Du kan lytte her og læse mere på Nummer9.

Lyt her og læs mere på Nummer9.

Claremont er meget talende og har snakket om de her ting i årtier, men jeg synes man får meget for sin tid — der er mange oplysninger at hente, han giver et interessant kig ind i sin arbejds- og tankeproces og selvom han undgår at blive for negativ, fornemmer man klart hans professionelle frustrationer og uenigheder mellem linjerne. Det kræver nok, at man interesserer sig for the X-Men og Marvel, men hvis man gør, er det virkelig et interview med vitaminer, synes jeg.

Lyt her og læs mere på Nummer9.

No, these aren't the caricature mentioned, but they're also by Titian (and/or his assistants), and they're on the back of the Ancona Pala Gozzi.

Here’s the abstract:

The article examines drawings found on the back of the canvas of the recently surfaced Portrait of a Man (Girolamo Cornaro?) painted by Titian around 1511:1512. Drawn with the point of the brush, they depict a large head in profi le and two smaller figures. Loose and broad in execution, at least the former belongs to the domain of caricature. By comparison with similar drawings, on paper as well as the versos of other paintings, the drawings are here attributed to Titian. Further, the possibility that the head might be a portrayal of Michelangelo is explored, as is its value as evidence of the reception of Michelangelo’s outsize public stature and self-fashioning as an imperfect, Socratic artist whose work carried palpable overtones of the grotesque. The two figure studies, in themselves acutely Michelangelesque, are related to inventions by other contemporaries. Next, the fact that the caricature wears a beard, but no moustache, occasions an excursus on contemporary facial hair generally and specifically that of Michelangelo’s patron, Julius II. Ecclesiastical beards were a controversial issue at the time, and shaving one’s upper lip carried liturgical significance. Julius was the fi rst Renaissance pope to grow a beard, as is famously charted by Raphael in his portraits of him in the Vatican frescoes and elsewhere. By focusing on the depiction of his beard, the article sheds new light on the iconography of these pictures and potentially their confused chronology. Lastly, Titian’s drawings are examined in the context of contemporary grotesques with reference to Leonardo’s explorations of exaggerated physiognomies. On this basis, it proposes a reevaluation of Renaissance caricature.

The issue is second of two dedicated to Professor Peter Humfrey in his retirement. I am very happy to thus take part in the celebration!

Artibus et Historiae vol. 68 is available now in a specialist library near you!

Jimbo in Purgatory

Surely one of the most unusual works of comics of the past couple of decades, it is an incredibly dense and (let’s face it) difficult work. layered as it is in intertextual reference. But it rewards the committed reader, providing an oblique viewpoint upon the classical tradition, and not the least its humanist iteration as born in the late middle ages and developed through the renaissance to shape Western culture as we know it. Although its particulars may largely be forgotten today, Panter insists upon its currency and situates it at the heart of contemporary culture in what is merely the most hubristic manifestation of his ongoing efforts to break down the barriers between so-called high and low culture. By demonstrating that the two were always of a piece, fruitfully synthesized in multifarious ways through the early modern period, and alive and kicking today.

The interview was originally published in Danish at Rackham back in 2004, and was followed by my review of the book, which we also reprinted here recently. We named Jimbo in Purgatory Book of the Year back then, and the interview and review were at least in part an effort to get behind the scenes a little bit in order to unpack the work for the first-time reader, as well as to provide a little extra for Panter connoisseurs. I hope we succeeded, even if Panter’s subsequent edits never made it to my inbox, leaving a few lacunae in my transcript exposed and unelucidated. A pity, but in a way not inappropriate.

—

I’d like to start out by asking you about how the project came about. What prompted you to embark upon Jimbo in Purgatory? Which thoughts and ideas did you bring to it initially?

Two things happened. The first was that I started reading Finnegans Wake along with the footnotes to it. Secondly, I started thinking about why I had named my first Jimbo collection, the Pantheon book, Jimbo in Paradise. It clearly had to do with Dante, but I’d never actually read Paradise, I hadn’t read the Comedy. The reading of Joyce and the footnotes to it lead me to all this medieval stuff, all this satirical stuff, which really appealed to me, while Dante lead me to Boccaccio…

And you’d never read that kind of stuff before?

No, I had never really read the classics. I have always read a lot. I would usually find an author I liked and read everything by him, but it would usually be modern stuff — I had read a lot of Borroughs, Ballard, Pynchon, Burgess, and various exciting stuff, but never really the classics except for the stuff they had us read in school.

From Jimbo in Paradise

So what was it about Dante that grabbed you?

The architecture of Dante is really seductive, to a lot a people. Seeing it, you just go “wow — you can wrap anything around this thing.” And I started applying it to what was happening to Jimbo in the comics I was doing at the time. He was following these girls…

That would be in the Zongo series of Jimbo comics that came out in the mid-90s, right? I’ve only seen the first three issues…

Yeah, it was in the Zongo comics [the main part of the story was later collected as Jimbo’s Inferno in 2006]. They’re kind of hard to find today because they were making fewer and fewer of them. I really put myself into those books. Initially, I thought it would be a really neat opportunity for me to get my work across to a readership, but they really didn’t do well — I also guess there was a problem with their distribution; I mean they were being distributed to places where they were selling Simpsons comics, and they also looked really rough. The idea was that they progress and become increasingly elaborate as the story goes along, so the early ones are really incredibly loosely drawn, while the later ones become tighter and more organized, with the intention of ending up with this really complex construction at the end. The last one is a version of the Inferno. Though nowhere near as elaborate as my Purgatory. It was basically what got me going, and the elaborate construction that is Purgatory grew out of that.

From Jimbo #1 (1994), published by Zongo

Yeah, one really gets the sense that it is so much more reflexive and constructed than anything you’ve done before, a lot of which has been really loose and kind of freeform.

Yeah, I like to approach each project in a different way, and Dante’s structure is just such a compelling model. He himself says that everything is happening on many levels in his poetry, I think in relation to his explaining his encoded poems to Beatrice in the Vita Nuova.

How do you mean?

Well, the Comedy is just so many things at the same time. While clearly this enormous Catholic cosmology, it is also incredibly seditious; aside from its giant beauty, it’s also like a dirty joke, a pit and peak — a vagina, a peak and an ejaculation.

And that’s what Boccaccio taps into, presumably?

Yeah, Boccaccio stuck by the encoded humor and satire of Dante. He comes out and tells it straight in the form of bawdy stories. He saw what Dante was doing, the astounding presumptuousness of it. I mean, he puts himself in this place where he passes judgment on everyone and often in very irreverent ways.

I’m asking specifically because the connection you see between Dante and Boccaccio really seems to have been the driving force of the project, at least initially, and while the connections you make sometimes indeed appear resonant, many of them also seem tangential at best.

I just got the notion that there was a connection, and if you think about it : why are there so many boring, moralizing stories in the Decameron? He seems to be addressing specific topics, to be looking for topics in Dante to address. But yeah, absolutely, sometimes it doesn’t quite fit, and sometimes I’ll already have used a story that fits a particular canto elsewhere. I might be wrong; some of the connections are probably not there.

Canto 15

In any case it provides for compelling juxtapositions of similar ideas, treated in quite different ways…

Yeah, what I really wanted to do was a book for myself and my readers. When I was doing the Zongo comics, I figured that there might possibly be 20,000-30,000 people out there that want to read my comics. Now, most of those people I might not be able to reach, so my actual readership is much smaller, maybe a thousand or so. I’m really mostly working for a small crew of readers. And I was looking for change here; I thought “I’m going to write a book for those readers. This is for me, not for a market. I’m going to really please myself.” And it’s really, quite simply a folly. My friend Ric Heitzman, whom I worked with on the designs for Peewee’s Playhouse, was building an actual folly in his backyard at the time, and I thought that would be something to do — this thing that is simply built for its own sake and doesn’t necessarily make a lot of rational sense. But at the same time it was very important to me. So I thought, “If I’m going to build a folly, let’s write a good one!”

You have previously mentioned your strict religious upbringing as a major factor in your approach to your work, not the least in this particular case.

Yes, me and religion. I grew up in this fundamentalist Christian milieu in Texas, so dealing with all this satirical stuff was really good for me, for untangling some of what was impressed upon me as a child. Now, my family are really nice people, their friends are nice, I’m not putting them down, but their thinking is kind of clannish. You have all these churches that all profess to offer the Truth, it’s just clannish, and I’m thinking that if Jesus had any real message it would be to break down all these clans. I suppose the churches provide a sense of local community, but they also isolate themselves from each other and the rest of the world. There’ll be fifty churches in a tiny Texan town, each of which asserts itself as offering the One True Faith. Sometimes they get together — like after 9/11, most of these churches and their congregations got together to pray, except the kind I grew up attending. They’re like the Taliban; even in a case like this, they go “We can’t pray with these people, because they’re going to burn in Hell.”

If you grow up like that, it becomes a blinder, a lock on your brain, which I guess is what most of this country is suffering from. Most people think that either this country is the One True Country, or they think theirs is the One True Religion. Growing up, I became a reactionary, which is kind of a lame thing to be in a way, but I really ended up not liking organized religion. Now, Dante lived in a time where you could be jailed, if not beheaded, for criticizing people like that. And he just emerges as this poet-politician-pharmacist guy and writes this monumental poem, in the vernacular, where he describes these popes shoving pitchforks up each other’s asses in a burning pit. He has these monks wearing lead robes to comment on how Catholic monks were getting into such excessive finery and wouldn’t wear red robes anymore. That takes a lot of balls to do. His work is this ecstatic metaphysical event that cracks open all these things that the church has turned to stone, into institutions — Dante comes along and takes all that apart and puts himself up there with the writers of the Bible.

It’s very presumptuous and very daring.

Yes, and he obviously also part of a classical tradition. What happens is a mix of biblical and classical sources, informing each other. It’s simply audacious and very helpful for somebody like me.

Canto 10

How so, more specifically?

When you can move effortlessly between ideas and literal-mindedness, you’ve broken out of the trap. Everyone I know in Texas believes that the Earth was formed in six days, etc. They believe that there’s actually a Satan with horns and everything, while it seems so obvious that Satan is an idea, and that sort of belief is hugely prevalent in America — it’s really an idea taken literally. Dante masters allegorical writing, writing about ideas. And then Boccacio comes along and tries to write something like Hustler Magazine, with all these seemingly very literal stories that of course are equally allegorical. And then I think somebody like Petrarch sees what he’s doing — the danger of it — and calms him down, so he spends the rest of his life translating classical texts and stuff. The Decameron was inflammatory stuff, it was risky. This was the time when Tyndale had his hands chopped off simply for translating the Bible. Being literal was dangerous.

All this led me to satire. These guys who think outside the box, and often write in some kind of code, when they can’t get away with writing it straight. And it’s not necessarily all that accessible; when Swift writes, he writes a sea of words, and if you want to catch something, you have to sail into the book and find it — he’s not going to come up and say it directly.

