Destroy All Movies!!!

Anytime Fantagraphics publishes something outside of its core alternative comics foundation, I take note because it’s often quirky and entertaining as hell reading. That’s definitely the case with Destroy All Movies!!!: The Complete Guide to Punks on Film, co-edited by Zack Carlson & Bryan Connolly. The book strives to be the “most dazzlingly insane film reference book of all time … an informative, hilarious, and impossibly complete guide to every goddamn appearance of a punk (or new waver!) to hit the screen in the 20th Century”. To get a taste of the book, watch a video flipping through it; or take a gander at the introduction as well as a 24-page excerpt of the book. Once you’ve had a chance to read my email interview with Zack & Bryan, consider the current deal that Fantagraphics is offering, where you can save 20% if you buy Destroy All Movies!!!, along with Portable Grindhouse: The Lost Art of the VHS Box.

Tim O’Shea: I love book dedications for the stories potentially behind them. What’s the story behind this “Dedicated to PENELOPE SPHEERIS and JON GRIES for inspiring this project and countless others.”

Zack Carlson: Spheeris’ 1984 film SUBURBIA is by far the best movie I’ve ever seen, and Jon Gries’ performance in JOYSTICKS is a true display of subhuman wildness. Bryan and I watched both of these movies in a short span, and the realization of their sheer power planted the seed for this book that would devour our lives for seven years. We should sue!

O’Shea: How did it come about that Richard Hell wrote the intro to the book?

Zack: He was someone that we were really hoping to even just get an interview out of, though expectations were pretty low considering his prominence in the music and art community. I mean, we couldn’t even get Emilio Estevez to call us for a REPO MAN interview, so what shot did we have for Richard Hell?

Surprisingly, he responded quickly and was very easy to deal with. I’d initially promised him that it’d only take 30 minutes, but we ended up talking for 90. For someone who gets approached so often, he was incredibly open and seemed to have a great time with the interview.

When the time came to ask someone for a foreword, he was easily the first choice. He’d been there for the beginnings of punk, had appeared in several narrative films and documentaries, is well-spoken and funny. We just didn’t know if he’d say yes.

O’Shea: The book was designed by Jacob Covey, did you have any input in the design, or did you just trust Covey to create the best design for you?

Bryan Connolly: The man is a genius. Look at the book. It’s gorgeous. We knew we wanted hot ’80s pink and we knew what images we wanted to go with what, but that layout is all him. I truly love it.

Zack: Jacob and I spent many, many nights on the phone until 3 AM working out details. He’d call and say, “I need 14 more images for the D section!” and I’d get crackin’. He was definitely the entire force behind the book’s visual power. All the funny touches — like the pink skull superimposed over Bernie’s face for the Weekend at Bernie’s II image — that was all him. He is the king.

O’Shea: Can you talk about the editing process for the book, how did you go about deciding what to include and dividing up editorial responsibilities on the project?

Zack: I mean, we basically had to just watch as many movies as humanly possible, as long as they were made between 1975 and 1999. And we were dead set to include as many punk/new wave appearances as we could. Punks can pop up in almost anything besides a period piece or a western, so we had our hands full. Bryan and I each scanned through at least 7000 movies in the last seven years, and our friend Spenser did almost as many himself. Whoever found the punk usually wrote the review. Then we had other pals who signed on to review specific films that were already punk-confirmed, and that they were excited to write about. Then I proofed n’ edited them and that was it, until the general book proofing came around. That was a nightmare. Bryan, contributor Laura Fleischauer and I spent two weeks proofing, and then four people at Fantagraphics did the same, and we’re STILL finding typos!

O’Shea: I was surprised to see a film like Against All Odds included in the book, even more surprised after reading the review: “A typical ’80s noir throwback that benefits by having the dad from Webster in it. Though full of plot twists, it’s predictable, and the only surprise was the woman with intense eye make-up, chopped, messy bleached hair and bullet belt mingling with the wealthy at a posh nightclub. Later she dances to the safe sounds of Kid Creole & The Coconuts. Richard Widmark plays a corrupt angry man. He’s fine. Phil Collins has his title song play over the end credits. He’s paid. I watch this movie on my television. I’m bored. (BC)” Were movies like this included for comedic relief opportunities?

