The following excerpt is from an interview that was conducted in February, 1997 with the memories and temperaments of the interviewees aided and abetted by a bottle of Jack Daniels and a 40-ouncer of malt liquor.

Who We Are

JORDAN RAPHAEL: Let's start with some history. Tell me a bit about yourself, Dean.

DEAN HASPIEL: I was always reading comics since age 12. One of the first comics I ever read was Shazam!, and then Fantastic Four. I eventually became an assistant to Bill Sienkiewicz, around 1985. I would do backgrounds on New Mutants for him.

RAPHAEL: How old were you at the time?

HASPIEL: I was... around 17 or 18.

RAPHAEL: How did the relationship between you and Sienkiewicz come about?

HASPIEL: My friend, Larry O'Neil, Denny O'Neil's son, got a job assisting Howard Chaykin, at a place called Upstart Studios in the garment district. He shared the same studio with Walt Simonson and James Sherman, and before that, Frank Miller and Jim Starlin. It was a wild room. Bill Sienkiewicz, Denys Cowan and Michael Davis set up shop next door to them on the same floor. Bill wanted an assistant. It was very hard to assist Bill, because he has a very specific style and so at first I was cutting out reference for him. Then he let me do some background inks and when Frank Miller did Elektra: Assassin with him, I painted some of the backgrounds for that. I was getting disgruntled because I felt that my style didn't fit with his. I'd go next door and hang out with Howard, Larry, and Walt, until finally Howard hired me as a second assistant. Larry would pencil the backgrounds, I'd ink them, fill in blacks, apply craft-tint, do all kinds of stuff. Walt would sometimes use me as well.

RAPHAEL: That must have been pretty heady stuff for a young guy.

HASPIEL: Oh, man. It blew my mind. I was going from high school and reading X-men to digging a book like American Flagg! which was so different. A little while later, I hooked up with Eternity Comics where me and writer, Martin Powell, created a character called The Verdict. It was very Howard Chaykin-influenced in terms of the artwork. A lot of insets, a lot of the way he designs stuff, but I didn't really have the chops to pull it off. When I went to college, I got two Bonus Books to draw for DC Comics. They were experimenting with something called Bonus Books in their comics — an extra 16-page story written and illustrated by new talent -- and I penciled one for Detective Comics, which was inked by Denis Rodier. The other was Justice League International, where I had to draw Blue Beetle, Booster Gold, and a couple of other characters.

RAPHAEL: Who was your inker for that book?

HASPIEL: That was me, except that after I penciled it, I fell off a three-story building, broke both my legs, and tore the ligaments in my drawing hand.

RAPHAEL: Jesus.

HASPIEL: I had to wear a wrist brace when I inked it. I was in a wheelchair at an art table, inking what I was hoping to be my breakthrough comic to get mainstream work. And that backfired!

RAPHAEL: That's horrible.

HASPIEL: Yeah, that is horrible. I got a little jaded by that experience.

RAPHAEL: When did you and Josh Neufeld put together Keyhole.

HASPIEL: Josh and I have been friends for about 16 years. We came to a fork in the road, where after high school he went to Oberlin and I want to SUNY-Purchase. He went abroad and traveled to Asia and Prague, and I went from Westchester back to Manhattan and moved into Soho and started waiting tables and taking small jobs… I had a lot of stories that were finite and small. So did Josh, and we realized, "Now that Dan Clowes, Chester Brown, Harvey Pekar and all these other cartoonists are telling small stories in anthology type formats, why can't we do our own?" So we collaborated on Keyhole Mini-Comics and eventually got a publisher. [police siren sounds in the background]

RAPHAEL: Is that a police siren?

HASPIEL: Yes it is. [laughter]

RAPHAEL: Okay, Tony, let's hear from you.

TONY CONSIGLIO: I went to school in Queens, and I read MAD Magazine more or less. And I watched television: the Warner Bros. cartoons and The Flintstones and stuff like that. I guess that would be my influence. I always traced MAD Magazine when I was a kid, and more or less tried satires when I was younger. Then around 7th or 8th grade I used to draw my teachers, pictures of them, and pass them out in class. And then I graduated to making little stories about them and stuff like that.

