‘Insane, but not impossible’: ALIVE OUTSIDE editors Cullen Beckhorn and Marc Bell discuss their ambitious anthology

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At the start of 2025, Cullen Beckhorn and Marc Bell invited Bill Boichel to discuss the genesis, creation, production of their 2024 comics anthology, ALIVE OUTSIDE for the edification of TCJ readers. This discussion took the form of an email conclave that meandered through March and April. Enjoy!

-Bill Boichel, aka Copacetic Comics

BILL BOICHEL: How did this project come into being? What was its impetus?

CULLEN BECKHORN: If I remember correctly, it started with Marc and I talking during the pandemic lockdowns about the large hole in the publishing landscape for a comics/art anthology that stands more as a book than existing as a periodical or magazine. We were both considering comics at the center of our conversations, but we are each also looking at a lot of things in art outside of that microcosm. It didn’t seem like anything else in North America was taking this kind of expansive editorial approach that felt natural for us.

MARC BELL: Yes, and backing up a little bit before that, I remember visiting this web press Cullen was using in Lynden, WA (where we were printing Boutique Mag #4) and I had a look at one of these “cow catalogues” they had produced. Which is what you might imagine it is (given the description). I liked the utilitarian look of it, and thought it would be nice to think about making a thick book of weirdness of some kind. Cullen came at me later and said “Would you like to make a cow catalogue?” The book we are discussing today does not much resemble a cheaply printed squarebound publication used to list and sell cattle, but you get the idea.

At what point did you decide on the theme/title of “ALIVE OUTSIDE” and what does that title mean to you? How would you articulate its theme?

MB: I remember talking to Cullen on the phone while walking around Victoria, BC during said pandemic, we had been discussing the idea of an anthology a little bit more, and he suggested the name “ALIVE OUTSIDE”.

CB: We were looking to cultivate something that comes from an alternative, underground, or outsider orientation. The title emerged early on in creating our initial invitation list, recognizing a feral vitality forming a connective thread between everyone. The artists we were drawn to were all working in highly stylized ways which they had developed on their own terms, and not generally while working as part of a scene or an easily described movement.

art by Roman Muradov

This may fall under the category of a question not worth answering because the answers could end up just being a statement of the obvious, but I am curious if you were conceiving the work that you are presenting as existing / emanating / emerging from Outside of anything – or any relations – in particular, such as: status quo, normative reality; the patriarchy; neoliberalism; the body politic; something else? Or is it simply the obvious, that it is a catch all amorphous “outside,” in that it is the creation of “outsiders” – as in outsider art, Albert Camus, S.E. Hinton, The Ramones (“I’m an outsider, outside of everything”), etc. Or do you believe that “true / authentic” creativity by definition must exist outside to be authentic, that any and all artistic work created inside the matrix of capitalism is automatically simply a replication of the relations of capital ( à la Marx). Or did none of these thoughts ever even enter your mind?

MB: That could be too complicated a question for me, however, I am sure some of these ideas you are suggesting could have come into play as an undercurrent that would be difficult for me to articulate. I will leave that to the academics like you, Bill! I kid.

CB: It’s interesting that you (Bill) feel compelled to consider this book as a political statement. Political tracts are another part of my publishing practice, which I keep separate from Neoglyphic, but I am very interested in the manifesto as a literary form; this didactic way of sharing information in the most succinct way you can imagine, or trying to convey some sort of utopic vision for the world. I wouldn’t say that there’s an explicit political message here, but certainly many editorial decisions were informed by my own political convictions, and in describing the book as a “wood pulp manifesto for the messy comedy of creation”, my intention was to use this loaded political language to provoke viewers to view it also as a political statement.

Do you have any particular views of this work vis à vis gallery and museum supported definitions of art and/or conversely folk art? Do you embrace one or the other? Are you antagonistic towards either? Do you see [this] work as a bridge between the two? Do you relate art production to class struggle in any way shape or form?

