The Comics Journal #307

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W I N T E R – S P R I N G 2 0 21

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COMICS & ANIMATION Interviewed by CATHY MALKASIAN: Gary Groth FROM NICKELODEON TO GRETA GRUMP

and SALLY CRUIKSHANK • BEN SEARS • CHRISTY MARX • HO CHE ANDERSON & MORE

Well, shock and awe. Bought right into that. You know, you don’t strike me as a screamer.

I’m a cusser. I don’t scream, but I cuss a lot when I’m pissed off.

That’s interesting.

[Laughs.] There’s a lot to be angry about. I think I told you before, that’s usually my way in. What’s pissing me off today? I’ll write a story about it.

No dearth of that.

Seriously.

TEMPERANCE Violence, Fear and Power You said, “I started with the idea of war and how it may be the larger expression of our struggle with entropy. Temperance is all about entropy and synthesis. The two sides of change, the dual nature of everything.”

Can you expand upon that? Temperance was published in 2010. So, you were working on this in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, which continued for so many years. Was that a trigger for this?

That was one of the triggers,. I was trying to figure out why our country loves violence without really having to participate in it. [Groth laughs.] I mean, why we send people off to war without much thought to why we’re going there. I remember at the time, these bumper stickers, “Freedom isn’t Free.”

And I would think, “You could say that again!”

You’re just blithely sending people off to war without really doing your research first as to why they’re going, and they’re coming back in pieces. I’m no expert in this, but it seems like since Vietnam, our media and government have sanitized the whole experience of war so that people can forget about it, unless they are military families.

The invisible war.

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The invisible wars. It makes it easy to get in them.

People are like, “Let’s do it! Yeah!” [Sighs.] Because nobody has to get their hands dirty.

You said that the story was about entropy and synthesis. When you were mulling over our propensity for invisible wars, how did the concept of entropy and synthesis enter into that?

I like to boil everything down, so I saw this fascination with war and death and violence in a lot of our storytelling as a very sidewise way of philosophizing about life and death without directly confronting it.

I don’t think in our culture we like to directly confront things. We’d rather just shoo them away. It’s the human condition to be really scared of things breaking down. We don’t like dealing with that.

Do you think there is something unique about American culture that — We just don’t talk about it. We don’t talk about death.

We don’t talk about decay. We don’t talk about loss very well. We’re getting much better now, but everything used to have this macho veneer of “I’ll take care of this.

Problem solved.” This is a problem you can’t solve.

And we don’t really have good myths. I think sometimes when I’m writing a story I’m thinking, “I want to make a myth that I’m going to get into.” So, I made these two characters who are actually forces of nature. But I don’t really spell that out, I just want people to feel things. I throw hints here and there about these two characters, but these are the two characters that are always with us. They express themselves in entropy and synthesis, but also in violence and nurturing — all those dualities in life. I wanted to throw them into the context of this one person, Minerva, who I think was probably a war orphan and had personified the forces of war and life into these characters and tried to deal with them in her way.

The entropy and synthesis, it seems to me, would have been embodied in Temperance by Pa and Peggy.

Right. We see entropy as an evil thing, when it comes down to it. In a culture that is a little bereft of a spiritual dimension, you’re going to see entropy as an evil thing.

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You’re going to see it in strictly materialistic terms, too.

Exactly. And then you throw in the Judeo-Christian level on top of that, where there has to be an evil and a good. Oblivion and annihilation in a materialist’s mind is probably an evil thing. Even though they don’t think in religious terms, it’s probably the worst thing that can happen. If you don’t have a sense of continuity and don’t have a spiritual life. We always like these armageddon battles, these Avengers movies and stuff, where there’s a big guy who’s destroying the universe and all these people are going to vanquish him. We go for that because we haven’t really dealt with our natures. That interdependency of destruction and creation that makes change.

Are you saying that we haven’t come to terms with them? That we haven’t reconciled these in some way?

No, I don’t think so. We keep trying to destroy destruction. Or at least find new ways of controlling it. I mean, my God, the atom bomb. [Groth laughs.]

We keep thinking we’re going to have a handle on it and be able to predict and control nature. That’s how Western science, until probably pretty recently, has looked at nature. It’s something to predict and control.

That’s had wonderful uses, but the attitude toward life in that is really flawed. It puts you in this fictitious role of overseeing nature, rather than just being a dust mote with some equations.

I think you said that America was lacking in a spiritual dimension. We are one of the most religious countries in the world.

We’re very religious, but we poo-poo spiritual life — at least publicly, which I don’t understand. It’s this weird dichotomy in this culture where there’s always this interplay between extreme skepticism — this “show me” type of skepticism — and on the other side is people believing in creationism and poo-pooing vaccines. It’s an interesting country. [Laughs.]

Do you think there’s a spiritual lacking in the Judeo-Christian tradition, or has America somehow perverted it?

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I don’t know. I think there’s always going to be a lack if you have a religion, or if you have a culture run by a religion, that has a deity that’s a judge and a punisher.

You’ll never quite be able to accept all aspects of being human, being animals, being part of a bigger system.

