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"Stephen R. Bissette Interview"by Roger A. Ash
Westfield:
What can you tell us about Spider Baby Comix?
Stephen R. Bissette:
Spider Baby Comix is a gathering place for the material
that I've been responsible for, or collaborated on, over the 20
years I've been working in comics. It is a mature readers title.
I've had the luck over the last 20 years to work with a lot of
people who are good friends to this day, like Rick Veitch, his
brother Tom Veitch, Larry Shell, Steve Perry - there's quite a
body of work there. It was something Rick Veitch and I had discussed
off and on over the past five or six years. At one point, we were
going to do it as a book. But now's the time. A couple of things
prompted my doing it this year. One of them, of course, being
the collapse of Capital, because I need capital [laughter]. Also,
DC is re-releasing the whole run of Swamp Thing
that Alan Moore wrote and John Totleben and I illustrated as a
monthly. It just seemed silly for me to sit on this material any
longer. I'm finding with the signings and conventions I do these
days that we have a whole new generation of readers coming into
the field, and a lot of them haven't seen the earlier work.
Westfield:
So this goes all the way back to '76?
Bissette:
'75 actually, which surprised me. I forgot [laughter]. My first
self published material was back in 1975. It was a comic entitled
Abyss. A number of friends of mine at Johnson State
College (way up in Johnson, Vermont) pooled our resources. One
of my friends, Tim Viereck, ponied up $200, which in those days
would buy you 200 copies of a 48-page magazine-format periodical.
We put out one issue of Abyss and a lot of that
material still holds up. I am going to give a good blend to each
issue of more recent work as well as the older work. But it does
go back that far. If Spider Baby does well, if there
is an audience out there for the work that I'm doing besides Tyrant,
I'll start putting in some of the new material I've been playing
with as well.
Bissette:
Boy, all over the place. By the mid-1970's, the underground comix
were closed houses. It was hard for someone in my position to
interest Ron Turner at Last Gasp or the folks at Rip Off Press
in the kind of stuff that I was doing because I wasn't of
that generation, although I'd grown up reading the underground
comix. So some of my early work appeared in what, for want of
a better word, I'll call the "fringe" undergrounds.
Most of them were East Coast, and I landed work while going to
school at the Joe Kubert School in New Jersey. Clifford Neal was
publishing Dr. Wirtham's Comix & Stories out
of Mystic, Connecticut. Larry Shell was just starting his publishing
operations with titles like Fifties Funnies and
Alien Encounters. Larry calls his titles "aftergrounds."
Some of the work was done for fanzines, including the last hurrah
of fanzines like Rocket's Blast Comic Collector,
the RBCC, and so on. So I appeared in a lot of odd
places - anyone who would have me [laughter]. I'll also be reprinting
some of the material that appeared in more mainstream publications
- Heavy Metal, Epic, magazines like
that.
Westfield:
Will you be able to reprint any of the black and white work you
did for Marvel?
Bissette:
That's up in the air. I obviously won't be able to reprint any
of the stuff using their characters, like the Dracula story that
Steve Perry wrote and I Illustrated. I did a few things for Bizarre
Adventures. I have a letter of permission on file from
the powers that were at Marvel to reprint one of the stories that
I had done for Bizarre Adventures, but I wouldn't
even know how to approach Marvel these days.
Westfield:
Is there any work from the older time period that was never printed
and will be showing up here for the first time?
Bissette:
Oh, yeah, I'm pretty sure [laughter]. I'm surprised. In literally
one evening I was able to put together two pretty solid issues
of Spider Baby Comix, and I did find a fair amount
of stuff that had never seen print.
The thing is, I look at the stuff and
I'm just looking at slices of my past. It was a pleasant surprise
once I had these ashcans together and I showed them to some friends
of mine who weren't familiar with the work I'd done prior
to Swamp Thing. They were very vocal and positive
about their reactions to the stuff. I was also surprised that
it was still shocking to people [laughter]. Maybe I'm just numb
[laughter]. But there is that element if you're the person who
had a hand in it: in the case of working with my buddy Rick Veitch,
we were doing stories at that time to be provocative and shocking,
and they seem to still have that impact on people. That was a
pleasant surprise to me. I guess I always think we're in the "unshockable
'90s," but I'm wrong. Just look at the legal prosecution
of Mike Diana, Planet Comics, and so on.
