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An Interview With Dylan Horrocks
posted May 31, 2002
 



What follows is an interview I did with the cartoonist Dylan Horrocks for The Comics Journal. The interview was conducted on both sides of September 2001. The first part of the interview we did in person right before my father died, the second part we did over the phone after I got back home to Seattle. It was a memorable time. I like Dylan very much, both as a cartoonist and as a thinker about comics, and this is the most fun I ever had doing an interview. What follows is the introduction and interview I turned in, which is probably slightly different than what ended up being published in early 2002.

From The Comics Journal #244, May 2002

Sweeping Out the Lighthouse: An Interview with Dylan Horrocks
By Tom Spurgeon

Comics journalist Leonard Batts flew to New Zealand; I only had to go to Bethesda. I met the cartoonist Dylan Horrocks at the Small Press Expo in 1998, during a major crossroads in his professional life and a minor crossroads in my own. Horrocks had made it out the other side of alternative comics publisher Black Eye's business collapse with a box of graphic novels collecting Hicksville, the story that had introduced the world to Batts and an endearing cast of comics-savvy characters while garnering incredible word-of-mouth momentum in the little-seen comic book Pickle. Horrocks was the breakout star of SPX '98, in the modest sense that comics allows someone to break out – he had the book everyone wanted, he gave the lecture everyone attended, and he was the person with whom everyone wished to sit down and talk. Horrocks would leave that show having made an impression on publishers big and small in ways that would lead to a great deal of future work, projects just now coming to fruition.

From my own perspective, Horrocks' drive to indulge as many facets of his creative personality as possible – fantasy mainstream books, sex comics, challenging straight-ahead fiction, political cartooning, criticism – served as a very encouraging example heading into my own career as a freelancer. Both the work and the artist seemed admirable. Hicksville was the first accomplished graphic novel of the post-alternative generation, a sweetly-told love letter to the comics medium full of visual iconography at once universal and specific to its New Zealand locale. But even smaller, subsequent pieces like his sex comics – surrounded by the bizarrely juvenile offerings of other cartoonists in the Dirty Stories anthologies – were formally interesting and bravely straight-faced and un-ironic without coming across as cloying or narcissistic. All of these things indicated an artist more interested in personal exploration than careerist explication, a rare find in any art form and even more so in the world of comics.

Dylan Horrocks was born in Auckland, New Zealand in 1966, and lives near that city on the coast with a wife and two sons. His major credits are Pickle (1992-1997), the political strip Milo's Week (1995-1997), Hicksville (1998), the New Zealand Comics survey catalog Nga Pakiwaituhi o Aotearoa: New Zealand Comics (1998), Better Luck Next Century for Top Shelf's Small Batch Series (2001), The Names of Magic miniseries and Hunter: The Age of Magic for the not-quite-Harry-Potter wing of Vertigo Comics (2001 and ongoing), and the startling Atlas (ongoing) for Drawn and Quarterly. His minor gigs could fuel their own mid-sized interview. I hope the following conversation gives the reader some insight into those things Horrocks values as an artist, the specific ideas that have served as building blocks for what should continue to be an impressive body of work. I also selfishly hope it's not the last time we get to talk at length.

Dylan Horrocks was interviewed in my apartment in August 2001, during the Seattle stop of a mini-tour in support of Atlas #1. A second session was conducted by phone in late Fall of that year. The manuscript was copy edited by the participants.

Dylan Horrocks Interview

Childhood Assumptions

TOM SPURGEON: From what I've read, you grew up in a pretty liberal, comics-friendly household.

DYLAN HORROCKS: Well, apparently my first word was "Donald Duck."

SPURGEON: Dylan, that's two words. I'm just telling you. [Horrocks laughs] I'm not trying to ruin a childhood memory here.

HORROCKS: I have a friend whose first words he ever spoke were, "Mom, did you know there's a beautiful butterfly out in the garden?"

SPURGEON: Really?

HORROCKS: Yeah. His parents were just about ready to send him to a speech therapist because he hadn't uttered a word. He was like four years old.

SPURGEON: Is he just shy?

HORROCKS: He's a cartoonist. What do you expect?

SPURGEON: Can you talk a little about what comics were like in your home, or how you encountered comics as a kid?

HORROCKS: Well, my dad was always into comics. And when he was a teenager, for a little while he dreamed of being a cartoonist. That was one of his goals in life. He used to go to enormous lengths to get a hold of what were, in New Zealand, obscure American comics. He had a subscription to Captain Marvel in the early '50s. And he used to get—he had all kinds of stuff like Sheena, Queen of the Jungle and some of the E.C. titles. These things weren't imported to New Zealand, so he'd go down to the docks and find an American sailor or soldier and he'd trade some money with them, which was fairly illegal. And then send the money over in an envelope hoping it wouldn't be intercepted. Or if he knew someone who was going overseas for business or something, some uncle or what have you, he'd beg them to send in a subscription form while they were in America. So gradually he managed to accumulate these comics.

And when I was a kid, in the house there'd be... He always bought us Tintin. When there was a new Tintin book out he'd enthusiastically buy that, and Asterix. And in New Zealand, Tintin and Asterix are everywhere. Every school has them all and every public library has several copies of them all, and just about every household has a few Tintin's and Asterix. They're very, very common. See, when I think back now, I realize, God. Those Donald Duck books we had floating around, those were reprints of Carl Barks' stories. For a long time, when I was 20 or something, I used to think, "Carl Barks? I don't know if I've ever read any of Carl Barks' Donald Duck." And then I thought back and realized that, actually, I've read heaps of them, because he was buying them all and giving them to me. He bought me an Edward Gorey book when I was about ten -- the first Amphigorey book.

SPURGEON: That was huge.

HORROCKS: I was reading Heavy Metal magazine when I was far too young to be allowed to -- back in the days when it was really good. Just all kinds of things. Doonesbury. There were New Yorker collections in the house. He introduced me to Cerebus. He went to the states on sabbatical one year. I was back in New Zealand. He sent me issues #12-15 of Cerebus saying, "Maybe you'd be interested in this thing." Boy, was I! So yeah. It's all my dad's fault.

SPURGEON: In comics terms, you had the coolest dad in the world.

HORROCKS: I really did, yeah. He really was. And Crumb, too. I was reading Crumb when I was ten because it was lying around the house.

SPURGEON: So your dad stayed aware of what was going on?

HORROCKS: Yeah. But that's my dad. He stays aware of everything. He's also the source of all of the best music in my music collection, too. He introduced me to Nirvana when no one had heard of them outside Washington State. And whether it's John Cage or John Coltrane or techno or whatever the hell, that's the guy I get it all from. He's just one of those people who's never stopped being interested in what's new.

SPURGEON: Is there a point where you can remember that you started thinking about comics in terms of doing them?

HORROCKS: I can't remember ever deciding to do that or starting to be interested in it. It just feels as if I've always been doing it.

SPURGEON: So you did comics when you were a kid?

HORROCKS: Yeah. As far back as I can remember, I assumed I was going to grow up and be a cartoonist.

SPURGEON: So you had an awareness that there were people that did those comics and that they had jobs... did you also get that from your dad?

HORROCKS: I don't know. But I certainly had that sense. But Tintin... Tintin was so perfect, I always imagined it was done kind of technologically somehow. I thought it must me some incredible computer that had made them. I knew that Herge made them and I knew he was a genius, but I just assumed that he had some amazing technological wizardry helping him. I was amazed when I realized they were hand-colored.

SPURGEON: Were these feelings reinforced or discouraged in your schooling?

HORROCKS: Well, my parents were very encouraging. My mom bought me my first drawing board when I was a kid. Yeah. They were completely positive about it. But they were academics and some-time poets. It's not like they were going to tell me to get a real job...

SPURGEON: So there was never any rebellious attitude on your part to go do something conservative?

HORROCKS: Go and be a stockbroker? There were times when I wished I had -- like whenever I thought I was going to jail for owing too much money to the bank. But no, not really.

SPURGEON: Did you avail yourself of art classes in school? Were they supportive?

HORROCKS: I got a fair amount of encouragement. But where I got most of the encouragement was actually from the English teachers. I had some really cool English teachers. Again, this is like the '70s and early '80s. English teachers were all kind of aging hippies with their Robert Crumb collections and things. They thought it was cool.

SPURGEON: They encouraged you in doing comics?

HORROCKS: Oh, yeah.

SPURGEON: Not just in doing art and writing?

HORROCKS: No. Also, I did it all. I did a lot of writing, too. And I always read as many books as comics. It wasn't like I was just a comic geek.

SPURGEON: Was there a point at which reading comics or knowing about comics was a social distinction for you? Did you have other comics-reading friends?

HORROCKS: Well, I never had anyone else who was that into comics until the last couple of years at high school. I was introduced by someone to a guy called Cornelius Stone, who... I had friends who were kind of into comics, but mostly because I'd introduced them to things. But Cornelius was the first real comics friend. He was as serious about comics as I was. And that was amazing. That was great. He's still a good friend and still an inspiration, as well.

SPURGEON: Did he end up being a cartoonist as well?

HORROCKS: He's been in and out of comics. He founded the main comics anthology here in the second half of the '80s/early '90s, called Razor. He was pretty much the center of the comics scene here from the mid-'80s to the early '90s. He wrote Knuckles, the Malevolent Nun, which Roger Langridge drew and which was published by Fantagraphics. So he's been published fairly widely. He's working on some new stuff at the moment, which is probably going to find its way through Diamond to places around the world as well. But he did take a break from comics, really, between the mid-'90s till the last couple of years.

SPURGEON: Did you get your enthusiasm through talking about them or doing them, the both of you?

HORROCKS: Yeah. We'd talk about them endlessly. He kind of introduced me to American mainstream comics, which I never read that seriously.

SPURGEON: Were those around in New Zealand?

HORROCKS: Well, they weren't when my dad was growing up, but they were by the time I was. But the comics that were the easiest to pick up were the English ones. I grew up... The other stuff that I read most enthusiastically were the English weekly comics. I was very lucky, because I was reading them as a kid enthusiastically at the time that you got Battle, which was one of the comics that a lot of the 2000 A.D. people worked on before they started 2000 A.D. It was a kind of lineage; it went like Battle, Action, which came afterwards and then was merged with Battle. Action was very controversial because it was extremely violent. And then 2000 A.D. followed on from that. It was the same group of people. It was Pat Mills and a lot of those guys. They were my favorite comics. 2000 A.D. was just incredible. It was one of those earth-shattering moments when they started up. It was the same year that Heavy Metal started as well [1977]. So suddenly you had this incredible stuff coming out of England. Very funny. Very dark. Very punk. It was really good stuff. And in Heavy Metal you had this great European stuff reprinted. Chantal Montellier and Moebius and lots of great stuff.

SPURGEON: Anything local you were seeing?

HORROCKS: Oh yeah. There was a magazine that started the same year, called Strips, which ran from '77 to '87. That was started by a little group of people including Colin Wilson, who went on to work for 2000 A.D. and then made a career in Europe. He drew the La Jeunesse de Lieutenant Blueberry series with Jean Giraud. His all-time hero was Jean Giraud and he finally achieved his dream by essentially becoming Jean Giraud. He's now in Australia. He's doing some work for Vertigo and WildStorm with Ed Brubaker, which I'm pretty jealous about. I want to do something with him! He was a bit of a local hero. All of the guys working on strips were incredibly good. People like Joe Wiley and Barry Linton, who is probably the most interesting of them all. Barry started doing comics in the early '70s. He's still doing them now. Throughout, he's just been constantly interesting and incredibly good. He's the most distinctive and distinctively New Zealand voice that we'd ever produced in comics.

SPURGEON: Linton's voice is distinctive in terms of…?

HORROCKS: The look of the comics, the feel of them, the tone. Everything is just so incredibly New Zealand. It's hard to explain without looking at them. They're very strong. It's a very distinctive voice and quite unique. It's not just someone aping what's happening overseas. New Zealand cartoonists seem to talk about him as being the Robert Crumb of New Zealand comics, which just means that we all admire the hell out of him. He was one of the first of the New Zealand comics to have a huge influence on everyone that came afterward. Not everyone, but a lot of us. He had a huge influence on me in terms of the way I draw, and so on.

Artist, Seeks Industry

SPURGEON: So after you've been exposed to this world of comics, how did that have an effect on your expectation to become a cartoonist?

HORROCKS: I was just getting a clearer sense of what that meant and just getting a wider picture of how you could become a cartoonist. At first, my ambition was to go to England and become part of the European industry like Colin Wilson had. Just because it seemed like a much more rewarding and interesting thing to be part of. It never occurred to me, really, to go to America and write for DC. [laughter]

SPURGEON: But you had a pretty good picture of what was going on over there thanks to Cornelius, right?

HORROCKS: Yeah. And I was buying the Comics Journal from way back when. There was a shop in Australia called Minotaur Books. They did a mail-order service. I discovered them -- I don't know when that was -- 1980 something. I started ordering stuff from them. I got Cerebus from them and the Comics Journal and a lot of European stuff. They were very good at importing French comics.

SPURGEON: You had a relatively cosmopolitan view of comics.

HORROCKS: That's something about New Zealand. Because we grow up reading Tintin and Asterix, if you ask... When I occasionally teach or give lectures at art schools and design schools, one of the first things I ask the students is, "What was the last comic you remember reading and what's your favorite comic you've ever read?" A lot of them can't think of one until you say, "Have you ever read Calvin and Hobbes in the newspaper?" "Oh, yeah." But, I sometimes say, "How many of you have ever read a Tintin book?" Every hand in the class will go up; every single hand. And the same for Asterix. So as New Zealanders grow up, if they're aware of comics at all (and most of them don't even think of Tintin as a comic), they've got equal access to Tintin and Asterix, the standard American mainstream stuff, the British weekly comics like 2000 A.D. and those little Commando Picture Library things, and increasingly to manga as well. We've got quite a growing Asian population here. We increasingly get Korean and Japanese versions of manga and Hong Kong comics as well. And also, the aesthetic of manga has seeped through so much popular culture through video games and anime and stuff. All of those things have equally had a powerful influence on New Zealand comics. My friend Tim Bollinger, who is writing a history of comics here, he really thinks that that's quite a big factor in the history of comics here, that the cartoonists have grown out of this real mixture of overseas influences, and they put their own spin on it, rather than just getting the American influence or just getting the manga influence or what have you.

SPURGEON: Looking back, do you see any huge misperception or misconception that you had about the way comics worked?

HORROCKS: Well, I thought it was a bit easier to make a living from it. I think we all had that misconception or no one would ever have started. Jesus! It's a bit of a revelation. Those photos that I took of the Fantagraphics building when I was there... Ever since I've been taking enormous pleasure, whenever I meet up with a cartoonist here, in telling them, "I've got some photos to show you from my American trip." Then I pull out these pictures and I say, "That's Fantagraphics." I can just tell that all of their hopes and dreams are being shattered before my very eyes.

Apart from that, I used to think that Europe was a bit more exciting than I now realize it actually is. It's still exciting, but... Actually, it's exciting again, now. In the early '90s, when I was going to Angouleme, and living in England and having more to do with the European scene than I ever had, I started to realize that it wasn't quite what I... I'd sort of made it out in my head to be like a great big Hicksville -- a kind of comics paradise. And then I realized that it wasn't quite like that. But now there's such cool stuff coming out from publishers like L'Association. It's quite exciting again.

SPURGEON: Is there a point where you can look back at your own comics then and go, "O.K. This is where I started to kind of get it?"

HORROCKS: I still haven't got it.

SPURGEON: What kind of comics were you doing when you said you did comics? Adventure stories?

HORROCKS: I drew a lot of war comics when I was a kid. My favorite comics were war comics. Sgt. Rock is still one of my all-time favorite American comics. It was great. Russ Heath and John Severin. You see, I always had this notion that I wanted to do comics. But because I also really wanted to be a writer—this is all going to sound really ghastly and pretentious... I always wanted to be a writer, as well. I didn't see that there was any contradiction there. I wanted to do comics but I wanted, in doing comics, to be able to satisfy all of the things that I wanted... I wanted comics to be able to satisfy all of the needs I had or would have as a writer, if that makes sense.

SPURGEON: Yeah. It does.

HORROCKS: That's why I was so excited every time I discovered something new that seemed closer to that. And I always, as a kid at school I would get on my high horse and do irritating little raves about how comics could be like novels. I would talk about what comics would be like if they were by Picasso and James Joyce. I was really insufferable. That's one reason why I felt such kinship when I first read Understanding Comics. It's like that's where Scott is coming from and that's still his mission in life, to persuade everyone that comics can be anything. It's just that I'm not doing that anymore. Or maybe I am…

English Major

SPURGEON: Did you go to a university? Was there something after high school?

HORROCKS: Yeah. When I said to you before that the English teachers were very helpful, well the art teachers weren't. I feel a bit bad dissing them, because they were nice people. But they just didn't quite get it. At no point... Basically, the art system at school here -- I don't know what it's like elsewhere -- is geared toward training people to go to a fine arts school. What that means is they want everyone to grow up to be Picasso. They don't want people to grow up to be Howard Chaykin.

SPURGEON: Now there's a straight line.

HORROCKS: Or who is that guy that was doing the Evening Post covers?

SPURGEON: Rockwell.

HORROCKS: They don't want anyone growing up to be Norman Rockwell, they want them to grow up to be Picasso. At every stage, there's this kind of discouraging that goes on if you're into stuff that's not really "fine art." It's not a conscious thing, it's just that that's what their heads are around and their curriculums are around and they think that art teaching is all about teaching people to look at the world like Picasso. If at any stage an art teacher had said to me, "Look. Bring in your favorite comic and let's look at that." And even if it was crap, even if it was the worst, most ghastly garbage you can imagine, if they'd then sat down and said, "Well, how do you reckon they did that?" -- that would have been a revelation. I would have been, "I don't know! What do you think? Are they using a pen or a brush or is that watercolor or what?" I didn't really think about that. I just carried on doing them my way, which was usually with felt-tip pens or whatever.

SPURGEON: Sure.

HORROCKS: I never really... And also, over here, how the hell am I going to find out what they're using? Even the Comics Journal has such reluctance to ever ask people what pen they use. I used to stare at the photographs in the Comics Journal of an artist sitting next to his or her drawing board, desperately trying to work out what he or she used.

SPURGEON: That's the saddest thing I've ever heard.

HORROCKS: I would think, "What is that? Is that a brush? Are they using a brush? What is that thing?" Our art supply stores weren't that big or great, so it's not like I could just walk in and say, "What do people draw with?" and then they'd take me through how to use crow quills and things. Hell, I just had to try and guess and make all of that stuff up. I didn't know. I had no idea. For years and years I kept reading about "the Hunt 102" and I had no idea what they were talking about. So if an art teacher had actually sat down with me and started to address some of that stuff, then I'd have happily learned to draw like Jean Giraud for five years and then probably would have gotten interested in Picasso. I don't know. It's just like they weren't prepared to come at it from the angle of what I was into. As a result, my art marks were always dreadful, which you can probably tell when you look at Hicksville. I just had the worst grades in art.

SPURGEON: Did you continue art into college?

HORROCKS: No. Because I didn't have good enough marks. Seriously, I couldn't have gotten into art school if I'd wanted to. I did English. Halfway through I started doing more and more history and sort of wished I'd majored in history. I majored in English with history as a sort of secondary thing.

SPURGEON: And you still continued doing the comics on your own?

HORROCKS: Oh yeah. The point of going to university was to study stuff I was interested in, but I never for one minute doubted that I was going to be a cartoonist. The thing was that you couldn't go to a university and learn how to be a cartoonist. There wasn't a technical college course or anything; there was no cartooning course. So I was just doing it myself on the side. What I was studying at university was a lot less important for me than doing strips for the student newspaper.

Defining Limits

SPURGEON: I want to take a step away from your career path for a few minutes and ask you about comics in general. You're one of the few cartoonists I'm aware of who seems interested in theory, so I was hoping we could maybe use that as a springboard.

The Journal recently ran your Scott McCloud article, a piece you had originally written for a McCloud issue two-three years earlier.

HORROCKS: The idea of that special issue of the Journal was that each contributor would do at least one chapter of Understanding Comics. I picked the first one, the one in which he defines comics, because for some reason I'd grappled with that more than any of the others. But I also found that chapter in some ways the most inspiring of the book because what he does is create a new way of how comics fit into the world. By a kind of theoretical sleight of hand, he allows us to look at a whole lot of other stuff as comics. I found that really... And also his whole thing that comics can be very different to what we are used to, just by defining them formally rather than as a cultural phenomenon.

SPURGEON: You talk a lot about Understanding Comics as a polemic without letting on if it's a polemic you find useful.

HORROCKS: There are lots of ways of defining comics, and they're all useful. Ultimately that's what I'm arguing. Where there's a big danger with Understanding Comics is when people treat Scott's definition of comics as the definition of comics. Because it has enormous limitations and it has boundaries built into it. It does act as a constraint as well as a liberation.

He presents Understanding Comics' theory so effectively. He presents it as a huge liberation: "We're liberating ourselves from the constraints we've labored under all of these years because of the way we've defined comics very narrowly. And now we can see comics as being anything at all." But actually, when you look more closely at his definition, that's not quite right. Because there are a lot of things that he says aren't comics. So if you want to do comics, stay away from those things. Scott's such a sweet, accommodating guy who wants people to do whatever they want. It's not like he's going to say, "Don't you dare do this kind of thing." He's going to say, "Sure – do that stuff. Although then it won't be comics." But a lot of things he was ruling out are things that I'm actually very interested in – as someone who makes comics.

SPURGEON: Can you talk about some of the different ways of thinking about comics?

HORROCKS: Well, when I was teaching there were a few times when I dedicated a whole session in the course to discussing with the class: what is comics? What are comics? We'd talk about... I wouldn't prompt them. I wouldn't say, "Here's one way of defining comics." I would leave it purely up to them. Through the discussion, we would usually end up with a bunch of variations on three different ways of defining comics. One of them was Scott's, that it's a sequence of pictures that tell a story – some variation of Will Eisner's idea of sequential art. That was one category of definition. The next category was something that highlighted the combination of words and pictures. So more like Art Spiegelman's thing of com-mix.

SPURGEON: Or R.C. Harvey's verbal-visual blend.

HORROCKS: Although I must say that again I try to point to the fact that even Harvey – subconsciously – I think he's still basically foregrounding the visual narrative. But yeah. He's forever going on about how comics are an equal blending of words and pictures. And his way of judging them critically is how much they are an equal blend of words of pictures.

[Laughs.] You didn't ask me that.

SPURGEON: Well, no, but...

HORROCKS: Which is facile in its...

