Kim Deitch [2007]
Kim Deitch is one of comics’ foremost chroniclers of the twentieth century journey, surveying the breadth of American culture, tear in eye, knife in hand. After honing his vision throughout the ‘60s, his work was compiled in Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Hollywoodland and now, Shadowland. Deitch’s genius is in steering seemingly autobiographical elements into surreal vignettes about psychosis, memory, and the tawdry histories of American carny culture and Hollywood.
SS: The theme of this issue is Old Hollywood, which is something that you’ve had an interest in over the course of time as well.
Kim: Define that. What do you exactly mean by “Old Hollywood”?
SS: In your afterword to the Hollywoodland book you say the collection of things that interested you from that era led to a breakthrough for you in terms of narrative. It seems like the serial quality of Hollywoodland lends something to the serial nature of Shadowland. Was there a breakthrough for you at that time in terms of the kinds of material you wrote?
Kim: Well, it was fascinating; you know, I wrote Hollywoodland in Los Angeles, which is where I was born. I mean, I spent the first five years of my life in Los Angeles. I was just kind of fascinated by the fact that, I was in this like... it was like being in the middle of the archeology of the birth of the movies, in that there were so many relics still around… you walk down the streets of Los Angeles… in spite of the fact that that town is constantly tearing itself down and it building itself up, you can still look at the sidewalks and they’re dated and you can sometimes still see dates, you know that some of the sidewalks you’re walking on go back to the 1920s. And in fact, the neighborhood where I was born which was in Los Angeles, it’s just off LaCienega Drive, a street called Westhorn Drive. You know, it’s a street full of bungalows. Not that much changed from an old Hal Roach comedy from the late 20s or the early 30s. While Hollywood keeps reinventing itself, you go into the neighborhoods there and really, it’s very similar.
SS: When did your interest in that era of Hollywood begin? Do you have early memories of being into that when you were growing up, or was it later?
Kim: It seems like something I glommed onto almost before I even knew I glommed onto it. You know, I started seeing silent movies on the Howdy Doody show when I was a kid growing up and there was an instant fascination for that kind of thing, even before I even knew exactly what I was looking at. The first time I saw those movies, I said to my father, “Those aren’t real movies.” I had some kind of weird feeling that there were live TV cameras taking movies of these weird-looking people wearing too much makeup on down the street. And when he explained to me what it was all about, I just got immediately fascinated by these rather bizarre, otherworldly films. You know, and there was a lot of that on TV. Like, when I was a little kid, on TV, [in addition to] the Howdy Doody show, until Charlie Chaplin got run out of the United States, there was the Charlie Chaplin show on TV and all these weird old movies and I was just utterly fascinated by it. When I was old enough to learn how to use a movie projector, I started buying ‘em. You know, in eight millimeter, sixteen millimeter, even in some cases, thirty-five millimeter. It’s just something that was beyond my understanding, this really deep fascination. Then going back to Los Angeles in the early 80s, doing Hollywoodland, that was really my opportunity to try to explore that further, including trying to scout out people who actually had worked in silent films, which I did, for researching Hollywoodland. That’s the strange thing about Los Angeles: they say it’s really uncomfortable, it’s unhealthy, you know, there’s smog, it’s not a great place to live, but I was astounded how many people in their nineties were walking around in that city back in the 80s.
SS: It’s interesting to imagine a teenaged Kim Deitch freaking out about this stuff. It seems so unusual; talk about unhealthy, it seems like you were really obsessed. Were you alone in this, or did you have friends who were into this? How much of this came from your dad?
Kim: You know, not that much. He had a certain amount respect for the classic silent comedians and stuff, but getting beyond that into stranger old films I was kind on my own. In fact, as a kid, I felt really marginalized; I had this obsessive interest that really wasn’t shared by anybody else, but you know, that made me all the more interested. I’ve always felt strongly, you gotta follow your own nose and go where it goes. I felt a certain dissatisfaction about the world around me; it just wasn’t as interesting to me as the world that had come and gone before I was even born. I don’t quite understand what it’s all about myself, but that’s always been how it is with me.
SS: How do you feel about the almost condescending cliché that mature comic art is often described as “cinematic”?
Kim: I haven’t got have a problem with it. How people are going to refer to my work or other work is fine with me. I mean, the fact is, comics and movies did come along at about the same time and there is a lot of parallel development in the way that words and pictures are doled out in both movies and comics. And you could see that happening even in the earliest comics. Like the D.W. Griffith films, when they started using parallel development; well, you can look at early comic strips and see them coming up with those devices at about the same time. And then as far as the silent films go... look, it’s just like comics in that it’s a medium that you look at and it’s a medium that you read. I’m not going to waste my time taking umbrage at people saying that it’s condescending that comics have a cinematic quality, cause sure they do! And anyway, people have to figure ways to relate to things, it’s all healthy. It’s healthy to have conversation and any way that people will pay attention to what you’re doing, I gotta chalk that up as good. It’s opening up a form of communication with me and them. I’m gonna take the high road with that and not be grumbling with them about they’re how they happen to approach discussing it.
SS: As long as they’re buying the books, right?
Kim: Well, yeah, I want them to buy the books. I’m grateful for the opportunity to be able to entertain them, which is what I’m trying to do.
