I am proud of this interview. At times some readers may find that it strays too far from comics: so be it. People who believe that Seth Tobocman’s "artistic" side can be cut off from his "political" side (indeed, who think of this question in terms of "sides") are deluding themselves.

The three interviews comprising this text were conducted in a Ukranian restaurant in Tobocman’s neighborhood in March 2000. Somehow it all seems so long ago — Clinton was still president, Rudoph Giuliani was about to take on the First Lady in the race for the Senate, and the economy was still sizzling. Nowhere sizzled hotter, of course, than lower Manhattan, and so with the influx of capital and the support of the City, the Lower East Side was finally reinducted into New York City. War in the Neighborhood, which appeared a few weeks before we began these interviews, tells the story of this induction. While Tobocman’s sometimes abrasive — even caustic — artistry may not appeal to certain refined aesthetic palates, this book nonetheless stands as an honest, vibrant and surprisingly deft record of contemporary take-it-all-the-way politics. The same may be said of his polemical work, You Don’t Have to Fuck People Over to Survive, a book described in some circles as an underground classic.

This interview, through which Tobocman’s strong personality and viewpoints shine, touches on his magazine World War 3 Illustrated (co-founded with Peter Kuper in 1979), his book War in the Neighborhood (Autonomedia, December 1999), and his extensive work with housing issues, postering and other politically influenced cartoonists and illustrators. For Tobocman himself, who is no doubt reading this, I have one final comment: shine on, baby!

WORLD WAR 3 ILLUSTRATED

WORCESTER: Didn’t the 20th anniversary of World War 3 Illustrated pass recently? How did that magazine come about?

TOBOCMAN World War 3 started when Peter Kuper and I were in art school part-time at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. Peter was an assistant for Howard Chaykin and I was doing illustrations for various publications including the New York Rocker and the East Village Eye. We sort of ran smack into the Iran hostage crisis and the enormous amount of patriotic propaganda that was part of the culture at the time. I remember these big buttons that said, FUCK IRAN on them. They were sold in grocery stores by very respectable people. So we wanted to do an anti-war comic book. We started World War 3, and continued to do it off and on for years.

WORCESTER: There’s nothing quite like it in the magazine business. On the one hand, it is a comic book, yet it’s exclusively political. Which is to say, you wouldn’t run something about somebody’s first girlfriend or boyfriend, would you?

TOBOCMAN We might. We have done that. I mean, we always try to approach the political through the personal. I don’t like people who do pieces that they have no qualification to do. I want people to speak about things that they have experienced directly. We find politics through the study of our everyday lives. We started out doing a lot of anti-war material, but we moved into other areas because people did a lot of stuff around housing, around drugs, around sexism, because these were issues in the lives of the artists who were working on the magazine and we found that this was worked out better than some sort of obscure foreign policy issue.

WORCESTER: Say a little bit about the first issue. This is the one about the Coca-Cola bomb headed toward planet Earth.

TOBOCMAN The first issue had some material that Peter Kuper and I had done together for Heavy Metal but was rejected. The first work I’ve ever seen by Peter Bagge came to us then. When he first showed up at this apartment, back when we didn’t have heat, we had to police the door. There was a line of drug addicts out in front of the building. He had notebooks and notebooks and notebooks of comics that were basically scribbles with really good dialogue. He could write dialogue. He could write stories. He couldn’t draw. Over time, he turned his bad drawing into a style. And now, you wish you could draw badly as well as he does. He created his own style, completely his own way of drawing characters. I think he’s phenomenal. We had two pieces of his in the first issue. [In our first issue we ran] a piece [of his] based on the life of a guy named Tom Keogh, who was one of our cartoonists. Tom Keogh came from a family with some Klan background and he was marrying a black woman at the time. So Peter had a talk with Tom and came up with a comic strip. I didn’t even know this about Tom. He later said, I got the idea from talking to that guy who was at your house and did a comic strip about a guy who goes back to his hometown and finds that all of his high-school friends have joined the Klan and they eventually shoot him, which was a good description of the early 1980s.

We had a lot of help in doing that issue from Ben Katchor, who was, at that time, producing a magazine called Picture Story Magazine. He was a technical advisor for us on the first issue of World War 3 and technical advisor to Art Spiegelman on the first issue of RAW, which were both being produced at the same time. Ben knew every cheap printing deal in New York City. There was this clothing store on Broadway called Que Linda and in the back there was a second storefront run by two brothers, who I believe were retarded, who sold short-end paper, so that you could get the paper to do the cover on more cheaply than if you just got it at the printer. Ben could set you up with this.