SPURGEON: I don't think we have any disagreement about that. You're right. Bob does do that. "This is what comics is, and the comics that do this are the best comics of all." I think that's something people find tiresome or inflexible about his critical viewpoint. Plus it runs very much counter to the whole, general assumption of literary standards that people bring to comics. Which might be a good thing, actually.

HORROCKS: Well, I don't think it is. It's quite an old-fashioned essentialist way of looking at art, where you define the form and then find the essence of the form and then that becomes the critical standard: how well it utilizes the essence of the form. That just seems to me like something that was a popular notion 60 years ago and it's a bit... It's just not very useful. I don't find it useful, especially when you see him apply it to particular cartoonists. He winds up giving a wonderful mark to some dreadful cartooning purely because it's an equal balance between words and pictures.

And when you closely read his analysis of certain strips that he thinks fail against that criterion, you see that actually he's not really looking for an equal balance. He's looking for a situation in which the words do one thing and the pictures do another. He feels uncomfortable when comics break the "show don't tell" rule. For example, I remember in one of his books where he talks about Alex Raymond's Secret Agent X9. He shows a strip that is a very odd strip because every important event is consigned to a caption. You get this odd, staccato cutting between moment and moment. One moment they're zooming along in the car and it's fine. And then you get a caption that describes a bullet hitting the car, the car having to stop and the heroes being left behind as the bad guys race away. Oh – and one of them has been injured. Then there's this picture of them stopped on the side of the road, with one guy saying to the other guy, "Are you all right?" So the whole climax of the chase scene is slammed into this caption and you don't get to see it. And Harvey criticizes the strip on that basis and says that it's bad comics and bad cartooning. But I feel uneasy about that.

I think Harvey pretends, as any essentialist critic has a tendency to do, that he's found some scientific basis on which to judge something. And he actually argues in his books that this is an objective criterion. Well, it's not an objective criterion. That's the whole point of my essay, to say that none of these things are objective at all. It's completely made up and it's driven by other agendas as well as the ones on the surface.

SPURGEON: What do you think Harvey's driving at?

HORROCKS: It's a particular aesthetic. He's got a particular aesthetic. In that particular case, with the Alex Raymond story, he feels that it's failed against that particular aesthetic. That's what it is. It's an aesthetic. It's not an objective criterion.

SPURGEON: So you have sequential art, words and pictures... what's the third definition of comics?

HORROCKS: The third definition is probably the most common and the most influential. And that is defining comics as some sort of cultural phenomenon. Those are all of those definitions that are based on how they look, the kinds of stories they tell, the kinds of formats they use, the kinds of readers they tend to find, the kind of market they tend to go to. Everyone who assumes that comics equals Superman and Donald Duck are defining it as a particular kind of cultural phenomenon. In fact, a lot of comics histories do the same thing, especially the early ones. The ones who say, "A comic book is…" and then they start telling you the dimensions of the magazine. The first comic book was the first comic that had those dimensions. But I actually think that those are equally valid ways of defining comics, and often very useful ways.

SPURGEON: McCloud's essentialism plays into what he finds exciting about comics and the things he likes to explore in his comics. Is there something about another definition that has actually had an effect on your work or the way that you've approached a certain project?

HORROCKS: All of those ways of defining comics I find exciting and useful. Because Scott's definition allows me to look at a painting by Colin McCahon -- he's one of my favorite New Zealand painters and a lot of his paintings I read as comics. By Scott McCloud's definition, they most certainly are. As a cartoonist, they fascinate me. They really interest me. He does things with comics that almost no other cartoonist ever does. But at the same time, I also find his paintings interesting as combinations of words and pictures.

SPURGEON: Right.

HORROCKS: He has some paintings that wouldn't fit Scott's definition because they are a single panel. And he has some paintings that wouldn't fit Scott's definition because they don't include pictures. They just include words.

SPURGEON: One thing that's interesting beyond the historical puffery that happens is that looking at comics a certain way allows you to look at a lot of art as comics – comics becomes a process of experiencing art rather than a type of art.

HORROCKS: I'm completely uninterested in the historical puffery thing. I have no interest in waging a war to make comics legitimate. I just don't care. I don't mind if they're made legitimate. I mean, there are some cartoonists who hate art gallery shows about comics because they think it's buying into the whole art scene culture. And they have a valid concern. But ultimately, personally, I don't care. I know enough painters and I have enough to do with that world that I know there's a lot of really exciting stuff happening there, too.

SPURGEON: So what is it that's appealing about being able to see those things as comics?

HORROCKS: Because it opens up different ways of approaching my own comics. Colin McCahon, in his paintings, he uses words in the most extraordinary way graphically. He letters them, and his lettering is often very rough, apparently crude, thick brushstrokes, which are often inspired by things that he's just seen around on the streets. In New Zealand there's a kind of general store that is called a Dairy. They will often have a blackboard which they paint on, using white paint on the blackboard. They paint: "Apples, $3 a kilo" or something. They'll list stuff they have for sale. And that's the kind of lettering that McCahon was really interested in. Lettering in comics is so incredibly uninspiring. There are so few people who really explore anything like the potential for using words graphically. Including myself.

SPURGEON: It gives you access to other artists who use different tools.

HORROCKS: And let's face it. There is an extremely rich history of comics. It's a very rich cultural landscape to explore. But it's only one very small part of a much bigger cultural landscape, which includes some extraordinary work that most cartoonists don't even look at. In a funny way, sometimes it's easier to look at, say, Picasso and explore it and find something useful in his work if I think of it as comics.

For comics as a whole, as a scene or a community or whatever, that was one of the things I thought was most exciting about Scott's book – that he found a way to open up the eyes of the comics world to the rest of the art world by saying, "Hey, look at all of those cool comics out there!" It's like that story about Spiegelman. He had a real reverse snobbery about fine art until someone took him to an art show and said, "Look at Picasso. Look at what a great cartoonist he was." And Spiegelman was like, "You're right. That's a good comic."

Exploring Drawing

SPURGEON: One of the things that I find interesting if you look at a series of paintings as comics is that it provides ideas for the non-narrative possibilities of comics.

HORROCKS: Yeah. That, too. Absolutely. The last few years particularly I've become more and more interested in the non-narrative aspects of comics.

SPURGEON: Can you talk more about that?

HORROCKS: Well, it's all a bit vague in my head at the moment. I guess for most of my life, I've been mostly interested in comics as stories, at least my own comics. I've tended to highlight the narrative side of it in my own work, which is why it's all so badly drawn for one thing.

I used to buy into the thing that was repeated over and over again in that hotel room panel discussion with Kim Deitch, Seth, Joe Sacco and Bill Griffith in a recent Journal. They were all enthusiastically repeating that old chestnut: the story is the most important thing and the artist serves the narrative. Well, I don't buy that anymore. I really don't. I no longer believe that a good story that's badly drawn is better than a bad story that's well drawn. I just don't buy that now. Because to me now, the drawing in and of itself is actually a big part of the story. And I don't mean that the way that it's drawn is important to the tonal voice of the narrative or whatever, though that's all true. I actually mean that the art can be the story quite aside from what is supposedly the story of the book. There are cartoonists where I have no real interest in the stories they're telling at all, but their art is so rich and complex and multi-layered that I will pore over it for hours. Not just because, "Oh, wow! They're a cool drawer." Because often they're not. It's as though a big part of the story for me now in a comic is how they've struggled with drawing and pushed their drawing and explored new kinds of drawing and that kind of thing.

SPURGEON: I would imagine that most people don't read them like that.

HORROCKS: It's just me. It's my obsession at the moment. Part of it is because I've spent the last few years looking at a lot more art. You look at a Matisse drawing and you're not trying to work out the story. And you don't judge the line and the graphic qualities of the drawing by saying, "How do they add to the narrative he's trying to spin?" There's a whole different bunch of things that you're looking at.

SPURGEON: Are cartoonists particularly good at conveying information in that way as opposed to other artists?

HORROCKS: No. A lot of them are terrible at it.

SPURGEON: Can you give me an example of a cartoonist where the artwork is so intensely interesting to you in that it changes the way you look at the work as a whole?

HORROCKS: At the moment, actually, Dan Clowes is one. I mean, he tells a lot of interesting stories, of which the most interesting is probably Ghost World to date. But at the moment I'm most interested in his art as art. I find his art as rewarding and interesting and complex and insightful and deep as a good novel. Even without reading his stories. Really.

I feel the same about Charles Burns at the moment. Charles Burns is another person who I always felt was enormously pleasurable to read and to look at his comics, but I didn't feel that they were particularly... there was nothing particularly profound about them. They weren't deep enough to really satisfy me. But that's kind of changing, purely because now I'm appreciating his art more. Also, I think his art has moved to a new level with Black Hole. It's gone beyond a purely kind of decorative illustration style.

SPURGEON: Is it the range of expression that they're getting out of their art, or is it the that they've built an idiosyncratic visual language?

HORROCKS: To me, it's a bit like a singer's voice. And to hell with the lyrics they're singing, you know? Just listen to the voice. Some singers develop and it's a really rich and interesting voice. So they can sing in a completely different language, but their voice is still endlessly fascinating. With Burns and Clowes, there's a kind of a obsessiveness to it and an ability to create a kind of stillness and a depth. It's the rendering and the line work that I'm most interested in.

Crumb is, in some ways, the most interesting graphically. Crumb's sketchbooks were a big part of me starting to explore this a bit more. I knew that I was becoming obsessed with his work all over again, but it was in a different way. I had to try and work out what was going on with it. He had an exhibition in Angouleme one of the years I was there -- I think it was '91. In the catalog, there was an interview in which he talked a lot about [the 18th century English caricaturist James] Gillray, about being obsessed with Gillray. It was the first hint for me that I could look at Crumb's work in a new way. And the feeling, that since the mid-'70s or something, through the whole Weirdo era and so on, he was going deeper than before. I'm most drawn to work that has the feeling of someone going on a kind of little quest on their own. They don't know where they're going, but they have to go deeper.

SPURGEON: Jim Woodring, with his drawings of souls... is his work something that speaks to you that way?

HORROCKS: I love his work. I love his comics, and the stuff of his that I'm most fond of is the work where this presence of spirits is a really big part of it. It was only after reading a long interview with him that I started to get a handle on what he was doing at all. And I quite like that about it. His artwork is very seductive, but at the moment -- and I haven't looked at the last few things – at the moment, I find his drawing primarily feels like it's serving the narrative. And that's cool. But I wouldn't put him in quite that same group for me at the moment.

SPURGEON: Dave Cooper?

HORROCKS: Yeah. With Weasel, particularly. His work's much more interesting to me than it used to be for that reason. And in Bizarro Comics, it was interesting because his was one of the few stories where it was unmistakably an undiluted Dave Cooper story. It's as if his drawing has this powerful quality that could not be suppressed under any circumstances. It just shines through with its powerful sickly green light and warps minds no matter what.

I'll just add, though, although this very well might change soon because they are such interesting cartoonists, but I feel like Dave Cooper and Jim Woodring are different from Clowes and Crumb and its just simply that their drawing still seems like they're exploring style. Whereas, particularly with Crumb, it's as though he's exploring drawing. He's moved beyond style, and he's exploring something that goes much deeper than that. I don't know that Burns has yet either, but there's more of a feeling that maybe he is. But Crumb more than anyone, and also with Chester Brown, it's like they've pushed through narrative and they've pushed through drawing style, and it's no longer that they're exploring having a particular drawing voice. It's going much deeper. It's like they're starting now to mess around with the entrails of drawing itself. I'm very interested in stillness right now.

SPURGEON: There's an amazing stillness in Chester's work.

HORROCKS: Chester's probably the ultimate on that score at the moment, which is why Louis Riel's probably my favorite comic at the moment. Boy, has he gone on some odd little quests.

The Dominant Aesthetic

SPURGEON: Do you value stillness in that it brings about the kind of art you're interested in, or is it stillness as a value in and of itself?

HORROCKS: Both. Reading comics all my life I feel that I have completely gorged on dynamism and momentum, because those have been, more than anything, the driving forces of comics, the dominant comics aesthetic for decades.

SPURGEON: You've had one too many trips through the Kirby vortex.

HORROCKS: It's like I've eaten far too many chocolate cream puffs. I want to go back to eating carrots or something. I'm looking at a lot of very early newspaper strips, because there's not such an obsession with dynamism there. The comics I'm most drawn to at the moment are things like 1950s D.C. romance comics. Nobody's leaping about. The line work is very cool and still, and everybody is very graceful and composed. There's almost no dynamic energy to it at all and I find that very refreshing.

SPURGEON: You drew one of the Bizarro stories for DC. You drew the Hawkman strip.

HORROCKS: Yeah. I drew the James Kochalka one.

SPURGEON: Was there something about the early, Shelly Moldoff stuff that attracted you in that way?

HORROCKS: Very true. I think so. Yeah. It was stiff, very stiff.

James asked if I could draw the story, and I was thrilled to be drawing his story. So I was going to be drawing it anyway. But at the moment, I'm repelled by Joe Kubert's stuff. I enormously respect him as a very interesting and important cartoonist, and I used to adore his stuff, but right now I'm repelled by it. As I say, I just gorged on that stuff and I can't look at it. Because to me, Kubert's stuff from the '70s on up exemplifies that comics aesthetic more than anyone really.

SPURGEON: More than Kirby?

HORROCKS: More than Kirby. Because Kirby started with it and over time, by the '70s, he was getting into that really stylized, chunky sculptural way of drawing and those big double splash pages full of grandeur. To me, now -- I mean, I didn't look at them this way four years ago. Now I look at them and they're filled with a kind of monumental grace and stillness. If you don't look at them in terms of the narrative but look at them purely as a collection of lines and shapes. Particularly when he's inked by -- not when he's inked by Vince Colletta or something. I'm not enough of a Kirby buff to rattle off the names, but when he's inked by someone who respects the nice clean lines and you get these beautiful, smooth brushstrokes, they do have a kind of sculptural quality, which is quite different to the Kubert thing. Kubert was breaking up the line work. He was making the line work fast. Those later '70s Kirby pages, the line is laid on with a very slow brushstroke. But Kubert, the ink is a very fast pen stroke that's done quickly. You can feel the hand racing across the page.

SPURGEON: Also when Kirby drew figures that were still and at rest, they actually looked like they were at rest, as opposed to having potential energy.

HORROCKS: Yes. Which is the case with his '60s Marvel stuff, too. Part of what frustrates me about the dominant way of drawing mainstream comics since the '70s is that no one's ever standing still. You get two characters…

There was a lovely interview that was done years ago in the Journal of Popular Culture and Kirby's asked about Frederic Wertham's assertion that good literature is the kind of book where you can have a boy and a girl sitting on a windowsill talking about the meaning of life. But in comics, they'd be sitting on the windowsill for two minutes, two panels, and then someone's going to leap in and throw one of them out the window. And Kirby doesn't... I don't think he really understood the question, in his way, and he tries to defend comics, saying, "Well, but it is kind of boring." And yet he could just draw two people sitting on the windowsill talking. He'd be able to do it. Whereas so many of the cartoonists around now – sure, they're sitting on the windowsill talking, but they're gesticulating and they have these wild facial expressions. The angle is constantly shifting. There's that rule of thumb that to make it interesting it always has to be changing and moving. So if the characters aren't moving you always have to change the camera angle as much as you can. All of that stuff. It feels like this huge, dominant aesthetic – the whole foundation of how people look at comics. And I just feel like getting rid of the whole bloody thing.

Now what I prefer to do is look at all of the odd little by-ways of comics history. The forgotten stuff. The stuff that was eclipsed, like the Kurt Schaffenberger and Curt Swan and Carmine Infantino comics and all of that stuff, all of that aesthetic that was eclipsed by that speed-driven work. I'm drawn at the moment to all of the cartoonists that everyone's been deriding for 20 years. There was an uncredited panel illustrating the Michael Chabon interview in the Journal. I was besotted by it. I thought it was just beautiful. I tried to find out who it was by asking on the message board, and people told me it was probably Mike Sekowsky, so since then I've tried to hunt some down. Mike Sekowsky. Wayne Boring. Beautiful stuff. It's very elegant, all of it. The thing about the romance comics -- my favorite thing in the romance comics is looking at the women's hair. Beautiful, graceful flowing shanks. Lovely. It's so lovely. Jaime Hernandez and Dan Clowes and Adrian Tomine -- that's their heritage.

SPURGEON: Their heritage is great hair?

HORROCKS: That great hair from the romance comics. They were good hair days, man.

SPURGEON: Do you have an opinion about Alex Toth?

HORROCKS: Yeah. I was talking to Eric [Reynolds, Fantagraphics Promotions Director] about that the other night. I can't look at Toth right now. I just can't look at him. Whereas I used to love his stuff. He was right up there in the top ten for me before. And he deserves to be. He deserves to be one of the great creators of comics of all time. It's just that he exemplifies, in a lot of ways, the thing that I'm moving away from. Although probably if I looked at some of his '50s stuff I'd really like it. But once he got into that quick, sketchy style, I actually find it... It's like virtuoso stuff. It's virtuoso hackwork.

SPURGEON: Do you feel the same way about Hank Ketchum?

HORROCKS: Ketchum I never looked at much. People keep mentioning him and I'm thinking I must go and look at him again. I never used to, but I'll have to check again. But it's quite quick. It's got a very quick, thin line.

I read some Little Lulus the other day for the first time and they were amazing!

SPURGEON: That's my great, unread comic.

HORROCKS: Yeah, it was mine too until I visited [Dark Horse Maverick Line Editor] Diana Schutz. She's a big fan and lent me a bunch of them.

SPURGEON: I'm kind of saving up, because you know, you run out of cartoonists. I'm a jaded bastard now. I don't have many cartoonists left that I can enjoy, so I have to kind of parcel them out.

HORROCKS: You know the newspaper strip that I'm really wanting to hunt down but I can never find? Garret Price's White Boy. There's like a page of it in the Smithsonian Book [of Newspaper Comics], and it's among the most beautiful things I've ever seen. It didn't run for very long so no one knows anything about it. It seems to have dropped out of most of the histories. But those Sunday pages in the Smithsonian book are absolutely beautiful.

SPURGEON: So you have a respect for stillness and grace, a newfound respect for non-narrative, a respect for the elements or graphic approaches that non-cartoonists might bring that you become aware of when you look at their work as if they are comics, and an interest in forgotten, unpopular ways of doing comics. Any other values that you're now bringing to your work, newfound or otherwise?

HORROCKS:I guess you've summarized them pretty well, really. I am also less interested in narrative per se. I haven't read a novel in I don't know how long. I just read a lot of nonfiction. I'm interested in the architecture of history and of people's lives, biography. I think it's partly, too, to do with working in mainstream comics for the last year or so. I mean, it's enormously fascinating and a lot of fun – I enjoy writing a comic that's a ripping yarn, a great adventure that has momentum and is a dynamic story and so on. But because I'm pouring all of that into my Vertigo comic, it's kind of like I've had enough of that when I sit down to do my own work. I'm not interested in... well, I say I'm not interested in doing a story that's easy and fun and satisfying to read, but actually when it comes down to it I still... I'm too... I mean, I grew up on Tintin.

SPURGEON: Almost the ultimate in story comics.

HORROCKS: Part of the experience of doing Atlas #1 was that part of me was trying to do a Chester Brown and undermine all of the drama and narrative, and undermine the pleasure of the narrative. Louis Riel is the most fascinating comic. I could talk about it for days. It's such an interesting comic. He often seems to be deliberately undermining or suppressing any pleasure that could be gained from the narrative and any drama and excitement. I'm absolutely fascinated by that. I found myself doing that with the first issue of Atlas.

The Big O.E.

SPURGEON: So getting back to your personal development – after school what happened? At some point I know you went to England.

HORROCKS: After university I always planned to go overseas, just because there is no comics industry here. So that was my intention from when I was really very, very young. I always just assumed that I would go to England. Also, my sister went to England when I was 15-16; she went to England to live. So right through the time I went to university and everything I'd get letters from her and she'd say, "When you come over you can stay with us." It all sounded very exciting. My sister has a way of making everything sound exciting.

SPURGEON: Forgive my ignorance, but isn't travel abroad or working abroad a pretty common thing for New Zealanders?

HORROCKS: Oh yeah. We call it the O.E. -- the big O.E. -- the Overseas Experience. It's kind of... It's pretty much expected that you go after university. You go on your O.E., usually to England and then you go around Europe, backpack around and all of that stuff. That's very much expected. So I planned to do that, but I didn't necessarily have any intention to come back. What I was going to do was I would go to England and break into the comics industry. Little did I know…

SPURGEON: You said you were kind of clueless about how that would be done.

HORROCKS: Yeah. I had some ideas. What I assumed was that I would get work with 2000 A.D. or something. I don't know. I don't really know. By that stage I'd been doing a lot of stuff for Fox Comics in Australia. Fox Comics... we kind of jumped over a whole bit, which is what you were asking about before -- whether there was any point where I started doing it seriously?

SPURGEON: Yeah.

HORROCKS: See, I started publishing strips when I was 13-14. It was in a kids magazine in New Zealand called Jabberwocky, and I did a regular strip for them every issue. It was kind of like Buck Rogers. It was really stupid. I got my first strip in Strips, that local anthology, when I was in the seventh form -- that's the last year at school. I felt like, "Oh, man! I've got a story in Strips! This is it! It's my career now. It's started!" Of course, at every stage in my career, I've thought some variation on that... "If I could just get a story into Strips, man. That's it. The world would be my oyster!" Again, little did I realize...

SPURGEON: Was there any kind of adjustment that you had to make in order to get published?

HORROCKS: I'd always acted as if I was doing it for publication. I was always trying to figure out how people, how the professionals, did it. By the time I was in high school, I was hunting down shops that sold... I did a little article once for a film magazine here about comics. It was when I was about 15. I used it as an excuse to go interview all of the guys who put out Strips. To me, these guys were heroes. They were the big guys. So I went and interviewed them all for that. As part of that I said, "What do you draw on? What do you use?" It was the first time I'd ever found a cartoonist and so I grilled them. I found out that some of them drew on ivory board -- I had no idea what that was. So I went to an art supply shop and asked for ivory board. The first one they gave me was this kind of dappled, textured thing that was all wrong. By trial and error and that kind of thing I gradually... It was always my intention to work out how the professionals did it. I got every scrap of information I could. So by the time I was doing stuff for Strips, it was drawn at about 130% and it was on ivory board and I was using rapidographs and blah de blah.

SPURGEON: When did you start doing stuff for Fox?

HORROCKS: In between Strips and Fox I helped Cornelius start up this magazine called Razor. That was the focus of all of our energies for several years.

