This month, we’re talking with HUGH D'ANDRADE about his powerful and intimate memoir, THE MURDER NEXT DOOR. Hugh reflects on how childhood trauma and the shocking murder of his neighbor influenced his art and storytelling, crafting a deeply moving narrative on grief and healing. Tune in for an unforgettable conversation about a book that will stick with you long after the final page.
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MUSIC
“Scritches” The Mega Meows
So good morning and welcome to the Commons Experience Graphic Novel of the Month Club. This is our February show for 2025 even though it's March right now. And we've got a really fantastic book for you. It's a piece of memoir. It's about trauma. It's about Life and healing and getting better and it's just a very smart fantastic book that really touched all of us In the store quite a lot The book is the murder next door and I'm very pleased to have our author Hugh and Roddy here Oh, I did it off camera.
I was great with you Hugh D'Andrade!
Speaker 2: Woo!
Speaker: Yeah. And we've got a live studio audience as you can hear as well. So this is fun. We haven't done one of these in a while. Thank you for coming and being willing to talk to us. It's my pleasure. So my first question, it's always the same, and I think it gets to what we do here at [00:01:00] Comics Experience and with the club.
And it is thus. Why comics? Of all the ways you could express yourself. What is it about comics that speaks to you? That talks to you? Because comics are not an easy art form to do. It's a solitary art form. And you generally don't make any money doing it, generally. Yeah. So why?
Speaker 3: So why? I think that's a really good question.
For me, I might even frame it, why not? I think I have been a reader and fan of comics and graphic novels since childhood. And then I was coming of age, is it my 20s in the 1990s, which was just incredible time for graphic novels and comics. There was so much amazing literature being produced and I would read it with relish and this kind of jealousy that I couldn't do it, because it was too hard.
I couldn't quite at the time, couldn't quite put my finger on like, why is it so hard? Why? Somehow I can't do that. I did, and I did do [00:02:00] actually a couple of two page comics, in fact, the first the first thing I had published was a two page comic. In a radical magazine called Processed World.
Okay. That used to be a sort of a institution here in San Francisco, a radical magazine geared towards the, what would be the tech workers of the time. Yeah. Yeah. And I did a two, that was the first thing I ever got published, and it was so hard to do two pages that I was traumatized and never did it again.
And And but I think and I've had a career, 30 years of being an illustrator. Graphic artists of various graphic designer, graphic artists and not doing them and wondering why I wasn't. So it was the pandemic, the experience of being at home for months on end, right?
With my thoughts, looking at my life going, why the fuck am I not doing a graphic novel? Yeah. [00:03:00] That made me finally do it.
Speaker: So you just, so I'm clear, you went straight from doing just those two pages to doing a big old book. Was there steps in the middle?
Speaker 3: The longest I had done several two page comics before doing this.
Okay. Yeah.
Speaker: But that, but two pages was the most you had ever done. The most I had ever done.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And I realized I could tell you part of the reason for that is ADHD. Is I tend to one thing about having an ADHD behind you, you tend to look at a problem all at once and see this like bird's eye view of the whole problem and I don't tend to break it down into constituent parts and then do them in a logical order, like a normal person would, and so a graphic novel seemed always, and so I always, so my solution for that is always To dive in with the deep focus mind the ADHD has a hyper focus mode and so all my art was always done in hyper focus mode when you can't do a graphic novel in hyper focus mode, it's [00:04:00] not possible.
So that was, I was always limited to those two pages, but once I knew I had that brain type, then I could read some books about how to. Address it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah. I it's a big jump to go from two pages to what do we got here? 140 or so. 160. Yeah. Yeah. What was that like to suddenly have this giant canvas in front of you?
Speaker 3: It was a challenge was figuring out how to write and draw at the same time. I've always been a writer. And an artist. So it seemed Oh, it should be easy to combine the two things, but they are two, maybe different hemispheres or two different brain types, two ways of thinking. And it was hard to combine them.
And I had read. That many artists, I my, I'm a huge fan of Adrian Tomina and I read everything he does and everything he says about his work. And I knew that he's Oh, I [00:05:00] write a screenplay. He writes a screenplay. Like you would have not like a movie, and and then I had also seen the incredible scripts that.
Watchman was awesome. Yeah, Alan Moore does for his, with panel by panel. Yeah. Just describes each panel. Yeah. Twelve panels per, per page. Yeah. Each panel has a description. Yeah. And I thought And
Speaker: sometimes for three or four paragraphs. Yes. For one panel. For
Speaker 3: one little panel. And I thought, so I thought, oh, is that how you do it?
And I tried to do that. That didn't work. Yeah, I had to find a way. I had to find a way to do it. And eventually I realized that my way of doing it was to take a page of just notes that if you, anybody here was to read it, it would look gibberish. This looks like just gibberish, throw this away, recycle that, but this is my precious notes for my graphic novel.
And then I could take one page of notes and turn it into five pages of paneled comics.
Speaker: Yeah. That's how I do it. Yeah. Did you
Speaker 3: did you,
Speaker: thumbnails first?
Speaker 3: Of course. Yeah, okay. Of course. Little crappy thumbnails that, again, nobody else could read. [00:06:00] Yeah. Just like you would, if I should have saved some of them.
I they look, they, it would amuse me because I could see clearly. What's happening up there, and I'm certain nobody else could ever understand, decode them and then I took those thumbnails, turned those into pencil pages. I always work, you know how this is a, I was lucky that I have a method that I have learned from my illustration work.
It's, which is, I never draw in sketchbooks. The sketchbook. I'm always aware. Oh, I'm just going to stay around forever. And I'm going to value like, there's going to be a thing of value. I feel the weight of maybe at least my future self looking back and judging. And and so I work on just Xerox paper. I buy reams of the Xerox crap paper and then I throw away everything that doesn't work.
And I, so I just penciled all my things on that size paper and went from there. Yeah.
Speaker: Did you this is actually going a little ahead of what I was, where I was going to go with this originally. But did you have a home for the book when you started doing this or wow. So you [00:07:00] were just doing this completely on spec.
Speaker 3: Yeah, absolutely. Yes. I, and I, but I was in part because of this Oh, realizing I've got ADHD challenge. The other thing I didn't mention was that. I thought, sitting there during the pandemic at home for months on end, I should get my master's degree. And maybe I could do, I could, I've always wanted, it's always bothered me I didn't have a master's degree.
It's this stupid, shallow feather in your cap reason. It's just, why don't I have a master's degree? And I wanted to do comics, so I thought I could put those two things together. And there are a couple of master's degree low residency programs. There's one in Vermont and I forget the name of it, but then there's one here locally at my alma mater where where friends of mine teach a place where I myself taught at times.
And I thought, Oh, it's just sign up there. So I did. And they gave me a lot of help, a lot of breakdown of different systems.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: [00:08:00] And this was all virtual as well. It was a lot. Yes. The first year was all on zoom. I didn't see anybody in person. Yeah. Yeah. Unless we were all super masked up, everybody's super paranoid.
All your professors are like, I cannot I have, everybody's got people in their lives who are immune compromised and yeah, it was a tough time. But it, that, that gave me a lot of support. Yeah. When it was very, it was great. And I got a lot of feedback from other people and produced as part of that program, produced two chapters and an outline.
And then I had something that I could shop around and street noise. Liked it. Nice. Yeah. Did you have
Speaker: a,
Speaker 3: an
Speaker: agent do that part yet?
Speaker 3: Yeah. What it was funny. In fact, I had found street noise and made a connection with them and knew that they liked my book. And then I said, Oh, but hold on. I just also met an agent and and then he shopped it around and we ended up back with street noise.
Did you have multiple
Speaker: people making offers or?
Speaker 3: Yeah, a few. But [00:09:00] but street noise was the best that we found. They their books are so beautifully produced. It's not like Fantagraphics level in terms of their reach and certainly their budget. But one thing, I loved the selection of books that they produce.
The other authors that I was in, in in a category with. Yeah. It's wonderful. And then the actual production value is very high.
Yeah.
Speaker: No,
Speaker 3: very
Speaker: much and it's a nice looking book too. It came out physically very nice. I love it. They let me do a gatefold. Yeah. I had to talk them into it.
Yeah, no, that's good. Okay. So you said that you read comics when you were younger. What's the first comic that you read that stuck with you? Not the first thing that you read,
Speaker 3: right? The one Tintin for sure. Tintin. Okay. Tanan. However you say. Yeah. I loved those. And I didn't ever really, I, there, there were times when I was reading Spider-Man, but I was never one of those kids that [00:10:00] knew all the Spider-Man.
Oh, I'm right. Didn't superheroes, but Tanan, I love that. And asterisk and OB bolus and asterisk. . Those had a profound effect on me. Yeah. Yeah. And then when I was in high school, I also discovered Crumb. Yeah, those reading from yeah, and you're trying to have
Speaker: trauma from that.