SS: In your writing in Hollywoodland, you said you were also writing script material in and around that period.
Kim: Yeah! I just got off a whole year of doing nothing but storyboards. I mean, the entire year of 1982, I was off in North Carolina, being an art director for a company called Artborough Films, and actually, how I ended up in Los Angeles is when they relocated to Hollywood to make the film Reanimator, I came along too. I was doing a lot of that kind of work.
SS: Is a certain part of yourself that is a frustrated filmmaker?
Kim: Yeah, definitely. But it’s like this: if I had been eighteen years old in 1910, wild horses couldn’t have kept me away from going into the movies. Because it was more of an emerging art form, it was easier to get into, there was more room for finding your own voice than when I was really was eighteen in the early 60s and movies were just this big monolithic thing and you couldn’t really expect to just slide in and do your own thing. The beauty of comics is, if you order a few art supplies, pay the rent and you were willing to work hard, it’s a doable thing. And that is also the reason why... yeah, I flirted around with the movies; I made some money working for movie producers. But going to Hollywood actually taught me a good lesson. I saw that I could waste the rest of life just writing screenplays, and have a closet full of ‘em and get nowhere, or I could just get back to comics where I can be published, I can realize my projects and at least get something done. I saw a lot of sad cases in Los Angeles. Yeah, sure, in the best possible world, to be able to do movies my own way, God knows, that would be the kick in the head thrill of all time. But I’m pretty happy right where I am, doling out words and pictures in narrative forms. I feel unbelievably grateful doing that, and more to the point, doing it my way. You know, the more money a project has behind it, the more people who are supplying the money have to say about how the project is being done. I was breaking my heart working for a company for a whole year that was paying me a salary to adapt my own strip and then telling me how they ought to be done. That was just getting kind of far away from why I got into comics in the first place, was to be able to realize something artistically my way.
SS: To shift a little bit: you talked about being young, and underground comics being this burgeoning field, kind of like the early cinema. I don’t know what it is, but it always surprises me that you began at the same time as the underground comix phenomenon. For instance, when I spoke to you before about that BLAB [an irreverent 80s comics-zine] piece on Crumb. Reading that, it seems obvious how much a part of things you were; in New York, writing for the some of same newspapers, clearly paying attention to what was going on… And yet, there are things that I find in your work that I don’t find in any of those other guys. So can you talk about how you see yourself in relationship with that 60s community?
Kim: Well, you know…in a way, you’re hitting on something, because I didn’t really have the full-fledged hippie religion. I saw an emerging situation that I was lucky enough to get into and work with, but I was never trying to really be a part of that, so much as to do my thing in that theater of activity which was available to me. I never got into any of the hippie politics. The closest I got to the hippie religion was, I guess I got kind of swept away by Timothy Leary and all of that for awhile. But really, most of the time I was trying to tell good stories and develop my skills as an artist so that I could tell better stories. By broadening my basic bunch of abilities to the extent where I could tell better and better stories. And that was pretty much my focus. Yeah, I felt a certain pride as things kept moving along that I was a part of something that was really wild and wonderful. And I always had that consciousness that, I am really lucky, that this is a really exciting art form that I am somehow in the midst of and I’m really lucky that this came along, and I was riding it for all it was worth. But riding it for all it was worth to do good stuff, not for any other reason. It sure didn’t get me rich.
SS: What you’re saying is, you’re honing your storycraft, you’re telling these stories. Somehow I can’t imagine, Gilbert Shelton, for instance, saying the same thing. Or any of those guys. There was more emphasis on psychedelia and humor and breaking conventions, but not a lot on structure.
Kim: Well, everybody was doing it as they saw fit. I knew all those guys, I was friends with them, I knew Gilbert well. But I never felt like I wanted to imitate them. The only person I would put forward as a role model for me was Crumb himself, just because he raised the bar so high. At first it intimidated me. In fact when Crumb first came to town, I got so chagrined, I stopped drawing for awhile. But not for long; it gave me time to think about it and realize there’s a lot more going on here than there was before, it’s gonna be tougher. But really, that’s a good thing. And it was a good thing. Because of Crumb and his high influence and his high standards, I’m probably a much better artist than I would have been if he had not come along, and in a way I would consider that one of the most primary miracles of the whole situation.
SS: Wow. Another thing in your work that is distinct from the rest of those other guys is that the characters have an emotional reality. It’s more than just making them come to life. There’s a way that your characters talk about their feelings, talk about their failings, that is really modern, and in some ways anticipates what has happened in comics: this sort of autobiographical trend in comics over the last ten years or so.
Kim: Well, I think one thing is that I’m a lot more influenced by literature than I am in comics. I think that this is becoming more and more so as time goes by to the extent that right now, believe it or not, I’m not doing comics. The book I’m doing now, called Deitch’s Pictorama, is illustrated fiction. I’m actually working on text, short stories (there’s pictures on every page) but I decided that comics are a good delivery system for words and pictures, but not necessarily the be-all, end-all. In fact one thing that puts this bee in my bonnet is when they started calling them graphic novels. It’s pompous and pretentious, but then it made me start thinking, you know, what is a graphic novel, what could a graphic novel be? And that is something I’m exploring more and more. I probably shouldn’t even be saying this to you, but I’m not even reading comics much anymore. A year ago, I was right in the thick of it. I was probably reading more comics than I’d ever read before, mostly of not exactly my contemporaries, but the guys were like, ten, fifteen, twenty years younger than me. But lately, I’ve gotten away from that, and what I’m mostly reading is books of different kinds, to the extent that it’s influenced me so much that I think I’m heading for writing a novel. Right now, the story I’m writing, I guess you could call it a novella. It’s seventy-seven pages of illustrated fiction.
