List of Terry and the Pirates comic strips

Transcription

>> Mary Lynn Broe: Welcome to the sixth speaker in the 2011-12 Visionaries in Motion series. Our guest this evening, cartoonist and illustrator Charles Burns, continues a vibrant tradition of graphic novelists, cartoonists and designers featured in our series over the last 6 years, among them Mira Colman, Stefan Sagmeister and, most recently, cartoonist Chris Onstad, Nick Ehrlich, Linda Berry and Alison Bechdel. Influenced by the parodies of Mad magazine, Herge's Tintin and the dark tales of William Burroughs, Charles Burns rose to prominence with early work in Art Spiegelman's Raw magazine, that was in the mid-eighties. He's illustrated covers for Time, the New Yorker, Rolling Stone and New York Times magazine. Since 2003 he's been official cover artist for The Believer. His range of publications, and I count 15 or 16 books since El Borbah appeared in Paris in 1985, include Big Baby, Skin Deep, Black Hole and, most recently, X'd Out, 2010, the first volume of a trilogy whose second book, The Hive, is slated to appear in October. Remarkable too are his many projects, not just his comic creations, but his many projects from Iggy Pop album covers to ad campaigns for Altoids. In 1992 he designed the set for Macarthur Award-winning choreographer Mark Morris who restaged The Nutcracker at Brooklyn Academy of Music. He has any number of solo exhibitions of his singular, stark, black and white line drawings full of both beauty and nightmare. His exhibitions have ranged from the Philadelphia Museum of the Arts, Adam Baumgold's Gallery in New York City to a major show in Belgium. A quick glance at the many languages of interviewers and discussions of his work on YouTube gives you just a taste of Burns global reach, beginning with the publication of El Borbah in Paris 1985 to his 2008 contribution to the French animated feature Peur(s) du Noir to work with Lorenzo Mattotti's Valvoline Collective in Italy. Now, after the talk Charles will take questions. There're microphones and runners on either side. Use the mikes if you can, the roving mikes, and continue the conversation with us upstairs at a reception and book sale and signing. Pick up a postcard for the remaining two Visionaries this season and stay tuned, as I mentioned last time, on our website where you can join past speakers in commenting on what has inspired you about Visionaries, Visionaries in Motion over the past 6 years. Join me, if you will, in welcoming Charles Burns on his own creative visual journey tonight, Drawn in the Dark, the Art of Charles Burns. [ Applause ] >> Charles Burns: Have to close this out here. Thanks for coming on this, this, this balmy, summery night. Hold on, I'm getting there. You're seeing a quick preview there. So what I wanted to do is, is show a lot of slides. What I get asked all the time are about influences and, and where I got my weird ideas. So hopefully I'll be able to, to, to show you a little bit of that tonight. This seems pretty absurd but one of the first, one of the first television shows that I ever saw was this very, very crude animation called Clutch Cargo that came out in the sixties and it, there was one episode that scared the hell out of me. It was something incredibly benign but one thing that they did, it was, it was such a cheap animated show, they, they, they cut cost by, by not really animating anything, they just, they just used a, a stationery drawing and put these, this very odd looking real mouth in there to have the characters talk and there's something very disturbing about that. There were a few occasions where I had to leave the room when Clutch Cargo was on. Our, our household, in our house we really didn't watch that much TV to tell the truth. My parents believed in books and, and our, we had a house that was filled with books and I was, I was, I had an older sister but I spent a lot of time by myself and, and a lot of time entertaining myself and by, by looking at books and, and, and in preschool I would pick up books that were around and, and examine them. I would look at things like this, this is a National Geographic book and where an illustration from Nat, National Geographic book about life in ancient times and it, it's very disturbing, I, you know, there was, there was just imagery, I didn't know what to think of it, it was like incredibly violent, you know, beautiful, beautiful painting of this, of this, this, this scene, this, this gory scene. I don't know, I still don't know what to make of this, I've never read the actual book but I sure spent time examining the, you know, these, these fish people that are administering, you, I don't know, medicine or something to this guy. And I think a lot of, a lot of it had to do with the fact that I was looking at these, looking at these images before I knew how to read and, and I was really making up my own stories about the meaning behind these, these images. This is, this is an illustration from a book that I, that I picked up, you know, from my father's books by, it's an illustrator called Boris, I'm going to pronounce it poorly but, Artsybashev, I think, and still, for me, it's like this incredibly, this, this stunning image. He was, he was an illustrator, did a lot of Time magazine portraits, but he did these very oddball, surreal thing, this is, I think this is for the steel industry. Again looking at, my Dad had a book on, on comics or a book about comics and it included this image by Daumier and I know that I had really bad nightmares about just thinking about headless corpses and little child corpses. It was, it was a very, I mean such a potent image. It was potent when it was, potent for an adult to look at but for a child I think it was, I think it really, I really internalized some of these, some of these pieces. And even something like this, my Dad, my Dad was interested in art, he had, he had, he had books about comics, books about how to, how to make your own comics, he, he, he liked sculpture, he was kind of a, he was kind of a hobbyist but he was interested in, in a lot of different things. So he had books around that were kind of how, how-to books, how to illustrate, how to do watercolors, how to do all sorts of things and I would, I would look at those. This was like some illustrations about how to do folds in clothing and in my imagination I was looking at these things and realizing these were clothing that didn't have any people in them, they're almost like these ghostly, ghostly creatures that were, were headless creatures walking around. I had a vivid am, vivid imagination. One of the odd things that my, my father had were these reprints of Mad comics that were, that were written originally by Harvey Kurtzman. So before, before there was Mad magazine there was a, a series of color comics that came out in the early fifties and they were parodies, they were short stories, they were parodies of popular American culture whether it'd be movies, books, television shows but, again, if you keep in mind that I didn't know how to read, I, and I, and I didn't know what the, the parodies were of, I was just looking at the pictures and finding my way into these very, these very kind of strong black and white images, very potent images. For example, I had no idea who Wonder Woman was in this parody. Originally this story was in color and these guys were actually wearing skin tight clothing but in black and white they looked just like kind of very menacing, naked guys with, you know, a sub machine gun pointed at this voluptuous Wonder Woman. So I had no real point of reference to any of these, these things. I mean if you look, this is a parody of a Sher, Sherlock Holmes story, the Hounds of the Basketballs. [Laughter] And, and there's something very moody and, and intense about the, just the atmosphere of the scene for me. I loved the, the kind of dark shadows, these, these characters emerging out of the shadows like that and I know that this kind of imagery really was embedded in the back of my head. This is a good one. I mean my favorite part of this is the, is the lock that gets broken on the drop seat, this disgusting, disgusting butt that's bursting out, I don't know. This, I mean these are, these are for comics for children, anyway. One thing, as I mentioned before, one thing my father did was he kind of dabbled in all kinds of hobbies and, and one thing, like I said, he was interested in comics so he would, he would copy comics occasionally so, one thing I remember him working on was this copy of these three panels which was a, a parody of Flash Gordon called Flesh Garden and it appeared in Mad magazine and I think what, just looking at his, I wish I still had the original, I think he tossed the original, but he was using pen and ink and he was working on board and he had, he had, he could letter very well but he was pretty much tracing, doing a tracing of the drawing and then inking it in himself but I think just by looking at his original art work or seeing this kind of physical object that, that someone had made, I had some sense that comics were made by a person, it wasn't just something that, that appeared in a magazine, it was something that you could do with your own hands. So I kind of witnessed, you know, him using a pen and, and he had those tools around. I think that that was a really profound thing for me to, to, to experience at that age and also it just, it, I was also very aware of the fact that, that he was, he had this, he was incredibly talented with his lettering, it just looked impossible for a human hand to do, I was very impressed. One thing he had and I, I never really figured it out until later, he had a scrapbook of, of old like snippings, he had, of old comic strips from the forties and I guess into the fifties perhaps, and he was putting together and I remember looking through and never quite figuring out why, you know, why he'd assembled these, these images or these, these pieces and it wasn't until later that I realized that he was kind of gathering, if you look up at the upper right hand corner it says F for female and standing, so he was, he was using these as kind of a, as a, as a reference guide