Dreams in Ink and Motion: The Art of Jim Woodring

Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
And I've done some one page things for him and he said, you
know, I have an idea, why don't you do a comic that looks normal
but isn't? And the first Frank story just
popped into my head completely. They said oh wow, I know exactly
what I'll do. Welcome back to Direct Edition,

(00:21):
a podcast about nothing and everything.
I'm your host, Dave. Today I'm bringing you a very
special interview with a amazingcreator, a cartoonist,
illustrator, painter. Jim Woodring.
Jim Woodring is somebody that's been producing comics and
illustration for over 40 years where his home is mostly been a
fan of graphics. And that's actually where I met

(00:43):
him was very recently. I was at the Fan of Graphics
store in Georgetown. And Larry Reed, the manager, who
I know pretty well and he's a super great guy, He introduced
me to Jim. Jim was there dropping off some
prints and I, you know, thought it was a great time to ask him
if I could interview him, Somebody whose work I've only
known for maybe about a decade or so.

(01:06):
But his, when you start looking at his artwork, it just screams
to you it's something that is not what you see every day.
Very much influenced by the surrealist movement.
And that's something that we getinto in this great chat, which I
really hope you check out his work after this if you've never
done so. And most of it's still in print

(01:28):
via Fan of Graphics. And if you're going to be at a
short run, which is the small press Expo that Fan Graphics
puts on in Seattle, Jim is theirguest of honor.
So you can meet him there. And also you should check out
the documentary about him calledThe Illumination of Jim
Woodring, which is available to rent on Amazon.

(01:49):
I think it's like 3 bucks or so,but we go through his career, we
go through a lot of inspirations.
We have a very nice warm chat. We're both natives of the
Pacific Northwest. We both reside about 15 miles
from each other. It wasn't just a great chat, but
it was an honor to speak to him and I can't thank him enough for
his time. So let's get right into it with

(02:10):
the master Jim Woodring. Welcome back everybody.
And I am honored today to have amaster visual artist storyteller
on the podcast today. His bibliography includes Jim

(02:31):
Congress of Animals, 1A beautiful Spring Day Prosper.
He's a Harvey Award winner. He did a Freak Freaks
adaptation. He's also played around in the
Alien and Star Wars universe. He worked animation and his home
publisher, Fan of graphics, is also part of where he lives in
the Northwest. I'm talking to Jim Woodring.
Good morning, Jim. Good morning, Dave.

(02:53):
How are you? Thanks for that swell
introduction. Sure.
Well, I mean, it's nice to lay out, you know, a little bit of
somebody's work before I talk tothem because it's impressive to
say the least. That's that's a nice sentiment.
I really appreciate that. Yeah, yeah, it's, you know, one
of the things that this podcast is about is about the power of

(03:15):
arts and how we connect to it, because everybody connects
differently to it. And I guess that's kind of the
segue to start off is I know you've been the subject of an
amazing documentary, well, a couple, but The Illumination of
Jim Woodring and it goes throughyour childhood.
But in the realm of comics, whatwas your introduction to the

(03:39):
comic book format? Or, you know, like your first
connection to comics? Well, the first comics that
really made me sit up and take notice were the old Mad magazine
comics. Before that I would read comics,
you know, my family or another kids family would take us to the
beach and they'd give us a dollar and we'd buy 10 comic

(04:02):
books and we'd read them. But they didn't mean very much
to me. I always liked things that were
grotesque. Grotesque and lyrical, you know?
And so when I saw those old Mad magazines, they were lyrical in
the sense that they were so beautifully drawn, and even as a
little kid I could see that. But they were grotesque to an

(04:23):
extent that was frightening sometimes.
And I really liked that. When you look at them now, those
comics are really transgressive.Yeah.
There's a lot of terrible misogyny.
And, you know, there's in the inthe Archie parody, starchy

(04:44):
bideous flying at Archie throughthe air and her purse is opening
and hard drugs are spilling out.There's needles and pills and,
you know, joints and things. You know, there is, there's
those things are kind of scary. Harvey Kurtzman had this scary
intensity. So I really responded to that,
and that was, that was what thatguy said.

(05:07):
I guess that was the first time that I realized that you could
do things with comics that were not just entertainment, but
pushed into realms that were notquite metaphysical, but which
were, you know, outside the normal consensus conversation
that was going on in other comics that I had seen, if that

(05:31):
makes sense. That does it's interesting
because mad, you know, it's, it ran for so long.
So it's part of my childhood. It's part of your childhood.
You know, anybody who looked at a newsstand would see mad at
some point in, you know, the 50 years it existed or so.
And I was talking, I had to gym food on the podcast recently.

(05:53):
We were talking about how Mad kind of traces back to the
beginning of what we look at hismodern humor satire.
Like it's not the beginning of it, but it shapes so much that
it kind of goes back. You know, Weird Al is somebody
that talked about how much influence Mad magazine had on

(06:14):
him. So like you can trace that.
And did you, I mean, you've got a sense of humor about yourself
in your work and, and could you see that also being an influence
and mad being an influence in kind of the way that you look at
things in a humorous way? Well, I think, I don't think it
affected so much the way I looked at things as it affected

(06:35):
my behavior. I was a monster kid.
And I felt that Mad magazine gave me permission to act just
as obnoxious as I wanted to. You know, it also gave me an
identity because even as a little kid, I could see that the
drawings in Mad were great. Yeah.
And that. That I, I was attracted to and a

(06:55):
part of this really good thing gave me a sense of identity as a
person for the first time. So I, I don't know if I, it
affected my sense of humor, but it affected my, it just affected
my sense of what could be done, you know, And it, it's true that
Mad magazine, I think was part of the, the, the early breeding

(07:19):
ground of late 20th century humor or mid 20th century humor.
But you know, before that, if you look at the comics around
the turn of the century, by outcult Buster Brown, I mean,
they seem pretty tame now, but at the time you imagine those, I
mean, for a very, for an audience, it was used to very

(07:40):
demure things. Buster Brown's antics were
outrageous. And and there's a big book of
cartoons from that era called Society is Nyx.
It. Captures a whole bunch of these
old the word that's used as anarchic, but they're they're
just yeasty mayhem laden, as transgressive as they could be,

(08:02):
you know, romps through bad behavior for the sheer fun of
it. So I think that is a definite
predecessor to MAD. Yeah, I give.
I mean, it's probably what thoseguys were looking at when they
were kids. And so and that that's that's
the thing I'm always fascinated about is looking at what
everybody was looking at and just kind of working your way

(08:24):
back that way because it gives you a greater appreciation of
everything that comes after it. Or at least you know, So I know
you, you, you, you weren't really into the superhero comics
as much. I've I've heard you talk about
that. It just.
Wasn't. And then cartoons, Fleischer,

(08:44):
Fleischer Brothers stuff was wasalso something that you were
extremely inspired by, to my understanding.
Well, yeah, yeah, as a little kid I had kind of severe
perceptual problems and I saw the Fleischer cartoon Bimbo's
initiation. I've talked about this a million
times when I was about four and it changed my life because I
thought it was like a travelogue.

(09:05):
I thought it showed a place thatyou could go to and I began to
live for that place immediately because that was where I wanted
to live. I wanted to live in a place
where things like that happened.Sure.
And then it fulfilled the promises of my dreams is what it
amounted to. So.
And then I realized that all that kind of stuff is just what
you make it so, but that that desire to find something, to see

(09:28):
something behind something, to be looking for the inner
workings of things that influenced everything I saw when
I was a little kid. And and when I was a teenager
too. I fell in love with the cartoons
of John Hill Junior, the the great illustrator from the
1920s. He was the sort of the art Crumb
of the 20s because he's sort of in the same way that Crumb

(09:50):
defined the way hippies looked and acted.
John Hill Junior showed the way sheiks and flappers acted
colleges in the 20s. And he had this beautiful clear
line style, but I saw this, thislike heavy lyrical mysticism in
it. I would look at his pictures and
I would just feel flooded with this sense of purity or calmness

(10:12):
or transcendence or something. You know, it's hard to say where
it came from that in that case. But other artists like Borisart
Sebastien, whose work is both lyrical and grotesque, the
Russian American American illustrator, you know, he that
that was something I read all kinds of spiritual significance
into his work. You know, I felt I felt literal

(10:34):
for songs of of Mystic energy when I looked at his stuff.
And that was what I tried to getinto my own work by channeling
the things that were in me. It took me a long time to
realize that he was he was. I don't that I was really seeing
a lot of things that weren't there.
Yeah, you've and it's been explored in various interviews

(10:58):
you've done in the documentary about the hallucinations and the
kind of the waking dreams that you were having.
But one thing I, I wanted to askabout that was there a lot of
that involving animals? Because your work is extremely
full of creatures that exist, creatures that don't exist,
stuff, you know, and, and was that part of it because kind of

(11:22):
attracted to the animal list, you know, like the animals that
you've put in your your books and the shapes that they take
and the anthropomorphic nature of it all.
Well, I've always I've always loved animals and I've always
had a real thing for frogs. When I grew up, my grandmother
had a pond and there were frogs in it, and I would just lie on

(11:42):
the edge of it with my face nearthe water looking at the
tadpoles and the frogs into the Lily pads.
And they did that for hours. I just loved it.
And you know, when you do imaginative drawing, you're
trying to create tableaus and landscapes and things
interacting symbolically with other things.
Animals come in real handy for those purposes.