Bryan: It was included simply because a punk was in it. I would have preferred not
to because it is a terrible film. But the goal was to include every movie made before the year 2000 with a punk in it, so we had no choice.

O’Shea: Were there certain films you hoped to include in the book, but could not track down to review? Were there others that proved challenging to find, but that you were able to include ultimately?

Zack: It’s nice to be able to say it, but we honestly tracked down everything we were looking for. And many were tough/expensive to get our hands on. The closest call was the film Banned from director Roberta Findlay. It was never released theatrically or on video, and Findlay allegedly hated it so much that she personally suppressed its release. We even called her at her day job, and she didn’t wanna talk about it. We eventually struck it lucky by reaching Banned’s writer Jim Cirile, who was friendly enough to email us a VHS dub. That movie is a true masterpiece, by the way.

O’Shea: The book is rich with archival photos, were there any favorites that you were pleased to include? And what were your sources for some of these gems?

Zack: I was the guy on image patrol. There was an even divide between VHS covers, old materials from magazines, glossies and internet discoveries. I even took a trip to LA to buy stills from some of the old memorabilia stores there, and came across some pretty great material. Some of the better images (like the Class of 1984 or Surf II stuff) came from the filmmakers themselves.

If anyone reading this is working on a research project, I strongly recommend looking beyond the web for images. Most of what you’ll find there is low resolution and will look lousy when reproduced, and it’s a lot more fun to stumble across stuff that isn’t just laid out for you online.

O’Shea: In terms of punk documentaries, I was struck by Fugazi’s Ian MacKaye’s response in the book’s interview: “A lot of times, the documentaries are put through a major distribution. They’re often tweaked. That American Hardcore movie—I know the guys who made that movie, I’m in the movie—but my analogy for that movie is it’s like watching people fuck through a keyhole. It’s titillating, but it’s not even close to what was actually happening.” In your experience, do you think the same could be said for a majority of documentaries about punk?

Zack: It’s probably largely true of documentaries about anything. Trying to capture the essence of something in 90 minutes is going to be a tough prospect, but that’s especially true when that thing is as large and important as punk.

O’Shea: How many interviews were conducted for the book?

Zack: 65 or so. There were a couple more that we didn’t use because the subject might have been hazy on the details, or just seemed to be answering by the numbers. We contacted about 130 people for interviews and I guess our returns on that were really pretty good, considering we couldn’t pay anyone for helping. A couple people asked for money, but if we had any, we wouldn’t be the kind of people who’d write this book.

O’Shea: Did your definition of punk change drastically in the course of working on this book? If so, how?

Bryan: My definition of punk didn’t change, but it was certainly interesting to learn what the old white men in Hollywood had as their definition: arrow through head, eats broken glass, harasses the elderly, etc.

O’Shea: Can you single out your favorite three to five favorite films among the book?

Bryan: Madame Wang’s, Surf 2, and Get Crazy!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Zack: Those are all great. Also: Suburbia (’84), Joysticks, and Ladies & Gentlemen — The Fabulous Stains!

O’Shea: Man, how long did that index take to create?

BRYAN: It was a lot of work on our end and even more work on Fantagraphics’ end. We listed all the names, and they matched up the page numbers.

Zack: That was the rough part. It took five of them over a straight week. Ugh.

O’Shea: You thank a number of film rental places at the start of the book, some of them classified with an RIP (as having closed, I assume). How saddening is it to you to see storefront institutions fall victim to streaming technology and Netflix?

BRYAN: I like those places. I like them a lot. I like to talk to the people that work at them. Going to a RedBox must feel cold and depressing. Their selection is shot. Netflix is convenient, but I like to still rent VHS tapes, which they don’t have. I also get a headache browsing on a computer. I like to go to a tangible section and just pick up boxes I don’t
know anything about, sometimes finding a hidden treasure. This can’t be done the same way on the internet.

