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Daniel Clowes
By Daniel Robert Epstein
Sep 11, 2005
It’s been a big year for comic book creators in the movies with Frank Miller co-directing Sin City and the Fantastic Four movie being such a big hit. It was going to get even better with the reteaming of Terry Zwigoff with Daniel Clowes on Art School Confidential. But since that movie has been delayed we’ll have to tide ourselves over with Clowes’ newest hardcover book, Ice Haven.
Buy Ice Haven
Daniel Robert Epstein: Was all the material in Ice Haven originally in Eightball?
Daniel Clowes: Not a lot of it. Probably 90 percent of it was there, but I went back and changed little things. Things that probably only I would notice. Certain words and any little drawings that irritated me after they were in publication. It was the kind of thing where after I sent the comic away to the printer, I instantly had all these small ideas that would’ve made it 80 percent better for me and I was like “Damn. Why didn’t I get a chance to do that?” Then when I was able to do the book, I was actually able to put these little things in. Mostly the ending of the book, which was on the inside back cover of book collection. The little thing with the character David Goldberg that made it much stronger for me.
DRE:
How come Ice Haven is being distributed solely by Pantheon Books instead of Fantagraphics?
DC:
I did David Boring with Pantheon and they got the book in a whole different world of stores than Fantagraphics normally does. Fantagraphics at the time wasn’t going through Norton and so they were getting all books only pretty much in comic stores and progressive independent bookstores. Pantheon was getting them in Barnes & Noble and stuff like that. It was interesting to me, to see how a book like mine would do in a world like that. So with Ice Haven, I was trying to get it in the mainstream world a little bit.
DRE:
Do you think you’ve picked up new fans as a result or was it the Ghost World movie that did that?
DC:
I’m sure that movie was seen by several million people and the best-selling of my books is in the hundred thousands, so that’s a huge difference. I’m sure many more people have seen the movie than have read any of my books. Especially with it being on –the Independent Film Channel all the time. I can’t even imagine how many people see it just flipping the channels.
DRE:
So Ice Haven definitely keeps up with your stalking theme.
DC:
[laughs] Yes, it runs through my work.
DRE:
Obviously you’re an observer, but I bet you never really stalked anybody.
DC:
Well how do you know that? Have you checked my police records?
DRE:
Maybe in your younger days?
DC:
Not exactly, but it’s something that always occurred to me as an interesting prospect. I always liked the idea of applying the rules of detection to somebody not necessarily related to a crime, just sort of to figure out what makes them tick. There’s a store in San Francisco called The Spy Shop that sells things like briefcases with hidden microphones and things like that. Every time I pass by I think, what a great thing that would be for a writer. You could go to restaurants and listen in on people’s conversations across the room. It would just be great. So it all comes from that.
DRE:
I always wanted to get bugs, little microphones.
DC:
Yeah, believe me. I think about that all the time.
DRE:
I don’t know about other states but you can’t buy them in New York. You have to buy the kit to make them.
DC:
Oh, is that right? That I didn’t know. I’ve never actually gone so far as to look into it, but I’m sure with the Internet it’s not hard to find.
DRE:
I worked in an office and I thought bugs would really have helped me out in an office situation.
DC:
Oh, yeah.
DRE:
I don’t think you’ve worked in an office for many years.
DC:
No, it hasn’t happened yet [laughs].
DRE:
I’m sure you have an unlisted phone number and things like that, because you’re pretty popular with a certain kind of crowd that might be into stalking.
DC:
I have been stalked to some degree. Back in my early days, I used to actually publish my home address in my comics, just because I was too cheap to get a post office box. So once some crazy girl drove all the way from Cleveland and camped out on my doorstep and just sat there sobbing for like two days. Stuff like that you want to avoid.
DRE:
Was David Boring serialized in Eightball?
DC:
It was. It was three episodes and I was kind of making fun of the fact that I was taking so long in between episodes. I had these absurd cliffhangers in between each episode. Like the first chapter ends with a bullet heading towards the reader. Then the next issue came out like eleven months later or something. It’s the world’s slowest bullet.
DRE:
Why does Ice Haven feel less structured?
DC:
It was just a different way of looking at things. My original impetus for Ice Haven was that I bought a whole bunch of old like Sunday newspaper comic sections on eBay and I got really obsessed with that format. I thought it was such a great thing to have all these disparate styles together in the same booklet. I thought it would be great if you could somehow do a story that had that quality and diversity of all these different styles to tell one story. So that was where Ice Haven came from.
DRE:
You use a few different drawing styles in Ice Haven, but you really seem to have perfected the one that you normally use.
DC:
I don’t even know which one that is. [laughs] Lately I’ve been lost on my own history.
DRE:
I was thinking of the one you used for David Boring.
DC:
That was my sort of film noirish photographic style or something. In Ice Haven, it’s a much looser, more cartoony thing. At least to me it looks much looser probably to everybody else it still looks exactly the same.
DRE:
It is looser. I guess that’s maybe a result of me looking at the coloring.
DC:
The coloring is very time consuming.
