In this third and final part of our discussion with The Clouds Above artist, we discuss Crane’s first venture in kids lit and how having children of his own has affected his art.

[Part One][Part Two]

How did the kids’ story come about?

I was in Portugal and I saw a really tiny kid with a really giant cat. He looked exactly like the kid in The Clouds Above. The kid was so small that the cat was the same size as him—it’s not a big cat, but next to him, he was huge. And then I just kind of went from there.

How conscious were you that you were making a children’s book while you were writing it?

I was very conscious. This is definitely for kids, absolutely for kids, in a much as Harry Potter is.

It’s not watered down.

I hate watering down stuff. Any kids book that’s watered down is just terrible. I mean, kids get it. they know when you’re talking down to them. It makes for a worse story and the things in which you talk to kids like adults—adults can appreciate them too. Those are some of the best stories we have. Even Dr. Seuss’s stuff. It’s the stuff that both adults and children can both like. A lot of Shel Silverstein’s stuff is like that. There’s a lot of really get stuff in there, whereas the just for kids stuff is totally brainless.

Do you feel like there’s less of that universally good stuff around these days?

Oh, I definitely do. I think we’re in a super-scared, cautious society that just likes to test market everything. It sucks all of the individuality out of it, in favor of appealing to as many people as possible, instead of just assuming that if an artist makes it and it’s good, their crazy singular vision will actually make a singular work of art.

I mean, fuck, if Roald Dahl had been test market, there’d be a lot of stuff that was taken out. I mean, even Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the original, if you watch that, it’s nuts. There’s the scene where they go in the tunnel, with the chicken head being cut off and insects and scary shit. I mean, we just live in a really scared, safe society now. The danger has gone way down, but our cautiousness has gone way, way, way up. People have to protect their precious little children. I have two children now, and I think it just fucks them up because they don’t feel any ownership over anything.

They don’t feel that charge you get when you discover something for yourself, like a piece of music that none of your friends told you to listen to or any exact interest of yours led you to. It’s a charge, because you’ve discovered it. and even though maybe a lot other people have heard it, it’s yours. You own it. and that’s taken away from kids. The thing about music is you’re responding to something that’s really human. A lot of what you see has been illustrated and changed by package designers, they change the fonts. They’ve been engineered by committee. Like Baskin Robbins. The new Baskin Robbins font is extreme and jaunty. You show it to a kid and focus group it. the focus marketing gives a skewed view of what is important. you see it and you respond to it. “I like that one.” It’s one thing to show two things to someone and ask what they like more. It’s another one to say, “here are the things that are important to us.” I’m getting very far afield. It’s just that I don’t think that kids are thought of thinking individuals. You don’t give them anything that isn’t florescent.

How has having kids actually affected your storytelling?

Having kids has made me have to drop everything that is not entirely related to what I actually want to do.

[An apology here—the audio quality of the recording from the Comic Con showroom floor was just too indecipherable toward the end. The transcription had to be cut of mid-answer, sadly.]

–Brian Heater

This second part of our interview delves deeply into the artist’s process–mapping out stories, sketchbooks, ten-issue arcs, and the importance of drawing noses and eyelids.

[Part One]

In terms of the disparate aesthetics, do you get bored doing one style all of the time?

No, that again is just trying to learn. Everything I’m doing is there to serve the story, and there’s a reason I’ve made those choices. I started using noses and eyelids in the stories.

What does that mean, exactly?

Well, I started drawing noses—distinguishing actual noses. Like last year I started using noses, but there were still the dot eyes. It’s kind of like I did it because I thought the story needed a certain level of expressiveness. The reason I pulled back from using eyes and noses in the first place is I felt like their faces felt cartoony when there was eyes and noses. It has a certain impression on a reader to see a well-rendered face—there’s a certain level of detachment. There’s more empathy for a reader when there’s not as much detail. So that’s why I did it. and now I feel like it really should be the situation that the person is in that’s creating the empathy and not the way they look. It’s kind of the visual version of “show, don’t tell.” It’s much richer than just showing a drawing. So I put the noses and the eyes back in and I can actually more be more accurate.

