I'll start with a quote from Chris Ware that I know you're fond of: "When you don't understand a painting, you assume you're stupid. When you don't understand a cartoon, you assume the cartoonist is stupid."
You're starting in the right place. That high/low divide. Maybe we're past it, I have no idea. But it didn't seem like that in the '70s. And maybe even now we're temporary residents where all the bums get kicked out next year when the next fad comes along. You're starting at the back, which is good, because the back essay was meant to explain the front, which was meant to explain the book, which leads you through wormholes back and forth through all three sections.
So, in the back, there's this thing that describes my cartooning life from age 10 to 24, in which I had this calling to be a cartoonist, but it didn't have anything to do with breaking the boundaries until I got a syndicated strip offered to me, which I decided would be a fate worse than death, when I was still in high school. It eventually led to underground comix and bubblegum companies. Neither zone was that interested, or would say the word 'art.' Bubblegum cards, of course, are art, everyone knows this, but it's not something you toot your own horn about. Underground comix were proud of being ephemeral. They appeared in underground newspapers, on disposable newsprint, on underground comics pamphlets that you keep rolled up in your back pocket, and if you re-read one, it's because you just don't remember that you read it before.
But the notion of a comic to re-read, that was not quite where I was coming from, even though a lot of the cartoonists I admired were refugees from art schools. And after putting in time and learning how to draw people trucking, and pervert pirates and lesbians and whatever, I found my way into some zone, which wasn't exactly the identical zone that my betters and elders were traveling, and that had to do with coming late to the stuff on the other end of the hyphen, the high-art stuff, and after growing up somewhat suspicious of it as a hoax and a racket because I didn't understand it, and it was making me feel stupid, as Chris Ware pointed out, I just began to get drunk on it. At least the art from the late 19th, early 20th century. And similarly, I began ... well, that's a little bit different ... I was going to say I began reading harder books. But I was always reading harder books more than I was looking at harder pictures. But the whole thing came together in a notion of, 'Well, why can't I use comics as a medium of self-expression. It was already happening in underground comics, but to really pursue it as a possible end, as opposed to the more casual notions that came with the medium. That had me breaking a taboo among my peers: it's snooty, upward-striving gibberish to call yourself an artist. Let it go. But the idea of having an audience that would attend to the work, rather than just simply float over it, was rather intriguing to me. Because I knew, as someone who grew up in the communication arts, which they portray on that Mad Men AMC show...
How do you like Mad Men?
Ah, man, it just takes me back to the days when I could smoke in elevators. And I was sort of primed to be in that office, that high school or vocational school that would have ended up there.
But was that one of the problems with the underground comix scene? That they were too willing to ghettoize themselves?
It didn't feel like a ghetto, it felt like a revolution. It just wasn't that much of an issue. The difference had to do with where in that Chris Ware quote the conversation takes place. Like, if you're an artist, you're a shaman: you get to spread your entrails on the ground and people have to come over and read them. If you're a cartoonist, it's your job to be a member in good standing of the communication arts and go all the way so someone doesn't have to bat an eyelash while imbibing the information and continuation on their merry way. Underground comix began moving that bar elsewhere. Which isn't to say it was the first time it got moved. Certainly Krazy Kat and other comics indicated that there's life in all this. But the idea that one could make a comic that couldn't even be understood on a first reading, but that the first reading was entering the terrain to re-read, that was not exactly where things were, and that was interesting to me because I didn't want to become a painter. It has so much to do with class, I'm realizing as I'm talking. To me that would have been shameful. When I was working at the bubblegum company, there was this guy Woody Gellman, who the book is dedicated to, and he had a formula that I found very useful. It's either make one and sell it for a million dollars, or make a million and sell 'em for a dollar each. There were two routes to happiness. And the latter had more to do with where I lived. So, all that said, that was a new notion for me, that one could make comics that were carefully built, and would reward time spent, rather than everything having to come at first blush. Despite the fact that MAD had already shown that more time spent meant lots more yuks.
