* * *

Where did the near-sighted monkey in Picture This come from?

Well, I like to draw monkeys. I had been drawing a lot of the meditating monkey—I talk about it in my book—and then I started drawing that monkey with glasses on it. It’s definitely a self-portrait. So I had drawn one and we were broke, so I was trying to figure out stuff to sell on eBay. People will buy monkeys and I like to draw them, so this seems like a natural. I did this little near-sighted monkey and asked my husband if he would do some of the watercoloring. (My husband’s a brilliant watercolorist. He’s so good. He can draw everything far away. We always say I can draw stuff close up and he can draw stuff far away.) So when I got it back, the stuff he had done in the background was just like, Whaaa! We probably did about twenty of them back and forth, and I’d sell them on eBay. Then I was sending them to Drawn & Quarterly, just because they were funny and cute, and I think it was Peggy who really liked them, so they wanted to do a little book of just those pictures. But I had this whole other idea. So the book kind of expanded out of just the monkey pictures.

The pages in What It Is are heavily collaged and the images in Picture This are much simpler. There are obvious reasons for the difference—you’re showing readers how to draw in the latter—but do you find another kind of inspiration for your prose writing in the very layered, textured drawings?

There isn’t any difference for me. There might be a difference in the way that, you know, some days I’ll just mostly paint and other days I’ll collage. I could collage all day long, it’s my favorite thing, but I just felt like I couldn’t just do that, people would feel ripped off. [laughs] I wanted to make a book where you really made it from stuff you have around the house or you can get at the drugstore. So it’s just white glue, scissors, and paper from the garbage, and glitter glue, because I do love me some glitter. And there’s other stuff in there that no one will ever see: I love using glow-in-the-dark paint, and no one will ever see it but me.

And you know, there’s no other publisher who would let me do what they let me do. I can tell you, because I tried to find ’em. I don’t think either of those books would exist if I hadn’t found Drawn and Quarterly, because there’s no way to explain that book before you make it. You need a publisher to just trust you and give you a big skating rink, and that’s how I felt. Chris [Oliveros] would say, How big of a rink do you need for this one? Well, I’d like a rink that is 100 or 224 pages long. So that made a big difference.

Had you shopped the book around elsewhere?

No. In 2002, after I did One! Hundred! Demons!, that publisher didn’t want to do another book with me, and then nobody did, so I didn’t have anybody until 2008. I realized that if I waited for someone to offer to find me a publisher, the likelihood was I would have to conform the book to whatever they wanted. So I thought, I’m just going to start anyway with this idea that I had about collage and images, and that’s when Chris contacted me to reprint all my work that’s out of print. And I said I had this other book and it really looked crazy as hell, I mean, crazy, and I sent it to him and he was like, Okay. I had him on the phone and had to look at myself in the mirror, had to hold the phone to the mirror and was like, Really? Okay, well, I’ll get it done.

And because of that, this whole book happened—both of ’em. I just don’t think they coulda happened if I’d had a traditional publisher; they would have made me at least outline it, or they’d need to know what it is, and that didn’t happen.

What did you show Chris?

I had some collage stuff, and then I just sort of explained it to him, but mainly he trusted me—which was amazing, I mean, he really trusted me, and he never made me feel stupid, which, I have to say, my other publisher . . . I mean, editors can be crazy. The reason the guy at my previous publisher didn’t want any more of One! Hundred! Demons! was because he said my work was remedial. I’ll show you something remedial! I got my boot cocked in remedial mode! Yeah, remedial. And the editor at Simon and Schuster told me that this book I wrote called Freddie . . . he goes, “I just need to tell you, I think this book is stupid.” I mean, without hesitation, they’ll tell you that stuff.

Then why did they publish it?

Well, he didn’t want to. There was another guy who was my editor there who jumped ship. And then I inherited this guy.

I’ve heard bad stories about inheriting editors.

If you love your editor, you can have it in your contract that if they go, you go, too. But this guy hated the book, and he really made it hard. It was almost done, and he made it very, very difficult. And he was a reference guy; he’s like one of those guys that has some ideas about lit-er-a-ture. So he talked about it being a picaresque novel. He goes, it’s not quite picaresque. And I made some comment, you know: I’m not as educated as you. What does that word mean? And I knew exactly what it meant. And he goes, Oh, that’s okay—because he really did assume that I was that dumb.