DRE:
Are you still developing new styles?
DC:
I feel like I’m always kind of trying to do something new and try to forget what I’ve done in the past and start over with each thing. I’ve found that’s the only way to work. I try not to live up to any expectations or to build on anything I’ve done before but start as though I’ve never done it before. Of course it always turns out in some ways to have similarities with everything I’ve done before, but I try not to think about that stuff because I find it very crippling.
DRE:
Have you done anything more with the Ice Haven characters?
DC:
No, they were all created just for that story. I have this sketchbook that I just fill with character ideas that are often just little one line things. Like the Random Wilder character might have started as a guy who is very polite to his neighbor, but secretly hates her and all his thought balloons are filled with hateful indictments. It starts as something as simple as that. Then later when I’m putting together a story, I take all these little character ideas and see which ones actually work in the story and enlarge them or discard them as they do or don’t fit into the story.
DRE:
Has it become easier to create these stories?
DC:
I wouldn’t say it’s ever been difficult. It’s time consuming, but a big part of the process is to sit with these characters for a long time before actually committing them to paper to really get to know and understand them as real people before trying to define them on paper. Right now I’m starting a new story and I’ve spent the last two months just kind of sitting in my room thinking about these characters. It’s an odd thing to do. You have very little evidence that you’ve actually done any work all day and yet I have this kind of entire world in my head that I’m almost ready to start drawing.
I spend months and months thinking about these characters. I find that since comics are very difficult to edit after the fact, it’s behooves you to know what you’re going to do before you sit down and get started. Whereas working on movie scripts, you can just plunge into it and rewrite it any number of times so the characters become clearer with each draft. Eventually they come out and you get a sense of what they’re about. But in the comics, you can’t really do that. You can’t go back and redraw them over and over unless you’re completely out of your mind [laughs]. It’s a much better idea to know where you’re going before you start.
DRE:
Was that your cell phone ringing?
DC:
Yes it was. I work out of the house a lot and we have a baby, so I must be reached by my wife.
DRE:
That’s interesting. I would’ve thought you would’ve foregone cell phones.
DC:
Believe me, I held out as long as I could. It’s actually funny, every month we get the bill and there’s a couple of months where I used it a total of three minutes by myself. I was like “Can I get a plan where if we use under five minutes it’s even cheaper?”
DRE:
Was it right after you got a Hollywood agent that you had to get a cell phone?
DC:
No, I actually didn’t get it until the baby was born. That was the demarcation.
DRE:
Yeah but then all of a sudden you realize that maybe you never could’ve lived without it.
DC:
Well if I lived in LA. I absolutely would’ve had one for years, because if you’re stuck in the car for three or four hours a day, it gives you something to do. Here I never drive anywhere so I don’t have to worry about that.
DRE:
Do you ever get writer’s block?
DC:
I never have but I always expect to. I always work as though I’m going to get it. [laughs] I try to get down all my ideas while I can while I’m still excited about them. I always anticipate that one day they’ll just all stop, but so far I’ve never had any time where I couldn’t work for that reason. It’s always been just because a story was taking longer to develop than I wanted it to or something like that, but I’ve never had it where I was just out of ideas and had no idea what to do. That seems like a terrifying prospect.
DRE:
Is there anything of yours that you’ll never reprint?
DC:
Oh, there’s stuff I did when I was like 18 or 19 that I would not want to reprint, but I don’t know. I always find it kind of irritating when people have every single line they ever drew in print at all times. I try to keep it so that there’s only the most recent stuff from the last ten years or so. But I only do it just because people bother me about it so much. [laughs] It’s easier to do it than to not do it.
DRE:
Harry Naybors stuck me as the most personal character in that book.
DC:
In some ways he is and in some ways he started off as kind of a cheap joke. I just thought “I’ll make fun of the fact that there really are no sort of distinguished comic book critics. I’ll make it as though this guy has the nicest apartment and in Ice Haven he’s sort of a celebrity because he’s a comic book critic.” Then as it went on, I realized that I wasn’t all that interested in that particular joke and then I started to give him thoughts that I have on a day-to-day basis when I’m sitting at the drawing board. Like “Why am I doing comics? What’s the point? What is it about comics that makes me do them?” I let him voice some of those thoughts and then as the story progressed I realized I had made him a fan of my work. He’s sort of obsessed with me. I thought since there are no critics out there who are actually obsessed with me, I had to create my own.
DRE:
I saw that there’s an Ice Haven screensaver. Did you create that?
DC:
There is? I don’t even know about it. I wouldn’t have a clue how to do that.
DRE:
Just by coincidence two nights ago I couldn’t remember the name of a character from Cracked magazine.
DC:
That’s a sad night.
DRE:
I think my wife was late coming home from work I think.
DC:
What was the character?
DRE:
I think it was Souped-Up Man, the parody of Superman.
But I typed Cracked Magazine into Google and your name popped up. I didn’t realize that it was you who drew The Uggly Family. I used to read that all the time.
DC:
Really? My god.
