An Interview With Comics Writer Michael San Giacomo

I've read Michael San Giacomo's comics articles in The Plain Dealer for a long time.  He even helped me out with some publicity when I was doing some research on comic books on cd-roms.  But in addition to writing about comics, Mike also writes comics such as Phantom Jack and Tales From The Starlight Drive-In.  I ran into Mike at the Akron Comicon recently and bought the latest Phantom Jack trade paperback, The Nowhere Man Agenda.  As is typical of his work, I enjoyed it and decided to find out more about it with the following interview.  Thanks to Mike for agreeing to it!

1) What led you to create Phantom Jack?

I had a long history in comics and journalism before Phantom Jack.  I've been a reporter for major daily newspapers forever and, like many reporters, came to think of myself as invisible.  The best reporter is not the jerk who shouts out "HOW DO YOU FEEL?" to a man who just lost his family.  Real reporters hate those loud-mouthed jerks.  A real reporter stands quietly off to the side and observes.  He listens.  He pays attention. He becomes part of the scenery.  Invisible.  Then, when the wolf pack is off to find its next meal, he sits with the news source and asks the questions the others forgot to ask, or never knew enough to ask.

That's how I've done it for more than 30 years.

So, when Marvel President Bill Jemas contacted me and said Marvel was starting a new imprint called EPIC and asked if I would like a shot, I said no.  After all, I had been writing a comic book review column for the Plain Dealer and a slew of other newspapers for 10 years and felt it would be a conflict.

On the ride home, I thought about it and realized what an idiot I was.  This was an opportunity that would never come again.  I'm the guy who covered the murder trial of his cousin.  I wrote the book on objectivity.  And if my comic took off, I wouldn't need to write a column about comics. 

So, in my hubris, I resolved to pitch a character with the weakest superpower I could imagine and do it with flair and creativity.

Earlier that year, I was covering a sniper in in the suburbs who had pinned down police.  Thinking I was invisible and not part of reality, I stood around watching.  Then a bullet zinged past my head and hit a tree behind me.  At that moment, I realized I was NOT invisible or intangible.  That inspired me to create Phantom Jack, the Nowhere Man, a reporter who was gifted with limited invisibility and who would use that power.

Jack is not a superhero, he's just a guy.  He tries to do the right thing, but is not beyond using his powers for his own good.  Living in Cleveland, the home of Superman, it was also a tribute to my favorite reporter, the guy with the glasses and spit curl.

Jemas loved it.  I chose the amazing Mitch Breitweiser as my artist and we produced five amazing comics under Marvel's watch.  But the EPIC project never really got very far.  Bill Jemas left Marvel and his replacement was not very keen on the project.  Marvel, who wanted Phantom Jack to go at least 5 issues and more if it sold, offered to publish the first issue.  Mitch and the rest of the crew finished five issues and I felt obligated to put all five out.  For the second time, I said no and took the whole five finished issues to Image.  The books were collected into a "Director's Edition"  graphic novel with almost 100 NEW pages including six new stories and an origin.  It was published by Speakeasy Comics, 15 minutes before they went out of business, and repackaged (with even more new material) by Atomic Pop Art Entertainment.

2) Yes, poor Phantom Jack seems to have had a convoluted publishing history, which is a shame because it's a better superhero comic than most of its contemporaries.  But you've managed to keep the series going.  What led you to return to the character with The Nowhere Man Agenda?

I had a specific storyline done for Jack.  I wanted to show how a character with superpowers is not always a superhero.  I also wanted to show realistically what a normal person would do if suddenly granted superpowers.  That's why I have a short story where Jack invisibly sneaks into the dressing room of the Philadelphia Eagles cheerleaders.  C'mon, what guy wouldn't?

You know that scene in every action movie where the bad guy grabs a hostage and threatens to kill the woman or child unless the hero surrenders?  And what does the hero do?  He surrenders.  In the movies something always happens before the hero gets shot.  In real life, the hero would be shot dead in 2 seconds.

This scenario always bothered me.  In real life, a normal person would at least be troubled before laying down his own life for a stranger.  In the second issue, Jack faces that Sophie's Choice and does what a human would do, nothing.  He agonizes and while he's considering giving up to be tortured and murdered, time runs out and a little boy is killed.

Tough scene, but real.  And it adds to the body count.

