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Interviews

July 2000
Standard Issue
Interview by Bryan D.

Where did the two of you meet, and what made you decide to do a comic together?

JOSH: R. and I met through my girlfriend. She was working as a reporter/fact-checker at a magazine called The American Lawyer and R. was a reporter there. Then R. ended up taking over my old job as the Rights & Permissions Manager at The Nation magazine. That was right before Sari & I went off backpacking through Asia, etc. R. had always been interested in comics and I had always been drawing them, so when I was just starting Keyhole, R. suggested collaborating and he came up with Titans of Finance. The rest is financial comics history, the stuff legends are made of!

What were your inspirations to do Titans of Finance? (I love the idea by the way!)

R.: The twin inspirations were the Wall Street Journal on one hand, and the work of Drew and Josh Friedman on the other. I started reading the business press, especially the Journal, in the early 1990s, for work-related reasons. I've been reading comics for a long time, and since college at least I d been a big fan of alternative comics, which in the late 1980s and early 1990s (that s when I was in college; I'm 31) were kind of at a peak in terms of their cultural acceptance. Anyway, Drew and Josh Friedman did a number of stories that were very deadpan, and apparently fact-based, but totally outrageous. Josh Friedman's writing was very spare, and of course Drew Friedman was using the stipple style, sort of suggestive of photography, which really underscored the verisimilitude. Meanwhile, I was reading all these outrageous stories in the business press — people making money, losing money, behaving insanely, hitting each other, whatever. Stuff I never knew went on in the business world. So, Josh and I started talking about putting these two elements together: True-life tales of money business, told in the form of comics.

JOSH: R. and I had always wanted to do a comics collaboration. He came up with the idea, and I really enjoy satirizing these super-capitalists, who are usually celebrated in the business press purely because they accumulate piles of gratuitous wealth.

What about your other comics?

JOSH: As far as influences on my overall comics work, there was definitely something about Hergé's "clean line" style on Tintin that made me want to emulate his work. And, like most young boys, I loved the superheroes: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, etc. As I grew older and lost interest in the fantasy stories of my youth, I found inspiration in cartoonists like Art Speigelman, Harvey Pekar, Joe Sacco, Julie Doucet, Peter Bagge, Dan Clowes, and Chris Ware.

Titans is done entirely from press accounts. Is this hard to do? Do you pretty much know basically who the next Titans strip is going to be about first?

R.: Yes, everything in Titans is taken from the press (with certain obvious exceptions, like when we have a building in the background that's made of paper towels, or a businessman suddenly starts wearing a superhero costume or whatever — that's creative license). It's not all that hard in that there are plenty of stories out there. It's sometimes a pain to weave it all together, but I think I've gotten better at that. And it can be somewhat expensive to round up all the articles from electronic databases like Dow Jones News Retrieval. Usually I have a few files with ideas for subjects, so I have an idea what the next one will be — but sometimes something better comes along.

For Titans of Finance you draw actual businessmen, economists, etc. I'll bet that none of these men and women ever imagined that they would be portrayed as characters in a comic strip or mini-comic. Do you get responses or any kind of reactions from the people you draw? What about from other readers?

JOSH: So far, nobody we've done a strip on has contacted us. It would be great if they did! I showed the strip once to an investment banker I knew. He was familiar with all the subjects we covered. After reading the strips, he told me — completely without irony — that one day we'd be doing a Titans story about him! I think the whole point of the strip went right over his head.

What kind of references do you use for Titans?

JOSH: Generally, when R. sends me a script for a new story, he encloses press clippings on the subject that he accumulated as he did research. Otherwise, if I am having trouble finding a likeness of one of the people in the story, I can often find a photo of them on the Internet. As a last resort, I just make up faces to go with some of the more obscure names! In any case, I don't think it's necessary to draw the characters exactly as they look in real life. Unlike Josh Friedman, that's not really my forte as an artist, and as along as they look consistently like themselves throughout the strip, the reader gets the idea...

Josh, how long have you been drawing comics? What first caught your interest and made you say I want to do this?

JOSH: I can't say when comics first entered my life; it happened so early that I've been reading and drawing comics since before I can remember. I still have drawings and comics I did when I was 4 or 5 years old!

Are you into any other forms of art (or do you even consider comic books to be a form of art? I know some people don't)? Do you write as well?

JOSH: As a dedicated alternative cartoonist, I obviously consider comic books to be a rich art form. I don't feel the need to justify or explain that opinion other than to remind people that the medium is not the message; Richie Rich and Art Spiegelman's Maus are both comic books. Just because one is junk and one won the Pulitzer Prize doesn't reflect on the medium of comics as a whole. As far as other forms of art, I'm also an illustrator — mostly for websites and magazines — and a website designer. I was an art history major in college and I greatly enjoy all forms of applied art. I occasionally dabble in watercolors. And, yes, I also write comics — see my work on Keyhole, below.

