In 2014, I conducted an interview with the artist A. Degen for Frank Santoro’s Comics Workbook Magazine.
What's your background, and what lead you to start making your own comics?
I was born in Brooklyn, NY in the early 80s. Moved with my family to Connecticut when I was 10 or 11, about an hour and a half outside of New York. Everyone in my immediate family is an artist, my dad, my mom, my older brother. So I was always drawing since I was a kid. I don't know if it was some kind of black sheep move but I didn't really pursue art, I didn't go to art school. Maybe because my mom and dad and brother all went to the same art school and I didn't want the pressure, not sure, maybe thought I wanted to do something else. I went to a liberal art school with no idea why I was there. Tried to get into the film program because it seemed like something to do, but I was rejected from the film program and went into literature. Reading the epic of Gilgamesh and Jacques Derrida, not knowing why, and learning that academia is not for me. So I dropped out of school. Bummed around and lived in different places. When I was 24 or so I went back to school and studied Japanese, got into a program to study in Tokyo so I went to Japan.
It took me a while to get around to drawing comics. I had been reading comics since I was a kid. And always drew things that could be comics, panels, characters, backgrounds, that kind of thing, but I don't think I drew a finished comic until I was like 26. Not sure why. I was thinking about this the other day. Maybe some kind of weird perfectionism, or narcissism, not wanting to make the effort to do a finished thing because it might turn out bad. Some kind of weird block like that. I drew a whole bunch of comics with my friend Rob, on placemats as we sat in a diner, or on napkins in a bar. We'd do this thing where we would alternate panel for panel, making it up as we were going along, and leaving the word balloons blank. Later we would get someone else to fill in the dialogue. The goal was to make each other laugh. I guess those were the first comics I drew, really.
But strangely the first comic I actually completed was in Japanese. And was published in Japan. I joined the Mash Comix collective, as the token white guy I guess, and soon after I joined I had to do a comic for their book. So I ended up doing this really strange and pretty bad comic. I'm looking at it now, it is pretty horrible. It's sixteen pages long. About a man in a tragedy mask and a woman in a comedy mask doing battle inside a building that looks like a human head. There's some good stuff in it. A part where the woman in the comedy mask kills a philosopher with a boom box playing Screaming Jay Hawkins' 'I put a spell on you'. A portrait of Sartre fighting some robotic deer. The whole thing is a mess. But yeah, I didn't really start making comics until fairly recently.
With your first work being published in Japanese, I think it presents an interesting parallel to the first exposure people in North America may have had to your work. What I mean is that, AREACC is silent, which (I felt), upon first reading, gave it a sort 'mysterious/foreign' feeling to it. I thought of Yokoyama and 'Travel' a lot when I first read AREACC. How so much can happen just when trying to reach a destination. I always feel like there's a real sense of motion in your work, one that isn't seen in a lot of other current ‘alternative’ or ‘art’ comics. Would you agree with that?
I think I try to cultivate a feeling of 'foreignness', I like to make work that's like an artifact from a different culture. And I don't mean that as like fetishistic-exotic or alien beyond understanding, just that it is a piece of an intact, other world. Maybe because I don't believe in objective reality. Especially not in art. Sagan said 'if you wish to create an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe' and he was talking about, I'm not sure, matter and the Big Bang, but I think that applies to any thing you create. You make up a thing, fiction, a comic, a story, a picture, etc., and you invent a whole world for it to be in... Hopefully the focus of this piece of art is happening on the page, and the rest of the world of that work extends off of the page, or that the art itself hints at this world. That's the kind of thing I want to make. For my purposes it helps to disarm any of the reader's preconceptions, so I can define the language, the visual language, the culture, and the language and symbols inside the work itself.
Especially because I do silent comics. There's that 'show don't tell' truism, that may be right or wrong, but when you do silent comics you have no choice but to tell by showing, or show by telling, all without words. And I like that a lot. I don't make silent comics to be withholding, or purposefully obfuscate my meaning, or be mysterious, or whatever. I have a thing I want to convey. But it asks a lot of the reader. It asks the reader to look at the page and figure out what exactly is going on. It asks the reader to read slow or re-read. It asks the reader to make connections and follow a narrative that you don't directly telegraph through words. And I think it is very intimate. If the reader is receptive to it, and if I'm capable of doing it right.
