 |
| Paul Kirchner |
AD | Paul, you’ve had a really interesting career.
I don’t think that it’s the most logical or expected path that the guy who did The
Bus and worked at High Times would go into advertising.
PK | From a career perspective it’s probably best
to stick with certain things; I, for some reason, just didn’t think that way. [laughs]
Doing Dope
Rider was just a strange series of events. I was trying to get into
comics and doing fan art and I realized that I actually needed to draw a complete
story. So I did this western and it was not quite surreal but trippy and very influenced
by Steranko. I always liked the kind of thought he put into frame progressions and
overall page design.
I was at Cooper Union and I got so comics focused
that when we were drawing from a model I would draw the model and then start adding
all these barbarian elements and ruined cities. One of the girls in my class had
been at the New York High School of Art and Design and she said, I know someone
who likes to make women look the same way you like to make them look. That was Larry
Hama. She gave me his phone number. I went to see him and we got on the subway and
went up to Neal Adams’ studio. Neal was an entry point for a lot of people to get
into comics because you go up and show him your work. There was a front room of
the studio where there four or five drawing tables and you would start tensing up
when someone would come in with their portfolio because he was merciless. If Neal
liked the stuff he would start making phone calls and get you appointments with
editors, but sometimes he’d be flipping through the pages going, bleh. Neal called
Joe Orlando over at DC and Joe hooked me up with Tex Blaisdell who was doing Little Orphan
Annie.
PK | This guy at the Mego Toy Company liked a Screw
cover I’d done, which was in the Wally Wood style and he got in touch with me. They
wanted a line of toy soldiers developed and I did that for about a year and a half.
I took a beating because I didn’t realize the company was going out of business.
[laughs] Anyway when that company dissolved it led to people being spread far and
wide and I kept getting work from different people. I was working for Ideal Toys
for a couple of years on Robo Force. I worked for Coleco. Then all those companies
went out of business. [laughs] The toy company work led to me working for a company
that was then called TelePictures. They did these popular magazines for kids based
on popular toy lines. It was one of these clever ruses because there are still moms
that don’t think their kids should be reading comic books, but this was a magazine.
It had puzzles and short stories and mazes, so it looked semi-educational, but it
would have a comic as well. I got brought in to write and draw comics–He-Man, Thundecats,
Go-Bots, Power Rangers.
That led to ad agency work. An ad agency got
in touch with me because they had the Go-Bots account and they really wanted someone
who was familiar with them. That was the mid-eighties and then I started getting
storyboard work. I found I was pretty fast at it, which was surprising to me because
I was always so slow with comics, but I didn’t have to attempt to be realistic in
storyboarding. I could have a more comfortable style. It was very important to communicate
gestures and emotions. I really enjoyed doing advertising work. I liked the atmosphere
at the agency. It was a fun place.
I’d been working there freelance for about ten
years but during that period from the mid-80s to mid-90s I had the storyboards,
I had a lot of toy company work, and I had magazine illustration work. They started
asking me at the agency if I wanted to come on staff and I thought, I don’t know
if I really want to be tied down and give up the other things. Then around 1995
or so, the toy companies were going bankrupt. Things were getting tight and I had
three kids and this house with a mortgage so the next time the ad agency said you
want to come on staff? I said, I guess I do. [laughs]
AD | You were working on staff at an ad agency
for many years. Why did you leave? Or what was behind your leaving?
PK | There was a restructuring. Some of the people
had really gone nuts when the boss let them know they were going to get laid off.
They were screaming and yelling at her and telling her that she had ruined their
life. When I get laid off, I was going to talk myself into steady freelance work.
And that’s what I did. She told me, I’m sorry, and I started by saying well I’ve
really enjoyed working with you, I’ve learned a lot from working with you, I think
I’m better prepared to go back to freelancing than I was before, I understand the
industry better. I got a lot of work from her for the next couple years. But then
she got cut loose too.
At this point the toy business was all gone,
the editorial work was all gone too. I kept busy with storyboarding, but in the
last ten years it started dwindling a bit. Lately advertising is just trying to
figure out what the hell they’re doing because people don’t watch the ads on TV.
The younger generation often don’t even watch whole shows. The storyboarding work
has really petered out. I have a job right now for snapchat commercials. It has
to be very entertaining and only 5-10 seconds.
AD | So advertising work slowed down and you
had a little more time and energy and interest in comics again or what happened?
PK | As the advertising work slowed down I began to
get pretty depressed. Its an ego thing. When I first started getting assignments
from toy companies or ad agencies when I was doing my own stuff, it was great. When
people would say, Paul we need you to do this, that’s a good feeling. When that
stops happening, it’s a bad feeling. [laughs] When Claude Amauger published the
2012 collection of The Bus, interest in it had been perking up because people had
been putting up the old strips on reddit or pinterest or tumblr and so I was starting
to get fan mail again. I still had some of the old strips and some people wanted
to buy them. I started thinking about it again and it was a weird thing because
in the years that I had been doing assignments I had come to feel that I probably
just couldn’t do that stuff anymore, but the ideas started coming to me again.
