John Porcellino is a favorite cartoonist to many. He has published over 60 issues of his comic King Cat. Porcellino would be important simply for his self publishing efforts, but it's his actual comics that have been important to me and many others. There are currently 3 collections available of his work available. Find all about them at his website:
www.king-cat.net
John was unable to provide photos of his studio but his interview is so good that I'm sure no one will mind.
1. can you describe your drawing routine---how often you draw, how many hours per day---how you break up the day with drawing?
It really varies. Sometimes I’ll go weeks or even months without drawing much at all. But all that time I’m working on King-Cat. I spend a lot of time writing, and revising, before I sit down to start drawing. I keep notebooks and scraps of paper everywhere with little ideas or phrases jotted down on them. Sometimes I start to wonder if I’m ever gonna get a new issue out. Then somehow it starts to gel and I can “see” the issue in my head-- where all this stuff has been leading. Then, once I sit down to begin drawing the new issue, I might work 12 hours a day until it’s done.
Usually I try to draw/work in the mornings, cuz the later the day gets the worse I feel physically and mentally, so it helps to do my comics when things are smoother in my brain/body.
2. how much revision/editing do you do in you work?
A good bulk of my creative time is spent revising. It’s hit or miss. Sometimes you get it on the first try, sometimes I agonize for weeks over little words choices etc. One reason I spend so much time on the writing is I like to have a clear idea where the comic is going before I start drawing. It’s hard to edit the pages after they’re drawn, and I try not to do too much Photoshopping.
3. talk about your process---do you write a script or make up the drawing as you go?
At this point I almost always have a completed script before I start drawing. Every once in a while though I do just sit down with a blank piece of paper and start writing/drawing off the top of my head. It’s interesting to see what comes out that way.
4. do you compose the page as a whole or do you focus more on individual panel composition?
I tend to concentrate on the panels and the rest works itself out. Sometimes I’ll compose with the idea of the end of the page, or the start-- meaning I take into consideration that slight pause that happens when the reader turns the page, or their eyes move to the top of the next facing page. When you can work something like that in, I think it adds something to the reading experience.
5. what tools do you use (please list all)?
I use various non-photo blue pencils to draw with. I ink with Microns, or sometimes a soft-lead pencil or black colored pencil. I use brushes only rarely nowadays. Using the pencil to “ink” gives me some of the flexibility and surprise of using a brush, but a little more control, which I like.
I used Rapidographs till the late nineties, but I always had problems with them splattering and clogging; and the ink took so long to dry, I’d smear things sometimes. I like Microns cuz they’re easier in that way, but I think they’re a little inconsistent-- the line quality really varies as the pen gets broken in. And with my artwork being so simple, and typically drawn at 100%, that kind of thing can really bother me. So when I’m drawing I often have a stack of Microns on the table, not only varying line weights, but in various states of decay. At first Microns give me a scraggy, thin line, then they flatten out into a nice smooth line, then they start to dry up and thin out, then they mysteriously start making a thick, wet line, then they start to erode and give a scratchy unpredictable line… so I have all these pens on the table with identifying marks on them so I know which one is in which state, and I plow ahead.
Other than that, just the usual-- a Staedtler Mars plastic eraser, X-Acto knife, misc. black and colored inks, rubber cement, white-out tape, old typewriter correction sheets (the best for whiting out tight or detailed areas), miscellaneous white-out bottles, a ruler (for cutting paper), various brushes for whiting out or filling in with ink, scraps of paper, a small light box for tracing.
6. what kind(s) of paper do you use?
For years I’ve just used some kind of inexpensive smooth laser paper. I fold it in half and it’s King-Cat sized, but sometimes the quality and smoothness varies from batch to batch. The nice thing is I can buy a ream for not too much money, and get like 3 or 4 years worth of comics pages out of that.