so he could copy them if he was going to be doing his own comic because I get, I think he'd read about that in, in some how-to comics book that you need this kind of morgue of images that you could use as reference. He noticed that you can even start to kind of paste in random comics as well. And at some point I noticed too that he was just kind of, you know, assembling a lot of images of just very sexy girls too [laughter] On, and another, another side of the influences that I had as a kid, a very unusual thing for a, American kid for the time that I grew up, was to, to be, to read Tintin. In the, in the late, in the late fifties and early sixties there were six books that were published in, in America and my, my Dad, once again, bought those for me and they were really, they were truly amazing books. I mean, I still, they, for me, they still hold up, they're beaut, great characters and, and, and the production on them is really pretty amazing. So those were the first books that I had a real sense of it's, of what my comics, something that was handed to me and it was something specifically just for me. There were other comics around my house like, I don't know, Dennis the Menace and, I don't know, Donald Duck and things like that that I shared with my sister but this really felt like something that was uniquely mine. There were six, there were six books published in the US and on the inside, these are the end papers of the, of the Tintin albums, and what you'd see when you opened them up was this cast of characters and, and as a kid I would be able to look through and, and see some of the characters I recognized but what made me crazy is there were so many other characters that looked really intriguing that I had no idea about and, and just imagining those stories was, was really, really just had a, had a real strong effect on me. On the back cover you had this list of, list of the other albums, the other books that were available and I would look at that and, I would look at that all the time as well. There'd be, here's a little close-up, I'd look off into the horizon and see this, this crumbling castle off in the, off in the water there and just, that would, that would make me crazy just thinking about what that story was and the fact that I couldn't read that story, you know, was, was, you know, would just burn in my mind. And I think that the, I think that the stories that I imagined were probably more exciting than the, than the actual book when I finally read it. On the other side there, on the same back cover, there's, there were just odd things like this, I didn't know what that was, it was like a, a mushroom or something, but I didn't even know what a mushroom was. It was just this very odd abstract thing off there and so I'd, you know, I had to wait many, many years before that mystery was solved. So here's, here's, here's one of my favorite passages of, of TIntin and keep in mind that you have, these are books that were read to me early on but I, you know, I guess I slowly learned to read while, while looking at these but I primarily read them by looking at them. Here you, Tintin never looked really upset, you see sweat droplets flying off of him so you know that he's scared, because you never see him scared, anyway. Ha, ha, ha, ha, admit it, you're scared, come closer to the door, come closer. Come a little closer, good. Now look, there's an intercom. So of course I don't know what an intercom is, I've never seen an intercom in my life, I have no idea what the concept it. When I'm looking at it I see this voice coming out of the wall and I see that as a, as like it's a mouth that's kind of inside this, inside, embedded into this wall. So there was something very dark and mysterious about a lot of the images that I was looking at that, that, that I just wasn't able to interpret that, at that, that age. And I was also, I was, I was a prime candidate for the, I don't know, there was a monster fad in the early sixties. I was just, I was just the right age for that. My friends had monster magazines, I had to figure out what I could trade to get copies of those because I didn't have access to them. There were also things like ugly stickers that Topps Bubble Gum put out and there was, there was, those made me crazy too, like, you know, like, you know, there was, you just, I didn't have that much disposable income so I could only afford a few things so if you look at that, the sticker, in the middle of gym, I remember my, one of my grade school friends realized, he said, I, I realized you could really draw when you, when you copied gym perfectly. I was also into, there was a television show called the Outer Limits and these were some kind of garish cards that were, that were taken from the Outer Limits television show and they, they featured a lot of very intense creatures. They were, they were, whereas the twilight zone was more cerebral, more a mystery, the Outer Limits was more science fictiony and outer space creatures, that sort of thing. But you've got tha, if you, you see the jelly creature on the side there, I remember there was a sequence where he's out in some, some swampy, some, some marshland and he's feeding swamp grass into a little mouth in his stomach, that was, that was a good moment for me. And as I said, as a, as a kid I didn't have that much access to comics, it was pretty much where, you know, where you live, we moved around a lot. So I'm kind of relying on what, where your parents took you and what they were, what they were willing to buy for you. So early on there were pretty much the things that were available were, were mainstream superhero comics and of course you kind of had your choice between Superman and Batman and of course I opted for Batman because it was kind of darker and weirder. Superman just, it seemed too easy for Superman. Just, there's just something about, I don't know, the lines and the, and the kind of spookiness of it that I was very attracted to. A little bit later I was, I was, I got into Spiderman. This is, this is the early issues that were, that were done by an artist called Steve Ditko who was a really, had this very idios, idiosyncratic way of drawing. Peter Parker, here's Peter Parker, the very, very earliest you see, he's, he's always a nerd but he was, he had really bad glasses, he was actually, he was, nothing muscular about him, he was very, very skinny and he was, he was just kind of a creep. He was a guy that just, you know, you try, he wanted a girlfriend but he just was always, he just couldn't quite manage it. He had to take care of his, his ailing aunt and a, and a lot of the stories really were a little bit of a, of a soap opera and I think at the time I, I, I convinced myself that I was buying those, those superhero comics and the Spiderman comics, you know, for the fact that it was like this, this, I don't know, this story about a crime fighter in a costume, but I, I realized, in retrospect, that I really enjoyed the, the stories about, you know, his personal life a lot more, the kind of, his bad romance, his bad, I don't know, his, his, his lack of luck with girls. And here you see, here's like a little headdress, so the, on the, on the left there you see Steve Ditko's more kind of primitive and scary=looking Spiderman and then they brought in, when he got fed up with the strip, they hired a new cartoonist and you can see it's a lot more sanitized. The guy on the right actually knows how to draw a neck properly. [Laughter] And, and, you know, all of a sudden Peter Parker is, is driving a motor cycle, he's got a girl, he's got girls that are interested in him. He's dancing, he's got two girls that are interested in him so it's like, you know, suddenly, you know, he took on a whole new character. I guess I like the darker, nerdier guy, I could relate to that a little easier. Just about the time that I really, really was fed up with, with mainstream superhero comics, I was introduced to underground comics. I remember walking the halls, I really think it was in ninth gr, when I was in ninth grade, someone said Burns, I just saw these, these comics and you're going to love them, they're called Zap comics and they're really dirty and sure enough, you know, I got my hands on them pretty soon. So these are, this is a comic that was, the early issues were, were entirely done by Robert Crumb who's still working and still doing really amazing work and, and then later he gathered together other artists to contribute, including well, a lot of other, a lot of other famous underground cartoonists. His work kind of veered off shortly after that. He was kind of, he was the, he was kind of the, the nice, sweet, hippie cartoonist and, and at a certain point he kind of allowed all of this kind of darker side to, to emerge so we have, we have big ass comics, weird sex fantasies with the behind in mind, another one, plunge into the depths of despair. See if there's anything good on, why bother. [Laughter] And also, I guess I was probably, probably in, in high school around that time, I, I discovered some specialty stores that, that sold old, old magazines from the, from the fifties, from the forties and fifties and so I, I, I bought these odd crime comics and again these were for, these were for kids but they were, some were pretty gruesome and violent. There was a whole crusade against comics in the fifties and these were the comics that they were trying to get rid of and they, they succeeded but I succeeded in finding them in the used bin in, in old comic stores. So I'd pick up the, you know, very trashy, whore comics and I was, I also really liked romance comics, I still do. I, I like the, they're a little slice of Americana, they're, they're, they're stories that are, that are written by middle aged white men that are, you know, talking, you know, and they're for, they're for supposedly for teenage girls or for preteen girls about, about what they have in store for them. [Laughter] And there's, and there's also kind of a darker side that emerged too. There were, there were kind of these, these kind of, I don't know, bad girls or, or, or people that are, that are, you know, where romance is kind of going, going