These are lessons that you learned from previous issues?

Yeah, yeah. Just kind of moving forward. I’ll probably draw like that until I figure out a new way. But I don’t know if I will. There’s only so many ways you can render a face.

Is that a good thing? Do you ultimately want to settle on a style?

Um, yeah. Because I would rather jump around with the stories I tell, rather than jump around with the trappings of the stories.

The art being a trapping of the story?

Oh yeah, yeah. The art—those are the tools I use to transfer the story. Pictures, words—those are the conveyance of the story. The important thing is the story, so once I get my tools there, I convey the story in a way I want to. You write, you write, you write, and then suddenly there’s this way you can write where you can express everything you want to. So yeah, I would totally not mind settling. It’s the story to me that’s the most important thing.

So you sit down and map the full story out first?

Oh yeah, yeah. I thumbnail the whole thing and get it to where I’m happy with it. and then it changes again when I’m drawing it out. But I need to get the story out first. Then it goes through a few more iterations, and it’s changing with each one.

How rough is that first thumbnail? Does it reflect the way the art is ultimately going to look?

It depends. There’s some composition. [Pulls out a notebook with sketches.] It basically shows the important things. They need to register. It reflects that more or less. Of course it does change. But it shows the position it’s going to be seen from. It’s certain things that need to be shown. I’ll take those things that need to be shown and refine the composition. But it’s there to get the idea of the pacing and how the panels sit next to one another.

That’s the first thing that happens? It doesn’t exist first as prose?

Most of the time. there are certain times I make prose notes. I did make a lot of prose notes for the next chapter. These are all moments for that. Who know how many I’ll use, who knows how many I won’t? I had them all in my head and instead of trying to draw all of them, I had to just get them down.

It all sort of came to you at the same time?

No. this particular regurgitation came when I was driving up to San Diego, having dropped off our kids at their grandparents. I had to come up with four or five good ideas and I had to get them on paper before I forgot. And those are just ideas. Just notes. The next step is to block out the thing I’m going to build with them. That will happen in pictures.

Things get left out during that process?

Oh yeah, all the time. When I’m starting, it’s like there are loops of strings sticking out of the dirt, and you pull them and it comes up a little and then it stops coming. And then you see some over there and pull that up, and eventually the strings will connect. It will eventually form this unifed thing. That gives me a place to start from.

Not to get too literal with this analogy, but do you feel as if there’s a formed story out there already and you’re just pulling it together?

I don’t know if I have that much faith. I’ve heard people say that before, and that’s cool. But I feel more like I’m digging a ditch.

That’s a glamorous way of putting it.

Well, you’ve got to get in there and do the work of putting the story together. There are a lot of pieces in the story that are made, but I don’t use. They all need to be done. Some of them fit and some of them don’t, but it’s all the work that goes into making it. sometimes they fit, and sometimes they don’t. And that’s okay. I may end up using that stuff later. It might be a good scene, but it just doesn’t work for this piece.

How far are you working ahead? [Points to notebook.] It’s looks like you’ve got a lot of stuff here.

Well, I mean, that’s another thing. If I’m working on a story, it’s not exactly ‘how far ahead.’ It’s like I have all these pieces and when I’m sitting down dig the ditch, that’s for the next issue. I’ve got notes scattered throughout. So I’ll just be working on the next issue. I’m not thinking that far ahead.

In your mind, is the next issue mapped out?

It’s about 85-percent mapped out, which can totally change. It can change drastically.

What about that 10-issue arc? How far ahead have you thought about that?

Well, I mean, I see the whole story, but I don’t have it divided into chapters.

But you see how to get there.

Well, I see things that I want to happen. And I know how they fit in, but maybe I won’t be needing all of them, because things change. But most stories are really, really simple. But the thing that makes them engaging are the characters and the way they interact.

There’s the saying about there only being five stories in the world.

Yeah, well, there are that many stories, but there are a lot of great ways to tell them. Most of them are pretty simple. Somebody does something that affects someone and they react.

