In honor of Secret Acres’ release of the first-ever P.S. Comics collection, we sat down with Bay Area artist Minty Lewis to discuss the pretension of Italian fascism, the difficulty of drawing beaches, and why no one cares about the arm lengths of fruit.

[Part One]

Were you doing graphic design before you started making your comics?

I started making comics in 2003 and I started studying graphic design a couple of years before that.

Did studying graphic design lead you down that path?

No, the first comic I actually made was because my boyfriend ad the time—not Damien [Jay, Lewis's husband], a different one. He was doing something for the SPX anthology, and he said, “you should do it, too.” I said, “okay,” and I made a comic. Mine got in and his didn’t. I got some good feedback from that. I didn’t really set out to make comics. One thing led to another. I like getting feedback and knowing that people are responding to my stuff. I really like graphic design, but most of the graphic design stuff isn’t stuff that I feel that passionately about. A lot of the same skills go into comics, but you put a lot more of yourself into them, so it’s a little more creatively rewarding than graphic design.

Were you doing any sort of writing before that?

No, not really.

The way you described it, it seems that, in terms of making a comic, storytelling is foremost.

I think it’s something that I’ve always been really interested in. I’ve always read a lot of books and I’ve been interested in comics, but I think it me a lot time to not be intimidated by the act of actually producing stories myself. When I went to college, I took a lot of art classes, and I don’t think I put that much of myself into anything I did, because I was always intimated by the seriousness of it. once I started making comics, it was a way to make art and have it be more personal. It could be funny and I didn’t have to go to class and be critique.

Are the stories in this book based on events that have happened to you?

No, not necessarily. Bits and pieces are stories I’ve heard and sometimes they’re things that have happened to me and my friends or things that I’ve observed, but they don’t usually happen in the order I write them in. usually the actual story in the comics is made up.

But they do feel personal on some level?

Yeah. I can put my personality into them—that’s what I mean when I say that I put myself in them. I don’t mean that they’re autobiographical. When I was trying to make art in college, the things I was trying to be academic about were things that I don’t think were in-line with my personality. I wrote my thesis in college about fascism in Italian drama, and I’m not actually that interested in that.

That would make a great comic.

Yeah, I know! I feel like I align more with Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. But it took me a long time to grow out of an academic approach to storytelling and making art. I don’t think that that kind of thing really suits me.

The stories all feel pretty real, despite the fact that they’re mostly played out by dogs and fruit. Why not just fill the roles with people?

I didn’t really make that a conscious decision either. The first ever comic that I made that I actually thought about was a Fruit Pals comic. At that point it was because it was a lot easier to draw fruit than people, because no one was going to say, “Apple’s arms aren’t that long.” I think it’s more effective when they’re fruit for people to focus on the dialog and what’s going on, rather than trying to identify who this person is and what they’re doing there and what clothes they’re wearing and what kind of haircut they have. I think it makes it kind of more universal when they’re fruit and dogs. I also feel like it makes it a little more ridiculous, because I don’t intend to have my comics be that serious. I feel like a lot of people come away feeling like they’re depressing or mean spirited, so I think it makes the tone a little lighter and faster.

Do you get that feedback a lot? That the strips are “mean spirited?”

Yes. Some people think they’re funny and charming. I guess there are two sides to them. But I’ve heard a few people say that they felt really down after reading my comics. Somebody Twittered and said that they had nightmares about mean spirited fruit after reading them.

Does that kind of feedback affect your work?

I don’t know. I think it must in some way. It’s not like I sit down and think about writing something that’s not mean spirited. I mean, I try not to be mean spirited, but I can’t help it! It just keeps happening that way. Or depressing. I don’t feel depressed or mean in my normal life, but I can’t stop writing stories that end up that way.

So you don’t want to sit down and write, say, a romantic comedy with fruit?

I feel like I could. Donuts for Lunch—that’s kind of a romantic comedy. But there’s always a depressing or awkward side to it.

Now that the book is here, do you feel as you’ve closed a chapter on P.S. Comics?