Yeah You're also talking about three artists who You know are very precise very detailed very. Oh, yeah
Speaker 3: Specific kind of styles. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah
Speaker 3: masters. Those are all masters of the medium. They make it look so easy Yeah, and but the one wonderful thing about that is you just you open a page of a tin book And you're off to the races.
I just you guys have anybody read tin. Those are incredible books They have problematic now to us with our modern eyes. We can read them and go. Oh, that's some bs,
Speaker 4: right?
Speaker 3: [00:11:00] But they are so engaging. Yeah, and you fall right into them and it's interesting to me that's right at the beginning of the History of comics literature.
It's all there. Our little Nemo is another one. And you're like the actual founding of the whole genre and it's incredible masterpieces. Yeah. That everybody's trying to catch up to from there on.
Speaker: Yeah, no, it's one of the incredible things about comics and and just, again, we're all, we're talking about things that are all very different from one another that were produced under.
Very different conditions in very different ways. And they're all other art forms. Other media tend to get narrowed into like kind of boxes, yeah. To me, comics are fantastic in that. There's no one way to do it. There's not true, right? Like you can do it any old way you want to.
There are definitely people who do comics literally on, on Xerox paper and just fold them up and that's how they do their comics. And there's other people who, you know, meticulous [00:12:00] about.
Speaker 3: Some are wordless. Some have all words with a few pictures. It's even hard to come up with a definition, a working definition, although you know it when you see it.
It's like pornography, so it's great.
Speaker: Yeah.
So did you do a screenplay like Adrian suggested or no?
Speaker 3: There are like, I did, we do a page of notes. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And the notes would be a description of things beats. I would want to hit, I think of it as comics of deets, and so I go, I want to hit this beat where my character says this, and I want to have this beat where, Oh, it looks like this. I knew I want to have several pages that are full page with this. Giant looming monster murderer. . . . So
Speaker: That's how we did it. . There's a number of chapters in here. You got what, nine, 10 chapters? Something like that. Did you structure the story out that way, or did that just, I come Okay.
Speaker 3: That I did, so I knew I did the second chapter first. . And then I thought I should just do 10 chapters and see how many pages that'll come to and I [00:13:00] scripted that out.
So I had an outline. I knew what the subject of each chapter was going to be. Yeah. So in that sense, I had an outline. But that was, it was not an outline, conventional outline and a little hard to shop it around too, because my notes were my notes for chapters I had not yet penciled. Were
Speaker: rather rough, right?
Yeah, once you had two chapters done that's all really any publisher needs to see at that point like, oh you can sustain a story you can do the thing. Yep,
Did that make it easier for you to wrap your hands around? the story and doing it in 10 chapters.
So they're each, let's say 16 to 20 pages. And so it wasn't like you had to do 160 pages all at once. You had to do 16 pages at a time.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right. Like I said it's not my normal way of thinking to break a project down into its constituent parts and then do them in a linear fashion.
But I have learned that works. So it's a thing that you have to do [00:14:00] with ADHD mind. You have to look at the linear thinkers and go. Oh, I'm going to have to learn from them. They should do the same with us. They should be like, why am I not creative enough? How can I be more like you?
Speaker: One of the things I really appreciated about the book was how honest you were about your own fears and about. The trauma that you went through. And that's not something that you generally see in memoirs of comics, at least not from male authors. There's plenty of examples of trauma in comics, like personal trauma, but it's almost always women talking about, men tend to talk about incidents, right? Like when I think about most of the [00:15:00] memoirs. From men in comics, they tend to be like like Adrian, right? Yeah. Or Joe Matt, Joe Matt spends a lot of time talking about his masturbation habits, even crumb. It's here's a very specific part of it, but it's not dealing with the underlying trauma.
Speaker 3: They're they're very honest too, though. They're not afraid to make themselves look bad. Yeah. And that is definitely. There's some weird thing about comic artists and self
Speaker 2: loathing.
Speaker 3: I've noticed, I don't know what that is about. But you've got your, maybe some of the giants are these self loathing individuals.
The Crumbs and the Joe Matt. Joe Matt died during my production of this. Went back and looked at him having gotten pretty bored of him and his masturbation stories. The years ago in the nineties, I was like flip this aside and I don't need to read another of these books by this guy.
And then he died. And I thought, Oh, I should go back while I'm working on a graphic novel. I should go and look at Joe man. And I'm like, this guy's amazing. He was an amazing artist, an [00:16:00] amazing cartoonist. I had no idea until I myself tried to do cartooning and tried to reinvent my illustration style in a cartooning way, which is a whole other thing.
But I think those guys are all very honest, but it is true that my inspiration. Was people like Marjane Sartrapi. Yeah. And also my mentor at CCA, T. Bowie,
Speaker 2: her
Speaker 3: book, the best we could do. Yeah. Yeah. It's like that.
Speaker: Was it hard to plumb the depths of your own
Speaker 3: brain on this? No. Okay. No, because I do that all the time. Anyway. Yeah, I'm mostly like walk around doing this in my head So this was like to do the con felt great because it's oh I spill out all this stuff that my brain is Ruminating on like I think I have a brain that ruminates like I'm just a little cycle the same thing over and over again You know what?
And then my art has always been a [00:17:00] way to put that out on the page But I think I had reached the point in my career where I was like, Oh, it's not really enough for me to make a single image. And in the comics, just, what a relief. It's like letting it out. Yeah. Yeah. Felt great.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker: And do you find that you're ruminating about it less?
About the murder less. Yeah.
Speaker 3: In fact, so one of my jokes I apologize to my friends who, who have all heard me say this, that my friends that are in the room heard me say this, that this book was a process for me of turning my trauma into boredom. Because there's just so much tedium involved, I'm just sitting there Oh my god, do I have to like what, where am I going to put the red when it's a red dot, which the first time I did it and put a little red dot for a blood drip, I'm like, was re traumatized myself.
Speaker 4: By the
Speaker 3: time I'm done, I'm like let's make it white instead of red. Like I'm just like, it's a technical problem.
And that was great. Yeah. Very healing. I recommend it for anybody with trauma. You should. Do a comic
Speaker: Yeah, I just you know, the [00:18:00] to me the question is just The amount of time that it takes to do comics right means that you're really living with it Like in a really intense way and particularly as you said you were doing this during lockdown.
Yes So you didn't have anything else going on? You might have had other things going on but right like your focus was on this that is that's that's a pretty big challenge. I think
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was it but there were especially the seat, you know what the scene where my character encountered the body Yeah was really hard.
I'll actually left it to last So I did that aft long after we were out
Speaker 2: And
Speaker 3: it was very painful to face and sit there ruminating in it day after day. Yeah, it was really hard and then you know, what else was hard was it was hard for me to give it off to my Friends who were children when we were, when, when we were 10, we were kids together.
They're now middle aged men like me. And it was hard to draw this [00:19:00] knowing I was going to have to give it to them.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Really anxious that I was read traumatizing them.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Last thing I want to do, but I still need to do this book.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: What was their reaction? One brother was very talkative.
The other brother was not. He just didn't seem particularly interested. He was like, Oh, this is great. Congratulations. Good luck. Please go ahead. You have my blessing. But not interested in engaging. But they didn't have any issue with you? Talking about no the events. Okay. No, but they did want to see the draft They want to see the draft.
They asked me to change the names.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yep. Okay.
Speaker: Yep Makes sense.
Speaker 3: Yeah, just a crazy life world we live in where you know It's like there's a risk that a very tiny risk that my book might become a hit right and then somebody might come stalking them and Harassing them for being victims of a murder, it's that's the craziest thing that we have to worry about That they have to protect themselves, but that's the world that we live in.
[00:20:00] Yeah, it sure is. Yeah you
Speaker: you're Therapist or psychiatrist. I don't remember which it is. It is a therapist.
Speaker 3: Yeah. He wasn't able to give me any drugs. That's how, I learned this. I learned this after I started seeing him that he couldn't give me drugs. I was very disappointed. He's no, I don't have that kind of degree.
What are you talking about?
Speaker: But he's a pretty significant character in, in, in the story. Were you seeing him still? Are you still seeing him while you're producing the book at all?
Speaker 3: No, only to say, Hey, I'm doing this book. Huh. And one, one of the, there were sort of two things he was always working with me about was like, one was overcoming my trauma.
The other was, when are you going to do your book? So it was pretty cool. I had at least work with him around 2018. And and then pop up years later. I'm like, Hey, I did my book, [00:21:00] your character. What was his reaction? Very positive. Yeah. Yeah. Very positive. Did you give him a draft as well? I gave him a draft and then I showed him the final.
I thought if he had anything he wanted to change or anything but he didn't. He just said, Oh, that guy sounds like a pretty good therapist.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. No, that was definitely the impression I got as well. I he came off very well in, in the way that he was
Speaker 3: trying to help you. Yeah.
