Ted is an incredible storyteller, the curator of a glorious beard, and one of the most naturally hilarious people I know. Now, you can know him, too.

***

The Rumpus: How did you make the leap from co-writing Sex: Our Bodies, Our Junk to writing about political scandal?

Ted Travelstead: It’s not a leap I ever thought I would make, although both books are extremely sexy. Political scandal, current events, most topical humor is not something I consider a strong point, but St. Martin’s came to me with this idea and gave me the opportunity to show them what I could do with it. The fact that they liked what I came up with and then gave me the opportunity to create what I did with virtually no interference on their part was amazing. The cover may scream political humor because it’s based on true events, but the inside of the book is a world of my own creation. It was nice to work on something outside of my comfort zone, and still be able to stay true to my own weirdo roots.

Rumpus: If the CIA were to get upset about this book, do you think you could fight them off? If so, how?

Travelstead: While a freshman in college, I earned a yellow belt in Karate. That being said, I do not think I could fight them off. So, if I happen to get hit by a drone strike while eating at Blimpie, you know where to look.

Rumpus: In The Petraeus Files, there is a lot of fan-fiction traded between John Allen and Jill Kelley. Can you maybe give us a sample of some Ted Travelstead fan-fiction using your favorite television show?

Travelstead: Arthur Herbert Fonzarelli sat down heavily on his deathbed. It looked like any other bed, but places like this housed only one kind. The kind you died on. He eyed the room. Sparse. Clinical. A framed picture of Richie, Lori Beth, and the kids, that Chachi had hung earlier in the day, blinked weakly at him. It was about as effective as a dying distress beacon in an empty ocean cove. He sighed and rubbed his hand over the bedspread. Rough with starch, slightly frayed. Who knew how many hands had made this same path across it in unison with a sigh?

In a box near the bed, Arthur spied the jacket. Worn soft as milk by time, it lay perfectly folded on top of some other useless mementos that would be flung into a dumpster as soon as he was gone. It hadn’t fit him in years, he hadn’t even thought of it, but suddenly he yearned to touch it, to hold it against his cheek like a talisman. He bent at the waist and reached to pull the box toward him, but gravity got the best of him and he tumbled forward, striking his head on the corner of the nightstand. He was unconscious before his head hit the ground with a resounding smack. He lay prone on the floor, with one hand resting on top of the leather jacket, when Chachi walked in carrying two small cups of vanilla pudding.

“Hey, Fonz, I thought we could eat some pudding together before I took off. They got all the pudding you could want down there, you’re gonna lov—.”

Chachi stared down at his cousin on the floor.

“Fonzie?” he asked, placing the pudding cups on the dresser beside the door.

Fonzie didn’t answer. He was gone.

Rumpus: In the intro for The Petraeus Files, you explain that you stumbled upon all of this top-secret material while downloading a Black Sabbath bootleg. If you had to run a three-legged race with any member of Sabbath, who would you choose and why?

Travelstead: As much as I love Ozzy, and would be honored to spend fifty yards strapped to his side, if I really wanted to win I’d have to pick drummer Bill Ward. A lot of heavy metal drummers play the double bass drum now days (two bass drums, two pedals, two feet), but Bill Ward always blew the doors off the coliseums with just one bass drum, using one foot. I would harness the speed of this fantastic bass drum-playing foot of his to win the three-legged race. Hopefully they would blast “Children of the Grave” while we ran, to give us that extra boost to the finish line!

Rumpus: Since David Petraeus is probably knocked out of the ring for the presidency in 2016, what would it take for you to run in his stead? And what is your party platform?

Travelstead: Oh, I’m definitely running. My platform is going to be kind of a “NO MORE STRAY ANIMALS/PLEASE NO SANDALS ON THE SUBWAY/FREE CINNAMON ROLLS EVERY OTHER FRIDAY 2016” type of thing. I might clean up the wording just a titch, but that’s basically it. My running mate will be ex-Poison front man, Bret Michaels (also the star of Rock of Love). We will absolutely win in a landslide decision, and Bret Michaels and Jewel will perform a cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide” at the Inaugural Ball. I’m getting chills just thinking about it. (Bret is not aware of my plans yet, so if you could refrain from telling him that would be great. I have a whole PowerPoint presentation I plan to deliver to him very soon. Thanks.)

Rumpus: What’s the first example of satire or parody you remember really getting into in your life?

Travelstead: The Jerk and Airplane! were defining moments in my life. The Jerk might not be considered parody, per se, but I have to mention it because Steve Martin’s comedic sensibility really shaped the absurdist place a lot of my comedy comes from today. Also, The Pee-Wee Herman Show that appeared on HBO in 1981. I have a K-Mart brand cassette tape of that somewhere. I taped it off of the television, and you can hear twelve-year-old me cackling in the background.

Rumpus: What’s the funniest thing you have ever seen firsthand?

Travelstead: Wowee. I’m not sure there is a clear-cut winner here. Here’s one though: my wife Julie and I used to do a comedy show together called, appropriately enough, The Ted & Julie Show. Julie would play this character named Lil’ Stefan, a mute, orphan boy who had been adopted by a former pilot named Gary. Gary had been struck by lightning and rendered brain-damaged. He adopted Lil’ Stefan because the government denied him a service animal.

I realize the comedy of this might not translate very well to paper, but watching my wife play this character is one of the funniest moments I can remember. Without using a single word, she brought the house down every night. It was a joy to behold.

Oh! Just thought of another one. One time a teen elephant slapped my sister across the face with its trunk. [Neither party was injured in this altercation.]

Rumpus: Medical science has discovered a new affliction called Ted Travelstead Syndrome. What are the symptoms?

Travelstead: Extreme OCD, offset by overwhelming silliness and periods of cookie-eating mania.

Rumpus: Do you have any advice for young people who want to be just like you?

