♪ [heroic music] ♪ ♪ ♪ - Hello, and welcome to Comic Culture.

I'm Terence Dollard, a professor in the Department of Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.

My guest today is writer-artist Paul Pope.

Paul, welcome to Comic Culture.

- Thank you, sir.

Happy to be here.

- Paul, you are here because recently you've had some work that was featured in a gallery show.

So I'm wondering how you go from being a working artist to curating an exhibit and also featuring some of your work alongside some of the greats.

- Jeez, that's a good question.

I think the Philippe Labaune Gallery, which is in Chelsea, New York, he's really interested in curating contemporary comics and illustration.

He has shown a lot of great artists.

He called me out of the blue and said, you know, I think we should do a show with you.

It was basically the launch for my new art monograph, "Paul Pope II."

So it opened in June, and a lot of people showed up to look at the art.

- Being an artist, especially somebody with a career as storied as yours, I mean, without sounding too much like a hype man, you've won a lot of industry awards over your career.

And now you are in a gallery, which is sort of taking your artwork to another level.

This is, I think, what, your second art book that's being published?

- Yes.

- So as you are going from somebody who is starting a career to somebody who is able to be approached by a gallery, how do you kind of balance the creative drive with the curative drive with the fact that you're getting a little bit more recognition than most cartoonists get?

- Your art is kind of like your child, and you have to raise them.

And my work has fortunately stayed in print now for decades.

And I took the opportunity seriously.

We have a really good collection of originals from across the decades.

And if anything, I sort of feel like it's a win for comics because being able to show in the same neighborhood as major fine art artists, I think it's got to be good for comics as a genre or as a medium.

So I'm happy to be out there and do that.

And it brought a lot of people in.

And the opening night, a lot of people from different parts of my life came in to see it.

I think it was 28 pieces.

And it was half of the gallery.

And it was a great event.

It felt very much like kind of a gathering.

And it was good.

So I hope that this will be a step forward for our art medium in larger settings like this.

- When I was in high school in the '80s, comics were still sort of seen as for kids.

And it wasn't until maybe Frank Miller's run on Daredevil or The Dark Knight Returns that we start to see people talking about his comics as serious art.

Now we see people going back and looking at the true master, someone like a Kirby or a Wallace Wood, and pointing out just how brilliant their design style is and maybe what they do with telling a story versus what somebody might do with a painting is something that should be studied.

So as someone who is a sequential artist as well as someone who's doing the single piece, how do you kind of work into the idea of you're the visual storyteller, you are the designer, you are the director of those people on the page?

- That's a great question.

I think I always describe comics or manga as kind of a telegraphing story where every panel doesn't have to be perfect.

As opposed to like a commissioned piece or a cover for a book, you have to do the opposite.

You have to read the script, the story breakdown, and dilute the most essential things from the story into one image or the character, portrayal of a character.

Let's say this Batman, like it has to be like this Batman and whatever it might be that you need to portray him.

Whereas working on Batman, not every panel has to be perfect.

I don't know quite what it is, but I think that's the friction between the two different visual languages.

They're the same, really, but it's like one is a bit of a dialect, you might say.

- I've heard other artists say before, in a panel, you're capturing somebody not necessarily in a perfect anatomical position, but you're capturing them at that moment where everything is fully extended because it's the most dramatic angle.

So when you're combining the storytelling elements with the art element and the fact that things don't have to be perfect, but can still be really effective and beautiful, is there that temptation to say, well, it's not perfect.

I need to just keep working at it.

Or is it something where you say, no, that frenetic imperfection is what makes this work?

- There's the old adage that the deadline is the ultimate inspiration.

And in my case, a lot of the work I do has a lot of vehicles in them and detailed costumes and things.

Those are actually hard to draw, but they're important.

If I'm drawing a motorcycle, I want it to be researched.

I want to make sure that if it's a BMW twin cylinder, 1986, English bike, it has to look like that.

Or you work on something else where maybe it's a little more slapstick or it's a little more ephemeral.

So you don't need to be too specific with details.

So if a person's drinking a cup of coffee, it doesn't have to be a specific cup of coffee.

It could just be a cup of coffee.

And so I think, depending on the type of project you're working on, you have a different set of standards you have to bring to the process.

And I think both work.

