‘You can do all kinds of weird stuff if you’re delivering the goods’: The Zander Cannon Interview

1 month ago 13

Jake Zawlacki | February 20, 2025

At first glance, Zander Cannon's work might look unassuming. Colorful, simplified rendering, and in Cannon's own words, "cartoony." But don't let that fool you. His work digs into the deepest thoughts and emotions of human (and sometimes Kaiju) experience. It's this disarming style that invites the reader into a tranquil calm before subverting those expectations with both the absurd and profound. Beyond his art style, his writing is equally excellent. His characters are not only complex, but follow arcs that satisfy. His balance of pacing, exposition, and world-building is the stuff of envy. And he always delivers on his setups.

There is something beyond this duality of Cannon as artist and Cannon as writer, however, in a less appreciated skill within our beloved medium. He possesses an elemental understanding of the comic page. He'll be the first to deny it—his humility too genuine to truly consider himself a master—but mastery is no superlative when describing his work.

As we discuss in this interview, Cannon began his career in mainstream comics drawing layouts for Alan Moore and Gene Ha's Top 10. While drawing layouts certainly isn't as sexy as drawing covers or pinups, it was this journeyman experience as a "layout specialist" for over a decade that has in part led to his comfortable control of the form. On a fundamental level, every panel is engaging. Whether there's an unexpected Easter Egg that garners a laugh, the perfect distance from a character in a melancholy moment, or a neutral framing to allow for a totally insane event to take place, his instinct is always right. And he makes it look effortless.

In both mainstream comics and his creator-owned work, we find the many stories Cannon has been a part of—either in his writing, art, layouts, collaboration, or some combination thereof—as greater than the sum of their otherwise individual parts. It's this intimate understanding of what makes comics comics that leads to such strong, and affecting work. As we know, being an artist who does comics is different than being a comic artist. Zander Cannon is an excellent comic artist.

Zander and I were able to talk about his career, work, and philsophy while grabbing lunch during San Diego Comic Con at Louisiana Charlie's in Seaport Village. The catfish po'boy lived up to my Louisiana standards for Cajun food, Zander enjoyed his brisket sandwich, and we had the following fruitful discussion.

To look at your work thematically — I'm thinking of Chainsaw Vigilante, I think that was your first published work.

Yeah, that's right.

You also did shorts in Negative Burn, which had some Replacement God prequels, but also some standalone one- or two-pagers. And then Replacement God. What are some themes that have carried out throughout your career? What questions are you interested in?

I guess from the very start, I always wanted to do stuff that was satirical. I chanced into Chainsaw Vigilante, which is a satire from the start, through The Tick. I never could really get it together to write a straight superhero thing.

Every chance I've had at Marvel or DC, they're kind of like, "Hmm, that was ... fine. We'll call you." I don't love the idea of, let's just sort of give people another 20 pages, then another 20 pages, then another 20 pages of this superhero's life or whatever without ever wrapping it up. I can see the beauty in it, sort of. But I also am — if you're a student of writing, you kind of want to be like, "All right. Let's wrap this sucker up. Tie it up with a bow." And that's terrible for sales, because you want them to buy the next month.

Are you skeptical of superheroes?

Skeptical of them? Not in general, but I think that when that's all there is, it's really tiring. I love superheroes. They're super fun. It's such an American thing, which I think is kind of interesting. But it's not like Reese's Peanut Butter Cups with me — I don't like superheroes in my other stuff. [Laughs] I'm skeptical of superhero stuff that's too adult, or isn't at least a little bit funny. Or if you have something like — did you ever read The 'Nam in the 80s? There's a Marvel series by a Vietnam vet. It was drawn by Michael Golden.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

It was really great. But I think that at a certain point the writing was on the wall, sales-wise, and they're like, "We're going to have this soldier dream about Captain America fighting the Vietcong." And I was like, "God, just let superheroes be superheroes, and let Vietnam sort-of-memoirs be Vietnam sort-of-memoirs." [Laughs]

When you started, you came out of the black and white explosion of the '80s. Is that more of an influence? I'm trying to think if there's a dichotomy between that moment and the "graphic novel" for adults, like Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, things like that. Do you see that as a separate thing?

I liked all that stuff. I liked Watchmen. I liked Dark Knight. I liked all that stuff. And I was reading everything; if it had some quality, I was going to like it. I mean, Groo the Wanderer was the best comic that was coming out. It was so consistent. It was so good. It was a genre piece that was funny; I loved that. There was another series called Ralph Snart Adventures by Mark Hansen that was basically this guy who's in an insane asylum dreams his way into a different genre story every issue. That's just, that's heaven. It's the best. And you can make fun of all that. You can make fun of all the tropes, but then you can also deliver an adventure, within that framework. I thought that kind of stuff was so much more fun than your standard stuff at Marvel and DC, unless it had a great artist. Unless it was Excalibur. [Laughs]

Early on you did a lot of jam comics. How did those come about?

In the early 2000s, Minneapolis had a very strong artist community, and we were doing a lot of jam comics that were going up online. That stuff was kind of fun. I don't know how I came up with the energy after a full day of drawing stuff, and then they'd be like, "You know what we should do now? Draw." "Oh."