Travelstead: Start by having a lot of trouble focusing on just one thing. Learn to pursue whatever you’re passionate about in the moment, even if it takes you away from a project you’re desperately trying to complete. Work many soul-sucking jobs while doing all this, until you land one that is bearable. Never stop creating, and never be afraid to try something that interests you.

Rumpus: What’s next for you?

Travelstead: I just finished shooting six new episodes of a web series called “Ted’s Talks.” It’s a parody of the very popular TED Talks. We’re editing them now. Other than that I’m writing and performing whenever and wherever I can.

Thanks very much, this was a whole lot of fun!

***

Ted Travelstead can be found on Twitter @trumpetcake.

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Enjoy:

***

Cassie J. Sneider is trying to “put a kid-friendly, weirdo-friendly float in the sad, boring annual parade” in her small town hometown. You can help make this happen! There are three days left to contribute and meet the Kickstarter goal.

Related Posts:

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• The Shittiest New Year’s Eve Ever
• Already Gone
• The Rumpus Interview with Russ Kick
• The Rumpus Interview with Jeanne Thornton

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• The Rumpus Interview with Ted Travelstead
• Happy Groundhog Day!
• Already Gone
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“Not yet,” I said, changing lanes somewhere on I-40 West.

“How have you avoided it for this long?” she asked as we whizzed past the vast gas-station-dotted nothingness of the American Southwest at night.

I thought about it a moment. Rusty and I had been doing it for two weeks, so it was actually rather impressive that I had hidden my butt from him this whole time. Specifically, the tattoo on my butt: my ex’s whole name drawn into the Aerosmith wings, occupying the entire left cheek. It seemed like a great idea at the time, but now, less than a year later, I did not respect or love either Aerosmith, who had begun to resemble their own groupies, or the person whose name was Xavier Roberts-ing my butt, who, I might add, had gotten my name in Metallica font over his heart.

I considered how big the tattoo was and finally answered, “I think Rusty is just really inattentive.”

“So Rusty is rusty?” This seemed like a pretty accurate assessment. Laura worked with both of us at the record store, so she was as good a judge as any. Laura had also been the one to tell me about the accident.

“Do you know that Rusty fell into the subway?” she’d whispered while we put away a shipment of metal T-shirts at our job the month before.

“What?”

“Yeah, dude,” she said, keeping her voice down. “Twice. The second time, he was dragged through the tunnel until the train came to a stop.”

“Whoa,” I whispered back, hanging up a Gorgoroth shirt of a bloody pentagram.

“Yeah. He had to learn to walk again and everything. He said it’s all scar tissue on his left side.”

We both looked at Rusty where he sat at the counter, angrily cataloguing 45s. He only really communicated by arguing about black metal bands with the tourists who flooded the store on weekends, or fighting with me and Laura in that viper’s-nest-of-elitism way that dudes who work at record stores are wont to do. He was kind of muppety and had a red beard, like Beaker if he were into Nordic church-burning music. That wasn’t usually my thing, but after moving home from a soul-crushing ass-tattoo sort of break-up, I wasn’t exactly sure what my “thing” even was anymore. As my best friend, Laura probably should have known that there was no greater incentive for me to get someone’s clothes off than to tell me they were covered in 40% scar tissue.

We made out a couple of days later.

***

The car slowed down through a work zone in Arizona, and Mo dug for the map under my seat.

“Whoa, whoa, wait,” she piped up from the back. “Your new boyfriend hasn’t seen your Aerosmith butt yet?”

“No. It’s kind of miraculous. And he isn’t my boyfriend.”

“But hasn’t he said I love you?” Laura pointed out.

“Yes,” I said. “Twice.”

Ali put down the map. “What did you say when he said he loved you?”

“I said thank you.”

“You’re his first girlfriend since the accident,” Laura said. “This is not going to end well.”

“I’m not his girlfriend. He hasn’t even seen my butt.”

We drove on through the desert, past orange construction barrels lit up under blinding work lights. Laura turned up the radio, and I thought about my butt. I had gotten it tattooed in the same spot Cher had her Greg Allman rose, but ironic soft-rock chic didn’t seem like a good reason to carry an indelible reminder of failure until I died. I had an appointment for a cover-up when I got back from this trip, but I was still unsure of what would take its place. I felt confident inspiration would find me. Road trips are good for that sort of thing.

We were on our way to California for me to do a big reading at the San Francisco Public Library. I had moved back home with no money, but I knew I had to make this trip.

There was another reason for the journey: the gravitational pull of destiny. Another friend had pointed out that the Eagles, a band I hated, were always playing wherever I was. At first I didn’t want to believe it, but the theory held up over time. Whenever I started the car or walked into a grocery store, “Hotel California” was there, singing out about its dark desert highway. When the Aerosmith logo was being seared into my butt, “Take It to the Limit” fuzzed from a little boombox in the tattoo parlor. And when it was New Year’s Eve and I decided to leave my boyfriend in the nowhere town I had moved to, I stopped somewhere in Maryland at midnight, turned on the radio, and caught the last two minutes of “Heartache Tonight.”

When I was planning our route to San Francisco, I saw that we would pass through Winslow, Arizona, the sleepy Route 66 town mentioned in “Take It Easy,” as in, “Standin’ on the corner in Winslow, Arizona, such a fine sight to see / It’s a girl, my lord, in a flatbed Ford, slowin’ down to take a look at me.” I Googled a little deeper and found that this town featured something called Standin’ On the Corner Park, which had both a mural of the girl, my lord, in a flatbed Ford and a bronze statue of Don Henley.

Surely, this was no coincidence. This was fate. I had survived, and now the radio was raining supernatural coincidences like George Bailey ringing a bell and giving out wings in my new wonderful life.

I had been covering every available shift at the record store to pay for the gas to San Francisco. The stars had also aligned so that I could pick up Laura and my two other best friends in their respective states on the way. We had two and a half days to drive 3,000 miles and three days to drive back home. Laura and I both had to work that Sunday, but we figured out that with time-zone changes and by only stopping for gas, we could make it to San Francisco exactly three hours before the reading. We hopped in the car after work on Sunday night, tailed by a drunken Rusty, who blurted out his second I Love You of the week before I got in the car. He said it the way you would tell a waiter that a restaurant toilet is clogged: a short burst of embarrassment with no eye contact, followed by stumbling away in a fast and undignified manner. “Eagles suck!” he slurred into the night as we drove past.

“He’s going to freak out on you when you dump him,” Laura said as she buckled her seatbelt. We picked up Ali in Philadelphia and filled her in on our current dating mistakes on the drive to get Mo in Charlotte. My friendship with Mo was one of the few good things to come out of the butt-tattoo relationship. The other good things were these lessons:

1) Failure can’t kill you if you don’t let it.

2) Surviving remarkable failure will give you a magnificent, fireproof Teflon exoskeleton that will make you unstoppable and let you plow through life like Mario high on starpower. At least until the next remarkable failure.

3) If a tattoo artist tells you something is the kiss of death, listen to them.

I took a sip of coffee, accelerating the car while bugs turned to vapor on the windshield. Ahead, I saw the exit sign we had been waiting for. “Dudes! Winslow! We’re almost there!”

Laura felt around in nest of chip bags on the floor and located the Eagles greatest hits album I had spent months listening to, like a schizophrenic looking for clues in SRO wallpaper. “Got it!” she said, gently inserting it into the stereo.

“Track nine!” I commanded, and took the exit. The frontage road led us into a town lit by streetlights in soft orange, the parked cars and houses glowing like a thirteen-year-old experimenting with self-tanner. At this point, I had no directions to go by, just instinct. I assumed that Standin’ On the Corner Park would be at the center of Winslow, a desert piazza of ’70s soft rock much celebrated by the townsfolk. Even though it was 11:00 PM on a Tuesday, I imagined it would be full of long-haired dudes teaching each other the ins and outs of acoustic guitar. Equally long-haired ladies would probably be lying out on blankets at the feet of the bronze Don Henley, braiding each other’s locks and looking dotingly at their boyfriends. Winslow was a town that knew how to take it easy, a lesson we could all learn.

“Where the hell is this place?” I said, hitting the repeat button to hear “Take It Easy” a third time. Winslow was a town under construction with a lot of one-way streets.

“Hey,” Laura pointed. “There’s a Sonic that’s open. Maybe we can ask directions.”

“Good thinking,” I said, trying to stay motivated. I drove toward the green neon of 24-hour fast food, taking note of a man in a seasonally inappropriate puffy coat walking in the middle of the street. He was strutting with purpose. More lessons. Do everything with purpose.

I left the car idling and got out to ask the cashier where the park was. “Excuse me. Um, I’m looking for Standin’ On the Corner Park. Do you happen to know where that is?” I felt strangely anxious. At any second, this could easily turn into the set-up for a Rob Zombie movie.

“That got a statue?” she said.

“Um, yes. Of Don Henley.” I smiled, overcompensating for my lack of direction.

“You gotta go back down where you came and make a left on Second.”

I thanked her and ran back to the car. “We’re hot on the trail!” I said to my three friends, who were listening to their fifth rotation of “Take It Easy.” Excitement was still in the air. Everyone looked out their windows, squinting at street signs, eager for the left we had to take.

Laura saw it first.

“There! On the corner!”

We all turned at the same time, and there, on the corner in Winslow, Arizona, in plain sight on a Tuesday at 11:40 PM, lit by streetlights and a neon bank sign, the determined man in the black puffy coat we had seen on the drive to the Sonic was giving some other dude a blowjob. With purpose.

“THAT’S WHAT HAPPENS ON THE CORNER IN WINSLOW, ARIZONA!” I was beyond elated. Everyone else was screaming.

“Hey!” Ali pointed to a street sign. “There’s Second!”

I turned left, toward destiny, toward my future, toward the empty public park and the bronze statue of Don Henley that we all took turns pretending to give blowjobs to. Then we hopped back in the car toward our second destiny, our continued future. And as the sun came up over California, I realized that an eagle would cover a set of Aerosmith wings quite nicely.

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He is an anthologist and writer for The Disinformation Company, an independent media outlet that compiles both weird trivia and the chilling realities of government and war that are happening in the world, while the rest of us are YouTube-ing videos of dogs saying “I love you.” He is also the editor of The Graphic Canon, a three-volume compendium of illustrated interpretations of classic stories. Volume 2 just came out, which covers Kubla Khan and the Brontë sisters, to The Picture of Dorian Gray, making it a definite must-have for both literature and comics nerds.

I had the pleasure of asking Russ some questions about The Graphic Canon and his life as an information hoarder. Here is what he had to say.

Russ Kick: I was trying to find a new direction for my writing and anthologizing, and I figured it might have something to do with my lifelong love of literature and of art, including comics, illustration, graphic design, and other red-headed stepchildren. I was in the graphic novel section of a bookstore at some point in 2008, and I saw a full-length adaptation of The Trial by Kafka. I already owned several adaptations of plays by Shakespeare, The Odyssey, and some others. My anthologist instincts kicked in. I was picturing the humongous, doorstop-sized anthologies of literature from Norton. We needed something that huge, with that epic sweep, with the twist being that all the literature is graphically adapted.

The timing is perfect. There’s a tsunami of amazing material coming out from comics artists and illustrators—we’re really in a golden age, and I can’t even keep up with it all. I figured it was high time to turn artists loose with the greatest works ever written, give them free reign to visually approach the works any way they want, and see what would happen.

It’s not a new concept, of course. There’s a long tradition of visual artists and performing artists using literary classics as the basis for their work. And when it comes to comics, there was the famous Classic Illustrated line that had its heyday in the 1940s and 1950s. But those comics were basically blah. The artwork was competent but generally not fantastic. It was a pretty workman-like transcription of the book’s highlights into panels. With the Canon, I wanted the artists to put their own stamp on the works, really collaborate with the (mostly dead) writers to create something new. And I wanted to include not only novels and plays but a lot of poems, as well as the occasional folk tale, letter, speech, scientific work, etc.

Rumpus: In putting together The Graphic Canon, have you personally been introduced to any classics you didn’t already know?

Kick: There were a bunch where I just knew the basics until I started really researching the book—the ancient Incan play Apu Allontay, “The Mortal Immortal” by Mary Shelley, Mother by Maxim Gorky. Somehow I had completely missed “Jenny Kiss’d Me” by the minor Romantic poet Leigh Hunt until I was looking for poems for the Canon, even though it’s somewhat widely anthologized. I had never read any Saki—who satirized upper-crust society in Edwardian Britain—until Sonia Leong said she wanted to do a manga version of his first story, “Reginald.” A couple of artists in Volume 3 picked lesser-known works from writers who are household names—H.G. Wells’s “The New Accelerator,” which is kind of like a Philip K. Dick story half a century before Philip K. Dick; and John Barleycorn, which is Jack London’s autobiography told through the lens of his overfondness for alcohol (he started drinking beer when he was five).

Rumpus: How did artists choose the work they illustrated with so few overlaps? Basically, how did you keep Volume 2 from becoming a karaoke party where everyone wants to sing the same Kelly Clarkson song?

Kick: Sometimes I did have to tell someone their choice was already taken, but that didn’t happen as much as it might seem. Sometimes I suggested a possible work or two based on an artist’s style and obvious interests. Mostly, though, the artists would get my wishlist of works I thought would make for great adaptations. Some would choose from that, and I’d remove their choices when I sent the list out from then on. A lot of artists would name two to four works they’d like to tackle —some from the wishlist, some not—and I would tell them which ones were unclaimed. No one ended up having to sing a Miley Cyrus song.

Rumpus: There are set to be three volumes of The Graphic Canon, which makes for roughly 180 different authors and stories. How do you edit so much information without your brain exploding?

Kick: I originally signed up with Seven Stories for a single volume. It was going to be big—400 oversized pages—but still, a single book. But when I kept signing up more and more enthusiastic artists (seventy-five percent of The Graphic Canon is original material) and finding fantastic, often obscure work to reprint, they expanded it to a three-volume set, 500-plus pages each. The first one starts with Gilgamesh and goes to the end of the 1700s. The second volume is completely the 1800s. The third volume will be the 20th century from beginning to end.

Basically, with these giant anthologies, I try not to think about what I’m getting into on the front end. If I really thought about how huge and complex and mega-multi-tasky it would become, I might not do it. So I just send out the first invitation to the first potential contributor, keep putting one foot in front of the other, and much later look back and wonder how in god’s name I pulled all that together.

Rumpus: A lot of classics meant for children are usually pretty horrifying, for example: Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm, or Der Struwwelpeter. Which fate would you least want to meet?

Kick: Getting your thumbs chopped off—à la Struwwelpeter—probably tops the list. Freezing to death on the streets on New Year’s Eve is up there, too. (That said, Hans Christian Andersen’s unbelievably morose “Little Match Girl” is a demented literary masterpiece.)

Rumpus: If you could go on a platonic Craigslist date with any of the authors in The Graphic Canon, who do you choose and what would you do? (Note: It must include riding a bicycle built for two.)

Kick: Well, I’m not sure what’s really going on in the platonic section of Craigslist, but assuming it does mean just being friends, hanging out with new bros, etc….

It feels like I should choose some towering intellect like Voltaire or George Eliot so that I could pick his or her brain, blah blah blah. But really, I have to say the king of all literary wildmen, Lord Byron. We could hang out in luxurious villas surrounded by his pet bears and eagles, go on nature treks in the most beautiful spots in Europe, and do some world-class cruising for girls (this last would be done mainly on the aforementioned bicycle built for two).

If your question had said non-platonic, I would have to say Edna St. Vincent Millay. I would gladly have let her have her way with me, callously toss me aside, and write a delicious, gloating poem about how she treated me.

Rumpus: Many of the other books you are responsible for are compendiums of weird facts for The Disinformation Company. Can you give me a top-five list of the most unbelievable things you have learned as a knowledge hoarder?

Kick: My mind is reeling. So many wild and crazy facts. Finding out that around one in ten people weren’t fathered by the man they think is their dad was pretty eye-opening (and that’s just an average—it can be much lower or much higher in various regions, countries, etc.). The fact that fetuses masturbate is well-known among ob-gyns, but pretty surprising to the rest of us. On a much more serious note, a colleague of mine dug up military documents from the late 1990s, showing that U.S. military labs were working on biological weapons in direct violation of international treaties and federal laws. A reporter from The New York Times was very eager to do a story on this, but his higher-ups suddenly told him to stop working on it, with no explanation, so I ran an article about it—with reproductions of the documents—in the third anthology I did for Disinfo, Abuse Your Illusions.

I’ve always been intrigued by all the holes, contradictions, and impossibilities in the official story of the Columbine High School massacre. Among other things, police and F.B.I. documents show that a lot of students saw a third person take part in the attack, all of them describing him exactly the same way when they were interviewed on the very day of the massacre, and on the following day.

One of my favorite articles I ever ran was from Sydney Schanberg, who won the Pulitzer for his reporting from Cambodia, which was depicted in the movie, The Killing Fields. He presents fact after fact showing that POWs were indeed knowingly left behind in Vietnam, despite the assurances of every president since Nixon that they were all brought home.

It’s kind of mind-blowing when you realize that the list of religious rules that everyone calls “The Ten Commandments” isn’t really the Ten Commandments. It’s a little complicated, but basically the list we always see (worshipping idols, honoring parents, bearing false witness, coveting, etc.) is actually from earlier in Exodus when God is speaking to Moses in front of a crowd of Israelites. If you simply read on, to the part where Moses goes up the mountain to get the famous stone tablets etched with the Ten Commandments, you see that those rules are different…and some are really, really weird. The actual Tenth Commandment, for example, runs as follows: “Thou shalt not seethe a kid [i.e., a young goat] in his mother’s milk.” I think we can all keep that one, no problem.

I also like the fact that, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus told his followers that if someone asks you for something of yours, you must give it to them. Period. No qualifications, no exceptions. That little tidbit rarely gets quoted. Elsewhere (Luke 14:13, to be exact), he commanded that whenever people host a dinner party, they must invite the poor and the disabled. I’d love to see the Romneys and the Bushes following these commands from their Lord…

Well, I could go on and on, but those are some of the facts that spring to mind immediately.

***

Original Rumpus artwork by Cassie J. Sneider.

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I am a slow reader with a cold, stony heart, but I finished The Dream of Doctor Bantam in three days, and when it was over, I cried, hugged my dog, and went for a power-walk to process all of my new feelings. It was like going to a Gordon Ramsay steakhouse when you are used to the Wendy’s dollar menu. This is not just a book; this is some serious literature. The plot takes place in Austin, Texas and revolves around chainsmoking, Scientology, and the gut-kicked feeling of falling in love with someone who is nuts. Read on!

Jeanne Thornton: Really weird. For one, it’s because I really like this book, but I finished it a few years ago except for a few pretty big edits in the past year, as it was getting ready for Actual Book Status. So there’s this feeling of like, “But wait! I see all these problems and I can write a better one, I swear!” This feeling competes with the feeling of, “What if this is the only book worthy of publication that I will ever write? What if I’m now a total has-been?” In short, it’s a lot like, um, being a writer without an Actual Book, but there’s this concrete thing that you have and that doesn’t seem to shift with your feelings.

Rumpus: How does this compare to the Writer With An Actual Book fantasy most of us grew up with, where the man with the ponytail says, “Kid, you got what it takes!” and the next day a dumptruck of cash and babes gets unloaded onto your driveway?

Thornton: I STILL BELIEVE IN THIS FANTASY. I AM STILL WAITING FOR THIS. I WILL NEVER STOP BELIEVING.

Rumpus: Until this point, what had you considered your greatest achievement?

Thornton:  Objectively, probably this weird little video game called “Immortal Defense” that I wrote the story for in 2007. It took not very much time to write, but people seemed to get really into the plot. That’s in terms of people responding to it. In terms of what I’m proudest of, probably writing some good book reviews for Fiction Circus or working really hard to get better at drawing comics between 2002 and 2012.

Rumpus: What has been your history with comics and zines?

Thornton:  The first creative project I remember doing was a novelization of “Zelda II: The Adventure of Link” when I was seven. Half the page was prose describing tedious early NES mechanics, and half was adorable pictures of Link on his adventure—my favorite of these was one where he’s got these big saucer eyes as one of those ladies in the red dresses is flinging herself across his body to shove him into a door, so she can heal his life to full. I feel that I haven’t fundamentally advanced beyond this: it feels like telling stories with comics runs in parallel with telling stories with prose, and it makes some kind of intuitive sense to me whether a story idea should be for one or the other. I have no justification for why this is a good idea—it just really makes sense to me that some stories make more sense as comics and some stories make more sense as prose.

There was a period of time where I didn’t really write prose beyond a few odd stories, just comics (and video game scripts). I was only really interested in doing very novelistic comics—this was around the time I was becoming aware of stuff like Ghost World and this certain mean-spirited novelistic sensibility in the comics world. I really switched to writing prose initially because I thought (and friends told me) that my drawing sucked, and I figured this was the only way I could get people interested in my stories. So there’s a way in which prose writing feels very much like a second language, even though I think I’m a lot better at it technically than I am at drawing—which I think I don’t have a ton of native talent at, but which I hack away at obsessively until it kinda works.

Zines are the best thing, also! As soon as I realized that you could make little books using a photocopier and stapler, that was it. I used to go with my dad to his office on weekends and we would use up reams of his office photocopier paper, photocopying collections of my elementary school comic, “Dog Days,” that I’d assembled with scissors and glue. (I remember I made him write the introduction for one of these books as well, so that it would be more “legitimate.”) It only occurred to me a few years ago that this was not something my dad was supposed to be doing with valuable office supplies. But this is almost basically what it means to me to publish something—once you have something that’s complete, you design it and print it yourself for three cents a page. In a lot of ways it feels really weird and abstract that O/R Books agreed to publish this [book], that there’s someone other than me or my immediate circle of friends who’s interested in printing and distributing my work. It’s not a bad feeling at all—it’s something that I think I needed, also, because of this magic spiritual cachet of “publishing something”—but it’s definitely strange not to have had to think about what kind of paper was being used or how to bind the thing.

Rumpus: Which character in The Dream of Doctor Bantam do you identify with most closely?

Thornton:  Tough one, and depends on the day. Julie is mostly things I think and would say if I wasn’t actually in a world with other people. Patrice is probably more what I’m actually like relative to that world. It’s an even mix on average.

Rumpus: You really nail what it’s like to be a weird teen girl. What were you like as a teenager?

Thornton:  It was not a great time for a lot of reasons, notably the feeling that one’s been cheated by the circumstances of one’s birth out of having the “right adolescence”—probably everyone feels that way to some degree. I thought a lot about what it was like to be a weird teen girl and had weird teen girl friends, but was a weird teen girl to the extent that I was like, not anatomically an actual teen girl, which is about as weird as you can get. And one becomes weird and horrible as a result—or at least in retrospect that’s how I interpret it.

For a period of time I was really creepily influenced by Ayn Rand books, and felt like it was important to be very “honest” with people, which usually equated to me saying that the choices they were making in life were evil and “anti-life” or something. Kind of like my Man Who Hates Fun character, but not fun in any way (and, uh, a lot of the Patrice scenes in the book draw heavily on this stuff). There was another period of time where I compulsively wore a horrible green trenchcoat and plaid boxer shorts to school to symbolize some kind of casual ’90s kind of freedom, and one where I was trying to turn this Celtic medallion I bought from a kiosk at the mall into a “magic artifact” by wearing it every day. I drew a lot of little comics that rarely went anywhere, had a lot of complicated plans. I made video games with this incredibly archaic game-making program called ZZT, and different friends and I pretended we were running video game companies, and hired and fired one another. I spent a lot of time online on IRC, engaged in complicated social dramas with people I had never met in real life. I played a lot of Dungeons & Dragons with friends, and once I could drive I spent a lot of time walking around different local creeks, or going to the library and looking things up.

It was a messed up time, Cassie! Mostly, I spent this time believing that I had been fated to be some kind of troubled Goth girl who wrote poetry that people indulged me in, this sort of markedly superficial but tumultuous and emotional person who people hated but still kind of thought fondly of, and I felt bitter and resentful about having been cheated of this social fate. I still kind of believe that I got cheated out of this status, but I am coping, and really it’s way better in important ways to have a completely weird and messed up “trans” background than to fit neatly into anything.

Rumpus: How did this story evolve as you were writing it?

Thornton:  The “first draft” of this was a 24-hour comic about a “chrono-cult” I drew in like 2003 or 2004, featuring a cult member and this night DJ named TRISTESSA—the cult guy calls into TRISTESSA’s radio program and she gets involved in this weird relationship where she tries to help him, but the cult sucks him back in. That was the beginning of the idea. When I started actually writing the book in 2007, initially Julie was the one in the cult, which she joined to cope with Tabitha’s death. Patrice was this side character who was there to explain the cult to her, and most of the book took place in a wacky “cult house” in Austin, where people made big collective meals for one another and played guitar and stuff. I got 200 pages into this version before realizing that no way would Julie, as I was writing her, join this cult. So then the story became Julie and Patrice as the first half of the book, then Patrice meets a terrible fate, and Julie moves to New York and gets into a sleazy relationship with the actual Dr. Bantam, somehow working for him as a secretary as he does a lot of drugs and tries to finish his book. The Julie and Patrice story just kept getting larger as I was working on it, until it became obvious that that was the real heart of the book and that the rest of the stuff was pretty much vestigial.

Rumpus: Did you have any obstacles while writing the book?

Thornton:  Writing a book about Austin while living in New York was kind of weird—everything had to be based in memory or really occasional map references. I think that makes the sense of Austin-ness about the book stronger for me. I handwrite everything in the first draft, so the book transformed a lot as I slowly, slowly typed everything up sometimes months or years after I had originally written it. At one point a series of computer crashes caused me to lose everything I’d typed on the novel—maybe just the first five or six chapters at that point—and I had to start from scratch, which was maybe inspiring, since I had to re-type it all and it had to be “better” this time than my memory of this lost draft.

Rumpus: What kind of research did you have to do into Scientology, if any?

Thornton:  I mentioned that Ayn Rand stuff before: for a while, starting when I went to college in 2001, I was reading really obsessively about Scientology on Operation Clambake. Something about understanding Scientology got me to understand and deal with a lot of the stuff I went through with Ayn Rand, though that was way less bad than Scientology’s super craziness. At some point I kind of realized that I had read so much about Scientology and was boring friends so much by talking about it, that I could probably use it as the backdrop for a book of some kind—it felt like a way to get it out of my system, and it was, I guess. Basically it didn’t feel like research, though a couple of times I went back and looked at Clambake documents to get some details of things right, or to make sure that the cult in the book was, uh, legally distinct enough from Scientology for my comfort. There was this whole section that got cut from the book really late, in 2010 or 2011 or something, that was about Dr. Bantam in the ’60s and that was kind of like the plot of The Master, but I ended up cutting it because it didn’t fit with the rest of the book—that part required a lot more research than was good for it.

Rumpus: Would you consider getting an E-meter audit with me to see our potential as Scientologists?

Thornton:  No way on the E-meter audit, nooooo. I went to the L. Ron Hubbard Life Museum once with a friend in LA. It was so messed up and terrifying: the museum gallery is in this fairly small room, but you keep going up and down different staircases to make the space seem larger. There are these creepy religious paintings of scenes from Scientology history: L. Ron Hubbard communing with Native American tribes in his youth; L. Ron Hubbard healing his body after terrible wounds in World War II with Navy doctors astounded at his revival; other stuff. This big wall full of fake awards and certificates. I got a close look at them, and they all said stuff like, “Awarded for your kind donation of $5 to the Scranton Parks Department in the name of L. RON HUBBARD”—just so they could have this huge wall full of plaques and certificates L. Ron Hubbard had supposedly won for his great humanitarian efforts. Totally creepy and crazy, and the nice-enough woman who was giving us a tour did an E-meter demonstration and started putting the hard sell on my friend to join. I’m so scared of Scientology. I guess I could be talked into it, but it would take a while, and I’d be shaking the whole time.

Rumpus: What are some conditions you need to write and draw? Do you have any special pens or superstitions, or do you just get right to it?

Thornton:  I have so many pens and superstitions. Right now I use this one fountain pen exclusively, and I have to write in very specific composition books. They don’t really make the kind of comp books I like anymore, so I’m kind of flailing around right now —there are ones with all kinds of fancy covers and things, but the glue they used to bind them sucks, and they’re all semi-falling apart. But I must use them because I must write in a composition book or else everything will fall to pieces.

Rumpus: Did you have a Plan B if being a writer hadn’t worked out?

Thornton: Nope! I mean I guess it was “being a cartoonist,” which is equally not a good plan.

Rumpus: Who are some writers and cartoonists that have influenced you?

Thornton:  Eileen Myles! Dodie Bellamy! Robert Crumb! Bill Watterson! Eddie Campbell! Al Capp! Junichiro Tanizaki! Crazy Yukio Mishima! J.D. Salinger! Martin Amis! Anais Nin! V. S. Naipaul! Jonathan Franzen! Jeff Smith! Ariel Schrag! There are like a gazillion of each, and I’m certainly forgetting some, but these are the ones that are easiest to come up with.

Rumpus: If you were in a bus accident with the Beach Boys and melted onto one member—into a mutant showcasing both of your positive and negative qualities—who would you choose and why?

Thornton:  Probably Dennis Wilson! He would be fun because he’s so completely crazy and adventuresome, and I’m less adventuresome, so it’d be a good combination of strengths, whereas my sensible side would curb his horrible destructive tendencies. It would depend on who got to be the legs, maybe.

Rumpus: What can we expect from you in the future?

Thornton: I have a short story collection called The Black Emerald that’s making the rounds right now. It’s about a magic emerald that turns your ordinary drawings into mean-spirited underground comics while you sleep. I’m working on this big ol’ novel about a really libelously fictional Brian Wilson called Dumb Angels. I do a comic strip called “Bad Mother,” about a kind of breezy sculptress mom who’s raising her kid to be some kind of Napoleon figure, and another one called “Diary of A Ghost Girl,” about a girl who falls in love with her own writing. I guess all of these things are somehow collected on various websites of mine, or via Facebook? One of the messed up things about having an Actual Book is that the rest of your projects seem like scummy poor relations who aren’t pulling their weight, even if you actually spent more time on them in a lot of cases, but this is how it goes.

***

Original Rumpus artwork by Cassie J. Sneider.

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The Rumpus: What are some things you do?

Sinister: I’m a self-help author, a standup comedian, and a poet. Those are the three main hats I wear.

Rumpus: Well, I noticed that D. Randall Blythe from [the band] Lamb of God did the foreword on your newest poetry book, so maybe you should add Viking metal god hat to the list.

Sinister: My poetry hat is mighty and fearsome.

Rumpus: How did it come to be that you are a guru of metal?

Sinister: Mr. Blythe found me somehow. He reads a lot. There are a lot of band guys out there who get a lot of reading done on tour. In bands like his, they can be on the road for over a year at a time. Most of that time is spent waiting. One can burn through a lot of books that way. Since then, I’ve gotten emails from guys in other bands who were turned on to my work through him:

Buzzoven, Devil Driver, Coal Chamber, Bison DC, and Stephen Gibb.

Rumpus: What can fans of your poetry expect from the new book?

Sinister: The poems are getting longer, for one thing. There are a lot of poems about the Mission in the 90’s. More of the poems are about other people, rather than being all about me. This book contains the first poems I’ve written since I started doing standup five years ago, which affected my word choice and rhythm.

Rumpus: How is your weekly comedy show going? [Bucky is a founding performer of the comedy group The Business at The Dark Room in San Francisco every Wednesday.]

Sinister: It’s going really well. Most weeks, we have a full house. We recently added Caitlin Gill and Chris Thayer to the regular crew, and they’re doing some amazing work in there.

Sinister: I also watch more movies than anyone I know. I watch everything from pretentious foreign films and arthouse fare to the latest big budget Hollywood disasters.

Rumpus: That’s impressive. I hear you have a projector in your house.

Sinister: Yes, I do. When I was a kid, there was an old one-screen movie theater in my hometown. The owner was also the projectionist. I thought that would be a great place to live. When I was older, I saw Sunset Boulevard. The lead character had a movie projector in her house. I was fascinated. I’ve always loved movies and I thought someday I could have that setup.

Rumpus: Is there anything else you’d like to tell the world? Any life lessons to impart on impressionable youngsters?

Sinister: Do the kind of art you want to see but doesn’t exist yet.

***

Bucky’s newest book, Time Bomb Snooze Alarm, is available through Write Bloody Publishing wherever good books are sold.

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Cassie J. Sneider shares her illustrated “Stars of Classic Rock Radio” valentines.

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My new second grade teacher was Mrs. Man, who looked like her head was screwed directly onto her body, like the Malibu Barbie whose neck I had accidentally snapped. She had a brushed-out blonde perm and often wore dashiki-print dresses though she was a white woman in her forties. Mrs. Man learned from my file that my father was dead, so she paired me up with a girl named Lori, whose father had also passed away. Lori seemed unaffected by the loss, twirling her long blond hair around her finger with a fifty-yard stare and a mouth-breathing semi-smile while I did both of our homework. There was a separation between us, an indifference to life’s harsh tokes that allowed Lori to talk about how she used Pantene Pro V on her hair and that’s why it was so shiny while I read chapter books about orphans and methodically planned what route I would take when I ran away from home to live in an abandoned camper in my cousin’s backyard. There wasn’t much common ground for us to stand on, and at lunchtime, I read quietly by myself.

Our class also had a student teacher a few days a week. Miss O’Reilly was young and idealistic, with flaming red hair and an early-90s fashion sense that was very Pearl Jam Goes to the Temp Agency. She picked up a piece of jaundice yellow chalk and scratched LOCAL HISTORY onto the board.

“For this month’s Special Assignment, everybody has to interview an old person and find out about what Lake Ronkokoma used to be like in the old days. You have to record the conversation and write a paragraph about it.”

I was only eight, and this seemed like a pretty tall order for someone who hardly had their toys unpacked from a major life uprooting. I raised my hand, hoping for a loophole. “What if we don’t know any old people?”

Miss O’Reilly had already thought about this possibility. “Well, the oldest store in town is Andrew & Taylor Hardware. It was built at the turn of the century, and I think some old people still work there, so you can just talk to them. Otherwise, you can interview an elderly neighbor.”

Earlier in the week, my stepdad, Artie, had shoveled the driveway for one of our neighbors. Otto was in his eighties and had some kind of birth defect where his fingers looked like he was holding a handful of disembodied nipples. I started to sweat profusely just thinking about talking to him.

When my mom picked us up from school, I choked out the details of the assignment, deeply inhaling the tranquilizing blue secondhand smoke in the car. The project seemed absurd, and my gut instinct said that this was the worst idea anyone had ever come up with while stoned in a college Elementary Education class. I awaited my mother’s response, which finally came in the form of an angry string of rhetorical questions.

“What is she? A fucking idiot? Sending a kid to the hardware store to talk to some old coot? Doesn’t anybody watch America’s Most Wanted in this town?”

Artie came home from work just as my mother was piercing the plastic seals on our TV dinners with a fork. They both went upstairs to give each other an update on their respective days, which usually involved the UPS guy failing to deliver an important piece of jewelery from QVC, gossip on our relative’s personality disorders, and one person or another at the Union Hall being an asshole. “Can you believe this? Sending a kid out to tape-record a bunch of pedophiles?” I heard my mother asking when I pressed my ear up to the door of their room.

“Why doesn’t she just interview Old Nipple Fingers?” Artie suggested. “I snowblowed his driveway, so he owes us one.”

“That’s not the point! It’s not only dangerous, it’s sick! You don’t know what’s out there!”

My parents were hardly ever on my side. My sister Carly had a way of doing this whalesong ambulance cry that made everything my fault no matter who had let the first slap fly. Any judgement in my favor was practically a miracle.

“What are you gonna do?” Artie asked.

“I’ll just write her a note,” my mom answered. I heard the groan of the mattress and my parents moving toward the door. I scrambled downstairs and waited at the table with folded hands, an innocent victim in a world of sick elderly pedophiles.

Miss O’Reilly was disappointed when I handed her the note from my mom, excusing me of all local history assignments for the town of Lake Ronkonkoma. I shrugged and gave a sympathetic smile, as if to say, Moms! Sometimes they just don’t want you to end up on A Current Affair! Then I took my seat next to Lori.

“What did your note say?” Lori asked, running her fingers through her flaxen locks and breathing like a muppet.

“My mom doesn’t want me talking to any old people.”

“Why?” she asked, absently doodling on her desk in pencil, which I felt was a direct affront to the rules of the class.

“She thinks it’s weird.”

By lunchtime, everybody knew I wasn’t allowed to participate in the impressive history of Lake Ronkonkoma. A few kids asked me why and I responded with a shrug, hoping my aloofness might generate some mystery that would make them want to be my friend, even though everyone I went to school with struck me as a complete idiot. It seemed uncanny that out of an entire classroom of twenty-five children, I would be the only intelligent person. What if the whole world was full of idiots? What if the rest of my life was spent battling the terrible ideas of other people who didn’t understand the way the world really worked? My head started to hurt just thinking about it, and I asked to see the school nurse, Mrs. Keizel, who sent everyone away with a sandwich baggie of ice, no matter how severe or life-threatening their injury was.

I started getting migraines in the second grade, and when I realized I didn’t have to go to school when I was sick, I would make up phantom stomach aches. Sometimes, if it seemed doubtful that I would be able to leave school in the middle of the day, I would nervously allude to diarrhea, an affliction that no school nurse will ever question. The second grade seemed pretty useless anyway. I was stuck being deskmates with Lori for the rest of the year, even though she chewed the erasers off all of her pencils and didn’t know how to read. In our science unit, we were learning about the lifecycle of mealworms, a parasite that turns from egg to worm to chewed-up-piece-of-Winterfresh-gum to beetle. Each student had a petri dish of mealworms taped to his or her desk. I did the bulk of the work for both me and Lori while she chattered on about how her mom’s new boyfriend was buying her a horse for her birthday and gnawed the end of her pencil. The mealworms crawled around in Quaker Oats, eating them, burrowing in them, crapping in them, and eventually dying in them. I stared at the mealworms, climbing over each other in the oatmeal, eating and moving around in a giant circle, ignoring the dead one off to the side, and I started to get another headache. I raised my hand.

“Yes, Cassie?”

“Can I go to the nurse?”

Mrs. Keizel called my mother to take me home again because the jury was still out on whether I was actually afflicted with a nervous disorder or just knew how to work the system. Before she picked me up, I made the slow walk back to my classroom to collect my books and jacket.

“Oh,” Mrs. Man said, handing me a list of homework, “don’t forget to take your mealworms. Everyone gets to bring them home today.”

I stared at the clear petri dish taped to my desk. I looked back at Mrs. Man. “Go on,” she said, like she was doing me a serious mitzvah. “They’re yours now to keep.”

I gathered up the serving-sized container of bugs and put them in my backpack. I knew this wasn’t going to go over well, but I had to take it one step at a time. First, make it home, then the Big Reveal. It seemed logical. A part of me really wanted Mrs. Man to be right, though. I wanted nothing more than for an authority figure to know what they were doing, to nudge me in the direction of truth and universal light, for it to make sense that I was taking home a flask of live insects.

“Oh, HELL no,” my mom said when I busted out the mealworms in our kitchen and explained that they were now mine. “What kind of person would send bugs home in a kid’s backpack? Does she want to infest the whole goddam town? Is this some kind of a sick joke? Can these teachers get their heads out of their asses and make a good decision? What are they teaching you in this school? Is this what my tax dollars are going to?”

I knew these weren’t questions for me to answer, that I should just nod thoughtfully or shrug when it seemed right. When Artie came home, my parents discussed the mealworms for a long time behind their closed door while I held up a drinking glass to my ear to better hear them, a trick I learned from one of the books I had read. I spent a long weekend with the mealworms, watching them ignore each other in their little plastic world, pooping and eating and tunneling with a listless apathy for one’s fellow mealworm. And when Monday finally came around, I put them on Mrs. Man’s desk along with the note from my mother.

“My mom says I’m not allowed to have them.” I tried to sound like I was on her side, like I really wanted to keep the mealworms, but the unjustness of my life was beyond my control.

Later in the day, our class set them free outside. We watched them crawl through the sand into the grass until they disappeared, hobbling off on a hundred brown legs into an uncertain future, to be picked off by birds or bigger insects, to never again enjoy the comfort of a flavorless dehydrated oat. Then we all went back to our desks and I rubbed my temples, feeling another big one coming on.

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