Poking a Dead Frog: Conversations with Today's Top Comedy Writers (41 page)

Comedian,
Feelin’ Kind of Patton
;
Voice-Actor; Actor,
Big Fan, Young Adult
; Writer,
Zombie Spaceship Wasteland, Silver Screen Fiend

When you’re writing something, and it makes you laugh, don’t judge that. Even if it doesn’t seem to fit. If it made you laugh out loud, it probably belongs on the page. Let someone else see if they can make it work. In the industry, you’re always told about this imaginary ethereal audience, like, “People wanna see this, people wanna see that.” Actually, let me boil down what I just said even better: Have trust in amusing yourself.

The next step is always the same thing, and it’s actually very simple: Just keep going onstage. This is really helpful even if you just want to write, but especially if you want to perform. You’re not going to figure out what your next step is unless you do get up onstage. Just keep doing it, and the way will show itself. I know that’s frustrating to hear, because it sounds like I’m brushing people off, but it does come down to knowing it when you know it. And the ones that ask, “But what else?” never make it. It’s the ones who just keep going who eventually make it.

The right manager and agent will find you when you’re ready.

I know that it doesn’t sound like I’m being very helpful, but trust me, I’m being
extremely
helpful right now.

The sometimes fictional, sometimes autobiographical comic universes of Daniel Clowes’s books—he detests the term
graphic novel
—aren’t the idealistic utopias conjured up by so many of his comic peers and predecessors. There are no heroes, super or otherwise; no precocious children. His comics, much like Robert Crumb’s work, are about not-so-lovable losers who aren’t so easy on the eyes. These characters generally live in urban wastelands or mind-numbingly boring suburbs, where nihilism passes for hopefulness, football is understood as “sublimated homosexual rape and Oedipal hostility,” and sometimes dogs are born without orifices. He writes about characters with names like Needledick the Bug-Fucker, Hippypants, Peace Bear, Zubrick, Pogeybait, and Dickie: the Disgusting Old Acne Fetishist.

Born in Chicago in 1961, Clowes was by his own estimation a “shy, loner, bookworm kind of kid.” He first realized he could draw after attempting (unsuccessfully) to reproduce his favorite
Batman
covers. “I was convinced [the covers] were either done by a machine or they had a special tool that made the lines perfect,” he told the
Guardian
. “If I could get that tool, I too could create
Batman
comics.”

Clowes majored in illustration at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and graduated in 1984 with few career prospects. But he soon discovered the Hernandez brothers’ brilliant and influential
Love and Rockets
comic-book series at a local comics store and decided to submit some of his own drawings to their Seattle-based publisher, Fantagraphics. The editors there recognized his talent and quickly signed Clowes to their stable of artists and writers.

His first series,
Lloyd Llewellyn
(1986–87), a parody of 1950s gumshoe detective noir, lasted only six issues. But his next attempt, called
Eightball
, would evolve into a fifteen-year odyssey. Originally subtitled “An Orgy of Spite, Vengeance, Hopelessness, Despair, and Sexual Perversion,”
Eightball
was introduced in October 1989 and featured an array of bizarre story lines and controversial comedic rants, such as “I Hate You Deeply,” “Ugly Girls,” “Sexual Frustration,” and “The Sensual Santa.” Clowes became popular with the kind of people who had previously never entered a comics store.

His most famous series, first published in
Eightball No. 11–18
and then reprinted as its own comic in 1997, was
Ghost World
. Set within a suburb with no name and no distinctive characteristics beyond the usual detritus produced by chain stores and fast-food restaurants, it followed the lives of two teenage girls and best friends, Enid Coleslaw (an anagram of “Daniel Clowes”) and Rebecca Doppelmeyer, after their graduation from high school as they grapple with the inevitable by-product of the late-teen maturation process: melancholy. Enid feels disconnected from the “obnoxious, extroverted, pseudo-bohemian art-school losers” that surround her, and she ends up befriending a collector of 78-rpm records—a lonely, older male (is there any other type?)—who soon becomes her sole confidant.

When Clowes collaborated with director Terry Zwigoff on the movie adaptation of
Ghost World
, released in 2001, he approached the task with the same all-encompassing devotion he gave to his comics. It took more than five years and nearly two dozen drafts before they finally got it right. In the end, Clowes was Oscar-nominated, but didn’t win, for Best Adapted Screenplay.

“Dan has an astute, critical eye,” Zwigoff once wrote. “He’s been accused of being pornographic, nihilistic, misanthropic, sacrilegious, overly critical, and hopelessly negative. How would I not love the guy?”

In 2010, Clowes published
Wilson
, a book featuring seventy one-page gags about an unlikable middle-aged man. The long-time
Simpsons
writer George Meyer remarked: “Dan is somehow able to dip bucket after shimmering bucket from the roiling depths of his unconscious. Add talent and hard work and courage, and you create blazingly original art like
Wilson
. The book is heartbreaking, wistful, and joltingly funny. I’ve read it nine times.”

Is it true that your first professional published work appeared in
Cracked
magazine?

That’s true. I contributed to
Cracked
from around 1984 to 1989, though I think I only published one piece under my own name. For the other pieces I was “Herk Abner” and “Stosh Gillespie”—Stosh was the name my father originally wanted for me.

Any particular reason?

He worked in a steel mill when I was born, and several of his Polish co-workers had the name Stosh. Also, I think he was trying to bum out my mom.

As for Gillespie, it’s my middle name.

Were you even a fan of
Cracked
? And, actually, I should probably point out to readers that this was the first incarnation of
Cracked
, not at all similar to the current Internet version. This was for print only, and was, more or less, a direct
Mad
rip-off.

