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Nervous Self-mockery
an interview with Dylan Meconis

Continued

Q: Your web bio describes you as a Francophile. What is it about French culture that attracts you?

Dylan: For awhile there they had all the fun literature, and they damn well know how to make the best bread in the Western world. (Although they have very little interest in sourdough, to my chagrin.) I also love figuring out how French works, and seeing how it crashed into Old English to produce the bizarre dialect we all speak today.

I'm not entirely sure, though. It's a culture that's simultaneously picky-clean and madly romantic, and I adore that contrast. They certainly have their raging problems, but the things the French do well they do with elan

Q: Parlez-vous francais?

Dylan: I'll answer in English so as not to be a jerk, what say. Yes, I've studied French since high school and can hold my own. I'm not as fluent as I would like to be, but for that I'd have to live in France for a decade or so. I have the mixed blessing of a very good accent, which means that on a good day Americans think I'm French, and the French can't tell if I spent my childhood somewhere else or if I just have a mild neurological disorder.

I occasionally tried to put French into Bite Me, which means that there are a lot of gruesome errors early on which francophone readers have not hesitated to tease me about. My favorite one is where I wrote a sign saying "Welcome, Garlic Lovers!", which apparently in French slang translates to "Welcome, Dykes!"

Which is actually fantastic, so that'll stay in.

Anyway, yes, I speak a decent amount, and hopefully I'll go back abroad at some point and bring tons of French comics home with me. Beautiful, full-color hardbound French comics, which none of my friends will be able to read. Dammit.

Q: Have you encountered any political reactions to your status as an American when you were visiting France.

Dylan: Oh, they thought I was great. I eat cheese, drink wine, vote Democrat, and read Victor Hugo. I'm also small, brown, wear dark colors, can compose in alexandrine verse and can distinguish between a good and a bad baguette. I fit right in.

Ironically, French people often wound up defending America from me. They love Americans and America; they have a wonderful, romantic notion of us as youthful free spirits backed by a noble Constitution, which I think comes from WWII. They really mistrust this administration; there's a sense that somehow they've besmirched what for them has been a treasured relationship.

All you have to say is "je suis anti-Bush" and you're a celebrated guest of honor, and the American contingent in the antiwar protests always got a huge cheer from the rest of the parade.

My favorite story in this regard involves my student visa. My consulate had given me the wrong kind, so I had to go into the Prefecture of Police in the center of Paris and get my passport approved.

Naturally I had to do this on the very day that we declared war on Iraq. I was in a rotten state of emotion, which I hadn't really expected, so in a fit of angst that morning I had scribbled "NON À LA GUERRE" on one hand and "NO WAR" on the other in permanent ink.

At any rate, thus rattled, I arrive at the Prefecture, which is essentially a giant stone castle of the sort which is supposed to include dungeons somewhere, and go through the metal detectors and answer the little list of questions and arrive in the middle of a courtyard which is empty except for a few policemen who are busy striding around and carrying very large weapons. (In Europe they are not so coy with their security; you can bring nail clippers no problem, because the guards all have Uzis.)

So I wander nervously into the first doorway I find, and eventually encounter a bureaucrat---a fortyish something Haitian-French man---behind a large desk, who does not seem to be terribly occupied. I tell him in very nice and apologetic French that I'm an American student and I need to get my visa checked, and could he please tell me where to go, if it's not too much trouble.

He looks up at me for a moment. "Yes, sure," he says. Then he gets this mischievous little grin and leans forward on his hand. "But first," he adds, "are you for or against the war?"

At which point I see no better response than to flip out my graffitied hands. He takes one look at them and absolutely cracks up, then says, grinning widely, "...you'll want Staircase F, mademoiselle."

My French friends were absolutely horrified at this story, but I still think it's one of the most hilarious things that happened to me in France.

Q: This whole counter-reaction of the American right-wing to France's anti-war stance ("freedom fries" and the rest), did it drive you crazy?

Dylan: It drove me absolutely insane, and it strikes me as random hatred. The French were mostly just baffled---the whole "freedom fries" thing just sort of evoked confused chuckles and discussions about how they're actually Belgian.

