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The following post was written by David Heatley, in response to last week’s Cage Match:

I’ve been checking out some of the reviews of my book floating around on the web, including here on good ol’ Comics Comics, and I wanted to take the time to articulate some of the intentions I had with My Brain is Hanging Upside Down and respond to some of the criticism.

First off, I’m really proud of this book. I spent almost five years on it. It’s not perfect by any stretch and I’m sure it will be a maddening read for some people, but it’s my baby and I stand behind it. I think of it as a catalog or a ledger accounting book. It’s an inventory of my life. It doesn’t have a traditional novelistic arc to it. It doesn’t follow the rules of usual literature and might not look like your run-of-the-mill comic book.

My Brain is a series of fractured vignettes that approximate a self-portrait, clearly incomplete— a record of who I was and what mattered to me most while writing it. More than that, it’s the best way I know to talk about my country. There’s an amazing amount of personal and cultural baggage I was bombarded with as a kid and teenager and it’s my job to sort it out and make sense of it and decide what’s worth keeping (and passing on). The risk I took was in betting that readers would find that process entertaining or moving or helpful in some way. It seems the jury’s still out, over here at least.

I used to do this a lot, but I no longer spend time wishing works of art were something they’re not. I don’t wish Stan Brakhage made commercial Hollywood films. Or that Kanye West would do something more stripped down, personal and emotionally revealing. I try to accept art for what it is and decide if it has anything of value to offer me. If I take a stance against it, especially if it’s accompanied by a righteous feeling of being sure of my opinion, I’ve found that I’m using someone’s work to further my own unhappiness, discontent and irritability and ultimately it has nothing to do with the artist on whom I’ve fixed my angry gaze.

Frank Santoro leads the discussion here with a lot of emotionally charged accusations, which for me, mostly amount to this: “Your book (of which I read bits and pieces in the bookstore) stirred up a lot of feelings in me and I’m angry at you that I have to feel these things, so I’ll pretend that it’s actually boring and that I don’t care about it.” This was disappointing since my hope is that people will actually read the book, in all its complexity, before commenting on it (I’m reminded of Catholic nuns protesting Last Temptation of Christ). But also because I’m a big fan of Frank’s work and like him personally. He has a simultaneously painterly and cinematic approach to comics that I find enlightening and educational. He was a big inspiration for me in working on the “Family History” strip of my book, in particular his book Incanto, which is a gorgeous series of drawings done at an inhuman velocity. I’ll continue to admire and seek out all his new work. No hard feelings, Frank! For real, yo.

Tim Hodler articulated some excellent points of criticism and was generous with his praise. He’s of the mind that the asides in the book, written in the present tense while I was working on it (including the “shout outs” in “Black History”, or the epilogue of “Sex History”) don’t belong and are too jarring to be included in this volume. I’m not objective and I’m sure I have a distorted view of how they come across. I think they add a further wrinkle of complexity to the story. For what it’s worth, I’ve heard from several readers that they loved reading the asides in the midst of the otherwise heavy narrative. It was like a comic relief or a moment of decompression.

I don’t have much to say to people who don’t like the way my art looks. I certainly have my own preferences and tastes and you’re entitled to yours. Hopefully I’m getting better at it. There’s plenty of other stuff out there if you’re mostly looking for traditionally beautiful comic book artwork. I think Overpeck will look a little more “fully baked.” This one was like editing together the work of 5 different people under a single pseudonym.

I want to clarify Heidi MacDonald’s comment about a panel I recently did at Barnes & Noble. She states, “Heatley was very frank about being a narcissist and how that informs his work. I got the impression that the effect on the audience is a secondary motivation for him.” What I actually said was that there’s something narcissistic about all writing. We’re people who are traumatized into thinking that the most incredible thing in the world is what’s happening inside our heads at any given time. And we constantly think about how we can use what we’re experiencing in our own work, sometimes at the expense of being present with the people around us. I went on to say that I hope that what may look like narcissism could be seen as a desire to look deeply into myself and share what I find. I don’t feel a lot of attachment to my story as something that defines me. I’m done with it. And if I’ve done my job with this book, my readers will find something useful or illuminating or entertaining in it.

