parody. It starts becoming a problem  for lawyers [laughs]. But I have some notions.

It seems natural to consider doing something in the style of, say, Jack Kirby.  He’s an artist who everyone rips off all of the time, anyway.  So I might do a story based more on an artist’s approach than on a specific character. But I’m not sure how that will really work for me, because  I really like playing with the icons as well as just the drawing styles. On the other hand, his work is so instantly recognizable that it would be something different, but still very interesting.

In a sense these books stories seem more sustainable than, say the Mad style, because they’re not targeted at hitting joke after joke.

Right, but if you do frame it as humorous, or full of jokes, I think people are more willing  to accept it.  They have more of a sense of what it is, whereas if you do some crazy homage that lasts for a full-length graphic novel, it  might just feel bizarre. I do hope my work feels somewhat bizarre, but I don’t know if something that long would really appeal to people, or if it could sustain itself.  I don’t  really think about the audience that much, that’s not the only issue.  I also like being able to jump around stylistically. That’s the other thing that it really comes down to. I get very impatient when I have to draw one way for too long. Also, as you can imagine,  the way I do some of these stories, it’s already a very long process of capturing the specific styles. I don’t know if I have another Dick Sprang homage in me!  It would be fun to revisit some of these styles, but I can’t really imagine what would make me go back to ones I’ve done before.

In terms of the strips in the book, which was the hardest style to teach yourself?

Well, there are a couple of them in the book. There’s the  Little Nemo parody, where I thought, ‘well, most of it takes place with only one character!’ That would have to make it somewhat easier.  And there were none of his beautiful architectural designs that I had to deal with. But even so, I found myself agonizing over every panel of that. I don’t know how McCay did it it every day.

Or even how he developed such a modern style in that period.

Well, he drew every minute of the day. He didn’t spend much time lettering, obviously, but he spent all of his time drawing. Between his vaudeville shows, his animations, his weekly comic  strips, and his editorial cartoons—I know he didn’t do them all at the same time, but he was doing a lot of them at the same time. It was  really humbling trying to get that look down. Beyond that, I’d say the E.C. style was very difficult. I was aiming for Jack Davis. I think I was more successful in some panels than others. Down to the compositions of panels, I was very particular in trying to match his layouts, his choices of poses, and his other tropes. But one thing I wish I had another crack at is his inking. It’s so idiosyncratic and free-flowing, and it’s completely antithetical to the way I work. He would knock out one of his stories in a week, I’d guess.

Obviously he’d built his style from the ground up, and I was learning it from the outside in.  It’s completely alien to the way he’d work, so that was interesting, trying to make the drawing feel completely organic, when it was a completely inorganic process. I work very hard to make all these stories look hand-made and hopefully not agonized over, but of course they are all completely agonized over.

On the other end of the spectrum, every artist I’ve spoken to who has attempted to mimic Schulz’s style has found it incredibly hard to ape the simplicity.

Oh yeah.  I had the advantage of having mutated the main character into a cockroach, so that took some of the pressure off [laughs]. But that’s also one of the earlier strips in the book, and  I look at the lettering now and think, “aah, it’s not quite up to snuff.” But that strip has been reprinted a couple of times, and I feel, at this point, people actually know that strip. So I left it alone.  For some of the other earlier strips, I actually went back in and fixed a lot of the lettering, and colored them for the book, as well.

It seems like if you hit on a few of the key points—like Schulz’s shaky lines, most people can forgive a lot.

I think that’s true. But it is so specific. The other thing that’s fascinating is how much Schulz’s characters changed while he drew them over 50 years. I’ve done other parodies of Peanuts, and you really have to choose your era. If you’re looking at too many strips from too many different eras, it can get a little unspecific. But the more precisely you choose, the better the parody is.

Maybe you can do a Time Machine parody, with the different Schulz eras.

Yeah, yeah.

You mentioned earlier that there are a few stories you’re interested in tackling. Are there any that you have been able to pair up?

I would love to do something with Moby Dick, and I have about eight different ideas for how to approach it.  I’m totally intimated by that novel, especially because it was written by someone 13 years younger than I am now, who is clearly more brilliant than most people, period.

How about Marmaduke [laughs].

Someone actually suggested that I pair up Moby Dick with Nancy. I didn’t take  him up on it, and I’m still trying to figure out what he meant.

Sluggo as the white whale?

I guess [laughs].

