Early Years of Bitter Struggle

GARY GROTH: Are you prepared for the time of truth?

BRUNETTI: I guess so. [Groth laughs.] I put on women's clothing. I'm very comfortable now in my silk panties.

GROTH: I only wish I were doing it in person. [Brunetti laughs.] Well, I'm sure it's not the first time I've interviewed a cartoonist wearing women's clothes. How'd your day go yesterday?

BRUNETTI: Wizard World.

GROTH: Oh, Jesus.

BRUNETTI: Yeah, I went to visit a friend of mine, and then we went to Wizard World.

GROTH: I see. Well, describe that for me.

BRUNETTI: Wizard World?

GROTH: Yeah. Was it great?

BRUNETTI: To be honest, I only looked at a couple of booths, and then I found somebody that had some original artwork and then I traded some of my artwork for Seth's artwork. And then I left right away once I got that. I said, "There's nothing left for me here."

GROTH: Were you able to soak up any of the ambience?

BRUNETTI: I tried not to. I actually like San Diego, but I don't like Wizard World. Although, it's kind of the same problem, but at least San Diego's got everything, and Wizard World's just the bad stuff, for the most part, really concentrated.

GROTH: Yeah, I've never been to a Wizard World, but I can just imagine.

BRUNETTI: Well, I've been in the Chicago Comic Convention every year, I think, since 1988 or 1989. Every single year.

GROTH: Man. You're a better man than I am.

BRUNETTI: It's almost like a way to mark the time.

GROTH: Right, like doing the chicken scratchings on the wall of your cell.

BRUNETTI: I don't know why I go ever year.

GROTH: Well, if I may say so, there's a certain masochistic impulse I detect. All right, well. I want to get some background. You're apparently the least documented cartoonist of any cartoonist I've ever interviewed.

BRUNETTI: I try to lie to everyone who's ever interviewed me.

GROTH: Well, I've had very few interviews with you, so...

BRUNETTI: Yeah, I actually wasn't doing them anymore for a while.

GROTH: Well, let me start from the beginning. You were actually born in Mondavio, Italy, in '67, which I think you described somewhere as a shit hole.

BRUNETTI: Oh, I don't think it was that bad. It was just a really, really small town.

GROTH: When you moved to the United States, you were eight years old, so you must remember a bit of what Mondavio and Italy were like. Can you describe it?

BRUNETTI: Yeah. I lived in that town until I was six, maybe, and then I lived on a farm for a couple of years. I think when I was between the ages of six and eight I lived on a farm.

GROTH: Mondavio was a small town?

BRUNETTI: A very small town.

GROTH: Located where? What part of Italy?

BRUNETTI: And the farm is in a separate town. They're both in the central eastern portion of Italy.

GROTH: I see.

BRUNETTI: And there were no big cities anywhere near where I lived. It's a province with no really big cities, no big tourist places.

GROTH: Right. And I assume both of your parents were Italian.

BRUNETTI: Yes. As am I.

GROTH: What'd your parents do when you were growing up in Italy?

BRUNETTI: Well, there was a recession going on in Italy. My father was a carpenter and a house painter. And my mom was just, you know... cooked and cleaned at home. And then my father came here a year before I did -- so, in '75 -- and he tried to be a house painter here, too. I guess that didn't work out, so he ended up getting a job as a janitor at a hospital, and then after a few months, he got a job at a steel mill. We had an uncle who lived here and helped my dad get a job at the steel mill. And that's what he did for a while. And then he got injured there and he also had an operation that didn't go well, and sort of severed a nerve in one of his arms, and so he was on disability for a while. Now, both my parents work in a factory, actually.

GROTH: In Chicago?

BRUNETTI: Uh huh. So, very working class background. Blue collar.

GROTH: Can you describe what the first eight years of your life were like, growing up in Mondavio?

