Bob Fingerman: Finding Humor After the Apocalypse

I've even used that line. Think The Road, only funny. Not a lot of laughs in Cormac McCarthy in general. Although who knows, he might be a real cut-up if you actually get to meet him.

Oh yeah. That's why I didn't want to hide behind a paper-thin stand-in. Granted, when I did Beg the Question, or serialized it as Minimum Wage, I was looking back more. I was portraying a guy in his early twenties and when I started it I was in my early thirties. I at least had a little bit of hindsight. But it was a work of fiction. I took an earlier relationship of mine, and events from various parts of my life, and conflated them and mixed and matched and took friends from one period of my life and put them back into a different period and took other people out. It was realistic but it was not autobiography. That's why I referred to it as a roman a clef because it's realistic but it's not real.

With From the Ashes, what I wanted to do was something that was way truer to the way I am and my relationship with my wife, but make the setting completely fictional. I think it's a lot truer to who I am and so forth, but it's guarded by the setting, so I can portray the kind of loving relationship that I have with my wife. I wanted to depict that. I've been with Michele for almost twenty years now and she's never really gotten to be in any of my comics, not that that's necessarily such a great prize. [laughs] Some people would say, "keep me out of your goddamn comics. I don't want you to portray me." But she was happy with the inclusion finally after all these years, especially since I think I portrayed her much as she is. A very smart, capable, kind person who can kick ass if she has to.

She loved the way I drew her hair. She said that the post-apocalypse was very good to her hair. I made it a little fuller than it is. She's got beautiful red hair but I kind of really pumped it out. She said that's better than whatever hair product she uses.

But I did consult her. Her main caveat was, don't draw me naked. [laughs] It was a good exercise in self-control. I've never been very good at keeping nudity out of my work. And I think in some ways that's hurt me with some more conservative comic retailers, but with this one, they don't have to worry about that. Of course if I'm doing an interview on SuicideGirls, the conservative comic retailers aren't going to be reading this interview anyway so they won't know. [laughs]

Yeah, not anymore. People kind of forget what the word "comic" means.

Thank god for Peter Bagge. He's got a great collection out of strips he did for Reason magazine. Though I generally find libertarian philosophy a bit appalling, he's a good libertarian because at least he's funny about it and I don't think he's really trying to preach. But at least Pete Bagge still does funny stuff. There are a few practitioners. One of my all-time favorites is a friend of mine named John Kerschbaum. Have you seen his book, Petey and Pussy?

It's so good. Please get it. This is my big shout out/plug. Kerschbaum is the guy out there who can reduce me to tears when I'm reading his stuff because I'm laughing so hard, and that is rare. He is just so damn good. But yeah, generally, I think comics are a little serious these days.

Part of it's because I like writing. I finally sold my second novel and it's way more serious than my comics work. I think part of the reason I tend to write funny, and of course funny is debatable, some people might not think I'm funny at all, but when I do comics is because I think I have a comical art style. I don't think my drawing would lend itself to deep drama. I can have a moment or two here and there that are pensive but generally I think I draw in a funny way. With the writing I can just write serious. There's no visual to kind of, in a way, limit me.

Ideally what I'd like to do would be to alternate. I'd love to do a graphic novel one year and a straight prose novel the next and repeat. That would great because then I could do both things that I love. I don't think it really had to do with my trying to figure out what and where my audience is. I think there's always going to be an audience out there who likes humor and there's always going to be people out there who just want stuff very serious and somber. I'm not the guy, at least in terms of my comic work, for the serious and somber. That holds no interest for me to create. Some of it's fun for me to read, but that's not what I want to do. For the prose I don't mind getting serious although even there I like to have some gallows humor mixed in.