astray. You've got, here's a woman who's saying and just what must I do for those. [Laughter] I don't know, great, great lover romances are just kind of sleazy and fun. So some of my, this is, this is some of my early work. I did a, I'm trying to even remember the title of this comic, anyway. Here's, here's an early piece that was based on some of the romance comics I was looking at. Oh no, how will I face another sleepless night with this terrible image in my mind. Why is it that every time I think about Ron I have a horrible vision of a burning bed of flesh, all crispy and swollen. [Laughter] Oh yeah, so this was a series called Mysteries of the Flesh and I did, they were, they were, they were one page pieces that I was, I was trying to find outlets for my work after I got out of school and this was in a, in a punk fanzine out of Oakland that was printing these. Here's another one, I've finally reached the point where it's impossible for me to face her. I was living a lie that was consuming me from within. Nothing's wrong, it's just that something's come up and I won't be able to see you for a while. Look, I've, I've got to go, I left the water running in the bathtub. Why do you have to lie to her Brian, you're going to have to tell her about it some time. And other things I was working on, I was doing some, some comics or, or illustrations that were really dealing with, not really explicit in areas [assumed spelling] but, but piecing images together and it's something that I still do, it's almost a collaging, a collaging of images together and, and here I'm looking at some, some romance comic covers. I'm looking at advertising from the forties and you can tell from fairly early on I'm, I'm, I'm interested in disease or the idea of disease. This is, this is a comic I did for Raw magazine, Raw magazine was mentioned. It was published by, it was published in the early eighties by Art Spiegelman who went on to do Maus and his wife, Francois Mouly, who's now an editor of the New Yorker, or cover editor or art editor, and they were putting together this very, this big oversized comics magazine, an anthology, and Art Spiegelman was really probably the first person, the first person, first cartoonist, first real cartoonist that I met. He was the first person I feel like really understood what I was getting after and I remember showing him this piece very early on along with a lot of other work I had and I remember he was looking at it for a very long time and I was starting to get nervous and, and, and at a certain point I started trying to explain it, well what I'm doing here is and he cut me off very quickly and said no, no, you never have to explain, and after I heard that I realized that he understood what I was getting at and appreciated it and I didn't have to explain, which was great. Here's an early water, early watercolor again, you can, you can imagine this was probably taken from a romance comic, slightly darker. This kind of led into this character called Dog Boy. I was, I was, this again, this was published in Raw magazine and I was living in Philadelphia at that time, working as a, as a waiter in downtime Philadelphia and I felt, I remember just this, this idea of being a Dog Boy came to me, I felt like a dog boy coming back on the train, felt cr, you know, horrible and so here's a story about, just this short, little story about this, this guy who can't afford a, a real heart transplant so he has to opt for having a Labrador dog heart put into him and he obviously takes on the characteristics, takes on doggy characteristics. And at first I really felt like it was really kind of a one liner, okay, you kind of get, you know, it's, he has, he takes on dog characteristics and, and that's it. So here's another little, a little strip that I did, but then I went on to do some other pieces, longer pieces with him. In this case I kind of placed him in my, in, in my work environment. I didn't wash dishes but I was around dishwashers and I was around that whole kind of that, that, that whole, the, the, the kitchen scene there and so I, its, it made sense to have dog boy in there licking the dishes and, and begging for bones. Here's another, another early story I did called A Marriage Made In Hell and this appeared in, appeared in Raw magazine as well. At the, at, at this, in this particular story I was really using the kind of language in a lot of the, in a lot of the romance comics that I was looking at, this kind of overwrought language. Our life, our, our, our life together, sorry, our life together continued, a monotonous parody of marriage, seeds of doubt had been planted in my mind. Was John's story about his physical affliction really a lie? Was he secretly in love with a Hollywood sweater girl? All of my efforts to make our marriage work now seemed useless. What's this, lipstick on his collar and I know it isn't mine. Sniff, sniff. What's that smell, why, it's, it's perfume and what's this funny looking thing? [Laughter] So here's a, this is kind of hard to tell, but this is a cover I did for Raw magazine and in each issue they had, again it's a very large oversized magazine, in each issue they had kind of special things. This issue had a little flexi disk, a little plastic record that was a, an edited version of a, a Ronald Reagan speech that, I mean he sounded a little crazy a lot of the time but this was an amazing edit where he's talking about cans of poison meat that have a, attachable stein handle [assumed spelling] I don't know. So anyway this, the, we had to figure out in this particular cover there were, we had a die cut, meaning you're looking at the black and white cover and you're seeing the image behind it. So on the cover we've got a vinyl record inside with Ronald Reagan Speaks for Himself and I remember being very resistant, I didn't want to draw Ronald Reagan in my comic but it would, you know, it had to be on there somehow, so I ended up having Ronald Reagan in a picture frame holding a gun to a steak and so during that time, early on I was also looking anywhere to have outlets to have my work published and there weren't really that many magazines at that point that were, were publishing the work that I was doing or was interested in doing. There was a magazine, Heavy Metal, which doesn't seem like it's very appropriate but it was a, it's a science fictiony sort of magazine that, that, that published a lot of European comics and they started taking American artists so I started serializing this, this character El Borbah who is a, oh you can see for yourself, he's kind of a, an odd, overweight Mexican wrestler, he's got a little mask on, smokes and drinks incessantly and, and kind of accidentally solves his, the cases that he's hired for. He was inspired by, when I was living in California, I would be able to go to Mexican stores that sold Mexican magazines so I'd pick up these beautiful, import, I mean for me they're beautiful, imported, imported, imported Mexican wrestling magazines and they, in almost every one of them had these, these great masks. My favorite one, I don't have a good photograph of it, my favorite was this guy called the Executive who, who just wore a suit and tie and a mask and, and came on with a little briefcase into the ring. So this is, this is my, the first book, a, a French book called El Borbah that collected some of those stories. Eventually those stories got put together into, into an American edition called Hard Boiled Defective Stories and whenever I got interviewed it was always Hard Boiled Detective Stories and I always winced whene, you know, so I, I think there's a few times where I was on, on camera where I was making a face when they said detective instead of defective. Anyway, this is the book dump where it says buy my book or I'll feed you your face. For the, for the back cover I created all these little, these, these oh, they're, they're based on pulp fiction magazines, pulp detective stories that came out in the, in the, I guess in the forties. So I did, I did a separate cover for each story. Throwing defective, crack defective, spicy defective. And this is a more recent collection that Fanagraphic Books put out, Fantagraphics Books put out, it's hard to say and [laughter] I couldn't resist to, you know, stealing from my, from my favorite author so I, I took his, I took Ehrjay's [assumed spelling] cast of characters and, or the idea of, of using that cast of characters, and used that for my end papers of the book. This goes back a little bit further. Early on again I was, there was a period where I, I was looking for any outlet to get my work published and there was, I can't remember what, I think maybe it was the Village Voice, some, some weekly periodical, weekly tabloid paper, they had an opening for a, a, like a little panel strip like this so this was my attempt to, to try to do a gag strip and I just wasn't very good at it but this, this was, I call it mutantis [assumed spelling] this, this was published in a small Seattle paper but on the far right you see the very first permutation of a character I came up with called Big Baby. Oh you're nothing but a big baby. I guess that's my idea of a punch line. And, this, this was a, this was the illustration I did for a French, a French comics magazine and early on the, the character was pretty, it was pretty nasty, kind of a nasty kid, you got, he's got his, his air rifle that he gets for Christmas and you can see his parents in the foreground. But then I realized that I, that, that, I, I, I, I'd like the character and I, and I really, I made him a lot more, I, I kind of placed him in this environment that I grew up with, grew up in in the early sixties and so he's this much more, I don't know, much more benign, benign character. This is from a story I did called Curse of the Molemen, it was a little book that was published by Raw Books in the early eighties. And here's the, you're looking, this is kind of the, the front, back and spine of the book and spread out and we took, if you're looking at the back it says meet Tony an average American kid with everything in the world to look forward to except nightfall. The mom and the dad were islands of