But it was fun. It was good. It was social and stuff like that. I like jam comics, and I like collaborating in general. I think that that stuff is really fun, even though the work that I really end up enjoying is usually when I'm the sole creator, lettering it and coloring it and everything. I don't know what that says about me.

[Laughs] I'll ask you about that in a bit, but how do you go from working on independent titles in your early 20s and just starting out and then working with Alan Moore?

I mean, it was crazy. Chiefly, I was working with Gene Ha because he and I were sharing a studio. He was in town with me, and so I was taking these pretty, legendarily-dense scripts and parsing them out as artwork. At the time, I thought, "I'm just here to speed things up." I came to realize that that's not really true. What I brought to Top 10 was more that it made the storytelling very matter of fact. I wouldn't say workmanlike, but documentarian style. Because Gene, I think, as much as he's a realist in his rendering, is a 90s cartoonist. He wants to have that punch, and he wants to have that wild, fisheye lens shot. I was the one being the buzzkill and saying, "No, we've got to have this pretty neutral shot because something extremely weird is happening." Or all these characters are meant to be perceived one by one.

So, how'd you meet Gene?

He and I did a signing at a store near Purdue University. It was the first time that anybody had really asked me to do a signing, so I was pretty young, probably 25 or so. And Gene is just a couple years older than I am, and I knew his work, so it was fun to chit-chat with him; the signing wasn't exactly mobbed or anything. He had some people coming up and talking to him, but nobody really knew who I was, and so we had a lot of time to just talk, so we were friendly. Then coincidentally he was moving up to the Twin Cities for a different reason. I think he was just looking for a change and he was going to collaborate on Top 10 with somebody else, and that fell through for whatever reason. Then I was top of mind, I guess.

Originally, this guy was going to do backgrounds, and so Gene asked me if I wanted to do that, and I'm like, I don't know if I've got the chops to do Gene Ha's backgrounds, you know what I mean? But I feel like I'm a strong – or at that point, getting to be a stronger–storyteller, so I could do layouts and design. I could design these pages and give him a running start because all of his stuff is so time-intensive and "high-budget," as it were. That's a lot of rendering on someone's hair if they're one inch too far to the left. That was a learning thing, too. I draw backgrounds of buildings just as boxes. He draws them as fully rendered things, so do not put them in if they're not absolutely necessary.

You were trying to save him time as you're doing it, too.

Yeah, and I think that was really fruitful once we got it down. Because there were a couple tries at a couple different approaches. You can see in the earlier issues where it's like, Oh, I drew that whole section. But like, it doesn't match, or it was easier just for me to do the first part, him to do the second part.

I really look back at Top 10 as being a game changer in terms of one of the checkboxes you have to have in a career, which is: why does anybody know your name? I can do all the indie books I want, and maybe people will have heard about that, but it's like, Oh, if you work with Alan Moore, you're vetted. In a way, it's nice that that's kind of all it is. People don't really ask me about Top 10 anymore. I'm happy that I have other stuff that people want to ask me about. And it's obviously more relevant to me as a person.

How did Alan Moore's writing affect yours? I saw some Kaijumax scripts, but they don't look like Batman: The Killing Joke scripts.

[Laughs] Well, when I wrote the Kaijumax script, it was not originally for me. It was for Ryan Browne. But even then, I was probably trying to hold back. I do like to write detailed scripts. And I think that Alan Moore was instrumental in that, in that his scripts typically described a limited number of layouts, because you only need a limited number of layouts, especially to tell a story that's that type of genre story. That really helped when I was interpreting these excellent scripts into layouts. I started seeing the rhythm of these pages that I'm creating out of his sheet music, so to speak. And that really helped me sort of figure that out. He was such a good writer and when he's working within a really narrow framework, this sort of cop drama, it's nice to perceive those tropes of the cop drama and lean into them, play them up rather than have to fight against them at every turn.

So you do the layouts for Top 10, then you're the artist on Smax, which Moore writes. And then you're the writer and artist of Top 10: Season Two with Gene Ha. It's like a fast track mentorship program to professional comics publishing. [Cannon laughs] What would you tell yourself now if you could go back to that person who's just about to start doing layouts on the first issue of Top 10?

Yeah, I would say enjoy it. Enjoy it a little bit more and realize you don't have to over deliver. You can just do what's asked of you.

Were you trying to impress Alan and Gene?

I mean, sure, but I think I was trying to encroach on Gene's part of the art. He and I have a different aesthetic and I was probably trying to make the art more grounded. He was trying to make it more like the way he makes it. I think that there was a little bit of push-pull there. And I could have backed off an inch and I think I would have been happier. He would have been happier. I did, I just would have done it earlier.

At some point you become a "layout specialist." There are tons and tons of books where you're credited with "Layouts" or "Special Thanks." How does one become a layout specialist, and are those projects as creatively satisfying?

