[MUSIC PLAYING]
Welcome, everybody.
Thank you for joining us at today's program, presented
as part of the Wignall Museum's Home Edition
[AUDIO OUT] curative artists talks, workshops,
and discussions featuring artists and cultural workers.
My name is Rebecca Trawick.
I'm the director and curator at the Wignall Museum.
The Wignall is a teaching museum,
an interdisciplinary arts space that introduces Chaffey college
students, faculty, staff, and community members
to innovative contemporary art objects and ideas.
By fostering critical thinking, visual literacy, discourse,
and empathy, the museum [AUDIO OUT]
to enhance the intellectual and cultural life of our community.
We want to take a moment to recognize that we're situated
on the Rancho Cucamonga campus of Chaffey College, which
resides in the traditional and unseated lands of the Tongva
people.
We offer our respect to the elders, both past, present,
and future.
And hello.
My name is Roman Stollenwerk.
I'm the assistant curator at the Wignall
Museum of Contemporary Art.
In a moment, Ben Passmore will present for about a half
an hour, and the remaining time will
be available for question and answer.
Thank you.
Thanks, Roman.
Today, we're thrilled to have artist Ben Passmore with us.
Ben Passmore lives on the island of Philadelphia.
Oops, I meant the--
the island was New Orleans, and you do not live there anymore.
[LAUGHS]
Pardon me.
Ben Passmore lives in Philadelphia.
His comics are about crime, monsters, anarchism,
sexual dysfunction, police brutality, art theory,
and his fields.
Author of Daygloahole, Goodbye, Your Black Friend,
and most recently, Sports Is Hell.
He's a regular contributor to The Nib.
Please welcome Ben Passmore.
Ben, take it away.
OK, cool.
Thank you.
[LAUGHS] Depending how global warming goes,
maybe Philly will be an island.
So I guess-- yeah, I got this presentation.
I have no smooth way to transition to it,
but I'll just start.
So all right, hey, what's up?
I'm Ben.
I normally have a beard.
I cut it recently.
So just when we snap back to video,
just imagine me as I was and not the gruesome person I am now.
Anyway, so I make comics.
You all probably know that.
I make comics usually through my POV
that talk about identity and society and sociopolitical sort
of topics through a Black anarchist lens.
I'm generally considered and I consider myself
a political cartoonist, but not so much in the standard sort
of political party way.
I define politics sort of more broadly.
And this is sort of my general definition--
actions or concepts that engage with forms of force
waged by or on an individual and/or groups.
I'm known mostly for the work I do for The Nib, which
is a kind of political editorial and a comics journalism
website that also puts out kind of semi-regular publications.
And also, I bet you all will know me
for my comic, Your Black Friend.
I also do some work for The New York Times
and have done some for Believer Magazine.
So I kind of do general stuff.
[LAUGHS]
I remember what this slide was for, but, anyway, comics
about stuff.
So more recently, I've been trying
to get away from writing about sort
of my own particular experience of the world
and write about things that I'm just sort of generally
interested in that don't directly have to do with me.
So more recently, I did a comic for The Nib that
was just about the first day of uprisings here in Philadelphia.
And also, I want to just sort of write
about general grassroots struggles
and a lot about history.
I did a comic maybe last month after meeting
with this guy, Russell Maroon Shoatz.
His son, Russell Maroon Shoatz Jr. Russell Maroon Shoatz
is in prison, is probably going to be in prison
for the rest of his life.
But there's a lot of people like this.
This guy in particular was just someone
who spent a lot of time and effort
doing things in the service of Black liberation,
and he's sort of not really known about.
So I'd like to do more things about that.
And yeah, Your Black Friend has won some awards and stuff--
yada, yada, yada.
I also like to do genre things.
I really started out doing sci-fi stuff or more--
particularly post-event stuff in the series called Daygloahole.
And sort of, I guess, last year, I did a book with my friend,
Ezra Clayton Daniels, that was about gentrification
through the genre of horror, more specifically body horror,
called Bottom Feeders.
Let's see.
So starting out, I'm from Western Massachusetts, really
rural Western Massachusetts.
And I was definitely a Blerd before Blerds
were known to be Blerds.
And I started out reading Spawn comics.
And then at 16, I got locked up in an institution
for five years.
And I had read largely superhero comics before that,
but the experience of getting institutionalized for almost
five years sort of inspired me to sort of look
at the world differently.
It's, I think, a pretty common experience,
I know, for other men in my family
that have been in prison.
But also, the experience, a lot of people
that are in prison, the experience
radicalizes you quite a bit.
And even in the reform school, we had a student uprising
that very, very much reflected revolutionary movements
in countries.
So getting out, I started trying to engage
in street-level demonstrations, at first just watching them,
being totally wrapped up in sort of maybe the chaos of them.
And then over time, got engaged in sort
of more organized projects--
Books through Prisoners, Food Not Bombs.