If you don’t know how the story breaks up right now, where does the number ten come from?

Well, I know where the story is going, and I know how much I’ve conveyed in this particular chapter. I could be totally wrong. It could be a lot shorter or longer. But I hope it’s not. I need to do a lot of issues a year to get it out quickly.

If you spread it out too long, does it run the risk of losing your interest?

Yes and no. It’s interest, but I really want to get it done. I like the story. I’m really excited about it. I don’t really get bored with things. I know where it’s all going. Comics take a while to draw, and I’ve never had a problem with that. I’m pretty patient watching it unfold.

[Continued in Part Three.]

–Brian Heater

When all was said and done, it seemed that Jordan Crane had a good Comic-Con. He’d had his share of complaints about the show, of course—we all did. “[N]ow that it’s selling out,” he told me, as we spoke inside his booth on the final day of the show, “it’s people who have no interest in my work or they already know it. There doesn’t seem to be anything in between. There’s no new faces. It kind of takes an element of the fun out of it.”

Be that as it may, there’s no denying that the artist did brisk business, our interview interrupted several times as showgoers forked over cash. From the vantage point of the passerby, Crane’s artwork is unquestionably his strongest draw, with giant screen-printed posters of art pulled from Uptight hanging above him, alongside works by co-booth renters Johnny Ryan and Steven Weissman.

Speaking with the artist, however, it soon became clear that, in spite of possessing an unquestionable flair for graphic design, to Crane, all aspects of sequential art are secondary to his passion for the written word, a fact reflected in his recent decision to focus far more time and energy into comics making than his life as a work-for-hire cartoonist.

His passion is Uptight, one of the last few remaining serialized books in the indie comics scene.  Fantagraphics released the third issue of the book earlier this year, just in time for Comic-Con. Until now, the production schedule has been sporadic at best, but Crane has promised that, with his new-found focus, we’ll be seeing a lot more of the book in the years to come.

Do you find that most of the people who stop by your booth are familiar with your work, or is it largely people who get stopped by the prints?

You know, it’s changing. Most of the people at San Diego before were people who came in off the street—not exactly super-fans. And now that it’s selling out, it’s people who have no interest in my work or they already know it. There doesn’t seem to be anything in between. There’s no new faces. It kind of takes an element of the fun out of it.

Are you promoting anything specific? You’ve got a new issue of the book out.

Yeah, yeah. I’m also working on the next issue. Should be out in December.

It’s been a fairly sporadic publishing schedule.

Well, I’m trying to make it less sporadic. I want to do it two times a year, solid. It’s been kind of a chaotic last couple of years. So now I’m focusing everything I can on it.

Work stuff? Home stuff?

Home and work. I’ve taken on a lot of jobs I shouldn’t have. And I had kids. So now everything’s kind of adjusting and I’m just not taking as much work.

So now you’re trying to be a full-time comics guy.

Yeah, I really am.

Is that possible for you, in terms of income, especially with kids?

I’m doing everything I can to make it not a hobby.

Was does that entail beyond publishing more regularly?

Well, more regular publication is pretty big. More regular screen printing as well, which isn’t comics, and I’m trying to veer toward comics and spend less time with everything else. The order of priority is kids, comics, prints. And there’s nothing else. That’s it.

Are prints really that time-consuming?

Um, yeah. If I’m working on a big print run, it sort of cuts the continuity of my work. And so there may be a week or so of continuity that I lose in there.

So it’s a week or two to do some screens?

Well, usually if I’m gonna go do it, I’m renting the space—a studio. There’s a lot of stuff that goes into it.

What’s the distribution for the prints?

On my Website and [at comic conventions]. It’s really pretty simple and it makes a decent amount of money. And then comics—the first part of the problem is, I need to be doing comics regularly. And the next part of the problem is figuring out how to make money.

Are you working on a longer piece right now, or are you focused primarily on these single issues?

Well, within the magazine, I’m doing longer stories.

Longer arcs over issues?

