Two-thirds of the way into my interview with Liz Baillie, a shouting match broke out in the Holiday Cocktail Lounge on St. Mark’s St. in Manhattan’s East Village. After 15 minutes, the incessant sound of the woman sitting directly behind us, banging a pair of wooden drumsticks against her table was enough to make a man seated nearby snap. Naturally, we both stopped the conversation for moment.

After a beat, Baillie turned to me and smile, “It’s a perfect environment for an interview with Liz Baillie.”

Fair enough.

In this final part of our interview with the Sing Along Forever author, we discuss the impetus for Baillie’s Mini Comic of the Month Club, the author’s inability to write a short story, and oh yeah, there’s also some talk about a punk band from New Brunswick, New Jersey, whose name currently escapes me.

[Part One][Part Two]

You were looking for a more creative way to distribute your books when you hit upon the idea for the Mini Comic of the Month Club. Had you tried more traditional approaches like publishers? Microcosm put out the My Brain Hurts book.

What’s funny is I didn’t even approach them for that. They asked if I wanted them to put my book out and I said, “sure! That’s convenient.” That’s why I did that. It’s not like I don’t want to work with publishers, but I have a hard time getting my shit together enough to put together a proposal. I’m not really good at that.

So your not averse to that idea?

No. I plan, when I get the time and the energy, to put together something for Freewheel, to try to get a publisher for that. The first issue is out right now, but I don’t think people know what it’s gonna be like—but I do. And I think it’s gonna be awesome [laughs]. It’s going to be a really cool young adult book.  It’s one long story. But it’s going to eventually be a really strong departure from My Brain Hurts, because aspects of it are kind of fantasy. It’s more than just hoboes and runaway kids. It’s magical hoboes, kind of—without revealing too much [laughs].

So you just can’t do a short story.

To save my life, I can’t do a short story. Whenever I try to do one that’s less than six pages. It sucks. At least I think so.

And you can’t just do a set up and punchline strip.

No, not really.

You did a guest strip for us.

Yeah, I did it a really long time ago. It was a short story about when I barfed on Christmas. It was originally for an alternative Advent calendar. Someone had little comics folded up in it. it was kind of anti-Christmas.

But that doesn’t come naturally? Not the barfing…

The barfing comes naturally. But short form comes don’t come that easily to me, because usually when I come up with an idea, it takes time to execute.

In the interim between My Brain Hurts and the Comic of the Month Club, there was the Bouncing Souls book.

Yes. Sing Along Forever.

How long were you waiting to break that one out?

Well, the idea for it started in May 2008, when I had put in notice for my job. I was counting down the days and decided I had to celebrate in some way. I happened to see that the Bouncing Souls were playing the day after I quit my job. I had go. It was already sold out by the time I found out about it. So I had to go through all of this shit to get tickets. I literally had to meet a promoter in a dark alley.  I tried every way to find tickets, but couldn’t get anything.

And then I get this email from someone that I don’t know, who I hadn’t been corresponding with, and all it says was, “do you still want tickets? Call me.” And then he call me on my cellphone, two seconds after I got the e-mail. I listened to the message. It said, “this is so and so. Do you want the tickets? Call me.” I had no idea how he got my information. I was like, “that’s weird,” but I had to get this ticket for the show, the next day. I called him and he had me meet him infront of Kellogg’s Diner in Williamsburg, which was closed at the time. And I was like, ‘I’m gonna get murdered.’ I eventually went down this desolate street and got the tickets from this guy at face value.

But, through a series of unfortunate events, I ended us missing the show, except for the last song. I just cried. But, on the way out, I ran into Microcosm, my book publisher. They were actually on tour with the band, which I didn’t know. After the show I was helping them take their stuff through the back door, and I had this pile of items in my box. I was kicking the door open and it kept slamming on me. Finally a guy with a hood over his face opened to door for me, and I looked at him and thanked him and it was Greg [Attonito] from the Bouncing Souls. I looked at him and was like “ablublbubla, thank you.” And then I ran off. Afterwards, I thought of the title Greg Attonito Touch My Box for a short comic.

