SURRIDGE: Was it mainly Kirby and Ditko at Marvel?

GONICK: Um... I'd say mainly Kirby. I see the merits of Ditko, but there is something about his art that made me uncomfortable, and I didn't love him as much as some people did. I mean, I liked John Romita. The guy was, he's not considered a star, but he was a very, very competent storyteller. He took over Spider-Man, I didn't mind that at all.

SURRIDGE: A friend of mine really enjoys Romita's work.

GONICK: His Spider-Man is less spidery.

SURRIDGE: That's one thing I notice, that the very flashy villains... not that they drop out, but that very few new designs come along.

GONICK: Fantastic Four and Thor were the two I followed the most closely.

Oh, and Gene Colan. Master of the low-angle shot. [Laughter]

SURRIDGE: He was doing Iron Man, I think?

GONICK: Yes, he did Iron Man. He did a bunch of stuff.

SURRIDGE: I always associate him with Tomb of Dracula.

GONICK: Then later guys like Wrightson came along, what were those magazine, the Warren things.

And the undergrounds. Then the undergrounds is what obviously really got me going.

SURRIDGE: Maybe we should...

GONICK: I'm getting you out of sequence here...

SURRIDGE: It's funny that you bring this up, actually, because the article that I mentioned to you that I wrote about your stuff I actually mention a couple of the For Beginners books and say pretty much that. There's text and then there's illustrations, but there's not any real give and take between them and there's no panel to panel progression to make it really comics.

GONICK: Right.

SURRIDGE: At least in the ones that I've seen.

GONICK: So you've got to see Cuba For Beginners, you've got to see the ones Rius did.

SURRIDGE: Oh, yeah.

GONICK: The ones you saw were these concoctions.

SURRIDGE: [garbled]

GONICK: I can't hear you. We're having an air show today, and the military fighter jets are flying low.

SURRIDGE: The For Beginner books I saw were Wagner for Beginners, Philosophy For Beginners.

GONICK: Right. There you go. Say no more, right? But they have the same left political slant. That was the other thing about Rius, he had a left wing political slant. He was doing comics that were education -they were funny, but they weren't satirical only. They were meant for political action. They were meant to inform people. And that's what unique about them. What was unique.

ON NEW YORK CIRCA '74

SURRIDGE: At this point in time, '72 or '73, was there still an underground scene in New York?

GONICK: I don't remember, which sort of tells you something, I guess. A lot of those people moved out to California. I just don't remember. I kept up with the undergrounds, but by then a lot of the early experimentation had kind of evaporated. I'd read anything that Crumb came out with. Despair Comics came out sometime around then. I don't remember when, exactly. That's about my favorite Crumb of all time. And the Freak Brothers kept coming out, which I love. S. Clay Wilson...

SURRIDGE: Yeah?

GONICK: All that stuff.

SURRIDGE: I'm actually kind of curious. One of the things I did in preparation for this was look through the history of underground comix, the Estrin book. It actually probably would have come out at this point. I was just sort of surprised looking at this stuff again, how over the top some of it was.

GONICK: Oh, yeah. Wilson still does it.

SURRIDGE: Yeah, exactly.

GONICK: [Laughs] Turning out the same stuff for years; I kind of admire him for it, to tell you the truth.

I guess, I had actually... I must have taken... I can't remember... I drew up, I had this idea. One night I thought, "I should do the French Revolution." Then I thought, "No. I should do the World." Because there's enough of it. So I drew up, I think I had eight Sunday half-pages. Four from some evolution stuff, and four from the Greeks. I'm trying to reconstruct the chronology. This ended in the summer of '76, and I was done, I worked a couple of months ahead, so I was done in the beginning of the summer. How did this work. I dig up this thing, show it to Toni, she was discouraging, it's a Sunday strip, and I must have gone out to San Francisco in the summer of '76. I must have sort of been done with the thing in about June or July.

PAGE SIZE AND FOOTNOTING

The footnotes are derived from two things. One was doing the newspaper strip, doing a Sunday strip, you have to make the format flexible. It has to be usable as a half-page, a third of a page, or a quarter of a page. And there's a standard way that cartoonists do that. They had disposable panels.

SURRIDGE: Really?

GONICK: A third of a page is six panels. A fourth of a page is eight panels. So the first two panels of the eight-panel format are a freestanding gag that can just be thrown away. I think Dilbert sometimes does it by inserting panels in the middle. But anyway, there's a standard way of doing it. I figured out a non-standard way of doing it. I designed the third of a page format as three pages. It looked like the shape of three book pages, side by side. You take it up to half a page, do a footnote underneath. And then the footnote could be cut apart and put back together and stuck over on the right as a fourth of a page.

SURRIDGE: That actually makes it kind of different then, because the whole page including the footnote isn't a unit, it's the page excluding the footnote which then gets rearranged.

GONICK: Yes.

SURRIDGE: I see.

GONICK: So the strip, all these Yankee Almanac strips, looked like -at least once I evolved this format, looked like three book pages one after the other. So you could have any kind of layout in those pages you wanted. And then this footnote at the bottom.

And the idea from using the footnotes came from something my father showed me years ago, which was called the Almanac -- coincidentally -- the Almanac for Thirty-Niners. Which was a booklet that had been put out for the 1939 World's Fair in San Francisco. It was a calendar of events, but it had historical items in it. Sometimes on the page, on the date in the calendar part, but it also had these footnotes that were freestanding from the calendar that were little tidbits about San Francisco history.

SURRIDGE: Sidebars, that kind of thing.

GONICK: Yeah. But totally cartooning also. Very nice little book. Still have that. So that's where the footnotes came from. With Rip Off, I was doing the footnotes I was doing the Footnotes as a weekly strip, right, for their syndicate. So the footnotes went out with the syndicate package, completely separate. I [laughs] don't know if they made any sense or not, but it worked.

POST RIP-OFF & PUBLISHING

SURRIDGE: You had a very good relationship with him, then.

GONICK: Oh, yeah. I haven't seen him in years.

SURRIDGE: Are there any particular memories of around this time, the late '70s early '80s?

GONICK: Ping pong.

SURRIDGE: Ping pong.

GONICK: There was a ping pong table in the middle of the studio, the Rip Off Press studio. We had a lot of... there was a lot of different things, but the Fast Draw scene was a melodrama. Rip Off Press was dependable.

SURRIDGE: What did the melodrama result in?

GONICK: Ehh... what did it result in? I guess, eventually we kind of split it up. I can't remember when, isn't that odd? Probably... how long did that last...?

SURRIDGE: One of the things you sent me was a scholastic poster, and that was dated '81.

GONICK: I was definitely working at home when that happened. Well, let's see. I moved here in '77. We must have gotten the studio shortly in the middle of '77. In '78, we bought our house. And I moved... Fast Draw couldn't have lasted more than a year, or a year and a half. Because I started working at home after that. We had extra - there was an apartment downstairs.

SURRIDGE: So basically Fast Draw just sort of became a bad working environment.

GONICK: Only at times. Yeah, it was... it was just a struggle. Everybody was struggling. And nobody enjoys struggling. We were trying to keep up rent. It was in a great place, though. It was above this print shop, this fine color printer who did all the Bill Graham posters. [Chuckles] A great union man, this printer. Levon Mosgofian was his name. When he died, Bill Graham came to the memorial. So how far do we want to go? I'm starting to run out of gas here.

SURRIDGE: We're almost at the point when you go aboveground into the comic strip and collections.

GONICK: Well, all right, let's talk about that for ten minutes. Sitting, silently staring at the ceiling...

I'm trying to remember ... chronology is not good. I should do my homework. There was a collection done, an anthology done of volumes one through four. It was published by William Morrow. About '80 or '81, let's go back to Phoenix. I mentioned there were these two guys. One was was a cartoonist, Ken Stapely, but then there was a guy named Howard Rheingold, who is now an Internet phenomenon of some kind. He's written a couple of books about the history of the development of computers, and so on. Virtual communities and things, what really got them going. And Howard was beginning to write some popularized science books. He did a book called Talking Tech I did some illustrations for. And I thought, "I could do this." Not only that, but there are some subjects that could really use the visuals. So there was this microbiologist that I had met through my wife, my second wife, Lisa, named Mark Wheelis and I asked him if he'd be interested in doing a book on genetics, a cartoon book on genetics. And he said he would. So we kind of got a proposal put together, about 40 pages. While that was in the works, I did four of the pages up in finished form, I had the History of the Universe, and I was also doing this comic strip called the Cartoon Kitchen. You have some samples of it.

