Interview with Independent Comic Artist Marguerite Dabaie

A number of years ago, I had the pleasure of speaking to a group of young artists at the Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art. It was spectacular evening, and I’ve made a point of keeping in touch with several of the talented young people I met there. A few years later, at the annual MoCCA event, I ran into one of those young artists, Marguerite Dabaie. She handed me a self-published comic about transvestites during the Weimar Republic. I was instantly hooked by her personal style of story-telling that communicated emotion, without beating you with it.

A few years later,  when I ran into Margot again, she had just published the first volume of her book Hookah Girl and Other True Stories. I read the first volume and have since been giving it away to people as an example of a voice that needs to be heard and a talent that needs to be enjoyed by as many readers as possible. I am quite literally in the habit of buying her book to give it away. One of those gifts gained Margot a short write-up by Brigid Alverson on Robot 6.  Brigid writes:

[Hookah Girl]  a memoir of growing up as a Palestinian Christian, within the immigrant community in the U.S., as well as a meditation on all the contradictions and labels that come with that identity. Dabaie starts the first volume with a set of paper dolls that embody each of those stereotypes‹Muslim girl in full hijab, suicide bomber with vest full of explosives, I-Dream-of-Jeannie seductress, starving artist. The stories touch on things that are familiar to immigrants in general — scary relatives, peculiar customs, native foods — but there is also an interesting comic about Leila Khaled that presents her as an interestingly complex individual. This book left me wanting to see more, and I hope there is a full-length graphic novel in the works. If there isn’t, there should be.

Today it’s my pleasure to introduce you all to Margot and her work.

 

Erica: Let’s start with the obligatory introduction.

Margot: I grew up out in San Francisco, dabbled in drawing for a long time, and decided to move to NYC in order to strike a match under my butt.

For the past couple of years, I’ve been working at a museum while attending graduate school (for illustration). I also freelance and teach art- and comic-related workshops. It’s a busy time for me right now, very productive, and I like it that way!

 

E: What was your motivation for The Hookah Girl and Other True Stories?

Two different threads led to the creation of The Hookah Girl: One is that I got a lot of “you should make a comic about this” comments from people who heard some of the stories that I ended up putting in the books. Tom Hart and Leela Corman were especially assertive about this, which I appreciate now.

The second thread stems more with my aggravation towards how Arabs are generally portrayed in the media and the public perception of them. I was very good at not paying much attention to the bad rap, and managed to just completely tune it out for a really long time. But then, 9/11 happened and it became impossible for me to ignore it. I had friends telling me to not let on that I was Palestinian so that I wouldn’t be discriminated against, and I think that really hit home. Of course, my friends meant well, but it was difficult to swallow that I now lived in a place—In the US, no less!—where some people gave a crap that my father was born in Ramallah. I had my own little “Arab Spring” throughout the years and one of the results is my comic.

I’ve nicknamed The Hookah Girl “Arab 101” because I ended up writing with a non-Arab audience in mind. I wanted to highlight that, while my family and some of their practices are not “western” and may be distinct, they are not any more or less distinct than any other family. The positives and negatives are not all that different from any variety of cultures, and they just are. I get the greatest thrill when someone comes up to me and tells me that my grandmother reminds them of their French grandmother, or Nigerian uncle, or Korean mother. This is exactly the kind of reaction I wanted—that we all have a Teta in our lives.

 

E: How has the reaction to Hookah Girl been? As a person of Jewish descent, it’s been hard for me to watch the vilification of everything Arab in some of the media. Like, haven’t we learned anything in 2000 years, seriously? I can’t imagine that you haven’t gotten at least some negative feedback.

M: The comic has been received fairly well. I have had some unfortunate instances where people did not agree with the political implications behind calling oneself a Palestinian (because just using the “P” word can be a political act) and dismissed it for that alone. I’ve also had people admonish the work because I mention some negative aspects—namely, my father’s sexist tendencies and my exploration of Leila Khaled, a 1960s terrorist. The positives outweigh the negatives, though, and I absolutely feel like making the comic has been worth it. The connection I have achieved with people is the whole point, really!

 

E: Well, for what its worth, it totally connected with me. You’re very outspoken about what you think, which I just love. What is the  one panel you’ve done that best expresses yourself? 

E: Hahah, I can totally see you like that.   Who are your artistic influences, comic or otherwise?

M: Firstly, I’m really influenced by “folk” art. I especially love work that is flat and very graphic—patterns on textiles, tapestries, manuscripts on vellum, murals, and the like.

Some of the artists who I actively look at are Rembrandt, Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, Lorraine Fox (I can thank Murray Tinkelman for introducing me to her work!), Trina Schart-Hyman, J. C. Leyendecker, and Yoshitaka Amano.

In regards to comic influences, I’ve felt strong connections to Naji al-Ali and lots of older manga—especially anything made by CLAMP in the 1990s (RG Veda takes the cake), Masamune Shirow, and Rumiko Takahashi.

 

E: The manga influences really show in your story-telling style. You write a webcomic “He Also Has Drills For Hands,” where did you get that name? Tell us about the comic.

M: I originally started writing HAHDFH as a self-imposed exercise. I felt like my work was getting too precious and I wanted to publicly make a large body of work. So, I chose to leave the strip’s subject matter totally open (a lot of them deal with funny little everyday occurrences, but I still have my occasional Really Random Strip) and I draw them in a small sketchbook that’s really portable, so I can draw them while I’m out running around and doing my thing. They’re a lot of fun to make and when I started out, I was drawing one a day. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to keep that schedule up—grad school does that to you—so they’ve been knocked down to three strips a week.

The title alludes to one of my really early strips in which I talk about my childhood crushes. One of them is a robot named Crash Man who is a character from the video game Mega Man 2. The title was a line in the strip, because Crash Man does, indeed, have drills for hands! My kid self managed to look past the drills.

E: We’ve reached the obligatory “What are you working on right now?” question.  So, what are you working on?

M: I’m currently in the research/very, very preliminary sketching phase for a historical-fictional graphic novel. It’ll take place in 7th-century Sogdiana, which was in modern-day Uzbekistan.

 

E: We talked about this a bit at New York Comic Con. It sounds pretty fantastic. 

M: It will be chock-full of Silk-Road goodness. I’m going to put up a website about this project soon!

 

E: I know I’m looking forward to reading it. Margot, thanks so much for your time today!

M: Thank you!

I hope you’ll all check Margot’s work out at Margoyle.net – and let me know what you think here.

Gene Colan: The Hidden Eye

In 2008, Steve Cohen asked me to contribute to a magazine to honor Gene Colan, to be entitled Genezine. I took the opportunity to arrange with Gene and his late wife Adrienne to tape an interview. We met at a pizza joint in midtown Manhattan while they waited for an appointment Gene had at a hospital nearby. Beforehand, I attempted to ink an elaborate drawing of Gene’s, in order to directly inform myself about his work’s structural properties and to have something to fuel the discussion. It was the last time I saw Adrienne, another reason why I regret that when I transcribed the tape, her many relevant comments were inaudible because the microphone in the little recorder I used had been aimed at Gene. Although the transcript is slightly disjointed without her portion of the interchange, Gene offers some interesting insights. For a reasons outside of Steve’s control, Genezine never came to fruition, so HU is as good a place as any to present this conversation with an important and influential comic book artist. Click on images to enlarge.

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The first time Tom Palmer inked Gene, from Dr. Strange #172

Transcript of an interview conducted on February 7th, 2008.

James: You like to work to music as a sound thing that’s going on…does that affect you compositionally? Your compositions tend to flow, and lead the eye around.

Gene: Let’s say it helps my composition, music helps me get into it.

James: In our earlier interview you said you wanted to find a way to represent music. I think you’ve done it! (laughter)

Gene: Well, Disney did that with Fantasia.

James: Comics don’t have sound, but there is timing, the beats.

Gene: I’ll play anything. I’ll handpick the records. A symphony, whatever it’s going to be, and that launches me right into it. Blocks out anything else, and it kind of blends with what I’m doing. Sometimes I’ll play just sound.

James: Do you find that produces a sort of time warp, you get lost in what you’re doing?

Gene: Ooh, yeah.

James: Like missing time…how long have I been here? (laughter)

Gene: Yes, because music launches me into another time, another space, and that helps me a lot. It’s very hard to describe just what the mental process is…everybody a different way of approaching it. But, that how I approach it.

James: You are able to visualize a three-dimensional environment in your comics, what I call “motion perspective.” In other words, you are able to portray different angled views of a given environment, with some elements in motion. For instance, you vary vantage points within the six sides of a room, on furniture, the people moving through it in time, and what can be seen through the windows and doors. These skills are specific to cartoonists and animators, and you are able to manifest it so realistically, and with your style of graceful, expressive page design.

Gene: I’d get an idea of the form and light from something in a photo or on film, and I’d take it from there. One of the reasons I prefer taking my own reference pictures is because I’m able to shoot pics of some elements from different angles. Especially people. Of course, there’s much more to it. I can tell you also that when I read the script (even if it’s only a page or two), I’m planning the composition of the panels for days in my head, looking for different elements to take pictures of and deciding the best way to portray the words.

James: Photos and film give you light. Would you pose yourself?

Gene: Sometimes, yeah I did.

James: Like the Nightmare drawing I inked, you obviously didn’t have a model for that thing. (laughter)

Gene: Well, sometimes I need a springboard.

James: If you’re doing a long piece with the same guy, like Nathaniel Dusk…at a certain point you’ve got him, you can draw him all the way around.

Gene: Yeah.

James: You would go to different locations, to find something specific that would be a springboard?

Gene: I would get an mental image, right away, or sometimes not right away, but I would get an image of a location and the person in it, what’s in the foreground, what’s in the background, and I would work with that to get a sense of depth. Very often I would use something in the foreground to frame the picture, something recognizable, like a lamp.

James: I see…it’s not really the focus of the image, but something to make the space.

Gene: Right. Then I’ll work into the background, or sometimes I’ll work right up front. I have to have a good notion of where they are. If they are in a tunnel underground, that’s not much to work with.

James: In your story in The Escapist #2 (Vol. 1 of the collections) you draw the characters in a tunnel, and they’ve got no room. You do a claustrophobic thing, and find a place to hide the “camera,” imbedded in the wall back here (holds an imaginary camera behind his head). It’s not a real view, but it works.

Dan Adkins puts a nice polish on Gene’s pencils, from SubMariner

Gene: They’re not complete images, they’re kind of fragmented…but I generally know what it’s going to be. And once I start doing the figure work it becomes clearer and clearer what I’m going to put into the background.

James: Okay, but also you don’t read the entire script, right? You prefer to be surprised?

Gene: Page to page, page to page, or if everything feels like it is leading to a particular page that I don’t know about, then I’ll read forward, to find out what that place is…I have to, or I’ll screw it up, you know. I mean, sometimes it has to do with something that is going to appear later…but they are usually pretty basic. It usually starts out in a basic way, two people talking. You don’t need much more than that.

James: I wanted to get into your acting. I mean, your characters act, within their framework. So even the smallest little guy in the background has a role to play…he’s not there by accident, you already cut out all the extraneous…so each of those would be based on types from film or from your life?

Gene: Yes, things I’d seen on the screen…

James: Or your family…

Gene: Oh yes, my son.

James: You put Adrienne in there?

Gene: I used to, yeah, and my daughter.

James: As goddesses? (laughter)

Gene: Did you see the film Patton? There’s a particular scene in it where there’s a close-up of two Generals, Patton and someone else, talking about their next strategic move. During the thick of the battle, way in the background shells are being lobbed all over the place, explosions, everything, and the camera was focused on these two generals. But, if you looked in the background they were telling another story and that story was, a GI had been shot, wounded, and a medic comes running to him. It has nothing to do with what’s up close, that was the important thing and that was the thing that has dialogue, the generals talking, what they’re going to do next; the background essentially relates to it, to where they are and what they’re about….yeah, we all knew it was wartime, but to see a medic come out and help a wounded soldier and drag him back to safety…they didn’t have to put that in, but boy, what reality. It added to the scene.

James: Okay, for instance at Marvel with Stan Lee, if you have a conversation on the phone, it goes for….how long is it?

Gene: A few minutes. I’d tape it.

James: Right. So you’d actually refer back to the tape while you’re working.

Gene: Yes, that’s what I did.

James: You have to plan out all the action and movement…and that’s actually an optimum kind of freedom for you to design everything.

Gene: It’s not done that way anymore.

James: Okay, now they say, here’s four panels on this page, and the editors do futz around with the balloons…do you pencil the balloons in first? Or leave room for them?

Gene: I try to leave some room at the top.

James: I can’t design a comic page without putting the balloons in first, because I know I’ll need this much space. Anyway, at Marvel you were writing the story on the top, your originals have notes in your handwriting.

Gene: Those books would never have long sentences, just very short captions so it wouldn’t crowd out the art. Stan gave me the ball and let me run with it.

James: Well, for instance in Dr. Strange #182 there was a two page spread with the Juggernaut, a very psychedelic layout, a few panels rippling across a spread with gradating colors on the page behind, a really unusual resolution….you’d make that decision?

Gene: Yes.

James: You’d say, ‘I’m going to do this two-page spread,’ and then for that space you might have to pay on the last page by having to pack in a lot of information for the end.

Anatomies clash over an effective background, in the print Jim Steranko made of the cover he inked for Gene.

Gene: Oh yeah. But sometimes there were issues that the panels weren’t clear enough. Stan would say to me, ‘Find the man in the puzzle.’

James: Yes, but it would make complete sense when it was colored. They just weren’t able to see how it all came together, right away. Marie Severin or whoever colored it would think, ‘Oh, I see what he’s doing here,’ comprehend it, make it clear.

Gene: I did more of what pleased me than what pleased Stan. I didn’t disregard what he wanted, but I worked for many writers, and I did what pleased me. I thought that was the right thing to do.

James: Your body of work has a consistent kind of realization.

Gene: I had some writers that were editors, who were very specific about what they wanted, and that would intimidate me, and then I’d start to worry about the work, and they could never get the best out of me because I had to follow what they wanted.

James: They should want the artist’s vision. Otherwise, why hire you? I find penciling to be the most pleasurable part.

Gene: It is.

James: For a long time I didn’t enjoy the inking, it was like doing the same drawing over again. I’d ask, can’t you get me an inker? But no one else could ink it because they wouldn’t know what the hell it was.

Gene: I inked a few things when they asked me to. But, editors and writers want what they want. They often don’t care what you want.

James: Or, the writer would not understand what the artist was facing. They’d say, give me 200 people standing on a street corner. Thanks for that!

Gene: I’d give the effect. There’s a story I like to tell, about an artist Alexander King who did a painting of a street corner full of figures, and the editor said, ‘Can’t you just turn everybody to the left?’ That meant the whole painting was destroyed. They’re not pawns on a board (laughter). So King just folds the painting in half and dumps it in the trashcan and walks to the elevator. There was another fellow in the room who was watching the proceedings, observing, and he followed King out to the elevator. He said, ‘Let me give you a word of advice. The next time you do something of this nature, paint one of the women with a hairy arm. If you did that, they’d spot that right away, and justify their job’ (laughter).

James: That’s like what I read Adrienne said to you at some point, fixing one of Shooter’s corrections on every page….

Gene: ‘Make him feel like you fixed everything.’

James: And he’s like, ‘That’s more like it.’ I didn’t mean to bring him up (laughter). About inking again, your own inking is very fresh and quick, like you actually did it kind of quickly.

Gene: I have a rough finish with ink.

James: It’s not something you want to be doing, really?

Gene: No, I don’t. I can get a suppleness of tone with a pencil, and let the inker decide whether he wants to put those greys in or not.

My try: I should have used a brush

James: Well, inking your Nightmare drawing I realized that all of your lines are going in a trajectory. When I printed it out I should have flopped it, because I’m left handed…are you right-handed, Gene?

Gene: Yes.

James: Right, well, your directional strokes are going like this (demonstrates). I would have done it better backwards (laughter).

Gene: I’m a stickler for faces. And you got Strange spot on. Overall, a little too scratchy with the lines. But I know that’s very much your style which works brilliantly when doing your own art, but I’d like to see mine with a little more mix of pen and brush work.

James: That was my second try at inking that drawing. I printed it off your site and blew it up on Xerox, then lightboxed it. The lightbox made it very hard to see the lighter lines.

Gene: Your inking is quite good and actually it’s really how I drew it. If you had put a denser line on the back of the monster, it would have improved the confusion. You couldn’t have picked a more complicated picture. (laughter) You should have started with something simple! It’s confusing because that’s how I drew it. Bottom line: ya did good, Joey!

James: Well, thanks, Gene.

Gene: Let me ask you this. Supposing on the page it’s raining, and you’re focusing on some of the characters, rain streaks are coming from right to left. But now you’re focusing on this character, who’s talking more or less to the reader. There’s another panel where he continues to talk, but not from the same angle.

James: You’d have to change the direction of the rain.

Gene: Right. Did you do that?

James: Yeah, my first issue of 2020 Visions started with a rain scene, and I angled it depending on the viewpoint. But in inking you, it’s in the faces that you go, oh my God, that’s really Gene. The way it wraps around the form of the head…

As an inker, Al Williamson 'gets' Gene, from Tomb of Dracula (miniseries) #1.

Gene: When I draw a face with an eyeball in it, very often that eyeball is so bloody outstanding, that it almost looks like they’re looking at you in shock.

James: (laughs) The eyeball!

Gene: I mean just a general face talking, so I try to soften that, so that, if you look twice, maybe the first time you moved to the eyeball, but if you looked at it again more carefully you wouldn’t see it. You know what I mean? I have the eyeball in such a way that it’s not offensive. It doesn’t look like it’s scary-eyed. Do you understand what I mean?

James: You mean a specific piece with an eyeball?

Gene: No, when you draw a face, say a guy…

James: You mean whether it comes to life or not?

Gene: Well, it can come to life, but if you’re frightened, of course, your eyes are wide open and you can’t help it…you have to show the eyeball. But if you want to keep that brave look on a hero, then don’t show the eyeball.

James: Well, certain cartoonists will…and I was doing this. I used to draw an eye, and put a little highlight in the pupil…a little gleam.

Gene: Yeah.

James: Then a couple jobs I just blocked it in. It causes this sort of Charlie Brown effect. It becomes a little more universal, people identify with it in a different sort of way.

Gene: I find when you’re dealing with that specific thing that I’m talking about, the eyeball, it’s either over the top, or it’s hidden, so that it’s not offensive. You don’t get the feeling that this guy is staring at you. It’s all in the eyes, like softening. They could be looking at you but there’s just a hint of an eyeball in there. Just a hint.

