Liz Baillie’s ongoing webcomic Freewheel can best be described as a slice-of-life fantasy.  Volume 1 of the series (collecting the first five chapters) introduces us to Jamie, the young girl who runs away from a foster home in order to find her brother.  Baillie slowly reveals a world of hobo encampments, secret cants and signs and an invisible culture.  As the reader adjusts to this new information, Baillie eases the reader into the real fantasy elements of the series.  This culture is intimately wrapped up with the magical, the mysterious the unexplained and the quite hazardous.  Ballie uses the classic fantasy story tradition of leaving the protagonist completely in the dark as both reader and heroine try to decipher this world.

Baillie is a cartoonist whose previous book, My Brain Hurts, was a slice-of-life/coming-of-age queer youth story set in 1990s New York.  There weren’t plot threads so much as there were occasionally overlapping character threads.  In the first volume of Freewheel, the plot was mostly an excuse to find ways to introduce and explore a variety of interesting characters.  Baillie was in no hurry to get the reader from point A to point B and instead invited readers to get lost in moments of chitchat and story-spinning with her characters.

That said, there was still an easily-discernible plot thread to pick up in the first book, and that continues here.  The second volume very much feels like the second act of a three-act work.  With characters established, Baillie deepens mysteries, introduces new threats, derails Jamie’s plans and finally points her back in the right direction to set up the climax of the story.  As such, there’s a little less of the ambling charm of the first book to be found here, given that Baillie is spending a lot of time hinting to the reader that the mysteries of the book go far deeper than one would initially suspect.

Some of the fantasy elements of the story remind me of Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere.  That’s the story of a man accidentally exposed to the secret culture that lives underneath London, a scavenger society with the same sort of rules & regulations regarding contact & business that Baillie slowly unravels in Freewheel.  Both books are quite clever in how they take urban or national legends and weave them together in unexpected ways.  In both stories, knowledge is one’s most valuable weapon, because its lack is quite hazardous.  A significant difference is that Gaiman’s characters feel more clever than truly heartfelt; one always understands that they are characters, not people.  In Baillie’s story, she has a way of endowing even the most trivial of characters with a sense of humanity, even warmth.  Even the most eccentric characters get just enough backstory for the reader to understand why they’re lunatics.  That said, the “darkness” introduced as the primary antagonist feels awfully generic and cliched at the moment.  We’ll see what Baillie ultimately does in setting the series’ ultimate conflict on its ear so as to avoid easy “light vs dark” cliches.

Throughout the course of illustrating the frequently challenging layouts, Baillie has become quite an assured storyteller.  The complexity of her pages, the intuitive and almost poetic full-page word/image mash-ups, and the way she depicts gesture & interpersonal contact make this a beautiful strip to simply look at.  About the only aspect of her art that I find lacking is the way she depicts motion.  It’s herky-jerky and static at times, lacking a sense of panel-to-panel flow.  Baillie mostly avoids having to do straight chase or fight scenes, so the impact of this is minimal if still noticeable at times.  Honestly, Baillie could turn this weakness into a strength if she played up the static nature of her drawings in an exaggerated fashion during action sequences.

What is most interesting about this chapter of Freewheel is the way in which it becomes quite clear that this is a girl’s story in a society were women have every bit as much clout as a men.  Jamie’s “minder” is a girl, the minder’s mentor is a woman, Jamie’s spiritual advisor is a female cat-creature called the Contessa, etc.  It’s all very matter-of-fact and subtle but still serves as an interesting corrective for the thousands of entries in the “boys’ adventures” genre.  Baillie plans to wrap up the story in the third book and then start a sequel using the same set of characters.  It’s a world that clearly appeals to Baillie’s punk rock sensibilities, a gritty world that nonetheless has a lot of room for warm-heartedness and friendship.

Nick Bertozzi is an alt-cartoonist who’s never been easy to categorize. He comes from a mainstream tradition in some ways but has always had an interest in formalism, like with his map comic Boswash. His comics often touch on the grotesque while still fiddling with formal challenges, such as his comic The Masochists or his series Rubber Necker. At times, he even drifts into the surreal, as in his contribution for the anthology New Thing: Identity. Of late, he’s turning to historical fiction in places like Syncopated, using a simple and scratchy line that wouldn’t look out of place in mainstream B.D. His The Salon turns this historical fiction on its head by introducing a fantastical plotline to a story that is really more concerned with the birth of cubism. Bertozzi has never been published by one of the significant alt-publishers (although arguably Alternative Comics was close to holding that status) until he landed with First Second. Lewis and Clark is very much the model of what Kim Thompson refers to as “good crap”: a clever, well-crafted and exciting mainstream story with a number of deeper flourishes. This is very much by design, as Bertozzi aims this book at a somewhat Young Adult audience; what he comes up with is the model of what this sort of book should be.

It’s an interesting fit, since in many respects, First Second is best at producing and/or translating “new mainstream” books. That is, books that are either young adult-fiction or straightforward fiction. The art tends to have a very European sensibility to it, including the American artists who produce original work. Lewis and Clark is very much a mainstream comic designed for a wide audience, yet it capitalizes on the idiosyncrasies of Bertozzi’s style in the form of clever layouts, an attention to unusual detail and a certain focus on visceral and even scatological detail. Bertozzi goes out of his way to ground the legend of Lewis and Clark into a narrative that is as much about muck, hard-drinking and madness as it is about science and pioneering. Along the way, Bertozzi manages to avoid a number of storytelling traps that could
have made the story cliched, jingoistic or preachy. Indeed, the deftness with which he avoids these pitfalls rivals the skill of the intrepid explorers themselves.