When I was in college, there was stuff around the Iraq
War happening a lot.
I went to the Savannah College of Art and Design,
which I don't usually like to tell people 'cause me
and them had a bad experience.
Or I guess they had a bad experience with me.
But when I was in college, I studied
a lot of political cartoonists, primarily Peter Cooper
and just generally a lot of the art coming out
of the World War 3 Magazine.
And also, The Boondocks by Aaron McGruder was real big.
The TV show was out, so me and my friends
were watching that a lot.
And then also, Joe Sacco got me really,
really inspired to sort of take my interest
in going out and engaging in political protests,
demonstrations, riots, sort of decentralized social
environments, and writing about them
from the first person as something--
it's a combination of a journalistic piece
and a report-back.
I also really fell in love with Guy Davis and a lot
of fiction comics writers.
When I was in school, there became more flexibility
about the kinds of art that could
be just in superhero comics, which seems like a really
innocuous sort of change.
But for me, I got really excited about Guy Davis, but also
Mike Mignola, people that were approaching sort of superhero
stories in a more cartoony way.
And something that I always had a problem
with a lot of the political comics that I was reading
is that the art just didn't feel very engaging.
It was often really blocky.
Peter Cooper himself was--
I don't know, still makes very, very angular work that felt--
I don't know.
It didn't feel very now, you know what I mean?
And it felt very static.
So when trying to develop sort of my own comic style,
I was really trying to blend sort
of the approach of the political cartoonists
that I was reading with the more cartoony, dynamic styles
that I was reading in BPRD.
So the first comic I did, which I won't show anyone
any significant part of, was a historical fiction
about the IWW that was super terrible,
but I tried to pitch it after I finished 170 pages of it.
I tried to pitch it to Top Shelf,
and they said no, and Slave Labor,
which I don't even know if that still exists.
But I think they're the most known for Johnny the Homicidal
Maniac.
Anyway, obviously, my book and that book
have everything in common.
But Slave Labor just said they would publish it,
and then they sort of failed.
It never happened, which I think is ultimately a good thing.
Around that time, I moved to New Orleans.
It was a couple of years after Katrina,
and there was a really big anarchist and squatter scene
there.
And I got sort of in that time-- maybe
because the thing with Slave Labor didn't really work out,
I got really disillusioned with the book
that I was trying to do and sort of, I don't know,
really literal political comics.
I just started to feel like I was just
making the same content as the people
I was reading for an audience that basically already agreed
with where I was coming from.
So I started just doing comics that were really sci-fi.
This is when I started doing the Daygloahole comics that
were sort of still a critique of the subcultures
and sort of, I guess, the meta-cultures that
were prevailing in the city that were contributing
to the displacement of certain people, particularly
impoverished Black people.
This is more of that.
So yeah, I got really into squatting.
This is, here, me in a studio I used
to draw in that was in, I guess, at a former warehouse.
And you can kind of see it, but the floor used to flood.
And I would sleep right next to that desk
in the middle of that concrete thing on a wooden pallet.
So anyway, so I was real punk.
I guess that's the point of this story.
And I got really into squatting and sort of what, I think,
Murray Bookchin would uncharitably
call anarchist lifestylism.
But I started going to comic shows.
I hadn't really gone to shows like CAKE in Chicago
or Small Press Expo near DC.
I hadn't really engaged with the subculture of comics.
So I started using these print scans, these ways that I could
get free copies that I had previously used for flyers
and posters and stuff for demonstrations,
and started using them to make my own comics
and then scam my way onto a bus or something
and go to these shows and start trying to sell my comics.
And shortly after probably a couple years into me
going to shows and meeting people,
I got connected with The Silver Sprocket Bicycle Club
in San Francisco, which was a punk label for a bunch of years
that actually was the label of this really
embarrassing folk-punk band I used to like,
which I won't name because I don't
want to fully snitch on myself.
But they published the first thing
that someone else had ever published of mine,
and it was their first solo artist book.
And it was this book called Goodbye
that I had written while hitchhiking with an ex of mine
for a number of weeks.
That was about turning 30.
So sometime a little after that, I was sort of--
I loved making comics, but it wasn't--
I was obviously not making any money at it.
And it was turning into sort of a financial suck or whatever.
And even though it was really dope
that Silver Sprocket had published goodbye,
and they had even started reprinting the Daygloahole
comics, I told myself, Ben, maybe
it's time to refocus and do some other things.
And kind of around that time, me and a friend of mine, Greg,
we lived in a squat together sort of outside of downtown.
We were this sort of Black punk, anarchist maroonage outside
of the white punk subculture.
And we were reading this Frantz Fanon book, Black Skin,
White Mask, which is sort of Frantz Fanon writing
about the phenomenology of colonized Black people
in Martinique and in France.