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My earlier interview with Gene from 2002, at Comic Art Forum: http://www.thearteriesgroup.com/ComicArtForumColan.html

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Daredevil, Sub-Mariner, Tomb of Dracula, Dr. Strange, and Nightmare copyright 2011 Marvel Comics. Nightmare drawing copyright 2011 by Gene Colan.

The Roundtable Has Pants: Mr. Campbell Speaks

Wrapping up our roundtable on Eddie Campbell’s Alec comics here at HU, we present to you an extended conversation with Mr. Campbell himself about work, life, and fate.

The interview was conducted via email during the course of the past two weeks or so. It focused primarily on the Alec comics as collected in The Years Have Pants (2009), so all page references, whether unspecified or in the context of individual stories, are to the pagination of that book. Except for when we talk about Campbell’s most recent personal book Fate of the Artist (2006), which is not included in Pants. I should note that Caroline Small (Caro) graciously stepped in at the eleventh hour and formulated a couple of incisive questions about that book that I couldn’t have come up with myself. They have been inserted near the end.

My thanks to Mr. Campbell for taking the time and for helping out so promptly with edits and images. ‘Nuff said!

Authenticity
At the beginning of How to Be an Artist you write with a certain amount of irony, but fundamentally seriously, “I will only lie in the service of truth.” This seems to me a good starting point for discussing your autobiographical work, since Alec clearly has had a complex and evolving approach to truth, with the issue perhaps most clearly articulated in Fate of the Artist. What is your truth in autobiography?

Firstly, let’s dispense with ‘autobiography.’ I felt uncomfortable when that word crept into comics, and even more so with the more recent ‘memoir,’ which I believe arrived with [Alison Bechdel’s] Fun Home. In the contract of fiction a storyteller says ‘let’s make believe’ to his audience. Let’s make believe there’s a person named Alec MacGarry. If the outline of this character’s life largely resembles my own, that’s interesting, but it doesn’t mean we’re no longer ‘making believe.’ And just to remind you where we are, let’s make believe he makes a bargain with the deity Fate, who allows him three wishes. The “I will only lie in the service of truth” is just a variant on “Every word I tell you will be true. It happened long ago…” It’s just opening the door. It’s part of the storyteller’s craft. I’m looking at two books on my shelf. One is The Life of Thomas More by Peter Ackroyd, and the other is The Collected Stories of O. Henry. I’d put my book beside the O. Henry.

I understand, but you’re still working in a reality-based register with your Alec comics, no? And at least in the case of How to Be an Artist there must have been documentary concerns, since it concerns in part an extended number of public figures in the comics world. I guess that what I’m interested in is your way of negotiating material that is in large part lived with your wish to craft a story, and the reason I’m asking is because reality-based material has been so central to the development of comics in the past few decades – a notion of, or at least a feeling for, truth must be essential to it, as you indicate.

Okay. First thing that springs to mind here is The Salon by Nick Bertozzi, and I can’t recall where I read this, in an interview somewhere, but while he was interested in Picasso and Braque and the story of Cubism, he felt that more was needed for a ‘graphic novel,’ and so he introduced this magic absinthe idea, or whatever it was, but it was a supernatural element. I was so disappointed; I mean not in the work itself, but in that there was a presumption that comics can’t function without a super-element. As though you couldn’t find enough daftness for cartooning purposes in among Picasso, Gertrude Stein, and that whole nutty circle without needing to bring in supernatural stuff.

In my own case I was dealing with a much smaller event, the ‘graphic novel’s’ first crash and burn in the early 1990s, and there certainly wasn’t any need to make things up to keep it interesting. Just figuring it all out was enough of a feast. A good storyteller can make a banquet out of much less than what was on offer in that case. But I think comics are mostly dealing with a very immature taste among its readers. There was a fellow pitching an idea at San Diego, and I can’t remember why he was pitching it to me, perhaps I was listening just to be polite, but he started ‘There are these vampires—‘. I cut him off. ‘Stop! I’m bored already.’ There’s only one vampire I have time for and that’s the Count on Sesame Street.

How to Be an Artist could have been done as a complete fiction quite literally, except it would have taken five times as long to do. Referring to real artists living and dead really wasn’t what it was supposed to be about. That was just an extra sheen. Fictitiously I wanted to create a sense of a lot of names and styles, and some of these would appear once and never be heard of again, some would recur, and others would become significant players in the drama, while others yet again would be established as a category of ‘old masters’ that could be referred to almost in the prayers of the protagonist (King, Herriman, Caniff). In fact there is a sense that Drake, in my epilogue, is the last of these old masters to pass away (even though he isn’t literally – Feiffer is still alive – but my point is that the reader should think of it as fiction).

Also, I was thinking about Tolkien and the way there are names that exist in the mythology of Middle-Earth, and also the way some of these characters are about to enter into that realm, like Galadriel, if I’m remembering it correctly, it’s been a long time (I adored the Silmarillion). Like Tolkien, I wanted to establish a dense mythology, but in a very short space. And on top of that, the effect I wanted, is that this is what the artistic environment is made up of. In fact it’s what life is like. School, work, etc. At first there is a crowd, and in time individuals stand out, and there are departed individuals that are only ever referred to and are never met, and in time you may become a significant figure yourself as you achieve credit for your actions. The novice has to negotiate his way down a populated road.

I could have made up a lot of stuff, names and titles of their works, like Eisner did in The Dreamer, but why cheat the reader of an extra layer to the work? And you could do the same thing for a musical environment, or art of any sort. So rather than ‘drop names’ as one critic has said, it was necessary to represent each occurrence of such a personage in my story by showing an image from his work. And then, so that this didn’t seem like an arbitrary art-book thing, I challenged myself to find an image that commented on what was actually happening at the exact point in the story into which it was being inserted. It works as often as not. So anybody just skipping those panels because they’re not interested in that artist, is missing the meaning of the scheme. An average reader, I have discovered, is only willing to recognize a limited number of characters, six or seven or whatever, and I’m sure somebody somewhere has tabulated it. Beyond that they tend to complain.

So just pretend they’re made up. Although, as it happens, a lot of those old masters are in print now, who weren’t when I drew my book, so maybe a lot of that stuff is less obscure than it might have been. And Umberto Eco in his Queen Loana used a lot more obscure stuff than I ever did…. There was a moment when my confidence in what I was up to threatened to fail, but I came across a couple of quotes that shored up my resolve. The first was “Literary history is a modern invention and so is the automatic sense which a modern writer must have of his location in the flow of literary time.” The full thing is on page 249 of my book. It encouraged me to believe I was on the right track. The other one relates to Alan Moore’s position in the story. When I knew I was going to end with the Big Numbers fiasco, and I knew from the start, I started working in allusions to chaos theory, and then I stumbled upon that great paragraph from R.G. Collingwood “The same instability which affects the life of the individual artist reappears in the history of art taken as a whole…” He glimpsed the fractal idea way back in 1924. I had to put the whole quote in there.

Anyway, there was an investigative angle to How to Be an Artist. Why do these things fail? Art in the bigger sense, and the artist’s life as a microcosm of that. And since it was my intention to find useful answers to these questions, there was no room for making things up. Even if I’d changed a name it would have ruptured the fragile fabric of it. Apart from MacGarry of course, but by that time everybody accepts that as a metaphor for ‘Okay, make yourself comfortable and I’ll tell you a story.’

I watched The King’s Speech last night. Good movie, and it’s amazing that a story about a guy overcoming his stammer gets to be Picture of the Year, but a few things niggled as being implausible, and when I looked into it, sure enough, those were the parts of the story that were tweaked ‘for dramatic effect.’ In movie-making there’s a presumption, in fact it appears to be a commandment, that ‘there can be no drama without conflict,’ and so conflict has to be manufactured where it can’t be found growing naturally. I’m referring in this case to the depiction of King Edward, who has to be made somewhat unlikable for the purpose of making George look good. In another story it’s easy to make Edward’s story the love story of the century. He gave up his throne for the love of a woman. But here he’s an air-headed Champagne Charlie who mocks his brother’s speech impediment. That’s the movies for you. As soon as I see the cheap mechanisms at work, it tends to weaken my willingness to suspend disbelief. (Lest you assume I’m against movies per se, there are some that I do have an enduring fondness for: prime Laurel and Hardy, such as Blockheads from 1938, Howard Hawks’ To Have and Have Not, Jules Dassin’s Rififi, and many more, none of which are based on real events.)

Before we leave the notion of autobiography behind, I wanted to ask about your distinction between that term and what you are doing – isn’t all autobiography, even as commonly understood, a kind of storytelling? Does the term seem to constrictive for what you’re trying to do?

After I sent you my previous I thought to myself, what was I trying to say there? My point I think, if I were to finish circling around it, would be that I resent mechanical interference in narrative configurations that occur naturally. What attracted me to real life events in the first place was that they always happened in ways that didn’t fit my preconceived notions of narrative logic, arrived at by years of reading books and comics and watching movies. When I first started thinking about this I’d take bits of business that I’d observed in real life and then fit them into my work. But later I’d resent the damage I had to do to the observed moment to make it fit in. There are non-obtrusive things you can do, like juxtaposition, or a bit of careful pruning can help nature along. And a short story doesn’t need to arrive at a snappy conclusion. Even as recently as the new stuff in the The Years Have Pants there are a couple of places where my interfering hand may have gone too far. Hatfield and Fischer’s ‘tiny fragments’ theory is a useful reference here. Sometimes the preciousness of the found moment is best preserved by keeping it along with other found moments and not trying too hard to connect them.

Regarding autobiography, yes it is a kind of storytelling. It’s just that I consider it the shelf of people who have done important things in the world. And ‘memoir’ by definition means looking back, which is not always what I’m doing. And a diarist is recording the days in order one after another as they happen. All of these are literary terms. Something bugs me about this, and what I’m trying to say will probably occur to me after you send your next question.

Right, I definitely see what you’re saying about found moments. In Graffiti Kitchen, however, you have this line “I am the only element of continuity in my own life”, which you end up subverting as an egotistical conceit, but which still remains what seems a certain statement of purpose. Making sense of one’s life, one seeks continuities, and reading the Alec comics in their entirety, this seems a driving principle. Would you agree?

I have to keep on answering for the egotistical blather of that young whippersnapper, Eddie Campbell. That’s my problem right there. I realize now that at the beginning of our exchange I was attempting to express my current aesthetic position, which is inevitably going to make me contradict myself, if the younger me still has a voice. If that amounts to continuity then so be it.

Thinking about my impasse in my previous response, I’m remembering that I have always been striving to get back to a more immediate kind of story-telling. I mean telling of an oral sort. Talking. In talking, one simply begins ‘I heard,’ or ‘do you know who I bumped into’, or ‘I was reading about this woman…’ (naturally establishing ‘I’ as the author and motivator of the anecdote.) However, the writing of fiction, and autobiography for that matter, involves this whole other formal way of going about things, such as: “From a little after two o’clock until almost sundown of the long still hot weary dead September afternoon they sat in what Miss Coldfield still called the office because her father had called it that – a dim hot airless room with the blinds all closed and fastened for forty three summers because when she was a girl someone had believed that the light and moving air carried heat and that dark was always cooler, and which (as the sun shone fuller and fuller on that side of the house) became latticed with yellow slashes full of dust motes which Quentin thought of as being flecks of the dead old dried paint itself blown inward from the scaling blinds as wind might have blown them.”

I can see how in that first book, The King Canute Crowd, I was trying to do that very thing with “Danny Grey never really forgave himself for leaving Alec MacGarry asleep at the turnpike”; all this creating characters and putting them in a very particular time and place. I think I’ve been wrestling with trying to defeat this aura of the literary ever since. I feel that it’s a formal screen erected between speaker and listener. On this subject, I greatly enjoyed [Michael] Chabon’s recent Maps and Legends. It’s a collection of essays I suppose, or at least that’s how it would have to be described, but it’s really all of a piece, and it involves talking about stories and telling stories. And in it I feel that he was talking directly to me without that formal thing between us, that contract of ‘Let’s make believe…’, that same situation which is where I placed myself at the beginning of this chat, which started two days ago but is probably only eight inches above here. And since the tension between one mode and the other is exacerbating my paragraphs here, maybe it’s the same tension that gives a certain frisson to my better comics, that setting up of a literary pretension and then its casual deflation.

Literature and art
In your discussions of the graphic novel you’ve raised the term ‘literary’ as a defining aspect. I take it you mean literary as a register, rather than specifically text-oriented. How are comics literature?

If you go back to where you found that reference, you’ll probably find that I was representing Will Eisner’s original intention. When Eisner used the word ‘novel’ he was alluding to literariness rather than to a ‘prose work of more than 70,000 words’ (as science fiction societies that give out awards like to define a novel). And by literariness he meant seriousness of meaning, and a book that stays on a bookshelf as opposed to a periodical that gets thrown out after its use-by date. (Curiously, a book-writer I recently encountered was nonplussed upon observing that comics now stay on the shelf forever, no matter how awful they are whereas regular books have their moment in the daylight, get remaindered and are never seen again outside of garage-sales.)

On the other hand, when I used ‘literary’ above I meant it in the sense of written as opposed to spoken (and spoken here meaning straight from brain to tongue, not reading aloud a prepared speech as in the movie mentioned above). The three-panel gag comic can still be very close to the spontaneous, to the told joke, or to the scurrilous caricature sketched on the outhouse wall. A short comic book can still be analogous to, or a rendition of, a memorized tale. But to spin a comic out for a hundred pages (or even 48 pages, as in Graffiti Kitchen, or all of the stories in [Eisner’s] A Contract With God) and do it successfully (by which I mean it holds the attention of a ‘reader’), involves a kind of long-range planning that can only be arrived at by ‘writing.’ (In the same way, the symphony could only have been conceived in an era of written music, and at some point in its evolution, The Iliad shifted from an oral tradition to a written one (As M. L. West demonstrates in his magisterial The Making of the Iliad, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011; ”…at some point Homer wrote down or dictated his material, and in the course of years or decades he composed the vast panorama of The Iliad, expanding his early draft…”)

I could draw a large number of images, as say for instance Picasso does obsessively in his ‘Artist and Model’ series of Dec ‘53/ Jan ‘54, in an improvised, purely mind-to-hand way, or as Al Columbia did equally obsessively in his recent Pim and Francie, but something like The Arrival by Shaun Tan, even though it has no words in it, is a book complicated enough (this is not a qualitative argument) that at some point in its evolution, it would have required a written plan, even if the writing consisted entirely of hieroglyphs that neither you nor I could interpret.

In this way, comics become a kind of literature if we do not intend that to mean that they now reside on Parnassus, as a fellow comics practitioner seemed to be presuming was my intention on a panel, a few years ago, for which I had pre-proposed the subject “Will the literature of the future have pictures?” ‘Comics are not literature, they are comics!’, he declared emphatically at the outset, leaving us wondering where the discussion could go next. (This was not at a comics event, but at a writer’s festival, which was casting a sidelight on the ‘graphic novel’ phenomenon, and so the literary angle opened a potential channel of connection.)

And would you say that comics as literature in this sense is constituent of your conception of the graphic novel? Clearly it is not the only criterion, and I know you’ve more or less disavowed the term because of its dissolution in the market, but is it salvageable, and what role would this literary aspect play for it?

An artist usually wants to be part of something bigger than himself, but ‘the graphic novel’ no longer seems like any kind of worthwhile aspiration to me. Nor does the prose novel for that matter. My thinking has been floating adrift for some time. I’m working hard on a new book, but I don’t think of it as being part of any current dialogue. Maybe I’ll come out of that and see everything in a different way.

In your foreword to the collected edition you write that part 1 of The King Canute Crowd was where you found your artistic voice, and that’s precisely the story that starts with that line “Danny Grey never really forgave himself for leaving Alec MacGarry asleep at the turnpike.” It’s a very ‘literary’ opening as you say (and a very fine one, if you ask me), but in some ways it feels more poetically wrought than your graphics – the generally large grid, the preference for medium- and long shots, and the general lack of dynamic panel layouts; the sketchy, notational drawing style, etc. The continuity between that through your current work makes a lot of sense to me, but I’m curious as to how you’ve refined this ‘voice.’

It takes a long time and a great effort to cut away all the dead wood and get things as straightforward and simple as you describe. The first thing that had to go was everything that was cinematic. Next, anything that looked like comic books, and most comic book readers are not even aware of the peculiar pictorial syntax of comic books, the way characters stand in a panel in relation to each other and in relation to the frame and the way word balloons sit in a panel unrelated to everything else in there. ‘Panel layouts’ is a term I haven’t used in a long time. It’s a comic book term, like ‘nine panel grid’; ‘medium shot’ and ‘long shot’ are cinematic terms. I threw all of this stuff out of my vocabulary long ago. They’re part of the dead wood. In an early attempt to start the book, the characters had the slightly enlarged heads of a cartoony style. That had to go too. To have repeated it in panel 2 would have been the makings of a ‘style.’

I read an art instructional book once, I can’t remember who wrote it, but I extracted a valuable lesson from it. That is, that an artist should spend his artistic career expunging from the work everything that he recognizes as a habit. If he finds a neat way of doing something, instead of using the trick again, he must refrain from ever doing so. He must cast it out. A particular brushstroke or a figural gesture, or whatever. Comic books are entirely made up of this sort of thing. I have a pal who loved the way Berni Wrightson drew the strings of saliva stretched between upper and lower teeth, so he borrowed the device and still uses it forty years later. Wrightson himself got it from Graham Ingels, and he may have invented it or got it from somebody else, perhaps the face of a witch in the illustration in an old book of fairy tales from the turn of the nineteenth century. So this ugly device has been perpetuated through several generations, perhaps a whole century. Acquiring an artistic voice should be a subtractive process. Get rid of everything that you recognize as a device, or an aspect of style. Try to have no style, to go beyond the idea of a style. And what’s left will be your own voice, which you can never properly recognize, and then get rid of that too. Transform yourself. The book didn’t go that far. I’m extrapolating now.

It seems to me, however, that there is still a stylistic choice involved – the stories are very determined by the narration, sustaining the notational aspect of the drawing and leaving less room for images of a more independently evocative nature. Such drawings as the silent one in chapter seven of How to Be an Artist (p. 258 in Pants) where your brother plays clarinet from the basement window of your building are few and far between. I assume there’s a conscious choice involved here, perhaps having to do with reflexive tenor of the narration?

I had to go back and check that because I remember I was consciously avoiding silent panels by that time. In going for a verticality, I’ve pushed the caption dangerously high up there so that in a quick reappraisal you’ve overlooked it.

Argh! How did I manage simultaneously to read and overlook that caption?