Bertozzi makes the shrewd move of focusing on the expedition’s leader, Meriwether Lewis. He’s depicted as a combination of visionary explorer, upright patriot and total lunatic. Commissioned by president Thomas Jefferson to find a water passage to the Pacific Ocean, Lewis is shown as someone who gets things done in part because he’s so unforgiving and demanding. He’s a smart figure to hang the narrative around because of the way his life unfolds:
carrying out the mission despite great adversity on route to becoming an American hero, only to slowly go insane, become an alcoholic and eventually commit suicide. The way Bertozzi starts to poke hints of Lewis’ madness into the story (in the form of a dark, blurry homunculus of a figure) is a smart juxtaposition to both Lewis’ frequently cruel drive and gleeful, childlike
enthusiasm in pursuit of his goal. His madness, it is revealed, has much to do with a family history of insanity, but one can see the edge between that insanity and genius throughout the story. Bertozzi hints that Lewis being removed from the structure of his society during the course of the journey may well have begun the process that eventually unhinges his mind.

Bertozzi makes another smart move in the way he depicts the Indians that Lewis’ crew encounters. When the two groups speak, the reader “hears” the dialogue from the point of view of the Indians, as the white men were shown speaking haltingly. That move strips the narrative away from Lewis, putting the reader into a parallel narrative whose complexity is entirely lost on the white explorers. Lewis, accustomed to being the master of all he surveys, is very much a lost stranger in these sequences, often flying off the handle when he’s frustrated. At the same time, Bertozzi is quick not to depict the various Indian tribes as noble savages. Each tribe and each tribesman is different, with different means and goals. In dealing with the French, British and Americans, each tribe was quite adept at manipulating political ends and parlayed with that in mind. There are a few heartbreaking moments where Lewis promises some of the friendlier tribes that they would keep their land (Andrew Jackson was just a few years away). Other chiefs know better, understanding that Americans were settlers, not mere tradesmen.

Both groups are “savages” in their own way, as Bertozzi isn’t shy about injecting scatological humor into the proceedings. This is a shorthand method Bertozzi employs to forward the idea that both groups are more alike than different in a number of ways, including their senses of humor. It’s an entryway to demonstrate that both groups are flawed, ambitious, clever, funny,
playful and loyal to their own kind. Neither group can see this in the other, viewing each other as savages. Bertozzi doesn’t linger on this point for very long, instead letting this emerge as a series of humorous jabs that give way to the main narrative itself. Lewis himself emerges as a bundle of contradictions: he’s a Virginian and a gentleman, having little tolerance for the niceties of negotiation with the tribes (despite orders from the President), yet he develops great admiration for Indian maps, methods and even dress.

The other major character in the story, the young Indian guide Sacagawea, is depicted as being conflicted. She’s shrewd enough to be a great negotiator and guide but is uneasy both with the white men and her own tribe. Her relationship with French trapper and translator Charbonne is more akin to master-slave than husband-wife, a power relationship that’s compared to Clark’s own slave.  Slavery is discussed in a matter-of-fact way not to dismiss it, but to immediately alert the reader that the heroes of the story (even President Jefferson) were mostly slave-owners, with all that power that that relationship entailed. The reaction of Clark’s slave, York, not wishing to run off said a great deal about their relationship, but it also reflects a bit of what could be considered the 19th century version of Stockholm Syndrome. York considers himself to be a Virginian and wants to “earn” his freedom, even when offered a way out. Bertozzi prefers to let the reader sort out their own feelings about the matter, refusing to absolve or absolutely condemn any of these figures.

The big format of the book is instrumental in its success. Using an 8.5 x 11 page, Bertozzi employs a dizzying number of panel and page formats. He uses two page spreads, standard grids, pages with no panel borders, pages with decorative panel borders (the latter two seen for intra-tribe interaction), huge splash images with smaller panels dropped on top, zig-zagged light and dark panels that depict movement over time, insects buzzing outside of panels to indicate their omnipresence and many other tricks. What’s impressive is that these tricks help drive the narrative and never feel superfluous. The thickness and scratchiness of his line gives the reader something to hold onto even as the narrative itself flew by. These details add to the humor and irreverence of this comic while still allowing it to stand as a reasonably complete and accurate portrayal of the real historical events. Nick Bertozzi does a lot of work to keep things simple.

Gabriella Giandelli’s Interiorae wound up as one of the most conventional of the Ignatz line of comics.  Of course, given how unusual most of the line has been, that’s not much of a knock.  Giandelli wove genre and slice-of-life concerns into a single story that wouldn’t have merited much notice on their own, but this extended exploration of the dreams of the bored and disaffected in an apartment building is notable for a certain flat beauty.  Each issue had a single-color wash: pinkish-red in the first issue, olive green in the second and kelly green in the third.  The fourth issue, however, is entirely in black and white.  Dreams and dream-time are over, the issue suggests.

