Feature: Short Run 2011

For all its arts credibility and resident cartoonists, it seems nothing short of amazing that Seattle, of all cities, has had no small-press festivals.  The city boasts Fantagraphics as a local publisher, which has served to galvanise a strong comics scene, with some energetic and vocal work emerging from the underground.  What’s notable about many of these works is that they appear at the crossroads between comics and zines.  But, the exposure of this work in its home city has been marginal at best.  Until now, that is.

Last weekend saw the inaugural Short Run small-press show at Seattle’s Vera Project.  The event was curated by four local cartoonists and zinesters — Kelly Froh, Jenny Gialenes, Martine Workman and Eroyn Franklin.  It featured over 75 exhibitors, ranging from first-time minicomics makers, to local legends like Jim Blanchard and Megan Kelso.  That “crossroads” aspect was also very much evident, with many tablers exhibiting prose works or pure illustration.  Then there are the people like Jason T. Miles, whose Profanity Hill distribution collects together all aspects of the burgeoning underground.

Indeed, Short Run felt very different from regular festivals — it had more of a community vibe to it, with a bake sale greeting visitors when they walked in the door and tables tightly arranged so that exhibitors could chat to one another across the aisles… if they were able to.  The show floor was jam-packed with attendees and business seemed to be brisk, with many visitors voraciously indulging in the works on offer — I witnessed one lady buy a complete set of Tugboat Press’s Papercutter anthologies (nearly 600 pages of comics!).

Feeling that there was something unique and special about this show, I decided to chat to the organisers over email to find out more about Short Run and what its future may look like.

l-r: Martin Workman, Kelly Froh, Jenny Gialenes, Eroyn Franklin

What was the impetus for starting Short Run?  Why now?  Why Seattle?

Short Run was founded to strengthen our small press community and show off all the amazing work

being made in our area. Seattle has been lauded as a home to comics artists and small press self publishers of all kinds and we've craved a festival that celebrates them. All of us at Short Run hoped that something like this would appear in Seattle before now, but after spending a lot of time wishing and waiting we finally realized that we had to do it ourselves if we really wanted it to happen. It was important to us that Short Run included small publishers of all types, since we each have slightly different interests. Kelly makes true blue mini-comix and has a degree in fine art, Jenny's a zinester and crafty gal, Martine and Eroyn make work that cross between art and comics. We all came together because we felt that Seattle was missing something and we wanted to be a part of finding that thing. We've had a lot of fun and feel really lucky we work so well together as a team.

Did you model it after any other small-press festival, like say the Portland Zine Symposium? To me, it felt like a nice melting pot of various disciplines with zines, comics, literature, animation, etc.

Short Run felt like a nice melting pot of various disciplines with zines, comics, literature, animation, etc. We didn't model it after any festival in particular. We have been tabling in other cities since about 2004, so we had a strong idea of what we wanted out of an event. Ideally, a festival will give artists and writers a stage to show work to their peers and audience while building a strong sense of community. We wanted to showcase the best self-publishers our region has to offer; people who are passionate about their discipline and share it through printed short run editions.

Did your own experiences of exhibiting at other small press events help you plan for Short Run?

Indeed! We've learned a lot from our years of exhibiting. We also had a few ideas we thought could make our event fun and relaxed. At one of our first meetings we discussed our likes and dislikes with our experiences tabling, and Kelly even poked fun at a few of these things in the comics she drew that we used to promote the event. We knew we wanted our event to be free to the public, and the tables as low cost as possible. We were also familiar with the “dead zones” of a table floor, and tried our best to configure the room so that every table was active (we will be better at this next year). Lots of little things were discussed to make the tablers comfortable and the attendees happy that they came.

How many of the exhibitors were known to you already?  Were any of them personally invited to attend the festival?  

A lot of the tablers were known to us. The comics community is a friendly, supportive one in general. We knew we had a great “base” to build from, but we also had the goal of reaching new faces and people who had maybe never tabled before. Once word started to spread, we were emailed by people we didn’t know. We have since received emails from people who came to show as attendees, and felt inspired to make their own books so that they can attend as a tabler next year. That’s amazing to us!

How far did the exhibitors travel to attend?  I noticed a lot of Portland residents — was there anyone from further afield?

Most of our exhibitors were from Seattle and Portland, a few from Tacoma, Bellingham, Olympia, Alaska, and an exhibitor all the way from Reno! 
 

Do you have a rough number of how many people attended the festival on Saturday?

We had over 800 attendees in our first year.

What were some notable successes of the day?

There was a strong sense of community! Both exhibitors and attendees seemed excited and happy to be there. Our exhibitors were selling out of their stock, and making money. One person told us that it was nice to come to a show like this and see so many people smiling.

Do you plan to organise another Short Run for 2012? How would you like to see the show grow?

Yes, we will do this again next year. We are considering how large do we want to grow, how we want to expand our programming, if we are going to apply for nonprofit status, and how we can get financial support. This year we put this on entirely ourselves with our own money. We had no idea if it would be a success, so we had to plan on maybe losing our asses on this. We still wanted to try, and luckily, Seattle came through for us.

While there is a very healthy arts scene in Seattle, a few people I have spoken to say that it's not quite as closely-knit or as much of a community as the one that exists in Portland.  Would you agree with that?  Do you think smaller, local events such as Short Run help to foster a stronger community?

We hope so, that’s kind of the whole point. Portland is a model for sure, they have a huge comics community and zine scene, lots of organized shows, lots of support from their public library, and a mayor who decreed April “Portland Comics month”. Seattle is a bit fractured in that regard. There’s a lot going on with no hub, and no means to see what anyone else is doing. Drawing clubs and groups exist all around the city, and tons of people are making comics, zines and books, but there isn’t a lot of sharing and crossover. Four years ago, Fantagraphics opened a store and gallery in Georgetown and this has been a great place to see comics-loving people at least once a month when they have a new art opening, or a comic artist from out-of-town appears, or there’s a book launch. We need more spaces like this, and certainly more spaces that take on the task of curating a section for independently published books for sale.

Anything else you'd like to add?

We want to thank everyone who came out on a rainy day in Seattle and made our event a great success! Our first year exceeded our expectations and we can't wait to see everyone again next year!