–Brian Heater

What do Dostoyevsky, David Heatley, Demi Moore, and the guy who drew Bazooka Joe have in common? Why the second part of our interview with Masterpiece Comics Author R. Sikoryak, of course.

[Part One]

There’s a point in terms of adaptation that you move so far away from the source material that it almost doesn’t seem worth keeping that original name on the work.

Yeah. It’s amazing what Hollywood does with classic literature, let alone anything they touch.  Remember the 1990’s Scarlet Letter movie?  “Hester Prynne, she’s an interesting character. Let’s make her Demi Moore and rewrite the entire plot.”

On that note, why would you choose Little Lulu for that story?

Well, I think the real spark of excitement came when it occurred to me that there are parallels in the relationships of the characters in Little Lulu to the relationships of the characters in The Scarlett Letter. Whenever I start thinking about a new comic, I return to those comic strips I–potentially–want to parody. And I think about those novels that are very well known and very respected. I try to use sources at the top of the canon, and it’s not a huge list— though it’s more books than I’ll be able to read in my lifetime—

And draw, certainly.

Oh, yeah, well there’s that [laughs]. No question. But it’s a matter of thinking about those books, books that I love, books that people will grab you by the collar and say, “you must read this!” whether they’re English professors or friends. I recently got a letter from someone who said, ‘I love your stuff, and here are five novels I think you should do.’ There were some pretty good ones on the list [laughs]. And a couple of them I have some ideas for. That’s what’s interesting to me. Certainly the novels have to speak to me and the comic strips have to speak to me, or be so enormous in their cultural impact as to be unavoidable.

In a sense you want to pick the material that will most upset those sorts of people who would be upset that you’re adapting it into a comic strip.

Yeah, that’s a fair way of putting it. The first strip I did was “Inferno Joe,”  in ’89, and yeah, I was being a smart alec. It was just, “ha, ha, ha, high culture meets low culture.” But as I’ve done more of these stories, I’ve gotten in deeper. I still want them to be absurd and funny, but I feel like there’s something more here that I want to keep playing with.

It seems like the dichotomy isn’t as pronounced now that both mediums can be accepted as high culture.

Oh yeah, it’s totally leveling out. That’s what’s so weird about the book coming out now. The book is a hardcover and thus appropriate for libraries. When I started doing these, it didn’t occur to me that they would end up there. And also, newspaper comic strips, in particular, were a mass medium in a way that they aren’t any more. I feel kind of sad about that [laughs]. And a lot of the artists that I’m parodying are no longer with us, and that also adds another level.

They’re canonical in their own way now.

Yeah, yeah.

I don’t know if there are dates on all of the strips in the book, but I didn’t realize that the Bazooka Joe one  was the first one. But reading the book, it stood out to me as one of the few comics in the book that you wouldn’t cite as a “great” comic.

Right. I chose it more for its ubiquity than anything else. Also, at the time I was working at RAW Magazine with Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly, and Art worked at Topps then.  I did some freelance writing for Topps, so I was thinking of bubblegum a lot.  It was also a natural choice: ‘what’s the smallest, most insignificant strip in which to retell Dante’s Inferno?’ The book prints the strips even larger than they originally appeared, so that’s a little jarring.

Now that you mention it, it does bring to mind a lot of the stuff that Spiegelman was doing at Topps, like the Wacky Packages.

Oh sure. And he and I would go back to Kurtzman. I think that most of the artists that I’ve been influenced by have been influenced by the first 28 issues of Mad—or really, all of Mad, but certainly Kurtzman laid the groundwork.

You said that you didn’t really take the first strip all that seriously. At what point did it grow into something more?

I think as soon as I did it, it occurred to me that there was more to be explored here. I shouldn’t say that I didn’t take it seriously, but I think that the pairing of the two sources wasn’t as agonized over as some of the later ones were [laughs]. Partially that’s because, with the “Inferno Joe” strip, I only had a couple of months to do it, whereas, with some of the other strips like  “Little Pearl,” which is The Scarlet Letter story, I probably worked on it for a year.  It was done between paying jobs, because I was doing it for an independent comics anthology. I wasn’t getting the big bucks for it, but I had the time to do it right.  That’s just how it goes— I’m grateful that I’ve had places to print these stories.

I’d actually gotten some funding for my “Masterpiece” series from the New York Foundation for the Arts in the mid-90s. They’d started recognizing comics as an art form to support —I think David Heatley also got a fellowship from them, recently. In any case, I’d gotten one from them, and that rejuvenated me, encouraged me to do more. That was around ’94. At that point, I’d started working on “Dostoyevsky Comics,” my retelling of Crime and Punishment.

