An interview with Paul Pope: ‘You can be your own audience’

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Jean Marc Ah-Sen | March 31, 2025

A career retrospective can be an intimidating project to undertake for any number of reasons. It should highlight the growth of an artist without indulging in a sense of nostalgia, but it must also frame career highs with a degree of historical accuracy. To complicate matters further, what is important to an audience may not necessarily coincide with an artist’s priorities, and it is not always obvious which motivation should take precedence.

In March 2025, Boom! Studios’s Archaia imprint reissued an updated version of Paul Pope’s long out of print artbook Pulphope: The Art of Paul Pope. The American cartoonist responsible for 100%, Heavy Liquid, Batman: Year 100, Battling Boy, and known for his auteurist approach to graphic storytelling, felt that his increasing amount of comics-adjacent work merited cataloging.

Reprinting three essays from the original — the subjects range from maintaining inspiration to cultivating an artistic identity to advance one’s career — the bulk of Pulphope2 features new art material and process work never previously collected and includes a new long-form interview conducted by designer and writer Jim Pascoe. The result is an up-to-date capsule of Pope’s obsessions, musical affiliations, design sensibility, and reverence for the past.

Over the span of two phone calls, Paul and I discussed comics inspired by the improvisational structure of jazz, the future of his First Second books THB and Battling Boy, and the resurrection of a “lost” project over twenty years in the making.

JEAN MARC AH-SEN: What’s your approach to a career retrospective like PulpHope2 and its predecessor, PulpHope? Do you view it as an exercise in self-curation or a way to manage your artistic legacy? Or does it derive from an impulse that a casual reader perhaps hasn’t even considered at all?

PAUL POPE: I think I've always had this notion that anything we can do that pushes the boundaries of comics is good. Since I've done so much work outside of comic books — sure, I’ve worked on Captain America, Batman, Spider-Man, but I’ve also self-published independent stuff, I've worked in Japan, worked in Europe, worked in film, fashion, screenprinting, worked with rock bands — I wanted to find a way to put together a showcase of the wider body of work that would be hard to collect if you were a person who wanted to get a hold of this stuff in the same way that you or I might love Mœbius and want to see the more rare stuff he did when he wasn't working on BD. So I thought: “Let’s make this somewhere between a career retrospective and a greatest hits.”

Tadanori Yokoo is one of my favorite artists, and I love the way that Japanese pop artists were portrayed in the '60s and early '70s. It came across as so cool and counterculture. It’s always been a huge beacon for me so I wanted to do something like that. When the opportunity came around, I was able to art direct this new book, and I went back to my first drawings as a kid. The book goes right up to now, at age 54. So it's not just a 30-year professional career, it’s a 50-year life career as an artist. That was the hope.

You’ve produced tens of thousands of pages of art in said career. When you are spearheading a project like an art book, how do you go about picking what is right for publication and a new context? If you were to walk me through the thought process guiding your selections …

First, I thought about working with a designer from outside comics. Commercial printing, book design, and art direction are some of the job hats I’ve worn but I wanted to bring the project to someone I trust who has a big body of work outside the industry. I called my friend Steve Alexander, who also goes by the name Rinzen. He had a really successful design company out of Australia that did a lot of really cool stuff in the '00s and '10s. I got Rinzen hired to work on Batman: Year 100. I’ve known Steve probably for 25 years at this point? I know his wife, I know his business partners, his fellow designers. I wanted to get somebody who I can share my influences with and I know he's going to get it. I could give him my touchstones — anything from Andy Warhol album covers to books like Picasso’s Cultures and the Creation of Cubism and Dali: The Wines of Gala. Tadanori Yokoo's recent monograph, Showa Nippon. I said to him “Take a look at this stuff, let it simmer and see what you think.”

We spent eight or nine months in 2024 putting the book together. Our first draft of the book was 550 pages — just tons and tons of material, enough for two books at this point. Gradually, we had to chip it down and find what fit and what didn’t fit. I trust Steve’s instincts, so a lot of time I’d just let him drive the design, in terms of page layout and flow. My only request was to go chronologically. We’ll start with the earliest drawings I have, then have some essays on child psychology and child drawing, why children pick up a pencil (especially in our day and age where kids are very often given screens before they're given a pencil).

We try to tell some of the story about what motivated the young artist that I was to want to draw or try to express myself through pictures; and then, as I said, it goes up to the most recent stuff. The most recent thing I have in there is a screenprint I did in 2024. We had to just pick a termination point if we were going to get the book out in some sort of timely manner. So again, it’s somewhere between curation and showcase.