(12:04):
They can be cute or sinister or threatening or whatever.
They embody things that you wantto be introduced into the action
and they're they're perfect for that.
Perfect vehicles. Yeah, I was.
I, I Long Island life as a childwas filled with frogs.
So I, I understand that fascination as a kid.
And then, you know, for me, being a kid of the 80s,

(12:26):
nineties, turtles come into it with, you know, what Eastman and
Laird do. And and there's, there's my
anthropomorphic life. OK.
Well, that's good. Yeah.
So, you know, as a teenager growing up in the 60s, you
talked about Cromoretti. Did you?
And being in Southern California, I mean, assuming,

(12:46):
but I don't know if I'm right, that some of that underground
stuff makes its way down, you know, down California.
Were you looking at some of thatstuff as a as a teenager seeing,
you know, Griffith and Crumb andRobert Williams and you know,
the the greats of that era? Oh, yeah, of course, of course,
of course. Yeah, the first, the first thing

(13:07):
of that sort I saw was our Crumb's Head comics, which was a
paper bound. I think it was published by some
reputable publisher, like I forget who, but it was slightly
censored, but it was Crumb and it, you know, astonished me like
Crumb astonished everybody in those days.
And then ZAP Comics, particularly the ZAP comics with

(13:30):
the Rick Griffin cover of the Beetle in the in the Illuminated
Mine shaft or whatever. Oh yeah, that's such a wild
cover. That really opened my eyes to
what could be done with comics, but it also made me feel like,
well, I have to find a path that's completely different from
what these guys are doing, you know, so and somebody like

(13:53):
Robert Williams, you know, he was so intense and so strange
and he had such a great visual imagination and he could just
draw anything he wanted to and that covered a lot of territory.
So that, well, there's, there's a lot there that I can't do now
because he's he's staked it out for himself.
And with Crumb, you know, that, that I would love to draw in

(14:14):
that rough line that he has, youknow, but when I draw like that,
it looks like I'm imitating our Crumb.
It could look like I'm imitatingour Blackman, but I'm imitating
Crumb. You can see it.
So I don't do it again. It inspired me to try to to do
work that would affect that thathad that kind of power.

(14:34):
I wanted to try to be as good asthe guys in the ZAP comics in
terms of being creative and thatevent saying something and doing
something. Yeah, they were doing a little
bit of everything. You know, there was the social
commentary, there was the, you know, anti Vietnam commentary
and then there was the the drug culture and all the just all of

(14:55):
these things that went into a pot that created such an
amazingly beautiful movement. And thousands, literally
thousands of underground comics by other people, some of which
were nearly as good and some of which were inexcrable.
But you really people were just cut loose to make crazy comics
during those days. It's too much of it.

(15:18):
And it's a, it's a great form ofexpression.
But yeah, it was just make it and put it out there.
And, and, you know, obviously, like you said, some of it was
just, you know, on a pedestal because it was amazing and some
so much of it was forgettable. And I love finding that stuff
though, just seeing, you know, Zenes and, and, and self

(15:40):
published stuff from people thatnever made anything else and
people that became people that we all know and artists and.
Yeah, yeah. Interesting, isn't it?
I was going through a box of oldzenes that I had, and I realized
there's a lot of early work by people who became very famous.
It's fascinating, the trajectories.

(16:01):
Going going back to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I had
gotten a collection recently andhad some stuff from Eastman,
from Kevin Eastman that predatesanything that he did with Peter
Laird. And it's it's not X-rated, but
it's definitely on the R rated side.
And I was just fascinated like this is somebody who I have
known about for 40 years and I'mjust finding out that he did

(16:24):
stuff before Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that never really
got seen by too many people. So I, I, I do love that.
And as a music fan, I'm assuming, you know, I, I, well,
I don't want to jump ahead, but in, in the 60s, were you taken
by music a lot? Is that a part of the mix of
influences that you had? Oh yeah, definitely.

(16:47):
Yeah, yeah, it's a it's very similar to the road map of
comics of looking at like bands who didn't become anything or
singers who joined bands that became something.
But you listen to their first stuff and it's like, oh, it's
the same person. I remember being a teenager and

(17:07):
and with my friends. Comparing bands to cartoonist
is, for example, like art Chrome.
Kind of yeah, but not really. Who's who is Robert Williams
like? Well, he's like Ornette Coleman.
No, he's like Cecil Taylor. No, he's like Bach.
We were just immersed in All in all of those words.

(17:28):
But yeah, Captain Beefheart was a big, huge something I listen
to everyday. You know, trap for a long time,
Trout Mask Replica was the record I wanted to be buried
with and all, you know, all the electronic music that was coming
out at the time. Plus I like to find I had AI had
a Victrola. So I would go and get old 78
records. So there were some interesting

(17:50):
ones in there. There was a guy named Yogi
Yorgenson who who sang in a Swedish accent and these really
dumb songs. And there were records by Mel
Blanc. And.
A lot of fun stuff mixed in withthose things, just like stuff
that was oddball and aggressively independent
sounding. Bonzo Dog Band, I like them and
awful. I don't know.

(18:11):
Bonzo Dog band. Bonzo Dog Band.
That band, Death Cab for Cutie, took their name from one of
their songs. Ah well, I do.
I do know Death Cab for cutie. Big fan you.
Should get to know the Bonzo Dogband.
I'll check them out. For sure if you don't enjoy
them. I yeah, I like all kind of, I
mean, I'm like you said, a fiercely independent, you know,
just as far away from that, you know, mainstream as you can get.

(18:34):
Those kind of things fascinate me.
It's not only what I listen to, but I'm always interested in
hearing what's happening over here.
Right. Well, let me ask you this.
Do you know of a band called Cardiacs?
No, I don't. I should check them out though.
You should. All right, writing it down.

(18:56):
Cardiacs. Cardiacs like cardiac arrest.
Like cardiac arrest but with an S.
OK, getting getting back to the 60s and you know, you
discovering the underground stuff, how soon after did you
discover Salvador Dali in like the surrealist movement, which I

(19:17):
know is a huge thing for you because.
Yeah, it is. And this is a story I've told a
million times to the 1968. I was so out of it.
I didn't know anything about surrealism or modern art or
anything. And some friends took me to a
huge retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art,
huge retrospective of Dada and surrealism.

(19:38):
And it was a greatest hits show.So the first thing I saw was The
Song of Love by Giorgio de Carico.
And that stopped me in my tracksright there.
And being in that museum and seeing all those pieces, it
changed my life. Took me days to recover from it.
And I was a different person afterwards.
And the the deepest, heaviest, scariest thing I saw there was

(20:01):
this painting The Invisible Man by Salvador Dali.
They had that. They had imperial monument to
the child woman, persistence of memory, first days of spring,
living pleasure, rainy taxi was out in there.
I mean, it was a the choicest stuff.
And in the Invisible Man, there are these women hanging by their

(20:21):
hair from this kind of vertical clip that it looks like they've
been put in a wet suits which have been carved off of them so
that they're ripped and bleedingand their faces are turned away
from you as if they were ashamedto be seen in that state.
And at 18, having ever seen every, having never seen
anything like that before I was 18, I was 16.
It just it just like it's like acherry bomb went off in my head,

(20:44):
which is that you can do this. You get this deep, it's scary
and perverse and people will like it.
People will honor you. They'll put it in museums and
lines will form for people to see it.
And the more I got to know aboutSalvador Dali and what a
terrible man he was, I thought, And you can be celebrated
through your. Faults.
You can be a monster and people will beg for more.

(21:06):
You know, I thought it was. I thought this is it.
You know the art life is much better than I thought it.
Was right wow. You know, it's interesting
because I, I, I've, I've been tothe museum in Florida and it's,
you know, seeing his stuff in person, like you said, it's,
it's, it does something to you and you don't know.

(21:27):
And obviously you, you know, you're explaining it now.
But it's interesting when you talk about artists and you know
how the art you, you can separate the art from the person
in a lot of cases and maybe somecases you can't, but.
I don't see any need to, you know.
Yeah. I've got artwork by people that
I consider reprehensible. I read books by people that I

(21:47):
consider reprehensible. My lookout, you know?
Yeah. It's the art that interests me.
That their, their problems are their business.
Their, I mean, their problems are their problems.
They've got to work it out. They're the ones who have to
live with them. And for anybody to think that
like there are people that exist, that which is people in
general that don't have problems, that don't have these,
these things, like that's, that's not reality.

(22:08):
We all have things that we deal with.
Yeah, and I think in a lot of cases the big difference between
someone who's famous for their their misbehavior and us or most
people is that our crimes aren'tin the newspaper.
Right, right. Exactly.

(22:29):
That is the big, that is the biggest difference.
And, you know, yeah, there's a lot of reprehensible people out
there today that are getting away with it, and we're seeing
it in life, so. Well, or always have.
I've always been astonished thatpeople gave William Burrough
such a pass. He, he, I wouldn't say he was a
monster, but he did terrible, terrible things.