Yeah, I think I want to try something longer. I’m actually working on something right now that I’ll write and Damien, my husband, will draw. He’s a very good artist—and he’s agreed to this, this isn’t just my idea. The story’s about terriers and there’s a little bit of interior design involved in it. I’m imagining Damien drawing it, which is opening up  a lot of possibilities as far as things that I would avoid because I didn’t want to draw them.

In terms of their being too complicated?

In terms of things like beaches. Damien struggles with writing more than I do, so I think it could be a good marriage of the minds for us.

–Brian Heater

Robert Sergel was born in 1982 in Boston. In 2005, he graduated from New York University with a degree in photography. You can view some of his photos on his website robertsergel.com. His comics often, beautifully, contain evidence of photo referencing.

He’s drawn a weekly online comic since 2005 for the Transplant Comics collective, and recently self-published the first issue of his book, Eschew. Sergel continues to update his comics site idiotcomics.com and is working on the second issue of Eschew which will be published by Sparkplug Comic Books. He currently lives in Cambridge, MA, and recently contributed to the Boston Comics Roundtable’s anthology In Bound #3.

His books are available for purchase through his online store or in the Secret Acres Emporium.

-  Sarah Morean

Theo Ellsworth pulls his book out of a manila envelope and sets it on the table. “Officially it went on sale October 6th–the day I came back.” Theo has just returned to Portland from the Small Press Expo in Maryland. His publisher, Secret Acres, brought him out there for the book release. “I also did a reading in Baltimore with Jesse Reklaw and five or six other cartoonists.”

A performance of sorts, one-panel projected on the wall, Theo read all the voices and used a hand-held recorder to playback sound effects. “Before I left New York, I helped my publishers ship pre-orders.”

He unwraps an autumnal colored scarf and unbuttons his jacket. His green T-shirt draws my attention, a print of Sesame Street’s Bert with a third eye. Theo wears a groomed beard, short cropped hair. His features are delicate and birdlike.

“I’m going to get some tea,” he says and leaves me with the book. The shimmering feathers and plants growing from the characters are the flesh of innervision, emerging from the mind’s eye. Capacity is the full attention span of an artist, sitting for long stretches of time where his only point of reference is internal, a dream on paper. It’s narrator speaks directly to the reader, invites you into the story, makes you the main character. “This is you,” it says. In your dream, you’re the main character.

Theo takes a drink of tea, breaks a piece off a blueberry muffin, and apologizes for the crumb that tumbles in front of me. I feel I’m in the presence of a monk, a cartoon visionary. His calm self-definition extends through his words and gestures. A gently unassuming maturity, a soft mellifluous voice.

“I have this really long story, a multi-volume story following the lives of these characters. This book is a working up to it, working in short stories.” Theo self-published seven issues of Capacity as a mini before Secret Acres approached him. “It’s taken awhile to get my words and pictures to work together. Every picture I would draw, there was always a feeling of a story, something that happened before and just after that.”

When Theo first moved to Portland, he had trouble finding work, so he did the work he knew and showed his drawings to the Saturday Market. They jury each new artist and accepted Theo. “I thought I was just going to do it in the meantime, while finding work, but I just never stopped doing it. I’ve been selling at the Saturday Market since I moved to Portland. I make my living doing that–ideally I want to make my living just making books. Comics are the most challenging. What I’d like to be doing, as soon as possible, is working on these longer stories, these ongoing stories . . . and publish a book every year.”

Theo’s family moved from L.A. and he attended first grade through high school in Montana. “Through my twenties, I followed a migratory route. I went all over, did a big loop around the U.S.. I went to upstate New York, Florida, New Orleans. I actually camped in a cave, off and on, for four months or so. I was there with a girl I was dating, then started going back there by myself.”

“There’s all this time when I didn’t take in anything from the media–just this period of time when I was out there internalizing. I did that instead of college. That’s when I really started to develop my art.” Theo jokes that his girlfriend now says he has a pop culture deficiency, TV shows and references he has no idea of, and he says, “Then my art’s what brought me back to society.”

“I remember an assignment from first grade, and I drew a picture of myself as a cartoonist.” Theo pauses to take a sip of tea and adds, “There’s a great comics community here in Portland. I hadn’t met other cartoonists until I moved here . . . no one really does comics in Missoula.”

Craig Thompson helped Theo with some of the book production. “Putting together the book became like this crazy puzzle–the final piece came into place right before the deadline–and I just pulled it off, yeah . . . it’s a strange process.” A book release for Capacity happens November 6th at The Pony Club in Portland.

–Arthur Smid

Fatal Faux-Pas
by Samuel C. Gaskin
Secret Acres

‘Maybe I shouldn’t review this,’ I thought for a month. ‘Sam Gaskin is ripping off a lot of people. He could get into some trouble.’ However, it’s all done in the spirit of parody, so give the guy a break.

The title alone is a Faux pas. There’s no dash in Faux pas! Too too clever. There’s an extra jab in here for everyone, from “The Amazingly Incredible Spider-Man” to “Copy-Cat Comics & Stories.” He lampoons television too. “Learn to Sit with Slater” is a total crack up as is “Fonzie’s Funnies.”

The bulk of it all makes Fatal Faux-Pas so great. The tireless string of groaners and pale artistry would seem lame if they’d been parsed out into minis, but Secret Acres has helped pull together Sam Gaskin’s gags, parodies and non sequiturs into something substantially giggle-worthy. It’s so bad it’s gone back to good again. Like a Dad Joke. Or memories of adolescence.

The cover is dead gorgeous and the back cover, which illustrates the conclusion of the man’s bear encounter, comically breaks your heart. Through and through, this book is rad. A word that might have been conjured by multiple Saved by the Bell references, but consequentially is what I really think.

It’s 96 pages, it’s $10, it’s got purple ink! It’s available from Secret Acres.

- Sarah Morean

Wormdye
By Eamon Espey
Secret Acres

It starts innocently enough—two grotesque twin boys shoving the pet cat into microwave at 30 seconds on Defrost. Take it as a warning sign from the author, right out of the gate—if these images disturb you, then now would be the ideal time to back out unscathed. Like a visual tour into the concentric circles of hell, the further one descends into Wormdye’s rabbit hole, the more simultaneously disturbing and engrossing the book’s words and images become, forgoing the former at times to cobble together an orgy of terrifying imagery, like small scale black and white tributes to Hieronymus Bosch, sketched out in the childlike pen of a latter day Gary Panter.

Like the Heaven and Hell painter, Eamon Espey seems to gleam some manner of visceral thrill from its depiction of such horror, however, unlike Bosch’s work, Wormdye largely eschews the Judeo-Christian code as a moral compass, at least on the surface largely ignoring that tradition altogether, save for an trip into a Vatican inhabited by a warlike, gluttonous pope who might easily go head-to-head with Boniface, himself gleefully satirized by Boccaccio and banished to hell by Dante.

Instead the roots of Espey’s storytelling feel decidedly more classical. The aforementioned twins who serve as the core of the book have more feral Romulus and Remus in them than Cain and Abel, a fact carried over into the deployment of armies of beetle creatures, bestial relations, and a woman who gives birth to a Pandora-like box.

Espey’s artwork too reflects such allegiances to classical forms, largely flat and devoid  of perspective, as if it were scrawled on the sides of some ancient building or painted onto a long forgotten vase. But despite a fairly basic style drawn out with thick ink lines, the artist has quite a gift for cramming a large volume of visual information into a tight space, swirling the convergence of his objects together with conflicting patterns of hatched shading, an aesthetic complexity that matches the increasingly complicated twisting turns of his storytelling.

Wormdye’s plotpoints alternate between what feels like arcane mythologies—origin stories from a time when our gods were far less well-behaved—and small tributes to a time before Disney, when fairytale heroes were potentially every ounce as wicked as their villainous counterparts. Taken individually, they add up to little more than a collection of demented grotesqueries. Taken together, Wormdye’s story, like its art, is a fascinatingly complex tribute to the traditions of a bygone eras—one whose nature will almost certainly take several repeat visits to fully understand.

–Brian Heater