The Littlest Freelancer

DEPPEY: My understanding is that you attempted to sell your first Oz story when you were, what? 12?

SHANOWER: Well, there's this organization called The International Wizard of Oz Club. They publish a fiction magazine every year, and they send out a call for stories: Anyone wanting to contribute, send your stories in. So, when I was 11 -- it was my last week of sixth grade -- I sat down one morning and wrote this Oz story to send in.

DEPPEY: How did you discover these people?

SHANOWER: About 1972, this book called The Annotated Wizard of Oz came out, so there were a lot of articles in the media about The Wizard of Oz at the time. Anyway, Martin Williams wrote an article in the newspaper, and my mother cut it out. He mentioned The Oz Club in it, and so I sent away for a membership, and I started getting their magazine, The Baum Bugle, and I've been a member ever since 1973. So, anyway, I sent this story in -- this is several years later -- I sent this story in that I had written, this Oz story, and the editor, Jay Delkin, wrote back eventually and said, "Oh, I like your story, but it needs some work. How would you feel if I worked on it and we shared credit?" So, I was just thrilled, you know, being 11 years old. I said, "Fine! Do it!" And he did, and I got copies of the magazine. My story was in it, but... the basic premise was, I guess, sort of the same... [Laughs.]

DEPPEY: He just completely reworked it, top to bottom.

SHANOWER: Yeah. I had used one of the established Oz characters, a little boy named Ojo, as the protagonist, and he had invented an Oz version of Sherlock Holmes, and brought in this new character called The Great Detective as the protagonist of the story, and just totally changed everything around. They didn't use my illustrations, either; someone else illustrated it, which was fine, in retrospect. Mine weren't very good. But, I was still thrilled! [Laughs.] I thought it was great! My name in a magazine, and it wasn't exactly my story, but it started out as my story.

DEPPEY: You could see your story underneath all the piles of other stuff.

SHANOWER: Yeah, sort of, but I didn't care. I thought, "Oh, great! Here's my first credit!" It wasn't professional: They didn't pay anything. I got three copies and that was it. But, whatever -- I was happy.

DEPPEY: Now, according to the checklist of your works on your website, you also did a fair amount of stuff in high school?

SHANOWER: Well, the first comic strip I did was for The Guantanamo Gazette, a Naval newspaper. My family and I were living in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which is a U.S. Naval base. I guess everybody knows what it is now, but before -- a few years ago -- nobody knew. People weren't that familiar with it. This was in the late '70s, and, this officer named Jerry Ryan -- he ran the newspaper, and I think he was in charge of the radio station and television station. It was AFRTS, American Forces Radio and Television Service, because we were on a Naval base in Cuba. I mean, we couldn't go anywhere. I forget how big the base is, but it's small, and so we were on the Armed Forces network. The only other TV or radio we could get was Cuban TV or radio. His wife was a dance teacher, and I was taking tap lessons, so I took tap from her for a couple of years while we were there. My family was sort of friendly with their family. It was a small base. Everybody knew everybody, and he knew I could draw, and so he came over one night and he goes, "How would you like to draw a comic strip for the paper?" And I said, "Great! Sure!" It wasn't a daily strip. It was in the form of a daily strip, but it only appeared every once in a while when they had room to put in something extra.

DEPPEY: Would this be a short gag strip, or...?

SHANOWER: Yeah. It was a gag strip about a dog named Pudge. I mean, I really wanted to do an adventure-continuity strip, but that was just not practical. Looking back at it, the strip was really bad, but it was experience at the time, and I'm grateful to Jerry Ryan for having the idea and asking me to do it. It was very encouraging. Later, when we moved back to the states, I had a subscription to Cartoonist PROfiles, and there was a syndicate that was just starting up that was asking for submissions, so I reworked the strip and sent it to them, but they weren't interested.

DEPPEY: How intense was your interest in fine illustrative art? You've got one of those drawing styles that clearly took several decades to refine, which would suggest that you were interested in it early. And your art style really harkens back to people like, you know, John Neill and Charles Dana Gibson, and people like that.

