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 -- URL = http://grove.ufl.edu/~jrm/index.html