WALRUS COMIX PROUDLY PRESENTS:
An Exclusive Interview with Comix Genius.... TIM KREIDER!

TIM KREIDER is the author of the weekly comic, "The Pain—When Will It End?"  Not only is it the funniest comic strip ever, but, well, that's it:  it's the funniest comic strip ever.  Or, to quote the novelist David Foster Wallace, "These cartoons are extremely, extremely f--king good..."

Timothy (as I call him), began self-publishing "The Pain" in 1994; it is now carried every week by the Baltimore City Paper.  His cartoons have been collected into two volumes by Fantagraphics Books – the epinonymous "The Pain—When Will It End?" was followed by "Why Do They Kill Me?:  A Chronicle of the Era of Darkness, 2000-2004."  His next book, the intriguingly titled "Fuck Them All:  A Chronicle of the Era of Darkness, Volume II," will be released in 2009.

Timmy (as I call him) has also appeared on ABC News, and has written for The New York Times and The Comics Journal.  He has been stabbed in the throat and had his cartoons singled out for censure by the Catholic League.

Tim Kreider is awesome.  And you can read (and buy) his stuff at: www.thepaincomics.com.

Artist’s Self Portrait – Tim Kreider (center); from left to right; insane hippies, insane fuckheads.

Hi, Tim.  So here's my first question for you.  I think it really strikes to the heart of everything and starts this interview off on a brilliant note... So what's going on? What are you doing? Are you hanging out with your cat?

In fact the cat is sitting on my lap at this moment. I am at my desk in The Turret, ostensibly at work on this week's cartoon, which gives voice to my outrage at the theft of a two-headed turtle from a nonprofit pet store/animal shelter nearby, but in fact I am multicrastinating, answering these interview questions while simultaneously talking on the phone to my friend Boyd about whether or not we are classists. These are what an old friend of mine used to call The Terrible Hours, that existentially hazardous interval of the afternoon between naptime and cocktail hour.

So, like, this is what you do.  You draw at home and you hang out with friends and drink and stuff, and then, at the end of the week, you produce a cartoon?  And that's your job...

Please allow me to congratulate you on having the best life of all time.

It’s going to be hard for me to answer this question without either admitting to having the best life of all time, or, worse, sounding ungrateful for my pretty privileged and leisurely life, which I do appreciate.

A normal day for me (and bear in mind that it's all too rare that I get to have a normal day) is being woken up by the dreaded Tentative Paw of the cat, feeding the cat, drinking a lot of coffee and reading email and news online, meditating, working on whatever I'm writing, having lunch, riding my bike, running errands, napping, and drawing or socializing with friends in the evening—going to movies, having dinner, hanging out in bars talking. I draw one cartoon a week, which usually takes two full days of work and pays twenty dollars. (This accounting does not include the 65% of my time spent looking at internet pornography, which I strongly suspect is more or less the norm.) At its best it seems to me like an ideal human life, sanely paced and pleasantly varied. But more often I feel wretchedly anxious and guilty about all the work I'm supposed to be doing instead of procrastinating and wasting my time.

I decided a long time ago that time was the most precious luxury in life, since it is irreplaceable; you can always make more money.

My days undeniably include a lot of unproductive fucking off but this seems to be true of most people's working lives, unless they actually do something useful or necessary, which as far as I can tell only about .03% of the U.S. population does. My friend Boyd sends me a lot of movie trailers and photos of naked actresses from work. My girlfriend sometimes sits reading werewolf novels all day—and that's what she's supposed to be doing. It's not always clear to me why what some of my friends do are jobs and what I do isn't. The only difference seems to be that no one is paying me.

The obvious follow-up question here is how come I get to live like this while earning only twenty dollars a week. Arranging this life has been more luck than virtue. I decided a long time ago that time was the most precious luxury in life, since it is irreplaceable; you can always make more money. I was lucky to have parents who were pretty well off and willing to subsidize my career as an artist. I also lived frugally for a long time in our family's cabin on the Chesapeake Bay. I've never been very acquisitive, and only spent money on things like travel and eating well and drinking with friends. Now that I’ve moved to New York City, of course, the money evaporates from your bank account like rubbing alcohol wicking off your skin, and I'm probably going to have to figure out how to get something like a job with the skill set of a very talented ten-year-old and a conspicuous twenty-year gap on my resumé.

If I may add this caveat without sounding ungrateful, I will say that subsidizing your child’s career in the arts is maybe not the best way to inculcate self-sufficiency or a disciplined work ethic in your child.