–Brian Heater

In the second part of our interview with My Brain Hurts creator Liz Baillie, we explore the parallels between the artist’s life that her protagonist Kate, whom the artist readily admits is a thinly-veiled stand-in for herself. The chronological end of the series (which Baillie has recently wrapped up) parallels her own post-high school move from New York to Boston, where, while at school, she first entertained thoughts of pursuing a career as a professional cartoonist.

Oh, and we also talk about the Bouncing Souls a little bit as well, because, well, some things just can’t be helped…

[Part One]

When did it first become clear that comics were something you seriously wanted to pursue—or is it clear?

It is pretty clear, because what happened was, my first year of college, I went to the Art Institute of Boston, for photography—I wasn’t into comics.

So you moved away from New York and then moved back.

Yeah, yeah. Part of the reason I moved away was that I did have a situation with my best friend, toward the end of high school where she got heavily into drugs. I saw a lot people I knew getting into stuff like that, and it became not a cool thing. It’s not easy to break yourself off from people.

Is that person essentially the  basis for the best friend in My Brain Hurts?

Kind of. Joey is an amalgam of a couple of people I know. I’ve had a few people say, “Joey is based on me, isn’t he?” you’d be surprised at how many people say that to me.

As if they take some pride in that fact.

One of them who Joey’s physical appearance is based on said, “I saw he and he looks just like me and acts just like me. What’s up with that?” He seemed kind of happy about it. But another one was like, “he’s based on me,” in kind of an angry sort of way.

Yeah. He’s not necessarily the kind of character you want representing you. You don’t want that to be your legacy in the world.

Yeah, not really. I mean, I like Joey, I think he’s fun, but he’s ultimately a tragic figure [laughs].

Are the reasons for ending the book similar to the reasons for your moving to Boston?

Yeah, pretty much. Also part of it was that I grew up in New York, and everyone seems to move to New York. No one seems to move away, and I was sick of the big city life.

But you moved to Boston, not the woods…

Oh, when you grow up in New York and you move to Boston…I moved back for a reason. I hated it there. But part of it was that I moved to Boston with one of my friends who was supposed to go to college with me and the first week because she was having withdraws.

Did the switch from photography to drawing occur around the move from Boston, back to New York?

What happened was, when I graduated from high school, I was still going out with a guy who was in high school and he still lived in New York and I lived in Boston. He like R. Crumb and had a lot of issues of Hate. So I would come home pretty much every week when I was living in Boston [laughs].

To read his comics?

To hang out with him. My excuse was that my thesis project was a photography project on ABC No Rio, which obviously in New York, so I’d have to come home for it. that was my trick that I tricked my mom into. So I came back all the time and would read all of his comics. Eventually I wanted to get into it, because I thought they seemed cool. I asked him what he thought I should read, and he said his friend said that the only comic he’ll read is Eightball.

A pretty safe recommendation.

Yeah. Obviously it worked great. I loved Eightball.

It’s pretty clear that you could draw by this point.

Yeah, I drew comics before that, recreationally, just for fun. Like, we’d be in a bar and I’d be drawing a little doodle of my friend yelling something.

But you weren’t reading comics at that point?

No. I mean, I read them as a kid, but I wasn’t reading them anymore, by the time I was 18, 19.

Like X-Men or…

No. I never really read any of that. When I was a kid, I read Uncle Scrooge and funny animal things and Little Archie—not big Archie, but Little Archie. I was very into Little Archie.

Did you retain any of that Little Archie influence?

Well, actually, Little Archie was an influence.  If you notice, a lot of the characters I draw have kind of large heads.

And cowlicks.

And cowlicks. The way I draw mouths, I copied Little Archie.

Your understanding of anatomy is based on—

Little Archie. Not big Archie. It’s important. They’re kids, so they have big heads and big buck teeth. What’s kind of weird is that they still go on dates and wear bikinis. But I don’t know, I tried big Archie, but I never got into it.

Well, now that you’re an adult…

Now is the time.

Has the Comic of the Month idea been brewing for a while?

Yeah, yeah. I kind of started thinking of it six months ago. I was thinking of interesting ways to distribute comics and not lose money, basically. At first I thought I’d do a comic you’d only get by giving me a donation, and then I thought people would just give me a dollar.  I don’t expect people to give me any money. I mean, I should speak—I don’t buy anything. I wait for my friends to buy it, and then I read it. But nevertheless, I had this idea for one comic and I thought it could be a special donation comic. That turned into the idea of a Comic of the Month Club. People would want to be a part of it because it’s a club. It’s not just comics. You can have a membership card and number. People get into that. I know I would if I had money to burn. Coincidentally, not to bring it to the Bouncing Souls—

We were going to get there eventually.

