Conducted last summer for an EYE WEEKLY profile/TCAF cover story (currently missing from their site, unfortunately) and now punctually edited into this transcript for yr perusal. Even timelier: Eric's Trip reference!
CR: You were just in San Diego, right?
PP: Yes.
How was that?
Well, I think it was...I think it was a bit overwhelming, but good overall.
Yeah, I haven’t been – I know guys who were there and they say it’s like a huge media thing now. It’s not even about comics anymore.
Well, I wouldn’t say it’s not about comics anymore. I think if anything comics is really the medulla of the show. You know what I’m saying?
Yeah.
Comic Con is basically a landlocked cruise ship, half of which is overtaken by Hollywood…the other half is the reptilian brain.
[laughs] OK, so, this is for a profile, so I guess I should start at the beginning…the start of your career? You dropped out of college and then started self-publishing, right?
Yep.
And how was that experience?
Well, I mean, the dropping out of college part kinda sucks but when you get to the point where you’re in your eighth year of school…you’re in advanced Japanese immersion, you’re looking at your possibilities in academics realizing that you’re probably going to make more money than your professors if you go into comics. The writing’s on the wall, man. This is the 21st century, I don’t think it’s necessary. And I’m all in favour of education, don’t get me wrong on this. I’m a total classical humanist when it comes to this stuff. The measure of man’s mind is everything in the world. However, in my case, it was the best thing to do.
When did you hook up with Kodansha, a few years after that?
That’s the reason I’d been immersed in Japanese. Yeah, it was my last year. Basically I could be a full-time artist or a full-time student. So, that’s where I was. 1995.
And how did they – I assume they approached you, right?
Well, even though the term “synergy” is overused it was basically a synergistic experience. Believe it or not I was at Comic Con for the first time, I was living in San Francisco and I had been to Japantown…I saw Japanese comics there. And I was just fascinated by it on a number of levels. And so, the stars aligned – I managed to meet editors from Kodansha without even really realizing they were hiring. I just began to ask formal artistic questions the way that you would if you were doing a critique in school. You know, composition-wise, everything. Long story short, within an hour they asked “are you interested in working in Japan?” I was like “oh shit, they’re hiring!”
They didn’t actually end up publishing a lot of what you – I was reading through P-City Parade, and they didn’t publish most of it, right?
No, it’s true. The analogy I make is to…they wanted a hit single out the door, because Japanese mainstream manga publishing is intense competition. They need to know if you’re going to do well right away. It’s comparable to pop music. They wanted a Top 40 hit right away. They were willing and able to develop talent – in my case, I work with them for five years, they published a little bit of stuff…halfway through my tenure in Japan they changed the top editors, which basically meant starting over again. And meanwhile, the irony is that it’s the equivalent of grad school education, because I learned so much over there, even though they published very little of it.
I think that’s a good analogy, actually, the pop single thing, because comics are read openly by a more diverse strata of society there. Like, they have comics marketed towards middle-aged women and businessmen and...
Yep.
And a lot of sports comics, for some reason.
Dynamic action. Does the same thing superheroes does.
Are you gonna have any of the stuff you did there published? I heard some of it was in Pulphope…
Yep, some of it is. The only problem with that stuff is that it’s a bit spotty. It’s basically demos, it’s like manga demos. It’s like demos and a couple of wholly-recorded pieces, like, the full Phil Spector treatment. It feels like that if I were to publish a book like that it would be this processed book and I’d have to really frame it. So I’m a little leery about publishing it now. And also I feel like the material’s time-sensitive. The important thing is having developed this skill set which is unique for a Western artist and to bring that back on top of a foundation in European comics. What I’m doing in mainstream comics in the States is what I would’ve been doing for the Japanese.
Right. Another thing in P-City Parade – the essays in there – where you talked about how you started off trying to unify American and European comics, and then you discovered manga, the emphasis on characterization and the really deliberate pacing, and tried to assimilate that into your work.
That’s the frontier for comics now.
Oh yeah, that’s the stuff that sells here, to kids at least.
I guess it’s a little bit of a concern to people who work in mainstream comics, because the audience for manga, as far as I can tell, is an entirely different and new audience. And that’s very exciting.
Tons more women or girls, the young kids…I was talking to Chris at The Beguiling, and that’s a huge part of their business.
Oh yeah. In fact when I was in Japan, if you went into any random bookstore there’d be a number of kids lined up sitting on the floor, reading the manga. Like in a library or something. And that’s the way it is here now. We’ve just caught up to them. That’s the way it was ten years ago in Japan. It’s very exciting.
I actually didn’t know you lived in Toronto for any period of time until I started talking with people about this…um, when was that and how’d you find Toronto?