Noah Berlatsky, an acquaintance of mine, and a talented, but bitter writer living in Chicago, wrote about my “Sex History” strip on a site called comiXology. The highlights of his career so far have included well-written, but scathing attacks on Chris Ware and Art Spiegelman with titles like “In the Shadow of No Talent”. For the record, back in 2002 I almost illustrated one of his poems as a comic strip, but had to abandon it because it seemed too similar to a Marc Bell strip at the time. He also contributed to an incoherent failure of an anthology I produced while living in Chicago called The New Graphics Revival. I stand behind the idea of that book, which was that given the time and materials, most anyone could produce an interesting comic strip. But I’m embarrassed by almost all of the work that was sent to us, mostly by a middling, call-for-entry gen-x set. I’m not saying that my failing to promote an anthology that contained work by him or my inability to finish a strip based on his writing could have led him to write this line: “Whether through pointlessly tangled continuity, repetitive autobio dreck, aggressively ugly art, or reflexively irrelevant literariness, [Heatley’s] comics seem determined to find some way, any way, to keep out all those readers and creators who might otherwise, and naturally, see comics as their own.” But anything’s possible!

More to the point, he claims that in the anecdotes about bad sex, longing and one night stands that make up “Sex History”, I’m depicting ciphers, not real women. “He occasionally wonders what is up with one of them — why is she behaving so oddly? Why didn’t she get me off? But he never really cares enough to find out — or, at least, not enough to waste one of his tiny panels telling the reader about it.” Unfortunately, he missed the fundamental idea behind the piece and took the work at face value. The “me” character is something of an unreliable narrator. I’m asking the reader to imagine an alternate universe where the details of falling in love and getting married deserve a single panel and where obsessive thinking about a meaningless crush or one-night stand deserve dozens. I’m certainly not defending the behavior or even the thinking shown, quite the opposite. Something I tried to expound on in the strip’s new epilogue.

The pink bars, by the way, are pretty much a non-issue outside comics circles. I think previous readers feel like I gave them something and then took it away. So now they’re angry. One plausible theory, at least.

A few words about “open ambition”, which seems to be popping up on the comments section here. I’ve never felt at home in the “indie” comics world, where authenticity is judged by how few books are sold and ultimate hipster cred is dealt to artists who are selfless enough to leave their name off their piece entirely. It’s true I’m a self-promoter. I want my book to sell. I want to make lots of money. I want to have a house and give my kids a college education. I used to think that making art and making money were incompatible. It took shedding a lot of my own self-loathing and shame to get to a place where I believe in what I do and get excited about sharing it with as many people as possible. Maybe I’ve tipped a little too far in my excitement. I’m cool with that. I’m not sure what “careerist” means. It must be the sexiest word a surly 25-year-old can muster to put a “successful” artist like me in my place. “He’s just in it for the career!” I don’t really make those distinctions. The business side of art isn’t evil. It’s interesting. If all that turns you off, there’s plenty of other work out there by sad, lonely, misunderstood artists to fetishize and worship. They need your attention more than me.

It was heartening to hear some excitement even among My Brain‘s detractors for my next book Overpeck. I think of it as the polar opposite of what I was going for with My Brain, so there’s a good chance all my fans and critics will switch sides when it’s published. Or maybe not. It should be out from Pantheon by 2010 or so. It will have a more-or-less novelistic structure with a traditional story arc and will feature the best, non-cramped art I can deliver. Yours for $24.95, if not less.

Sincere thanks for reading. And for all your comments, even the viciously nasty ones. Peace out.

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So, following Frank and Dan, I am now the last of the Comics Comics bigwigs to get interviewed on Inkstuds. You can listen to the carnage here.

I can’t really bring myself to listen to much of it yet. Lauren tells me it’s actually not that bad, but I still remember several answers that I would change if I had the chance to build a time machine and do it all over again. I’m sure I made other misstatements that I should correct, but I’ll spare everyone by just addressing the two I still recall in vivid insomnia-inducing glory.

1. When Robin mentioned Guy Davis, my brain immediately leaped to thoughts about the difference between “mainstream” and independent cartoonists, and for some reason I started talking about this post by Jacob Covey. I was thinking “generic talented artist working in the corporate comics world”, but in this context, Davis himself is about as bad a specific example as I can imagine. The bulk of his work is independent and/or creator-owned, and even in his work for DC and other big publishers, his art is almost unfailingly personal and ambitious. If I had been writing slowly instead of speaking quickly, I would’ve pointed out that Davis was not really the kind of artist I was talking about.

