Exploring The S.S. Adams Novelty Co.

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.

Comics at Columbia

Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Collection, which includes such items as an 9^th (or 8^th) 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).

An Interview with Gary Panter – Part 1

For more than 35 years, when his illustrations and comix began appearing in publications like the Los Angeles punk magazine Slash, Gary Panter’s ratty line and ubiquitous everyman character Jumbo have been pushing the boundaries between high and low “art” through a multitude of forums—comic strips, large scale paintings, puppetry, pop cultural-twisting TV shows, album covers, magazine illustrations, animation and, most recently, psychedelic light shows.

Panter remains one of the mediums most adventurous experimenters. An early presence on the LA. punk scene, the Texas-born Panter’s Work contributed to the scratchy and abrasive iconography of the scene. Remnants of those days, such as the logo he created for the band The Screamers, survive to this day. Panter has had a hand in many projects that have skirted the line between popular and unpopular culture, including being a core contributor to Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly’s Raw Magazine, a leader of the 1980s faux-primitive art movements with fellow shaky artists Mark Marek and Lynda Barry, and an award winning creator and designer for the immensely popular “kiddie” show, Pee-wee’s Playhouse. His album covers include work for Frank Zappa, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Oingo Boingo and Duke Ellington.

Since 1986, Panter has lived in Brooklyn, N.Y. with his wife Helene Silverman, an accomplished art director and designer. They have a daughter, Olive. A recipient of the prestigious 2000 Chrysler Award For Design Excellence, Panter was also awarded three Daytime Emmys for his work on Playhouse during the 1980s. His illustrations have appeared in the New Yorker, Time and Rolling Stone, to name but a few, and his art has been displayed in places like the Bess Cutler Gallery, the Madd River Gallery, the Galerie St. Etienne and the Whitney Museum.

The following is an excerpt of an interview conducted in six sessions, spanning late-November to late-December 2002. It originally appeared in The Comics Journal #250 in February 2003.

— John F. Kelly

The Screamers, flyer for a show at The Whisky artwork by Gary Panter, April 1978

Raw

KELLY: Can you walk through the progression of getting involved with the Raw crowd?

PANTER: My memory is faulty on this. I started appearing in Slash magazine in ’77, I guess, the end of ’77, and if I’m not mistaken, Art and Françoise saw Jimbo, or someone showed it to them, and they approached me and asked me to contribute to Raw, but there may be another true story, but that’s the one I remember. And I think I was in by issue two or three, I’m not really sure. That’s basically how it went. I’m not sure if I’d come in contact with Charles Burns at that point. I had seen his work through Matt Groening, and Lynda Barry in the free papers, and in self-published minicomics and stuff like that. I was really excited because I’d been doing this kind of work since the early ’70s. I went to college in about ’69 and started doing cartoons in ’71 and ’72. Jimbo actually dated from about ’74, I think. And so it was really ideal, and Art and Françoise were great and they were very dedicated editors and very involved in putting out a good, high-quality magazine, not just putting anything in it.

KELLY: How much did they push you to stretch yourself?

PANTER: They praised and encouraged me to be myself. I was just ready to go. It was more they have a real… Art wants things to cohere, so sometimes he would help me make it make more sense. Like when we did the Pantheon book, he came up with a scheme to sequence all the strips I had done. In my mind it was just one big continuity, and all part of the same thing, and I wasn’t really thinking about the reader as much as what I was trying to do in a scene. I always appreciated that criticism. I don’t really like doing things over, but they never really asked me to do things over. There was just a lot more discussion and brain power applied to the whole enterprise.

Raw #3, 1981.

KELLY: Those are the strips that were included in the reprint book that came out later?

PANTER: The Raw one-shot at first and then the Pantheon book, and there was also a collection of Jimbo right before the Pantheon book. I was already interested in doing ambitiously weird, experimental comics, and even moreso after I was contacted by Bruno Richard, and Bruno played some role. Art may have shown my work to Bruno, or Bruno became aware of it. Bruno took this world tour, in I’m not sure what year, ’78 or ’79, just visiting all the weird artists and underground cartoonists that he could find and really put a lot of people together. And his work with Pascal Doury and [Marc] Caro, in the publication Elles Sont de Sortie, “The Girls Have Gone” — it was really inspiring because it was two or three guys working on one piece of art, so they would make it really dense, where I was dense to a certain level, they were really going far beyond that, in terms of density. It challenged me to make my stuff denser, and I did, visually.