Dude, allow me to say this.  I don't gush.  I'm not a gusher.  I'm not so into the gushing.  I mean, if I met, say, Steven Spielberg in real life, I would probably say to him something like, "I hear you make movies.  That's nifty."  I've only ever gushed over one person in real life, and that was the novelist Paul LaFarge.  (I met him in a bar, and terrified him with my drunken ability to recite entire paragraphs of his writing.  He backed away from me, waving his hands in the air.  In terror.)

With all of that said, please allow me to gush for a second.

We've mentioned already the important topic of your cat.  Let me just say that I find your drawings of your cat to be Hi-LAIR-ious.  I laugh every time I see one.  ...And that's another thing.  I never laugh when I read something.  Never.  Well, only once, and that was at a P.J. O'Rourke essay, and that was about fifteen years ago.  But I laugh all the time when I read your stuff – which always surprises me; the fact that I'm laughing out loud, I mean.

In fact, let's take a look at a cartoon.  It’s called “What’s Gonna Happen” and it’s one of my favorites*.

(*Sorry!  This cartoon features hard to read dialogue; Tim’s fault, not mine! 

The dialogue is as follows—

Tim to cat:  “Who’s the poozle?  Who’s the poobaloo?”

Interviewer to Tim:  “The Palm d’Or for your first film—it must be an incredibly humbling honor.”  …Tim’s response (probably in a French accent):  “No because I always knew I was different you see.”

Tim’s thought over the drawing board:  “Maybe if the carrot is up the guy’s own ass…?”  This is a reference to another cartoon, featuring—yes—a carrot suck up a guy’s ass. ) 

It strikes me that every single drawing in this cartoon is, in fact, funny.  The horrifying dead-eyed stare as you type away at the keyboard.  The frozen rictus grin as the little girl screams at you.  And – my favorite – the drawing of you and your cat.  It's weird, but when I read your cartoons, I often find myself laughing at the drawings before I even "get to" the punchline.

It seems like so many cartoons in the funny pages these days don't even bother to try to make the art itself funny.  Say, for example, Dilbert – which features intentionally or unintentionally bad drawings…

…I don’t get the impression that people like Scott Adams or Tom Tomorrow are all that interested in cartooning—they’d be just as happy if they got to say what they say as stand-up comics or humor columnists or radio personalities. They have keen eyes for the absurdities and hypocrisies of corporate and political culture, respectively, and people love them for holding those things up for derision and contempt. But I’m honestly not sure how much actual drawing either of them does anymore—their strips both look as though they might be done entirely by some software program. For me, as an artist, I couldn’t stand to draw a cartoon week after week if the drawing weren’t fun.

But illustrative drawing is out of fashion right now; what’s currently in is the punk, DIY aesthetic, clip art and minimalism. The good thing about this ethic is that it’s encouraged everyone to go out and create art whether they’re technically skilled or not. The bad thing about it is that it’s encouraged everyone to go out and create art whether they’re technically skilled or not. I don’t want to sound too snotty about this. John Porcellino has written about how punk music inspired him to draw comics, and I’m glad that he didn’t get intimidated out of his vocation by some snobby standard of technical rendering. He’s obviously not a great draftsman like, say, Franklin Booth, but he clearly has the eyes and soul of an artist. And I can’t imagine Get Your War On illustrated in any way other than it is; the dissonance between the bland corporate clip art and the crazed, filthy dialogue is the music of the strip. It’s maybe worth noting that that David Rees is in a punk band also.

On the other hand, the DIY aesthetic has also enabled a glut of crude, amateurish, boring, crappy art. (The art critic David Apatoff recently described one of Gary Panter’s drawings as looking like the cover of a high school literary magazine. I will not disagree.) And it’s also too bad for me, since my own drawing style is at the moment kind of passé. I remember when I submitted some of my cartoons to The New Yorker their cartoon editor told me they were too cartoonish. He said that they preferred their art to blend in with the text and not detract attention from it. Suffice it to say that in this effort I think they have succeeded. Of course The New Yorker doesn’t want to look like MAD Magazine.They want to be funny but respectable. But this is, in my opinion, trying to have it both ways. Humor isn’t dignified.

My own drawing style is gratuitously complicated. I’m sure I spend about eight hundred more hours per week drawing than any of my colleagues (with the possible exception of Carl Steven, an even more compulsive cross-hatcher). I’m just not a versatile enough artist to know how to draw in a more simplified, minimal style than I do. My colleague Emily Flake (who is actually a more accomplished draughtsgirl than she bothers to show off in Lulu Eightball) is at least as funny as I am and only spends about four hours drawing her strip every week. You can certainly overwork a cartoon, ending up with a drawing that’s just too busy and detailed and illustrative to be borne by the flimsy gag it’s meant to convey--the visual equivalent of a shaggy dog joke--which I’m afraid happens to me more often than I’d like to admit.

