Previously: Part One.

CHRIS MAUTNER: One of the things from early on that you had in Mome was the guest star who anchored the issue; the “big name” who provided a draw for readers who might be unfamiliar with the other contributors. You just had Gilbert Hernandez and you’ve had David B., Lewis Trondheim, serializing At Loose Ends. How important is that? What does it bring to the anthology to have that, both in terms of aesthetics and marketing?

ERIC REYNOLDS: You know, commercially I don’t think it’s all that important. I think if I took a hard look at numbers sold for each issue, you’re talking about spikes of a few hundred copies when you have someone like Jim Woodring or David B. in there. So it’s not a huge deal. In fact, I remember when I used to work on The Comics Journal, there was a fairly wide variation depending on who was on the cover. And that made sense, because most people were buying an issue based on who the cover interview feature was. I don’t think that was really the case with Mome so much. It was really more something that happened accidentally; I think the first one was David B., and that came about because Kim Thompson said to me, “Hey, there’s this great David. B. story that ran in Lapin. What do you think about maybe running it in Mome?’ I was basically like, “fuck yeah.” [Mautner laughs.] And then it turned out there was another one. So we just ran them as they came along, and Kim translated them.

And then there was the Woodring issues: One day I was going through my own Woodring collection and realized that the “Lute String” story had only been published in Japan, and it was, at that time, prior to Weathercraft, his most recent book, it was the longest Frank story he had ever done, and it was a really exceptional one, and it just seemed insane that you had to import this little, hard-to-find Japanese book to be able to get this comic. So I just asked Jim if he’d be interested in me running it, he was nice enough to say, “Yeah.”

Gilbert’s thing came about because I was just talking to him a few months ago, and he mentioned that when he was working on Love and Rockets Vol. 3, he had done this Roy story that he didn’t think was going to fit, and he was going to have to save it for a later issue. And so I just said, “Well, shit,” you know, “Gilbert Hernandez in Mome would be pretty cool.”

And he said, “OK, let’s do it,” because otherwise, he was going to have wait over a year for it to see it in print. By that point, he would have probably already have done too many pages for that issue, and that would bump something else.

So it’s never really been a concrete decision to have that anchor guy in there. And in fact, there’s plenty of issues that don’t have one. But for whatever reason, for myself, I’ve enjoyed having these counterpoints of these younger artists and then these older cartoonists. The Gilbert strip that was in #19, and also the At Loose Ends story by Lewis Trondheim, I like both — even though those are very different stories, they are both in some ways self-referential comics about comics. For whatever reason, I’ve very much enjoyed putting comics like that in Mome. In a weird way, I feel like it creates a different perspective on things. I liked the idea, when the Trondheim strip was running, of having this more successful, established artist who’s wrestling with all of these real existential, philosophical concerns about art and about his place in the world as an artist. I thought it served as a nice counterpoint to the work that some of these younger folks were doing. It had a little added resonance alongside all these other pieces than it might have even had on its own.

MAUTNER: Is it fair to say that how you put together Mome is a very organic process?

REYNOLDS: Yeah. It’s really just me talking to people, and asking them. I’m not a real ballbuster when it comes to deadlines from issue to issue, so I’ll invite people to contribute and they’ll take their time, whether they hit the next issue or the following issue. They’re just juggling all these things, and it happens to come together every issue.

MAUTNER: How do you work as an editor? How much input do you give to the specific artists involved, especially some of the less-known people? How much input, corrections, suggestions do you make?

REYNOLDS: I have that fairly typical alternative-comics-publisher mentality of, if I’m asking you to do something, I’m more or less going to give you a pretty wide berth. Some artists, in particular, have asked me for feedback in the scripting stages or in the layout stages, and I’ve worked as closely with them as they wanted me to. Others, I simply say, “Would you like to do something?” And I trust that they’re gonna. Most of them I trust. The only time I tend to get really involved in the process is when the artist asks me to, specifically. It has happened, many times; but really it varies from cartoonist to cartoonist. And there are other cartoonists who I’ve encouraged to strive to be in Mome, but I’m not going to accept sight-unseen anything that they do. It’s been an ongoing process of accepting one thing, rejecting another, etc.

MAUTNER: When you reject something, I’m curious about the process, because I know for me, at work, it’s very hard to say, “I don’t want this. I’m sorry: this is no good. This is not what we want.” I can imagine there’ve been times when you’ve been in that position while working on Mome. I’m just curious as to how — without naming names and getting into too much detail — what your general philosophy with that is.

REYNOLDS: Well, I’m not sure what my general philosophy is. If I’m actively having a conversation with someone about potentially contributing to Mome, then I think there’s an implication that I have some respect for his or her work. So it’s a matter of balancing that respect with the hard realities of what I ultimately think of any given piece, specifically, and trying to diplomatically address that. I try to be honest without being cruel or anything. It sucks; one of the hardest things in editing an anthology is saying no to people, for sure. It’s never a fun thing. But most people tend to take it very well.

MAUTNER: One of the things that struck me as interesting about Mome is that it really has become a haven for European work. And now you’re getting people like Nicolas Mahler, whose stuff I love, and I’m so happy you’re running. And you’ve had Émile Bravo, and we already talked about Lewis Trondheim. There’s not a lot of that going on right now, apart from maybe what NBM is doing, and even then they’re very selective. Is that deliberate on your part, or is it, again, you find that person’s work and you’re like, “I want this person in Mome,” or are you deliberately saying we need more European work translated here?

REYNOLDS: I’m not deliberately saying we need to get more European work translated. But, it’s not completely accidental either. I think part of it has to do with the fact that Kim Thompson’s here, and he’s turned me onto a fair amount of stuff. And then I’ve also found enough stuff on my own that, between the two of us, it’s made it seem like there’s a real over-arching intent there. But Kim’s a real fan, and Kim’s a real student of European cartooning. So, he’s very enthusiastically turned me onto things. Then there have been these cartoonists that I’ve stumbled across that I’ve fallen in love with, like Olivier Schrauwen, who’s become one of my very favorite cartoonists right now in comics. So, I’ve just been lucky enough to establish a relationship with him, and he’s been productive enough that I’ve managed to include him in a number of issues.

MAUTNER: That last story you had by him — about the quadriplegic — that was amazing.

REYNOLDS: Yeah! The guy is phenomenal. He’s in that groove where everything he does, you don’t see it coming. Every time you think you’ve got him figured out a little bit, he does something completely surprising.  Visually, his work is stunning to me. I love the way that he plays with color, which is a real attraction for me as it pertains to Mome specifically, because we do have the luxury of having color in there, so it’s something I like to take advantage of if we’re going to pay to print a full-color book. And then cartoonists like Émile Bravo: At first, I think it was his agent just happened to send me a story, and I just loved it.  It didn’t really have anything to do with the fact that he was European; it just worked out that way.

MAUTNER: How successful is Mome in general? You don’t have to give me actual numbers, but I’m just curious. It’s lasted five years, so I assume it’s holding on.

REYNOLDS: It’s modestly successful. But, that said, it’s been successful enough to keep going and we’re not publishing it to lose money, that’s for sure. It’s modest. By our own relative standards, it does modestly. I think it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,500 copies an issue: which is fine. I’m perfectly happy with that.

MAUTNER: What do you have coming up for the next couple issues? What can we look forward to?

REYNOLDS: Well, have you seen Vol. 20?

MAUTNER: Yeah.

REYNOLDS: So I’m starting to work on 21 pretty shortly here. I just last night got a fantastic six-page story by Sara Edward-Corbett which is, I think, the best thing she’s ever done. It’s a different style than she normally works in, even though the subject matter and themes are very much in the same vein as most of her Mome stuff. But it’s got an almost Edward Gorey-ish quality to it that’s really beautiful.

What do I have lined up for the future that I can mention? Tom Kaczynski is working on a piece for the next issue, which I’m excited about because he hasn’t been in Mome for quite a while. There’re a couple more Europeans that I’m trying to get into Mome that I happened to discover at MoCCA this year. I don’t think I should mention them, because I’m not sure which issue they’re going to be in. There’s a lot of repeat offenders, if you will, people who have been in previous issues. I just started running work by Aidan Koch in #20, I like her work, I’m interested in seeing more short stories from her. I’m sure she’ll be in other issues. Josh Simmons’ White Rhinoceros is going to continue, and I think that thing is batshit insane in the best possible way.

MAUTNER: [Laughs.] One thing that occurs to me is: Mome, in some ways, has replaced — people either used to self-publish or run their little pamphlets, which would serializ stories they were working on. And that, of course, has gone the way of the dodo, but Mome, in some ways, has filled that gap in. You’re a farming ground for people to work on these multi-linked stories that go out and get collected: things like Wally Gropius, or Life With Mr. Dangerous, or a lot of the stories you’re currently …  Even somebody like Nate Neal, which hearkens back to what we were saying in the beginning, the original idea of Mome, where now he’s just produced his own graphic novel, which you guys are publishing.

REYNOLDS: That, more than anything, has been my intent with the whole series. I grew up as a fan of alternative comics in periodical form I will probably never love any comic as much as I loved Eightball and Yummy Fur and Love and Rockets when I was 20 years old, and that excitement of a new issue of Eightball and those first 10 to 20 issues of Yummy Fur — where you never knew what was going to be in the next issue. Sure, you might expect another eight pages of Like a Velvet Glove, but even that, you had no idea of where it was going to go, and you always knew there were going to be surprises.

I miss that, and I think that, by and large, cartoonists, whether they know it or not, they miss it as well, because I think you need to learn how to walk before you can run, and blah blah blah. Some cartoonists are going to miss out, not having the luxury of doing stuff in shorter chunks and shorter deadlines. Cartoonists like Tim Lane, who I’ve been running the last few issues, I think he’s a really great cartoonist, and he clearly has a knack for short stories. I sometimes worry that, in the environment we have today, cartoonists like him will be discouraged from doing what they ultimately want to do, because there is such an emphasis on long-form works. Even if not long-form works, big collections, whether you do short stories or not, you’ve got to compile at least a hundred pages to get it out there in the world.  This ignores the whole concept of Web-comics and everything; I’m really speaking in terms of print. I enjoy cartoonists whose work is specifically created in mind for print.

MAUTNER: Do the contributors to Mome get paid?

REYNOLDS: They do. It’s quite honestly an insultingly low page rate [Mautner laughs] that’s totally beneath what they deserve, but that’s probably true of just about every anthology that’s ever been published [laughs], so I don’t feel too guilty about it.
All images are ©2010 their respective creators.

Good Minnesotan‘s origins are not unlike that of Kramers Ergot.  Both anthologies started small and featured stories by friends of the editor, a young cartoonist with ambition and a wide view of comics art.  The fourth issue of Kramers exploded onto the art-comics scene and gained its editor, Sammy Harkham, a considerable amount of notice and respect.  That issue saw him reach out far beyond his own circle of friends to include the most cutting-edge of cartoonists, as well as a number of pieces that stretched the boundaries of what could be called narrative.

©2010 Sean Lynch

Raighne Hogan’s anthology is not on the same level, but it’s clear that he’s become more ambitious and has taken a number of interesting risks in the fourth issue of Good Minnesotan.  It’s now become the anthology of note for a part of the country packed with up-and-coming cartoonists as well as a few stars, and Hogan made a point of reaching out to the likes of Zak Sally and Tom Kaczynksi for this book.  Tom K, best known for his Mome work, once again contributes a piece that straddles the line between eschatology and genre concerns, with a character named Ransom Strange who pontificates on the apocalypse.

©2010 Will Dinski

There are a number of other cartoonists from the Minneapolis scene that made their first appearance in the anthology, including Will Dinski (contributing a funny strip about an Evel Kneivelesque stunt biker jumping over a canyon),  and Kevin Cannon (with a strip depicting a cartoon history of the quest for the North and South Poles).  Good Minnesotan is now really tapping into artists from the Minneapolis College of Art & Design (MCAD), providing an outlet for artists whose output is line with Hogan’s sensibilities.

©2010 Kevin Cannon

Hogan is interested in a number of visual approaches, from traditional comics narrative to visceral, disturbing images to photos that carry their own sense of narrative. Hogan’s blog is well worth a look, both for his essays on comics and the many interviews he’s conducted with Good Minnesotan contributors.   He also includes a number of what seem to be sketchbook pages as a sort of palate-cleanser between stories.  With this volume, Hogan clearly put a lot of thought into making GM an art object.  The anthology, acknowledging the minicomics roots of its contributors, comes in the form of four separate minicomics, collected in a color cover sleeve.  Each edition also comes with a print (there are four different prints to be found, with Moorman’s “landshark” joke being my favorite).  I generally don’t mention pricing when I review comics, but it was thanks to this project’s successful Kickstarter fundraising that this 162-page anthology costs only $5.  Hogan was able to figure out just what needed to be done with an earlier, shorter version of the anthology. Hogan made some subtle alterations in addition to adding new stories, including moving certain illustrations around and doing a better job of identifying stories in each mini’s table of contents.

©2010 Nicholas Breutzman

The heart of Good Minnesotan has always been Hogan spotlighting emerging artists.  The best of these cartoonists, Nic Breutzman, contributed another in a series of stories about the unsettling nature of the isolation children can feel growing up in a middle-of-nowhere suburb.  That eerie stillness was at the heart of this story about a boy fascinated by the skeleton of a new house going up next door to his, where the stillness became a sort of companion as he would lie down in the scoop of a bulldozer at night.

©2010 Joshana Anderson

Sean Lynch’s “The White Dot” is a series of abstract, swirling images arranged in a four-panel grid.  One gets a sense of motion, if not direct connection, between each image.  Joshana Anderson’s “OCD Hand Study” is a fascinating series of drawings of hands, wherein we see the artist drawing hands as mechanical, in a clear-line style,  in a graph-paper grid, in shadow, as anatomy-textbook items and as hatched and crosshatched objects.  It’s one of the more interesting pieces in the anthology.

©2010 Martha Iserman

Other standouts, all done in different styles, include  Martha Iserman’s”Albert,” a funny illustration-with-caption strip about a puffer fish who goes on a series of escalating, ridiculous adventures; Justin Skarhus’ “Indestructible Breeze,” a strip about parasites digging around a person’s face while they sleep that brings that visceral, Fort Thunder feel to the proceedings; Anna Bongiovani’s fable about onions bringing a mother back to life in an unusual way; Eric Schuster’s funny “My Favorite Spider,” drawn and lettered in a deliberately crude computer 8-bit-style; Meghan Hogan’s weird photocomic featuring plush bears; and Buck Sutter’s haunting, blurry series of photographs that ooze with desolation and despair.

© 2010 Eric Schuster

The anthology is ragged at times.  Hogan’s own contributions don’t seem to be as well thought-out as his editorial contributions.  Hogan at times goes overboard by inserting too many incidental drawings and  sketchbook scribblings of some of his contributors.  There are also some strips that looked like they were originally color pieces that were greyscaled for the anthology, and they simply don’t look as good as the crisper black-and-white pieces or moody photography. I think if Hogan decides to do another edition of Good Minnesotan, he should consider adding a color section, even if he has to handle those chores himself (he’s actually an interesting colorist in his own right).  That aside, Good Minnesotan #4 combines the craft chops of the most beautiful of handmade comics art objects with a remarkable level of challenging, unusual, amusing and thought-provoking comics.

©2010 Buck Sutter

*     *     *

I’m going to start by asking Tom why he uses the comics medium to put across his ideas. Why not write essays or op-eds?

Op-eds aren’t comics. I grew up with comics. Making comics is what I always wanted to do. I struggled for a long time with what I wanted to do with comics. I didn’t know what to write about. At the same time I was thinking about all kinds of things. I was reading all kinds of stuff – philosophy, history, literature, and so on – and at one point I realized why not put that stuff in there? Why not just make comics about that stuff? That’s when I started to find my voice, and I’ve been trying to go in that direction ever since.

There are certain ideas we talk about that can be shown in a new light by using comics. We tend to forget that certain ideas exist as anything other than abstractions. We think we see them but we don’t see them. When we write words about these ideas they remain in the realm of abstraction. But, if you draw it in a panel or as a diagram, you can make it concrete and see what it can or cannot do. These things or ideas – something like capitalism, communism, or architecture – images can help make them more tangible. Furthermore, there’s an inherent tension between words and images that can be exploited for all kinds of purposes.

(Click on any image for a larger version.)

What were some of the styles you tried out before you settled on your current approach?

I had done a lot of comics in the 1990s that were genre driven. For example, I created this character – basically ripped off from Tank Girl, and put her through all kinds of “weird” adventures. It never jelled into anything interesting. Every time it did become interesting to me, it was idea driven. I finally decided that what I needed to do was to make ideas the whole point.

Were you trying to make a living at this point? I take it we’re talking about the late 1990s.

Well, yeah. I was working in graphic design and comics were something I wanted to do professionally…

Was there a point in time where you wanted to break into Marvel or DC?

Not really. After being into superhero comics as a kid there was a point where I abandoned reading them and got into other things. The indie/self-publishing revolution of the early 1990s caught my attention, and I wanted to create my own material. I was really impressed by the idea of self-publishing and finding an audience I could connect to.

When they talk about their early development, a lot of cartoonists talk about slowly gaining confidence in their linework, their compositions, and so on. As you describe it, your struggle as a young cartoonist had to do with finding the confidence to use comics as a somewhat abstract form of social criticism. Was there an artistic development going on? Is your early work as recognizably Tom K. as it is now?

Absolutely. Some of my early comics were abysmal. There was definitely a development. A lot of it involved just working through my influences. I was deeply influenced by people like Paul Pope, David Mazzucchelli, Dan Clowes, Adrian Tomine, the Hernandez Brothers, and others. As I absorbed all that stuff my work would sometimes get very derivative.

You didn’t mention superhero/mainstream artists like Jack Kirby. There are some folks who draw a sharp line between anything they do and anything that has ever come out of superheroes. I take it you don’t have that problem.

I grew up with that stuff, especially Jack Kirby. I have always liked the Fantastic Four material, the pre-1970s Kirby in general. I didn’t get the weird stuff he was doing in the 1970s – the Eternals, Devil Dinosaur, the Forever People. At some point it just clicked and that post-1970 work really became much more compelling to me. It took me a while though. But I find myself looking at Kirby more now than when I was doing my early comics. Back then, I was more influenced by whatever cool thing was going on at that time.

One of the things about Kirby’s work is he makes people notice his buildings. He has a fascination with imposing architecture.

Exactly. Here’s a Kirby image from 1971. This monumentally brutalist building fills the entire panel. In the foreground there’s this forlorn figure, very much foreshortened, walking toward the building, thinking. In a sense, this image is sort of a palimpsest of my own work… which is about these gigantic structures that rule our lives. It’s funny because Kirby didn’t seem to have much time to think through this stuff very much. He was just regurgitating all these influences – Planet of the Apes, 2001, books he was reading at the time, and so on. But I think in his images he’s really stumbling on something… unconsciously. He was trapped in this fast-paced mainstream commercial world, but the images are getting at something real.

Did you ever think about becoming an architect?

Yeah, I went to architecture school actually. I did plan on becoming an architect for a while, but that was a long time ago. Then I started doing graphic design and mini-comics… architecture fell by the wayside. At the same time, architecture stayed with me. I still read many books on architecture and I love drawing buildings with a straight ruler, perspective and all that stuff. But it’s more than just drawing buildings. Architecture to me is a way of thinking visually. A building has a program, and as an architect you give it a shape and form. Comics are like that in some ways. Ideas and stories given concrete shapes and form. So yeah it’s more important to me than folks may realize.

Why don’t you choose three or four things you want us to look at as examples of your work and we’ll talk about them.

I brought a story from MOME number nine. It’s a story about a couple living in Brooklyn in this tiny, weird little neighborhood. The top left panel describes what the neighborhood is – an urban island between a bunch of highways and a bridge. All of a sudden a new building starts going up in this neighborhood, and it begins affecting all the residents in different ways. It starts haunting them at night. They hear the insulation flapping in the wind and digging in the back yard… all kind of strange sounds and events are happening. Most of this story is autobiographical… though it’s been heavily fictionalized. Anyway, the building keeps going up, and new residents start moving in.

These characters don’t feel particularly in control of their circumstances, do they?

No, and they’re not even well developed characters. They’re ciphers that live in this place, and suddenly the new building starts affecting them and they respond unconsciously… without thinking about it… They break into the building to check it out… Pee on the wall…

Did you do that?

Ahhh… yes. (laughter) The characters visit an open house to see what the building is going to be like. Turns out it’s going to be a luxurious condo building. One of the phrases people use to sell these kinds of places – a phrase that I absolutely love to hate – is “affordable luxury.” It’s such an oxymoron.

One of the things I wanted to explore is how these monstrosities get built and how the builders don’t think about the neighborhood in any meaningful way. When you go inside of these massive luxurious buildings you often find an architectural model of the building in the lobby. The model is like a sculpture… it stands alone… there’s no neighborhood surrounding it. In this particular building, if you bought a condo, it came with a daily shuttle bus to the subway… which is only a couple of blocks away. If you lived there you would never have to actually interact with the neighborhood!

The marketing material described the building’s neighborhood as having “urban grit,” but you experience it only through the window of a bus. The building in the story is much more than simply “a building,” it’s a world view. The main protagonist becomes obsessed with the condo and gets haunted by it’s future residents. She’s driven insane at the end.

How is it that you’re able to tell these kinds of stories and yet people don’t call your work bleak?

I don’t know. (Laughter)

In this story you can either be a cipher or you can be insane.

Yeah but sometimes it’s the insanity that keeps you sane. It’s the kind of thing Freud talks about in Civilization and its Discontents. Society and the individual are in perpetual tension. We’re living in a civilization of neurotics. But if you take J.G. Ballard takes that a little further. Insanity frees us from anxiety. It’s the pathological acts that enable us to keep going back to our cubicles. Insanity as a safety valve… In an insane world, only the insane are sane…

That’s one reason I’m interested in utopias. Most of the time utopian ideas are dismissed as crazy. “You can’t have equality for everyone, we can’t have relatively equal pay structures,” and so on. One of my favorite quotes [by Slavoj Zizek]: “it is much easier for us to imagine the end of the world than a small change in the political system.” In some ways all these negative apocalyptic visions are about the despair about the state of the world. The only way to imagine change is to see it brought down and destroyed. We can imagine the collapse of civilization but we can’t picture taking a few concrete steps to make things better.

Do you think your work is going to continue in this vein? Is alienation from the modern world your big theme?

I don’t know.

I mean, Joe Matt has a theme…

Oh sure, I think alienation is my theme to a certain extent.

Let’s turn to your story “Ransom Strange.” In this story, architecture plays much less of a role and the story operates almost purely in the realm of the imaginary.

Sure, this was a short comic based on a goofy idea. I was asked to do a two-page comic for Swindle magazine and I had no idea what to do. I was reading all these Marxist books and I came up with this character. He’s a bit like Hellblazer…

A Marxist Hellblazer?

Yeah. I kind of invented this occult science, called immaterialism… and Ransom Strange is a kind of capitalist exorcist who fights consumerist demons using immaterial dialectics. An example of a Ransom Strange villain is a shiny CGI demon. The demon’s job is to keep its human host on the consumerist treadmill. It’s a minor entity that thinks it’s the Cthulhu. The only way to thwart the beastie by using obsolete technology… the demon’s power is tied to the latest and greatest consumer items.

It’s a goofy idea but I want to develop it further. I just haven’t gotten around to it. The character of Ransom Strange is partly inspired by Dr. Strange and Dr. Elwin Ransom, a character from C.S. Lewis’ science-fiction novels.

We mentioned Kirby earlier; how about Ditko?

I love Steve Ditko. I’ve really grown to like Ditko’s work, especially Dr. Strange. I even like the really didactic stuff that came later. The Randian rants… they are some of the earliest comics that engage with philosophical ideas. I like to see how he thinks through his ideas on paper.

Frank Santoro: I wanted to get back to the organization of space and how you switch camera angles in your pages. The way you’re organizing space in some of your comics is almost Cubist.

Yeah?

Santoro: Do you have the one with the swimming pool?

The one where he dives into the pool? This story is about a brand specialist who works on this gigantic corporate campus. He wanders around the grounds finding unusual things.

I worked out how the whole campus was laid out in order to have a couple of points of reference… that way I could change the POV and still see the major campus buildings in the background. It’s sort of a combination of real and fake perspective. I pull some elements into the background, and some into the foreground. In that pool scene I definitely exaggerated the perspective to make that pool seem bigger… it became a metaphor for everything the protagonist was about to immerse himself. A lot of my stories are generated from some specific place or space. I generally have a rough plan – in the architectural sense – worked out.

Santoro: The way you’re organizing the format is page specific.

In this particular case the emphasis is on the horizontal, with sparser built environment and a more open space. In the “condo story” this huge building was dominating the space of the page. In that case I tried to emphasize the verticality of the building as it slowly dominated the story. Towards the end, the building starts to pull the grid apart as the character starts losing her mind.

Let’s connect this to the creative process. Do you write the story first?

That’s a complicated question. This particular story ["976 sq. ft."] was based on true events so it pretty much wrote itself. I changed only a few things. I was able to script this one completely before starting on the drawing. I was living in that area and I just walked around to visually conceptualize the neighborhood from several angles.

Other times I’ll write something… and after drawing a few pages and I’ll change my mind about what the story… and at that point I’ll rewrite all the text. It happens often enough that I worry that it’s become my process. But yeah it really depends… I don’t really have a set process, and it’s frustrating at times. I wish I had a formula. Instead, there’s a lot of push and pull.

Are you making a lot of images the comics world doesn’t see? Do we see most of your artistic output?

Not really. I keep sketchbooks and do some fun non-comic-book things. You’ve probably seem most of my material. I don’t do much pure image making. Most of that energy goes into making comics whenever possible.

Audience member: Have you seen Jacques Tati’s movie Play Time?

Yes, absolutely.

Audience member: Almost every shot is a long shot of people kind of wandering through and trying to negotiate modernist spaces.

That kind of stuff is really hard to draw. When I actually try to convey that kind of experience in a drawing there’s so much information to get across. There’s so much space and there’s so many things going on, it’s hard to convey what these spaces are like at times.

There’s a very powerful sense in your work that architecture can create an extremely negative social environment. Can architecture make us better? Since you were raised in a Communist country, is it even possible for you to believe in progress?

Yes. (laughter) This is something I struggle with because I tend to have a negative and critical take on things, but I really would like to find something to believe in. I would love to create a successful utopian comic. Something akin to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backwards or William Morris’ News from Nowhere. I’d like to make some kind of positive statement rather than negative critiques. At the same time, I always find myself passing through that and falling back into the negativity.

Audience member: When I read your mini-comics I’m left with a sense of hope and yet it sometimes seems as if you are nostalgic for the world of your childhood. I was wondering if you could talk about this contrast in your work.

As I said before, I want to make a positive contribution and I hope that it comes across. But the whole idea of utopia is also fraught with danger. You can certainly find yourself in a negative utopia like, for example, the Third Reich.

You have a line in one of your minis where you say, “We destroyed our Great Alternative!”

Yeah that’s my take on the demise of the Soviet Union. It certainly wasn’t a perfect place, and in many ways it was a horrible place. At the same time it demonstrated an alternative structure. The existence of the Soviet Union suggested that it was possible to build a world outside of market mechanisms. Now that the Soviet system has disappeared… what do we do? Maybe now we’re getting to the point where the death of communism is the best thing to happen to communism. That’s why I put communist zombies in some my comics. They keep coming back… haunting us.

Audience member: What do you mean “communist zombies?”

Let’s show the image.

There is a take on the zombie genre that says, “the great unwashed masses are coming to take your things away.”

Audience member: Zombie movies show a total cataclysm, and most of the zombies start off in Pittsburgh, which is worker hell. (Laughter)

With Dawn of the Dead, which is set at a Pittsburgh mall, the zombies are coming for the consumer goods, but they are coming for something else as well. The zombies are coming to get not just their consumer goods (as in Dawn of the Dead) but also their rights. For example in the recent Land of the Dead, the zombies gain a kind of Martin Luther King figure that leads them in an attack on humans holed up in a “gated community.” One aspect that makes zombies so popular is a constant shift in the “zombie paradigm.” They can represent so many things. But there are many ways of reading zombies.

How autobiographical is your work?

Sometimes it’s very autobiographical, but sometimes it’s not. The Trans books are very autobiographical, but I try to use parts of my life as a springboard for exploring larger ideas. Trans-Alaska is about working through ideas in real time… on paper… it was regurgitated in a short period of time. In had no idea what I was doing. In the next two books this regurgitation started taking form. In the final book, Trans-Utopia, on which I’m still working, I’m trying to cohere all these semi-formed ideas into some kind of whole. It’s taking shape as I’m working on it.

Audience member: You say you like doing these stories about technology in the future told in this medium that is old, handmade and personal. Can you tell us more about that?

I constantly struggle with this. To a certain extent, the computer has taken over our lives. On the one hand, computers represent an amazing tool that can do all kinds of amazing things. It can also so easily un-do them. If something goes wrong you can start over… like in a video game. There always have all kinds of options. You can save multiple versions, etc. But this can become a kind of never-ending project… at least for me. I find it very difficult to finish projects sometimes, because I’m always tweaking them…

I appreciate the material nature of working with paper. I like the finality of a line on paper. I like the goopiness of white out… you can only apply so much before you get in trouble… and working with the physicality of these materials instead of just floating in cyberspace endlessly tweaking things and never being satisfied with them.

I don’t hate computers but they do frustrate me frequently. I want to be able to use them in a smart way and not have them take over my life. But like them or not, they lend themselves to certain behaviors… Seen through the monitor everything becomes endlessly optional. You have one girlfriend, or you can have another one… you don’t like your avatar or identity? Choose another… etc. It’s a constant flux… you’re always floating… never anchored… never committed to a place or idea…

In an earlier post, I wondered whether Will Eisner’s distinction between “instructional” and “entertainment” comics could be applied to the work of someone like Tom Kaczynski, whose mini-comics and short graphic stories are mainly concerned with the play of ideas.

When we focus on the question of abstract thinking in relation to comics we tend, I think, to point to formal experiments and liminal cases (like those showcased in the thought-provoking Abstract Comics; see my comments here), or to projects like Action Philosophers and Marx for Beginners, which use comics as a sweetener to introduce high-end concepts to otherwise reluctant readers. Tom Kaczynski’s witty, cerebral and sometimes mordant work points in a different direction, where comics becomes a platform for thinking out loud – in a story-based context – rather than either pushing the medium’s boundaries or summarizing key lives and historical events.

Kaczynski was born in Gdansk, Poland in the early 1970s. His father worked as an engineer, while his mother was a computer programmer. He moved with his family to West Germany in 1986, a few years after the repression of the Solidarnosc movement. Less than two years later, they were living in the United States.

Now based in Minneapolis, he crafts observant, often haunting mini-comics and graphic stories that grapple with both the official Communism he knew as a child and what he deems “the oversaturated wasteland of today.” His work is unusual in that it not only invokes political themes, but starts from the premise that the present won’t last and that we should try and figure out what we want from the future.

Growing up under Communist rule, Kaczynski idolized American culture. As he writes in Trans Siberia, a self-published mini that came out in 2007:

All I wanted were products that to my mind were vaguely American. USA and Reagan were where my allegiance lay. I hated all the lame Eastern European cartoons and movies. I deliberately got C’s in Russian at school.

As he got older, his relationship to his Communist past and what he calls “infinite growth capitalism” became more complicated. Trans Siberia, along with its companion comics Trans Alaska and Trans Atlantis, depicts its author as a bewildered exile from a vanished and deeply imperfect past, struggling to make sense of the world around him.

“Where is knowledge and wisdom in the age of information overload?” he asks. “This incessant stream of information, good and bad, it does something to you, a deadening, a mental coma,” he complains. In fact, Kaczynski’s anxiety-ridden, pen-and-ink surrogate spends all three comics searching for that “kernel of temporal resistance” that recalcitrant malcontent types always go on about.

The stories reprinted in Cartoon Dialectics, Vol. 1 (2007) are similarly concerned with the disconcerting gap between hype and reality. His hero Ransom Strange, whose exploits open the volume, uses clove cigarettes, obsolete technology and “immaterialist psychonautics” to give a “dialectical emetic” to a Cthulhu-like corporate monster. “This is 2012,” declares this brave humanist from the future. “There is much to be done. The future won’t create itself.” The juxtaposition between Kaczynski’s playful visuals and his fierce intellectual preoccupations is part of what makes his work so appealing.

In political terms, Tom Kaczynski is hard to pin down. In a 2008 interview with Gary Groth, Kaczynski said that,

what I’m looking for is alternatives to the Utopias that we have. We should maybe pause and look at classic Utopias to counteract these capitalist luxury consumer fantasies that proliferate everywhere. To a certain extent I’m bothered that most of my critiques are so negative. I want to be able to put forth a positive Utopia. Something that inspires one to move forward.

After pointing out that markets “in general have worked for centuries and do certain things very, very well,” Kaczynski told Groth that

markets are taking over way too much of our lives…I’m definitely not pro-Republican or pro-Democrat. I find both parties to be kind of reprehensible. The debate in this country is very skewed by these two parties that basically co-opt the entire debate into red or blue. It’s easier to imagine the end of the world rather than a small change in the political system.

Tom Kaczynski’s graphic stories have appeared in The Drama, Punk Planet, and Backwards City Review. For the past few years he has been a regular contributor to MOME. His mini-comics are available from uncivilizedbooks.com.

Next time I promise to excerpt my on-stage conversation with Tom Kaczynski at last year’s MoCCA Festival.

At a guess, I’d have to say that Mome #17 must have been a very difficult issue to put together.  That’s because there were an unusually large number of serials in this issue in various stages of completion.  For a casual reader, or even someone who hadn’t followed the serials closely, this undoubtedly made this issue a fairly baffling experience.  The other problem with this volume was that the interstitial material wasn’t quite as interesting as usual.  Despite those problems, there was still a number of strong stories to be found here, and a number of rewards to be gained by those who were following serials like Paul Hornschemeier’s “Life With Mr. Dangerous” or the second chapters of the stories done by Renee French and Ted Stearn.

I had long wondered just where Hornschemeier was taking his story about a sad-sack department store clerk with a pop-culture obsession on a TV cartoon show.  The protagonist, Amy, had been depicted as incapable of expressing her feelings toward her best friend, a man who had moved across the country.  She also found it difficult to relate to her mother, as expressed in the reaction to the ridiculous birthday present she received from her.  The serial had been one, long downward spiral up until the long, concluding segment in this issue.

The central theme of the story had been one of watching vs. doing, passivity vs. activity.  That played out in the way Amy obsessed over the “Mr. Dangerous” cartoon show as a substitute for activity, and also in the way she created intricate figurines related to the show that would have a special meaning for the man she was in love with.  That flipped the passivity of Amy’s life (floating from one situation to the next without allowing herself to connect to others) into true activity, when she accidentally found a message her friend had hidden for her in a toy he had made.  From there, Hornschemeier connected the dots rather cleanly: Amy wore the ridiculous rainbow sweater her mother gave her, she stood up for herself at her dead-end job, and she hopped on a plane.  When the story is collected I’ll revisit some of the imagery, but I was impressed with the way Hornschemeier brought the story to a satisfying conclusion.

In terms of the longer stories that weren’t serials, I was most impressed with Dash Shaw and Tom Kaczynski’s collaboration, “Resolution.”  Shaw drew it and I presume they collaborated on the story, because it’s an interesting hybrid of the slightly distant and vaguely dystopian city stories that Kaczynski writes and the offbeat and emotionally centered science fiction Shaw has been interested in of late.  Concerning a world where most everyone lived in virtual space, the story hung at a transition point as the society was about to switch to a new system that would create a larger virtual space completely indistinguishable from reality.  The slightly corrupted resolution in this world led to a number of people checking back into the harsh conditions of the real world.  Things unsurprisingly went horribly wrong, encapsulated in the breakdown of a particular husband-wife relationship.  The visual and verbal puns in this story, combined with fuzzy color that served the parameters of the story rather snugly, helped it work both as a serious examination of perception coloring reality and a winking series of nods toward sci-fi (as the crossed-out “For Heavy Metal” at the beginning of the story clued us in).

Olivier Schrauwen’s brand of lunacy has been a particularly delightful discovery for me in Mome, and his “Congo Chrome” didn’t fail to live up to his earlier stories.  A silent story about two men on safari, we met a corpulent and obnoxious hunter and his slender and nervous friend as they negotiated killer hippos, vicious swarms of ants, and vengeance-seeking monkeys.  There’s something about the way that Schrauwen used his color palette to create an almost-sickly reality on the page that put me off-balance as a reader.  It allowed him to depict any event and have it fit into the context of the story, like heads swelling up like balloons in moments of shock.  It was interesting to see the main characters cycle through the extremes of their personalities until the end, when they both shared  a moment of stillness.

On the other hand, the collaboration between Michael Jada and Derek Van Gieson felt like something that would have appeared in a Vertigo anthology 15 years ago.  Van Giesen’s blotchy and scribbly art made great use of shadow and then flipped over effectively to red during a flashback.  As always, it’s interesting to look at.  Unfortunately, the story was a pile of well-worn war cliches invoking the specter of zombies and a certain kind of madness.

The shorter and interstitial pieces in this issue were mostly forgettable.  Rick Froberg’s pen-and-ink illustrations had some interesting compositional qualities but didn’t really draw in my eye.  There was a weird slickness to them and a too on-the-nose character to the captions that had me quickly turning to the next page.  Laura Park’s strip about the folks she saw on the bus felt like a piece quickly done for a deadline.  While it was beautifully drawn, as always, it lacked the charm and innovative page design that we had seen from her in earlier issues of Mome.  The same felt true for Josh Simmons’ one-pager — the non sequitur quality of this page was unfortunately paired with Bak’s story.  Unfortunate because they used similar color schemes (black page, bright colors), and I initially thought Simmons’ story was a bizarre left turn of Bak’s.

The more successful short pieces came from Van Gieson and Sara Edward-Corbett.  The former had a one-pager built on a single joke based on a horrible image.  The latter had yet another stunningly beautiful strip, this time involving an aquatic animal blundering its way through its environment and winding up on land, only to suffer an indignity thanks to some birds.  The intricacy of her figures and her bold use of color stood out and were a perfect palette cleanser after several pages of murky figures from Van Gieson.

With regard to the other continuing serials, it was a delight to see a new chapter of “Nothing Eve” from Kurt Wolfgang, one of the few Mome originals who’s still contributing.  Both protagonist and the creator are both taking their time walking through the last night of the world.  I loved the character’s walk down the street he grew up on as he time-slips through his own memories.  That sense of one’s memories being a living thing and existing side-by-side with one’s current experiences—whether you want them or not—was powerfully evoked by Wolfgang’s thick but expressive line.

Renee French’s “Almost Sound” was every bit as evocative, as the child we met was obsessed with a sea creature and desired nothing else but to be taken by it.  The heavily stippled figures of French were nicely set off by a wide use of negative space.  The only problem was that the rhythm of French’s strip has not been done any favors by the way it’s been serialized.  With just six pages in this issue and a few in the prior issue, the sense of atmosphere that French created simply didn’t work as well broken up in this way.  I’m not sure how many installments this story will wind up being, but it  would work so much more effectively in 20-page chunks. The second chapter of Ted Stearn’s new Fuzz and Pluck story was typically brutal and hilarious.  Stearn is a master of depicting horrible idiots, and we got enough of a chunk of story to be satisfying.

Finally, the second chapter of T. Edward Bak’s biographical strip about the explorer and naturalist Georg Steller was another stunner.  The transition he made from his white-lines-on-black-pages about the history of St. Petersburg to the orange-soaked autumn of Steller’s youth was remarkable.  The composition of the next page, which depicted Steller’s growing obsession with the flora and fauna of other parts of the world, was beautifully split across the lines of seasons yet again, drawing the eye from orange to blue-black to green.  The first page of the autumnal interlude was another masterful piece of composition, as the text described Steller’s difficult birth (he was thought to be stillborn until an insistent neighbor coaxed a cry out of him) and was matched against autumn’s nature as a time of beautiful decay.  The way images played across panels to create larger compositions and then were broken up in other panels made for a powerful transition.  That’s especially true when one considers how bleak the first chapter of this story was.  The meticulousness of Bak’s research combined with his warmth as a storyteller (especially the scenes with young Steller and his mother) instantly drew the reader into the narrative.

Overall, this felt like another transitional issue of Mome.  I think the editors struggled a bit in trying to make all of the parts fit in a way that made sense, especially in terms of balancing the various serials.  The length of the concluding chapter of Hornschemeier’s story threw the balance of the issue a bit out of whack, especially since it was the first story in the book.  Mome tends to be at its strongest with just one or two serials per issue, along with one longer (but self-contained story) and several 8-15 page stories.  The next issue is supposed to feature Dave Cooper, Nicolas Mahler and Joe Daly, and all three artists are quite adept at striking short stories.  It’s undoubtedly exciting to try to create a big anthology of new work three times a year with pretty much no restrictions at this point, but not having the editorial anchor of the original group must make the actual assembly of each issue a daunting task.