BRUNETTI: Um, it's kind of hard because I was so introverted and in my own world. A lot of it, I think, was just living in my own imagination, so it's really hard for me to remember a concrete thing. I know we lived in a bunch of different apartments, and one of them was on a second floor that was a very high second floor, and I remember -- well, I don't remember this, but I was told a few years ago -- that I fell down the stairs when I was a little kid. That might explain a few things.

GROTH: That explains a lot, yeah. Well, you must have gone to school in Italy, for at least a few years.

BRUNETTI: To the middle of third grade?

GROTH: So what was that experience like? And what was it like compared to what you found in Chicago?

BRUNETTI: Well, nobody ever liked me. That was clear from first grade onward.

GROTH: Even in Italy?

BRUNETTI: Even in Italy. And one of the problems was I knew how to read before I went to school -- I mean, I could read whatever at that point, and I remember having to pretend to be dumber than I was because I was embarrassed that I knew more than all the other kids.

GROTH: How did you learn to read before school?

BRUNETTI: Comics. Comic books. I was drawing a lot when I... I must have been drawing a lot when I was four years old, five years old. I didn't go to kindergarten because that was not mandatory in Italy at the time. I don't know what the situation is now, but I liked drawing cartoon characters so much, I wanted to read the comics, too. So, I just kept asking my parents how to do it and I just picked it up really fast.

GROTH: Would these be European comics?

BRUNETTI: Yeah. They were Disney comics and some western comics. I remember one, I guess Tex was probably the title. There was a comic called Diabolik. I don't know who does it, but it's kind of weird. He was like a super hero, but he's a criminal. He's a masked character. Any kind of comic I could get my hands on, I would read it, but it was mostly Disney stuff.

GROTH: I see. Translated Disney?

BRUNETTI: Translated Disney, not the classic stuff. It was stuff that was being produced in the 1970s. When I look at it now, it looks terrible.

GROTH: Not Barks.

BRUNETTI: Not Barks.

GROTH: Do they have the equivalent of newspaper strips over there?

BRUNETTI: Yeah, but I don't remember those being around so much.

GROTH: So you were introverted even then.

BRUNETTI: I was very introverted. I'm not sure why there were any comics around. They were probably just more prevalent. At some point I probably got ahold of some comics and probably bothered my mom to buy them for me at the corner store. The ones that were mostly available were Disney. Occasionally I think we had to make trips into the main part of the town. I remember begging to get some other comics, and I would have bought anything that was available.

GROTH: And you started doodling and drawing and cartooning as early as the age of four?

BRUNETTI: Yeah. I was doing it between the ages of... They're probably terrible drawings. In some ways, they're probably the best drawings I've ever done. Age five is probably the high point.

GROTH: I was going to say, I'm sure you were a prodigy.

BRUNETTI: I wouldn't say that, but there's a charm to them that was gone not too long after, I think when I tried to make things look like what I was copying, and some of the charm moved on. Even by age six or seven, they're not the same anymore, I can tell. I still have -- I had quite a few of them until recently.

GROTH: What did you do? Sell them?

BRUNETTI: Yeah. Well, I sent you one of those fragment boxes...

GROTH: Yeah.

BRUNETTI: I saved a few. I saved some of the earliest ones because I thought they had some kind of charm, but most of that stuff I drew I chopped into pieces and put in those boxes.

GROTH: Well, now, to what do you ascribe your introverted nature early on to?

BRUNETTI: I don't know.

GROTH: Are your parents particularly antisocial?

BRUNETTI: I mean, part of it is just the way innately you are, I think. But I had a domineering, tyrannical father, and I think that made me shyer than most kids.

GROTH: Right. Do you have any siblings?

BRUNETTI: I have a younger sister.

GROTH: Was she born there or here?

BRUNETTI: She was born there. She's two years younger than I am.

GROTH: I see. Your father wanted you to become a boxer.

BRUNETTI: When I was a kid, yeah. He wanted me to be a tough guy. I'm named Ivan after Ivan the Terrible. He wanted me to be like a great outdoorsman, boxer, fighter, intellectual, doctor, I don't know...

