Interview: Cartoonist T Edward Bak
...mainstream superhero future movie horseshit factory comic book industry...
Years in the making, ISLAND OF MEMORY, the first volume of T Edward Bak’s historical graphic novel about German explorer and scientist, Georg Wilhelm Steller, was recently published by Floating World Comics. Below is an interview conducted through email between Bak and NAILED’s Reyna Kohl on the topics of then, now, and the unknown in regards to his life in comics and in general.
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NAILED MAGAZINE: How did you become involved in the graphic novel “scene” (for lack of a better term)?
T EDWARD BAK: I began self-publishing my work in the late 1990s in a zine called, I Have Ruined My Entire Fucking Life. I later created the self-published mini-comics, Continental Drifter and an “ironically-titled” collection called Rainbow Pudding. I founded a small press comics event in Athens, GA, and afterward began writing and drawing a comic strip called Service Industry. The “scene” I was associating with were mostly underground or independent Bay Area, Montreal and New York artists. Eventually, some of the artists I know and have published with have known each other (or, at least, have known each other’s work) since the late 1980s. I’m a latecomer; people knew me as kind of an antagonistic drunken baboon, but didn’t actually notice my work until I remained sober enough in my late 20s to create a small handmade comic called The Firefly Waltz—a comix-loteria, a kind of low-brow underground comics, Fleischer animation, Jose Guadalupe Posada influenced stamp-colored card-comic accordion fold-out booklet.
NAILED: Did you always supplement your words with drawings/drawings with words? Or, what came first, the words or the drawings?
BAK: I grew up copying Peanuts characters, but was later one of those teenage boys who composed unrequited love poetry for cheerleaders during his early high school days. Later, I began associating Rock’ n ‘Roll lyricism with the Beat writers and Henry Miller and Charles Bukowski. I’m an unrepentant Kerouac apologist. I wanted to write about “real life,” man! Reality! Realism! I still don’t know what that means!
But I was always drawing, too, and took classes with instructors who were steering me towards a practical career in scientific illustration, and I’ve had friends who thought I ought to become a tattoo artist. Who knows how many callings I’ve missed out on.
I consider myself a writer who draws. It was always important for me to learn how to write effectively. It took me years to understand the meaning of “language,” and how it could apply to a cartoonist’s work. Paul Westerberg’s lyrics helped me as a cartoonist, I think, more so than reading Crumb or Clowes or Kurtzman. I don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing.
NAILED: What sort of training do you have in writing? Drawing?
BAK: My writing came about because I knew I had to develop a voice, and I focused on this for a long time. I knew that if I could manifest a voice, I would be on the right track. It is a matter of me understanding what I find important in writing myself and what is truly self-evident to me. I’ve always been drawing. My mother was a watercolor artist when I was very young, and she insists the first words I learned were “pencil” and “paper,” which is a story I think she read about Picasso and transferred it to her memory of my early drawing impulse. I’ve only recently begun feeling as if I’m developing a graphic drawing style of my own.
NAILED: Talk a little bit about your history with publishing graphic novels. How many stories/comics have you had published so far? What was the first piece that you got published (aside from self-published works) and how did that opportunity come about?
BAK: I’ve published one complete volume of work, a Service Industry volume that collects most of the last year of the strip into one long story. Mostly, I’ve published stories that have appeared in anthologies. I am currently at work on a project that is being published in serials and will eventually become my first “proper” graphic novel. This new work, ISLAND OF MEMORY, which is the first part of WILD MAN – The Natural History of Georg Wilhelm Steller, was originally serialized in a Fantagraphics anthology (MOME) but is now published as a series by Floating World Comics, and will eventually be collected as a single work.
The first work that was published was through an invitation by my friend, the late Dylan Williams, a publisher who’d seen The Firefly Waltz. Dylan was curious to see if I could adapt a story for a comic anthology. The story was “The Tomb of Sarah” (originally by FG Loring) and it appeared in the anthology Orchid, the first book by Dylan’s company, Sparkplug Comic Books, in 2001.
NAILED: Can you give a brief explanation of your current project, and your process in the context of this particular book?