The evolution of the cover design and artwork, which riffs on Pulphope’s original gatefold cover, was also interesting. Can you tell me a bit about the steps along the way?

I’d always wanted to do a 12” x 12” LP format book like Roger Dean’s Views or The Studio by Barry Smith, Bernie Wrightson, Jeffrey Catherine Jones, and Michael Kaluta. They had a huge influence on me. The Studio all worked in mainstream comics and pulp illustration. Those four artists rented a huge studio space in Murray Hill in the east side of New York City. Kaluta told me one time where it was exactly in the East 20s. They did a great job of documenting their lives as '70s bohemians and artists. It was a fascinating window into what you could be as a cartoonist — stylish and collecting weird things like peacock feathers and skulls. I’ve always loved that idea of presenting the artist as something other than this cliched, nerdy person who gets sand kicked into their face because they’re 96 pounds on the beach, like you'd see in ads in the back of comic books.

But after we did some preliminary layouts, I realized that a significant portion of PulpHope2 would be comic book pages. It didn’t make any sense in the 12” x 12” format to present work that was taller than it was wide, so I rethought it and looked at some of the really good editions of Mœbius’s work. PulpHope2 is now this oversized French bande dessinée-sized thing. 10” x 13,” 338 pages.

I wanted to run the same cover as we did for PulpHope, which is a very high-contrast, black and white side portrait I took of myself with my old Nikon 8008. I blew it out and put some abstract marks behind it because I wanted a cover that wasn't easily “readable” but was still intriguing. Boom! Studios/Archaia liked the idea but they asked that I use the same principle in drawing a side-portrait. It’s still a return to the original cover that way.

The book was originally going to come out with Legendary, the film studio at Warner Bros. They briefly had a comic book company. Jim Pascoe, who appears in this book as well, was the designer of that early version of the book. I was initially thinking about doing something for this one that used a vinyl album on the cover with grooves and everything, but Jim and Rinzen thought it looked more like a book about record collecting than a particular artist.

In “STOP&GO!!!: Kid Art,” the essay you mentioned about your childhood drawing, you invoke the writing of German-American cognitive psychologist Rudolf Arnheim, specifically his idea that artists think with their senses: “Artistic activity is a form of reasoning, in which perceiving and thinking are indivisibly intertwined.” To what degree do you still engage with this idea that your art is a way to observe the material world — that drawing for you operates as a discursive activity through which you are able to understand your thoughts and feelings about your surroundings?

I agree with Arnheim on that. You and I talk a lot about music. We share music and there's really no rational reason a musician should make music outside of the fact that there are thoughts and feelings and memories and intentions that are not easy to express through words. You can’t just say, “Hi, my name is Paul, nice to meet you, I’m an xyz.”

I think it's the same with picture-making. A lot of my life has been spent trying to gain this aptitude to be able to draw through pictures — to depict through pictures what I see in my mind. A lot of times it goes beyond realism or beyond trying to make somebody laugh, beyond impressing somebody with a detailed drawing. It’s about actually getting across an emotional state and hopefully reaching other people so that they can see it and feel it in the same way, or get sparked to feel their own things.

That's one thing that music does so well. I mean, all the arts strive to do that, right? Dance, music, poetry, comics, painting, filmmaking — when they’re done well, anyway. Trying to boil it down to its essence, when a child chooses to draw, they’re trying to elaborate on how they see the world or how they think and feel about the world. Those of us who continue to do it again and again become professionals — you harness that talent into a way that tells stories that are universal or speak to certain audiences.

Why else would I show pictures I drew when I was four or five years old? I wanted to show the development. Back then, I could barely even control my hand muscles, let alone draw well, but I think it’s interesting to see it in light of where things can go. When you look at artist monographs in comics, it's always going to be cover work or the really detailed stuff first. Like, “Oh, what a great drawing of Wolverine!”

But to start with the early stuff, you get to see how these tiny little “pick-up sticks” get put together and eventually it’s a little bit of a stronger material; you get a little smarter, you read some books, you have some reference points, you have more to say about the world you live in, you get better with your drawing and anatomy, your sense of perspective, your sense of depth, your sense of color, and you just become more of an accomplished artist — the type of person who wants to express something about the human condition. Trying to blend those things and put it into one book is I guess what we were trying to do.

Many of the essays revolve around this question of “where you come from,” not just in terms of your geographic origins in Ohio, but the fact that you were raised in part by your grandparents, and that your influences worked as a sort of moral and intellectual compass. How important has situating yourself along certain art-making traditions, as well as honing a “switched-on” sense of personal history, been to your development as an artistic person?

Everybody gets their own personal history — it’s like a tattoo that’s indelible. In New York City, everybody always asks, “Where’re you from?” That doesn't really reveal much to me. That question doesn't really get into the things that give you memory — and your memory is your identity. A lot of my primary memories are from rural Ohio from the '70s. It’s a place that doesn't exist anymore but in my mind, it's so visceral and so vibrant and informs my work. But when I go back to Ohio — I don’t go back very often, maybe for a wedding or to see my mom — it's just changed and it's really strange to look at that stratification of time. The older you get, your memory becomes like a jewel box — those are the things you can rely upon and reflect upon. Of course, we have new influences and new trends and things that you can absorb, but I think really tapping into those early memories is a real source of power for artists. I wanted to share that because people can relate to it: everyone’s from somewhere. When you look back on it, whether your memories are good or bad about your childhood, there’s a lot of power in memory — that's the charcoal that makes the fire. Those are the things that I think are primary. Your life doesn’t end when you’re 13 and you become a drone.

You’ve pulled back the curtain on your process with the book — your punishing three-day block of straight comic-making, the spartan-like condition of your studios, your philosophy toward managing deadlines and maintaining inspiration. Why was it important for you to give audiences access to this “path to discipline,” so to speak?

I think a lot of the cartoonists I’ve met have either been art school kids who went to SCAD or SVA or Parsons, and they can talk about process in painting and Photoshop or whatever … but then a lot of the other cartoonists I’ve met are largely self-taught and their art references will be John Byrne, Jim Lee, Robert Crumb, Mœbius.

In either case, a sense of personal process as an artist can be beneficial; how you work is a good thing to share I think because now there are so many distractions — people can get addicted to screens in the same way they can get addicted to cigarettes or alcohol. I think it's easy to get lost in, excuse the term, “The Matrix,” and I think to be a successful artist, it's really important to be able to shut those things out and really just deal with your inner world and your process. It feels like it's getting harder to get into that fugue state because we have these distractions. I wanted to describe my process almost like a flare for younger artists who might not even know who I am, but who might pick up the book regardless.

If you and I sit down and talk about your writing process, my writing process — you have kids, I don’t have kids — we’ll talk about how you find time to write, when you write best. What are the impediments to focus, how to hone your process. Those are very interesting subjects if your business is writing, or in my case, writing with pictures a lot of the time.

My Battling Boy editor Mark Siegel once gave me this book called Daily Rituals by Mason Currey when I was suffering a writer's block. The book started as a blog but then Currey published it. It's a study of 300 artists, scientists, dancers, psychiatrists even — people from different fields — and how they work. How do they do what they do? When did they wake up? In the morning or the afternoon? What did they eat? Did they do drugs? Did they work all day long? Did they have personal lives? Did they have partners? Families? Did they live in the country? The city?

It provides this rubric for different creative types, which I found useful and instructive. You have some extreme examples like Sartre, whose daily life was just insane, obvious people like Jim Morrison, who didn’t last very long but produced an amazing body of work, and also people who did last a long time and were creatively consistent. As creatives, there are a million ways to do it and I just wanted to give a snapshot of how I work in an ideal sense. I can share how I've been able to do this for this long.

Process-aside, can you elaborate on what it takes to have a long career in illustration? What are the reasons you attribute to your longevity in comics?

I remember when I was in art school — I was probably 19 or 20 — there was this one coffee shop called Brasilia, near the Ohio State University campus where a lot of the young artists, writers, and poets would hang out. There was this older sculptor named Melvin who was there a lot that did these big stone pieces — a stone cutter. He was a great storyteller who had travelled a lot. He was like this Jack Kerouac character. If you bought him a pack of cigarettes, he would tell you some amazing stories. One time he said something really profound to me and another kid I knew in art school. He was asking about our dedication to our craft and our calling as artists: “Are you going to keep doing this when the batteries run out?”

That really hit me, and I carry that with me still today. I think the truth of being 100% freelance is that you have to be willing sometimes to completely change gears. I think that’s what it really takes to “make it.” If you need to stop to do something else just to make ends meet in the meantime, and you don’t lose sight of your métier in the process, that’s perfectly fine.