Last issue brought the interpersonal conflicts and dramas of the building’s inhabitants to a climax, or rather, an anti-climax.  There was a great deal of the proverbial sound and fury, but the lives of the combatants changed as little as the ghosts of a family shown inhabiting their old apartment.  The genre conceit of the series is that an invisible white rabbit watches the lives of those who live in the building, reporting back to his dark, ovular master, a creature that feeds on the dreams (and nightmares) of the building’s people. This series is less concerned about the petty secrets and lies of people and more interested in the idea of inbetween spaces.  There’s the space between sleep and consciousness, the line between life and death, the space between commitment and detachment, the line between love and hate.

Giandelli revealed in the third issue that the rabbit in fact was the personification of the go-between between life and death, between flesh and God.  When a frail elderly woman began to sense the end was near, she tried to find ways to cross that divide.  When the rabbit guided her across a mystical forest to meet her maker, that was literally the end of everything.  The rabbit and the dream-eater left the building.  The family of ghosts departed.  The building itself shuddered and collapsed, its protectors now gone.  One gets the sense that the most truly worthy people left, or at least the most interesting; there was nothing left for the dream-eater to nourish himself on.

That final forest sequence was spectacular, as Giandelli drew a forest of delights filled with Jim Woodring-style creatures and numerous purely decorative touches.  This sequence was certainly in sharp relief compared to the rest of the series, which bore a flatness of style and affect along with a certain relentless grayness.  All of the various interpersonal conflicts never went anywhere, an indication that the “interior” life of the building’s characters was drab and dull–no matter their ideals or lack of same.  That essential dullness and tedium, while necessary to portray, wasn’t necessarily all that interesting to read.  Happily, the final issue addressed that issue by simply having the characters stop in their tracks with regard to the conflicts, with many realizing that something awful was about to happen.  While the series wound up cohering nicely, the end result was simply less engaging than the rest of the books in the Ignatz line.

IAN BURNS: Are you still living in the theater?

JOSH SIMMONS: No, I moved in with my girlfriend about two years ago. We’re in a loft downtown.

BURNS: That’s where you’ve been drawing White Rhino, then?

SIMMONS: Yeah. My girlfriend taught me Photoshop, and at the beginning of 2009 I started drawing White Rhinoceros. The first chapter in Mome #19 took most of 2009 to do. I’m usually a lot faster than that, but it was ’cause I was learning how to use color. That was about 20 pages and took most of the year. I’ve gotten a lot faster with color, but I’ve found it’s still twice as much work.

BURNS: With White Rhino, using color now, what’s a typical workday or a workweek look like?

SIMMONS: Are you familiar with the Jessica Farm book?

BURNS: Yeah.

SIMMONS: I try to do that page at the beginning of the month, get it out of the way, and then, because I have deadlines for Mome now with The Rhino, basically I try to draw The Rhino next and get that done, and then whatever time I have left I’ll work on a short horror story or something else. With The Rhino, I do the pencils and the inks per page, so I’ll pencil the first page then pencil the next page, and then ink the first page, and then scan it and start coloring it. I do the penciling and the inking in the morning generally and do color-work at night. But that’s a really loose schedule. It’s scattershot, doing so many different comics at a time.

BURNS: Are you balancing that with a day job still?

SIMMONS: I’m balancing it with whatever little jobs I could get. I’ve been fortunate to be selling a fair amount of original art over the past year or two, so I definitely don’t have a 9-to-5, but actually I have a good amount of time to work on comics right now. I’m very lucky. I’m not sure how much longer that’s gonna last, but it’s been good lately.

BURNS: So you’re coloring White Rhino all digitally, then?

SIMMONS: Yeah.

BURNS: From a technical point of view, how do you approach a full-color comic differently than when you were doing black and white — other than obviously you’re using Photoshop, which is new — but do you prepare differently?

SIMMONS: Definitely: when I’m penciling and inking it I have it in mind that it’s going to be in color, so just stylistically speaking, compared to my other strips, there’s a lot less hatching and shading with the line-work. Because I’m just trying to have the panels be open, so that I’m going to be filling it with flat color. I was thinking ’60s or ’70s comics, like old Disney comics, is somewhat the look I had in mind for the way that The Rhino should look.

BURNS: What artwork and comics did you familiarize yourself with specifically?

SIMMONS: Well I was thinking of kids’ comics — superhero comics I read in the ’80s, when I was a kid. Not even looking like that: Just the feeling I got, how it was fun to read those when you were a kid, you know? I was trying to capture a certain look; I was thinking very loosely (I didn’t look at a lot of these comics, but the Disney comics from the ’60s or so — very nice, smooth, rubbery, cartoony line and bright colors) but trying to draw it somewhat realistic too. Not too cartoony. For me the main influences would be those kind of comics, and fantasy epic stories like Narnia, Lord of the Rings. And Shaun [Partridge] is a huge Narnia fan. That was a large jumping-off point for him.

BURNS: It might be silly to ask, but how do you build that color palette for White Rhino? Once you’ve decided, “I want a psychedelic palette,” or whatever you choose, how do you collect the actual colors you’ll use?