Coincidentally, the Bouncing Souls are doing a song a month in 2009, as well. It’s kind of funny that that happened at the same time. Purely coincidence.

How hard has it been to keep up?

It hasn’t been that hard. I don’t have a job anymore.

You seemed to be dreading it at the beginning.

Yeah. It funny, what happened is I figured out how I would do it, and then I put up in the store on my site something to subscribe in Novemeber. I didn’t think anyone would look at it, but someone bought the first subscription before I announced it. I could back out then. Someone gave me money.

It seems like you did that on purpose, like you wanted someone to push you into it.

Yeah. That’s part of it, too, I know I’ll do it because I have people waiting.

How many at present?

Thirty-two. It’s pretty good. My original hypothesis was, I would be happy if I had five people, because then I’d have $200! That would be pretty cool. It worked out much better than I thought it would. And the year’s barely started. People can still subscribe througought the year, and I expect that some people will wait until I get to a convention.

[Concluded in Part Three]

–Brian Heater

After threatening for months to conduct and interview with her for my comics blog, Liz Baillie and I finally settled on a time, just after work on a snow night just after in late-January. As for a location? I suggest a bar, an old favorite just north of Houston st. in Manhattan, only to concede that it, arguably that last punk bar standing on the island, might be a bit too noisy for our needs during happy hour on a Friday night.  I search for the name of a café in the area, but come up short, not much of  experienced coffee drinker myself.

“We could try the Holiday Cocktail Lounge,” she suggests. She had been there a week prior and the place had been suitably quiet, at least so far as east village bars go—and, she adds quickly, “it’s the namesake of a Bouncing Souls record.”

It’s the 12th track off the band third, self-titled album. “I’m staying here where I can get a song free with my drink, to smooth thing’s along. The bartender he looks kind of sauced, but he always knows what’s going down.” It’s snowing lightly outside on St. Mark’s Place.

Inside, said free songs are largely old Bruce Springsteen tracks, as though someone had just hit Play on the boss’s greatest hits. When “Born to Run” starts, the minute the interview ends, Baillie pauses and her eyes light up. It’s the same song, she explains, that customarily blares out of the PA when the Bouncing Souls take the stage at the top of a show.

“Obsession” might be too strong a word, but Baillie is quick to discuss the various locales she’s traveled to see the band, including most recently, in another piece of Jersey band synchronicity, Asbury Park for a handful of dates the month before in the seaside town the boss put on the rock and roll map. And, of course, there’s Sing Along Forever, the one-off followup to her long-running My Brain Hurts, which carried the telling subtitle, “A Love Letter to the Bouncing Souls.”

You’re gonna be at New York Comic Con.

I am gonna be at New York Comic Con.

How do you feel about that?

I feel fine. I don’t have to pay for it.

I ran into you at the show last year. You didn’t seem very happy to be there.

[Laughs] I don’t think I would go if I wasn’t a cartoonist. As a fan, I probably wouldn’t go. There’s not really that much that I’m interested in, there’s some annoying people, the food is overpriced, it’s hard to get to.

You don’t enjoy the spectacle of all of it?

I do. But you know, that’s why there’s Flickr.

Last year you were at the Indie Spinner Rack booth.

Yeah. I’m gonna be there again. I’m not gonna pay a table at that place, because I’m not sure that it’s worth it.

But you find that people still seek you out?

Yeah. But I tell them I’m gonna be there during a specific period of time, and they know to come then. So it’s pretty easy on my part. And I don’t have to sit at a table for three days. That can be really, really draining.

Are these people that you know, generally?

Well, the people that seek me out, generally I know them, not personally, but they’re regulars. They buy everything as it comes out, so I know their names. They’ll send me a message on Myspace or something.

You don’t really do a ton of stuff on the Web.

No.

You’re very print-based. Everything you’ve done has come out in print, in some form or another.

That’s because everything I do is really really long. My small forays into Webcomics have been—not unsuccessful, but just kind of mediocre.