SURRIDGE: Yeah, that's what I was alluding to before as the comic strip...

GONICK: That was syndicated by a small outfit here in San Francisco, the Bay Area.

SURRIDGE: Out of curiosity, are they your own recipes?

GONICK: A little secret of the food business, nobody has their own recipes. [Surridge laughs] "Are they my own recipes?" Yeah, sure. I invented them all. Every single one of them.

SURRIDGE: I just meant did you dig them up or did you have readers send them to you or anything like that.

GONICK: I dig 'em up here and there. It was word of mouth and it was honestly done for the first seven or eight years, and then [laughter] And then I just started adapting them, which is what everbody does.

So I had these three things. And I thought, "OK. I do non-fiction cartooning." I hadn't quite thought of that word, but here's what I do. I don't think anyone else was doing this. This is '80 or '81, nobody had a personal computer. There was such a thing as word processing, but you had to go a professional word processor to do it.

SURRIDGE: Actually, to be honest with you, my father is what you might call an early adapter but I distinctly remember just a bit after that he brought home a computer that had a word processing program that was very primitive. It was like an Osborne. I don't know if you remember the Osborne.

GONICK: Yeah.

SURRIDGE: He brought home one of those.

GONICK: He didn't buy a Commodore. The Canadian one?

SURRIDGE: [Laughs] No! Is that Canadian?

GONICK: Oh, yeah.

SURRIDGE: He had an Atari 400.

GONICK: That's Canadian.

SURRIDGE: That was a big thing in high school, the Commodore.

GONICK: Ted Richards went to work for Atari. I actually got a hand-me-down. That was my first computer. I got a hand-me-down Atari, maybe an 800 from Ted Richards. The word processor, it was actually on a cartridge, right? So it didn't take up any RAM. You just stuck this thing in the slot. There was your word processor. It ran off of a little 13-inch TV. But in '80, you had to go to a professional. So I got Writer's Market, looked up 30 publishers, and had what looked like an individual letter - it was 29 actually - 29 different letters, 29 different publishers. Said this is what I do: I convey information in comics, there are these three proposals - the Cartoon Kitchen, the Cartoon History of the Universe, and the Cartoon Guide to Genetics. Are you interested? Sent 29 packets. Some of them came back, almost unopened. I believe what happened is that the postal rates were going up in the middle of this process and the publishers had instructions to send everything back before the rates went up. Right? Because I sent a SASE, and they just popped it into the thing and sent it back.

But some looked at it, and I got several nibbles. And one of the rejections was from Harper. Harper and Row, it was called then. And a couple days after, it was one of the rapid ones - literally three days, it went out and came back like that. A couple of days after this comes back, I get a phone call from somebody. He says, "I'm Herb Levy at Harper and Row, and we're very interested in your book." And I said, "I got this rejection from Harper, what's going on?" He said, "Well, we're in this other part now, the Barnes and Noble college outline series. We did this book called the anatomy coloring book. I don't know if you're aware of it." "I certainly am, I saw a medical student using it." He said, "Yes, it turns out to be a great teaching tool, because you color the different systems of the body, they're color-coded differently and you color them in and you learn. We sold about a million of those." [Laughter] "And I always wanted to do something with cartoons, we got some money obviously from the sales of this thing. We're looking for more ways to do visual explanation. We'd like to do a deal with you." So this was great, that was it.

SURRIDGE: The idea of doing a series with them, was that part of the whole package?

GONICK: Well, he signed me up for two books. Yeah, he wanted to do a series. The computer book and the genetics book were contracted for at the same time. I went with the proposal to New York, and I met him and so forth. I also then got this contract with William Morrow, they were going to do the first four volumes of the Cartoon History of the Universe. There were actually five of them done at that time, but the fifth one is the beginning of the Greek sequence, and I didn't want to put it together -and they were kind of miffed about that -and they didn't do well with it at all, actually. They sold 4500 and they were going to remainder the other 5500, and I bought them back. I bought the 5500 books through Rip Off Press and sold them all. Made much more money than Morrow had.

I had horrible experiences with them. I went to the ABA convention, American Booksellers Association, the month the book came out. I go to the Morrow booth, and say, "There are distribution channels you guys oughta think about because this is comics. There are all these comics distributors and publishers over there." And the Morrow people would say, "Oh, great. Why don't you have them come over and talk to us." So I'd go over to the comics distributors and say, "Listen, hey, these have come out and William Morrow, bluh, bluh," and the comics guys would say, "Oh, great, just tell the Morrow people to come over and talk to us." [Surridge laughs] These people were pathetic. I got the book, and the first thing I did was get a list of science museum shops and called around, and sold a bunch of them. They'd never done it. I don't know, book publishers... don't get me started. Book publishing is a funny business.

EARLY LIFE, POLITICS

SURRIDGE: You mentioned your father and mother and the FBI being down on them. I wanted to ask if you knew any details about what they did that attracted this interest.

GONICK: Um... not specific. I mean, in my father's case he had actually lived in the USSR for three or four years, actually. Back in the early 30s. So that was certainly enough. And what happened was when he had applied for this job in Phoenix, he had left those years blank on his resume. The way he found out that the FBI was after him was following him around was his department chairman called him in one day and said, "Hey, the FBI was here, and they said, 'Have you ever wondered why they are these blank years on Gonick's resume? Why don't you ask him?'" And instead of asking my father, he just said, "I don't know what they want with me, why don't you go find out?" And of course, the FBI wouldn't talk to my father. So this guy stood behind him.

SURRIDGE: You mention your mother would have been followed also, was there anything specific or just their general outlook.

GONICK: It's just that they were party members. They'd been party members. That was enough. "To the best of my knowledge." [Surridge laughs]

SURRIDGE: These early experiences had a real impression. Growing up in the '80s, that was a criticism of the '60s politicization. It largely came from people who at a certain point just gave it up and went back to their regular lives.

GONICK: Yes, and you can even say more. A lot of their focus was international. The New Left arose as a result, first, of the Civil Rights movement - a fine thing to arise from - and the Vietnam War. And it was an international movement. It was happening in France, everywhere, all over the world. To me, the focus of the left had always been the labor movement. The people who were involved in the New Left really didn't - many of them, most of them, who knows how many, some did - many of them lacked interest in unionism and those were the issues that pushed my buttons.

SURRIDGE: You mention the New Left as having this International focus, you mention Vietnam and civil rights, I think from a Canadian's perspective, Vietnam was something the Americans went off and did. The American civil rights movement has been very specifically American. As you mention, the labor movement is much more international.

GONICK: True.

SURRIDGE: What was your draft status during the Vietnam War? Were you in danger of being drafted?

GONICK: I was. My... let's see ... at first, everybody had student deferments. Then it was decided that wasn't fair. This, by the way, I think is a lot what provoked the student protest movement. [Laughter] A lot of students are suddenly in danger of getting drafted. Then you had a lottery where you had a certain, they assigned you a number from 1 to 365 according to your birthday, and mine happened to be fairly low - close to being drafted, if I remember correctly. And then they were doing draft physicals in Boston. I did have a draft physical, and I flunked it on psychiatric grounds. [Surridge laughs] My status was 1-Y.

SURRIDGE: Really? Did they give you any specific reason for why that was?

GONICK: I had letters from psychiatrists and I acted like a lunatic, and furthermore, I don't think my heart rate dropped below about 150 for the entire physical. [Laughter] And that was natural. I hadn't taken any drugs.

SURRIDGE: I was going to ask if that was a natural hyperactivity.

GONICK: Yes.

SURRIDGE: So the psychiatrists had given you letters - was this following actual visits?

GONICK: Oh, yeah.

SURRIDGE: When did those start?

