The Comics Journal #304

The

Comics

#304

SUMMER–FALL 2019

A DEPRESSED WITC H , A PERVERTED CAT AND A DRUGGED -OUT WEREWOLF

A Bad Gateway into the World of

Simon Hanselmann INTERVIEW BY GARY GROTH

Labor & Economics

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A Bad Gateway into the World of

Simon Hanselmann Interviewed by Gary Groth

simon hanselmann was born in 1981,

OVERLEAF: Back cover of WOTW, a zine published in June 2017.

ABOVE: From One More Year, 2017.

18

in the town of Launceston (pronounced Lawn-ses-ten — get it right!) on the Australian island of Tasmania. He lived there for 21 years, and — despite the fact that he describes it as a “cultureless, barren shithole” — he managed to cultivate a knowledge of and appreciation for comics (not necessarily a contradiction, now that I think of it), as well as a passionate interest in making them. His earliest influences include Carl Barks’s Donald Duck, Morris’s Lucky Luke, Tintin, Asterix and Mad magazine.

Launceston may have been colorless, but Hanselmann’s life there was anything but. It was filled with extremes of love, pain, fear, confusion — out of which he seems to have learned empathy, discipline, self-reliance and an appreciation for the absurd.

It also evidently served as the raw material he needed to transform incidents from life

into art. Even his high school experience was extreme. There is a generation of cartoonists (mine) whose high school years were fraught with misery and bullying and that left its mark on them and their cartooning. I can make no such generalization about Hanselmann’s generation, but his high school experience was like my generation’s on steroids. “I was pretty mercilessly bullied in high school. I had put quite a lot of weight on. People would spit on me at school. There were a lot of bullies that would just spit all over me.

My back would literally be covered in phlegm. Once I was dragged through the mud by my legs, and even the teachers just stood around chuckling it up.”

His mother worked at a bar and sold drugs on the side and became a heroin addict, which caused trouble with the local authorities, not to mention all the familial friction that would ensue therefrom. His father was a biker and quasi criminal who mostly vanished from his life when Hanselmann was 2 years old. Nonetheless he remembers his mother as loving and doing her best: “My mum did a really good job.

I always had slick lunches at school. Nice sandwiches and Roll-Ups and muesli bars.

She did provide a really good home.” If it wasn’t all roses, it wasn’t all heroin, either.

At 21 or 22, he moved to Hobart, Tasmania’s largest city (Launceston is the second largest), where his cultural horizons expanded. He met other cartoonists, including Grant Gronewold (aka html Flowers), who would become his closest friend and with whom he would occasionally collaborate. After four or five years in Hobart, he was growing restless.

In 2008, he moved to Melbourne, where he lived in Gronewold’s mother’s garden shed. Throughout this time, he was drawing comics constantly — most prominently a long sprawling family drama titled Girl Mountain, never published and which the author now refers to as “shit,” but which sounds like the kind of complicated, ambitious work a young artist needs to get out of his system before he can move on.

interview • Simon Hanselmann

LEFT: Hanselmann’s cast of characters from One More Year, 2017.

Hanselmann moved on to Megg and Mogg, starring characters he created in 2008. At the urging of his pal, Grant, he put some Megg and Mogg strips on Tumblr in 2012, which instantly attracted the attention of both fans and professionals, and which led to the fame and riches he enjoys today.

I exaggerate, but he has achieved New York Times best-sellerdom, no small feat among those artists not drawing corporate characters. Megg and Mogg share the stage with Hanselmann’s dramatis personae, most prominently among them being Owl, bourgeois, clueless, more conventional than the rest and often indignant at their shenanigans; and Werewolf Jones, a sybaritic beast, literally and figuratively, whose lifestyle revolves around self-inflicted damage and to whom the word excess does not exist.

These, and a few other characters, provide Hanselmann the ensemble he needs to create an astonishingly wide scope of character dynamics and situational comedy — from the depiction of loopy I Love Lucy-like hijinks to drug-addled fantasies to solitary and unendurable pain. And it should not go unmentioned that Hanselmann’s perspective on sexuality and gender, which permeates his work, is refreshingly liberating and latitudinarian. His characters’ sexual appetites run the gamut from the conventional to the perverse and their gender preferences are fluid, and they are entirely unselfconscious about it. The secret,

THE COMICS JOURNAL #304 • SUMMER–FALL 2019

I think, is that the author respects his characters’ uniqueness, individuality and autonomy, and doesn’t judge them (he leaves that up to the reader); nor is the openness about human sexuality presented didactically or as self-righteously enlightened. It merely is, and often hilariously so.

His earlier work, especially, was often referred to as “stoner humor.” This is accurate, up to a point, but the description never sat well with me because I always thought of stoner humor as lazy and brainless and by this definition — my definition — it does a disservice to Hanselmann’s work, in which there is usually (though not always) an underlying pathos and genuine connection to human feeling in these stories.

One of Hanselmann’s narrative tricks, evident in even his earliest work, is to lure readers in with humor and weirdness, then whipsaw them with truth. Even in his first book, Megahex (2014), there is plenty of scatological humor, drugs and dissolution mixed in with a freewheeling nihilism, but all this, in a way, is a decoy. There are stories, for example, like the two-page “Silver Sequin Mini Skirt,” about the futility of trying to avoid pain; the three-page “Bad Brains,” which depicts an ineffable and inexplicable sadness (or melancholy or anomie) so powerful it hurts; or the twopage “Rimming,” about the paradox of sexual incongruity between lovers — all deeply affecting as well as masterpieces of formal 19

RIGHT: From Megahex, 2014.

OPPOSITE: From Megg and Mogg in Amsterdam, 2016.

concision. (He couldn’t achieve such effect without mastery of the formal elements of comics — timing, pacing, visual rhythms, all learned autodidactically.) He can also be expansive: His longer stories are intricately woven comedy dramas, balancing a fidelity to the internal consistency of the characters with plot-driven mayhem. Stories like “Amsterdam,” “Jobs” and “Heat Wave” read like a mash-up between Preston Sturges and Frank Tashlin, with a little S. Clay Wilson- or R. Crumb-style transgression casually thrown in just to keep the reader a little uncomfortable.

Bad Gateway (2019) is certainly his most accomplished and humane work to date. His previous three books were composed of short stories ranging from one to 52 pages, but Gateway was conceived and executed as a single, stand-alone novel-length story. It’s his most intensely autobiographical story, couched in the lives of the characters he’s breathed life into for more than 10 years, proof of their protean, imaginative applicability.

This interview was conducted over two sessions in Simon Hanselmann’s living room in his Seattle home in February and March. In person, he is funny, smart, 20

loquacious and opinionated — as you will see. He seems to accept the more distressing aspects of his upbringing with equanimity (though his work may indicate less sanguinity), he speaks eloquently about his creative process and is alarmed by the more punitive effusions of social media.

[Full disclosure: For those who are not aware of it, Fantagraphics Books is Simon Hanselmann’s publisher.]

Gary Groth April 2019

interview • Simon Hanselmann