As a reviewer, I’ve taken a real interest in the career of Noah Van Sciver – not just for his promising work, but for his letters.  He sends the most heartbreaking updates with each review copy, all about how he’s giving everything to comics, how he barely has food to eat, and why he’s putting every ounce of energy into the page.  The usual fare for any cartoonist, really, but he’s the only guy around being so honest.

More importantly, he’s in this mess because of his agenda: with indie fans in mind, he’s printing semi-quarterly issues of his series Blammo, just to give them something regular to look forward to like their mainstream counterparts.  Boy’s got a dream!  Don’t you just want to send him $20 and some dry pasta?

Since I’m rooting for him, it was heartening to learn that he’s been accepted in an upcoming issue of MOME, and soon will be published with the rest of indie comics’ innovative young talent.  Proof that sometimes, kids, hard work and persistence pay off.

Sadly, a few weeks ago, his girlfriend Robin (whom he often writes about in his comics) went the hospital for serious migraines only to find something more serious behind the pain.  Can’t this guy get a break? Before that, however, he was upbeat and took the time to email a few responses about his work, his forthcoming Abe Lincoln story arc, and the general trajectory for his series Blammo.

How many issues now have you released of your series Blammo?

I’ve released 4 issues and I’m currently putting together #5, as we speak.

What is the regular, or ideal, publishing schedule for that series?

It’s hard for me to cement a schedule for it. Sometimes the new issue will come out quicker than the last issue. I draw a lot of comics! And after I get 24 pages that I like together, I put it out.

Tell me about your overall purpose for publishing Blammo on such a regular basis.

Well, I’m in pretty close contact with the other half of the comics world. A lot of indie comic artists consider super hero books lame. But I read everything that my brother does, so I’m in comic shops quite a bit.

One of the things that I think is most appealing to people about super hero comics is how frequently they come out. It’s like your favorite TV show! You get to feel like you can really get to know your favorite characters and the artists and writers even. It’s something that alternative comics sort of lack.

I want people that give me a chance with Blammo to be able to have that. To not have to wait so long. They’ll be able to keep up with characters, and watch in amazement as my drawing skills improve!

With issues coming out so often, what are some of the problems you encounter with creating the books on a set timetable?

A big problem is trying not to forget about my other comic responsibilities. I have to remember to draw up a three page interview for The Comics Journal every few weeks, a comic strip for Denver’s Westword every week, on top of any other illustration work I can scrape together.

Do you think most of your time is spent (as a cartoonist) working on short stories for use in Blammo? Or in working on extra stories for side-projects or other purposes?

I would guess Blammo takes up most of it.

How long have you been submitting stories for consideration in MOME?

I think I started bothering Eric Reynolds early last year. On my days off from work I usually just walk around Denver and go to bookstores and hang out. I always look at the graphic novel sections and it kills me. A lot of my drive comes from seeing what’s going on and feeling that feeling in my gut that I don’t even exist.

Nobody knows who I am, you know? And I always see MOME there on the shelf. It’s what’s happening in the alternative comics world! And It’s beautiful!

I remember thinking to myself “Why am I not in this? Am I not not good enough to be a part of this?” I wrote out a bunch of cursing in my notebook that day, and walked home in my melancholy. I still don’t even know if they are open to submissions, but I sent Fantagraphics my first package originally with a note that said I would kill myself if I didn’t get in, but I changed it at the last minute to something less desperate.

I got a rejection letter, and sent another package, and got another rejection letter. It went like that for a bit. And then, Jules Feiffer came to do a talk in Denver around that time, and he said in his talk, “never give up with editors. They’ll get so tired of rejecting you that eventually they’ll give you a chance.” I swear to god it’s like he was talking only to me.

So in December of 2008, Eric accepted me.

Are you happy with the work that finally got accepted?

I’m very happy with it. It’s my favorite story.

When is your MOME debut scheduled for?

I think the summer 2009.