RAPHAEL: Were they well received?

CONSIGLIO: By the students, yes. Sure. The teachers never even saw them. Then after that, I went to high school and I more or less forgot about comics, I didn't even read them, much less draw them. I just wasn't interested, I guess. Then in college I realized I enjoyed comics; I enjoyed drawing them and making up stories for them, but I wasn't too good of a draughtsman, especially in high school I was terrible, so I would just write stories. Then I went to Queens College for one year. And it was atrociously horrible. I said "I cannot spend my life doing something I can't stand doing."

RAPHAEL: What did you do at Queens College?

CONSIGLIO: Nothing. I went to classes, and if I didn't want to go to classes, I didn't go to classes, and that was about it. I got to look at naked women. That's what I remember. Then, after that year, I said, "I can't do this anymore," and I didn't want to go to college, so I applied to the School of Visual Arts. And I realized I wasted more time there than at Queens College.

RAPHAEL: There's quite an honor roll of people who went to SVA, is there not?

CONSIGLIO: Well, there's a lot more people that achieve nothing than achieve something. [laughs]

RAPHAEL: Weren't you enrolled in a Bachelor of Fine Arts in cartooning at SVA?

CONSIGLIO: Yeah, more or less. I went there with the idea of having a comic strip. Like getting a comic strip was more like winning the Lotto. I met Alex Robinson there, and he was thinking of ideas for mini-comics and I said, "Well, I might as well make my stories into mini-comics instead of comic strips." And from then on we started drawing mini-comics.

RAPHAEL: What happened to all the work that you did during that time?

CONSIGLIO: It's in a garbage bag in my closet. I'm serious, in a garbage bag in my closet. Once in a while, if I want to show someone, I'll take it out and look at it. But I've gotten a lot better since then, and now I look at it and I'm like, "Oh, this is shit."

RAPHAEL: What was the education process there? Would take a course on paneling, or...?

CONSIGLIO: We went to class, and the teacher sat there and said, "Okay, draw comics." [laughter]

RAPHAEL: That was it?

CONSIGLIO: Yeah, more or less.

RAPHAEL: Well, that sounds like fun.

ALEX ROBINSON: It's expensive fun.

RAPHAEL: So, Tony, you started publishing your mini-comics when you got out of school.

CONSIGLIO: I started doing mini-comics and I'd work my jobs to make money, because I didn't make money -- actually, I lost money on my mini-comics.

RAPHAEL: Is that a continuing situation?

CONSIGLIO: Yeah, more or less. I don't really print them to make money. I just print them because I want other people to see them. Otherwise, I'd just draw them and put them in a closet.

RAPHAEL: Alex, what were your beginnings in comics?

ROBINSON: I guess I started collecting comics and stuff when I was 13, and I've always wanted to draw. And I guess when I started reading comics, I thought, "This is what I want to do." And I, of course, like probably a lot of people, was dying to do superhero comics. I did that Marvel Comics Try-Out Book, and I got the form letter rejection, and I think it was at some time in high school that I just stopped reading superheroes. I think I read some article about Cerebus, and I picked it up, and that was one of the first comics that told me there was something that could be done other than superheroes. So that kind of ruined it for the superhero stuff for me.

Like Tony, I went to a state school first and I was going to major in English, and just try and do comics on the side. And then I said, "I'm going go to art school," so I applied and got into SVA and it's exactly like Tony said. It's like a $40,000 sleep away camp.

RAPHAEL: Is there a portfolio review?

ROBINSON: There's a portfolio review, but I cannot imagine who got turned down. You wouldn't believe some of the stuff.

CONSIGLIO: There were teachers, like Will Eisner. He was a great teacher...

RAPHAEL: What did he teach you?

ROBINSON: He would do more storytelling type stuff. We used to get into violent arguments, me and Tony and our friend Glen... he was right about a lot of stuff but we would still fight him tooth and nail. He'd say, "Every time you start a new page, you have to re-establish where the character is, because people are going to forget when you turn the page." So I went to SVA, and I got into a lot of other alternative comics. I remember Harvey Pekar was the opposite of LSD because when I first read him, I realized that you could do comics that were about everyday situations; there didn't even have to be the big conflict, you could just do a strip about making lemonade, or your stories at work and that kind of stuff. At that point, I thought, "I'm going to start doing mini-comics, and I'm going to send them to publishers and try to get published and then after that see what happens." I did mini-comics for about three and a half years.