MB: I am antagonistic towards the “art world” in a general sense but I am not antagonistic towards ART (or what I consider to be good art). There are interesting factions operating within the art world though of course. How couldn’t there be? The barrier of outsider art/folk art is a bit troubling. I feel a kinship with a lot of outsider art/folk art but I could never be considered part of it I suppose. I went to art school. Is that the line? I don’t know. Now I will also have to look up the established distinction between “folk” and “outsider” artists. Maybe this book is a version of the proof that these things can all coexist naturally? Or interestingly? Or maybe it points to the fact that some cartoonists could be considered folk or outsider artists, ha.

CB: I’ve always seen myself as a kind of fringe character in relationship to the art world. I’m a voracious student, but I’ve never had a formal higher education in art or otherwise, and have lived most of my life in rural settings. I often consider my art practice more closely aligned with farming or gardening than how I see my peers in publishing approach their work, and my days in the studio are often broken up by fits of tree pruning, hole digging, or bush watering.

MB: We have made private jokes about how this book is a “hillbilly” (i.e.: North American) version of some of these sophisticated European “art comics” anthologies. And it does sort of look that way. I did not grow up in the bush. But I come from a line of farmers in Ontario. My mother told me the other day that her grandfather had brought a potato over to Canada from Ireland and that was a big deal of some kind.

CB: I do think that comics share something with folk art, both traditionally being accessible media forms, and in that a singular creator, often working repetitiously with simple tools, can create something that then passes beyond their creator’s scope to become part of a vernacular expression.

I would interject here that a case can be made that all self-published and many small-press comics – especially those made not-for-profit – are folk art, or at least could be considered as such; and certainly many of the mainstream, standard newsstand comic books as well, especially pre-1965, before anyone started getting overly self-conscious about them; specifically, folk art under – or within – capitalism.

And, speaking of capitalism, do you view the Neoglyphic project in general and ALIVE OUTSIDE in particular as working towards ways to preserve personal expression to protect it from the depredations of capital and/or public funding, of having to grovel for grants, to create work that matches donor needs and expectations that dominate on the one hand – and the mass marketplace lowest common denominator demands on the other. Where is the happy medium (in all senses of the word) for art today – is that the definition of “ALIVE OUTSIDE”. And as a corollary, does art that is sincerely personal and not made with an eye towards remuneration then by definition have to be made for and is only able to be appreciated by a small audience? One that is personally connected to the sources of inspiration and what is being addressed?

CB: Neoglyphic Media has always been about exploring art publishing on my own terms, reaching for those ambitious projects that would not be made otherwise, and having accountability to nobody but the artists that I’m working with. Receiving funding for this work would be a welcome relief from the hustle, but it would necessarily require some shift of focus that I’m currently not willing or able to make. Certainly there’s an ethic to my publishing practice, but perhaps it’s more simply a circumstance that the work that most interests me tends to be these idiosyncratic visions of artists working outside of any space for arts funding. I hope that I can help to shape the context around these artists, so that their work may reach a mass audience by comparison to what they would be doing on their own. ALIVE OUTSIDE certainly follows this logic, bringing numerous artists back to the front who have been out of circulation for years, or using this rather elaborate publication to introduce artists who have never been widely in print before. For better or for worse, I return again and again to the common refrain: insane, but not impossible.

MB: I am happy if the book kicks at something or inspires these thoughts, Bill. Can you tell me your read on it? What is it doing? I have always found the write ups on your site very thoughtful. And maybe that is enough but please elaborate if you care to.

I think that a big part of my experience of reading ALIVE OUTSIDE – and what makes it stand out – is that the contributions feel less like assignments that have been turned in and more like conversations freely given; less like going to a group show at a gallery and more like being at a party with the artists – or, perhaps more accurately, a synthesis of the two. Less inhibited, more intimate. More concerned with communicating, less concerned with reception. Or, in the current academic argot, prioritizing strengthening community resiliency over building community capacity.

It struck me also that these aspects just identified arose organically out of the process of its making. How much resemblance did your original conception have to what ended up being the finished product? Was it close or did the final form take shape during the process of its coming into being? If the latter, how did it evolve, morph and/or mutate as it went on? Any notable turning points?

