Some things just can’t be helped. Sitting out in front of the San Diego Convention Center, surrounded by throngs of showgoers decked out in their finest spandex, the conversation almost inevitably returns to the state of the superhero in contemporary comics, even with an artist whose life and work and are seemingly inseparable from sequential art of the past.

A line of questioning about Seth’s work on the gorgeous Complete Peanuts soon takes a turn for the superheroic when the artist mentions a childhood fascination with Marvel Comics, and a conversation about Jack Kirby progressing into philosophies regarding the negative pop cultural impact of Alan Moore’s Watchmen.

[Part One][Part Two]

When artists are discussing cartoonists whose style are impossible to mimic, Schulz inevitably comes it. It’s so deceptively simply and easy to mess up.

Yeah.

Was that a fear?

I do very little real drawing in the Peanuts collections. Anywhere I have to replicate Schulz’s art, I actually trace it. So that relieved a great deal of that fear. I mean, there is no way I could replicate his drawings. He had a style that is impossible to imitate, so it’s just a simple matter of either reproducing his actual art or retracing it. Generally, the art you see in the book is 100-percent Schulz, or mostly Schulz with some little additions from me or complete retracings.

Does the art lose something when you trace it?

It definitely does. But I’m aware that any design elements I am including that include my hand have nothing to do with Schulz’s body of work–they are just decorations for a book. For example, when I do a two-page spread of one of his famous Peanuts locations–I look at it as simply a something to make the book nice. I don’t worry that I am fiddling around with the master’s art because it does no harm to his genuine body of work. Schulz’s work is right there in the book. Every line in those strips is his. But the design stuff is just design stuff. It’s a setting to put a gem in. The setting is not the gem.

Was the legacy hard to deal with? People love his work so much. Were you afraid you’d do something and upset people?

No, no. I actually wasn’t. I didn’t really care about the fan’s opinions–I was only thinking of the work itself and what I thought design I would come up with that would give it the right “feeling”. In a lot of ways I was freed up by the fact that Schulz is no longer alive—I don’t know if I could have done the book if I was dealing directly with him. That would have inhibited me. I couldn’t really have had that attitude of, “it’s my way or forget it.” With him there I would have been far too aware that it was his book. Whatever he wanted would have been the right choice. The series might very well have looked very different if he were still alive. Who knows?

Do you feel like Jeannie [Schulz, Charles’ widow] knew exactly what he would have wanted?

I don’t know. It’s hard to say. But I do know that she clearly thinks he was a genius. She clearly has respect for his work and wants his work to be treated with respect. I take for granted, at this point, that she trusts me, because what I’m trying to do is give his work respect. That really is all it’s about for me. I want to present his work in a dignified manner. I feel like Schulz’s work has been casually approached in the past. The books have been usually designed in a very half-assed manner for 20 or 30 years.

I should qualify that statement–the first few books from Hold Reinhart were very nice books and the remainder of the series throughout the series is okay. The 70s Peanuts books, for the most part are abysmal. They have a cheap and lazy aesthetic. Off the top of my head, the only good Peanuts book after 1970 is probably Chip Kidd’s amazing volume.

They’ve had no problem merchandising.

Yeah. No doubt about that. Whether the books were good or bad looking the work inside always sold well. I don’t think Schulz must have cared about the books. What they looked like. I suspect he wasn’t really involved in the book designs. The book really weren’t—- I mean, beyond the first few books– it didn’t really seem like Schulz cared what they looked like, because they just didn’t look very good. He couldn’t have cared. He was concerned with the daily strip. That was his life.

Did you have Snoopy stuff? Did you buy into the merchandising when you were a kid?

Sure, I had all of that sort of stuff when I was a kid. I loved Schulz. He was my primary influence. I loved him right until I got into Marvel comics. I still read Peanuts, but I didn’t think about it in the same when after I started to read those Marvel Comics. Then in my early twenties, I came back to him in a strong way and started to re-read all of the strips and got very Peanuts again. At that point I did collect all that Peanuts merchandise–dolls and statuettes and Avon products. But eventually I got rid of all of that stuff because I realized that I don’t really care about all of those toys and things. That was all just gilding on the lily. It was only the strip that mattered to me.

