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Nervous Self-mockery
an interview with Dylan Meconis

Q: Were you named after Bob Dylan or Dylan Thomas? And (inevitable follow-up question) are you interested in either of said gentlemen's works?

I was named after the poet Dylan Thomas, who after all was the inspiration for Bob Zimmerman's stage name. My dad is enormously devoted to Dylan Thomas's poetry, and I grew up hearing it on a regular basis. I'm more familiar with the things he did for a broad audience, like A Child's Christmas in Wales or the radio play Under Milkwood, as some of his more straight-up poetry is a bit too pounding and esoteric for me at times. I'm a girl, I like Rilke. What can I say.

Q: Are your parents cool?

Dylan: I sometimes think they're listed in the Guinness Book of World Records under "most lovely parents ever of all time." We're one of those gross families where we all get along and they secretly hope I'll move back in after college. Suffice to say, they're great parents, and they're supportive without being invasive. I mean, they know who Scott McCloud is. They think this comics stuff is a good idea. Occasionally I want to say, "couldn't you guys be jerks for awhile? So I can struggle for autonomy?" But no. They insist on being rational and loving. Pff. Whatever.

Q: In one strip, you have the character Lucien going into a rant about the illogic of "splitting up," and you have a footnote saying that the scene was inspired by your dad.

Dylan: Whenever we'd sit down to watch, say, Star Trek---yes, Star Trek, shut up---we would arrive at the inevitable scene where the crew would transport down into the middle of enemy territory, and immediately decide to split up. At which point my father, who's a 20th century war history buff, would launch off into a four star rant detailing every precise tactical error they've committed. "You don't beam down the first in command! And you'd go in kneeling, with phasers armed!" I think of it as endearing, because if I didn't I'd have killed him by now.

Q: I noticed that your Modern Tales bio consists entirely of a quote from Emma. Is that just Austen fandom, or do you perceive yourself as having some of Emma Woodhouse's character traits?

Dylan: Well, I also just got tired of the one which implied that I was actually a rare species of dolphin. I had a Jane Austen phase in early high school, but somehow never got around to Emma---I guess the human mind can only handle so many witty societal portraits in a row---then this summer I finally succumbed. As for sharing Emma's traits, Emma is a sheltered, self-satisfied young woman of fortune who spends her novel discovering that she isn't nearly perfect, mature creature she thought herself to be.

I personally have Ye Olde White Liberal Guilt over being an upper middle class girl from a happy little family, nestled in a prestigious university, and I'm at an age where self-critique stops being about whether I did well enough in class this semester and becomes about what traits I'll carry with me into adulthood. So I guess it's a bit of nervous self-mockery: the cozy little rich girl thinks she has it made, well, ha ha, we'll see about that next year, won't we.

Q: And, speaking of alternate identities, your web handle, Covielle, seems to be taken from The Middle Class Gentleman by Jean Baptiste Poquelin Moliere. Does it have any particular significance?

Dylan: And now is the part where I humiliate myself terribly. I was one of the permanent institutions in my high school's earnest little drama program, and in 9th grade I wound up with the part of the wily valet, Covielle, in the play you mentioned. This actually resulted in a legitimate academic love for Moliere; don't get me started on him or you'll end up listening to a 20 minute oral presentation full of lots of excited, incoherent noises. At any rate, I loved the part, because I adore playing drag parts, and because I was sort of the Bugs Bunny character of the play.

On to the humiliating part, though. At the time I was just discovering The Internet. Everybody has their own mode of entry, but for me, the gateway was Disney fandom. With all the studied elegance of a farmgirl I tromped my way into the "Hunchback of Notre Dame" community, because it was a brilliant, dark, charmingly inexplicable movie that Disney had accidentally sneezed out.

Specifically I gravitated towards the fandom dedicated to the villain, Minister Frollo, mostly because it had a lot of eccentric, overeducated female graduate students in it. We argued about which circle of Dante's Inferno Frollo would end up in based on his moral trespasses as depicted by the film. There were also a lot of dirty jokes which you'd have to take AP English to actually find funny, and a lot of animation industry gossip.