In what other areas of your life have you been persistent, and how has that helped or harmed you?

I’ve had to be persistent in getting every girlfriend I’ve ever had. Most of those relationships were helpful in their harmfulness!

Do you hope eventually to keep up Blammo and have it published by someone else to take some stress off? Or would you rather use it as your “calling card” for now, in hopes of doing different, larger projects?

You know, I go back and forth on this. I don’t think any comic publisher sees Blammo for what it is yet. I wish somebody would pick it up for me. But, I don’t worry about it really. Actually, the next issue is the start of a bigger project. Blammo 5 is the first chapter of my book on Abe Lincoln’s life from 1830-1842. Hopefully, when all 4 chapters are done I can put it together in a book with somebody.

What is the comics scene like in Denver, CO?

It’s charming. We are having our first comic con this year! I don’t know what to expect. I think we have an interesting Indie comics scene for the size of the city. John Porcellino and I are painting a mural next month on the side of the historic Wax Trax record store.

Do you want to stay there? Or eventually move to a city like Portland, Chicago or NYC that is known to have a thicker community of cartoonists?

Right now I feel like I’ll die here in my apartment in Denver. I have a fear of flying that can be pretty arresting some times, so it’s hard to say where I’ll end up. I’d like to see other cities and meet more cartoonists, but what would they think of me? Would I fit in?

Has the current economy at all affected your work as a cartoonist?

I thought it would more, but I think I’m okay for now (knock on wood). I still have my work. I’m still on the bottom rung of the economic ladder. I’m basically a cockroach in society and cockroaches survive it all!

You began as a painter, and continue to paint the covers for each Blammo issue. Do you still find time to paint?

Oh yeah! I was in an art show last fall and somebody stole 3 of my paintings!

What is a typical daily routine for Noah Van Sciver?

I wake up at 5:00 am and put on my work clothes which I have draped on a box of Bob Dylan records the night before, then shave and brush my teeth. I walk a block to my job at a bakery and start work. I don’t take a break at my job anymore because my boss tells me I’m a girl if I do. At 1:30 pm I sneak out of there and come home. When I get home I put on a Bob Dylan record and start drawing either at my desk or on my floor. I’ll usually walk to find some food somewhere then come back home and read something while the homeless masses search through the dumpster outside my window. I have to go back to bed early so I can do it all over again.

As a huge Abe Lincoln fan, I’m really excited to see the finished Abe Lincoln story you’re working on. When do you think it will be ready? Will it be factual? Will there be a series of Abe Lincoln comics? I must know!

I’m also a huge fan. I have a good portion of it put together in my sketchbook. The first chapter will be ready in a couple of months and starts with his family moving to Illinois. It will be factual,and will focus on a human story more than a political one. The story I’ve written is worked out so the present time in his life will be 1841 and flashes back a few times for different events before proceeding into 1842. It’s a story of bravery, depression and love.

Like I said it will be released in 4 separate issues of Blammo. Each of these issues will be dedicated to this story entirely.

Do you think you’ve found your “style” yet as a cartoonist? How long did it take you to find it (if so)? Also, (if so) do you regret that it seems to have developed so quickly?

No, I’m still growing as an artist/cartoonist. I look at things I drew only a year ago and can see a difference!

I guess what I’m getting at is this: when you work on a regular publishing schedule, and seem to be so new to comics, it’s easy to fall into a quick way of doing things – and the quick style you fall into then become routine and very necessary for the schedule – but it does kind of discourage a cartoonist from growing more adventurous as an artist, because people come to depend on you for a certain type of story or drawing style or immediacy.

With that in mind, do you relate to these (perceived) issues at all in your own work? And is your style limiting in any way for all its quickness? And if so, do you ever hope to “go back to the drawing board” to work up something more adventurous than your current style? Or are you pretty happy with it?

