FACT: I did this interview for the March issue of a local Tucson ‘zine I’m very, very fond of entitled “The White Rabbit”.
OTHER FACT: I was interviewed by the publication’s founder, Nichole Goff.
OTHERER FACT: I’m posting this because I forgot to scan Ken(jamin) Wright’s pages (they’ll start rolling next Wednesday. I promise).
OTHERER FACTER: You’re all lovely, lovely people. Especially those of you who came out to Spazdog Comics sendoff on the 30th.
What (and who) is Modern Mythology Press? How did Modern Mythology Press form?
Well, if you want to get technical about it Modern Mythology Press is the small press lovechild of Dave “Party Time” Baker and myself. We dreamt it up. We threw what little money we had at it. We shouted about it to anyone who would listen. We churned out all the first books ourselves (God help us). All of that. I’m the primary writer and Dave’s the primary artist, but we switch off from time to time (in the self-publishing world, everybody does everything or nothing gets done).
We met up for the first time in 2003. I worked at a shitty record & “alternative” clothing store where Dave occasionally stopped by to pick up Punisher T-shirts & Paramore albums, and Dave worked at the comic shop that I made a pilgrimage to every Wednesday in order to pick up Smallville prop replicas & Hawkman comics. We made eyes at each other for months, but Dave was the first one to break the ice. I believe he said something to the effect of “I like your Wonder Woman ear plugs. Wanna make funnybooks?”.
Since then we’ve been lucky enough to attract a whole slew of creative types who hate their social lives enough to join forces with us:
Robert Mion come aboard pretty early on to help letter our books and handle formatting issues (aka “the boring shit”). Dude’s a genius when it comes to that stuff. He sped up the release of our graphic novel “Horrible Little People” by at least a year.
Angela Montgomery signed on to draw the touchy-feely romance stuff I love to write and nobody else can stomach (bless her little Asian heart). She’s the closest thing to a “manga” artist on staff, but to designate her with that label would be unfair to the rest of her fine art & commercial illustration influences. She’s going to be bigger than the whole lot of us combined in a year or so. Mark my words. You can see her work at www.MontGum.com
Angela’s beau, Sam Laggren, is hard at work drawing a boy adventurer series in the vein of Johnny Quest & Tin Tin that’s going to knock people right on their nerdy asses.
Holly Randall brings a real bold, underground feel to the mix. There’s nothing that woman can’t or won’t draw. It’s the most freeing feeling in the world to know that I can hand her a script that says “ok, I need a sex scene in this panel that’s equal parts Melrose Place and Dead Alive” and just rest assured that she’s going to nail it. She’s absolutely incredible. Plus, one time she drew me incredibly well-endowed, thus securing her position in the company FOREVER.
Alex Riegert-Waters honestly…just sort of makes me want to kill myself. He has this beautiful, incredible stylized way of visually communicating ideas that’s so effective I almost feel bad putting my words next to it, y’know? Like I’m cheapening it, or something? And, not only is he a hero with a pencil, he’s also a sponsored triathlete. Honestly. No bullshit. It’s ridiculous. Homeboy’s the Captain America of Tucson. I hate him. You can check his stuff out at www.Alexriegert-waters.com (but don’t, ’cause it’ll make you so jealous you’ll want to hurt someone.
Sam Bock draws the kind of figures I would give my left soul to see animated. She has that really rare gift that apparently God only saw fit to bestow upon her, Jim Lujan, Geoff Darrow and Mike Judge that renders every single character she draws as interesting and compelling as the story’s lead. Her people are so rich with little idiosyncratic quirks that I would plunk down my hard-earned three dollars for a book about any extra in any crowd scene she has ever drawn, no questions asked.
Ken Wright is this… this concrete God of Soul Power that could make any of the kids in Juxtapoz regret they’d ever been born. He and I first collaborated when he hired me to take elements introduced in his graphic novel “Bikini Automatic”, and spin them off into an ongoing series called “The Adventures of Bikini Automatic” (which remains one of the books I’m most proud of to date). He has been kind enough to churn out some minis for me since then, taking time out from his busy schedule touring the fine art circuit and literally makin’ babies with his wife (and oftentimes writer) Maggie Wright. He has his own little space carved out into the web at www.KenWrightOnline.com.
Free comics by all of those crazy kids can be found at www.ModernMythologyPress.com
Also: no one calls Dave “Party Time”. I made that bit up.
How does the creative process go for you, since you’re making comics
instead of traditional art (i.e. Is it difficult to write the comic
WITH someone as opposed to traditional art forms that are more
solitary? How does the “writing” and “drawing” process go?)
99% of the time, I sit alone in my pathetically geeky apartment & write a full script (which looks almost exactly like a screenplay for a film or play: stage directions, dialogue, character blocking–all of that), and then hand that off to the whichever artist I’m collaborating with and they just take it from there, and that’s that. They draw what’s on the page.
So far, Dave is the only visual artist (I say “visual artist” because it irks me to no end that illustrators get the “artist” accreditation, but for some reason people don’t consider writing an art form–probably because it’s immediately recognizable when someone can’t draw, but skill in writing manifests itself in less tangible ways like cadence, and…y’know, that sorta shit) who has expressed an interest in trying his hand at writing.
Dave and I sometimes will sit down over dinner (read: “a bag of potato chips and a couple of hands of ‘Magic: The Gathering’”) and talk out a story beat-by-beat until we’ve got something worth reading, and then he’ll go home and draw it, and I’ll come in afterward and lay down the dialogue and captions and all that jazz. We used this method with “Childish Delusions of Grandeur and Superiority #3″ and with “Horrible Little People”, and both times fans have lost their shit over the result. He has an amazing way of thinking in visuals that one can only attain after spending 22 consecutive years doing absolutely nothing but honing one’s drawing skills. It’s incredibly time efficient. Dude draws like a little Jewish robot.