At any rate, this being a fandom, I needed a handle, and it needed to be French, and if I were going to be a real star, it was going to have to be clever and literary. Thus, Covielle it was. It's a weird and ridiculous way to get your start in the online world, but my first website was dedicated to Frollo, and I got my first scanner so I could show off drawings to the rest of the gang.

One of my fellow artists on Girlamatic, Ariel Childers of "All Undone", actually was part of that community, too. It was Weird Girl Central.

Q: How old were you when you started Bite Me?

Dylan: I came up with Claire when I was 17, and then a couple of months after my 18th birthday I threw together the first eight pages. I had a lot of free class periods my senior year, and had taken a lovely cartooning class earlier in the year, and I guess thought it would be a fun way to work off all that pre-college nervous energy. Or use the word "wench" a lot, whichever plays better.

Q: Was it the first comic you ever created?

Dylan: For awhile I thought of it that way, but it turns out I was doing comics left and right and it just hadn't occurred to me that that was what I was doing. There's a 65 page sketch-comic I did in middle school featuring me as a super-heroine, coupled with a sardonic talking banana sidekick named Bob. It's total goof-off loonery---the villain was a stick figure threatening to blur the lines of the entire comic unless we met his demands, getting your superhero license required filling out registration paperwork at the DMV, etc.

I also drew a lot of little strips and panel gags as a kid. So basically I've been doomed for a long time, I just had no idea what I was doing. In retrospect if you took time-lapse footage of my childhood and adolescence you can probably get a very clear image of me inching, fungus-like, towards graphic novels.

Q: Creating a graphic novel at your age, how much has it cut into your social life?

Dylan: Well, luckily Bite Me was always kind of slapdash (and I'll always think of it as a comic book, not a graphic novel. I'm one of those). It was designed to be done between Math and English. So as soon as I had enough practice getting the drawing done quickly, it was mostly a matter of vaguely formulating the dialogue sometime during the week, then throwing down two to four hours to draw the thing. Virtually no thumbnailing, just layout, pencil, ink, marker, shade, and done.

I hear horror stories of people estranging all their friends and family and becoming anemic, fish-eyed monsters who compulsively lock themselves into their rooms to painstakingly crank out more of their cosmic sagas, and who live entirely off dry ramen noodles, diet Coke, and the distant cheers of their online fans. I think I avoided that scenario by doing a comic that had payoff every week and that didn't require a huge amount of mental and physical effort to do well.

The layouts are dead simple, the plot's pretty much an excuse for punchlines and character fun, the style isn't designed to be beautiful or impressive, just fun. In retrospect, probably the best way to make your accidental debut.

Q: Working like that, quickly and simply, do you think it stimulates your creativity? A number of artists, like James Kochalka and Paul Pope, swear by that approach.

Dylan: Not particularly; while I dislike lots of intense work-up, and feel much happier just starting the damn page already, it was also really restrictive. I couldn't get too experimental or the humor would've just crashed; with a joke on every page it's essentially a strip, but because it had a continuous storyline and took up full pages, I had to keep things reasonably consistent. I was also stuck adhering to a lot of drawing quirks that I used in high school, which could get very frustrating. I would try to squish a completely two-dimensional character, like Lucien, into a drawing using actual anatomical perspective and the wheels would pretty much come off. It was gratifying to sit down and two and a half hours later have a finished page where once was only the swirling void, but I missed the slow-and-steady of really polished artwork.

Now that I'm free to move on to other projects, at least for awhile, I find that I'm actually a lot more competent an illustrator than I gave myself credit for during the last year or so of Bite Me. I think what Bite Me really has helped me with is the ability to throw down script, come up with visual solutions to tricky propositions and just run with it. Now that I don't have Bite Me constraints it turns out I might be decent at it on a larger scale, too.

This is how I feel today, of course. Give me three hours of trying to draw somebody sitting in a chair from a slightly unusual angle and I will look at you with haunted eyes and speak longingly of a career in medical transcription.

Q: From the business with the chickens and with Ginevra's head, I take it you are the master of the running joke. What, then, is the secret of the running joke?

Dylan: Introduce it and use it like crazy until it starts to get a little run-down. Then drop it almost completely. Then, just when people have looked away for a bit, hit Œem over the back of the head with it. This is one of the things I learned from my abortive improv comedy career.

