Ivan Brunetti

Ivan Brunetti

By Daniel Robert Epstein
Dec 25, 2005

IvanBrunetti creates some of the sickest and funniest one panel comic strips in his book Haw that I have ever read. His deconstructed style makes it seem like a Family Circus strip gone mad. Some of my favorites include a captionless image of a man sitting naked on the floor with a gun clicking empty at his penis. On his penis is a hand puppet of his wife, who had just walked into the room. Another one has someone tilting a jay of dark liquid into their mouth and the caption says “Now where is my jar of AIDS blood?” His work will make you laugh out loud, as you run around showing the panels to your friends.

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Daniel Robert Epstein: I read that you teach part time, what do you teach?
Ivan Brunetti: Well right now I’m not teaching anything. But I teach a class on writing the graphic novel.
DRE:
What school?
IB:
Here’s the thing, I teach at the University of Chicago but I work at Columbia College so my full time job is a web designer at Columbia College. I’m also going to be teaching at Columbia next spring too. So I will have three jobs.
DRE:
Do they know you make these sick comics?
IB:
I think people are aware of some of the things I do but not everything.
DRE:
What would happen if they did know?
IB:
Probably nothing at this point.
DRE:
Is having a secret identity fun for you?
IB:
I never thought about it like that but maybe there’s an element of doing something on the sly. I do go out of my way to not tell people what’s going on with me.
DRE:
You’re probably the only Fantagraphics cartoonist that wants to do it on the sly and wouldn’t want his books to sell a lot better.
IB:
I’ve never really cared if my book sold. I never even drew it to sell it. When I started drawing stuff I just assumed I would be making 25 Xeroxes and just giving it to people I know. So it’s very strange for me to have people read some of this stuff. Sometimes I regret putting it out there.
DRE:
Is it too personal?
IB:
It’s personal, yeah. There is something loathsome about publishing. It’s almost better people saw it after you die. I think that’s the best in that situation because the minute people see it and react to it; it just starts to ruin the purity of what you’re doing.
DRE:
When did you develop that concept, did it come from seeing it happen to other people?
IB:
Yeah, I’m aware of people whose work was mostly seen after they died but just from my own experience, it tends to screw you up. There’s a lot of nonsense you have to deal with. When you put something out there, people start misunderstanding it and criticizing it.
DRE:
Do you get hate mail?
IB:
I actually don’t get that much. But nowadays people can just go on the internet and have that little protective screen of posting under a fake name on a message board or something. So that’s annoying.
DRE:
What books did you do before Haw?
IB:
I’ve done three issues of an autobiographical book called Schizo. It’s half autobiography and then the other half is whatever goes through my mind. To my mind it’s all biographical on some level. The last one came out seven years ago but there’s going to be a new one that’s coming out in early January. Unlike the other ones which are black and white comics; this one’s going to be full color and oversized. It’s been seven years in the making so of course it’s going to be disappointing to everybody.
DRE:
Your work has probably changed quite a bit.
IB:
Yeah, the first three books I did were really angry. This one is just sad. Before I was angry and depressed, now I’m just depressed. I don’t have the energy to be angry anymore. I give up, the world wins.
DRE:
How old are you?
IB:
I just turned 38.
DRE:
Being close to 40 can be depressing.
IB:
Yeah, the years go by faster and faster ever since age 30 or so. The things that I think they happened two months ago happened two years ago. Time goes much faster every year that goes by.
DRE:
How far back do the cartoons in Haw go?
IB:
Haw first came out two days after September 11th. The jokes that are in there I probably did in 1996 and 1997 because I remember doodling them at a job I used to have back then. So I had a big stack of doodles and jokes that I would do on my lunch hour. I took me four years to sift through them and pick my favorite ones. Then I did another gag book that just came out this summer. It’s a miniature Haw so it’s called Hee. It’s like a retarded little brother to Haw.
DRE:
I think my favorite gag in Haw is probably, “Now where did I put my jar of AIDS blood?”
IB:
I don’t know where those jokes came from. I can’t even explain them; they just were stream of consciousness. I would doodle them in my lunch hour or when I was on the phone. I doodle all the time so they just pop into my head. I can’t even figure out what they’re about.
DRE:
But they are funny. Do they always make you laugh?
IB:
Yeah. I had a huge stack of them and then when I’d look at them much later, like a year or two or even four or five years later, I see if they still make me chuckle. If that happens then they go in the book.
DRE:
How did you first get to Fantagraphics?