BAK: The process is very intuitive. I try to complete a drawing a day; it’s imperative that I accomplish a little work every day, whether that is drawing or researching or writing. I probably write too much about what needs to be written, and what needs to be examined.
The new work is a kind of multi-tiered work, on one level about a naturalist who traveled with the Russian imperial expedition to North America in the 18th century, but it’s also about the human
relationship with the environment at that time, the beginnings of ethnography and ecology, the natural history of the North Pacific, all within a context of the philosophical confluence of empire, science,
religion, and traditional ecological knowledge. It’s going to be a spectacular failure!
NAILED: How do you think the graphic novel, its authors and publishers, have been and will be affected by the ever-increasing popularity of the ebook? Do you think it is more important for a reader to be able to hold a graphic novel in their hands and flip through the pages than it is with a traditional (word-centric) novel?
BAK: I don’t think any of this matters at all. There have always been word-image representations for people to read. I prefer reading a book, but I think new work and/or mediums will adapt to new technologies, and vice versa. Books aren’t going to disappear. There may come a day when people are reading comics (or graphic novels, or sequential narratives, or whatever they decide to call it next) through electro-telepathic 3-dimensional holographic implants. They might prefer that. Who knows. “Graphic novel” is an inane term for “comic book.” I am basically making a comic book. It’s pop culture. I was once interested in participating in the “elevation” of the comic book to some ridiculous imaginary realm occupied by art and literature. But comics already occupy a very specific place in pop culture, a genuinely American phenomenon/tradition. I’m okay with that, it’s what I want now.
NAILED: Has/will/can anyone become wealthy by writing graphic novels?
BAK: I have no idea. I don’t think my work will be embraced by American readers, which is fine with me. I would actually prefer an international audience. America has given the world pop culture, but Americans could care less about comics outside of the Frank Miller-Disney mainstream superhero future movie horseshit factory comic book industry. I’m never going to make any money. Does it matter? If I could barter my life through my drawings and comics stories, I would. I’m looking for ways to get there. I’m also looking for ways to cut my ties to everything and everyone in my life. There’s no escape!
NAILED: Future plans?
BAK: I have projects I’m working on with my publisher. I’ve raised money through Kickstarter to fund a drawing expedition to Alaska and the Aleutian Islands and for a lecture series tour to promote the first volume of WILD MAN. I received a State Dept grant to visit Russia, where I made presentations of my work at an international comics festival and did some research while I was there. Occasionally, I teach comics classes. I’ve been back in school in an Environmental Studies program, and I’m interested in GIS, but I’m also interested in Art History and Anthropology. But I’m tired of heartbreak and comics scenes and people who don’t understand that I’m not a fucking character in a story, I’m just a human being, I’m completely lost and have no idea where I’m going or what I’m doing. I feel like people want me to be something else, like they want me to fit in the little boxes I’m drawing. Hopefully, I can
just find a way to disappear, just find a way to exist somewhere and make my work without having my heart broken by this awful, modern existence anymore. That sounds pathetic, right? But it’s just the
truth and my work is just an absurd response to the absurd position the cosmos has put me in.
NAILED: Of course we need to know: When’s the last time you NAILED it?
BAK: I wish I could remember the last time I nailed it. I can’t make Portland work for me and I can’t meet anyone. It has always been kind of a disaster for me, as far as relationships go. I’m actually moving to Seattle in the spring. I really don’t remember, it’s been over a year.
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Read the NAILED review of T Edward Bak’s ISLAND OF MEMORY here.
T Edward Bak was born and brought up in Denver, but frequently migrates throughout North America. He is the author and artist-cartoonist of the Ignatz award-nominated Service Industry, has taught and lectured comics classes at the Independent Publishing Resource Center, Portland Community College and Pacific Northwest College of Art. He was the 2007-2008 Fellow at the Center for Cartoon Studies, and his stories have also been featured in various critically acclaimed anthologies, including The Graphic Canon, The Best American Comics, MOME, Drawn & Quarterly Showcase, Studygroup 12 and Orchid. WILD MAN – The Natural History of Georg Wilhelm Steller is his first graphic novel.