sanity in a world they never made. Mr. Pinkster, his obsessive jealousy did not mix well with booze and bullets. Mrs. Pinkster, she wanted love but all she got was a black eye. [Laughter] So if you opened up the book, there, there was a, the end papers, these were the end papers and I, I really loved, I always loved the, the design of books where, where someone's really paying attention to every aspect of the book as an object and I love end papers and, and beautifully designed books so this is my chance to, to, to do that, this was, was kind of like looking, looking at things that would have been in my drawer or what I wished was in my drawer when I was a little kid. So bubble gum cards, comics, robots, toys, plastic spiders. And I did another, I did a later version of it for another publisher and of course on the back cover I once again stole from Ehrjay, I even lifted, did a version of the text that was on the original American edition. I'll try to read it here but it's on, it's small type. It says what you should know about blood club. Blood club is the newest addition in a brilliant series of picture story books loved by children and praised by parents and teachers all over the world. [Laughter] Each book in the series tells a complete, exciting story featuring Big Baby, a slightly abnormal American kid whose exploits take him from his own backyard to the darkest recesses of his sweltering brain. Big Baby's devoted readers number in the thousands and include not only children but a handful of feeble-minded adults. [Laughter] Here's what, and here are some of the reasons why. And I went on and included some quotes that were taken from the London Times Literary supplement and then on the bottom I added one by Dr. Jerry where he says pictures within pictures for children who aren't quite sure what they're looking at. And this is, this is another illustration from a recent volume of a, that's still available that, that Fantagraphics put out and of course, some of, I don't, I didn't have all those toys but I probably, again I wish I did but we have imageries from, imagery from the Outer Limits there, some Japanese monsters in the background, Japanese toys and then this little, this little re-creation of something, a little character that I created when I was a kid, the Little Green Man. And, and later I was actually able to design some toys, so these are some toys that I created for, for a, a Japanese comp, Sony Entertainment in Japan and these, these were called mon, monster teens and they're, they're very small. They maybe that tall and, and I remember going back and forth with, with the, with the, the people who were, I was working with and I remem, I originally was saying, well they, you know, have them all, they'll be like Goth kids or something like that because I'd, I'd come up with the first one, that's got this girl, this kind of, this green girl there that looks kind of Gothy and I remember having explained to me like the Japanese people do not understand the concept of Goth. I thought that's, that's weird, why do I see that magazine called Gothic Lolita, I don't know, where did that come from [laughter] anyway. So later I was showing you some of the, the pieces that I grew up with that were, you know, made by Topps Bubble Gum and, and later I actually got to do work for Topps Bubble Gum. These are some pieces that were from, I don't think anyone probably knows about Peewee Herman anymore but Peewee Herman was very popular and they, these were from a Peewee Fun Pack and they were these really ridiculous little masks that would never fit, you know, even the smallest child but they were fun to do. I did iron-on T-shirt designs, they were fun. I didn't come up with the concepts but I was more than happy to, to do these. [Laughter] I actually, I actually had to in order to scan these I actually, I didn't have, I didn't have the original artwork anymore so I actually had to iron these on a T=shirt material to scan them so that's what you're looking at. When I'm talking about my work I usually primarily talk about the work that, I mean the work that I create all by myself, meaning my comics, but I've always, another side of my work is, is doing illustration. I've always kind of gone back and forth supporting myself by doing illustration and advertising and I guess the, the, the, it feels, it all feels like it's my work, it's all my work, on the other hand, the work I do, one, on one side it's work for hire, it's, it's, someone's hiring me and, and wanting me to execute their ideas primarily or hiring me to, to, to, for my style. So this is a, this is a Rolling Stone illustration about Heavy Metal so of course, of course I like robots so, I got to draw a robot. Little Richard, sweating Elvis. To see Lou Reed, a young Lou Reed, I guess his parents gave him shock therapy because they thought he was gay or they're worried about him being gay, so, going to try to burn that out of his brain. This is Iggy Pop. And I was lucky enough to, mo, I, I, I did a few album covers, I haven't done that many. There's something about, for, for me anyway, there's something about an association with the music and the artwork that appears on album covers that are very, very, they're, they're completely locked together and I've been offered to do album covers by musicians that I'm just not crazy about so I, I usually turn those down. I just don't want to, I don't want to have my work associated with music that I can't stand. So there's been some, I, I can't remember the names of people that have asked me but I haven't done that many but, of course, I grew up loving Iggy Pop and the Stooges so it was my chance to, to do an album cover for him. The only thing, the, the, the funny story here is that the, the, it was done by Virgin Records, I guess, and they were a little concerned about the girl smoking the joint on the cover but then I explained that well, yeah, there's this song on there about a girl smoking, a cute girl smoking a joint, so that seemed legitimate to me. But the character in the center there with the red hair, originally, I guess, he looked a little bit too much like Roy Orbison so [laughter] Roy Orbison who I have great respect for but he had just died recently and I guess he was on, I guess Virgin Records was, you know, was putting him out so I had to doctor him up a little bit so he did not look so much like Roy. It was an odd, it was an odd thing to get edited on. And I've done, I've done some very mainstream, some surprisingly mainstream things like Time magazine covers. Usually that has to do with when it's a down, a down time in the news, you've got to, you've got to have something on the cover so, anyway, we got covers like this, or this, something about the yin. Here's the New York Times magazine [laughter] This is, it's funny, things, there's something that's so iconic about this image obviously and I've seen it, I mean obviously I was stealing from the original and I've seen this actually used and people have stolen this for, I don't know what they're trying to sell, used cars or something. And I, I did a couple, I've done some illu, I've done a lot of illustrations for the New Yorker, I did a few covers. This was done around the time that everybody was talking about, I don't know, cholesterol, so, bad joke. And, I don't know, I was always, I was always, as far as New York was concerned, my Dad grew up in New York in the Bronx and was interested in Reginald Marsh and people who were showing, I don't know, Coney Island, scenes like that kind of, I don't know, working class scenes, that was things that I looked at, so I wanted to do some, something that kind of related to that, that feel, that time period, let's look at Coney Island. And this actually, believe it or not, this came close to being a, a New Yorker cover but this was actually, it was run in the magazine, there was a, they asked a bunch of, of artists to do their version of the New Yorker mascot Tilly, so this is Mutant Tilly. So here's getting back to some comics here. I did, I did a number of comics that, that kept on going back to this, this idea of, I don't know, a plague or a teen plague, a disease that manifest itself in teenagers and so I, this is, this is part of a, this is a page from, I think it was a 3 or 4 page story where you got this kid who's got a rash that's slowly creeping up his chest and he knows that eventually it's going to reach his face and he's going to be outed. Everyone's going to know that, that he's got the bug. And here's another short piece that I did for Raw magazine. It's, it's more to do with the, the, the living dead, I suppose. Walking down a cool, dark road, set of teenagers who won't stay dead. Creepy crawling into the back door late at night after Mom and Dad are safe in bed. They stay a while, maybe watch TV, make a sandwich, always leaving something, a stain on the sofa, a clump of hair, a decomposed finger and always that same odor, hard to define, something wild and rotten, the smell of shallow graves. So initially I think I, I, before I worked on Black Hole I, I, I had a couple of false starts, I had the idea that maybe this story would be about kids coming back from the dead or, or living out in the woods, having this community out in the woods and, you know, kind of crawling back and, you know, coming back to what's comfortable and normal for them at night. And then it, that just seemed, it seemed to, I don't know, it seemed more like the er, I wanted to, I wanted to do a story that was really much more character driven, that was much more about the-- I don't know what I was going through at that time in my life and what my friends were going through or at least what I felt like I was going through. So this is the first page of Black Hole where you've got this, this big graphic image. I mean, most people I knew, at least in America, not a rite of passage but something that almost everyone did was did a dissection in, in, in science class, biology class, so I wanted to start with that. It was so weird, happened in my third period, biology class. We got divided into groups of two because we were going to, we were going to be dissecting frogs. I lucked out