Recently I have been using nicer paper, bristols, for doing commissioned artwork on. It’s great-- using a good paper like that-- it kind of made drawing fun again-- that delicious tactile sense of putting this ink down on paper. So I may start experimenting with using better paper for my actual comics. We’ll see… For the first 5 or 6 years of King-Cat I just used these cheapo notepads I got from my Dad, that read “From the Desk of Charles Porcellino”, and had like a clip art image of a pen and bottle of ink. I’d just use the back side to draw on… and sometimes you could see where the printed ink bled through onto the comic side, but I always thought that was funny.
One thing I like about comics is, if you need to, you can really get away with just the basics in terms of materials.
7. do you read a lot of comics? are you someone who reads comics and then gets excited to make more comics---or is your passion for making comics not linked to any particular love for other comics?
Sometimes reading comics inspires me directly to sit down and draw, but mostly it’s like a kind of psychological boost I get.
I have a lot of hang-ups about comics, and for years I never really read too many. I used to pretty much just read whatever I happened to get in the mail from creators. As that scene kind of got smaller, I found I was seeing a lot less comics. It helps me to read people’s comics, because I think: “See, other people do this and it’s fine…” Nowadays it’s hard to afford comics, but I try. I check them out of the library sometimes. I think it’s helpful for me. It kind of reminds me: “Oh yeah-- I like comics!”
8. do you make comics for a living? if not, how do you support yourself, and how does this relate to your comics making process?
For the last few years, and off and on in the past, I’ve really tried to make a living doing just my art. To be honest, I don’t know how I feel about it. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with doing that, but it sure is hard, and the stress it creates kind of messes me up.
When I work dayjobs sometimes it’s actually kind of inspiring to me-- like I have this secret life of comics outside this, and it kind of keeps me going and strengthens my faith in my art.
As I mentioned I have a lot of hang-ups about art, and comics. I struggle with it all the time. It might be that trying to make a living 100% off my comics brings out too many of those bad feelings-- the doubt and insecurity. I don’t know.
9/ do other artforms often seem more attractive to you?
Well for years I made music too, and that was nice balance. It’s a different part of the brain that gets exercised. Same is true for painting. I miss getting messy, and the unpredictability of painting-- not knowing where things are going and being surprised and making mistakes that turn out to help the work. I bought some paints this summer with the idea of getting back into it, but I haven’t really had time to do so yet.
Sometimes I think music is the best medium, cuz it has words, but also that non-intellectual aspect of SOUND, where emotions are translated without words or ideas. It adds to the power. Then I think movies are the best because they can be closer to real life. And formally, they’re visual, literary, and musical. So they cover a lot of those bases.
But the fact is, I’m a cartoonist. It’s what I do.
10. what artwork (or artists) do you feel kinship with?
I draw inspiration from just about everything. And I can find a connection with just about any creative person. That said, a short list of people and things that have had a strong impact on me would be: The Chicago Imagists, Lynda Barry, Matt Groening, Jenny Zervakis, Jeff Zenick, Eric Bag-O-Donuts, Max Beckmann, Matisse, Warhol, Duchamp, Joe Chips, Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, Punk Rock, Han Shan, Ryokan, Kosho Uchiyama Roshi, Dogen Zenji, the Arts and Crafts movement, Kerouac, Kobayashi Issa, Thoreau, John Lennon, and the Zine movement. To name just a few.
One time I was in Chicago with Kevin Huizenga. We were at the Art Institute, it was a few days after 9/11. I was wandering around looking at all this great art, and I just couldn’t relate to it-- not only the imagery, but even the process-- I was wondering how did people make these pictures, and why? I couldn’t connect-- it was this weird state of mind. Then, from down a long hallway, I saw a large black and white print by Un’ichi Hiratsuka, of the Buddhist monk Nichiren, and I practically fell over-- it was so bold and simple and lovely -- and I could intimately relate to it-- it was an astounding experience. Learning about Hiratsuka really added something to my thinking, about art, and being an artist.
11. is a community of artists important or not important to you?