…In fact I’ve broken one of my own rules about caption placement and suddenly feel embarrassed. I shall seize upon one aspect of your question and surge ahead. Looking at it now, I feel that I was resorting to a cheap cliché there. I had decided by then that silent panels were a gimmick that belong in the Eisner-Steranko school of comics art, in which analogous techniques are found for representing time and sound (or its sudden absence). You can certainly find passages like that in the King Canute Crowd, such as page 93:

…or in close proximity, page 101. But at the time I drew those pages I would have been incapable of something as complicated as the Big Numbers fiasco (pages 305-310, or “OUCH!” on pages 468-471:

…or speaking of the wispily poetic, the graveyard sojourn on pages 569-570. For everything gained, some other thing must be abandoned).

I always felt that my challenge was to make my little paper characters live in the reader’s mind. Too handsome images can be a distraction. When I read Gasoline Alley, I always prefer the workaday dailies. The Sundays sometimes interrupt my suspension of disbelief just by being so stylistically interesting.

I guess what struck me about that panel was that it was uncharacteristically ‘poetic’, as if you for once ease your grip and let the drawing resonate.

You’re forgetting that the crux of How to Be an Artist, the hinge upon which the whole book turns to face its conclusion, is an extremely poetic moment, both verbally and pictorially (since you are separating the elements here). Beginning with the third and final lapse of faith in the bargain made with Fate (the crushing void of space around MacGarry in that central panel on page 294) with Skeezix, Terry Lee and Krazy Kat then all doing walk-ons (‘walk’ literally, compare the motifs in pan 2 and pan 9 of page 295), with MacGarry by contrast dormant until Fate animates his rigid form by dripping molten silver on his head from a Coconino moon (while he is sleeping at the turnpike no less).

Sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest that there was no poetry in your work – the poetry is one of the reasons I like it so much! It was merely that that particular panel in that sequence seemed uncharacteristic in context and therefore stood out, prompting my inquiry.

We’ll rub a hole in that panel if we pay it any more attention. :)

[Laughs] I definitely see what you mean about cliché though, but then in After the Snooter you have a couple of silent passages when you slip into internal, symbolic sequences. This seems a departure from your earlier work, and anticipates some of the choices you make in Fate of the Artist. Could you talk about your motivations for this?

There are always going-backs of course, reversions to see if I missed something. I’m always wrestling with problems on the conceptual level of the art of making a comic strip. Sometimes I follow a thought as far as it can go. I come up against a block and have to trot back to an earlier position and pick up the thread.

I’m talking about my best work there, the Alec books. Otherwise, I can get all that old-fashioned action stuff out of my system by doing a book like Batman: The Order of Beasts, or The Black Diamond Detective Agency. But with my personal books, I’m trying to be pure.

On the other hand, looking through Pants I’ve just fastened on a panel relevant to the discussion of silent panels. Panel 6 on page 618:

…one of the new pages drawn for the book. I drew that thing several times, and it even had a caption at one point. But there it is frozen in its silent glory. Alec opens a tough bag of sweets at the cinema. A rare instance when I appear to have done a whole page just to set up that silent panel.

Worth capturing
Those sequences in Snooter are dealing with inner life, in this case semi-awake dreaming I guess, in a fairly expressive manner:

This is something you hadn’t done all that much of before in the Alec stories, which leads to a more basic question: with a few notable exceptions – parts of Graffiti Kitchen and Fate of the Artist – you seem to avoid addressing moments of strong emotion, preferring to suggest your character’s emotional life subtly in his narration and, in the images, through observation – I’m thinking here in particular about the retrospective undercurrent and lingering despair in the margins of Snooter. This runs counter to a lot of comics autobiography where the extremes of their author’s experience often take center stage. What are your thoughts on this?

Of course, I’m Scottish, as you know, and we don’t do emotion. I’m reserving the emotional thing for some real catastrophe (there might be some raw emotion in my book about money that I’m working on). All through this endeavor I’ve had the idea that by the end of it I would like to have covered the whole spectrum of life in our times. I don’t mean I want to dig into all the dark corners of experience. I’ll leave that to Alan. But rather that the commonplace life is a thing worth capturing. That’s why I referenced Gasoline Alley in my introduction. What is interesting about life at 20, at 40, at 50? etc. In theory anyway, it’s a goal. I often have readers say they liked The King Canute Crowd, but that things tend to slope off after that. Then they come back after a few years and say they missed half of what The Snooter was about the first time around. Which is another reason why I avoid making up stuff, since I need the work to hang around for a long time. The bogus parts look pretty obvious after a few years.

Purity or not, your prose style is so distinct, and I find passages not only in the earlier work, but in After the Snooter that seem to me fully as wrought as the “turnpike” line. This is not a criticism – I think it is part of what makes your storytelling voice so compelling, this intermittently poetic, if also often straightforward or ironic, approach to the mundane. Any thoughts on this?

Just yesterday I took a few lines out of the thing I’m working on, because they sounded just like the self-conscious Alec MacGarry narration of the Canute years. It took me a few minutes to figure out that that’s what was bothering me about them. There’s nothing like hearing my lines quoted back at me, as my wife often does, to make me go off them very quickly. The ones I’m happiest with are usually phrases that I dropped by accident when I was in the right mood. A lot of my stuff does look caption-heavy when you skim through the book, but it would be difficult to reduce any of it. It’s all contributing vital information. If Alan had used captions in From Hell we could have wrapped the job up in nine months.

It’s not so much that the use of captions feels heavy to me, but rather that they tend to steer the narrative considerably more than the images, which accent, deepen or provide counterpoint. Is there some sense that the images, left to their own, would risk skewing the narrative toward a more ‘seductive’ register? In some ways, Fate takes more risks in this respect.

Yes, Fate is my only personal book where I let single pictures fill up whole pages. Other than that however, way back in the 1970s I felt that comic books had become these fat ugly things that wallowed in bad drawing. I rejected them then and I do so even more vehemently now. At that same time I discovered the old strips of Noel Sickles and Roy Crane. (Matt Seneca’s review of the Buz Sawyer reprint at The Comics Journal yesterday just reminded me of this: “During the frequent artistic high points, the panels are suffused in a glossy, bracingly realistic natural light…”) And I thought that this was a whole other thing entirely, and I wanted to work in that idiom, with the small compact black and white drawings, but with this great sense of real sunlight created with the doubletone board technique.

So I developed my own version of that (in the King Canute Crowd), using letratones. Putting the stuff on flat tended to kill dead any sense of light, so I cut the stuff up into fragments, letting the scraps lie at odd angles to each other. Panels 5 and 6 on page 77:

…are good examples of what I was trying to do, where I step out of the narrative for a second and enjoy the mist rising on a May Sunday morning. But it’s not obvious. I don’t make a big deal of it, but those are two little panels that succeed in taking me to another place when I look at them now. Elsewhere I might have dwelt on it more consciously, for instance the bottom panel of page 404 in The Dance of Lifey Death is a little contemplation of nature running wild under Alec’s house. If you follow the gradations of tone on the wooden fence slats, you might be pictorially astute enough to notice that I have spread out my entire range of tones from 100% black through 90%, 80%, etc down to 0 at far right.

On the whole, the reader is always aware of a hand making a drawing. It’s never reduced to the hieroglyphic manner of Nancy or some of the other newspaper funnies, not that there’s anything wrong with that. But the reader is always aware of a hands-on event taking place. There are many places where I’ve done a whole scene because I wanted to draw one thing, but I usually disguise my intention. I’d feel terribly vulgar if a reader thought ‘ah, there’s the money shot!’

Your visual-verbal register is, I guess, largely an attempt at realism, but your use of letratone makes me think of the way comics historically have often achieved naturalistic effect through abstraction – the dark winter sky in Canute on p. 51, for example, or the Vermont landscape in The Dance of Lifey Death, on p. 370, are fairly abstract suggestions of real phenomena.

I suppose you feel your way towards an equilibrium between such instances and more barebones linework, or images making direct of symbolic imagery to illustrate concepts, and I guess the use of color and the opening up of the images in Fate was a challenge to whatever equilibrium you had built? Comics seem to accommodate a fairly wide range of approaches without too much difficulty, but it still can’t be easy to make things cohere seamlessly.

Having set my course I have to keep coming up with little pictures and every one of them has to be different from all the little pictures that have preceded it. And every page has to say something that hasn’t already been said. The techniques used in Fate certainly point me in a new direction. My next book in the autobiographical mode, if we are agreeing to call it that, is in colour and I’m producing it mostly on the computer.

I wanted to ask you about irony. It’s a big part of your humor and, consequently, your self-representation. It seems to me a risky approach when striving for authenticity, and it is, I’m sure, hard to control how people take it?

I don’t think of irony consciously, but I do scrutinize my writing like it’s a legal document before I let it go. Does this phrase leave me open to such and such an interpretation, does that one contradict my earlier position, does this other one cut the matter finely enough? I’ll tweak it to add a mischievous note, but over-tweaking introduces the danger of a formality creeping in. I see that in my old blog when I find myself re-reading parts of it. One’s audience is so widespread nowadays, and its educational status widely varied, that pinning down all the possible misinterpretations can wind up piling extra hours onto the job. I also find that humor itself is complicated. I know well-educated people who have a very primitive sense of humor.

But it’s one of those things where people always think it’s the other person who hasn’t got it. I read a review of Fate of the Artist, which emphatically declared that Honeybee was not funny in the least. Since it was essential that it should be funny, being the work of A. Humorist, whose ironic tale ends the whole shebang, I obviously wasn’t getting five stars from him. In fact, I think of myself specifically as a humorist, but I so often find myself out of tune with what passes for humor today. Myself, I can sit through a half hour (well I can’t literally) of stand-up comedy in a wretched state of dismay. I understand that to amuse a room full of average citizens requires sticking to a very obvious line of quips. If there were fewer of these citizens you could just get them on the floor and tickle them I suppose.

It seems clear that a lot of your work derives quite directly from oral joke- or storytelling, not the least the gag strip. Why do you consider that in some ways quite strongly determined format to work better for your representation of daily life than the literary register that you seek to purge from your work?

Did I say purge? These things change from phase to phase. With the Snooter book, which appeared piecemeal as it was being drawn, I wanted to have it both ways, which is to say that I wanted the spontaneous quality of ‘something funny happened today,’ like you get from [James] Kochalka’s diary comics, in the way that James studiously avoids any hint of continuity. I wanted to do that but also have a big mosaic of pieces at the end of it. So going in I had no idea how or if it would end, except that a storyteller worth his salt always finds a way of wrapping things up before closing time.

Anyway, my point is that there is a quality about improvising humour from day to day that can’t be manufactured in a looking-back kind of way. But at the same time, interspersed among that, I was looking back at childhood memory for about thirty pages if you add them all up. I hadn’t done childhood before that, I mean from the inside, first person, if you think about it, except for a brief one-page interlude in The King Canute book.

Another thing about oral storytelling; whenever I’m put in the position of giving advice to a student comics artist, I always say, tell your story orally to one or more people first. That way you’ll quickly figure out how the ‘timing’ needs to work. Then when you draw it you have to figure out something that is graphically analogous to real timing. There’s one page, in the ‘Fragments’ section of the Pants book, which appeared in The Australian newspaper’s magazine section in the week that the Melbourne Writer’s festival was giving the ‘graphic novel’ a guest-spot. The editor is a lady who interviewed me for a huge big tabloid profile-spread ten years ago and figured I could do a colour page for her that would fit the requirements and subject. Anyway, time was tight and I had to call back in a few hours and tell my piece over the phone, which is unnerving, as you can’t see how it’s going down, and there was a nice piece of cash involved. ‘That’ll work’ she said and I was in. So oral storytelling is a useful skill apart from being an aesthetic position.

High/Low
Stepping back a bit: you’ve emphasized often enough your interest in early modern cartooning and the visual-verbal vernacular it developed, and it’s clear that your work is informed by it. At the same time, of course, Alec is clearly a project with high art connotations. What is your take on the dissolution of modernity’s hierarchical structures of high and low culture and what’s the potential of comics in that context, now that they are increasingly integrating high art registers?

The problem with the dissolution of the high/low hierarchy is that it’s been replaced by communities. And each community goes to great lengths to define itself and repel boarders. So they establish definitions. Thus you find, last week when Shaun Tan’s film won an Oscar, on The Beat’s news site:

“Whatever you thought of the hosts, the win in the Best Animated Short Film for Shaun Tan …was a nice win for a very talented artist. Although the Australian Tan is more of an illustrator than a cartoonist, his best known work, THE ARRIVAL, is certainly an example of graphic storytelling — so if he isn’t exactly on our team, he’s pretty darned close.”

So we have ‘Team Comics,’ which is defined by its geekiness. Just a few days earlier, the recommendation for Lady Gaga’s latest video had a different tone:

“Lady Gaga’s nerd-friendly world…If you like Fritz Lang, Giger, Superman, Sin City and Bernard Herrmann, you are sure to like this short SF film!”

I much preferred the old High/low thing. On the other hand, I’m not sure I agree with the ‘high art connotations’ in that my work, however intellectual it gets, is still always ‘about something.’ It is illustration in other words, and that has for a century and a half run in a contrary direction to ‘high art.’

So, when you say you hope to represent the entirety of life, you don’t think that’s a high art ambition? I know there has been Gasoline Alley, but largely that’s been the domain of literature, right?

I wrote something here then deleted it. I really don’t know any more. ‘High art,’ ‘literary’… these kinds of frames are usually describing our relationship to something rather than the thing itself. And Gasoline Alley might be confusing the picture here. That’s a depiction of a pleasant ordinary ‘everyday’ in small town America like you might have heard on the radio. In the context of our current overblown comic books it appeals for its ordinariness and also it represents America’s view of itself in a time and place. If I used the word ‘entirety’, I meant let’s not leave out the commonplace.

OK, this notion of illustration then: do you mean your comics are illustration or that your drawings illustrate your text, or rather – the ‘literary’ writing behind it?

In the larger world of art, anything representational is seen as illustrating something other than itself. A painting of two people talking illustrates a conversation. A picture of a bowl of flowers is an illustration of a bowl of flowers. A painting that has no relationship to anything in the real world however, is pure and escapes from the supposed taint of illustration. Pure painting is not representational. (Even something like Lichtenstein, a discussion of whom both you and I got involved in a couple of years back: his picture of a girl with a tear in her eye is not an illustration of a weeping girl in the same way that the source panel from the comic book is… but that’s an argument for another day…) I’m always illustrating something, so I can’t imagine my work ever being discussed in a conventional fine art context. There would have to be a rather dramatic change in the game for that to happen.

In a narrower context, illustration is making pictures to order for commercial purposes. In an infinitesimally small context, illustration is saying one thing in a caption and same thing in the drawing that it is attached to. In an even more conservative version of that, it’s crafting the picture into a very attractive representation of the thing it is describing, more attractive than is theoretically necessary. A hundred and fifty years ago, being well read was considered a good thing to be, therefore pictorial art that referred to scenes from books (e.g. the Pre-Raphaelites and their contemporaries) was held in high regard, and in due course there was a golden age of illustration that gave us people like Norman Rockwell. But the literary establishment came to see illustration as a low thing, because it corrupted the primacy of the word. That’s not even a Victorian thing, because the Victorian era was the great age of illustration, but a later superiority that crept into literary establishment. The theory was conceived that it stunted the imagination of the young.

This of course is nuts. I often look at the ease with which old-time illustrators drew the rigging in an old ship, or something equivalent to the remoteness of that from our own experience. How could you ever know about something like that unless you see it in a picture (short of seeing it in life of course, always preferable)? To tell somebody that they have to imagine it is willfully illogical. But that is the tenor of the age we grew up in and the residue of which we still find ourselves confronted with. (In the one-year foundation course in art I did at college I was horrified when they realized they were going to have to give us a lesson in perspective, because only half a dozen people in the class knew anything about it. Representational drawing had fallen so low, but this is something I smile at when I still hear some old codgers complain about it)(maybe you just did :) ). The lowest of all arts is the one that is made up entirely of illustration, the one that we are discussing. There used to be something raffish about the contrariness of that. There isn’t any more, which depresses me. But if I think about it too much I’ll go mad. Which is not to say I haven’t already.

I hear you, but I’m not sure I follow entirely: the visual fine arts historically have been and continue to be representational in large measure, and aren’t we, in fact, seeing this rather dramatic shift taking place, where comics are being discussed increasingly in such a context? And couldn’t one make the argument that your comics contributed toward this shift? I mean, the Alec stories explicitly champion comics as an art form, From Hell does it at least implicitly, even Bacchus has that subtext. I guess what I’m trying to get at is your notion of what comics have to offer as an art form, and how they might derive and realize such potential precisely because of their lowbrow history. Is your point that such terminology gets in the way of the “thing itself” – and if so, what framework would you prefer for the discussion of it?

We’re discussing it seriously here, but in the world out there I’m concerned that what has happened is that the culture at large has, instead of leveling out the high/low thing, plunged to the level of comic books. So I don’t think there is a fine art to aspire to any more, except insomuch as one might aspire to live in a bygone age. Good work happens wherever it happens. There are no ‘art forms.’ The best work happens independently of that. Think of Tom Phillips’ The Humument or Graham Rawle’s Woman’s World. And as for comics, they start to interest me somewhere after the point where they stop being comics. Apart from the very old stuff of course. I’ll always have a fondness for the classics.

The high/low thing has been replaced in the present-day by an obsession with categories and genres and trying to draw lines of demarcation and hold everybody to them. You get articles around the comics net in which writers try to figure out what exactly a comic is, and what qualifies and doesn’t qualify. Order is wanting and people will make up some system of order rather than face having to get along without it. Now we no longer say ‘Is it art?’ or ‘is it literature?’ We say, ‘yes but is The Arrival comics?’ or ‘is Vonnegut science fiction,’ or ‘the graphic novel is not a genre, it’s a format,’ or ‘This isn’t gangsta rap, it’s crunk.’

Also, in my experience, anyone who describes themselves as a “fine artist” usually turns out to be an idiot.

Disappearance
From Alec McGarry to the disappeared Artist, your central character has always been an unstable entity, and you’ve moved toward fairly extreme dissolution in Fate of the Artist, which sees theoretical concerns take over what has generally been, or at least felt like, a fairly realistic, accessible narrative in earlier books. The book evinces a tension in the work that one realizes was there all along, but less foregrounded. Where does this tension come from, and did you find it impossible to proceed without addressing it?