I communicated with Claude and he said, do some
and I’ll print them. Eventually I had enough for a respectable book and this French
gallery owner just bought the whole slew. That was pretty good. It’s not great but
it’s better than going down the drain. [laughs] The other thing was when I started
coming up with The Bus and thinking of where I could market them, I tried High Times.
They didn’t want The Bus but they were coming up on their anniversary issue and
they said, would you do another Dope Rider? I did one and they were very excited
about it and they wanted me to do one page a month and I’ve been doing that. I’ve
been doing that and it’s good, the originals have been selling, High Times pays
me a pretty decent amount. Eventually there will be a collection of that.
AD | I read Dope Rider and I think El Topo and
other work that some people call trippy but it’s more surreal. For you, the drug
element is an excuse for the surrealism. Murder by Remote Control is just crazy.
Which I’m sure turns off some people, but that’s also the appeal.
PK | I just don’t know another way to do it. I have
different styles obviously. The Bus isn’t drawn the same way as Murder by Remote
Control is drawn and my advertising style is a little more loose.
For Murder by Remote Control I really wanted
to do things realistically. It wouldn’t make sense to have the surrealistic element
hint to the reader that this part isn’t real. I wanted it to be like a crazy person
who just can’t distinguish between reality and fantasy. That’s all intentional.
AD | I’m sure Murder by Remote Control confused
a lot of people. The people who knew your crazy work read the first few pages and
were, like this is boring, and the people who knew van de Wettering’s mystery novels
flipped to the middle and were shocked and confused.
PK | Janwillem proposed the idea of doing it to me.
We met and he loved Dope Rider and my Heavy Metal stuff and he wanted to do something
with me. He wrote an outline of the plot, about seventeen type-written pages. Clearly
he had written it giving me as much latitude to draw as much as what I wanted to
draw as possible. It was written for the visuals. You could have illustrated the
story literally–without the fantasy elements–but then it would be nothing. It would
just be some Agatha Christie short story. He didn’t want that. There was a time
when we were working Stan Lee-Jack Kirby style, bouncing ideas back and forth. Him
plotting things and then me putting the page together and in the artwork creating
a lot of the visual gags and how things would work. He never said, maybe we should
do this. He let me take the lead. When it was all tightly penciled I went up to
him his place in Maine and we scripted it together.
AD | I do understand what you’re saying, though.
The text is very straightforward while the art and the design veers off in different
direction. Which makes it more surreal, really.
PK | The funny thing is though is that when something
is done, the flaws leap out at you but sometimes when you put things aside you think,
this is actually pretty good. So I don’t look at it and think, I wish I did this
or that differently. One of the things I’ve been thinking about is that as an artist
you have your limitations. We can’t all draw like Moebius. Moebius could draw a
figure and he could completely model the musculature in crosshatching and if I tried
to do that it would look like a mess. So I don’t do that. I take it to the level
of finish that I’m capable of. I think I have other strengths that some other people
may not have. You’re always going to have strengths and weaknesses and some elements
that make your work strong, might make it weak in another way.
AD | I have to ask about the last page of the
book where the detective ends up in his locker. Where the heck did that come from?
PK | That was Janwillem’s idea. He goes back to the
station and everybody looks like him and they’re all put away. I think it was just
an absurd thing he wanted to do. [laughs] I thought it was a good way to end it
actually.
Janwillem was just such a great guy. One of these
people you miss terribly when they’re gone. We kept in close touch, but I wish I
visited even more. You know how you have an experience that may strike you as funny
in an odd way and you have one friend you know will love hearing that story and
everyone else will go, huh, what? Janwillem was that guy. When those people die
off, you feel cut off from that ability to share an experience. I’ve been fortunate
in knowing a handful of people like that in my lifetime who have had that kind of
effect on me.
AD | Did you two ever talk about working together
again?
PK | Oh yeah. For a while I didn’t think we’d get
this published at all. This sounds very mercenary, but you have to live. When he
was initially proposing it he was talking about I think we’ll get a $20,000 advance
here and then more here. Janwillem was quite wealthy and you meet someone that’s
obviously success and it seems like a good idea. Then when the project was done,
we were butting our heads against reality. We had so much trouble getting it published
in the US. There was no graphic novel market. It’s not like it was the first graphic
novel, but publishers didn’t know what to make of it.