for once and got Chris as my lab partner. Chris Rhodes, she was a total fox. All the other girls were squealing and stuff and the guys were sort of taking over and putting on the whole tough guy act. I guess I was trying to do the same thing. I went ahead and pinned the arms and legs down like you were supposed to and was just starting to cut it open when it happened. As the skin opened up a bunch of formaldehyde spilled out. You could see the guts through the slit I'd made and they looked all hard and white. I froze, I can't explain what happened, it was like a deja vu trip or something, a premonition. I felt like I was looking into the future and the future looked really messed up. Keith, what's the matter, are you okay? For a while there I was just floating. It was this totally black space, I'm sorry, totally black place, it felt kind of spacey but it felt nice, nice and safe. And then it was like things started pushing into the blackness, voices, blurry shapes. I must have passed out, I was lying on my back. He just keeled over Mr. Fullner -- kaboom. You should have seen the look on his face. And the next thing I know, I'm looking at all these faces. Mr. Fulner was saying something, back up, give him some air. Keith, what happened, are you all right? I didn't say anything, I felt like a total dipshit. He must have wimped out looking at the frog guts. Yeah, what a pussy. Everybody was laughing their fucking heads off, everybody except Chris, she wasn't even smiling. So when I, when I originally was, was putting together the book, I, I'd always conceived of it as a, as a long story, a full story, but I, I put it out, I serialized it in, in comic book form, kind of a traditional American comic book format and one thing I always aware of, I really, I really wanted, if you're looking at, these are some of the covers, I, I, I was always interested in the, in the, the graphic effect, having a very strong graphic effect with, with, with all the images and, and I would have the title on each cover but I didn't put my name on it, I didn't put the publisher's name, I didn't put the price, I really just wanted the artwork to speak for itself. So there were 12, there were 12 issues that came out, serialized to, to tell the complete story. And here's just, just to show you a little bit of the way that I, that I work. When I'm working I, I use the, the cheapest school notebooks to take my notes in, either to draw in. I, I always feel a little intimidated by beautiful sketch books, I always feel like I've got to fill them up with beautiful drawings. So maybe I'll do one beautiful drawing and then set it aside. I always buy like, really cheap books and I guess most of my notes end up end up being written out, but then I'll just make visual notations. So these, I was coming up, I was trying to come up with a cover for Black Hole and these will probably be the first, just kind of first scribbled notes that I was making. And I arrived on this idea of this, of this cover, and I make a little -- it says, "The cover with Frankenstein, famous monsters" so on the right there, you see what I am referring to, which is like an old, an old cover from a monster magazine that I've remembered. And when I'm drawing, I, the first image is the one on the, on your left here, I started out very, very roughly, almost gestural drawings. There are some drawings that I do that are, that almost look abstract. I'm really putting the basic shapes down. And so I work on layers of tracing paper, so just build, building up images that way. And then I put another piece of tracing paper on and refine the drawing that way. And so here, I actually flip the drawing over sometime, so you're seeing a mirror image. If any of you draw, you can try that sometime. You can either look in a mirror or you can, if you have a computer, you can look at it as a scan and flop it over, and you can really see, your, your brain becomes very adjusted to looking at drawing after a few hours, and it gives you a clear, a clear view, or, you know, a clear view of the drawing. So I do that quite often, I, I'll flip it over, so I've got a, a mirror image of it. So there a, a more tight drawing on the, on the right there. And then on the, I'm sorry, on the left. And on the right, you see a, the inked version of it. And back then, this is before I was working on the computer, I had this odd technique of a, doing a, doing a black and white transparency of the, of the black and white artwork, and then doing the color from behind, almost like an animation cell. And then on the right, you, you see the final cover. And one thing I was trying to do when I was, was working on the book was, was really thinking about how the book was constructed visually. For each of the title pages, I would have a corresponding image on the, on the left there. And for the, when you open up the book, open up the comic, I would have end papers that would, that would fill up the entire book, there was end papers in the front, and end papers in the back; they would be usually slightly different in this case. The only difference was a little bit of splatter. And this was, this was an issue where there was some reference to a bucket of tadpoles that got bad. Put it at the end of the story. This is Rob Fasencandy [assumed spelling] from my ninth grade art class. [laughter] If you look really carefully, you can see a roach clip on his, on his lapel there. [laughter] Keep in mind this is ninth grade. [laughter] This is, I'm trying to remember his name, I forget. Anyway, he lived down the street from me and he was a mouth breather. [laughter] So in, another thing I did on, in the serialized version of Black Holes; there's a page that had a copyright and indicia information. I would do this kind of before and after drawing. So this is the guy down the street and he got what he deserved. [laughter] And I was taking these from, I was taking these from my high school annuals, and this is a really, really nice girl that did not deserve this, but I couldn't, I couldn't resist. [laughter] She was really nice. Good Christian girl. And this is, yeah, so, something I worked on for a long time, there was something I, Black Hole was serialized and I never really want to admit how long it took, but it took a long time. But I was bouncing back and forth, doing illustration work, so I was always kind of starting and stopping. And in a lot of ways, I think it was really helpful to do that. It gave me time to kind of step back and, and think about the story, and, and I think that a lot of the decisions I made were, were better because I had time to reflect. So more recently, this is, this is a book that came out in 2010, it's the first book in a series of 3. And if any of you remember that little mushroom image from Tintin, you can see that I haven't, haven't stopped stealing. [laughter] I'm using the exact same format as the Tintin books, and if the page count isn't exactly, isn't quite the same, but it's pretty close. But I decided I wanted to do a color book and it made total sense to kind of immersed myself back into, to the world of Tintin. So I've got 2 major threads in the story, one that deals with this character who is unnamed in the first story, but we'll call him Johnny 23, and then we've got Doug, who's really his real world counterpart. It's not really explained, and I'm probably explaining too much now. Here's a little sequence. Pardon, I, English, do you speak English, mouth, eat, no thanks. [laughter] [ Laughter ] >> Hey, hey mister, you don't eat that. You don't eat that junk. It will make you sick. So one thing that I became aware of while I was working on this book is I was, I guess I was, there was something great off the Internet, but I was looking up foreign editions of Tintin and actually finding pirated editions. These are, this is a cover of a Chinese, Chinese version of a Tintin book, "The Shooting Star." And something about this, there's something about it that, that, that really intrigued me. In a way, it, it kind of, it, it felt like I was, the same impression I had when I was a kid, looking at, before I could actually read, there was a kind of mystery there of looking at the text that you couldn't actually read. I, I remember seeing some French editions of Tintin when I was really young, and I couldn't read French and it was incredibly frustrating, so it kind of held that same sort of mystery for me. Here's a couple of other Chinese editions that, that are incredibly bizarre [laughter] You got to, I mean, Tintin shouldn't look that happy holding that gun, it's just a little [laughter] and, and Captain Haddock shouldn't look that angry either. [laughter] So I actually took that idea and created some-- woops, sorry-- created some foreign alphabets and did these kind of fake magazine covers with keeping that in mind. I did some kind of fake Nitnit, Tintin spelled backwards. Tintin covers. [laughter] And I actually went so far as to actually do a, well, kind of a cut up version of my story. This is, this is Johnny 23, which was published at same time as X'd Out and it was, it was put out by a small French publisher, and I just asked him whether he would do a, a cut up version of my story in, in purple ink with a, with a fake alphabet. So I, I, with, a friend of mine who knows computers, took my, took my, I did a typeface, a foreign typeface, and just, just re, reassembled, did a new story with this, with this fake script. A cut up, as it were. Little did I realize I was, it's a real alphabet that corresponds to a keyboard; little did I realize that someone was going to sit and translate that or break the code, so somewhere online you can find the translation of it. And it's pretty much gibberish, but I was still, I was writing in some William Burroughs' phrases, I was writing in some, I don't, some obscure things I was thinking about. So it was interesting for me because I was touch typing and I didn't realize, I wasn't really paying attention to what I was writing, so they corrected some of my mistakes, but it's out there somewhere. I'll be like this forever. I'll never find a way out. There's a river flowing under me, dragging me downstream. I'm on a raft, I'm