Mimi Pond has been a successful cartoonist and writer since the early nineteen-eighties. Her cartoons appeared everywhere from Seventeen and The Los Angeles Times to National Lampoon and the Village Voice. She’s the author of five humor books including "The Valley Girls Guide to Life," "Shoes Never Lie" and "Splitting Hairs." She describes her writing for television as “a sidebar,” but it’s a sidebar that almost anyone would envy. She wrote episodes for three television series - "Pee-Wee’s Playhouse," "Designing Women" and "The Simpsons." Her episode “Simpsons Roasting on a Open Fire” was the Christmas episode that was the first full-length episode of the show broadcast.
Her new book and first graphic novel is “Over Easy.” A fictionalized account of the time she spent working at a restaurant in Oakland in the late seventies and early eighties after art school, it’s an incredible portrait of being young and of an incredible cultural moment. The first of two books, "Over Easy" is out now from Drawn and Quarterly and Ms. Pond was kind enough to take the time to talk about the book and her career.
ALEX DUEBEN: Where did Over Easy start for you?
MIMI POND: It really did start the first day I went to work at the restaurant. I just had this deep instinctive feeling that this was a story. This whole scene–all these people in this place–were a story that I was going to have to figure out. It just stayed with me over the years and it was one of those things that just kept nagging at me that I had to get onto before I forgot it all or somehow suffered some horrible fate. [laughs] That this was the most compelling story of my life.
AD: At the time were you keeping a journal or taking notes?
MP: I wasn’t. It was a pretty consuming job. There’s no way I could have kept notes while I was working. But the manager–who’s known in the book as Laszlo–in real life was a very gifted writer and poet. He was someone really important in my life because he really validated my feelings and my observations that this was a story worth telling. He wanted to tell it himself. After I left the restaurant after working there for four years we corresponded for about six more years until he passed away. His letters were absolutely wonderful and his descriptions of what was going on in restaurant. He actually didn’t work there that much longer after I left because he had cancer and he quit and then he wound up having a fatal heart attack. He basically wrote me all the dirt that was going on at the restaurant. That became real fodder for the story I wound up telling. One of the most important things for me was to infuse the book with his voice, which was so wonderful.
AD: Did you always know this was going to be a piece of fiction as opposed to writing a memoir?
MP: I struggled with it for a long time and I just realized that there were too many characters who passed through there. There was such a huge cast it would have become like a Russian novel or a vast Wagnerian opera so I had to strip it down to a few essential characters just to try to convey the spirit of the times. Otherwise it was just too unwieldy for me.
AD: I know that you spent years working on this and I’m just curious about the process of making it.
MP: Initially I wrote it as a conventional piece of fiction and my agent couldn’t sell it. I had to break down and admit to myself that the most natural way for me to tell the story was as graphic novel. That took a lot of doing because it was just an inconceivable amount of work. I couldn’t fathom how I was ever going to get that much work done. I was raising a family and running a household and trying to manage everything and everyone. I couldn’t figure out how I was going to get it done but this little voice inside kept reminding me that I did like to draw. [laughs] That helped. I think I’d been a mother for so long that I’d forgotten how much I loved drawing. Once I did embark upon it I think it made a huge difference in terms of the way my children saw me. Not just as their mother but as a working artist. It gave them a whole new perspective on who I was. I had been doing other comics. It wasn’t like I stopped making art while I was being a mom, but I didn’t prioritize it the way I had to with this. As they got older it got easier for me to reclaim my time.
AD: You described that the graphic novel was more natural for you than prose.
MP: I just always knew what it looked like. That was never a problem.
AD: Have you always thought of yourself primarily as a cartoonist?
MP: Yes. I know in the press they like to drag up the TV writing, but that’s such a tiny part of my career. It really is. That’s the sidebar.
AD: How did you go from having a prose book to assembling a graphic novel? Did you throw out a lot or was there a lot of revision?