I think there's a misunderstanding in a certain way---we as Americans are all about cultural exchange. Even our language absorbs and invades at will, and we're used to taking what we like and selling what we have. The French are much more skeptical about such things. American stuff is popular, especially with kids, but this is a country where they try to keep words like "e-mail" out because they're so deeply invested in preserving their cultural heritage. They have cathedrals, for heaven's sake. They should keep track of these things.

For another example on that front, what we think of as fancy luxury foods are over there just standard treats that average people can afford and are raised on. Hand-bottled hard apple cider? Wow, exotic! Over there's it's two euros and there's an entire aisle for it in the store. But finding peanut butter is a challenge, and to market itself McDonald's has to dress up in café drag.

So I think uninformed Americans see that attitude as snobbery rather than a basic element of French culture. When you live in Europe you'd damn well better be able to accept the different quirks of your neighbors; in the States, as long as you don't border Mexico, you've got no angle of comparison (sorry, Canadians: I've lived near you my entire life, and while you have more hockey and easier access to Aero bars, I could move tomorrow and not feel too displaced).

Not to say that the French can't be arrogant as hell when they care to, but this depiction of them as weak-blooded snooty traitors who want to dictate our business is just poisonous and bizarre.

Q: You recently posted an extended political rant in your blog. Is this the first election in which you've become emotionally involved?

Dylan: No, not at all, but it's the first one where I've been actively scared about what might happen. The last four years have felt truly excruciating in a thousand different ways. I hate feeling so divided from half of my fellow Americans. I'm goofily, stupidly patriotic, but for all the things that seem to have been defined as unpatriotic of late. As a young person I'm scared about the world I and my children will end up living in. I can look back at the second World War and see that my grandparents had a much more horrifying prospect than I did, but "it's been worse" is a recipe for apathy just as much as it provides perspective. Although I'm in school in Connecticut I vote in Washington, a swing state par excellence, and you can bet that I will be putting five stamps on my ballot and getting very little sleep in November.

I see why people are so invested in Bush; but it seems like investment for all the wrong reasons, and that's what bothers me. I'm all in favor of having a good conservative party, because lord knows liberals are idiots as much as anybody else, but this current batch seems to have adopted positions antithetical to so many actual conservative principles. And yet so many people seem oblivious to it, and they're in no way planning to disillusion them. There's just an astonishing arrogance involved in taking advantage of a national earnestness.

Anyway, I don't want to go off on this; we've all heard enough of it from so many different sources. Suffice to say that I think America's pretty darn good as is, and has room for improvement something fierce. And I intend to stick around.

I also intend to get more people reading graphic novels. I'm pro-comics, and I vote.

Q: Tell us about Pants Press.

Dylan: We're a pretty simple operation; six young folk who all like each other a lot and enjoy going on things together, for fun and profit. Erika Moen and I went to high school together, and in large part she's responsible for introducing me to the world of comics and the comics community online. The rest of us glommed together over the internet, through mutual admiration/amusement/fear, and have since cemented matters in the real world, as demonstrated by my mother's unprompted willingness to knit scarves for them.

Together we seem to have attracted some attention, through our joint ashcan comics, our individual comics online, and our contribution to the Flight anthology. Through the wonders of cartoonist networking I think we've all joined a much larger group of general comrades, who, if they don't like all of us, like some of us enough to feel obligated to invite us all to dinner.

It's a great scam.

Q: How did you link up with Girlamatic?

Dylan: Lisa Jonte, who does Arcana Jayne, had read Bite Me and really liked it. She's friends with Lea Hernandez, so she passed on my name and an invitation showed up in my mailbox. I asked a few questions about how things would be run, and then I signed the contract and was off to the races. So it really came to me, and now I'm totally spoiled.

Q: When you joined Lea's site, you went from a free comic to a comic behind a subscription wall, correct? Were you concerned about how your readers would react to that?

Dylan: Sure, but not overly. Each new page would be free for a whole week; if you can't bring yourself to check a website once a week, you're not that big a fan anyway. I understood that not everybody would be able to afford the site, or even would have access to payment methods, but the setup seemed fair. I was losing money at a pretty good clip due to bandwidth costs, and I was really leery of asking a fan to host the data for free. That can go wrong in a number of ways, and I didn't want to risk that.