Jack is not Deadpool or Wolverine, who casually gut people and laugh as they lay dying.  It bothers me that these characters, and many others in comics, seem to not give a whit about people they kill or wound.

Jack cares, a lot.

That's why I had to write THE NOWHERE MAN AGENDA, the follow-up book from IDW.  I had to follow through on how Jack redeems himself and finally becomes the hero he was always destined to be.  At great cost.

In addition, I had a whole lot more to say than could be contained in the medium.  So, the Director's Edition and the follow-up PHANTOM JACK: THE NOWHERE MAN AGENDA include more than a dozen text and/script stories that expand the adventures of Jack and his cast.

So, I HAD to keep going to tell the whole story.  There are clues to what's really going on in the series all over the place that are not resolved until the IDW book.  Ideally, these were all supposed to come out within a year's time, but then we ran into publishing issues and bounced around a bit.

I would love to hear from someone who read both trades cover to cover, and got the whole story.  I hope a few people out there managed to do that.

SPOILER ALERT; For Thor's sake, don't read the next few graphs if you haven't read Nowhere Man Agenda.












And then Jack had to die.  It bummed me out, but I needed to show that he was willing to make the supreme sacrifice to kill the super-evil Nowhere Man and save the girl.  I damn near cried when I wrote the graveyard scene that involves Jack's dog.  I won't say anything more about it.

Someday, I would like to continue the series with THE BLOOD OF PHANTOM JACK, in which unscrupulous folks steal Jack's body and create a new invisibility serum from his blood, a serum that grants a person 10 minutes of invisibility.  Jack's friends, including the last remaining invisible agent in the world, Madison Blue, would team up with the insufferable genius Peter St. John, Jack's reporter buddy Wolf Bigelow, and others to retrieve the blood and save the day.

We'll see.

3) Yes, I was wondering about the script stories.  It's too bad more issues of the comic didn't come out, as some of those text stories would have been nice to have seen fleshed out with art.  I hope you do get to do that third volume.  Why do you think such a good series had trouble in the marketplace?  Although there are problems with comic sales in general these days (though some would dispute that), why do some people buy really crappy corporate comics (and sometimes they don't even buy the good corporate comics) but won't try something better such as Phantom Jack?  Is it all marketing and gravitating to the already familiar characters such as Batman?  What are your thoughts on superheroes and the comics industry these days?  Sometimes I think that once creators' rights became more of a popular idea, the smart creators wouldn't give away their best stuff to the large companies so those companies have been just recycling their old properties with diminishing returns ever since.  Yet that stuff still seems more popular than most of the much more creative and interesting creator-owned work (with some exceptions such as The Walking Dead and Hellboy).  What's going on?
  
If you ever figure out the answer to that question, let me know.

It's not just comics, it's everything.  How does some Hollywood dreck film make millions while a wonderful film dies on the vine?  Why do more people know the music of (name a crappy artist here) than geniuses like Ralph McTell or the late Bill Morrissey?

Phantom Jack did quite well at Image, but the collected edition with its 100 new pages did not because the publishers had no idea what they were doing.  There was NO promotion, nothing, not a lick.  Anything that was done, I did myself and I tried a lot.  But my efforts were thwarted when the books failed to come out when expected.  So the people I reached assumed the book was dead when it didn't come out when promised.  I'm a pretty good hustler, but that hurt.

Bottom line is, no matter how good a book is, it doesn't matter if no one knows about it.

Only the big boys like Marvel and DC can afford advertising and publicity.  The rest of us just do the best we can to get the word out.

So, let me tell you about TALES OF THE STARLIGHT DRIVE-IN and my NEXT project: CHALK ...

4) Ha!  My next question was going to be about Tales.  Though the comic book industry may have seen better days, the medium seems to be doing wonderfully judging from events such as the Akron Comicon that I saw you at and the new respect that graphic novels, particularly the nonsuperhero ones, get.  While many comic writers seem to stay on either the superhero or alternative side of the comic book medium, you work in both.  What attracts you to the medium, whether it's Phantom Jack, Tales Of The Starlight Drive-In, or Chalk?

If I am going to do a superhero book, I would like it to be one of the established characters from DC, Marvel, Image or Valiant.  I have created a slew of superhero characters including AGONY AND ECSTASY (a husband and wife science-hero duo.  She has the power to basically make men and women swoon in delight and he makes them feel intense pain.  Catch is, there is a feedback and the heroes enjoy/suffer when they use their powers) and a bunch of others.