Well, I grew up in Northern Ohio…you know how there’s the Rust Belt and the Bible Belt? I kinda feel like there’s also a Rock Belt. For me…Chicago, Cleveland—
Detroit.
Toledo – Detroit for sure – Windsor, Toronto…and maybe Montreal. That’s the Rock Belt. I grew up with that in my history, and also, I realized at a certain point that I had so many friends up in Toronto, it’s a place I wanted to live.
Was that in the late 90s, or…
Mid-to-late 90s, yeah. ’96 to ’98.
The Rock Belt thing is interesting because I know some guys who’re a fair bit older than me who were in the music scene here in the 90s and it sounds kinda brutal.
Oh, but there was great talent though, man. Neko Case…Eric’s Trip, which became Elevator, one of my favourite rock bands…
They’re playing here in a month, I think. Eric’s Trip.
Oh man. Really?
Yeah, they do occasional reunion shows.
That’s interesting. And Sloan was big too, come to think of it. Danko Jones was…I don’t know where he’s at now, but he had a bit of a career there. You know, there was a music scene.
Yeah. Um, Batman: Year 100…was that something you pitched to DC, or did they sort of suggest “hey, do Batman!”?
It was a little more subtle. They were like, “what would you do if we gave you Batman?”
[PHONE CUTS OUT]
I was going to say, Year 100…it is sort of a futuristic dystopia, but Batman is this silent-movie vampire in the middle of there…he’s this guy who’s out of time.
Oh yeah. It’s interesting too because a lot of my friends here are performers, burlesque or musicians, some circus performers, and I’m really fascinated by this idea of setup/cleanup. You know, Batman in a sense is a production – to be able to pull off a superhero, that’s gonna require a team of people. So that’s why I wanted to go with the whole superstition angle. I think the best thing to play off high-tech is superstition.
I was just reading – I was reading your blog post about iPhones, and how they were basically “retarded Motherboxes” and that tomorrow is being reverse-engineered from Kirby. The psychedelic futurism. And I think there’s a lot of that in your own work as well, stuff that looks futuristic but weirdly anachronistic at the same time.
Yeah. Well, you look at what’s important is – the sensation of new things. The first time I saw an iPhone, my visceral response was “it’s a retarded Motherbox”. I honestly didn’t know what this thing was, and I have a ton of friends who work in high-tech…you know, advertising, creative consulting. But I have this very ambivalent relationship to machines. I use them a lot, but I’m a little disturbed by how they distance us from each other. So, yeah, I feel like the kind of commentary I’m able to bring in is a bit of a skeptic – not really a gadfly point of view, just sounding a warning once in a while.
In the 90s, you were working with a lot of odd formats, in terms of size and design, and you seem to have moved back to traditional books…is that just a side effect of working with Vertigo and DC, or was it a conscious thing?
Well, I think when you start playing with the majors, so to speak, you are limited by format.
There’s another thing from P-City Parade I wanted to bring up – you said you intended to split all your future projects into “serious” and “frivolous” work? Is that still the case?
[PHONE CUTS OUT AGAIN]
No, the unfortunate thing about growing up in public is that you often say things in print – there has to be a provision to this stuff, because you don’t really know what the future’s gonna bring. I mean, the new crop of work I’m doing now is intended for a young audience. But I wouldn’t consider it frivolous. In the 90s I was looking at a very superficial side of manga where I was interested in doing work that was very playful and cute, and I kind of got it out of my system, you know what I mean? We’re kind of on the music analogy tonight, so it’s like the three-minute pop song. I’m done with it. I’m ready for the seven, ten-minute pop song, or freeform jazz. Whatever it might be beyond this.
Yeah, I totally get it. Actually, I want to know – tell me about Battling Boy. I remember being in the room at the last TCAF, when you were sort of dropping hints about it...
Well, I think it’s a strong story ‘cause I can sum it up in two or three sentences. Basically, it’s a story intended for children. It’s a story of either a young god or a young superhero, who’s on sabbatical from Mount Olympus, and his job is to clean up this giant city called Monstropolis, which is this huge city and it’s overrun with monsters. That’s the root of the story right there.
I remember there was something about magic t-shirts.
Yeah. Well, you know, the Twelve Labours of Hercules, he has twelve t-shirts, each with a different animal totem. When he wears them he has different attributes of the animal that he wears. It’s a device in the story that helps to move it along, but it’s interesting because – without revealing where the story goes – the idea of a sort of talisman is endemic to mythology. I wanted to find a way to make that exciting. History’s so…not only exciting to me, but it’s important. And I feel like if we can take these classic ideas and make them new again – that’s the idea of oral tradition, right? Maybe it’s comics tradition now.