SHANOWER: Well, I loved books. I read a lot, and a lot of the kids' books I read were illustrated books. I read all the classic stuff.

DEPPEY: So, it was really children's art.

SHANOWER: Yeah. I mean, John R. Neill, at the turn of the century, he was a newspaper artist, and he was also roommates with Joseph Clement Coll for a while. And when they were roommates -- those were the years, like '05, '06, when Neill really started blossoming. When I first saw Charles Dana Gibson artwork, I thought, "Oh my goodness! Someone's ripping off John R. Neill!" Even though it was obviously the other way around. The Oz books for him -- I mean, a couple of them he did really nice work in, but the Oz book series, he did 35 books and the last 20, he was just hacking them out. I've seen a letter from him to one of his daughters, I think, saying, "Oh, yeah, I finished 30 illustrations for the latest Oz book this morning." It was from the mid-'20s, and I don't know which book it is -- he doesn't say in the letter -- but it shows in his books from that period. So, it's my idea that John R. Neill was far more interested in magazine and newspaper illustration, and if you look at the magazine work he did, it's so beautiful. It's beautiful all the way through his career. And he was working for the top magazines: Saturday Evening Post and magazines like that. And so, I suspect that he assumed his fame or longevity would rest with magazine illustration. But no one remembers that stuff. He's only known for the Oz books now. I think he'd be really surprised.

DEPPEY: Am I correct in assuming that you actually came back and looked at most of this stuff later in life?

SHANOWER: Yeah, I didn't have access to it as a child. I mean, I was a member of the Oz club since I was 10. People would research every single aspect of Oz and it's endless, endless, endless. People had done a lot of research into John R. Neill's life and works and there's checklists of everything he's done. And I've met his daughters and some grandchildren. I edited and illustrated his final manuscript because he died before it was published. So, I've been involved in many aspects of John R. Neill's work, and many aspects of my own work are interlocked.

You know, one of my recent enthusiasms, talking about children's book illustration was the Raggedy Ann books, written and illustrated by Johnny Gruelle. I don't know if you're familiar with them. He was such a great illustrator, and just a couple of years ago, I started buying all this Johnny Gruelle stuff on eBay, and went through this Raggedy Ann phase. I mean, the books are basically unreadable. Everyone just sits around having parties, stuffing their faces with ice cream and cookies. And then Raggedy Andy goes off and punches someone out. Then, "Oh, I'm so sorry we had to punch you out. Let's all eat cookies." And then they sit down and eat ice cream and cookies for pages, and then they get into some other adventure where Raggedy Andy has to get them out of it by punching people. Very weird. But the artwork is spectacular. They're doing a Johnny Gruelle exhibit at the Comics Art Museum in San Francisco right now.

The Kubert School

DEPPEY: After high school, you attended the Joe Kubert School. How did you learn about the Kubert School?

SHANOWER: That was through Cartoonist PROfiles, too, because they used to advertise in there, the Kubert School. And about 11th grade, my mother said to me, "Well, it's time to start looking! What are you going to do after high school? You have to start looking at colleges." So, I looked at all these places -- places that offered art programs and things, but I kept coming back to, "I want to go to the Kubert School."

DEPPEY: So, you attended the Kubert School in the early-to-mid '80s?

SHANOWER: Yeah, I started in '81 and I graduated in '84.

DEPPEY: My understanding is that the school is very focused on teaching you the practical things you will need for working in a career in cartooning. It's not so much one of those, "We'll teach you art in an abstract sense and let you find your inner muse," or whatever. They were there to teach you to draw newspaper strips and...

SHANOWER: Yes. They give you the skills you're going to need to draw comics. Or, supposedly give you the skills for a career in advertising or animation. Obviously, they're far more geared toward comics. And certainly when I was there, the animation program was just starting -- there was only one guy, Milt Neil, who had worked for Disney in the '30s. He was a really nice guy, but the animation program wasn't really anything to speak of. I mean, he obviously knew what he was doing, but I think it was too much for him to handle alone, teaching everybody, preparing them in three years to go out and get careers as animators. And he's used to working old-style. I mean, computers weren't anything then.