Westfield:
You mentioned that some of the work in Spider Baby Comix
was done with Rick Veitch. Have you considered putting any of
his solo work in the book?
Bissette:
I'm just going to stay with my own stuff. Rick certainly has a
huge body of his own solo work and if Spider Baby Comix
does find an audience, I'm certainly going to encourage Rick to
collect his material. As I've stated in a few other venues, I've
really tried to get away from publishing. Self-publishing
works for me, where I'm responsible to myself, and only
myself. Stepping into reprinting this material puts me back in
the venue of being a publisher because, in many cases, I was working
with writers and I'm responsible to those people: getting their
permission, making sure they're getting a fair share of the income,
and so on. Those are chores I don't take lightly, responsibilities
that can be a bit of a burden. One of the reasons I now feel comfortable
launching this title is I feel, for better or worse, our market
has stabilized for the time being. It feels like a safe window
of opportunity, however narrow it may be. So, point being, no
I'm not even going to be inviting my best friend in the world,
Rick Veitch, to put his solo work under these covers, because
I don't want to be responsible to Rick as a publisher beyond the
relationship defined in the work that we collaborated on artistically.
In that venue, both Rick and I are comfortable with this. Beyond
that, I wouldn't be comfortable.
Bissette:
Well, horror, fantasy, and humor. That's always been the bent
of my nature. I've never had any secrets about it [laughter].
There will be some surprises down the road. There is some material
that I'd forgotten about that falls outside of the genre. Even
when I wasn't doing what I might consider horror, most
people read it and go, "Wow. That's pretty creepy stuff"
[laughter].
Westfield:
You also plan on having articles in each issue. What sort of things
can we expect to see there?
Bissette:
Most of the articles will be autobiographical in nature, about
a specific body of work. In the case of issue #2, I'm gonna be
reprinting the story Kultz, a story that appeared
originally in Epic #6. It was a story that I did
before video had really taken hold in the home, a horrific fantasy
about a shopping mall that was entirely dedicated to showing movies.
Now that seems pretty absurd, because home video has steered us
in another whole direction. But it still holds up as a story.
Kultz was inspired by the "Midnight movies,"
which were a really important part of my college years, films
like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Eraserhead
- one of my all time favorite films - El Topo. Drive-in
films like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Night
of the Living Dead found new leases on life as "Midnight
movies." These "Midnight movies" were an important
phenomenon to people who loved cinema in the early and mid '70s.
So, in issue #2 the article will be The Midnight Movies &
Me, sort of a nostalgic piece. In a later issue I'll be reprinting
a story I did for Larry Shell called Forgotten Fears of the
Fifties, which involves Drive-In movies, so the article in
that issue will share my drive-in memories. Sometimes in lieu
of articles, I'll do autobiographical short comics. It's my
magazine, cover to cover, so anything goes.
I'm looking at Spider Baby Comix
as being a venue for a lot of the material that hasn't fit into
the venue that I've set up with Tyrant. Tyrant's
been focused, properly enough, on dinosaur and prehistoric material.
I never felt it appropriate for me to use Tyrant
to, for instance, talk about the market. I've got strong feelings
about how things are going in the comics market. In Spider
Baby, I can address that. So every issue will be 32 pages
of comics plus another 16 pages of letters and articles and short
essays. They'll all be pretty fully illustrated, so it's not like
you'll be looking at 16 pages of solid six point type. There will
be lots of "eye candy," fun stuff.
Westfield:
Switching over to Tyrant, it's obvious you put a
lot of research into each issue. How much time do you spend researching
vs. the actual writing and drawing of an issue?
Bissette:
A lot of time goes into the research. My reading habits
have slipped away from reading novels and short fiction. I'll
go weeks not having read anything other than the current books
on paleontology. I'm constantly getting photocopies, which I'm
very thankful for receiving, from people who work professionally
in the paleontology field. I just got a batch this week from Michael
Ryan, who was the first paleontologist to take me under his wing
and open the world of paleontology as a science to me. And it's
dense reading. I'm not exaggerating when I state in Tyrant
#4 that it takes me three dictionaries to read a lot of this stuff.