SPURGEON: Which years were these?

HORROCKS: '85 was when we founded Razor, I think.

SPURGEON: And how old were you?

HORROCKS: It was my second year at university.

Because I was at university, which meant that I could start a university club. So I started a comics club, basically with the sole intention of getting a grant so we could put out a magazine, which we did. But me being absolutely hopeless at publishing, which is why I've never, ever tried to self-publish, by the time it got to the stage of actually doing the first issue, I'd pretty much run out of organizational steam. So Cornelius took over and called it Razor and did a much better job than I ever could. And Razor was what we put all of our energy into for quite a while.

Razor was a great, great magazine. It was a strange hodgepodge. It was a 'zine before its day. This was like '85. It was like the craziest of the 'zines around now. So on one page you've got some superhero comic by some great and crazy guy from Christchurch, and then on the next page you've got a wonderful underground strip by Barry Linton and on the next page you've got a Xerox of Ian Curtis's Death Certificate. On the next page you've got a photocopy of an interview with Heidegger. It was just a wonderful magazine. Razor was what we did for a while. A few of the strips that appeared in places like Reactor Girl, Michel Vrána's anthology -- a few of those first appeared in Razor. And then about '87, the year I met my wife, around that year I started doing stuff for Fox Comics. They just wrote to me and asked if I'd be interested. I think they'd got a copy of Razor.

SPURGEON: For those unfamiliar with it, can you describe Fox Comics?

HORROCKS: Fox Comics was an Australian anthology that ran for a while in the late '80s. They were very ambitious. They got Dan Clowes to do one of their early covers. Eventually, Fantagraphics was doing distribution in America for them, and they published a Best of Fox Comics collection.

SPURGEON: How much work did you publish through Fox?

HORROCKS: Quite a lot. I did a serial called Sex. [Spurgeon laughs.] Yeah. I was kind of obsessed with it even back then. Well, probably more back then. Let's face it, I was in my 20s. It was called Sex, and it was a five-part serial. And I also did a few stories. I did a story called "Little Death," which was kind of a trial run for "Cafe Underground." I did some other stuff. Some of the stuff that's in the early issues of Pickle I'd originally done for Fox Comics. Like "Men that Perish." "The Last Fox Story," which was in Pickle #3... "The Last Fox Story" was drawn when I was in England. Fox Comics wrote and they said they'd had enough; it was driving them crazy and they were just going to publish one last issue. They were inviting all of their contributors to do a story about their relationship with comics. I don't think they knew what they would unleash with me. That was while I was in the midst of my comics phobia incident.

SPURGEON: This was where you couldn't go into shops?

HORROCKS: Yeah. I'd go into a comics shop and I'd start to feel dizzy and nauseous and I'd have to leave. And I couldn't... I remember receiving an issue of Fox Comics which had some of my stuff in, and I couldn't open it for a while. I couldn't even look at a comic. So getting this invitation to do a story about my relationship to comics was kind of intriguing, but it took me a long time to get around to doing it. By the time I finished my story it was too late. They'd gone belly up without even having done their final issue.

SPURGEON: That was an important story for you, as I recall.

HORROCKS: Oh yeah. I still think it's probably the best thing I've ever done.

SPURGEON: Really?

HORROCKS: Yeah. I do.

SPURGEON: What makes it the best thing you've ever done?

HORROCKS:I think the drawing is on a whole different level for me, which was because the way I did it is that... Have I talked about this once before in the interview?

SPURGEON: You hinted around it.

HORROCKS: I got to England, and I was all fired up with this ambition to break into comics. I was just in the middle of finishing the story I did for Eddie Campbell's Dead Muse, which became... That story was "Incomplete Works," which was in the fifth issue of Pickle.

So two days after I arrived in London -- I'm jet lagged as fuck. I'm staying at my sister's place. It's the middle of winter. I always seem to travel to England in the middle of winter, which is pretty dismal. And the city seems grimy and horrible. I'd blow my nose and it would be black from the grime in the air. London's quite a hard city to live in. In the midst of all of this I was trying to finish this story for Eddie. So I was kind of sitting up, drawing away on this tiny little half table at my sister's place in the middle of the night, doing this strip. And rushing out to comics shops and buying every local comic I could and trying to work out which was the best one to take work to. And trying to get the address for 2000 A.D. and worrying about networking. I'd really got myself into quite a state. There's no way in hell I could have gotten work at 2000 A.D. anyway, even if I'd known what I was doing. But basically, over the next few months I got to the point where I had a kind of cartoonist career breakdown. I just ground to a halt, really. I couldn't.... All of the work I was doing just hit a brick wall. All of the networking I was trying to do was... I hadn't realized that I was basically a small-press cartoonist at that stage. I hadn't realized that there was this small press, which wasn't necessarily in any way connected with actually making a living. I really didn't understand the industry.

SPURGEON: Was that your personal view of things, or is it a New Zealand way of looking at comics?

HORROCKS: The thing about New Zealand is that I knew that there wasn't an industry in New Zealand. Well, once I had a strip in Strips I realized that there wasn't an industry in New Zealand. But I assumed that anything overseas kind of was the industry. All you had to do was go there and get published in anything overseas. See, I remember submitting a story to Escape Magazine, Paul Gravett and Pete Stanbury's wonderful, wonderful magazine. They had a lot of connections with Fox Comics. A lot of people contributing to Escape, and involved in the fast fiction scene, were also sending work from Britain to Australia's Fox Comics for some odd reason. That's why I came to do stuff for Fox, because there were people like Glenn Dakin there who were a huge inspiration to me. I remember thinking, "You get something in Escape Magazine and you're set for life!"

Paul Gravett, being the wonderful guy he is, when I turned up he immediately introduced me to everyone. I went along to their regular pub meetings where they sit around and talked about odd '70s disco bands and whatever else they talked about. But the whole time, part of me was kind of networking. I was schmoozing. I thought, if I talk to these guys maybe I could find out how to get work. Little did I realize that these guys weren't in the industry. They were the artists on the fringe of the industry, doing the most interesting work. But they weren't getting paid for it.

The English Small Press

SPURGEON: Can you talk a little bit about your admiration for the fast fiction/Escape scene?

HORROCKS: I guess their stuff started filtering into New Zealand in the early '80s. We had our first comic shop by then. The first comic shop in New Zealand had opened. It kind of became our... Between Cornelius and me it was like our second home. We were there all the time. Luckily, it was quite a good shop for... I mean, it started literally in a cupboard.

SPURGEON: Really?

HORROCKS: There's this building called the Old Customs House, downtown, which has just been turned into shops -- sort of a boutique shopping building. Downstairs they had this group of shops, and at the end of the corridor there was a space where I think they used to keep cleaning stuff. This 15-year-old kid called Mark Paul talked to them into letting him lease that. He couldn't afford anything bigger. That was his first comics shop. By the mid-'90s he was running a chain of a dozen shops around New Zealand. Then of course the crash came. Now he's...

SPURGEON: Back in the country...

HORROCKS: ...down in the cow barn. Actually, he really has given it up altogether now. He's doing something else. But back then he was quite young. He was younger than we were and full of enthusiasm. He was importing things like Cerebus and Love and Rockets in the early days. And we were lucky enough to get all kinds of interesting things coming through that shop.

SPURGEON: Including these English small-press comics?

HORROCKS: Yeah. Escape Magazine and the Harrier Comics were filtering through the shop. And then there was that little patch where Fantagraphics were publishing stuff like Centrifugal Bumble Puppy. And then Fox, too, was printing a lot of that stuff. It was just immediately, completely exciting. It was... To me, that work is the immediate ancestor of the scene celebrated by Tom Devlin in his issue of the Comics Journal -- people are really struggling to find a word for it. Some people call it the Highwater Books Crowd, and some people call it the Fort Thunder Scene. It's a whole bunch of things, really.

I first encountered that American side of it when I was in San Diego in 1994, and I met that group of small press people who were at the time based in Seattle. People like Megan Kelso and Tom Hart, Jon Lewis, Ed Brubaker -- all of that crowd. I immediately was excited by the work they were doing. It seems so close to my own vibe, and to that fast fiction/Escape crowd as well. Which isn't surprising, because Tom Hart's like a huge Glenn Dakin fan. But the sensibility is very different from the underground comics sensibility. It's also quite different from the "Alternative comics scene" with a capital "A," which I associate Fantagraphics with most strongly.

SPURGEON: How did you end up leaving England?

HORROCKS: How did I end up leaving England?

SPURGEON: You're hanging out with the small press crowd, you're about to launch your career…

HORROCKS: I was telling you about "The Last Fox Story," that's right. I was networking like crazy with these people, which was a complete waste of time in terms of getting a job. And also going to the Society of Strip Illustrators and god knows what else and not getting work, but instead getting a job at a book shop and being desperately poor. London, as I said, is a very hard place to live. I was very homesick as well. I missed my girlfriend enormously until she came over and met up with me. I was just miserable as hell. It all got focused on the comics thing and I became comics phobic. "The Last Fox Story" was how I got out of that. That's one reason why I have such affection for it.

SPURGEON: How long a period is this that you were over there?

HORROCKS: I was there for two and a half years. The comics phobia -- I don't know how long that lasted. It feels like it was a good six months. "The Last Fox Story," part of what made that so therapeutic was that I said, "O.K. It's not a comic. I'm not going to do it as a comic." Instead, I did it as a kind of picture book, an illustrated storybook.

The way I drew it was that I had a little pad, like one of those little memo pads -- a square little pad. During my lunch break at noon, I'd go down to a local cafe or coffee bar and sit there with my lunch, doodling. Those doodles are what I then put together as "the Last Fox Story." A lot of the drawings in there weren't even me trying to draw a particular picture. It was just doodling, and then I found a way to fit it into the text. What that meant was that I wasn't penciling, I wasn't thinking about how this picture can serve the narrative. I wasn't planning it. I wasn't doing roughs. None of that stuff. I was just drawing. And that's why I think it's the best story of all my comics. Why did I leave England? I'd had enough! It was entirely personal, all of that stuff.

SPURGEON: Was that beneficial to you as an artist to meet other cartoonists like that?

HORROCKS: Oh yeah. Their work is the most inspiring. If I had never met them, people like Glenn Dakin, Ed Pinsent, Chris Reynolds, would still have been a huge inspiration.

There's a bit more eccentricity about the English ones though. About their comics and the people as well—they're quite odd. In a good way. They're very lovely people, but they're quite odd. There's a bit of an edge to some of them, to the oddness of some of them. The English ones have a tendency to be sort of reclusive -- not necessarily reclusive, but boy... If you're a geek in England, man, it's a whole 'nother thing, right?

SPURGEON: What does that mean?

HORROCKS: Well, are you familiar with trainspotters?

SPURGEON: Yeah.

HORROCKS: Trainspotters are such an unusual thing, and they're so quintessentially English. Everyone's a geek in England; England's like the geekiest, nerdiest country in the world. So if you're a geek in England, you're really strange. It's just an odd country. There aren't any jocks in England. There's no such thing. Tall, blonde, handsome, muscular... It just doesn't exist. What they have instead is sort of football hooligans. Everyone's geeky. You know Monty Python, right?

SPURGEON: Sure.

HORROCKS: Well, Monty Python is... I remember the first day I arrived in England I thought, "Man, look at this. What a crazy place." And my sister said, "What you have to understand about England is that Monty Python is actually social realism. It's documentary. It's completely accurate." The more I was there, the more I realized she was completely right. It's a really strange country, and London's a very strange place. And the cartoonists are absolutely fabulous. They're among the best things about England, but they're quite odd. On the message board, the Comics Journal message board. I'm so sad -- now I'm talking about the Comics Journal message board!

SPURGEON: The only thing sadder than the Comics Journal message board is talking about it.

HORROCKS: Talking about it in a Comics Journal interview! Anyway, what the hell -- let's embrace that. We're just sad people and we'll learn to live with it.

On the Comics Journal message board, Gary Groth was saying something about Glenn Dakin. He was suggesting that it's not surprising that Glenn's work has been a bit marginal and he was sort of pointing to the body of work he'd produced. But I think, sure -- it's not surprising that Glenn Dakin's marginal, but it's not because of the body of work. It's because of the peculiarities of the English small press scene, the history of it. It underwent a very strange meltdown about the time I was there, so it's probably all my fault. [Spurgeon laughs.] I went to one of their meetings and they all thought, "God, if these are the people we're attracting we're getting out now." [laughter]

There was that little post-Maus explosion of media interest and mainstream press interest. Penguin Books started publishing graphic novels and they were desperately scouting for new people and so on. Paul Gravett was swept up in all of that, because he was the comics expert everyone was turning to. And a lot of the Escape and fast fiction people started to feel like actually maybe they could start doing graphic novels and make a career out of it or something. When all of that imploded, I think it left a lot of them just a bit burned out and bitter. I think that contributed to the fact that the scene almost disappeared for quite a long time. Eddie Campbell describes it really well in How to Be an Artist. I thought that was a really good depiction of that whole process that the English scene went through.

SPURGEON: Do you think American cartoonists are more suited for the long haul?

HORROCKS: I think we all are now. We've been through quite a lot of boom and bust stages and are now actually a bit more clued up about the reality of it all. I think the progress that's happening now, which I feel is very good progress, is really on that level of so-called mainstream acceptance and being able to make a living out of it. I think that progress is a lot healthier than the progress that was made in the late '80s, partly because of all of the lessons that we've learned. I was talking to Kim Thompson about that at San Diego when he shocked the hell out of me by saying, "Maybe we're winning the war at last." I thought, "My god! Kim Thompson's sounding cautiously optimistic! What's going on?"

But that's sort of what we were talking about, that there was no magic bullet. Maus wasn't the Holy Grail that would suddenly launch us into the fabulous world of comics being accepted and lucrative and everything else. What it actually was was the beginning of a very long, hard slog. And as Kim put it, every single foot of ground that has been gained has been hard-fought. But the fact is, progress has been made. Now the fact that someone like Dan Clowes or Chris Ware or someone can sell 60 or 70 thousand copies of their graphic novels, mostly through bookstores -- I mean, man! That's great! In the year 2000 we had three or four of these incredibly successful, incredibly good graphic novels that received wide attention in the mainstream media. That's progress.

But with the English scene, the other thing that was feeding into it... There was all of that, but the other thing is that they're just not... It's like the stereotype of an American everyone has overseas -- some guy who walks up to you and he thrusts his hand at you and he says, [in an American accent] "Hi! My name is Hank! How ya doing? Have I gotta deal for you!" You know, that kind of thing. There are little elements of that that I think are quite ubiquitous in American culture. You're kind of expected to hustle to some extent. In England, you start to hustle and everyone just kind of frowns at you and walks away. Which I like, that's something I like about England. It's a bit like that here, too. But in England they almost take that to a perverse level, where it's so easy for them to get negative about that and to be gloomy and cynical about the state of the world. It's a self-deprecating thing, and those cartoonists are not going to go out and aggressively push their stuff on the world and hustle their work. There are people in the American small press whose work isn't that great but they are so good at schmoozing and so on that everybody knows them; everybody buys them just because they're a big part of the scene. But someone like Ed Pinset or Glenn Dakin or Chris Reynolds... they're verging on the agoraphobic. They're not going to hustle. And yet their work is so much better than so much of the stuff that is out there.

SPURGEON: Don't you think that that's the problem with having a scene? What drives it is someone's position within that scene rather than someone's artistic value?

HORROCKS: Yeah. But it's not a problem I'd lose sleep over, because it doesn't prevent the good work from coming out. I don't mind if someone makes a living and their reputation that way, because that's cool. There's nothing wrong with comics being basically a community. It's better than it not existing at all, which I think was the alternative for a long time. I think it's only the fact that comics is a community that's kept them alive since the '70s.

What I'm hoping is that there's enough good work around now that that won't matter. There will be a few of these things and they'll bomb. There will also be some good stuff. To me -- I don't know if I said this earlier in the interview or not, but one thing I am turned off by is that the attitude that... I think it was Erica Clowes who expressed it in the Journal when they did that interview with the wives. Oh God, now I'm getting at Erica Clowes... This is terrible! [laughter] It's hard enough to be a cartoonist, but to have his wife being picked on in print! I'm sure she's wonderful. But she was summing up an attitude that she and Dan had that I think is quite ubiquitous in parts of the comics scene, which is: it's not enough to like the good stuff. You have to hate the bad stuff, too.

I just don't... That's not me. That's not where I come from at all. If the presence of the bad stuff is preventing the good stuff from coming out, then the good stuff's not good enough to... then the problem's with the good stuff. Because this was the thing that I always... If no one's publishing your work, so what? Do it anyway. If the fact that no one's publishing it and no one's paying attention to it stops you doing it, then you know, you're probably not serious enough to be doing it in the first place.

I'm a bit of a hard man about this. Did William Faulkner write As I Lay Dying because he was given a commission by Random House to do it? No. He had a fucking day job! Or actually he had a night job. He was working as a night watchman. But anyway, he wrote the damn thing at work. How many novelists have their first novel commissioned? It's just... And Dostoyevsky or Solzhenitsyn. He writes all of these books and hides them in a drawer because if anyone sees them, he's going to go to jail. I mean, compared to that, what have we got to complain about? I don't see what's stopping us doing these great masterworks, to be honest, even if there weren't an industry at all. So I don't think the bad work is such a problem. The problem is us not doing the good work.

But now I do think that is happening. There's enough of the good work being done that it doesn't matter how many second-rate pieces of tripe are peddled on the world. Sure it might not be great in marketing terms for a while, but if the comics are good enough and there is enough of them, I think that's all that matters to me.

But then I've got a day job [laughs].

Black Eye

SPURGEON: How did Pickle get started?

HORROCKS: Oh... I was in England. I was living in England and thinking I could break into comics. Ha. Ha. Getting depressed and burned out on this whole attempt to get into comics. I went through the whole patch that's described in "The Last Fox Story," when I became phobic about comics. Just looking at a comic made me dizzy and nauseous. So to get around this, I applied a few strategies that I thought would sidestep the whole comics phobia thing, one of which was to do a comic in the style of kid's books -- with separate text and pictures, trying to make it as little like a comic as I could. That was what "The Last Fox Story" was and it worked really well; by the end of "The Last Fox Story," I felt like I was a cartoonist again. The other strange idea I had was to start putting out mini-comics again. But because I couldn't bring myself to actually draw any new comics, I pulled together a whole lot of old stuff and reprinted that as mini-comics. That was the first few issues of the Pickle mini-comic. I couldn't even draw a cover because it was too intimidating. So I just xeroxed one panel, blown up to the point where it filled the whole cover. The title was just typed out on an old portable typewriter. And I printed them very badly on the photocopier at work. I said, I'm just going to give them away. The only thing that matters is to get them out. So they're badly printed and I only did a few copies. I don't even know what I did with them. But all of those things were strategies for getting out of this fear of comics that I'd developed. And they all worked.

SPURGEON: How? Was it just in terms of getting the work out there again? Or was it seeing it in a different way?

HORROCKS: It was like I tricked myself into doing comics again.

SPURGEON: Gotcha.

HORROCKS: It was just a way to be a cartoonist again in some form. But "The Last Fox Story" was the really big breakthrough. And because it was the first new thing that grew out of the minicomic, that made me do a few others as well – using the same format. I did one about the Gulf War.

SPURGEON: What one was that?

HORROCKS: "The Last Fox Story" is actually in Pickle #3. You know that one. The other one was called "Opposite Equinoxes." It's in the same format; it's like illustrated text, too. But anyhow, I was doing all of that and I had started doing new work and then Paul Gravett introduced me to Michel Vrána and Nick Craine, who were in London for a convention. They were just in the process of setting up Tragedy Strikes with some business partners in Canada. We just talked comics for ages at the pub and swapped mini-comics. A little while later, when I'd gone back to New Zealand, Michel sent me a fax saying, "Tragedy Strikes Press is now up and running. We'd like to do a comic with you." But it arrived on my dad's fax machine, which must have been malfunctioning or something, because what I actually got was this long piece of paper that started with "Dear Dylan," and then the text turned into like this long bar code stretching down the whole page. And then at the bottom: "We'd really like to publish you." And that was it. I couldn't even tell who it was from.

SPURGEON: Oh my god.

HORROCKS: But eventually I managed to work it out. There was something about it that told me it was from Canada. And so I rang up a bunch of people, friends in England. Who the hell do I know in Canada? And finally I was talking to Paul Gravett. "Who do I know from Canada?" "Maybe it's Michel Vrána." "Oh, that's possible." So I finally got a hold of Michel Vrána, and sure enough it was. It just went from there.

SPURGEON: Were they supportive? You know, the Comics Journal hasn't talked to too many of the Black Eye cartoonists.

HORROCKS: Oh, Michel was always enormously supportive.

SPURGEON: Was there much editing?

HORROCKS: No. He always meant to. He always meant to. He always said, "Send me roughs." I always said, "I'll send you roughs." And then we wouldn't get round to it. Because I was quite keen on an editor. I'd been reading about Pound and Eliot and blah de blah. But we never got round to it because I was always doing it at the last minute and he was always too busy anyway. It fell down with Michel toward the end because he'd gotten in over his head to the point where the comics weren't ever really making money at all. After years and years of losing money on them, while his other business, his design business, was growing exponentially... He had to put more and more time into the design business, so he didn't really have time to maintain the publishing properly. If he made one mistake, it was not giving it up a couple of years earlier. But then if he had, Hicksville never would have come out. So I can't begrudge him that.

SPURGEON: Well, you got out of there with a book. Was it hard to extricate yourself as cleanly as you did?

HORROCKS: Oh, I felt guilty about it, because I felt like he'd been through shit. He sort of decided to give it up and then when Hicksville came out and The Sands came out I think he thought it was such a buzz to be publishing again that maybe he could do something again. I think he was a little bit disappointed that I said no. But I think he knew, too, that I needed to get out. I just felt a bit guilty about it but I probably shouldn't have.

SPURGEON: Was there a struggle?

HORROCKS: No. We're friends. We keep in touch. I'm hoping to see him in Canada.

SPURGEON: But was there a struggle in getting the book from him or anything like that?

HORROCKS: No. No.

SPURGEON: Did you appreciate him as a designer?

HORROCKS: Yes. Very much. He did most of the design on Pickle. And I was happy to let him do it because he was a very good designer. I've never been to art school or been to design college and I didn't know how to do it. Although I now have learned quite a lot more, and I can now do stuff on Photoshop and Pagemaker. So Atlas is completely my own design.

SPURGEON: How much contact was there between you and Michel on a business basis? I remember when he was doing $2.50 comics when everyone else was doing $2.95 comics and thinking, "Wow, those cartoonists must really trust him."