Yeah, I was going to ask about accessibility…

In some ways this is how I perceive my book; I don’t pretend to stand by that stuff, but I think I’ve made something visually. And the idea was also to provide a good reading list for my readers — go read Lucian, go read Ovid’s erotic poetry. Everybody around here plays video games all day; I teach comics and my all students know the last five years of comics history, but I want to tell them to go read all the good stuff — read Rabelais, read Chaucer.

Returning to Dante: the satire is there, definitely, but I wouldn’t expect you to say that the Comedy isn’t intensely religious…

Oh no, Dante was very religious, and very serious, but the richness of this thinking goes beyond what you were allowed to think. Maybe it’s, actually not so far from intellectual Catholicism at the time; the high-level scholastic and Augustinian discourse of the time, I’m very ignorant of all of that, but there is definitely a difference in the level of discourse of something like that and what most people were exposed to. I mean, this is a time were monks in Ireland would dip the Book of Kells in water and beat their sick cows with it to cure them — a very literal-minded religious approach to an everyday problem.

Whereas Dante’s thinking is visionary and idea-driven.

Yes, the Comedy is probably the result of a single instance, a singular vision. He probably saw the complete Comedy in one night where everything just poured into his brain — a great hallucination which he would spend the rest of his life remembering.

So you’re suggesting he had a vision under the influence of hallucinogens?

Yes, I think it’s likely. Remember, Dante was a licensed pharmacist and likely had access to and knowledge of these substances. He probably ate mushrooms or took some other form of hallucinogenic.

So you would regard hallucinogens as a powerful source of artistic inspiration?

Yes, but it depends. I took LSD in the early 70s, and later, in the early 80s. In the 70s, it was a completely devastating experience — I’m still working off that trip — later it wasn’t that big a deal. It really depends on the situation and how you use it. I had a friend calling me the other night, saying “Gary, I’m taking LSD with this girl out here in Miami and it’s amazing,” and I just went “Look, everything is going to be back to normal in the morning.” It’s not a very recreational thing, it’s kind of shamanistic. Hard drugs I flee like the plague, psychedelic drugs are very powerful and dangerous and definitely not for everybody, and regarding soft drugs, I don’t get why we have so many people locked up over them in this country, it just makes no sense and is really the consequence of an inhumane policy of no vision, claiming the religious and moral high ground. It seems to me that John of Revelations, for example, must have suffered from red mold or something — it’s a powerful vision. George Bush doesn’t have a vision.

We’ve already touched upon it, but I’d like you to elaborate a little upon the thoughts behind the structure and form of the book, if possible.

I decided early on that my approach would be very procedural. I wanted a sense of rhythm, so I went with a basic structure where each spread consists of a fairly dense, contracted page on the left, with a grid of four by three panels, and a less dense, more expansive one of the right, with a grid of three by three panels. The idea is that it expands and contracts rhythmically, like a heartbeat. I also wanted to make something that looked somewhat like an illuminated manuscript, which is why I framed each page with these borders, referring both to the past and the 20th century.

Procedurally I, as mentioned, worked on the assumption that Boccaccio had encoded Dante, so I went through the two works side by side, looking for connections. If I couldn’t find a word or a theme, I would look for something visual; fluttering flags, for example. Anything. I would also read a lot of other stuff, looking for quotes that would somehow state whatever theme I’d come up with, like fluttering flags or whatever. If I was dealing with the abuse of alcohol, I could go to [George] Cruikshank, for example, his screeds against alcohol from the 1830s. So it would grow and become this kind of sculptural construction, kind of a mosaic. Once I made a connection, I would divide the number of words in the canto with the words in the Boccaccio story and then divide that with the amount of panels on the page, to get a sense of how to spread out the narrative.

So you would actually compose the page according to a very schematic structure? Were you trying to divide up the words you needed for each panel exactly?

Well, I would calculate an average and use that as the basis to know how far each panel should progress the story : where I would put each of the elements that corresponded with the individual canto and so on.

Your approach seems to become increasingly mosaic-like as you go along; the first ten pages or so follow the Dante canti and Boccaccio stories in question quite closely, whereas later you move further and further away from them as source material and incorporate a much wider variety of material.

Yeah, that’s right. At first I didn’t quite know how to approach it, and I knew I wasn’t going to do anything I did over again later, so it basically was a continuation of my approach with the Zongo comics where I would start sloppy and then tighten up and go increasingly complex as I went along. So by the time I reached Purgatory it became really intricate and took several years to complete. When I began Purgatory, I was literally trying to tell the stories of Dante and Boccaccio, but that was just unsatisfying, so I figured I could slow down and make it tighter, more convoluted, since that’s also what Dante does; when you read Paradise, it’s like there’s a big hand coming down to you from above, telling you to bow down your head. Paradise is really loaded with information; it becomes fairly tedious at times, Dante is listing all these heroes of his.

Yeah, and it’s also where he gets into the most complex theological and philosophical discussions, the most abstract stuff…

Yeah, it’s really interesting, because, again, you have these different levels of meaning, and I really see Paradise as incredibly erotic. It’s basically about how Dante aspires towards Beatrice, who is put in the place of the Divine. There’s a very carnal aspect to it.

Panter's Paradiso print

It came to mind to do something similar, to continue the story, but then I did this print, representing the different generations of cartoonists spiraling inwards towards the present in what is kind of a cartoon-analogy to Dante’s pantheon of personal heroes in Paradise…

Is that the one on the inside of the dust jacket of McSweeneys #13?

Yeah, that’s the one; I originally did it as a print. It’s kind of a take on Paradise, but I might want to do something more, although I don’t think I want to do a Paradise like this Purgatory… I don’t know — it could be anything.

Canto 11

OK, let’s look at some specific examples from the comic to arrive at a fuller picture of your approach. Your treatment of Dante’s canto 11, for example, mystified me a bit, since it is so ripe with possibilities for thematic exploration, dealing as it does with the nature of art and the transience of human endeavor. You turn that whole thing into a bunch of dirty limericks!

Yeah [chuckles] I just decided early on to follow my whims; if I got distracted visually, for example, I’d go with that distraction. The dirty limericks here are about Boccaccio. I would really like to hear what Dante and Boccaccio experts would have to say about it — my ears would probably be red afterwards.

I guess your introduction of that kind of material was also an attempt to honor the humor in Dante and Boccaccio, and — I could imagine — an attempt to temper the gravity of the material and the danger of coming off as too pretentious.

Yeah, I knew that if I made it too heavy, nobody was going to come with me. That’s also the reason I added the page with the record recommendations in the back — to sort of round it off on a playful note. While the Purgatory book was in production, I sent photocopies of it over to my friend Bruno Richard in Paris, and he sent me back the record page, basically meaning “What the fuck?” [Matthias laughs]

Canto 12

Related to that, possibly, is your use of popular culture — a constant in your work, but extremely palpable here because of the lofty context. Sometimes there seems to be kind of an asymmetrical relationship between what you use and what you represent. An example is in canto 12; in Dante he sees these sculptural reliefs in the floor that are basically a history of mythological representations of human hubris and the transience of our lives, and you replace that by these B-movie posters…

Yeah, they’re posters from Japanese monster movies…

Right, OK, I guess I first want to ask what your interest in popular culture is, and why you use it here?

I use it because pop culture is the reigning mythology now, just like In Roman times everything was referring to the gods, for example. I got into Japan from watching Godzilla movies, these hokey Japanese monster movies, and there’s something mythological about that — it resonates with Japanese culture and history. I went and started reading about Japan on the basis of that.

The same important messages that used to be conveyed by mythology are today conveyed by popular culture, and that’s not to excuse popular culture — most of it is mind numbing — but it definitely reflects important things about us and our time. If I, for example, look for harbingers in my comics, I see them: just before the Tsunami disaster in Southeast Asia, for example, I had done this drawing of a beach with a threatening wave on the horizon. If you look for this kind of stuff, it’s there, but I think its best to avoid thinking about it.

Canto 20 (with the bombing of Serbia)

Things happening around me in the world as I was working also made it into the book. One thing that was happening was the bombing of Serbia, and when Jimbo is on the mountain with all the dead bodies — that was Serbia. And I have the death of Princess Di, the crashed car, in the place of Violent Death, along with John Lennon. I have Frank Zappa in the Valley of Negligent Kings. I was looking for specific traits in many of the pop-culture figures, much in the way that Ben Johnson derives the humor of his characters from giving each of them a distinct character trait. I for example place Boy George amongst the slovenly, who are too lazy to seek out their own salvation, preferring to loaf around and wait for it to come to them.

I generally just tried to find connections, things that resonated with the themes and situations described by Dante. And since he also fills the Comedy with contemporary characters and stories that would probably since have been largely forgotten were it not for him, and basically things he just likes, I figured it was natural to do the same. I was also looking at it as my remembrance of the latter half of the 20th Century — the period in which I had lived for what will be most of my life, and which was ending as I was working. I wanted to acknowledge that.

Canto 7 (with the Valley of Faithless Kings)

Right. Part of the reason I wanted to ask you about your use of popular culture was also that, in a way, its use can — along with such things as the record page — be seen as kind of an ironic, self-conscious gesture, which can seem as a kind of copout, given the thematic profundity of the work, like you’re having it both ways.

Yeah, well, I didn’t feel very defensive about it. Pop culture is something most people can relate to, and it’s really analogous to Dante’s references and, at an even more basic level, his use of the vernacular for the Comedy. One thing I did worry a little bit about was turning the whole thing into this ‘rock and roll heaven,’ so I tried to put all that, all those bands I like, on one page and get it out of my system. I also try to maintain some kind of consistency in the way I represent things throughout the book; the angels are mostly Japanese toys, for example, except for the one I draw as the robot from Metropolis.

…Which is the one that in Dante descends upon our protagonists and talks about human aspiration and idealism, something you seem to entirely leave out in your version…

Yeah, I can be totally criticized for not often addressing the material, and instead looking for thematic resonances. I see it as kind of a combination of what I usually do in my comics and what I do in my paintings. In my comics, I’m usually telling some kind of story or something around the story. In the paintings, I don’t tell stories and it’s all about images that resonate with each other. I don’t regard myself as a profound intellectual thinker, and I didn’t feel constrained by intellectual concerns here, I never do; it’s an associative thing. I was trying to build a bell. In a way it’s the biggest copout ever.

Canto 31 (Beatrice/Twiggy)

Well, in other places you seem to be very attentive to the themes Dante is concentrating on; you for example seem to quite profoundly follow and comment upon his discourse on love throughout the book.

Yes, especially at the very end. I was wondering how I was going to convey this, since it is so important. How to represent Beatrice. Beatrice is Twiggy, who was just omnipresent in my sexual awakening, this androgynous look, very boyish.

That’s very appropriate…

Yeah, Dante kind of gets into that by addressing several of his homosexual teachers, some of which he places on the Mount, which is quite heretical.

Yeah that too, but I meant appropriate since Dante’s relationship to Beatrice surely dates back to the days of his own sexual awakening, and even before.