GONICK: Well, strangely enough, it started not too long before the draft physical. [Laughter] Let's not got into this too much. You never know what the FBI is reading, even now. [Surridge laughs] This was not uncommon at that time, let's put it that way. There was a whole network of organized ways to help people not get drafted.

SURRIDGE: I've personally known people who dodged out of Vietnam.

GONICK: Who moved to Canada.

SURRIDGE: Yeah, absolutely.

GONICK: I didn't want to do that. No offense.

SURRIDGE: No, I can imagine.

Getting back to comics...

GONICK: Incidentally, I didn't know it at the time, but I almost certainly already at that time had a back condition that would have made me 4-F if I had known about it. In a minute. But I didn't know.

SURRIDGE: You mentioned Ken Steakly. Do you know what happened to him? Are you still in touch with him?

GONICK: No, no. He died. When he died he was 33. He died in 1979.

SURRIDGE: Did he do anything that got into print?

GONICK: You know, I don't believe so. He may have done some things in Arizona New Times, you know, the weekly paper in Phoenix. Tempe. But no, mostly he... he easily could have. He was really good.

And the college paper, I'd guess. Up at Reid.

THE CARTOON HISTORY

SURRIDGE: The History of the Universe comic strip that you did, the material for that came directly back into the comic books.

GONICK: The footnotes, the thing for the weekly syndicated... those are the footnotes.

SURRIDGE: They're actually one by one...

GONICK: Those were the footnotes, independently.

SURRIDGE: I'm sorry, I thought you were talking about the general idea.

GONICK: No, those were the actual footnotes. And then I would just take a photostat and paste it on the comic book page. There were more footnotes done as ended up in the books, because the books started to take longer. So I had to do somehting each week. So there are several footnotes that never got published in the books.

SURRIDGE: I don't necessarily want to talk about an awful lot about the Cartoon History in this session, but I will ask since we're at the right point and time, you mentioned Gilbert Shelton. You called him a midwife to the Cartoon History in the second collected edition. I just wondered if you wanted expand on that. You mention that he gave you the name... is there anything more you want to say about that?

GONICK: I mean... I showed him my history comics, I told you this. He liked them. No, just that he made it possible for it to happen. He's the guy who said yes. And then as I also said I'm not very good with titles. So I was trying to figure... I had a couple of ideas, but none of them very snappy. And so I was bouncing them off. "Universal History" or "The Outlines of History" -a drawing pun in there. He's not big on puns, as it turns out. And then I said, "Cartoon History" and he just started to chuckle. And that's his meter. He's a fairly reserved person, but that's one of his good qualities as an editor. He can read comics and he'll start to laugh at loud. It's great to see. Especially it's great to see when it's your comic he's doing it to. [laughter] When he laughed at that, I thought, "That's a funny title."

SURRIDGE: The scholastic posters, it was probably around the same time. I saw the one that was dated '81.

GONICK: That was the first one.

SURRIDGE: How did that come about, was it sort of through connections...?

GONICK: It was an editor I knew who worked at Scholastic who approached me about doing it. They liked it, so I was hired to do several. I only sent you the one, I think, but they were all similar.

SURRIDGE: Was there any sort of change in outlook when you started doing this stuff, rather than focusing on the Rip Off stuff? You were sort of between underground or aboveground.

GONICK: Not too much. Even when I was doing the first Cartoon History for Rip Off, I thought, "This could be used in a school." I put things in that were obviously, what's the word...?

SURRIDGE: Pedagogical?

GONICK: No, no, no. That were -oh man, sorry, it's not working today --you know, broad, sexy, what's the word I want?

SURRIDGE: Populist?

SURRIDGE: Attractive to kids basically?

GONICK: No, no. There's stuff in there that's sexy, right? There's this thing with the guy and the sheep.

SURRIDGE: Oh, I totally misunderstood what you were saying.

GONICK: I reined it in a little bit. So in the first one... For example, there's a thing about... it drive me nuts I can't think of this word...

SURRIDGE: Risque?

GONICK: That'll do. It's not quite it, though. It's like Rabelaisian or something. Anyway, there's the account of the evolution of reptiles from amphibians in terms of their sex life. And I wouldn't change that in a minute. I think that's the right way to do it. That amphibians have sex in the water, and therefore the males have disperse their sperm over these soft-shelled eggs, and reptiles have sex on land. Which means they have to... it's the origin of fucking. [laughter] That's important. You don't often see it in evolution books, because it's dirty.

SURRIDGE: Well, especially with showing the reptiles with these big, broad smiles on their faces.

GONICK: So I wouldn't change that for a minute. But I had a two-page spread of a brontosaurus fuck. But it's not in there.

SURRIDGE: What you've got here is the brontosuaruses necking.

GONICK: Originally that was this wild scene with like this giant earthquake, everything's shaking. And I did this, that was going to be it. And I thought, "Well, maybe this is is a bit too much." Even then, I was kind of watching it. So the answer to your question is no, I didn't. Basicaly, I didn't change my way of thinking about this stuff. Obviously if you're doing something for eight-year-olds, you do things the editors are going to accept. [laughs] I never had a commitment in my mind to doing, what could you say, there was a certain way the underground believes that you should be able to do anything in print. And actually, I have no problem with that, mostly. I don't want to just be able to do anything in print. My aim is not to put all my deepest stuff on the page, necessarily. Sometimes I think maybe that would be good. But I've always sort of exercised this rational control over it.

SURRIDGE: It seems as though most of what you're doing is rather than doing something that's self-expression and that's about it -- it's teaching something, explaining something...

GONICK: True. But the things you say about it could be much more outrageous, right? I could rant and rave and curse and scream. Right? But I tend not to. It would be easy, believe me.

SURRIDGE: Would you worry about that interfering with effective communication?

GONICK: You never know. Sometimes it helps.

SURRIDGE: One of the things I find comes out of your books is a certain balance, which it just seems to me would have been difficult to square with ranting and raving. But we'll get back to that later.

GONICK: OK.

SURRIDGE: I imagine most of what was in there would be what could be proven, right?

GONICK: It's not just that. The space considerations are really tight. And so they'll have a little overview of what's in the story, and it's very, very compressed the way it's expressed and it's written for people, by and large it's written for people who know what they're talking about already. Kind of share these ideas. If you don't, if you're not in that specialty, it's fairly opaque. It really helps to know where they're coming from, and also what they're looking toward. And they'll tell you. Generally, they're eager to have it put out there, because they feel like they labor in obscurity.

The only one that didn't play off the cover was when they had to change the cover at the last minute. The do have this thing with Smithsonian. They discuss with Smithsonian what it's going to be ahead of time. They wanted to do this thing on sewage, so the cover was going to be a picture of a toilet, looking straight down a toilet bowl. And Smithsonian knew this ahead of time. But when it actually showed up, the dummy of the magazine, someone said, "Oh my God! You can't have that! That's a toilet!" [Surridge laughs] So I had already done the strip, and they made a new cover from one of the other stories. Which was about mazes. So the one with the cover story about mazes, the strip is about toilets.

SURRIDGE: I guess if you're trapped in a maze... [Gonick laughs]

There's one thing that's a Muse interview. It's just a back and forth, with one drawing of a character.

GONICK: With the cow.

SURRIDGE: Did you write that?

GONICK: No, they wrote it. And then I put my two cents worth. This isn't in character. Shouldn't say that, I'll just say this. Same thing with the letters to the editor. The kids all write in, they all want to talk to the cartoon characters. A wonderful experience, by the way, for me. As I say, I've done cartooning for... I started in '71, so it was like 28 years I've been doing cartooning? And I never had characters until recently. I just do non-fiction.

And, as I also said before, people want to see characters. And I've gotten more interested in designing characters over the years. I think one thing I didn't mention was this chemistry CD-ROM I worked on. That was really the first set of characters I designed. It was supposed to be a chem lab or chemistry set simulation. I don't think you have that one. It doesn't have my name on it or anything. Basically, what I did was design characters that classified all the chemicals. So there were these seven lockers and each locker belonged to a certain character, and every chemical belonged to in exactly one locker. But the characters had real life to them. They weren't just icons. It's fun desigining characters. So in the statistics book, there's a running characters who's the narrator, which I've had [garbled] in the genetics book. Since the History of the Universe there's a narrator character, and in the science books I just make my collaborator be that character.