The advertising career aspects of school were a little better. Actually, I got a paste-up job on a real-estate magazine the two summers between my years at the Kubert School, and I used all my skills I had learned at the Kubert School for making stats, cutting type, all stuff that no one uses anymore. Although, you know, I did a hand separation for a cover of Oz-story magazine in 1995, and we sent it in to the printer and they didn't have any idea what it was.

DEPPEY: So, the campus for the Kubert School...

SHANOWER: It was in Dover, New Jersey. When I was going there, it was in an old mansion. It was a beautiful, beautiful three-story mansion, with a basement, on an estate. They had a carriage house. The carriage house was turned into dorms.

DEPPEY: You lived there for three years?

SHANOWER: I didn't live in the carriage house. They owned another house about a couple miles away in Dover. The bottom floor was students, and the second and third floor were just these old men who lived there, rented rooms. I lived there for my first year. Second year I lived in another house, just a bunch of students -- there were about 11 of us, including Jim Balent and Bart Sears. And then third year I shared an apartment with Anna-Maria Coleman, who's now Anna-Maria Cool. She's done a bunch of stuff for Barbie for Marvel in the '90s. I don't know if she's really doing any comics now, she was working for Hallmark and illustrating kids books. I guess lately she's done some stuff for Claypool.

DEPPEY: What was the atmosphere among the students like? I mean, was there a shared -- I don't know -- aesthetic toward comics? Were you all just...

SHANOWER: No. I mean, there was -- I forget how many students there were. There were three years of people. Maybe there were 200 people total. I can't even remember how many. Everyone had their own opinions about what was good, what they liked, what they were intending, what they were going to school for. There were people who just wanted to draw funny stuff. There were people who wanted to draw superhero stuff. Everybody had their own interests, people fell into their cliques. I'm afraid that people who were perceived as being able to draw better were not always as nice as they could have been to people who were perceived as not being able to draw so well. I was generally in the group that was perceived as being able to draw better, and I'm not really happy with some of the things I said or did while I was in school. But, I was 17 when I went there and 20 when I got out. And it was the first time I'd been away from home, and my ideas of what college life was supposed to be like were basically garnered from the movie Class of '44, the sequel to Summer of '42, where it was just like hazing, so I thought that behavior was okay. [Laughs.]

DEPPEY: When you say "perceived as drawing better," would that have been in a traditional classic illustration sense? For example, if someone could draw like Walt Kelly...

SHANOWER: Well, if you could draw like Walt Kelly, it would have been fine... but, yeah, more in the classic illustration sense. If you could draw a really nice figure, you were at the head of the pecking order. Although the two people who were perceived as being able to draw the best in the year I was in -- one guy was from Norway; his name is Bjorn Ousland -- he did very little in U.S. comics, he went back to Norway soon after he graduated and he's doing Norwegian comics. I've seen a few things, but I don't know what he's been doing lately. He had this really loopy, funny style. His idol was Möebius. He didn't actually draw figures -- classically well-proportioned figures -- that well. I mean he could get away with it fine, but it was just his line was so expressive and his imagination was so wild, that everyone just loved his work. The other guy who could draw really well, basically he was the second coming of Wally Wood. He did maybe one or two comics and then went into advertising. The last I saw -- I saw his website a couple of years ago, and he was doing caricatures for functions.

DEPPEY: And who was this?

SHANOWER: His name was Fred Fassberger.