I only got one or two angry e-mails; mostly people were supportive, even if they said they couldn't pay to subscribe. I'm sure my readership went down a decent chunk, but I wasn't getting much out of having a big readership. I loved getting appreciative e-mails and fan art and all that, but having the comic support itself was a much more tangible benefit.

The argument against me that I really enjoyed was the "if hosting is expensive, then get a job!" one. Apparently my labor as a fast-food employee would be more valuable to them than my labor as an artist. Ahhhh, the fresh smell of entitlement in the morning!

Marvelously, this summer I was paid enough for Bite Me that I could avoid workdrone mode and spent the time finishing the comic. So, you know, I did get a job. Doing what I wanted to in the first place. It was wonderful, and I owe everybody who chipped in a great deal of thanks for their vote of confidence.

Q: Flight seems to be really taking off in the print comics market (excuse the pun.) How long did the entire effort take, as far as you know?

Dylan: Man, heck if I know. Total man-hours are probably pretty high, for all the stories in there; and I don't think Kazu Kibuishi has actually slept in the past year. I was really a fringe player on the whole deal, since last spring was my hardest academic semester of all. I wrote my script and sent it to Bill Mudron, and then I showed up at the table in San Diego and it was magically all there and people were buying it like crazy. The first thing I've ever been print-published in, and after about three hours of effort on my part, I'm complaining about having to sign so many of them. I have a lucky fairy somewhere, I guess.

Q: What was it like being part of that crew? Was it a bumpy ride? (Excuse the pun.)

Dylan: I really checked out for it, which I now sort of regret. Occasionally rumor would reach me---"Kazu says we're doing it in full color now!" and I would shake my head in disbelief at the pointless ambition of it all. And then after a false start or two, Kazu walks into a contract with Image and everybody's kind of blinking in disbelief. It's like one of his Copper comics, where the two characters put together this immensely dubious flying machine and then just shove off a cliff; in the strip the thing crashes and the characters reassure themselves with the hope of building a better machine next time, but it real life the damn thing just keeps flying.

Meeting nearly everybody at the table in San Diego was wonderful. It was a bit like a Soviet sweatshop at times, with everybody huddled on the carpet frantically signing copies, but in the end it felt like a moment of spontaneous community. Internet artists have a lovely advantage that way; you form a relationship based on group correspondence, so it holds up at long distances, but when you get the chance to come together it's both casual and a wonderful treat at the same time.

Of course now everybody will have to move to within driving distance of Portland, Oregon, which is the crux of my secret plan to actually interact with these people in the real world and on a regular basis.

Q: This Mudron character you collaborated with-- what is known about him?

Dylan: Rumors about him are myriad, and I would like to do my part right here and now to dispel them: Bill is actually a Spanish buccaneer who lost his power of speech and three fingers from his left hand to a Moor in a tavern in Dublin during a knife-fight over the honor of his fiancée, Diamond Sally, who was one of the cabaret girls and a notorious mole for the Duke of Buckingham. When Sally left him for a Bulgarian midget after his gruesome disfigurement, Bill sailed an unmanned schooner to a Bermudan grotto, where he uses a flock of trained ravens to carry his correspondence to the mainland and smokes hashish to the sound of the tides echoing through the watery caverns around him. I intercepted one of his messenger ravens by accident one day in a park, and we struck up a friendly exchange in which it eventually became clear that, having being a skilled cartographer, he might in fact be an ideal collaborator for a short piece for Flight. It checked out with Kazu and the ravens seem to be up to the task, so we figured, what the hell. Why not.

Q: Your bio and your website suggest that you're involved in a lot of other creative endeavors-- writing, directing, photography. Do you find that the creative act has different kinds of satisfaction in the different mediums?

Dylan: Oh yes, of course. Theatre is simultaneously the most horrible and the most fantastic of them all: it's agonizing and exhausting and tedious, then it's captivating and spiritual and immensely gratifying, and then the show is over and it's just gone, and who knows if anybody but you remembers it? It really does act like a drug for me, and I've gradually decided that I prize my sanity more than spending my life catapulting between the crystalline spheres and the vaporous abyss.

It's also a tough market for women, and you have to have a certain predatorial dedication to it that I don't think I could handle over the longterm. I like stability and regularity, bless my Protestant upbringing, so the stage would not seem to be the best place for me.

