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.]

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

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