WORCESTER: Did Ben sympathize with your politics?

TOBOCMAN Um... our politics were less pronounced than they are now. But I think that Ben really sympathized with us trying to do something more sophisticated with comic books. That that was a project we were all engaged in.

WORCESTER: Did you meet most of the artists personally and then recruit them on to World War 3? Or did you get some good submissions from people who weren’t in your circle?

TOBOCMAN Both. Spiegelman sent Peter Bagge in our direction because he didn’t want him in his books. It happened both ways. As time went on, I met more artists, particularly living in the Lower East Side.

WORCESTER: The first issue of World War 3 came out in 1979. How many people did it go to?

TOBOCMAN 1500 copies.

WORCESTER: And 20 years later, how many issues have been printed and how many people read the magazine?

TOBOCMAN 28 issues, and our distribution has varied from 3,000 to 5,000. It goes up and down.

WORCESTER: You haven’t been burned out by working on a magazine that doesn’t have many advertisers, outside funding or rich sponsors?

TOBOCMAN Well, because it’s collective, I don’t always have to work on it. I went through a period when I was working on it less, and I’m working on it a little more now. Peter’s working on it a lot less. Different people come in and out of it. There’s a big turnover of people. There are people working on the magazine now who were 5 years old when we put out the first issue. World War 3 was just sort of an idea that Peter and I were sort of trying to work together. As we got to about the third or fourth issue, the focus of the magazine shifted a lot to the Lower East Side where I was living. And to urban politics. I began to work with Eric Drooker, Josh Whalen, Paula Hewitt and James Romberger, who were all neighborhood residents. And we also formed -- me, Drooker, Hewitt and Whalen -- formed an informal postering collective. We were putting up posters around the neighborhood about Michael Stewart’s murder by the NYPD and about housing issues, and drug-dealing issues. At that point we started to have more of a collective of artists, which is what I had envisioned. Because I never thought I would have the time and resources to run the thing myself. Eventually, we developed a collective editorial structure and an editorial board, as opposed to having a single editor. And we began to plan things at meetings and work as a group. It didn’t really start that way. It started out as an individual thing; just me and Peter getting it together and pulling it off.

WORCESTER: How did you and Peter Kuper meet?

TOBOCMAN Peter and I grew up together in Cleveland Heights. My father and his father were both professors of physics at Case Western University. We lived a block away from each other and we collected comics together.

WORCESTER: You were comic fans before you were aware of political issues?

TOBOCMAN I certainly was, although I think there was always a certain awareness of politics in the family, because my Uncle Jack had been in the Communist Party. That was before I was born, but there was a certain amount of awareness of political issues. My father was actually what you would call first a Johnson liberal and then a Reagan Democrat. Now he’s a Clinton Democrat. But during the Reagan years he was a Reagan Democrat. Peter’s father actually was fairly liberal and lost his job at the university for opposing the Vietnam War.

WORCESTER: What did your father think of your art?

TOBOCMAN It was hard for my parents to understand that I was an artist and the fact that I was political. There had been political people in the family before. My grandfather’s generation had been very, very leftist, because they came from Eastern Europe and they’d experienced oppression under the Czar as all Jewish people did. So their sympathies were socialist. My parents rejected that, but they were familiar with it. In fact, I think they really dreaded that, because I think they saw that [I was] going to have an unfortunate life like [my] uncle. But they had more of an understanding of that than they did of being an artist, which is something that was very mysterious for them. I guess it still is.

WORCESTER: Neither you nor Peter Kuper produce anything that looks like superhero comics, but you don’t renounce your comics past. Why didn’t you end up working for Marvel or D.C. turning out superheroes?

TOBOCMAN Well, I grew up reading superheroes, and as I got a little older I started to read underground comics. I got to the point where the superhero comics, the superheroes [themselves] weren’t real to me anymore. To really love superheroes, you kind of have to imagine that these were real people and you knew them. At least for me. And a lot of the best superhero comic artists say that the characters are real to them, and they live with them. It didn’t have that effect for me. I started looking around for other things. The artists who affected me the most were artists like Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, stylistically. They really can tell a story.

WORCESTER: And their work doesn’t go in an esoteric direction. And that’s one thing that they have in common with your work in World War 3. It’s meant to be accessible to a large audience.