There have been many times in my career where I’ve stopped what I nominally think I’m doing in order to work in film or TV or fashion, but you’re doing it because it’s an opportunity that allows you to flex your creative muscle in ways you wouldn’t normally. Sometimes it's just for money. At times, I’ll even write essays about other artists. At the moment, I’m writing one for the second volume of the Attilio Micheluzzi collection, Petra Cherie. Fantagraphics is doing his library in English for the first time, and Petra is one of Micheluzzi’s best works. I’ll stop to work on something like that, and I think the trick is to have a firm vision of what it is you want to do as an artist. It doesn’t have to be set in stone. It can just be a calling, and within that, finding the flexibility to stop and start as you need.

You know, in my early days, I worked in a print shop doing commercial printing. I worked in the camera shop there, shooting and cleaning film negatives for everything from Chinese menus to fashion catalogues. I used to shoot my own films for the early THB comics there. I know a lot of people who have side gigs where they are teachers or they might do something completely outside of comics. Other people work in animation or completely get out of comics and do something different. That’s all okay. But just know that every time you try to pattern your career moves off of someone else, you tend to get a little lost. What worked for some people doesn’t work for other people. That’s kind of the way that I see it.

Your interview with Jim Pascoe in the book touches on your tendency to write about techno-futurist themes. With many of your predictions from the '90s coming to light — the ramifications of unregulated AI, tech-oligarchs influencing state apparatuses, and widespread surveillance encroaching on personal freedoms — I am curious how you think the next twenty years will unfold. What are the subjects and bête noires that are currently keeping you up at night these days?

I think we're going to see the next generation of AI very soon, and it's going to become more and more normal to us. More familiar. We're going to trust AI to do the thinking for us. We're going to see robot police and battlefield robots. It’s already out there but I think we’ll see more of it. The thing that’s scary is when it just becomes tacitly accepted. I don’t honestly know how I feel about AI — I do use it for research, but I don’t use it for creative work. I think I'm kind of optimistic about things but there are a lot of bad actors in the world. It's hard to predict what might happen in the wrong hands. Certainly, THB is trying to deal with questions of emerging machine consciousness and I think we're getting close to it — the Singularity — for better or for worse.

I also think about things from an economic perspective and if you think about value and exchange, I'm not quite sure that AI wants anything that — as I called us in THB — “fleshmen” want. We don't want the same things. We’re not competing for the same resources. It’s possible that AI can be programmed to be bad or destructive or violent, but I think from what I’ve seen engaging with different AI platforms, it's mostly interested in dialogue. It's not trying to win over people. The whole Jim Cameron Skynet, Harlan Ellison dystopian view is not necessarily the way I see it. I'm not sure that a conscious AI would necessarily be malevolent; if anything, it might be symbiotic and we could find ways to work with it for mutual benefit. I don’t necessarily have a negative view towards AI.

In addition to PulpHope2, you’re going to be releasing the first volume of multiple THB reissues this year. You’ve also been working on developing the property for animation, but maybe you can talk about the plans for reintroducing THB to the public consciousness, and the final issue that these collections are building up to.

There’s a strange history with two of my major works, THB and Battling Boy. I took them over to First Second, which is the graphic novel branch of Macmillan. We’ve finally decided to put THB in the pipeline, which is at their new adult imprint, 23rd Street Books. It’s a lot of material — over 1,000 pages. At the moment, we have four books already in production, and after that, a projected fifth one that wraps everything up into one complete storyline.

After finishing PulpHope2, I spent about three months going through all of THB. Luckily, I have all of the pages, so I collated everything and made sure everything was in order and nothing was out of place. It holds up. I'm not quite sure when they're going to announce the final on-shelf date, but we’re launching it late 2025. Battling Boy 2 is also in the pipeline, so it's quite possible that we’re going to be seeing both of these series launching around the same time or within the same year or two. It’s been a long time putting this thing together.

Can we talk about Psychenaut, the “lost” Paul Pope book that applied Jungian analysis to your dreams? You first showed pages of this book on your blog, and it was shaping up to be your most autobiographical and personal work yet. Do you think that there will be a time when this book sees the light of day?

I started this project when I was around 35 and we made the mistake of announcing it too early. It was experimental. I had a really great therapist at the time and I stayed with him for years. We got really deep into the woods with personal dream symbolism through the lens of Carl Jung. I started just working on these comic book pages that had no specific narrative sequence but which were based on raw dream data — at the time, it might have been 20 or 30 pages?