R., how did you get into the writing field? How long have you been writing creatively?

R: I kind of drifted into writing; when I was about 18 I thought it would be cool to be a fiction writer, and that's sort of what I had in mind when I arrived at college (University of Texas), and then I discovered it was easier to get paid by writing nonfiction. I did record reviews, movies reviews, I wrote about books, and media, I covered football games, whatever I could do. That led to various journalism jobs in Texas, which is where I'm from, and then I moved to New York and worked at a series of magazines there. I've almost always had some kind of creative project going on the side. I wrote a screenplay in college, which in retrospect is incredibly bad. I also wrote a comic strip series in college that was kind of quasi-autobiographical, but also somewhat experimental. It was basically about childhood angst. Hmm. Anyway, so, I also wrote some short stories back then, some of which appeared in college-type journals. And I made a run at a novel in the early 1990s, but that sort of sputtered to naught. Titans came along as a project in, I think, 1996. But like I said there have always been other side projects, and I'm hoping some of those — particularly the stranger ones — will come to light by way of the webzine my girlfriend E and I are planning.

What is your favorite style of writing? Any personal preferences as far as topics go?

R.: I like writing the comic a lot; it's a totally different form, and Josh basically taught me how to write for comics. I pay my bills by working as a journalist, or a nonfiction writer, and I enjoy that, too. I've dabbled in fiction, though not to much effect. I guess I still feel as though I'm experimenting with different styles, trying to find the things that I'm best at. Actually, the emergence of zine culture, and the kinds of surprising and unpredictable voices that that's given rise to, is another inspiration. And I'm interested, actually, in the monologue form — certain works by Spalding Gray and Eric Bogosian for example. This is slightly different, but I'm also extremely interested in some of the things that Wallace Shawn has written. And I think in her heyday, the way that Laurie Anderson wrote (around the United States Live period) was brilliant and inspirational, and again a kind of monologue or performance form that I'm generally interested in. As far as topics, I've obviously become very interested in the money culture over the years, but I'm interested in just about anything.

What other projects/jobs are the two of you working on?

R.: I write a column for Slate.com called "Moneybox." I'm also a contributing writer for Money Magazine, and I freelance for a range of publications, on all sorts of stuff. I sort of have an online clip book at robwalker.net. I'm mulling over a strategy for doing a big project that pulls together some of my thinking on money culture, but I haven t quite worked that out yet. My girlfriend E. and I are working up a kind of online zine, but we're still in the early stages. Here's an interesting thing: We moved to New Orleans a few months ago, and at the time I wrote a Diary about that for Slate.com. That Diary is going to be included in a collection of Slate Diaries that will be published in book form in August. Anyway, I've written for many, many publications, but I can honestly say that Titans of Finance is, in my opinion, by far the most interesting and original project I ve been involved in for the past five years. It's been incredibly gratifying watching it come together, the meshing of Josh's style and mine. It's very cool to do something so collaborative.

JOSH: My main project is a series of comics about my travels abroad with my girlfriend Sari, when we backpacked through Southeast Asia and Central Europe. These stories have appeared in every issue of Keyhole, a comic I co-created with longtime friend Dean Haspiel. I'm currently working on a long story which wraps up the travels abroad and deals with our return to the United States. I'd like to collect that story and the previously-published ones in a trade paperback which could be sold in bookstores in the travel section. Other projects I'm involved in include a regular gig as a cartoonist for Harvey Pekar, the writer of American Splendor. American Splendor is an unflinching and pessimistic account of Pekar's life which has helped validate comics as an art form and has been illustrated over the years by some of comix' best talents. On occasion, I do other comics for anthologies and other collections.

Is there anything else in the works for future?

R.: Nothing besides what's mentioned or alluded to above. As you may be able to tell, and as Josh would certainly tell you, I'm a bit secretive about stuff like that.

Are you a member of the corporate world yourself, such as a businessman? Any funny/good personal stories?

R.: Well, I'm not a businessman. As a journalist I worked for several large companies, including Dow Jones, Time Warner, and The New York Times. The only funny story that relates to this, I suppose, is that I do the strip as R. Walker, instead of using my full name, partly because I was paranoid about being caught writing comics.

What do you believe is the most beneficial factor in a good stock portfolio?

R.: Weeellll, I'm actually not much of an investor myself, and I try not to give advice on stuff like this, so I'll just say a few things that will sound banal, but are true. The most important thing for a portfolio is diversity — that is, you don t want to bet it all on one stock. Beyond that, the main thing that I've noticed about investors in the past five years is that they want the thrill but don't want to do the work. If you re going to be an actual investor, it does take work and time and commitment. That's why I don t really do it. I have a few thousand dollars in mutual funds that are left over from jobs where I had a 401(k).

Bull market or Bear market?

R.: Nice try, pal.