Nobody was ever a fan of
Cracked
. I was buying it at the time because I wanted work in the satire magazine field, but it was just a terrible publication.

Growing up, my friends and I used to think of
Cracked
as a stopgap. We would buy
Mad
every month, but about two weeks later we would get anxious for new material. We would tell ourselves, We are
not
going to buy
Cracked
. Never again! And we’d hold out for a while, but then as the month dragged on it just became, Okay, fuck it. I guess I’ll buy
Cracked
.

It was like comedy methadone.

Right. Then you’d bring it home, and immediately you’d remember, Oh, yeah, I hate
Cracked
. I don’t understand any of the jokes, and [
Cracked
mascot] Sylvester P. Smythe is the most unappealing character of all time. He wears janitorial overalls and carries a mop.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen
Sick
magazine—just one of many
Mad
rip-offs over the years—but they actually had an even uglier mascot: Huckleberry Fink. He was just so ineptly drawn that you didn’t know what the hell he was. I think he was a freckled hillbilly. And instead of “What, me worry?” [
Mad
’s Alfred E. Neuman’s motto], his was something like: “Why try harder?”
10

Were you given free rein at
Cracked
?

Maybe too much. The very first thing I published was a two-pager called “Aren’t You Nervous When . . .” which was a by-the-book
Mad
rip-off. One panel had a gag about noticing a fire engine heading toward your house as you drive home, and the only reference picture I could find was from an old children’s book. I remember my roommate looking over my shoulder and saying, “Aren’t you nervous when . . . you’re being followed by a fire engine from the 1930s.”

My friend Mort Todd was the editor in chief for several years, and we created some truly ridiculous material. We did parodies of TV shows that nobody our age, much less the nine-year-olds reading the magazine, had ever seen—programs like
Ben Casey
[ABC, 1961–66] and
The Millionaire
[CBS, 1955–60]. I don’t think we ever bothered with a show from our own era [the eighties], or even the seventies.

Did any
Cracked
readers complain?

Oddly enough, nobody ever wrote in to say, “What in the hell are you doing parodying
Dragnet
and [1950s sitcom]
My Little Margie
?”

Cracked
was a strange place. They had a consistent, revolving audience of nine- and ten-year-old kids who would innocently pick it up at the grocery store for a year or two before moving on. In the front section of each issue there would be photos of children holding up their issues of
Cracked
, or posing in front of giant Sylvester P. Smythe birthday cakes with confused, lukewarm smiles on their faces.

I also remember that one of the publishers had a vanity plate that read “Cracked Man.” Sad, but also kind of charming, I suppose.

Cracked
did achieve one note of distinction: It managed to somehow convince longtime
Mad
cartoonist Don Martin to leave
Mad
and join
Cracked
in 1988.
Mad
is still upset about this.

I know. There was some below-radar talk about lawsuits, but I don’t think they had any real claim. They were furious. Don had been there for more than thirty years.

I remember
Cracked
throwing this big, fancy dinner for Mr. and Mrs. Don Martin in an attempt to woo them over to the other side. Don’s wife was really a character. She acted as his agent and was angry about the way
Mad
had treated her husband. She thought
Mad
paid too little. They wouldn’t allow Don to own the rights to his own work. Companies would call Don and ask, “Can we make a calendar with your work?” and he’d have to say no.

Both were very happy to jump ship. Don received a little more money per page—I think a hundred dollars more—and he regained the rights to his own work, which was more important.

How happy was Don Martin at
Cracked
?

As far as I could tell, he was happy. I don’t think he ever seemed to notice that
Mad
was respected, whereas
Cracked
was loathed.

I left
Cracked
in the early nineties. Once my own comics started to get published by Fantagraphics Books—first with
Lloyd Llewellyn
and then with
Eightball
—I started to receive freelance offers from
The
Village Voice
and
Entertainment Weekly
and other magazines.

You became one of the first comic artists to contribute to
Esquire
magazine—or, really, to any major, mainstream magazine. What year was this?

Dave Eggers, who was an editor for
Esquire
then—but who had not yet written his first book [
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
, Simon & Schuster, 2000] or published the first issue of his literary journal
McSweeney’s
—wanted me to create a comic for
Esquire
’s fiction issue in ’98. The story was called “Green Eyeliner,” about a slightly unhinged young woman who was arrested for pulling out a gun in a crowded movie theater.

The fact that
Esquire
would even publish a comic for “adults” in their fiction issue was really a big deal, it turned out. No one remembers the actual specifics of that comic, only that it was published.

I wonder why it was such a big deal—your comics had been out for years by that point.

It was one of the many “comics aren’t just for kids and fat collector creeps anymore” moments in what has become never-ending fodder for journalists.

Did you ever imagine that you’d one day be producing covers for
The New Yorker
or have a serial comic strip in
The New York Times Magazine
?

Back in the early
Eightball
days? Never in a million years.

Your strip,
Mister Wonderful
, about a shy middle-aged man on a blind date, ran in
The New York Times Magazine
in nineteen installments, beginning September 2007 and ending February 2008. How was it received?

I’ve received more response to Christmas cards.
The New York Times
didn’t have a comments section on their website at the time, but the editors told me that they received some nice letters—although, of course, I never saw any of them.

It’s interesting: I’ll receive a lot more of a reaction when something appears on a small website than I will when something’s published in a major magazine or newspaper. The easier it is for a reader to contact you, the more responses you receive.

Maybe that’s a good thing. I have a feeling that a lot of the responses to
Mister Wonderful
would have been negative. It’s amazing how sensitive newspaper readers are when it comes to humor. If you look at the syndicated comics, you have to wonder who reads that sort of thing. One would think editors would want to lure readers back to the comics section again, but they’re just so terrified of one negative letter.