The Rumpus.net » Spotlight

Spotlight: Boco Watches the Sea

Liam Golden — Tue, 21 May 2013 21:10:12 +0000

Spotlight: Frog Heaven

T. Coulter — Tue, 07 May 2013 21:33:40 +0000

A beautiful, amphibious comic from writer and illustrator T. Coulter.

Click images to enlarge:

Spotlight: Adrienne Celt

Adrienne Celt — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 21:10:54 +0000

Writer and cartoonist Adrienne Celt imagines the complicated inner lives of animals in her comics. The following collection artfully blends hummingbirds and hippos with politics, mortality, and more.

***

Spotlight: In San Francisco, There Is a Street

Liam Golden — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 21:00:56 +0000

A comic based on a French children’s song found in a book by Georges Perec, who found it in a book by Paul Eluard, who heard some French children singing the song, who heard other French children singing the song.

***

Spotlight: Hiphop Is the Future

The Rumpus — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 20:11:09 +0000

Though Matt Dojny has become known primarily as a novelist since the publication of The Festival of Earthly Delights this past June, he’s been making comics since his earliest childhood: his first collection of single-panel drawings, Frankenstein’s Book, was visited upon the world (or at least upon his parents) when he was five. “My parents didn’t know what to make of it, I think,” Dojny says. “It was drawn on a stack of McGraw-Hill stationery my dad had brought home from his publishing job, and it basically just detailed various aspects of Frankenstein’s day-to-day life. I guess their interest in Frankenstein wasn’t quite as far-reaching as mine.”

Born and raised in suburban Connecticut, Dojny went on to study art at Oberlin College—where he drew a much-beloved strip, “Making Choices,” in the campus paper—then made the requisite pilgrimage to New York City to try his luck selling his paintings. He quit in disgust a few years later, in spite of finding a number of devoted collectors, among them the painter and sculptor Red Grooms. He never stopped drawing, however, and this past year, finding himself with some free creative energy for the first time since beginning his novel, he began, almost by accident, making comics again, and posting them daily in his Tumblr, hiphopisthefuture. “I got an iPad for Christmas, and for the longest time, I couldn’t think of what I could possibly use it for,” he said in a recent interview. “Then I found a great, simple art app called ‘Paper,’ and started doodling on it while I was hanging out in my three-year-old son’s room, keeping him company and waiting for him to fall asleep. Now he’s come to expect a drawing from me every night. It’s kind of like the situation with my parents, actually, way back when—I’m not sure what he makes of them. He falls asleep, though, so I can’t complain.”

***

No related posts…

Spotlight: I Dream of Sweden

Mark Hardy — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 23:00:53 +0000

I have been thinking a lot about Sweden and Iceland. Maybe it’s because its cold in Chicago—and I know it’s much much colder there.

These cards, I have no idea what to think of them. The job I just lost, was throwing away all this paper and office stuff so I appropriated these horrible business holiday cards they had and didn’t care about. And so I drew whatever I was watching or thinking about.

I don’t know if I’ve conveyed anything positive. Perhaps it is winter. I’m in this thing where I’m pretending I’m in Scandinavia rather than in my apartment on the South Side of Chicago. My fantasy world is wearing thin, or maybe its my cloak of invisibility. Some people go nuts and shoot up the place and everyone in it, and I just pretend I’m in Sweden by watching 70s tv shows.

Conversations with Literary Ex-Cons: Matthew Parker

Cullen Thomas — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 21:16:55 +0000

You know what struck me about Matthew Parker, one-time homeless wanderer, former drug addict with more than ten years of prison under his belt, between his ears, now a writer and graphic author?

A basic decency.

We met in the New York Botanical Garden in mid-January. The Bronx River was frozen with rich swaths of emerald in it. At times, Matt looked carefully out into the main space of the café where we finally sat. We were safe, against a brick wall and with a full view of the room. But I wondered if it wasn’t the ex-con in him warily peering out at the world.

When we left, Matt asked the young guy working the register if it was all right to leave him a tip. It wasn’t that kind of place. Matt’s money was already out. This wasn’t the only instance, I realized. He’d asked the young girl working the ticket kiosk at the front gate if she was warm enough. Basic. Decent.

He’s over fifty now, balding on top, which is a recurrent image in his graphic memoir Larceny in My Blood: A Memoir of Heroin, Handcuffs, and Higher Education. I told him that his depiction of this bald spot made me think of the top chakra at the peak of the human form, the top of the head, an open conduit for forces from above—a scrappy, working-class, everyman enlightenment.

He laughed.

But it’s there, as sordid and messy as his story is: that humble decency, a hard-fought humanity.

***

The Rumpus: For a memoir especially, where the character in there is also the narrator, if it’s too angry and too bitter…

Matthew Parker: Nobody wants to hear it.

Rumpus: You feel like the Columbia MFA program helped bring you out of that, from a writing standpoint, or just personally?

Parker: Yeah, from a writing standpoint. Well, maybe from both. I was never really angry about doing time. I never had a problem with that because it was a part of my lifestyle: okay, I’m a junkie and this is part of being a junkie. I’ll have to go to prison every couple of years, so be it. Prison’s not that bad, you get your own TV. Once you get out of county jail.

Rumpus: What struck me in your descriptions of all these places—county, state, and federal—you seemed to have a lot of physical freedom, relative to other systems—going out on the yard.

Parker: The only place you don’t have physical freedom is in the county jails. And you’re locked up with a lot of really bad people—people who deserve to be there, frankly. I was locked up with a guy who cut his girlfriend’s head off.

Rumpus: Jesus, really?

Parker: Really sick shit. And you have to sit down and eat with this guy.

Rumpus: Where was that?

Parker: Maricopa County Jail.

Rumpus: That is fucked up.

Parker: Yeah. And he was a vicious guy. I saw him assault a guy in the pod, you know, really fucked him up, backstabbed the guy: waited ’til the guy turned his back and attacked him that way.

Rumpus: What kind of guy was he: old, young, white, Hispanic?

Parker: White guy. He was a little nuts. You kind of don’t know what people are in for. I found this out after. I knew he was in for some serious shit. You’re in there in maximum security. A lot of them are murderers. A lot of them have nothing to lose.

Rumpus: You never know, because all you get is their version of it. Maybe some rumor and gossip.

Parker: Yeah and then they ask you, “What’re you in for?”

(muffled) “Shoplifting.”

(louder) “What are you in for?”

(louder) “Shoplifting.” And they’re like, “Aw, fuck.” It’s like that Arlo Guthrie song where they all move away from you.

Rumpus: I appreciated the way that you seemed to hold yourself outside the nonsense and the craziness, all the little trivial shit, resisting the pressure to join the White Brotherhood, staying independent, just minding your own time. Do you feel like that has helped you out here?

Parker: Yeah, definitely, with the cliques and the groups—especially at Columbia. I was able to just kind of laugh at it. You know how in my book I compare the genre gangs to the prison gangs. It was even worse between the film people and the theatre people and the writing people. In the School of the Arts at Columbia you’ve got four disciplines. You have your little cliques in the writing group, but then you have the bigger cliques outside. Last night when you called me, I was doing alcohol proctor on campus.

Rumpus: What does that mean?

Parker: I basically check people’s IDs, or if it’s a grad student event I make sure no one gets out of hand. It’s basically a bouncer.

Rumpus: But they call it alcohol proctor?

Parker: Yeah.

Rumpus: Make sure people aren’t boozing. Do you drink?

Parker: A little bit, but not to get drunk. I only have a couple of beers or a glass of wine.

Rumpus: And a while back, Columbia fired you from that job because they found out you had all these convictions?

Parker: Yeah, they fired me from all my jobs.

Rumpus: And this is Columbia, bastion of liberalism, human rights.

Parker: What happened—what I think it was—you remember when that girl got killed at Yale? This was a few years back. She had a lab and there was a guy, a civilian worker, who worked in the lab with her and he killed her and he stuffed her in the wall. So right after that happened, Columbia decided to do background checks on everybody. Before that, when I first started applying for jobs at Columbia, I would tell them, “I’m a convicted felon, blah blah blah.” Nobody gave me a job. Except for the law school. The law school didn’t care. Law school still doesn’t care, because I still work for them.

Rumpus: Why are they different? Just because they have a better sense of crime?

Parker: Yeah, because they’re the law school. They see it as, This guy’s a petty thief with a history of drug abuse, that’s it. So I’m working at the law school. I’m also alcohol proctoring, and they do a background check. Of course I lit up the computer, bing bing bing, like a pinball machine. And I got an e-mail from Human Services and a letter in the mail saying Columbia can no longer employ you anywhere on campus because of your felony convictions. So I went to the Dean of the School of the Arts, and some professors I’m in tight with, and they all went ballistic on Human Resources, and they ended up hiring me back.

Rumpus: Maybe it was just an overreach in response to the Yale murder. But that’s the power of crime.

Parker: Well that’s what I think happened.

***

We’re above the frozen Bronx River.

Rumpus: I’ve been up here to the Gardens, but have not walked around like this. How often do you come here?

Parker: Two, three times a week. You can be isolated here. It clears my head.

Rumpus: You were talking earlier about anger and writing in a didactic way.

Parker: To me it was all about the system, right. In my mind, if drugs were legal I wouldn’t have a problem. All right, that’s how I thought because of course I was a junkie. I was fucked up. To me, they shouldn’t be locking people up for drugs. It’s just a personal choice. It’s a prohibition thing. It’s really all just business. So I was very angry about it.

Rumpus: You’re right about that. An easy and important distinction can be drawn between violent and non-violent, and they just don’t do it.

Parker: Nah, they don’t do it because they figured how to make money off it. They figured how to employ people. They figured out how to bring these ghost towns back to life.

Rumpus: You were in some ghost towns out there in Arizona? Name some of them for me.

Parker: Winslow is a big prison town. There’s a place called Buckeye, Arizona—big prison town. Florence, the whole thing revolves around prison. Douglas.

Rumpus: Did you feel those spirits out there, in the middle of nowhere?

Parker: I never got the ghost sense you got. I remember you wrote about that. Because most of the Arizona prisons were new. The closest I came to that was Terminal Island Federal Prison. That was an old, old prison, with the rack cells. You really get the sense there’s been a lot people in this place.

Rumpus: That was on your first bid, in the late ’80s?

Parker: Yeah, that was the Fed beef.

Rumpus: In your story, all the relationships come and go—all these different girls, your brothers, those tragic moments, which really hit me—but your mom is always there. She always seems to come through for you. But I could see where some readers would be like, Well, she’s the root cause of it all, because she was counterfeiting money. She was smoking weed all the time. She brought this whole “larceny in my blood” to the family.

Parker: ”Larceny in my blood” is basically an advanced degree in street sense. It doesn’t necessarily have to do with thievery. A lot of it just has to do with knowing how to survive on the streets. Now my mom is definitely culpable of certain things. But my mom’s redemption came in 1978, two years before my brother was murdered. When my mom moved to Arizona, that was it. She shut down everything. They wanted to start cooking speed because the counterfeiting thing fell through, and she said, “You know what, I’m done.” And she got a job and she’s pretty much been clean ever since.

Rumpus: Has she ever been to prison?

Parker: No. No, no.

Rumpus: That’s amazing, though. I mean, with the way you describe all the stuff they were into. She’s the luckiest one in the whole book.

Parker: Lucky and smart. The main reason I went to prison is I was high all the time. When you’re high, you’re not thinking too clear.

Rumpus: One of the blurbs on the back of the book talks about your story as a portrait of being desperate and lost. Through the course of it I got that feeling, like a lot of American lives maybe. You’re in Bridgeport, then you’re in Pennsylvania, then you’re out in Arizona, then you’re back in Bridgeport; then you start doing these prison stints, from one girl to the next. There’s this wandering.

Parker: Yeah, a lot of it is just self-marginalization, straight nihilism.

Rumpus: Not giving a fuck?

Parker: Yeah, you know. It’s a cop-out.

Rumpus: Another phrase related to your story: false protest. You came to this realization that a lot of your rebelling was hollow. I wanted to hear your thoughts on that.

Parker: It’s like that old James Dean line—or is it Marlon Brando? “What are you rebelling against? Well what do ya got?” It was kind of like that, especially growing up at the tail-end of the ’60s, the violent end of the ’60s. The way I chose to rebel against society was, “Well, I’m just gonna be a junkie.” Really, when you’re holding yourself that much outside of a group, you’re saying, “I’m better than the group,” which really makes you no better than the group. It comes full circle.

Rumpus: You think some of that is the ex-convict’s burden? I ask because I recognize this self-marginalizing, as you’re calling it, in myself. Something about the isolation, the ostracizing, that prison breeds in people?

Parker: Some of it. A lot of it is I don’t like crowds, for obvious reasons, because American prisons are very crowded. You’re never alone, ever—maybe when you’re in the shower, but even when you’re in the shower whacking off, on the other side of the curtain there’s twenty guys brushing their teeth—you know what I mean?

