Interviews Conducted by Robert J. Beck

When was it you realized your comic would be able to

support you financially?

I don’t know, I guess back in the second grade when I
made a drawing for a girl in my class and she asked me
if I was going to be an artist when I grew up and I said,
“Yes.” By the fourth grade I was selling colored pencil
drawings of fighting monsters to my classmates for a
quarter apiece. Then when I was in art school at
Michigan State, my Honors College advisor saw that I’d
gotten a perfect score on my science ACT tests and kept
trying to talk me out of an art career so I could become a
nuclear physicist or brain surgeon, but I stuck to my guns
and stayed an artist, so here I am. Eat it, college
advisors!
But financial success isn’t the goal at all. You know, my
anti-war comics are judged on how well they help stop
wars, not on how wealthy they make me. You can’t judge
anti-corporate greed comics by how well they succeed in
out current economic system, you know?

What is the process of actually making a piece?

Each piece of artwork I do builds on the last so there’s really my lifetime’s work in each one. I used to work on really big canvases that I’d have to climb a ladder, put a brush in one corner and then jump off in order to get the kind of long, slashing, uncontrolled lines I’m after. But that was the low tech way to do it, now I work on a big Cintiq tablet monitor with graphics programs like Painter and Photoshop, collecting my ideas with my iPhone and Evernote, and keeping them organized with Scrivener writing software.

Do you have a favourite piece that you've done?

I am always in love with the latest one. I’m working on one right now that’s an homage to “The Sinister House of Secret Love,” a quickly-aborted yet highly influential 1970s gothic romance graphic novel series published by DC comics. It’s got my wife as a vampire princess in the foreground, and me looking like Fabio with tentacles in the background. Great stuff.

Your comic has come under quite a bit of criticism, how do you deal with this?

It just comes with the territory. People on the street are going to scream death threats at you for wearing the wrong hair cut or holding the wrong hands or the having the wrong color on your skin, so of course people go crazy when you actually express yourself in a way they disagree with. That’s been that way, ever since my Fat Uncle Sam comics were winning editorial cartoon contests in the 6th grade at the same time my teachers were telling me my artwork showed I belonged in a mental institution. We express ourselves; they try to censor us. That’s the way of the world.

Do you ever find it hard to come up with a new idea for a piece?

Not at all. I’ve got a bazillion ideas. Finding 25 hours in the day to realize them all is the hard part ....