Herewith the second part of our excerpt from the Highwater oral history. Bostonians, Go check out the show, opening tonight. We pick up with a discussion of the Highwater look and feel.

Highwater Style

Kurt Wolfgang: I felt like things were going kind of a different way, and Tom was really doing them right, not as a businessman, but as far as a publisher and as far as his idea of what a publisher’s job is, which I agree with about 99.999 percent. He put it in really basic terms to me a few years ago [at the Highwater reunion] in Scituate. And I didn’t agree with that statement when he first said it because it seemed too simplistic. He said, “A publisher’s job is to discover and expose and nurture talent.” To me, looking from a capitalist point of view, well, gee, then no one’s going to publish R. Crumb. But he said, “No, someone will always publish those guys. They’re not the good publishers.” To really find things and nurture things, I think Tom’s publishing philosophy probably had less to do with the actual books come out than with making things happen that make those books possible.

I think when a lot of people look at Highwater they think of crazy design and textured paper and rounded corners. That’s all they look at. These are people who probably wouldn’t like that kind of comics anyway. So when you throw all that stuff on I think that they think you’re trying to deceive them. But I think with Tom the beauty of it all has nothing to do with the design of those books, as I said it’s part of a whole, as amazing as it is. The things that him and Jordan did and bounced off each other. I think with those two together, I think that you’re really talking about Highwater. Jordan, at least from a design perspective, is a really big part of that. Him and Tom were bitchy old ladies and trying to prove each other wrong at all times. And wonderful things come out of that.

Every time I see them together, which isn’t often any more, there’s at least one point per 45 minutes where you’re thinking, “These guys might smack each other in the head.” Jordan has called me with design choices that Tom made and said, “You know what, if he ever does it again, I really have to start thinking about not being friends with him.” They’re like two wonderful old ladies. I think they both benefited from that greatly. And we all benefited from it greatly.

Jef Czekaj: Jordan, Tom and I were setting up silkscreening at Brooke’s place. Brooke was in JP [the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston]. I had lived in town for a while, but I didn’t really know much about Jamaica Plain or how to get there. For several weeks, usually me and Jordan, we would try to get to Brooke’s loft and we would get really, really lost. This was before Google Maps. I had no idea how to get there. We would show up, we would try to silkscreen, but we didn’t know the exposure time and it wouldn’t work. So we would just have to recoat the screens and go home. We did that for a couple weeks. Eventually we got it up and running. I can’t remember what we were printing. I think just posters. I did an Anchormen poster.

Then there was some Highwater thing that we were trying to print. It was me, Jordan and Tom. We still hadn’t got the hang of it yet. The prints weren’t coming out good at all. We couldn’t figure out if the ink was too thick or too thin. They were coming out really bad. I just remember Jordan just pouring beer into the ink and Tom getting so pissed off. Jordan was like, “We’ve just got to thin it out,” and he poured beer in and that was that. And Tom got so angry. I don’t know if that was the final straw for some reason, Jordan’s carelessness with the ink. They would fight a lot over stupid aesthetic things that nobody else cared about.

Jordan Crane: I think that my take tends to be a little bit more pop, popular than Tom’s and Tom’s tends to be a little bit more obtuse. He definitely influenced me in seeing cartooniness, liking cartooniness. Not hugely. One of my favorite comics as a kid was Ralph Snart and that was all cartoony, weird, semi-realism. I like cartoony stuff but that was reminding me that I liked it. And just taking it seriously, this is a fucking life or death equation here. This isn’t something to be taken lightly. Which I already had, but having an assenting voice so close by made it all the more important to me. I remember getting fucking pissed as hell at him for fucking up designs…I definitely think I had a little more attention to detail about it and was very much like this artwork needs to be served and it needs to be treated reverently and with all of our ability to make it properly presented in this printed form. What constituted property presented in the printed form was certainly something we butted heads about.

Greg Cook: Tom and I used to talk a lot about narration in comics. Tom really felt that there was too much narration. Or too much written narration that was redundant to the drawings. Narration is a crutch for many cartoonists. And that really influenced me to cut narration out as much as possible. Or to try to make it an addition to or counterpoint to the visuals.

Ron Regé: The funny thing about the early times was Tom always had a new crazy idea of something he was going to put out. And he would call me like every couple weeks. He’s like, “We’re going to make a game board. I met this guy and we’re going to silkscreen them and it’s going to be like a Parker Brothers game. We’re going to make a box. And Brian’s going to do this. And so-and-so’s going to do that.” Then I’m like, “Uh, okay, yeah.” He’s like,” So get to work on it.” I’m like, “Okay, sure. Great.” Then one out of every 10 things would happen. There was the issue of Coober Skeber that was going to be like 150 punk patches put into a box. You had to do your comic, but they would silkscreen them on a piece of cloth and then cut it off. They wouldn’t be in any order, but everyone’s contribution would be like a punk patch. That was a good one.

Cook: The “bodega” idea was this idea that since we were already in this booth selling stuff we’d make a booth that was like a junky dimestore, but it would all be original screenprinted packaging and screenprinted objects. I was making ice cream or candy–related things because it related to my book. I don’t think we were going to have any comics. I think it was some sort of interest in—but conflictedness about—the whole sales part of the thing. But it never went anywhere.

Regé: I don’t remember how we came about doing the Boys comic book. I think I worked on those for anthologies because people would ask me to be in anthologies. So I just had these one-page comics that I was doing. And then he collected them into the comic book. Put it on pink paper. Which wasn’t my idea. At the time I don’t think I liked it. It’s not that I didn’t like it. It wasn’t my idea and it wasn’t my intention of doing it that way. And I don’t remember necessarily having a choice in the matter. I do remember just being like, “Oh, in blue ink on pink paper. Oh, that looks cool. I like it.” But I think there might have been some things with Highwater along the way where things like that happened but people weren’t so cool with.

Cook: There was this anthology, Rosetta [2002]. I don’t even know how Tom got involved in it. There’s a lot of times I would send Tom pages and he would process them for me. Without me knowing it, he reversed the colors is what he did. He made the light dark and the dark light. The second color he made the primary dark color and the line art he made the light color. And it was totally bizarre and weird. When I saw it, I’m like, “What the fuck?” It was annoying, but at the same time, I’m like, “Uh, I guess it’s interesting.”

The other thing about Tom, Tom is part colorblind. I think there’s something really distinctive about the look of Highwater that comes out of him being colorblind. He had this fucked up color sense that was very attractively different. But part of what was distinctive was that he was handicapped. Those sort of mustard yellows. There are recurring colors that I really think are just colorblind man. But they amuse me, because they’re somewhere also in the core of what the Highwater style is.

[Part 1 can be found here.]

Labels: anthologies, book design, Greg Cook, Highwater Books, Jef Czekaj, Jordan Crane, Kurt Wolfgang, Ron Regé Jr., Tom Devlin