PEANUTS FOR PUNKS

One of the more boyish things I did as a kid was collect comic books. My main focus were the comic spin-offs of TV I already watched at home: Invader Zim, Adventure Time, sometimes even the occasional X-Men.

Once, my dad (former boy, former comic collector) brought down from the attic a box filled with two different comics: Steven and Idiotland, both by the author Doug Allen. I was thrilled. I had just read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and couldn’t believe that one of my favorite authors had written two comic series! (My 13-year-old brain mistook cartoonist Doug Allen for novelist Doug Adams, but nevertheless comic reading ensued.)

Idiotland was a little beyond me at the time: a surrealist, plotless jam strip 1 prioritizing absurdity and irreverence above all else. (If you were interested in seeing an overtly feminized rabbit-humanoid hitting a bong, or perhaps a man with dicks for legs emotionally re-learning how to walk, Idiotland is the place for you. At 13, I didn’t think I was ready to move there yet.)

Steven was a little more my speed, a punky, bratty little boy named Steven who hates everything. (Imagine if Bart Simpson wore a white top hat and lived on Angell Street, or if Charlie Brown started listening to Dead Kennedys.) Flipping off the reader, Steven makes it very clear that he does not like you. He hates you, he hates his friends, and he definitely hates Providence. In fact, he doesn’t really like anything, except maybe TV, beer, and music. It is as if Steven walked out of a Black Flag music video and onto Kennedy Plaza, issuing zingy one-liners like: “Eat Paste!,” “I hate you!,” and (my personal favorite) “no!”

Unlike Steven, I really enjoyed his friends. There was Brock, his sweet—but naive—sidekick, unaware, sincere, and often Steven’s punching bag. There was the tiki-man, the owl-man, the local mailman (I’m sensing a theme). My personal favorite side character was Mr. Rochambeau, the flamboyant, aristocratic poodleman, constantly begging Steven to be taken on a walk.

Moving away from the boy, and onto the-man-whodraws-the-boy, Doug Allen is a cartoonist originally from Greenwich, Connecticut, who moved to Providence in 1973 to enroll as an Illustration major at RISD. At RISD, he would go on to create Steven, originally as a recurring jam strip in the student paper, The RISD Press. Allen would later move the project to Providence’s underground newspaper, The New Paper, after graduating in 1978. He would continue this strip, Steven of Providence, for the next three decades, even after moving out of The Creative Capital and into Brooklyn. Steven would later go on to be compiled and sold in collections, these editions being the ones my dad bought and read.

Wanting to interview Allen for this project, I first needed to find his email. I tried looking for it through his website; however, that became difficult upon realizing that his website had been hacked several times. First in 2016 (I found these dates using the Wayback machine) by a dropshipping furniture company, and then again in 2018 by a group of poker players from Indonesia. While I may not have found his email on the website, I did leave with an appreciated knowledge of international poker cultures. (Did you know that “PLAYING ONLINE SLOT GAMES WITH REAL MONEY IS AN ATTITUDE”?)

I was eventually able to get in touch with Allen through the incredible connective force of the RISD alumni network (special thanks to Annabeth at RISD). On November 3, Allen graciously agreed to be interviewed, calling in from his home in New York as I responded from my Slater triple.

CM: Hello. Is this Doug?

DA: Yes, Charlie?

CM: How did your relationship with Providence shape what your comics looked like in their early stages?

DA: I always had a connection to Providence. My mother and grandmother were painters, and I would visit an aunt in Providence off and on when I was a kid, so we were always driving up there. My mother encouraged me to be an artist from an early age; I was an only child, and she was always sticking crayons in my hand to keep me busy. I had a stack of newsprint paper, so I was always drawing from an early age, and I definitely wanted to go to art school, and RISD seemed like the clear cut choice for me. I really fell in love with Providence in 1973; it was so down and out, and it’s such a gritty kind of Rust Belt looking town. So different from where I grew up in Connecticut.