SS: What are you reading right now that’s helping put you in that place?
Kim: I’m reading a lot of pulp and pre-pulp material. I’ve been reading a lot of stories featuring Frank and Dick Merriwell that were at the turn of the century. I’m pretty enamored of the pulp writer Max Brand who wrote a lot of western fiction back in the teens and twenties…
SS: We saw him on your shelf in The Stuff of Dreams, right?
Kim: Yeah, yeah, that really is my shelf there. I’m really getting interested in, call it hack writing, I don’t know… serial writers, people who just wrote their ass off. I mean, they just have hundreds of novels under their belt. I’m not saying that that’s the absolute ideal kind of writing, but there’s something about guys that just wrote all the time, all the time. They just plumb the hidden depths in their mind, because they’re just plundering it so relentlessly. I think the earliest example of writers I follow is Charles Dickens, who just like, basically wrote himself right into a hole in the ground; he was dead by fifty-eight. But what a body of work he left! And maybe it isn’t even all good, but just that fact that he wrote, wrote, wrote. He got some great stuff out of himself. And that’s just the beginning of it; there’s a million examples of these kind of people and I’m trying to model myself after that, to the extent that I’m really trying to go, go, go: just keep it going all the time. Keep it going, keep it going, just see how much momentum I can keep going, for how long, until I croak.
SS: There are so many guys who venture out, not just out of comics into something else but out of anything into something else, and it’s a whole new can of worms, like the guy who did Art School Confidential, where you think maybe he should have taken a little more time. So you’re in this new world: how does it feel?
Kim: Great, I feel like I’ve got a tiger by the tail, but I’m fuckin’ ready for it, man, I been preparing for it for forty years! I’ve kept myself in good condition, and I don’t know where it’s going to end up, but I feel like there’s some kind of meaning to my life. The motivation is as strong as it can be, I’ve developed good work habits, I think I have a pretty good relationship with my brain, and I’ve gotten certain things worked out with myself to keep it going, pausing to knock on wood as I say that. I’m on it!
SS: You named all these pulp guys, and a fascination with that. Do you feel that your style is emulating them in this new fiction, or is it going to be more like the voice you’ve had in your comics, where it’s as a fan of that stuff, incorporating it as a thread?
Kim: I’m emulating them in terms of maniacal productivity, but I don’t think my work is really imitating them. The story I’m doing right now, which is called “The Sunshine Girl,” has a feeling of a Hardy Boys book or a Nancy Drew book, but it’s a lot wilder. What it’s got going for it for me is that it’s something new, it’s not like I’m just telling the same old thing. I might be making a big mistake but I don’t think I am; I think it’s a hot story and I couldn’t be more excited. The book I’m doing now is not all me, I’m also utilizing my two brothers, because my youngest brother is a darn good writer. There’s gonna be a thing that’s written by my youngest brother and illustrated by my brother Simon but it’s his concept. My two brothers seem to be more interested in going illustrated literature as opposed to comics, and those two guys. Spiritually and creatively I felt more of a kinship with them then I feel in particular towards anybody else that I could be working with.
SS: Speaking of your relatives, what does your wife Pam do? Does she have any creative pursuits? Have the two of you collaborated?
Kim: Well I hope that we can collaborate; she was doing drawings for a long time, and doing well with that. Lately she gotten into early photography systems; she’s taken lessons on how to make daguerreotypes and other early forms of photography. At some point I hope to come up with a story that utilizes that. I would love to collaborate with her because I show her everything I do, and she’s a really good critic. Everything goes by her because she’s good, she’s smart and she’s not scared of me; if she thinks that something isn’t right she’ll tell me. You should always have somebody around you when you’re doing something like this who will be willing to tell you the truth about what’s going on. But the short answer to your question is we’re not totally collaborating right now, but I hope that that will happen at some point, and you know, I’m using her as a character a lot in my work, and I’d love to see it go beyond that. She’s definitely been a big inspiration to me.
SS: You alluded earlier to collecting. There seems to be a moment of ennui [in collecting] where you say, “What am I bringing all of this into my life for? Am I just going to sit on it? Where does it lead me?” Obviously, collecting stuff has meant a lot to you. Is that something you go through?
Kim: Grist for the creative mill. I don’t see myself as a collector so much as an accumulator. It feeds the brain! Yeah, it creates problems, I mean I got a warehouse space full of stuff. When I croak, going through all my stuff, either it’s gonna be a thrill for somebody or a monumental headache, probably a little of both. It’s just part of the deal; to not do it would be selling your brain short. I crave to be able to study stuff. It’s a great pleasure of my life.
SS: What percent of it is for your work and what percent is pure fascination?
Kim: Just about everything I look at, I’m asking myself, “How could I use this? How could this fit in to something?” Even if it’s not true half the time I convince myself that it’s true.
