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Cutting Up The Dead
an interview with Eric Millikin

Q: To earn money during college you had a job as you describe, 'cutting up cadavers in the human anatomy lab.' Did that rather fearsome occupation have an effect on your outlook?

Millikin: Well, I was already pretty comfortable with the concept of death before I took the job. I guess I had to be or I wouldn't have taken it. I'd seen enough people die and had enough of my own brushes with death that the idea, that, "yes, people die, their lives leave their bodies" didn't bother me anymore. Other than I guess it bothered me in a "I could die at any moment, I've got to make the best of the time I've got" sort of way, but I wasn't really afraid of death the unknown or acting like I was young and never going to die or any of that shit.

But about the anatomy lab: Basically, when people ask me what I did there, I just tell them, "Every thing you could probably imagine and worse." We had cadavers who we'd sawn in half right down the middle of their face so you could open up their heads like a book and read what was going on inside their brains. We had these extracted human hearts in formaldehyde, you know with the aorta and vena cavas still attached. One day a girl was studying one of those hearts and it spontaneously started bleeding everywhere -- there must have been a blood clot in there that finally dissolved or worked its way loose. Needless to say, she was a bit freaked by that, started screaming, the whole bit. Now that's a good college education, watching a girl holding onto a human heart, screaming as it bleeds all over the floor.

And I've got tons of stories even more bizarre then those. There was the one involving slicing people into thin little sections so no one would recognize them. Or spilling the big vat of male pelvises out on the loading dock when trying to wheel it into a Ryder truck -- nothing like trying to wash splattered male pelvis juice off your shoes. Or discovering the secret to getting a big man pumped full of formaldehyde into a body bag without dropping his slippery heavy ass on the floor where you'll never be able to pick him up without asking for help. Or the times people I had actually known in life donated their bodies without me knowing about it -- until I pulled back the sheet to work on them. But those stories aren't the most interesting, to me anyway.

Q: So then, what was the most interesting part?

Millikin: It was watching how different people reacted when faced with these cadavers, these big constant reminders of our own mortality. The first time I assisted in an embalming was right after my grandmother died. And I had to deal with it in what I thought was the proper manner -- with the understanding that this is a dead woman, used to be a live woman, somebody's daughter, sister, mother, aunt, grandmother, best friend. She could've been my grandmother, shit, it could've been me that died the night before. I can't just black it out or try to think about something else or cover it up with jokes -- I've got to deal with it. And I had to help drain all her blood out and remove her pacemaker so it didn't melt or explode at the crematorium. She was a dead human being and I had to deal with her as such.

But on the other hand, I watched other students make some bizarre deals with themselves in order to get through their anatomy classes. They'd pretend that the cadavers were just models, like plastic, not even human. Or they'd pretend that death was something that only happened to old people -- if the cadaver wasn't obviously elderly they didn't want to work on him. Apparently that's what you have to do if you want to continue your life of drinking yourself into a stupor every weekend and screaming at the football players on your TV set. But, fuck it, man, I'm awake and I know I'm gonna die and I've got a few more important things to do before I go.

And these were med students. Med students, afraid of death and dying and bleeding. Is it any wonder that the health care industry treats patients the way they do? Some of them are still making little deals with themselves -- these aren't people dying in front of them, but just customers paying for their next round of golf.

So yeah, I learned a lot about life and death and humanity while I was wearing that lab coat and up to my elbows in embalming fluid. Every decision I make is within the context of the constant reminder that I could be dead on a slab in another hour.

Q: What's this about the cops shutting down your sculpture show?

Millikin: While I was in school I had quite a few run ins with the Michigan State police as well as the MSU administration. To make this extremely long story short, an MSU art professor made up some crazy lies and tried to get me kicked out of school for harassing a female student, so I put together a show about how that was total bullshit and then installed the show at the gallery that professor curated. Predictably, she was pissed and tried to shut down the show and called in the cops. But the cops in the gallery were just an intimidation tactic; the cops never actually interviewed me on that one. The only accusation that ever got made was a totally weak copyright infringement claim that I managed to blow holes in before it even went to court.

