Seattle’s The Rocket wasn’t exactly an Alt-Weekly paper, as it came out monthly or, later on, twice a month. But the extremely influential free music/art/politics publication shared all of the important characteristics that are key to our study of the Alt-Weeklies. Here’s a piece I wrote for The Comics Journal on The Rocket, focusing on the Xmas-time covers done by some great cartoonists and illustrators and art directed by some really talented people:
Here’s my latest piece for The Comics Journal, a look at this year’s SPX festival. I focus on my inability to get an interview with Joan Cornellà and the remarks he gave in a panel moderated by Bill Kartalopoulos. I then look at some of Cornella’s influences, including Drew Friedman, Mark Newgarden and Dan Clowes. Also, Dylan Horrocks talks about how the comics scene has changed and grown since the publication of his book Hicksville.
Standing out among the crowd of youngsters displaying their new work at SPX last weekend was 71-year-old Bill Griffith, who was there signing copies of and talking about his new book Invisible Ink: My Mother’s Secret Affair With A Famous Cartoonist (Fantagraphics). Invisible Ink is a bit of a historical detective story detailing the 16-year love affair his mother had with the then famous, but now mostly forgotten, cartoonist Lawrence Lariar, a man Griffith calls his “Shadow Father.”
Lariar was an extraordinarily prolific cartoonist whose work included comic books, newspaper strips, magazine gag panels, crime novels, several how-to-draw books, and even contributed to National Allied Publications’ (later DC) New Fun, one of the earliest 10-cent newsstand comic book to include all new material, rather than newspaper reprints. And while prolific, Lariar never achieved much success as a cartoonist himself. “He was like a comics version of Woody Allen’s Zelig character. Present at every historical moment but never a major player…” Griffith writes in Invisible Ink.
In the late 1950s, Griffith’s mother, Barbara, began working as a secretary for Lariar and would sometimes bring home work, which the young Griffith would help her with. One of her first assignment was Lariar’s recently launched annual Best Cartoons of the Year collection that reprinted gag panel cartoons from magazines as chosen by [from the inside flap of the 1954 volume]: “America’s Cartoonist-in-Chief, Lawrence Lariar.” The series ran from 1942 until 1971 and was, and Griffith says, Laiar’s “cartoon bread & butter for decades.”
Griffith’s mother had replied to an ad in New York’s Newsweek placed by Lariar looking for part-time secretary for a crime writer.
Lawrence Lariar (from Cartoon Humor Vol. 3, No. 1 March 1940)
“It didn’t say ‘cartoonist,’” said Griffith. “My mother was a writer, she had been published a little bit, and that was what she did. He would speak his novels and she would transcribe them and then she would do all the grammar checks.” The relationship evolved over time and a good part of Invisible Ink is dedicated to Griffith’s search through history to uncover exactly who was this man his mother had been sleeping with. Barbara Griffith spoke of the affair exactly once, in 1972, moments after learning that her husband—and Griffith’s father—had been killed in a freak bicycle accident.
The book explores the effect the secret affair had on Griffith, his mother and his father. This took piecing together clues found on the internet and libraries about Lariar, who was a neighbor he hardly knew as a child growing up in Long Island, NY, and from the papers his mother left after her death in 1998, including love letters, two diaries and an unpublished novel detailing the affair. He said that he began to see Lariar as a sort of “shadow father.” While Griffith’s actual father was an intelligent man, he had no interest in art, Lariar was a “cultured intellectual.”
The Thropp Family from Liberty Magazine, May 11, 1946. Written by Lariar and drawn by Lou Fine and Don Komisarow.
“Lariar was a New York intellectual—you’d never guess it from his comics which were strictly boffo gags, guys and gals, just low brow stuff,” Griffith said. “But Lariar introduced my mother to a whole different world of art, music and culture. They just didn’t have a ‘hot sheet’ affair. They would go to gallery shows, museums, Broadway plays, movies, and all this stuff filtered into my house through Lariar, my mother and to me. I didn’t know…I didn’t say, ‘Hey mom, how come there’s a Picasso book in the house.’ It was just there. And it was there because of him. And I poured over it and I got wrapped up in the whole world of art, and comics, both, through him. Without knowing it.”
In addition to his mother’s papers, Griffith spent extensive amounts of time researching Lariar on the internet: “Go to Google and put in the name Lawrence Lariar and you will see hundreds and hundreds of pages of images, interviews, bios, articles. A huge amount of material.” He also visited the Lariar archive at Syracuse University’s library, which contains materials the artist left the school in the 1960s. Why the material is housed in Syracuse is unclear.
“I called Syracuse and asked, ‘Do you have the papers of Lawrence Larier by any chance? And they said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Has anyone ever asked for them before?’ She said, “No. You’re the first one.’ I went up there and spent a couple of days and went through boxes with white gloves and found original art, letters, scripts he wrote for early TV shows. This guy was…people think I’m prolific or overachieving? This guy was 10 times that. I can’t imagine that he had a minute to spare. He wrote 16 crime novels… He wrote three Best Selling How-to-Draw Cartoon books, one of which was in my house.”
With the help of the internet—“I can’t imagine doing this book without the internet”—Griffith then bought every single book that Lariar ever wrote, “dozens and dozens of books.”
For his mystery and crime novels, Lariar used several pseudonyms, including Michael Stark, Adam Knight and Michael Lawrence. Griffith compared them favorably to the hard-boiled style in current favor at the time and said he prefers Lariar’s crime novels to his cartooning. In addition to the Best Cartoon anthologies, Lariar served as the cartoon editor at both Parade and Liberty magazine, and he wrote or edited books—often using cartoons as illustrations—about many different topics, including golf, fishing, babies, driving, hospitals, teenagers, the suburbs and sex.
Lariar also produced several volumes of How-To-Books about cartooning, which were thoughtfully written and geared toward learning the basic skills he deemed for necessary for working cartoonists. In the mid-40s, Lariar started the Professional School of Cartooning, a correspondence school that promised to teach the art of cartooning from the likes of Henry Boltinoff, Ed Nofzinger, George Wolfe, Adolph Schus, and Lariar himself. A promise in a 1947 brochure for the School read: “Lariar’s smart, stylized cartoons are a model for many beginners, and his drawings of cute girls are familiar to all. He will criticize your drawings personally!”
Some of the most playful parts in Invisible Ink come when Griffith imagines how different his cartooning career would have turned out if he had indeed taken up Laniar’s offers to mentor him as a young artist. Griffith reimagines his Zippy strips done Laniar-style.
“There are thousands of cartoonists like Lariar we don’t know about, and in many cases for good reasons,” Griffith told comics historian Chris Mautner at a SPX. “Lariar was not somebody you’d want to sit down and read 40 or 50 years later. His crime novels hold up…but his comics…he did four daily strips. One of them ran for four years. Terrible strips, and only one of them did he draw, by the way. He wrote the others. They were done totally cynically, which is why they failed. I have all of the scripts for those materials…these were calculated make money. ‘OK, Milton Caniff has Terry and the Pirates…I’m going to do Irving and the Pirates.’ He just decided to do stuff that he thought would be popular and make money….He was after the paycheck, he was after ‘making the buck.’ And that’s what he did. He did a strip [Mr. Rumbles, drawn by Jack Sparling, another neighbor of Griffith’s] for four years where the main character was a romance writer who couldn’t get a girlfriend and so he has a Leprechaun appear to him and tell him to do stuff. And you’re reading these things and going, ‘What the Hell is going on?’ It’s much more obscure than any Underground Comic I ever remember reading. And it went on for four years.”
For Invisible Ink, Griffith chose to redraw all of Lariar’s work himself, rather than rely on reprints because “it was an instinctual felling. That’s my best way of explaining it. I wanted to feel that the book was all by my hand, every inch of it. And the idea that since I was going to refer to and show his work all throughout the book as I discovered it, if it was to be reproduced from the source—just photographed and dropped in—it would be jarring graphically. I faithfully reproduced everything of his that I put in the book. I didn’t try and make it my version of his stuff, but I felt that I had to redraw it feel like the book had a cohesive graphic feel. I also felt, I have to admit, that I was processing it in that way. That I was owning it in a way…maybe it was a bit oedipal.”
Invisible Ink is Griffith’s first attempt at a long-form graphic story in many years and said that writing it brought him back to his Underground Comix days when he was writing longer pieces of 10 or 12 pages rather than the routine of writing his strip Zippy, which he has produced since the 1970s and as a daily syndicated strip for the past 30 years.
“I felt like I had been kind of damning up that urge for years,” he said. “Sometimes in Zippy I will do what amounts to a long, continuing narrative that goes on for days and days, and if you read it all together it is a long narrative, but not the way narrative feels when its done specific for the long form. In a daily strip you have to break it up. It has to feel self-contained and every four panels it has to feel like you could read it without knowing what went on before or after. Doing a long-form graphic novel is exactly like writing a novel. It requires a lot of concentration, a lot of thought about structure, continuity. I have incredible grateful feelings toward my wife Diane [Noomin] who is a really great editor. When I would bring three pages up that I did that weekend she would say, ‘You know what? I think there’s a bump between this page and the next page. I think there’s a glitch. Something is off.’ Which I didn’t see, even at this point in my career. I teach comics, and I teach kids about continuity and about how everyone does things with continuity that make presumption about the reader. You can never make presumptions in comics. You have to spell out very carefully and clearly without being didactic. It’s a tightrope walk that you have to do and you need someone with an outside view to tell you when you’ve made a glitch, when you’ve hit a bump in the continuity.”
Once he began the book, Griffith said “it just sort of flowed out,” and his routine became working on Zippy during the week and the book on the weekends.
“Luckily, Zippy kind of just rolls out of me,” he said. “Each morning I get up about 9, 9:30 and I go for a walk, about a mile, a mile and a half. When I get back each day, I have at least one, maybe three, strip ideas. I write them down while I’m walking and when I’m home I do one or two Zippy strips. And it’s a little like writing in my diary. Once in a while I sit there and I have no ideas…and that lasts for maybe 10 seconds. Zippy and the characters in the strip literally talk to me. Not in a schizophrenic way…and so I listen to that voice.”
Griffith says he will continue longer graphic pieces; next up for is a biography of Schlitzie Metz, one of the pinheads who appeared in Tod Browning’s 1932 film Freaks and an inspiration for Zippy. “I started researching Schlitzie and found two people who actually knew him well, his last manager—he worked in the circus right up to his death in 1971—and I found a man who had spent a summer with him in Toronto in a circus, living next door to him and kind of taking care of him, and I got wonderful stories. The idea is to make Schlitzie the Pinhead be a human being, not a sideshow freak, but to try to bring him to life as a human. I’m about 25 pages into it and will keep going. I have loads of material and am very grateful to have two very wonderful direct sources to use to bring it to life.”
[MANY] YEARS AGO WHEN TONY MILLIONAIRE SHOWED UP ON THE NEW YORK CITY CARTOON SCENE, SOME VIEWED HIM AS SIMPLY A DRUNKEN GIANT IN A LIME GREEN LEISURE SUIT. BUT THEN AS HIS STRIPS AND ART BEGAN TO APPEAR- FIRST IN SMALL FANZINES AND LATER IN PLACES LIKE THE NEW YORK PRESS, THE NEW YORKER, NEW YORK MAGAZINE AND OTHER OUTLETS – THE PICTURE OF TONY MILLIONAIRE BECAME MORE COMPLICATED. HOW WAS IT THAT THIS HUMAN CARTOON CHARACTER WAS ABLE TO CHURN OUT WEEKLY INSTALLMENTS OF A STRIP ABOUT AN ALCOHOLIC AND SUICIDAL CROW, BUT ALSO FROM TIME TO TIME PRODUCE SHOCKINGLY ELEGANT DEPICTIONS OF NAUTICAL ADVENTURES AND UNCANNILY REPRODUCE THE FEEL AND SPIRIT OF OLD TIME NEWSPAPER STRIPS.
WORLDLY, TALL AND DRUNKENLY CHARMING, MR. MILLIONAIRE IS THE TYPE OF PERSONALITY WHO INSTANTLY LIGHTS UP A ROOM–SOME RUN TO GREET HIM, WHILE OTHERS RUN FOR COVER. HE’S FUNNY, LOUD, ENDEARING AND ALWAYS UNPREDICTABLE. HE IS ALSO ARTISTICALLY GIFTED AND INCREDIBLY PROLIFIC, WITH HIS MAAKIES STRIP APPEARING IN NUMEROUS WEEKLY PAPERS – AS WELL AS AN ANIMATED VERSION THAT HAS BEEN SHOWN ON SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE — THAT FANTAGRAPHICS WILL SOON BE PUBLISHING A COLLECTED VERSION OF MAAKIES, AND HIS DARK HORSE COMIC, SOCK MONKEY, HAS TWO ISSUES OUT THIS SUMMER. MR. MILLIONAIRE, WHO BEGAN HIS CARTOONING CAREER IN EARNEST SEVERAL YEARS AGO IN NEW YORK CITY, RECENTLY MOVED TO LOS ANGELES, WHERE HE LIVES WITH HIS GIRLFRIEND, THE ACTRESS BECKY THYRE.
FITTINGLY, THIS INTERVIEW WAS CONDUCTED IN A CRAPPY BAR ON MANHATTAN’S LOWER EAST SIDE, WHERE THE TAPE PLAYER WAS OFTEN PUT ON PAUSE TO ALLOW ONE OF US TO GO FETCH ANOTHER ROUND OF BASS.
By John F. Kelly
This interview originally appeared in The Comics Journal #215, August 1999. Old photos courtesy of Danny Hellman.
John F. Kelly: I guess what everyone wants to know is where and why you came up with the name “Tony Millionaire”? What point are you trying to make with that name?
Tony Millionaire: What? It’s my name.
Kelly: Tony Millionaire isn’t your Christian name–
Millionaire: Sure it is. It’s French.
Kelly: It’s the French spelling of your actual name?
Millionaire: Yeah. No, Millionaire is a French name. Comes from Old French. It means a person who owns a thousand slaves. Serfs, not slaves.
Kelly: But that’s not your real name.
Millionaire: Sure it is. One time my girlfriend was up in upstate New York, somebody said to her, is–what?
Kelly: Your current girlfriend?
Millionaire: No, it was a long time ago. And she was talking about me, saying something about her boyfriend Tony Millionaire, and the person talking to her said, “Tony Millionaire? What kind of a name is that?” She said, “It’s French!” He said, “Oh, I thought it was some stupid performance art clown name.”
Kelly: I thought it was your porno name.
Millionaire: Porno name? I haven’t worked at Screw Magazine in a long time.
Kelly: Okay, let’s really start. You’re doing your weekly Maakies strip, and you’re also doing the Sock Monkey comic book for Dark Horse. What’s the biggest difference between the two projects?
Millionaire: Well, the strip is shorter.
Kelly: Okay, besides that.
Millionaire: I think that although I’m always doing my comic strips, I really try to create–when I do my comic strips, I try to create another world. That’s what I think is the most important thing about comics, is that you’re looking at it–I mean, I’m reading Fred Bassett. I love the comic strip Fred Bassett. It’s like an old shoe, it’s like a comfortable old shoe. It’s a place that you go. It’s not about the joke, it’s not about the story so much, as about a place that you go to. You’re in Fred Bassett‘s comfortable world. That’s what I try to do with this–with Maakie’s, also. But with a comic book, I can go further with that. Of course, it’s all in one book. I mean, the world of Maakie’s is like a–it’s a world that you go to every week. With a comic book, it’s like–well, the same thing. Just love it. Whatever.
Comic strips about dogs, old and new.
