OFF LIFE 12

Echo Chambers the impact of online feedback on artists

Down the Rabbit Hole An interview with Charles Burns

issue #12 • aug / sep 2015 • free

Plus comics from the best indie talent around

Why do you make this magazine?

Illustration: Charles Burns

It’s a question we were asked in an interview a couple months back, innocently enough, but it’s stuck with us. It’s certainly not for money. After print, distribution and web costs we’re lucky to grab a burger for our efforts. It’s not for any sort of admiration either. Sure, we enjoy hearing people say nice things about OFF LIFE, we’re not fucking masochists, but those kind words soon fade after seven hours lugging stacks of free magazines around crowded cities. This copy you’re holding right now probably has a sweat mark on it somewhere. Check for yourself.

No, as cliched, trite, pretentious and mealy-mouthed as it sounds... we do it because we believe in the printed magazine as a medium and the artists’ work we feature within its pages. For every utterly shit moment of running an independent magazine on a shoestring budget – and trust us, they are foul and often – there’s the moment when you open an email and discover the most beautiful piece of work that you’ve seen in months.

And when that happens you know, you absolutely know, that there’s nothing for it – you’re going to have to make another issue, because there is no way in fuck that you’re letting this incredible piece of work get stuck, unloved and unappreciated on some obscure blog somewhere. We’d rather haul it around on heavy paper drenched in sweat. There are also the moments when a creator as prolific as Charles Burns drops you an email to say he’d be game for an interview in your little magazine. Seriously, that guy is ace.

Really, this is just a long winded and self-indulgent way of saying thank you to everybody who has supported OFF LIFE over the last three years. Whether you’ve submitted work, blogged about us, bought back issues or even just flicked through our pages in a bar someplace – we appreciate each and every one of you.

Right then, that’s enough of that, isn’t it? We’ve an incredible line-up this time out, not least the aforementioned Charles Burns, a column from Guardian comic-er David Squires and pieces from some of the best damn indie talent around. Dig in and enjoy Daniel Humphry / editor

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echo Chambers How does online feedback affect today’s artists? there’s Few who know better than David Squires, a comic artist whose work is serialised weekly in the Guardian online ... with the comment section left open to all.

Last year, I suddenly found that my cartoons were being seen by more people than I could have ever imagined. For each day of the 2014 World Cup I tweeted a short comic based on the day’s play and, over the course of the tournament, I slowly gathered followers and some attention from the national press.

People were very generous in their comments and while I can’t recall every confidence-boosting message, there’s one that sticks with me: “This is horseshit.”

It probably says a lot about the fragility of my ego that out of all the positive notifications I received, I remember the negative one. To be fair, he had given it enough thought to specify the exact kind of shit that my work represented.

As a result of my World Cup drawings, I was lucky enough to be offered the chance to create a weekly cartoon for the Guardian sports section.

This clearly meant a much larger audience would be seeing my work, and it also meant getting my head around the dreaded comments section.

I decided that I wouldn’t read below the line.

Although constructive criticism is vital for any artist’s development, online feedback mostly attracts the extremes of opinion. You’re either a genius or a fraudulent hack. Like many creative people, I’m often wracked with an almost debilitating self-doubt and frequently find myself wincing as I hit the send button on my latest cartoon. I decided that it would be beneficial for my mental health not to add to these anxieties by having my insecurities independently verified.

Unfortunately, the contents of my cartoon’s comments section is often the first thing that

people want to discuss. A friend recently told me that he doesn’t actually read my cartoons, he just scrolls through to the comments section. My dad occasionally says to me things like, “Ooh, they didn’t like it this week” or “Don’t worry about the comments, I thought it was good.” LALALALALALA – NOT LISTENING – LALALALALALA. Clearly, I shouldn’t be such a cry-baby about it all. I’m conscious of the fact that most cartoonists would give their non-drawing arm for the opportunity to make a weekly strip for a national newspaper. I still have to pinch myself that I scored such a great gig. I also know that I actively invite the vitriol by mocking what is dearest to some people: their football team. Bloody hell, some people name their children after these things: I once met someone called Notsa, which I thought was exotic until I discovered that it was simply Aston backwards.

Her dad had been a Villa fan.

Despite all this, I get off lightly really. A journalist recently told me that he regularly receives hate mail and once had someone threaten to hunt him down and break his fingers so that he would never be able to type another word about football. I’ll stick to the horseshit, thanks. So I’ll leave you with the thoughts of cartoonist Kate Beaton. She gets it.

“Remember that on the internet you can go to a place that reviews Citizen Kane and underneath it someone will have written, ‘This is the most overrated piece of shit on planet Earth.’ Then remember that whoever said that doesn’t matter. So keep it up! And nuts to the haters, you’re the best.”