GROTH: Was your father like that?

BRUNETTI: No. I think that was his fantasy image of himself. He was a very bright man, but he grew up in rural poverty. There weren't any opportunities. I think there was a lot of pressure on me to achieve the dream that he wanted for himself and he was just very driven.

GROTH: I think you could argue you live up to the name.

BRUNETTI: [Laughs.] In my own quiet way.

GROTH: In your own fashion, yeah. So, you went to three years of school. What was that like? You have described your school days as being...

BRUNETTI: It got worse when I came to the United States, though.

GROTH: School over here is so terrible it would almost have to be worse than school in Italy, but you described your school years as being picked on and abused by kids.

BRUNETTI: Constantly. Constantly.

GROTH: Was that true even in...

BRUNETTI: It started in Italy, though, even before I left. I went to two different schools in Italy by third grade because we moved from that small town to the farm in the adjacent town. And I remember just before, a few months before I knew my family was going to leave to come to America, I gave one of my classmates a lot of my comic books that he wanted to borrow, and he never gave them back. But he was a lot bigger than I am and I remember him publicly humiliating me, telling the rest of my classmates that he basically got all my comics for free and he wasn't going to give them back, and all the girls laughed, too. So, that was a great way to leave my country. And then I came to America, and my father had been here for a year. I think the original plan was that he was going to work for three to five years and then come back to Italy. But, of course, he couldn't get along without my mother there taking care of him, so everyone had to pack up and come to America. He spent the year that I wasn't in the United States bragging about me. I don't know why. But he's very competitive, so... He lived with my uncle, his older brother, and he was kind of tyrannical with his own children, but he and my father have always had this same competition, so when I got to the United States, my cousins already hated me because of whatever they heard about me from my father, which is probably totally false. So everyone already disliked me right off the bat, and things just got worse from there. So it wasn't good at home. We lived above my uncle. He had a two flat apartment building. And then right away at school... It was never explained to me at that point why we were moving exactly. I didn't know why this was all happening. All of a sudden we're being transported to a whole new place. We're going from a farm to the south side of Chicago, which is at that point mostly steel mills and other factories. I'd never seen houses packed together that closely before. When we came to the United States, it was January of 1976. It was probably the worst blizzard Chicago ever had, and I'd never seen... I think I'd seen snow once. It was maybe a half and inch and it melted right away. So all of a sudden were on another planet. I remember when I was a kid, because of that blizzard, there were people shoveling their walks and all the snow would be on the side. And to me, it looked like mountains. I'd be walking through snow and filthy slush and ice. I'd never seen that stuff. I'd never seen houses packed together. I kind of freaked out. Everybody's speaking a different language. And then the Italian people we were around were from a different part of Italy and their dialect was so thick as to be almost unintelligible to me at that age. I couldn't really understand what they were saying. It's almost like a different language. I think I learned English very fast just to be able to communicate with somebody. But my father had been here a year and he had learned to speak English well enough that he wanted my sister and I to learn, so we only spoke English in the house. And to this day I really don't speak Italian to my family because of that. I've forgotten a lot.

GROTH: But you were fluent.

BRUNETTI: I was. It's strange. I learned to think in one language, and by age nine or ten I'm thinking in a different language, and that shift just happened without me noticing.

GROTH: Did that affect the way you think?

BRUNETTI: The way all that stuff affected me was I just, sometimes I have identity issues or something. I just don't even know what I am. I don't think I would fit in in Italy anymore. I don't really think of myself as... A lot of things about me are probably typically Italian, but I don't feel particularly Italian. I don't feel connected to that. I don't feel like I fit in here, sometimes, in America.

GROTH: But you don't feel like you have any Italian roots, per se.