DA: It was just the look of it. I was a big fan of Edward Hopper’s paintings and that desolate down-and-out New England look. Factory decay, I guess you’d call it. I used to be able to walk around downtown and go into these old factories that were abandoned. There was one called Dorette Incorporated, where I would find tap handles, old plexiglass, every different beer brand buried into the ground. Everything was just inside these open warehouses. You could wander around another factory that made leather cigarettes, cigarette cases, and purses. There were all these different creations you could just pick up. I still have a cigarette holder made with red leather that I just picked up off the floor. I applied to RISD in 1973. When I got there, there were all these second hand clothing stores, and everyone looked like they were from the ’40s. There was a big music scene playing big band jazz. You could see a roomful of blues playing downtown with Big Joe Turner and Scott Hamilton playing saxophone at the Met Café. Everybody sort of looked like they were Robert Crumb characters. I was in the Illustration department at RISD, and everything I drew kind of looked like a cartoon. My teachers would say, “Oh no! Everything you do looks like a comic.” So I thought why fight it. The RISD paper had a weekly rag called The RISD Press, and my roommate and I did a comic strip series for that in ’74.

CM: Did this comic for The RISD Press bear any resemblance to work you would go on to create later in your career?

DA: The strip was called the “history of ____”: “history of animals,” “history of people”... etc. It was a jam strip with my roommate. When he lost interest in doing it, I switched to a character from one of my sketchbooks named Steven. I thought, I’m gonna do a punk comic strip with Steven and his friends, like a punk version of Peanuts. And just, I was also a big fan of Pogo, and that was similar to a Peanuts kind of thing where it was just a little group of furry animal friends and they were very political, but all that stuff was over my head at the time.

CM: What was the influence for Steven’s attitude?

DA: Yeah, well, that was part of the era too, because it was the late ’70s, and the whole punk thing was going on. And there was a music scene downtown at Lupo’s. 2 You know, these, the Ramones and the Dead Boys played down there, and everyone threw bottles at them. There was also the whole punk scene going on at Brown’s radio station, BRU, playing Elvis Costello and The Clash. It was really part of the era. I was always into the concept that Steven would be this little punk character who hates everything and drinks beer.

CM: I’m wondering about the politics you saw represented in comics, going back to Pogo. What do you see as Steven’s relationship with this?

DA: There wasn’t much politics in Steven other than it was based in Providence: “Steven of Providence.” This was in the Buddy Cianci 3 era with all the mob stuff that was going on in Providence. There are also a lot of local references in the comics. I would drive around in my car, and I’d sit in front of one of these iconic landmarks like the Ocean State Theater and draw a picture of it in a sketchbook so that I could put it into the strips the next week. Even when I moved to New York, it was still Steven of Providence. After I graduated from RISD in ’78, Ty Davis from The Providence Journal started The New Paper, which was the local underground free press paper, similar to The Phoenix in Boston and The Village Voice in New York. I started doing a weekly strip for them. They’d have music listings, apartments for rent, classified ads, editorial pieces, comics, and all the advertisements that supported the rest of the publication. They were just stacks of them at all the shops, especially in record stores along Thayer Street.

CM: I’m interested a little bit more about Steven as part of a college publication. Did you have a big readership at RISD? Did you get a lot of interaction with the comic?

DA: I think it wasn’t really big, it was circular. It was kind of the way all those free papers were, with this one being for RISD students and teachers. There were stacks of them around campus, and people really did read articles by their classmates, look at the comics, see the listings and music reviews and things just like any underground paper. But I think for me, I just had the thrill of seeing my strip get printed, and being able to pick up a copy of it and tear out my strip and see how it would look on the page along with all the articles and that kind of thing.

CM: Were there any noticeable changes in Steven as a RISD comic vs. as a Providence comic?

