Welcome to The Corner Box with David Hedgecock and John Barber. With decades of experience in all aspects of comic book production, David, John, and their guests will give you an in-depth, and insightful look at the past, present, and future of the most exciting medium on the planet—comics—and everything related to it.

[00:24] John Barber: Hello, and welcome back to The Corner Box Season 3 Episode 4, I think. With me, as always, my good friend, David Hedgecock.

[00:33] David Hedgecock 2.0: The reboot of David Hedgecock. Actually, I've kidnapped David Hedgecock, and I've locked him in the lair. I'm taking over The Corner Box with my nonsense.

[00:41] John: Do you know what I'm talking about, if I say we do the Image thing, where a bunch of Image comics jump to Issue #25, we don't explain it, but then when we actually get up to Issue #25, it all fits into continuity. So, tragic, what happened to David, huh?

[00:55] (Chase): Yeah. Very sad.

[00:57] John: Well, I don't know if I was being sarcastic about tragic. Maybe, I was.

[01:00] Chase Marotz (actually): It's Chase Marotz Editor-in-Chief of FunTimeGo, if you didn't know. What is funny, and I was actually watching that new documentary about Charlie Sheen—I think it's Netflix or Hulu—one of the two—it's Netflix, I think—where he basically just gives his litany of horrific behavior, but he's handsome. So, it's all okay, and we all have a laugh, but I was watching that, and I remembered that the excuse they used to kill him on Two and a Half Men was, he got trapped in a meat explosion in the Paris Underground, I think they said, or something like that, and David is in Paris. So, we could crib that same excuse.

[01:31] John: Wow, that's a deep cut. I didn't know that. All right.

[01:33] Chase: At least that's how I remember it, which could be just wildly fabricated. I don't care enough about Two and a Half Men to look it up.

[01:38] John: Yeah, okay. Well, that's awesome.

[01:40] Chase: I actually think that does seg nicely into our topic of the day—the documentary about Charlie Sheen, where he just talks about his litany of being terrible to the people around him, because today, since David's not here, we don't have to talk about Rob Liefeld. We get to talk about what I want to talk about, which is navel-gazey autobiographical comic books.

[01:58] John: Nice. Yeah, I definitely have read my share of those. Was it last time you were on, when we were talking about the last issue of--

[02:05] Chase: Peepshow. I promised myself, today, I wouldn't bring the conversation back around to Joe Matt too much. I mean, we'll certainly touch on him, but I didn't pick Peepshow off my shelf, because I feel like I always just go on and on about it.

[02:18] John: No, that's fair, but he was one of the pillars of 90s autobio comics.

[02:23] Chase: Totally.

[02:25] John: So, I've known you for a long time. We've talked about comics a lot, and I know a lot of comics that you like, but I don't really know your direction on comics. Were you more of an indie guy who also liked superhero stuff, or were you the superhero guy who liked indie stuff, or something totally different?

[02:39] Chase: I started on superheroes. So, my way through comics was, I got into them in grade school, and it was all Spider-Man, and Batman, and Superman. I don't think I really got exposed to any indie stuff until I started working at a comic shop in high school.

[02:52] John: Okay. Hopefully you weren't going to be reading Joe Matt much before that anyway.

[02:56] Chase: I actually distinctly remember my first exposure to an autobiographical comic book, and it's one of the ones I chose to talk about today—Chester Brown's The Playboy, because for some reason, they had this on the shelf at Barnes and Noble in Idaho Falls. My parents and I go there after church, and I remember picking up this comic, because it was just in the comic section, and my mom would just let me hang out there, without screening anything, and I was probably in late elementary school, at this time, and he’s finding this Playboy, and all these weird scenes of him jerking off, and then there's the devil lady, and stuff, in it. I was so horrified. I couldn't look at autobiographical comics again, for years. It was deeply scarring on my psyche.

[03:34] John: Yeah, that makes sense. I also feel like, culturally, we're at a place where that's where most adults would be looking at that stuff now, if that makes any sense. I remember it being, you had superhero comics, and you had autobio comics, and everything got filtered into one of those categories, regardless of what it was. It could be stuff that didn't really have superheroes—it was a superhero comic, and stuff that wasn't autobiographical—that would be an autobio comic, if it's Eightball and HATE.

[04:02] Chase: Right, or I feel like, Optic Nerve, a lot of people think of that as an autobio comic, even though there is not much of that in there, until his most recent one, which wasn't even an Optic Nerve. It was just The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist.