But I also brought in Sherlock Holmes because we did this thing on deductive reasoning. And that worked great I thought. And he was fun to draw. And graphically, he's more successful than any of the other characters, too. [laughs]

SURRIDGE: Graphically, he's also such a well-known image that you know the deerstalker and the magnifying glass.

GONICK: True. Right. I think President Clinton makes a token appearance in that book, too.

SURRIDGE: There was a politician.

GONICK: Yes. Senator S. Tute [????] Accent on the Tute.

SURRIDGE: How did you come by the different topics?

GONICK: Uh... let's see. Well by and large it's been based on who's available. Who comes forward and says "I'd like to do one with you." So the first one, I had a friend who was a microbiology professor. I asked him if he was interested, and he said, "Yes." The computer book I had to do myself because I couldn't find anybody. I had somebody I wanted to do it with, but everybody was too busy. Everybody in the computer business has been working a seven day week for the last fifteen years. So I just used him as a consultant. Then I heard from a physics teacher, he wanted to do a relativity book. And I ran that one by the publisher, and they said they'd rather have a beginning physics textbook. The market's bigger. I'm still not sure about the general market, but he was willing to do that. What came next? The history books came next. And I did those myself, obviously. I wanted to do the history.

Non-communication, that's an unusual case. That's a reprint of another book. I was hired to do that book by a Dutch company for a conference they were doing in Amsterdam. And Harper re-published it here. And then the environment was again, Alice approached me. And then sex was something I knew the co-authors. There were two, originally. One of them died.

SURRIDGE: Statistics?

GONICK: Statistics, well there, I told the publisher I wanted to do a math book. They said statistics would be the one, because of the huge enrollment and my agent happened to know this guy. They had vacation homes next door to each other. So she introduced us.

SURRIDGE: I guess that's... I guess that's pretty much it.

Do you find that the subjects cross over from one to another?

GONICK: Genetics pops up in sex, doesn't it?

SURRIDGE: [laughs] Yeah. But to some extent there's history in the environment, there's physics in the environment, too. That sort of thing.

GONICK: I wanted them all to have some history in it. It makes it interesting. The genetics book, which you don't have, has quite a long history section. The first half of the book is organized historically, before we start describing molecular biology.

SURRIDGE: Actually, that's what I noticed in the computer book, too. I remember reading it thinking, "OK, this is a computer book from the early '80s, which is right when I was being taught computers." And I never saw any book that began in this very rational way of describing the history of how the computer developed. Which made a lot of sense.

GONICK: I like history; what can I say?

I probably should have had more in the sex book. Even then there was a little bit, but it wasn't organized that way.

ON THE ENVIRONMENT

SURRIDGE: There are three books that have certain questions about. One is the American history book, one is the environment, and the guide to sex, too. A couple of interesting ones about the environment: having written the book, are you ultimately optimistic and pessimistic about the environmental situation as a whole?

GONICK: Um... not optimistic. Not optimistic. It's hard to say what the principal problem is, but doing the book made me think... I mean, pollution's bad, right? No question. But it's the extraction of resources and destruction of our own habitat that's the unsolvable problem. You look at - how do I want to put this? - we're just sucking energy out of the ground. In a way, the Greeks were right. Prometheus made the first big boo-boo. If you use animal power, or human power, you're basically using the energy that went into your mouth. As soon as you discover that you can take wood and set it on fire and extract its chemical energy, you've begun a process of extracting energy that ultimately leads to catastrophe, because at some point there's not going to be any more energy to extract. We've used up most of the wood, now we've got to go underground and use fossil fuels. Dead wood, basically, or dead animals. And once that's gone, I don't think there's enough solar energy coming down. At least not with the kind of technology we like to run. And poeple, the computer industry likes to pretend this is all fixed because there's no more stuff being moved around, just bytes. You're kind of ignoring the fact that electricity not only burns stuff up but is one of the least efficient of all the energy forms we have available. The extraction of energy. Plus, it goes along with all the enormously epanding population.

SURRIDGE: You mention towards the end the no-growth economy. I'm kind of curious as to exactly what that meant. I don't know if it's too difficult or complicated to get into.

GONICK: I'm going to to refer that question to my collaborator. Alice Atwater.

SURRIDGE: The phrase is there, and it's described as people enjoying their quality of life but don't consume too much. I was wondering if there were details about it.

GONICK: See, I think of these things in really theoretical terms, you know? It's like, it's the efficiency of energy extractions. Not extraction -- the efficiency of energy conversion. You've got this sequence, you start with whatever it takes to dig it up out of the ground, and then you got to move it somewhere, and then you burn it, and then you convert it into mechanical energy or electricity and you lose a certain amount of heat that way, and it goes down the wires, loses some more, and finally it runs your coffee grinder. So these chains of, the number of converters, as they call them, are long. It's a big sequence. And they're very inefficient. You lose a lot of heat. So there are lot of places where you can get the same amount of work out the other end with a lot less sutff going in at the beginning. I guess that's the idea.

SURRIDGE: I notice there's a very effective, structurally this is one that I've noticed a very, very effective structure. It begins with the ecological parable of Easter Island, and then moves into that works for --

GONICK: Island Earth.

SURRIDGE: Right. And the way things are happening now and what society and civilizations are doing and so on.

GONICK: Give Alice credit for that one, too.

ON COLLABORATION

SURRIDGE: Was this approach to structure yours or hers, or a combination? Generally, how do yo approach structure to these books?

GONICK: I tend to defer to the co-author.

SURRIDGE: Generally, in terms of the collaboration, how does it work? Do they provide you with information and that kind of stuff? Or do they give a full text?

GONICK: They give a full text. But with the exception of the physics book, in which the text was just exactly right, it generally needs work. It's too long... so I do a lot of rewriting. Sometimes perhaps not to the best effect, you know. [laughs]

SURRIDGE: Stylistically, the seem pretty, they read well as a group.

GONICK: That's probably because I re-write them at the end. That was very true of... I don't know, I don't want to judge one against the other. In terms of the co-author's feelings.

SURRIDGE: Oh, sure.

GONICK: They should all know that I had to wrestle every single one of them to the ground except for the physics book, that one he just gave me the manuscript, it was just the right length, I cartooned it straight out.

In terms of the way the subject is presented most of the time, I have to let the co-author determine that because they're the expert. So they're supposed to know what's important to be in and what's not and so forth.

SURRIDGE: Have you ever heard from any of them -- I mean most of these people are prose writers, have you heard from them in reaction to the cartoon format?

GONICK: I've been very, very lucky in this respect. Well, do you mean when we're working on it? I mean, they know going in what it's going to look like.

SURRIDGE: I would assume, and maybe I'm wrong, but I'd guess going from prose to comics there is a certain amount of condensing.

GONICK: Yeah.

SURRIDGE: That type of thing.

GONICK: No, I've been lucky. I've never had anybody, I've never worked with anybody -- I mean, they're not egoless. But they've all be happy to defer. None of them has ever -- I've never had an argument about any of them. About my condensation. Unless they say, "You missed some point." Or "It should sound like this." Then I say, "Fine," and I fix it. But the kind of thing you're talking about, where I really do major surgery on their text, they don't complain.

SURRIDGE: I was sort of wondering how they appreciate...?

GONICK: They like it. I'm still on good terms with all of them.

SURRIDGE: [laughing] That's good. Do they wind up being turned onto another form because of this?

GONICK: I don't know about that. I don't think any of them are about to go out and write for comics again. Although I have two former collaborators who want to do another one.

SURRIDGE: One last question about the guide to the environment. You mention you enjoyed drawing outdoor scenery. That's really in evidence here. The book is very visual. Have you ever sort of struggled to find visual representations for subjects?

GONICK: All the time. That's the nature of the business. [laughs] Yeah.

SURRIDGE: The environment would provide more than statistic, for example.

