JESSE FUCHS: One thing that is really striking about your work is that it has a certain affinity with Rick Altergott's Doofus, in that both of them seem very obsessively rendered where it seems that the artist put a tremendous amount of effort into making people look wrong. Everyone in your strip has this very accurate look, but just there's something off about them. They look frozen in a very awkward way, but in a way that is clearly intentional, as opposed to a lack of being able to render a person. Is that derived from a lot of the work that you admire from the olden days, or is that --

KUPPERMAN: I'm not sure if admire is the right word, but it certainly seems to me that the essence of comics, or certainly one pole of it, is these comics with people striking poses. Usually the poses are somewhat ridiculous, but it's all very heartfelt, and I think I'm trying to convey that impression.

FUCHS: Yeah, that the people always seem very intent on whatever they're doing.

KUPPERMAN: Right. Absolutely.

FUCHS: They're dead serious, right? And that deadpan quality is a lot of what makes it really funny from just a visual standpoint. You have a tendency to set eyes just a little too close together...

KUPPERMAN: Right. It has a slightly moronic quality. Fixating.

FUCHS: And it comes off as very unironic, in a sense that it's working off of the fact that a lot of the work is very referential and ironic. It seems that you almost have to do it in that way to keep it from being so "nudge, nudge, wink, wink."

KUPPERMAN: Yeah. I think that humor in general is funnier when it's played as seriously as possible. Millionaire said a little while ago, "I knew how to draw a long time ago and then forgot and right now I'm trying to do it again."

FUCHS: How much do you draw on older comics for material, and how much for inspiration?

KUPPERMAN: A lot. I'm always looking at older stuff for inspiration... I think that the juxtapositions in it can be extremely useful for me. I was looking at some of the old Radio comics that I think Archie printed in the mid-'60s, when they were trying to imitate Marvel, and the psychology in those and the storylines are so wonderfully off that I would just love to appropriate some of them wholesale. I wouldn't have to change very much at all.

FUCHS: One thing that impressed me when you were showing me some of your collection is that, while a lot of the fake comic-book covers that you've done definitely spring from your own imagination, you have such an immense and fine collection of things that I can see that a lot of that Z-level stiffness is taken from. These really absurd comics that have so fallen out of favor that nobody even knows they exist.

KUPPERMAN: Yes. I think, looking at things from the past, there are very visible contradictions that are very evident to us now. Whereas it will take a while for our consciousness to acknowledge the contradictions of today; contradictions between intentions and deed, and between archetypal symbols and reality.

FUCHS: You have a lot of stuff in your collection that was obviously, for instance, intended to be sexy in some way.

KUPPERMAN: Yes. There are some amazing examples of that. I think Duchamp said that what can be really fascinating about a work of art is the distance between the intention and the realization. Sometimes it's very visible, the distance between what they thought they were doing and what actually came out of it.

FUCHS: When you're doing those, you're not really making fun of them. It's not a parody.

KUPPERMAN: Maybe a homage to the process? I am, after all, a graphic artist, so I understand that sometimes things just don't work out.

FUCHS: You're essentially taking what they've done and amping it up, like the strip about the guy whose face is half soup and half salad. That triggers so many different associations of absurd sci-fi stuff from the '40s and '50s. But they look so absolutely serious about it.

KUPPERMAN: Right. It's hard to preserve a sense of genuine naiveté in my work, because everything about being a professional graphic artist works against it. It hasn't been easy. My existence is very schizophrenic a lot of the time. And in illustration, I have about two or three different styles going so it's a little strange.

FUCHS: You have a very clean, non-heavily rendered style, and the one that was more seen in Snake 'n' Bacon. And what would be the third do you think?

KUPPERMAN: Well, more simple cartoony spot-illustration style. My favorite style currently I think is one I've been using for the New Yorker spot illustrations, which is like a transformation of the Snake 'n' Bacon style. Cleaner and with the backgrounds rendered in computer so that I can do things with the cross-hatch.

