Jim Woodring
When they let me alone I feel lost. It's too confusing... too many variables.
Those Jim stories are fun to draw, 'cause they're loose, but I got sick of drawing myself. I don't ever want to draw myself again.
Those Frank stories are not a lot of fun to draw because I plot them so carefully.
This old man was throwing up in front of my house I went out to help him and I had to call an ambulance, and the paramedics literally slapped him and called him Deady and said they hated to waste their time on him.
Think of how vigorously some people resist change in art. They're protecting the stronghold. Art can be a real destructive force. It can rob people of their cherished delusions.
There's a kind of writing that I do that I've always liked. I write really fast and let the words come out the way they want to and it satisfies me.
There's a challenge of trying to take my peculiar and not very attractive personal peccadilloes and turning them into something universal. I always liked work that does that.
There has been plenty of good subjective, propagandistic art. But I think that if you have an interest in being aware, if your philosophy points you towards the universal and you spend a lot of time investigating that, then you are your own laboratory.
There are a lot of elements in the stories that mean something to me that shouldn't mean anything to anybody else, though of course I hope they do.
The way I figure it is, life is sad. You may as well try to pull some kind of fast one.
The process of drawing Frank is very, very boring because by the time I'm ready to draw, it's all worked out. I've worked out the page breaks and I've sketched it all out, and all that remains is the process of drawing it in my deadpan style.
The basic question is, what short-term avatars do people want to inhabit? Animals? Famous people? There's something weird about the way an avatar is inhabited.
That loner-ness can lead to a kind of social backwardness. I've got it bad.
Some stories have taken longer to get, and I've had to work at them much harder than I wanted to, and I don't think those are the strongest ones.
R. Crumb can draw a comic about Charlie Patton or whoever he wants and he can get it just right and make it real. I can't. I don't have enough common ground with humanity.
People aren't interested in seeing themselves as they really are.
My studio is in my house, on the third floor. I can see the cemetery from my window. So sad.
Microsoft has been easy to deal with. I enjoy it. They have brains and money.
It's hard to hire cartoonists now. The good ones are all hired. I don't have trouble with work for hire. I know some people can't abide it.
It's hard for me to draw stories about anybody else, because I don't know what anybody else's experiences are like. If I draw Joe Blow doing this and that, it just doesn't mean anything to me.