Zack: I agree. I’m constantly shocked by people’s willingness to forgo the most valuable resources we have — like bookstores and video stores — because of the lazy convenience of the internet. Why don’t people want to leave their homes? Are they afraid they’ll get struck by lightning or bitten by a dog? It makes me nuts.

O’Shea: Anything you’d like to discuss that I neglected to ask you about?

Zack: The world is full of semi-illiterate jackasses poking at their cell phones and treating each other like shit.

This Side of Jordan

Fantagraphics Books has surprised me on many levels this past year (all good levels, of course). So when I heard it was publishing Monte Schulz‘s prose novel, This Side of Jordan, I contacted the author (with some help from friend of the blog/Fantagraphics’ Associate Publisher Eric Reynolds) to discuss the book through an email interview.

As detailed by the publisher: “This Side Of Jordan is a story of another America, eighty years distant yet familiar, too, a vibrant and scandalous tapestry of eccentric characters from a nation embroiled in criminal liquor traffic, thrilled by Jazz Age fads and frolic, drunk amid the glittering showgrounds of a booming circus whose flag-topped tents are about to come down. Through mayhem and merriment, past the violence and hypocrisy of Prohibition, along miles of dirt roads and busy Main Streets, we see in this wonderfully evocative narrative a simple yearning for love and hope. This Side Of Jordan is about the distance we travel in America to find our rightful place. …

He spent ten years writing Crossing Eden, from which This Side of Jordan is drawn as the first of three interconnected novels; the second and third, Fields of Eden and The Big Town, will be published in 2010 and 2011.

Monte Schulz received his M.A. in American Studies from the University of California at Santa Barbara. He lives in Northern California. He is the eldest son of Charles M. Schulz (PEANUTS).”

My thanks to Schulz for an interview in which the quality of his answers greatly exceed that of my questions. Once you’ve read the interview, please be sure to visit the Fantagraphics website for a 23-page PDF excerpt from the book.

Tim O’Shea: Your first novel, Down by the River, was published in 1991. How has your writing voice matured in the past 19 years?

Monte Schulz: My basic style of writing hasn’t changed in thirty years. The issue was always doing what I was best capable of. “Down By The River” was the pinnacle of what I could achieve in a novel back then, but after it was finished, I discovered I was capable of so much more. Stylistically, however, I’ve always favored and embraced a lyrical prose, and these ‘20s novels have just given me more room and opportunity to express it. Also, I’ve read much more than I had back then, so my work since that first novel has been informed by writers I knew nothing of at that time – Bellow, Marquand, Cozzens, Kantor, etc. Then, too, I think I’ve refined what I like best about artistic writing, while improving my sense of character and story, and better differentiating voices in dialogue, something that is very much on display now in “This Side Of Jordan.”

O’Shea: This Side of Jordan is the first of three novels, that will be published collectively by Fantagraphics as Crossing Eden in 2012. If you wrote these three novels–set in the Jazz Age–separately, what is the appeal to ultimately publishing the three stories as one?

Schulz: “Crossing Eden” was always one novel. I never conceived of splitting the book apart, and the whole novel is greater than any of its three parts. All three stories are interwoven together, much like the structure of John Dos Passos’s “U.S.A.” trilogy. So when you change chapters in “Crossing Eden,” you change storylines. I broke Alvin’s story off in 2002 and called it “This Side Of Jordan.” The others came apart a couple of years later. When Gary Groth agreed to buy the book, he said he’d be willing to publish it all as one book straight away, but the part I call now “The Big Town” still needs work. So I thought it might be better to offer them as three books, so as long Fantagraphics would put it all together again. And they will in 2012.

O’Shea: These three novels took 12 years for you to create, how did the time breakdown between research and the actual writing. What aspect of your research was most critical for the work?

Schulz: I wrote and researched simultaneously. I believe that doing research beforehand inhibits writing, at least it does for me. So I made sure to push the narrative forward in one place while researching and gathering material for other areas of the novel. I collected period arcana – catalogues, novels, magazines, etc – and drew inspiration and information from each: three books, for example on Prohibition written and published during Prohibition; twelve books on Spiritualism and séances from the period; a large library-bound collection for six months of Collier’s magazine from 1929. And encyclopedias from the era, medical books, etc. Then, too, I read extensively in the fiction from the period and took notes on idiomatic expressions and names of things to use in both narrative and dialogue. Reading Farrell’s “Studs Lonigan” and seeing how his characters speak showed me that I had done it correctly. “This Side Of Jordan” should feel like a period piece, as if the reader were transported back to the summer of 1929, and I believe it does so.

