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.
Were you entirely self-taught, or did you have any formal instruction?
I had various kinds of instruction, but everybody's somehow self-taught. But my education, in brief, was when my parents were horrified to find out I wanted to be a cartoonist, they put me in an after-school painting course with a lot of dowagers, figuring that would cure me, which it almost did. I painted the dowagers on my paper palette while supposedly painting a landscape, and was eventually asked to leave. So that was the beginning. Then I went to a vocational art high school, and then I had to go college to avoid the draft. No choice. So I started taking advanced art courses, and when I had to declare my major was told that I couldn't be an art major, even though I'd gotten A's in all the advanced classes, because I hadn't taken the beginning classes. So I decided to take drugs and go on a spiritual journey to find out why they wouldn't let me major in art, became a philo major first semester, and then agreed to a mental institution and beyond. All the while still working as a cartoonist.
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