I’m guessing you mean the idea of art and MacGarry’s relationship to that. As early as page 68 in the Pants book there’s a direct reference to this, although prior to that we would always be presuming that he had some other agenda above working in a factory. In Graffiti Kitchen it’s there, but there’s always a certain cynical caution about the subject. By the end of How to Be an Artist, the disappointments are accumulating. Fate of the Artist is a full-fledged attempt to bail out. Perhaps he would like to turn back the clock to the years of, in the words of Nietsche, “…that happy state in which one does not yet know the limits of one’s gifts and thinks that all objects of love are attainable.”

CARO: Both How to Be and Artist and Fate of the Artist are very concerned with influence, but How to Be an Artist references are much more overtly to comics history than Fate’s, which reference art and film and literature. The influences in Fate seem much more distant than those in How to Be an Artist; there’s no image of you knocking on the door of the Petersplatz or the Globe. The story of the CDs implies a deep investment in music, but it’s still depicted with distance, due to the conceit of the author being missing. The effect of reading them back-to-back is that affectionate intimacy of your relationship with comics comes across really strongly. The pan-arts references in Fate are something I really like about the book, but do you think you could have written Fate referencing the history of comics in the places that you referenced the history of the other arts, or was it essential to you to cast a wider net?

In How to Be an Artist the idea was to present comics as an art to stand in for all arts. The book was in the form of a comic and it was relevant to use the history of that idiom. But I’m interested in art as a whole. And on page 298 I let R.G. Collingwood make it clear on my behalf: “The story is the same whether we look at Samian pottery or Anglian carving, Elizabethan drama or Venetian painting…” In Fate I wanted to develop the theme further. In the interim since I had started How to Be an Artist (1996), I had become more consciously interested in postmodernism. This consciousness began with a chap who wrote his university thesis on aspects of postmodernism in my autobiographical work. I got to thinking, ‘hey, I better look into this whole thing, check out some of these texts I keep stumbling upon.’ No big surprises, as I think I must have breathed in a lot of information without being aware of it, but this did help me out of an impasse. I had started writing Fate as a prose novel, believe it or not, which is the point here. It wasn’t a comic, so my affection for comics wasn’t going to be relevant to it, in answer that part of your question. And during this time I had been keeping the roof on the house by doing Batman and other superhero things, not all of which were mentioned by Alex Boney the other day. But I was having trouble writing in a voice that didn’t sound bogus. In fact most fiction sounds bogus to me. I can rarely get past reading the first page of other people’s novels. So I let it be bogus and threw in a lot of other bogus pastiche stuff, even using O. Henry’s voice to say what I wanted to say, and the thing ended up being another big complicated comic, but that is the odd direction by which I arrived at it. My own voice is a visual/verbal one I guess.

CARO: Fate opens up a nice double entendre in the title (the kind that would have been immediately obvious if it were in French): it’s both the artist’s fate and artistic “fate”, both “the fate of the artist” and “the kind of fate appropriate to the artist.” And that “fate” appropriate to the artist is a chaos, held together with a paperclip (the paperclip on the toilet, the paperclip on the brick). So there’s a really nice synergy between the “not very tightly held together” chaotic universe and the “not very tightly held together” artistic identity. And Evans’ desire for control is, in the end, what kills the artist off.

The book itself is pretty tight conceptually, though, even though you do a great job of making it seem insouciant. There’s this cluster of contradictory things at the center of this view of art, which is why, I think, it’s so compelling as art to me. Re-reading this immediately after How to Be an Artist, though, where “fate” was more a motivating force that you had to submit to, I wonder how much the idea of submission to chaos, not trying to control, is meant as advice, a philosophical assertion of how to approach making and taking in art.

The dichotomy is between the arts on the one hand and the sciences and other more logical disciplines on the other. Once again, R.G. Collingwood: “To the historian accustomed to studying the growth of scientific or philosophical knowledge, the history of art represents a painful and disquieting spectacle.” That one line expresses my overriding theme in all of these books. In our own time this spectacle consists of the upsetting of the traditional high art/low art balance. Campbell’s issue with this is that he thought this meant that comics would be accepted as a medium, with its particular forms, and also with its rich background of having evolved through its Kings, Herrimans and Caniffs, etc., etc., but what has actually happened is that the whole geek thing has prevailed and we have a huge proportion of the movies coming out of Hollywood being based on superhero comics, or they might as well be, and genius-grant-winning novelists writing issues of superhero comics. And fine art, somehow missing the fact it’s now on a level field, is still appropriating crap all over the place with all the imagination of tribute bands. It’s such a crushing disappointment, the whole current artistic landscape. Things didn’t turn out as I dreamed they might have. The potential satisfactions perceived at the outset have disappeared in the reshuffling.

I didn’t exactly say that in Fate, as ordinary readers are unlikely to know what I’m talking about (he gets to draw pictures for a living; what’s he got to complain about?). So I went for a more conventional and more entertaining malaise, the problem of being a vampire in my use of living people in my work, a thing which does worry me from time, and its accessible. And it’s not like I’ve thrown in a bottle of magic absinthe. And knowing that was the conclusion, I built the book toward that. But in a much more general sense, and I think this should come across in the work, the idea of art and being an artist never pays off in the way we imagined it would. (Hence my forays into history in Fate). For every Shakespeare or Mozart there’s a Louis Gabriel Guillemain who wanted out of the world enough to stab himself fourteen times before expiring, or a Henri Duparc, a composer who destroyed all his work except for a dozen songs that escaped from him and you can find on one CD, who wrote in a letter to a friend: “Having lived 25 years in a splendid dream, the whole idea of [musical] representation has become – I repeat to you – repugnant. The other reason for this destruction, which I do not regret, was the complete moral transformation that God imposed on me 20 years ago and which, in a single minute, obliterated all of my past life. Since then, [my opera] Roussalka, not having any connection with my new life, should no longer exist.” So there’s also a mysterious psychological element to investigate. But that’s perhaps for a future project. Fate exhausts the theme for now, and my next book, which I’ve nearly finished, will be all about money, you’ll be glad to hear.

It seems clear that Fate is your most complex effort so far to step outside yourself and to go beyond the already fairly complex set of narrative registers you’d operated on up till then, i.e. the narrator in the captions, the Alec character who morphs into Eddie in Snooter, the different versions of same that appear occasionally, the intermittent spilling over of inner (verbal) monologue into symbolic imagery, etc. An attempt to suppress that, while acknowledging the inescapable presence of you as an author – did you have a concern that your work might otherwise risk solipsism?

To avoid tipping over into insanity I should think. How sane that fellow looks, at the end of Fate, now that he has managed to escape from himself. I guess he was doing it by increments over the years. I see what you mean though. Even in fairly straightforward sequences there was often a switching from third to first person, long before I complicated it by introducing the second person, and from past to present tense, before I threw in the future. Occasionally I would catch myself doing those first/third changes and past/present and then wonder whether I should leave it or change it. I’d scour assorted literary works to catch the masters doing it. It’s everywhere in Henry Miller, so I figured that it must have been debated already as much as it needs to be debated. So the authorial identity uncertainties were part of the prevailing neurosis of my oeuvre before I threw MacGarry out altogether.

The next step was to cast the actor Richard Siegrist in my place. I didn’t develop this as there was already too much in the book already, so it remains an extra-textual thing that never got invited in. Somewhere in all my files and collection of old jazz music, the name Siegrist appears as a confusion of Secrest. Andy Secrest was a trumpet player who as a young man fell under the influence and artistic spell of the great Bix Beiderbecke (who pops up on page 75 of Fate as one of the author’s circle of imaginary friends… to the true inhabitant of the imaginary realm, one’s heroes are really in the room), and who got his first big break in music by subbing for Bix in the Paul Whiteman orchestra. By all accounts, he was an amiable chap whom everybody liked, including Bix. An Italian film-maker, Pupi Avati, made a drama-biopic of Bix’s life in 1991, which I haven’t seen (trailer).

This relates to what I was saying earlier about movies and ‘there can be no drama without conflict.’ In the same way that Salieri was made the envious villain in the life of Mozart first through Pushkin’s drama Mozart and Salieri of 1831, an apparent falsehood perpetuated all the way through through Shaeffer’s play, Amadeus of 1979. In the same way, the innocent Secrest was cast as a scheming and jealous rival to Bix in Pupi’s film (so I have read). You can see how this relates to my thesis about the artist’s fate being in the hands of an unreasonable world. I satirized the absurdity of this baloney in Fate by having author Campbell murdered by his book-designer, Evans. I even describe the body ‘double-bagged.’ Since he wasn’t in fact murdered, obviously, all the other suppositions must also fall apart.

The funny part about it really is that this murder was an addition that I put in at the twelfth hour because my editor, Mark Siegel, felt that the drama of the book had been left unresolved. And funnier still, the designer, who was the last to handle the digital files, wreaked his own vengeance by salting away a secret message in the small print on page 46 of Fate, which wasn’t discovered till after the book was printed. I turned the story of this conflict into a stand-up comedy performance, which was filmed in Chicago by Bookslut. All of this is a huge self-indulgence unless we allow that it illustrates my point about the artist’s fate being swallowed in a vortex of untruths that are superfluous to the simple facts of his short time on the planet. And if you shouted ‘Self-indulgence!!’, I can only wonder at how you got all the way to the end of a huge interview with an author about his 640-page autobiographical comic. [Matthias laughs].
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The entire roundtable on The Years Have Pants is here.

In addition, our colleagues at the Panelists held a simultaneous roundtable on Campbell, focusing especially on the Playwright but touching several other works as well. Their roundtable is here.

Desire Without Identity: An Interview With Sharon Marcus

I’m a huge fan of Sharon Marcus’ book Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. I’ve already discussed the book in a couple of posts (here and here.) But I thought it would be fun to speak to Sharon herself, and she kindly agreed to an interview. We talked at the end of January about fashion, superheroes in speedos, gay and lesbian identity, Victorian pornography, Freud, and, of course, Wonder Woman.


Noah: So, just to get started and maybe let readers know something of what your book, Between Women, is about, I’m going to try to crassly summarize your main point. That main point being that in Victorian England, erotically charged relationships between women were not seen as necessarily lesbian nor as necessarily anti-heterosexual. On the contrary, such relationships were expected and even encouraged, and were considered an essential part of being a heterosexual women. Is that a reasonable two sentence description of what you were getting at, or have I butchered it?

Sharon Marcus: No, I thought that was very reasonable two sentence description. I think that what I would like to throw into the mix as really important is that, there are a lot of relationships that we now group together, including erotically charged ones, which were not necessarily grouped together by the Victorians. It seems that both feminists and people who aren’t very interested in feminism since the 70s see relationships as being on a spectrum of female intimacy. I don’t think the Victorians thought about things that way. They gave a lot more social centrality to female friendships than we now do, in the culture.

Even when I read contemporary sociology about female friendships, the literature was surprisingly scant, and not very specific about the gender of friendships. And when I found examples of people in Victorian England encountering women who were clearly in quasi-marital relationships that seemed somewhat sexual, pretty overtly because one of the partners was somewhat masculine, a lot of people reacted in a fairly blasé way to that which really surprised me. So I was surprised both that they recognized the relationship and that they weren’t that upset by it. Because what I had always heard about the Victorian attitude towards lesbianism was complete denial, ignorance, impossibility of believing it could even exist, or when confronted with incontrovertible proof, total scandalous shock.

What I ended up getting really interested in was that because there wasn’t this clear-cut category of the lesbian which came about with the rise of sexology and psychoanalysis— you know, in the 20th century the category of the homosexual was probably too well-defined. Because there wasn’t that, it meant that there was a lot more play in the relationships between women and in the relationship of women to imagery of women. So the fashion plates that I ended up looking at a lot seemed to be making it part of the community to look at women in a fairly objectifying way. Not just as part of objectifying oneself, but that this was what fashion was about.

Women checking each other out in a Victorian fashion plate.

Fashion was about fetishizing clothing, but it was also about fetishizing the women wearing the clothing. And what I ended up looking at was the similarity between pornography, which was probably written primarily for men, but which had a lot of sex between women. It’s not that different [in that sense] than pornography today, though, in some ways, Victorian pornography was really different from porography today. But there was the same kind of objectification of women, aggressivity of women towards women, intense interest in focusing on specific body parts.

Also the pornography, a lot of the Victorian pornography I found was really obsessed with clothing, which surprised me. They just weren’t obsessed with taking clothing off and nudity and exposure, but they were really obsessed with the latest style, and lace, and what sort of skirt someone was wearing, there was a whole subcategory of pornography that was about corseting. And there were incredible overlaps between pornography and fashion, both in terms of the fetishization, but also, fashion magazines. There was one fashion magazine that for almost two years published letters to the editor about corporal punishment of children, that were really graphic and in many cases overtly tittilated and titillating. And these were later reprinted separately, and the British library now categorizes them as pornography.

So that was a case of literal overlap. And I think the basic link is just an obsession with the body and its impulses. The presentation of the body to others, and how one perceives, and a real emphasis on the visual framing and control and pleasure that bodies can provide. But this was a case where it’s a publication for women to which women are contributing, and that is filled with women.

But it wasn’t what I would call lesbian.

Right, you’re saying that it was women appreciating women and that being part of their heterosexual identity.

And there was no perceived contradiction there. So you asked the question about fashion imagery today and its homoeroticism. And yes, there is a lot of homoeroticism in fashion imagery today. And there’s actually a great article by Diana Fuss which was on my mind while I was researching my book, and I think it’s called Fashion and the Female Homospectatorial Look, it came out in Critical Inquiry 20 years ago now. And she talks a lot about the fashion imagery of the 70s and 80s and early 90s, and the way that it’s playing on desire and identification, and the kind of twinning of women that takes place in a lot of contemporary fashion imagery that shows two women together.

Gwen Loos & Pauline van der Cruysse for Vogue Turkey November 2010 by Mariano Vivanco

But one of the things you ask was, well, is that really different now , now that there is a visible gay rights movement. And I would say, absolutely. And there’s where I can only speculate, I don’t feel like I know enough to say with any certainty what’s going on. But first of all fashion is a very gay world, a very gay male world. So that’s kind of an interesting wrench in the works, because what we usually say is that these kind of images of women together are a heterosexual male fantasy. And I don’t know about the fashion photographers, but certainly the fashion world, I don’t think anyone would claim that it’s dominated by heterosexual men, nor that it’s trying to appeal to heterosexual men.

Right, it’s trying to appeal to heterosexual women mostly, right?

Right, and I think playing too on the affinities there are between heterosexual women and gay men. Especially when it comes to these areas of life that a lot of straight men pretend not to care about, or genuinely don’t care about. You know everyone says that women don’t dress for their men in their lives, who don’t notice or care that much what they’re wearing. Again that’s not always true, but as a generalization it’s what circulates.

But I do think that now those images are always playing with a certain kind of transgressive charge. Like the one that you sent which wasn’t just lesbian, but was Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell. So, you know, it’s a black woman and a white woman…

Kate Moss and Naomi Campbell, Vogue Paris February 2008

And I think fashion since probably the 60s has become more of a site of potential rebellion or, I mean it remains incredibly conformist, by definition. It’s about being in style and doing what you’re told to be doing this year. But I think there started coming into play in the 60s a certain kind of rebellion or hipness or esotericness, being part of an avant-garde which you see shaping the imagery.

And that was interesting, too, to realize that in the Victorian period, fashion was really much more conventional. And also to see that instead of mothers and daughters fighting about whether the daughters could be in fashion…because now the sense I have is that mothers are shocked by what’s in style a lot of the time and tell their daughters, “No! You can’t dress like that.” When you read about conflict in the Victorian period, it’s about daughters who don’t want to be in style, and mothers saying you have to dress this way, this is what’s expected of us in society.

But more of the time you just got the sense that it was a real bond between the older and younger generation. There wasn’t the same sense of fashion defining a generation and creating generational conflict the way there is now. And part of the main source of generational conflict between parents and children is sex. So fashion is supposed to be sexy, it’s how you show that you’re sexy. And it seemed that non-normative sexualities can sometimes read as more sexy than mainstream ones.

I kind of wonder, it seems like there’s some of what you were talking about going on still. I mean lots and lots and lots of women, women who don’t necessarily want to be all that transgressive and women who do, just lots of women read fashion magazines, right? And they’re all about looking at images of fetishized women. So there still is this important component of being a heterosexual women which is about appreciating the fetishized bodies of other women, and which isn’t necessarily always about lesbianism at all.

I think the real question now is whether for the millions of women— I just watched the September Issue [a documentary about Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue] and it was actually really interesting, because it was a glimpse into how they put together the issue [which is the biggest of the year]…and they were clearly trying to find a story. Because there’s not a lot of suspense. You know that the September issue came out. You can’t sit there worrying about whether they’re actually going to put the issue together.

And a lot of it is about how mean and cold and harsh Anna Wintour is , trying to get some traction around that, but in fact it’s clear that although everyone around her is nervous because she’s the big boss, they also kind of worship her and think she’s amazing. But she’s the editor-in-chief, but she also has a creative director, a woman named Grace [Coddington], who is about the same age she is, and is a former model, and she is the vision behind a lot of the images.

So that was interesting to me, to see that although most of the photographers are men, there’s this women in her 50s, practically 60s, who is really kind of masterminding what the shoots are going to look like, and she loves looking at these models. At one point she refers to a husband, so presumably she identifies as straight.

I think the question now is what’s on women’s minds when they sit, millions of women, who presumably many of them think of themselves as mainstream, not just heterosexual, but mainstream, what’s on their mind as they turn page after page after page of these incredibly erotic images of women. Are they disavowing and denying that there’s any kind of lesbian thing going on? Are they actually enjoying it and perfectly aware that they’re enjoying it? I don’t know how they think about it.

I mean for writing about the Victorian period, I kind of have the convenient problem that there’s no way I can go back and ask the subjects what they’re thinking. I could read what people wrote about fashion and it just…even when there were these sexual scenarios erupting in their fashion magazines, they didn’t seem to take that and extend it to the rest of the imagery that was in the magazine. They just seemed blissfully unaware that there could be a specifically lesbian sexual subtext to any of this. And that in a way licensed the images in becoming that much more erotic.

I don’t know what is on women’s minds now. I mean, I’m a lesbian, so I look at these images as a lesbian. And I do wonder, how are other people experiencing these. And some of them are so overtly sexual, and I think in some other contexts might disturb the readers of the magazine.

from Vogue Paris

But in this context, the fashion context makes it safe, possibly because what the fashion context says is that this is about identification, not desire. But part of the whole creation of a visible lesbian identity is that it gives people a way to cordon off identification and desire. Though in my opinion they’re always blended together and it’s really really hard to say where one stops and the other starts. But they tell themselves they’re different, because identification is what you do if you just like dressing up and looking at pretty pictures of half-naked ladies, but desire is just if you’re a lesbian.