Kelly: How long does it take you to put together a full issue of Sock Monkey?
Millionaire: The first two issues, I don’t know, took about two months each to do. I don’t think I could ever do anything like–I wouldn’t want to do it for years and years like Peter Bagge or Dame Darcy, busting your ass for the small amount of money you get from comic books, drawing those beautiful, beautiful drawings. It’s so sad. Dame Darcy is just the best. She can draw a shiny hat like nobody’s business. She is, I think, the greatest cartoonist of our time. I love Dame Darcy’s comics. But the problem is that, being so poor, and not being able to get paid for a comic book, after a while it just got–it must have got tiresome for her, and now she wants to be a movie star, or whatever she is. Who wants to work that hard all the time for that kind of money, and not being able to go out to dinner now and then?
Kelly: Right. She’s achieved a certain level of fame or notoriety, and she’s achieved that with her–at least on a certain level–with her art. Then again, some people might know about her because she dresses strangely and acts like a kook. But at the end of the day, if there isn’t any real financial gain that comes with it, it’s kind of a lot of work. It’s kind of a pain in the ass.
Millionaire: Right. So instead of drawing all the time, now she’s just decided to become annoying.
Kelly: But you’re able to subside on your drawing–
Millionaire: Yes. Not strips, of course, but on my illustration, because the good thing about a weekly strip in The New York Press all the time is that I’m constantly getting calls for illustration work for magazines.
Kelly: Like what–
Millionaire: Huh?
Kelly: I don’t want to make you list–I know you’re not good with lists, but like come up with–
Millionaire:The New Yorker, New York Magazine, Wall Street Journal…I’m doing illustrations for the Boston Phoenix, for…yeah, this and that. Plus lots of things that nobody’s ever heard of. Brooklyn Brewery, Cattle Trade–shit like that.
EARLY YEARS AND INFLUENCES
Kelly: You’re from Massachusetts, right?
Millionaire: Gloucester, Massachusetts. By the sea.
Kelly: Does that explain your…you know, your drawing ships and tales of the sea, and the rest?
Millionaire: Yes, it does. My grandfather and grandmother used to be–they were artists. They did portraits of the sea, portraits of ships and portraits of people. They lived up in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where my grandfather used to do a lot of pen and ink work. I remember, my brother was just telling me the other day, that our grandfather had some big collection of old Sunday comics that we used to read when we went over there on Sundays. We’d always go over on the weekends.
Kelly: Your grandparents lived nearby where you and your parents lived?
Millionaire: Yeah. And somehow I remembered that. I remembered laying on the floor opening up these huge pages of color comics. I don’t know what book it was, but I guess what they had was a collection of color comics. And I remember that. I still didn’t remember that it was a book, I thought I was actually reading the comics, but I remember they were full-page Sunday color comics, and I loved the memory of those. That’s why I draw comics now.
Kelly: That’s pretty interesting. I mean, a psychologist might say that what you fixate on at a very young age is going to come back in your later–especially for artists, it’s going to come back in your work.
Millionaire: Right. I like the idea of digging back to your farthest memory and trying to recreate it. I remember–the comics that I remember or that I dream about, the ones like the old Sunday newspaper comics, I don’t even know–the memory of them is better than when I actually go back and I try to–I really love to be able to recreate the memory of them, more so than actually looking at the old comics themselves. And that’s why I don’t read very many comics nowadays. I don’t want to pollute the memory. Sometimes I look at old collections, Winsor McCay, or–you know–the Smithsonian Collection, something like that. But not much.
Kelly: Well, with your style, even the format of your strip–you know, there’s like a willful recreation of the style of the old strips.
Millionaire: It’s recreating the memory of them. I try to recreate the memory that I have of them, rather than looking at the actual strips and try to copy style.
Kelly: But beyond cartoon influences and stuff–I mean, your drawings are just absolutely exquisite.
Millionaire: Thank you.
Kelly: You can draw a house, or a boat, and realistically, with the power of a fine artists. What accounts for that?
Millionaire: I think that it comes from growing up in a family full of artists. My mother teaches art to junior high school kids, my father is an advertiser and designer, and my grandparents are both painters. So it was always around. I was looking at drawings and always watching my grandfather paint watercolors, oils, so it just came naturally to me. And also I think that probably one of the biggest influences was reading Winnie the Pooh when I was a little kid–first book that anybody read to me.
Kelly: Obviously pre-Disney influence.
Millionaire: Yes, of course. Ernest Shepard drawings. That’s what made me pick up pen and ink, really, was just loving those books so much.
Kelly: And did your mother–obviously she encouraged you and she was teaching you–
Millionaire: Well, yeah, she read them to me. Also, my grandfather read them to me, also I lived with the pictures, those beautiful pen and ink drawings. Also books by Johnny Gruelle, the original old Raggedy Ann and Andy books. That’s why I draw those little round flowers.
Kelly: Right. Did your mother–beyond just like encouraging creativity and stuff, did she push you to master the real fundamentals of the art?
Millionaire: Yeah. She used to tell me that there were no–she used to tell us–like me, my brothers and my sister–that there were no coloring books allowed in the house, that if we wanted to color a drawing, we’d have to draw one first, then color it.
Kelly: Interesting.
Millionaire: So I never even saw coloring books till I was older–too old to be interested in them.
Kelly: Uh-huh. Did you–like, a lot of cartoonists, or kids generally–like, did you make your own comic books when you were kids?
Millionaire: When I was a teenager I did. As a matter of fact, when I was about ten I had a comic strip called Zero-Man that I used to draw.
Kelly: What was that about?
Millionaire: It was about a little egg-shaped superhero with a zero on his chest who was a loser, like Charlie Brown. Flew around proclaiming how great he was, and then crashing into trees. My parents sent me to a psychiatrist when they started seeing those.
Kelly: Is that right?
Millionaire: Yeah, I’m not joking. I was ten. They said, something’s wrong with him. Look at these comics. So they sent me to him. So he said, what do you do? Do you draw? That was the question he asked me. I said, yeah. What do you draw? I said, oh, comics. He said, let me see one. Then he had me draw one. That motherfucker had me coming back every week after that.
Kelly: Well, I find it kind of hard to believe that they would send you to a shrink based on just drawing.
Millionaire: I believe it was because I was stubborn. I don’t remember. Something happened. When I was young, I started–things like smashing milk bottles in the street, and punching holes in the ceiling of my father’s car, things like that, so it might have been one of those incidents that spurred that.
Kelly: Did you ever figure out what was causing this aggression, or–
Millionaire: No.
Kelly: Are you still going to a shrink?
Millionaire: No.
Kelly: How long did you go to one for?
Millionaire: Uh, three or four weeks.
Kelly: Maybe he was a very good one, he fixed you.
Millionaire: Yeah, fixed. I’m fine!
Kelly: Early intervention. Now, the other thing about you is that unlike many other cartoonists, you’re a pretty tall guy. What’s that like? Did that affect your childhood?
Millionaire: They used to call me Long John in high school.
Kelly: Did you get picked on, or were you like bigger than the other kids?
Millionaire: No, I’d get picked on. I was considered really tall and nerdy, hippy, and I used to be always high.
Kelly: Always high?
Millionaire: Yeah, I smoked pot every day, and I had a comic strip character in high school called “Reefer Man”.
Kelly: What was that about?
Millionaire: It was about a guy who smoked pot. He had a T-shirt with pictures of his lungs on the T-shirt with a star in each lung. I wonder if anybody in my high school still has a copy of that, because I haven’t seen one for years.
An early strip, from 1978
Kelly: Are you in touch with anybody from your high school days?
Millionaire: No. I just heard that my best friend–when I was in high school, I always hung around with one guy named Danny Smith. He was my best friend, we were pals, and we hung around, we were losers and nerds together, and smoked pot. And I just found out that–my brother said he saw him a couple of years ago walking around the streets of Gloucester carrying cans. Picking up cans off the street. Now I just found out he died. I assume it was from acute alcoholism. It’s weird, though, because I haven’t heard anything for more than 20 years, so it’s funny to even try to sum up an emotion about it. A guy who was that close. It’s such a long time ago. Actually I’m not even sure if he’s dead. Maybe he’s not.
TONY’S PAST, PART I
Kelly: What were you doing, like ten years ago? It seems to me as somebody who’s been on the periphery of this New York cartooning world for a while, you just sort of appeared about six years ago or something, just sort of out of the blue.
Millionaire: That’s right, out of the blue. I was living in Berlin for about–I lived there for about five years, and there I was bumming around being arty, hanging out with people and doing paintings, and for a living I had been drawing houses. I’d go out to fancy neighborhoods, drop cards in mailboxes with a little picture of a house on them, and they’d call me to draw their house.
Kelly: This was in Germany?
Millionaire: I did it in Germany, I did it in Boston where I lived after school. Everywhere I went, when I was in Florida, California. So I could go out and do that. So I just drew house after house, and finally I just–it was driving me out of my mind, when I got to be about 35. I said, I’ve got to do something else than draw houses. So I just started drawing comics, and I tried to get them published anywhere I could, any fanzines or any magazines I could find.
Kelly: So you came to New York directly from Berlin?
Millionaire: Yeah.
Kelly: What was the magnet that brought you here?
Millionaire: Heh-heh.
Kelly: What? A girl?
Millionaire: Well, the opposite. It was that when I–
Kelly: A guy?
Millionaire: No, it wasn’t a guy, it was that when I was in Berlin with a girl, she kept hanging around with this German guy–she was a German girl, but he kept–I was going out with her for about a year. She played around with this German guy, and so I kept saying to her, you’re not sleeping with that guy, are you? She said, no, he just–yeah, he sleeps over sometimes, but I’m not having sex with him. So then I went into her room one day, and her tampon was on the floor, I said, what are you doing? You’re pulling out your tampon so your friend can sleep on the sofa? So then I decided I had to leave Berlin, so the next logical place to go was New York, because I knew some people here, so I came to New York.
Kelly: The first time I saw your stuff was in Murtaugh, which is sort of a baseball zine.
Millionaire: Right. That’s Spike Vrusho’s magazine. I was doing a strip about an alcoholic baseball player, called Batty.
Kelly: Was your stuff appearing anywhere else at that time?
Millionaire: Yeah, I was doing a daily strip in Brooklyn, in a paper called “Waterfront Week.” It was one page, it was photocopied, and they would leave it on the bars–bars and stores. I had a strip in there called Medea’s Weekend, where I for a year or two years, maybe, learned how to draw comics. And how to meet deadlines. Having the discipline of having to draw a comic, no matter if you’re in the mood to do it or not, you’ve got to get it done every week, if you’ve got a hangover, you’re sick, it doesn’t matter, you’ve got to have it done. Even if it’s going to just be photocopied and put it in a storefront. It was–it pretty much changed my life. It’s different than having to pay the rent every month. Sometimes I would get paid for it and that’s fine, but you lose your comic strip, even in a little photocopied paper, that’s a much worse failure than getting evicted.
Kelly: It’s interesting that you say you learned how to draw comic strips through that. I never saw the Waterfront strips, but the Batty ones, I don’t know how different they were, but a lot of the stuff you still do today is there in that work. I have to say it was a real eye-opener for me to go to see from those like little scratchy funny drawings to like all of a sudden, you know, the shift in this just amazing line that you had, and were able to create such a totally realized drawings of ships, the sea, etc.
Millionaire: Right. I got that from drawing houses. When you’re drawing a house or something, it’s got to look like the house, so, you know…so I’ve always known how to draw. Then comics have always–at first seemed to me–something, okay, make a funny little picture, make sure it’s funny-looking. And then draw something funny with it. And then I started putting in drawings. Sometimes I’m afraid that I’m like showing off that I know how to draw when I do something. Sometimes the drawing is too elaborate for the joke or the story. Or something.
Kelly: . Besides your mother’s teaching you and encouraging you, have you had any other form of training at all, or is this–
Millionaire: Yeah, I went to the Massachusetts College of Art for four years.
Kelly: What was that like?
Millionaire: It was really difficult to get a traditional drawing class there. It was–I remember the first time I went into a drawing class, a hippie took some pastels and crunched them up–he was the professor–crunched them up, put the piece of paper on the floor, and then he put the pastels on the floor, then he took his shoes off and started walking on them. I thought, I don’t think I’m going to be able to learn how to draw anything in this class, really, but I just kept going, and it was good to meet people. But I never really got any training from it.
MAAKIES: SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE AND THE STRIP
Kelly: How did it come to be that Saturday Night Live has been running an animated version of your Maakies strip?
Millionaire: I believe it was Adam McKay, the–what is he?–the writing supervisor or something, at Saturday Night Live, head writer of Saturday Night Live. He’s a very funny guy who is a great actor who read my comic strip and really liked it and called me up and asked me if I wanted to do something with it. Jim Signorelli is I guess the director of films over there, and he got involved, too. He’s been there for a long time, doing those commercials. He’s very funny, too. But I don’t really know. I don’t watch the show. I haven’t watched the show in years, so what do I know?
Kelly: It was exciting to see some funny cartoons on a program that generally isn’t all that funny. Was it a lucrative deal? Did you get–
Millionaire: Uh…no. I don’t know if I should talk about that. I’d rather not talk about how much money I got from the Saturday Night Live, but I’ll tell you that it isn’t very much money.
Kelly: But now that you’re living in Los Angeles, will it help you pursue any other sort of animation deal out there?
Millionaire: I don’t know. I don’t really care about that stuff. I like to draw the pictures and write the stories. And the most important thing with those is I think the voices. I’ve got to make sure I get good actors to do the voices, because I always thought with cartoons, of course, the best thing is the voice. Like with Bullwinkle.
Kelly: Right. Who did the voices on yours?
Millionaire: One actor whose name I can’t mention. Another actress whose name I can’t mention. An actor whose name I can’t mention, and another actor whose name I’m not sure I’m allowed to mention, because of union rules. If you listen carefully, maybe you can figure it out.
Kelly: You’re sort of weirdly secretive about certain things. Like, what does the name of your strip, Maakies, actually mean?
Millionaire: I can’t release that information until a certain person dies.
Kelly: Is it because–
Millionaire: Because he or she would be extremely pissed off to even know that that name was being used. Actually, someone told that it’s a derogatory term for Jews, but that’s spelled differently, M O C K I E S. Somebody heard that on a Lennie Bruce album one time. But I don’t know what that’s all about. Anyway, it has nothing to do with being a derogatory term for anybody.
Kelly: What were you trying to do when you started out doing the Maakies strip?
Early Drinky Crows
Millionaire: All right. This is the story of Drinky Crow. One time a long time ago…not a long time ago, a time, let’s say, about five years ago, I was walking down a snowy street on my way to a bar, my heart broken, no place to–well, looking for a place to live, because a woman had told me that it might be a good idea if I moved out of the house. So I was depressed, went into a bar called Six Twelve, in Williamsburg, and the bartender told me that every time I would draw a comic strip, he would give me a free beer. And since I was pretty broke at the time, one of the reasons why I don’t live there any more, I started drawing a cartoon about a little bird who drank booze and blew his brains out all the time. So they were pretty funny, because they were just so–well, you know, drinking works well in comics. They’re not really jokes, they’re just sort of depressing. They’re just sort of there. So people who came in the bar saw those, and they all started drawing their own, so Drinky Crow became like a symbol for that bar. So then the bartender started doing photocopies of them and putting them around the bar, and people would come in and draw more, and then he put photocopies of everybody’s comics in this little newsletter that he was putting out. Just like a little bar newsletter. Basically just a Drinky Crow comic book. Then I did a couple of bigger versions of them and sent them out to fanzines like Selwyn Harris’s Happy Land, and Murtaugh. Then, somebody at the New York Press saw it and asked me if I’d do a strip for them. So I did. But apparently, I was told, that when it was maybe about four or five weeks old, the art director, Michael Gentile, asked Danny Hellman, “what do you think about it? I don’t know about this strip” because it wasn’t really that good in the beginning. It was not that strong, it wasn’t…he said, “What do you think of him? I don’t know what to do about this Maakies strip.” Danny Hellman told him, “No, you got to let it run, let it develop, see what happens with it.” So he did, so it stayed in–it was almost cancelled. But it stayed in there, because that beautiful Danny–now he’s my sworn enemy.
