Generation Gap

JORDAN RAPHAEL: How do you "third-generation" -- for lack of a better term -- cartoonists get along with "second-generation" cartoonists like Peter Bagge and Dan Clowes?

ARIEL BORDEAUX: I've been getting really excellent support from Pete Bagge and Dan Clowes. They're both just incredibly encouraging; it's helped to keep me going, that people like them who have succeeded have been able to just give me really, really good support.

RAPHAEL: Do they ever offer any advice?

BORDEAUX: Oh, all the time. Pete Bagge has been a really good friend. He's offered technical advice, and just moral support as far as, you know, trying to keep your head above water and keep swimming even when it's really frustrating to try and work a full-time job, and get stuff done, and so forth.

JON LEWIS: On a level of my personal reasons for doing my work, I don't feel like I have much in common with that group of people. To me, it seems like there's some kind of distance between our different reasons for doing comics, or something, and I guess the only person of the second generation that I feel like I've made much of a connection with was Jim Woodring. On a technical level, I have so many friends in my personal life who are my age that I just see day-to-day, that I just address those questions to them.

MEGAN KELSO: When I first started doing comics, I sent the mini-comic that I did to Pete. I loved Hate, and it was definitely one of the first alternative comics, along with Neat Stuff, that I read. He wrote back to me this really sweet postcard. I've always admired Pete's encouragement of younger cartoonists and the plugs that he gives, and I get the feeling that he cares really passionately that younger people continue to do comics. I often hear him talking to other people, and talking to me, hoping that we're still doing comics. I think he's always worried that we're going to quit, and he wants us to stick with it.

RAPHAEL: Why do you think he's worried?

KELSO: Because it's so hard and there are so few rewards. Like Jon, my day-to-day support system are my colleagues like Jon, Tom [Hart], Jason [Lutes], Ariel, and Al [Columbia]; just people more my age. But, I sense a general encouragement from people like Dan and Pete, and Jim Woodring especially, of the younger, coming-up people -- that they have the best wishes for us. But I don't have any real personal mentor relationship with any of them.

LEWIS: It almost seems parental because I feel like, in a way, there are connections that are being missed. We don't really quite understand why each other does what we do, yet they wish us well, and we wish them well --

KELSO: And they really want us to stick with it.

LEWIS: Right. But then when it gets down to questions of our actual work, in a way, we just don't get each other, almost. I remember right after I put out the first issue of True Swamp that Pete Bagge said, "I just don't understand why someone would want to do a comic about a frog." It seemed to me like we were coming at it from different directions.

RAPHAEL: Are any of you able to support yourself strictly from your comics work?

LEWIS: Right now, with this thing for Japan that Tom and I are doing, I just about can. I'm making about $500 a month writing that, and that's almost enough for me to live on. And with the odd illustration thing that comes in from The Stranger or from other illustration jobs, I'm used to living really cheaply, so I could. I wouldn't expect a normal person would be able to in my case, though.

BORDEAUX: I'm not really making any money at all so far. What I spend on it and what I make on it may be fairly equal, but I think I spend a lot more than what I make on it in general, at least so far.

RAPHAEL: Do you find it discouraging that only a handful of alternative comics artists are able to support themselves solely from their comics?

BORDEAUX: Well, I have confidence that I'll make it at some point. But, yeah, I find it pretty discouraging. I mean, I have a really hard time supporting myself working with the day job that I have. The most frustrating thing is that I just don't have enough time to get my comics done. Now that I have an actual deadline, the prospect is much more terrifying than when I was self-publishing and I had only my own deadlines to worry about.

KELSO: I guess I feel the same way that Ariel does: I have hopes that it will eventually work out. I really can't imagine what else I would do. Comics are such an essential part of my life. I'm not going to quit just because I can't support myself doing it.

Publishing in the '90s

RAPHAEL: You used to self-publish, didn't you, Jon?

LEWIS: Yeah, from about '88 to '90, I did a whole slew of mini-comics, and of course those were all self-published. I ended up self-publishing True Swamp because I showed it to a couple of publishers and they were like, "This is too eccentric, too hard to sell. We're likely to lose money because it's too weird." So, it wasn't really a principled thing for me. I went for the Xeric Grant and got that, and then after three issues of self-publishing True Swamp, even though the sales kept going up, the whole situation -- putting comics in boxes and counting them first and writing up invoices, and calling up distributors, all the grunt work of publishing, I found totally antithetical to creating my comic. It's really good for a lot of people, but I love having somebody taking care of the little nuts and bolts stuff.