I'm a big fan of Carl Barks' old Donald Duck comics.

Real simple, it's like he walks into a little shanty town, and there's a place called the Bucket of Blood.

It's just like a little house.

And there's a parrot outside, but it doesn't look like a parrot.

It's a little cartoon parrot.

Whereas if you're Andrew Wyeth and you're painting something realistic based on the coastal landscape in Maine, I believe he came from.

Am I wrong?

Andrew Wyeth?

It was somewhere in the Northeast.

It has to be specific.

And in his case, he even-- he bought dead cows, and he let them rot in his farm because he wanted to paint crows.

And so he let the birds come in and sit on the cow, and he'd paint from life.

So I think those are different missions, I guess, as an artist.

When I approach illustration versus comics, it's different.

If I'm working on something like Batman, I tend to try to be more specific with the details.

Because Gotham City is a character in the book.

It has to look like a city.

My version is kind of a Fritz Lang Metropolis, decayed-looking thing.

But that's where you see Batman.

You hardly see him in another environment, like he's in a field somewhere.

He's always in a city.

So that's one of the things you have to do to make it credible.

- When you think about the way other artists work, a lot of times they're drawing things literally from life.

But in many cases, you're drawing things from sheer imagination.

Because again, there is no Batman.

Whereas you might use a reference photo for that BMW motorcycle from 1986, Batman on a rooftop is still going to be the figure that you see.

So as you have sort of evolved in your career, what sort of progress have you seen in your own work that has gotten you better as maybe somebody who doesn't have to hone so closely to anatomical perfection, but more towards this is a good feel?

- Well, before I got into comics, I was studying painting, printmaking, anatomy, life drawing with a great master artist, Theoris West.

I studied with him for eight years.

And every day, we would draw from live models.

And I got a good sense of gesture.

And whether the drawing would have been a 30-second drawing or a two-day drawing, I got an intuitive sense of how the body moves.

He always told me, you need to know how the spine moves.

And then from there, you can look at different facial features or distinctive characteristics that make a character a character.

And so when I got into comics, even though I wasn't technically that good at drawing yet, I had a sense of academic drawing.

So I could come in and say, well, I understand whether I'm doing Jack Kirby foreshortening or I'm doing a Hal Foster pseudo realism.

I had a foundation.

So that was kind of my training before I got into comics.

- I was reading a little bit about you before our conversation.

And you were self-publishing at the age of, what, 24 or so?

- Younger.

- Younger.

So how does somebody-- 22.

Somebody just decide they want to make comics and then decide, I'm going to publish my own and kind of get it into the comic shops?

- You know, before I even published anything, I did my research.

We had a lot of good research libraries at Ohio State University, which is where I went.

And I found a couple of good books on publishing and just did my research while I was in school.

So I thought, OK, what's the best story I can tell?

And at the time, there were already some breakouts from the indie world.

Like, let's say, Mutant Turtles is probably the biggest one.

We also had Dave Sims, Cerebus.

Jeff Smith's Bone blew up.

It was doing very well.

And so I'm like, you know what?

I think this could work.

I think I could do this.

If I do my research and I do the work, I think I could make it happen.

And I worked in a print shop at the time, so I could cut costs on production and learn all of the mechanics of what goes into web press publishing, stuff like that.

And when you're 22 or 23, at least in my case, I didn't have a lot of responsibilities outside of going to school.

My rent was cheap.

So I'm like, I'm just going to do this.

I'm going to jump full into it.

Because at the time, my heroes were people like Emerson and Thoreau.

And I'd listen to them in transcendentalism, make your words like cannonballs, as Emerson said.

And I really took that to heart.

And I'm like, I have nothing to lose, man.

Otherwise, I'll quit and I'll do something else.

- I'm guessing you learn lessons.

And I always think the most instructive lessons come from when you make mistakes, because you learn what doesn't work and what to do to make it work.

So as somebody who is trying to publish their own comics, are you learning something about maybe the way the page has to be structured so that it fits where the printed areas are?

So what sort of things are you picking up that are more of a perhaps an administrative or business point of view that are informing what you do as the artist and storyteller?

I think at the peak of THB, THB is coming out through 23rd Street Books, which is an imprint of Macmillan.

This is a project I've been working on for decades.