I finally met him and we had lunch, and I swore that I was just going to look at him like this [staring unblinkingly] the whole time, like no matter what, like I never took my eyes off of him—kill him with my little eyes. Cause it’s unnerving, right? But he couldn’t say, Stop lookin’ at me! That was fun.

But those are people who have no attachment to the work. And before Drawn and Quarterly I never had an editor that was attached to my work, at all, ever. I had people who’d publish it and sort of liked it, but they didn’t have any curiosity about it. When Cruddy came out, the guy who was my editor, the one who liked the book, wrote a description of what the book was about, and he wrote something about a white father with a black child. Nothing that he described is in the book. And he had this whole idea that it was a book about race; it’s not, it’s about a serial killer, it’s not about race at all. But what was amazing is when I get the manuscript and the copy editor or someone sends it back, she read the back description and just assumed that it was about race. There’s a character called the “spooker” in it, and she says, “If she’s black, she would never use that term spooker.” She is not black! Find a place in this book that says she is black!

The great thing, though, is that you get a Dewey decimal number at the library, and that rocks, that totally rocks. When What It Is came out, Amazon didn’t know where to list it, so they put it under science fiction, which is so boss. I was like way into it. I was so excited that they listed it under science fiction. Because if I was gonna write a science-fiction story, I’d think this was a damn good one, a society that shames people out of doing the very thing that will make them sane.

I like that Picture This deals so much with a kind of art that we all already do—doodling. It’s an unconscious act: when you’re talking on the phone, you hear a voice but you don’t have anything to attach it to, so you end up walking around or rearranging things or doodling—doing something concrete.

You’re right, you’re right.

And in doodling on a piece of paper, it’s always a little surprising to see that you’ve made a picture, that there’s something there.

It’s in a sort of transitional phase: it’s not completely in you, it’s out into the world but it’s some other thing. You’re absolutely right about that, that’s so interesting. Especially now that everybody has their wireless phones. It is wild, like at an airport, you see people having to move and gesture while they’re talking.

I think often, too, we want to assign meaning to abstract shapes, like Arna and Marlys staring at the ceiling looking for pictures in the shadows and stains.

It’s wild, isn’t it? And that’s why I’m sort of upset or curious—I try not to be upset—about everybody looking at these little screens now. Remember how you had to find ways to cope with boring time when you’re on a road trip? And now everybody has these little DVDs so the kids can watch some stupid thing instead of having to find a way to cope with time, with the passage of time. Chris Ware did the best Halloween cover for The New Yorker last year. It was the little kids going up to the porch to trick-or-treat and the parents are all looking at their devices in the blue light. That was brilliant, wasn’t it? I love him. He’s so smart and very sweet and he thinks he can’t draw. So if he thinks he can’t draw it turns out that’s the normal state of things.

I was on a panel with Chris, and Dan Clowes, Kaz, and Charles Burns. We all had had a couple drinks and I was feeling a little mischievous. So when we were talking about drawing, I said, “You know one thing I always wondered about you guys is why there’s always a page in your sketchbooks, where you draw yourself with a huge dick and then you’re jacking off and then you look depressed afterwards.” I said, “I was really confused by that, until last night, I drew myself with a huge dick, jacking off, and I was depressed afterwards, and then I understood.” Cause you know they all have that moment, Oh no, I jacked off and I’m depressed. It was so funny giving them shit about it. They were all mortified [laughs].

You’re of the generation with Burns, Gary Panter, and Matt Groening. There are formal and thematic connections between your work, but do you feel a kind of generational relationship with them?

That’s a good question. I don’t really feel that separate from those people, but I also feel there were other cartoonists like Matt and Charles and me and Gary that are almost never mentioned. There were the people at the Village Voice who were kick-ass: Mark Alan Stamaty, Stan Mack, Jules Feiffer. In the National Lampoon there was Mary Kate Bishop. They always talk about me being this first woman cartoonist. No! There were two really amazing women who were big influences for me. One is M. K. Brown—Mary K. Brown—and the other is Shary Flenniken, and she did this wild strip called Trots and Bonnie, that looked like almost a Krazy Kat strip, really naughty and wild. And Trina Robbins! So there were all these people, and I think what’s really strange is how they’re left out of the history of comics. It’s like there’s this huge gap. I can’t believe that none of those guys are in the books, that none of those guys are in the histories. So I feel like I was a generation—not necessarily a generation, but they were seniors when I was a freshman. And that’s how I feel about the other cartoonists: it’s like we went to the same high school, but I was a senior when some of these people were a freshman.