DA: I think mostly just a slow change from when the focus of it opened up to local events in Providence. And then more, it became more national when I moved to New York—the idea was to move to New York, you know, and become an illustrator, which I tried to do for about a month when I sublet an apartment that was owned by a RISD painting teacher who was on sabbatical. I would put on my sport jacket and take my portfolio around to magazines; I think I only got one gig doing a strip for High Times. And then I ran out of money in a month very quickly in New York and had to move home for a while. And then I ended up moving back to Providence for a few years, because it was easier living up there. And I was playing in bands.

CM: I read about you and Gary Lieb in bands. You did bass for a band, right?

DA: We had a band called Rubber Rodeo. It was all RISD students, and we had a pretty good following. We played a lot in Boston, and we ended up getting signed to a record deal for Mercury Records, which was part of Polygram. We traveled a lot to perform. We’d sleep on somebody’s floor, and then would drive back to Providence at 2 a.m. It was a similar kind of music of the era that gave birth to Steven. It was punky stuff, like a new wave band. It was kind of like an art school, Talking Heads thing. It was like Dolly Parton meets Devo.

CM: That’s awesome.

DA: It was a new wave, punk kind of pop band. I did that for a couple of years. I actually got kicked out of that band right around the time we did our first album. And so they replaced me with another more seasoned bass player who ended up playing bass for a lot of bands like Iggy Pop. Also, I was a terrible bass player, I was always partying and drinking, and there were looking to kind of go more commercial.

CM: I’m thinking about the two of you working together. Was there a lot of collaboration within the comics scene at the time? Was there an established, networked community?

DA: There were other cartoonists out there doing the same kind of thing. Kaz, Gary Panter, Dan Clowes, who did a comic book called Eightball, Matt Groening. At this time, I was doing a weekly strip called “The Angriest Dog in the World” or something like that. You know, they were all running in these underground newspapers. Sometimes we got together when Gary Lieb was in Chicago; we’d go out to a coffee shop and sit around and draw these jam strips. Did many comics with Dan Clowes and a bunch of other boys. It became national. Gary and I both moved to New York and eventually there were other cartoonists in Brooklyn, in Williamsburg. There definitely was a scene. And then eventually we started having these comic book conventions in Brooklyn, where all these underground cartoonists would show their books and trade things and sell their wares.

CM: Do you still feel connected to any kind of comics world or scene now? Do you read anything? Do you keep up with anything?

DA: Not so much now, I haven’t really followed anything online. I haven’t followed many of the new cartoonists. As soon as all of these underground newspapers started to fold and were replaced by online sources, the fun really went out of being able to see these things get printed. So after 23 years of doing a weekly strip, I kind of lost interest in it, and around the same time I was running out of ideas for weekly strips.

CM: That’s interesting, what you’re saying about the death of the underground comic with the death of the underground newspaper. I’m also interested in your opinions on graphic novels, as I’ve heard it argued that they are a contributor to the death of the comic strip?

DA: I didn’t really get involved in that whole wave of that change in comics nor make myself available to any of that. Now I’m just one of these old grouchy guys who talks about the old days. But there’s supposed to be a collection of old Steven stuff coming out in a book called Alive and Outside this fall.

CM: Thank you very much for this interview! I’m glad that the RISD alumni email chain could connect us.

DA: Yeah, yeah, that did work. I’m kind of off the grid these days. Since you know, I had a website for a while. People used to complain that there was no contact information. I put it up in 1996, and I never changed it until one day I finally said, “Why am I paying for this?”

CM: There’s like some crazy poker thing on it now.

DA: Oh, really? I haven’t looked it up lately. That’s another little glitch with the Internet. You can never really erase yourself. They sell your domain to somebody else or something. It’s weird.

1 A jam strip is a collaborative comic where eachpage is drawn by a different artist.

2 Lupo's Heartbreak hotel: old bar downtown.

3 Mayor of Providence, twice, from 1975-1984,and 1991-2002.

CHARLIE MEDEIROS B'24 eats paste.