I try to work in as much detail as I think a story should have. Now, Blammo is made up of a lot of stories. Each one different, and each one needing a different level of detail to make it feel and look right. To me, a funny cartoon should be simplified with less lines in order for it to be easily read and laughed about. A story comic could be simplified as well and work okay, but, generally I’ll work in a bit more detail on those.

I’m not sure if people depend on me for one or the other. Readers of Blammo should know that it’s a variety show. They get all kinds of odds and ends. I don’t want to ever settle down on it finally and say “this is my style.” Because, If I wanted to do a story and thought that it required a more sophisticated look than I’d get to work on it. Ultimately, I want to do something meaningful in between all of the meaningless.

- Sarah Morean

Last week, Eric Reynolds was in town for the opening of MOMEntum, a retrospective of comic artwork from the MOME anthology he edits. He also curated the show, which is on display in the MCAD Concourse Gallery now through April 19th. For the opening, Reynolds enjoyed the usual rigors of being a guest of the MCAD comics program, which include an incredibly busy day of critiquing student work, lecturing a hall full of students and the public, and drinking the night away at Grumpy’s. You can read more about his experiences HERE. For some very nice photos of the MOMEntum gallery opening, check out Tom Kaczynski’s set on flickr HERE.

I sat in on the lecture with the intent of posting brief quotes and highlights from the talk.  However, this was the first time I recorded a talk I planned to cover for the Cross Hatch rather than scribbling quotes as they came.  As a result, I found myself typing up…pretty much all of it.  This is why, only today do you get what you should have received a week ago.

Reynolds talked primarily about the recent history of comic books, with a focus on how today’s “graphic novel big shots” first cut their teeth by serializing their work, how today’s cartoonists might be at a disadvantage if they leap right into long-format stories, and concludes with a smart explanation of how MOME is filling a need for young cartoonists.  Mixing art with commerce can be an ugly thing, but Reynolds did a good job talking live on the issue.  As a result, I did very little editing, but it should be noted that I did some.  Mostly adding words or punctuation to transform run-on ideas into readable sentences. Also, I chunked the information into bits that seemed to convey an especially similar block of ideas, so you on the internet will have an easier time reading it.

I recommend that you take your time with some of the information, particularly if the phenomenon of “the rise of the graphic novel” interests you, and particularly if you’re an upstart cartoonist looking to jump right onto the graphic novel gravy train.

It’s amazing how much the landscape has changed for cartoonists in terms of being accepted as a real artist. The fact that you can have a school of prestige like MCAD where you actually learn comics without having the faculty and the administration thumb their nose at it — that is really an amazing thing. You probably don’t even realize how much it’s changed. On the other hand, we are in a very interesting time right now where graphic novels are booming and the economy is faltering and commercial opportunities for cartoonists are basically drying up. So today, I basically want to talk to you about where I see things having come from, then ‘til now, and what that means for many of you who are going to graduate from college and try to establish careers on your own.

In 1993, if you wanted to be a serious “literary cartoonist” or “alternative cartoonist” …the recipe was really pretty simple. You’d probably begin by doing short stories and sending submissions to any number of anthologies that were on the market at the time. Then eventually after a few anthologies you might find a publisher that was willing to publish your own solo comic book – and by comic book I mean the old-fashioned 24-32-page stapled comic pamphlet. Having your own solo comic and being able to contribute to anthologies enabled cartoonists to experiment and find their voice and find their style, which can be a little more difficult to do in the marketplace. Anthologies provided an opportunity for you to grow as an artist. So you’d have a comic book, and it would serve as your sort of calling card to the general populace. Back then the field of illustration was still a healthy one for cartoonist. I don’t know how many of you [students] are doing that now, but back then the alternative weekly newspaper market and the zine world were still an incredibly healthy one for cartoonists. Independent music was thriving and there were a lot of opportunities for cartoonists in cities like Seattle and Minneapolis for cartoonists to contribute…music and comics had a real synergy and seemed to offer up opportunities in ways that don’t seem to exist as plentifully as they did then. You had cartoonists driving the graphic look of companies like Sub Pop and Rhino Records and perhaps more importantly, photography and photoshop had yet to make most art directors believe that cartoonists and illustrators were obsolete.