But it also lets me make a whole visual language and symbolic vocabulary for a comic, (relatively) free of connections to other things. I don't know. I like art that defines its terms within itself. And I'm convinced that good books teach you how to read them in the reading of them, same with art, movies, etc. That's something I aspire to.
Something I have thought about a lot: I grew up playing Nintendo, the NES, when I was in elementary school. (I'm old). The majority of those games, by design, just started with a title screen and then you began playing them with very little, if any, introduction to what you were doing in the game, why, or how. Especially the games that had a non-linear structure or a world you could walk around in. Zelda just opened, and you were walking around, and it was up to you to figure out what to do. Maybe there was some explanation in the game but it was written out in poorly translated English, more confusing than helpful in any way. You turned the game on and then just started trying to figure out what you could do, and how to continue on. I was obsessed with this game called Rygar. You were some kind of knight with a bladed yo-yo who was fighting turtles and centipedes and flying lizards. You could find rooms with giant bearded men who would only say cryptic nonsense, and this was your only hint on how to continue on. But to me it just felt like this giant mysterious alien world with its own rules and cosmology, the mythos hinted at by the landscape, and your little character was walking around in. (Also the Rygar instruction manual was the height of bastardized English; the page with a list of enemies was titled "ANIMALIZED MEN WRIGGLING EERILY"). I just bring all of this up to say that as a kid I really liked that feeling of entering a totally alien world and trying to figure out that world's logic, trying to figure out your role in it, and making a narrative interpretation of it for yourself. Also some of those early Nintendo games felt totally alienating and oppressive for the same reason. Depressing, crazy existential dread. You were lost in an illogical world, your only allies spoke in broken riddles, and you are never quite aware of the rules or the meaning of anything, or what you should do. To me Faxanadu feels like a better representation of our world than anything Jonathan Franzen has written.
Also related: When I was in high school a friend of mine who was an exchange student from Japan gave me all of Tezuka's Phoenix books as a gift, and I loved them, and would keep reading and re-reading them. Though they were in Japanese and I couldn't read them at the time, so I guess I was just looking at them more than reading them. But eventually I did re-read them when I could read Japanese and was surprised that there were whole chapters that I had understood the first time, not knowing the specifics of the characters' names and back story, but had gotten the general plot of the stories. Same thing with French comics; a French friend of mine gave me some David B. comics and Darrow's Bourbon Thret because he thought I might like them, and I loved the art so much that I kept re-reading them. Eventually it dawned on me that it was easy to read the French in the comics using a dictionary, because even if I didn't fully understand the text the pictures would fill out the context. (The David B. comic I liked the most from those was "Les 4 Savants" which is one of my favorite comics ever, shame that it is out of print and never came out in English.)
So I guess this is just a roundabout way of saying I enjoy making comics that drop the reader into a situation they have to interpret without too much telegraphing of the meaning or intent of the narrative. And I always liked silent comics like Woodring's Frank and Moebius' Arzach for the same reason. Though it is pretty difficult to convey certain things. In the comic Mighty Star I did for Study Group, there is a climactic scene where the villain outlines his plan for world domination, how he will create a new society, and I had to convey this using images, and I was so worried that readers would have no idea what any of it meant. People seemed to have understood it.
AREACC was my first published book; up to that point I had only made short comics for anthologies. I guess there is a lot of motion in my comics, especially in AREACC. That's something I kind of want to change, maybe make a comic with more quietude and less of a main character or characters just running around.
I was thinking about a lot of different things when I started making AREACC. That was in summer 2011. I had just seen the Sol Lewitt retrospective at Mass Mocca. I was in love. With the Sol Lewitt works, but also with a girl that went to see them with me. I wanted to make a comic that had a simple and rigid structure, where the narrative for each chapter would be as simple as the main character having to traverse an 'area' to find an exit. And in that simple traversal and the main character dealing with obstacles would be the narrative of the comic. Like in Sol Lewitt's drawings (the simple line ones) where repetition and relationship of patterns itself becomes a narrative, I wanted to make a comic that did that with the character moving through patterned space. There's even a 'key' of the main patterns for each chapter on the back cover of AREACC, just like Lewitt's drawings have a pattern key. But I didn't want to make AREACC just a formalistic experiment, I wanted to make something with a spiritual and emotional depth. I'm not totally sure if I succeeded at that. Because if the narrative premise is a character moving through space, through these different 'areas', you of course start thinking about that character's destination. And that 'destination' becomes the question and climax of the book.