It’s only in the last few years I’ve been meeting younger people who actually grew up reading that. When we were doing it we had no contact with the 13 year olds who read it. We had no idea anybody was actually reading that thing and now 15 years later, they’re all adults and have these fond memories of it. It’s kind of amazing.
That’s something I would actually like to reprint because it’s never been collected in any form but I never got back any of the artwork. But a couple years ago they had that Anthrax scare in Florida and that’s where all the Cracked artwork was stored. I heard it was all destroyed including the film too. Now the only way we can reprint it is to go get actual copies of Cracked and get somebody to fix them up on a computer, which would be unbelievably time consuming.
DRE:
How did you retain the rights to that stuff?
DC:
The editor at the time was an old friend of mine and he sort of tricked the publishers into granting the artists their own copyright. That’s how they got Don Martin to work for Cracked for a in the mid-‘80s because he was sick of giving up his copyright to MAD. So I co-own the Uggly Family along with the writer, Mort Todd.
DRE:
Oh, I remember that name.
DC:
Mort Todd was actually the pseudonym of the editor, so he was giving himself work under a pseudonym. It was probably illegal.
DRE:
Was Cracked a good gig?
DC:
Yeah, that was like my first paying job when I was 23 years old. At the time it paid incredibly well.
DRE:
It was just like a funny coincidence. I’m glad I brought it up, especially seeing as you heard about something two weeks ago.
DC:
Yeah, we were just talking about how we’d like to do a collection of that and trying to figure out how in the world we were going to do that without any art or film to print from.
DRE:
It’s too bad the film was destroyed.
DC:
Yeah and it was printed so hideously by Mafioso in Connecticut or something. It’s the shoddiest print job so it would take some poor computer technician the better part of a year to clean up the art, but maybe there’s somebody out there who’ll do it.
DRE:
So Fantagraphics would definitely not pay for that?
DC:
I don’t know. Maybe they will. We’ll see how extensive it is. Maybe it’s not as bad as I think. Certainly I’m not doing it, I can tell you that.
DRE:
Maybe if you can find a Cracked that wasn’t folded up and shoved in some kid’s back pocket.
DC:
I know. Even my copies look like they went through the washer a couple of times.
DRE:
I haven’t read the new issue of Eightball. I’m a guy that waits for the trade paperbacks.
DC:
As many people do now. That’s why we do the books.
DRE:
What’s Death-Ray?
DC:
Death-Ray is about a teenage superhero in the 1970’s who develops superpowers and gets a death-ray that can make people disappear without a trace. He goes through this kind of teenage trauma in the ‘70s and then puts it away for twenty years and then in present day, he kind of gets back into it a little bit. He comes back out of retirement towards the end. A very superhero story. It was just in one extra long big issue.
DRE:
Will you do anything more with it?
DC:
I have an idea for another story I’d like to do with the character that I would add to the book, but that wouldn’t be happening for anytime soon.
DRE:
I saw you had a “Special thanks” in the credits of Bad Santa. Did you work on the screenplay at all?
DC:
I did not. I had almost nothing to do with it. I think I read an early draft and told him that he shouldn’t make it, but I think that’s about it. I was really Terry Zwigoff’s sounding board. We worked on Ghost World together and had a great time so we had this real camaraderie. Then he went off and worked on Bad Santa and had nobody that he could trust on the entire film. So he would call me at three in the morning and tell me the horror stories of working on that film. It was a thanks for being his psychiatrist.
DRE:
[laughs] Why didn’t you think he should make it? Too dirty?
DC:
No, that was the part I liked about it. The original script was actually much more extreme and much funnier, but my fear was that they weren’t going to let him make that version of the script and they did to some degree. But they did cut out a lot of stuff that I thought was really funny.
DRE:
Did you see Badder Santa [on DVD]?
DC:
No, Terry wouldn’t let me see it because that isn’t his film at all. That’s just some hack editor putting in longer takes of scenes. I thought that was a real insult to Terry. That’s not his cut at all. It stinks because it seems like he had something to do with that but it’s just a marketing ploy.
DRE:
I heard he might do a director’s cut.
DC:
His director’s cut is by far the best version of the film. I saw it early on with a big crowd and everybody loved it. Then the studio wound up changing some stuff around. I really hope some day somebody will release his director’s cut.
DRE:
Did you like the version that came out in the theatres?
DC:
Yeah, for what it was I thought he did an amazing job. I thought there were so many funny parts to the film and just knowing how amused he must’ve been made it fun for me to watch. It’s painful when they go in and change stuff around that doesn’t really make any sense. They added scenes that just don’t make any sense.
DRE:
When is the film Art School Confidential coming out?
DC:
It’s the last film made by United Artists, which is owned by MGM.
DRE:
Which Sony owns now.
DC:
We were scheduled to be out in September [2005] and then the deal with Sony went through faster than they thought it was going to. Sony took over and then all the sudden a whole new team of people is handling the film. They’ve now decided that there’s no way they have time to promote it for a 2005 release. So they’re going to put it out in I think March of 2006.
DRE:
Oh, so it won’t make the cut for this year’s Oscars.
