The Comic Book and Covers: A Novel

SAMMY HARKHAM: I'm leery of anyone who has "A Novel" written on the cover of their comic. I'm nervous about that. A lot of people do it. Do you ever pick up a prose book and it says, "A Novel"? Just do the work and let everyone else try to figure out what the fuck it is. It bums me out, the way people are always talking about how the audience doesn't exist and there's no money in this. How many painters are there who make a living as a painter? How many writers are there who make a living from writing? It's bullshit. It's like cartoonists use movies as their gauge, like they expect there to be a Premiere magazine for comics. Don DeLillo is a huge writer, but how many people know what he looks like? Does that guy get mobbed in the street? It's so weird. People are funny. They think, "If only I could get the distribution, if I could get to the people, I'll sell a lot of copies." They blame distribution, but the truth of the matter is most cartoonists -- not all, but most -- have the audience that they deserve. They only deserve 2,000 readers, and that goes for me as well. Their work wouldn't really appeal to that huge mass audience. And all the work that is really great, that can be appreciated by a couple hundred thousand people? It seems like those people have found their audiences, and distribution isn't such a problem -- people like Dan Clowes and Chris Ware and Art Spiegelman. I hope the same happens with Charles Burns and Black Hole. It probably will. Everyone blames the infrastructure, but the truth of the matter is that we don't have the work. I'm weary of people who are so concerned with tapping into the literary world or the book market, designing their books in that way. I guess that's why I like the Fort Thunder boys: Even now, they're still not interested. Fort Thunder introduced an idea of just doing the work and reveling in your comic book-ness.

MILO GEORGE: You made a point of naming your company Avodah Comic Books, not Avodah Books.

HARKHAM: Yeah, on the inside of that comic, I wanted it to say "comic book." That's what bums me out when people bitch about Kramers four being like an art book or that it's trying to appeal to the art world. Fuck you; that's not it at all. I'm trying to give it some energy, and hopefully it has that energy of picking up comics when you were a kid.

GEORGE: Is that why the collages are included?

HARKHAM: I still, even now, can't figure out why they're in there. It still feels like the right thing to put them in there. How far can you take something where it's not even comics anymore? Just get rid of narrative. It's all the language of comics, all those collage things. They resonate in some way for me.

GEORGE: Quite a few of the artists did a cover, which are included in the back of the book, but Mat Brinkman's actual cover doesn't have any text at all. Was that an intentional thing? Did you solicit covers from all the artists?

HARKHAM: Yeah, I did. Well, not all: There's like five or six. I thought it would be cool, because I like ephemera. I like sketchbook sections, letters pages, scraps, drawings and all that stuff. Why not?

GEORGE: It also enriches the book, where it's not just one comic and the next comic --

HARKHAM: Right. The cover defines the aesthetic of something, but if you have all these different covers, it's like you're saying, "OK, Kramers feels like this," and you have Anders draw a cover. And then you turn the page and it's, "No, it feels like this," and it's a Ben Jones cover. Which I think works for an anthology, because there is no clear, clear aesthetic. And I liked it. The problem with the covers was that everyone thought they were rejected covers, which they certainly weren't. I love all those covers.

GEORGE: What was your process for assembling Kramers volume four?

HARKHAM: Volume three was the first time I asked cartoonists I didn't know to contribute and I was surprised that they all contributed. I thought everyone turned in really good work, except myself. And I just realized, if I'm going to do this, there's got to be a reason to do it. There's got to be a point to it. You just don't want to release another book into the sea of bullshit that's in the world. You want something to be something special. I think that's how everyone should approach their work: They're going to make something as good as they possibly can. With this, I decided I was going to ask cartoonists that I liked and I thought were exciting in some way, not necessarily new or young cartoonists, just cartoonists I wanted people to see. I wanted to ask people who, for the most part, don't have that venue. There's no point in doing an anthology if everyone already has their solo book that is being released by someone, or everyone already knows who they are. You might sell more copies that way, but what's the point? There's gotta be a reason. I think what made RAW so exciting was that those people didn't have a venue to get their work out there, and so when you picked up an issue, you knew you weren't going to see this work anywhere else. And so with Kramers it was like, Ben Jones is a fucking genius, he's so funny and smart and his work is so incredible, and I wanted more people to see it. And the same with just about everyone in that book. That was kind of the goal, and everyone said yes to contributing, which I was really surprised by. I think that was because of color. Even if they looked at previous issues and thought they were pretty shitty or something...

GEORGE: No one turns down a chance to work in color.

HARKHAM: Color! And they were so balls-to-the-wall, I thought, "Fuck it, we'll make this thing 500 pages if we have to." There was a lot of editing, but page count never came into consideration until I had to think about it, at the very end, once I had made the book that I wanted to do. It was then a matter of, "How can I make this happen?"

GEORGE: How much material was cut?

HARKHAM: There's probably about 100 pages of stuff. I'm an asshole because I asked people to do work for me, and it didn't work out. Most of the stuff was good; it just didn't fit stylistically or aesthetically. It was just a matter of "Does this add something to the whole or does it take away?" What was cut was great but it didn't need to appear in Kramers. They're great stories; they'll exist regardless of where they're published. But I still felt bad, because you ask someone to do a story for you with the intention of publishing it, and then you don't, and you can't even pay them for their trouble. But Kramers is obviously not the end-all. There are a lot of good anthologies; if a story's great, it'll get out there.

