Jon Lewis's SPECTACLES: Interviews

Jon
Lewis

• News

Spectacles Interviews

June, 1997
indy Magazine #18
By Jeff Mason

Tom Hart and Jon Lewis have followed parallel paths in the comics field. Both entered the picture with the help of Xeric grants in 1994, after years of mini-comics work — Hart with his poetry vs. profit graphic novel Hutch Owen's Working Hard, Lewis with his biology/psychology drama True Swamp. Next Hart achieved his most abstract and elusive work, New Hat, three stories that somehow fit together in time and space to make one; while Lewis also reached the left-field wall in his Ghost Ship, where page-structures and lines of logic ran wild. Hart's current series The Sands, is a sweet, lyrical tale of the desert, in which the protagonist follows his entomologist girlfriend to an unfamiliar country and ends up baby-sitting a temperamental (and temporarily "retired") boy-king. Lewis' new series Spectacles features quiet, humorous "reality-based" stories that frame the brilliant details of everyday life, standing alongside a continuing serial, "The Frost Changes", in which the 20th century American Midwest becomes one with pre-industrial Scandinavia, allowing Lewis to explore his own past (he grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota) and the legends and folklore of his ancestors (he's half Norwegian) in one bizarre multi-layered epic. Both Hart and Lewis' drawing styles can be disarmingly simple at first glance, but take on a transfixing depth as one reads their stories. Hart's comics are atmospheric and spare, with sudden bursts of noise and activity, like in Japanese Noh drama. Lewis' are profuse with criss-crossed ideas, hints and details, broad statements alternating with meticulous dissections. The two cartoonists have influenced and inspired one another for years.

How long have you known each other?
Tom Hart: Seven years.
Jon Lewis: We were both doing mini-comics of a highly shitty quality.
Tom: Mine higherly.
Jon: But mine were more pretentious!
Tom: Yeah, but they were creative in a lot of ways.
Jon: Creativity's overrated.
Tom: And mine were what? "Honest" comics?
Jon: Anyway, we both sucked and we corresponded from Minnesota to New York about that. Then I moved to Seattle and so did Tom and Trina, his girlfriend at the time.
Tom: There were three factors. Jon was there and was certainly more rife than anyone I'd met with the material I felt a good life was made up of. I had an Aunt there. And there was something of a comics community there.
Jon: Which by the time we both left had swelled till it comprised at least three distinct comics sub-communities: The two of us along with Ed Brubaker, Megan Kelso, Dave Lasky, Jason Lutes, Jen Daydreamer; and there was the community centered around Fantagraphics; and there was the furry animal crowd centered around Edd Vick. Maybe Mike Grell had some little group of chums too...
Tom: ...That he'd get together with and watch Asian bondage movies [laughter].

While we're eastward, tell us about the project you two are doing for the Japanese publisher Kodansha. I gather that rather than your personal projects is supporting both of you?
Tom: Yeah. I quit my job washing dishes almost a year ago, which is just wonderful. Doing this Kodansha stuff every month is great, because I would have loved to spend four years at comic book school, which doesn't exist, but now I get to do something that's not as egocentric as my work is, and Jon's work is a little too . . . drawing Jon's stories for Kodansha is good for me because it forces me not to be lazy. If I were constructing them, I'd fall into certain patterns, but I don't get to do that. I get great pleasure out of what Jon comes up with and I'm forced to confront something else.
Jon: It was kind of disappointing when I realized I wasn't going to be able to write stories the way I wanted. At first I thought we could do sort of fun, picaresque adventures that were humorous but romantic...

Sort of like Bob Hope and Bing Crosby go to wherever?
Jon: [laughs] sure! [attempts impersonation] "I'll go to the wall for Bang-bang! I tell ya I love that girl!" Uncle Scrooge, Groo, Jack Vance, I love that shit. But it soon became clear that this was going to be like a game we'd be paid for. They wanted a more instant, idiotic, and hopefully universal kind of imagery and humor. I've never written stories with this kind of lack of self-criticism before. I'm just considering every deranged piece of caffeine poisoning that comes out of me as being something every salaryman on the street will love. Everything that was really personal about this project has been reamed and discarded by our kind editors.
Tom: True, except that in a way getting rid of all that baggage has taken us to the core-ourselves, our penises and the women we're trying to snare. I didn't realize until a couple of episodes into it how degenerate and perfectly primal it is.
Jon: I don't find it too primal. It doesn't touch me that way. The only things that resonate with me are little incidental things we fit in, like having to fight that squid in the swimming pool. But now I'm writing and laying out a whole episode in an afternoon, which if you break down my pay hourly, comes out about right.
Tom: Unfortunately I can't make the same comment.
Jon: You're drawing pretty fast! This afternoon we were waiting for our food at a Vietnamese restaurant and Tom was sitting there filling in solid blacks at the table [laughter]. I must say I love the chance to specify images which will become Tom Hart art.
Tom: I learn a lot from seeing how you do your layou
Jon: I think layouts are probably the most intensely creative stage.
Tom: You think? The composition of panels, pages or both?
Jon: Probably more panels, or a given row of panels. It seems like that's where the most alchemy goes on, where every decision has the most effect. There are so many little factors at play in a comic, all producing tiny reactions. Comics have that same level of nuance "serious" music sometimes has. Even though music has been codified into notational systems and harmonic theory, etc., it's still largely just intuitively picking out elements to put in the hopper, and sometimes they end up containing a special truth.
Tom: I think much more about the panel layouts than the page too, but I do know that my brain can't handle the cluttered comic page we've all gotten used to.

