Poking a Dead Frog

by Mike Sacks

  I was really interested in the secret life of girls from the time I was in high school. I’ve always been fascinated by this alien species. I loved the rhythms of their speech, but I wasn’t overly familiar with it. As I got older and actually had girlfriends, I’d always ask them to tell me specific stories about what it was like behind closed doors.

  It also helped that I had a very special place in my heart for Enid. I have true affection for that character, even though a lot of the audience saw both the movie and the comic as an indictment of Enid. I’ve always found that strange.

  Why do you think that is?

  Perhaps they found Enid too judgmental. Also, she’s a part of a leisure class and her problems are hardly matters of life and death, but she still complains about every little detail.

  Enid tries to create an interesting life out of a potentially dull existence by uncovering—or actually manufacturing—the strangeness beneath this seemingly sterile world. I find that heroic.

  If Enid were truly cynical, she would have just gotten a retail job in her town and given up. Enid thinks there’s something better out there for herself, and she searches to find it. That has to count for something.

  What should also count is Enid’s utter disdain for the commercialization aimed at teens her age.

  How many teen girls her age are even aware of it? I find it horrible. I find the commercialization and the suburbanization of this country really, really depressing. I’m lucky enough to live in a rarefied part of the country [Oakland, California] where there aren’t too many strip malls. But every time I go on a road trip, it’s just the same thing over and over again.

  What did you learn from your experience as a screenwriter that you later used for writing comics?

  I’ve learned basic rules of dramaturgy that you don’t necessarily learn only doing comics. I learned about the nuances of a bigger plot arc, where characters have to travel longer distances emotionally. I learned to rid everything that doesn’t work, even though I might have spent a long time on it.

  I’ve always noticed a cinematic flow with your comics.

  When I’m doing the comics, I don’t think in terms of cinematic flow. Comics have their own rhythm—that’s what they’re all about. It’s the beat to the storytelling that makes them come alive.

  Look at Peanuts. Charles Schulz had a perfect rhythm in every single strip. They always worked. Robert Crumb also has that talent, as did [the first editor of Mad] Harvey Kurtzman.

  If you really want to succeed as a cartoonist, you have to do more than merely create cool eyeball kicks.

  What does eyeball kicks mean?

  If you’re drawing a really detailed, tricked-out image, and your only concern is how it looks on the page, then that only goes so far in telling a story in comic form. It’s just a series of kick-ass images.

  How does one learn to create rhythm that’s appropriate to comics?

  You have to learn it to the point where this rhythm is in your head. You can’t overthink it, because if you do, the comic becomes fussy and stupid. It has to arrive with no effort at all.

  And that even holds true for the rewriting. You cannot labor over something for too long. If that’s the case, just start over and try again.

  Really, in the end, each cartoonist has to develop their own rhythm—as well as their own reality.

  How have you managed to capture your own reality?

  I have to distill all of the elements and then make it into my own. Years ago, cartoonists would have a “morgue file,” which contained photos of every imaginable reference: cars, radio sets, boats, buildings. But I don’t want anything like that. To me, it’s much more valid to remember what something looks like.

  For instance, if I wanted to draw a Starbucks store, I could take a photo and then trace it. But what I really want is for this Starbucks to be my internal impression of what that world is like. Doing that adds value to something like this. It may not be perfect, but it won’t be dead on the page, either.

  There’s a specific paradigm that has frequently shown up in your comics: middle-aged children living with their elderly parents. What is it about this relationship that interests you?

  When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time around these old parent figures. I was pretty much raised by my maternal grandparents.

  My grandfather, James Cate, was an academic at the University of Chicago, and he had a lot of interesting friends. His next-door neighbor was Enrico Fermi, who helped create the atomic bomb. Saul Bellow was a friend, as was Norman Maclean, the author of A River Runs Through It.

  There would be a knock at the door at night, and it would be a professor friend of my grandfather’s. They’d sit up until God knows when, two in the morning, and just talk.

  Do you think this type of childhood later affected your writing?

  It certainly didn’t hurt to listen to these brilliant people endlessly converse with each other for hours upon hours. Beyond that, my grandfather was a very, very funny guy—very different. He was born in a tiny little town in Texas and he somehow made himself into this world-class history professor. His whole shtick was that of a backwoods rube, and he used it to disarm people. Every year at the university he used to perform in a series of skits called “The Rebels.” He’d write and perform in campus parodies—I loved this as a kid.

  On the other hand, my mother was a mechanic. There was a dichotomy in my life. My stepfather, who was a race driver, died in a crash in Elkhart Lake, Indiana, when I was about five. I guarantee you that the crash today would be nothing—he’d walk away from the car just fine. Back then, though, cars were not padded correctly.

  I never forgot the details. I suppose it gave me a sense of mortality, in which I knew even at a young age that things could go very badly, very quickly. My earliest memory is of feeling anxiety.