[04:14] John: Yeah. He was definitely coming from the Raymond Carver school of storytelling, which is not a thing that I think everybody in comic bookstores immediately looks at, and goes, “I know what that is.” That seems a weird phenomenon, to me, for comics. I think I get the way it gets there—that you have the underground comics that started to have autobiographical elements, or would be straight-up autobio. Although, I don't think that's what a typical underground comic was in the 70s, but again, Freak Brothers, or something, or a lot of Robert Crumb’s stuff feels autobio-y.

[04:46] Chase: I think Robert Crumb did a lot of it. It wasn't all autobio, but there is a lot of it. He, especially, I think, pioneered the frank depiction of all his sexual neuroses, which is a strain that runs through way too many autobio comics, whether we like it or not.

[05:00] John: That's the key, right there. This is the key, for anybody that wasn't living in the 90s, and didn't read this stuff then. In other genres, if you write an autobiography, usually you've done something, and you're writing about the thing you've done, but this was the people who very much did not. Chester Brown, the thing he did was write about that. He wrote about The Playboy, or wrote and drew. I can see where that happens, I think, from Crumb, absolutely, and then Harvey Pekar, and getting into this world, where you didn't have a YouTube channel you could do. It's crazy to think this, but there's a certain part of--

[05:34] Chase: That's actually a very interesting connection that I hadn't made. I think you do see a lot of—I don't know. Do they call them vloggers anymore? I think that dates me. I don't think anybody calls them vloggers, but people who have Twitch streams, and stuff, and just watch people play video games. There is this same slice-of-life, of people who are not doing much of anything, at all, that is being widely consumed, just in a digital format, instead of a printed one.

[05:54] John: Yeah. My daughter's into this YouTube channel where it's this Australian family, and she makes fun of her watching it, but also knows the stories of all the real-life family people. There's a ton of stuff like that out there. I guess it's hard to make that link between that and Chester Brown, or Seth, whatever. So, when you went to the comic bookstore, did you then check out what Chester Brown was up to, at that point?

[06:21] Chase: I didn't return to Chester Brown, until years later. The first Chester Brown book that I consciously bought, actually, was pretty late in the game, was Paying For It—the first one of his that I bought, and I was familiar with his work. The first autobio comic that really grabbed me was--I found a copy of the Kitchen Sink Press Peepshow, the big one-pagers, in the college library at UW, where I was going, at the time. Chester Brown and Seth were characters in that, and I think I slowly migrated into there, but then, of course, I consider Maus an autobio piece. I mean, it is about Art Spiegelman's father, but it's also about his relationship with his father. So, I think that one's a huge one. That book is just so unimpeachably good, and then I think, a lot in college and grad school. Fun Home was a big one—the Alison Bechdel book. I thought that was great. Persepolis, that's another one. I think I started, on the one hand, with people who weren't doing much of anything, and then on the other hand, there are these autobio comics from people who did a lot. I don't know.

Being a child during the Iranian Revolution is certainly interesting reading. Having a complicated relationship with your father, who survived the Holocaust, and retelling his narrative of that, is very literary, but I think that's what I like about this conversation, and this genre. I feel like it catches such a wide net, that they can do a lot. I hadn't really thought, beforehand, on why that is—why you can have a comic about somebody not doing much of anything, and still have it be satisfying, but I think it comes down to humor, timing, and draftsmanship, in a way. I think comics can benefit more from not really having an active, exciting protagonist, because the drawings can be really cool. If Chester Brown wrote a book about the time he found a Playboy in the woods, that would be insufferable.

[07:56] John: It seems like it really would be, yeah.

[07:57] Chase: But because he drew it, and it's weird, and the framing’s strange, and it looks all crazy, it becomes a compelling narrative.

[08:04] John: Yeah. You can also probably draw the line into shows, like Louie and Atlanta, and stuff, where it's definitely, again, not really autobiographical, but so down to earth, and just about sometimes taking the regular moment and making it extreme, but sometimes really just playing out real stuff. There's probably no better thing that really shows what life was like in the 80s and 90s than those Toronto cartoonists, Seth, Chester Brown, and Joe Matt.

[08:32] Chase: I feel like you can even look at a film, like Clerks, that I think is the same time period, which is that slacker, slice-of-life. It's just a day at work, but that was wildly successful, and I think, for me, as a reader—setting aside some of the more literary and active ones—I think what draws me to the slice-of-life stuff is, you can see shades of your own life and your friends in it. I am a happily married person, who doesn't spend my meager comics income frequenting prostitutes, like Chester Brown does, but it's interesting seeing somebody react to that strange world, even though I'm not a part of it.

[09:06] John: Ed, can you edit that, so it says the opposite?

[09:08] Chase: Yeah, all right. My wife is going to love that. She's not a big Chester Brown or Joe Matt fan. She finds their work distasteful.