RAPHAEL: How did that work out?

ROBINSON: Each issue would sell a little bit more, and I got good reviews. I got reviewed in the Journal, you know, that kind of stuff. Circulation would go up from 50 to 75 -- I would do those little increments. Print up like 25 at a time, because I couldn't afford to print up 300 at one time. Anyway, I did the Box Office Poison mini-comics, and then I was going to apply for the Xeric Grant, and I was in the middle of doing that when my heroes at Antarctic Press came to my rescue and offered to publish it.

RAPHAEL: And how's that going?

ROBINSON: Uh... not as well as I would have liked.

RAPHAEL: Why's that?

ROBINSON: Well, they picked me up, and then I think within a week after I signed the contract, the whole Capital/Diamond thing happened.

RAPHAEL: How did that affect you?

ROBINSON: Well, they said, "Oh, it will probably affect sales; they'll drop about 20%." And of course, they dropped about 50%. So it's kind of touch-and-go right now. They say unless I can get the circulation up, then I'm going to be back to square one.

RAPHAEL: What are your options if Antarctic does drop you?

ROBINSON: Well, I can try other publishers and --

CONSIGLIO: -- Back to the photocopy machine.

ROBINSON: No, I'm not. I'm not going back to mini-comics. You can't make me go back! Maybe I'll do the Xeric grant, I'll try other publishers. My dream is to come out with a trade paperback. I don't buy too many comics that come out... they're expensive for something that takes you 5-10 minutes to read. But I love any comic with a spine. Most of the comics I buy nowadays are collections. So, somehow or other, Box Office Poison will survive. It may sound egotistical, but I'm convinced that if the book is around long enough, it will garner at least enough sales so that it can survive. I don't know if I'll make a living at it...

RAPHAEL: So in spite of everything, you're optimistic.

ROBINSON: Ummm... yes and no, depending on what day it is. I can't see myself being 40 years old and still working in the bookstore, and doing comics in a sense almost for free. But I'm determined to at least see this particular storyline out before I reconsider my options.

RAPHAEL: All right. Over to you, Yvonne.

YVONNE MOJICA: The first comic I ever read was Red Sonja #2, series three, which was drawn by Mary Wilshire. And Nestor Redondo did the finishing on that issue. And that's like a really incredible issue for the first comic you've ever read. I knew what I wanted to do at that point; that I wanted to do comics.

RAPHAEL: How did you come across that comic?

MOJICA: My Dad took me to buy it. I was staying with him for the weekend; my father is a huge comic book fan and also self-publishes -- a book called Eugenus, a black and white book. The art work is beautiful. It's sci-fi, which is not 100% my thing, but it's a great book. It won the CBG award for best "customer service." When I got out of high school, I got a job at St. Mark's comics, which is a really popular comic book store in Manhattan, and I started to learn the inside-out of the industry. Exactly how it worked and exactly how a person got work in that industry. When I was about 19, I took my first work to a convention where I met Michael Davis who was at the time the co-owner of Milestone Comics. He took me under his wing, and he had a studio group he was doing called Bad Boys Studios which I became a part of. It lasted about a week, fell apart.

RAPHAEL: Why is that?

MOJICA: What Michael Davis was trying to do was to cultivate talent to eventually be employed by him. And I guess he had his inner circle, and I wasn't in it at the time, so he took his inner circle and started to work on some other things which eventually became the Motown/Image crossover. But I touched base with him again at the Philly con, in '94. And I was able to do some work with the Motown/Image thing. In the meantime, I worked for James Fry as his assistant and he was the most wonderful man. He really taught me what it means to be a freelancer, what it means to put yourself out on the line, take your stuff around. He taught me so much that I'll owe everything, if I ever make it, to him one day. He introduced me to a lot of professionals which helped me to get my networking thing and get more comfortable talking to people who were actually working.