SS: As a person who was out there getting 8 millimeter films thirty years ago, is seeing more and more things available in this era a satisfying outcome?
Kim: Of course, it’s marvelous. I never dreamed in my wildest dreams it would come to this. Paying hundreds of dollars for lousy 8 millimeter and super 8 films was tough. Then I got into 16, and then the price of film stock went up which just blew me right out of it. To have it come back first to tape and now DVDs, it’s a miracle.
SS: We were picking up Weirdo when it came out [in the 80s], and were privy to some of the chapters that are now collected in Shadowland. The whole thing has an incredible impact all put together.
Kim: Yeah it really came together. I was pleasantly surprised.
SS: Now, was it just a work in progress, or did you have some sense of the big picture while these little parts were being issued in different publications?
Kim: I think that in the back of my mind I envisioned a book. It wasn’t 100% conscious but it wasn’t 100% unconscious either. I was really focused; I was a working fiend when I was doing that stuff. 70-hour weeks were not unusual, and working out too, I mean I was just a maniac.
SS: Over what period of time was it all done?
Kim: Oh, it was about four years I’d say. Late eighties, early nineties.
SS: And there were other things in that period that you were working on.
Kim: Yeah, Boulevard of Broken Dreams and Shadowland, they overlap. At a certain point I stopped doing all that Ledicker stuff because the potential for Boulevard of Broken Dreams to be a viable commercial product, it seemed like strike while the iron is hot, so I put all that Shadowland stuff aside for a while. But just as soon as I more or less finished Boulevard of Broken Dreams I picked it up again. “The Strange Secret of Molly O’Dare” for instance is all post-Boulevard of Broken Dreams.
SS: There’s one piece in Weirdo that isn’t a Shadowland piece, and it feels as if it too is a fragment of a larger thing.
Kim: Would that be “Two Jews from Yonkers”?
SS: I think it is! Is there more to that?
Kim: That’s all there is to that right now. It’s something I might pick up later on. Basically my brother told me this very funny story about how he happened to meet the Pope, and I just filed that away and thought well that’d make a good one at some point. Then at a certain point I was taking a creative writing class and I wrote the story in the writing class, but I liked it. I was also at that point being heavily influenced by illustrated fiction, Victorian fiction specifically, the writing of Charles Dickens, the writing of Thackeray which I was just devouring like marzipan.
SS: It’s a testament to the work in Shadowland that it makes more sense to me today than it did when it was coming out in fragments in the eighties.
Kim: I’m delighted that the book came out as well as it did. I went out to Seattle and met all the art directors and I think that was a big help. I think that it was all meant to hold together, and the fact that it does seems to bear that out.
SS: The narrative quality is really strong from beginning to end. Does the illustrated narrative that you’re working on now have the same fractured, jumping back and forth in time narrative sense?
Kim: Yeah it does in a way because, even though the story I just told you about “The Sunshine Girls” is told by a twenty-six year-old girl to me, I’m a character in that, and I’m also a character in the shorter story that I wrote and illustrated in that book called “The Cop on the Beat, The Man in the Moon and Me,” which goes back to the late sixties. It features me as a character working for the East Village Other in underground comics, but that’s just the platform to tell a story about the music scene in the early thirties. I wanted to talk about stuff that people might not be familiar with musically, but I thought if I couched it in a fascinating enough story, that would make them want to pay attention to it and maybe learn something new.
SS: Do you have a publisher?
Kim: Fantagraphics. Part of why I’m doing a story in this book now is because the main feature my brother Simon is doing is being delayed. I decided that instead of having his story be the main feature, I better come up with another main feature or I could be in trouble. But I’m glad it happened: I’m really loving the story I’m doing now and it wouldn’t have happened if those situations hadn’t been such as they were. Actually if everything had gone according to Hoyle, this book would be being finished right about now, cause the original plan was I was gonna have a 31-page collaboration between me and my brother Seth, 31 pages all by me, and then a long piece that would have been a collaboration between my other two brothers without me. When that one started faltering, I had to jump in and make another long one so that this one between my other two brothers [if it doesn’t happen], we can get away with it because I’m gonna give em a big rock ‘em sock ‘em 77-page story by me and that ought to satisfy everybody.
SS: Talking about pulp writers and Max Brand... are you familiar with the writing of Eugene Manlove Rhodes?
Kim: You know I have read some of him, believe it or not. He’s an interesting writer. It’s weird, he’s not very disciplined and his focus is a little odd. His stories tend to ramble, and they’re frankly hard to read. I discovered a whole volume of them. But I read them all, 300 pages worth. I liked them; I’d be interested to know more about him.
SS: He stands out from those other guys because he just so bizarre. Someone compared him to Bret Harte, but from New Mexico.
Kim: The whole idea of the literate cowboy sitting on his horse during the cattle drive with his nose in a book this is what I think of when I think of Eugene Manlove Rhodes.
SS: And using Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar as passwords in a particular case of intrigue!
Kim: There seemed to be a lot of that going on. There was a lot of cheap fiction being distributed out there; there was such a thing as the well-read cowboy.
SS: When you see those big-letter books, you have to assume that those are for the cowboy to read by the fire… When you go back to LA now, do the same sorts of sensations about the place happen?
Kim: As a matter of fact I’m going back in May to give a lecture on silent movies at the silent movie theater, along with a slide show of stuff from Alias the Cat, which I’m thrilled about. God I used to haunt that place when I lived in LA, way back when. It’s not a dream come true because I never dreamed it would happen.
SS: The theme of this issue is Old Hollywood, which is something that you’ve had an interest in over the course of time as well.
Kim: Define that. What do you exactly mean by “Old Hollywood”?
SS: In your afterword to the Hollywoodland book you say the collection of things that interested you from that era led to a breakthrough for you in terms of narrative. It seems like the serial quality of Hollywoodland lends something to the serial nature of Shadowland. Was there a breakthrough for you at that time in terms of the kinds of material you wrote?
Kim: Well, it was fascinating; you know, I wrote Hollywoodland in Los Angeles, which is where I was born. I mean, I spent the first five years of my life in Los Angeles. I was just kind of fascinated by the fact that, I was in this like... it was like being in the middle of the archeology of the birth of the movies, in that there were so many relics still around… you walk down the streets of Los Angeles… in spite of the fact that that town is constantly tearing itself down and it building itself up, you can still look at the sidewalks and they’re dated and you can sometimes still see dates, you know that some of the sidewalks you’re walking on go back to the 1920s. And in fact, the neighborhood where I was born which was in Los Angeles, it’s just off LaCienega Drive, a street called Westhorn Drive. You know, it’s a street full of bungalows. Not that much changed from an old Hal Roach comedy from the late 20s or the early 30s. While Hollywood keeps reinventing itself, you go into the neighborhoods there and really, it’s very similar.
SS: When did your interest in that era of Hollywood begin? Do you have early memories of being into that when you were growing up, or was it later?
Kim: It seems like something I glommed onto almost before I even knew I glommed onto it. You know, I started seeing silent movies on the Howdy Doody show when I was a kid growing up and there was an instant fascination for that kind of thing, even before I even knew exactly what I was looking at. The first time I saw those movies, I said to my father, “Those aren’t real movies.” I had some kind of weird feeling that there were live TV cameras taking movies of these weird-looking people wearing too much makeup on down the street. And when he explained to me what it was all about, I just got immediately fascinated by these rather bizarre, otherworldly films. You know, and there was a lot of that on TV. Like, when I was a little kid, on TV, [in addition to] the Howdy Doody show, until Charlie Chaplin got run out of the United States, there was the Charlie Chaplin show on TV and all these weird old movies and I was just utterly fascinated by it. When I was old enough to learn how to use a movie projector, I started buying ‘em. You know, in eight millimeter, sixteen millimeter, even in some cases, thirty-five millimeter. It’s just something that was beyond my understanding, this really deep fascination. Then going back to Los Angeles in the early 80s, doing Hollywoodland, that was really my opportunity to try to explore that further, including trying to scout out people who actually had worked in silent films, which I did, for researching Hollywoodland. That’s the strange thing about Los Angeles: they say it’s really uncomfortable, it’s unhealthy, you know, there’s smog, it’s not a great place to live, but I was astounded how many people in their nineties were walking around in that city back in the 80s.
SS: It’s interesting to imagine a teenaged Kim Deitch freaking out about this stuff. It seems so unusual; talk about unhealthy, it seems like you were really obsessed. Were you alone in this, or did you have friends who were into this? How much of this came from your dad?
Kim: You know, not that much. He had a certain amount respect for the classic silent comedians and stuff, but getting beyond that into stranger old films I was kind on my own. In fact, as a kid, I felt really marginalized; I had this obsessive interest that really wasn’t shared by anybody else, but you know, that made me all the more interested. I’ve always felt strongly, you gotta follow your own nose and go where it goes. I felt a certain dissatisfaction about the world around me; it just wasn’t as interesting to me as the world that had come and gone before I was even born. I don’t quite understand what it’s all about myself, but that’s always been how it is with me.
SS: How do you feel about the almost condescending cliché that mature comic art is often described as “cinematic”?
Kim: I haven’t got have a problem with it. How people are going to refer to my work or other work is fine with me. I mean, the fact is, comics and movies did come along at about the same time and there is a lot of parallel development in the way that words and pictures are doled out in both movies and comics. And you could see that happening even in the earliest comics. Like the D.W. Griffith films, when they started using parallel development; well, you can look at early comic strips and see them coming up with those devices at about the same time. And then as far as the silent films go... look, it’s just like comics in that it’s a medium that you look at and it’s a medium that you read. I’m not going to waste my time taking umbrage at people saying that it’s condescending that comics have a cinematic quality, cause sure they do! And anyway, people have to figure ways to relate to things, it’s all healthy. It’s healthy to have conversation and any way that people will pay attention to what you’re doing, I gotta chalk that up as good. It’s opening up a form of communication with me and them. I’m gonna take the high road with that and not be grumbling with them about they’re how they happen to approach discussing it.
SS: As long as they’re buying the books, right?
Kim: Well, yeah, I want them to buy the books. I’m grateful for the opportunity to be able to entertain them, which is what I’m trying to do.
SS: In your writing in Hollywoodland, you said you were also writing script material in and around that period.