By David Squires thesunshineroom.com

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Down the Rabbit Hole An interview with

Whether in the pages of seminal comic books or on the covers of now iconic magazines, few artists have a style so instantly recognisable as Charles Burns. As part of the wave of artists who reshaped the boundaries of the comic medium in the late eighties and nineties, even fewer have left such an indelible mark on the creators who came after.

Often copied, rarely matched, the creator of Black Hole, Skin Deep, Big Baby and X’ed Out joins us to reflect on his 30 years in comics.

CB Yeah, it is. The one thing that is important to me is that I know what I’m working towards. Recently, I’ve been working on a book and it’s nice to be able to these days.

OL One of our favourite magazines is The Believer, for which you illustrate pretty much every cover. What drew you to that title and what keeps you going back?

CB It was just a phone call. It’s one of those odd things where someone saw my work and got in contact, so I guess the first phone call was something like, “Do you want to do a cover for us?” and I said yeah it sounds good, and the next question was, “Do you want to do every cover for us?” It was interesting in that they made a kind of template for the cover.

At least initially, there was a template with four portraits, so it was pretty straightforward; it was finding photo source material and doing portraits of people. Eventually, they did other special issues, film, art, music, so that was something that was more typical illustration. But as far as doing the portrait there was something kind of pleasant in that, it was straightforward and there’s no real editing – it was, “Here’s the portraits.” That was fun to do.

OL Our readers probably best know you as a comic artist, but for decades you’ve also worked in advertising and editorial. Is there something that commercial work gives you that comics don’t and visa versa?

CB When I’m doing editorial or advertisements, you’re either illustrating someone else’s piece or you’re selling a product.

With my own work it’s something that is completely mine, so if the story’s bad, if the drawings are bad, everything is on me. There’s not a huge amount of difference as far as the way that I draw, but the content of my comics work is something that is personal, something that is my story and something I completely control. The one thing that is great about comics is that you can do everything yourself, for the most part. You can even take it to the photocopy shop and have it printed yourself.

OL Arguably the one piece of work that people most associate with you is Black Hole. How do you think that coming-of-age story might differ if it was based today?

OL Is that control important to you, to the way you work and the stories you want to tell?

CB The characters are really based on the time period that I was going through, coming-of-age I guess, which would have  14

been somewhere around the early seventies. So I know what that felt like, what the environment was like, what my friends were like, what music we were listening to, what zigzag rolling papers looked like, what kind of beer we were drinking – so it was a story that I could tell from that point of view.

I think the story itself could be set in another time or maybe even another culture, but it’s more a matter of me knowing that situation pretty well. I would not be able to talk about cell phones and Twitter – I know about all those things, but I’m not fluent enough to be able to have that come through properly in a narrative.

cartoonists – or whatever you want to call them – that have been working hard and coming up with interesting books and narratives. So it’s no longer a matter of, “Here’s three interesting books,” there can be 25 that might be interesting – that’s really grown in a very positive way. Early in my career you could find my work in specialist comic shops, but these days you can find them in bookstores so that part is good.

OL Presumably, all the teenagers hiding out in the forest would just be found after posting selfies online anyway?

CB If there is, I’m not really aware of it. There aren’t really those discussions with the people that publish my work. The one draw back, maybe, if you’re starting out in comics is that there’s probably a push to make some huge, very long graphic novel, instead of like saying, “Here’s a seven-page story” or “Here’s a one-page story.” So maybe the learning curve would be a little more difficult if you feel that kind of push, that you have to come up with this masterpiece.

OL Do you feel a different expectation from readers or from your publishers when creating a big graphic novel that will be sold in bookshops?

CB Haha – yeah, I wouldn’t have the patience for that!

OL You’ve been publishing comics for over 20 years now.

What keeps you returning to tell your stories in this medium?

CB That always changes, but it’s just something that I feel fluent in. There was a certain point that I thought I should study fine arts, because that’s what I thought I should do – I didn’t have any real sense of what being an artist was. But I like that comics are accessible – even though some of the graphic novels these days can be fairly expensive, they’re still not impossible to have access to.

Also, I want to tell stories and that’s something I really had to teach myself. Every single time I sit down, I’m not reinventing comics for myself, but I always think I should know how to do this better than I do. It feels like there’s always that frustration of “God, this is hard.”

OL You’re often spoken about in the same wave of artists as Tomine, Clowes and the Hernandez Brothers. Do you feel any kind of kinship with that generation of creators?

CB Yeah, I mean that has to do with age I guess, but I know all the people you just mentioned as friends or acquaintances.

In America it’s a relatively small community. So there are a lot of people that I feel connected to and read their work.

OL Do you notice any trends or waves among the new generation of comic creators?

OL Is that what keeps your comics evolving? There’s a notable shift between your books – even though it’s a similar style, there’s still a shift from story-to-story.