Virtually all the major cartoonists I grew up admiring in this era started with their own solo anthology comics to explore ideas and experiment with styles and voices and approaches to comics. You had cartoonists like Dan Clowes, Chris Ware, Joe Sacco, Jim Woodring, the Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, Seth, Chester Brown, Julie Doucet, Adrian Tomine, Renee French, Charles Burns…basically today’s all-star graphic novelists really made their names by doing comic books, not graphic novels. The list goes on and on…that was just half a dozen people or so. Basically you’d walk into a comic book store in 1985, 1990, even 1995, and find any number of great options to spend a couple $2-3 on. These comics worked for fans that just wanted to explore what was out there, but they also worked for the artist. It provided a structure for an artist to just do whatever they wanted. They weren’t beholden by big fat book contracts that had to be approved by editors.

Take Dan Clowes for example. Clowes is widely considered one of the modern masters of the “literary graphic novel” – most notably for his book Ghost World which was then turned into a movie. But Clowes started with a pretty unambitious 1950’s satirical pastiche called Lloyd Llewellyn and it was this kind of hard-boiled fast-talkin’ lightweight comedy comic strip that he did for a few issues, and then he worked his way through that up to Eightball, and Eightball number 1 came out in 1989 and it just featured short stories and humor strips and serials and he started serializing his first major graphic novel which is Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron – which is an incredibly flawed work, but also an incredibly powerful work. When it came out it was unlike anything you had ever seen. It came out around the same time as Blue Velvet by David Lynch and it had a similar effect, I think, on people who saw Blue Velvet, they were both so unlike what had come before. It wasn’t until about the 12th issue of Eightball that he began serializing Ghost World, which is his most famous work and he serialized it in a series of episodic vignettes. It wasn’t intended to be a long narrative. My point with all this is it’s safe to say he wouldn’t be the “long-form graphic novelist” that he is today without the opportunity to make mistakes as an artist, to do strips that were excellent, but also to do strips that didn’t work…and it’s safe to say he wouldn’t have been afforded the ability to make mistakes in something like Eightball – given the current economic climate, because I don’t think he would have gotten the freelance work that would have enabled him to work on this on the side. So the landscape now is a lot different for a cartoonist, and I think it’s a lot more challenging. It’s also a lot more exciting, because you’re having more and more good work published all the time, but it tends to be more and more kind of long book format.

Anyway, let me back up. So recent mainstream acceptance of comics, including film adaptations, major book deals, museum and gallery exhibitions like here at MCAD, academic interest – it’s all resulted in that complication of the term “graphic novel.” Which has a kind of nice ring to the untrained ear, but it’s also kind of a semi-pretentious description that has taken over the publishing industry simply because it’s a little more respectable-sounding, but I think it’s as every bit a misnomer as “comic book” is.

You take something like Joe Sacco’s Palestine which is a work of non-fiction reportage, and it’s referred to as a graphic novel – it’s not a novel, it’s non-fiction. And then you’ve got something like Dan Clowes, whose work is very literary I guess you could say, though literary is even a limiting term…but what I mean by literary is that there’s subtext. There are things happening beneath the surface. Most of the literary construction that you can point to is actually deeply rooted in the comic book tradition. [Uses page from Ice Haven to illustrate.] So I’m not sure that graphic novel really applies any more to a work of fiction like Clowes’ Ice Haven than it does to Joe Sacco’s Palestine. Then you’ve got Chris Ware who is really just blowing open the language of comics. His constructions of the page and panel kind of mimic the syncopated rhythms of music more so than literature. So again, here is one of America’s most well regarded graphic novelists but really what he’s doing has less to do with the medium of novels than it does music, visual art or things like that. So yah, they’re all graphic, but the terminology suggests the hand of a marketing department more than an author.