Kim: Yeah! I just got off a whole year of doing nothing but storyboards. I mean, the entire year of 1982, I was off in North Carolina, being an art director for a company called Artborough Films, and actually, how I ended up in Los Angeles is when they relocated to Hollywood to make the film Reanimator, I came along too. I was doing a lot of that kind of work.
SS: Is a certain part of yourself that is a frustrated filmmaker?
Kim: Yeah, definitely. But it’s like this: if I had been eighteen years old in 1910, wild horses couldn’t have kept me away from going into the movies. Because it was more of an emerging art form, it was easier to get into, there was more room for finding your own voice than when I was really was eighteen in the early 60s and movies were just this big monolithic thing and you couldn’t really expect to just slide in and do your own thing. The beauty of comics is, if you order a few art supplies, pay the rent and you were willing to work hard, it’s a doable thing. And that is also the reason why... yeah, I flirted around with the movies; I made some money working for movie producers. But going to Hollywood actually taught me a good lesson. I saw that I could waste the rest of life just writing screenplays, and have a closet full of ‘em and get nowhere, or I could just get back to comics where I can be published, I can realize my projects and at least get something done. I saw a lot of sad cases in Los Angeles. Yeah, sure, in the best possible world, to be able to do movies my own way, God knows, that would be the kick in the head thrill of all time. But I’m pretty happy right where I am, doling out words and pictures in narrative forms. I feel unbelievably grateful doing that, and more to the point, doing it my way. You know, the more money a project has behind it, the more people who are supplying the money have to say about how the project is being done. I was breaking my heart working for a company for a whole year that was paying me a salary to adapt my own strip and then telling me how they ought to be done. That was just getting kind of far away from why I got into comics in the first place, was to be able to realize something artistically my way.
SS: To shift a little bit: you talked about being young, and underground comics being this burgeoning field, kind of like the early cinema. I don’t know what it is, but it always surprises me that you began at the same time as the underground comix phenomenon. For instance, when I spoke to you before about that BLAB [an irreverent 80s comics-zine] piece on Crumb. Reading that, it seems obvious how much a part of things you were; in New York, writing for the some of same newspapers, clearly paying attention to what was going on… And yet, there are things that I find in your work that I don’t find in any of those other guys. So can you talk about how you see yourself in relationship with that 60s community?
Kim: Well, you know…in a way, you’re hitting on something, because I didn’t really have the full-fledged hippie religion. I saw an emerging situation that I was lucky enough to get into and work with, but I was never trying to really be a part of that, so much as to do my thing in that theater of activity which was available to me. I never got into any of the hippie politics. The closest I got to the hippie religion was, I guess I got kind of swept away by Timothy Leary and all of that for awhile. But really, most of the time I was trying to tell good stories and develop my skills as an artist so that I could tell better stories. By broadening my basic bunch of abilities to the extent where I could tell better and better stories. And that was pretty much my focus. Yeah, I felt a certain pride as things kept moving along that I was a part of something that was really wild and wonderful. And I always had that consciousness that, I am really lucky, that this is a really exciting art form that I am somehow in the midst of and I’m really lucky that this came along, and I was riding it for all it was worth. But riding it for all it was worth to do good stuff, not for any other reason. It sure didn’t get me rich.
SS: What you’re saying is, you’re honing your storycraft, you’re telling these stories. Somehow I can’t imagine, Gilbert Shelton, for instance, saying the same thing. Or any of those guys. There was more emphasis on psychedelia and humor and breaking conventions, but not a lot on structure.
Kim: Well, everybody was doing it as they saw fit. I knew all those guys, I was friends with them, I knew Gilbert well. But I never felt like I wanted to imitate them. The only person I would put forward as a role model for me was Crumb himself, just because he raised the bar so high. At first it intimidated me. In fact when Crumb first came to town, I got so chagrined, I stopped drawing for awhile. But not for long; it gave me time to think about it and realize there’s a lot more going on here than there was before, it’s gonna be tougher. But really, that’s a good thing. And it was a good thing. Because of Crumb and his high influence and his high standards, I’m probably a much better artist than I would have been if he had not come along, and in a way I would consider that one of the most primary miracles of the whole situation.
SS: Wow. Another thing in your work that is distinct from the rest of those other guys is that the characters have an emotional reality. It’s more than just making them come to life. There’s a way that your characters talk about their feelings, talk about their failings, that is really modern, and in some ways anticipates what has happened in comics: this sort of autobiographical trend in comics over the last ten years or so.
Kim: Well, I think one thing is that I’m a lot more influenced by literature than I am in comics. I think that this is becoming more and more so as time goes by to the extent that right now, believe it or not, I’m not doing comics. The book I’m doing now, called Deitch’s Pictorama, is illustrated fiction. I’m actually working on text, short stories (there’s pictures on every page) but I decided that comics are a good delivery system for words and pictures, but not necessarily the be-all, end-all. In fact one thing that puts this bee in my bonnet is when they started calling them graphic novels. It’s pompous and pretentious, but then it made me start thinking, you know, what is a graphic novel, what could a graphic novel be? And that is something I’m exploring more and more. I probably shouldn’t even be saying this to you, but I’m not even reading comics much anymore. A year ago, I was right in the thick of it. I was probably reading more comics than I’d ever read before, mostly of not exactly my contemporaries, but the guys were like, ten, fifteen, twenty years younger than me. But lately, I’ve gotten away from that, and what I’m mostly reading is books of different kinds, to the extent that it’s influenced me so much that I think I’m heading for writing a novel. Right now, the story I’m writing, I guess you could call it a novella. It’s seventy-seven pages of illustrated fiction.