SIMMONS: Just Photoshop. I just go in. I might tweak the colors one way or another. Well, with this one I’m using — this is really boring technical stuff — if you look at the swatches, it’s the middle of the scale on the colors, so I’m trying to use the brightest colors for this strip. And I’m going to be doing more color work. I’m trying to do very different ways of using color, so some colors are going to be more pastel and some are going to be as realistic as I can get. But with this story it’s basically the brightest colors I can get.

BURNS: So you have more color comics coming; that’s something you’re experimenting with?

SIMMONS: I’m coloring, for the first time, an old story, which is going to be all pastels. And, a new story I’m working on now — a short horror story —where I’m trying to do, in a way, the opposite of The Rhino; I’m trying to make the art as naturalistic and realistic as possible and also have the colors very muted. ’Cause color’s new to me, so it’s fun to experiment with different ways of using it. It’s new to me as far as using it in comics.

BURNS: Are you feeling that you’re bringing more to the table now using color? Showcasing a talent your readers may not be familiar with?

SIMMONS: I don’t know. I’m liking the way the comics look. And I am hoping I’m not completely incompetent with colors. That’s hard for me to say. I’ll say it’s definitely a lot of fun doing a strip in color after working in black-and-white for a long time.

BURNS: Talk about how you met Shaun Partridge.

SIMMONS: Shaun I know from Jim Goad’s message board: Netjerk Lounge. Jim Goad did the Answer Me! magazine back in the ’90s, and he also wrote the Trucker Fags in Denial comic, and Shaun … well,l I know Shaun’s work because he contributed to Answer Me!, and I’d just seen some of his writing and interviews in various places and then he and I were both guests on Jim Goad’s message board in the early ’00s, and he was just the guy on there — I always loved the way he wrote. He was always dealing with similar subject matter. A lot of the people in Answer Me! like ugly or sort of tabooish subjects. But Shaun just had this really dark humor, but he always had this super rainbow-colored, psychedelic and manically gleeful spin on it. I always liked that and I think that our sensibilities work together pretty well.

So we were both on that message board. I recommended that he should just write a book someday, ’cause I thought his writing was so funny. And someone else recommended that I should draw pictures for the book. Shaun and I started talking, and originally The Rhino was going to be a children’s-book format with just me doing big illustrations, but we realized later on that it would make more sense to do a comic — that’s what I do.

It’s been coming together, this project, for six years or something. I think we started talking about it in 2004 or 2005 when I lived in Vermont. I was living in Vermont at the time, and then I moved to Portland in 2006, late 2006, which is where Shaun lives, and so we got to meet up and just work on it probably once a week or something like that. We wanted to get like the whole story mapped out before I started drawing it. It just seemed like a good idea to get the whole outline. So we spent pretty much a year doing that, and then I moved down here, and something like a year after I moved down here he sent me his finished rough draft, and my girlfriend and I read it and we thought it was just pure gold, hilarious. So I started drawing.

BURNS: You said you were interested in his writing from the start … did you ever have any experience with The Partridge Family Temple [a website that deifies the group] at all?

SIMMONS: No, not beyond when I started hanging out with him in Portland. He showed me some of the videos. I think The Partridge Family Temple is pretty great. It’s pretty funny. It makes more sense than a lot of religions, actually. So it’s cool. But that wasn’t my first interest in Shaun’s stuff. I really liked his writing and his aesthetic and his perspective on things.

I Dreamed a Dream

BURNS: You met Josh [Simmons] on the Netjerk Lounge, which is Jim Goad’s message board.

PARTRIDGE: I met him, and that’s how the White Rhino thing happened. Years ago, I was walking down the street and I had this idea. “Wouldn’t it be funny …” Because everyone’s always like, “Oh, what’s racism?” or “That’s racist!” or “That’s not racist!”

I thought, “Wouldn’t it be funny to put a record out and say ‘This album’s racist.’” And it would be called Hail the White Rhinoceros.

People would get the record and be, “This is going to be horrible!” And you’d listen to it and every song would be about a white rhinoceros, it would make no sense at all. Just put songs about a white rhinoceros and that would be it. People would be like, “What. The fuck’s that record about?” [Laughter.]

And then a few years later, on the Netjerk Lounge, I one day started writing about the White Rhinoceros. It was just strange stream of consciousness kind of stuff. And I remember turning around to my girlfriend Kaleidoscope and I said, “I think I should write a book about this. I think this makes sense.”

A few days later some people were like, “Hey, you should do a comic! Josh could do it.”

And Josh said, “Yeah I’ll illustrate it.”

Originally it was going to be a book, and then I was walking down the street after me and Josh had agreed to work on it, and I was like, “Wait a second, Josh is a comic artist, it should be a comic, clearly.” I mean that’s what he does, you know what I mean? He’s good at it. So then he moved out here, and that’s how that session happened.

BURNS: How long were you a part of the Netjerk Lounge, and are you still participating there?

PARTRIDGE: I’m not on there anymore.

BURNS: But you were on there quite a while before the whole White Rhino discussion.

PARTRIDGE: Yeah. I wrote that first, well, maybe only a year into it. Yeah, I think the Netjerk Lounge, if I remember, started in 2003. And it was 2004 when me and Josh first discussed the idea. And then a few years went by. He came out here in Portland in 2006, and we started working on it.