Tony with Danny Hellman
Kelly: Why?
Millionaire: Bastard.
Kelly: That’s a joke.
Millionaire: What?
Kelly: That’s a joke.
Millionaire: No.
Kelly: You guys are feuding?
Millionaire: Yeah.
Kelly: About what?
Millionaire: About his E-mail pranks.
Kelly: Oh, get over that.
Millionaire: Something he decided to–what?
Kelly: Get over that.
Millionaire: I’m over it.
Kelly: Get over that. That’s just Danny going insane, he loves a joke.
Millionaire: That’s right. Someday I’ll get him.
Kelly: Good old Danny. Anyway, besides the New York Press, Maakies has been running where?
Millionaire: Seattle Stranger, Vancouver’s Terminal City, Albuquerque Alibi, Okay Magazine in Oklahoma City, Richmond Punchline and online at www. word.com. Just got picked up in Cleveland, Ohio. Ft. Lauderdale New Times, but I haven’t seen a check from them in a long time, I guess they don’t care.
Kelly: And what is the reaction out in the heartlands to the strip?
Millionaire: I don’t know. Well, I put my E-mail address on the strip, and people send letters now and then, it’s generally very positive. Which is surprising. I thought it was kind of surprising.
Kelly: Because it’s so depressing and violent?
Millionaire: I don’t know. Maybe it’s depressing and violent, but I guess there’s something touching about it.
Kelly: This is a boring question, but I want to ask it anyway.
Millionaire: What are my influences?
Kelly: No. That comes later. Do you draw a certain number of strips all at once, or do you tend to do them week by week?
Millionaire: A strip is due at The New York Press at 10:00 Monday morning. I usually start it around ten or eleven PM Sunday night. I stay up all night and get it done. Sometimes you can tell that I was completely drunk while doing it. Sometimes I had a terrible hangover and my hand was shaking. Sometimes I feel great, and the drawings are strong and bold. But it’s always the very last minute. It takes like six hours to do it, and I’m usually about three hours late getting it in.
Kelly: Ernie Bushmiller used to flip through underwear catalogs to get ideas for Nancy.
Millionaire: Really?
Kelly: Yeah. Do you have any similar techniques. Are there any other publications–
Millionaire: Oh, sure. I read books about the sea, ships. Patrick O’Brian mostly. Do you know Patrick O’Brian?
Kelly: No, I don’t.
Millionaire:Patrick O’Brian wrote a–he’s still writing, actually–a series of novels about life during the War of 1812 or during the Napoleonic Wars, life at sea. Life aboard a man o’ war.
Kelly: How many books are in the series?
Millionaire: I think there’s 17, maybe there’s 18.
Kelly: Jesus! What kind of genre is that? Is it historical fiction, is it–
Millionaire: Historical fiction.
Kelly: And they’re good?
Millionaire: They’re fantastic. He said that he was–he was deeply moved when they moved his books out from the Fiction section to the Literature section…in some fancy bookstore in London.
Kelly: Is he from England?
Millionaire: Yes. Well, I believe he’s Irish.
Kelly: And how did you come across him?
Millionaire: I think I was in a bookstore and I saw the first book sitting there, and I picked it up–there was a picture of a ship on it, I picked it up and read it, and I’ve been reading it ever since. I’ve been reading practically nothing but Patrick O’Brian’s books over and over again for the past two years, three years.
Kelly: Before you like hooked into that, were you somebody who always read a lot of books, or–
Millionaire: Yes.
Kelly: How do your tastes run?
Millionaire: Dopey classics like Moby Dick and–this is not dopey. I don’t–
Kelly: Overblown classics. But they’re all sort of nautical based?
Millionaire: Yeah. Overblown? The only reason…I have to tell you that I’m really bad at coming up with lists of things that I’ve done.
Kelly: Do you look at art books much?
Millionaire: I do. I look at a lot of–mostly books of old–I really like–I hate to say it, but crude, excuse me, naive paintings of ships.
Kelly: Naive? What do you mean? Bad ones?
Millionaire: Naive. When they used to build a ship, back in the old days, they would hire somebody to come and draw a–to come and do a painting of it. Just like me drawing houses.
Houses.
Kelly: Yeah, but your drawings are well done, though.
Millionaire: So were those paintings. Those are beautiful.
Kelly: What makes them naive, though?
Millionaire: They’re called naive. It’s bullshit.
Kelly: Oh!
Millionaire: It’s like, you know, straight art.
Kelly: That’s like a technical term.
Millionaire: Yeah. Well, it’s like–it’s straight art, it’s actually an illustration of the ship, but you can do a beautiful painting. Those people were more concerned with drawing the–getting a painting of the ship itself then doing a painting.
TONY IS THE LIFE OF THE PARTY
With Kaz, talking about food.
Kelly: Though you’re a relatively young man, you have false teeth. What’s the story there?
Millionaire: Yeah. Got ’em knocked out in a car crash when I was 13.
Kelly: When you were 13? So you had false teeth all through high school?
Millionaire: Yeah. So what? Lots of people have false teeth through high school, they just don’t pull them out in bars.
Kelly: Well, lots of guys have dicks, too. But not everyone pulls them out at parties all the time.
Millionaire: And they don’t fuck slices of pizza, either, right Kaz? In Kaz’s interview with the Comics Journal, he told the story about how I fucked a slice of pizza one time. He makes it seem like I wrapped the slice of pizza around my dick. I didn’t. I put a hole in the center of it and pulled my penis through.
Kelly: Was it erect?
Millionaire: No.
Kelly: Oh.
Millionaire: That’s why I had to pull it. It was a gag! Sam Henderson was there, King of the Gags.
Kelly: It worked as a gag. But you like have a reputation for like pulling your dick out, though, sometimes.
Millionaire: I don’t know if that’s a reputation or not. I just–one thing–one story like that–one beautiful sexual act like that happens in front of some people, and suddenly it happened forty times and everybody’s making a big deal out of it.
Kelly: I know you’re with a steady girl now, but before that, I used to see you with a lot of cartoon groupie girls. You’d always be sitting in the corner of the party, surrounded by sad, little tattoo girls.
Millionaire: It’s funny about that, because somehow I get–I keep hearing from people that I’m a lady’s man. I don’t know what that’s supposed to mean, but what it mean–the point is that, when I go out, I like to go to a party, I like to hang around with the girls. I don’t sit in the boys’ corner. I like to go out with girls, but that doesn’t mean I’m fucking them all. I don’t know why–when somebody says “lady’s man,” then they start asking about VD and pregnancies, because they assume that every time they see me with a girl, that means I’m screwing her. I don’t like that. I don’t get it. It’s a bad reputation. Someone else–I don’t know if it was Dame Darcy–said I was a cad. I don’t know why she calls me a cad. Me, a cad? I’m a genuine gentleman. Except if there’s a slice of pizza around.
Kelly: Who do you hang out with around here, in the city? Who are you going to miss when you move to L.A.?
Millionaire: Helena Harvilicz, my roomate. And the great poet Terrence Ross, who writes poems for me sometimes for Maakie’s. Practically–maybe 50%–of all my jokes come from conversations I’ve had with friends. Most specifically Helena.
Tony with ex-roomate Helena Harvilicz
Kelly: Former Comics Journal editor?
Millionaire: Yes. Former Comics Journal editor. My favorite one that she came up with was called “Leaving Skid Row,” where there’s a guy and a woman, and the guy says, “One thing, baby, don’t ever ask me to stop drinking.” And she says, “Can I ask you to stop peeing on my leg?” It sounds better with a Baltimore accent.
Kelly: Yeah. But that was probably based on a life experience for her.
Millionaire: Could be, yeah. What do you mean by that?
Kelly: What’s that like, living with a member of the opposite sex in a sort of a–is it like Three’s Company, and is it like–
Millionaire: It’s great. It’s good. It’s like being married, but you don’t have to fuck her. When she’s having a period, I don’t care. [Both laugh]
Kelly: If you come back to New York, are you going to move back with Helena, or–
Millionaire: Well, I have no idea what’s going to happen out in California, so I really can’t make any predictions about where I’ll be.
Kelly: Do you have any plans at all?
Millionaire: I simply don’t have any idea what will happen. But I’ve moved to another city with no plans before, and something great always happens. One time I moved to Italy with $250 and a one-way ticket, no idea what I was going to do. I didn’t know anybody there. I had $250 and a one-way ticket, and the money ran out in about two weeks, and then I thought, well, I’d better do something. I did a drawing of the Roman Forum and when I sat in the Coliseum and I sketched on it, it was the drawing–I had it printed up, this drawing, I had it printed up. I had about 500 copies of it. So I sat there and I just added an extra little rock and some grass, till I heard American tourists walk by and I would ask them what time it was, and they’d say, “Oh, you’re American?” I’d say, yeah, and I’d lean over so they could see the drawing, and they’d say, “What are you doing?” And then I would sell the drawing for about ten bucks. And they’d be so shocked to get such a beautiful drawing for $10.
Kelly: It was just a photocopy.
Millionaire: Yeah. One time this couple came back, like two hours later. They saw me sitting there drawing the same picture and I thought, what am I going to do? What am I going to say? I said to them, oh, I liked the picture I did for you, that picture I did before, I liked it so much I came back and I drew the same picture.
Kelly: Now, a lot of cartoonists seem–a lot of them are kind of like slobs.
Millionaire: Kind of like what?
Kelly: Slobs. On the other hand, you’re kind of a natty dresser.
Millionaire: When I’m going out.
Kelly: What accounts for that?
Millionaire: I’m Tony Millionaire, for god’s sake! Do you want me to walk around dressed like Sammy Henderson?
Kelly: But also, physically, you keep it up. You look good.
Millionaire: Yeah. But that’s the clothes.
Kelly: But knowing what I know of you–
Millionaire: That’s what clothes cover up.
Kelly: –you don’t do any jogging or any–
Millionaire: I used to wear fancy tuxedos and wacky plaid pants, but suddenly everybody started calling me Kramer. That TV show came around, so I had to knock that off. Had some of the wackiest suits. Was I cool.
Kelly: Where would you get them?
Millionaire: You know. Thrift stores.
Kelly: Do you ever tire of doing strips of alcoholic–
Millionaire: Yeah.
Kelly: –animals blowing their brains out?
Millionaire: Yeah. I figured it out the other day. Look at all that booze. Makes you sad. Makes you sad and mad. Something happened to me on my fortieth birthday.
Kelly: When was that?
Millionaire: What?
Kelly: When was that?
Millionaire: That was about two years ago. Where I…I got really–of course, it was–I decided I wasn’t going to drink any hard liquor any more, because it was getting to be too much. So I drank a bunch of red wine, then I drank a lot of red wine. Then I got into a fight with a taxi driver because I was pissed because he wouldn’t take five people in his cab. So I crawled up on top of the cab. The taxi driver took off, went zooming down the street, and then I figured I’d either hang on or jump, so I decided to jump, and cut my leg up kind of bad, and my shoulder, then spent the rest of the night ranting about how the bastard tried to kill me, then woke up in the morning and realized that I’d better knock off all that hard drinking. So guzzling bottles of wine is something I don’t do very often.
Kelly: You still drink though.
Millionaire: Sure! Beer.
Kelly: That’s it?
Millionaire: I’ll have a shot of Scotch now and then, but you don’t see me walking around with a bottle of vodka in my back pocket any more. My friend Vinnie Dagnilo used to say, “That Tony Millionaire, he’s like an enigma! He’s got a bottle of vodka in the back pocket and god knows where the teeth are.” That’s funny, that’s cool. Vinnie Dagnilo.
Kelly: I’m just amazed that you’re able to draw these beautiful drawings of ships and things when you’re always loaded.
Millionaire: Oh, it’s just made up, I’m joking. I draw just swell, drunk or sober. Unless I’m really drunk for three days. Then I just start getting so tired that I actually fall asleep while drawing, so the pen starts to slip. But drunk or sober doesn’t make any difference when you’re drawing a picture.
Kelly: Do you have a really high tolerance for booze?
Millionaire: No, I have a very low tolerance for booze. I mean, I probably have an average tolerance for booze, which I used to overcome by drinking lots and lots of it, fast. But now I’ve learned to cut down. Once you’re over forty, your body can’t really take that shit. Well, how do you think Drinky Crow was born? Drinky Crow was born because I was such a fucking drunk, that I treated the woman I was living with badly, and then I was walking around on the streets looking for a beer. Drawing in bars. The only big thing in my comic strip is the celebration of getting drunk. It’s not really. It’s like–well, you know what it is, just read it. It’s a picture of a person who drinks a lot of booze, what it’s like. It’s not a celebration.
Kelly: Yeah. So in one aspect, there’s autobiographical ties–
Millionaire: Of course.
Kelly: –in the actual drinking. But the precedent, is that rooted in any sense of your own personal history, or not?
Millionaire: Yeah, of course. I mean–yeah, of course. What am I supposed to say about that?
Kelly: Well, you’ve never blown your brains out, have you?
Millionaire: No. No.
Kelly: But you’ve thought about it?
Millionaire: Not really. I think that’s a metaphor for just saying, fuck everything. Jumping on top of a taxicab and zooming down the street. You know, it’s just–it’s also an easy way to end a comic strip. What do I do now? What do I do now? Fuck everything. It’s a good way to end a conversation, and a story, or a relationship. Metaphorically blow your brains out. Fortunately, when you do that with a comic strip, you can move on, right?
Kelly: Do you do any drugs?
Millionaire: I used to, yeah. I don’t do any drugs any more.
Kelly: What did you do before you–
Millionaire: I used to like cocaine a lot, but that was a different time period, but now it gives me an immediate sinus attack and I feel nervous and all I want to do is get more.
Kelly: Is it still as expensive as it used to be?
Millionaire: It’s always been expensive, but it’s not that expensive. I used to buy $5 bags of cocaine down on 7th Street. Stand in line. It was yellow. Came wrapped up in tinfoil. Five bucks.
Kelly: How much would you get?
Millionaire: Just a little.
Kelly: A line?
Millionaire: Two lines. I don’t like that stuff. I don’t like to even think about that any more. I’d rather think about butterflies fluttering on a hill.
Kelly: Do you think there will ever be a time when you like don’t drink any more, or don’t do anything bad any more?
Millionaire: I don’t know. My life changes all the time so much that I have no idea what would happen in the future. But yeah, I could imagine a time coming when I don’t find any amusement in booze.
Kelly: Are you worried that as you get older, that it’s more problematic–
Millionaire: Yeah. I used to–really, the reason that I used to drink a lot wasn’t so much to drown out the horror of being alive, but more–maybe that was part of it, of course–but when I started, it was to have a good time, to have fun. What a blast, being drunk, being the king of the world, standing on top of the table saying, look at me, I’m a fucking idiot [laughs]. But it’s not so fun any more, after you’ve done it for the eight-millionth time. I can stay home with a nice glass of wine, light a candle, and fuck a slice of pizza at my own house. I can bake my own pizza and fuck it.