HORROCKS: Yeah. I was a bit oblivious to it, though. Being so far away from the industry, it's not like I knew what people were doing in a big way. I didn't know what was working so I pretty much left it up to him. I know some of the others didn't. But being at San Diego last week with James Sturm -- he had a book coming out. Because of James's background, he was paying a lot of attention to the precise colors of the cover and so on. It was kind of hard on him when they weren't the right colors. I'm probably lucky -- either lucky or maybe it's just a fatal flaw -- but because I haven't got the training and I don't really know how to control those things as well as those guys, I just kind of assume... To some extent I leave it up to the gods. Once it leaves my hands I'm just pleased when it basically comes back in one piece and the pages are in the right order. [Spurgeon chuckles.] I think that's probably unusual among the Drawn and Quarterly cartoonists. Makes me feel a little inadequate in front of them when they're being so careful about it.

SPURGEON: What you're saying is Chris Oliveros doesn't have to fly you out for press checks.

HORROCKS: In fact, I left the blue lines to him because I figured it would take too long to send the blue lines to me and then back to him.

SPURGEON: Wow. You're the publisher's dream date, Dylan.

HORROCKS: It would take too long and we wouldn't get it out in time for San Diego. So I left them to him. I just said, "Make sure the pages are in the right order and the bleeds are correct."

SPURGEON: So there's no personal acrimony between yourself and Michel, but you sound sort of regretful of the experience.

HORROCKS: Well, there was some acrimony from others at the time, when books were late and orders weren't being filled and stuff... But I don't have any of it personally. I just feel sorry for Michel having had to go through that. I think he was pretty burned out by the end.

I have enormous respect for anyone who publishes the way he did, or the way Chris Oliveros does or Fantagraphics. I mean, it's not an easy life. And they don't get the kudos. We get the kudos. And a lot of people seem to think that these guys are making a lot of money and exploiting us, but they're not. They're not getting anything out of it.

SPURGEON: It's amazing how little any of those guys take out of their companies.

HORROCKS: All they get is the satisfaction of having helped all of these people produce these beautiful things. And that's a pretty selfless thing in a way.

Cafe Underground

SPURGEON: Pickle -- a one-man anthology, I think was how it was described in the ad copy. It kind of evolved into an almost meta-conceit of stories within stories, in that characters from one story might have been producing the story that appeared. Can you tell me how that developed? Was that intentional from the beginning?

HORROCKS: No. At the beginning of Pickle, the serial was meant to be Cafe Underground.

SPURGEON: You had done a little bit with the Cafe Underground before Pickle #1, right?

HORROCKS: I put out a mini of the first chapter. But that's the only place it had been printed. However, there was a story called Little Death, which was like a sort of rough sketch for cafe. That was in Fox Comics and also later reprinted in Reactor Girl. But Fox Comics is what it was drawn for. So Cafe Underground was meant to be the serial and the big story and everything else was just stuff that gathered around it. But I've always had this habit of having an ensemble of characters that tend to turn up all over the place. In spite of myself, I sort of create a Dylan Horrocks universe and most of my stories involve those characters or whatever. I started Hicksville initially because I needed a serial that I could just relax with. Because Cafe Underground, by that point -- I'd scripted the whole thing way back years before. I did the first draft in '85. And wrote the script I was working from in '89. And I'd even done roughs for a huge amount of it. I had done roughs for more of it than I have ever drawn. It actually got quite boring. I'd sit down and draw it and I knew exactly what I had to draw. I knew where the story was going.

SPURGEON: Comics making was becoming a process for you, or you used it as a process even then?

HORROCKS: Yeah. It was just boring. It was a boring process.

SPURGEON: Were you satisfied with the end result?

HORROCKS: I was pretty satisfied with the end result. But there were no surprises. Part of the pleasure of starting Hicksville was that I really didn't know where it was going at all. I knew that I could say, "Oh, I feel like drawing this. Let's take the story in this direction." Plus, I just like to draw people sitting around on the beach and New Zealand landscapes, really. [Spurgeon laughs.]

SPURGEON: There's almost this repudiation of the Cafe Underground serial in Hicksville, where it becomes a not-so-great story done by one of the characters.

HORROCKS: Kind of, but that argument between the writer and the artist was just what I used to take a break from it. I intended to come back to it.

SPURGEON: Will you?

HORROCKS: Someday I might, although the reality is I probably won't. In theory, I would like to finish it one day, but I know that by the time I ever sat down to do it, it would probably seem very sophomoric. But there are elements of the story I'm still enormously fond of. I'm very fond of the characters, and there are certain scenes I still like. It's also very much a story out of my life, which was a really important part of my life. And it's also a story about New Zealand politics, strangely. I know no one realizes that.

SPURGEON: About what specifically?

HORROCKS: Well, the whole thing is a metaphor about what happened to New Zealand politics in the '80s.

SPURGEON: Huh.

HORROCKS: It's a really deeply buried subtext, I have to say. It was going to be much clearer towards the end.

It's hard to go into that without going into New Zealand politics. Basically, the '80s was a time of enormous disillusionment and betrayal for people on the left end of politics. We finally, after many, many years of very conservative government, elected a Labour government. Little did we realize that the Labour party had changed completely in the intervening years. The policy wing was now dominated by a small group of extreme, new-right, neo-liberal fundamentalists. It was a very odd situation, but we ended up undergoing the most far-reaching neo-liberal economic reforms of just about any Western economy. On the scale of Chile under Pinochet.

SPURGEON: Wow.

HORROCKS: But also we started with a very strong welfare system and a very strongly regulated economy. Because it was a very small country that relied on an export–based economy. So there were a lot of tariffs and import controls. A lot of subsidies for the agricultural sector because it wasn't like a big agro-industry – mostly it was smaller family-based farming. All of that was very swiftly dismantled under this Labour government. They floated the dollar, they deregulated every aspect of the economy they could, they removed as many tariffs as they could overnight, they lowered company taxes, flattened out income tax rates to benefit the rich and introduced a GST, which is a consumption tax and tends to be regressive rather than progressive.

There was a kind of standing joke in the late '70s with the Prime Minister, who was also the finance minister. He was very conservative, but actually in his policies he worked very hard to preserve the welfare state and the subsidies for farmers, because he viewed his constituency as the farming sector. People would say, "What about unemployment?" And he would say, "The unemployed? I know them all by their first name." There was some truth to that. It was like a few thousand people in the whole country were unemployed. It was an extraordinarily low number... But by the late-'80s, after a few years of this so-called Labour government, it was up to like 10-12% of the work force. It was in the hundreds of thousands.

All this had a huge impact on the economy. Local industries were just dropping like flies because cheap imports drove them to the wall. A huge amount of the economy is now owned by overseas corporations. Farmers were walking off of the land because they couldn't make a go of it anymore. By the mid-90s our balance of payments was at the same level as those Asian countries that had triggered the Asian financial collapse. Anyway, it's just been a crazy, crazy time. And the Labour party just dissolved by '87 in a flurry of recriminations and bitterness. I was quite involved in all of that, just as a foot soldier.

At the same time there was a big shift in the cultural politics. The last 30 years has seen a big Maori renaissance.

SPURGEON: A big what renaissance?

HORROCKS: Maori [the indigenous people of New Zealand]. They've become a much more powerful presence in national politics and in culture as well. The late '80s was a time when the big slogan was, Honor the Treaty, which is the Treaty of Waitangi between a lot of the Maori tribes and the British Crown in 1840. The Maori were saying that the treaty sanctified a partnership, an equal partnership between the two races. So there's a lot of this stuff going down. In fact, the Cafe Underground was trying to get a sense of what was really a pretty safe and cruisey existence in which people's focus was on lifestyle stuff really. The politics was moral... politics about personal lifestyle. Under our noses an economic crisis was brewing without anyone realizing it. The problem with the Labour party in the '80s is that it was dominated by people who didn't give a shit about economics. They didn't understand it, and so they couldn't realize what was happening until too late. They thought economics was something that only the boring people were into – so they left it to them. Except that the boring people happened to have an agenda of their own.

So the characters in Cafe Underground are pretty much like a lot of my friends at the time who were politically aware. Basically, we were exploring different ways of living and different values and things. But before we understood what was happening, suddenly the whole world had turned to shit. The world we were exploring was taken away in the place of something much harsher and more ruthless. Other people were in charge of it. We had very little place in it anymore. It was like: get a job or die. Also, the character Gabriel represents sort of the seductive face of the new look Labour party in the '80s. That all makes Cafe sound like a really crass political parable, but really, what I was intrigued at most of all about what happened in the '80s was the way it changed the culture of the country. The whole atmosphere of the country shifted in the space of a year or so. Suddenly everyone was adoring and worshipping stockbrokers. Somehow accountants suddenly became a really sexy thing to be. I never quite grasped how they pulled that one off…

SPURGEON: And cartoonists?

HORROCKS: Cartoonists were a sad, miserable thing to be. Always have been, always will be.

SPURGEON: "Social Revolution Takes Place. Cartoonists Not Effected."

HORROCKS: The cultural heroes of the '80s were corporate raiders. You turned on the news and half of it would be dominated by the stock prices that day. Everyone got caught up in this crazy... It's my impression that a similar thing's been going on in America in the last five years with this whole bizarre technology boom. The sales of champagne increased 100-fold. Yuppies suddenly became the dominant voice in the culture. And then the '87 stock market crash started a recession which hit us harder than any other country. We were still recovering from it in the mid-'90s. Terrible, terrible effect on our economy. It had been ripped wide open by all of the deregulation and we were completely dependent now on the stock market fluctuations. It all kind of came crashing down. So Gabriel was meant to represent the seductive face of all of that but also its dark consequences…

SPURGEON: So that wasn't working? That's why you gave it up?

HORROCKS: I just got sick of it. Once I got into Hicksville, that was much more interesting to me. And once I realized what Hicksville was going to be about, it got really interesting...

Style Points

SPURGEON: Can we talk about the visual vocabulary you put together for Hicksville? There's a very distinctive look to your art of that period and it almost looks worked out, if that makes any sense.

HORROCKS: It looks worked out, does it?

SPURGEON: Well…

HORROCKS: Because to me, it's not very worked out.

SPURGEON: It seems like you're casting about for a style that will work for this longer story. My sense of it is that you'd been doing all of these short stories and kind of letting it flow and then…

HORROCKS: Each short story had quite a different style.

SPURGEON: Yeah. But then you have to settle into a style for the longer haul.

HORROCKS: It took a long time, though. When I look at Hicksville now I cringe. When it came to doing the book, I really wanted to redo the whole thing from scratch.

SPURGEON: Even the later stuff?

HORROCKS: Everything. I still feel that way when I look at it now. But I knew that it if I did that it would never come out. So I just had to knuckle down and grit my teeth and just change it as much as I felt I could.

SPURGEON: Let me ask you a few visual things. Going back to the start of Hicksville or working through Hicksville. You make interesting decisions. There's a cartoony quality to your figures that doesn't really exist in a lot of your other work.

HORROCKS: Yeah. But none of this was very consciously worked out. Cafe Underground has a much more fully realized visual style I think than Hicksville. That's one reason why I might still finish it someday. I'd like to explore that style more.

SPURGEON: The variation was just you going around trying to grasp a visual style rather than any kind of pre-planned effect.

HORROCKS: That's it completely.

SPURGEON: Let me ask another question then about…

HORROCKS: You sound disillusioned.

SPURGEON: [laughs] This is horrible! Quit answering the questions honestly!

HORROCKS: You still respect me, don't you?

SPURGEON: We'll see how the rest of the interview goes.

Another thing: there's no attempt on your part to draw the Dick Burger stuff in terms of how that stuff might look in the real world. Or maybe there was an attempt.

HORROCKS: There wasn't an attempt at first, but later on there was. It was an attempt that failed miserably.

SPURGEON: Your style pretty much overwhelms any attempt in that direction.

HORROCKS: Which I regret. I regret that.

SPURGEON: So you would actually have preferred to have done a better knock-off?

HORROCKS: Yeah. I would. There's a bit where you see a page from Lady Night that was drawn by Dick Burger's Studios. And I was genuinely attempting to do like a Todd McFarlane thing there. But I was so terrible at it.

SPURGEON: But it communicates. I don't think it affects the work or anything.

HORROCKS: Really? I do.

SPURGEON: Well, I don't. It wasn't until I started to break the story down into its component parts that it even occurred to me.

HORROCKS: See if Seth had drawn it, if it was Seth's story, I think he would have pulled that off credibly. If he had drawn these superhero comics that were supposedly by a Todd McFarlane type but they still looked look like they were drawn by an underground cartoonist I'd have believed it. It wouldn't have bothered me. But when I look at Hicksville, it does bother me that they were drawn in this kind of bizarre compromise style.

SPURGEON: For some reason it works for me. It's like the Hicksville version of what Todd McFarlane's art looks like. Does that make sense?

HORROCKS: Yeah. That does. The funny thing is, five years before I probably could have pulled off a much more convincing mainstream comics rip-off. And now, I could, too. Because I have been doing stuff that's closer to that. But at that particular moment, I couldn't really do it because I was still trying to learn how to draw all over again.

SPURGEON: You also use a lot of really classic visual motifs.

HORROCKS: The clouds.

SPURGEON: You have the clouds. You have the beach. You have the tower and you have the tree. Not only are these classic symbols, they're all symbols of the relationship between earthly space and divine space. The beach where a lot of the action takes place is the space between the land and the infinity of the ocean. The tree central to Grace's experiences out of country serves as the connection between earth and heaven. The tower at story's end is another space between earth and heaven, where all the great comics exist. And so on. There's a very simple and very powerful iconography in Hicksville, all of which seems to support a very specific view of the creative process.

HORROCKS: Though you've just described a whole iconography that I wasn't really aware of.

SPURGEON: Really? Because that was my first question, if you were aware of this kind of symbolism.

HORROCKS: Not that particular iconography. What I... Where that stuff is really resonant for me is that these are very big parts of the New Zealand landscape and of New Zealand art. So in painting and film those motifs are an enormously powerful presence. Particularly the beach and the sky -- all these big skies. The beautiful, ever-changing cloud formations. The lighthouse is quite a presence in New Zealand. And the fields, obviously. What I was trying to do with Hicksville was get back out of the city and just... Partly, Cafe Underground was getting me claustrophobic, so I just wanted to go out and take a walk in the country. Those were some of the things I longed for, especially the beach. If you're a New Zealander the beach is always the place we long for. If we're sitting in a tube train in London what we all want to do is be sitting on Kare Kare Beach or Piha Beach where it's huge open space. In front of you, as you say, there's just this infinity of the ocean stretching out forever. And behind those is the wild bush and the cliffs. It's simultaneously very comforting and very... It's passionate, the landscape there. So initially, I was just trying to get out there. But over time, it started to take on a lot of meaning for me within the story. But the ones that became quite carefully worked out motifs were the clouds, the lighthouse and the beach. Well, the beach was never really a particularly conscious symbol of anything. The clouds and the lighthouse were. But all of that symbolism you just outlined was definitely where I was going. It's just that it wasn't a conscious thing. It's part of the pleasure of doing a big work like that -- a big book. You set up such a huge and complex structure, and while you're doing it, a lot of it is done instinctively, and you just know that these things are significant to you. Once you've got it big enough and intertwined enough it creates its own structure of meaning that informs the rest of it. That's why I feel that some cartoonists, there are some cartoonists who are kind of stuck in a particular place. What they need to do is to do a big book. It's a place you get to where that's what you need to do. You need to do a big work because there are whole new things that open up for you, which you can never explore in a short story.

Casting Call

SPURGEON: Another way to read Hicksville is to see each character as representations of various attitudes towards the creative process: the critic, the cynic, the true believer, the pragmatist. Take for instance…[laughs]

You know, I'm going to forget every character's name.

HORROCKS: You too?

SPURGEON: Grace! With Grace, you explore palpable cynicism about the creative process.

HORROCKS: I'd say not so much about the creative process but about comics quite specifically. In lots of different respects, the characters are a whole bunch of different aspects of my relationship with comics.

SPURGEON: Could you talk about what each character represents in terms of your relationship to comics?

HORROCKS: Oh, god.

SPURGEON: Trust me.

HORROCKS: Well, Sam is the cartoonist that I was when I was younger. Dick Burger is the part of me that when I was a kid I would invent my own comics company -- Dylan Horrocks Presents... It was the whole Marvel bit and it's quite an exciting fantasy when you're a kid.

SPURGEON: Leonard Batts?

HORROCKS: Leonard Batts is the fanboy who... when he talks towards the end about what drew him to comics and what comics meant to him when he was growing up in Newfoundland, I think that's a very powerful part of a lot of people's relationship to comics. When you could construct a world that you could escape into. It was more satisfying and more evocative than the one he was in, even though he grew up in this beautiful, amazing place, like I did. And my life was great. I had nothing to escape from. But it somehow didn't have this zing that I thought these other worlds did.

SPURGEON: Grace?

HORROCKS: Well, Grace is the disdain that surely all of us who care about comics have at times - those days where you feel this contempt for them.

SPURGEON: I call those weekdays. [laughter]

HORROCKS: I call it going to San Diego.

SPURGEON: Yeah. You get a lot of that in San Diego. That look of exhausted horror.

HORROCKS: And also when I was in London and I had my comics phobia. I would walk into a comics shop and it just disgusted me. It repelled me.

SPURGEON: Physically nauseous?

HORROCKS: Physically. I was dizzy. I had to get out of there or I would faint.

SPURGEON: I don't think you're the only cartoonist who has ever felt that.

HORROCKS: Well, I've talked to musicians who've had that with music, artists who've given up painting, writers who couldn't read a novel for ten years. I think it's quite a common thing for any kind of writer or artist or musician.

SPURGEON: And the gentleman who guards the sacred space?

HORROCKS: Kupe.

SPURGEON: Kupe.

HORROCKS: He's my myth of a cartoonist. He's the mythic comics figure. He's a little to me like a patron saint. And he occupies a mythic presence that I'm not sure he really deserves but I'm happy to use him.

SPURGEON: And Mrs. Hicks?

HORROCKS: Mrs. Hicks is the lovely archivist. In some ways she's modeled on Paul Gravett. She's the woman at the crossroads.

SPURGEON: That doesn't seem far away from your own personality.

HORROCKS: On my good days I have very, very broad tastes in comics and I'm prepared to be positive about anything. At San Diego you walk away from the alternative comics part and it becomes increasingly shrill and frightening and disturbing and I try not to run screaming back to the Drawn & Quarterly booth to huddle in the corner. You're afraid you won't get back there in time before you get eaten up by the whole thing. But occasionally I catch a glance at some ten-year-old kid whose wandering around saying how cool it is and they want to get some new Dragonball Z cards or something. That's lovely. I was like that at the first comics convention I went to in San Francisco when I was 13 or 14. And I got a sketch of Conan the Barbarian by Tony de Zuniga and I was so excited! It was so cool. I like that. I think that's great.

Mrs. Hicks has no contempt for anything in comics. She's the one person in the whole of Hicksville who still writes and sends postcards to Dick Burger now and then. Sam's able to, too, but he doesn't live in Hicksville.

The Evil Dick Burger

SPURGEON: Is Dick Burger evil?

HORROCKS: Of all of the readings I've encountered, that's the one I'm least comfortable with, that it's a simple story of how the comics industry exploited cartoonists and that's why there are so few good comics around. Because I don't believe that.

SPURGEON: So am I right in that you intended something more nuanced from your portrayal of Dick Burger than he was a bad man acting badly?

HORROCKS: Absolutely. Yeah. I have enormous sympathy for Dick Burger. To me he's a very sympathetic character. The thing about Dick Burger was that he wanted to be a great cartoonist, but he allowed his horizons to shrink. His failure was a moral failure, but it's not like he was bad. He made a moral choice, which was one that corrupted him. He knows that. What he really wishes is that he could be clean again. He wants to be a good person. There's a scene in Stars when he gives Sam the check. Sam says he's leaving. Sam has done the right thing, and it's hurtful, but Dick knows it's the right thing. He wishes he could be like that. But the only way he knows anymore to express that is by giving Sam a check, which is not what Sam wants. It's Dick's money that's the problem.

SPURGEON: What did you intend to say about people who work in that part of comics?

HORROCKS: There's no one thing I intend to say.

SPURGEON: I think people will pretty much see Dick Burger's empire as an inflated Image Comics parallel, even though you're very careful to couch it in language that denies it.

HORROCKS: There's a whole lot of stuff feeding into Dick Burger. There's even a bit of Frank Miller in Dick Burger. But I have a lot of respect for Miller. And he hasn't done any of what Dick Burger did. He's never betrayed anyone or stolen anyone and he publishes very independently through Dark Horse Maverick. He could be doing -- well he is -- he's doing Dark Knight Returns II. But I don't hold that against him because it's probably fun and he's doing it on his own terms. But there are elements. The elements of Frank Miller that are in there are Dick Burger's -- it's when Dick Burger does his first Captain Tomorrow book and it takes the world by storm. That's like Dark Knight. So there are people I respect in him, too.

The thing is, I'm never really interested in saying anything. I don't like parables. That's why I don't like that Comics 2000 book. Well, I liked Comics 2000. But when I finished Comics 2000, having read it from cover to cover in a week and a half (which few people have been crazy enough to do), I felt like I could never read another wordless comic in my life. That's because so many of them fell into the trap of being a pantomimed parable. I just don't like that. You know what I was saying that it's not about communication for me, it's about exploration? What I've done in Hicksville is try to explore the landscape of comics and explore it as thoroughly as I can.

SPURGEON: Well, is there anything that surprised you in what you discovered during that exploration? Did you end up respecting certain people who did that?

HORROCKS: Yeah. It's hard to think of any one person who is anything like that. In a way, Dick Burger represents the mainstream cartoonist industry and the cartoonists in it. To me, the story is a tragedy about Dick. He's not the bad guy; he's the tragic figure. That's why I feel nothing but sadness for him. I feel a lot of sadness for the mainstream comics industry, too, because they've undergone the same tragedy that he has. And they're forever trying to purify themselves by doing good comics again, and there are a lot of people in there who really are trying to do good comics. But over the years, in so many ways, they've harmed themselves.

SPURGEON: Through making bad comics?

HORROCKS: Through making bad comics and through making bad decisions. Primarily I guess through making some very poor moral decisions. But I don't blame the industry. I don't feel like the industry is a bad thing. I think a lot of the comics that have been made that you call bad comics -- well, I don't dislike them. I think some of them are good comics. I guess I feel like it's not even about the comics at the end of the day. It's not even about... The whole Dick Burger thing isn't about -- which might seem strange given the whole thing you sort of find out at the end -- it's about the people. I feel like people have been treated very badly by the industry and the people doing it to them were themselves being treated very badly by the industry and were corrupting themselves. The whole Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster saga is one of the quintessential tragedies of comics, and it's a tragedy, because often the people screwing them over were themselves harmed. Siegel and Shuster, they were big bucks guys for a little while. They had people working for them and everything. The whole thing's just a big tragedy.