And it gave us a lot of language and even gave us
sort of the comfort for us to have
a conversation about the alienation
that we felt within our own community
and our own alienation we felt with our own identity
as Black people that lived in what was considered
a white subculture and Black people
that sort of inhabited what felt like, at the time,
very peripheral sort of interests
as punks and anarchists.
So me and Greg had a series of conversations.
This is Greg on the right.
And it went from just sort of just joking about shit
that had happened to us, but also
really just sort of in some ways reiterating what we had just
read, but also just sort of coming up
with a sort of a shared understanding
about what our experience was and what it meant.
And at the end of that, I was supposed
to go to the Chicago Alternative Press Expo,
where Silver Sprocket was also going to be tabling.
And I have a new book.
So Greg was like, you should make--
this conversation we're having, you should make it into a
comic.
So I made this comic, Your Black Friend.
And at first, it was [INAUDIBLE] using
the copy scan, where I could only do black and white comics
and I could only do 8 and 1/2 by 11 or 11 by 14.
So I made Your Black Friend be sort of this little square.
I printed two sets on a 8 and 1/2 by 11,
and then I sliced them down the middle.
So it was this little brick.
And I thought that was sort of a more interesting shape.
And I took it to Chicago.
And I figured I'd sell a couple and then maybe I'd
bring it back to New Orleans and sell them
at the anarchist library or something, which
was called the Iron Rail, which unfortunately
doesn't exist anymore.
I was really speaking to Greg, really,
and people that might be like us that really could
use the experience that me and Greg felt like we
had reading Frantz Fanon.
And then I thought also there was maybe a secondary benefit.
Maybe our white friends could read it.
The general premise of the book was not
just to sort of complain about being Black
amongst white people.
It was really to sort of deconstruct
or reveal things that I thought were really basic that I
realized that for white people, they didn't really realize--
and for black people who felt sort of embarrassed or not very
confident to sort of admit having certain experiences.
So anyway, so I sold out of all of the comics
that I had printed in Chicago.
And one of the editors at The Nib, this dude Andy Warner,
who I had kind of known before, he read the book
and asked me if I wanted to start working for The Nib.
And Silver Sprocket, they saw the book, too.
And they were like, yo, we should reprint it.
And within a couple of months, everything really
changed for me.
I went from just drawing in my squat,
still trying to do jobs off Craigslist or something,
to getting reviewed in different places like NPR.
And The New York Times reviewed the book.
This, obviously, is a review for the collection.
And shortly after that, me and Ezra
started working on the script he had written for this body
horror comic that would later become Bottom Feeders
and that Fantagraphics would later publish.
So yeah.
So that was really just the start
of Ben going from being just a weird squatter anarchist that
really liked to do comics to kind of being
more of a professional.
And then more recently, my job has
looked like doing regular Nib comics, trying
to do comics, essays, and an opinion,
and some journalism where I can.
And I did this comic for Koyama Press that came out,
I guess, last spring called Sports
is Hell, which was inspired by both the Euromaidan movement
or, particularly, the Euromaidan movement's sort of transition
into a proxy war between different kinds
of Ukrainian nationalists and Russian nationalists and, also,
the Eagles Super Bowl riots that happened in Philadelphia,
where I live now.
And I went outside.
I guess me being me, I went outside during the riots
to just sort of experience them.
I don't know if I would really call myself a sports
fan, although I definitely--
I played football in high school a little bit very poorly.
And I hadn't really followed it.
So it was interesting because the riot--
a lot of the aesthetics and sort of the language people
used and the social dynamics very much
reflected my experiences of political riots,
but I had no idea what people were into.
There seemed to be divisions that I didn't really
understand.
People were talking shit about Tom Brady.
And I was like, I know who Tom Brady is,
but I don't fully understand what this is all about.
And I thought about how that's probably
what people that don't engage with politics that maybe get
stuck in the middle of a political riot--
what they feel.
So I sort of just wanted to make this comic that sort of really
engaged in that, that sort of talked about what people are
like when their ideas about the world,
their ideas about themselves, really flipped with sort
of very active challenges.
Yeah.
So the ongoing sort of North Stars for me
is to try to subvert, to continue
to subvert the sort of bubble that I'm
in politically and the mores of traditional political comics.
I often ask myself, why should anyone care, and try
to earn my place, rather than just
assuming people should care about the things I write about.
And yeah, I make things real personal,
make it relatable and fun.
I got this new book coming out in 2020.
Pantheon was generous enough to option it or whatever.
It's going to be called Black Arms to Hold You Up.
And it's going to cover seven different revolutionaries
and revolutionary groups, particularly
Black revolutionaries and Black revolutionary groups,
that existed over the last hundred or so years.
And what sort of links them together
is that they are all part of armed struggle
and part of a very particular tradition of Black liberation
and Black nationalism to a degree.
Yeah, so hopefully that will be cool.
I got to finish drawing that.
And yeah, that's it.
Thank y'all for bearing with me.
Thank you, Ben.
So I know I have some questions from audience members
that we got in advance.