So I found your book because I googled Between Women, because I was trying to find a book that addresses what Eve Sedgwick addresses in her book Between Men, but in terms of women. When I was reading your book, it seems like you are using Eve Sedgwick’s theories, but that you’re kind of moving away from Freud. Because you’re sort of arguing that it isn’t repressed homoerotic….

I think it depends. I’ll free associate in honor of Freud, and say the various things Freud meant to me in writing this book.

The biggest concept would be the concept of repression, and the idea that sexuality is always repressed. And that can be a kind of effective circular definiion. You can argue that if it wasn’t repressed then it wasn’t sexuality. But that seems to be assuming what you need to prove, and I think becomes too restrictive a definition. Some aspects of sexuality at a given moment in time and for a given person may be repressed, but that doesn’t mean that every erotic impulse and interest is necessarily repressed. And I think that in Victorian England, women’s interest in other women was not a huge site of repression. I think that what caused more problem was if a woman didn’t want to marry a man. But a woman who married a man but had children and also wanted to go to the skating rink and exclaim over the beauties of the young women skating around…

There’s the one anecdote in your book where a woman writes about how, if it was in line with propriety and the other women’s comfort she wished that the breast of the women she was looking at would pop out of her clothes.

Yes. Yes. And that woman was married as far as I can tell. I mean I read a lot of her diaries and letters, and it seemed like a pretty genuine marriage. There was no contradiction to her. I don’t think that she actually pursued sex with women. She just felt very comfortable having this erotic appreciation of other women. It didn’t cause an existential crisis for her.

So step one where I took a different tack from Feud was not equating sexuality and repression.

Step two would be that I don’t think — I think he contradicts himself a lot and says a lot of different things in a lot of different places about masculine and feminine and whether everyone has a mixture of both, or whether everyone has a mixture of both in childhood but then as part of maturity has to become defined much more strictly as one gender rather than the other. He is really interested in castration as the way that gender gets understood, again, kind of contradictory, is that more important for men or really important for both sexes? He really I think sees there being two sexes and that that is very defining for people. And, of course along with castration he’s really interested in Oedipal dynamics, nad in the family as a source of prohibition, and that the family generates sexual desires which it then prohibits. That brings us back to repression, that being really really central. And I was interested in thinking outside of the family as the primary unit for defining, shaping, and containing sexuality. So that’s one place where I was not taking a Freudian perspective.

I think…there’s a book that came out a little bit before mine by Martha Vicinus, called Intimate Friendships, and she’s really interested at looking at how these relationships between women take on different kinds of family models. Like a maternal model, or a sororal model, or a husband-like model. And she definitely finds individual case studies that fit those rubrics. But she wasn’t’ really generalizing about a whole bunch of people. She was looking at a few specific cases, that I think she herself would say were kind of idiosyncratic. Which I don’t see her cases as necessarily as idiosyncratic as she did. I don’t see women who were in intimate relationship with other women as being so cut off from their society.

I think that I ended up getting very interested in things that did not seem to be particularly unconscious. And I guess we would say the main Freudian contribution is that a lot of what we feel and think is unconscious. I wouldn’t necessarily deny that, but it leads to this sort of assumption that for things to be really interesting they have to be hidden. And I found all kinds of interesting, wacky stuff that didn’t seem to be at all hidden. And that people had ignored because it didn’t have that charge of repression, so the critic and the analyst can come along and expose it. I was finding stuff that people were saying in diaries and letters that were meant for other people to read, that people were publishing in magazines, that they were writing in novels — one didn’t have to dig to find erotic desire between women.

And I think that in for Eve Sedgwick, it’s one of her early books, and I think she ended up moving away from this model, but she’s really looking at how Victorian society repressed erotic and sexual desire between men, and forced it to take the forms of either heterosexual exchange of women between men, or violence between men. Repressed desire can only surface as violence. Now I did find a lot of examples of aggression between women or between girls and these female objects of dolls, but again it didn’t seem like it was the manifestation of something that had been repressed, it just seemed like aggression. It seems like aggression is a fundamntal drive between people, and maybe even a fundamental part of eroticism, and it doesn’t seem to me like it’s a sign that something has been repressed.

It didn’t seem like the girls were fantasizing about whipping or being whipped by their dolls because they had no way to express their erotic desires for women. Because the whipping stories were already erotic — if they were supposed to be covering something up or serving as something that masked eroticism, they weren’t doing a very good job of it! And there were always these moments in these stories too where a girl would talk about an older woman in a very admiring or adoring way, or even talk about wanting to marry some woman. So it didn’t seem like any of this stuff was hidden, and perhaps because these were girls who were being discussed and they were so young, there wasn’t as much concern.

From Clara Bradford’s, Ethel’s Adventures in Doll Country, 1880, with sentient sticks for better chastisement. Reprinted in Between Women.

Though that was of course very surprising, because what I would have expected knowing what I know about the Victorian period from a select group of novels…I mean, I’ve read many Victorian novels, but it has to be said that one thing I found was that Victorian novels are not necessarily representative of anything except Victorian novels. There’s a whole other world of Victorian discourse that shows things and says things that don’t show up in novels. The Victorian novels would have led me to expect that girls were supposed to be sweet and not aggressive and not have any kind of sexual desire whatsoever or any kind of erotic expression, and that just turned out not to be the case. And of course these are books written by adults, not by girls themselves, but usually by women, so it was interesting to see that these women are perceiving all these things in little girls that are very very different than primarily male novelists or Victorian painters —who would paint these very saccharine sweet angelic looking little girls — were willing to think of as being part of girlhood.

So yeah, the violence between girls and their dolls doesn’t seem like it’s there because there’s no other way for girls to express affection for feminine objects. It seemed like just part of what it meant to be a girl.

So in arguing that this particular thing isn’t repression, that seems to call into question at least to some degree how much repression works in other areas as well, right? In terms of the repression of homosexual desire and whether that’s really a problem.

I don’t think it necessarily proves that Eve Sedgwick was wrong, because I do think that male sexuality and female sexuality were treated fairly differently. I think it comes as a little bit of a surprise, to me even, after haivng spent all this time with this material, to realize that in some ways male sexuality in the 19th century might have been more severely policed than female sexuality. At least same-sex eroticism. Because we’re used to thinking that men, especially middle-class and wealthy men, you know, there was a double sexual standard, they could have sexual experience before marriage, they could have extra-marital affairs, they could go to prostitutes. None of these things were really allowable for women. They would have caused women to be completely ostracized, whereas this kind of behavior in men was tolerated, even encouraged.

But it turns out that when it came to same-sex eroticism, I do think that men were more policed than women. And I don’t think Eve Sedgwick was…I think that was the intuition she was working with in a way, and some historical research has appeared since her work that suggests that it was actually true. And you know there is no female equivalent to the Oscar Wilde trials. Even though there were women, some of them fairly prominent activists, journalists and artists, who were in relationships with other women. But there wasn’t the same sense that your reputation could be utterly ruined by haivng your same-sex affairs exposed.

from The Queen, 1851, reprinted in Between Women

And partly there was a legal difference, in England anyway. Because it was criminal for men to have sex with each other. Sodomy was a capital crime and, while in the early modern period there were cases of sodomy between women, by the 19th century sodomy was understood as something that existed only between men.

One of the results of this is that your book is a lot cheerier, than Eve Sedgwick’s book. Because for you the erotic relationship between women, it’s all good. It’s good for everybody, right?

Yes. (laughs)

It’s good for women, because they get emotional benefits, but it doesn’t hurt men either, because it makes women more conventional, in some ways.

Yes, that was true of women’s erotic interest in one another, and …the only thing I would want to throw into the mix is that one of the things I ended up wanting to insist upon fairly strenuously was that female friendship, while it offered a lot of the physical intimacy and interest that we associate with eroticism, that female friendship was not the same as what was going on in the fashion magazines. In that female friendship was this very idealized category where women were kissing and hugging and writing each other these rapturous letters that now read like love letters — these relationships really were, many of them, were friendships.

And one of the things I was trying to point out too is that it’s complicated. You can’t read one letter that a woman sends to another and say, “oh here we see, just friendship,” or here we definitely see erotic interest. You have to look at the history and context of the relationship in the person’s life.

So I would say in terms of the cheery view, one of the things that I expected, that had been said a lot in the scholarship, was, oh, women’s friendships were marginalized and suppressed and demeaned. And there are a couple of people [in the Victorian period] who would say from time to time, women shouldn’t put too much energy into their friendships, or women’s friendships aren’t to be trusted. But in general I found this incredible idealization and glorification of female friendship and respect given to it, and that women actually made a lot of time for their friendships. Whether they were friendships with people they saw on a regular basis or friendships that were epistolary. I mean, one thing you come away with from this material was awe at the amount of time people had to write letters. I guess with our age of blogging and emails we probably are giving the Victorians a run for their money.

So female friendship wasn’t seen as competing with marriage. And women’s erotic interest wasn’t seen as competing with marriage. And there weren’t — because there wasn’t a movement of women who were interested in exclusive sexual relationships with women and avoiding relationships with men, those relationships weren’t seen as a threat either because they werne’t linked to a whole political challenge to the system of heterosexuality, even if the individual women in them did see them as challenging heterosexuality.

I just didn’t find a lot of evidence of anxiety.

You also say that there isn’t this anxiety among men, there isn’t this anxiety among women, but at the same time you were arguing that the existence of this sort of normalized erotiized bonds between women meant that women who were lesbian could form marriages. Essentially female marriages then were less controversial then than they are now.

Yes, female marriages didn’t seem as odd because in many ways they overlapped with relationships that the majority of married women had.

So one of the things I was going to ask Is — did the Victorians do better than we do in some sense in terms of their treatment of gay relationships?

I thought that question was very interesting. If I were asked if I would rather live then or now, no question I would pick now. Not only do we have contact lenses, running hot water, refrigeration…but I think that there’s…

Okay, sexual identity really fixed sexual identities are really constraining in a lot of ways, and also often very inaccurate. I know very few straight women who haven’t at some point has some sort of sexual experiment, affair, contact with at least one other women, often several, but they never really stop thinking of themselves as straight.

You may have some sample bias.

I don’t really care, but of course people tell me this stuff, because of who I am.

(laughs)

This is also, like when people were in their twenties, before they got married. I just think things are very fluid still for women, but it all has to be thought of in very different ways.

The way the Victorians had it better off I think is that they didn’t have to sit around torturing themselves with frankly rather inane questions like, am I a lesbian? Am I straight? Am I bisexual? On the other hand, I think it can be difficult not to have ways to organize your experience.

from Revue de la mode, 1885, reprinted in Between Women

I mean the women in female marriages seemed to find each other very easily, so there were these subcultures or networks of women who lived in Italy or lived in England, and a lot of time they were expatriates, and then if they went to Paris they knew who to look up. So they didn’t seem to be isolated — I mean that’s one of the things identities brought people in the twentieth century was a sense of community. But of course communities always end up foundering when they’re based on identity because people start policing the identity and if you step outside the defined boundaries of the identity it can be really problematic.

I think you see the same thing now with gay marriage; the way that the gay community is in some ways fissuring about the question of whether marriage is a permissible part of the gay identity or not. So that people who are really invested in queerness are kind of…I would almost say repulsed by the embrace of gay marriage among a lot of gay people, because they feel that was not what being gay was about. Being gay was about saying I’m going to defy institutions like marriage.

So I see all the negative baggage that comes with identity. I also see how being part of a group that form the start was defined by the mainstream in terms of stigma and deviance, has been kind of a mixed blessing.

But I don’t know, I think it’s in some ways I can’t even answer the question, because it’s hard for me to really imagine what it would like to be me living in this very very different time. I mean I could sort of establish a conceptual and sympathetic scholarly relationship with these people, but I don’t know who I would be if I were in Victorian times.

Well I think one of the things that’s interesting about it is — you could argue about whether the Victorians were better or whether it’s better now, but there was a period in the middle where it was clearly worse than either, right?

Yes.

I was reading John Boswell writing on gay Catholicism in the Middle Ages, and he was basically arguing that the worst time in history to be gay was like 1950 in the west.

Well, yeah, sure, being identified with Communists, perverts, pedophiles, probably serial killers — it’s interesting, because there’ve been periods in time when sodomites were identified with kind of the unthinkable, Satanic, bestial, the thing that’s so bad we can’t imagine. But no one actually thought of an actual person as being a sodomite. This was a point that Alan Bray made in his book on sodomy in early modern England. There’s all this discourse about sodomy as being the worst thing imaginable, so you can’t even imagine it. And then there are all these people writing about how John had sex in a closet with Tom. And they’re not connecting the dots. Why aren’t they connecting the dots? Because a sodomite couldn’t even be a person that you knew. You couldn’t put the two together.

Unfortunately, I think what happened around 1950 was — well I guess everyone had become so closeted that no one actually knew any gay people anymore, they didn’t know that they knew any gay people unless they themselves were gay. And then when you found out someone was gay, it was much easier to connect them to all this propaganda about how evil gay people were. So I think it was the combination of this association of gay people with a set of fears that were really panicking people and the intense closeting that was a response to all the witch hunts that were going on. And I do think that one of the real big things that changed all of that was people coming out more. It’s very, very difficult to really demonize people that you know. I mean, people have proved that they are quite capable of doing that under the right circumstances, but there really have to be circumstances.

And there we go back to the comparison between the Victorians and now. People couldn’t come out unless they come out as something, so there you need the identities. They’re limiting, they allow a group to be singled out, and generalized about in a way that the Victorians just didn’t do. But [identities] also limit what people…I don’t think most people feel comfortable acting on the range of their erotic impulses. Well sometimes that’s good….

(laughs)Well Freud would say that’s really good, right?

Because sometimes those impulses are destructive, but I think that in some ways, yes the Victorians were a little, unexpectedly, counterintuitively, were more sexually free than people are now. Maybe not sexually free, but erotically free. Because there wasn’t the same close connection we make now between erotic impulses and sexual identities.

I also wonder if it’s in some ways possible to sort of see the Victorians in this more positive light because things are…because Eve Sedgwick, part of what was going on with her, part of why it was such a grim view, was because she was writing during the AIDS epidemic, and it was really depressing. And I’m wondering if the fact that now we’re moving towards a place where most people think of marriage between women as okay — if that’s one of the things that makes it possible to recognize that the Victorians thought it was all right as well.

Well, I think it’s impossible to write about the past without being influenced by what’s going on in the present, and I think it was really interesting to me to see how in my lifetime, I’m 44, people had gone from being really incredulous about the existence even of actual lesbians, I mean, like really, is that even possible, what do they do? Side by side with the constant pornographic representation, usually not too accurate, but still it’s there, of what lesbians do. But there was this sense of unreality about lesbians, and maybe hyperreality about gay men.

How quickly people could move from that to, oh yeah, they get married now. Oh yeah, they have kids now. It took so little for people to be able to acknowledge the existence of something which a little while before they had thought of as completely unthinkable. So I definitely approached the Victorian period with a sense that what people thought was possible erotically or what people accepted or what people would or wouldn’t be shocked by could be very different from what I expected, and might be different from one decade to another or one group of people to another. Because I had seen how rapidly attitudes could shift.

So it wasn’t so much only that things had gotten better, but that things had changed so fast and so intensely in ways that you know that in the middle of the AIDS epidemic it didn’t seem possible that things could change that quickly, just as when it started it came out of nowhere. From the 70s being such a period of sexual celebration, and then all of a sudden there was a really huge health crisis going on.

So a lot of what the book is about over and over again is plasticity and mobility and elasticity and how much things can change. And I had definitely lived through that. I hope we don’t live to see things take a massive turn for the worse. But experience says it could happen. It could definitely be something on the horizon.

So getting towards the end maybe I’ll force you to talk about comics. I gave you that link to the post about the superhero swimsuit issue, with the beefcake — which presumably was mostly for men, and in fact, superheroes in general are male fetishized bodies to be observed by men. And that is more or less okay as part of a heterosexual identity — you take some flak for it, so maybe it’s not entirely ok, but mostly ok. So obviously male homosexuality and lesbianism are different, but I wondered if you felt like there was a parallel there.

There definitely seemed like a parallel — it seemed like there were multiple parallels, which made it a parallel. There are these exaggerated bodies that are rendered in ways that are on the one hand are kind of realistic, I mean there’s sort of a photographic aesthetic going on, but the bodies are completely unrealistic, like the bodies of women in fashion plates of the Victorian period — no one could have certain features of those bodies.

by June Brigman and Tom Palmer from the Marvel Superheroes Swimsuit Special

And this is clearly for a male audience, and a male audience that has to be very mixed. I read a lot of the comments, and I know that physique magazines were ways that — the audience for physique magazines in the 50s was a very gay audience, and it was a way to sort of send material through the male that looked like it wasn’t gay.

from Tomorrow’s Man, a 1950s-1960s physique magazine

You know that the guy who drew Superman was sort of really into body building magazines.

Didn’t he also have a whole set of fetish drawings? I saw that book….?

 

I thought that was really interesting…

So, on the one hand you could say that there’s a double audience. Yes, this is for people who really think of themselves overtly as having gay desires, and then it’s for a straight audience that is just into superheroes. But I think that what is also going on is that it’s for the double audience in each of us. It’s for the gay guy who wants to be into this pretty straight thing of the super-hero, and for the straight guy who’s into superheroes, but, you know, who enjoys looking at these pictures of men with their huge muscles and their bulging speedo bathing suits.

by Jae Lee

And you don’t have to, really more for the straight guy than the gay guy, but you don’t have to have an existential crisis about it the way you would if you were looing at something that was more overtly gay. And also it’s not overtly gay in the sense that it’s not images of men having sex with each other. And I think that’s an interesting difference too. Enjoying looking at pictures of sexualized bodies, it feels different to a lot of people I think than looking at pictures of people having sex, which at this moment in time it’s really easy to find also.

Right. Just a click away.

Yes. (laughs) Hard to avoid them sometimes.

Is there a parallel with the Victorians at all, in terms of there being heterosexual males expressing or being allowed to express desire for other heterosexual males and having that reify their heterosexual identity rather than calling it into question?

Well, in the Victorian period there definitely is a lot of the painting and the photography, there’s a lot of imagery of beautiful men. And people have often glossed over that in talking about the way the body is represented in the 19th century as if only female bodies were represented, but that’s just not the case. And a lot of people producing the imagery of beautiful men were men. Some of them were gay, some of them were not. The audience for this imagery was huge, and so has to have included people of all kinds.

