This Is Not News

One of the critical elements of pragmatism and of Not News’ overall philosophy is that nothing exists in a vacuum; the connections between events, ideas, statements and people add shadings of meaning beyond what we can find in ‘the thing itself.’ Without trying to, I discovered a vivid example of this recently while reading through some graphic novels I recently purchased, a group that included Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning Maus and Joe Sacco’s American-Book-Award-winning Palestine. Those accolades should make clear that each is a tremendous work on its own; each is a nonfiction narrative with great emotional power. Reading them so close together, however, hit me especially hard, due to their thematic connections and shared contexts.

Maus is a fascinatingly multi-leveled story. It is a recounting of Spiegelman’s father Vladek’s recollections of his life as a Jew in German-occupied Poland and in Auschwitz. It is also the story of Spiegelman’s relationship with his father during the conversations in which he tells his son the stories over a period of several years. Yet further, it also becomes at times the story of Spiegelman’s efforts to finish the story years later, after his father has died and after the initial chapters of the story (which was originally published in serial form) were published to great acclaim.

All of this is done with deceptively simple art that features anthropomorphized animals rather than humans as characters — Jews are depicted as mice, Germans as cats, Americans as dogs, Poles as pigs, and so on. While some have complained that the device smacks of racial and ethnic stereotyping (especially in the case of the Poles), I found it to be effective, at least for an American audience long familiar with such anthropomorphic characters as Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse. In much the same way that the violent antics of Looney Tunes don’t quite seem real, Spiegelman’s cats and mice give us a little bit of emotional distance from the horrors of the events depicted. Given the intensity of those events, that can be necessary, and lets the reader absorb more of what the characters are saying as the emotions that Spiegelman infuses into these characters. (As for the stereotyping, I didn’t find it to be much of a problem. As someone of partial Polish descent, the pigs did throw me off for a moment. At the same time, whether it’s the alliteration or my association of my Polish roots with pork roasts, kielbasa and the like, or something else entirely, it also somehow seemed to fit. More importantly, the animal avatars are purely a visual device — Spiegelman no more portrays the Poles as being like pigs than he does the Americans as being like dogs.)

The accounts of Spiegelman’s meetings with Vladek are more than a mere framing device; they are as essential as the Holocaust recollections. Here, Spiegelman is either brutally honest or lacking in storytelling skill, or perhaps both. There is clearly tension between the two Spiegelmans; it seems apparent that if Spiegelman were not working on his comics project, he would not want to have much, if anything at all, to do with his father. In depicting this tension, Spiegelman often comes off as immature and self-centered; he is unwilling to go to his father’s house to help him replace storm windows, and he calls his father a murderer when he finds out that Vladek destroyed the journals that his mother (who had long ago committed suicide) had kept during her time in the camps. Spiegelman tries to portray Vladek as a difficult man, demanding and even cruel to others and frugal to the point of miserliness. In most cases, though, I found a lot more to like in the father than in the son, and he didn’t strike me as any more set-in-his-ways or difficult than many of the other people I know of that generation, and it is clear that he loved his first wife and that he loves his son. Whatever causes Spiegelman to view his father the way he does, it does not come across clearly on the page, even as so many other parts of the story do.

A few weeks after I read Maus I picked up Palestine, a relatively recent collection of Sacco’s series from the early 1990s about his two months in the Israeli-occupied territories in the early stages of the intifadeh (or uprising). Trained as a journalist, Sacco bounced from town to town, refugee camp to refugee camp, trying to collect as many stories as possible from the Palestinians. While Sacco provides some details to set the historical context, Palestine does not attempt to be a thorough treatment of the history of the region or the root causes of the conflict, nor is he concerned with achieving the dispassionate ‘here’s one side of the story, now here’s the other side with equal time’ attitude that is usually considered to be ‘objective’ news reporting. He is concerned with truth and with facts, but he also makes clear that he believes that the American audience has thus far received a one-sided view of the Palestinian issue and that he hopes to do at least a little to rectify that.

In doing so, Sacco doesn’t spend too much time with any one group of people, and so it’s somewhat difficult to really identify with many. It is not impossible, however, and that’s a testament to Sacco’s writing and drawing skill. He distills each person’s story to its essential details without leaving out emotional resonance, conveying rage, despair, grief and hatred in an atmosphere of violence, poverty and injustice. The description of conditions in the Ansar III prison camp, or of the efforts of Israeli soldiers to coerce confessions from prisoners, are vivid for being relatively brief.

Morever, his detailed and realistic landscapes and surroundings contrast with a more distorted, almost cartoon-like depiction of human beings, with facial features (especially mouths) getting increased emphasis. In part because we don’t get immersed in any one person’s story, Sacco’s hyper-realism is as well-suited to his story as Spiegelman’s abstract simplicity is to the highly personal Maus. Sacco also makes liberal use of captions to provide narration for the story, and unlike the tidy rectangles that many comics raders might be used to, these caption boxes often seem to fall haphazardly over the page, graphically demonstrating his disjointed and hurried stream of thought while going through security checkpoints, smuggling illegal videos from house to house, or trying to figure out what exactly he is trying to accomplish so that he can explain it to the skeptical Palestinians who have come to distrust the West and its media.