I worked on that on and off for a couple of years. I was doing a lot of freelance work for magazines, when magazines were more plentiful. So, I was slowly working on that, and it became a longer process, because it was based on the Dick Sprang [Batman] style, which is a lot harder to master than the Wesley Morse style [the original artist who drew Bazooka Joe]. Getting that style down and figuring out the story was really time consuming—and oh boy, I had a lot of sub-plots I wanted to put in, involving Two-face and Batgirl. It went on and on and on. But at a certain point, I decided, “enough.” It was published in 2000 by Drawn & Quarterly, in their Volume 3 anthology.

[Concluded in Part Three]

–Brian Heater

It took Michelangelo four years to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Beethoven composed his 9th Symphony over course of six. Jonas Salk, meanwhile,  spent eight years chasing the cure for Polio. According to the copyright on the inside cover of Drawn & Quarterly’s Masterpiece Comics, the book’s 13 strips were created by R. Sikoryak over the course of 20 years—roughly the same period of time it took tens of thousands of workers to complete the Great Pyramid of Giza.

While it would, perhaps, be a bit of a stretch to suggest that the work were an accomplishment on par with, say, that big triangular structure in the middle of the Egyptian desert, the collection has certainly been eagerly awaited for all of those who’ve followed the New York-based artist’s work, which, over the past two decades, has appeared everywhere from RAW to The New Yorker to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

But while Sikoryak has certainly built an impressive portfolio by way of his freelance output, the strips that comprise Masterpiece Comics are his masterwork, filtering some of the greatest works of literature through some of 20th century sequential art’s most iconic figures. The cast of Bazooka Joe plays out Dante’s Inferno, Garfield becomes Mephistopheles to Jon Arbuckle’s Dr. Faustus, and Beavis and Butthead wait patiently for Godot.

These 13 strips are not straight comic satire, however. Sikoryak’s Masterpiece Comics are defined by two key factors. First is the artist’s devotion to his source material—never straying too far from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, even as Bruce Wayne’s alter-ego adopts the role of Raskolnikov. Second is Sikoryak’s commitment to aesthetics, switching gracefully from Winsor McCay to Charles Schulz to Joe Shuster.

In honor of the book’s release in September (with early editions available at San Diego), we sat down with Sikoryak to discuss the book’s secret origins.

The copyright in the front of the book is about 20 years long.

It’s 1989 to 2009.

So this was a two-decade long project for you.

Yeah. I kind of hate to say it, but it’s true. I’d say a quarter of  the book is from the late-’80s/early-’90s and most of it is from ‘99-on.

Which is still a long time to be working on a book.

Yeah, yeah.  As you can imagine, I spend a lot of time on these. It’s interesting, because I do a lot of commercial work where the deadline is a week to do a page or two of comics. With these strips I’ve been very vigilant about trying to get all of the details right, in terms of being faithful to the dead author and faithful to the on-going comic strip. It’s a weird balancing act and the longer I do it, the more I wonder about the process. But I’m still fascinated by the results. People seem to be able to hook into it, in terms of approaching it as a reader. I like the idea of making comics that people who don’t necessarily read comics can wrap their heads around.

Was it initially intended as a takeoff of those old Classics Illustrated books?

Yeah, a few different things happened. Certainly I was inspired by the post-modern artists of the ’80s, and of course the cartoonists in and around RAW Magazine,  who were playing with ideas of high and low art. I also remember reading an interview with P. Craig Russell in the ’80s about doing opera comics, which he’s been doing for decades. He made a remark—I can’t track down  this quote and I would really love to–I think it was in The Comics Journal. He said something like, “you know, when you take the music out of an opera,  it’s very different” [laughs].

Yes, that’s true, and so completely obvious–and yet people accept adaptations so naturally sometimes. They just assume they can be faithful or unfaithful. It’s amusing to me, because any adaptation is going to completely tear the guts out of the original version.

So I actually like playing with that idea — that any switch from one medium to another is going to to utterly and completely change the thing that you’re paying great homage to.  I wanted to make something where you couldn’t help but be confronted by the absurdity of doing adaptations—doing a translation of the work.

Cartoon characters aside, do you think the move from prose to sequential art is as dramatic as taking the score out of an opera?

I think so. Yeah. I can’t imagine how it wouldn’t be. For instance, I love audio books, but even they’re not really the novel anymore. Once someone attaches their voice to a piece of literature, it adds another personality, and creates a different experience. I guess if you had Dickens reading Dickens it would be closer [laughs]. But that doesn’t happen too often.