[09:14] John: Which I can completely get. Seth always seemed the classier one, who also wasn't really doing autobio stuff. […] Weaken portrays itself as that, but it's wholly fictional. It's the Seth character, who Seth himself portrayed, and continues to portray, in real life.

[09:35] Chase: I really like Seth, as a draftsman, but did you ever watch I Think You Should Leave?

[09:38] John: No.

[09:38] Chase: It's the Tim Robinson sketch show on Netflix.

[09:41] John: Oh, okay.

[09:42] Chase: There's this one where he's just like—I forget what the quote is, but he's trying to do an old-timey theater thing, and people just show up, and heckle him, and he's like, “look, I just like old stuff. If you don't like old stuff, don't come here,” and I just feel like that's the work of Seth, in a nutshell.

[09:56] John: There's this Andy Warhol quote, or something, about him--“if you dress old when you're young, people don't think you age, as you get older,” and you see that in Andy Warhol. He looked the same age for most of his life. Barbara Bush totally looked like that, if you remember.

[10:10] Chase: How could I forget? I feel like she was on the TV a lot, when I was a kid.

[10:13] John: Yeah, and she always looked the same age. She looked like George Bush's mother, in the beginning, but then she looked 20 years younger than him, by the time she died. Seth is the Dorian Gray version of that. He dressed in these old-fashioned clothes. So, he looked older, when he was young, but also hipstery, and then when you've seen him, anytime in the last 20 years, he looks 20 years older than he must be.

[10:35] Chase: Yeah. I did meet him at San Diego ComiCon. He was a class-act guy. He drew me a really great sketch in my Hardcover Deluxe Edition of Clyde Fans, that I will definitely get around to reading, someday. For the first 20 page of that comic, man, it's just looking at his shop, thinking about fans. It's very immersive, in that world of fans.

[10:56] John: Yeah, definitely. Let's talk about the ones you have.

[11:02] Chase: I just selected four books off my shelf, just to riff on today. I have The Playboy and Paying for It, by Chester Brown, that I'm showing, even though this is not a video podcast. I have It's Lonely at the Center of the Earth, by Zoe Thorogood, which is one of my recent favorites. I think it's done so well. My wife actually did very much like this one.

[11:19] John: Yeah.

[11:20] Chase: I have Palestine, by Joe Sacco, which is a wildly different one, that works for a lot of reasons, and I think is very timely, especially given the hellscape we're all trapped in.

[11:32] John: I genuinely can't remember if I've read The Playboy. I know I haven't read Paying For It, but I have read a bunch of other stuff by Chester Brown, or I might have read parts of either one of those in Yummy Fur.

[11:44] Chase: Ed the Happy Clown, and The Little Man.

[11:46] John: Yeah, I remember going to the comic bookstore. It was this big comic bookstore in Orange, whose name I'm forgetting, but it was this really cool store with 2 stories. I used to love going there. It was the deluxe store. It wasn't my regular store, but it was the one I'd go to, and they'd have stuff that you couldn't find. I remember buying It's a Good Life If You Don't Weaken, an issue of Supreme by Alan Moore, I feel like, something else, and the guy being like, “nice picks,” or something. It was one of those. They were all off the wall from each other. So, I really like It's a Good Life If You Don't Weaken, and I read Louis Riel, which is a biography of the real-life Louis Riel, drawn in the style of Little Orphan Annie, which is weird departure for Chester Brown, but all right. It was cool. I mean, that was interesting.

[12:31] Chase: I feel like all those 90s Toronto guys f*cking love Little Orphan Annie. They just love it. I mean, my father-in-law loves Little Orphan Annie, too. He's a 78-year-old man.

[12:40] John: A lot of those old comic strips, when you dig into them, they're really interesting, because they are so weirdly stylized, and then, so far super-right-wing in their politics that your left-leaning cartoonists really dig into them, like Chester Gould or Harold Gray, and the draftsmanship—not Chester Gould—but the draftsmanship tends to be really good. I don't know. You do see a ton of that stuff, yeah, you're right, of people really getting into that era of comics, at that time.

[13:10] Chase: I will say, I do support Chester Brown on Patreon, and occasionally, he'll just send minicomics that he prints himself, which is always such a thrill to get in the mail, but then, 50% of the time, they're just libertarian anti-vaccine comics.

[13:22] John: Okay. I didn't know where he was, these days. That makes sense.

[13:24] Chase: Yeah.

[13:25] John: All right.

[13:26] Chase: Sometimes, I'm really excited to start reading it, and then I get to the end, and I'm like, “next time, maybe.”

[13:31] John: Let's say the politics still doesn't align with Harold Gray.