GONICK: Well... yes and no. Because, let me put it... this quick pen style? It works for me better just doing characters and doing stuff. So in the statistics book where it's just characters acting out things, it was quite easy. And in the environment book, there are actually quite a few places where I'm actually not happy with the illustrations. Because it has to be more illustrat-y. It has to be... it's not just schematic diagrams, you actually have to draw a picture of a certain kind of ecosystem. I feel more comfortable doing funny little cartoon people with big noses saying stupid things.

Unless I'm drawing with a brush.

SURRIDGE: That was one of the books I was unable to track down.

GONICK: Really?

SURRIDGE: That one and the guide to non-communication.

GONICK: That would be harder. But the genetics book is certainly around.

SURRIDGE: A retailer friend of mine ordered it but they weren't able to get it to him, they said they would get it in two weeks, and then they told him they'd have to look around for it. There's a technical distributing term for that, but I forgot what it is.

THE INDIVIDUAL IN SOCIETY

GONICK: (...) Even in traditional societies this is recognized and actually built into their customs. In native American cultures, some of them anyway, there's a recognized role who want to dress up like women. This was known in California for instance. No big deal. So what's my point? Where were we?

It's an individual thing.

I guess I'd say that the range of available options is pretty wide these days [laughs] compared to what it used to be.

SURRIDGE: Is your sympathy with this freedom of the individual... or how do you see this as balancing between cultures there?

GONICK: I'm going to have to pass on that one. It's too big a question. It does seem to me that things are out of hand right now. And the way I measure that... there's various ways I measure that. One way is how I feel when I walk down the street. And I feel like people have their stuff out front way more than I'm comfortable with. I wish people would just rein it in a little bit. Now this concerns people's behavior and how they dress, what kind of ads I see on the bus, everything. What they do in the privacy of their bedroom is none of my business. But even there, you talk about a measure of being out of control. The rates of sexually transmitted diseases are just outrageous. People aren't being careful enough. People are doing more things, more times, than they ought to. It's as simple as that. Somebody's got to get a grip.

So I guess this makes me a puritan these days, I don't know.

I'll say it again; this is in the book. The rate of sexually transmitted diseases is about... let's see if I can remember the statistic, I'm not sure if this is in the book... but for people between 16 and 65, no, it was between 15 and 45, sexually active ages, it's like, I don't know, 1 of 4? One of seven? This is outrageous.

SURRIDGE: "Ten percent of people age 16-24 will be infected annually." Is that it?

GONICK: Annually! Get that? Some of them it will be the same person infected over and over again. But you add that up over a few years... it's unbelievable. So keep it clean, kids.

And the media has this sort of conspiracy of silence on the subject. On TV people jump into bed all the time, you know? There's no condom, there's no STD, three's no pregnancy. It's all social.

ON AMERICAN HISTORY

SURRIDGE: From here, I'd like to go into the Guide to American History, then...

GONICK: Now it's called the Cartoon History of the U.S. You have that combined edition, right?

SURRIDGE: Yes, I do.

GONICK: The fat one, sepia-toned.

SURRIDGE: I'll begin by asking, generally what do you think is the perception of history in the United States. How is it taught, where is it in the national consciousness, and where do you think it should be?

GONICK: Where do I think what should be?

SURRIDGE: America's awareness of its own history.

GONICK: Since I grew up, it's sort of been all over the map. [sighs]

I may have said this before, but history has several purposes. Actually, for this talk at Wellesley I jotted down several. I thought there were probably three, but I ended up with a list of about ten. But two big ones. Two obvious ones. The first one is to try and reconstruct the past with as much accuracy as possible. To come to as clear an understanding of what cause what as we possibly can. That's one. That's sort of the obvious, no-brain definition. But that's actually not what history has been very much of the time. Starting all the way back with Herodotus, who's considered the first historian, or the chroniclers of...

SURRIDGE: The Father of Modern History?

GONICK: Yeah, the father of history. Actually, before him there are chronicles of kings. Like in the bible there are some older histories. Those histories are meant to glorify, in the case of the Chronicles, they're meant to glorify the king and his reign, and his family. Or in the case of Herodotus, it's to glorify a people and its accomplishments. Herodotus wrote after the Persian wars why this little town, called Athens, managed to defeat this humongous empire, called Persia.

American history, as it's taught here, is like that. Or has been. Historicaly, so to speak, in the past, in my childhood, it was really a subject that was taught to inculcate the values of society in the students. Now this can be at direct cross-purposes with the "just the facts" approach. In fact, it often is, because a lot of the facts are unsavory. So when they say history is told by the victors, that's what they mean. The victors tell their own story, they tell it the way see it, they talk about the ideals that moved them and they don't talk about any of the ideals on the other side because they don't respect them and they've forgotten about them.

They certainly don't, for some reason, actually this is another interesting question, they don't talk about the repressive measures they often have to take in order to become the victors. It's very, very rare for the conqueror to conquer anything without repressive measures. You might ask yourself, "Why is it that conquerors can't admit to their atrocities? Because everybody did it." It's the only way it ever happened. Almost. But they don't. Because the ideals of justice and so forth in society preclude the kind of things that army do. There is no justice between armies, you might say. The laws of war -the modern laws of war notwithstanding.

So when I grew up, American history was about the progress of democracy. Then, when I was in college there was this reaction coming -probably starting in the Civil Rights movement and then in the Vietnam War to look at the darker side of U.S. history, and look at it from the point of view of other peoples that had been stomped on. Now this has tremendous value because it brings to light more facts, it rounds out the information. But it also has had the effect, which I think is unfortunate, quite frankly, of clouding the issue of what the society's values really are. And I think that's where we are right now. There's a lot of pushing and pulling and tugging about what should be in the curriculum and that's what at the root of it.

SURRIDGE: I saw a newsreport about the history of textbooks, these textbooks had been put together the lowest bidder company, Prentice-Hall. And they had filled these textbooks with just these wild inaccuracies. They had Carter as the first Democrat-elected president since Truman. They had the first nuclear bomb used against Korea. Sputnik was the first ICBM nuclear warhead on board.

GONICK: Well, of course... I'm not aware of this, but that's obviously not a textbook that's going to survive. You can't be factually inaccurate. More interesting is that there are these textbooks put together by some woman all by herself. I can't remember what her name is, and I haven't seen them but they're supposed to be terrific. They're supposed to be really well-written, and cover all sorts of interesting things. Really give you a sense of what it was like to live in those times.

That, incidentally, the sense of what it's like to live in those times, is another aspect of history that really often disappears completely. History is so much a subject about dead people, that the readers don't want to admit that these people were alive and as confused as anybody else is right now.

SURRIDGE: It raises the question, within that context, of "Do you see this as a play of individual or of systems. Is it the individual that shapes the structures that make power, or is it a function of different populations, movements, whatever, that define things."

GONICK: Well, it's a system. But it's an extremely complicated system. I actually... [laughs] ... I actually tend to think of it in terms of physics.

SURRIDGE: Oh yeah?

GONICK: Yeah. Because this has sort of been thought through in the last 20-30 years by - I don't know if you call them Chaos Theorists - people who study dynamical systems. If you have a complicated system of any kind, that has feedback in it, where it can take information about what's going on and that influences the behavior of the system. The systems, when you say is it just the movements of people or is it individuals. The fact is, that these systems come into configurations where tiny perturbations can have a big difference. Have a big influence. Later.

The physical way of saying it is that in a simple Newtonian system, a linear system, no feedback, a small change in the system produces a small result. F=MA; a little change in force gives you a little change in acceleration. But in a complicated system, a little change can produce a huge result. So when systems often come into these sort of chaotic configurations and then the behavior of individuals absolutely counts.

So it's both. I'm not a believer in the Great Man theory of history, but it's absolutely certain that things might turn out otherwise based on little historical contingencies. It might have been just a matter of luck.

SURRIDGE: It reminds me of a point in the guide to the environment, where you say an injection of energy into a complicated system tends to make the system more orderly.

GONICK: Right. It causes the systems to organize themselves. It's actually a chemist, Nobel prize winner, named Prigojine, wrote a book called Order Out of a Chaos and this is his whole thing. The second law of thermodynamics says everything has to come apart and become gray, and he says that's only true if you don't have any energy coming in. If you have a constant supply of energy coming in, as we do from the sun, forget the second law of thermodynamics, it's not true. You can have greater order instead of less.