— Gavin Lees

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Review: Nobrow 6

Nobrow 6 – various writers and artists

Nobrow Press, $24, ISBN: 978-1-907704-19-2

Never has there been a publisher with such a unified sense of aesthetics as Britain’s Nobrow Press.  Occupying a strange hinterland somewhere between screenprinting, the Sunday funny papers and sketchbook scribbles, their sensibility has sparked a home-grown comics scene, as well as attracting like-minded international artists.

Nobrow 6 is the latest installment of their anthology series.  This time around, the artists involved tackle the theme of the double.  This is an idea that has resonated throughout literary and mythological history, from Narcissus’ reflection, through the German doppelganger, to Gothic imposters and science fiction’s endless nightmares of parallel worlds.  Given how central the techniques of reproduction are to Nobrow’s artists, it’s a theme that seems ripe for fresh exploration through the comics medium.  In addition to a comics section, there is also a flipside to this anthology, offering 60 further pages of illustrations.  Again, these are mostly double-page spreads and offer some humourous, dark or outright abstract takes on the double theme. 

Art by Sam Kolchoz

On the comics side, Luke Pearson’s opening strip is also one of the highlights of the book, exploring the relationship between art and the reality that it depicts.  In it, an artist leads his unsuspecting date to see the sculpture he has been creating — a larger than life replica of himself. It’s a curious examination of the Nobrow aesthetic, inviting us to question what some of these abstract, cubist images would look like in a three-dimensional world.  The resulting horror is compounded by Pearson’s wicked sense of humour, as the artist lists the materials he used in the sculptures creation very quickly turns our stomachs.

Michael Deforge

This sense of the grotesque is common to many of the strips — each a double-page spread, naturally — such as Stephane Blanquet’s incredibly dark, surgical tale.  His characteristic body horror is rendered even more disturbing here, as he adopts the borderless cut-out style of other Nobrow artists.  The result is something not too far removed from German expressionism and early Soviet animation.  Disturbing, too, is Michael Deforge’s “Splitsville” story that looks at the narcissistic side of relationships and takes it to a surreal extreme, with a man in love with his female double.

There are, thankfully, some more innocent and fantastical explorations, too.  Joseph Lambert produces a classic strip here in-keeping with the ideas of his I Will Bite You! collection.  Reflections, shadows and mirror images all take on a physical presence as he meditates on childhood imagination, and the games we invent when we’re alone.  That same approach that emphasizes the corporeality of images is also evident in Kevin Huizenga’s strip (yes, there’s a Huizenga comic here, which says so much about the heights that Nobrow’s profile has reached in the past year).

Joseph Lambert

Some other stand-out strips include Jon McNaught’s contribution that takes advantage of comics’ artistic abstraction to play with the notion that, naturally, an artist’s characters will bear some similarity to one another.  The noir style with which he renders his tale makes this an altogether more sinister notion.  Herman Inclusus (the sinister alter-ego of Stuart Kolakovich) also keeps it creepy with his wonderfully anachronistic ghost story, which manages to squeeze a great deal of story and development into the short space allotted to him.

Herman Inclusus

The formal restriction of two pages per artist, while fitting for the book’s theme, is also often its downfall.  Many of the artists here work in broad strokes, or in a decompressed way that makes their strips feel unfinished or underdeveloped.  Irkus Zeberio’s brilliantly conceived “Fukushima” strip falls unnecessarily flat, and Malachi Ward’s piece feels more like a teaser for a larger work than a complete story.  It’s artists like Lambert and McNaught for whom small, compressed panels form part of their style that are able to flourish under these constraints.

There is much promise in many of the artists on display here, many of whom have yet to find a wider, international audience.  With the continued growth of the publisher and their ability to attract bigger names like the aforementioned Huizenga, Blanquet, and cover artist Tom Gauld, it would seem likely that we will see some vital new art emerge from this homegrown scene very soon.

— Gavin Lees

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Review: The Manara Library Vol. 1 by Milo Manara and Hugo Pratt

The Manara Library Vol. 1 – Hugo Pratt (w) Milo Manara (w/a)

Dark Horse, $59.99, 978-1-59582-782-1

It’s one of the great ironies of the 20^th Century that the best and most-enduring visions of the American West have come from Europeans — the films of Sergio Leone (and the music of Morricone), Django, Moebius’ Blueberry, to name but a few.  To that pantheon, we can safely add Milo Manara.  Although more famed for his erotic works, Manara’s dramatic Westerns stand as beautiful works of art, and invite us to reconsider any preconceptions that we may have of him.  They are also certain now to endure for English-speaking audiences, thanks to these handsome hardcover reissues of his work.

Within the context of the current reprint renaissance, it’s pleasing to see this reframing of Manara as a serious cartoonist. American audiences tend to view his work as exploitative and pornographic and, while there is a helping of sex and nudity in this volume, it is tempered by the craft and literary weight that the creators bring to them.  This is helped by the introductions from Italian comics scholar, Andrea Plazzi, and Frank Miller (who, whatever your opinion of his current work, was responsible for a surge in interest in Japanese comics in the ’80s and remains hugely influential).  By framing his life as an avid student of illustration and comics, with a strong devotion to the work of Hugo Pratt and Moebius, they ground Manara as a consummate artist and help to demystify his notoriety.

Of course, nothing helps to do that more than the work itself.  Contained herein are two albums from the early 1980s: Indian Summer and The Paper Man (leaving something to be desired of the cover’s promise of “Indian Summer and other stories,”) the former being a collaboration with Hugo Pratt, who the young Manara not only revered, but mythologised in his H.P. and Giuseppe Bergman series.  The resulting work is nothing less than stunning.

Indian Summer begins elegantly with a 9-page wordless sequence that acts as the story’s catalyst.  On a beach, a young pilgrim girl is raped by two American Indians. The tragedy and savagery of this act is offset by the stillness of the landscape, and the elegant squalls of seagulls flying past, so much so that it strikes a curious tone that’s neither horrific nor gratuitous, but rather serene and matter-of-fact…which makes it all the more chilling.  Even Manara’s notoriously lustful gaze is tempered. His usual indulgence in the soft curves of his women is less evident, and when Sheva is stripped of her clothing, her nudity serves more to shock than arouse.