SS: What are you reading right now that’s helping put you in that place?
Kim: I’m reading a lot of pulp and pre-pulp material. I’ve been reading a lot of stories featuring Frank and Dick Merriwell that were at the turn of the century. I’m pretty enamored of the pulp writer Max Brand who wrote a lot of western fiction back in the teens and twenties…
SS: We saw him on your shelf in The Stuff of Dreams, right?
Kim: Yeah, yeah, that really is my shelf there. I’m really getting interested in, call it hack writing, I don’t know… serial writers, people who just wrote their ass off. I mean, they just have hundreds of novels under their belt. I’m not saying that that’s the absolute ideal kind of writing, but there’s something about guys that just wrote all the time, all the time. They just plumb the hidden depths in their mind, because they’re just plundering it so relentlessly. I think the earliest example of writers I follow is Charles Dickens, who just like, basically wrote himself right into a hole in the ground; he was dead by fifty-eight. But what a body of work he left! And maybe it isn’t even all good, but just that fact that he wrote, wrote, wrote. He got some great stuff out of himself. And that’s just the beginning of it; there’s a million examples of these kind of people and I’m trying to model myself after that, to the extent that I’m really trying to go, go, go: just keep it going all the time. Keep it going, keep it going, just see how much momentum I can keep going, for how long, until I croak.
SS: There are so many guys who venture out, not just out of comics into something else but out of anything into something else, and it’s a whole new can of worms, like the guy who did Art School Confidential, where you think maybe he should have taken a little more time. So you’re in this new world: how does it feel?
Kim: Great, I feel like I’ve got a tiger by the tail, but I’m fuckin’ ready for it, man, I been preparing for it for forty years! I’ve kept myself in good condition, and I don’t know where it’s going to end up, but I feel like there’s some kind of meaning to my life. The motivation is as strong as it can be, I’ve developed good work habits, I think I have a pretty good relationship with my brain, and I’ve gotten certain things worked out with myself to keep it going, pausing to knock on wood as I say that. I’m on it!
SS: You named all these pulp guys, and a fascination with that. Do you feel that your style is emulating them in this new fiction, or is it going to be more like the voice you’ve had in your comics, where it’s as a fan of that stuff, incorporating it as a thread?
Kim: I’m emulating them in terms of maniacal productivity, but I don’t think my work is really imitating them. The story I’m doing right now, which is called “The Sunshine Girl,” has a feeling of a Hardy Boys book or a Nancy Drew book, but it’s a lot wilder. What it’s got going for it for me is that it’s something new, it’s not like I’m just telling the same old thing. I might be making a big mistake but I don’t think I am; I think it’s a hot story and I couldn’t be more excited. The book I’m doing now is not all me, I’m also utilizing my two brothers, because my youngest brother is a darn good writer. There’s gonna be a thing that’s written by my youngest brother and illustrated by my brother Simon but it’s his concept. My two brothers seem to be more interested in going illustrated literature as opposed to comics, and those two guys. Spiritually and creatively I felt more of a kinship with them then I feel in particular towards anybody else that I could be working with.
SS: Speaking of your relatives, what does your wife Pam do? Does she have any creative pursuits? Have the two of you collaborated?
Kim: Well I hope that we can collaborate; she was doing drawings for a long time, and doing well with that. Lately she gotten into early photography systems; she’s taken lessons on how to make daguerreotypes and other early forms of photography. At some point I hope to come up with a story that utilizes that. I would love to collaborate with her because I show her everything I do, and she’s a really good critic. Everything goes by her because she’s good, she’s smart and she’s not scared of me; if she thinks that something isn’t right she’ll tell me. You should always have somebody around you when you’re doing something like this who will be willing to tell you the truth about what’s going on. But the short answer to your question is we’re not totally collaborating right now, but I hope that that will happen at some point, and you know, I’m using her as a character a lot in my work, and I’d love to see it go beyond that. She’s definitely been a big inspiration to me.
SS: You alluded earlier to collecting. There seems to be a moment of ennui [in collecting] where you say, “What am I bringing all of this into my life for? Am I just going to sit on it? Where does it lead me?” Obviously, collecting stuff has meant a lot to you. Is that something you go through?
Kim: Grist for the creative mill. I don’t see myself as a collector so much as an accumulator. It feeds the brain! Yeah, it creates problems, I mean I got a warehouse space full of stuff. When I croak, going through all my stuff, either it’s gonna be a thrill for somebody or a monumental headache, probably a little of both. It’s just part of the deal; to not do it would be selling your brain short. I crave to be able to study stuff. It’s a great pleasure of my life.
SS: What percent of it is for your work and what percent is pure fascination?
Kim: Just about everything I look at, I’m asking myself, “How could I use this? How could this fit in to something?” Even if it’s not true half the time I convince myself that it’s true.
SS: As a person who was out there getting 8 millimeter films thirty years ago, is seeing more and more things available in this era a satisfying outcome?