But the superhero field is just so crowded, I'd like to use what's already out there and give it a new spin.

I also believe the best writers are well-rounded, and not just physically.  I want to show that I can do everything.  Or maybe I'm just going to keep pitching things and see what sticks.  I have another series written and partially drawn called THE BASTARD SON OF JESSE JAMES, which I put together just to prove I could write a western.  Hopefully, that will be out sometime after CHALK (Horror [Original graphic novel] where the chalk outline drawn around a murdered priest comes to life and kills his killers.)

TALES OF THE STARLIGHT DRIVE-IN was a labor of love.  I was looking for a follow-up to Phantom Jack and was asked by a French publisher at the San Diego Comic-Con to "come up with something uniquely American that has never been done in a comic book before."  And like Monty Python's John Cleese once quipped, "Certainly. And would you like me to move the building a bit to the left?"

I never did get to make my pitch to him before he left, but it inspired me to do what he suggested.  I drove around the hills outside San Diego for hours and the STARLIGHT concept and the stories just kept on coming.  On the flight home, I jotted down my favorite movies:  THE BIG CHILL, THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALENCE, INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM and on and on.

The concept was to set a series of stories in a drive-in theater.  By focusing on certain characters, I could show the rise and fall and ultimate fate of the drive in through 31 stories that could be read independently, yet would come together like a quilt to form one, complete novel.  Also, to further torture myself, I would use my favorite movies, presenting every genre from horror, romance, disaster, comedy, political and even a western.  The movies would play some role in the story, even if only a spiritual one.  The amazing artist Francesco Francavilla drew "THOSE DARN HATFIELD KIDS" and the only connection to the Zero Mostel movie, A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM, was the chase scenes, a vital part of the movie and the story.

There are things that can be done in comics and graphic novels that can't be done in regular books.  There are many scenes in STARLIGHT which need to be seen, not read.  That being said, I have already turned STARLIGHT into a stage play and gave it to a group in London to market, though no one has actually put it on yet.

I would love to see STARLIGHT picked up as a 13-episode television show, come on AMC, talk to me!

And I also plan to turn it into a novel, a book book.

I do think superhero comics have hit a sour patch.  It's all gimmicks and "events" which seem to stretch on forever.  I also dislike the way so many comics open with an action scene and then go to "TWO HOURS EARLIER ..."  Sorry, but that's cheap.

At the finest, comics can show more than text can tell. I teach a course in comic studies at CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY in Cleveland and I get great pleasure showing the students a wonderful Alan Moore Swamp Thing (No. 34) story where Swampy and Abby make love.  It's not so much physical, but a chemically inducted joining of minds and souls.  The art by Steve Bissette and John Totleben is so incredible, words would never do the art justice.  It's a story that has to be illustrated.

I know book lovers will freak on that statement but hey, true is true.

5) Anything else that you want to tell the world?

Pressure.

Bottom line is, read what you like.  Don't be bullied into buying stuff you don't like.  When Spider-Man underwent that terrible  "One More Day" fiasco, I actually stopped buying the Spidey books.  Considering I bought EVERY Spider-Man book since Amazing Fantasy 15, it took a lot to totally piss me off and lose me as a reader.  I eventually started reading it again after the writing and art improved about a year later.

Do this, assume every comic you buy will never be worth what you paid for it.  So, the only reason to buy a book is because you like it, not because of the "No. 1" plastered on the cover.

An Interview With Author Crazy Carl Robinson

I've known Crazy Carl Robinson for a long time, and we're good friends.  We met when we both went to graduate school at Kent State in the 1990s (where he impressed me with various pranks such as by giving me a copy of Pro Wrestling Illustrated in the middle of an otherwise ultraserious Women in the Renaissance seminar).  His writing impressed me as well, and I published it in my drinkdrankdrunk zine.  Eventually, that road led us to both publishing novels with the Underground Literary Alliance, which we promoted by going on a book reading tour in 2007.  His ULA Press novel is Fat On The Vine, and its two sequels are Dead In The Head and My Parents' Medicine, which are excerpted in the collection Bloodreal.  He told me that he has a new book coming out, so I investigated further with this interview (and his answers are left in the traditional Crazy Carl style). 