Yeah, they were children when they met, and when she died really young, he was called upon to write a poem on her funeral. The Comedy is very sexual; it’s a big topic in the book, human sexuality versus institutional restrictions. Dante was struck by her for the rest of his life, and went about transforming the whole of Catholic doctrine into following this girl to Heaven. The relationship between the two is very vividly rendered — probably the most acute ‘Boccaccio-moment’ in the Comedy is when Beatrice scolds Dante, just after they first meet in the Garden.

Canto 29 (with Mathilda and Sulphur Springs, TX)

I’d like to ask you about your representation of the Earthly Paradise and its agents towards the end of the book. There’s that mysterious woman, Dante meets by the stream, who leads him to Beatrice, Mathilda…

Yeah, I think she’s that Indian toy.

Is she? But what about the woman in the Stetson whom he meets on the following page, in the garden? Wouldn’t that be Mathilda? She’s the one that leads him on through the garden, to Beatrice?

Well, it’s all quite mysterious — who are all these women in Dante? I kind of relate it to Joyce’s writing about this girl waiting on a beach. But, yeah, I guess that Texas cheerleader is Mathilda, I have her leading him along, first one side of the stream, then the other.

Canto 26 (Gogo-poodles quoting Michelangelo)

I find it interesting that you chose to almost exclusively use Michelangelo’s poetry for the scene where Dante has to go through the fires of purification and enter the Earthly Paradise. It’s the only place in the book where you almost become entirely coherent, because you are mostly quoting one source. And Michelangelo is all about transcending the flesh, which I find to be more purely Platonic than what Dante is expressing in these canti…

Well, I chose to use that because it just seemed so appropriate. It’s quite physical; it really seems like a kind of flagellation. He seems to be struggling with his physicality, with his homosexuality and all these things in a very physical way. It’s very much in the style of somebody who is working with his hands, of a sculptor.

Could you address the humorous and profane interest and tone of the book? I’m thinking of it in relation to the transcendental aspects of Dante. You seem very insistent on the profane aspects of him…

Yes, I’m certainly interested in all of that, but I’m not so different from most people. I’m in favor of friendship and fidelity and believe in moral values and all that, but when you believe like I did and take everything literally, and decide to break away, a lot of questions come up. You’re aware that you should have values, but where should they come from? What should they be? This book attempts to be an articulation of that. I guess all my work is; I’m probably only always writing one comic strip in different forms. I’m probably not very good at it [laughs]. It’s like coming down from LSD. A billion dollars worth of fantastic imagery was great, but I’m glad it stopped. I have ideals, but seduce me and see what happens. I don’t know; I’m an average Joe.

And keep checking for him. It’s great hip hop music, going places.

As mentioned in this space once or twice, Kolor Klimax — Nordic Comics Now, edited by this site’s owner Matthias Wivel, is now available in bookstores across North America, and thus the rest of the world. To mark the official release, I decided to ask him a few questions on the book, the project and the future.

Why a Nordic comics anthology? Why the US? And why Fantagraphics?

The idea came from the Finnish Comics Society. They’ve been running an international initiative called Nordicomics — which includes exhibitions and workshops — for a number of years now, and figured that publishing an anthology series in English would help their mission to promote Nordic comics internationally. The idea is that this is the first in a series of books with rotating editors, under the general helmsmanship of Kalle Hakkola of FCS, who is responsible for Nordicomics. The second book is already being planned and will be totally different from Kolor Klimax in concept as well as content. As I understand it, the idea is that every book will be a stand-alone work.

As for Fantagraphics, I basically bit the idea from you. As I’m sure it did for your Danish anthology From Wonderland with Love, it just seemed the obvious choice — besides having been one of the best American comics publishers for decades, they’re consistently the most interested in supporting grass roots projects such as this one, as long as the quality is there. And co-publisher Kim Thompson is half Danish and knows about and is interested in Nordic comics already.

From Jenni Rope's "The Island 2"

I know that the theme will be children’s comics but that’s about the extent of it, and this may have changed since I last heard about it.

How did you select the contributors? What picture of the Nordic comics scene did you wish to paint, consciously or subconsciously?

Putting together a good anthology is similar to making a good mixtape. Whatever the individual merits of a piece, it won’t do to include it if it doesn’t somehow work for the anthology as a whole. There has to be a consistent idea or tone to the book, which doesn’t mean that there can’t be dissonance — there’s some of that in Kolor Klimax, and I think for the better — but the individual parts still have to generate something greater than their sum. It’s incredibly difficult to achieve, but also a lot of fun.

It was of course important that all the contributions were of high quality, that they weren’t so long as to destabilize the book’s anthology concept, and that the work included was current. Other than that I had no specific criteria for inclusion — what was important was that each contribution presented a strong, original, personal vision. One of the advantages of the relative lack of a lucrative comics mainstream in the Nordic countries is that many of talented people who decide to make comics anyway, do it to pursue their own muse, often in decidedly non-commercial ways. Although the output is necessarily meager because cartoonists have to make their living doing something else, it also results in comics of remarkably high quality. I think the book demonstrates this, even if it also includes contributions from a few strongly consolidated, popular cartoonists.

From Bendik Kaltenborn's "The Great Underneath"

As it happened, the book is a combination of new comics made especially for it and others recently published elsewhere. Only one piece is somewhat older. The contributors include a handful of the people who broke new ground for comics in the seventies and eighties, as well as a number of the nineties innovators, but since the focus is on current work, the majority are younger artists — the ones making waves today.

In the book’s introduction you say — broadly speaking — that Swedish comics are autobiographical and in social realist, Finnish comics are experimental, and those from Norway and Denmark are only now being liberated from each their mainstream yoke. Is this a characteristic you would apply to the book’s contributions?

From Thomas Thorhauge's "Suicide Joe vs. The Dead Tree Press"

What were your deliberations when planning the book’s structure, the sequence of the individual stories?

It has to work. It’s a question of feeling rather than principle. One important choice was designer Frederik’s Storm’s decision occasionally to insert blank pages between individual contributions. This meant that we were able to start each comic on the left-hand or right-hand page that worked best for it without having to worry about the overall sequence. It also gives the book a nice sense of punctuation, enhancing the reading experience.

Are there artists who especially surprised you when handing in their contributions?

Yes, I think Bendik Kaltenborn went in a bold new direction with his disturbing “The Great Underneath.” It still has his signature humor, but this is new territory. Johan Krarup’s “Nostalgia” perhaps didn’t surprise me as such, but it is presents his ablest handling of concept and execution to date. Gitte Broeng and Mikkel Damsbo’s “Relocating Mother” is also an innovation in Nordic comics — a very fine synthesis of the visual and the literary. And Thomas Thorhauge’s “Suicide Joe vs. The Dead Tree Press” is a remarkably angry, trenchant piece for him, not the least when seen in relation to his earlier work. It ends the book with a bang. There’s plenty of other material in the book that I love just as much, but these were the most surprising, each in their way.

Johan F. Krarup’s “Nostalgia” was nominated for a Ping Award for Best Danish Comic, and Mikkel Damsbo & Gitte Broeng’s story was accepted at the Charlottenborg gallery’s spring exhibition. Are there any other entries in the book that have had a life of their own outside of the book?

From Joakim Pirinen's "This Is My Life"

In the 60s and onwards, Color Climax was the name of a world famous Danish producer of porn. Is there a statement of intent in the book’s title or is it just an amusing throwaway reference?

I guess it plays on some of the most persistent prejudices about the Nordic countries in the world at large. It also reconfigures a great title from something not only sordid, but repellent, to something that might still be sordid, but is also beautiful. There’s a belief in the transformative power of art somewhere in there.

From Sol Carrelus

They both come from a fine arts background, but quickly turned to comics once they were out of art school, publishing short pieces in various anthologies, most notably Férraille Illustré, in the early 2000s. This led them to the seminal French alternative publishing house L’Association, where they released their book debut Safari Monseigneur : an examination colonialism through cartoon vaudeville : in 2005. The next year, it was followed up by Panier de singe (“Monkey Cage”), which weaves gruesome humor from body language and optics, and Le Tricheur (“The Trickster”), a heavily symbolic heist procedural, and Sol Carrelus, a gothic masquerade in 2008. American readers might know them best for their grand stairway in Kramers Ergot 7.

In 2009, they published the first in a multi-part series, Irene et les clochards (“Irene and the vagabonds”), which contrasts one woman’s personal rage and isolation with the issue of homelessness endemic to any big city, filtered through a meta-layer in which the artists themselves are contracted to narrate her experiences. More emotional in tone, it promises a new direction for them.

There is an element of performance to their work, a playful complicity with the reader that lures one into uncomfortable places. This interaction is often quite concrete: Gogo Club (2007) in part collects a number of cartooned encounters based on conversations with readers at their signings, while “Le Championnat de bras de fer” is an online effort uniting a number of the cartoonists’ colleagues for small jam strips based around a virtual arm-wrestling tournament. Their most complex work in this vein to date was the “Maison close” (“The bordello”), a controversial online jam comic commissioned for the 2009 Angoulême festival by its presidents that year, the cartooning pair Dupuy/Berberian, in which Ruppert and Mulot united a large number of cartoonists in a virtual whorehouse — the women playing prostitutes, the men their johns. (It was published in book form in late 2010).

The present interview is a second take. It was conducted at that same festival, but because of technical problems, it was written down from sparse notes and memory, ably assisted by Ruppert via e-mail. It was originally published at tcj.com on February 1st 2010.

—

I’d like to start by getting an idea of what led you to comics. You both went to art school : what did you do there?

R: We didn’t do comics, at least not in school. I was primarily involved in contemporary dance, but also video installation and performance.

M: I did a variety of things, including video, sculpture and installation art.

Why did you choose comics as your medium instead of some of those activities?

R: Comics is a comparatively free medium to work in, less encumbered by history. It seems open as a form, with lots of material to work with and explore. And the comics world is smaller and more accessible, more pleasant and fun than the contemporary art world.

Your comics are clearly comics, making use of traditional contour line drawing and clear panel-to-panel storytelling, but at the same time you make use of these elements to do things that have rarely if ever been seen in the form. Would you ascribe that, partly, to your other artistic interests?

R: Sure, it’s always an interesting challenge to integrate into comics unusual elements. We’re interested in storytelling, but we emphatically want what we do to be clearly recognizable as comics. We want it to be clearly legible.

You share this sensibility with a lot of contemporary cartoonists who are simultaneously innovating within the form. Chris Ware would be an obvious example, or David B. Why are you interested in working within the traditional cartoon language of comics, rather than something entirely different and more related to the other pictorial arts?

R: We think this form has a lot to offer and want to work within the tropes of the traditional cartoon, even if simultaneously our work is experimental with an ambition to invent new ways of storytelling. When you look at the comics of Hergé or Winsor McCay, there’s a whole conception of the world on display there, with much thought and care put into it. We want to achieve something similar : to create something that is solely possible in comics.

In that respect, you seem very much to be in accord with the school of thought that looks back at the early classics. Art Spiegelman had that memorable line “the future of comics lies in their past.” Would you agree?

