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Interviews
June
1996
A
Peek at Keyhole
Interview
by Larry Bogad
A
Peek at Keyhole
Keyhole #1, coming in June from Millennium Publications, already has a reputation to live up to. This is because of its acclaimed run as a mini-comic, where it garnered praise from publications such as Comics Buyer's Guide, Subliminal Tattoos, World of Fandom and Factsheet Five. Keyhole is the collaborative effort of cartoonists Dean Haspiel and Josh Neufeld, native New Yorkers who attended Music & Art High School together in the early `80s and have been friends ever since.
Haspiel is known primarily for his work on Caliber Press's The Verdict, which he co-created with writer Martin Powell, as well as penciling duties for two DC bonus books, Detective Comics and Justice League International. Neufeld's credits include Harvey Pekar's American Splendor (Dark Horse) and DC/Paradox Press's Big Book of Urban Legends.
Haspiel and Neufeld had been itching to find an outlet for their own stories when they teamed up to produce Keyhole Mini-Comics, which ran for four issues in 1995. Poopsheet called it "one of the most thought-provoking, interesting, entertaining and all-out cool comics," and Joe Zabel of Amazing Montage praised Josh and Dean for "aggressively exploring the comics medium." Tony Isabella said that Keyhole was "not to be missed."
Keyhole's premise is to tell stories. Simple as that. Although the two creators tend toward the independent flavor of comics published by Fantagraphics, Drawn & Quarterly and Slave Labor, they don't necessarily reject the conventions of genre storytelling. Therein lies Keyhole's difference, and hopefully its appeal.
I've been a Keyhole Mini-Comics fan since Dean started sending them to me at Tekno as samples of his independent work. Dean and Josh's self-published stories, whether on a four-page folded Xerox or a colored index card, are offbeat and entertaining. After a few phone conversations and meeting Dean in his Alphabet City studio in Manhattan, I decided to pick the minds of these intense, dedicated writer/artists extensively.
[Larry Bogad, most recently an editor at Tekno, will soon be attending Northwestern University with a fellowship in Performance Studies.]
Larry:
Keyhole is a pretty unique project. I'd like you to describe what
this comic book is all about.
Dean: That's tough to describe. What I can say is what we're influenced by, and why we decided this might be a good idea. We are fans of Eightball, Optic Nerve, Stray Bullets, and big fans of black-and-white anthology titles. We enjoy telling smaller stories sometimes, and they don't always fit in a mini-series or an ongoing series. Josh and I balance each other out. I might do some darker stuff, Josh might do some lighter stuff, Josh might also do autobiographical things and I do more fiction. I think we're a good balance with each other, so that you can pick up an issue of Keyhole and if you don't like one thing you'll probably like the next.
Josh: The thing that Eightball and Optic Nerve all have in common is that they are pretty normal-sized comics, but they've got a number of different stories in there, even if they're by the same person. Our idea is sort of like an anthology, in that there'll be one eight-page story that's pretty serious and have some poignancy, and then a few one-pagers that are maybe a little more humorous or just have a short sort of poetic "bing" feeling to them. There's something more intriguing about doing that than just one comic once a month that's got one straightforward story, that's it, boom!
Dean: We're going to tell stories, hopefully in a way that we're not hitting you over the head with them, and maybe you are going to walk away with your own questions about life. Other stories, of course, are just pure entertainment.
Josh:. Ultimately, we're telling our stories and we hope that they're yours too. They mean something to us and we're hoping that the feeling that comes out of that story will leave the reader with a similar feeling.
Dean: We also want you to put Keyhole down, because we don't want you to consume it all in 24 pages. It's impossible. No matter how well we could put these stories next to each other, there's no way that they're all going to work in one consecutive read. So put it down on your coffee table, come back and read two more stories.
Josh: Yeah, we'd rather that you read it slowly because you're not going to see another one for three months. You'd better just take your time with it! We want people to fold up Keyhole and stick it in their back pocket and carry it around with them during the day. And get it mangled and stuff. This is not a collector's item. We don't want it to sell for ten bucks a few months later.
Larry: How often is Keyhole going to come out?
Dean: Right now, four times a year. Quarterly. It's got a color cover, 24 black-and-white pages, and a $2.95 price tag.
Larry: Tell me about the process. How did Keyhole Mini-Comics build up and how did Keyhole come to be?