Are you still interested in the older superhero stuff? Like the Kirby stuff?

Yeah, it still has a lot of resonance. Kirby especially. I loved him so much as a teenager. I have all of that Kirby stuff from that period. I re-acquired all of it in my late twenties and thirties. I think Kirby was a great artist. I think it’s unfortunate that his stuff doesn’t stand up to a great deal of re-reading. But I still take real pleasure in looking at it. There is no artwork in the world like it. And of course it has great nostalgic value for me. It’s no accident that his work has influenced mainstream comics in a manner that no other artist has or ever will. He was a giant in that little world.

He had some kind of basic understanding of how to draw that stuff–a primary vision that set the template for almost every aspect of the superhero genre that followed him. But, that said, I think Jack’s work doesn’t hold up well for an adult reader. I think that if Jack had been born in Europe and had worked in the album format with the kind of freedom that Herge had then I think there would have been a series of Kirby books that would have left behind a more coherent artistic vision. In some alternate reality Kirby would have left a great pile of fantasy comic albums that would have been beloved classics–much like Herge.

This is all just speculative nonsense but I think he had that kind of narrative vision. Yet sadly, too many years in the salt mines and too many editors fucking around with his projects left a scattered body of work behind him. Wonderful series cancelled before they could even get going. Great fun and inventive concepts neutered by little bureaucratic assholes. It’s a shame, because I think he was a kind of genius. Left to his own devises who knows what he could have accomplished.

Do you have anything invested in the superhero characters themselves?

Not beyond nostalgia. The superhero has a weird dichotomy. On one hand, it’s full of American charm like the Easter Bunny or Santa Claus. It’s a solid pop culture image that’s just loaded with charm. But I think so much of that charm has been destroyed over the decades and turned into a weird fetish object. Because unfortunately the other side of the superhero image is overflowing with weird sexual energy. I mean, a superhero is basically just an erection running around on the loose. Two sides of the same coin– the innocence on one side and all that sex on the other–there is so much naked sexuality in the superhero image. I mean, look around at this convention.

There’s plenty of erections running around.

Yeah. That’s for sure! So I think the modern comics have chosen to focus exclusively on the sexual part. Though they may not realize it.

Werthem realized it, though.

Yeah, I guess he did. in some sense Werthem was right. He was just so wrong-headed in what he chose to criticize and what conclusions he drew from the comics. He was a bad social scientist but a good propagandist. I think the problem with the superhero for me is the loss of that the othe , the charm of the superhero—- I mean, when I see the old covers of Superman and Green Lantern running a race and breaking a ribbon, or sitting around there little table in their clubhouse– that’s that kind of simple charm they had. That is very appealing as a pop-culture image.

They were big policemen helping out the world. Those simple tales of adventure had a childish feeling of profundity to them–very appealing when you were a kid. The big cosmic adventures that happened to these colorful characters were very silly but that absurd childishness made for great innocent reading. They weren’t psychotic killers, or whatever it is they are now. It’s become a weird product that I feel no attachment to. Who wants to read a book where Winnie the Pooh has become a rabid grizzly bear?

So no interest in ever tackling a character like that?

I don’t think so. And I would have thought it was impossible to use a superhero as a subject for an adult story until I read Dan [Clowes]’s Death Ray. That was the book that showed me that all these modern mainstream writers who have tried to write the “real” superhero story, none of them knew what the hell they were doing. Because Dan actually got away from all of those tropes that those fellows can’t help but write about—because these genre tropes are more important to the mainstream writers than the writing of an adult story. It’s too much of a fetish interest.

