Aliens: Mondo Pest was originally serialized in Dark Horse Comics (hereafter to be shortened to DHC) the 1992-1994 full color anthology meant to effectively silo off the licensed properties from flagship anthology Dark Horse Presents (popularly known as DHP). Previous to that, your Aliens or Predator comic serials would by necessity sit with fully creator-owned properties like Concrete or Bacchus, creating a frisson from the juxtaposition that defined early Dark Horse Comics (the company) releasesâa charming sort of "I've got a barn, let's put on a show" energy defined them from the very beginning and up to this point. But as the harsh comics industry landscape 90's began, the need for line-go-up style growth meant more licensed properties and attempts at home-grown superhero universes.
So, Dark Horse Comics (the anthology) was born. This is a time when DHP was particularly fertile thoughâthe first Sin City serial, Bacchus, Paleolove, Madwoman Of The Sacred Heart, An Accidental Death, and Hellboy: The Wolves of Saint August all ran in DHP during this period, among other thingsâso I for one am glad they had the more corporate venue of DHC to off-gas Comics Greatest World tie-ins and Robocop serials.
Eventually, the licensed comics would return to DHP and you'd have to endure Buffy tie-ins next to creator owned comics, but by that point the creator owned comics were less personal as well. DHP's content kind of reached a grim homogeny of "product" in those last couple yearsâfor every NEVERMEN there was IP slop and self-dealing problematic editors pushing their attempts at superheroes into the mix.
DHC only lasted two years, and Dark Horse Presents managed to hobble into the year 2000, so apparently the market wasn't clambering for the type of material that DHC was focused on. That isn't to say that there was nothing of value published under that bannerâfar from it, many excellent creators did work there. Case in point, Aliens: Mondo Pest was originally a serial that ran in issues 22-24. It was well enough regarded that they then repackaged it to feed the hunger for Aliens comics in 1995.
Written and drawn by two animation industry stalwarts who weren't big names at the time but would go on to much success in their fieldâGilroy is a co-author of the Clone Wars series and Del Carmen wrote and co-directed the hit Pixar film Inside Out, among many other credits of note. But at the time they were jobbers working on stuff like Where's Waldo and 2 Stupid Dogs and who shared credits on Batman: The Animated Series. Mondo Pest has an economy of story that suggests TV experience. It gets in, gets out and signposts everything that you need to know with visual storytelling and the occasional bit of chicken fat.
Mondo Pest (the character) is a LOBO-typeâbig shoulder pads, cigar chomping and backwards baseball cap all working like neon signposts to communicate a shorthand about the type of story you're reading. It's a bit of 90's comics fluff, but effectively told. The real reason to pick it up is to soak in Del Carmen's art and panel to panel storytelling. Pest himself may be an exercise in stereotype, but the other characters are all appealingly and smartly designed. His inks appear to be built mostly from luxurious brushstrokes but will occasionally scrawl into a sparser pen stroke. Hollingsworth's colors are effective but like most comics in this early 90s era of computer coloring, there's an almost oppressive level of saturation here...ironically causing me to wish they'd commissioned the comic for DHP, where it would have run in glorious black and white.
Getting reacquainted with B. Kliban after one of his cat drawings had a cameo in Project Hail Mary, and I didn't realize Kliban was also responsible for one of my favorite comics ever:
Connor Willumsen one-pager from 2011, appeared in Les 48 Heures De La Bande Dessinee de Montreal, edited by Vincent Giard. Broken up into three images on account of my scanner, forgive the not-great alignment.
Sammy Harkham, Interviewed by Zack Soto & Mike DawsonÂ
This chat originally appeared as Episode 45 of the podcast Process Party. We spoke to Sammy just as he was about to release the sixth issue of his ongoing series Crickets, in which heâd been serializing the story âBlood Of The Virgin,â which has since been collected into a graphic novel. Transcription by RJ Casey
Sammy Harkham: Itâs so nice not to have to deal with one other thing that doesnât make you any money. Itâs likeâlet our comics be the thing that we invest all our energy into. I donât even mean that in a negative way. We have limited time. You know, in our lives. And itâs like weâre going to spend it on the projects that are so essential. Itâs the not making money, right? I mean, they arenât making us our living. Doing a page of comics will always outrank any other thing I possibly could be doing, for no money. You know what I mean? Crickets is eight pages from being done.