(22:50):
Yeah, really terrible things. Reprehensible, bad thing.
Maybe he was a monster, really. But, and he's the one artist
whose work I've stopped enjoyingbecause I learned too much about
him as a person. And I thought, I can't get into
this particular thing because it's all it's, it's all immersed

(23:11):
in the things he did that are bad.
You know, it's not like he was an evil person who is trying,
who is still doing good work. And it's like his work is about
the bad shit that he did and I just can't take it.
Some of the, you know, the Bukowski's one of those guys
that like, I don't know if he was a like, I don't, I just

(23:32):
can't read his work because whenI I read it, I'm just like, this
guy's a like a, an asshole and I'm just like, I'm not into it.
Well, yeah, I can relate to that.
But he wrote 1 short story wherethis guy and his girl are at a
restaurant and two famous old writers are there and they're
being total pricks. They're getting drunk and

(23:52):
abusing the waitress and just being completely obnoxious in a
way that nobody would count us. And the girl is going, let's get
out of here. And the guy who was like an
aspiring writer is going, no, no, they're great.
I want to be here. Looking at these things reminds
me I was in San Diego once at a comic book convention, and we
were sitting in one of those outdoor Mexican restaurants and

(24:15):
there was this guy there, this utter bore, and he was harassing
the waitresses and he was harassing people on the sidewalk
He was sitting next to some Hai Krishnas came by and he jumped
up and threatened to beat him up.
And he and his Goomba friend were laughing their heads off.
And the next day I saw him in the convention.
I was looking at him going who is he?
And Mary Fleeter comes up to me and she goes, do you know who
that is? That's Thomas Kincaid, the

(24:37):
painter of light. And it just that sums it up
right there. Isn't it wonderful?
Yeah. It's as if you needed another
reason, Right? But when he was younger, he put
out a book on sketching how to draw things from life, and it

(24:58):
was great. He could really draw.
Before he became that guy who sold exclusively to Christian
grannies, he was a really good nuts and bolts draftsman.
Well, you know where you start and where you end up in the
public eye. When it's all in the public eye,
sometimes it's a hard pill to digest, you know?
Well, he ended up very rich and he he in his mind acquired the

(25:20):
right to take a a whiz wherever he wanted to so.
Yeah, yeah, well, he had. A lot of freedom that way, but I
understand that he was unhappy that he wasn't taken seriously
as an artist. Interesting he.
He died with that regret in mind, I heard.
Well, I, I imagine as somebody who creates parts that is

(25:42):
consumed, whether it's by 10 people or 10 million people, I
think there's, I'm sure strugglealways.
It's like, well, I want to survive.
And then you go from that to becoming like, oh, I want more
millions to well, I'm not respected and it's hard, I'm
sure to balance both. I don't know.
I think things happen to people.I think people try to make

(26:03):
choices and steer their lives, but we're all subject to what
happens. That is very true.
That is very true, and we're subject to how we feel about
what's happening around us too, which very well changes us.
Yeah, and that. But that's something we can
change. We can change our attitudes.
Yeah, there's that. There's that little out.

(26:26):
I wanted to jump into the you you getting into animation at,
you know, Ruby Spears and ultimately working with, you
know, two people that are giantsin the superhero and the comic
world. I mean, Gil Kane and Jack Kirby.
But how did you get into animation to begin with?

(26:46):
Like how did you? What was your path to to go?
Nepotism. My old high school friend John
Dorman, who was the best naturalcartoonist I've ever known,
personally worked in the animation industry and he was
the head of the Ruby Spears Story Deport department.
And they had an opening and he hired me.
I could do the work, I could draw storyboards, but I did not

(27:07):
have the right attitude. Most people who were there were
in the business and looking to stay in the business.
And for me it was just a weigh station, a place for me to make
money while I developed my own work on the side, which I did as
spending more time doing that than I should have.
So the time I spent not doing myjob coupled with my attitude
problem made me a very bad Co worker I think.

(27:31):
So I really took advantage of it.
But yes. Gilt Kane and Joe and Jack Kirby
were both hired by John, hired at John's assistance.
He also hired Alfredo Alcala, Alex TA and Doug Wildly, the guy
who designed Jonny Quest. Yes, Jonny Quest.

(27:55):
And another of other luminaries came through there.
GAIL Kane and I became good friends.
Well, well, let's talk about Gila bit.
I mean, you know, this man has left the mark on comics and, you
know, obviously an animation, you know, forever.
What was he like to work with? And I mean, being friends with

(28:16):
him and being, you know, he he'she's just a guy that has so many
different. There's so many people that have
told stories about him and I'm just kind of fascinated by that.
Well, I didn't really work with him.
He worked at home and he broughthis work in, but he always
socialized with us a lot. We'd go out to lunch and after
we came friends, we we, we wouldsee each other after work.

(28:37):
His he and his wife and I and mywife would go out to dinner and
do things. And he was say, like everybody
says, he was a witty, polished raconteur who loved to tell
stories, love to acts philosophical love to it's hard

(28:59):
to put into words. He he lived life with a real
flourish. He spoke with the flourish.
He would say my boy MG, my boy MG.
And he, he taught me a lot about, he filled a lot of gaps
in my, my comportment and my demeanor and my understanding of

(29:20):
the world that my upbringing didn't give me.
He was sort of a, a mentor to mein that way.
And I didn't, I could see that he could draw really well, but I
didn't appreciate him the way the other people did.
You know, I don't have anything by him.
All the years I knew him, I don't have a single gilcane
drawing or a sketch or a signature or anything to my

(29:42):
regret. But to me, he was, he was just a
guy who could draw in a way thatwas really beautiful.
You'd look at his figures and the silhouettes and the
placement and the dynamics, and he was always drawing.
He was just hanging out. If you're at a restaurant, he'd
grab a magazine and he would take a photograph of somebody
and he would draw the skeleton on the photograph or the muscles

(30:06):
just to place it. Oh, Bern Hogarth, Speaking of
that kind of thing, also worked there.
So he was friendly, he was charming.
He was a hell of a great guy. Seen a lot of his original
artwork in person. I actually used to own a Conan
page of his and that's gorgeous.It's almost it it, it's perfect
without being, you know, I don'tknow, annoyingly perfect or

(30:31):
something like that. Well, his drawing also had
virtues that draftsman and appreciators of drawing could,
could enjoy, connoisseurs could enjoy who didn't necessarily
like comics, because there is a real classical quality to his
poses and his compositions and things.
He had a wonderful eye that way.And I think I know that it

(30:55):
bothered him a little bit that he was, he would say, my boy.
My influences are pulp. That's forever.
That's what I grew up with, and I can't escape it.
I'm a pulp artist. But he tried to escape it.
He he copied classical drawings,he copied Raphael and
Michelangelo. And he really wanted to do

(31:17):
serious, meaningful work. And later in his life, he he
wrote and drew a few sample strips for what he hoped would
become syndicated comics based on what he based on adult
themes, things that he kind of philosophical.
And and like that he had one called Divine's Comedy, which is
about a man that starts the first panelist guy wakes up and

(31:39):
he's just had a heart attack. And that's about his life after
the heart attack. Oh wow.
Which is a good premise, really.Yeah.
And but for some reason, maybe the the impulse to do that came
too late in life for him to realize it, or he was too busy
doing other things. He didn't have to do that much
work in those days anyhow. He he did hope to transcend his

(32:05):
comic book Me to you and. He worked, did he work in
advertising for a bit too? Was that or am I just I'm?
Guessing that he did a few drawings when they came to his
way for ads. But no, I don't think he ever
worked for an agency or had steady work.
If he did, I didn't know about it.
When we talked about in person alittle bit, but Kirby, you, you

(32:27):
actually ain't over Kirby like that.
He would cut. You were saying he would come
into the office and you would interact with him.
What I mean, to me and to a lot of US, Kirby's a mythological
figure that was also a real person.
You know, his talk, his stories that he would tell about the
war, the way he would talk about, you know, growing up in

(32:48):
New York. I mean, like, I could listen.
I wish there was thousands of hours of interviews with him
because I could listen to that man talk.
Me too, me too. And he, even though again, I
wasn't bedazzled because it was a Kirby fan, I could see that he
was a protein force and that hiswork was just astonishing
inking. It was very easy because he drew

(33:10):
with a lumber pencil on big sheets of Crescent board and it
was very easy to follow those lines with a great big brush.
I just inked in exactly what wasthere and it was all there.
But I remember one time he had this antenna or something coming
out of something and then it turned into the, the place where

(33:31):
the two walls joined. So it went from being an object
to an, to a corner. And I thought, oh, I got to fix
that. So I started to fix it.
And it was like when my dad usedto give me a haircut and he had
to fix that. Oops, got to fix that.
Oops, got to fix that. And then in the end there was no

(33:51):
more hair. I just, I, I just, I almost
destroyed this thing by trying to fix this one tiny little
flood just stopped hanging together as soon as I changed it
at all. I finally got it to work, but it
was, it took all day just to compensate for trying to correct
that. So I never did that again.

(34:13):
But it was funny. And he would come in and he'd
like to hang out with us. We had kind of a we had musical
instruments and on our breaks we'd pick him up and we'd make
music and he would come in and do it.
He'd pick up the Stratocaster and he'd start bashing out
chords. He'd pick up the trumpet and he
could play it a little bit and he'd tell us stories.
He said one night. I've told the story before, but
one night I had just seen for the first time that Alfred

(34:35):
Hitchcock movie wrote. I don't know if you know, but
it's all shot in one take. Oh wow, no, it's like you saw.
Shot in one take. They had to change the reels,
but they disguised it. Anyhow.
I said, hey, I just saw this movie Rope.
An interesting technological innovation, Jack, have you ever
seen it? And his face dark and said, he
goes, yeah, I saw that. I didn't like it because when I

(34:57):
was at the World Fair, they introduced scuba gear and you
were underwater. You're in a theater watching
them, But you went down in the water and you didn't come up.
You stayed down in the water. And I was in the movie theater
and I was underwater and I couldn't get out.
And I hated that movie. Wow, Such he, I mean, I, I would

(35:19):
love to just hear him talk about, yeah, things that he
enjoyed, you know, art, movies, whatever he enjoyed, he did.
He'd ask him, we'd ask him questions to make him stay
around. Good eyes, me.
Ask him about the past, ask him about what he liked, what he
didn't like, and he would never,ever, ever put anybody down.

(35:40):
He was a real Mensch that way. That's yeah, it's incredible.
It was great. You know, I get to you get to
see because I, I don't know who has been somebody that owns a
lot of the Ruby Spears stuff hasbeen slowly auctioning a lot of
it off over the last couple years.
So you get to see some of that stuff and it's it's impressive.
It's man did so much work. Yeah.