RAPHAEL: Megan, you mentioned earlier that you were thinking of finding a publisher after you finish up Girlhero.

KELSO: Yeah, I think so. I mean, who knows? My story is similar to Jon's. When I was doing my mini-comic, it never occurred to me to even bother to look for a publisher. Then I applied for a Xeric Grant and got it, so there I was, self-publishing. It wasn't out of any political stance or whatever. I sort of kept doing it because I really have felt over the last few years that my comics have been a process of learning how to do comics, and I haven't had the confidence to inflict myself on a publisher, really. And I'm just beginning to feel like maybe I could. Self-publishing, like Jon said, is a tremendous amount of work. I mean, it's great to be in charge of everything and to do things exactly the way you want to, but it's a lot of work. And it's work that is completely the opposite of the sort of "head space" that you need to be in to draw comics. So, I'm just burned out on that, and I'm ready to have somebody else deal with that. I also think that possibly my comic could do better if I had a publisher, because I just don't have the time or energy to promote it in any way. At this point I might be hindering myself by self-publishing, but I started this six-issue story, and I want to finish that before I move on.

RAPHAEL: I remember reading in one of your comics, Ariel, that it was a long-time desire of yours to be published by Fantagraphics.

BORDEAUX: The reason I mentioned that is because I did some work for Real Stuff. Once I started doing comics myself, though, I found that I would probably be more comfortable with another publisher. There seems to be a pervasively cynical attitude at Fantagraphics and I can't really take a lot of challenges, as far as criticism of my work is concerned. I would need them to be really, really nice to me. I think that they are a very good publisher, but there's just a lot of politics that I would have a hard time with.

RAPHAEL: Have there been reviews of your work?

BORDEAUX: Yeah, I've gotten quite a lot of reviews. A couple that are a little bit negative, but not really; I've been really, really lucky.

RAPHAEL: Why do you say that?

BORDEAUX: Because I like positive, warm, glowy reviews. I'm really sensitive. Not that I couldn't take it -- I would find it actually interesting and I'd like to actually get more constructive criticism than I get, in some ways -- but I also have a hard time with it. So, I'm very happy with the fact that so far I've been getting these very nice reviews.

LEWIS: Our little group of cartoonist pals are incredibly straightforward and harsh with each other about our stuff, sometimes almost hurtfully so. But I think that there isn't really an alternative comics company right now that really edits the people's work that gets turned in, that really criticizes people's work really heavily. If it looks pretty good and there's no misspellings, it's cool. That's the kind of lack that exists, and I'm glad I can get criticism from my friends.

KELSO: I agree. I have this concept of what editors seem to have been like in the '30s and '40s and '50s with novelists; it seems like in some situations the editors and the writers had a very close working relationship, in terms of giving feedback on works in progress. And like Jon said, it seems like comics publishing in the alternative scene is just very hands off. So I have this fantasy publisher out there, where I really respect the publisher and they really respect me, and I would be happy to hear what they had to say about my work as it was in progress. So, even though I really want a publisher, I don't even know where I would go to get what I want because it's not really there.

BORDEAUX: I agree with that fantasy completely. I think my comment about Fantagraphics had to do with this fear not of criticism, but of just straight-up, negative commentary that doesn't have any constructive criticism in it. That's what I fear. I don't like to have someone completely harshing on me without making me understand what their specific comments are and so forth, and being helpful.

LEWIS: Most of the comics reviewing these days seems to be either totally "Aw Shucks!" fanzine or totally hard-bitten, like "I'm going to ream this fucker because how dare he put pen to paper." There's a middle ground that will hopefully become more populated.

RAPHAEL: Have any of you experienced a negative review that caused you to rethink your work?

KELSO: I've had reviews of my comics but it's mostly been short reviews in Destroy All Comics, or fanzines. I don't really feel like my comic has ever seriously been reviewed. The few criticisms that I've had have been really interesting. But once somebody said the comic wasn't worth the paper it was printed on, and that's the kind of bullshit that's not helpful to the artist, that's not helpful to the reader. But if reviewers were to thoughtfully consider my work, the criticism would be helpful to me, and I'd totally absorb it and think about it.

LEWIS: I'd say all the observations or criticisms that I've gotten that have really registered or that have had an effect on how I do my comics have come from either close friends who are also cartoonists or people that I've encountered personally who've read my comic. None of them have come from anybody in print.

BORDEAUX: I've had some good feedback from fans where they get pretty indepth about likes and dislikes about the comic. I think people feel more free to write more honestly if they know it's not necessarily going to be published.