Zack Soto: So is that another Blood of the Virgin?
Harkham: Yeah.
Soto: Nice. I love that youâre chipping away at this thing.
Harkham: I canât believe that Iâve become one of those fucking guys. I canât believe it.
Soto: Youâre a graphic novelist, Sammy Harkham.
Harkham: Dude! I never thought Iâd be⌠I would look at people and be like, âThat guy spent 10 years on that thing.â What the fuck?
Soto: Well, itâs only been like five years or something, right?
Harkham: [Loud sigh] First issue came out in⌠OK, if I keep it at its shortest, the first issue came out in 2011. Yes. So five years. Thatâs fine. So I think the readers are OK.
Soto: Yeah. And is this the final chapter?
Harkham: No. Two more. Two more, two years.
Soto: Iâm actually really interested in the setting that youâve got it in. The â70s, sort of. Is this sort of based on the Roger Corman thing?
Harkham: You mean the movie milieu? Or the visual milieu?
Soto: Mainly the movie milieu.
Harkham: This is the thing, Corman was always kind of a high-end player in that world. Right? So when you start reading Video Watchdog and Cinefex, or whatever, thatâs the stuff you come to like, âOh yeah, yeah.â Like the Coffy movies. AIP. But then, if you dig deeper⌠If you start watching a lot of Something Weird Video releases. Do you know that company?
Soto: Yeah.
Harkham: What you start seeing is that thereâre these companies that existed that were really bottom of the barrel, but the people who ran them, thatâs the thing I always found most fascinating. The movie would be a scuzzy movie based on the Zodiac Killer or the Manson killings, which werenât that old at the time, right? But theyâd be this scuzzy, disgustingâthey would change them and add like porn to them so that they could play at different theaters. These are really bottom-of-the-barrel movies. And then the people making them, you read about them, and itâd be like, âOh yeah, he was like a financier or a lawyer in Beverly Hills.â Like so weird! And that to me was always the interesting thing. Thereâs no connection between the work itself and the people who made the work.
Soto: Right. Theyâre just like people who wanted in on the business or whatever.
Harkham: No, they just took an opportunity. On the producer-level, yes. Theyâre just like... The one I likeâthe most charming version of thisâis even earlier. You know that movie Eegah about the caveman? Itâs Richard Kiel, the guy who played Jaws in James Bond. He plays a caveman that is discovered near Palm Springs.
Soto: Oh my god.
Harkham: And the movie title is E-E-G-A-H. Like âArrrrgh!â [Laughter] Right? Thatâs a movie thatâs like, next to Ed Wood, itâs in Clowesâs generation and Jaimeâs generation. Like thatâs their what the early â80s stuff is for us. Thatâs what that is for them. That stuff is like so charming they love it, you know? That movie was made by a guy who wanted his son to be like the next Justin Beiber of 1967. So itâs endless scenes of his son with a huge pompadour playing a guitar. Itâs cut with this caveman guy.
Harkham: And that whole world, itâs folk art. You know what I mean? Itâs people just making shit, you know? Itâs the equivalent now of like people making fan films on YouTube, basically. A lot of this stuff, youâve got to think like, back then if you could make a movie and finish it, if you could finish the movie, that was the hard part. Like if it had something to sell it, like literally one scene of something, you could find theaters that would carry it. I mean, John Waters grew up on that stuff and thatâs why his moviesâhe was smart enough to see through it and see what was good about it. And heâs like, âIâm making a movie with Divine and sheâs going to eat shit and Iâm going to have a guy open his sphincter.â Heâs the first guy to champion that stuff, you know? So I thought that world was such a good corollary to comics, honestly. Thereâs a lot ofâespecially back in the â70sâmy lead character was in that first generation of guys that want to make garbage. You know?
Soto: Like he enjoyed the garbage and wants to be part of the garbage.
Harkham: Yes. And thatâs a whole other subculture that you can look up. Monster kids. They call themselves monster kids. Theyâre the kids like in the â50s who watched the Universal horror movies when they were like seven or eight years old on reruns late at night on TV. There was a horror host in every city, and theyâd watch these old movies.
Joe Dante, and De Palma, and Scorsese, and Spielberg, all these dudes, they were the first generation of filmmakers who were fucking psyched about making a gangster movie or a science fiction thing, or whatever it was. Any other person, like any other movie you watch in the â50s thatâs a science fiction movie, or a horror movie, those guys are at the bottom of their careers and theyâre embarrassed, you know?
I thought that was interesting too, because those guys, theyâre like⌠I donât like a lot of stuff thatâs coming out now in that world, at all. Itâs an interesting thing that there was a time in America where people could recite poetry. They could. They could just recite poetry. I was reading a Steinbeck novel and, at one point, a homeless guy recited poetry and this other one finishes the poem. And youâre like, âWhat the fuck?â [Laughter] This is so weird. That was America in 1950. America now is like people just talking about The Avengers, you know? So, in many ways, I think of like, those directors, those guys, theyâre like the guys who invented the atomic bomb, you know what I mean? [Laughs]
Soto: Like itâs all down hill from there, kind of?
Harkham: Yeah. They start this thing where they love this stuff and who knew it would just become Star Wars. Six years from Seymour, you have George Lucas. My character Seymour. Itâs interesting on that level for me too, you know?
Soto: In comics, thereâs like the Roy Thomases and the Kurt Busieks or whatever.
Harkham: Exactly. [Laughs]
Soto: Who love the garbage.
Harkham: Roy Thomas always speaks a good game when you read interviews with him, but then you watch something like Fire and Ice, or you read any of those books, and youâre like, âUggggh.â
Soto: Yeah.
Harkham: Iâm dying. Iâm dying.
Harkham: There was no youth culture until 1950. Literally as soon as that happens and stuff starts getting catered to kids, those guys grow up and they just want to make more stuff for kids. It all just becomes a thing and now all culture, even the New Yorker is writing essays about Game of Thrones or whatever. And not the book. [Laughs] The Game of Thrones TV show. You know what I mean? You go wider, and go, âLetâs step outside the culture,â and the whole âWhat happened to America?â
And then you start thinking about America and start reading about America. You think of Whitman and think of Kerouac, you know? All those Beat writers in the â50s, and theyâre vision of what it was and what freedom meant and what America meant. How that got totally twisted just by becoming popularized and becoming a fashion thing by the late â60s. So like, in many ways, Blood of the Virgin is like the end of America. Like thatâs the end. Weâre already in the decline. Itâs over.
Soto: The decline seems really relevant right now.
Harkham: All the research Iâve been doing for this strip is trying to figure out like politically where were they in 1971. Nixon is still president. How did Nixon become president? Nixon became president the same way Donald Trump became president. There were eight years of a very progressive Democrat. Maybe six months after Lyndon Johnson made it federal law that you couldnât have segregation in schools, there were the Watts riots. So yeah, itâs weird. Doing the comic now, Iâm like, âOh my god.â I absolutely have the right space to make this very political and it would speak to now just by the nature of it. Itâs all lined up. By 1971, thatâs the thing, is that Americans were⌠Thatâs when you realize whatâs going on in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, is that Hunter S. Thompson was going like, âWe were doing it. We were making this huge change in America.â And then it was like, âFuck it! Fuck it!â They just pushed back against the progressive agenda and so heâs like, âIâm just going to get stoned. Fuck it.â You become a nihilist, you know?
Soto: I definitely sympathize with that at the moment.
Harkham: [Laughs] Yeah, right.
[INTERVIEW BREAK]
Harkham: Initially I didnât want to serialize [Blood Of The Virgin] because I find it so difficult to talk about work when Iâm working on it. So part of not talking about it, is to save the energy. You know, weâve all done that thing of like, âOh man, Iâm so excited about this story Iâm going to work on.â And then you talk to a friend about it, which kills it. Like itâs dead in the water. You know, you learn that in your early 20s hopefully. Not to really talk about work. For a long time, I didnât want to serialize it because I didnât want to talk about it. But then it just becomes obvious that if I didnât serialize it, Iâd disappear from comics. And thatâs insane when Iâm reading about comics everyday and Iâm thinking about comics everyday. I want to be part of the conversation, you know?
Soto: Yeah. You also have a title that, you know, happily you resurrected. Crickets started off as sort of explicitly like an Eightball, one-man-band kind of thing. You had Black Death, which was ongoing, but it sort of clearly seemed more like improvisational almost. Sort of slighter compared to Blood of the Virgin. There were a lot more stories and now it is a vehicle for this story and maybe you fit some stuff on the inside covers.
Harkham: Look, ideally an issue of Crickets would have one main thing, one short thing⌠One ongoing big thing, like a piece of Blood of the Virgin, a good short story that was like four-to-eight pages, one or two short, short strips. Thatâs a perfect issue. But the way this goes, is that everything ends up going into Blood of the Virgin. And itâs also very difficult to contain it to 48 pages and I donât want to make an issue more than 48 pages. Itâs just so long, you know?
So itâs become just The Blood of the Virgin thing for now, but Iâm hopingâit would be really nice if the last chapter of Blood of the Virgin ran with the next chapter of Black Deathâ which hasnât run in 10 years. Or something new. You know what I mean? It would be cool to be like, âThis is another issue.â Just rolling, like this thingâs done and weâre just going, you know?
Mike Dawson: I think you said yourself that you donât even fully have it scripted out. Is that right?
Harkham: I donât script it out. I mean, with this story, unlike most things that I work on, the basic plot outlineâthe big beatsâall came to me at once. The whole arc of it and the whole shape of it. I didnât even really write it down or anything. I just know the order. Some of those scenes and ideas will sit in my mind for years and I think, âOh, that will be like a five-page sequence and this thing will be a page.â What ends up happening is that you cannibalize a lot of stuff, so by the time you get to that scene, the whole rhythm is completely off from what you imagined you thought you were going to do.
Harkham: Because youâre really just feeling your way through it and some scenes end up being much longer and some scenes end up being much shorter. But itâs better because itâs sort of living and breathing. It can evolve and change, while still sticking to that basic plot structure. I wouldnât say itâs changed a lot, but I can definitely infuse more into the characters and into the world. Thatâs what I mean by it can grow with me. Instead of having all these sort of set ideas or script. Iâm against having a script, you know? You can write something thatâs so great on paper, but thatâs a different medium. Thatâs a written word on a piece of paper. Thatâs not a comic. A script should just sort of be a collection of all of your notes and ideas, sort of organized in some form. Itâs important to look at the page as a page and the more you draw comics, the moreâyou guys know thisâthe more you do it, the more you can actually physically see⌠Like looking at the page, is this joke good? Does this angle work? Is this moment happening? You know, thatâs one of the great joys of comics is that you can really see the finished thing in front of you as youâre doing it. Itâs almost like if you could shoot a movie while you edit it and did sound design. A script gets in the way of that, I think.
Harkham: As I was finishing the last issue, I was doing a page a day. I had to stop myself from doing a page a day.
Dawson: Why would you stop yourself? Did you feel like you were rushing?
Harkham: I think itâs too fast. I donât want to start rushing it. Just because I can pencil and ink a page in five hours doesnât necessarily mean that thatâs a good thing.
Soto: Right, right. So you can sit with it.
Harkham: Yeah, just for the day. Just pencil it and if youâre done after two hours, then awesome. Go do something else for a while.