What they really like about the superhero is the genre trappings–the origin, the costume, the first battle, the villain, the list of superpowers…you know. Whatever the things are that make up the main elements of the superhero genre. What they are not interested in is writing a meaningful story where the superhero is merely a devise to get at something. The superhero is so shiny that they are blinded by him. The Watchmen is a good example of this. Those superhero tropes are all in there. Dutifully trotted out with grim seriousness. Unlike the Death Ray, which is a genuinely grim story which used the superhero as a mere springboard– nd turning the superhero literally inside out. After the Death Ray, I seriously doubt I could figure out anything to do with the superhero. It was too perfect.

Do you like Watchmen as a book?

I don’t. It’s unfortunate, because I like Alan Moore. He seems like a nice, funny, intelligent person.

But it’s an important book…

It’s an influential book. But I don’t think it influenced things in a good way. I actually think so much of what’s going on right now is Alan Moore’s fault. I’m suspect he would be the first to admit that it started a bad trend.

At this point when someone says “real,” they mean violent.

Yes. The Rorschach character, who is supposed to be a someone to pity or hate—now he’s cool. That’s the basic problem with Watchmen. Even Alan Moore couldn’t keep it from being cool. The Death Ray isn’t cool. He’s a real kid. He’s a sympathetic kid and later a frightening adult. Rorschach isn’t actually frightening. He kicks ass. People like to identify with him. He’s Batman.

It comes back to that idea of letting a character out of your hands. Alan Moore obviously didn’t want the movie, and now that it exists, it’s reason enough to celebrate its characters.

Yeah, I guess.

That’s why it’s easy to sympathize with people who want to hold onto their creations.

Well, I feel for Alan Moore, but if he’s mad about anything, I think it’s that DC treated him poorly. If DC treated him well, he might have been excited about these films. I think he’s had a long history of being screwed over by these corporations and losing control. I totally sympathize with him and I think really highly of him that he didn’t take the money. That’s what it boils down to–that’s the most powerful statement you can make in our culture, “I won’t take your money.”

–Brian Heater

From his book design to his brand of cigarettes, let there be no debate that Seth is a man of complete and largely uncompromised style, a fact that has made his art some of the most instantly recognizable cartooning work of this decade. The artist practically recoils at the mention of editorial oversight when it comes to his comics, by anyone from The New York Times on down.

In this second of our three part interview, we touch on that exact topic, as it pertains to his most recent book, George Sprott, and his work on the design of Fantagraphics’ Complete Peanuts.

[Part One]

Despite the fact that [George Sprott] was on TV and he was a big personality, he was a big personality in a small community.

Yeah, exactly.

And he was doing the same thing over and over again—reading in the same theater, week after week.

Exactly. I wanted George to be someone who was in the public eye, but obviously not a genuine celebrity, because then you’d have to deal with the problems of real celebrity in the story. It’s not a story about fame, because that’s too easy.  But George’s limited fame is an essential ingredient.  It’s a story about things falling away with time.   That minor fame of his simply gave me another element of his life to fall away.

It’s a story where I’m ambivalent about who George is. I wanted the reader to feel ambivalent as well, and to make up their own minds about whether George is a person to like or not, and whether he’s a failure. I mean, it’s hard to paint him as a success. He’s running away from a lot of things. But I wanted to make the reading experience as fragmented as possible, because if you fill in too many gaps, then you’re deciding for the reader what he should feel. You can’t entirely escape that as the author, but I wanted to try and give the reader some choice about whether they liked George.

Do you feel as if you were filling in too many gaps in prior books?

Um, no. but I think I had a bigger picture of who the characters are in other books. With George I never really did work him out fully for myself. There’s stuff in this book where I don’t know what the answer is, either. Someone today asked me why George was in the seminary, was it to avoid going to war? I agreed that the narrator of the book hints at that, but he sort of retreats from it as well.   The answer is, I don’t know myself.  It’s a possibility that George goes into the seminary because he wants to avoided the war, but it’s also a possibility that he genuinely thought that that was the seminary was the direction his life was going and it simply didn’t continue in that way. I don’t really know what the answer is, because I didn’t really bother to figure it out—it wasn’t really important for me to know. George is a fragment.