1) What's this new book?

i actually have short stories coming out in two 2012 anthologies.....my story, "chasing the american dream: a chubby fan(atic) recalls his favorite professional wrestlers," will appear in "the facts of life, family ties and the real world: everything i know about myself i learned from television" from lexington books.....the article basically examines the pro wrestler as role model for overweight kids......my second story, "the brown washcloth," means exactly what you think it means and appears in victor thorn's new anthology, "outlaw rebels" from sisyphus press.....it's a bit risqué, but i'm sure clevelanders would enjoy the sections which celebrate punk rockers like dee dee ramone and g.g. allin as well as graphic novelists like r crumb and harvey pekar (although i'm not quite sure how pekar would feel about being sandwiched between george lincoln rockwell and ed gein)......i'd also like to think that i introduced victor to artists like ivan brunetti, julian beck and sam peckinpah ......whatever the fuck victor thorn is, he's certainly an american original....like all our friends' blogs regurgitate the same partisan crap whereas victor appears to be challenging the censor (and you know i like that)

2) Another combination of the literary and political was the Underground Literary Alliance. Recently, you got namechecked again in the essay/hatchet job about the group republished in Tom Bissell's collection Magic Hours. What did you think of Bissell's essay and of your experience with the group?

brother, you think i'm vain enough to pay $14 for a book that makes fun of my name once?---yeah, i think we all are....truthfully, i had no idea who tom bissell was in 2003 and i still have no idea in 2012......i tried to read the other essays in "magic hours," but all i really remember is a fairly dry article on "the big bang theory".....if that's what it takes to be a hipster in 2012, then tom bissell beat all of us by about 2 episodes.....as for the ula, i have quite a few rockstar memories, including our 2007 book tour.....my mama dresses me kinda preppy and much like the kent punk rockers, the ula never judged me.....they listened to what i had to say and treated me with the same respect that they treated you.....i know a lot of people in the past were intimidated by king wenclas, but if you had a beer with him in the tavern, I think you might become friends.....jeff potter might be the coolest dad in the world and has built an entire fantasy land for his kids in their backyard----and instead of posting pix of his cat sleeping or generic rants about stopping the tea party on facebook, he celebrates the lives/careers of meaningful artists like ed sanders and doc watson......tom bissell said in that article that the "crazy" in my name implied concealment and aggression, but if he had actually read my shit he would have realized that i just needed to get laid

3) Along those same lines, I had a conversation with you recently in which you said that too many people today were wrapped up in politics when they could be doing something more interesting.  What did you mean by that?

victor thorn (and mr crowley) would say: do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.....ultimately, if your favorite thing in the world is discussing politics, then i'm not gonna take that away from you.....me, i wanna get laid, be under-the-influence, eat, sleep, listen to music and play with dogs.....and i could break out old smack about the weather wanting you to vote for obama or about consulting the youngstown book of socialism before (not) buying your panties at target, but the truth is: we're all capitalists and the only "fact" that's relevant is who cut the check that sanctioned your truth....we have to ask ourselves that question whether we're watching fox news or cnn---whether the blog is endorsed by victor thorn or alan miller....wred fright, do you remember when we argued about whether antigone-the-cat would prefer another cat as a companion and you pulled that (human) book off the shelf as proof that you were right?---that was the big cat lobby, man....i was drunk though and needed a ride home.....more-to-the-point, the only thing that's real is what happens when i take a shit.....my friend susan lowers a person's "i.q. points" when we're driving and we see a house with columns and i have to say that i do the same when someone forwards me a partisan website as proof that they're right.....that ohio state professor didn't conduct his/her experiment for the love of humankind----he/she did it for money and fame....and as soon as i determine that the article i'm reading has a non author's shit-in-the-toilet agenda, i stop reading.....everything else is lemming ridiculousness

4) Speaking of ridiculousness, why is it 2012 and I still don't have Dead In The Head or My Parents' Medicine on my bookshelf?  Is there any hope of the followup novels to Fat On The Vine being published in their entirety?

the short/quick answer is that kids don't read anymore----they look at pictures instead.....i'd say that "dead in the head" has disappeared into the mist....i recycled parts of it for "bloodreal" (2010) and other parts will be included in "my parents' medicine".....if i'm being honest, "dead in the head" was the weakest of my planned trilogy.....i'm not much of an editor, but i've discovered that the 27th paragraph about what color panties my (fictional) students are wearing is pretty similar to the 1st...."my parents' medicine" is actually good-to-go....i got mad at someone last summer and edited it down so that the format is comparable to "bloodreal"---nice rationale, yeah?.....the art professor at my school offered to turn me on to one of her friends in madison whose a publisher, but i haven't contacted him yet.....perhaps your reader knows someone?

5) That's too bad about Dead In The Head.  I really liked it and thought it was even better than Fat On The Vine.  We actually have more than one reader on the blog, so maybe somebody can hook you up with a publisher (use the comments section, folks).  With ebooks and the Web, self-publishing is easier than ever as well.  The final question is the traditional one:  Anything else that you want to tell the world?

all the young corporate douches have an e-signature in 2012 that is designed to announce to the internet that they have retained their creativity as well as their souls.....i don't have one, but if i did, it would be 1 of 2.....the first is an old chestnut: if you're gonna drink and drive, don't forget your car....the second quote belongs to paul goodman: "in america you can say anything you want----as long as it doesn't have any effect".....cheers!

The Peasants Are Getting Sonnets: An Interview With Pop Novelist King Karl Wenclas

If I recall correctly, I met King Karl Wenclas when I was doing research on zines for my dissertation back in 2000 or so.  He was just starting the Underground Literary Alliance (ULA) with some fellow zinesters, and they were going to invade American literature and make it less boring through some protests and other literary activism.  That they did, and I got caught up in the fun, joining the organization myself for a few years.  I appreciated Wenclas's literary criticism and his zines, particularly War Hysteria, which he bravely released at the height of war on terror fever in 2001/02.  Since the ULA has run its course, Wenclas has been concentrating more on his own writing than on literary activism, but he and Anis Shivani probably still duke it out for the title of the most caustic critic in literature today (sorry, Michiko Kakutani, you're a pussycat compared to these two tigers).  He just released The Tower, a novel about a group of activists protesting a new sports stadium in an American city, and that's how our conversation starts.

1) Why did you put out The Tower as an ebook and not as a zine?

For two reasons. One is that it's easier to produce an ebook, once you figure it out. Second is that right now I'm flat broke and couldn't afford the copying and mailing costs. But I think The Tower would be great as a zine. A person can actually do more with zines-- like selling them at readings. Kinda hard to do with ebooks. That said, ebooks look to be the future of reading. I'd like to get at the forefront of what promises to be a sea change in how literature is produced, distributed, and read.

2) How do you think ebooks are affecting American literature?  Are things better than last decade when the Underground Literary Alliance was protesting the dismal state of it?

A good question. My impression is that the literary elite is more insular and hostile to change than ever before. They fear what ebooks are going to do to them. In public comments from the likes of Ann Patchett and Leon Wieseltier about Amazon and ebooks one receives nothing but emanations of fear. Ten years ago they were so complacent about their standing and their art that they could afford to let the ULA make a little noise. This couldn't happen now.

Unlike ten years ago, real change is coming that will sweep aside their world. I saw change in the city of Detroit, of a different kind, throughout my life. Wrenching change.  I saw the same complacency and the same underlying economic forces that were impossible to stop. The same kind of change is happening to publishing because of ebooks. There's just no way for a top-heavy publishing system with enormous built-in overhead costs to compete, in the long run, against 99-cent ebooks produced by low-rent characters like you or me. The Big Six are producing cheap ebooks also, of course, but that's not where they make their money. They're still dependent on the $25 print novel to pay the bills. It's what the Apple-Amazon lawsuit is about. The big guys were trying to stop natural forces that can't be stopped.

What underground writers have going for them is that we're not locked into a rigid model. We have flexibilty with our art. I believe that the novel can be both literary and pop. It can be readable and fun but also art. No one knows what kinds of writers will survive the coming sea change. What won't survive is the standard finely-detailed, slow-moving "literary" novel, which has been artificially propped up by the mass print media and the official arts organizations for decades. That kind of introspective writing isn't what people want. The public wants characters who dominate a stage; who are larger-than-life. They want superheroes. So I'm trying to make my characters, or at least one of them in my latest ebook, properly "large." Classic storytelling art. Homer after all gave his listeners larger-than-life characters.

If we can't create or lead the changes, we can at least surf them.