MB: I get really OCD about figuring out the order of material in books I’m editing. Deciding which goes after whatever else. I love to do it. So I either had to do *all of that*, the whole deal, or none at all. And so I left that up to Cullen. I would look at it here and there and make suggestions but it appeared to be something taking shape that I did not need to fuss with. So that was probably a healthy move on my part, letting go of that, ha. Oh wait, but I did mostly organize the material in the “Alive And Outside #1” section. And the location of that section was dictated by what Cullen was doing.

CB: It really felt like it became its own thing as factors beyond our control began to shape it from the first submissions we received. A significant number of submissions came in that didn’t fit our requested parameters, and then technical difficulties with production forced us to change our approach. The final result of the book was nothing we could have designed from conception.

How did you conceive of the relationship of form to content? Did one take precedence over the other? Were they in a constant state of organic back and forth.

CB: The editorial direction was initially inspired by a series of books I was printing through a nearby small town newspaper publisher who operate an offset web press, one of those incredible warehouse-sized presses that blasts out about 2-3 signatures per second. Marc and I had previously collaborated, using this press to publish his Boutique Mag #4, which was one book in a series of experimental magazine-sized newsprint books in a series I collectively refer to as “Po-Mo Pulp”. This series also included books with Lale Westvind, Leomi Sadler, Drew Miller, Matt Lock, Stefan Gruber, and Amanda Vähämäki. I was looking to retire this series, but wanted to do something monumental with this printer to signal the end of an era. In my initial invite to artists, I mentioned that I’d be using this same printer and the same paper, but after some staff layoffs that affected the production quality, I didn’t feel confident in this method being used for a longer-form book.

Clearly the printing and production of the book was a challenge. Did you think right at the start “we want to have multiple inserts and different paper stocks, etc.” or did that come about largely – or at least partially – in response to the material you received and/or an evolving conception of what you were making?

MB: I had a huge hand in the editorial process and I had an invisible hand and visible hand in some of the production (I coloured Joey Haley’s strips for example) but this was his brainchild in regard to the unique form of the book. I would have thought it too expensive an idea or impossible (the smaller booklets bound in) but it turns out it was very doable.

CB: There had been the idea from the beginning of considering the book signature-by-signature, with the majority of the book produced using full-color CMYK offset, but also employing the Risograph in my home studio to produce some spot color signatures. The shifts in format were always in service of finding the best way to present work produced in different mediums or at different original sizes. In the end, the Risograph only ended up being used to produce some of the extra materials that were created for pre-orders, but my work with it definitely informed the use of Pantone colors and the exact shape emerged as we went.

MB: Cullen was going to print signatures of different types (offset, webpress, etc) and then have them bound by a third party. I said “whoa nelly, you should look at just one printer”. And, thankfully, he did. That would have been too much.

CB: Yeah, this is something I’d really like to do with a future project, but at some point in this project I had to pivot and throw out earlier assumptions about production methods, and we started to look at the initial submissions as the starting point. In that sense, form dictated what we first sought out, but from there, the first submissions directed how things would ultimately develop.

Kramers Ergot and Mould Map struck me as the most obvious precursors for ALIVE OUTSIDE. Did you have those and/or any others in mind as models, inspiration? Were there certain things that you were motivated to do/try as a result of NOT seeing them in earlier anthologies? As in: There needs to be X; Why hasn’t anyone done Y? We should try; There’s not enough Z in comics.

CB: Both the anthologies you named were big inspirations for me, but I knew this thing would be strongest if it didn’t try to be a reboot of anything that preceded it. Rather than trying to make an updated version of anything, it was important to me that it got a chance to grow up with its own DNA. In selling the book through his Domino webstore, Austin English noted that ALIVE OUTSIDE gave him a similar feeling to looking at Kramers Ergot 4, which I think is an interesting comparison, because they’re on the surface very different books, but both make similar leaps in connecting things that may not usually be seen together.

MB: For me this probably has something to do with trying to recapture that early 2000s excitement, the world when Kramers Ergot was first coming out. And The Ganzfeld. That was a very interesting time to have been a part of. And working on this also reminded me of how many comics “start-ups” I have been a part of. It’s been many. I was folded into the gang at Highwater Books and then started working with Buenaventura Press at their outset and then was able to tinker a bit in the Picturebox enterprise. I edited Rudy at the outset of 2dCloud. So, this was interesting to me to lend a hand to this. For me it’s all been a big interesting struggle to get back to 2004. So, thanks to Neoglyphic Media I could chip away further, ha. And: I like editing things.