DC:
No but I don’t know if it’s an Oscar film. It’s the kind of film that the Oscars don’t notice until five years later and they go “Oh yeah. Maybe that was good.”
DRE:
Yeah, but you got nominated once so there’s always a chance.
DC:
I guess there’s a chance. But we’re very proud of this film and we just want it to have a chance with an audience. So we’re happy that we’ll actually have time to promote it and it’s not just going to get thrown into a couple of theaters and have to compete with all the October Oscar bait. We still have our own chance in March to really do something.
DRE:
Is the film all done?
DC:
Yes it’s been done for a few weeks. We finished the sound mix a couple of weeks ago.
DRE:
Are you producer on it?
DC:
I was a producer. I have like five credits in the end of the film. I did paintings. I designed the main titles. It’s almost like a real mom-and-pop business, these Clowes/Zwigoff films. We all just pitch in and do all these weird tasks as we’re making them.
DRE:
Art School Confidential is being scrutinized by on the Internet . I’ve people who are already saying “Didn’t they already do this kind of thing in Ghost World? Blah blah blah.”
DC:
It’s nothing like that. We did do that thing in Ghost World and this isn’t at all like a cheap joke about art school. It’s really a twisted love story/comedy set in a world of art school. It’s not about making fun of bad art and pretentious art teachers at all. It’s about these very specific characters. In some ways it’s more like David Boring than it is like about the Art School Confidential comic strip.
DRE:
Is it as depressing?
DC:
No, I don’t think it’s depressing. It’s got a comedy underpinning to it with an obsessive love story at its center.
DRE:
Is it rated R?
DC:
Oh, without a doubt yeah. I wouldn’t be surprised if we hit trouble trying to get it rated R. It has nude modeling in it.
DRE:
Do you do any rewriting of other people’s screenplays?
DC:
I’ve been asked to do them. I always think that it would be really fun and easy money. Then they send me the scripts and they’re always so horrible. My advice is always to kill the main characters off on page five and start a new movie on page six.
DRE:
Do you still get paid for that?
DC:
No, I’ve never gotten a nickel for that. I’ve spent many hours reading horrible scripts and never made a dime. I finally told my agent, “I don’t think I’m a rewrite man unfortunately.” I can only do my own thing really.
DRE:
Was it tempting?
DC:
Yeah, because it’s unreal how much money they pay. You get paid by the week and it’s just outrageously over the top. It’s more money than the actual writer who spent nine months working on the script gets paid. I just cannot bring myself to do it. Even if something was really good, I don’t think I could do it. I can’t get in the mindset of thinking about a film or a story when it’s that far along. I have to be there from the beginning.
DRE:
Is Backyard Resistance still going on?
DC:
I am possibly turning in the first draft of the script tomorrow. It’s actually not called Backyard Resistance. That was some title that somebody at one of the agencies made up and told Variety.
DRE:
Oh good, because it sounds like some kind of Colombian rebel thing.
DC:
Yeah or like a gay porn movie. I thought that [producer] Scott Rudin had come up with the title and they thought that I had come up with the title. We had a meeting right after the Variety announcement and we were looking at each other like “How come you’re not telling me about the title?” Then we realized that none of us had come up with it. It was probably some intern who answered the phone. We have no idea. As a friend of mine said, “It doesn’t even make sense to the nerd in me, because there is no resistance in Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
DRE:
I would imagine that though it’s might not be your favorite kind of movie but you still liked Raiders of The Lost Ark.
DC:
I did. I think Raiders is really the last really good action film, because it’s sort of based in reality. Everything that happens in the film is possible for a human being to do, whereas films after that, all the characters became superheroes and were doing things that were out of the realm of possibility. Raiders is really a down to earth film in a certain way. It has a certain something like no other film like that really has. I hadn’t seen it since I was 20 years old, but to see the version these kids made, I got very caught up in the story just from watching these crazy12 year old kids in ridiculous costumes running around and shooting at each other. There’s something very affecting about it.
DRE:
Did Rudin say why he wanted you to write it?
DC:
I think he had seen Ghost World and knew that I could handle adolescent characters. Also he had read the script for Art School Confidential and were fairly impressed with that. I think that was all there was to it. I think they wanted somebody who would come to it with a kind of a different sensibility and who wouldn’t bring kind of an oversentimentalized feel to it. It would be very easy to make it a weepy sentimental film. Which isn’t necessary because all the emotion is already built into the material. You don’t have to enhance it at all.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
It’s been a big year for comic book creators in the movies with Frank Miller co-directing Sin City and the Fantastic Four movie being such a big hit. It was going to get even better with the reteaming of Terry Zwigoff with Daniel Clowes on Art School Confidential. But since that movie has been delayed we’ll have to tide ourselves over with Clowes’ newest hardcover book, Ice Haven.
Buy Ice Haven
Daniel Robert Epstein: Was all the material in Ice Haven originally in Eightball?