...frankly I think a lot of graphic novels and stories have no compelling reason to be comics other than that, if they were prose, they’d be too unremarkable to publish

So talk to us a little about balancing words and art.  Which one is more important to you?  Or are they both equally important?

I’m pretty good at both drawing and writing. I’ve enjoyed them both since I was a child. I used to write illustrated stories in middle school and high school, which I sometimes think was the closest I’ve ever come to finding the ideal artistic form to combine those abilities. I’m still trying to find the perfect medium to integrate them. (For a while I thought I might want to make films, but cinematography isn’t drawing and screenwriting isn’t prose, and directing has a lot more to do with being a canny businessman and bossing people around, neither of which I’m be any good at.) I majored in writing in college, and I really wanted to be a writer before I accidentally became a cartoonist instead. For a long time the artistic ideas I had were either for essays or single-panel cartoons, but not anything in between. (And frankly I think a lot of graphic novels and stories have no compelling reason to be comics other than that, if they were prose, they’d be too unremarkable to publish.) I’ve always given a lot of attention and care to the diction and cadence of my dialogue and captions, even to the emotive quality of the lettering and word balloons (I’m an admirer of Dave Sim’s virtuosic lettering). In recent years I’ve been drawing cartoons accompanied by “artist’s statements,” which aren’t exactly exegeses but more like essays based on, or extended digressions departing from, the cartoons, but this is a pretty inelegant solution. This summer I drew my second-ever comic story for a magazine, and, inspired by that experience, in the last few weeks I’ve just started drawing things that are less like conventional cartoons, with a premise and several gags, than illustrated essays, so maybe that’ll be my new thing.

Do you have weeks where you're hoping that the funniness of your drawing shores up the less-funniness of the words, and vice versa?

I’ve been drawing a weekly strip long enough that by now I can usually count on being able to enliven even an uninspired premise with some funny, out-of-left-field detail. Sometimes it’s a visual gag, sometimes it’s a line of dialogue. If you can just get yourself to start working they will come to you as you draw, or when you’re in the shower or doing dishes, in a quiet, matter-of-fact way that seems to be inspiration’s signature—less “eureka” than “oh, of course.” It’s kind of like using averted vision to see a faint star, or getting a cat to come to you. You can’t try.

How do you draw “funny”?

I grew up cracking up over the hilarious drawings in MAD Magazine by artists like Don Martin and Harry, North, esq.—some of whose faces are still my mental dictionary illustrations for things like Idi Amin or esprit de escalier (thinking up the perfect rejoinder much too late). Drawing funny facial expressions and hand gestures is the fun part for me, and that’s where I always start. If I were an Old Master with my own cartoon studio I’d just draw the faces and hands and leave all the rest of the boring unavoidable details like bodies and clothing and objects and backgrounds to my apprentices while I went to lunch. This is also why I take advantage of every excuse to draw monsters, explosions, aliens, superheroes, or naked women. I don’t know why you’d want to be a cartoonist if you didn’t enjoy drawing funny, cool things. If I had to draw an entire graphic novel of people sitting around talking I think I’d hang myself.

As for how to be funny, whether in art or prose or real life, this is something of a mystery, and I’m not sure the humorist is the best person to ask to analyze or explain it.

So here’s something that I’ve been thinking about.  I went to an M.F.A. program for writing (and so did you, according to your bio)**.  And for a long time, what took me through the lonely years of eating cheese sandwiches and ramen, while my friends were buying BMWs and such…  what took me through those lonely years was the thought that at some point, my writing would be published, and then I would be famous.

Of course, that didn’t happen.  I got stuff published on a website that a million people read, and then, still, obviously, normal people didn’t care.  I remember the first time I tried to hit on a girl by “interviewing” her for my website.  She didn’t care.  “But…  a million people read it a month!” I said.  But…  who cares?  Of course she didn’t care.  I made a fundamental mistake there that I never made again – if you’re trying to point out how quasi-famous and important you are, then of course you’re just a pathetic loser like the rest of us.

So I realized the other day; I’ll never be famous.  Which was very sad.  You are more famous than I am, which is of course as it should be.  But you’re not famous famous. 

So here’s my question... What’s it like for you, being famous, but to, like, two hundred or four hundred or a thousand people?  And these people think you’re awesome, but outside of that, nothing.  I mean…  these two hundred people, they would sleep with you or stalk you or gush about your work for hours, but then, that’s it, and the person at the local DMV still doesn’t know your name.  …Or do you not even care about fame, and I’m just a shallow asshole?