SURRIDGE: You can go back to your point about people holding things up against the ideals of the present.

GONICK: Yeah, sure. Certainly. But another thing is... why do I like Jefferson so much? It's because I'm a sucker for a good prose style. [Surridge laughs] Same reason I like Frederick Douglass. There are black people that don't like Frederick Douglass, they think he's an Uncle Tom. But the guy was an unbelievable writer. Like Jefferson. More prolific. It hooks me, what can I say?

SURRIDGE: There was an article I'd read a while ago on Jefferson, it was Conner O'Brian or somebody like that, sort of upbraiding him for the whole racism issue, but also for his point of view on militias. This writer was suggesting Jefferson's point of view, that he had basically been in favor of stuff like this, the periodic violent rebellion.

GONICK: Yeah, he liked the French revolution.

SURRIDGE: Is it a fair assessment of Jefferson?

GONICK: It's very hard to have people who are dead and can't defend themselves, to ascribe opinions to them about what's going on right now. Give me a break.

SURRIDGE: What made me think of it was your mention that after the Constitution and the Bill of Rights were adopted, everyone immediately fell to worshipping it. Which is how it's been ever since, almost.

GONICK: Yeah. The ten amendments, the ten commandments. [Surridge laughs]

Well, it's true. And this has had good and bad consequences. Except for the Civil War -- [chuckles] a slight exception -- things have been fairly stable down here. This system of electing the president is another one. This electoral college, the non-direct election of the president. Non-proportional representation. It makes for extreme stability. That's why it's so hard to crack the two-party system.

SURRIDGE: I don't know if it's necessarily a concern in American history, but was there any point at which you thought, "OK, here's where the idea of Americans as distinct from Europeans began." I don't mean in terms of legalized independence or anything like that. But even the idea, the sense of...

GONICK: The answer's no, it never crossed my mind. [Laughter] Seriously, it didn't. It's an interesting question, but I didn't think about it. I think there's some differences between Canada and the U.S. in that respect. Canada is a little more European in the sense that it was composed of loyalists for the most part.

SURRIDGE: It's not even that. Maybe it's just more a question of Canadian history, this notion of "What are we?" as opposed to Americans, as opposed to the English... It's something that doesn't crop up in terms of American history, that there was never any doubt.

GONICK: Canada didn't have a revolution of independence.

SURRIDGE: No, it never did. And actually, it's even more complicated than that. Because a responsible government came in in 1849, 1867 the British/North America act made it partly independent, 1920s we finally got to control our own foreign policies, we got our constitution in 1982. So it's really been a weird evolution.

GONICK: And nobody was complaining.

SURRIDGE: Yeah, exactly. Well, there complaining in 1837, that's when there was an uprising. But by and large it's been quieter.

GONICK: And there go the cops, right. [sirens in background]

SURRIDGE: You could say the closest thing the Canadian had to a war of independence was the war of 1812. Where a certain empire on the rise tried to...

GONICK: That's right. And I tried to talk about that in the book. Most history books, in American history books, the war of 1812 is represented as a war against England. But actually it was a war against Canada and against the Indians in the midwest. Mostly.

SURRIDGE: One thing about the book as a whole, on page 185, when you're assessing the fallout of the Civil War. You mention that the winning system advertised itself as a system of free labor -- the American dream as you describe it. And I was wondering how congruent to reality you find this change to be over the course of the subsequent history of the States.

GONICK: Oh, not at all. The betrayal was immediate. It was the party of big business. But before there was union, there was problem of the competition with slavery. Free workers -- meaning not enslaved workers. Once it was clear that all workers were to be unslaved, so to speak, it was every man for himself as far as Republicans were concerned. They were really on the side of enterprise and business. And the workers deserted the Republican party straight away.

ON MODERN POLITICS

SURRIDGE: I was sort of wondering, with pop culture, and stuff like that. Having lived through these times, the '50s and '60s, did that effect the way you cartooned them or presented them.

GONICK: Ah. Well, of course, I did put some things in about my experience. In the '60s, mainly.

SURRIDGE: I was wondering more generally about something I remember in your presentation of Kennedy. I've seen historical assessments recently that were basically derogatory of Kennedy.

GONICK: My impression is that it's swinging around the other way.

SURRIDGE: Really?

GONICK: People are giving him credit for being awfully good at it considering what a novice he was. In that his gut sense got us thorugh the Cuban Missle Crisis with a good outcome, for example.

SURRIDGE: Were you own experiences key in figuring out...?

GONICK: Well, my family was for Stevenson. So Kennedy was not liked. He was glamorous, but he didn't do it for me, particularly. And I remember, and this is ironic, considering what happened later, after he was elected, Edward R. Murrow the famous newsman used to have this show called, I don't know what it was called, they would basically set up the cameras in somebody's house, and they would interview the person in their own place. And he did this with Jackie Kennedy in the White House. So she kind of walked the camera crew around and showed them different things in the White House. And it was laughable. She seemed to have this tiny little breathy voice and she seemed like a flyweight. No, I didn't put that in the book. Of course, later I found out she was no flyweight at all.

SURRIDGE: November 12, 1999, they've declared the race for the 2000 primaries to be on. Anything strike you about the race so far?

GONICK: I'm somewhat gratified to see a move away from the extreme right. That's nice. Otherwise, no.

SURRIDGE: Maybe this is unprecedented, too, but the concern with celebrity in politics seems to be escalating.

GONICK: It's part of mass culturism.

SURRIDGE: Warren Beatty talking about jumping in with no political experience, and people take him serious.

GONICK: I have John Locke... John Locke is a good one. When South Carolina was founded, he was hired to write the state constitution, the colonial constitution, which was the most aristocratic of all of them. South Carolina as founded, if I remember correctly, of refugees from the English Civil War, refugees of the Puritans. So Locke was young, he was a good writer, and they hired him. And then [chuckles] some years later, he got hired by somebody else, and William and Mary, to justify them he came up with another idea. This is totally craven, I'm sure it's unfair, I don't know that much about Locke, but it's perfectly true that one year he said one thing and the other year he said the opposite. "Government must be by the consent of the governed." Trends that he found himself in the midst of.

Machiavelli for that matter. Machiavelli was a republican. And he had to get out of Florence. And so he was so desperate to get back in he tried to kiss the Doge's ass. Not the Doge. Someplace else. He kissed up to the ruler by writing this thing how princes behaved. So you get a little of the history of Florence, and you get a little of the personality of Machiavelli. And it gives you a little better appreciation of what's going on.

BACK TO CARTOONING

SURRIDGE: I don't know if they did a certain amount in each category, Search on the Yahoo engine and you'll find it.

I was told there was a history of intrigue behind the CDs. I don't know if that was what you were telling me there.

GONICK: What?

SURRIDGE: This is what I was told a couple of months ago when Darren Hick got in touch with me.

GONICK: Nah.

SURRIDGE: Nah? OK. All right.

GONICK: Only in the sense if you think it's intrigue that I didn't get to participate in the development. But that's pretty dull [laughs] as intrigue goes.

SURRIDGE: Did you worry at all about how to, what level of cartoony-ness to bring to the people as you drew them? You're dealing with human beings not just as we know them, but homo erectus and previous editions of humanity.

GONICK: And also people who we don't know what they looked like. Julius Ceasar, right?

SURRIDGE: That was something else I wanted to bring up: specific caricatures. I'm looking at the second volume and there was one point where you had this very on page 75, you have this very realistic cro-magnon. The neanderthals up to that point had been more cartoony, the style of the later volumes.

GONICK: It's true that it's not entirely consistent throughout. You can't put your finger on that. I think the more interesting drawing. That cro-magnon thing, I don't know what the answer is, but the drawing I really like, actually, was the last one in volume one. Where you see people for the first time. Just walking... I happen to like that drawing a lot. I felt the chill go down my spine when I did that drawing. Partly because it's the end of this first book and I think the first book is still one of the best books. First volume. But there's something about... there's something about the menace. They're kids, they're running, but they're throwing stuff and there's a certain expression on their face. But it's not exactly realistic at the same time. It's fairly realistic. They're muscled. I don't know.