I was recently talking to Joe Sacco and asked him if he preferred that his books be called comic books or graphic novels, and he said comic books by a long margin – it just seems more honest somehow. So anyway, I guess my point of this is, I feel like the graphic novel has moved us away from some of the very proud comic traditions that have enabled us to get to this point where graphic novels have taken such a foothold in the world of literature.

I just keep coming back to this: comic books are not something to be ashamed of.

We’ve got to this point where sway is given to more ambitious, formal approaches. Expanding the form – literally and figuratively – pushing the term comic and its associated format increasingly to the edge of anachronism to where comic book is virtually an obsolete object for art unless it’s a monthly assembly-line Marvel or DC kind of mainstream product, which is very different in nature, and more of a collaborative soap opera than an attempt at making art.

My point in all this is, all these great cartoonists I’ve mentioned so far I don’t think would have become who they are today, except that they benefited from the comic books they did before they entered into the long-form work.

So for better or worse, our comic books have slowly begun to make the traditional comic book obsolete in its own market. It’s an anachronistic format with a reliance on periodicity and origins in the newsstand market, which was really never viable for anything less than corporate mass-market. And why is that? The labor-intensive and time-consuming nature of creating quality comics, especially graphic novels, requires skill in several disciplines and an ability to make them all work in harmony, so the notion of being a regular monthly or bi-monthly comic is a relative near-impossibility for most of you. It’s not unusual now for an alternative comic like Optic Nerve or Peep Show to take several years to come out. The increasing lack of viable alternative comics means there just isn’t enough critical mass of excellent books to sustain at the commercial level in the marketplace, which is why graphic novels have taken on such a hold.

The irony though in this increasingly marginalized format – the comic book – is that for most creators, it really is the perfect financial route as well as the perfect creative route. It usually allows an artist to be paid faster on a very practical level. Most publishers, including Fantagraphics, don’t really pay for work until either the artist delivers it or the book is published. If you are doing a 200-300 page book, that means you will be waiting a long time to be paid. By instead serializing a 200-page book in 24-page chunks, it makes things a lot easier. You have a deadline to aim for, rather than hold to an abstract 3-year on the horizon deadline. Practically, it provides a cartoonist with an opportunity to explore their own voice and get work done. Most cartoonists really can’t maintain the kind of schedule that’s crucial to establishing any kind of a minimum marketplace though, so you’re forced to think in terms of books, and that’s why I’ve seen graphic novels gain such a foothold this decade as the format of choice. The book format has a better-scaled economy for publishers than comics, and allows for a wider distribution. Comic books are only distributed to comic book stores, and as any of you who go to comic book stores know, comic books are not something necessarily that an average Joe goes to. You have to be a comic book fan. Casual comic book fans don’t go to comic shops, they go to book stores and they look for the book collections.

As a result we’re in this weird place in history. We’re kind of in the dramatic paradigm shift in the way comics are packaged – and the biggest paradigm shift since comics started in the 30s, when publishers took a newspaper tabloid and folded it in half and called it a comic book. That format has pretty much stuck until today. Now we’re in this shift towards a proper book collection with a spine and an ISBN.

So publishers are increasingly moving towards the graphic novel whenever the cartoonist’s personal situation will accommodate it. There are still a number of good books that come out this way. Fun Home by Allison Bechdel was an original graphic novel. Dash Shaw’s Bottomless Bellybutton was another amazing original graphic novel that he did on his own. Doesn’t hurt that he’s an incredibly efficient cartoonist. Persepolis was another one. In many cases, cartoonists just can’t afford graphic novels, and publishers can’t afford to bankroll cartoonists for the length of time it takes them to create graphic novels…which leads me to MOME.

When I first started reading comics and cartooning it seemed like it wasn’t that hard to get published through anthologies, zines, etc. In 2004 when I first started to conceive of MOME in my head, and with Gary Groth at Fantagraphics, one of the reasons we started thinking about it is because there are virtually no regular comic anthologies on the market. Graphic novels were booming, but there wasn’t a place you could send a short script when you finished it, and anticipate having it published in a few months. You pretty much had to self-publish or web-publish. The best anthologies that were out there in 2004 were probably Kramer’s Ergot and also NON by Jordan Crane. They came out very infrequently though, maybe once every couple of years, while simultaneously pushing the boundary on what comics could be. But they weren’t the kind of thing you could send a strip in with the hopes of being published.

Seemed like at any given time there was one hot graphic novel, like Jimmy Corrigan or American Born Chinese, and they’re great, but at the same time, there are hundreds of great books being published all over the place at 1000 copies or fewer and not getting the attention these bigger breakout successes might have had. Most of the stuff Fantagraphics publishes sells as few as 2000 copies. So there are these people out there who have read Maus, for instance, and don’t know where to go next. So my idea with MOME was basically to present something that could be a receptacle for what else was out there. We wanted to have a nice survey of contemporary alternative comics. There was sort of a two-fold approach: on the one hand with readers in mind, and on the other hand with cartoonists in mind. I wanted to have a venue that would give cartoonists the venue and motivation to publish comics regularly without having a regular deadline. I also wanted to provide readers with an opportunity to see what was out there in the market beyond the 1-2 breakout graphic novels they might have read. With that in mind, I looked to things like McSweeny’s or Verante [?] or maybe something else entirely. What McSweeny’s meant to the world of prose, really, is what I wanted MOME to be for the world of comics. When McSweeny’s came out, it was a very influential thing for me. It was the first literary journal that I really clamored to read every issue, and I realized that it single-handedly broadened my awareness of the contemporary prose that was out there. I kept coming back to that with MOME and wanted to have something that opened the eyes of anyone with any kind of casual interest in comics.

Aside from what I wanted MOME to be for the readers, I also have this goal of MOME being a place where the cartoonists can nurture themselves in their voices – so part of the key with that was posting MOME regularly. We post it quarterly – which might not seem that often – but in the world of alternative comics it’s very frequent. So I wanted to make something fans could go every new stories few months, and I’m proud to say within the first five years of MOME, we will have published over 2000 pages of comics, which is kind of amazing, to me. 2000 pages of comics is kind of incredible, and I don’t know if there has been another alternative comics anthology on the market that has ever published that many pages of comics before.

So as a quarterly book series, we can get it in newsstands, we can get it shelved with other graphic novels, we can get it shelved with other literary anthologies – at least that’s the goal. And again, I’m talking about art and commerce, and maybe this commerce stuff is kind of dry, but the reason I bring it up is because I can’t emphasize enough how much I think the short-story form – especially in conjunction with a regular deadline – can really benefit a younger cartoonist who is trying to find their way in the world of comic art.

As any of you in this room who make comics know, they’re very labor-intensive. You need to be multi-disciplined. You need to be a good writer, you need to be a good illustrator, you need to take your illustration skills and apply them. You probably need to be a good graphic designer at the same time, and you even need to be a good actor and director, because you need to be able to communicate with your characters in their dialog and physicality. These are not easy things to do individually, let alone in harmony, and what that means too is that on the back-end that comics are so much harder to edit than prose. You can’t just go in and delete a word or a panel and sandwich everything else together. You’re creating panels and pages and chapters and longer works and you can’t just cut-and-paste so easily. Part of this is, the medium is so young, that a lot of it is just intuitive for many people, and it’s only in the last few years that you’ve had dedicated academic institutions trying to codify the language of comics into something that can be taught. It’s getting there, but it’s still an incredibly young and intuitive medium, that I think even after hundreds and hundreds of pages, you’re still trying to find your way, you’re still trying to come up with new ways of doing things and find the perfect process for creating a page or a story. You have to remain flexible and not be boxed into any particular genre or style, which is why I think it’s so important to experiment with short stories and to essentially not lock yourself into a long-form work too early in your career.