They aren't as creatively satisfying, but when I was doing all those layouts, I was writing and drawing Heck. I had my thing that I was working on. I was only working on it one day a week so I'd work on that on Monday and then I would do layouts all the rest of the week. The layouts were great practice because, at my slowest, I would do four in a day and at my fastest, I might do ten. You get really good at noticing the limited number of layouts that you end up using, but also that there's a vocabulary to it. When you're working on it really fast, you can get a sense for how people are going to be reading it. When you're not doing all the finished artwork, you don't get lost in the weeds.

It's fun to have those documents sitting in a three ring binder somewhere too. To go one extra step so that they can be their own document. In a way I was doing things that were not necessary for the artist, but they were nice for me where I can feel like my job is done here. I was over delivering on those a little bit, but it was really for my own satisfaction. It's essentially for my archives.

I'm sure as a freelancer, it's nice to have a job like that, where you're not giving your heart and soul every day.

Oh, yeah. Boy, I never thought about it over the weekend. [Laughs] And nobody ever needed it after five o'clock. I was doing it for an audience of one or two, and the editor was always delighted. They're like, "Oh, you saved our butts." And I was like, "Well, that's all I needed to hear."

I had a bunch of friends who found out about this and were like, "What is the matter with you? We need to get you penciling a DC book or something." And I just ... I tried. One of the things about Top 10, Smax, and all that stuff was that I found out that was the only place that DC or mainstream comics wanted to have me, which is working with Gene Ha. I tried so hard to do pencils. I tried so hard to do inks or writing. There was just no place for it. My artwork was too cartoony. That's what everybody would say, or it was too idiosyncratic or it was too odd. That was really frustrating and hard to do. Then when I found this place where it's like, Oh, I can do this for layouts, have an in at DC, and know all these editors. That's really kind of the perfect interaction with that big company. I didn't have to be disappointed that it got colored weird. I turned in what I turned in and everyone else can do whatever they want.

Do you think you could have had a career in mainstream comics working with Gene Ha?

I mean, I was doing layouts for just random artists for years, so I could definitely have done it with Gene. That kind of stuff was a lot of fun, and it's fun to see great art come out of it. But I like that Gene and I come back to drawing and writing things together only every once in a while, when it's appropriate to the work. Something a little off-kilter, something a little heady, that doesn't necessarily need to deliver the usual goods.

About your style. I've heard your work described as "charmingly out of whack"—which is great—and you've also said your drawings are "more like ideas." Why cultivate an aesthetic like this? Did you ever consider changing it to try and fit it into popular mainstream comics?

Obviously. I tried all the time. [Both laugh] It's like, who's popular? Let's try it. Let's try to get those muscles more striated or whatever and it just never worked. Or I could do it for a couple of pages and then it's just, I'd have to throw someone in the background and they would be a goofy looking weirdo, you know? I wanted to work. I wanted to get that regular job, but it was sort of too early, in terms of aesthetics. Those licensed books of cartoon shows were years off at that point. If I wanted to draw Green Lantern, I was going to have to sort of study Gene or Alex Ross or Brian Bolland or whomever. Whoever it is that was the gold standard for that dynamic realism style. I just couldn't do it. I couldn't do it at that kind of volume.

But eventually you did work on licensed properties. You worked with Transformers, Star Trek: The Next Generation and an issue of Simpsons with Gene. But they read differently than your creator-owned work. It seemed like Star Trek and Transformers, especially, felt very close to their TV counterparts, more like screenplays. How was your writing process different? Why do they feel different than your other work and what was it like working on them?

I felt like Star Trek and Transformers were written a little bit more like Top 10 where they were almost like ... the grid came first, and I was going to figure the story out within that. And it's a little bit stiff the way that I did all those layouts — I did the layouts for those as well — and so it has a certain stiffness to it that I think I grew out of a little bit. I was trying to make it like the Transformers show or the Star Trek show. I felt like, Why emulate the comics? I liked the idea that all the limitations of TV made Star Trek the way it is. All those budget conscious special effects forced them to push the story in headier directions, and I wanted to capture that same feeling, even though the limitations were gone. That said, I wanted to do one thing they couldn't do on TV and so I had the aliens have six fingers on each hand. [Laughs] But throughout the rest of the story, I kept doing things like, Oh yeah, they're trapped in a white void, totally saving money in this comic book. [Both laugh]

And they all have these ensemble casts that you're trying to involve. So you can't just follow one person. You've got to get the whole team involved.

I had to make sure there was a medical drama to fit in Dr. Crusher. I had to make sure that there was something about a warrior caste so that Worf would have something to do, and so on. I think that I was probably overdoing it a little bit, but also, these licensed books don't pay very much and they don't get royalties. It's like, I'm not doing this over and over and over again. I'm going to get one shot at this, so I'm going to do it to my satisfaction.

Back to your unlicensed works. They're filled with Easter eggs. Some of the best jokes in Top 10, Kaijumax, and Smax are all in the background. Is there a price you pay when filling a story with Easter eggs?

Other than time? I was late on Smax all the time. Part of it was wanting to give readers more for their money. I mean, Smax to a lesser degree, but Top 10 and Kaijumax are told as fairly serious dramas, even though everything about them is completely silly. When you tell the story as something that basically hits all the classic notes of whatever genre you're doing, you need to have something extra, something unique that essentially justifies its existence. So all the little jokes are there to basically make me feel like the work is complete. The story might be something you've seen before but the gags at least are new. Anyway, I ... it's a problem. It's a sickness. [Laughs] I don't know if there's a cost. I can't not do it.

