Josh Neufeld &
R. Walker

• News

• Reviews

• Interviews

• Contact

• Buy

Interviews

April 1999
Semi Auto-Bio Revelations with Josh Neufeld, part I
Interview by Austin English

Josh Neufeld is the definitive young alternative cartoonist. He isn't getting rich from comics; in fact, he's not making any money on them at all. At the same time, though, he's creating very unique comics, along with his comics partner and friend of almost twenty years, Dean Haspiel.

Keyhole is the story of two very different real lives, told by two of the best auto-bio storytellers in the business. While Dean's stories tend to focus more on life in America, and what goes along with that, up to this point, all of Josh's stories are about his one-and-a-half year long trip to Southeast Asia and Europe. Josh tells the stories in a way that come across especially well in comics form, and is able to render them so that every panel presents something interesting to think about. His clean-line style suggests influence from Hergé, as do his adventure/travel oriented stories, but Neufeld is doing something different. Keyhole as he says, is an "appreciation of life," and I really can't think of a better way of describing it myself.

I talked to Josh for an hour and a half at his Mission District apartment in San Francisco. He told me of his partnership with Dean, his travels with his girlfriend Sari Wilson, how Keyhole is put together, today's industry, and a variety of other things. Most importantly, his enthusiasm for comics shines, and is what makes Keyhole the stimulating book that it is.

GROWING UP

English: [When did you first meet Dean Haspiel?]

Neufeld: I first met Dean during our freshmen year in high school, at Music & Art in New York City. By chance, we were waiting in the lunch line together. He was really friendly, and he introduced me to this group of people who were all drawing superhero comic books. Up to that point, I had always been the one kid in the class who drew comics, and now I was part of a group. When Dean and I were first getting into alternative comics, about 5 or 6 years ago, we were really impressed with a lot of kids who were as young as we were when we first started doing comic books seriously, who already had made the leap to doing alternative stuff. They weren't like us, who had started doing superheroes first. They were starting out doing auto-bio and independent stuff. It was nice to see. Given the kind of comics that I think are the most important artistically, I really wish I had known about the possibilities earlier, because I could have been a lot further along in my understanding of the craft.

English: Before you got into alternative comics, did you feel Dean's work influencing you?

Neufeld: Oh definitely. He was a hilarious, charismatic guy, just like the characters who populate his comics. So, I was influenced and inspired by Dean in a lot of ways. And I hope that he was by me, too. The dynamism that he brought to his work, and his implicit understanding of the way that comics work on a formal level, was obvious. He understood concepts of your abilities as a cartoonist to move the point of view around like a camera to really make a page dynamic. Dean and I, as well as the group of other kids doing comics, did a lot of collaborations. For instance, our buddy Phil would write a story, and then I would pencil it, and Dean would ink it. We kind of had this mainstream-style factory system going.

English: Any collaborations like that in Keyhole Mini-Comics?

Neufeld: In the mini-comics we did a couple of short things, maybe one or two pages, that I wrote & penciled and Dean inked, or vice-versa. Dean and I do collaborate on things like "Lionel's Lament," a regular feature in Keyhole. We give each other ideas, and it's always open that he can do an episode for it, and even though we wouldn't be collaborating on that particular story, the idea that this character is available to either of us, is something that I think is cool.

SPLENDOR WITH HARVEY PEKAR

English: How did you come to work on American Splendor?

Neufeld: That was the beginning of when I got into independent comics. When Sari and I left the States in '92, I was still doing mainstream stuff. I knew about Crumb and some of the underground comics, and I knew about European comics like Hergé's Tintin, and Asterix, which I grew up on, but I had never made that leap to conceiving that it was possible for me to do comics out of the superhero mainstream. It was when we were in Prague, ironically, that I was sent a book of interviews with alternative cartoonists. I started reading Scott McCloud, Dan Clowes, Peter Bagge, and all these interviews, and it totaled opened up my world. And then I even saw some copies of Eightball in Prague, copies of Hate.

English: They can barely make it in the states! How'd they make it to Prague?

Neufeld: (Laughs). I almost felt like it was this word of God, saying, "Josh — look, there are other options out there."

English: Harvey Pekar was in there?

