All of you people who attend events like MOCCA, snatch up any mini-comics from up and coming creators and are desperately trying to get their weird and offensive comics embraced by the cool people owe a huge debt to cartoonist Frank Stack. Frank Stack published what is considered by many to be the first underground comic book. Those books were The Adventures of Jesus which he authored under the pseudonym Foolbert Sturgeon. Now after over 30 years all of Stacks Jesus comic books have been reprinted under one cover by Fantagraphics Books called The New Adventures of Jesus. I found these stories to be quite fresh and even more relevant today. The controversial stories have Jesus being arrested for being AWOL, Jesus pitching movies in Hollywood and Jesus getting beat up by the cops for being a long haired hippie type. Stack's most famous work is Our Cancer Year written by Harvey Pekar and Joyce Brabner which documented Harveys struggles with cancer.
Buy The New Adventures of Jesus: The Second Coming
Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up to today?
Frank Stack: Trying to juggle books to rearrange my house.
DRE: Are you working on anything?
FS: No. Im about to move into a new studio and I intend to put in long days but I dont have much of a place to work here. When I paint Im usually up in the drawing studio doing figure watercolors or outside doing landscapes.
DRE: Who contacted you about reissuing the Jesus comic books?
FS: Well, what I had done so far had been collected before in 1979 or 80 by Rip-Off Press but their warehouse burned down so hardly any of the books got distributed. Rip-Off Press went moribund and I started working for Kitchen Sink Press. Several of my friends were already doing stuff for them and we were talking about doing a collection of the Jesus stuff but then they said, No, were not going to do anything like that anymore. Then just as Kitchen Sink was winding up to reprint it, they went out of business. I scouted around a little bit. I explored with Dark Horse but they werent interested or at least I didnt know how to talk to them. Finally I was complaining to Robert Crumb that I would never get the book reprinted because I didnt have a reliable publisher and he said, Well, [co-founder of Fantagraphics] Gary Groth ought to do it. Its time for Jesus to be reprinted. I was hoping that he would say that to Gary but I figured Roberts word was pure gold with the comic publishers. So when I got back, I called Gary and said Robert says you ought to reprint it. He said, Okay, lets do it and then we did it.
DRE: So you were actively looking for someone to reprint these specific books.
FS: Yeah, I wanted to reprint them and I want to reprint some of my other comics. I always like seeing my stuff in print. I hope that happens but Im not much of a businessman and not a very good self-promoter either. Sometimes I work with another writer whose work I really like such as Harvey Pekar but generally I dont like to tell other peoples stories. I think Harvey Pekar is a better writer than I am but I still like my own jokes.
DRE: I speak to a lot of guys from your generation and theyre usually not dying to get their old work reprinted for whatever reason. Did you feel that the Jesus comics were relevant enough to be out there again?
FS: I remember back in 68, 69 or something like that, there had been this movie The Milky Way, which was very much about poking fun at religions and it was deliciously funny. I came away from it talking to one of my friends that Ive known for a long time and she said, Who cares about that shit anymore? like doctrine, dogma, superstition. I said, Well, maybe nobody does. With the resurgence, well its not exactly resurgence, it was a surgence. When we grew up, those people didnt know what to think about politics and were not very involved in it. They didnt vote much and they didnt have anyone that kept telling them how Jesus would line up in politics. So I felt religious interference in politics was on the way out but then it becomes not only a serious force but a frightening force in international politics. So whatever relevance the satire had then seems to have more relevance now.
DRE: Besides the hippie references, the Jesus comics felt very fresh. I know that when you first started doing them it was just a small, satirical book but did you mean for it to last through the generations?
FS: I didnt avoid topical references but you can look at a painting from the 30s and you can recognize the hairstyles and things like that. James Thurbers satire seems to float free of the time and I admire that. Mark Twain, Shakespeare and Homer have a timeless quality to them. The New Yorker cartoons now are deeply flawed by being too timely. A lot of times I dont even know what theyre talking about because I havent read the paper in the last week. People make a lot of jokes about things that are so trivial. I saw Carlos Mencia on Comedy Central making this energetic joke about Dick Cheneys dick and they showed this close up on his crotch where, obviously, there was a great big leaner there. I just thought. Who the hell bothers to look? Of course, people still think codpieces, old Elizabethan paintings and Brueghel are funny as hell. I just wonder whats wrong with them.
DRE: [laughs] When the Jesus comics were originally released, were they very controversial?
