He Did It All for the Nyuki – Part 7
KO: Was Columbus a good town to work in?
JH: I don’t think anything would have happened the way it did if I hadn’t been in Columbus. I really attribute it not only the owners of The Laughing Ogre, but the environment, and the fact that there was this place with friendly people who were interested in the work and what I was doing, and who were plugged into all this independent alternative stuff, and all of this mainstream stuff, to the point that they offered a legitimate perspective. Those guys were all so very helpful. They’re not comics pros, but these are the guys that I would actually show the stuff to, other than my wife and my best friend Jeff. Their encouragement helped quite a bit too. I sold 600 issues maximally. I peaked at about 640 on the third, fourth and fifth issues of Clan Apis, and I think 100 of those were sold at The Laughing Ogre. It’s astonishing the effects a store can have just by saying, “You should look at this.” The Ogre is a kind of place that will recommend a DC book that they like, and they’ll recommend a no-name alternative book that’s on its first issue. If it’s good, they will point it out. I think that’s the strength of the store. I think that’s why they make a lot of money for a comic store. At some level, I have to believe that Clan Apis is good. Once it gets into people’s hands, and they give it a chance, I think the majority of people say, “You know what? I like this.”
KO: In some way the industry supports that as well, in that since it’s still kind of struggling, people just starting out might be given more of a chance than they would in TV or film or publishing.
JH: One of the things I used to do was I used to point out when a book was coming out. I would hype it on the usenet groups. What you have there, and I think in comic shops across the nation, and in magazines like Comics Journal, you have not only an acceptance, but a yearning to find something new and different that’s good. I mean, there’s a difference between new and different that sucks, and new and different which is good. I think that people are looking, and people want to be entertained, and readers are much more open to giving people a chance. It’s still not that big a chance, but I think that Clan Apis really took off and started to do well. My numbers went up from my first issue. I’ve always been told that that’s unusual. I’ve always been told: Big first issue, and then drop-off. And I had dreaded that through word-of-mouth in the industry. And then people like Neil Gaiman were saying in interviews that they really liked Clan Apis. Alex Robinson mentioned Clan Apis. People who don’t know me being kind enough to say things like that — that has, at some level, a really significant impact in this industry, because it is so small, and it is so tight-knit.
KO: What do you read now?
JH: I’ve really cut back on my pull. I read Bone, I read — I’m trying to think of what I just got. Castle Waiting. Dork. I love Evan Dorkin, dystopic and depressed as he can be sometimes.
KO: Milk and Cheese is definitely something that’s not for all ages.
JH: No. It is not. There’s a book called The Wiggly Reader, by John Kerschbaum, that I really like. Usually anything by Jim Ottaviani, which is great. Rachel Hartman’s Amy Unbounded. I just read Box Office Poison, which I loved. And From Hell. And I’m a huge Stan Sakai fan. I love Usagi Yojimbo. That’s one of my favorite books, and I’ve said this to him. There’s a story in there that was really one of the major inspirations for Clan Apis. The story opens with a sequence demonstrating how the samurai swords are made. The constant folding of the metal. And I thought, “Wow. Here’s sequential art, it’s a fundamental element of the plot — it’s also taught me something.” I enjoy Akiko. The Wiggly Reader is adult fare, it’s pretty sick humor. I’m trying to think what else. I like Murder Me Dead. Stray Bullets. I’ve been reading some Spider-Man lately, mostly because of J. Michael Straczynski. I’m a huge Babylon 5 fan. I love Hellboy. It’s just fun.
Not a lot of ongoing books, but graphic novels, like Stuck Rubber Baby. I just handed a big pile to another faculty member here. She grew up reading ElfQuest, so I wanted to hand over a few things that she might be into. I love Rich Geary’s Treasury of Victorian Murders. Hate. I loved Hate, which is not kiddie fare by any stretch of the imagination. There was The Replacement God by Zander Cannon, who’s doing a lot of work with Alan Moore these days. One of the things I find interesting is that there’s a fair bit of fantasy in there, and I’m not much of a fantasy buff. So it’s not so much genre.
KO: There seems to be kind of an overarching philosophy in what you write that says “You’re special, but you’re still a cog in the machine.”
JH: The philosophy I always keep in mind is this: Reality is so much more interesting, and at times more painful, as recent events have taught us, than most of the made-up stuff. I’ve already admitted to liking Babylon 5, so the whole concept of aliens is fun. But we live in a world obsessed with concepts like that, like pseudoscientific mumbo-jumbo. We drape ourselves in it, we wrap ourselves in it, we call it philosophy. And these are the same kinds of people sometimes that really don’t have any fundamental idea of how the world works. And as a biologist, you can’t help but be just blown away by how the world works. The way in which individual organisms have adapted to environment. The enormous history that this planet has. And when you accept as I have the concept of evolution — and when I say “accept,” it makes it sound like a religious thing, and it’s not; obviously firm scientific evidence is the best explanation for what we see — you have to recognize that you are this point in this continuum that has existed for four and a half billion years on this planet. Each of us is very special in that we are unique. We have this big brain that confers upon us this consciousness, and that consciousness is shaped by our invariably different experiences. So we are unique.
But we have a habit sometimes of equating uniqueness with deification. Each chimpanzee is unique, but it’s not a god, it’s not divine. We spend our time being awed by the quote-unquote miraculous — which oftentimes is just coincidental — and we ignore the marvelous, which is all the awe-inspiring things in nature. I’ve got this story I want to do in which we trace a photon of light which leaves a star four billion light-years away, at the same time the Earth is forming. And it’s flying in a trajectory toward the Earth. And it’s heading in, it’s heading in. And you sort of draw the story in parallel, above and below. And below is this sequence of Earth changing and yada yada yada, and evolution, blah blah blah. And you get to the point where the photon of light reaches its destination, which is the fortuitous turning of someone looking toward the sky, and it popping onto their retina, and turning on a photoreceptor, and having that register. The payoff here is that the person actually appreciates it. The person says, “Whoa. That star, that light that I’m looking at, is older than I. It could be older than the Earth.” It’s amazing little marvelous elements like that in nature that we don’t spend any time, or we spend very little time, marveling at. It’s not cool, it’s geeky. Whereas it’s really cool if we imagine dinosaurs coming back to life today, and eating people. That is cool, K-E-W-L cool. A lot of my work is the recognition that we are unique, but that we are part of this ongoing drama that really is writing itself as it goes. And there’s all this amazing stuff around us, and we’ve got all these other players in this drama who have eked out very unusual existences. There are all these different strategies that life has taken to survive. The point is that we’re all unique but we’re also connected.
KO: And we’ll see that coming back in The Sandwalk Adventures?
JH: I hope so. For me, the concepts of coming to terms with different ideas and facing your position in the scheme of things, and being content with that — maybe content’s the wrong word — having appreciation for the role you play, that’s going to be playing out with the follicle mite. And Darwin is going to be in a position where he’s the grand master, the storyteller.