[13:34] Chase: Yeah. I think, since I started on The Playboy, I guess we can just start there, and move forward, just with the Chester Brown stuff, because I think Chester Brown, he's such an interesting character. I've never met the man, but he draws and portrays himself as somebody with such a flat affect. Especially, in Paying For It, he's almost this little Skeletor-like figure, who's doing all of these things. I think this is one that works, for me, because even though the material is challenging, I think, like R. Crumb, one of the things I like about autobio comics—certainly, not all autobio comics have this, and not all autobio comics that do this are good autobio comics—but I do like some of the frank depiction of these sexual neuroses that color the life of the artist, and the warts-and-all approach to putting it out there, because—I don't know—It's not a trainwreck, but I think people like to look at things that are shocking and challenging, and get inside the heads of people that are very different than them, in frightening ways, sometimes.

[14:46] John: Yeah. Those guys, especially, walk a weird line of identification, and then what you're just describing now. I feel like The Playboy starts from a position of “you know what this is like?” Or something like that. I mean, doesn't it?

[15:02] Chase: I have it right here.

[15:03] John: I don't mean that it literally starts like that, but I mean, it comes from the position that you're going--

[15:07] Chase: Yeah. He starts as a time traveler, going back to when he's 15, and goes into church, and stuff, which is funny, and you chart the path of this guy's life, because yeah, The Playboy is all about the guilt of masturbating over a magazine he found, and church, and stuff, and then, by Paying For It, he's just seeing a rotating cast of different prostitutes and, clearly, life did a number on the man, between the two books.

[15:30] John: Yeah, I guess so. I mean, he was making comics, living in Toronto.

[15:35] Chase: I get the sense that he's not very successful, at all. I think, at least at the start of Paying For It, he's living in a room in his ex-girlfriend's basement that has a dirt floor.

[15:44] John: Yeah, I started to say that, and then started to realize, the money that was really in autobio comics probably wasn't what young John thought it was.

[15:52] Chase: I think, if you were in your 90s, I think, if you're Adrian Tamine, Optic Nerve probably made him a little money, but I think he makes most of his money from illustration work for the New Yorker now, and the fact that Shortcomings got turned into a movie. It's very rare that you can be R. Crumb and buy a castle in France. That's usually not the end result of autobio comics.

[16:15] John: Actually, that's interesting, all in itself, too, but yeah, the path of success was doing New Yorker covers, was getting into that world. Sorry, this is a real digression. Do you know the character, Olivia, the pig—the cartoon pig character?

[16:31] Chase: Yeah, I know that.

[16:32] John: The children's books, written and drawn by a guy named Ian Falconer. Do you know anything about Ian Falconer?

[16:38] Chase: No.

[16:39] John: So, I've read these for two kids. Two kids went through reading the Olivia books, and even before then, I was really familiar with Olivia, because I like pigs. I think they're adorable. So, 25 years ago, the first Olivia book came out. So, the stuff was fairly new when I was in New York. Walking around bookstores, you'd see this stuff. So, I knew what Olivia was, and then it was one of the first books my daughter got. So, I just found out, this week, that Ian Falconer started off—the reason, what this comes up as—is he used to draw New Yorker illustrations, and drew a bunch of New Yorker covers. He was hired by Françoise Mouly, when she was art director at The New Yorker, and then somebody offered to draw a children's book. He was like, “no, I want to write and draw this one.” So, he started doing it, but he died two years ago. I assume, HIV-related kidney failure. He used to date Tom Ford, to the point that Tom Ford, when he directed the movie, Single Man, named the character Ian, because in the Christopher Isherwood book, the character has no name. So, he was named after that. He used to be the muse of David Hockney. Muse is just a word that everybody […] around about what he was. Hockney, at one point—maybe still is—the highest paid painter on the planet, which is wild.

[17:51] Chase: That is wild.

[17:52] John: The characters have this sense of being really real, but they're all based on his niece and her family, very directly. There's a one-to-one on their animals, and kids, and siblings, and stuff. That was wild. I had no idea that there was a whole story about Ian Falconer.

[18:05] Chase: I would read it. If that was a comic biography, I would absolutely read that.

[18:08] John: Yeah. When I was a kid, I loved these books called Space Cat, which are these, I think, late-50s/early-60s books, by a guy named Ruthven Todd, and one day, I'm reading a Michael Moorcock book, and Michael Moorcock references Ruthven Todd. I'm like, “why is he referencing the guy that wrote Space Cat? Ruthven is not a normal name.”

[18:26] Chase: Yeah, you don't hear that one a lot.