As I’ve said, Palestine on its own is a tremendous work, one that I can’t recommend highly enough. But reading it so soon after I read Maus at times filled me with a sense of despair. To see Jews with the Star of David sewn onto their coats harassed, interrogated and tortured by German soldiers, and then to see Israeli soldiers take Palestinians from their homes, beat them, and hold them in squalid prisons without trials while trying to force them to sign confessions was truly disheartening. I kept thinking of George Santayana’s warning that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it, and I found myself wanting to scream ‘Have we learned anything?’ In the weeks since, as I look at today’s environment of us vs. them ideologies and wars on terror, I still wonder if we have . . . or worse, if we have learned the wrong lesson.

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.

KO: When you look at Cow-Boy these days, how do you think of it?

JH: I still like it. It still makes me laugh.

KO: You don’t look at Cow-Boy now the same way you look at your older strips?

JH. No. Uh-uh. There are things I look at and say, “I’d change that. I could have stood to re-draw this, or paste that better,” but you invariably look at things and find things that you would fix or do differently. But so far, it’s one of those things that I’m really proud of.

KO: What kind of choice was self-publishing for you? Have you ever considered trying to go to a bigger publishing company? Would you do it full-time?

JH: There’s a part of me that would love to write books, and with comic books, I’m releasing a book in installments. So a collection isn’t an endpoint, it’s the goal. But I’d love to write books for the rest of my life, but I also love being in the classroom. So as far as full-time — No, I haven’t really entertained that seriously. And in self-publishing — and this is not a disparaging comment on those that do — I never wanted to write somebody else’s characters. I’ve been always very proprietary about the things I write and draw. And the other thing is, if I were at a big publisher, I’d have to make a decision, probably. I wouldn’t be famous enough to write and draw. The bottom line is, too, that I’m not a good enough artist to be at a place like that. I have to do my own thing and do my own style and not worry about the specifics of house style or whatever. So that never was a goal of mine. Self-publishing feels like the only avenue. And I feel compelled to place the caveat here that the money hasn’t been mine, the money has been Daryn’s. I’ve sort of just done the creative thing. And it’s been tremendously valuable for me because I’m not a businessman, nor do I have any interest in that. So we share the revenues from the work.

But I have a real problem being told what to do. It’s a good thing that I’m an academic, because the course is mine to make exactly the way I want to do it. I don’t take direction very well, except from Lisa and Max. And mom and dad, I can handle that as well. But I don’t, and I tend to feel like, when it comes to writing a story, I know what’s best for my story. And I’ve taken one piece of advice on structuring a story. It was from Lisa. And I only admit this because it was really good advice. It was the fourth issue of Clan Apis. And you know how that opening sequence ends with Nyuki saying “Isn’t this great?” and that sort of segues into her working on the comb? I was going to have that be the first page, and have the whole (foreign bees invading the hive) conflict thing happen later on. The way it works is that I would write out the stories and I would read them to Lisa. This is when we were living in Columbus. She would come in, and I’d say “I need you to listen to this, it doesn’t feel like it’s got the right oomph.” And she said I should put the whole fight thing at the beginning. And I sort of looked down, angry that I hadn’t thought of it myself. I was unwilling to admit that that was exactly what I was going to do, since I’ve developed a pretty firm reputation with her for not listening to what she tells me. And that made it a really good story, but for the most part I chafe a little bit at being told what to do. So self-publishing is the only option for someone who’s as fussy as me.

KO: As you went through this, did you feel you were sort of going it alone in terms of breaking into the industry?

JH: I know a lot of people in the industry now, and email and talk to a lot of people who I really like and look forward to seeing at shows. But before Clan Apis finished, it wasn’t until it finished did I consider myself a participant in the industry. When people read it, and thought it was good, that was sort of my ticket into the dance. Before that, people were really nice. But in all fairness, I was some unproven person. And it’s tough for me to ask for help. What that left us with was me trying to figure it out on my own. Daryn and I didn’t really become partners until we did the Clan Apis trade. I got the Xeric Award for the first issue, and I published all the other issues myself, although he did step in once when I didn’t get the invoice and covered my costs on the second issue. But it wasn’t until we were done with it that I started talking to people. I didn’t make too many horrible blunders. But not really, I didn’t really have guidance on the way. And that’s not me saying “oh, boo-hoo me,” because I really didn’t ask for it, and I really didn’t know anybody.

KO: Would you do it the same way if you could do it over again?

JH: Yeah. I applied for the Xeric Award, and it’s nice to have that award. A lot of great books have gotten a start, or have gotten attention, with the Xeric Award. Jim Ottavianit’s Two-Fisted Science, which I love — great book — is a Xeric work. There’s a whole long list of them, and of course I can’t remember anybody’s names right now. So that was nice. It was nice to have that recognition, because ultimately, that was a group of people who didn’t know me, a funding organization that was reviewing my first issue. I hadn’t really shown it to anybody, and I was pretty unsure. And to have someone like Peter Laird and his group say, “Hey, this is good. We’re gonna give this money.” I’d have to say that was the one sort of industry pat on the back that gave me the boost to have the confidence to do it. I’m at heart not a very confident person, and some would say borderline neurotic. I don’t know that that makes me much different from many other cartoonists. But I approach things with trepidation, and the assumption that it’s not all that great. So that was nice. That was the one big pat on the back. I met Jeff Smith for the first time at the Chicago Comicon, and shamelessly dropped my name as doing the Cow-Boy strip, which he apparently liked. And he was impressed, or acted impressed. So that was a nice boost too. It’s just little things like that, little nudges like that, that keep you going.

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.