We finally placed it with Ballantine which brought
it out in a small version and the advance was just so little. Janwillem wrote up
another proposal, but by that I was onto other things. Books take a tremendous amount
of energy. The books that I wrote, I knew they wouldn’t pay that well. The book
was just my excuse to pursue something that I found very interesting. You’re always
partly motivated by fairly unrealistic fantasies; you need those. You wouldn’t get
anything done if you didn’t have some unrealistic fantasies. But after the trouble
with getting the first one published I thought I just can’t plunge into this and
come out if with maybe 1500 dollars. So we didn’t do it.
PK | I love it. I was so excited. One of the things
that was frustrating to me at Ballantine was that I penciled that cover design and
submitted it and they said, no, we want to come up with our own cover. They came
up with a cover that I thought oh god this is just dreary looking. When Dover was
going to do it I told Drew Ford I have a cover design I did thirty years ago. I
sent him a scan and he said, I like it.
AD | So what are you working on right now?
PK | My latest project is about this guy in hell.
It’s called Hieronymous and Bosch. Bosch being this little duck. I’m coloring it
on the computer. I’ve done like thirty of them. All one pagers. We’ll see what happens.
Maybe it’ll become a giant hit television program. Who knows? You’ve got to have
those giant unrealistic fantasies. [laughs]
AD | So right now you’re doing Dope Rider, The
Bus, and now Hieronymous and Bosch?
PK | I’m retiring The Bus for the time. The ideas
are coming pretty well on Hieronymous and Bosch, but I really don’t think I have
any more Bus ideas for the time being. This is where my business plan is not that
good. The smart thing to do would be to keep doing Bus strips, but I just can’t
stick to a plan.
AD | You have started doing shows again.
PK | Not having really stuck with the comics I don’t
have the name recognition that would be helpful at this point. It was funny at the
Comics Arts Brooklyn because people would come by and there were people that actually
remembered The Bus, then there were young people whose father had Heavy Metal so
they kind of knew it, but what was gratifying is that there were people who had
absolutely never heard of it and they liked it and bought the book. I thought, well
that’s great, I’m not relying on nostalgia value.
AD | Do you still do everything by hand? You
have a computer here but you also have many, many pens and pencils and markers.
PK | With everything becoming digitized what’s working
to my advantage is the people I work for don’t have to know how old I am. [laughs]
Which is something you worry about. Everyone is advertising is like 28 years old.
[laughs] Just the fact that I actually do things in ink rather than drawing it on
a tablet is old school to them. I just don’t think I’m going to adopt to the tablet.
When people are good at it it’s amazing. I realized that for the type of comics
I’m doing, most of the money is from selling the originals so I’ve got to produce
an original.
I’ve gotten pretty fast at coloring on the computer.
I still have this giant array on markers, but the computer color looks so much better,
so much cleaner. You have the option of changing it and fixing it. I really should
give all the markers to some art school. I figure eventually they’ll dry up and
I’ll just throw them away. I color with the mouse. My wife, who uses a tablet, was
very impressed with my mouse speed. [laughs]
AD | So you’re having fun with “Hieronymous and
Bosch?”
PK | They’re faster to do than The Bus. I’m trying
to get a woodcut look. I’ve also found that I like to use a heavier outline to separate
elements. When I first ink it, I just go over all my pencil lines. When that has
fully dried I clean up the page and get all the pencil off it. Then I really go
over that ink line and heavy it up and give it weight where it needs it and separate
things. I like the look. It’s different than what I used to do. The other thing
that makes Hieronymous and Bosch easier to do than The Bus is on the Bus I have
to keep drawing the bus clean, but I decided when I was going to depict the landscape
of hell that everything should be run down and dirty looking with no straight lines.
It’s sad when you think of somebody like Steve
Ditko, who I was such a huge fan of. At a certain point he obviously felt that he’d
been very abused by the business and he was giving more than they were paying him
for. Stuff like Hawk and Dove just wasn’t great and has this “I could do better
but why should I?” attitude. I think I still have the attitude that I have something
to prove, which is the attitude you start out with. I think it’s a good attitude to maintain.
*****
EDIÇÃO COMEMORATIVA | CENTENÁRIO
DO SURREALISMO 1919-2019
Artistas convidados: Frank Miller,
George Herriman, Grant Morrison, Katsuhiro Otomo, Max
Andersson, Moebius, Neil Gaiman, Paul Kirchner, Robert
Crumb, Tsuge Yoshiharu
Agulha Revista de Cultura
20 ANOS O MUNDO CONOSCO
Número 140 | Agosto de 2019
editor geral | FLORIANO MARTINS | floriano.agulha@gmail.com
editor assistente | MÁRCIO SIMÕES | mxsimoes@hotmail.com
logo & design | FLORIANO MARTINS
revisão de textos & difusão | FLORIANO
MARTINS | MÁRCIO SIMÕES
ARC Edições © 2019
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário