Horse 1-3 Ad

Here's a little custom advertisement Dylan made for the first three issues of his mini-comic, Horse. This one appeared in the anthology Don't Shoot! It's Only Comics issue 12 in 1995, which also had a four-page comic by Dylan (see a couple posts below). I assume this was one of those situations where the editor of the anthology magazine would give you a free small ad in the back if they ran your comic.

An Interview with Puppy Toss

[Originally published in issue six of the zine Destroy All Comics]

Puppy Toss is a collective of artists in Berkeley. I rode BART down to their office space on Friday, May 6, 1994, and conducted this interview. Present were Gabby, Scott, Ibar, k, Roy, Barry, Ben, Lisa, Max, Nik, and Dylan.

Jeff: What is Puppy Toss?

k: Puppy Toss is a collective of independent comics artists. We get together and pull our resources, our money, our time, our talent and try to help each other get our work out there. We're basically a company run by artists.

Gabby: (Jokingly) and we're all God-fearing Christians.

Roy: We handle snakes.

Jeff: Is Puppy Toss is a real company?

k: Yeah. We actually have all the business licenses, and if we ever make any money, we'll have to pay taxes and stuff like that.

Scott: This is my department. We're officially formed as a business - a partnership, and it's really open to new people to join the business officially. We're considering going to non-profit status. Maybe, maybe not.

Jeff: What does Puppy Toss do?

k: We do a couple of different things. The main book that we publish, and that Puppy Toss pays for out of its own bank account, pocket, and time, is Skim Lizard. It's an anthology that comes out quasi-monthly, you know, whenever we can put it out. The first issue is a full color cover outside thing with shitty newsprint interiors. After that we decided we needed a change because we didn't want to use that format. So, we switched to doing more the mini size... digest. The philosophy behind the anthology, like our first issue, we had a lot of really good pieces from everyone, but it was kind of weird for me to have one piece that was really dark and disturbing, and then something really cartoony, and then something kind of touching ... and it was too much of a jump. So from issue two on, we try to group pieces together that fit and will complement each other. One issue might have a really somber tone, and another one might... it all varies. We also do a catalog which Dylan puts together, a newsletter called Forbidden Grampers that Scott does, and generally try to foster a little community here and support.

Scott: I think even though those are the concrete things that we do, that we put out there ... l think going back to the beginning of when we were formed, Skim Lizard was more like a concrete goal to get us to get moving, but for me the most important thing is the creation of the group... the collective. Skim Lizard is just an outgrowth of that. We could chuck all the projects were doing and do something completely different and still be Puppy Toss.

k: A really cool thing is that when I think of Puppy Toss in my mind, I don't think of it as a place, or as someone who publishes. I think of all my friends in Puppy Toss and all the people.

Dylan: Yeah, I think that all our arms are like vehicles to get people to contribute, to get involved and to show people that they can publish themselves or work together.

Jeff: To finish with Skim Lizard, how many issues have been put out?

k: So far we've put out five issues, and the sixth issue is all set for production.

Scott: And you see the stack of artwork in front of you there ... that's coming up issues.

Jeff: What's the story with the catalog and what's it called?

Dylan: There's no name for the catalog ... it's just the catalog, and the name's going to change every time depending on who does the cover. Basically, it's just a way to put a whole bunch of books together by every possible mini-comic artist that we can find, and zines, and it's even open to records and stuff like that too. It's the theory that together they'll sell each other. There's no exclusionary policy. That's the big point.

Scott: The big point, yeah.

Dylan: We won't turn anything down, basically. You can fart on toilet paper and send it to us.

all: No, don't say that (laughter). You could...

Gabby: We won't buy it and say it's the greatest shit ever, but we'll include it.

Scott: And if in a year from now and we can't even sell one copy, it's not our fault.

k: But if it has a distinctive smell, we'll say that.

Roy: Actually, the last one did have a name, it was named Lester, wasn't it?

Dylan: That was the first one, and this one is called A Catalog.

Scott: I think the greatest thing about the second catalog is that as soon as it was done and Dylan was giving copies to people, they were sitting there and reading it for ten, twenty minutes. It really surprised me, because a catalog is not something you read usually… it's something you flip through and say, oh I want that and order it. It's like a review zine, and all of us did reviews for it. It was neat to see people reading it. It was great!

Gabby: I hope someday it grows to be as entertaining as the Amok catalog... that's one of the greatest catalogs.

Dylan: Except ours is better.

K: Ours is cheaper and free.

(laughter)

Jeff: I liked it a lot, because I found some stuff in there that I'd never seen before, or that I'd vaguely heard of and was wondering, how the hell can I get this.

Scott: That's the great thing about the catalog. Everybody we get in contact with who is a publisher, we say, "Give us five, ten copies. We will see if we can sell it." It's not like were excluding people.

Dylan: And there's even mainstream comic artists in there, like Mitch O'Connell. Anything that's self-published. That's another criteria. I mean, if it's printed by Marvel, we're probably not going to carry it.

(laughter)

K: What would happen if Dave Sim sent us a bunch of Cerebus.

Dylan: We'd probably carry it.

Scott: Carry it and sell no copies, and then it'll go away.

Gabby: We can vote too. If somebody is strongly opposed to something, we can vote about it.

Jeff: How often does your catalog come out?

Dylan: There's no regular schedule. I plan to do updates... because it costs so much many to put it out all at once. We're going to do updates with maybe twenty books in them, or something like that.

Jeff: Have you found that you are getting orders from the catalogs you send out?

Dylan: Oh yeah. A surprising amount of orders. I expected like ten percent or twenty percent returns. There are so many returns, I don't know. Fifty percent, I'd say... if not more. Which is amazing, because with most catalogs you get like ten percent.

k: And we get a lot of people requesting it too.

Scott: I remember the first one that came out...we sent out twenty of them right away, and a few days later, somebody sent us thirty bucks, and I was like doooo.

Dylan: And most people buy more than one thing.

Jeff: Tell me about Forbidden Grampers.

Scott: Originally it was going to be a newsletter for Puppy Toss, and I wanted to do something more, but I don't know where it's going. It could go anywhere.

I'm not sure who: Do you think we should tell him about the name?

Scott: Oh boy. That was like ... l wanted to do Forbidden Grampers, and I sort of jumped in and took over and wanted to make something out of it, but I realized that the strength of Puppy Toss is the group of people. So, to start it off we got together at meetings and tried to come up with a title. It was easy to come up with Puppy Toss and Skim Lizard because we had like four people deciding, but we had like twenty thirty people at meetings.

k: We had the weirdest list of names.

Roy: I think we should have stuck with the animal, verb symbol, like we did with our last two titles.

Dylan: We should have just done a symbol, like Prince. People would have gone "Oh, is the new out."

(laughter)

Scott: So that was a pretty long, involved process, just coming up with the name. I kind of see it as a tool to unify the small press. That's mostly what I'd want to do with it. It comes out whenever I can get it out.

Nik: The ads are really cheap.

Scott: Yeah, the ads are really cheap. Classifieds are free.

Jeff: The third issue is next. What's that going to be?

Scott: I was trying to come out with it in May, but since I'm leaving on a long trip and moving out at the same time, I don't really have time to do it. The next issue is going to have the rest of the Eric Haven interview, a Chris Ware interview ... as soon as Dylan types it up. I think an article on how to start a business, and I think k is going to do something on teaching, and we're going to try to have regular columns for whoever here wants to do it. It has classifieds. I put lists of addresses, and reviews. We're doing reviews now.

Jeff: There was definitely a big improvement from issue one to two.

Scott: Yeah.

Dylan: We had a lot of criticism, I mean feedback. People just told us what they thought about the first one. Scott: Originally, I didn't want to do reviews, cause I thought that excluded some people, because you didn't put them in… like we were being elitist and we're kind of going against being elitist here, but all the comments are got were, "Where are the reviews, where are the reviews?" and I kind of saw the need to point out books that are really good and just let people know about them.

Nik: I'd like to point out that the reviews are very objective.

k: He's full of shit!

Scott: Bullshit. No, that's the catalog. The whole idea of all the reviews I wrote is very subjective. Nik: That was a joke.

Scott: Sorry.

(laughter)

Scott: It's in the beginning stages still because we really have no money to throw at it like we did with Skim Lizard in the beginning, and it's got to start small.

Jeff: About size... what are the print runs for your different projects?

k: Skim Lizard... the first issue we did two thousand, and we're going to be getting rid of those until the day we die.

Scott: We've sold over twelve hundred.

K: Skim Lizard two... we started small. We went down to 200. From there, we're printing about one thousand of each issue, and we're considering going up to two thousand, cause we're almost out of some of our books.

Scott: And with some distributors, like with Capitol, our order keeps doubling every issue, so it's looking really good for the future. Diamond still won't carry the book.

k: Bastards!

Gabby: And we keep finding new distributors and new avenues and stores...

Scott: It's great how we can take eighty, one hundred copies over to Comic Relief and know that they're going to buy them all from us.

Nik: So how many catalogs did we print up?

Dylan: We printed up one thousand and that's not enough. We're probably going to need two thousand, but we just don't have the money. So, a thousand is enough for now. At the WonderCon we couldn't even give it out to everybody, we had to just give it out to people who bought stuff mostly, or people who looked interested. That's the big problem. Finances. Donations, that's what we need.

Scott: And Forbidden Grampers we're doing two hundred and fifty at least, and more if we finagle more copies. It's like a limit right now, because they're being sent out and it's hard to find money for stamps. But we have like ten subscribers already, and that's cool.

Jeff: The first issue of Skim Lizard was in the standard comic book format, but now it's in the digest mini-comic type format. Why the change, and what's your feeling about the standard comic versus mini-comic format?

Scott: Boy, that's a big question. Do you have enough tape? We spent a lot of time talking about that one.

Gabby: We debated it for weeks.

Scott: and weeks. I think that was the big turning point in Puppy Toss so far. For the whole first year, it was really building on the foundations by the people who were there at the beginning. By that time, we had built up a large group of people and that was the first real huge collective decision that we'd made. Go ahead ...

k: Having it the standard size was kind of like playing someone else's game. Using this format that's established by whoever. To me it felt kind of cheap, because most of the cost of the issue was having the full color cover printed, so you're kind of like showing them this nice glossy surface and then you open it up inside and it's this shitty newsprint... it's going to turn yellow and degrade in a few years. We wanted to do something more on our terms. We felt that if ii went down to a mini size, we can cut costs. Instead of having to charge $2.95 we can charge half that. We can have it come out more often. We have more control of the final look of the book, and it would feel more intimate. Instead of being this product, you could look at it, and for the ones that were actually folded and stapled, a page might have a little bend on it. Now we can't do that that much, because we're printing so many of them, but we still handle each issue. We insert things.

Nik: Plus, it's cheaper for the consumer.

Jeff: I think it looks a lot nicer the way it is now, as opposed to the first issue.

Scott: Yeah, there was something really impersonal about it. Also, the content of the issue ... we decided to change at that point. The first issue was kind of a roll call ... like the Mickey Mouse club or something. "Here's mine! Here's mine! Here's mine." We had something that was from everybody in the group, and we wanted to make it so that each issue was really solid.

Nik: Although I thought that was a fabulous way to start.

Scott: Actually, yeah, it was probably a good way to start.

k: It was kind of like jumping in - SPLOOSH!

Gabby: We meant to do that.

(laughter)

Dylan: Some members of us are doing an anthology comic of women's comics, headed by Gabby Gamboa.

Jeff: What's the story with that?

Gabby: It started off with Fawn Gehweiler and I talking about how we always wanted to do a comic together, and then it kind of evolved into, we wanted to do like an anthology. We're just working on a one shot anthology of women who haven't been published very much. Right now, it's called On Our Butts, following in the Puppy Toss tradition of having horrible names for all of our projects. (laughter) We kind of have most of the work together for it, but we haven't come up with the money to print it or anything like that.

Jeff: When do you think that's going to come out?

Gabby: God, it's hard to say. It all really depends. It's really close to actually being together, it's just that we still haven't figured out how we're going to print it. I think we're going to run ads. Hopefully by summer... sometime this summer it will be out. That's as much as I can say. It's all Puppy Toss.

Jeff: What about the weekly meeting that Puppy Toss has?

Roy: We have a weekly meeting every Friday.

Dylan: At six o'clock every Friday.

Jeff: What happens at the meetings?

Scott: First we just go through a rundown of what we want to talk about, and we just talk about it for a while. One of the biggest things we do is to bring out the submissions. Everybody who wants to submit something gives us a xerox copy of it, we put a little form on top of it and everybody writes little nasty comments about it. That's how we decide on what goes in Skim Lizard. Other than discussing things, most of the work we do in the meetings is trying to decide what goes in Skim Lizard. That's what we do at meetings.

Gabby: Also, how to get money. We discuss plans for going to conventions, or plans for the catalog.

Scott: Throw out new ideas.

Gabby: Change our goals.

Scott: Twice a year we have a big meeting where we discuss our overall goals, but we're changing the name.

Dylan: To Bastard Session!

k: To Bitch/Bastard Session. We want to be fair here. The meetings are just a way for everyone to touch base on things and for new people to show up, and we can kind of welcome them into the group.

Scott: So everybody is invited.

Dylan: Yeah, they're completely open and we welcome any input anybody has.

Jeff: What's Puppy Toss's plans for the future?

Dylan: Just at this meeting we talked about sticking to a monthly schedule. Putting out a book that's twenty pages long or so, and maybe only having two or three artists in every issue.

Gabby: We want to be entirely self-supportive.

Scott: We want to open a store.

k: It probably won't happen in the near future. We almost did it a couple of months ago, but we re-examined our financial situations and decided we couldn't afford the risk or the time. Eventually we would like to have a store where we can just sell mini's, and t-shirts, and stuff.

Dylan: Records.

k: One thing that would be cool that we could do with a store is just set up a library. Just have an area where people could come in, sit on a couch, pick out a mini and read it and have coffee. When you're done you could wash your own cup, or whatever. Just to make it a place where you'd want to go and read, or buy something, and talk to us.

Scott: We also kind of decided to not stick to comics so much, to let people's individual projects grow a little more than we've let them. Another thing... I think the best things that we've done, and that I think we should continue doing, is providing a place for people to learn. Like, three months ago Ben didn't know how to put together a comic book out of his own. Dylan helped him out, and now he's got two issues out and now he's a professional at doing it.

Ben: It's in 5.0 magazine that Steve Lafler talks about it.

Scott: Yeah, he mentions it.

k: We had an interview in 5.0. Aren't we hip!

Gabby: Hmmm.

k: And we all have individual side projects that we do. Like Dylan is doing this thing called Horse.

Dylan: All about large gay men. Yes, I've given up comics.

k: Puppy Toss has these main things we put out, but we have side projects. Like Ben does Crossbred,. He has two issues of that out. It's an anthology that he puts together himself. He'll put pieces in there that he doesn't think are appropriate for Skim Lizard. Dylan had his own anthology Dead Air, and now he's doing Horse. Scott has his Living in the Shadows series, and I have my own series Black. Gabby does Hysteria Action Forum. Lisa does the coolest little mini's, like Little Goth Girl, and stuff. Everyone likes to have this little project where they have all the control and not everything is up for group approval.

Roy: We solicit all that stuff through Puppy Toss.

k: Yeah, it's available in our catalog and stuff.

Dylan: I think the best thing about Puppy Toss, at least what I learned from it, is that there's all these other people doing all this other stuff. It's inspiring to me. If I'm at home drawing and there's nobody to talk to and I can't reach anybody on the phone... at the end of the week I come here, and it kind of recharges me. There are all these other crazy people here... it's like an asylum.

Jeff: If this question isn't too insensitive, what do all of you do in "real life," so you can enjoy this fun and exciting hobby of making comics?

Scott: I have a career in science, but I'm throwing it away to go back to school and study art. I work in this building, which is why we have this office. It's a job.

lbar: I go to school.

k: He's like fourteen.

Nik: Fourteen now?

lbar: Yes. Fourteen.

Dylan: But he has the mind of a thirty-year-old.

k: I'm unemployed right now, but any day now I'll be doing color separations for Image comics and superhero type things.

Jeff: That's where the future is...

(laughter)

Dylan: It'll all be color one day.

Gabby: No matter how bad it is k, don't Cobain yourself.

Roy: Model by day.

(laughter)

Roy: I work at Comic Relief too, we all do.

Gabby: There's like five of us.

Barry: Don't point at me.

Sean: I don't work, and I cut all my classes.

Dylan: Didn't you have a job at a winery?

Sean: I got laid off, and I didn't bother to sign up again.

Dylan: You could get unemployment.

Sean: Yeah, that ran out, because I started college, but I'm cutting classes.

Gabby: That's screwed.

k: Nik is a rent-a-cop, and he studies opera.

Dylan: I'm quitting my job at Comic Relief to make a career out of art.

Scott: Do they know that?

Dylan: They will now.

k: I'd like to add that I'm not selling out, I just have to pay bills.

Dylan: Yes, you are. Sell-out!

k: No! Seriously I'm so sick of working in offices...

Gabby: That's okay k, you don't need to justify it.

k: No, I need to justify it. It's not really creative work, it's just technical work, so that's how I justify it.

Jeff: Does anybody have anything they want to say that I didn't ask them about?

Roy: No, I think we just reached the pointless babble stage.

Jeff: I thought that was since we started...

(laughter)

k: It's all been kind of pointless really.

Jeff: What comics are really good that people should be checking out?

most everybody: Zak Sally.

Dylan: He's our hero.

all: Sauce, Benzine, One Beautiful Day.

Ben: I found some mini-comic, it's one of my favorite mini comics, called Mustafa by Joseph Fullerton. I've never seen anything else by him ...

Dylan: There's some stuff in Caliber.

Scott: I don't know ... l find it hard to go into a comic book store these days.

nik: Chantale Doyle.

Dylan: Yeah, Chantale. We all like the same stuff.

Gabby: Megan Kelso is great.

k: And for any of you who have a computer and want to download something cool ... there's this guy, Dana Muse. He put together this program called Brain Box Comics, and what is, is digital comics you can look at on a computer. You press a little hand to flip the pages and stuff. Scott's in the first issue, and the work in there is really cool. It's available on America Online, or just search around the Internet and you'll probably find it.

nik: It's very cool.

k: Highly recommended by me.

Gabby: Bobby Madness!

Jeff: The last thing I wanted to ask, since you're self-publishing as a collective, doing it in the mini-comics format, and you claim to want to make a living from it… do you really think that the mini-comic format is getting more acceptance, being placed in stores, and getting to the kind of level where that could happen?

k: Yeah.

Scott: The biggest hope for me that I see happening is that there are stores that are opening that specifically stock zines and minis.

Roy: They talked about it in Sassy magazine and everything.

somebody: Damn

Dylan: And Details.

Gabby: It's a hot media thing right now, which would normally make me puke, but it has been doing us a lot of good. Like at WonderCon last year, we made a third of what we did this year. There were just way more people into buying it.

Jeff: But did you guys have a lot more stuff this year than last year?

Gabby: Yeah, but a lot more people came to our booth, and there were just a lot more people who were into it.

Roy: I think a lot of people are really getting fed up with the mainstream stuff, and are kind of feeling around to see what else is out there.

Scott: When Fantagraphics started Love and Rockets there wasn't really a market for it. They kind of created it, and we feel that we have to create our own market here.

k: Also, in terms of minis, zines and alternative culture ... it's becoming more widespread and more accessible to people. Harsh reality, alternative stuff is like, really the mainstream is into it more, and people are being exposed to it more. Details magazine had an article on zines and Factsheet Five. Factsheet Five has been around for a while, and zines have been around for a long, long time, but people are only waking up to it now.

Dylan: I think it just makes more sense than mainstream crap that has no personality. You aren't really reading what somebody else is saying, you're reading what somebody else thinks you want to hear. There's no personality, and I think that's the thing that zines and mini-comics have over everything else, is that it's individuals speaking to you rather than corporations trying to sell you what you want.

Nik: I think that when you buy one of these mini-comics, you have to be personally involved when you read it. You can't become detached and get the same thing out of it. It just doesn't happen.

k: It's not escapist.

Nik: Like you pick up a fucking comic book, and you can read it, and it'll just be like trash, but this shit is actually personal. Some people will attach themselves to it, and the ones who don't, won't buy it again.

Lisa: One of the things you could generalize from what everybody is saying ... we're acknowledging that more and more we're specialized in our interests. If you look in Factsheet Five there's a lot of different categories and topics, and even within these topics, there's a thousand different categories and tangents, like everyone going their own direction, their own personal vision. It's sort of the American dream... we're carving out the frontier. (laughs)

Dylan: I think it's just choices.

Scott: I think it's interesting that on the independent music scene, an independent label can come out with somebody that's really popular, and they can sell like 50,000 copies of their record. It's weird that in comics you can have something that sells over 1,000,000, but on the bottom you have people that sell 100 or 200. I think there's plenty of room for independent voices to be more popular without being co-opted.

The Devil's Weed Will Kill You Stop Smoking it Now!

This four page comic by Dylan Williams was originally published in issue 12 of the magazine-sized anthology, Don't Shoot! It's Only Comics, in 1995. To read it at a larger size, you can click here.

Dylan's Rant

So, this time I've decided (on Landry's suggestion) to talk about the evolution of the comics reader from the early formative stages to a hopefully more refined adulthood.

I work at a comic store, Comic Relief in Berkeley, and have worked around comics for 6 years now (I worked at Stand-Up Comics in El Cerrito, Ca too). I can't forget 10+ years of fandom before that. In that time, I've seen a lot of comic book growth. Myself, I've read everything from the Human Fly to King Cat and Sandman to Famous Funnies… if it's out there I've probably read it at one time or another.

What this has to do with the "mini comic" world (the words "mini comic" are so degrading) is that most of the people who now read books that inhabit our ghetto of the comic world most likely come from one of two back-grounds: the young hipster - punk-zine-reader who has a somewhat open mind or they are someone who at one point or another read mainstream comics of one kind or another.

A scenario follows:
Jane has been reading comics since she was 10. She began with Archie or Disney comics (which her parents forced on her since she is a girl). In high school she reads less comics but X-men, Teen Titans and Elfquest have characters she can identify with so she reads them. At this point her comic store has begun to carry a few of the stranger black and whites but Jane passes on them since they aren't in color and she knows no one who reads them. She continues to read the mainstream books and starts picking up a few of the female heroes and semi-literate comics but eventually finds books without pictures have more in common with her than the bland overground comic world. Sadly, this is what seems to happen most of the time.

I know that there are always exceptions. The lady who got me into reading the Carl Barks Disney duck stories was in her 50's and had been reading them and collecting them for 40 years. There are also people who have stuck with old Marvel characters for 30 years and will never stop even though "they haven't done anything good since the 70's."

Every once in a while (it's happening more nowadays), there is a monkey wrench thrown into our scenario: someone who likes comics and is vocal about the books they read. Usually, these people are thinkers and won't settle for corporate comics. When these people meet someone like Jane, they feel obliged to point out comics they like. In most cases it's a book like Love & Rockets or Sandman or a Carol Lay book: something you have to think about while you read (kind of like real books, huh). Now she's hooked, 'cause these are comics by people, people like her, like you and me, PEOPLE. They weren't created to fill a need in anyone but the person who did 'em. From here on out Jane's eyes are opened, she's on the lookout for other comics she can relate to. She tries Eightball cause she saw an ad in L&R, she tries Violent Cases cause the writer of Sandman wrote it, she tries Twisted Sisters 'cause it's an anthology that Carol Lay (who is God-like according to Kristine) is in. It's all downhill from there and the bottom of the hill is self-produced "mini comics"... but they are also the top of the hill. The way most people nowadays find out about minis is through a great comic like Eightball or Yummy Fur where the artist regularly plugs their faves which are usually comics done by someone who loves the ARTFORM (God forbid) and hence are doomed to do their comics in runs of 100 on a copy machine and make no money off them...

My point: be vocal about what you like. One way or another your mind will be opened. Supporting small press out of charity is bullshit. Support it cause it's work by fucking human beings, not a pre-determined marketing strategy. An individual's voice is inherently superior to "what they think you'll like."

[Originally published in Skim Lizard 6, in 1994]

The Ill-Fated Andrée Expedition to the North Pole

Here's a two page comic by Dylan Williams that originally appeared in issue eleven of Don't Shoot! It's Only Comics, in 1994. Click here to view this story in a larger format.

Stick with Me by Flora Worley

[This article was originally published in The Comics Journal # 217, November 1999.]

Reporter
Dylan Williams
Self-published



Lamentably, most of the mini-comics I read don't stay with me long after I read them. Most of their stories - and here I don't mean to include the more anecdotal, gag, or strip-format minis - run about ten pages long and do not reach, in that short spell, a narrative or thematic complexity. Dylan Williams' Reporter series is an exception to this norm. Reporter is thoughtful and unusual, thematically complex and reflective of the process of writing. Reporter also tells a good, albeit ambitious, story.

To give a sense of the narrative, I'd like to go into a bit of detail about the first issue of the series. Reporter #1 kicks off the story of two very different writers, Adam and Ivar, living in the town of Willoughby. Period-fiction writer Adam sits across the table from "natural history" diarist lvar (who aspires to record everything) at a local diner. Adam is called outside by his "muse," a bandaged character dressed in Mafioso suit and hat, who strongly suggests that he pay attention to the immanence of death. Adam returns to the table and tells Ivar of his predicament: he owes his muse for a story idea he solicited. The story, which Adam relates to Ivar, is a metaphor for writing about two kids' discovery of an underwater stone giant. Reporter #1 ends with Adam's resolution to return the story idea and to start telling the truth in his writing.

In Reporter #2 Ivar's dedication to his project of recording everything abbreviates a developing relationship with a young ghost named Felicia Frame, who herself has "baggage" that interferes in the affair. The issue ends with Ivar leaving Willoughby on a bus, bound to continue his work in the next town. In Reporter #3 Adam, in his quest to tell the truth, has become an aspiring reporter stuck doing the more lowly jobs at the local newspaper. While working over the weekend he is interrupted by four robbers who are fleeing a heist. They intend to take him hostage, but he gives them the slip. Adam's run-in with the criminals turns out to be a stroke of luck as it provides his claim to writing the newspaper story about the whole event. This story - it has the feeling of a story within a story, as if it may be an intrusion of Adam's “untruthful” imagination - is another of Williams' ways of suggesting that weird, extraordinary forces are at work in life, interfering in different ways, and that these may even be given credit for "making life interesting."

Aside from the more anomalous forces at work, the past plays a leading role in Reporter. The past, represented by ghosts, flashbacks, and the abrupt return of old "skeletons," keeps popping up and manipulating the sequence of events. This experimenting with the time is perhaps most self-consciously explored in a three story progression in the Reporter Short Story Collection which has a sequence of events happen in reverse time. In other words, the B is given before the A, and everything that goes on in between, the bulk of each story, is revealed as a very odd series of means to all end. If there is a point to all this manipulation of time, it's that one never knows when the past will come back a'haunting or exactly how any situation will give rise to future events.

Another theme at play in Williams work has to do with the reflective process of writing. There are two different versions of truth for Adam and Ivar. Adam is two-sided, wedded to reportage in his job, but strongly inclined to flights of imagination, while Ivar would like to record - to simply get down everything that is going on around him. One wonders if their habits in fact become crossed, in a way, being that Ivar's "natural history" notebook surely contains an account of a ghost and Adam's wild imagination was, perhaps, surpassed in extraordinariness by the real events in #3.

When I first picked up Reporter #1 I was given to the idea that Williams' artistic style was nothing all that interesting, nothing all that unusual. However, that was before I realized that there is a definite function to the simplicity of Williams' renderings. Williams' simple artistic style juxtaposes nicely with the narrative complexities in the story he is telling. The main characters in the narrative arc simply, consistently drawn and made to look like the epitome of who they are. Adam looks highly plausible as a young adult writer, simply dressed yet expressive. Ivar looks like what you would imagine a dweebie fifteen year old introvert intellectual would look like: always dressed in a suit and bow-tie and is reserved both in terms of facial and bodily expression. The more fantastic characters that they come into contact with, the same fantastic characters that influence their lives so much, are simply drawn yet aren't so stereotypical. When I think of a muse, an art-nouveau picture of a beautiful woman pops into my head - a far cry from Williams' bandaged marauders. Ivar’s love interest, Felicia Frame, hardly fits with the popular image of a typical ghost in style or in manner. She is about the least scary and most "everyday human" apparition in spook history. What I find so interesting - almost eerie - is that these fantastic characters are made plausible in that they fit almost seamlessly into the narrative. It is as though Adam, Ivar, and the few other realistic character are pausing all the time just long enough to remark "hmm, odd" as though they themselves recognize the improbability of these characters.

Aside from these general tendencies in Williams' Reporter series, there are a few very interesting artistic tools which he employs. He builds directional arrows right into the panels so that they distort the borders. Flashback scenes, which are particularly abundant in the short story collection are rendered with either charcoal or very soft graphite while the present time story is rendered in sharp inked lines. In terms of narrative features, Williams based the story in number two on David Lean's A Brief Encounter and got the death threat scene in number one from Jack Nicholson's script for the film Flight to Fury.

Certainly, Williams earned the Xeric Grant that helped make Reporter #3, including its beautiful cover, possible. His artistic and narrative styles are extremely complimentary and he has a good feel for dialogue. Though Reporter is rife with seemingly fantastic characters and situations, overall it has a very real feel to it. There is, however, a plot lurking in the background - involving a stolen antique - that threatens to unify the related situations into one grand, conspiracy-theory-informed plot. I worry that the development of this plot will push Reporter away from its realistic strangeness into epic blockbuster, though all I can do at this point is wonder and eagerly await Reporter #4.

Flora Worley

George Roussos 1915-2000

Comics veteran George Roussos died of a heart attack Feb. 19 at the Southside Hospital in Bay Shore, N.Y. Roussos was a man of many parts, and his interests ranged from astronomy to photography, but his work as a comic artist was strong enough to turn such comic-book greats as Alex Toth and Jack Kirby into fans. Almost everyone in the field knew something about "Inky," a nickname given Roussos by artist and editor Bob Wood of Crime Does Not Pay fame.

Roussos worked in comic books and strips for an amazing 60 years, straight through. He worked for nearly every major publisher, worked in every aspect of comic production and managed to set the look for the most recognizable pop icon of the 20th century.

Roussos was born Aug. 20, 1915 in Washington, DC, to William and Helen Roussos. He and his two sisters, Helen and Alice, were orphaned at a young age and he spent his youth at the Brooklyn Orphan Asylum. He went to school at PS 125 in the Woodside area of Queens, NY, where he started drawing for the school paper. Roussos told close friend Bill Cain, "I was always interested in the newspaper comic strips. I actually learned the basics of comics production from Frank Miller's strip, Barney Baxter. I would imitate Frank's style and send him samples of my work. He'd critique my work and I'd learn from his comments and criticisms." Roussos has said he was most influenced by the artists Chester Gould, Stan Kaye, Robert Fawcett and Hal Foster.

With an indelible knack for adaptability, Roussos broke into the comics in 1939 doing lettering for a Spanish language version of the Ripley's Believe it or Not strip. He couldn't read Spanish, but as he told Mark Gruenwald, "It wasn't as hard as it sounds. I know Greek and there's a lot of similarity between the two languages." In 1940 Roussos answered, along with 60 other applicants, an ad in the paper that was hiring assistants for Bob Kane on the Batman comics published by National (DC) Comics. George's familiarity with comic production, thanks to Miller's advice and his own skill, got him the job. Bill Finger wrote the stories, Jerry Robinson would draw the people and Roussos would do almost everything else (including drawing backgrounds, inking, lettering and possibly coloring). Though Batman was quite popular, Roussos wasn't fazed by the character's success. "I needed a job," he told Jon B. Cooke (The Jack Kirby Collector #18 - January 1998).



After a few years Roussos moved on to work directly for DC Comics on Vigilante, Johnny Quick, Superman, Starman and most notably Airwave: "I had so much fun with this title because I could do almost anything with the character. It was only five pages, so I could go in many directions." He turned a little known filler character into a work of art, remembered to this day. On Airwave Roussos began, in earnest, a lifelong passion for experimentation with every aspect of the art including coloring. "One thing I did in an Airwave was use only grays," he said. "Mr. Leibowitz, who was the publisher, came in. 'George' he said to me, 'Where's the color?' I said 'This is a different effect. This is color but it's different.' I don't know what the hell I said! I made it up! He walked away and after a while he said 'I'm talkin' to another nut!'"

During his time at DC, fellow artist Stan Kaye became a friend and mentor of sorts, taking the place of the art schooling Roussos had never had. Roussos continued working for DC Comics off and on through the end of the 1960s. Roussos would sometimes draw the whole package, but often he would sign on as an inker, letterer and/or colorist. He was recognized by editors as a superlative drawer of settings and backgrounds.

During the 1940s, Roussos worked for companies like Timely, Standard, Avon, Fiction House, Family, Better, Spark, Hillman and Lev Gleason, among others. Through DC, Roussos also produced a series of 16 comics for General Electric in the early' 40s; he told Bill Cain, 'These pamphlets were distributed 111 schools throughout the country and South America, Europe and India. I received an extension from the local draft board in order to complete this publication. When the work was over, the bomb ended the draft. This is a good thing for the Army ... they might have lost the war!" There were 68 million of the pamphlets distributed, according to an article in the New York Daily News. He worked on an advertising comic for Thom McAnn Shoes in 1944 and '45. During this time, Roussos also began a long period of working as, his usual, inker/ penciller/ letterer/ colorist with fellow comic artist Mort Meskin. Roussos told me that Meskin, suggested opening an art school. "We rented this room for about 25 bucks a month and we [set up] chairs and everything," Neither of them were too business minded though, "We bought orangeade and made tea and coffee, so the profit went out the window, plus paying the model."

One thing Roussos was always very adept at was dealing with authority. While working at DC he had a run in with editor Mort Weisinger: "His trick was to give you a job to ink and he would have your job to ink and another job ready. The third week, you go up there and there was no check and no story. He would watch your expression. Now he's got you at bay. Finally, you'd say 'Where's my check Mort?' He said 'Oh, the check!' and all that, try to see what my reaction would be. He'd hope for me to get angry. I said, 'Mort, forget about it.' So, I pulled out some change from my pocket, about a dollar fifty or so, and I said 'Don't worry, I can get along with that very nicely. Whenever you have my check, fine. I didn't want to give in to his tricks."

The comic books weren't enough to keep Roussos busy and he branched out into newspaper comic strips over and over again throughout his career. He worked, as always, in many capacities on The Lone Ranger, Judge Parker, Judge Wright, The Phantom, and Flash Gordon during the 1940s, '50s and '60s. He also came up with a number of finished proposals for his own strips: 2001 A.D. (in 1945, 20 years before the movie), Azeena (1967), an archeology strip and Transisto (in the late '60s with writer Bill Finger, but these ideas never made it into the papers.

During the 1950s he worked for outfits like St. John, EC, Atlas and Crestwood (a shop run by Jack Kirby and Joe Simon). He returned to Atlas, now Marvel Comics, in 1964 where he worked under the pseudonym "George Bell." Stan Lee needed a fast and good inker. Roussos told Mark Gruenwald (in Comics Interview #2), "I could sit down and ink 24 pages in about a day. I sat down with a pen and outlined a whole job in about 10 hours (less with a brush) then went back and spotted blacks. But I wouldn't bring it in the next day, because I didn't want them to know I was so fast.” Roussos even worked for Warren publishing for a brief time in 1970 and '71.

After working for Marvel for years, in 1972 he joined the staff of in-house artists and began a second career in comics, as a full-time colorist, taking over the position after Marie Severin quit. Roy Thomas, chief editor at Marvel, from 1972-'74 remembers Roussos as somebody who knew what he wanted: "I liked his coloring and we got along real well. We used to go around and around about one little thing. When he was coloring interiors, whenever Spider-Man, who wore red and blue, leapt from one wall to another, he was always leaping from a yellow wall. Whatever wall he headed for suddenly became yellow when he landed on it to contrast. He would say, 'You've got to have contrast: and I would say, 'There's also got to be continuity.'" Roussos' amazing color sense reinvented the look of Marvel books, particularly the covers. He believed that colors in comics had to be simple and striking and developed a unique approach to using white that would "make a white seem whiter than the paper it was printed on," he told Gruenwald. His color sense is unmistakable. He was working on cover proofs and corrections until his death this year. He still continued to do hand coloring as a back-up, even when computer coloring became the norm in the '90s. As usual, playing down his own role, Roussos told me in 1999, "A very easy job, I have now."

In the 1950's Roussos began a lifelong interest in photography which would eventually lead, in 1984, to The Bayard Cutting Arboretum, a book, of his photographs and writings on the history of a local (Oakdale, NY) estate. Flo Steinberg, longtime Marvel Comics staffer, puts it best: "George was many dimensional" Steinberg knew Roussos from his days as "George Bell" but in the 1990s the two began sharing a workspace in the Marvel offices. "He was a very learned guy," she said. "He was always reading: papers, books, magazines. He had such eclectic tastes, he could be reading about history, philosophy, ethics, politics or architecture. He was very erudite and had sophisticated tastes. As a young man he had traveled all around the world."

Roussos, always the philosopher, told me his ideas on art: "Our natures are expressed in the way we work. Some people are very meticulous in the way they live, the way they do things, and it expresses itself in their work. When you find a detailed artist, he's usually not a very creative artist. In order to make up for it, he becomes meticulous. When you look at his work you see everything in order.You appraise him on that value. People who are more creative, they are more or less like [their] handwriting.You know how some of the guys write with this wild handwriting, even, terrible penmanship? The same thing with [their] artwork. Technique, usually, is a disguise for creativity. Sometimes you don't need creativity, you need people with technique. It's a toss up."

Roussos, a Leo and astrology buff, always noted that his life was full of Geminis: "The first artist who helped me out (Stan Kaye) was a Gemini. So was the second, Mort Meskin. My two wives were both Geminis." His first wife's maiden name was Viola Fink; they had met at school in their youth. Roussos married his second wife, Florence Lacey Nov. 17, 1980. The second Mrs. Roussos passed away in 1998. He is survived by his sister (Alice), three sons (William, Robert, and Louis) a daughter (Marie), four grandchildren, and four great grandchildren.

One thing that everyone I talked to about Roussos has noted is that for the last 20 years of his life, he would always take time, even in the dead of winter, to go the nearby park, the Sportsmen's Club and feed the deer. His daughter Marie has told me, "The deer knew him and did not run from him."

Two interviews of Roussos are being printed in the comic magazines: Alter Ego (6/00) and Comic Book Artist (4/00). You can send any letters to the family of George Roussos, care of Marvel Comics, 387 Park Ave, South, New York, NY 10016.

Dylan Williams

[Originally published in The Comics Journal # 223, May 2000]