I'm attracted to certain kinds of stories. I want something that feels very genuine, something that feels right. I'm nervous about any comic that has a statement. I don't like political comics for the most part. I guess the one thing I do want with Kramers is that everything is sincere and honest and genuine and not so self-conscious. I know it's very abstract; I'm not really putting it into concrete things, but it's not something you can put your finger on, like why a story feels right and why it feels genuine and why one doesn't.

GEORGE: Is that aesthetic and point of view carrying on into the next volume?

HARKHAM: It's clearer, I think. It'll have fewer cartoonists, like 17 cartoonists in this one, and they're not all young guys. Some are well known, but the main thing was to show people work that you think is worth showing, that's exciting in some way.

I see these weird trends in comics and they bother me. I don't know how obvious it is if you're just a reader -- but if you talk to cartoonists, you find everyone's so obsessed about tapping into that literary world or the bookstore market and all this stuff. I'm interested in cartoonists who just work, who just do the work they do, regardless of whether it's going to be in five copies of a mini or on the cover of the New Yorker. I just want stuff that's from the heart in a weird way. That doesn't mean that everything's neo-sincere, just that it comes from inside in some kind of way. I don't know. It's a very hard thing to put the finger on.

GEORGE: So do you think that the publishers' -- well, I guess it's spread to the cartoonists as well -- their mania to get material that's bookstore-friendly into bookstores has had or will have a negative effect?

HARKHAM: It's funny: You walk into a bookstore with a big comic selection and they have all the Top Shelf and all the Drawn and Quarterly and all the Fantagraphics and whatever else -- and the truth of the matter is there isn't much there, of actual great comics that would appeal to a general fiction reader. From what I've heard, and I could be wrong, but Ghost World and Acme have sold over 100,000 copies each. I bought an issue of Acme at Virgin Megastore and the girl behind the counter, when I was buying it, said that she doesn't read comics but Jimmy Corrigan broke her heart. It was like the most beautiful thing she'd ever read. She's talking to a stranger, saying how this thing made her cry. She was so into it. And it's like 100,000 people have read these great comics. They go back to the bookstore to find something else to read, and there's really nothing like that. I don't care what anybody says. There isn't much. Unless you can appreciate stuff like Krazy Kat or Thimble Theater, but as far as what people are doing now in finished long-form stories, I have a hard time coming up with five brilliant, incredible books besides the work of our great cartoonists. There are those standards: Chester Brown, Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, Kim Deitch.

GEORGE: The problem that comics faced in the '80s is still fundamentally the same.

HARKHAM: As a cartoonist, you want there to be a library of great, fantastic comics and what we have is a lot of interesting work that doesn't appeal to a general audience. Like EC Comics: I love reading them, but I don't expect to give an EC book to someone who doesn't read comics and expect them to enjoy it as much as The Thin Red Line. They're not. It's hokey. How much stuff really stands up to intense scrutiny? Certainly not my work. I'm not saying I'm making an improvement on this, but when I think about those things, I can't work. I'm doing a comic where a guy cuts wood and gets on a boat and it's not meant for anybody. Don't review it; don't talk about it. If someone picks it up and reads it and they enjoy it? Awesome. But I definitely don't think my work stands up to that type of scrutiny, but I don't want it to. I don't care what anybody thinks. What can you do? You can't think about that stuff and why you do the strips that you do. The thing I'm working on now, I'm sure a lot of people would look at it as a step backwards. It's embracing action as an end unto itself. With Die Hard, the point of the movie is Bruce Willis jumping off a building and shooting someone in the face, not his relationship with his wife. I'm drawing a comic where it's five pages of a guy falling down a mountain, and that's the point. But I want to do it. I can't think about what's better to do or what I should be doing...

GEORGE: You're following the muse.

HARKHAM: Yeah, because who cares otherwise? And I don't expect most people to love it. If I try to approach a strip wanting it to be great, nothing's going to happen. I'm going to choke. I just don't have it in me. I'm not one of those great cartoonists. Simple stories, you know? And if they amount to anything more than that, that's awesome.

GEORGE: Do you have any interest in working for publishers like Marvel or DC, or --

HARKHAM: No. [Laughter.] Just because I'm doing genre stuff doesn't mean it necessarily has to be stupid. I don't know. Obviously, doing Daredevil or Batman would be fun, but at the same time, it seems like such a waste of time. I find that, for me, I get a lot of stuff out of my system after I work on it. And who knows, after the thing I'm working on now, I may be done with adventure. Then I'll do boring comics with girls staring at sunsets for 500 pages. Or not. You want to do all kinds of stuff. I realize what attracted me to comics when I was a kid was that they were fun and adventurous. And I want to do something that moves, that just runs, just fucking runs!

GEORGE: You don't necessarily want to wallow in nostalgia but instead you want to create something that feels the same.

HARKHAM: It's definitely not nostalgia. I want to do a comic with proper structure, where stuff happens and, hopefully, there's emotional stuff there that people can tap into and feel something. But a large part of why I'm doing this is that I just want to do a comic that moves. It's not an artistic statement. Hopefully, I'll be doing this for the rest of my life. It's one strip. Hopefully, by the time I'm dead, I'll have done hundreds and thousands of strips. And I did one adventure comic? Someone gets stabbed or something? Why not?

[To read the rest of this interview, please see The Comics Journal #259.]

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