Taken all together, no single element was the most critical because I believe everything had to work together, all forms of language, for instance: poetic, lyrical, narrative, dialogue. The way the characters speak in “This Side Of Jordan” was especially important, given that I mix ordinary dialogue with lyrical exposition and both rural and Jazz Age slang. The latter was a big part of the entire book, because it took several years to figure out how to do. Just the idea of recreating period language in dialogue is unusual in modern fiction. It’s very difficult and time consuming to research and enact, but I do believe it’s one of the best, most impressive tricks in my novel.

O’Shea: Cory Doctorow’s rave review of the book includes the following interesting line: “I should reiterate that I didn’t like any of these characters.” How risky do you consider it to structure a tale populated with unlikeable characters, do you care if that might alienate some of your potential audience or is that a concern of yours?

Schulz: Well, I was very appreciative of Cory Doctorow for his great review of my novel. Every reader brings his or her own perspective to a work of fiction and it’s never easy to anticipate how art will be received. In truth, although Chester is not meant to be loved and admired, I like Rascal quite a lot, and have great sympathy for Alvin Pendergast, who is just nineteen years old, after all, sort of a dumbbell, and quite sick. If he’s not likeable, well, each of us like different people in this life, and different characters in works of fiction. I grew up in a rural community, so Alvin seems more familiar to me than, say, Philip Roth’s characters or the narrative focus in “Bright Lights, Big City.” As for Rascal, he just seems to be a kind and eccentric fellow, who was my father’s favorite character in the book. When I asked Dad what he liked about Rascal, he said, “Well, he’s just such a funny little guy.”

As for anticipating how readers will react to any characters in a novel, I do believe the writer can neither become overly concerned with how a reader will react to his or her creations, nor ever know with any true authority or consistency how any given reader will relate to or appreciate any given character. That’s just one of the mysteries of art.

O’Shea: How much input did you have with the book’s cover, designed by Al Columbia?

Schulz: That’s hard to say. Al’s drawings for the jacket art came to Adam Grano at Fantagraphics over a three month period, and initially I’d had a different concept for the cover, a photograph involving a river to reference the book’s title. But when I could not find just the right photo, I began to think about Francis Cugat’s original painting, “Celestial Eyes,” for Gatsby, and came around to agreeing with Gary Groth’s idea of an artist like Al, with his own fans and following, doing the jacket art. Once Al began sending further drawings and Adam designed the jacket, my input was mostly registered in great approval of what appeared. I was offered fonts for suggestions and also liked what Adam conceived, as I did with the interior guts of the book. But mostly, the process was only collaborative insofar as Adam Grano and Gary Groth showed me what they were doing and asked for my opinions, which invariably were enthusiastic. I just believe the cover art for “This Side Of Jordan” is fantastic, both Al Columbia’s wonderful artwork, and Adam Grano’s overall design. I am incredibly pleased with the result.

O’Shea: Why did you opt to go with a publishing house that typically does not dabble in prose novels? When you committed to Fantagraphics, was it always as a four-book deal, or did it grow to four books later?

Schulz: Yes, Gary Groth conceived of this as a four book deal, right from the beginning. It was easy to go to Fantagraphics because Gary wanted the book. And he was enthusiastic about all four, and loved my writing. The fact is, I’ve never met anyone in publishing more literate, erudite or enthused by the literary art and the written word than Gary and his people at Fantagraphics. They were a revelation to me regarding the world of publishing, at a time when I had come to feel that too many people in this business see books as commodities to be bought and sold rather than expressions of a singular art form. Yet, the truth is, I had no idea that Fantagraphics even published prose fiction until a friend of mine from Santa Barbara sent me an email regarding the publication of Alexander Theroux’s 800 page novel, “Laura Warholic.” Indeed, at that time I assumed it must have had some graphic novel-comic book connection, until Gary Groth told me that it was literary fiction, something he’d been wanting to publish for a long while and was finally able to do. But his view of literature suits me perfectly and there is not enough money at any larger house to draw me away from Fantagraphics now, so long as they want to publish my work. Fantagraphics Books, all the people there, really have been outstanding throughout this entire journey. They’ve allowed me to be involved every step of the way. It is a dream come true for an artist. So the fact that they don’t typically publish prose fiction is entirely irrelevant to me. I love where I am.