drifting away, swept up in the flood, a raft loaded up with all my crap, all the things I can't seem to let go of yet. We were happy. We really were. At least for a little while. I try to control it, try to focus in on the good things, waking up with Sarah on a clear, beautiful day, walking with her through Chinatown, the sky impossibly bright and blue. Everything bright and clean and new, but my eyes always drift. I always look down. [ Silence ] >> There's a, there's something in my eggs. What, that? That's nothing. Sometimes the eggs get fertilized by accident, but it's no big deal. Hey, it's all protein. If you don't want it, I'll eat it. Come on, get over it. It's a nice clean place; you've got nothing to worry about. And that is that portion. [ Applause ] >> So I'll be more than happy to, anyone want to put on some lights in here so we can see everybody? No one needs to look at me in the light here. There, that's better. So any questions? Yeah. >> Is X'd Out based on any particular Tinin comic or just sort of a hodgepodge of them all? >> There's like, you know, not the very first, just little bits and pieces that find their way in and it's, it's really just a kind of the images that I internalized, so you, I was showing you that intercom in the beginning, and if you noticed, on the last pieces here, you see an intercom, so that kind of, those, those things, whether they're very specific or not, find their way in. I think, I mean, I know that people in the U.S. are, are reading Tintin now, and there's the movie that came out, but over in France and Belgium, it is, it's like so incredibly popular that, that every single reader of, of my book instantly knew like, what all the most obscure references were, so...yeah, I mean, it's not necessary to understand the book, but it's something, it's just a part of who I am, so it's something that just kind of rose up to the surface and something that I wanted to include. >> I read it when I was a kid for what it's worth. >> Charles Burns: Okay. [Laughter] It's funny but when I talk to other cartoonists my age, none of them really read it. Like, if there was like, if there was a limited run of American books and I guess they just didn't do very well, like, I've never come across someone my age that, that was influenced by Perjay [phonetic] Like, people who are younger, you know, now they're accessible and they've been around for quite long, so, it's much, you know, it's much more prevalent. Right there. >> Okay. I thought I remembered reading in an interview with you that at one point you had spent a lot of time in museums, too, and were looking at a lot of paintings, and I'm just curious if you've been focusing on kind of the comic stuff... >> Yeah, yeah, that's true. >> I'm just curious which, which painters you responded to. >> Well, I skipped, I skipped around, I mean, I pretty much showed you the, the most direct influence. I think the things that I really internalized were the things that I looked at, you know, when I was 5 and 6 years old or something like, you know, going into 7 years old. I think those are the things that, that, that bubble up from inside of me. But when I went to, when I went to college, I went to study finance, I was someone, I was like the kid that could draw in school, and I remember going to college, I remember going to the University of Washington. I stayed in Seattle, you know, I got in there, and I thought, oh great, I'm in here. And I had this very naive attitude that, you know, that somehow I would study something and by the time I got out, I'd be an artist. I just was clueless. But at that point, I, I went in and I studied printmaking, because that seemed like it was close to drawing. I didn't want to paint. I didn't know anything about painting. And I quickly found out that I didn't know anything about printmaking either [laughter] So I bounced around; I did photography, I did sculpture, I was really lucky enough to kind of work my way through all those different things. And, and there was a point where, you know, I did some really bad paintings. I realized I don't have to do, I don't have to be a painter. But I looked at a lot, I looked at a lot of work, my wife's a painter, so, you know, we both shared an appreciation of, of going to museums, so, and yeah, I'm not someone that's just influenced by print comics, but I guess, if I'm thinking about, I'm thinking of some of the Chicago imagist painters, there's a group called "The Hairy Who, but I never really responded to, they weren't, they weren't doing pop art but they certainly were doing work that was influenced by the pop imagery that I was, that I had grown up with, and, and I still liked their work, but, then I can look at, I can look at, you know, Italian, Italian Renaissance painting, I can look at all kinds of things and enjoy. Like I try not to limit myself to anything, you know. [ Silence ] >> I was just wondering what made you choose black and white over color for Black Hole? >> It's a story that, for me, it could only be in black and white. It really, there was so much about the actual, the actual feeling of that black and white. Some of my earlier comics, I used to use grey tones, I used to have, there were some tones that you could, you could cut out and apply to your paper, and I would even do crosshatching and things like that, but my work slowly moved towards just being purely black and white, and in this case it really had so much to do with the character of the story, feeling the story. There's a, it's somehow, just like sometimes, just like a texture, or like a real visceral feeling of what those shapes are, what those images are, just the textures, the forest; it starts to be a real character, for me anyway, of the story, the atmosphere. It's created by the lines. So it's something just about the lines themselves that have a, have a real, they're very important. And, you know, color just doesn't seem like it would enter into the story at all. It just seems like it would be wrong. When I approached the story that I'm working on now, I didn't want to just do a colorized version of my black and white work. I really want to utilize color as part of the storytelling, so I've been, I've been very aware of that, how I can, how I can use the color to tell the story and that's been, that's been really fun, a new thing for me to do. I've also, if you look at the story, there's, a lot of the work is much more open and allowing, you know, I'm not using so much black, I'm letting the color work that way, so...there's just a real difference, a different feeling, a different atmosphere to the character of, you know, pure black and white. There. >> I've seen many different illustrators and artists who have very similar artistic styles before. But I've seen ones who have many, I mean, many of the similar ones, but ones that also have very different and unique ones. What are some of the most unique ones that you've seen before? >> Unique artists? >> Well, unique artistic styles for comics. >> G-d, I don't know, I mean, it was mentioned before that I worked with some Italian artists and when I was, I lived in Rome for, I lived in Italy for a couple of years in the early 80s, and what was nice was being introduced to a group of artists that had very different influences. Somebody was talking about painting, and here, it was nice to see a group of artists that, they, most of them did color work and, and did very painterly looking work and a lot of their influences were from painting, so it was nice to see that, I mean, most cartoonists I know grew up with very similar things that I, you know, same influences. You know, we all were, you know, looking at those kinds of comics that were available to us, so it was nice; it was nice to see those kinds of influences. So, so, yeah, I don't know, just some of the Italian cartoonists that, that I was aware of early on. It was funny; I was, I was around those guys for a couple of years working with them, doing work, and I remember at one point, one of their girlfriends said, "You know, you have been here for 2 years; you know, your work should start changing; you know, why isn't you work changing, you know, you're still doing this black and white stuff." And I had tried some color experiments but, yeah, my work is pretty much, it's, it's going to be the way it is, yeah. Yeah, it was not going to be changing any time soon. I, I can't, there's some, I mean, I guess I'm always attracted to some of the, the underground cartoonists, there's, when I say underground, it's not, I don't know, I guess less, less commercial cartoonists. In France, there's a lot of, I don't know, I don't even know what the right terms would be, but there's some, there's some interesting underground work or alternative work or non-commercial work that comes out, so I like looking at that work. Work that's not trying to sell anything, I suppose. That's all. That's not a very good answer, but... >> Just from a process standpoint, you tend to populate your panels with quite a lot of black. I've always wondered, do you approach it from the shapes to begin with and then apply the black as shadow and element or do you ever work in reverse, you know, white on black? >> No, I have, everyone thinks that would be the logical thing to do, kind of a scratchboard technique, to pull the whites out of the black, but no, I, I, it's always, it's always from white to black, so it's very simple tools; it's just like making lines and [laughs] building up those blacks, but that's, yeah, that's, the way I, the way I work, I showed a little of that, but when I'm constructing, when I'm constructing the pages and designing the pages, I'm, I'm always thinking about how a book works, and how a book is read, so you're thinking about 2 facing pages, and I'm always designing with that in mind, how you read a book, and how the 2 pages play off of each other. So it's very clear in Black Hole that each of the pages, or, they're always playing off of each other. They're mirroring each other or they're playing off of each other. So I would, I design the pages in very, you know, very rough thumbnails, very rough sketches, and then everything really starts in very rough form and slowly, slowly materializes. And that has to do with the writing as well. I write everything down in, in crappy notebooks. I just, I make an enormous amount of notes. And I repeat myself. Sometimes I'll think I've found an amazing solution to some passage that I'm working on, and I go back in my notebook and I'll see that I wrote the exact same lines down 6 months earlier. So it's that kind of struggle; I'm just, I'm taking all of this material and slowly, slowly refining it. It has to do with my drawing style, as well as the, as the writing style. So, I didn't have examples, really, but when I'm, when I'm working, I do very, very gestural drawings, and I'm just building shapes, and everything is built up internally, it's slowly formed. So, the drawing, you know, in pencil at first and then more refined, more refined, lined, and the final marks are made with a brush on paper, so I'm using a light box so the image, the final drawing is, is, a light box, I draw that out and ink everything out. So that's how I work. It's, it's, it takes too long, unfortunately, but that's the way my brain works, so I, that's the technique, the very, this convoluted technique that I've come up with. Anybody else? There's a person right there. >> [inaudible question] >> No, he was, he was always a, he was always someone who kind of dabbled in different things. I guess, I guess the primary influence was that, those things were not frowned down upon. He was interested in in pretty mainstream American daily comic strips. So some of the things that I showed you that were in the, in the, in the notebooks that he had, that would be an example, the things that he was clipping from newspapers or looking at, which again, it's like, Terry and the Pirates, very mainstream sort of adventure comics. But in the, he didn't really, he didn't, he, when he was working on projects, there always something, he would do sculpture, but it would be a copy of something, so he never really created characters of his own. If he was doing a water color, it would be a water color based on somebody else's drawing. So I, I was aware of that side of it. So he was just, he just had an interest in those things. The one thing that was really nice is I had access to those tools very early on. I could, I knew that, you know, I had books that kind of explained what tools you were supposed to use if you were a cartoonist, you had to work in ink, with India ink, with pens and so on. So what was nice is that I had access to those things and could, you know, could experiment early on. I didn't, you know, you have to do really, really bad, bad versions until you get slowly a little better. There was a certain line quality that I liked, the line quality that I have now, which is this kind of tapering, fluid line; I had no idea that that was created by the brush, so I would use a pen and draw one side of the line, draw the other side of the line, fill that in until I realized, oh that's a brush. Just do it that way, one mark. So yeah, so he, yeah, my father, my father is still alive and he still likes comics. I just bought him a collection of Prince Valiant, so it was like his last gift from me, so. Yeah, he still, he still enjoys it. He, I think that the subject matter of my comics probably is a little bothersome for him. At some point, I remember when Black Hole was coming out, I said, "I'm not going to give you this book. You can, you can search it out on your own. If I give it to you, that means I condone you reading it. So, you know could, just don't let my mom read this" is what I told him. [laughter] It was a little bit like, I was talking about, meeting Iggy Pop, and I did this album cover. He was saying, "Yeah, this new album's coming out, but I don't know what my mom's going to think because I swear a lot, I swear." I think like, are you kidding, you're Iggy Pop and you're worrying about what your mom thinks?" [laughter] There was something kind of sweet about that. Anyway. "I use the "F" word a lot. I don't know what mom's going to think." >> Right here. >> Yeah. You've talked a lot about your, your visual influences and, you know, how you, you go through that. But it's kind of interesting how you, you're able to make good use out of your writing as well. First off, do you find that daunting, as a, as a part of the process, because you're unique in that you do both parts. And then also, second question is, where do you find influence for, for your writing for your stories? >> Yeah, I, I think that most, most, most cartoonists that I admire do both. I know that there's a tradition, especially in America, of kind of breaking up that, you know, in the commercial counter, having someone that writes, someone that draws, someone that inks, someone that letters, but the people that I really admire, Alison Bechdel came here, Lynda Barry [assumed spelling] Art Spiegelman, Dan Klaus, Chris Ware, the people that I think are, you know, amazing artists and writers, they do both those things. And, and, and good comics are really that, that, there's some-, it's not prose, it's not film, it's not illustration; it's really, it's combining words and pictures in a way that, that tells a story that's totally unique. That being said, I think that, a lot, I think that there's cartoonists that, that come from a very visual side, which I would put myself on that side, and then there's cartoonists that, that are, they're, they're much more from the literary, or that, I don't know, the prose side. And I think that, I really did have to teach myself to, to, to tell stories, you know, so the writing part was something that, that, that, I won't say it came, it was something, I mean, I had stories to tell, but it took me a while to, to really learn how to tell a, a story well, I think. And, and as far as like, writing influences, that's a harder thing for me to, to nail down as far as direct influences, I can't, I can't think of a really specific author that would, that I can, that I can think of, in this book here, in the book that I'm working on most recently X'd Out, I, I use William Burroughs as, he's, he's certainly an influence there in the story, but that's primarily because the, the protagonist is, you know, going through a certain period of his life that I went through and I'm basing it on some of my experiences, so there's a certain point where I was reading a lot of William Burroughs, and I, I, I really responded to his, his very kind of dark humor and his, his very, I don't know, his kind of visceral, very visual writing style that, that I appreciated, especially at that point in my life. And I also am using some of his kind of collaging, collaging techniques that he did as well. Yeah, I, if, it's harder to come up with, like, a very, like, you know, someone I can directly think of. I guess I can think of someone like Ernest Hemingway that would tell very clear, very lucid short stories, like, I don't know, that was someone I'd respond to early on, but, there's not that, that direct correlation there. I'd, it's hard to say. There's someone that was right here, no, okay. >> You mentioned the Zap comics, and I know in later issues Crumb did a lot of like jams with Wilson and Imascoso [phonetic] and stuff. Have you ever considered collaborating in such a fashion with some of them? >> I, I actually have, yeah, I have with, I've, I've done, I mean, the thing, what you're talking about is, a, a group of cartoonists get together and they basically pass a page around. And, and add to each other's drawings. And it's, it's, it's fun to do, it's a nice, it's kind of a social situation. Cartooning for me, anyway, is a very solitary activity. It's really, it's me sitting in a room and I can spend, you know, 8 hours, 9 hours by myself, working by myself. And I, that's the kind of person I am. I'm fine with that. I have no problem with that. But occasionally, it's really nice to socialize, especially with other cartoonists, and that, yeah, so for me I find, you know, there's a, there's a dividing line there. It's kind of, it's a little more lightweight, but it's fun and it's fun to see what other people come up with, so I've done, I've done strips with Art Spiegelman, I've done a number of things with Gary Panter. I did, I did some, a piece with a French, a French artist called Killoffer. So, usually, it, it's almost the way I just described; you're sitting having coffee or drinks or whatever it is, and you're passing; it's fun, it's looking over someone's shoulder and it's social activity. But it's, it's just that, yeah, it's fun. [laughs] >> Hello. Like one of the motifs, like, I kind of got a bunch of your like, illustrations, at least, were, like, the wounds, and how it's like, very gruesome. Do they ever bother you drawing it? Or, because... >> There's been, there's been times where I've, it's maybe, maybe it's just the ideas that I've come up with, especially...I know, in retrospect, I know there's a certain period where I was, I didn't think I was censoring myself, but there was certainly some censor -- you know, I was self-censoring to a certain degree, and when I worked on Black Hole, I really made this effort not to censor myself, so when I was writing and thinking through ideas, I just, I really worked hard to delve into subject matter that, that was difficult for me. Difficult, I mean it was revealing, it was revealing a lot about myself too, or it felt like it to me. I know that Dan Klaus, another cartoonist that I admire, was saying, "A good story is a story where you reveal a little bit more about yourself than you feel comfortable." And that, that's what I was trying to do. I was really, I was trying to be as honest as I could. I was really trying to put myself into the characters and, and there were certainly passages where I thought, "I don't know if I can draw this. I don't know if I can do this..or" And it wasn't so much, I just didn't, it seemed kind of overwhelming, like, like it was too much, too much there, so there was, not so much to do with something gruesome, but maybe something that was just kind of, I don't know, overwhelming emotionally. I don't know how to explain that. But I really made an effort to, to