Entering the Fort

TOM SPURGEON: At that time, a lot of minicomics and zine writing was autobiographical and confessional. It's worth noting that you weren't drawn to attempting that kind of work.

BRIAN RALPH: I've never really had the desire to do anything about myself. I liked comics for the sake of comics. At the time, I was really into the graphic look of it; I didn't care so much about the storytelling. To do a story about the skateboarding, it didn't have to be about me. It was just an excuse to do this graphic art. In the beginning, they were really bizarre, because I didn't care if anyone could read it. When I see that now, I hate it, but at the time I was really into it. It was a big page of crazy stuff, with little arrows pointing where to go -- which is funny, because now I'm so concerned with readability and everything has to be perfect. In the beginning, I just wanted things to look cool.

SPURGEON: You said you discovered Flap Stack, which is kind of the proto-everything Fort Thunder comic book. Did you start running into the other guys?

RALPH: I didn't realize that Mat had drawn that comic until I'd known him for a year or two. The address was Texas, his parents' home address, and when I met him in Providence it took me a while to figure that out. I don't know if I ever talked to him about it, but it was a really big influence. It was a wordless thing, just these weird creatures in this environment. I can see in Cave~In how I was inspired by that comic early on.

SPURGEON: Tell me how you got drawn into that circle.

RALPH: Paul Lyons and I were friends from the first day of freshman year. He was in the next room over from me. He's been my lifelong friend from that day. We met Mat through rock posters. He was printing a lot of rock posters and I was really into screenprinting. There was this whole thing where late at night you went out and put your rock posters up for whatever the show was that was coming up. You didn't even really know other poster artists, but you'd see a person's poster and it made you want to one-up your poster and make it bigger or have brighter colors.

So Mat and I met through that, and I didn't even know he did comics. But when I got close to graduation, he asked me what I was doing. He said, "We have this place, and we're looking to take over another section of this studio. We have one big area, and then there's an area next to it where there's nothing there and we can rent the rest of this floor of this warehouse." So he kind of asked a couple of people if they were interested. I said I was interested as long as my friend Paul could do it, too.

I think the first people that did it were Jim Drain, me and Paul. I think that was it. We had this huge space and just the three of us. That first summer, we hadn't built anything. One side of Fort Thunder was finished -- people had their rooms -- and we had this big, long, empty hallway with nothing but mattresses on the ground. It was a really depressing summer. It was hot, and you had to build something. I wondered if I had made the right decision moving in. Then the rabbit peed on my pillow. [Spurgeon groans.] I was sleeping one night: "God, it really stinks in here." And I woke up and I realized the whole pillow was yellow. That made me think, "What am I doing? I just graduated from this expensive school!" and I was living in a wreck of a warehouse.

SPURGEON: Who was in the developed part?

RALPH: Brian Chippendale and Mat Brinkman. There were definitely a couple more people, but I can't remember because so many people came and went.

SPURGEON: How long were you physically in the place?

RALPH: I guess four years, from '96. I think I left in April of '99.

SPURGEON: Were you getting some work done?

RALPH: I went right to work on a new issue of Fireball. I wanted to keep the ball rolling after graduation. There wasn't any pressure to get a job because rent was pretty cheap and I was screenprinting things. My brother has a record label, so I was screenprinting stuff for him. I was making enough from printing a few things to pay for rent. I was maybe getting a couple little illustration jobs. But I really wanted to keep going with comics. The mood of the place was really busy. Everybody was always busy doing things; no one was ever really slacking off. You came there and you were inspired to keep going, so I did a whole new issue of Fireball. It's a terrible comic, one of the worst ones I ever did, but it was the first one I printed somewhat professionally.

SPURGEON: Which one was this?

RALPH: This was the one with angels and devils [issue #6]. That summer was the first time I went to San Diego. I knew I was going to [the convention], and I wanted to bring that to give to people. That was my first big comics thing. I kind of liked it. I thought it was amazing that all these artists were actually there, and everybody was really approachable. It was kind of cool. I was excited. I liked handing my comic to people. I had no expectations, so I just thought it was the craziest thing ever.

Scratching It Out

SPURGEON: By your first San Diego, people had begun to hear about you. Your publisher Tom Devlin says the first person that told him about you was Jessica Abel.