KELLY: Were those pieces that appeared in Raw your first extended narrative? The longer pieces that you did?

PANTER: Well, I was working on an extended narrative in Slash, but it was just one page a month. And in college I had done a still unpublished, and not really looking to have it published, comic called “Bow Tie Madness,” about a transsexual with a kids’ show. It was the first Jimbo story, and Jimbo and his wife, Nancy, send their kids to the kids’ show so they can have some time together…

KELLY: And that’s a longer piece?

PANTER: Yeah, that was a long one. It’s around here somewhere. I did some prototype page strips right when I got to Los Angeles that Glenn Bray has now, and I had started trying to do a version of Dal Tokyo probably called something else at that point, that I had just done in newspaper format; I didn’t really think I was going to try to submit it to a newspaper, but maybe I was, and that was all about this other story that’s never really come out, that feeds into all these other stories. One called “Jelly,” which is about the same transsexual-transvestite kids’ show host, who is killed in the “Bow Tie Madness” story, and he shows up again in “Jelly,” having been resurrected by a bunch of technological archaeologists working for wrestling franchises. They’re trying to find people in the past that they can spiritually invest into these big fighting androids. So Jelly becomes the soul of this big android, but really just wants to be a weather woman, and ends up totally screwing up the weather in this giant city. That story never came out. But they were prototype strips of that one too.

The Asshole. 1979

KELLY: Now with Cola Madnes and Bow Tie Madness, is that like Reefer Madness?

PANTER: I hadn’t thought about that. Maybe it was. I never thought of it. It was just I was really drinking a lot of cola.

KELLY: Were you wearing a lot of bow ties during the —

PANTER: Not really. I don’t know what that was about. It was some weird…

KELLY: Kiddie hosts wear bow ties often.

PANTER: Maybe that was it. And later, I was to meet Pee-wee, a kids’ show host with a bow tie. Maybe it was just some kind of psychic thing.

KELLY: Prescient.

PANTER: Maybe. The character was kind of based on my friend Thomas Lambert, who was a friend of mine in college who collected my work. He died a couple of years ago of AIDS. He was a really flamboyant character, a wonderful guy. So, his personality informed that character, Jelly. This all muddies the water, doesn’t it?

KELLY: Those Raw strips were more harrowing than the earlier stuff that I’d seen of yours.

PANTER: You mean the terrorist bomb stuff?

KELLY: Just the apocalyptic…

PANTER: They were always like that. That was just this theme that ran, probably from many sources, probably having to do with this fundamentalist religion, where they just talk about how everyone you know is going to burn in Hell except us. And you are too, if you sin. That’s a pretty apocalyptic stage, right there, and otherwise, just… Even cars. Just thinking about them. We get around in cars, and all these people die every year in cars. There’s just so many … It’s so easy to die; our lives are so short. We like them and want them to go on. It’s a weird situation. So, I already had all those fears.

The apocalyptic stuff, and I guess it comes from a lot of things, but the annihilation of the Native Americans, that’s something that’s always with us, and I’m part Indian, so it’s something…

KELLY: You’re particularly conscious of?

PANTER: Yeah, because I was around Indians, hearing them speak their language, when I was a kid. And then also, we dropped nuclear weapons on Japan, and it’s just something that was very abstract to us until September 11th; our mortality became more of an immediate possibility, but death, we try to immediately sweep it back under the carpet. And, so that’s all. It was a mediation on Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and I felt very… I think I did some pretty drawings, but I have real mixed feelings about the overwroughtness in that type of stuff. It was a real silly thing to do, but it was something I had to do.

KELLY: You feel silly about the stuff from Raw that…

PANTER: Well, the bomb stuff. Because I could meditate on that, I could grieve, I could somehow try to apologize to Japan and try to have some understanding, but I wasn’t really up to the task. It’s still a comic book, and so it just comes off as some kind of hysteria. And I tried to explain that within it, like the cheap little spook-house effect, but I couldn’t really escape it. So, I did my piece. I did a real bummer comic and I went on from there. But Jimbo lived.

Cola Madnes, 1983

KELLY: Do you feel like you worked it out? You certainly come back to those same themes… there’s both the Native American stuff and there’s Asian stuff in Cola Madnes…

PANTER: Trying to understand what it is to be a human, a finite blip in a long-lived universe and the possibility of the spirit — those are all things that are tied together. I was really so far into Christianity and into a world where nothing else is spoken of or thought of. It was a cult, that way, to my thinking. But it took just tremendous brain power or courage or stupidity to get out of it, so a lot of those things are about disappointment or catastrophe, and they’re also about interior things as well as social and historical things. Because we’re just really primitive. This is still medieval times, still… The aliens aren’t landing because we still eat animals and kill each other. If there’s any aliens out there — I wouldn’t land here.

KELLY: Do you think there are any?

PANTER: I don’t know. I think it’s an extremely weird universe. I think it’s a lot… It’s so weird that it’s really important for us to just pretend everything’s normal and to just watch TV, and to hope the TV’s going to come on again tomorrow. At some point, it’s important to contemplate the heavy stuff. And these writers, poets, shamen are part of that… the risk-takers, in some way: OK. I’ll risk going totally broke because I want to do this crazy comic, or recite this incantation, or eat this plant, or whatever, to try to have this vision. It’s all part of a similar activity.

KELLY: I hadn’t thought about this before, and I wanted to talk to you a little bit more about the… I saw some of the sketches you did for September 11th, when you mentioned Oklahoma a minute ago, how much did that resonate when the building was bombed there in Oklahoma?

PANTER: Oh, God, well, it’s just horrible. It’s at a distance, and your response is different depending on your physical or psychic distance to the catastrophe. If you have someone who works in the building then it’s a lot more real to you than if you have relatives who live in the town, or if you have no one who lives in the town. I guess I think about that kind of stuff a lot, so when it happens, it’s not a relief, but at least it’s like, “OK. I wasn’t totally paranoid. There are people out there trying to screw things up.” And those are just like, to me, they’re the same guys written large. When I lived in Brownsville, Texas, when I was like 5 to 8, and the little groups of kids would come by, and there’d be the smart, pachuco dudes, and then they’d let the stupid ones stir up trouble for them, and then they’d back them up to just fuck everything up. So it’s always been the stupid people vs. the smart, empathetic people, and I don’t … If it’s smart, empathetic people blowing up anything for a political cause, then they’re not really smart. Their cause might be, perhaps in some ways, but you don’t go killing civilians to achieve those ends.

KELLY: But those are two sides of two extremes and everything else… Where does the sort of masses, just the people who aren’t coming from either political —

PANTER: Our fate’s all in the hands of… It’s great when the masses have power and a voice, but if they’re just stupid, then we’re doomed. So, they get the vote in Pakistan. Great. Power to the people! But if the people vote in hateful, idiotic maniacs, then what’s democracy done for them? People still have to be smart and empathetic to make things work, not mixed-up zombies. That’s maybe why my work’s a conundrum: It’s all a conundrum.

Invasion of the Elvis Zombies, Raw Books and Graphics, 1984

KELLY: What did you think of your co-contributors to the magazine?

PANTER: In Raw? I used to stand on the playground when I was a kid, and I had friends and everything, but I would just wonder where my peers were. I actually found a whole lot of them in Raw, so that was wonderful. It was fabulous, and it continues being really great. I’m not in touch with all those people — I wonder where Mark Beyer is — but I am with Charles Burns and Kaz and everybody else. I’m really lucky to have all these great friends who are interested in similar things, and we have a lot of fun.