And we have a number of other questions.
And I believe Neil also has some.
So maybe I'll kick it off, and we can kind of bounce around.
Oren, who I think is here--
sorry, letting someone in.
OK, so Oren had a question regarding Sports is Hell.
So are you considering any other sports for a Sports
is Hell spin-off?
Or is American football the only sport capable
of creating a suitable strain of fanaticism for a comic?
[LAUGHS]
Well, I mean, there's--
I think, probably, a lot could be
done with soccer, which I probably
know equal amounts about.
But I mean, for Sports is Hell, I think, in a lot of ways--
so the iconography of football works really, really
well for military combat.
So it's really convenient in that sense.
It is in many ways just literally simulated war,
but I don't think that it matters
so much what the actual sport that's sort of being referenced
is.
So I probably won't do a follow-up,
but I probably will do a sequel.
I really enjoyed the world.
And there's definitely a lot more to be done,
especially with--
I made that before Colin Kaepernick, I think,
had made a Nike deal.
You know what I mean?
So there's probably a lot more to be
done since one of the things sort of investigated
in that book is how we should relate
to these sort of political heroes
who are probably very disconnected-- who are very
disconnected from us, even if we share certain things,
like both me and Colin Kaepernick are black.
We both got-- he's got two white parents.
I got one.
But pretty quickly, you can sort of
sense a certain disconnection.
So anyway, so I might do a sequel.
We'll see.
Can I ask about the animated video for Your Black Friend
that came out?
I think that was my first exposure to your work.
How did that collaboration come about?
Well, it was--
I had made--
Alex Krokus-- he used to be in a band called Wood Spider.
So anyway, so the people that animated it,
at least primarily, were Krystal Downs and Alex Krokus,
who are fairly old friends of mine,
who are cartoonists and animators themselves.
And I met Alex when he was on tour in New Orleans.
But kind of shortly, I think, before the colored version
of Your Black Friend was published,
Alex, because he's a friend of mine,
had seen the book, the black and white version,
and asked me, because he was trying to get--
him and Krystal were trying to get their animation studio
off the ground and just do projects
that they were interested in.
So they just asked me to animate it.
You know what I mean?
They were like, you don't have to do anything.
And those are the magic words, basically,
to get me to say yes to something
is that I don't have to do anything.
So yeah, man, they just did it.
They did a whole, whole lot of work
in their off time and the animators.
That meant they had no off time.
Yeah, and Silver Sprocket ended up hosting it.
But yeah, it was just an attempt to sort of make--
albeit a very truncated, but sort
of an accessible version of the book.
I think if I have a regret, it's that it's too hyper-focused--
or it gives the impression that the whole book is ultimately
about microaggressions, and it leaves
out other aspects of the book that I
think were really important.
But it's meant a lot to a lot of different people,
so it's good enough, you know?
It's a good entryway into the conversation for people,
though.
Yeah, I think you're right.
It's a primer on that.
So since we're talking about collaboration,
I also wanted to ask about Bottom Feeders,
your collaboration with Ezra Clayton Daniels.
Can you talk about what it was like to collaborate
with another comic, artist, and author?
And any advice for artists who are
interested in collaborating?
Because those seem to either go really well or it's a disaster.
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah.
So when Ezra asked me, primarily, the way I
was making--
excuse me-- the way I was making money
was to do a bit of a comic.
Some guy would hire me to do the art for his script.
And none of them would ever get published or whatever.
And I usually didn't like it.
And Ezra was someone who I met in Chicago at a show.
And he stood out to me because he's another tall, mixed guy.
And at the time, we both had beards.
And I was like, man, this looks like my cousin.
I should see what's up with him.
And at the time, there weren't a whole lot of Black people
at these shows, you know?
So in a lot of different ways, he stuck out.
And a year after we met, he just approached me about doing it.
And since I was broke, I had nothing
to do, you know what I mean, I was like, absolutely.
I was kind of a yes before I saw the script.
And then when I read it, I was like, man, this is incredible.
Ezra is an incredible writer.
He's able to do--
I don't know.
He's able to create sort of a very cinematic aesthetic
with comics, which could be seen as sort of an insult.
But in his case, it's definitely not.
He's incredible.
He's got serious Ingmar Bergman vibes.
So in some ways, it was just really intimidating
because he also draws.
So in some ways, it was really intimidating to approach
the art for his book.
Because I was like, Ezra could just draw this himself,
you know what I mean, and do a fantastic job.
So I think what helped is that--
so before we even started the project,
I went to Los Angeles, where he lives.
And we had sort of a comics camp.
I stayed at his house.
We ate all our meals together.
We spent all day sort of going through what characters
would look like, the general aesthetic of the book.
We'd watch movies that could maybe
help inspire sort of the aesthetic
of the book, the pacing, something like that.
And it really helped to create this bond.
So now we're friends, which I think that's not the thing that
made the process really easy.
