by Mike Sacks
Yeah. Around that time, I had read a quote from Charles Schulz that was something like, “A real pro cartoonist can sit down at the board for a few minutes and come up with a funny strip.” And so I was kind of testing myself to see how fast I could write a bunch of joke comics that were actually funny—at least to me. My dad was in many ways very similar to Schulz, and a big fan of Peanuts, and so in retrospect I guess I was trying to gain the old man’s approval.
Every story in Wilson is only one page. They remind me, in their rhythm, of syndicated comics or even Mad pieces. But the material is obviously much darker: death, failed hopes and dreams, inability to connect. It’s an interesting combination, similar to hearing canned laughter during a drama.
I’m blind to the darkness. I just genuinely thought the strips in the book were either funny or moving in some way. That format seemed to work for the character, but it’s unlikely I’d ever use anything exactly like that for another strip.
What do you think you tapped into while sitting in that hospital? Was it a meditative state?
It was more of a burst of creativity that you can have when trapped in a situation that’s both boring and anxiety-inducing. I used to think about enrolling in college courses in subjects I had no interest in so I would be able to achieve that state of restless boredom.
Early in your career, did you find that readers had a difficult time labeling you? The type of work you produced wasn’t your typical style of a traditional comic.
They still have a difficult time. I’ve been called everything from a graphic novelist to a comic-strip novelist to just a cartoonist. I’ve always preferred cartoonist, because that seems the least obnoxious.
I used to tell people I was a comic-book artist, but they’d look at me as if I’d just stepped in dog shit and walked across their Oriental rug. I never knew what to call myself, but I was always opposed to the whole “graphic novelist” label. To me it just seemed like a scam. I always felt that people would say, “Wait a minute! This is just a comic book!” But now I’ve given up. Call me whatever you want.
When you started, the graphic novel was such a new form. Growing up, where did you even find inspiration for something like this?
Well, there were a few people doing this as early as the seventies. There was a writer and illustrator named Justin Green who wrote and illustrated a comic book called Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, which was published in 1972. It’s about a young boy living within the strict confines of his Catholic upbringing as he deals with his sexual awakening and severe OCD symptoms.
Art Spiegelman has claimed that Binky Brown influenced his Maus books.
The Binky Brown comic was out of print for many years, but it’s not as difficult to find as it used to be. It is definitely worth buying. I was around sixteen when I discovered it, and, truthfully, I didn’t understand it at first. A friend told me that it was the greatest comic ever, but I was not raised Catholic. It was kind of over my head. Then I reread it when I was in my twenties and I really connected with it.
People say that Binky Brown is the first autobiographical comic book. I’m not sure if that’s exactly true, but, at the very least, it is extremely personal and wonderful.
What were some of your other comic influences when you were growing up?
I have a brother who is ten years older than me, and he gave me his stack of comics from the late fifties and the early sixties—a lot of horror and sci-fi and crappy superhero comics. I never watched TV until I was older. I was obsessed with a lot of early Marvel Comics and DC Comics.
When I was about twenty-one or twenty-two, I bought The Official Marvel Comics Try-Out Book, which had a bunch of professionally penciled comic pages printed on good paper. Some of the pages were unfinished to give young artists a chance to ink and color a “pro” drawing. It seemed like it would be fun to test my skills on a few pages of Spider-Man swinging through 1970s New York on his webs. That lasted for about fifteen minutes and then I started giving all the characters afros and exposed tits.
Which did you prefer, Marvel or DC?
I liked DC comics, such as Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen and Superman’s Girl Friend Lois Lane, because they were about “real” people, with the superhero stuff in the background. I never quite got into superheroes—except on kind of a Pop Art level. I just never got into the fighting. What I found more interesting was the romance and the attempts at conveying some kind of reality in this absurd universe. Like Superboy’s dad still working at the general store, even though his son could take over the world—things like that. My friends were the exact opposite. They used to say, “God, who cares about this romance? Get to the punching!”
And, actually, you know what I liked even more? Regular people yearning to become superheroes.
And perhaps failing?
Oh, that I would have found especially fascinating.
Was it always your intention to become a cartoonist?
I had no idea what I was going to do with my life. I really wanted to be a cartoonist, but there was no market for anything I was interested in doing. I just couldn’t see myself drawing newspaper strips or working for Marvel Comics. I remember waking up in the middle of the night and being petrified: What’s going to happen to me? What am I going to do?
I mean, to this day, I have no skills beyond those within the narrow confines of what I do.
So you were laying it all on the line for this?
My parents were like, “Are you sure you want to do this?” It was a ridiculous career choice, which I should have known early on in my life. Thankfully, it took a very long time to hit me just how ridiculous it was.
At what point did you notice that people were beginning to understand what a graphic novel actually meant?