When I did the stuff for Motown, I designed the cities and the buildings for all the good guys and bad guys to hang out in, and that taught me perspective. It taught me how to fake it. Enough to do books. And then I just started drawing on my own. I realized I wasn't going to do the things I wanted to unless I perfected my skills as a craftsman, and I just hit the books, and I went home for the next couple of years, and I drew every day, busted my butt until I thought my stuff deserved to be looked at, and then I started taking it around again. I did an issue of Elvira at that point, issue #33, with James Fry, and then after that I published Bathroom Girls, which is my mini-comic. And from there, I went to San Diego, which is where I met Gary Groth. I will be doing Medusa Thrill for Eros.

RAPHAEL: What else do you hope to accomplish?

MOJICA: I want to do everything in comics. I love comics so deeply in my heart. I want to do the best books. I don't want to give people shit and garbage, I don't want to rush a book and sell them some piece of junk that belongs in the garbage can. I want them to get good art work, good stories.

Our Days and Nights

RAPHAEL: Tell me about your day jobs.

CONSIGLIO: I work in a health spa. I give people their slippers and their robe. [Mojica laughs] I make good money at that, so don't fucking laugh.

MOJICA: I think that's awesome.

CONSIGLIO: And then at night I work at Madison Square Garden. I serve people beer and pretzels during the basketball games and hockey games. It's fun. I get to meet all the famous people and I watch games. I'll tell you, the best part of working there is the national anthem. Patrick Ewing once threw a ball at me.

RAPHAEL: Why did he do that?

CONSIGLIO: It was coming at me, and it hit me.

RAPHAEL: What happened to your beer and pretzels?

CONSIGLIO: They fell on Woody Allen. [laughter] Before I worked at Madison Square Garden, I worked at the largest department store, which is Macy's.

RAPHAEL: I think I read about that in your comic.

CONSIGLIO: Yeah. That was sheer hell every day. And I couldn't imagine working there for a long time. There are people there that have been there 30 years, and I would have just killed myself. Issue number 12 of my comic is a story of a day in the life of the marketplace at Macy's. It's going to be about 45 pages.

RAPHAEL: Dean, what are you up to?

HASPIEL: I'm working three days a week at a bank investment company filing files. I like to refer to myself as "filing bitch #12." It allows me to do my comic, but I've had many, many jobs, and I think I'm a little over this job, and it's time to find something more career oriented.

RAPHAEL: How is life in the bookstore, Alex?

ROBINSON: It's a challenge just to get up each day.

RAPHAEL: How are your work habits? Do you generally work quickly, slowly, do you find it hard to motivate yourself?

CONSIGLIO: I usually take about four months for a comic. Between two jobs and a girlfriend and looking for jobs and looking for other jobs, it's been tough. So I've been doing a lot less.

HASPIEL: I'm a night person, and I'll find that I can't draw anything when there's sun out. I'll start as the sun is coming down, and boom -- it's like a roller-coaster, and I can do a page a day.

RAPHAEL: What about you, Yvonne? You sound like the type of person who can do comics under any conditions.

MOJICA: Yeah. For the storyboards I was doing, I was actually the only storyboard artist for an entire motion picture. So I drew the entire motion picture single-handedly.

RAPHAEL: What picture was this?

MOJICA: This was for Inmotion Entertainment. They're located at the Tribeca film center, down here in New York. The film was called Stuffed Dolls.

RAPHAEL: What about you, Alex?

ROBINSON: I work four days a week. One day, I hang out with my girlfriend, and the other two days I try to do a whole page... I can do a page a day. Every now and then you get into a bad --

RAPHAEL: Funk?

ROBINSON: Yeah. Writer's block, or artist's block or whatever. I actually do it during the daytime. I usually start in the afternoon and wind up finishing around 11 or something. I find if I draw too late then my hand just gets too shaky and I can't do it.

HASPIEL: I find that the writing process is the hardest demon to conquer.

ROBINSON: Really?

CONSIGLIO: The writing just flows right out of my...

ROBINSON: Yeah.