Although the scenario is Pratt’s, it is naturally Manara’s line that makes this opening so powerful.  His style is so idiosyncratic that it is instantly recognisable, and the range of subjects here allows us to appreciate it in great depth.  From the rolling sands of the beach, to wild, untamed forests and crude pilgrim villages, his backgrounds practically overpower his characters.  So meticulously rendered are they and with such subtle expressionism — billowing clouds that suggest mystery and changing weather practically dictate characters’ thoughts to us — that we can follow the story’s emotional dynamics through landscape alone. 

But Manara’s true talent obviously lies with his figures.  So gentle and fine is his ink-line that allows for a great deal of nuance in every character.  In a story such as this with a large ensemble cast, it’s difficult to think of any other artist being able to capture such a diverse range so well.  In his bodies and faces, it is easy to see the indebtedness to Moebius (and also in the tell-tale stippled hatching) but equally easy to trace his influence on modern artists like Paul Pope and Frank Quitely, with the expressive body language that he seemingly so effortlessly employs and an obsessive attention to detail in even the smallest wrinkle of cloth. 

In his crowd scenes, he avoids the mistake of having a single focal point for every figure.  Rather, they capture the chaos of the scene, with each character fully acting their part.  It’s a wonder that he did not go on to illustrate war tales, or become more renowned as an action scenarist.  

Perhaps it is not so baffling, though, as it is Manara’s women that overshadow all else.  He obviously takes great pleasure in capturing their form, as every one of his female characters is impossibly beautiful and sensual.  With the loose period clothing here, he indulges in several opportunities to flash a buttock or breast — the female lead in The Paper Man is even referred to as “Princess Rump-in-the-Breeze” — yet, it never really feels exploitative.  Yes, the women are sexually-charged (but so are the men, in a far more insidious way) but they are also strong and empowered, rarely weakening in the company of men or driven by romance.

For that very reason, this volume should be everyone’s introduction to Manara’s work. It is easy to flip through Click or Butterscotch and dismiss it as degrading, but works like Indian Summer and especially The Paper Man — with its tough, no-nonsense Indian girl — show that Manara was a true artist.  Even as a writer, he has been given his due with a new, polished translation from Kim Thompson that reflects the vivacity of the original prose.  This is stunning work and a welcome addition to the comics canon.

— Gavin Lees

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Review: The Unexpected #1

Cover by Rafael Grampa

The Unexpected #1 – various writers, artists and editors

DC Vertigo, $7.99

No sooner had the monthly anthology been declared dead than it began to make a resurgence.  The recent relaunch of Dark Horse Presents — back in print form, and thankfully without the MySpace backing — and DC’s Strange Adventures showed that not only was there a market for these comics, but also top-level talent who were willing to jump on-board.  Now DC’s Vertigo imprint is getting in on the action with The Unexpected which delivers much of what we’ve come to expect from the publisher in terms of both content and creators.  Where it differs from past Vertigo anthologies, though, is in its pairing of established names with fresh new talents.

Script and art by Dave Gibbons

The title, almost certainly deliberately, hearkens back to Roald Dahl’s morbid and macabre short stories, and their rather successful TV adaptations.  Rather than willowy ladies gyrating in frontof a fire to introduce these tales, though, we have a frankly bizarre cover from Rafael Grampa — a lady wearing a furry pig-head and candy-striped chaps, about to bludgeon a pair of drive-in lovers to death with a mace.  From here, anything’s possible.

Indeed, the stories on offer inside are wildly varied, from post-apocalyptic survivalism, to folk legends and magicians.  The latter subject kicks the whole series off with a story — written and drawn — by Dave Gibbons.  Taking equal parts Jason Lutes, Christopher Nolan and Michael Chabon, it tells of an immigrant escape artist and his early success in New York.  The beauty of Gibbons’ work makes this tale entirely his own, and it plays out like a skillful card-trick.  Exploiting the limits of the form to its fullest, he frequently sends the reader back and forth through the panels, scouring for the sleights that make the narrative fall perfectly into place, and the subtleties that build his characters with an almost complete absence of dialogue.  And, like the best magic tricks, even when you figure out how it’s done, you’re still left in awe of the skill of its practictioner.

Script by Alex Grecian, art by Jill Thompson 

It’s a hard act to follow, but the trio that follow manage to keep up with Gibbons’ high standard.  G. Willow Wilson and Robbi Rodriguez spin a frightening fable about the limits of humanity, with its monstrous implications being even more unsettling than the very visible horror.  Similarly subversive is Alex Grecian and Jill Thompson’s short about an image-conscious zombie.  Thompson’s art is sumptuous enough to sell the premise and the writing sharp enough to make the character breathe across the scant few pages, with the twist subtle enough to feel genuine.  Josh Dysart and Farel Dalrymple’s parable of racism follows and keeps the momentum.  Picking up threads of depression-era literature and adding a touch of the gothic proves to be a winning combination, and it’s a joy just to see new work from Dalrymple.

From here, though, the quality becomes less dependable.  The names you expect deliver — Brian Wood, Dave Lapham, Emily Carroll — all come through with solid material, but others feel too forced or downright unoriginal.  Joshua Hale Fialkov’s narrative of a cheating lover returning as a ghost feels all-too familiar and thinks it’s a lot cleverer than it actually is.  In the same way, the preview of the new series, Voodoo Child — even if it’s title wasn’t cringe-inducing enough — feels like a retread of too many old Vertigo series with some faux-history combined with some cursory mythological elements.  It doesn’t bode well for the future of the already dwindling imprint.

Art by Emily Carroll

Perhaps it’s due to a lack of overall editorial control of the book — no single editor is listed, rather each story is curated by a different person — that prevents this from being the slam dunk it needed to be.  Instead, it becomes everything that was wrong with older anthologies, having the reader lay out twice the normal amount for the issue, when only half the stories are actually worth paying for.

— Gavin Lees 

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Interview: Jonathan Case

Jonathan Case came to my attention back in 2009 when I picked up the first chapter of his Sea Freak story.  It was an intriguing tale about an atomic monster who was obsessed with Shakespeare and spoke in iambic pentameter, in between devouring amorous teenagers on the beach.  Earlier this month, the full story finally appeared in trade paperback, now titled Dear Creature and backed by a mainstream publisher.  It was an auspicious debut and one that exuded confidence and ease with the comics medium.