And back in the day when I was publishing THB as comic books, I would talk to distributors.

I think at one point, I had 30 distributors in different places.

Some of them were in Europe.

Some of them went to Asia.

Some of them were regional.

They would go to Wisconsin area, Chicago, different things.

And I talked to the sales rep and just asked, like, what's really doing well?

And you remember back then, there was a phase when early image comics did the variant covers or the foil covers.

And that was kind of a trend for a little bit.

Pogs were a trend for a little bit, different things like that.

And so I would try to get my round table together and say, I've got this idea for a thing.

I can get it out in six months.

Do you think this would be better as a stapled comic book?

Or would this be better as a square-bound, longer graphic novel?

And you could always listen to that information, step back, and say, OK, I think-- let me look at the budget and see, like, can I do this?

And how can I do this?

And so that's always kind of been the motivator.

For me personally, I like comics that are larger.

I like European-size, larger bande dessinée.

And in the old days, that was more difficult because you know what they call shelf space, like, oh, that's taking up too much shelf space.

No one has a shelf space to put that book anywhere.

And now I think that that threshold's kind of been broken, thankfully.

So we can get all-- you mentioned Wally Wood.

I think he's amazing.

You can get artist editions of his work or Kirby.

And they're done in a way that looks like the art was when it was created.

Or you can get the softcover edition, which is going to fit on your shelf space.

If you're 15-- I mean, I didn't have much money back then.

But it's like, I have enough money.

I'm going to go out.

I'm going to get two or three European books.

I'm going to get the latest X-Men, Nexus, Steve Root, who both love him, Love and Rockets, and maybe, I don't know, something-- some wildcard thing.

I don't know what it would be.

And I think now there's more of an acceptance of the breadth of comics.

So it's not-- not everything has to be a comic book.

I mean, I've got a stack of comic books sitting over here.

I could pull one out.

But we all know what they are-- floppies.

So I think that's a real revolution that we've had in our lifetime.

I mean, comics is a pretty new medium.

I mean, it's barely 100 years old.

They always say the three great artistic inventions in America were comics, basketball, and jazz.

[laughter] So we're still evolving.

- You know, it's interesting because, again, when we think of comics, we are thinking about-- a lot of people still think about the comics that you buy every month at the comic shop or in the newsstand back in the day.

But you can go to the supermarket, and you can get those Archie Digests.

And those were great because there was 100 pages for, like, a buck.

And I think DC now is doing something where they're putting out books in a smaller size to give people a chance to go back to the old days of maybe being on a train reading a dime store novel on your commute or something.

So the fact that the delivery method has changed, whether it's still print or whether it's on somebody's phone and they're reading it, is kind of interesting.

And I did want to circle back because you mentioned the Hernandez brothers, who are-- Love and Rockets is perhaps one of the greatest and most underrated.

No matter how much praise it would get, it would still be underrated because it's just a brilliant book.

And it's in brilliant black and white.

And I'm wondering, your work, a lot of it is in brilliant black and white.

How do you sort of go from that design where it is harsh shadows, that fine definition between black and white, to something where maybe it's got to leave room for color?

- Actually, that was a learning curve in my case because most of my favorite artists are Italians or French, and then later, Japanese.

And in manga, it's rare to have color in comics, and at least for the Japanese printing editions.

Because I know everyone's going to say, well, Akira was in color, but it was in color in America.

It wasn't in color initially in Japanese or in Japan.

I wanted to transfer the art traditions I got from school.

You say chiaroscuro, or a study of light and shadow.

You look at Rembrandt.

You look at Caravaggio.

And then I would see threads that connected it to Hugo Pratt or Attila Michelucci, Guido Crepax.

These artists, I'm like, wow, this stuff is really strong.

And it doesn't really need color because it tells the story in the same way Orson Welles could do a great film, or Fritz Lang, as we were saying.

It doesn't need to have color in order to have pathos and depth.

And I like that.

And then working in color is different because you're literally opening up an entire palette of mood.

And if you have a certain emotional state, you want to communicate through a scene, whether it's a disastrous tragedy, lots of reds and blacks and whatever, or something pastoral, you want to have maybe cornflower, yellow, and blues, things like that.

I think, again, it's like you were asking earlier about illustration versus sequential.