How did the editing/curation proceed?

CB: We started by making a list of people we were in contact with; people making incredible stuff, who had a strong practice of drawing. We talked about A LOT of people, and added more names to the list than we could ever conceivably invite. From there we started thinking about whose work connected to each other, and worked redactively to come up with an initial list to send a first round of invitations to.

MB: Yes, I knew that the first wave of submissions would not do it and I knew we’d need another round. I think it came out two or more years after that initial call out? I’m not sure. Things always take longer than you’d expect. …But anyway to the point: we were trying to strike some kind of balance with the book and present some interesting “new” combination of things. I had been seeing this amazing work on Instagram by relative unknowns in the world of comics (at that time). So it was interesting to place people like Becchi Ayumi Bessho and Jordan Rae Herron alongside more established people like Julie Doucet and J. Bradley Johnson. Becchi isn’t really someone who makes comics per se. I guess I would call them “bookworks”. Eden Veaudry, in a way, seems the furthest from the world of comics and yet she still has those cartoon-y mouse characters in there and her work brings to mind Joseph Yoakum and the comics adjacent Chicago Imagists (there, perfect for a cover, it’s a great cover). Angela Fanche was a known entity at this point but it seemed important to have her work in the book. She seems to represent part of that new school of New York comics. And then later I thought Bridget Trout would be a good addition. By the time we reached that point it had become a pretty interesting line up. Trout was the lynchpin in a way, the final puzzle piece. This does not mention all the steps, that would be dizzying.

CB: Yeah, as Marc is saying, we didn’t have a singular vision for this book from the outset, and there were multiple rounds of invitations sent out as we got a sense for what was missing. The idea is that it would do more than just collect either of our ideas of “the best” work being created in a particular mode or within a singular cultural space. It was a push and pull of looking at the thing again and again, and discussing what was missing, and who we were aware of that could bring that missing element to the table. In some way, I think we found ourselves trying to be comprehensive of many different currents running through contemporary drawing and book arts, but always turned our attention to those who were pushing at the edges.

Did you have certain people (artists creators) in mind from the word go? As in, was the conception of the project inseparable from their involvement?

MB: I think there were some artists that I thought I could contact that would give us something. Some are people I would consider to be peers. And there were others that I hoped would. Most of those came through remarkably. I was turned down by a couple but that’s ok. Everybody can’t do everything.

Did you have any of the work already at hand BEFORE the idea for the anthology came into being? As in: we have (or have access to) this great work, what should we do with it?

MB: I don’t believe there was, not that I can recall. Cullen, is there anything in there you had premeditated? Oh wait, I guess I should look closer to home: I think we did throw around the idea of printing some of my collaborations with Christian Schumann.

CB: There had even been some back-and-forth about the possibility of printing those collaborative works with Christian Schumann. After learning of them, they seemed emblematic of what was emerging, and I pressed Marc to prod Christian further to send these back through the mail and bring these drawings to print after years of dormancy.

Another way of asking this is: did the existence of certain work provide some of the impetus for the project?

MB: I suppose it did in some general way? Maybe just the sense that something could be done with what was around. Then when you arrive at the nerve to ask someone like Trenton Doyle Hancock to give us something, and he does, that eggs you on. It then egged on Cullen to the point where he went further (thankfully) and was able to get those vegan city drawings that are in the book. Initially it was only going to be the painting printed on the poster included with the book. Cullen also had the nerve to contact The Susan Te Kahurangi King Trust and that was quite something to be able to publish some of that stuff.