Soto: You just work one page at a time? You donât do batches?
Harkham: I usually work on a scene. I wonât pencil a whole scene, but Iâll thumbnail in a notebook or on typing paper. Iâll thumbnail the basic thing. âOK, this is about four pages.â Then Iâll just start. Even going from thumbnails to bristol board, it will change. It can often change within that, you know?
Soto: Yeah.
Harkham: But I always feel like Iâm working in chunks, depending on how long the scene is.
Soto: I really feel like the scene-to-scene transitions... Obviously the book is about movies. Youâre obsessed with movies in your real life and a lot of this stuff is based on real people, or at least a real âsceneâ in the â70s or whatever. Blood of the Virgin really does have that cinema feel to it, with the cuts...
Harkham: I donât know. People say that. People say that, but I donât know if I see it. I think of like Jaime Hernandez and his crazy transitions. Gilbert does two-panel scenes and jumps forward and back in time. In two-panel increments, you know? So I donât know. Other people have said that, but Iâm just not sure what that means really. I definitely donât want it to feel like a movie.
Soto: No. I was sort of wary of saying that.
Harkham: Itâs fine. Iâm not passing judgments.
Soto: âItâs comicsâ [Laughter]
Harkham: Iâm not passing judgments.
Soto: When Iâm reading Blood of the VirginâI read it again today just to get back into itâŚ
Harkham: You read the whole thing?
Soto: Yeah, I read the whole thing.Â
Harkham: Oh my god.
Soto: Just to get back in the headspace. I was really impressed. Youâre not doing anything un-linear. Youâre not jumping around in time or anything like that, but there are narrative⌠Not shortcuts. Itâs like youâre cutting out the fat.
Harkham: Thatâs the thing. You do realize at a certain point if youâre writing long enough, that the difference between the good storyâwhether itâs a movie, or a book, or a comicâisnât that thereâs just one good scene, or two good scenes. Itâs that everything is the choice bit, you know? So if thereâs material that youâre not excited to do and itâs only you going, âOh, I need to include this thingâ purely just for exposition, then fuck it. At a certain point, you realize fuck it. You donât need that shit. Just fold the exposition into⌠Add it as another piece into an already existing idea and that will make that scene better. That way your comic, ideally, is just made of your best bits. Not just like, âOh, he clearly wanted to draw the head-melt part and all this other shit is super boring.â You know what I mean? [Dawson Laughs]
Harkham: That was kind of a big revelation when I did that first issue because I had more scenes planned that were in-between what is currently there, but I didnât have it in me. Comics is so much work. I spend⌠Especially back then when it would take like 20 to 25 hours to do a page. 30 hours to do a page. Man, to draw a scene just because I needed some sort of piece of exposition thrown out there is a ridiculous reason to do a page. Now, maybe if it feels like âcutty,â then maybe thatâs just because Iâm trying to condense. This fucking thing just keeps on getting longer and longer. And itâs telling. Not that the story keeps getting longer, itâs just that trying to just tell the story that I have in my head⌠This thing was supposed to be a three-pager initially. [Laughter]
Dawson: Really? How many more issues will there be? How many chapters?
Harkham: Two more. Two more. Iâm really hoping they donât go beyond that. The challenge is going to be to tell all this material in 48 pages. This next chapter that I have, thereâs a lot. Donât cut corners. Itâs a nice challenge. I love really dense one-pagers, you know? To me, a great cartooning challenge is to go, âYou have one page. Make it fit.â How to fit all this stuff in there. Itâs not a thing about being lazy or trying to make it just a way out for yourself. I think that is the best version.
If every page of your comic is just full of material, thatâs great. In the last issue, it opens up and becomes six panels a page as the main character leaves that party with the girl and stuff. I was like, âOh, Iâve earned it now.â Iâve earned having six panels per page after all these really dense sequences. Just to have two people stare at each other on the hood of the car, you know? Stuff like that hopefully is more effective after coming after all this really dense, layered stuff, you know? Itâs all intuitive. I just try to think what do I want as a reader, you know? And what I hope to contribute to this conversation of making comics and loving this stupid medium. Wanting to make something really good. Youâre trying to make something really, really good, so, thatâs it. I donât know.