RAPHAEL: How does it feel to have fans?

BORDEAUX: I like it. [laughs] It's weird and very strange to me, but it's really nice to feel that there are people out there reading your work, and that they liked it enough to bother to write a personal letter to you.

KELSO: I agree. I think about people I know who are in bands, or who do some kind of performance thing, and their audience is an immediate experience for them. With comics, you work so hard and you put this thing out in the world, and if you're like us, where you're not immediately reflected back in any kind of print media, it can feel very weird to just throw it out there and not know. And to get mail from fans -- if you even want to call them fans -- and from people who have read your work and care enough to actually write back and tell you what they think, it's totally nourishing. It's definitely a big part of what keeps me going.

LEWIS: I think that a lot of us can depend on the fact that most of the copies of our comics that sell are being read by people who are specifically into reading them.

KELSO: I think people who are reading my comic now are part of this hard core of people who respond to what they read -- and even if I was selling a lot more comics and making money, I may not be getting much more feedback and mail than I do now. I think with the more mainstream consumer of comics or records, it doesn't occur to them necessarily that just because they like a comic, they ought to write to the person who created it, because to them it's much more this anonymous product that they got off the shelf.

RAPHAEL: Have any of you had offers from any of the mainstream companies?

KELSO: The closest I've come to that is Bob Schreck from Dark Horse Presents asked me to do a story for their 100th issue, but it still got to be all my own thing. It wasn't like doing half, like writing or inking or whatever. So, the experience of doing that was pretty free even though I got paid real money for it, and that was pretty neat. I also did a trading card for Topps, for the set of their Vampirella trading cards.

BORDEAUX: You'll be inking Batman soon. [laughs]

KELSO: Yeah. [laughs] I guess they asked Sarah Dyer, who does Action Girl, and for some reason she couldn't or she didn't want to, and so I was the second choice. It was really hilarious because I had to draw a licensed character. I had to draw her outfit exactly within the Vampirella parameters and it was just bizarre, but they paid me a lot of money, so that was cool.

RAPHAEL: Do any of you have hardcore objections to working, say, for Marvel or DC?

LEWIS: The magazine that Tom and I are working for in Japan sells several hundred thousand copies an issue, and they completely reject ideas we send in; they tell us we can't do certain things. We've completely done the dance they want us to do on it, and we still have fun doing it. Me and Ed [Brubaker] submitted a proposal for a mini-series to Vertigo that supposedly they were awaiting with much interest, but apparently this is something they do to get proposals from people so that they can then say, "Well, we might do this later if you'll write a fill-in issue of The Dreaming," or whatever. So that never panned out to anything. But there are editors in positions to publish things in really big magazines all over the place who are comics fans with good taste. Like Heidi MacDonald, who edits Disney Adventures --

KELSO: Or Anne Bernstein at Nickelodeon.

LEWIS: Exactly. Both of those people will give work to pretty outside artists. I mean, Nickelodeon publishes Sam Henderson.

KELSO: That's the kind of thing I could imagine doing in terms of big, mainstream color publication. I mean, Marvel, it's just laughable that Marvel would ever be interested in what I was doing.

RAPHAEL: Trina Robbins does Barbie.

KELSO: I know, but Trina Robbins has this very, very traditional, "realistic" style of drawing. Ariel, Jon and I, we don't draw that way. That's all there is to it. There's this threshold of realism that mainstream comics readers require and we don't work in that way; it's just a fact.

Finding Readers

RAPHAEL: When you were starting out, did you find it difficult to get your work out to readers?

BORDEAUX: I didn't at all. I mean, I didn't have any grand illusions to start with, really. I just sort of handed them out to my friends and I felt that it went really quickly. Once I got a couple of plugs, I was getting enough orders to really surprise me. So, I didn't really find distribution tough until it started getting further along and I started realizing I was going to have put a lot more effort into getting them out there. Now, I'm just completely burnt on attempting distribution.

KELSO: When I did the one mini-comic that I did, I didn't know that that's what it was called. I mean, I just thought it was this comic that I xeroxed, and I gave them to my friends and I sent them to cartoonists. I had literally no expectations. I wasn't asking," Where's my audience?" I wanted to do a comic and I did it. When I got the Xeric Grant, I thought, "Oh, I'm going to do a real comic now." That's when I started finding distribution frustrating. That's when I actually entered into the industry -- you know, I soliid with Capital, I soliid with Diamond, and I had pathetic orders and that's pretty much how it's been ever since. It's funny to me because I've sent my comic out to other comic artists who I admire, and I correspond with other people who do mini-comics, and a lot of times when people ask me how much my comic sells, they're really surprised that it sells so few, because the word of mouth about me seems to be bigger than the actual number of comics that I sell. People tend to be surprised that it sells so badly. And even though the distribution is frustrating, since my original expectations weren't that high, like Ariel said before, in a way I'm surprised it's gone as well as it has.