Yeah, yeah. This issue has the first part of a longer story. Hopefully I can do this more regularly. It would be great to do it three times I year, so I could move on to the next thing. The thing is, because there’s not really a specific market—it’s not like, “you do this, you’ll make money,” drawing for somebody else is something I have to do. I’m working on the stories that I think are really good stories and just letting the chips fall.

Are you more incline to do shorter stories?

I think shorter stories are satisfying because I can finish them. But then again, longer stories can be really reward, as well.

It seems like the independent market has moved almost entirely away from issues.

Yeah, yeah. There’s practically nobody, and I think it’s a shame. I think most people, myself included, shouldn’t be working on super-long stories. What if everybody’s first book was a novel? It’s hard to structure that, I think. You’re blathering on for 600 pages. If you trimmed it down to 100 pages, it would still be the same story.

You think the longer works aren’t as tight as they could be?

Yeah. I think there’s a lot of flab.

Do you ever look back on your older books and see that?

Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely.

You feel like they could be a bit shorter?

Yeah, definitely. It’s a learning process. You have to ask yourself what story you want to tell, and then make it simple.

Have you ever looked back on something and wished it were longer—that you had explored things a bit more in-depth?

No, not at all. It’s just a learning process. You can through more lessons faster with short stories, completing the story, seeing the thing, whether it’s good or bad, rather than just doing one big, long piece.

I’ve seen a lot of people compare the book to Eightball. I think a lot of that may come from how different one story is from the next. How much thought do you put into the pairing of the stories in the book?

I don’t really put one story in there over another one. I just happen to have fairly disparate interests.

Are the stories ever connected in some way?

No, I don’t think they’re connected, other than the fact I’m doing them. I don’t even think they’re particularly well-paired. It just happens to be my interest at the time. like if I was making a mix tape, I’d have a lot of things to chose from, but it’s like, ‘here’s the things I want to do at the time.’ It’s kind of like a snapshot of what I want to do at the time.

[Continued in Part Two.]

–Brian Heater

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

A Mess of Everything
By Miss Lasko-Gross
Fantagraphics

As the comics medium has flourished over the past decades, autobiographical (and semi-autobiographical) comics seem overdone—or are at least well on their way to being so. How many first-person stories about growing up do we really need? How different can they all really be? It’s hard to ignore such questions when picking up Miss Lasko-Gross’s second graphic novel, A Mess of Everything. The book, which is also number two in her semi-autobiographical trilogy, tells the tale of  Melissa, as she goes through high school. Admittedly, I wasn’t hugely excited by this prospect. I’ve read plenty of these types of books.

But A Mess of Everything surprised me. It turned out to be quite worthy: funny, insightful, and at times, moving. It’s not a revolutionary book—it doesn’t stretch or redefine the bounds of its genre—but Lasko-Gross reminded me that the beauty of her chosen genre is that everyone’s story is, in fact, different and unique. If the author is a skilled storyteller, it’s as good as a reason as any to read yet another graphic novel about growing up, even if you’ve already read many.

Let’s start with the title: It is perfect. When you’re a teenager, you pretty much always feel like you’ve made a mess of everything—or, even if it’s not your doing, like everything is a complete mess. Lasko-Gross hits the nail on the head with her title, which captures perfectly the angst that fills Melissa’s journey.

Said journey takes place in an comfortable, safe town where, as Melissa acknowledges, there’s virtually no violent crime or poverty. But, like teenagers the world over, she is unendingly bored and restless. Her experience in high school encompasses all the usual struggles for a girl her age: boys and sex, bitchy girl friends, girl friends with eating disorders, drugs, acne, and figuring out how to trust and be yourself. To top it all off, Melissa is extremely smart and precocious, finding high school to be “all ‘euro-supremacist’ and misogynistic lies.”

Lasko-Gross tells the story in short, individually titled episodes rather than as one continuous narrative—a series of snapshots, really. Though the vignettes stay in chronological order—no flashbacks or jumping around—this format affords her a certain freedom that regular storytelling would not. The opening episode acts as a kind of introduction, but beyond that, there is really no exposition. Lasko-Gross jumps right in to the meat of it, highlighting the relevant and important people or events and skipping the rest.