BURNS: I guess people should know, even the writing of the story happened on the Netjerk Lounge before …

PARTRIDGE: Yeah that’s where it first happened. In fact we put a lot of stuff on there, like when we first started doing characters Josh would put little character sketches up there. I guess we should talk about the White Rhino the character … there was a dream that happened.

BURNS: Yeah I was going to ask you about that.

PARTRIDGE: That was a weird synchronicity. Me and Josh had been working on The White Rhino all summer long, and then I dreamt about this former dream I’d had that was about this White Rhinoceros. And I realized when I woke up that it actually was a real dream I’d had years before. I had this dream, and it was one of those intense dreams. I’m like outside in a field and there’s a gigantic, huge rhinoceros. And next to me was like this weird skinhead guy, and he was terrified of the rhinoceros. I was looking at him—there was a door I had to go to — I go, “I need to go by this rhinoceros to get to the door.” It wasn’t a white rhinoceros; it was just a gigantic rhinoceros. And this skinhead guy was terrified. I remember going, “Well, I’m going to go.” As I walked by the rhinoceros I was thinking, “This is an ancient, powerful creature.” I was really tense walking by it. But as I started walking by it started rippling rainbow colors, and I remember going, “I don’t remember rhinoceroses having rainbows …” [Burns laughs.] And I thought, “How weird.” Then I went in this door and all this psychedelic shit happened. Psychedelic magic. So anyway I thought that was a really weird dream. I always wondered why there was a skinhead there.

The day I remembered that dream I went to work and I go, “I’ve got to tell Josh about this dream.” And then I come home, open the mailbox, and Kaleidoscope has gotten a letter from Ian Brady. There’s a stamp on there of a prehistoric rhinoceros. I’m like, “This is fucking weird.” Of all days, you know what I mean? Those are those magical synchronicities that just make you realize you’re on the right path. And then later of course it makes sense. The whole idea of The White Rhino, it’s like … colors, you know, the Rainbow Warriors. And why was there a skinhead? Well, because the White Rhinoceros deals with racism. At the time I had no idea why there was this paranoid skinhead sitting there afraid to walk by the rhino. That was an interesting dream: very prophetic. Again, that’s why I say things are just planned. We’re just little vessels, you know?

Me and Josh, we always know something is good when we feel we didn’t do it. When I do a painting, if I look at the painting and go, “That’s a cool painting! Oh! I did that! How weird.” That’s when I know it’s good and that’s why I think we know The White Rhino is really good. I’m connected to it in a way. I am. I wrote it; Josh is illustrating it. But we stand back from it and we’re like, “Wow, this is really far out and fun.” And we just laugh.

BURNS: And it is interesting because the original writings on the Netjerk Lounge are completely different than what’s going on now. It’s almost like a big transformation happened when that turned into a comic.

PARTRIDGE: Absolutely. In fact, at first I wrote all the stuff, it was going to be for a book and Josh was going to illustrate it. It was going to be very William Burroughs-like: just stream of consciousness, insane dream world of racial craziness. Because I think when you do racial things I think you should do it on overload. People like to do things real safe. That’s why I really liked Dave Chappelle, and I was really sad that he ended his show. He was taking racial stuff and just overloading it to the point that it was just absurdist and weird. I think that’s the way to deal with this stuff.

When we started working on the comic it just changed so much. All these other weird things were happening. It became a totally different entity. It was just a very strange scene. At the time my girlfriend would go to work in the morning. She’d go to bed around 12 or 1, and then I would sit there for like four months just sitting there writing. And I’d have to go into this weird, active imagination … kind of live in this weird world. So this long process that seemed like it would never be done. Writing this stuff down, writing this stuff down. And then Josh finally started illustrating it and it was just amazing to actually see it come alive. It was just unbelievable. He’s just flowing. I think his stuff is so amazing.

Transformation

BURNS: So we come back to deconstructing something and creating a new idea: gold out of shit.

PARTRIDGE: That’s what happened. I was taking a shower one day, and I was like, “I should write a book.” And then that famous saying “Write what you know” pops into my head, and I laughed. The reason racism is interesting is the fact that you just couldn’t discuss it. People get angry. People scream. You can’t have a rational, turned-on conversation. I thought, “Well that stuff is interesting, all this ugly stuff. What else do I love? I love fairy tales, I love fantasy.” So I just thought, “Why not merge these?” That’s the idea with The White Rhino.

I thought, “Let’s go back to your childhood.” And my first, earliest memories of racism were because of All In the Family. Because I didn’t know what racism was when I was a little kid. So I’d watch All In the Family, and it was just Archie Bunker calling everyone “coloreds,” and the main thing was always calling Meathead a dumb fucking Polack. “You dumb Polack. Yah big dumb Polack.” And then I started hearing Polack jokes, and I was a kid and I was like, “Are Polacks real?” ’Cause I’d look at Mike Stivic and think … I imagined this race of people that were kind of stupid and pink and sweaty, they were retarded people, but humans, they were Polacks, and they were just dumb. I was confused. I was young. “Are they real?” So that was my earliest turn on to the racist scene and with racism.

Then later, when I got older, Roots came on. That was a big thing. One of my best friends was black, and so all of a sudden everyone was talking about racism when Roots started in elementary school. And I remember going to school one day thinking about racial slurs, and I go, “Why do blacks have more racial slurs?” And I started thinking, “What are white racial slurs?” At the time all I knew was “honky” and “whitebread.”  And honky reminded me of the comic, Turok: Son of Stone. The Indians called the dinosaurs Honkers. I started thinking one day, “A lot of these racial slurs aren’t so bad. ‘Jungle Bunny’ …” I actually pictured a really funny little jungle bunny. And then I thought ‘gook’ sounded like an alien frog to me. And I started wondering about racial slurs.

So I went back to that with The White Rhino, and let’s make these mythological creatures. In this world, they’re not what you think they are: Spear Chuckers are actually these great warriors that have spears — to transform that. The story’s just a really cosmic, amazing, fantastic adventure that’s completely alchemical and mystical and fun.

But yet when you read these things, it’s funny, we’d be going over in it and then all the sudden we’d start laughing because if someone were to hear us discussing this … it sounds like a schizophrenic has some crazy you know … horrible racial slurs. We’re discussing like, “OK! The Spic does this, and then the Spear Chucker comes through and goes here …” [Burns laughs.] And it just sounds really offensive, and yet we’re just describing these amazing characters, you know? I thought when I printed out the script, “If I left this on the bus, what would someone think?”

I guess Josh’s girlfriend’s friend read like the first chapter and said, “What kind of person would do this? This sounds like an insane person.” [Laughter.]

That’s a good compliment. The other thing is, after Josh and I decided to make this a reality I started thinking, “Do I really want to do a comic that has all this heavy racial baggage attached to it?” Because I think people want an answer. If you’re dealing with a racial session, they want an easy answer. And there is no easy answer. Ray Kroc said: “Keep it simple, stupid.” And as a Servant of God, that’s what I’m going to try and do.

Tomorrow: Josh Simmons talks about drawing The White Rhinoceros.

Though it’s flying a bit under the radar now, the joint Fantagraphics-Coconino Ignatz line publishing project has produced some of my favorite comics of the past five years.  While all of the series are clearly labors of love, Zak Sally’s Sammy The Mouse feels as much like therapy-on-the-page as it does a comics narrative.  Like many of the Ignatz artists, Sally is drawing inspiration from 1920s comic strip cartooning, using it as a template to explore some deeply personal aspects of his own life.  Whether or not the personal aspects of the comic refer to current or past events isn’t relevant, nor is proving my particular supposition essential to appreciating and fully apprehending what Sally is trying to do here.  This is a story about purpose, inertia, the road blocks we throw up for ourselves and the ways in which we are forced to interact with a demanding and frequently demeaning world.  This book feels intimate because unlike his past work, Sammy The Mouse has an immediacy to it that’s quite different in tone from his earlier, more distant (but no less visceral) comics.

Anyone following this series should prepare themselves by re-reading issues 1 and 2 before tackling the newest issue.  Sally is delicately balancing a number of visual motifs that double as long-term narrative devices: a bullet flying in the air, a moustache sinking in the ocean, a pair of eyes blinking in the dark, and unseen voices offering direction to lost souls like Sammy and best friend Puppy Boy.  Sammy lives in a shabby, crowded urban environment that’s clearly seen better days, like most of its residents.   Each issue more-or-less resets with Sammy in his house, staring at the walls.  Sally really gets at that feeling that’s a combination of claustrophobia and agoraphobia, the awful sensation that the only thing worse than staying inside is going outside.  In the first two issues, events conspired to make Sammy leave the house and have an “adventure” that felt like a seedy, drunken version of Floyd Gottfredson’s Mickey Mouse adventures.  While Sammy was pushed and pulled in all sorts of unpleasant ways in the first two issues, what happened here felt worse.

Instead of an outside force pulling him out, it was the awful realization of how disgusting his bathroom was and how little he really wanted to clean it, despite his using that as an excuse to get him.  In the first chilling scene, Sammy parrots his hidden voice word-for-word in order to create an excuse to leave.  When he visits his friend Puppy Boy, he’s far worse off than our protagonist, working on a “project” in a paranoiac state while sitting in the dark.  The characters are pushed along by their unseen voices, as Sammy is told to bring a shovel and Puppy Boy told to draw a map.  Even drunken loudmouth Feekes (who feels so much like a character based on a real person that it’s palpable) is hiding secrets from Sammy, concealing the presence of the mysterious, silent and vicious Him, a skeletal creature with sharp teeth.  The apparent aimlessness of Sammy’s “adventure” ends with him encountering a barkeep who happens to be a talking fish in a bowl–wearing a moustache.  It’s a very different sort of ending, marking a transition point of sorts.

Sally’s comics have an ugly physical quality to them that I’ve always liked, but the two-color process he uses here pushes the ugly/beautiful tension even further.  The ugliness I refer to is the deliberate messiness of certain corners of the page: a squiggle here, a patch of darkness there, or the employment of a ragged or scratchy sets of lines.  The blue/sepia color gives the book an air of being something old, of being an artifact of sorts.  Animation seems to be as much an influence as comic strips, both in terms of the character design (Disneyish anthropomorphic animals gone to seed, but with an organic design rather than as part of a specific parody) and the overall look.  The colors add to this cartoon effect and set off some of the more ragged lines with a genuine sense of beauty.  Sally is careful not to overdo it with color, leaving lots of white space as Sammy tries to negotiate his world.  The care and thought that Sally put into adapting his comic into the Ignatz format shows on every page and makes the story resonate all the more.

The Broadcast reminds me a bit of the old Rod Serling-penned Twilight Zone episode, “The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street”.  Writer Eric Hobbs creates dramatic tension by focusing on a small Indiana town whose residents, like many in the USA, were fooled by Orson Wells’ broadcast of The War Of The Worlds in 1938.  In short order, the simmering fears and hatreds of this town were put on the front burner thanks to the feeling of helplessness and paranoia engendered by an announcement that an alien invader could be anywhere.  The Serling story was a thinly-veiled swipe at McCarthyism, as the members of the town took turns accusing each other of being the alien threat, while the real threat watched from afar, content that the dissension they created had taken root.  In The Broadcast, what Hobbs was getting at was not that style of paranoia, but rather the way that extreme circumstances can bring out the worst in people.

The character types will all seem pretty familiar, though Hobbs does his best to flesh them out and add a little unexpected depth to them.  Hobbs throws in class conflict, race conflict and even gender conflict while still trying to create memorable characters.  He’s not entirely successful, as the young lead couple (Gavin and Kim) seem undercooked: he’s a supportive farmer who’s best friends with his dad, and she’s a writer who’s defying her father.  There’s not much more to them then that, but they form the emotional core of the book and its conflicts.  On the other hand, Kim’s father is an interesting set of contradictions: he’s a rich man who saved the town but now essentially holds all its workers in indentured servitude; he’s a doting father who lost his sons to World War I and is in danger of alienating his daughter despite his wanting all the best for her; he’s dismissive of those less educated than him but is one of the few characters who isn’t casually racist.

It was clever of Hobbs to set the story in Indiana, home of the Ku Klux Klan.  The thread involving Marvin, an African-American worker in an otherwise white town, wound up binding the rest of the plot together.  His presence was a divisive element as the townsfolk were trying to determine who got to stay in the rich man’s cellar.  Marvin’s inadvertently killing two white men who had assaulted him was one of the key pieces that caused panic, since they were burned to death–much like the Martians’ flame-throwers in the radio play.  His status as an outsider led him to almost act as an instrument of death for the old man.  As we flashed back further to Marvin’s story, Hobbs was able to pull the strands of his plot taut.  I felt like the happy ending we eventually got strained credulity more than a little as everyone winds up healed, in all senses of the word.  Hobbs went out of his way to be forgiving of all his characters, being careful not to paint any of them with the villain brush.  The way the book ended, however, made it seem like their actions had no real, lasting negative consequences.

Tuazon’s scribbly, scratchy line is the book’s secret weapon.  He transforms what is otherwise a conventional narrative into a story viewed through a driving rainstorm or distorted sheet of glass.  Everyone is a little fuzzy and instinct, even as he has an uncanny way of providing just enough identifiers for the reader to quickly decode each scene and immediately understand what’s happening and who’s acting.  I’m usually not a huge fan of greyscaling, but Tuazon finds an ideal balance between light and dark.  Tuazon captures both the naturalism of the setting and its characters as well as the expressionistic nature of the human conflict.  In the hands of a lesser artist, The Broadcast might have been trite and too on-the-nose.  Thanks to Tuazon, it has a raw and visceral energy that raises the stakes for the reader.

Sean Michael Robinson: Moving on to Rick’s Story, there are some interesting things happening here, some new tricks. I really like the faux stained glass on 130. This has got to be what your coloring book looked like when you and your babysitter were done with it.

Gerhard: Right.

Robinson: So on these where the figures are really integrated into the panel, how many of these were worked out by Dave?

Gerhard: You know, in this particular example, I believe Dave probably did most of this. I probably just did the decorative strips on the side.

Robinson: How about, say, 128.

Gerhard: Right. Dave did the foreground figures and I did the rest of it.

Robinson: I like the combination of the optical and the medieval perspective.

Gerhard: I spent so much time and thought trying to get the perspective right on the backgrounds, and I was now trying to do this and have to figure out “How did they do it wrong?” We had some reference books on medieval stained glass and I’d see that they would flatten the perspective.  They would see the top of the bar stool as round instead of an ellipse from there. I had to unlearn everything that I was trying to get right.

Robinson: I really like how when you guys have the figures that hearken back to classical sculpture, you both drop the contour line. That’s really nice.

Gerhard: Yeah.

Robinson: I suppose I should put some of these in the form of a question, huh? [Laughter.] So on 143 there’s this mind-boggling portrayal of a cracked fresco in ink …

Gerhard: That’s all Dave.

Robinson: Really.

Gerhard: I may be just flattering myself, but I think he was trying to emulate me there.

Robinson: So that was a surprise when it came to you?

Gerhard: Yeah. Every once in a while he would just decide to do something. You know, we had this kind of unspoken competition, where I would look at something like that and go “Shit! If he’s gonna pull this out of his ass I’d better straighten up and fly right.” And over the next couple of pages my line work would get even more tight and meticulous, and then he would see that and his line would get more tight and meticulous. We were trying to out-meticulous each other. [Laughter.]