Q: Were you guilty?

Millikin: Well shit, even if I was I certainly wouldn't say so,would I? But no, I wasn't guilty of copyright infringement at all -- believe me, if she had any chance in hell of winning that case it would have gone to court. The fair use provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976 were my friend. And no, I wasn't guilty of harassing any female students -- the student she accused me of harassing was actually my date for the reception of another show that was running that same week. In the end, the university's judicial system even miraculously "lost" all evidence that bogus charges had been filed against me so that I couldn't counter sue.

(There's actually a lot more info on that case here, but that doesn't even start to scratch the surface.)

Q: Did this [legal trouble] happen often?

Millikin: Yeah, way too often. But I've always managed to beat the rap. I've never spent a day in jail. I wasn't guilty when the chairperson of the Department of Art accused me creating sculptures that were explosive or that might electrocute people. He actually claimed my artwork was "not unlike a hand grenade." I'm still not sure whether he meant that literally or figuratively, but it's a cool quote for my resume either way. And I also wasn't guilty when the cops raided my apartment without a search warrant looking for the dead fetuses in jars they apparently thought were the secret ingredient in my sculptures. The cops even came to harass me at the job I was working then. That was cool, explaining to my boss that there were two cops downstairs who wanted to grill me about dead babies. This was of course the main inspiration behind the fetus-in-a-jar comics.

Q: Is it true that being harassed by the cops over this was what inspired you to get into comics?

Millikin: Inspired me to start Fetus-X, I'd been working on comics since I was three years old, making little comics to stick in my ears at night in an attempt to control my dreams. Actually, I guess I started before that -- I made comics chronicling my nightmares as I learned to properly use a toilet. But yeah, it got to the point where if there was ever anything potentially criminal going on near a local gallery or museum, then the cops were after me. After they were in my apartment without a search warrant looking for stolen dead fetuses while I was in the shower, I figured, "If fetuses are what they want, fetuses are what they will get." Casey and I started up Fetus-X, and convinced the local college paper to run it every day. We knew that the cops read that paper, so my hope was that my little fetus could make them choke to death on their doughnuts in the morning. So, if detectives Alicia Nordmann and Douglas Monette are reading this, thanks for the inspiration. Just stay the fuck out of my house. Or actually get a warrant next time.

Q: I'm surprised to see that Fetus-X ran in newspapers. It seems pretty radical for that venue. Can you tell us about your experiences with the Family Circus crowd?

Millikin: A lot of them shit their pants, to be frank. One newspaper Fetus-X was in was running two or three letters a day about the comic. Which, actually I guess I ought to clarify that -- not all of the letters were from irate Family Circus fans who'd shit their pants. Even though the paper was trying to fire us, and printing letters on their editorial page to justify firing us, the majority of the letters were actually in support of keeping the comic. They had to print at least some of the fan letters because the readers were CC-ing me on them -- the editors couldn't pretend they didn't exist.

And there were so many letters for and against Fetus-X that people started to preface their non-fetus letters by saying, "I'm sorry this letter has nothing to do with Fetus-X." And most of the student letters were in support of Fetus-X by far -- I mean, c'mon, this paper was running Frank and Ernest for fuck's sake. Are there any college students out there that actually identify with Frank and Ernest? When was the last time anyone wrote a Frank and Ernest fan letter? But the weak-kneed editor of the paper caved in to pressure from the administration and from groups like the Catholic League. He yanked the strip even though it was a student newspaper and the students wanted their Fetus-X.