R: Yes completely; I’m not saying that the past is always better, blahblahblah, but it’s obvious for me that comics staked out a special form of expression early on and it’s important to understand that it is a young medium and that the form it has now is different of what it’s going to be in the future. The earliest comics had this energy of being movable in the making.

I was specifically thinking of your storytelling approach, which uses only what in film would be called total and half totals, no close-ups or dramatic shifts in perspective. This is very much in the tradition of the early newspaper strip.

M: Yes, we’re not interested in cinematic effects. Instead of presenting a conversation between two characters in shot-reverse manner, we prefer to have them both be there, fully visible, next to each other. That way, you can make use of their body language. We would like it to seem much more like a stage play in a small theater than a film.

And you seem fascinated with movement, both natural and performative. Especially in Le Tricheur and parts of Panier de singe, where you break down physical actions into their component parts, using many more individual panels than one would normally see, or need in a traditional comic. I was wondering whether this might in part stem from your background in dance?

R: Of course. We’re interested in how body movement can convey emotion, how emotion can be conveyed in this more external way, inviting the reader to interpret what is going on.

Yes, you have this almost voyeuristic approach to mise-en-scène. It’s as if we’re given a kind of ‘God’s eye’ perspective on your characters.

R: Yes, we find this much more fascinating than spelling out what each character is thinking or feeling. We want the reader to invest in the story, to bring his or her own interpretations as to what is going on.

You’ve mentioned a connection to Greek drama and its use of masks?

M: Yes, when we draw our characters, we draw them with a simple ‘V’ instead of a face. We don’t want the distraction of facial expression, pinning down whatever emotion the character has. Usually in comics, the face is were all the emotions are written; that’s why a lot of cartoonists work with close-ups. When you talk to someone you look at the face and you perceive the movement of his body. We try to work with neutral faces and concentrate on what is expressed by the body.

R: In Greek theater, the mark of a good actor was to inhabit the imaginations of the spectators, to invite their own experience, interpretation and emotions and channel them, rather than convey specific motives or emotions. The mask is an important means of achieving this : it obscures the specificity of the actor’s appearance and expression and it is where the spectator must write his own emotions, while taking cues from the actor’s body movement and expression.

In this sense, you’re making an interesting connection, I think, because traditional comics seem to me to be one of the few narrative forms that retained the archetypical models of ancient theater through modernism, where contemporary drama, the novel and eventually film were more concerned with realism, or at least naturalism.

R: Yes, we’re not naturalists, but we draw bodies in realistic proportions.

Yes, you even make this a central part of the premise in Sol Carrelus, where the participants in the masked ball turn into the archetypes from classic horror stories.

R: Yes, we like the little masquerades we all play.

I don’t know whether you agree, but to me there’s a certain coldness to your presentation; it can seem almost clinical. The reader is placed at a distance from the action, as if he or she were looking at microbes in a petri dish.

R: We like to maintain a certain distance between the reader and our characters, and as you said, today’s cultural representations are more about making the viewer project himself into the characters, to empathize. Our concerns are a bit different: we like to create little human objects with human behavior, and we are, of course, mostly interested in the dark aspects of human nature, which might lead to the impression you’re talking about.

From Irene et les clochards

R: You have to make a choice somewhere, and we find these aspects of being human the most interesting. The instances where we misunderstand, deceive, betray, hurt, and kill each other are the most relevant and therefore worthy of exploration.

You seem very much attracted to traditional storytelling genres and formulae : Safari Monseigneur works with colonialist tropes, Sol Carrelus is a combination of the classic haunted house story and the classic American film monsters, and Le Tricheur is police-interrogation-based caper story.

R: We like those forms because there’s a lot of truth in them. They have been used to tell so many stories and have accumulated a lot of cultural baggage that one can make use of. They offer a kind of shortcut to interesting issues, a means of exploring them.

I was wondering in this context about the “Maison Close” jam project. Choosing the kind of premise you did : female and male cartoonists drawing themselves interacting in a whorehouse, the former acting the part of the prostitutes, the latter that of their johns : one would assume that one of the most natural themes to raise would be the one of gender roles in comics, as well as the world at large. And I guess you do address this, to a certain extent, but only subliminally. You don’t seem to be interested in going for obvious, or dare I say difficult themes, but rather treat… not subversively, necessarily, but with a certain deadpan irony.

R: Well, the “Maison Close” was a collaborative project involving over two dozen cartoonists. We merely provided the premise and drew the scenery in which they had to interact. And we appeared as characters here and there. But really, the individual storylines were left to the participants themselves. Mostly they worked in pairs, creating the story of their own interaction. There was a certain consulting with us, but really, we had no control over the story.

Yes, but you chose the premise, the setting, and that in itself dictates a lot of what is going on. It’s an uncomfortable premise.

R: Yes, absolutely. We wanted to put the participants in this slightly uncomfortable situation of devising a story in which they participated in this kind of encounter. It was a way of eliciting interesting and difficult choices from them, of making them deal with it. We think that’s more interesting than comfortably letting them do whatever they want, and in any case, we needed a premise to make the project cohere.

It’s also a premise that was bound to draw criticism, I guess, but I was surprised that someone like Chantal Montellier took such offense. I mean, it’s pretty obviously not an attempt to perpetuate sexist stereotypes…

M: Yes, I had expected her to have a more nuanced view. It seemed a bit of a knee-jerk reaction.

Was there an element of provocation in the project?

R: Definitely, yes : we of course wanted to provoke the contributors to do interesting work.

Speaking of collaboration, I wanted to ask about how you work and how you build your books. Obviously a lot of thought goes into their conception…

R: It’s hard to tell you one thing, because each project is different. It usually starts with some kind of idea or concept that we want to try out, and then we develop it from there. Le Tricheur for example, is based on the duet as a model. It’s structured around three duets of characters that interact and reflect each other’s relationships. Often it starts with individual scenes that we find interesting, and only later do we provide a unifying structure.

M: Yes, Sol Carrelus, for example, started with a number of separate situations that we found interesting and drew out. By doing this, we gradually developed a set of characters that we figured would work well together. We then pasted up the individual scenes on the wall and began figuring out how we could tie them together, by providing a structure and creating a story.

R: Yes, and that phase obviously is more about planning, but it’s not always the case from the start.

Self-portraits from Irene et les Clochards

R: Well, it’s complicated, and we always try to make it look homogenous, as if it were drawn by one person. [Picks up Le Tricheur] But, for example, here I drew Cravate and Jerome drew Batman, and here I drew Bonnet and Jerome drew Casquette, and then we put it together.

I assume you work next to each other?

M: Yes.

It’s clearly very homogenous work, but do you recognise individual differences between yourselves, that can be used to your advantage? I was thinking that the fact that you are two different individuals might at times be used actively for artistic purposes. Is there a kind of division of labour in this sense?

R: This is not something we think it makes sense to talk about. We do the work together. It’s Ruppert and Mulot together. We get this question a lot, and so do Dupuy and Berberian. They refuse to talk about it at all : we talk about it a little, but really it doesn’t make sense. There’s a tendency amongst journalists to want to put things into neat boxes, like “this guys does the characters and this guy does the backgrounds” or whatever, and that’s both rigid and reductive. So it’s not really something we want to talk about in detail.

As should be evident from my 2005 review, I consider this a remarkable book in a remarkable oeuvre. I never thought the interview rendered Brown nor the book justice, consisting mostly of dead ends and leads left unpursued, but I still think the artist makes a number of interesting points and observations and foregrounds the motivations that led him to write Paying for It. I am in any case grateful that Mr. Brown took the time.

The interview was published at Rackham in 2004. This is its first publication in English. I hope you enjoy it, despite its shortcomings.

From Ed the Happy Clown

I want to start by asking you what it’s been like to work with historical material [in Louis Riel], and especially in relation to your earlier work. Because I see underlying themes, which : as far as I see it : are recurrent in all your work that I want to touch upon later. What were the differences between this and your earlier work, and what were the continuities?

There weren’t a lot of problems. Really, the jump from what I was doing before to doing historical comics wasn’t that big a jump. I’ve being doing autobiographical comics, which are about someone’s real-life experiences, so moving to biography, which deals with someone’s life… the only difference is that it’s someone else’s life rather than mine : in both cases you have the same problems of dealing with a large mass of material, all the events in a person’s life, and trying to condense it down into a narrative of however many pages you have : I knew from the beginning I wanted it to be around two hundred pages. The problems were rather ones of finding reference, not the least visual, and trying to reconcile different historical accounts, where for example two historians would disagree with each other, or where two eyewitnesses had different versions of the events, that sort of thing. Whereas with autobiographical material, it’s just one person’s version of what happened : my version.

The reason I’m asking is because I see a lot of your work dealing with notions of reality and normalcy. The problem of what constitutes insanity : you have the whole question of Riel’s sanity…

Right.

From "My Mother Was a Schizophrenic, published in Underwater #4.

… and you address it very directly in your work on your mother : as well as the ideas, I guess, of representing reality in comics, which is something one does pretty directly in many ways : and in some ways not : in both autobiography and history writing. Do you see some kind of continuity there? And, if you do, what kind of problems do you see in relation to representing reality in comics?

Uh… problems?

Well, the problems, which present themselves as to what to show, how to be honest, being true to reality, while telling a story at the same time…

Yeah, being really honest and really true to Riel’s story was impossible in two hundred pages. That’s why I had to have the footnotes at the back of the book; to explain where I’d fudged stuff or changed details for the sake of narrative flow. Most of the changes I made were to keep the book at around two hundred pages. If I really wanted to tell Riel’s story as honestly as I could in comic book form, I would have needed more like a thousand pages or something, not two hundred. That was the big problem : space consideration. Being able to stay true to the material.

The sequence at the bottom of this page from Louis Riel is typical of Brown's method. The three generals never met in person, but by presenting it thus, Brown saves himself and the reader unnecessary complications.

Do you regard what you did as a representation of reality or more as a work of fiction?

Uh, it certainly has fictional elements in it, but I don’t think my concerns were the same as someone who sets out to write fiction. I think writing fiction has more to do with entering into a character’s emotional life, whereas I had absolutely no interest in that. History is more concerned with the events, the outer representation of those events, what happened, the sequence of events and those sorts of things, not getting into a character. So my interest was more of a historical one, but in order to tell that historical story in two hundred pages, I had to resort to fictional methods : making up dialogue, inventing or condensing scenes, that sort of thing.

The reason I’m asking is because so many of the themes found in your previous work seem to pop up in Riel. Did you set out to consciously treat these themes, or did they just present themselves as part of the material as you went along? I can see how some of them would, but…

Yeah, that’s certainly why I was attracted to the story in the first place : Riel’s interest in religion, the whole question of his sanity, his messianic fervor, and those sorts of things. It was there, that’s why I did the story.

Riel is transported to the 4th Heaven.