Your other option is to just keep on doing it, without cease, for as long as you can sustain it. It'll be funny, then confusing, then irritating, than baffling, then SUDDENLY HILARIOUS again. That last one doesn't work so well in comics, as people aren't as captive an audience when it's not a live performance. But I've seen it done.

Q: Another thing I notice is your frequent use of physical comedy. Hmm, what kind of question can I ask about that... sigh... um, tell us about your use of physical comedy.

Dylan: Ha! I love Looney Tunes (Bugs/Daffy and Roadrunner/Coyote being the essential set-ups). I love classic screwball comedies like Bringing Up Baby or Some Like it Hot. And I grew up on the slapstick bits in Disney movies, too (the genie in Aladdin is one of the best film clowns of all time). It's cheerful, it's innocent, it's got tons of energy, and cartoons are obviously an ideal medium for it. Nobody can possibly get hurt, you can exaggerate actions and reactions as much as you like, you can write the word "twong!!!" in silly lettering. It disarms things.

It's far better if it's ensconced in a lot of badinage-type character humor, so it doesn't dissolve into mindless Three Stooges routine, but it's a fun wrecking ball to set loose on your characters now and then. My characters earn their salary, dammit. They'd better be prepared to hit some window panes face-first.

Q: Claire seems to hail from the tradition of characters who are rather uninhibited-- like Carol Burnett or Lucille Ball. What was your inspiration for this character?

Dylan: Originally Claire (or Zanya, as she started out) was a sort of hip, sophisticated, wryly modern vampire. A little wacky, as the hair implied, but tres chic. She was an excellent excuse to draw striped leggings and she said clever things in no particular context.

I was fond of her and decided she should have a fun origin story, so I decided to make her a tavern wench during the French Revolution. At first she was going to stay hip and cool, but I figured out before I started that she would be much more fun if she were just a complete nutbar. I think she's probably modeled a little on my fellow Pants Presser Erika Moen, who I sometimes think is a thirteen year-old boy masquerading as a thoughtful young woman.

I also figured that if she was going up against a cast of dour, black-clad vampires, it would probably work best if she were on the giddy bumpkin side. She's absolutely the last person you'd expect would make a good vampire. "Hijinx ensue!!"

Q: At times Claire seems rather dim-witted, but she ends up being the most intelligent of the lot. Did you have difficulty deciding how to handle her?

Dylan: That was a shoe that I had a lot of fun waiting to drop. Comedy is all about the "ha! Gotcha!" and I had a good time dropping hints that she was actually several miles ahead of everybody else the whole time. I never thought of her as dim---just happy to sit back and let all these self-absorbed immortal types throw histrionic fits around her. People read through thinking of her as the crazy person in the cast, but she's absolutely the most sane of the bunch. She has fun, she's loud, she's that wacky aunt you really liked as a kid and who drove the rest of the family batty.

I think it's pretty classic to have the goof character turn out to be the sage, and it was a really fun joke to build up to. The trick was just putting it in enough to seem plausible at the end. And poor Lucien, like the good straight man he is, takes it in the kisser.

Q: Lucien is one of your most well-developed characters, kind of a male sex-object who's constantly pursued by females he's not interested in. What was your inspiration for the character?

Dylan: That was another favorite joke of mine; the poor guy could be a real vampire Casanova, what with the rapier and the horse and the tight pants and valiant deeds, but secretly he just really wants to go read a book. Originally he was going to be a sleaze, and in the original drawings I did for him he's obviously a slinky trickster type. But then he hit the page and transmogrified into a baffled straightman. Claire came out very high energy, and having another character at that frequency would've been irritating as hell.

I'm not sure if there's an actual inspiration for Lucien. My highschool boyfriend had a fixation on being a white knight, and was a really sensitive, intellectually-fixated kind of kid. He was darkly pretty, liked swordfights and wore black a lot; sometimes high school-age stress would just pile up on him and he'd lose it for a bit. So I guess Lucien might be a little tribute to my first love. If that's not too nauseating.

I discovered early on that it was really fun to make Lucien's life difficult, and soon the entire comic became a game of "can we drive this guy crazy?". In the first eight or ten pages he's much more sexy and at ease, and for awhile there I thought it was a bit of inconsistency on my part (not unlikely, given that Ginevra was originally his girlfriend, god help me).