I used to think “I could be anywhere and do what I do.” And that’s still true. However, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve begun to really see the benefit of having artists around that you can relate to, that you can talk to about stuff. To me, making art is a pretty private thing. I squirrel myself away and make it. But then it’s nice to emerge from that mindset, and have people around to share with.
12. what is your parents/family's reaction to your work?
My Dad used to read King-Cat, and we would talk about it. He surprised me once-- we were having a conversation about art and DIY, etc, and I saw that he really understood where I was coming from. I’m not sure he necessarily thought it was the best thing for me, but he understood it.
Now, my Mom reads King-Cat sometimes, but I have to go through each new issue and make sure there’s nothing in there that’ll bother her. So she doesn’t read every issue. And she doesn’t really talk about it when she does.
13, what is more important to you---style or idea?
I guess you need both-- an idea, and a way to express it that makes the thing whole.
14. is drawing a pleasure to you or a pain?
Well it’s been a particularly bad time for me lately, so my answer might reflect that… but-- when I’m not drawing it seems like the hardest thing in the world. I’d rather do just about anything than draw. And for that reason I procrastinate a lot. Then when I finally sit down and start drawing, the instant the pencil hits the page, I realize “This is what I was born to do.” Then the second I stand up, that feeling of confidence is so distant, it’s almost like it never existed, and the despair and fear sets in again. It must be something weird in my brain. I don’t understand it.
15. when you meet someone new, do you talk about being an artist right away? do you identify yourself as an artist or something else?
For a long time I would never bring it up. I was afraid of being an artist. So to fight back I started trying to come out and say it when the situation warranted. Now I’ll say I’m an artist, or sometimes a cartoonist. Why not? It’s the truth.
16. do you feel at all connected to older comic artists like steve ditko or jack kirby---or does this seem like a foreign world to you?
Yes, I feel connected to those guys, though I should say I never really read much of that stuff growing up. I love to look at it though. You get a sense of the paths cartooning has taken and is taking. Anyone who sits at a drawing table and digs away at comics I can relate to in one way or another. These guys dedicated their lives to this artform. It’s inspiring.
17. do you ever feel the impulse to not draw comics?
All the time. Practically every issue of King-Cat I’ve released over the last 8 or so years, I’ve wondered whether it will be the last. The process is so painful to me. I know people don’t like to hear that. And I know it’s not like that for everyone. But in my case it’s true. I have OCD, and it makes a lot of things really difficult. When I’m focused on comics, the OCD focuses on comics, and it can be brutal.
I often think of trying to lead a normal life. It seems really inviting at times. The bottom line is I know that as crazy as comics makes me, I get crazier if I don’t do ‘em. So I do ‘em, and hope for the best.
18. do you draw from life?
Yes. I like to draw alleyscapes in particular. I’ve sometimes thought if I quit comics maybe I would become a landscape painter. It took me a long time to understand landscape painting. But once I did, it seemed like the purest, most beautiful thing.
19. do you pencil out comics and then ink? or do you sometimes not pencil?
I almost always pencil first. Then I dread inking, cuz I like how the pencils look-- they have a looseness and an organic quality to them. Then I start inking, and I like how the ink looks, so… The only times I don’t pencil first are sketching, or those comics I mentioned above where I just let loose on the page as therapy.
20. what does your drawing space look like?
A mess.
Dash Shaw
Dash Shaw has been making great comics for as long as I can remember. Recently, he's risen to higher prominence for his wonderful book Bottomless Bellybutton. He's now hard at work on Bodyworld, which one prominent cartoonist recently described to me as "basically, a perfect comic."
Read all about both works here:
http://www.dashshaw.com/
Above is a work in progress page by Dash.
1. can you describe your drawing routine---how often you draw, how many hour per day---how you break up the day with drawing?
I draw every day for most of the time, over ten hours. I used to take breaks to smoke cigarettes and that was all I would do. Smoke, draw, smoke, draw. I’ve since quit smoking and now I don’t know what to do. I walk to a place to get a cup of coffee and walk back, but I can’t do that ten times a day. Finding some small activity to replace smoking has been hard. But, of course, I’m happy I quit.
2. how much revision/editing do you do in you work?
Because of the quality of the Bottomless Belly Button drawings, if I had an idea for a scene I could just draw it and then decide later whether or not to put it into the book, or where to put it. The idea for that book was to do a lot of editing. With BodyWorld, my webcomic, I haven’t done any editing. I’m slowly executing something that’s planned before in sketches and notes.
3. talk about your process---do you write a script or make up the drawing as you go?
With BodyWorld I divided the whole story into sections, and then divided those sections further. The outline for it looks sort of like a map or grid. So I know what’s going to change about when, but how I get there is only drawn in sketches right before I draw on the Bristol. It was difficult when I started but now it just writes itself. If you know the characters well enough you can just imagine what they’re doing and it’s easy and super fun.
4. do you compose the page as a whole or do you focus more on individual panel composition?
I used to compose something as a whole book, or whole facing page spreads. Everything had to look the same on a spread. You can tell I was doing that, if you look at The Mother’s Mouth or some of the GoddessHead short stories.
I wanted to just focus on individual panels with BodyWorld. I wanted to not think about a page at all. But I cheat sometimes and I think about the tier or the whole page if it was printed.
5. what tools do you use (please list all)?
For BodyWorld I use black India ink with rapidograph pens and microns and markers and the largest crowquill nib. It’s the 513EF crowquill nib. It’s huge and weird, because the line looks sort of like a cross between a brush and a crowquill, because people usually think of crowquills as smaller and scratchier. It’s more like a fat calligraphy pen. And then I color it using a lot of different things, but I usually go back to gouache paint on acetate sheets or construction paper or color cards with colored pencil and sometimes watercolor. In chapter nine I wanted a part of it to be gold foil, but the scanner didn’t read the foil correctly so I took photos of the foil in the sun and then cut it to be the shape of the smoke (in the comic) and pasted it in. I’m playing around. Recently in my sketchbook I’ve been trying things with combining pencil and ballpoint pen, drawing large, and then reducing it on a photocopier so that they blend together. I’m annoyingly a formalist so I’m always screwing around with different things to see what it looks like.
6. what kind(s) of paper do you use?
BodyWorld is drawn on Bristol paper.
7. do you read a lot of comics? are you someone who reads comics and then gets excited to make more comics---or is your passion for making comics not linked to any particular love for other comics?
When I was in Richmond I lived close to a comic shop, Velocity Comics, and so I would read a lot more comics. I lived a block and a half away from it for 8 months, and there was a great used bookstore that carried a ton of older comics close to me too. But now a comic shop is like an hour away, so I hardly read anything. I’ve always read comics, and I’ve read all kinds of comics, so I have a weird backlog of everything in my mind. I’m trying to flush it out. Sometimes I think everything I draw is just a combination of all of the millions and millions of drawings I’ve seen. For the past year I’ve been trying to move back to some natural reaction. How would I draw something if I didn’t know what a drawing is supposed to look like? How can I try to put my mind in that place? It’s impossible- But I feel like I have to try, at least, as hard as I can. Working in color is helping. It’s hard, too, with comics because comics naturally have an invented/borrowed language- like, I didn’t invent the word balloon, right? I didn’t invent the thought balloon. Is drawing the eyes larger a natural reaction to a face? Uggh. I could ramble about this for pages and pages, so I’ll stop there.
8. do you make comics for a living? if not, how do you support yourself, and how does this relate to your comics making process?
Yes. I used to work as a figure drawing model for Virginia Commonwealth University, but now I just do comics and comic-related things.
9. do other artforms often seem more attractive to you?
I like to do animations and will be doing that more next year.
10. what artwork (or artists) do you feel kinship with?
I feel a kinship with Oyvind Fahlstrom. He did a lot of different things, wrote, made board games, etc. I’ve been reading his writing about art/life lately and I’m responding to it. Also I’ve committed the social faux pas of ripping off of my friends Tom Herpich and, more recently, Frank Santoro, who I both feel a kinship with. Those are both probably one-sided (“unrequited”?) kinships. But I’ve been influenced by a lot of people who I don’t necessarily feel so close to. The backgrounds for BodyWorld come from animation (“Yogi Bear”) style backgrounds, but I don’t feel a deep kinship with Yogi Bear background artists. “Bottomless” is a family fiction story, but I’ve never felt a kinship with any other family fiction storyteller. What I’m saying is that I define “kinship” as kind of a felt, deeper sensibility about everything, rather than just someone/something I like.
11. is a community of artists important or not important to you?
I would like a community that actually felt like an artists’ commune, where everyone lives in the same farm house and sleeps together. What happened to that? I don’t want to talk about nibs over the phone. I’m born in the wrong time maybe. I think about this a lot and it’s really frustrating. This is another answer where I could ramble on and on.
12. what is your parents/family's reaction to your work?
There was a time when they didn’t like it, but they are enjoying it nowadays. I think that BodyWorld and Bottomless having more of a sense of humor is important. My sense of humor is very personal/unique to me, and since they know me they can see how the comic comes from me, more than other (less humorous) comics.
13, what is more important to you---style or idea?
When something’s good they’re inseparable.
14. is drawing a pleasure to you or a pain?
It’s extremely pleasurable. Over the years I’ve tried to weed out all of the painful parts. “Why am I drawing this annoying fucking thing? Wait… I don’t have to! I’m in control!” Really, I don’t have to draw anything I don’t want to. Nobody’s paying me enough. The only painful parts left are scanning and computer work (piecing together pages, layers, etc.) but even that can be enjoyable if you get a new CD and listen to it, zone out, by the computer. If it was painful I’d be a lot less prolific and more tortured. All of the pain is when I’m not drawing, in society! Ha! I’m half-joking I guess.
15. when you meet someone new, do you talk about being an artist right away? do you identify yourself as an artist or something else?
I identify myself as a cartoonist or artist. The other day I was at a party and someone asked me what I do and I said I do a webcomic and my girlfriend overheard that and got really mad at me. She said I was misrepresenting myself and we talked about it later. Personally, if someone told me they did a webcomic I would be intrigued. But, of course, I like webcomics.
16. do you feel at all connected to older comic artists like steve ditko or jack kirby---or does this seem like a foreign world to you?
I got into Jack Kirby early because I was into the Batman animated series and Bruce Timm would talk about Kirby. So I looked up Kirby and started reading him. Also my Dad is in his sixties now, so he’s the age where he read all that and then the underground comics. He still had a lot of those comics in storage or around the house. I saw Ditko too but I didn’t get it. I only got into him in college. Then, for a while, I liked Ditko more than Kirby and would tell people that. Now I’m swinging back and Kirby’s my man. But I do like the recent Ditko comics. Not the essays, which I just skim through. I read “The Fountainhead,” just because of Ditko. Maybe I’m crazy, but I think that the lineage of Kirby and Ditko is being carried through both in some of the contemporary “alternative” cartoonists and some of the current Marvel/DC artists, without favoring either camp especially. It’s really a sensibility of an individual artist, rather than a tie to a particular genre. Kirby and Ditko worked in a million different genres anyway.
17. do you ever feel the impulse to not draw comics?
I’ve tried to quit a few times before. That was years ago. Now I’m in it pretty hard-core so I don’t think I’m going to quit anytime soon.
18. do you draw from life?
I do figure drawing and observational drawing, but my comics aren’t drawn from life.
19. do you pencil out comics and then ink? or do you sometimes not pencil?
Currently, I’m penciling and inking.
20. what does your drawing space look like?
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