There are points in the narrative where you sense a definite authorial hand, the most obvious being the representation of Riel’s vision. That kind of moves beyond traditional historical writing, you become aware that there’s an author interpreting the material and adding to it. Did you plan to make that kind of thing obvious, or did it just come naturally? What were your considerations regarding that?

I don’t think I was aware of it, and with that particular scene, it shows what Riel said happened. Of course, in representing it…

Yeah, that’s what I mean.

Yeah, in drawing it, you have to invent : I have Saturn in the back, and Riel never said Saturn was there, or whatever. But of course, that happens in any scene in the book; I draw Riel in a room and have a chair next to him : who knows whether that chair was there?

No, I guess I’m talking about traditions of historical writing. In a traditional account, you normally wouldn’t normally go into a person’s head as you do in that particular scene : not that you do it that much in the book, but in that case, at least. Whether it’s real or not is of course the question, but it’s Riel’s vision represented on paper in your line; it becomes much more palpable than if you’d drawn him coming up telling somebody about the vision.

Yeah, it is an interpretation, and I probably chose that way of doing it, because I do take seriously when people say the have visions. I’m sure sometimes people aren’t truthful about that sort of thing, but other times I think we have to take seriously what people say they experience : if they say they experience talking to the Holy Ghost, then I think they probably really did experience something, and we tend to discount those sorts of experiences and I don’t think we should.

Following the discussion of representation, I would like to ask you what you think are the strengths and the advantages of doing an historical narrative in drawn, comics form.

[Pause] I think it’s more readable. History does seem to be kind of dry, and I say that as someone who enjoys reading historical books. But I know that for a large part of the population, reading history is less exciting than reading other sorts of things, and I think that comics might be a good way of popularizing history in a way that doesn’t do damage to historical truth in the same way that, say, film does when it tackles historical subjects. I think if someone tried to do a… well, actually, there have been film versions of Riel’s story, and I think… I can say for certain that my book was closer to the truth than those films were; it’s probably not as true as a serious prose biography, it kind of sits somewhere in the middle between film adaptations or versions of the story and prose histories. I think cartoonists should be looking at this more seriously at this as a way of getting people to read history.

A while ago I was talking to Joe Sacco about similar problems. The fact that if you recreate something on film, it immediately looks fake [Brown laughs], it connotes fiction…

Yeah.

…whereas, if you draw it, it seems more convincing. It’s obviously an interpretation, but because it’s so obvious, it kind of seems more real than film, which on the face of it looks more real… it’s something he’s given a lot of thought, but couldn’t say anything definite about : have you had similar thoughts? About the interpretative act of drawing? What’s the nature of reality drawn by you, in a style obviously derived from cartoon history?

[Pauses] I didn’t worry about it that much. I think what made this seem not so daunting a task was reading Larry Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe; he just made drawing people in certain historical periods look so easy, the costumes he would put people in just looked so cartoony, so dashed off, but still looked right, somehow. That kind of made it look possible, and made me worry less about getting things absolutely accurate. Obviously, I did try to research as much as I could what things looked like, but…

It didn’t trouble you too much if you couldn’t find a source for something you needed to draw?

No, I did try…

Because I know for Joe it’s very important…

Heh, yeah…

What he does is obviously quite different from what you do, but there are central similarities : the representation of truth in drawn form.

Yeah, maybe I should have made that even clearer in my notes : to refer to my visual sources. I would try to find reference for all the historical figures : photographs or drawings : but sometimes I couldn’t, so I would just make up what they look like, so maybe I should have mentioned in the notes when I did that.

You did that at least once, with that guy whom you drew skinny, but who was actually fat [laughs].

Yeah. There were other instances where I couldn’t find references, and I didn’t note that in the back.

William Mcdougal incorrectly depicted as a skinny man.

I’ve already asked this question, but I think I’m going to ask it again…

OK.

Did you set out to represent historical truth, or did you primarily want to tell a story?

[Long pause] The thing is… you can’t know the truth at this point… Yeah, I was more concerned with the story, and I had a bias. I set out to make the Canadian government look as bad as possible, because my political stance when I began the project was anarchism : it was supposed to be an anti-government work, even though my politics kind of changed while I was working on the book : what I believed at the beginning wasn’t what I believed at the end : and even though I knew Riel himself wasn’t an anarchist, if anything he was politically conservative.

So, did your view of the situation and your politics change because of the work?

Yeah, because of the reading I was doing.

McDonald, "the villain of the piece," presents a plan to thwart Riel.

Yeah, you express in your annotation that, even though [the Canadian Prime Minister] McDonald is sort of the villain of the piece…

Yeah.

… you wouldn’t want to live in a state governed by Riel.

When I began the book, I saw McDonald as a villain, but several years later, when I was actually drawing those scenes, I felt differently, so that’s why I wrote that in the notes. Changing the book’s direction at that point just seemed too difficult; I actually sat down and tried to rewrite the material to reflect my changed in political perspective and it was just too difficult, so I just kept to the script that I had originally written and finished the book that way.

Approaching a work with such profound spiritual content from an anarchist point of view seems kind of problematic. How did you reconcile the two? I mean, you’ve always treated themes of spirituality in your work : could you comment on that? Have you become a religious person along the way?

Oh yeah, I’m a religious person and I have been all along. I don’t see a conflict between being anti-government and believing that there’s a God. Actually, my political views and my spiritual views kind of complement each other, but I’m sure that there are committed anarchists that are also atheist, and that’s fine, whatever… [chuckles]

I just figured that anarchism at its base tended to preclude spirituality, but, of course, looking at your work, that’s obviously not the case. [Long pause] Right, I think I want to return to the drawings. To me, perhaps the strongest aspect of your work is the poetry of the drawings, for example the sheer evocative power of the dream sequences in Underwater, and it’s also very present in Riel, although it has obviously been reined in a little. Did you have any conscious goals you wanted to accomplish with the art themselves, the style, the compositions : the open field, the cartoony characters…

My… one goal was to make the artwork look as much as the artwork in Little Orphan Annie as possible, I was trying to draw like Harold Gray, and…

Was that just self-indulgence or…

I love Gray’s work and that looked like fun to me.

OK.

It looked like fun to draw like Harold Gray. I had other things going on too; there’s a lot of distance between the viewer and the characters, the characters are drawn really small in most of the panels and there’s almost no use of close-up. And that had to do with not wanting to enter into the emotional lives of the characters, trying to stay as distant from them as possible. They were drawn in a very cartoony style, a more cartoony style that Gray used actually, they have big noses, wild hair and that sort of thing, and that was really to keep the characters distinct from each other, so that you would be easily able to recognize which character was which.

Accessibility again.

Yeah.

Yeah, that was also my hunch about it : it was enjoyable to draw like that [Brown laughs]. Your resistance to the use of close-ups : and I might be going out on a total limb here : complements ideas of nineteenth-century visual culture very well. It’s almost like looking into a stereoscope; you present a view that seems God-like, objective, but upon further scrutiny, especially of the framing, you start noticing how subjective it is : it’s all chosen for the viewer by you.

Mm-hm.

You work with that very rigorous grid, and all the panels are the same size : do you think a lot about framing as you work, or does it just come naturally?

Um… Yeah, I guess you could say it comes naturally. I don’t think there’s a lot of thought given to that… the compositions are pretty simple and basic, the characters are either centered or very close to the center of the panels.

Riel's men enter Fort Garry.

There’s a very interesting passage : the one where Riel’s men are entering the fort at the beginning and you keep a figure – not the same figure because they’re all running : but you keep one figure almost at the center of each panel [Brown chuckles]. And at the very corner of the upper images, you can just see a cannon on the other side of the gates.

Mm-hm.

To me, it seems like some thought went into that composition.

Yeah, probably [chuckles].

I don’t know, maybe not, maybe not [laughs]. I’m just thinking of how, in the nineteenth century, images tend to become fragments of a greater whole, and your work very much seems composed of fragments, not the least in how you compose the page; the way you draw each panel individually as you’ve mentioned in several interviews.

Right.

How has your approach to the composition of a page evolved? Have you given up page layout as a prime concern?

Oh yeah, completely. I never think of how each panel is going to work on the page. That happens once the page is put together. Certainly, there was no point in Riel where I put a page together and decided it didn’t work and had to be changed. There was one instance of it in the Ed the Happy Clown book, where I had drawn a head in one panel, a close-up of someone’s head, and when I put the page together, the panel directly below it was a picture of someone else’s body, and it became an odd juxtaposition, it looked like it was supposed to be a total drawing of a head and body, so I had to change the panel with the body : I moved the body over a bit. But nothing like that happened in the Riel book… So yeah, if the pages work, it’s just serendipitous.

OK. Why are you not concerned with that?

[Pause] Because I don’t have to be concerned with it. The pages look fine to me without it. There have been times in the past where I’ve been concerned with it and have tried to be conscious of images work together in sequence, and have tried to do what comic book artists are supposed to do where you lead the eye compositionally through the panels on the page, and… I don’t know, I don’t think that makes a page any more appealing than the random placement of images that were used in, say, the Riel book. People know how to read a comic book page, what balloon to read first and so on; I don’t think there’s a need to guide them.

It again makes for very interesting results in Riel; almost no page is self-contained…

Right.

There’s invariably a change of scene or something on each page that embeds it in the narrative.

Right.

From Riel's trial. Note the assymmetry and the disconnect between the characters across the central gutter.

And you have many instances, especially in the courtroom scene at the end, where the characters are talking to each other with the images showing them as if their backs were turned to each other. Is that also serendipitous?

Yeah. Just as there are sequences were the characters have their backs turned to each other, there are others in that courtroom scene where they actually are facing each other. I just didn’t worry about it.

So there’s no concern with guidelines like the 180 degree-line which is used in film and which some people claim also works better in comics… well, you obviously don’t think so.

Yeah, I never switch : if one person’s supposed to be at the left and another to the right, I don’t switch them around.

But you do between images, and I think it adds to the narrative meaning…

Good [chuckles].

[Laughs] How and when did you develop that approach : drawing each panel on its own?

Uhm… Quite early in my work. I think the first time I did it was with the story “Walrus Blubber Sandwich” in an early issue of Yummy Fur : it’s in the Little Man book, it’s one of the earliest strips in that book. Uhm, why did I do that? [pause] I don’t know, It’s hard to put myself back in…

From "Walrus Blubber Sandwich"

Returning to that approach to the individual panel, did it feel liberating? And have you consistently done it since then?

No, no, no, for the most part I’ve worked that way, but I’m sure that there are a couple of instances where I have done everything on a page. But for the most part I’ve done it. I think I started doing it for the reason I still do it : it’s the easiest way of editing a story and making changes, and things like that. Also I think it was just due to the practical fact that it’s hard to work on a large board : at the top of the page you have to kind of stretch your arm up, whereas if I’m just working on one panel, my arm is closer to my body and it doesn’t have to stretch out as far : it’s easier.

From I Never Liked You.