BRUNETTI: No. I mean, there's other issues I think... When my father left... He never got alone with his own family, and I think he had some other problems -- debt problems. And when he left, things were not on good terms. So, we never went back. I've gone back once, to Italy. My father's never gone back. My mom's maybe gone back twice because of family debts. I'm very disconnected from that. And even the surrogate family we had here in America, which is my uncle -- his wife, she had a lot of siblings. I don't talk to any of those people either because our families had a falling out when I was much younger. I feel like I have no roots anywhere. I'm just in Chicago. I think one of the reasons I've never left is... I tried to sort of establish some kind of roots for myself. I'm almost afraid to leave.

GROTH: Well, you've been there almost 30 years now.

BRUNETTI: Yeah. I never left. I went to school in Chicago. I've just always been here, and I'm kind of afraid to leave. And I wonder sometimes... I think I would like to have roots somewhere, and I feel everything's really tenuous. Sometimes my brain does switch back and forth from Italian to English. It's just really strange. What am I? I don't know.

GROTH: Well, if you don't have roots there now, I'm not sure you ever will.

BRUNETTI: Nah. I don't feel I have roots. I mean, I have roots de facto, or by default: Well, I guess I'm here. I notice a tendency with me. I'll just adapt to wherever I am and get used to that and then not want anything to change. But a lot of the change in my life was imposed upon me, or external circumstances change, but not because of my doing.

GROTH: Well, that attitude seems very American in the sense that I think very few people in America seem rooted to a place. Everyone's from a different place. Everywhere you go, everyone's from somewhere else.

BRUNETTI: That's very true. But sometimes I meet people, American people, where it's not like that at all, and they do feel a sense of being connected to where they're from. I kind of envy that. I kind of wish I had that. I guess I'm a Chicagoan, but I could see myself just leaving at some point and getting used to wherever I am. I don't have a good reason to leave I suppose.

GROTH: I guess I always thought it was silly to have some sort of proprietary interest in a place simply because you happen to live there.

BRUNETTI: Yeah, but someplace like Italy -- I mean, every town has a history of a couple thousand years and all these traditions. And the food. Everything you do is so tied to the past, and the way you get shaped by that stuff. It's not something you experience here.

GROTH: Yeah. It's not something you get here, no matter what city you live in. You think?

BRUNETTI: I would agree with that.

GROTH: Well, now. So, what was your school life like when you got to the States? You moved into what grade? Fourth? Third or fourth?

BRUNETTI: That was the middle of third grade?

GROTH: And so can you kind of contrast what you left and what you arrived at, and the difference in your perceptions of the schools, if there were any? Was it just as oppressive?

BRUNETTI: It's hard to compare them because I went to school much longer here than in Italy, so I don't know what my high school life would have been like there, living in a small town versus living in Chicago. Although where I lived in Chicago it's very cut off from the city. I lived in a sort of southeast corner of the city where you could walk to Indiana. It was almost like living in Indiana more than Chicago. It was an industrial area that was very cut off from the rest of the city. I just remember crying for a few days, because all of a sudden I couldn't understand anybody anymore. Didn't understand what was going on. It was a much bigger school. I was in a small school in a small town, and now all of a sudden I'm in a city school with a lot of people, and it just seemed like chaos.

GROTH: Well, how did you cope with not speaking the language immediately?

BRUNETTI: I just learned really fast.

GROTH: [Laughs.] Well, it's a good thing you were young. So, you described your school years... You said, "My parents didn't accept me. The teachers distrusted me. The other kids beat me up. I got yelled at a lot." That true at American schools?

BRUNETTI: Yeah, that's probably mostly true of here because most of my life has been here. I don't remember as much from grades one through three in Italy. I don't remember as much -- just isolated things.

GROTH: But that problem exacerbated here.

BRUNETTI: Yeah. It's strange. It almost doesn't matter where I am; I'm always in my own head and in my own world. I think I was always like that. Lost in whatever, on a cloud.

GROTH: Why were you beaten up and why were you abused and beaten up by other kids?