Kelly: What does fucking a pizza feel like?
Millionaire: Nothing.
Kelly: Have you had worse?
Millionaire: Huh?
Kelly: Have you had worse?
Millionaire: Well, I don’t want to talk about what I’ve had.
LIKES AND DISLIKES
Kelly: I think you’re a pretty open-minded kind of guy.
Millionaire: Extremely open-minded. What do you mean by that?
Kelly: I think you’re also pretty sentimental, right?
Millionaire: Yes, of course, I’m sentimental. Haven’t you ever read the Sock Monkey?
Kelly: Yeah, I know.
Millionaire: Yeah, it’s a very sentimental comic book. I cry at the Funniest Home Videos, for god’s sake.
Kelly: I’m not sure I believe that.
Millionaire: It’s true. I’m telling you, it’s completely–it’s absolutely true.
Kelly: Do you cry at the horror of life because of it, or is it–
Millionaire: No, at the beauty of it! A little kid squirting his mommy with a hose and then she freaks out and then he gets scared because he thinks he hurt her, so he starts crying and she bends down and hugs him. My god, that’s beautiful. I love that show. I’m not making an ironic assertion about it, I really love that show. It’s just really like pictures of little kids banging baseball bats. It’s so–about–I’ll tell you, I get much more of a thrill from–let’s see, I’m trying–I have to make a comparison now, don’t I? Well, I’m not going to make a comparison. But I get a great thrill out of watching the Andy Griffith Show, when Pa talks to Opie, and Opie says, “Pa”–a criminal was coming to town one time, and Pa was kind of nervous about it, because he had a grudge against the sheriff. And Opie said, “Pa, are you scared of the trouble that’s coming?” That was beautiful. Now that’s beautiful.
Kelly: What’s your favorite TV show?
Millionaire: I like Mister Show. That’s a great show and It’s going to get a lot better. You know why?
Kelly: Why’s that?
Millionaire: Because Becky Thyre’s going to be in it this season. She’s my girlfriend!
Kelly: That’s great. Now maybe it won’t suck as bad. What about movies?
Millionaire: SUCK!? That’s a great show, what are you, insane? Movies, Damn the Defiant, now there’s a film.
Kelly: Who’s in that?
Millionaire: Don’t ask me that, because I’ve never really seen it. I just really like it. It’s about big sailing ships shooting at each other.
Kelly: Did you ever read the Popeye collections?
Millionaire: Yeah, I love Popeye. But I–you know, I got into Popeye–I love the cartoons on TV, of course, but I really started to like Popeye after I started doing comics myself. Then I saw collections of old Popeye comics. I didn’t know they existed. I really love them. My grandfather used to be friends with Roy Crane.
Kelly: Wow.
Millionaire: Yeah. He went to college with him.
Kelly: That’s pretty funny.
Millionaire: Roy Crane used to say to him…used to get him into conversations and he said, “One day I realized he didn’t care about what I had to say, he just wanted to hear my Texas accent.” That’s my grandfather’s Roy Crane story.
Kelly: Did you read any other comics as a kid?
Millionaire: Sure. Good old Charlie Brown.
Kelly: Any superheros?
Millionaire: No, I never read Marvel or any of the superhero books. I’ve always found those totally boring. I still do. I don’t know why anybody likes to watch a big muscular guy run around in a suit. I liked Batman when it was on TV. But sure, good old Charlie Brown. I like Peanuts. Really mainstream shit I love. Blondie. I love Mutt and Jeff. I love newspaper comics. Even really stupid ones. I used to pick up the newspaper every day as soon as I got old enough to buy it, just to read the dopey comics. Something about the paper, I don’t know. But books? The only comic books I ever bought were Sad Sack. I love Sad Sack.
Kelly: You’re the one!
Millionaire: Yeah, I was buying them. They’re easy to read. Just like Kaz.
Kelly: Do you like Kaz’ work?
Millionaire: Yeah, I love it. I love Kaz.
Kelly: What other contemporaries do you like?1
Millionaire: Michael Kupperman is a fantastic cartoonist who writes a strip in the Seattle Stranger called Up All Night. He also goes by the name of P. Reeves. He’s fantastic. That’s a cartoonist. Sam Henderson, king of all gags. Those are the only cartoonists I read.
Kelly: Just those two?
Millionaire: Dame Darcy, Michael Kupperman, Kaz, Dan Clowes, Bagge, some of those crazy Italians. But I really have to say that I don’t read Peanuts any more.
Kelly: His line has gotten shakier and shakier.
Millionaire: Yeah, it’s gotten shakier and shakier, and so has the ridiculous story. But I remember a comic strip in the newspaper nowadays, the Daily News, it’s One Big Happy.
Kelly:One Big Happy?
Millionaire: Yeah. it’s by Rick Detorie. It’s about this girl named Ruthie. She’s just a little kid. It’s nice. It’s sweet.
Kelly: It’s good?
Millionaire: Yeah, it’s great. It’s about a little kid. It’s about how little kids think. I guess that’s what I…I like Family Circus, too.
Kelly: Yeah! Everybody likes that one.
Millionaire: I love Family Circus. I love it. My favorite one, Jeffy is sitting up in bed, the window behind him is open. It’s black outside. Just black, no moon. He says, “Mommy, how many days are there after tomorrow?” Jesus. It’s like watching America’s Funniest Home Videos. I cry when I watch that TV show. It’s so real. Little kid squirts his mommy with a hose, I’m sitting there crying watching it. Go into my room, draw pictures of crows blowing their brains out. Look, I’m starting already. The tears are going into my eyes.
A LIFE OF CRIME REVISITED
Kelly: Someone told me you almost started a major war once. True?
Millionaire: Oh, the LaBelle Discotheque–it was a discotheque in Berlin a long time ago. You remember when Reagan bombed Libya?
Kelly: Yeah.
Millionaire: Well, that was stirred by a photograph of me. Okay. You laugh, but it’s true. Okay, this is what happened. I was in Berlin, and I had just come from a party, and I was wearing a tuxedo, so it was maybe three o’clock in the morning, and I was in a car with a bunch of friends. And we went past this bombed-out building, and all the firetrucks were around it, and American soldiers, and I said–and my friend said, “Oh, my god, look! A bombed-out warehouse or something, I wish I could get some photographs of that.” She had her camera with her, see? I said, “You want photographs, baby? Follow me.”. So I ran in there, ran past the cops, and I ran past the police, and she was right behind me and she started snapping pictures. So I started screaming, “Oh, my god, my wife! My wife is in there!” and I started picking up a big boulder, trying to move it. And some American soldiers came over, and they said, “What’s the matter, buddy?” “My wife is in here!” And they said, “All right, all right, come on over here, what’s your wife’s name?” They brought me over to a jeep, and I sat there and I said, “Sally,” and then I noticed there was a reporter right next to me, a German reporter. “Sally,” and then they got my name and–
Kelly: Sally Millionaire?
Millionaire: –checked my ID–yeah, Sally
Millionaire, well, Richardson. They checked my name and my address, the name on my ID and all that stuff, and then they–after a while, they realized that I was full of shit, so I wanted to get out of there. So I started letting the story kind of fall, and then they realized that I was like–that I was just a goofball, see? Yeah, your wife Sally wasn’t here, you don’t even have a wife, do you? What do you mean, wife? I don’t have a wife. They said, oh, a wise guy. So they brought me over to the cops–the German cops, and they stood me next to the cops and they said to the cops, I want you men to hold this man. We’re going to come back and question him later. So they went back into the bombed-out building. And the cops didn’t understand English, but I understood German. So the cops said to each other, what did he say? And then I said to the cops, I don’t know what he’s talking about. Crazy Americans. And then I just walked away. The cops didn’t do anything. So I just walked away. So the next day, I was living in a squat, see? I come downstairs, and there’s a–friends of mine are sitting in the living room with the newspaper. I’m on the front page of the Berliner Morgenpost, it’s like The New York Times in Berlin. On the front page there’s a picture of me holding onto a rock screaming, oh my god! It said underneath it, his wife Sally danced as the bomb detonated. So I was like–yeah, cool! I mean, I’m on the front page of the newspaper. Yeah, I’m famous! But then they were like–that’s not funny, man. People died in that. I said what? I didn’t realize that two people died in the explosion. I thought it was like a warehouse or something. So then my father called up from America. He said, so we saw you on the front page of the Boston Herald. What! And then it turned out I was on the front page of all these American newspapers, because that was the only photograph they had, because the ambulance had cleared everybody out so quickly that by the time the photographers arrived, there was nobody to photograph except me. Desperately drunk, pulling up a rock, wearing a tuxedo. So they photographed me. So here’s the aftermath: Ronald Reagan picks up a paper, the Washington Post, and there on the front page is me going ahh! His wife Sally dances, the bomb detonated. Those fucking Libyans. And then we launch an attack on Libya, we killed Quadaffi’s daughter-in-law or something.
Kelly: Now do you feel guilty about this at all?
Millionaire: No, what? Guilt–what’s there to be guilty for?
Kelly: Well, you caused the death of somebody’s kid.
Millionaire: No! Well, yes, I do. Yes, I feel very guilty. I feel guilty to be a part of the news.
Kelly: Well, at least it’s a funny story.
Kelly: Have you ever–or are you ever going to–spend much time in prison?
Millionaire: No–well, yes. I’ve been in jail about ten times, I’d say. One time–okay, –public drunkenness–I woke up in Fort Lauderdale jail, I had one shoe on, and I sort of woke up, and I thought, this is preposterous, what’s going on? I started banging on the cell bars. I only had one shoe. And this big fat cop came out the door, and I said, let me out of this jail! How dare you put me in jail? He said to me, “You may think you’re in Disneyland, boy, but you’re in the Deep South now. You’d best behave.” So I behaved. One time I was walking down the street in San Francisco, and I–it was Christmas time, I didn’t have any money for a Christmas tree, so I thought–I’ll just pull out a shrub. Of course I was drunk. I pulled a shrub out of the ground, I was walking home with it, with the root tail dragging out of the end of it, like it was a Christmas tree, and some cops pulled up. They said, “Where are you going with that?” I said home. They said, “What is that?” I said, it’s a Christmas tree. They said, “Where did you get that?” I said, uh…they started getting out of the car, and I thought to myself, I can either stay there and explain my way out, which I wouldn’t be able to do, or I could run. So I dropped the tree and I ran, but the bottom of my shoe–because my shoe had come loose, the bottom of it, the sole was flapping. So I just kept running, and then I heard them coming right behind me, so I just laid on the ground . So I laid down on the ground, so they wouldn’t knock me down. And then they picked me up and took me to jail.
There was a riot in Berlin while I was there. So they were burning down the supermarket across the street from my house, and they had blocked off the whole block. They were protesting that Reagan was coming to town. And it was a big riot, we were all throwing rocks at the cops, because in our drunkenness we thought–at least in my drunkenness, I thought I was doing something for the good of the world, by throwing rocks at the cops. So then in the morning, the sun was coming up, I walked up to a cop, a very young cop, and I said, hey–I said to him in German–hey, want to fight? I said to him, hey, how old are you? And his friends, the veteran cops, the older ones who had all this like riot gear on–his friends are right next to him, they’re leaning over to him, saying, don’t pay any attention to him, just ignore him. Don’t pay any attention. And he was standing there getting all red and I said, what are you, about 17 years old? Then finally I said to him, say, you want to fight? Come on, let’s fight. I showed him my fists. And then all the cops go, all right, let’s go. So they started to run at me, and I turned around and I ran. I was running down the street, and I turned around to see where they were. They were right behind me, especially that young guy, who was really red-faced and puffing, and he was really pissed off. And then I saw him fall, and he tumbled around. It turned out later he broke a couple of his fingers when he fell, and the other cops, the older cops, the ones who knew what they were doing, they ran really fast, and they came right up to me, and one of them dived and caught my legs. So my face came down bam! Smacked right on to the pavement. And then I sat up, and I reached for my nose, for my face. There was no nose. And I couldn’t find–there was no nose on my face. So I reached over to the right of my face and then over to the left. There it was, hanging way over on the left. And then the cops all came around me, and they pulled out their sticks, and they’re about to bash my head in, as they had done to my friend earlier that night. Broke all her teeth out, because they don’t like rioters. Anyway, they held up their sticks and they looked at me, and they went, oh my god! and turned around, because I was so disgusting. I guess my whole face was like a big–it looked like hamburger. So I grabbed my nose immediately and I pulled it out and let it snap back into place, which I knew you were supposed to do if you get a broken nose. It healed pretty well. So that’s that story.
Kelly: Were you actually arrested at that point, though?
Millionaire: Well, actually they took me to like some kind of a–they took me to like a trailer, a special riot jail, which was a trailer, and they didn’t have enough room to put me in jail, so they just let me go, since I was American. Then a year later they made me pay $700 to have the–to pay the doctor bills for the cop whose fingers got broken.
When I lived in Berlin, I also used to do stage decoration and costumes for a band called “The Wonderful Guys”. I would go to a slaughterhouse and get some cow heads and some bones and hang them from the ceiling. I’d hook windshield wiper motors to them so they would dance around over the band. Once we were in Munich and I went to the local slaughterhouse and asked if they had any heads. The slaughterer looked at me kind of weird, happy, and then he went in the back. He wheeled out this giant bin full of cow heads, no fur but plenty of meat still on them. They were twitching and the eyeballs were rolling around, moving. “Ganz frisch!” he says, that means “really fresh.” I didn’t have a car so I had to put the heads in a sack and carry them over my shoulder. I could feel them moving on my back as I walked. That night at the party, a Bavarian hippie farmer started to cry, he was drunk. He was upset about what we had done to the cows, dishonoring them. He pulled down one of the heads and tried to leave with it, but the bouncer wouldn’t let him. They wrestled with it till the bouncer finally got it away from him, but that farmer just started to really cry. The bouncer got disgusted and heaved the head at him, it was very heavy, he heaved it like a medicine ball, and the farmer fell over in the dirt. It was a pathetic scene, I started to feel like maybe I was doing something bad.
Another time, my house got blown up with a bomb.
Kelly: Who blew up your house?
Millionaire: Some teenagers. I was living in a house on Mission Hill, in Boston. We were having trouble with the neighbors, a lot of noise and parties. There was this guy named Finegan who lived behind us, he used to threaten us with a shotgun sometimes. One day we decided to have a party, so I went to the slaughterhouse and I got some heads. A cow’s head, a boars head and then Billy Ruane brought a lamb’s head. I hung them up in the closet and put a motor on them so they danced around a little, I put a light in there. You know, it was funny. Late that night they started to get smelly, so I took them outside and threw them over a fence. Early the next morning, I was sleeping on the sofa and there was a loud explosion. I opened my eyes to see smoke gushing through the cracks of the front door. The whole apartment filled with smoke. I ran around waking everybody up and getting them out of the house. Someone had put a bomb in the stairway, it blew out all the windows in the hall, but nobody got hurt. Later, I was sitting in the front of the house, the firemen were going in and out, the downstairs neighbors were moving out, and one of the local teenagers walked up. I said, “Look what they did to our house, Bernard!” He punched me hard in the mouth, my fake teeth shattered and I spit them into the street, bloody. “Fuck you Tony Millionaire!” he said and he walked away. I decided to move out, so I went down the block to my friend Pia’s house. That night they smashed out the rest of the windows in our house with rocks. Pia came in the room and said,”Someone just called to say that they know the devil worshipper is in here and that they are going to firebomb my house.” I decide to get out the back door and I went to North Carolina for a vacation. They wrote some crazy shit about it in the papers, most of it wasn’t true, but it was bad enough anyway. I moved to California after that.