I definitely found a lot of examples of young men talking openly about their admiration for — you know, men in our equivalent of high school or even college — talking about how beautiful another man was or how much they love him, or how jealous they are because he seems to be more interested in some other guy than in him, and it’s not always clear to me, and I didn’t do the kind of in-depth research that might give me a chance to clarify — whether they were talking about someone with whom they were having some kind of physical sexual relationship with, or whether it was just this romanticized friendship that women have with each other. Although I think Eve Sedgwick was right about the cases she was looking at and about the culture in general, I think that even for the Victorians and despite there being more repression of male homoeroticism, it wasn’t completely repressed, and there were male friendships that had a real erotic component.

In terms of pornography I would say, for highly sexual imagery — well comics are not, I mean nobody thinks of speedo bathing suits as pornography — it would just be a comic. I mean you wouldn’t get nervous if you were a teenaged boy buying that in a store, right?

Probably not.

Because Victorian pornography was much less visual. It was much more textual. And the thing I really noticed when I was reading it was how polysexual it was. It was almost as though the convention of it was, okay, now we’re going to have the men having sex, and now we’re going to have the women having sex, and what was really noticeable and very different from now was that so much of it was about family members having sex with each other. Now the uncle and his nephew are going to have sex, now the aunt and niece are going to have sex, now the brother and sister are going to have sex.

That exists now too…

But it’s a niche now.

You know where it has historically been a bigger deal recently is Japan. There’s a…

I know there’s stuff about mothers and sons, I read this…

Anne Allison. That’s a great book..

That’s a fabulous book. That was one of the best books…I read that when I was doing the research for Between Women and I didn’t really get to use it that much, but I thought that was a really really great book.

So I think part of my answer has to be, hmmm, I don’t know, because I didn’t focus on men. I mean in that sense I presumed some of the gender differences that in a way I ended up saying might not have existed, but I had to limit what I was doing somehow. So I think that there are other people that could answer that better than I can. But I know that there are a lot of images of St. Sebastian, and he was kind of a gay icon and they were sort of prized among gay men.

Saint Sebastian by Titian, 1570

But they were hanging in museums and showing everywhere and nobody was saying take that down. It was something that all male art critics and all the men who would go to art galleries would look at. And I think that there were plenty of statues of men, basically the neo-classical equivalent of superheores in speedos, I think that was as common in statuary as images of women. It depends on the country of course, so France seemed to show a bit more of a predilection of images of women. And then in the 19th century there’s sort of less and less imagery of men.

I mean, one of the famous Victorian boys books of the 19th century, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, it’s all about boys worshiping each other, and that book was seen as one of the key contributions to the Victorian discourse of manliness. So boys’ adventure fiction would be another place I would like, a guy named David Agruss has been writing a lot about the homoeroticism of Victorian boys’ adventure fiction. So I think there’s definitely sites like this, sites that seem to be the sort of ne plus ultra of masculinity, of heterosexual masculinity that are so involved with masculinity and so interested in masculinity that they end up being also homoerotic.

Which Eve Sedgwick would say would get them in trouble, but which seemed to not necessarily have done so.

I don’t think the authors of boys’ adventure fiction were getting in trouble.


I was winding the conversation up, but Sharon brought up Lost Girls…so we decided to talk about that a bit.

I was surprised actually that Lost Girls hasn’t come up.

Oh yeah? Have you read that?

Yeah.

What did you think?

I didn’t know it existed while I was writing Between Women and then in 2008 I was actually in Paris on leave for a couple of months and I decided I wanted to engage with an aspect of French culture that I had not engaged with before. So I thought, French movies aren’t what they used to be and I’d seen enough of — I mean, I still went to a lot of movies, but there was another time before that I had been in Paris that I think I went to a movie every night.

So I thought what is there? It’s not going to be pop music, that’s just going to be too depressing. So I thought, oh they’re so into the bande desinee…and in the meantime I had of course read more graphic novels and things like that. And I would frequent these various comic book stores, which were really pretty inspiring and they would have a lot of American stuff. And they had Lost Girls which is British not American right, and I was like — what is this, I’ve never seen this before.

And I think of it as a great retort to A.S. Byatt’s Possession, which is — there are a lot of neo-Victorian literature that one of the main things it does is try to go back and imagine, well, if we were to rewrite all these Victorian stories and put sex into them, what would they be like? So that’s what A.S. Byatt, and that’s what Sarah Waters does, really trying to imagine what lesbian Victorian stories would be. And I really like the idea [in Lost Girls] of taking these actual fictional characters and imagining sex lives for them. And I was really pleased on all levels to see how much lesbian sex there was in there.

(laughs)

It really was like a Victorian pornographic world, because it was just like, let’s go for every configuration possible.

from Lost Girls by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie

So you liked it.

Yeah, I did.

I mean I wasn’t — I’m not a comics critic, so I wasn’t trying to have a really critical take on it, but I found it sort of delightful. Like Alice and Dorothy and Wendy get together, and have a kind of Bocaccio you know Sadeian exchange of stories and sex that just goes on and on and on

It’s interesting because that book is all about the evils of repression.

Well, that’s true…

Right, I mean the idea is that if you — not just if you have sex but if you talk about sex…pornography will free your soul.

Mmm-hmm, mm-hmm right. Yeah. Well, I think I have enough of a late 80s legacy in me that I think, sure, I don’t believe completely in sexual repression and therefore can’t believe in sexual liberation, but I do think that expanding the sexual discourse that we have is better than the alternative, which is closing it down. And I felt that the book — it felt like it had a different sensibility to me than a lot of stuff you read, and so I enjoyed that. That aspect of it.

Did you know that Alan Moore was in a unconventional — he was in a long term relationship with two women.

No — I didn’t know that. Polyamory?

Yes, they were in a polyamorous relationship, which ended when they dumped him. And then the woman he did the — Melinda Gebbie who did the art is his sweetie now. Then and still.

No, I didn’t know that. Nor did I know that, if I’m remembering correctly from your blog, that the creator of Wonder Woman was with two bisexual women. Two bisexual women who were like his roommates?

No, one of them was his wife and one of them was his lover, and he had kids by both of them, and then after he died — he died of I think lung cancer relatively young, and the family stayed together after he died, the two women stayed together until they died. He was an odd fellow.

It’s so interesting to me — it’s not surprising there there are all these varieties of relationship and there are billions of people in the world, so if there are even hundreds of thousands of really distinctive kinds of relationship it’s not necessarily statistically significant for the sociologist. But what is interesting is that people who are in relationships that are so different from what we think is the norm are able to create these culturally central characters and narratives and imagery that a whole bunch of people who might feel really alienated form these people’s life choices can embrace and identify with. It’s kind of like the Rock Hudson phenomena.

The interesting thing about it too, especially for Marston, saying that he was able to create this very popular character despite his kinks — isn’t really right. I mean it’s because of them.

Yeah, no, I wasn’t saying despite his kinks. The “despite” part that you’re hearing is that I think if you polled everyone who’s ever enjoyed Wonder Woman, what do you think of polyamory, a lot of them might be like, “oh not for me,” or “I wouldn’t want anything to do with that,” or “I’m against that.” But then…and it’s not like Wonder Woman was about that, but there must have been some relationship between his life and what he was…

She was totally about his kinks. I mean, it’s kind of insane.

I loooove Wonder Woman.

Have you seen the early stories?

No… I’m not that knowledgeable.

She gets tied up like every other panel.

Yeah…

I remember being a little kid and wasn’t the Lone Ranger always getting tied up? I think he was always getting tied up. Maybe it’s a theme in comics in general.

It’s way more in Wonder Woman — you know he has her getting tied up, and there’s all this very — there are lesbian relationships which are not especially repressed, and there’s all this cross-dressing and there’s — oh, there’s the one story where the Amazon ritual is that they dress up as deer and then they hunt each other and then when they get caught they get put in these giant dishes, and they pretend to eat each other.

Oh my god.

from Wonder Woman #3, William Marston and Harry Peter

Yeah, it’s crazy. He was nuts. And it was great. He was a genius. But it’s really — this is for under 8 year old girls.

Yep. Well there you go.

You are not at all surprised.

No, no. Not really.

“You Have To Make A Space”

Interview: CF x Matt Seneca

If I had to pick a creator who best exemplifies the present moment in the comics medium, it would be Christopher “CF” Forgues.  CF’s work encompasses the bleeding-edge immediacy of the most innovative art-comix while retaining the universal themes and broad appeal of classic genre, creating a space for itself that can’t really be forced into any of comics’ established stylistic categories.  There’s a nearly unparalleled intensity of personal expression to his pages, but the elegance of CF’s graceful, delicate pencil lines and the bold directness of his design and color sense often completely transcend the subjective, calling up an archetypal feeling of comics’ essence, as well as a roll call of the medium’s past greats.  As a visual stylist, CF is massively influential; echoes of his emphasis on harmonious forms and his use of raw, unadorned pencil and paint as drawing tools are visible in recent work by many promising newcomers to the field, not to mention a few old masters.

It would appear that, like Chris Ware and Gary Panter before him, CF is being absorbed by the comics medium itself, the particular language he uses the form to create bleeding from his books into the general idiom of comics shorthands and techniques, pointing toward the way of tomorrow by inventing the way of today.  Coming off a star showing in his most recent graphic novel, Powr Mastrs 3, CF has transcended influence and inflection, reaching a purity-in-comics that only a handful before him have; but there’s also a distinct sense that his best work is still ahead of him.

CF is one of our most articulate artist/talkers, a fascinating explicator of his own work and of the medium in general.  I was thrilled to interview him, and I hope you’ll enjoy reading what he had to say.

Matt Seneca

*******

From Powr Masters 3

MS: So, you gave a pretty rousing slideshow presentation on the book release tour for Powr Mastrs 3.  One of the things you mentioned that I was most struck by was that drawings can contain different forms of energy.  What are these energies, and which ones do you try to make a part of your work?  Do the drawings capture them or create them?

CF: Drawings of course can have energy of any kind… every drawing is an evocation of a spirit, not really “capturing or creating” but manifesting, more like “both”.

My work is investigating where these different energies meet in familiar and unfamiliar places, and the moments or places in which they transform.  Looking at these things teaches us about our work, our loves, everything, what we have to do right now in our lives.  Nothing is inadmissible evidence, I try to look at “everything”.

MS: Have the energies your work is manifesting been manifested by comics before?  Are there any artists whose work you look at for inspiration along those evocative, totemic lines?  Anyone who you want to capture the same energies as?

CF: All creative work is about energy, so yes, I would say every comic and more has explored these things before.  Some cartoonists you can feel a lot of shapes in: Kirby, Herriman, Mazzuchelli, Gould.  When it comes to raw shapes I’m influenced by music a lot, many many underground bands, pointless to list.  Just a few artists that impress me in this way are Frank Stella, Morris Lewis, Tony Smith, Lawrence Weiner.

MS: There’s been a tendency toward the abstract in your work for a long time, but in the new Powr Mastrs it seems like it’s taking a more prominent stage, both in the penciled and painted sections.  Is that accurate?  What do you hope to achieve with your abstract, shape-based sequences as opposed to your more representative ones?

CF: Well, all cartooning is an abstraction.  Cartoons tend to be easy to relate to because the character’s personalities and appearances are (at worst) reduced or (at best) refined to an abstraction.  So there you have Andy Capp or Charlie Brown.  I guess to me these things are already happening in cartoons so it’s not such a leap to employ the whole toolbox of shapes.  These shapes are literally universal, and can speak to ideas or feelings that are “beyond human” or maybe “beside or beneath” human.  I’m not sure what the most appropriate preposition is there, ha ha.

Our response to these things can be visceral, nonverbal, or hardwired from ancestral memories and associations.  I believe these shapes have a power that’s inherently cosmic.  Shapes go right to the heart of mystery.  The basic things a shape can represent… numbers for instance…. these things seem to be indestructable, principles that were here before us and will be after we are gone.  “1”, “2”… these are ideas so basic it’s hard to escape them.  We barely can see them as ideas but they are. In that way they are “the ultimate”.  However, they are also very mundane, and even boring, “nothing special”.  We are surrounded by them everywhere we go, in buildings, clothing, furniture and of course in nature.  So the spirit world is the normal world too.

I use elements like this in a story to talk about states of mind and being that are not so easily explained with a normal representative signifier. To me it’s not much different than the stars when someone gets hit, or a cloud when someone’s supposed to be depressed, it’s just a bit more exploded on the pages, and a bit more obtuse. The difference is, these shapes are the subject and the object simultaneously. In this way they remain accessible — you see a square, and that’s it… there’s nothing more to understand.

An abstract page from City-Hunter Magazine

MS: Those more obtuse meanings your shapes and marks carry — they’re not yet agreed upon in the way comics readers instinctively know what pain-stars or depression-clouds mean.  Still open to interpretation.  Do you think there’s any common effect they produce across the spectrum of your readers, or do you think everyone will take them in totally different ways?

CF: Getting hit on the head is a pain we feel on the surface of our body.  There are other pains too, harder to describe, but it’s tedious to assign meaning; meaning already exists on its own.  These forms talk in a mysterious way to everyone, you can call it unconscious, intrinsic, or ancient.  But like I said, it’s nothing special.  What makes it so mysterious is that it’s so obvious, so plain.  It’s so simple that it seems hard to penetrate, but actually it’s just what it is, very simple, sitting where you left it before you started to try getting clever.  Just a triangle, or what have you.  To me, that’s the mystery of life!!!  Ha ha ha.

MS: Do different shapes hold more or less meaning, or more or less powerful ones?  If simplicity is what gives shapes their importance, what about more complex shapes?  I was especially noticing how the “Black Tarp” sequence in your new book starts out with very intricate forms and then simplifies itself down until only squares and emptiness are left on the page.  Do you think there’s a greater appeal to simple shapes?

From the “Black Tarp” sequence in Powr Mastrs 3

CF: Everything has its purpose. It’s not that simplicity gives shapes importance, it just makes them more universal. Different things “appeal” at different times for different reasons, there is no one right way.

MS: How much storytelling potential do you think these abstract shapes have?  To what degree do the meanings in them need the straightahead meaning of more relatable, figurative drawing in order to carry a narrative?

CF: Simple shapes can tell a simple story. Figurative and abstract create an electricity between them, between understood and not understood.

MS: You mentioned evoking spirits with your drawings.   Especially in talking about shapes coding for more nonverbal ideas, my immediate thought is religious iconography and the way shapes like a cross or the lines of Islamic calligraphy (just to name two more obvious examples) can serve as visual conduits to the spirit world.  Is any of your work explicitly “spiritual” in the meditative, rapturous sense of the word — designed to produce a transcendent effect?

CF: Everyone seems to be waiting to hear that I’m using intentional code parented by a world tradition of spirituality, numerology, astrology, cartography, whatever.  The subtext is that this makes what I’m doing more valid or authentic, less a story about something, and more the thing itself.  I don’t subscribe to this philosophy whatsoever.  When I draw I open myself up, I’m not fully in control.  I have to give up or nothing will happen.  If I try too hard, I’m deluded, and I think I’m doing one thing when I’m actually doing another.  This delusion is a lot of the world’s history of religion.  If you want to feel the universe move through you, you have to make a space.

Imagine inviting someone over and taking their coat, then offering them snacks, then getting them a drink, then putting a blanket on them and putting their feet up for them and asking them if they’re comfortable, then telling them where the towels are and so on.  By trying so hard to be a good host, you become the worst host ever.

So if I were to make a comic full of intentional occult (or what have you) references it would make my work “just a book” full of tools that aren’t mine, that I don’t know how to operate… I would look like a fool and I would deserve it.  As it stands now, my work has dynamicism, and rings with a sincerity towards the “spiritual” exactly BECAUSE I have kept all this second-hand claptrap out of it.  There’s me, the work, and a third mysterious thing.  I’m not opposed to these things showing up of their own accord, I welcome it, but I’m not trying to make a show.  The energy of the universe is (naturally) “universal”.  It will power a swastika, a cross, or a gag cartoon.  One is not necessarily better than the other, by which I mean the point is not the symbol — it’s what’s behind it, what’s “universal”.  If someone is trying hard to convince you that their vessel is better than any other, they have a horse in the race… they’re a politician, police, or a baby brained baloney peddler.  And they will continually be looking for victims.

Comics can transport people to another place entirely… if it’s done well, that’s transcendent enough!

MS: Is that abandon — that willingness to relinquish control and let the other things in the work speak for themselves — something that you try to employ in your use of comics’ picture-making tools?  Are there tools you like to establish different amounts of control with?

CF: Pencil is very versatile.  I only try to be sincere in the moment of the creativity — control is almost irrelevant in a way, or at least too complex to quantify.

Kirby draws divinity

MS: You mentioned Kirby as an influence.  Now there was a guy who really did use comics with the intent of creating hermetic, or even straight up religious texts.  I think his raw abstract shapes definitely carry that telegraphing, spiritual power, but I think your analogy about being too good a host is spot-on where his attempts at more explicit mythology are concerned.  He showed too much, explained too much a lot of the time.  Do you have an opinion on how successful Kirby was at putting spirituality on the comics page?

CF: He certainly transmitted his deepest thoughts and feelings.  I think his world was pretty black and white, or he wanted it to be.  He seems to have had a burning rage for answers, and he asked questions on a monthly basis.  Kirby had an acute sense of just who he was in life and in society, he had a great self-awareness.  I don’t think he was trying to offer answers for all of time, it’s more like he was asking questions in a proud notebook series.  He related to things in a big, bold way, and it comes through naturally on the page… the consummate American warrior.

MS: How about Herriman?  Even though he was less overt about transcendence and spirit worlds than Kirby was, I think his shapes and spaces can often put across more meaning than Kirby’s.  What hits home with you about his work?

CF: Herriman was a free spirit, plain and simple.  He was nothing like Kirby, his whole angle of quest was different.  His whimsy belies a patience and acceptance of ignorance, even a celebration of it.  I think he had a keen sense of how small we all are, how little we actually know.  His landscapes compete with the figures in almost every panel.  You don’t need to read into his work very much to see that that says a lot.  He could have drawn anything, but that’s what he drew… he was a very special artist, very generous and humble.

Herriman figures, Herriman landscapes

MS: You tend to ground all the comics pages you draw, no matter how far-out the subject matter gets, in relatively basic, simple layouts.  What keeps the abstraction mainly in the pictures and less in the sequencing?

CF: Well, I am trying to make a readable comic after all. Comics are meant to be read.  You can push, but you need to have something to hold onto or you’re not transported, you’re back in a chair, looking at a piece of paper, and you’ll lose a lot of readers that way because you’ve broken your contract with them.

MS: Color definitely plays a strong role in your work, but it isn’t something you use all the time.  What dictates where you choose to use it and not use it?  What purpose does it serve that your black and white linework doesn’t?

