Ed Piskor on the division of identity in comics

Jack Teagle on copycatting in the illustration world

Plus comics from the best indie talent around

esus Christ, it’s cold. I can’t decide what’s colder, my fingers or these keys I’m hitting. If I keep typing then something’s bound to warm up… isn’t it? This could be a long one.

It’s been a mixed start to 2015. Atrocities in Paris brought cartooning – or illustration or comic stripping – bang in to the public consciousness. A medium that for centuries had been so deft at reporting injustice was suddenly, sadly, at the centre of one. But artists from every corner of the globe stood together in defiance as only they could, taking to their drawing boards and showing the world just how powerful pen on paper can be. It was a proud moment for anyone involved in this medium. Closer to home, we launched Yellow back in November – a new illustration series that will see 52 artists illustrate 52 weeks of news. The idea is to see what artists can bring to current affairs that written journalism can’t, and already artists like Gavin Strange, Stanley Chow and Kristyna Baczynski are proving that it’s quite a bit. Each artist is assigned a week and asked to illustrate a news story from those seven days. That piece is then posted the following Monday morning on offlife.co.uk, building a whole illustrated year. Of course we’re bias, but four months in it’s already becoming something special and we’d urge you to check in out! Back to OFF LIFE, and after the pressure of putting together our tenth issue last October (and everyone asking if it’s a special anniversary edition!), we’ve relaxed back into our rhythm and have a cracking issue 11 for you. It’s a serious honour to feature comics from the likes of Box Brown, while insights from Ed Piskor and Jack Teagle will be an eye opener for anyone involved in our beloved medium. Anyway, that’s quite enough from me for one issue. Over to the artists…

— Daniel Humphry / Editor

JACK TEAGLE 7 / ED PISKOR 15 / YOU HAVE BEEN READING 28

Editor Daniel Humphry / Art Director Steve Leard / Copy Editor Lucy Rice / Cover Sébastien Thibault

OFFLIFE.CO.UK / @OFFLIFE_COMIC

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What have you to lose?

For decades, illustration and comics were the outsiders of the art world. Snubbed by

critics and avoided by galleries, it left artists in the West West – free from expectation or

convention. But with their gradual acceptance over the last decade, has the spirit of risk

taking and otherness been whitewashed by safety nets, copycats and autobiographical

tales of mild woe?

Jack Teagle, the creator behind Nobrow-published comics Fight! and

Jeff Job Hunter, explains why it’s important to always push for new ground.

These days I see a lot of artists and creators borrowing similar symbols, styles and work methods – even themes in their work – and it can feel like an over saturation. Being aware of similar work is one thing, but feeling a need to fit into that world of design, comics and illustration is another. People should have as much fun as possible with what they create. Though things can feel hopeless when living in an economic downturn, where opportunities for artists can be scarce, it’s really the best time to experiment, explore and go wild with your work. After all… what have you got to lose? It’s important to push boundaries and see how far you can go. When artists are conservative with their work, it can stagnate. Often artists will try to aim for the easy money or what they think people would like to read or admire. But for self-preservation as an artist, you can’t think like that all the time. You have to adapt and evolve, and by taking chances you can open up new doors of what works. I don’t blame anyone for trying to make money, but while it’s important to stay connected and relevant to trends, it’s equally important to introduce an audience to new ideas and new ways of working… to set yourself apart from

your peers. Creators can unconsciously pick up on similar techniques and styles from other artists, and you can start to get very similar work in some cases. Branching out can help you to differentiate yourself from others. It can be frightening to venture into the unknown, but when you’re breaking new ground, people aren’t really going

to know what to make of it. You have to persevere, have fun and play with what you’re doing. Words and pictures do not need to adhere to any preconceptions you may have of them as an art form. You do what feels right. A story can be non-linear and paced in non-conventional ways. Imagery doesn’t have to be photo-realistic, you can play with perspective, warp proportions, draw in a way that feels natural. There is a fear that budding artists and writers must conform

to working in ways that have come before them. It’s important to understand that this isn’t the case. You can learn from what came before you, but you don’t have to perfectly replicate it. There are no rules. The road less travelled is rockier, but also ultimately much more rewarding. Always push yourself to try new things and never be content to settle for the status quo.

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Falling Off the Mainstream

An interview with Ed PiskorIn a medium that is often mired in claims of copycats and trends, some comic artists shine bright as true auteurs. Having started out in the spotlight as Harvey Pekar’s artist du jour, self-published his own long-running series and now embarked on a non-fiction comic that

chronicles the history of Hip Hop… Ed Piskor is truly one such artist.

OFF LIFE caught up with the creator behind crossover hit Hip Hop Family Tree (HHFT) to chat self-publishing, pushing the art form, and his disdain for the tropes of mainstream comics.