FS: Tell you the truth, I didnt know. If you were in California, nobody was going to get too upset. If you were in the Midwest you probably wouldnt even get to see the stuff unless you had a friend from California sending it to you. So I was living here in the Midwest and had fewer cultural distractions because there wasnt much going on around here that you would notice.
DRE: Did you have the original art for this stuff or was it taken from the books?
FS: Its a mix because back in the 60s you were lucky if you got your art back. In fact, artists often werent interested in getting it back. I went to a conference several years ago and this guy said, I have one of your original covers. I asked, Which one? He said, The Dr. Feelgood book. I said, You have it? I thought I had it. I went over to his booth and he had it all right. I said, Did you get it from somebody at Rip-Off Press? Then he got real coy about it and didnt tell me how he got it. Im sure it was stolen from me at some point but I couldnt take it back.
DRE: I read that you were nervous about being killed as a result of doing the Jesus comics and thats why you did it under a pseudonym.
FS: That was a joke, I think. But there are soldiers of Christ that feel like anybody that shakes their faith for any reason whatsoever are endangering their immortal soul. Mark Twain defined faith as Faith is believing what you know ain't so. Theres no virtue in having faith in the sun going up in the morning and coming down in the evening. Its dogma to which a moral is attached that makes them different, that empowers or disempowers the people and argues that it has to be difficult to believe for there to be virtue and faith. I know it pisses people off for me to say that Im sorry that their mind is so ruined that theyve got to cling to those beliefs so desperately. What else would make you strap a bomb to yourself and go blow yourself up hoping that youll get a bunch of non-believers.
DRE: Were you ever attacked?
FS: No, but I laid fairly low about it. At the time I did do a book signing locally and I was surprised by some of the people who came up to me. One of them said, Im a Sunday school teacher and I love this. I did get some bad letters, some real nasty ones. But since I was using a pseudonym, they didnt know who to send them to. I recently found one of the letters and sent a copy of it to Fantagraphics. It was by a real nut who threatened to kill me.
DRE: Oh my God.
FS: About the worst thing I ever got from somebody face to face was when I did the Amazon cartoon and Ive got an Amazonian friend who expressed some annoyance with it. I said, Well I had a lot of fun drawing it. She said, Yeah, but I didnt have a lot of fun looking at it. But thats pretty mild.
DRE: Do you read many comics now?
FS: I follow some of the people that I have always followed like Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton. I generally like the people that appear in the Funny Times like Dan Piraro. I also like Linda Barry and Peter Kuper.
DRE: So you keep pretty current.
FS: Moderately so. I really could hardly care less about the superhero comic books and mainstream stuff. Im friends with Mark Schultz who does Cadillacs and Dinosaurs and several others like Pete Poplaski who is Robert Crumbs always faithful assistant. I like to meet cartoonists and artists that I like, such as Lorenzo Mattotti who often does New Yorker stuff. A lot of times when I go to Paris, Ill look him up. Gilbert Shelton introduces me to people like the guys that put out Viz Magazine in North England.
But I dont follow anime. I dont follow the decrepit new adventures of Batman and I dont like hyper-violence like Frank Millers Sin City. Its not that I dont think those guys are talented but that their moral compass is askew.
DRE: [laughs] I think those guys would agree with you.
FS: I think they probably would too. Ive seen things by Frank Miller that make me admire his resources a lot. I like the Hernandez brothers. I actually like Scott Adams. I communicate regularly with comic scholars like R.C. Harvey.
DRE: What did you think of the American Splendor movie?
FS: The Village Voice interviewed me before I saw it and I behaved badly in the interview. Then I tried to apologize later. Id already heard that the character they represented as the artist that drew Our Cancer Year was this spaced out, disorganized hippie who gives his daughter up for adoption. My own daughter who was pursuing a Ph.D. in art history at Washington University got asked I didnt know you were adopted. She said, I wasnt. That made me a little bit angry that they represented me that way. But when I saw the film I realized that they were taking great liberties not unlike liberties that are often taken when works are translated. The screenwriters of American Splendor compacted like eight years of events and, in a sense, misrepresented some things. Such as the idea that they got an artist working on the story before Harvey even went through any treatments for cancer. That is not true. When they finally called me about doing it, he wasnt well yet, but he was through the regimen of chemotherapy. I spent a week in Cleveland meeting with doctors and gathering photographs. But that wasnt the story they were telling.
DRE: Whats the next book you are going to have out, either new or reprints?
FS: Well, Im doing a jungle girl serial for a magazine called Mineshaft. It is full of nonsense and jokes. Ive just done the third episode of it and I use the tradition of the cliffhanger. I essentially kill the character in the last panel and then try to figure out how to get them out of it in the next one. But the problem with doing a thriller is that you have to up the ante every time you do one. So the last one was 200 gallons of gasoline blowing up and the next one has got to reach higher than the Empire State Building.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Buy The New Adventures of Jesus: The Second Coming
Daniel Robert Epstein: What are you up to today?
Frank Stack: Trying to juggle books to rearrange my house.
DRE: Are you working on anything?
FS: No. Im about to move into a new studio and I intend to put in long days but I dont have much of a place to work here. When I paint Im usually up in the drawing studio doing figure watercolors or outside doing landscapes.
DRE: Who contacted you about reissuing the Jesus comic books?
FS: Well, what I had done so far had been collected before in 1979 or 80 by Rip-Off Press but their warehouse burned down so hardly any of the books got distributed. Rip-Off Press went moribund and I started working for Kitchen Sink Press. Several of my friends were already doing stuff for them and we were talking about doing a collection of the Jesus stuff but then they said, No, were not going to do anything like that anymore. Then just as Kitchen Sink was winding up to reprint it, they went out of business. I scouted around a little bit. I explored with Dark Horse but they werent interested or at least I didnt know how to talk to them. Finally I was complaining to Robert Crumb that I would never get the book reprinted because I didnt have a reliable publisher and he said, Well, [co-founder of Fantagraphics] Gary Groth ought to do it. Its time for Jesus to be reprinted. I was hoping that he would say that to Gary but I figured Roberts word was pure gold with the comic publishers. So when I got back, I called Gary and said Robert says you ought to reprint it. He said, Okay, lets do it and then we did it.
DRE: So you were actively looking for someone to reprint these specific books.
FS: Yeah, I wanted to reprint them and I want to reprint some of my other comics. I always like seeing my stuff in print. I hope that happens but Im not much of a businessman and not a very good self-promoter either. Sometimes I work with another writer whose work I really like such as Harvey Pekar but generally I dont like to tell other peoples stories. I think Harvey Pekar is a better writer than I am but I still like my own jokes.
DRE: I speak to a lot of guys from your generation and theyre usually not dying to get their old work reprinted for whatever reason. Did you feel that the Jesus comics were relevant enough to be out there again?
FS: I remember back in 68, 69 or something like that, there had been this movie The Milky Way, which was very much about poking fun at religions and it was deliciously funny. I came away from it talking to one of my friends that Ive known for a long time and she said, Who cares about that shit anymore? like doctrine, dogma, superstition. I said, Well, maybe nobody does. With the resurgence, well its not exactly resurgence, it was a surgence. When we grew up, those people didnt know what to think about politics and were not very involved in it. They didnt vote much and they didnt have anyone that kept telling them how Jesus would line up in politics. So I felt religious interference in politics was on the way out but then it becomes not only a serious force but a frightening force in international politics. So whatever relevance the satire had then seems to have more relevance now.
DRE: Besides the hippie references, the Jesus comics felt very fresh. I know that when you first started doing them it was just a small, satirical book but did you mean for it to last through the generations?
FS: I didnt avoid topical references but you can look at a painting from the 30s and you can recognize the hairstyles and things like that. James Thurbers satire seems to float free of the time and I admire that. Mark Twain, Shakespeare and Homer have a timeless quality to them. The New Yorker cartoons now are deeply flawed by being too timely. A lot of times I dont even know what theyre talking about because I havent read the paper in the last week. People make a lot of jokes about things that are so trivial. I saw Carlos Mencia on Comedy Central making this energetic joke about Dick Cheneys dick and they showed this close up on his crotch where, obviously, there was a great big leaner there. I just thought. Who the hell bothers to look? Of course, people still think codpieces, old Elizabethan paintings and Brueghel are funny as hell. I just wonder whats wrong with them.
DRE: [laughs] When the Jesus comics were originally released, were they very controversial?
FS: Tell you the truth, I didnt know. If you were in California, nobody was going to get too upset. If you were in the Midwest you probably wouldnt even get to see the stuff unless you had a friend from California sending it to you. So I was living here in the Midwest and had fewer cultural distractions because there wasnt much going on around here that you would notice.
DRE: Did you have the original art for this stuff or was it taken from the books?
FS: Its a mix because back in the 60s you were lucky if you got your art back. In fact, artists often werent interested in getting it back. I went to a conference several years ago and this guy said, I have one of your original covers. I asked, Which one? He said, The Dr. Feelgood book. I said, You have it? I thought I had it. I went over to his booth and he had it all right. I said, Did you get it from somebody at Rip-Off Press? Then he got real coy about it and didnt tell me how he got it. Im sure it was stolen from me at some point but I couldnt take it back.