I'm reminded of Jim Rugg talking about Jamie Hewlett's artwork and how he has doodles in the margins everywhere and there are always these jokes. Rugg was saying that he's making every panel interesting whereas a lot of comic panels are simply not, but it takes a lot of time too.

That's the thing. For Evan Dorkin, one of my favorite cartoonists, you can see his solo work come out less and less over the years because of that very thing. But he's so productive. I subscribe to his Patreon and he generates so much artwork and commentary and all sorts of work, but when you look at his Dork stuff where it just gets so detailed on even just a throwaway panel, you can tell that he crosshatched it for three hours. Sometimes that's hard to see. 'Cause man, I know what you're doing. It hurts. But you can't break away from it. I totally get that.

A last Easter egg note. What are the basic tenets of the Church of the Great Hole in the Ground?

[Laughs] Oh my God.

It shows up in Replacement God, but it's also in Top 10.

I know, I know. Being on a billboard in Top 10, that was at Gene's insistence. He's like, "When else are you going to get a chance to plug your comic in a comic that sells like 30,000 copies?" I'm like, "I don't know, Gene. It seems ... pretty cheap, but I'll do it. Cause you seem to know what you're talking about." And every time I see it in there, I'm like, phew. Seems kinda thirsty.
Anyway, the tenets of the church? I just liked the idea that there would be a church that sort of worships the scariest thing that's around. It's the hole that people keep falling into, you know?

Moving on to work you've done with Kevin Cannon — no relation.

No relation.

What are some of the advantages and disadvantages of creating historical fiction in the comics medium? I'm thinking of Bone Sharps, Cowboys and Thunder Lizards and T-minus: Race to the Moon, both excellent books. Are there any unique challenges to historical fiction?

Well, both those we worked on, we worked with Jim Ottaviani. He's a great writer; he knows his stuff both in terms of the history and in terms of the science. And of course he knows his stuff comics storytelling wise, which is really fun. Some of the things with those —like T-minus — is how do you make a cast of 70 white guys with crew cuts look different? And the answer is maybe you do and maybe you don't, you know? [Laughs] Sometimes we had to just make sure they said their name or whatever, Jack Kirby style. It was nice that all of a sudden we were in a place where our art style — my art style and Kevin's art style, which are similar but not exactly the same — were both celebrated and were the right tool for the job. That made me really really happy. And I love Jim. One thing that was interesting was that when we were doing those, we were always being asked to do adaptations of classic literature and I kept pushing back on that. I was like, I don't want to do ...

Dickens illustrated?

Dickens I might go for, but they wanted us to do Fahrenheit 451 and we didn't do it and then it sold unbelievably well and of course I was kicking myself. My problem was: I get it's recognizable and people will buy it for their teens or whatever, but I just sort of thought I would rather do nonfiction stuff where you explain a concept or you use comics to make this map of ideas. I always thought that was an interesting undertaking rather than just saying, "Well, this is what the main character from Fahrenheit 451 looks like." You know? I didn't like either the cynicism of coming up with an excuse for a new edition, or the arrogance in remaking a classic. It can only be so unique. If you do too much making it unique as a comic, you're moving away from the literary source.

That gets to the "novel graphics" you worked on with Kevin Cannon. I'll admit the DNA one was difficult for me. A little dense.

It was pretty dense. Mark Schultz wrote that and even though he's not a scientist, he was working hand in glove with the people who really knew that stuff. I think he was wanting to really make certain that he didn't leave anything out. It was a lot of fun to work on, but it was a pretty dense one.

Well, it was just complicated. DNA is pretty complicated.

And then Jay Hosler, who wrote the second one, Evolution: The Story of Life on Earth, he's not an evolutionary biologist specifically, but he's a biologist. He studies bees. He's done about a million graphic novels about bees. [Laughs]

That one seemed to loosen up a little bit more. There's more of a playful tone to it.

The ideas of evolution are probably less complex. We really liked the editor we worked with at FSG, Thomas Lebien. Those were fun work. Kevin and I really liked working together.

When I taught college composition, the Understanding Rhetoric book you both worked on was discussed as a legitimate book to teach.

That was an interesting one. That was one of the first times that we were brought in as experts, as collaborators who were kind of shaping how the book would really work, rather than illustrators. The writers, Liz Losh and Jon Alexander, were really interested in comics both as reading materials and teaching tools, but they were savvy enough to know that we'd been doing it a lot longer. So they gave us scripts with panel descriptions and dialogue, but no page breaks: basically each chapter would be something like 90-100 panels, and we'd make the decisions on how to break them up. Since we weren't being paid by the page, and there was no specific page count to the book, we could put it together however it flowed best. We also did a lot of Marvel-style mini-edits, where a clear panel can make a line of dialogue redundant, and they were very happy to go along with that kind of stuff. It was quite a fun collaboration.

How do you co-draw together?