TOBOCMAN Yeah. I think that in the 1970s, people got overwrought with techniques and airbrush. Basic drawing is a lot more important than surface technique. When Peter and I were working at Heavy Metal, back in the late 1970s, there were always these artists who would have a lot of airbrushing and didn’t know how to draw or write. But they could do this really slick surface. I never liked those guys and Peter didn’t either. That was something we shared, that aesthetic about a clear, direct drawing style that told a story.

WORCESTER: Do you have any fans in the mainstream comics world?

TOBOCMAN I can’t think of anybody offhand. I know that James Romberger is now into straight comics, but he started out with us. Scott Cunningham is writing for straight comics, but he also started out with us. There are people who have gone into straight comics who know us. I can’t off of the top of my head pin down a straight comics person who acknowledges my work, although I have a pretty good dialogue with [DC Editor] Axel Alonso even though I don’t work there. I guess that’s a kind of a "No."

WORCESTER: Were there any other childhood influences on your politics?

TOBOCMAN Sure. I was one of those kids who got beat up a lot in school, which is sort the stereotype of a comic-book fan. I think because of that superhero comics were a lot more real to me than say, children’s literature, which is written to satisfy parents. So I think that created to some extent concerns with issues of justice and a concern with issues of power, which are all in my work. It also created that incredible attraction to the Incredible Hulk and all of those characters who expressed a lot of rage a little kid doesn’t know how to express. I later found that same expression in rock and roll and in politics and developed through that.

WORCESTER: How do you distribute a magazine like World War 3, which isn’t quite a magazine but which is not going to show up in the more mainstream world?

TOBOCMAN You distribute it by Mordam Records, who are an underground record distributor who distribute bands like the Dead Kennedys and various independent record labels. They were basically set up to protect independent producers from unscrupulous distributors. They deal with so many records nobody can afford to rip them off. They carry a few magazines. They distribute us to some comic book distributors, but we are distributed a lot more in places like Tower Records, places like the various anarchist bookstores, places that are sort of the contemporary equivalent of head shops.

WORCESTER: How many anarchist or quasi-anarchist bookstores does America have right now?

TOBOCMAN I don’t know. I think there’s one in every major city.

WORCESTER: So easily 30 or 40?

TOBOCMAN Easily. Easily.

WORCESTER: What kind of letters do you get?

TOBOCMAN We get a lot of letters from people in small communities who feel they don’t have anything in their environment that supports them in terms of their discontentment with American society. They see World War 3 as something that represents that and so they want to relate to us. And we also occasionally get some really amazing fan mail from people who are doing really interesting things. And we get some weird stuff, too. Someone once sent me a picture of himself all cut up and said that was his art. One guy once sent his underwear. I got some weird mail. One day I get a package. It’s a gray package, completely covered in plastic. It’s kind of soft and squishy. It says on it, "Street Rat Liberation Army." I’m like, "Oh no! Somebody sent me a rat. I know it! Somebody sent me a rat." So we go outside. We get a scissors, and we say, "OK. We’re going to cut this open outside. It’s probably..."

WORCESTER: When was this?

TOBOCMAN This was a few months ago. We very carefully cut it open, and it’s not a rat. It’s T-shirts. It’s a couple of T-shirts with one of my designs on them. With the design that says, "You don’t have to fuck people over." And I’m like, Oh great! Somebody is out there marketing my design on a T-shirt. So I take it inside, I throw it on the bed and I don’t look at it for the rest of the day. I finally go and look at it, and there’s a letter with it and a fanzine. The fanzine is called Street Rat. Apparently this group of kids at a university, representatives of NATO were coming to speak at their school. So their protest was that they printed up 20 T-shirts with my design on it and they interrupted the guys speech and took him to task about Yugoslavia. And then they sent me the T-shirts just to let me know that they did it and that they weren’t selling the T-shirts. That was very heartwarming. It’s almost like a little fable. Don’t look for a rat in the bag. I get some really amazing support from people that way. They’re really enthusiastic. Traveling around the country doing my slide show and my performances, I’ve met guys who would have a tattoo of my artwork. This has happened a lot. Once I’m sitting in a bar, and a guy walks up and orders me a beer, buys me a beer and I say I want to pay for it, and he says, "No, don’t worry. That’s royalties on the tattoo," and he rolls up his sleeve. So the people who like this stuff really like it.

WORCESTER: What kind of negative letters do you get?

TOBOCMAN Very few. People who don’t like it don’t bother with us.

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