Connections
{mosimage} GARY GROTH: One thing that caught my attention is the catholicity of your taste in comics. You like a lot of people who I wouldn't necessarily have thought you would appreciate, like Dick Sprang and Steve Ditko and Basil Wolverton. I was curious to know, since you're part of the second generation of cartoonists -- those cartoonists who are devoting themselves to personal expression as opposed to finding a craft level and pursuing it -- how you see yourself in relation to a lot of the older cartoonists who didn't devote themselves to personal expression so much as getting a job done? Do you find a connection between you and that generation?SETH: Well there is a connection, definitely. And I think the connection comes along the lines of craft. If I had been talking to you, say, in the early-'80s, I probably wouldn't have had that big of a connection to those guys. At that point, when I was young and excited about cartooning, I was looking at the Hernandez brothers, say, or Crumb, or Pete Begge, and I had a real clear distinction in my mind between alternative cartooning and mainstream cartooning. And whereas I probably still had some kind of affection for people like Kirby or Ditko, I wasn't thinking about them much. I think as I've gotten older and become more confident with what I want to do with cartooning, I haven't felt as strong a need to tie myself into a classification, and I started to be able to look at the whole range of cartooning, and appreciate the qualities that different cartoonists in different areas had, that aren't necessarily analogous to the direction I'm heading in. If you look at somebody like C.C. Beck or Kirby, you can't help but admire the amount of craft involved in their work. And to some degree there is personal expression going on, certainly, but it's not like an artist's concern. But you still end up getting really involved in the care that these top creators manage to put into this stuff, and that has filtered through somehow.
GROTH: Can you tell me what you mean by an "artist's concern"?
SETH: I think when I use the term, "artist's concern," I suppose what I'm thinking of mostly is really trying to use whatever medium you're working in as a true personal expression, where the first prerogative of what you're doing is for yourself, and there's no client involved in any manner. I do a lot of illustration work, I'm working for clients, and there's a real clear distinction in my mind between doing that and doing my comics. The illustration work is always of a lower quality, simply because of the fact that you're dealing with somebody else's concerns. But with just your own work, you're freed up to really... Somehow or other, even in just the drawing alone, it becomes a superior product. I suppose an artist's concern can be really a wide variety of things, but number one would be pure personal expression.
GROTH: What I would call an "artistic conscience," among the first generation of cartoonists, was always being mitigated by all kinds of essentially commercial demands.
SETH: Yeah. When you read Gil Kane's interview, you see that the artists' concerns have been delegated down to developing their craft, to becoming the best draughtsman among the bunch, or the number one stylist or something. And what they're actually saying with the work gets completely lost or subordinated, and they stop thinking about it entirely. They think, "Am I doing a good job?" They might be thinking, "Is this a superior product?" But most of them don't seem to get down to that point of being concerned with what they're trying to communicate to their audience.
GROTH: Yeah. Kirby would probably be the best example of someone who was pushing to express himself, but who had to bury that expression beneath all these layers of genre and corporate dictates and so on, and you really wonder what such artists would have done if they didn't have those burdens. Of course, it's quite possible they needed those boundaries in a way.
SETH: Kirby is the classic example. You wonder if Kirby had had the sort of economic control that Herge had had, say, what kind of a universe would he have constructed of his work? The funny thing about Kirby is, I was just reading a bunch of Kamandis the other day, and I was thinking, "Kirby's such a strange character, really, because he's kind of like a naive artist in some ways." Whatever was going on in the culture would just filter right through him and come out as a comic book story. [Groth laughs] You're reading along, and it's obvious that Kamandi is The Planet of the Apes, and then at the same time, Watergate must have been going on because you've got all this stuff coming in about these ape people in the future and their religion being based on the Watergate situation, and it's just hilarious because you can really feel he's just a conduit for this stuff. Much like the folk painters in the back country: they'll have Elvis and he'll be standing next to Abraham Lincoln or something. [Groth laughs] Somehow they're fascinated by the subject matter and it manages to squeeze its way into the work.
GROTH: I guess at a certain point it's impossible not to because we live in the age where everything is so saturated with what's going on around us and the media that filters it through us. And I guess it depends on how you juggle those elements, whether or not they become meaningful or not, or whether they just become part of this meaningless pop culture tapestry.
SETH: Yeah. I'm wondering if I'm being a little hard on these older artists, because some of them obviously were making an effort to get their philosophies through. You think of somebody like Ditko. Even within the structure of something like Spider-Man you can feel his efforts to get that Randian stuff out. But I suppose being hampered by the company, it's still like a game they're playing; they have to squeeze in what they can within the parameters of what's allowed.