And then I totally messed up. I forgot to put his name in the thanks. But yeah, he was a really good therapist. His name's Mark from, if anybody wants to go see him, look him up. Yeah, he was a very good therapist. And in fact, my, so my partner, Wendy, who's right here. Is a therapist. And I when we met, I said, Oh, you went to school where my therapist teaches.
He's also, he was my mentor or advisor. Interesting. That interesting. Yeah. Wow. Yeah.
Speaker: It's a small, it's a small world.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And he was a good therapist. And then there were also things times with him, it was hard. And I fired him a couple of times. [00:22:00] It was like you're out. I'm stormed out of sessions.
It was like forget you. Yeah, so he's not perfect
Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't
Speaker 3: think there's a thing I think that's an important thing that your therapist I liked him a lot, too He's also a friend.
Speaker 4: Yeah,
Speaker 3: And I miss him as a friend, And I think that's an important thing with your therapist that you They, you don't really want them to be your friend, but you want to have a personal connection.
Sure. And if you see somebody for 15 years, I saw him for 15 years. You will develop a really deep bond. I think it's important. And we, we, I put that in the book. We would make each other laugh.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah. He was always like, Oh, the other thing was that he was like standup. He thought I should do standup.
I'm like no, I do. I'll do author interviews, but I'm not going to do
Speaker: standup. It's yeah. It's the other place where the loathing as well. Exactly. Exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah. People love to witness your self loathing.
Speaker: Yeah. Cause we [00:23:00] all have it and we all feel it and we don't know how to express it necessarily.
Yeah. Seeing that other people are feeling the same things that, are in the, as they say, the long tea time of your soul. Yeah. It's helpful. Yeah. Yeah. It
Speaker 3: helps you to see another
Speaker: person. Yeah. Yeah, go through the same things you're going through.
Yeah, no, and and that was one of the things that I think that we all took from this book was the honesty that was on display about that trauma and really putting ourselves in your shoes and feeling that as well.
And it, I personally don't have any trauma that's specific like this, but it made me think about things in my own life and experiences that I have. And It's brave what you did. Thank you. Thank you. And I'm glad
Speaker 3: if it brings that out of you, it resonates with you that way.
And that's what I was hoping would happen is that because I feel like we're all there's that there's a part of the book where my therapist sort of awkwardly brings up this story about. Holocaust survivors and how one holocaust survivor feels he can never [00:24:00] discuss his trauma because he's aware that there's somebody else who had it even worse, and that's a real thing that we're all of us are going through carrying our own pain, knowing that somebody else has it worse.
It doesn't mean that your own pain doesn't need to be witnessed or shared or something. Or processed. I don't know what you're supposed to do with it. Get it out. Give it to somebody else to hold.
Speaker: Yeah. I think it's one of the, it's one of the fantastic things about comics is that you can, it can really put you in another person's shoes in a way that feels Very personal you mentioned, marjane satrapi before and that was one of the first books that I read that I walked into that book not knowing anything about the country How people's lives were and I walked out of it feeling like I actually had felt that part of you know Those experiences and that i've never there's a distancing that [00:25:00] I get from like film, right?
People make films about similar subjects, but it always seems so at arm's length. Whereas this is not arm's length. Comics are not arms length. Comics are very, and I think part of it is because the audience is the participant is a participant in, in comics, right? Without the audience. There is no comics in a way, right?
Because you're showing an image and you're showing a different image and the audience has to make the jump between one and two and figure out what's going on there. Yes. And so it's so participatory in that way that Other media really don't
Speaker 3: do it. Yeah. And there's also this idea, I can't remember where I countered this.
I guess I'm borrowing somebody else's idea is that comics are situated in an interesting, in between point between literature, textual literature and cinema, and combines the [00:26:00] best of both in the sense that with with with a movie. Go see a film and you get the visual depiction of the world as you know it to be And it resonates with you on that level, but you do not get the interior dialogue that you or the description that you get from reading a book from reading a book of text literature and comics has this ability to do both those things at the same time, it's like it is also a thing that in individual.
Can do still so it has this way of being potentially more punk rock than i think cinema can be sure where it's just any work of cinema even the smallest movie with a tiny five million dollar budget still has a five million dollar budget and it's thousands of people collaborating on it enormous pressures and concessions Where a comic you're looking at, it's pretty much one [00:27:00] person's brain spilled on the page.
And that's a great thing really is a great thing. So I'm really pleased that look at this book in this store. And there's I'm looking at this incredible diversity of different types of imagery.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: It's a little triggering for my ADHD,
Speaker: but hopefully in a good way, in a good way, like that, you're that you're in a Pantheon, right?
Speaker 3: There's a little part of my brain. That's wait, what is the rest of Scott Pilgrim's? I need to read those.
Speaker: I hear you. Let's talk maybe about the physical production of of the book. How long did it take you to get this done?
Speaker 3: About three years.
Speaker: Three years.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Three years. And maybe I'm hopeful that my next book might go a little faster.
So like I said, I draw on the Xerox paper. I I have a grid, a very simple grid that I print onto it so that I could at least get my panels close to the regular [00:28:00] size. And and I sketch on those. Then I have a technique. I don't, you know how a lot of people use that blue pencil and examples of the people that they draw comics, they draw a blue pencil.
And then they ink over top of it. I hate those blue pencils. I can't do that. I take my pencil sketch that's like small, and I had developed this technique from my illustration work, where I found that my sketches had this energy, and I was always like, how do I maintain that energy, that sort of authenticity, when I go larger for my final.
And oftentimes there was something lost in the translation from small to big. So in my illustration work, I take even sometimes a tiny thumbnail and I print it in light blue ink on to Bristol paper and work and draw directly on that. So I just applied that technique to doing comics.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So instead of blue pencil.
It's blue ink from a scan of a pencil sketch. And then there's often a [00:29:00] lot of transformation in that ink state. That's very different from the pencil.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cause that the thumbnails are all about gesture. Yeah, about immediacy and yeah, when you start inking, then you have to start getting into the details and a lot of little just, yeah,
Speaker 3: and a lot of times you're like, oh, that is completely has no oh, that body would not work.
Although that's a great thing about comics. You can really draw ridiculous figures where like with a giant hand or bendy arms. I love bendy arms. It saves my life. Yeah, I always like my characters to be made out of rubber.
Speaker: Yeah, their bones are rubbery.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker: That's the beauty of the cartooning part of it.
That's the cartooning part. Yep
Speaker 4: Yeah,
Speaker: I mean there's definitely artists. I don't know say a barry winsor smith something who's very accurate To reality and then there's
Speaker 3: cartoony. Yes, And most of us do the more stretchy cartoony [00:30:00] thing can I make one observation about that?
And i've always noticed this thing. With with comics that there's a way that they Just they simplify reality. I don't know. I see i'm not gonna be able to explain it So you continue with the other question and it'll cycle back into my
Speaker: brain. No, I think that's pretty accurate that you want you're trying to I think of comics And I don't make comics, right?
I just think about them a lot and can't talk about them. But I think about comics as as a way of it's like editing. You, you're not gonna, most people aren't gonna draw a car exactly the way that a car exactly
Speaker 3: looks. No, and if you did, it wouldn't work. That's what I was about to say, yeah.
That Sometimes when somebody comes to comics and they want to make, they don't really draw that well, or they're really challenged by it, they'll think, I know what I'll do, I'll photograph things, and then I will trace those photos. And there are comics that are made this way.
It's a really interesting book by the people that did, that create. This American life, the [00:31:00] podcast, and it break fantastic book explaining how they break down stories and pitch them and in the process of pitching the story, they discover the core, what is the, just boil it down to the very heart of the thing of why somebody should care about this totally obscure thing that you want to do a podcast
Speaker 5: about,
Speaker 3: and then, Build back from that, boil it down to its essence.
And so it's, I've forgotten the name of the book, but you can find it. It's a great book, but it, the process of they've made to create it is a comic format in which it's traced photos. And. And digitally done type and it's looks terrible. I would never have read this book except I was assigned to read it in school.
And then I was like, okay, I'll read that. And it was actually really informative, but it looks like shit personally, to my way of thinking, it doesn't look like what comics should look like because it's too photographic. And a thing I learned from [00:32:00] T. Bowie was she, the way she put it, the, she would study her pictures and then set them aside.
And then and, because she had lots of photo reference to describe the Vietnamese refugee experience, but no, don't put it aside and then ink it and draw it from memory. And it goes through a memory filter. And so I just learned from her. I did the same thing. I would study my family photos and then I would be like, okay, put those aside and draw my parents from memory.
And it comes out more authentic and more true, more real. Yeah. So there's some, is there something about. It has to go through that memory filter and then, Seth, the great comic artist, Seth there's a documentary about him. And he says, comics are memory machines. That it's, what it's doing is recreating the human process of remembering things.
Yeah, so I think there's something to that.