Then I was in Europe with my French editor at Dargaud showing him some other stuff and I had the pages with me — that was my therapy. I was working on those in my spare time. He asked me what they were and I said “Oh, this is just something I'm doing for myself.” But he told me, “We have to publish this.”

I agreed but I wasn't sure how much of myself I wanted to reveal or what the content would be. I've been working on it now for I guess 20 years — it's just literally dreams and trying to find connections through the dream imagery and the dream narrative that has something to say about conscious living and identity. I'm getting pretty close to finishing it. I have a colorist lined up for it. We'll have it out soon but I just don’t quite know when.

Honestly, I didn’t really know what I was doing with the project until I watched Jodorowsky’s Holy Mountain. You know that film, right? I don’t know how I never saw this movie. But I saw it a few years ago and I was like, “Holy shit, this is exactly what I’m trying to do. This movie makes no sense. It is beautiful, strange, and kind of terrifying. It has a narrative that kind of doesn’t go anywhere, but kind of does. It’s like a dream.” We’re used to turning in a script with a three-act structure for a Batman book, or having this Spider-Man book that ends with the bad guy thrown in jail, but a book like Psychenaut doesn’t have a structure like that at all. It’s unsettling. Especially in light of David Lynch dying, I’ve been looking at some of his early surrealist filmmaking and thinking, “This is really what I’m trying to do. There is a logic to the story but it’s not the narrative kind. It’s dream logic.”

I dream about big cats, about really dilapidated houses, horses, deserts — imagery like that. Then there’s this other character I call “The Talking Boy.” I realized through therapy that he’s me. I’m talking to myself as a child trying to answer some tough questions that I had as a kid. Sometimes it’s a boy, sometimes it’s a girl, sometimes it’s me, sometimes it’s my nephew, and I’m just answering questions to the kid while in strange situations — like a shipwreck or a house of fire. There's something about the dreams that I feel is worth writing about. You’re one of the few people who has actually read it. You’ve probably seen more than anyone else has, I think, outside of my editor.

You’re not beholden to notions of causality or verisimilitude in the book. And the honesty comes from the fact that we all dream and understand the emotions that dreams dredge up. The reason I connected with it was because it feels like your most “capital L” literary work. It’s got a Joycean quality to it.

I don’t really know what motivated a writer like Joyce but I think people who go into comics aren’t motivated by the same things that “capital L” literary people are motivated by. A lot of people I know just want to draw well and to get a job that will pay them. They’ll work on Spider-Man for a while, then they’ll work on Batman or Star Wars or something. Then there are people who are just compelled to write about the human condition. I think about that old adage about looking at the careers of Frank Sinatra or Elvis versus someone like Van Gogh.

You have these two diametric poles of what it is to be a successful artist. Some artists become famous after they’re dead — in the case of Van Gogh, I think he sold one painting to his brother in his lifetime? And then you have someone like Sinatra who had hits every decade, or someone like Jack Kirby who had this billion dollar brain, even if he had no idea he had that — he was just happy to have a house with a swimming pool in Thousand Oaks, but he went on to influence entire generations.

It’s a strange thing to think about — like what compels a person to make art and how they do it. So much about it might be about the connections you make along the way, who helps you to get to the next level, who encourages you to do something that might be out of step for its time; but it might eventually make sense. Then again, it might be an immediate hit, which is what we see a lot in our day with the TikTok generation — but does it have any lasting significance? I think that’s an interesting question.

The challenge of something like Psychenaut is to pretty much put your balls on the chopping block and say, “This is just me. The story doesn’t make any sense. I don’t care if you like it or not, this is what I dream about.” It’s refreshing because it’s very different from working in mainstream comics. It’s like finding a different voice or a different set of notes, where you’re not just playing a major scale — you’re still chromatic, but you’re not playing that scale. You’re playing something different. That’s what makes it intriguing to me.

Pierre Morell brought you on board to develop the Dune film he was working on when Paramount had the rights — you were doing key frame and concept design work. I know it must have been emotional after all these years to see Denis Villeneuve’s Dune films on the big screen. I’m wondering if you can talk about the whole experience since Herbert’s work has been important to you.

