Interview with J.O. Applegate
This interview first appeared on Hardwood Paroxysm on December 7, 2012 between Ananth Pandian and J.O. Applegate, a featured artist in the show for In the Paint: Boston.
1. How long have you been into basketball? How long have you been drawing/making basketball players/art?
I started playing basketball on the backyard concrete slab and around the neighborhood relatively young, 9 or 10 maybe. I never had cable TV and didn’t live in an NBA market growing up so most of my NBA watching came through the occasional Sunday national TV games or Inside Stuff. The neighborhood I grew up in got pretty bad as I got into my early teens (crack cocaine and starter jacket jacking era- I’m dating myself here) so my family ended up moving out to the burbs. Everybody had nice hoops in the driveway, but they had cars parked under them or they were permanently set at 7 ft. for pseudo-dunking, and most the other kids were inside watching cable anyways so it was harder to find people to play with.
Then at 14 I tore my ACL in a school league game on a misguided breakaway dunk attempt (I was a tall 14) with absolutely no one around me (embarrassingly, but it did roll in) and that was about it for my serious playing days. I had always been drawing, but after that is when art really became my thing.
I didn’t really start drawing basketball stuff specifically until I started my comic, which was about two years ago now. Before that I only drew bowls of oranges and empty glass bottles and stuff like that.
2. What is your background in art? How did you learn?
I’ve had no formal art training outside of the free spirit high school art teacher that gave us the period to do whatever we wanted. Mostly everything I do now is self-taught and trial and error. Look too closely and it probably shows.
3. What other artists have inspired you?
As far as the comic goes, the big one is a Japanese comic book artist by the name of Takehiko Inoue (E-know-U-A). I always liked comic book art, but could never get into the superhero/fantasy type stories much. Living in Japan in my early 20′s I came across a series he did called “Slamdunk”. I thought it was so cool that there was a whole comic that focused on basketball, and not where the main guy like turned into a crime-fighter at night kind of thing, just straight-up basketball. There’s not really anything like that here that I know of. It’s a really famous series in Japan, to the point that he’s probably responsible for a large chunk of the basketball fandom that exists there (even more so than the legendary Yuta Tabuse). He’s close to a household name I’d say. Many people who couldn’t care less about basketball know and love Slamdunk because it’s funny and the art is great.
There are many others that I could cite that have influenced or inspired me along the way, but Inoue is definitely the biggest influence on me choosing to make a b-ball comic. Honestly I hope someday to try my hand at a long-form fictional narrative format comic about basketball like his works, but I’m still at the putting in work stage with my art now.
4. How do you decide who to draw in your weekly comic? Do you just tend to draw players you like or that are in the news?
I have only two major rules that I follow. The first is that I try to work relatively clean (comedy wise) as a challenge to myself, and so that it’s not something I’d shy away from showing to anyone, and second is that I try to not be too negative. I want the comic to be more of a love letter (and occasional friendly critique) to the game and culture of basketball than something with a negative vibe dragging it down. I won’t name names (mostly because I don’t remember), but in my early searches to see what else was out there I came across some basketball comic stuff that was so negative it made me wonder whether the person really liked the game or not. If the situation deserves something scathing, like the whole Dwight-Magic fiasco, I’ll go there, but I’m not going to make fun of some guy for struggling when he’s out there trying. That’s not my thing.
I do try to spread the focus around the league, but I could probably do a better job of it. I don’t want to pander to the audience, but I don’t want to completely alienate them either.
Let’s break down your Dunk Contest piece that ran on The Classical. What was your inspiration? How did you create the concept?
This was an illustration that ran with a Lang Whitaker piece for The Classical. He was defending the dunk contest, the basic concept being that no matter what zany props or elaborate set-ups they use, he will still always be wowed by the athleticism on display. I went with a pretty straight-forward interpretation of that. I like a good mix of lowbrow/middlebrow/highbrow humor, so I put in Rick Ross and a bookshelf with the complete works of Proust. The player jumping over an optical illusion is one of those jokes that cracks me (and maybe only me) up for some unexplainable reason.
This was actually the first commissioned illustration that I had ever done. They reached out to me based on seeing the comic, and I think I had a two day deadline. Given all that I think it turned out alright.
Let’s breakdown your NBA playground piece as well.
This is a good example of how the idea behind a comic can randomly evolve. Believe it or not I think the original inspirational spark for this, were these old Family Circus cartoons where Billy’s (?) mom would ask him to go get something, and then there’d be an elaborate drawing of the neighborhood with a dotted line showing the crazy circuitous route he took to get to his destination. I always loved those when I was a kid, and I wanted to do one with a basketball player doing the same thing on the court. I thought Nash was a good example of that, and then I thought maybe I should have him be a kid at recess doing it to complete the homage. Then I started thinking about other players and how they’d be at recess as kids… and it turned into what it is.
I’ll add, and I think this something that writers -especially ones without access of any sort- that try to write about the human side of sports can relate to, one of the difficulties with doing a comic about sports and pro athletes is that we only really know the public side of them as people. I try hard to not put words into people’s mouths that I don’t really know, and I try hard to not just juice easy one-dimensional memes for jokes, or at least try to be what I consider subtle or creative about it when I do (such as in the playground piece).I could probably make the comic more popular if I was a little more vicious and jumped on the easy jokes, but what would be the point of making something that I myself wouldn’t want to read? If that connects to some readers out there, then I’m happy with that.
Check out J.O.’s work on his site, buy his work and follow him on Twitter.