Speaker: Yeah. As I say, you're trying to get the perfect image and the next perfect image, and then there's connections [00:33:00] between them. And that's a powerful thing. You're, and you brought it up and I actually, I hadn't. Actually realize it until you brought it up that you are working on a pretty formal grid here Yeah, you've got three tiers in all of the book Except when it's full page.
Other than that, it's all three tiers all the way along three tiers.
Speaker 3: Yes Mostly, no, there's sometimes it's a half.
Speaker: Yeah, but it's still three tiers even if you're using Oh, yeah, even if you've got a big second panel,
Speaker 3: yeah, right Still in
Speaker: the
Speaker 3: grid it's still in the grid. Yeah, and you're not That's a different, that's a result of a different trauma, which is of being a graphic designer.
Like I see a grid everywhere I go, there's a grid. I'm always like, I'm always like going, I'm always like, I'm looking at these books on the shelf. I'm like, how can I align them up? Believe me, I go through that too.
Speaker: Yeah. And and it's essentially it's a nine panel grid. Just like the cover there's nine panels there.
And I
Speaker 3: really wanted to do that. I spent so [00:34:00] much time looking at comics and I was like, I want to do a nine panel grid. Like my heroes before me.
Speaker 5: Yes.
Speaker 3: Do
Speaker: you, does that structure make it easier for you or is it limiting in some circumstances? Oh no,
Speaker 3: it's wonderful. No, because you want to be, Constrained everybody wants to be swaddled, like we're all babies We all want to be swaddled again like we did when we were babies And so it gives you a way to be constrained something to some way to lock it in give you a limit Should be a limit.
If everything's too free, then you're like, I don't know what I'm doing here. I'm in this like soup of my own brain. But if you break it down and then you, and you say, I'm going to lock it into a nine panel grid. And then you're like, damn, that's not working. I can't make it fit in those nine panels.
Okay. I've got to have a good reason to do that, to break out of the grid. And then when you do, it's. going to have [00:35:00] more power. And then when you go to, from your nine panel grid to a single page panel, single panel. Then you really get a big punch, right? Yeah. It's just a formal technique that many people have used.
Sure. Yeah. But I think it's, it feels good. It's like putting on your little handcuffs, or like that, that artist, Matthew Barney, if you ever, if you're ever at the MoMA. And you're on the walkway. There's these weird marks on the wall and you're like, that's weird. Why didn't they clean that up?
I was left by Matthew Barney. And when he, and he would constrain himself by tying him a little rope to himself. And then he can't quite draw because he's can't reach because he's tied back. Yeah. Interesting.
Speaker 4: Yeah,
Speaker: That, that doesn't sound helpful
Speaker 3: to
Speaker: me to
Speaker 3: make it hard, but that's sometimes you want to make it harder.
You want to constrain, you want to put on these handcuffs and then the creativity comes out of solving against pushing back against those.
Speaker: No, I very much see that, when I think about the tradition [00:36:00] of American comics that are largely superhero comics. It's all about dynamism, right?
Like it's all about panels that go diagonal across the page. And, sometimes you're like, you, my, I can't follow this. Whereas a book, like when you're using the grids, there's no question about what comes
Speaker 3: next.
Speaker: No, ever. Yes. Very clear. What's happening in all cases. And yet though you are in a very solid, predictable grid.
You have absolutely no problems breaking your frame
Speaker 3: breaking out of
Speaker: the frame. Yeah, so like I said when he breaks out sticking out This is a good. This
Speaker 3: is a good page here. I'll show you this was a thing we and this I got a wonderful suggestion. This is why readers are so important So I was in my class with my fellow students at cca and somebody suggested this to me.
I had My character had fallen off of his skateboard And I had [00:37:00] drawn him with his hands sitting just barely outside the frame. And in the next picture, I had myself with my friends watching TV, but I had myself sitting in a cross legged. Fashion. And they said, it would really resonate if you had your character in the same position with his hands, just exactly mimicking that same thing.
And I'm like, of course, you're right. You're a genius. You should like, that's, I'm going to take that idea and I will get credit for it,
But I love that when you do break out of the panel your eye. So yeah. And that was a, by having the hand outside the panel and those two, it makes you remember.
My older self is my younger self. So to tie those two guys together, because they look pretty different. I'm going to say I used to have all this hair.
Speaker: I was going to ask him again. Oh, I know. In terms of, as you're working. And doing your thumbnails and laying out your page. Are you looking at it a page at a time purely, or are you going, these two [00:38:00] pages are next to each other.
So I need to have not continuity, but. But visual continuity, between the two pages.
Speaker 3: I do. I do both. But you have to do both. The page needs to stand on its own, and then you always need to remember it's on a spread. And then, that is another thing that comics have over any other form of literature, is you get to use the page turn.
Maybe poetry has that in some. Sometimes poetry is written, in a sense, to lay on the page in a particular way. And break the stanzas exactly how they're supposed to be broken, but any other book that you get that's literature, it's one long scroll and it doesn't really matter the page turn and as a comic artist, you get to use that.
So it's okay, the person is going to turn the page and then boom, or there's a beat, there's a pause. It's a pause, and yeah, so you get a rhythm to it. And then, but then the unfortunate thing is that also they are seeing that they're peeking a little into the future. Aren't they right?
Because they're seeing ahead. They're going to see. Oh, you're going to have [00:39:00] that big red frame with the evil murderer figure. They're going to see that before they read what comes before it. And I need to keep that in mind. But you do both. Yeah. Yeah. Do you draw comics yourself?
Speaker: No, I can't. I can't draw at all.
I'm an awful artist. I've tried writing a couple of things, but I just, I. I like talking about it more. You like talking about it more. That's an art form in itself. I'm suited obviously to own a bookstore because I can talk about it all day and compare different things. I
Speaker 3: think everybody does it a little differently.
Many people think about it differently. I know that some people, some artists are panel by panel. And they're much more focused on that little panel. And then they just assume that They're going to all work together.
Speaker: Yep. Yeah. And then you get guys like say Alan Moore, who not only are thinking about the units of the page, but also how a word on that closes [00:40:00] one page can transform what you're seeing on when you flip.
Then you turn the page, right? Like you look at it, but it's filled with these tense shifts or whatever, it's astonishing actually that I had never even realized that could happen until I encountered him in Moore's work,
Speaker 3: No, those are incredible book. Yeah I, again, it's something I'd never read that.
On my own. I read that assigned in, in my . Master's program. . Because I don't like superheroes. Sure. Even the dark take on superheroes. Sure. I'm like, there. To me, there's something like reactionary about the whole concept. Sure. That there's gonna be a Superman who's gonna come.
Speaker: That's literally the text of Watchmen.
That is, it's a critique. It's a critique
Speaker 3: of it, but it also contains it still too. So I was hostile even to the genre of even parody
Speaker: of it too. It's crazy, cause Zack Snyder made that Watchmen movie and he literally adapted it. Rather than understanding what it was about. And so [00:41:00] he made it sexy, the superheroes, like they jump out of planes and they land in their poses.
And it's that's not you missed it, dude. You totally missed the point of this thing. The
Speaker 3: show they did a show and I loved the show, which was a very, its own thing. And then it got canceled because it was too good. No, I can't, you shouldn't watch this. It's too good.
Speaker: I actually think that the the showrunner did his season and went, and I've said all that I can say, let's not ever do anymore.
It was, his choice is my understanding. It was not canceled. It was, he was like, that's my story. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah. No, I thought it was great. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. So you spend a good amount of time thinking about that page turner.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, very much. Yeah. Yeah. And I, again, it was like a thing of that's something I have always admired in the comic artists that I like.
Seth is a great example. I learned a lot from reading Seth, if you guys read Seth or his
It's a good life. If you
Speaker: don't, we can good life. If you don't, we can, it's fantastic.
Speaker 3: But even the later things the couple of later books [00:42:00] and they're fantastic.
Speaker 4: Yeah,
Speaker: they certainly are.
Was it a big jump for you because prior to that you'd only done two pages, right? Yeah, two pages. There's no page turn. That's true. That's a tool you didn't have before. Yeah. All of a sudden you're using this tool.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. It was felt great. . I was really enjoying that aspect of wow, I got a page turn.
. Cool. . . Yep. But it, it definitely was it, one thing I hadn't realized, but page management was gonna be an issue too. I, wow. In what way particularly? I sometimes lost pages cause I don't know where they went. I guess I accidentally recycled things that I thought, Oh, page management, like you've got to have them ability.
Finally, I realized. I got I went to went online and found giant magnets boards and put up giant magnet boards so I could go put my panel pages as I was working on them and see them all at once. And that's how I did it. But before that I had these sort of loose leaf. Floating sheets of paper [00:43:00] lying around and I was always losing them or getting confused about what order they went in or losing track of my thought, my process.
So once I had that, that really helped to be able to see it. And then also I, as I would finish an ink page, I'd put it up there so I could be like, okay, dopamine hit. Cause you gotta have feed yourself with a little dopamine. Sure. Yeah,
Speaker: sure. Yeah. I know a couple of people who who have they set up strings.