At times, this can be a little bit frustrating for the reader, as some characters appear once or twice only to vanish for good. We are left to assume that they have essentially vanished from Melissa’s life as well, or that they remain there but lurk in the unimportant background, but that doesn’t always seem to do them justice. One episode, “Not to Love” (which also contains the title line for the book), shows Melissa with a boyfriend, Elijah, who tells her he loves her. Although she enjoys his company, her thoughts let us know she doesn’t feel the same way. The story ends with the two kissing and then parting ways—but that’s it. Elijah never re-enters the book, and while we can assume they broke up, it’s a bit of miffing experience for the reader.

It does point, however, to the way in which Lasko-Gross posits Melissa as the absolute center of the book. Supporting characters are important for how they relate to her, for what they teach us about her, but ultimately they are just there to support. A Mess of Everything is the exploration of the psyche of one character, a premise emphasized by a recurring visual motif that represents Melissa’s thoughts. An abstract pattern that looks like a maze or a web of roots and suggests a brain or some kind of organic form, the pattern appears whenever she is deep in thought and serves almost as an aura.

It is a subtle, bluish-grey aura, though, pretty much in the same color tones as the rest of the book. The reason for this muted palette isn’t entirely clear—maybe because it hints at flashback, positing the story in the past, or because angst combined with bright colors might be a bit over-the-top. Either way, the art is nicely detailed and heavily shaded, giving the images a life of their own. And the title pages and panels for the episodes definitely have lives of their own: These expressionistic and sometimes semi-trippy drawings play up Lasko-Gross’s ability to tell a not-entirely new story in a novel way.

–Jillian Steinhauer

In part two of our interview with cartoon art historian Craig Yoe. We discuss the roles that Fredrick Wertham, a Brooklyn-based gang of Jewish Nazis, and the Supreme Court judge who helped found the ACLU played in Joe Shuster’s post-Superman SM drawings.

[Part One]

Shuster’s name was kept entirely off of the original pamplets.

It was illegal, so he didn’t sign it, but I immediately recognized that it was his style and confirmed it with all of my buddies who are Siegel and Shuster historians and they all agreed that it was Joe’s work.

What specifically tipped it off?

It’s like a detective looking at fingerprints. You can tell. I’ve made a career of studying the work of cartoonists, and I just knew Joe’s style. There are little ticks about his work—the way he shaded it. Few comic book artists used pencil for shading and the little small hands he drew, and the squint of the eye, and the three-quarters back view, and just all of these kinds of things add up to where you can say, “holy shit, it’s Joe Shuster.” Not the least of which are that the characters look like Superman, and Clark Kent, and Lex Luther, and Lois Lane, and Lana Lang. You’ve got this alternate universe to the citizens of Metropolis—what happened between the panels.

It’s really an early version of fan-fiction.

Oh, yeah, right.

Except that it’s actually drawn by the artist himself.

Yeah, this time it’s no fan. It’s actually the creator of Superman drawing these pictures and it’s like the citizens of Metropolis gone wild.

What does the book’s supplementary text tackle?

I have the whole history behind the story. When I sold the book, it was just on the basis of being this erotic S&M artwork by Joe Shuster, the creator of Superman, but after falling into this and discovering this work, I fell into the story behind it. Tthis was part of one of the most important censorship cases probably ever in the history of our country. Eventually the case against he Times Square booksellers went all the way to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court ruled against these booklets and ordered them destroyed. It was a sad day in our country for freedom of the press. And actually, the judge who delivered the summary was one of the founders of the ACLU. He had a secret identity! By day, he was all for civil rights, and then he rules against these booklets.

And also, four Jewish Nazi juvenile delinquents that eventually became tagged the “Brooklyn Thrill Killers,” got a  hold of these booklets and used them as inspiration to commit their crimes, flogging girls in the park and torturing and murdering bums. They were arrested and brought to trial, but the judge of that case called in a psychiatrist who was very familiar with children and teenagers, by the name of Dr. Fredrick Wertham, who we of course know as the author of Seduction of the Innocent and the main figure behind the censorship of comic books.