Have you had something more invested in your characters in previous stories?

Yes. George, for the most part, was based on other people, and all my other characters have been largely based on myself. The two brothers in Clyde Fans, for example, are clearly two sides of my own personality. George is actually more  based on three or four or five people that I know through the media or through my personal life—my father being one of them.  So it’s more of an outside view.

Is there a news presenter that he’s largely based on?

Yeah, the initial figure that he’s based on is a fellow by the name of George Pierrot, who was a local Detroit TV travel host in the 60s and 70s.  I took a good number of surface traits from. He was well-known for falling asleep on the air, so I took that exactly from Mr. Pierrot.

I’m certainly not saying that he was anything like George Sprott though.  If anything, he seemed like a very nice old guy. His show was a remarkable anachronism of a show when I watched it as a teenager in the 70s… and it always stuck in my mind.

He was already on the wane at the point?

Oh yes, he was. He probably died some time in the late 70s. I watched him then with a sense of boredom. It was not the kind of thing I was interested in at the time. Whereas now I think I would love to be seeing his shows again.

You’re carrying this personality with you, all these years—at what point does that congeal into a story?

Just around the time the Times called me, actually. I had been playing with the ideas of  a character like George. I didn’t fully know what the character was going to be.  The idea was a bit more expansive originally. I was going to involve more characters from the TV station. At some point I thought I would have two central guys. These two old fellows from the TV station and their individual lives—they would have parallel stories and then somehow they would collide at some point in the story and have a conflict. But I wasn’t really all that sure where it was going. And then the Times called and asked me for ideas.

So, I gave them three ideas. The first one was that I wanted to finish a graphic novel that I had started in another magazine–and I knew they wouldn’t go for that—but that was the main project I wanted to do. The second idea was really kind of characterless and esoteric. I was to be about a city block, and allowing the reader to act as sort of a ghost figure, you would go through each of the buildings and explore their history and experience the whole city block.  This idea may still get done some day in some form.  This would have been quite fragmented.  A lot of bits and pieces.   Certainly more than George turned out to be.

That’s sort of the ultimate version of this story, because it doesn’t connect with any of the characters.

Yeah, exactly. You really need the reader to make something out of it themselves. To piece it together. But I had a bad feeling that they wouldn’t go for that one either. For the third one, I just threw in the germ of the George story, “something about an old guy. He’s an old, lonely TV host. It’s the end of the career, etc.” And, of course, they said they liked that one. And then I had to figure out what the hell to do with the idea.

Did they have any input beyond choosing the initial story?

No, remarkably not, and I was a little worried. You see, the first idea I mentioned– the unfinished story I hoped to complete– the reason I didn’t finish it was, the magazine I was working for in Canada…well,  I had been very clear to them about allowing no input from the editors. They had agreed and it ran in four installments before they started to interfere. Then they wanted to change things.

Someone was telling me earlier—I don’t know if it was on a panel today—but you made that point that you don’t like any editorial input.

I don’t, it’s true. I can’t deal with people telling me what they want from the story or forcing me to think differently. The minute I know they will be in a position to ask for changes, I start  self-censoring. I talked to the Times about this before hand, and they were very reassuring, but I still didn’t feel entirely relaxed at the beginning.  I was waiting to see what would happen.  But, I have to give them real credit– they never interfered.

What’s that law of physics? You automatically change things by observing them?

Yes, exactly. I can work in the  illustration business that way—I don’t care what anybody says. They can ask me to change things and I am more then happen to change it.  Turn the guy into a girl–no problem.  Make it red and not blue.  Right away.  But I can’t write that way. The Times didn’t interfere We only had a few disputes over a couple of words that didn’t quite work for them.  Didn’t match the ethics of their “style book”.  It was all fine. I took the words out, and then put them back in for the book version.

How much control do you have when you’re working on something like the Peanuts books?