When you were drawing comics on placemats and napkins, you said the goal was to make each other laugh. Just to run with that, with the different things you're working on right now, are there different ‘goals’ behind each of them, or do you feel there is a larger 'collective' goal/intent behind what you're working on?
That's a difficult question. I guess there is a different goal in everything I do.
To be totally honest, sometimes I start out a comic with a set idea of what I want to do and the actual process of drawing it changes my focus. Whatever my initial intent was changes when I actually see it becoming something on the page, something different. I'm still not at the point where I can totally envision what I want to do, sit down, and execute it to be exactly how I imagined it. I don't have the skill to do that, and maybe I never will. Or maybe that's just the nature of making something. You have this inchoate ideal in your mind of something, and it is perfect because it is raw thought with no ugly concrete decisions limiting it. But when you go to put it down on paper you have to make one million decisions, which cut it out of imagination and make it into something real.
I try to start every comic I do with a simple premise. The stories are all pretty simple and straight-forward. But all of my recent comics have changed from my initial plan into something different in the making of them.
Mighty Star was going to be a simple superhero story. The main plot conceit being that it was like a golden age Tezuka story or Ishinomori Shotaro comic, but instead of being about scifi technology it would be about philosophy. I was thinking about those old science fiction manga and the way they treat technology. Like the will of mankind, for better or worse, sublimated into something great and terrible; the heroes and villains use technology for good and evil on a grand scale. I was thinking about how in the 17th and 18th centuries science, philosophy, and art were treated as almost one discipline, and regarded as holy. So like Tezuka's Atom which takes place in a world of advanced technology, Mighty Star would instead take place in a world of advanced art and philosophy. I was thinking about those strange, early Shazam/Captain Marvel comics where he is a superhero that serves an ancient god. I was also thinking about how Alfred Jarry treats the idea of 'science' in 'Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician.' And how Plato's Republic sounds like a society built by a comic book supervillain.
And when I first started planning it out I was thinking it would only be three fifteen page chapters to make a little 45 page comic. It ended up being 6 chapters and over 120 pages.
The Mindhunters comics are another example of this. Every episode is pretty formulaic, the main characters sneak into a world or situation which is being powered by a brain, and they steal that brain and escape. Each one is a little vignette, the focus being more on the world they are in than on the main characters. There's no introduction or explanation as to why the Mindhunters are doing this. But as I made a few of these comics and it became a series, a greater theme started to develop: that these worlds that the Mindhunters are sneaking into are worlds in stasis. Worlds where they have the power to make marvels, using whatever technology these brains are, but the ruins of these worlds, where that power has been wasted on insular escapism, subjugation of people, lost in dreams of the past or dreams of vainglory. That kind of thing. That theme just arose naturally once I had made a bunch of comics in that series, and was not at all what I was thinking about when I first started drawing it. Also, strangely, the second Mindhunters episode has some deeply autobiographical themes in it. Not that I set out to do that, and not that it is explicitly about me or presented in such a way that to tell the reader it is autobiographical. Just that as I was making it I started looking at it and saying "damn, this is about what I'm going through right now".
Maybe it's a bit of a cliched question, and should have been asked earlier, but do you have any major "non-comic" influences you’d like to touch on?
I think it is hard to talk about influences, to talk about them honestly. I think a lot of my influences are pretty unconscious and I only figure them out later. Sometimes I go into a project with the idea of making something, some idea that I have, some reference to something, and then the act of actually making the thing changes it entirely.
I used to have this really immature attitude about influences, like I didn't want to be influenced by anything, wanted to make things that were wholly original. Which is insane and impossible, and which is a goal that has more to do with other peoples' perception (OPP) than actually making something. When I first started making comics I took my then girlfriend to a show of David B.'s original pages they had at the French embassy, and when we were looking at the pages she said something to me like "Oh you're trying to make comics like this guy does". And I thought "Goddamn, I am." And then kept this post-it note "stop trying to draw like David B." in my mind while I was drawing comics. And probably wasted a whole lot of time looking at my own work, trying to not be biting David B.'s style (which also makes no sense because he is such a great artist and my work is nowhere close to his, and in retrospect I don't even think my stuff from then even looked all that much like his work). I probably lost a lot of productive time to that weird self-imposed problem...I probably am losing time right now to other self-imposed problems.