Totally. That’s sort of like THB as well. There’s a lot of – not stuff that’s old, but there’s a lot of early American science fiction, like Heinlein. Especially with the libertarian themes. I actually wanted to ask about that too: how do you approach the political stuff in your work?
It’s funny. If you’ve read any of my early stuff, I think I come from a much more earnest and very didactic side of expressing ideas. I sort of realized at a certain point that it’s impossible to betray your values if you really know what you think and believe. And what’s really more important in fiction, and particularly pop fiction, is to entertain people. You’re not gonna be able to betray yourself, so have the faith to write what you believe. But do it in a way that is story structure. So it isn’t…you know, I’m not a politician, it’s not necessary to go out and change people’s minds so much. I sort of pulled back off that.
I think there are some playful moments there, like when she yells out “Walt Disney!” to the bugfaces.
Oh yeah, for sure. And I hope it can make it to the final cut – let’s wait and see – but Walt Disney in THB is this symbol of rebellion. The term, the name Walt Disney, is used by a number of characters. And in fact there’s a ton of Disney references in THB. It’s something that I want to keep because it has a certain strength in this day and age.
Are you going to put all the material in there or are you gonna cut some of it? There is some that’s sort of crazily formatted, the really big stuff.
Yeah. Well, actually it’s exciting for First Second, because they’ve wanted to try something format-challenging for awhile. So what we’re working on now is initially a series of four or five trades in full colour, paperback edition like the rest of the First Second line, but they want to do a - we haven’t come up with the right term yet, but director’s cut or something, the version I want, which is oversized, the old Giant THB format. 13 inches tall, black and white. That’s more of a collector’s edition thing.
That’s awesome. You also have La Chica Bionica coming up, right?
Yep.
From – from Dargaud? The French publisher?
Well, it kind of began as my take on Barbarella. It’s very farcical, it plays with a lot of 60s pop icons, recombines them in a way. Has a lot of action, it’s very fast-paced. One of the best things I learned from Batman was how to edit myself. I’ve managed to make a pretty lean story.
One of the great things, I think, about Year 100 is that there’s a part that’s basically this huge fight scene, but it’s really well-paced. It doesn’t seem bloated or anything at all.
No. No, in fact I think – if you think of competition, comics have to compete with games and movies now, so I want as much space to tell the most visually dynamic story I possibly can. The one thing that drawing has that film doesn’t have is a certain individual dynamic. A magic, if you will, that comes across in the style. And if you’re able to tell a story in pictures well it has this weird energy that’s unlike anything else. The further we’re into this digital world we’re getting this has become more and more important. To me it’s a very aggressive frontier for comics. That’s why I’m hand-lettering stuff. It’s a real bitch to hand-letter but it’s become important.
And with comics is that there’s no budget. You can do stuff that would only be possible in a $50 million video game or a blockbuster movie and it doesn’t cost anything.
Exactly. And you also don’t have a team of people. Having worked in film for a bit, that’s a very hierarchal situation. Very slow, collaborative. Comics isn’t like that. If you’re able to turn off the machines and shut the door…maybe put on some nice music, make some coffee, that’s about it.
Even with the largest number of people, in the assembly-line model, it’s like a band.
Comics has the same sincerity as music. That’s one thing that’s really cool about it, it’s got that, like, guy-with-an-acoustic-guitar thing. A brush is like a guitar. The way you can get a message across simply and briefly – doesn’t require tons of bells and whistles. That’s what’s awesome about it. In fact at TCAF I wouldn’t be surprised if we see some amazing self-published minicomics.
That’s one of my favourite things about going to conventions. It is sort of like a rare 7-inch or something. There’s a design thing but a nerdy collector thing there as well.
Mm-hmm. Which is awesome. It’s complete, it makes you whole. It’s like graphically being filled by food or something.
I was going to ask what kind of comics you’re reading, but now I want to ask what music you’re listening to right now…
I’m really into this band Darker My Love. Have you heard of them?
I don’t think so.
I don’t know where they’re from, but someone recommended them to me this week. I’m into a band called the Hungry Goats, from Australia. I’m into the Drones from Australia. What else…I’m into Black Angels, if you know them…they have a record coming out, I’m psyched about that. I love Motorhead. I listen to a lot of jazz. I love John Handy and John Coltrane. I love Hawkwind. Peter Gabriel, stuff like that.
Yeah, I dig the Motorhead. I am down with that.
I listen to a lot of stoner rock. Hypnotic, Black Moses, Queens of the Stone Age…I love a lot of that stuff. I love Kyuss.
0 comments:
Post a Comment