The sound quality wouldn’t be great, I imagine.

No [laughs].  The wax cylinders didn’t sound great—I know they didn’t have wax cylinders yet—I hope you don’t get any e-mails about that.

From the Edison people.

Yes [laughs]. So the personality in comics is so important. I can get thrilled or nauseated just looking at certain artist’s ink lines. There’s such a personal touch involved, it can’t help but be totally different from the original author.  Even a brilliant adaptation–and there are many–is going to be a whole new experience. I appreciate what Craig Russell does. I love people that have these obsessions and follow them through, which he totally does. It’s just as a quote, I remember hearing that and just thinking, ‘that’s the strangest thing I ever heard.’ Or maybe just the most obvious thing I ever heard.

But I can see why he’d have to tell people that, because a casual reader might think, “well, they’re wearing the same costumes—it’s the same thing, isn’t it?”   Think of the Watchmen movie—well, let’s not go into that in too much detail—but that’s the perfect example of a film that’s playing  slavish homage to its source material, while the viewer’s experience of it is entirely different in every possible way.

In your case, you’re attempting to pay homage while creating something that’s about as far from a literal adaptation as possible. Do you feel like you’re working in two entirely different directions at the same time?

Yeah, definitely. I think the more you slavishly try to do something that’s impossible, the more interesting the results are. You could say, “well, if I’m going to put a Batman character in Crime and Punishment, I can change the plot”–because once you introduce him, it changes so much already.  But I really think the results are more fascinating if you say, “No, it has to be the same plot. I have to put this character in this situation and see what comes of it.”  So by keeping as much of the dialogue and plot as possible,  you can see how the new character changes your response to the themes and the narrative that already exist. And I think it makes for a funnier and sadder final product, if I just say, “I’m not going to do anything different.”

“I’m going to work within the parameters of this storyline, and I’m going to work within the parameters of this comics strip. I’m not going to deviate from them in any way that I can help.” And I think that constraints are really important to me, in terms of making interesting comics. Constraints are already in the boxes of every comic. So, every way I can find to keep me from making impulsive choices, I think makes the comic stronger.

[Continued in Part Two.]

Asterios Polyp
By David Mazzucchelli
Pantheon

At some point we all become ambassadors—to our parents, to our friends, to strangers we meet at parties. We give recommendations and lend out worn copies with bent spines. We attempt to justify our passions as more than simple guilty pleasures. There is no guilt here. This is art.

Few statements in this world are more subjective than that last one, of course, so, for the hard sell, we compile lists of game changers—the Spiegelmans, Satrapis, Wares, and Moores—authors whose work has convinced the critics to assess the medium’s finest work alongside the world’s high art and literature. Because, after all, if a book is high brow enough to win over some stodgy old book critic at The New York Times, surely it will do a number on mom and dad, right?

Of course it’s a touch too early to bandy about a term like “game changer” for Asterios Polyp—that’s a distinction that will have to be bestowed upon the book by future artists. Despite the still drying ink on the title’s first printing, however, it doesn’t seem too early to add David Mazzucchelli’s new book to the personal lending libraries of some of this medium’s finer works.

Opening Asterios Polyp feels like cracking open the pages of some vintage art book, one stashed away on the library for a few decades, which pulsates and comes to life the moment its contents hit the air. Mazzucchelli, who has already established his talents in any number of corners in this medium, from Frank Miller’s Daredevil to Paul Auster’s City of Glass, seems, perhaps for the first time in a long and storied career, to have finally allotted himself sufficient stretching room, dripping these pages with free-flowing cartoon lines and splotches of electric neon ink.

Mazzucchelli clearly has something to prove on the pages of Asterios Polyp, to demonstrate just how nimble and whole his artist abilities truly are, adopting the aesthetic antithesis of the dark and ripped Batman of Year One, a free-flowing line borrowed from the cartoon cover of some early 60s beatnik jazz records.

It’s an attempt too, perhaps, to draw out some of the oft self-seriousness of a storyline that airs out male narcissism in a manner akin to the works that helped make Phillip Roth and John Updike famous. Asterios Polyp is a slow deconstruction of the male ego—the fortress constructed around himself by the titular world famous architect—if only on paper.  It’s a cautionary tale about the tenuousness of genius, success, and memory.