Wertham entered to interview the leader of the Thrill Killers, who was this Jewish Nazi kid who would yell “sieg heil” and “heil Hitler” during the Pledge of Alliance and sported a Hitler moustache and led his buddies on these crime sprees. The judge ordered Wertham to interview the leader of the Thrill Killers, Jack Koslow, in his cell and found out Koslow was reading comic books and these booklets that Joe Shuster illustrated, and that he was using the text and illustrations from the Shuster books as inspiration for the crimes.

This pre-dates Seduction of the Innocent?

No, it was right around the same.

Do you feel it had a bearing on the introduction of the Comics Code?

Yes it did, because the Senate investigation was about juvenile delinquency, comic books, and pornography. It was called by Senator [Estes] Kefauver, who was trying to make a name through those hearings in his bid for the presidency. Wertham spent his time during those hearings talking about the Nights of Horror booklets and the Brooklyn Thrill Killers. When the Code did start, it was self-censorship on part of the publishers, but Wertham testified that it was ineffectual, because the Brooklyn Thrill Killers got their whips from ads in the back of Code-approved comic books.

They were selling whips out of the backs of comic books?

Yeah. So Wertham used the Brooklyn Thrill Killers to make the publishers be much more strict about the Comics Code. Because he was telling the Senate investigation that the code was really a whitewashing of comics. So this all did figure in. And newspapers and places like Reader’s Digest would report about comic books, Nights of Horror, and the Brooklyn Thrill Killers all in the same articles. It was all kind of tied in. But no one ever knew this portion of the history of comics and how this affected the comics of the time.

Do you know of any other comics artist who followed any similar career paths, later in life?

There are a number of cartoonists that were doing comics by day and pornography at night, but none of them of the stature of the creator of Superman and really the comic industry.

–Brian Heater

In this second part of our interview with the visionary—if not especially verbose—author of Low Moon, we discuss the case for autobiography comics, Jason’s pre-comics work in a Norwegian furniture factory, and the influence of American underground cartooning on its European counterparts.

[Part One]

Was your early work a little more autobiographical than more recent books?

No, autobiography is not really something I’m comfortable with. I did some during a period when it seemed like everyone did it.  I just wanted to try it out in a couple of shorter stories. I’ve done very little of it.

People tend to do it a lot early on.

Yes, it’s just the obvious choice to tell your own story–David B with Epileptic and Satrapi told her story. You have very good comics made out of that. But if you draw a comic about a guy drawing a comic—it can cross the line.

With Satrapi, she’s obviously led a very fascinating life. Do you feel as if your own experiences wouldn’t make for as interesting a comic?

Well I don’t think that you necessarily have to experience an interesting or life, or something truly remarkable. One of my favorite autobiographical comics is I Never Liked You, by Chester Brown, which is—

It’s a pretty traditional suburban coming of age.

Yeah, yeah, I think so. And still it’s very interesting, because you can relate to that period of childhood and adolescence. Everyone went through that period.

So there’s something to be said for the universal nature of autobiography.

Yeah, yeah.

You said earlier that you had worked in a factory.

Yeah. After high school I did my service in the military—one year. And then I was looking around for a job. I worked in a furniture factory for nine months, which was the one thing that finally made me decide to continue my education.

You hated it?

Yeah, yeah. I really hated it. So I went to art school instead. Turned out to be not that much of a difference, of course.

In the States—until fairly recently—there’s been a big stigma about making comics in art school. It’s not thought to be very academic, it’s for kids. Does that exist too in Europe?

Oh yeah, it’s the same thing in Norway. Comics were looked upon a medium for kids. It’s mostly in the last 15 years that that’s changed. The main thing is that it’s very difficult to make a living doing comics in Norway. There are only four million inhabitants, so the market is very small. I think that was the reason that in art school you didn’t have much of a possibility to learn comics. There was a three weeks class that taught them.

Is there a fairly tight comics community in Norway?