And they, the little clips. The little clips. Little clips, yeah. And you've
Speaker 3: seen, I've seen pictures of Chris Ware's studio . And his originals are enormous. They're like maybe 18 by 24 sheets. Yeah. And he, then he's doing, finishing them and then putting them up on these wires.
. Yeah. . If I had space, I would do that.
Speaker: But you're working at eight and a half by 11.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I for the pencil and then for inking and 11 by 17.
Speaker: Oh, okay.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay. Did you hand letter? I hand letter too,
Speaker 3: for that reason that we've talked about before that I feel like that the hand quality is part of the comic that it.
I developed this idea for a mouse years ago, reading mouse. And then as I was learning [00:44:00] more about mouse and he produced a book called meta mouse, where he revealed more of his process and, his earlier versions, you did like chapters of that book that are done in a more traditional, he's actually excellent cartoonist, very highly skilled cartoonist.
And there are pages that look way more Disney. The mice look more Disney. The cats look more illustrated and they're drawn large and reduced in a traditional illustration style, but he found that his sketches were more powerful. And so for the final book, That book is done on a one to one scale.
He drew all his pages for Maus at that scale, which is why they have that rough hewn quality, an awkward quality, where you can see him really trying to cram things into each panel. And what that does, it creates an intimacy. The book has an intimacy where you almost feel as if you have discovered somebody's journal
Speaker 4: Yeah,
Speaker 3: and you're read you're like [00:45:00] intimately reading.
Yeah is his brain. Yes, sir His journal or in a way, he's recreated his mother's journal. That was lost And so I've really thought about that and that's one reason why I insist on hand lettering is no it costs me a lot of time I feel that it gives that quality. I want somebody to feel like they just don't read my journals if you ever are at my house, but I do want people to feel like they've
Speaker: read
Speaker 3: my journal.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah, no, and it, I it works very well. That connection to the art to the line work with the lettering. It your handwriting is incredibly neat, though, I have to say. Oh, thanks. Yeah. Did you did it take you a while to be able to find the right balance?
Speaker 3: Nope,
Speaker: that was easy.
Speaker 3: That was easy. The only thing that was hard actually, so one thing I thought when I first started doing comics, that the scale of writing, cause I had to, I was drawing larger and shrinking down that meant my handwriting had to be larger, but then I would be like how much larger and I have inconsistency and inconsistency in this book in terms of the what would be the point [00:46:00] size of the text, it's huge.
Sometimes it's a little smaller. And so that is a little harder to navigate. That's still a challenge when you're hand lettering it to, to make sure there's a consistency and, graphic design must be consistent.
Speaker: Did you know that the book would be in this format?
Speaker 3: I was hoping it would be six by nine.
Yeah. Something like that. Yeah. Or that John and that size. I didn't want anything too large. I do love larger comics, but for this book, I wanted it to be smaller. I wanted more something that just a book size, whatever the book size is, as opposed to there's Dan clouds, Monica, which is a great book. But it's a little larger.
He designed it to be big, . Just a different, it's a different way of thinking. . .
Speaker: When you when you work on each, you go chapter by chapter, I'm assuming. Yeah.
Speaker 3: As you're
Speaker: working
Speaker 3: mostly,
Speaker: yeah.
Speaker 3: But it was done out of order. Okay. It was done outta order in chapter two then chapter 10 that, it didn't [00:47:00] get out of order,
Speaker: do you?
Do you go through and do your layouts all at once and then do your pencils all at once, then your ink?
Speaker 3: No. Yeah. So the, so each page is I'm working on pay or spread. We're going to be working on a spread. There'd be a little thumbnail of what that's supposed to look like. And then I would break that into the pages.
Yeah.
Speaker: How long would you say it took you to thumbnail out the book?
Speaker 3: Oh, I couldn't say. Honestly, I couldn't, I have no idea about time. Okay. Yeah. I always had that difficult, I still have that difficulty. I have a day job too, sure. Where I have a creative director with a nonprofit called the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and my clients or my coworkers will ask me, how long will it take you to create this?
I have no idea. time has no meaning. Like 10 hours. I don't know. ,
Speaker: Are you, I guess part of my question, are you doing like a page [00:48:00] a day? Is it taking longer? Once you're into the actual production of it, as opposed to the sort of conceptualization of it.
Speaker 3: Yes, a page a day seems fair. Yeah. I could do a page, I could pencil a page a day.
Yeah. If I was lucky. Yeah. But then there would be all that work before that. So I wouldn't know how long does it take? So for scheduling my next book, I will have to pull us some idea of my, I have no idea. Publishers are going to say, how long will it take you to create this book? I'll be like. Six months
Speaker 5: like I don't know
Speaker: Yeah we took you three years for the first one, right?
It won't take anything like that I was hoping for a year and a half. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah You already have an idea for the next book. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah a couple of ideas One is it like I've talked a lot tonight a bit about ADHD I don't have to do a book about it like life with ADHD. I don't know exactly what it would look like I wouldn't want [00:49:00] it to be too much of a science presentation, but I would also want it to be accurate.
So that's a little tricky because that means I'd have to read a bunch of books. Luckily, my partner is a therapist, so she can explain to me how ADHD works and I can put it into a comic. But and then I also, I'm still interested in this idea of ordinary trauma that we're all carrying around. That's what I call it.
It's just like you living a life. You got beat up when you were a kid. Cause you lived in a tough neighborhood or, in my case, the other ordinary trauma I had is my parents died. I think everybody goes through this. It's the most boring, banal thing in the world, but it happens to you. And you're like, my parents died.
Oh my God. This is like what you mean? My parents can die, yeah. So I want to do a book about that too.
Speaker 5: And
Speaker 3: my parents died in two very different ways. Like my mother died in a, like from like dementia. So that's like a long, slow bye, bye. Okay. I think you're dead. No, you're still [00:50:00] alive. And then my dad was like, I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine. Oh my God, I'm dying. So they, I have this great asymmetry in my personal family. And then another treasured member of my family saw what happened to my parents and was like, yeah, I'm turning 80 this year. So I'm going to commit suicide.
Does anybody want to see me? And wow. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. And so I was like, Oh, there's a book there.
Speaker: Yeah, I can see that. I can see that. Just a little more on craft. So if you're, if you can pencil a page a day, what about the inking? Does the inking take you substantially longer or? Cause you know I've met people who work both ways, right?
Like that the penciling is the really hard part. And then the inking is just, you turn off your brain and you just ink and other people who are like, no, I sweat inking takes me all the time in the world.
Speaker 3: That's a really good question. And yeah, I think I'd say it's a little bit of both. There's some pages I did really did feel like when it got to the inking, I was like, [00:51:00] now the hard work begins or this is really much harder.
I thought it seemed so easy in the pencil. Oh, I'll just have some detail back here. Some plants and I'm like, no plants. Cars. Oh, there'll be some cars in the distance. I like to draw cars. And so sometimes the inking was harder in that way, but mostly it's to the, but you said the hard work is the pencil breaking it down.
And then when it gets to inking, it's a little bit more like downhill. It feels a little bit like when you go on a bike ride and you get to the top of Twin Peaks and you're all exhausted and then you get to ride down. That's great.
Speaker: I love that. How about the lettering? Do you do the lettering?
Cause again, everybody does it slightly differently. Do you do the letter, do you do pencil, letter, ink? Yeah, okay.
Speaker 3: Oh, do you mean I do the lettering before inking? No, I stupidly leave the lettering to last. Okay. That was a bad mistake because then sometimes it didn't fit. Yeah. Yes. And so I would be, but luckily I'm a Photoshop expert.
So I just go in there and move shit around. [00:52:00] Okay. Incredible Photoshop skills.
Speaker: Yeah. So you're you're trying to stay as physical as possible, but there's definitely a digital step. Oh, there's definitely
Speaker 3: a digital step. And that is another thing I learned from my illustration career was I was always trying to maintain the aspect of like, how could I get the power of.
Digital work, the speed of it and the ease of that production method and also the how it goes to print so easily. But but not get that clean, that horrible clean quality you get from digital, things that just so perfect. Yeah. Sometimes I feel like digital art is you know what a clean room is.
We're like, yeah, we're like, there's this room you go in and it's perfectly sterile and clean. There's no dust. There's no dust. There's no bacteria. You shouldn't even breathe. Can't sneeze in there. And and I feel like the computer is that world. I spend a lot of time in that world for my day job.
And then when it comes to making art, I want it to have. I want it to be messy. I want it to [00:53:00] have the rough tune, intimate quality of a drawing, but then I still want it to be to do digital. To do another layer of color. That you're going to do digitally because you know who wants to use paint For a comic people do it people are crazy so I'm gonna do the color digitally, and that's how I that's how I do I would scan it move the things around make sure the speech bubbles aren't too crowded And then I go in and add my second layer of color.