Just last night at a bar some friends of mine and I established that if you have to explain who someone is—like "he writes for Nerve.com" or "he's a cartoonist, he has a website, and he's got a couple of books out"—that person is not famous. If, on the other hand, you have no idea who they are or what they've ever done but you've heard of them anyway, that person is famous. (I only recently learned that Bret Farve plays football and that Hannah Montana is fictitious, but I still knew their names.) My colleague Alex Robinson and I coined the term "fame-ish" to denote the condition of being famous among a relatively low number of people, such as we are. I generally tell people, "I'm famous in Baltimore."

I hear you about requiring that mirage of future fame and fortune to keep crawling toward across the desert of positive reinforcement that is a career in the arts. It helps to compensate for all the material success you're sacrificing—none of my friends are exactly driving BMWs, but they do have a lot of the trappings of grownup respectability, like nice houses, and wives. But it's best to recognize it for a useful psychological crutch and not count on it or make it the goal of your work, because you're likely to end up bitterly disappointed. Recently, as I've noticed that I am now middle-aged and not yet successful or very widely recognized, this has been getting under my skin. I sometimes imagine that it would be better received abroad, and think that I ought to have spent the last decade living in Europe. At this point I've re-set my hopes on posthumous recognition.

Obviously I'd like my work to be as widely seen as possible, and I will confess to being genuinely baffled as to why it's not better known. Like all artists, I have to maintain the functional delusion that my work is excellent and undeservedly ignored. Part of it is just that my cartoons are, I'm afraid, pretty marginal in their outlook, so they're never going to appeal to a mass audience. People who write about them always call them "black" and "cynical" when to me, you know, they were just supposed to be funny. But anytime they've been accidentally exposed to a broader audience, a more representative cross-section of the general public, I am reminded that my cartoons are in fact grotesquely offensive and shocking to most people. I gently pointed out to a friend of mine who innocently stirred up a lot of ire by posting one of my cartoons on her blog that if you were to air Eraserhead on ABC in prime time it's not like you'd create millions of new David Lynch fans; you'd just generate a wave of outraged and nauseated letters and get slapped with a huge FCC fine. That said, I do think that my work could appeal to a much larger audience than it's found so far, and a lot of the blame for this is mine. I'm just lousy at self-promotion, because it's so embarrassing and demoralizing and dull.

Reading the Stoics recently restored me to a saner perspective about all this. Marcus Aurelius is particularly scornful of this preoccupation with the opinion of the public, or posterity. He points out that you know very well what most people are like and what their taste and judgment is worth, so why are you so worried about what they think of you? (Which echoes something my colleague Megan Kelso and I always used to tell each other years ago before we made a pact never again to look at the Comics Journal message board: why are we so easily upset by the opinions of people for whom we have no respect?) As for posterity, he says, what does it matter to you whether people know your name a thousand years from now? Those people will all be dead soon enough, too, and so will the people who bury them, and eventually they’ll all be forgotten. What matters is maintaining your personal integrity and doing what you can be proud of. In Marcus Aurelius's case this we'll-all-be-dead-soon-anyway attitude enabled him to massacre a lot of Parthians but it had the same effect on me as it does when, in a movie, someone's having hysterics and you grab their collar and slap them repeatedly back and forth across the face until they snap out of it and calm down and say, "Thanks—I needed that." I realized I was spazzing. Most people have no taste; mediocrity rules. That's how it's always been. I certainly owe it to my work to try to promote it as it deserves, but to get upset at the world for being the way it is leads to a kind of insanity and makes you miserable. It's like getting furious at your computer, or at the weather. Which I've also been known to do.

I'm making myself sound a lot more sanguine about this than I am. The truth is that I struggle with it. We live in a culture where celebrity is just about the only common measure of value or worth, which is sort of like trying to breathe neon. And I live in New York, where that tendency is especially toxic. And I am not exactly immune to petty professional jealousy and resentment. There is never any shortage of examples of talentless people who have been wildly successful through relentless self-promotion, nepotism, or sheer luck. Last night I got the new issue of The Funny Times, which they send me regularly even though they've only ever published two of my cartoons. Look through it sometime and try to imagine how I must feel seeing what's made it in there. So yes, I'm vain and an insecure and sometimes get to feeling sorry for myself and mad at the whole world. And sometimes I wonder if maybe the obvious explanation for my lack of success is that I suck at what I do and should quit. Because there is, for every artist, always that possibility lurking over everything you do: that you suck.

