[Photo from Bully's Flickr set]

In this final part of our interview with cartoonists Mo Willems and Kyle Baker, we talk about comics for grownups, taking yourself too serious, and the pitfalls of Captain America.

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

Ever since around 1985 [sic, 1986]—the year that Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and Alan Moore’s Watchmen came out—there’s been a lot of talk about how “comics aren’t just for kids, anymore.” The industry has really shifted. It seems to me, at least from my perspective, that things are shifting back a bit.

Kyle Baker: Yeah, well, my thinking was, when they were doing this whole “comics aren’t just for kids anymore” thing, that this was 40-year-old men who were reading Batman and were ashamed to be reading Batman, so they would say, “oh, it’s not as lame as you think! It’s full of a lot of dirty stuff and violence!”

Mo Willems: I also think that a lot of the guys that are doing comic books are starting to have kids, and there is a tough thing when you’ve worked on something and you can’t show it to them. That’s just a weird thing.

KB: And then there’s the whole thing about your fanbase dying. I compare it to pop music, also. When I was in my 20s, I would go to the record store every Tuesday, when the records came out, and I would buy all of the pop records and all of the videos and stuff. And now I have kids, and I spend all of my money on their records and movies, and I don’t have any money for myself. And so, the same thing with comics—you should reach a point when you stop buying them for yourself, and start buying them for your kids. What happened there, for a while, was they started marketing them as collectables and not as entertainment. And that’s where it all went to hell.

It seems like a similar thing started happening around the same time in animation, as well. Has that shaped—especially on networks like Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon—what you can and can’t get away with?

MW: It’s not about what you can and can’t get away with. I think a lot of animators are embarrassed that children enjoy their medium. I’ve never really understood that. It’s not that it’s a medium that adults can’t enjoy, and it’s not that you can’t make adult films—Paul Friedlander, for one, is making these great documentaries that are really, really beautiful—it’s that what’s come to pass as ‘adult animation’ is 15-year-old booger jokes. It’s not actually for adults. It’s post-pubescent animation. There’s nothing wrong with that, it just doesn’t interest me. If I was going to do adult animation, I’d like to do something that grownups would actually watch.

But you know, in the same way that picture book authors were running around saying, “it’s art, no really, it’s art! We’re artists!” And now that’s over. We don’t need to prove that we’re artists. We can go back to the work that we’re doing. I think animators are stuck in this mindset of having to prove their aesthetic work. For me, I’m a cartoonist. The second you take it seriously, you lose all of its potential. What made daily strips in the paper so power was: no one ever suspects the cartoonist. So you read Peanuts every day, it will affect the way you look at the world, but it’s very subtle. I even get nervous when people take picture books seriously, because I’m going to have to start sculpting doo-doo. Just something that no one will take seriously.

[Laughter]

Was there a similar point of renaissance in children’ books, when people started taking them seriously, as art?

MW: Yeah. I mean, I think we come from a collectable culture. I think anything can be taken seriously. And it’s not that there isn’t actually worth and aesthetics and all of that stuff in the work. The point is, if you notice it, it’s not entertaining. If somebody says, “oh, check out that amazing composition. He’s really doing an amazing page turn,” you’re not actually reading the story. So, for intellectuals to gain enjoyment out of it is fine, but I don’t even want my audience to know that it’s drawn. I just want it to be. So, for me, the seriousness with which all of this is taken makes me nervous. I hate the term ‘graphic novels.’

KB: Well, I hate it because it sounds like a dirty book.

WM: It sounds like Jane Austin, with a chainsaw.

KB: The reason I do the opposite of whatever a critic says I’m doing, is because—for example, I did a Captain America book, and it got just terrible reviews. Everyone just trashed it. And the thing you have to keep in mind, when you read a bad review of your Captain America review, if you ever get one—

And if you want one, they’ll probably give it to you—

KB: You have to remember that this is the opinion of a grown man who has taken it unto himself to write a 400-page analysis of a Captain America comic. Is this someone you really want to be pleasing? I always test my stuff on my four kids. I say, “is this funny or not? Would you watch this show or read this comic book?” That’s how I decided to take the Phineas and Ferb job. I showed them the pilot and asked if they would watch it. If they said, “no,” I wouldn’t have taken the job.

Do you find a similar difficulty with critics, as far as kids books? Do they just not get it, most of the time?

MW: No, no, they get it. I don’t have a problem. They understand the history and all that, and I think there’s definitely a place for that. I don’t have a problem with, per se. I don’t really have a problem with reviews or any of that, mostly because a lot of them have been very nice to me. But still, it’s just the story—you just shouldn’t know it’s there. It should be magical. The big lesson that I learned, when Sheep in the Big City was cancelled—I did go on the Internet and found a 10-year-old who wrote, ‘it looks like he’s trying too hard,’ which really shocked me to my core, because I started to think, ‘in what other industry is this a problem? With plumbers?’

KB: In the Olympics?

MW: Exactly. “He’s swimming away. Look at him, swimming too hard. He’s a plumber, he showed up early, he didn’t take a cigarette break. I don’t trust him.” That ultimately is the core. That is it. They just shouldn’t notice that I was there at all. And when I was writing for Sesame Street, I’d meet a lot of people who’d say, “I don’t watch television. Television’s bad. What do you do?” And I’d say, “I write for television. I write for Sesame Street.” And they’d say, “oh, I love Elmo.” And I’d say, “oh, where’d you see Elmo, on your toaster, or you’re microwave?”

Well, actually…

MW: Yeah, probably, now, they’re different times. But they did see it on television. That was the medium. No one thinks that those scripts are written, which is a sign to me that they’re good.

KB: You know, have you ever had the experience of drawing a character for a kid, and they sort of get mad at you, because it destroys the illusion?

MW: Yeah.

KB: I was at a part, a couple of weeks ago for some friends. I said, “do you like Phineas and Ferb?” And they said, “oh yes, we love Phineas and Ferb.” And I said, “oh, well I happen to draw Phineas and Ferb.” And I sat there and drew that for them, and they were so unimpressed, because to them, Phineas and Ferb are real people, and they didn’t know that there’s some guy—an old man—drawing them.

MW: Basically ever public appearance is a setup for disappointment.

KB: That’s why Big Bird never takes his head off.

Really quickly, can you guys talk about what you’re working on now?

MW: I’m working on a pop-up book with this paper engineer, which is very cool. It’s about this character who can’t fit in, literally. So the whole book is this character trying to fit in. I’m doing radio cartoons. It looks like, and this is in the very distant future, that I’ll be working with the Kennedy Center, I’m going to be writing a musical, based on Knuffle Bunny. So I’m very excited about that. I’m also walking my kid to school…

KB: Let’s see. My new book is How to Draw Stupid—which is, how to draw cartoons my way. I was trying to think, what can I offer? There are only 100 other cartooning books.

Is it How to Draw, Stupid?

KB: There’s a whole chapter on how to draw stupid people, for example. Comedy is full of stupid people—cross-eyes, buck teeth, and all of that. Also I have a new book called Nat Turner, which is about the Turner Rebellion. And now I’m working on The Bakers TV show, and I guess I’ll do more Bakers strips.

–Brian Heater

In this third part of our interview with artists Kyle Baker and Mo Willems taped during the Brooklyn Book Festival, we discuss writing books for kids, critical feedback, and going out of your way to horribly offend your readership.

[Part One][Part Two]

The classic image of the cartoonist is one that’s very isolated, sitting at his or her drawing board, not talking to anyone. Now that the Internet affords that sense of instant feedback, do you find that you’re influenced by the reactions that people have toward your work?

Mo Willems: I love bad reviews. I love ‘em. Some kid once said, for one of my animated films that they could make a better film if they stuck a pencil up a monkey’s ass, and let it dance around. I thought about that for a long time, and I thought, “not the soundtrack. My soundtrack would be better.” I love terrible reviews. So, in that sense, yeah, because people can just say whatever they want.

How does a terrible review affect you, specifically? Are you going to go out and change anything? Are you going to make it even more of that thing that offended them?

Kyle Baker: I do that! I do, I have a rule. Anything that is complained about repeatedly, I do more. I’m not sure how it’s affected my work. It occurred to me that people only write to complain. One of the reasons I live to come out these sorts of things and book signings is that it’s the only time I actually get to meet people who like what I do. There’s been a couple of times where, if I look on the Internet, I’ll think the book is a disaster, and then I’ll come out on the street, people say, “oh, that’s a great book!” But I’m the same way. If I read your book [points to Willems], I’m only going to write to complain.

MW: In person though, a lot of people will tell me what my books mean. I tell this story a lot, but the first two reviews I ever got for Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, one person said, “I like this book, because it teaches kids the value of ‘no,’ and when to stop, and not to go too far.” And the next one said, “I like this book, because it teaches kids never to give up.” You know, the complete antithesis from each other. I like that. That’s interesting, because I don’t really know what my stuff is, until people tell me.

KB: One thing I found—I’ve been doing a book called Special Forces, which is about war. That book is designed—because I’m trying to be Joseph Heller—to be offensive. Seriously, there’s a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ guy in there. There’s all of these jokes about Iraq and the military, so I’m expecting all of this hate mail, when I’m writing it, and the only negative comment I go from people—and it’s a thoroughly offensive book, there are kids blown up and everything. It’s terrible. I was trying to be like M*A*S*H*, contrasting the violence and the comedy. It’s way over the top, and all anyone complained about is the naked girl, because the girl is in a bikini. Because again, I was trying to offend people. I decided she was going to be more naked on every page, in the next issue.

MW: It must be hard to fail like that.

KB: It is. It’s hard to find out what people’s hot buttons are.

MW: You should write yourself an e-mail. ‘Dear Kyle, you’re evil. Love, Kyle. PS, pick up some milk.’

KB: I got maybe one of the hatemails that I expected.

Kyle, you’ve done some all ages work, too. The Bakers is a family-friendly book.

KB: Yeah, my family.

And both of you have also done some adult work at some point some point. Is it difficult, especially initially, to get into that world of writing for kids?

MW: I prefer writing for kids. Partially, in a way, because it’s harder, because you don’t have any of those hot buttons to cling to. You’re not going to get a letter from a kid, ‘how dare you do that to a bunny? I love my bunny!’ So you really have to be pure in your comedy and your writing. There are really no cultural modifiers, whatsoever. And I’ve written some adult comics and some adult stuff, and I always fear for getting lazy, because it is easy for me to just sort of follow those paths. That said, I may do more. I’d love to write a memoir called Don’t Tell My Mother I Wrote this Book, but that’ll have to wait a few years.

Is it difficult for you, doing The Bakers?

KB: No, no, but I do a lot of stuff for DC Comics. They do Batman and Superman and stuff. They do a lot of things, except they don’t like most stuff. Over the years—again, when I started, we were distributed in 7-11 and it was 50 cents, they always beat us over the head with, “your audience is kids. Don’t make it too hard to read, and make sure there’s lots of action.” My books still look like that today. What’s happened over the years is that DC’s become more of a nostalgia business. My problem now is not writing for kids, it’s ‘how do a write a Superman story for 40-year-old men?’ These last two movies—they made a Superman and Batman movie that I couldn’t take my kids to. That’s the thing I can’t do. “Write me Batman story that’s inappropriate for children. Go!”

–Brian Heater

This year, at the third annual Brooklyn Book Fair, we had the opportunity to sit down—or, rather, stand up—with two highly regarded representatives on their respective, and sometimes overlapping, fields, for a panel entitled ‘Cartooning Today.’

Kyle Baker is no doubt familiar to most Cross Hatch readers and the multiple Eisner and Harvey Award winning author of Why I Hate Saturn, Plastic Man, Nat Turner, and Special Forces. Mo Willems’s work tends to skew a bit younger, both as the highly lauded author of such children’s books as Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus and as a writer for TV shows like Sesame Street and Codename: Kids Next Door.

In this second part of our conversation, we discuss the state of animation, the role of the Internet, and why Warner Bros. wasn’t so keen on naming a character “Afghanistan Sam.”

[Part One]

Has the animation industry changed in, say, the past 15 years?

