Right from the outset, the prevailing mindset in British comics fandom was a radical and progressive one. We were all proto-hippies, and we all thought that comics would be greatly improved if everything was a bit psychedelic like Jim Steranko.
I really want people to read the book, and bookstores never sold an issue of Eightball because nobody knew what it was.
Maybe they're not 'books,' but 'Acme Novelty Library' and 'Eightball' are two comics I can't get enough of.
I decided I was going to tell these stories. I went around and met Crumb. He was the cartoonist. I started realizing comics weren't just kid stuff.
In many ways, my entire graphic novel career was a long diversion. Originally, all I wanted to do was to be an underground cartoonist and maybe bring out a groovy underground mag.
I created 'Captain Underpants' when I was in the second grade. I was constantly getting in trouble for being the class clown, so my teacher sent me out into the hallway to punish me. It was there in the hall that I began drawing 'Captain Underpants'. Soon I was making my own comic books about him.
Of course, I started really being a comics fan with the underground stuff in the '70s.
I got into underground comics fairly early on and kind of wandered away from the superhero stuff, but I was an art student and I was drawing a lot as a kid.
I did a movie called 'American Splendor', based on the comic book writer Harvey Pekar.
When people say 'What are underground comics?' I think the best way you can define them is just the absolute freedom involved... we didn't have anyone standing over us.
American Splendor is just an ongoing journal. It's an ongoing autobiography. I started it when I was in my early 30s, and I just keep going.
The type of cartooning that I think is generally referred to as 'alternative' or 'underground' is usually - the distinction is usually in terms of whether it's made by one person, the entire thing is done by one hand or more of a production line process, which is how the comics that we grew up reading were made.
It's just an easy catchall to describe a style because there are a lot of alternative comics who are completely different from each other.
Watching everyone root through their psyche, it just delights me. Especially R. Crumb's stuff.
I just try to keep myself a traditionalist. I liked being an underground comic doing my thing. I want to maintain that. I just do.
I'm a comic nerd. I'm a former serious collector for much of my childhood and early teen years I wanted to draw underground comics.
'Malice' wasn't about horror to start with but an underground comic driven by the power of rumour. However, as nothing fuels a rumour like fear, I decided that it had to be a frightening comic.
As a fan and collector of 'MAD' magazines as a kid, I am well aware that my art is unworthy. I remain in absolute awe of 'MAD' artist Mort Drucker and loved Wally Wood and Harvey Kurtzman and Al Jaffee and Don Martin and Angelo Torres and Peter Kuper and Sergio Aragones.
There are some short stories in R. Crumb comics that are just wonderful and touch me in ways no other comics do.
I went to an art school in Brooklyn and painted Fine Art, if that's what you'd call it for eight years in New York, until I saw the first underground comics in the East Village Other.
I met Robert Crumb in 1962; he lived in Cleveland for a while. I took a look at his stuff. Crumb was doing stuff beyond what other writers and artists were doing. It was a step beyond Mad.
I'd begun reading Crumb shortly before that, and other underground stuff, so that was an influence to some degree. Of course the Marvel and DC comics, they had been my main interests in my teenage years.
Once we got going on the Fantagraphics version of Love and Rockets, our encouragement was constant. People wanted us to do more, do more. Thirty years later, here we are.
Underground and alternative comics existed in a vacuum for years, where money really wasn't an issue. No one would get into doing a black-and-white comic because they thought it might be a route to riches.
Things improved a little bit in the '80s; there was kind of a revival of alternative comics, but then they went downhill in the '90s.