2. If I remember accurately, when discussing Steve Gerber, I talk about how while he never really wrote any entirely successful comic books, he still managed to pave the way for future good work, simply through his willingness to stretch the boundaries of corporate comic writing. I think I ended up saying that “someone had to do it.” In fact, though, his importance stems from the exact opposite of that statement: No one had to do it. He did it anyway. That’s what’s important about him. (This doesn’t even go into his legal fights for creator rights, which may be a more important legacy, but that’s another story.)

Anyway, that’s it, I think. Number 1 is much worse than number 2, and the one that really bothers me. I don’t want to know what numbers 3, 4, and 5 are, but feel free to point them out and mock me in the comments, or in person this weekend at SPX.

UPDATE: Okay. I listened to it. It’s not that bad. There are a few more parts that made me cringe a little, but nothing egregious enough to write about here. Only the Guy Davis part really makes me feel embarrassed ashamed embarrassed. Carry on.

UPDATE II: Also, it may have sounded like I was joking when I suggested that Robin get Paul Pope to do a cover for his bound collection of Ambush Bug comics, but actually, I think that would probably be pretty great!

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This weekend at SPX PictureBox will unleash some serious chaos on you. Lauren Weinstein, CF, Frank Santoro, Timothy Hodler and Matthew Thurber will be in attendance.

PictureBox will debut new zines by Dash Shaw and Santoro. AND we will have limited advance copies of the books below.

The Ganzfeld 7
Edited by Dan Nadel and Ben Jones
Art directed and designed by Ben Jones
Edition of 1000

This is the final issue of The Ganzfeld. We got excited and just skipped 6 and went straight to 7. For this one we’ve really stacked the deck. Ben Jones art directed and co-edited the whole thing, even providing covers. Inside the 288 page, full color book is new work by: Brian Gibson, Lauren Weinstein, Taylor McKimens, Andrew Jeffrey Wright, Jessica Ciocci, Chris Ware, Mat Brinkman & Joe Grillo (24 pages of collaborative drawings), Erin Rosenthal, Keith McCulloch, Peter Blegvad, Joe Buzzell, Jon Vermilyea, C.F., Eddie Martinez, Chuck Webster, and many more. There are features on Marc Smeets, Joanne Greenbaum, Heinz Edelmann and Pshaw. And there are comics by Ben Jones throughout. It’s a brick. A monument. A terror. Available at very few outlets and pretty much only online.

If that weren’t enough it comes packages with 4 more items only available as part of the package:

-Problem Solvers, the DVD, by Paper Rad. EXCLUSIVE to Ganz 7
-A 12 page zine collecting the best of Kathy Grayson’s blog
-A 24 page pamphlet examining the work of L.A. genius artist Bob Zoell by Norman Hathaway
-An 18×24 two-sided poster by Lauren Weinstein

Travel
Yuichi Yokoyama

All SPX copies are signed with a drawing by Yokoyama

In Yuichi Yokoyama’s Travel, the storyline is as linear as it is sharp: it is the long, silent and crystalline description of a train ride undertaken by three men. The subject Yokoyama depicts here is less the landscape around the train (the distance covered, the regions travelled through) than the actions within the train itself. As the train moves, the three men walk through the string of cars and are confronted with the vehicle’s architecture, its machine-like environment. By above all, they are confronted with the stares and the physical presence of other passengers. Travel is a journey into the contemporary Japanese psyche – a brilliant, wordless graphic novel. Bookforum has written of Yokoyama: “Concerned with phenomena rather than character and narrative, his comics resemble the output of a drafting machine: sequences that present multiple views of an object in action and look like exploded product diagrams. Yokoyama seems to enjoy the resulting images as much for the strange shapes that are generated as for what they reveal.” This edition features an introduction by cartoonist and historian Paul Karasik and commentary by the author.

Powr Mastrs Vol. 2
C.F.