KELLY: Well, a number of those guys, the SVA-based [School of Visual Art] guys were all here in New York at the time, and you were out in Los Angeles. I’m always interested in the formation of that whole nexus of people. Well, obviously the European people weren’t over here, but, did you feel disconnected at all, or…

PANTER: No. At first, when I really liked Punk magazine and the New York stuff that I first saw [John] Holstrom and everybody in, it seemed to be more about beer, in a way, and I was more about cola. So that was the only distance I really felt from those guys. And that SVA group was a little younger, and Charles is younger. The first person I practically noticed was Savage Pencil, Edwin Pouncey, in England, and we are the same age, and on the same beam, so he was the first person, and Sue Coe. And I could see people’s work popping up in illustration before I saw it in cartoons, that I felt were peers in a way. No, I was just happy to meet all those people and try to learn how to live in New York.

KELLY: You met them later on, you mean?

PANTER: Yeah, I didn’t move to New York till ’86, so I didn’t really see those people so much. I’d come to town once a year for Raw parties and met people, communicate with people. But, I just felt excited about all the interesting cartooning being done.

KELLY: How do you look back at the legacy of that magazine and how it’s affected where comics are now?

PANTER: I always felt and wished that there’d been like 20 Raw magazines. In Spain, right after Tito died, suddenly there were massive amounts of cartoon energy. And the U.S., for being such a giant country, it is kind of astounding how kind of slow and spread out everything is. The Internet puts people together sooner, now. So, that was a fantasy wish I had, but as far as Raw itself goes, I thought it was really great. Art and Françoise did this really, extremely hard and thankless job, in that, by trying to be tough editors or good editors, people got their feelings hurt — including me, occasionally. Basically, it was great having really smart mentors, and someone who cared out there. I still really appreciate Art’s point of view, and call him up and ask him for it very often.

KELLY: So, how do you think this stuff holds up now, 20 plus years later?

PANTER: I think it holds up pretty good. I think it… It’s just such a conservative world. I really like the experimentation and ambition and willingness to try things that are beyond. It’s kind of embodied now in Chris Ware’s work. He’s kind of become a one man Raw, in a way. I think it holds up pretty good.

And the French guys are still doing tons of interesting stuff. They’re not doing narrative so much, just in terms of insane drawing and book making and silk screening. They’re very ambitious and energetic.

KELLY: You mentioned Mark Beyer a few moments ago. I always find it kind of disappointing that you stop seeing his stuff after a while.

PANTER: The weird thing about cartooning is — and I compare it to poetry and short-story writing — is that the rewards are similar. There’s just not many rewards for doing it. There’s the personal satisfaction and the meeting people, and that’s cool. But financially, it’s extremely hard to do comics and justify it in any way. Anything I do in comics just totally puts me at risk of going under financially. It takes hundreds of hours to do. It’s hard and takes a lot of time, and I’m sure that’s what happened with Mark. I imagine he’s out there drawing cartoons somewhere or painting paintings, but no one’s beating his door down lauding him as the great artist that he is. And there’s a lot of great artists like that. One needs to be a kind of salesman as well as a business man, and very few sensitive artists are.

The Pee-wee Years

Gary Panter poster for an ad for Paul Reubens’ Pee-Wee Herman stage show in Los Angeles, 1981.

KELLY: How did you meet Paul Reubens?

PANTER: I met him because I had some notoriety in Los Angeles, from Slash and Wet. He was a fan of my comics. I did this poster for his show and found his vision was really similar to the stuff I’d been doing with Jay Cotton and Ric Heitzman in Dallas, in our performance group Apeweek. I designed the Pee-wee stage production that became the Roxy show and that ran for maybe a year, and that was filmed for the HBO, and wrote a script for Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, which didn’t get made and then the TV show did. I got to design the TV show partly by accident.

KELLY: What kind of accident?

PANTER: Just that the show got sold to Broadcast Arts, a production company in New York. It was accidental that I had just moved to New York, that I was here helped.

KELLY: So you designed pretty much all the elements of the show that people are familiar with.

PANTER: I designed with a lot of people, but mainly it was Ric Heitzman and Wayne White. A lot of what you see is done by one of the three of us, most of it. And then there were people from Broadcast Arts who designed a lot of other parts of the show.

KELLY: Just a quick aside: How come Wayne White just never did more comics?

PANTER: Well, Wayne did a lot more TV shows actually, and he’s really interested in puppets, so he does kind of puppet things, and he has a painting career. He did a lot of self-published comics for a while, those Geedar comics.