For the first year, the school was really wonderful for me. It's like this whole world had opened. I mean, I hated public school. I was just waiting to get out. I just couldn't stand it. And the idea of going to a regular college, where you had to write papers and take classes you weren't interested in, just made me feel exhausted. So, going to the Kubert School, where it's just art stuff all day long, was really good. The first two years I was there, I just loved it. Especially the second year, where the social aspect actually became a much larger part of what was going on. I mean, we'd get drunk every weekend. Have parties every weekend and get drunk, and then have to drag in on Monday morning. Because school was five days a week, morning till afternoon, like regular public school, the hours were. But third year, I don't know, something happened. Joe had bought the old Dover middle school, because the school was getting too big for the mansion, and he had split the hours so that the second and third year students went -- we had to get up really early in the morning, had to be in by 7:00, and school went to about 2:00. And the first year students came in at like 2:30 and went until about 7:00 at night. Of course, a lot of the teachers had to do both shifts, and that must have been horrible for them. It was horrible for us, because it was just more intensive. I mean, the hours weren't different from the first two years, but it was more intensive, somehow. I guess because it was earlier. The third year was all crammed into one little room on the top floor. It was the largest third year that had been at that school up until that point. We had maybe 28 people, whereas the year before, second year, the class I was in had two rooms, and I was in the second room where there were only six people, and Andy Kubert -- both the Kubert brothers were in my class -- Andy Kubert had sort of finagled the seating in the second room, like only the people that he wanted in there.

DEPPEY: So you were sort of in the impromptu gifted class.

SHANOWER: Some of the teachers were reputed to be scared to go in this room. We used to shut the door and just do whatever we wanted. We'd draw; we'd get work done, but we'd goof off a lot, too. And, second year was really fun. But, third year... Part of it was the specter of school's going to end; we have to get a job, sent into the real world! Oh, my God, what a shock. That was part of the atmosphere. Third year was horrible.

DEPPEY: But it wasn't necessarily the intensity of the class itself?

SHANOWER: No.

DEPPEY: It was more of just, "Holy shit! It's the third year!"

SHANOWER: Yeah. I know for me, I started going up to DC and Marvel like about February. Graduation was in May; I started going up in February. I sent photocopied portfolios out to all the publishers at the time. I almost sold a story to Pacific Comics, they sent me the contract and everything, but then they went under, so it was never published and I never got any money. Actually, Fred Fassberger penciled that story. I wrote and inked it, but Fred penciled it. I still have it. It's never been published. But the first real job I sold was First Comics. I was lettering Warp -- the last two issues of Warp.

Storytelling

DEPPEY: Several things really stand out from reading Age of Bronze. The thing that struck me the most is the really excellent usage of silent sequences, and what I guess the kids these days are referring to as decompressed storytelling, which is to say sequences where there's not a lot of words: Actions pretty much tell the story, and there's a lot of moment-to-moment sequences. It's something I did not notice a lot of in your early work. I think the first time I actually saw storytelling like that was in -- around the period where you were doing Prez and Accidental Death, and I think your story in Gay Comics was pretty much traditional storytelling.

SHANOWER: [Laughs.] Yeah!

DEPPEY: Where did you become more interested -- I'm badly phrasing this -- what drew you into more complex forms of storytelling? What were your influences there?

SHANOWER: Oh, that's very difficult to say. Every project I do, I think, "What is the pacing? What is the atmosphere? What do I have to do to tell this story?" Everything is its own particular project. What is the best way this is going to impact the reader, to communicate what I want to communicate? Whether I consciously do that all the time or not, that is where I'm coming from. Those are definitely my intentions. Make sure that the overall feel is what the project calls for. With the Oz graphic novels, I was definitely going for traditional storybook feel. Whether I succeeded very well or not, I don't know. But my idea, at least at the beginning, certainly at the beginning, was every panel has to look like it could have been printed in a children's book as an illustration. Now, I don't know whether you go through every single panel, whether those all could have worked as illustrations, but that was generally my idea. I wanted to get away from really jazzy, weird layouts, and just do something really traditional. That's always something I've tried to do with Age of Bronze because I just want anybody to be able to pick it up and read it, not someone who only knows how to read a comic book. When there are no panel borders, what do you do? Well, the general public doesn't know what to do when they're confronted with a page that has multiple panels but no panel borders. They're not going to know what to do, so I certainly try not to do anything too wild. Breaking down actions and hitting the high points, I mean... Age of Bronze is an ongoing series. It's going to end at some point, but basically, it's an ongoing series, so I have lots of room. With the graphic novels, I didn't have room. I had 46 pages, and I had to tell the whole story in 46 pages, and no more. With Age of Bronze I have room to play, and expand things. The silent sequences are really important to me because sometimes in some scenes there's so much information that has to be conveyed in word balloons, that it's really difficult for me to get everything in, even after I cut and cut and cut and divide balloons up and put in more panels, still it looks like the page is really overwritten, and I just think, "Well, no one's going to want to read this page no matter what I do." So, I just am very determined to have silent sequences every once in a while, just to break it up. And I get reviews saying, "heavily written," "The dialogue, you have to wade through it." So, I don't know whether I'm succeeding or not. Every once in a while, someone like you mentions the silent sequences that are so beautiful. [Laughs.] At least someone notices.