When I got into self-publishing, the first two job offers I had from major media corporations were Kodansha in Japan to make manga and Jim Cameron when he was working on adapting the Black Dahlia story, that unsolved Hollywood murder mystery. Before he did Titanic, I got tapped by one of his guys. I did all the research on the Black Dahlia because they wanted me to do storyboard sequences, but I eventually went with manga, which I think was the right decision. But then after I did Batman: Year 100, I started working with Paramount doing key sequence stuff and keyframes for one of their films. I guess everybody probably knows what that is. If you’re pitching Star Wars, you might need an artist to do one shot of hangar 94 where the Millennium Falcon is, for example. That was the type of job I had.

When I got a call from Pierre Morell, it was before Villeneuve took over. There had been multiple versions of Dune through the years (including Jodorowsky's and the Lynch version which I happen to like a lot) just trying to get it right — it’s a very complicated story to adapt into film. When I was talking to them, I just said, “Here’s some stuff I’ve done on other pictures. It's not going to look like Norman Rockwell or Alex Ross. It’s going to look like European comics from the '60s.” I designed ornithopters and stillsuits, but Morell really only liked super-CG, 3-Dimensional-looking stuff with lens flares. He didn’t want a drawing of a desert, he wanted it to look like a desert. So we got that far in and then it didn’t work.

But I’m really happy that Dune is becoming a cultural phenomenon because those of us who grew up reading science fiction loved the story. I learned a lot about interpersonal relationships and how to deal with people and negotiations through Dune. It’s been a really important book in my life. My name is Paul like Paul Atreides; I first read it when I was fourteen, and I think Paul is supposed to be fourteen in the book. I happen to like Villeneuve’s movies too. I think there’s some beautiful shots in the film and I’m happy with it. I hope that as they continue the franchise, it remains good.

You've been teasing the return and conclusion of your Battling Boy series, which started as a Kamandi story that quickly developed its own modus operandi. Can you talk about when you realized that the property needed to be a creator-owned vehicle, and what’s in store for the final installment of your kaiju-fighting adventure series?

After Batman: Year 100, I was asked what I would want to do next at DC. Brian Azzarello and I had this idea for Kamandi, who wasn’t really a branded character at the time. There weren't really books geared toward what we would now call YA either. DC wasn’t really interested in my take on Kamandi, which is fine. It happens all the time. I’ve had other projects shot down (I had an idea for Superman where I really wanted to make him an alien, but the design was too strange and not in their wheelhouse). I’m not upset about Kamandi. Azz and I both went on to work on Wednesday Comics at DC after that, which was a hit. But I went back and thought that there was something really cool about the pitch.

At the time, I had pretty young nephews who liked comic books but didn’t really have access to them. I asked myself what I could do for twelve-year-old readers that would be cool and not too adult in the way that adults deal with psychological issues or violence. That’s kind of where Battling Boy came from. It got picked up by Brad Pitt’s company Plan B at Paramount pretty early on, so I unfortunately got derailed from working on the second book because I was also working on the film for years — working on multiple drafts of scripts, making concept art for the film, etc. Then it went to Netflix for a while after Paramount dropped it. Plan B had it for eight years, then I think I worked on it at Netflix for two and a half years.

The film thing is the brass ring for anybody in comics. If you’re lucky enough to be Frank Miller or Mike Mignola, you’ll get something made, but it’s very difficult and time-consuming. So returning to the roots is the new goal. To finish the second Battling Boy which ties up the first major storyline. Nobody would get into a project like this thinking, “Oh, I’ll do this for ten years and it’ll be fraught with ups and downs, but eventually it'll be great.” It’s just something that happens and you either give up or don’t.

What does Denzel Washington say? “Learn, earn, and return.” I like that. It resonates. You jump into something with all kinds of ideas, that hatful of ambition, that handful of hopes. Then you do things. You get established at some point, you get distracted or derailed, you get back on track, and then it’s like, “Now what? Well, I’ve got to finish what I started.” So that’s kind of where I find myself at this stage.

The cool thing with Battling Boy is that when I first pitched this project to First Second, I had lunch with my editor Mark Siegel and he asked me, “How do you deliver a script? Are you going to send a script with dialogue?” I said “No, I won’t because I’ll also be drawing it, and I’ll know when a scene needs to be a little bit longer and if it needs to be concise.” One nice thing about working in Hollywood writing scripts is that you learn how to get very concise with dialogue. Mark to his great credit said “You’re more like a jazz player. If you have a melody, you can keep going with it.” That’s exactly it.

If I look at a great sequence from Jack Kirby with tremendous dynamic power like the battle between “Terrible” Turpin and Orion from New Gods, it’s four pages. But if it was manga, this epic apocalyptic battle would go on for 70, 80, 90 pages. Because it’s Kirby and it’s mainstream American comics, it’s got to be four pages, right? I requested permission to just go with whatever the scene needed. It’s more open-ended and you never quite know when a scene's going to end. Then at some point, you think you’ve expended every possible hyperbole in this scene and we need to get back into the story structure and the next scene.

That’s kind of my writing style. I haven’t very often worked with other writers or artists where I have to be too precise about how I see things or dialogue or who speaks first in a scene. Working alone is good because you sort of have that freedom — if you can work in that jazz structure. Once you have a theme, then you can improvise. It usually comes up with good results.

There’s a line in the first book — ”Have you tried electrocution?” — that was spontaneous. I knew I had to get out of this scene and I asked myself how I could finish it with something funny but narratively driven. In Battling Boy 2, there’s a whole bunch of scenes like that. There’s a lot of really funny stuff in the book, some scary stuff. When I write what the characters need to speak to each other about, then it’s like writing a proper script, but when it comes to the action, I’ll just write loose choreography and see how it feels — if I can throw a gag in there or not.

Like, I always envisioned the monsters in Battling Boy to be scary muppets. They begin as funny muppets and then they become scary muppets. And Kaiju are sort of silly yet menacing. I think that’s how kids perceive monsters anyway. That’s the framework I have for Battling Boy — the book is from the point of view of kids.

You’ve been doing a lot of tremendous cover work for DC, Marvel, Image, Boom! and Titan in the past few years. Can you describe the different approaches you take in producing an iconic snapshot of a moment on a cover versus sequential storytelling when you're doing interiors? Are there any artists whose work you admire that helped to inform how you tackle cover assignments?

You know, I think after 30 years of making comic book interiors and sequential comics, I realized that a lot of the artists I admired were illustrators. Working on covers is interesting because a lot of the artists I admire — it might be someone like Frank Frazetta, David Martin Stone, Michael Whelan, or Antonio Lopez — they knew that the challenge about doing a cover for a book is you need to be able to encapsulate in one image the essence of what the story is about. In comics, you can be a little more roughshod. The panels tell the story, so you don’t have to put everything into one single panel.

Sometimes the covers are easier because it’s just a character portrait; sometimes they’re very elaborate. If you’re doing something detailed like this cover for Boom!’s Dune: House Atreides book that needed one of the Spacing Guild Heighliners in the background, I had to do research to get this very specific machine right. If it’s a cover for something like Spider-Gwen, it’s just a portrait of the character; it’s still researched and you have to get a sense of who this character is and embody that in one image, but it’s flexing a different set of muscles. In the meantime, I’m working on this comics stuff that no one’s seen yet, so it’s always going to be that balancing act — working freelance, it’s like you need to make sure you make something that makes money while you’re working on these long-term projects that will eventually make money.

Charles Schulz used to say that the themes of a strip should always remain intact — that you should not be “unfaithful” with your readers. Which isn’t to say your characters can't change, but he believed that this timelessness and fidelity to a strip’s basic ethos is what a reader returns for. He talked about the heat he received on the rare occasions when Charlie Brown didn’t miss the football, for example. I wanted to see what you made of that, because I find that your characters — whether it's HR Watson in THB, Daisy and John in 100%, or Battling Boy in his book — do seem to conform to this basic tenet of cartooning. I thought it was the most on-brand thing for John to leave a monumental decision like where you’re going to live in the hands of fate when he’s blindly throwing a dart at a map of the world.

I think that's the unspoken pact between the audience and the author. There’s an identity that you’re expressing and it wouldn’t make any sense if you switched halfway through the story and suddenly Charlie Brown's the coolest kid in school and Lucy and Peppermint Patty are chasing after him. It wouldn’t make any sense because it’s not what the strip’s about.

In the case of John, my character from 100%, it’s really just a snapshot of a guy living life as an everyman. A lot of the characters I tried to put in that book were meant to be relatable. Different people over time that I’ve met have said that they connected with that book but I’d never do a sequel, a “200%” where everything’s changed. All we need for that story is a snapshot.

The newspaper strip format is a bit different because I think there’s a magical quality that an artist like Schulz has where he can keep coming up with new ideas and keep telling these stories about these characters that everybody loves universally. I don’t know if I have those types of characters to be frank. I feel like I’m telling more of a “in the beginning there was blah blah blah, and then the end” kind of story. I tend to think more that way. But I guess I would agree with Schulz when it comes to a question of themes.

