|
|
Pages
1|2
Cutting Up The Dead
an interview with Eric Millikin
Continued
Q: I want to talk a little about horror. Is H. P.
Lovecraft's work an influence on you-- I mean, other
than a source of pop-culture references?
Millikin: Yeah, I've slipped a few rather obvious Lovecraft references into my
comics, and
at one point even made a CGI Cthulhu in humanoid form, but haven't used
him
yet. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe have been with me forever. I started
reading
Lovecraft when I was in the fifth grade. I remember my brother and I got
busted
for trying to check some Lovecraft books out of the local library --
stupid
adults saw the big word "Lovecraft" on the covers of the books and
thought we
were trying to check out sex manuals or something. They thought
"Lovecraft" was
like "The Craft of Love." I guess that taught me a little bit about the
silliness of censorship at an early age.
More subtly, my work also shows a bit of the Lovecraftian idea that
there are
dark forces beyond our control just outside the edges of our
consciousness.
Whether that's the elder gods or the U.S. government, I'm not sure it
really
makes a difference.
And actually, lately I've been looking at Lovecraft from a more formal
angle.
He's one of the few writers that can pull off first person horror
fiction. You
might think that first-person horror would be more immediate than
third-person,
but a first person horror story generally has less of a sense of danger
about
it -- your protagonist has clearly survived to write his story. So
Lovecraft
got around that by having his stories told from the perspective of
people who'd
gone mad after witnessing some terrible event, or writing a story from
their
room as something approaches to kill them. Great, that works with
prose, but
with comics there's this whole other level of trouble with the visuals.
With
prose it's actually believable that one of Herbert West's med school
colleagues
will write down his story -- but would he ever draw a comic about it?
Well,
sure he would, but it wouldn't look like a typical American comic book.
It
would more like a med student's lab notebook with illustrations and
sequences
of sketches and handwritten notes. But that's still a comic, isn't it?
And
that's sort of one of the reasons why my comics have taken this U-turn
toward
sketches and handwritten lettering and autobiography recently. I've
also been
combining it with alternate forms of graphical record keeping that
cartoonists
generally ignore -- maps, charts, exploded views, diagrams ...
Which I suppose I could have arrived at just by combining my experience
in
newspaper infographics with my readings of, say, Kochalka's diaries,
but I
needed Cthulhu and Dagon to show me the way instead, I guess.
Q: In Lovecraft, in William Burroughs, you get the
idea that beneath the surface of everyday life is a
realm of unimaginable loathsomeness. Is recognizing
that a requirement for one to be completely sane?
Millikin: Fuck sanity.
Q: I'm thinking
of that one shot published recently that has a US soldier sitting
cross-legged on top of a folded-up Iraqi prisoner. Is
there a horror in real life that is too unexpected or
too elusive for art to capture?
Millikin: Yeah, in some ways there is. I remember thinking about that back during
the
height of the X-Files popularity. Here these people were getting
interested in
these fictional conspiracies, but they didn't have time to worry about
the
actual conspiracies going on around them. There's a conspiracy by many
powerful
whites to keep blacks powerless. There's a conspiracy of the rich to
make sure
the poor stay poor. We've got the right-wing media convincing the
middle class
that any type of socialist system is going to steal their money and
give it to
all those lazy bums on welfare. Here's a news flash: You won't have to
worry
about the redistribution of wealth stealing all your wealth unless --
get this
-- you're fucking wealthy. So to all those red necks working the
assembly lines
listening to Rush Limbaugh and worrying that their hard earned pay
checks are
going to -- oh god no -- help a some poor kid go to school, that's not
what I'm
talking about.
Why do you think millionaires like Limbaugh and Cheney
are
always so anti-socialism? Because they know it's their precious money
that's
going to help send poor kids to school. But they've got this neat
little
conspiracy going where the middle class is all afraid that they're
going to be
made poor trying to help the poor. Well, sure, that's the way it might
work if
it's Bush doing the tax cuts. And that's why guys like Bush represent a
greater
level of horror then Dracula or Leatherface. Shit, Bush gets more
Americans
killed in a month that Dracula kills in a millennia. That's why Bush is
more
frightening to readers than Anal Ho Tep, the butt-fucking mummy.