I have a current edition of the Websters unabridged sitting next
to me, along with a dictionary of scientific terms and a dictionary
of evolution terms. I am not a scientist by any means. Even after
I've been doing this for 15 years, at the end stretch of Tyrant,
I still won't be a scientist. I'm a cartoonist. I'm a storyteller.
The material that's presented in scientific
papers is rarely illustrated in a manner that easily translates
to my needs as a cartoonist. I still have a hard time finding
proper text books on the plant life, the flora, of the late Cretaceous
era. The books discuss these plant forms with a certain familiarity
assumed between the author and the reader that I just don't have.
Often I'm doing research on the research I've just done! So it's
a hard call. Hopefully that'll get easier as time goes on, as
I become more familiar with the material and better resources.
In the comics field, it took years of establishing the personal
contacts that led to being published. I'm still working very hard
at establishing the personal contacts with scientists who have
the expertise I'm looking for, and are willing to work with me.
In Tyrant #4, it took me two months to track down
what kind of turtle was going to be in the book. For people who
don't care about that - and plenty of my readers just want me
to get on with it, they just want to see dinosaurs fighting -
that sounds superfluous to what I'm doing. But to me, it's essential,
the bedrock that I'm building on. I also find with this research,
that every time I stumble on new material, it suggests many story
ideas. It's very fertile ground for the storyteller in
me.
Westfield:
After you have done this research, how long does it take you to
do an issue?
Bissette:
It's an ongoing process. You have to understand that I'm doing
the research as I'm writing and drawing. The books are very…
mercurial. Every issue is in a constant state of change and flow
until I get to the point where I go, "OK, that's issue 5."
I'm in that stage right now where I've got pages up on the wall
in my studio that belong to issue 5, issue 6 and a few pages on
the Tyrant special that I'm planning for next year.
These pages shuffle themselves around; sometimes pages that I've
finished for the issue I'm working on end up being bumped into
the next issue, because additional material suggests itself that
I hadn't even imagined a week, a month, a year ago. I'm really
giving myself, for the first time in the 20 years I've worked
in comics, the room to create with the kind of freedom that I
used to enjoy when I was a kid drawing in my own sketchbook. It's
a hell of a way to run a publication [laughter]. But it does yield
my best work and I continue to look at the big picture in terms
of our market as a whole; in terms of the medium I've chosen to
work in, the medium of comics. Fifteen years from now, no one's
going to care how long it took for Tyrant #5 to
come out or the fact that 6, 7, and 8 came out two months apart.
No one's going to care. And that's really what my eye is on; those
completed novels. I realize that it's a completely, to most people's
minds, irresponsible way of running a publishing company, but
it's one of the reasons I'm self-publishing. I'm not hurting anybody
when it takes me additional time to work on an issue. It impacts
on me. It impacts on my finances; it impacts on how people will
perceive me in the market, but I don't care. All I care about
is that when that issue comes out, it's the best work that I could
do. And it's also important to me, as I've already said, that
it be as accurate as I possibly can make it. So I can't say it
takes me a week to do two pages; it just doesn't work that way.
Some weeks I'll get five pages done, which mathematically works
out to a page a day. Other times I'll go a month or more and I'll
just manage to complete a sequence. It's strange, but it's how
I work.
Westfield:
In doing all of this research, are there any books you'd recommend
to people who want to find out more about dinosaurs?
Bissette:
The one author I can recommend whole-heartedly for laymen readers
is Dr. David Norman. There's quite a number of his texts out there,
The Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs, and
the book Dinosaurs that was a companion piece to
the A&E television series of two or three years back. Norman
is a pretty reputable author if you're an interested reader or
just someone who loves dinosaurs, or if you're a teacher looking
for a book to bring into the classroom.