Obviously Jeannie Schulz had the final say. But that’s not to say I wasn’t determined to do things my way.   It was one of those cases where when I went down to see Jeannie with a presentation for what I was going to do, I told myself beforehand not to get too attached to the idea of being the designer of the series.  I told myself that If the people in charge of Peanuts were going to require this series to be  another one of those collections that I hate–meaning, bright pastels and smiling Snoopys– I was going to tell them that I wasn’t interested in working on it.  As difficult as it would be to turn down the Complete Peanuts there was no point in getting involved in a project that would depress me.  I was pretty determined that it had to be my way. But Jeannie was a dream. She didn’t ask for any changes but one, which was, my initial plan was to have Charlie Brown’s face on the cover of every volume.

The evolution of Charlie Brown.

Yeah. I wanted to have him on all 50 volumes. They (meaning everyone else involved in the project) thought that was just too similar for a set of books. And I kind of figured that as well. I was more than ready to throw that idea out. Beyond that, no one really interfered.  It’s been the perfect working experience.  Everyone at Fanta and everyone at One Snoopy Place.  I have nothing to complain about.

Are you locked in for the entire set?

It’s totally locked in. The design evolves slightly for each decade, but it’s all about subtle change. For example, the end papers change each decade. The color scheme changes each decade, but it’s a very subtle shift. The design is set in stone. It will be a set that looks like it was planned to be a set.  That might make each volume a little less creative to put together but this is a sacrifice I am happy to make to get the cohesiveness of the overall design.  I like sets.

[Concluded in Part Three]

–Brian Heater

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.]

Cecil and Jordan in New York
By Gabrielle Bell
Drawn & Quarterly

They didn’t change the name of the title story or stick a group of actors on the cover or add the words “Soon to be a Major Motion Picture,” but timing reveals more than any of those things could—Cecil and Jordan in New York was released in an attempt to capitalize on Tokyo, a collection of film shorts recently released in theaters, a third of which was co-written by Michel Gondry and Gabrielle Bell. The lead off comic, which lends its name to this collection of short strips cherry picked from Bell’s work over the past few years, forms the basis of her segment in the film.

Let there be no mistake, however, while the release of Cecil and Jordan in New York is something of a thinly-veiled attempt to provide supplementary material to curious film-goers, it is, above all, an celebration of Bell’s work as a sequential artist. The decision on the part of the publisher to package the book as a fairly straightforward collection of comics, rather than a movie tie-in, is an attempt to create something that will outlast Tokyo’s likely relatively brief stint in limited theaters, a life that hinges on the quality of the strips contained inside. Fortunately as a cross section of some of Bell’s best work in recent years, there’s more than enough contained herein to sustain that life.

The strip “Cecil and Jordan in New York” is a rather strong note on which to open the book. In a sense the short story is a graphic representation of what is so powerful about Bell’s best work. It’s an embrace and subsequent transcendence of one of underground cartooning’s most dominant themes: alienated youth. That Bell manages all of this in four short pages is, of course, a testament to her mastery of storytelling pith. This time out, Bell enlists the aid of a magical realist conceit, but rather than overwhelming the piece, her momentary flirtation with the fantastic compliments wonderfully her protagonist’s sense of useless upon moving to the big city.

“My Affliction,” arguably the weakest story in the collection, demonstrates what happens when the fantastic is embraced too fully, drawing Bell away from the her core strengths as a storyteller. The story weaves a dreamlike narrative, complete with a flying Gabrielle and a fidgety “behemoth.” The story sheds some interesting light on the manifestations of Bell’s own neuroses, but it’s a far cry from the tight storytelling the artist embraces in her best work.

“Gabrielle the Third” and “Helpless,” the two stories that close out the collection, are every bit as strong as the first, but both manage to transcend their boundaries without the aid of Bell’s keen knack for understated magical realism. The first parlays a sense of isolation into a connection with animals, an innocent lot whose natural tendencies parallel the manner of alienation Gabrielle’s character feels in urban surroundings. “Helpless” is an equally sweet tale whose themes of playful adolescent rebellion echo strongly the duo from Dan Clowes’s Ghost World. Like “Cecil and Jordan in New York,” the two stories also serve as strong reminders of that one element often overlooked in Bell’s writing—her understated sense of the comedic.