But I really ought not to complain. I get a dozen letters every week from people who tell me how much my work means to them, which is more than most artists ever get in return for their efforts. And I'm one of the very few cartoonists I've even heard of who has groupies.

All right.  And hey – thank you for not calling me a shallow asshole.  So, I'm currently looking at your, um, current weekly strip, "Obama and Me:  A Love Story."  In fact, let's throw that strip up so that we can all take a look at it…

 I, um, love the drawing of McCain with his little hand-tied bowtie.

Yeah, I ended up feeling bad for him in this cartoon. He really dandied himself up. He looks so hopeful.

So, this seems as good a time as any to mention that "The Pain" started as a self-published comic book, and then sort of evolved into a more political cartoon.  Your published collections are, in fact, pretty much neatly divided between the two, um, "eras" of your cartoons:  ten years of personal-ish cartoons about superheroes and girls and fat people and your friends and so on, and then eight years of increasingly horrified political cartoons.
 
Your cartoons pretty much convey the impression that George W. Bush is one of the worst things to ever happen to America.  And so, what happened with that?  Was there a seminal moment of Bush-hatred that flipped the switch for you, and pushed your strip toward the political? 

No one will ever read this whole interview.

Of course they will!  What, do you think we’re both too long-winded or something?

Anyway, to get back to your question.  …I'm only forty-one, so perhaps I lack the perspective to call George Bush the worst thing that's ever happened to the country. I think it's still safe to rank the Civil War, the institution of slavery, and the extermination of the Indians above even a disastrous presidency. He's inarguably the worst President of my lifetime, and certainly seems to me like the worst president in American history, and a lot of historians agree. Over the last eight years a lot of liberals have recalled Mencken's pronouncement that "on some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron." I believe he wrote this during the administration of Warren Harding, who was no great thinker or statesman. So let's not lose all historical perspective; people have always been gullible dullards, and we've had plenty of ineptitude and cronyism in the Oval Office before. But it's possible that even Mencken's cynicism would've failed him in imagining how bad it would get. I once asked Jules Feiffer whether things were really as bad as they seemed, and I didn't even get to finish my sentence before he said, "They're worse!"  But, as George himself once pontificated: "History. Who knows? We'll all be dead."

I really can't pinpoint any one moment when Bush crossed some sort of political or psychological line for me. I never really got past his father's cronies stealing the election for him. The day the Republican-packed court handed down their indefensible verdict in Bush v. Gore I kind of looked around to see whether anyone else was going to drive down to Washington to throw flaming bags of human shit at the Supreme Court, but we all just sort of shook our heads in disbelief and said that's fucked up, man and got drunk and thus kind of glumly acquiesced to a coup d'état. I'm the kind of guy who tends to hold a grudge, and I never accepted George Bush as a legitimate president of the United States, at least not until 2004, which was disillusioning in an altogether different, and maybe worse, way.

It seems like almost every day of the Bush administration brought some new insult to common sense or outrage against human decency, some new perversion of the language or travesty of  law. It was clear, early on, that the people in charge of the country had nothing but contempt for the constitution, for the electorate, all the inconvenient antiquated apparatus of democracy. But our acquiescence was maybe the worst part of it. Of course the usual yahoos went along with whatever the administration wanted to do and chanted U!S!A! and got all gung ho, like they always have, in every tribe and nation in every era throughout history, since a quarter-million B.C. But the ineffectuality of people who knew better, myself included, was appalling. We're educated and informed, better informed than anyone in the history of the world has ever been. We just had no idea what to do. The muscles of democracy had atrophied to the point where all we could do was flail our feeble little vestigial arms and whine "Aw, hey! Quit it! You guys! No fair." We figured someone ought to do something to stop them, but the opposition party was too gutless and compromised to take a stand, so nothing happened, and for a long time Cheney and Bush just stomped up and down on us and laughed.

I started to get the feeling that reality had come utterly unmoored, that the laws of cause and effect no longer applied.  Philip K. Dick once defined reality as that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away, and for a while there it looked like George was successfully going to pull a Bugs Bunny, just stand there smugly munching his carrot in midair explaining that he never studied law. He could tell any ridiculous lie he wanted and it would be true. He could do any stupid thing he took it into his head to do and it would be a fait accompli. They've fallen so far since then that it's already hard to remember how monolithic and invincible their regime seemed only a few years ago; I got so paranoid—and the wildest paranoia seemed so validated by reality—that I bet my friend Myla they would somehow seek to stay in power past a second term. It was almost a relief to me when it turned out that no, invading Iraq was just as bad an idea as it seemed, when everyone else in the country suddenly noticed that, in the first debate against Kerry, Bush seemed like sort of a surly, petulant moron, when the administration just stood around grinning and congratulating each other while New Orleans sank underwater—that, no, these people don't know what they're doing after all, they're complete idiots who can't carry out the most basic functions of a government.