But no, he's sexy and at ease in the beginning because he's away from the absolute wackos he lives with.

And then he runs into Claire. Man never gets a break.

Q: One of the most interesting parts of the conclusion is where Claire tells Lucien an obviously bogus story about her past history, and in reaction Lucien develops a crush on her. What does this say about love? I mean, Claire is obviously getting what she wants-- Lucien's amorous attentions. But if he's not loving her for herself, is that a good thing?

Dylan: Wait... ...you don't believe her? What kind of childhood did you have? Of course she's telling the truth. Probably not all of it, because there's only so much lettering I can take. But still.

Also, I'd point out that Lucien has actually had a huge crush on Claire the entire time, which he mostly expressed by trying to run away. He's just a nervous boy and hasn't had a girlfriend for a very, very long time. You can't blame him for being a little intimidated.

As for not loving Claire for herself, Claire is always herself. She just, you know, doesn't feel the need to inform you entirely of what that actually involves.

Q: Bite Me is part of a subgenre, I guess you could call it "Vampires as heroes." Apparently it started with Anne Rice. What do you think is the appeal of the subgenre?

Dylan: Oh, I think it's really me mocking that subgenre more than anything else. I could've gotten much nastier with it, but it was more fun to take good-natured digs at it instead.

I think Anne Rice came around right at a particularly good time for friendly vampires; only three years after she published Interview With the Vampire the cinema ambiguity that is the Frank Langella version of Dracula hit the scene; in it Dracula's obviously the one you're supposed to root for. At the end they reduce him to a little scrap of singed cape, and the Mina character, who has had some seriously hot scenes with Frank by this point, is clearly devastated. Then when all the heroes have turned their backs, the cape actually creeps off on its own power, and Mina beams into the camera as the credits roll. Yeah, Dracula! You go, dog!

I have a strong suspicion that it's all related to the glam rock movement and the androgynous-amoral-hedonistic male sex symbol/god on earth thing that David Bowie French-kissed onto the pop culture scene in the 70's and 80's. (Even going beyond his rock star personas; look at his role in the Jim Henson teenflick Labyrinth, for heaven's sake. Tight pants, manipulative sexual relationship with Our Young Heroine, heavy eye makeup, kidnapping infants, breaking into rock soliloquies, sinister magical transformations, it's all there but the teeth.)

As for the appeal---well, it's got aesthetic pizzazz. He's sexy, sinister, powerful, and since this character is now somehow vaguely sympathetic, he's no longer seriously scary/threatening. Everybody wants to be gorgeous and immortal and omnipotent and have a great singing voice and wear really cool clothes, and have all the great parts of sex without any of the awkward clumsy bits involved in actually having sex.

It's superheroes, only marketed for your creepy big sister, basically.

Q: Are you a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan?

Dylan: Curiously, I hadn't seen a single episode until last year, when I was finally indoctrinated. (Joss Whedon is actually a Wesleyan graduate and visits campus pretty much every year, so it was rather inevitable.) I enjoy it quite a bit, and think it's representative of how pop culture on TV occasionally gets things right. I'm not a rabid fan, although I think if I'd seen it when I was 15 it might have gotten messy. Luckily I didn't, so know I can enjoy it like a rational human being and natter about how great Tony Stewart Head is without being in danger of writing fanfiction.

Another irony here is that I think people who watched Buffy then read Bite Me would assume that Lucien is an Angel spoof, right down to the chunk-a-block facial features. Odd how things work out.

The great thing about Buffy is that it's not at all about vampires; the vampires are an elaborate and very fruitful excuse to manipulate the characters. That's good television writing.

Q: What do you think of Goth? Are you into Goth?

Dylan: Mostly I think Goth culture is entertainingly benign. Clearly the more self-aware Goths feel that way, too---Jhonen Vasquez and Roman Dirge are the big Goth cartoonists and they both spend a lot of their time ruthlessly mocking the entire setup. I like some of the clothes and the cheerfully quirky attitude---I own striped tights, I know far too much about the personal life of Danny Elfman, I can pull off a pretty good Sandman Death when given a couple days to assemble my resources. But I'm nothing near what one could call an actual Goth, and I flee in the face of anything hardcore or self-serious. It's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. I'm just a geek who likes Halloween.