Mo Willems: Oh, absolutely. You’ve got to remember that cable was as new as the Internet was, maybe five years ago. No one knew what cable was going to be, so they just went in and found young guys in their 20s, and said, “make something.” I didn’t have focus groups and I didn’t have any of that stuff. My series—the two things that I did—were basically pitched in bars. People were like, “yeah, okay, do it.” And it really didn’t matter. You had a lot more leeway, and now there’s all this blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s a lot more difficult. You’ve got to realize that, if I was in TV for the last 15 years, that was 20-percent of the history of television. So it was a really, really new medium, particularly cable. Now they know what they want to do, but they can’t do it. So, yeah, I think the days of creator-driven shows—it’s a lot harder to do it. And if you’ve got a track record, that’s one of the few ways that you’re going to be able to do something.

Do you think it’s more difficult to establish yourself a creator-driven show on cable television, rather than, say, a firmly-established Disney show?

MW: You know, that’s hard to say. I don’t really know—all I know is that I had more fun, and I certainly got less interference on my failure than I did on my success. The show that I was headwriting, my last show, when we got number one on the network, all hell broke loose. You’d literally have to say “how much more number one than number one do you want to be? You want to be number zero? Because we can figure that out.” But when I was number 18, they’d be like, “oh, did you hand in the script? Oh yeah, approved. Go for it.” I had a lot more fun. I had a lot less people watching, but…

Kyle, can you discuss what you’ve been doing in animation, recently?

KB: Gosh, I’ve work on a lot of shows. Phineas and Ferb was the last one I worked on. Andre 3000’s Class of 3000—I worked on that. Bugs Bunny, the rotten Brendan Fraser movie—Bugs Bunny and Brendan Fraiser go Treasure Hunting, or whatever it was called.

[Laughter]

KB: It was awful!

MW: That’s a great title! Bugs Bunny and Brendan Fraser Go Treasure Hunting, or Something: The Movie!

KB: The thing is find about Hollywood is that they change everything. Or, at least in my case, they change everything, so you do your best, and then they go and change everything. And then you complain about how they changed everything, and then the thing’s a hit, so you go, “oh yeah, I wrote Phineas and Ferb,” or whatever. But now I’m actually doing a show for Fox, based on my family, called The Bakers. That’s fun, because if the story is about you and your family, they have no leverage. “We’re not sure about the kid.” “It’s my kid! Sorry.”

Working on the Bugs Bunny/Brendan Fraser movie, is there something that jumps out in your mind as something that you pitched that they absolutely hated?

KB: Well, I had a couple of ideas for shorts, because they wanted to bring back the shorts program. Bugs Bunny began as one of those.

The pre-movie cartoons.

KB: That was the idea, but the exhibitors put up a fight, because Warner Bros. movies tend to be three hours or longer, and they didn’t want to add another ten minutes of free content [laughs]. But the idea that didn’t go anywhere that I really loved, was Wile E. Coyote, Suicide Bomber.

[Laughter]

KB: And the joke was that the bomb would never go off, because he’s Wile E. Coyote.

It’s not too far removed from an actual Wile E. Coyote cartoon, it’s just the title that’s particularly iffy.

MW: You put Brendan Fraser in there, and you have a hit. I think that’s what’s missing. The Fraserness of it.

KB: What they used to have in Bugs Bunny was topical issues. Bugs Bunny would fight Hitler or something. So the other idea I had was Bugs Bunny Meets Afghanistan Sam, The Roughest, Toughest Cave-dwelling Millionaire, East of the Pecos. That one didn’t go anywhere, either.

MW: No Brendan Fraser. That’s the loss there.

I once was asked to pitch something to the networks. I had one a series of shorts about these sort of loser kids, and I came in and met the executive, who was just celebrating her Bat Mitzvah—it was a very exciting time for her—and she was also running a network, and she came up to me and said, “oh, I love your show! It’s one of the reasons I got into television. I watched the show when I was a kid. It was so great, what do you got?” I said, “well, I was actually thinking of updating those characters, making them teenagers, and what not.” And she said, “yeah, I don’t think those characters really work.” And that was the end of it. It was pretty much the last thing I ever pitched. I just started doing books.

I want to take it back to something you touched on, Kyle. The name of the panel is “Cartooning Today.” I think if they had done this panel two years ago, it would have been something along the lines of—

KB: “Cartooning Two Years Ago?”

–“Cartooning after 9/11.” Do you feel that the climate has changed, as far as what you can get away with?