Right. The reason I’m asking is it really becomes a powerful storytelling tool in I Never Liked You : it becomes very noticeable for the reader in that story. Often a scene that doesn’t necessarily carry a lot of emotional significance gets a single panel on a full page, while in traditional comics grammar you would only do something like that for an emotional climax in a story. Here, something else is going on…

Mm-hm.

Uh, I don’t know what I was going to ask you : I seem to keep wanting to attribute conscious choices to these things if they’re not there… [chuckles] Please deny it, if that’s the case. But did that book feel like a breakthrough narratively in some way? Or even in terms of your autobiographical work?

You mean I Never Liked You? Because I was using that in The Playboy too, and even with “Showing Helder”.

Right, right.

That way of isolating certain panels from the others. So, in those terms, the breakthrough was probably “Showing Helder”, even though later on, midway through Underwater, I went back to using six panels per page. But yeah, that was a great way of working : being able to have as many panels per page as seemed necessary, and being able to isolate certain panels. Yeah, probably more work should be done way, or at least it’s a potential area to be explored by cartoonists.

Brown shows part of his work process, including a phone call to his colleague Seth. From "Showing Helder" in Yummy Fur #20.

So, how much planning goes into individual sequences? How do you put them together? Do you decide in advance roughly how many panels you’re going to use and how you’re going to distribute them on the pages?

Well, with Riel, I did write out a full script beforehand. Each page of script was an 8,5 by 11″ sheet of paper and I would divide the sheet of paper into six panels and write the dialogue for each panel on it. And if it was necessary to remind myself what was going to be drawn in a panel, I would have stick figure indications. I wrote out the whole script, which ended up being 240 pages, and the story ended up being 272 pages I think, which is a bit longer because I extended scenes and added material to what was in the script. I knew that would happen as I was writing the script; the script was really a draft, just because the script indicated a certain number of panels didn’t mean that was the number of panels that were going to end up being on the actual page once the book was finished.

Did you take out a lot?

There were some scenes that were not drawn, but I definitely added more than I took out.

Because I was wondering : the cover of the last issue of Riel has him exiting the window, going to his execution, an image which isn’t found in the actual book.

Right.

The cover to issue 10 or the serialized version of Louis Riel.

Are there many instances of that?

That scene was drawn for the interior of the comic and then I decided it wasn’t necessary for the story, and then I needed an image for the cover and I decided to use it [Matthias chuckles]. And yeah, there were quite a few panels like that which were taken out.

We’re getting very technical here [chuckles]. Just to wrap up, I think I want to ask you whether you see your work as continuously exploring similar themes or moving towards new ones? Some of cartoonists I’ve talked to basically say they’ve explored the same set of themes in all their work and will continue to do so : how do you see your work in relation to that? Is it something you’ve given any thought?

Hm… [long pause]. There are things I’m becoming more interested in dealing with, which I’m not sure were present in the earlier work, particularly political ideas. My earlier work wasn’t that political…

Do you see Riel as being very political?

It’s probably not as political as the work I’ll be doing in the future.

Is this a result of your work on it?

Yeah, working on Riel changed my political perspective and I’m going to want to reflect that in the work I do in the future.

How so? Do you want to express a particular political viewpoint? Or, as I see it, present a situation as you do it in Riel and leave it ambiguous? That’s why I asked whether you thought it was a political book, because I don’t perceive it to be pushing a political agenda.

It’s not an explicit agenda, that’s for sure, and the work I do in the future will probably be more explicit.

I’m grateful to Henry Sørensen for transcribing the interview.

Far from an assured success, the collaboration and the thematic focus the two have selected make for a remarkable consistent album, containing moments of vocal fire as well of spiritual oomph. The maturation Marley exhibited with last year’s remarkable Welcome to Jamrock continues on this record—his vocals are more varied and self-assured than ever—while Nas has not been this consistent on a whole album for many years.

Musically, the album could have been a little more adventurous, sounding perhaps a little too polished, but it is skillfully and melodically composed by Damian and his brother Stephen and carries the amazing vocal performances perfectly, with nary a weak track and only one or two instances of ill-advised sentimentalism.

I caught up with the two of them on their tour stop in Copenhagen the week before last, a few hours before a fantastic, sold-out show at Store Vega and got the chance to ask them some questions for Rapspot.dk. I was joined by my buddy, DubCNN’s PTA. Since we were in his hotel room, we started talking to Marley, but Nas showed up about half-way through.

Matthias Wivel: How did the album come to be? What made you decide to work together?

Damian Marley: The album came to be because we were respecting and being fans of each other’s music. I invited Nas to be on the Welcome to Jamrock album, on a track called “Road to Zion”, and he had invited me to do some work with him on the Hip Hop Is Dead album—unfortunately, the song that we did together didn’t make it onto that album—so we always had an interest to do more work together. And then our management teams came up with the idea to do an EP of four songs based upon Africa. And when we started working on that EP, it became an album, so that’s how it happened.

PTA: Nas is one of the few rappers that are still talking about Africa in his music—was that something that drew you to him, or was it something else?

DM: Yes, that’s something that drew me to him over the years—Nas is someone who can communicate with the streets and can still keep it real in terms of being human, he doesn’t try to be this super perfect person, but has respect for his history and for his ancestors and for spirituality. So Nas always displayed that in his music, while at the same time keeping it hard and something that you can relate to.

MW: About the theme of common ancestry in Africa, it runs through the whole album. It’s very tightly conceived in that sense…

DM: Yeah. We had two songs from my last album that we couldn’t use, because we couldn’t get clearance on them at the time—one of them was with K’Naan, which ended up becoming “Africa Must Wake Up” on this album now. So because we had those two songs, we decided to record two more songs and do the EP, and then we just decided to keep going and make the whole album about Africa: a lot of the music on the album is sampled from African songs and the topic of songs is Africa—every song in some way has a connection to Africa. We liked that, so we kept that theme.

PTA: You also shared something in that both of your fathers were, and are, musicians. Is that something that came through in your relationship?

DM: No. I learned about Nas’ father being a musician right before starting work on this album, and I didn’t know how much of a legend he was, so I never really had much knowledge of it during the process.

PTA: Something I found interesting about the album is that there are spiritual songs, but there’s also some great emceeing, where you guys almost go head to head—on “As We Enter”, “Nah Mean”, and so on—what was it like recording that? Nas is one of the best spitters in hip hop, so did you have to step up your game?

DM: Yeah, I mean, it’s something that keeps you sharp. I was really in the zone working on this record, because I was really inspired and enjoying myself. For “As We Enter”, the first track on the album, we were in the booth together, literally on the same mic, going back and forth. That in itself was a lot of fun, a great experience.

PTA: Nas describes you as “two Obamas” on that track; there was a great feeling of change when Obama was elected, and both of you have been very vocal about politicians not doing their job—how do you feel about the political scene now?

DM: The greatest thing to me about Obama is not the individual, it does not have to do with Obama himself—it’s really about the people who have elected Obama. It demonstrates that people are ready for change, and I think Obama knows that, because he really came up from the people, the young generation especially. He motivated a lot of African Americans who never voted before to go and vote. In Jamaica, I can’t say there’s been much change in the political scene—same shit, different day.

MW: How did you approach the music in terms of mixing hip hop and dancehall reggae, both when came to your deejaying and singing, and when working on the music, did you and your brother [Stephen] have to adapt your approach to accommodate hip hop emceeing?

DM: Not really, my albums have always had that kind of flavour. We’ve always listened to hip hop, I’m a fan of hip hop music, so I always used a hip hop element in my music anyway. What it was really about was bringing in the African element—that was new. We sampled a lot of African music and used a lot of African influence. I listened to a lot of African music during the process of creating this album, just to look for pieces to use. So that was a learning experience. Also, it was different for me, knowing I was making music for Nas, somebody who is already a legend in his own right, has a lot of experience, and knows what he wants—that was a challenge; it helped me to rise to the occasion, and I think I really grew as a producer during the making of this album.

MW: Being in charge of the music on the album, you must have set the direction to an extent?

DM: Musically? Yeah, to an extent.

MW: So maybe Nas was the one who had to adapt more?

DM: I think if you asked him, he would tell you ‘yeah’. I’ve heard him say that some of the grooves we used are not really typical of hip hop music, so for him I think, in that sense, it was kind of a challenge. For me, it was a challenge to have the music be up to his standard and liking.

[There is an interruption as Nas arrives, greets everyone, and sits down]

DM: We were just talking about you [laughter].

Nas: Nice room—you know Damian gets the better rooms [laughter].

DM: It’s the press room, dawg [more laughter]

PTA: One of the things I really like about dancehall is the idea of teaching the youth, and it’s also been a tradition in hip hop, but it’s been gone for a while—[to Nas] your song “I Can” is along those lines, but on this album there’s a lot of it, “My Generation” is a great example. Was this something you set out to do and was there anything specific you wanted to communicate?

DM: Well, like you say it’s always been prominent in dancehall reggae music, and when you do an album about Africa, you can’t be too superficial. One of the things that Nas and I have in common is lyrics that say something, that you can learn from. So it’s just building upon common ground.

MW: [to Nas] For many years now, conscious rap has been less prominent than it used to be, and this is a thoroughly conscious record, maybe more so than any of your previous albums—could you describe your ambition in moving in that direction with this work?

Nas: To me, it’s an honour to be accepted as a hip hop artist, it gives me a lot of opportunity to express myself. At this point in my career, within myself, this is the kind of record I wanted to make. Probably, a lot of artists have not reached that far in their own thing—maybe they’re too new, maybe they’re scared, maybe they’re just comfortable in their zone—I’ve been lucky enough to reach a place where I can speak what’s in my heart, and people know that it comes from a real place; I don’t have to worry about doing what someone’s not doing—I can do me. I think hip hop allows us to talk about everything, and this is what I choose to talk about now. If people are not talking about Africa, that’s them, that’s cool, there’s nothing wrong with that. But this is who I am, this is what I have to say, this is what I have to offer.

MW: You also put some pretty personal stuff on the album—there’s a very mature vibe to it.

Nas: Today, with the media, the internet, things get out there about anybody, anytime, so there’s nothing wrong about talking about your life, because someone else is going to talk about it and mess it up.

PTA: What’s the greatest thing you’ve learned from doing this album and touring with it?

DM: How much people love it [laughter].

Nas: Yeah, yeah.

DM: How much people appreciate it; they don’t just love it, they love it with a kind of appreciation that’s different than just loving the average party record. Learning that has been something that feels like what we’re doing is worth it.

PTA: It definitely feels like you guys are reaching each other’s audiences, as well as a whole new audience, not the least over here.

Nas: Yeah, we’re broadening each other’s audience at the same time. This thing is universal—you can’t put it in one place. Me and D are doing something that’s different from what we’ve been doing, this is opening up new things for us, and it’s great.

MW: [to Nas] is there also a feeling of connection back to the origins of hip hop for you? I mean because hip hop evolved to such a significant extent out of Jamaican music?

Nas: Oh man, big time, this is like getting into my roots—this is me doing my own soul searching and letting the world watch me as I’m digging into myself. Yeah.