I think the reason that our collaboration was really easy
is that we both respected what was our thing to do.
Ezra was the writer.
I was the artist.
Ezra hired me because he liked my work.
So he was really hands-off for the process,
and I think it's a pretty good work for that reason.
I feel like a lot of these collaborations
break down because people don't really
actually respect what people are bringing to the table.
And if I had any advice--
[LAUGHS] I'm trying to think how to say this.
Something I learned maybe a little too late
is that when it comes to the contracts, the really
boring legal aspect of doing any sort of project,
you should just do whatever the most professional people do.
You know what I mean?
Before Bottom Feeders, I had--
Your Black Friend wasn't out.
I was just working for random dentists.
So I didn't think about, oh, what if we want
to make this into a TV show?
You know what I mean?
What if we want to sell movie rights?
What happens when we sell this to Fantagraphics?
What's the back end look like?
What's the split look like?
I was just thinking about the money up front.
So if I could go back not just with this project so much,
but just sort of all these general projects,
I would do the whole--
it's a very boring and washed answer,
but I think that's the big thing is respecting your collaborator
and having a real specific and expansive contract.
At this point in your career, you talked about being--
in a matter of months moving from a squatter
anarchist comic to quote, unquote, "more professional."
Whatever that means, right?
So what does that mean in terms of your business practices
like a contract?
Do you have a lawyer and all that kind of crap now?
Well, I was really able to get by without having
to have a lawyer or an agent because Silver Sprocket is such
a unique sort of publisher.
A lot of publishers will just print your books,
but publishers like Silver Sprocket really invest in you.
So me and Silver Sprocket, we had nothing
more than a handshake deal that was distribution.
They don't own any of the rights to-- like,
they don't own Your Black Friend.
What they're allowed to do is basically to publish the book,
and then they have to call me when
they want to run more copies.
And with that, Avi, the person that runs it,
runs around and just tries to figure out
other ways to put you on.
So they have a lawyer.
Avi was trying to set up some sort of Your Black Friend TV
show with PBS or something.
It's like, Avi really doesn't get a cut of that.
You're really not going to find a whole lot of relationships
like that, so I had to weigh it off on that for a long time.
Now I have a film and TV agent, and I have a literary agent.
I signed contracts for everything.
I work for a lot of established outlets.
I do work for The New York Times, right?
So they send me the contract, and I read it, and I sign it,
along with my W-9.
So in terms of that, everything is pretty regimented.
It's not just like I email somebody, and they're like,
do this, and I'll be like, cool, give me the money first.
You know what I mean?
I think when it comes--
I think the challenge has been to not let professionalism take
control of my life, really, and to sort of maintain
the core ethics of the praxis around my politics.
Because it's very easy--
I think in a lot of ways it would
be really easy if I made my whole life just
be political comics, right?
Like I do a comic, people will email me compliments,
I get a little bit of hate mail, and I get some money.
And I can go down the street and get a hoagie,
and I'm comfortable.
You know what I mean?
So it's been really important for me
to challenge myself to try and have an arm's distance
relationship with my career, even
though, I guess, comparison to a couple of years ago,
it's going well.
You know what I mean?
To sort of not buy into that and, also, to not buy
into this sort of flattened sort of depiction
I see of myself, because publishers
are trying to sell my work.
We all live sort of in the social media, whatever, bubble.
We all got a brand at this point, you know what I mean,
which is very much a flat version of you.
And people will sort of respond to that.
So yeah.
So I just try to keep growing and to sort of not
believe my own hype.
Do you feel that pressure with your next book?
Because pantheon is part of Random House or something,
right?
Isn't that a huge publisher?
But it's--
Yeah.
It's like the pinnacle of graphic novels.
That's Art Spiegelman.
That's Maus.
That's Persepolis.
That's all Pantheon.
You're in-- that's the big time.
[LAUGHS]
Is that pressure on yourself?
Or are your anarchist friends like, you're a sellout?
Or--
Oh, I don't think that--
I think there's probably, maybe a community of anarchists that
would think that I'm a sellout.
But I guess my friends see who I am, see how I move, generally,
whether or not-- there's no--
what is it?
There's no ethical exists--
or no ethical consumption under capitalism.
So it's like, the choice is not whether or not
to engage with it.
It's whether or not to lie to myself
about my level of engagement.
But, yeah, I mean, something that was helpful
is that I definitely had a bit of Kanye ener--
not contemporary Kanye, but "I'm a God" Kanye.
You know that era of Kanye, more 5% of Kanye.
I sort of had that energy with my work
before I was put onto anything, before Your Black Friend
was a thing, because I think you kind of have to be
to being an indie cartoonist.
No one reads your books.
No one pays you money.
It's one thing to get the energy to do one book as an indie
cartoonist, but to get three, four in, you know what I mean,
and you'll still be like, oh, cool, I'ma do it,
you definitely got to have some narcissism.