3) Speaking of the Underground Literary Alliance, what do you think the group's legacy is?  Literate-driven precursors of the Occupy and Tea Party movements, or a brief flare-up of the underground into the mainstream that will chiefly be remembered as communists and terrorists as their enemies described them (the Tom Bissell Believer essay was recently republished in his essay collection)?

One of the questions I ask in The Tower is: Who gets to write the history? Who constructs the narrative? Those outside the systems of authority and power are unable to, unless they construct their own histories, their own organs of voice and message; their own platform. That's what the ULA was attempting to do.

Those in the halls of established literature constructed a distorted narrative about the ULA, pushed it home and made theirs the accepted narrative about us. As you point out, "literary terrorists." If it's printed by authority, it becomes the truth. It's why our window of opportunity was so brief-- we had to establish a platform before the walls went up against us. We moved too slowly. We thought we had forever to get our books out there, or to build some kind of substantive foundation, even a nonprofit organization, which in hindsight we should've done. We lacked urgency, even I did, though the urgency I sometimes expressed was taken as too demanding by some.  The odds against us were impossible from the start. For myself, I was too easily sidetracked by the ULA's opponents, when I should've stayed narrowly focused. But that's hard to do. One has to restrain natural temper and have no ego. Life is a process of knocking away ego, stripping aside vanity and illusion.

I believe our legacy is more than we can see at the moment. We had a great history. That can't be taken away from us. The ULA is like Crazy Horse. Exterminated in cold-blooded fashion. Yet Crazy Horse lives on. You can't exterminate an idea. You can't exterminate authenticity, which the ULA had by the truckload and which new generations are always looking for.

The irony is that now literary elitists like the folks at n+1 and even those who most scorned us are supporting the very kinds of actions that the Underground Literary Alliance engaged in ten years ago. Yes, we were ahead of the curve. Definitely precursors. The contradiction doesn't register with them, except maybe at the back of their heads. They push the notion to the rear, but it's still there. I find curious the idea that years after we were relevant, many literary people remain fascinated by us and what we did. We're the Other. The ultimate literary rebels. I notice that even Bissell, in a recent interview with Ed Champion, discusses the ULA. (I haven't listened to the interview, but was told about it.) I'm sure he gives the false narrative, again, but the notion of the literary Outsider continues to trouble him.

It's a psychological truth that the more you repress an idea, the stronger it becomes.

4) What ideas are you interested in now?  What are your current projects?

My current project is American Pop Lit. Like a million other writers, I'm producing ebooks. I hope to distinguish mine from the mass. Instead of making easy genre lit, I'm attempting a fusion of styles, so the reading is fast and fun but also meaningful and relevant.

Having ideas about a style or genre of writing, to support and justify that style, is necessary in today's crowded literary scene. Supporting ideas add value to the writing. I still believe that the indy and populist ideas we inherited from the zine scene are winning ideas. But ideas are useless without ways to bring those ideas to the mainstream. How do we announce our writing to the larger society? I ponder this question often.

5) Anything else that you want to tell the world at the moment?

I would simply ask the world to support indy literature by purchasing independent ebooks. Thanks.

Check out more King Karl Wenclas at his blog!

An Interview With Cartoonist Mark Justice

I've known Mark Justice since 1988 and I have enjoyed discussing cartoons and comics, among other things, with him over the years. In the past few years, Mark has started creating his own comics, at first employing his writing skills to create Grammar Man and Fanboy, and now expanding to drawing with his mini-comic Fun With Diabetes! from Eureka Comics!. I interviewed him recently about his cartooning.

1) What inspired you to make a comic about diabetes (besides the obvious catalyst of discovering you had the condition)? Why a comic though?

To answer, Fun With Diabetes first started as an idea I had for a stand-up routine. I was doing the Advanced Placement College Board reading last year, and the essays I read were about humorists, their roles, and how they were valued. I began thinking about what I would do if I were to make a stand-up routine. I thought, "begin with what you know," and since I became diabetic two years ago, I thought, "this might be fun."

What made the idea truly fun was that it was taboo, as most diseases are, but as SO many comics do politics and sex and gender roles, blah, blah, blah, I simply wanted to talk about having diabetes in a fun, biting way.