Photos from the Copenhagen show by Kenneth Nguyen (see more of them here). And here’s a Rapspot drop from the duo:

So while, yes, The Surrogates film starring Bruce Willis may have been a bit of a letdown, Robert Venditti’s consummate vision of a strikingly modernist post-modern future still vibrantly successful, in no small part to his recent prequel The Surrogates: Flesh and Bone. Begun in a mini-series published by Top Shelf in 2005, Venditti’s The Surrogates quite dutifully reimagines the Yeatsian postmodern societal disintegration in a world in which people do away with their physical selves in preference to beautiful idealized androids, which they then live vicariously through. In the first series, Atlanta has already been taken under the spell of this corporate wundermachina; Detective Harvey Greer, the main character, never even sees his wife physically to have dinner. Despite its simple premise, Venditti achieves a contemporary ethos which holds a mirror up to a reality-show culture, summoning the most biting fable of American socio-cultural trends in recent memory. What is most impressive is not that the story is soundly constructed, but how vast an area of area of the American mindscape the story encompasses, yet how personal it feels. These poignant narrative techniques evince the abilities of a great storyteller in the making.

I spoke to Venditti from his home in Georgia, and was delighted to find an open-minded and cordial man who, ironically against his traditional upbringing in the American South, manages to breathe new life into the old “Android” science-fiction trope, partly by blending it with that underused juxtaposition: religion. While it is impossible to deny the religious undertones associated with the characters who eventually serve as series’ antagonists, The Prophet and The Steeplejack, what I found most refreshing about their portrayal is the complexity with which they are situated in their respective positions in society. Disney made a mistake in changing the story to include mass-death; the comics feel much closer to reality and more innovated due to their realistic portrayal of human reaction to such phenomena as terrorism, violence and the disconnection of identity of the postmodern world.

Despite the fact that Venditti does not come from a tradition of comic authors of any kind, his storytelling is ultimately sound. Flesh and Bone, ostensibly a tale of social rapture and the beginnings of a dystopian America, feels like Venditti is in his element. Atlanta serves as a useful petri dish for the examination of the logical conclusions of contemporary perceptions of identity, providing an appropriate backdrop of materialist culture, which does not seem to value or even remember the purpose and value of the human soul. Patrolman Greer in his younger incarnation walks through a world in which the Surrogates are initially the playthings of a gang of misanthropic children—a useful metaphor for the problems the Western world currently appears to be facing. The story expands its scope to encompass relationships of cause and effect in all walks of life, ultimately coming together to form a Dickensian world run on pathos, far from the shores of its Asimovian predecessors yet unexpectedly, and delightfully, serving as something a younger cousin.

In this interview, I tried to strike a balance between Venditti’s background and his opinions. I hope you will find it a useful look into a unique, emerging talent in the industry.

The cover to The Surrogates 2 and the Surrogates collection

I’ve noticed that some or your fictional theories are similar to those of inventor Raymond Kurzweil. You both seem to believe in the escalating development of technology. One of the more obsessive things he has is a timeline of what he thinks will happen as technology advances in the world for the next hundred year. I thought it was interesting in the way that it paralleled what you want to say.

Since writing the book, I thought that the technology of The Surrogates is going to be probably real, and its going to exist much earlier in the future than 50 years from now that I posit. I mean I get forwarded all these stories from fans. There’s a professor in Japan who doesn’t want to deal with the morning commute so he has an android version of himself that’s in the classroom. He connects to it virtually and teaches class through this robotic dummy of himself. Somebody else sent me an article from Sweden where, because the living centers are so far apart from each other, they are working on technology where a doctor can remotely commute to a hospital in another city and perform a crucial surgery through robotic arms by controlling them with thought. They could be performed in time and not have to worry about flying in doctors. The technology looks like it’s definitely coming along faster than I thought it would.

One way I thought you portrayed this very interestingly in The Surrogates is through its impact upon human relationships. You’ve said that Margaret and Harvey’s relationship is the backbone of the story. What do you think this has to do with the separation of reality that comes with the virtual life?

I think its all about identity and the anonymity you get from technology: text messaging, chat rooms, World of Warcraft, Second Life, any of those kinds of things that allows you to create yourself as you want to be. The biggest impact is upon how we perceive others perceive ourselves. [Chuckles] It is a big impact, and I think there is a breakdown in personal communication. That’s why I’ve always felt that the relationship between Harvey and Margaret is really the backbone of The Surrogates story and, to me, the most important element. It gives you that personal aspect and shows you, if this technology of Surrogate machines really existed, how it could even invade the home at that point.

In other words, right now if I’m living through Second Life or interacting through chat rooms or whatever, I’m still me in my home. In my little bubble, I’m still me and when I interact with my family and my neighbors, that’s still me. But if you had a Surrogate, and you did as Margaret does, since you use that even in the home… well, now its even breaking down the family unit. Whereas now, the lack of personal relationships exists, the effect is more on the level of perhaps professional relationships—telecommuting to work or really relationships with people you never would have had in the first place—with a Surrogate, it would really come in at a much more personal level and get to us in our daily lives.

Apparently in the future, getting sliced up with a chain saw is nothing to freak out about. From Flesh and Blood

One thing I was really touched by in your characterizations was the portrayal of Margaret. Margaret is the wife of the main detective, Harvey, who has primarily used a Surrogate for years now. She is afraid of even getting out of her bed. Do you see this as a common malady in your postmodern world structure?

Margaret’s sense of character, where she’s coming from… I think I was looking more at body image aspects, which are felt more acutely by women. You’re bombarded if you’re a women, with magazine covers and TV shows and everything is about how you look. At least that’s the way things are presented to you in the media and popular culture.

I don’t know if its necessarily a fear, like its not some kind of xenophobia. She just doesn’t want to face the realities of the fact that her body image is no longer what society would determine it needed to be for her to pass muster and she’s trying to stave that off in any way she can. I guess she’s trying to go for that singularity that you said Kurzweil does but for very different reasons. Whereas Kurzweil is trying to reach immortality and it doesn’t really matter what his age in years is, Margaret just wants to stay young.

A lot of that was borne out of what was going on at the time, which is certainly carrying forward into today. You have a lot of these shows, extreme makeovers and kinds of things where people go in these radical plastic surgery procedures to revamp the way they look, and they come out at the end and they’ve got a new haircut a new clothes and new teeth and the crowd claps for them like all of a sudden they are acceptable people, which they weren’t before or something. That’s a lot of what goes into Margaret’s character.

A lot of what The Surrogates is about is “where does the line get drawn between what’s right and what’s too much?” There’s the technology aspect of that to the story: “where does it become good, and where does it become bad?”, similar to plastic surgery. I think that no one has a problem with a burn victim or somebody born with a cleft pallet undergoing plastic surgery, but it’s looked at differently if its something like breast implants. Why is one OK and not the other?

I mean I understand the realities of the sense that one is different, but when you get down to the basic philosophy of it, they are still really about physical appearance and image. I don’t know the answer to that question; I don’t know where the line is drawn.

It can also be read as a take on the classic superhero epic, the characters taking up the dichotomy of good and evil, order and chaos.

In that same way where there are gray areas, I don’t think that there’s good and evil necessarily either. I think that Steeplejack and certainly the Prophet; I don’t think you can say they are entirely good or entirely evil. It depends on how you are coming to the question and how you choose to answer it for yourself: where that line in technology gets drawn. That’s where you’re going to come down on who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy in the story. You know, I think even Harvey whose a police man and who’s certainly the hero of the story—and I guess you would classify him as a good character rather than an evil one—he’s not beyond sympathizing with the “quote unquote” villains of the story.

Its something that I really try to go for in everything that I write. That I don’t ever want to feel like I’m asserting… I feel like in a lot of comics and a lot of art in general you get the sense that the writer or musician or whoever is telling you what they think and how you’re suppose to think. It’s like they are preaching at you, you know. I don’t ever want to do that. I always want to present my stories in a way where the audience is leaving it up to themselves. I’ve had just as many people interview me and say “wow you must really hate technology” and say “wow you must really dig technology”. And I like that [chuckles] because in a sense I made it so people don’t really know where I’m coming from just from reading my book. And that’s what I want. I want them to come to the answers themselves.

Well, if I may say so, I think you make Steeplejack the perfect villain if that’s what you’re going for, because not only is he going completely all out against our heroes, he’s also an admirable human being. You know, you’re giving it a little bit of this imagery in which Steeplejack, who has basically imposed his view upon the world is now trying to take it back. I can’t help but notice the Christ imagery in that.

Oh yeah, definitely. Kudos to you [laughs], you can mark this down. I think you are the first person to ever approach the religious undertones of the book to me at all, which I find astounding because I always thought it was a very big part of the story.

It’s funny you say that, pointing to the Christlike aspect of it. I think that’s a through line that runs through a few of the characters and you also get a sense of that in the new book that’s coming out as well. We go into it a little bit deeper, where you see the Prophet building up his Church. You know it’s funny. In the original draft of the story, just when it was in script form, I had done some things, Jeez, I’m going to try to do this without giving up some spoilers I tried to do some stuff where the original prototype Surrogate, the ones that all the others are based upon, it actually had a name and the name of that Surrogate was Adam. Right? How clichéed is that? [laughs]. I also thought about some things where [the character of] Lionel Canter, coming up with his name, originally his name was going to be Emmanuel because Emmanuel is a name they use to refer to Christ in the Bible.

As I was writing the story this religious undertone was something that was kicking around in my head the whole time and those were unsuccessful ways I was going to evoke that and I edited them out because they weren’t working. But it just sort of shows the process that I was writing it that kind of imagery you were referring to and those kind of analogies was something I was very conscious of.

I love that essence that he’s got. I think that’s why so many artists have been able to take the ball and run with it.

Well something that’s always appealing; when you’re reading a story and you have this voice crying out in the wilderness. When you have this one person raging against a society for benevolent reasons, I think those stories are very attractive. [Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s] V for Vendetta would be one that comes to mind. I certainly don’t agree with some of political points of that book necessarily, but I think V is a great character for that reason. I mean you just love a guy who’s out there, laying it all on the line, and completely alone. He’s trying to change things, to make them better or to what he perceives to be better, and I think those are very attractive characters. I always wanted to do a character like that, so I did.

…also, smoking has lost every negative side-affect, unless your lungs are still connected to your body like Greer. Test Page from The Surrogates

I can’t say enough about the art. It’s very color driven—Weldele, even though he’s modern, is very old school. Do you think that your narrative had any impact upon that art?

Brett has a very expressionistic style. I felt—Chris Staros felt first because he’s the one that brought him in. He had a great style, that sketchiness he has, for whatever reason, evokes in me the cyberpunk feeling I was trying to go with in the book. I also felt, the way he renders characters, because they are so sketchy, they are not hyper-detailed, they all look like iconic representations of themselves. I think that helps play into the idea of the Surrogates too.