IB:
The first issue of Schizo was done with a different publisher and after it was published I got a nice letter from Kim Thompson, who’s one of the publishers of Fantagraphics. Then I asked him if he would be willing to publish it. They reprinted the first issue and from that point on they became my publisher.
DRE:
Why do you create one panel cartoons?
IB:
I’ve always done them. I think it was because I read those New Yorker collections in college and the 1925 to 1950 collection was the seminal book in my opinion. I’ve just always liked one panel cartoons. I was collecting a lot of those gag cartoonists’ books from the 20’s, 30’s, 40’s and 50’s.
DRE:
Are you married?
IB:
I’m getting remarried in the next two weeks but I don’t have any kids.
DRE:
Did your first wife like your comics?
IB:
No, she hated them. The darker they got the more she hated them. I was definitely going into darker and darker territories.
DRE:
How about the upcoming wife? Was she a fan?
IB:
Yeah, she hadn’t read a lot of what I had done before we met, but she’d seen some of it and she didn’t freak out about them. She’s been really supportive.
DRE:
She must have a good sense of humor.
IB:
Yeah she does. I think she understands where it’s coming from. I’m not just a depraved pervert or something. I think there’s a little more of a cerebral angle to what I do than some people notice. To me there’s a philosophical undercurrent but maybe I’m just crazy. Sometimes I’m embarrassed that I’ve put a lot of things out there, maybe I should have just kept them to myself. But then I see somebody else laugh at them.
DRE:
What’s the process for writing this new issue of Schizo?
IB:
It’s when I can do it. What I ended up doing are one page stories in color so they’re kind of like old Sunday comics. So the whole issue is one page stories.
DRE:
How many panels per page?
IB:
It’s about 24 panels or something like that.
DRE:
Are they all connected story wise?
IB:
They are but I didn’t plan it that way. It’s not a continuous narrative. I’m printing the pages in the order I drew them. For the most part they were done as one page entities but when I put them together they told a story. It’s like the last seven years of my life, one step at a time.
DRE:
How does doing Schizo affect your doodling, if it does?
IB:
It’s interesting. My drawing has gotten closer and closer to my doodling. I tend to doodle all the time so I’ve taken the way my doodles look and I’ve tried to incorporate that more and more into the finished work. I think in the past they used to over construct what I did. I’ve tried to find a way of drawing that’s a little more natural for me, because I tend to over think. So I’ve been forcing myself to simplify and try to get it to look a little more spontaneous.
DRE:
Do you look the way you draw yourself?
IB:
I’m sadder in real life.
DRE:
Your artwork is very stripped down. Have you ever done more detailed work?
IB:
Not really, the first issue of Schizo has a story that where I used photographs for reference and you can really tell. So I’ve done things like that but they’re just not as enjoyable for me. But more and more I’ve just been trying to simplify the graphics. It’s also a way of getting some work done because since I’m working two or three jobs and there are other projects that I’ve been involved with too. I just curated a show of about 75 cartoonists.
DRE:
Where was that?
IB:
That was at Columbia College’s art and design gallery. Now I’m editing a 400 page anthology of comics for Yale University Press. I had to write the introduction which I’m almost done with and I had to pick a lot of different works for it.
DRE:
Did you grow up in Chicago?
IB:
Yeah, I grew up in and around Chicago but I was born in Italy.
DRE:
Did you read many comics when you were a kid in Italy?
IB:
I read Tom Mix. I copied all the Disney comics when I was a little kid. They were very popular in Europe.
DRE:
What comics did you read besides Disney?
IB:
Mostly there were genre type things like westerns. There were a lot of western comics. I remember one comic that was about this Davy Crockett type character. There were all these different books that were in those genres.
DRE:
Do any students take your classes expecting a wild man?
IB:
I don’t know. There have been a few students that knew who I was and were familiar with what I did but for the most part the students aren’t aware that I did these really filthy horrible comics. To be honest, a lot of times students are very guarded and even if they do know something, they never let on. It’s very strange. Part of the challenge is to get them to open up as people so they open up more with their work. They tend to be very guarded with their work as well.
DRE:
Does doing your filthy horrible comics help you be less guarded with something like Schizo?
IB:
Yeah, probably. I’m generally a pretty shy person so maybe it’s a part of myself that I’ve repressed and now I put out it out there. But it wasn’t thought out, that’s just what came out of my head. I can’t really control it that much.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

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