The Midwest Comic Book Association throws a big event each year called Fallcon.  In most ways it’s a con like any other con.  Costumes, long boxes, xeroxed minis that don’t sell well, and a lot of dudes wearing black coats.

To me, the identity of Fallcon was apparent long ago: it’s just your average hero-worshiping local comic convention.  Make of it what you will, but in the end, creators go because their friends go and the more they go the more friends they know.  It’s fun, but even if you come out a few books light, you’re not leaving with a book deal and you’re rarely getting out with a date.

Fallcon is a hospitality show that fosters comics love in the Twin Cities.  It works that way because it’s basically the pet project of a very successful local comic book shop owner.  Comics love = comics business.  Our good fortune comes as easy as that but it’s not a formula that could work everywhere.  Luckily, this show is very good at achieving it’s mission, but it’s also been decidedly predictable.  Until this year.

I recently noted a change of tone in MCBA’s marketing strategy.  At least, it seemed new to me.  I perceived this year, for the first time, that the identity of Fallcon is slowly attempting to morph.  Into what, I don’t know.  But while Fallcon certainly appears to be just another fanboy-centric con to you — look again.  Look at that postcard!  This year the MCBA slogan for this show was realized by me for the first time.  Suddenly I couldn’t think of Fallcon as “just a con” anymore because, as the postcard notes, it is “A Comic Book Celebration.”

Wait.  “Celebration.” That’s like a party!  Huh-freaking-zah.  We’re all friends here.  It’s about time we got down.

That word “celebration” got me totally psyched to attend Fallcon this weekend, but looking back on things, I think I took it the wrong way.  All weekend long I sought evidence that Fallcon was much more than a sales floor, but was in fact one big swinging bash the likes of which Saint Paul, Minnnesota, would not see again until its next annual, epic appearance in 2010.  We were gonna tear down the rafters and spike the cola and open a kissing booth and gamble on real life Superman vs. Batman combat bouts in the adjacent conference room.

I took my camera and snapped what I could, but found none of this highly anticipated debauchery.  When I finally discovered the source of Fallcon’s celebration mojo, however, I was pleasantly surprised.  And while I’m sure that the celebration aspect of Fallcon takes on different forms for different people, to me it has become something very specific.

I’m taking you now on a photographic tour of the 2009 Fallcon.  Maybe the fruits of my walkabout will prove “celebration” enough to you, but it wasn’t until I reached the final piece of evidence that I really knew what it meant to have a comic book party.

The parade of butt cracks inspired by the low shelves at the Half-Price Books area. (Actual butt cracks withheld due to modesty and courtesy.) Photo substitute is meant to illustrate how EVERYBODY NOTICED the cracks so this image is meant as a cautionary tale. If you go for the low boxes, man, belt yourself in.

The growing body of work from MCAD grad Aaron Poliwoda. Brace yourself, world. No kidding. The effect of Poliwoda's observational essay-style comics, personal confessionals, and crude humor can be strangely engrossing and might be addictive.

Birthday cake. Comes in in an edition of 1/1. Highly collectible.

The ubiquitous Fallcon Superman...in black? Seems Supes was "in mourning" because his real suit was being fixed. No kidding. Had to attend Sunday as Mr. Incredible. Ha ha. Awesome.

Man in a mysterious luchador mask selling porn comics from a long box. Again I say awesome.

The Hulk. Being incredible. Doing the robot?

Sarah met Will at Fallcon three years ago. Aren't you happy for her? Will's books are so pretty. If you buy enough of them next weekend at APE, maybe he will buy Sarah something nice for their anniversary next month.

That guy who sells laminated KISS posters that he draws and colors himself and sells for like $1. They are so awesome! I've got the 17"x12" "Psycho Circus" edition. It features such quotable quotes as "STANDING PROUD COS' WERE THE CHAMPIONS!" and "RAISE YOUR GLASSES!"

The release of "L.A. Diary" by Gabrielle Bell. This mini was published by Uncivilized Books (Tom Kaczynski) for special release during the weekend's concurrent Minneapolis book events. Bell signed at the Rain Taxi Twin Cities Book Festival on Saturday, and at Fallcon on Sunday. If you have her draw a sketch for you, she will draw your face. THAT is awesome!

So Fallcon was pretty great this year.  Definitely close to party status if you keep standards low. Clearly a non-discriminatory celebration of the comic book in all its forms.  But what really cinched the fun for me?  I will tell you.

Lucy Knisley and John pose in line on Saturday night for the annual FREE STEAK DINNER. Hell yes. Does your local comic book convention throw in a free steak dinner on Saturday night? Didn't think so. Party on, Fallcon. Party on.

Oh yah, and Peter Bagge was there too.  Everybody said he was great to chat with and incredibly nice.  I didn’t get to meet him though.  I guess the MCBA guys have been on him for years to come out as a special guest but this was the year they said pretty please with a cherry on top.  Hopefully he had such a good time, he’ll come back again next year of his own free will and I’ll get to slap him that well-deserved high five for being a great cartoonist.

But seriously guys, free steak for everyone?  That’s quite a gesture, and it’s a Fallcon staple.  That, and good company.  Thanks again, Midwest Comic Book Association!