Also, George is personally loathsome. Don't let's underestimate this. I always found it an offensive rhetorical tactic when the right dismissed us as "Bush-haters," as though there were something arbitrary, inexplicable, and irrational about our objection to someone who was trashing the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions—as though it were no different from the rabid misogyny that seems to motivate so much of the Hilary-hatred on the far right. To me it was like shaking your head over those crazy "Franco haters." But to be truthful, they also had a point: I do hate George Bush's guts. He's the personification of everything willfully ignorant, proudly stupid, and just plain mean about the right.  He's this smirking, strutting, rich-kid frat boy trying to act like a townie, the bullying jock who cruised by on Cs and still got into a better college than you 'cause his daddy was an alum. I haven't actually seen George Bush's face in motion or heard the sound of his voice in several years. I can't bear it. And I still don't feel I've ever accurately captured the distinctive combination of cringe and sneer, the insecurity and sadism, of his characteristic expression. No caricature could be any more damning than his actual face.

Well, actually, here’s an afterthought…

Actually now I am remembering a moment when I began to understand how bad things were going to be. It was the week after 9/11. I was in a Polish restaurant in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and on TV someone was asking some self-appointed expert why they had done this, what could explain these attacks. "These people hate freedom," he explained. "Oh Jesus," I said out loud. "Is this what it's going to be like?" This will sound pathetically naive, but I was shocked that something terrible and real had happened that ought to have  shocked us all into noticing some serious things going on in the rest of the world, and the people in power were still responding to it with their usual simple-minded propaganda and talking points. After an entire decade of frivolous, idiotic diversions—remember how a blowjob was absolutely the biggest new story of the Nineties?—we'd lost all ability to think or talk about things seriously in public as a nation. "They hate freedom." It think this is actually something Lorne Greene said about the Cylons in the old Battlestar Galactica. No mention of al Qaeda's actual stated agenda, of our army's occupation of Saudi Arabia or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or the last fifty years of American intervention in the Middle East. Understand, I'm not someone who immediately blamed America for what happened or felt that we had it coming. I lost my shit: I wanted the people responsible nuked; I wanted to see the Middle East turned into a radioactive wasteland that would glow at night for the next fifty thousand years just to remind people that the Americans were not to be fucked with. But I do believe in history, and in cause and effect, and this 'they hate freedom' crap seemed to me like the most childish, crazy denial and delusion in the face of a grave crisis, like being diagnosed with cancer and heaving your doctor tell you that you'd probably been the victim of a voodoo curse. It's what Kim Stanley Robinson calls 'an imaginary relationship to a real situation.' and it's dangerous.

 

One of the most frustrating parts of the Bush Administration is that we've got this guy, he's president, and he's dumber than mud.  And it's really really really...  very...  frustrating.  I'm going to make a grand sweeping statement here, and say that the Bush Era has been an era of impotence for smart, creative types.  We see all this awful shit happening, and yet we can do nothing – or, at least, jackshit, which is, after all, pretty close to nothing.
 
But do you think that George W. Bush has been good, in a way, for your cartooning?  Not good in a fame/money sense, but good in the sense that, do you think that all this anger and rage that all of us non-fuckheads feel at the current situation...  do you think that has been good in that it helped focus your cartooning, your art?
 
Or, to quote Orson Welles:  "You know what the fellow said—in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance.  In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace—and what did that produce?  The cuckoo clock."
 
Would you have to grudgingly admit that G.W. Bush has been good for your cartoons?  And how do you deal with the upcoming prospect of a non-awful Obama presidency?
 
I remember sitting in the Old Town Bar with a friend of mine a few years ago having our usual talk about the moronic and ruinous state of the nation when we told me, "well, they’ve been great years for you." I suppose I have to concede that, if nothing else, it's offered a lot of fodder for cartoons. It's undeniably brought about a real renaissance of satire in this country—the Daily Show, the Colbert Report, the Onion have all thrived on the absurdity of the Bush years. (In my one visit to the Museum of Sex, I was struck by the fact that the flourishing of sexual subcultures has historically coincided with periods of repression.) Though I also have to say that reality has increasingly outstripped parody in its outlandishness and it's been a constant challenge to try to stay one step ahead of the absurdity curve.