Q: So lets turn to politics. Eric, the early Fetus-X installments kind of stayed
inside their own sardonic fantasy world. But more
recently, the series has become highly political, like
a more accurate alternative to the Evening News. How
did this evolution come about, and why did you decide
to go that way?
Millikin: Basically, our President made me do it. As he told more lies, took away
more
Constitutional rights, launched more unjust wars, cut more deals for
his
millionaire and billionaire buddies, I had to create more comics that
fought
back against him. 'Fetus-X' has turned into my own personal War Against
Bush's
Reign of Terror.
With the early Fetus-X comics I thought I could afford to be more
subtle and
more general in my politics, but I can't anymore, not when the people
who are
supposed to be showing leadership are claiming the Geneva Conventions
don't
apply in Gitmo or trying to make a fine distinction between "torture"
and
"sodomizing prisoners of war as part of interrogation." Since Bush
refuses to
show any competent leadership, I guess it's up to me and my fetus
comics to
guide the world.
Q: When I heard about the Abu Ghraib prison abuses, I
thought, yeah, here's some more shit going down that
the American public is going to ignore. But it turned
out to be a really big deal, and Bush's polls even
took a temporary dip. Why was this? I mean, these
things happened to people who weren't Americans,
weren't caucasian, weren't even Christians. Why would
Americans suddenly give a fuck what happened to them?
Millikin: I think the power in the Abu Ghraib prison photos lies in the fact that
those
pictures totally destroyed the last remaining rational for the war.
Bush's
first rational was of course that Saddam was trying to build nukes with
that
uranium from Niger and was going to kill us all. After we all knew that
was
bullshit, then we were at war because secular Saddam had somehow
Marvel Super
Villain Teamed-Up with fundamentalist Osama and together they were
going to
kill us all. But, oops, that was all bullshit, too. Then Bush and his
crew
decided that we were there to liberate the Iraqi people. Then the Abu
Ghraib
prison photos showed us that about the only thing we liberated was the
Iraqis'
pants before we started torturing them. That made it a little harder
for the
average American to fly the "support the troops" decal in the back
window of
his SUV.
Q: Do you think Abu Ghraib will make any difference
in the outcome of the election?
Millikin: I think it's already made a difference. Those photos woke a lot of
people up.
That's sort of the testament to the power of visual arts, isn't it?
When the
stories were just trickling out, nobody really cared, but damn, when
there are
photos, that's definitely gonna cost Bush some votes. Whether it'll be
enough
to cost him an election, I don't know. There's just too many people in
America
right now that have supporting an incompetent president confused with
patriotism.
Q: It's pretty clear that most progressives are
squarely behind the Democrats this time; everybody's
an ABB (Anybody But Bush). But then of course there's
the Nader campaign. What do you think of Nader?
Millikin: I honestly haven't thought about Nader much at all. He'd make a great
VP for
Kerry -- a Kerry/Nader ticket would get some excitement into the
campaign. Can
you imagine big-corporate Cheney going up against anti-corporate Nader
in a
vice-Presidential debate? Or maybe after the Republicans are completely
embarrassed in the next election we can shift to a two-party system of
the
Democrats vs. the Greens for 2008. That's where America ought to be.
But other
than that, Nader is far from my mind right now.
Q: Assuming you followed the primaries, did you get
caught up in the Howard Dean campaign?
Millikin: Oh, I was all over the primaries, but, no,I wasn't at all into Howard
Dean. I
was a Kucinich and Sharpton man from the beginning. Dean lost me with
his
support of the death penalty and opposition to universal health
coverage. Sure,
Dean supports civil unions and domestic partner benefits, but what good
are
domestic partner benefits without health insurance? What good are
hospital
visitation rights if you can't even get into the fucking hospital?
Q: Dean's activity since the primaries has been pretty
unusual. Do you think his new organization Democracy for America
is going to have lasting impact?
Millikin: I think the only lasting impact that Dean will have is as a reminder of
how
superficial our election coverage is. Remember how the talking heads
were all
freaking out because Dean actually got excited at that campaign rally?