RAPHAEL: Megan and Ariel, is cultivating an audience different for you as women?

KELSO: I have really conflicting feelings about this. Some days I feel incredibly oppressed and think, "You know, if only I were a man, I would be doing so much better." And other days, I don't believe that at all.

RAPHAEL: I would think female customers would want to buy books by women cartoonists.

KELSO: The women customers thing is frustrating in and of itself because women don't buy comics as much as men do, and a lot of it has to do with the typical comic book store experience, and the history of comics -- how there's just so little out there that appeals to women. I feel like there's a lot of women out there who would probably really dig my comic, but it's just invisible to them because they don't go to comic book stores, and my comic isn't in bookstores. That's continually frustrating to me. I wish I could somehow get into book stores but we all know that's an ongoing struggle right now. I think there's probably a lot of guys out there who look at the title on my comic, and they look at the image on the front, and they're not interested. Still, there are a ton of guys who I get great mail from who I know really like my comic a lot.

RAPHAEL: Do you get more response from guys than girls?

KELSO: No I would say I get more -- well, it's really hard to say. I'd say it's about even, usually.

BORDEAUX: I really relate to Megan on this issue. I feel pretty much the same as everything that she just said.

RAPHAEL: You feel oppressed?

BORDEAUX: No, I mean just some days I feel that, and other days... I also do feel like I came along at a good time, because there is some media attention being paid to women cartoonists. There is a little bit of interest being generated now that's been really positive. And I do find that Megan's right -- women don't buy comics. But I think it's slowly growing and it just takes a long time for things like that to change.

LEWIS: It will probably be a very long time before women cartoonists will just simply be cartoonists.

BORDEAUX: Exactly. I'd love to see that. I'd love to not be called a woman cartoonist, but it's kind of hard to avoid.

LEWIS: Even in literature, there's still just the faintest trace: a woman writer is still sort of a woman writer in literature.

KELSO: The thing that's annoying about it is it seems like it's this cycle. It's like, every few years, "women in rock" is rediscovered. "Women are in rock bands. Isn't that wacky? Let's explore this novelty." I sort of feel that goes on in comics a little; that the interest in women in comics is the interest in the social or political phenomenon of it, not what we are doing. That's just annoying.

RAPHAEL: Do you find that publications which feature only women cartoonists, like Action Girl and Twisted Sisters, are helpful to young female cartoonists?

KELSO: I am a little bit frustrated with the women's anthology thing because I sometimes wonder if I would ever be considered for any other kind of anthology. Because it's like, "Oh, well she's in Action Girl, so she's represented." Like I said, I have really contradictory feelings about all of this, and I do sort of resent the segregation at times, although that's not to say Sarah isn't doing a great thing with Action Girl. I think her motives are similar to mine and Ariel's: she wants more girls to read comics and more girls who are doing comics to get more comics work. And that's awesome. But I look at Zero Zero, and have there ever been any women who've done a Zero Zero story? Maybe one, maybe none. What's up with that? There are a lot of women alternative comics artists; why aren't they in regular anthologies? Why are they all in women's anthologies?

RAPHAEL: Will your generation of cartoonists be able to buck that trend?

BORDEAUX: I doubt it. As Jon pointed out, women writers are still women writers centuries later. I think every generation is going to make a little change, but I don't think we'll be able to break anything apart.

KELSO: It's probably easier for us than it was, say for example, Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Mary Fleener, in the sense that we can look to some of our earliest influences in comics and they are women, like Julie [Doucet] and Mary and Aline. Women comic artists did exist before us, so we don't have to be pioneers in the sense that they were.

BORDEAUX: I don't think I'd be doing it today if it weren't for them because I look at male and female cartoonists, and when I was younger, looking at a cartoonist like Charles Burns or Pete Bagge and Robert Crumb, they all have very high technical expertise, as far as very precise brush lines. Aline Kominsky-Crumb was just such an inspiration to me because she obviously was the polar opposite of that kind of style, and I realized I could do that and I could do anything in between. But if I had just grown up looking at artists who worked in a style that I would never be able to attain, I don't think I would be doing it.