  You were obsessed with death?

  I was, and, even more specifically, I was obsessed with the Leopold and Loeb murder case. I grew up about five blocks from where they carried out the killing. They went to my high school—obviously, sixty years before I did—but that story just haunted my entire adolescence. It still haunts me.

  Why?

  They did this horrible thing, and now all they could do was sit there and wait for the authorities to find them. I’ll never forget that feeling: Doom is approaching, and there’s not a thing you can do about it.

  It seems that you remember your childhood with great clarity.

  I think most cartoonists remember every little slight, every playground insult. I was telling somebody the other day that I can remember the name of every person in my second-grade class. They were astounded by this, but how could anyone not remember them?

  Do you remember your classmates out of anger?

  No. I was perfectly happy in second grade. It’s not really based on holding a grudge. On the other hand, I can’t remember somebody I had dinner with two years ago. It’s just the intensity of childhood. It was being with the same group of thirty kids every day for a year and trying to figure out who you are in relation to them.

  Everything that’s happened to me as an adult seems like a fantasy. For a long time, if someone were to wake me up—this is just hypothetical—and ask me how old I was, I would give an age of about eighteen. I think it’s now up to twenty-seven, but that’s only recently changed. I still identify with that period between being a kid and being an adult, when you’re confused with how exactly you should fit in with the rest of society.

  If you woke up and were eighteen again, how long would it take to convince yourself that everything that’s happened since has been merely a dream?

  Not long at all. Ten minutes.

  In November of 2007, you appeared as yourself in a Simpsons episode, signing autographs at a comic-book convention. George Meyer, a writer for The Simpsons, said that he once visited you at a convention and that you looked “alert, but dispirited, like
a falcon trotted out for third-graders.” How do you feel about these conventions?

  I’ve always felt like such an outcast at those events, but in the past it was sort of pleasant. I never used to mind it, and it used to have this weird appeal. Now they’re just so horrible; they are like a big media conglomerate. It’s like going to Sundance or something—just this hideous group of agents and horrible people trying to promote themselves. No charm at all.

  Do you think that today is the heyday of graphic novels and comics?

  I think so—certainly in terms of current work, narratively and aesthetically. It would be hard to find an era that was much better. There were certainly people who could draw a lot better in the old days, but it was very rare to find a great writer who could also draw.

  What do you see as the future of the graphic novel?

  I don’t know. When I started out, nobody—none of my peers in art school or anywhere else—would have thought of this as a viable career. They wouldn’t have said, “I am going to write and draw a graphic novel.” I used to hear classmates from art school say they wanted to work on children’s books. Everybody thinks they can write a children’s book, and it’s something semirespectable to work on.

  I receive letters from young writers asking for advice about a “career” in comics. If somebody asks me, I always say not to do it unless you can’t not do it. If you need encouragement from a stranger, then you shouldn’t do it.

  Once you are a cartoonist, the best advice I ever received was from Robert Crumb. He told me to just get away from cartooning for awhile. He told me he wished that he had taken up some other form of art, like sculpture; that it was important to do more than just sit at a desk and perform the same repetitive act over and over again. That it was fantastic just to be able to get away from the drawing board, to actually talk to other human beings and to gain some perspective on the many freedoms you take for granted as a cartoonist.

  After fifteen years in a room alone, you can start to feel as if you’ve unwittingly sentenced yourself to solitary confinement. It’s no wonder that pretty much every cartoonist over fifty is totally insane.

  Do you ever see yourself not doing this?

  If I get old enough and my eyesight gets really bad or I can’t hold a pencil, maybe. Outside of that, I don’t see ever stopping.

  There’s a book that came out more than fifteen years ago—a fiftieth-anniversary index of the members of the National Cartoonists Society. It’s a book of photos and short bios of hundreds of old-time American cartoonists, and for some reason a few “younger” nonmembers, such as myself, were included. I was thirty-seven at the time.

  There are dozens of photos of these old codgers smiling with these stupid grins on their faces. But you can see the sadness underneath. It’s such a grim document. My friend [and fellow cartoonist] Chris Ware told me he had to actually hide his copy of the book, because he can’t bear to look at it.

  What did you both find grim about it?

  All these lives spent behind the drawing board; fifty years on a daily strip that no one remembers.

  What’s the lesson for you—that you don’t want to end up like that?

  I sort of do want to end up like that—that’s the pathetic part about it. I look at that book and I am thrilled to be a part of it. It’s sort of like the ending to The Shining, when the camera zooms in on that group photo with Jack Torrance at the black-tie party in the 1920s.

  There is something so great about becoming that guy.

  ULTRASPECIFIC COMEDIC KNOWLEDGE

  DANIEL HANDLER, aka “Lemony Snicket”

  Writer, A Series of Unfortunate Events

  Writing Humor for Children

  Before you became a best-selling children’s author with A Series of Unfortunate Events, published under the pen name Lemony Snicket, you wrote books for adults. Why did you make the switch?