Speaker: Second layer of color. So
Speaker 3: you're, you do a, an earlier layer. No, there's a black and white and then there's a layer of color. And then there's often like a couple of light color layers because. In Photoshop, there's like multiply mode and there's screen mode. Okay. A lot of people don't know about screen mode.
So if anybody here is a comic artist, mess with the screen mode, put color on a layer and screen and it, it will turn your black lines [00:54:00] to whatever that color is. So I just do that. It's one layer for multiply one for screen. It's the most basic. I use it's true that I am a Photoshop expert, like I teach Photoshop sometimes, but the methods that I use in my own work, I teach on the first day of Photoshop class, like it's like Photoshop 101, basic,
Speaker: Simple.
Did you did you have the color theory
Speaker 3: of the book from the beginning? Yeah, from the beginning, yeah, that was the concept. It's gonna be a black and white with one other color, mostly blue, and then I'll use red. For the scary parts. Yeah, because I thought like red is like scary. Yeah. Yeah
Speaker 5: No, it
Speaker 3: is. It is a scary color Yeah,
Speaker: And how much Messing like with filters and brushes and stuff like that.
Brushes and stuff.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So here, there's a page you have right here. There can see this page here. There's a texture behind this [00:55:00] blue. I do that in procreate with a brush, oh my God. The simplest thing, keep it simple. I, sometimes I think a lot of times people are making art and they comp, they think, and I've seen this with when I've taught.
I'll have a student and they have big dreams for their project. And they think I'm going to get a computer and the latest brushes, and that's going to make it really good. No, it doesn't. That's not what makes art good. You make the art good. If it doesn't sing as a thumbnail, it's not going to work when you make it fancy.
So
Speaker: Does this understanding come out of your day job?
Speaker 3: Sure.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yes. Graphic design. Anybody. Everybody should just do graphic design because it's a way you will learn how to boil it down. Take out everything that's superfluous get it down to the core and then build up again from there. Yeah, it's a very powerful Mind method to look at world the world as a [00:56:00] graphic designer Unfortunately, then you also end up looking at the things going like that typeface is terrible
Speaker 5: It's like
Speaker 3: a total curse, I can't even go see a movie anymore They used to have beautiful typography in the movies And currently movies have terrible typography and any graphic designer will tell you, I can't buy a bottle of wine because the labels are all ugly.
So there's a bad side to being a graphic designer, but there's a very good side, which is, I feel it brings a certain clarity and simplicity to your understanding of things.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. And I'm assuming that the coloring was a relatively speedy process. So you can do
Speaker 3: totally two or three or four.
That's downhill. Doing the color work was downhill. So fun. Save that for last to get the dopamine hits. Yeah. But then I did also find you can't overdose on dopamine. Don't dose your dopamine little bits because if you do it all at once. Then you're [00:57:00] going to, your brain will crash and you won't want to work on your pencil pages.
Yeah.
Yeah,
Speaker: It depends on the creator too, I was talking to clouds about not Monica, the one before that patients and he told me that he did patients. He literally started at page one and penciled it all the way through from page one to page 400. Then he went back to page one and started lettering it from one to 400.
Then he started inking it from one to 400 and then he colored it from one four and i'm like How can you do that? How do you not lose interest at page 300,
Speaker 3: But then we know from his work that he's insane. Yes. So that's probably what that is. But he also ran into him.
Sometimes he's, I see him in a cafe that I go to sometimes. And I'll say, hi, Mr. Klaus. I'm a fan. He's like the most normal person. So he gets it all out in his work. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, he's really approachable too. I think, oh, he's so friendly. He was so nice you're like i'm having [00:58:00] this awkward.
I had this I have this so I have this friend Can I tell you a story of that? Okay, so I have this friend some of you guys here might know who i'm speaking of who was a san francisco radical subversive weirdo famous And he had he went by the name Nestor Machno, but he had a real name, but I won't say but his anarchist name was Nestor Machno.
And he used to put up these flyers and this guy would just did nothing. I'd never had a job. I don't know how he lived in the mission, but he lived in the mission. He would always just be walking around. And so we became friends because I would always walk around the mission too. And he's really interesting, smart guy.
We'd have these really interesting conversations, but he'd just be going on walks and he'd just be sitting there thinking about how rotten the world is, how stupid people are, how terrible our systems of government and economy, just people's culture, just seething. [00:59:00] With a resentment and a disgust and everything before him, including me.
He unintentionally dumped me as a friend because I'm disgusting. And but this guy was just such a character, and I was friends with him because of this. He just a fascinating, brilliant. Miserable person. Yeah, and Exactly like a clouds character, right? Yeah, exactly Is that what who his characters are like wilson or any of the there are all these miserable white dudes who went around like With incredible articulation. So my friend was incredibly articulate as well. And But the weird thing, this guy looked EXACTLY like Dan Clowes. If you saw him from Am I right, Russell? This dude looks just like Dan Clowes if you saw him from across The room you would be, there's, oh no it's Nestor,
Speaker: so interesting.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And so I ran into Klaus at this cafe. I started trying to tell him the story and I get partway through. I'm like, this is no, [01:00:00] I got it. I'm sorry. Okay. I got to go. Bye. He's very politely going, Oh, that sounds
Speaker: fascinating. Yeah. It's it's certainly interesting to me that I find that most men in particular start getting more and more calcified as they get older.
They get more and more rigid, they get more and more locked into into one thing. And this is one of the things that I That will happen to me. But it's one of the things I like about the book is that It shows change, right? Like it shows growth and change that you're confronting things that were really hard for you to deal with and you came out the other side.
And I don't know, I don't know that I've ever read a comic that was a was a better. Endorsement of therapy.
Speaker 3: Oh, wonderful. Thank you. And that was one of the reasons why I would do what would think therapy is a wonderful, magical thing. I don't do it in myself anymore. Other people should do it, but it's great.
It's no, it's great. My partner's a therapist. And [01:01:00] so you can work with her if you want.
Speaker: I guess I could ask the question, is it hard living with the therapist? But I'll, I think I'll, I think I'll leave that there's a
Speaker 3: scene in my book, there's a scene in my book that is where my therapist's partner is an off screen character. Which isn't true. I have no idea. I don't think his partner was ever around when we're in our sessions But I put that in there because that's my life now It's like I'm always like turning on the noise machine so that she can have her sessions Privately.
Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah, so One of the last things I want to ask you About the book is
the notion that spoiler alert, that the murder is eventually caught or identified. Yes. And it's through stuff that I would. I think in your day job is one of the things that EFF is like [01:02:00] trying to oh, yeah yeah, so there's a real conflict for you kind of person.
Yeah
Speaker 3: No, that's interesting. So mostly I have this wonderful day job. Like I said working for this incredible nonprofit Where we're like currently suing the government over Doge and their privacy violations. This is I get to go to work every day and fight Elon Musk. What?
Speaker 4: It's
Speaker 3: incredible. But I don't agree with my coworkers about everything, and I don't agree with my organization about every single thing. And there is a an objection that EFF has to this use of these databases as a de facto way for the government to have access to all of our DNA, and there's, I can't remember if there are laws against this, but they certainly, the government does not control a database of everybody's DNA.
And that is. I believe because groups like EFF have fought against that for so long. It's just a very bad idea. But what we've now done is we've said, Oh, there are giant databases of [01:03:00] everybody's DNA that are controlled by private companies. When the government wants that information, all they need is a warrant or maybe even just a court order or they can go get it right.
And so that is a, where we've slipped. accidentally into this world in which we're all exposed all the time. In my case, it had a very positive effect. And many other people I've, I've encountered a few people through doing this book who have had a similar story that a murder or a murderer was identified because of this method is becoming more and more.
Common.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And there is something very, I was surprised by this how important it was for me to have a name. Yeah. To put on this guy. Isn't that weird? Yeah. I don't know why that was. I don't think it's
Speaker: weird at all. I think it's absolutely normal and human that you wanna understand it and Right.
You understand things by naming. Yes.
Speaker 3: And you want the closure.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: You want the closure. People want closure.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: And that was one of the things that a lot of people, when I have objections to people having their weird conspiracy theories [01:04:00] or, projecting that maybe the husband in this case had been a murderer, it was because they didn't have closure.
They couldn't say who it was. . And they need, we need closure. . We, it's really important for us to be able to have an answer. And that sometimes you can't have an answer, sometimes you don't. But when you can have one, it's very important.
Speaker: Yeah. Is this something that you now, I don't know, debate at work with your co workers or?
Oh,
Speaker 3: No. They know never to debate with me. Okay.
Speaker: Yeah.
Yeah. I'm just, I, cause there's a dichotomy between your work and your own. Yeah. Human thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know. But that's but that's how, but that's that's normal. Can you imagine working at the ACLU? At least I don't work at the ACLU, they defend Nazis.
But one thing about, I've been an activist my whole life. It's not new to me to be working politically. Yeah. In fact, that was what drew me to this. I started working there, they advertised for a job. The title was designer slash [01:05:00] activist. I was like, oh, that's me. That's what I do already, that's what I'm doing.