DEPPEY: It's very controlled. I mean, you do generally hold to the established comic book storytelling tropes, and when you do break open, it's generally to establish a very specific mood. I'm thinking, for example, of the sequence where Cassandra rebuffs a god's advances and gets cursed. And all the pages up to there were standard comics panels and borders and whatnot, and you get to the sequence with the god itself, and the modern day sequences where they're telling the flashback are in standard panels, and then the sequence to which the flashback is flashing back, the panels are kind of open and sit in between the standard panels.

SHANOWER: Yeah. The standard panels are supposed to look like shards of glass, or something broken. It's supposed to be a reflection of her mind. In between the flashback, I intended to draw in a very smoky, foggy style, because this is a memory of her when she is very young, a very traumatic memory. Yeah, there are a couple of formalistic elements, I guess you might call them, that are in Age of Bronze, and one of them is the flashback. Every flashback, I try to do something formalistic...

DEPPEY: Something to distinguish...

SHANOWER: That says something more than just what you're seeing in the panels. The one that people always seize on is the Herakles...

DEPPEY: ...the more cartoony art.

SHANOWER: Yeah. I get two reactions. Either, "That was great!" or, "Why in the world did you do that?" So, I don't know. That's the one that everyone seizes on. It's the most obvious. But, every flashback, I've done something like that. I don't have a list of techniques lined up to use. I just am saying to myself, "Well, when I get to the next flashback, it will dictate its own form." And so far they have, and I don't know if it's worked, but it's at least worked in my mind.

The other formal thing that I imposed on the layout is this: many scenes start out with three panels on the top tier, and start out with a close-up, and then draw back, and then draw back even more. And usually there's no dialogue in the first of the three panels. And there's very minimal dialogue in the second and third.

DEPPEY: Is there a specific thinking behind that strategy?

SHANOWER: No, it just felt right at the time. In the back of my mind, it's like, well, how long am I going to be using this, because it doesn't fit every situation. I use it when it fits, and I think, by the end of this series, this is going to disappear, and is that going to be a problem? That it doesn't look consistent? It hasn't disappeared yet. I thought by this time it would probably be gone, but it's still there. I keep using it. I don't know whether anybody notices, but... I do.

DEPPEY: The other thing I noticed about the Cassandra sequence is it's the only place where a Greek god seems to appear.

SHANOWER: You can interpret it as a god if you like. It's intended to be priest of Apollo, a priest of the sun god. Something like that really could've happened -- an incident where this guy molested Cassandra and her brother, Helenus, and that set her life on its course for the rest of the story. It's not supposed to be a god. But she obviously was young enough to believe it was a god.

DEPPEY: The scene is ambiguous on that point.

SHANOWER: That's fine. I stated very categorically that I'm not using any gods in the flesh in this series. In the story there are no gods in the flesh. I've stated that in interviews and things. I even wrote it in the afterward of the first volume. But if someone wants to interpret something I've done as a god in the flesh, that's fine. Actually, I got a letter from someone after the last issue -- issue 19 -- which deals with the end of the episode of Iphigenia, and he said, "Oh, this is very different! You brought in the gods taking action!"

DEPPEY: ...and it's actually people interpreting dreams.

SHANOWER: Well, the Iphigenia story, traditionally there are two different endings. One is where the gods come in and rescue her. And I deliberately left it open to interpretation. So, people could interpret it either way. I'm not going to give it away. Is it okay to give it away?

