Nick Bertozzi
Winter 2015 Issue
Interview by INK team
“Not Being Afraid to Ask” with Nick Bertozzi
How and when did you first decide that the comics medium was for you?
Um, wow, that’s a good one. I don’t know. My dad used to read me comics before I could read. He read R. Crumb comics to me and he would skip over the dirty pages and he would leave out the swears when he read it out loud. He read Classics Illustrated comics and Tintin to me. And so that’s kind of my inspiration for comics. That’s where my comics viewpoint comes from. I think that when we’re little we all glom onto something and that’s kind of, not always true, but I think it’s often true that we can kind of see traces of that through somebody’s older work. You know, if you look at my old work you can definitely see the little bits of Crumb wannabe-ness. Always being disgusting, and I’ve sorta left that behind and now I’m more in the Classics Illustrated world, doing biographies of historical figures and that sort of thing. So that kind of fits in, with Tintin, I drew in a very clean line style for a long time. I’ve kind of worked through all those influences.
So, I made my own comics as a kid. I made 80 little mini-comics. Little fold-over, 8 page mini comics. You would think that a kid from year 10 to 15, if they made 80 little comic books, they were gonna be a cartoonist. However, I just took some bad advice and stopped making comics. I just moved into painting and rock and roll, because I thought that was cool. It wasn’t until I had gotten out of college, and I was a Spanish literature major, that I got a job as a manager at a comics shop in Philly, Fat Jack’s Comic Rip, and I got surrounded by comics again. There were so many bad ones, I thought, “I could do better than this”. And I really could. It took a long time to be able to do better than the worst of the comics. So that’s where it came from.
Did you go to school for art?
I got an art history minor. No, an art minor? I can’t remember. I did get an art history or art minor to do a lot of studio classes in college, but I was a Spanish literature major. Which is good, you know, I had to read Don Quijote, half of it in it’s original, and then I gave up and read the rest of it in English because it was too hard. My creative outlet was being in an industrial rock band. You might not know this, but when you guys were born, there was this kind of craze for 6 months for industrial rock, like the original Nine Inch Nails, and that sort of thing. That was what I was into for longer than I should have been.
What was the name of your band?
Swale, Smut Willy. I didn’t come up with either of those. And when I was in high school it was UV Catastrophe, and the Daytrippers before that. My friend wanted to call us the Mahu Vishnu Brahma Llamas and the Tofu Miracles, but we wouldn’t let him. And we should have! That’s by far the best name.
Since you never had any classes that were specifically geared towards comics, do you think there’s anything that you learned by teaching yourself that you don’t really see in cartooning students?
The only thing I can say is that the best thing I ever did to become a better cartoonist was to do a 4 page comic in the style of Tintin. That’s it. Otherwise, I was just kind of stumbling in the dark. It took me way longer to become a decent cartoonist than my friends because I was too embarrassed to ask for help. It wasn’t until I had been given this assignment, to draw in the style of your favorite artists and make fun of your favorite artists, that I became a better cartoonist. Just through speaking with someone else’s voice. You know how groups or bands or singers do cover songs? They do it because you get to feel how somebody else’s song structure works, somebody who’s better than you. For me, I went right to the top of the heap, Herge, the guy who did Tintin. You don’t get much better than that. Trying to copy that style, I realized what my deficiencies were and what my strengths were. I never traced, it was all copied, so it made me draw using his strokes, and it was really enlightening. Do you guys know the author Hunter S. Thompson? He did Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, that’s his famous book. Gonzo journalism, he covered the Nixon McGovern campaigns in the early 70s. I know, ancient history! He’s a famous writer, with legions of followers.
The way he learned how to write was rewriting by hand F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby. So, he redid that by hand, just to kinda learn the architecture of how writing a book works. You don’t really see Fitzgerald in Thompson. Maybe a little bit you do? I don’t know, I haven’t read Fitzgerald since reading Hunter S. Thompson, so I couldn’t tell you if that’s 100% true, but I feel like that idea where you kinda work through somebody else’s lens, that works. It helped me. That was the biggest thing I did, and I recommend that to everybody. I tell students to do that all the time! Nobody listens to me. I used to make people do it in Principles of Cartooning. I would make them draw in the style of John Stanley, of Little Lulu, of Tintin, Jack Kirby’s X-Men, and Peanuts, and Archie. They learned so much! And you realize, oh my gosh! Drawing Little Lulu is way harder than it looks, it looks so simple! And it’s much, much harder than they thought. I stopped teaching Principles to start a Thesis about 7 years ago, I think? 8 years ago?
What’s some advice you would give to yourself when you were our age (ranging from 19 to 21)?
Stay in Spain! So, I lived in Spain for a while, during my junior year of college, and I wish I never came back. I really do! I loved it there. Would I be a cartoonist now? Maybe, maybe not. Probably not. I’d be a bartender in some scummy seaside hotels somewhere. I would say, go outside the United States. I would say, work with friends. Get a studio, or work in somebody’s house. I would say, listen to WFMU, which is a great radio station because they don’t play the same thing twice. Challenge yourself in that regard, auditorily. Challenge yourself, go to museums once a week, even if you don’t like what they have. Just go. That helped a lot. I think as an artist, a lot about being an artist is being new and different. Unfortunately, that’s our culture. It’s not always just what your level of craft is, it’s being able to say something in a new way that nobody’s seen before, and that’s the hardest thing. Having something new. Go over to the galleries in Chelsea, we are about half an hours walk from there. That’s it! Getting good exercise, a nice walk in. Go see some horrible, some wonderful art, and there’s both. There’s a wide, vast array of different art styles in there. Watch movies that are in black and white and with subtitles.