Born, perhaps, out of financial motives, Cecil and Jordan in New York is ultimately a collection of some of Bell’s strongest work and a friendly reminder of why she has become on of the most celebrated storytellers to come out of the mini-comics scene in recent years.
–Brian Heater

Good-Bye
by Yoshihiro Tatsumi
Drawn & Quarterly

Most people in the States—even comics people—don’t know the name Yoshihiro Tatsumi, but they should. Tatsumi is a vastly influential figure in the history of manga, the Japanese comics style that developed in postwar Japan and that has exploded in popularity abroad in the past decade or so; until fairly recently, however, few people here had ever heard of him.

Tatsumi is credited with being the creator of gekiga, comics for adult readers, which contrasted with the manga that was prevalent in the 1950s and ’60s, generally aimed at children. He is, in a sense, the godfather of alternative Japanese comics, and a look at any of his work, much of which is now being repackaged and re-published by Drawn & Quarterly, will instantly tell you why.

Tatsumi wrote about and drew everyday people, a practice that in and of itself carries historical weight, but more than that, he focused on lonely, marginalized everyday people. Reading Good-Bye, D&Q’s third compilation of his selected short stories, makes it immediately clear that Tatsumi’s Japan is not the bright, shiny place we might be tempted to envision. His is a dark Japan, full of confusion, depravity, and despair.

The book has nine tales, which range from intensely sad to kind of bizarre, to outright disturbing. What unites them is a focus on the underbelly of Japan—how all of the characters reside on the fringes of society. Together, the stories paint an affecting picture of a country scarred by the Atomic bomb (even though Tatsumi was writing these more than 20 years after its dropping, in 1971 and ’72) and the darkness it brought, a country still figuring out how to move on. The characters are struggling to live, often both literally and existentially, and in doing so they come to represent something larger than themselves. What they think and feel is more important than the specifics of who they are.

Burma Chronicles
By Guy Delisle
Drawn & Quarterly

If there’s a major complaint to be levied against Guy Delisle’s new book, it’s a simple matter of unfortunate timing. When the Myanmar’s government was reluctantly thrust into the world’s spotlight by outrightly refusing aid following the devastating effects of Cyclone Nargis, many US residents were sadly left to our own devices, cobbling together what small scraps of information about the region that had been gleaned from latter day episodes of Seinfeld and strangely-named Boston post-punk bands.

It would have, perhaps, given a few of our more comics-savvy residents a bit of relief in the face of their own geographical ignorance to know that, in a matter of months, Drawn & Quarterly would deliver a book by Delisle that does for the region what Pyongyang and Shenzhen had done for their respective cities.

Burma Chronicles is, in many ways, the logical successor to those volumes, detailing Delisle’s life under yet another politically oppressive regime. Things are, however, a touch different from the outset. Where both Pyongyang and Shenzhen found the artist traveling alone as part of his life as a supervisor of animation, this time out it’s his wife, an employee of Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), whose career prompted the move with their infant son Louise in tow.

The shift in motivation affects Delisle’s storytelling in a couple of key ways. The work feels a bit more fragmented, particularly when contrasted with Pyongyang. The artist’s motivation feels decidedly less linear, this time out. Rather than maintaining a focus on his own livelihood, his day-to-day interactions largely revolve around the care of Louise, a cyclical existence that results in a more episodic breakdown of the author’s narrative. By the same token, his wife’s career affords him the opportunity to explore key subjects that generally play a minimal role in the existence of a studio animator, occasionally following the group around as they make calls to Myanmar’s most rural and impoverished regions.

As always, Delisle is unafraid to tackle the most grave aspects of the region he’s exploring, producing a book as unflinchingly informative as that associated with Satrapi or Sacco, but like the artist’s other work, Burma is steeped in a far more comic tradition, always seeking humorous moments in even the most unfortunate surroundings, a manner reflective in the artist’s characteristically cartoony shaky-handed line-style, which, rendered in black and white, might fit comfortably on the pages of a New Yorker issue.