[18:28] John: He was supposed to have hung out with the poet, Dylan Thomas, on the night Dylan Thomas died. Dylan Thomas skipped out on dinner with him, or something. He was part of that crowd of—I don't know—self-destructive alcoholic poets.

[18:39] Chase: People used to be so f*cking cool. I don't know if I can swear on this podcast. I don't know if it's for the kids. We'll bleep that. We'll fix it in post.

[18:45] John: All the kids looking for their Joe Matt fix.

[18:48] Chase: Yeah. All the kids who want a heady, rambling discussion on autobiographical comics of the 90s. We'll have to protect them.

[18:55] John: Sorry, that had nothing to do with any of it, other than—anyway. Yeah, Chester Brown. That's the thing. He never made it to The New Yorker, or anything. That never happened, right?

[19:04] Chase: Chester Brown, I think

[19:06] John: Or hasn't yet.

[19:07] Chase: No. I mean, I don't know if I see him as a New Yorker guy. I feel like his drawing has gotten very interesting and defined, but it's very sparse, and black and white. I don't even know what he'd do for the New Yorker.

[19:19] John: Yeah. I don't mean he didn't reach that pinnacle, but I mean, that wasn't where he was going.

[19:23] Chase: Yeah, it seems like he writes about his own obsessions a lot. I think he's very fixated on the things that interest him, and is fine making the living that he makes.

[19:33] John: Yeah. I had a real distinct realization, at one point, when I was trying to figure out—which I guess, I still am—but trying to figure out what comic book maker I am, because I was really into Tomine. There was a few months where I was trying to figure out how to draw like Adrian Tomine, and that's a really precise look, and I always love Chris Ware, and all this stuff.

[19:54] Chase: Oh, God. I love Chris Ware.

[19:55] John: Yeah, and that realization of the path of success is that you get to work in the New Yorker, but then I would look over it, like, “well, I also like what Grant Morrison's doing on Invisibles, and the day job there is writing Justice League, and that sounds more fun, to me.”

[20:12] Chase: That is entirely fair. I actually was doing my own little autobio comic, for a while, that I would post on Tumblr, when I was unemployed, and then, during COVID, I collected some of them, and just printed it up, and was leaving it around bars, and laundromats, and stuff, under a fake name.

[20:27] John: And that's how you met your wife, right?

[20:28] Chase: No.

[20:29] John: I'm just kidding.

[20:30] Chase: I think if my wife had read my work before she was married to me, it might have turned out different. I got her in too much paperwork, and then I sprung the comics on her.

[20:39] John: That's actually a real funny thing there, too, which was one of the things that has to direct the way Chester Brown's life works. I am not in a position where I could be as forthright and honest as Chester Brown, about the things I think about, and the things I'm obsessed with, or whatever.

[20:56] Chase: It really is putting yourself out there. Yeah. Anybody who meets you has a front-row view to the weird things floating around in your head, and I think that's what makes people like Chester Brown and Joe Matt, and Robert Crumb, work for me. If that's not the real weird sh*t going on inside their head, they do a damn good job of making it feel very authentic, and almost cringey, that they share it. I don't really picture any of them being like, “this is all pretend. I like to go to the bank, and get lunch with my friends, like a normal dude.”

[21:26] John: Yeah. It’s what separates it from Dave Barry columns from the same time, or something.

[21:30] Chase: Yeah, totally.

[21:31] John: And again, I don't mean there's some super dark secret I have, or anything, but I just mean, like you're married to somebody. That puts limits on things you can say, and remain married, to most people, or you're dealing with a real specific type of person, which I think is when Chester Brown wasn't literally Paying For It, who he was dating, but also, you wind up in this world that I assume is where—I don't feel like finding a Playboy, and having those things, whatever happens in the Playboy, is what leads you to Paying For It, but I think, writing comic books about that puts you on the right path.

[22:02] Chase: Totally. I mean, certainly, if I meet a new person, what I don't want them to say is, “I read the 100-page screed about the most embarrassing time you masturbated, when you were 13. How are you doing?” That's not really what I want to lead with.

[22:17] John: And also, just putting people you know into your comic.

[22:20] Chase: And that's what I really like about the new Craig Thompson book that I'm still reading, Ginseng Roots. His parents are in that, and there's a lot of them reacting to how they were portrayed in Blankets, because they were not portrayed very well in that book, and they're portrayed much softer in this book, and I think, he himself is grappling with “the people you portray a certain way in your comics, they are going to read those comics, and have feelings about that. You don't always feel good about what they ended up feeling.”

[22:45] John: In addition to the part of whatever—shame, or whatever—not wanting to give up my own secrets about things, there's the part of not wanting to do that to people. There's people who are in your life, in a real specific point, that—that's not their whole life. They're doing other stuff. That's a point of intersection you have with them, and then that might not be the way that they see it, and yeah, that's really interesting.