- Sarah Morean

There’s a little bit of the future and the past in this quick final installment of our interview with The Lagoon author. We discuss the ways in which Lilli Caree’s fascination with sound has affected her comics, the power of a resolution-free ending, and why Hans Christian Andersen’s short story about a sad little Christmas tree is good fodder for a comic.

[Part One][Part Two]
Beyond the clear role that it played in The Lagoon, do you feel that your interest in sound has played affected your comics work?

I guess I’ve never thought of it as such. I don’t really see a connection between my initial interest in that and The Lagoon, but I guess it does create an environment, and it’s an interesting thing to play with, both in sound mixing and visually.

I brought The Lagoon to a panel I was on and found that people tended to interpret it in very different ways. That seems to keep with the thematic openness of Woodsman Pete. How important is the general lack of resolution to your books?

It definitely doesn’t offer that kind of ‘aha!’ ending, which a lot of people look for in a book—and I look for, sometimes. But I guess that’s just not the kind of book it is. I’m not interested in giving it a clear resolution like that. I was thinking of it more as a poem. I don’t want people to walk away with the same interpretation of it. I want people to have different readings on the whole thing.

What drew you to the Hans Christian Andersen story that you’re working on?

That was asked of me. I got to choose from several stories and I chose that one. But I love that story. It’s just so ridiculously dismal. I was kind of surprised that that was an option, and I leapt for it. it’s really interesting—I’ve never illustrated another person’s story, let alone a genius like Hans Christian Andersen. So well see.

What’s the project?

I don’t know much about publishing or what’s okay to talk about yet.

What drew you to the most dismal option available?

I wasn’t drawn to it because it was so bad. I just love that story and was surprised that they included it. in essence, this little tree is just waiting to be taken in. and then he does get cut down and taken into the home for Christmas, and he’s loving every minute of it. he overhears the Humpty Dumpty story and gets put in the attic and tells all of the mice the Humpty Dumpty story over and over again. They get kind of sick of it, and he’s just waiting to get dressed up for Christmas again. And they finally come up, and he gets excited to go down, but they just take him down to the alley and cut him up. The end! Although much more eloquently told.  I was also living in the moment. I don’t know why I got so excited about it…

–Brian Heater

For a book so invested in the poetry of sound, The Lagoon seems somehow quiet. Siren songs and metronomes and the whooshing of wind fill the its pages, but the book’s important moments, more often than not, seem to exist in the spaces in between, those quiet panels when its cacophonies have been temporarily extinguished.

It’s fitting then, in a sense, that when I first approach the book’s author, Lilli Carre, about doing an interview, she was a bit hesitant. She soon admitted that she had never actually done one via phone, and while I finally convinced her to give it a shot, I largely expected that, like The Lagoon, Carre would keep many of her answers to herself.

As it turns out, however, for all of her fears of coming across as muddled, Carre had plenty to say with regards to her methods and works, from The Lagoon to its predecessor Woodsman Pete, to the more sporadic work she’s done in the field of animation.

Are you on a regular 9 to 5 work schedule?

No. I have a really weird, open schedule.

What do you tend to do during the day?

These days I’m kind of indulging a bit. I’m working on my own stuff at the moment. I work two to three days at a movie rental place here as a clerk. And the rest of the time I work on illustration, comics, and that sort of thing. But I might have to switch to a more regular schedule soon.

Part of me misses working retail. Do you enjoy that process at all, or is it more just something that you have to do for money?

Well, I do enjoy it. for one because I just enjoy weird movies and I love being around creepy customers. It’s a social environment to counter all of the time spent alone, staring at paper. I think it actually keeps me kind of sane. I think I need a kind of structure like that, outside the realm of the things I make myself do for myself. It’s necessary for me, I think.

