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Spectacles Interviews
The Comics Buyer's
Guide #1220
By Jeff Mason
It used to be a surprise when the latest hot comic book was created by a twenty-something comic book artist/writer with no little or no formal art training. Nowadays it is a surprise if the latest hot creator is someone other than a twenty-something comic book artist/writer with little or no formal training. Some comic book creators continue to surprise, no matter their background. Jon Lewis is one of those creators. With two critically acclaimed series True Swamp and Ghost Ship under his belt, Jon Lewis is now putting on his Spectacles to look at more realistic stories.
Lewis, like many of his creative contemporaries today had little formal artistic training. "I got sick for a few years starting when I was 17," explains Lewis, "so that kind of ruled out college or even completing high school." Also similar to a number of his contemporaries, he had been doing comics most of his life already, originally only doing comics to please himself, "but during the years I was sick I started them with a potential reader in mind for the first time," says Lewis. He took advantage of the burgeoning mini-comic underground in the late 1980's to distribute his mini-comics and receive valuable feedback. "I did them, usually 16 pages or so, xeroxed, from 1988-1991, trading with a handful of other mini-comics artists through the mail," says Lewis.
Distributing his mini-comics through the mail is how he started interacting with some of today's better known alternative comic book creators. He met Tom Hart, self-publisher of Hutch Owens Working Hard and creator of Black Eye's The Sands series, this way. "Tom would eventually become my best friend and biggest source of creative support after we both ended up living in Seattle," Lewis explains, "but eventually the milieu of mini-comics started seeming too cramped and confined, and I decided to push myself to do something that wasn't deliberately obscure, primitive, and difficult." What resulted over the course of the next 2.5 years was the 5-issue run of True Swamp, which earned itself a respectable cult following.
The leap from xerox to real printing was facilitated at first by a grant intended for people who want to self-publish their comics work (the Xeric grant). The grant money ran out after three issues but by then Lewis was "sick of the duties of publishing anyway," he says, "and had enough notoriety to convince a publisher, Slave Labor Graphics of San Jose, CA, to publish True Swamp." The book ran its course for Lewis as a creator after two more issues, but did three issues of contra-rational stories of the high seas in his Ghost Ship comic, also published by Slave Labor Graphics.
The material for his new book, Spectacles, has been taking shape over the last year. After doing stories about animals in the swamp and surreal pirates that were all actually about everyday emotions and observations he "finally just feel like doing stories that feature Īnormalā people feeling the everyday emotions," Lewis explains, "A lot of what drove me to feature the strange or animal characters was a disinterest in drawing human beings, but I now find that totally enjoyable; and wanting to do stories with more familiar settings has followed from that." Half of the stories in Spectacles are quieter, more "realistic" ones set in Seemington, which is Lewis' version of Seattle. The other half are chapters of a longer, stranger serial that deals simultaneously with his feelings for Minnesota because " it's where I grew up," explains Lewis, and his interest in the folklore and legends of Scandinavia because "that is where half of my family originates," he says. The Scandinavian story has a large, recurring cast, and the Seemington stories, while self-contained, visits certain characters more than once.
Spectacles is published quarterly by Alternative Press, 611 NW 34th Drive, Gainesville, FL 32607-2429.
Images, characters and likenesses © and TM Jon
Lewis