I know you go to a lot of the smaller press shows like MoCCA and SPX, but beyond that, what’s the, sort of, mini-comics underground railroad? How do you get your books out there?

Well, one of the ways is Tony Shenton. Tony Shenton is the sales rep for a lot of mini-comics people, so he gets my books in stores all over the places, far away places that I wouldn’t go myself. Other than that, Myspace, Livejournal—people find out about me through the Internet.

So, despite the fact that you’re not doing a Webcomic with any kind of regularity, the Internet still plays a pretty large role.

Yeah, because I still have a Web presence even though I don’t have a Webcomic.

You’re done with My Brain Hurts.

Yes! I just did a two-page short story, the characters from My Brain Hurts, for Microcosm’s 13-year collection, but that was the last thing.

That’s a weird year to celebrate.

Yeah, I know [laughs]. But that, hopefully, will be the last time I draw those characters. But I could eat those words in five years.

You said that the main thing standing between you and doing a Webcomic is length.

Yeah.

Do you thing your work is going to be a little shorter, now that you’ve finished that book?

No. The only venue I have for shorter stories is the Mini-Comic of the Month Club. So that’s pretty much specifically for short stories that don’t fit anywhere else. But, other than that, the other things I’m working on are all really long.

But in a sense the existence of that program comes out of the fact that you’ve recently finished My Brain Hurts.

Oh yeah. I couldn’t have done that if I was still doing My Brain Hurts.

So these were stories that you were collecting over the years, while you were working on that book?

Or I’d have ideas and I couldn’t do it because I had no place to put it. The shorter stuff I do is usually for an anthology, so either I have something specific to work with or the anthologies tend to be not long enough, because even my short stories tend to be like eight pages, and sometimes it’s only one or two pages. It’s the only way I can do it and have it have a point, instead of just doing it and putting it online for nothing.

About how many pages long was My Brain Hurts?

Uh, well I know both of the collections are going to be about 128 pages each, but it’s maybe 200 pages. There was supplementary stuff.

How did you know when the book was finally over? Was that something that had been clear from the beginning?

Yeah, because it was really my first foray into telling a long story, so I had a formula that I went into with. I decided that was going to be 10 issues, and I wrote out a list of topics that I wanted to cover, and I figured out how to put them in, and squished them into ten issues.

Was ten issues not enough, in terms of what you wanted to tackle?

Well, by the time I got to the tenth issue, I was so sick of it that I couldn’t wait to move on. When I had first started the series, I was a couple of years out of adolescence.

About how old?

Twenty, twenty-one.

That’s a ways out of adolescence.

Not really. You graduate high school when you’re 18. You’re in college for three, four years—five years for me. I was thinking about it as part of the recent past, talking to other people in college and realizing that my experience in high school was different than most other people’s.

That was something that hadn’t occurred to you until you distanced yourself from it?

No. I mean, I knew it while it was happening, but all of my friends were doing the same things as me. But when you look at teen movies, like The Breakfast Club, it’s all suburbia. I kind of fetishized suburbia, a little bit.

Part of the impetus behind the project was this idea that it was a story that not everyone had lived.

Yeah, definitely. I’d have these moments in my early-20s, when I’d see my friends from back in the day, and we’d be telling stories, and it would be like, “man, that shit was fucked up” [laughs]. Older dudes getting with these younger girls and drinking at bars when we were 15. It’s not normal. It was a crazy time.

At what point do you decide not to make it entirely autobiographical?

To do something strictly autobiographical would have, to be perfectly honest, been kind of boring. A lot of interesting things happened around me, and I was there, but not that much of it happened to me. I had supportive, loving parents—I didn’t have crappy parents. I was not totally normal, but I was probably the most prudish, relative to the people I hung out with.

So what’s the clear end of the book?

Well, it’s hard to say, because, in situations like that, when you have an unusual series of experiences in your formative years, unless you move away, they don’t really end. They kind of peter off, or change slowly, and that’s not really much of an end for a book. So I just kind of decided to focus on the friendship of the two main characters, and how it changes, because that was something that came right from my own life. I kind of felt like I was starting to get my shit together and I had these close friends that were like, “whoopee, I live in a box!” and it’s not really cool anymore. It’s not really fun.

[Continued in Part Two]

–Brian Heater