Josh:
This is in late `94. We'd been talking about doing a comic together
and Dean came up with the idea of Keyhole. We were talking about
what we would do, and it was totally a pipe-dream. We thought maybe we'd
self-publish it. We were talking about borrowing money from our parents
and using our credit cards and all this stuff. It was just kind of chugging
along very slowly, this pipe-dream. And then I started being exposed to
mini-comics — just photocopied, self-published things.
I said, "Forget all this stuff about trying to get us published. Let's do the underground route. Let's be agitators." I took the material that I'd already done for our big version of Keyhole and I put it together into a thing called Keyhole Mini-Comics. It was just two pieces of paper folded together, so it was eight pages altogether. I put that out and I sold it to people at my job, and I put it in this store in my neighborhood and another store, and they would sell sometimes. Eventually, when I got an Internet account I sold it over the Internet, and we kept doing it. Dean did #2, that was mostly his work, and #3 we did more as an anthology book with some other people that we invited along, and then we did #4, which was the experimental David Greenberger issue. We did really well. We got reviewed in a number of magazines.
Dean: Factsheet Five, Subliminal Tattoos, Tony Isabella in Comics Buyer's Guide. Which eventually led us to finding a publisher, Millennium.
Josh: Paul Davis has given us a total green light — we can do whatever we want with this comic. That goes with not being part of a huge company. It's a nice freedom.
Dean: Paul had been doing a horror/vampire/crime kind of comics line, but I think he wanted to do something like an Eightball, like a Fantagraphics comic, and wanted to hit that side of the market.
Josh: I think almost from a pragmatic point of view, Paul saw that maybe the kind of comics that he got into publishing a few years ago, which were popular based on the Anne Rice books and things like that, maybe just aren't the kind of big sellers that they were then. He's looking to expand, to diversify, almost like the way DC started Vertigo. I think he wants to start a new line coming out of Millennium that's going to have the kind of independent feel of Keyhole. For instance, he not only wants to do Keyhole but there's interest in doing a comic just for Billy Dogma. He's also talking to Joyce Brabner, who writes political comics, about doing some straight-ahead political comics without any attempt at genre stuff.
It's important to say, though, that we still totally support mini-comics. It's not like every mini-comic should by nature become a full-sized comic. There are terrific mini-comics out there right now, that I think that's the best form for them. Like Matt Feazell, who's the "king" of mini-comics, for instance. I was really fortunate in the last year to become exposed to the world of mini-comics, at conventions and stuff, and there are all sorts of great minis that are being done by everyday people.
Dean: In fact, we kind of did mini-comics in high school, even though we didn't think of them as mini-comics.
Josh: Right. We didn't think of them that way, but we were doing them.
Dean: They were 8-1/2" x 11" mini-comics, is what they were.
Larry:
Dean, talk to me about Billy Dogma. From reading Keyhole
and from our brief conversations, I suspect that Billy Dogma is you!
Dean: I've been struggling to create a character who speaks for me, and so far I've found that in Billy Dogma. I found a good angle, by making him confused, and a social character, so anything that happens to me happens to Billy Dogma in a very metaphorical way.
Larry: It's like a social commentary — he's looking for work! As well as encountering the "superheroes" in his underground life.
Dean: Recently, I've been very influenced by Robert Crumb. Not so much artistically, even though he's a brilliant artist, but just by the fact that he did what he wanted and told the stories that he wanted in metaphorical as well as biographical ways. That's what Billy Dogma is to me right now. He's my Crumb character.
Larry: What are your comic book artistic influences?
Josh: I would say my earliest influences are still the ones that I draw from now, which is kind of ironic because for a long time I didn't think about them. But definitely the things I looked at the earliest — when I was like six or seven years old — were, on one side, the Action and Superman comics that Curt Swan and Murphy Anderson were drawing back in the early `70s; and on the other side were European comics like Asterix and Tintin. So there were really disparate things coming there. I think I got a sense of humor from the Tintin and Asterix comics and a kind of grounding in reality from the Superman comics. I know that sounds sort of weird to say about Superman, but if you look back at those Curt Swan issues, what's so amazing about them is just how grounded in the time period and regular people they really were. I mean Superman just looks like a sort of overly-muscled, 35-year-old guy. There's a lot of focus on that science fiction stuff about Superman, but a lot of those issues were about Clark Kent and regular life and the pitfalls and other things that happen to a person. Swan and Anderson just loved to draw people on the streets: people walking along, wearing regular clothes, people crossing the street, little things with dogs. Human moments. I think that was always what appealed to me.