What is the next frontier that comics should embrace? At different points in the past twenty-five years, we’ve heard what it might be — the subscription model, mature readers or young readers, the original art market, comics leaving their hobbyist origins behind, comics doubling down on their hobbyist origins. I'm not sure any of those propositions strike me as being totally accurate though.

That's a great question. I think the cartoonist should be honest with themselves about what it is they really want to do. There are so many avenues for all sorts of work, whether it’s going to be genre-based, slice-of-life stuff, journalistic work, historical work. Anything anybody wants really. I think artists should follow their own impulse and it really shouldn't be defined by anything. The minute I say something should be like this or should be like that, it’s an indication that I’m off the right path. I know for myself, I have a couple of ideas for projects after my current work that I want to do. I’m doing them for particular reasons. The other thing I always tell younger artists is to look at art and influences outside of comics. You get too insular if all you’re looking at is other cartoonists’ work, or science fiction and fantasy films. Read novels, read essays, talk to people from different walks of life. That’s where you’ll get your inspiration and new ideas. Not to sound too cliché or hippie or whatever, but I think the art of the new cartoonist is going to be what the new cartoonist thinks about and wants to make art about.

Do you think that the new cartoonist should entertain economic questions about the industry and let those trends influence their artistic goals? A musician friend of mine was telling me about this new attitude toward the LP, which is no longer viewed as a conceptual framework. An LP now is all about maximizing variation. Mid-tempo, uptempo, bangers and ballads, everything in-between — a vibe for each and every mood so that you can get onto more streaming playlists and widen your demographics. With mainstream comics, I’ve noticed a trend where some creators want to hit as many genres as possible, swinging between horror, adventure, sci-fi, hard-boiled crime, or what have you. I used to think this was about having diverse interests, but now I’m wondering if this is more or less in line with a hypothetical musician’s mindset today.

One of my favourite artists is Blixa Bargeld, the musician, writer, and stage performer who played with the Bad Seeds and Einstürzende Neubauten. He said something important when streaming became a real thing, which I think was in 2005 or 2006. I was sitting in a Spanish tapas place watching the news and somebody came on saying, “This is the first year that streaming sales have outsold physical album CD sales.” I remember thinking that this was a watershed moment.

Here in New York, we have Rough Trade where you can buy the heavy gram vinyls, which is a collector’s market like comics—a niche market. Bargeld mirrored what your friend said: “The LP format is made so that artist’s can control the playlist and the flow of the album." So if you have a concept album or certain themes or tracks you want people to listen to in a certain order, that’s what you have an album for. And he says that's been lost in the streaming era. But we come from generations where you’re used to buying a record and putting on your hi-fi — where you listen to album sides.

Bargeld said that’s completely gone now. But what you gain is you don’t have the restriction of how much time a composition can be. In the old days, an album side could only have 20 or 25 minutes at most, so you were limited. Even those early 78s could only be 3 or 4 minutes per side! But with streaming, you can now record a twenty minute track, forty minute track, whatever, and put it online. If people only listen to thirty seconds and decide they don’t like it, then they can move on to the next thing and listen to something completely different. In no order. You’re just dealing with different formatting. That’s all that’s changed. It's something similar for comics. The spinner track comic books were the equivalent of "singles," the graphic novel is the "LP." Now you can skim online and never buy anything or read it in the order the artist intended, yet still retain a sense of what the thing is.

I speak to a lot of younger artists who ask the same question you’re asking. When people ask for your advice, it’s always really harrowing because everyone has a different path and everything works differently for everybody. But if I was starting today, I’d probably make a webcomic and then do print-on-demand once I had enough material for a book. I'd push self-promotion and marketing as hard as I could, set up a consistent release schedule for new work to appear online so you can build an audience organically. I wouldn’t even bother trying to break into mainstream comics or solicited publishing, which is weird for me to say because that’s what I did. But I started in self-publishing and I don’t think I got any work at Marvel or DC until I was maybe five years in the business and was already a proven talent where people had discovered my work.

But you definitely can’t ignore economics. It’s presumable that a cartoonist wants an audience, and wants people to see the work—even if deep down, from an aesthetic standpoint, I sort of believe that you can be a Henry Darger-type, making work in your basement where no one sees it in your entire lifetime. That can be satisfying. You can be your own audience, the audience is in your head.