So that helped.
And then just sort of experiencing
what gets awards, what things pay attention to,
I feel like, for me, I came to understand
that it didn't have--
to a degree, it had a bit to do with the quality of my work.
But also, a lot of it is just super random.
You know what I mean?
So I'm really excited that Pantheon
is putting the trust in me that they put in to Chris Ware.
You know what I mean?
That's cool.
That's a feather in my cap.
But honestly, I just try not to think about it
very much, particularly-- and that's easy these days.
You know what I mean.
It's like, I'm in here drawing my comics a certain hour
of the day, but there's weird racists with bats and M16s
like a block away from me trying to protect some weird monument.
We got Proud Boys everywhere.
The police is heavy in my neighborhood,
so my vision of myself is not super caught up into
whether or not I'm as famous as Art Spiegelman, which
I will never be.
[LAUGHTER]
So that's a relief, without me even really thinking about it.
So that's interesting.
I had a question about-- you were talking
about those few months where you went from,
let's just say, a poor comic artist struggling, right,
and then finding success.
But I think you've kind of answered
how you've maintained your moral compass, for a lack of a better
phrase.
And really, still, you are--
it hasn't changed you, right?
It sounds like you've really got your feet on the ground,
even though life has changed a bit.
And I imagine your obligations are much greater today
than maybe they were a few years ago.
[LAUGHS] Yeah.
Hey, and to be clear, I'm still broke.
You know what I mean?
Let's not get it twisted, yeah.
[LAUGHS]
So we have students on the line and students
who will watch this in the future.
And so you were really gracious in sharing your life
from about 16 on, but can you talk a little bit
about when did you start--
have you always been drawing?
Were you drawing as a child?
Is this something that you aspired to
or that you used as an outlet, whether or not you saw it
as a career as a young person?
Can you tell a little bit of that?
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, I've always been drawing comics.
The first comic I read, I think, was Spawn, in part
because this dude who was also a Black nerd sort of
saw that in me and handed off a number of nerdy things,
but one of them being some Spawn comics.
And I remember liking Spawn, not knowing who--
didn't know anything about Todd McFarlane at the time, but was
like, oh, cool, it's a Black character.
But this whole comic is not--
it's not some Blaxploitation thing.
You know what I mean?
The focus wasn't all the time that he was black.
It barely came up.
And then later, I realized that's because it was written
by a white guy that probably didn't know anything
about Black people.
But growing up, that was significant to me.
It was the '90s.
He's all dark and gritty.
I thought that was cool.
So I started drawing just sort of Spawn rip-off characters
kind of from the jump, from 10.
I was always really, really passionate about it.
I don't think that I was a prodigy or anything.
The drawings were pretty bad.
It really took a lot of work, when
I got to college, deconstructing my approach or more, actually,
constructing an approach, going through all the comics
that I liked to read and really ask myself why I liked to read
them and breaking down--
I'm like, OK, how does Guy Davis draw eyes on an older man?
I think that looks pretty cool.
I guess I'll try that out.
You know what I mean?
So my art style getting out of college
was like a weird Frankenstein of maybe a hundred so artists
that I like, just one particular approach that they
had that I would just sort of do until I found a way that I
liked to do it that felt in continuity with sort
of the general aesthetic for what I was trying to do.
So I think there's a couple people who are around my age
that I think came from the tradition of Guy Davis and Mike
Mignola.
Andrew MacLean, I think, is someone
that I can think of who does a lot of work for Image.
So yeah, hopefully that's an answer.
Thank you.
How did your family feel when you said you
were going to go to art school?
[LAUGHS]
Well, I mean, I was pretty lucky with that.
Let's see.
Neither of my parents went to college.
My mother, she's an artist.
She's a seamstress.
That's how she paid for everything, which is impressive
in and of itself.
She was working for some clothing
company in our small town.
But she liked to paint and sculpt and dance and stuff.
So when I got accepted to colleges,
she was really, really encouraging.
So I got a lot of family support.
And my dad draws, too, or at least he did.
So that was fine, you know what I mean?
I think my mother was always just--
because I was such a troubled kid,
she was happy I wasn't in prison.
You know what I mean?
She was like, oh, OK.
He's doing things that are constructive.
She's less excited about the anarchism thing.
[LAUGHS]
That's always been a bigger problem.
She's worried about you.
That's all.
Well, my mom's a Trump supporter,
so she thinks I'm a--
Oh--
--ANTIFA super-spy or something.
It gets more complicated.
OK, interesting.
[LAUGHTER]
OK, wow.
How does that go?
How has the last four years been?
Well, I mean, to be honest, me and my mother--
we lost contact kind of early on.
She voted for both Bushes.
She voted for W. twice.
This has always been a thing that my mother
has been a pretty standard Evangelical Christian
conservative.
It was definitely like--
I don't have to tell anybody that it's
like a whole new energy to be a fervent Trump supporter.
You know what I mean?
And I think, too, there was a degree at which my mother--
there was a coherence.
I think this is a lot of our experiences with the Right
for a long time, the Fox News Right.
We were like, well, there's a degree of consistency.
I think that your ideas about the world
are terrible and wrong, but there's a consistency.
And my mother now sort of totally
embodies what feels like a wild, inconsistent array
of very racist, classist, bizarre ideas.
Because, for a while, she was just
like-- she's super Christian, doesn't believe in abortion.
Boom, she's a Republican.
And now it's like, I don't--
why is Trump your guy, right?
You know what I mean.
So we haven't really been in contact
because it's like, what do you casually talk about?
You know what I mean?
Because my mother, a lot of--
I don't know if she's a QAnon supporter,
but she's definitely a conspiracy person now.
And that's all she wants to talk about.
So I'm like, I don't know--
we kind of have nothing to talk about.
We'll have to figure it out eventually, but yeah.
I think it's a situation a lot of families
are experiencing presently, unfortunately.
Yeah.
I have a couple friends who are also
black that have a white parent.
It is definitely a unique sort of intersection
of experiences to be a Black person with a white parent
and trying to figure out what your responsibility is
to sort of--
when people are-- some boomers are racists
and people are like, what do you do with the racist boomers?
And they'll be like, well, where are their millennial kids at?
Like it's the kid's job to sort of get their parents,
you know what I mean?
And for me, it's like, I'm the subject of racism,
and also I got a racist parent.
I got a couple of racist family, if we're honest.
But it's like, I got a racist parent.
So it's a weird sort of small, micro sort of dynamic
that very much reflects what's going on
in America in some ways.
[INAUDIBLE] Black son.
I see it in the future.
[LAUGHS]
Oh, god.
She'd love that.
OK, so I have a completely ignorant question.
I have to admit, I'm not familiar with body horror.
What is that?
What does that mean?
What does that phrase mean?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, I think it's--
so for me, the frame of reference is--
the main frame of reference is Cronenberg,
like The Thing movie, like The Fly, shit like that.
And I guess it's really just horror that is specifically
centered on the inhuman sort of distortion of the body,
of the human body.
But it can sort of speak to a lot of different experiences,
right?
I think that's a general--
that's a very, very general sort of description of it.
All right, thank you.
So let's see, we've got a question from Deckerd.
Ben, can you please describe your creative process?
Do you have a usual sequence of steps-- writing,
drawing, coloring, revising, and so on?
And how long does each stage usually take, for example,
to create a single page?
To create a single page, it really depends.
So I still do Daygloahole comics,
but I do Nib comics very regularly, right?
I'll get hired to do something.
And they have sort of their own processes because, one,
the sci-fi stuff-- the personal work I do is sort of like--
the approach is often different.
I really like to do sort of manga-inspired,
aspect-to-aspect sort of panel transitions,
so that can take any sort of time.
And then the Nib stuff tends to be primarily very text-heavy.
And then I'm sort of working back
to have something that looks more
like a synthesis of drawings and text and stuff
for the non-fiction stuff I'm always over-writing.
So for either one of them, if I'm
trying to sort of just think of a story, I will--
I got a different kind of playlist.
I got the bag, so I got a Spotify account.
So I put my headphones on, and I'll
walk around my neighborhood.
I'll take a run and sort of think about it.
Or maybe I'll do something that makes it hard
for me to think about anything, like sometimes a focus,
like a mental focus, and then sort of a distraction
will help me think of something.
The other day, I was at an Enterprise Rent-a-Car
being really frustrated because I
had to go through six different desks
to rent a car and thought of a comic
in the middle of complaining about that.
So you never know where it's going to come from.
And then I usually start with writing.
The thinking process, I'll try and sort of create,
whatchamacallit, sort of a trailer for the comic I'm
going to make, like all the big moments, which is usually
when the playlist is helpful.
You know I mean?
Usually, the playlist has a range of different--
I got your Travis Scotts that go into--
I don't know.
It goes in your [INAUDIBLE] [? wax ?] or whatever.
And then when it comes time to sit down,
I get little bullet points.
And I'll try to just sort of mark out the beats and sort of
expand from there.
So usually, by the end, what I have is
a kind of pretty loose script.
And for The Nib, at that point, I got to send that in with--
it would be the script broken down in panels with--
it looks just like a movie script with action
that's happening on screen.
Da, da, da, da, da.
If it's a personal work like Daygloahole,
I probably will go from the dialogue
straight to just sort of thumbnailing it out.
And then when it comes time to do a visualization, because I
over-write, I'm just cutting.
I'm just cutting, cutting, cutting, cutting, cutting,
cutting, cutting, cutting.
And then yeah, from there, it's like--
a Nib piece, I'll--
if I'm covering something like the Philly riots,
I'll go through social media and news and stuff and sort of--
if I was there, sort of recall different things
and try to pull together a bunch of reference and stuff.