Who were the freshmen when you were a senior?

People who are doing comics now, like Chris Ware. I feel like we went to the same school. I was the older chick who kept hanging out by their lockers: [batting her eyelashes] “Oh hey, Chris.”

I love to give Charles Burns shit; he loves to be teased a little, he does. He could totally draw like that in high school. Our high school had a staircase that was in a hallway. He painted this mural that wrapped around two floors. It was fabulous, and he had this kind of big Art Garfunkel afro, right? I was just smitten, I mean wrecked, over this guy. It was just a head-on collision, but I was two years younger. So I go up, like, “Hi, Charles. What are you painting today?” He said, “You know, I remember you.” I figured he was thinking, Oh no, it’s that girl. So for me it’s like Charles, Charles, and for him it’s like this mosquito bzzzzzzz and he’s scared. But I love to give him shit about that because it makes him really embarrassed—and happy, I think.

You knew each other at Evergreen, too.

Well, I knew him [laughs]. He knew there was a mosquito that seemed to show up constantly.

How did you come to meet Matt Groening at Evergreen?

He took over the school newspaper, and I always loved newspaper and journalism. But even in our little junior high–school paper I was really into it. So he took it over and when he took it over he printed a thing in the paper that said, I will print anything that people submit, and I thought, Ooohh, okay, let’s see how wild I can get. And he did! I would sneak stuff in at night, just through the slot in the door. I wrote fake letters to the editor, being outraged over something that happened to me when I was six, like on some camping trip. He would print everything. And then I started doing comics and submitting them, and he would print them. This was a hippie school in the seventies, but Matt looked like the straightest, squarest guy ever. I mean, he wore a buttoned shirt, he had hard shoes, we were all like, Who is this square? If you know The Simpsons, he’s somebody who loves to figure out what will drive the people around him the craziest, and that outfit, totally. It was hilarious to him.

He dressed that way on purpose?

Yeah, to mess us up. And he would always be playing this crazy music. It turned out it was Nino Rota, the Fellini soundtracks. But I’m like, What is this damn music! And then we had this fight—we fight about it all the time. See, I really was kind of a person that you had to … you had to ditch me if you really wanted to have a good time in the evening, because I was just like, I’m here, I know where you’re going. So I remember one time—Matt was pretty groovy, he had groovy fruits—and I remember one time they were going to play bridge. And I didn’t really want to come and play bridge. Then it turns out he was lying. He was just giving me shit. But he swears up and down he never said that. But how could I make that up? You can’t make that shit up. You’re in a hippie school, but no, it’s our bridge night.

1. In 1947 Stan Lee was virtually unknown, except to the few perverse readers who paid attention to the credit lines of 3^rd rate knock-off comics. But Marshall McLuhan, who himself was years away from fame, had a great radar for what was happening in popular culture. He noted a 1947 issue of Writer’s Digest where Lee wrote an article arguing “There’s Money In Comics” (which turned out to be very true for Lee, although much less true for Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko). In his 1951 book The Mechanical Bride, McLuhan used Lee’s article as a jumping off point for talking about middle- and low- brow art.

Here is what Lee wrote in Writer’s Digest: 

DON’T WRITE DOWN TO YOUR READERS! It is common knowledge that a large portion of comic magazine readers are adults, and the rest of the readers who may be kids are pretty sharp characters. They are used to seeing movies and listening to radio shows… a great deal of thought goes into every story; and there are plenty of gimmicks, sub-plots, human interest angles….

Here is McLuhan’s comments on Lee’s essay:

This happens to be true. In the matter of intellectual quality there is little to choose between Dare Devil Comics and Gone With the Wind and between the claims made for the romantic movie of our day, just as in the emotional pattern there is little or no difference between the ‘middle-brow’ and the ‘low-brow.’ The difference is mainly in the amount of lush verbiage and opulence of turnout. There is no question of perception or taste in the genteel movie or novel or in the pulps. But the superiority of the pups is in their absence of pretentiousness, and the readers of this form of entertainment are altogether undeceived by it. They are never under the impression of having bought or read anything with ‘class.’