Mazzucchelli supplements his character deconstruction with a visual one, keeping with the architectural theme by showing us Polyp’s framework in those rare instances that he lets his guard down. Or perhaps its just that a woman—Polyp’s intellectually neglected wife, Hanna—is one of the few characters capable of seeing the man through decades-old layers of insecure posturing, the same innate bullshit detection that ultimately leads her to leave Polyp in search of her own untapped potential. It’s an action which, when coupled with a freak lightning strike, serves as the catalyst for Polyp’s obligatory journey of self-discovery and subsequent redemption.

In order to achieve absolution, however, Polyp must become Orpheus and rescue Eurydice from the grips of Hades. Again Mazzucchelli illustrates this act on dual levels, both through Polyp’s abrupt move to a rural community, working as a car mechanic, and through a dream sequence which finds the architect descending the circles of the underworld, a t-square-turned-harp clutched in his hand. And once again the author can be forgiven the tendency to literalize such subtext when so much story is swirling around at any one moment.

And, ultimately, the construction of memories is every bit as central to Polyp’s return to the land of the living. “To live (as I understand it) is to exist within a conception of time,” the character narrates toward the end of the book’s packed 344 pages over an image of a pocket watch a young Asterios pulled apart and never figured out how to reconstruct. “But to remember is to vacate the very notion of time.”

Dreams are every bit as essential as memories in Polyp’s de- and subsequent re-construction. After all in a sense they are the same thing, “because,” adds Polyp on the facing page, “every memory is a re-creation, not a playback.” Unfortunately for Polyp, however, such self-realization and redefinition cannot be achieved through memory alone. Far stronger catalysts are required here like divorce violence and forces of nature—catalysts that bring the character as close to the brink of non-existence as possible.

The amount that Mazzucchelli hurls at his protagonist—and, by proxy, his readers—is staggering. What’s even more impressive in the frequency with which his trials and experiments succeed. Asterios Polyp is the work of a veteran artist firing on all cylinders, who, despite having worked his way through the sequential art ringer for a few decades now, has managed to craft something remarkably fresh. Something that is sure to be borrowed from the libraries of plenty of self-appointed graphic novel ambassadors.

–Brian Heater

There’s part of me that felt a bit strange discussing the merits of superhero books with Jaime Hernandez. Sure the subject has come up with plenty of indie creators, and certainly artists like Jack Kirby are obligatorily rattled off when discussing Hernandez’s artwork, but the artist, who, along with his brother and longtime co-conspirator, Gilbert (and to a lesser extent, the eldest Hernandez sibling, Mario), is credited perhaps more so than any of his contemporaries as being one of the primary catalysts in indie comics’ divergence from the medium’s dominant caped paradigm.

The first issue of Love & Rockets’ most recent run (now an annual), however, bears the image of a caped Penny Century on its cover, a subject reflected in Jaime’s contributions to the book, which whole-heartedly embrace the superhero genre. Thankfully, however, they do so in a manner that fits comfortably into the world that Jaime has worked so hard to construct, thanks in large part to appearances by characters like Century and perennial loca, Maggie.

In this first part of our interview, we discuss caped crusaders, the fate of those early sci-fi stories, and the weird and wonderful world of Pogs.

You’ve gone pretty full bore into the world of superheroes, with the new book. Is that something you’ve been interested in pursuing for a while?

Yeah, for a while. It started out with Gilbert and I wanting to do a superhero comic separate from Love & Rockets. We wanted it in color and wanted to do a superhero comic, our way. As it got more involved, my story started to get longer and kept going. Gilbert was working on other stuff, and one day he goes, “why don’t you just do that yourself, and we’ll maybe do something together later?” It just got longer and longer, and I thought, “well, I’m really into this—it’s really exciting, so maybe I should just do it as Love & Rockets. I didn’t know how I was going to split up the chapters or anything, and shortly after that is when we came up with the idea of doing this 100-page annual. It just worked perfectly. I just fell into it. It was the right time and the right amount of work. I don’t know how it happened to work out like that, but that’s how it started.

When you say “do it our way,” how would you define that? What’s the Hernandez brothers’ way of doing a superhero book?

The thing is that Gilbert and I have always been superhero fans, it’s just that, at the time when we were starting our with our comic, we didn’t really like the way the mainstream was handling it. They were living off of a 60s Marvel formula. While we were fans of that way, the way the big two took superheroes was just not the way we would have done it. We were more fans of the 40s- and 50s-style, where superheroes still lived in the fantasy world. They weren’t trying to put them in the real world.

As a teenager, I had always drawn my own comics with my own superheroes as characters. I thought that I would put it in real life, and I would just have them do stuff in my hometown. I lived in a small town outside of LA called Oxnard. The more I did it, the more I was like, “that’s dumb!” [laughs] It just didn’t work for me, so I just started to like having superheroes in more of a fantasy world, because a lot more can happen than in the real life stuff.

It’s interesting, because a lot of kids who are starting out with their own art tend to work with established characters—Batman and Spider-men, etc.—did you do that too, early on, or were you always working with your own heroes?

It became my own characters when I was in my early teens—actually maybe even earlier. When I was a little kid, I would draw Batman comics. I think I drew Batman’s origin like a dozen times. I would just do it over and over again [laughs]. I remember doing a lot of Batman—I’m trying to remember other characters I did. I think I did one or two Hulk comics, but the one I most remember is Batman, because the TV show came out, when I was about five or six. The Batman craze was all of the place. You couldn’t avoid it. And being that age it was just “give me more.”

Over the years, you must have been solicited by Marvel or DC to work on some of those established characters. Was that something that was ever on the table for you?

Um, actually, it was more like, “hey, one of these days, we’d like you to work for us,” and I’d say, “okay!” And then I’d never hear from them. DC came through a couple of times. “We’d like you to do a pinup or something in a Who’s Who.” But it was really small stuff. So, whenever they’d ask me to take over a character, I’d say, “we’ll see.” And then they’d never call me back [laughs]. And Marvel, the only time they ever approached me was early on to do—what are those things called?—Pogs. Those little discs. It was during the Pog craze. They asked me to draw a Pog, and I was like…”hello?” [laughs] “who are you calling again?” “Well, we were just wondering if you wanted to draw a Pog.” I don’t know, at that time,I was just like, “I’m not going to draw a Pog!” Maybe if they asked me a year before or after, I would have said, “sure it would be fun.”

Depending on how broke you were…

Yeah. But that was the only thing that Marvel asked me to do—I think later on they would call Gilbert and ask, “would your brother be into that?” And he would say, “I don’t know, ask him,” and they would never ask me.

They would call Gilbert to ask about you?

Well, they would call him to ask about a project and then he would say “yes” or “no” and then they would say, “do you think your brother would be into it?” and then he would say, “I don’t know ask him.” It really all depended on who the editor was and what it involved. Did they really want to work with us, or was it, “we need an artist, who can we get?” It was hard to tell.

In the case of Pogs, it sounds like maybe it was the latter.

Yeah, “we need a Pog artist. Who do we get?” Because sometimes I could figure out that they like the way I drew this one character in a certain issue—it looked like Supergirl or resembled Lex Luthor. That was usually why they asked. But sometimes, like the whole Pog thing, it was a big mystery.

You mentioned before that when you were creating superhero comics in your teens that you set them in your hometown. Was one of the things that initially turned you off from these books the fact that they weren’t enough like people you really knew?

I guess so, yeah. That’s a good point. It didn’t feel right because here I grew up in a Mexican-American world, and comics weren’t that. This is before they started adding a Latin character, here and there. So, as a teenager, I decided that I would have this character running down Oxnard Boulevard, next to a Mexican man in a cowboy hat [laughs]. It just didn’t feel right. Now when I think of that stuff, I go, “wow, that’s perfect!” you know, but at the time, the superhero world and Marvel just didn’t click, so I kept it separate. That evolved into the work I did. In the early stuff, I had more sci-fi in the background, and it dropped out, because I got more excited about real life. It was just more interesting to me, my life at the time, and realizing that I could do comics about all this stuff and most comic readers were not exposed to it, so it was kind of new. It was rarely shown in comics at the time.

In the case of the early sci-fi stuff, were you ever afraid of pigeonholing yourself as a genre artist?

It might have had something to do with that. I had a lot of that early sci-fi stuff, but it kept going back home, where the kids were punk and real. That stuff was more interesting to me. The sci-fi stuff started getting in the way, but Gilbert and I just never really talked about it. I remember later, Gilbert did an interview or was on a panel and he said, “you know, if we would have stayed a science-fiction comic, we would have been just another science-fiction comic.” We actually challenged ourselves to do something that was harder, which was normal life. I think it was more unconscious why it turned out that way. I don’t usually have a big game plan. I was just doing what entertained me and hopefully that cuts across to the reader. So, it’s a hard question to answer.

[Concluded in Part Two]

–Brian Heater