You
know, the whole "oh my gawd he raised his voice while giving a pep
talk, how
unpresidential" crowd? Now we have the same people complaining about
how boring
John Kerry is. Which is just stupid on so many levels -- if you're
going to
complain about an excited candidate, don't bitch when you get a
supposedly
boring one.
Not that Kerry even is all that boring -- every time I hear
that
shit I just think that everybody's got a lot of left over "Al Gore is
so
boring" sound bites that they're going to lazily recycle and use on
John Kerry
rather than actually cover any actual issues. And who really cares if
the
President is exciting or boring -- I want a President that doesn't
invade other
countries based on lies and then pass the profits onto his corporate
buddies. I
don't give a shit whether your speeches are really exciting or really
boring
while you're torturing and killing naked Iraqis -- the issue is the
torture,
stupid. We've got a President right now destroying basic human rights
both in
Iraq and here in the U.S. -- and I'm supposed to care about the next
President's ability to crack a joke or how nice his hair cut is?
I
don't want
the President to be my buddy, I've already got plenty of friends -- I
want the
President to stop running concentration camps in Cuba, Afghanistan and
Iraq,
you know? That ought to be a slightly higher priority than how
photogenic he
is. I want a real President for a change; if I wanted photogenic I'd
vote for
Fabio or something.
Not that I'm ruling out a vote for Fabio at this point. It's still
early and
he's got nice pecs.
Q: The most troubling question for me is, how do you
go about opposing corruption and reactionary elements
in the Democratic party without weakening them and
handing elections to the Republicans?
Millikin: As long as everyone couches their criticism of Democrats with a healthy
dose of
relativism, then everything will be OK. Like, "sure Al Gore helped his
wife
launch a wave of pro-censorship hysteria in the '80s, but at least he
never
built a concentration camp in Guantanamo or blew the cover a CIA
operative just
because her husband proved that he was lying about Iraq." That, and
working to
destroy the two-party system. Imagine if politicians had to actually be
good,
rather than just the lesser of two evils.
Q: I was wondering if you could comment on some of
the other political cartoonists out there, starting
with Joe Sacco.
Millikin: Sacco's great -- he's had the journalistic aspect of political comics
down for
years. You know, actually doing your own research, interviewing people,
travelling on assignment. I'm working on slipping more of that into my
own
comics, and when you see it you'll know that I ripped it off from Joe
Sacco.
Q: How about Ted Rall? I notice you have a link to
him in your blog.
Millikin: Yeah, Ted makes some damn fine comics, and cranks out three a week with
very
little filler. Occasionally he'll do some single panel thing that looks
like he
had a deadline breathing down his neck, but it's still better than 99%
of the
indistinguishable, interchangeable dreck that most political
cartoonists spit
out. Rall's so prolific, it pisses me off to no end. Because he makes
so many
comics, he's the one guy who's most likely to do one of my ideas before
I get
around to doing it. I don't know how many times I'll be making comics
over the
weekend, working on one I'm going to post on Wednesday only to have
Rall post a
similar comic on Monday, making me start all over. What a bastard,
right? I'm
actually working on going back to daily strips, which is probably at
least
partially a subconscious desire to keep up with Rall. And with the
political
situation the way it is today, there's no shortage of material.
Especially when
I'm working on political horror comics. Bush is so stupid it's scary.
Q: Tom Tomorrow, another guy your blog links to.
Millikin: He's definitely one of the best. When most political cartoonists are
working in
a single panel, Tom Tomorrow is pulling off six-panels a week. I never
understood the single panel political cartoon -- it always seemed to me
that if
you wanted to deal with complex political issues you'd need a more
complicated
means of expression then just a single panel with like a donkey looking
over a
cliff but the cliff is labeled "tax cuts" or some shit. I just made
that up off
the top of my head. Damn those shitty political cartoons are easy. I'll
play
this game with the mainstream cartoons in the local papers, go up to my
friends
and say "OK, if Bush is piloting an airplane labeled 'economy' and
there's an
aircraft carrier labeled "recovery," what does the flying duck say?"
Shit, I just made that one up, too. And I could probably get that
syndicated to
1000 newspapers. People working in multiple panels, guys like me and
Tomorrow
and Rall, we're just able to make clearer, more powerful, more
intelligent points
than the other hacks. And we can be funnier, too. Tom Tomorrow will
pull off
these six-panel comics where every panel could probably stand on its
own and be
better than 99% of the political cartoons in major American newspapers.