To find out more about how this book came about, I called Jonathan up for a chat and in the process learned about his unusual life at sea and Portland's benevolent dictatorship.

-- Gavin Lees

I understand that you spent a significant amount of your childhood living on a boat, and when reading Dear Creature, it became evident that the book was informed — if not inspired — by that experience.  Could you possibly tell us about what your life growing up was like?

Sure. My dad had this dream that started in the '80s when he visited New Zealand and it became his Shangri-la — he wanted to get back there. When I was about 8 years old, he bought his first boat as the start of realizing that dream and that boat was in the United States and we worked on it a bit. Then eventually he decided that wasn’t the boat for us and he found another boat that was in Mexico, which was a natural jumping-off point for that big trip through the South Pacific and on. We never ended up making that trip, but we did end up going down to Mexico for about six years from the time I was about 11 or 12 to the time I was maybe 15 or 16. We would work on the boat and we would live on it and we dinked around a bit in the Sea of Cortez. The main mark that that experience left was the people we met from all the corners of the world. We would go down there and spend about 6 months when the weather in Oregon was nasty — we lived in Oregon the rest of the time, on the coast. We would just get to know all these people that either had the same cyclical lifestyle or they would live down there semi-permanently. So, we would all hang around in the same marina and have parties at the top of the dock — pot lucks and that kind of thing — and you were always meeting people from different cultures and different walks of life. That was really the most formative part of it for me.

I was also pretty isolated on the boat. I mostly experienced life through the eyes of people who were ex-pats. 50, 60 something s that were getting away from the rat race and went down to Mexico. So it was paradise to them, but for me — at least for the first couple of years — it was moving away from all the friends that I had, and I didn’t even have that many friends since I was homeschooled. So, I had a lot of freedom, but I didn’t have a lot of connection with other kids. I spent a lot of time in that forward cabin that I used as the model for Giulietta’s cabin in the book. It was quite isolating and her agoraphobia was modeled a little bit after that. [Laughter]

So you still had a physical house home in Oregon?  You weren’t at sea for the full six years?

Right, we would head home basically when it got hot and we would stay in Oregon through the summer and fall. Then, when it started getting rainy and nasty, we would head back down. My dad would be working on the boat a lot, but it was always that the boat wasn’t ready or that we weren’t ready emotionally to leap off and do that big trip. He did eventually get to New Zealand — he and my mom bought a place down there, which they actually just sold — but they went back and forth for a number of years.

Mum and Dad Case

But at least they got there after all that — geez!  So, let me ask you a little bit about being homeschooled.  From the timeframe you mentioned, I’m guessing that you would have been at sea during term-time. Did your parents teach you, then, or did you just work through text books? What was your education like?

My mom and dad both taught me. My dad had a background as an English teacher. We did different things: there was a correspondence course that I took one year, where I had another teacher in the states that I was in touch with… that might even have been before we went to Mexico, actually. But the structure was different every year. My dad would put together a curriculum with his college textbooks and I would read through those. I remember by the time we got to Algebra II, my dad was just kind of scratching his head, so I was self-taught in a lot of things. The whole point of the homeschooling wasn’t that my parents were trying to shelter me from the wicked ways of the world or any of the usual things that you hear about kids being homeschooled for. It was just kind of an experiment. [Lees laughs] I'd had two older brothers and they’d both gone through public school and thought I should have to go through all the pain of middle school that they did. I dunno, my parents tried it for what I think was supposed to be a couple of years and by the time I was going to go into first grade, my mom was going to drive me to public school and I told her, “You can drive me to school, but you can’t make me get out of the car.” [Laughter] For some reason, she gave me power in that situation. Even with my own peer group at that time, I was still anti-social and I related more to adults. I guess I was primed to relate to adults in Mexico more so than kids, so maybe I didn’t even seek out the limited opportunities that were there.

Anyway, that was the experience of homeschooling — it gave me complete freedom in a lot of ways and time to focus on drawing and other things that interested me and I got a great experience seeing a bigger world. But, I had no experience in relating to people my own age, so by the time I was 15 or 16 I told my parents that I had to go back to the States and get plugged-in to a public school before college or I’d be completely out of my depth. And they let me do that, so that was nice.

How did that affect your cultural experiences?  If you weren’t around other kids, were your tastes in books and music and movies being shaped by older people?

A little bit. You know, I had a sense of my own era’s culture through movies and TV when we were at home in the States. We would go out to the movies in Mexico when we’d go ashore and catch a double-feature or something. So, as far as music and movies and all the things that kids experience, I wasn’t totally landlocked…or, sealocked [Laughter] but I did have a lot of time spent with my mom and dad without as much media saturation as other kids. We would have Sesame Street recorded — we had a VHS of Sesame Street — it’s like something you’d see in a prison film. [Laughter] No, I’d watch that tape over and over when I was a little kid. Maybe that’s where I developed a lot of that focus; I didn’t have a lot of stuff vying for my attention.

It was a weird, weird growing-up experience. I saw Apocalypse Now when I was, like, seven. Maybe that was a result of having older brothers.

Weird is certainly the word!  I dunno, though, I get a sense from your work that you’re kind of — I don’t want to say “stuck in the past,” but it’s very retro, and you capture a lot of the styles of the past really well.  I mean, Dear Creature is set in the ‘50s? ‘60s?

Yeah, it’s set in ’62.

Right, and then you did the Green River Killer book, which was another period piece from the ‘80s.  I’m wondering whether that’s a result of growing up with an older generation’s culture?

Yeah, I guess so. I definitely I gravitate towards the older stuff and maybe that’s because I had my dad reinforcing, or my mom reinforcing what was good and what they appreciated and latching on to that. As for the aesthetic, there were deliberate choices that went into that, and there’s also just the aesthetic that I appreciate since illustrators in the ‘50s and ‘60s were badasses! I mean, nobody draws that way today. They’re not trained to. So, you could do a lot worse than to try and emulate that style.

Who are some of your favourites?