RALPH: Jessica was really big in the minicomics scene. Maybe there was a review in Factsheet Five, and she sent me one of the early photocopied Artbabes. We started sending stuff back and forth. She was doing a signing at Million Year Picnic with Joe Chiapetta. I was still in college then, and she asked Tom to see if I'd be interested in signing with them. Tom called me and I drove up there and did the signing. I got to meet Tom for the first time. I don't think I'd ever been in a comic-book store like that. I hadn't even seen who was out there. I had never seen a Dan Clowes comic. Charles Burns was probably the only person I knew anything about. I really liked his stuff because I think it was easy for a beginner to get into. My school had a copy of the Raw Big Baby book in the library, so I read that. I was really into scratchboard stuff, so my first books were like Eric Drooker's stuff and Charles' stuff.

SPURGEON: How did you fall into the scratchboard technique? That was a striking signature of your early material.

RALPH: I took a pen-and-ink and scratchboard class. I liked scratchboard because you had control over the line; if you messed up, you could take it all out and repaint it back in. You had three or four chances to get it right. I think I really took to it. People ask me now if my drawings are lino-cut or woodcut, which I really don't see but I guess there's something about it that's still like a woodcut. I still think back to scratchboard when I draw, and I draw now in a scratchy way.

SPURGEON: I guess the work could be done that way, even though I don't think it really looks like it was done like that.

RALPH: My first comics were all scratchboard. I don't think I did comics for that class, but I really figured out how to work in black and white in that class. I never figured out how to use pen and ink [laughter] but I did learn to understand black and white.

SPURGEON: Did you see any of the work Eric Drooker references, like Frans Masereel's?

RALPH: I started to research that. That class got me interested in woodcuts. I also found the Seth Tobocman stuff and World War III. Even though the class wasn't about that, it started to turn me on to what was out there in terms of strong black-and-white imagery. A lot of my early stuff in college was this World War III-looking stuff. I didn't have anything to rebel against [laughter], but I had this imagery.

SPURGEON: You didn't have anything to say, but you said it really loud.

RALPH: Exactly. [Laughter.] So I kind of ended up making goofy things. I made this McDonald's thing that people ask me about even today. It's a picture of Ronald McDonald running from this mob of people with their fists in the air, and flames -- this is when I started to do everything on fire, automobiles overturned and skaters were destroying everything. It's weird to look back on it, but people really liked it.

SPURGEON: There's a real disconnect between subject matter and presentation in your early work. You're using this look, which had been used to do socially responsible narratives, to draw devils and robots and monsters. Were you aware that you were getting an effect out of that incongruity?

RALPH: No, not really. [Laughter.] It was the type of work that I liked, but I didn't have anything to say. That first comic that you reviewed, with the wrestler and robot, I have no idea what I was thinking. I just came up with stuff, I started to write stories page by page. I wanted to do these comics, but I didn't think of myself as a writer or storyteller at all. I was like, "Robots!" "Wrestlers!" Whatever was easiest. [Spurgeon laughs.] I like those comics, but I don't know what to think of them now. I liked making these charged images, but there was nothing behind them.

Meandering

SPURGEON: One thing that links a lot of the Fort Thunder comics is the fascination with what comics can fundamentally accomplish: objects moving around in an environment. Stripping the ability to depict events down to its essentials.

RALPH: One of the things that inspired me about Brian Chippendale and Mat Brinkman is that there was their joy in making a figure walk around an environment. I really picked that up as a way to make comics. Just enjoying having this character and having that figure slowly meander around. That's where I really started with Cave~In, having this environment and having things happen slowly.

SPURGEON: How did the poster work and the silkscreening that you were doing affect your development as a cartoonist?

RALPH: As far as drawing, drawing things that I knew were going to be screenprinted made me think in a graphic way; not having a lot of feathery lines. Not having a lot of little lines. Being very bold. Making lines I knew I could print. All the lines are solid. And thinking about things in very basic coloring terms; one or two colors. I even think of that now even if it's just a black-and-white comic. I think of it in very simple terms. If it's a white figure on a black background, I still think to balance the composition with blocks of color or, in this case, whites or blacks.

I think that, coming from painting, I started to think a lot about composition. Getting into screenprinting, I was still thinking about composition, but in a more graphic way. The things I think about now when I'm drawing, I can see where they came from -- and one of them is screenprinting. I still think in those terms.

SPURGEON: Mat's rock posters are very clip-art heavy and seem more about balancing shape and making everything work around a single striking image. On the other hand, yours seem more of a type with the comics you do now.

RALPH: In the posters, I always felt like I should draw something. Just because the clip art is so easy to do -- and I'm not taking anything away from Mat, but pretty much anything you find looks cool in a poster. I didn't see anything Mat drew the first months I knew him. It wasn't until I lived with Mat that I saw his work. I always felt that since I was an illustrator, I should draw something. And I'm glad I did that, just to keep drawing, keep practicing.

[To read the rest of this interview, please see The Comics Journal #256.]

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