Daniel Clowes: Not a lot of it. Probably 90 percent of it was there, but I went back and changed little things. Things that probably only I would notice. Certain words and any little drawings that irritated me after they were in publication. It was the kind of thing where after I sent the comic away to the printer, I instantly had all these small ideas that would’ve made it 80 percent better for me and I was like “Damn. Why didn’t I get a chance to do that?” Then when I was able to do the book, I was actually able to put these little things in. Mostly the ending of the book, which was on the inside back cover of book collection. The little thing with the character David Goldberg that made it much stronger for me.
DRE:
How come Ice Haven is being distributed solely by Pantheon Books instead of Fantagraphics?
DC:
I did David Boring with Pantheon and they got the book in a whole different world of stores than Fantagraphics normally does. Fantagraphics at the time wasn’t going through Norton and so they were getting all books only pretty much in comic stores and progressive independent bookstores. Pantheon was getting them in Barnes & Noble and stuff like that. It was interesting to me, to see how a book like mine would do in a world like that. So with Ice Haven, I was trying to get it in the mainstream world a little bit.
DRE:
Do you think you’ve picked up new fans as a result or was it the Ghost World movie that did that?
DC:
I’m sure that movie was seen by several million people and the best-selling of my books is in the hundred thousands, so that’s a huge difference. I’m sure many more people have seen the movie than have read any of my books. Especially with it being on –the Independent Film Channel all the time. I can’t even imagine how many people see it just flipping the channels.
DRE:
So Ice Haven definitely keeps up with your stalking theme.
DC:
[laughs] Yes, it runs through my work.
DRE:
Obviously you’re an observer, but I bet you never really stalked anybody.
DC:
Well how do you know that? Have you checked my police records?
DRE:
Maybe in your younger days?
DC:
Not exactly, but it’s something that always occurred to me as an interesting prospect. I always liked the idea of applying the rules of detection to somebody not necessarily related to a crime, just sort of to figure out what makes them tick. There’s a store in San Francisco called The Spy Shop that sells things like briefcases with hidden microphones and things like that. Every time I pass by I think, what a great thing that would be for a writer. You could go to restaurants and listen in on people’s conversations across the room. It would just be great. So it all comes from that.
DRE:
I always wanted to get bugs, little microphones.
DC:
Yeah, believe me. I think about that all the time.
DRE:
I don’t know about other states but you can’t buy them in New York. You have to buy the kit to make them.
DC:
Oh, is that right? That I didn’t know. I’ve never actually gone so far as to look into it, but I’m sure with the Internet it’s not hard to find.
DRE:
I worked in an office and I thought bugs would really have helped me out in an office situation.
DC:
Oh, yeah.
DRE:
I don’t think you’ve worked in an office for many years.
DC:
No, it hasn’t happened yet [laughs].
DRE:
I’m sure you have an unlisted phone number and things like that, because you’re pretty popular with a certain kind of crowd that might be into stalking.
DC:
I have been stalked to some degree. Back in my early days, I used to actually publish my home address in my comics, just because I was too cheap to get a post office box. So once some crazy girl drove all the way from Cleveland and camped out on my doorstep and just sat there sobbing for like two days. Stuff like that you want to avoid.
DRE:
Was David Boring serialized in Eightball?
DC:
It was. It was three episodes and I was kind of making fun of the fact that I was taking so long in between episodes. I had these absurd cliffhangers in between each episode. Like the first chapter ends with a bullet heading towards the reader. Then the next issue came out like eleven months later or something. It’s the world’s slowest bullet.
DRE:
Why does Ice Haven feel less structured?
DC:
It was just a different way of looking at things. My original impetus for Ice Haven was that I bought a whole bunch of old like Sunday newspaper comic sections on eBay and I got really obsessed with that format. I thought it was such a great thing to have all these disparate styles together in the same booklet. I thought it would be great if you could somehow do a story that had that quality and diversity of all these different styles to tell one story. So that was where Ice Haven came from.
DRE:
You use a few different drawing styles in Ice Haven, but you really seem to have perfected the one that you normally use.
DC:
I don’t even know which one that is. [laughs] Lately I’ve been lost on my own history.
DRE:
I was thinking of the one you used for David Boring.
DC:
That was my sort of film noirish photographic style or something. In Ice Haven, it’s a much looser, more cartoony thing. At least to me it looks much looser probably to everybody else it still looks exactly the same.
DRE:
It is looser. I guess that’s maybe a result of me looking at the coloring.
DC:
The coloring is very time consuming.
DRE:
Are you still developing new styles?
DC:
I feel like I’m always kind of trying to do something new and try to forget what I’ve done in the past and start over with each thing. I’ve found that’s the only way to work. I try not to live up to any expectations or to build on anything I’ve done before but start as though I’ve never done it before. Of course it always turns out in some ways to have similarities with everything I’ve done before, but I try not to think about that stuff because I find it very crippling.
DRE:
Have you done anything more with the Ice Haven characters?
DC:
No, they were all created just for that story. I have this sketchbook that I just fill with character ideas that are often just little one line things. Like the Random Wilder character might have started as a guy who is very polite to his neighbor, but secretly hates her and all his thought balloons are filled with hateful indictments. It starts as something as simple as that. Then later when I’m putting together a story, I take all these little character ideas and see which ones actually work in the story and enlarge them or discard them as they do or don’t fit into the story.
