The Comics Journal

Borgman:
I have no idea if you reveal yourself. It could be an entirely manufactured persona. But I guess I always thought that basically any interesting thought you had, you had a place to put it. I did editorial cartoons for 30-some years — I just quit that in the fall — and then I had the comic strip for the last 12 years. And basically any interesting thing that I felt like I came across, I could use one place or another. If it was a very close-to-home domestic sort of thing some kid said, just a thought I had about my own life: that always fit in the strip somewhere. And if it was a larger thought about the world, or what was wrong, that tended to fit into the editorial cartoons somewhere. I thought I had the perfect situation that way. I guess that’s what I’m trying to compliment you on. It seems to me like your work can go anywhere you want it to go. It’s not limited to, “I’m just gonna talk about kids on the playground.” It can be about the concert you had the night before, it can be about your family, it can be about your growing up. You’ve defined it in a way that every interesting observation you have can find its way in there somewhere.

Knight:
The San Francisco Weekly was the first one that ran The K Chronicles regularly, and they were asking me, “So what do you want to do?” And I said, “Well, I wanna do anything I feel like doing. Every week. It can be completely different.” And I almost see The K Chronicles as like a blog, before blogs existed.

Borgman:
Yeaahh, that’s really good.

Knight:
I was trying to define that. Because when I started The Knight Life, which is essentially the same thing but a whole different format, I now started to see that The K Chronicles is about me, me, me. It’s a blog. It really is. I can write about whatever. Whereas The Knight Life is more character-driven. If I have a certain feeling, instead of it just channeling through my character, it can fit maybe into my wife’s character, or into the Gunther character, or into the Clovis character. It’s a whole different thing. You do it mostly by these characters speaking, and their actions, whereas The K Chronicles is more of a narrative. It’s like this guy sitting in a bar, telling you a story, and you’re not sure whether to believe him or not.

On your end, how much do you contribute, as far as writing goes, to Zits?

Borgman:
Jerry and I have a really organic relationship, which I’m not sure other partnerships have done. I can’t say for sure, but the impression I’ve gotten listening to how other older partnerships have worked is like one guy writes it, and they basically mailed it to the other guy.

Knight:
Mailed it, well. That’s something we can talk about, about the last 30 years.

Borgman:
Yeah, well, it sorta fits with the conversation here. And then because there was that division, that space between the two, the other guy drew it. I don’t know if that’s true in every case, but my impression is that it divided pretty cleanly down the middle. But now, I think that’s one of those things that’s a difference in these 30 years. Jerry lives in San Luis Obispo, Calif. I live in Cincinnati, Ohio. We’ve been doing the strip for 12 years — we’ve maybe seen each other 20 times in those 12 years. We only see each other maybe twice a year. One thing or another brings us together. But we’ve become great friends. We talk every day; we talk just like friends. And then every now and then, in the course of relating what’s going on in our lives, the other person’ll say “Ooh, write that down, that was an interesting line,” or “That’s a good story starter.” We almost come up with — no, that’s not true. I was gonna say we almost come up with the strip inadvertently, but that’s not true. There’s a lotta sweat. But certain kinds of seeds are planted in the course of those daily conversations that often grow into what becomes the strip. It’s hard to say who’s planting them.

My family — OK, here’s my story. My wife died when we were both 44 years old, like that. [Snaps.] I had two kids, 16 and 9. So I was a single dad for like five years, and then I met Suzanne, who’s here and you’ll meet her sometime. And she had three kids. So when we got married five or six years ago, we had five teenagers in our house all of a sudden. So here I was, living the life. Our strip’s about life with a teenager. We got five teenagers in the house, and my drawing board is kind of set up in the middle of our family room. You know, I’d just hear — without trying — I’d just hear a lot about the teenage world. I would write that stuff down or just relate it to Jerry, and so I was kind of the embedded reporter, and I was sending my field notes to him. At that time, he didn’t have any teenagers yet.

But Jerry’s just incredible at taking a story and boiling and boiling and boiling it down to its essence, and writing it in the very, as you know, almost haiku kind of form that daily comic strips have to be in. The K Chronicles isn’t like that, you have that wonderful luxury of words. But he’s great at that part, so I’d say for a long time I was sort of the source material, and Jerry took that material and also plumbed his own memories to do the writing part of the strip, and then I drew it. Now he’s got a 15-year-old daughter. My kids are all kinda going out the top now, off to college and such, and so I think there’s a different kind of germinating going on. But also what happens is, after you’ve been doing something for 12 years, you almost don’t need that material so much any more. Now it’s a living, breathing thing, and it just goes on its own.

Knight:
That’s a great point about those conversations involved in those ideas, because I’ve found — I don’t draw at home. I don’t have a studio. I draw in cafés. The reason why I do it is because I’m a very people-person. I need that stimulation of conversation, of interaction. I picked the worst —

Borgman:
You’ve got the wrong profession. [Laughs.]

Knight:
That’s why it was so great being in a band. For a long time, I was in a band too, and it was just going from being by myself to bouncing all these ideas and playing live in front of people. It was such a perfect balance. But yeah, I mean, I go to this one café in Culver City, and it’s such a great café. They let me sit there all day long, and I have these regulars who come in. I got my political guy who comes in — I have a great conversation. He always has the New York Times with him. Things like that.

Borgman:
Do they know they’re contributing?

Knight:
Oh yeah, they know. They totally do. I wish the L.A. Times was running The Knight Life, or any paper was running any of my stuff in L.A., but at this point it isn’t. But some people are seeing it online and stuff.

Borgman:
So you have collaborators, too, in a sense.

Knight:
And my wife, too. It’s so funny. If she doesn’t get a strip, it’s usually a good strip. [Laughter.] And then — I haven’t introduced him yet. I’ve introduced him into The K Chronicles, but I’m holding off with The Knight Life — but my son. Because The Knight Life basically launched just around the time he was being born, and I didn’t want it to be a baby strip, starting off as a kid strip, you know. I want people to get into the characters first, and then when she does get pregnant, people will be like “Oh yeah!” Or maybe they’ll be like “Oh, no, no!” But, yeah, I kind of set it up. There’s this one character, perpetually pregnant Peggy, who’s just starting to needle her, saying, “So when are you gonna have kids?” and that type of thing. This woman was the Octomom. This character was great, ’cause she was before the Octomom existed, and she always has these kids hanging all off her. You know, if it was an alternative weekly, they’d be hanging off her boobs and stuff.

Borgman:
[Laughs.] Oh, that’s beautiful.

Be Sociable, Share!

•