CB: Yes, I’ve been very grateful for the opportunity to include this selection by Susan Te Kahurangi King. I’m thankful to Petita Cole, who is the younger sister of Susan, for the invaluable assistance she provided. She is intimately familiar with Susan’s oeuvre, from childhood to her most recent work, and has been working with curators and writers for years. I had seen some of the drawings Susan had done in the 70s, drawn on discarded column templates from her father’s work, and was really fascinated by their strange resonance with the panel vocabulary of comics. Petita drew my attention to the breadth of this body of work, and our selection became a focal point to the later half of the book, sparking on numerous themes that appear throughout the book. Additionally, Marc had learned of numerous people in possession of various bodies of work from Joe Grillo, including Ben Furgal, a guy from Philadelphia who had traveled to Virginia Beach to meet with Joe and scan a few of his sketchbooks. Ben edited a really nice historical sketchbook project Miles of Slime and Smiles, which collected many drawings that were used to compose Joe’s pages in Paper Rodeo. There was a bunch of work that had been scanned from another sketchbook which I was able to pull from to create the Joe Grilo section in ALIVE OUTSIDE.

How has the reception of the book been so far? How have you been promoting it?

CB: It’s been a runaway in some respects. It’s the largest project that I’ve published through Neoglyphic to date, and it seems like it’s still gaining momentum, even as it’s nearing sold out. There’s a lot behind the material included in this collection, and there’s a lot more that I want to say about it, and the artists involved, so I started a Substack to write some longer blog posts and dive deeper into the work in ALIVE OUTSIDE, and future publications.

What comics shows/expos/etc. have you done so far?

CB: We launched this book in November 2024 with a back-to-back series of events, starting at Seattle’s Short Run Comix Fest, which is the closest thing I have to a hometown show, then I did a one-day popup at a bar in my actual hometown in Chimacum. That was incredibly fun, because it was the first time anyone had made a book fair there, and there were about five publishers set up in a converted feed trough. After that I pushed off for Europe and attended A Ocche Aperti in Bologna, Italy, and Graphix in Antwerp, Belgium the following weekend.

I saw that you did a series of European events with it. Was there any notable differences in its reception, people's reactions, and/or general vibe surrounding comics in Europe vs North America?

CB: I was invited to premiere ALIVE OUTSIDE at the Graphix Festival in Antwerp, Belgium, which spurred me to make the trip overseas. Marc was already in Europe at the time for a residency, so we were able to meet there, and give the book a nice welcome to the world. I was very impressed by the European festivals that I attended. There just seems to be such a deeper interest in comics, and the organization of festivals shows that consideration. In the USA it seems like there’s one model for festivals, and it’s just a marketplace, but in Europe the marketplace aspect has much less emphasis, and the programming will include exhibitions in really nice venues, performances, films, and activities that get people talking a lot more.

I was a bit surprised by the view of ALIVE OUTSIDE when arriving in Belgium. I thought we’d created this kind of sophisticated thing, but numerous Europeans remarked, or described it as ‘low brow’, which makes sense, really, when you compare it to the Belgian tradition of comics stemming from Hergé and the ligne claire gang.

Any upcoming shows?

CB: I’ve got a few shows planned for the next couple months, including the Seattle and Los Angeles Art Book Fairs in May, then heading to Europe for Miss Read Art Book Fair in Berlin, and the legendary CRACK at Forte Prenestino outside of Rome!

Let's talk about the sequencing. There is a definite DJ vibe to the way the pieces are arranged. Clearly, the segue is important. How did you go about figuring out the sequence for ALIVE OUTSIDE?

CB: I love playing DJ for friends’ parties, and I’m always hyped when I get asked to, even though I don’t really know what I’m doing. It’s a lot of fun to work out the progression of an experience, and I have been making seasonal mixtapes for the last decade, mostly just as temporal emotional markers for myself. I’ve also been booking and hosting all-ages concerts for just as long, and since 2017 have been curating a 3-day multimedia art festival called Sh’BANG, which is held on the land where I live. Marc’s been out for it.

I think the approach that I took in sequencing ALIVE OUTSIDE was just like that of creating a mixtape or booking a festival: beginning with a zoomed out perspective until I can understand the macrocosm of the underlying story that exists, then drawing my focus in tighter and tighter on the pieces and their relationships. The segue is important on the journey, but for me the narrative is built more through repeating motifs, or arcs in tempo or dynamic. This is really what I’m after.