GROTH: Of course Ditko is an interesting example because I probably prefer his Spider-Man or Dr. Strange to any of his didactically repetitious Randian tracts. [laughs]
SETH: Yeah, I'll agree! They're certainly more fun to read. You've got to wonder though if that has to do with a growing ideology in him or a growing sledgehammer approach. If he had been allowed to do what he wanted, would he have been doing that from Day One? I'm not sure if he had been doing Mr. A at the same age that he was doing Spider-Man if it might not been a bit more readable.
GROTH: One of those unanswerable questions.
SETH: It's obvious that he really had his own approach to the comics. Both the drawing and the writing.
Odd Man Out
GROTH: How do you feel being a cartoonist who has the liberty to engage in serious aristic expression? Do you feel like an aberration? You mentioned that you always felt like an odd man out.
SETH: Yeah, I think that has a lot to do with why there are serious cartoonists. I think the marginalization is a big part of it. Part of the fact that comics have so little value in the mainstream society probably does attract a certain type that is not even going to consider going into film, for example. Film has such a high profile that it seems beyond reach, for one thing. It probably does attract a type that's more concerned with getting that big product out there. The smallness of comics allows a certain type, I think, to consider it as a potential career or something. For myself, I can't really say I ever made any real clear decision about it. It seemed to have just been a natural evolution. I was talking to some people about this recently -- I did this little interview for a local television station -- and I was talking about certain literary interests and the interviewer asked, "Why are you even considering doing this stuff as a comic book if that's what you're interested in?" I had kind of forgotten that comic books are not thought of as a place to do anything serious. I had just gotten used to the idea over the years, as I became more interested in trying to write something better. So it's just natural that I would think of doing it as a comic since I always wanted to be a cartoonist. There wasn't a point were I thought that my cartooning should be more serious. It just sort of evolved from wanting to draw superheroes when I was a teenager, to eventually becoming more ambitious bit by bit, without re-evaluating whether the medium could take it or not. I think that probably is true of most alternative cartoonists in that, as their tastes broaden as they get older, they've already been trapped into being cartoonists by the stuff they loved when they were kids.
GROTH: That's an interesting point. It does look like you evolved into seriousness. If you look at your career, you started with the Mr. X stuff which probably wouldn't qualify as a serious creative effort in the sense that I mean it.
SETH: No. Although I think even at that point, I kind of knew that I wanted to do more than that. I didn't fully know, because I can remember when I started on Mr. X I was genuinely excited about what the Hernandez brothers had done on it. But even then I could sort of realize this wasn't their best work. So I wouldn't say I was completely clued in. But certainly by the time I had done a couple of issues, I could feel this nagging feeling like, maybe I had gotten myself into a situation where no one would ever take me seriously. In the long run, I'm very thankful that I didn't put out a comic book of my own at that time -- because it would probably be something I'd be really embarrassed about now.
GROTH: One thing that the second generation of cartoonists, starting with Crumb, had, that the first generation really never had as far as I can tell, is a mature conception of what constitutes seriousness. If you look closely at the passions and interests of earlier artists, they're simply not serious by any stretch, or they're so flawed as to be fatuous. I'm not trying to attack that entire generation of cartoonists, but one thing that the second generation brought to the medium was a coherent conception of what constitutes seriousness -- which doesn't always necessarily make for good work, but it's hard to think that much work could be good without that consideration, either.
SETH: Well, it seemed to be the next step, I felt, in cartooning. You had a period, like with the underground cartoonists, where they went through the whole taboo-breaking phase, and also attempting to show that comics could cover a wide range of material. But nobody really had any concrete literary aspirations. I think it took a little while, even in the first part of the early-'80s for cartoonists to come around to the idea that perhaps longer stories and more challenging content was acceptable. But it seems like it's the next step. As comics move forward, that's really the areas that can be pursued; not coming up with new gimmicks or clever characters, or not finding flashier ways to tell the story so much, as to try and actually infuse it with some content.
GROTH: That generally sounds like a pretty accurate historical assessment.
SETH: Although I'm a little worried at the moment. I really felt a couple of years ago that this was obvious to everyone working in the alternative market. But I've felt in the last couple of years that there's a bit of a swing back with the next generation of cartoonists towards this concept of, "Fuck that boring shit! Comics are supposed to be fun!" Sort of a return to this idea that you don't want to get overly pretentious. Maybe it's a bit of a reaction to all of this autobiography.
GROTH: Could you name names? Who are you referring to?