Alex Raymond comes to mind as a guy who uses black and white really well. Alex Toth is amazing, his efficiency is incredible. And, older than that, Windsor McCay was a big inspiration. Those are the big heavy-hitters that I reference a lot in my work.

OK, so it’s comics illustrators you were talking about, rather than fine art or commercial art?

Yeah, but if we’re talking fine art, by the time you get to the ‘50s and ‘60s, it’s more conceptual art and pop art. As far as classical art, I was looking at Rodin, the sculptor, when I was doing early work on Dear Creature. When I draw I tend to think sculpturally and I wanted to capture that sinewy expressiveness in my drawings. So, that’s a major influence as well.

So, how was it that you got into comics?  Were they something you had grown up with?

I read Calvin and Hobbes and the funny pages and that kind of thing when I was a kid, and I ate that up. I still owe a lot to Bill Watterson for the way in which I approach black and white when I ink — I don’t think there’s much better than that. But I didn’t read a whole lot of traditional newsprint comic-books and I didn’t start getting into that world and the world of graphic novels until I was out of college, really. I had drawn comic strips and that sort of thing as a kid, but life took a strange turn after I got out of college with a theatre degree. I did this short comics version of the play I performed, which was Sea Freak and that then became Dear Creature. So I did this 10-page thing to give as a gift to this girl that was in the performance… I had a crush on her… It was one of those theatre things, you know? 

So, some friends that had been working in the film department at that school said, “Oh, this is great — we should do one of these short films as a comic book and use that as a way to pitch for a feature film or something,” because they were going to New York and L.A. and doing that whole thing. So that’s how I got into comics — researching and learning with that in mind. But then my buddy said, “Oh, never mind, we’re just going to make it an animation.” So, I was left hanging with this surplus of rudimentary knowledge of comics-making, but there was something really appealing about that, so I decided to use that to tell my own stories. I was going to go to L.A. and New York and do that whole thing with them, but I thought, “This is a way for me to tell the stories I want to tell now, without having to work up a budget to do it or a reputation to do it as a movie or whatever.”

Right, and have it diluted and rewritten by producers and directors and script-doctors and everything else in the Hollywood grinder.

Yeah, exactly.

So, you don’t have any formal training in art at all — you’re pretty much self-taught?

I am self-taught, although I did take some classes when I was in college in illustration. I did multiple levels of drawing and that kind of thing, but most of my development was self-taught, just drawing tons and tons of material when I was a kid. My mom still has my first graphic novel, it’s like eight pages and it’s called Whale’s Christmas. [Laughter] It’s all bound together with yarn and Whale, more than anything — remember, I did this when I was six — Whale wants a Walkman that works under the sea. She brought it out of storage a while ago and it was pretty fun to look at.

But, yeah, from the age of four, I knew I wanted to be an artist — I just didn’t know what sort. I see the performing arts as being quite connected to comics. A lot of the people that I work with are actors — they’ve either done it in the past or have an interest in it — so all of this, the drawing and the acting, it’s all rolled-up into one creative impulse. So, in college I decided to streamline that creative train and just focus on acting, mostly because I felt I had the most room to grow in that side of things and a little bit less in the drawing side… at least in terms of what I could get out of the illustration classes there.

I’d like to talk about the development of Sea Freak, or Dear Creature as it’s come to be known.  You mentioned that it started as a play — was that something you wrote yourself, or with an acting troupe?  What were the seeds of the story?

I needed to develop something as my senior thesis, or senior project, and I was in another play at the same time, I was in Waiting for Godot. I was going to have be competing for a place to perform with all the other seniors and there were three theatres available. So, I thought, “I’m not going to use a theatre, I’m going to do something on the beach.” That was a driving force behind the story, and I knew I wanted to do something with a monster. So, it developed in a class I was taking and with these collaborators that I’d worked in the film department with. I had a guy that directed a bunch of short films that I’d been in, and I had him direct the play. So, it bubbled up out of relationships that I had established in college and morphed out of my college final into something that was more my own.

Was the story you told in the play, was that just a condensed version of the story you told in the comic?

There’s been a lot of development. In the play, the monster falls in love with a typical ingénue character — she’s young and pretty — and their point of connection is that she sings. She’s practicing her choir music on the beach one day by her lonesome and that’s the first time that the monster’s heard anything that he appreciates as far as his delicate sensibilities go. He was still an Elizabethan monster who spoke in iambic pentameter, so he was used to listening rock ‘n’ roll, which he didn’t like very much. That was the point of connection and the beginning of everything, but it was 30 minutes long, so it was pretty simple. The crabs weren’t a part of it — there was a crab! But it developed a lot over the course of re-writing it as a graphic novel.

Now, what year would that have been that you started work on Dear Creature, the comic?

As a comic, it was late 2005, early 2006. I started working on a few sample pages just seeing if I could achieve the look I wanted and then once I had four of those, I started writing the script and I worked on the script for about a year off-and-on while I was working other jobs, and I had a buddy in L.A. helping me edit, which was immensely useful. So I worked on the script and did a lot of revising before I began the drawing, which is part of the reason that it’s taken so long.

Did your decision to move into comics coincide with your decision to move to Seattle — because you lived up here for a while, right?

I did, yeah — your neighborhood! I moved there because I had a cousin who lived there, north of Seattle, and I could get cheap rent. I was just trying to find a place to put down a few roots and get plugged-in somewhere. Like I said, initially, I thought I was going to do the New York, L.A. thing, so Seattle was just a place of convenience. Once I found out that Portland was a hub for comics, it wasn’t too long before I moved there. I moved to Portland specifically because of the comics community.

I see. So, had you been in contact with any of the Periscope Studios people that you currently work with? How did you become involved with the studio?

I moved to Portland and I went to the Stumptown Comics Fest in 2005 and I was showing around some of the pages I had done for Dear Creature and I met a few of the Periscope people — I didn’t know they were members of Periscope at the time. I met Jesse Hamm that had been doing assistant work at that time and he brought me along at some point and so I started doing assistant work and backgrounds and that kind of thing. At a certain point, I think it was 2006-2007, they were moving to a larger space and they brought me on-board as a member. So, that’s how that happened.