  My editor read The Basic Eight [a 1998 adult novel for St. Martin’s Press]. The book is narrated by a teenage girl. My editor didn’t think she could publish such a book for young people, but she thought I could write something that she could publish for children. I was sure she was wrong.

  Do you think children’s books have changed since A Series of Unfortunate Events was first published in 1999? Have publishers come to accept the notion that a children’s book can be funny without being preachy?

  In terms of straight percentages, I don’t actually know if that’s happening. There seem to be just as many syrupy books for kids as always, but I do think the good books aren’t slipping below the radar like they might have in the past. More attention is being paid to children’s literature.

  Were you a fan of Roald Dahl’s? I’ve always found his work, both for children and adults, to be as dark as the work of any horror writer, and yet incredibly funny.

  I was. Even Dahl’s lesser works for children have a kind of wondrous quality about them. I always loved The Magic Finger [Harper & Row, 1966], which is about a girl with magical powers.

  All of Dahl’s stories have this chaos and menace where the readers are encouraged to smack their lips over the downfall of nasty people. To me, that has a delicious, yet unsavory, vibe.

  Dahl’s stories also never seemed to have a real tight arc, which I always appreciated. In James and the Giant Peach [Knopf, 1961], a huge peach grows in James’s yard. Inside the peach, James finds giant insects. His parents have died, and off he goes with these bugs on adventures. But there’s never a sense that James is learning something about himself. It’s just a pure, crazy journey.

  The older I get, and the fewer tight arcs I’ve experienced in which I learned something about my life that enabled me to go forward, the more I appreciate these books.

  A lot of readers who otherwise would have loved Dahl are put off by his anti-Semitism and reported nastiness. Should that affect whether parents allow their children to read his stories?

  I’d think it would affect whether or not you wanted to have him over, not read his work. If you start refusing to read writers who weren’t nice people, your shelves are going to be mighty undernourished. Dahl’s anti-Semitism is overstated anyway, although his nastiness is understated, so that might balance out.

  A favorite childhood book of mine was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory [Knopf, 1964]. I reread it recently but had forgotten that the Oompa Loompas were Pygmies from “the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle.” A far cry from the happy-go-lucky orange cuties who appear in the 1971 film version Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.

  I do remember that, and it seemed unsettling even when I was a kid. There was a very menacing quality to Dahl’s writing. Beyond the Pygmies, there was this bizarre candy in the original book capable of doing all these strange things. They cut this out of the movie, but there’s an extended joke in the book about square candy that looks round. The kids look through the window of a lab, and they say the candy is square. Wonka then opens the door and the square candies turn “round” to look at them.

  Wonka says, “There’s no argument about it. They are square candies that look round.”

  There’s something about Dahl’s books that incorporates the fear and the sadness and the chaos that exists in life while also managing to be funny. He doesn’t make the world a funny place where only funny things happen. His tragedy is honest, and it doesn’t always have redeeming qualities about it.

  You don’t feel that kids are too young to learn the truth about life?

  They already know it. Even if you have an extremely happy childhood, you’re going to learn about chaos and heartbreak and all the rest of it on the playground.

  Manohla Dargis of The New York Times called the whitewashing often found in children’s literature the “tyranny of nice.”

  I think that’s a good way of putting it. It’s an author using his or her position of power to attempt to force-feed an unrealistic version of the world on those who most
likely already know that such a world doesn’t exist. That’s something I’ve always tried to avoid, especially when it’s come to humor.

  You made it very clear at the start of A Series of Unfortunate Events that things weren’t going to turn out happily for the characters. You wrote: “If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle.”

  The books for kids that have stood the test of time—like Grimm’s Fairy Tales or Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland—have been strange and chaotic and bizarre. The treacly crap has drifted away. I mean, you can still find Bobbsey Twins books, but they seem to be only for adult collectors and other fetishists. No honest-to-goodness child would ever read that sort of thing.

  Was your publisher concerned that some of the scenes in A Series of Unfortunate Events were too graphic for kids? In the first volume, The Bad Beginning, the fourteen-year-old character, Violet, is nearly married against her will. In The Vile Village, the character of Jacques is murdered before being burned at the stake. And, reminiscent of what took place four years previously on 9/11, a large building—in this case a hotel—burns in 2005’s The Penultimate Peril, the second-to-last volume.

  Before I wrote A Series of Unfortunate Events, I thought that only kids with happy childhoods would enjoy the books. I thought it would be a safe way for them to explore other, not-so-nice worlds. But I found the opposite to be true. It surprised me, especially considering how tragic certain parts of those books are.

  It wasn’t so much the publisher who was worried, it was my agent. She was certain that no publisher would ever want to buy books like this, whereas I never saw these books as representing anything that was really all too new.