Neufeld: He was interviewed. I don't think I saw any American Splendors in Prague, but I had seen them before. And I'd seen Harvey on David Letterman. When I finally got back to the States, one of the first things I did, just out of the blue, was write to Harvey, and send him the stuff I'd been doing in Prague, and just begged him to let me work with him. I don't know where I got the idea, but I thought, "Who knows? Maybe he'll work with anybody." To be honest, I wasn't that impressed with some of the artists that he'd been working with, and I thought, "Look, I can draw as well as some of these people, so give me a chance." I don't know what exactly sparked his interest, but he actually called me. It was a great moment for me, because we were just back in the States, we had just moved to Chicago and I was going through severe culture shock. Getting his call was really terrific. Well, he didn't actually give me any work right away, but promised me something in the future. I just basically pestered him. I would call him up every six months. We started to have a little rapport — we'd talk about things outside of comics — being Jewish, or politics, or what was going on in our lives. And then he came to Chicago with his wife to do a reading, where they were promoting Our Cancer Year. I finally met him in person, and I said right in front of everyone, "When are you gonna get me some work?" I just sort of shamed him into giving me some work.

English: So, the trick to getting into American Splendor is shaming Harvey.

Neufeld: Yeah. Pestering him and making yourself a big pain in the ass. (Laughs).

KEYHOLE

English: How did Keyhole develop after that?

Neufeld: I think it was really Dean. We were both starting to appreciate alternative comics about this time. Actually, even before I did something in American Splendor, I had some work in Duplex Planet Illustrated . That was because of Chris Ware. I met Chris in Chicago, and he was really nice, and looked at my work and was very supportive. He said, 'Why don't you do something for David Greenberger in Duplex Planet?' It so happened that David was coming into town. I met him, and I got something in there. Dean, of course, was immediately jealous and competitive, and swore that he would get something in there too. So then Dean succeeded in getting something in Duplex Planet. We started to think, "This is really fun. I like this kind of freedom of expression, you can write about anything. There's all sorts of possibilities for our work." We started brainstorming, but we didn't know where we could place our work. We were just learning about, and were excited by, the world of mini-comics, by people like Matt Feazel. At that time lots of stuff was going on in Chicago: Jessica Abel was still self publishing... Dean and I were talking about putting a book together, but had no idea who'd publish it. We thought, "Oh, Fantagraphics will publish it!"

English: They'll publish anything (laughs)!

Neufeld: Yeah. It was very silly. We had no context for any of this. We thought we could send stuff to Pete Bagge, and he'd print something about it in Hate . Finally, I just jumped the gun and decided to publish a bunch of pieces I'd put together in mini-comics form.

English: That was Keyhole Mini-Comics?

Neufeld: That was Keyhole Mini-Comics #1. We put out four issues of the mini-comic in the first year. We sent out lots of free copies, and we got lots of nice responses from people. Then Dean met Paul Davis, the publisher of Millennium, at some convention, and he convinced the guy (laughs) to put out Keyhole as a real comic. That's how it happened.

English: What was the inspiration of doing auto-bio comics as Keyhole's focus?

Neufeld: For me, it was easiest to write what I knew. Growing up as a hopeful mainstream-style comics artist, I had never really considered writing my own stuff. I felt like I had a facility for writing dialogue, but coming up with an original idea was — and still is — very intimidating. It just seemed natural to me to combine my love of the Tintin comics — which are all about adventure and travel — with my real-life travel experiences. I thought, if I tell these stories in an engaging way and I try to structure them so they have the basic elements of a good story — character, plot, conflict — that would be interesting." I was influenced by a lot of the stuff I was reading. Mostly Harvey Pekar, but David Greenberger to an extent, because he was doing interviews with people who were telling him about their lives. It was an appreciation of real life. I came back from traveling and had lots of stories to tell, and was really interested in that type of storytelling. Getting away from the fantastic, the super-heroic, and thinking, let's appreciate people's real lives.

English: What's the next venue for auto-bio comix? What's the next take?

Neufeld: I think the main problem with autobiography is that a lot of people tell stories that are just not inherently interesting. Chester Brown was able to do that with some issues of Yummy Fur because they delved into issues that were so personal that you had this voyeuristic excitement when you read them. Lots of people try to copy that approach, and they just don't have the perspective that makes the story interesting. I think that as long as people have interesting stories to tell, auto-bio doesn't need to change, because everyone has their own story to tell. But I think that the idea of pseudo auto-bio stories — stuff that Dean and I do, where we call Keyhole "semi-auto-bio comix" — I think the knowledge that maybe not every detail is true adds an extra dimension to the story.