[23:06] Chase: There is an interesting moral line there. You can still find it online. There's an interview with the woman who Joe Matt called Frankie in The Poor Bastard, and she was upset to be in the book. She did not like her portrayal, she did not like him, and she's absolutely right to feel a little violated by the fact that she just intersected with this person, and then became a major plot point in his weirdo f*cking 90s comic.

[23:31] John: Yeah. I, at one point, did a comic. It was not autobiographical, at all, and it was titled, “Why Are You a Failure, Daddy?” Here's the thing that I did not think about, all right. This is a fictional story about a Christmas tree salesman. I had this idea of, “what do Christmas tree salesmen do for the rest of the year?” That was the genesis of it.

[23:55] Chase: I don't know. Carnival.

[23:57] John: Well, yeah. I mean, in reality, there's companies that own this stuff. I was in my 20s. So, I'm drawing the character. It was reflective of myself, and I'm drawing myself in there, and here's the degree to which I don't think about this. I was, at that point, frequently wearing this jacket that used to be my dad's—this checked jacket. So, that's what the character is wearing in the book, because it's the warm jacket that I had. So, I'm just going to base it on this jacket, and even shoes. I think there was even something about the shoes that were similar, and I did not piece together that that could, in some way, reflect on my own father, or imply opinions that I don't have about my actual father. I don't feel like that, at all. That's not a thing I think about. We were so far out of the realm of something that I was considering, and it wasn't until later, I'm like, “oh, man.”

[24:48] Chase: That could have been really hurtful.

[24:50] John: Yeah, and that was not even in not intending it to be. If that character looked like my dad, it's because I look like my dad, and he looks like me, and I was sitting there, drawing myself. Not literally drawing myself, but I had a mirror in front of me, getting expressions right.

[25:03] Chase: Oh, yeah. I mean, I can only draw with life reference. It's hard for me to just wholesale makeup characters out of nothing. Everybody has a genesis in someone I've met.

[25:12] John: Yeah, but I've never talked about that. That was my weird experience with that. I didn't mean it that way, at all.

[25:19] Chase: The podcast exclusive.

[25:20] John: Yeah, there you go.

[25:27] Chase: Have you read It's Lonely at the Center of the Earth, by Zoe Thorogood?

[25:29] John: Oh, yeah. We talked about it, at length.

[25:30] Chase: That's right. This book works so well, for me. I remember being dubious when I heard a 23-year-old was going to make an image autobiography, because “I'm a bitter failure who is frustrated at my own lack of interesting things to say in life” probably is the root of it, but that's neither here nor there, but this book did so well at just putting imagery to the feeling of depression. It made me understand certain family members that I have, who suffer from it, way more, having read this, and taught me an empathy, through her experiences, that I think I've carried with me.

[26:03] John: That's really interesting. I think there's two big things that are really interesting about the shift that you get from going straight from those Toronto cartoonists to Zoe Thorogood, or maybe there's a bunch. One, she's not a straight white guy, like I think you saw a lot of, from Crumb through the 2000s. I don't mean to say that the level of craft is higher, because Seth and Chester Brown are extremely good at drawing. I mean, Seth is immaculate at his drawing. I don't know. The variety of art styles, the different ones.

[26:37] Chase: Oh, she uses so many different styles. I mean, the sparse black and white, people are depicted as cats, for a while. The color, the digital element she puts in—No, I think she has such an imagination, and was so good at making the different styles actually feel like they were additive to the story, and not just randomly inserted. It was very honest in her emotionally interacting with the world. The use of bright color sometimes, versus when she doesn't look like herself, it mimicked a mental state, in a way that I don't know if I've seen any other comic pull that off as successfully.

[27:12] John: No, it was super effective at that. I agree, but there's also the switch from, “I'm going to tell you the secret truth that's deep inside me, and that is about my jerking off habits, or whatever,” or with Crumb. I like Crumb a lot, but there's a level of—what's the right way to say it?—He's confronting racial and sexual stereotypes that are within his own psyche, but not the way he wants to be, or carries himself in life, to certain degrees, and by 2022, or whenever this came out, no sh*t. It's like that stream of TV shows, where the cops weren't always good guys, and the straight white protagonists could actually be bad, and again, you get to a certain point, and it's as good as some of those shows are—No sh*t. We know that—but I do think there's a huge shift into the autobio stuff being about mental illness, and about dealing with your own mental states—not mental illness. Mental distress and emotional distress. I run into that a whole lot on books, and a lot of them are really cool. I mean, really interesting. I think almost nothing works at the level that Zoe's book works at. It's super good.