When we broke it down most cleanly, I would pencil, and then I would ink the characters and he would letter and then ink the backgrounds. But we did it all different ways. Usually I would have a stronger opinion about the story, the page layout, and I would start it. We could do it anyway we wanted. Kevin would, a lot of times, do a lot of the stuff where it was like: here's an anthropomorphization of an RNA molecule. He was so good at that. [Laughs]

In an introduction to one of these books, it talks about your command of black and white. Almost half your work is in black and white. What's it like to work in black and white versus color?

Well, I've scarcely done anything in black and white for almost ten years, mainly because the work I've been doing hasn't really called for that kind of lighting.

I liked doing Heck in black and white because it was in a world where things are very intentionally and harshly lit, and there are a lot of black backgrounds so it would really work for black and white. It's essentially a supernatural noir, and the black and white art really sells that from the start. For things where it's sort of a neutral environment, on the other hand, being limited to black and white would be very frustrating because instead of being able to put a big black dramatic shadow down somebody's side, you have to acknowledge that they're in a place with lights coming from everywhere so you dial it back and sometimes it can end up looking a little flat.

At the end of Replacement God, I think you mentioned talking about just putting black everywhere. If it was important, just put black.

[Laughs] I think when I said that I was essentially reaching the first inflection point in my improvement as an artist. The idea that you have to do more than imitate what you've seen other people do. I had always struggled with how to stage a scene with depth and volume, how to make something recede into the background, and so when I was working on Replacement God and starting to do enough pages that I was internalizing the basics more and more, that was when I was starting to learn some lessons hat were maybe one step more fundamental. Now, probably 25 years after I said that, I think the answer is a little more nuanced, but it certainly worked as a guide to a young me.

If I were doing The Replacement God again and approaching it as black and white art in that way, I think I would have to relearn a little bit. A lot of it's like: What's your rendering style on a feathered edge? Are you doing that with a pen? Are you doing that with a brush? Are you doing that with a dry brush? Are you doing that in a stylized way like Mike Mignola where there's two little triangles and then a straight line or something? There's a way of freeing myself from having to think about any of that by going to full color. And that change made me enjoy comics a whole lot more because I felt like I could take care of the storytelling stuff first, in the line art phase, and then I wouldn't have to worry about the rendering stuff until the very end. Then I can play with it instead of having it be like, Well, I rendered that shadow this way in ink and that's how it's gonna be because I can't erase it so this is it.

I want to ask about your work for SAGA (Sequential Art via Game Assistance). How long did you work on it and what were some memorable moments?

I worked on it for maybe a year and a half. It was a program through the Department of Defense via DARPA and it was really interesting because I was doing that at the same time as I was doing Heck. I was working on this thing where we were talking about veterans coming back with PTSD, and all these men and women are usually younger people who maybe are not into traditional therapy, but they might have grown up reading comics. There's a sense that we can figure out a way and have this gamified system to tell your story or to tell sections of your story in a visual way. Then you didn't have to put things to words. You just say this thing was here and this thing was here and this is what happened and, for instance, a stick figure with one leg can get your point across without being quite as upsetting.

That was a fascinating project to work on because it had worked to a certain degree for me. I remembered putting a lot of my heart into projects, especially Heck, and working on it so much and accessing those feelings so much to get this story across that it almost became boring, which is a funny thing to say. But this stream of sad emotions became commonplace and I found a place where I was able to access them, but only when I wanted to. They don't go away but they aren't surprising me anymore and so I wanted to do that same thing for people. I don't know. I was only a small part of it, so I didn't really have any control over where the project went or what it did but I really believed in that. I think it's a valuable tool.

How do you understand trauma?

One of the things that we kept talking about in this SAGA thing, especially as a way to appeal to younger vets, was that it's like a dragon. You have to battle it, and even let it consume you and then you come out and you're a little worse for wear. But then you let it consume you again and every time it gets a little smaller, a little smaller, a little smaller, and then in the story we told, it becomes the size of a pet. At that point, you understand where it is and what it can do. Outside the story context, it means that person can avoid and understand triggers. I can avoid this and that, but I'm not going to be surprised by it and I know what it's about. You know that's not completely ideal, but it's a form of wisdom too. I think that it's not necessarily what all stories have to be about but I do think that stories are a way to figure out all of these wild emotions and put them in an understandable order. That's what we were trying to get people to do with their traumas.

Trauma shows up a lot in Heck and Kaijumax. I'm reminded of Freud's conception of trauma where it's these layers of repression you can never really overcome and Alfred Adler's conception where trauma isn't continuously repressed and you can conquer it. I'm oversimplifying this of course, but I'm curious if you think it can be completely erased or, like you're saying, shrunk down to where you understand it better.

My thought is that it can be shrunk down because, well—

—it can't be slain.

Right. Well, I think you wouldn't necessarily want to. I think that's the realm of science fiction where you can say, "Oh, I just deleted this bad thing from my head." And while you don't want it to rule your life so that you're jumping at shadows or that you're yelling at people whenever they make you feel a little off balance. I think that it's important. If someone has trauma, but you work through it enough that it's small and manageable, your life doesn't have to be so limited. You can get to a point that you know certain things – art about that subject, for instance – are going to make you uncomfortable but you don't have to avoid them at all costs. That's just having a bit of knowledge about yourself.