BRUNETTI: I don't know. Because I'm a homo? I don't know. There were a lot of bully kids and I probably just seemed like a sissy to them, and they got to beat up all the sissies. It was very Darwinian, you know? And I was very small and scrawny as a child. I was very skinny and it took me a long time to fill out or whatever. Maybe when I was 20, my body changed a lot. But up until then, I was always skinny and no shoulders. Very scrawny kid. I was never athletic. I tried to play sports when I was a kid. I'm very glad I know how to throw like a boy now. I tried to play every sport, but I was terrible so I gave up by a certain age. I wasn't athletic. I wasn't popular in any way. I don't know. I just kind of spent most of my time reading, I think. Just hiding from people.

GROTH: You're a stereotypical cartoonist.

BRUNETTI: Yeah, I'm just not much different from anyone else doing this.

GROTH: Now, during this time, did you continue to draw? Were you constantly drawing?

BRUNETTI: You know, I was. I never had much approval or encouragement from anybody. But I kept at it. I was just obsessed with it, so I'd do it all the time. And I think it got on my father's nerves that I was so obsessive with this thing that kept me indoors, and...

GROTH: And away from the boxing ring.

BRUNETTI: Yeah. He also wanted me to be interested in things like fishing and hunting, and even as a kid I hated all that stuff. I never liked shooting guns. I still don't. I know you like to do that. All that stuff just kind of frightens me, frankly.

GROTH: Yeah.

BRUNETTI: And I don't want to shoot a defenseless animal. Things like that never interested me. I lost my train of thought. The question was?

GROTH: I was trying to explore a little bit about whether this was a way of sort of retreating into your own world, fabricating your world by drawing...

BRUNETTI: I think the only happiness I had was to draw these happy little cartoon characters. It's kind of funny now. I'd just go to the library and take out the same books over and over again, because they had a few books at the time about Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck and stuff like that -- and Peanuts, too. I'd just get obsessed with drawing these characters.

GROTH: Well, when you got over here, what kind of comics were you looking at?

BRUNETTI: I think I was still trying to search out the Disney comics because they were familiar. Then I started reading Spider-Man superhero comics. And then a little bit later, I got really obsessed with Peanuts, too, but I was obsessed with Spider-Man before that. And, the strange things is -- another thing I want to mention -- is I had to give up my comic collection, which wasn't very big, when we left to come to the United States. I had to leave all that behind. That wasn't really explained to me either. But, like, "No. You can't take that stuff with you." And then I sort of built up another collection, after about three years, I had quite a few American comics I was able to scrounge together, and even at that age -- I was maybe ten or eleven -- I started to get interested in Kirby and Ditko. For some reason, I was aware that they were specific artists, whereas, like John Buscema, that kind of stuff, just seemed like a machine made that artwork. And the first time I saw Ditko's Spider-Man, it looked really clunky and weird and I thought it was bad. I was ten years old, or something. It looked wrong, but it had this strange power over me. I was fascinated by it because I think I started to realize it wasn't made by a machine, like a person drew this because you could see the clunkiness to it.

GROTH: Yeah. It didn't have the generic...

BRUNETTI: Kirby's stuff too. And it was probably the worst Kirby material of his career, at that point. But I started to realize, "Oh, that was an actual guy that drew this." He had a style that was different from -- that would be late '70s at this point -- that kind of Marvel style.

GROTH: Yeah. Watered down, generic style.

BRUNETTI: Yeah, they had something where they were actual artists... I can't even put it into words, but I was gripped by what they were doing, although at first it looked completely wrong and bad. But I just kept coming back to it. And then I did a little more research, and I wanted to collect their stuff. And then I had to get rid of my comic collection. I think anything I was ever interested in, my father just felt that he had to take it away. If I got happy with anything, he would just arbitrarily make me get rid of it. I remember being forced to get rid of my comics at about age eleven. I'd built up a little bit of a collection.

GROTH: Another trauma.

BRUNETTI: Another trauma.