Kelly: How did you start the Sock Monkey books?
Millionaire: My other grandmother, my father’s mother, lived in Newton, Massachusetts in a big Victorian house. To me it was a big huge Victorian house. I went back and saw it, it wasn’t that big. But to me it was a huge Victorian house with stairways–that’s what Sock Monkey is all about. She gave me a sock monkey for Christmas one time when I was about two, three, and she said, “His name is Monkey.” And I held it, and I said “Mummy.” My mother, who I also called Mummy at that time, didn’t like that too much, so she said, “His name is Joe.” So I had a sock monkey named Joe, and my cousin Ann Louise–that’s why the Sock Monkey is set in that old Victorian house. And my cousin, Ann Louise, used to–there was like a hidden stairway in the back, and she used to play tricks with it. Like she’d go up to–there was a closet up there where she would do the things that 14-year-old cousins do where they would knock on the door. And we were little kids. So there was a little man who lived in there. She would leave a little apple for him. She put a little dollhouse chair and a table there for him, and we really believed that he was in there, that he lived in there. I believed it completely. So remembering that was one of the things that I tried to do with this book.
Kelly: Uh-huh. Well, it’s gorgeous. Again, it’s just, you know…the drawing is as good as anything that I think I’ve ever seen.
Millionaire: The interiors are mostly taken from the–from corners of my brownstone apartment in Brooklyn. The houses that I draw are all in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.
Kelly: Do you use much reference material for your work?
Millionaire: Yeah. That’s why I have all those paintings of nautical scenes in books, because practically everything I draw, I draw it from a painting or an etching or a photograph. And then I cartoonize it.
Kelly: So where do you get paintings or photographs of drunken sock monkeys or crows?
Millionaire: I have a sock monkey. I hold it up and draw it. I have a stuffed crow, too, that I hold up and draw with button eyes.
Kelly: Did you have that before you started doing your strip?
Millionaire: Yeah, my sister made this sock monkey for me, because she remembered that I had one when I was a kid.
Kelly: What about the crow?.
Millionaire: I don’t remember how it came into my house, but one day it was there. I sewed button eyes on it because it didn’t have any eyes
Kelly: So its eyes have “X”s like a drunk.
Millionaire: Yeah. Like Drinky Crow when he’s drunk.
Kelly: But–so you got that after you were doing the Drinky Crow character?
Millionaire: I don’t know. It was a crow–I don’t remember who dropped it off, but somebody left it in my house, maybe at a birthday party or something. A black stuffed crow with no eyes.
Kelly: Like a real crow?
Millionaire: No, a toy.
Kelly: Oh.
Millionaire: Here it is. Because I have a photograph of it on the back of the first issue of Sock Monkey.
Kelly: Oh. It’s pretty.
Millionaire: See the hat? It’s small, and it doesn’t look as good, and I used to draw it that way, and I drew a couple of Sock Monkey comics for The New York Press. Then I lost the hat. My sister made me a new one, and gave it to me for Christmas last year. My sister and her kids. And the new hat was bigger. It looks a lot better.
Kelly: Uh-huh.
Millionaire: I’ve dedicated my comic book to my niece Robin and my other niece Caroline.
Kelly: How old are they?
Millionaire: Six and three.
Kelly: Have they ever seen the monkey stuff?
Millionaire: Yeah, they see it all the time. Yeah, I send them stuff like that all the time.
Kelly: Your sister’s fine with that?
Millionaire: Sure. I don’t send them the nasty ones.
Kelly: Oh, okay.
Millionaire: And they don’t know about being–they don’t know about the ravages of alcohol. They see a crow drinking booze. I remember when I used to watch cowboy movies, and the Indians would drink and they’d crawl over a wagon filled with hooch and be riding the wagon, cracking open the cases of whiskey and drinking it. I remember thinking to myself that I couldn’t stand the taste of whiskey, so the movie was ruined for me, so I would imagine they were drinking orangeade, which I really loved. Yeah, orangeade! Hah, hah!
Kelly: You were talking before about the reaction that your strip has gotten. What kind of reaction has the comic book itself got–
Millionaire: Well, it’s getting really good reaction. Of course, look at it, it’s a beautiful book. It’s selling out everywhere it appears. There’s a weird system for selling comic books, I guess, so it’s really hard to find it. But maybe that will change, who knows? Comic books–selling comic books has always been a totally mystifying, weird, process. I don’t know how it works, not at all. I mean, where do you buy them? Who knows? I don’t know. I know one store in New York where you buy them. I found out recently there are other stores, only because my book was in them. You’d think they’d want to sell them. Mommies would want to buy this for their kids, these comic books, except for the end, which I won’t spoil. Except to say that something really bad happens.
Among the many great things on display at the Alt Weekly Comics show at the Society Of Illustrators in New York City are a number of pieces from Mark Newgarden‘s New York Press strip, including this Little Nun (copied from his book We All Die Alone, Fantagraphics, 2006).
This reminded me to dig back to an interview I conducted back in August 1993 with Newgarden for issue number 161 of The Comics Journal which gives some more details on the making of the great Little Nun strip. The complete text of this interview will appear on this site shortly.
Newgarden on The Little Nun
I was really trying to work with a lot of self-imposed limitations: No dialogue, pantomime strips with no close-ups, or very few close-ups. No “camera” moves. They were influenced a lot by [Ernie] Bushmiller, [Otto] Soglow too, who did The little King. It was always pantomime, the Little King character, anyway. He would only have the other characters talk. But in The Little Nun, no one’s allowed to talk. It’s all pantomime. You rarely see that stuff anymore. It’s a relatively hard thing to do. It’s not an easy thing at all. You almost have to draw like Bushmiller or Soglow, you have to be crystal clear and ultra simple in your drawings to make them read. A lot of people still have trouble reading pantomime strips. They are not used to looking at the pictures that closely. They’re used to reading it from balloon to balloon and then going on to the next thing.
Show below are photos of the original art, showing how The Little Nun was created on graph paper.
Newgarden: They were hard. They took a long time. I did all The Little Nuns on gridded graph paper and it was like a lot of math. Slavishly making minute changes—the kind of stuff Bushmiller did as second nature. But it was a lot of slow work with rulers and Rapidographs and drafting stuff. It much more fun and easier and satisfying to do stuff like Meet the Cast.
Newgarden: But she’s a character I really like a lot. There used to be this strip called The Strange World of Mr. Mum (above, by Irving Phillips). It was a gag panel where there was no dialogue and this guy would observe weird gag cartoon situations. The little Nun has got a lot to do with that. She’s just there and her only reaction, ever, to anything, is praying. My grandmother’s reaction to anything disastrous would just be silently praying.
Kelly: Like the one where she shoots herself in the head so a flower could grow.
Newgarden: Yeah. That sums up Catholicism for me in a nutshell!
In February 1993, while in search of examples of original art work by legendary novelty artist Lewis Glackens, John F. Kelly and Mark Newgarden traveled to Neptune, New Jersey to speak with 78-year-old Bud Adams, owner of the S.S. Adams Company, “world’s largest manufacturer of practical jokes and magic tricks since 1906.”
Bud Adams, Jul. 30, 1917 – Apr. 24, 2001
Adams, son of Sam Adams’ (the self-proclaimed inventor of the Joy Buzzer), spoke at length about his many years of providing merriment to the masses. He also led Kelly and Newgarden on a guided tour of the factory, pointing with pride to happy workers busily producing Snake in the Cans, Joy Buzzers, Squirt Nickels and Magic Wands. Chances are the very same novelties that you enjoyed as a tot were produced in this beloved sea-side warehouse. What follows is a candid conversation with one of the men who make us laugh:
Workers assembling the Snake Nut Can gag.
Mark Newgarden: When did your father start the company?
Bud Adams: 1906. He started it in Plainfield, New Jersey and then he moved it to Asbury Park in the early ’20s. Then we moved to this building in about ’33 or ’34.
Newgarden: What was the very first line of products that Adams sold. Was it the same sort of stuff? Adams: The first one was Sneezing Powder. My father got into that by accident. He was a salesman for a coal tar company and they extracted various materials from the coal tar, one of which made everyone sneeze and it was thrown out. So he got it and put it into little packages and sold it to his friends for a nickel or a dime and then business started getting good (laughter). So he rented a room in Plainfield. And he had one girl working at a card table putting sneezing powder into envelopes all day long. Then his business doubled, so he had two people putting together Sneezing Powder. From then on he went into a rather nasty line of jokes. He made Itch Powder, Stink Bombs, and also made one item which we still have today, which was the dribble glass.
John F. Kelly: Your father invented the Dribble Glass?
Adams: I don’t know. I wasn’t there then.
Newgarden: So you don’t sell any more Itching Powder.
Adams: Oh, no. We wouldn’t dare. Itching powder has put people into the hospital. Sneezing Powder contains something that is very injurious. But it’s funny as the devil. If I wanted to make someone sneeze, I‘d put this little package against the key hole of the door and fill the room with Sneezing Powder and it worked. It really worked.
Newgarden: Someone’s still selling it. I was in a novelty store recently and they had it. It looked like it was imported or something. It had a lot of German writing on it.
Adams: Sneezing Powder? No, today I think it’s made with a type of pepper. Itch Powder is still imported. It’s made from a weed that grows wild in India. If any cattle get into that weed, they have to be destroyed.
Kelly: Wow. They can’t stop scratching themselves?
Adams: Oh, they just go crazy.
Kelly: What other products did your father make?
Adams: He made a can, it looked like a plain raspberry jam can, and if you opened it, a spring cloth-covered snake jumped out. And that was one of the big items.
Newgarden: Did your father employ a development department to come up with the ideas?
Adams: He was the development department. In the same way that I am.
Kelly: What are some of the things that you’ve come up with?
Adam: Shooting items were the first ones.
Kelly: I’m sorry, what?
Adams: Shooting items. And then I did a lot of development work on the Joy Buzzer. The Joy Buzzer was first made in Germany. Originally my father had a joy buzzer made by someone in this country. I don‘t know who it was. It was four inches in diameter and one inch thick. And he went over to Germany in 1928 and he met a clever Jewish tool and dye maker. My father told him to make it small, which he did. It was a good Joy Buzzer. He made the tools for it and the Joy Buzzer was made that way for several years. And I guess it was in the middle ’30s, Hitler was coming into power, the Jews were held down and persecuted and everything else. And so my father got a letter from the tool maker that said that for a very small amount of money he would sell him the Joy Buzzer tools. My father sent him the check and that was the last that we heard of him. I certainly hope that he got out of Germany. That must have been his travel money.
I’ve worked on the Buzzer all my life to improve it. I cut out a lot of the manufacturing process—I didn’t cheapen it. I made it better. And then in the last eight years, we made a big change and we made most of the plates out of zinc casting. Today it’s a relatively minor job to assemble the Joy Buzzer. We throw a lot of parts together and we hit it once and it’s finished.
Newgarden: Why don‘t you explain how a Joy Buzzer works.
Adams: You wind it up, shake hands with somebody and they get a buzz. If you sit on it, you get a surprise (laughter).
Newgarden: Now has the buzz’s charge changed over the years?
Adams: Oh. yes. Today. It‘s much stronger.
Newgarden: Do you think today people demand a stronger charge?
Adams: (No Answer)
Newgarden: Um, did your father try out the products on his friends.
Adams: Yes, every one of them.
Kelly: Was your father a funny guy?
Adams: No, they called him “Silent Sam.” He was rather sneaky. He was always pulling jokes on somebody.
Kelly: What are some of the other early items that have lasted?
Adams: There aren’t many that have lasted. Most of them have been discontinued because of the labor to assemble or manufacture. It’s awfully hard to compete with us because we’re the biggest in the business, we have the largest line of joke novelties and magic and most of the tools have been…There’s a Rubber Pencil that was made years ago and it used to retail for ten cents each. Now we make it with a little better quality and it retails for $1.49. We also made a Shiner. You look through a tube and you get a black eye. We still make that today. The Shooting Fountain Pen we still make today.
Newgarden: What are some of the products that he made that just bombed, that never went anywhere?
Adams: Oh, he had lots of them—and I’ve had plenty myself. One day on the Forth of July somebody was setting off a big firecracker in the middle of the street, lighting it and I took a little bitty firecracker and l threw it under him. He jumped straight into the air. That led to an item that I made, a firecracker about an inch and a quarter in diameter and six inches high. Under the firecracker was a bingo mechanism. So you would light the fuse and nothing would happen and then somebody would go over and pick up the firecracker and it would go bang (laughter).
Kelly: Now, what about the Woopee Cushion?
Adams: Oh, that was a terrific item. Somebody came in to see my father to sell the idea—the original inventor. That must have been in the late ’30s, early ’40s. My father turned it down and said. “That will never sell.”
Kelly: How does Disappearing Ink work?
Adam: It‘s made with a very close PH factor and the difference between being acid and alkaloid is the difference between being visible or invisible, like water. And when that changes, due to absorption of carbon dioxide. then the color disappears.
Kelly: Have your competitors ever stolen your ideas?
Adam: Oh, all the time! The Hindu Cones [a magic trick] was an item of ours that was knocked off in the Orient and it was very faithfully duplicated. In fact they even put our patent number on it and our name on it too (laughter).
Kelly and Newgarden: Wow!
Adams: They couldn’t read the writing on the trick. but they faithfully duplicated it anyway.
Newgarden: Are most of the new items magic tricks. rather that practical jokes?
Adams: Right now magic is easier to create than anything else.
Kelly: Did you ever carry X-Ray Specs?
Adams: No. We had an X-Ray Tube though. You see the bones in your hand or apparently you could see through clothing. That was a big seller. There was a little piece of a feather pasted over a hole (laughter)—that gave you an optical illusion. If you looked at your hand, you’d see the outline and you’d see another darker area that looked like bones. I think they were Guinea Hen feathers and we only put a piece over a hole that was about a 1/4 inch square.
Kelly: What about exploding or sparkling matches?
Adams: Oh, yeah. We had them but they were very dangerous. We used to have book matches, paper matches, and there was a little piece of fulminate on each match. I was responsible for that being discontinued. My father and I bumped heads on that one. That was in the early ’40s. it was very dangerous. You’d light a match and if would whoosh up in your face.
Newgarden: What about these? Hitler Horse Cards? “Strike a match on a horse’s ass…”
Adams: Oh, that was funny! And it says, “Hell Hitler!” The message was written with invisible ink. If you struck a match on it, the heat would make the message show up. That was a scream.
Newgarden: How far back does Fake Dog Doo go back?
Adams: I don‘t know. How far back do dogs go back? When was the first dog invented?
Kelly: Has that always been a big seller?
Adams: Always, yes.
Newgarden: I remember having fake vomit as a kid and getting into a lot of trouble with it. It’s very realistic.
Adams: There was a man who went to a bar and every night he‘d fall asleep at the bar. The bar owner didn’t like him at all. So one time when he was passed out, the bartender slipped one of those vomits under him. The man woke up—he wasn’t disturbed at all, apparently—he left a big tip. That was the last they saw of him.
Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Collection, which includes such items as an 9th (or 8th) century papyrus fragment of Homer’s “Odyssey,” Galileo’s “The Starry Messenger,” Arthur Rackham’s sketchbook for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” René Descartes’ “Compendium” and Tennessee Williams’ eye glasses, is also drawing the attention of scholars whose interests lie in researching the world of comics. A selection of these comics related items from the University’s collection, including a Red Sonja outfit cartoonist Wendy Pini once wore on the Mike Douglas Show in the 1970s, are currently on display at an exhibit, Comics at Columbia: Past, Present, Future, at the University’s Butler Library.