Tom, all your previous comics were one-shots . How do you feel doing a series?
Tom: I hate it. I know that if you're going to issue a fifteen dollar book, it's a good idea for that work to have had some audience already. But my approach has gotten more holistic and less linear (bad buzz words, I know), so I don't like the periodical thing. But I have to do it. Hopefully the market will change or I'll just get more obstinate and never do it again. If I want to make a 168 page book or whatever it is, I want to came to that 168 pages as a unit. I don't think the way to compose a comic or anything is one piece at a time and then call it finished. I would rather do the whole thing, look at it and say, "Okay, now what does it need? Let's do another draft. A lot changes about the beginning as you get towards the end. I just wish I didn't have to publish those 24 pages every time I get them done.

Do you ever feel a comic reaches a point where it's done?
Jon: No, but I leave it unfinished in the right proportion, instead of trying for this illusion of completeness, that you see at its apotheosis in something like Dave Stevens, which is just horseshit.
Tom: Right, and all those fellows Scott McCloud terms Classicalis
Jon: The last stage of the artwork is the reader's. The reader "finishes" it. You have to leave something for the reader's mind to do! Be the Richard Simmons of the comic reader's mind. Just enough exertion too keep them from getting too sluggish. What happens when they're fit and they don't need me anymore? [portentously] Then my real story begins! [laughter].

What do you think about comparing the novel to the comic book? That seems like a frequent reference point these days.
Jon: I think it's a length fixation. Artists want to crow, "I'm the alpha male because I've got the longest graphic novel!"
Tom: There's a lot to be had in novels.
Jon: Yes, but I think comparing comics to novels will be problematic. Like saying a masterpiece of sculpture must be as big as a masterpiece of architecture.
Tom: I don't think comics are capable of the depth of interrogation that novels are.
Jon: I think they're capable of reaching that depth, just not with the same game plan.
Tom: People do need to stop comparing comics to cinema or even theater, precisely because there are no real people involved. You're seeing drawings of people and I think that gets overlooked. We need to remember that we're not dealing with people, and we need to ask ourselves what we can get from a drawing of a person that we can't from an actor or photo. If there's a way for comics to keep any sort of integrity while the Web and the computer swallows us all, and anybody can distort a photograph to make it look like something from "Jurassic Park" in the space of twenty minutes, what is it? In answering that we need to stop thinking about cinema and novels so much and think about puppet shows, poetry, and music.
Jon: Except music, all those things are wildly nonviable commercially, and of course the only thing almost as embarrassing as a comic convention is a poetry slam.
Tom: Well that's not true, because the poetry slams are actually pretty vivacious right now. You could say there's a craving or fervor for comics as much as for poetry slams, but it seems like the poetry slam fervor is a lot more immediate.

Nobody wants poetry.
Tom: That isn't true. You could probably cram 200 people into a significant poetry slam.

That's less populated than a comic convention.
Tom: But these people are howling and hooting.
Jon: And going home drunk with each other afterwards. [laughter] But there's the question of whether poetry was ever meant to be...
Tom: Slammed. [laughter]

It was originally an oral art form.
Tom: Right. I respond better to poetry that way. Not necessarily as a World Wrestling Federation type of event, but definitely oral. I just wanted to object to what Jon said about poetry slams.
Jon: I've only gone to a few, but it was pretty sad.
Tom: Sadder than a comic show?
Jon: That's hard to answer because I'm inured to that brand of pain. But when I see the woman with the bad perm reading her poem about the beauty of dragons mating in flight, or how she calls on the help of her power-animal (the she-wolf, incidentally) in times of stress, I'm stricken quite quickly because I'm not used to defending my brain against that.
Tom: She wrote that poem because she can't draw [laughter]. But seriously, poetry and comics are both pretty marginalized, poetry more so.

What's wrong with being marginalized? People who build model rockets are marginalized, as are people who sew, and people who collect antiques.
Jon: Deservedly! Those people are devian

How do you feel about comic book stores?
Jon: Tom and I went into one this afternoon, and lo and behold, there was some sort of magic-card session going on and people were bickering spiritedly about which magic game universe they were going to play in, and the sense of camaraderie broke my heart [laughter]. I like to go for long periods not being reminded of the vulgar, crappy things that are attendant on comic book culture. I like my illusion that it's this wide open field.
Tom: There's a medium and there are the cultures that adopt that medium. The perpetual adolescent culture has certainly dominated this one for a long time. I don't like that in the comic store, usually that one culture is being broadcast, and it's just not one I'm interested in.
Jon: There are things in life that are just too horrible to see, like an entire wall mostly full of half-assed, badly executed, parody or bandwagon comics. You just can't be open to the full gross splendor of the human pageant and still function and stay optimistic.

What makes you want to tell a story?
Jon: Hard to say because I'm so immersed in the process. I've probably thought in story form since I was playing with little rubber lizards and ants and army men when I was little. It's inescapable for me. It's just how I think.
Tom: I think Jon is more a storyteller than I am.
Jon: What I do is not necessarily storytelling, but arranging. Being interested in something that was jarring or painful or beautiful when it happened to me or just popped into my mind, that thing becomes the germ and then the process is to arrange a tableaux around it, which may end up including another germ with things orbiting it.

You were both strongly affected by comics when you first discovered them. Is the desire to affect someone else that way one of the reasons you create comics?
Tom: I've been affected by comic strips all my life, but I didn't read comic books until I was 16. I certainly want to give someone as much pleasure as I would like to get from a comic, but that's not necessarily directed at a 16 year old version of myself. If kids can find good comics, though, maybe they'll stick around and create comics later that I'll enjoy.
Jon: I've been reading comics since I was five. Thus I have memories of experiencing a comic book as this charged, captivating, emotional thing, which probably makes my expectation of how my comics could ever affect a reader somewhat unrealistic. The same probably applies to a lot of comics creators.

Do you really think creativity is overrated?
Jon: It is thought of as being more useful in an immediate sense than it really is. It's more like a series of random mutations whose effect can't immediately be gauged, than a scientist inventing a cure for syphilis. Art that goes for maximum utility usually has a shelf life of about six months and the allure of a PTA newsletter. Creativity seems to be thought of as some kind of heroism, which it isn't. It can transform more than one person, but it usually just transforms the creator, and never how it's supposed to.
Tom: I think being creative is a courageous act. If you produce something that transforms only, you can still glean from that what your life is about.

What comics are you reading these days?
Tom: James Kochalka's last several comics, Underwater, Jim Woodring's stuff, Jon's stuff, Land of Nod, whatever comics from young upstarts are at hand like Megan Kelso or Dave Lasky, and Steve Weissman's stuff.
Jon: Pickle, The Sands, Magic Boy and the Word of God, Two Fisted Tales, Kirby monster stuff, Ed Brubaker's stories in Dark Horse Presents, Berlin, Girlhero, Eightball, The Trespassers, Jim, The King of Persia, and Julius Knipl.

What other mental stimuli do you go in for?
Tom: Nonfiction. I've been reading a lot about theatrical processes lately.
Jon: Nonfiction about fiction?
Tom: Yeah.
Jon: I can relate. I read a lot of non-fiction about the lives of authors and composers. God, that's really depressing. Or else books about the history of science. I love CD bookle Can't get enough of the things. They come with CD's though, so it's a pretty costly form of enrichment. I read novels obsessively as a teenager. Now I hardly ever read them. I'm more drawn to books I can skip around in, like non-fiction or story collections. Working on a comic story from start to finish is enough linearity for me.
Tom: I was called a liner note hag.
Jon: Well, some of the little bits of reading that have affected me strongly have been in classical CD liner notes. They sometimes put together some really mean little essays in those things.
Tom: I just want to go on record as saying that I like Dilbert a whole lot.
Jon: Yeah, I like Dilbert pretty well too.
Tom: I like it not just for the business cubicle satire, but for the incredibly crude and funny drawings. Their arms that are half the length of their torsos and their eyes and mouths that hardly move.
Jon: They're like these minimally articulated puppe It might be such a pleasure to read because you feel a sense of wonder that these drawings actually work. The basic magic of comics. They work!