Powr Mastrs Vol. 2 follows hot on the heels of this elusive artist’s first volume– in a series of six graphic novels–which was one of last year’s most anticipated debuts. C.F. comes out of the mythic Providence, Rhode Island art and noise scene–his musical alias is Kites. In a recent profile The Comics Reporter observes, “Contrasting sharply with many of his flashier contemporaries, C.F.’s primary skill lies in overlooked nuances of comics storytelling, in particular pacing.” His distinctive voice and intricate rendering skills have attracted attention from the groundbreaking comics anthology, Kramers Ergot–he was included in the fourth issue, and featured on the cover of the fifth. Here, C.F.’s epic fantasy–an allegorical tale where power, physical identity and even gender are always in flux–picks up steam: Buell Kazee sneaks down into the cellar of the plex knowe crypt and conjures trouble; Tetradyne Cola takes a nap and dreams of Monica Glass and the lemon sparklers of star studio; members of the Marker clan compare notes on their magical crimes and the witches of Lace Temblor conspire over transmutation night.

Monster Men Bureiko Lullaby
Takashi Nemoto

“Nemoto is the undisputed master of filthy comics. His work is brutal and horrifying and sure to shock even the most jaded comics reader. And yet underneath all his absurd depravity is a beautiful and touching story of a father’s love for his giant mutant sperm son.”-Johnny Ryan

At long last, this underground Japanese classic has been translated into English. A seminal work of manga from the mid-1980s, Monster Man Bureiko Lullaby is a Candide-esque tale–if you can picture Candide as a mutated sperm brought to life by radioactivity. Unremittingly explicit, this is the comics equivalent of Henry Miller at his best: direct, honest and insightful while simultaneously beautiful and grotesque. Tokyo-based Takashi Nemoto, who was born in 1958, has been called the R. Crumb of Japan: Nemoto and Crumb share a similar, surreal drawing style and pessimistic, satirical stance, for which both have faced their share of negative criticism. Due to his unapologetically squalid subject matter, Nemoto has long been a controversial figure in Japan–clashing violently with mainstream Japanese morals–and is just now receiving some critical success there. Reviewers are finally looking past his gross-out humor to find farflung influences and connections like Mark Twain, Otto Dix and Andre Masson. Book design by King Terry.

See you this weekend!

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The audio of the panel mentioned earlier is now up, for anyone who’s interested. It’s going to be a while before I have time to listen to it myself, fortunately, but I am sure of two things: (1) I sound like an idiot trying to answer Tom Spurgeon’s first question to me, and (2) at the time, I was greatly depressed by some of the things being said, openly, freely, in front of an audience, and on tape, seemingly with little awareness of or concern for the ethical and journalistic implications. (To be clear, it wasn’t the audience or recording devices that bothered me, but the fact that even their presence couldn’t inspire the barest lip service to be paid to the ideal of journalistic independence.) All this doesn’t mean that it was a particularly exciting discussion, so don’t expect fireworks.

(By the way, one of the other panelists, Johanna Draper Carlson, has posted her thoughts as well.)

UPDATE: And now a third panelist, Heidi MacDonald, has also weighed in.

UPDATE II: This guy is making sense! And he’s even more persuasive because of his DEFT use of CAPITAL FUCKING LETTERS!

UPDATE III: Update II was juvenile.

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The Comics Comics and PictureBox advance team has arrived in Charlotte, NC for Heroes Con. Frank and I are lounging in our hotel room, high above the convention center. So far it looks like a fun show and damn fine for back issues. Why, there’s an entire Fangoria section at one table! Anyhow, Tim will be joining us tomorrow and then we have some fun panels:

Friday, 3 pm:

CAGE MATCH: Comics Comics Vs Comics Comics! | Room 208
A live critique session with the editors of Comics Comics. Timothy Hodler, Dan Nadel and Frank Santoro will conduct a no-holds-barred argument about a comic book or graphic novel of their choice. Audience participation is encouraged. Chairs might be thrown.
Topics:
John Byrne’s FX
Kirby’s OMAC
The new issue of Mome
Kick-Ass 1-3

Saturday, 12:30 pm:

THE NEW ART COMICS
From critical favorite hits like MAGGOTS and POWR MASTRS, to prominence in influential anthologies like KRAMER’S ERGOT, “art” or “abstract” or “out” comics are pushing the boundaries of the avant garde in comics. Join Tom Spurgeon of the Comics Reporter as he sits down with Picturebox publisher Dan Nadel, KRAMER’S ERGOT editor Sammy Harkham and publisher Alvin Buenaventura for a frank discussion of this leading edge of art in comics!