Yeah. There’s a couple of communities. My first publisher was Jippi. There were a group of us that sometimes met to draw and talk about comics. And I shared a studio with some of them while I lived in Oslo, but since moving abroad in France where I live now, I’ve kind of lost touch with what’s going on. And now there’s also a new generation of Norwegian cartoonists. Some of them you can meet here at MoCCA, like the Dongery guys.

Why did you move to France?

I just got a bit tired with Oslo. I’d live there for fourteen years. I wanted to be closer to the French comic book industry. I wanted to make comics for a living, and it’s really hard to do in Norway. That’s the main reason I moved to France.

Is the community that much larger? Obviously there’s a great tradition out of France.

Yeah, there’s a great tradition. The market is much bigger. In Norway, there’s maybe nine or 10 people who make a living doing comics, whereas in France, it’s hundreds.

Were you making a living at it at all while you were still in Norway?

Sort of. I had to do some illustration work and other stuff, just to pay rent. After art school, there was a period of seven or eight years, maybe, of struggling.

Paying your dues.

Yeah, exactly. Finally, the last five or six years, I’ve made an okay income from comics.

When you went down a list of comics influences, you mentioned several American artists. Has the comic scene here made a large impact in Europe?

Yeah, I think that alternative comics from the 80s and 90s like Dan Clowes, Chris Ware, the Hernandez Brothers—I think they’ve been an influence for Europeans. French comics have traditionally been more adventure comics—secret agents and stuff like that. Then you have comics from L’Association, like David B., Lewis Trondheim, which I think have been influenced by a lot of the American alternative comics, and who I think do a lot more interesting work than the old French adventure comics.

–Brian Heater

Given the breadth and diversity of Craig Yoe’s career, from My Little Pony employee to creative director of the Muppets to self-made comics historian, it might be easier to define him by those seemingly few things he hasn’t done in the entertainment industry. Or better yet, we’ll simply focus on those aspects of Yoe’s career that are particularly important to us, at the moment, beginning with the 2005 publication of Modern Arf.

The first in the Fantagraphic series—which now includes Art Museum and Arf Forum—the anthology helped established Yoe a first-class documenter of sequential art’s secret history, a position echoed in the near simultaneous publication of Boody, the Fantagraphics-published love letter largely forgotten master, Boody Rogers and Abrams’ Secret Identity.

We sat down with Yoe at the recent MoCCA Festival in midtown Manhattan for a conversation that largely revolved around the latter, a book devoted to the long lost SM drawings of Superman artist, Joe Shuster, which Yoe happened to stumble upon at a rare art sale.

Were the Shuster pictures fairly well-known in certain circles before the book was published?

No, they were totally unknown. I discovered one of the booklets at a rare antique book sale, and what made it so rare was that they probably only printed about a thousand copies of these. The mayor of New York assigned 80 detectives who descended on the Times Square bookstores who were selling these under the counter. They arrested the owners, and the case eventually went to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, in a sad day for freedom of the press, banned these and ordered the copies destroyed. As a result, these are very, very rare and unknown to students of comic history.

Was it difficult to secure the rights to them, in light of that history?

Well, there was a whole thing behind that that I had to work through…but as you can see, it all worked out.

Was Shuster’s family involved at all with the creation of the book?

No. I kind of wanted to keep things objective while I was writing it, though eventually Joe Shuster’s sister wrote me. I sent her a copy of the book, after it was published, and she wrote me a very nice letter saying that she thought the work showed how much Joe loved to draw figures and that they were beautiful, though she felt that while he was doing them he probably detested the content. But she thought I did a good job on the book and complimented me on it. I appreciated her honesty. She told me what was going on in Joe’s life at the time, that she was pretty desperate. So that was her perspective. I appreciated her sharing that.

So the feeling what that he hated the work while he was creating it?

That was her feeling. That wasn’t necessarily my feeling.

What was your take?