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OFF LIFE: You’ve worked across comics, illustration and animation projects. Do you have a preference for what you’re called or what your discipline is referred to?

Ed Piskor: Cartoonist is just fine. I went to Germany last year and met the artist Glyn Dillon, and we had this exact conversation where here in the States cartoonist is just fine; we’re happy to be associated with people like [Charles M] Schulz, who did the Peanuts strip. But Glyn said that in the UK, to be called a cartoonist is like little kids work, like animated shows. It doesn’t have the same context here.

OL: It seems splintered in the UK. Some trying to reclaim the term cartoonist, some trying to stay away from it, so it’s good to hear that people are comfortable with it in the US.

EP: Yeah we consider it pretentious if you call yourself something too ostentatious like a sequential illustrator or some crap like that. It’s relaxed, man. We’re cartoonists. If Chris Ware can be a cartoonist, you can be a cartoonist too.

OL: Your style varies so much from title-to-title. How do you land on your styles and choose which one to employ?

EP: I work intuitively and just try to capture the spirit of whatever the narrative is. So Wizzywig was a story about a highly logical, almost Asperger Syndrome type artistic guy. So I wanted the style to be very clear and almost kind of static, and just the way that story worked there was a lot of grey area where you didn’t know which side of the fence you wanted to be on. But basically I just

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operate through intuition: if it feels right, I just go down that direction.

OL: That’s interesting, because so many artists move sideways and keep to their own style, but you’re kind of hopping from one to another, flexing your muscles...

EP: The next thing I want to do will be a fictional work, but I really want to use the comic strip format to it’s full extent and do something that isn’t easily translatable into other mediums. So maybe some pages are going to be told in four panel, then there will be pages that are like a Peanuts type comic strip, and then there’ll be some pages that are sprawling, full sided broadsheet Sunday pages. I’m preparing for this next project by playing around with a bunch of different styles.

OL: Are you trying to investigate what the medium can do?

EP: I kind of am, yeah. I’ve become obsessed with the great masters of American comic strip art. It’s amazing to think about how these individuals are given the exact same structure – you have four squares a day to tell a story, and so the way that everybody handles these things so differently is fascinating to me. Chester Gould can tell multiple stories within four squares, and it’s concise and cohesive so it makes plenty of sense, and Charles Schulz knows the perfect moments to capture these five-second moments in a child’s day that can get you thinking. So with all of things I’m trying to really study and I’m going to use their pacing structure for this next thing that I work on.

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OL: You got your professional break collaborating with Harvey Pekar. Was that a tricky gig for a relative newcomer?

EP: I’m comfortable enough saying that I failed at the gig. I worked with him when I was 21 years old and I was no more mature than any other 21 year old idiot that you see at a pub. I was obsessed with comics and I put in the work, I really worked hard for him and I saw it as my big break, but I was operating from an immature head space so when I look at that work, I didn’t do a good job because I just wasn’t smart enough to do a good job. I remember that there was a tremendous amount of stage fright when I was working on that stuff with Harvey, because I knew what it meant. Usually people start out doing something in an anthology that’s nobody’s heard of or maybe you get your own comic, but you’re lucky if 5,000 copies of that are ordered.

OL: Normally artists get to make their early mistakes in the shadows…

EP: That’s an excellent way of putting it. Harvey was fresh off his movie American Splendor, he won the Sundance Festival the year before and he was never more popular than right at that exact moment. He was on Entertainment Tonight! So I was put in front of people at the start of my career and I had an initial print run of 25,000, so it was out there. You do almost learn on the page.

OL: You eventually went on to self-publish your own series in Wizzywig. Why did you choose to self publish rather than seek out a publisher?

EP: Well, the business of comics really changed a lot because of our distributor in the States during those years. The way Wizzywig is structured, it was going to be an eight issue mini-series. I liked the idea of having a regular comic format, published maybe four times a year maximum, with each chapter being a 32-page comic. But the distribution model requires a constant presence and for a single issue of a $3 comic you would have had to sell 5,000 copies for the Diamond distribution company to keep a presence in their catalogue for you. If you’re not in Diamond then that’s the equivalent to being dead to comic stores. Even to this day stores still fully rely on Diamond, which to me is a mistake because KickStarter has made it easier to self-publish, so if you don’t pay attention to the whole culture of comics, you miss out on a lot of good stuff.

OL: How was the business end of it for you? Was it a risk at the time?

EP: I was in my early twenties and I had no shame about sleeping in a walk-in closet at my mom’s house to get this thing off it’s feet. I would’ve sacrificed almost anything at that age to make the comics thing work. OL: Do you feel that dedication in the rest of the comics world?

EP: Yeah, I’m not special in any way. Comics are an extension of an obsessive compulsive disorder and I identify that neurosis within all of my closest friends in comics. All of the best people in comics are compulsive to an incredible, unhealthy level. It’s great that they’ve found a way to exorcise that stuff because they would probably be very unsavoury characters if they didn’t have comics. I say that kind of jokingly, but I also do completely believe that too.