(36:01):
You know. Oh, he did.
But you know, another story I like to tell is that I think at
first he thought he was going tobring in some story ideas and
they would get pitched and they would get sold and then there
would be a show on TV based on his ideas.
And that kept not happening. He did it for a few years when I

(36:21):
was there. And why they kept hiring, they
must have been paying them a good amount of money.
Why they were kept making all these pitch pieces which never
sold, I never figured out. But towards the end, I think he
began to get a little discouraged, and the stuff began
to get less and less tightly wrapped and less and less

(36:42):
usable. And one of the last ones, and I
wish I had a picture of it because it's disappeared into
the sands of time, was a character called Heidi Hogan,
which is a lumberjack and a pinafore who's jumping off a
Cliff holding an umbrella and A2edged Lumberman's, you know,

(37:03):
Woodsman's axe. There's just no explanation, no
context, just Jack Kirby on autopilot drawing crazy crack
brain stuff from his inner psyche, you know, And I don't
even, I don't even think that one got inked.
We kept it around for a long time.
He also drew a picture of PrinceValiant, which is outstanding
because of the horse. Prince Valiant's horse had this

(37:26):
nasty insinuating leer on his face.
You couldn't even miss it. It was very conspicuous, like,
like, you know, Don Juan's horseor something.
So we actually had a, we named that horse Widow maker and we
had a publication that we put out in the, from the office that

(37:47):
we all contributed to. And it was, it was a lot of fun.
It was a fun working environmentfor sure.
I worked with some of the greatest cartoonists in the
world. Everybody who worked there after
the after the job ended and I went away to do my work,
everybody I worked with went on to a stellar position in the
animation industry. Oh, wow, Lead animators and

(38:07):
heads of art departments and, you know, just just the the
Creme de la Creme in that business.
Yeah, it's absolutely or. I could think of them working at
Ruby Spears. I used to say that Joe Ruby
bought race horses to grind up for dog food.
Yeah, it ends up being this breeding ground of creativity

(38:29):
that yeah, it would go on to, like you said, everybody would
exit and go on to create these things and become a huge
inspirations to the rest of us. Well, here's some successful you
know, they could show portfoliosof the work they did in Ruby
Spears and get hired on the spot.
Wow. You know, David Silverman went
on to be a leading figure in TheSimpsons franchise.

(38:52):
Duncan Marchbanks became a lead animator at Disney.
Wow. Everybody, everybody went on to
something like that. Ted Blackman went on to work at
Pixar. We worked on The Incredibles.
And Pixar, you know, Pixar shapes animation as soon as it's
created. It changes everything about the

(39:13):
animated world. I think we're all better off
because of it. Have you seen The Incredibles
lately? I saw the yeah, I've seen all,
all of them. I mean the last one that was
released, which was what, 8 years ago or something.
That was an amazing movie. No, I mean the first one.
I haven't seen the first one, probably in 1010 or so years.

(39:35):
Well I I watched it the other day and it it doesn't look even
slightly dated. What is limited about it just
looks totally stylistic and whatis done with it is so perfect.
Yeah. You don't think, oh this is CG
in its earlier days, You just think this is perfect?
It's timeless, right? Yeah, that's a real

(39:56):
accomplishment. That's foresight of a cosmic
nature right there. Yeah, that that movie, I
remember seeing it in the theater and just being
absolutely blown away. Like I'm, you know, even more
blown away than I was when I sawToy Story for the first time.
I mean, Toy Story was a revelation, but The Incredibles
felt completely different. Yeah.

(40:19):
It's great, just great. Brad Bird is a genius.
Absolutely. I mean Iron Giant also does not
look dated at all. Nope.
So in the time of Ruby Spears isis that when you self publish
what would be the first Jim Zen,which was more of a auto journal

(40:40):
than a comic? Actually, I started
self-publishing Jim before I worked at Ruby Spears.
Oh, it was before a couple. Of years before, yeah.
OK. And then something else I wanted
to ask. I I had the privilege to
interview Stan Sakai a couple months ago and, you know, he he

(41:01):
would talk about these drawing meetings that he would go to
every week with Kirby and, you know, Sergio Aragones.
Did you ever get invited to that?
Were you around any cartoonist outside of work at all?
Let me think, well, not Stan Sakai or Mark Evanier or there's

(41:22):
a there's a bunch of people. No, I didn't.
I didn't. I I knew Robert Williams and
Schakowsky and Rick Griffin. People like that.
I would seek out their company. Because what fascinates me about
the Southern California cartoonist kind of, I don't

(41:45):
know, atmosphere is that that's kind of what births San Diego
Comic Con, the fandom and all ofthat combined.
And it's just, you know, Phantographics published that
book Meet Me at San Diego, whichwas kind of a fascinating road
map of how Phantom crashes in tothe cartoonist and creates this
thing that obviously San Diego Comic Con is not what it once

(42:08):
was, but it's still the biggest pop culture event in the world.
Yeah, too big. Too big.
Yeah, yeah, it is. It is but too.
Too big and too much of it has zip to do with comics so.
Right. And but you know this first
20-30 years is, is it's only comics.
Did you go down? No, it was wonderful.

(42:29):
Yeah. It also mentioned that at Ruby
Spears we had Marv Wolfman was working there.
Oh yeah. Dickson and Gordon Kent and a
number of other writers who werethere, and people would drift
through. I remember Dave Stevens showed
up one day. Oh my God, he knew somebody.
I'd no he knew Doug Wildy. That makes.
Sense, right? Doug Wildy was the model for PV

(42:50):
and the Rocketeers. So he would show up and hang out
with delegate. We would look at his work and
go, God damn this guy. Yeah, Dave Stevens was a
absolute master of his craft. Just insane.
That first Rocketeer book is amazing.
It is it's gorgeous. And you know, he would go on.
He did some he did some covers for Doug and those covers have

(43:13):
become iconic in their own righttoo.
And, you know, I think it's fascinating too with with
Stevens is he kind of he ushers in this entire like generation
of people that didn't know who Betty Page was and kind of
brings her to a a second career,you know, a second, you know,

(43:35):
her being an icon again. Yeah, no, he did.
He and I guess he helped her a lot in person.
He frankly hated her. Yeah, seems like a nice guy.
I didn't get to know him at all.Also, I I met the Hernandez
brothers about that time. Oh wow.
George DiCaprio, who is a friendof Glenn and Lena Bray's.

(43:58):
And about the time my son was born, I was over at George
Dicaprio's house and Leonardo DiCaprio was there and he was
about 12 and I saw him interacting with adults in this
very mature and self assured way.
And I thought, that's the way I want my kid to act when he's
that. Age.
Yeah. And he turned out Leo turned out
to be somewhat decent of a Yeah,he's not.

(44:19):
A clam digger or anything, you got to give him that.
But I, I've heard stories about him going to, you know, I'm a
kind of buying a lot of art and being a big original art
collector, which is pretty cool,makes me happy.
So. So Gil introduces you to Gary,
Gary Groth, who, you know, for decades now has been your

(44:40):
publisher. When did you kind of make the
choice that you wanted to move into comics and and pursue that?
Well, I as I said, I had been publishing Gym by myself and I
had a few issues of that. And Gary told Gil that he was
looking for somebody to edit oneof his new books.

(45:01):
I think it was Centrifugal Bumble Puppy or maybe it was
Honk, one of those magazines. And he asked me if I would like
that job. And I said sure, I'd like to try
out for that. And so Gary Gil gave Gary some
of my self published work and Gary said, listen, forget

(45:22):
editing this magazine. If you want, if you'll do some
comics to put into this gym mix,I'll publish it as a as a book.
Oh wow, so. That was what made me decide to
start doing comics right then and there.
I'd drawn comics before. I'd tried to be a cartoonist.
I was interested in comics. I drew cartoons of Ruby Spears,
obviously, but this was the first time I had the opportunity

(45:44):
to be a cartoonist in any significant sense with the
promise of being published. Yeah.
And they published it for many issues at a loss, just because
they believed in. It, I mean, that's the, that's
what he does, though. That's, I mean, his conviction
as a publisher along with Kim. Yeah.

(46:05):
They were just doing what they could to get it out there.
What year was that? Did the first issue of Jim get
published by Phantom? I think it was 86 or 7.
OK, so that's. So they had already been
publishing Love and Rockets. Oh yeah, yeah.
And I guess. And Stanza Kai's work, they were

(46:27):
publishing and they had a book called.
Critters what? Was it?
There's a book that Kim edited about animals.
Cartoon. Yeah, it was critters.
Critters. Yeah.
So, so Frank is the character that you come up with, You know,
he's your, he's your guy or whatever he is.

(46:50):
What's interesting about? It wasn't in the first few
issues of Jim. Oh, he wasn't.
The first few issues that they published were all the stories
were transcribed hallucinations or stories that I had written to
reflect certain ideas that I hadthat were significant to me, or

(47:14):
just autobiographical stories inwhich like dream stories, things
like that, you know, all personal art stuff.
I didn't. I first drew Frank I think in
1987, I think, and I drew him atwork and I showed him to this
guy, Ted Blackmun. And I go, what do you think?
This character isn't this prettygreat?
And he goes, you know, this is one thing I really hate about

(47:37):
you. You're always messing with my
head and showing me this rubbishand asking me if I think it's
great. And I said, well I'm going to
put this guy in the cover of my next magazine.
So I had a magazine issue of Gymthat kind of graphics was
published and I put this kind ofcreepy version of Frank on the
cover of that. And then I didn't do anything
with him until that 1992 when I was working with Mark Landman,

(47:59):
who had a magazine called Buzz. And I've done some one page
things for him. And he said, you know, I have an
idea. Why don't you do a comic that
looks normal but isn't? And the first Frank story just
popped into my head completely. I said, oh, wow, I know exactly
what I'll do. And so, and from then on, it was
during Frank's stories was easy.I would just sit down somewhere,

(48:21):
write at top speed without any hesitation, and I would have a
story. You just came without thinking.
And sometimes the stories are about things I understood and
sometimes they weren't. But I mean, there was never an
easier birth for an artistic effort than that was.
It was just a piece of cake. Later on, it began to get hard
because I began to wrestle with the formula a little bit and try

(48:43):
to interject myself and I kind of introduced A wobble into the
perfect scenario. But yeah, it was a it was a gift
from God that strip, that scenario, that place.
And that's first. Oh, sorry.
I was just going to say I, I'm doing, I'm going to be going to

(49:04):
to have an event here in Seattlecalled Short Run, which is a
small press Expo. And they invited me to come this
year. And so I'm going to do a whole
bunch of little Frank drawings that I can sell cheap.
And I just love to draw Frank. I love to draw those curves.
It's like, it's like a game to see if I can get it right.
It's so enjoyable for me. That comes that comes off in

(49:28):
your work 100% when I see it, when I look at it, there's a no
matter what the story is about, I still get the joy jumps off
the page that you know, is palpable from from you know,
what you're creating and that first Frank drawing.
I'll I'll throw it up on the screen in the post edit, but

(49:50):
it's cool that that still exists.
It's, you know, it's it's been published again and you know,
and I was going to ask you aboutyour process and, you know,
writing and you just spoke aboutthat.
But was it ultimately a decisionfrom the beginning to keep it
wordless? Dialogue less?
Yes. Yeah.