And Fetus-X ran in and out of other college newspapers after that, but I really got sick of dealing with people who don't even like comics controlling comics pages. It was like an endless cycle of cool comics editors picking up the strip, graduating, and then me getting fired by the young Republican who had the job the next semester. But that's actually in a lot of ways where I want to be -- I don't just want to be preaching to the converted through serializer or my own web site. Don't get me wrong, the web is great, it's allowed me to make contact with a lot of wonderful readers from around the globe, but I also want the Wall Street Journal reader to have to deal with fetuses in his newspaper. And that'll probably happen, slowly but soon. First an alternaweekly or two, then back to a few more college papers, then the world. You know, a double feature of the Garfield and Fetus-X movies.

Who ate the lasagna? Garfield or Fetus-X? Tune in to find out.

Q: I'd like to talk about an innocent young comic strip that was simply trying to make its way in the world. It seems to me that the early installments of Fetus-X were in the mode of a classic comic strip, except with a lethal dose of black humor. Fetus-X could almost be equated with a young Charlie Brown.

Millikin: Yeah, I can see that an extremely young Charlie, maybe a couple months after conception: "Good grief! I've got my umbilical cord stuck in the tree." Seriously though, Peanuts actually played a heavy role in my early thought process behind Fetus-X back in 2000. After Schulz had died, I wanted to push comic strips somewhere beyond where he'd left them. Unfortunately, not too many newspaper editors wanted that. Every time I did something that was, God forbid, new or different or creative, they'd pull out the "but that's not comics" card, forcing me into these philosophical discussions with them about what comics are. Which is of course the last thing your average comics editor actually wants to think about, they just want the syndicate to deliver completely harmless comics on time, so that editors jobs are as easy as possible. They don't want to be reading "Understanding Comics." The last thing most newspaper comics page editors want to do is actually, you know, edit the comics page. Because that requires thought, rather than just taking a smoke break and collecting a pay check.

Q: Can you describe where you were at with the early strips?

Millikin: Basically the same place I'm at now, except back then I was about four years less smart and less talented and less rebellious. I was still in art school then, trying to make comics I could be proud of as someone who had, you know, like above average intelligence, some actual artistic ability, and a really bad attitude. It was basically, "I've read Derrida, the cops just shut down my senior sculpture show, and now I'm going to tell the world some 21st century anal fisting jokes."

Q: I'd also like to ask when Casey Sorrow began to be involved.

Millikin: Casey was involved with "Fetus-X" from the very beginning. We'd gone to art school together, worked in the same art supply store, we were roommates for like a year. We'd both studied art and English and film, so making comics was sort of the natural thing to do for us. We both understood the power of images as well as words. We'd both done years of print making-- etching, lithography, wood cuts, screen printing-- and so we weren't locked into that whole "unique art object" mentality. You know, we didn't have heart attacks over the idea of using printing presses to distribute our artwork.

The "Fetus-X" comic strip was actually sort of a re-working of an earlier comic book Casey and I had created, an anti-censorship horror comic book called "B.I.T.C.H." It was the "Bureau Investigating Terror, Crime, and Horror," but due to the original Comics Code we couldn't use "terror," "crime," or "horror" in the title, so we had to use the presumably more family-friendly acronym "B.I.T.C.H." But then when we heard Schulz was retiring, we decided to try to seize the opportunity. We ditched the comic book and decided strips were the way to go. Of course, we had no idea that newspapers were just going to keep re-running Peanuts. But that was still kind of cool, because papers were running "Fetus-X" right next to Peanuts. At least until, you know, they fired us.

Q: One thing you notice in the early strips is, I guess you could call it formalism.

Millikin: Right, with the early newspaper strips especially, there had to be a certain structure to them, just because of the way Casey and I were working on them and the way we were distributing them. When you're working in collaboration, at least for me, there has to be a little more planning ahead, a little more structure. The artist and the writer have to clearly communicate so many things during the creative process. Don't get me wrong, there were numerous times where it was just total chaos, where Casey would surprise me with some artwork and I'd have to say "Oh, fuck, now what am I going to do with this?" But usually there was at least some sort of basic structure, you know, Jesus turns Fetus's formaldehyde into wine on Wednesday, guns into snakes on Thursday, breakdances on Friday ...