The Columbia collection was not always so robust; in 2005, when librarian for Ancient & Medieval History and Graphic Novels Karen Green initiated Butler Library’s graphic novels collection, it consisted of three books often used in curricular offerings—Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and Joe Sacco’s Palestine. It now consists of more than 4,300 titles. Since 2011, the collection has grown to also include the life work of artists as diverse as mainstream superhero legends Jerry Robinson and Chris Claremont, Mad’s Al Jaffe, Elfquest’s Wendy and Richard Pini, and Denis Kitchen’s Kitchen Sink Press archive. In addition to original artwork, the Columbia collection contains vast amounts of letters and correspondence, contracts, editorial and business files, mechanicals, draft art and mock-ups, and other original materials for researchers that chronicle, as Green says, “the process behind the finished product.” These materials, Green adds, are proof that the comics medium “is worthy of academic study…these are the materials that bring a creator’s career into focus and provide context.”
“The year after we acquired the Claremont archives,” Green says, “that collection became the most requested collection in the entire Rare Book and Manuscript Collection…One of the things I love so much about libraries is that our core philosophy is grounded in organization, preservation and access. Not to trash talk museums, but generally a visitor sees no more than 10 percent of a museum’s collection and the rest is stored away where very few people can find it. Our Rare Book and Manuscript Library is open to a global community of scholars. Anyone conducting a research project can come and request something in the collection and it will be brought to them. This keeps the legacy of our creators alive. “
Columbia’s libraries contain more than 12 million volumes and draws four million visitors a year. Among the materials in the Columbia collection on display are:
Wendy Pini’s 1970s comic con Red Sonja costume (below), as well as her painstaking sketches of its creation–View the Youtube clip here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9wRii6aiUk
Letters between Denis Kitchen and Stan Lee about the possibility of an approved, underground version of Spider-Man (above);
The sketches and final art from Al Jaffee’s Mad/Batman fold-in alternative;
Bill Finger original script for “Punch and Judy!,” a 12-page story that appeared in Batman #31 (1940), drawn by Jerry Robinson (listed as Bob Kane);
And psychologist and Wonder Woman creator William Moulton Marston’s contract to teach at Columbia.
The exhibit also includes an ancient strip discovered in the Butler Library’s archives that dates back to the 1700s, when Columbia was know as Kings College.
“The real star of the show is a comic that was confiscated from undergraduates who had made this extremely rude comic strip making fun of a professor whom they hated in 1766, when we were still King’s College,” Green told the Columbia Spectator.
The strip, shown below, “College Intrigues, or the Amors of Patrick Pagan,” tells the tale of a student who is seduced with “spruce” beer and impregnated by a professor who then pays for her abortion. Images from the strip serve as the promotional materials for the exhibit.
Speakers at the opening included Jaffee and Claremont. In his remarks, Claremont thanked Jaffee for his help in getting his start in the industry. Jaffee was a family friend of Claremont’s parents, and when while on break from Bard College in the 1960s, Claremont asked for Jaffee’s help in securing an internship at Mad Magazine. Jaffee instead put him in touch with Stan Lee at Marvel.
“Al called Stan Lee, Stan called me, and I told Stan Lee that I would work for nothing…so I was hired,” Claremont said. “So it is my privilege that my stuff is exhibited in the same place as Al’s. You should look at his. It’s a lot more fun at mine.”
The exhibition will be on display through January 23, 2015 in Columbia’s Kempner Gallery, Rare Book & Manuscript Library (Butler Library, 6th Floor).
Excerpted from The Comics Journal #186. April 1996
Kazimieras G. Prapuolenis — or the artist formally known as Kaz — first burst onto the comic culture scene in the late 1970s through his appearances in Art Spiegelman’s RAW (along with his School of Visual Arts classmates Drew Friedman and Mark Newgarden). Those early strips, an edgy mix of punk rock and classic comic aesthetics, served notice of the arrival of new voice that was both pioneering as well as grounded in the medium’s traditions. And like fellow RAW alumni Gary Panter (with whom he shares more than a few influences) and Charles Burns, Kaz’s style has evolved to where it is instantly recognizable — especially when it pops up in the work of other artists he’s “influenced.”
Born to Lithuanian immigrants in Hoboken, N.J. in 1959, Kaz has created an impressive and immense body of comic strip and illustration work through his apprearances in Weirdo, Bad News, the East Village Eye, The Village Voice, Details, Nickelodeon, The New Yorker, Swank, Eclipse, N.Y. Rocker, Screw, and Bridal Guide, along with many other comics, magazines and fanzines.
Since 1992 his weekly comic strip Underworld has appeared in alternative weekly newspapers across the country. Along with Glenn Head, he co-edited the comics anthology Snake Eyes, and has three collections of his work available from Fantagraphics: Buzzbomb, Underworld, and most recently, Sidetrack City. Other projects include the cover for writer Mark Leyner’s book My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist, various work for Topps Trading Cards and Pee-wee Herman Toy Designs, as well as several animation and Internet projects currently in the works.
Kaz lives in a pop culture-cluttered apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side along with his girlfriend, Linda Marotta, a book buyer for Shakespeare and Company and book reviewer for Fangoria magazine. The following is an excerpt from the interview appearing in TCJ #186.
An early UNDERWORLD.
JOHN F. KELLY: Before we talk about your schooling as a cartoonist, do you have any opening statements?
KAZ: Underground comix made a man out of me.
KELLY: Did you go to art school right out of high school?
KAZ: No, I worked for a year or so.
KELLY: Doing what?
KAZ: I had a few factory jobs. The first job I had was at a plant called Springboard Records that had a license to press the Chipmunks’ albums. I swept the floor. That was my first job right out of high school. And it was completely disheartening to think that this was going to be my life. The forklift drivers felt so bad for me that they would lift me up on the forks of these vehicles that would rise up really high and deposit me up onto the top shelves of the warehouse where I would sleep all afternoon. I had a job working at a factory called Boyle-Midway that made Black Flag spray, and carpet cleaner, oven cleaner, that kind of stuff. It was an assembly line job. You would sit there next to the conveyor belt and watch the line in case a cap falls off a bottle. You’d have to put it back on. Or if a can had a leak, you’d toss it into the trash. The most dangerous spot on the line was right after the compression room where they forced the oven cleaner into the cans. Any one of those cans could blow up. One night I was sitting there with my dorky safety glasses on fantasizing about something when I heard a pop. I looked up and my whole face was drenched in oven cleaner. I felt my body being lifted up and then my head was shoved into a water fountain. A co-worker thought my eyes may have gotten sprayed. I also worked in an air conditioner factory. It was another mind-numbing assembly-line job. With an air-powered screw-gun, my job was to put in two screws that held the cooling unit into the air conditioner frame. That was it. All day long. The machines would come down the line non-stop. It was Modern Times. The place was big, hot, and noisy. I had some friends who worked there and they would drop Black Beauties and puncture holes into the compression tanks just to break up the monotony. One guy’s task was to line the cardboard boxes with plastic foam that had a sticky side on it. It would come off these gigantic rolls. One day he wrapped that foam around his head until he looked like a mummy and walked off the line. There he went, wandering throughout the whole factory in a daze. People were jumping out of his way. He finally made it to the nurse’s office where he declared, “My brain hurts!” He was fired on the spot.
KELLY: How long did you work there?
KAZ: About a year. I had my own breakdown. I disengaged from the machinery much like the main character in my strip, The Little Bastard. One morning I got a bit ahead of myself on the line when I stood back and watched the whole factory disappear. It was like at the end of an old cartoon where blackness engulfs the picture leaving a small circular view until the circle itself disappears. Then I blacked out. I woke up in an ambulance. I later learned from the hysterical Puerto Rican women who worked beside me that I fell down and started to thrash about banging my head on the conveyer belt. My screw gun, which was stuck in the “on” position, was flapping about on my crotch. No one wanted to touch me. They were convinced that I was a drug addict anyway, so they assumed I was having a freak-out! Later, the doctor at the hospital told me that I had some sort of seizure but they weren’t sure what it was. Two weeks later, I learned, the doctor blew his own brains out. I actually went back to work there. But it was so embarrassing. Everybody kept their distance waiting for me to freak out again. That’s when I decided to listen to my heart. I always toyed with the idea of being a cartoonist. And now it seemed if I didn’t try, I would die right there in the factory. So I quit and went to art school where the freak-outs were more pleasant.
KELLY: And this was in Hoboken.
KAZ: This is when I was living in Rahway, a suburb of New Jersey.
KELLY: When did your parents come to this country?
KAZ: My father came here in the early ’50s and my mother arrived in the late ’50s. He was responsible for getting my mom’s family over here, both being Lithuanian refugees. They had escaped Lithuania which had turned Communist. My father was a Lithuanian nationalist who was forced to fight for the Russians in WWII. The Baltic countries were a real mess at the time, what with the Germans and then the Communists stomping all over them. He had a lot of near misses and almost wound up being shot by a German firing squad. Or was that a Russian firing squad? It all sounds so confusing. I have this picture in my head of my father running around a battlefield like Charlie Chaplin being blown from one side to another. He was eventually approached by the CIA to spy on the Communists and he realized that if he took that job he would not be long for this world. There was an underground pipeline to America, so he took it. And all he ever wanted to be was a priest who worked in a leper colony.
KELLY: What did he do for a living when he got here?
KAZ: He worked in a factory. He had no other skill and he had no interest in improving his English. He also organized anti-Communist protests and taught Lithuanian classes to immigrant children and dreamed of one day returning to his beloved motherland. My mom was a housewife and then she worked in factories too.
KELLY: So you were born in Hoboken, NJ in ’59?
KAZ: I was born in 1959. I have a twin sister named Laima. We both have Lithuanian names. I also have two younger brothers, Vincent and Thomas.
KAZ as a TOT.
KELLY: What was it like growing up there?
KAZ: We were poor. Lived in a tenement building. Bought our clothes at the Salvation Army. Ate my mom’s horrible Lithuanian cooking. But we didn’t know any better. My dad had two jobs, so he was never around. We played on the streets, the city parks, abandoned buildings, the Hoboken piers. We were the Dead End Kids. There were always big family parties where the adults got drunk and the kids went insane. My favorite toy was an Alvin the Chipmunk bubble-bath container. But the Salvation Army also sold toys, so I always had a lot of junk. I watched a lot of kids shows and cartoons. I could see the Empire State Building from my bedroom window. Then, when I was ten, my parents had saved up enough money to put a down-payment on a house in Rahway, New Jersey, and off we moved to the suburbs. The people next door had a big yard with swing sets. I thought it was a public park so we played there until we were kicked out. It was my first taste of someone having something bigger and better than me. So instead of the Dead End Kids, we were now the Little Rascals. We played in the woods and built soap box derby cars and tree houses. But I always knew that my family was different. For instance we were forced to speak only Lithuanian in the house. My friends were convinced that it was a practical joke. As if we were speaking gibberish just to fuck with them. Nobody had ever heard of Lithuania, and I was beginning to doubt its existence myself. My father forced us to take Lithuanian classes at a Catholic parish in Elizabeth, NJ on Saturday mornings. Saturday mornings! I was deeply into television cartoons at the time. He had a hell of a time each week rounding us up for the car ride. We’d hide under the porch, up a tree, anything. And I couldn’t tell any of my friends about it. At these classes we would be forced to participate in Lithuanian folk dances. My brother and I would intentionally step on the other dancers’ feet just to get kicked out. I finally ran out of a class in a middle of a lesson one day and refused to return. Well, my father couldn’t do anything to get me back. He tried beating me. But one of my heroes at the time was Papillion, and I could take anything he dished out. Eventually I won and got to watch Scooby Doo to my heart’s content.
KELLY: What was high school like for you?
KAZ: Oh, it was miserable. Torture. I was a bad student. I had a hard time getting interested in lessons. I later learned that my high school was one of the worst in the state. I tried. I really tried to be normal. I even joined a baseball league at one point. But I hardly played at all because all my teammates were championship players, so I sat on the bench the whole time. I won two trophies, but I barely touched a ball. Just my own balls. I went through periods of joining clubs and other periods of being a total loner. Just staying home and watching television. Most of my pals were misfits. But I also dated and had girlfriends. Some kids thought I was cool because I could draw. They kept saying, “He’s an artist. He’s an artist.” Until I eventually became one. Though my grades were bad, I never thought I was stupid. I just didn’t give a shit. Four years of prison. Just counting the days.
KELLY: Did you start going into the city a lot when you were in high school?
KAZ: When I discovered there was a train station in Rahway that was connected with New York City, I’d play hooky and explore the city. All the television stations that we got in New Jersey were broadcast from Manhattan. So we never knew what was going on in our own hometown, but we knew everything about New York. I felt like I lived there, anyway. When I found where CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City were, and that they would serve me liquor, I was there practically every week.
KELLY: So you were going to see bands and shows?
KAZ: It was the beginning of the punk scene — ’75, ’76. And I was completely into it. The Ramones, Blondie, Richard Hell. And then later the British punk bands. It was very exciting to a kid like me. I read all of the rock press. My friends were all into the leftover bands from the ’60s — Led Zep, the Stones, the Who. Although I liked those bands just fine, here was a new rock movement springing up practically in my backyard. I could not convince anyone to check out these bands with me. They sneered at me. As far as they were concerned, punk sucked and was for faggots. I alienated everyone. With my ripped jeans and leather jacket I stood out in sleepy Rahway town. People would scream, “Punk rock sucks!” at me as they drove by in their vans.
KAZ meets an early hero, Richard Hell.
KELLY: Were you reading Creem?
KAZ: I read Creem, I read Rock Scene, Circus… you don’t really read those magazine because there’s no real writing in them. You look at the pictures and you skim them.
KELLY: Were you drawing all the time?
KAZ: I started really drawing in junior high school. All through school, art class was my favorite. No rules. I got the best reinforcement in art. In junior high there was this kid, Bernard, who sat in front of me and drew these fantastically funny monsters. Big Daddy Roth monsters mostly. I wanted to emulate him and get some attention, too. Plus, it was more entertaining than doing math. He was good at drawing cars, too, and I was good at monsters so we would compare notes and crack each other up. I got real good at shading on a school desktop. Nice enamel surface. We’d leave these elaborate monster/car battle scenes for the janitor to clean off at the end of the day. Even then we would get upset when some other kid would cop one of our drawing licks: “Hey! You copied that from me, you thief!” Meanwhile I was copying everything out of MAD magazine!
KELLY: Nothing has changed.
KAZ: I was reading a lot of comics at this time, but I didn’t share my passion with anyone else.
KELLY: It was a secret?
KAZ: I didn’t hide it, but there was nobody in my immediate circle that read them. There were times when I didn’t have anybody to hang out with so I would just collect comics and read them off on my own. After a while, I became a comics junkie. I started to buy everything. I loved Spider-Man, Conan, and all those weird Kirby DC books like The New Gods and Forever People. I started sending away for back issues of Nick Fury Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., and Not Brand Ecch! I was soon scraping the bottom of the comics barrel buying Jimmy Olsen and Archie’s Madhouse Funnies. Any fuckin’ thing so that I wouldn’t have to live in reality. I started to draw my own homemade superhero comics, which were utterly pathetic.
KELLY: Well, look what you’re emulating.
KAZ: Then I discovered underground comics and everything changed.
KELLY: How did that happen?