I think a lot of comics now, especially the younger generation of comic practitioners, and I don't mean mainstream stuff obviously, but a lot of people coming in and doing more personal stuff have a very different sensibility. I'm not saying it's a good sensibility or a bad one, but it's a different one, and I think the audience that's coming in with their work definitely reflects it. I've said that a lot of the new comics to me seem like poetry. Coming out of my mouth that sounds like a put-down, but I think it's true. It's that sort of attempt at high art. I just want to tell entertaining stories. I've never had any aspirations to creating high art. If it happens by accident, great, but it's definitely not anything I set out to do. I try to do really good work and I try to do entertaining work but I don't think it's ever going to be confused for high art.

I had a false start back in 2003 at doing a narrative where I was just doing the art first and would write the story later. I did about twenty full color drawings for that and I liked them but I didn't really know exactly where it was going, so I abandoned it. Then in 2006 I started doing a series of drawings again with no plot written, but obviously sequential. Once again, wasn't sure where I was going to go with it and what I was going to do with these drawings so I put it aside. I started an art blog, so I posted some of the drawings that ended up in Connective Tissue on this blog and Gary [Groth, publisher of Fantagraphics Books] sent me an email saying he really liked these drawings. For Gary to actually send me an email and tell me that he liked something, I knew he must really like it because he doesn't necessarily reach out and touch you, as the saying used to go.

I thought, okay, Gary's interested, that saves me some trouble of trying to make a pitch so I just shot him an email back. I thanked him for the nice comments and said, "Hey I've got this idea. I've got a bunch more of these drawings." At that point I probably had about 25 or 30 already done, but I'd only posted about five of them because I didn't want to give it all away. He said yes and I said this is what I want to do, where I reverse-engineer the prose then of course do a little more art to make the prose make sense with the art. Basically it was an experiment.

Everything I've ever done I wrote first and did the art for it second, so I thought it would be fun to try doing it the other way around. I think it worked out nicely. I like how odd and dreamlike it is. I've also always had a fascination with Alice in Wonderland and Wizard of Oz and those down-the-rabbit-hole kinds of stories where you take a normal person and then put them in this totally trippy environment. And I didn't behave myself at all because as you've seen it's got abundant nudity in it so that one's sort of truer to my nature.

That's just generally my approach. I think that is why Philip K Dick is my favorite author, because he took such regular people and threw them into the fantastic. I always like a mix. I don't want everything to be fantastic. I think that's why a lot of fantasy novels don't just hold any appeal for me because everything's fantastical.

I did a Hellboy story when they were doing Hellboy Tales. It was basically Hellboy doing battle with a vending machine. That's where my head goes. Hellboy's my favorite comic, but I thought, let's just frustrate him with something completely workaday. He fights monsters all the time and he beats them, what would beat him? A vending machine. That's the one thing he wouldn't be able to work his way around.

I did a Star Wars story for Star Wars Tales and they basically said to me, you can use anything in the Star Wars universe, any character, any alien, any anything. I chose the Jawas and I did a story called Fred Jawa, Consumer Advocate, which was about a Jawa who shows up after the robot traders come to hawk extended warranties. This is the way my brain is wired. I like genre stuff. I love horror, I love sci-fi. But then I like to take it down a peg or I like to take reality and move it up a peg. That's where From the Ashes comes from. It's just the way I like to play with things.

A little bit. It's still early in the process. It's a horror novel. It's more serious than Bottomfeeder. This one has less humor. It's a book with zombies, but I don't want to say it's a zombie novel 'cause I think that makes it sound more action-packed. It's basically about a group of survivors holed-up in an apartment building with a supermarket across the street from them that they can't get to because of the zombies. It's really more about the survivors. The survivors could be on a desert island and the ocean could be the zombies. It's just something to keep them from what they need. And then a mysterious element happens and that's where I really don't want to start giving away too much.

I don't know if you're familiar with Dennis Potter at all? He wrote The Singing Detective and things like that? I'm not putting myself in his exalted company, but the approach would probably be more Dennis Potter than George Romero -- no disrespect to Romero, who's one of my heroes. Again, what I wanted to do was take regular people and put them in a fantastic situation. That's hardly unique to my approach but I think that's what most horror is. The author thinks what would it be like and they can't help but think what would it be like if this happened to me. And then they just make it happen to other people. I think about zombies a lot. [laughs] Zombies and the apocalypse. I have a very cheery inner life.