Do you make a mental catalog of the sort of weirdos who come through the door?

Well, maybe that’s too harsh to call them all “weirdos.” There are random people who do pop in and out, and I do think that movies draw a kind of interesting crowd, but I wouldn’t say I catalog it too much. I just enjoy it.

Was this ability to work two or three days a week afforded to you by having had back to back books out on Fantagraphics and Top Shelf?

Uh, no. That really has nothing to do with it. It’s really most the random illustration jobs that I get. And it’s just kind of living cheaply in general. It is kind of an indulgence to not work a 9 to 5 job. Which, I might do that again, sometime soon. I need to finish some things I’m working on now. I think I kind of like that, too, on occasion, so there isn’t so much pressure on working on stuff independently, in terms of making money and lifestyle. I think that just to relieve that pressure would be nice.

What percentage of the stuff that you work on during the day is illustration and what percent is comics?

It really depends on if I have work lined up or not. If I’m not getting any illustration work, then I’ll just work on comics for the whole day.

Do you always have a comics project waiting, if you don’t have other work lined up?

Yeah, kind of. I don’t know how that worked out, but yeah. There’s always some sort of long-term project boiling up. I’m really excited now that I’m in the Mome anthology, because then it’s a sort of a constant venue that I have for my work. So it’s exciting for me to now think about that.

Is that the deal with Mome? Whenever you have new stuff it will appear in the new issue?

I believe so. I’m actually not totally sure because I’m going to be in the next one for the first time. My understanding of it is that, once you’re in it, you’re allowed to contribute to each issue, quarterly. I’m not sure if they accept everything or everything or how that works. But, regardless of that, it’s just sort of a great motivation to make more short stories, basically.

So your work for the new Mome is a one-off?

It was 32 pages—the story was actually for something else, actually, that then got cancelled. That was pretty heartbreaking, actually [laughs]. So I was just sitting on this full-color story and I didn’t really know how to put it out, and then it ended up that it could be included in Mome. That was really exciting to me.

Was The Lagoon your first long-form piece?

Um, well, I kind of think of Woodsman Pete as being one continuous story. I think of that as being my first long-form story, even though it’s sort of broken up into vignettes. I think the bits and pieces all connect in a way that sort of makes it all one piece. But I guess, yeah, more distinctly, as one united story, The Lagoon is the longest thing I’ve done and my first “official” long story.

Was Woodsman Pete broken up that way because it was issued as minis?

Yeah. I was submitting them to the school paper. And as I was thinking of it more as a book after putting out the second mini comic, I started thinking about them as a whole and including the Paul Bunyan character and tying the stories together.

So working on a long-form piece is really something you’ve been interested in for as long as you’ve been doing comics?

Yeah, it’s exciting. I still don’t know know how to do it well [laughs].

In the literary sense, The Lagoon reads like a short story. Do you think of it that way, at all?

Yeah, somewhere between a poem and a short story, I’d say. Certainly not like a novel. It’s weird comparing comics to books, in terms of novels and short stories, because what defines “short?” you can read a comic so quickly, and so much of The Lagoon is this sort of ambient feeling and sound. I don’t know if that makes it long or short or what. But the content is definitely that of a short story and it kind of resolves itself more as a poem.

The use of sound in the story was an interesting choice, particularly given that it was created using a silent medium. Is it hard to rely so heavily on sound in a comic book?

I wasn’t pulling my hair. It was fun. I liked playing around with it as a visual, throughout the story and trying to figure out ways to visualize it. I really wanted to create a certain sound, and I felt like sound was the way to do that.  I had to spell it out, but when you’re reading a book, you really hear it in your head. I really wanted to create that kind of space. I don’t know if it worked for other people, but when I read those sounds, with the pacing from panel to panel, I feel like it created a mood that I really wanted.

[Continued in Part Two]

–Brian Heater