So yeah, at that point, it gets pretty--
the steps turn into micro-steps, and it's
kind of boring to explain, but that's the general idea.
And Ben, when you do a project for somebody like The Nib,
is the turn-around--
I know, Illustrator, sometimes it's
48 hours, right, between a final product.
What is it like when you're doing projects for The Nib?
Right.
I forgot about the time.
The writing and the penciling take the longest.
And then the inking and the coloring,
which, unfortunately, in some ways the most fun for me,
that doesn't take that much time at all.
I think that I could do a fiction page in eight hours.
And a Nib page will take probably a little longer,
depending on whether or not it's a four-panel or something,
but probably like 10 or 12 hours, depending on--
a lot of The Nib stuff has crowd scenes and stuff.
You know what I mean?
So that's a lot of it.
It's like, I got to draw people running and a burning cop car.
So I have all these things I got to get reference
from different angles and stuff, so it takes a little longer.
I always wonder how illustrators and comics and other folks
with that quick turn-around, how do
you have a private personal life when you're like,
oh, hey, friends, I can't come to dinner tonight,
I have a project due tomorrow morning?
Yeah.
I mean, unfortunately, particularly starting out,
I had to learn to say no to a lot of social things.
Now I try to break it down and say no
to work and to people sort of equally so they--
but, yeah, it's like, comics are incredibly time-consuming.
I didn't really understand that until, actually, I
went to college for comics.
And everyone I date, I think, it's like the conversation
I ultimately end up having with them.
It's like, you read it in a couple minutes,
but I had to spend two days on that,
unfor-- you know what I mean?
So it's hard to explain.
I briefly dated a cartoonist, and that was cool
that we didn't have to have that conversation.
And also, we never saw each other.
[LAUGHTER]
Oh, interesting.
OK, so let's see.
We've got a question from Rihanna.
And then I think I've got a couple close-outs,
because we're getting near time, and I
want to be respectful of everybody's time.
So Rihanna asks, do you ever question yourself
before submitting your work?
Do you get nervous if readers will like it?
Good question.
Thank you for the question, Rihanna.
Big fan.
[LAUGHS]
Yeah.
I mean, was it--
Chris Ware did a really great, I guess,
editor's note for this McSweeney's collection
from many years ago in which he talked
about how miserable he felt producing comics,
which was funny to read.
Because, at the time, I was like,
oh, Chris Ware's one of those pinnacles of success.
You know what I mean.
He's a legendary cartoonist.
But it was sort of relieving.
It was relieving to sort of be like,
oh, man, I also feel kind of miserable and really not very
confident when I make comics.
So in a lot of ways, that is my experience.
Particularly if I have a close deadline,
it's like, I don't know how good the comic is.
I'm relying purely on my abilities
as a-- my baseline abilities as a cartoonist
to produce something that's readable and entertaining.
The first skill I learned in school
was how to finish something.
And then I feel like the last or the most recent sort
of big, important skill for me was
to produce something readable and professional,
even if I don't feel inspired, have no ideas,
and hate what I'm doing.
I think it also helps I have a number of friends who are also
cartoonists, like my friend Ron Wimberly or Tanya
Tucker or Ezra, who I can--
if I have the time, I can send my finished work to
and be like--
or even just pencils or something and be
like, how does this read?
Does this look good?
Does it make sense?
So that's helpful.
And sometimes you get a really, really good editor.
Matt Bors at The Nib is an incredible editor
because he's a really, really good cartoonist.
And he almost always improves the things
that he's editing me on.
So yeah.
So I think constructing a really good support system--
comics, much like insurrections, are only
as strong as their support system.
[LAUGHS]
Thank you.
Good.
So I think the final question I'll ask, if--
I know you've mentioned a huge number of artists who influence
you, but is there anybody that is really exciting
you and a group of artists or collaborative
or an artist whose work you'd like to amplify and suggest
that we all look up?
Yeah.
I mean, I don't think--
I don't know if they need my help,
but Richie Pope and Nicole Ham and Conner Williamson and Asia
Bay are really, really good cartoonists.
They're all doing a lot of good work,
and you can find them all on Instagram.
Of course, right.
Great.
Well, unfortunately, we're out of time,
but I really want to thank you, Ben, for your time.
It was great spending a little bit of our day with you today.
So if you all don't mind, I just have a couple things to share,
and then we can all enjoy our afternoons or evening,
depending on where you are in the world.
So please fill out this really quick, short survey.
The link is here.
And it just helps us to improve our future programs.
So we'd appreciate it if you could do that.
And also, here's a slide if you want
to learn more about Native Land Acknowledgment.
You can also visit.
But a huge thanks to you, Ben, for your time
and energy and creativity and your amazing work.
We appreciate you.
No problem.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah.
And thanks, everybody, for attending, and take care.
Be well.
[MUSIC PLAYING]