One of the most important things that I always think about is — and it's what really got me into doing independent comics after kind of crashing and burning after my attempt to do superhero or other genre comics — was Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics. In there he says, "Comics are not the message, they're a medium, and any story you want to tell can be comics." But a lot of people confuse the medium for the messenger. A lot of people think, "Comics equals funny animals, comics equals superheroes," and they don't want to look at them. Nothing against those kind of genres, but there are so many other stories that comics can tell. That was really inspiring for me.
Larry: That's a great point. I would say when I first read Harvey Pekar's American Splendor a couple of years ago, that was the message I got without it being explained to me. That showed me, but Understanding Comics told me.
Dean: I liked Chester Brown's Yummy Fur a lot. That's one of the breakthrough comics for me. As an adult, I went from superhero comics to, "Oh, what's this over here?" That was probably the first comic that broke me out of superheroes. I was also into the idea of a comic book like American Splendor — a guy talking about the most mundane things and somehow making a comic book about that. To think that the major villain in American Splendor is David Letterman! [Laughter] It's funny now that Josh has graduated into being one of Harvey's main artists...
Josh: There are two kinds of comics that appeal to me, and I think Dean would say this too. Just because we're not doing superhero comics doesn't mean that we still don't enjoy that kind of fantasy. Because if it's really well done, I'll still buy that. In addition to the alternatives and independents we've already talked about, I also love Astro City, I think it's really well done. I really dug Marvels, Watchmen, those sorts of things. It's just more and more rare that you find good stuff like that nowadays.
Dean: The comics that I first was influenced by were Captain Marvel, Fantastic Four — basic superhero comics. And then when Frank Miller started to do Daredevil I was like, "This is cool, this is different — it's got ninjas and stuff in it." When I first started reading comics, I wanted to do superhero comics, and that's what I drew.
Josh: That's all we could really think of. I'm jealous of kids nowadays when I meet them at conventions. I meet kids 13-14 years old who are doing autobiographical mini-comics. I was talking about this with Matt Feazell. We are both so pleased that that's open now to teenagers, young kids who are just starting out in comics. Because of the undergrounds and the growth of mini-comics, they don't have to just think, "If I want to do comics I have to do superheroes." It limits what you think you're going to do and how you're going to focus yourself.
Dean: I didn't really think of doing a personal, autobiographical comic until I was 26 or 27. And these are kids like 15 or 16 who are doing comics about their lives.
Larry: Are those young artists among the people that you're hoping to reach with Keyhole?
Dean: Absolutely!
Larry: How do you envision your audience? Obviously, you want to appeal to as many people as possible.
Dean: Josh and I were thinking that there weren't a lot of comics that spoke to people our age. I'm talking ages 25 and up. So the audience is people our age and older, but as Josh stated, from meeting Matt Feazell and talking to kids who are doing mini-comics about themselves — I would love to hit that audience.
Larry: Dean, you worked with Howard Chaykin and Walt Simonson.
Dean: Some of my training and learning about comic books was when I was an assistant at Upstart Studios with Howard and Walt. Howard taught me about designing a page, and all of a sudden that became important. It wasn't about a superhero flying or fighting, it became about, how do you tell a story? And why would the character look right rather than left? The way you carry your eye around the page. I remember Frank Miller was famous for doing an "S" formation on his pages — it's like a backward "S" — where you could almost follow it right, down, left, down and right again and then you go off the page, and you turn the page and go onto the next page. Another thing I was learning was why you'd want to have the last panel make you want to turn the page: is it a cliffhanger, is it a beat, what is it? I was learning rhythm.
Josh: This is back in high school when Dean and I were part of this big group of kids. We went to Music and Art High School in New York, and there were maybe up to ten of us who did comics. We were really into it. Some of us would write, some would draw, some would pencil and ink. We had different "companies" competing with each other. Dean worked for a "company" called Paradox and I had a "company" called Premiere Comics. We really worked on this stuff and took it really seriously. And that was really great, but it was kind of in a vacuum. We were only looking at comic books and we really didn't know anything about storytelling or about anatomy or these minor things [Laughter] having to do with comics, so it was really great that Dean ended up working at Upstart Studios with Howard and Walt. Even though I didn't work with them, I absorbed so much from Dean, because Dean was learning so much every day, and coming back and telling us stuff.
Larry: I want you guys to just generally run down your professional experience.