So my mom’s redemption came twenty years before mine. Then my older brother died, then my younger brother died, and her third son was in and out of prison constantly. My mom liked it when I was in prison. She knew I was safe. She knew I could take care of myself. Nothing was going to happen to me, whereas on the street, she found me OD’d a couple of times.

Rumpus: It’s seems amazing that you beat heroin, in 2002, right? How did you beat it? Is it still tempting?

Parker: No, not at all. For the first couple of years after I got out it was.

Rumpus: Why not now?

Parker: Well, I did a lot of research on it. It’s very clinical. What I found out is your brain is inherently lazy, so if it can get chemicals artificially, it’s gonna shut down making them by itself. Like endorphins. So once you stop doing the heroin, you may have convinced yourself that you don’t ever want to do it again, but your brain is screaming for you to send up more heroin, or else you’re gonna die. That’s what your brain is trying to convince you. Same with smoking, same with overeating, same with any kind of addiction on the planet. These receptors open up in your brain.

So I have a million heroin receptors screaming to be filled.

Rumpus: Understanding that gave you control over it?

Parker: Yeah, to a point, because those receptors close down in a year. Takes about a year, then they close up.

Rumpus: So you knew that and you thought, If I can just get through a year…

Parker: Yeah, that was one part of it. The other part was the rebellion thing. Nobody’s gonna tell me what to do, and if going to prison every two years is the price I pay for my freedom, then that’s it. I’m gonna shoot all the fucking heroin I want, and fuck everybody. Nobody’s gonna control me, nobody. And then I’m standing in county jail. This guard walks by and says, “Parker, what are you doing in here? You’re a smart guy. Why do you keep coming back?” And I couldn’t answer him. It was right around when I turned forty, and the judge had told me earlier that junkies usually get clean when they’re forty or they go all the way. They end up in prison or they end up dead. I realized that there was nowhere on the planet I could be in less control of my life, than I was in that fucking jail cell.

Rumpus: So you weren’t even living true to your conviction.

Parker: No, I realized it was all a lie. That guard kind of tripped it. And the judge kind of tripped it, because she told me eight years earlier, “Junkies don’t get clean until forty. You’ve got a good eight years left.” By me being a junkie, I was playing into the hands of the government, because I wasn’t being rebellious in any way that meant anything. Nobody gave a fuck that I was a junkie. I wasn’t changing anything. I wasn’t being active. I wasn’t political. My writing sucked. And basically nobody cared about me. That’s basically what it was. It was all bullshit, a sham. I realized that by me being a junkie, I was playing right into their hands, just like almost everybody in prison plays into their hands. Gangbangers on the streets play into their hands.

Rumpus: The same dynamic I thought you describe really well in terms of how you were trying to master your dick, not let your dick dictate your behavior.

Parker: Exactly. It’s kind of the same thing. You know, I never really thought of it that way. That’s interesting.

Rumpus: It dovetails with your intellectual curiosity in evidence in the book. You getting into evolutionary psychology, biology, instincts, Darwinism. You dug into that stuff and it sounds like it opened doors for you. You realized, Wait a second. My brain is trying to trick me and I don’t want to keep doing the dope and I can’t just let my dick run wild.

Parker: Right. I have a girlfriend I love and that wouldn’t be right. When I first got out of prison, though, it was very hard. My brain was still screaming, Send up the heroin! What are you doing?! The way I resisted that was also through music.

Rumpus: I love that theme in your book. Talking about the biological insight you had into addiction and the way that helped you; talking about the biological insight you had into sex and lust, and how that’s helped you. Those are earth-bound, biologically-bound. It’s not a spiritual healing. But sometimes when you talk about music, the way it healed and helped you all through your life, that almost has a spiritual aspect to it, a magic.

Parker: Darwin had a theory about music being naturally-selected. Music makes you feel good just like drugs do. It’s a rush. You get a rush when you hear a good song that you haven’t heard in a long time, and it just washes over you. That’s like heroin, not as intense and it doesn’t last as long. It’s very natural. It’s just a boost of endorphins.

***

We’re in the café now, out of the cold but still surrounded by the peace of the park. Lady Day is soothing us sweetly over the speakers.

Parker: I was brought up going to all these concerts. We went to all these concerts when I got out of prison the last time and I was trying to stay clean. Remember I used a few times when I got out. Every time you use you go back twenty steps. Same thing with quitting smoking. I still haven’t quit smoking. It’s basically the same thing. You need to quit for a least a year, then all those receptors in your brain shut down naturally. So all of a sudden you don’t have nicotine receptors in your brain, you don’t have heroin receptors in your brain. They’re ways to speed it up. Exercise. Exercise is the best and surest way.

Rumpus: Amen to that.

Parker: Music is another way. Getting you the natural high you need to maintain an equilibrium without saying, “I need heroin! I gotta fucking have heroin!” It’s a way of telling your brain, “We’re not doing any heroin. Here’s some music.” Or, “You want some heroin? Let me go run around the block like fourteen fucking times. How’s that, motherfucker?” Then your brain is too tired to do anything.

Rumpus: I think most people don’t do what you’re doing, being able to recognize you’re your own worst enemy.

Parker: It took me a long time to come to that conclusion. In court-ordered rehab, it was all about God and all these abstractions. The whole point with me and the God thing: if God’s got nothing better to do than help me kick heroin, I mean, God’s got a million other things to do. Go feed some hungry kids. Go stop a war somewhere. I’m cool. Don’t worry about me.

So when the people in rehab told me the only way I’m gonna get clean is to link up with this higher power, I just couldn’t buy it. I had to look for other reasons. I had to look clinical. I started looking at what psychiatrists said. Starting looking at what scientists were saying. And what they were saying is that you can get addicted to anything. You can get addicted to beating your wife—where you’re not gonna feel that sense of equilibrium until you beat your wife and that’s really sick, but that’s basically how it works. Your brain thinks, I need to do this to feel good.

Rumpus: To snap that pattern is very hard, right? The patience and wherewithal to hold off.

Parker: Right, so I’m out of prison. I’m living with my mom. She finds me stark fucking naked, half OD’d, in a heroin stupor. My mom’s like, This is it. This is gonna be his life until he dies. This was 2002.

Rumpus: You do say that the prison time did serve you in the sense that you would clean out.

Parker: Yeah, you could clean out to the point that you weren’t strung out, but you could still fix on the weekend if you wanted to. There are plenty of drugs in prison.

Rumpus: But once you got out you knew you were just gonna tear it up.

Parker: ”Out the gate at eight, in the spoon by noon.”

Rumpus: Where did you get that?

Parker: It’s just a prison saying, a prison cliché. I wrote a short story called that. I don’t like reading addiction memoirs, though. According to Billy Cioffi, who is a musician and a friend of mine, you can write an addiction memoir in one sentence: And then I puked.

Rumpus: That’s hilarious. Right, with prison stories in general, how do you get past the clichés and stereotypes. How do you get past “And then I puked.” One thing I did admire in your story is how you let it hang. You really revealed yourself.

Parker: I shot too straight, to where people are holding it against me. One critic said there’s no redemptive arc. Another critic in the New York Journal of Books said, “Oh, he’s still exactly the same person that he was when he went to prison.”

Rumpus: Maybe it’s just that you don’t couch it in moral terms that they’re used to.

Parker: Yeah, I mean after prison I got two college degrees. I graduated with honors. You know how hard it is to graduate with honors from ASU? Then I graduated from Columbia. I got a book deal. I wrote, drew, and lettered an entire, two-hundred-and-eighty-page book. One critic said that “he’s still gaming the system.” My book is gaming the system.

Rumpus: That you’re making money off crime, drug addiction?

Parker: That I’m just a cheap liar. I didn’t meet his standard of redemption, whatever that might be.

Rumpus: The ex-con narrator is a real double-edged sword. Did your editor ever want you to be more explicitly anti-drug?

Parker: No.

Rumpus: Did your editor ever talk to you about wanting more redemption notes in there?

Parker: No. The only thing my editor didn’t like is I had a lot of politics in there. He made me take all that shit out.

Rumpus: I thought the recurring fantasy of you kidnapping Rush Limbaugh was funny.

Parker: But see that tied into the story because you can’t get a student loan with a drug conviction, but you can get a student loan with a “kidnapping Rush Limbaugh” conviction.

Rumpus: That’s fucked up.

Parker: It’s insane. There was another scene right after that where I kidnapped Ann Coulter and sewed her mouth shut. He cut it out.

Rumpus: Arizona certainly lends itself to some political conversation.

Parker: Going back to, “And then I puked.” That was kind of the problem I had and the problem my agent had.

Rumpus: You yourself saw the limitations of what you’d written?

Parker: Yeah, especially after A Million Little Pieces came out. The addiction memoir is getting kind of tired. How are we gonna make this different? One day me and my agent were having lunch down in Greenwich Village. I was done with course work at Columbia. I had three years to complete my thesis. I showed him this little five-page graphic memoir I did for a cross-genre class at Columbia. I’ve been drawing all my life. It was a hustle in prison. If you gave me a picture of your girlfriend, I could draw her and you pay me. What I found out is that you had to bullshit ‘em a little. Someone gave me a picture of his girlfriend and I drew it in one night and gave it to him the next day. And he didn’t like it, and the reason he didn’t like it is ‘cause it was done overnight. After that, if somebody gave me a picture I would draw it and then sit on it for a week and then bring it back and tell them, “Oh, I really worked hard on this.” And they would love it every time.

My agent said, “All right, I’ll get back to you in a few weeks.” By the time I got back to my apartment uptown, he had called me like six times. He said, “Drop everything. This is what we’re doing. We’re gonna make your memoir a graphic.”

Rumpus: Were you resistant to that?

Parker: Yeah, I told him, “You’re outta your fucking mind.” I didn’t know how to do a graphic story. I read Persepolis—that was it. But then I read Maus and said, “Ohhh, now I get it,” because I really didn’t get it with Persepolis, although I think it’s a good book. It was more comic-y and childish to me. Then I read Maus. I kind of based my book on a Maus format.

Rumpus: Do they still call it a graphic novel? Which isn’t precise. It should be graphic memoir.

Parker: Yeah. In fact, in Publisher’s Weekly it’s listed under graphic novel, under fiction.

Rumpus: For me that further blurs the line, and I think those lines need to be clear. Obviously in a graphic narrative there’s much less text. Did that force you to be much sparer and sharper? What are some of the advantages?

Parker: Well you can show a lot of things, but you have to be very sparse, very clever. It has to grab you, ‘cause you’re not just reading anymore. You’re looking.

Rumpus: On the other side of it, what gets lost?

Parker: A lot of detail is lost, a lot of background information. Telling a memoir in a graphic form, the reader is having to work harder in some ways to figure out what’s going on, even though you’ve got a lot of visual clues. The reader is still gonna have to do a little more work. You ever read Fun Home? Fun Home is kind of the same way. You don’t have pages and pages of background detail, and maybe the reader is gonna have to cut you a little slack at some point.

The writing part is hard. Getting through the editing is a nightmare. Then I got to the point where I had to handwrite all the lettering and do all the art, but that is very therapeutic, just sitting there doing the lettering. You wonder why people do calligraphy until you actually have to sit down and do it. It’s soothing. Just doing the art, you’re not writing anymore, so it’s not as tiring.

***

We take a break. Matt goes outside to smoke a cigarette on a hillside.

Rumpus: How are Vonnegut and heroin related?

Parker: The postmodern thing. Vonnegut’s characters are always these geeky, off-the-wall guys, like Billy Pilgrim. He just didn’t fit in. I still self-marginalize myself, living in the Bronx. The Bronx is like the anti-Berkeley. Brooklyn is kind of artsy-fartsy, liberal, but the Bronx is the Bronx. I have a soft spot in my heart for it, always have.

Rumpus: Why? Is it the realness, the grit?

Parker: Yeah.

Rumpus: So heroin is postmodern, just because it’s outlaw and fringe?

Parker: The whole postmodern thing is life is really a random thing. There’s no heaven or hell. Basically you just live your life, then you die, and that’s it. You can turn your life into a struggle, which is what I did. By trying to escape you’re making it harder on yourself.

Rumpus: Escape what, the system?

Parker: Right. You don’t want to be like everyone else. The thing about prison is you’re right there in the middle of the system. You’re putting yourself into that position where they can victimize you. You’re playing into their hands. My way of not being bourgeois was being a junkie, living on the other side of the law. My nihilism was the destructive bent was turned inward. So you’re basically living out that postmodern thing, that Vonnegut character.

Rumpus: Were you trying to be that?

Parker: Yeah, in a sense, in a very real sense. I was trying to be a Billy Pilgrim. I was trying to be that person who didn’t fit. I didn’t want to fit in their system. I wanted to be outside. I buried two brothers. Everything was all fucked up. The whole system was skewed towards the poor and minorities.

Rumpus: Still is.

Parker: Still is. There’s a great book I just read, The New Jim Crow. Michelle Alexander. Once I figured out that by being in prison I wasn’t doing anything to hurt the system, being critical of it, like Alexander’s book, all I was doing was being a part of it. I was playing into their hands. I was just a number, just another convict.

Rumpus: Is it just a matter of not getting caught and not going in there or using your energy differently?

Parker: Using your energy differently to try to effect change. So by being a writer, maybe, but being a convict…

Rumpus: Being a convict you can’t do shit. You’re just banging your head against the wall, driving yourself crazy.

Parker: And my writing was just angry and didactic—the system sucks.

Yeah, well, we know the system sucks. Tell us something we don’t know. There’s a lot of things you could say about prison, like there’s a million non-violent drug offenders, but everybody already knows that. Everybody with any kind of a social conscience knows that.

Rumpus: When you read Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle in prison you say, “I’m surprised it didn’t make more of an impact on me at the time.”

What did you mean by that?

Parker: When you read The First Circle they were very intellectual, and I wasn’t. I thought I was. It should have encouraged me to turn to writing rather than heroin, that writing was a better outlet, that you can be rebellious in the writing. You can be everything that a junkie is by being a writer. You can be self-marginalized. You can be rebellious. And you can effect social change in writing. What I was writing in prison at the time was stuff that everybody had heard. Yes, you’re a junkie and you’re in prison, so what. Join the club. There’re a million of you.

Rumpus: And then I threw up.

Parker: And then I puked.

***

Rumpus: Your brothers. I got to tell you, I found that really affecting. I’m reading the story and it’s gritty, a kind of American picaresque, there’s this guy who is aimless and lost, drug-addled, and then I got to those moments where your brothers die. I was shocked. Fuck, now it’s for keeps, I thought. And it wasn’t just John—then it’s Mark later on. It adds a depth to your story. You can’t get any more dramatic than life and death, of course. It hit me hard, but I thought you did a good job with it, that there’s no self-pity in it.

Parker: No, I was just the opposite. I used my brothers dying to go further into heroin. Rather than lightening the burden on my mother and my sister and other family, I made it worse. I just made it worse.

Rumpus: When you reached the age at which they both died, twenty-three, did you think about that? That this was as much time as they got?

Parker: Yeah, but not enough that it would do anything to make me change. I OD’d the next day.

Rumpus: I was thinking of the line you’re fond of, where the doctor told your mom, “Go home and grieve.” Did you finally grieve or are you still?

Parker: You grieve a lot. But in prison you can’t show any kind of weakness, ‘cause they’ll eat you alive. If you have suicide scars, they don’t want you around, ‘cause they figure if you’re weak enough to commit suicide you’re weak enough to snitch.

Same with being a junkie. My younger brother was a total shock. What’s ironic about my older brother John dying was he was everything that I was becoming. He showed me that it’s kind of a dead end, even though he never used needles or anything. I didn’t learn anything from him, because I kept doing the exact same thing.

Rumpus: I really admire the piece you wrote for the Times about John’s murder. The grace you showed.

Parker: “Wanting to Kill.”

Rumpus: The resistance and refusal to hate. Is that a fair way to describe what you wrote?

Parker: Yeah, it was a very bizarre incident in my life.

Rumpus: I think that was a really powerful piece to put out there. I think that for a lot of readers that is a way to talk about revenge and hate and murder in a way that they’ve never heard before.

Parker: Yeah, that was kind of what it was all about. When I’m sitting in Arizona state prison and they told me you have a Do Not House in your jacket with this guy who murdered your brother. Well, if you believe in the death penalty, here it is. I believed in the death penalty at the time. It’s very easy to say, If they put me in the same yard as this guy, I’m gonna have to kill him. Because of my sense of duty, my own sense of revenge, my belief in the death penalty at that time, and my own sense of self-preservation, because he could come after me.

Rumpus: You’re such an anti-establishment guy, why would you believe in the death penalty?

Parker: Because my brother was murdered. In my little mind that’s gonna bring me closure. When really there is no closure. You never forget, ever. I don’t care how many people they killed. It doesn’t do anything.

Rumpus: Where is that dude now?

Parker: He got out. In fact I didn’t know he got out until I wrote that New York Times piece. The Times fact-checker found out. I knew people in prison who knew him. They called him Heart Attack Fred because he was always faking having a heart attack.

Rumpus: Any chance he read your story?

Parker: All’s I know is he did twenty-five years almost to the day.

Rumpus: It sounds like you’re pleased about that.

Parker: Well twenty-five years ain’t no cakewalk. What pissed me off about this guy most was that he was unrepentant. He’s got to be in his sixties now.

Rumpus: What was the response to that piece?

Parker: I did an interview with The Takeaway, on NPR. The response I got was all from anti-death penalty people. The death penalty really is just about revenge. What I realized is, Hey, if I don’t want to kill this guy physically, then I sure as hell don’t want the state to do it.

Rumpus: However fucked up people might take you to be, as fucked up and crazy as they might view your family and experiences, you never seemed down with the knee-jerk hate and the racial shit in the prisons and society at large. You have a tolerance about you.

Parker: If you think you’re better than someone else, it’s easy to look down on them and fling shit on them. And you’re not being any different than the white supremacist in prison. One thing I found out in prison is it’s easy to hate.

Rumpus: Easy to hate?

Parker: Hate is the easiest emotion in the world. See, they bring these kids in and they convince them. It’s very Machiavellian. See that twenty-year-old kid coming in doing a five-year beef. He’s never done heroin before. Within two weeks he’s shooting heroin, ‘cause that’s the easiest drug to get in there. And he’s also being taught that there’s going to be a race war. I can’t imagine what it’s like now with Obama as president, because they hate black people so much.

Rumpus: You were also in a very white part of the country. Has a Hispanic population, too.

Parker: In every prison in America you have to stay with your race. It’s self-segregating.

Rumpus: Even though you were an independent you had to play by white-boy rules.

Parker: You can’t even play basketball with them. There’s still that myth that if you touch a black man you’ll catch something. I got in trouble rooting for Serena Williams in a tennis match once. I couldn’t even watch Seinfeld because of the Jewish thing.

Rumpus: That’s just crazy. Are prisons that bad, or is it Arizona in particular?

Parker: I did time in California and it was the same there.

Rumpus: Did you feel awkward having to behave like that, not letting guys of other races ever sit on your bunk, for example?

Parker: Yeah, but there’s nothing you can do. They’ll kill you otherwise. That’s what’s different about the mythos of “larceny in my blood,” the family thing. We may be criminals, but we don’t hate each other. It’s like the Bronx. It’s very communal. It’s kind of what people miss in my story, because even though we were shoplifters and into drugs, we weren’t racist assholes. We weren’t religious fanatics. We weren’t judgmental. We were always close as a family.

***

Click here to read excerpts from Larceny in My Blood.

A Taste of Larceny in My Blood

Matthew Parker — Wed, 13 Feb 2013 21:15:46 +0000

***

Excerpted from Larceny in My Blood by Matthew Parker. Copyright © 2012 by Matthew Parker.
Reprinted by arrangement with Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc.

Click here to read The Rumpus Interview with Matthew Parker.

SPOTLIGHT: Ozge Samanci

Joen Madonna — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 12:30:30 +0000

Ozge Samanci has been making comics since she was a little girl growing up in Turkey. Drawing has always been her refuge, her mother’s harshest punishment when she and her sister were misbehaving was to take their drawing materials away. After finishing college then teaching for a few years in Turkey, Ozge came to the US for a Master’s at Ohio University then a PhD in Digital Media from the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her prolific series, Ordinary Things, began as a daily letter to her friends, and combines drawing, painting, and various found objects delicately paired with contemplative thoughts on life and being. Her work is deceptively simple, where beautiful and sometimes dreamy images are layered with insightful and inspiring semi-autobiographical perspectives on life. As I worked my way through the over 1200 comics she’s created since 2006, they alternatively made me smile, or laugh, or pause to let the poignancy set with me for a few moments. A renaissance woman of the cartoon form, in addition to her organic and sincere Ordinary Moments, Ozge created 20 comic tiles for a UC Berkeley Botanical Garden installation, is currently working on an autobiographical comic about her life growing up in Turkey, and creates and collaborates in digital media making things like comic-generating interactive software. The text interwoven below is excerpted from questions I asked about her work and process, Ozge’s perspective on her work in her own words.

When I was in college I used to write letters to my close friends. I would give the letters by hand and watch my friends while reading them. If they giggled I was the happiest person. I dedicated my entire creativity to these letters. Later I started drawing my letters. I even made little comic books for my friends.

When I moved to the States at age 27, I drew about my first 10 days in the States and my friends enjoyed it a lot. A couple years later I decided to make a comic everyday and post it on a web site and that would be my drawn letter to my friends.

I had some English speaking friends in the States by then and most of my Turkish friends speak English, so I decided to make the comics in English. When many people whom I don’t know started reading Ordinary Things I was surprised.

I now have readers all over the world but mostly from the United States, Turkey, Brazil, and the UK. Since I started making Ordinary Things in 2006 I have been drawing in English. I can only speak Turkish and English. Maybe one day I may make comics in a made up language.

Before I came to the States I used to draw for a weekly humor magazine in Turkey. There is a big humor magazine tradition in Turkey. I had the habit of drawing 4 frames every week.

When I quit working for the magazine I didn’t want that habit to die. I wondered if I could draw one image everyday for a year. I tested that thought by making Ordinary Things. After the first year I increased the time I spend for each image and I began posting 3-4 images per week.

My other motivation was to make an autobiographical graphic novel. It was this perfect idea in my mind and I was never able to get started for fear of spoiling the perfection.

I decided to make something less serious just making one image everyday for finding the best aesthetic I could use for my book. It worked!

I discovered many things in those 6 years and I am using them in my autobiographical graphic novel, Dare to Disappoint, which will be released in 2013 or early 2014 from Farrar Straus Giroux.

When you do something you love it does not feel like work and you end up working all the time but it feels like playing all the time. I love all the things I do. It is good and bad.

I have wonderful time while working but there are endless deadlines in my mind that I can never catch. Sometimes work becomes like a fight. Sometimes it becomes an escape.

Once I asked a friend, “Am I compulsive?” and she said “If you ask that to someone who loves you they will say you are passionate. If you ask someone who does not like you, they will say you are compulsive.”

The Rumpus Interview with Natalie Dee

Jory John — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 19:52:42 +0000

Cartoonist Natalie Dee’s eponymous website, NatalieDee.Com, has consistently ranked among the most highly trafficked comic sites on the Internet since its debut. Her comic panels are equally hilarious and dark, featuring all manner of talking creatures, personified objects, and, occasionally, a likeness of Natalie herself.

Characters are often despondent, depressed, and brutally honest about life and, equally as often, death. The style is bright and lively, an appealing and deliberate contrast to the nihilistic tone.

Natalie Dee—”Dee” is a pen name—grew up in Marion, Ohio, a gifted artist from the start. She concedes, however, that paper was scarce in her home, an overlooked, unnecessary expenditure, so Natalie often resorted to tearing end-pages out of books on which to draw. Her single-parent family struggled financially throughout her childhood, so Natalie worked assorted jobs, beginning at age eleven. These formative experiences—having to work during school vacations, while her friends were out playing—strongly influenced her work ethic into adulthood. In a stroke of prescience, Natalie was hired as a graphic designer for an apparel company when she was just fifteen, where she first got to experiment with Photoshop, the program she now uses to create her comics. She also gained experience designing t-shirts, which would come in handy later on.

At first, her website was just a hobby, something to update whenever she could get online. (She was an online personality, in fact, since before she owned a computer. She would hand-draw comics and physically mail them away to be scanned in.) As her site gained traction, though, Natalie quit her day job and invested in the venture full-time. These days, it’s her livelihood. By 2003, NatalieDee.com was being updated on weekdays. It progressed to daily updates—that is, seven days a week—in 2005, a relentless work schedule that the artist imposed on herself. Trace it back to that work ethic. She has created around 3,000 comics thus far, generally working two months in advance, and has never missed a deadline, even when she had complications with her pregnancy in 2008, nearly dying in the hospital.

Because of her desire to take full advantage of her unique situation of being able to work from home—and to satisfy an admittedly short attention span—Natalie immersed herself in a number of side projects, unwilling and/or unable to focus on just one thing. She collaborates on a second comic called Married to the Sea, started a cosmetics business, pens a blog, and has written a regular advice column, all the while releasing a consistently funny, extremely popular daily comic. She has an extensive fan-base that circulates her work around the Internet and also helps her keep track of copycats. (Natalie Dee and I were first in touch in 2007—as it happens, we both make t-shirts and sell them online, and we discovered that an Australian company had been ripping us off. We became online commiserates in our battle against Australia.)

Natalie’s comics look like this:

And this:

As mentioned, there are thousands more where that came from. A few will be scattered throughout this interview…and the rest you can peruse in your leisure.

It’s difficult to write a full bio of Natalie Dee without mentioning her husband Drew, an equally prolific cartoonist and web presence, best known for his daily comic Toothpaste For Dinner. Natalie and Drew formed the company Sharing Machine, an umbrella to their numerous products, including their bread and butter: t -shirts. Over the years, Natalie estimates that the two of them personally shipped upwards of 100,000 shirts featuring their designs to every country that receives mail, sometimes hundreds of shirts in a day. Only recently did they employ a warehouse to stock and ship for them, having run out of storage space in their house with the addition of a daughter.

For this interview, I spoke to Natalie Dee by phone for nearly three hours. She opened by telling me that she wasn’t a huge fan of interviews and preferred to do them—if she had to—by e-mail. But it didn’t take long for her to open up, as you’ll see. She came across as funny, quick, outspoken, thoughtful and opinionated. When I first started transcribing this piece, I designated laughter throughout our conversation with the ubiquitous[laughter] brackets, but quickly realized that I would have to add those brackets every tenth line or so. And so [laughter] was, regrettably, omitted. For the record: Natalie Dee likes to laugh and it’s contagious.

She can also rant with the best of them, whether she’s talking about her aforementioned work ethic, the state of the Internet, her struggles with chronic depression, occasionally creepy fans, being a female cartoonist in a profession dominated by men, or the world at large. She’s a force. Talking to her makes you want to work harder. She’s a great, inspiring conversationalist with a unconventional story.

***The Rumpus: The fact that you’ve done more than 2,500 comics is amazing to me. You update them daily, seven days a week, which is incredible. What does that mean to you when you think back on more than 2,500 comics? What do you think about your body of work?

Natalie Dee: In terms of just being prolific…previously, I had a job doing work with people who had worker’s comp injuries and pharmaceutical stuff, and I was doing my site and it was not as often as I do now. At some point, I quit my job because my site was doing okay. I mean, it wasn’t enough for me to live off of at that point, but it was okay enough that I could quit my job and look for a new job. So, once I quit my job, I just started treating my site like it was my job. I just kind of thought to myself that if I was expecting to make enough money making comics to hold me over to my next job, that I should put more into it. And the more I put into it, the more successful it was. I think that a lot of people see me posting every day as something that is Herculean, but I think that’s kind of the standard when it comes to comics. Anybody who makes comics, who doesn’t do it online, I think they do it at the same clip. Right?

Rumpus: Newspaper comics that are published seven days a week, that kind of thing.

Dee: Yeah. And so I just kind of look at it like it’s my job. I treat it like it’s my job. I probably have closer to 3,000 at this point.

Rumpus: I tried to count them, but I only got back so far.

Dee: There’s a lot of them. I mean, I have a lot on there and I think that having that many on there kind of gives me more room to do different stuff. By the same token, it kind of makes the topics a little more sporadic, just because there’s so much.

Rumpus: Do you look back on them at all?

Dee: I do. I will look back at recent months when I’m working to make sure that I’m not repeating myself too much. And I will look back on previous years to see if there was anything that I did that maybe, in hindsight, I didn’t go all the way with. So I’ll kind of revisit them, just in the interest of being consistent. I think that a lot of times when I look back on them, though, I have a strange relationship with them. I think other people look at it and see what’s on the site, but when I look at it, I’m usually looking at it through a lens of the stuff that was going on at the time. I can look at it and tell if I was having a particularly shitty time, or if other stuff was going on. So I kind of view it through a more critical lens. I can see when I wasn’t paying attention. I have a tendency to look at stuff like that.

Rumpus: Are you saying that when you look at a particular comic, it’ll remind you of where you were and what you were thinking when you wrote it? Or are you talking specifically about the comics where you’ve inserted yourself into the panels?

Dee: There’s this series—maybe in the beginning of 2008, end of 2007—where it’s probably one of my favorite times of the comic. The comics, in that particular era, I thought were good when I made them and when I go back to them, I still think they’re good. But the time directly after that, between the summer and fall of 2008, I can tell that it’s not how I would’ve wanted it to be, necessarily. That was when I was pregnant and I wasn’t telling anybody about it. I was really sick and having all kinds of problems, and trying to work up enough back-catalogue so I would be able to take leave. So I can see, looking at it, that it’s not quite as on-point as I would’ve liked. That’s when I go back and see if there’s anything that I didn’t go all the way with. I will look back there and see if I had any ideas that just kind of farted out, instead of getting my full attention. It goes both ways.

Rumpus: I remember reading in an interview you said you wish people would notice how much work you put into your comics. Do you still feel that way?

Dee: I don’t feel put upon by people not noticing it, because obviously they’re not viewing it in the same way that I am. I would prefer if what I liked about what I do was more similar to what other people liked about it, but I am not going to complain, because I understand that my situation in being able to make the kind of art I do and make a living at it is so lucky and it’s such a privilege that I’m not going to complain about why people like my stuff.

Rumpus: In terms of cartoonists, do you feel like women are still in the minority? You’re a really prominent cartoonist, but the field seems kind of dominated by guys, right?

Dee: I will tell you a story, Jory, and you are going to hate it.

Rumpus: Oh really?

Dee: Are you ready for it?

Rumpus: I’m ready.

Dee: Okay. Here’s my story with comics: I was raised by a single mother, and so I never had any ideas in my head about stuff that women could or couldn’t do. Like, if women can’t do something, that means that it’s not gonna get done and they’re fucked, right? If you can’t do it yourself, you’re fucked. I could do anything. There’s nothing I couldn’t do, and I dare anybody to tell me I can’t do it.

So, when I was younger, there was a comic book store in the city that I lived in. And my friend’s parents owned the comic book store. Her mom was always the one at the comic book store. I would go and hang out with her mom. I just loved her, I thought she was great. I would go down there all the time after school. It was a small town and no one cared about indie comics, but she would always get stuff for me, because she knew that I liked it. And so I was always on top of all the comics, which was great. It was my jam. And I was able to get what I wanted instead of having to read kiddie superhero shit. And so that was my exposure to comics. It wasn’t threatening, because it was just me and my friend’s mom. And we would sit there and talk about comics. And she would order stuff and say, “I thought you’d like this.” And I’d get it and bring it home and read it. And I’d come back and she’d find something else that she thought I would like.

So then I moved from Marion to Columbus, and I was still into comics. There’s a lot more comic book stores here, but it wasn’t women who were working at the comic book stores. It didn’t even occur to me that I’d go to a comic book store and just feel gross, but you could feel people staring at you. It’s sick. This was in the late ’90s/early 2000s. I could feel people staring at me. I’d go through the door and a door chime would ring when you’d walk in, and you could almost hear everyone’s whiplash. “Oh, there’s a chick in the comic book store!” And after a few times, it just made me feel so gross that I stopped. I just didn’t do it. I was tired of guys looking over my shoulder and seeing what I was getting. “You’re getting what I’m getting!” Or being judgmental about what I was getting. So I stopped going to the comic book store. I’d do other stuff. You know, I’d order stuff online if I wanted to read comics.

Rumpus: Wow.

Dee: I started doing my own stuff, and it wasn’t comics necessarily. I was drawing pictures. And it was like cutesy stuff, when I first started out, it was real cutesy stuff. It was one-shot, one-panel comics. Right? And it kind of evolved into something where it resembled comics.

So, I had a Wikipedia page. Toothpaste For Dinner had a Wikipedia page. Married to the Sea had a Wikipedia page. Drew’s defunct industrial act had a page…and my Wikipedia page got deleted because I wasn’t notable. They put me as a footnote on the Married to the Sea Wikipedia page, even though I was getting more traffic than any of those sites. And nobody ever said anything, no one ever mentioned me. At the height of my site—I was probably one of the top five [web cartoonists online] in terms of traffic—and no one would even acknowledge that I was there.

Rumpus: That’s insane.

Dee: And I don’t care, really. You know what I’m saying? I’m making a living. I have a house. I’m doing my thing. I know I don’t need other people’s approval. But it is definitely a bro scene. They definitely don’t want chicks coming to the party. If you’ve read other interviews with me, I’ve mentioned it before. It is definitely a clubhouse and they’re all in there talking about which Legend of Zelda cartoon they’re going to draw tomorrow. You know the bullshit those dudes do, right? “I made a comic about a video game with Chewbacca in it!” You didn’t fucking make Chewbacca! Quit drawing Star Wars comics! Anyway, they’re like, “No girls.” Periodically there will come a girl who’s doing webcomics, but either she can’t hang, she gets overwhelmed and she can’t update regularly, or she immediately gets into this tokenism, where she goes and tries to rub elbows with these dudes and they just tokenize her. They’re like, “Here’s the girl webcomic.” It’s embarrassing. I don’t want any part of it.

And I think, to a certain extent, I’ve had issues with people objectifying me. I’m not, like, anything special. But I have had people saying gross shit about me. I’ve had people e-mailing me about my tits. Gross stuff. The only time I’ve ever seen another comic mention me is when some dude made a comic and the gist of the comic was, “Webcomics don’t look how they draw themselves to look, so-and-so draws himself like this but he looks like this! And Natalie Dee draws herself like a stick figure, but she’s a fox.” For years, I never posted pics of myself anywhere, and people would say things like, “Oh, she doesn’t post pics because she’s fat and she’s ugly and she probably is covered in zits and real nasty.” Then, when I did post a pic, it was a flood of people saying really disgusting things to me and accusing me of being a cam-whore and all that. There’s no way to have it be okay.

Rumpus: I don’t know about the fans, but do you feel like the other web cartoonists use you as a target because they’re not happy that you’re simply funnier than they are? Do you feel like that’s an issue?

Dee: It might be an issue. I don’t sit around thinking I’m great. In general, I’m like, “I suck.” You know? But I think there’s probably a level of honesty and a level of humor in my stuff that they can’t get to because they’re trying so hard to not be honest about themselves. And they will never get over the hump, as long as they can’t be honest about themselves. And maybe that threatens them. Maybe the amount of traffic I get without involving myself with the scene threatens them. I don’t know. Maybe it’s that most of the people making comics are on that weird nerd shit, where all they talk about is fucking video games and shit like that, and there aren’t female characters that aren’t inserted in a really sloppy, heavy-handed way. Like, they’ve never drawn anything in great detail in their comics, right? They don’t have fucking any handle on perspective or anything, but when they have a female character, her tits are fucking perfect. They’re suddenly the Rembrandt of titties. She’s still all fucking wall-eyed and shit, and she’s just in the panel to roll her eyes and be like, “Oh, you guys are crazy!” and then fucking get out. Right? That’s the female character they have. Maybe they’re mad about the traffic I get because I’m not threatening to women, and there’s more women online than men.

Rumpus: Do you feel like that has driven you? That you had to prove yourself a little more because of that whole scene? Do you feel like that’s made you even more adamant about, This is what I do, this is my work ethic, I’m going to kill it every day.

Dee: Well, my work ethic is always the same, regardless. I don’t see myself as being in competition with people. They are not making my site, and I’m not gonna be threatened by them doing their site well. It doesn’t affect my work ethic, because I’m not in competition. Like, I’m not going to be mad at you for getting a manager position at Subway when I’m still frying fries at McDonald’s. It’s not the same thing, we’re not working at the same place, and so there’s no reason for competition. So I don’t think about them. I don’t participate. I don’t do anything, except mind my own business.

Rumpus: It sounds really annoying, honestly. Because for the most part your site is entirely content. Nobody’s even in the same room. It’s crazy there’s still that gender discrepancy.

Dee: Well, my site isn’t about being a chick. I don’t talk about chick shit. You know? I am a lady and I have lady friends and we do lady shit, but that’s not all I have going for me. I’m not sitting here thinking about my period all the fucking time. I’m not Cathy.

If anyone ever tells you there’s not sexism in comics, they’re lying to you. Because that’s the only place I’ve ever experienced sexism in my entire life. [On Wikipedia] they put me as a footnote in Married to the Sea. I’m not “notable.” I don’t care, I don’t make money off a Wikipedia page. But it just really illustrated to me how people feel about it. I think it’s kind of played into stuff I’m doing on the side, because I’m doing my blog about cosmetics and stuff. And people initially—if they think about it—they’re like, “Why would you do that? That’s just dumb chick stuff.” But I wanted to have something where it was a woman writing about women’s interests and not making it stupid. Because you have a choice when you’re a lady: you can either be smart and homely, or you can take care of yourself and be fancy and dumb. That’s the choice. But that whole thing lit a fire under my ass and—as I get older—I just get fancier and fancier. Because I’m like, You know what? If it bothers them, I want them to fuckin’ know a girl brought it. If you think I can’t do it, I’m going to make sure you know I did it. I’m not going to go up in some fucking corduroys and some kind of fucking homely, mousy haircut because it’s not threatening or whatever. If it’s going to be an issue, I’m going to make sure you know that I’m a bad bitch. Too bad.

Rumpus: You’ve said that your site is about holding up a mirror to society and showing how disappointing it is. Do you still feel that way?

Dee: Oh yeah, absolutely, absolutely, I still feel that way. Because I think that everything when I first started, it was fun; the first comics on my site aren’t even comics. There weren’t webcomics. No one was talking about webcomics. There wasn’t MySpace. Not even blogs. I remember making comics so long ago where I was making of fun of people calling these things “blogs” because I thought the word was so dumb. Because it was new. So, I think I got into it at a time when it was different. Aside from that, as my site was picking up steam and I was starting to focus more on it, it seemed like the United States in general was taking a really shitty, dark turn. It was right after 9/11 and all this other stuff. And all of the blind patriotism was going on. And we’re invading Iraq. And I’m sitting there trying to work and watching Nick Berg get his head cut off.

I think that that kind of real heavy, dark negativity kind of influenced my site in a way. It was an issue for me then, to get into a jokey mindset when all that ill stuff was happening, so I had to find a way to make it work. I mean, I was not raised in an environment where everything was cool. You know? And I think my upbringing was a lot different than a lot of Internet college-educated liberals and so I think I came into it, anyway, with a little bit more realism than a lot of people my age have toward stuff in general. I am liberal, I am a Democrat, but I can see stuff that they do that is the same as the stuff right-wing people do. I don’t think anybody is perfect. And so I think I’m able to hand it out everywhere. Just like, liberals talking about Republicans hating blacks and hating women. But at the same time, a lot of the liberal media will talk about people in a way that’s really classist. I don’t put blinders up just because I feel like I’m a part of something.

Rumpus: I remember you said that being on the Internet, you don’t have to worry about getting approval from some editor somewhere, or worry about distributing your stuff. It’s immediately global.

Dee: Oh, yeah, absolutely. There’s a lot of stuff that I’ve made that no editor in the world would touch with a ten-foot pole. I’ve done spec work, though. I will be honest: I really like doing spec work. I like just making bullshit and squaring it up, slapping a logo on it and then dusting my hands off. I’ve joked with Drew before that if I didn’t do this anymore, I might work for Valpak, in Columbus, and just make all those shitty coupons. Because I mean, it is what it is. What’s the difference between me drawing something and me making a car wash coupon? There is no difference. More people would probably see the car wash coupon and it would actually be useful in some way.

Rumpus: You’d still get to see it published and distributed and read.

Dee: Yeah, making it is making it. I mean, I have done a lot. I’ve worked since I was eleven and I’ve done work that was really horrible. Like, when I was in middle school, I had to go get documents, because I was too young to work, but I had to go and work in the summertime. Everyone would leave on the last day of school and I would come back, the next day, and clean all the graffiti up and scrub the desks and wax everything. And I was eleven or twelve years old, and my hands were petrified with wax and my knuckles are cracking and bleeding and shit. That is way worse than making comics. You know what I’m saying? And coming back the first day of school, after you’re done cleaning the whole thing, and seeing your friend walk down the hallway with a pencil and just dragging a pencil on the wall the whole way down. I mean, I’m not going to complain about making art for a living. It’s probably part of the reason I’m so prolific. If I’m not sweating, I’m not convinced I’m working enough.

Rumpus: You were always really enterprising, huh? Were you always hitting the pavement and getting products out?

Dee: Yeah. I started working when I was really young because I had a lot of sisters. My mom was single. So it was kind of expected that once we were able to work, we had to take care of ourselves. And so I was always working. I was cleaning the school and working at restaurants and working at the library and making t-shirts and watching people’s kids and…everything. Like, I always, always, always worked.

Rumpus: After all that work, it seems like it would take a huge amount of confidence to finally quit those day jobs and just make art for a living.

Dee: Well, I didn’t quit my job thinking that I was going to make a living off my website. It was just a happy coincidence that when I invested more time into it, things started taking off in a way that I was able to procrastinate on finding a new job, longer and longer and longer. And even now, it’s been a really long time that I’ve been working online and making my living online, but I don’t feel entitled to it. I keep good track of what’s going on and, if I have to get a job, I’m not going to be sad about it. Because who else got to do what I got to do? I don’t feel entitled to anything.

Rumpus: So you come from pretty humble roots.

Dee: Oh, absolutely. I mean, I grew up in Marion, Ohio, which is north of Columbus, but it’s a really small town. No one is educated, no one has money. It’s a very Appalachian scene. There was a business there called the Power Shovel, which was a factory that made giant diggers and crawlers, those big trucks that take the shuttle to the launch pad. But when they opened, there wasn’t a ton of people in Marion to work there. And so, a lot of people came up from Appalachia to work there. Then the Power Shovel closed and now they are on some Rust Belt shit.

So the scene is rough. Only ten percent of people there have a college degree, and a quarter of them live in poverty, and everyone is blue collar. Or not even blue collar. Like, no collar. I was not originally from Marion, but I grew up there, so a lot of my friends are from there, and I graduated high school there. So I’m used to working-class people. And I think that feeds into me thinking that a lot of people online are kind of frivolous, or something. And Drew, also, his family is Appalachian. So we both know what it is actually like to work. When I see somebody who has a webcomic and I go to their site and their site says, “I had to go to the dentist today. No comic,” it definitely colors how I feel about their work ethic. And there are definitely people who are like, “Oh, I don’t have a new comic. I couldn’t think of anything.” Fucking do your fucking comic. No one gets to do comics. No one gets to do comics! Just shut the fuck up and do your comic. There’s no excuse. There’s no excuse. If people want to come to my site and look at my comics, there is always a comic. If I know I have to go to the doctor tomorrow, I’m going to make sure I already have tomorrow’s comic done. I’m going to go and I’m not even going to tell anybody about it, because it’s not people’s business, and they don’t care if I need to get a rash checked out or something.

Rumpus: Right. Like when you were pregnant.

Dee: Oh yeah. And you know what—I almost died when I had my daughter. I was in the hospital for a week. I had preeclampsia really bad. I was going into organ failure. I had an emergency C-section where I got cut twice, in the shape of an anchor, and my daughter was premature, and I didn’t miss a goddamn comic. Not even fucking one. No one even knew I was fucking pregnant. Because I wasn’t trying to take this project I had for so many years and turn it into a mommy blog. I have a daughter and I love her and I take care of her, but she’s not content for my site. And so I don’t want people to think about it like that. So I didn’t say anything. I didn’t tell anybody I was pregnant, and I never missed a fucking comic. Not one. Not one.

Rumpus: When you were pregnant, how long did it take to make a backlog? Are you always working four-to-six weeks ahead?

Dee: I work pretty far ahead. And I just did double-time. And obviously, I didn’t work as far in advance as I would have liked, because I didn’t know I was going to get so sick, and I didn’t know my daughter was going to be premature. I thought I was going to have another couple months to do more comics. As soon as I found out I was pregnant, I started double-timing it, because I knew I was not going to be up to it.

So, I had, like, six weeks extra. I had the month that I had just taken care of and then I had six weeks extra. And so my daughter was born in the beginning of October, and I had to go back to making comics in November. I had it dropped in my lap that I wasn’t going to have as much time as I had thought. I only had a couple weeks after I was discharged before I had to start making comics again, so that was really hard. And that’s what I’m thinking about when I was talking about looking back on my stuff and seeing that some stuff isn’t as good as I would’ve liked. I can see where I was not mentally there, I was not firing on all my cylinders. But I still went. I still fucking did my shit. People who wanted to read my site wanted to read my site, not hear me moan and call it off for a month.

It’s just—I don’t understand people with no work ethic when they have such an amazing opportunity to do something that is fun, that they love. Go make those goddamn comics.

Rumpus: I don’t know if this is accurate, but I would imagine that you’re the only one who noticed a discrepancy in the quality of the comics at that time. You’re your harshest critic, right? Did anybody else notice?

Dee: Oh, no, I don’t think that they would. I mean, I was telling you before—what I like most about my stuff is different than what other people like. And so I don’t think that people notice when there’s a discrepancy, but I notice when there’s not as many that month that I liked. I’ve had people write me and say, “You’re on a roll!” when I definitely was not feeling like I was on a roll, and I’ve had people write me and tell me I’m slipping when I am making a ton of stuff that I’m really digging.

Rumpus: Going back to that period at the beginning of 2008 that you were happy with: what appealed to you about that period, versus the next phase where you were just trying to build up a backlog?

Dee: The stuff I like is weird and dark, and the stuff other people like has a sillier slant to it. I know that you do stuff online, so maybe you feel the same way about this—I have my ideas of what I like the most about what I do. And when I look back at the stuff that I like the most, it is not the stuff that other people like. I have to kind of balance it, in order to make myself happy, but then also not make people drop me.

Rumpus: And can you say what it is that you like about it, exactly?

Dee: Well my experience is in art. When I was a kid, I was real involved in art stuff. I went to college for art stuff, and then I think I got kind of disillusioned with some things and kind of divorced myself from fine arts and professional arts, just because I am a little bit misanthropic and I don’t like a lot of the snootiness that goes around with it. And so when I started my comic, it wasn’t something that I was doing with an eye towards it being professional. I was dating someone and we just drew pictures, and I put them online because it just seemed like somewhere to me, like a shoebox to put ‘em in. And so, when I first started out, I didn’t have any grand designs. It was just something I was doing for fun. And I ended up getting into a situation where people liked it a whole lot, so I kept on doing it. But stylistically, it maybe wasn’t something I would have done originally.

So when I think about what I like the most—and most of them are from the last five years or so—I’ve been a little bit more comfortable with the style that I started with, but also kind of having a lot more drawing in it. There’s a little bit more attention to detail. I will spend considerably more time on some pieces. If you look over my comics, sometimes the drawing is pretty quick. But other ones I draw, I will spend a really long time on it. I personally like the ones where it is a little bit more detailed, because I think the kind of childish drawing quality, combined with elements that are a lot more realistic. Like, I really get down and draw it to the very, very tiniest detail. I like that. And so that’s the stuff I like the most. But people usually like the shit jokes the best.

Rumpus: And when did you start occasionally inserting yourself as the protagonist? Was that something you were doing pretty early on?

Dee: I think that the protagonist in my comic is loosely based off of me, but is not me. Like, it’s as much me as anything else I write. Obviously, I can’t completely get out of my head, so there’s always going to be a little bit of me in anything I do. It was always like a very slight me quality to the character. I started really clearly trying to make myself a different character, when people started to blur the line a little bit too much, or they didn’t really understand that I wasn’t the same person that was on my site. People have ideas about how I am that aren’t accurate. And they talk to me in a way like they think I’m a cartoon. That’s not really the case. I make comics, but that is not my whole life. So now, when I am making a comic that is definitely about me, I make it look more like me. It’s just a way of further marking the difference between what people see on a regular basis and how that is a character that I made. And I’m somebody different than that.

Rumpus: Right. And it sounds like, based on what I’ve read and what you’ve told me, that there’s a part of you that really enjoys not sharing everything about your life, keeping some of your life to yourself.

Dee: Absolutely. You know, I’m not like a hermit or cagey or anything, but when I first started out, I had a few things happen to me—in terms of my privacy—before I was even popular at all, that really kind of shook me up a little bit too much to be comfortable sharing too much about myself. Like, I got married when I was really young. When I got married, no one was looking at my site. But I mentioned getting married, and someone wrote me and told me all the personal information about myself, because he heard me say I had got married, and he went through the Franklin County records and went through all the marriage licenses until he found someone named Natalie who had gotten married in the last week. He was like, “Your name is blah blah blah and you married this guy,” and it was creepy as fuck.

I’ve had stuff like that happen a few times, to the point where I’m like, “You know, I have a pen name and that’s fine.” And initially, I had the pen name because everybody had fake names that they were using on the Internet. No one used their real name, because no one knew what was going on. Everybody had, like, AOL handles and shit. So my name on my site—my maiden name started with a D. When I was younger, people would call me that, if there were other girls named Natalie in my school or wherever, so they wouldn’t confuse me with some other Natalie. I picked that for my pen name/site name because I thought it was funny, calling myself that, since of course there were other Natalie’s online.

After I got married, my last name didn’t even start with a D anymore, so it’s like an extra layer of disguise. I’m fine with that, and I’m fine with people not knowing my real name. When I wasn’t even popular at all and I wasn’t making a living and people didn’t care who I was, there were still people who were really fucking creepy. It’s not that I don’t trust people. Once I’ve talk to people in real life or become online pals, I don’t care. My online friends—I have no problem telling them what my name is, they mail me stuff to my house, I’m not weird about it. I don’t care if you know what my name is, because I know your name and if you started being weird, I could be like “Whoa, Jory’s being weird,” and I could take care of myself because it’s not me versus some anonymous weirdo. But if I don’t know people, they have no reason to know my personal information.

Rumpus: Do folks in your real life—your neighbors and people you encounter where you live—do they know what you do and do they get it? Or do you feel like you keep that part of you separate from the people that you see in real life?

Dee: I used to keep it more separate, because it was something I did casually. Once you do it as your main job, it’s really hard to not tell anyone about it. People in my neighborhood don’t bug me, because I just think the vibe in my neighborhood is different for whatever reason, and it’s part of the reason that I decided to live here. People leave me alone. Like, my particular street is middle-class, but there are areas in my neighborhood that are considerably fancier. Eric Clapton owns a house a few blocks over from me.

People don’t care about me, and people don’t care what I’m doing. I’m just that lady who is weird, but pretty nice to chat with in line at the market. I like this neighborhood. But there are certain parts in town where I can’t even go, because people get in my grill. And I realize that part of that is my own fault because I am kind of eccentric and people kind of know how I am and and see someone weird and do the math. There are certain areas in Columbus where I know that I will get hassled if I go, so I don’t like going there very often. Drew, just a couple weeks ago, had gone to a neighborhood in Columbus to meet Kris [Wilson] from [webcomic] Cyanide & Happiness, because he was in town and, on the way back, Drew stopped to get custard or something. He was in line at the custard place and three different people went up to him. I have a fucking shitty station wagon with no A.C. I don’t make enough money to want to be all “jazz hands” all the time, in case someone sees me.

Rumpus: Yeah. I would imagine that the longer you’re online and the more and more people who see your stuff, it becomes harder and harder to completely separate it, right?

Dee: Oh yeah, and like I said, I’ve been doing this as my only job for such a long time, so I meet new people and they’re all, “So what do you do?” And what am I gonna tell them? Sometimes I’ll say I have an online store, because I want to keep it real vague, you know? I have an online store. And they’re like, “Oh, what’s your store? What do you sell?” And I’m like, “Oh god. I sell t-shirts with stuff I’ve made on them.” And they’re like, “Oh, what do you make?” And they poke me until I have to tell them and then their iPhones come out.

Rumpus: And you have to stand there, watching them look at your stuff.

Dee: Yeah, and it’s awkward as hell. And it’s like, I know you wouldn’t like it, then it’s awkward forever after that. And my family, obviously, they all know what I do. But my family is like the total opposite of me. They could not be any more different than I am. And so I don’t even think they care, really.

Rumpus: You don’t think they check the site?

Dee: They might. But they don’t seem to be affected by it at all. My sister modeled t-shirts for me. But they don’t care. I’m just as weird as I’ve ever been. My sisters and I have nothing in common at all.

Rumpus: Switching subjects, what’s your writing process like? Do you carry around a little notebook? Or is there a routine where you always sit down at a certain time?

Dee: When I do my comics, I know I have to do them, and so I will sit down and do them. I know people are like, “I don’t feel like it, I don’t have any ideas.” But sitting down and starting to work will always give you ideas. Sometimes, if I have an idea and I’m not working, I have that little note app in my phone, that thing with the Post-It notes. I’ll make a little note with that, or on some scrap paper at my desk. But I usually like the drawing-pictures part. So, a lot of the time, I will draw something that I want to draw, and then think about what I want to write on it as I’m drawing it.

Rumpus: Oh, I wondered about that, whether you just picked an object and then figured out what funny thing the object would say.

Dee: Yeah, I do that a lot and, I mean, when the joke is more specific, it’s usually something that came to me before the drawing did. But a lot of times, I will draw something that I wanted to draw, I thought would be funny to draw, or I thought would be enjoyable to draw. Then, as I’m drawing, I will think about what I’m drawing and then come up with something.

Rumpus: And do you have a quota? Are you trying to do one drawing per day, or is it more like a long-term weekly or monthly thing?

Dee: I try to work monthly. I don’t do it all in one day. I have a file on my computer where I store all of the stuff for next month. And so I am always working ahead of time. That also makes it easier for me to make sure that it goes together. You know what I’m saying? It flows better. And then, right before the month changes, we have this proprietary thing on our site, where I will load up all of my comics and then it updates for me. It updates at the same time every day because, if it was up to me, I would sleep through it.

Rumpus: So when you go into the office, the first thing you’ll do is just basically think, What do I want to draw today?

Dee: I will think about what I have to do this month. I have a lot of things that I’m doing in addition to my comics that don’t necessarily have to do with my comics. After I upload my comics for the month, I will spend a few work days doing other stuff, just so I can clear my mind and not think about it for a minute. It’s really hard to get ideas if you’re just constantly thinking about it. And so, at the beginning of the month, I’ll work on other stuff. And when I come into the office, I come and I sit and I drink coffee and think about what I have to do. And if I have to do comics, then I figure out how many comics I want to do, and I open up that many files in Photoshop and get cracking on it, and if I have something else to do, then I might do that instead.

Rumpus: And your workday: is it all over the place, or is it pretty consistent? Are you in the office for a certain number of hours?

Dee: It used to be more sporadic and I would work whenever I felt like it, but now we have someone who comes over and takes care of my daughter, and so I work when she’s there.

Rumpus: Are there days where you just bang them out and other days where you’re kind of like, Oh boy, I haven’t even finished one yet?

Dee: Hell yeah. I mean, sometimes I’ll sit down and I will really fucking crank them out. I’ll do a lot. But other days, I’ll be like, I need some comics today, and I’ll sit, and I’ll…get hung up on one that is detailed and I’ll spend a few hours doing it and my hand hurts and I don’t want to do any more. It just depends.

That is a benefit of working so far in advance: you have a lot more time to be flexible with what you’re getting done on a daily basis. If I had to do comics every day, and I was just posting them every single day, I’m sure it would be really taxing and it would be easy for me to be a puss about it and call it off, you know? But I could call off three days in a row and no one would know.

Rumpus: Totally. But is there ever a time where you’re like, I’ve just thought of the perfect idea for tomorrow and I’m going to do it right now and get this thing online, ASAP?

Dee: Oh yeah, sometimes I’ll do that and I’ll be like, I have one that’s just for tomorrow. Or there’s something that happens at the beginning of the month and I know we’re not going to update until two days afterwards, and I’ll send that up the line and rearrange things so comics that are time-sensitive happen when they need to.

Rumpus: Right.

Dee: It just depends. A lot of times, it doesn’t really matter what day it is. But when it does, I will always shuffle the deck and make sure it happens when I want it to. I try to be timely. If there’s something that’s a hot topic, I’ll switch things around so I’m not making a joke about last month’s news. I try and keep an eye on what’s going to be going on next month, too, so I plan for seasonal topics and things you can expect, like it being sweltering in July, or Halloween, or the next apocalypse prediction.

Rumpus: And what about your theme weeks? I really love them. Like your Daughters Say Crazy Shit series. It seems like every once in a while, you’ll come out with a different series. Does that help you come up with ideas?

Dee: I started doing themes because I would think about something I wanted to do, and I would get more than one idea about it. And so when I do a theme week, it’s not really so much of trying to dump out a whole bunch. It’s more like I group them all together, so they are a part of a set, instead of people being like, Oh, is she doing another one about worms? If I want to do a whole bunch about worms, I’ll put them all in the same week and say, Oh, it’s “Worm Week!” Sometimes I’ll do a theme week and sometimes I won’t. It just depends on what kind of ideas I’m coming up with that month. Sometimes I think I’ll do a theme week, and I can only think of three of them. When that happens, I’ll scatter them out. But when I do something like that I try to do them under the same heading so you can tell they belong together and it’s not accidental.

Rumpus: The headings of your comics are always funny. The titles play off the comics. Do you write the titles first and then the comics come after that? Or the other way around?

Dee: Yeah, I write the titles when I save the files.

Rumpus: Were they always titled? Or were they untitled in the beginning?

Dee: No, I think that they were always titled. It’s just that the titles evolved, because as I made more and more comics, I couldn’t keep calling them things like “Socks,” because then I’d accidentally erase the old file with the same name. I started making them more declarative, so it’s really hard to have the same title twice.

Rumpus: So it’s a way to both be doubly funny, with an extra joke, and to also archive them?

Dee: Yeah. It kind of started off like that, but then it evolved into a way of clarifying the joke for someone who might be simple. Or adding another element to the joke. Just kind of tying it up and sending it off.

Rumpus: And what about your style for drawing people—was that always the same? Looking back to 2002, it seems pretty consistent.

Dee: Yeah, in terms of my site, I think it’s always been pretty much the same. But it kind of started off as—like I said—I think it was me doodling stuff for fun, just ’cause I got some markers or something. And it wasn’t something I was doing on purpose. Prior to that, I was always into comics and always into art and stuff like that, and I used to draw people and it was different. It was a totally different style. I think that my other styles of drawing, in the past, there’s definitely influences and that’s probably why I opted not to use them.

Rumpus: Who was influencing you?

Dee: I think that probably in terms of how I kind of learned how to draw in general, on my own, there’s stuff you learn in school and stuff you learn on your own. I used to read a lot of indie comics and Slave Labor stuff and I think that in terms of comics I always enjoyed and comic artists who I think are really great, my favorite is Evan Dorkin. His main comics are really good, but something I think is probably real influential — in hindsight, I can see it as influential — was Dork. I liked that a whole lot, because it was a collection of his single-shot stuff and he would just compile ‘em seasonally or whatever. But then, as it progressed, toward the end, it had a real autobiographical bent to it and it was really dark. It was like really, really super dark. And there’s just something I liked about that. I think that something that is important about making stuff is being able to be self-deprecating and acknowledging negative stuff about yourself. There’s a lot of comics online where I’m not feeling it, because they are incapable of seeing themselves in a light that isn’t like this super-dude, awesome-guy thing they’re trying to get the Internet to think of them like that. You know what I’m saying? I don’t ever pretend to be anything that I’m not. Because it’s just exhausting.

Rumpus: I think it really shines through. You genuinely say in your comics that sometimes you deal with depression, for instance. That’s stood out to me. Is it cathartic to work that issue into your comics?

Dee: I think that in terms of talking about depression and other problems I’ve had—at this point, I wouldn’t even consider it a problem. It’s just something that’s ongoing: I have chronic depression. I’ve had depression since I was a kid. And I also have ADD. And that contributed to my chronic depression. I’m never gonna not have it. But I’m not like Morrissey. I’m not crying in my bedroom. It’s so internalized and it’s such a part of my personality, it kind of manifests more as a nihilistic attitude. But I like being honest about it because I think that there’s a lot of people who just don’t say stuff like that to their friends, or don’t say stuff to, like…whoever. And I think it’s refreshing to have someone talk about it like it’s not something they’re ashamed of, and to make other people feel better about it. Because I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with it. I don’t feel that there’s anything wrong with me. It’s part of my personality. But I’m chronically depressed. I’m not going to make comics where I’m saying, Everything’s great, everything’s cool, and I’m cool, and you’re cool! No, if everything’s cool then nobody’s cool. Right?

Rumpus: Doesn’t one of your comics basically say, If you like everybody, you don’t like anybody?

Dee: Yeah, exactly. That’s what I always say. My daughter is walking around the house like, “I love everybody!” And I’m like, “If you love everybody, you don’t love anybody. You just gotta shake that off, sister.”

Rumpus: You don’t see a lot of comics talking about funerals, as you’ve done. There was that one where you had a woman in a coffin and you had some guy giving a bland eulogy about how the woman was really good at Bejeweled. I don’t know if that was supposed to be autobiographical, or a random woman.

Dee: That was actually autobiographical. I whoop a donkey’s ass at Bejeweled.

Rumpus: I mean, that’s something you don’t see everyday in comics—not only somebody in a coffin, but somebody just giving the most surface, unemotional eulogy for the poor woman. And I remember a comic you did that talks about a solitary march to the grave. I think there really is something very appealing about combining the imagery that you create with those super-dark themes.

Dee: Well, yeah, and like I said, there are certain things that I really enjoy. I really enjoy being totally honest, because I’m sure that I’m not the only one who thinks that way. You know? And I think I like talking about it because it kind of does make people squirm a little bit, because people don’t like to think about it. They don’t want to talk about it or be reminded. I like the combination of the kind of simple, childish style with the dark themes.

Rumpus: Do you know where your humor comes from?

Dee: I don’t know. I think my humor is probably more of a gallows humor than anything else. I wasn’t, like, totally fucked when I was a kid. But shit happens. And I think my sense of humor kind of comes from trying to find humor in stuff that maybe isn’t that great, you know? I mean, aside from the obvious disadvantages of poverty, there’s a level of brutality on a day-to-day basis that people who have had a nicer row to hoe maybe don’t understand. [In Marion] kids were always getting fucked up and stuff. I’ve known all kinds of people who’ve died huffing freon in the parking lot, or killed themselves, or died of cancer from living too close to the toxic waste dump, or wrecked their cars or O.D.’d. I just think it’s real precious when people think that there’s a certain idealized way that the world is. How do you think it’s like that? I’m intimately aware of how shitty things can be, I’ve actually seen what happens to people who were unlucky enough to be dealt a cruddy hand, you know?

And that kind of goes back to the nihilistic, depressive spin I put on everything. I’m too exposed to stuff to not notice things now. Just because shit is depressing or horrible, doesn’t mean you can’t laugh about it with blood in your mouth. If you can’t make light of the horrible stuff that happens all the time, you’re never going to laugh at anything. You know, like, “George just got hit by a train, where’s that weed?”

Rumpus: Right. And just because things have gotten better for you, doesn’t mean you don’t remember what it was like.

Dee: You know what—I think things have gotten better for me, but, if anything, it kind of makes things worse for me, because it kind of makes things seem capricious, or maybe unfair. I don’t think I’m better than anybody else, so I don’t think it’s necessarily fair that other people I’ve known in my life, who are as smart as me, or as funny as me, or as hard-working as me, are not in the same situation that I am. I think it was very lucky that I ended up in the position that I’m in. I think it was just a function of me being in the right place at the right time. We had a collection [of comics] online when people started being online. And so we were there already. We got in not knowing what was there and then it was just a happy coincidence that the Internet turned into something different. We are hard workers and so we were able to respond to the increase in traffic and interest and business by working harder. But it was luck and I know it was luck and it also plays into the thing of having a good work ethic, just because I don’t take it for granted.

I don’t think that I deserve it. I don’t think that people need to kiss my ass. I don’t think that people need to suck up everything I make. There is no artist, anywhere, who has it how I have it. I’m so fortunate. If people are going to pay attention to what I’m doing, why would I sit there and not work? There’s a level of entitlement where people take things for granted and are like, “I’m just not going to today.” Just fucking work! No one gets to do this! If you’re doing something you love, it shouldn’t be a big deal to fucking go to work. Go to work!

Rumpus: Something that I was thinking, when I was looking back through your stuff, is that you seem like such a perfect fit for the Internet and vice-versa. It’s such a great example of something coming together so perfectly.

Dee: Well, thank you. I mean, I think it’s funny seeing what I’m doing now, in comparison the stuff that I was doing when I was younger, because when I was younger, there wasn’t really a slot that my skills would fit into. But I do agree that it’s definitely a uniquely Internet kind of thing.

Rumpus: Are you feeling like you’ve sort of experimented with different techniques that you can really do on the Internet, as the comic has progressed? One of the things I noticed you doing, in more recent years, is incorporating actual photos of things into your drawings.

Dee: Yeah, yeah. I mean, a lot of times I do that because I like the way it looks, too. I think the contrast looks cool. But it’s just something I’ve started doing recently, to try out new stuff. And I kind of started off not putting details in at all, then I got more detailed. Then I started doing more of a thing where I would render out textures myself, and work them up to have a weird, more realistic vibe to it. Lately, I’ve been doing photos. But a lot of times, I’ll use photos when I need people to recognize what it is, immediately. Like a lot of times, I’ll use a can of soda. People know what it is and I’m not going to spend a half hour drawing it. I like how it looks. The style of drawing I do is obviously not realistic at all, and it is kind of projecting them into a situation that is more realistic.

Rumpus: And what about your more gruesome stuff?

Dee: Oh yeah! And when I do that stuff—most of the time when I do the really gory stuff—I do all of that by hand. But that’s just my own personal aesthetic. I’m a pretty unapologetic metalhead, so I like kind of injecting the horror elements into it. That’s something that I would probably say is one of the things that I like doing on my site, gore and stuff. The pictures I have for my Facebook group—the one with the nesting doll—that was one of my favorite ones I’ve done. I took a really long time doing that, and no one gives a shit about that one. But I’m gonna keep it up there, because I like it.

Rumpus: Are you self-taught with Photoshop?

Dee: Yes. I had a job doing Photoshop before I had used Photoshop, really. There was a company that makes t-shirts for anybody and everybody. They had a lot of business, considering that it was such a small town. I’m not even really sure why they hired me. I was fifteen. I got hired to do graphics for this company. That’s where I learned to how to do Photoshop. No one taught me how to use Photoshop. They taught me how to fire up a file, and then they were like, “Do it.” And so the first files took me a really long time to do.

Rumpus: So you were just thrown into it.

Dee: Yeah, I was thrown into it, and it was also where I started drawing pictures in Photoshop. That was probably the place where I first started doing doodles that were kind of primordial versions of what I’m doing now. I was working in Photoshop and kind of hacking it out.

When I was a kid, I was poor. I liked drawing pictures, and I was good from a really young age. When I was in first grade, I started going to the art college on weekends, on scholarship. Doing art was always my thing, but my family was always poor, so I didn’t have stuff like…paper. There’s actually a part in Drew’s novel where the guy is talking about the first page and the last page of a book is free paper. You just rip them out. That’s what I used to do—rip out the first page and last page of the book, because it was free paper. But I started doing stuff in Photoshop, and I was working and doing all this stuff with fonts and stuff like that…and I was like, Couldn’t I just draw pictures with this? And so when I was on lunch, I would fuck around with it.

Rumpus: And did it immediately feel like a good fit, like, Oh, this is it?

Dee: It was awkward at first, but I think I got it at a point when I was kind of young. And so it was easy for me to train myself into doing it. I didn’t have a computer for a really long time. When I started doing Photoshop, it was such a long time ago, we’d save stuff on these massive Syquests, since computers had no memory, and Photoshop would grind forever whenever you had to do anything. So it wasn’t particularly elegant. The technology was intriguing, but I wasn’t like Princess Jasmine on the rug with Aladdin or anything. But I could make it work because you use the materials that you have access to. I didn’t have a computer at any time in high school, or in college, and I didn’t have a computer until my website was well on its way, when I was in my early twenties. So when I got back to Photoshop, it was a lot better.

Rumpus: That’s amazing that you didn’t have a computer while your site was up-and-running. People associate you so fully with the Internet.

Dee: Oh, yeah, people probably assume a lot about me, just because I’ve been on the Internet for such a long time. But I didn’t have a computer for a really long time, and some of the first computer files that are on my website where I drew pictures, I did not use a Wacom pen or a mouse. I had a keyboard with the nubby clit-mouse in the middle. I always called it the clit-mouse. I know that’s not what it’s called. You have your finger on it …

Rumpus: Those things are terrible.

Dee: Yeah, I drew on those. That’s what I started off with. Then eventually I got a Wacom tablet and was like, This is like the future.

Rumpus: That must’ve been a million times easier.

Dee: Oh yeah. But I mean, you use whatever you have, if you want to do it. People always come to me and they’re like, “How can I make money doing what you’re doing?” And I say, “Don’t try to make money. Do it because you like it.” I did it regardless. I did it for a really long time before anyone gave two fucks about me.

Rumpus: Is that what you tell people who ask how you end up working for yourself? Is that the advice you give them?

Dee: I try not to give people advice, because I know it’s so uncommon to be able to do something like this. My thoughts on it are: do something you like, because you like to do it, not because you have expectations of what’s going to happen with it. If you don’t like what you’re doing, then that’s just stupid. When people write to me and they’re like, “I want to do webcomics. How can I do a webcomic?”, one of the first things I say to them is, if you’re making comics, you need to sit down and do 300 of them. If you can’t do 300 of ‘em, how are you going to do two or three or four or five or ten years of your comic? If you can’t do it, then don’t do it. And, like I said, you have to do it because you like it, not because you expect something from it.

The way things are now, the Internet is changing in a way that is not good for people who create content, so you can’t expect that that is going to happen for you. You have to do it because you love it. If you don’t love it enough to do it, whether people are paying you enough—or paying you at all—then you don’t love it enough to take it as far as you’d need to in order to make it a thing. If you don’t love it enough to do it 500 times, then fucking don’t do it ten times and quit when you don’t immediately get high-fives from everyone who looks at the Internet.

The Internet is changing now where people don’t care about where the stuff came from. People want to go look at it at BuzzFeed, or they want to go look at it at Reddit, or 9Gag. Anywhere but going to the website. They want people to spoon-feed them. And so if you’re thinking that you’re going to get online now and make content and be in the same situation as anybody who makes content for a living, you’re wrong. It’s just not the same as it used to be. People don’t go look at a comic because they like the comic. They look at a comic and then they scroll farther down the page and look at a different comic, then they scroll farther down the page and look at a picture of a cat. It’s just different.

So my advice is: you have to do it a lot, do it because you like it, and don’t quit your job until you’re already making as much on your site as you’re making at your job. People are in a hurry to quit. If you love it, then it’s not a big deal that you’re doing it full-time on the side, right? If you love it, then it doesn’t make a difference that you have to do it in addition to your job. I just think that this situation with the content and aggregators and stuff is going to make it very, very hard. And, like I said, the only reason I was able to make it is that it just wasn’t a thing when I started. There are a lot more people making content now, and it’s harder to get that initial burst of traffic.

Rumpus: Speaking of which, do you have a concept of how many people are reading your stuff each day? Or is that not something that you’re paying super close attention to?

Dee: You know, I used to pay closer attention to it, but I feel like I have a better relationship with my website when I don’t pay attention to how many people are looking at it, when I don’t pay attention to the demographics of the people who are looking at it. And I never, ever, ever, ever, ever read people talking about what I have done, because I didn’t care when I made it, so I can’t care now. It doesn’t make me mad. It’s just like, you didn’t get it! You didn’t even get it. You didn’t get it, and now you’re getting all huffy and pedantic and condescending about nothing, when all you’ve done all day is sit on the computer with your thumb up your butt.

Rumpus: And why take the time to write about it when you don’t understand it?

Dee: Why do you even care? That’s the other thing. Why do you care? You decided to look at my site, and you didn’t have to pay for anything. If you didn’t like it, put the pretzel back and order something else. It’s no skin off your ass. I’m sitting here minding my own business. But what are they gonna do? They have the keyboard right there. They’re just typing to hear the clicks. “Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.”

Rumpus: Can you tell me a little bit about how certain comics become t-shirts? What’s your process for choosing them?

Dee: Usually I keep an eye on what my readers seem to dig. A lot of times, what my readers like won’t really translate to shirts, so what I’ll do is just pick out what I like that will translate to something that someone will wear around and will look good on a shirt. But the most popular [comics are] nonsensical. It’s not gonna be a good shirt. I will pick according to that kind of stuff, and I take it pretty seriously. This is as close to being Karl Lagerfeld as I’m going to get.

Rumpus: And you used to screen-print them yourselves, right?

Dee: No, we have never screened them ourselves. Initially, one of Drew’s friends did it. Then, as we got more popular, we had to switch manufacturers. Now we have a company up in Michigan. They do our warehouse stuff, and they ship our stuff, and they make our shirts for us. They’re good. I do all the graphics stuff for it myself. I prep all the stuff for them, so all they have to do is make the screens and screen it.

Rumpus: Was your business model always the plan? When you first started the comic, did you think, Oh, maybe these would also be good as shirts. Maybe I can make some extra money here?

Dee: No, it was never the plan. When I first started, I didn’t think anybody was going to look at it. I didn’t think of it as being something that would even hold interest with anybody, and when I started, people weren’t even on the Internet like they are now. People didn’t have the Internet at work, you know? People might work on computers, but they wouldn’t have the Internet hooked up on their computers. So the scene on the Internet was totally different. There wasn’t anyone on there. It was more of a hobby that I was initially just doing by myself. I had a whole bunch of these doodles and I just put ‘em up. I didn’t even have a computer. When Drew and I met, he lived in Cincinnati, so he would come up and we would hang out. He was like, “Why don’t you just post your pictures on the Internet?” And I was like, “All right, but I don’t really have a computer.” So I drew stuff, and I would mail it to him.

Rumpus: Oh really?

Dee: Yeah. I didn’t even really have a computer until I had been doing my site for a while. And I say “doing my site” in a very passive way, because how involved can you be if you can’t look at it?

Rumpus: Do you still have the drawings that you would mail to each other?

Dee: Um, I think that he probably has them somewhere in his office. But I don’t have them. I’m not real sentimental about stuff.

Rumpus: So when did you know the shirts were gonna take off? I’ve read that, over the years, you’ve shipped merchandise to every country with mail delivery, right?

Dee: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think it’s really crazy how many shirts we’ve sold over the years, and how many places we’ve sold to. But, I mean, it was never the plan and it was so gradual that it wasn’t even like, one day we didn’t sell anything, and all of a sudden we were selling a ton. It was a really gradual process, so we were able to improve our workflow and our order-packing speed as it was ramping up. It really wasn’t like waking up one day and suddenly everything’s just going great. It was gradual, and Drew and I are kind of frugal, anyways, so it wasn’t like we were struggling and suddenly we weren’t, you know? We were generally pretty frugal. So we were never really hurting when we started out, even though we weren’t selling much.

And we weren’t doing it because we expected to make money. We were never really shocked and amazed by suddenly selling a bunch out of nowhere, or planning to sell a ton and making sales-projections or whatever. We just worked and it slowly snowballed. We shipped a bazillion shirts by ourselves. I’m not even sure—like 100,000 shirts. We folded them up and put them in envelopes, and shipped them ourselves. And we did that until I had my daughter because at that point, I was too sick and that’s when we set up fulfillment with someone else. Until then, we were doing it all ourselves. If we shipped 500 shirts, it’s because we packed up 500 shirts and carried them to the post office. We would do it ourselves. Especially over Christmas, we would go in a few times a week and mail out hundreds of them a day. But like I said, I’m not afraid to put my back into it. It’s amazing what you can do if you’re not afraid to get some blisters.

Rumpus: And it must be nice to get out of the house and switch it up, right?

Dee: Oh, yeah. And now I feel really bourgie about it, because I have someone else shipping stuff, so all I have to do is graphics stuff for the shirts—when I need to do that—and I work on my comics. I work on other stuff on the side and it’s a lot more chilled out. It was really a little bit hectic when we had a lot of stuff to send out and I had a lot of comics to do and this and that. But with a kid, that wasn’t doable. It feels different, but we tend to have a way of filling the time up with other stuff. So we didn’t delegate the shipping and then go drink beer in the yard, or something.

Rumpus: In terms of the shirts’ popularity, are there designs that clearly stand out as your most popular of all time? Also, do you discontinue them after a while, or do you keep some of them around forever?

Dee: We’ll keep a shirt around if people like it. We have three sites and we have all the shirts for the sites. We will keep shirts if they are popular. If they are unpopular, we will get rid of them. Even when we were shipping stuff ourselves, a spot on the shelf is money. Renting that spot on the shelf is money. If something is not selling, we will discontinue it, so we can make more money putting something on that spot on the shelf that will sell. It’s just like with my comics—when I put new shirts out, I will put stuff out that I know other people will like, and I will put stuff out that I like and that I’m just making because I like it. Then, when we discontinue stuff, it’s always stuff that I liked best. That’s always the stuff that gets flushed down the toilet first.

Rumpus: How did Sharing Machine come about? Did you just want to come up with an umbrella company for the whole thing?

Dee: Yeah, kind of. Originally, my stuff and Drew’s stuff was separate. I had my store page and sales got deposited into my bank account and he had his. Then we got to the point where we were doing more business and we were filing taxes together and all that other stuff, so it was just a lot easier to set that up, to have one store page to maintain, instead of three store pages to maintain.

Rumpus: You guys really seem meant for each other. I mean, you were both doing independent comics when you met, right?

Dee: Yeah. We were doing different stuff job-wise, too—I had my job where I was doing pharmaceutical stuff, and he was a chemical engineer. We were doing our own projects in our spare time, and that stuff definitely wasn’t our main gig. We had a lot in common when we met, obviously, and we hit it off. We have different stuff that we are good at, aside from being fond of each other or whatever. Like, we have complementary skill sets. I’m horrible at computer stuff and math, and anything that has to do with little, teeny details. I have to get the calculator out to multiply “7-by-8,” you know? But I’m better at, like, having an eye for certain design stuff and things like that. So I think it balances out and makes it a little bit easier to do as much stuff as we do. I have my nail polish, and that’s all me. Every single part of it I did on my own, I didn’t really have any help from anybody. The packaging, formulating, making the store—everything was just what I’ve been doing for the last year or so. But Drew is a chemical engineer, so if I have to talk to commodities labs, he will talk to them for me, because he knows the lingo. He used to do that stuff at work when he was doing chemical engineering, and I don’t need vendors thinking I’m a rube when I get confused and think a pound is more than a kilogram or something.

Rumpus: Were you guys familiar with each other’s work before you met?

Dee: No. He had stuff online, he had the Drew site. I didn’t even have a computer so I didn’t know. I just met him and we hit it off because we had a lot of stuff in common. We were both kind of weird.

Rumpus: Did you both come up in Ohio?

Dee: Yeah, I was living in Columbus and he was living in Cincinnati. I don’t even remember how I met him. I met him in some capacity and I was probably drunk. But I met him and I was like, “Heeeyyy. Why don’t you come back to my house?” And he stayed for three days.

Rumpus: That’s a great first date!

Dee: It wasn’t even a first date. I didn’t know him, and then I met him, and then he was at my house for three days. And that was basically it. I always joke with him—we should’ve just gotten married that first day. Just to freak people out.

Rumpus: That’s a great story, though, and it would be a good addition to the nonexistent Wikipedia page about you.

Dee: Oh yeah, oh yeah. Like I said, I got married really young. And Drew and I have been together for a really long time.

Rumpus: And what about your collaboration with Drew on Married to the Sea? What’s that like?

Dee: Well, I do not work on Married to the Sea as much as I did when it first started. We don’t collaborate, like collaborate. If he does the comic on Married to the Sea, it’s all his. And if I do one, it’s all me. It’s a lot easier to get an idea across if you don’t have someone else trying to help with it. The reason it started off with both of us trying to work on it is because it’s like a font and the art is not hand-drawn, so it’s easy to put any voice into it that you want. It kind of feels like a mutual screen to project stuff on that’s different from his site or my site. It’s a place where you could throw something up that doesn’t necessarily fit on the other sites.

Rumpus: I always pictured you guys working across from each other, basically nose-to-nose.

Dee: Oh, no. We used to share an office, but I actually moved my office recently, because he always wants to listen to some kind of Portuguese psychedelic stuff, and I’d rather be by myself and listen to Nicki Minaj for a minute. We always have instant messenger on. We’ll talk, but we’re not in the same room anymore. I had to spread myself out.

Rumpus: Switching subjects again, do you have favorite and least favorite things to draw? I know you have certain things popping up from time to time, like your dog Chester, and other repeating images.

Dee: You know, I used to like drawing my dog, because my dog is so dumb looking. But people were unable to see it as a comic about a dog. They were like, “Pug, pug, pug,” fetishizing the breed or something, calling me a “pugmom” and stuff. So I kind of don’t draw my dog as much anymore because it was a little annoying. I like drawing animals. I like drawing gory stuff, like bruises and zits. I like drawing gross stuff. I think drawing gross stuff is probably my favorite, but I don’t draw it all the time. I think it’s better if you don’t do it very often. It has more impact if you don’t do it very often.

Rumpus: I also really like all your sea creatures: the narwhal, the sharks, all that.

Dee: Yeah. A lot of times, I just draw animals because I haven’t drawn them yet. There are certain animals that I always like drawing. I like drawing snakes just because I think it’s fun. I like drawing the scales and stuff. It’s not that I care about snakes. I don’t give a fuck about snakes.

Rumpus: Do you sometimes approach something like, “I’m going to challenge myself. I’ve never drawn this type of thing, so I’m going to try it?”

Dee: You know, I used to do that a lot, and there are still things that I’m not very good at drawing. I’m really bad at drawing horses, stuff like that. But there’s a feature I have on my site where I will periodically draw commissioned pieces, and it’s usually like, “Will you draw something for my girlfriend?” Usually they want me to draw something that would never, ever, ever occur to me to draw. So I used to challenge myself more, but when I started doing the custom drawings on my site, it had me drawing stuff that is beyond what I would even think to practice. Every kind of dog. All kinds of stuff. If you pay, it’s spec work; I don’t care anymore and I’ll draw whatever.

Rumpus: Have you thought about doing books? Collections of comics? Or is that not on the immediate agenda?

Dee: I’ve had people contact me about doing books and they always give me the “Fuck You” deal. The deal where they’re like, “$5,000, and you’re never going to get any royalties.” And I’m like, No. And they would put [the book] in that area—we always call it the “LOL Ghetto”: that shelf where it’s all the website books and the next month, the whole shelf is on the clearance table. I’m not really trying to get into the LOL Ghetto, so I have turned down some book deals, because the deal isn’t very good. I’m a little bit petulant—I know it’s really hard to believe—but I’m a little bit petulant, and I don’t like when people tell me what to do. It’s hard for me to get into the idea of a book, because there’s a lot of work involved with getting a book set up. It’s hard for me, because they just want to do, like, a collection of stuff I’ve already done. It’s hard for me to set aside so much time so I can redo a bunch of stuff I did already, and then I’d just end up in the LOL Ghetto and not make any money for it, anyway. And if they give me $5,000, I mean, that’s not much money for how much time I would have to spend putting it together.

Rumpus: Yeah, but on the flip-side of the coin, do you ever look at somebody like Gary Larson and think, Oh, I should be making all these calendars and all this stuff that sells forever like The Far Side does?

Dee: You know, I’ve thought about doing that stuff, but I’ll say if I decide to do something like that, I have business relationships with print shops from making merch over the years, so I would do it myself. I don’t think I’d give people my cut. Because that’s my problem—I know how much money book companies make off of stuff, and I know they give everybody the “Fuck You” deal. And for the same amount of work, I can remove them from the process and get to keep their cut, you know?

I’m just a little too crotchety. I don’t want people saying, “You have to have it done by next week.” I have other shit to do! I’m not dying to have a book out. I mean, if people want to see my old comics, they can look at them for free online. That’s what stops me, because I’m like, Who’s going to buy it when they can look at it for free, online? And they’re not going to let me put the nasty stuff on there. They’re not going to let me put the messed-up stuff. They’re going to make me put all the dumbest ones in there, and it’s all stuff that’s already online.

Rumpus: About have you thought about newspaper syndication? You already have a built-in readership. But I would imagine going through a syndicate to get your comics in the newspaper would be a hassle because…

Dee: It would be impossible! It would be impossible. I don’t have any illusions about the stuff that I do. It’s not, like, an ongoing storyline. So there’s nothing compelling in that regard. The jokes themselves are either nasty or sort of absurd. It’s not something that people reading the paper would want to read, or any other host of reasons. I don’t think anyone would want them in the paper. When I’ve had comics printed in the paper, my comic doesn’t stand up very well in black and white. That’s another thing that makes it hard for me. It’s just not something I’d pursue. Like I said, I have problems with people telling me what to do.

Rumpus: And what are your current side projects? Are there things that we haven’t heard about yet?

Dee: Probably, probably. I’m starting a cosmetics company. I’ve been making handmade nail-polish. So I had been selling it on Etsy, but it was moving so quick on Etsy that I didn’t publicize it. I posted it to a group of 1,000 people and it sold out immediately. And that happened a couple times and so I’ve been kind of trying to organize that… I put the brakes on it, just for a little while, because I wanted to get a better workflow going on with it. I’m getting an actual site set up, instead of selling through Etsy. There’s other stuff on the side—like I’ve been taking notes about a horror novel and just different stuff. I get tired of myself, I get tired of it. People have this idea about who I am that is really suffocating. So I always have to do stuff on the side that doesn’t have anything to do with that. I want to do something where I make it look how I want it to look and it doesn’t have a comic on it, it doesn’t have my name on it.

Rumpus: You just seem like a real idea person. Have you always been like that, where you’re always thinking of new concepts and stuff?

Dee: I mean, I try to. I feel like I’m obligated to, because my situation is so unusual and it’s such a privilege to be in the kind of situation I’m in, so if I get an idea, I run with it. I have the free time, or at least the flexibility to make time if I need it. I have the space and all that kind of stuff. I’m not rolling in money. We call it “Ohio rich,” which is not at all rich, but the low cost of living here makes it easier to scrape money together for projects. If I lived in the Bay Area or New York, I would not be able to get half the stuff done that I do, because the cost of living is exponentially more. I doubt I would be able to do my site as a full-time job, and I’d probably live in an apartment behind a dumpster.

Rumpus: That’s what I do!

Dee: But since I live in Ohio, it’s different, because the cost of living here is so low. So it’s a lot easier to be able to flex your muscle—in terms of stuff like that—because it doesn’t cost as much to run a house, it doesn’t cost as much to do…whatever. So I feel obligated with my situation and what I’m able to do, and what I’m able to produce with the connections I’ve made in the process of getting other stuff done with my comics. And so I feel like I have to. If I didn’t, then who’s going to? And so, in order to be happy with doing the same thing all the time, I have to do stuff on the side, just to keep balance with it. And I’m prolific, but Drew is mega-prolific compared to me. He is a lot more prolific than I am, because I have attention problems. There’s certain things that he’s better at than I am. But there’s certain things that I’m better at than he is. I think it kind of makes it easier for us.

Rumpus: I’m really impressed by your output. It seems like it’s pretty smooth sailing for you, at this point. Do you ever look toward the future in terms of where you see Natalie Dee comics going, or are you having a good time now, and you’ll basically keep doing it as long as you’re having a good time?

Dee: I am doing it, now, and I like the body of work I have, thus far. But I can see the Internet changing and I can see the way people interact with content changing. So I’m always keeping an eye toward that, because I don’t want to play dumb on the stuff that’s going on and end up fucking myself. You know what I’m saying? I like making my site, but at this point, I’m in my thirties, I have a house, it’s my job now. I like doing it and I’m very fortunate in being able to do it, but I always have other stuff that I’m working on. And if one thing stops working and something else starts working, then I think it would be stupid to not follow avenues. I am flexible enough to take other avenues if they present themselves to me.

Rumpus: Is there anything you want to add?

Dee: I feel like we’ve covered it. We’ve talked for such a long time that I don’t even remember any of the questions, honestly.

***

Editor’s Note: Due to some technological issues, this interview was originally published without all of the intended material intact. The interview above is an updated and extended version. —Rebecca Rubenstein

The Rumpus.net » Spotlight

Spotlight: Boco Watches the Sea

Related Posts:

Spotlight: Frog Heaven

Related Posts:

Spotlight: Adrienne Celt

Related Posts:

Spotlight: In San Francisco, There Is a Street

Related Posts:

Spotlight: Hiphop Is the Future

Related Posts:

Spotlight: I Dream of Sweden

Related Posts:

Conversations with Literary Ex-Cons: Matthew Parker

Related Posts:

A Taste of Larceny in My Blood

Related Posts:

SPOTLIGHT: Ozge Samanci

Related Posts:

The Rumpus Interview with Natalie Dee

Related Posts: