The Comics Journal

Borgman:
You know, our influences are not so different. I wasn’t so much brought up on the comics page as a lot of people were. I knew of Peanuts, I liked it, but I loved Mad Magazine, and I immediately went to Mort Drucker’s drawings and Jack Davis’s drawings and those kinda things. It was somewhere around high school, heading toward college, that I started finding editorial cartoons in the newspaper. I was not political, my family was not political; I didn’t really know what they were about. But I was just so drawn to the work of Pat Oliphant and Jeff MacNelly. Are these people who had any impact on you?

Knight:
Yeah, it was newspapers that I was totally into. Just reading the cartoons in the newspaper all the time. But I knew early on that there were way more cartoons than just on the comics pages. So I would comb every page looking for cartoons, because there’d be some in the Classifieds, there’d be some in the Editorial pages.

Borgman:
This is in Boston, right?

Knight:
Yeah, Boston Globe. Feiffer was in Parade at that time. So I always — to this day, I comb every single page of the paper, doesn’t matter what it is. I will look at everything, because I just grew up looking for cartoons all through the paper.

Borgman:
I hadn’t really thought of it, but now that you say that, there are a host of nameless people who probably influenced me a lot. The guys — I guess they were guys — who were drawing these little spot-art things here and there, unsigned work. I think for me it was always looking at the line-work that really turned me on. Then eventually story, or with editorial cartoons, the meaning behind it. I came to follow the news because I wanted to understand what the cartoons were about. And that was the backdoor way I came into editorial cartooning.

Knight:
One of the neat things about Warner Bros. cartoons, is that they made all these references to what was happening in that time, and some of the actors that they did caricatures of. It made you wanna find out about it. The older I got, I was like “Oh, OK, that’s what that meant. That’s what this meant.” And I really wanted to do that with my work, make these different references. Not to totally date it, you know, not just totally base something on that thing, but to have something subtle in there — you want layers. You want different people to get different things. And if they get more of it, that’s even better.

Borgman:
You still think your stuff’s layered like that?

Knight:
Definitely. I was doing this in The Knight Life, I was making this reference to Suicidal Tendencies and a lot of college bands I remember listening to on college radio: Joy Division and stuff like that. And I don’t expect a lot of people to get some of the references I was making, but I knew someone out there would get it. And lo and behold, someone wrote to me and said, “Oh my god, I can’t believe you made a reference to Joy Division on the comics page.” That makes it worth it, you know? I made one about scratching, and this cat. I said scratching was invented by this cat in New York City in 1976 — I can’t remember exactly. It was basically “This is when scratching was invented.” Hip-hop, DJs pull it back and make that noise. I say it’s a “cat,” like it’s slang, but then this dude walks into the room and he sees this cat on his turntable, scratching it, and the guy’s like, “Theodore, no!” Hopefully people get the joke — like cat, scratching, and all that stuff. But Theodore, the name of the cat, was actually a reference to Grandwizard Theodore, the real DJ who invented the stuff. So only serious hip-hop-heads would get that stuff. Those little things. There’ll always be one e-mail someone writes and goes, “Oh man, I can’t believe you did that!” I love that.

Borgman:
Not quite as sophisticated, but in Zits, I often have the dad referencing the fact that he’s a baby boomer by having different old concert T-shirts and stuff on him. Moby Grape and things like that. One of those old guitarists from Moby Grape looked us up and was sorta thrilled that anybody remembered it. [Laughs.] That’s fun.

Knight:
The Zits cartoon that made me just go, “Man, you guys are doing really amazing stuff,” was where the kid basically says to another kid, “Oh,” — whatever he was wearing — “that’s so gay,” and then the kid goes “I am gay.” It was like, not the joke.

Borgman:
The different generations.

Knight:
Yeah! And I was just like, “Wow. This is — “

Borgman:
Jerry and I are sort of quietly proud of that one. You know, you have certain ones that you’re proud of in your own way.

Knight:
And the fact that, you know, I was just reading online how someone’s making a big deal out of tackling an interracial relationship. And that was another thing about Zits, how a couple of kids are dating, and no one’s making a big deal that one’s black and one’s white.

Borgman:
Except in Oklahoma, they are.

Knight:
Yeah, well. Let those folks make the big deal out of it. But is really that the big basis for a storyline? For the cartoonist?

Borgman:
OK, we’re trading compliments here; lemme tell you something. I was looking through The K Chronicles just before coming out here, and one of the things that impressed me was: Several times you reference the fact that your heroes are Charles Schulz, Bill Watterson, George Herriman — at least I remember reading that somewhere. I know you did a strip in which you kinda did a sly reference to throwing the brick, you know, a Herriman kind of thing. And I’m thinking, “OK, so this guy,” who I’d never met at this point, “is coming out of the same kind of classic traditions that I have looked at,” and yet you’re also bridging the world to people who I don’t feel like are part of my audience. I mean, you’re talking to what feels to me like a very — what’s the word — wired-in kind of reader, who understands the references to the hip-hop things you say, and just a very cool, urban sort of culture. So I think it’s a big span.

Knight:
Thanks, I really appreciate it. When I first started out, the thing that I felt I wanted to do was a strip that I could relate to. When I first started the strip in its current form, the way The K Chronicles was, gangster rap was huge. So anybody who was into hip-hop was considered a thug, depicted in the media. So it was just like… no. There’s plenty of people into rap music. And the most popular rap music — like any other music — is not the best music. So the stuff that people say, “Oh, I can’t stand hip-hop, blah blah blah,” they’re hearing the worst of it. Like any other good music, it’s on the fringes. It’s all the alternative stuff. I wanted to make a cartoon about someone who’s into hip-hop but who’s also into, you know, comics and Star Wars, and is a geek at heart. But also, you know, growing up in Boston, being a sports fan… all those different things.

Borgman:
You really reveal yourself in your work. Well, I don’t know if that’s true or not. [Laughter.] It feels like you do, to a reader.

Knight:
Yeah. People come up to me and say, “I feel like I know you, blah blah blah, you’ve got a twin sister, you live here,” and all this stuff, and I’m always like yeah, but you don’t really know. You don’t really really know me. I’m not going to reveal that much. Certainly, when I reveal stuff about my family and my friends and all that stuff, there’s certain lines I won’t cross.

Borgman:
Yeah, there’s all kinds of blood on the floor over cartoonists who use their families as — [Laughs.]

Knight:
It’s really interesting, too, because I’ve been very fortunate to have a healthy family for a long time. Sometimes I think about, when rough stuff happens, how I’m gonna handle it. One of the things I did was in my last K Chronicles, I Left My Arse in San Francisco — it’s not included in The Complete K Chronicles, it’s the first book after. But they found a fist-sized tumor in between [my wife's] heart and her lung, so she had to go in and have it removed. It was a really super-heavy time, and I didn’t go near writing about it until we thought it was resolved enough to a point. I did it in three different installments, and it was hard to do that first one and then have all these people writing in. So many people reached out. And I already knew the outcome, so I felt really bad.

Borgman:
[Laughs.] They’re out there sweating it.

Knight:
[Laughs.] Yeah, yeah, [and me] not saying what happened. It was a benign tumor, and she was OK. But I got these e-mails from people younger than me who had lost their spouses from cancer and stuff. They were thanking me for doing these comics. It’s shocking sometimes how many people actually do read your stuff. Especially considering The K Chronicles is not in the daily paper, it’s more alternative.

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