I started drawing political cartoons because politics was what was making me angry. And, as is true of most humorists, anger is the source of my work. The job is to transmute rage into laughter. I kept doing it because I kept being outraged, and because I started getting a lot of positive reinforcement from readers. But frankly by 2004 I was burned out on politics and ready to quit. I felt like I'd just run a marathon and was trying not to vomit up my own lungs as I dragged myself across the finish line when someone told me, 'oh, no, this isn't the finish line—it's the halfway point.'

I can't say that I regret drawing all those political cartoons because I was brought up to believe that you have to speak out against lies and injustice, and drawing cartoons was my own useless impotent response to the times. (My parents were Mennonites, who have a long tradition of witnessing--"speaking truth to power," as they say--and consequently getting tortured with tongue screws and drowned in barrels and hung up to die in cages on the spires of cathedrals.) And I know that my work meant a lot to some people. It changed nothing, of course, but at its best it let people know that no, it wasn't just them, they weren't alone and they weren't crazy, things were exactly as fucked up as they seemed. (It may be hard to remember now how surreal and terrible it felt when the media was so frightened of the Bush administration, or of being seen as liberal or anti-American, that they just patriotically parroted the official propaganda, and the only place you ever heard the voice of reason was in your own head.) But I am kind of angry at the Bush administration for forcing me to waste eight years of my life drawing transient topical cartoons that no one will even get ten or twenty years from now. This is hardly the greatest of their crimes, but it bothers me. I suppose it was the artistic equivalent of having to abandon your farm or your workshop for a time to go fight in the army: the call to battle comes, you gotta go. Okay, once more into the fucking breach. From time to time I hoped that perhaps in the future people would look back on this aberrant decade as a crucial historic moment, like the Weimar years, and my work might turn out to be the equivalent of someone like George Grosz's. (Although this hope depends on things getting a lot worse before they get better—basically I was banking on something like World War II or the Holocaust to enhance my professional reputation.) But it's more likely that my dumb cartoons will just be forgotten as soon as this current crisis is over. I mean who, besides dweeby cartoon enthusiasts and collectors, ever looks at old political cartoons even from the Nixon or Johnson administrations, much less the Harding or Taft or Jackson administrations? Who cares? It's like all those in-jokes in Swift or Euripides that were pointed at some contemporary political or religious figure, which now have to be tediously explained in footnotes that nobody bothers to read. It's very hard to be both topical and timeless, like Goya or Grosz or Ralph Steadman. Even though my drawing's improved over the last decade, I still prefer my earlier, non-political cartoons, the kind collected in The Pain—When Will It End? They're more timeless and universal, and a purer form of art. I'd like to go back to doing something more like that after Inauguration Day 2009, when I fervently hope we'll see the Republicans run out of Washington like vermin.

And yet I do think that humorists will find themselves feeling unexpectedly deprived and bereft after Bush has left office, the way they felt after they didn't have Nixon to kick around anymore. Think of the unbelievable assemblage of dingbats and villains the Bush administration has given us: George, Mr. Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and let's not forget John Ashcroft. You could not invent such characters. They're a rogue's gallery of grotesques out of Dickens or Chester Gould. Of course as a citizen I'd like to see them all impeached and displayed in cages at the Hague, but as a humorist, I think we're going to miss those guys. After they're gone, it'll be hard to believe they were ever real. We will not see their like again. Knock on wood.

All right.  I’m horrified to say that this interview is coming to an end…  soon-ish.  But before we do that, here’s a semi-random pu-pu platter of cartoons.  Tim, you shush for a second.  What the people want are cartoons, cartoons, cartoons!  And to get more of them, go to www.thepaincomics.com.  There’s plenty more cartoons there, and you can buy Tim’s books…  which is what you should do, you cheap bastard.  Give him some money, all right?

Okay.  Honestly, T.K., it pains me to bring this interview to a close.  But if I must end it, allow me to at least end it in grand style, like James Lipton does on 'Inside the Actor's Studio.'

So, here are your final questions.

Finish the following sentences.  You may want to get drunk or stoned or something before doing this.

"The most important thing is..."

Spending time with the people you love. I think. I could be wrong about this, though. Maybe the most important thing is producing great art. Maybe it's helping other people, fighting suffering and injustice. Maybe it's just fucking as many girls as possible and leaving more descendants than the next guy. Maybe it's freeing yourself from the endless cycle of desire. Who knows what's really important? This is what makes life so impossible. The only thing I'm sure of is that whatever I choose to do I will regret on my deathbed. 

"I am happiest when..."
  
Goofing off in the company of old friends, with absolutely nothing else we're supposed to be doing. This gets to happen about once a year these days, if I'm lucky.