SETH: I guess I'm thinking mostly of the mini-comics movement. But I suppose I could certainly throw Terry LaBan in there as one example. He's sort of an older guy who I felt has made a rather contrived decision to move back to an underground sensibility. But in the mini-comics movement, or in the younger guys, I'm not sure if I can put a finger on it, but I guess I could point a finger to Jeff Levine and his discussions in Destroy All Comics. But I don't know if personally I could say Jeff wants to do that with his own work. There does seem a climate of that attitude prevalent in the minicomics community and, perhaps this is unfair, but I seemed to sense it in Jeff's magazine. But Terry Laban. I thought that was a mistake on his part, if I can be that presumptuous, because I know he wasn't getting the sales with Unsupervised Existence, but I thought he was heading in a good direction. And I enjoyed that more than I enjoy Cud.
The Meaning of the Title
GROTH: Can you tell me what the meaning of the title It's a Good Life If You Don't Weaken is?
SETH: Well, I got the title of course from my mother who always said this to me as a kid. It's actually a positive message I suppose -- the only way to live a good life is if you don't give in to the factors in the world around you that are trying to crush your opportunities for a good life. It has to come from within. It's only when you weaken to all the negative forces around you that your life is basically destroyed. You've got to make of it the best you can. That's the analogy I draw with Kalo near the end, where forces didn't come together to create the life that I envisioned for him; but he still managed, it seems, to have a positive existence. I suppose it's a fairly trite point of view. I'm not trying to say anything too deep there. But basically I'm trying to show myself as a character -- without trying to map out exactly what the story's about -- as a person who doesn't seem to be able to exist within the world, just constantly displeased by things. And that's pretty much keeping the character from enjoying what life he could have.
GROTH: You as a character seem to stand in sharp contrast to Kalo too. Because Kalo essentially gave up cartooning at one point and started an insurance or a real estate business.
SETH: Yeah, real estate.
GROTH: I always get those mixed up. A real estate business, which could be an indication that he weakened and gave up.
SETH: I tend not to think of it in those terms. The circumstances of life aren't the things that are going to destroy your chances for happiness. It's what you make of it. Which comes down to a sort of a cliché I suppose. Within the confines of the story, the Seth character really has a lot of opportunities to be happy. But instead it's this constant struggle of living in a world that you don't like, and that makes you unhappy. It's like a line from Stardust Memories where Woody Allen's a successful filmmaker and he's saying, "I can't enjoy myself if I know there's one person who's starving out there." I mean, this is not an absolute factor in your life, and yet you're allowing it to destroy your peace of mind. Or at least your happiness.
GROTH: Do you think that you as a character in that story exemplified that point of view? Because, if I had a criticism of the story, it was that certain things weren't dealt with more deeply. This might actually go back to your philosophy of avoidism as enunciated in the story. [laughs] I guess in a way I thought you avoided certain things by invoking avoidism. One of them was your relationship with Ruthie, where she disappeared and there was a sop to self examination, but I got the impression that it was only that, and that Ruthie herself came across as a bit of a cipher.
SETH: I can certainly understand that.
GROTH: Which would probably be a good indication as to why you broke up, because perhaps you weren't as interested in her as you would have had to have been to have stayed with her. And that whole side to the character in the story intrigued me, but was not dealt with as much as I would have liked.
SETH: Within the way I was putting together this story, I think what I was trying to do was err on the side of understatement. Because I felt that with the first three issues I'd worked on, I'd done the exact opposite, which was to try and make things very clear. I felt they were really heavy-handed. What I wanted to try within this story was to try and get ideas across, but not too heavy-handedly. I'm still not completely satisfied. I still feel certain ideas came across heavy-handed, and other ideas came across maybe a bit too soft and didn't really tie up together, that maybe I'm asking too much of the reader to try and put all of this together. But I guess I'm kind of asking the reader to take a lot of disconnected ideas and somehow merge them together into what I'm hoping will be a fairly distinct viewpoint of that specific character. But I'm not sure if I've got the mechanics of it worked out yet. I still really feel like I'm in the middle of a growing process of trying to get this stuff out there. And with Ruthie, I certainly was trying to portray the relationship of someone who gets involved quickly, without any considerations whether or not they truly want to... It's just a desire to be involved with someone. And then not having his ideas confirmed by the other person, so he has to get out again, immediately. Sort of a shallow response to getting involved with someone else.
GROTH: Your next story is not going to be autobiographical? Or, at least not as overtly?
SETH: No. I have a feeling that a lot of it will basically be autobiographical, but all the circumstances will be fictional.