CF: There’s always a threshold to be played with in terms of how much we can tell an audience and still be understood.  Some radio plays shine brighter than a movie because they leave things to the imagination.  This is the basis of eroticism and a lot of religious tradition as well… “the unseen hand”.  So it’s not always so great to use color.  Also I find it refreshing to be reading in black and white, and then come to some color, and then go back to B&W.  It reminds you in the story and in life that there’s more we could be seeing, or more to imagine than what’s in front of us.  There’s things beyond color, too, that we can imagine.

It’s really American to think “more is better, lets do everything we can, all the time”.  When I use it, it’s because “I’m inspired to”.  Usually I “see” the colors on the drawings and it makes sense, so then I know to paint it.  Ha ha — not a very good answer, but an honest one.  Maybe I’m too ignorant to answer well. Some things look better in color!

Color panels from Powr Mastrs 2

MS: Your stories also carry more abstraction, or at least non-linearity, than a lot of comics, but they’re pretty much always still solidly narrative.  Powr Mastrs, especially, seems to be shaping up as something of an epic.  Is there a reason you’ve chosen to utilize narrative in your work?  What about the form attracts you?

CF: I’m aware that there are young people right now trying to make moves in comics and deny the story, but comics are a storytelling medium, more or less.  They can be poetic in the hands of one who “knows” (John Porcellino), but comics are designed to tell stories of some kind.  So in a way you’re asking “why comics?”.

Stories are actually our history, our knowledge, our wisdom.  We can’t live without them!  Stories are unique in their ability to speak on many levels at once in a very intimate way.  I’m drawn to that infinity of possibility.  I want to talk about “everything” with my work, but in an elegant and economical way.  Comics are perfect for this.  So we have funny jokes, economics, significant and insignificant events, cruelty, violence, eroticism, death, and tranquility within one work.  It’s a visual world, with exclusive abilities, living in time…. and still so simple.  That to me is very beautiful. This is what comics are for… if I want to do other things, I make a painting, a sculpture, or music.  There’s no excuse for abusing comics.  Of course we can play with the idea of “story”, and I think that’s a great, worthy thing to do, but I want the characters and ideas to always remain legible within that experiment.

From Monster

MS: So how do the stories come about?  It seems like Powr Mastrs is somewhat improvisatory, following more of an internal logic than a rigid set of plot points.  How much do you compose the specifics of your stories before you start drawing them?  Does a lot change in between the original idea and the finished page?

CF: Yes, a lot changes.  It’s really funny when you’re young, because you think a great idea is all it is.  You think if you can imagine something terrific it’s just a hop skip and a jump until the book’s done.  Ha ha, but that’s not so, it’s hard work, and there’s a lot of ways to skin a cat; which one is the best?  You can spend the rest of your life trying to find out.

Also when you prepare for a story, that’s one moment in time.  By the time you’re finishing it, that’s another.  So it’s always going to change substantially.   But you can always hold the first moment, like that shudder when you see something for the first time, your first impression.  There’s nothing quite like that undeveloped glance, that’s pure magic.  And I try to keep that in mind as I develop something, big or small, whether I’m moving away from or towards it.

As far as composing stories, I get the major points or inspirations at the ready.  Then I improvise to bring point A and point B together….  So you know you want to go from the apartment to the store, you know what to buy, you might even know what road you’re taking, and maybe you’ve taken it 100 times, but you never know what’s going to happen on the road, not really.  Different stories have different amounts of freestyling in them.

I used to feel a little sad or embarrassed about working like that — i.e. “That’s not how real writers work”. But then I heard an interview with Cormac McCarthy, and he said his process was very similar, that if he knew everything about the story before he began, he would quit writing out of boredom.  So making stories is a way for the author to learn.  In a way I think this might be their raison d’etre.

MS: How separate are the characters from the ideas in your stories?  Do you see your characters more as embodiments of abstract concepts, or as “personalities” that just do what they will — like, how rigid is the “logic” governing your characters’ actions?

CF: Certainly they are personalities and simultaneously embody abstract concepts as everybody does.  They work to different ends, and on different levels at the same time, playing their roles to form a complete circuit.  So you have a transistor here, a resistor there, a capacitor somewhere else… if one part moves, it changes the whole relationship and the machine works differently.  Just very basic things like this. Basic, but potent.  Maybe you’re trying to ask where they come from?

It’s not dogmatic if that’s what you mean.  The characters represent themselves.  I never tell them what to do, I don’t control them in the normal way of force.  They each have their own logic and agree, conflict, or neither, or both.  That’s pretty close to a logic gate, i.e. “if A, then C and G” “if C, then not B”.   These nuances are not necessarily very predictable though, because it’s a complex mesh of these devices, all superimposed.  And there is a random number generator in there too, so there’s chance.  This is how creatures are made!  And after they’re made they begin to fall in love, and that changes everything too, so you see it’s not so simple to bully characters into being what you want, and saying everything you think like a puppet.  Like any good creator, you have to be patient and generous with them, and try to have some broad understanding.

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The Internet is the Return of the Repressed

Back in 2007, after the release of You Don’t Love Me Yet, I was fortunate enough to “silently interview” Jonathan Lethem (I emailed him the questions and he responded in email).

Mr Lethem was a remarkably generous conversationalist, and his answers were lovely — well-thought and well-formed. I wasn’t sure what would interest him, so I sent very disparate prompts on everything from literacy to comics to postmodernism. The coherence of this interview is entirely due to his thoughtfulness.

Thanks to bizarre editorial preferences, however, the full interview never saw the light of day, until now. Lethem comments at one point about things you write on the Internet coming back to haunt you; I hope if he notices this he’ll be pleased with what he wrote. I think it’s more the Return of the Impressive.

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Caro: Since I’m in DC and you’re a known baseball enthusiast, got anything safe to print about the Washington Nationals?

JL: I fear not, but I’ll risk it. As a lifelong Mets fan I grew up feeling dread and fascination with the Montreal Expos, who tended to torment us, especially a now-mostly-forgotten cluster of players — Tim Raines, Floyd Youmans, Andres Gallarraga, etc. The whole Francophone thing, the obscure swirling logo on their caps, the name bound in time to some mysterious public event… all combined to make the Expos a source of wonder. The Nationals, by contrast, remind me in their flat, grey, literal existence of the “Washington Generals” (as opposed to the “Specifics”?), the basketball team destined to lose every night to the Harlem Globetrotters. I do like Dmitri Young, though.

Caro: I feel a little obligated to ask you about book festivals [Note: this interview was conducted in conjunction with Lethem’s appearance at George Mason University’s book festival]. I’m wondering if you have any thoughts on the value of putting authors and readers together in festival settings or on the state of literacy in the US in general?

JL: Ah, well, that’s a big question, literacy. I tend to worry about blowing a lot of hot air if I generalize about something like literacy, except to say that I’m in favor of it, fortunately find it everywhere I go, and therefore prefer to believe rumors of its demise are overstated.

As for festivals, all jokes aside, I really do like greeting other writers, and readers too. There’s a tension in this passion of ours, between the fundamentally solitary acts of reading and writing, the completely beautiful monastic tendencies that those activities cultivate in us, and then the countervailing urge to gather, come out of our shells, rediscover the tribal world, exchange enthusiasms, autograph one another’s first editions, brag and complain, talk about baseball, etcetera. I’ve always felt this double-urge very strongly, and I suppose my life can partly be described as a series of attempts to bridge the gap between the solitude of my private obsessions and the embrace of a larger human world — from working in bookstores, where I could meet other readers and press my favorites on them, to publishing my novels and then going out to thank personally the odd folks who liked them. Festivals are a nice opportunity to, again and briefly, resolve the public-private paradox.

Caro: You Don’t Love Me Yet is set in LA even though you are now, given your two best-known books, strongly associated with New York. Did you set this book in LA because you felt it was more appropriate, or more metaphorically significant, or just imaginative tourism?

JL: I lived in California for ten years before returning to Brooklyn — though I lived in Northern California, which in its way is as different (and as pitted-against) Los Angeles as New York is. And during that time everything I wrote was more or less set either in the Western part of the country — the Bay Area, or the desert west — or in a kind of vaguely gritty urban cartoon. You Don’t Love Me Yet actually felt like a return, to me, to the settings and modes of some earlier work, most particularly a book called As She Climbed Across The Table (as well as more recently unBrooklynish short stories like Vivian Relf). But I do understand that for a certain readership I “begin” with Motherless Brooklyn and then continue in The Fortress of Solitude, and that for those readers it may have come as a sort of shock, not just because of Los Angeles but because of the relatively blithe comic tone. I suppose I was willing to provide a u-turn experience for those members of my audience (assuming they were willing to follow me into the new territory, which is never something one should take for granted), just as I’ve felt willing — and sometimes even driven — to disappoint earlier expectations that I “stay” a hard-boiled detective writer, or a science fiction writer, or a postmodern writer, or whatever.

I landed in Los Angeles rather than the Bay Area — which would have been the more obvious home for a novel about hapless hipsters in their late twenties, seeing as how that was where I was when that was more or less who I was, but I realized that after the Brooklyn work — not just the two novels, but the constellation of essays and stories that surrounded them — I wanted to avoid the air of personal reminiscence even more completely. Rather than relying on the flavor of my memories of a place, I liked Los Angeles for being a place I was merely curious and confounded by. I felt free to write into my own perplexity about the way L.A. works because these characters are themselves perplexed (just as I felt safe writing about high-end particle physics in As She Climbed Across The Table because my characters are befuddled by physics).

Caro: LA’s media-saturated, less-than-intellectual culture is often credited with our society’s turn away from verbal literacy toward audio-visual media. It’s not uncommon for writers and teachers of writing to consider the proliferation of non-verbal media as bad for traditional verbal literacy (although there are different literacies at work). Do you think audio-visual literacy impedes verbal literacy, or is it just a matter of access and practice?

JL: Oh, big questions about literacy again! I’m terribly interested in your remarks here but fear I can’t do them justice in brief. Why don’t I just make a mysterious gesture in their direction by saying — yes, absolutely, yes: “different literacies,” even within the notion of a “visual literacy” – for instance, I’ve become hugely curious about the enormous differences in the ‘reading protocols’ that distinguish film spectatorship from comic-book reading – despite the great temptation, indulged everywhere lately, to conflate the two. One is passive and collective, the other so elaborate and private – and difficult, because of the necessity of constantly switching from verbal to visual presentation – that it may in fact be more hermetic than traditional reading. And, though I’ve never made myself familiar with it, I bet video game literacy is another thing altogether.

Anyway, I’d hardly be the first person to note that the great irony of cyberspace is that everyone’s using it to revive the epistolary tradition… e-mail (which we’re using now) was hardly the revolutionary post-literate virtual reality everybody was so hot for and frightened of fifteen years ago… but it is a revolution, isn’t it?

Caro: What prompted you to take plagiarism and originality as your subject in You Don’t Love Me Yet? And why did you choose alternative music as the place to work this out rather than, say, hip-hop, where appropriation is so much more direct and obvious?

JL: Great question. For the record, I once did, long ago, try to write a story about appropriation issues in hip-hop — this was around the time that Vanilla Ice was being compared to Elvis Presley for his usurpation of black cultural authenticity — and I failed. My attempt became a science fiction story about basketball players who appropriate one another’s skills using digital technology, so that a new player could “sample” Michael Jordan — it was a sort of disguised hip-hop story. And — continuing to feel defensive — I have no particular aversion to hip-hop. I feel the need to specify this because my semi-autobiographical character in Fortress of Solitude, Dylan Ebdus, is a sort of purist about soul music and has a great discomfort with rap. Not me, though. Yet somehow I’ve never managed to write about it very embracingly or extensively. It’s one of those things that just doesn’t seem, despite my interest, to be “mine” to write about. Like – ha! – Los Angeles.

Anyway, I had a whole bunch of other reasons to want to write about a mediocre rock band. I didn’t think of myself as having something to say about the ‘alternative scene’ (by the way, since since you mentioned scare quotes, I feel obliged to use them everywhere) in any real sense – this book simply doesn’t take place in the real world in that sense. But a rock band – two guitars, bass and drum – seems to me some kind of homely and encompassing archetype of the urge to blend artistic aspiration and hanging out with your friends – to refuse to choose between the two. And that interests me very much.

Caro: I’m not sure I have the chops to ask this question but I want to ask you about comic books as a literary influence because one of the things that I find myself as a adult not liking about comic books is how disruptive they feel in contrast with reading prose.

But highly literate people who love comics don’t seem to experience this the same way – there’s a deftness at balancing the multi-media form. Reading a comic seems to wish for a more seamless experience that takes a particular kind of literacy to really accomplish. Do you think art and words do inherently different literary work, or do they just work on the reader in different ways?

JL: Actually, I think I want to disagree with you directly here (and this is a distinction I began making in an earlier reply, above): For me, comic books are actually a very disrupted and baroque kind of reading experience, with uneasy shifts between simultaneous languages, and interesting tensions created between levels of ‘reality’ – the cartoonish and the mimetic coexisting – and it is in those kind of disruptions and discomforts that I find comic books most directly influencing my own art. (This is, again, as opposed to cinema, which seems to me a language of seamless immersion, imitative in that regard of waking reality, or dream – and, of course, interesting to and influential on me as well!)

Caro: You’re one of these literate people who love comics, but you have written several long and completely un-illustrated books in quite meaningful prose that take our cultural and personal engagement with comics and other art forms – music, film — as starting points. How do you feel about projects where someone makes a graphic novel out of a prose book, like with Auster’s New York Trilogy? Are they two ways of telling the same story or just a post-literate Cliff’s Notes?

JL: Well, yeah, much as I love that trilogy, that adaptation always seemed a bit dignified and literal to me — for the same reason I was never much of a reader of Classics Comics, and I mostly don’t like doggedly faithful middlebrow film adaptations of novels regarded as important. When one form takes from another I mostly prefer it to be a more fugitive and irreverent relationship, with stuff discarded or hidden, with slippages and rough edges showing. More energy and uncertainty. I’d love to see what would happen, for instance, if Paul collaborated with a comic book artist on something new, from the ground up.

Caro: From comics to lyrics: In your review of The Ground Beneath Her Feet for the Village Voice you say Rushdie’s lyrics “die on the page.” Lyrics play a pivotal plot point in You Don’t Love Me Yet — but not as quotes. Do you think quoting always has this death-effect on language that lives in another context? When you pull from a context that isn’t prose — lyrics or comics — what needs to happen to that language in order for it to not “die on the page?”

JL: Ah, this is the horror of the internet – ‘the return of the repressed’. I wish I hadn’t written that review. I’ll console myself by imagining that every writer has one such regret in his catalogue somewhere. The point I was snottily and overconfidently advancing is one that still concerns me: the difficulty of presenting one work of art within another, persuasively. Yet the evidence shows that I’m compelled to go up against this seeming impossibility. Rock lyrics have been, for me as a reader, a particular sticking point, even in books, like Delillo’s Great Jones Street, or Shiner’s Say Goodbye, that I find otherwise pretty beguiling. For that reason, I suppose, I chickened out and only quoted fragmentary lyrics in You Don’t Love Me Yet — and not even many of those. Mostly I just dropped the titles of my fictional songs and allowed the reader to imagine the rest. But I also believed I was safeguarding myself (perhaps wrongly) by asserting the mediocrity and marginality of my band – I didn’t claim they’d conquered the world, or even the pop charts. It’s that claim, for fictional art – that it changes the course of culture – that I usually find the most problematic and unpersuasive, like the presence of a “555” prefix in a phone number. And this is from a writer, and reader, not usually terribly concerned with verisimilitude. But we all have our sticking points.

Caro: In an interview with Robert Birnbaum in The Morning News you mention your “postmodernism” in scare quotes and emphasize your traditionalism. A sense of history and place doesn’t often provoke the adjective “postmodern,” so I’ve grabbed onto that as a traditional element in your work — you describe it as something that you had to learn by reading less-postmodern authors. Have you self-consciously tried to balance the influence of writers like Coover and Calvino an Angela Carter and those imaginative writers who created what came to be known as postmodern writing with the influences of modernism?

I’m also thinking of the way you mention elsewhere that a notion of “realism” that doesn’t take imagined reality into account isn’t really very realistic. Also in that interview with Birnbaum you say, “in Fortress of Solitude, the superhero is the metaphor that breaks out of the metaphorical and runs amok, distorting the reality.” It seems like metaphor is a much more useful and descriptive concept than “realism” for talking about the distorted way we experience the world. Questions of whether your work is realist or not seem to elide these postmodern influences and your sensitivity to metaphor and how we make our world through cultural engagement. I want to take that quote as saying that reality is itself richly metaphorical but let me prompt you to say more on how a metaphor “breaks out of the metaphorical.” Does it become something else, no longer a metaphor?

In all these dichotomies and contrasts — metaphor against reality, intellectual against inspiration, postmodern against traditional, audiovisual against verbal, LA against NY — the begged-but-not-mentioned one is fragmentation against synthesis: your essays are very synthetic and your novels do try to say something about history, something meaningful about race and class and experience and the way people make sense of the world. In that same interview with Birnbaum you say American writing “gobbles contradiction” — do you mean that it feeds on it or that it makes it evaporate?

JL: Can I say “both”? It gobbles it as it evaporates? I love all these remarks of yours, I should say first of all. Any answer I give here, in this brief form, is destined to be inadequate. But a few observations: yes, I’m quite devoted to the notion that the dreamlife is also life, and that the exclusion of reverie, daydream, hallucination, paranoid or reverent irrational belief, wishful distortions, needful projection, art projects, and other distortions of the ostensible ‘literal’ everyday surface of reality results — to the extent that my straw man actually exists — in a ‘realism’ that is not only impoverished, but by my standards quite utterly unreal. In fact it makes for a kind of kabuki notion of the real, highly mannered and communicating as mimetic only within certain very local and temporal formal traditions. In time such narrow notions of mimeticism may look as silly as, say, the huge prevalence of a bogus jiggly ‘documentary’ camera style in nearly all serious Hollywood films of the past five years, regardless of their subject.

But then again, I’m quite committed — to glance, for a moment, at the evidence — to a choice that is itself mannered, specific, and funky, and I’d be guilty of obfuscation if I seemed to be claiming that my work simply (or “simply”) represented a fuller and more “real” “realism”. That is to say, the metaphor that breaks out of the metaphorical — the magic ring or spray-can that makes lost things visible or goat man in my work — for shorthand, let’s call it my goat man. My goat man is a deliberate affront, a textual problem, an area of slippage or fissure between the use of an (generous and florid) mimeticism elsewhere and the objectionable, suspiciously genre-activating chunk of fantastic stuff — a character or object or environment that blurts out of the category of symbol or metaphor, into the story itself, and demands to be recognized. The chunk of cognitive dissonance my customers are always finding in their soup spoons. For that I can offer no explanation briefer than my collected works themselves. That pursuit is the tail I am forever chasing, and it is my own tail, and whether you find my effort ludicrous — like a puppy on the lawn — or enthralling and terrifying, like the Worm Oroborous (check the spelling on that) depends on your set and setting, I suppose. If I have anything, ultimately, to add to the great conversation of literature, it is this habit of deliberate confusion.