So yeah...I don't know. I think the majority of influences, the kind of things I think about and the kind of things that directly influence my work, are not other comics. It could be any number of things. Lots of the time it is music, or books that I'm reading, or conversations I had.
As I said before AREACC was influenced directly by looking at Sol Lewitt drawings. But also around that time I was having a conversation with my friend Frank who is a music producer and he was playing me some songs he was working on. We were talking about the economy of space in a song, and Frank was talking about how in a short song, a minute or two long, he had to introduce themes, maybe repeat them a few times, so that the listener would be familiar with them, and also understand all of the weird mutations and variations on those themes when they happened later in the song. I think that conversation had a big influence on how I approach comics. It definitely had a direct influence on AREACC. I'm sure that conversations about art influence what I make the most.
I'm a chronic insomniac so I read a lot, and it's been like this since I was a kid. Probably reading 2 or 3 books a month. I definitely am inspired by what I am reading but usually just an idea, or a visual, some passage I come across and think "I want to draw that." But it's never a finished idea for something that comes out clean and finished in my mind. I think mostly it is stylistic. Reading a lot of Milorad Pavic or Nabokov, two of my favorites for example, and thinking about the complex way they introduce ideas, thoughts, and feelings – ones that conflict and grow within the characters and the world, and trying to think about how I could express that in my comics language.
Most of the time I usually have a pretty broad idea or emotion I want to express and work from there. And I think that those ideas make up the basic skeleton of the work, and are baked into the logic of the work, but when I start fleshing it out, that armature defines the work but recedes into the background. And I think it is on that basic level of the work that both the influences and 'idea' of the comic exist. But I don't know. Because I want the reader to be involved in the reading of the comic and not just passively being told what is going on, hopefully I leave space for those ideas to occur and be challenged in the reader's mind.
This is all very abstract so to explain it with an example: you've read Mindhunters. The basic germ for the idea of the world of that comic came from a lot of feelings I have about the here and now. I was listening to an interview with the documentarian Adam Curtis where he was talking about the strange cultural stasis we have at the moment, the sort of futureless now awash in nostalgia that may be imposed by entrenched political forces which will not be challenged by change, by pushing ideas of change out of the discourse. I think this is something we are all thinking about. Everything seems to be a sequel or continuation or remake of something. We are sold ideas based on comfort and nostalgia for a collective golden age childhood which includes all of the ages and popular culture from before we were born. Art is devalued to fashion in easy to understand shorthand and any conflicting vision of the future is one of apocalypse and harm; how many movie versions of the apocalypse have we been given in the last few years? So all of these ideas are in the air. Conversations I have had over text with Pete Toms, about nostalgia and culture marketing itself to itself. Conversations I have had with friends and family. Maybe last year in mid-winter, one night I was standing in a basketball court in Greenpoint looking out at the Manhattan skyline with some friends and one of them said "Our city has become fuckin' Dubai."
So all of that was in my mind when I started making Mindhunters. It's maybe not even represented in the first chapter but I was thinking about it. A world where that stasis has persisted and defined all life for centuries. A world where everything is made to preserve that stasis, that nostalgia, a world falling apart and suffering to preserve the static dreams of the powerful. Maybe none of that is apparent to the reader, and maybe I haven't done my job. Maybe some of this is me retroactively attaching more meaning to the work. But these were all things I was thinking about while making those comics...and if I can at all be conscious of my influences I think this is where they are.
Do you think that comics as a medium is more susceptible to an audience considering the creator's influences?
I don't want to outright reject the premise of the question, but this bugs me about the discourse surrounding comics: that really narrow scope of comparison...that comics are judged and discussed only in comparison to other comics, and usually in comparison to a narrow and established canon. I like Spiegelman and I like Crumb, there's stuff I also don't like about them, but it's strange that those two (amongst others), who are pretty old at this point, are still held up as some kind of measurement. I don't think it makes much sense to look at a comic made by a 21 year old in 2014 and try to shoehorn it into a cosmos where all of the main constellations are comics artist from 1965-1991. That or compare things made now to Fort Thunder, etc. Ultimately I don't see the reason or reward in guessing influences or looking for them in new work.