In most of my illustration now, every figure and element is separate and then assembled on the computer, which is both quick and necessary because they're frequently pressed for changes on the pieces.

FUCHS: One thing that impresses is that of the cartoonists I know, you're not one that strikes me as a humper. As in, a James Kochalka or a Shannon Wheeler type; people who really self-promote.

KUPPERMAN: I'm very bad at self-promotion. I was brought up not to blow one's own horn. Very old-fashioned.

FUCHS: Someone told me that the year the Snake 'n' Bacon book came out, you were giving copies away at the Small-Press Expo.

KUPPERMAN: That's true.

FUCHS: That's mindblowing.

KUPPERMAN: Well, they were copies that were given to me from HarperCollins. It seemed like it would be corrupt of me to sell them.

FUCHS: Having that sense of honor and humility in comics is astounding.

KUPPERMAN: Well, thank you. As a career tactic, it's a hindrance. I wish I was more active and shameless.

FUCHS: What do you think of those active, shameless artists?

KUPPERMAN: Most of the cartoonists whose work I find most attractive are not like that. I think cartooning is a profession that most people go in to because they're not outgoing, type-A personalities. I respect that quietness and dignity, which is a quality I associate with the artists whose work I like.

FUCHS: What about Millionaire?

KUPPERMAN: Well, he's the exception. He has a certain flair for self-promotion. I remember the first time I heard about him. I saw this enormous guy in a silver lamé jacket. I thought, "Oh great." [Laughs.] "Here we go." But he does it with enough charm so that I don't think it becomes grating.

FUCHS: And his work backs up the hype.

KUPPERMAN: He's an amazingly talented guy. That he can do it while drinking so heavily so frequently is just amazing. Once, I sitting next to him at a party in Williamsburg, and there was an ivory horn sitting on the table that belonged to the owner of the apartment. Silver inlay, from the 19th century. He picked it up and, using a nail or a pen-knife, carved a whaling ship on it so quickly and so deftly that you never could have told from a casual glance that it had not been there forever. Of course the person who owned it was upset.

FUCHS: Was Tony under the influence at this point?

KUPPERMAN: I think, in those days, he pretty much always was.

FUCHS: Would I be correct in assuming that THC was involved in the creation of a lot of your work?

KUPPERMAN: I think it might have been involved.

FUCHS: The non-denial denial.

To jump back to your work ethic, you've managed to get into some really fantastic venues. You're getting so much work that we had trouble setting up this interview.

KUPPERMAN: That's right. I think in the magazine world, it's been completely a matter of persistence and stubbornness. For comics, it's mostly been luck; things come out of the blue. I was doing comics for Heavy Metal, which was the next place after Screw in the early '90s and then that ended. And then I got a package from this magazine, the Oxford American, and they wanted me to do comics.

FUCHS: And they had seen you in Heavy Metal?

KUPPERMAN: Yes. They printed pretty much anything I gave them for the next few years, including the District Attorney strip.

FUCHS: That's Grisham's magazine, right?

KUPPERMAN: It's a literary magazine that's funded by John Grisham and published out of Oxford.

FUCHS: You're their one strip artist, right? They don't have a section.

KUPPERMAN: Right. I haven't been in there for a year or two. But I don't think they've ever done any other cartooning.

FUCHS: Did they tell you what attracted them about your work?

KUPPERMAN: No. Just in a very general "We love you, keep it coming" way. They would occasionally ask me to do things with a Southern theme to them. So that's why I did the Poe strip, and one with the Civil War veteran hiding in the bush.

FUCHS: With the Japanese soldier?

KUPPERMAN: Yeah. And then an editor at Avon books saw me in the Oxford American and they called me out of the blue and asked me about publishing a book.

FUCHS: That's the secret. Just make sure to have an answering machine, I guess.

KUPPERMAN: Right. It's very important to have call waiting and an answering machine. Very important. I can't overstate that.

[To read the rest of this interview, please see The Comics Journal #244.]

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