DEPPEY: Yeah, I didn't get the impression that anybody rescued her, actually.

SHANOWER: That's not my take on the story, either. My take is that she died. They killed her. They slit her throat and she died. Odysseus comes with this story about the gods rescuing her, just to try to placate Klytemnestra. It obviously doesn't work. [Sighs.] There are versions of the story where the gods come down and carry of Iphigenia in a cloud and substitute -- there's like a whole list of things that are from different versions -- usually it's a deer. But, there are other versions of the story: A goat or an old woman. I think in Racine's play, they just substitute another girl. Yeah. And then in the opera, they substitute a slave, I think. I don't remember.

DEPPEY: You actually show a great deal of ingenuity in keeping the gods out of the story.

SHANOWER: That's one of the most fascinating parts of the whole thing to me. I mean, part of the impetus to do this story was just the relationship of humanity to gods, or particularly my relationship to God. I was a Christian. I was raised a Christian. I was a pretty devout Christian for a long time. Now, I consider myself a rationalist. I don't believe in the supernatural, and that's sort of just... struggling with issues surrounding that sort of thing in the early '90s was one of the things that gave me impetus for Age of Bronze, and that's still something valid in my life. In Age of Bronze I'm finding human motivations for the most heinous acts that people can blame on the gods, but, you know... I want to show, at least in this story: No, these are people acting, and they had choices. They did this, and this is why. I'm not saying that it's good they did these horrible things, but this is why, and this is what can lead someone to do horrible, horrible things. And I'm hoping that readers will go, "Oh, OK. This is how this story applies in my life. I'm responsible for my acts and I can choose what to do." I'm not trying to teach any lessons here, but that's the theme of Age of Bronze.

DEPPEY: Strictly from a storytelling sense, the scene that really impressed me in terms of writing the gods out of the direct actions was the sequence with Paris and the apple in Age of Bronze #4, which was just a beautiful example of staging. I mean, that was one of the most erotic sequences in the book.

SHANOWER: Thank you very much.

DEPPEY: The very tight close-ups on Paris's mouth and the apple. That was impressive.

SHANOWER: Thank you. I'm very proud of that. I was waiting and waiting to get to that issue. It's long gone, way behind me. Well, you know, it was a critical story point. Why would Helen run off with Paris? Why in the world? So I had to figure out, how am I going to present this story so that people would buy that? Well, you make it as erotic as you can and you sort of present it already decided. That's why I sort of started that issue while Helen's having second thoughts about it. "Oh, I don't know if I want to do this! Well, I'll go." She already decided to go.

DEPPEY: It was a neat end-run around the traditional supernatural impetus for the story. Essentially the entire Trojan War kicks off over the sequence with the apples...

SHANOWER: You've got to be convincing about Helen running off with Paris. And if you're not going to use the gods, so you don't have Aphrodite telling Paris, "Well, I'm going to make this happen," you've got to make it pretty convincing.

DEPPEY: It was actually reading through Age of Bronze that I realized just how much deus ex machina is involved in the whole Trojan War mythos.

SHANOWER: Oh, yeah. And there are still problems coming up that I don't have totally solved yet. Every once in a while... You know, I have these questions in my mind, and I go, "How am I going to handle this? How am I going to handle this?" And, you know, I just think about them every once in a while, and every once in a while there's the answer. Sometimes it's a different version of the story that I haven't read before that I come across. And it's like, "Oh, I see how this'll work in." Sometimes it's like, "Oh, well, that's just obvious. I should have seen that all along." Just figuring out how to get around not using the gods.

Cassandra. I was very worried about the Cassandra scene. I wasn't particularly worried about any of the sex scenes. Nothing is very overt. But once I got into child molestation, I was like, "Oh, my God. I'm going to be crucified." But no one said anything. Carla Speed McNeil wrote me a complimentary letter saying that that was the only way she would be able to think of Cassandra from then on. But, no one else has ever mentioned anything negative about it. Maybe they're all too polite. I don't know.

[To read the rest of this interview, please see The Comics Journal #265.]

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