Josh: After graduating from high school, I still wanted to do superhero stories. I just didn't know that there were other options out there. I'd always known about underground cartoonists like Crumb because my dad had collected those comics back in the `60s and `70s and he had shown them to me back then. But to be honest they had always kind of freaked me out and scared me `cause I was looking at them when I was too young, and there's some pretty basic stuff in there. It kind of freaked me out. Going back to Scott McCloud, I just didn't associate that kind of thing with comics. I thought it was something else that was similar to comics but it wasn't what I was doing. What I could do.
After college (I went to a liberal arts school, I didn't study comics there), I kept doing it, I kept struggling at them. I sent my stuff out to independent publishers like Eclipse, Eternity and Comico and got my rejection letters and just kept plodding along. After I graduated, I took a regular job, I worked at a magazine for awhile, and I still said I was an artist but I never found the time needed to work on it, and it was becoming this sort of false identity thing. And then my girlfriend and I left the States and went backpacking in Southeast Asia for five months —
Larry: Which your story, "The Cave of Fear," details in Keyhole.
Dean: I remember the first thing I got from Josh — he had only been drawing mercenaries and superheroes — and I get this letter from him traveling, and the envelope looked really cool. I was like, "Where did he buy this envelope?" It was an awesome painting of a boat on a beach. It wasn't until a couple of weeks later that I realized that Josh had painted that and that he had become this other person all of a sudden. That was a leap.
Josh: What happened when I traveled was really weird. For one thing, I didn't think about comics for five months. And that in my experience has always been the best thing for my comics: just to not even think about them for a certain period of time, and then come back, because you can drop away some of these bad habits that you've gotten into. I worked on my art. I painted. I brought a little watercolor set with me, and I sketched from nature, and —
Dean: And you were influenced by Peter Kuper.
Josh: Right. I had brought along this one comic by Peter Kuper, which was perfect. It was Comics Trips, and it's about his backpacking in Asia and Africa with his wife. So the parallels there were very obvious to my own experiences. My girlfriend and I both read it and just thought it was incredible. It's just really funny, and about poignant moments as you backpack, from getting sick to traveling night after night without getting enough sleep, being jet-lagged, and going to Thailand and seeing the sex shows in Bangkok. Just all over the place.
Dean: The comic book form became a diary for you.
Josh: Exactly. After traveling in Asia, we ended up in Prague, in the Czech Republic, and we lived there for a year and I ended up getting work as an illustrator, which was a really good ego boost for me. I did cartoons for the English language papers there, Prognosis and the Prague Post. I was really lucky. I got to do that and actually made enough money. I was able to really focus on my art. I got together with some other Americans there, and started doing a comic. I really had no influences. I wasn't reading comics anymore, I was just kind of working from, like, "What can I do? I can do whatever I want."
Dean: The bare minimum of influences from American comics. And remember I sent you something?
Josh: You sent me the Sin City graphic novel. Even though I had already seen it (I had bought it back in the States) it was the only thing I could look at. It was incredible. I mean first of all, that is an incredible book. I really don't care much for anything that Miller's done since that Sin City graphic novel — I think he's kind of rehashing the same stuff — but that was phenomenal. And his artwork was a whole new step for him. So that was really interesting. You wouldn't really look at my art and say that there's any influence there from Miller, but it definitely worked its way in in a lot of little ways.
And the other main thing that happened was that a friend of my girlfriend was working for a magazine where they got an advance copy of a book called Comic Book Rebels, and she sent it to me. It's a book of interviews with all these independent and avant-garde people. Chaykin's in it, Alan Moore's in it, Neil Gaiman. Name any big name in the comics industry in any genre, from Crumb and those guys to Moore and so on. I just devoured that. I learned a lot. Scott McCloud — before he had done Understanding Comics, but while he was working on it — was in there, and it had a lot of the ideas in there and a few of the panels and stuff. That's what really just jump-started me and I said, "Hey! I can do comics about regular things." It can be about the things that happen in ordinary life that are interesting, that would be interesting to other people, and that people can relate to, but that also have a certain element of fantasy or poetry.
When I came back to the States I was lucky enough to — this is a funny story. Dean had kind of been doing comics in a sort of "abstract" way, but he hooked up with Bronwyn Taggert at DC when they were starting Paradox Press. They were going to do the Big Book of Urban Legends, and Dean got a gig to do one of the stories in that. But unfortunately, he broke his drawing hand in a fight and he was unable to finish his assignment and it kind of got shifted over to me. He mentioned my name, and Taggert saw my stuff and thought she'd give me a shot and I was lucky enough to get something in there.