(50:13):
So your outlines kind of just those are also no dialogue in
there at all. No, no dialogue in there at all,
just describing the action. I just finished a book.
I didn't just finish it, but it's not going out until next
year. It's called Quacky and I don't

(50:35):
know if they started. Well, I guess I can talk about
it. It's Do you ever see those big
little books? Oh yeah, of course.
The well they were. Yeah, it's in that.
It's in that format exactly so. Well, that'll be fun.
Yeah, it is fun, but it's the the the structure so that on all
the right hand pages there's a picture and a caption and all

(50:58):
the left hand pages there's a block of text.
So you have these two narrative streams that are related.
You can read the pictures and follow the story, or you can
read the text and get a much deeper understanding of what's
happening in the story. But that the text, it describes
what Frank is thinking. It doesn't say anything.

(51:20):
The other characters talk, quacky talks, other characters
talk, but it describes what's going on in his mind and it
describes what's going on in theminds of the other characters.
It was a lot of fun to do this. Plus, I like the story a lot.
The story is complicated. And.
And it also, well, I don't want to say anything more about it,

(51:41):
but I'm looking forward to it coming out.
Cool. Yeah, I don't.
I don't want you to get. I don't want any.
I don't want Gary emailing me and saying like hey.
No, they're going to start promoting it any day now, so I
don't think I'm jumping the gun.And is playing with format
something that keeps you like even more interested is is to

(52:02):
mess around with format and try something different.
Is that an exercise for you thathelps you?
Well, it it, it's something I enjoy.
You know, the idea for the 3D book came because I met a guy
who he'd taken one of my drugs and converted it into three.
DI said let's do a book of these.
So that was easy. The the Trosper book, I wanted

(52:26):
it to kind of look like a littlegolden book, but also be its own
thing. And Bill Frazelle had told me he
would do a disc of music to include with it.
So I said I'll do a whole book. Then I did a board book for this
company called Press Pop. Yeah, which was, yeah, I do like
working in different formats anddifferent things because keep it

(52:48):
interesting. It's interesting that we kind of
talking about this because New York Comic Con is going on right
now. But I was reading something that
GAIL Simone wrote on Facebook today about how, you know, comic
sales are up for comic stores. And it seems to be in part by
the fact that different formats are starting to appeal to
people. I've always been fascinated by

(53:09):
it. I love treasury size.
I, you know, I'll, I'll buy any,anybody who puts out work that I
like, if they're doing differentformats, I'll buy them all just
to see how the reading experiences, You know, I'm old
enough to grow up completely with physical media, so I'll
always be drawn to that. But I love it that you've put

(53:33):
out so many different types of of the format of comments.
Thanks. Yeah, and Fantagraphics also.
Let's let's give them another shout out because they are very
much happy to try it. They are.
Indeed they are. Indeed they're going.
They're going great guns at the moment.
They're publishing books like crazy.

(53:54):
Yeah, they have. They've been published.
One of my favorite books in the last 10 years was Barry Windsor
Smith's Monsters. I mean, that thing was, yeah,
there's so much to say about that book, but I think we'll
leave it at that. So I wanted to ask about your
process about, well, your pen and ink stuff is gorgeous and

(54:15):
it's completely on the other side of it is your painted stuff
is there What, what were you attracted to 1st as a creator?
Were you trying to do more painting when when you were
getting in or was that somethingthat you had to build up to?
Well, the first thing I had to do is learn how to draw at all,
because I was not talented. I didn't have a gift for it.

(54:41):
So I didn't make a drawing that I liked, that did what I wanted
it to do until I was 26. I'd been trying hard up to that
point. And then I felt like I had
cracked the code. It was a charcoal drawing.
And I thought, OK, I know how tomake.
I now know how to make semi realistic, convincing pictures

(55:01):
of unreal things. So now it's just down to my
imagination. What can I do?
And I produced a bunch of charcoal drawings and they it's,
it's impossible for me to overestimate or to overstate the
importance those things had for me.
Because when I started taking the things that were in my
psyche that I had wanted to get on paper all my life and

(55:21):
succeeding in doing so, I don't think I don't know how other
people felt about it, but they mesmerized me.
When I finished a drawing that Ithought was successful, I would
just stare at it for hours and just feel the emanations coming
off of it the way I had felt with Dali and Art Sebastian and
Harrison. Katie was another innocent

(55:43):
cartoonist and whose work I saw all kinds of heavy portents and
signs and I just liked that feeling that came off of it.
I could warm my hands over the the rays that were coming from
these things and this my own work was doing it for.
Me. And that just to me, that was
the jackpot. That was the sign that I was

(56:03):
doing exactly what I wanted to do.
And that gave me a kind of confidence where I literally
didn't care if anybody else liked it or not.
I didn't care that Gym Magazine was the lowest selling magazine
in the Phantographics roster andthat I was making no money.
I didn't care because I had to achieve what exactly what I had
wanted to achieve. So you can't say fairer than

(56:24):
that. Most people never can never even
say that about their own work and that's.
What may be an obnoxious thing to say, but I'm just this is
straight Rep or Talers man, I'm just telling you what happened.
No, I mean, I like that though. I, you got to be proud of what
you're doing. It's got to appeal to you.
I I feel. You know, well, I don't even

(56:46):
know, you know, pride. I don't know if I actually felt
pride. I wasn't like, oh man, I really
good. I really did this.
I thought, this works. This has the magic.
This does the stuff that I've been looking for, and it was
almost like something I couldn'ttake pride in.
It's like I had captured a rare animal.
Yeah, I couldn't really take credit for it, but it was
working and that was all that mattered to me.

(57:07):
It's but it's. Important.
I liked it and that was what I wanted.
I wanted to do work that I really liked.
The first time I saw your work and I, I can't remember when it
was, but it's still, it stands out to me as you know, your,
your line, your your line, whichis, is like almost a little
small wave and it's, it's in thebackground of everything that

(57:30):
you do in in the black and whitestuff and the non painted stuff.
Where does I mean, it's simple as I can ask, where does it come
from? Like what was that?
It's just did it just come natural?
Is that your line? No, I wouldn't say so.
I had seen lines like that in other drawings.
I remember seeing a drawing by aJapanese artist.

(57:54):
It was a pen and ink drawing andhis WAVY lines weren't quite
like mine, but he used them in the sky and it gave the sky a
vibrating quality much. I mean, if you if you've done it
with just straight lines, it wouldn't have had this.
Yeah, it wouldn't feel. Happening that's I'll just do

(58:14):
that, except instead of doing itwith a repeated graph, I'll use
a dip pen and I get a varying line.
And I'll. Control the frequency and many I
for many times I'll do a drawingand I'll or page even I'll get
it done. I'll look at it and go I just
missed it. It doesn't it's not broadcasting

(58:37):
on the frequency I want. The vibe isn't there.
These lines are too big. These aren't right.
It isn't it isn't generating theHertz that I wanted to.
So I would just set it aside andstart it over and make those
corrections. And then I could say, yeah, that
works, that sings. I don't always get it.
I don't do that for everything but an important pictures like a
panel that is big and transitional and is supposed to

(58:59):
set the mood and is supposed to make the reader look at it for a
few seconds to kind of control time instead of glancing at it
and going on. And I feel that I really have to
get those frequencies of lines just right so they'd work their
magic. Yeah, that's difficult.
I'm working on a big drawing now.
You want to see it? Yeah, I'd love to.
I think we all would. I don't.
Know if you can even see it Oh yeah wow it's huge and it's.

(59:24):
Giant. It's got a million different
things in it that have required different line frequencies to
make them read. Plants are different from the
little plants are different fromthe trees.
The rocks are different with theplants.
It's not like I'd draw the textures.
You know, there's something you hear referred to in line
drawing. They'll speak of the color.

(59:45):
Remember, I remember seeing thatin the discussions of Joseph
Pennell's work or Charles Dana Gibson's work, You know, that he
would get the color of his line work.
And I never really knew what that meant until I started
trying to get certain effects. And when it would work, I would
say, yeah, the color did change there somehow.

(01:00:06):
I don't know how to. How that works, But there is
there is something to that that's a good analytical tool or
maybe it's just a misnomer, but it but there's something to it.
Speaking about painting now, I mean, I love looking at art in

(01:00:28):
general, but something that I really appreciate is color
palette, because there are artists that explore colors in a
way that I don't understand. And when they come out on the
canvas or the page or whatever you're, it does a little dance
in my mind. I, I think about some of the
people that I in my my life in the modern artist Alex party or

(01:00:51):
you know, somebody like Sean Crystal or you know, a lot of
these people that I'm a fan of. But your exploration of color.
It is that what was that like? Because I mean, I've still
money. Anybody who's listening to this,
just look at Jim's color paintings and try and explain to
your brain what you're seeing. But I don't have any sense of
color theory at all. I mean, you speak of a real

(01:01:12):
painter, something like Bill Ray, if you've seen his
paintings. Yes.
He he invents whole new ways of dealing with color the way a
jazz musician invents a whole new way of expressing an idea
through sound every time he makes a picture.
And I can't do that, you know, for me it's red, yellow, blue
and what they make. That's it, you know, so I don't

(01:01:34):
have any kind of an overall. Sometimes I've, I've done
paintings that didn't work at all because the color balance
was off. I just had to get rid of them.
So I don't really know what I'm doing.
My color palette I think is very, very primitive.
But you know, I did this calendar and.
It's. On the back, it's got the 12
images in a group, so you can see them in a grid all together.