DRE: I read that you were nervous about being killed as a result of doing the Jesus comics and thats why you did it under a pseudonym.
FS: That was a joke, I think. But there are soldiers of Christ that feel like anybody that shakes their faith for any reason whatsoever are endangering their immortal soul. Mark Twain defined faith as Faith is believing what you know ain't so. Theres no virtue in having faith in the sun going up in the morning and coming down in the evening. Its dogma to which a moral is attached that makes them different, that empowers or disempowers the people and argues that it has to be difficult to believe for there to be virtue and faith. I know it pisses people off for me to say that Im sorry that their mind is so ruined that theyve got to cling to those beliefs so desperately. What else would make you strap a bomb to yourself and go blow yourself up hoping that youll get a bunch of non-believers.
DRE: Were you ever attacked?
FS: No, but I laid fairly low about it. At the time I did do a book signing locally and I was surprised by some of the people who came up to me. One of them said, Im a Sunday school teacher and I love this. I did get some bad letters, some real nasty ones. But since I was using a pseudonym, they didnt know who to send them to. I recently found one of the letters and sent a copy of it to Fantagraphics. It was by a real nut who threatened to kill me.
DRE: Oh my God.
FS: About the worst thing I ever got from somebody face to face was when I did the Amazon cartoon and Ive got an Amazonian friend who expressed some annoyance with it. I said, Well I had a lot of fun drawing it. She said, Yeah, but I didnt have a lot of fun looking at it. But thats pretty mild.
DRE: Do you read many comics now?
FS: I follow some of the people that I have always followed like Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton. I generally like the people that appear in the Funny Times like Dan Piraro. I also like Linda Barry and Peter Kuper.
DRE: So you keep pretty current.
FS: Moderately so. I really could hardly care less about the superhero comic books and mainstream stuff. Im friends with Mark Schultz who does Cadillacs and Dinosaurs and several others like Pete Poplaski who is Robert Crumbs always faithful assistant. I like to meet cartoonists and artists that I like, such as Lorenzo Mattotti who often does New Yorker stuff. A lot of times when I go to Paris, Ill look him up. Gilbert Shelton introduces me to people like the guys that put out Viz Magazine in North England.
But I dont follow anime. I dont follow the decrepit new adventures of Batman and I dont like hyper-violence like Frank Millers Sin City. Its not that I dont think those guys are talented but that their moral compass is askew.
DRE: [laughs] I think those guys would agree with you.
FS: I think they probably would too. Ive seen things by Frank Miller that make me admire his resources a lot. I like the Hernandez brothers. I actually like Scott Adams. I communicate regularly with comic scholars like R.C. Harvey.
DRE: What did you think of the American Splendor movie?
FS: The Village Voice interviewed me before I saw it and I behaved badly in the interview. Then I tried to apologize later. Id already heard that the character they represented as the artist that drew Our Cancer Year was this spaced out, disorganized hippie who gives his daughter up for adoption. My own daughter who was pursuing a Ph.D. in art history at Washington University got asked I didnt know you were adopted. She said, I wasnt. That made me a little bit angry that they represented me that way. But when I saw the film I realized that they were taking great liberties not unlike liberties that are often taken when works are translated. The screenwriters of American Splendor compacted like eight years of events and, in a sense, misrepresented some things. Such as the idea that they got an artist working on the story before Harvey even went through any treatments for cancer. That is not true. When they finally called me about doing it, he wasnt well yet, but he was through the regimen of chemotherapy. I spent a week in Cleveland meeting with doctors and gathering photographs. But that wasnt the story they were telling.
DRE: Whats the next book you are going to have out, either new or reprints?
FS: Well, Im doing a jungle girl serial for a magazine called Mineshaft. It is full of nonsense and jokes. Ive just done the third episode of it and I use the tradition of the cliffhanger. I essentially kill the character in the last panel and then try to figure out how to get them out of it in the next one. But the problem with doing a thriller is that you have to up the ante every time you do one. So the last one was 200 gallons of gasoline blowing up and the next one has got to reach higher than the Empire State Building.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
zoetica:
All of you people who attend events like MOCCA, snatch up any mini-comics from up and coming creators and are desperately trying to get their weird and offensive comics embraced by the cool people owe a huge debt to cartoonist Frank Stack. Frank Stack published...
ymonster:
I can't believe this interview went up the day after mine... I took a ton of classes from Frank in college. He's an amazing person, and a truly inspirational artist.