Q: For instance, a joke about burrito diarrhea has two pay-offs-- in one, Fetus-X's jar becomes filled with diarrhea, and in the other, the rest of the room has become filled, leaving only the jar unflooded.

Millikin: Exactly. That's the type of rhythm that's perfectly natural, for me anyway, when doing a daily strip. You can't say everything in a single day, so you go for the one-two punch, or the five-punch combination. Or maybe four punches and then a spinning round house kick to the head. Or maybe four wedgies and a kick to the groin. This is why the challenge of making daily comics feels so much like ultimate fighting or Mortal Kombat.

But more importantly, can we get back to the topic of diarrhea?

Q: Would you say Fetus-X has a kind of crazy logic to it?

Millikin: Sure, there's definitely a crazy logic to it, maybe a bit of what the psychiatrists call "Formal Thought Disorder." I've often wondered whether I could sue an editor for firing me, whether the Americans with Disabilities Act would prevent newspaper editors from firing comics artists that they thought were mentally ill.

But to the editors who just don't like a little chaos and confusion in their comics, they can go read The Family Circus. They dig that straight-forward-shit. I have a theory about that, why certain people love or hate confusion so much. Here it comes:

People of above average intelligence don't mind being confused. That's how smart people get to be smart -- rather than being afraid of confusion, they thrive in the face of confusion. They overcome confusion, turn the thing that used to be confusing into a new piece of knowledge. But your average person hates to be confused. They get confused rather easily and when they do, its uncomfortable, its frightening, they know something's wrong. But really intelligent people are confused so rarely that they treasure every moment of confusion. Its sort of a supply and demand thing- there's such a short supply of confusion for the intelligent reader that challenging comics are in high demand for them. But the average reader? He runs in fear from a three panel comic he has to read twice to completely understand. Because, you know, having to read three panels twice would be almost like having to read six panels or something. Can't have that.

Q: I wanted to jump forward to a recent piece from Fetus-X deluxe, 'The Happiest Bunny in the World,' in which Bunny has fallen in love with a pickled ring bologna. First, thematically, it seems to me that the piece has an arc to it-- at first, it seems to be a pitch-black satire on the idea of love. But then Bunny and the bologna start to learn things about each other, and by god, it seems to take on the delicate, precious, good-intentioned sentiment of a Lifetime movie-for-television!

Millikin: In case it hasn't been completely obvious from the beginning, my main goal with Fetus-X is to create the greatest romance comic of all time. I mean, come on, everyone loves babies. Especially pickled dead babies in jars. A pickled Fabio fetus in a jar? Now that would sell some romance novels.

Now with "Happiest Bunny," I just wanted to tell the type of love story I'd want to read. Not the cliché Meg Ryan romantic comedy, but something different, something a hell of a lot more interesting. And oddly enough, my story about a bunny in love with ring bologna ends up being a lot more real and relevant than something like "Sleepless in Seattle" or "When Harry Met Kate and Leopold vs. the Volcano." But I shouldn't bag on Meg Ryan too much. She was in "Amityville 3-D," after all. But she's never made anything as true to human experience as "Happiest Bunny." Admit it, there were points where you said, "That's me. I am the pickled ring bologna." And then you cried.

Q: The drawing in the piece is really well done, especially the pictures of Bunny. Did you use photo references for these?

Millikin: Oh, thanks. Yeah, I used photo references to get the bunny looking right. Different animals have different proportions, they move in different ways. The bunny there is all CGI. He's based on another 3D model -- he's actually a CGI cat hacked up into the shape of a rabbit. I felt like some sort of bizarre taxidermist gone wrong working with that.

Q: How did you come up with the color-streaks-on-black look?