(01:01:55):
And I was looking at them thinking, you know, these really
hang together as a group of paintings.
There's a there is a sense of cohesion to the color schemes
and all of these things in themselves and as a group.
And that surprised me. I wasn't expecting that.
And that calendar, that calendar, you're 2026 Jim

(01:02:18):
Woodring calendars coming out, Phantographics.
And unfortunately, this won't beout in time, but tomorrow you're
doing a signing at Phantographics, correct?
It's tomorrow and it's also yourbirthday.
And it's my birthday, yeah. What a fun way to celebrate.
Your birthday selling it in Walmart of all places.
Oh my gosh. Yeah, I figured.
Salvador Dali once said that he would consider himself a success

(01:02:40):
when they started selling his work at Woolworths.
I don't know if they ever did, but I think I've reached the the
modern day equivalent of that. Yes, yeah, Woolworth's probably
closed. The last one probably closed in
the early 2000s or late 90s. I'm sure they had a calendar of
his there. So.

(01:03:00):
So what I'm hearing is you're not jazz, you're more punk or
maybe experimental. You don't know exactly what
you're doing with the colors. You're just well.
No, I'm just utilitarian. I'm very, very simple.
I'm no good at, there's no sophisticated aspect to my
technique at all. There's no fancy reflected
light, no daring compositions. I just want objects to be

(01:03:23):
represented in such a way that you can read them and see them
in opposite in, in conversation with each other.
Yeah, obnoxious term. I just want to want the
different elements in the picture to be positioned so that
when your eye goes from one to the other, there's an effect.

(01:03:44):
So that's what I think about. And then I just try to make it
look as good as I can. But if you look at my colors,
they're very, very simple. I seldom paint a color that
isn't one of the primaries or secondaries.
Very few Browns and Grays. Well, you still find a way to
make them not only communicate with each other, but communicate
with the interpretation that my brain is feeling.

(01:04:08):
And I know I share that with a lot of people who admire your
work and enjoy looking at it. That that big drawing that you
have on your desk, how long approximately we've been working
on it. I started working on it when I
had COVID. I have.
This sketchbook that I did when I had COVID and I thought, Oh

(01:04:29):
well, this stuff, it's good thatI'm getting this cracked brained
rubbish out of my head because you shouldn't be there.
But afterwards I found out this is full of usable ideas.
I've made a number of drawings based on the stuff that I drew
when I had COVID and this, this is one of them.
When it took me this, this drawing here, the actual
finished picture. There's a few, there's a couple

(01:04:52):
of weeks in it, but I did a ton of sketches leading up to it
trying to figure out exactly what was happening in this thing
and what this creature was doingand how it worked like that's
his feet are the when it lifts his foot off the ground, it's a
ball with this kind of a pedal thing attaching it to the arm.
And when it sits in the ground, it spreads out like an

(01:05:12):
elephant's foot, only more so. So it looks like a squashed
flower. I.
Got picture that? Yeah, it took me a little.
You won't have to when you see this thing, but it was, it took
me a long time to figure out that that was the way that it
needed to be. How did this thing connect with
the ground? What?
What does that mean that it doesthis?
Is it like an all terrain monster?

(01:05:34):
Is it out of its element? It's walking on the hard Rd.
It doesn't even feel like that. Is it super heavy?
What's inside it? What is it doing?
It's communicating with things. It's got these, the head has got
these four big protuberances which open up and these tendrils
come out and the tendrils are touching things in the

(01:05:56):
landscape, communicating with them.
And that was a hard, it was hardfor me to figure out how that
would look. It took me a lot of sketching
and figuring out how to get thateffect.
So I don't know. We'll see how it looks when it
all comes out. I'm at, I'm at the point where
I'm, I'm wondering if I can saveit because so much of it has not

(01:06:17):
gone the way that I want. But I won't do this one over
because it's too bloody difficult.
And don't get rid of it. Please don't I when I hear about
artists. It depends on if it if it comes
out any good or not. You know, yeah, yeah.
You just have to. It would bother me.
I would get up in the middle of the night and go.
That goddamn drawing is still inmy studio.

(01:06:37):
I should have burned that. I, you know, as a person who's a
collector and a, you know, a patron of the arts, I, when I
hear about that, it breaks my heart.
But when I think about the perspective from somebody who's
creating it, like, I don't, I'm not happy with this.
Nobody else should have this or nobody else should be seeing

(01:06:58):
this. Is that kind of what you're
saying There is is? No, it's not even that.
It's that I like drawing. I like working with the Tenon
Inc. I feel entirely privileged to do
it, and I have to do it. If I have to do a page over,
that just means more fun for me.Less money, but more fun.
So I get to do it and I get to try to achieve this thing.
And that's really what drives me.

(01:07:20):
If I do something and I don't think it really works, I would
rather get it right, no matter what.
It cost me in time and effort. And if I don't have the time to
do it, or if I'm not inclined to, I'll just destroy it.
So if this is a total flop, I will definitely destroy it.
This is Ian. Well, hey, it's your artwork.
Nobody can. Do it's my artwork and the world

(01:07:41):
won't miss it. Right, because it was never
happened to. You served its purpose, which is
work. Sure, sure.
Yeah, I can't. I can't promise.
I'm not guaranteed the results, just the opportunity to work.
You spoke about dip pen and tools.
I do want to dip into talking about this pen that it couldn't

(01:08:05):
resist the this giant pen that you created several years back,
Nibus Maximus. It's.
In the studio with us. Oh yeah.
I can see it now, now that you said it's right there.
So you how many years ago was that now?
Oh, I. Don't know, maybe 15.

(01:08:25):
OK, look at that. What a an amazing tool.
But you learned, you learned to draw with that.
Like you, Larry told me, you gotreally good with drawing that,
with that. I did.
I did. I made.
I made a bunch of large drawings, about 3 by 6 feet and

(01:08:45):
it came out really good, I thought.
And so I rolled them up and I took them to the Frye Art
Museum, and I showed them to thewoman who was running the place.
I can never remember her name. And I said, listen, I know
you're retiring and I'm not asking for a show.
But when you leave this place and go out into the world, I
want you to remember that I'm making these pictures in case

(01:09:06):
you think of a place for them. And she said, well, actually
here at the Frye, we're about tohave a show retrospective of
Alexander Arkopenko, and we've been looking for something to do
as a pendant. So if you can do a few more of
these, you can do 10 more of these.
We'll give you a solo show in one of the big galleries
alongside Alexander Akopenko. So I said, OK, great.

(01:09:29):
And so I did them and it was a great show.
I thought, I still have. I sold all of them except for
the one I have hanging in my living room.
And I love it. It's one of my favorite things
I've ever done. And so you had that custom made,
you know the the nib I wanted toask because your was your dad an
inventor, is that am I correct in that fact?

(01:09:51):
My grandfather was an inventor and my dad was an electronics
quiz. And so when I grew up, I had
access to his garage. And in addition to electronics,
there was there are a lot of tools and a lot of hardware for
fabricating things. There are taps and dies and saws
and a drill press and a bandsaw and a mellow roller and all this

(01:10:11):
stuff. So I learned how to make things
like that at an early age. And I is it safe to assume
that's the inspiration behind making something like that?
Well, it was just the idea that it would be nice to have a giant
pen that would work. The whole point was that it had
to work. And I knew it would work.

(01:10:32):
While I was making it. I had AI, had conversations with
people online where I would talkabout it.
And I had, as people say, I'm a professor of fluid dynamics at
MIT or somewhere, you know, and I can tell you this won't work.
I said I know it'll work becauseI know how dip pens work.
I just need to put some, ordinarily a pen, this pin here,

(01:11:00):
it's just a piece of metal, but you can get these reservoirs
that will clip onto the other side of it and hold a drop of
ink through surface tension. So I made a number of perfectly
spaced, well, not perfectly, butspaced copper plates with just
the right space between them. And I nested them under the nib
so that when I dipped in the inkwell, all the ink got in

(01:11:22):
there and it tended to stay in there.
When I tipped it, it would run out, but slowly so I could
control it. And it was just exactly like
using a dip pen. You dip it in the ink, you shake
off the excess and you can draw a 30 foot line that's half an
inch long with this pen. So, so it was I made AI made a
big custom drawing table to holdthe paper that I could walk

(01:11:43):
around and it was, it was a lot of fun.
I mean, it's, it's, it's one of those things, if you don't, if
you think of something that you want to see in the world that
can actually exist and it doesn't exist, create it
yourself. Yeah.
Yeah. Well.
That's a lot of fun, isn't it, Coming from something you think

(01:12:04):
is new? Yeah.
And yeah, it's fun to watch those videos of you drawing
using that pen. And you can still find some of
that stuff on YouTube. Well, it got much better after
those videos were made. Speaking about, you know,

(01:12:25):
Northwest and living up here, did you find when you moved out,
you know, to Vashon Island? And I don't know how long you've
been there, but did you find some new inspiration?
Was it very inspiring for you tobe here artistically?
I'm Vashon. Yeah, yeah.
Well, no, it was much less. Actually, by the time we moved,

(01:12:48):
we lived in EU District for 25 years.
OK. There are a lot of cartoonists
around and we had reorganized volleyball games in the park
that were populated almost entirely by by cartoonists and
shows. And you'd go to concerts and
you'd go to the Fanigraphics bookstore for events.
And we were a fairly tight knit group, really.