MP: There wasn’t a lot of revision. There were a couple of very minor characters that disappeared but that’s what’s taken so long. I wrote it very very carefully over the course of three or four years and chose every word very carefully. There’s lovely turns of phrases that had to go out the window because visually they were already there if you drew them. You can’t be redundant in that way. That’s what makes it harder to do because there are so many sentences that beg to be an entire page and you’re arguing with them and saying no you don’t get to be a whole page, you get to be a panel. [laughs] Otherwise it’s 800 pages long.
AD: Was there a graphic novel you were thinking of in terms of a model or structure?
MP: Fun Home was a huge inspiration. It was the first graphic novel I saw that made me think that I could that. I don’t know, I just really related to it. It felt very familiar. There were lots of other graphic novels before that but nothing that I related to so strongly as that and felt like, that’s a way I could tell my story. It’s a memoir and a different story, but just the format felt very comfortable to me.
AD: Putting together a book this long–to say nothing of two books–is a very different project from the short comics you’ve made in the past. Otherwise was the process and approach the same for you?
MP: Well this was different. With a comic strip, that’s a page or shorter. You’ve got anywhere from 5-20 panels to tell your story so you have to shortcut and you figure out your punchline and you work backwards. This was entirely different. It just becomes very instinctive. I mean I’ve got my roadmap. I’ve got the manuscript to go by. I’m going through chapter by chapter. First I do pencil roughs and then I do inking and then I do the tone on top of that on a lightbox. Mapping it out in pencil form is very instinctive. I’m just looking for the ways to get the best emotional impact and the pacing right as I go along.
AD: One thing that fascinated me was the period. I’m too young to have experienced it, but there was so much that I could relate to and there’s a real sense of missing something and cultural loss.
MP: It did feel that way at the time. But I think young people always feel that way because there’s always someone slightly older than them around to remind them that you just missed the cool party. “It was five years ago and now it’s over and too bad for you.” There’s always going to be that person there telling you, “oh man, you should have been there, it was awesome.” You’re young and you lack confidence so there’s not a way for you to be in the present and think, I’m where it’s happening right now. I think it was probably the same for people who were around for the sixties. They were probably enjoying themselves but they didn’t realize what a hugely historic and momentous time it was. They were probably busy getting high. [laughs]
AD: And as part of that, the observations about the arrival of punk, her thoughts about hippies and there is a sense of things really shifting.
MP: Yeah and it was really time for that shift too because the hippie thing was getting so tired. The thing is that hippies are still there in the Bay Area. It’s just held on and it’s sort of like they’re the establishment now and they’ve become sort of hidebound. I mean they were sort of hidebound that was the thing about hippies that was annoying. They did have very strict rules about things when they were claiming they didn’t. I mean, some of them. The people who had the most fluid sense of life and change who chose to stay with a hippie identity were the people that went onto invent computers. Then there’s this other aspect of people who stayed in that identity and felt very threatened by things outside of that, which is just tiresome.
AD: It’s an interesting look at this time. The late seventies period when punk appeared and then Reagan was elected in 1980 and the rise of the moral majority and there’s this weird rocking back and forth and uncertainty on all fronts.
MP: I think that’s true. It all get very strange very quickly especially in the early eighties. I worked at the restaurant until 1982 and that’s where the end of the second book is, where I left the restaurant to go off to New York, so it all takes place within the world of the restaurant. That political aspect almost had no effect on what we were doing at that point. Also I think people were probably trying to ignore at the time. [laughs] Once I got to New York it became harder and harder to ignore and it became all about eighties excess and Reaganomics and luxury and yuppies and all that but in the world of these working class kids in this restaurant, it was negligible.
AD: I don’t know if you can really answer this, but I’ve never worked in restaurant and the stories people tell me about working in restaurants always seem involve a lot of drugs.