KELLY: I just think that one comic, the first issue of Bad News — The Civil War Kid.

PANTER: He’s like a gunslinger of drawers. Incredibly fast and has a lot of ideas. He grew up in kind of like a… I think his mother had an antique shop, so he has this incredible mental catalog of antiques and ornaments.

KELLY: So it was the three of you guys who designed the Pee-wee show.

PANTER: And people from Broadcast Arts. I put many things in place. Everything on the show came from the scripts, so the designers didn’t make up characters as a rule. Clocky, that weird clock was something I made up. It wasn’t in the script. That was from the stage show. And the one that was on the Saturday morning show was the one I built out of papier mâché for the stage show. The dog chair wasn’t in any script. It was something I made up. And the exterior Playhouse, I drew pretty much like just in one moment; just threw the whole thing out. I had in mind, in that moment, stuff that Ric had done in college. He had done these really elaborate paper models. So when I was designing the outside of the playhouse, I knew that I was going to politic for Ric to oversee the construction of that model and it would be in that sensibility. But, say, like the big rug on the floor: Wayne did that. Tons of stuff. The murals, the cowboy and Indian murals, the wallpaper over by where Countess is. It was usually like 20-hours-a-day type stuff. So at the end of the day you just can’t even talk.

KELLY: For how long a period of time, though?

PANTER: I would only work on it for about three months every year, and I would work on specials, and the rest of the time I would work with 40 toy companies that were making all kinds of products. I was like an art director or consultant for that stuff. Really, I tried to get Mark Newgarden, Kaz, J.D. King and people like that to do products. Many Underground cartoonists did Pee-wee products.

KELLY: The show earned you a bunch of Emmy nominations —

PANTER: Five nominations and three Emmy Awards. Whatever that is, it’s neat. I don’t think I got any work from it, or anything, but I got this self-esteem, or whatever false hope.

KELLY: But when you say you didn’t get any work, do you mean illustration work, or…

PANTER: I mean TV shows. Ever since I did Pee-wee, a few times a year, I get calls from people who want me to design these gigantic things.

KELLY: I was wondering about that.

PANTER: And the projects always take millions of dollars to raise and they usually don’t raise the money or they decide they don’t need a designer after all. So, it’s a lot of hot air, most of it. I did a playroom for the Paramount Hotel. That was fun.

KELLY: Could you just describe that a little bit?

PANTER: Well, it’s kind of like Pee-wee’s Playhouse, but it doesn’t really have anything in it that Pee-wee’s Playhouse had in it, in particular.

KELLY: It has that feeling to it, though?

PANTER: Yeah. It was this crazy, kind of acid drenched environment for the kitchen help to go smoke pot in at night. It was a tiny little bedroom. I was talking to Ian Schraeger, the owner of the hotel, and it sounded like it was going to be this giant place. But you walk in and it was this tiny bedroom. And so I had to make it look big, using mirrors and decorative painting and stuff to make it look really pretty big. I had some sculptural forms made, furniture shapes and had them covered them with stuffed animals. Like take 16 giant Sylvester dolls and eviscerate them and then apply their skins to these forms. Sylvester and Pink Panther and Tweety Bird chairs. TV sets with toys glued all over them and aquariums with toys in them. Bright color schemes. It’s a project you could easily do in your house. It would take some money for the decorative paintings, unless you did it yourself, and the sculptures, but that was kind of the idea.

KELLY: Has anyone ever approached you to do their house?

PANTER: No. I would love to come and paint someone’s bedroom. But they’d have to pay me a lot of money. It takes a lot of time and energy to design these things and execute them. So, call me up, but give me a lot of money.

KELLY: None of the TV pitches or pilots or whatever you call them ever got beyond the point of just the idea stage.

PANTER: Not really. Wayne and Ric stayed in Hollywood and did more TV shows. Wayne did a lot of shows.

KELLY: Which shows did he work on?

PANTER: He designed Shining Time Station and that cowboy show, Sons of the Pioneers or whatever. I can’t remember.

KELLY: When you get an Emmy, are you in a ballroom wearing a tux and your name is called out…

PANTER: Well, a suit, and you go up and make a speech and they give you the thing, and you’re sitting at a table with Florence Henderson and stuff. It was really neat. But it’s not the same as the nighttime Emmys. It’s the daytime Emmys. There’s a whole lot more technical people and producers and categories…

KELLY: But the element of suspense is still there?

PANTER: Yeah. It’s all still really grand and exotic. Eating breakfast at these giant tables with soap-opera stars.

KELLY: And you’re hoping you’re going to win…

PANTER: I wanted to win. I worked hard. I thought we did a show that was really different from anything else. Maybe there could have been better shows on that would have given us some competition, but this was kind of an idea that had been wanting to be done for a long time. Still needs to be done a lot more. There’s been a lot of bad versions of it, mostly in like kids cereal commercials.

KELLY: On one level, given the sort of tastes and nature of television, are you surprised it ever even got on the air in the first place?

PANTER: Not really, because, like I felt about Matt Groening, I really felt Paul was destined to do this. He was really driven; he was really talented, much more than talented. He was really a genius with Pee-wee. He can do a lot of other kinds of things too. So he had the drive; and he also had the willingness to pay for it when other people wouldn’t. I’m sure that Broadcast Arts and the other companies paid massive amounts of money to do those shows, but Paul paid for the cost overruns and for me to be a designer. It could have just been an art director with a prop shop. But there were a lot of sculptures that he got people to build.

KELLY: Are you still in contact with him?

PANTER: I talked to him a couple of days ago.

KELLY: How’s he doing?

PANTER: He’s doing good. He had this thing happen to him. I don’t think it’s over with. I think it could have turned out a lot worse. I personally advised him to just really, I don’t know… I think he should come out and go on every show. I don’t know what Paul’s going to do, and what he really should do, but my opinion, just as someone who really likes him a lot, is that he should just come out on TV and just go, “Look. It’s none of your guys’ business at all, like, who I am and what my sexuality is. But since everyone seems to think it’s their business, let’s clear up a few things here. Paul Reubens is separate from Pee-wee.” I also have a feeling this news thing that’s happening, which involves Paul’s art collection and his collection of magazines and erotica and stuff, is probably not any different from someone that just buys Re/Search volumes. I would hate for someone to look through my stuff and find all the wonderful letters I’ve gotten from Bruno Richard, of him holding a gun to his head or up his butt or something. So I’m not going to throw the letters away because I highly value them, but I don’t want Ken Starr to have a look. I have a feeling that’s kind of what’s happened to Paul.

We wrote this movie together and it would be fun to make.

KELLY: The original Pee-wee, is that what you’re talking about?

PANTER: Yeah. The one we wrote years ago, he’s re-written with John Paragon, who played Jambi on the show. Their re-write of it is really funny. I always thought it was a really good movie. The ideas were appropriate for Paul.

KELLY: How different was the actual TV show from the stage show?

PANTER: It was incredibly different. The stage show didn’t have an elaborate set. The set I designed for the stage show was just emblems of walls, just funny shapes painted pastelly colors. And somehow I got away with that. People thought it was really neat. When we did the TV show, we could actually texture it and dress it.

KELLY: How many years did the show run?

PANTER: I’m not even sure when it was on anymore. Late ’80s, early ’90s?

KELLY: Did it end before the first incident?

PANTER: It was around the same time of the first scandal. Paul had been doing Pee-wee for ten years, and he was real tired of doing it. And CBS asked him to do more shows and he said no, and then his scandal happened and then CBS said they dropped him. It coincided with him being tired of doing the character and too tired to come out and defend himself. Just wanted to take a break. It was an incredible treadmill.

Pink Donkey and Funny Garbage

Pink Donkey, 2003.

KELLY: How was your experience in animation with your Pink Donkey cartoon for Cartoon Network?

PANTER: Great. My friends John Carlin, Peter Girandi and Chris Capuozzo started a company called Funny Garbage. They signed a deal to do cartoons for the Cartoon Network Web site. They hired me and Mark Newgarden to do original programming for Cartoon Network. So, that’s what I did for a couple of years. I worked at my studio, drawing and faxing them stuff. They’d say, “We need this script, or this re-write, or these characters designed or these colors designed or… ” And I also got them to use my friend Jay Cotton. He was in our puppet band back in Texas. Also they hired Ric Heitzman, who was in that same puppet band, Apeweek. It was a great chance to work with Ric and get the Apeweekers back together on Pink Donkey. Ric directed the cartoons and ran the animation department. Jay did the music — almost all of it. And it was just great. It was really, really fun. I had lots of support from people who really liked me and believed in me. And I could do it: “OK, here’s the next batch.” It was really fun.

KELLY: How much satisfaction did you get out of doing Pink Donkey?

PANTER: I loved doing it, because they pretty much let me run with it, and the characters really lived to me. I had just read all this Ben Jonson stuff and had the point made to me, really clearly and simply, that you can just develop the personalities and the humor of your character very strongly and then see what happens. So, with those characters, I made a great attempt to know who they were and then I could just watch them interact with each other. If someone said, “Take them to space,” then the story would just kind of write itself.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get to finish everything we started. Things had changed where they would say, “Write 36 episodes.” I wish that we had finished the last six episodes of Pink Donkey so the viewers could have seen what happened to the Flitter Mouse and the Robot and everything.

KELLY: So, how many episodes were actually done?

PANTER: I don’t know. Maybe something like 12.

KELLY: And it existed solely on CartoonNetwork.com?

PANTER: It’s on the Cartoon Network Web site and FunnyGarbage.com.

KELLY: It was interesting stuff; it’s cool to see the scraggly line come alive.

PANTER: I didn’t really draw any of it. I just faxed them many, many, pencil drawings and then people they had there did all the [Flash] animation. They were actually tracing my drawings, but totally, the line work changed. But I think I had a lot of sympathetic cohorts there. It couldn’t be a scratchy as we wanted, it because it uses up more memory to make rough lines. So it got simpler and cleaner because of that.

KELLY: But you were happy with the way it looked?

PANTER: Oh, yeah. If I’m doing my own personal thing, then I can be really testy and weird about it, but if I’m setting out to collaborate with someone, or do a commercial job for someone, I’m really just trying to move forward. If I were to start having tantrums and stuff, that just slows everything up. And my job, really, like designing a set for a TV show, is to get it going forward. I loved it. They’ll sell a movie of it one day, and then I can send Pink Donkey to Mars.

KELLY: Can you see yourself ever doing another — or would you want to — working on another TV show?

PANTER: I would like to do that, with the right people, sure. Ideally with Paul Reubens again. I’m approached every year to do some TV show. Someone comes along; they’re developing something and it just never hatches — very seldom hatches. And that’s just the way show biz is. It’s a lot of nervous people trying to raise a lot of money, trying to get a lot of someone else’s attention at the right time and place, and usually they don’t happen. So, I’ve designed many, many things that haven’t come about, including one really cool show. One of the closest things we nearly got to make was a Pee-wee puppet show, like Pee-wee in Space with puppets. I really wanted to do that show. Kind of a Thunderbirds-type of show. We had a development deal with Imagine Pictures but nothing came of it. That’s show biz!

KELLY: Is this a case where you get paid to get it to that point? Or is it all based on a possible sale sometime down the road?

PANTER: In that case, I did, and it was because Paul insisted on it because we had gone through so many development deals where people just want to talk to you and have meetings and just nothing comes of it. I was pretty sick of it at the time, so I think he pushed for them to actually make an arrangement with me where I was getting paid to go forward with it. So, I went forward with it, but then no one ever came around and said, “OK, let’s start making the puppets.” Paul and I have a script that we wrote years ago that has still been in development. It would be really cool to make another Pee-wee movie. It’s a good script. His re-write of it made me laugh out loud.

KELLY: Well, it’ll depend on his legal problems.

PANTER: Yep. Nervous presidents of movie companies.

An Interview with the Artist Known as KAZ

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.

FACTORY JOBS

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.

“HE’S AN ARTIST”

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.

SVA

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.

STYLE

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.

OTHER INFLUENCES

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.

PATCHES ON EVERYTHING

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?

PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE

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.