And not being afraid to ask. That would be the biggest one. I’ve always been too afraid to go, “will you publish my stuff?” I was always too afraid of rejection, and it’s really held me back because it made me very shy as a kid. I couldn’t talk, at all. I would’ve sat in the corner and just stared at you guys, and just ran out of the room in about 2 minutes. I would have thought you guys were too cool for me. I would say, just ask and don’t be afraid if somebody says, “No, we don’t really like your comic. We think your comic sucks.” So what! On to the next! There’s always somebody else. With rejection, with getting somebody opinion, that’s how you learn if you’re good or bad at it. Yes, you have to believe in yourself, but you also have to be able to bounce your ideas off of other people.
Oh, and drink less. Don’t drink as much. I mean, 2 drinks. That’s enough. If you go out on a Friday night, just have 2. Sip it really slowly, have a water, and look like you’re drinking, but don’t. You know, go easy. And if you’re smoking pot, one. The new stuff is crazy! One is good enough, right? And don’t do the other stuff, that’s too much, too expensive. It’s too easy to waste your life on that stuff. I wish I had drunk less. A waste of time. And a waste of money, oh my god. Think about all the money I’ve poured down my throat! Oh, god, ridiculous! Burned a hole in my stomach drinking red wine, cheap red wine. Don’t drink wine from a bar, be sure it’s an actual bottle that they have to open. Don’t get it from a jug at a bar, it’s bad for you. One last thing, don’t make yourself miserable for another person. Nobody’s worth destroying your dreams over, unless they are hot.
What’s the least enjoyable part of making comics and how do you work through that? What’s the best part?
Editing. When you realize that 40 pages of the graphic novel that you drew suck and are horrible. You just gotta redraw them, you just have to do it. And that’s painful knowing that your going over work you already did, but the good thing about it is, you have a better outcome, a better comic. What else? Erasing. I hate erasing, so I don’t do it anymore. I do my roughs on cheap printing paper and I scan that in. I bump up the contrast, I make it blue-line and I print it out on my nice printer. I invested in a $400 printer just for this reason alone. I got a big job and I realized, one day, I’ve gotta have this printer. It’s 400 bucks and I thought, “this is an insane amount of money to spend on a printer.” But it prints beautifully, it prints 11x17 and it’s easy to get cartridges online. This is not the point, sorry. What was the question again? Oh, right! So I would print on the blue lines and just ink over those, so I don’t even have to erase anymore. You just tear up the paper and it’s horrible to ink over, cause it’s all bumpy, and you never get the line you want. And the other way they used to do that is they would take another piece of paper and redraw the entire panel and then tape it back on the page.
The best thing is when you know you’ve come to a good solution to a problem. So, let’s say you had a storytelling problem where, panel one, there’s people having a meal at a table. And in the third panel is they’ve left the house that they were at. It’s coming up with that second panel, that’s the best. When you come up with that solution, you realize, oh! Maybe they were standing up from the table, or they’re walking away from the table, or they’re leaving, opening the door to leave. Any of these solutions, whatever it is, when you figure out what moment in that space of time is the right one, it feels so satisfying. The rest, not so much. No,no, I like drawing, because it’s kind of meditative. Kinda, it is very meditative. You just get to relax. Yes there are times where it’s painful. Most of the time, I know roughly what I’m doing, it’s fun.
At what point did you start to make work that you saw as mature, where when you look back on it, you’re proud of it rather than embarrassed about it?
I think of that all the time. And that was when I did my graphic novel Stuffed!, which nobody’s ever read. I did this graphic novel, The Salon, which is good, I think. I think it’s strong, and I think it’s good, but there’s parts of it I’m not crazy about. Some of the drawing is pretty wonky. After that I worked on a book called Houdini with Jason Lutes. He did all the layouts, all these tiny little beautiful drawings. So I just had to do the penciling and inking and greytoning. It was terrific, because I got to learn so much about pacing and how to compose two pages together. So, the next book I did, which is Stuffed!, which is from a script by Glenn Eichler, who is a writer on the Colbert Report. My goal with that one was to work on my anatomy and my black placement. Making sure that my design looked good. I was looking at Alex Toth the whole time and using his design sense. I did that for about the first half of the book, and then the last half of the book I got lazy. I think the first half of the book is the first time I really felt “This is my mature work”. And I was 38. I mean, I was old by the time I got there. I started kinda late. We started doing comics around 23 and it took me about 15 years to finally feel confident. Probably 14 years more than most people. I’m a late bloomer, What can I say? Just talk to me when I’m 60!
INK would like to thank Nick Bertozzi for taking the time to be interviewed!
psst! check out the Winter 2015 Issue to see this interview in print…