How it turned into a comic book started with my trip to SPACE (Small Press And Comics Expo) last year. I was amazed by the sheer amount of mini-comics out there, the creativity, the fun, at all levels of ability, from simple shapes to fully-painted pages. I can't draw to save my life, but I was inspired from SPACE that even I could draw simple shapes and tell a story. I can write. That's my ability. I knew that if I made a comic, the words would have to carry the brunt of the load, so I thought, "maybe it would be fun to do part of my stand-up routine about diabetes," and the idea was born.

I had a few really good punchlines, so I created the panels around a strong visual to go with those punchlines. "Strong" is a relative term, artistically, but when you see a panel of my pancreas in a wheelchair along with the line "I prefer pancreatic cripple," well, the reaction that I was shooting for is generally what I get.

This is my first mini-comic, and I'm happy with it. I'm working on more now, which is fun. I hope that my artwork improves with time, but I think I'll just have to be content to draw simple shapes and let my humor come through my writing. 

2) You've written comics before though, right?

Yes, I've written comics before. I've created a whole comics universe that I would love to see actualized some day. It's an homage to the Golden and Silver Age eras called The Golden Agers. I've got a large cast of characters and would really love to flesh them out into full stories.

I'm probably most proud of a comic I did that was published in 2005, called The Adventures of Grammar Man and Fanboy. It's really a grammar-teaching tool in the form of a comic book. I wrote the scripts, and an artists named Linda Ayala did the art. It covers four big issues with grammar with a lot of humor. It was inspired by the Adam West Batman series. When I wrote the dialogue for Grammar Man, I kept hearing it as if Adam West were saying it, which made it easy to capture that era and style. Fanboy was a smart-alecky me but sounded a lot more like Joe Pesci, haha!

Grammar Man has been very successful in helping kids learn grammar. Kids take a set of quizzes before reading Grammar Man and take the same set after reading. In an assessment of over 1000 quiz sets, scores went up 22% after reading Grammar Man. That's over 2 letter grades' worth of improvement, which is fantastic. I'd get notes from the kids, saying things like "I wish all my books were like this!" and "Grammar Man makes learning fun!" That makes me feel very proud.

3) Did comics interest you in reading when you were a kid?

Oh, yeah, I've loved comics for as long as I can remember. I've had them literally all my life. On the day I was born, my dad bought me issues of The Phantom, Mandrake the Magician, and Flash Gordon. I still have those very issues!

I've always been a reader, and I cannot separate my childhood from comics. I used to go every week and buy whatever I could with my allowance. I can't know for sure how many comics I've read, but it's got to be in the thousands, for sure.

Comics are wonderful in that they transport me to being a kid all over again. I can't help but feel like I'm 8 or 10 or 12 when I'm reading stuff from the 70s and early 80s. They're inextricably a part of my childhood and my life. I fantasize about not having to do anything but read comics all day. If I could read 15 comics a day, that be about 450 a month, almost 6000 a year. I can SO see myself doing just that for the rest of my life, hahaha!

4) Today's comics seem to be less accessible to kids.  Most of them are sold in comic book stores and to enter one of those one usually has to be into reading comics already.  Indeed, the average comic shop patron seems to be a middle-aged man.  One of the fears of the comic book industry is that their customers are getting older and older and they don't look likely to be replaced.  Perhaps online comics or graphic novels might change that, but I know that you're involved in an organization that connects kids with comics.  Can you tell us a little about the organization?

Before I answer your question, I'd like to chime in on your first point. I agree that comics are slowly getting to the point of "elite" culture in that you have only a few special places to get access to them. When I was a kid, every drug and convenience store had a spinning rack or two of comics. I'd go to two or three stores every week to buy my allowance's worth of comics. The way comics are distributed now, with only one or two major distributors--is it one, Diamond?-- well, that stranglehold is destroying readership. If comics are to see a resurgence in young readership, kids have to have easy access. Bring the comics back to the local stores. I bet sales would go up 15% in the first year.
 
Now, on to the ECBI. The Elyria Comic Book Initiative is a non-profit organization whose mission is threefold: get comics into kids' hands, promote literacy and creativity by teaching kids how to make their own comics, and create opportunities for writers and artists to be able to take their talent further--sort of a "comic book academy."

We do programs for after-school, during-school, library, and other settings. The ECBI will be two years old this Free Comic Book Day. We've done dozens of programs in grade, middle, and high schools; in libraries; and in alternative educational centers. Hundreds of kids have gone through our program.