It's funny, I was telling this friend about a dream I'd had in which all the doctors in the world had gone insane and just started cutting people up on the streets with scalpels and performing amputations and blood was everywhere and limbs were everywhere and that wasn't a nightmare. It was just one of my dreams. I'd had a nightmare which had to do with me stumbling across a friend of mine having an affair. His girlfriend didn't know about it and I got so upset that this friend who I thought was in a good relationship was having an affair. I actually woke up from that one really upset. Nightmares for me have a more emotional core. Blood, gore, horror, the end of the world, that's just par for the course. I guess what I'm saying is, I'm fucked up, can you help me doctor?

Just send me some bills. I'll take care of them.

And I'm sure I'll come back to them

And worst selling.

I finally thought I had a hit and I think because the marketing was the sum total of zero for that, nobody even knew it existed. That book's an incredible frustration to me because I thought this one is much more accessible in many ways, provided you like children and disemboweling.

My biggest hope for that book was to have it turned into a video game, which I still hope will happen. I'm not sure how to go about making that happen, but I can't think of anything more fun than doing a survival horror game with a bunch of prepubescent kids armed to the teeth with machetes and shotguns. That would great and I think video games are the last bastion of getting away with stuff, except for comics.

In terms of the television, the only ones who get away with it are the guys on South Park. They have some nasty stuff happen on that show. Those guys are my heroes. Getting the quote from Trey Parker for From the Ashes was such a thrill.

No one was more shocked than me. And for no good reason. But let's not dwell on the negative -- says the guy who lives the apocalypse in his head all the time. Let's be optimistic, please.

I think by the time I do a book that's just pure despair, that'll be the hit that finally makes me. I Give Up will be the title of the book. Or What More Do You Want From Me? Just have a picture of me with my wrists slit on the cover and my heart on my sleeve. With the word "hooray" in bold type.

I'm always working. I disappeared for a couple of years. 2007-8 virtually nothing came out, but I was working on stuff. Unfortunately a large part of working is trying to sell publishers on stuff. With From the Ashes, I was really happy to get a new publisher interested, IDW, because I haven't worked for them before. It's always exciting to work with somebody new and it's been a good working relationship with them, so hopefully I'll do more for them. I've got ideas for a whole bunch more comics or graphics novels. There's one that I've been dying to do for years set in Hell that I hope is my next project. I also, prose-wise, have a sequel to Bottomfeeder that I really want to do.

In terms of how many comics I've put out, it's largely how successful I've been at finding homes for them. Since I do stuff that is a little off the beaten path it's always harder to find someone willing to take a chance. With the exception of Recess Pieces, I've never brought a project to someone saying this is a guaranteed bestseller. I've always thought that there's a bigger audience for my work than I've reached but it's a matter of hipping them to it. I'm making a more concerted effort these days by using the internet as much as possible.

I think about throwing up all the time. Sorry. Bad joke. My friend Dean Haspiel runs a site called Act-i-vate and he's been trying to get me to put stuff up there for a long time. I think a lot of my resistance is that I just don't like reading comics on the web. I like paper. I'm very old-fashioned that way. But if you're going to be in this modern world I suppose it's a good idea to get onboard, so who knows, maybe I will start previewing stuff. I've got my own website, too, so I could always put stuff there. I haven't thought that far ahead.

...How many minutes before they started drinking their own urine. That gives you a pretty good idea of where things are going to go with the comic. In the next issue you encounter the cannibals eating Anthony Bourdain. If that doesn't hook somebody I don't know what will.

Oh yeah. They're eating him because that's the way they're honoring him. They think that's what he would be doing. We discover they're not just cannibals, they're foodies. They're just seeing the apocalypse as one big outdoor buffet where they're getting to try stuff they never got to try before because it was too exotic.

Mmmm. Human thigh. Yay cannibalism!