SPURGEON: Gil Kane…

HORROCKS: Gil Kane is an absolutely perfect example because that long interview with him in the Journal, which I actually read in hospital…

SPURGEON: Wow.

HORROCKS: I was hospitalized with appendicitis and they were going to whip my appendix out. I just lay there and read the Comics Journal while I waited. Anyway, I found it one of the most moving interviews I've ever read, because here's this guy who wanted to be a great artist, but he didn't have it in him. When I was reading it, I kept thinking, "Shut up, Gary! Stop giving this guy a hard time." Because you're forcing him into this corner where he has to admit that he's not an important artist and he's never done great literature and he feels bad about it. Over the years he started to feel that that was what was valid and meaningful in the world, great art and great literature, and yet he was incapable of doing that. What I felt sad about was that he did do very, very, very good hack work. Very good hack work. And that's something to be proud of. But he couldn't feel proud of it. I guess he's another tragedy of comics. I don't know whether it was his standards that was the problem or the industry that was the problem. Gary kept trying to blame it on the industry and I don't think that was right. It was Gil Kane that kept bringing it back to himself saying, "It was me. I wasn't up to it. I couldn't do it."

Tower Good, Industry Bad

SPURGEON: Another thing I find hard to accept in Hicksville is that it seems to set up this myth of unfulfilled artistic ambition with an industry fall guy, complete with the idea that these various artists had these amazing stories in them.

HORROCKS: You're right. It sounds a bit like the industry is the villain, but…

SPURGEON: And I think we learned in the 1980s that when a lot of artists get the freedom to do whatever they want, what they often want to do is almost exactly what they did before.

HORROCKS: Crap.

SPURGEON: [laughs] Well, not crap, but what I might call uninspired genre work.

HORROCKS: The reason I said crap -- that's not really fair. But the reason I say that is what I dislike most of all is pretentious hackwork. Ultimately what many of them wanted to do was hackwork, but pretentiously. And the fact that they waited for some publisher to commission it before they did it says it all.

That's why the industry is not the fall guy for me -- it does seem like that in Hicksville, and that's a failing. To me it's not the industry's fault ultimately.

SPURGEON: So why was it important for you to imagine a secret history?

HORROCKS: The reason the great comics that are in that library didn't happen is because the people who could have done them had no interest in doing them. They didn't have enough interest in doing them to ultimately fucking do them. And there ultimately is no reason why they couldn't have done them, because it's not like for comics you need a big budget. You don't need financial backing. You can just do them. Plenty of amazingly great novels were being written at the same time that all of these comics weren't being done. There were writers getting a job as a security guard at night at some power plant and sitting there and writing their novel. They could have been doing a comic at the same time just as easily, but they weren't. And that's kind of what... The lighthouse library is the comics that would exist if that weren't the case. Why that wasn't the case is a much more complex question.

SPURGEON: So why do people respond to the more simplistic reading? If I remember right, that was Bart Beaty's comix@list criticism, that particularly with the Tower you raised this secret history to the heights of romantic myth rather than trusting in the more subtle portions of your story to carry that theme.

HORROCKS: I thought it was valid to construct a myth for comics in a sense that comics are a community, which I think they are. They're certainly more a community than a mass medium now. Communities have myths. Constructing a myth is a valid way of exploring a lot of thoughts and feelings about something. I'm turned off by a kind of crass approach to mythologizing, reinventing the... I mean, I've never been drawn to Joseph Campbell's work. I'm sure it's entirely valid but it's not my bag. But on the level of Roland Barthes, I'm more interested in that kind of myth making – the idea of mythology as simply a field in which we construct culture and cultural meaning.

SPURGEON: Do you really think the comics community lacks for myth?

HORROCKS: No. I was just trying to create a myth that's more meaningful for me.

SPURGEON: So what about that myth is meaningful to you?

HORROCKS: When we were talking about Scott McCloud, I said that what I found most exciting about his definition was that it allowed us to re-imagine comics. He constructed an alternate history for comics. That's kind of what I was doing with this. I don't know. When I was growing up, I had the same missionary zeal that Scott McCloud has to convince people that comics could be something else. I then went through this gradual process of discovering that what they actually were was of enormous interest to me as well. And Hicksville was an expression of both of those impulses together. It's a love poem to comics as they are and as they have been, but at the same time an attempt to imagine what they can also be. They also carry within them this enormously beautiful... I don't know quite where I'm going here. I love comics and I love what comics could be. And I love what they are.

SPURGEON: You love what they are and what they could have been, can be, could be.

HORROCKS: The reason that I find the whole Dick Burger story so very sad and so meaningful and powerful to me is that I care about him, too. I care about Todd McFarlane. I really do. And I don't feel that by doing the work he does he's somehow betraying comics. He's under no obligation to do "art" comics.

SPURGEON: That's a terrifying thought, even.

HORROCKS: At least that's what I think. I do know that I've tried to overcome some of the stereotyped Comics Journal approach. I have no problem with people doing that kind of stuff.

SPURGEON: Do you mean a kind of dismissive approach to those kinds of comics?

HORROCKS: I know some cartoonists who feel if you're not doing the good stuff, you shouldn't be doing it at all. And I don't see why that should be the case.

Dirty Comics

SPURGEON: Porn. [Horrocks laughs] Let's talk about your erotic comics for a little bit, partly because they're some of the only comics we've seen from you between Hicksville and Atlas. Is it just the two pieces in Dirty Stories?

HORROCKS: Yeah. Although there's some of my stuff that I consider erotic comics, too, although other people might not. Like there was the "Western Wind" story that was in the Dark Horse Maverick 2000 Annual. And a story called "Men that Perish," which was in an early issue of Pickle. I include those as erotic comics, too.

SPURGEON: Can you talk about your interest in doing those kinds of comics? Today I saw you delighted at the gift of an actual Tijuana Bible. Are your own erotic comics just cultural objects to you, or is there something about the way that comics work when expressing those kinds of issues that appeals to you as an artist?

HORROCKS: It's a lot of stuff. I'm partly just interested in it as a wonderful hidden part of the history of comics. And also the Tijuana Bibles are in a format which I adore -- a single panel per page, landscape format. It's so different from what people have generally done, and I find it a real interesting format.

SPURGEON: In what way?

HORROCKS: It changes your relationship with each picture and makes it easier to go into each picture with the concerns and values that we talked about before, that you take when you look at a painting. And it slows everything down, and it slows down my process of drawing it, too. I draw each panel more slowly and carefully. And it brings a stillness. It slows down the momentum and it brings more of a stillness because you're looking at just one panel at a time instead of going straight on to the next panel.

SPURGEON: But some of your erotic comics precede your interest in still comics. So is there something about eroticism in comics that you find appealing?

HORROCKS: Well, "Men that Perish" was done for a friend of mine in New Zealand who was putting together a magazine I don't think came out. He didn't want it to be a gay magazine and he didn't want it to be some kind of dreadful "new man" thing. He just wanted to explore different ideas of what it's all about being a man. So I did Men that Perish as a way of trying to talk about men. It's about the way the woman is looking at the man, which is something I keep coming back to in these stories.

SPURGEON: Right.

HORROCKS: I really am interested in what it is about men that women are drawn to. There have been times in my life when I've had more respect for the women in my life. I was like, "They're much nicer people." Some people have never liked any men in their lives. I've never been anything like that. I keep remembering as a child, remembering the love that I had for my dad -- and still have -- it's a very deep love. I guess I was just trying to explore the idea of loving men. Men being loved. Which involves a very different way of looking at masculinity to what we usually have. Because it means looking at the qualities that inspire respect and love and the gentleness and... "Men that Perish" became an erotic poem because it was about love. Love to me, that kind of love is very entangled with desire. I don't... All of the stuff that I've done so far really has been about desire and has been tangled up with love. They've all been, in one way or another, kind of erotic love poems, which is what I'm interested in, really.

SPURGEON: So much of the work in Dirty Stories reads like humor comics with pornographic elements, whereas your stuff seems to be concerned with the root causes of desire and the human connection.

HORROCKS: Yeah. I have to say that that's the big flaw in the ones I've done to date. They don't sufficiently wrestle with lust. There's not enough lust in them. That's actually something I want to try to do with the Top Shelf book I'm working on. I think they function O.K. as erotic love poems, but they don't yet function well enough as pornography, and I'd actually quite like them to work better as pornography. I have no problem with the idea of pornography as something that you read to get turned on by. I think it's a lovely idea.

SPURGEON: Here's how I know this subject is important to you. In Dirty Stories #1, you introduce the pornography to the reader through an undiscovered trove of great comics.

HORROCKS: It's like the Holy Grail!

Sex is one of the most important things in my life. The relationship that I have with my wife is one of the absolutely most important things in my life. And desire and sexuality -- it's always been a hugely important part of who I am, and I'm sure it is for everybody. So of course it's important to me. It's like if you did find a hidden treasure trove by your favorite cartoonist or artist of all time -- you suddenly found that for 40 years they had done work that was intensely personal and addressed their sexuality -- what an incredibly rich treasure trove that would be! That's why I'm trying to do precisely that. It's just that I'm publishing the risque part.

SPURGEON: Assuming sex is important to everybody -- how come in comics it so often gets communicated through smarmy and in some ways scary vehicles?

HORROCKS: I don't know. I really don't know. I mean, there are a few sex comics that I've encountered that I think are very beautiful comics. Edmond Baudoin has done some beautiful pornography, and it is pornography. No two bones about it. Some of them are very personal stories and aren't pornography. Like Le Portrait is a very personal story and I wouldn't really call it pornography. But it's very sexy, very sexy.

There is a story that he did years ago which appeared in Heavy Metal magazine of all places. It was called something like the 1:32 Bus. And it's a very, very, beautiful story, and serves no purpose other than being a lovely little piece of poetic pornography. Reading that made me wish he'd do more, and something more substantial -- a big piece. There are probably others but it's pretty rare. I don't know. But then, in most genres it's pretty rare. Art and drawing and painting there's a lot of stuff out there that's very interesting. Picasso did a lot of weird things. And Crumb. Crumb is probably the best example of someone who has gone a long way down that path at great, great cost to himself in many ways.

SPURGEON: He's an interesting example because I think a lot of people are taking a completely different set of lessons from Crumb. People sometimes undervalue the self-exploration.

HORROCKS: A very, very deep self-exploration. And part of what's interesting about it is that at the same time he doesn't feel like he has to let go of the other aspects of it – the humor and the scatological stuff and the sheer perverse pleasure he gets out of it. That's again part of what makes it so interesting. He has admitted to jerking off to his own comics. He may just be saying that he jerks off to it, but it's not hard to believe it. And somehow that actually enriches his comics for me, because he's running the whole spectrum on his comics. They're extraordinarily interesting art -- and I'm sure he goes further than he feels comfortable with on some of those comics.

SPURGEON: There's a camp of people who don't think comics can be erotic.

HORROCKS: But I don't believe them.

SPURGEON: It seems that comics would be a natural for eroticism just because of the kind of absorption they demand.

HORROCKS: But I should warn you though that I'm less interested in thinking about what comics do or don't do well in relation to other media. Because once you've decided the definitions and the boundaries between the media are kind of arbitrary and false, then those whole questions kind of evaporate.

Part of what I enjoy about certain comics and what I like to explore with comics, though, is a very intimate relationship with the work. I like the fact that comics are books that you can carry around with you and read quietly by yourself and immerse yourself in. I like that there is that intimate relationship with the work. And that approach to comics I feel could make for great pornography because of the intensity and intimacy and personal involvement with it over time. And I'm interested in using words more than is usually done in pornographic comics. There is a tendency that once the sex starts we drop the text altogether. Particularly captions. It just becomes dialogue. But I'm actually interested in using captions more, to slow it all down and to focus in on every little detail of what's happening. And I'm most interested in the whole build-up of desire and the increasing closeness and that kind of thing. I'm really interested in erotic teasing, which I think can be done by slowing it down. But anyone who thinks that comics can't... that a drawing is incapable of being erotic. I find it a ridiculous argument. I can only imagine that they've been looking at the wrong comics...

There's a part of me that's going to want edit this whole conversation out, because all kinds of relatives will probably want to read this interview...

Vertigo

SPURGEON: You're currently doing a fantasy book for Vertigo. Can I call Hunter a fantasy book?

HORROCKS: Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

SPURGEON: Can you tell me a little bit about your background with fantasy in particular?

HORROCKS: I should drag out all of the interviews I've done in the past year…

SPURGEON: I'm assuming it's a genre that you read?

HORROCKS: I've read a lot of fantasy and some science fiction, but I was always more drawn to fantasy.

SPURGEON: We're talking the big JRR Tolkien-style fantasy novels?

HORROCKS: Tolkien. C.S. Lewis -- the Narnia books. Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising. And Ursula LeGuin. Probably the one I can talk about with the greatest enthusiasm is Alan Garner, who wrote The Owl Service, which is ostensibly a sort of older kids story, but it's a very beautiful book.

SPURGEON: You were reading them as a child and then on into your teen years?

HORROCKS: And right through.

SPURGEON: You still read them.

HORROCKS: I think a lot of what I'm drawn to in books and comics is when people are constructing a fully-realized world that they then inhabit and explore. Even when it appears to be our world, like Joe Sacco. His work is particularly interesting in this way because he's gone to enormous lengths to explore real people and real people's lives. It's factual and it's journalism. But what he then does is he goes down to a studio and works on it for a few years and he rebuilds it. He reconstructs it and it becomes his world. So when we're reading, say, Safe Area: Gorazde, we're actually entering into the Gorazde that Joe Sacco has constructed for us. And he's probably carefully making it as close a facsimile to the one that he felt he really visited as he can. We are entering his world, but he has made it such a complete, credible, whole and rich world that it makes for an extraordinary work.

SPURGEON: James Sturm said something similar about Ben Katchor's work, in that you kind of always feel the pull of Katchor's world even though you're getting... he almost used it as a criticism.

HORROCKS: The Katchor universe.

SPURGEON: Does Katchor appeal to you in that way?

HORROCKS: Enormously. Yeah. Very much so. But I wouldn't use it as a criticism. This is related to the stillness thing, too. I'm all fucked up about this stuff. Part of what appeals to me about Herge's comics and a lot of stuff that I like is that it feels as though you could step inside the panel and wander away from the action. There's a whole world to explore. It's really there, and it's fascinating.

Pretty much all fantasy books that I like actually do that. I mean, they put you into this world. Tolkien -- Lord of the Rings is a classic case -- 30% of it has to do with the plot and the characters. The rest of the book is just a big travelogue. It's just a big exploration of his world. It's a walking tour.

As a kid I always wanted to... I mean, I grew up in the most beautiful place surrounded by bush. Bush, cliffs, hills, not that far from the amazing West Coast beaches where The Piano was filmed. We used to roam for hours in the bush. It was an idyllic childhood in many ways. But for some reason I still longed to be in a more vivid and exciting world. That's what fantasy provided -- the opportunity to hop into these places where every place and every moment was kind of shimmering with this vibrancy and beauty.

So to me, fantasy is all about the landscape, really. And it's a nostalgia thing, because I liked it then, when I was a kid. To me, what nostalgia is, is remembering the past without time. You're remembering what it was like five years ago -- or for me, I get nostalgic for last week. You're remembering what it was like last week but without the passing of time in it. So that nothing's hurried and nothing's rushed and nothing's stressful. You're just remembering what the place was like and the particular atmosphere and so on, but without any of the hurrying and worry that made it unpleasant at the time. And fantasy books are often like that. A lot of the fantasy worlds -- they have history in them and the world does changes, but actually, they'll pretty much be the same for thousands of years. And there is a kind of nostalgia atmosphere to them that's an inherent part of the story I think.

SPURGEON: In addition to reading the books you also played role-playing games.

HORROCKS: Yeah. I've played role-playing games for many, many years.

SPURGEON: You still do?

HORROCKS: Occasionally. Unfortunately, most of my friends are too busy to do much these days. We used to devote a lot of time to this sort of thing.

SPURGEON: It seems like, from my experience with those…

HORROCKS: It's an embarrassing thing to admit.

SPURGEON: One thing that used to occur to me is that they are very narrative oriented. It's almost like narrative stand-up.

HORROCKS: It's like theatre sports.

SPURGEON: It's impromptu narrative.

HORROCKS: Yes it is. It's group constructed impromptu narrative.

I think I learned a lot about narrative from them, especially running [refereeing] a game. There was one game in particular that I ran for ten years called Sorrow Hill. We didn't use the ones... We didn't use modules.

SPURGEON: You weren't buying the supplements.

HORROCKS: Partly because, on the whole, they were really tedious and boring cliched worlds. Because the biggest part of the pleasure for me has always been inventing the worlds. So the last thing I want to do is just go in and buy one. What I want is to completely immerse myself in the world. When I was having a bad day at work or something, I'd tune out and start thinking about a particular part of my world. And add some detail to it. There's nothing more satisfying to me than that. Which is why I'm a little sad that we don't play them much at the moment. I've lost a lot of that... I've lost that ability to just easily lose myself in an imaginary world, though I put a lot of it into my comics. I think that's probably, in terms of writing comics, one of the biggest things that comes out of the games is that I really like to explore the world. The other thing is that it's a narrative thing, but it's also a kind of geography. You construct a geography. It's a geographical experience. Most of the games I've enjoyed there's a tendency to wander around the world. In most fantasy books, too, they just wander around a world.

SPURGEON: A map and little men on the map…

HORROCKS: Exploring the dungeon. A lot of it is about exploration. There's a novel by Georges Perec called Life: A User's Manual, which isn't so much a linear, chronological narrative. It's exploring a building room by room -- an apartment building. And it is a narrative, but it's almost like a spatial narrative. There's a lot of that for me in role-playing games and fantasy books -- a lot of spatial narrative. In fact, you know those big, huge turgid novels that go on for five long volumes?

SPURGEON: My mom reads a lot of fantasy for pleasure. The books are all humongous.

HORROCKS: But a lot of those big, fat books, the reason why they're so fat is every time a character walks into a room you get a two-page description of the room and everything in it. I think for a lot of fantasy fans that's exactly what they want. Because the plot's O.K. and the characters are O.K. but what they really want is to explore the place.

SPURGEON: Now are these the experiences that you're drawing on to do Hunter?

HORROCKS: Yep.Writing an ongoing monthly title is almost exactly the same as running a role-playing game. And that's what I'm enjoying about it more than anything, is that I get to construct a world, make up characters and then explore the world with the characters and have adventures along the way and a little bit of fun. The ongoing continuity is just the same as in a role-playing game. It is just like running a game over a period of time.

SPURGEON: Do you really have the leeway to create your own world?

HORROCKS: Pretty much. Yeah. Because it's a Vertigo book, there's a lot more lee-way.

SPURGEON: So this wasn't one of those things where you had to research what existed here and what went there?

HORROCKS: I did. But…

SPURGEON: Did you find that a stifling process?

HORROCKS: No. I didn't really find that stifling, because sometimes that's part of what I enjoy about it. And it was my decision to set the first six issues of the new book, Hunter: the Age of Magic, on the gemworld, which is from Amethyst.

SPURGEON: The 1980s DC fantasy series.

HORROCKS: It's a girl's comic. I love girl's comics. Not enough of those in the world.

SPURGEON: Are there girl's fantasies versus boy's fantasies?

HORROCKS: Well, I guess so. I'm not involved enough in the fantasy scene to have much of a sense of it. Amethyst was certainly a girl's fantasy, with all of that riding around on white stallions and being a princess and talk about romance and stuff.

SPURGEON: I'm not sure I get the similarities between building a world and cobbling it together from old series.

HORROCKS: Because essentially I'm building my new world, it's just I've got a framework to do it in. Also, I spent a great many years enjoying watching Alan Moore do it, doing precisely that over and over again, so it's a fun exercise. And with Amethyst -- and a lot of what I was doing when I was running the games was taking a lot of the fantasy cliches and recasting them in a way that I found very satisfying. It allowed me to play with a lot of subjects. One day I want to do a big, long epic comic based on the game called Sorrow Hill. I have done a few drafts. It was a big, long epic I can tell you.

SPURGEON: I find a lot of fantasy books are kind of... lacking in subtext?

HORROCKS: Yeah. Well, often they are. [Spurgeon laughs.] But then often they're not. Gene Wolfe's series has no shortage of subtext, as has Alan Garner's. His books are extraordinarily rich in subtext and they're very powerful and lyrical books. So it's just what you do with it. Any genre has access to unlimited subjects.

SPURGEON: So you were recruited to do this series?

HORROCKS: Yeah. Pretty much.

SPURGEON: Based on…Hicksville?

HORROCKS: Yeah. Yeah. The editor, Heidi MacDonald, said she had been familiar with my stuff for quite a long time. But I think Hicksville was the breakthrough. And when she started at Vertigo she rang a bunch of people, to talk to them and let them know she was at Vertigo and that if they had any ideas they wanted to pitch, she'd welcome them.

SPURGEON: It seems like doing a book with Drawn & Quarterly and doing one with DC/Vertigo, you're embracing two very different forms of communication.

HORROCKS: With Atlas, I'm not concerned with communication. It's not, to me, an issue of communication. That's one of my things with Scott McCloud. I'm not that interested so much in art as communication.

SPURGEON: Self-expression?

HORROCKS: No. To me, it's an exploration. It's a journey. It's like... With Louis Riel, and all of Chester [Brown]'s work... he keeps turning around. As soon as everyone starts flocking around him saying, "Wow Chester, you're doing great stuff. Let's see more of that," he turns away and wanders off into the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights. So everyone starts saying, "Oh, where's Chester gone?" and they start following him into the desert – finding his tracks in the sand and trying to work out what in God's name he's doing. That's how I feel with Louis Riel. It's like I'm following along behind him, campsite to campsite, poring over the wreckage of his campsite and trying to make out where the hell he's going. But it's such an extraordinarily interesting journey he's taking that I'm fascinated by it. I feel like that's fine. With Atlas I'm trying to do something like that. I'm doing it to explore something for myself and if other people want to come along for the journey, that's fine.

SPURGEON: So is that true of the Vertigo work?