OL: Gilbert Hernandez once told us that there are much easier ways to make money for artists than comics. Which means they’re doing it for the love of comics, which makes it a relatively pure art form…

EP: I think comics are the best art form. They’re also one of our earliest forms of communication, they tap into a reptilian lizard brain within us, because before the written word there was the picture, there was the cave painting of some spider that if bitten by, your arm will fall off. It’s not a unique thought, but comics do have a direct relationship to our earliest forms of communication, so I think it touches people in that way. So it’s pure that way. The comics that I pay attention to are done by a singular creator, where you’re seeing someone’s complete vision. I don’t really mess around too much with collaborative comics, and I certainly don’t care about assembly line, corporate stuff. To me, a penciler just wants to draw pretty pictures. He doesn’t have thoughts about comics, very few of those guys do.

OL: Hip Hop culture is quite a unique source material for comics. Why did you want to put the two together for HHFT?

EP: I’ve always been part of Hip Hop; that’s always been a constant in my life. I always hear about the promise of Manga Japanese comics, that there are comics out there for people within every facet of Japanese culture. So your Grandma is reading a certain type of Manga, you’re little sister is reading a certain type of Manga that’s catered to her. There are comics about fishermen that Japanese fishermen latch on to. So I have a lot of interests beyond the comics language, yet these subject matters are not really talked about in our medium.

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OL: Were you surprised by the extent that HHFT resonated with comic fans?

EP: I publish through a company called Fantagraphics and they have all but abandoned the direct market in comics, and the direct market for the average reader means comic shops… I don’t imagine that the bulk of Fantagraphics’ business is in comic shops and just from conversations with the publishers, I get the impression they don’t really give a crap about the average comic shop reader. They plan for a more sophisticated crowd, and I like to be a part of that, a part of Fantagraphics. But I also saw my book doing good in a book store crowd as well. When the first HHFT came out, I saw the most popular writers in comics mentioning my comics, tweeting it to their legions of fans. So now I’ve been invited to more of these comic festivals where people dress up as Deadpool, and that’s a new development for me. I guess I am surprised that a direct market comic reader would have the good taste to read my comic.

OL: It seems that within a certain section of the comic world there’s been a move away from the comic shop. You’ve been in the industry for 10 years professionally now, have you felt that shift?

EP: For sure, because the hardcore Marvel, DC guy, the guy that’s the stereotype, that’s still very strong. I’ve been gambling my entire life on comics being a respectable thing. I had my comics forefathers like Spiegelman, Crumb, Clowes and Ware really kick down doors and gain legitimacy so that me and my peer group were able to just walk in this

open door and do personal, singular work. But there’s still a whole culture of these neck-beard lamos who are that crowd, and I come from that. I talk smack, but it’s from self-loathing in a way because I can have a conversation about any kind of comic up to 1994 to 1995, before I fell off that mainstream thing. But I do still go into the comic shop to pick up my new Love And Rockets or my new Peanuts collection, so I’m privy to the conversations and I’m also privy to the goddamn sexism of these people and the castigation and the polarising nature of these Arrested Development weirdos.

OL: Where would you like to see the comics industry or medium progressover the next five or 10 years? Have you got an idealised version of where it’s heading?

EP: I really don’t think about the comics business at large, and I think

it has to do with my self-publishing Wizzywig early on. I figured it out, I know how to do it and sustain and live and be comfortable. So if this entire industry goes away, the sadness for me is that I don’t have a lot of good stuff to read. If all the hipster cartoonists who are into it now, if they move on to painting canvas, I’m still going to make comics as long as paper still exists. I’ll just have to print them myself. Through social media, the internet in general, we now have a direct connection with the people who are reading our stuff. I know how to put my work in the hands of taste makers, who’ll put the word out. So I don’t really think about things at large, in good or bad terms, everyone’s going to do what everyone’s going to do.

“there’s still a whole culture of these neck- beard lamos”

You can check out more of Ed’s work at EdPiskor.com

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— you have been reading —

issue #11offlife.co.uk

@offlife_comic

Darren CullenWar on Magic@darren_cullen

Box BrownR.I.P.@boxbrownPage 13

Nick Burton I’d Like To Say@nickdburtonPage 4

Kelsey Wroten Earthlings@jukeboxcomix

Matthew DooleyOlfactory Settings@mddrawsPage 8

Mouni FeddagDrivetime@mounifeddag

Grace WilsonMistaken Identity@baxwilson

Brigid DeaconDream Manifesto@brigidedeacon

Alex PottsWhy Oh Why Did I Shave Off My Beard?@avpotts

52 weeks 52 artists One illustrated year

What can artists bring to news coverage? Check offlife.co.uk every Monday to find out.