Well, I look at the work and I’m not of the mindset that the work offends me in any way, so I don’t have that barrier. I look at it and it seems like he actually enjoyed working on this sexual fantasy material. At the time it was illegal to do it, so he didn’t sign his name. But I don’t know, if he were alive today, that he would necessarily be ashamed of it. I think he would welcome the fact that the book shows him to have a lot of breadth and shows him to be a mature artist. Because, really, pretty much the only work we ever saw by him, he did as a teenager.

People tend to criticize his Superman-era work.

Yeah, and I love his earlier work. It had lot of slam-bang action and gusto. It had an immediacy to it, but it was still the work of a teenager—a young man. Even when Superman took off, he immediately had assistants drawing stuff and inking stuff. There’s no pure Joe Shuster stuff out there, except for this material. I think he would be glad that a major chapter of his life has been shown. It has strong, beautiful figure work, and it’s actually very progressive.

There’s still some people that would be against this portrayal being published, but I think, as a country, we’re a little more open. He was a groundbreaker in the world of superheroes—he really invented the first, and his writer pal Jerry Siegel really started the whole comic book industry. And then he was progressive enough to portray a frank sexual fantasy. The guy was an amazing innovator, and I think this shows that off. So I was proud to do the book, and I think that people who love Joe and Joe’s work should not disparage it. they should be proud of it, too.

What was the format for the original books?

Kind of small, primatively printed 8.5 x 5.5.

So a folded sheet of paper.

Well, they did have binding. These were printed by a printer in Brooklyn who had a secret identity, too. By day he was doing wedding invitations and business cards and stationary, and at night he was doing these S&M pornographic books in the basement.

It’s an interesting parallel—you’ve got the nice married couples on one end during the day, and then their activities after dark on the other.

Yeah, yeah. Joe Shuster, he created the most wholesome force for moral good—a red, yellow, and blue boy scout. A superhero. The printer was printing wedding invitations by day and pornographic materials at night. And the publisher is the real mafia kingpin behind this, Edward Mishkin. He lived out in the suburbs and went to temple every week and gave money to the temple. But by day, he was probably the biggest pornographer in the country.

And this sort of thing was the bulk of his material?

Well, Edward Mishkin had four or five bookstores. It wasn’t so set up like a publishing house. This was all covert activity and it was very illegal. He eventually got three years for publishing this kind of material. Now all of the sudden this is a coffee table book.

[Concluded in Part Two]

–Brian Heater

Nine Ways to Disappear
By Lilli Carre
Little Otsu

Given a little more time, one suspects that Lilli Carre could conjure up a lot more than nine. There are plenty of ways to disappear, and perhaps even more justifications for wanting to do so. It’s a good number though—certainly enough to fill up this beefy little teal volume. And besides, a nice, neat, round number like 10 wouldn’t suit an author so prone to open-ended tales as Carre.

Nine Ways to Disappear is a quiet book of single paneled pages based largely around narration, pieces mostly spun with fairy tale omniscience, a storytelling method well-suited to the magical realism that unfolds in nearly every piece. Mermaids populate these pages as do perpetually shrinking men and living skeletons. But Carre doesn’t embrace the fantastic for its own sake.

The unreal, rather is a means of escape—from reality, from society, from relationships, from ourselves. And true to her title, each piece explores a different means of doing so, some intentional, some accidental, and some—as in the case of a sewing needle that slips silently through a lonely drainpipe—seemingly indifferent to causation.

In that sense, these short stories feel like a logical extension to the wanderlust that persisted in the book’s successor, The Lagoon. But where that book explored Carre’s passion for the aural, Nine Ways to Disappear has more invested in the visual—particularly the artist’s love for old-fashion animation. At moments these stories feel more like the contents of flipbook than a comic.

But as a multimedia artist, Carre is keenly aware that the key moments of a story aren’t always in what you opt to put on paper. In both traditional animation and short fiction, tales unfold by the ways in which our minds connect the images and words and fill in the spaces between. As with The Lagoon, Carre is never one for a convenient ending, and even those tales that take the longest to unfold, such as the multi-layered “The Pearl,” the author never hands us a satisfactory resolution.

After all, even those in life who manage to disappear are never able to do so completely. There’s plenty more to see on the other side of a storm drain.

–Brian Heater