Of course comparison is a natural way to understand things. But whether or not something looks to someone like something else isn't really interesting to me. Maybe this is my ego and the desire for my work to be looked at and judged on its own terms, maybe it's pretty anti-intellectual and anti-academic but I value the aesthetic experience of a work over trying to fit it into a larger (or smaller) context.
In college I could not make sense of why anyone would care enough to talk about post-structualism and freud, and fight these no-stakes turf wars over the human soul, or fight each other for an authority position, leapfrogging off of art.
I'm opinionated and like to talk about what I like and don't like but I'd rather have a conversation about a work than about its hypothetical place in all works, or than define the terms of all art. I'd rather read a review about the work itself.
And I feel that way when I hear/read about how comics are discussed. Ex cathedra pronouncements of things like "If you don't like John Buscema you don't get comics," etc. (I'm not mad at Buscema but he has nothing to do with what inspires me to make comics.)
Especially because right now there are so many different people from so many different backgrounds making so many different and interesting comics I don't think that these limited comparisons are helpful. Alabaster is making amazing work right now and I have no idea what her influences are; if I had to say what her work reminds me of, it's not other comics, maybe early 20th century children's books? Does that comparison illuminate anything about her work?
And there are reviews of comics written by people who have a very limited critical scope. I read a comic review on the internet that said all comics that feature any kind of war will naturally be compared to Spiegelman's Maus. Not to war itself, or even World War 2 itself and all the different experiences of different people from different countries in different theaters of war; no, any comic featuring war specifically refers to/is compared to Maus. A cartoonist I know was once asked in an interview, or maybe on a panel, how he draws depictions of sex and how he was influenced by CF, the first person to put sex in comics. Of course that's a crazy question, for obvious reasons, but wouldn't you assume someone writing about sex was doing so from their own feelings and experience and not in direct reaction to a comic?
I guess I just want to read reviews that focus on the content of the comic, and tell me about that, and the reviewer's reactions.
There's also that high mandarin style of people writing about generalized sociology/politics through comics that also drives me totally fucking crazy. More people fighting and spilling ink about post-colonial readings of the Incredible Hulk, etc. Like looking at a comics review site with an article on the Avengers with some grandiose title like "HAWKEYE AND HAKIM BEY, RETCONNED PEDERASTY AND SUPERHERO GROUP AS TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONE." (I made that one up.) That kind of approach could be really interesting if it was well researched and illuminating but usually just reads as a grad school thought experiment, more about rhetoric than meaning.
Are there any ways in which your work/process has changed since you started making comics, and are there any changes you could see yourself making in the future? Any final things you’d like to add?
Yeah I think my process has changed considerably... I started to say that but the more I think about it I'm not sure. I think it's changed? I think my drawing is getting better, I hope? I think having finished a lot of projects I am able to more realistically follow through on things. I think I am getting better at giving comics a consistent 'tone'. I hope so. That's an aspect of my comics I agonize over and have so far not really received much feedback on: pacing and tone.
Recently I have been thinking about doing more comics with words. I did a short one for an anthology and it felt good to be writing and drawing, that you can have another narrative level running with the pictures, words can express things differently than pictures.
I am especially inspired by the way Zach Hazard's Inflated Head Zone and Pete Toms' Paws/On Hiatus series use words in the narrative. Both of them have a level of running dialogue throughout the work that is like this diagetic/non-diagetic sound in a movie, a narrative level that both dips into the action, dips out, compliments and contradicts it. Same with Antoine Cosse's J.1137. I really like that, and want to try and do something similar. Though it's hard because every time I write down an idea or start thinking about a new project it starts growing in my mind to some giant complex novel with 1000 characters. Also totally unrelated I think it would be fun to do some genre scifi stuff. Have a strange story brewing in my mind. Also a reworking of that comic Murmur I never finished. Who knows, maybe I'll marry a very rich woman and never draw again, move to Dubai, be some trophy husband. That's my ultimate dream, free of art keeping me up at night, no longer mad at twitter, divested of the need to draw.