English: Is doing a personal story like "Cave of Fear" harder to sit down and work on than an American Splendor story?

Neufeld: Not as an artist. As a writer, sometimes, because I don't have the distance I need. Fortunately that's why I have Dean and Sari, who's a fiction writer, to be able to look at it. If my stories have been successful, it's because they've been so helpful to me in refining them and editing them, and bringing out the kernel of the story. When it comes to drawing my own stories, I don't find that emotionally difficult at all.

English: Do you just write the story as it happens, or do you try to bring a certain emotion to the forefront?

Neufeld: I try to think about what would be the next interesting story that I want to tell. What are the stories that I've told when people were sitting around drinking, that made people have some kind of reaction? I try to find the elements of my own "adventures" that fit the structure of a story. Why is Hemingway's work considered great? Or Mary Renault, or Gore Vidal? I try to apply those elements of good narrative to my comics. You're creating a plot based on your own life.

English: So you're not trying to project any certain mood on the story.

Neufeld: I ask myself why do I want to tell this story? What mood did it create when I told it to people? So, for instance, "The Cave of Fear" [from Keyhole #1] is very different from "The Ice Cream Man." I've gotten great reader responses about "The Ice Cream Man" [Keyhole #4], which is the story where I pushed the most as a writer, since there was a whole other point of view involved. I was approached by somebody from the former Yugoslavia at a convention and he said the story was really dead-on, which made me really happy. If you look at my travel stories, they're all told from a slightly different perspective, and this one was my biggest stretch. We were the short encounter he had.

English: You talked a little about what you consider good literature. Do you feel comics present any limitation that literature does not? Do you feel literature or film would be better at telling these stories?

Neufeld: I don't think so. I really believe that you can tell any story in comics that you could tell in any other medium. And I think that's the thing that most people don't appreciate about comics. Scott McCloud says people mistake the medium for the message. But, just to fine-tune that answer, because I just read an interview with Chris Ware from the Journal — in it, he said that he felt there were certain limitations in the way comics have been used — so far — to express certain forms and tenses which are inherent to literature. He's trying in his work to expand the formal possibilities of the medium.

English: You rarely hear someone of the opinion that literature makes story-telling easier then comics.

Neufeld: Well, he was saying that. He was saying that one of the best things about literature is that it asks so much of the reader. It's really a collaborative effort between author and reader, because no matter how well you describe something, the reader always brings so much of his or her own subjective interpretations to it. I could describe you in infinite detail, in writing, but a reader who's never met you before would still their own personal, unique idea of what you looked like. But when you draw something, that's it. There's no way to re-interpret that.

English: [What was it like] returning to America?

Neufeld: The next story I'm doing is about coming back to America, which was almost like traveling again. We'd been gone so long that it was culture shock in reverse. I've never been a big drinker, and I've never taken any drugs, so I don't know what it's like to be high and to be totally out of it. But I imagine that's what the experience was like, of culture shock. The dislocation is so weird that sometimes it's scary, but it's an amazing feeling, and worth writing about. It's hyper-real. So that's my next story: leaving Prague, my grandmother's death and her funeral, and coming back to America and dealing with being back in a new culture again. Because so much about the States had changed when we were gone, like the whole Internet revolution had happened.

KEYHOLE CRAFT

English: One of the things that you've surprised me with in this interview already is that you're new to writing. How have you progressed as a writer during the short time Keyhole's been around?

Neufeld: I hope I've progressed. I think that I'm getting near to the point where I'll be able to write fiction. I really want to do that. There's a thing I've just done recently, a four-page story which stars Josh and Sari. But it's not strictly auto-bio, it's almost completely fictional. I'm almost stepping away from these characters of "Josh & Sari," which are becoming separate from the real us. I'm very intrigued, for instance, by the writer Paul Theroux, who has a first-person story (in a book called My Other Life) where he's a character, and he meets the Queen of England at a dinner party, and he touches her breasts. I mean things that you know could have never happened, but it's an interesting tension.

English: I've always enjoyed that. I really like comics that blur the line between fiction and life. Reading Keyhole is like reading three auto-bio comics, because you get two or more different views on life, in one comic book. Could you comment on that element?

Neufeld: I'm just happy that you see it that way. That's exactly what we were trying to do. We're trying to have a common theme, which is autobiography, or real-life experiences, and then have different points of view about it.