Caro: Paul Auster and Robert Coover have both come up in this email and both, like you, have a thing about baseball. Is there something inherently literary about baseball?

JL: Well, sure, many things. And they’ve nearly all been remarked upon here or there. But one I don’t think I’ve seen clearly identified is baseball’s tendency, with its schematic base-to-base, one-thing-at-a-time, let’s-stop-and-talk-it-over tendencies, to create a strong feeling of missed opportunity, lost chance, alternate outcome thoughts in the viewer. Whereas other sports are largely about things that actually happen, a lot of baseball ends up being about things that almost happened, that could have happened, but didn’t. It’s full of speculation and regret. Stories, in other words.

Caro: Although you have put girls at the center of your stories (Pella Marsh in particular), you have been often concerned with boyhood, with male coming-of-age as mediated by popular art. I heard someone refer to you once as the Francois Truffaut of books (which I interpreted to be because you find boys fascinating but aren’t incapable of doing justice to girls.) You do get asked a lot of those Questions-That-Are-Good-To-Ask-Smart-Men about race and class and popular culture and comics and magic realism: I would like to ask you about girls. Girls in popular culture, girls in literature, girls in your literature. The Mother Jones article on sexism in comics. Whether feminine coming of age is mediated by popular art in the same way as for boys…really just a general prompt.

JL: Let me again be defensive: before I’d written The Fortress of Solitude, I remember seeing an entry on me in some literary encyclopedia that defined my accomplishment (on the strength of As She Climbed Across The Table and Girl In Landscape, surely) as “strong female characters”. That’s a reputation I’d love to imagine I’ve burnished with You Don’t Love Me Yet. But of course the two Brooklyn books are also both books of male comraderie and female exclusion. No doubt in those books, and in some stories, I’ve explored the Hemingwayesque theme of “men without women” (and you’d be safe enough adding “men who don’t deserve women.”) And then the whole comic book and rock and roll thing may have reinforced the impression (though I don’t know the Mother Jones article you mention). But hey, wait, I didn’t write about “masculine coming of age” per se in my essays-cum-memoir — I simply wrote about my own! It wasn’t a sociological book, but a confessional one.

Caro: What would happen if Jack Kirby and Jack Kerouac showed up on your doorstep expecting…something?

JL: Jack Kerouac I’d simply want to offer soup and a sandwich, maybe a shoulder to cry on. That would be relatively simple. Kirby could get more complicated. We’d have a lot of stuff to talk over. Kirby frightens me a little.

Interview with Nina Paley, Part 2

This is part of a roundtable on copyright and free culture issues. You can read the whole Cuckoo for Copyright roundtable here.

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Previously, Part 1.

So that’s a pretty good segue into talking about Sita. You’d talked about how traumatic it was to realize that the film was illegal. Can you tell me a little bit more about how you found it out, what specifically was wrong, and what it meant to get it decriminalized?

It’s not so much that I realized – I mean, I knew that I was using stuff that I did not have permission to use. But it should have been public domain. I knew that it should have been public domain. I learned that part of it was public domain and part of it was not, and the realization was not so much “oh, I don’t have permission for this.” The realization was the severity of the penalties, and how much more severe the penalties have grown in the last 10 years. Realizing that, wow, I could go to jail for making this film. That was impressive! And it’s all because of these law changes thanks to the industry reacting to the advent of the Internet and really cracking down, and it was like, “wow, I could go to jail.”

If you didn’t pay?

It’s not even if I didn’t pay. There was this dawning realization that getting permission was this Kafkaesque nightmare. Because before that, it was like, oh well, I’ll just pay. They’ll say some amount and I’ll pay. I could not have imagined the difficulty of even talking to them. They wouldn’t even answer my calls. So I think that after a few months of getting the runaround from all of them and not having our calls returned, and being told to call other places and then that went nowhere, while reading about the severity of the punishments, maybe it just took a couple of months, April-May of 2008, when I’d been working on this for a few months and realizing There is No Way Out. They’re not going to talk to me. They don’t have to talk to me. The burden is on me. If their deal is that they only talk to you if you hire a paid intermediary, I have to hire an intermediary to talk to them. I have to do this stuff that I can’t afford to do, and I’d better do it, because if I don’t, I could go to jail [laughs] not to mention being fined zillions of dollars.

So it wasn’t a sudden moment, it was a long gradual slow sinking feeling.

Was it pretty easy to find out at the beginning which pieces were copyrighted and which pieces weren’t?

Well, it was possible to find out. I knew that her voice was not the problem, thanks to the student attorneys at American University.

But someone else did that research; you couldn’t do that on your own.

No, there’s no way I could have done it, but at least they did it for free. And they did all this extensive research on the recordings, and we found that the recordings were not a big problem, and that the underlying compositions were under copyright. I knew that from the beginning, but I could not have imagined that it would be that difficult to clear them. I really thought they’d just name some reasonable number, ‘cause they want money, right? They’ve gotta be – everything I’ve heard about these companies is that they’re interested in money, so clearly they’d set something up so they could get money, right? They wouldn’t ask someone who doesn’t have money to pay $220,000 because there’s no way they’re going to get that! That’s why there’s the whole statutory rate for mechanical licenses. I learned that the statutory rate exists because the record industry lobbied for it, because too many labels wanted their artists to record covers that were the property of other publishers, so it was the record industry that got the statutory licenses for the benefit of the record industry. So the licensors were just crazy; there was no way they were going to get this $220,000 they quoted, and that’s fine with them. It was just this dawning understanding that if no one gets to see my film, that’s fine with them. They don’t have anything to gain from my going forward. It’s not worth the trouble to them, but I could go to jail. I could go to fucking jail.

So as the technology to do things with culture has gotten more democratic they’ve gotten more draconian in almost every way.

Yes. This is like a mafia shakedown. Copyrights were always designed for publishers, not authors – you should read this great essay by Karl Fogel about the history of copyright – but they’re a monopoly for publishers and the argument that publishers used to get this monopoly is “look at this writer. How is this writer going to get money? They’re going to get money by selling us their rights. First we give them a right, and then they sell it to us and then we get a monopoly, yay!”

This is so utterly irrational and unreasonable. It’s something that was supposed to be in the public domain, and if the cultural work is lost, they don’t care. They don’t give a shit about my film, or the songs they “own.” So what I’m supposed to do is kill the film. That’s every message I’m getting: the whole structure is designed for me to kill the film. That is the only possible outcome of this. So then I was like, ok, this is censorship. If the system is designed for me to kill my film, this is censorship. And it was a long struggle, let me tell you. Many tears were shed; I felt so trapped.

You found lawyers who were willing to negotiate this?

I had a sales agent who is a lawyer. I didn’t end up using him in that respect, but his firm – he was trying to get it sold to a distributor and the distributors required that everything was cleared first, and the burden of that fell on me. So initially I used his law firm which was phenomenally expensive and also they did a terrible job. But at least the companies talked to them, because they knew the name. So we got the initial estimates from the companies, and for the mere $10-15K or whatever I ended up paying this law firm, I got to learn that $220,000 was what I would have to pay to clear the rights.

But you didn’t end up paying the $220,000.00; you ended up paying in the range of $50K. What would have been different if you’d paid the $220,000.00?

Then it would be free and clear. Then I would not be required to pay additional money for every 5000 copies sold. I have to make additional payments now, for every 5000 copies sold.

If someone makes a derivative work and they use the songs, can they pay the fees listed on your website, or do they have to negotiate their own?

They have to renegotiate their own licenses. The only thing that my license fees pay for is the cost of a copy, any copy that is sold, a DVD or the iPhone app. If you sell an iPhone app of a movie, you have to pay those fees, which means that the iPhone app is either very expensive or free.

So if someone downloads the film and uses the sound, they’re going to have to call and get their own agreement.

Right, it is a copyleft work that contains copyright stuff. And the copyright stuff will probably be unfree forever, so any reuse of the songs has to be relicensed. You could certainly use all of it without the songs. And some of the modern songs are copyleft now as well; you can make derivative works with all of the soundtrack works except the Rudresh Mahanthappa songs and the Annette Hanshaw songs.

I had one question about Sita itself. The first time I saw the film this dynamic of the whole purity and honor thing really struck me, because I associate that so much with this very politicized aspect of Islamic culture, with honor killings, and that was a real obstacle for me the first time I watched the film, because that such a serious issue for so many Islamic women. I realize this film is not about Islam in any way, but this is a phenomenon that’s been politicized in our culture in relation to Islam. I’m not sure most Americans would realize it’s even an aspect of traditional Hindu culture. You’re obviously critical of it in the film and show it as hurtful, yet I don’t think your film politicizes it. Did you think about that at all when you were making the film, that this issue of a woman’s ‘purity’ being a smear on male honor is a really loaded concept?

I think it’s a problem in all cultures. I just had a conversation with a Hindu friend of mine about Islam, just last night, and I pointed out that our ideas about Islam are not Islam as a whole, they’re a very Arab idea. There’s crap in parts of the Koran just like in parts of Hindu texts, and Christian and Jewish – I don’t know if Buddhists have really horrible things in their texts, although certainly Buddhists can act horrible, like everybody else.

Actually, Ken [Levis], who just walked in here a few minutes ago, made a great documentary called Struggle for the Soul of Islam, and he shot it in Indonesia, which for a very long time has practiced a relatively gentle kind of Islam and only very recently this Arab-style fundamentalist style has come in, and the fundamentalists say that their way is the Real Islam – they say that this really tiny slice of Islam is the Real Islam, and I sometimes wonder if it’s just pure oil money that has created the crisis in today’s Islam, because this Arab style is dominating. They do outreach, they go everywhere and try to convince Muslims all over the world to practice it their way, and that their way is the real way.

Any religion has misogynistic practices, all cultures – ours has evolved from a culture with those practices – so I don’t think they’re unique to Islam. We just know a lot more about them in Islamic countries today.

Right, they’re politicized in Islam in a way that they’re not politicized in other cultures because of political Islam and the way that’s intersecting with the West.

And I can very much believe that they’re more prevalent in Islamic countries right now, which is not to say historically. Obviously, sure, Hinduism has that tradition too, and nobody likes it when you talk about things negative in their cultural history. It’s just all over the world. It’s certainly been a practice by Christians and Jews.

The first time I saw the film it was something I snagged on, especially at that scene where Sita is taken into Mother Earth, which just felt so much like a metaphorization of death and yet it’s presented as a victory for her. The second time I saw it I had gotten more into the spirit of it and just thought “this is so great.” [laughs]

I love that scene. When I do talks, I often don’t want to sit through the whole thing and I come in at that scene –– and it’s just “yes! Go, Sita, run!”

You are giving a lot of talks, now, and spending much of your time being a political activist for copyleft. Do you see yourself being self-consciously political in your art now, or is it going to be two strands?

I’m going to do whatever the muse tells me to do. This past year, definitely these copyright and censorship issues have been on my mind. So it’s natural and essential that I express that. It’s very unlikely that will last forever, because I tend to be passionate about things and then I work them out of my system so I can talk about something else.

I’m always singing your Copying Isn’t Theft song, whistling it in the convenience store and belting it out in the car when I’m at a redlight.

[laughing] Yay!

It’s really catchy, and it’s always popping into my head and reminding me to think about copyleft. And I think with the samples of work I read and looked at from throughout your career, that’s a very Nina Paley thing – that little encapsulation of some point that just really gets at the heart of a point in a way that sticks in your head. Do you really just think like that or do you work at coming up with those things?

I’m terribly forgetful, and every day I will hear or think something that seems so brilliant, and it is a constant source of pain that I can’t remember them, and I guess I do this to remember, but I can only do it for a tiny, tiny fraction of what moves through my consciousness. People say such great things, and I get a headache! I’ve had a headache for four days, because I’ve heard such great things that people have said!

You should carry one of these recorders around.

Yeah, but who has time to listen to all that! Sometimes I’ll write notes, and they go in a notebook and I never look at that again. That’s why I’m thinking about the attention economy: there is more brilliance than I have attention for, and it’s really painful. It’s also my biggest concern as an artist, when I make anything: who is going to look at this? Who has time to look at this anymore? We’re all looking at everything, so who has time to look at anything? And a lot of it is fantastic. I know 98% of it is crap, but there’s so much more of everything, that the 2% of brilliance is growing. Which is why, mostly, I love the idea of the free internet as a wonderful culture filter. I just sit there and wait for someone to recommend something to me, but I don’t have the patience to filter everything myself. That’s how it really works – people recommend things that they like. They don’t recommend things they don’t like, and you have your networks of people that you trust, and they suggest things to you and it all works in a very decentralized, organic way. I have faith that this is increasingly going to be the way we filter our media.

Even when things are recommended to me, I have a very short attention span. So if someone suggests a YouTube video, if I’m not hooked after 45 seconds, I’ll give up. I’ve seen YouTube videos that have made me cry. I saw a great one yesterday; it’s so dumb, it’s so perfect for the Internet. It’s the Cat-certo. It’s a full orchestra, being conducted by a live conductor, beautiful 5-minute long composition, accompanying Nora the Piano-Playing Cat. Nora is just some woman’s cat who goes bang bang bang against the piano. It’s a cute cat video that’s been all over the web and this guy did this beautiful orchestral thing to this video.

I think audiences are taking back their power as the scarcity of works goes away. Most people haven’t realized the power that they hold in their attention. I’ve been thinking about how much people pay for attention, and this idea that people have that the work is a product; the work is the scarce resource, and people will pay for the scarce resource. And it’s so completely backwards, because in the digital age, works are not scarce. They can be copied for almost no money, and the scarce resource is in fact people’s attention. And of course that’s the last thing the media industry wants them to think.

And people don’t acknowledge that. Artists pay a lot of money to get attention, but they don’t talk about it. Most films lose money. It’s like 95% of films lose money at the box office, and I don’t know how much time they give them to make money back on DVDs and merchandise, but most of them make a loss permanently. You’d better be glad there are niche audiences because that’s the most you can hope for!

That right there should make you go, “ok, what is happening?” People are doing these things and they are losing money. I was thinking about my All Creative Work is Derivative Minute Meme, and it was hovering at 8000 views on YouTube. And I thought, “oh, I want more people to see it!” And I wondered if I was going to have to promote it to get more attention. So I was thinking about submitting it to film festivals, and the amount of money it was going to take to submit it. I picked out 20 film festivals and it averaged about $40 a film festival to submit, and also the cost of making the DVD, packaging it, the time spent filling out forms, and postage, and all that sort of stuff, and that’s probably $60 a festival.

If it got into the festival, how many people would likely see it? 100 if I was lucky, and probably more like 45. But let’s be generous and say 100. I am paying $6/person for their attention. And I would totally do that. When I look at the economics of me, that’s not a bad investment; it helps the film a lot.

Speaking of the economics of you, Jaron Lanier asked you [on WNYC’s Soundcheck radio program] about artists being able to make a middle-class living, a consistent and predictable living. It’s a general response to copyleft, that this creates a situation where you can’t have an artistic middle class.

I think it creates a situation where you can have an artistic middle class, which we don’t have right now. What we have now is you can get paid for craft. You don’t get paid for art. You get paid for craft. Every animator that I know, or almost every animator that I know, works at a studio, working on shit. They know it’s shit. They do their best to not think about it, but it’s god-awful commercial shit.

Which is not to say that commercial stuff is bad, I’m not anti-commerce. But it’s devised by some idiot, it’s lowest common denominator, and this is what really talented people do. They do crap work. And it’s not just in animation; it’s at all levels. I can say when I did illustration work, 9 times out of 10 it was for some god-awful piece of shit that paid a lot. That’s not art; that’s craft. You can be paid for your craft. But copyleft actually allows me to make a middle class living as an artist for the first time in my life. It’s not predictable. I don’t know how long it’s going to last, but I will say I’ve got more money coming toward me that I ever had before. But the real problem is that copyright proponents don’t like the idea of artists making middle-class livings, because artists are supposed to be fabulous superstars and make millions and millions of dollars. It’s the lottery, the winner-take-all. I think with copyleft you can have a lot more artists doing a lot of good art, making reasonable amounts of money, but this whole fantasy of being the super duper rock star that makes millions and millions of dollars, that is a lot less likely.

It’s the artistic version of people voting against their economic interests because they think they can be Bill Gates.

Yes. Proprietary art is the lottery, and people fantasize about winning the lottery. And with this other system, it’s like, well, if you do this you’re not playing the lottery anymore. You’re not going to win the lottery but you’ll have a much better chance of actually making a living, but no lottery. And they go “Noooo! I wanna be able to win the lottery! And if that means that what I’m actually doing is squandering my talents on somebody else’s piece of shit, then I’ll do that because I wanna be like Madonna someday.”

And by the way, these professional people like Marvel Comics, that’s a product factory. There’s very little of Marvel that I would call art. I’m not saying there’s none.

I have a friend who says one of the things that appeals to him about superhero comics, especially from the ’50s and ’60s is looking for the places where you can see that there was an artist behind that craft factory, looking for that one panel out of 100 where you can see that hand behind the art. That’s what he looks for specifically, and he finds it very humanizing.

That’s really cool. There’s another problem in that copyright is not related to attribution. We don’t actually have laws that protect attribution. You can protect attribution in a copyright contract, when you sign your rights away, you can include things that say you will be credited. But there’s nothing inherent in copyright that says that; that’s up to your contract. So most of these craftsmen, the ones that Jaron Lanier calls artists, they’re not credited. They sold it, and it’s just amazing. We don’t need copy rights; if anything, the big concern for society as well as for individual artists is plagiarism.

With Copying is Not Theft, people conflate copying and plagiarism. Oh, copying is not theft, oh, I’ll just copy this kids’ term paper, and I’ll get an A on it. But no, if you copy it and copy their name with it, that’s copying. If you copy it and put your name on it, that’s fraud! They’re not the same thing!

I just wrote an article called the Limits of Attribution. It’s got pictures; I illustrated it.

When we were going through all the work [on Sita], people kept saying, “you realize copyright protects you?” but it really doesn’t. It doesn’t even protect the people who want the lottery; it protects their fantasy. And also people would say, “Oh, it’s all about money.” But if the corporations wanted money from licensing they would set reasonable prices and they would let ordinary people talk to them. It’s not about money; it’s about control.