[28:29] Chase: Yeah. I think that that's a really cool shift, because I think what I admire about, I think, the younger generation, especially, is it's not always perfect, but I think they're at least trying to develop these tools to talk about their emotional internal lives, openly, which growing up where I did, and when I did, in the 90s, when this hipster detachment was cool, and certainly, I didn't have a father who believed in therapy, or anything, I think I lack the language to communicate some of that inner emotional truth, in a way that people, it seems, Zoe's age, don't have that issue in their fiction or autobio stuff. Let's talk about Palestine, by Joe Sacco, while we still have some time left.

[29:11] John: Yes.

[29:12] Chase: Joe Sacco—I'm […], because he was actually just at Rose City ComiCon, and I didn't get to go, because I was in the emergency room with my cat, while he was having his panel on Friday, but I had wanted to go, but both of the books he did about Palestine, what he did about the Bosnian War, I think what he did about the oil in Canada, Paying The Land, all of these are so good at inserting him into these places to indicate a broader truth, and I think it's fun, because he doesn't pretend to be an unbiased narrator. You see him reacting to these things, and forming opinions, in real time, but it's interesting to have journalism, where the journalist is such an active character in the unfolding narrative. I think it makes it more effective, for me, to emotionally connect with it.

[29:48] John: Yeah. I haven't read Palestine in a while. I definitely read that, and then I actually just, I think at ComiCon, I got his newer--

[29:55] Chase: Oh, yeah. I bought that, and then I packed it, and I have not figured out where I unpacked it, after we moved.

[30:02] John: Yeah. This one's super quick. It's 32 pages. It's a magazine, basically, but I have mixed feelings about comics as non-fiction, which is another thing I've never really talked about.

[30:12] Chase: Let's unpack this, actually.

[30:14] John: Yeah, I definitely live most of my life under the idea that there's nothing that comics can't do as well as, or better than, other mediums, and there is no way to separate out the bias that anybody has and they put into stuff, but the drawn comics, comics drawn on paper, adds a level of unreality to anything, because not only is it photographed and cropped, and you're choosing the subjects of the image, but you're literally making every part of the image. I don't mean that to assail Joe Sacco.

[30:44] Chase: No, I think that that's an interesting observation, that it's correct to grapple with. It's not photojournalism. I mean, you do have to extend a certain amount of trust to the author of the book, that what they're drawing is actually what happened, and it's right to consider the intentionality and the process, and how that might impact how close any narrative is to reality, when it's so far removed from the actual reality.

[31:07] John: Yeah, and I mean, that's through photos, too, though, in that you don't know what's just on the outside of the picture, and also, it's 2025. You don't really know what's inside the picture anymore.

[31:18] Chase: That's the rub, isn't it?

[31:19] John: Yeah, but I also think—this is something I grapple with, and I don't know if I agree with what I'm about to say—but I think it's tough for comics to have the depth that just straight prose nonfiction can have on a subject. There are times where I worry that there's a superficiality that the images force onto a real-life narrative, that doesn't have to happen with prose, with just writing.

[31:47] Chase: Yeah. I think, and it's been a while since I've read Footnotes in Gaza, but I think Joe Sacco actually grapples with that a little bit himself, in that book.

[31:54] John: Oh, he's really good.

[31:55] Chase: Again, I think he might have some of those same doubts, even as he's creating his work, just because the time it takes to draw, and stuff, and the demands of putting a narrative together, it certainly influences you to make it in a certain way that maybe isn't just the story, or the thing as it was. You're taking these things, you're figuring out a cartoon representation of them, and you're turning it into a product that needs to have a certain structure to be successful.

[32:23] John: Maybe I'm projecting some of myself on there too, because I think I probably spent more of my life thinking I was learning stuff by reading comics, and not reading actual books about the subjects, and not that comics aren't actual books, but reading more in-depth books about the subject, and then—I don't know—people talk about, read The Cartoon History of the Universe, but don't just read that.

[32:44] Chase: Right. Absolutely.

[32:45] John: Some of the stuff can be good introductions. I don't know if there's something that you really—is non-fiction comics good only for introducing subjects to people, and not necessarily a limitation of the medium of comics, but of the economic realities of what kind of comics are getting made, how long it takes to make them, who's consuming them, who people think are consuming them, all that stuff? Does it only work as an introduction to the subject? To go into further depth, you have to go into something else, or am I just wrong about that? I read David Walker's book about The Black Panther Party, and it was really interesting. I didn't know that much about the formation of The Black Panther Party, and I got a lot out of it, but if I did know about that, I don't know that I would have got that much out of that book.

