[Art by Frank Cammuso]

Before his reinventing himself as a children’s book author through Toon Book properties like Otto’s Orange Day with Frank Cammuso and the Dean Haspiel collaboration, Mo and Jo Fighting Together Forever, Jay Lynch was a driving force in the Chicago’s underground comics movement of the early-70s, publishing Bijou Funnies, which brought the comics world pioneering works by the likes of Gilbert Shelton, Art Spiegelman, and, of course, Lynch himself.

In the interim years, Lynch has worked on a wide range of projects, both comics and not, including the Spiegelman-created Wacky Packages series for Topps, and its successor, The Garbage Pail Kids. The artist also contributed to Mad, shortly after the return of counter-culture cartooning legend, Harvey Kurtzman.

In this final part of out interview with Lynch, we discuss working on Mad, whether today’s children’s books are a bit too safe these days, and the battle to stay afloat financially.

[Part One] [Part Two]

Do you think that children’s books have become a bit too safe?

Hypocritical? Well, it’s like a regular children’s book publisher will say that you can’t have the main character die—unless you’re Shel Silverstein.

His work was also a product of a different era. It would be interesting to see if he’d be able to get away with that now.

Well, Shel Silverstein’s books can be read by adults or kids. The Toon Books, possibly too. Actually, Art wrote some of the dialogue when they’re fighting and they say snappy things.

Do you find that you tend to work better when you’re collaborating on something?

Yeah. I think of myself as more of an editor than a cartoonist. The end product is better. Like, if I do a rough, I can put 2,000 people in one panel, and whoever draws it can draw 2,000 people. But if I were to draw it myself, I’d only put 50 people in it. So I think the end result is better. It all comes from Kurtzman’s Mad stuff. Kurtzman would do the rough, and Elder or Wood would be required to intensify it.

You’ve done some work for Mad, as well.

Relatively recently. Whenever it was that Kuyrtzman came back to Mad—I guess it was in the late-80s.

Did he play a role in bringing you on-board?

No, I just thought it would be—I never tried to work for Mad, because of the old idea that Kurtzman should have gotten a better deal. What happened was, Bob Stewart, who used to work at Topps, became Joe Orlando’s assistant, and I did a Mad stylekit. And I pointed Monty Wolverton out, because Monty draws just like Basil. They didn’t know that.

That’s his son?

Yeah. They started using him, and I wrote stuff for him. I wrote about three or four articles in the 80s, but it’s hard to do stuff for Mad, because you do it and it’s a year between the time you do it and when it’s printed, and it’s hard to predict what will be known in a year.

Especially in terms of the magazine’s pop culture satire.

Now I can do Obamalot. But what if he’s not elected?

You’ve since stopped working for Mad?

Well, it’s speculative. You write something, and maybe they’ll use it, maybe they won’t I’m in a position where I have to constantly do stuff to get money.

So what are you working on right now?

This very second, I’m drawing an old Wacky Package character for some guy who paid me $300.

So it’s a lot of commissioned personalized artwork?

Yeah, a lot. I did about 200 in the last three years. And I did a t-shirt for some kid’s Bar Mitzvah. On my Webpage, it says I’ll draw a piece of art for $300. I do that and some of the people get Mineshaft to print them, and then they’re original art, as well that’s worth more because it’s printed. Let’s talk about the new Toon Books book. I get royalties off of that.

Dean mentioned that if the book does well, he’d be happy to do a sequel. You’ve definitely left the door open for a part two. Is that something that would interest you?

Oh yeah. So it’s good that we can’t kill of the characters [laughs]. Yeah, there could be sequels now. It’s like twin superheroes. They’ve learned to get along, so next time they can learn something else.

–Brian Heater

His latest work, a collaboration with Act-I-Vater, Dean Haspiel, is hardly Jay Lynch’s first foray into the world of children’s entertainment. The book, Mo & Jo Fighting Together Forever, is Lynch’s second for Francoise Mouly’s Toon Books imprint. It’s also the latest in a long line of output aimed at children, including Garbage Pail Kids packs, My Little Pony sticker books, and lyrics for kids songs—a far cry from the latter day output of many of his late-60s underground comics contemporaries.

In this second part of our interview with the artist, we discuss the state of children’s books, X-men’s sales figures, and why his days drawing Duckman comics will also make him think of OJ.

[Part One]

Do you find that interest in your work tends to come in waves?

There’s certainly more interest in old underground comics than there was seven years ago. I don’t know, I kept all of my underground comics stuff out of print, because no one has really—I started an autobiographical comic that I wrote and Ed Piskor drew.

That appeared in Mineshaft, right?

Yes, that was serialized in Mineshaft. We don’t get paid for Mineshaft, but I like it. When we did underground comics, we made good money. When we started, Bijou was the third title, so there were only like a dozen titles. One of our titles would sell about equally with what Mad Magazine sells today. In the 60s, Mad sold 3 million a month. Our books would have printings of about 50,000. So today Mad is under 200,000. We’d sell out the reprints. Now for comic books, it’s not something you do for money. The X-men, now, is the biggest selling comic, and it has a smaller circulation than most of the underground comics.

Is that a result of the marketplace being flooded?

Yeah. And also, it’s sold in the shops. No one ever really goes to the shops, except collectors. That’s why I haven’t really done any comics. I drew a Duckman comic for Topps, about—when the OJ thing was happening.

The mid-90s.

Yeah. When OJ was on the car chase. I remember when I was drawing Duckman, OJ was on the TV, being chased. I guess that was like the early or mid-90s.

When you’re working on something like Duckman, how closely do you have to study the source material? Do they make you watch all of the episodes?

No. Stefan Petrucha wrote the thing. They sent me a style kit. Sometimes I’d write it—that’s mostly what I’d do, draw roughs, and other people draw it.

When you’re actually doing the writing, what are you using as source material?

Well, most of the sticker albums are based on movies or episodes of TV shows. Oh, that was a good job—I had to read every Goosebumps book that there was. I had a three-foot high pile of Goosebumps books to do a Goosebumps trivia book with questions about the stories.

Do you have a particular favorite non-comics job that you’ve done, over the years?

Non-comics? I wrote a comic in the 60s which was like a poem. And a band called The Boogers covered it on a album with songs for kids. Country Joe and the Fish wrote one, too. That will be out in a month, or so.

Let’s talk more about the superhero book, Mo & Jo. The first thing is to get a moral and then write the book.

It seems that, in the case of that book, the moral is pretty well stated in the title.

Yeah, that was Francoise, or maybe Art, who came up with the title. I called it something like “Major Mojo.”

Were there things that you wanted to put in, which were deemed not age appropriate?

No. Well, I think the hippo balloon was originally a Thanksgiving Day parade, so it was a turkey balloon, but that would have made the book seasonal, so they changed it to a hippo balloon.

You’ve done a bit of work for kids at this point. Would you say that you’re pretty well accustomed to what will and won’t fly for certain age levels?

Yeah. Well, there’s some stuff that you can’t have in kids books. No one can smoke, no one can die, and there can be no fire. Although a lot of the old classic things like Snow White and the original Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and Sleeping Beauty, the prince goes blind, and in Cinderella, they cut off the queens feet. Pecos Bill, they went over the whole film and took away his cigarettes.

[Concluded in Part Three]

–Brian Heater