DRE:
Has it become easier to create these stories?
DC:
I wouldn’t say it’s ever been difficult. It’s time consuming, but a big part of the process is to sit with these characters for a long time before actually committing them to paper to really get to know and understand them as real people before trying to define them on paper. Right now I’m starting a new story and I’ve spent the last two months just kind of sitting in my room thinking about these characters. It’s an odd thing to do. You have very little evidence that you’ve actually done any work all day and yet I have this kind of entire world in my head that I’m almost ready to start drawing.
I spend months and months thinking about these characters. I find that since comics are very difficult to edit after the fact, it’s behooves you to know what you’re going to do before you sit down and get started. Whereas working on movie scripts, you can just plunge into it and rewrite it any number of times so the characters become clearer with each draft. Eventually they come out and you get a sense of what they’re about. But in the comics, you can’t really do that. You can’t go back and redraw them over and over unless you’re completely out of your mind [laughs]. It’s a much better idea to know where you’re going before you start.
I spend months and months thinking about these characters. I find that since comics are very difficult to edit after the fact, it’s behooves you to know what you’re going to do before you sit down and get started. Whereas working on movie scripts, you can just plunge into it and rewrite it any number of times so the characters become clearer with each draft. Eventually they come out and you get a sense of what they’re about. But in the comics, you can’t really do that. You can’t go back and redraw them over and over unless you’re completely out of your mind [laughs]. It’s a much better idea to know where you’re going before you start.
DRE:
Was that your cell phone ringing?
DC:
Yes it was. I work out of the house a lot and we have a baby, so I must be reached by my wife.
DRE:
That’s interesting. I would’ve thought you would’ve foregone cell phones.
DC:
Believe me, I held out as long as I could. It’s actually funny, every month we get the bill and there’s a couple of months where I used it a total of three minutes by myself. I was like “Can I get a plan where if we use under five minutes it’s even cheaper?”
DRE:
Was it right after you got a Hollywood agent that you had to get a cell phone?
DC:
No, I actually didn’t get it until the baby was born. That was the demarcation.
DRE:
Yeah but then all of a sudden you realize that maybe you never could’ve lived without it.
DC:
Well if I lived in LA. I absolutely would’ve had one for years, because if you’re stuck in the car for three or four hours a day, it gives you something to do. Here I never drive anywhere so I don’t have to worry about that.
DRE:
Do you ever get writer’s block?
DC:
I never have but I always expect to. I always work as though I’m going to get it. [laughs] I try to get down all my ideas while I can while I’m still excited about them. I always anticipate that one day they’ll just all stop, but so far I’ve never had any time where I couldn’t work for that reason. It’s always been just because a story was taking longer to develop than I wanted it to or something like that, but I’ve never had it where I was just out of ideas and had no idea what to do. That seems like a terrifying prospect.
DRE:
Is there anything of yours that you’ll never reprint?
DC:
Oh, there’s stuff I did when I was like 18 or 19 that I would not want to reprint, but I don’t know. I always find it kind of irritating when people have every single line they ever drew in print at all times. I try to keep it so that there’s only the most recent stuff from the last ten years or so. But I only do it just because people bother me about it so much. [laughs] It’s easier to do it than to not do it.
DRE:
Harry Naybors stuck me as the most personal character in that book.
DC:
In some ways he is and in some ways he started off as kind of a cheap joke. I just thought “I’ll make fun of the fact that there really are no sort of distinguished comic book critics. I’ll make it as though this guy has the nicest apartment and in Ice Haven he’s sort of a celebrity because he’s a comic book critic.” Then as it went on, I realized that I wasn’t all that interested in that particular joke and then I started to give him thoughts that I have on a day-to-day basis when I’m sitting at the drawing board. Like “Why am I doing comics? What’s the point? What is it about comics that makes me do them?” I let him voice some of those thoughts and then as the story progressed I realized I had made him a fan of my work. He’s sort of obsessed with me. I thought since there are no critics out there who are actually obsessed with me, I had to create my own.
DRE:
I saw that there’s an Ice Haven screensaver. Did you create that?
DC:
There is? I don’t even know about it. I wouldn’t have a clue how to do that.
DRE:
Just by coincidence two nights ago I couldn’t remember the name of a character from Cracked magazine.
DC:
That’s a sad night.
DRE:
I think my wife was late coming home from work I think.
DC:
What was the character?
DRE:
I think it was Souped-Up Man, the parody of Superman.
But I typed Cracked Magazine into Google and your name popped up. I didn’t realize that it was you who drew The Uggly Family. I used to read that all the time.
But I typed Cracked Magazine into Google and your name popped up. I didn’t realize that it was you who drew The Uggly Family. I used to read that all the time.
DC:
Really? My god.