Much could be said about this encounter in the late 1940s of two writers, then obscure but on their way to great fame in the 1960s. It is noteworthy that at least as early 1947, Lee was making the argument that “adults read comics too”, a spiel he would perfect as the spokesman for Marvel comics in the 1960s and 1970s. And McLuhan’s arguments for the merits of low-brow art can be usefully compared to that of other essayists of the period like Manny Farber, Robert Warshow, and Leslie Fiedler, all of whom found some merit in forms such as the pulps and roughneck movies.

2. I was in Montreal last week and had the honor of giving a talk at the Drawn and Quarterly store. You can listen to the talk here:  here (this is an MP3 recording).

A few thoughts on my Montreal trip:

An essay could be written comparing the offices of Fantagraphics with the headquarters of Drawn and Quarterly. The Fanta office, at least on my one visit there, really did look like something out of Animal House, a ramshackle frat boy abode with papers and books flung everywhere. The D&Q office, by contrast, was very orderly and serene. I think something of the philosophies of the two publishers can be seen in how their offices are kept. Fanta remains an outgrowth of the 1960s/1970s counterculture, with a let-it-all-hang-out spirit. D&Q came along at a later point in history and really is a boutique operation.

The same can be said of the D&Q store: the traditional comic book store has a club house atmosphere where books and toys are scattered helter skelter. Like a few other stores that have opened up in the last decade (including, if photos are to be trusted, the Fantagraphics store), the D&Q store puts much more thought into creating an inviting, relaxed space. The store really is an oasis of culture.  There has been a new development in comics retailing, which deserves notice and celebration.

Yes, please.

Normally we don’t really do “news” here at CC, but I’m fanboyishly excited about the Nipper series that Chief Oliveros just announced. This’ll be an affordable reprint series of Wright’s masterpiece. I adore the Doug Wright monograph D&Q released last year and found Nipper to be a elegant, expressive and deeply resonant comic strip. It’s a little out of my usual taste, I have to say, but there’s something about the body language and the precision of Wright’s period details that just gets me. Anyhow, it’ll be out in September. In the meantime, go out and get the Doug Wright book as an introduction. It’s more than worth it.

New York has long been the hub of contemporary graphics and comics publishing, and Brooklyn the borough of choice for many of the city’s best cartoonists and graphic artists. Bringing together an international cast of cartoonists, illustrators, designers, and printmakers, The Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival , founded by local bookstore Desert Island and local publisher PictureBox, is the first festival to serve this vibrant community.

The Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival will consist of 4 components:

- Over 50 exhibitors selling their zines, comics, books, prints and posters in a bustling market-style environment
- Signings, panel discussions and lectures by prominent artists
- Exhibition of vintage comic book artwork
- An evening of musical performances

In the cozy basement of Our Lady of Consolation Church, exhibitors will display and sell their unique wares. Exhibitors include leading graphic book publisher Drawn & Quarterly of Montreal; famed French screenprint publisher Le Dernier Cri; artist’s book publisher Nieves of Zurich, Switzerland; Italian art book publisher Corraini; master printer David Sandlin; and tons of individual artists and publishers from Brooklyn.

Featured guests include the renowned artists Gabrielle Bell, R. O. Blechman, Charles Burns, C.F., Kim Deitch, Ben Katchor, Michael Kupperman, Mark Newgarden, Gary Panter, Ron Rege Jr., Peter Saul, Dash Shaw, R. Sikoryak, Jillian Tamaki, and Lauren Weinstein, among others.

The commerce portion of the Festival is partnered with an active panel and lecture program nearby at Secret Project Robot gallery, down the street at 210 Kent Ave. This mini-symposium will run from 1 to 6 pm and is being overseen by noted comics critic Bill Kartalopolous. Also at Secret Project Robot will be an intimate exhibition of original comic book pages from 1950s romance, western and science fiction comic books, curated by PictureBox’s Dan Nadel.