You’ll keep accepting blame or trying to blame someone else. The punisher god model stifles people.

And yet, oddly enough, you could argue that the American conscience is woefully lacking as well.

That’s the flipside of it, isn’t it? When you have a very stern parent, what are you going to do? You’re going to rebel. You might do it in secret. You might do all these shameful activities like Jerry Falwell’s son just did. Who cares about what he gets up to in his private life? I couldn’t care less, as long as nobody is getting hurt. Anyone should be able to do whatever they want among consenting adults.

Except that he has professed otherwise for his entire career.

Exactly. It’s that hypocrisy when you have a punishing, judgmental god. It leaves you a very narrow lane to live in. You’re hiding all the time, like these legislators who end up using glory holes and airport bathrooms.

Definitely too narrow for Jerry.

Speaking of a parent, or a pseudo parent, let’s talk about how Temperance opens — with Pa, who is certainly the most nakedly brutal character you’ve created. It opens with a tour de force of violence to a degree I’ve never seen from you before.

It was hard to draw. You probably won’t see it again.

The violence involves a rape, or an attempted rape, and then an attempted rescuing of Peggy from that rape. What was that like to stage and draw?

First of all, it’s a mythological scene. With Pa and Peggy, it’s the interplay between these two forces. He’s always going to be wanting to possess her and she’ll always elude him. They’re two sides of the same coin.

Minerva is a bystander to this eternal dance, but the

interview • “It’s a Spiritual Palindrome” Cathy Malkasian

way I had to stage it it had to be like an attempted rape for the stakes to be very high in that scene.

Staging it was very difficult. What I was trying to do with the whole book was de-trivialize violence. To make violence have a consequence in a story, rather than just be another scene that you can forget about.

The whole rest of the book is about unraveling what happened in that forest by the character that witnessed it. But it was hard to stage.

Your pacing deliberately prolongs the violence.

Lester intervenes and gets into a fight with Pa. Then there are these interludes that last a few panels where the reader thinks the fighting might be over, but then it resumes. I think that happens at least twice. Was that a deliberate strategy to — Lester thinks he’s dealing with a human, but he’s actually confronting a force. A force that can only go in one way. He’s basically standing up to a tornado of everything that is destructive and it feels an obligation to be eternally linked with everything that is creative. He’s trying to stick a stick in the spokes of mythological forces and getting pretty damaged in the process.

There’s a reluctance that I sensed in your depiction of Lester engaging in violence.

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Images on page 79–91 are from Temperance, 2010.

He doesn’t want to have to, right.

Which may be why, of course, he loses. There’s one remarkable page where Lester has Pa in a position where he can hit him and maybe end the fight, but he hesitates. Why does he hesitate?

He looks into his eyes and sees that this is bigger than he thought. I tried to make Pa’s eyes these voids.

Cosmic voids. They’re so dark. When you look into his face, it’s almost like this boiling force. It’s not even like a body, it’s just this force of anger. He’s a cosmic force like a black hole. And when you look into those eyes, it’s this moment of realization that this is bigger than just a human being he’s dealing with.

And it just goes on and on and on. Pa eventually knocks Lester down, throws him off a cliff and then goes down and chops his leg off.

[Laughs.] That’s all?

The violence continues in this slow burn even after Lester is completely subdued.

Minerva seems both delusional and a little craven.

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Well, she wants to be on the side of power.

And there must be fear involved as well.

Right. You want the shark in your corner. If you’re a little kid who’s known nothing but violence — which at that point in her life, she’s known nothing but violence and the threat of violence — you want to be on the side of the violence. Because at least you know where it is.

But wanting to be on the side of power is sad.

She did not have the courage of Peggy.

Right. Peggy is just this force. Peggy was trying to be by Minerva’s side. The kid was trying to decide between the two, and she went with the one who showed the most obvious power. Destruction is always more obvious than creation.

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One of the things that I love about your work is that even though all of your characters symbolize something greater than an individual, you’re able to impart a visceral humanity to them, which I think gives the symbolism a greater depth.

Oh, thank you. Well, I wanted to show the suffering in the Pa character, especially.

Minerva also takes on a greater dimension. In the first chapter, she is quiescent. A bit of a cipher. Then later on in the story, she takes on a deeper humanity, showing remorse over how events unfolded and her involvement in them. Her love of Lester.

She’d never seen someone human. She’d never seen someone who actually wanted to do good. Seeing him was a revelation to her. And it woke up qualities in her.

interview • “It’s a Spiritual Palindrome” Cathy Malkasian

that, learning the history of the medium through the pages of this very publication. You’d think, with my background in comics and my interest in cinema, that animation would be a natural. Yet I’d never once considered getting involved with the craft.

Not because I didn’t love it. My love for animation has always run deep, ever since the day a family friend projected a reel of the Walt Disney epic Man in Space for me as a child, forever blowing a 4-year-old kid’s mind. I can still see that Wernher von Braun-designed rocket ship rising into the sky, and feel the goosebumps, equal parts the thrill and romance of space travel and the beauty of the art moving before my eyes. And it’s been suggested many times over the years that I should try my hand in the field — as an animator. This was the barrier for me, because animation always felt to me like Elektra’s unclimbable wall: I find it difficult enough getting a single image to look right, let alone 24 of them to the second; having

THE COMICS JOURNAL #307 • WINTER–SPRING 2021

to draw iterations of the same picture sounded like a nightmare compounded.

Despite this, an email showed up one day with the acronym nfb in the title; I saw those letters and was immediately transported to an era of innocence, before I realized the true depths of the ocean of feces we call life. Inside was the offer to design and guide a project, to provide keyframes rather than having to labor over the in-betweens. I was scared. I’d never done animation. And I was too busy with other projects to reasonably take on the job.

I said yes. Of course I said yes. I couldn’t have said no even if I’d wanted to. So I gave myself a day or two to shit my pants. Then I dove in.

To get myself somewhat up to speed I took advantage of the age we’re living in and spent an afternoon To establish the look of the film, Anderson designed these two characters.

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on YouTube watching interviews with animation directors. Listening to them discuss their craft and, in some cases, watching their process in action, my biggest takeaway was that everyone had their unique method and workflow. There was no set path to making this happen, and that it was OK to make a few mistakes while forging a path of my own. After all, if I messed up too badly, my collaborators were there to nudge me back on track.

As I’ve said, up till now, my only education in animation was absorbing it for decades. But I’ve been directing stuff for 10 years now. Before that I did a long stint as an editorial illustrator, and I’ve been a cartoonist since I could first hold a pencil. Ultimately, it all comes down to visual storytelling — an eminently transferable skill. The rest is just getting used to the change in format. Once I made those connections in my mind the process started to feel much like it always does.

Usually, my work begins by developing a script.

This foundational insight into a story allows me to fully embody the piece’s themes and interpret its needs through images. In this case, a script didn’t exist. Instead, we started with a 90-minute interview with the subject of our film, Munira Abukar, a brilliant young criminologist and budding politician running for city council here in Toronto on a platform of police reform and redistribution of funding in favor of social and spiritual services. In essence, a revolution in how we govern.

I began by listening to the interview and taking notes and doing the occasional doodle, and reading as much about Munira as I could. New iterations of the interview started to arrive, each more concise than the last until the editors painstakingly arrived at a three-minute version that managed to distill Munira to her most potent. I spent the next couple of days listening to the interview over and over again, until I knew her words by heart. With each listen, I’d sketch thumbnails of whatever image or progression of images came to mind. Even if my ideas were obvious or stupid, and many were, they all got consideration. I started in my sketchbook, then quickly decided I was going to do the project entirely in Procreate, so continued my preliminaries on my iPad, which in retrospect is perhaps too much power to give a single device. I studied footage of my subject and tried to get a sense of how she moved.

I tried out styles, textures and approaches. I played.

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I mentioned earlier I did a stretch as an illustrator, producing images for magazines, newspapers, advertising and the job I’m most proud of: a stamp for the mighty federal government. I discovered early and somewhat to my surprise that this job had the most in common — not with comics, as I would have thought — but with illustration. Editorial illustrators are handed an article or essay. It’s their job to create pictures — sometimes narrative-based, but more often metaphorical — to support the words they’re given, and that’s pretty much what I’m doing: creating well over a hundred illustrations to support Munira’s words. Largely metaphorical with the odd image of a strictly narrative nature, with the added component of making those visuals move through time.

Once enough ideas had been generated, it came time to organize them and turn them into a storyboard. Then it came time to discuss. The mandate was to go easy with the images, to leave breathing room for the subject to get her ideas across and not have to compete with an overwhelming succession of images.

I still wound up coming up with more than we needed, reasoning it was better to have too much and prune it back then have too little and be forced to fill in the gaps. But that was just a theory.

Next, those crude boards were turned into an animatic. Because time was of the essence on this project, with only six weeks, give or take, to deliver a final cut in time for its use in classrooms in September, crucial moments were decided upon and it became my task to turn those boards into keyframes, representing the beginning and the end of a shot, and sometimes critical movements in between.

This is where the real and tactile design of the movie had to be worked out. Was it going to look like one of my comic book drawings or veer towards a more traditional, Disney-style animation? Or were we going to create something wild and eccentric and entirely of its own design? Needing to move quickly, I went with my gut and decided on an angular, cartoony look similar to a style I had used often during my years in illustration. (Sadly, a dark period in my career.) Rather than hard ink lines, I went with a stripped-down pencil and pastel look, very soft, yet with very hard-edged shapes.

OPPOSITE: Anderson played with styles and mediums, searching for something that worked.

feature: ANIMATION • Police Reform, The National Film Board of Canada and My New Career

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SKETCHBOOK

Vanesa R. Del Rey learning how to capture shape and form in life around me has been one of my main goals since I began training as a draftsman. My sketchbooks are journalistic in nature. But they are also a place for studying different tools and techniques — a playground for the

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development of ideas and an escape from “finished” work. I start with a warm-up sketch in my sketchbook every day of work. I always have one and I use it often.

It is like my morning coffee. ’

SKETCHBOOK • Vanesa R. Del Rey