Next, I met David Greenberger, who's the editor of Duplex Planet Illustrated. I met him at a signing and he said, "Sure, I'll give you some work." That was actually the first I'd seen of Duplex Planet, which added another element to this autobiographical concept, this new idea of comics that I had. You could just tell a story, any story, just have a person talking, and interpret it any way you want. And add a whole new dimension with the art that the story didn't have before.
Dean: I saw what Josh was doing with Duplex Planet, and I was like, "Damn! You think I could do this?" The thing that intrigued me the most was Greenberger doesn't send you a script, doesn't send you a panel breakdown, doesn't show you how to tell the story. He sends you the words verbatim, not even broken up. And you as the artist have to not only break that down for the story, but you have to plot the story visually because the words are left up to your interpretation, in terms of how to tell it. There isn't one specific way of telling the story.
Josh: David has some kind of magical sense that something will work as a comic. He'll look at something and he'll say, "This will work." He doesn't exactly know how it will and he really trusts the artist to go with it. It's a weird freedom. When I first got that "script" from David I was, like, "Whoa!" The possibilities were anything and that was very intimidating. I finally came up with something, but I had to sort of break it down and turn it into a script that I could recognize before I could start working with it.
Dean: When I first got mine, it took me a month and a half. For two pages. It was driving me crazy.
Dean: Josh and I have this running joke that the minute Josh finishes a story, whether it's one page or ten pages, if I like it, it's been published. And vice-versa.
Josh: Right. That's it. As far as we're concerned, that is our audience. For all we know, Keyhole could be awful. People may hate it. But the thing is we like it. And when I do a piece and I send it to Dean, that's who we're doing the art for.
Dean: We're doing it for each other.
Larry: That's interesting. The two of you have both autobiographical stuff and fictional pieces. What is the feedback process? How do you compare each other's styles? The creative dialogue between the two of you, deciding what's going to go in. What kind of feedback do you find yourselves giving to each other? `Cause you've got different styles...
Dean: We also have different aesthetics. I get pissed off at Josh all the time because I feel like Josh is too analytical, too concerned about what's going into the comic, almost what goes into a panel. I mean even though I appreciate and respect all the work that goes into something, if I feel that this is going to be good, let's just try it out and see what happens... I think that Josh would almost prefer to do a focus group with Keyhole before publishing it [Laughter]! Just to make sure! And for me, it's like, I'm happy with it, go with it. Go with the flow.
Josh: The short version of it is, Dean is the visionary and I'm like the cranky old man. Dean and I have been friends for over fifteen years now and there's really nothing we can say to each other that is off-limits. Dean is a terrific art director and a great editor. Many times he's made me go back and re-draw or re-think comics that I've been doing, or has just been like, "Look, this sucks." I can take that kind of criticism from him that I would be very resistant to coming from anybody else.
Dean: We trust each other. Part of our conversations will have to do with, "OK, give me your criticism," and then if you can't defend what you've done and the other person's right, then you have to go with their suggestion because that's how much you trust that person. I've had to go back and re-draw stuff and I hate it. Because he's right.
Josh: If there's anything that Dean does it's that he sometimes jumps ahead and just wants to get something done before he's really thought it through. My problem is thinking it through too much and not just going ahead and doing it.
Larry: Some of these stories are pretty intense, personal, and they also involve in some cases people who are very close to you. Do either of you feel funny about bringing this stuff out to the world?
Josh:
I don't worry about it maybe the way I should. "The Cave of Fear,"
in Keyhole #1, is actually an experience that happened to my girlfriend
Sari and me in Thailand when we were backpacking. It was a very intense,
emotional experience, very frightening, especially for my girlfriend.
She actually basically co-wrote the story with me; I took elements from
her journal as the basis of the story. It doesn't bother me to expose
these things, but Sari at times has been a little concerned. Just those
qualms, those feelings of, "Wow, I can't believe people are going to see
this." That's a part of herself that she'll talk about with her friends,
but the idea of all these other people seeing her scared or reading her
private thoughts has made her a little nervous. But she in no way would
want me not to do this.
I'm trying to do comics that are just about real people, about real experiences that other people can relate to. There's nothing that I'm afraid of saying about myself. If anything, my friends will tell you that I talk too much about my own feelings anyway, so I've gotten over that hump. I've been through therapy. [Laughter]
Dean: And that's a perfect segue, because I've never been in therapy. I think that what I'm doing with some of my personal comics is therapy. Some people say that if you write down what you hate, or a problem, and then you roll it up and throw it away and burn it, there's a sense of closure like you've expelled it. Not that it goes away, or not that you don't have scars, but that there's a way of bringing it out and it's not stuck in the basement of your soul anymore. You're expressing it.
