From: [j r m] at [grove.ufl.edu] (Geoffrey Robert Mason)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.comics.info
Subject: [INTERVIEW] Interview: Paul Pope
Followup-To: rec.arts.comics.misc
Date: Sun, 03 Sep 95 18:57:43 GMT


Interview with Paul Pope
by Jeff Mason
From: Indy #11 - Blackmore Publishing - July 1995

This file is available as: http://grove.ufl.edu/~jrm/paul.pope

Paul Pope, the critically acclaimed self-published author/artist of
the drawn novels Sin Titulo and The Ballad of Doctor
Richardson, talks to indy magazine about his plans after wrapping
up his six-issue series THB, the story about a 13 year old girl,
living on Mars 300 years from now, her robot chef, and her
inflatable rubber bodyguard.

indy magazine:  Your art and writing style is quite surprisingly
fluid.  That level of fluidity is rarely seen in comics.

Paul Pope:  I think that a lot of my influence is coming from
outside of comics.  Formally, there is a lot of influence from
comics, anyone who has seen my stuff would know that Alex Toth
is a big influence, Milton Caniff is a big influence, Moebius is a
big influence.  But as a writer, a lot of my ideas are coming from
outside of comics, particularly from music.  When I approach
comics, I am trying to think of it on that level because I do want to
do things that are original, not original for originality sake, but
self-expressive and therefore original.

indy:  If you wanted to be original just to seem original, you could
just ape Don Lawrence from the Netherlands and nobody would
ever know the difference.

Pope:  Exactly.  That backfires though.  I've been reading Joe's
Bar by Jose Munoz and Carlos Sampayo, and I was thinking about
how there was too much similarity between what Keith Giffen was
doing with some of his work, and the stuff was coming out in
Spain.  You are going to get busted sometime if you lift.  I have a
few lifts in my work, but I only do that when I am really tired, and
need something done fast [laugh].  I think, oops I am making a
mistake, I'm lifting something.

indy:  What kind of interaction are you looking for with your
readers?

Pope:  On the one level it is just basically selfish, I like getting
mail.  I like opening the post office box and having tons of mail, as
anyone would.  Also, with THB, I've been telling people "send me
your drawings, send me your drawings!"  I want to publish them,
because I am interested in the way people are drawing the
characters.  I've gotten a ton of drawings, I'm looking at a stack
now.  I get about 100 letters a week from people, that's an amazing
increase from The Ballad of Doctor Richardson, for which I may
have received 50 letters altogether, they were always very serious
letters, nice long letters from intelligent people, but this is the first
time I've gotten letters from high school kids.  That's not saying
that high school kids aren't intelligent, because they are, but it is
interesting to get letters from people who are relating to HR
Watson as a 13 year-old, sort of on a first hand level, not
approaching it in a nostalgic sense.  The letters I receive from
readers in their 40s and 50s; they talk about reading Jack Kirby
comics when they were a kid, or Adam Strange by Infantino, and
that this has the same kind of feeling, and they have a nostalgic
reaction.  I am interested in seeing the differences in the way
people draw the characters.

indy:  Do you think that readers approach a single graphic novel
and a series differently, in that a series is interactive so to speak.

Pope:  Yeah, I think so.  It's funny because I've talked with Jeff
Smith about this notion of one thing that has made Bone
successful, I think, is the regularity of its publishing.  It is almost
like there is a formula that a self-publisher could use to become
popular.  That sounds cynical, because Jeff's stuff is some of the
best stuff being published, I don't know about in the world, but
definitely in the States.  I wouldn't be able to put out THB, month
after month, and you talk to him and he's got at least 5 years of
Bone ahead of him, and to me that is maddening.  I couldn't
imagine doing just one thing, because there are so many other
possibilities of what can be done.  I have no way of knowing
whether in three years I'll be interested in THB.  I started a letters
page starting in THB #3.  I wasn't going to do it because I don't
like the idea of the artist kind of breaking into the comic book;
after you read something that's really fun and engaging, then you
have some guy talking about himself.  I was talking to Jim
Valentino and I asked him why I should put in a letters page in the
end, and he said that it gives you the chance to put into print ideas
that people have about your work, that are critical or appraising,
but it also gives a reader the sense that there is a community going
on here; that there is some kind of interaction between a creator
and the audience.  That is a lot of the structure behind a lot of the
things I do in the comic, like referring to myself in the comic as
"our vaulted Pope."  I want the audience to identify with the comic
on a really fun level, that this is a person doing this stuff.

indy:  Kind of like when Larry Marder first started out with Tales
of the Beanworld?

Pope:  Yeah, and there is a fine line to draw as well.  You don't
want to come across as unprofessional, like "aww gee, I am so glad
you are reading my comics."  That's part of the reason I run those
photographs of myself in that rock-n'-roll style [laugh].  In the
music world, for example, Bono has a really strong persona, and
that's a really great thing about U2.  When you see a U2 video, or
when you are listening to U2, you get a sense of persona.  You
know it is not everything about Bono, but then again you are not
getting the Bono that goes to the bathroom, or the Bono that
prefers pizza over Chinese food, or has read this number of books,
or whatever.  You are getting the idea that the artist wants you to
have.  That idea doesn't really exactly glamorize Bono, it
glamorizes the expression in the music, or the expression in the
artist's work, and I think that is terrific.  I think that the best artists
have that.  I want there to be that organic feeling between the artist
and the creation.

indy:  How would you imagine this would affect your work after it
is finished, or after you are gone, years from now when readers no
longer have this perception of you?

Pope:  That's a good question.  I don't think about posterity,
because you tend to change your outlook when you try to think
about writing Moby Dick.  So, I'm not going to worry about that.
I'm going to leave that up to the historians.  I mean the day after I
die, the world may fall apart, who knows.  I'm making this up as I
go along, so if it seems right to me, if I think that it is the best thing
to do, I will go ahead with this idea of an artist's persona.  I know
within the next ten or twenty years, as far as I can see ahead in my
career, so to speak, it will be essential for people to identify with
an artist beyond THB, because I am not going to stick on Cerebus
for the next 15 years, I know that.  I want people to follow the
career of this cartoonist, the way they would follow the career of a
musician, where you would pick up a record and you wouldn't
expect every song to sound the same, or every album to sound the
same.  If you look back on a career of a band like The Beatles,
you'll be aware of different styles, different periods, different
intentions at different times.

indy:  Or like a movie director.

Pope:  Or like a movie director, exactly.  That is one thing that
American cartoonists are going to have to do.  I don't say
publishers and I don't say promoters, because it is up to the
cartoonists, the artists, to change the way that things are perceived
in the States.  There aren't enough artist artists in comics in the
States, and I don't know if the audience is there on the wide level
or that even really care about comics, to change the perception.
Although definitely I think that there are probably more
mainstream people out there who don't read comic books, but who
like experimental music, or who like film, who would be interested
in a comic like THB, than there are within the comic book industry.
My stuff isn't even a very good example.  There are other comics
that are being published today that have, I think, potentially huge
audiences "out there," that if they could get in contact with those
people, that would be the true audience.  The Japanese have that in
their comic book industry.

indy:  What comics?

Pope:  Steve Bissette's Tyrant, the Hernandez brothers' Love &
Rockets, maybe Adrian Tomine's Optic Nerve, although it is hard
to say with him because I think he is so young with what he is
doing, I think he hasn't hit his vernacular yet, so perhaps wouldn't
put him in that group.  Rubber Blanket definitely, David
Mazzucchelli is great.  Somehow in Europe, take for example an
artist like Hugo Pratt, one of my favorites, his work is very literate,
very historically correct, very educational, not in a didactic sense,
but you get a very strong sense of history and culture when you are
reading his stuff, it just doesn't have that wide of an audience in
the States.  I think that a good analogy for the comic book industry
would be the light from stars or the light from the sun.  We are not
looking today at the current marketplace, so to speak, as a
reflection of this very instant, we are looking at a reflection of
trends that have led to this.  Hugo Pratt doesn't have that wide of
an audience today.  That is why I think that it is so important to
emphasize the responsibility of the creators to do work which
ideally does have its widest audience.  I think that a lot of people
make the mistake of finding a hot trend.  One thing that I was
thinking of doing, that Marvel beat me to, was doing the clear
acetate covers, like Alex Ross and Kurt Busiek's Marvels.  I saw
that, and thought oh crap, I wanted to do that, see-through covers.
But by that point, it had already been done, it is not my thing
anymore, as there are a million other creative ideas to hit.  I never
want to react to something.

indy:  What do you think of the Spirits of Independence tour so
far?

Pope:  I only went to the Columbus stop so far, but I am going to
go to the Chicago stop for sure on August 12.  I was quite
surprised.  The turnout was really good, really strong support.
Everyone there was a comic book reader, an independent fan too.
Naturally, most people were there to see Sim, but I was pretty
overwhelmed because this was the first time I've done an
appearance since I began THB and I was just really surprised by
how many people liked the stuff.  Most of the time I was looking at
what people were putting in front of me to autograph, but I would
guess that the turnout was around a couple hundred people, which
seems to be par for course for these tour stops.  Steve Bissette was
there, he cleaned up.  Naturally, the Sim line stretched out past the
Tutenkamen line.  It was a pretty good all around.  I'll also be
going to the San Diego Comic Con this summer, and I may go to
the Pittsburgh tour stop in September.

indy:  What is your current deal with Japanese publisher Kodansha
and how does that affect your self-publishing?

Pope:  I am doing a monthly strip for them called SUPER
TROUBLE and it is based on THB.  I have two characters who
resemble HR and Lollie from THB.  The series is based around a
number of events of "super trouble" in which they get themselves
into.  So they can't help it, they create calamities.  The project is
interesting because rather than having some kind of supernatural
gimmick like they are magnets for trouble, they get into trouble
because of the character flaws that they have.  They are
obsessively trying to avoid being dirty, they are trying to avoid
being perceived as loud and smelly, all these kinds of Freudian
aversions that you might imagine a young girl in a pressure
situation would have.  They end up trying to cover their butts a lot
and they end up getting into "super trouble."  It will appear
monthly in Afternoon, a 1,000 page manga book that comes out
once a month with a circulation of 250,000.  Most of the SUPER
TROUBLE episodes are about 30 pages in length.  It is slated to
debut in September, so I am working a few months ahead of their
schedule.  Horse Press is reprinting everything, six months after its
debut.  So here it will debut as a bi-monthly comic starting in the
Summer of 1996.  In Japan there is a definite collection coming out
at the end of the first year's run.  They want me to keep working
on the series, but we are open for negotiations if I want, they have
accepted a number of other projects from me, so if I have nothing
more creatively to say or do after a year, I can move on to
something else if I want.
I will be working on my next drawn novel Smoke Navigator, which
will probably begin in September, as soon as my project with Dark
Horse is over.  For Dark Horse, I am doing a graphic novel called
The One Trick Rip-off that will appear monthly in Dark Horse
Presents for 12 issues, eight pages per issue, starting with issue
#101 and continuing through issue #113.  The One Trick Rip-off is
kind of a potboiler, kind of hard to explain, a big convoluted mess
of events.  It is a little more noir and pulpish than most of the
things that I have done so far.  I wanted to do something that was
action oriented, something that was intelligent.  If you need to
compare it, think of a mix between Sin City, "Pulp Fiction," and
Doctor Richardson.  That's kind of cool, because Dark Horse is
running the pared down serialized version in Dark Horse Presents,
totaling 96 pages, and the collected graphic novel will be 150
pages, like a directors cut.

indy:  What did you do for the big landmark set of Dark Horse
Presents #100 issues?

Pope:  Well, I did three different projects for #100.  I've got a short
THB strip called "Pistachio" which will be appearing in the THB
collection this year.  Jeff Smith and I worked on "Pan Fried Girl"
which is a THB universe story, which I think is his first
collaboration in comics.  It is really cool, really wierd.  I told Bob
Shreck, before he saw it, that it is probably going to be the
strangest thing he's ever published in Dark Horse Presents.  He
called back and said that it probably was the strangest thing he's
ever run.  Finally, I did a story called "Yes," which is an
unaffiliated 8 page short strip.  Also, Dark Horse has asked me to
do a full color romance for them, coming out in February on
Valentine's day, an anthology.  They just asked me to be involved,
and I said sure.  I don't know much about it yet.

indy:  When is the THB collection coming out?

Pope:  There are going to be two collections.  There will be the
storyline, issues 1-6, collected in a big book for the December
holiday season, that will be the big THB collection.  It will be
about 275 pages.  Two or three months after that, perhaps for
April, there will be a second THB collection which will compile all
of the ancillary material, a glossary of Martian terms and locations,
all of the science strips of which I think two were published in the
first issue of THB, a Pig-Dog strip involving Lollie's little sisters,
and also, I'm happy to tell you, there's going to be a 45 page story
called "The Wingtip Caper" done by Jay Stephens and I.  He's
inking my stuff.  He and I have collaborated on a project already
for Buzz Buzz and it worked out so well, he had some time in
August and September.  So I've got this really awesome stand
alone story about HR and Lollie before the events of THB #1, so
you get to see what happens before THB happens.  The second
THB collection will have a ton of new THB stuff.

indy:  So tell me more about Buzz Buzz.

Pope:  Buzz Buzz is a vehicle I have created, primarily to have a
place to serialize my next graphic novel Smoke Navigator, but also
just with the research I have been doing as a publisher, I decided
that it would be worthwhile to change the format of the comic
book to make it more acceptable to non-traditional comic book
readers.  It has already been picked up by Tower Records, so it is
definitely getting distributed internationally outside of the comic
book market.  It is oversized, printed on slick paper.  The first issue
has a stand alone story by me called "Saint John."  It has a
collaboration with Jay Stephens and I called "Super Gag Comics."
It has a three-way interview with Steve Bissette, Jeff Smith, and
myself, and it has a couple of little features.  The second issue isn't
coming out until December or January.  What I am looking at, is
that since I have a lot of work to do once the Japanese project
begins, I am considering only putting out two issues of Buzz Buzz a
year, but putting out segments of Smoke Navigator that are like 50
or 60 pages long.  So I don't have to worry about publishing
comics on a monthly schedule, it is a lot of work, and I am ready to
put it down for a while.  Coming back with SUPER TROUBLE will
be good, because it is all reprint material, so I won't have to worry
about making deadlines, about getting sick, etc.  So hopefully I'll
be able to plug it into the proven formula of putting out a black and
white every other month, consistently on time with quality
material.  Terry Moore is now the current reigning up-and-comer
doing that.  At this point, I think I am going to publish SUPER
TROUBLE right to left, so it will be the only American manga.  I
want to do this because for the Japanese market it is designed to be
read right to left, with the sound effects worked in that way.  I
think that it will be an interesting challenge to read an enjoy a
comic, that is not actually backwards, but reads right to left.  I
think that it will be a very good year.


Geoffrey R. Mason		  |	[j r m] at [grove.ufl.edu]
Editor - indy magazine		  |	611 Northwest 34th Drive
College of Law - Univ of Florida  |	Gainesville, Florida 32607-2429
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