For Heck, how deep did you go into Dante's Inferno?

What's funny about Heck is I never read Dante's Inferno. I was familiar with it but I didn't even read it in college. For one thing, it's so much about the specific people that Dante hates. [Laughs] I was like, "Well, let's just read the map." That was a key thing to mark out equidistant spots where things could happen. I wanted to tie it into this character stuff that I'm creating; I don't want to talk about popes in the 13th century that had done him wrong or whatever. It was a funny thing. It felt like cheating, but not really. A lot of what it was was fighting my hyper-referential impulses that I'd gotten from all the years of Top 10 and just letting myself live in the world. The art has some deep cuts in it, but I really had to remind myself not to try to do the too-cute thing of shouting out every last time – whatever – we see Brutus and Cassius in Satan's mouth. I could just let it be basically what everybody knows about it.

It is so seeped into our culture that everyone's familiar with it.

Yeah and it doesn't have to be about that. I didn't want to say it was about Dante and then give it a really surface reading. In a way I just basically used his world-building. I feel like that was the most useful thing, because it's a deeply unfair system, that tiny mistakes lead to untold suffering, and that's a great world to stick a harrowing adventure into. It was funny too because friends of mine who read it who weren't really familiar with Dante thought I made it all up and they're like, "What's wrong with you?" And I'm just gesturing, passing the buck to the world's most Catholic man of the 13th century.

Were you looking at the Doré engravings?

A little bit. The funny thing is initially he was going to go to every version of hell. It was going to be the ones on Heavy Metal covers and I was going to somehow work in the Buddhist hell but then I was writing the book so fast that I got to the end of the first act break and realized that all I should include is what has been talked about thus far in the story, and Dante's Inferno makes the story a lot tidier. The other thing is: I didn't want it to be a Christian tract at all. I didn't want to have any of that sort of stuff that anything is accomplished by belief or anything like that. I felt it was really important to say here's the world building and here's the lore but everything is going to relate to how it impacts these characters that I've established.

You've mentioned this was a personal book for you.

When I was working on that book, we were trying to have a baby and we couldn't. We had miscarriages and it was just endless. It was traumatic and it was super sad and then when we started the adoption process, that came with its own challenges and hard times. We adopted our son when the book was about half finished. He was a toddler while I was writing some of the stuff where this guy is taking care of his friend who's a tiny little mummy. There was a lot of real life and real parental anxiety that powers some of the sad moments in the book.

Writing and drawing and lettering takes a while. You're going through it over and over and over and over again and it really was exhausting, which is why I was really happy that I didn't pencil the book all the way through, and then ink the book all the way through. I penciled and inked and lettered as I went. It was just "bashing" my way through this novel. It was a journey. It was really tough. It probably took me six years to make, off and on. The process was so exhausting and emotionally raw at times – just because the art was so simple that I could do several pages in one sitting–that then by the time I finished the book I was really relieved to put a lot of that aside and stop thinking about it.

The car crash part is really tough.

I mean, there's that absurdity there and I think that when it's absurd on the face of it, I think that sometimes it lets you get into it more. It's not trying to spook you or shock you; it's just a cartoon tree man but then once you've gotten sucked into the conversation it hits you with the old existential angst one-two punch.

In thinking about the souls in Heck and the kaiju and Kaijumax, does evil exist?

I don't know. From a practical standpoint, sure. People can be awful. People or systems are always making people's lives miserable for the sake of money or temporary power or any other inconsequential reason. If you're not going to call that evil, then what's the point of having the word? We always talk about philosophical evil as if it's some kind of element, straight from the devil, but that always seems to be a feint for trying to burn books.

How do you balance the absurd and mundane in your work?

From a story perspective, I really like to put things in a framework that is very expected and then you can do all kinds of different stuff. You can do all kinds of weird stuff if you're delivering the goods I think. Or the opposite. It's like the difference between something like Kaijumax where the storytelling is extremely normal and kind of neutral because everything that's happening is so weird I have to make you believe it. Or something like Jimmy Corrigan where everything that's happening is so mundane but it's being broken up, and being made so obscure that you're understanding all this mundane stuff in a different way. I always feel like it has to be one or the other. You couldn't tell Kaijumax in that kind of storytelling because it would drive people nuts.

In Kaijumax, you did a lot of kaiju movie reviews at the end of the issues and you talk about your hierarchy of importance for a kaiju movie. You mention writing is always the last on the list. How does Kaijumax sit with that considering how well-written it is?

Well, thank you. I didn't want to make a monster movie like any of those. I was just using that lore as the framework. With my compulsions of putting in hyper-referential stuff, and of making my stories be huge bummers, I would find it very difficult to write a straight monster movie. I think that it would not be very fun. I mean, I'd draw it. That'd be fun. But writing it would just be like, "The scientist is outrunning the monster in the jeep or whatever." [Both laugh] While I was watching all those monster movies it's like: I don't want them to be good, I want them to be crazy and I wanted to mine them for ideas. In a way, it doesn't sound like I'm a very fun person when my favorite thing to do was to watch monster movies and then just take them apart and look for funny ideas as opposed to just loving them. That's the way I am, unfortunately.