So obviously I don't want to make it look like real war comics. It's got to be cartoony. But there are places in the book where I think I made it too cartoony. There are some faces in some of those book that I can stand to look at. [laughter] Actually, later on. I just think, "What was I was thinking when I drew that? That is too goofy."

SURRIDGE: Any you want to mention?

GONICK: There's some in the section on the Greeks. There's one in volume 5, I don't know where it is exactly, it's about the Greeks going off and trading with people. And there's some guy he's just got little discs for eyes and great long hose nose. And I look back and that, and I think, "Good Lord." Let's see... page 239. Oh, I can't stand that face. But then, you go a couple pages farther, 242, with the silhouette drawings of the Dionysian rite, that's one of my favorite pages out of all 650 pages.

I try to make them a little less goggle-eyed, though.

SURRIDGE: I did notice that the style of the second book seems to be different -there's less roundness to the figures.

GONICK: They're getting more realistic. I think it's basically an improvement. They're a little more controlled, realistic.

SURRIDGE: You mention Ceasar as an individual caricature. How great a liberty do you allow yourself with your caricatures? I did have Ceasar marked down where there's a commonly-received image of what he looks like.

GONICK: Oh, there's a death mask.

SURRIDGE: And you re-interpret that in a way, where just looking at the way you draw him, you get a sense of a different personality then has really come down. He's got this almost snake oil salesman kind of smile on his face in a lot of the panels.

GONICK: You mean like when he's come out of Pompey's wife's house? [laughter] Right.

Oh Lord, I don't know. It's true... dignity... well, because. He wanted his dignity, that's what set him off. Anytime anybody criticized, "Lead reduces dignity" he'd flip out and start killing people. So I wanted to make him a little less dignified. What can I say? But he's another one. You gotta admire the guy. Like Jefferson. He was brilliant. He was brilliant at advancing his own career, I don't know what kind of ideas he had. And he was a great writer, also. So there you are.

But still, a mafioso of a certain kind. I guess I should have done him as the godfather.

SURRIDGE: I'm looking at the panel, him with the partnership where he's explaining, "You divorce your wife and marry my daughter, I'll take care of that..." Dynastic swapping around.

GONICK: Exactly. The nerve, right? [Surridge laughs]

SURRIDGE: You have him as this glad-handing guy.

GONICK: It's true. He was. He was a good politician. Good politicians tend to be generous. This is one of the lessons of history. They give away stuff they don't even have. In this case, he was giving away somebody else's money. Just putting on these gladiator contests using Crassus' money. He didn't know Crassus was going to go get killed somewhere. Crassus might come back and try and collect one of those days.

Same thing in the Chinese history, right? After the Chen dynasty fell, the horrible, tyrannical Chen dynasty. The first unifiers of China. It kind of came down to a struggle between two different warlords. And the guy who won was the generous one.

SURRIDGE: The loud one, right?

GONICK: Right. The loud one was... he probably wasn't so... well, he had a big voice. I may not have been fair to him. He's considered a tragic hero in Chinese...

SURRIDGE: Really?

GONICK: Yeah, because he was an aristocrat, you see. He was a reifned character. He had one true love. That's the story. There's a Chinese opera about him and this concubine. Eventually she went down with him, whereas this other guy, the successful one, he was a commoner, he was coarse, he swore and screwed lots of women. [laughs] A type we admire. [laughter]

SURRIDGE: How much do you rewrite, reimagine these things. How much is this a conscious process?

GONICK: Oh, it's a conscious process. I don't have this... the first history I did was a history of colonial Massachusetts. It was a newspaper thing. And there I got deeply into it. A tremendous amount of documentation about all these people. I found myself feeling about them as if they were alive, right there, next to me, and I had the experience of re-imagining people I knew little about. And then discovering I had done it just right. It was uncanny. I don't have quite the leisure with this to got to those lengths.

But you know, I'm about to do Charlemagne now, and there's a little, a very brief biography of Charlemagne by his secretary. And it does give you a sense of his personality. There again, it doesn't tell you about the atrocities. There was a tribe called the Avars. Now... I don't know now, but some point in Eastern European history, there was an expression, "It's gone like the Avars." There are no more Avars; he's the reason. And the Saxons, he did all these numbers on the Saxons.

SURRIDGE: He tried to on the Moors, I guess.

GONICK: He didn't try very hard. He made war on the Saxons almost every year. He was trying to convert. It was a convert or die deal. And they just kept saying, "OK, OK." And he'd go away, then they'd doublecross him. He only went down to Spain once or twice.

SURRIDGE: How have you found visual references for all the cultures and all the individuals, too?

GONICK: Well, it's getting easier, of course. That was a big problem early on. Just to know how people dressed. There's not much. But there's tons of stuff now. Too much, actually.

I don't know about this thing about the Templars.

SURRIDGE: It was part of the Holy Blood, Holy Grail; that whole thing. There's this big argument about how the battle on Bannockburn was fought. That type of stuff.

GONICK: Having to do with the Templars?

SURRIDGE: Apparently, part of the theory involves is that the Templars, they weren't all killed in France when they said they were killed. And they all went to Scotland. There's one point in the battle of Bannockburn where there was supposed to be a charge, the Scottish side was saved by a charge of camp followers. Guys say, "Well, it's nice and romantic and all of that. But could such a charage have really turned the tide." My point of view is (A) Catfleurs [????] and his evil army that would have been a hell of a lot of people; (B) if it wasn't them, it's kind of odd that the Scottish crown and quarters and the English crown and quarter both came up with the same lie independently of each other.

GONICK: Never heard that story. But I did see something really cool in Spain three years ago. We were lost, actually. We'd gotten into some small village, I don't remember the name. And pulled up, we were driving in a rented car, it was down south. And there was a brand new sort of little stone monument. Highly polished. Couldn't have been more than five years old, sitting there. In English. And it was about -I don't know his title -the earl of something-or-other, but he's a descedent of Robert the Bruce. I'm sorry, I get this wrong, He was Bruce's right-hand-man. So when de Bruce died, he said he wanted his heart taken and buried in the Holy Land.

SURRIDGE: That sounds familiar.

GONICK: So they put de Bruce's heart in this lead casket and the Earl of Lincoln I think it was, or somebody, set off with an army. Through Spain, overland, through Spain to go down to the Holy Land to deliver the casket. They got to this village, and there was a battle about to start between the Christians and the Moors. So of course they went in on the side of the Christians. And as the battle goes on, the Moors are getting the better of it, so this Lincoln -- I think it was Lincoln -- rallied his men by taking the casket with de Bruce's heart and saying, "Go get that!" And he throws it out into the battlefield. And his men charge, and it turned the tide. And they got the heart back. So this thing was to commemorate it.

And then the newspaper story that maybe you saw. The heart went back to Scotland in fact, and was buried under some church. And someone found it last year.

SURRIDGE: It's kind of interesting, actually, because in the second book here, I'm on page 291, you've got a drawing of [???] meeting the goths at Hadrianople [???] and the big picture there is of a goth going down on civilizations. And he's drawn fairly realistically from the back.

GONICK: From the rear.

SURRIDGE: Yeah.

GONICK: Right, right. So yes, exactly. And then you go to the next page, the top of the next page, there's emperor Thedosius and he looks like Bert and Ernie. [Surridge laughs] Because he's still happy, even though everything is in ashes around him. So, often times the humor makes the point. So there's one thing, the stories are funny in and of themselves often. But sometimes one is just telling a story one wants to make a point about it or say something about it. That's the next place humor comes in. Because by highlighting an irony or a contradiction or showing them something obvious, something that seems obviously to be true isn't true at all and it's something else, that's a little tension. And you can release it with humor, bring a litle surprising viewpoint. That may or may not be funny. [laughter]

It's also a question of rhythm. I was talking about this last night. I was with a scientist who studies how squirrels see the world in three dimensions, how they navigate the world, how they remember where they hide the nuts. This and that. And I said, I guess I'm in the business of organizing things in two dimensions. But that's not quite it. Because there's also a time element. So you have this page, you have to read in a certain order, and it has to have a rhythm -- both a visual rhythm and a verbal rhythm. The humor does a lot to kind of create that rhythm.