I honestly prefer writing full scripts because I have more control over the story that way but I’ve found that the more collaborative “jam” process makes for much better comics.
There’s something about the challenge of collaboration that brings out the best in me. I wrote better articles as a journalist when I had a really hands-on editor, and I make better comics when I have an artist who is bringing his “A” game, and I have to really struggle to keep out from under his shadow. When everybody is trying to “one up” everybody else, the end result is that we all do much better work than we would have by ourselves, alone, in our “pathetically geeky apartments”.
What made you decide to tell your stories in comic book form, rather
than simply in art or writing form?
As I sort of half-assedly mentioned earlier, I worked as a “teen perspective columnist” for The Tucson Citizen when I was in high school (mostly to tease my poor mother into thinking that I might someday chase a financially responsible career than out of any real aspiration to be a journalist. Well, that and the fact the fact that it made me feel sort of like Lois Lane).
I’ve edited an online pop culture journal called “Heroes and Villains Online”.
I’ve written enough fan letters to Morrissey to fill a modest sized library (or the world’s biggest closet).
Heck, I even post prose on the website occasionally (see September 7, 2009’s “I fucking hate you, Pretty Girl At The Coffee Shop With The Tattoo On Your Neck. You are unnecessarily mean, and I’m pretty sure that’s real fur”).
What I’m saying is: I’ve written my fair share.
Believe me when I say: nothing comes close to writing for comics (or “graphic novels” or “pop art novellas”, or whatever buzzword is popular this week). A lot of it has to do with the collaborative nature of the beast and how awesome that is socially (I’ve met most of my favorite people on the planet at comics gigs), but it mostly has to do with the fact that I was raised by comics.
Growing up as a young guy in a single mother household, I gravitated towards fiction that I thought could teach me about the ever allusive concept of masculinity. Since the majority of American comic books have the word “man” in the title (“Batman”, “Spider-Man”, etcetera), they were a logical choice.
I studied them like scripture, and to this day there’s not a single conviction I hold dear that I can’t trace back to an issue of “Superman”.
And that’s exactly why comics are so important to me. For better or for worse, they made me who I am today.
Of course, there’s also the fact that (even though comics can be as loaded with meaning and subtext as any prose novel) one doesn’t have to be extremely literate to enjoy a comic book. They’re like film in that regard—they have the potential to convey loads of information in a relatively short amount of time to the widest audience possible. I dig the accessibility.
Unlike film, however, comics don’t have a budget. Cameron has to spend millions of dollars to pull off his special effects. All I have to do is set my artist up with a two dollar mechanical pencil and a twenty five cent eraser in the shape of a dinosaur I got from the vending machine at The Taco Shop. That sort of financial self-reliance means that I don’t have to tailor my stories to be “financer friendly”. I can say and do whatever I want in comics, because the only person whose money I’m gambling with is my own.
And there’s also the amateur scientist/professional elitist in me who feels like since images speak to the right side of the brain and words speak to the left, only when one combines the two is one creating a work of fiction that fully engages the entirety of the human mind.
Plus, y’know, comics (as in “sequential art”) are the earliest form of human recordings (the oldest example we’ve found thus far dating back 30,000 years on the walls of the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in Southern France)—so it’s pretty bitchin’ knowing that I belong to the universe’s oldest fraternity of storytellers, too.
Like I always say: “if it’s good enough for French cavemen and cavewomen (the latter of which my Microsoft word spell check does recognize, which offends me to no end), it’s good enough for me”.
If you had a chance to hang out with your favorite superhero, who
would it be and what would you do?
For a kid who grew up on them (and a man-child who spends most of his paycheck on them), I don’t really write a lot of superhero stuff. My work usually tends to be autobiographical. When I do write superhero-ish stuff, it tends to come out more on the side of “magical realism” than “action adventure”, y’know? More “I Heart Huckabees” than “Spider-Man 3”.
What primarily interests me in metahuman fiction is how the characters perceive their world. I dig on guys like The Flash (the fastest man alive, for whom seconds pass like hours) or Iron Man (who has so much weird mechanical bullshit wired into his nervous system he has more in common with a F-117 than with a human being).
My favorite superhero comic of all time is the last issue of Grant Morrison & Frank Quietly’s “All-Star Superman” in which Lex Luthor temporarily gains superpowers, ‘cause there’s this great monologue by Lex about how impossible it is to feel anything but boundless compassion when one can hear children’s whispered prayers and actually see peoples’ atoms swirling around and colliding with each other’s.
I’d do that, I guess: hang out with Clark Kent and stare at the swirling particles of my own hand until I had attained Nirvana, or until Jimmy Olsen needed help with his homework, or something.
Posted under eric's blog
“Graphic Novel” is a bullshit, made up, fairy tale term for comic books that evil marketing people utilize to sell their wares to intellectual assholes who think they’re too cool for comics.
The term “graphic novel” was first used by authors to describe non-serialized works that were larger than the standard 22 pages, but the phrase is now used to describe any collection of words and pictures a publisher wants to smash together between two covers (everything from Spider-Man to Watchmen). It’s a meaningless, embarrassing, shell of a word & I wish people would stop using it.
If you want to sound super extra hip: call monthly periodicals “singles” or “floppies” & the bound collections “albums”.
OH GOD I SOUND LIKE A CRAZY PERSON.