Soto: I have a bit of a question about⌠I donât want this to sound like a back-handed thing, or whatever. The wife characterâŚ
Harkham: Uh-huh.
Soto: Sheâs like a real good character, right? But maybe itâs because Seymourâs so oblivious, but she never quite edges into having much of a voice in the book. How much of that can you talk about?
Harkham: WellâŚ
Soto: Sheâs having her own story, right?
Harkham: Hereâs a piece of news, I guess, for anyone who likes the story. Hereâs a scoop. [Laughter] The next issue is focused solely on her. And Iâve been, for the last two years, wanting to get there. But Iâve had to just wait. It contributes to the overall story. Itâs not just to shift perspectives necessarily. I think the overall themes that are talked about so far can still be⌠Thatâs one of the cool things in fiction is that you can do something that feels completely separate from what youâve already done, but it adds another component to it, you know? Iâm insecure about it. Like when I give the issue to friends, Iâm always like [sighs] this is such a sausage party.
Soto: So far, Mike and I were talking about the theme of the book, and obviously itâs about how selfish you have to be to be an artist. So far itâs about men and how fucking hopeless they are. I really feel a lot when I read the book so far. It reminds me of me in my 20s or early 30s when I was just so far up my own ass. I mean not that Iâm not completely⌠[Laughter]
Harkham: But now youâre aware that youâre up your own ass.
Soto: Exactly. [Laughter] I actually found some online journal stuff thatâs private, and I was reading it. Itâs from 10 years ago and Iâm like, :What an asshole,â you know? But it actually made me think of that when I was reading it today. I was like, âOh, wow.â You know? Anyway, it really struck me that sheâs a great character, but...
Harkham: She barely gets any room.
Soto: Exactly.
Harkham: I havenât had an⌠Every time Iâve had an opportunity to do anything with her, I try to make the most of it, you know? I try to hint at more with the little bit that sheâs there. But yeah, the next issue is really going to be all about her, you know? Most of it. And Iâm excited to get into it.
Soto: It will be exciting.
Harkham: Yeah, I know. Iâm excited. And I do think it will add a lot to the book. Not that it will create⌠I donât mean that in sense in the sense of a new perspective on how to look at scenes.
Harkham: Itâs like totally sheâs living her own life because sheâs away.
Soto: Yeah.
Harkham: Iâm excited.
Dawson: Was that always the plan, or was that a realization?
Harkham: You know, it wasnât always the plan. But I mean, you know, I started drawing this strip 10 years ago. It wasnât there 10 years ago. But maybe it was there seven years ago. [Laughs]
Soto: Yeah.
Harkham: Itâs been there awhile.
Soto: When did the first issue come out?
Harkham: The first issue came out in 2011. The beginning of 2011 or end of 2010. But it took me two years⌠Look, I started drawing it and made the kid 10 months old because Iâve got a kid and heâs 10 months old. And that will help me because I can draw him. [Laughter] That went out the window very quickly, obviously, because now heâs 10 and a half. And that babyâs still a year old. So itâs always been there for a while. The thing thatâs interesting to me is that I knew I wanted to do it, but then thereâs that part of me thatâs read about writing. Like the rules of writing dramatic fiction. And youâre like, âWhy? What are you doing? Whatâs the point of it?â Because I donât know the themes. I was just like this is the title and this feels right.