O’Shea: The novel was written at least partially in tribute to your father. Did you hesitate in going that route, knowing that it would open people to framing the work not as by “Monte Schulz”, but rather as “the son of Charles Schulz, Monte.” Or is that a nuance you cannot or will not worry about?

Schulz: I embrace my identity as my father’s son. Dad is, and always has been, a huge part of my life. He was not only a great influence on my work — directing to me to writers like Carl Sandburg, Thomas Wolfe, John Steinbeck, Joan Didion, Carson McCullers, who became stylistic inspirations for me — but he also offered constant support and encouragement over the years I needed to grow and mature as a writer. So I am actually pleased when people identify me with my father. The work I do has to stand on its own, anyhow, and if somehow my family name might draw readers to my book, that’s all to the good.

O’Shea: This review by Bruce Grossman notes that: “Even though there are moments of brutal violence in the vein of Cormac McCarthy, JORDAN is more about the young man facing his future with uncertain terms.” Do you think the comparison to Cormac McCarthy is an apt one, does McCarthy inform your writing to a certain extent?

Schulz: I don’t see great similarities in my work that of Cormac McCarthy, though I do consider him to be the greatest living writer in American fiction. The violence in my book is more incidental, less integrated into the story, than it is in a novel like McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian.” But we both have that love of language, the poetic phrase, a love affair with place and setting, and a constant fascination with the notion of life and death as being central and integral to good fiction. While my literary antecedents in “This Side Of Jordan” are more properly Truman Capote, Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor, I am flattered that anyone would compare me to McCarthy, and his influence is present here and there in all my work, but more stylistically than anything else.

O’Shea: You’ve been on a book tour for almost a month, what’s been the most enjoyable element of the experience?

Schulz: Although I spent seventy hours in my car and drove more than four thousand miles in five weeks, signing books from San Diego to Seattle, I thought the best part of the tour was seeing the reaction from people at each stop as I read from “This Side Of Jordan.” And the gratification comes not from the size of the audience, and I had a couple big ones, but rather the response to what I explained about artistic writing and literary fiction, and how I was able to express that through my own work. People I’d never met before told me I had a passion for my writing, and that’s what came across best in my reading. Books are meant to be read and discussed, and we cannot judge the worth of a work of art strictly by commercial concerns. But two things I heard during my tour, I suppose, resonated most strongly: the first was up in Eugene, Oregon, where three young people, a woman and two guys, listened to my presentation, then told me afterward they were impressed enough to buy a copy of my book, even though doing so meant they would be eating Bisquick for breakfast the next morning. I found that very touching; and then, sometime during my talk in Santa Rosa, my wife noticed one of my eight year-old twins weeping softly; when she asked why he was crying, he told her, “I can’t believe that Daddy is my daddy.” That makes it all worthwhile.

O’Shea: Is there anything you’d like to discuss that I neglected to ask you about?

Schulz: I think it’s important to point out how writing literary fiction is not a market driven exercise. Once I saw “This Side Of Jordan” in print at last summer’s Comic Con, wrapped in that beautiful Fantagraphics jacket art, once I could lie on my bed with the book in hand and read from it at last, I felt that I’d reached the end game. The book was done, completed, finished, my part in its creation over. Which meant that reviews, interviews, touring and signing are postscript. I never wrote this novel with a thought for how it would be received. Obviously, I love this book and have great faith in its place within American letters. I would throw my novel on the table with anyone’s book today. But I never had any idea how it would be received, what kind of sales it might generate, or the publicity I might get for it. And all of that it is beside the point of writing, anyhow, as I see the literary arts. To find a voice to write, a story to relate, a language to tell it in, and a desk to work at, is what writing is about. I don’t try to anticipate my audience or my critics. I sit down at my desk, day after day, head focused on my work, and move the narrative forward. I never had writer’s block, never went away from my book, never tired of it, never quit until the novel was written. I gave a decade of my life to “Crossing Eden,” my entire forties, gone now, but with the contract offered me by Gary Groth, and seeing “This Side Of Jordan” appear at last, I feel vindicated. And now it’s time to get back to work again.