(01:13:11):
And then people started to move away or die or things, and the
city changed. So it wasn't as easy or as much
fun to do things. And I just thought, you know, I
didn't move to the Pacific Northwest so that I could live
in a city going supernova like this one is.
It's turning into San Francisco.So let's move out to the country

(01:13:32):
somewhere. And we settled on Vashon.
And so it's it's, it's very, there's definitely an art
community out here. And there are a lot of really
interesting people out here, butI don't know that many of them.
I see them around, I go to theirshows and things, but I'm not as
connected with them as I was with my friends in Seattle.

(01:13:54):
Right. And it's just a whole.
It's just different out here. It's pitch dark at night in my
street. There's no lights.
It's quiet, it's peaceful. It turns out I like solitude
like so it was a good move. Yeah, I, I mean, I, it's also an
island, which I think feels, I don't know, I'm, I grew up on

(01:14:18):
Long Island, which is the antithesis of a comforting
island. And moving, moving out here to
the Pacific Northwest, seeing, you know, the, the, the places
that exist out here and islands and stuff like that.
It's it's just very comforting to me.
Oh, I love it. We live, we live near the North
End ferry boat dock, so anytime I want, I can saunt around down

(01:14:39):
to the dock, which is just picturesque.
Yeah. And wait for the ferry boat to
roll in, stroll aboard, take it over to West Seattle, stroll
off. And now I'm in West Seattle,
which is a wonderful place. Absolutely.
Love it over there. So it's really I couldn't ask
for more than that. It's ideal for me.
Yeah, well, it's, it's that's good to hear.

(01:15:01):
And yeah, Seattle's got such a history of, you know,
cartoonist, artist, musicians. I mean, one of the things that
fascinates me is like, Gary Larson lives in Seattle
somewhere. And it's like, wait, what?
Gary Larson and Bill Frizzell were good friends and lots of
times being back in the day, youcould go to the Tractor Tavern

(01:15:23):
couple nights a year and your Bill Frizzell play a few nights
a week or Danny Barnes or some other local genius.
And evidently Gary Larson would be at those things, but he
nobody was to know about it. So Gil introduced him to me or
pointed him out to me. He wanted to return me
Incognito. So I guess I've seen him, but

(01:15:44):
I've never met him. We're talking it's.
It's interesting about that class of cartoonist that this,
you know, the, the Schultz, the Larson, the Watterson, those
guys like how, you know, Schultz, he embraced everything
and I think we were all better off for it.
But it's just interesting that alot of those guys don't.

(01:16:04):
I mean, Watterson just retired and that was it, and Larson
retired and that was it. But we get to exist in the times
that they did, so I'm cool with that.
Oh yeah, no, I'm totally happy with it.
I can see why Gary Larson wouldn't want everybody to know
he was in the room because he'd be mobbed.
Yeah, yeah. So yeah.
Yeah, decades and decades of, you know, some of the funniest

(01:16:28):
stuff to ever be put. Yeah.
He's one of the great greats. I, I don't know if it was an
interview or was in documentary,but I, you talked about getting
big in Japan. Is, is that something that
you've been to Japan? I know at least once.
Have you been there a bunch of times and is it a place that
kind of inspires you at all? Because I recently went there

(01:16:50):
last year and I'm going there again this year.
And it's absolutely a beautiful place.
I, I did Tokyo for three weeks last year and this this year I'm
doing Tokyo for three weeks and then I'm going to travel around
the country for, for a week. Oh, great.
I've been there four times to mostly to Tokyo and Kyoto.

(01:17:11):
And I wouldn't say it inspired me exactly, but it was a
fantastic experience and it's a book and the things that
happened there, as far as I'm concerned, it's great.
I love being in Japan and. We I know what?
Oh, sorry. I was just going to say in
Kyoto, we stayed at my publishers house and he had in

(01:17:34):
his backyard, his family lived in the house in front and they
had a classic, you know, 200 year old Japanese house in the
back with the Tommy Mattson, thesliding panels and the treasure
house beyond it. Very primitive and rustic.
And we got to stay out there a few times, my wife and me.
And it was, it was like living in a storybook illustration or

(01:17:55):
something. The birds there make different
sounds. The crows make different sounds.
Yeah. Monk coming down the street,
ringing his bell. And you go outside and
everything is different. The way the house is faced, the
street is different. The way the people relate to
their environment is different. The way people act is different.
It was just, it was a different country.

(01:18:16):
I love being there. Press Pop Is your publisher out
there? Yes, yeah.
And what's cool is I know it wasn't something that you were
involved in, but they there was AI guess an anthology style
anime created about your work. Yeah, yeah, they put that
together. Yeah, I'm going to have to track
down a copy of that because I really want to see it.

(01:18:38):
It's interesting. It's called Visions of Frank.
And what I said like the most about it, there's all these
animators. They picked a story and they
animated it, but in every case they changed it.
It's like they thought I hadn't quite got it right.
So they fixed something and I think that's just marvelous.
I'd loved it. Yeah, yeah.

(01:18:59):
To see an interpretation of yourwork that's different.
Yeah, yeah. I mean.
It was really great. It's kind of in line with
thinking, you know, talking, going back to jazz music, you
know, hearing people or, or just, you know, written music
for talking about classical music or something like that.
Hearing somebody else reinterpret it, change it some,

(01:19:20):
but make it their own in a way, Yeah.
It is. It is.
Yeah, it was. It was like, it's really.
It's nice that people know Frank, but they don't know me.
I think a lot of people, when they meet me, they go, you're,
you're really the guy who draws Frank.
Because to a lot of people, I don't seem to have the right

(01:19:40):
temperament or personality or demeanor for the guy who created
Frank. And I think, well, you're just
not seeing the whole picture then, are you?
Maybe you don't really know whatFrank's all about.
Maybe the Frank you see is your Frank.
You know, it's not the same as my Frank.
Could be a Seymour in it or something different in it.

(01:20:04):
Do you think that maybe that could be attributed to the fact
that it's, there's no dialogue and you're reading it, so you're
interpreting it in your own way.And you know, I mean, I can't
explain to you what I'm how I feel about it when I'm reading
it because I'm reading it and I'm getting something that maybe

(01:20:26):
wasn't the intended use of or not use, but the intended
meaning behind it. I, I, I actually, when I'm
looking at your books, I was flipping through the services
You're missing gonad yesterday and there was music playing in
my head. There was no music at all, but

(01:20:47):
there was music playing in my head while I was reading it.
And I don't even know what it was.
So. Well, I I can relate.
I've had that experience with with other people's work.
Yeah, that I have that experience with the work of the
illustrator Harry Mcnaught. He illustrated this book that
was actually important to a lot of people in my generation.
It was, it was called The Big Golden Book of Science.

(01:21:10):
It was a book a lot of us got when we were kids, and it taught
us about dinosaurs and volcanoesand fossils and minerals and the
night sky and the Aurora borealis and all that stuff.
And his illustrations have this beautiful lyrical quality.
And you got to just we would allwe've got talk to Palmer Breeds
about it. And we're saying, yeah, there's
this. It's so lyrical and beautiful.
You can it works that way in your mind.

(01:21:35):
So. But I think also another reason
for not having dialogue in the Frank comics is because that
there's a lot of things in therethat don't have names, a lot of
situations that don't have names.
And in this big little book I did, I say the first line is it

(01:21:55):
was morning in the Unifactor. The lot of Frank's stories start
off in the morning and the Unifactor is mentioned in a
comic for the first time. And what's going on in the minds
of the animals is the sun comes up is described, and what's
going on in the mind of William and of Manhog and Frank, all the
other characters is described. So that's a first, but it it

(01:22:20):
kind of highlights the idea thatinstead of showing, instead of
naming the things that people are and characters are
interacting with, it describes their reaction to them.
So if I'm in a strange city and I wake up and I look out and
there's a citadel and a tower and a a red barn and a man

(01:22:40):
making moonshine over there. Except for the moonshine, I
don't really know what's going on with any of those things.
I'm just seeing them. And I could describe them as a
citadel in a tower in a barn, but I don't know what any of it
means. And I think that that that's
what this big little book does. It describes the way people are
reacting to things. But what's happening is so

(01:23:01):
bizarre. The central action in this story
is so spooky and upsetting in a certain way that also for this
story, I did a backup story withthese pig characters and I'm
interested in seeing how that goes.
These big little books had a lotof shitty comics in them.
You know you're you're buying for the great cover, and then
you'd open it up only to discover that somebody had taken

(01:23:23):
a bunch of Mickey Mouse crew sheets and collage them to
somehow resemble the action thatwas being described and it
didn't look right. So I did this story with these
pigs in it and I deliberately made it look bad.
There's no rendering the back tothis kind of stilted and the
story is kind of pointless, but I just wanted the book to be
thicker so that it would be as thick as a big little book.

(01:23:44):
So I came up with this 80 state,80 page story and popped it in
there and I'll be interested in seeing if people like it at all
because I don't think it necessarily works.
It's just filler. It's just.
Area. So we'll see.
But purposefully doing that kindof makes it even better, you
know? I hope, I hope it's a gamble.

(01:24:05):
You know, I mean, if I could have rendered it all nicely and
interestingly and it would have looked good.
But then that might have missed the point because the story
isn't good. I think it's better that it's
all of a piece and it's just a piece of filler.
It's not even named on the cover.
It says quacky. Plus second big feature.
They. Just didn't know what it was

(01:24:26):
going to be and the last minute they slammed this thing into the
press. Incredible.
I love that name. I mean, it's like, and it's like
being in on a joke, right? It's like, yeah, I I appreciate
that. It is something staggering about
your your body of work, especially like, you know,
beautiful, beautiful spring day and Congress of animals.

(01:24:50):
And you know, the Frank book, like all of your books are very
large and and you know, page count is, is incredible on a lot
of these books. And how so this book that you're
working on that's coming out next year.
How long have you been working on that?
Oh, I don't even remember about a year.
I think a year when I did a lot of the drawings over again.