For me, there was a sea change by 2001 or 2002, around the time the Ghost World movie was released. Average citizens like my parents’ neighbors started to say things like, “Oh, you do graphic novels! I love [Art Spiegelman’s] Maus!” A few years earlier, they would have thought of me as the lowest pornographer.
I assume you never had any interest in creating a syndicated strip for newspapers?
No, that’s a whole different genre—an entirely different genus of cartoonist. The ones I’ve met tend to be these odd, suburban, country-club types. And just because the format worked with audiences in the 1920s doesn’t mean it’s still the greatest idea today.
It’s not very appealing. To create these four-panel increments, day in and day out, week after week, I just don’t see how you could accomplish anything of note.
Were there any syndicated cartoonists that had an influence on you?
I guess Peanuts would be the obvious one, though I never read it in the paper. Nancy was the only strip I read every day throughout my childhood, and it had quite an impact. As the Mad cartoonist Wally Wood said about Nancy, “By the time you decided not to read it, you already had.” I think that’s something I always keep in mind with my own comics—always opt for clarity and simplicity.
You grew up pre-Internet. To what degree do you think the Internet has changed comics?
I’m not really sure. There are comics now being created on the Internet, but I’m not interested in reading that sort of thing. I’d just rather wait until it’s printed. I don’t like the aesthetics of seeing something like that lit up on the screen. That’s just my personal take on it—I don’t expect anybody else to not read Internet comics for that reason.
One thing I’ve found about the Internet is that it’s very distracting to cartoonists—myself included. Most cartoonists are just looking for any excuse for a distraction. This type of work can be so lonely and tedious and frustrating at various stages of the process.
If I had had a computer in high school, I would no doubt have become obsessed and literally thrown away twenty years of my life. I would not be here talking with you. I would be sitting in front of a TV playing Grand Theft Aut
o. I would have done nothing.
You really wouldn’t have become a cartoonist?
I don’t think so; I really don’t. I would have been way too busy trying to talk to girls in chat rooms. Why would I ever have bothered with comics? I can’t imagine.
Do you work alone?
Yes.
You don’t have assistants at your disposal, like many syndicated newspaper cartoonists?
No, no. I’d love to hire an assistant, but only to do the lowest shit work. I don’t have the right temperament to have an assistant. I’d feel bad criticizing them, and I’d wind up accepting work I wasn’t happy with.
I do like the idea of having a whole studio of artists and forcing them to draw in my style and cranking out these huge books every year, but I know I’d never be happy with that. They’d never get it right, and I’d wind up doing everything myself anyway.
Who do you bounce your ideas off of?
I don’t. That’s part of the fun.
I’ve tried in the past to gauge people’s reactions, and nobody is really honest. I’m not the sort of person who would encourage somebody to be brutally honest; I may really like what I created and not want to hear anything bad. I have to just go with my own instincts. They’re not always right, but I’d rather do that than be swayed by somebody who might just be in a bad mood or have these reasons I don’t necessarily agree with.
Also, the work becomes more specific if you work alone, more singular.
I’d think that as a comic-book artist you’d have to really commit to an idea. Once you put an idea down onto paper, it would be difficult to tweak it—unless you worked on a computer.
No, I draw everything by hand. But that’s right. To change it once you start the process is literally impossible—unless you just start over from the beginning.
What I’ll usually do is start with an outline. I try to get the beats of the plot figured out, and from there I just wing it. At a certain point, a cartoonist will have a sense of how long and what rhythm a strip should be. You don’t really need to break it down further than that.
Often, when I’m halfway through a story, I realize that if I went in a more promising direction, the strip would have been a lot more interesting. When that happens, rather than starting over, I switch gears. It’s exciting to work that way. It’s one of the few things about drawing comics that actually is exciting.
You never stop once you start?
I’ve abandoned a few things, but most of the time I try to keep going. That’s the thing: You can’t go back and redo it over again, because that’ll just dissipate your creativity; you lose everything that’s interesting and spontaneous. I could spend the rest of my life redrawing everything I’ve done, but it would just kill everything that’s good about it. That would be a total waste of time.
Isn’t that a strong creative urge, though? To want to make a work as perfect as possible?
It’s similar to when a musician isn’t happy with the quality of their early records and wants to record again with a better band. The original work is connected to a specific moment of time; it’s never going to become “better.” Even when I do a new cover for one of my old books, they always seem sort of condescending to the material.
I can understand the motives, I suppose. I’d love to go back and redo my earlier work. I can see the crudeness of it, as well as the potential, but I just know that it would not be better—it would only be slicker.
Actually, that was the great appeal of writing the scripts to Ghost World and [2006’s] Art School Confidential. The process was very fluid. The ability to just change a character’s name is something that no comic-book artist would ever have the luxury of doing. It would be such a pain in the ass to reletter somebody’s name or to reorder scenes in comics. I’d just say, “Forget it,” and move on.