Tim O’Shea: Given the personal, autobiographical nature of your work, do you intentionally avoid reading reviews of your work, or are you able to distinguish that folks are reviewing your storytelling skills, not your life?

Debbie Drechsler: No, I like to read reviews. I call my work autobiographical because there doesn’t seem to be another word that fits. But, really, it’s somewhere in between fact and fiction, I guess. The stories were very deliberately constructed, although I tried to maintain what I call the emotional truth of incest. They’re something I created, not a slice of my life.

O’Shea: These stories started out as a form of catharsis and therapy for you, correct? Can you look at these stories now with a certain sense of detachment, or is there still a level of catharsis when you read them again?

Drechsler: I don’t think that’s how I saw it at the time I created them. I had something I wanted to tell and had, I guess you could say, a strong urge to tell it. Now I find them really hard to look at, but I’m not sure it feels cathartic. I don’t feel like I’m reliving them , and I don’t feel a sense of emotional release, but they’re awfully uncomfortable to hang out with. I guess it feels sort of like I’ve gone back to visit a place I had very fond feelings for and find that a freeway has been built over it. Something bad happened to it and I find it hard to come to terms with that.

O’Shea: Have you ever received feedback from victims of abuse who have been helped or sought help after reading Daddy’s Girl?

Drechsler: Yes. I’ve heard from a few people.

O’Shea: Do you know if your siblings or other family members have read the book, or is that just not a subject that can be broached with your family?

Drechsler: Two of my sisters have read it. One was sympathetic and accepting, and the other never said anything about it after reading it. It’s not a favored topic in my family. I don’t know if anyone else knows about it, or has read it.

O’Shea: In reading the book’s author blurb, I was surprised to read that you feel that you have told all the stories you have left to tell. Does that sadden you to some degree, or do you get more satisfaction from your illustration work these days?

Drechsler: It doesn’t feel sad at all. I’m really happy to have done the comics–it was wonderful doing them, and I’m equally happy not to be doing them anymore. I have a number of interesting things that I work on, besides illustration. In the past few years, I’ve been drawing and painting outdoors. I’m enjoying drawing what’s in front of me instead of what’s in my head. I’m most interested in the things that few people seem to notice–tiny wildflowers, insects, leaf galls and, my favorite, fungi. One of the things I disliked about doing comics was having to be in my studio ALL the time! Now I get to combine two of my favorite things—drawing and being outside!

O’Shea: One of your favorite things to draw is fungi? Is there any chance you would ever try to compile a book of the works or stage an exhibition? What is it about fungi that engages your interest?

Drechsler: I’m not even close to exhibiting. I’ve been sketching for three seasons, now. I’ve done conceptual illustration for so long that I’m still stretching out my “muscles” on this representational stuff. They each use pretty different parts of the brain and eye. I do plan on getting a blog going, so some of the sketches will undoubtedly end up there.

O’Shea: When you are painting some of your outdoor pieces, what painting or drawing mediums do you favor?

Drechsler: Oddly enough, I’ve found that my favorite sketching tool is a ballpoint pen! I can get tone without having to constantly stop to sharpen. It took a while to find one that didn’t do that ballpoint blobby thing. I have a few that I like for different uses. The only drawback is that my favorite (Parker refllable, medium point) won’t work when it’s cold out. Then I use a Bic retractable. Apparently the ink in those isn’t quite as temperature sensitive. And they’re great when I need lots of dark. For color I use watercolor, but I’m still learning how to work with wet, transparent color. I’ve always favored opaque paints so this is entirely new. The watercolor is easier to use in the field and quicker. And you don’t have to mix as much, because of the transparency.

O’Shea: Again, in the back of the book, you thank a number of people for making the book possible, and in particular, editor Gary Groth, for keeping you laughing as you put the book together. How important was it for you to be able to laugh when dealing with such a subject and such a process?

Drechsler: Really, the laughter happened after all the stories were written, and helped more with what I find to be the boring process of revisiting work I’ve already done. Gary was great at keeping me going when I just wanted to go and work on something NEW instead of reworking something already done.

O’Shea: What changes (if any) did you make in this edition versus the edition printed back in the 1990s? Did the original version have color pages in the middle–or how did that come about?

Drechsler: Well, I got to do a new, and in my opinion, better cover, the interior printing is MUCH better–very crisp. Gary wanted to have more pages, so I added the story Constellations, which is in color and really always was a part of this series of stories, anyway.

Tim O’Shea: What made you decide to work with scratchboard for Funeral of the Heart?

Leah Hayes: It happened by accident. I was playing around with Scratchboard at the time that Fantagraphics talked to me about publishing a second book with them. I had written part of one story just for fun, so I decided to go with it.

O’Shea: What is the creative process like for a medium like that, given that I assume revision is near to impossible with scratchboard?

Hayes: Revision was basically not an option. Working on it was treacherous, which also made it exciting. It was also really amazing to work with different tools than I’m used to… the whole book was drawn with a scalpel or an exacto-knife, which is intense when you are used to a Bic pen.

O’Shea: Am I correct in thinking you are heavily influenced by folklore?

Hayes: Yes. I like creation myths and I read lots of Ovid these days.

O’Shea: Would you say your musical work in Scary Mansion and La Laque attracts more people to your art work, or vice versa (your art work makes people check out your music), or the two audiences don’t really influence each other?

Hayes: I think the art+music thing has always worked out in terms of allowing people to see what I’m doing artistically. But I don’t know if they will ever come together in a coherent way. For now it’s a just a side-project, depending on who you’re talking to…the comic people see that I have a band and go, “oh look, I guess she does music”, and the music people see the comic and say, “huh; I guess she draws, too”.

I haven’t met a die-hard Scary Mansion fan who has all of my comics or anything like that. I have never met a die-hard Scary Mansion fan, actually!

O’Shea: Of the collection of stories in Funeral, would you say any story (or stories) were creatively harder to execute than the others? Of the stories in the collection, did you one or two that you find yourself more attached to, or protective of?

Hayes: They are all intensely personal, and they are all autobiographical. Family, lovers, being in love, death, twins, and the confusion of wanting to be successful vs. wanting to be alone…I find myself quite attached to all of these subjects.

O’Shea: You favor the use of banners in your narrative, I’m curious if you can speak to your thinking in the use of them?

Hayes: I think phrases are funnier when they are framed in a waving banner. Like an ad for something stupid that takes itself very seriously.

O’Shea: Your choice of layout on the text is interesting, to say the least. You may have a pagraph or two for narrative and dialogue to accompany the art on the next page. The text rarely filled the page, allowing for a great deal of “black space” (aka white space in scratchboard terms). Did you consider this a bit of a storytelling risk on your part, or was it the only layout choice you could envision?

Hayes: I liked the sparseness of the black page; it made the writing on it seem even sadder, which is what I was going for.

O’Shea: Did you work with an editor on this book? How did that help?

Hayes: Gary Groth (from Fantagraphics) did final edits near the end. I had very few people read it before it was published. The whole book was a quiet, alone sort of thing for me. I don’t consider myself a writer by any means, so I did have friends look at the text so I could edit the storytelling a little bit. Fantagraphics has been wonderfully trusting with these comics… they let me write/draw super weird books that make very little sense and are really sad. It’s very nice of them.

O’Shea: The book is dedicated to a few folks, would you care to discuss the book’s dedications?

Hayes: I don’t know if I could talk about that without crying! They are people who made it possible for me to feel like an artist, and who I owe everything to. Some of them are now gone, which made the book especially sad/important by the end.