MP: First of all, it’s a high stress job. I can’t tell you about now with the way that the cash economy has changed, but it used to be that there was a great deal of cash going through your hands every day in terms of tips. I’ve never worked in any other restaurant–and I don’t think I could work in any other restaurant after having worked at this restaurant–but at the end of the day you had your tips and you took home a wad of cash. Being young and stupid, a lot of people would take their cash and go to the bar and start drinking and buy some blow and maybe some speed. It was a little like Pleasure Island from Pinocchio. [laughs]
You just have to be very aware to avoid those pitfalls. I just saw so many people fall down that rabbit hole of alcohol and drug use over the years. Quite a few people who disappeared down that rabbit hole for years and finally emerged. Ironically they came out of it and retained sobriety and worked different programs, but still you talk about those days and they say to you, yeah but wasn’t it fun? [laughs] It was fun. It was fun until one day it wasn’t anymore. Anytime you’re working full time in the service industry you just get to where you hate people before you walk in the door. It’s just really hard. It’s a really hard job. Fortunately at some point when I was working there, I stopped working full time. I was working part time and the rest of the time I was trying to focus on my fine artwork and developing comics to send away to magazines in New York and focus on the goal of getting out of there. I was very fortunate that I had that presence of mind and that discipline to do that because a lot of people didn’t. There were so many object lessons in front of my eyes every day. Don’t do this, don’t do that. Don’t close the bar every night with your pals. [laughs]
AD: Do you want to say anything about the second book? Or are you in the midst of it and would rather not?
MP: I don’t want to give too much away, but it still all takes place within the world of the restaurant.
AD: You wrote for two series which for people my age are huge, The Simpsons and Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. What was it like writing for Pee-Wee’s Playhouse?
MP: Writing for Pee-Wee’s Playhouse ruined me for writing for television because I really didn’t know anything about writing for television when I went into it. I wrote an episode with Lynne Marie Stewart who played Miss Yvonne. We had a wonderful time writing it. We wrote the episode and here’s what they did: They took our script and they shot it. They just took the script and they shot it and I thought that’s the way it works. It doesn’t work that way. [laughs] You turn in your script and then ten people piss on it and completely take it apart and put it back together and then if you’re lucky they put your name back on it and it gets made and you’re like, what? [laughs] In the sixth grade my teacher said, Mimi does not relate well to her peer group. [laughs] I’ve never really been that great at working in groups. It’s all for the best, I think.
AD: You later wrote the first episode of The Simpsons.
MP: Well it wound up by accident being the first episode because they were getting behind in production and mine was a Christmas episode so they decided to premiere it with the Christmas episode.
AD: How did you end up writing for The Simpsons?
MP: We had been introduced to Matt Groening through Gary Panter, who worked with my husband on Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. Matt was asking his cartoonist friends if they wanted to write for this show that he was going to do. I guess I was the only one who said yes. Basically–and this is information I only know from finding it out through the grapevine because no one ever explained it to me–it was a boys club. I was Matt’s friend, which worked against me because he was already having his difficulties with Sam Simon and the other writer-producers there, so my coming in as his friend was not a good thing. Plus I was a woman and they didn’t care for that and they didn’t want to hire any women to be on staff. I kind of got thrown off the moving gravy train and I never got an explanation for it. Honestly, I know my life would have been very different if I had been on the staff of this hot, hot animated show that made all kinds of TV history, but I got to raise my children and be at home with them and I finally got to produce this book that I have been that my heart and soul has been screaming at me to finish since 1978.
AD: Do you have any regrets about not working in television more?
MP: No. I regret that there’s still massive sexism in television in film. [laughs] I regret that. I regret not being able to prove myself in that venue, but I’ve had a really wonderful life. I’ve raised two talented wonderful human beings of whom I’m very proud. A lot of people who work in television have to hire someone to be them. They get a nanny and you’re basically paying someone to be you for 8-12 hours a day. I don’t regret having done that, staying at home with my kids. It is a huge sacrifice. I had to put a whole lot of stuff aside for many years, but I got fantastic loving intelligent wise incredibly talented kids out of it. And I’m doing the work I feel like I was always meant to do.