1. What drew you to comics initially?
Who knows. Comics grabbed me when I was very young, before I could even read, and that was that. It started with newspaper comic strips, which arrived like magic every day on our doorstep. Peanuts was the first strip that hooked me, and this was Schulz’s peak in the 1960s. Then I discovered Mad magazine around age 6 or 7, like every other cartoonist who grew up in the 1950s and 60s and 70s. They were everywhere in the kid world back then, not just new copies, but back issues, passed on from older kid to younger kid, or at every garage sale or church rummage sale for pennies. I had a pile of those beside my bed that was three feet high. I also found psychotronic stuff like Ed “Big Daddy” Roth. Then mainstream comic books. Those got me through adolescence. Somewhere along the line, I found underground comics. Spain Rodriguez was a favorite. Then European comics, the Metal Hurlant crew. Concurrently, I was drawing comics this whole time, either pathetically aping Jack Kirby or Don Martin, or making my own primitive comics.
I first got published in college, in the school newspaper at Ohio State, where I drew political cartoons. I can’t remember why I chose to draw political cartoons instead of a humor strip. I think it was because I noticed the paper ran the political cartoons bigger! I certainly had no business publishing political commentary at age 20. As awful as those cartoons were, the buzz of being published just fed me. I’m still chasing that buzz. When I started making comics, I stopped reading comics. That sounds extreme, I know, but it worked for me.
2. How did you arrive at your unique style?
Which style? I’ve had several distinct stylistic periods. My body of work looks like 4 or 5 different artists drew it. I started out writing and drawing in the standard political cartooning style of the 1980s. That was both boring and depressing, so after a couple years I chucked everything and remade myself as a post-punk alt-cartoonist. That was great fun in the 1990s, but it wasn’t a style that was going to work for graphic novels when I decided to make those, especially dark ones like My Friend Dahmer. So I remade myself again. I arrived at my current style by steadily working the craft and trying to skirt my own artistic limitations. I haven’t always liked the way I draw, but I’m pretty happy with what I’m doing now.
3. You have a talent for presenting realistic/true details visually — what is your process like for this kind of work?
Lots of research. My degree is in journalism, and I was trained as a reporter. I use basic journalism techniques to research and write a story, not because I think that’s a “superior” method, but because that’s how I was taught and I’m not bright enough to wander too far from it. Seems to be working out so far. Comics journalism is becoming more popular. That’s great to see.
I’m pretty obsessive about getting visual details right, especially in period pieces, which most of my GNs are. It’s fun hunting down images and recreating places that are long gone. It’s a fun challenge, since these stories took place before the internet. I can go pretty far down the rabbit hole.
For example, there’s a famous scene in My Friend Dahmer set in a mall; a shitty, completely forgettable mall on the outskirts of Akron, Ohio. There’s virtually no visual record of this place, because who cares? No one took photos of this place, especially back in the days of film when it was an expensive production to do so. Digging through the archives of the Akron Library, I found one lone photo of one of the hallways, and a floor plan of the mall from 10 years before the scene in the book. It listed all the stores, and their positions in the mall. That photo was enough to trigger visual memories of the place, and the floorplan gave me documentation of what was inside.
I drew my own floorplan, and wrote in the stores I remembered still being there when the scene occurred. I questioned my friends, all fellow mallrats, about what they remembered and was able to fill in the blanks. Then I went to the newspaper archives in the library (on microfiche!) and found ads for as many of the stores as I could. That gave me the store logos, as they were in the 1970s. Then I used MY floorplan to compose the scene. When the characters move about, the correct stores are behind them, based on where they are in the mall, and the correct logos are on the facades! Like I said, I get a bit carried away.
4. Please tell us a bit about Kent State, as well as any upcoming work you’d like to mention.
Kent State is my most recent book, released in the middle of the Covid Plague, which is not something I recommend. Thankfully, it got great reviews, won some awards and did very well. It’s a recounting of the Kent State Massacre of 1970, when soldiers of the Ohio National Guard, under orders from a reactionary governor to crush Vietnam war protests, opened fire into a parking lot full of unarmed students. They murdering four, and shot nine others, five of them critically wounded. Most were just students walking to class, not protestors. Kent State is a troubling story about political malevolence and the bitter cost of dissent, themes that certainly resonate today.
It was my largest, and most challenging book to date. I grew up near Kent, but I wasn’t part of it. It’s not my generation. I was just a kid in 1970. Nor did I attend Kent State. I went to Ohio State. I’m a complete outsider, so I had to somehow insert myself into that time and place. I pulled it off, but it was difficult.
I’ve started a new book, but it hasn’t been officially announced yet.
5. Where can we find more information about your work, including social media and author/publisher sites?
I’m all over social media. A simple Google search will turn up more interviews and articles than anyone would need or want.
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