- Sarah Morean

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

At a comics convention, an early stages movie deal is something of a 300-pound gorilla—something everyone wants to discuss, but still tries hard not to jinx. In this industry we’ve seen countless optioning deals come and go, so when a creator announces that they’ve got the ball rolling on a project, it can be difficult to broach the subject.

The Goon creator, Eric Powell, while slightly apprehensive, seems fairly confident in a recent deal struck for his most famous creation. And really, the artist has every right to be. After all, he’s got David Fincher in his corner. A self-proclaimed fan of the Dark Horse  series, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button director has signed onto the project as a producer. Powell has begun working on treatments for the film, and, by all accounts, the early animation looks extremely promising.

In this second and final part of our interview with Powell, we discuss working for the Hollywood machine and what it’s like letting his creation go, ever-so-slightly, in order to explore mediums outside the insular comics world.

[Part One]

The old cliché is that the character writes itself. Is that the case with the Goon, or do you find yourself shaping him to fit what you’re interested in doing as a storyteller?

I think to a certain extent, the character writes himself. What I’m doing is coming up with a story and basically dropping the characters into it and it’s how they react to a certain scenario, that’s where the story comes from.

Have you attempted to drop them in a scenario that felt artificial? Are there ways they won’t bend?

Yeah, there are. I do a lot of weird stuff with them, put them in a lot of weird stories, but there are things that I’ve come up with, when I started writing and I’m like, “no, scratch that.” Sometimes you can play with that, too. You drop them in a scenario where they completely don’t make sense and play off of that. I have a project that we’re going to be announcing in the next month or so that’s very much that type of scenario.

Mike Mignola has a very tangible universe, but he lets other creators explore it. Is that something that interests you, or do you just want full control over your creations?

I don’t mind letting some other people come in and play, but I like it when the creator is really—kind of like when Paul Chadwick does Concrete. When Concrete comes out,  it’s always Paul Chadwick. That’s the way The Goon is going to be. I might bring other people in to help, like bringing Dave [Stewart] on to do colors. And there might be some other projects with other creators involved, but The Goon itself, I’m not going to turn that over to another artists. If The Goon book is coming out, I’ll be doing 90-percent of the work involved.

You’re working on The Goon film project right now.

Yeah.

In a sense, does it feel like you’re turning him over to other creators?

That’s such a different animal to me. They’re doing an adaptation of my comic, which I’m helping out with. But we’re adapting my comic and making it work in a different format. The comic is mine and always will be mine, so that doesn’t feel that weird to me. I actually like the idea of having a team take on the character, because I’m just so used to the idea of working in that room alone, and I’m the only one putting anything into it. I think it’s really fun and cool to have this big group of people with all of these ideas coming together and working toward making the film.

So you’re not losing any sleep over this?

No, it’s been great, so far. They’ve been really great about keeping me involved. I thought they’ve had some really great ideas. I’m working on the treatment for the story and [David] Fincher’s been very involved and had some great ideas, so I’m very happy with the way it’s been going.

Is the treatment an amalgamation of stories you’ve done in the past or an entirely different beast?

I would say it’s an amalgamation of the comic book as a whole and making it work in a movie format. Direct translation is not really possible.

There does seem to be a cinematic feel to some of your work. Is this more of an issue with storyline?

Storyline—because all of the issues of The Goon have been very episodic. Probably three-quarters of The Goon so far have been self-contained stories that have linked together to a bigger story. You can’t really take that and make a movie out of it, so we’re basically taking the material and staying very faithful to the characters and everything. We’re basically taking the whole concept of The Goon and contracting it into 90 minutes that we can make a film out of.

Ideally it’s such a strong character that it will translate to any other medium. Do you feel pretty confident in the Goon as a character?

I’m probably more confident—if we actually get the thing made, I’m probably more confident than I should be, because one, I think the characters themselves are funny and strong enough to really work. And I’ve seen the visuals—some of the test stuff that they’ve done, and I have absolutely no fear that it will look amazing. Those guys just do crazy spectacular work, and if we actually get the thing up on the screen, it’s going to look amazing. I know that. I have no doubt aobut it.

You’re still in that really tentative stage?

Yeah, they’re basically still pitching it to the studio. I don’t know how Hollywood works, but everybody talks about stuff that never ends up happening. But, all of the feedback I’m getting so far, it sounds pretty positive that we’re going to get the thing moving forward, but I like to stay cautiously optimistic.

Is the script finished?

No, I’m working on it.

How much say do you have in the script?

I’m taking input from Mike Richardson, from Dark Horse; Tim Miller, with the animation company; and David Fincher—the three producers along with myself. I’m basically laying the ideas out and taking feedback, and we’re all working together, trying to get the treatment the way we want it, and I’m working on the script at the same time.

Beyond collaboration, how different is the experience of writing a movie script.

It’s actually similar to writing a comic script, because you have to do a descriptive narrative with dialog. The major difference, really is that, when you’re writing a comic, you have to work with static panels, like still photographs. Whereas, when you’re writing a film script, you can actually have action going on that you couldn’t in a comic.

So it’s almost easier, in a sense?