Millikin: That's actually real close to the look of some of the wood cuts I used to do, with heavy opaque ink on black folio paper. Once I figured out how to get a piece of software to start drawing comics that looked like my wood cuts, making CGI web comics started to make more sense than drunkenly stabbing a wood chisel into the palm of my hand every weekend. It's amazing how much your left hand looks like a sheet of oak ply wood after a couple cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon.

And those purples and yellows are colors that I've used together often. There's even a line in the story about it, when Bunny considers painting his fur "some weirdo color like palladium metallic lilac or Pantone 395 CVU." Which, of course, to those reading the comic, his fur already is that color. That was a super special shout out to all the girls working at make-up counters and reading their Pantone swatch books before bed.

Purple and yellow together give maximum contrast, they're the complementary colors that have the greatest difference in value. Old-school Bauhaus dude Johannes Itten calculated that the best ratio of purple to yellow in artwork ought to be 6 to 1, that is there ought to be six times as much purple in a painting as there was yellow, so that the purple could counteract the intensity of the yellow. Of course, being an art school rebel, I'm using yellow at a much higher, freakier-ass ratio. I've got to break every law of Bauhaus color theory I can. That really helps with your street cred when you live in Detroit.

Q: This piece is really a webcomic, in the sense that it takes full advantages of the new medium, with a winding infinite canvas design, and even animation! I guess this is a good place to ask what you think of the potential of webcomics and digital art as a new frontier for comics.

Millikin: Technology and art have always walked hand-in-hand. That's why nobody ever finds any Stone Age cave paintings done in acrylic. Many of the greatest advances in art have been caused by advances in technology. We didn't see any brightly colored Impressionist landscapes until people figured out how to make brighter pigments and store them in tubes so they could be easily taken outside. It's the same with comic books -- they're tied to a certain era of technological development. There'd be no comic books without the second Industrial Revolution. I've always found it bizarre that some people who love printed comics, a medium born of the early 20th century advances in printing and distribution technology, are suddenly fearful of 21st century internet technology being applied to those comics. That's just silly. Unless, you know, you're like Amish or something. Then it makes total sense.

Q: That animated bunny leaping across the page, that was really well done! Is that a GIF? How did you do that?

Millikin: Damn, you're really pulling back the curtain here, making me give away the secrets behind all my magic tricks. Yeah, it's an animated GIF -- I try to stick to GIFs and JPEGs whenever possible, rather than Flash or Quicktime or anything that requires special plug-ins and the latest browsers. I'm trying to strike a balance between low tech and high tech -- high enough tech to let me create the comics I've got in my head, but low enough tech that people can actually read them. I don't want to make a comic that you can only read with Netscape 666 for FetusOSX running on the HAL 9000. Whenever I do something like a Quicktime VR comic, I'll get like 800 e-mails about how nobody can read it. Then I'm all like, "Come on, mom, you could have just e-mailed me once."

But yeah, the leaping bunny is an animated GIF. Because he's a 3D model, once you've got him built then the animation is a lot faster than traditional animation. You set up certain key frames, and let the computer fill in everything in between and do the final rendering. It's basically done the same way the people who make movies like "Shrek" do it, except with fewer ogres and more fetuses and a slightly smaller budget.

Q: If I was doing a Harvey Pekar story, I think it would be absurd to toss in a piece of animation like that, because I'd be trying to establish a sense of verisimilitude. Animation would be a distraction. But it seems to me that surrealistic satire (and I'm sure that's not a properly descriptive phrase, but what the hell...) has no rules, and pretty much anything goes. Is that a fair statement to make?

Millikin: Yeah, I'd say "no rules" is a fair enough summary of my basic creative philosophy. I've got stories to tell, and I'll use any means necessary. Many of the techniques I've used would definitely destroy the mood of something like Pekar's stories, but I don't think a little animation is going to throw off a Fetus-X reader. I haven't had anyone writing to me saying, "I was with you on the whole dead fetus in a jar talking to a bunny rabbit about unicorn ass tattoos and mad secret crushes on pickled ring bologna, but you lost me with that animated sequence," you know?