Robinson: Towards the end of the book, on 196, we’ve finally almost left the bar, and you get your big stepping-out moment.

“Dave’s dialogue — “You might be surprised at who you’re driving crazy- staying in one place this long, I mean.”

Gerhard: After I finished that page, I was wondering if people would get it. That’s a photocopy of the Staedler pencil and my ruler and my floor plan. Those are all the issue numbers that we’ve been in the bar. And the bottom left panel is a reference to way back when, when Dave said that if I wanted to, I could draw the interior of a submarine behind the characters, the backgrounds were up to me. Well, I finally got to draw my interior of a submarine. I wonder how many people actually got that, or were they thinking, “What the hell is going on here?”

Robinson: In Going Home, it seems to me like there’s a pretty significant stylistic shift at the beginning of the book. There seems to be a shift toward more pattern, especially in the exterior scenes. I was just curious about the design-y-ness of some of the pages.

Click to view larger image.

Gerhard: It has a lot to do with there being no outline to the panel border again. It made the design aspect more important. The only thing that defines the top of the panel on page 57 is the line of the clouds and the corn and the fence going through.

I need something here to show where the edge of the panel is. As far as the corn went, I would draw the contour of the front row of corn, and then it was a matter of putting little indications of corn behind the front row. It was quick and efficient and looked good, so into the bag of tricks it goes, and then belabor it to death.

Robinson: On 76, there’s that great quilt. Did those designs come from anywhere in particular?

Click to view larger image.

Gerhard: Dave had some books around the studio on medieval times and that kind of stuff. Those designs were in that book, I’m sure.

Robinson: I didn’t want to ascribe too much intentionality to the stylistic shift …

Gerhard: It’s all intentional when it comes to Dave.

Robinson: When we get to “Fall and the River,” the screen tone technique is interesting.

Gerhard: At the beginning of a new story arc it was a chance for me to stylistically change what I was doing, so I wasn’t stuck doing the same thing again. Looking back on it now it doesn’t look too bad, but I think I got better at it as I went along.

Click to view larger image.

It was a change for me, because before if I was going to use tone on the background, I would use that stipple tone stuff, because it had a non-mechanical, organic feel to it — as if it could have been hand-drawn as opposed to using a dot tone, because again I can’t use a dot tone behind Cerebus. But especially on the boat itself I didn’t want to have a lot of crosshatching, but I still wanted to define shadows. So I selected a very fine tone, with a much finer dot per inch, that was much lighter than Cerebus. I didn’t want that Church and State, rough hewn look. This was another case where I actually built another model — I had a physical model of the barge.

Robinson: I didn’t know if you had gotten to the computer era yet.

Gerhard: I used a little of both. I had a computer model of the staterooms, and a physical model of the whole thing. It was a pretty crude computer program by today’s standards, but it did what I needed it to do. This is where we started putting the panel borders back in, so I didn’t have to worry about defining every edge.

Robinson: There’s a really interesting panel on 265.

The perspective is so flat, I don’t know why, but when I did it, I thought, “That’s what I want.” The moiré pattern happens because you put one dot screen on top of another. And I thought “I like that too.”

Robinson: You managed to get the sun glinting off the water from the moiré pattern. It’s interesting, in Japan, the comics industry is huge — there are a ton of books on really specific techniques you can use with screen tone, that kind of thing. But I guess intelligent people using the same tools will sometimes come up with really similar solutions.

Gerhard: I discovered the moiré effect quite early on working with tone. It’s hard not to — all you have to do is accidentally put two pieces of tone on top of each other and you go “Isn’t that cool?” Of course it’s also distracting — more often than not it’s something you’re trying to avoid. But when you can use it as an effect …. like Dave said: “If it occurs to you…”

Robinson: So where did the photo covers come from?

Gerhard: Vacation pictures, mostly. Some of them are from across the street or the backyard, but a lot of them are photos from travel. Dave decided that we would do photo covers; one reason was then we wouldn’t have to draw them. I used to take slide photos all the time, so I sat down with all my slides and my projector. We’re talking thousands of slides. So over the course of one or two nights I literally saw my life flash before my eyes one slide at a time. And I just pulled out hundreds, all that I thought might be appropriate, that didn’t have any anachronisms, any that might make a nice cover or could be used thematically for the book. So I gave all those to Dave, and he picked out the ones he wanted to use for the covers.

Robinson: It’s inspiring to see the stylistic shift you pulled off in this book.

Gerhard: They do stand apart from each other. 292’s interesting — dense. Where it’s supposed to be foggy, there’s gray on everything.

Robinson: Did you draw in reverse on the back of the page for the tone that didn’t have any contour?

Gerhard: No, I just cut out a strip of tone and stuck it on there. Man, I went through a lot of Letratone on this one.

Robinson: It’s not cheap.

Gerhard: No.

Robinson: But at least they were still making it.

Gerhard: Yeah, that became a problem before we finished the book. We were having a tough time finding the Cerebus tone. Letraset stopped importing Letratone to Canada.  It’s not like we could suddenly change  the gray on the main character. It was always the same numbers too, depending on how big the Cerebus was on the page. LT 10,LT 17, LT 30 or whatever.