Harkham: This element feels right. And itâs totally just following a feeling. All these elements, I donât know what they mean, but they feel good and Iâm going to build this thing. Then the idea of doing a chapter that would be of a different character on another continent. Itâs exciting and I got excited, but then the rational part of my brain goes, âWait a minute. What are you doing? How does that work? How does that fit?â At a certain point, I said forget it. I donât care. I have to do it. If it feels right, I have to trust the intuition. If something feels necessary, I should go with it and it will sort itself out. And then in the meantime, you know, I have sort of figured it out because now I understand the book more. A lot of things that are intuitive I now understand. The same way when you look at a story that youâve drawn years later and go, âOh, wow, this is clearly about my relationship with this person.â Or itâs clearly about my feelings, you know what I mean? So that happens if you work on a long story. Like, I now know as Iâm wrapping⌠Iâm going to be on this thing for another year, the goal now is to not hit any of those themes on the head because now I do know what itâs about, for me. You know? So the trick is not to tie it up too neat and tidy, you know?
Harkham: The big revelation to me came once I realized that I spent 10 years working on Blood of the Virginâitâs not going to be Maus. Itâs not going to be Jimmy Corrigan. Thereâs a very good chance it will come out and sell like an issue of Crickets. Crickets sells really well for an alternative comic. I make money on it. But it may not be some sort of massive hit, you know? So I have to have to enjoy the process of making it. I have to feel good about what Iâm doing everyday. And part of that is about the process. You start thinking about your daily life and how youâre living. Youâve been talking about trying to switch up your schedule, you know?
Soto: Yeah.
Harkham: You were trying to do like mornings. Tim Hensley does that. But for me, I moved last year. So a lot of it was setting up a proper studio space and not having any books in the room that I didnât feel gave me a good energy. And that now carries through to everything in the room. And it started to carry through to my commute to work, you know? It became all about like finding this zone where I feel good, you know? And where Iâm in the moment. Then you start going, âI guess thatâs life.: When you get older, youâre just trying to peel back the onion. As you get older, just trying to peel back the onion of finding the right way, you know? So, so much of that is wanting to enjoy making comics. You want to enjoy just being in the moment. Youâre not concerned about what the life of this thing is beyond just right this minute.
Harkham: What you want to do, is just⌠My mornings are very important. Kevin Huizenga talks about this thing where if you do your work and get it doneâyour two or three hours⌠Two hours, literally, if youâre in the zone, even an hour penciling, you can get so much done if youâre already in the zone with a strip.Â
An hour is a huge amount of time. If you do your work, the rest of the day youâre floating. Not only that, but you look at other people who are frustrated, and youâre like, âWhat are you stressed out about? Itâs a beautiful day.â You feel so good if you can just do your work and get it over with, you know? And then if youâre in the zone, then you just carry that through. Maybe you come back to it at night and tweak your work or look at it. Thatâs not that different from most fiction writers, I think. They try to do two or three hours in the morning.
Harkham: Alexander Mackendrick was a filmmaker who started out as a cartoonist and he talks about when youâre trying to write a scene and you hit writerâs block, heâs like the best thing to do is just donât do it. Get up and go have lunch, or go ice-skating, or go bowling, or get drunk. Heâs like the mindâand I find this to be trueâis that youâre going to work in the morning and youâre going to go to your day job. Itâs even better if youâre not actively thinking about your work. Your mind is doing it. Your mind is working. It is thinking about it. Thereâs so manyâŚ
I remember for the last issue of Crickets, I knew I wanted it to start with some sort of nightmarish dream, but I couldnât come up with what that would be. So I was thinking about all these cheese ball quote, unquote ânightmaresâ that he could have. I was just like, âForget it. Forget it.â Then over the course of two months, I had this perfect dream, you know? It was handed to me like, âThere you go.â You keep thinking your carâs in drive and you keep going in reverse into a fucking black chasm, you know? [Laughter] I totally believe that the subconscious is working. Cormac McCarthy talks about this a lot. Our active minds, our conscious minds, does some of it, but so much is happening that weâre unaware of, you know? I mean itâs useful for writing characters, but itâs also useful to know that even if youâre not actively thinking about your strip, your brain is doing the work.
Harkham: Every⌠[Laughs] Every decision in your life should lead to you making better work and feeling calm and healthy.
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