GROTH: Now let me just ask you a question. You said you were collecting, or looking at Ditko's Spider-Man. Did you look at Kirby material from the same period, which would have been the '60s?

BRUNETTI: No, this would be stuff I could have found at the local drug store, so whatever reprints... Sometimes at the library they'd have history of comics. I'd look at that kind of thing. I was pretty fascinated by it all, and I tried to read up as much as I could. I started to get interested in the history of it all, and just wanted to copy the way these people drew. I think that was my main thing. I just wanted to mimic them. I started to draw my own stories to amuse a couple of my classmates who were nerds, just like I was. The other kids who were being beat up every day. So, I made a few comics to amuse them. But they were kind of rooted in this super hero parody kind of thing. I'm kind of ashamed to admit now what the name of my comic was that I drew in the sixth grade. It was The Fag Force. It was about the one kid...

GROTH: Say that again!

BRUNETTI: There were two kids wussier than I was, and they were the Fag Force, and then they had all these people from television and comic books. It was a strange pop culture mix. I'm really embarrassed now, but that was the comic I drew.

GROTH: The Fag Force was about two gay guys?

BRUNETTI: No, they weren't gay. It was in the sixth grade mentality. You just think that word means retarded or something. Didn't really know what that actually meant, but they were the two kids that were even bigger sissies than I was, so I had to make fun of them to establish myself as not-the-wussiest kid in the school. I remember what I was trying to draw. It would include characters from television, like J. J. Walker or Archie Bunker, just weird things I would pick up from TV or other comics. Some kind of Batman parody character. I just kind of threw them all in. I don't remember what kind of stories they were, but they were probably terrible. I don't know if I want this to be printed. I'm going to seem like a horrible homophobe. It was just sort of the way you use words like that when you're a kid. You don't even know what they mean. I didn't actually learn what that meant till I was 28.

GROTH: You didn't learn what the word fag meant?

BRUNETTI: I was just kidding.

GROTH: OK.

BRUNETTI: No, I'm pretty embarrassed about all that now. My point there was that I was trying, at some point, to create my own narratives, as stupid as they were.

GROTH: You drew these in sixth grade, you said?

BRUNETTI: Yeah. I remember in sixth and seventh grade I began to draw these comics.

GROTH: Did you Xerox them and try to sell them?

BRUNETTI: No. They were just originals that were passed around amongst a couple of people, and then they were confiscated pretty quickly.

GROTH: I see! Now, were you raised Catholic?

BRUNETTI: Oh, yes.

GROTH: Did you go to a Catholic school?

BRUNETTI: No, I went to a public school. My parents were against spending money on things like that, so... I'm kind of glad I didn't go to a Catholic school.

GROTH: You should be. You would have been traumatized several times over.

BRUNETTI: Probably. I went to a public school in Chicago, but I did have to go to Sunday school and Catechism, and I got all that stuff: my communion and my confirmation, etc. Went through all that. I was really kind of into that at a certain age. I remember wanting to be a Franciscan priest when I was probably in the eight grade. I thought would be something I'd want to do when I was older. I don't know why. Yeah, I kind of got a little bit obsessed with all that stuff. I think when I was 12 and 13.

GROTH: How rigid and dogmatic were your parents about Catholicism?

BRUNETTI: Well, it's kind of hard to explain. Being Italian, you're just automatically Catholic, so you don't really question it. They weren't really dogmatic about that stuff, They were very strict about everything, but I don't know how seriously they took that stuff. It was just a way to discipline. We didn't talk about actual dogma or anything like that. It's just what you believe. It's almost like, you know, you eat pasta every day. You go to church on Sunday. It's just part of the culture.

GROTH: Right, right. So it didn't have a really rich spiritual dimension to it.

BRUNETTI: Not at all. I think I was looking for that at a certain point.

GROTH: And you didn't find it.

BRUNETTI: No. I didn't.

[To read the rest of this interview, please see The Comics Journal #264.]

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