With the Ghost World script, I made a million changes right up until the very last minute. We changed Steve Buscemi’s character’s name from Sherwin to Seymour the day we handed in the script for the first time, and I’m still not used to it.
How was Ghost World green-lit? It was unlike any other Hollywood movie dealing with teenagers I’d seen up to that point—maybe with the exception of Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Heathers.
Who knows how that film ever happened. It was the most cobbled-together financial arrangement in the history of film. It was held together by spit and Kleenex. It was very low budget. There are a million Sundance films made every year with this kind of money.
The screenplay for Ghost World is not your typical Hollywood fare. Even the action descriptions are different from what one would normally find in a script. For instance, this is from the very first page: “A large, hirsute man, wearing only Lycra jogging shorts, watches the Home Shopping Network while eating mashed potatoes with his fingers.”
[Laughs] When Terry and I wrote the Ghost World screenplay, we would take turns and hand it back and forth to each other. We were just adding detail upon detail to crack each other up. We showed one of our producers the first ten pages, and it was just packed with descriptions: “The high school graduation banner should be sponsored by Dunkin’ Donuts.”
Never in a million years could we have afforded the rights to Dunkin’ Donuts. The producer said to us, “You know, perhaps you should have looked at another screenplay before you started.”
It’s really a miracle this movie ever got made, quite frankly. A lot of people sort of missed the point of it.11 Both Terry and I were so green when we were pitching it. We would tell executives we wanted to make another King of Comedy [1982] or Scarlet Street [1945] or Crimes and Misdemeanors [1989]. Big mistake. The executives would look at us as if we were insane. It’s like saying, “We’d like to take $6 million of your money and shred it for an art project we’re doing.” The people who make the decisions in Hollywood are never the oddballs or creative types, so you have to tell them what they want to hear. It didn’t take long for us to start saying things like, “We want to make another There’s Something About Mary.” We had no intention of doing that, but you must at least make the effort to be reassuring.
You just mentioned a movie I’m not familiar with: Scarlet Street. What is it about?
It’s a noir movie, but to me, noir is more about a state of anxiety and profound loneliness—an awareness of the quotidian grimness of the postwar world. Scarlet Street is about a poor, ugly loser [Edward G. Robinson] who gets hoodwinked by a horrible woman and her pimp, almost willingly so, since even this cheap thrill is preferable to his emasculated existence with his harridan wife.
The original version, directed by Jean Renoir, is even better. The [1931] movie is called La Chienne, which translates to “the bitch.” I’m not even sure “the bitch” meant the prostitute, as much as life itself.
What is it about The King of Comedy that you like so much?
I think it’s Scorsese’s best movie—just a perfect little film. I enjoy anything that has an ending that is happy for the characters but is bad for us, the viewers. That ending knocked me to the floor the first time I saw it. I really wasn’t expecting it.
I also like any movie that deals with the ugliness of the relationship between star and fan.
And, of course, Jerry Lewis. I think he’s very appropriate for the role of the late-night TV host: wired, angry, very close to losing control.
I read an interview with the Asian actor [Kim Chan] who played Jerry’s butler in the movie, and he said that the scene when Jerry was yelling at him from outside the house to open the front door was not an act. It was completely real. Jerry was pissed off at the guy for not being able to open the door, and Scorsese luckily had the genius to keep it in the movie.
This next question may very well be the most specific in this entire book, if not in the history of humankind—but here goes anyway. There’s a scene in The King of Comedy that has always fascinated me. It takes place when Robert De Niro is eating
in a dim sum restaurant with a date. There is an extra in the background who stares directly at and mugs for the camera. Have you noticed this?
I have, actually. From what I’ve heard, this extra was a friend of De Niro’s who was just hamming it up. But why would Scorsese have allowed this to happen? It makes no sense. It might be the only time that an average viewer will ever notice an extra. But it somehow adds to the unreality of the film; the scene is very dreamlike.
Were you into teen films growing up?
I never connected with that sort of film. I couldn’t relate to the problems of average suburban teens at all.
But I never really considered Ghost World to be a teen film. It was more about these two specific characters working through something that felt very personal to me. I wasn’t necessarily trying to communicate with teenagers, and I never really imagined they would be as much of our audience as they have.
You say you weren’t necessarily trying to appeal to teenagers, but you did manage to capture teen dialogue extremely well.
I wasn’t exactly a teenager when I wrote that movie, and I couldn’t have told you what an average seventeen- to eighteen-year-old sounded like or what slang they used. It was a total mystery. So I used a modified version of the slang I knew, and I tried not to take it in a too-specific direction. I really wanted the script to be read by somebody of just about any age and not seem dated or corny or overly mannered or overly screenplayish.
All writers want to achieve that with dialogue, but how did you manage to pull it off?