I mean,
c'mon, why are all those political cartoonists using the same one panel
format?
Because it works so well for the Family Circus?
Q: Any other up-and-comers in the political
cartooning game?
Millikin: David Rees's "Get Your War On" is fantastic. Probably makes me laugh
harder than
any other political comic, but then that's probably because he's
working in
similar profane vein as me most of the time. Aarron MacGruder's "The
Boondocks"
is pretty consistently strong, too -- when Grandad spoke out against
Bush and
torture in the Abu Ghraib prison on the basis that Bush was ultimately
responsible for the increase in pictures of naked men on his TV -- that
was
beautiful. I guess neither Rees or MacGruder are exactly up-and-comers,
but
they're part of a newer wave of must-read alternative political
cartoonists.
Q: I hear you've got a day job working for a
newspaper?
Millikin: Yeah, I work at The Detroit News as an art director. It's a lot more
than just a
day job, though -- the long term goal is merge the newspaper art and
the comics
art together. You know, slowly slip in a few fetuses until suddenly the
whole
newspaper is nothing but Fetus-X comics.
Q: Are you comfortable there-- I mean, is it a good
fit with your lifestyle and politics?
Millikin: With my lifestyle, yeah. I get to work nights, which fits into my
nocturnal
schedule. And since my only interaction with the public is pretty much
through
words and pictures, nobody gives me any shit for the way I dress or how
I cut
my hair or any of that other typical job crap. Fitting in with my
politics is
another story. Detroit is one of the few two-newspaper towns left, and
The
Detroit News where I work is the more politically conservative of the
two. I'm
not sure whether that makes me a sell-out or a subversive.
Q: Do they let you get away with anything that
satisfies your creativity?
Millikin: Oh, yeah, all the time. Readers only encounter the conservative views
on the
editorial page; the rest of the newspaper strives for facts over
opinions, and
giving balance to all sides of issues. I've been able to use the
newspapers to
make points in ways my other artwork fails me. The cool thing about
newspapers
is you get to show your stuff to people who don't necessarily want to
see it.
On the web, you can be pretty sure that anyone who visits your site
wants to be
there, they're not there on accident. But in a newspaper you can grab
the
attention of someone who's just looking for the TV listings.
For
example, I
designed a whole section on affirmative action, looking at how if the
Supreme
Court declared affirmative action unconstitutional, what that would mean
for our
society. It was all pretty logical, but things most people don't think
about --
fewer blacks in law school means fewer black lawyers and judges means
less
justice for blacks. Pretty simple stuff that a lot of people would like
to
ignore, but I'm screaming it at them as they're on the way to reading
last
night's baseball scores. Considering the paper's circulation is over a
quarter
million, I've got a lot of power as an artist there.
Another example, here's where the newspaper succeeds where my other
artwork
fails me. A couple of years ago I did this gonzo installation about
Martin
Luther King. In Lansing, Michigan's capital city, they had renamed
Logan Street
into Martin Luther King Boulevard. Of course, Joe red neck didn't want
his
streets named after any civil rights leaders, so there was all sorts of
protests and counter protests. And even though they'd finally renamed
the
street after Dr. King, most people still referred to it as Logan
Street. Most
of the street signs still said Logan on them. That was back in the
early '90s.
Well, about ten years later I did this gallery installation on the
topic. For
part of it I went out to the Logan Square shopping center, conveniently
located
on Martin Luther King Boulevard, and asked random shoppers directions to
Martin
Luther King Boulevard. Even though we were standing on Martin Luther
King
Boulevard, 90 percent of the people had no idea where it was.
But
anyway, I did
my gallery show, and of course everybody said it was cool but nothing
changed.
A year later on MLK Day, I ran photos on the front page of Lansing's
paper of
all the Logan Street signs that should have been removed a decade ago.
That
gave the local black church leaders enough ammo to raise some Hell, and
the
Department of Transportation replaced all the old Logan signs a few
days
later.
Now that's power! Newspapers can be really wonderful things. Also, for
Halloween
I drew pictures of naked aliens.
Return to page 1
|