It just opens up a new range of possibilities.

And I don't know which is better.

I think I can-- you and I could probably sit down and list, just to say Mount Rushmore, probably four or five great examples, black and white comics, including Lois Brosworth, or great work in color.

And I think it's a matter of what the story requires and what the artist wants to do, or what the publisher can afford.

So I'm very practical about these things.

I mean, in the early days, when I started self-publishing, I had very small budgets.

And it would be like, OK, well, in order to do this, I'm going to have to work all summer, not go anywhere.

I'm going to eat a baguette, some coffee, some hummus.

I'll be fine.

And then by the end of summer, it'll be published, and we'll see if it's a hit.

Great.

If it's not, I'll go back to the drawing table, literally.

- I spoke to the artist Lee Weeks once.

And he was talking-- I asked him about light, because he's got a great sense of light and shadow.

And he also does a lot of work that could live just in grayscale and still be absolutely gorgeous.

And he was talking about reflected light.

So I'm wondering, as you have sort of evolved as an artist, are you thinking in terms of there is that primary source of light, but there's also going to be a little bit of a bounce from that object on the desk or something like that that's maybe going to give that little nuance again, sort of like the Chiaroscuro lighting, where you're going to have a little pinpoint over here that just draws the eye?

- Yeah.

I mean, in that sense, you're thinking like a director, where you're-- if you take a very difficult image in the sense of what you're saying, like let's say a person is looking through a foggy window at a person in the distance, that's very difficult to draw in pure black and white.

You can do it.

It's difficult.

With color, it helps a lot.

And I think the one thing that did attract me to black and white is I was a student of Alex Toth.

And he always said, make it so simple you can't cheat.

And he would always be on my back about, you've got to draw your hands better.

You have to work more at mundane images, just like the real part of life that people live.

It can't just be Jack Kirby slam bang, unless you're doing fantastic form.

And I always thought about that.

So as a writer, if I ever went any place, I would just sit and observe people.

I'm like, OK, how does this person move?

How do they hold their posture?

What do they look like?

What are they doing?

There's a great panel from Bravo for Adventure, one of Alex Toth's works.

There's a bus boy coming in.

And it's just such a real image, because it's like he delivers a line of dialogue.

Everything was said in that panel.

It's like, OK, this guy is working at this diner.

And we're about to get into some sort of a conflict with bad guys.

But this guy is in the scene.

And what is he doing?

So everything was explained in that one panel.

And I like that.

It didn't need color.

But something like we were saying earlier, if you're looking through a steamy window at somebody in the distance, maybe color's better, because you have to think about cinematography.

I don't like comparisons between film and comics too much.

But over time, I've reluctantly come to believe that the cartoonist is the director.

Because I've also shot film before.

And it's a lot of work, because you've got hundreds of people.

And you have to rely on your editor, cinematographer, DP, sound engineers, actors, who are a lot of work usually.

And when you're the cartoonist, all of that is just in your head.

And you can selectively figure out which decisions are best for the comic.

And whether it's a graphic novel or a comic book, let's say 26 pages, whatever the story needs is what it needs.

And then the cartoonist will figure out however to do that.

- Well, they are telling us that we are just about out of time.

So Paul, if the folks watching at home wanted to find out more about your work, or maybe if the exhibit is going to be shown at other galleries, where can they find you on the web?

- Well, the best places to find me-- I'm not on social media too much.

So I have-- my website is just paulpoke, my name paulpoke.com.

And I have an Instagram, which is @comicsdestroyer.

And I only post either work in progress or things that inspire me with the date and the name of the artist, maybe some details.

Because I think people really appreciate that.

Nobody needs to know what I'm eating for dinner, like that kind of stuff.

Nobody cares.

So those are probably the two best places.

And then as we were saying before, the monograph, Pulp Hope 2, is out through Boom.

And THB Volume 1 is coming out in November through 23rd Street Books.

And those are all available online.

Go to your local comic book shop or Amazon, whatever you want.

So that's the latest.

And I'm promoting THB this season.

- Well, Paul, thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule today.

It's been a really great conversation.

- Yes, thank you.

Thank you very much.

Really appreciate it.

- And I'd like to thank everyone at home for watching Comic Culture.

We will see you again soon.

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