That genre doesn't have a lot of critical success. Other genres like horror or sci-fi will have these go-to movies, but the monster genre is pretty vacant.

Godzilla Minus One. Everybody kept talking about how great it was and I do think it's great but I saw that and I thought "This is a great movie. If people ask me what kaiju movies they should start by watching, it definitely goes on the list. It should also be in any discussion of the best kaiju movies. But my favorite kaiju movies? Probably wouldn't even make the top 25."

Oh really?

It's great. It's fun. But my favorite ones are gonna be ones where a monster gets suplexed. [Laughs].

Rubber suit stuff.

Yeah, the rubber suit, where you can see the zipper, or something completely kooky happens. There's one called Invasion of Astro-Monster where they have this token white guy in it that is just the best character in it. He's a weird sort of lothario the whole time through, and he's always calling the aliens "double-crossing finks." I was like, "This is the best thing I've ever seen in my whole life." It's so stupid. I love it.

If Kaijumax was a TV series, where do you think it would rank among kaiju movies?

Probably towards the bottom.

[Laughs] Not for you to tell?

It's not for me, yeah. It's funny. There's been talk about a TV show — not lately — but we kind of go back and forth.

Animated or live action with rubber suits?

It would be animated so it would look like the way it's drawn, which I obviously think would be great. I have big dreams of maybe stop-motion animation, or maybe they'd make all the suits, but who would make 350 suits? To say nothing of all the sets and – it would just be unwieldy, especially with all the dialogue and character stuff. If we were to make it in 2-D animation, I really do like the idea of adapting it to that medium and having to change it a little to make the most of, say, sound, and music, and movement. And since people can't control the speed that they absorb it at, you'd have to kind of dial back a lot of the visual puns and visual jokes. But then you have the whole thing about people's accents and voices and line delivery. All that sort of stuff would be so fascinating. Even if you were almost telling the same story, probably different characters would become more important.

Do you think it'd be more of the prison drama of the early seasons or . . . ?

In my mind, it would be similar to how we structured the comic. It's very self-consciously organized like short TV seasons, with the benefit of having all the lore and character background more or less solid, which it definitely was not on the first go round. I like that there's a little bit of a view of the world outside the prison, absurd as it is, so I would want to keep all that. Additionally, I like the first season, but I do think that the book didn't really get its feet under it until the second season, once I'd run out of all the prison tropes, all that ultraviolent grotesque stuff. [Laughs] I started thinking that instead of making this book shocking, let's make it sad or melancholy, that's when I really thought it started to improve. I think rather than putting in so many shocking twists early on, I might have focused more on how people navigate the sort of black and gray morality of prison.

It's like a separate morality.

It has all its own markers you have to follow. I think that's fascinating. That's why I did it in the first place, but I could only make it truly that bleak for so long. Because it is bleak and it continues to be bleak, but I did think I tried to make characters a little bit more relatable later on, I tried to give them more of a way forward.

Unlike Zonn, for instance?

I mean, I needed to have a proper villain. Someone to just be the worst, so that when you need a climactic and cathartic moment of violence, you don't feel one bit bad about who gets eviscerated. Zonn was also a really interesting character, process-wise. I created Mechazon first, as a pretty clear analog to Mechagodzilla, with big spheres on his back that are probably nuclear turbines or something, and gun barrels sticking out and so forth, and then a couple issues later, I had to make his fleshy counterpart. So it was the opposite process that you usually have, where you find machine equivalents to all the presumably natural looking monster parts, and instead you end up with a really vile-looking monster. Jason Fischer, who was right there with me for the whole run doing color assists, just popped in some color with no guidance from me – I'm sure I was behind the eight ball on deadlines – and I just said, fine, those are great. Hideous, clashing colors, a body that looks like a chemical burn, patchy feathers; it was playing against type for a sinister villain, but I thought it really fit the bill. It was fun, then, to have Zonn, with this horrible design, be the sort of prime version that then gets extrapolated and inverted in these other versions, that are invariably good, in contrast to his awfulness. It was fun coming upon the plot in the later books to have a "Space-Zonn" that essentially took his design and did what Space Godzilla did with Godzilla's design–crystals and what have you–to tell, of course, a sad parable about adoption.

In the beginning, there are racial analogs for the monsters which you've talked about before, but you've set it entirely in the monster world. There isn't a one-to-one where it's its own separate world that clearly has racial tension, but it's not like a direct application to American society. Yet, you do write East Asian and South Asian characters. Kang, Gupta, the little boy in Whoofy's mind–who you've said even resembled your son at the time – and many more. What was it like to draw those characters from that cultural perspective?

As a white middle class guy having every character be essentially Asian? I think I step away from controversy a little bit by having it be so cartoony. A character is more a cartoon character than they are a real person of any race. I think that's part of why I was more at ease with it than I might have been if I was doing it in a hyper realistic style. Of course, everything I do no matter what, I worry that it's going to offend somebody. [Laughs] I hope this is going to work the whole time, but I think that it came across fine and I also think there weren't any problematic stereotypes — at least for the human characters — that were being played with. I guess it was a matter of how people looked and one, I didn't feel like it was really getting into dangerous territory, but two, if people are wanting to criticize it, I'll say, "Well, you're probably right."