get it out there. That's the best I can say. [ Silence ] >> Are there still plans to make Black Hole into a movie and if so, what are your thoughts on adapting your work into film? >> It's a, that's a good question. Yeah, Paramount Pictures had an option on Black Hole for, you know, about a year after the book came out that recently, I think they've gone through how many periods. Anyway, they're still interested, they're still working on it, they're still, it's Hollywood, so, so for a while David Fincher [phonetic] was attached as the director for awhile, and then, as far as I know right now, there's a script that has been written; they think they've got a director, and they think that they've got a new -- it used to be Paramount -- I think they've got, I can't remember the name of the, anyway. I hear, I get periodic phone calls, and it's a very funny Hollywood, all that Hollywood talk is real and I, I can't, I can't I can't mimic it. [laughter] I was writing down phrases and reading them to my wife after talking on the phone last time and I was like, I can't remember, there were some really good Hollywood phrases, but yeah, that's still being worked out. As far as how I feel about it, my feeling is, gee, I sure hope they make a good movie and I, my feeling is that I kind of doubt a movie will be made; that's just because it's Hollywood. So I just, I don't know. I've done 1, I've worked on 1 movie and it was, it was a good experience. I don't know that I'd do it again. I really, I was working with a, a small production company in France, and it was under really ideal circumstances; they really wanted me to, they wanted my vision to be there upon the screen. I was involved in every aspect of the, of the production, including sound effects; now that was fun. But I, what I realize was, working on it is, is that it's such a collaborative medium; you are just so reliant on other people for the final product. The one thing that's great about comics is that you, you know, you're responsible for everything. You can, you can do everything yourself. For Black Hole, I designed the cover; I was able to choose the paper stock, the binding, all those things. I really, really, I really had control of like, that object was mine, and if, if it, if there were any problems with it, if it was a crappy story, then that's my fault. So that's what I really like about it. I also like the fact that it's something that anyone can do. You can sit on a...sit at a table with a felt tip pen and a piece of paper and you can, you can do a, do a story. I like that, I like that about comics. So, as far as a movie, goes, yeah, I'm hoping for the best, but it's not a world that I, that I'm very concerned about, to tell the truth; I mean I, I concern myself about the story, something that I have control over. I know that if I got involved, I would make myself crazy, so, that's about it, yeah. Someone's got the mike, so they're in charge. >> I was wondering if you had any memories related to reading National, or a, yeah, National Lampoon magazine, in the 70s? >> Sure, sure, yeah, yeah. >> Because that, that was some, pretty interesting cartoons in that magazine that were along the lines of ... >> Sure, kind of like another... >> ...stuff that came out later, I thought. >> It was kind of like the next stage up from, a, from Mad Magazine. So sure, yeah, I was always looking at everything that was out there, and as I mentioned before, there were not that many outlets for comics and cartoons, so I was always keeping my eyes peeled. There was actually a little, a little comic section in the back of National Lampoon for a while, that, that I tried to, you know, tried to send them my comics. I'm actually glad that, they actually accepted the comics and then rejected the comics. So I'm pretty -- in retrospect, I'm glad that they rejected the comics. It was pretty bad. >> I remember a dog-faced boy, live action... >> Dog-faced. >> It's called dog boy, but yeah. >> Yes. >> So the character that was showing you on my slides. >> That was based on...? >> ...a short-lived MTV series called "Liquid Television" where someone was reminding me about Beavis and Butthead, which is going to be revived recently, but that was, that premiered on the show as well. So, he was a, 10 episodes of a live action story that I actually wrote, but it was directed by this British, British director, using British actors who were trying to be American, having American accents, so I guess they sounded okay to him, but they sounded really strange to me. And also, he was, he was directing it and kind of ran out of money after a while, so, I had the script, and he just like, there were just like, whole scenes that he didn't include because they ran out of money. And so I said, "Well, what about this scene and that..." and he said, "We couldn't film that." And so, when I finally saw everything put together, I couldn't understand the story that I had written, so [laughter] it wasn't a good sign for me, anyway. So I will do 2 more, does that sound good? The microphone's whirling around. Oh. >> Would you tell us anything about your recent projects? >> About my... >> Most recent projects, your... >> The most recent project is, you saw, X'd Out, which is the, the, a book that came out in 2010; I'm, the next book is a continuation of that. There will be 3 volumes in all. So that's coming out in October, so it will be 3 books in all; I'm working on the third, and when it's all put together, it really tells one big long story. A few other little side projects, but that's primarily what I'm working on right now. Okay, 1 more, 1 more question. There's one right in the center there that's been holding her hand up for a long time [laughter] >> [laughs] I was wondering if you had any advice for anyone who wanted to become a cartoonist and you know, what that process is like to kind of get started. >> My, my advice would, would be to, I'm not going to even be able to verbalize it very well, my advice is like, not to, not to, think, think about what's commercially viable, but think about what you care about. If you're trying to do the next, I don't know, Buffy the Vampire Slayer adaption, or whatever it is that you think is going to be a commercial hit, chances are it's going to just not going to be very interesting for you or for anybody else. I would say to draw and write about what you care about or something that is going to sustain you. If you approach it as a commercial project, you can do that, but I just, my advice is to approach it for your personal satisfaction to begin with. And like, again, the people that I admire are telling good stories and the reason they are good stories, is because they are heartfelt and they care about them and they've worked their asses off, you know, creating those things and you have to have something to sustain you. You have to have something that, you know, at the end of the day, that you are happy with, that feels like it came from you and it's not something, I don't know, a roller derby vampire story, with, you know like, I don't know [laughs] you know, something that you care about. [laughter] That's my best advice. Oh we got one, very last, no, there you go, very last one, right here. >> [inaudible] dark imaging in Black Hole? But as I was just reading Black Hole, I couldn't help put it alongside some other things I've been studying which was "Razorhead," by David Lynch and William Kentridge's "Re Envisioning of Jarry's Ubu," which reminded me of Netnet. So I was just wondering, I see in common predominantly, is this world like, sort of jumbled with lack, of these characters almost becoming objects damned by their own sort of efficacy towards this love object that they'll never touch, you know? So I was wondering if you could share any personal like, if you've been, if this has been in your head this whole time since the beginning or is it something that has been really bugging you during Black Hole. >> I don't know, I'm not even sure if I fully understand the question. I mean, you're respond, you're, you're, you're comparing it to a couple of other pieces -- but what was the -- what was the primary, you're, the question that I've... >> It's just, it seems like...like where in Big Baby, you see this drawer with just tons of toys... >> Mhm. >> ...that are just terrifying and cool at the same time. And then later in Black Hole, his room is just strewn with, with, like, almost the new version of that drawer, kind of, and, but it's just all sort of...junk. >> All me, yeah. >> But at the same time, everything is just so stressful regarding like, vaginal images and phallic images, and these characters. Like, the men, these characters, look like men because of the phallic, they're just like going after this vaginal image, you know. So... >> I'm hearing...I'm trying to...okay... >> And, I'm just wondering where the [laughter] okay, like in this, in this like world of lacking desire, you know, where everything is just built up around the lack, I'm wondering if... >> It must... >> Go ahead. >> It must have to do with what I was saying before, maybe, I mean, obviously it says something about me. My wife was saying, I can't remember what it was; she was looking at the, the, the animated movie I did and she said, "That looks like me, you're doing a story about me?" I said, "No, I wrote that story, you know, before I even knew you." But sure enough, you know, short hair, and looking too masculine, or something, I don't know, I mean, all the stories, I mean, there's something, there's obsessions and ideas that I come back to again and again. And you're talking about some of the vaginal imagery and these kind of obvious phallic imagery. For some, In some cases, I'm really playing with that kind of doing obviously over the top Freudian imagery that's just, just fun to play with. But, again, kind of, is built into the texture of the story. So if you are out in the woods, you're seeing this, this very kind of rich texture, and, I don't know, but I don't know if I can explain what, you know, what you're getting after and what you're question is... >> Okay. >> So that's the best I could do. >> Thank you. >> Okay, yeah. [ Applause ]