The comic itself had an interesting development, since you had published some installments as — I was going to say “minicomics” but they were huge, letter-sized affairs.  I’ve got three of them here, I’m not sure if there were any more.

That was it! You have a complete set.

OK, so then you just seemed to disappear and go to ground. You weren’t at festivals, you were just working on it in background. What was sustaining you through that period?

Let’s see. The whole timeline is really compressed for me now that I’m on the other side of it. I was going festivals and I did Stumptown, I think, and I did different conventions off and on. A lot of the time was spent going to conventions and not having a table, but just trying to meet editors and different people that might be interested in publishing the book. So, I was walking the floors about half the time, and I was exhibiting about half the time. So, if you didn’t see me around, that might be part of the reason.

But I was doing, as far as how I was sustaining myself, I was working odd jobs like I said doing assistant work at the studio and other freelance jobs. It was a long time before Tor happened along, it was late 2009, I think, that I got connected with them. So, they ended up picking up the book and then it was done at that point, so the fact that it’s taken as long as it has is partly to do with just the fact that they’re part of a major published that needs a year, year and half of lead time before they can put out a finished book. It gets into their system and then they have their own strategy for how they’re putting it out, so it was actually done almost two years ago.

Wow.  How did you end up with Tor?  I ask because they’re not really known as a graphic novel publisher, they tend to do manga almost exclusively.  Did you have a connection there, or were they trying for something new?

I had shopped the book around at different places and received a lot of rejections and a few offers — nothing that made me want to settle on anything — and they came along in late 2009 and they were looking for pitches. So they solicited different pitches from Periscope Studio and it just so happened that I had a book that was completely done. [Laughter] So, I had my agent send it to them — Judy Hansen was representing me by that time — she submitted it and Steven Padnick my editor over there, looked at it and loved it. They made me an offer and it kind of — I hear what you’re saying that they don’t have a huge canon of comics. They’ve done a few things as far as non-manga stuff, but they made me an offer that got me closer to regular book publishing. I was thinking of solutions that were a few steps away from self-publishing. There were a few different options on the table, but theirs was the best in terms of distribution, and so on.

Yeah, they’re part of Macmillan, so I imagine that the distribution will be good, and there’ll be good bookstore exposure which is never a bad thing.

Yeah, it was good deal. They left the book intact. Stephen’s editorial came down to like, “Make your ellipsis use consistent!” and things like that. There were a few notes with art, but I think I changed one panel or part of a panel in the whole book. So, I was happy, they were happy and it seems to be doing fairly well for them.

Did you do much self-editing between the self-published chapters and the final book.  I notice some minor, minor changes between the minis and the finished book — so, was the book pretty much done by that point?

Yeah, I did my own mini version of what George Lucas does. [Laughter] I made a few refinements — those three chapters that you have are probably all hand-lettered and at a certain point I decided I wasn’t good enough as a letterer to make that worth trying to do the whole book that way. At that point I revised things that I felt needed revising a little bit. So, there was polish throughout the process of making the book. I didn’t do much with the art, but the text I edited and re-edited right up to the very end. And certainly throughout the course of writing the book, I probably had like 10 or 12 drafts and 3 or 4 whole chapters that got thrown out or redone. There’s quite a bit of that that went on.

Did you ever get frustrated with that process, having that grand vision that was taking so long to get out?  Did you ever get the impulse to do some minis and just get your work out there?

I was actually pretty focused. I’m fairly stubborn and I’m not a good multi-tasker, so I don’t think it would have entered my mind to have tried to take on too much. I did that short piece with Sara Ryan for Comic Book Tattoo in 2008 and, beyond that, I was pretty much just nose to grindstone. I enjoyed the process of editing and rewriting. For me, writing is one of the most enjoyable parts of the process, so I don’t mind going through the process of discovery and reworking things. I guess the challenge is to just not do that because eventually you have put something out: done is beautiful.

OK, let’s talk about monsters!  I was wondering if you could talk about the genesis of Grue, the monster of Dear Creature, and some of the inspirations feeding into him?

Well, it’s not too much of a stretch to say that if you’re a nerd that’s into comics and drawing and stuff like that, then you probably feel a little bit — like we’ve talked about — at a loss with your social norms. [Laughter] Peers and that sort of thing.

I’ve no idea what you’re talking about, I’m sorry… [Laughter]

Yeah, that sort of outcast that everybody who’s into comics can relate to. Feeling maybe like you’re born in the wrong time — I mean, he’s an Elizabethan sea mutant in the modern world. As a kid that was so connected with this era of the ‘60s that my parents grew up in — culturally, emotionally, I felt that when I would go into the modern world, I didn’t necessarily have the same set of tools that other people had, you know? From a very young age, people would refer to me as an “old soul,” so I wanted to put some of that old soul into this monster.

There was also a part of him: the thing that you find precious, everybody else finds ridiculous. The Shakespeare plays are like Grue’s instructional manual for life, it’s like his faith or his divine inspiration and the rest of the world is just like, “What are you, nuts?” That was part of it, for me, too. I see his monstery shenanigans as a spiritual quest. I was processing through a lot of that myself, coming out of college, trying to figure out what my priorities were. I was trying to come out of a place of self and ego and get to a place of developing more relationships; grabbing on to a sense of community that I hadn’t had as a kid growing up, at least from a peer group. So, those were some of the grandiose notions going into that character, I guess.

It seems that the setting he’s in reflects your early life, being in that seaside community with the family that live on the boat — and you’d talked before about how your isolation fed into Giulietta.  So, would you say there’s a bit of you in all the characters in the book?

You’ve got it right on the nose. I don’t know how to speak to that more, but I don’t know that you can write characters without some part of yourself coming through in different ways. I tried to draw them out of places that felt real and experienced.

I just wondered before if, perhaps, because of the origins of the story as a play, that these characters were coming from other people — the actors in the performance.

Yeah, I mean there’s me, but there’s also other actors and actresses that I had in mind as models. You know the little boy, Bobby, that rides the bicycle is like a little Peter Lorre. [Laughter] I had people in mind who are amalgams of classic actors and then bits of me.

The monster himself, even just physically, he’s an amalgam of many monsters from ‘50s and ‘60s movies.