SURRIDGE: Do you ever find yourself dealing with culture shock? It's obvious with the Chinese, that this is a different culture. But even something like Greek culture, you mentioned Heroditus the power that omes had in that world. Maybe in California that's still the case.

GONICK: I was thinking of ancient times, rather than just Greek.

SURRIDGE: Any point in time where you have to deal with this historical barrier. Does this type of thing ever...?

GONICK: Oh, yeah. But that's what's fun about it. When I started reading the Chinese histories, and begin to see how -- I don't want to use a stereotype, so I should be careful about how I say this -- chinese diplomancy is extremely subtle. They make very complicated calculation by what everyone means by what they say. It's very, very interesting.

SURRIDGE: You mention one anecdote where the king who said, "Oh, by the way, this is a secret. And as a result the guy ended up killing himself because the king..."

GONICK: Because the king told him it was a secret. That's a perfect example. There's another one where the guy isn't... Goudtza, or Kowtza [???] the founder of the Han dynasty, before he's won, when he's in the clutche of his rival. And things are really hot, right? And he's got friends and enemies in there, and these guys are waving a sword and this dance. And he's gotta get out of there. So he says "I've gotta go pee." He goes outside, and he leaves, and he knows he's made a serious mistake because he left without saying goodbye.

There was one part I had to leave out for space considerations that I was very, very sorry to leave out. It was a great biography, it's got some great military history in it. Kowtza had a general named Han Shin who -- there's a whole story and a biography of him -- and Han Shin was his best general. He went and conquered some region for him. And he asks the king, after he conquers this region. He asks his lord, Kowtza, whether he could be king of that region. And just for asking, he had to be killed. Because he should have let the guy give it to him freely. But by asking, he revealed his ambition. And then he couldn't be trusted. Because he was in charge of this rich area, and if he ever decided to turn on his lord, he'd be hard to deal with. [laughter]

SURRIDGE: While we're dealing with this kind of stuff, page 136, you've got this part of the battle between Lu Pang and Shang Yu. You mention in the first panel on page 136 that the Chu army was running out of food. You say in the footnote, you say you wish you had space to to explain why. I was just wondering if you wanted to throw that in here.

GONICK: Do I remember? I think it was this guy I was just talking about, had done some other action somewhere else, and cut off their supply train. It's all in Sumachiim [???], an incredible book.

SURRIDGE: I went looking for stuff on Chinese history, after reading your stuff, and maybe it's just around here but I had a real difficulty finding anything about ancient China. A lot of stuff on communist China and 20th Century China.

GONICK: Try Amazon. Sumachiim... Columbia University had a series, two version of selections. One is from Columbia, and the other one was published in China. The one from China, the translation is actually better.

SURRIDGE: The way you use stuff in picture to enhance or help make a point in prose. What I'm looking at is in volume 8, right at the start of the second book, page 8, you're talking about the seasons of India. I thought this was pretty clever the way you did this. You've got... coming off the page before, you've got this picture of Shiva sitting on top of the Himalayas. In the first panel, you talk about walking the northern Asia, and then most of the page is taken up by following this tiger through the different seasons.

GONICK: A character running through it.

SURRIDGE: Exactly, running through not just the seasons, but...

GONICK: The moldy rhinoceros...

SURRIDGE: ...and then you go to talk about, "and, around the year 2500 BC, civilization sprouted along the Indies." It's a different type of subject than the seasons. Although it ties into them, it ties in visually. I thought that sort of enhanced the continuity of that discussion, if you see what I'm trying to say.

GONICK: I guess. I'm looking at it, thinking, "Gee, that's kind of an odd thing to do." But the visual continuity is that the picture of Shiva has his hair flowing down the mountains and that's what forms the rivers. The visual continuity is not just the tiger, it's also the river. Yeah, actually, this one that I'm working on right now, I'm not quite sure how I'm going to do this or how it's going to work, but I want to talk about iconoclasm. There's this weird episode is Byzantine history where they decided to destroy all the pictures. It's a cartoonist's nightmare! [laughter] And the first draft, I just told the story, they went, they decided to do this, they hunted them down, they set the monks beards on fire, they resisted, so on and so forth. I thought, there again, it's like "Is this too much the same." They're fighting, and I wanted to put in some discussion of why, what they thought they were doing. So I think what I'm going to do is have this panel, the panels, first it's got the FBI agents coming to apprehend the pictures. "Where are your pictures? I hear you got pictures." It's a very wide panel, so there will be room for these specatators to say, "Why are they doing this?" The other than can begin speculating. So you get two more panels where the main content of the panels is the discussion of why they're doing it, but in the background this scene that was set up in the beginning plays itself out. So you just don't get this one picture at the beginning where the monk's beard is being set on fire, you have a picture where they're just going into search the monestary, but in the background of the panels where these two guy are having this -- I don't know if they're two guys, they're two people -- are having this discussion. The scene will be played out in pantomime so to speak. Or mostly. See what I mean? So it will be more like comics.

SURRIDGE: Facing the tiger page, you've got the story of --

GONICK: They're planning the city. They're visiting the city that didn't work, druvidian [???] tourists. The guy from India goes to see the ancient cities of Sumer, and they're filthy, disgusting, everybody's sick.

SURRIDGE: Coming back home, and they plan their own city. You mention trying to depict visitors and travelers in the History also.

GONICK: It's a way to get from one civilization to another.

SURRIDGE: In this case, it does something else, as you've got this character you follow thorugh the page and it explains the transmission of an idea. Which actually recalls your piece on the origin of greek drama, where you have a traveler from Greece in Egypt who sees the rite [garbled] and introduces it to the [garbled] worshippers.

So I was wondering if this was part of your technique?

GONICK: Yes. The answer's yes.

SURRIDGE: [laughs] Nowhere much to go after that. It's interesting because you got not only the big people in history, the movers and shakers, you also have these nameless...

GONICK: Yeah, and you know, sometimes I wish they had names. I can't figure out how to do it, though. I had this sort of grand idea that it's too late to realize. But there would be this one family have representatives all over the world, in every culture. Their name would be Smith, I'd suppose. Or whatever the equivalent is. Once there was iron, they'd be smiths, I'd suppose. Somehow you'd recognize them, and they'd show up and you'd get your point of view. Instead they're anonymous. Same idea.

SURRIDGE: One of the attributions to it, I don't know the exact circumstance, is that he said it during a libel trial. So he may have had an ulterior motive.

How about Gibbons' famous line, about "History is indeed a little more than a register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind?"

GONICK: Sometimes it looks that way. This the wake-up call to the historian, to pay attention to the fact there were long, there were long happy periods in-between that we tend to forget about. In retrospect, looking back, suppose you had a war every 25 years. In retrospect, that's a lot of wars. Right? But it means you get two whole decades in-between. Whole vast cities... lots can happen in two decades, three decades, or four decades. Even on a bigger scale. There was some episodes a hundred years apart. They look close together looking backwards, but that's a long time. It's important to talk about what happened then as well.

SURRIDGE: Do you do a lot of stuff on computer?

GONICK: No. Less and less.

SURRIDGE: When and for whom did you do the paradox story that was in the Best Comics of the Decade compilation?

GONICK: I have to get the answer to this right, because I'm not sure. [Laughs] I did it for Fantagraphics.

SURRIDGE: They actually commissioned it?

GONICK: Yeah. What was the book, I don't remember.

SURRIDGE: I had it in this collection.

GONICK: It was done for something else. I did a couple of pieces for them. There was one on that. There was one on winner-take-all voting. Where a majority takes everything as opposed to proportional representation.

SURRIDGE: I should be able to tell you, because they actually do have all the copyright information at the very back of the book. And it says, "Originally appeared in Itchy Planet #1."

GONICK: So there you go. Leonard Rifas did most of Itchy Planet. Do you know Leonard Rifas?

SURRIDGE: No. I think I've come across the name.

GONICK: He was big - he wanted to do educational comics. He had a little company. He was more entrepreneurial. Edu-comics was his company. He lives in Seattle now, I think. Tall guy like me.

Trimmed from The Comics Journal #224