HORROCKS: No. To me, I'm approaching it in a different way. And with Hunter, to me the reader is ultimately the most important part of the equation. If I start to feel as though people are not getting it, I'll try harder to do it in a way that works for them. The biggest thing that I've had to get used to I guess... There are a few things. But also, I'm having to get used to writing for someone else. Luckily, Richard [Case] has been really patient with me, because I put him through the wringer a bit during the miniseries. Getting the pencilled pages and saying, "Could you put that character on the left-hand side of the panel instead of the right?" Things like that. And he's been very patient with all of that. But I now feel as though I've finally learned to write for someone else. The issues I'm writing now are much better suited to the collaboration. I think we're getting into a kind of groove that works better.

SPURGEON: You mentioned earlier that there was something very interesting about writing scripts after doing your own comics for years.

HORROCKS: Yeah. Because it's just me and the computer. When you're drawing... It's like writing is really just brain work, pure brain work. Drawing is not. Drawing is also physical work. And it's wrestling with physical objects, with the line on the page. It's not being in control in quite the same way as you are with words. I feel like when I'm drawing it's a collaboration between me and the paper and the brush. It's not always an easy collaboration.

SPURGEON: And the trade-off would be a lack of control? How hard has it been to learn how to collaborate? How hard is it to depend on someone else to bring that world to life? Certainly the role-playing games are collaborative.

HORROCKS: Yes. They are. And that's part of how I've gone into it. I know that if I'm running a game for a certain group of players, then there are certain things that I'm going to play well, and there are other things that they will really enrich because of their style of playing. If I give them a particular situation I know that they're going to make it enormously entertaining. They'll do things that I don't expect that suddenly change the meaning of the situation and take the plot into new directions. And there are other players that are more suited to other kinds of situations. And it's a bit like that with writers and artists.

The other thing is -- you know I said that drawing is like a collaboration between me and the paper and the brush and it's often a rather difficult one. I've recently come to actually appreciate that collaboration and to allow the paper and the brush to help do it. I'm not trying to force them into doing what I want to do. Scott McCloud in his book presents the idea that you've got in your head this perfectly formed idea which you're trying, through the paper and the brush and the ink, to get to your reader's brain with the minimum interference along the way. Which is like in basic communication theory that uses the idea of noise as interference; the medium of communication is a conduit that adds the risk of 'noise'. But I find this metaphor a little misguided. I'm actually interested in the paper and the brush and the ink for their own sake. I hope that they are equal partners there. I find this really interesting -- it's why I find a lot of comics interesting as art, for its own sake -- a lot of what the story of those comic is, for me, is the relationship between the artist and the brush and the interesting things that happen with that.

When I'm working with Richard Case on the comic, he sort of replaces those parts of the equation. At first I think I was just writing a script. I didn't really think about what would happen to it next. I was thinking of it in the same terms as if I was then going to sit down and draw it. I often change a lot when I'm drawing. I think I wrote some really good scripts at the beginning but they didn't necessarily end up being quite as good comics as they were scripts. And that wasn't Richard's fault. It was the way I'd written them that was the problem.

SPURGEON: You know, I really like Case's work. But particularly in terms of mainstream comics, his style is very specific and very stylized. His figure drawing is even stylized, especially when compared to what you might consider a traditional fantasy approach. Case has one of the more interesting bodies of work out there, but he's not the first person I would have thought of for a lush, fantasy comic.

HORROCKS: What I feel that I've had to learn to do is to embrace writing towards what his art style does well, to focus on what it does do well rather than what it doesn't. And then get a feel for its groove -- you know? And start writing more in tune with that groove. I'm learning to not be so precious about the narrative style. That if we can tell a really strong story, and it can look good, then the way that story's told might not matter so much. If it works, it works. Ultimately, Hunter is as much Richard's book as it is mine. Maybe more.

ATLAS

SPURGEON: Let's talk a bit then about your hopes and desires for your new series Atlas. It's been a while since we've had a comic from you. So there must have been a great deal of thought, and it must have had a lot to do with a lot of the issues that we talked about so far.

HORROCKS: Yeah. I feel like I've spent the last three years doing a lot of poems and short stories. But Atlas is my first attempt at getting back to writing a novel.

SPURGEON: Is it possible to talk about Atlas in terms of it being the end of a process?

HORROCKS: Atlas is a... The first issue of Atlas is the beginning of a big long book but it's also the end of the long and painful process of trying to start that book. After Hicksville came out, I was really shocked by the reception, which was way beyond what I dreamed of. Where I had gone from wondering if anyone was reading it to getting recommended by Frank Miller. I was like, What? I think it only sold 2,000 copies, but by God, we sold them to the right people. It felt... Working on the next thing, because it was going to be published by Drawn and Quarterly and because Hicksville was just -- honestly, it was just way beyond what I dreamed of as far as the way it was received. I felt really intimidated about starting something new. I felt like it had to be a really good book. I wrote like a dozen drafts of the whole Atlas epic plan. And this is going to be at least a thousand pages. It's going to be a big, long story. It's a whole life I'm trying to... I went through stages where I got really pretentious. I was kind of sounding soulful and terribly serious and then stages where I felt like I wanted to draw in this very, very different style. A bold style. I spent three years really trying to get to the point where I could just start doing it. I must have written it a number of times and started drawing it a number of times and gave up and tried it again. It was just three years of false starts and banging my head against a brick wall. I'm not quite sure how, but I managed to break through enough to feel like I was actually doing it. The first issue now I look back on some of it and I say, Hmm... I'll redo that before the book. Because there's an element of me just getting over that first issue. But this trip has been really good for clarifying what I actually do want to do and what I can let go of or experiment with. It's a hard process.

SPURGEON: Are you happy with the first issue of Atlas?

HORROCKS: Yeah. Yeah I am. There are a few little... I haven't looked at it in a little while and I'm sure when I do there will be a few things. But I think, like I said before, the main thing with Atlas was getting the first one done. Because the process of planning Atlas and getting started was so long and excruciating that I really felt that I had to get the first one done and then I'd have started. I would no longer just be at the planning stage, where there's an infinite number of possible ways I could do it, possible approaches I could take. It's very hard to definitively say to yourself, "O.K. This is how I'm going to do it." You keep thinking, "Oh, but I could do it that way." After I've done the first one I've kind of committed myself now.

SPURGEON: One of the hardest things to do is to let go of the imagined book in your head.

HORROCKS: Which is, of course, not one imagined book in your head. It's an infinite number of imagined books in your head. It's hard to really say, "Let's chase after that one." Because then you're giving up another one.

SPURGEON: Is there going to be a similar weeding process for #2?

HORROCKS: There is a little bit. There always is a little bit. Even when you're planning out each chapter, there are lots of different ways you can do it. But this was... The stage I was going through before #1 was deeper than that. It was much more unpleasant. I was questioning every single approach I've ever taken to comics. I was even questioning the whole idea of doing a fictional narrative at all.

SPURGEON: How did you get back to a fictional narrative?

HORROCKS: Well, I couldn't get out of it. I couldn't just not do it. No. I don't know. The thing is I've always done fiction, with a few little exceptions, and I do seem driven to tell stories. But as a reader I've become really tired of fiction and tired of the conventions and cliches that dominate literary contemporary fiction with a capital "L". So all I've been reading for the last few years was nonfiction. I read a lot of history and biography.

SPURGEON: Was there anything significant that you read during that time period?

HORROCKS: One of the most significant books I read during that period is a book by Gitta Sereny called Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth. It's a biography of Albert Speer who was a very important Nazi official and also Hitler's architect. I've got a really good summary of this on my website [www.hicksville.co.nz].

SPURGEON: I remember you said you admire the book, but I don't remember why.

HORROCKS: Yeah. It's a book about being moral, being a moral person. The way she does it is to examine Albert Speer's life, with so much... She's so exacting. She goes very deeply into his moral life, really, and explores the absence of moral instinct that he had. What made the book really significant to me was the really pressing question she seems to have, which is, how can someone who appears to basically be a decent person, how can they go so far down a path that is so morally corrupting? She's sort of extending that to how can a society go through that as well. She has one phrase that she only uses a couple of times. There is one paragraph in the whole book that to me is the capstone in the whole book and that's when she talks about "the twilight between knowing and not knowing."

The big question becomes, "How much did Albert Speer know?" Because he claims, to his dying day, that he didn't really know what was going on. When he did find out what was going on during the Nuremberg trials, he underwent a kind of emotional collapse and accepted responsibility for it. He said, "I didn't know, but I don't think that absolves me of responsibility." He seems to have undergone a kind of moral and emotional conversion at Nuremberg and spent the rest of his life writing books condemning Nazism. The big question is, "Did he really not know?" Very painstakingly she explores this question and comes to the conclusion that he did know. And that actually he knew stuff that to his dying day he claimed he didn't know. But that he chose to kind of turn away from it. It's kind of the opposite of the Quaker idea of bearing witness, where when you know that something terrible is happening you deliberately turn to look at it and you bear witness. Even if you can't do anything about it, you make sure you bear witness because it's wrong to turn away. What she explores as this "twilight between knowing and unknowing" is the opposite of that. It's choosing not to know; choosing not to recognize or really incorporate it into your view of what's happening and what your responsibilities are even though deep down you know what's going on.

Just for one paragraph in this huge book, just for one paragraph she really gently says, "This is not unique to Albert Speer and it's not unique to Nazi Germany." It's the same process that essentially everyone goes through, because we all know that there are terrible things happening in the world that our governments are doing in our name and that other people are doing. And even closer to home, that we do to each other and so on that we choose not to acknowledge and to incorporate into our view of the world. During the Vietnam War, how many Americans knew what was going on in Vietnam? They chose to kind of forget the things that they would encounter on the television or on the streets. So that when they were coming to a moral position on the war they just didn't... It didn't factor in. They had encountered it, so they did know what was happening, but they chose not to know it. The same process applies to so many things in the world that we deal with. I've really gone off on a tangent here, but I guess the thing I thought was very good about the book was that she approached the whole question of the Holocaust and responsibility for the Holocaust with enormous complexity. She didn't try to simplify the complexity; she embraced the complexity. I thought that was the most useful response.

SPURGEON: How does having read that book make your work different?

HORROCKS: Oh, I don't know. It made me different. It's just one of those books you can say it changed one's view of the world a little. But it also, it gave me enormous respect for the process of biographical investigation. I just read my dad's new book, which is a biography of Len Lye, a New Zealand artist who lived in New York for the last 40 or so years of his life. It was really interesting because I've kind of grown up with dad writing this book and doing the research for it. And now finally the book's there. Because I'd been reading quite a lot of biography, I was interested to see how dad tackled it. Thankfully, it's a wonderful book. It would be terrible, of course, if your dad wrote a book and it was dreadful. Like "So, what did you think of that?" "Well, um... nice cover." Probably how he feels when I give him one of my comics. But no, it was a really good book. One of the things I like about it, and that I like about all of the best biographies that I've read, is that like a novel they explore certain themes and questions about what it means to be alive and what lives are actually like. Not just one individual life, but what it's like being alive. It just happens to explore those themes through a factual life rather than a fictional life. Part of the problem I had with fiction after a while was probably partly because when I started reading a lot of nonfiction and history, I read a lot about the Holocaust, partly as research for Atlas, and partly as research for the story I did for the Comics 2000 book.

SPURGEON: This is the one that's reprinted in Atlas?

HORROCKS: Yeah. In the first issue. It's very hard, after reading something like the transcript of Shoah, to turn around and read something someone's made up and they want you to care about it. So there's that, but also I felt that the insights that I was getting from a lot of the novels that I would read were really pretty shallow compared to the insights I was getting from reading the best biography and history.

SPURGEON: And this is modern literature?

HORROCKS: Well yeah. I suspect that's part of the problem, because I recently have... I was talking about this with a friend over here [in New Zealand], a cartoonist called Sophie MacMillan, and she said, "Oh, you should read War and Peace." Of course I laughed. I thought she was joking. But no, she said, "Really. It's a really good novel and it might cure you." And she was right. It did. It's a really, really good novel.

SPURGEON: Yeah, it is.

HORROCKS: It's a novel completely unlike what I'm used to from most contemporary writing. Part of what I like about it is that it has much more of the feel of what it's actually like living life. It captures much better the feel of the way time passes when you are actually living life. I think most... There's almost a convention in contemporary writing where essentially you're moving from extremely intense poetic epiphany to extremely intense poetic epiphany. The story is told as a series of very intense moments. Each intense moment seems to be presented as lyrically as it can.

Whereas in War and Peace, even the most intense moments in the people's lives are sometimes just brushed over. They're just mentioned in a paragraph as some thing that happened while he was on the way to the other thing. Or when you do get the thing played out, there's none of that attempt to construct a heightened atmosphere, an atmosphere of heightened intensity. He keeps things very every day and real. And there's a real sense of the humdrum coexisting with the meaningful. He just does all of that so much better than any other novel I've read.

SPURGEON: Is there anyone who even tries to do that in comics?

HORROCKS: I think there's a little bit of that in people like John Porcellino.

SPURGEON: Lat does it, too. …

HORROCKS: Yeah. That has got a lot of that feel. You're right. Lat's work and Porcellino's work are in some ways quite in tune. But Porcellino is quite quiet. And when he has an epiphany, something about the way he draws means that it doesn't get too carried away with the intensity. You don't feel like there is loud music playing or beautiful lighting.

SPURGEON: It's very lyrical, though.

HORROCKS: It is, and strangely, it's intense, too. But it manages to remain very grounded. I think it's to do with the way he draws, and also his storytelling is quite -- this is going to sound wrong -- but his storytelling is almost kind of plodding. He doesn't do clever dramatic shifts between scenes.

SPURGEON: The kids get on bikes and they ride to the next place where the story continues. You actually see the kids riding on the bikes.

HORROCKS: And the captions are part of what help to ground it in the real and the everyday. The captions are in this very everyday voice.

SPURGEON: So there is work that does that.

HORROCKS: Yeah. But you know, I never gave up reading fictional comics, which is odd.

SPURGEON: Just fictional prose?

HORROCKS: Just prose. It was partly from working in a bookshop for ten years and having to deal with that scene a little bit. I said before there were poetry geeks and novel geeks. I just got tired of the whole kind of very middlebrow... It's the Booker Prize. The swarms of people who come in and buy the latest Booker Prize winner and think it's just marvelous. Such a marvelous novel! So beautiful and lyrical! It's just another collection of the same cliches as last year's. And it's the pretension around the whole thing. It's funny, because when I was reading a lot of novels ten years ago, I was reading people like Michael Ondaatje. I enjoyed all of his novels up until The English Patient, which I just could not bear. I couldn't stand the film, either. To me they exemplified what turns me off about the whole middlebrow, dreary, arty scene, where everything's got to be just so. Everything's beautiful lighting, scenery, and people having intense, passionate moments. God save me!

SPURGEON: As a remedy to that we have Atlas. A slap in the face of dozens of years of literary tradition.

HORROCKS: It's plodding. It plods.

SPURGEON: This is the virtue? It plods?

HORROCKS: All of this is feeding into Atlas, because with Atlas, the first 30 pages consist of this extremely claustrophobic, repetitive, conversation in a dark room with no background. And that's one of the reasons why. I really did want to kind of... I did feel like I needed an antidote to all of this goddamn beauty.

SPURGEON: Atlas also seems to draw on a lot of story elements you mention as favorites: There's storytelling as map-making. There's this kind of lofty mystical quality to the unknown life of the cartoonist -- I don't know how to say the name.

HORROCKS: Kópen. [Ko-pen]. Emil Kópen.

SPURGEON: Emil Kópen. He's almost like a personification of the tower in the last book; a kind of Holy Grail.

HORROCKS: Like Yoda.

SPURGEON: [laughs]

HORROCKS: Feel the force.

The Cerebus Effect

SPURGEON: Do you feel that you're still working with some of your pet ideas, your ways of doing a story?

HORROCKS: Yeah. But I can't not, really. Even my Vertigo work keeps drifting into ideas about mapping and language and so on.

SPURGEON: Is there any fear in the way you're approaching Atlas? You talked about that in the middle of the two bigger serials that found their way into Pickle, one of the things that made you switch from one to the other was that one was planned out and the other one was kind of free. Has that informed the way you're approaching Atlas?

HORROCKS: Yes, it has. That's why I've planned Atlas but I haven't planned it in so much detail. And I haven't scripted it beyond scripting each issue at a time.

SPURGEON: How long do you think you'll be on the project?

HORROCKS: Ten years.

SPURGEON: And how often will it come out?

HORROCKS: Twice a year is quite enough. It is possible that it will be slightly less frequent for the first few issues, just because my youngest kid will be going to school in a year and a half. I figure I'd rather my comic was late for a year and a half than I didn't spend any time with my kid. I can't get that time back.

SPURGEON: You structured the magazine with back-up stories, both by yourself and with others. Was there a reason you did it this way? Are you going to continue to include other stories, stories published elsewhere?

HORROCKS: Yes. Absolutely.

SPURGEON: Can you talk about your thinking there?

HORROCKS: It was partly inspired by that editorial in the Journal by Bart Beaty called "The Cerebus Effect," in which he used Pickle as an example of what's wrong with the serialized graphic novel format. Do you remember that one?

SPURGEON: I do. What was it Bart found specifically wrong about Pickle?

HORROCKS: The thing that happened with Pickle was that Hicksville was serialized in issues #2-10. Or #2-... I've even lost count now. Was it #2-11 of Pickle? My understanding of what happened was that Michel had reached the stage where he could really only manage to put out one more thing. And he was like, "Is it going to be the last issue of Pickle, or is it going to be the Hicksville graphic novel?" I think we talked about it and I said, "Well, to be honest, I'd rather the graphic novel came out if it was one or the other."

This was of course very irritating to anyone who had been collecting the comic. The only way to get the final chapter of the story was to buy the trade. Also, I made quite a lot of changes to the story, especially the first part of the story, for the collection. So Bart was sort of saying that there are a lot of comics out there which consist solely of the latest chapter of a serialized thing that you know is going to be collected in a graphic novel. And the cartoonist is going to make changes before they collect it. There will probably be new material in there. It will be corrected and everything. Why the hell would you buy the comic book when you can just wait for the graphic novel? I thought that was a very good point. In fact, there are various comics that I've stopped buying for that very reason. I'm waiting for the trade.

My thinking was, "If we are going to do a comic, then the comic's got to be worth buying in its own right, regardless of whether you're going to get the trade or not." Which led me to a number of things. One of them is that you've got to get a really good chunk of the serialized story. No good just having 16 pages of the thing, especially if the storytelling is really slow. Which is like the Underwater syndrome. I can't remember who it was that said reading each issue of Underwater was like reading James Joyce's Ulysses a couple of lines a day. Or a couple of lines every six months. So it's got to be a decent chunk. It's got to be a fat comic. I'm very keen on cheap, fat comics. I think the biggest problem the comics scene has now in terms of an industry is that it's simply dreadful value. It's really bad value. So I want it to be cheap and fat and have a big chunk of the serialized story but also other stuff that makes it worth reading. My favorite comics are the ones that every time you get an issue, it's like you're going out and hanging out with some really cool people in a real interesting place for a while. And you do this every few months when the issue comes out -- you get together with them again. In Pickle, I think I had that because I had all of the editorial stuff with Mrs. Hicks chatting and the various other characters of Hicksville writing stuff. Eddie Campbell's Bacchus, I think, has a little bit of that feeling because of all the text pieces he puts in. It's just the sense that each issue is a bit of an event and it's kind of fun and you're part of something.

SPURGEON: I seem to remember one of Bart's points discussing Hicksville was that he liked reading it in Pickle because the pieces that did not make it into the final graphic novel kind of gave the serial a context, or at least kind of informed that larger story. I think you accomplished something similar with the stories in Atlas, to a certain extent. They all kind of play off of each other. Is that intentional?

HORROCKS: Coincidental, actually.

SPURGEON: Oh.

HORROCKS: That really is sheer fluke. In fact, James's guest strip fit in really nicely with the Comics 2000 story. It's the same black background that I used.

SPURGEON: You also have a more direct engagement of the atrocities of a time period that are going to be of a concern, perhaps, with the cartoonist's story. That was totally coincidental?

HORROCKS: It was completely coincidental. In fact, I was going to have a different back-up story of my own, too, but then that story grew so large that I confined that to the next issue.

SPURGEON: Was there any resistance from your publisher in doing this big of a package?

HORROCKS: Are you kidding? He [Chris Oliveros] doesn't complain about anything. He's such a dear, sweet soul. No. He's very good to me. I talked with him about what was the best way to do it economically. I was keen on it being small and fat and cheap. But I don't want it to be so cheap that he's losing money off of it. So we talked through some of that.

SPURGEON: I find it interesting in Atlas #1 that you get two conversations that are told two completely different ways, two interrogations. Was there any kind of mirroring that was going on in your head about that? Was that planned out?

HORROCKS: Yeah. I just wanted it to be really boring. [Spurgeon laughs.] Yeah. That's my mission in life now, to do the most boring comics on the planet. The comics that have been the biggest inspiration for me in the last year or so have been Chester Brown's Louis Riel, which, along with John Porcellino, I think is the most interesting stuff coming out.

Part of what I like about Louis Riel is that it completely... It's more War and Peace than Booker Prize, you know? Chester seems to be working very hard to avoid any kind of heightened drama or intensity at all. There was a particular scene that crystallized the whole thing for me. I can't remember which issue it's in [issue 5]. But it's when Louis Riel is elected to Parliament. And he has sworn that he will go and take his seat in Parliament no matter what. You get this sequence where he and a friend are walking toward the Parliament Building, and they're talking about how this will be dangerous and he'll be arrested and so on. Then he just kind of stops walking and he stands there and he says, Hmm. Maybe I won't. And he goes away. Then you read the note at the back of the issue where Chester is quoting historical accounts of what actually happened. You discover that actually, Louis Riel did go into the Parliament Building. He talked to a clerk there, gave his details. The clerk at first didn't realize who he was. But when he did realize who he was he went and got the soldiers and essentially Louis Riel fled the soldiers from the Parliament Building, which is far more dramatic.

If I were an editor at DC, I would say, "That would make much better comics." And Chester knew all of that, but he deliberately toned it down and made it just this guy walking down the road saying, Maybe I won't. That's much... It's as if he was almost denying what really happened to make it more like a really kind of everyday, boring sort of event. I don't know. Somehow it works. I'm not sure what he's doing with that book but it's incredibly inspiring to me.

SPURGEON: Is there any significance to the fact that you drew the formal interrogation in four-panel grid and the informal conversation as one panel per page?