KAZ: You know, after you start collecting enough comic books, you start running out, because they only come out once a month. You wind up with piles of the stuff and so you start reading the ads for a change. There were ads for back issues — you know, Golden Age and Silver Age books — so I sent for a catalog. In the back of one of these catalogs were ads for the underground comics I remembered seeing in a head shop once but was too young to buy. It took me a couple of months to get up the courage to send for some titles. I wrote that I was over 18 years of age and I felt like such a bad boy. I knew I was buying something nasty. Something worse than MAD or National Lampoon. Well, the first two books I got were Rubber Duck and a copy of Zap #3, the one with the S. Clay Wilson story of Captain Piss Gums and his Pervert Pirates. Well, it blew my little mind. Here were cartoon characters fucking, doing drugs and chopping each other’s dicks off! I hid them under a loose floorboard in the attic and quickly sent away for more. I wasn’t allowed to have MAD magazine in the house because my mom saw a back cover once that had a hippie crucified on a hypodermic needle and she said it was sacrilegious. And now I had Captain Piss Gums and Joe Blow!
I had already had a taste of this kind of stuff with National Lampoon. I loved their “Funny Pages” section. I was a big fan of Bobby London’s Dirty Duck. It’s not cool among my contemporary cartoonist pals to have liked Dirty Duck, but I thought it was hilarious. I also loved Vaughn Bodé, another no-no, the way he mapped out an entire universe from his mind. The mythology and space ships. It was all very unique and drenched in drug and hippie culture. It was Tolkien as an underground comic. Cheech Wizard was very funny. Cobalt 60 anticipated Heavy Metal comics and cyber-punk. And he was a true eccentric who cross-dressed and died accidentally during sex play. What’s not to like? This idea of creating your own private world has always fascinated me. That’s why I liked those Kirby books.
KELLY: I would buy those and just stare at them.
KAZ: Yeah, they look really good even today. They’re pretty amazing. All that demented machinery. His characters look like they’re made out of granite. They all wore expressions like they had permanent headaches. His writing was really blunt and at the same time mind-bending. Characters were constantly being hurled through time warps and dimensional trap-doors.
KELLY: When you were going into New York in high school, were you going to those comic book conventions?
KAZ: Oh, no. I didn’t even know they existed. I had no idea. The first time I ever went into a comic book shop it was a very weird experience. It kind of scared me. Because it was kind of dark and everything was in boxes. It smelled pretty bad in there. This was pre-Jim Hanley’s Universe and St. Mark’s Comics.
KELLY: I remember seeing my first comic shop when I was 10 and just being paralyzed by the sight of it. Anything you wanted was there, it was really traumatizing… When did you start going from imitating other artists’ styles to doing your own work?
KAZ: After my dismal failure trying to draw superhero comics I pretty much gave up drawing until I discovered the undergrounds. I would imitate Crumb’s comic book covers and I found that cartoony style more natural for me. I remember once copying a Mr. Natural cover with watercolors. My mom liked the Mr. Natural cover so much she hung it up on the living room wall. So that was very encouraging. Crumb’s work was very important to me because he drew in a style that I recognized from other comics but his stories were free from formula. They were truly shocking to me. And I met that challenge by drawing my own underground comic book called Bird Turd Funnies which I never finished. Crumb’s work is so organic and real I can’t say enough about it. Viva la Crumb!
Another important influence was a hard-bound edition of Krazy Kat comics that I sent away for. Again, here was a guy who had created his own universe with a deceptively simple drawing style. I felt like I could walk around in Coconino County and taste the ink. There was a photograph of George Herriman that I would stare at ’til I put myself in a trance. It’s a picture of him sitting at his drawing table with his hat cocked, dreaming about his comic. I would fantasize myself in his place sitting there in the newspaper office working on a cartooning deadline. Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy was another important influence for me. I would clip the Sunday strips and paste them into a scrapbook. Reading them over and over again, I was slowly teaching myself the mechanics of comic strip storytelling. In Penn Station, New York, there was a bookstore that had on one of their shelves a hardcover copy of The Celebrated Cases of Dick Tracy. It had no title on the front of the dust jacket. Just a drawing of Dick Tracy’s famous profile. Whenever my family and I would come back from a show or circus in New York City we’d wait for the local train home in that station and I would stare at that cover, too shy to ask anyone to pull it down for me. The thought of that big book containing nothing but Dick Tracy comics from the ’40s was driving me mad. I would stare at that cover until I was hypnotized. I finally saved the money to buy it and fell completely in love with it. It was dark, violent, and weird. drawn in a style that I could learn. You can still see Chester Gould’s influence in my drawing style.
KELLY: I think Dick Tracy is a big strip for a lot of people, although a lot of them wouldn’t admit it.
KAZ: They won’t admit it? Really? Dick Tracy is the seminal strip for cartoonists who draw detective/crime comics. There would be no Batman without Tracy and the grotesque criminals Chester Gould invented. Each panel is like a blueprint drawing taking you deeper and deeper into his dark, twisted Chicago cartoon gangland. I find his drawings to be like graphic noir. Sinister. I also collected the Crimestoppers Textbook panels.
KELLY: They always gave the best advice. I remember one that said you shouldn’t let people into your house to use the phone if you were an old woman. Did you read Nancy?
KAZ: Nancy I read without even thinking about it. Sometimes clipping them because the local paper ran them. It wasn’t until I went to the School of Visual Arts and took a class with Art Spiegelman and Jerry Moriarty who drew Jack Survives for RAW that I started looking at and reading Nancy a little closer. Moriarty had a very Zen-beatnik way of talking about Bushmiller that really clicked with me. Nancy soon became a celebrated strip among the RAW crowd. And whenever anyone would say it was stupid or they didn’t get it, we would just close our eyes and smile. Nancy was so corny it was beyond corny. It somehow shifted into the kind of meta-world that only Zen masters navigate.
KELLY: That was right before Bushmiller died.
KAZ: Right. [a moment of silence]
KELLY: So you weren’t studying Dondi, though.
KAZ: I read everything. I always loved Smoky Stover. Even when I was a kid. I remember reading it but not understanding it. I understood Spooky, the cat strip that ran at the bottom. Little Orphan Annie, when I was a kid, I remember had too many words and not enough action, although I remember liking Maw Green. Nobody talks about the influence of Harold Gray’s Maw Green on my work.
KELLY: I think Smoky Stover had a big impact on you.
KAZ: It sure did. But I didn’t think about it again until much later, when I started thinking about what kind of sensibility and style my hand was suitable for. There was that piece I did for Snake Eyes #3 called “Zak Smoke.” The look of that strip was intentionally goofy because the story itself was so dark and depressing. Zak catches a glimpse of his own impending death and then he runs from one death symbol smack into another until the strip ends with his enlightenment. The sign pops up like the corny puns that mushroom all over a Smokey Stover comic.
KELLY: What made you choose the School of Visual Arts in New York?
KAZ: I went there because somebody told me once that SVA was the School of Cartoon & Illustration, which I believe is what it used to be called. So I went there with a portfolio of drawings that I drew in high school. I actually had a strip that I did then called Mr. Roach, and my idea was that I was going to submit this to syndicates to get a daily comic strip. It was really bad. Badly written, badly drawn. It didn’t even have gags. But I did a few things right. I had six weeks’ worth. I learned about photostats. I paid for all the printing and I sent them out to all the syndicates and got rejections. I was sending copies of the strip to newspaper cartoonists looking for feedback. The only guy who wrote me back was Russell Myers, who draws Broom Hilda. He was very encouraging. His letter was written on green Broom Hilda stationary with a green envelope that had all of his characters frolicking about on it. It was very exciting to me at the time. I thought, “Maybe I can actually do this!” Although he did say that I should go to art school and learn how to draw.
KELLY: What did the syndicates say in their rejection letters?
KAZ: One of them said basically there was no way they’d ever print a strip about a cockroach [laughs], so right away I was doing the underground comic thing. I still love that daily comics form. But my sensibilities and humor are more in tune with the underground. The writing in Underworld is all over the place. One week it’s R-rated, the next week it’s a G.
From Robert Crumb’s WEIRDO, 1984.
KELLY: Well, I think the strip is such a traditional strip; I mean, it’s black and all….
KAZ: Right. And the gags revolve around heroin, death, and mutilation.
KELLY: But if you change a couple of words around, it looks like a classic.
KAZ: That’s the way I designed it. To getcha. To make it look appealing.
KELLY: What did you submit to get into SVA?
KAZ: Stuff from high school. I literally sat down and did a drawing specifically to submit.
KELLY: Seconds after it was done?
KAZ: On the train! They must have been desperate for admissions, because those drawings were pretty awful. From what I understand, it wasn’t that difficult to get in at that time. I don’t know what it’s like now. I went with the thought of getting into animation. But they expose you to everything: painting, sculpture, photography. My head was swimming with the possibilities. The more I thought about animation, the less I wanted to do it. I took Art Spiegelman’s cartooning class. Only after I had signed up did I go back to my underground comics collections and pullout a bunch of his strips. Although I did remember the story that Maus came from in the Funny Animals book. I remember reading that strip over and over again. It was a very powerful story. Then after I took his class I went back and I looked up all the back issues of Arcade and I got a copy of Breakdowns and I really appreciated where he was coming from. He was very dry and arty, He was so passionate about the possibilities of comics that I got sucked in allover again.
KELLY: Was that when you met Mark Newgarden and Drew Friedman?
KAZ: I met Mark and Drew in Harvey Kurtzman’s class. Harvey’s first class assignment was that we had to pair off and do cartoon self-portraits. I drew Mark and he drew me. He drew me as a cartoon punk from new Jersey. I was wearing a black leather jacket, spiky hair, purple jeans. I thought punk was cartoony to begin with. And that attitude eventually encompassed everything: the visual arts, writing. It was starting to affect the arts at the time. This was ’79, ’80.
RAW #8, 1986 with a cover by KAZ.
KELLY: So you show up at SVA with spiky hair and you meet up with Drew Friedman and Newgarden. What did you think of each other?
KAZ: We were friends at first. I’m not sure what they thought of me. Mark and Drew and a few others were kinda cliquey. Drew seemed pretty self-absorbed, always cracking jokes. Mark was the same, joking and laughing during class. We didn’t socialize. I remember when Spiegelman started RAW, he called Drew, Mark and myself after class and asked us to contribute some comics. He said he wanted some experimental student work. I was looking for people to relate to. I was into the whole idea of scenes. I was reading about the surrealists and they had a scene. The punk rock thing was a scene. I was looking for a cartoon scene but it didn’t really happen until a bit later with Bad News and Snake Eyes. And even then it wasn’t much of anything. It’s hard to keep people together in New York. There’s too many distractions. So Spiegelman started this workshop class after his lecture class. He hand-selected a few students for it and that was fantastic. I learned so much in that class. Art was the best teacher I’ve ever had. I don’t know how he felt about me at the time. I remember him calling me a snot once.
KELLY: That’s just about what he said on the back of your new book. But you’re funny, which is what saves you.
KAZ: I wasn’t trying to be funny then. I was trying to do art comics. I was into Krazy Kat and all this avant-garde stuff. So I was gonna be the guy who would experiment with page design and layout. Trying to incorporate the narrative into strange page designs. In my second year at SVA, I already had a regular comic strip being published in The New York Rocker.
KELLY: And it had a punk feel to it.
KAZ: I guess it did. But I always thought comics did, anyway. I mean, The Yellow Kid had a punk feel to it, Barney Google, Snuffy Smith…I mean, Snuffy Smith was like a hillbilly punk. He was lazy, you know, shooting people, drinking moonshine.
KELLY: There’s a lot of proto-slackers in the history of comics: Jughead, Wimpy; Sluggo, and all those hillbillies.
KAZ: Maybe cartoonists admired those types because it’s a lot of work drawing cartoons so you wish you could slack off.
KELLY: What was the Kurtzman class like?
KAZ: It was a complete waste of time. Unfortunately, he wasn’t teaching what he was good at, which was comics. But for some reason, he was teaching gag cartoons. It was a silly class. He would come in and he’d say, “Okay, today we are going to practice WORD BALLOONS!” Or cartoon sound effects. So we’d sit there going KARANG AND BADOOM and POW. It was really stupid. Here’s this master who created MAD and Two-Fisted Tales completely wasting his and our time. Friedman and Newgarden were real palsy-walsy with him, trying to upstage him with silly sounds and whatnot, so sometimes nothing would ever get done.
KELLY: They were palsy-walsy with him after they made him cry.
KAZ: The story I remember about that day was Kurtzman was showing some slides and Friedman and some clowns were in the back making Three Stooges noises. All I could think about was that he’d been working all day trying to sell some piece of shit cartoon to Hugh Hefner, driving all the way down from Connecticut to teach this useless art class to a room of students that couldn’t give a shit, and all we had to offer him was, “Hey, Moe!” and “Nyuck, nyuck!” Making wise cracks at everything he said. He looked tired. Real tired. He finally bowed his head and turned on the lights and walked out of the classroom. Leaving us there in stunned silence. Then he comes back in and goes into a sad speech about how he doesn’t have to do this to make a living blah, blah, blah. It was sad and pathetic. Everyone was nice to him after that, but it was too late.
KELLY: What types of things would Spiegelman focus on?
KAZ: He ran the gamut. He would talk about everything from the story-telling to the actual words that the cartoonists would use, like the way Herriman would use dialect. He gave you the whole scope of it. He talked about inking styles a bit, but Spiegelman isn’t really a techno-nerd the way a lot of cartoonists are. It was theoretical. He had an intellectual approach that I found refreshing. I never heard comics discussed that way. He made you want to do smart comics. There was nothing else you could do. You had to do comics that reflected your intelligence and knowledge of art and literature. Aspire to greater heights. At least that’s what I got out of it. I found myself going through the whole history of comic approaches and trying them on for a while.
KELLY: In Buzzbomb, I can identify several different phases of your work. the post-psychedelic stuff; etc. The Tot story seems to stick out as most like what you are doing now, maybe a little darker.
KAZ: With that work, I was moving away from comics as pure design and I was trying to tell a tale. I found that people remembered characters and stories more than they remembered style. Very few people come up to me to compliment me on my layout or style. They remember something a character said or did. So I taught myself how to tell a story. After dropping out of art school, I moved back into Hoboken and wasn’t doing much of anything except taking two months to draw a page of comics. I would draw and re-draw panels like a lunatic. Peter Bagge was living in Hoboken at this time, and we would visit each other occasionally. We’d met before when I submitted a comic strip to a publication he was editing at the time called Comical Funnies. At this time, he was working on STOP! with John Holmstrom, JD King, and Ken Weiner. I got to know the whole gang and they would tease me for being in RAW. Apparently, they all tried to get into RAW, but were rejected or something, so they all hated Spiegelman. They literally saw themselves as the antithesis of RAW. Funny, disposable, lightweight. I liked the idea of a purely funny comic book so I submitted some comics. But I always felt they were suspicious of me. You know, I was one of the RAW guys. Peter and his wife Joanne would often throw these drunken dinner parties back then. Everybody was drawing for SCREW. They were a fun bunch of characters. After I did Buzzbomb I. had decided I didn’t want to draw comics anymore. I was just getting nowhere with it. Underground/alternative; publications pay $50 a page, and I just wasn’t making any money. So I started doing illustration work, and that started taking up a lot of my time. But still there was this nagging feeling that I had to express myself with comics, so I started working on a comic strip in secret. I didn’t talk about it to anybody. I didn’t think I was ever going to finish it, and I didn’t ever know what the story was going to be. I just started it and it wound up being Sidetrack City. It pushed me right back into comics. I was going through a real tumultuous time in my life. I had broken up a relationship of seven years, I moved into an apartment with a friend of mine–Alex Ross, who’s a painter–and getting into psychedelic drugs, and reading books on philosophy, just living this complete bohemian, intellectual art life. And all that spirit and energy went into Sidetrack City. At the same time I was doing a lot of illustration work, I was doing Pee-Wee Hennan designs with Gary Panter, comics for National Lampoon, which got me to exercise my funny bone. I remember Drew Friedman giving me that job saying, “Just do a page. The only thing is, it has to be funny.”