English: And each issue has kind of a central theme to it right? The Journal commented on that for issue #5 — discomfort was the theme.

Neufeld: Yeah, that was funny. We didn't plan it that way, so it was interesting that Scott Gilbert took it that way.

English: How does Keyhole get put together by you and Dean?

Neufeld: We send each other our scripts. We write full scripts, and then the other guy edits them. We work very closely on each other's writing. We do a lot of brainstorming. And then sometimes we send each other pencils of our work. It's a great relationship, because we can say anything to each other. I've known Dean for almost 20 years now, so it's almost like a marriage. It's funny. I mean, we fight, we make up. We compliment each other, we criticize each other, and we critique each other.

English: And I think, if it wasn't for that, Keyhole wouldn't be the book it is.

BAY AREA UNDERGROUND

English: The Bay Area was the center of the underground explosion, with Zap and all that. There are so many [cartoonists] here now. Do you think that the Bay Area, along with Chicago, I guess, is the center of maybe a new alternative movement?

Neufeld: It might be. I don't know if there's really that discussion and collaboration among people to the same degree. Crumb and those guys, they were all egging each other on, and I don't get that feeling now.

English: But there are so many people here, like Dan Clowes, Adrian Tomine, and a host of others. Why isn't there that kind of discussion?

Neufeld: I don't know. I guess the easy answer would be to say that cartoonists are all solitary and sort of misanthropic, and we're not very good at being in groups together. The basic fact of existence for a cartoonist is that you sit at home alone for hours. It's not really collaborative work. For Dean and me, it's different. In Seattle, it was really like that a couple of years ago. Jason Lutes was always helping other cartoonists: Ariel Bordeaux, or Jennifer Daydreamer, or David Lasky. Ed Brubaker was out there. A number of people just seemed to bounce off each other. But I just don't get that sense from the Bay Area. Personally, I was fortunate that I learned so much from Chris Ware, and Understanding Comics was really helpful to me as well. A comics community of some sort would be ideal for people who are just starting out rather then for people who are already established. If there was a group of people who were all doing mini-comics together, and they all learned from each other's work, and taught each other things, that would be the time for that to happen.

TODAY'S INDUSTRY

English: Do you think what you and Dean do, working on a comic together, gives it a better chance of being noticed?

Neufeld: That's what we hoped for, but to I think part of the reason why Keyhole doesn't sell, and the reason that Dean has been having trouble with Billy Dogma, is that we haven't hit on the right form for the comic. In terms of sales, Dean had his own Billy Dogma series, which got canceled after a couple of issues due to low sales. Now he's doing a Billy Dogma collection, which I hope gets ordered. But it's just so much about a product. I think Dan Clowes is incredible, and I think Adrian Tomine is very talented. Jessica Abel, Peter Bagge — but these are comics that are basically about the audience that is buying them. Optic Nerve is definitely about hipsters. Artbabe too at its most basic level. Hate, obviously. They're great, I'm not taking anything away from them. But Keyhole is not about hipsters. But I think that's part of being savvy, and being successful. I don't know if that means supporting the best art out there, but if you find that niche, and you can exploit it and it fits your talent, then you'll do well. And if you don't, you might not do so well.

English: Who do you think your readers are?

Neufeld: Well, the ones who I've met, I've been really happy, because, they have seemed to me like "normal people." There's one couple from New Jersey who I met at a convention. They've got a kid, they're like 35. The kind of people I want to read Keyhole are people who are curious about the world, or are interested in traveling. Y'know who really likes the comic is Jeff Smith of Bone, which is really funny. He picked it up was because it just so happened that he and his wife had traveled in Asia too, and they found this comic, Keyhole, that was like their own experiences. I met him at the San Diego Comic Convention last year and he had this long line of people, and he saw me and stopped and said, "Hey! Josh! Oh my God, it's great to meet you!" (Laughs)

English: You work in web page design and illustration to supplement your income. But you couldn't just be happy doing that. You have to do comics?

Neufeld: I have to keep doing comics. I just love the form. I love reading the new comics, and seeing what everyone else is up too. We're really lucky right now. We're living in a time where there's just a lot of interesting stuff being done. And I feel like I am part of some movement that a lot of other art forms are not part of right now. I think there's a certain time, when you're lucky, when a medium is going through a Renaissance, and I think one of them is right now, in comics.