Finally, at the end of the day visitors can troop over to Death by Audio at 49 S. 2nd Street, for an evening of musical performances by cartoonists, organized by Paper Route, and including performances by Boogie Boarder, Ambergris, Scary Mansion, Nick Gazin, and many others.

I’m going to try to sneak out some quick little thoughts on some recent books and ideas knocking around my brain.

I want to begin with Talking Lines: The Graphic Stories of R.O. Blechman. A longtime favorite of mine, Blechman is a master of the shaky line school of cartooning, his mark as unmistakable as, say, Herriman’s. Coming into his own in the 1950s, Blechman absorbed the lessons of linear cartoonists like Steinberg and just kept refining and refining so that each mark actually means something. You won’t find anything extraneous in a Blechman drawing. When combined with a judicious use of spot colors, his delicate images pop to life, becoming communicative graphics on a page. As a cartoonist, he’s unusual these days: he’s a yarn-spinner and a moralist. These tales are subtle examinations of a theme or subject. This, as well as use of the page, rather than the panel, as a storytelling device, seem to bring him in line with 19th century cartoonists like Caran d’Ache. But his urbane concern with current events, social mores, and city life make him resolutely modern. Blechman resolutely looks outward and at the world around him: No moody ruminating or action adventure here. More clear eyed commentary on life. I think of him like I might think of the writer Joseph Epstein: a bemused observer whose wit always surprises.

And Blechman, of course, has had one of the great modern careers (the kind it’s sorta impossible to have anymore) in graphic communication, covering animation, illustration, design, and comics. His other essential book, The Juggler of Our Lady is, as Seth notes in his introduction, one of those inbetween tomes that seems to be a proto-graphic novel.

So, go out and get this fine book. It, like D&Q’s other recent essential archive project, Melvin Monster, is one of those volumes that knocks my vision of the medium slightly askew and reminds why I’m bothering in the first place.

There were plenty of happenings to note at this year’s TCAF – the Doug Wright awards, Frank Santoro gracing my sketchbook with Jah Batman, the relentless growth of the Scott Pilgrim massive – but the most purely joyful was seeing a delighted Yoshihiro Tatsumi sit before fans lined up out through the door. “Great strip rescued from moldering obscurity” is a familiar comics story by now, yet too many of those cartoonists died amidst poverty or just indifference, unable to enjoy their own reclamation. Tatsumi can, and clearly does. Grim gutter chronicles like Good-Bye, A Drifting Life’s rueful social history: not the most intuitive candidates for new multiple-language readerships, but deserving ones.

I spoke to Mr. Tatsumi the day before TCAF began, on a high floor of a swanky hotel. He was meeting journalists all afternoon in their restaurant. It was a gorgeous day, summer’s first; Tatsumi’s wife spent most of our interview gazing down at the unbroken blue of Lake Ontario below. (They are a stylish and completely adorable couple.) We had this conversation as an ice cream sundae slowly liquefied around his spoon. Tatsumi laughed more than I expected, and sometimes he would stress a point by making violent gestures towards his chest, as if stabbing himself through the heart. Can the highlight of your festival precede the actual event?

(I owe a few people thanks and my gratitude for their help with this interview. To D&Q’s Peggy Burns, who arranged it, remaining unflappable even when a series of minor disasters made some fuckup writer late; to ace translator Jocelyn, who shadowed our words on the fly; and to Mr. Tatsumi, who gave me his time. Sheila Heti and Jeet Heer made separate assists during the long process of getting this thing published somewhere and I owe them both drinks.) — Chris Randle

******

Chris Randle: A Drifting Life is about the formation of gekiga, but I’m wondering how you would characterize the style of the book itself.

Yoshihiro Tatsumi: In Japan everything’s always read the opposite of here, so I think about the design as two pages, and if everything will be reversed I think about that before I design – of course [the individual panels] as well, but I want to have a balance to the whole thing. When it flips I’m uneasy about it, but there’s no way around that.

[The translator wonders if that was precisely what I wanted to ask about, and I clarify that I meant how Tatsumi would characterize the artistic style of A Drifting Life in comparison with the gekiga period it’s about.]

YT: When I was writing back at that time – I was really enthusiastic, I had a lot of passion when I was drawing gekiga. But now gekiga and manga are [the same thing], so even if you draw gekiga, it’s just called manga. Comparing my passion with that time… I was much more passionate then.