"My three favorite things are ________, ________, and _________.”

My beloved cat. Asses/pie (tie). The stars. 

 "I would like to irrationally complain about the following thing that bugs me.  And that thing is..."

Car alarms. The second worst invention of the 20th century, after the atomic bomb. Like the atom bomb, the car alarm has made the world a much worse place for everyone. Unlike the atom bomb, the car alarm has failed even to achieve its ostensible short-term goal. The bomb at least successfully obviated an invasion of Japan, but the car alarm, I'm quite sure, has never once since its invention prevented a car theft. Can't we just abolish the goddamn things?

Commercials in movie theaters: also unconscionable. As with the 2000 election, I can't believe the whole nation didn't rise up in spontaneous violent revolt the first time this was foisted on them. Cancels out the improvement of stadium seating. 

 "My favorite word is..."

There are too many to name. I'll mention two I just learned recently: (1) cenotaph, which I'm trying to work into as many conversations as possible, which isn't very many, since there aren't all that many empty tombs around, and (2) staycation, recently minted slang from the current oil shortage, meaning a vacation where you stay home. I love how spontaneously and mysteriously slang appears. No one person seems to invent it; it's just suddenly ubiquitous, like the jokes and riddles that are everywhere within days after a national tragedy. And there's some brutally efficient, Darwinian selection process by which slang evolves. Staycation is the perfect word for this phenomenon, funny, elegant, concise, and self-explanatory. 

 "My least favorite word is..."

"Inappropriate." Like "concerns,"—as in "concerns were raised"—this word is a gutless bureaucratic euphemism used only by officious twits and prigs to mean: "I am not going to let you do the perfectly harmless thing you want to do." 

 All right.  I'm going to officially fuck this interview up by throwing in this last cartoon.  I can't interview you without bringing up this cartoon.  It's called "The Sorrows of Pluto." 

This cartoon kills me; the funniness, the actual sorrow, the last caption at the end.  Feel free to talk about this cartoon, the creative process, say something witty, and then we'll say goodbye.

  

Thanks so much for saying so. I'm glad to hear you think that cartoon is both funny and sad. I'm very fond of it. That last caption was in fact the first part that came into my head. The rest of the cartoon is really just an excuse for the last panel to exist. I don't think I'd better talk about the genesis of the cartoon much. I will say that I thought it up on a train from Washington D.C. to Seattle, sitting in the observation car looking out at the Siberian desolation of North Dakota in January. (Though I didn't draw it there—it proved impossible to draw on the train.) Although this cartoon is about the actual planet Pluto, which I pity and love, it's also, obviously, sort of a poetic metaphor. But I think I'd only ruin it for you by telling you whatever personal story inspired it—what it's "really" about. Stanley Kubrick, in evading similar questions, used to say that if we knew why the Mona Lisa was smiling—say, she was hiding a secret from her lover—it would only limit and reduce its meaning, and the painting would lose its fascination for us. What I'll say about the creative process is that, when it works, it allows us to transpose our mundane personal experiences into more universal metaphors that resonate with other people, the way this Pluto cartoon does for you. Which I think is why roman a clefs tend to be minor works that seldom, if ever, attain the status of great art. Nobody wants to hear about your unhappy love affair or your drug problem or your grandmother's death. It's like, yeah, wow, you and everybody else who's ever lived, pal. Tell us something we don't know. But everybody loves Pluto.

One of my favorite cartoons I've ever drawn is "Feedin' Time." I love this cartoon because even I couldn't tell you what it's about, or what it means. But I think it definitely works; it resonates. I mean, something's going on in that drawing. It doesn't have any obvious, pedantic point or message. It's funny and awful and disturbing. It reminds me of my favorite cartoonist, B. Kliban's work, in that it's on that border between the cartoon and fine art. It's kind of like a cartoon drawn by Francis Bacon. If I sound like I’m complimenting myself here it’s because I almost don’t feel like I even did it. The best work, in my experience, emerges spontaneously from the unconscious, the way Kliban's series "The Turk" did. I wish I could do this more often. It's what art is supposed to be. But, as with being funny, you can't force it; the best you can do is create the conditions for it to happen, make yourself a receptive transmitter. 

…Timothy, it's been a pleasure.

Really?

Absolutely.

_________________________________________

Interview conducted by Oliver Miller, via email – August 21st to September 8th, 2008.  You can ask Tim your own questions via letters@thepaincomics.com.  I would recommend buying some of his books before doing so.  **And oh!  Sort of a footnote thingy—Tim would like me to point out that he has a B.A. in writing, not an M.F.A. like I said he did.   –O.M.