The
"Cabbage Patch Man" story asks, "What do you think about that?" I'm very
interested in what people will think of that. A lot of people have either
ignored it because they don't want to deal with it, maybe because they're
embarrassed that they know something about me. Which is not even that
big a deal, honestly, 'cause I'm comfortable with it. I haven't shown
it to my dad yet, but I'm going to give him a copy of Keyhole #1.
That isn't to say that he's going to read it, but the potential is there
for him to read it and see that story. Like I said, I wrote it in a way
that's not judging him, but visually it's showing that there is a problem.
Because the protagonist can't wash dishes now. Not that I can't
wash dishes — I love washing dishes! But I made a statement there.
I'm saying maybe that was the wrong way to go about explaining where babies
come from. I don't know. But I'll tell you, I would never give up who
I am today. I think I am all the bad things as well as the good. I wouldn't
want to take that away. So that's why I kept "The Cabbage Patch Man" kind
of abstract as to whether it's good or bad.
Josh: To me, that story symbolizes the absolute best thing that we can do with Keyhole. I think that story so far is the pinnacle of what we're doing. First of all, visually it's beautiful. It's not a straightforward narrative — you actually have to look at it and figure out that there are two narratives going on, a literate narrative and a pictorial narrative, going parallel but not perfectly in synch with each other. It has a quality that's really rare in a lot of comics. I think the closest feeling that I can associate with it is Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Library. The sort of sad fact of being a child. It's so easy being a child to be wounded. You carry those wounds with you. They don't necessarily screw up the rest of your life, but there are these moments that happen as a kid that you'll never forget.
Dean: Which is why I gave it the tag-line, "Children's Stories for the Adult in Question," which is a series I'm compiling. What I'm basically saying is, we are always children until we die. We're always learning, always dealing with issues, and —
Josh: In a basic way, you're still reacting to those shocking things that happened to you when you were a kid.
Dean: I co-created The Verdict, with writer Martin Powell, and did Batman and Justice League bonus books for DC. When I did the bonus books for DC, I was nervous, I hated it. I look at them now and wish I had never done them. At least with The Verdict I helped create a character. I look at The Verdict now and I think there are so many things that I could have done as an artist to make it better, but maybe I'll come back to it again some day. Back then I wasn't even considering writing. The reason why I got into writing — which is a major bridge to cross for Josh and me is because we never wrote. We never intended to write. We always intended to interpret other writer's stories.
Josh: That's part of the segmenting of the major comic industries: you grow up thinking, "Well, I'm a penciler, you're a letterer..." All you can think of yourself is one function.
Dean: I wanted to grow up to be a penciler. And two things happened. I went to film school, which taught me a lot about how to draw comics. Which is funny because comics and film are very different, but there is a sense of storytelling in film theory that actually made me think about comic book theory. It made me think about storytelling much more. Which is ironic, because you'll pick up most comics books nowadays and there is not an iota of storytelling. Matter of fact, Josh and I are going to do some plugs in Keyhole, and one of the jokes I have is we're going to plug Walt Simonson and say, "He's one of those old-timers who still tells stories." As a cartoonist, he knows how to tell a story.
Film school helped me think about how to write, how to tell a story. I bought some books on dramatic structure, I read a lot of plays, and thought about dialogue, and why you stop a scene in rhythm. I started to write little pieces and I encouraged Josh to write little pieces. And his came from journals and other ideas I never thought to explore.
Josh: I'm in awe of people who can just write straightforward fiction. I'm still at the beginning stage, where pretty much everything I do is directly based on real experiences, on things that actually happened. So that's a whole other step for me to make fiction.
Dean: Josh and I just want to experiment with the medium. We're not pioneers, we're not geniuses. I just think we're trying to help influence this other direction of comic books.
Josh: I think even having that as a goal is important. I don't think we've done anything new yet. Not at all. There are some pioneers. I'd say Chris Ware, right now, is the pioneer of comics — what he's doing, I've never seen. That's a goal for Dean and I. We'd like to tell a story that's never been told in that way in a comic, or actually use the medium in a new way. That's a big goal, and I don't think we've done it yet, but the point is we're not just sitting back complacently and saying, "Well, comics are this, and this is how we can tell our stories." If we can push the envelope somewhere — anywhere! — and the opportunity comes along, we'll do it.
Images, characters and likenesses © and TM Dean Haspiel & Josh Neufeld