Sunday, 1 pm:

CRAFT IN COMICS: Jaime Hernandez, Jim Rugg, and Frank Santoro in Conversation | 213A
Less a conversation on materials and techniques and more a conversation on ideas and beliefs, this panel will focus on tradition and innovation in composition and drawing for comics. From Jaime’s insistence on not using photographs as reference in his comics to Jim’s clarity of composition and Frank’s careful color choices, there are countless tenets of craft that are largely underappreciated by readers. This panel will investigate these ideas and attempt to illuminate and outline them in a lively conversation led by Frank Santoro.

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See if you can catch the several (not-important-at-all-oh-no) mistakes I’ve cleverly hidden in my replies to Tom Spurgeon’s interview questions over at the Comics Reporter. If you can find all five (or are there more?), I will reward you with a look of embarrassed panic.

[UPDATE: To paraphrase General Petraeus, the Spurge is working — and the mistake I allude to in the headline of this post has now been fixed. No more freebies in this contest.)

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I enjoyed Rich Kreiner’s review of Comics Comics. It was, as Tim noted, too kind. So this isn’t an argument, thank heavens. In a long parenthetical thought, Kreiner wonders about our criteria for coverage, and also about our seeming fascination with the fact of something existing, as though the effort alone was enough to qualify our interest. I can’t speak for Tim or Frank, but, as for me, well, Kreiner might be on to something.

Sometimes I see things so sublime or so ridiculous that I have to just wonder about them. It’s not that I like them, per se. I don’t like Dave Sim’s Collected Letters, but what drives a cartoonist to undertake such a project is interesting to me because (a) Sim is clearly a man with his own vision and (b) he’s a hugely important cartoonist, no matter what you might think of the quality of his work. And, on the other hand, there are artists like like Steve Gerber or Michael Golden, both beloved Comics Comics figures.

Let me digress for a moment: During the most recent SPX, me, Frank, and Tim went out to dinner with a large group that included Gary Groth, Gilbert Hernandez and Bill Griffith. Gary ribbed us about Steve Gerber, etc., and Frank, in a moment of comics euphoria confessed his love of Michael Golden’s work to the entire table. I don’t think Bill even knew who we were talking about, and Gary seemed duly horrified, while Gilbert smiled beatifically, as if to say, “I love that this guy loves Golden, but I’m not saying a word”. I mean, Gary’s fought for sophistication in comics for 30 years, and now he has to listen to three knuckleheads talk about Golden and Gerber. Oy vey. See, all three of us were formed, in a sense, by The Comics Journal, and to an extent, by Groth’s own sensibility as a publisher and editor. But we also came up at a time when we didn’t (and still don’t) have to choose between art and hackwork. We can like both, and enjoy both on their own merits, precisely because Gary won the battle for sophistication and seriousness. His efforts have allowed us to sit back a bit and examine the things that got passed over, shunted aside or simply spit at. That means that Frank can talk about Michael Golden because he’s fascinated by his figuration in the context of action comics. Frank wouldn’t, at least, not sober, make a case for Golden as an artist in the same way he does for Gilbert. But then again, he did just post about Nexus. I guess what I’m saying is that a central tenant of Comics Comics is a kind of enjoyment of something within its context. Steve Gerber is an interesting comic book writer. That is enough to make him worth examining for us. And, he, like Golden, like Rude, et al, is someone who has willingly labored in a field with few rewards and a lot of creative restrictions. Those “rules” that these guys bump up against make for an interesting friction and can produce, accidentally or intentionally, interesting work. And part of is also that, to an extent, we take the greatness of someone like Dan Clowes for granted. He’s been written about, been hashed over. For us, it’s perhaps more fun to dig through a body of work that has yet to be poured over, and to find artists whose visions carried them into strange places under odd restrictions.

So, Rich Kreiner, yes, we, or at least I, sometimes like things just because they exist in an odd space, and occupy a strange little niche. And while I’ve never been a proponent of confusing effort with merit (i.e. the praise for something like Persepolis is primarily because people were impressed enough that a comic could be about Iran that they ignored how slight the actual content was), sometimes noting the effort is worthwhile. And I thank Kreiner for making the effort to write about us. Now if we can just make enough time to do that next issue….