Writing is probably the quietest and most private of art endeavors I've undertaken. Nobody else can really be a party to it while it's happening, and it's such a finicky beast; you write something and it's glorious, then you read it the next morning and it's ghastly. I guess it never really feels like it's been truly caught. You finish a story, it still feels like some otherworldly entity only slightly tethered by its existence in print. But the things you come up with in writing are intensely important and long-lasting to you. Characters I haven't done things with since high school are still right there. Good ideas I've had still make me glow. When I learn something about writing I feel like the whole world has somehow shifted; I never liked learning about acting process, and artistic process I only liked so much as it proved technically useful to me, but writing process gives me shivers.

So I guess writing has a kind of sacredness to it, and is really at the core of everything I find interesting, including theater. Once you get into the purely visual, or the purely musical or physical, I can be intrigued, but I never get seized and dragged as I do with good writing.

This is why I essentially majored in Reading Books. I'm one of those. I think at the age of twelve I told my mom that my sole passion was for characters, and in a way it's true.

I'm totally screwed, of course, but at least I won't be the first.

Q: I notice you've posted quite a photo-gallery on your website.

Dylan: That's more just a fun thing. Colors and shapes are a marvel, and that's all I feel really equipped to try and capture. Composition for me is just something that clicks nicely in my brain, like what a good beat does for one of my musician friends. I don't yet have the courage or delicacy to really try human and journalistic subjects. So I take photos of rust and windowpanes.

I also admit that I dislike what photography does to my experiences of the world. You start to think of everything as a potential photograph, and all the other elements of reality get levered out of your perceptions. So I take pictures in spurts, but inevitably find myself leaving the camera at home when I'm really interested in what will be happening to me.

Singing for me is what doing sports or going to church is for many people: it cleans me up and fits all my pieces back together, it makes my brain switch into a purer gear, and when it's done right, with other people, it feels like I'm part of something marvelous and integral but in a way that isn't so terribly tragic as theater. Singing just taps into some simple and deeply honest part of you and pulls it out like a fine ribbon.

That all sounds vaguely pretentious, but clearly I'm an arts kind of girl. If I had a few extra lives I'd pursue it all and take dance classes on top, but for now I'm trying to spin only as many plates as I have sticks to support.

Q: What do you think changes about writing when it's used in the comics form? I'm referring to your own writing, of course, but also if you could speculate about stylists like Neil Gaiman.

Dylan: It really depends on whether or not you're working with a separate artist. I'm much more clinical when dictating to somebody else; when I'm the whole show, I tend to put down only a vague description of a panel's imagery and then spend most of my time on the dialogue or narration.

The balance between image text ("in this panel we see a cat"), narrative text ("the cat sat quietly"), and spoken text ("‹has she been fed yet?") is tricky. I love Neil Gaiman's Sandman (it was my first big comics crush), but occasionally I'll run into a panel where the artist has done something really striking and rich, and layered on top is a lot of narrative text which seems unnecessary. He's very invested in having a strong narrative voice. It works beautifully for some stories but can really bog down others; as he went along you could see him improving at it, and there are some moments of total narrative silence in the ninth book that are just murderous.

Kind of frustrating, because you can writing a huge beautiful story, and in the end it looks like you wrote two lines of dialogue and your artist did all the rest, or like all you did was draw some pretty pictures in sequence. Oh, the sacrifice. But the comic is almost always better when you stamp out your urge to opus.

So in a way, writing for comics is like writing haiku; how to evoke as much as you can with as little as possible. There's a lot of leeway in that equation, but I think it holds true for a lot of people.

In the end almost all of my favorite comics are done by one person alone, or with only backup support from others. I think two hands work best when they're attached to the same head, or at least the things produced seem to have a greater self-consistency when done correctly.

However, I'd like to see more illustrators teaming up with writers and creating independent comics together. That way a lot of single-blade talents could do some serious damage to this industry. Comics will have to get a little more trendy-chic before it really occurs to known authors to do it, but it might happen someday. I look forward to it. Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman shouldn't own the field: anybody can play. People ask me how to write a comics script as if there were some industry standard. Maybe if you're writing for Marvel there are editorial requirements, but there is no School of Comics. It's a postmodern medium. People can do whatever the heck they like.

Q: Your favorite cartoonists (including Gaiman) are pretty well documented on your homepage. Do you spy any up-and-comers about to land on your Comix Pros page?