It’s only in the last few years I’ve been meeting younger people who actually grew up reading that. When we were doing it we had no contact with the 13 year olds who read it. We had no idea anybody was actually reading that thing and now 15 years later, they’re all adults and have these fond memories of it. It’s kind of amazing.
That’s something I would actually like to reprint because it’s never been collected in any form but I never got back any of the artwork. But a couple years ago they had that Anthrax scare in Florida and that’s where all the Cracked artwork was stored. I heard it was all destroyed including the film too. Now the only way we can reprint it is to go get actual copies of Cracked and get somebody to fix them up on a computer, which would be unbelievably time consuming.
It’s only in the last few years I’ve been meeting younger people who actually grew up reading that. When we were doing it we had no contact with the 13 year olds who read it. We had no idea anybody was actually reading that thing and now 15 years later, they’re all adults and have these fond memories of it. It’s kind of amazing.
That’s something I would actually like to reprint because it’s never been collected in any form but I never got back any of the artwork. But a couple years ago they had that Anthrax scare in Florida and that’s where all the Cracked artwork was stored. I heard it was all destroyed including the film too. Now the only way we can reprint it is to go get actual copies of Cracked and get somebody to fix them up on a computer, which would be unbelievably time consuming.
DRE:
How did you retain the rights to that stuff?
DC:
The editor at the time was an old friend of mine and he sort of tricked the publishers into granting the artists their own copyright. That’s how they got Don Martin to work for Cracked for a in the mid-‘80s because he was sick of giving up his copyright to MAD. So I co-own the Uggly Family along with the writer, Mort Todd.
DRE:
Oh, I remember that name.
DC:
Mort Todd was actually the pseudonym of the editor, so he was giving himself work under a pseudonym. It was probably illegal.
DRE:
Was Cracked a good gig?
DC:
Yeah, that was like my first paying job when I was 23 years old. At the time it paid incredibly well.
DRE:
It was just like a funny coincidence. I’m glad I brought it up, especially seeing as you heard about something two weeks ago.
DC:
Yeah, we were just talking about how we’d like to do a collection of that and trying to figure out how in the world we were going to do that without any art or film to print from.
DRE:
It’s too bad the film was destroyed.
DC:
Yeah and it was printed so hideously by Mafioso in Connecticut or something. It’s the shoddiest print job so it would take some poor computer technician the better part of a year to clean up the art, but maybe there’s somebody out there who’ll do it.
DRE:
So Fantagraphics would definitely not pay for that?
DC:
I don’t know. Maybe they will. We’ll see how extensive it is. Maybe it’s not as bad as I think. Certainly I’m not doing it, I can tell you that.
DRE:
Maybe if you can find a Cracked that wasn’t folded up and shoved in some kid’s back pocket.
DC:
I know. Even my copies look like they went through the washer a couple of times.
DRE:
I haven’t read the new issue of Eightball. I’m a guy that waits for the trade paperbacks.
DC:
As many people do now. That’s why we do the books.
DRE:
What’s Death-Ray?
DC:
Death-Ray is about a teenage superhero in the 1970’s who develops superpowers and gets a death-ray that can make people disappear without a trace. He goes through this kind of teenage trauma in the ‘70s and then puts it away for twenty years and then in present day, he kind of gets back into it a little bit. He comes back out of retirement towards the end. A very superhero story. It was just in one extra long big issue.
DRE:
Will you do anything more with it?
DC:
I have an idea for another story I’d like to do with the character that I would add to the book, but that wouldn’t be happening for anytime soon.
DRE:
I saw you had a “Special thanks” in the credits of Bad Santa. Did you work on the screenplay at all?
DC:
I did not. I had almost nothing to do with it. I think I read an early draft and told him that he shouldn’t make it, but I think that’s about it. I was really Terry Zwigoff’s sounding board. We worked on Ghost World together and had a great time so we had this real camaraderie. Then he went off and worked on Bad Santa and had nobody that he could trust on the entire film. So he would call me at three in the morning and tell me the horror stories of working on that film. It was a thanks for being his psychiatrist.
DRE:
[laughs] Why didn’t you think he should make it? Too dirty?
DC:
No, that was the part I liked about it. The original script was actually much more extreme and much funnier, but my fear was that they weren’t going to let him make that version of the script and they did to some degree. But they did cut out a lot of stuff that I thought was really funny.
DRE:
Did you see Badder Santa [on DVD]?
DC:
No, Terry wouldn’t let me see it because that isn’t his film at all. That’s just some hack editor putting in longer takes of scenes. I thought that was a real insult to Terry. That’s not his cut at all. It stinks because it seems like he had something to do with that but it’s just a marketing ploy.
DRE:
I heard he might do a director’s cut.
DC:
His director’s cut is by far the best version of the film. I saw it early on with a big crowd and everybody loved it. Then the studio wound up changing some stuff around. I really hope some day somebody will release his director’s cut.
DRE:
Did you like the version that came out in the theatres?
DC:
Yeah, for what it was I thought he did an amazing job. I thought there were so many funny parts to the film and just knowing how amused he must’ve been made it fun for me to watch. It’s painful when they go in and change stuff around that doesn’t really make any sense. They added scenes that just don’t make any sense.