Kim: Of course, it’s marvelous. I never dreamed in my wildest dreams it would come to this. Paying hundreds of dollars for lousy 8 millimeter and super 8 films was tough. Then I got into 16, and then the price of film stock went up which just blew me right out of it. To have it come back first to tape and now DVDs, it’s a miracle.
SS: We were picking up Weirdo when it came out [in the 80s], and were privy to some of the chapters that are now collected in Shadowland. The whole thing has an incredible impact all put together.
Kim: Yeah it really came together. I was pleasantly surprised.
SS: Now, was it just a work in progress, or did you have some sense of the big picture while these little parts were being issued in different publications?
Kim: I think that in the back of my mind I envisioned a book. It wasn’t 100% conscious but it wasn’t 100% unconscious either. I was really focused; I was a working fiend when I was doing that stuff. 70-hour weeks were not unusual, and working out too, I mean I was just a maniac.
SS: Over what period of time was it all done?
Kim: Oh, it was about four years I’d say. Late eighties, early nineties.
SS: And there were other things in that period that you were working on.
Kim: Yeah, Boulevard of Broken Dreams and Shadowland, they overlap. At a certain point I stopped doing all that Ledicker stuff because the potential for Boulevard of Broken Dreams to be a viable commercial product, it seemed like strike while the iron is hot, so I put all that Shadowland stuff aside for a while. But just as soon as I more or less finished Boulevard of Broken Dreams I picked it up again. “The Strange Secret of Molly O’Dare” for instance is all post-Boulevard of Broken Dreams.
SS: There’s one piece in Weirdo that isn’t a Shadowland piece, and it feels as if it too is a fragment of a larger thing.
Kim: Would that be “Two Jews from Yonkers”?
SS: I think it is! Is there more to that?
Kim: That’s all there is to that right now. It’s something I might pick up later on. Basically my brother told me this very funny story about how he happened to meet the Pope, and I just filed that away and thought well that’d make a good one at some point. Then at a certain point I was taking a creative writing class and I wrote the story in the writing class, but I liked it. I was also at that point being heavily influenced by illustrated fiction, Victorian fiction specifically, the writing of Charles Dickens, the writing of Thackeray which I was just devouring like marzipan.
SS: It’s a testament to the work in Shadowland that it makes more sense to me today than it did when it was coming out in fragments in the eighties.
Kim: I’m delighted that the book came out as well as it did. I went out to Seattle and met all the art directors and I think that was a big help. I think that it was all meant to hold together, and the fact that it does seems to bear that out.
SS: The narrative quality is really strong from beginning to end. Does the illustrated narrative that you’re working on now have the same fractured, jumping back and forth in time narrative sense?
Kim: Yeah it does in a way because, even though the story I just told you about “The Sunshine Girls” is told by a twenty-six year-old girl to me, I’m a character in that, and I’m also a character in the shorter story that I wrote and illustrated in that book called “The Cop on the Beat, The Man in the Moon and Me,” which goes back to the late sixties. It features me as a character working for the East Village Other in underground comics, but that’s just the platform to tell a story about the music scene in the early thirties. I wanted to talk about stuff that people might not be familiar with musically, but I thought if I couched it in a fascinating enough story, that would make them want to pay attention to it and maybe learn something new.
SS: Do you have a publisher?
Kim: Fantagraphics. Part of why I’m doing a story in this book now is because the main feature my brother Simon is doing is being delayed. I decided that instead of having his story be the main feature, I better come up with another main feature or I could be in trouble. But I’m glad it happened: I’m really loving the story I’m doing now and it wouldn’t have happened if those situations hadn’t been such as they were. Actually if everything had gone according to Hoyle, this book would be being finished right about now, cause the original plan was I was gonna have a 31-page collaboration between me and my brother Seth, 31 pages all by me, and then a long piece that would have been a collaboration between my other two brothers without me. When that one started faltering, I had to jump in and make another long one so that this one between my other two brothers [if it doesn’t happen], we can get away with it because I’m gonna give em a big rock ‘em sock ‘em 77-page story by me and that ought to satisfy everybody.
SS: Talking about pulp writers and Max Brand... are you familiar with the writing of Eugene Manlove Rhodes?
Kim: You know I have read some of him, believe it or not. He’s an interesting writer. It’s weird, he’s not very disciplined and his focus is a little odd. His stories tend to ramble, and they’re frankly hard to read. I discovered a whole volume of them. But I read them all, 300 pages worth. I liked them; I’d be interested to know more about him.
SS: He stands out from those other guys because he just so bizarre. Someone compared him to Bret Harte, but from New Mexico.
Kim: The whole idea of the literate cowboy sitting on his horse during the cattle drive with his nose in a book this is what I think of when I think of Eugene Manlove Rhodes.
SS: And using Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar as passwords in a particular case of intrigue!
Kim: There seemed to be a lot of that going on. There was a lot of cheap fiction being distributed out there; there was such a thing as the well-read cowboy.
SS: When you see those big-letter books, you have to assume that those are for the cowboy to read by the fire… When you go back to LA now, do the same sorts of sensations about the place happen?
Kim: As a matter of fact I’m going back in May to give a lecture on silent movies at the silent movie theater, along with a slide show of stuff from Alias the Cat, which I’m thrilled about. God I used to haunt that place when I lived in LA, way back when. It’s not a dream come true because I never dreamed it would happen.