[33:27] Chase: That's totally fair. Yeah, I think it depends. I think for stuff, like Joe Sacco's journalism, what I like about it is, it is essentially an autobiography of a guy going through a certain experience. So, you're getting emotional resonance, in a way that if you read an academic piece about why the Middle East is the way it is, you're not quite getting that human narrative, but do I think that reading Palestine, by Joe Sacco, is all you need to know about the crisis in the Middle East? Absolutely not. I don't even know if it's the best source to learn about the actual ins and outs of it. Just going back to Maus, where we started this—I don't think reading that book will teach you maybe everything you should know about the Holocaust, or why it happened, but I do think that what that book does very well is showing, in the life of one person living it, how what was done to his father continues to reverberate down through him, and into the work he's obsessed with, and I think comics are very good at capturing this emotional truth, even if perhaps, academically, they're not the finest primary source.

[34:24] John: Yeah. Maus and Palestine, I think, are amazing works of art, I guess, and the autobiographical angle on both of them is super important, in a way that maybe the stuff I'm talking about is different, and again, I think David Walker's book was meant to be an introduction to the story. I don't think he was trying, and failing, to get into a greater depth than it was. I super enjoyed it, and it accomplished what it was trying to do, for me. You're right. There's a lot of truth in Maus, not just about the onslaught, but about the world, in general, and everything. I mean, not to minimize the Holocaust. I didn't mean anything like that. You mentioned Persepolis. Same thing there. That was somebody—Marjane Satrapi had an extraordinary life, and then also told you about this world that you don't know about, and the L'Association stuff that she was—you can see the influence that David B had on her, when he was writing Epileptic, and stuff, or they were pulling that into the personal narrative. Even in prose, that's very different than a non-fiction book. Ta-Nehisi Coat's book about going to Palestine is different than reading a book about the history of Palestine, and is more similar to, I think, what Joe Sacco did.

[35:35] Chase: Yeah. I think it brings me back—I think what comics are good at, especially autobiographical comics—I feel like we live in a world that, much to my dismay, has become increasingly less empathetic and hostile towards people who are different, in a lot of different regards, and I think what appeals about autobio comics, to me, is I might not agree with maybe the outlooks, or the choices, or the actions of everybody I'm reading an autobiography about, I might not have suffered from the same things as them, I might not have done things in the same places, or seen the same things, but I think the good ones resonate with me, because they allow you to feel a shared humanity with a character that is very different than you, as they move through the world, and I think it's a good value that we don't practice enough.

[36:16] John: Yeah, and are so often actively hostile against, and I think you're right. Yeah. That's a great way to put it.

[36:22] Chase: I feel like I finally got there, after […] about this for over an hour with you. I was like, “why do I like these?”

[36:27] John: Yeah. Well, we solved it.

[36:28] Chase: I feel good about this chat. Maybe joining each other again next week.

[36:32] John: Yeah.

[36:33] Chase: If David still dead in his meat explosion in the Parisian Underground.

[36:36] John: Yes. Did you ever see the TV show, Sledgehammer?

[36:39] Chase: No.

[36:39] John: So, it was a parody of shows, like Hunter—the tough guy cop shows. It was about a cop named Sledge Hammer. That was his actual name, but he was this over-the-top cop, super powerful gun that would blow up cars, or whatever, but it was a sitcom. This is a sitcom on TV. The show got terrible ratings, and was definitely getting canceled, and at the last episode, Sledge has to defuse a nuclear bomb in the city, and he cuts the wire, and there’s an explosion, and it cuts to the commercial, and then you cut back to the credits, as it's rolling. You see rubble everywhere, and you hear the chief yelling, “Hammer!” He’s really mad at him. Then, the show got renewed. So, they had to come back the following year. So, in the first episode of Season 2, the title flashes on screen, “Sledgehammer: The Early Years.” It's the only reference they make to it again. So, if David turns up again, maybe we'll just go back to—what are we? Corner Box.

[37:42] Chase: “Corner Box: The Early Years.” I mean, it's comics. Nobody stays dead for long.

[37:45] John: That's right.

[37:46] Chase: Not even Bucky could stay dead, dude. Everyone’s on the table.

[37:49] John: That's right. All right. Well, we'll be back next week. Thanks for joining us here on The Corner Box. Thank you, Chase, for coming on.

[37:56] Chase: Thanks for having me. It's been a lovely little chat.

[37:59] John: See you all next week. Thank you.

[38:01] Chase: Bye.

This has been The Corner Box with David and John. Please take a moment and give us a five-star rating. It really helps. Join us again next week for another dive into the wonderful world of comics.