Yeah, I think so.

And the collaborative aspect isn’t difficult, having worked alone for so long?

Not with these guys.  I’ve had collaborative efforts in comments, where people will throw out ideas.

But these guys are all fans.

Yeah. That’s what makes it so cool. They love the comic. They wanted to make the film from the comic. They get it. they understand that’s it’s this weird quirky thing, and we’ve got to keep it this weird, quirky thing. All of the input I’ve gotten—it goes without saying that David Fincher knows what he’s doing. So I’ve got complete trust in their judgement and their input. They’ve been pretty great to work with.

It’ll be interesting to see how these conventions change for you, as we get closer to the movie.

Yeah. It’ll be curious. Once there’s actually a timeline for the film, I think that’s when things will actually increase.

Are you excited for that inevitability?

I’m excited and kind of scared [laughs].

–Brian Heater

A skilled craftsman by any measure, Eric Powell has put in his time all over the industry, from more independent works to superhero franchises like Batman and Superman. The Lebanon, Tennessee-based artist is, however, most content to do things on his own terms, reveling in the rare manner of freedom afforded to him by his own Dark Horse series, The Goon, the ever-evolving tale of a classically-styled pipe wrench-wielding ruffian doing battle with whatever manner of strange and fantastic villianry the artist’s mind can concoct.

After nearly a decade, the series has become Powell’s major creative outlet, and the hard work has paid off in spades. The book has become one of Dark Horse’s most popular creator-owned works and has garnered Powell numerous awards, including a handful of Eisners. It’s also recently been optioned by David Fincher in hopes of being transformed into an animated feature.

We sat down with Powell at this year’s New York Comic Con to talk about his work in the industry and why all roads lead back to The Goon.

How many conventions do you come out to a year?

About four or five a year.

Any favorites, or do they all tend to blend together?

They all kind of blend together. I know lots of people don’t like San Diego because it’s so big, but I have to say, I love San Diego because it’s the one show, because it’s so big, that you feel like you’re doing something. You don’t feel like you’re stuck in a closet. There’s so much other media.

It’s the non-comic people who come by the booth. The ones who aren’t as familiar with the medium.

Yeah. It’s just cool to be there. And I love San Diego, the town.

Is it more difficult in the superhero shows—shows like Wizard World—to get people to pay attention to what you’re doing?

Yeah, it is. But that’s the case in the industry as a whole. It’s hard to get anyone to pay attention to you when you don’t have a superhero title coming out from Marvel or DC. But things have changed. I feel that, because more bookstores are getting involved and carrying comics and manga is making such a big impact, that the superhero genre is kind of losing its stranglehold and other types of material are getting looked it. It’s really exciting.

I read an interview with you some time ago, in which someone asked you what The Goon was about. You seemed to have a hard time describing it. Is that still difficult?

It is, but I have my standard answer now: “It’s a dark comedy about a street thug, in a world of monsters,” which doesn’t even begin to describe what the book is all about, but that’s my standard answer now, when people ask that question. Because it’s so all over the place and just any weird thing that comes out of my head, it’s hard to describe exactly what it is. It’s really something you have to read to really get, I think.

When you come to a show like this, you’re really selling yourself to passersby. That’s got to be difficult when you don’t have a straight ahead pitch—“it’s Superman meets Aquaman, meets Love & Rockets.”

Exactly. It doesn’t have that automatic hook, like, “I’m doing this book and it’s Spider-man versus zombies.” Everyone automatically understands that. I can’t really say The Goon is like The Matrix meets Indiana Jones. That’s how everyone tries to categorize what they’re doing, and with The Goon, I can’t really make those comparisons.

How did it evolve when you were putting the pieces together?

It still evolves. Because the one goal I had was that I was going to play to my strengths and do exactly what I wanted to do. And if you look at the book, for better or worse, that’s what I’ve done. The art is always changing and evolving, because I love playing with the medium and experimenting. And the stories go anywhere from completely absurd to, with Chinatown, overly dramatic and serious. I don’t plan on changing that. If I want to do Goon fighting giant robots, I’m gonna do that. If I want to do a serious love story, I’ll do that. I’m going to do whatever I want to do, and if people like it, that’s awesome.

I know you’ve done some stuff with the Marvels and DCs of the world, specifically the Bizarro book. Does that sort of thing appeal to you at all? Or are you surrendering too much creative control?

Yeah, I’ve been offered quite a few jobs in superhero books, but, for the most part, I turn them down, just because they’d take my away from doing The Goon. The amount of creative control I have in doing The Goon is the main reason. Because this is my job and I’m making a living off of it, but also, not to sound pretentious about it, I feel that I am an artist, so if I want to draw a big guy punching shit, I get more fulfillment out of that than I do working in the constraints of a superhero universe, where, if I want to do something completely off-the-wall, they tell me that it doesn’t fit with the rest of the universe.

It’s all by committee, basically.

Yeah. That’s their system, and that’s fine, but for me, that doesn’t work. I want to be able to do what I want to do. I want to tell the stories that I want to tell, and if I was working on a superhero book, I wouldn’t be able to do that.

[Concluded in Part Two]

–Brian Heater