Yeah, it’s This Island Earth for the exposed brain, and Creature from the Black Lagoon for the scales, Horror at Party Beach for the goofiness… [Laughter]

Why did you decide to have Shakespeare be his anchor to the human world?  Was that coming out of the tradition that has Frankenstein’s monster reading Paradise Lost, and so on?

I think the essence of it was that I wanted this creature to be gifted in some way but to have a gift that was almost a hindrance to his chances of being understood, you know? He’s already a monster — that’s a tough row to hoe — but then he had this great ability that almost nobody can make sense of.

It’s almost like you’re subverting that previous tradition.  For Frankenstein’s monster it’s Paradise Lost that teaches him about humanity and justice, and then you have Brave New World and John the Savage who, even though he’s an outcast, because he reads Shakespeare he’s considered so much more noble.  But, with your monster, reading Shakespeare only seems to alienate him further from what he wants to achieve.  It’s an interesting inversion.

Well, good!

So, it’s been a strange year for you, publishing-wise, since you released your debut work, Dear Creature, then in the same month you had Green River Killer come out through Dark Horse. Where had that second work come into the timeline?

It was really strange timing. I just had finished Dear Creature, Tor made me the offer and then shortly thereafter, Sierra Hahn, the editor from Dark Horse from that project got in touch with me because she’d seen a few pages of Dear Creature because I had been showing it around. So, she and the writer, Jeff Jensen, approached me for the Green River project based on my work and just feeling that I might bring an interesting take to that material. I think what they were looking at was the sense of acting in people’s faces and gestures. A lot of the Green River Killer story has people sitting around tables with moustaches and suits. [Laughter] So, I think they wanted somebody that could communicate some of that acting. At any rate, that’s how it came about.

I had been trying to get something going with Dark Horse and we’d had a few false starts on a couple of different things. So, that project came along and I was reticent at first because I had already done a book about a monster that eats people and I didn’t know that I wanted to steer myself, career-wise, into an even darker niche. But, the particulars of that story as being told from the detective’s perspective and Jeff having an inlet with his dad being the detective that really brought that case home, was appealing to me. It really was a family man story in a way that you sometimes see people attempt with cop stories — the cop that is trying to keep his work life and his home life separate — but it was so real, so that appealed to me and won me over.

Was there a lot of research involved in that?  Were you scouring through old photographs and news-clippings, or was there some invention involved in the way people looked?

The former. They provided me with a lot of visual reference. I got pictures of his dad at all different stages of his life and there were wedding photos of Jeff’s mom and dad; different detectives that worked on the case. There had been a lot of other books published that had a lot of details on the case and different photos of the environments, the crime scenes. I didn’t have to look at anything grisly — that stuff I made up. [Laughter] They provided a lot of that material, and what I didn’t get from them, I would use Google Streetview for views of downtown Seattle and things like that. It really sped up the process for me.

Did you have a lot of creative input into the book?  As you said, a lot of it is conversations — was that directed to you in the script or were you able to take license with what Jeff had written?

The script was delivered to me in a pretty clearly-structured way that I didn’t deviate from all that much. We did have some discussions about changing things up because we’d felt mutually that it would work better one way or the other. I had some limited input there. They really invited me into that — I’ve got to give them credit for that — they invited me to be an equal-part storyteller. I think there were some things that came up as a result of my being reticent to depict things in a graphic way. When I signed-on, I said, “I don’t have an interest in being David Fincher, I’d rather be Alfred Hitchcock with it and leave some things implied.” Everyone was on-board with that, mainly out of concern for being respectful to the victims, since these were real people that were being depicted, even though names were changed a lot of the time. But still, it was real stuff we were dealing with, so we wanted to be sensitive to that and I had to draw some things that were uncomfortable for me, and kinda day-wreckers. Some of that ended up getting struck from the record by the time I’d delivered what was asked for. In one or two cases it was decided that it just wasn’t right for the tone of the book, and Sierra and Jeff came to that conclusion themselves. So it was a process of give and take on some of those sensitive parts of it, but mostly it’s all Jeff and Sierra. They did a great job laying down the tracks and I just followed behind with the art and interpreted it as you do as an artist, working off a good script.

Was it a case you were familiar with?  Growing up in the ‘80s, it was probably something you’d heard about as it was happening, right?

It really wasn’t. I mean, I knew there was a Green River killer, but that’s pretty much where my knowledge stopped. In the ‘80s when all that was going on, we didn’t have TV in the States, so I probably wasn’t exposed to it then and then I was obviously back and forth from Mexico and by the time we had TV in the ‘90s, that case had quieted down quite a bit. I didn’t really have much knowledge about the case before coming on to the book.

Do you think that helped you keep a distance from it?

Maybe. My studio certainly helped me keep a certain distance from it. I was grateful to have laughter and people around me, and 20 artists all joking about a ninja movie they saw, or just some levity while I was working on it…not just being alone in the house. One thing we talked about was the fact I never got to meet Tom Jensen and his family. We had tried to set up a meeting at a certain point, but Jeff ended up feeling that that helped the book because I was able to feel not completely beholden to the reality of everything and just make the characters my own in a way. So, maybe that ended up helping, I don’t know.

You mentioned that you’d tried to get some other projects with Dark Horse off the ground.  Is this the start of a publishing relationship with them now?  Have you got other projects lined-up?

I do, actually. It’s, of course, nothing exclusive, but right now I have three different projects going on with them. As I said, I’m not very good as a multi-tasker, but I’m learning to be. I’ve got a project coming up that’s a longer project — I don’t know how much I can talk about any of this, they haven’t told me — but I’ve got a project that’ll be a five-issue series. I’m doing art on all of these, I’m not writing them. So, I’m doing a longer project and then a couple of shorter pieces. They’re all fun projects! I’m grateful to have the work with Dark Horse, I enjoy the people there and the opportunity to work with them. Working on Green River Killer was me paying my dues a little bit and proving to them I could meet deadlines. I think that’s what editors are looking for a lot of the time — can this guy deliver, or this gal? I think I delivered on a good time frame with Green River and they were happy with the work, so they’re giving more.

Are the writers that you’re working with other Portland creators — people you know and work with already?

So far, there are no Portland creators — there’s people on the east coast, some in L.A. — some who have been working in comics for 20 years and some that are just new to the format. So, a variety of things.