There’s this scene, you go somebody’s nice penthouse apartment, you meet their butler, and the Butler’s kind of sketchily drawn but he looks like a Butler. He’s got the iconic traits that an “Alfred” like butler would have. I think this plays into the story because, not that people might think this when they see that butler, but my intent is, when you see that butler to think who it is on the other side of that Butler’s surrogate. Is that really an old guy with an old butler’s Surrogate, or is that a young guy who wants this really good-paying job as a butler to this rich guy in this penthouse so he went and got this old butler’s surrogate? In a future where everyone lives through these idealized versions of what you think they are supposed to look like, all of the stereotypes would be reinforced.

At one time it would become extremely egalitarian, because there would be access for anyone who could afford a surrogate to do whatever they wanted, because they would all look the part. By reinforcing stereotypes, it actually breaks the stereotypes down in a weird sort of way. That’s sort of something I wanted to play around with in the book.

Your character the Prophet is the symbol in the book for a world without Surrogates. Despite operating as a religious prophet, some of your material in the book reveals that he actually killed his family. How could a criminal become a prophet, I don’t get it?

If you believe in the Judeo-Christian faith, look at Saul. He was on the road to Damascus. He was one of the worst persecutors of Christians, and all of a sudden the scales fall from his eyes, and he becomes the apostle Paul. All sins can be forgiven if you turn to Christ, and I think that’s what the Christian faith teaches. I don’t think that his past, those events that happened, whether or not he did intentionally kill his family, is matter which I don’t think is definitively resolved. Even if he did, according to the tenants of the Christian Faith and of his followers, him turning to Christ would [allow it so] those things have no bearing on that. They don’t prevent you from becoming a Prophet just because you did bad things in your past.

The Prophet even has his own legal seat of power. That’s another issue: in the world where nothing is real, political power seems to have finally been successfully localized. Federal government and state government do not seem to be dwarfed in power to the municipal government. How does that happen in a world like this?

I didn’t really get bogged down in the politics much. In our current governmental structure, it’s a big territorial dispute. Cities fight with state governments, state governments fight with the federal government. Everyone wants more power and everybody wants to handle things on their own and not have somebody come in and check the forms. Having it set in a future version of Atlanta, I could have had the governor settle the dispute at the end and not the mayor because in Atlanta, the governor and the Mayor live in the same city. I just wrote it the way I did and I didn’t really dwell on these things a heck of a lot.

Gender roles within society are being addressed in the value system and legislation in the US. I’m referring to a case in which an eight-year-old, biologically born male, has declared herself a female. In what way do you think technology in The Surrogates addresses these heated issues?

For a political science course I took in college, I read a book called Taking Sides. The book was set up in groups of two essays in each chapter, and they would discuss a policy subject, whether it was the environment or one of these things. You’d read one essay from a guy who was for it, and another essay there was a guy who was against it; you’d read them back to back.

That was a day, reading that book, that I learned that arguments can be very convincing no matter which side they come down on because you’d read the first essay and go, “man, I am totally for that!” and then you’d read the second essay and go “now I’m totally against that.” By presenting facts and opinions in a certain way, you can shape these journal articles that you’re writing to reach these biases that you want the people to agree with you on. So when I wrote that mock-journal article that you’re talking about, that isn’t me the writer talking about that. That is William Lazlow, this future scholar writing this journal article, trying to convince the reader how awesome surrogate technology is. So when he says how awesome it is that females can be pilots now, because all they have to do is go get a male surrogate, because customers are more comfortable according to the statistics with males being pilots over females—again this is in a future world, I don’t know if these statistics are based in reality today I’m making all this up.

Does that really solve the problem of sexism? I don’t think it does. I’m not a women who has ever tried to get a job as a pilot, but if I was, and I was told I could be a pilot, and all I’d have to do is be a guy, I would probably be offended by that. I don’t know that actually having a Surrogate would solve any of those identity issues, but again I’m not somebody who’s dealing with any of those issues, so I don’t know that I could say.

What can you say about your statement about the economy, the materialism of it?

You read a lot of stories about utopias, obviously this is something that’s been done a million times where you’ve got this world where this technology has come in and taken over, everybody’s a part of it but there’s always going to be some faction of society that’s going to be left out of it either because they don’t want to participate or because they just plain can’t. What do you do in this future where everyone needs to have a Surrogate and you want to go get a job but they’re not hiring people who don’t have Surrogates because, “I’m an armored car service and I don’t hired somebody who doesn’t have a Surrogate because it’s a lot cheaper for me to insure equipment than it would be to insure a human being behind the wheel, so I’m not going to hire you, you don’t have a Surrogate.” But then you can’t get a Surrogate because you don’t have a job.

It would become this vicious cycle to be involved in that society, so that’s where the Dreads come from. Some of them are opposed to this Surrogate technology for religious reasons, or they just don’t want to use it, but there’s a group of them that- they can’t. They’ve just been locked out of this world. Economically, I think that’s probably the way that would go down. You’re always going to have these people that can’t take part.

That’s one of the points I think you’re making. In a world where nothing is real, almost anything can seem be reasonable. In your story, everybody is very reasonable, even people we might disagree with.

I think that’s very true. I really wanted to have the story so that you could sympathize with everybody in it, no matter who it is.

I mean it’s funny because The Surrogates can be read as a critique on materialist capitalism, yet DisneyCorp is making the movie.

[Chuckles] I don’t have a problem with Disney making the movie. I know Disney gets a bad rap for whatever reason, a lot of people like to bang on Disney, but they’re all the same to me. I don’t mean that in a bad way. They’re all big companies and they’re all just out there doing their business. I’m fine with Disney, I’m happy to have them. The Touchstone imprint is nice and I guess if it were Disney proper, I would have been a little more worried only because [I think that Disney proper] only makes G-rated movies and I don’t think that The Surrogates is a G story. With it being on the Touchstone imprint and being PG 13 I’m totally fine with that. I was very, very happy to have the film people involved, so it doesn’t bother me at all.

In many ways you are part of a growing trend of having comic book creators having their work adapted into movies and television. You have Brian K. Vaughan whose written on Lost. You have Jeph Loeb’s infamous involvement with Heroes. It’s a major part of the culture.

I think I just got into it at the right time. So much of it is just dumb luck—you’re in the right place at the right time—and I think I just got into comics at a time they were becoming really popular and they were getting some wider recognition in culture and more power to those guys. Brian K. Vaughan is a great writer, I love his stuff. Me personally, I don’t really have a desire to do teleplays or screenplays right now. I’m very happy writing comics but I’m happy that those guys have reached the success that they have. I think it’s great. I think there are a lot of things about the comics medium that are appealing to wider audiences and now that comics are getting that kind of exposure I think that’s being borne out.

Three adolescent punks steal their dads’ luxury surrogates and terrorize a homeless person. Hilarity ensues. From Flesh and Blood

It’s a very immersive experience, the comic book. It combines the sequential narrative and pictures, while still involving imagination to move your eye across the panels and necessitating the reading of the words.

There are a lot of things in comics that are very basic to us. If you go back through the history of art, all the way back to the cave paintings, sequential art has always been with us. There must be something about it that is imprinted upon our consciousness and I think that people are starting to come around that way.

I like the way that Harvey says in the original book, “I’m just not going to wear the surrogate again,” after it’s destroyed. Does your new prequel, Flesh and Bone, give any insight into his mindset?

There are practical reasons why we would have Surrogates too, and Harvey falls into that category. As a cop, he wants to have a surrogate so he can avoid getting hurt while he’s at work. I think in some ways that what started out to him as a practical idea to use a surrogate as a bullet-proof-vest to protect his real self. It ended up becoming something that took over his life in a much larger way, and I think that’s what technology does. You can get sucked into it so easily and then suddenly—Boom! You’re just totally immersed in it and before you even realize it it’s just there, and it’s taken over. I think that’s they way it was for Harvey. What started out as something very practical and logical and sensible—and his surrogate even looks like his actual self, except for the differences that have taken place of the course of his aging while using a Surrogate—has ended up becoming something much more pervasive in his life.

Do you have any future projects?

I’ve got about three Surrogates books in my head. One is the third book in the trilogy, this core trilogy I had an idea of when I first envisioned the story and that would take place after volume 1. The other two that I have an idea of right now would take place in between the prequel and volume one, which is utterly confusing to have a prequel before volume one but, you know, that’s the hand I dealt myself. Aside from that, yeah, I’ve got a few things I’m working on. I’m working on a few graphic novel adaptations right now for Hyperion books. Most people have never heard of it, it’s a Disney-owned company They had never heard of The Surrogates and didn’t know there was a Surrogates film when I met them. I also have another graphic novel coming out from Top Shelf, summer 2010. It’s not sci-fi at all it’s more of a modern day political/medical thriller which is much closer to what my background and my interests are—like I said, I’m not really much of a sci-fi guy.

What about the sci-fi genre compelled you to write this story?

It’s an idea that I had that had to be sci-fi. It’s a future world that is using technology which doesn’t exist yet. To me, that meant that it had to be a sci-fi idea. I think that sci-fi is great in it’s inherent ability to put you in a world that doesn’t exist, and make it believable and therefore make you realize how real and how plausible something can be even when it doesn’t exist. I think that’s a great trait in the sci-fi I’ve been lucky enough to read. The few books I’ve read I’ve been lucky enough that they were the really good ones; 1984, Brave New World, where there’s this world which seemed completely implausible at the time but here we are, down into the future, several decades from when those books were written, and those futures seem very realistic now.

What are your favorite TV shows?

I think Friday Night Lights is a great show. Probably the most realistic family unit I’ve ever really seen on TV. I think it’s a really well done show. I like to watch that new Southland show, I enjoy that one a lot. I like that new Castle show. It has a Moonlighting vibe to it. Even though I was very young when Moonlighting was on TV, it’s still a show that I really like. Bruce Willis was cool and the whole thing going on with him an Cybil Shepherd was really entertaining. That and the news.

What it’s like knowing that Bruce Willis is going to portray your character?

It’s no lie. When I wrote the book back in 2002 and we didn’t even have a publisher yet, my wife and I were hanging around one night, talking about “if they were going to make a movie about this, who would you want to play or cast,” just total pie-in-the-sky kind of stuff. We both thought that Bruce Willis would be the perfect Harvey. He’s one of those guys who can do the action stuff and be also be convincing in what would be the heart of the story which would be Harvey and Margaret. We needed an actor who could be tough and yet bring home that personal element as well. When they ended up casting him five or six years later it was crazy. What do you say at that point? You just sit back and enjoy it, I guess.

What are you going to do when the Surrogates lunch boxes come out?

I’m going to go make a lunch and pack it in it [chuckles]. I write the books, and let everyone else do the things that they want to do… it’s all good with me. If I get to have a Steeplejack lunch box I would be one happy guy.

The funny thing is, we might never meet. So… are WE now THE SURROGATES?

[Laughs] we are. We are living our lives virtually! I work out of my house. Brett Weldele drew the book, and to this day I think I’ve probably been in the same room as him maybe four times, once a year at Comic-Con and when we visited the set in Boston. We are very much living these lives removed from ourselves, so the interview is very self-referential in that regard.