GROTH: Do you see that as in a way freeing yourself dramatically?
SETH: Yeah. I've really reached the point where I feel like autobiography is way too restraining. The whole idea of the relationship that you have with the audience, because this is you, really changes the nature of what you're trying to do. And you get caught up in this whole idea of trying to portray yourself in a manner that's not repulsive to the reader; that they're not thinking, "Oh boy, he's making himself look too good," or, "He's making himself look too bad." You start thinking too much about how you're portraying yourself rather than just trying to have a character putting across ideas.
GROTH: I tend to think people like Joe Matt and Harvey Pekar have fallen into a certain trap.
SETH: Yeah, I think it can be a trap.
GROTH: I would think that one of the problems is that it's a little more difficult to imaginatively deal with problems you're posing because they're so personally your problems.
SETH: Exactly.
GROTH: I noticed, for example, that one of the ways you did that was by a lot of exposition between you and Chester. I thought that perhaps if it weren't quite as overtly autobiographical, you'd have dealt with that not expositionally, but dramatically between characters.
SETH: That's probably true. Although I think one of the things -- and this may be a problem too that has come about -- that I think I have developed a slight aversion to the idea of confrontations in storylines. I think that comes from having read too many fantasy-based comics that are built around the idea of confrontation. When I drew the first issue which had a fight in it, I felt very weird about the whole thing afterwards, because I actually had to draw someone punching someone else. I felt like all those years of reading mainstream comics was still in there and there was no way to draw a punch without drawing on that source material. It made me feel like I never again want to have a scene where one character hits another character. I think that's probably not a concern that a prose writer would have.
GROTH: That's right, because he doesn't have that baggage.
SETH: Yeah. Unfortunately even at this point, I think too much of what people are doing in the alternative is still a reaction to the mainstream.
GROTH: I think that's true. I think one of the most difficult things in the world is to get rid of... Well, you can't get rid of baggage, but you can find perspective.
SETH: Yeah, I think you have to find some middle-ground with it. You have to come back and be able to embrace what was positive in that, and try and get away from what was negative.
GROTH: It's hard to say, but I think that what you experience as a kid, right up through your teenage years, really affects you for many, many years, and it's hard to get rid of that. That's especially true in America, because it's so saturated in media; I mean, kids are media-savvy at God knows what age these days, far younger than I was when I was a kid...
SETH: Certainly. I would agree with that.
GROTH: And the younger they are when they start becoming media consumers, the deeper that baggage gets, the earlier it worms its way into their consciousness.
SETH: It's true. What we hope is that at some point, as an individual, you can reject the values it's putting across onto you, and analyze what they're showing you.
GROTH: Yeah, but that's the most difficult thing in the world.
SETH: Yeah, it really is.
GROTH: Not to accept those values passively and make them part of yourself, but to analyze them and get rid of what you don't find useful.
SETH: Definitely.
GROTH: One of the more interesting tangents in the Don't Weaken book was your difficulty in maintaining a long-term relationship. I can understand that a person like you, at least as you depict yourself in the comic, as idiosyncratic as you are, relationships would be very difficult.
SETH: Well, it certainly has been true. I'm a difficult person to get along with.
GROTH: Is that something that you intend to explore fictionally in the future? Is that a theme that you might find fruitful?
SETH: I'm not sure. Not in the next story, I don't think so. I'm certain that at some point or other I'm going to come back to that. I think the big thing that holds my interest at the moment is a person's relationship with their world. I guess that's what possesses me in my day-to-day life. That sort of picking and choosing from all the things around you that builds your viewpoint of the world, and I'm not sure if I can boil it down into what exactly it is about that idea hat interests me. But that seems to be a driving force in my in my daily thought, and what I want to write.
GROTH: How you construct your world.
SETH: Yeah. What it is that people pull out of the culture around us to build their viewpoint. When I think about the characters that I'm writing in the next story, that's kind of the focus, beyond the incidentals of their lives. It's the focus of why I'm interested in these particular characters. To some degree -- I guess it's sort of self-defeating -- but when you start thinking about your opinions and why you believe certain things, if you have any sort of a cynical nature, at some point you start to doubt your own opinions, and you can easily become involved in the kind of thinking where you wonder, "Why do I even bother to form opinions on things? Except to build some sort of persona for myself?"
I think the problem is that my ideals are higher than I can actually live up to. So when I start to try to figure out my motivations on why I'm doing work of a particular kind, my own motivations don't live up to what I want. You can almost always find some motivation in yourself that you would find repulsive in someone else. Invariably, anything you're doing seems to tie in with ego at some point.