Delisle’s humor, however, is seemingly careful not to make light of the issues themselves, but rather the business-as-usual routines of those who have ably survived in them (and his own occasionally thwarted attempts to do so). It’s these snapshots of everyday existence—a supermarket playing the same Karen Carpenter song on repeat or Delisle running around feverishly, apparently the only one concerned by his seemingly inevitable death by avian flu—that add up to a complete picture of what it’s like to be a stranger in such a strange land.

The artist’s focus on humor also makes Burma, like its predecessors, an incredibly readable book. Due in part to Delisle’s own situation at the writing of the travelogue, Burma sometimes falls short of the powerful moments induced by the work-a-day life of Pyongyang and Shenzhen, but it’s still another fantastic testament to the medium’s incredible power to simultaneously inform and entertain.

–Brian Heater

The diary strip has become a nearly ubiquitous form of expression in the world of alternative comics, and while there’s certainly something to be said for that old adage about writing what you know, it’s rare to come across an artist that breaks free from the pack.

Thanks in large part to her primarily autobiographical series, Lucky, Gabrielle Bell has managed to do just that, with oft introspective short stories that focus more on the power and humor of universal experiences than the pursuit of extraordinary circumstances.

In this second part of our interview with the author, we discuss the ups and downs of autobiography and the role that the Internet has played in Bell’s storytelling.

[Part One]

Are autobiographical comics inherently self-indulgent?

I think you need to evaluate that on a case by case basis.

Were you reading other strips in that style when you first went ahead with Lucky?

Not really in any consistent way.

Not with the intention of influencing your work?

Well, like I said, I’ve been doing diary comics since way before I knew that other people were doing them. Perhaps it was other people doing them that gave me the courage to do them myself.

You mentioned working on pieces that you had no intention of ever releasing. Are those diary strips?

No. I think it’s sort of the difference between a diary strip and a personal journal or essay. Lucky sort of started out as diary strips, recounting something that had happened. But even then I was selecting themes to bring out, because there is always an element of storytelling. Nowadays it does seem like a diary, but I’m really looking for something else. I like diary strips, too, but I’m really trying to bring stories out of them.

The “Myspace” story in the new Lucky is certainly more fantastic than just straight diary. Is that an area that you’re interested in pursuing further?

In that case, it’s more of a personal essay. It’s starts as a diary, because something will happen and I’ll write about it, but that’s more of a launching pad. I like that kind of stuff very much. I’m always aiming for stuff like that, but sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

You’re looking for less straightforward methods for telling the same story.

Well, I guess the idea is my being addicted to the Internet, which I guess is something that people struggle with, nowadays. I was just making a story around that.

Having you being working with the Internet much, in terms of the comics that you’re creating?

I use it a lot for general research, but I actually don’t use the Internet very well [laughs]. I was reading an article about the way the Internet affects the way we read—I guess it sort of proves his point that I couldn’t read the whole article—but it was about how we read and look at some things here and there and go from link to link and skim things. We don’t really read whole articles. Our concentration is very fragmented. It affects the ways that we read books and magazines. Most people are reading less. I think that I never really learned how to read in that fragmentary way, because I still read novels.

That’s interesting, because most of the pieces in Lucky are only a couple of pages.

Yeah, well, it takes me a long time. I wish I could write a graphic novel. I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing for people to jump from subject to subject and skim links. Our attention is divided up. We can be reading an article and checking our e-mail at the same time. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe it’s a good skill. Unforuntately, I don’t have it.

Multi-tasking.

Researching and reading on the computer and the Internet.

Is it the lack of technical savvy or more an investment in the physical format that sees so much of your work coming out in print?

Well, I don’t really read a lot of comics on the Internet myself. I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with it. Maybe I’m just getting old [laughs].

[Continued in Part Three]

–Brian Heater