Q: Bite Me seems to have a lot of fun with smart-aleck footnotes that reveal how smart its author really is. For instance, I noticed you dropped a mention of a "classic Melian power dynamic." When I Googled the term, I discovered it refers to a historical power struggle that seems pretty relevant to our current situation (the Athenians corresponding to our own Neo-conservatives.) Do you think Bite Me has a didactic role?

Dylan: Ha! I think I just like to show off, and I also think that a good in-joke is a beautiful thing. A lot of people think that academia is totally humorless, but scholars are just sneakier about where they put the gags. I had fun in a few parts of Bite Me putting in things that would maybe make somebody interested---putting Robespierre in, having rats argue in squeak-language about which revolutionary orator was better---but again, more about entertaining myself than educating others.

As for Athens and Melos: I fell in love with Greek history my freshman year thanks to a professor not born of this earth, and we read a good deal of Thucydides in his classes. He "reconstructs" all sorts of speeches and incidents from the big war happening at the time, all with a really heart-rendingly accurate eye for human nature. He was very critical of the arrogance of Athens in subjugating all the other city-states, and equally critical of the deluded bravura of some of those city-states. Certainly I made the depressing connections when I first read it. Apparently we hairless apes don't change, we just get bigger spears.

However, I then used the Melian Dialogue to explain that Lucien should be very, very scared of Audric, because Audric has lots of very sharp teeth. Humor: enabling us all to get up in the morning.

Q: One thing that distinguishes Bite Me is that it's a historical saga that really seems to know its period. Were you ever tempted to hold back, thinking that your audience might not be able to follow you?

Dylan: Oh man, the comic's as historically accurate as an electric toaster oven would be in Wuthering Heights. I had only read Tale of Two Cities and gotten one history lesson on the French Revolution when I started, and it was only a year or two in that I started to actually feel guilty about the horribly inaccurate costumes and dates. (For example it was originally set in 1789, the date that everybody associates with the Revolution, but they didn't start in with the guillotine until 1792, and only really heated up in 1793.)

I assumed that most people would have some idea who Robespierre was, that Louis XVI was the king of France, that they cut off the heads of a lot of nobility, and that it was a popular revolution that started out with some intellectual bits and turned Paris into a total mess. And most of that gets stated pretty explicitly in the comic anyway. So I had no real worries. I wish I'd been a little more historic, actually, because I could've had even more fun with the setting. Suffice to say that as a result of Bite Me I've become much more interested in the period, and during my semester abroad ironically lived next to the Bastille.

Q: You mentioned living in or near the Bastille. What was that like? Did you meet any vampires?

Dylan: Well, it would hard to spend a semester in the Bastille prison, as they rather tore it down during the Revolution. (Not that the damn thing had many prisoners in it, and most of them were living in accommodations more reminiscent of a Motel 6 than the usual dungeon scenario, but by god, it was a prison and they were going to tear it down).

So now there's actually no trace of the thing; it's an enormous traffic circle surrounding a big memorial column at the border of the Marais, the hip Jewish/gay neighborhood in Paris (the only place in town where you can rock out in vinyl pants on Saturday night and get amazing matzo-ball soup the next morning). On top of the column is a nearly naked, golden, male angel. Ha-cha-cha.

But every single protest that happens in Paris---and protests in Paris occurred pretty much every hour on the hour when I was there---will go through that intersection and close off all traffic. Underneath is my subway stop, which has some cheerfully goofy Revolution-themed murals in the tunnels, and once or twice I would be coming up out of a train and realize that the ceiling above me was tremoring with the weight of a thousand furious public school teachers. It was like going back in time, only without the open rioting and senseless death.

So, no more Bastille; it seems people made off with all the prison's foundation stones. There are a few still drizzled around in various civic parks, but it would seem that there are a lot of Parisian families that maybe have some really interesting antique limestone coffee-tables.

I lived down a block from all this, across from the Opera House and within walking distance of the Louvre, the Musee d'Orsay, and this one bakery with really astonishingly good rustic-style baguettes.

You can tell that it was a very harsh life.

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