CB I mean, you could say there are people who do autobiographical comics, but that’s been around for quite a while. And there’s a group of people who are doing things that are more abstract and more visual, but I think there’s always a core of people who write interesting stories, whether they’re autobiographical or based on their own lives.

There’s a wide range of approaches these days, but it really has to do with the author, if they’re doing something interesting with it. There are people who do autobiographical comics that are incredibly boring and tedious; there’s other people that make something come alive and make something interesting. So it really has to do with the individual I think.

CB Again, it’s not about reinventing or doing something new every time. But, on the other hand, I wouldn’t feel comfortable repeating myself, though there are certainly themes and ideas that have flowed through my work over the years. But yeah, I wouldn’t feel comfortable about getting comfortable.

OL The industry has changed a lot over the past 20 years – are you happy with how it’s developed? Are you keeping up with that still?

OL We’ve always been kind of fascinated with the amount of autobiography in comics. Few other mediums have quite the level of autobiographical stories.

CB Yeah, I keep up with mostly everything. I’m glad someone can walk into a bookstore and find my work, and find other books that are interesting. That’s what’s really evolved over the years: there’s just more and more artists and

CB There was a certain time where, in the States, the joke 16

was, “Hell, here’s another comic about someone picking their nose.” On the other hand, there are people who do amazing work – you have Alison Bechdel. There’s a lot of people that do great pieces.

style – the kind of comics that I looked at. For whatever reason I saw that kind of rendering of hair when I was younger, and there’s something about that shiny hair. I started emulating that; I have no idea why I got fixated on that.

OL Jess from East London wants to know if she can call her new coffee shop ‘Black Hole’?

OL You tend to leave a good while between your projects and it’s been about a year and a half since your last book.

What are you working on at the moment – is there something for people to get excited about?

CB Haha! I don’t know whether that’s a very smart thing to call a coffee shop, but that’s fine with me. That’s kind of hilarious! My friend Richard McGuire and I worked on an animated movie together, at some point we were sitting together and – I don’t know why we found it so funny – but we were saying, “You’ve read Black Hole, now read the follow up – White Pole.” That got us laughing for a long while – but I don’t know, maybe we were just giddy at that moment.

OL Nick from Manchester asks: ‘Nobody draws hair like Charles Burns – how do you draw hair like that?’

CB I’m working on an art book. It’s kind of hard to explain, but it’s an art book related to the last three books I’ve published. I’m not intentionally slow – for me to gather ideas and find something that I’m really interested in devoting my time to, that usually takes a while. There are usually a number of false starts. I think almost every project I’ve ever worked on, there are at least two or three false starts where you want to get moving and you realise you’re moving in the wrong direction.

OL So is there a vault of bad Charles Burns ideas somewhere?

CB I don’t think anybody draws hair like me anymore!

The look of that is certainly based on a traditional American

CB Probably. I don’t think I’ve managed to unlock it yet!

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Ellice Weaver

Alessandra De Cristofaro

Pete Gamlen

@ElliceWeaver

@aledecristofaro

@petegamlen

Fish Bowl Fever “I made this comic for curiosity of the unknown. I cannot comprehend what it must be like to have dementia, I wanted to explore that.”

Bruno “I live in a noisy building. All day you hear people chatting, arguing or listening to music. There’s a man who sings Italian love songs at the window.

I’ve started to imagine who could he be, is he lonely? Does that matter?”

Destroyed “This comic came from an odd, inexplicably singular moment from my life that really should have meant very little, but has stuck in my mind like glue.”

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@nickvokey

@debbiefongdraws

With Samplerman On A Couch “This little story is the nearest to something narratively intelligible I’ve done so far, by cutting out elements from 1940s American comics. The meaning of it is uncertain and totally open to the reader.”

Coach Bird M.D. “About an anesthesiologist-come-youth footy coach who was transformed into a bird by a wizard. I want people to consider, ‘Why do random things happen to us?’ More importantly, I just want to make people laugh.”

News Flash “In light of all the ridiculous things we hear on the news these days, I wanted people to reflect on what we readily accept and how, despite how outlandish a new discovery seems, life simply goes on.”

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@tilliewalden

@stevie_gee_

Sun in my Eyes “I hate summer. I made this to explore the way I feel during the heat of the day.

I wanted to capture a feeling, with the juxtaposition of small moments with this large teenage girl, too oversized to ever fit in the landscape.”

Strategic vision “As a teenager I once had a ‘psychotic episode’ tripping out for eight hours from smoking weed.

As an adult I have to sit through meetings where I have no idea what’s going on.”

Samplerman @julizetoguste

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EDITOR Daniel Humphry ART DIRECTOR Steve Leard COPY EDITOR Lucy Rice COVER ART The Project Twins OFFLIFE.CO.UK @OFFLIFE_ COMIC