HORROCKS: I initially wanted the whole of Atlas to be a maximum of two panels a page and most of it will be for all sorts of reasons. Specifically, with that four-panel a page scene, if I hadn't done that the whole issue would have been just the interrogation scene, which would have been really boring. Too boring. The interrogation was meant to be incredibly claustrophobic and unsettling. By having four panels a page and by having it incredibly repetitive -- the same view used over and over again. Even the nature of the interrogation, the questions I picked were repetitive. They keep not getting anywhere. He keeps not giving them the answers that they want and they keep going off in different directions. I wanted it to be incredibly claustrophobic, and I thought the four-panel a page structure helped that, especially the way once the interrogation begins it really sticks very rigidly to four panels a page until the very end of that sequence. By the end of the scene I wanted the reader to be like, God. Let me out of here! And then you turn the page and it's a complete... It's like a whole different world. You get these double-page spreads and a whole different scene. It's outdoors. There are a lot of trees. It just has a completely different feel. So it's partly like having a relentless drum roll that goes on for far too long so that you appreciate much more the cymbal crash at the end, which was the title page.

SPURGEON: Are we going to see more of Dylan Horrocks the character? Of is that just kind of a framing technique that you use to kind of bring the reader in?

HORROCKS: Partly. You see, the book is by Dylan Horrocks. It even says so on the cover. What I'm moving toward is that Hicksville and Atlas and also the book that I'm doing for Top Shelf, they're all by Dylan Horrocks. But it's not actually me. It's this other Dylan, the one who is interrogated at the beginning of Atlas. It's also that Dylan Horrocks who you see in Hicksville meeting Emil Kopen with Grace.

SPURGEON: Is there someone who specifically did that?

HORROCKS: I have a feeling I have read a few novels where there was. Milan Kundera actually did one. I think it's Immortality. He himself is the narrator, and the narrator is Milan Kundera, but there are all of these things that make it clear that it's a complete fiction. Obviously, that's not quite the real Milan Kundera. It's possible that's where it came from. It grew partly out of me agonizing over who on earth that guy was in Hicksville chapter four. Because I don't name him in Hicksville. He's undergone quite a lot of different identities as I've been planning Atlas and the Dirty Comics books. He was Daniel Hicks for a while, and at one point the role of Leonard Batts in Atlas was going to be this other character, Daniel Hicks, who was the fellow in chapter four of Hicksville. And then I decided I would make it Batts after all, but I also went through a stage where I thought Dylan Horrocks would replace Leonard entirely in Atlas. I'm still going through the same dilemma with Dirty Comics. I still haven't completely decided whether the main character is going to be Daniel Hicks, Leonard Batts or Dylan Horrocks. The problems I have are that it's very difficult to think of an erotic graphic novel with Leonard Batts, isn't it? And it's extremely uncomfortable to think of an erotic graphic novel starring myself.

SPURGEON: Yeah. Oh man.

HORROCKS: Which is where Daniel Hicks comes in, but partly I feel that Daniel Hicks is a cop out. So we'll see. If the book comes out and it's Daniel Hicks you can all say, "Oh, what a cop out."

An Introduction to Cornucopia

SPURGEON: You did a signing at a bookstore here in town right after we spoke last time. I talked to someone who attended and he said that you presented Atlas in a very compelling, very straightforward fashion that made him eager to read it.

HORROCKS: I tell you, I was much more coherent at that signing than I was during the interview.

SPURGEON: Is there anything in the way that you presented it to those people that night that we haven't talked about yet?

HORROCKS: Oh yeah. But I doubt that I can do it again. It was one of those moments, Tom. You had to be there.

SPURGEON: I'm interested in how you would present Atlas to a roomful of semi-comics savvy strangers. Is there a different quality of the book that it would occur to you to bring up?

HORROCKS: I don't know. What did I say? The thing is, there were some really good questions. Not that your questions aren't great, too. [Spurgeon laughs] But boy, these guys were really on the ball!

SPURGEON: We just had the tape recorder in the wrong place that day.

HORROCKS: I was sitting next to James Sturm, who was talking about The Golem's Mighty Swing. So a lot of questions revolved around questions of identity. Someone had read Hicksville very carefully and they were asking me about this business of locating... I think I talked about Hicksville and I said that Hicksville's partly about how, if you're on the margins, then one way of dealing with that is to make the margin your center. You simply say, "Actually, I'm not on the margin. I'm absolutely bang smack in the center of what's really interesting." So if you're drawing a map... See, we get this all the time in New Zealand. That's why Hicksville is partly about comics and partly about New Zealand. If you look at a map of the world the way it's usually drawn, you see that New Zealand's absolutely right out on the fringes of the map. It's at the bottom or on the edge and it's small and no one even notices that it's there usually. You sometimes buy globes even here in New Zealand and New Zealand's not on there. It's not there at all. So we're very used to being at the margins of the world and at the margins of global culture.

The New Zealand response to that is to say, "To hell with that! As far as we're concerned, we're right in the middle!" Occasionally you can buy maps here, kind of jokey maps, which are maps of the world that are upside down so New Zealand's at the top of the world. There are also maps where all they do is put New Zealand in the center and it's the world as seen from here. You get quite a different perspective on things. In a sense, Hicksville is doing just that. It's saying, "Comics are on the margin, at the fringe, and so is New Zealand, but what happens if we just stand on those margins and say, 'This is where we want to be? It's very nice here thank you very much and as far as we're concerned, this is the center of the world.'" And the whole world starts to look a little different when you do that. That's what the ending is about.

SPURGEON: And that leads us into Atlas?

HORROCKS: Well with Atlas, Atlas is all about mapping or partly about mapping. Cornucopia is a place that has gone to great lengths to keep itself on the margins over the centuries. It works very hard to keep itself isolated from the rest of the world. It's illegal in Cornucopia to draw a map without a royal writ, which is partly because they want to control the process of mapping their country, which is partly a way of controlling what their country is, the way everyone sees their country and what people know about their country. It's only the king and his royal cartographers who are able to map or look at maps. They completely control that process, conceiving the country. Also in Cornucopia, any act of representation has a mystical connotation because Cornucopia has long been a kind of animist culture where everything has a spirit. Every lake has a spirit, every stone has a spirit. Also, every gesture or sign can create a spirit as well. Which means that if you draw a picture you're not just drawing a picture. You're also creating the spirit of the image. And a map... That means that mapping has enormous occult power in the eyes of a traditional Cornucopian. So there is a residue in Cornucopia of that very old idea that if you draw a map of the country, you are actually somehow taking control of the country.

That's all partly a metaphor for how we use mapping or describing or picturing or representing ourselves and our place; we use that as a way of controlling what that place is. Which all goes back to my Scott McCloud essay, because I argued that by mapping comics... See, Scott's definition is like a map of what comics are. That's his way of actually trying to control what comics are. He's trying to influence what comics are and what they'll become just by drawing a different map.

In Atlas there are a number of maps that will be very significant to the story. One of them is the Royal Atlas of Cornucopia, which is this grand map of the country in enormous detail. It's been worked on for centuries. The control of that atlas is of great significance to the country's future. Because Cornucopia has long been a very isolated country, in fact it's been the world's only communist monarchy for the last 50 years and now it's finally opening up to the outside world and the global economy and it's awash with WTO and World Bank advisors and what have you. But the atlas has gone missing. And because there aren't any other maps of Cornucopia, now no one's got a map of Cornucopia. If someone wants to build a... The country has a very primitive infrastructure because they've avoided modernizing for so long. So one of the things that's happening now is that the WTO is coming in and saying, "You need a proper road system. You need an electrical grid" and so on. But to build these things, you need to have maps. So everyone's running around trying to find the map, the Royal Atlas of Cornucopia. But there's another map as well, which is a map of the sky, which will become important to the story. I'm kind of exploring these ideas of mapping the sky. I don't just mean mapping the positions of stars and what have you. I'm talking about the clouds primarily. How do you map a sky when it's changing all the time? There are patterns there, but it never stays fixed and if you just map how it is on Tuesday at 3:00 pm it's meaningless two weeks later. Or is it?

I sounded much more coherent that night in Seattle.

SPURGEON: You're doing great.

HORROCKS: I'm building up these series of images of what maps are and how they can work and how they can be used to try and understand the world and also to change the world. But the story is partly about globalization. We watch Cornucopia going through this rather agonized process of opening up to the global economy. Given that they're in Central Europe it's not a happy process. There's a lot of debate there about whether this should be happening at all. There are a lot of people who think that Cornucopia should remain closed off from the outside world because it's the only way to retain their cultural identity and their location at the center. If they open up to the global world they'll be pushed to the margins. Everyone's trying to control that process in different ways. There's a small uprising going on as well. Bombs have started going off in the capital city, that sort of thing.

Comics have quite a significant role in Cornucopia because... When I was in Toronto I gave a presentation there on the history of comics in Cornucopia. It was a lot of fun. I had examples of comics by lots of different Cornucopian cartoonists that I showed. It was... I deliberately made it as boring a lecture as I could. I made it as boring as I could. And it worked. A few people at the end actually seemed to be completely fooled by it. They thought it was all true. I got a lot of New Zealand cartoonist friends of mine to do the various examples.

SPURGEON: That's fantastic.

HORROCKS: Which was nice, because there's a way in which Cornucopia is a kind of parallel universe to New Zealand. In that talk I talked about how after the second world war in Cornucopia, when they became a Communist monarchy, the government passed laws that allowed them to very strictly control all cultural production: writing, novels, poems, painting pictures or what have you. They all had to be approved by the government. If there was anything in the least bit dubious to them then you could be arrested and your work destroyed. The one format or genre that wasn't strictly controlled was comics, and that's because the king was such a comics fan and because he was a friend of Emil Kopen. And Kopen was a bit of a war hero. As a result, they managed to get a piece of wording into the legislation that excluded comics from the things that were controlled. That meant that you could effectively get away with anything in a comic. One of the results of that was that a lot of the most interesting writers and artists in Cornucopia, who were picking up on the avante garde from the rest of the world, or who wanted to do dissident work, a lot of them drifted into comics. It was the only place where they could get away with doing that stuff. As a result the history of comics in Cornucopia has been a history of radical experimentation and one of really wild stuff happening.

This reached a peak in the '60s and '70s, and there were some very strange things going on. One of my favorite stories is about a Cornucopian novelist who wrote a novel which was very critical of the government and its policies and he just knew he was going to go to jail and his novel would never get published. He was showing it to some of his friends who were involved in running Komek, which was a cooperative anthology comic that Emil Kopen helped start up. They loved this guy's novel but they agreed that he was going to get into some serious trouble with it. Then they came up with this brilliant idea. They ended up publishing it from Komek as a graphic novel. They said, "This is a comic book," and they marketed it as a comic book. It's just that it didn't have any pictures. So they sold it as a comic book without pictures. Of course the government read this and immediately arrested the writer and threw him in jail and seized all of the copies of the book. The result was there was a test case in the courts in which all sorts of cartoonists and writers and so on appeared as witnesses for the defense arguing very strongly that yes, this really is a comic. They ended up having a kind of Scott McCloud debate in the courtroom about what constitutes a comic and can you have a comic without pictures. In the end they reached a kind of compromise where he was let out of jail but the book was seized. The government said, "We'll release it sometime." But they never did. It's very hard to get copies of it. There were a whole series of events like that that were all the result of the fact that the law was phrased in such a way that comics were much freer than the other forms. Anyway... None of this will reach Atlas for many years I'm sure. It will be a long time before we get to this point.

SPURGEON: I think it was Art Spiegelman who suggested that if it weren't for the oppression of comics there wouldn't have been an artistic flowering later on. Which almost seems -- not the opposite, but a counter to what you're saying there.

HORROCKS: I think it's true. He's right in one sense, which is that the flowering that has been going on in comics for 40 years would have been very different. I think the flowering was very much shaped and formed by that suppression, especially the underground scene. But I also think that comics benefits from being marginalized in that I actually think it's a lot easier to find a very good comic these days than it is to find a very good contemporary novel.

SPURGEON: Really?

HORROCKS: Maybe I'm just reading the wrong books.

SPURGEON: I'm not going to argue with you about that, because I'm not equipped to, but that runs counter to conventional wisdom.

HORROCKS: Well, it's just with my own tastes. Because I find that most of the novels that are supposed to be the great contemporary novels are so riddled with literary cliche and are so precious. It's a lot less common in comics. It is more common in comics than it used to be, though.

Political Cartoons

SPURGEON: I don't know if you're still doing political cartooning, but a Top Shelf book was released in their midi-comic line, a kind of a compendium of your work in that are: Better Luck Next Century.

HORROCKS: Yeah.

SPURGEON: It includes a lot of written work from you but there are also a lot of cartoons.

HORROCKS: The written stuff is just me trying to make it a little more comprehensible to the rest of the world outside New Zealand.

SPURGEON: I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how you got into that. Specifically, are you done with it? Do you still do work like that?

HORROCKS: I still do it occasionally. In fact, this week I've got to do some work for the Political Review, which is where most of those cartoons came from. It's about the New Zealand response to September 11th.

SPURGEON: I've never talked to anyone who has done both editorial cartoons and comic books. Is it completely different?

HORROCKS: It's quite different, but I wouldn't say it's completely different. In New Zealand it's -- maybe this is unique to New Zealand, I don't know. But some of our top political cartoonists are also among our top comic book people. You can't make a living doing comic books for a living in New Zealand. Not for the New Zealand market anyway. There's no New Zealand comics industry. But you can make a living doing political cartooning. So there are a few people -- Laurence Clark and Anthony Ellison and Chris Slane -- who love comic books and would love to be doing comic books. Instead, they ended up doing political cartooning. That's the only way they could cartoon for a living in New Zealand. So they do both. In fact, Chris Slane's just drawn a Darth Maul comic for Dark Horse. He was so excited about it. He said, "Finally I've done something that my kids will respect me for." And he's one of the top political cartoonists in New Zealand, but that doesn't mean a damn thing to his kids.

SPURGEON: Is there a specific set of lessons that you take from your work in that field and apply to work in other formats?

HORROCKS: With me, I first was doing political cartoons when I was in university, for the student newspaper. But it was a comic strip. I only occasionally did single-panel cartoons for them to illustrate particular articles. Most of the time I was doing a weekly comic strip called Tisco George. It was a kind of Doonesbury thing in that it was a gag strip, but it was about politics. And then I... I only did that for a year, and then after that I was just doing comic books for a long time. I was also doing single-panel illustrations for the Listener, which is a big magazine here. I was illustrating their jazz column for a long time, which my uncle wrote. So those were single-panel cartoons.

And then a few years ago in 1995 I quit my day job and went running around trying to get freelance illustration work. I went to the Listener to see if I could get illustration work from them, and it turned out they were looking for a comic strip, a new comic strip. So I rushed away and put something together which they ended up approving. I did that for about a year and a half. It was called Milo's Week. There are a few of them in the Top Shelf book, but one day I'll put together a collection of all of them. It was pretty much the same as Tisco George. It was a weekly strip about politics. But the hero of the strip is a political cartoonist.

When I started doing this I read huge amounts of... I read David Low's book on caricature. I read quite a lot of stuff about political cartooning. I studied it really closely, and one of the reasons is that to do this strip properly I had to occasionally draw recognizable caricatures of politicians. I hate doing caricature. That's why I read David Low's books, because he writes very intelligently about the effect of caricature and ways to do it meaningfully, and also just how to bloody do it. So I kind of immersed myself in it a bit for that reason and then toward the end of doing Milo's Week I started getting requests from little left-wing magazines in New Zealand asking if I could do a cartoon here and there. So I started doing that for them and almost as an exercise I said to myself, I'm going to try and do these as if they were single-panel political cartoons rather than a comic strip. Just because having read so much of David Low's stuff I kind of wanted to try it out. That's where a lot of that stuff came from. But I found that a lot of my best drawing came out of these. I paid more attention to the drawing doing these.

SPURGEON: I would think that the visual vocabulary would be very different.

HORROCKS: Well, the main difference for me is that because it was one of the few times that I'd actually sat down and said, "I'm just going to draw a single image here -- just one picture," I could draw them quite big. I remembered seeing some David Low original art in England. One of the things that struck me were how enormous they were; these single little panels but the originals were vast, huge things. It meant that he got much freer with his brushwork. I kind of wanted to play with that a bit. One of the main things it did was that it just made me focus on the drawing as drawing. Just as drawing. And it coincided with me starting to do life drawing a lot more, doing these great big crayon drawings of naked people.

SPURGEON: What about that kind of cartooning as a communication or as a way of communicating ideas?

HORROCKS: When most people talk about political cartooning, what they're interested in is the way it communicates ideas or commentary.

SPURGEON: Sure.

HORROCKS: Which is interesting, but that's not what I'm most interested in with it. I guess because I feel like I'm doing that all of the time anyway. The big change for me in the past few years, the big revelation is, as I've mentioned before, going from treating comics primarily as a story and the role of the pictures being to tell a story -- I've moved from that to treating the act of drawing as being equally important as the act of writing. The physical act of drawing and the presence of the artwork as not a representation of something in the story and not just as something that serves the narrative, but completely on its own terms and for its own sake, its presence on the page in front of the viewer. Those things are now just as important to me as the act of writing. A lot of that has come from doing the political cartooning, just because I suddenly found myself spending a whole day just making a drawing look really good. Also, I got much freer in my drawing because I didn't care as much about it. It freed me up to just sit down and experiment and play around a lot more. I try to have a lot of different styles. Yeah. That was incredibly good for me.

SPURGEON: And you say you're still doing it, too?

HORROCKS: Yeah. Now and then. I don't have time to do it very often. I'd love to do more, but I just don't have time.

SPURGEON: How do you sort offers? Is it according to what's interesting for you to draw or according to the statement being made?

HORROCKS: If they call up and say "We'll give you 10,000 dollars," sure, I'd bloody do it. But no one does. These things are for small amounts of money. The ones I'm doing for the Political Review I'm doing for nothing.

Another thing I enjoy about it actually, the Political Review, is the feeling of engaging in a dialogue, a meaningful dialogue. I enjoy that a lot.

10-7

SPURGEON: Speaking of political cartoons, I wanted to ask you about the 9-11 strip you did. You sent it to me with a note saying "I'm not sure that people are going to understand this." Can you tell me what you meant by that? You made me paranoid into thinking I don't understand it.

HORROCKS: How did you read the strip?

SPURGEON: It seems like you're taking a moment in time and kind of capturing this sort of natural reflection of what might be going on in the rest of the world. You're kind of plodding on, not knowing exactly where your family is but being concerned about them. And then there's this sense of foreboding...

HORROCKS: And not knowing whether you're not making things much worse by getting into trouble when your family's already safely back on the beach.

SPURGEON: The rising tide is this uncertain future.

HORROCKS: It's mostly just the strong sense of unease. That's what I was trying to get across. But it's an unease about everything. An unease about the fact that it was a horrible, horrible, horrible...

SPURGEON: Why the emphasis on 10-7 rather than 9-11?

HORROCKS: That was quite complicated, too. The seventh of October is when America started bombing Afghanistan. It's also the day when the moment that I describe in the strip actually happened to me. On the seventh of October we were across on Waiheke Island where my sister lives, and we were playing on the beach there. I describe it in the strip; that's what happened. My wife and kid started climbing on the rocks and after a while I thought, "Where are they? The tide's coming in." So I started following. I reached the point where these big waves were coming in and getting me wet up to my knees and I thought, "This is getting dangerous -- I hope they're all right because I'm turning back now." So I did turn back. It was that situation, thinking about it later... I thought it captured quite well this strange mixture of feelings. I just feel... Being asked to do a strip for the benefit book was kind of nice, but at the same time it's an incredibly complicated situation. I feel that it's a very worrying situation. And to be completely honest, I think one of the big problems right now is George Bush. I don't know. I'm a long way away from things, here.

SPURGEON: That would give you perspective and insight, Dylan.

HORROCKS: [laughs] Maybe perspective, but not necessarily insight. A different kind of insight. Over here people are pretty frightened by America and have been for a long time.

On September 11th, which for us was September the 12th, because we're a day ahead of everybody else, the two things you heard most often were expressions of how horrible and ghastly and upsetting it was, but also, Thank God we live in New Zealand! Over and over again. Everybody! Even on the news there was some comment like that. And boy, it is nice. But New Zealand has jumped on the bandwagon too and is sending special forces to take part in the war in Afghanistan. There's a huge debate erupting right now, because the Alliance, a left wing party that is part of the government here, just had it's annual conference over the weekend. The party told the parliamentary wing of the party to withdraw support for that military action. The parliamentary party is reluctant to. It's getting very messy. What it's a sign of is that beneath the superficial veneer of consensus about this "war on terror," there's nothing like it really, below the surface. There's nothing like a consensus.

SPURGEON: Sure.

HORROCKS: And certainly here, and I gather in Europe too, there's a lot of unease about what's happening now as well as what happened on September 11th. My feeling is that it's just a really, really horrible situation that we've all got ourselves into, and a very complicated situation and a very dangerous situation. It requires a response that is complicated and aware of the dangers and everything else. And I feel as though the response that is taking place right now is none of those things. It's not necessarily going to help, frankly. It very well might make things much worse. So some of that was feeding into my strip. But I didn't want to... I felt like the book was a commemoration, and...

SPURGEON: The 9-11 book?

HORROCKS: Yeah. When I was asked to do something for it by Diana Schutz at Dark Horse, who I have enormous respect for and like very much, I was very happy to say yes. And then I started... I had a look at the cover recently of the one that Jeff Mason's putting together, which is by Frank Cho.

SPURGEON: Is this the one you're in, or is this a different one?

HORROCKS: Well, I think it's a different one. I don't know. I've completely lost track of who's putting together what. They all seem to be cooperating on it and I don't know if it's all one book or if it's several books. DC is doing one, too.

SPURGEON: Right.

HORROCKS: I felt like I didn't want to be part of a book that was just draped from cover to cover with the stars and stripes, and had endless, turgid images of superheroes sort of brushing away a tear or something. I don't know.

SPURGEON: Wasn't there a directive to write personal, autobiographic stories?

HORROCKS: That's right. That was what Diana said. That's why I said, "I'll go with that."

SPURGEON: But isn't that in some respects just navel gazing? Why should I care if some cartoonist felt a moment of anguish? "I could not eat my cereal anymore. I held my head in shame." Did the kind of work being asked for concern you as a participant?

HORROCKS: Yeah. There are those worries. For the first week... For the first week I was prepared to forgive anybody anything, short of going out and shooting the local Sikh who works at the petrol station, which is...

SPURGEON: Barbaric.

HORROCKS: It's completely barbaric. That's right. But short of that, one is prepared to forgive any amount of navel gazing completely. I know that—I mean, this argument went on on the Comics Journal message board, because that's what everyone was doing. And everyone was checking up on friends who might possibly have been somewhere in New York State. But I think that was O.K. It was fair enough. This was really... This was one of the all-time, horrible moments. But sometime afterward, I remember a week afterward I was at a comics convention down here in Wellington, our capital city. We stopped off for a moment in someone's hotel room on the way out to dinner. And they had CNN on. The two things that suddenly sent a kind of shiver through me were that at the bottom of the screen they'd changed the... you know how they have the title of the story at the bottom of the screen all the time? Well, it had become "the War on Terror". And that was the first... This was only a few days afterward, but at first it had been "Attack on America," or what have you. But suddenly it was "the War on Terror." This was after George Bush's speech, too, to... whatever it's called?

SPURGEON: Our Congress. Yeah.

HORROCKS: Which I remember listening to live on the radio, in the car, with my baby asleep in the back seat. I felt that same shiver run through me then, when George Bush had his line about, "You're either with us or you're with the terrorists." And I just thought, "Oh, God. Here we go." It's as if Americans don't understand. They just -- hopeless generalization here, but so many Americans just don't seem to understand why the majority of the rest of the world doesn't want to be on their side. You know? I mean, if it's a choice between America or the terrorists, then sure, everyone would go with America. But just because we're all against the terrorists, that doesn't mean we want to be with America, thank you very much. We don't want to be saying, "What ever you do, America, that's great with us." Because America has done the most appalling things in the last 100 years -- utterly appalling. Appalling things. America has committed some terrible atrocities. And they're just not talked about. It's that twilight between knowing and unknowing thing.

SPURGEON: Oh, so you're threatening my twilight of knowing and unknowing…

HORROCKS: I'm twisting your mind.

SPURGEON: As an American citizen...

HORROCKS: I'm shining that searchlight.

SPURGEON: ... I'm going to get very uncomfortable. I'm going to start asking you questions about cuisine here in a second just to change the subject.

HORROCKS: It's a very complicated situation, because you don't want to start laying into America right now. But at the same time, no one wants to give America carte blanche right now. Because God knows, we've seen what America does with a carte blanche, and it's not very pretty. Anyway, so there was this CNN heading that had "the War on Terror." And they had this slow-motion montage that kept fading between the Stars and Stripes fluttering in the breeze and slow-motion images of people all around the world doing the two-minute silence. And then this footage, which was the first time I'd seen it, of George Bush standing on the ruins of the World Trade Center. For god's sake, this man is standing on top of these people's graves! It's only a few days afterward and they're still digging there hoping they're going to find somebody alive. And he's standing there with this awful, creepy, death's head grin on his face and he's holding up his hand doing a kind of V for victory sign while the firemen are chanting, "U.S.A!" and punching the air. And oh -- fuck -- I just... I don't know what that's like when you're in America, but when you're anywhere else, that is really kind of chilling. You just feel like, Where is this going to go? So the last thing I wanted to do when I was asked to do a strip for a benefit book was buy into that, you know?

There was a very good piece in the Guardian -- actually, it was in the Washington Post -- a few weeks afterwards, which was talking about... He didn't use the term, but he was essentially talking about the pornography of grief, which is a term I heard used during the Princess Diana thing. Because that's the other thing that was on CNN. After that whole slow-motion montage, they cut to this—it must have been the middle of the night in America—and they cut to this crazy, tired-looking reporter who was sitting there reading a long list of other important historical events that had taken place on September the 11th throughout history. And saying, "That's interesting, isn't it?" I mean, don't you have anything else at all to talk about by now? The ribbon thing -- all wearing their stars and stripes ribbons...

SPURGEON: It seems to me that comics' reaction breaks down into where you have the two big companies doing the goofy, superhero version of -- I don't know -- Captain America weeping over the wreckage. And then you have the alternative comics people doing the self-absorbed, "Where was I when it happened? Oh, I'm an anguished artist!" Is the paucity of responses a concern for you as a participant?

HORROCKS: Yeah. It totally is. Yeah. That's why... I went through a terrible... It took me so long to do my strip, all two pages. I drew the damn thing in two days, but I went through weeks and weeks of agonizing over it. What that was about was, as you say, I didn't want to do either of those things. I didn't want to have...

SPURGEON: Well, I liked your strip.

HORROCKS: ...the weeping over the flag, and I didn't want to just have how this made me upset. Which is why, I mean, I opted for something that was pretty incomprehensible, but I'm just trying to make...

SPURGEON: I thought it was pretty elegant.

HORROCKS: That's good. I can't even try and explain what it's meant to do except that I guess it gets across my feeling about the whole thing, which is that I was...

SPURGEON: It's also ominous.

HORROCKS: I was enormously upset about it. Who the hell isn't? But I'm also scared by it.

SPURGEON: When you edit this, you can change all of the nasty things, the questions I ask you.

HORROCKS: Yeah. I can just change all this. I'll sing the Star Spangled Banner.

SPURGEON: I'll take the hate mail.

HORROCKS: And I love America. My relationship with America is complicated because my mother is American. She was from Buffalo, New York.

SPURGEON: I didn't know that.

HORROCKS: She left America shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis. She'd been living in New York City. She'd moved there as a young woman, living by herself in New York, loving New York. But every so often this air raid siren would go off and there was no idea if this was a drill (which luckily it always was) or the Russian bomb was coming in. So you ran for shelter. After a while she said "I've had enough of all of this. This is insane. I can't bear this anymore." So she found the furthest country she could on the map that still spoke English and looked like a nice place. And she went there. And that was New Zealand. That's why I've grown up in New Zealand instead of America.

The thing is, I've always grown up... My father -- he's always had a lot to do with America. He fought to teach American Poetry at university. He introduced film studies to the university, which is evenly divided between American films and French films, basically. So I've grown up very aware of the good side of America and the dark side of America. Because they've also been... My parents were very active in anti-Vietnam war protests and everything. To me, America in the post-World War II world, America kind of brought us the best and the worst, in a way, of what the modern world had to offer.

A lot of New Zealand is very down on America. There's a real anti-America thing that's a kind of knee-jerk thing in New Zealand. I've never really had that. To me, there's a lot about America that is clearly sick. Any country that tolerates people going on rampages with machine guns in high schools because they don't want to take away the toy guns of a bunch of Charlton Heston fans, there's something seriously wrong in the psyche of that country. Quite aside from what America has done in other countries around the world. But at the same time, America has produced so much of what is so exciting and so good in the arts and music and film and everything. I love America, but a lot of me also hates it. I just get worried when people don't seem to hate it at all. I'm happy for them to love it, but I want them to hate it, too, because there's a lot to hate.

SPURGEON: This interview's over.

HORROCKS: [laughs.]

Team Comix

SPURGEON: There's a group of cartoonists I consider your peers: those cartoonists that emerged as artistic voices in the '90s as opposed to the '80s.

HORROCKS: I just think of them as my friends.

SPURGEON: Are there elements to their comics that you find less than satisfying? Are you self-critical about your "generation" of cartoonists?

HORROCKS: I'm probably less critical about that group of cartoonists than the others, simply because they're my friends and because we share so many things that are so interesting to me.

SPURGEON: Can you describe specific factors you appreciate about them? For instance, [Highwater Books Publisher] Tom Devlin has talked to me in terms of recapturing for comics a decorative sense to art. Can you tell me about those kinds of elements that you find fascinating or exciting in this generation of cartoonists?

HORROCKS: Yeah. With the drawing, I think a lot of them in their own ways are pursuing some of the things that I was talking about. They're interested in drawing in a way that's very different from just... Which is funny, because when you talk to some of them, they'll talk about drawing purely serving the narrative and blah, blah. And that it's less important. But often, the drawing that they're doing is so interesting as an exploration of drawing.

SPURGEON: Like?

HORROCKS: Like John Porcellino. He's not a friend of mine. I've never met him, but I think of him as one of the most -- I'd almost use him as the exemplar. This is like the post-Drawn and Quarterly group, I'm thinking of. The Highwater group. I think of [Porcellino] as almost the exemplary cartoonist of that bunch. And Megan [Kelso]'s drawing is a whole different thing. It hasn't grown out of comics and it's very different. That's the drawing I find most interesting for its own sake. James Kochalka. In his sketchbook diaries, his drawings of Portugal are so beautiful to me as drawings.

SPURGEON: Is it that they're expressive drawings? Is it the quality of the drawing itself?

HORROCKS: Often the drawing is less about communicating and more about... Often the drawing is driven by the desire to make it beautiful. Ron Rege…

I feel a bit stupid about this stuff, because I haven't worked out how I feel about a lot of this. I want to try and write something about it. It really excites me. But I don't want to try to present it as a uniform group, because it's not. It's just that sometimes I feel that there are a lot of shared sensibilities. Sometimes there aren't. Sometimes I think Jason Lutes is following quite a different path. But there are also a lot of shared agendas there. They are at ease with each other and all of that. It's as though in the '80s there was this big fight. Alan Moore and Frank Miller and [Bill] Sienkiewicz and a whole bunch of them were wanting to break away from the tradition of comics. A lot of that was about creative freedom and it was all tied up with Scott McCloud's bill of creative rights and Dave Sim's self-publishing thing. Even some of the early Fantagraphics people -- the Hernandez Brothers and so on -- initially, at least, there was a feel that they were freeing themselves or liberating comics and so on. Although the best of them have moved on from that. Like Jaime [Hernandez]'s work, which I'm also currently obsessed with.

SPURGEON: He's an amazing artist.

HORROCKS: Extraordinary. But anyway, for that group that I think of as my closest friends, it's like the fight's been won. It's like that battle's already been won. We came into it without any sense of needing to fight that battle. I'm amazed when people talk about creator's rights now because it's like, "Well, you can do whatever you like now. So why don't you?"

SPURGEON: Like going to the American South and seeing some guy still waving the rebel flag.

HORROCKS: I mean, to some extent that stuff is still relevant for work with the big companies, like my Vertigo work. I guess you could call that hackwork -- it's certainly work for hire and I'm using other people's characters and there's a monthly schedule and everything. The realities of all of that production system means you can't get too precious about it. And also it has to be a good read and a good yarn and everything else. It's a commercial comic. I can't do a Chester Brown and go off in the desert for 40 days and 40 nights and to hell with the readers -- not with that comic. But you see, if I want to do that, there's nothing to stop me doing it in my own comics -- in Atlas and so on.

SPURGEON: I remember discussing on-line the recent DC Bizarro trade with artists like Dean Haspiel and James Kochalka, as well as the Hulk story that James did for Coober Skeeber that Marvel reprinted. They were both very adamant that they just did these stories because these were stories that they wanted to do.

HORROCKS: Well, James's story for Bizarro was edited, and it lost the best line in the process. I don't want to criticize the editor on that either, because I know the reality he's working in and I think he pulled off a very difficult task and made a beautiful book -- it's a lovely book. But I think it's a different book to what it would have been if it had been done with complete creative freedom. [The Marvel Benefit issue of] Coober Skeeber is more like the book it would have been, and in some ways the Coober Skeeber strips are very pure stories by those cartoonists. But in a sense Bizarro was like very, very, very good hackwork. I probably shouldn't use that word, because it has so many connotations; believe it or not, I'm not using it in a derogatory way. If that's what DC's regular comics line was like, I'd be buying a lot of it. I'd be a complete DC fanboy. Those were great comics. But they weren't an undiluted, pure artistic vision.

SPURGEON: As a fan of those artists, you would rather see the more expressive, personal comics?

HORROCKS: If I had to choose, yes. But I'd be even more happy to see both. The reality of the industry now is that you can do both. Except it's very hard to be... you don't want to get overcommitted...

SPURGEON: One of the things with cartoonists is that they have an awareness of how much time it takes, especially for artists to make pages. So there's a certain amount of either/or proposition...

HORROCKS: That's quite true. If I had to draw Hunter, it would probably be an either/or thing. That would be agonizing, to have to make that choice.

SPURGEON: But you wouldn't automatically choose Atlas over Hunter?

HORROCKS: I've got kids. It would be a very hard choice. It might mean I'd have to take time out for Atlas. Or it might mean that I'd do one book every five years. I don't know. Or else I might make the decision to go back and work in a bookshop and only do my own work. But the bad thing about that is that it doesn't really pay. So you can see how people can let the hackwork take over. God, I'm going to get into trouble for using that word. I mean, I genuinely believe that good hackwork is a really beautiful thing. I would include all of Quentin Tarantino's films as hackwork. And all of Scorcese's films as hackwork. Because he's working within this incredibly constrained industry. If he took out a camera and had a dozen people and made an independent movie... I don't know. Within the context of comics I'm using it a bit provocatively I guess. A bad move.

SPURGEON: You're so fired.

HORROCKS: But anyway, the writing is much easier to do as a day job than the drawing. And even if Atlas was earning enough money that I could just do Atlas I'd probably still want to be doing the Vertigo comic, because it satisfies a whole different side of me as a cartoonist and a writer. Of course, because it takes less time to write the things, that does set up the awkward moral proposition that there are a whole lot of artists out there who are just illustrating our stuff and probably don't have the time to do anything else of their own. But then, I guess there are cartoonists where that's all they want to do. And that's cool. Thank god for them!

Dylan's Peers

SPURGEON: The quality and beauty of the line work is something that you've taken from your peers. Anything else?

HORROCKS: The complex relationship between the drawing and the contents of the drawing. Are we talking about just me right now?

SPURGEON: We're talking about your friends. Your peers.

HORROCKS: The one thing I keep coming back to is lyricism. At one point I was even thinking about writing a piece for the Comics Journal called "The New Lyricism." It was going to be my attempt to distill where I felt a deep kinship with those people. Their comics are very, very lyrical. James Kochalka, Megan Kelso…

SPURGEON: Craig Thompson?

HORROCKS: Craig Thompson, John Porcellino, Tom Hart. And to me, the closest antecedents to these guys is the English small press scene like Glenn Dakin, and Ed Pinsent, Chris Reynolds and Carol Swain. There's a very deep lyricism to their work. It's very poetic, very beautiful. In fact, in a lot of ways that group, that American group now, they are to the English small press what grunge was to English punk. And if you talk to – certainly Tom Hart, Jon Lewis, those guys – they're very aware of people like Glenn Dakin. I think Tom's even interviewing Glenn for the Journal. There's a similar aesthetic, a similar approach to comics.

SPURGEON: Anything else? We have lyricism. We have quality of line.

HORROCKS: I remember at the Small Press Expo in '98, at Mark Nevins' panel, a lot of them talked about the writing end. That they were more interested in it as literature than as art. I don't know that that's true anymore. I know that that was the case with the Black Eye crowd and initially with some of the Seattle crowd, especially with people like Jason Lutes.

SPURGEON: And James Sturm.

HORROCKS: And James Sturm, absolutely. I think that's probably still the case with those two. But I also feel like the Highwater Books crowd, people like Ron Rege and…

SPURGEON: Brian Ralph?

HORROCKS: Particularly the Fort Thunder group. They've introduced a whole new element that has enriched it enormously by foregrounding what is in effect a comics art movement as well.

SPURGEON: Is there a fourth thing you've learned from your peers?

HORROCKS: They're really nice people. They're really, really nice people. I think that a lot of the sensibility of their comics comes from the fact that they seem... I don't know America that well, but it seems to me as if their generation produced a whole subculture which was very sweet and very gentle and wished the world were more like them. It wasn't quite the same as the revolutionary '60s shift in culture. It was a very quiet thing.

SPURGEON: A lot of people find that maddening about those comics.

HORROCKS: But I love it. What's wrong with it?

SPURGEON: It's hard for some people to relate to not wanting to punch someone, anyone, in the mouth.

HORROCKS: But that's based on a very macho idea of what good art is... that image of Picasso as the rippling virile apex of avante garde art. I don't have that aesthetic. Though, y'know, Picasso is one of my gods at the moment as far as fine art goes – it helps that he was doing representational drawing most of the time; I find it very inspiring. But I think that idea of the artist as the avante garde hero reflects a particular kind of modernist approach to the arts, a very macho kind of thing. You had to be crawling in the dirt... I don't know. The thing is, those guys, their work to me is just as extreme. It goes pretty deep, you know? Life is often about the little stuff. James [Kochalka]'s work is constantly criticized but one reason I love his work is because he's often writing about the little stuff.

SPURGEON: Do you have a problem making a differentiation between those artists and their works?

HORROCKS: Oh, I have an enormous problem with that because I know them. But also their work is very, very personal and very candid and they're totally open and giving of themselves in their comics.

SPURGEON: But I could see where it would be very hard not to think that you know a lot about John Porcellino.

HORROCKS: I feel as though I know him.

SPURGEON: In a way, I feel like I lived down the street from him and played football in his yard.

HORROCKS: Exactly. And felt sorry for him on the bad days and wanted to give him a hug. You know? And enormously enjoyed his company on the good days. And maybe that's a complete misrepresentation of himself. But that's another thing about all of their work. It has a very, very deep kind of integrity and sincerity about it. And I know people thought that James' cuteness was kind of forged or affected. But then, even to the extent that it is, I feel that it comes through very honestly as well. He's honest about the extent to which he's conscious of his own personae and constructs it. I feel that you really do see what you get.

I don't think that's to do with a shift in the history of comics. I think it's a sensibility that's feeding through all of the arts at the moment. A maturation. It's a very beautiful and exciting and gentle thing. I always remember the line that Milton Caniff supposedly said. I actually took it from an interview where someone else was quoting him from a panel that they remembered, so it's probably a complete misquote. But Caniff ostensibly said, "The reason good is better than evil is because it's nicer." I often feel that niceness is underrated. Kindness is the most important thing. They're very kind people all of those guys. And their work is kind. In their work they genuinely try to give something to people.

I remember on that same panel at SPX with Nevins, we were asked if we were looking back on our work in 20 years, what would we want to have achieved. James answered by saying that what he would like is for himself in 20 years time to be able to look at his comics from 20 years before and to learn something about himself as he is now rather than as he was then. I thought that was quite a beautiful thing to say. He wanted his comics to be a place where people could come and actually learn something about themselves and not just about him. Though sometimes it seems as though it's all about him.

SPURGEON: Well, as far as getting you to say something critical about these people I've completely failed.

HORROCKS: Failed miserably.

SPURGEON: Is there a person that surprises you? A person that you think is undervalued in that group?

HORROCKS: Well, John. John Porcellino. Amongst my friends, he's adored. His comics are absolutely adored. They're precious gems.

SPURGEON: This may sound crazy to anyone who hasn't experienced it, but there's almost a Christ-like appeal to John amongst small-press cartoonists.

HORROCKS: I think that's true. It's cultivated by the fact that he doesn't go to most of the conventions and he has this reputation of being fragile.

SPURGEON: Speaking of Jesus…

HORROCKS: Speaking of Jesus? Chester has a role like that, too. Chester has the role of the scary Jesus that's in his Gospel comics, you know? That's who Chester is. [Spurgeon laughs]

SPURGEON: I don't think he plays that same kind of role amongst cartoonists.

HORROCKS: Well, he does for me! He's John the Baptist. He's the guy who goes out into the desert. I'm in awe of him. I'm staying with him next week in Toronto and I'm terrified because he intimidates me so much.

SPURGEON: When I said, "Speaking of Jesus," I was going to ask you about Joe Chiappetta. You once said he was your favorite cartoonist.

HORROCKS: Yes. He was. And he's still one of my favorite cartoonists, and Silly Daddy is one of the best comics of all time in my opinion.

SPURGEON: What is it about Silly Daddy that had an effect on you?

HORROCKS: All of those things that I've been talking about with my relationship to storytelling and drawing, because he exemplifies them all. I look at his comics and they're drawings. They're not cartooning. They're drawing. It's wonderfully liberating. And the way that he would use all of those different formats. It was certainly -- the reason I say that it's the best comic book is that as a pamphlet it was just the most satisfying thing. It was the only pamphlet coming out at the time where I would just about run screaming down the street skipping when I heard there was a new one out. I never knew what it was going to be like – what shape it was going to be. It was more exciting to me than Acme Novelty. And his relationship with the drawing was this heart-felt, sincere kind of relationship. Everything about it was…

SPURGEON: Have you seen any of his newer, gospel-based material?

HORROCKS: No, I'm very keen to get them. Very keen to get them. I will completely reserve judgment on them until I see them. It would be nice to have some good religious comics, and I hope that's what he's doing.

I'll tell you about when I first really read John Porcellino. I probably won't be able to tell this story without choking up. I was at a comics convention in Auckland last year or early this year. On the first day, driving to the convention, we had to pull over and stop because there had been an accident. My wife got out of the car to go and see if she could help. It was a teenager who had been on the road and had got knocked off his bike. And he was dead. There was no saving him. This happens all too frequently on our country roads, so we get very upset whenever it happens. So I turned up for the convention about three hours late because we had to take a huge detour. It's a small convention, but it's like a mini-San Diego. It's pretty loud. I was hanging out with my friends, and that was good, but I felt a bit subdued.

On the second day I was driving to the convention by myself and on the spot where this boy had died one of his friends had gotten a big piece of wood and they painted on it in bright pink florescent spray-paint, "RIP Sam." And I saw that and I just cried all the way to the convention. And the thing that I kept thinking when I got to the convention and I was surrounded by all of this horrible, horrible stuff screaming at me, really, was that that piece of wood was the most meaningful piece of art that I'd seen in a long, long time. The process of making art was expressed in such a pure way by that piece of wood. And it was the most useful piece of art that I'd seen in a long time. It was very, very hard to stay at the convention all day. I was selling my own comics and I had my friends bringing up comics and saying, "What do you think of this?" It was very hard to care about any of it. I just felt like, "What's the point of all of this?"

That night my wife was out. I put the kids to bed and I had dinner and over dinner I read John's book, Perfect Example. I felt like it kind of purified me. It was like the Jesus thing. It was like Jesus touching my head. It purified me, and it felt like finally, after all of that crap that had surrounded me all weekend, here was a piece of art that you could hold up next to that piece of wood and you could say, "This is just as meaningful and just as beautiful and just as useful as this piece of wood." And I think that this is what that generation is striving for. That's what they're doing, is they're doing something that can match that piece of wood. Whereas so much of the stuff that's come before, they just try to do something that puts their mark on the world or makes them look good. Or is just fun, which is fine. All of that's fine.

But when it comes down to it, the absolutely deepest part of my aesthetic is where I distinguish the kind of work that's really important to me. There's a lot of work that satisfies me on the level where it gives me a good time, it makes me feel good, I'm impressed by it, I enjoy the virtuosity. But the work that means the most to me, the work where I feel like this is great art, is the work that is as useful and as meaningful and as beautiful as that piece of wood for Sam.

I feel like this is the end of the interview.

This interview will one day be archived here, but this incarnation will scroll off the site in one week.

Spread from Forthcoming Atlas #2

*****

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