CR: I interviewed Adrian [Tomine] a week or so or ago, and he thought – to him the book has a “symphonic” quality, because it moves back and forth from the stylized sections about you and your collaborators to these photo-realistic depictions of Japanese history and pop culture at that time. And I’m just wondering if this structure was consciously planned out beforehand…

YT: There’s 48 [chapters] in total, so you think of those and then you go into detail and write them. I thought about 60 or 70 different sections, but the circumstances of the [Japanese] company that is publishing it, as a serial – they stopped it in the middle. There’s still 15 or 20 more stories. I guess you don’t realize that it was stopped halfway through…

CR: No, I had no idea.

YT: The last two or three chapters are really rushed-through. I was forced to end it there. In any case, I’m going to write the rest of it, so…

CR: One part that I thought was really interesting in the book was your mention of negative news coverage about what the young artists were drawing – the “vulgar manga.” Could you describe that in more detail?

YT: The parents were really up in arms about these bad books. Manga at that time was different than it is now. It was friendly manga, so little kids could read it too… On the page you have the same number of panels, the people move from left to right and they’re all the same size and it all looks the same on the page… There was no movement or anything like that. We took inspiration from movies, doing zoom shots or close-ups. Using the camera. We wanted to use these techniques in manga, really violent movement. We were trying to move the panels in a realistic kind of way, to make work without lies, true work. In work before, for example, if a samurai cuts someone­-

CR: There’s that great line from the book: “If a person is stabbed, they bleed.”

YT: Even if a person’s head was cut off and fell to the ground there was no blood, nothing came out. Like an onion [Tatsumi chuckles]. Even if the head was separated from the body it looked like the head was still alive… You couldn’t really say that would have a bad influence on kids. So we came in and took a bat to the whole thing. We did more realistic work, more photographic almost. In Tezuka Osamu’s work animals speak, and people answer them. I think that’s probably the influence of Walt Disney, but when we wrote mysteries it’s no good if animals are talking. If a dog watches a murder or something and you know that the killer escapes – if the dog says “oh hey, that’s the murderer,” that’s not really a good thing. So we didn’t draw things like that. We drew realistic things, like the strong feelings of happiness or sadness that people have. Close-ups on the main character to really show their anger – when you’re looking from far away there’s not really a lot of power in that angle. When you’re drawing a work like that, of course you’re going to see blood. If you compare that manga with the children’s manga up to that point, they just couldn’t forgive – they wouldn’t accept that kind of manga. The [parent-teacher associations] were like, “let’s just not buy it.” A lot of them sprung up all over Japan to boycott the work.

CR: That’s fascinating to me, because this was only a couple of years after the exact same thing essentially happened in the U.S., with parents and politicians and other figures in society trying to ban or boycott violent crime comics.

YT: Yeah, it was the same thing.

CR: You mentioned Tezuka, and there’s a few times in the book where he’s depicted as an icon. Obviously he was a great influence on you, but I’m wondering why you made that specific choice to depict him this way – there’s the silhouette on the train at the start of the book, and then he’s sort of shown floating above the sea near the end.

YT: That was how I felt about Tezuka at that time. I mean, when I was a kid I thought of him about on the same level as God. I really wanted to draw that honestly. Right now I don’t think many young people are buying Tezuka’s work in Japan, but at that time… he had a halo, and lights came off of him…

CR: To me, reading later Tezuka books like MW or Apollo’s Song and comparing them to his earlier work, it seems he became influenced by the new style you and others were already exploring. Do you agree with that? It’s almost as if he internalized the critique…

YT: We were imitating Tezuka when we became mangaka. [Then we created] what became gekiga, and Tezuka Osamu took an interest in it. Our work was all called “dramatic pictures,” he knew that, and kind of got angry, maybe? [Tatsumi laughs]. He fell down the stairs a little bit, he came down a few rungs… I think there was definitely some influence from us, but when we met with Tezuka and talked with him he would say, “Oh no, my work’s definitely not gekiga, it’s definitely manga.” But before we lost him [Tezuka died of cancer in 1989], when we talked to him, he would say: “Maybe my work is getting a little closer to gekiga, you never know.” … I really wanted him to just keep drawing manga no matter what. Gekiga was a world of – it was us, who were regular crazy people, and to have Tezuka Osamu come into that world… I didn’t really want that.