MB: Yes, the book does work that way, a good “mix”. Like I mentioned earlier, I left Cullen to it except for the arrangement in the Alive And Outside #1 “comics magazine” inside the book though we still had some discussions about the order of that and who would be in it. The mag did not come out as pronounced as we had hoped, with some unexpected paper results. Dems the breaks.

Did you try it first one way and then another? Did any certain segues jump right out at you? As in, This piece has to follow that piece, it makes perfect sense!

CB: The latest drawings Dylan Jones is making, strike me as an immediate descendant from the work that Susan Te Kahurangi King was making in the 70s, and I wanted to show them together and make the link between their approaches to figurative drawing, showing twisted or disfigured bodies, and using many visual motifs of comics or illustrated children’s books, but warping them in unexpected ways. Of course there’s the whole section of abstract landscape drawings, which is kicked off by Andy Cahill, then leads into Lucas Weidinger, Marc Bell and Christian Schumann, and Trenton Doyle Hancock running it home.

At what stage during the project did some pieces being printed as smaller sized inserts come up? How was that determined?

CB: The selection of drawings from Joe Grillo had been directly inspired by Joe’s trip to Japan, and I had already been playing around with the idea of presenting this work like a manga from another universe, printed in all purple. Joe was really into this idea, and so I started prototyping it this way. Julien Ceccaldi’s work clearly plays off of manga, so it felt like it worked to produce it also as a smaller insert. One of Kari Cholnoky’s digital collages already referenced a painting from Julien, so linking them came naturally. Poncili Creacion are puppeteers, and this being the first publication of their drawings, the work they sent didn’t meet the publication specifications, so an insert it would be!

What’s next for each of you? Anything in the pipeline? Any plans for an ALIVE OUTSIDE 2?

CB: There are certainly a lot of new threads to be followed from ALIVE OUTSIDE. Most immediately there are a few upcoming exhibitions with some of the contributors. In May, Marc and I are organizing an exhibition for Theo Ellsworth at Lucky’s Comics in Vancouver, BC, and I’m working with Dylan Jones to exhibit some of his work at a space called PARTLY in Portland, OR. Beyond that, there will be a few new books coming out from Neoglyphic Media this Spring, including publications from Bridget Trout (who contributed to ALIVE OUTSIDE), Juliette Collet, and WURE.

MB: Yes, and there will also be an exhibition of Becchi Ayumi Bessho ay Lucky’s in June. So another extension of ALIVE OUTSIDE. And I have plans to produce a small booklet in relation to it. I’ve been helping Lucky’s with curation this year so it’s no surprise there would be an overlap in the choices.

CB: As for an ALIVE OUTSIDE 2, we’re both interested in further editorial collaborations, but this thing was such a monument, I’m not so sure that it makes sense to posit anything as a direct successor. It’s more likely to grow out as many splintering pieces. I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but I think it’s safe to say that this won’t be the last word from Beckhorn and Bell.

OK, I hear that. Thank you for your time. Looking forward to seeing what grows out of this project…

Cullen Beckhorn is the flesh and blood reality behind the cultural construct known as Neoglyphic Media.

Marc Bell is the author of Worn Tuff Elbow, Boutique Mag, Stroppy, Hot Potatoe [sic], Pure Pajamas, and Shrimpy and Paul and Friends. He has also been active in self-publishing and “the small press” for decades, producing countless other “limited edition” booklets. His comics have appeared in Kramers Ergot, The Ganzfeld, New York Times Magazine, The LA Weekly and many Canadian monthlies and weeklies. He has edited several books including Joe Hale’s Love And Forgiveness, Mark Connery's Rudy, and the anthology Nog A Dod (Prehistoric Canadian Psychedoolia). He recently co-edited ALIVE OUTSIDEwith Neoglyphic Media and was awarded 2nd place for the design of his latest book Raw Sewage Science Fiction in Comics / Graphic Novels / Bande dessinées in The Alcuin Society’s 42nd annual Awards for Excellence in Book Design in Canada. His work was recently exhibited at Le Sterput (Brussels, BXL) and Fatbottom Books (Barcelona, SP). Marc Bell is currently living and working in Vancouver, BC

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