It seemed like you were looking at the character's relation to the kaiju more than anything. Where you're the warden of a Kaijumax prison and that's enough for the character.

Right, and frankly, I don't think that I'm particularly good at drawing people being identifiably one race or another. I felt that these are cartoon characters and you can tell by their names that they are from Korea or wherever.

Throughout Kaijumax you treated the letters pages like a column where you offered advice and a lot of wisdom for creators. What inspired you to do that?

I love letters pages. They were always fun and when you would only buy three or four comics a week and then you would read them all six times, eventually you get to the letters page and it's always nice if there's something substantial in there. That's certainly the idea behind the essays and movie reviews and fan art and so forth, but I also kind of edited down people's letters or cherry-picked tweets that were more like prompts to let me say a thing or two about art, or creativity, or workflow, or whatever. And I don't know what it is about me, but I have no reluctance to explain my jokes or the origins of any of my ideas. That's the purpose of all of the annotations in the hardcovers; it's nice if people have the context, but really I'm just taking a bow after inflicting my jokes on you.

And as for the advice, I dunno, in a way, that's like free content for me. I've always got thoughts about how to make comics swirling around in my head, I might as well write them down, and having to knock out 600 words on a deadline sets the bar at a good level for me. It doesn't have to run in the New Yorker, it's just a little bit of friendly advice for someone that was just like me 30 years ago.

This is kind of a heady question, but we'll figure it out together. I'm considering Fredric Jameson's idea of how we live in a world of pastiche with these constant references, but no greater critique of genres, mediums, forms, etc. Instead, we just have this endless recycling of tropes and traits and ideas, but we can't go anywhere new. You've worked in this vein of satire your whole career, so I'm curious if you think you're doing something new.

Well, first off, I think it's kind of a losing battle to worry about whether you're doing something that's truly new or not. I talk to a lot of art students at MCAD here in Minneapolis, and I feel like there's this sense that every story has to be original that weighs so heavily on them that they describe their very formulaic adventure stories to me absolutely from the ground up. I think that's great, but it's all I can do to keep from breaking in after a couple minutes and saying "Oh, like The Mandalorian but under the ocean." Like, I think there's something really valuable about being confident enough in your project that you can just say "It's like this very popular and long-lived thing, but with these crucial tweaks, either to update it, or address a flaw, or give a new aesthetic, or change the genre." It's especially important in comics, where 95% of things are variations on a handful of genre frameworks. And if you spend any time pitching big companies with characters that were invented 80 years ago, you really have to learn to find something new in the tiniest margins.

I do think that I have a tendency – that I don't dislike, but I need to be aware of – of cramming a thousand pastiches and references into every thing that I do. Obviously Top 10 was kind of ground zero for that, and Kaijumax is as full of them as you maybe can get, and I did hyper-referential illustrations for gag illustrations for the video game magazine Game Informer for over 15 years. I'm very comfortable floating around in that world where everything is an echo and a callback to a thousand old stories. But all that stuff is just a road to get to what I really want, which is to make people feel a feeling about my comics. I don't think any of these feelings are ones that people haven't felt before either, but between the process of getting to them (via a black-and-gray prison drama filled with candy-colored monsters) and my personal favorite things to stick in there (deep melancholy, grotesque violence, numb protagonists), I feel like it's new and fun enough that I can live with it if people say they've seen it before.

Has anyone ever said that about Kaijumax?

No, people were always really charitable about Kaijumax in that way; the reviews frequently said, "It's like no other comic out there." That's great as a starting point, because my thought – I mean, practically my guiding principle – was the opposite: that there should be nothing in Kaijumax that you hadn't seen in either a prison movie or a monster movie. Everything had to have this sheen of familiarity so that you could put that coat of kaiju paint on it and make it darkly funny. I like the idea of taking familiar things and reorganizing them – wallowing in pastiche, if you will – because we have a hundred plus years of pop culture and science fiction and fantasy and every subgenre within them, and it's fun to grab little bits of it here and there and remind people of the stuff they forgot about after they became adults.

After creating such an intricate masterpiece in Kaijumax, where do you go next?

Can I say something really quick about "masterpiece?" I obviously appreciate it, and I quote people on the cover saying nice things like that, and I don't ever want to have false modesty about my work, but I never set out to make anything other than an amusing absurdist comic book. Like, I think we can always look back and rewrite history, even our own little internal history, until we think that we had something burning in us and we had to channel the muse and make something great. That's all fine and good, but it also ignores the very practical process of coming up with something fun and silly and full of characters and gives it this mystical bent that is by its very nature unreplicable. How could you follow it up? Again, I think of Kaijumax as a fun genre parody/satire, so I hope to follow it up with another genre piece, steered in one direction or another. Currently, I've been making a horror story that's very grounded. It's got three characters; it's just in black, white, gray, and red. But I'm also doing an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink type of superhero adventure that's a throwback to Silver Age levels of reality. Two completely different approaches.