Our program is designed to teach both story telling and art. We cover the whole story arc, beginning-middle-end, setting, character, plot, rising action, climax, conclusion, etc. We help them understand why they need to have all of these elements to tell a good story, and we also help them as they create their characters, as well, so we give them the tools to develop their characters' background, motivation, their powers and abilities, their weaknesses, and personality traits that make the characters seem like real people.

The art lessons help them understand that all comics are drawn from simple shapes and that no matter what level of their drawing ability, they can create a great comic. It's all very hands on.

Our first pilot programs were at a local middle school. We did three programs there. We had 20 kids start the first program. About 12 of those kids stayed for the second and third programs, all wanting to do more on their books, tell more stories, all of them becoming better artists and storytellers. It was wonderful to see how they grew not only in ability but in confidence.
 
One of the coolest things about all of this is that kids get excited about comics. We always bring a few long boxes of comics into whatever program we're doing so that the kids can look at and read them while they work on their comics. Most of the kids we've worked with have never read comic books, so a whole new world is opened to them. What is the greatest joy is in letting the kids take a few comics for themselves, to keep. They are so excited, and we are thrilled to share our love of comics with them. I'd like to think that we are helping create the next generation of comic readers, writers, and artists. Hello, Marvel, DC, Image? We'd love to work with you.

We are really excited with a few projects we have going on now. I'm not sure how much I can tell you, so all I'll say is that we're working with some local comic book industry professionals and will be creating a project together. It's all very cool, and I'm really thrilled to see where this goes over the next few years.

I have to conclude with letting everyone know that as the ECBI is a non-profit organization, any donations they make are tax-deductible. We gladly take comic books, art supplies, financial donations, and donations of time. If you'd like more information, please contact me at mark AT elyriacomicbookinitiative.org.

5) Any last words of wisdom?

I don't know about words of wisdom, but I did want to thank you for the opportunity to talk about Eureka!, the ECBI, and about comics, in general. I LOVE comic books. What I'd really like to see is for comics to come down in price, for them to be distributed in more places, for more and more kids to get into comics and fall in love with the medium. The love of comics can last a lifetime. Life wouldn't be as sweet without comics.

An Interview With Artist Michael Dee

I've known Mike Dee for a long time and he's been making art for as long as I've known him. I interviewed him about the sculpture I showed a picture of last week, as well as what else he's been up to lately.

1) What inspired your latest sculpture?
Following the Melted Hearts And Deadly Force show in September 2009, I became interested in increasing the scale of the Heartsmelt series and employing elements of architecture. Last summer, Plastics Make It Possible contacted me about doing a plastic Eiffel Tower or arc for the Philadelphia International Flower Show, which was really cool, because I had just started a new series of drawings of St. John's Wort flowers to go along with the ongoing Jacketed Hollow Point series. I am always excited to do more accessible public projects that will be viewed outside of the standard gallery setting such as gardens, store windows, building facades, and rooftops.

2) Where will the sculpture end up after the show?
The multi colored Lexan tubes and the PVC pipe connectors will be recycled locally in Philadelphia, while the neon will be shipped back to Los Angeles for future projects.

3) Do you like the finite nature of such sculptures? Is that part of their beauty that they don't last long? Do you approach such sculptures differently than more longer-lasting works?
I like the finite nature of these types of projects, because it becomes more about the experience, like seeing a band live, or going to watch an eclipse or meteor shower. You were there and you were engaged with the lights, sounds, and movements for a limited amount of time. People remember where they were and their enthusiasm. Longer lasting works of mine are generally produced at more of a human or home-related scale and don't involve complex interactive or hardware components. I've recently found that I like the immediacy of photography and drawing for producing archival works which reference the concepts and materials used in the installations and large sculptures

4) What are you working on now?
Right now I am working on a suite of drawings, a suite of photographs, and two interactive sculptures, as well as doing freelance photography of bands and playing fuzz bass in a new "punk rock" project. The newer art and music has taken on more of darker tone and recalls the earlier work that was produced in New York and Ohio. Between my job as a vis com professor and being a new homeowner I have been very busy since November.

5) That's a wrap! Any last words of wisdom?
I guess in the words of Augustus St. Gaudens and Jeff Koons: "To the beauty in simple things." But then again there is always Oscar Wilde and The Jesus And Mary Chain, "We may have been in the gutter, but we were looking up at the stars."

Watch Mike make a sculpture on this video!