CR: Later on, after the events that you depict in A Drifting Life, you worked with a studio of assistants…Do you think you were a good teacher, or at least a good boss?

YT: I was a pretty selfish boss. I wasn’t really a good boss. If you use an assistant it stops being your own pictures, right? It’s not all your work anymore. Part of it is your work. So when you publish that… it’s hard for me. I always drew all the characters, and then the backgrounds, the details, the extra stuff – drawing the squares for the panels, shading, erasing the pencil marks – all those kinds of things, I had five assistants doing that. If you didn’t have five assistants you couldn’t get magazine serial work, because you had a deadline every week. You had to put out at least 30 pages a week. With just one person, with just yourself, it would be impossible, you just couldn’t work. So even though I had some people who didn’t really do a lot of work, I had five people.

CR: Are you still friendly with any of the collaborators or peers from those days, like Matsumoto or Takao Saito?

YT: At first there were seven of us, and then we had eight. And of those people now I’m really good friends with four of them. The other two don’t draw gekiga anymore, they’re doing different work. So there’s only two of us now that are doing gekiga, me and Saito Takao.

CR: Some of these artists are still almost totally unknown here, and perhaps they’ve been forgotten even in Japan as well. Are there any books or works that you really think should be rediscovered and published here, like yours was?

YT: I don’t really read anything recently, for some dozens of years I haven’t been reading anything…Japanese manga, we’re not really all together, we kind of keep to ourselves. This might sound a bit snotty, but – I read something like Golgo 13 and I’m maybe ten pages into it and I start thinking of something else, my thoughts just go somewhere else. It’s kind of a bother, so I just don’t read it. It’s not just Golgo 13 but anything that’s popular, you know? Even if I read it it just doesn’t go in my head. There’s a big gap between me and the younger artists, in terms of age, so even if I do read someone’s work I don’t feel it. I’m not moved by it. I’m sorry I have to say that, but…

CR: No, that’s okay. Is there a conscious way you approach political content in your art? Like the Hiroshima story from Good-Bye, or the anti-American protests at the end of A Drifting Life… are they just part of society’s broader story?

YT: In Japan, with politics and politicians there’s really nothing I personally can do, but what I can do – political unrest or the lives of the citizens, I’d like to express that somehow. When I was writing about Hiroshima in that story [“Hell”], I was broke forever, and everyone around me was broke. I was angry about that, you know? Japan has become such a rich country, and here we are, so why aren’t the politicians taking that extra money and giving it to us, giving it to the citizens? It’s the same now in Japan. It doesn’t change. My own dissatisfaction, my frustration, I put that into my work. At the time I wrote “Hell” I always worked for magazines, so I could write freely like that. “Hell” was written for Japanese Playboy, in fact. No one would publish that kind of manga, so it was kind of a surprise that even Playboy would give me work. I think I’ve left behind some really good work. I’d like to just keep writing like a novelist, keep writing for as long as I can. I’m pretty satisfied.

CR: I’ve heard that you’re already working on the next volume of your memoir and have a few hundred pages done, so I assume you’ll be doing that for the foreseeable future, but I’m wondering if there’s any books from before, after or during your gekiga period that you’d like to see reprinted… I want to see the one with the giant snakes.

YT: I have so many. If you put my short stories and my longer volumes together, I’ve written about a thousand pieces. I’d like to [recover] as many of them as possible. I plan on writing the continuation of A Drifting Life within the near future. If I don’t do it soon – I don’t have that much life left, you know? [Tatsumi laughs.] I gotta do it as soon as possible.

Item the first: Dan talks about Rory Hayes with Comic Book Resources here.

Item the second: PictureBox will be at the Brooklyn Book Festival this weekend, and Frank Santoro, Gary Panter and Lauren R. Weinstein will be signing their books. (Other notable cartoonists—Adrian Tomine, Gabrielle Bell, Miriam Katin—will be at Drawn & Quarterly’s table at the festival, too.)

Item the third: Lauren was interviewed by Bookslut this week, and her Goddess of War was reviewed by Richard Gehr at the Village Voice last week.

Item the fourth: Sometime soon, I will attempt to write a substantive post!