And and in activism, any kind of political work that you do you really very quickly have to set aside this idea that we're all on the same page. We're heading in the same direction, on this project, but we don't all agree on everything and if everything's a coalition and within the coalition that, that supports EFF are many people that I very strongly disagree with.
There are many like techno libertarians that are big funders of the organization where I work and I may agree with them on certain issues, not on others. And that's just, that is actually the heart of politics that you have to find a way to work with people that you don't always agree with and work on the things that you do agree with and disagree on where you don't, or in that other case, with the tech companies.
EFF will sometimes be like. Good job, Apple, by refusing to give up, your customer's privacy to the government when they come knocking. You will not [01:06:00] build a backdoor into your encryption. Good for you, Apple. We stand with you. Another moment, Apple is like, we built a very nice walled garden and you can't have the code.
And we're going to control all of your software and your hardware and We won't sell you a book. We'll license your right to display it on an approved device. And we very strongly disagree with that and criticize them there. So that's just, that is literally politics.
And then, I think we're all in a moment now we're having to become more political. All of us, everybody here has to be an activist now. Sorry. Bad news for sure. Yeah. Yeah. It,
Speaker: It feels like once it was all simpler, I'm sure it was never simple, right? But it feels like it was, right?
Speaker 3: Yes. And is that because the digital world is absorbing everything? Yeah. Is that why? I think so. I think it's like the digital world, which at one time seemed like it was contained inside our devices. It's now everywhere in us. We're, this is a digital, it's instantly going onto the internet and many [01:07:00] stores are tracking their people.
They walk in as you walk in a store and they have a little secret tracker that says Oh. I see what your social media profile is. And eventually they'll be able to be like, Oh, you are a high earner. So you're a lower, more likely, right? Those people don't get any attention or even
Speaker: how long someone spends in a particular rack or looking at a particular thing or where your eyes go.
It's, there's a lot of scary implications in so much stuff. And, to me the scariest part is just, as we say, the insinification of of that, where people are more concerned about how they can monetize us. Then actually doing something that's better for us, that's why I love living in a world of print and real things.
I like the world of real things. I want
Speaker 3: people to be able to read my book digitally if they want to, but it's much more about, you've got to be able to smell a comic book. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah. I also think that, to go back to what you were saying about the frame and the boundaries.
I think that is a part of the comic, right? Taking in [01:08:00] that whole page, the page is the unit, the panel is not the unit, the panel, you can break a comic into panels, but the page is actually the unit, cool, I think I asked most of my stuff, so I want to turn to y'all in the audience, does anybody have any questions for Hugh here?
Speaker 7: You said you took three years to do the book. Was there ever any time during that process where you got to a page and said, I know I wrote it this way, but I can't do it this way. Did you find yourself doing a lot of rewriting as you went?
Speaker 3: Oh, definitely. Yes. Many times. Yeah. And I'm trying to think of when would, can I see that book?
This would be a good example of that. Some of these chapters just came right out exactly how I had them in my head and I thought, I'll pencil it and it came right out. So there's a chapter here about my high school reunion. It's called Go Wildcats. And I'm here I am at my high school reunion, [01:09:00] going and talking to my former friends people I haven't seen for 30 years.
And and that came out really easily. The chapter that's called The Black Hole. So this chapter, I have myself encountering this sort of black hole, metaphorical black hole. I had to draw these over and over again. I could not get that black hole to look right. I couldn't get the figures interacting with it correctly.
I'd be like, I would have planned for many times for a scene to exist in a single panel and on a nine panel grid. But no, it's not, it won't fit. It will. I can't say what I need to say in that panel. That means all the panels before it need to get scrapped and reorganized. And all the time I had to do that.
And then sometimes I've drawn it so nicely and at one panel and now I've known, so I've expanded it into a wide panel, but if in my head, originally it was a vertical and now I had to make it a [01:10:00] horizontal and it's all ruined. All that work is lost. Is there some way I can save it? I'll try to save it. I know.
I'll photoshop it and stitch it together. Doesn't work. Gotta redraw it. It's just all the time. That's doing comics. That's just, there's no way around it. It's it's so inconvenient.
Speaker 2: Inconvenient.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And time consuming. Persnickety. Snickity. That's a good word for snickity. And if you have ADHD, it's even worse. I'm so self pitying about this. These little pieces of scraps of paper and post it notes. And Oh my God, I can't even, it's terrible. No one should do it. No, that's not true.
Speaker: Everybody should do it.
Everybody should, but if they didn't, I'd be in a, they have my sympathies. I have
Speaker 3: my sympathies when they do.
Speaker: Yeah. I hear that. Do you have a follow up? No. Okay, thanks. Anyone else? Please.
Speaker 6: One of the bits from the comic [01:11:00] that really resonated with me was your character and your pop talking about masculinity and struggling with masculinity.
I was curious if that part of the story was resolved or gained new thoughts and new perspectives with the, not the solving of the murder or the the identification of the murder. Or if that has resolved in different ways than yourself.
Speaker 3: Oh, that's a good question. No, I wouldn't say, I wouldn't say that information about him.
It made me feel, but it did the information about the murderer did shine a light. It was like a little light went on and it was the actual final straw that made me go, I need to make a book about this because I could see the arc of the narrative and how it could, it tied the story up in my head. I had been playing around with the idea of doing a book, but then that happened and that was in 2018 or 19.
And I was like. Oh, now I've really got to do this book. But I, one thing I would say too, though, is that I didn't really [01:12:00] set out to do a chapter about masculinity and it just emerged. It just spilled out. I was like, Oh no. Cause that's right. So it was almost like that was work that I didn't do in therapy.
That was work I did Therapeutic work I did in the process of doing the book, which was interesting Yeah was interesting to me, and I wanted to give that chapter I wanted to give credit to my mom in a way I felt like the book is a criticism of my parents for sucking so bad at parenting that they didn't get me therapy but then I wanted to give my mom credit for wow, she actually did a really good job of gently prodding me to shift my thinking about these things about feminism.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah. Also parenting, I think was a lot harder than it is now.
Speaker 3: I don't
Speaker: know. I have no
Speaker 3: idea. Why would anybody have a child? That's crazy. Oh, cause they're awesome. They are. There's a kid here. I saw a child in the, how you doing Jack?
Speaker 5: The [01:13:00]
Speaker 3: best people. They are until they grow up.
The weird thing is realizing that you're, there's really actually are no grownups, that was a strange thing for me to realize when I was in my twenties oh, there's no grownups.
They're just children that got bigger. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: And some of us get to hold on to it. And then they have the nuclear
Speaker 3: codes
Speaker: or whatever, like you're just like, this is crazy,
Speaker 3: but that's the world. Any other questions?
Speaker: Anyone
Speaker 7: did the experience make you put you off of the idea of ever doing another one?
Or is this like one and done?
Speaker 3: Oh no, I wanna do more. Okay. Yeah, I wanna do more. Yeah. 'cause I'm a masochist. .
Speaker: Also once you start building up those muscles like then you've gotta, you've gotta use them if Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I'm a really skinny superhero.
Speaker: Yeah. , I'm sure that before you started this, you.[01:14:00]
You didn't know half of what you know
Speaker 3: about comics. No, that's absolutely true. Yes. Yes. The process of now and then, and it's also ruined reading comics for me now because I look at him and I'm like, Oh, I see what you did there. I'm like reading them and I'm like analyzing how they do it.
I have to read it once to get the story and then go back and examine Oh, I see. You didn't sit, you just alluded to the story, and then you drew it in the picture. That's a big part of comics. Is it's not in the text, it's in the picture and the correspondence the balance between the pictures and the comics yeah.
No, that's the magic of comics. Yeah, that's where it is, right and I think a lot of times many times people start doing comics and they've written it all in advance the screenplay mode And they, it's a text document and it needs to get shattered and turn into an image, half image, 75 percent image.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. When I talked to cartoonists who [01:15:00] are, who talk about that screenplay mode and I, they're the people who I just don't understand but you made it rigid by doing this and comics are about fluidity. It works, but it works. Yeah. But
Speaker 3: yeah. And then I think there may also be a thing that happens when.
You get like they would say, like Mozart would just could visualize the whole piece in his head all at once, and maybe when you get, you've done a, done it a bunch and bunch over and over again, it's almost like your brain already just works that way.
These guys, the Hernandez brothers, right?
That's how they work. They just they just start at the beginning and go and see where it takes them, but they're so fluid. They've been doing it their whole lives. Decades, 40 years, these guys have been making these comics. More than that, I think. They're at
Speaker: 50.
Speaker 3: They're at 50 years now.
It's an incredible achievement. Yeah. And and that's just how their brain works. They would they would, they dream in comics. Yep. Yeah. I don't dream in comics yet. Yeah.
Speaker: Keep doing it. You might, though. [01:16:00] All right any last questions from anyone? Yeah, please.
Speaker 8: Not like I have an opportunity to ask you.
Speaker: Huh.
Speaker 8: No, really,
Speaker: Really nail him on this one. Come on.
Speaker 5: Ha. You
Speaker 8: know, I was there for the process and certainly watching this amazing growth as an artist and as a human being that was just a real treasure.
Speaker 2: And it's
Speaker 8: interesting, too, to listen to you talk about some of the areas, some of the pieces that were more difficult. were also some of the pieces, like, how do I draw the black hole?
How do I relate to the black hole metaphorically and literally in my material? I feel like those two processes are so distinctly both symbolic and literal.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 8: And I was curious too, I hadn't really thought about it that way, like some of the harder pieces, or the harder chapters, or the harder aspects of writing it.
You know how often did you find that it was also [01:17:00] linked to
Speaker 3: how hard it was emotionally? Yeah, that's a really good point Yeah, I think it's I think probably most of the time so maybe that chapter about my high school reunion is a little easier Formally it was easily easy to do formally Because also emotionally it was easy.
Yeah, that's I hadn't even thought of that So I think I do think that's the case, but then also sometimes it's just hard to draw a car
I'm an illustrator. I've been an illustrator for 30 years every time I have to draw a car I have a little panic attack. I like It is literally the worst thing to draw.
It's like machinery But then it's all like at least a machine. I'd rather draw a motorcycle, but the cars are just so what's the edge of it? Where does it start or begin? It's all reflective.
Speaker: You said you got, and that really was an excellent question, but you should be doing this. Yeah. You say you've gotten, A [01:18:00] couple of ideas for a couple of different books. Have you started work on any of them or are you still in the formulation stage?
Speaker 3: I just sit around ruminating on them.
Yeah. When I go for walks, my brain just cycles through it and I think, Oh, that's going to be a good beat. That's a good beat. That's where that story point. And I start taking notes, start writing, have a text document where I put things into. But I really haven't. My next thing that I want to do is a self, just a self published collection of shorter works.
So I said, take a bunch of those two pages that I've done over the years and put them all together. Yeah.
Speaker: Nice. I given that this is your first long work and how strong it is I really have to say, I cannot wait to see where you end up as. a cartoonist, like at book five, because if you're this good
Speaker 3: now, I'm this good at 55.
Imagine how good I'll be at 60. Yeah. No, but
Speaker: I think so, I think that doing a work like this, not [01:19:00] just not just the craft, but the emotional work of it is such a heavy lift and you pulled it off in a really spectacular way. And I think you've got, good things coming, kid.
Thank you, . Thank
Speaker 3: you. That's so you to say. Yeah, I really do appreciate it,
Speaker: but I'm, it's really sincere. I'm not just Yes. Blowing smoke. I truly think that. I cannot wait to see what the next thing will be. All right. Then let me wrap this up with much like the first question, which I do in every thing.
I have a similar last question. And that is, is that as we've been doing this, I've been doing these interviews for almost 10 years now to a month. That's 240. So we've got a lot of people who watch the series of interviews who want to make comics themselves and who, but who are like, but I'm not good enough.
Yeah. And I, I don't know that I can do it, or I don't know, I don't know that my emotional truth is true enough, or emotional enough or whatever. And they're scared, so what might be The advice that you would [01:20:00] give someone who thinks they have a story inside of them, but doesn't know where to start or if they should start or If anyone will even like them once they started.
Oh i'm
Speaker 3: glad you asked that because you know I meant to bring this today, but I didn't bring I have a self published book little mini comic Called making friends with monkey. And I can share that with anybody. If they want to write to me and find me through my website, I can sell you a copy. It, it describes that very question of how to develop your creative mind.
And I project my concept of a creative mind as a little monkey. That you need to become friends with and the thing about that monkey is he's incredibly creative and everybody has one in your brain you think you're not creative at all but what my belief is that when you go to sleep every single even the most boring person in the world Like take an accountant, somebody who just works with numbers all day.
[01:21:00] That person, when they go to sleep, they have fantastical dreams. So it's in there. There's a little, and I project it. I imagine that it's a little monkey. It's like a master film director. That's a creative genius. That's inside your brain and projecting these little dreams at you while you sleep. And then when you wake up, he goes to hides.
So how do you make friends with that monkey when you're awake? And that's the creative process of how to tap into the creative mind that is just there. It is there. It is part of your basic cable of being a human being. If you're out here walking around, you can have a conversation and you dream.
You have a creative genius inside your brain and you just need to find it. Get friends with him. But the thing is that he will hide at the little monkey. If you are getting angry with him, you've asked the monkey for, to give you some sketches and he gives you a bunch of crap, and you're like bad monkey, fuck you.
And the monkey's like, all right, see ya. I'm out.
He's [01:22:00] not coming back for a while, but then he will come back. But you have to be, you have to set the food out for him, and you've got to give him a little fun task that he wants to do. He will come to the fun task and then go away, come back.
And maybe if you call to him and feed him at the same time every day, he will show up on a more regular basis and he will give you access. To these wonders that are inside your brain. They're just locked up So that's I think that probably the best answer I can give to that because that but the way you frame your question There's a lot of different problems there.
There's maybe somebody might have technical problems or self esteem problems, or they may have concept problems or whatever Those will all solve themselves with regular show up 90 percent of the job is showing up and just keep showing up and it will it'll happen. And the other thing, last thing on that is everybody does not need to be the genius, the greatest artist ever, you [01:23:00] don't have to be like, I play guitar.
I'll never be a great guitarist. I just never, I was just not going to put the time in. I didn't start and keep doing it young enough, but I love it. It feeds me. It's very fulfilling. And if you do any creative pursuit, it will feed you and enrich your life immeasurably. If you're bored or depressed or sad or unhappy in any way, be creative.
Just do something creative on a regular basis and you will feel better. It's the solution. It's almost as good as therapy, and and it's there for you. It's part, like I said, it is part of your basic cable as a human being that got born with a brain. And the fact that we are cut off from that, or don't feel like we have access to that's the criminal society that we live in that has crushed it out of us through our education system, through our entertainment system.
That's constantly showing you, Oh, What music is this incredibly overproduced thing that I don't even know how they [01:24:00] make those sounds, and it sounds good a lot of the time, but it's like way beyond anything I could ever produce or create. I don't know, it's totally opaque to me.
How is a movie made? I don't know. But but start small, you do the little things and then it comes and you and it's there. It's part of the basic cable.
Speaker: Yeah I've been asked, asking that question probably 250 times. I think that might be the best
Speaker 3: answer
Speaker: I've heard on that
Speaker 3: whatsoever. Let me get, will you come carry my monkey book on consignment? Sure, of course. Okay, great. A thousand percent. That's easy peasy.
Speaker: Cool. All right. I got a little bit of housecleaning housekeeping to do here just for a second.
Bear with me. I have some things I want to make. I want to thank Jordan, my producer who does a bunch of stuff that none of you get to see but I could not have a show. With Jordan didn't do it. I want to thank Ben over there who was running the show. And again you're not seeing it now, but he was, moving the camera around and doing stuff and could not do without you, my [01:25:00] friend.
I want to thank my staff, I want to thank Kat and Katie and Chrissy and Max because they let me get away with doing this, right? I could not be able to sit and interview people about making comics if it weren't for them doing all the work in the store. Honestly thank them all very much.
I want to thank, I want to thank all of you people at home who are watching these shows who are members of the club. That, that level of, eyeball support and financial support allows us to keep going with this. So you are all really awesome. And I want to thank people like you because if it wasn't.
If you didn't make books, if the people who make all the comics didn't make them, I would be sitting in a store full of blank paper, which would really fucking suck. That would be boring. I don't want to run a stationery store. I want to run a store full of dreams and imagination and thoughts and emotion.
And I get to do it because of you. So thank you so much for that.
Speaker 5: My pleasure.
Speaker: I really appreciate that. If you're sitting at home and you want something to read you don't know, [01:26:00] you know what to buy. Get a copy of this. You don't have, you can buy it from us. There's a thing on the screen probably any second now.
We're happy to sell you one, but dude, go to your local comic shop, get it, go to the library and get a copy. This book will, it will fill your brain full of good thoughts and it will show you. A lot of hope and a lot of the ability to be able to confront your fears and to move past them in a way that I, it really touched us all.
Buy the book. Our next our next show for the adult club will be Raised by Ghosts. That will be next month. Or later in this month. Brianna Lowenstein is also local so we will be doing another show like this so I hope that everybody can come back for that as well. And then our our kids club this month is Bring Me the Head of Susan Lomond from Silver Sprocket.
Really fantastic book that shows why revenge is never Is never the path you want to take [01:27:00] I think that's a great lesson for kids these days. That's what I got for you all. Thank you all for coming. Thank you all for watching. Thank you for being here my friend it's been an absolute pleasure.
Thank you. Okay