Kaz’s old studio in New York City at 109th Street and Broadway in a photo taken in the mid-1990s, around the time of this interview was conducted.
KELLY: It seems like that period had a big effect on your current style.
KAZ: Because I was cranking out more comics, I had to reach deeper into my skull for ideas. Anything that seeped out, I used. In the past I would usually approach a strip as if I was doing something important. I wanted the work to be arty. Pretentious was not a dirty word to me. But now I had more deadlines and funnier stuff slipped out. I was staying up, working later and later. All those old gag comics began to look tragic to me. One morning I woke up and everything in my room and apartment had a black outline around it, with crosshatching and color separation. I had gotten cartoonal knowledge! I learned to relax and allow my drawings to get cruder so that my comics could get more organic. Closer to the way my brain worked. Glenn Head was starting up the old Bad News comic book, which became Snake Eyes. And I was excited to get involved with that, because there were a lot of talented cartoonists living in New York that did not have a regular outlet. I envisioned a book that showcased the New York style of cartooning that had come out of SVA and RAW.
Snake Eyes, #1
KELLY: What was it like working with a co-editor?
KAZ: It was fun to sit around and plan the books and talk about comics. We had a similar vision about comics. We both love that gritty urban wiseguy school of cartooning. For me, the most rewarding aspect was contracting artists whose work I admired and asking them to draw a few pages. My hands would tremble as I opened the envelopes. Since we weren’t paying much and didn’t really crack the whip as far as deadlines went, the issues took forever to put together. Some of the strips were too weird for most people; Jonathon Rosen, Jayr Pulga, and Brad Johnson–their visions seemed too private for most readers. At first, I had a hard time convincing Glenn to run Brad Johnson’s work.
KELLY: It looks like it’s drawn by a retarded 12-year-old. Which is why I like it.
KAZ: To be fair, Glenn tried to get me excited about certain cartoonists that I couldn’t see until much later. Dan Clowes is one example. At first I thought he was too slick and surface-oriented. But I was wrong. Now he’s one of my favorite cartoonists. And he’s doing work with so much depth, it’s astonishing. Now I see people on the streets and I automatically think, He’s a Clowes character!” I wasn’t looking below the surface. But for the most part, Glenn and I agreed. It’s just that we don’t seem to have any commercial instincts. I tend to gravitate to work that looks wrong. I can remember Alex Ross and myself trying to draw like someone who was insane or retarded. Instead of attempting, like everybody else, to be really sophisticated or smart, we got into this idea of American dumbness, like Philip Guston, whose work looks completely dumb on the surface -big eyeballed guys, big giant feet -but there’s a sensitivity there. Basically, he was still doing Abstract Expressionist painting, but he was using these really simple symbols that looked wrong on the surface, like Mutt and Jeff. Philip Guston was called a stumblebum painter by a critic once. Captain Beefheart sounds like Guston paints. I think it’s a way of being nostalgic for the things you liked as a kid, like Popeye, but also being sophisticated at the same time. That’s sort of what I do with Underworld. Some of the gags are really dumb, but they make me laugh so I leave them in. If it wasn’t a weekly strip, I’d be a little more thoughtful. But because I have to put it out every week, parts of my personality that would otherwise be guarded pop out. So you see me as the dumb vaudevillian guy, falling down for a laugh.
KELLY: So Snake Eyes is no more?
KAZ: It was too difficult editing a comic book and balancing an illustration career and doing my own comics and having a social life. I was also co-hosting a weekly radio show. Glenn Head did a wonderful job on that book, but it was driving him batty too. Fantagraphics was not paying us anything for editing and designing it. We were only getting a page rate. And it didn’t seem like anyone besides our fellow cartoonists were interested in an anthology comic book with no theme that only came out once a year. It kicked the shit out of us after three issues.
KELLY: I want to ask you about the influence of psychedelics on your work, since you’re currently on a natural amphetamine…
KAZ: Ginseng.
KELLY: When did you first start doing drugs?
KAZ: [laughs hysterically] It depends on the drug. I drank beer and smoked pot in high school like everybody else.
KELLY: I can’t imagine drawing on pot.
KAZ: I’ve inked on pot. Then the next morning I would see that I’d done these elaborate cross-hatching jobs that would go on forever and there would be thousands of little characters in the background. It was too much. Plus the idea was a lot worse than you had imagined it when you were high. Some people can do it. As far as other influences, I’m not sure that psychedelic drugs are a direct influence in the way my work looks. I think there’s a difference in the type of story that I might approach. Psychedelics put your head in a place that allows you to look at things differently. It’s not necessarily the right way, but it’s different and that’s what I’m after. It could be a dangerous thing playing with your consciousness. Your concept of the world changes. It becomes organic and infinite. I never did much drawing on hallucinogens. My hands were too shaky and my mind was exploding with visions. I jotted down ideas. Lot’s of ideas. STRANGE ideas.
KELLY: Do acid and mushrooms affect you differently?
KAZ: They sure do. Mushrooms to me are more physical. Your body feels more rubbery. And the mushroom make you want to lie down. The mushroom peak has a shorter duration. But the visions are just as intense. At first geometric shapes evolve into full-blown hallucinations. Whereas LSD gives me a more high-tech feeling. The world machine grinding away.
KELLY: Can you draw though?
KAZ: I was once staring at a piece of paper and seeing the most amazing things. But when I put pencil to paper to try to draw what I was seeing, the visions would quickly mutate. I found myself chasing these elusive images. You wind up in places that you wouldn’t normally go. Down a rabbit hole.
SIDETRACK CITY, 199x?
KELLY: You see it as affecting your storytelling, but in Sidetrack City, the overload of images seems like you’re recreating a trip.
KAZ: Well, it was an inner and outer journey for the main character. The landscape and the architecture had to reflect Bizmark’s inner life. So in that sense, it was very psychedelic. There was the sense of being lost and pushed around by sinister forces that recreated the deep paranoia that can accompany a psychedelic trip. Schizophrenic delusions and a sense of reality being only a shabby backdrop to the real reality happening behind the curtain. At the same time, there’s the magic. The knowledge that you create your own story. I wanted it to be emotional. The drawings had to be fun to look at. Lots of inventive backgrounds and playful layouts. You can tell what I was looking at. I didn’t care if the drawings looked like someone else’s or if the characters were in proportion. What mattered was how I was feeling at the time. Cartoonists always play this game of accusing others of stealing styles. It’s the guys who assimilate styles that learn and move on the quickest. At one point, your own hand will come out and by then you will have had all this experience. Then anything you draw will look like your own. You can recreate the whole world in your own hand. Now that’s psychedelic.
Original art for an ad for KAZ’s Sidetrack City, 1996. The strip originally appeared in Snake Eyes, #2, 1992.
KELLY: So how often do you do drugs now?
KAZ: I’m tripping right now. [laughs]
KELLY: Drinking certainly has a long and venerable tradition in the world of cartooning.
KAZ: It’s a pain killer.
KELLY: The thought of drawing Bazooka Joe for a living could be unbearable.
KAZ: Bazooka Junkie Joe.
KELLY: Do you see a difference between your art pre- and post-psychedelics?
KAZ: Yeah, but growing up in the ’7Os meant that you swam in the cultura1 debris of the ’60s which was left over psychedelia. Trippy black light posters, underground comics and Peter Max 7-UP ads. More than create that kind of world for me, the psychedelics allowed me to understand it.
KELLY: What is your process for working on a weekly strip?
KAZ: I’ve got a couple of things I do. One is if I have the time, I’ll sit down and work in my sketchbook. I’ll draw a panel, create a character and stare at it until I imagine what happens next. I wind up with a lot of three-panel strips with no punch lines. I just leave it alone and then weeks later I’ll re-read it and come up with an ending. Or if I have a good idea, I’11 riff on it, so that I’ve got a little series of ideas going. Quite often, I will sit down the day before and just bang something out.
KAZ in the mid-1990s.
KELLY: Have you thought about what it would take to do a daily strip?
KAZ: Yes. A lot of money and a crew of assistants.
KELLY: The whole concept of “underground” is totally bizarre at this point. Stuff that was underground 10 years ago is mainstream now. Everything from music to magazines and fashion.
KAZ: But the extremes are still hard to put over on the general public. For instance you don’t hear many groups that were influenced by Captain Beefheart being played on the radio. You never hear Frank Zappa on the radio. There are examples of success stories of great weird stuff, Tim Burton, The Simpsons. So it’s part of the evolutionary art process. Someone takes a chance with something really weird or you have a visionary artist with a small audience and somebody else takes a piece of it with a much broader appeal and that becomes successful. Primus reminds me a little of Zappa but more homogenized. Life in Hell has the attitude of an underground comic. But it’s written more professionally and it’s easier to look at.
KELLY: If you got the opportunity to do a daily strip on your own terms, would you do it?
KAZ: Yes. It would probably kill me, but if it were on my own terms I know it would be a success. People would be shitting in their pants while reading it.
KELLY: What if you had to just tone it down slightly?
KAZ: Meaning I would have to get rid of the hypodermic needles? I could do that.
KELLY: What if you had to tone it down completely but you were going to be paid a lot of money?
KAZ: Well, why would they bother asking me to do it at that point?
KELLY: Do you have any favorite source material?
KAZ: Sometimes I look through old comic strip collections. I don’t get specific ideas, just little random nudges. In Underworld, a lot of the pieces hearken back to things that look familiar, like the arms and the heads. I sample old bits that I find funny looking. My other comics style is meant more to be creepy looking than funny. Now I’m beginning to think that Sad Sack is a long-neglected American classic.
KELLY: Beloved by millions. I can see the Sad Sack influence in some of your earlier stuff, the folded over noses and the eyes.
KAZ: Total lids. Gary Panter does a character called Henry Web who kind of looks like Sad Sack, too. It’s getting back to the Mutt and Jeff thing. The bad, grungie drawing style. These low-rent American characters, scheming for a living. There’s poetry there. I grew up in a tenement building in Hoboken. Now I live in a tenement building on the Upper West Side. I watched The Honeymooners. I have an affinity for the bluesy, trash can, bare light bulb, scratch-a-funny-face-on-a-Chinese-menu style of cartooning.
KELLY: There’s so much despair in that stuff.
KAZ: The Salvation Army School of Cartooning. Dirty sinks, loose floorboards, cigar butts, a half a bottle of beer . I dunno…. Nasty pin-ups, scratchy records, and dust everywhere. Patches on everything. Blankets, couches, dogs, foreheads!
KELLY: I kind of cringe even asking this. but what do you think of post-modernism?
KAZ: I think it’s a beautiful thing, man. [laughs] No, really, modernism just ran out of steam and had to double back on itself. In fact, I think one of the first post-modernists was Harvey Kurtzman with MAD. I’m convinced that he influenced all these painters. They all read MAD when they were kids. So David Salle grows up and puts Tex Avery cartoons next to a pornographic image and blows everybody’s mind. I do it, too. Mixing old-fashioned animation, newspaper cartoons and underground comics. Twisting it, finding my own voice in that. It’s tough in comics because you have to draw figures and have them walk around in landscapes. If you make the thing look too original readers will lose their bearings. For somebody like Mark Beyer, who’s a complete and total original, sometimes he’s difficult for people to read because he’s coming straight out of his own head. There are no sign-posts. As a matter of fact, one road out of post-modernism is outsider art. We’re now moving into post-outsider.
KELLY: It’s interesting that you, Newgarden and Friedman all studied with Kurtzman during a period of your artistic development and today your work all comments on the history of comics and entertainment–either in content or style–as much as anyone’s. Yet, without exception, you all say he was a terrible teacher. You’d think there would be more of a natural link between his work and yours.
KAZ: By the time we had him, Kurtzman’s ideas had already been assimilated into the culture. It was probably more Spiegelman’s “Language of the Comics” lecture course that sparked ideas. When you’re a student, when you’re young, you’re stepping into other people’s ideas and feeling what it’s like. We had assignments to draw a comic strip like so-and-so or take a page from a novel and draw it as a comic strip. Then again, Drew Friedman walked in with a stippling style and walked out with the same stippling style. I used to see his graffiti in the school bathrooms where he used a more traditional cartooning style. Stippling on the toilet was too time consuming perhaps?
KELLY: Do you ever go back and look at your old stuff?
KAZ: Sometimes. I’m not embarrassed by it, except for the grammar and misspellings. But that was just me, where I was at the time.
KELLY: I notice you sometimes re-use characters from older stories.
KAZ: One of the hardest and most rewarding things is designing a new character. And there are some characters I just love drawing. That’s why I did so many Tot stories. I just loved drawing that head. Same with Little Bastard.
KELLY: The main thing I think of when I see your work is that it’s really its own unique universe. You’ve really created your own world. Is that all the same world even in different stories?
KAZ: A lot of the stories take place in Sidetrack City. One of the reasons I create my own world is because I was never very big on going out into the street and sketching. I do it when I have to. Even when I use photo references I change them considerably. Basically, I’m dissatisfied with how the world looks. Nature is perfect, but cities and houses could be more interesting. Why not live in a house that looks like a big baby’s head? Why don’t corporations look more evil than they do now? Instead of water fountains in front of their buildings, why not flames?
KELLY: Who are some cartoonists that everybody might not have seen that you think are doing good work?
KAZ: Right now I’m working on a comic strip with Timothy Georgarakis for Zero Zero called Meat Box. I’m writing and doing Breakdowns and he is drawing, inking and lettering. His drawings are amazing. Weird, funny, inventive. I really like Ted Stern’s work. Chris Ware is great. He’s like some mutation of a golden age cartoonist and Sam Beckett. Dan Clowes continues to do strong personal work. Tony Millionaire who draws Maakies for the New York Press does real nice work. He’s a big cartoon character himself. I watched him fuck a slice of pizza in a bar the other night. And then there are the cartoonists whose work I’ve always liked: Gary Panter, Mark Beyer, Charles Bums, Brad Johnson, Krystine Kryttre, Mark Newgarden. There was this weird guy from Texas, A.C. Samish; who would draw dominatrixes and steam engines.
KELLY: The first time I met you, I knew you as much from your cartoon work as for your radio show on WFMU. [A free-form radio station in East Orange, New Jersey.]
KAZ: Yes, The Nightmare Lounge with my co-host Christ T. Playing punk, art damage, hillbilly blues, noise, space-age bachelor pad music. We’d get drunk and take on-air phone calls. We interviewed Peter Bagge, Robert Williams, Gary Panter , Mark Newgarden, Joe Coleman, the Friedman brothers. I did it for a couple of years. After a while, I felt that I was spending too much time playing other people’s art work when I should be home drawing.
KAZ artwork for the TOPPS produced PEE WEE’S FUNHOUSE FUN PAK products, 1988. Art direction by MARK NEWGARDEN.
KELLY: What direction do you see your comics going in now?
KAZ: I’ m trying to decide if I should take the plunge and do a solo quarterly comic book or if I should continue to push the weekly comic strip. I’m also planning out a graphic novel. I’d love to design and write an animated cartoon. I’m even drawing comics for children in Nickelodeon magazine. “Just don’t make it scary!” the editors keep telling me. It’s not the kids who freak out–it’s the neurotic, parents. I used to read Captain Pisspants and His Pervert Pirates, and look at me.
Spooky Comics 