(01:25:13):
I got a huge stack of outtakes. Yeah, that one took a long time
to come together, but it's a pretty slight product All in
all. One beautiful spring day when I
put it all together, when I realized I could put it all
together and there would be a cohesive narrative flow.
I now wish that when I had published it, I had added a

(01:25:35):
large written section that said something about what's going on.
Because I think somebody just picking that book up without
knowing anything about Frank or that world gets exhausted by
what been about 50 pages in and there's 400 pages and that
they've been just asked to look at and swallow and observe and
accept so much stuff by that point.

(01:25:58):
But I think they might just begin to get filled up.
You know, like when like is a stupid self-serving analogy.
But like if you go to the Louvreand you see these, you even
though the greatest art in the world is there.
After a while we went, oh great,there's a laughing Kabalu.
It's got out of here and my brain.
Yeah. So it's it's overload.
Yeah, so I think that this book might do that, like Finnegan's

(01:26:22):
Wake or something. But on the other hand, I'm
hoping that it will stick aroundafter I'm gone and that somebody
will take a serious look at it and go, you know what, you know
what's going on here? You know, it's just going what's
happening in here. I put things in there and I've
even said that they were in there and as far as I know,
nobody's discovered them. Like there's a, there's just

(01:26:45):
hidden things in that book that I've talked about, and I don't
know if anybody's come across them yet, but there's some very
definite pointers in there to things.
I'll have to I, I mean that's the thing about also having
these books and owning these books that can take them off the

(01:27:05):
shelf any day. I want to sit down and just kind
of go over it again. And I, I feel like with comics
in general, it's good to do thatbecause you're not just like the
way you look at things, but likethe way your mind interprets
what it's looking at changes day-to-day, month to month, year
to year. One, one other thing I want to

(01:27:28):
ask about books in general, Do you think at any point you'll
ever want to publish like a big oversized, almost like artist
edition on some of these, you know, bigger pieces that you've
created? Is that something that you'd
ever like to explore? I don't think so, because for
one thing I don't have much of my own work left.
I've sold it and a lot of it I don't know where it went.

(01:27:51):
I lost my records. And the other thing is I try
really hard to make my work lookas clean as I can, so the
originals almost look like prints.
I don't. I don't use white paint if I can
possibly avoid it. I would rather erase the ink and
that's a whole laborious processin itself and you can see it.

(01:28:13):
But I just, I just want the things to be as pristine as
possible. I'm selling them to people to
hang in their walls like this drawing here.
It's not going to, it's not. I'll probably make a print of
it, but it's not meant to be a print.
It's meant to be a piece of artwork.
And if it's got a lot of white paint all over it, obvious
corrections that works against it aesthetically as far as I'm

(01:28:35):
concerned that. Makes sense that I I understand
that and your artwork does look beautiful in person.
I mean, I've seen it on walls, I've seen it in fan of graphics
of you know so well. Thanks, I appreciate that.
Yeah. It's nice to hear, you know,
this is kind of a, a solitary life, you know, here in my
study, you can't see it, but this room is tidy and I spent a

(01:28:58):
lot of time in here with the door shut listening to spoken
word stuff, just just watching the ink come out of the pen.
So it's nice to hear that it adds up to something for
somebody. I appreciate you saying so.
Yeah, I mean, that's this podcast serves as a you know, I

(01:29:18):
I said it in the pitch and I talked to you in person.
But you know, fandom when non-toxic is something that
really has pushed all of the arts forward.
I mean, you can, you know, and it's the, that part of it has
always fascinated me, whether it's zenes and comics, punk

(01:29:40):
scenes, metal zenes, you know, the music industry, you know
that or just, you know, like famous monsters of Filmland is a
fancy. And it was the nationally
published and nationally distributed and it it took
horror movies and propelled it forward for generations and
generations. And so.

(01:30:04):
I didn't know where to buy it. Kids would bring it to school
and I would trade them for copies because I I didn't know
where you can pick it up, man. I love famous monsters.
Monsters in general, man. Yeah, and you know, I know you
talked about, you know, being the, the wild one, the weird one

(01:30:24):
as a kid. And I feel the same way.
I was into the weirdest stuff. I mean, my, you know, my dad
tells the story about the first time we went to San Francisco.
There was a guy in the Wharf making balloon animals and every
kid got asked what they want. And my response was a shark.
Because I've been fascinated by sharks since I was a child and

(01:30:46):
saw Jaws and all that. And like that was me.
I was always the one that wantedthe weirdest monstrous thing.
And I didn't care about the cutething or the the thing that
everybody else wanted. So you're a.
Monster kid, as they say. I like that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%. And also my teacher said that

(01:31:07):
too. Last I want to ask you, is there
any any artist today that are producing work or you know,
newer discoveries that you've found at all or anybody that
inspired like that? You look at their work and
you're like, wow, the next generation, you know, anybody
that you, yeah, you wanted to talk about or some modern

(01:31:31):
influence for you. I have not kept up with what is
going on. Most of my interests that the
art I like most, the artists I like most, it's firmly rooted in
the past and in a certain way oflooking good things.
Comics have changed so much thatthe things that I loved about

(01:31:57):
comics that I always wanted to see in comics are not as present
in new comics as they were in the comics that I loved.
So between not keeping up on it and between looking at stuff and
thinking, I don't think this is for me.
The answer to that is probably no.

(01:32:18):
I'm sure there's I know there's a lot of great work out there.
I know there's a lot of tremendous artists working out
there, but it's either I haven'tseen it.
I'll probably see stuff at shortrun.
That's probably the first comic convention that I've been to and
I don't know how long. Actually.
The last one I was at was in Chicago and it kind of made me

(01:32:40):
think, oh, I don't belong here anymore.
I'm too old for this. I have to wait a few more years
until I'm a grand old man of theprofession because right now I'm
just one of those old pricks whowon't get out of the way.
Like I said, this will be up after the signing tomorrow, but
you'll be at short run in November, right?
Is it the first weekend in November?
1st of November I think. Yeah, And anything else to look

(01:33:03):
out for? Are you active on any of the
social medias that I should linkbelow or?
No, not really. Just Facebook.
I need to get back on Instagram.But those things take a lot of
time, it turns out. Oh yeah, they are a time suck.
No, I'm on Facebook, but that's about it at this point.
I also have a presence on Blue Sky, but I never quite figured

(01:33:23):
that out. So I've kind of left that, left
that hang. Anything else to promote or just
remind people is out there? I mean no.
No, no, no, no, for everything'sjust slodding along.
And if you're looking for any ofJim's work, Fan of Graphics has
whatever they have in print is available on the website.

(01:33:43):
And if you have never been to the store and Georgetown and
Seattle, it is small but mighty.Mighty Yeah, Larry Reid is
usually there, and he's someone to know.
Yes, Larry's the best and I wantto give a special thank you to
Larry for introducing us. And Jim, this was this was a

(01:34:05):
pleasure and 1/2 thank you so much for your time today.
Thanks Dave, it was for me too. Thanks for inviting me and good
luck to you and all your future endeavors.
Thank you so much for watching and once again thank you to
Larry Reid for making the introduction and many, Many

(01:34:26):
thanks to Jim for his time. Like I said at the beginning,
you can see him at the Short runFestival in Seattle and you can
check out all of his work via Fan of Graphics.
And if you live in proximity to the store, you can go pick up
his work in person at the Fanigraphics bookstore in
Georgetown, which is just South of downtown Seattle.

(01:34:46):
And it's an amazing place. I've, I've been there many
times. I've shot videos.
You, if you follow me on social,you see me post stuff about the
actual store. And man, what, what an
enlightening conversation. And once again, just friendly,
warm chat. And Jim really enjoyed himself.
He told me so. So that really made me happy.

(01:35:08):
And yeah, so we're getting closeto the end of the season, but I
still got some more surprises along the way.
But before we do get going, I'm going to ask you two things.
I'm going to ask you one, to write a review, rate the
podcast, leave a comment like any interaction with you, my
listener helps this podcast growand get out to most to new

(01:35:28):
audiences watching it till the end.
Even though there's, you know, sometimes a little goofiness at
the end that also helps pushing in the algorithm.
And 2nd, if you want to support the podcast but you're not into
buying the comics that I sell onmy other channel on Wednesday
shows, you could join the Patreon.
The link's down in the description below.
You'll get at least one Patreon episode of this program.

(01:35:51):
You'll get at least one West Coast Avengers.
Most likely you'll get two of those and a private sale every
two months. It's 5 bucks a month.
I know it's not the best times to ask people to support you
monetarily, but it's less than acup of coffee.
So thank you so much for listening to Direct Edition and
I'll see you next week. Hello friends, It's your pal
Dave, and I want to introduce toyou my brand new Patreon, West

(01:36:14):
Coast Avengers and Direct Edition, all under one umbrella.
You can now support me by joining the Patreon for $5 a
month. And what you're going to get is
me wearing this shirt and nothing else.
I'm just kidding. You're going to get at least one
bonus episode of West Coast Avengers and one bonus episode
of Direct Edition per month as well.
I'm going to let you vote on thecontent of another West Coast

(01:36:34):
Avengers video where I flip through a rare book or a rare
magazine or something that you've you've never seen before,
and you get to part. Part.
Yeah. And you get to participate in
what book it is as well. Every two months I'm going to do
a private. Sale.
Right here, Patreon exclusive and you're going to have first
access to buying it well before it goes live on West Coast

(01:36:56):
Wednesday of my comic book claimsale.
So that's a little exclusivity for you.
So plop down 5 bucks a month. It's not that much to ask, is
it? I'm I'm waiting.
No, it's not. For five bucks a month, you can
help support and grow this community while we do some great
things together. West Coast Avengers and Direct
Addition. Who's fucking hell, let me do

(01:37:21):
that one more part over again. Yeah, yeah, that's right.

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