DRE:
When is the film Art School Confidential coming out?
DC:
It’s the last film made by United Artists, which is owned by MGM.
DRE:
Which Sony owns now.
DC:
We were scheduled to be out in September [2005] and then the deal with Sony went through faster than they thought it was going to. Sony took over and then all the sudden a whole new team of people is handling the film. They’ve now decided that there’s no way they have time to promote it for a 2005 release. So they’re going to put it out in I think March of 2006.
DRE:
Oh, so it won’t make the cut for this year’s Oscars.
DC:
No but I don’t know if it’s an Oscar film. It’s the kind of film that the Oscars don’t notice until five years later and they go “Oh yeah. Maybe that was good.”
DRE:
Yeah, but you got nominated once so there’s always a chance.
DC:
I guess there’s a chance. But we’re very proud of this film and we just want it to have a chance with an audience. So we’re happy that we’ll actually have time to promote it and it’s not just going to get thrown into a couple of theaters and have to compete with all the October Oscar bait. We still have our own chance in March to really do something.
DRE:
Is the film all done?
DC:
Yes it’s been done for a few weeks. We finished the sound mix a couple of weeks ago.
DRE:
Are you producer on it?
DC:
I was a producer. I have like five credits in the end of the film. I did paintings. I designed the main titles. It’s almost like a real mom-and-pop business, these Clowes/Zwigoff films. We all just pitch in and do all these weird tasks as we’re making them.
DRE:
Art School Confidential is being scrutinized by on the Internet . I’ve people who are already saying “Didn’t they already do this kind of thing in Ghost World? Blah blah blah.”
DC:
It’s nothing like that. We did do that thing in Ghost World and this isn’t at all like a cheap joke about art school. It’s really a twisted love story/comedy set in a world of art school. It’s not about making fun of bad art and pretentious art teachers at all. It’s about these very specific characters. In some ways it’s more like David Boring than it is like about the Art School Confidential comic strip.
DRE:
Is it as depressing?
DC:
No, I don’t think it’s depressing. It’s got a comedy underpinning to it with an obsessive love story at its center.
DRE:
Is it rated R?
DC:
Oh, without a doubt yeah. I wouldn’t be surprised if we hit trouble trying to get it rated R. It has nude modeling in it.
DRE:
Do you do any rewriting of other people’s screenplays?
DC:
I’ve been asked to do them. I always think that it would be really fun and easy money. Then they send me the scripts and they’re always so horrible. My advice is always to kill the main characters off on page five and start a new movie on page six.
DRE:
Do you still get paid for that?
DC:
No, I’ve never gotten a nickel for that. I’ve spent many hours reading horrible scripts and never made a dime. I finally told my agent, “I don’t think I’m a rewrite man unfortunately.” I can only do my own thing really.
DRE:
Was it tempting?
DC:
Yeah, because it’s unreal how much money they pay. You get paid by the week and it’s just outrageously over the top. It’s more money than the actual writer who spent nine months working on the script gets paid. I just cannot bring myself to do it. Even if something was really good, I don’t think I could do it. I can’t get in the mindset of thinking about a film or a story when it’s that far along. I have to be there from the beginning.
DRE:
Is Backyard Resistance still going on?
DC:
I am possibly turning in the first draft of the script tomorrow. It’s actually not called Backyard Resistance. That was some title that somebody at one of the agencies made up and told Variety.
DRE:
Oh good, because it sounds like some kind of Colombian rebel thing.
DC:
Yeah or like a gay porn movie. I thought that [producer] Scott Rudin had come up with the title and they thought that I had come up with the title. We had a meeting right after the Variety announcement and we were looking at each other like “How come you’re not telling me about the title?” Then we realized that none of us had come up with it. It was probably some intern who answered the phone. We have no idea. As a friend of mine said, “It doesn’t even make sense to the nerd in me, because there is no resistance in Raiders of the Lost Ark.”
DRE:
I would imagine that though it’s might not be your favorite kind of movie but you still liked Raiders of The Lost Ark.
DC:
I did. I think Raiders is really the last really good action film, because it’s sort of based in reality. Everything that happens in the film is possible for a human being to do, whereas films after that, all the characters became superheroes and were doing things that were out of the realm of possibility. Raiders is really a down to earth film in a certain way. It has a certain something like no other film like that really has. I hadn’t seen it since I was 20 years old, but to see the version these kids made, I got very caught up in the story just from watching these crazy12 year old kids in ridiculous costumes running around and shooting at each other. There’s something very affecting about it.
DRE:
Did Rudin say why he wanted you to write it?
DC:
I think he had seen Ghost World and knew that I could handle adolescent characters. Also he had read the script for Art School Confidential and were fairly impressed with that. I think that was all there was to it. I think they wanted somebody who would come to it with a kind of a different sensibility and who wouldn’t bring kind of an oversentimentalized feel to it. It would be very easy to make it a weepy sentimental film. Which isn’t necessary because all the emotion is already built into the material. You don’t have to enhance it at all.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
