He Did It All for the Nyuki – Part 5

KO: Your first book, Cow-Boy, was published by The Laughing Ogre, a comic shop in Columbus, Ohio. Did you get your start in Columbus?

JH: I was a cartoonist as a little kid. I drew as a little kid. I think I remember my first gig being the Crestview seventh grade yearbook, where I did some spot illustrations. I did them in pencil, and I though it was insulting — I don’t know what my problem was — I thought it was insulting for someone to say I had to trace them in ink. Pencil wasn’t good enough. I still had the same stupid mentality my freshman year in college, when I submitted some cartoons to the newspaper there and they said “Well, they’re okay, and we’ll accept them if you go over them in ink,” and I was like, “I don’t think so,” which just demonstrated that I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. But my sophomore year is really when I got my start, and that was when I wrote a cartoon in the first newspaper of the year, and it was just the most awful thing in the world. And it was really poorly drawn, and there was no indication at that point to me that I could be funny, but I knew that I could draw better than that, and so I submitted my cartoons, and they were accepted, and that ran twice a week.

KO: A regular strip?

JH: It was an editorial cartoon called Under the Bubble. Most colleges talk about being in a bubble or cut off from the world, and there was this thing called the DePaul Bubble, so that was what it was called. I took it as an opportunity to make puns when I wanted to, to make political comments when I wanted to, and it was very open, very free form, and in the end, not that good.

KO: Why do you say that?

JH: My wife and I were actually talking about this last night. When I went to graduate school I had a weekly strip for five years called Spelunker. Looking back on those strips, you kind of go ooooh, aw. God. We were talking about the fact that when you are developing as a cartoonist or an illustrator or a storyteller or whatever, you have to have just the right balance between two things: Self-criticism, so you actually get better, and self-delusion, so that you think that what you’re doing at the time is actually pretty good. I look at strips that I did when I was in graduate school, and I remember finishing the strip, saying “Man, that is good. I can get better, but that is good. I’m really happy with that.” There would be strips I would leave sitting out on the drawing board for a few days so that I could admire them. “Mmm, that is good.” And you look at them now, and you’re like “Ho-lee smokes, that is bad.” And so it’s that balance between the two that keeps you going, and keeps you muddling through, and hopefully, you haven’t been discouraged. I had the great fortune of being surrounded by people who liked me enough to lie to me. Well, not all the time, but were very supportive. I wasn’t getting dinged and dissed, and on top of that I had a publishing outlet — in this case, two college newspapers. You have that learning that goes back and forth balancing between those two things. I was a graduate student until ’95 at Notre Dame and then I stayed for a year and a half, just to get some teaching experience.

It was at that time, and just a little bit before, that I started doing Cow-Boy, which was a strip that ran in Comics Buyers’ Guide weekly. I was getting to the point there at the end when I was teaching after I had gotten my degree that the whole three-panels-punchline shtick was just, number one, I didn’t feel I was very good at it, and number two, it was just tedious. And I wanted to do something longer and I wrote and drew a story called “Escape from Womb World,” which was the first Cow-Boy story. I did it because it was a biology thing. I did it because it was a superhero spoof. You don’t get any more origin than that — that’s the very first thing that can happen. And then I did “The Pernicious Peril of the Plummeting Plane.” Those whole sell-your-soul kind of stories have always been kind of — well, since I don’t believe in the devil, it’s always been kind of silly.

KO: And for something as lighthearted as Cow-Boy, it’s a pretty intense philosophical situation.

JH: Yeah, the thing is that — I don’t know if this distinction exists, but it exists in my mind — Cow-Boy was never a parody, it was a satire. Which, to me, I don’t know if Webster’s defines them as different things, but to me they’ve always been different things. X-Farce, that’s a parody. Swift’s “Modest Proposal,” that’s a satire. And so I always thought you could make a serious comment about something and still laugh. That was what a lot of those things were. “The Mighty Morphin Mutton Monster” — that was a comment on mob mentality, and how easy and seductive it can be. And of course there were things in there that were utter fluff. And you could argue that it’s all fluff. But once I started doing those long-form things, I could start playing with ideas that you really can’t address in a strip. I could start being serious every once in a while. The humor in my work, where it exists, seems to me on my own analysis to be not punchlines and zingers, but stems from a character saying something in character that’s funny. So I’m not spending a whole lot of time setting up the joke. I’m just having someone be themselves, and that itself is funny.

Which is the type of funny we encounter every day. We don’t go through life setting up jokes strategically to get our friends, we crack wise, and we make fun of the people we know best, because we know them best. That’s the type of humor that I like to write, and you can’t really do that in a four-panel strip. Unless you’ve been around like Charles Schultz was, for decades, and you have firmly-established characters. But anyway, I went to Columbus with a couple of those stories, and I got to know the guys at the Ogre, and they were very encouraging, and said, “Why don’t you do a book?” and it was one of the owners who footed the bill, and has actually become my business partner as far as Clan Apis and The Sandwalk Adventures and Active Synapse in general. But it was when they said, “Hey, we should do this book,” that I thought about putting more stories together. And then once I had the comic book out there, there’s just no way I’m gonna go back to that short form stuff.