HASPIEL: Really? The writing part is so difficult. I work in full script. I break it down per panel, per page.

CONSIGLIO: Yeah, I draw like that too. I sit there and I write out the whole story, and then I get the panels per page.

MOJICA: What I do is that I plot it, and then I draw it. I don't even look at the plot. I just keep the plot in my head, and then I draw the book. And then I look at the plot, and I see what still sticks and what doesn't and what did I change due to my drawing, and then I apply the dialogue afterwards, after I see how my drawings interact. Because I find that that creates more stories, and I wind up changing drawings.

CONSIGLIO: I have to shut off anything that's on and sit there alone, and then I can write for hours, until something distracts me. And whatever comes out, comes out. If it's funny, it is; if it's not, then the next time, hopefully, it will be funny.

RAPHAEL: So you go through a certain process of cutting down and cutting stuff out.

CONSIGLIO: I usually write it and then I put it away and I don't look at it for four or five days. And then I look at it again, and I'm like, "What the fuck is this?" [laughter] And then I edit out what I thing doesn't belong and then I add or subtract what I think belongs there or doesn't belong there.

RAPHAEL: Now then, you are all pretty much aware of where the comics industry is right now. [Murmured agreement] Yet you all sound fairly optimistic.

HASPIEL: It's not optimism. It's that we can't help it. You know what I'm saying? I'm going to do comics, but I have to educate myself on how to get my stuff into more people's hands, so that I can make a living at this and buy my girlfriend a slice of pizza!

RAPHAEL: What's your take on this, Tony?

CONSIGLIO: Well, I more or less draw my comics and if people see 'em, they see 'em. If they don't, there's just not much I can do about it. I would love to have more and more people see them, but when I tell people I'm a cartoonist, they ask me why I don't work for Disney. So if I show them my comics, they're like "Oh, what is this?" They really don't understand. The idea of getting a larger crowd of people to read my comic, I don't see it happening.

RAPHAEL: Yvonne, for the record, would you do work for a mainstream company if you needed to pay the bills?

MOJICA: To be honest, the only projects I would work on would probably be something I really believe in, because I have felt the pain of working on something I did not care about.

RAPHAEL: Are you referring to Elvira?

MOJICA: No, Elvira was awesome actually. Elvira was a happy experience. Actually, I'm talking about a storyboard thing I just did for some company. But the only thing I would be interested in doing is if I could draw, say, Supergirl as a complete fucked-up junkie whore.

RAPHAEL: You're not equating "fucked-up junkie whore" with good work, are you?

MOJICA: No, I'm just saying... if I thought they were doing something cool and outrageous then I could contribute to it with my art work and my sensibilities, and I'd be more than grateful for the opportunity. But I don't see anything they're doing now that's compatible with my art work and my sensibilities.

HASPIEL: Right now I'm working as a file clerk. I would rather contribute to a book I don't care about just to pay the bills, and draw my stories on the side. I'm sure that Yvonne would draw under “work-for-hire” conditions.

MOJICA: I only want to leave great work behind. I don't want to leave mediocrity behind, because there's enough mediocrity out there.

ROBINSON: We're going to have to disagree on this part. If I'm going to spend 30 hours a week working in some crappy book store, I might as well spend 30 hours a week drawing a crappy comic and getting a lot more money.

MOJICA: But the thing is, when you work in that shitty bookstore, that's where you get the life experiences

ROBINSON: No. That's where I got a drinking habit.

HASPIEL: I have often said, in the middle of a miserable day, "This is going to make a good story one day." At the same time, I would probably prefer to hone my skills inking Jughead while drawing the plethora of experiences I’ve already lived.

ROBINSON: If Marvel came to me and said, "Would you write some issues of Spider-Man?" I think I would do it, because it would be fun -- it's not the gig I'd want to do full-time, or for the rest of my life, but I think it would be an interesting, fun thing to play around with the characters. Of course, when I get there I might find out that, "Oh, you can't do this," -- obviously they have editorial restrictions. But it would be a fun experiment to try. Take the money out of it and go! I know, though, that it's tempting once you're getting the money to get sucked into that trap and you could wind up being some hack 40 years down the line.