What’s the working relationship with them like?  You seemed to have had a tight working relationship with Jeff, and his scripts were very polished.  What’s it like working with a newer writer?

Well, you know, the editors at Dark Horse do a good job of ironing out any kinks before things get to me, so I don’t necessarily work directly with the writers. The writers send their scripts into Dark Horse and we continue to polish as we go. There’s not been anything delivered to me yet where I think, “This just doesn’t work.” There’s definitely opportunity to improve things along the way when you see something presented visually then everybody knows, “Oh yeah, that would work better if we adjusted something.” It’s been good so far. I don’t have any issues with any of the scripts that have been provided.

Oh, I wasn’t trying to get you to say anything negative about your writers.  It’s just that you’re in the privileged position of being a writer as well as an artist — and I was wondering whether that had affected the way you work in any way?

Oh, sure. From that perspective, I know what I would want to do with a scene if I had written it. I have storytelling instincts that come from a position of just writing in addition to telling a story visually. That probably all comes into play but I often surprise myself where I’ll read something — and comics is such a tight format when you’re reading the script, you often don’t realize how it’s all going to come together until you draw it and you often see things work better than you expected them to. I feel like I’m still learning my craft as well, so I try not to insert myself too much where I’m not asked, but if I have a good idea, I’ll throw it in there. Usually people appreciate that.

Would you ever consider writing for someone else to draw?

I would. I really enjoy writing and I’d definitely be interested in writing and letting someone else do the stuff that takes so much time. I mean, writing takes a lot of time — don’t get me wrong — when it’s done well, it takes a long time. I enjoy both things for different reasons.

So, are those three series the only projects the only things you have on your plate for the foreseeable future? Are you squeezing in any of your own projects?

Yeah, I have my own thing that I’m working on, that I’m not talking about too much. It’s an adventure story and I’ll be doing writing and drawing on that. It’s my next baby… and I actually do have a real baby on the way, so that’s another project!

Oh, wow — congratulations.

Thanks — it’s debuting in January! [Laughter] Yeah, but I’ve got another thing of my own that I’m developing. I’m trying to structure my time so that I’m working on my freelance work several days a week and then my own thing the rest of the time. Right now, I’m trying to juggle three different projects, so my own work is taking a back seat for a little while. I’m trying to be diligent about giving it its place.

This is the all-ages book that you were talking about when we met the other week?

Yeah, it’s not exclusively a children’s book, but it’s something that I could hand to a kid and not feel, “Ugh, I don’t know if this is appropriate….” [Laughter] I want more comics to be like that. It’s essentially me hearkening back to what sorts of things I enjoyed when I was a kid, being out in the world and exploring in the woods. It’s a naturalist field guide narrative hybrid, that’s the gist of it.

You’ve also been doing some work for McMenamins — the hotel, bar and restaurant chain — because when I was last down in Portland, I was at the Crystal Hotel, staying in the James Brown room that you had painted murals for.

Oh fun!

Is that something that’s a regular gig for you?  How did you become involved with that?

That was also through Periscope. Karl Kesel is a member at the studio and his wife has worked with McMenamins for years, so they were looking for some other artists to come on board and help out with that Crystal Hotel project. So, I did a couple of audition pieces for their Kennedy School location, then I ended up doing 20-odd paintings for the Crystal Ballroom. That went in fits and starts with the economy — they had to take time off from developing that space, then they went gangbusters with it for a while and I was just doing painting after painting. So, I’m still on their roster as far as being able to work on a project in the future, but so far the Crystal Hotel is the main thing I’ve done for them.

What’s it like being part of Periscope Studio?  You’ve mentioned that it’s afforded you a lot of opportunities in the comics world — it helped you get your publishing deal for one.  Do you think you would be where you are if it wasn’t for them?

Absolutely not! I’d certainly be some place different, but I don’t think I’d have made nearly so many in-roads. You know, when I was first getting started with comics, I had remembered something someone said in an illustration class in college, which was, “Seven years is an overnight success for an illustrator.” And I thought, “Psch! Right. I’m going to come out of this gate swinging, and I’m going to take on the world and it’s going to be great!” But you need a lot of help, not only just to have somebody around you that says, “Oh, here’s an opportunity to connect with an editor, or publisher,” but just to have somebody that can appreciate where you’re coming from in this downtrodden medium of comics that we all love, and say that what you’re doing is worthwhile, or try this or try that. Not working in isolation is great. I don’t even have a home studio anymore, I just bring my drawing board home with me when I want to work at home. Other than that, I just clock in at the studio and it’s a great environment with great people. I love ‘em!

Portland’s one of the great cartooning cities of the US.  Is there an atmosphere of mutual recognition there with other professionals?  I mean, does it go beyond the work and extend into your social lives?

It’s a fairly close-knit community, yeah. There are definitely people that keep to themselves more than others, but there are a lot of community events where we’ll do life-drawing sessions at Periscope and invite other cartoonists that aren’t members of the studio to come out and participate. Things like that go on — pot lucks will happen, or parties — we’ll all hang out that way. Even when I was just getting into comics and going around to the different conventions, it really struck me how friendly and familial the business is. Maybe you don’t encounter that everywhere, but certainly in Portland it’s pretty close-knit.

Do you think that you could engineer that?  Do you think you could bring a bunch of artists into a city and create another great art hub?

That’s a good question. I really don’t know what it is. Dark Horse being here and a couple of other comics publishers being in town is definitely a big factor. Portland is a weird town — self-professed weird — so I think that people that don’t fit-in in other places gravitate towards Portland. Maybe that’s part of it. But, certainly what we have going on at the studio, I couldn’t hope to replicate anywhere. I think a lot of the success of that place has to do with what we lovingly refer to as our “benevolent dictatorship.” [Laughter] We have a few key people that really steer that boat and are self-sacrificing and really willing to give a leg-up to people that are just getting started. We have comics veterans there that have been in the business 20, 30 years and people that are just starting out. But those few key people that started the studio have just been incredibly supportive and welcoming of other comics folk that could be potentially taking jobs way from them! I don’t what their impetus for helping us was, but for some reason they decided it was a good idea.

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