It's hard for me to recommend books
because I've gotten so deep into it. The "hard paleontology"
texts are pretty intimidating. These academic books are often
quite expensive because they have small print runs. It's nothing
to me these days to pay $70 for a paleontology book. One of my
key reference books was a book entitled Dinosaur Eggs and
Babies, but I can't really recommend it to your readers
because it is a very difficult text, gathering the current essays
on dinosaur nesting habits, eggs, and in rare cases, fossils of
babies. But the material that I turn to, day in, day out, is not
the kind of thing I could really recommend to anybody.
Westfield:
What can we expect to see in upcoming issues of Tyrant?
Bissette:
Five and six wrap up the initial storyline in Tyrant,
the activity around the nest on the first day of Tyrant's life.
It's ridiculous. Before I'm done, it's going to take me two, two-and-a-half
years to wrap-up the story of what happens the first day of Tyrant's
life [laughter], the first novel. The first album of Tyrant
will collect issues #1-6, late summer of next year. I'm also working
on a one-shot special, a self-standing story called Daddy's
Gone A-Hunting. It's the story of the father's approach to
the nest and the mother's reaction to dad approaching the nest.
The next three or four years of Tyrant
are going to revolve around those formative years of a newborn
animal. A lot of issue 5 is pretty strange stuff: It's my character
literally learning to see. We take for granted that if we see
a bird in the sky and we look away and we look back at that same
bird, we know it's the same bird. When we're infants, we don't
know that. That's behavior we learn. When we see something twice
when we're very young children, and I'm talking pre-verbal, we
think we've seen two different things. Depth perception. There's
a whole passage in book 5 that I've just finished where Tyrant
doesn't know the difference between a fly that is an inch from
his nose and a Pteranodon that's circling the nest looking for
easy prey. To him it's something that's in the air above his nose,
that's all he knows; that's all he can recognize. A lot of that
kind of material will form the first couple years of Tyrant.
There's an entire issue based around
an accident that happens outside of the nest where baby Tyrant
spends an entire day watching what happens to a T-rex who's injured
itself. Over the passage of a day, this crippled animal is preyed
upon by a procession of larger and larger scavengers. A Tyrant
reader once said to me, "Gee, beyond the parental care, this
is a world without love." And that is true. It is a very
primal landscape that I'm playing in. For the next couple years,
we're going to be spending time with Tyrant, his nest, his siblings
and so on.
Westfield:
Do you have any other projects you're working on?
Bissette:
A couple of back burner projects are reaching fruition. Tim Underwood,
the California-based publisher who specializes in horror and fantasy
limited edition books, is just about to publish a signed limited
edition of the book Comic Book Rebels that I co-authored
with Stanley Wiater two years ago. It's a collection of interviews
with a number of key comic creators in the current scene like
Will Eisner, Neil Gaiman, Dave McKean, Alan Moore, Dave Sim and
so on. That'll be coming out from Underwood Books by the end of
the year.
Every year I illustrate one horror novel
or short story collection. It's a way of keeping my hand in drawing
people [laughter]. I don't want to forget how to do that. In the
past, I illustrated Joe Citro's Deus X and Joe Lansdale's
Dead in the West. The one that's about to come out
is from Cemetery Dance, Rick Hautala's new novel, The Mountain
King. I did the full-color cover and four illustrations
for that book.
I've also got a book I finished back
in 1990. I finally found a publisher for it, and I'm working on
the revisions this winter. It's called We Are Going to Eat
You, a history of cannibal films [laughter]. That's going
to be published by Borderlands Press, the folks who published
the From Hell scripts, late next year.
I'm also talking with Tim Underwood
about publishing my history of the horror comic. I've been doing
it as a slide show now for about five years, most recently in
San Diego. I've given the slide lecture at 50 or more venues to
date, including conventions, universities, libraries and so on.
When the slide show was almost four-and-a-half hours long, I realized,
"it's time to turn this into a book." But that'll be
a back burner project for five or six years. It's definitely taking
a back seat to Tyrant.
Spider Baby Comix is
not a difficult book for me to put together. Much of that material
will be new to Westfield's customers and I hope they enjoy it,
whether it's material that's completely new to them or work that
they remember reading years ago. But Tyrant remains
the main focus of my life. And it will be for the next 15 years
or so. |
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