KB: Uh, I don’t know. I’ve been doing my own stuff, for the last few years, so I can do whatever the heck I want, and I’ve been really pushing it. For the last few years, I was publishing my own books. I find that you can get away with anything, as long as it’s successful, so I’ve been publishing my own books, proving they work, and then selling them to publishers. Like I did a book called Nat Turner, about the Turner Rebellion, which everyone was saying I could do. Or, even if I did, I was going to have to water it down and make him a little more sympathetic before he chops up a bunch of people with an ax. And I kept saying, “no, I have a concept of how it’s going to work.”

To give an example of what used to happen before I started doing my own books, I pitched a Noah’s Ark movie. It was the easiest pitch I ever did. I said, “Noah’s Ark! And the animals talk and they sing and it’s going to be like a Disney animated thing,” and they said, “terrific!” So I bring in the first draft, and the big note from the studio is, ‘does everyone have to drown?’

[Laughter]

KB: And that’s the kind of thing you have to put up with, on a regular basis. So I knew that if I did Nat Turner, there would be this whole thing about how it’s so violent.

MW: And can he be played by Brendan Fraser?

KB: Yeah. And now that it’s done and I show it to people—same thing with The Bakers—once I show them the work, it ended up at Fox. It ended up at Fox because they’re the only network that wasn’t trying to turn it into The Simpsons.

MW: Because they all have that.

KB: Exactly. They’ve already got that, and if they want another one, they’ll call Matt Groening.

In terms of throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks, the Internet has been a great facilitator. Are you guys using it a lot, as a tool? How has the Web changed your work, and/or the industry?

MW: You know, what is great is that it’s allowed me to see a lot of people’s work that I wouldn’t have seen. It also allows me to hand in books from my house. There are some very practical things, but I don’t really quite “get” the Web yet. We’ve done some games, based on my characters that the kids can come and visit and stuff like that, but I don’t quite understand it. The thing that I’m doing that I’m really excited about is cartoons on the radio.

For NPR.

MW: Yeah, and that is very exciting.

KB: You do sound effects?

MW: No, I just write. I really think that cartooning on the radio is a new thing, and I’m pushing for that.

It’s kind of a new/old thing. There’s an interesting story about LaGuardia.

MW: That’s right, LaGuardia during the newspaper strike read all of the comics to the kids on WNYC, and I thought that was a great idea. Now that may come into the Internet in the sense that the radio cartoon is a nice two or three minute podcast. You don’t have to hear it on the radio. You can  carry it with you. But audio is more interesting to me than the Internet. I like how tactile books are. I don’t always want to have to interact with my stories. Sometimes I want people to tell me stories. Sometimes I feel like someone’s not doing they’re job if I have to tell them how to do their stories.

KB: The thing I like about the Internet is that you can sample stuff for free. If I’ve heard about a musician, I can check out their stuff. So I put all of my work on there. Also because, we were talking about newspapers before, the old model for popularizing a cartoon was like something like Garfield was available virtually for free. For a penny a day, I could read Garfield. So I’m exposed to it constantly, so when I finally see it in the story, I say, “oh! That’s that thing I know all about. I’m going to buy it, because it’s familiar to me.” So I tend to put my stuff on YouTube and all of that stuff, just so people see my stuff and say, “oh, that’s the guy with the funny cartoons. I’ll buy that.”

MW: But I think you have to be established to a certain degree to do that. If you’re just a kid starting out, and you give all of your stuff away, there’s a question of the value of that stuff. Like I said, the stuff we’ve done on the Web is based specifically on my characters, and it ancillary. I guess it fills that “oh, the pigeon, I can play with the pigeon, and next time I see the pigeon, I’ll be happy about it.” But I don’t quite get it as a medium. I’m old and slow.

In terms of both what [Baker has] been doing on YouTube and [Willems’s] NPR work, what the Internet does seem to afford you is a sense of instant feedback.

MW: Yeah. In that sense, the Internet and the NPR stuff is interesting, because they post the cartoons without captions, first, and then they just get thousands of submissions about what the caption is. So I guess there is that interactivity. What I don’t like about the Internet in that sense is that it’s kind of like living in a fishbowl. I don’t mind that, but I also want kind of a firewall. I don’t want people knowing what I had for breakfast.

[Continued in Part Three]

–Brian Heater