Dylan: Oh, there are a few missing, both in web (the wonderful Neil Babra, for example) and in print (I gave in to Dylan Horrocks this summer and still haven't quite gotten my brain back). Every time I think I've found everything I could possibly like, somebody new crops up and I heave a sigh of relief.

I think almost everybody on my Web list is primed to hit the Pros list. Honestly, I think the divide between the two is almost artificial at this point; half the people on my web list are contracted and are being paid for their work, or were published in Flight; some of them, like the ubiquitous Scott McCloud, are avidly working both sides of the table.

With the exception of a few people who really consider comics as just something to dabble in, almost anybody on that list could be publishing today. If there were enough publishers, and enough publishers smart enough to actively recruit them and have faith that good books well promoted will find readers.

But that's the story of the industry. It'll come down to whoever has the patience to stick around and the energy to seriously promote themselves, and what happens to the business model for comics over the next decade. Thanks to the web, it's easy to start, and thanks to the confused state of professional publishing, neckbreaking to finish.

Q: Considering that your next project is autobiographical, are there any auto-bio comics you're particularly fascinated by?

Dylan: In fifth grade I was introduced to MAUS and was completely absorbed by it, both the straightforward biographical and the loopier autobiographical parts. It was the first serious comic I'd ever read, and I didn't quite realize what it actually was, although I read it with no confusion whatsoever about its message and story. It was its own distinct being in my brain, something which had no precedent and no apparent follow-up. It took about twelve years before I figured out that it actually had a context, and then I felt as if I had been struck with lightning on the road to Damascus.

I suspect this is not at all an original story, but it's nonetheless imprinted in my brain as one of the first important books I read as a young adult. However that influence shows up, I'm sure it'll be pretty profound. Art Spiegelman could devour a litter of live kittens and I would still love him for that comic. (...now there's a dust jacket quote.)

In the past couple years I've had fun following the journal comics that've been cropping up; at SPX this year I met Drew Weing and Les McClaine, and finally acquired James Kochalka's American Elf collection. Now Derek Kirk Kim is doing a bit of it, too, which has been a lot of fun. I love all of those dearly, and think it's a really charming and occasionally poignant genre. Not necessarily a major influence on me, but it's deeply enjoyable and I'm amazed at people with the patience for it.

Lately, like everybody else, Marjane Satrapi has kicked my teeth in. Her personal honesty has nothing to do with the sort of creepy self-hating attitude of the Crumb-Pekar-Spiegelman underground trifecta. Her kind of plain-dealing mixed with real warmth and artfulness floors me. I think Persepolis was a wonderful new way of going at autobiography and I hope it spurs more attempts, and more diverse ones, after it.

Q: Your parting comments for Bite Me make a joking mention of your next comic being "...hopelessly introspective and autobiographical, all that indie comics nonsense..." I take it that you intend to strike off in a new direction.

Dylan: Oh yes, times three. My undergraduate thesis will be a short graphic novel, which may or may not be continued after I graduate, depending on how satisfied I feel with it. It's about my family, and what a strange little child I was, and the remnants of my childhood universe. It'll be an odd hodgepodge of everything from Greek mythology to school cafeteria politics, and a good challenge both for my writing and drawing skills.

From one point of view it's about as far away from Bite Me as I could get, but it's something I've been mentally planning for awhile. In a way, since I've been doing it so regularly and with relatively little concern, Bite Me is a neat, tidy category in my head that rarely interferes with other notions. So yes, I'm switching gears, but it feels more like I'm driving another car entirely.

I'm a little nervous, because autobiography can strike me as indulgent; really I think I'm just one of a lot of artists who doesn't like going "okay, I admit it, behind all this fancy creative stuff there's just me, ME, I tell you!" for fear that everybody will throw up their hands in contempt and go home. That same fear exists about going out into the world as an adult---that somehow all the significance in your life will just evaporate into the great expanse that is the real world.

Which is mostly silliness, but I'm at a very silly stage in life, and it's to be expected. It could be worse, I could be stealing cars for drug money.

Anyway, it'll be one of what I see as the growing genre of "imaginative girl coming of age" stories, both in comics and literature. It's a wonderful trend, one that really meant an enormous amount to me as a young adolescent, and that hopefully I won't screw up.

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